1KHO 830: Is the Adventure Worth It? | Devon O'Neil, The Way Out

**Ginny Yurich** (0:00)
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Welcome to The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast. My name is Ginny Yurich, I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside, and I have just read a page turner of a book and also been exposed to a different kind of writing that I wasn't, I didn't really know existed, which is about adventure and sometimes when adventure goes wrong and in the heightened emotions and these incredible athletes and how they survive. And so it's just been a fantastic read. This book I read is called The Way Out, a true story of survival in the heart of the Rockies. It is up for an award, the Reading the West Award. This is a true story of survival in the heart of the Rockies. Author of this book and an incredible amount of articles, Devon O'Neil, welcome.

**Devon O'Neil** (2:00)
Thanks so much for having me Ginny. It's a pleasure.

**Ginny Yurich** (2:02)
Okay. So you're going to have to give us a story here on how you got interested in writing all of these types of articles. So the book is a survival story, a survival story about backcountry skiing, which I didn't know much about and I learned about in your book in Colorado. But like a town, like everyone's known of a herd of male, but this is in a town called Salida. And then, okay, I knew I was going to say it wrong. So Salida.
But then you have all sorts of articles that you've written over the years. Like I read one about a girl named, I think Danielle.

**Devon O'Neil** (2:34)
Danielle Balanji, yeah.

**Ginny Yurich** (2:35)
Danielle. So I read that one that was on your website, Devon oneil.com. How did you get interested in writing about these types of situations?

**Devon O'Neil** (2:46)
You know, kind of by happenstance is always how it occurs. But I had gone to college in Vermont and played a couple of sports in college and got out here with my twin brother. We stopped in Breckenridge, Colorado for one night in 2002 And it's now been 24 years. I've never left. I just fell in love with it. We grew up on a sailboat in the Virgin Islands and our grandfather was in the 10th Mountain Division, which was the World War Two ski troopers. And they trained in Colorado in the heart of the Rockies, as it were. And, you know, he died before we were born, so we never got to meet him.
But he helped to pioneer this life, this mountain life, and we just fell in love with it when we stopped here and got exposed to it. And so I live at 10,200 feet and I started, I started writing for the local newspaper because I wanted to stay involved with sports somehow, but also use my brain in a way that was, you know, more than just playing those sports. And so I started writing for the local newspaper, which was a daily for free at first, and then they paid me $25 per story. And then I became the sports editor of that paper eventually, as well as another paper, and really just, just kind of like soaked it all in. How do you do it? How do you report? I mean, I distinctly remember the first story I ever wrote was about a JV girls basketball game and my knees were shaking. Here I am, this 22 year old college athlete, fresh out of college, and I'm shaking talking to a 15 year old girl about her jump shot. But it made me realize that I love the intellectual draw of writing about this stuff and sports. And it's broadened into now all kinds of stuff that's far beyond just sports writing. But that became the entry point. And I later became a staff writer for espn.com, covering adventure sports and Olympic sports and X Games stuff. And then kind of gravitated toward Outside Magazine, was a long time correspondent for them as well. And there are just these topics here. I mean, it's really cool. We get world class sports coming to the mountain towns around where I live, World Cup ski racing, all that kind of stuff.