My wife is freaking out a bit.
We’re six weeks away from downsizing from a four-bedroom (with carport, landing, a back shed and side shed) North Vancouver home to a two-bedroom condo.
“What the hell are you going to do with all of those magazines?” she says. “And all of those skis?”
Maybe POWDER magazine editor (make that: former POWDER magazine editor) Rob Story had it right back in 1994. I’d been freelancing full time for more than a year and a half at the time, and he’d had the dream gig as associate editor for both POWDER and Bike for a half dozen years. “Magazines and skiing ruined my life,” he told me. I think he was going through a divorce at the time.
The skis I can deal with, the magazines are another matter.
You might say I have a bit of a magazine graveyard in my basement. Most will end up in the blue box, but there are some true friends, too.
I’m especially fond of titles that flared up by printing outrageous stories and photography but then disappeared without a trace. Rocky Mountain out of Denver, “The Voice of the West.” The Intermountain Skier from Salt Lake, a local rag that documented the Park City ski scene in a style and format not unlike what Bob and Kathy Barnett would do with Pique Newsmagazine, the very publication you’re holding in your hands. There was Blue, a high-production travel magazine out of New York, Adventure Travel, edited by Bob Woodward of Bend, Ore., and Wend, a quirky outdoor hipster glossy based in Portland. One magazine you’ll pry from my cold, dead bookshelf will be four issues of Monocle Alpino, a large-format journal of mountain design magazine that was breathtaking in its curated content. And, of course, there was David and Jake Moe’s POWDER magazine. Purchased at Harvey Ross and Sons, a funky billiards room and smoke shop in my hometown of Kincardine, Ont., that cover photo of Wayne Wong floating down an alpine bowl wearing a Canadian flag toque probably changed my life.
But while POWDER still is in print, my magazine graveyard has more than four decades’ worth of deceased titles.
SKIER. Ski Press. Ski Freak Radical. Powder. Couloir. SKI. Skiing. Ski Racing. Off-Piste. Freeze. Apex. Ski Trax. Ski Racing. Ski Racing Canada. S Magazine, Snowboard Life. International Snowboarder Magazine. Snowboarder. Transworld Snowboarding. Frequency. (Actually, I stand corrected. The magazine rebranded itself as the Snowboarder’s Journal in the early ’00s). Warren Miller’s SnoWorld. Telemark Skier. Telemark Journal. Concrete Powder. Action Now. Surfer. Surfing. TW Surf. SBC Surf Canada. Windsurfer. Wind Surf. American Windsurfer. WindSurfing Now, Northwest Windsurfer. Mountain Bike. Bike. Beta. Peloton. Northwest Runner. California Runner. Running Times. Marathon. Climbing. Summit (the original, not the new version) Mountain (U.K.). The Mountain Yodel. Backpacker. Wend. Kootenay Mountain Culture. Coast Mountain Culture. (You want back copies? Call me). Equinox. National Geographic Traveler. National Geographic Adventure. Adventure West. Hooked on the Outdoors. Alpine Modern. Mountain Sports and Living. Snow Country. Bomb Snow. Below Zero. Men’s Journal.
I also have the full set of COAST: The Outdoor Recreation Magazine, which I edited and had a small financial stake in for the better part of a decade. Heck, you can even throw The Whistler Question and the Whistler Answer in there. And there was also 99 North, an ambitious attempt at a lifestyle magazine in the mid-’90s, probably a bit ahead of its time.
I am neither a completist (someone who has to have every issue of, say, The Surfer’s Journal) nor, well, that much of a hoarder—I don’t even keep each and every copy of the 800-plus stories I’ve written since my first placement in the March, 1984, issue of Explore magazine (long gone…).
For most readers, these magazines made as much of an impression as a café Americano in a mountain town coffee shop. Post-COVID, scarcely any coffee shops even carry newspapers. It’s a brutal truth that advertisers will use whatever means necessary to say “no” to an advertising rep, including the COVID crisis from 2020 to 2022, an event which, according to Mountain Life publisher Todd Lawson, forced the artfully-designed Mountain Life Annual out of business; although its Whistler and Collingwood editions seem to have recovered.
‘PRINT AIN’T DEAD’
Then, there’s Mountain Gazette.
