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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 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. [...]

I have a copy of this children’s book that I take everywhere I go. It’s called An Awesome Book, and everyone I know who’s had a baby in the past six months owns a copy, because I bought one for them. It’s a kids’ book, but I think the message is for adults too. I [...]

Get over here. Come on in and let the big bear get his paws on you. Sometimes men are afraid to hug each other, aren’t we? I am not, and I don’t think you should be either. If you and I have met before, and interact more than five times a year via any social [...]

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 asked my friend Nick to drive from Denver to Seattle with me a couple weekends ago, since we hadn’t spent several hours alone in a car together since 2008. After 21 hours in the van, I think we got sufficiently caught up. Basically four years later, neither of us have much of anything figured [...]

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 [...]

I remember flipping through 5280 Magazine‘s 2011 “Top of the Town” issue to the section where “Best Bike Shop” appeared, and seeing a full-page photo of my friend Scott Taylor sitting on a bike in front the south wall of Salvagetti Bicycle Workshop, and I started giggling like a little kid and pumping my fist [...]

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 [...]

“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 [...]

Every year, my pal Nick and I inevitably have a chat about our goals for the year, at some coffee shop in Denver. In 2009, it was already late February or March by the time it came up in conversation. I probably told Nick about my goals, which usually include sleeping outside at least 30 [...]

Remember that time you took that photo of you and your friend(s) standing on the summit of something and it was the most exciting photo ever? Of course you don’t. Look through your outdoor photo collection. Do you have 100 photos of the same thing, of you and various friends standing in front of various [...]

My friend Greg had hit the wall about four miles from the top of the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, and every time I looked back, he was a few more feet behind. Greg is a trail runner, but had been sitting at sea level for all but the last 21 hours, and had [...]

Not so long ago, my pal Nick made up his mind that he was going to get himself a motherfucking Trek 970 if it was the last thing he ever did. And it was beautiful. Not the bike, mind you, but the pursuit of the bike. It was nothing short of Ponce de Leon searching [...]

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 [...]

One night a couple weeks ago, I ate dinner with my back to a 180-degree view of Titcomb Basin, one of the most spectacular mountain valleys I had ever seen. I suppose when you think about it, it was like going to a restaurant and asking for a table with an ocean view and then [...]

I tried to pull around a corner on nothing, the crux moves of the third pitch of a route on Mary’s Bust in the Big Thompson Canyon near Loveland, Colorado. My climbing partner for the day coached me from about 10 feet away, at the bolts at the top of the pitch. I knew I [...]

It is 105 degrees in this room, 50 percent humidity. Seven of us are standing in the middle of yoga mats with towels covering them. I am sweating from every pore, and when I bend over, sweat pours into my eye sockets. I am in a room full of women, I am wearing nothing but [...]

“Hey, can you take photos with your phone?” I yell down from the belay to my pal Lee, as he works his way up the last 50 feet of the third pitch of Kor’s Flake. “Yeah, why?” he says, as he cleans a cam and clips it to his harness. “I set mine down on [...]

Sometimes men grow boobs. This is just a fact of aging, or more accurately, the lack of priority we give to fitness as we get older and more things take up our time, and our bodies don’t respond the way they did when we were 19. Lots of men accept the development of man-boobs as [...]

Remember your last road trip, the day you left town? Wherever it was, whenever — July 4th, Memorial Day Weekend, Spring Break — you were driving toward a place where you wouldn’t have to work. You could just play. Biking, climbing, backpacking, whatever. You were going to sleep on the ground in a place you [...]

I have a drip of sweat on the end of my nose. It itches, hanging there, but I cannot wipe it off. Even if I were to lift my hand to my face, I would not be able to touch my nose, because my head is inside a giant bear mask. I am dancing with [...]

I have biked everywhere within 4 miles of my apartment in the past 5 years, including every job I’ve had — I’ve never had to drive to work in Denver. I find riding a bicycle exhilarating, but that’s no reason for you to think you should. In fact, here are 9 reasons you shouldn’t bike [...]

I feel lucky to have a story that Grant Petersen thought worthy of the latest Rivendell Reader. It’s about riding across the country on the same bike I ride to work every day — the 1985 Raleigh Team USA I bought from a Craigslist ad for $100. Click the photo below if you’d like to [...]

“We’re going to take a little drive down Wall Street and check it out.” This is my friend Chris telling me that I am going to lead one more pitch today, no matter what level my motivation is at this point. It is late afternoon in Moab, and the wind has kicked up so much [...]

My girlfriend is taking a break from leading right now. Sport climbs, trad climbs, no leading. No sharp end for her, for a while. When we met, our first times hanging out were mutli-pitch trad climbs, with me leading all the pitches. She was a new, enthusiastic climber, and as we started to hit it [...]

  “Let’s just sleep in the car Friday night,” my girlfriend said a couple weekends ago, on our way to Ouray to do a little ice climbing. “No way,” I said. “I found a hotel for $42 a night.” I just got a new job. After years of scraping by on a newspaper salary, then [...]

  I think the first time I heard anything about Chesler Park, I was being a non-productive REI employee and flipping through a copy of Peter Potterfield’s Classic Hikes of the World at the Paradise Valley store in Phoenix. A couple months later, I would move from Phoenix to Denver, on the way stopping at [...]

“This is the kind of climbing I like!” -My pal Brian, pitch 2, Saturday, February 19 The East Face of the Fatiron is anywhere from 2 to 8 pitches of climbing, and is rated somewhere between 5.4 and 5.6 R, depending on who you ask. If you ask Colorado mountaineering legend and guidebook author Gerry [...]

I know people love skiing — I live in Colorado. People move here just to go skiing. They start salivating when the first reports of snow falling in Summit County, when summer is barely ending for me, and I’m still looking at climbing routes in the lower elevations. I’m less into the stuff I call [...]

  I’ve been lucky enough to have RMNP in my backyard for the past 5 ½ years. The opportunities to hike, backpack, camp, snowshoe, ski and climb have kept me as excited about it today as I was during my first visit as an adult back in 2005. I’ve spent lots of time in my [...]