A new video from Adam Barker Photography includes a host of Utah skiers including Hayden Price, Parker Cook, and Backcountry.com Athlete Julian Carr. Through the Eyes is due out in April.

Thanks Nathan

Backcountry.com Athlete Renan Ozturk put together another fantastic video, this one tells the story of a couple young Cuban climbers. Turns out that climbing is illegal in the country. You know, I never personally had a reason to dislike Castro until I found that out. The climbers face problems acquiring gear, but they certainly don’t have a hard time putting up insane routes.

A four-year study has found that living at above 5,000ft will likely extend your life by a couple years, provided you wear sunscreen to account for the increase in solar radiation. There it is - another reason to move to the mountains. Also, I suspect the happiness of powder days does something to contribute to that longer life. Now all you need to do is come up with a great way to squander those extra years you found on Earth - I suggest beer drinking.

Yes, it seems there is such a thing as a ‘pro downhill skater.’ That our society has risen to the point that we can sustain a man who works exclusively as a professional downhill skater speaks volumes. Most of those volumes are about how much we like skating. This 8-minute video is a short doc of his average day. It’s actually a cool video, definitely worth watching.

With all the news about endangered white rhino dust and oil spills covering penguin colonies, it’s easy to forget that sometimes good things happen to our environment. It seems that forests in Europe, North America, the Caucasus, and Central Asia have actually increased in size by about 17 million hectares, or “one United Kingdom.” Hopefully this one has better food. Of course it’s not all good news. It seems something called ‘climate change’ is threatening new gains, but it’s less of a threat if you don’t believe in it.

I suspect we’ll see more of this kind of thing now that the Tetons have come out of another massive storm. It’s a good time to be in the west. Check out some other highlights from the latest storm cycle on Teton Gravity, and if that’s not enough, Early Ups has more for you. Man…the Tetons must be getting crowded with filmmakers.

The film 23 Feet is about people across the West who choose to live simply so they can afford a lifestyle that lets them spend all their time in the outdoors. The women making the film launched a Kickstarter page to help them turn their 23-foot Airstream into a mobile film studio. The trailer for their film is in the kickstarter video, after a minute of the sales pitch. You know what I always say - the more people living off the grid, the better off humanity will be (especially when the zombie apocalypse that the Mayans predicted hits in 2012).

via Cold Splinters

All 37 cross country skiers that were stranded briefly in the Yosemite backcountry during a storm have safely made it out. Twenty-one of the group were together, and the rest of the stuck skiers were college kids on spring break - I can’t wait until MTV reports on the stranded Stanford cross country skiers. Rescuers helped by using snowmobiles to break trail, and all the skiers made it out under their own power.

Backcountry Access is offering a free software upgrade to everyone using their popular Tracker2 Beacon. It seems that skiers at Jackson Hole found the beacon would malfunction and go into a reboot-and-freeze mode if it became too charged with static electricity in a skier’s pocket. Hopefully you don’t get caught in an avalanche between now and getting your beacon’s software upgraded. (Simply stuffing dryer sheets in your pockets to avoid static is not an acceptable alternative.)