Field Notes: Voices of the Outdoors

In 1907, in the village of St. Anton am Arlberg, a seventeen-year-old named Hannes Schneider was hired to teach skiing to hotel guests. He had grown up the son of a cheesemaker in nearby Stuben, a village of about a hundred people, and had been skiing since he was eight years old. He didn't yet have a method. He just demonstrated, and his students copied him. Over the next two decades, he buil...

Paul Petzoldt was born in Iowa in 1908. He grew up on a farm in Idaho, read books about exploration, and at sixteen years old arrived in Jackson, Wyoming, looked up at the Grand Teton, and decided to climb it. That afternoon. In cowboy boots. He nearly died. He got trapped on a ledge in worsening weather, spent a cold night on the mountain, and used a penknife to carve footholds in the icy final s...

January 1936. Mount Mansfield, Vermont. Minnie Dole falls on the Toll Road and breaks his ankle. The response is improvised and slow. Nine weeks later, his close friend Frank Edson is killed on a slope in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. There is no patrol. No trained response. Just the terrible, familiar scramble of bystanders doing their best. Dole goes home and starts making phone calls. In March 193...

On June 7, 1913, four men stood at the summit of Denali — 20,310 feet above sea level, the highest point in North America. The expedition was led by Hudson Stuck, an Episcopal archdeacon who had spent fifteen years traveling Alaska by dogsled and had long dreamed of being first to the top. His book about the climb, published in 1914, is clear about what actually happened when the summit came into...

In the late 1950s, Yosemite Valley's big walls were considered unclimbable. The northwest face of Half Dome. El Capitan. Three thousand feet of sheer granite with no obvious route and no existing technique to get up them safely. Most serious mountaineers of the era looked at those walls and moved on. A group of broke climbers looked at them and moved in. Camp 4 — officially Sunnyside Campgroun...

In the early 1950s, fly fishing guides in the American West were barely a profession. You knew a guy who knew the river. You hired him. There were no standards, no certifications, no expectation that the person in the boat with you was anything more than a local with local knowledge. Then Bud Lilly opened a tackle shop in West Yellowstone, Montana, at the head of the Madison River — and started do...

February 19, 2012. Stevens Pass, Washington. Nineteen inches of fresh snow on a firm base, blue skies, and a group of fifteen expert skiers preparing to drop into Tunnel Creek — one of the most celebrated sidecountry runs in the Pacific Northwest. The group included some of the best backcountry skiers in the region. Professional athletes. Veteran patrollers. People who had spent years, sometimes d...