Hola!
Black bears have been wandering down from the La Sal Mountains and into the communities around Moab, cleaning out fruit trees and pretty much any other fruit they can find. After last winter’s drought, there simply wasn’t enough food for them higher in the mountains, so down they came.
While it’s fun to look out the window and see a bear going to town on some peaches, it’s also sad. They shouldn’t need to be here, and seeing them down in the valley feels like another small sign of just how dry our corner of the Southwest has become.
Let’s hope they get back to their mountain home… here’s what else is happening in the wild world this week.
Endless Light
📍 Narvik, Norway
Mtn bike magician Danny MacAskill shows us what is possible on a eMTB. Smooth as always, here you get giant granite slabs, boulder hopping, and narrow ridges. Five minutes of classic MacAskill opening up a lot of terrain on an e-bike powered with a Bosch system.
⏱️ 5 minutes
What keeps Kilian coming back?
If you’re interested in Jornet’s journey from childhood to now—and where his motivation comes from—this short film packs it all in, with an intimate look at one of the greatest mountain athletes of his generation. And after 20 years of racing, summits, records and world titles, what keeps pulling him back isn’t another record, but something much closer to what brought him to the mountains in the first place.
⏱️ 7 minutes
Skiing off Nanga Parbat
📍 Nanga Parbat, Pakistan
After making the world’s first full ski descent of Everest without supplemental oxygen, this time Andrzej Bargiel has does on 8,126-meter Nanga Parbat. Bargiel climbed the mountain without bottled oxygen, clicked into his skis on the summit and descended all the way to the end of continuous skiable snow below Camp I, completing a line no one had managed before and wrapping up the entire Base Camp-to-summit-to-Base Camp mission in just 2 days and 9 hours.
⏱️ 7 minutes
🪁 Still getting the butterflies
📍 Greece
After years at the top of kiteboarding, Brazilian rider Bruna Kajiya still gets butterflies. In this beautiful edit, she gets beyond tricks and competition to something more interesting: what it means to find a sport that becomes a way of expressing yourself, understanding yourself and moving through the world.
⏱ 5 minutes
Southern cone winter still going off
📍 Las Leñas, Argentina
Take 10 to see what you missed this winter in the Southern Cone. Dropping off Las Leñas’ famous Marte lift on a busy powder day, Hank Stowers somehow sniffs out an untouched chute—and gets the kind of primo snow conditions that explain why people obsess over this place.
⏱️ 9 minutes
⚡ Bonus News
♨️ List of crap people drop around Yellowstone’s geysers and pools include
AirPods, retainers, fake nails, rubber ducks, pacifiers and a McDonald’s toys. By early September, crews removed a record 20,100+ pieces of trash, 5,600 rocks and sticks and more than 280 hats.
🇮🇹 Austrian climbers linked five classic north-face routes across the Tre Cime di Lavaredo in a single push, climbing roughly 2,000 vertical meters in 14 hours—the equivalent of 56 pitches.
🧗 Climbers in Colorado Springs are being warned to inspect hardware after route bolts were smashed, mangled, chopped or missing at several crags. The damage was documented in the area of Old Stage Road.
🚲 Congolese cyclist tragically dies on 14,000-kilometer ride from Goma to Rabat, Morocco while carrying a message of peace for conflict-torn eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. He died while traveling in a taxi.
🦧 Wildfire in Indonesia have burned to within just 200 meters of a research station in Gunung Palung National Park, home to hundreds of critically endangered Bornean orangutans and more than three decades of continuous research.
🌴 Want a glimpse of our dystopian future? Investigation into thousands of property records finds that 37 billionaires own at least 218,000 acres of Hawaii—about 11% of all privately owned land in the state.
The amount of weed smoked in the United States.
🧠 Long Reads & Watches
….take your time with these ones…
Chossrider: 2,300 Feet of Loose Rock on Baffin Island
A week in, 15 pitches up and two-thirds of the way up the 2,300-foot Beak, the climbers finally reached the headwall—and the rock was still terrifyingly loose. Proper expedition climbing storytelling: remote Arctic walls, gale-force winds, aiders flying around in the storm and the peculiar determination required to keep climbing when the mountain seems to be disintegrating around you.
📖 Long read: https://www.summitjournal.com/blogs/scree/chossrider
The man who built Black Diamond
You can’t tell the history of modern climbing without telling the history of Black Diamond—and you can’t tell the story of Black Diamond without Peter Metcalf. This film traces the life of the company’s co-founder, the vision that shaped one of climbing’s most influential brands, and a period when the people designing the gear were often the same people pushing it to its limits.
🎥 Long watch
Alaska to Patagonia—with 35 summits along the way
23 year-old mountain runner Tobias Renggli is attempting a 40,000-kilometer journey from Alaska to Patagonia by bike—which apparently wasn’t hard enough on its own. His plan is also to climb the highest peak in every one of the 35 countries he passes through, and 171 days into the journey, he’s made it as far as Mexico’s Baja California peninsula.
📖 Long read:
Japan killed 14,000 bears last year
Thirteen people were killed by bears in Japan last year, prompting an extraordinary response: more than 14,000 bears were killed, most of them Asiatic black bears, a species considered vulnerable to extinction. With the government planning another major cull this year, this piece asks a harder question largely missing from coverage of Japan’s bear problem: why haven’t more resources gone toward preventing human-bear conflict before the animals have to be killed?
📖 Long read: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/27/bears-killed-13-people-japan-14000-bears
💥 Stay Stoked. Stay Wild. ❤️🔥 Your StokedAF fam 🤘
One More Thing…
Did you know this little potato is one of the elephant’s closest living relatives? Hyraxes look like rodents, but they share an ancient evolutionary ancestor with elephants and manatees—and once you know that, this video somehow gets even better.