highlights

Susan has worked full-time as a freelance writer since 1992. More than 200 of her feature articles have been published in periodicals ranging from In Style to Outside and from the L.A. Weekly to SKI. Here are a few highlights.

> Scroll to the right to see the full array of articles in this portfolio.

For complete text, please click on the article you'd like to read. For more samples of Susan's published work, click on the topic-specific portfolios listed in the menu above.

 
 
The Heart of the Matterhorn

SKI Magazine
March/April 2005
 
Snowy Days Starry Nights

SKI Magazine
December 2003
 
King of the Mountain

SKI Magazine
October 2002
 
Marion Jones: "There Is Nothing Stopping Me…Except Me"

Sports Illustrated WOMEN
September 2002
 
Watch Your Step

Vegetarian Times
April 2002
 
Tara Dakides: So Smooth

Sports Illustrated WOMEN
November 2001
 
Parallel Universe: Lost In Space

Skiing
February 2001
 
Ursus Major

Outside
August 2000
 
California Dreamin': Surf Camp

Adventure Journal
October 1997
 
Kate Mulgrew's Life on Earth

Redbook
April 1996
 
James Woods: Something Old, Something New

In Style
November 1994
 
Ma Bell's Kids Go to Hollywood

L.A. Weekly
July 15, 1994
 
 
The Matterhorn fills the sky, its famed pyramid silhouette, with its hooked crook and jagged edges, plain as day. Otherwise, the approach to Zermatt's renowned Chez Vrony does not seem all that promising. …
 
It's a powder day on Aspen Mountain, and the rumor making unhurried laps around the gondola like an Ajax regular is that comedian Mike Myers will be dressing up as an Aspen instructor today to ham it up on camera. "Silly is good," Myers later tells a delighted sold-out house…

 
It's a snowy Saturday morning in late January, and Whistler Village is buzzing and streaming with life. You name it and they're here: Old people and young ones. Loggers and lawyers. Asians, Latin Americans and Brits. People sporting Prada and people who are pierced. Happy vacationers are everywhere…

 
Marion Jones is sitting behind a folding table at the University of Pennsylvania, in a fenced-in practice yard just outside Franklin Field. With her are track greats Gail Devers and Tim Montgomery; the three are signing autographs for a long line of awestruck children and teens. Nike staffers hover…
 
In 1970, when Earth Day was born, entire schools of dead fish were washing up across the Great Lakes. Ohio's Cuyahoga River was so saturated with chemical waste that it spontaneously caught on fire. Roughly half as many cars traveled U.S. roads, but lead levels in the air were more than 1,000 percent higher…
 
Under a darkening sky at the base of Canada's Whistler Mountain, on a hulking stage bathed in light, hip-hop DJ Mixmaster Mike is scratching and spinning, playing the crowd and sending music into the night. Some 15,000 snowboarding fans press in from all sides. Overhead, go-go girls in skimpy fuchsia…
 
The trouble started with Klaus. He was a ski instructor who had been imported from Austria for the winter to give Great Gorge, New Jersey, some cachet. He was lonely. One day he took me down Kamikaze, the steepest, iciest, bumpiest run at Great Gorge. He held onto me and we skied it together. …
 
"Bear!" yells Tommy Moe. The downhill skier who won Olympic gold in 1994 in Lillehammer sounds the alarm from his safety kayak as he leads our paddle raft down a particularly narrow stretch of winding creek deep in the bush of south-central Alaska. We're on a Talkeetna River tributary called Prairie Creek …
 
On a broad, treeless beach in Southern California, under a gray early morning fog, a white-haired, wrinkled old man shuffles across the sand. He wears a wetsuit and a bright orange safety jersey. His 76-year-old body is lean and muscular. Apparently, it is also quite creaky and stiff. He hobbles purposefully …
 
Tossing pasta in the kitchen of her suburban Los Angeles home, the five-foot-five-inch star of the hit show Star Trek: Voyager has to stand on her tippy-toes to properly mix the long strands of fettuccine with egg, caramelized onions, bacon, Parmesan cheese, and parsley. Suddenly a boisterous 12-year-old …
 
Goulash. It's hard to believe, but James Woods is zipping around his small, brightly lit kitchen making goulash. "This is the fast bachelor version," Woods says with a sardonic smile. …
 
It is a dreary late-May morning in San Jose, and inside a large white tent erected in one corner of a neighborhood park, Pacific Telesis chairman and CEO Phil Quigley is waxing prophetic about the information superhighway and its potential for social change. …
 
                                                < BACK TO BEGINNING