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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Sitting dejected on the curb outside of the Taco Shoppe in Government Camp, OR, Andy Parry and Will Wesson bantered about how far $2.50 will go. “The gypsy lifestyle is embracing me,” quipped Parry, buried among a pile of Full Tilt boots. It was summertime and the pair had managed to wrangle a little money and […]

In March of 2021, deep in the guts of the COVID pandemic and stuck at home in Canada, Christina Lustenberger made her way to the top of a mountain that’s always been core to her sense of place. Mount Nelson, the 10,869-foot massif that rises above her hometown of Invermere, BC, had been on her mind […]

From the passenger’s seat of Leighan Falley’s 1957 Piper Pacer, the granite peaks of the Alaska Range loom large. Buzzing past heavily crevassed glaciers, the bush plane cuts through the narrow walls of the Great Gorge of the Ruth Glacier with intuitive precision—an extension of its pilot, an artist in flight. Climbers and skiers pepper the […]

Winter 2019 in Cooke City, MT. Set against the backdrop of the dramatic Absaroka Range, Jossi Wells sat atop the inrun. Below, Bobby Brown and his crew milled about. Two cameras, three friends and a 65-foot step-down. In the distance, the steady hum of snowmobilers, undoubtedly high-marking. It was a familiar situation for Jossi, a professional […]

“I’m a total control freak,” Dylan Siggers says.  It’s not the image most people have of the freeski prodigy from Fernie, BC, but the 28-year-old, renowned for his immersive filmmaking and flowing style on snow, is allowing me a peek behind the curtain. Making his skiing come across as fluid, natural and carefree has been a […]

There are no condos at Mt. Baker Ski Area. No high-rise hotels or luxury storefronts. And if there’s a hot tub, it’s the best kept secret since Bigfoot’s whereabouts. In the day and age of mega-resorts and conglomerate ski passes, this small, locally owned, 1,000-acre-ish ski hill at the end of Washington state’s Highway 542 is […]

“The garden at my house right now is just a mega, mega real image of myself,” Arianna Tricomi says in her unhurried, lyrical voice. “It’s a little wild, but the garden just grows and grows. Like me. I’m a mess, but I keep on growing.” Tricomi is sitting on her patio, drinking a beer and […]