Keen Vail Kids Adventure Race

Team Fire Monkeys, not in matching shirts but ready to roll at the Keen 2012 Vail Kids Adventure Race.

Adventure racing requires teamwork. What happens when serial squabblers (kids, that is) compete? My children bicker incessantly over the most inane things. Who goes first at piano lessons. Who gets the blue water bottle. They argue over cupcakes, radio stations, pizza slices, hunks of watermelon, stuffies, lacrosse pads, and ski [...]

Mountain Bikus Interruptus

Back on the  bike.

  I have a burly dual-suspension Proflex mountain bike that dates from the late 1990s. Amazingly, I now see this bike characterized on the Internet as “vintage.” Mine is in mint condition. In the first few years I owned the beast (the bike weighs about 7 million pounds), I did [...]

Nature Detectives on Wheels

A nature detective on the case at Pella Crossing.

This summer, after a decade-long hiatus from mountain biking—and when I say mountain biking, I mean the blood-on-your-knees, dirt-in-your-teeth  variety—I was thrilled to find myself navigating roots and rocks and whoop-de-doos on a dirt trail with my two boys, ages 8 and 11. Until this point, my kids hadn’t done [...]