the sustainable play reader

On Earning One’s Turns

There were articles about backcountry skiing on those pages. Or rather, upon closer examination, a series of screeds. Here was a rant about initiating an early "lead change" to carve the perfect telemark turn, and another about how to lay down the perfect skin track

Searching for Jensen

Brad Rassler 22 min read

YES, I KNEW SOMETHING of the great mountaineer Don Jensen; after all, I bore witness to his Sierran legacy with every ramble...

The Alchemist

Brad Rassler 24 min read

IT HAPPENED ON A CRISP SAN FRANCISCO EVENING. February of 1968 at the Carousel Ballroom. Jerry Garcia and the Dead were...

The Greening of Alex Honnold

Brad Rassler 19 min read

GO AHEAD: ASK ALEX HONNOLD about his unprecedented solo ascents, and watch how he reflexively flips the toggle switch to autopilot. He’ll rhapsodize about climbing...

The Majesty Polarity

Brad Rassler 9 min read

IN THE LAST DECADE OF THE LAST CENTURY, the videographer, writer and bon vivant Michael Strassman spied a line on a...

It Started With a Pile of Stones

John Long 13 min read

THE JOB SOUNDED AGREEABLE: film the Cliff Diving World Championships in Lana’i, Hawaii, for a network sports show. I didn’t...

The Pied Pipers of Pow

Brad Rassler 2 min read

I SKI BECAUSE Allan Bard and Tom Carter told me to. Anyone who banked a telemark turn in the Sierra Nevada in the...

Art of the Wild: Gessner, Stegner, and Abbey

Brad Rassler 29 min read

WRITER, PROFESSOR, AND ENVIRONMENTAL PROVOCATEUR, David Gessner, is lounging in his writing shack out back of his North Carolina house, a...

Swallowed Whole

Jim Stimson 10 min read

ON THE EVENING OF FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2015, a wildfire swept through the small communities of Paradise and Swall Meadows, located...

Like Surfers Gone Alpine

Doug Robinson 19 min read

“WHAT is alpinism, anyway?” Terry Kearney was starting to rave as we burned through the last of our fuel. It was...

Climbing to Freedom

Dick Dorworth 14 min read

Then she recounted a story that put climbing into a stark, perhaps primordial perspective, one that I’d never entertained or needed to entertain.

Into the Gloaming

Katie Ives 9 min read

The very word ‘gloaming’ reverberates, echoes—the gloaming, the glimmer, the glisten, the glamour—carrying in its consonants the images of houses...

Conservation Gone Wild

Robert Lugg 5 min read

The epithet “basic” was all over Facebook news feeds and the blogosphere in 2014, and not only because Taylor Swift...

The Winter Of His Disbelief

John Dittli 10 min read

I’M NOT A SUPERSTITIOUS GUY, BUT REALLY, I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN. I’m no meteorologist either, but after 35 years of...

The Adventure Gap and Narratives of Inclusion

Brad Rassler 21 min read

The reality is that if you have a constituency of voters who have no direct relationship with the natural world, why would they ever vote, allocate federal tax dollars to support it in perpetuity to the future the way it is now?