Multiday traverses, winter-camping trips and travels to far-flung destinations might sometimes seem like adventures you only experience vicariously through Instagram and Facebook. But there’s plenty of gear available today that makes ambitious pushes into the mountains more accessible. To push you toward that skintrack walkabout or remote vacation, check out these camping and travel selections that can help get you out there and back safely and smoothly.
How a little solar gain on Mt. Baker, Wash. led to big consequences
Spring skiing was in full swing on Mt. Baker, Wash. by early last April when photographer Grant Gunderson and his ski partner for the day, Kirsten Rowley, hit a skintrack for Baker’s Shuksan Arm. The duo had spent the previous day at the resort exploring sidecountry zones that had proved to be stable, so they went into the backcountry feeling confident about the snow stability.
Anna Soens reframes the conversation on athletic achievement in the mountains
Anna Soens didn’t expect that she’d become an adaptive role model over the last two and a half years. In December 2015, however, the 30-year-old Boise, Idaho-based wildlife biologist fell 35 feet at a climbing gym, breaking her lowest thoracic vertebra, an injury that left her with partial paralysis from the hips down. As an […]
Big Boots to Fill: How French brothers Jean-Baptiste and Jonathan Charlet follow the family footsteps
And so goes the Charlet family paradox—five generations of alpinists pioneering routes in the birthplace of mountaineering while the latest generation retraces these lines with a more modern, gravitational approach: snowboarding.
The Friendly Frankenboot: With their new Hoji Pro Tour, Dynafit builds a more accommodating monster
If pro skier Eric Hjorleifson’s first Dynafit boot, the Vulcan, went by the nickname Frankenboot, his newest model, the Hoji Pro Tour, falls more in the image of the hairy, blue Monsters Inc. character Sulley—big, strong and hardworking, but with a friendlier side. Dynafit’s Vulcan, launched in 2012, earned its sobriquet from Hjorleifson’s work cobbling together parts […]
Ace Kvale: An iconic photographer mentors a new generation
Ace Kvale has been on the forefront of adventure photography for the past 40 years, with subjects ranging from Himalayan peaks to the valleys of his southern Utah home. Kvale, 62, kickstarted his career in the ski industry as an athlete and model before moving behind the lens in the 1980s.
Mountain Skills: The dos and don’ts of quick pits
Balancing the need to assess snow stability on the skintrack while also making sure your partners don’t freeze can be a difficult task at times. To be safe in the mountains, you need to gather a lot of information on a variety of aspects and elevations, but spending an hour in a snow hole is less than appealing, especially in inclement weather.
Alta Withdraws Grizzly Gulch “Keystone” from Land Exchange, But Mountain Accord Presses On
You won’t find Grizzly Gulch in The Chuting Gallery, the steep skiing bible for Utah’s Central Wasatch Mountains. But the 284-acre patch of low-angle terrain at the head of Little Cottonwood Canyon has become a flashpoint in a multiyear battle to settle land disputes between ski resorts and conservationists in the increasingly popular canyons.
Backcountry Basecamp 2019
BASECAMP 6.0 – Backcountry Magazine teams up with Scott Sports and Nokian Tyres to spread mountain education across the country Jeffersonville, Vt. (for immediate release) – For more than 20 years, Backcountry Magazine has been committed to educating its community on how to safely travel through untracked terrain. And for six years we’ve been taking […]
Salomon and Atomic’s new tech/alpine Shift MNC 13 aims to do it all with enhanced safety
Quite simply, the Shift is an alpine binding that becomes a tech binding for the ascent. More specifically, the Shift meets the DIN ISO standards for both tech and alpine—it’s a best-of-both-worlds binding that some skiers may lament because of its lack of specialization while others will offer praise due to its quiver-of-one status.
