Meet Anthony Kasner, April's Contributor of the Month

At Outdoor Project we’ve used many methods to solicit contributors. One way has been to share information about contributing to Outdoor Project on Craigslist, and through this channel we’ve been lucky enough to find a few key contributors to share their expertise and passion with our full community. Anthony Kasner found us this way, and he has been instrumental in adding adventure coverage to Washington’s Alpine Lakes Wilderness, an area we love exploring. Since getting started this winter, he’s published 21 new adventures to Outdoor Project, mostly of the snowshoeing variety.

A cook by trade, Anthony recently returned to Washington after traveling in Europe, and he wanted to spend more time in the outdoors and connect other people to his love the outdoors as well. His girlfriend pointed out the Craigslist ad. According to Anthony, the mission really resonated: “Outdoor Project is doing what I’m about by getting people outside. I applied to be a contributor on the spot.”

Anthony grew up in a rural town of 4,000 people called Sultan, Washington, about an hour northeast of Seattle in the Skykomish Valley. In high school he started exploring the outdoors, because, as he notes, “There isn’t much to do in Sultan, so I started to get outside. People living out there often don’t really appreciate the outdoors, but they need to look around.” Since then he’s continued to explore the outdoors by way of hiking, snowshoeing, mountain biking, and mountaineering.

As Anthony tells it, in 2012 he was feeling like he needed a change, a chance to reset, so he looked into through hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. “It was like a beacon of light," he says, "I didn’t choose to hike the trail; it chose me.” He dropped everything and spent nearly five months hiking from Mexico to Canada. The experience was transformative: “Living day after day outside, connecting with the community of hikers, the camaraderie, the experience was incredibly rich in all respects. It shifted something inside me, where I got off the trail and realized cooking wasn’t my life’s work. Inspiring people to be able to experience what I’ve experienced out there is what I’m about.”

We’re thrilled that Anthony is sharing his passion for the outdoors by contributing to Outdoor Project. When asked what his favorite adventure is, without hesitation he says doing the full PCT. The most exciting upcoming adventure is hiking in the Enchantments this fall, when there’s a short window of time after permit season when the fall colors are in full bloom. We hope you enjoy exploring Anthony’s contributed adventures and photos of snow-covered mountains as much as we do.