Playing chicken Split Lip Rayfield, a “thrash-grass trio,” quickly learned that taking a live bantam hen from their farm in Kansas to mountain-town gigs ranging from Vail and Steamboat Springs to Jackson Hole and Utah resorts wasn’t such a good idea after all. They originally thought the chicken might drum up T-shirt and CD sales [...]
Envelope: By Autumn Stinar. We’re in the market for decorative envelopes to help beautify our Letters pages. If you’ve got an artistic envelope bent, pull out your weapons-of-choice, decorate an envelope with our snail mail address on it, mail the resultant envelope to us, and, if we print it, we’ll give you a year’s subscription [...]
Film: “A Skier’s Journey,” by Jordan Manley I thought I’d get in one last ski movie before Mud Season starts, and Jordan Manley’s is a good one (or three) to end on. This isn’t the standard hyper-expensive, multi-sponsor, mega-star affairs that are released every fall — it’s a series of three short films on Vimeo, [...]
Little Dog It took two years for me to be able to even think of being open to bringing a new dog into my life. It does not make me feel good to say this, but I am pretty much convinced that each of us will likely share time on this plane of existence with [...]
1. Unmooring On some days, you sit and look at the computer. Your fingers touch the keys and go nowhere. Your mind numbs as symbols collide on the screen. On some days, this all makes perfect sense. You have things to do. You are bound, chained. But on other days, there’s that cold wet black [...]
“Take A Seat,” by Dominic Gill In June 2006, Dominic Gill pedaled south from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, on a tandem bicycle loaded with video equipment and everything he needed to survive, but an empty seat on the back of the bike. He planned to bicycle the longest land route in the world, to the southernmost [...]
“Breaking Into the Backcountry,” by Steve Edwards In 2001, Steve Edwards, a 26-year-old Purdue University professor who had “never been much of an outdoorsman,” won a PEN/Northwest writing residency, earning him a seven-month stint as the caretaker of a backcountry homestead on Oregon’s Rogue River. He was a flatlander, a virgin fly-fisherman, 70 miles from [...]
