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
Digital trailers have become a popular form of marketing in book publishing. The above trailer is for the book Over the Top and Back Again… Read the rest, which chronicles adventurer Brandon Wilson’s 111-day, 1200-mile journey across the Via Alpina–a series of paths running the length of the Alps through eight countries.
Last night I met up with Winter Wildlands Alliance (WWA) executive director Mark Menlove at the organization’s Backcountry Film Festival, which stopped off at KEEN in Portland as part of the festival’s world tour to celebrate the human powered snow experience through film. Typical of events held at KEEN, the… Read the rest
UNDERCITY is a gritty documentary short that follows urban historian Steve Duncan along a tour of New York City’s forgotten, but still (illegally) accessible historic places.
The suspense builds as Duncan leads filmmaker Andrew Wonder down active subway lines where the deadly omnipresent third line will “kill ya quick”; through… Read the rest
A tracking device called Flaik (pronounced “flake”) has been growing in popularity at ski resorts across the country because of its ability to allow cautious parents to go about their days on the mountain in peace, knowing their children are never out of reach. Flaik is a GPS unit about… Read the rest
Here’s a video that will make you wish you’d pursued that geology degree after all. In the clip, volcanologist Geoff Mackley (who is wearing some sort of space-age protective gear that looks like the outfit you see in Intel commercials) and his team of filmmakers rappel into Marum, a magma-spewing… Read the rest
Police raiding a marijuana farm in western Canada stumbled across a group of more than 10 black bears that appeared to have been lured there to guard it.
Over the years, marijuana farmers have developed some novel ways of protecting their crops. From “invisible” fishhooks hanging at eyelid level to… Read the rest
Sometimes in this line of work we come across things that seem almost too cringe-worthy to be true. Unfortunately for climber Jason Kruk, this video looks real enough. If you are the type of person who gets childish joy from watching disgusting, humiliating, worst-moment-of-my-life-caught-on-tape videos then click play. If not,… Read the rest
In this video, outdoors enthusiasts and activists Forrest and Amy McCarthy explore the remote backcountry wilderness of the Wind River Range in Wyoming. Their goal? To climb the highest unnamed peak in the state – the mysterious 13′er known only as “13,198″.
Forrest McCarthy is the Public Lands Director for… Read the rest
