My dad told me the other day he’d won a three-day Harley rental at a raffle. I said Dad, I think you have to have a motorcycle license to rent a motorcycle, don’t you? He used to own a motorcycle, according to family legend, but that was before my brother was born in 1977. So [...]
My friend Forest put this photo on Facebook last December, with this caption: It was a hot day in July. Navigating the lunchtime jumble of Fort Green, head clouded by city fumes and a muggy humidity of self-doubt, a good friend said the word I needed to hear. So I went. Later, I wrote myself [...]
I flew to Iowa to visit my grandmother in the hospital a couple weeks ago. She’s been in and out of hospitals for the past few months, kind of one thing after another, the latest being a dental infection. I got off the plane in Des Moines, rented a car and drove straight to the [...]
Are you going hiking this weekend? Planning a climb of Mount Hood, Shasta, Rainier? There are two things you should be doing: training, and planning what your summit photo is going to look like. Here are a few things to think about: 1. What are you going to do with your hands? a. thumbs up [...]
Everyone poops. What to do with it in the out-of-doors can sometimes be confusing. Thanks to this hastily-scrawled, handy flow chart, you can now know what to do when you’re out on the trail. -Brendan Semi-Rad is brought to you by Outdoor Research.
You call someplace home, and if you think about it, there are probably one or two big reasons for that. Maybe you grew up there, you got a great job there, met an amazing girl or guy there. I wasn’t born in Colorado, but when I think about why I moved there, I know it’s [...]
Have you heard of Mount Everest? Mount Everest is the tallest mountain on Earth, so it is also the best mountain on Earth. For several months each year, it is actually the best thing on Earth. It is so high, its total height is often spoken about in meters, which are a larger unit of [...]
Six summers ago, a guy named Fred sat down across from me at a picnic table near Wonder Lake in Denali National Park, the end point on the bumpy 5 ½ -hour bus ride on the park’s only road. We ate lunch and talked about our respective trips to Alaska, where we were from, the [...]
“Bushwhacking is like my third favorite thing to do in the outdoors, behind crotch-deep postholing and getting hit in the head by falling rocks,” I said, shoulder-deep in desert foliage, hands raised like a man fending off a swarm of bees, walking forward in sloppy, almost-balanced steps. I am not a fan of bushwhacking, but [...]
You love snowboarding. Or climbing. Or mountain biking. You’ve been doing it for so long, you can’t remember what your life was like without it. But your new boyfriend/girlfriend doesn’t — yet. So you need to teach them. Here are some tips to guarantee they’ll never understand you or want to go with you, and [...]
This past Tuesday, a film called “35” went up on Vimeo — it’s 5 minutes and 17 seconds, including a ton of beautiful footage of a guy named Derek Craig climbing 35 pitches in Indian Creek on his 35th birthday. It was more than a year in the making, starting on Derek’s 35th birthday in [...]
Jesus H Christ, is that plain water in your water bottle? You’re a high-performance athlete. Your body is a high-performance machine. As soon as you get back to the trailhead, you’re going to put high-performance fuel in it: a cheeseburger and two beers. Won’t you also need high-performance fuel while you’re on the trail? It’s [...]
I realized a couple years ago that I have more fun skiing uphill than skiing downhill. I enjoy the Zen rhythm of methodically skinning up the snow, forcing myself to stay at a pace that I could hold for an hour straight without stopping, elevating my heart rate but not getting out of breath. Then [...]
A couple weeks ago at a party, I saw Dave Nice for the first time in a long time. We started talking about the interesting nearby town of Colorado City, Arizona, and he mentioned a restaurant there, saying, “I was dating a girl in Kanab for a little while and I would stop there and [...]
In October 2012, I became part of a rescue on Castleton Tower near Moab when a college student named Peter fell and landed on a belay ledge from about 20 feet above. I wrote a post about it on Semi-Rad, A Climbing Accident, which became one of the most-viewed posts ever on this site. Since [...]
I told my friend Dan I was getting tired of having long hair, that I often fantasized about trimming all of it off and leaving just a quarter-inch, fantasized about 90-second showers, no messing with ponytails under helmets, knots, conditioner, paying for haircuts. Dan, a curly-haired man himself who has more than once used the [...]
The Sunday night before my first day of fourth grade, I rolled my black-and-gold Huffy Thunder 50 BMX bike up to the retaining wall on the east side of my parents’ driveway at the end of Crestline Drive. It was about 20 inches high, three railroad ties stacked on top of each other. I had [...]
Do you have a hard time eating at fancy restaurants where food is presented as a sort of sculpture? I do. It’s usually a small amount of incredible-tasting food, which is great and all, but it’s kind of the opposite of what I consider to be the pinnacle of 2.3 million years of the human [...]
