Why Adventure is a Form of Art, With Ski Touring Legend John King

Outside Podcast

Wilderness, Sports

4.3 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 29 October 2025

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 1978, skier and kinetic artist John King, along with two pals, set out on a singular and epic adventure: a backcountry ski tour from Durango, Colorado to the Medicine Bow Range near Fort Collins. Over six weeks, the trio skied 490 miles, climbed 65,000 vertical feet. They finished gaunt and sun cooked, with boots held together by tape. Their route influenced the design of the Colorado Trail and the locations of the 10th Mountain Division hut system, but the journey has never been repeated. It’s not an overstatement to call this one of the most audacious wintertime feats of endurance in the history of skiing—a new documentary called Moving Line captures all of that beautifully. And for John King the true triumph was the artistic merit of the pursuit itself. John believes that his tracks on that trip sketched lines that extend into his present day and beyond toward his future. In John’s estimation, movement is creation, expedition is art, and all of it guides him every step of the way.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The Outside Podcast with Patio.
0:11.4	Can you point to a specific experience outdoors that then transformed into a sculpture?
0:18.7	I showed a group of people, a film of looking at this river that's right in front of my
0:24.4	house and then suddenly noticing that there was a rock in the water that was moving upstream.
0:32.4	Really?
0:33.2	Yes, really.
0:34.0	What, it was just stuck in an Eddie line?
0:35.9	No, I made that.
0:37.0	This was a kinetic artwork.
0:40.0	My grandson was upstream about 100 yards with a cable attached to a rock that was about
0:45.7	this big.
0:48.2	And he was pulling it so that it was going underwater.
0:52.3	We're standing and we're looking out into the world and we see the leaves moving
0:57.1	and we see the beautiful colors of everything. But then suddenly we see something moving out there
1:03.8	that has intention that moves in some way as if it was conscious. When it happens, it's so fascinating
1:10.7	that your whole awareness just
1:12.7	goes zooming in to this rock that's under the river. Like, what is it doing? Why is it? Well, if I saw
1:20.0	a rock underwater moving upstream, I would probably sit down for a little bit and drinks and water.
1:25.9	And so my kinetic art would be to do this on a city
1:29.3	park, an invisible rock that no one could figure out ever how it happened. It just was constantly
1:35.6	moving up and down the river course. A sentient rock. It's it. In college, I wanted to be an artist, but I couldn't paint or sculpt or take interesting pictures,
1:49.0	so I became a literature major with a focus on poetry. I started smoking a pipe, joined our lit magazine,
	...

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