When Mike Rogge purchased the rights to Mountain Gazette magazine in 2019, he probably never envisioned readers would post videos on their social media feeds of “unboxing” each issue; slowly pulling the heavy-stock publication from its massive 12-by-18-inch cardboard mailing envelope; reinforced so it can’t be folded or crushed while in transit. Getting an issue of Mountain Gazette feels a bit like Christmas morning, you never know for sure what’s under the tree.
“Print ain’t dead,” claims Rogge. In fact, the North Lake Tahoe owner/publisher/editor believes in it to the extent that he copyrighted the slogan, along with another euphemism from the magazine’s scrappy, irreverent past, “When in doubt, go higher.”
If that’s the case, then Rogge must be pretty close to the summit these days, because since he purchased the floundering title in 2021, he’s silenced the doubters who believed outdoor magazines no longer offer a financially secure way to tell bold, controversial stories, express outrageous opinions or feature fine-art quality photography.
Rogge was fuelling his freelance/van-life/ski-bum lifestyle as a fisherman up in Alaska when he heard the magazine was up for sale. MG is like one of those indie bands in a Cameron Crowe movie that attain some measure of critical and even financial success for a short while, are forgotten about, then roar to life as a couple new members take things in a whole new direction. Sort of like when Buckingham/Nicks joined the Mac in the mid-’70s.
Mountain Gazette was a niche publication started in ’60s-era Colorado as a sort of Village Voice of mountain culture. It was a time when Hunter S. Thompson ran for sheriff of Aspen, Colo., on the “Freak Power” ticket, and a Hollywood actress would “accidentally” shoot a glamorous young ski racer who looked a lot like Robert Redford. There were exciting new stories that demanded to be told as hot dog skiers invaded the slopes and rock climbers scaled walls of granite and limestone, while whitewater kayakers and oarsmen tackled Class V rivers.
I first happened upon some issues at the Canmore clubhouse of the Alpine Club of Canada in 1983 while participating in a backcountry skiing skills course. Jammed haphazardly on a library shelf groaning with well-thumbed guidebooks and other musty-smelling mountaineering books was a large-format magazine printed on newsprint which was already yellowing and ripping at the edges. Like the early years of Rolling Stone, stories went on for thousands and thousands of words. The photos were in black and white, nothing to write home about. Distributed free of charge at bars, backcountry stores and libraries of the American West, Mountain Gazette was full of wild, fantastical stories that quite likely were the product of drug-fuelled imaginations. Edward Abbey, Galen Rowell, Lito Tejada-Flores, Dick Dorworth and many others kick-started an entire genre of New American Western non-fiction. I had worked maybe halfway through the 10 or so issues when I had to leave; it was all I could do not to roll them up into my backpack for the trip to Vancouver. Because only hoarders steal magazines, right?
Little did I know the magazine I read in Canmore was already dead by the time I’d discovered it.
Like many of love’s labours, Mountain Gazette’s original owners ran out of money and patience in 1979. It enjoyed a Phoenix-like rebirth in 2000, this time in colour but in a less ambitious, magazine-size format, and available free of charge throughout the West.
Printed on sturdy, yet 100-per-cent recycled paper using soy-based inks splashed on a gigantic 11-by-17-inch canvas, Rogge’s MG re-build is a sight to behold. Alas, the new MG only comes out twice a year, and a subscription costs a rather wallet-melting $177.86. During its ’70s heyday, MG retailed for US$0.60 per issue, and the 2000s version was distributed.
These boutique outdoor publications, as Adventure Journal founder and editor Stephen Casimiro calls them, (see sidebar) are often likened to the extravagantly produced boxed-set records bands put out for superfans who prefer to sit down and listen to an entire record in one sitting. Like, say, the 50th-anniversary re-issue of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon or the recently-released 13-volume edition of Wilco’s A Ghost is Born, this new crop of titles is saturated with delicious imagery, finely tuned story-telling and mind-tweaking graphics and page layouts.
“Curated” is the word that’s thrown around to describe the selection of stories these magazines produce each month. Casimiro explains, “I always believed that the best magazine, regardless of genre, would be one where the inherent friction between an advertiser and the editorial product would be removed; where the editor directed both the style and content of the magazine.”
