ajtestbed Stones: We’ve built pyramids and castles with them and painstakingly cleared them out of farm fields, using them to build low walls for fencing. We marvel at the rocks in the Grand Canyon, Arches and Grand Teton national parks. Yet a perplexing practice has been gaining ground in our wild spaces: People have begun stacking … Read more
Have you heard that they’re remaking Point Break? Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised: The jackals in Hollywood will mine anything they think will make a buck. Indeed, they’re remaking National Lampoon’s Vacation (Ed Helms, you should know better), a travesty if there ever was one. What’s next, a remake of Caddyshack starring the Rock? But … Read more
Julie Ellison and Alton Richardson are something of a vanlife power couple: She’s the senior editor for Climbing magazine and does freelance writing and photography and he’s a full-time freelance photographer, videographer, and designer, in addition to being the founder and art director of California Climber magazine. Their home base is in Boulder, but when … Read more
At this very moment, someone is selling a 22-year-old mountain bike frame on Ebay for $700 and the odds are good that they’ll get what they’re asking for. Which would surprise most people. The frame, you see, is a scuffed and scratched relic that looks decidedly more Mad Max prop than Michelangelo work of art. … Read more
With over 4,000 stories in the AJ archive, we like to pick an oldie but a goodie from the vault and put it back on the homepage for readers to enjoy. So, enjoy. – Ed. 1. Half Lapping It’s one thing to break trail up the side of a big beautiful bowl and look back … Read more
The man pulls back the tarp, and I’m staring at a seal carcass. Two seal carcasses, actually. They’re 250 pounds apiece, laid out head-to-tail with a neat bullet wound through each head. Their congealed blood glows, drops of rubies on the blue tarp. I’ve encountered a lot of seals in Alaska, but I’ve never seen … Read more
At the nightly campfires on Colorado River trips through the Grand Canyon, stories make their way into legends, passed down from veteran boaters or guides, or read from books kept in the “library box” on one boat. Some of the names in those stories are those of people who died in the canyon, some are … Read more
“You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen.”-René Daumal We were … Read more
Each time you leave, my face gets tired from pretending to be brave. Holding back tears, the top of my throat hurts and my belly feels full of marbles. I turn my head to watch your silver Toyota Tacoma, our home, drive away. My crooked glasses slip down my greasy nose and I unconsciously make … Read more
One Saturday last May, I slid a key into the lock on a scrappy little apartment 80 feet off Denver’s noisy Colfax Avenue. We carried our stuff in and made piles, and flopped a mattress onto the bedroom floor. In bed that night, I laid on my back as sirens shrieked, motorcycle engines whined and … Read more