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Backcountry Issue166 The Space Summary

2026-04-18 1053 words 5 minutes #skiing

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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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Backcountry Issue164 Ski You Soon Summary

2026-04-15 408 words 2 minutes #skiing

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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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Backcountry Issue166 Straight Lines Summary

2026-04-13 512 words 3 minutes #skiing

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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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Backcountry Issue166 Ski(tour) Mountaineering Summary

2026-04-12 963 words 5 minutes #skiing

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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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Backcountry Issue164 Searching for Gold Summary

2026-04-11 689 words 4 minutes #skiing

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A backcountry project built from a mining ruin

Heather Hansman’s “Searching for Gold” begins with a useful reversal. The North London Mill near Colorado’s Mosquito Pass once existed to extract literal wealth from the mountains, sending silver and gold out into the world before collapsing into the usual tangle of incompetence, mismanagement and rot. Now people are coming back to the same basin in search of something far less tangible: spring ski lines, a sense of history and a more communal way of using the backcountry. That shift gives the article its core idea. This is not just a story about a hut. It is a story about what happens when a place built for extraction gets reimagined as a place for stewardship.

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Backcountry Issue166 Idaho's Island Summary

2026-04-10 560 words 3 minutes #skiing

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A safety vacuum hidden in plain sight

Erin Spong’s “Idaho’s Island” opens with a fatal 2021 avalanche in the Big Hole Mountains, where two teenagers were caught without rescue gear in a zone that had dangerous conditions but no dedicated forecast and little established avalanche-awareness culture. That choice of opening does more than provide a dramatic hook. It establishes the article’s central claim: east Idaho’s avalanche problem was not just a string of isolated bad decisions, but a regional blind spot. The terrain was active, the users were out there, and the consequences were real, yet the institutional support that skiers and riders in better-covered zones take for granted had not kept pace.

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Backcountry Issue166 Rapid Fire Summary

2026-04-09 728 words 4 minutes #skiing

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A ski record built on pressure, not bravado

Maeve Callahan opens “Rapid Fire” with the sort of moment that instantly strips a big objective of any glossy hero narrative. Mali Noyes is edging across steep spring snow above a 75-foot drop, trying to clip into an anchor, when a wet slide cracks loose above her. She survives because she is already close to safety and because Spencer Harkins, her partner, is right there to grab her pack straps. That near miss becomes the article’s emotional key. Noyes’ push to ski all 93 lines in Andrew McLean’s The Chuting Gallery in record time is impressive on paper, but Callahan is more interested in the strain hidden inside the numbers: how a project like this magnifies pressure, compresses decision-making and tests even a highly skilled skier’s sense of trust in herself.

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Backcountry Issue166 A Quiet Place Summary

2026-04-08 746 words 4 minutes #skiing

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A ski story that refuses to become a ski fantasy

Liam McGee opens “A Quiet Place” with a scene that instantly resets expectations. On the third day of a trip to Villa Cerro Castillo in Chile’s Aysen region, the snow is so thin that guide Julian Lopez suggests skiing on moss. The group does exactly that, rattling over ice and grass in a moment that is both comic and clarifying. This is not a Patagonia powder fantasy. It is a story about a bad snow year, long approaches, and the stubborn appeal of a place whose value cannot be measured by conditions alone.

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Backcountry Issue166 Moxie Summary

2026-04-08 907 words 5 minutes #skiing

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A guide service built around a harder question

Heather Hansman’s “Moxie” starts with a question that sounds simple but lands as an indictment of a lot of mountain culture: what would guiding for good actually look like? The article follows veteran guides Sheldon Kerr and Kristin Arnold as they build Moxie Mountain Guides in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains around an answer they could not find in the industry they had spent years working in. They did not set out to become entrepreneurs for its own sake. They did it because they were tired of a model that could deliver big days in the mountains while still leaving guides underpaid, clients unheard and too many people feeling like the sport was not built for them.

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