In November, a video posted online showed an American climber visiting Sweden blowtorching holds on some boulders to dry them after a recent rain. A handful of Internet message boards and comments sections blew up with criticism, calling the climber, Carlo Traversi, a “dick,” “idiot,” “moron,” “choad,” and “wanker,” among other names. One person went [...]
Fact: Shirts are for suckers. They’re heavy, hot, and if you wear one when you’re rock climbing, the ladies (or dudes, as it were) can’t see your back muscles when you’re sending your project. Well hey, not announced at the 2013 Outdoor Retailer Winter Market is a revolutionary new piece of climbing outerwear: It’s INVISICOOL, [...]
My friend Aaron is a pretty normal guy, by most standards: High school math teacher, homeowner, happily married, good hygiene, pays his bills, et cetera. We see each other several times a year, and almost every time we get together, we talk about one of his recent vacations with his wife, Krista. Without fail, this [...]
“I’ve been thinking about things on a cost-per-use basis lately,” my friend Nick said to me a few weeks ago. Nick doesn’t make rash decisions on anything that costs money, evidenced by the holes in the elbows of the merino wool hoody he wears to work most cold days. If he swipes his credit card [...]
My friend Joe crashed his mountain bike on a relatively mellow, sweeping right hand bend section of fast-rolling singletrack on July 7, dislocating both shoulders, which meant a summer and fall of walking around in an immobilizing sling. I watched the whole thing via Joe’s Instagram feed, and when I saw him, he had written “CHIN [...]
At a grocery store last week, the cover of Cosmopolitan‘s January issue caught my eye with the headline “EPIC SEX.” Immediately, in my head, I started imagining the scenario: “… and that was after about two hours of this. So I untied him, and we cleaned up all the broken watermelons, put away the jumper [...]
In a scene in the spaghetti western The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, the One-Armed Bounty Hunter finds Tuco Ramirez in a vulnerable position: In a bubble bath. Pointing his gun at Tuco, he begins a speech: He’s been looking for Tuco for eight months, and now he’s finally got him where he wants [...]
My dad and I walked into Busch Stadium in St. Louis on September 4, the first time he had been in the Cardinals’ new stadium since it opened in 2006, after having talked about needing to get down there “sometime” every summer since 2007. It was about time. If my dad has one thing, it’s [...]
“Send me a list of gift ideas for you.” Why do we do this around the holidays now? I mean, have you ever really said, “That was so thoughtful of you to buy me all the things on that list I sent you”? Have we taken the custom of gift-giving, and removed the heart from [...]
When you dismount a mountain bike going uphill, you end up doing a sort of bow. As you step off and swing a leg over the seat, your head naturally points down as you are admitting that the trail has you beat, this time. After years of saying “I suck at fast/gravity/downhill sports,” I bought [...]
A few years ago, I climbed Drift Peak near Leadville, Colorado, on Presidents Day with my friend Aaron and my friend Lee. Lee had started up the peak a couple times before in the winter, but bailed for different reasons. He had promised if we made it to the summit with him on what would [...]
My friend Mick’s heart stopped working last Sunday. He died at the age of 54, not knowing that the night before, I had sat around a campfire in the desert, telling a friend, Of course you can ride a bike across the country. My friend Mick borrowed my bike trailer two years ago, hitched it [...]
I haven’t had a “proper” Thanksgiving dinner since 2002, somehow managing to be anywhere but watching football and eating an oven-cooked turkey. When people say “Thanksgiving,” I think of being somewhere in the desert with two of my closest friends, Nick and Jayson. Three out of the last four years, the three of us have [...]
I was trying to start a campfire a couple weekends back and grabbed a fat piece of wood with a crack at one end, ripe for splitting into two smaller pieces that would burn more easily. I searched my van for something to split the wood with, and came up with: A 55 cm mountaineering [...]
When he hit the ledge, I was sure he was dead. He was a young college guy, and we had exchanged maybe five sentences as he climbed past, and then from 20 feet above us, I heard his cam pop out of the crack, the taut rope make a sickening twang like a plucked guitar [...]
Maybe you’ve heard this one: Ski resort patron approaches lift ticket kiosk on Powder Day of the Century and demands a refund for his/her lift ticket, citing “too much snow.” Or the guy who wants to return a 20-year-old headlamp to a store because it has a “lifetime warranty,” which he assumes means his lifetime, [...]
You, outdoor recreator, are quite probably quite educated: Bachelor’s degree, possibly a master’s degree or Ph.D. You wore a cap and gown and were handed a number of certificates decorated with fancy letters saying you went to college and finished — maybe even college for adults, which is called graduate school. But you climb rocks, [...]
