 Pirouetting Your Way to the Top
It was Benny Bach’s idea, if I remember correctly. Fall of 1986. The University of Colorado at Boulder’s Theater and Dance Department offered, as it always did, a beginning ballet class. Benny suggested it to me one day in my University Hill apartment (affectionately known by my roommate, Ethan Putterman, and me as “Junkie Squalor”).“From what I’ve read,” he said, “ballet is really good for honing balance, flexibility and strength. We should take it. It’ll help our climbing.”
 A Tale of Three Ledges
I haven't climbed hard for about 25 years. Since then, climbing for me has transformed from a passionate, even obsessive hunger to “something that was great to have done.” Past tense. They were formative experiences. I don’t do it anymore, but god did I enjoy it at the time. It was a fantastic 10 years and I still draw from those experiences. The climbing life was so simple — all other worries are stripped away.
 Soloing is Stupid
Soloing is stupid. Soloing is what I do with my trumpet, preferably over an easy chord progression after a few neat bourbons. Whenever I watch a video of someone climbing ropeless up a big face that doesn’t overhang an ocean, my palms begin to sweat. “How ridiculous is that?” I’ll remark to the person sitting next to me. “I mean, one tiny mistake and you’re dead. A big sneeze could kill you.”
 Making Way for Midas Mulligan: A Paranoid Vision of our Mountain Future
I’m looking at Colorado’s latest outbreak of contention between fishermen and whitewater boaters, and I’m thinking that life, like the planet life lives on, must have a lot of underlying geology: otherwise why these ridiculous and intractable surface perturbations? Earthquakes and volcanoes happen on the planet, and we can either believe them to be Acts of God, or we can listen to geologists who ask us to believe that we are riding huge stone islands afloat on a sea of molten magma, islands that are grinding and crunching against each other, resulting in all these disruptive surface perturbations.
 Rio Grande
If one were to put a correctly aimed (downhill, that is) truck into neutral, right there in my driveway, take the e-brake off, and let her go, it would creep, slowly at first, but then with more urgency until you’d find yourself careening down what would seem (if you resisted the urge to brake) like an impossibly steep incline. Perhaps, if there were snow (there isn’t, but still) it would even be skiable, until the ground flattened and the truck slowed and ultimately plowed into the waters of the roiling Rio Grande.
 Catch and Release in the Gila
The ESPN pair had pulled up at the RV space next to Woody’s the night before, shiny white Ford extended cab and fifthwheel trailer. Two famous fishing pros, Ed Weber and Gary Giudice, on an ESPNsponsored “Dream Trip”: fish all summer long, starting in southern Arizona, then follow the weather northward along the Continental Divide, all the way to Alberta by August, millions of readers on their ESPN blog, “Wannabe Trout Bums.”
 The Fatted Bear, or, the Prophylaxis of Fear; Being a Tale of Panick, Dread and Dalliance in the Wildland/Pantry Interface
As summer faded, autumn fell, and winter set in, some headlines fairly screamed the news: “A Bear of a Problem in Aspen” [Aspen Times Weekly], “Colorado Struggles to Run Bears Out of Town” [Wall Street Journal], and my personal favorite, “Grandmother Fights Bear In Bedroom With Pillow” [The Denver Channel]. In a slightly calmer tone, others described reactions from authorities on the subject: “Marshals concerned with new wave of pesky bear problems” [Crested Butte News] and “Woman warned against feeding wildlife eaten by bear” [The Denver Post].
 Mentors: Missing Snow
It is November 24, Thanksgiving Day — opening day of the ski season back home in Colorado. But I’m in Thailand, rock climbing on the beach at a place called Ton Sai. The limestone is stellar; the locals are friendly; the Andaman sea blue and beautiful. But it is hot, and I hunger for crisp mountain air. In the middle of a tropical paradise, I find myself missing snow.
 Mentors: That Sonofabitch Jay
Every hard-core skier knows someone like that Sonofabitch Jay. When it comes to skiing, he’s a whore. He’ll take ice inbounds, champagne powder out-of-bounds — and everything in between — to get his 50-plus days in each year. And one minute you’re willing to give him a kidney and the next you want to wring his frickin’ neck. When it comes to off-piste skiing, I’ve answered the sirens’ song of the backcountry temptresses on occasion — heli, cat and snowmobile skiing and the infrequent random hike up a gladed ridge.
 Fear and Lightning on Dirtyman Creek
Wyoming is the least-populated of the United States, housing a mere 532,668 souls scattershot across 97,818-square-miles. Great expanses of its terra are truly incognita. Its vast windswept range-land and high peaks are ruggedness incarnate, magnets for the imagination that dare us to enter the marrow of raw wildness. But as lost Teton hikers, bear-mauled Yellowstone tourists, hardscrabble miners, frozen-solid cows and their long-suffering, laconic drivers attest, Wyoming is a harsh land.
 An Unfinished Mountain Bike Story
“You mountain bike?” Steve asked.
“I’m thinking of getting back into it.” I responded. “There are some great trails around here. I’m not used to that. Where I lived before was real beautiful, but it was surrounded by farmland. You couldn’t just get on your bike and go, you had to get in your car and go.”
 The Straight and Narrow
I didn’t notice him following my little brother and me into the grimy, blue-tiled bathroom. We were hunched over the sink when I caught his reflection in the mirror the way a summertime cloud momentarily darkens a beautiful day.
His acne-scarred face gleamed beneath a greasy comb-over held in place by cheap hair tonic or an irregular bathing schedule. He wore a sweat-stained undershirt that was unsuccessfully stretching to meet his similarly overtaxed jeans.
 A Beer Drinker Bicycles the Barossa Valley
I am a beer man. I’ll go as far to admit I couldn’t tell the difference between a Pinot Noir and a Pinot Grigio (I think one is white). However, I do know a thing or two about the production process of these libations. For starters, beers are generally made in factory-like buildings in an urban setting. Sure one could do a brewery-bicycle tour, but who wants to pedal in a city?
 The Downhillers
Crows count telephone poles. The long-distance truckers drive by high on methamphetamine and the Holy Grail. And the liquor doesn’t matter anymore for the downhill racer at the bar. Everything else feels like being sober after the naked pull of the vertical white road. The world feels like water, and you start to feel seasick standing still, as if gravity itself, oxygen, and hope would disappear if you ever left the trail. Half of them are crazy. Half of all the downhill racers you know. They blow up at press conferences like slapshots into the back of the net, or burst into flames in the cars and bars.
 The Grinch’s Snow Tires: (Idle Thoughts on a Low Tank of Gas)
It took two hours to drive through the loving rapture of Mother Winter’s fanged breath to arrive 50 miles down the mountain at Colorado Springs. Once there, I deftly spun my car in pirouette against a tall curb at the velocity of a sleepy walrus — Ga-Whumpf! I felt the wheels land on the ground again (bellydown, noggin-up, fortunately), and I gave the pedal a squish but the wheels were not quite right. My little car wobbled into the parking lot of a Loaf and Jug gas station. I was trapped in the city!
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