Climber, artist, filmmaker, and general badass Renan Ozturk is now part of Backcountry.com’s Pro Team. Ozturk’s latest film Samsara won the Charlie Fowler award when it premiered last Friday at the Telluride Mountain Film Festival. “Samsara” is the term for the belief of an endless cycle of birth and suffering, so you’d think it’d be more about working in a cubicle than climbing mountains, but I think he’s referring to the 20 days spent on the mountain with only 10 days of food. Renan Ozturk is also sponsored by The North Face and has a site setup with his artwork.

The thing with being an animal serial killer is that no one thinks it’s out of the ordinary to make rugs or mount the heads of your victims so it’s tough to tell just who’s operating outside the law. Following an eight year investigation Steve Slavinsky was sentenced to five years in jail for hunting out of season, taking only the heads of animals, hunting at night, and hunting in Yellowstone National Park. The Montana judge not only locked him up, but said that Slavinsky is banned from hunting or fishing anywhere in the world for the rest of his life. That last part seems like it might be tough to enforce.

via Trout Underground

There’s nothing like burning a few cigarettes or huddling around a fire while hanging out in the blazing sun on a red hot day. The Sunlighter Solar Lighter uses a reflective dish to concentrate the sun’s rays onto a tinder holder so you can start a fire. It operates on the same premise as a magnifying glass and works pretty quickly in this video. Just don’t wait until after the sun goes down to start your fire since the Sunlighter won’t work with a flashlight. The Sunlighter Solar Lighter sells for about $16.

New coolers from a company in Florida will meet the regulations necessary to be considered ‘bear proof,’ so entrants to Rocky Mountain National Park (where bear-proof containers are required) will be able to keep their beers cold without locking them in the truck of their cars. What’s more interesting than the fact that one of these 35-quart coolers will cost over $1000 is the way they test them to determine bear-proofness. They drop coolers loaded with fish and peanut butter into a pen holding orphaned and nuisance bears in the Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center in West Yellowstone and see how well they hold up. I always thought that trouble bears were euthanized, but it looks like some of them get a second chance as product testers.

In 1912 this man stood at the observation deck of the Eiffel tower, looked at the camera he’d setup to capture his crowning glory, and jumped. The video was supposed to capture his homemade parachute jacket allowing him to slowly float to the ground, but instead captured his death. Maybe he didn’t invent jacket-based base jumping, but he did invent filming yourself doing some insanely stupid, to which we all owe him a debt of gratitude. I mean-how about a test run with a dummy first? We’d likely have all these great ski crash videos without him, but credit has to go to the first guy there.