Hey, you're listening to Outside In. I'm Nate Hedgy.

Something wild happened to me recently.

I was on a reporting trip driving down the Oregon coast to California

when Verizon had this massive outage.

My smartphone, it just stopped working.

No email, no texts, no Google Maps.

I was thrust back into a time

when we traveled without cell service.

And honestly, it was exhilarating.

I navigated with a paper map that I found at a visitor center. I listened to local

public radio. I ate a sandwich on the beach and watched the Seagulls, not the New York Times app on my phone.

It was a reminder about just how reliant we are these days on tech.

Now, we did a whole episode touching on this a few weeks ago, all about GPS.

But what about all that tech we rely on when we are off the beaten path in the

wilderness? That's what our friends over at K-A-L-W explore in their new

podcast, How Wild. It pokes and prods all the strange contradictions of big W wilderness, those areas of the country that were designated by the federal government to be primitive, undeveloped, and untrammeled, but are often anything but.

And just a side note, we love this podcast.

It's got great tape, great writing, fun energy.

I mean, if Outside In had a funky twin sister how wild would be it.

Enjoy. One of my favorite parts of any trip in the wilderness is when I get up on a mountain pass and I can see the view in both directions.

When I'm backpacking with my friend Holly, this is the moment that we get out the map.

I think we could totally see exactly where we came from.

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