Utah Adventure Journal

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Did I pass the turnoff? I glanced at the back of a receipt, marked up with directions to an inconspicuous trailhead, hand-drawn by a guy at the bike shop. Rumors of burgeoning singletrack in Small Town, Washington lured me to make an unplanned detour in the midst of a longer road trip. With no prior […]

  We describe home as a permanent place of residency, identifiable by an address and a couch and a water heater and a collection of cheesy souvenir shot glasses, all gathering dust on top of a foundation that’s been cemented into the ground — as if to prove that your home and all its possessions […]

I’m really good at procrastinating. I was supposed to have this column submitted last night so the magazine can go to the printer today. I was also supposed to leave for the first leg of a summer-long journey yesterday. Neither happened of course, and, as a result, both writing and packing will end in a […]

By Stephanie Nitsch   The change of seasons has me gearing up for another summer of warm weather journeys in the most literal way. As I take inventory of what I can roll over from last year’s foray into roadie life, I find myself analyzing the philosophical importance of gear. Specifically concerning the higher-quality toys […]

  As assumed by the title of this column, a lot of my time in life is spend traveling the road, gallivanting on an outdoor junket to ride a bike, lap the lifts or earn my turns in some part of the Continental West.   The lifestyle sounds glamorous, and, admittedly, it kind of is. […]

I couldn’t tell you the exact moment it happened – whether it built up over time or subtly crept in with an afternoon thunderstorm. But the lure of the Wasatch was nowhere to be found.   I had spent back-to-back seasons retracing my steps on miles of well-worn singletrack and skintracks, thinking it’d appear at […]

  More accurate storm forecasting begins with a single snowflake The study of snow is nothing new. Avalanche forecasters have been analyzing the intricate crystals for decades and modern atmospheric scientists have been tracking the frozen precipitation for just as long. But it’s a dynamic and temperamental medium that changes so quickly that even the […]

The start of any journey comes long before the physical departure. It begins with a ritual of planning, packing and organizing, making sure that you have the right supplies for the right environment. Then, compression straps are cinched, gear is sorted by activity and Tetris skills are mastered as you arrange each item to fit […]

An Anthem to a Single Ride in St. George St. George rocks. In the most literal, geological sense. They’re pretty phenomenal from a historical point of view. Red rock and crumbling mesas flank the horizon in every direction. Get close enough and you’ll spot petroglyph artifacts that are bleached into the smooth walls of sandstone […]

I take pleasure in discomfort. It’s a masochistic game that drives me to grind the chain ring a little further, glide the skin track a little longer or scramble the trail a little steeper. More often than not, this works in favor of many outdoorswoman or man on the pursuit of fresh air or first […]

  “You should never become a salesman, Steph,” Shaun Raskin told me the night before our departure to Antelope Island. I had just finished laying out the vague details of our upcoming trip and had started to recount the mundane memories from my only other Antelope Island experience when she interjected. “This isn’t very convincing.” […]

If you haven’t seen the city’s tagline spread across billboards or experienced the desert mecca for yourself, Moab is a place where adventure begins. And in this Utah town, where mud season sees upwards of two inches of rain, adventure never really stops. Come summertime, however, temperatures linger near triple digits, requiring outdoor junkies of […]

It’s a ski bum’s tragic reality: when livin’ the dream takes a backseat to a “real” job, and the art of powder chasing becomes the curse of pencil pushing. But for this dedicated crew of people, a simple wintertime hobby has turned into a lifelong job, whether intentionally or not. The result: a successful combination […]

Skiing has come a long way since the world’s first chairlift debuted in 1936 in Sun Valley. Developed by an engineer, the one-chair lift was inspired by the design of a conveyor belt that was originally built to efficiently load bananas onto cargo ships. With a few modifications to the banana hooks (replaced with seats) […]

You can’t buy happiness, but you can buy a bike. And any enthusiastic cyclist will tell you that that’s pretty close. Yet for a handful of those cyclists, bicycle-induced happiness is merely the end result of pursuing a lifelong, two-wheeled philosophy.   Thanks to the state’s evolving bicycle sub-culture, Utah has become a source of […]