Adventure
Are our trails as happy as we think?
It’s easy to be a nature detective on an early December morning at Brainard Lake. The coiled criss-crosses of Yaktrax and racket-shaped prints of snowshoes mingle with wide ribbons of knobby tread and the divot and drag of ski poles. The post-holes of lumbering elk ...
The mind-body solution
Carl Jung believed reaching full potential as a human required exploration of our deepest thoughts, those feelings that lay buried deep beneath our consciousness. As he put it, “There is no energy unless there is a tension of opposites; hence it is necessary to ...
You Could Smell Humanity
She let them sleep in her woodshed. But all night long, recalls Boulder resident Stan Havlick, he could hear the young woman praying fervently that the foreign cyclists tucked soundly into their sleeping bags wouldn’t harm her...
The last great adventure
When it comes to exploration, humans are obsessed with being first — just look at the past century: Robert Peary planted the American flag at the North Pole in 1909 after scores of others died trying; Roald Amundsen became the first person to reach the South Pole in ...
Now you see it, now you don’t
John Birchak’s eyes well with tears as he speaks about his first days in Tibet — three days in the sacred city of Lhasa, often spent watching Buddhist devotees walk wellworn paths around and around and around monasteries on Barkhor Street...
Where the next turn leads
It was a cold spring morning, a Monday, signaling my first week off work (as a veterans-law paralegal in Boulder) in seven months. The previous day I’d completed the eccentric 70-mile Eroica California, with around 6,000 feet of elevation gain meandering Central ...
Strength of mind:
Mark Williams looks just like any other Boulderite on this cool fall evening. Fit and athletic, he’s sipping a microbrew and talking about breathing. About how to breathe, about calming your inner self. About clarity of mind. Nothing really out of the ordinary, ...
Border-to-border
No one’s gonna top this, in our posterity, I don’t think. Maybe, but I doubt it,” Ben Thamer tells the video camera in the new documentary, Unbranded. “You can run a marathon, you can hike across the Great Wall, you can do a lot of things but you can’t do this. This ...
Flying high
The air is still this Sunday morning. It’s fall and the hint of yellows and reds are starting to dot Boulder’s lush landscape — but it’s still warm. In fact, it’s already warm out on the plains east of the city on this particular Sunday morning, and with no clouds in...
There are some special people here
If you want to be on the silver screen you move to Los Angeles, and if you want to break into musical theater you head to New York City...
Summer storming
The crowd inside El Montañes, a bar and restaurant in Farellones, Chile, is standing room only. There are more people outside, cajoling the security staff in a vain attempt to get in. They’re the unlucky ones, the ones without tickets to the hottest night of the ...
Figuring it out
Your sense of identity shapes who you are. It affects your decisions, your behaviors and your self-perceived value. Lafayette ultramarathon runner David Clark bases his identity on being a seeker, an explorer and a healthy person who would never dream of abusing any ...
