Backcountry Magazine The Wild Issue | #159 Back Issue

If you’ve read Maurice Sendak’s award-winning children’s book Where the Wild Things Are, you know his fantasy land isn’t a snow-covered mountain. It’s an island in the ocean with palm trees and furry beasts—an imaginative depiction of a young boy named Max struggling to grapple with his emotions after being sent to bed without dinner.

Our wild things look a little different. Windy ridgelines; snowy spines; rocky spires; chilling seracs. A concrete, wild reality. But one that is still rich with emotions to be grappled with. The joy from a long, hard day in the mountains; the dedication to an ethical first descent; the disappointment of being skunked; and the confusion of knowing you’re risking your life to ski the highest peaks.

While there’s a little bit of wild in every issue of Backcountry Magazine, No. 159 is all about the wild things. Lesser-known ranges, unforecasted zones and unique objectives—or ways of achieving them. It’s Norway’s northern lights and New Zealand’s high peaks; a Colombian first descent and reflections on the ethics of achieving it; a fruitless trip to Chile’s Cajon del Maipo; a first winter in Alaska’s fickle Chugach Front Range; and the spirit imbued into America’s penultimate frontier, the jagged, glaciated North Cascades.

The crisp quiet of a pre-dawn skintrack is peeking around the corner and that means the wilds things are too, wherever you plan to seek them. Once the wood is stacked, find a seat, flip a page and let us take you where the wild things are.