Even in a state as saturated with dramatic peaks and geological marvels as Colorado, it’s thrilling to get up close and personal with something as grand — and as emblematic of our ballooning climate change crisis — as a glacier. Given the near certainty of continued climate chaos in coming years, seeing these remnants of the last ice age is becoming a catch-them-while-you-can prospect.
On a crisp early October morning in downtown Crested Butte, the aspens are doing their thing, radiating gold and fluttering audibly in the breeze. Sunshine warms the shoulders of couples strolling along Elk Avenue—dogs on leashes, coffees in hand—against the backdrop of the town’s eponymous peak. Planters overflowing with fall blooms gild pastel-painted Victorian buildings, and handwritten chalkboard signs beckon passersby to pop through the open doors of storefronts. The whole vibe is impossibly quaint—perhaps more so because of the quirky free-spiritedness that makes the charm feel genuine.
Nora began drinking heavily in her late 30s, turning to alcohol after the demons of early childhood trauma resurfaced. A self-described emotional drinker, the fortysomething Denverite, who asked that her real name be withheld to protect her privacy, says her consumption only increased during the COVID-19 crisis. “You’d be seeing all these memes on social media at 2 p.m. that people were having wine parties together,” Nora says, “so you’d feel comfortable doing it as well.” But after a two-week bender in early 2021, Nora woke up feeling more broken than usual.
As I wobble along the via ferrata’s cable-wire bridge stretched across the Uncompahgre Gorge in Ouray, I keep reminding myself of one thing: Don’t look down. Don’t look down. Do. Not. Look. Down. That’s because a ribbon of frothy whitewater churns far below me. It’s the first feature of the Ouray Via Ferrata’s downstream route. My friend and I, despite our lack of rock climbing experience, are harnessed and helmeted behind our mountain guide, Micah Lewkowitz of Mountain Trip, who’d already cruised across the cable and swiveled around to snap photos of us. Via ferrata is Italian for “iron path,” a concept that dates to World War I in Italy’s Dolomites, where they were developed to maneuver troops through inaccessible terrain. It’s a system of steel rungs, ladders, bridges, and cables permanently bolted into rock walls and ledges. This one follows the east side of the 180-foot-deep gorge, across from the famous Ouray Ice Park, for nearly a mile.
Dwarfed by five stainless steel grain-storage bins outside the Root Shoot malt house in Loveland, Emily Olander gestures toward the horizon. A two-story cookie-cutter house with a white fence peeks out from the rolling green land. “See that?” 38-year-old Emily asks. “That’s what we don’t want.” The Olanders, who farm nearly 2,200 acres in northern Colorado and run a malt business that regularly supplies 150 breweries in the state, have nothing against the homeowners, of course. It’s the big-picture development they’re wary of—an encroaching sprawl that’s gobbling up farmland along Colorado’s I-25 corridor faster than older farmers can devise ways to affordably retire without selling their fields to the developers behind the ubiquitous mixed-use retail and residential enclaves.
Somewhere between Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula and Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido, just off the coast of a tiny volcanic island called Raikoke, a small vessel bobbed in the chop of the Sea of Okhotsk. An assorted group of photographers, scientists, and filmmakers lined the boat’s railing and stared in disbelief as the landscape came into focus. The island, usually lush and green, smoldered in an ashy gray state of complete desolation. The air was heavy with sulfuric smoke tendrils, and flocks of birds circled in infinite loops overhead with nowhere to land. The sea-lapped shores, once home to a thriving sea lion rookery, had been reduced to smoking rubble.
A frothy sea rages beneath a moody sky along the coast of Panama. It's mid-February, the day after her thirty-third birthday, and Frisco's Bethany Hughes is perched on a driftwood log near the water's edge. Frustrated, she casts sidelong glances at the whitecaps rolling in on the horizon.
On the horizon, barely visible through the falling snow, you can see them: elk, by the hundreds, silhouetted against the shadowy mountains beyond. Rolling meadows stretch in every direction, and Tarryall Creek, framed by the muted deep-gold of late-fall willows and shrubs, snakes its way through the land. Just off a rutted dirt road, an adobe-style pueblo-revival ranch house, built in 1928, stands hollowly, yet proudly over the landscape it anchors—a reminder of a bygone era, and a beacon of potential.
Colorado’s first family of running keeps it real on and off the race course.
It was Lissa Curtis’s dream to perform on stages beyond New England. So when the gifted dancer met one of the Boston area’s most prominent ballet masters, she accompanied him to a prestigious competition in Romania. But that’s only the beginning of her story.
How’s this for a branding achievement: In making the space-survival film of the year, The Martian, Ridley Scott turned to GoPro cameras as a key storytelling tool. As Quartz points out, “GoPros had more screen time than Kristen Wiig or Donald Glover.” Watching Matt Damon’s ill-fated astronaut log his every action with the small camera, you have to wonder at how GoPro has become synonymous with first-person video capture. One woman deserves much of the credit for that: Christina Anderson.
The multi-talented conservation biologist fears logging far more than bird-eating spiders, electric eels, or anacondas.
In the fall of 2014, Taylor Rees was part of a team of adventurers that spent two weeks slogging through the remote jungles of Myanmar, picking off relentless leeches and eventually abandoning more than half of their supplies to save weight—all before starting their climb up Hkakabo Razi to confirm that it was the highest peak in southeast Asia.
Life is pretty good when you’ve been crowned world champion in the sport you love, just a few days before starting your freshman year of high school.
Ayla Bystrom-Williams wants you to drink more beer. (We know, we like her, too!) But it’s not your garden-variety microbrew or local IPA. Instead, the founder of Santa Fe–based HoneyMoon Brewery suggests you start guzzling kombucha beer.
Most of the year, Kt Miller lives in “podunk [also known as Cooke City],” Montana. Population: 76. The nearest grocery store is an hour and a half away. In the winter, the only way to reach her one-room, 12-by-14-foot cabin is to drive down a one-way, dead-end road through Yellowstone National Park. And that's exactly how she wants it.
Izzi Gomez has seawater in her veins. Hailing from the beach town of Jupiter, Florida, the 15-year-old reigning stand-up paddlesurfing women’s world champion was catching waves practically before she could walk.
Dutch engineering student Boyan Slat shocked the environmental community when he announced in a 2012 TEDx talk that he had invented a way for the oceans to rid themselves of plastic with minimal human intervention. After all, we’re funneling a jaw-dropping 8 million tons of the stuff into the oceans each year, in addition to the more than five trillion pieces of plastic garbage already swirling in the waters. Could a then-17-year-old really have found a simple solution to this massive problem?
What do you get when you cross a couple of eco-minded California surfers with a team of sustainability-focused New York scientists? A whole lot of innovation and experimentation—and a surfboard made from mushrooms.
When the pale rays of the morning sun first peek over the ridgelines of Kirkwood Mountain’s wild terrain, casting a hint of the day’s promise over the rugged hills and horizon, most people haven’t yet stirred.
