Community Stories
Life on the deck of Hokule’a, the double-hulled canoe that sails around the world using only ancient wayfinding techniques.
The first-place essay from a youth writing competition we hosted with the nonprofit Write the World.
In northern Chile, a desert is being scourged by the textile industry. But a resilient community is transforming a reality of waste into opportunity.
Simplicity, style and lessons in bike jazz on Eastern Washington’s Beacon Hill.
Louisiana community organizer Roishetta Ozane on her fight to stop the biggest fossil fuel expansion on earth and how mutual aid can play a part.
Our next fight against Big Oil is for basic human rights.
A conversation with Vincent Stanley, Patagonia’s director of philosophy and co-author of The Future of the Responsible Company: What We’ve Learned from Patagonia’s First 50 Years.
Climate and sustainability journalist Yessenia Funes writes to her future child—the one she hopes to have and has been afraid of bringing into our world.
In a small British Columbia mountain town, one woman is using trails to help heal wounds and bridge two communities.
Struggling with a mental health crisis, one woman returns to the waters that raised her and finds healing in the ocean.
These women were forced to flee their homes in Afghanistan. Now the climbing community is helping them build a new one.
Inside Yakutat Surf Club’s budding stoke scene in Southeast Alaska.
Patagonia and Pop-Up Magazine Productions present a series about knowledge.
Patagonia and Pop-Up Magazine Productions present a series about knowledge.
Patagonia and Pop-Up Magazine Productions present a series about knowledge.
The remarkable relationship between Hidetoshi Matsubara and his birds of prey.
When your goal is to raise children in wild places, it helps if you’re flexible.
Shawn Hayes leads a life of devotion. For him, falconry is more than a deep partnership with raptors: it’s his life’s work.
Teresa Baker, Pattie Gonia, José González and Gabaccia Moreno bring a new initiative to the outdoor community.
Out of necessity, Jacqueline Sangueza loved fishing nets before she loved the ocean.
First-generation Vietnamese American Mai Nguyen follows in the footsteps of their agrarian ancestors with a farm that grows numerous types of grains with a no-till, anti-fertilizer regenerative approach.
The story of Naelyn Pike, a 21-year-old Chiricahua Apache, and her fight to keep sacred Apache land from becoming a copper mine.
Cydney Knapp and her husband, Bartek, knew they wanted to raise their kids to love the outdoors, so they learned how to navigate change and embraced the chaos.
Under the gaze of southern Arizona’s cinnamon-hued Canelo Hills, a mother passes along an ancient Puebloan tradition of natural adobe building to her three sons.
How a mother’s own childhood experience on the Appalachian Trail shaped the way she teaches her four children to find nature in the heart of New York City.
Why a logging protest has become Canada’s largest act of civil disobedience.
Rolling Stone called him “the real Indiana Jones.” His new memoir reveals why our friend Rick has always been a great deal more.
What’s the secret to a really good pair of jeans? Comics journalist Sarah Mirk tells us what to look for and how to keep them in play longer.
When it comes to making more responsible jeans, our work is never done. And, of course, we leave the really dirty work to you.
The father and son team behind Life Do Grow farm has focused their life’s work on building a sense of community and well-being in an area that has been plagued by poverty, violence and neglect for decades.
Ashe and Christin Brown are parents to their 3-year-old daughter, Quest, whom they want to raise with an appreciation for the diversity of the natural world.
Caroline Gleich grapples with the fears that come with an aging parent and the pressure she feels to have a child before her dad is gone.
Nearly every Wednesday, Courtney Reynolds can be found elbow-deep in a bin of someone else’s castoffs, searching for scraps of fabric and colorful quilts to deconstruct and sew into original clothing items for her three preschool-age kids, or to sell in her online shop, Napkin Apocalypse.
We’re entering Earth’s sixth mass extinction, but clues about this climate crisis could be right under our feet.
A book excerpt about how the microbes within us and the genes we share with other wild creatures are key dimensions of being human.
One young couple’s unexpected career path of farming sea vegetables drew them back to their roots and brought a promising climate-change solution to their coastal hometown.
As the proprietor of Cold Antler Farm, a 6.5-acre span of land in Washington County, New York, Jenna Woginrich spends her days with red-tailed hawks.
