Cover nostalgia and a farewell

For the last few years I've worked as an editor and photo editor for the Adventure Cycling Association. It's been a lot of fun, but recently I decided it was time to return to the freelance life. Last week was my last at Adventure Cycling. While I'm looking forward to spending more time outside and on my own stories, I'll miss putting together the publications with the crew over at ACA. As a farewell, here's a ride back through a few more of the covers I had the pleasure of creating (to see my earlier post on covers, go here)...

This is one of my all-time favorite covers from one of my all-time favorite adventure photographers, Cass Gilbert. My jaw dropped when I first saw the original image of Cara Coolbaugh riding a "road" high in the Indian Himalayas, and I was thrilled when it translated perfectly to a cover, even if I hated to crop the larger image. This was taken just over Sach Pass and was the beginning of a two-day, 11,000 foot descent. That, my friends, is epic...

Osprey pack catalog and the Rattlesnake Wilderness

Osprey used one of my images in their latest pack catalog...

Hard to do the beauty of that creekside campsite justice with all the graphics on top of it. Here's another shot from the same spot:

This was one of my favorite trips of last summer — a four-day bike-and-backpacking adventure into the Rattlesnake Wilderness. My then ten-year-old son, Silas, and I rode from our front door, through the outskirts of town, and into the mountains...

Behind the covers

Besides being a freelance outdoor writer/photographer, I work a few days a week for Adventure Cyclist magazine as an editor/photo editor. (Was there full time for a couple years, but a full-time office job, even one as cool as that, was entirely too office-y for an outdoor junkie like me.) So I manage most of the photography for Adventure Cycling and one of my favorite things to do is put together the covers of both Adventure Cyclist and Cyclosource, a gear catalog also published by the Adventure Cycling Association. There are some brilliant photographers out there traveling in remote corners of the planet on bicycles and I love going through their best work to find striking covers that convey the majesty and daring of their journeys.

Here's a look at some of my favorite recent covers and the original shots that birthed them. I often see a cover in a horizontal shot and then crop it to fit. A perfect example of this is the cover of the April issue, which we just sent to the printer (Adventure Cycling members can expect it in their mailboxes in about three weeks). Here's the cover...