It’s not an overstatement to say that Jeremy Jones’s contributions to backcountry snowboarding have been unparalleled. Not only did he bring splitboarding to the big screen in the Teton Gravity Research Deeper, Further, Higher trilogy, but his eponymous brand has also dominated the splitboard market. Now, Jones embarks on his biggest endeavor yet—not solely enjoying […]

In 1994, Bruce Edgerly, along with Bruno McGowan, founded Backcountry Access in a South Boulder , Colo. garage. At the time, telemark gear was the easiest means with which to access the backcountry, but Edgerly was unwilling to accept its limitations.

In 2010, at the age of 35, Revelstoke, B.C.-based skier Greg Hill set the benchmark for most vertical feet skied in a single year: two million. That’s an average of 5,500 feet per day, and Hill traveled around the world to make the dream happen.

In 1982, 12 years before the birth of Backcountry Magazine, Austrian mechanical engineering student Fritz Barthel and his partner decided to tack the summit of Mont Blanc onto the end of an April climbing trip. Burdened by heavy gear and 200 cm slalom skis, they were exhausted by the time they reached the summit. That climb instilled Barthel’s drive to design lighter gear.

On September 30, 2018, Hilaree Nelson, 46, along with partner Jim Morrison, made the first ski descent of Nepal’s 27,940-foot Lhoste. But this achievement was far from Nelson’s first when it comes to pushing limits of ski mountaineering.

Climbers and backcountry skiers have short memories. We possess an uncanny ability to jettison the grimmest mental details of unexpectedly demanding alpine epics—the crushing loads, the numbing cold and needling winter winds—in favor of the glowing pleasantries.

We started out as competitors, Backcountry and me. My crazy newsletter, le Chronicle du Couloir, became a magazine in 1993. During the transformation to national distribution I considered renaming it Backcountry, but Bela Vadasz convinced me to stick with Couloir.

Twenty-five years? Backcountry? You’re kidding. No? That’s 175 dog years—a long stretch, regardless of your species. And yeah, it’s cliché, but what a long, strange trip it’s been.

“We don’t live in a ski town,” my friend said one night a couple of weeks ago as we sat on the deck of the Brewster River Pub and Brewery, dubbed the Brewski by locals. We were only a quarter of a mile from Smugglers’ Notch Resort, but it was off-season and still warm enough to sit outside. My response echoed off the unoccupied metal chairs: “What are you talking about?”