Search Results for: jess walter

I’VE BEEN WRITING THIS urban outdoors column for about a year now and it is with a heavy heart and a blood alcohol level of .024 that I write this, my last columnfor a while. GROWING UP IN DENMARK, I never dreamed I could be an outdoors writer. When the editors of Out There Monthly

I was just at a swanky party on the top of the Smith Tower in Seattle and I kept getting the dreaded Spokane eye. You’re having a perfectly swell conversation about politics or literature and the Seattleite asks where you’re from and when you tell them, they pretend not to be horrified, but it’s as

This is the kind of story I used to read in the Drama in Real Life section of my grandparents’ Readers Digest-one of those harrowing winter stories in which a group of intrepid adventurers treks out into the wilderness, only to have something go terribly wrong and leave them fighting for their lives. This is

There was six inches of fresh powder over a righteous base and I was seriously shredding-practically cliff-hucking, and that’s when I caught more air than I’d intended and found myself about to go tree-jibbing. So I bailed, dude. I rolled off my sled. Went home and had some cocoa. See, I’m a sledder. I don’t

Lately, people in downtown Spokane have been stopping me on the street to ask how the urban outdoorsperson should vote in this month’s election. “Hey,” the curious voter will often say, “can I have some money to buy a forty or some crystal meth?” “Good question,” I’ll say. “So what you’re really asking is about

I have sort of an embarrassing problem with this month’s urban outdoors column (and I’m not talking about the above illustration which often portrays me wearing suspenders and shorts, like a Von Trapp family singer.) Here’s my problem: I haven’t actually been “outdoors.” Instead, I spent the month in a series of hotels and airplanes,

My brother and I were making preparations for our annual State of the Spokane River Float (this mostly involves getting my brother out of his home-detention ankle bracelet) when a Montana “friend” made a snarky comment about our beloved river. “Do you actually go in that water?” he sniffed, like a French wine snob over

Recently I was challenged by a poet in Lycra bike shorts to write an entire column about bicycling without making fun of the way people look in Lycra bike shorts (which, by the way, I believe should be regulated no less strenuously than, say, automatic handguns-with permits, 5-day waiting periods and restrictions on public display.)

DUE TO A REPORTING ERROR I recently found myself at a public hearing. The topic was Kendall Yards, KY as I affectionately call it, the 77-acre town of Sandpoint that developer Marshall Chesrown plans to gently ram into my neighborhood over the next decade. Like a lot of West Centralites, I’m guardedly optimistic about development