Category: Featured

We Need More: Avalanche Rescue Education isn’t Enough.

We Need More: Avalanche Rescue Education isn’t Enough.

Written by | Jun 12, 2024

You’ve put in the time to take an avalanche rescue course, maybe two. You practice each year with your beacon, and the dutiful among you might even attend your annual Snow and Avalanche Workshop to continue to learn all that you can about how to avoid an avalanche. Then, one day, you find yourself in the terrible position of digging out your buried partner. You succeed in pulling them to the surface, but they’re not moving or breathing. Have you trained for this?

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Fear, Lack, and Truth: Reflections on “The Tower”

Fear, Lack, and Truth: Reflections on “The Tower”

Written by | May 9, 2024

Truth can be an elusive prey. In The Tower, Kelly Cordes succeeds in tightening his grip on the truths and lies that make up the history of climbing on Cerro Torre.  The subtitle “A Chronicle of Climbing and Controversy on Cerro Torre” only hints at the depths in which he researches the topic.

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Give Monogamy a Chance

Give Monogamy a Chance

Written by | Feb 7, 2024

Consistent touring partners are a fickle beast. Good ones—the sort you build a “partnership” with—require the confluence of several factors. It’s like dating, but maybe even harder. It’s a very Goldilocks sort of quest.

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Sister from Another Mister—A Backcountry Friendship

Sister from Another Mister—A Backcountry Friendship

Written by | Nov 20, 2023

Mr. Walker had VHS tapes of Scot Schmidt and Glen Plake, and for sure, Brit and I didn’t just want to meet those guys;we wanted to BE those guys. I only ever had two posters of people on my wall—Glen Plake and Andy Hampsten. During the fall, when we couldn’t ski, and Mr. Walker attempted to fire our stoke, he’d get us to do wall sits to get in shape, and he’d screen those “extreme skiing” films. Maybe the most extreme part was actually getting your hands on those movies in the late 80’s in Ohio.

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The Chess Match of High Density Skiing

The Chess Match of High Density Skiing

Written by | Nov 9, 2023

Inter-Party Avalanche Involvements: There is a generally accepted and often repeated assumption that the backcountry is overrun with humans. Are there more of us out there? The idea of party density and the reality of managing autonomous groups touring in the same zone, and often on the same run, is a real dynamic. To say the backcountry is a swarming hive of reckless and adaptable bipeds, each caught in their cascade of heuristic traps, is overreach. But there are crowds.

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