Cold Splinters

We’ve sung praises for The Mountain Gazette before (and written for them as well), but now you can read old issues of the magazine in full online. Click here to read the issues above  – #2 from October 1972 and #4 from December of the same year – and a couple more. They’re a real treat.

(The poem on the October 1972 cover is from Robinson Jeffers’ “The Beaks of Eagles.”)

Not bad for a National Park Service brochure. Download the entire 100 page beauty here.

MP3: Philip Glass – Glassworks: Opening

The article I wrote about Peters Mountain Works for New York Times Style Magazine’s The Moment was printed in last week’s Sunday Styles. Click on the image above to see a large scan.

And in case you missed the Cold Splinters modeling debut (something I never expected to type on this website) with friends Tom from Archival Clothing and Peter from Best Made Co., check that out here. The photo shoot was a real trip, despite the fact that I had a temperature and could barely stand up.

More to come from NYTimes x Cold Splinters, so stay tuned.

If anyone knows more about OREGON RAINBOW, the magazine/art project whose Summer 1976 issue I found while out west last week, please speak up. I can’t find too much on the world wide web about this beauty, and that’s a goddamn dirty rotten shame. This thing is filled with poetry, photos, history and more, all of which celebrate the handsome Pacific Northwest. More pics after the jump..

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“Looked amazingly simple, but of course there was much going on behind the scene. Building the soundtrack, for example, we found that we could not stretch the words out over the full 30 seconds, had to settle for 20-plus to be understandable–which meant the visuals had to not show any bike at first. Then trying to capture the actual motorcycle shot we found that we could not pan fast enough as the bike passed, so we had to make a hidden cut during the pan. And neither the weather nor the motorcycle itself cooperated at first–we had to go out filming on three different days to get the bike actually operating properly, at a time when Mount Rainier was also visible!”

Thank you to CS reader Rick Stowe for mailing us this beautiful Campmor catalogue from 1985. More pictures to come, but if you get still get these things in the mail, they’re not too much different than they were 15 years ago. Except maybe for the cost of a WhisperLite. And the bear on the cover…

MP3: Pearl Jam – Insignificance

Sure, we’re late in posting this, BUT, the summer issue of Colorado’s Mountain Gazette, #180 – HIGH SUMMER, is out and ready for you to put in your pack and read under the moonlight. One of the best magazines around.

Subscribe here.

Mark Kryskow, one of my best friends from the University of Colorado, is someone I’ve written about before here on CS, describing him as an “animal, more fit and strong and crazy than anyone I have ever met, or probably ever will meet.” It was impossible to keep up with Mark in college. Waking up at 3am to ride your bike to Estes Park and back (37 miles each way in the mountains) was not part of my agenda. Mark lives up in New Hampshire now, so I get to see him pretty regularly, either in North Conway for an ice climbing adventure, in Portsmouth (while visiting my folks) for a beer and a burrito, or in Alton at his house on Lake Winnepsaukee, alongside his equally crazy immediate and extended family.

Mark is one of the humblest guys I’ve ever met, so of course he didn’t tell me that he was featured in an article in Outside this month, in a profile of the Army program he works for, studying the effects of altitude and extreme conditions on the human body. When I called him last night to talk about it, he quickly changed the subject, probably because they refer to him as one of the “hardest of the hard” and pull a quote that details a test that involved a tube up his ass. The article isn’t specifically about Mark, but I couldn’t be happier to see him gracing the pages of Outside. Makes it even better that he and his wife don’t give a shit.

From the article:

One of the hardest of the hard men is Sergeant Kryskow, a recreation rock and ice climber who has participated in “eight or nine studies,” including one designed to test a helmet prototype that cooled the wearer’s head with streams of air coming from the lining. Researchers wanted to know if cooling the head cooled the body as well. To test this, Kryskow and others walked for hours on a treadmill in 120-degree heat, fitted with anal and esophageal temperature probes.

“It was kind of miserable,” Kryskow tells me, suddenly transported back to that test. “You’re tired, you’re dehydrated, you’ve got a probe in your ass and another down your throat. But I like the challenge.”

And in honor of Mark giving up his “horn” for a climbing helmet…

MP3: John Coltrane – Giant Steps

We’ve posted some Summit Magazine covers before, and when a few more popped up on Garden and Gun’s Southern In The City a couple of weeks ago, well, they’re just too good. Go over and see ‘em yourself…

I was recently gifted a subscription to this fine magazine for my birthday. A couple months back, I happened upon a nice collection of Foxfire books on the cheap on ebay, which I’m sure you’re all familiar with, but Foxfire started as a magazine. In 1966, a high-school English teacher in Southern Appalachia named Eliot Wigginton resolved with his students to document and preserve the wisdom of their grandparents and local elders (initially, as a way to get them excited about English) by creating a magazine. Stuffed full of folk traditions, recipes, and some of the nicest looking covers around (especially the old ones), this magazine is released twice a year in two, double issues. I also loved that my address on the envelope with my first issue was hand-written in a high schooler’s hand, with a hand-written ‘thank you’ for the subscription. Some of the old issues of the magazine pop up on ebay every now and then, and go for less than $10. Feel good.