Snow Sports
Archive
In remote Zapatista country, the good people of Chiapas are engaged in a once-a-year change to upend the world. Men become women. Night becomes day. And a pilgrim in a rental car is barreling toward them.
For generations, it's been a curious springtime pilgrimage: hiking up, then skiing, boarding, sliding, or crashing down Tuckerman Ravine. But there's a first time for everyone.
For generations, it's been a curious springtime pilgrimage: hiking up, then skiing, boarding, sliding, or crashing down Tuckerman Ravine. But there's a first time for everyone.
The most imposing figure on Everest has been told to stay home. But don't count Henry Todd out yet.
An oral history of Everest's endearingly dysfunctional village
There's nobody more qualified to drag you to the top of the world than Babu Chiri Sherpa. And he'll gladly do it. But when he's through, he's got some business of his own to attend to. Namely, obliterating every last climbing record on Everest, shattering the myth of his people as high-altitude baggage handlers, and taking the Sherpa brand global.
Exploring the most enchantingly rugged places on earth is easy. Just follow our guide to the world's ten classic treks, put one foot in front of the other—and don't forget to take it slow.
Close encounters of the bear-human kind are skyrocketing, though actual attacks remain few and far between. Hopefully, new outreach education efforts will keep things that way.
Look out, Alaska: Doug Swingley is coming back. And this time he's… happy. The author picks the brain of the greatest musher in the Lower 48 and reveals his cunning plan to slay that 1,100-mile-long monster of the North, the Iditarod, for the fourth time.
Eight friends. Four volcanoes. Nine days. A primer on self-guided ski mountaineering.
How did a mellow, mop-haired, lackadaisically unfashionable snowboarder achieve freeride immortality? First he lifted his carve to a fine art. Then he linked turns down impossibly steep terrain on some of the planet's highest peaks. Now he bucks industry trends, eschews money, and foreswears fame. But most important, he just rides.
Thanks to improved safety standards and tandem flights, scores of acrophobes are giving hang gliding a second wind. And now, they're soaring in style—over the Golden Gate Bridge.
Terror put a chill on global tourism, but adventure travelers—used to a little uncertainty—seem determined to stay on the road
He was packing for a trek through roughest Afghanistan when the world shook. Sometimes adventure has to wait.
For a bargain price of $1.7 million, Doug Tompkins and his wife Kristine have sewn up a vast Patagonian wonderland. Who says cranky visionaries can't close a deal?
Going core with Yvon Chouinard—leery capitalist, walking contradiction
A new wave of adventurers makes the case that the world has much left to offer
Dateline: Nepal, 2001. The royal family has been murdered. Maoist guerrillas prowl the countryside, fomenting agrarian revolution. Kathmandu has succumbed to general strikes and indiscriminate bombings. And everybody's got his own pet conspiracy theory. Is this in the Himalayas, or the next Asian apocalypse in the making? August 10, 2001: Symmes reflects on th
The brutal Southern Ocean has seen more races this year than ever before. Here's why.
ϳԹ's guide to the coolest trips and the world's top new adventure travel spots.
The world's largest scuba-training company plunges into the treacherous depths of technical diving, where fatalities are the accepted price for adrenaline
ϳԹ's guide to the 95 coolest trips, the world's top new adventure travel spots, and the ten accessories you can't go without.
One climber broke his back. One wandered in a daze. One tried, and failed, to save a friend. They all left behind a moment and a place that would haunt a dead mountaineer's daughter for decades. A pilgrimage in search of a lost father.
A major new resort opens in the affordable Great White North, where they apparently didn't get the word that skiing is dead
SKIER'S HOP Start with your left leg on the ground and your right leg planted on an 8- to 12-inch-high platform. In one motion, use your right leg to leap laterally over the platform and land in the opposite of the starting position. Repeat, leaping from side to side…
Having blown both knees, the Olympic champ is back with her twice-proven prescription for total recovery
Searching for the keys to endurance, a ski racer pushes his body and heart to the limit—until his father's sudden illness changes all the rules
Using cutting-edge techniques, three young mavericks set out to tackle one of the hardest routes in the Himalayas
Meet the toughest wall rats ever. Some of them are still redpointing routes (fused ankles and broken backs notwithstanding). Or running their own companies. Or passing the torch to young acolytes. A portrait gallery of American climbing's greatest generation.
Has this tired old world been explored-out? Not Down Under, where uncharted, bottomless slot canyons hide just west of Sydney.
There's nothing more all-American than a long summer road trip—except maybe a long summer road trip sponsored by a kayak company. Meet the hard-drivin', trick-huckin', heart-throbbin' river punks that may just turn freestyle kayaking into whitewater's answer to snowboarding.
