Gear Junkie Adventures: Outdoors, Ultra, and Adventure-Travel Stories
Norway Ski Trip - Published March 14th, 2008
Kirketaket, a 1,439-meter summit outside the town of Andalsnes, Norway, is a famous peak in the Romsdal Alps of central Norway. My adventure up the mountain started with a...
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Featured Adventures:
Life, Death and Altitude
The mountain is called Kangchenjunga, and at 28,169 feet above sea level it is the planet's third-tallest peak, an immense white wall in the sky north of Darjeeling, India. Like all great peaks...
'Large Fella on a Bike'
The rebirth of Scott Cutshall began Thanksgiving day 2005, a bowl of vegetable soup for breakfast kicking off a new life where nothing would be the same.
Dog Power -- Skijoring for Speed
It's one degree below zero, a pale morning sky pitched over a barren field. A dozen dogs are yipping and twirling on a ski trail near a parking lot. I'm gearing up with the Midwest Skijorers Club for a...
Winter Bike Commuting -- 10 Tips to Ride Safe
Bike tires hum on snow, and they buzz on ice. But they rarely slip when you're going straight. Gears click and...
Top 10 Gear of the Year Awards 2007
From marathons and mountain climbs to kayak trips through the jungle of Quintana Roo, 2007 proved to be another epic year for The Gear Junkie. But without...
The Gear Junkie's Top 10 Adventures of 2007
From caves in Quintana Roo, Mexico, to the Nevada desert, to a 14,000-foot volcano in California, 2007 proved to be a year of high adventure for the Gear Junkie. Avalanches, mountain climbs, whitewater, crocodiles and...
Adventure Eating
You're seven miles down the trail. A pack on your back, boots on your feet. Sun streaming in through trees above. Time to get those calories down. But how to best fuel up?
Ice Biking
Over the course of two dark winter evenings, working alone in his basement at a makeshift sawhorse stand, Jay "Hollywood" Henderson carefully drilled 600 tiny holes in his bike tires. "At least 600, maybe more," he said.
Primal Quest Adventure Race
On the sixth day of the race, my head began to float free from my body. It was on a mountain biking leg, heading east into Manti-La Sal National Forest, where I first noticed the phenomenon. Halfway through an all night ride, pedaling from 6PM to 6AM, on a trail near Moab, Utah, the sensation kicked in strong.
Riverboarding Utah's Green River
Just off Interstate Highway 70 in eastern Utah, in the steep topography north of its namesake town, the snaking Green River cuts a deep gorge through a backdrop of desert monoliths and thousand-foot cliffs. My view of this gorge last month on a visit to the area was from a riverboard, soaking wet and half submerged at face level with the whitewater.
How To: Orienteering
You're running through the woods. Leaping logs. Ducking limbs. Skirting streams. A map is in your hand. A compass points direction. You're racing the clock, looking for flags hidden and strewn. You're charging through a forest thick as a jungle.
This is orienteering, a Nordic sport of quick thinking and backwoods navigation, where a wrong move will get you seriously lost.
International Adventure Girl -- Bria Schurke - Published March 20th, 2008
The year was 1989, the Cold War waning but not yet dead, when Bria Schurke was ushered into the U.S.S.R., slipping in backstage via Siberia, where her father was leading a winterlong expedition through a region long locked off to the outside world.
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Letter from Quintana Roo: Dirty Water
It's Spring break season on Mexico's Caribbean Coast, where the annual migration of international beachgoers looking for white sand and crystal-blue water puts millions of foreign feet on the ground.
Company Profile: Mandatory Gear
The kernel of the thought occurred to Dan Williams at 35,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean. "I was on a jet plane coming home from Borneo," Williams said, "and I thought 'How come there can't be better gear for my sport?'"
Meet Dr. Feet
The pain in Mike Levad's heel first pricked up after the Twin Cities Marathon last fall. "It felt like someone had whacked my heel with a hammer," he said, describing a pain that shot through his foot and up the leg when he got out of bed in the morning.
Q-and-A with The Gear Junkie
In this tell-all Q&A interview, Stephen Regenold (a.k.a. The Gear Junkie) talks with author Bill Katovsky about cycling 135 miles on snow, "existential realignment" via ultra-endurance athletics, and watching a friend rag-doll over talus on a particularly horrid ski biff in the backcountry north of Bozeman, Montana.
