At a conference in Florida reps from 400 ski and snowboard resorts beat the drum that things need to change in the industry in the new economy, but the truth is that it’s not the riders who are falling off. Last year’s skier attendance at the resorts was actually higher than the ten year average. Over 400 resorts, visits dipped 5.5% from the prior ski season, but there was still a .8% increase over the 10-year average. The real burn for the resorts is that the days of relying on lucrative real estate deals in their tacky European-village-style homes is over for now. My advice? Torch the housing for the insurance money and open up a cheap beer bar in a yurt on their ashes. Your non-second-home owning customers would be thrilled.

Soak up some footage of a 1940’s tour of Yosemite while waiting for the Ken Burn’s National Parks documentary to come your way. There’s some sweet Rob Roy kayak action and back then bear feeding was encouraged. Is it just me or where the cross country skiing scenes filmed in front of fake backgrounds in a studio? The ‘Upski’ tow at the end is sick. I never knew they allowed alpine skiing in Yosemite. The lift operators must have been freezing their asses off in those suits.

The New York Times sent a skullcapped barista into the wilderness with several coffeemakers to test their mettle in the outdoors. The guy used Stumptown Coffee, which if you haven’t had it it’s actually really amazing stuff. The place by my house somehow gets away with calling a 10oz glass a medium and charge $2, but I guess it’s better than pretending I speak Italian when I order.

The winner from the coffee shootout was the old-school GSI Stainless Mini Expresso Maker, which apparently didn’t get docked for spelling espresso wrong. Honorable mention went to the Handpresso despite its lame name. The Handpresso can now be used with straight coffee grounds instead of those annoying, wasteful pods. One of my favorites-the GSI Ultralight Java Drip-didn’t get tested, but at half the price and weight of anything else, I’d still argue that it’s the best option for fast and easy coffee in the backcountry.

via GetOutdoors

Uh oh. Glacier National Park might be the target of a non-binding resolution. Run for the fallout shelters everyone! Actually, the park, which spans the border into Canada (where those crazy Canuks call it Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park) is still open to prospective coal mining and a methane gas field. The southeastern corner of the British Columbia part of the park would be mined for about 18 million tons of rock and coal a year and the methane gas field would cover 500sq km. The danger is that the Flathead River on the western boundary of the park would carry those pollutants from the mining operation into Glacier. How a river on the western side of the park would carry in pollutants from a mining operation in the southeastern corner of B.C. is a logistical problem that I’ll leave to the experts. This U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization meeting would be to add Glacier to the list of World Heritage Site in Danger and it would be the first North American spot added.

The movie version of The Road by Cormac McCarthy is going to be coming out soon. He’s the guy who wrote No Country for Old Men and All the Pretty Horses. The Road is about a father-son duo walking to the coast in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where the remaining humans have resorted to roving in packs in the hope of killing and eating each other. Naturally I’ve been thinking about what kind of footwear would be good when this version of the near future comes through, and I can’t think of anything better than these ugly-ass UK Gear PT-03 Desert Shoes the Gear Junkie found. The shoes are made for weather up to 122F with a heat-resistant outsole (great for wading through the two inches of ash that will cover the landscape) and sand-proof uppers. I think UK Gear is a spinoff of the wildly successful American company L.A. Gear, but I’m not 100% on that one. The UK Gear PT-03 Desert Trainers cost about $130.