With so many iconic outdoors magazines having been sent to the permanent shredder in recent years—Backpacker (2022), Surfer (2020), Transworld Snowboarding (2019), to name a few—it's too easy to be pessimistic about the state of adventure storytelling. "Print is dead!" media harbingers continue to yell. But not everyone is listening, including journalist Michael Levy, who as of today is the editor of Summit Journal, a new biannual print magazine born on the shoulders of legendary climbing rag Summit, which ceased printing in 1996.
The latest in a growing cadre of outdoors editors to revive a once-shuttered but long-beloved title (a la Mountain Gazette), Levy is no stranger to shuttered rags. He worked for several years as an editor at Rock and Ice until Outside Inc. merged it with Climbing in 2021—and then killed it completely in 2022. But where some hear a death knell, Levy sees an opportunity.
With his recent acquisition of the copyrights and trademarks for Summit, a magazine about climbing and mountaineering that ran from 1955 to 1996, he's now the one making the tough decisions. First of all was bringing it back to life as Summit Journal, which will come out twice a year beginning in 2024 as large-format, archival-quality books that will only be available via subscription. Below, we talk with Levy about what else to expect from the new publication, and why he's reviving it.