It’s fascinating to hear Zaria Forman talk about ice, especially the way that it sounds. She describes the way it rumbles and thunders and cracks, even when you can’t see anything. It crackles and pops like breakfast cereal on high volume. “Ice crispies,” she calls it. “It’s a really beautiful… Read More
A group of four skiers moves methodically across the snow-covered Wapta Icefield in single file connected by a thread-like rope—mothers on each end, Cheryl and Nan, and their two daughters, Roan and Sailor, in the middle. As Roan’s father and Cheryl’s husband, I’m here to follow and hopefully take a… Read More
This summer, we–Clare Gallagher, Tommy Caldwell and Luke Nelson–explored, sweated, laughed and even cried in one of America’s greatest national treasures, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. We learned from the Gwich’in Nation about how the coastal plains in northeastern Alaska are… Read More
I wake early to the dazzling heat of the African sun. Perched 400 meters high on a huge granite face in central Madagascar, all I can see is black and blue, the color of the Malagasy granite meeting the sky and, coincidentally, the same color as large areas of my… Read More
Snow and icy rime break from the porous black volcanic ridgeline crackling beneath my feet. Gale-force updrafts from the gullied ridges below whip the skis and splitboards strapped to our backs. Each gust forces us to step toward the cornice that hangs above the caldera to our right. The temperature… Read More
What if we could wear our garbage? That’s the idea behind ReCrafted, our line of clothing made from the scraps of used garments collected at our Worn Wear facility in Reno. It’s premium, Patagonia, upcycled. A second life for products that might not otherwise get one. ReCrafted was created by… Read More
Del Ficke is a soil junkie. “It’s like a drug the first time you feel real good soil,” he says. “You get it in your hands and can feel how good it is. You can smell it and taste it. You just want to take a big old hit of… Read More
Hear “climate crisis” and you may picture a skinny polar bear stranded on a fragment of sea ice, bleached coral reefs, burning forests or maybe a world without bees. You’re not wrong: All those things (and more) are sadly unfolding or could be in the coming decades. Even more troubling,… Read More
Thirteen youth climate activists are taking to the courts to protect the Mississippi River and the people who depend on it for survival. Brent Murcia crosses the lively Mississippi River every day by bridge on his walk to class at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. The sunset sometimes paints… Read More
Lessons from Yosemite’s first climbing guidebook “I have this idea,” Mikey texted last October. “Let’s climb all of the suggested routes from the Yosemite red-cover guidebook.” I agreed immediately. The tattered copy of A Climber’s Guide to Yosemite Valley arrived in the mail less than a week later. First published in… Read More
Five hundred miles off the Chilean coast, there’s a small island that carries the name of a famous castaway. It’s a stark place surrounded by thriving seas and powerful surf, and when Léa Brassy, Ramón Navarro and Kohl Christensen traveled there to ride waves,… Read More
