Signed Copies Available Above* You may also purchase at It’s a big day for me today. It’s the day Coffee Story Ethiopia comes out, and moreover it is the day I get to thank everyone who has helped support and create this amazing project. We’ve done it. This morning a friend asked me to write her a note about … Read More
Going Big
In Conjunction with Pemba Serves Five days ago I drove out of Eldorado Canyon after seven pitches of climbing with two professional women who live in Boulder. We’d spent the day climbing sandstone cracks freshly crisped by the proceeding evening storms. The river roared beneath us for the full day making communication difficult and creating isolation of judgment and choices for … Read More
The Biggest Job I’ve Ever Had
This weekend a printing press in Texas is warming up its rotors and ink jets just for me. For me, that is, and the 90 million people of Ethiopia for whom I wrote the book it’s about to print. Are you cringing right now? Did I really just say I wrote a book for 90 million people? You’re right, I … Read More
So That’s What You Mean By Fat
An Additive Adventure Entry In Conjunction WithOutsideTV.com and Osprey Packs It’s hard not to like powder. It’s even harder not to like it when you are an outdoor athlete. If you are faced with this situation, my best advice is that which I have taken for twenty years: l lie. It’s easy. When people talk about face shots, ripping the pow, shralping … Read More
Trifecta, An Additive Adventure Entry
In Conjunction With OutsideTV.com and Osprey Packs It’s spring. It’s time to emerge from winter. It’s time, for me, to stop wearing long underwear. This is hard, because I have been wearing the same pair all winter long. One pair. It’s been easier this way. This wooly bottom/top combination has swathed me while I swung at ice in Montana, Wyoming, Ouray, Michigan, New … Read More
Joining The Return, Announcing Imagine Ethiopia 2011
Three years ago I received an email with a simple question at its core: could I envision a trip to Ethiopia whereby adventure and education combined to create new stewards of the world? I said yes. imagine1day said yes. And our first Imagine Ethiopia expedition was born. Last September, seventeen people joined us and journeyed through Ethiopia. This October, we’re … Read More
Robbery Friendships, An Additive Adventure Entry
In Conjunction With OutsideTV.com and Osprey Packs This is Haile. In 2006, I put Haile, and thirteen of his closest friends, in jail. In Ethiopian jail, to be precise. I’d like to say it wasn’t my fault, but then again, I was the one climbing in Ethiopia. The story went something like this: Caroline George and I were three hundred feet up a … Read More
Running With Haile, An Additive Adventure Entry
In Conjunction With OutsideTV.com This is how it happens. One person has the idea to run 13,286 kilometers—the distance from Vancouver B.C. to Mekelle, Ethiopia—to raise money to build a school in rural Ethiopia. It’s hard for one person to run that far himself or herself. So they ask for others to join them. One of the people who signs up … Read More
The Ballad You Forgot, An Additive Adventure Entry
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LfSxYaZojs&w=450] A blog in conjunction with Osprey Packs and Outside Television. Let’s get this out of the way. I was 8. I made bad choices like singing Don’t Fence Me In at my father’s second wedding and lying down on the carpet in the school loft; I had bad choices foisted upon me, like a two-inch buzz cut—billed as a smart fashion move with … Read More
Me, As a Dot. An Additive Adventure Entry*
I have no idea who the people are who will change my life in the next two years. I had no idea, two years ago, that a woman making a spontaneous stop in a Patagonia store in California would change mine now. Susanne Conrad caught a glimpse of a tall hardbound book called Vertical Ethiopia: Climbing Toward Possibility in the Horn … Read More