As part of a four-year renovation project for New York’s Brooklyn Bridge, the Brooklyn Banks–an iconic, urban skate are for “generations of skateboarders, and an increasing number of BMX bikers”–may be closed for years to come.

“Any day now, a new fence will slice the Brooklyn Banks roughly in half, giving construction crews a staging area for trucks and equipment until 2014,” reports John Branch of The New York Times.

Steve Rodriguez, a well known rider and founder of 5Boro, is hoping to maintain access to the Banks for generations to come: “He wonders what all the heavy equipment will do to the smooth brickwork. He wonders if construction will stay on schedule, allowing the entire Banks to reopen in 2014. He wonders if the intervening years will tempt the city to consider another sort of makeover in the plaza.”

photo credit: Melle_Oh

Katie Siber of The New York Times explores the paddling opportunities on the Colorado River above Lee’s Ferry (“sandwiched between Lake Powell and the Grand Canyon” in northern Arizona), where river permits are much easier to come by, the water is flatter, and the couple-day kayaking legs are perfect for beginners.

“One of the remarkable things about the Colorado is that no matter how many people have traveled it and no matter how many have tried to plunder it, from railroad builders to miners and even Hollywood movie crews (parts of “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” “Broken Arrow” and “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle” were filmed here), it retains a palpable sense of wildness.

River trips on peaceful stretches like this invite laziness and lingering, so the next morning we lounged about and sipped coffee, did some cursory yoga and inspected the tracks of ringtails and centipedes circling our tents and the bushes.”

photo credit: Wolfgang Staudt

Fly fishing gutter balls: writer Allen Morris Jones (Last Year’s River) of Big Sky Journal considers the consequences of losing a healthy Shields River brown trout in his short essay The Lost Fish.

“I sling out my first cast, dropping an ugly rubber leg down into the hole. Presented well, the water gives up nothing. I follow the line with my rod, then retrieve. Roll cast back up to the shallow riffle and watch the line float closer to the bank, smooth and slow. Uninterrupted. It’s dusk, no breeze, the stars are aligned. How could I not catch a fish?”

photo credit: carolynconner

From Hawaii and Baja to Tasmania and Western Australia to Easter Island and South Africa, Californian surfers Rusty and Greg Long have made a life out chasing the world’s biggest waves. Kitt Doucette of Men’s Journal spends a few days traveling, surfing, and trying to understand what makes these “big-wave hell men” tick.

“Their styles on the water reflect their personalities, with Greg surfing aggressively and competitively, riding deep in the tube and cutting waves to pieces with powerful carves, and Rusty surfing patiently, smoothly flowing between elegant, relaxed turns. Neither brother, though, is about to let the pursuit of a trophy or title get in the way of their good time. ‘Contests are an important part of big-wave surfing,’ Greg says, ‘but the greatest joy for me comes from leaving the first set of footprints on an isolated beach, paddling out into unknown waters, and being the first to ride a wave somewhere.’”

photo credit: Bengt Nyman

Bay Area sailor, banking heir, and entrepreneur David de Rothschild has built a 60-foot catamaran largely from recycled plastic bottles. In March he decided to sail this environmentally friendly vessel (the Plastiki) across the Pacific to Australia, with the hope of getting people to start thinking more sensibly and critically about our consumptive waste and its long-term impact on the earth and oceans.

Anchored in Christmas Island after 38 continuous days at sea, Jo Royle, the Plastiki’s 30-year-old captain, is interviewed by Sindya Bhanoo of The New York Times about battling the “power of your mind” while at sea, being a woman captain on a boat full of men, and the unique challenges of piloting this vessel:

“The fact that 70 percent of the Plastiki’s buoyancy is created by over 12,000 reclaimed plastic bottles, which lie directly against the flow of water, makes the boat slow and very tricky to maneuver. There were times when you could have been led to believe that we were in fact rowing across the Pacific and not sailing.”

photo credit: Roomic Cube

“The land of little rain”: Eastern California’s Owens Valley is known for rugged country and history, longstanding water wars, and diverse rock climbing opportunities. Vanessa Gregory of The New York Times and her husband spend a few days camping, hiking, and climbing the Alabama Hills near Bishop.

“With a final, clumsy motion, I clipped the rope that was tied to my harness into two carabiners at the route’s end. Now totally safe, I was able to relax, lean back from the anchor and appreciate the surrounding Owens River Gorge. I looked south to the river, shaded by cottonwood trees, coursing down between 300-foot-high walls of volcanic tuff.”

photo credit: Alan Vernon

Rebecca Ruiz of Forbes investigates the starkly beautiful landscapes, natural history, and challenging trail riding opportunities near Fruita, CO.

“Embedded in the valley floor and its cliffs are shark teeth and dinosaur fossils. To the south ordinary-looking hills are a false front for the topography of the majestic Colorado National Monument. Also unseen are the hundreds of miles of mountain bike trails carved into the landscape.”

photo credit: Tim Brink

U.S. freeskiiers Matt Walker and Tom Wallisch embark on a 1,783 mile journey throughout Western Europe, searching for urban skiing opportunities in the United Kingdom and Barcelona, Spain.

Produced by Michael Clarke

The passing in April of the 100-year-old man whose dams plugged up the Colorado and other majestic western rivers suddenly got plenty of attention this week, from sources as different in scope as the High Country News and the Wall Street Journal.

In The New York Times, Douglas Martin quotes Marc Reisner, who in his 1986 book Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water said Mr. Dominy cultivated Congress “as if he were tending prize-winning orchids.”

Here’s Dominy in an interview with Outside magazine in 1999, talking about the push to build Glen Canyon Dam: “‘Of course we covered up some delightful country: country that was inaccessible, country that would never be visited by very many people, which we turned into one of the most beautiful lakes in the world.’”

But our favorite coverage of Dominy’s legacy came yesterday from NPR’s Elizabeth Arnold, whose three-minute podcast includes the surprising reminder that the Sierra Club supported Glen Canyon in return for the bureau passing up on other damming projects.

photo credit: the_tahoe_guy

After months of hospitalization and rehabilitation, Kevin Pearce, Olympic snowboarding hopeful who was critically injured during a December halfpipe accident in a Park City, Utah, has finally returned home to his family in Norwich, VT.

“Pearce walks without assistance, a little gingerly but sturdily enough to navigate the stairs to the familiar bedroom in the barn. He looks a little different now, too. His hair, after being shaved to one length, has grown back to the top of his ears. He wears bold, dark-rimmed Oakley Frogskin frames with prismlike lenses,” reports John Branch of The New York Times.

“‘There is little use thinking about the past, what could have been, or what may be in the future,’ Simon Pearce, his father, said. ‘He has stayed focused on the present moment. And it feels like it is working.’”