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 [...]

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, [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

You have approximately one million different travel mugs at home. I know this because I have previously owned approximately one million travel mugs. You buy one, it works OK, but you think maybe you’d like one with a handle, or a new one without a handle, or one from a coffee shop you visited on [...]

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 [...]

(photo borrowed from avtraining.org) I’m not anyone’s mother, but stories like this make me feel like being everyone’s mother. I wouldn’t call myself an experienced backcountry skier. But the days I ski every year are backcountry days, and when I ski, my No. 1 goal is not dying. No. 2 is fun, and No. 3 [...]

Although lift tickets at Vail are now back down to a so-affordable $94, this season was the year of the $100 lift ticket in Colorado — Vail and Beaver Creek both had $102 single-day ticket prices just before Christmas. I was grumbling about lift ticket prices a couple years ago, and decided to do a [...]