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Every great outdoor story has a part nobody told you. The Outpost finds it. A boot sole that changed climbing. A yak ranch that became a race. A mountain that...
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Every great outdoor story has a part nobody told you.
The Outpost finds it. A boot sole that changed climbing. A yak ranch that became a race. A mountain that started in a van. Real people. Real dates. One small thing sets off the next, and the next, until you are staring at something enormous.
Each episode opens in a physical moment, follows the chain of consequences, and ends on a line that changes how you see the whole story. Short sentences. No filler. No lecture.
Narrative journalism from the backcountry and the world that touches it, built on named, documented sources. Roosevelt in the Badlands. Walter Bonatti on K2. The people and the decisions behind the places you thought you knew.
Print edition and more at ridehikeroam.com
show less
The Outpost finds it. A boot sole that changed climbing. A yak ranch that became a race. A mountain that started in a van. Real people. Real dates. One small thing sets off the next, and the next, until you are staring at something enormous.
Each episode opens in a physical moment, follows the chain of consequences, and ends on a line that changes how you see the whole story. Short sentences. No filler. No lecture.
Narrative journalism from the backcountry and the world that touches it, built on named, documented sources. Roosevelt in the Badlands. Walter Bonatti on K2. The people and the decisions behind the places you thought you knew.
Print edition and more at ridehikeroam.com
Episodes & Posts
Episodes
Posts
8 NOV 2026 · October 1, 1941. A two-passenger plane circles 800 feet above Devils Tower in a 35-mile-an-hour wind. The man in the passenger seat has 2,347 jumps in his logbook, and he's about to try to win a $50 bet by landing a parachute on the top of the Tower.
George Hopkins made it. Then the plan to get down bounced off the edge of the Tower and disappeared, and it turned out the rope was 200 feet too short anyway. For six days, America watched a man on a rock in Wyoming. Telegrams suggested cannons and lassos. Goodyear offered a blimp. Planes dropped him a steak, a bearskin suit, and a bottle of whiskey. Hopkins threw down a note saying he would not be rescued by mountaineers.
Then an ice storm hit, a Dartmouth medical student drove 250 miles through the night under police escort, and 7,000 people gathered under spotlights to watch what happened next. At the bottom, one man in the crowd was holding the fifty dollars. He was also known for keeping a live rattlesnake under his hat.
This is the story of the only person ever to parachute onto Devils Tower, and the country that couldn't look away, two months before Pearl Harbor. A note on The Outpost: This publication reconstructs historical events from verified archival, institutional, and primary sources where available. Atmospheric and scenic details are drawn from period records where available and from historical context where noted. Specific temperatures, weather conditions, and scene-setting details included for narrative purposes are grounded in documented historical context but should not be read as verbatim archival record. All named individuals, dates, and documented events are sourced in the reference list above. The Outpost is narrative journalism, not academic history. But it holds itself to the facts that matter.
8 NOV 2026 · January 4, 1917. Washington is cold, and the man who built America's national park system is coming apart in front of a room full of colleagues. Stephen Mather is making promises nobody authorized. The agency he founded has no operating budget yet. Three men decide on the spot that the public will hear he is ill and exhausted, and nothing more.
The man left holding the agency was Horace Albright, 27 years old and, until then, an assistant. For nearly two years he ran the National Park Service in all but name. When the United States entered World War I, a senator backed a plan to open Glacier National Park to wartime sheep grazing. Albright pushed back from behind a desk that was not his, and the grazing never happened.
The twist sits in a $15,000 pledge. Weeks before his collapse, Mather had promised his friend William Kent's money to a new conservation group without asking. Kent was one of the three people who then helped protect him.
This is the story of the understudy who held a young agency together, and the legend who got the credit. A note on The Outpost: This publication reconstructs historical events from verified archival, institutional, and primary sources where available. Atmospheric and scenic details are drawn from period records where available and from historical context where noted. Specific temperatures, weather conditions, and scene-setting details included for narrative purposes are grounded in documented historical context but should not be read as verbatim archival record. All named individuals, dates, and documented events are sourced in the reference list above. The Outpost is narrative journalism, not academic history. But it holds itself to the facts that matter.
21 OCT 2026 · February 1982. It's 3 a.m. in Leadville, Colorado, at 10,152 feet. The furnace has shut off, the pipes have frozen again, and it's eleven below outside. A man sits at his kitchen table holding a pink slip. It's not the first one on his street, and it won't be the last.
