Inside the New Mountain Gazette Anthology That Covers Decades of History

The archives of the Mountain Gazette, an offbeat outdoor magazine born in 1966, are kept in a cave. To access them, you need a secret code and sunglasses (there’s a retina scanner).

Or, at least, that’s what Mountain Gazette’s owner and editor, Mike Rogge, recently told me. He was joking, naturally.

In truth, after Rogge bought and resurrected the magazine about five years ago, the archives migrated to his garage before moving to the Mountain Gazette office in King’s Beach, near Lake Tahoe. Soon, they’ll live at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, where they’ll be available to the public. 

Those storied archives are also the source of a forthcoming book, Print Ain’t Dead: A Mountain Gazette Anthology. Reader interest spurred the idea. When Rogge took over Mountain Gazette, he began hearing from fans. Maybe their uncle had written a story for the magazine back in the ‘60s, or their mom was a former contributor. For Rogge, those experiences affirmed two things.

One, Mountain Gazette had an outsized legacy. Two, no one had catalogued it in one place. He aimed to change the latter with Print Ain’t Dead.

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In creating the anthology, Rogge had plenty of interesting material to choose from.

Mountain Gazette has long been a place that published unique (and sometimes irreverent) stories that no other outlets would consider. Once, in a send-up of the listicles you might find elsewhere, the magazine chronicled the best mountain towns to get your ass kicked in.

It’s housed oddballs and literary heavyweights, like Hunter S. Thompson and Edward Abbey, who both appear in the 500-plus-page anthology. They’re joined in Print Ain’t Dead by writers who’ve worked for the magazine since its revival. 

Rogge believes those modern voices deserve a place in the pantheon of great Mountain Gazette contributors. “I don’t think we need to look for the next Royal Robbins,” he said, referencing the pioneering climber and author of Advanced Rockcraft. Rogge pointed to who Mountain Gazette now enlists, like investigative journalist Ari Schneider or professional snowboarder Jeremy Jones, adding, “What I found is that they can actually stand on level ground” with their predecessors.

Print Ain’t Dead, then, melds the past and present. 

Leafing through the Mountain Gazette archives, Rogge found moments from bygone decades “cast in amber,” as he put it, that captured how life in mountain towns has changed and how it’s stayed the same. Enduring through-lines surfaced, like the friction between locals and tourists, or skiers and resorts.

All of it was surrounded by the counterculture twang that Mountain Gazette is known for. There were “a lot of free spirits, a lot of left of center thinking, a lot of outside the box thinking,” explained Rogge.

As far as the stories that made it into the anthology, Rogge said they’re the ones that readers told him they loved or cherished the most.

Skiers, specifically, have plenty to look forward to (Rogge, a former managing editor at POWDER, is one himself).

Print Ain’t Dead contains an original from the Jaded Local series, the wry culture column shared between Mountain Gazette and POWDER. One story is called How To Be a Skier. Henrik Harlaut, the influential, baggy-outerwear-clad skier who helped shape how modern freestyle looks and feels, also penned a reflection on the sport.

Rogge accurately noted, however, that skiers are about more than going up the mountain, going down the mountain, and going to the bar for après. They “like art, they like music, they like literature,” he said.

One such example from Print Ain’t Dead is the work of the professional skier Ingrid Backstrom, who wrote about one of her heroes, Arlene Blum, a mountaineer and environmental health scientist. Other topics outside skiing include fly fishing, drinking, mountaineering, and NEOWISE—the comet that blazed close to Earth during the pandemic—to name only a few.

All told, it’s an eclectic document of an eclectic magazine. Entrance thankfully doesn’t require a cave, code, or retina scanner. Instead, you’ll pay $45 for Print Ain’t Dead.

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