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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 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 [...]