skiing

Erin McKittrick and her husband traveled 4,000 miles from Seattle to the Aleutian Islands by human power — hiking, packrafting, and skiing through some of the wildest country in North America. A young couple's journey through a landscape most people will never see.

Bill McKibben spent a year training for cross-country ski racing and thinking about what physical effort means in a sedentary culture. The skiing is the frame; the questions about embodiment and endurance are the point.

If you’ve skied, you’ve seen and used the art of James Niehues. The lifelong Coloradan wielded the paintbrush that created more than 260 of the mountain portraits that grace some of the world’s greatest ski areas’ maps. Niehues was a struggling freelance artist and designer living in Denver in the 1980s and trying to support a family when he approached ski map legend Bill Brown. Fortuitously, Brown was ready to leave mapmaking, and he symbolically handed over the brush. Thirty years and many, many trail maps later, Niehues is the legend and this 2019 book celebrates his work in nearly 300 lushly printed pages. It moves quickly through his background and technique before getting to the heart of the matter: all those mountain paintings, each on its own page, with no trail names to mar the topography.

The life and death of the greatest steep skier of his generation. Coombs skied lines in Alaska and the Alps that nobody else would touch, then died on La Meije trying to save a friend.