The Dirtbag Diaries

Before Semi-Rad.com, Brendan Leonard wrote a Short for The Dirtbag Diaries called Sixty Meters to Anywhere. He recently published a book with the same title, documenting his journey from handcuffs to hand-jams, from rural Iowa to the mountains of Colorado and from business casual to assignments for Climbing magazine. We returned from our sixth annual pilgrimage to the 5Point Film Festival with som...

Looking west from Seattle, the skyline of Olympic National Park is defined by the notched peak of The Brothers. "I see it stuck in traffic. I see it from meeting rooms in downtown Seattle. I see it on my evening runs that I use to stay in shape for my days in the mountains. I've looked at that skyline and imagined the light, the wind and thought, 'I could be standing on that peak,' -- instead of d...

"My new husband, Bix, consulted the map and asked if I thought we'd make it to Bowknot Bend that day. Lots of honeymooners probably have similar conversations, except for one small detail," writes Emma Walker. "Unlike those couples who coyly take their twos at the gas station down the street, my spouse of less than a week sat discussing the finer points of canoe rigging from his perch atop of the...

"You have to imagine that you're on the frozen Arctic Ocean. You're six miles from shore, you can't really tell where the ocean stops and the white shore begins. All you see is white--and this thing where they're dumping crap into the ocean to make this island," says Dan Ritzman. "And there, stuck in the ice, is a sign that says 'No Trespassing'." It was 1999, the beginning of the climate movement...

"The sky above you goes on forever, and the landscape appears as endless as the sky. The world is expansive and you are tiny. All of your problems shrink down to the head of a pin," writes Melina Coogan. "This is why places like this matter--places like Great Smoky National Park: they give us perspective."  Just months after Melina got married, she walked out of a doctor's office with a sobering h...

Eric Johnson lives in Sturgis, South Dakota with his wife and three young daughters. He works as a high school English teacher. He's responsible--well, most of the time. Half way into his thirties, Eric emptied his retirement account to buy a raft, despite the fact that he lives in a state without any navigable whitewater. Just over a year later, he found something too good to be true: a group of...

"I unclipped the hot belay device from my harness. I looked over at Conor, smiled and announced, 'This is the best part of my day so far'!" writes Jen Altschul. "For a moment, a smile of pure joy spread across his face--which, just as quickly, flipped into disappointment when he realized that I was talking about being back on the ground."  The first time Jen tried to climb a desert tower, her and...

"Sometimes, when I'm hiking somewhere near Moab and chatting with other people, I think about saying something like, 'You know what's great about this hike? In about 75-minutes, you can be at Milt's Stop & Eat'," says Brendan Leonard. "Milt's is a 19-mile drive from Delicate Arch in Arches National Park, it's 55-miles from Indian Creek and 75-miles to Canyonlands' towering red and white striped sa...

"We started the trip without much of a purpose," writes Fil Corbitt. "We wanted to be pushed around. Wanted to find something we didn't know we were looking for. We wanted to take some small chance and see where we landed. And see which side was facing up."  But how do you find that kind of serendipity when you only have a week? Fil created a game. Each morning, he and his friend would wake up and...

We got a call from Australia. M'Lynn's husband, Paul, passed away this past July. He left behind three pairs of polished hiking boots and a backpack packed for his dream hike: the 2,190-mile Appalachian Trail.  M'Lynn reached out to us. She had an idea for one final gift for her husband. "How good would it be," she asked, "for his boots to make the journey even if Paul could not?" We want to make...

"I followed my friend through the small, dark weight room in a crusty garage-like building left over from the station's army days and up a narrow, twisted staircase," Hilary Oliver remembers. "Behind the door at the top of those stairs hid a magical place." Drudgery and boredom ruled most of Hilary's season at Antartica's McMurdo Station, but she also got an unlikely introduction--one that opened...

God told Steve Wescott to walk from the Space Needle to Times Square, NYC, with a goat named LeeRoy, to raise $200,000 for an orphanage in Nairobi, Kenya. Or at least that's the elevator pitch. In truth, when Steve started out of Seattle in 2011, it had much less to do with God, and much more to do with running away from himself and the mistakes he had made as a Christian rock star and sex-and-lov...

