Welcome to the Great E-Outdoors

Burgeoning online platforms propose a new way to learn how to rock climb, mountain bike and take epic adventure photos — without ever leaving the house.

Last spring, MasterClass’s celebrity-upholstered e-learning platform attracted $100 million in investment. Lockdown helped: with time to kill and nowhere to go, self-appointed students enrolled in courses on DJing with Questlove and dealmaking with former FBI negotiator Chris Voss. The course catalog leans toward the theoretical (and entertaining), but one that stands apart is a class on adventure photography taught by climber and photographer Jimmy Chin.

Chin’s syllabus leaves the cerebral space where leadership and creativity might bloom and goes into the backcountry. It suggests something after the end of the videos: an adventure (and a decent photo to commemorate it). Now, a host of new MasterClass-like online learning platforms have arrived to do the same.

These new online curricula make a hammer-to-nails promise, whether it’s explicit or not: Wanna be a mountain biker? A fly fisher? An adventure photographer? Start here, they say. Secrets of skill and etiquette once guarded by experienced guides and cranky locals are now accessible for a monthly fee. And while we can debate how much one can really expect to learn about the outdoors from a computer, tablet or phone screen, the following three options sure aren’t short on production value — or big-name caché.