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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

“You know, I was just thinking that three bumper stickers changed my life,” Dan said as we tromped down the trail a couple weeks ago. I laughed because I knew what he was talking about. Not “Obama/Romney/McCain/Bush for …” or “Nuke a Gay Whale For Christ,” but the time someone says something and you hear [...]

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 [...]

When did you visit Japan? Someone at the table asked Mike during our late dinner after bouldering in Central Park last Friday. It’s funny, Mike said, I ended up in Tokyo one time in college because I went for a walk. And everyone at the table laughed. Oh, so you just walked to Japan, someone [...]

As of May 1, I am donating half of my personal profits from the sales of all Semi-Rad products to Mountain2Mountain, a nonprofit dedicated to creating education and opportunity for women and girls in conflict regions. I met Mountain2Mountain founder Shannon Galpin in 2011 at a slide show about her mountain bike ride across Afghanistan’s [...]

“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 [...]

Click here to see the shop at Adayak with these and other designs for men and women. There is an extremely high chance you’ll be the first kid on your block to own one. Unless you live on the same block as my friend Alan, who already bought one. -Brendan Semi-Rad is brought to you [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

  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 [...]

One Saturday morning last October, my friend Greg and I were running down the North Kaibab Trail in the Grand Canyon, close to halfway through 26 miles of trail. We had run 4 miles and would run about 4 more to Phantom Ranch, where we could double-fist coffee and Lemmy lemonade at the cantina before [...]