The 500-pound cephalopod’s tentacles stretch out, reaching into every corner across a three-story space.

Normally hidden in remote underwater locations, this brown-and-tan speckled specimen made its home in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood—in a PCC Community Markets to be exact.

An elderly man passes beneath the gargantuan octopus and exclaims, “I’ve never noticed that before!”

Nearby, Kyler Martz laughs. This is his...

Last summer, the bike industry went into a frenzy.

Like someone noticing an open wound they’d been oblivious to, companies were having “oh shit” moments right and left. To me, it seemed as if many were finally realizing how underserved and misrepresented people of color are in outdoor spaces.

The brutal killing of Minneapolis resident George Floyd, a Black man, by former police officer Derek Chauvin struck a nerve even among...

Between April 2019 and April 2020, more than 40 percent of honeybee colonies within the United States died off,

according a survey published by the Bee Informed Partnership. Additionally, that annual loss number has been hovering between 30 and 45 percent for the past decade.

For Bellingham, WA-based beekeeper Michael Jaross, this is a fact he drops relatively nonchalantly as he gives a tour of one of his hive clusters—yet it...

The air is rich with the thick scent of dirt.

Trail-side blackberries accompany beautiful vistas at each stop. The muffled sound of tires cutting turns through deep loam is etched into the mind. A weekend of riding equates to mountain lakes, remote towns and warm nights drinking beer around a campfire with your friends. This is life at its best for a mountain biker. Yet these experiences are something we often take for granted, and...

When the coronavirus pandemic hit Whistler in March 2020, it was like a cross-check to the teeth.

Overnight, the town’s economic lifeblood of destination tourism screeched to a halt, and paychecks disappeared soon after. The ski resort closed two months early. Nonessential businesses were shuttered. Hundreds of people picked up and left. It went from full-on harvest season to ghost town, real quick.

The Canadian government...

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.”—Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It, 1976

Between the banks and along the meanders of the Nooksack River in northwest Washington are endless confluences where snowmelt flows atop lava deposits from historic eruptions on Mount Baker. Braided channels weave together like age-old stories of the Nooksack Indian Tribe and Lummi Nation, carrying centuries of...

Whenever someone asks me where I’m from, my answer, “Darrington, WA,” tends to generate a puzzled look and the response, “Where’s that?”

Nestled against the western slope of the Cascade Mountains, 75 miles north of Seattle, Darrington is a small logging town home to some 1,500 people.

It saw its heyday at the peak of logging in the 1970s and suffered the same fate many industry towns did in the ’80s. Falling timber prices left...

The first surfboard Maddy Marshall ever shaped, he miscalculated the amount of resin needed for the fiberglassing process.

To work around the slight shortage, he opted out of placing a leash plug, which meant when it was finished, there would be no way to connect himself to the board.

“I wasn’t that great of a surfer at the time, so I remember I got my first wave, [then] lost the board and had to swim in to get it,” he says. “...

It’s 1:00 a.m. in November. Gretchen Leggitt’s breath hangs in the cool, dark night like slowly billowing smoke against a black abyss.

Twenty-five feet above the nearly frozen ground, she’s perched upon metal scaffolding and intimately close to a stucco wall. Shadowy figures lurk in the alleyway nearby. She moves methodically against a pre-imagined grid that, when finished, will reveal an astronaut whipping its bike in a wonderland...