Sheep (and their poop) could help California’s climate-driven wildfires. One couple is ushering in this idea with a small flock and some supportive fire departments.
Coauthor Kim McCoy recounts discovering the mystery of what lies beneath the waves, where ocean and land meet and compete.
Two women, Black and Indigenous, reflect on the myth of the American West after horse-packing through the Sierra.
A wildlife ecologist reflects on the public lands that are his escape hatch and life’s work.
One woman’s decades-long fight for clean air and environmental justice.
Melinda Daniels is huddled under the shelter of her purple tent waiting for the rain to start, which only seems odd when you consider the context: she’s in the middle of a farm on a blindingly sunny day.
Returning endangered species to the wetlands of Argentina is good for humans, too.
Making face masks in the time of COVID-19: when “breathable face fabric” takes on a whole new meaning.
Young farmers learn what it means to do essential work during a global crisis.
Three moms share the details.
Jasmin Caton worried having twins might slow down her life in the mountains. Then she remembered what her parents did with her.
Welcoming back the “welcoming noise” near the Arctic Circle.
As seen in the November 2019 Journal. For the recipe behind Carston’s Spicy Magic Sauce, scroll to the end of the story. Although my tongue felt as if it might melt, Carston Oliver assured me I was not, in fact, going to die. “That’s just the capsaicin,” he told me, as he calmly ordered some…
It’s fascinating to hear Zaria Forman talk about ice, especially the way that it sounds. She describes the way it rumbles and thunders and cracks, even when you can’t see anything. It crackles and pops like breakfast cereal on high volume. “Ice crispies,” she calls it. “It’s a really beautiful sound.” Polar ice is possibly…
“We biked through wind, rain, and snow. If lightning struck, we kept going. We only stopped if it got too close. We outran tornadoes in Oklahoma. We waited out a storm in an old horse barn in Montana, huddled like penguins, our bikes cast carelessly aside in the mud,” writes John Flynn. After John lost…
Editor’s note: This post discusses anxiety and suicide. In a humble workshop in Washougal, Washington, a blind craftsman holds a locally harvested log that he has made into a blank with his miter saw. He turns it in his hands to feel its shape and weight. He measures and marks, measures and marks. A flick…
In a fossil-rich corner of western Colorado, set against lush agricultural fields, the big-box stores of Grand Junction and the sandstone formations of the Colorado National Monument, you’ll find Fruita. These days, the town is an international mountain-biking destination known for its ribbony, high-desert trails, technical routes overlooking the Colorado River and funky downtown where…
How the child in an old road trip photo from the Patagonia catalog is helping humanity understand Mars.
Dave Murray lives in a wooded mountain valley in western Montana with his wife, Connie; a labradoodle rightly named Loki, after the Norse god of mischief; and a bunch of mules. I live 140 miles north near Glacier National Park. He and I met on a float trip down a wild river in northern British…
The Best Times Are About Friends, Not Perfection It had been four years since Liz Clark, Léa Brassy and I first spent time together, on a sailing trip through the Tuamotus. We knew we’d found something special from the moment we met, and we’ve stayed in touch ever since. We’re all very individual women and…
Indigenous communities across the United States are increasingly confronted with threats to their sovereignty and to the places they rely on for their culture and way of life. Nowhere is this threat felt more than in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. A new short film, Welcome to Gwichyaa Zhee, looks at the Gwich’in people’s work to protect…
Fog from the distant Caspian Sea swirled around us as we left the road, crossed a narrow mountain stream on a rickety footbridge of wornwooden planks, passed a pungent corral full of dank, scruffy sheep, and started the steep climb to Alam Kuh base camp in the Alborz mountain range of Iran. Brittany Griffith, Kate…
Friday night at the Hot Tomato is not for those in a hurry. Hungry customers grip pints of beer and compare notes on the day’s rides in lines that spill into the parking lot. Music pumps and the staff whirls behind the counter, tossing floury dough, yelling requests to the kitchen, giving each other shit.…
Steve House joins forces with coach Scott Johnston and athlete Kílian Jornet to develop a comprehensive approach to finding the joy and the payoff of intense training. Even lunges.
