Jess Graham looks to mountain biking and snowboarding to inspire her artwork – both as a graphic designer for Alchemist Brewing in Stowe, Vermont and in her home studio. Whether she’s embarking on powder or dirt missions or applying her creativity through acrylic paints and sketching, Graham is always thinking about her lines.
Skintrack Sketches: Vermont artist Jess Graham speaks to her love of lines in painting and snowboarding
Backcountry welcomes Mountain Flyer, The Mountain Bike Journal

The publishers of Backcountry Magazine recently acquired Gunnison, Colorado-based Mountain Flyer, The Mountain Bike Journal. If you love Backcountry and also ride, Mountain Flyer is your quarterly journal of record for the sport. Through gripping storytelling and crisp, clean design, and showcasing photography only available on the printed page, Mountain Flyer celebrates the riders, racers, […]
Andrzej Bargiel makes history with first ski descent of K2

On Sunday, July 22, Polish ski mountaineer Andrzej Bargiel became the first person in history to climb and ski the Himalayan behemoth K2 (28,251 feet), located on the China/Pakistan border in the Karakoram Range.
Beyond the Gates: How the BRASS Foundation is teaching racers avy safety

How, in the wake of two U.S. Ski Team development-athletes’ deaths, snow-safety organization BRASS is educating the U.S.’s youth racers.
Understanding Beartooth Highway: Conversations on springtime-user conflict along the Montana/Wyoming border

It was Memorial Day weekend. 2018, but the road barricade still blocked Highway 212 just past the Montana/Wyoming state line. The Beartooth Highway, one of the highest paved roads in the country, was my access point to the spring skiing that still existed above 10,000 feet.
Skintrack Sketches: Artist Emma Longcope paints the public lands she protects by day

Colorado-based artist Emma Longcope, 25, sees art and journaling as a way to slow down and better appreciate her surroundings on the skintrack. And although she considers her art a hobby, Longcope works to bring her artistic side to her day job as the content coordinator for the American Alpine Club by illustrating infographics and other nature-inspired materials.
Fruits of the Sea
Backstory: Turning Back

An overhanging rock face looms to our left, and I can see the Coleman Glacier sprawling far below my feet. Kyle and I are on the Hourglass, a 50-degree ramp that gains Mt. Baker, Wash.’s North Ridge. Early this morning, after a few soggy hours of sleep in Murkwood Camp, we’d navigated the crevasses of […]
Skintrack Sketches: ACMG guide Aaron Enns zooms in on geometry to paint a bigger picture

Artist and ACMG-certified guide, Aaron Enns, 40, hails from Golden, B.C., where he looks to his skintrack-based work in the winter and tree-planting vocation in the summer as fuel for his creative juices. Through incorporating the natural, repeating patterns and fractal geometry that appear in the familiar backcountry scenery of his workday, he aims to […]