Whether birdwatching, route-finding, or hunting, you need the best binoculars to optimize your time spent outdoors.
Written by Kylie Mohr and John Beye
Kylie Mohr is a journalist by day and an adventuring outdoorswoman off the clock. When she’s not clacking away on her keyboard, she’s beating up gear in mountains, forests, and rivers. A Montana wordsmith by way of Wyoming, Kylie loves em dashes and elevation. She’s an award-winning environmental journalist who covers climate change, public lands, wildfires, and wildlife and cares deeply about our planet.
Kylie studied political science and journalism as a student at Georgetown University. She cut her teeth in the NPR and CNN newsrooms before deciding she needed more open space and less gridlock in her life. She found what she was looking for in Jackson, WY, where she worked as a local newspaper reporter for three years and fell in love with her surroundings.
She decided to hone her focus through a master’s degree in environmental science and natural resource reporting at the University of Montana. She freelanced for newspapers, magazines, websites, and radio stations as a grad student and won a reporting fellowship to cover the Crown of the Continent ecosystem. Her master’s work was published in National Geographic Travel. She completed another fellowship at E&E News/POLITICO prior to graduation and then went to work for High Country News covering Alaska, the Pacific Northwest, and the northern Rockies.
She valiantly tries to squeeze in skiing year-round and loves hiking, trail running, camping, and backpacking too. You also might catch her finagling a mountain bike or fumbling with a fly rod. Mohr can be found revisiting her old stomping grounds in the Tetons, exploring trails throughout the northern Rockies, and finding new nooks and crannies of public land to enjoy along the way. Depending on the season, you’ll find her deep in the backcountry, scrambling up scree fields or geeking out about wildflowers.
As an elementary school kid, I was a journalist for Halloween. In pictures, I’m proudly decked out with a big headset, my mom’s ABC News t-shirt, a notebook, and an array of press badges around my neck. The switch from costume to career came as a sophomore at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C, where there’s an undeniable buzz that comes from being home to breaking news and political action. I wanted to be in the mix, helping inform and inspire others. My first stint included confronting an irate laundromat owner for the college newspaper. I quickly progressed: first working as a press intern on Capitol Hill, then through internships at CNN and NPR.
But a gig at Teton Gravity Research one summer threw me off the political reporting track I thought I was on and introduced me to the world of outdoor media. While I didn’t stay in ski film production, I did return to Wyoming. As I’ve continued my career, I’ve seen the need for deep, nuanced, thoughtful reporting in the West and wanted to do my part to inform and engage readers about our communities and ecosystems. Writing about landscapes goes hand in hand with exploring them, respecting them, and spending time in them in as many ways as I can. I see gear reviews as a way of getting more people outside (dry, happy, and without blisters!) so they can care about and protect the world around them, too.
Whether birdwatching, route-finding, or hunting, you need the best binoculars to optimize your time spent outdoors.
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