One thing Adventure Journal and its peers cannot do regularly is to support the kind of investigative journalism that requires two or three dogged reporters who know how to get people to talk on the record. In other words, to finance a travel budget, pay for legal counsel, and hire fact-checkers in the same manner newspapers do. There used to be a magazine that carried that editorial vision, and while you still see Outside magazine on the newsstands, it, too, has changed with the times.
THE OUTSIDE EFFECT
It’s not very often the demise of a magazine is reported upon by another magazine—media outlets are loathe to report on either the triumphs or the failures of their competitors. Sure, everybody loves to rag on the CBC in an online forum, but you’ll never hear Global News or CTV badmouthing the Mother Corp on the dinner-hour news.
Yet here it was, in the pages of The New Yorker, the Western world’s most rigorously edited and fact-checked publication. “The Decline of Outside Magazine is also the End of the Vision of the Mountain West,” is not only a wordy title, but illustrates the enormous cultural power and political influence it once wielded in the outdoor industry.
Back in March, a group of highly esteemed adventure writers, filmmakers, and photographers informed Outside Inc. CEO Robin Thurston they no longer wished to be listed as contributors on the masthead of the company’s eponymous magazine. The diverse list included esteemed photographer/filmmaker Jimmy Chin (Free Solo), humorist E. Jean Carroll, award-winning science writer David Quammen and a stack of other contributors who probably haven’t written a story for the magazine in 20 years. (It’s a peculiar quirk of magazines that once you become famous, you are gifted in the masthead as a “contributing editor.”)
This stable of outstanding journalists was protesting Mr. Thurston’s mass firing of the magazine’s editorial staff, the shrinking of the number of issues from six (and previously, just after Thurston purchased the magazine, 12) to four, annually—and, in the weeks after Donald Trump’s early days, a new editorial mandate that would dispense with lengthy environmental and social justice warrior type issues.
It’s hard to describe just how powerful and influential the monthly magazine was, started on a whim by Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner (indeed, the first two “prototype issues” were folded into the pages of the counterculture publication). During a time when environmental battles were beginning to rage across the United States (along with the Vietnam War and civil rights), Outside published what would soon be called “advocacy journalism,” stories championing the preservation of wild places and the activities you could do there. One of the earliest issues I ever purchased, sometime in the late ’70s, had a cover story with the enticing title “Skiing Out of Bounds.” There were stories on climbing frozen waterfalls, on the strange cult of birdwatchers who travelled around the world so they could put a checkmark beside a “tick list.” For the longest time, the most hilarious (and utterly unbelievable tale, even in 2025), was “King of the Ferret Leggers,” whereupon author Donald R. Katz travels to Scotland to track down a wildly eccentric man who stuffs ill-tempered, sharp-toothed ferrets down his pants without, uh, wearing underpants.
In an ironic twist (and there’s much that’s ironic about the magazine’s success), each monthly issue was manually (until the early ’90s) put together by an incredibly dedicated team of staffers based in the not-so-wild urbanity of Chicago, Ill. But even after it moved to the decidedly more adventure-friendly after-work city of Santa Fe, New Mexico in the mid-’90s, Outside was geographically agnostic.
While it’s worth noting that Outside won numerous awards for its articles and art direction (Canadian-born creative director Susan Casey would single-handedly overhaul the magazine’s “look” during her tenure, and take home Magazine of the Year—General Excellence—on three consecutive occasions), there was an element to Outside that caused jaded outdoor adventurers to kinda barf in their mouths.
Indeed, way, way before Instagram influencers revealed the locations of remote hikes and deserted shorelines, Outside covers were “blowing up the spot” with tantalizing listicles such as “The 11 BEST FALL TRIPS ON THE PLANET” and “The WORLD’S 15 MOST BEAUTIFUL BEACHES.”
Outside perfected clickbait that appealed to a casual “weekend warrior” who probably made a nice living in finance, medicine, real estate or high tech, but who was far too cool to play golf, for instance. Aside from some very minor competition from Boulder-based Hooked on the Outdoors and National Geographic Adventure, Outside grew a massive subscriber base of more than 600,000 readers, plus substantial newsstand sales, doubtless driven by eye-candy covers with “sell-lines” like “World’s 15 Most Beautiful Beaches.”