"In the end, Iran's spirit took me completely and pleasantly by surprise," writes Greg Buzulencia. "The benevolence I received inspired me to approach every situation with a more open mind. Doing so opened up the world in a way I hadn't expected." Greg left for the Middle East with dreams of powder turns, but returned with the best gifts that travel can offer: new friends, shattered assumptions an...

Phantasmal footsteps, strange silhouettes, inexplicable movements and unaccountable sounds. In our sixth annual Tales of Terror, Bix Firer, Lorraine Campbell and Kealan Sojack share three stories of 'What the *&@! was that'? A dream? Or an indication that, perhaps, we are not as alone in the woods as we like to think. Happy Halloween. 

"Our four seater plane touched down on a small gravel bar in the heart of the Brooks Range. We unloaded. The engine roared back to life, and the plane disappeared down valley into the blue-gray mountains. Then, the mosquitos came," writes Fitz Cahall. In May, Fitz received an email that contained a golden ticket--a float trip down the Kongakut River through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The...

"This was one of those rare moments in life where you must act or die and everything was therefore very simple--although the outcome remained unclear," writes Kim Campbell. "If I lived, I knew that I could manage what followed. It was like a dare and a promise."  Today, we bring you the story of Kim's first sailing trip, of horizontal masts and lightning strikes and, in her words, a "kernel of con...

Maps. We've all studied them. Stuffed them into backpacks or the seatback pocket of our car. Maybe we've even been led astray by a map. But have you ever thought about the person who made that map? Or how that person might influence your initial impression of a landscape? "A map in not a perfect representation of a landscape. It's an abstract representation." says cartographer Marty Schnure. Today...

"By midweek, I can't focus on my duties at work, and spend most of my time on Summitpost and Mountain Project," writes Niki Yoblonski. "There are so many things in the world I want to see--so many mountains to climb, things to discover. I have to get out of there." Yet, inevitably, Sunday evening has her praying for the trailhead, a burger and a soft bed. Niki's theory on achieving the work-outdoo...

"I was looking for no less than a new way of living in this world for our entire society," says Clay Shank. "Like, 'What's the alternative to this capitalistic system that we have here'?" Today, we bring you "700," the story of Clay Shank's ambitious goal to find a new way of life and his unlikely method: skateboarding 700-miles through the state of California, hiking the 210-mile John Muir Trail,...

"All of my friends kayaked. All of the trips we went on were kayaking trips. When not kayaking, we talked about kayaking," writes Sarah Paul. In the four years since she left home, Sarah had constructed her whole identity around whitewater kayaking. Then, on the first day of a whitewater rafting guide course, she felt something shift inside her shoulder. In a bad way. As recovery dragged on, Sarah...

In our fifth annual "Live from 5Point" Film Festival, we interviewed Frank Sanders and Tommy Caldwell.  Frank spent his youth climbing on the East Coast. His path took a turn in 1972, when he hitchhiked west and saw Devil's Tower for the first time. Now, at 63, Frank owns and guides out of Devil's Tower Lodge. He shares the story of his journey and what it's like having found his place.  Over the...

"After a summer of bussing tables and lifeguarding, I had saved up enough and I was finally going to get it. My ticket to anywhere I wanted to be," writes Anya Miller. "I was a little worried about the money, but I was in complete realization that anything I actually wanted to do in life -- literally, anything -- depended on it." Today, Anya shares the story of her first sleeping bag, and the pers...

In the golden days, dirtbags lived to climb. They didn't work, have permanent addresses or sponsors. They ate leftovers off of tourists' plates and slept in beater cars or caves. They stayed in one place only as long as teh weather allowed for climbing. Now, our modern world of fees, time limits and locked dumpsters has made it nearly impossible to live that way anymore. Dirtbagging is dying-- or...

"We opened my aunt's basement door and walked into the dusty room. Among cardboard boxes and carpentry tools stood a bright red bicycle. The frame had a few patches of rust. The components looked clunky and the gears grated roughly when I spun the pedals. It had no seat post or saddle. It was unrideable, but it had character," writes Graeme Lee Rowlands. He had a few months before he would move fr...

"My first few days in Moab's red rock desert were like a blind date where everything went wrong," writes Hilary Oliver. "For one, it was August. My metal aviator sunglasses got so hot in the sun that I couldn't smile or they'd burn my cheeks." Four years later, Hilary and the desert got a second chance at their botched first encounter. Over the past ten years, they have developed a relationship wi...