Category: Cultural critique
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Off days and checking boxes
Structured or planned days off are a breeding ground for unproductive sloth and idleness. The point of rest days is to rest, but with a purpose. Merely sitting around runs a high risk of providing only physical respite, as well as allowing opportunities which might be otherwise hard to come by slip away. Not everyone…
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Evie is the story of the day
Evelyn Stevens won La Fleche Wallone Wednesday, completing a five year journey, from Wall Street investment banker and Darmouth alum who had hardly ever ridden a bike to one of the best female road racers on earth, which has made her the perfect Walter Mitty for athletic women. What is more remarkable, especially insofar as…
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Gender, grading, and the mental game
My idea was to promote this new sport by challenging climbers to improve their technical skills to the point they were capable of “bouldering level” difficulty, but discourage the degeneration of bouldering itself into a numbers-chase. –John Gill, on his invention of the first rating system for bouldering The logical follow up to Gill’s statement…
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Why i might be full of shit
or: Credibility and experience in blogging The Black Hole of White Canyon, January 1, 2007. Blogging has irrevocably changed the face of writing about outdoor adventure, in almost all respects for the better. The chief problem today, perhaps different from days previous in scale only, is how to allot proper credence amongst the sea of…
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Metacycles of feet
Human endurance does not run at the pace of modern humans. Our literature and schedules can easily grasp the seasonal and annual peaks and valleys which mind/body seem to necessitate, but the larger ways in which physical and mental development run are as yet poorly understood and too little spoken of out loud. Take as…
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The practice of practice
Boundary Trail, Glacier NP. I started this blog in late 2006, a significant date for my purposes today because it marked a rapidly growing interest/obsession with mountain biking. Serial obsessions have defined my life since childhood, but those of adulthood have necessarily been more defining. Mountain biking is thus far secondary only to climbing in…
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The cycling of middle childhood
Flood debris, Flathead River bends. Below the high water mark, so nobody owns this ground. I started mountain biking in middle school, on my Bridgestone MB5. My friend Adam and I would ride out to Hueston Woods, the only large natural area nearby, and ride on the mountain bike trails that were only then being…
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Ski to die
Steve Romeo is dead. The influential backcountry skier and blogger died in an avalanche in the Tetons less than a week ago. As the Black Diamond blog put it: “Steve never wasted a day, or an hour, and he was leading the life he dreamed for himself, which is the most any of us can…
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There are no first de(a)scents
M and Isaac playing in the mud, Robbers Roost, November 2005. In 2005 we found ourselves, during the course of an extended road trip out west, spending a long Thanksgiving holiday camped out in the Robbers Roost in southern Utah. We did a lot of great, cold hiking with ropes (aka canyoneering), cooked a spectacular…
Bedrock & Paradox 
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