Annie Fast

I don’t know what I thought raising a little skier/snowboarder would be like, but the reality of teaching your kids in the early days is not entirely the idyllic rewarding experience I had imagined. The reality is that the pace is slow and success looks different for a youngster than it does for ourselves. A great day on the slopes isn’t measured by the amount of vertical you log in a day—it’s measured in smiles and fun. This was my biggest takeaway from our five-year old’s les...

The new Outdoor Products Degree at Oregon State University Cascades in the outdoor mecca of Bend, “combines product commercialization, lands stewardship, and experiential learning to educate and inspire future leaders for the opportunities and challenges in the outdoor industry....

The summer of 2021 saw nonstop action on Mt. Hood’s Palmer snowfield ahead of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.

There’s an ebb and flow that happens from baby to toddler to a capable, yet reluctant, five-year-old. But one thing is for sure, getting out on the trails will save your sanity and having the right gear is key.

When we bought our Dodge Ram ProMaster, we didn’t have a great template to follow for the conversion to accommodate our family of three. We had just sold our Four Wheel Pop Up Truck Camper. The camper was amazing, but it just wasn’t working for all our gear and for the stop-and-go style of traveling we were now doing with our then three-year-old in tow.
We started with a new 2019 Ram ProMaster 2500 cargo van with a high roof and 159-inch wheelbase. We opted for this van over the Mercedes Spri...

Kids bikes is a category that has seen so much change in recent years. Bikes are now designed and built for kids as opposed to shrunk down from adult sizes. What that looks like is a much more fun experience for kids and the opportunity to start kids biking at a much younger age.

Sometimes a plan just comes together. That sums up a recent impromptu hike up Mt. Bachelor one sunny Sunday afternoon. Our group consisted of a group of close friends, all longtime Bendites. The idea of hiking up Mt. Bachelor to close out the weekend in late July came though the group chat, and a few hours later, the six of us met up at the West Village base area ready for a chatty hike up the mountain.

Our destination was a remote surf break in Costa Rica. Our packing list was not light and fast, it was more along the lines of heavy and bogged down—but that’s kind of the deal with kids. See what we brought.

Professional mountain biker Carson Storch is a leader in the sport of freeriding. The growth in this sport across Oregon is reflected in the newly abundant lift-accessed freeride trails at mountain resorts, an increase in public freeride trails, freeride-oriented youth camps, and top-tier events on local calendars...

Emily Jackson is a celebrated World Freestyle Kayak Champion with podium finishes across possibly every discipline of kayaking. We caught up with Emily and her family in Cascade, Idaho. The family travels about ten months out of their year in their RV running rivers, attend...

The simplicity of bouldering is almost defined by what you don’t need—no ropes, no knot tying skills, no climbing hardware, and no harness. You don’t even really need a partner. It can just be you, the few simple pieces of gear and the rock. This simplicity is what originally drew world-renowned climber Lonnie Kauk to bouldering.

The history of Oregon skateboarding goes deep. Some would say that it started 30 years ago under the Burnside Bridge with a crew of DIY Portland skateboarders. It was on Halloween night of 1990, when a tight-knit group of friends, seeking a sheltered spot to skate, started unloading bags of concrete and building transitions to skate on the bridge columns. In the process, these skaters spawned a skatepark building boom that continues to this day. The timing was fortuitous as one of the biggest...

Few could have predicted that skateboarding would one day go mainstream. The sport of outsiders, the kids out back in the high school parking lot, the ones who didn’t fit the mold, the Skate and Destroy crowd: their day is here with the impending debut in the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, marking skateboarding’s official rise beyond the fringe of traditional sports. This summer, the best skateboarders in the world will don Nike team uniforms, willingly submit to random drug testing, and follow the rul...

Thor Drake, owner of See See Motorcycles, is a unifier in the disparate world of Northwest motorcycling. Through the last decade he has managed to corral legions of riders together under a common roof ...

A Mother's Day blog for Rad Power Bikes, profiling pro snowboarder Kimmy Fasani and her insights in to the big, bike-friendly world out there just waiting for families to discover.