Resources

People who attend trade shows typically decry attending trade shows: the long days on your feet, the lousy convention center food, the incessant blah blah blah of small talk. And yet the seeds of great things can be planted there. This story was sparked in conversation at Outdoor Retailer when author Kelly Cordes told us how weird it felt to go straight from an alpine climb in the Alaska Range to the so-called “real world.” “This doesn’t feel very real,” he said, gesturing to the frenetic atmosphere of commerce around us. We know that alienation well, and so we cast our vote with the realm of snow and ice.

Cordes is the author of The Tower: A Chronicle of Climbing and Controversy on Cerro Torre. His last piece for AJ was “Anatomy of a Solve,” about the unexpected key that unlocked the first free ascent of Yosemite’s Dawn Wall, considered the hardest big wall free climb. kellycordes.com

The earliest known written description of skiing dates to around 2,200 years ago, in a history of the Chinese Han Dynasty called Hai Nei Jing, and talks of people living in the Altai Mountains who “sped like goats in the valleys and on the flatlands wearing the ‘horns of goats’”—wooden boards with hoof-shaped tips. The next reference came 800 years later, when the Byzantine scholar Prokopios wrote about northern people who slid across the snow on skis made of animal skin stretched over wooden frames. Whether skiing was invented first in China, Norway, or Russia probably only truly matters to those countries and their pride. For the rest of us, including author Jayme Moye, chasing that mystery—on horns of goats, of course—is its own reward. jaymemoye.com, @jaymemoye

Photos: Garrett Grove, garrettgrove.com, @grove_garrett

As the editor of Alpinist, author Katie Ives is legend for polishing climbing stories into narrative gold, and in 2019 her skills and dedication were acknowledged when she was chosen as one of three judges for the prestigious Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature.

More of photographer John Scurlock—lots more—can be seen at jaggedridgeimaging.com, where you can pick up his book, Snow & Spire: Flights to Winter in the North Cascade Range.

Dolores LaChapelle’s classic, Deep Powder: 40 Years of Ecstatic Skiing, Avalanches, and Earth Wisdom, is out of print, but LaChapelle’s literary executor sometimes sells remaining copies on eBay. You can learn more about Dolores, Ed, and David at lachapellelegacy.org.

Christopher Ketcham’s This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption Are Ruining the American West dropped on our desk with all the subtlety of a still-glowing lava rock. Acidic and indignant, it decries the spurious and cozy relationship between industry (energy, ranching) and the public servants entrusted with protecting and preserving those lands. It’s one thing to suspect nefariousness, it’s another to see the gross mismanagement and favoritism revealed by Ketcham’s reporting. Before you can stop such actions, though, you have to know about them; that’s why we excerpted the book and that’s why we recommend you read it for yourself. christopherketcham.com

Photos: Chris Dahl-Bredine, shotsfromabove.com, @shotsfromabove

Two-legged creatures aren’t the only ones with great narratives. In AJ02, Terry Tempest Williams wrote about her beloved, impossible dog (“A Strange Occurrence With Owls”), and in AJ03 we shared the story (“Lost and Found”) of Amelia the Tropicat, who accompanied sailor Liz Clark around the South Pacific.

Author Martin J. Smith and his canine friend, Scottie, live in rural Colorado, near the headwaters of the Colorado River. Smith’s last piece for AJ was about finding contentment and the perfect fishing spot in his own backyard. martinjsmith.com, @martinsmithedit

We believe deeply in protecting secret stashes and keeping relatively undiscovered gems on the down low, especially in the social media age, where one viral post can change a place forever. But people have been skiing Wyoming’s Teton Pass for generations, and with an estimated 130,000 backcountry riders a winter, what the pass needs is not quiet, but a public conversation about etiquette, crowding, and personal and collective responsibility. And as author Frederick Reimers writes, these issues are not endemic to the Tetons but are widespread across the American West. A good place to start is with education and self-reliance; the American Avalanche Association has a comprehensive list of workshops and seminars. americanavalancheassociation.org. Wanna help out in Jackson? Teton Pass ambassador Jay Pistono is supported in part by nonprofit Friends of Pathways, friendsofpathways.org. Read more by Wyoming-based Reimers at @writereimers

Photos: Chris Figenshau, figenshau.com, @jxnfigs; Elise Sterck, elisesterck.com, @roundtheworldgirl

Speaking of secrets, and spilling them, for decades the locations of Scottish bothies were passed by word of mouth from one trusted friend to another. That all changed in 2009, when the Mountain Bothies Association (MBA) published GPS coordinates in order to maintain its nonprofit status. Geoff Allan’s The Scottish Bothy Bible followed in 2017. The guide, however, is not comprehensive and there are plenty of bothy locations that remain unpublished. Of one, whose name we won’t reveal, MBA trustee Neal Reid said, “I hope people mostly forget about it…I like the idea of it being a seldom-visited outpost just inside one of our greatest and wildest mountain corries, a place of refuge where you can take cover when the weather starts throwing everything at you in a place where any other shelter is hours away, a pilgrim’s cell where you can regroup before venturing into the heart of the mountain.”

Photographer Nicholas J.R. White spent three years working on the bothy project that became known as Black Dots. “The smell of woodsmoke in the air, the whistle of the wind creeping through the timbers, and the traces of people that have been there before you: It’s a really interesting environment in which to make photographs. There aren’t any distractions, and you’re not trying to sift through the clutter to find something relevant to your story. You find yourself becoming part of the story, totally immersed in the thing you want to photograph.” nicholasjrwhite.co.uk, @nicholasjrwhite

When last we saw Megan McDuffie and Michael van Vliet of Fresh Off the Grid, it was along the banks of the Deschutes River in Bend, Oregon, but you can see them here, any time: freshoffthegrid.com, @freshoffthegrid

As photographer Kiliii Yüyan writes, “No place in the Arctic is less famous yet more important than the wetlands of the politically named National Petroleum Reserve.” Efforts to increase energy extraction from it have not garnered the same level of attention that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge gets, but that’s starting to change. To keep an eye on NPR-A, drop by the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Arctic Beringia page, wcs.org.

Photos: Kiliii Yüyan, kiliii.com, @kiliiiyuyan