Endless

My wife, Becca, and I have been adrift on a sea of blank granite for six days now, on yet another of my attempts to free climb El Capitan’s Dawn Wall. Our home is a 3-by-6 piece of nylon strung between aluminum poles and suspended from the wall by straps. On clear days, the sun reflects off the rock and cooks us like ants under a magnifying glass.

List, Interrupted

Swish swish swish. The tips of my skis poke through sparkling snow crystals as I break trail up the mountainside. Each step requires work to pull my skis through the deep powder, and leaves a sinuous trough marking my route.

Skintrack Confessional

Whump. The sound is not exactly the same but the feeling is. The otherworldly rumble of an earthquake that seems to fill the space in your skull before you feel anything actually shaking, and the whump of a backcountry snowpack giving up the ghost somewhere in its layered depth, conjuring a frosty question mark for your split-second contemplation – is it going to slide?

Winter Forgot Us

I’m a dirt surfer on solstice dawn patrol, zigzagging up the trail to the Druid Stones on the great swell of the Coyote Warp, south of Bishop. Below me, the sunlight is making its long southerly slide up the Owens Valley, illuminating only a narrow swath of the valley floor and the long waves of alluvium shore break that have been closing out for thousands of years.

Wild by Nature

The wild permeates and sustains us; it is our home, though our increasingly unnatural lives, lives distracted by artifice, obscure that brute truth. The boundaries between our wild bodies and the wild cosmos are in fact imagined, and we feel the actual oneness ...

Why We Go

What were we doing with our lives?

Dragging your feet is no way to go to the mountains. You should be cranking up the Lady Gaga to get stoker!

Split Decisions

The backseat of the Cessna wasn’t actually a seat: It was a low-to-the-ground, flimsy aluminum lawnchair. I wedged myself into it, surrounded by all the camping gear we could possibly cram into the cabin. With my knees at eye level, we throttled forward for takeoff.

Where Spirits Dwell

Fifteen hundred feet below the points of my crampons, windswept fjord ice bunches against the dark, 4,000-foot stone walls of Nachvak Fjord. The ice appears almost liquid, its brilliant emerald color – caused by flash-freezing – nearly glowing in contrast to the desaturated tones of the subarctic North.

The Waveriding Collective

As a 10-year-old grommet, I was in awe of all the cool surf and skate gear crammed on the store’s narrow, cluttered walls. I stood there, paralyzed, imagining what it would be like to ride one of the shiny new Puringtons, Bessells, Craigs or Staples surfboards lined up along the back room.

Non Delicious

Silver Canyon at the end of a hot day seemed like just the thing for heat training: six miles of runnable incline through a narrowing rotisserie oven that gives way to four miles of steep, open terrain and tops out at near 10,000 feet and cooler temps.

Unfazed

This morning I brush my teeth while wearing my harness, but I spit into the clean porcelain sink of a Spanish refugio – not off a portaledge into the abyss.

Field Report Archive

Since 1990, Patagonia field reports have offered intense glimpses of nature’s front lines through the eyes of athletes, travelers and adventurers. Covering the diverse ground between geography lesson, sport journal and anecdotal meandering, these essays all share a passion for life.