Higher! Faster! Stranger!

"Golf." Please keep this word in mind. Golf. As you consider the collection of pastimes described here, words such as "ridiculous" or "stupid" may pop to your lips. If so, cast your thoughts back to golf, the game for which Tiger Woods was paid $15 million in 1999.

Ridiculous, did you say? Keep golf in mind and all this will make perfect sense.

If not – if you still regard these sports as the pointless pastimes of geeks and freaks – there is one other handy phrase that should eliminate any sense of superiority: "Watching TV."

Bouldering:
Getting on top of life's little problems.

Liars will argue that bouldering isn’t proudly bizarre. To confirm the obvious, consider one famous bouldering challenge: Cradle Rock in New Hampshire. The rock is about the height of an elkhound and resembles a giant Easter egg laid on its side.

To climb it – or, rather, boulder it – you approach, lie down on your back, and scootch your butt up against the base as though engaging in some kind of forbidden embrace. With hands and feet on tiny holds, you pull your backside 2 inches off the ground, climb the underside of the rock, then inch up over the lip to the top.

Climbing Cradle Rock takes the brawn of an Olympic gymnast and the brains of – to be kind – an artist. It is the essence of bouldering, itself a sport described as "the distilled essence of climbing."

Modern rock climbers, the ones you see in deodorant ads, pursue a numbers game on a graded scale from 5.0 to a current maximum of 5.14d (a-to-d subgrades begin at 5.10). Success depends on commitment, genetics and sponsorship by fashionable activewear companies. Today’s hardest routes are usually short and require the appalling strength of a yogic contortionist. Only the climbing rope ties the sport to its roots in lengthy slogs up high mountains. Bouldering does away with this last reminder.

Here’s what you need to go bouldering: imagination. You don’t even need a boulder. You can make do with a brick-and-mortar building, a climbing-gym wall, an abandoned warehouse or a 1969 VW van – anywhere that you can dream up a short, hard route from A to B.

Bouldering is about the pursuit of physical puzzles, and if you want to give it a go, you need nothing more than muscle and bone. Most people also prefer to wear clothes, as well as sticky rubber climbing shoes. They also carry a bagful of gymnast’s chalk to keep their hands dry. And most bring along friends to cheer, jeer and help catch plunging bodies.

Though the action is low to the ground, bouldering deaths are not unheard of. Blow off without a spotter while cranking a move off the index finger of your left hand, and – boom! – headfirst into the turf.

Peter Michaux sums up the situation: "Hey, bouldering is climbing without a rope."

Michaux, the author of two bouldering guidebooks, switched to the low road after a fall during a roped climb left him unconscious and spitting up blood. More importantly, though, Michaux finds in bouldering the reason he started climbing in the first place.

"I like the feel," he explains. "It’s the physical part of climbing without all the clutter and nuisance of the gear."

In Michigan, would-be boulderers should visit Grand Ledge, a roped climbing and bouldering area near Lansing. It has been described as "the only natural vertical relief in lower Michigan." Since information about the best bouldering areas is often kept fairly secret, you could also seek insider information and potential climbing partners at Ann Arbor or Pontiac’s Planet Rock Climbing Gym (planet-rock.com).

The boulders of Grand Ledge don’t look like much, but then, neither does Red Cross Rock, a lump of quartzite in Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park. In 1959, a fellow named John Gill lunged his way up the rock’s steepest face and founded bouldering as a sport. Forty years later, I approached the Gill route with the confidence that it would be a walk-up by today’s standards.

I never got more than 4 inches off the ground. The 10-foot "summit" seemed as distant as Mount Everest. I imagine the sneers in the climbers’ campground as Gill toiled to climb a bump of stone beneath mountains whose shadows pierce miles into the Wyoming plains. I imagine him finally twisting up to a dime-size hold and making the one-armed pull-up to the top.

Gill was a quiet man. Good thing. Who’d have believed he had just climbed the hardest route in the world?

Mountain boarding:
Soil sampling made easy.

I was one of the first in my hometown to buy a mountain bike, which made me pretty cool – in retrospect. At the time, it meant a few years’ worth of taunting for my "clown bike." The really cool kids had skateboards.

Torn by this harsh reality, I used to sketch pictures of myself on an imaginary hybrid: A fat-tire skateboard with foot loops.

