Steven Threndyle

Twenty-two years after Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay summited Mount Everest, Junko Tabei — who had previously conquered another Himalayan giant, Annapurna III — became the first woman to set foot on the putative “roof of the world.” She was the only member from her Japanese team to reach the top, prevailing despite an avalanche that blasted her tent away at camp…

Not long ago, Vancouver’s alternative weekly newspaper, the Georgia Straight, posed a question that (for once) was not about real estate or housing: “Crows, yay or nay?” Two columnists drew swords. “See, we’re not alone!” said my wife. As I sat on our sunny porch to review Bill Arnott’s A Perfect Day for a Walk…

Hang around the footwear department at your local Mountain Equipment Company as I do, and you’ll soon understand that walking with a purpose — which is more than merely putting one foot in front of the other — has become hugely popular. Inspired by fiction (Rachel Joyce’s The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry…

In January 2021, ten Nepali climbers solved what mountaineers liked to call “the last great problem”: a winter ascent of the notorious K2. On this expedition, in contrast to many others, no Western “clients” accompanied the Sherpas, some of whom celebrated by dropping their oxygen masks and singing their national anthem on the summit, the world’s second…

Not far from our North Vancouver home there’s a stand of old-growth Douglas firs that I first read about in Randy Stoltmann’s Hiking Guide to the Big Trees of Southwestern British Columbia, from 1987. Stoltmann, whom I met on a few occasions before he died in a backcountry skiing accident in 1994, tracked down and measured humongous coastal…