Posts by Kyle Cassidy

Jason Hobbs, like many of us, owns a pocket knife. But unlike you and me, Hobbs has within the week plunged his miniature blade into the muscular chest of an aggressive mountain lion. I guess when you turn around to see a gigantic cat dragging your six-year-old son by his… Read the rest

Are you a liberal-minded newshound who is sick of hearing from pollsters predicting which candidate-of-the-week will sweep the next key state in the Republican presidential primary race? Perhaps the results from the 2012 Colorado College State of the Rockies Conservation in the West poll will make you a little more… Read the rest

Bicycling while clutching a guitar or banjo can be an awkward experience. Your balance gets thrown off by the weight of the instrument while its awkward shape impedes navigation. So what’s a pedal-prone musician to do? One option that works well is to get a soft case that can be… Read the rest

“Apocalypse Later, Surf Now” is a dark, gritty short featuring a group of surfers that choose to ride waves as the world around them erupts in a futuristic battle. There is no dialogue, but massive and strange-looking machines (alien vehicles???) loom in the distance while cool jets blow each other… Read the rest

When someone starts a Tumblr-blog dedicated to free porn, it’s bound to attract followers—even if the subject of said porn is cabins. Just. Plain. Cabins. (And awesome photos thereof.) Featuring over 20 pages of cool shots of shanties, lean-to’s, forts, tiny houses, barns and bone-fide cabins in iconic locations, the… Read the rest

Here’s a wild video to help kill two minutes of your workday. I won’t even pretend to say I understand what’s going on here other than the obvious—that this is pure, unbridled awesomeness. But if one of the commentators to the video can be believed, these folks are brothers performing… Read the rest

When Rory O’Connor slid his kayak into the Gulf of Mexico for some fishing, the last thing he imagined he’d pull out of the water was an injured dog. But that’s exactly what happened to the unsuspecting fisherman, whose actions would soon reveal a story with a more bitter-sweet ending… Read the rest

On the second day of his expedition to explore the Antarctic wastelands around the South Pole, Mark Wood encountered a problem unique to today’s polar explorers: his iPod failed. The setback was at first only a minor inconvenience to Wood, who is attempting to be the first person in history… Read the rest

Imagine this: You and some friends are enjoying the solitude of a remote snow shelter on Mount Rainier on a sunny New Year’s day when a helicopter appears in the distance. You watch it’s slow approach, wondering if perhaps a snowshoer has gone missing in the wilderness. But soon it’s… Read the rest

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Five or six years ago, I met renowned Portland poet, Walt Curtis at a keg party. I didn’t know who he was at the time but his presence there was impossible to ignore. Wearing a tattered, untucked flannel shirt and shouldering a mostly unzipped school-style backpack, the scraggly remnants… Read the rest

In November 2008, filmmakers from the Boulder, CO-based adventure film company, Sender Films captured Swiss carpenter and climber Ueli Steck‘s successful attempt to set the solo speed record on the North Face of Eiger (13,025 ft) in the Bernese Alps. Spoiler alert: He does it in two hours and forty… Read the rest

As editorial director here at Wend, my inbox tends to overflow with updates from contributors with whom I’ve worked over the years to develop stories for the magazine—reminders that on Mondays in particular seem to say, “hey,  while you’re sitting there staring at your laptop working on the next issue,… Read the rest

Pro-life mountaineers around the world rejoiced today as 0-year-old American climber and fetus-rights activist Frankie Valentine completed his historic ascent of Mount Everest.
“They told him he lacked the backbone,” said Jordan Romero, who set the previous record for youngest person to climb the world’s highest mountain in 2010 when… Read the rest

The last thing my buddy expected to find while checking out surfboards on Portland’s Craigslist yesterday was an 11-foot aluminum-skinned foam beast with a two-stroke gas motor. Was this a one-of-a-kind invention or one of many? Who would produce something like this? Having nothing better to do, we decided to… Read the rest

Note to self: If you are ever a passenger in a small motorboat on Kenya’s Lake Naivasha and hippos begin to charge, be sure to consider the millions of people who will be watching your video on Youtube before choosing to narrate.
Despite the almost Double Rainbow-esque observation-based narration (“We’re… Read the rest