Betty Ice Ball

I have two posts on the Betty Ice Ball floating around the interweb right now: 1. Your standard event rehashing with a fun anecdote thrown in from yours truly at Climbing magazine, and 2. Five things you get more of when you climb with Chicks, posted at All Climbing. Thanks, Tom, for letting me be [...]

People who push

Last year, my husband took up skiing again after a long absence, and after taking a class with the Colorado Mountain Club, he went out with our friends for a seemingly innocent day at a resort. “I’m pretty sure Mark and Judy were trying to kill me,” he reported upon his return home, grinning broadly [...]

Bailout Contagion: Rescue Print Media

Print media should ride the fumes of the big three’s inevitable bailout and ask for its own. The solution to the ongoing woes of writers, editors and photographers everywhere began to coalesce last week as I watched congressional hearings with the CEOs of America’s failing automobile giants. Simultaneously, news flew across Twitter that the Rocky [...]

Ice climbing is stupid

Ice climbing is pretty stupid. Non-climbers, I know what you’re thinking: Duh, any idiot can see that it’s a ridiculous sport. Non-climbers lump ice climbing in with other relatively stupid activities, like deep-water scuba diving into a cave with sharks, or pretty much anything Bear Grylls does in your average episode of Man vs. Wild: [...]

New media v. old media back home at ol’ Mizzou

Back at my alma mater, the journalism school‘s faculty and the board of the Columbia Missourian are trying to figure out what the heck to do with a failing community newspaper. There’s nothing unusual about the situation. Newspapers all over the country are in the same sinking boat and have been for years. Print sales [...]

You signed up for this

As promised, here’s part two of why the media scrutiny of Sarah Palin is perfectly normal. When you run for public office in this country, you are fair game in the eyes of the media. The American people are electing you to a position of power. You are meant to represent the voice and will [...]

Going Green, the American Way

Australians are picking up on a way of getting things done that we here in the U.S. know rather well. From Australia’s Business Day: “Companies could face class actions from shareholders unless the companies adequately report the risks that climate change poses to their businesses. While climate change-related litigation has been confined to planning in [...]

The redundancy of environmental Buddhism

What is the difference between an ecobuddhist and a regular ol’ Buddhist? Yesterday I discovered ecobuddhism.org, which conveys environmental messages in slightly different packaging. Here’s a quote from an interview with Dudjom Rinpoche on the site: “Well, then it seems renewable energy is possible, but the negative forces who seek to continue excessive use of [...]

Condensed scrutiny

This might seem smack-your-head obvious, but in all of the defenses I’ve read of the media elite‘s “attacks” on Sarah Palin, no one has came out and stated the obvious. Before the announcement that she would be McCain’s running mate, no one in the lower 48 (what they like to call “outside” in Alaska) had [...]

One hour of pain, spread around

Yesterday morning, Mr. Fields and I arrived at the Boulder Rock Club at 8 a.m. for something dubbed Group Training. We didn’t know what it entailed; when I inquired, I was told to just show up, no sign up necessary. It turns out that Group Training is a solid hour of spreading pain and exhaustion [...]