Colorado’s Powderhorn Ski Resort tweaks the cost of its senior pass. By 400 percent.
The operators of Colorado’s Powerhorn Ski Resort used to offer older skiers (those over 70) a season pass for $75, which was ridiculously cheap. For the coming season, the price was bumped up…if 400 percent constitutes a bump. The new price will be $329 (although 75-year-olds can still...
Glory is fleeting, as is not quite achieving glory
After three attempts to swim the 103-mile span between Cuba and Key West, and after multiple stings from jelly fish—correct that, make it Portuguese-men-of-war, a profoundly wicked animal that made her face and lips swell up like a collagen injection from Satan—Diana Nyad has announced that she’s packing it...
Breaking: Old age not a cakewalk, according to NPR, Harvard and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
This just in: a new study commissioned by National Public Radio, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health has discovered that for “one in four retirees,” life after retirement is worse than the 5 years before retirement. There’s a lot more to...
Sunday quote: September 25, 2011
Our latest feature, the Sunday quote, debuts a day late. This is an inauspicious start. But let us not be distracted by minor glitches and human failings. Instead, consider this, which we found in Robert Penn’s wonderful It’s All About the Bike, about which more...
Olds just won’t stop running marathons
If you were out pounding the pavement yesterday morning, you might have missed the New York Times story on the aging world of competitive running. Writer Tom Sims notes that 30 years ago, “the median age for a marathon runner was 34 for men and 31 for women....
There’s an app for this bike…or there’s a bike for this app
Why does an auto-maker like Ford offer an e-bike, even as a concept, when they’re (1) strapped for cash and (2) pre-occupied with bringing new technology into their four-wheeled vehicles. Could be just a PR gambit. Could be someone saw all these technologies on the shelf and thought...
62-year-old has 400 marathons to go
We’re not sure if we should be impressed or appalled by Japan’s Hajime Nishi. Maybe we’re both. We like the idea of setting ambitious goals, and Nishi is certainly unafraid of reaching beyond his grasp. He’s aiming to complete 1,000 different marathons in 250 countries, which would sound ludicrous...
When it comes to sweating the small stuff, Steve Green is our Yoda, our guru, our sensei
If you’re interested in laying down some of your backpacking burden, you can find plenty of advice in bookstores and online. (Type “ultralight backpacking” into the YouTube search box and you’ll get over 3,100 videos.) But no one synthesizes the opposite poles of obsessive-compulsive, shorten-and-drill-out-your-toothbrush hysteria and utterly...
A nice bit of backwoods skunkworks
Over the past year, we’ve come across a couple of innovative projects—one was a documentary, the other a band’s throwback vinyl record—being funded through Kickstarter. Kickstarter, if you haven’t seen it, is worth a look. The web site says it’s the largest funding platform for creative...
Hiker meets hero
There’s a special charm in seeing someone honestly and appropriately awed by someone else. Like watching a kid walk up to the mall Santa, or a young football player shaking hands with Peyton Manning. We read a bit of that same enchantment in a recent story by Scott Williams in...
Achieving Backcountry Hero Status Now Virtually Impossible
This is how extraordinarily tough Amos Richards is: the 64-year-old North Carolinian was hiking in Utah’s desert backcountry, around Little Blue John Canyon, when he fell about 10 feet, suffering multiple leg fractures and internal injuries. He was alone and unable to put weight on the injured...
Sorry for the interruption
Apologies to all who visited the site this evening. We’re learning our craft on the job—it’s like an old world apprenticeship program, absent the stingy and abusive master who actually knows the business—and most steps forward are pretty halting. So, for a bit, you might have...
