Reliving a strange, stripped-down season on the Freeride World Qualifier circuit Concrete chalk. That was the texture of the snow on Taos’ West Basin, a steep and slippery swath of terrain at New Mexico’s biggest ski area. It was also the venue of the next day’s...
Sitting on our gigantic backpacks, our shoulders feel like Celtic knots, painfully twisted. Ten hours of ski touring carrying 50 pounds of winter camping gear has turned my wife Allison and my once-supple torsos into tough, overcooked meat. Daylight is fading fast, but we have...
Canada’s Whistler Blackcomb is epic. Just two hours’ drive north of Vancouver airport along the scenic Sea-to-Sky Highway, the British Columbian ski resort is impressive by any measure....
Mount Rainier rises like a wayward iceberg from the green sea of moss, fir and ferns that drape both sides of the White River. Towering 10,000 vertical feet above us, it is a disorienting and intimidating glacial behemoth creased and crinkled by yawning crevasses and...
The towering range in central Nevada tests route-finding skills and serves up wild serenity on a 72-mile backpacking adventure Sunset over the Shoshone Range from the Toiyabes I sometimes envision the highways and off-beaten paths that crisscross Nevada’s vast landscape as contrails intersecting in the sky. They...
Beyond Tahoe, the region features several dramatic caverns that lure adventurous spelunkers to explore Caves harbor secrets so intriguing that spelunkers will go to extreme lengths to uncover them. They will search for days to find a hidden opening or dive into unforgiving darkness. They will...
Ski Alberta’s Banff, Lake Louise and Norquay on one cool Canadian Rockies trip O Canada! Your natural charms are many, but perhaps none so staggeringly stunning as the steep, snow-covered summits belonging to Banff National Park. Established in 1885, not long after three Canadian Pacific Railway...
A backcountry snowboarding adventure into the Great Western Divide Mileage smileage. This is one of those High Sierra adventures where it’s better not to know exactly how far we’re trying to go. Distances and elevations spinning in our heads might only distract from our confidence. The...
Bucket-list adventure achieved: Climbing five fourteeners in a day Perched on a narrow ledge, I lean out from the rocky mountain face to scan the terrain above me. I can see a scrappy corner that’s climbable, but the rock looks sketchy, too loose to risk messing...
Mt. Whitney tests the mettle of a rag-tag group of hikers with weather, elevation and steep granite The darkening clouds clustered above us on the shoulders of Mt. Whitney were starting to look angry. It was a bad portent for our eclectic band of eight adventurers. For...