If only I’d grabbed the patent. The board I drew is the spitting image of, say, the "Razor" model from Mountainboard Sports, which retails for $550. I’d be rich! Rich!

Or so I thought until I spoke to Jason Lee, all-terrain boarding’s original pioneer and three-time world champion. Lee built the first mountain board around 1992, and co-founded Mountainboard Sports in Colorado Springs, Colo., the year after.

Seven years later, he reports that snowboarders are his biggest market, yet just 2 percent of them own a dirtboard.

"Ninety percent will probably own one in the next 10 years," he says firmly. Nothing in his voice betrays any fear that mountain boards will go the way of early ‘80s "grass skis" – now the kind of kitsch collectible people wrestle for on eBay.

The fate of fringe sports is always hard to predict. Mountain biking looked stupid at first, and snowboarding went nowhere until such technological breakthroughs as baggy, drooping ski pants reeled in a whole generation. The two are now the biggest outdoor sports success stories of the last decade, but their love child, mountain boarding, is still learning to stand on its own two feet.

That’s getting easier, thanks to advances such as independent suspension, click-in bindings and cable handbrakes. DIY types are still jury-rigging fat wheels to street decks, but only the specialized boards look convincingly ready to drop a cobblestone gully or root-choked switchback.

"The ideal place to ride is an open grass hill," says Lee.

For sweet spots in Michigan, mountainboard.com suggests Five Mile Hill in Grand Haven, or Kensington Metropark in Milford.

Not bad, but it’s Utah’s slickrock country that puts a tweak in Lee’s voice: "Moab is just a mecca of riding."

Moab is a sandstone landscape designed by an astral child with a cosmic Spirograph. It swoops and slides, arcs and rolls. Mountain bikers converge here, and now dirtboarders, too, are clicking into bindings in search of big air, steep drops, smooth carves and broken tailbones.

Is it a dangerous sport? Of course. Ski hills are cautiously accepting mountain boarding, ever wary of the fine line between liberty and litigation. Lee emphasizes the importance of body armor, and admits most boarders are in the quick-healing 16-to-26 age group.

Nonetheless, Lee himself is dropping cliffs at age 31, and notes that snowboarders of all ages have the same reaction when the mountain boards appear in spring: They, too, want to eat dirt.

"They realize they still want to carve from April through October," says Lee. "It’s hard to keep it a secret."

Tree climbing:
Hug a tree, respect it in the morning.

"Treeman."

Peter Jenkins answers his phone, and within minutes his Georgia drawl has pulled you into his arboreal world, until suddenly you are celebrating things you’ve never even experienced.

"Climbing in the evening when all the fireflies are out ... it is just incredible." (Yeah!)

"In the summer, when the cicadas are singing? Amazing." (Yeah!)

"When the katydids are out? Incredible, just beautiful." (Oh, yeah!)

It dawns on you that maybe, just maybe, Jenkins isn’t stretching when he says he has introduced more than 10,000 people to the pleasures of recreational tree climbing.

Jenkins is an arborist, storyteller, self-declared founding father of recreational tree-climbing, and Great American Eccentric. His passion for trees is so broad that, even by phone from 1,000 miles away, he can fill you with longings most of us haven’t felt since childhood.

Tree climbing has come a long way since you last scrambled barefoot under mom’s watchful eye. She wouldn’t let you do anything worse than Class 1 – low, with a ladder of branches. Certainly nothing like Widowmaker 185 Class 5a.10-P3 TB III. But we’ll come back to that.

A typical modern tree climb begins with a weighted throw bag tied to a light line. A capable hand can launch the bag 70 feet up and over a branch, then lower it back to ground. A heavier rope with little stretch – a caving rope or arborists’ rope, for example – is then tied to the light line and pulled over the high limb. (For more distant branches, the light line might be launched by sling, bow, or even line-gun.)

With the rope set in the tree, a climber can then attach to it mechanical ascenders for the hands, which are attached to loops for the feet – one of several popular methods of climbing.

The climbing process itself is like a series of pull-ups aided by the legs. It’s a brisk but not excruciating workout, and you can rest at any time with full weight on the rope.

It can get more complex. There are techniques to climb leaning trees, to cross from tree to tree, to set up camp. You might climb a rope, then make some hard reaches from branch to branch.

Which brings us back to the (fictional) tree named Widowmaker. By its grade, you’ll know it is 185 feet tall, near the limits of difficulty on a scale from Class 1 to 6, and requires ascenders, rock-climbing skills at a 5.10 level, three rope-settings using a throw bag, and eight hours to climb.

