It’s a dreary winter afternoon in Huron, South Dakota. Standing in his safety gear — hard hat, coveralls, harness — mechanic John Tapken is ready to get back to work on trains. It’s a few hours past lunchtime, but the day is far ...
Features
Inside the Fitness Cult of Gym Jones
On the south side of Bloomington, Illinois, in a warehouse next to an empty golf cart dealership, a small tribe of men and women prep to suffer. Over the sink in the restroom where I’m hiding hangs a 1st Ranger Battalion flag. ...
‘You’re Saving Lives With This’ — How a Hunting Trip for Veterans Could Be a National Model for Better Health
This article was originally published on Dec. 6, 2020, on Coffee or Die Magazine. Steve Houghton’s rugged face shone orange in the firelight as he pulled in a deep breath of the frigid Montana backcountry air and shifted in his ...
Who the Fuck Is Tim Montana?
It’s about a quarter past 11 on a drizzly July morning in Butte, Alaska, when Tim Montana and his entourage roll into the dirt courtyard of Jeff Heard’s property and pour out of an SUV for a day of four-wheeling in the Alaskan ...
When an Archery Pronghorn Hunt Goes Wrong
Sitting in the cab of Miles Fedinec’s pickup, beside a dirt road on a high sage flat in western Colorado, I can see through binoculars a pronghorn buck. He’s a half-mile away, standing in the 94-degree heat, and my arrow is pinned ...
Smagical Thinking: The Life and (Near) Death of Phil Smage
Sweat dripping down his face, Phil Smage sat on his Kawasaki KLX 110 pit bike at the starting line of the first-ever Pastranaland Pit Bike Championship. Nine national-level motocross competitors were beside him — all gunning for ...
A Trial by Fire in the Antarctic Ice Marathon
I passed the threshold of the aircraft door and the cold cut through my piled-on layers of down and fleece in a flash. The cold went straight to my bones, and the primitive, reptilian part of my brain spoke, informing me that this ...
Fishing the Frank: A Fly-in, Fly-Fishing Adventure in Idaho’s Largest Wilderness
There is a rattlesnake somewhere near my left boot. I can hear it, but I can’t see it. My dad is sitting on the ground 10 yards away with his back against a log, holding a sandwich in one hand and pointing frantically with the ...
How Two Special Operations Veterans Found Each Other — and Healing — in the Himalayas
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars, And say “These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.” After I left the military in 2011, I wandered for months, crisscrossing India and Nepal. I studied Buddhism in the misty ...
The Untold True Story of How Black Rifle Coffee Got Its Start
Evan Hafer, the founder and CEO of Black Rifle Coffee Company, was suspicious. He was holding staff meetings every two days, being told that their in-house fulfillment center was only a few shipments behind, and yet customer ...
8 Questions with Former Operator Kyle Lamb
Kyle Lamb has lived a life most couldn’t even dream of. He grew up in a small town in South Dakota, but by the age of 24 he had been selected into the most elite special operations unit in the military. He went on to serve in “The Unit” for the next ...
Surviving Pastranaland: A Day in the Life of America’s Premier Daredevil
It’s not that the backyard pool was remarkable in and of itself. Rather, it was the people swimming in it. Most of them had visible scars, some of them had fresh wounds that would eventually turn into scars, and one was even ...
