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A traverse story built around limits instead of conquest

Andrew Drummond’s “The Space” follows a three-day, 45-mile ski traverse through New Hampshire’s White Mountains, linking Gray Knob Cabin, Harvard Cabin and Zealand Hut across more than 20,000 feet of climbing and descent. On paper, that sounds like the setup for a familiar kind of mountain story: big mileage, high exposure and a local skier stringing together an elegant objective in an often-overlooked range. But the article is better than that. Drummond does not treat the traverse as a showcase for domination or efficiency. He writes it as a lesson in how quickly a bold plan can be reshaped by thin snow, wind slabs, warming temperatures, fatigue and the need to keep choosing caution over ego.

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Why this article matters

Maddy Huggins’s article argues that inclusion in free flight is not a side issue to be handled after the flying is done. It is part of how the sport survives. Her account of the first Women’s+ fly-in at Tiger Mountain in Issaquah, Washington starts as an event report, but it quickly becomes a case for treating belonging as real infrastructure. Pilots need launches, weather knowledge, shuttles, mentors, and site access. They also need a community that does not make them feel like permanent guests.

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What the article is really about

Kevin Brenden’s piece begins with a launch accident in Valle de Bravo, Mexico, but its deeper subject is the false sense of security that insurance can create. After feeling rushed on a crowded launch and choosing a bad cycle, he tumbles just below takeoff and breaks his arm. What follows is not merely an injury report. The article becomes a close look at what happens when carefully purchased travel coverage collides with the realities of foreign clinics, cash payments, improvised paperwork, and remote claims handling.

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Why this article stands out

Lisa Verzella’s article is nominally about one meet in Ager, Spain, but its real subject is a broader shift in how paraglider racing can work. The Sports-Class Racing Series is built for competent cross-country pilots flying EN-C wings or lower, which immediately changes the tone. Instead of treating racing as an arms race toward hotter gliders and narrower margins, the series tries to preserve the tactical fun of competition while keeping the equipment and task design closer to what many experienced recreational pilots actually fly.

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A ski partnership stretched across adulthood

Carolyn Highland’s “Ski You Soon” takes a premise that could have been handled as a sentimental reunion story and gives it more texture than that. The article follows Highland and her longtime ski partner Lindsay as they try to make a short spring tour happen after years of life drift: marriages, children, demanding careers and a move from Colorado to opposite ends of the country. What makes the piece work is that Highland does not pretend the old ease still exists. The logistics are harder, the bodies are different and the windows for adventure are narrower. The story’s emotional weight comes from the fact that the friendship has to be maintained deliberately now, with the same kind of patience and improvisation that a backcountry day often demands.

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Why this article stands out

Jeff Katz’s guide is useful because it refuses to romanticize speedriding. The sport is easy to describe in a seductive way: skis, a small wing, steep terrain, and the ability to move between sliding and flying. Katz acknowledges that appeal, but he makes the stronger point that speedriding only stays beautiful when pilots treat it as a discipline rather than a shortcut to intensity. The article is built around progression, judgment, and energy management, not bravado.

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A one-plank joke that turns into a real mountain ethic

Ethan Daly’s “Straight Lines” starts with a premise that sounds like a gag and then steadily reveals why it matters. The article follows New Hampshire skier Kyle Huston, who tours in a perfectly recognizable backcountry kit only to lock his skis together at the top and descend on a mono-ski. Daly leans into the absurdity because the absurdity is the point. Huston’s project is not useful in the modern ski-industry sense. It is harder than skiing, less stable than snowboarding and dependent on a discontinued oddball tool, Faction’s Le Split Mono. Yet that very impracticality gives the piece its force. Daly presents mono-ski touring as a conscious refusal of the sport’s usual logic of efficiency, progress and product churn.

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Calef Letorney’s article argues that “active piloting” is often invoked as a vague compliment or criticism when it should be treated as a concrete, trainable discipline. The core idea is simple: a paraglider should not be allowed to wander through the sky while the pilot passively endures whatever the air does next. A good pilot is constantly feeling what the wing is doing, predicting where it is about to go, and making timely corrections that keep the glider overhead and efficient. Letorney frames that work not as nervous overcontrol but as the normal operating mode of serious paragliding.

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A mountain profile built around attention instead of fame

Matthew Tufts frames “Ski(tour) Mountaineering” as a profile of Andrew McNab, but the piece is really about a way of moving through mountains that has become increasingly rare in an era of public tick lists, famous zones, and aggressive branding. McNab is introduced not as a ski celebrity but as the kind of local skier other strong skiers quietly rely on: born and raised in Revelstoke, deeply knowledgeable, technically gifted, and far more interested in overlooked terrain near home than in building a public mythology around himself. Tufts places him in the middle of one of North America’s most famous ski landscapes while emphasizing that his preferred terrain often sits just outside the obvious spotlight. The point is not that he rejects big mountains, but that he has learned to see possibilities in their margins.

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John Matylonek’s article makes a useful argument against a common belief in hang gliding: awkward landings are not usually proof that the aircraft is inherently hard to land. More often, they are the visible end of a chain of small errors in setup, trim, body position, and timing. A graceful landing, in his telling, is less about athleticism than about giving the glider the conditions it needs to finish the flight cleanly.