Five summers ago, I met this guy named Lee Smith while climbing with a big group of people at Castlewood Canyon. At the end of the day, I think he said something like, “Give me a call if you ever want to do some trad climbing.” What he should have said was, “Wanna be friends? [...]
I walked onto the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder last Friday and a Denver Voice vendor looked down at my sandals, laughed and said, “Oh man, you must be from Colorado.” Hey, it was October 5th, far from winter, and it was still 35 degrees outside. Lots of people talk about fall being their favorite [...]
“You know, I was just thinking that three bumper stickers changed my life,” Dan said as we tromped down the trail a couple weeks ago. I laughed because I knew what he was talking about. Not “Obama/Romney/McCain/Bush for …” or “Nuke a Gay Whale For Christ,” but the time someone says something and you hear [...]
I always get sandbagged by guys in gear shops. I will stop in somewhere to pick up a cordelette, or a stuff sack, or a guidebook, and they inquire about my plans. Like you do when you work in a gear shop, because that’s the good stuff, talking to people about their dreams and climbs [...]
As the USA Pro Cycling Challenge was working its way around Colorado and into the Front Range in August, I saw this Facebook status on my friend Rebecca’s page: I thought, Hell No that’s not bad. And kind of a good question. A long time ago, after two years pouring drinks in a sports bar, [...]
2:39 a.m., August 11, 2012: Packs packed, Chris and I are about to shut the tailgate on my van and start walking the Garnet Canyon Trail to try to climb the Grand Teton in one day, one of the biggest, most daunting days I will ever have in the mountains. I tell Chris I have [...]
Sometimes I like to fantasize that I have some sort of backcountry suaveness and culinary instinct, and that I will someday take a special lady somewhere beautiful and make a nice dinner for her and it will be really romantic. But the reality is that this is pretty much the best (only?) trick in my [...]
Ever fantasized about being a fire lookout, or living in a cabin high in the mountains, or deep in the wilderness somewhere? It’s romantic, calming. Our world feels hectic—which is our own fault—and we think of a place like that, out in “the middle of nowhere,” as a place to escape, to get away from [...]
When you tell the story later, you are a little less descriptive of the moment you experience pure dread and barely-controllable fear. You say things like “I was totally pissing my pants.” If you even talk about being scared at all. We had assumed the finger crack was part of the route, or some route [...]
I’ve been a fan of Chris Kalous’ still fairly-new and incredibly rad podcast, The Enormocast, ever since my friend Josh gushed about the interview Chris did with Craig DeMartino back in May and said, “Anyone who climbs should listen to that show.” So I was very excited when Chris invited me to be a guest [...]
I think there’s nothing that feels more rad than picking your way up a ridgeline, trailing a rope, pulling your hood over your helmet and having the wind whip your backpack straps in your face while you’re watching clouds form to the west and you know you have to climb fast and efficient or risk [...]
Maybe you haven’t spent much time lately thinking about how awesome bears are. That’s OK, if that’s the way you want to live your life — but I don’t think it is. I am sure you are familiar with bears. They live in many places in the world, and come in many colors and sizes. [...]
My friend Jesse was about five miles east of Dighton, Kansas, a little over 200 miles from the start of his 500-mile bike ride from Wichita to Manitou Springs, Colorado, when the skewer on his bike trailer broke. The acorn nut holding the end opposite the quick release lever had flown somewhere onto the shoulder [...]
Staying hydrated is important. Perhaps equally important is subtly communicating your identity by decorating your favorite water bottle with the proper stickers to project your outdoorsy/adventurous identity. Here at Semi-Rad.com, we want to make it easy for you. For just $29.99 (or just three easy low monthly payments of $9.991/3), we’re now offering pre-stickered CamelBak [...]
When did you visit Japan? Someone at the table asked Mike during our late dinner after bouldering in Central Park last Friday. It’s funny, Mike said, I ended up in Tokyo one time in college because I went for a walk. And everyone at the table laughed. Oh, so you just walked to Japan, someone [...]
In the weeks leading up to my wedding in 2007, my hair was a little long for my parents’ taste. I stood fast against weeks of subtle suggestions that maybe I should get it trimmed a little before the ceremony, until my father got on the phone one Sunday evening and said, “Your mother wants [...]
In a conversation a few weeks ago, a climber friend of mine described herself as “not super-girly.” Her expanded definition of that was: I like cute clothes as much as the next girl, but I’d rather spend my money on new rock shoes, or spend my time hiking somewhere rad to go climbing … so [...]
