Welcome to all the new subscribers who found their way here this week! I am impressed!
Summer is slowly disappearing in the rearview mirror, so my daughters and I squeezed in one more big day in the mountains before school: climbing to the top of Mount Tukuhnikivatz in the La Sals Mountains.
It’s hard to beat standing on a summit with your kids! And those clouds! Wow
It is even harder to believe they are back in the classroom while I load the weekly newsletter with rugged bike adventures, Patagonian volcanoes, and the people who are taking flight all around the world.
While it is hotter than a frying pan in Moab…this week we’ve got big sends, a little history, a lot of gravity, and plenty of reasons to add things to the bucket list.
Let’s send it.
Con mucho amor!
Nico in Moab
PS. Don´t forget to subscribe
🏔️ New route up Volcán Burney—and a better way down
📍 Volcán Burney, Patagonia
Chilean charger Cristóbal Señoret keeps pulling off amazing things in the mountains, and this one comes with some history. British explorer Eric Shipton spent years trying to crack the remote Volcán Burney—once spending 16 days at its base without even seeing the summit—before finally making the first ascent in 1973.
More than half a century later, Señoret, Tomás Marusic and Felipe Bishara pulled off the first ascent of the north face and only the third known ascent. They launched paragliders from the upper glacier at sunset and flew off the mountain!
This is the definition of #StokedAF!
Watch Cristóbal Señoret's ascent and flight
⏱ Short and sweet
🪂 Hike up. Fly down. Repeat.
📍 The Alps
German paraglider Celine Lorenz took her first tandem flight at 11 years old and has been flying since. In this short film, she steps away from the competition scene to show another side of the sport: hike & fly—climbing into the mountains with a wing on your back, launching from wherever the adventure takes you.
⏱ 5 min
🚲 Bike surfing downtown
📍 San Francisco, California
Sometimes you don’t need an expedition to the other side of the planet and a 30 minute film. Brock Johnson needs only a San Francisco hill and apparently very little concern for rush hour. #BikeSurfing. That’s it. That’s the send.
⏱ Short and sweet
🚵 9000m vert, north of the Arctic Circle
📍 Tromsø → Lofoten, Norway
Bucket-list ride alert. Scotty Laughland and crew ride waaaay up there over nine days and a ridiculous 9,000 vertical meters of descent through some of Norway’s most spectacular terrain. Make sure to pay attention around minute four, when he points the bike down an absolutely enormous slab. Unbelievable.
⏱ 9 minutes
⚡ Bonus News
🌊 A new rapid is forming below Cataract Canyon. A newly exposed rock ledge near North Wash could eventually create an unrunnable rapid—or even a waterfall—and complicate the takeout for boaters running Cataract Canyon.
💧 This is what a drying world looks like. Reuters photographers document shrinking rivers, lakes and reservoirs around the world as drought and extreme heat leave landscapes increasingly short of water.
🐻 Colorado’s hungry bears are on the move. Bear reports have nearly doubled from the same point last year, with drought, low snowpack and wildfire reducing natural food and pushing bears toward towns in search of calories.
🏄 Fourteen years old, local knowledge—and a two-time world champ goes down. Tahitian teenager Kohai Fierro pulled off a massive upset at Teahupoʻo, beating two-time world champion Tyler Wright on one of surfing’s most intimidating waves.
🦈 Influencers + sharks: what could go wrong? At least three influencers have been bitten in less than a year while seeking close encounters with sharks. Is the social-media pursuit of content putting people and sharks at risk?
⛷️ A “Real Loser” just turned an insult into $30,000 for kids. Olympian Hunter Hess’s Real Loser Project has now donated $30,000 to STOKED (not our newsletter!), which helps underserved youth get into action sports—the project was born after President Trump called Hess a real loser.
🧗♀️ Mary Catherine Eden, the Trad Princess grades Autobahn at 5.14a and adds R rating. She sent on her fourth try, but says the combination of rope stretch and a concrete staircase lurking below puts the urban roof crack in risky territory.
🧠 Long Reads & Watches
….take your time with these ones…
🏄 The freedom found in the ocean
Born in 1993, just as apartheid was ending, this South African surfer grew up experiencing the ocean very differently from his father. Beaches had been segregated until only a few years earlier, and surfing was reserved for white South Africans. His dad nevertheless fell in love with it—and dreamed of one day bringing his own son into the water.
This beautiful short film is about surfing, but even more about a father, a son and what it means when a place that once excluded you becomes a place of freedom.
⏱ 16 minutes
🛶 Paddling Mada
📍 Madagascar
Big whitewater when you can find it, a lot of flat water when you can’t, and rivers that ranged from barely flowing to completely flooded. This kayaking trip delivers big emotions too—at times overwhelming, at others pure stoke. This is no polished expedition film, but a grassroots account of paddling through one of the wildest islands on Earth. Lakana means canoe in Malagasy.
⏱ 26 minutes
🧗 Climbing against the system
📍 Jakarta, Indonesia → Savoie, France
Twin brothers Raviandi and Ravianto Ramadhan learned to climb on the walls of Jakarta, then somehow fought their way onto the international stage with limited resources and little institutional support. Dissidence follows them from Indonesia to France, where they take on the 8c/5.14b route that gives the film its name. It’s partly a climbing film, but mostly a damn good story about two brothers stubborn enough to keep dreaming when the system gives them every reason not to.
⏱ 34 min
⛈️ And finally… check out this storm over the Atlantic!
Kevin from Cape May Astro caught Mother Nature putting on a show to send you into the weekend.
💥 Stay Stoked. Stay Wild. See you on the next send!
Up, up and….. awaaaaaaaaaay
Loved this one Nico! Sent it over to the old hippie in O Town who has some weird kink for climbing 😂