Brad Rassler 19 min read
“THE JOKE IS ‘Hey, I’ve climbed Everest; now I’m a motivational speaker,’” Conrad Anker told me after I observed that...
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...
Tom Rosenbauer 17 min read
THIS IS a true story. It’s a tale of unusually large brown trout, sewage, weird mayflies, floods and droughts. If...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
CMarie Fuhrman 21 min read
And always, in this search, a person might find that she is already there, at the center of the world....
Andy Selters 17 min read
IN 2012, I JOURNEYED with several climbing partners to an area of the Karakoram known only on satellite maps, arguably the last...
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...
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?
Thuy-vy Nguyen 6 min read
Time when we are unexpectedly alone can be difficult but, at least for some of us, it can also be a blessing in disguise.
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...
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...
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...
Philip Weiss 48 min read
YOU KNOW you are inside the Bohemian Grove when you come down a trail in the woods and hear piano music from amid a group of tents and then round a bend to see a man with a beer in one hand and his penis in the other, urinating into the bushes.
Donella Meadows 42 min read
Back from the sublime to the ridiculous, from enlightenment to caveats.