Love and Loathing on the River

Love and Loathing on the River

by Jeff Osgood October 12, 2010 Features

Bill the river guide was a welcome contrast. I’d spent the last day and a half traveling on a church retreat with a couple of deacon chaperones and a dozen squeaky-clean teenagers. So when we unloaded on the bank of the New River and met the man who would be steering our raft, I sidled [...]

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Hope is the Thing with Feathers

Hope is the Thing with Feathers

by Jen Jackson October 12, 2010 Features

The violet hour belongs to swallows. This is the evening span when canyon walls glow with an interior luminosity, when the setting sun simply cannot account for the wash of colors across the land — colors that exist for this one expansive moment each day, hues that Crayola finds impossible to ensnare in wax. This [...]

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The Devil’s Stairway

The Devil’s Stairway

by Cal Glover October 12, 2010 Features

“There’s just one particular harbor … so far, and yet so near … ” — Jimmy Buffett, 1987 So how was I to know that in June of 1971, standing at the on ramp to I-95 outside Fort Liquordale, Florida, with my protruding thumb pointed north and west, that 72 hours later I would land [...]

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The Loon of Mystic Heights Pond

The Loon of Mystic Heights Pond

by Dick Dorworth October 12, 2010 Features

Most of our time is spent in Idaho, but Jeannie, my girlfriend, partner and love in life, owns a house on the pond in Mystic Heights just outside Bozeman, Montana. We spend less time in the house on the pond than it deserves, but our irregular visits are cherished, nourishing and always educational. Bozeman and the [...]

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Cheapskates Rejoice

Cheapskates Rejoice

by Tara Flanagan October 8, 2010 Cartographic

Champions emerge from every crappy situation, and our long, lousy economic condition is no exception. Sometimes in the name of environmental sustainability, sometimes as a matter of one-upmanship, extreme thriftiness and downsizing have usurped ramen noodles and Geo Metros to become an art form. 1) Big on Small Dee Williams of Olympia has become a poster [...]

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Mountaineering: The Freedom of the Hills, 50th Anniversary Edition

Mountaineering: The Freedom of the Hills, 50th Anniversary Edition

by Brendan Leonard October 8, 2010 Books

Most of us who have gone look- ing for enlightenment in the big hills, armed with crampons or ropes or ice axes or other implements — but without paying for professional mountain guides — have a worn copy of one of the first seven editions of “Mountaineering: The Freedom of the Hills” somewhere on our [...]

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Ranger Confidential: Living, Working and Dying in the National Parks by Andrea Lankford

Ranger Confidential: Living, Working and Dying in the National Parks by Andrea Lankford

by Brendan Leonard October 8, 2010 Books

If you’ve spent any amount of time in our beloved national parks, you’ve probably seen some pretty bizarre stuff. A friend of mine who guides in the Grand Canyon once saw a woman actually pick up and throw a squirrel over a cliff at one of the South Rim viewpoints after it scampered up to [...]

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A Life Ascending

A Life Ascending

by Brendan Leonard October 8, 2010 Film

It pretty much makes my month when an outdoors movie comes across my desk, and after watching it, I get to give it my “not ski/climbing porn” stamp. In the first few minutes of “A Life Ascending,” you see Ruedi Beglinger, owner of Revelstoke, British Columbia, hut-skiing company Selkirk Mountain Experience, anchor a rope to a snowblower [...]

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Upwards

Upwards

by M John Fayhee October 8, 2010 October 2010

“If you deny what you know, or what you are, or where you are, you deny the simplest part of being alive, and then you die.” —Bel Kaufman, “Up the Down Staircase” The news came circuitously, and slowly, as is the way of these sorts of entrepreneurial endeavors: The Mountain Gazette was once again simultaneously [...]

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Letters – October 2010

Letters – October 2010

by Mountain Gazette October 8, 2010 Letters

The List Guy: Thoughts About Cool Things and The Fine Line Editor’s note: After priming the creative pump of both yours truly (Smoke Signals,“Listing Who We Are, MG #166) and the MG Tribe (via the two dozen or more Letters we have run on the subject), Dave Baldridge, whose idea it was for people to [...]

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