Shane McConkey

This is one that I really would have preferred to write while the dude was alive: Shane McConkey, probably the greatest skier of his generation, who was killed in an accident in Italy in March, at age 39, leaving a wife and three-year-old daughter, and lots of very sad friends.

Shane was a guy to whom the usual "daredevil" clichés did not apply. He was just a funny, laid back family guy who liked to jump off cliffs. Yet by all accounts, he was meticulous, and extremely careful, relatively speaking. He'd always be the guy who backed out if conditions weren't right.

And while the stunt he was attempting—a combined ski-wingsuit-BASE jump—certainly sounds crazy, it was also the product of more than a decade of step-by-step progression. From where he stood, it made perfect sense to ski off a cliff, pop off your skis, open up a wingsuit and fly around for a little while, and then throw a parachute. Why not?

Think of it this way: If you're an idiot or just hasty, you die on your 10th BASE jump; he'd survived more than 700. Yet in his POV videos, everytime his chute opens, you hear him let out a relieved "Yeah!" He knew that everything he did was a gamble, and no matter how well he'd massaged the odds, it's hard not to wish that he had quit while he was ahead.

My full feature on Shane and the cult of extreme appears in the July/August Men's Journal—but it's not online yet. For now, "Juke Box Hero" is going to have to suffice:

Crazy for "Crazy For The Storm"

You're going to be seeing a lot of Norm Ollestad this summer--him and his new memoir, Crazy For The Storm, which Ecco Press timed perfectly to come out just before Father's Day. Not only will the author be making the TV rounds, not only does he have an excerpt in Men's Journal, but he's been anointed by Starbucks, which will be selling it in something like 1,500 locations.

The story in brief: In February 1979, 12-year-old Ollestad was in a small plane that crashed into a mountain outside LA, in a blizzard. His father and the pilot were instantly killed; his father's girlfriend would not live long. Young Ollestad, the only survivor, had to get down the steep, icy mountain alone.

The survival part is only half the story; the real hero is Ollestad's dad, a onetime child actor and later FBI whistleblower who "retired" to Topanga Beach in the 1960s, which was everything you might imagine it to have been. Papa Ollestad believed in the "sink or swim" method of child rearing, dragging little Norman on one insanely dangerous adventure after another: big-wave surfing, off-piste skiing in deep powder, a roadtrip down to Mexico that reads like something from "Easy Rider." (Although luckily, the policeman's bullet bounced off Adventure Dad's guitar.)

If he tried to pull this stuff now (as I write in my Washington Post review), he would certainly be "pilloried by the Alpha Mommy Brigade and lose hope of ever visiting his beloved only son." But his intense parenting style (shall we say) also helped young Norman outlive him on that mountain, barely an hour from Beverly Hills.

Coming soon: the movie. Gnash teeth, envious writers; everyone else, go read it.

The Flying Man

Just closed a big piece on this guy: Shane McConkey, the singular skier who died ski-BASE-jumping in Italy this spring. Basically, he was doing what you see him doing here, but with one extra element thrown in: Before he pulled his parachute, he planned to fly around in a wingsuit, like a human flying squirrel. 

It was a stunt too far, and when his skis failed to release as planned, the whole thing went awry. And of course, a certain number of people on the internet decided that they needed to tell everyone else how stupid Shane was, what an idiot, irresponsible, how could he have left his wife and daughter, etc. But I wonder: Did they think that when they watched his videos and went, "oooh"? 

I particularly like this clip, from Mark Obenhaus's superb 2007 documentary, "Steep" — I've watched it over and over, noting every detail. I love the way he just seems to will himself off the ground, moving effortlessly from skiing to airborne front flip. But my favorite moment is when he jettisons his ski poles just before he goes off the edge. It's a gesture of total commitment, abandoning himself to flight, the pursuit of his own kind of beauty.

Was he "crazy," as the couch critics would have it?

Maybe. Crazy like an artist, I'd say.