Its real moneymaker was the Outside Annual Gear Guide, a gorgeously produced special issue that came out twice annually and was breathtaking in its celebration of material consumption without environmental consequences. Outside’s new owners claim the staff cuts were needed to finance the acquisition of digital properties as the magazine lost both readers and advertisers.
‘CONTRIBUTING TO A COMMON GOOD’
Adventure Journal editor Casimiro admits these are fraught times. Casimiro himself is a bit leery about advocacy journalism when it comes to issues like the environment or corrupt labour practices (AJ published a story three years ago about how managers at the beloved REI outdoor co-operative tried to stymie union organizers at its hundreds of retail stores across America). “It’s easy to print stories about environmental and social injustice and certainly we’ve done that, but right now I’m trying to focus on people who are keeping things positive and contributing to a common good,” he says.
Or, they’re just esoteric; in Mountain Gazette 205, journalist Ari Schneider traces how the Holocaust shaped his family history. (He had an uncle who travelled to local schools telling “survivor” tales; the problem was, as Schneider found out, most of them were fabricated.) There are photo essays on jam-bands and polar bears. I wrote a dazzlingly-illustrated story on mid-century modern resort architect Henrik Bull, co-inventor of the A-frame.
Boutique adventure magazines hew to a different set of rules than more mainstream titles do, sometimes counterintuitively. The business case for magazines has traditionally been to “deliver a target market to an advertiser.” But as AJ’s Casimiro says, “It was always a bit rigged. Magazines would charge $5 at a newsstand, then sell a subscription for $10. The magazine would essentially be padding their readership by devaluing their product.”
To keep editorial integrity, advertisers must provide ads that hew to the magazine’s overall design which is a big ask given that paper stock, inks, graphic design and mailing costs are surely many times more expensive than slapping a mailing label on a flimsy rag that will easily slide through a mail slot. Rogge at Mountain Gazette calls these advertisers “partners.” Indeed, many brands will hire the magazine’s very own designers to create words and imagery that are consistent with the overall “vibe” of the publication. For instance, you won’t find price-sensitive ads like “Pay for three nights, get an extra night FREE.”
At Like The Wind, a British quarterly devoted to running in all its myriad forms, ads by shoe companies cross the line into sponsored content or what used to be called “advertorial”—an advertisement written and designed to look like a “real” story. These advertorials are stunningly produced stories that carry the same high production values as the magazine itself.
Part of the reason these titles have for going circulation only can surely be found in the fact that if they were distributed in an old-fashioned way, in convenience stores or even conventional bookstores, very, very few people would pay $40 per copy and they would end up destroying many of the back issues, once returned.
To preserve what marketers call “the value proposition” for the reader, publishers of these magazines seldom, if ever, post stories that have appeared in the magazine onto the website. Indeed, if all newspaper and magazine publishers had adhered to “not giving away their stories for free” when the internet first came onto the scene, the media landscape right now might not be so incredibly confusing and, it must be said, unprofitable for so many players in the industry.
FRIEND OR FOE?
These boutique publications’ stout presence on one’s coffee table (definitely not the bathroom), could make them semi-collectable. What is the magazine’s value and its role in today’s adventure market, dominated as it is by pros, bros, influencers, bloggers, YouTubers and Substackers?
David Beers, founding editor of The Tyee and former editor at the progressive San Francisco-based magazine Mother Jones, (RIP), once told me that “the magazine feature is the great American storytelling art form; far ahead of films, documentaries, books, and even novels.” It seems true; although their lens on the world has changed dramatically, Time, Life and National Geographic carry some weight on a newsstand, even if the subject matter is Taylor Swift.
On the other hand, when I met a former editor at Outside at the Western Magazine Awards back in the ’90s and breathlessly told him that I had Volume One, Issue One as well as many other copies, he sounded incredulous. “What, you mean you keep magazines after you’ve read them?” I felt like a fool.
At the same event, (which no longer exists because there aren’t enough magazines) former LIFE and New England Journal editor Daniel Okrent described a well-conceived magazine as being like “a conversation with your best friend. It entertains you, informs you, makes you think, and can change your perspective.”
As I close in on my 70s, a few of my friends are dead. But there are many new ones to make out there, too.
