The Dirtbag Diaries

When listener Andy Guinigundo’s email appeared in the inbox on a rainy spring day, I read through it, read it again and thought “Damn, I wish I could have been there.?  That’s because no matter where you ski, a powder day is a magical thing. I’d been wanting to create some smaller shorts between feature episodes, so Andy joined us in the Dirtbag Diaries Midwest Studios and gave us his own farewell to an unforgettable winter season. 

In spring of 1991, Tom Broxson survived a 200-foot fall off the top of Yosemite Valley’s Washington Column. To this day, Tom, his climbing partner Pat and the rescuers who saved his life aren’t exactly sure what happened. Today we bring you Tom’s story of survival, recovery and will. 

Today, Becca Cahall brings us All These Things – a story about getting older and skiing faster.  We’re headed for British Columbia’s Selkirk Mountains – an incredible range of open alpine faces, perfect tree skiing and tight chutes that every backcountry skier dreams of visiting. 

In the summer of 2007, kayaker and blogger Shane Robinson found himself paddling down Peru’s isolated Apurimac River with Andrew Oberhardt and Bryan Smith. They had no map, no aerial photos and enough food for five days. Fifteen years of kayaking had led to this moment.

Today we bring you the “Year of Big Ideas? – a show all about goals, some big, some small. We’ve interviewed friends, professional athletes, random people on chairlifts, anyone we could rope into contributing. Here’s to dreaming big and going bigger in the New Year.

Today, we bring you the tale of Ryan Utz and Micah Helser -- both climbers, both soldiers -- and their quest to create a lifeline back from the frontlines to the things that matter the most – friends, family and that freedom found only in open spaces. We are headed to the world’s most improbable climbing wall. This is Camp Taji. Welcome to Iraq. 

In 2005, photographer, writer and avid cyclist Blake Gordon joined the Logsdon brothers in the midst of pedaling 15,000 miles and raising money for the National Brain Tumor Foundation. Today, we present The Reckoning – a story plucked from the pages of a young photographer’s notebook. You can ride your bike to the edge of a continent, but when the road ends it doesn’t always lead to neat resolutions. 

There’s no such thing as a perfect job. What if there was a magical place where you could get paid to climb? At the center of this kingdom is a mountain, and all you have to do is climb it. Find out what happens when a bunch of climbers are left unsupervised with the keys to the Magic Kingdom. 

Today on the Dirtbag Diaries, we’re traveling from the halls of a New England boarding school where two boys forged an unlikely friendship to the wind-swept wilderness deep inside the Cascade Mountains, where a trio of climbers have been hard at work solving one of the Northwest’s greatest free climbing projects. 

In 1996, photographer John Burcham and three friends completed the first foot traverse of the 650-mile long Alaska Range. Burcham decided to leave the group at the very end of the trip in order to make it to his sister's wedding. He was alone in the continent's last great wilderness with a sobering realization -- crevasses, hungry wildlife and hypothermia can kill you, but loneliness can drive you crazy.