In April 2023, Parkin Costain got the call he had been long awaiting—Alaska. Teton Gravity Re- search. Spines. And it came laced with an op- portunity to obtain a master’s degree in extreme skiing from two athletes that had helped define burly Alaskan descents: Sage Cattabriga-Alosa and Ian McIntosh. The phone started to feel a […]
Three figures stand atop the north face of Mont Blanc du Tacul above an array of skiers, ant-like, peppering the Bossons Glacier below. Skier’s left of the standard route, they eye a seemingly impossible line—a hanging face truncated by monstrous seracs, replete with airy exposure. The face is not only convoluted, but it is also discontinuous. […]
It’s not clear what Molly Armanino sees in the line off the summit of Volcán Azufre. It looked good from the valley, sure—a 50-degree, slightly fluted face, perched above a small cliff band and a few thousand more feet of skiable vertical. From the top, the descent looks dramatically steeper, icier, sun-affected and like some invisible […]
Icy lake water presses the air from my lungs and I can’t get to the dock ladder fast enough. Robbie Koets had descended slowly in the January chill, forcing himself into a zen trance with only hands and head above the surface. He said this strategy allowed a thin bubble layer to form around his skin, […]
After a relentless spring storm, the clouds finally parted. Leslie Hittmeier stared up at the East Ridge of Mount Bertha, a 10,204-foot glaciated peak in southeast Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park. She had to decide if she could ski the line. Hittmeier and a media crew had traveled with athletes Griffin Post, Elena Hight and Jeremy […]
Once upon a time, there was a world where even a skilled woman was very rarely included on a mountain expedition team. One could argue that this era lasted for most of the 20th century. After that came a time when the rare woman of a certain caliber was invited, but was often tokenized, her presence […]
It’s 6:30 p.m. at a train station several hours east of Geneva. Barreling up the ramp, we only have a few moments before the doors close as we frantically look for a spot to jigsaw our ski bags. The train, loaded with folks going home from a long day of work, begins to fill with the pungent smell […]
The U.S. Air Force cargo plane from Saigon was packed with row after row of refugees. It was April 1975 and the South Vietnamese capital was about to fall to the North Vietnamese Army, largely ending the Vietnam War. On the plane, sisters Cúc Kim Hùynh, then 16, and Liên Kim Hùynh, then 18, their parents […]
State Highway 13 is a lonely country road, coursing along the Rio Blanco in western Colorado. Pickup trucks full of ranchers and natural gas field workers are usually the only traffic, but every January, Utah professional skiers like Joss Christensen traverse the empty thruway en route to X Games in Aspen, CO. That’s exactly where Christensen […]
It was springtime in 1970s Utah, and the wildflowers were just starting to bloom when the general manager at Alta Ski Area, Onno Wieringa, ripped the only toilet from the floor of his little house. Lugging the porcelain throne up his ski hill, he met photographer David Stoecklein midmountain, and set his friend to work. Unfazed, […]
We respect your time, and only send you the occasional update.