Steve Casimiro has spent his entire career in outdoor media, and that career reads like a history of the genre itself. He worked at Powder Magazine for eleven years, most of them as editor, during the period when Powder was the most beloved ski publication on Earth. He was the founding editor of Bike Magazine. He helped launch Snowboarder. He served as West Coast editor of National Geographic Adventure for over a decade. When that magazine folded in 2009, Casimiro had already been running a blog on the side called Adventure Journal — a place for the stories that did not fit anywhere else, the ideas that were too personal, too strange, or too slow for the magazines that employed him. That blog became his life's work.
Adventure Journal grew from a one-man blog into a destination for more than 300,000 monthly visitors, and in 2016 Casimiro and his wife Joni — who serves as art director — launched the print edition: Adventure Journal Quarterly, a bookshelf-worthy publication that needs no batteries and no internet connection, will not bug you to check your email, and will not ask you to like it. The writing roster includes some of the most celebrated voices in outdoor literature: Craig Childs, Robert Macfarlane, Terry Tempest Williams, Doug Peacock, Peter Heller, Forest Woodward. The photography is given room to breathe on large, uninterrupted pages. The whole thing is designed to be savoured rather than scrolled.
Casimiro has described himself as idealistic about the power of magazines to change lives. Outdoor adventure, he has said, saved his life, and Powder gave him his focus. That conviction — that a publication about the outdoors can be as serious, as intimate, and as necessary as any other form of journalism — runs through everything Adventure Journal does. The magazine is not a gear guide or a travel brochure. It is an argument for curiosity, motion, and the hunger to explore, made by someone who has spent three decades proving that the stories sparked on chairlift rides, on tailgates after long grinders, and around campfires deep into the night deserve to be written down and kept.
The outdoor boutique magazine market has grown considerably since AJ launched in print, but Casimiro was among the first to bet that a high-quality, advertising-light quarterly could survive on reader loyalty alone. That bet has largely paid off. Independent voices, he has argued, are critically important to truth-telling in outdoor culture — and you are not going to get that from media dependent on affiliate sales. With the closure of Powder, Bike, Snowboarder, and Surfer in recent years, the case for publications like Adventure Journal has only grown stronger.
Explore Adventure Journal at <a href="https://www.adventure-journal.com/" target="\_blank">adventure-journal.com