Whaddup Clan!
Large amounts of mountain bike stoke in this week’s StokedAF. And we’re not sorry.
The Rampage is just a month away, fall riding season is kicking into gear, and everyone seems pretty damn stoked to get on a bike right now. So this week we’re leaning into it: Utah cliffs, bikes on glaciers, and that sweet Japanese loam—along with plenty of other reasons to spend less time scrolling and more time outside!!
Fall is coming. Get stoked!
Speaking of mtn biking, the other day I was over in Telluride, cruising the Gentleman’s Loop and we decided to check out the via ferrata above town
🚵 A bike has no business at 6,000m
📍 Huayna Potosi, Bolivia
Kilian Bron returns to the high Andes to take on one of Bolivia’s most iconic peaks—6,088-meter Huayna Potosí. On his bike. After hauling it into the high alpine above La Paz, Bron points downhill, over glacier crevasses, through snow, ice and rock.
The clip is but a slice of his recent long-form, travel docu Mirage that follows him through Bolivia and northwestern Argentina.
🤸 Landing the barrel almighty
Some tricks require a prolonged campaign against gravity. This slackline send follows the process to land a two-person Barrel Almighty—the crashes, tiny adjustments, near-misses and eventual satisfaction of figuring out something that initially looks impossible. Featuring Clement Droy and his homey Tlaloc.
⏱ 10 minutes
🚵 Trading the trees for the desert
📍 Utah, USA
After 30 years riding and building in the forests of Northern California, Tyler McCaul traded the redwoods for the desert—and Desertion is his love letter to steep freeride.
Huge lines, digging, riding… all built around McCaul’s belief that monotony kills creativity and sometimes the cure is simply a change of scenery. As he puts it: “There is an innate purity in discomfort, and something to be said for the solace found in solitude.”
⏱ 6 minutes
⛷️ Consider this your winter warning
We don’t usually send movie trailers, but films by Matchstick Productions film are reliably bangers, and with winter around the corner, we’ll make an exception.
The Way Out, MSP’s 34th annual ski film, chases the good stuff around the planet—from huge Alaskan spines and Whistler backyard laps to the Swiss Alps and deep Japanese powder. Hoji, Chris Rubens, Mark Abma, Lucy Leishman and a stacked crew provide four minutes of evidence that ski season can’t get here soon enough.
⏱ 4 minutes
⚡ Bonus News
🌧️ California’s storms could start over 7,000 miles away on the Tibetan Plateau where unusually warm winter temperatures disrupt the jet stream, strengthening atmospheric rivers. The discovery could help forecasters see big West Coast storm seasons coming earlier.
🚵 Quadriplegic rider Pete Lloyd is still getting after it aboard a heavily modified Quadrix adaptive mountain bike that he controls with his chin. Impressive!
🐒 At Bangkok’s Chatuchak Market more and more Amazonian wildlife is turning up for sale. Marmosets, capuchins, macaws, coatis and even capybaras are making journeys of more than 10,000 miles, exposing a growing trade in exotic pets. Not cool.
🌲 New Hampshire’s Loon Mountain gets 272 acres of new glades, calling itself the state’s largest resort, with 675 skiable acres. No groomers or new lifts, just a big traverse to the East Coast freeride shan-gri-glades.
🏜️ What exactly is Red Bull Rampage? If your feed is suddenly full of mountain bikers launching themselves off enormous red cliffs, this illustrated explainer breaks it all down. Women drop October 8; the men, October 10.
🧠 Long Reads & Watches
….take your time with these ones…
🚵 Getting back to Rampage
One year after the crash that nearly ended his career, Tom van Steenbergen returns to the Utah desert and the event where everything went wrong. With fellow Rampage veteran Carson Storch alongside him, Episode 2 of A MILLION FOR ONE is about rebuilding confidence.
Filmed over five years, don’t sleep on this web series as it follows Tom’s long road back to Rampage—and asks whether becoming the rider he was before the crash is even the goal.
🔗 Watch: A MILLION FOR ONE — Episode 2
🐧 Does Your Work Align With Your Values?
Working in Antarctica sounds like the ultimate adventure job. But for some expedition guides, getting paid to experience one of the wildest places on Earth eventually came with an uncomfortable realization: their work was helping fuel the very tourism boom they worried was damaging it.
Adventure.com spoke with 25 former Antarctic guides who walked away from the industry, exploring what happens when the job you love no longer aligns with what you believe.
🔗 Read: Why these Antarctic guides quit their dream jobs
🌕 7 years, a unicycle, and a full moon
Inspired by the great Dean Potter, Aussie photographer Aidan Williams spent seven years fiddling with his camera to finally capture Gabriel Camolesi riding a unicycle on a highline, silhouetted against the full moon. The Lunar Line looks almost too perfectly composed to be real.
Also check out this behind the scenes read with Aiden here:
🧗 Honnold on the Black Circuit in Fontainebleau
Alex spent a few weeks with his family in the Bleau, where local climbers invited him to take on the classics: L’Éléphant’s Black Circuit. Established in 1972, the circuit strings together around 40 boulder problems from V2 to V6, including plenty of highballs where commitment still matters.
🔗 Watch:
🌍 Suffering the FOMO?
(Pssst, this is where you should be right now!)
🧗+ 🇦🇷 Giant granite domes in Córdoba
Granite walls, high-country crags and seemingly endless places to climb. Córdoba is one of Argentina’s great climbing playgrounds, with everything from technical slabs and bouldering to long routes and steep sport climbing scattered through the Sierras.
The legendary Los Gigantes massif has around 400 equipped sport routes alone, while La Ola, Copina and Capilla del Monte add hundreds more—enough rock to turn a climbing trip into a very long stay. And judging by this short docu, that might not be such a bad problem to have.
Rock, wind, music, friendship and the particular culture that develops around a great climbing area. A nice reminder that sometimes the place and the people are what is really important.
🍂 Japow… but on a bike
Everyone knows Japan for powder. Far fewer people know what those mountains look like once the snow melts. Minakami, located in the mountains of central Japan, has quietly built a mtn biking scene, with steep forest trails, old charcoal tracks and deep, dark loam.
And the bike is only part of the trip. Minakami is one of Japan’s great outdoor playgrounds: raft the Tone River, go canyoning, hike Mount Tanigawa, then soak in a riverside onsen and sleep in a traditional ryokan. Come winter, those same mountains disappear beneath the powder that made Japan famous.
Best part? It’s only about 75 minutes by bullet train from Tokyo. Ride ridiculous loam, raft a river, soak in an onsen. That’ll do.