Adventure Starts After Coffee: The Story Behind September’s Wild Mug
September’s Wild Mug Club design comes from a place that had been sitting on my hiking list for a long time: Old Rag Mountain in Shenandoah National Park. If you’ve ever hiked Old Rag, you already know this isn’t exactly a casual wander through the woods. It’s the kind of trail that makes you work for what’s waiting at the top, which is probably part of why I wanted to do it in the first place.
Old Rag is known for its rock scramble, and “scramble” is a rather polite word for some of what happens up there. There’s climbing, squeezing between rocks, figuring out where your hands and feet are supposed to go next, and probably questioning at least a few of your decisions along the way. It’s challenging and a little ridiculous in places, but it’s also the kind of hike that keeps you completely in the moment because you’re too busy figuring out the next rock to think about much else.
A Mountain Worth Drawing
When I came home from that hike, I didn’t really know that Old Rag would eventually find its way into my artwork. However, over the last year this has happened quite a bit. I go outside because I want to hike, explore, clear my head, or get away from the computer for a while, and inevitably I come home with photographs, observations, colors, shapes, and ideas that end up on my drawing table.
For this design, I didn’t want to create a detailed scenic illustration or try to recreate one particular view from the summit. I wanted the mountain itself to be the focal point while still keeping the artwork simple enough to feel like something pulled from a trail journal. I reduced Old Rag to linework, added the surrounding trees, and let the ridgeline become the focus of the illustration.
The finished artwork wraps around a deep navy mug with warm cream linework, giving the whole thing the rugged, slightly vintage feeling I was after. It feels less like a traditional souvenir mug and more like a little piece of a day spent in the mountains, which fits Wild Ridge Studio much better anyway.
Of Course There Had to Be Coffee
Once the mountain illustration started coming together, the words were pretty obvious: Adventure Starts After Coffee. Around here, coffee and heading into the woods are fairly regular companions, and I’m certainly not volunteering to climb over boulders before I’ve had a cup.
There’s also something I love about the idea behind the phrase beyond coffee itself. Adventure doesn’t always have to mean climbing a mountain or tackling a rock scramble. Sometimes it’s finally doing the thing that has been sitting on your list, taking the unfamiliar trail, going somewhere you’ve wanted to see, or simply deciding that today is a good day to get outside and see what happens.
That was a big part of my Old Rag hike. I’d thought about it, heard about it, and wanted to do it for a long time, but eventually you have to stop thinking about an adventure and actually go have it. The coffee just helps with that transition.
The View You Have to Earn
One of the things that stayed with me most after hiking Old Rag was how much the trail makes you work for the payoff. You don’t simply wander up a nicely behaved path and arrive at a pretty overlook. The mountain asks something of you along the way, and that makes standing up there, looking across Shenandoah, feel different.
That experience became part of how I think about the September mug. The design isn’t only about Old Rag as a place. It’s about the whole experience of choosing an adventure, doing something difficult, laughing at yourself somewhere in the middle of it, and eventually reaching the point where you understand exactly why you wanted to do it.
It’s also one of the reasons I love bringing my actual experiences into my collections. There are already approximately 11 billion mountain mugs in the world. I don’t need to make another generic one. I’d rather draw a mountain I climbed and tell you why it mattered.
September’s Wild Mug Club Design
Adventure Starts After Coffee is the September Wild Mug Club release, and like every Wild Mug Club design, it’s only available for the month. The club has become a place where I can turn the wild places, creatures, observations, and slightly questionable adventures that make their way into my life into something you can actually hold onto.
Some months that might mean a goose wandering through wildflowers. This month, it means Old Rag, a pile of rocks I voluntarily climbed over, a hell of a view, and the coffee that probably made the entire operation possible.
If you’ve climbed Old Rag yourself, have Shenandoah memories of your own, or simply believe that most worthwhile adventures should begin with a full coffee mug, September’s design was made with you in mind.
Adventure starts after coffee. Then we’ll see where the trail goes.
