Finished with a flourish

Cat skiing at Monarch with the Liberty Skis crew leads to meditations and one mutilated ski jacket

With each turn of my skis, snow sloughs off the steep chute and cascades down toward the basin below. It’s not enough snow to be frightening, certainly, but enough to feel like I really am off the beaten track. And that, of course, is the point.

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Women's outdoor adventures: Changing choice

Women and girls outdoors program works to change lives by reshaping decisions

On a sunny September afternoon in Vedauwoo, Wyo., Mary Jackson stands addressing a group of six women, drawing three circles in the sand with the toe of her shoe.

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An ocean to learn from

Author David Helvarg comes to talk about how California’s ocean management techniques could apply in Colorado’s mountains

Journalist and ocean organizer David Helvarg is attending this month’s Colorado Ocean Coalition Blue Drinks to talk about his new book, The Golden Shore. On its surface, Helvarg’s latest book offers a lengthy history of California and Californians’ relationship to the ocean and their 11,000 miles of coastline.

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Georgia O'Keeffe at the Denver Art Museum: Far from flowers

O’Keeffe exhibition shows her place in the world beyond petals, into landscapes, spiritual objects and early expressionism

What O’Keeffe found, when she came to New Mexico, was a place where her study of line moved from the verticals of the New York City skyscrapers that championed America’s rise as an industrial power to the horizontal adobe structures and mesas of New Mexico — another American icon, but one much more about native people and ancient traditions than the rise of a new world superpower.

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Continental drift

‘5 Races, 5 Continents’ explores what motivates ultrarunners, whatever country they call home

Somewhere over the more than two years of interviews that went into making 5 Races 5, Continents, which tracks toward the emotional core of trail running, the conversation among the filmmakers and one of their central subjects, Killian Jornet, turned to the growing popularity of the sport.

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BIFF 2013: Find, save, copy, paste

'Digital Dharma' tells of one scholar’s work to save thousands of Tibetan texts

Imagine a trove of knowledge as vast and extensive as the famous Library of Alexandria, heralded for its archives of literature from antiquity and destroyed in the first centuries of the Common Era — burned, in the best of the legends about its destruction, in a fire that took six months to work through the documents that contained what was then the best and most comprehensive collection of the world’s knowledge.

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BIFF 2013: Buying some time for a climate change movement

Tim DeChristopher’s fraudulent auction bids and activism in 'Bidder 70'

Tim DeChristopher was a 27-year-old University of Utah economics student who’d spent five years teaching at-risk kids and was just beginning to get involved in activism around climate change when he found himself at a Bureau of Land Management land sale bidding on $1.8 million in leases.

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Not so endless love

Museum of Broken Relationships displays artifacts from romance gone wrong

When the Museum of Broken Relationships put out a press release in November announcing an upcoming exhibition in Boulder, it began with a question: Do happy people break up too?

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Stormy inspiration

Photographer David Mayhew aims his lens at the dark sky

At one point in his life, David Mayhew gave up on art.

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Weather permitting: Patagonian storms push a Boulder climber to test new skills

Christmas saw snowy weather around the Patagonian peak Fitz Roy, and Boulder residents Jonathan Byers and Joaquin Espinosa camped at its base, huddled together, wishing for better weather and wondering what would come of the summits both traveled to Patagonia to attempt.

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