Melissa Arnot Reid’s mountaineering resume is a jaw dropping list of accomplishments; hundreds of summits of the world’s tallest, most dangerous peaks, including becoming the first American woman to summit Everest without supplemental oxygen. Melissa has an uncommon athletic prowess, but what truly fueled her mountain pursuits was a long held and long protected emotional emptiness. In a gut-wrenching new memoir, Enough, Melissa details the childhood abuse that created harmful adult behaviors, like pushing her body to dangerous physical limits and pushing her psyche into abusive relationships. Both her trauma and her mountaineering accomplishments are singular, but everyone can understand the challenge of grappling with your parents and your past.

In and around his home of Bozeman, Montana, Ranga Perera is highly sought after as a fly fishing pal and even more highly sought after as a personal chef. There’s nothing unusual about that combination, until you learn that his family came to the States in 1991 from Sri Lanka after a happy childhood was disrupted by a violent civil war. Less than a year after emigrating, Ranga’s father passed away and the event haunted him until his own brush with death years later. And yet Ranga lives life without a trace of cynicism or resentment, but rather with childlike wonder and excitement. How does he do it? Through fishing and cooking.

Everyone knows it’s important to try new things, but combating that internal voice, which begs us to stay within our comfort zone ain’t easy—even for a professional tryer of new things like Mirna Valerio. Known on the internet as The Mirnavator, Mirna knows what she’s talking about. She took up running in her late 30s, then road marathons, then trail marathons, then ultramarathons. Then she took up cycling. Then mountain biking. And, as she rounds in on 50, Mirna is committed to be coming an expert skier. And every step of the way, Mirna has faced the internal voice, and the external voices of internet trolls who find fault in how she does it and who she is. How Mirna learned to deal with these voices is a lot more interesting than simply silencing them, and it’s a good bit of inspiration for anyone looking to expand their experiences outside.

You probably know Katie Burrell from Instagram, where she’s built a sizeable following by skewering outdoor stereotypes and having World Cup race ski-sharp takes on how relationships live and die on trails of all sorts. But she’s also a seasoned standup comedian who wrote and starred in 2023’s homage to 80s ski comedies, “Weak Layers,” all of which is why you’ll find her at the Outside Festival’s Ideas stage, talking all things funny outdoors. So you’d think talking with her would be a nonstop train of giggles, but Katie takes her craft pretty seriously, as evidenced by her latest leap: starring in the dramatic short film “Bardo”. This kind of range requires a lot of emotional intelligence, and it turns out there’s no better place to develop that than on skis and mountain bikes.

Minnesota is not always top of mind when it comes to outdoor adventure, but it should be. Just ask lifelong “Land of 10,000 Lakes” local Dave Simonett, lead singer of Trampled By Turtles. Dave grew up in Mankato and spent his youth exploring its rolling woods. And when he formed Trampled in Duluth in 2003, something surprising happened. His love of fishing, hiking, skiing, and hunting combined with his musical influences to create a songwriting career based on a deep connection to the outdoors. And today, when Dave isn’t headlining hootenannys like The Outside Festival, he works diligently to protect beloved Minnesotan locales, like the Boundary Waters. Turns out, Minnesota’s woods and water are as integral to Dave’s life and music as a guitar pick.

Ben Ayers has devoted his life to the Himalaya. If that conjures images in your mind of stone-faced mountaineers risking life and limb in pursuit of glory on the world’s highest peaks, you’ve got the wrong guy. Ben knows those guys and gals, but his experiences in these mountains are decidedly more down to Earth. In fact, despite living half the year in Kathmandu for decades, he’s never even tried to climb the world’s most famous peak. And it’s the ideas and insights he’s gathered exploring the region’s lesser known (and safer) mountains, while paying careful attention Everest’s impact on his adopted community, that make Ben such an interesting guy to talk to—that, and the fact that he’ll be reporting for Outside from Everest Base Camp throughout what promises to be one of the most eventful climbing seasons in recent memory.

We all do it, zip as fast as we can around our favorite trails and rides. Maybe it’s because we feel a pull to get to the next thing, want to rush through the hard part to get to the fun part, or only have a brief window in our overbooked day. Whatever the reason, moving fast often results in missing out on the moment. But what would our time outside feel like if we adopted a slow, measured movement? Skier and scientist Ellen Bradly loves answering this question. Inspired by research in the Hoh Rain Forest on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, Ellen adopted a mentality for her adventures that prioritizes a deep attention to the details of her surroundings. And what started as a way to appreciate the beauty around her evolved into an ability to learn and hear things that her Indigenous ancestors were trying to teach her. Sometimes, the best way home isn’t necessarily the fastest one.

Culture is a term that different outdoor communities like to discuss often, but what is culture exactly and how do we make sense of it—how do we define it? To really understand it, you need a person who can wax poetic, you need someone who has dedicated their life to communicating the ineffable to the masses…you know, someone who has held a mic in front of a camera at the world class skiing, snowboarding, and surfing events for decades and who has lived in the gooey buzzing center of our culture since the 1990s. You need a legendary talker like X Games Chief of Sports and Culture, Selema Masekela. 

Mikah Meyer is a persistently-filled-with-joy endurance athlete and the first person to visit all 419 National Parks sites in one continuous three year road trip. But before he was making headlines, Mikah was just a kid growing up in Middle America with a secret he thought was a death sentence. When the stories we tell ourselves become our reality, and we drag shame through that reality like an anchor, life can seem too heavy to bear. So how did Mikah Meyer free himself from that burden to live life to the fullest? He went on a river trip with his friends and his mentor.

Mostly, professional athletes are…kind of boring. Not because they’re fundamentally uninteresting. Rather, they’re too polished and are trained to spout canned and cliched nothing burger answers. But not professional snowboarder Kimmy Fasani. Kimmy has a remarkable way of distilling her snowboarding adventures into lessons she uses to navigate challenges in life we all face, like becoming a parent and dealing with loss, And she even manages to draw from her experiences in the mountains to grapple with things we hopefully never face, like Stage 3 cancer. Have you ever yearned to hear a pro athlete say something that’ll be useful in your own life? Just press play.