Survival Gear: 10 Items To Survive
Surviving in the wild-no matter the location or the time of year-depends on human wit and will more than the gear you have in your pack. But all survival experts still recommend assembling an emergency kit of equipment to stay with you at all times in the wilderness.
Greatest Gear Of 5 Years
Five years ago this month, in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, I penned the first Gear Junkie column, which covered an innovative backpacking stove from Mountain Safety Research. Since that time...
K2: The Play
Among all strange and unnecessary human avocations, of the hobbies and silly superfluous obsessions of the men and women on this planet, mountaineering stands amid the most misunderstood.
Self Reliance Defined: On A Bike In Alaska
I honestly thought the Primal Quest was a haul. Then a friend in the bike industry put me in touch with Mike Curiak, a 36-year-old man who has twice won a 1,100-mile bike race-through the snow-in Alaska called Iditabike.
Gear of the Year Awards 2006
GOOD GEAR CAN SAVE YOUR LIFE. This past year, as I competed in a dozen ultra-endurance adventures around the country, the value of top-notch outdoors equipment continually hit home.
The Gear Junkie's Top 10 Adventures of 2006
Of all my years of whacko ultra-endurance adventure, 2006 might just prove itself to be my magnum opus. From the eight-day Primal Quest Adventure Race in Utah, to the Arrowhead 135 Ultra Marathon in northern Minnesota, high drama in the great outdoors was my leitmotif over the past 12 months.
What It Takes To Run Badwater
The bitter pill that is the sport of ultramarathon - footraces of 50 miles or more - is unusually hard to swallow in Death Valley National Park, where each July the Badwater Ultramarathon attracts 85 men and women to run 135 miles through the desert sands and to the mountains beyond.
The World's Weirdest Footraces
Bart Yodel ran his first naked footrace at the Kaniksu Ranch, north of Spokane, Wash., in the summer of 1998. "I treated it like any other 5K race," he said. "I was trying to win."
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'Sailing Across the Prairie'
Wind howls unfettered for hundreds of empty miles across the great plains of North Dakota, tearing over wheat fields and abandoned farms, roaring winter and summer, horizon to horizon, to rake one of...
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World's 10 Most Dangerous Mountains
Known affectionately as the Man Eater, this craggy monster in Kashmir is an enormous ridge of rock and ice. The peak is the...
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Winter Running
Under a sky of burgeoning dawn, all blushing and sun-streaked in early morning glow, Paul Holovnia blew a cloud of frosty breath. "Let's run," he said. "I'm freezing here."
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Foot Care For The Ultra Crowd
In endurance sports like adventure racing and ultra running, keeping your feet happy and healthy for hours or days on the go has always been difficult. Lord knows I've learned the hard way...
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50 State Highpoint Quest
High on Mount McKinley, in the summer of 2003, stuck in a cramped mountaineering tent and waiting out a storm, John Mitchler took out a pencil to write a list. Wind tore into the nylon fabric above his head. The end was coming for Mitchler, and he knew it.
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Meet The Adventure Bike: The Humvee of Mountain Bikes
On the sidewalk outside company headquarters of Surly Bikes, on a chilly November afternoon, Dave Gray grips the handlebars of a shiny new purple bike.
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Canyoneering In Grand Staircase
There is a crack in the Earth. I am a bug in that crack, looking up at a slit of blue sky.
I stand chest deep in icy water at the bottom of a slot canyon in an empty corner of Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
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I stand chest deep in icy water at the bottom of a slot canyon in an empty corner of Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
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Yurt Ski Trip: Quetico Provincial Park
It was early Sunday morning when I heard the airplane overhead. If the passengers saw us, I was sure we'd be mistaken for moose. This deep in the Canadian wilderness, in the middle of an immense frozen lake, people would assume four slow-moving black dots to be wildlife of some sort.
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NYT Travel Articles
Regenold is a frequent contributor to New York Times. Recent articles include:
All of Stephen's NYT Articles...
- »Fungus Hunt
- »Trek To Tundra
- »Urban Mountain Biking
- »Natural Water Slides
- »Wakesurfing
- »Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula
- »Dryland Dog Sports
- »Subterranean Snooping on the Yucatán Peninsula
- »Hiking The Ice Age Trail
- »24-Hour Mountain Bike Races
- »Mount Shasta Redux
- »The Extraterrestrial Highway
- »Utah's Epic Ride - Skiing Six Resorts in One Day
- »Trail-running races
- »Michigan's Extreme Anomaly
- »Ice Bike Racing
- »Kayaking in the land of the Maya
