Outdoors

Checkout local Jackson Hole skier Jessica McMillan in this trailer for Warren Miller's 64th film, Ticket to Ride!

Now, this is our kind of race day: The 15th stage of this year’s Giro d’Italia was held in sporting conditions that prompted organizers to move the finish from the top of Col du Galibier four kilometers lower, to the Marco Pantani memorial. It still made for big fat wet flakes that plastered shades and sugared the peaks as the peloton cranked out 145 cold and nasty Ks, a scene captured perfectly by Jered Gruber. So more of Jered’s work at gruberimages.pro

I am so excited to represent the USA Jr. Men’s Freestyle Kayak Team.  The team trials were lots of fun, but the hardest competition I’ve ever entered. The never ending rain created changing water levels continually changing the hole, and just the added pressure of knowing that you had to finish in top three spots to be on the team fueled every competitor to give it their all.  Taking the top three spots are Bennett Smith, Alec Voorhees, and myself.  I am so grateful to be going to the world championship with my two best friends! Training partners, fierce competitors, and best friends; we should be a strong force to bring the USA some medals! The 2013 World Championship will be held September2-9 at the Nantahala Outdoor Center in Bryson City, North Colorado.  I have the opportunity to train with my team members in Colorado and Canada this summer.  Going to pack my favorite SUP board shorts and MK short and long sleeve organic tees for the Colorado rivers.  Thanks MK for sponsoring and making my favorite paddling attire comfortable and stylish!  Looking forward to my out west and Canadian adventures!

Today’s AJ chillout video series brings you a magnificent display of water vapor, temperature, and physics, otherwise known as clouds. *More or less. Probably more. Don’t be literal.

Multi-day river trips are a gear junkie’s dream, even better than car camping trips. Anything you can strap to the raft or stick in a dry bag is fair game. You’ll need PFDs, throwbags, a pump, a backup pump….whatever, snooze. This is the stuff you REALLY need: Limes Beer, especially cheap beer, tastes 30 percent colder if you put a lime in it. This is a fact, and an important fact when you’re six days deep, the ice is almost gone, and there’s no temperature gradient between lukewarm water of the Green and the PBRs in your drag bag. Portable Shade Those dorky, wide-brim, so-you-think-you’re-a-cowboy-now straw hats? They start to feel really practical when the sun is high and you’ve been marinating in a canyon for nine hours. Desert guides also swear by thrift-store, snap-button shirts. They’re cheap, and August river trips are the one case where slow-to-dry cotton makes sense in the wilderness. Stories Even on the Middle Fork of the Salmon, or the Grand, there’s a heck of a lot of flat water between the rapids. And, unless some jamoke brings an iPad, all you’re going to have to amuse yourself at night is fire and each other. So you’re going to have to, like, talk to people. Bummer. Way More Straps Then You Think You Need Because there’s always a chance that you might go upside down. Alternate Modes of Flotation There will come a time when the raft gets too small, you’re sick of the way your oarsman clears her throat, and you need to paddle your own canoe for a bit. Oh wait, you don’t have a canoe? Paco pads, empty kegs, and inflatable pool toys all make perfectly good temporary river crafts. Pirate Hat Or a banana costume, or at least a wig. One night, things are probably going to devolve into a costumed dance party. After a bunch of days with the same people it’d be odd if you didn’t get weird. Just my friends? Okay, then. A Toilet Seat There’s a reason they call it the groover. Bring a seat to stick on the ammo can and prevent raft ass. A Dutch Oven Would you like delicious pineapple upside down cake after dinner? Bet you would. Maybe it’s something about serving up lasagna or chicken potpie when you haven’t showered for a week, but a Dutch oven makes creekside cooking way more impressive. Beach Games Bocce, horseshoes, that game where you throw a Frisbee at a pole and try to knock a beer off. Because you get to hang out on a beach every single night, and there’s no weird guy tanning in a Speedo to throw off your game. Or if there is, at least he came with you. Photo by NPS For more Adventure Journal Lists, go here.