All this, and Jenkins says tree climbing isn’t about conquest. "You can make it extreme," he admits. "It has the potential for that, but it just doesn’t attract that sort of person." One reason is the fact that climbers rarely go to the tops of trees. The action is lower down. You might "tree surf" on a windy day, or balance on branches to reach distant "touch points."

More likely, says Jenkins, you will find yourself growing quiet and reflective. "There’s an atmosphere in the high canopy," he says. His voice drops to a ghost-story whisper. "It’s like you’re inside a living thing. People talk to the trees. Some people feel that the trees talk to them."

Some trees are surely saying, "See a therapist."

But Jenkins says tree climbing can have a profound effect on the way people feel about the natural world. It’s no coincidence that many environmentalists come down from protest tree-sits with an even deeper commitment, Jenkins says.

"The more they climb a tree and they get personal contact with a tree, the more related they get to the tree. It is no longer just ‘a thing.’"

Two years ago, I joined a team that was exploring the trees of the Walbran Valley, in British Columbia’s coastal rainforest. The day’s goal was an immense cedar, 50 feet around and nine stories tall, every inch teeming with life.

A canopy biologist raised the question: Is the tree worthless, or priceless? To a timber company, it’s worthless. The tree has been around for 1,000 years, and its core is hollow and rotten. A logging crew would simply knock it down to shatter and grow pale.

I don’t bother to put the question to Jenkins. We’re near the end of our conversation, and he’s describing the delights of trees covered with a light sheen of ice.

"When the sun comes out, it’s like climbing a glass tree. It starts to make this crinkling sound. Gorgeous. Incredible! Oh, man!"

For more, check out treeclimbing.com, the Web site of Tree Climbers International.

Striding:
Great views of impending health hazards.

Like bacteria, sports divide and subdivide. New strains emerge. Kayaking begets whitewater kayaking begets extreme kayaking and so on.

Eventually, mutants emerge. Mutants such as "striding."

"You’re talking about a branch of a branch of a branch," says Tom Bie, managing editor of Paddler magazine.

Striding is whitewater kayaking while standing up. Its leading proponent is Jeff Snyder of Accident, Md. (that’s right), who began striding, he says, "to lower the ante on the risks I was taking."

If that sounds like arrogance, think again. Snyder is best known as a pioneer of the extreme kayaking movement that has opened up some of the world’s steepest and most violent rapids.

In its most photogenic form, extreme boating involves big drops – paddlers are approaching the 100-foot mark. It’s intense, potentially deadly stuff. Snyder started striding to take some of the heat off.

"I’m always doing this stuff that leaves myself vulnerable, and I wanted to go back to the kind of fun I was having when I was learning," he says. "Starting out all over again is what it’s all about."

The epiphany came, he says, during a paddling trip to Mexico in the early ‘90s. Snyder saw a little girl standing in a dugout canoe as she paddled down the river. "I thought, ‘Shit, that’s not only beautiful, it’s functional.’"

Today, Snyder’s preferred "dugout" is an open, inflatable kayak. He can wedge his feet under the thwart (a center cross-tube), grab his helmet and 12-foot paddle, and run a 25-foot waterfall.

Yes, Snyder has returned to his old tricks. He spends most of his time striding these days, and while it might appear absurdly hard or entirely stupid, he says the key words are "easy" and "fun."

Bie isn’t so sure. A strong paddler in his own right, he sees only one real advantage to striding: "You can definitely see better ... but some of these big falls, you don’t want to see better."

As a sit-down paddler, Bie says the most impressive thing striders do is not the waterfalls, but the roll (you probably know it by the outdated moniker "Eskimo roll"). Seeing someone flip from a standing position and roll right back up to standing ... well, words fail even the aquatic wordsmith.

How many people are striding regularly? By Snyder’s estimate, a dozen. But soon, surely, it will be a baker’s dozen, and so on.

Snyder points to the history of squirt boating, a now-popular kayaking sideshow involving boats which, among other things, can be paddled underwater.

"It’s sort of like squirt boating was 10 years ago," says Snyder. "After they’ve seen that you haven’t killed yourself after a while, people say, ‘Damn, I’ve gotta try that!’"

J.B. MacKinnon is a freelance writer with no time to watch TV.