In January 1989, writer Alex Shoumatoff travelled to a small town in the Brazilian Amazon to write about the murder of a 44-year-old labor activist called Chico Mendes. What he discovered there tells us everything we need to know about the rash of fires that since January have consumed more than 1,330 square miles of … Read more
Outdoor gear companies warned President Donald Trump in a letter Thursday that his proposal to increase tariffs on Chinese imports could devastate the outdoor industry. The Trump administration last week announced tariff increases from 10 to 25 percent on $200 billion in Chinese imports, including outdoor products such as backpacks, sports bags, ski gloves, kayaks, … Read more
Outdoor enthusiasts associate Northeast Minnesota with the Boundary Waters, the country’s most-popular wilderness area. But to local folks it’s known as the Iron Range, so named for the ore the region has produced for generations. This is canoe country, and it’s mining country. Those two cultures have been on a collision course for decades. Now … Read more
For most of its history, Redstone, Colorado was a company town. The village was built at the end of the 19th Century by the coal baron John Cleveland Osgood, who lived there in a castle surrounded by 88 tidy cottages housing the men who stoked his coke ovens. The mines closed a generation ago, and … Read more
Meet Mason. He’s about to get married and is a little freaked out. So while his fiancé went to soak in the Southern California sun, Mason loaded a janky schoolbus with rafts, skis, and nine of his best friends for one final bromance on the Tatshenshini River. The 20-day trip took them 120 miles, starting … Read more
Mexico’s Copper Canyon is enormous—four times the size and more than 1,000 feet deeper than the Grand Canyon—but there’s no room for ego on its mountain-bike trails. Just ask Eric Testroete, a Vancouver-based mountain biker who Youtubes as BCpov. Testroete and his partner hired a young man named Luis to guide them down the trails, … Read more
Turner Liotta turned 12 on December 27, 2018, which means he has precisely 44 days to climb to the top of Denali and Gannett Peak in Wyoming to become the youngest person ever to tag the highest point in each of the 50 states. Denali, the highest mountain in Alaska and the United States, is … Read more
Researchers at Florida’s Big Cypress National Preserve pulled a 140-pound Burmese python out of the swamp this week, and promptly posted a public service selfie with the big constrictor. The 17-foot snake was the largest ever found in the preserve, and she was full of developing eggs. The team removed the python from the park, … Read more
A sliver of hope this morning amid the despair on Nanga Parbat, where Alex Txikon reported seeing two silhouettes on the mountain Thursday, hours after the active search for missing climbers Daniele Nardi and Tom Ballard was suspended. The duo have been missing on the world’s ninth-highest mountain for 11 days, as avalanches swept their … Read more
It started with a broken-down car and an offhand joke. After five years in Edmonton, Benoit Gendreau-Berthiaume and Magali Moffatt planned a months-long road trip home to Montreal, indulging their love of rock climbing as they toured throughout North America. Then their old Mazda 5 went into the shop for $4,000 in repairs, and the … Read more