There’s nothing wrong with parachuting into an area, skiing a renowned peak, and then heading home, but that’s not why Kim Havell came to Wyoming. No, she moved to Jackson a year ago specifically to immerse herself in the steep wild playground that is the Tetons, and the list of her descents after just one season in the range is impressive. It includes the Grand, Middle, and South Tetons, village classic Once is Enough, and dozens more. All of which is context for what she did last week: become the first woman to ski the Otter Body route on the Grand. It was her third attempt. The first was shut down because snowboarder Jeremy Jones was doing the route and it wouldn’t have been cool to tackle it, too. The second was skunked by unexpected weather. But the third try was perfect: a night spent at 11,000 feet led to a 3 a.m. start up the Ford-Stettner route, followed by first turns at 9 a.m. The Otter Body was first skied by Doug Coombs and Mark Newcomb in June 1996. Coombs had been eyeing it for about five years — Jackson local, Steve Shea, told him, “In the perfect year, at the perfect time, during the perfect hour, skiing the Otter Body is possible. It’s the most aesthetic, direct ski route off the Grand Teton.” Since then, the Otter Body has seen numerous tracks, but it’s nevertheless a burly, exposed route. When Havel, Brian Warren, and Pete Gaston first dropped onto the East Face, the snow was still a bit firm, though the forecast was for considerable warming. They waited 15 minutes to let it soften, then skied perfect corn on a slope in excess of 50 degrees to the first rappel. In that short span, the mercury was already climbing, ice was melting, and rocks were starting to fall, so they didn’t waste time scooting through the rap and to the Otter Body. Other than a few dodgy anchors and some extremely wet rappels in waterfall conditions, it all went smoothly. Compared to the more common Ford-Stettner route,in the Otter Body “you’re a lot more exposed,” Havell says. “You’re committed 100 percent. I don’t think you feel the exposure in Ford-Stettner as much. There are pullouts, areas of safety. But once you commit to the Otter Body, you’re committed to the dance. There’s no place to hide or change your mind.” Being the first woman to ski the Otter Body “was sort of a bonus. First females are tough. I definitely take credit for them because they’re part of our careers in the sport. They bring up the level in the sport, and you try to be on as even ground as you can. But it’s not the reason why I do things.”

Last year, I bought a house.  Certainly not the nicest house, as it needed quite a bit of work.  It’s on a busy street and it was pretty exposed to a high volume of traffic. So I built a privacy fence.  It was about 75 feet long, with one gate, all wood.  It took me less than a day to dig the posts, build the fence, and stain it.  I had a bit of help from my friends and family, but it was a pretty quick, easy project. My friend asked me to help him with his.  He wanted to build a fence that bordered his entire lot, around 300 feet, with 6 gates due to easement access issues.  I figured it wouldn’t take more than a few days, especially with two people, and he had a bobcat with an auger, rather than the hand auger from the rental shop.  The first day, we got about 30 feet in, and he ran out of materials.  The next day, we got about 20 more in before something came up and we had to stop.  The next, we got the posts in for about 90 ft of fence in the back yard, but still needed to dig and set the posts for both sides of the house.  Since this was taking much longer than anticipated, mostly because my friend refuses to buy more than a few hours worth of materials, I had to go back to work.  He claims that if he bought everything at once, I’d work through the night to get it done, and he doesn’t like to work that long at once, understandably.  Luckily, he rounded up another friend to help with the fence for a while.  When I came back to help, he’d finally gotten a palate of cedar for the slats.  I put as many up as I could, until we ran out.  Because he bought the last of the cedar, we had to wait a few more days until more cedar came in.  I had to go back to work.  After a few weeks of this, we still have to rip a few slats for the ends of the fence, where the space is an inch or two smaller than the slap, and we have to stain it.  Not sure if either of these things will ever be done, but it’s good enough to keep the dogs in. Now onto another project.

Nothing I can possibly write would be better than what “Transmorphers” director Scott Wheeler and “Malibu Shark Attack” writer Keith Shaw say about their new movie, Avalanche Sharks. After a horrific avalanche, the staff at Twin Pines Ski Resort starts to receive reports of missing people and creatures that move beneath the snow. As the body count piles up, the management tries to cover up the situation, which leads to disaster on their busiest day of the year: Bikini Snow Day. Spring break in the mountains: snowboarding, beer, drunken co-eds in bikinis. As the yearly Bikini Ski Day party descends on a small mountain town, something lurks beneath the snow. When an unwitting rider causes an avalanche, it awakens a huge, menacing, pre-historic Snow Shark! With a newfound taste for human flesh, the Snow Shark picks off the snow bunnies mercilessly. Cut off from help by mountainous terrain and blinding snow, the local sheriff must make an unlikely alliance with a motley crew of snowboarders to take down the Snow Shark before the white hills run red with blood! Not since Frozen have I been so excited about a snow movie. The only way it could be better is it was starring the platinum blonde daughter of Hulk Hogan as the improbable Dr. Sandy Powers, scientist. Oh wait, it is.

