The Foreign Policy blog offers you Good Times in Really Bad Places. Just make sure you stay on the Iraqi side of the desert hike if you go near the Iran border - it’s no good being accused of spying and confined to lengthy imprisonment for no good reason.

Thanks Jeff

Forget for a moment that the massive whitewater park in Charlotte, North Carolina - one of the largest parks around and an Olympic training ground - is on the verge of bankruptcy. Instead, turn your mind to the straight economics pitched by whitewater dreamers across the U.S. There are 86,000 dams in America, and their average age is 51 years. It costs on average $2.7 million to tear them down, but only $50k to $2.5 million to turn them into whitewater parks. Am I making sense yet? I guess we need to get more voters interested in playboating.

One camper is dead and two injured after at least one bear rampaged through a campground near Yellowstone National Park. The animal or animals crushed tents, killing one male and injuring two others. Authorities put the campers in their cars by 6am and closed the Soda Butte campground in case the bear returns. The attacks appear to be unprovoked, and it doesn’t seem that food in the tents was an issue.

A California teacher bought a box of glass negatives and stored them under his pool table for a decade. He joked to friends that they were shot by Ansel Adams since they were Yosemite images, and eventually his joking culminated in an investigation that verified their authenticity and valued them at $200 million. The photos come from Adams early work - most of which was destroyed in a darkroom fire. The man paid $45 for the box at a garage sale after bargaining the previous owner down from $75. On an unrelated note, I’ll sell you a box of garbage for $75 - oh, ok $45 - you never know, it could contain the original Bill of Rights (or a bunch of socks with holes).

via Backpacker

Jack Hanna, the guy who used to hangout with Johnny Carson and Dave Letterman, recently filmed a PSA urging hikers to carry pepper spray instead of guns into national parks to deal with charging grizzlies. Yesterday he was able to offer some firsthand notes along with his PSA. The guy was hiking with his family when they encountered a grizzly and her two cubs. They backed down the narrow trail yelling loudly for five minutes.

Then Hanna saw a small rocky clearing they could back into just off the trail.

“I said, ‘Crawl up the hill and put your backs against the wall.’”

Two bears walked past, but one of the 150lb cubs followed them and began to charge from 30 feet out. Hannah shot pepper spray from 30, 20 and finally 10 feet - the bear charged until the last shot right in its face, when it turned and ran off.

Alex Honnold filed a blog post for Black Diamond on how one goes about climbing the Nose, the Salathe Wall and Lurking Fear in one day. The post is worth reading, even if you have no intentions of ever dragging yourself up a big wall. He describes it like a 24-hour marathon, complete with mind-bending exhaustion, and it’s easy to forget that one missed step in this race would mean his and climbing partner Sean Leary’s deaths.

Here are a few choice excerpts:

“I stopped to re-rack at Camp 6, I think, but we moved pretty quickly. We accidentally woke some folks up on Camp 6. I’d thought that we had the route to ourselves so we were yelling back and forth. But when I popped over the ledge there were two poor dudes trying to sleep. They didn’t seem too bothered though.”

“Taking off my climbing shoes was an orgasmic pleasure, though my feet were so rocked that my comfy approach shoes hurt a lot, too.

The hike down was, again, surreal. It felt like we’d climbed the Nose the week before. We kept almost saying things like “the other day when we were on the Salathe,” only to realize that we’d topped out the Salathe 12 hours before.”

It’s not exactly the ‘Where are they now’ VH1 special about The Folksmen, but it’s an interesting read. Ever wonder what pro winter sport athletes do when they’re not soaring over terrain parks or getting towed into secret backcountry pow runs? Andy Anderson filed a story for Backcountry.com on just what the hell all their athletes are doing in the off-season. There’s more wakeboarding and working out than there are hash dens and getting-drunk-in-the-basement-to-avoid-falling-downstairs in case you decided to skip the article.

The short film Border Country is in its final form online. The story follows these two climbers through 70 bolts and 1,800 feet of climbing while putting up a new route in Yosemite. Jeremy Collins and Mikey Schaefer came and went on the route, until they found renewed sense of purpose in the memories of their friends Jonny Copp and Micah Dash’s.

via Adventure Life

A black bear climbed into a high school kid’s unlocked car trying to steal a peanut butter sandwich from the backseat. He honked the horn for a bit waking up the neighborhood before he put the car into neutral and drove it into a tree. The car door slammed shut when it stopped trapping the bear inside. The animal trashed the interior and took a dump on the driver’s seat before police were able to use a rope to open the door so it could escape. The article didn’t report on whether or not it ate the peanut butter sandwich. Hopefully the kid’s parents buy him a new car. Why? They’re the ones who packed a peanut butter sandwich for lunch. That stuff goes straight to the backseat. It’s a miracle that no bears stole his car sooner.

Backcountry.com Athlete Matt Hart just ran the 484-mile Colorado Trail in 9 days, 7 hours, 48 minutes. He covered over 75,000 feet of vert and logged the third fastest time ever. He filed a post on his blog, Tales of Endurance that included the above video of having fun with mosquitoes.

after 3 days i had run 180 miles and was 10 miles ahead of the record pace. but i paid for it the following day where i only logged 38 miles and couldn’t stay awake.

Someone loan this guy a car.