Ashes into the Shadow of Arrows
“There is a Paiute proverb to the effect that no man should attempt the country east of the Sierras until he has learned to sleep …
Hells Canyon Revival
And always, in this search, a person might find that she is already there, at the center of the world. It may be a broken …
Winging it in the Russian Far East
BEYOND THE WING of the Aeroflot twin-engine plane unfolds a tapestry of green tundra and mottled muskeg, the wetlands sliced into crescents by dark arcs …
Time for a Tree House
ACTUALLY, HANNAH AND CAROLINE never really asked me to build them a tree house. I came up with that idea myself, got them attached to it, …
Into the Gloaming
The very word ‘gloaming’ reverberates, echoes—the gloaming, the glimmer, the glisten, the glamour—carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grasslined rivers …
The Ascent of the Riffelberg
OUR GUIDES, HIRED ON THE GEMMI, were already at Zermatt when we reached there. So there was nothing to interfere with our getting up an …
The Science of Awe
This story originally appeared in the November/December 2014 edition of SIERRA, the national publication of the Sierra Club. A FEW YEARS AGO, I RAN Utah’s …
Figures on a Landscape
IN AN OBSCURE WASH in the high Mojave stand two domes, their north faces steeped in shadows. Four friends scrutinize the rune-like creases on the northeast …
The Natural
IN THE PREDAWN HOURS of a recent summer day, Peter Mayfield walked through the skeletal remains of Manzanar, the mothballed World War II Japanese internment …
It Started With a Pile of Stones
THE JOB SOUNDED AGREEABLE: film the Cliff Diving World Championships in Lana’i, Hawaii, for a network sports show. I didn’t know Lana’i from Louisiana, but …
That House of Happiness
IN 2012, I JOURNEYED with several climbing partners to an area of the Karakoram known only on satellite maps, arguably the last unexplored corner of the range. Our trek …
Climbing to Freedom
IN THE SUMMER OF 1972, I was living the simple life of a normal dirtbag, disaffected, counter to the mainstream-culture, climber of the time. The mainstream …
The Majesty Polarity
IN THE LAST DECADE OF THE LAST CENTURY, the videographer, writer and bon vivant Michael Strassman spied a line on a certain Minaret in the High …
Life on the Divide
“YOU AREN’T GONNA BUILD NO HOUSE OF STRAW IN MY COUNTY!” my wife Leslie and I were told by a small-town bureaucrat in our rural corner …
Like Surfers Gone Alpine
“WHAT is alpinism, anyway?” Terry Kearney was starting to rave as we burned through the last of our fuel. It was the morning after our second …
The Greening of Alex Honnold
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 – sure he will – …
The Lost Coast
THE CALL OF THE SEA is hard to resist. I became intrigued with the Aleut trade route in 1988, while reading George Dyson’s Baidarka. A year …
The Adventure Gap and Narratives of Inclusion
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?