For thirty years, the Climax Molybdenum Mine kept this town alive. When the price of molybdenum collapsed, the jobs went with it. Unemployment passed 20 percent and plywood started replacing glass on Main Street. Ken Chlouber, a miner, businessman, and state legislator, started throwing ideas at the wall. One night he stood before the city council and proposed a yak ranch. He was serious.
Then he stood on the edge of a road race in Boulder, watched 12,000 people run six miles, and asked a different question. What if a hundred people would run a hundred?
This is the story of the Leadville Trail 100, the sister-in-law who said yes when the town laughed, the wife's jewelry that paid for the permits, and the 45 runners who lined up in 1983 with a hospital on standby. Only ten finished. A note on The Outpost: This publication reconstructs historical events from verified archival, institutional, and primary sources where available. Atmospheric and scenic details are drawn from period records where available and from historical context where noted. Specific temperatures, weather conditions, and scene-setting details included for narrative purposes are grounded in documented historical context but should not be read as verbatim archival record. All named individuals, dates, and documented events are sourced in the reference list above. The Outpost is narrative journalism, not academic history. But it holds itself to the facts that matter.
19 OCT 2026 · In March 1932, a 26-year-old government employee pulls up to the Belle Fourche River in a borrowed truck with a broken heater. He has a thermos, a notebook, and 1,152 acres of federal land to look after. The land holds America's first national monument, and Washington has forgotten it for 26 years.
Newell Joyner had almost nothing to work with. What he did with it turned a neglected rock in the corner of Wyoming into a place 400,000 people visit every year. Along the way there are 338 Civilian Conservation Corps workers, a rodeo in the shadow of Devils Tower, and a box of index cards that tracks every stray cow brand in the county. Then in 1941, a daredevil parachutist gets stranded on top of the Tower, and the man Joyner calls to bring him down turns out to be someone he wrote about three years earlier.
This is the story of the custodian who held up a monument, and the stone that rings when you strike it. A note on The Outpost: This publication reconstructs historical events from verified archival, institutional, and primary sources where available. Atmospheric and scenic details are drawn from period records where available and from historical context where noted. Specific temperatures, weather conditions, and scene-setting details included for narrative purposes are grounded in documented historical context but should not be read as verbatim archival record. All named individuals, dates, and documented events are sourced in the reference list above. The Outpost is narrative journalism, not academic history. But it holds itself to the facts that matter.
12 OCT 2026 · He came to the California desert in 1984 with a balloon and one plan. Get it off the ground.
It never flew.
Leonard Knight stayed anyway. What he built next took nearly three decades, hundreds of thousands of gallons of donated paint, and one collapse he had to come back from. Today a U.S. senator's words for it are "a national treasure."
This is the story of Salvation Mountain, and the failed balloon behind it. A note on The Outpost: This publication reconstructs historical events from verified archival, institutional, and primary sources where available. Atmospheric and scenic details are drawn from period records where available and from historical context where noted. Specific temperatures, weather conditions, and scene-setting details included for narrative purposes are grounded in documented historical context but should not be read as verbatim archival record. All named individuals, dates, and documented events are sourced in the reference list above. The Outpost is narrative journalism, not academic history. But it holds itself to the facts that matter.
Every great outdoor story has a part nobody told you. The Outpost finds it. A boot sole that changed climbing. A yak ranch that became a race. A mountain that...
show more
Every great outdoor story has a part nobody told you.
The Outpost finds it. A boot sole that changed climbing. A yak ranch that became a race. A mountain that started in a van. Real people. Real dates. One small thing sets off the next, and the next, until you are staring at something enormous.
Each episode opens in a physical moment, follows the chain of consequences, and ends on a line that changes how you see the whole story. Short sentences. No filler. No lecture.
Narrative journalism from the backcountry and the world that touches it, built on named, documented sources. Roosevelt in the Badlands. Walter Bonatti on K2. The people and the decisions behind the places you thought you knew.
Print edition and more at ridehikeroam.com
show less
The Outpost finds it. A boot sole that changed climbing. A yak ranch that became a race. A mountain that started in a van. Real people. Real dates. One small thing sets off the next, and the next, until you are staring at something enormous.
Each episode opens in a physical moment, follows the chain of consequences, and ends on a line that changes how you see the whole story. Short sentences. No filler. No lecture.
Narrative journalism from the backcountry and the world that touches it, built on named, documented sources. Roosevelt in the Badlands. Walter Bonatti on K2. The people and the decisions behind the places you thought you knew.
Print edition and more at ridehikeroam.com
Information
| Author | Eric Pearson |
| Organization | Eric Pearson |
| Categories | Documentary , History , Places & Travel |
| Website | - |
| eric@ridehikeroam.com |
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