Starting in 2005 as a group of crowd-sourced rock climbing beta websites, MountainProject.com has grown to more than two million users and become a go-to resource for climbing route info across the U.S. and the world. Now, the producers of Mountain Project have announced a comprehensive user-driven website for mountain biking info at MTBProject.com. MTB Project’s new platform combines trail descriptions, photos, maps, condition reports, and data, all downloadable to iPhones and Androids. Several hundred trails have been posted across the country so far on the beta site, most strongly centered in Colorado and Utah. The full site will go online in early summer 2013. Adventure Projects co-founder Nick Wilder says the idea was born out of searching for mountain bike trail beta around the internet and finding a few resources but nothing that was quite perfect. “We kept thinking, ‘It sure would be nice to have a Mountain Project for biking…’” Wilder says. “And so after being unimpressed with the other options, we decided it was worth building.” He and co-founders Katy Ryan and Mike Ahnemann started dreaming up a user-based mountain bike web site, and connected with the 35,000-member International Mountain Bicycling Association at the perfect time. “We happened to start talking to IMBA just as they were preparing to start a massive campaign to map every trail in the country,” Wilder says. Combining that with our technical expertise and experience with large-scale, user-generated content was an immediate no-brainer for all of us.” Wilder says eight years of watching Mountain Project grow taught him a few lessons about curating content. Unlike Mountain Project, MTB Project content will not be completely user-edited: Three editors will review every trail for content thoroughness, grammar, and trail legality and accuracy. MTB Project collects GPS coordinates for everything — trails, trail photos, parking lots, technical features, for mapping and virtual 3D rides. As more data is collected, MTB Project will suggest trails to users based on their ratings of trails they’ve ridden. The iPhone app is available and the Android app is coming soon, and both have the ability to download entire trail networks for offline use, which show users their position on the trail by using their smartphone’s GPS. The website is free, and so are the apps, and although the website will be funded by ads, Wilder says future plans may include a paid app. Wilder says Mountain Project’s registered users grew about 30 percent per year since 2005, and although the population of mountain bikers is higher than that of climbers, the need for data is smaller — there are fewer trails than there are routes. In that way, mapping rides should theoretically be a little easier, but MTB Project will also tackle more ambitious ideas — like mapping the entire mountain bike route for the Colorado Trail (LINK). “Climbing and biking move people very deeply and create some of the most positive experiences in life,” Wilder says. “Sharing them with others is rewarding — tens of thousands of people have done it on Mountain Project, and we hope the same will happen with mountain biking.” For more, visit mtbproject.com

Blazing heat…beads of sweat rolling down my face…sounds of birds chirping as I paddle toward some trash in the water right in front of me a alligator swims off. My name is Gabriel Gray and that was a small bit of what I do in the sport of SUP. I was born and raised on a farm in North Florida. I spent most of my childhood exploring the local rivers and lakes in the area. My teenage years were influenced by the Wassica River and the Gulf of Mexico; fishing, hunting, tracking, surfing and rodeo were the norm when not helping on the farm. I developed a passion and respect for Mother Nature and the Ocean at an early age, learning to survive of the land around me. This added to my success as a big game tracker in the Sierra Nevada’s. After riding bulls professionally for a while I decided it was time to move home and rediscover my roots. Completing college I became a Firefighter/EMT and USLA open water lifeguard and moved to Panama City Beach Florida. I added the sport of Stand up Paddleboarding as one of my passions in life shortly after and became a WPA Level 2 instructor. Later my wife and I started a local Paddleboard company, Walkin’ On Water Paddleboards providing ECO-tours and lessons. In 2012 I became a team member of Mother Ocean.org offering my skills in mapping and logistics for the expedition paddles we do. We have completed over 400 river and ocean miles and becoming the first paddleboarders to conquer multiple rivers like the Apalachicola and Kissimmee Rivers. I am proud to be a part of the MK family and can’t wait to share stories from our trips, gear reviews and introduce people to the exploration side of SUP!