New-school nomads pedal the singletrack of the ancients on the first mountain-biking trip to northern Mongolia
So, feeling like a plunge down a Himalayan river, a race up the face of a Patagonian spire, or a ski expedition to the North (or South—that's O.K. too) Pole? Feeling a little scared? That's why we call them Tough Trips.
Guy Waterman had climbed every peak in the Northeast high country—in winter, and from all the cardinal directions. With his wife, he had co-authored four scrupulously principled books on New England wilderness, and he was revered as the conscience of the mountains, a beloved teacher and friend, a paragon of Yankee self-reliance. Why, then, did he hike to the top of his favorite peak on the coldest day of the year and lie down to die?
The Adventurist: My Life in Dangerous Places, by Robert Young Pelton; The Snakebite Survivors' Club: Travels Among Serpents, by Jeremy Seal; Teewinot: A Year in the Grand Tetons, by Jack Turner; and The Water in Between, by Kevin Patterson.
It’s not easy to add up all the ways in which Lance Armstrong has earned the title of American hero. Lance Armstrong Lance Armstrong First he was the fiery phenom, a brilliant athlete on the brink of greatness. Then he showed us the vulnerable, terrified, but always…
So is adventure racing pure competition, or just a grueling way to grab TV ratings?
The peaks of the Italian Alps may look daunting, but climbing them is la dolce vita.
After all the bad weather, bad luck, and bad food, there was only one thing left for the publishers and producers of the next big adventure blockbuster to do: Kill the writer.
Come ski Mad River Glen, where it is resolved that progress is not a good thing—and that man-made snow is for sissies
A partner drops out, one thing leads to another, and suddenly our hero finds that peer pressure has him fighting for his life
A corps of rock rats in a hurry is putting the pedal to the mettle in big-wall climbing
Last winter was among the deadliest avalanche seasons on record in the United States and Europe. Why is the number of fatalities rising? And what's being done about it?
It takes a brave heart, a keen interest in cryogenics, and a thick coating of neoprene to climb into an iceboat and fly across a frozen lake at upwards of 60 miles per hour. But hey, hard-water sailors don't mind. What else would they do with all their free time?
They were mountaineering's best and brightest. Three decades later, their story hangs over the Montana Rockies like a winter mist.
A Wetland Restoration Comedy: how one man transformed vile, polluted, dank little swamp into the perfect glassy ice pond
Books to upgrade your coffee table, featuring photography by NASA's Apollo astronauts, mountaineering legend Vittorio Sella, Glen Canyon chronicler Tad Nichols, and wildlife portraitist James Balog, along with Patagonia moments, Jane Goodall's chimps, and the world's most disgusting foods.
A tight crew of out-of-bounds crazies has been working overtime to turn the snow-flick world upside down with its relentlessly spectacular reels. Is it art or is it ski porn?
A tight crew of out-of-bounds crazies has been working overtime to turn the snow-flick world upside down with its relentlessly spectacular reels. Is it art or is it ski porn?
Way, way out in the land of powder, the cornices are steeper, the trails go deeper, and the crowds are nonexistent. Where is this mythical kingdom, you ask? Right here in North America.
Soaring over four continents, three oceans, and assorted hostile nations aboard a high-tech gondola, Bertrand Piccard of Switzerland and Brian Jones of England this year became the first men to circle the world by hot-air balloon. Here is their diary—the unforgettable highs, the lows, and the humdrum routine experienced by the unlikely duo who vowed to boldly g
New School Skiing is teaching good old hotdogging some radical new tricks
In an exclusive excerpt from the book by the men who led the quest to solve the mystery of George Mallory's disappearance, the authors for the first time reveal the evidence they uncovered—and offer their chilling re-creation of Mallory and Irvine's last hours.
It may be cold, it may be impossibly vast and empty, but in its first hours of existence, Canada's newborn Inuit territory proves that there's nothing so liberating as home rule.
This year's World Extreme Skiing Championships will feature two types of descent: Hail Mary and Mother of God
Swing a hammer, light a fuse, and let the dams come tumbling down. So goes the cry these days on American rivers, where vandals of every stripe—enviros and fishermen and interior secretaries, among others—wage battle to uncork the nation's bound-up waters.
Alaskan eccentric Trigger Twigg attempts the first winter ascent of the world's tallest face
Seven Olympic venues, one charming Main Street, and a host of High Peaks—it all adds up to Lake Placid, America's original snowbound resort.
Think Whistler is the only thing that British Columbia has to offer? Think again.
Can you feel it coming? Heat, hail, snow, rain. Wind, drought, flood, pain. Are you tired of waiting? Then hurry to Bangladesh, where the skies have already broken.
"He is for sure not one of us," says a teammate of ski racer Hermann Maier. "He is beyond this world," says a former gold medalist. "He is a beast," they say, and finally, "He is the beast."
Heed those rusty hinges now, and they'll work more smoothly when it really counts
A modest bit of indoor dedication now will give you the freedom to let loose this winter