Jeanie Adamson, a 50-something mom, decided to switch things up last year for spring break. When she told her son, Luke, she wanted to ski at every resort between Dallas and Lake Tahoe, he offered up his newly-renovated 1990 Dodge Ram van, Sherrod, for the job. The two of them threw in their skis, buckled…
Jordan Leads wants everybody to know she is alive and well. When she was six months old, she had her picture taken with her family at Joshua Tree’s Turtle Rock: a baby in midair, swaddled in a puffy purple jumpsuit, thrown over a disturbingly large gap between boulders. (Her parents, Jeff and Sherry, were the…
After falling in love with John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Charlie Turnbull and Leon Morton set out to recreate the 1,615-mile journey described in the novel – but on bikes. In July. With camera gear and a few buddies in tow, they followed historic Route 66 from Oklahoma to Southern California. And along the way,…
“I’d built it up in my head a lot—being a professional climber. This felt like the consummation of those dreams. I found the valley, I envisioned the trip, I got the funding, made it happen, stood at the base, picked the line, climbed it, sent, we were at the top and it wasn’t feeling the…
“For better or for worse, ideas are infectious. They become our goals, and the struggle to realize them becomes memory, the story of our lives,” says Fitz Cahall. When Brian O’Dell decided it was time to stop driving his Honda Civic, he didn’t list in on Craigslist. Instead, he posted in to outdoor forums in…
What if you could hit pause on life? This last year, Fitz turned 40. Instead of buying a sports car, Fitz took a sabbatical. Today, he presents a story about mountain biking the Oregon Timber Trail, a 670-mile-long, mostly single track trail across the state’s deserts and forests. What’s the difference between a groove and…
Drew Hamilton makes a living by taking tourists out into the remote Alaskan wilderness to hang out with brown bears. No fences, no guns—just Drew, and the eight hundred pound, six and a half foot tall, Ursus arctos horribilis of southern Alaska. Most people call them grizzlies. These days, he does it, in large part, as a…
Weather has a way of complicating—and enriching—everything. By the time I top out, it’s snowing and it’s dark. I walk back as far as the rope will let me, and in the flattest spot I can find, I dig a hole and sit, bracing myself. I yell, “Rope-fixed!” repeatedly, but my partners can’t hear me…
After a failed first attempt, three friends return to India’s Mount Nilkantha to confront—and embrace—the terrible, beautiful duality of a life in the mountains.
“Any time I ski a steep line, I’ve done it hundreds of times, and still every time for me there is that moment of fear on top, where I am like, ‘Do I really want to do this?’,” says Jason Hummel. “But, also, anytime you do anything scary, it really ties you down to the…
“I was certain I was paralyzed. My legs were totally limp, I was hanging upside down and the only thing stopping me from falling 160-feet headfirst into the talus below, was this rope that was wrapped around my foot,” remembers Craig Gorder. In November, 2016, Craig took a fall in Indian Creek that injured him…
“I have a pretty young grandfather, but he was starting to get old and knew he had one or two more big expeditions in him,” says Ethan Roebuck. “He wanted to put together a big trip, because he’s getting older, but also because I’m getting older, these are skills that he thinks are important, and…
Patagonia mourns the loss of Tom Frost, Yvon Chouinard’s former climbing and business partner, who passed away Friday morning. Tom, with Yvon, Chuck Pratt and Royal Robbins, made the first ascent of the North America Wall of El Capitan in 1964. He made other notable first ascents with Valley pioneers and others in Yosemite, the…
An excerpt from the book Family Business by Malinda Chouinard and Jennifer Ridgeway.
For most of his adult life, Cam Fenton has fought against climate change–and particularly to protect the Arctic. “The funny thing was, for most of that time, I couldn’t tell you why,” says Cam. “Sure, I could recite, and often wrote, the talking points: to stop sea level rise, stand with small island nations and…
Peter Kinnoch Noone, who embodied the down-to-earth style of the outdoor industry’s early days and helped shaped the development of the outdoor store as a commercial force, customer refuge and sentinel for the protection of wilderness, died at his home in Ojai, California, on July 9 of recurrent cancer. He was 75 years old. Peter…
“The definition of kidnapping is moving someone from one point to another point against their will, and that’s exactly what had happened to us,” says Ben Stookesberry. “But, to me, the most noteworthy part of the day was that, for the first time in the entire trip, we were actually all working together as a…
Building cultural bridges through a shared love of wild rivers and folk music.
