A blog for the more than average traveler, hiker, and mountain biker.
Strange history, vanishing acts, legendary characters, and stories from places that deserve more than a Wikipedia entry. Written like a campfire story. Read like one too.
Everyone knows Italy made the first ascent of K2 in 1954. Nobody leads with the night before, when two men were left outside at 8,100 meters and one of them was later accused of stealing the very oxygen he had carried up the mountain.
Six climbers died in an Alpine storm in 1935. One survivor spent the next two years arguing with a shoe, and the bottom of your boot has carried his answer ever since. The fog came up the ridge and closed…
A plane went down in Yosemite's backcountry in 1976, carrying two dead men and three tons of marijuana. Nobody found it for six weeks. What happened after became one of climbing's strangest true legends.
The bar smelled like spilled rye and wet wool. A wood stove pushed heat into the corners of Nolan’s Hotel, Mingusville, Montana Territory. Outside, November pressed down hard on the plains. Inside, a man had just hung up his rifle…
The Little Missouri in March 1886 did not look like a river. It looked like a wound. Snowmelt and broken ice came screaming down from the Badlands uplands, carrying cottonwood trunks the size of telephone poles and grinding ice cakes…
Daredevil George Hopkins parachuted onto the summit of Devils Tower in 1941 for a $50 bet, becoming the only person to ever do so. But when his descent equipment failed, the stuntman was stranded for six days on the volcanic rock, turning his ordeal into a national spectacle that required a dramatic rescue by experienced climbers
When National Park Service founder Stephen Mather was institutionalized in 1917, his 27-year-old assistant Horace Albright secretly took over—signing Mather's name to official documents and lobbying Congress to protect Glacier National Park. The cover story held for two years. The official history still glosses over it.
The furnace kicked off at 3 a.m. The pipes had frozen again. Outside, the thermometer read 11 degrees below zero. February 1982. Altitude: 10,152 feet. A man sat at the kitchen table in long johns and wool socks. He held…
The spring mud on the Belle Fourche River bottom smelled like iron and melt. It was March 1932. Crook County, Wyoming, had 5,000 people, no jobs to speak of, and one government employee who had just arrived in a borrowed…
The van was parked outside his sister’s house in Lemon Grove, California. The date was a Wednesday. The time was 10:30 in the morning. The year was 1967. The man inside was 35, a drifter from Vermont who had spent…