¿Cómo estái weon?
This week’s StokedAF is heavy on Chile. And I’m not going to say sorry!
I lived in Chile for many years, and it remains one of my favorite places on Earth—a ridiculously long country packed with ocean coastline, huge mountains, glaciers, rivers, granite walls and people who know how to have a good adventure.
So when this week’s haul turned up freeride skiing above Santiago, a crew of kayakers hucking a beautiful waterfall in Araucanía, and a 5.13+ big-wall free ascent in Cochamó, I wasn’t about to leave any of them out just for the sake of geographic balance.
Before the scrolling commences, let me say hi to you all from the White Rim in Canyonlands… I got a special invite last week for a night in erosion’s mansion. ❤️🔥 🤘
Scroll on!
Nico
⛷️ How to ski the Andes
📍 Santiago, Chile
Austrian freerider and Freeride World Tour skier Valentin Rainer shows us how it’s done in the Andes above Santiago, dropping the infamous cliffy sections (Santa Tere) of El Colorado and La Parva, ticking the giant cliff known as La Parva Classic.
La Parva resort was always my favorite place to ski when I lived in Chile, but I never quite had the courage to hit the Classic. This makes me want another shot.
⏱ 5 minutes
🦅 RIP Gabe Reilly
📍 Utah, USA
Utah BASE jumper and Salt Lake City firefighter Gabe Reilly, 27, died this week on a wingsuit jump in the northern Wasatch. A year before, Reilly had posted the exact same jump, making it his first wingsuit BASE jump in the Wasatch. At the end of an epic 2025—becoming a paramedic, graduating from fire department school, flying wingsuits around the West and learning to paraglide and speedfly—he wrote that “2026 is gonna be awesome.”
Tragically, it wasn’t the year he imagined. RIP Gabe, all heart!
Video Credit
⏱ 1 minute
🛶 Los cabros find a monster
📍 Salto del Quino, Araucanía, Chile
This is how good missions start: somebody searches #cascada on Instagram and finds something that looks runnable. The crew first scouted Salto del Quino in 2024, returned in August when it was raging too hard, then finally caught the window on September 26—with the right water, the right crew and just enough fear—to run one of the most beautiful waterfalls they’d found in Chile.
As they put it: ¿Qué mejor que ir a cagarse de miedo con tus mejores amigos? ❤️
⏱ 5 minutes
🧗♀️ Forty-five meters across the roof
📍 Rodellar, Spain
Last year, Ana Belén Argudo became the first woman to climb Gioconda, 9a, a 45-meter endurance monster that cuts through the enormous roof of El Museo in Rodellar. The new film gives us a proper look at the technical kneebars, upside-down movement and ridiculous endurance required to get through one of Spain’s great roof climbs.
⏱ 12 minutes
🚵 25 years of Rampage in 12 minutes
📍 Virgin, Utah
Before Red Bull Rampage celebrates its 25th anniversary, here’s a 12-minute primer on how we got from the wonderfully unhinged experiment of 2001 to what Rampage is today. It traces the evolution of the lines, building techniques and tricks, the riders who pushed the event forward, and how a bunch of people hucking themselves down cliffs in the Utah desert became one of mountain biking’s biggest spectacles.
⏱ 12 minutes
⚡ Bonus News
⚾ Major League Baseball has floated the idea of staging a game inside Grand Teton National Park, with potential sites reportedly examined in the park. People are unimpressed. America’s game should be in stadiums, not national parks!
⛷️ Colorado’s St. Mary’s Glacier—a perennial snowfield rather than a true glacier—has completely melted for the first time on record after an exceptionally dry winter and hot summer. The popular summer skiing spot is now a big pile of rocks.
🥾 A federal worker from Utah went on her dream hike in the Dolomites while collecting over $50,000 in disability payments, claiming her injuries left her unable to walk, climb or perform strenuous activity. Her social media posts landed her in federal court.
🐺 Researchers spent three years surveying roadkill through the heart of North Carolina’s red wolf territory. The data will help identify where wildlife crossings could protect one of the world’s rarest canids—as well as the bears, bobcats, deer and other animals sharing the road with them.
🤖 Investigative journalism exposed how bots game Recreation.gov, snatching up some of the hardest-to-get permits; a month later, N.M. Senator Heinrich cited the reporting while demanding action from the Forest Service. Now, in an unlikely bipartisan plot twist, a Trump executive order has directed the agency to reform its high-demand river lotteries and “prohibit the use of automatic computer entries into the lotteries.”
🧠 Long Reads & Watches
….take your time with these ones…
🚲 Alone in Liberia’s rainforest
Two days without seeing another person and a full day since his armed guide momentarily disappeared with his bike and money bag, Jude Kriwald finds himself deep in Liberia’s Gola rainforest. Alone Across Gola follows his unsupported journey through dense jungle, collapsed bridges and ravines while hauling a 53kg bicycle—a wild story about self-reliance, chasing childhood dreams and what happens when an adventure goes off script.
⏱ 21 minutes
Who gets to belong in the mountains?
Wyoming-based skiers and filmmakers Jr Rodriguez and Vanessa Chavarriaga take on a bigger question than where to find the next powder line: who gets to feel like they belong in ski culture? Follow the two Colombian immigrants as they explore skiing, identity, inclusion and climate change—and what protecting the culture and future of the sport might actually require.
⏱ 14 minutes
🧗 Aid route goes free in Cochamó
When Picaflor was first climbed on Cerro Capicua in 2016, the 1,000m route required aid—but its creators were convinced that one day it would go free. Eight years later, Hayden Jamieson, Jacob Cook and Will Sharp made it happen, freeing all 24 pitches at up to 5.13+ after weeks living and working on the wall, including a seriously cool dyno you’ll want to watch more than once. This 23-minute film tells that story—and since it takes place in Cochamó, one of those places every climber should see before they die, it absolutely belongs in the Main Sends.
⏱ 23 minutes
🏜️ 800 miles, no trail: The Hayduke
There are plenty of thru-hiking videos on YouTube. This is not just another one. Hayduke is exceptionally well told, beautifully shot and genuinely riveting, following four near-strangers into 800 miles of desert and canyon country just as one of the biggest snowpacks in decades begins to melt. This is part 1 of 3, and the kind of adventure film where you finish one episode and immediately want the next.
⏱ 35 minutes
Stoked playlist… the Chilean kayakers put this track on my stereo this week:
(RIP Oliver Tree!)