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 [...]

“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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

“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’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 [...]