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 [...]

“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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

“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 [...]

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 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Climbing is fun. But at the top of a route, everybody gets all serious. Which is good, because lots of accidents happen while rappelling. But that doesn’t mean it has to be all business. Have fun out there. But pay attention. It’s all fun and games until someone threads their belay device wrong and … [...]

There’s nothing better than some shit-hot new gear to spend your hard-earned dollars on, is there? Technological advances in apparel and outdoor hardgoods are fun and exciting, and we love to celebrate them. Like a lot of folks, I have my favorite pieces of tried-and-true gear, and here are my favorites for 2012: 1. Hoods [...]

“A man does not climb a mountain without bringing some of it away with him and leaving something of himself upon it.” —Martin Conway On May 11th, 2012, Chris El-Deiry and I made what we believe is the first ascent of the direct west face of Suicide Rock, a 1,491-meter summit kind of near the [...]

I showed up to meet my friend Becca at the bouldering gym in Seattle on a Monday afternoon. When we discussed what time to meet, she said something about needing an hour’s notice with the baby and all. I figured she meant that she had to arrange things so her husband could watch the baby [...]

A handful of Saturday mornings, I have driven out of Denver’s Capitol Hill neighborhood juggling a bowl of granola on my lap, trying to rub the sleep out of my eyes and asking myself if I packed everything in my pack— harness, shoes, rack or rope, headlamp, food, water. It’s 2 a.m., and people are [...]

I picked up these sweet-ass rigs after I finally wore out my last pair of trail running shoes after 2 ½ years (the tread was gone and one of the laces finally snapped). As you can see, there’s all sorts of technology and shit in them—there’s some plastic stuff on the side, and there are [...]

There are many good strategies to use when running the New York City Marathon. Throwing up at the start is probably not one of them. My friend Syd was in for a long day after he puked early in the 2011 race last November. He never got back the nutrients and water he’d lost, but [...]

It’s a singular feeling when you’re 33 and talking to your mother and she says, “You know what I think you should try? Match.com.” Then there’s another feeling when you say to your mother, “Well, Mom, I had this weird feeling about meeting women and telling them I live in a van full of climbing [...]

I’m hanging sideways from the rope going through my belay device, body completely parallel to the ground, one Chacoed foot pushing on a knob out to my left as I reach a full body length trying to flick the rope free all the way out to my right. All I want is for the rope [...]

I had this idea in early 2011 to make a web site about “normal” outdoorsfolk, those of us who are fairly average in ability when it comes to climbing, skiing, cycling, and other outdoor pursuits — but exceptional in our love for them. That became Semi-Rad.com, which I see as a celebration of that passion [...]

Remember when you first started climbing, or skiing, or mountain biking, and you went out and bought all the gear, and then you immediately sped to a car dealership to purchase a reliable $45,000 sport utility vehicle so you could drive to all places you needed to go? Me neither. I do remember, in 2006, [...]

The trail up and out of the South Park area of the Ouray Ice Park is maybe a five-minute walk, if you have full use of all your limbs. It is not typically the site of anything amazing — just a way for ice climbers to get up and down from the rim of the [...]

One of the things about telling stories is you think you should always know where the story begins and ends, and I hope I have a million stories, but I have this one that keeps going and I’m not sure where it started or where it ends. Sometimes I tell it and the beginning is [...]

Here’s a little tip to curb the spread of disease, illness and other microbial things when you’re in the backcountry with friends: -Brendan Semi-Rad is brought to you by Outdoor Research.

When you go on a climbing or backpacking trip and someone says, “I’ll bring the coffee,” do you secretly bring your own stash to supplement whatever they’re bringing, because you know you’re going to drink double the amount of coffee they think you’re going to drink, and then some? I do too. This is not [...]

  Christmas Eve, 2011, I am going to throw up on a spin class bicycle. Sweat is raining off my temples and pooling on the floor beneath my bike. This is my first spin class ever. Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” is playing, and is now the soundtrack in my evolving [...]

  For years, I have known to pee on rocks at high altitudes because mountain goats crave salt, and if you pee on plants, mountain goats will eat them until they’re gone. I have seen goats milling around the restrooms at Summit Lake on Colorado’s Mount Evans, kind of bashfully but definitely intently making their [...]

There’s a reason you clip everything to your harness when climbing long routes: If you drop something, chances are pretty good you’re not going to get it back. Which is why I was less than optimistic that I could find my camera after accidentally dropping it from the top of the third pitch of Kor’s [...]

“So I was thinking,” I said to Dustin in front of his house in Phoenix, “you can be either Santa or the elf, but I think the elf should lead all the pitches, because trying to see footholds over a huge Santa belly and beard is going to be tough.”   And then: ‘Twas the [...]

This might be my favorite piece of climbing gear I used in all of 2011: The Wild Things Guide Pack. I got one of these to review back in July, and then spent the better part of two months beating on it over several days and several dozen pitches in Idaho, Yosemite, and Washington. I [...]

My profile of the Grand Teton is up on Adventure Journal today — if you’ve ever seen it, or seen great photos of it, you know what I mean when I say, “The Grand Teton was not the first mountain I ever saw, but it might as well have been.” Click here to launch the [...]

This is my friend Jayson. When I’m telling people about him, a lot of times I say, “If you know him, and he isn’t one of your heroes, you need to re-think your values.” I’ve always wanted to write a story about his life, and Becca and Fitz Cahall and I were able to make [...]

It was the night before my 5-day backpacking trip with five tough teenagers from East Palo Alto when someone asked about toilet paper, and we discovered we hadn’t been issued any. This was most of the kids’ first time in any sort of backcountry outside the Bay Area, and each seemed to have a different [...]

It’s hard to sell me a water purification device. I’m a lifetime backcountry iodine tablet user, because of its simplicity: The only way it can malfunction is user error, it’s light enough to put in any pack, even if I don’t think I’m going to need water purification. Never have to worry about leaving other [...]