Adventure
ArchiveIntroducing the latest book, Ocean Fishes, from James Prosek, once dubbed “the Audubon of the fishing world.”…
In 2008, whitewater kayaker Patrick Camblin came up with an idea to allow paddlers to submit nominations online for the sport's best moments, athletes, and expeditions. “So many of the incredible things that happen in our sport never gain an audience,” he says. “I wanted to do something that…
A reindeer running in Norway. Photo: Shutterstock Here's something that might not surprise: Scientists have used a model to predict that if a formation of 241 snowkiters were to fly across…
M51, The Whirlpool Galaxy. Photo: The Royal Observatory Photographer of the Year/Martin Pugh Australian Martin Pugh nabbed the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2012 award from…
Nine climbers are reported dead following the massive avalanche that swept through Camp III on Manaslu this past Sunday, according to both the Associated Press and The Guardian. A local police chief said…
Repeat after me: It's not about speed. Photo: Katie Arnold Recently, a couple of friends and I decided to mark the last days of summer by taking our kids for a hike. It was a warm, sunny, windless afternoon, the top-five-best-days-of-the-year kind of…
A slab of snow broke loose, wiping out Camp III high on the world's eighth-tallest peak in what could be among the deadliest avalanches in Himalayan climbing history
Chimney Rock. Photo: USDA.gov/Flickr On Friday, President Barack Obama signed a proclamation designating 4,726 acres of land in southwestern Colorado as Chimney Rock National Monument.
Kelly Slater. Photo: ASP/Kirstin Kelly Slater moved into third place in the overall ASP standings when he won the Hurley Pro at Trestles on Thursday. “I feel like I’ve had so many good years at…
ext_script = "//player.ooyala.com/player.js?embedCode=MzY3h4NTrQC8bniUW2NFBinDNMdE5VCB&height=360&deepLinkEmbedCode=MzY3h4NTrQC8bniUW2NFBinDNMdE5VCB&width=640&video_pcode=1jZG06vQqWlGOe2jr1WK6VaYFHtK" I've written before about Jonathan Siegrist, the Colorado sport climber who's been establishing hard new routes in the United States while many of his peers have focused their efforts on destinations like Spain. This month, Siegrist was at it…
The Secret Race. Photo: Courtesy of Bantam Dell During the two years Daniel Coyle spent reporting and writing The Secret Race, he interviewed…
In this weekly roundup, we scour the Web for our favorite long-form magazine and newspaper articles, collecting them here and on Longreads and Twitter. This installment focuses on what exactly chicken tastes like, the mystery caves, what Mitt Romney would do to the envir
Wildlife advocates support wolves in RMNP
Filmmaker Chris Tangey recorded the above video of a fire whirl whisking through the Australian Outback near Alice Springs on September 11. Since then, the clip has swerved from news sites to blogs to social media around the world. In its…
“I don’t think in any other sport do you have the license to get so closely involved with the subject at such a high risk factor as surf photography,” says Ted Grambeau in the film Fiberglass and Megapixels. “It would be…
Conservationists try to protect shrinking population
57,000 sign petition as police ready to meet protestors
The record low compared to the average minimum. Photo: NASA/Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio The extreme melt of Arctic sea ice has stopped for the year, but only after setting a record low for area covered, scientists…
Dolphins communicate with each other, but can they communicate with us? Marine biologist Denise Herzing is drawing on decades of research, a vast digital library of whistles and clicks, and new computer wizardry designed to bridge the species gap. Tim Zimmermann goes deep with one of history's grandest experiments.
As parents, it’s easy to get caught up in the saga of our own children. Their all-consuming schedules, school, sports, our own fraught expectations. We want them to be smart, kind, and game. We want them to play outside and be healthy. We want them to remember their manners, read…
We're pretty committed to covering the newest, most innovative gear here on The Gear Shed, but every now and then there is a product, out for a while, that has evolved over time to set the standard in its class that we feel is deserving of a mention. Such is…
“San Diego Surf.” Photo: Copyright, 2012, The Andy Warhol Museum In 1968, Andy Warhol and friends moved out to La Jolla, California, from New York to film a surf movie about an unhappy married couple. The footage…
Ranulph Fiennes hopes to beat Norwegians
This might be the longest series of unnecessary honks in the history of driver-versus-cyclist confrontations. An older male driver in a Ford SUV, license plate Colorado 893 EKG, slowed behind two bikers out for a Sunday ride near Longmont, Colorado, and laid on his horn for an awfully long…
Activist Tim DeChristopher, currently serving out a sentence for fraud in Littleton, Colorado, reacts to losing his appeal last Friday and responds to criticism generated by a post in which he suggested that environmentalists should not vote for Obama
For almost a century, the world's hottest temperature was believed to be a 136-degree Fahrenheit measurement recorded in El Azizia, Libya, on September 13, 1922. This month, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) threw that record out. They gave their reasons in…
The seventh edition of America's biggest climbing film show features sport climbing showdowns and high-altitude epics
Josh Tostado overtakes an unsuspecting rider in the early morning Vapor hours. Last weekend, I rode the Vapor Trail 125, an unsanctioned bike ride out of Salida, Colorado. It was my third time at the…
Everyone experiences the occasional bad day at the office, and having an alternative career to fantasize about is a reliable coping strategy. Marine biologist. Fly-fishing guide. Ski patroller. A good friend and writer I've worked with on many stories over the years used to suffer from chronic bouts of…
A pika in its talus home. Photo: Karunakar Rayker By Mary Ellen Hannibal When Chris Ray got started studying pika, she could not have anticipated that these small rabbit relatives would one day become a poster child…
West Mata eruption. Photo: NSF/NOAA In 2009, scientists on a cruise in the Western Pacific sent a remotely operated vehicle 4,000 feet below the ocean surface and discovered a two-mile high volcano called West Mata erupting 2,200-degree Fahrenheit lava in bursts scattered over the area…
Winds were on the lighter side as the world’s best windsurfers began to battle on the first day of the KIA Cold Hawaii PWA World Cup.
“Frozen.” Photo: Mark Tipple, The Underwater Project There's a lot about Australian Mark Tipple's career as a photographer that appears backwards. Take, for example, his beginnings. The…
After years of sounding the climate-change alarm, writer Bill McKibben realized that gentle persuasion wasn’t cutting it. So he got mad. Then he got busy: tweeting, organizing, protesting, getting arrested, and becoming Big Oil’s biggest threat.
Forty-eight of the world’s best male windsurfers prepare to compete for the title of world champion in wave performance.
A former corporate lawyer whose back-of-the-napkin plan to kayak from Minnesota to Florida was so awesomely deranged, we decided to pay his way
Sentence necessary to 'promote respect for the law'
It's hard enough learning to surf. Just try it when you can't see and your instructor is deaf.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=TfCb33_nPe0 For more than 10 years, Survivorman Les Stroud has ventured into the backcountry alone and recorded his wilderness experiences. He’s traveled to more than 25 locations, racked up 200 days of solitude, and…
Yosemite National Park confirmed on Thursday that a ninth person had contracted hantavirus, according to Reuters. The park visitor, from California, has recovered. The notice came a day after the park notified roughly 230,000 people about the outbreak by email, according to the…
In this weekly roundup, we scour the Web for our favorite long-form magazine and newspaper articles, collecting them here and on Longreads and Twitter. This installment focuses on the animals we punish, the sports we can't play, and the fickle thing that is public opinio
There has been no better series about the making of an adventure movie than Sweetgrass Productions' 12-episode collection On the Road. The Colorado-based crew chronicled all the stink, snow, and blood that went into making the ski flick…
EPSON DSC picture Larry Gibson, keeper of Kayford Mountain. Photo: Vivian Stockman The Appalachian Mountains lost a hero on Sunday, September 10. Larry Gibson, the face of the fight against mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia, died of a heart attack while…
In a last-ditch attempt to preserve some of the only green spaces left on the eastern edge of Jerusalem, the city plans to build a series of national parks with an extensive network of trails. Is this an honest effort to encourage tourism, or a political attempt to keep Arab neighborhoods from expanding?
Michael Lewis, President Barack Obama. Photo: Official White House Photograph/Pete Souza Reporter Michael Lewis followed President Barack Obama for six months in order to write the profile “Obama's Way.” At its core, the Vanity Fair story is a…
With evidence piling up that Armstrong cheated to win, should he confess and ask his fans, enemies, and cancer-fighting supporters to forgive him? As Brian Alexander explains, that would be the worst move he could make.
Entering the cave. Photo: Rechitan Soran/Shutterstock Not long before Thanksgiving in 2009, 26-year-old University of Virginia medical student John Jones, his wife Emily, and their 13-month-old daughter flew home to Utah. Emily was pregnant, and the couple…
In the 16 years since Into Thin Air, Mount Everest has become safer in many ways, with better storm forecasting and amazing high-altitude rescue helicopters. So why did 10 people die in 2012?