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The Strange Tale of the Arctic Bank Heist

(GLWRUV· &KRLFH Winter Jackets That Bring the Heat

LIVE BRAVELY

+

TRAVEL The Ultimate Warm Weather Escapes

CAREERS How My Dream Job Became a Nightmare

ADVENTURE Search and Rescue Is Broken. Here’s How to Fix It.

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R E L A X STARRING:

RICH ROLL THE OPRAH OF ENDURANCE SPORTS

Outside Magazine

Contents

01/02.20

Features H E A LT H A N D WELLNESS 2020

:H·UH &DOOLQJ Time Out Americans are overworked, overscheduled, and just plain exhausted. The solution? Forget about radical diets and intense new fitness plans—what we all really need is to sloooow down. Presenting 17 relaxing strategies for beating back stress and reclaiming your mojo this year. PLUS: Why athlete and bestselling author Rich Roll knows from experience that you can always start over on the path to your better self.

58 The Arctic Job As one of the northernmost settlements on earth, the Norwegian hamlet of Longyearbyen has become a magnet for adventurous souls looking to start a new life. But when a bizarre crime happened, it brought home a harsh reality: in the modern world, trouble always finds you. BY DAVID KUSHNER

< 66 Running

in the Dark

Rob Krar had to embrace incredible physical pain to win iconic ultramarathons like the Leadville Trail 100 and the Western States Endurance Run. But that’s a form of suffering he can control—unlike his decades-long struggle with depression. BY CHRISTINE FENNESSY

74 I Rode Across the Country Five Times DQG $OO , *RW Was Whining DQG *ULHI Seduced by the idea of getting paid to do the thing she loved, CAITLIN GIDDINGS

led coast-to-coast bike tours throughout her twenties. As she learned, some passion pursuits are best left pro bono.

78 The Icy Sky at Night Few people are as devoted to the aurora borealis as Hugo Sanchez, a self-taught photographer who fled civil-war-torn El Salvador and moved to Canada. But tragedy followed him. During a frosty road trip in wintertime Alaska, Sanchez and DAVID WOLMAN lug cameras and tripods in search of connection—and the perfect shot.

2

P H OTO G RA P H BY

Jesse Rieser

DO YOU LIKE SAVING MONEY? Get GEICO.

geico.com | 1-800-947-AUTO (2886) | Local Agent Some discounts, coverages, payment plans and features are not available in all states, in all GEICO companies, or in all situations. Boat and PWC coverages are underwritten by GEICO Marine Insurance Company. Motorcycle and ATV coverages are underwritten by GEICO Indemnity Company. Homeowners, renters and condo coverages are written through non-affiliated insurance companies and are secured through the GEICO Insurance Agency. GEICO is a registered service mark of Government Employees Insurance Company, Washington, D.C. 20076; a Berkshire Hathaway Inc. subsidiary. GEICO Gecko image © 1999-2019. © 2019 GEICO

Outside Magazine

Contents

36

12

38

26

Dispatches

26 GEAR

36 STYLE

Cabin Comfort: Take coziness

Boots and Socks: Put a kick in your step.

12 BIG IDEA

to the next level. Puffies: Challenge the chill with these insulated jackets. Winter Workout: Activewear that gets you out the door. Go Bag: Everything you need for a tropical getaway.

This Is an Emergency: With Americans

surging onto public lands like never before, search and rescue operations are becoming overwhelmed—and help is not on the way. BY MARC PERUZZI

18 EXPOSURE Portfolio: Kennett Mohrman

captures the soul of pond hockey in Minnesota.

34 MEDIA Mysteries: Two books explore the

unique terror of murder in the outdoors. Plus: Our Oscar picks for best documentary.

38 TRAVEL Warm-Weather Escapes: Want to avoid the post-holiday blues? Try one of these sunny adventure remedies, from mountain biking in Baja to hiking Dominica.

6 BETWEEN THE LINES 92 PARTING SHOT Cover photograph by Beau Grealy

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Styling by Heidi Meek for the Wall Group; grooming by Johnnie Sapong for the Wall Group

C LO C K W I S E F R O M TO P L E F T: H A N N A H M C C A U G H E Y; C O L E Y G E N T Z E L ; H A N N A H M C C A U G H E Y; C O U R T E SY O F M U Y ’ O N O R E S O R T S

01/02.20

Outside Magazine

Between the Lines

01/02.20

Last spring, at a meeting to vet ideas for the theme of our annual January-February fitness cover story, deputy editor Mary Turner brought a timely concept with an ingeniously straightforward title: “Chill the F—k Out.” She went on to describe the frenetic, angstridden state of being that we all seem to be experiencing: perpetually overworked, bombarded by terrifying news from the front lines of climate change, and deluged with advice on how to reboot our nutrition, ramp up our workouts, and hack our time to supercharge productivity. We’re all exhausted from the constant striving, Turner argued, so maybe instead of our usual series of stories prescribing new time-saving fitness plans and foolproof keto-based diets targeting New Year’s resolution season, we should give readers some novel strategies on how to relax.

—CHRISTOPHER KEYES ( @KEYESER)

exceptional images of the northern lights. Here, Wolman offers his hardearned wisdom on three essentials for anyone who might find themselves doing a lot of standing around in subfreezing temperatures.

Cold Comfort To report “The Icy Sky at Night” (page 78), Outside contributing editor David Wolman

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traveled to Alaska with Hugo Sanchez, a photographer and aurora-borealis chaser, to pursue

Red-light headlamp: “Don’t be that guy with a bright light wrecking your neighbors’ long-exposure camera shot.”

Maple-leaf mittens (a gift from Sanchez): “The cold zapped my audio recorder’s battery. The next night I shoved it in a mitten with two hand warmers to help keep it going. This trick should work for most small devices.” Instant hot cocoa: “There was an unlimited supply. I drank a year’s worth in three nights.”

In Memoriam

John Askwith, 1943–2019 He was the first employee, the one who would help me visualize and understand the complexities of putting together a national magazine. The magazine was called Mariah, and it was conceived in late 1973, launched in February of 1976, and became Outside in 1978. JA, as he affectionately became known, was the art and design director for over 20 years and relocated from Chicago to our new offices in Santa Fe in 1995, along with his wife, Sharon, two daughters, Seandra and Aberlynn, and around 50 other Outside teammates. In the beginning, John and I each having day jobs, we’d work nights on the floor of my one-bedroom condominium in Chicago’s Near North Side, where we’d deliberate into the wee hours the intricacies of magazine publishing. We did this for 18 months—right until the first issue joyfully came to life in the winter of 1976. Throughout his two-decade tenure, John remained totally dedicated and committed to the idea of Outside. His creative talent and tireless work ensured the magazine always evolved to meet the shifting demands of the market. He stayed calm in a sea of turmoil, constantly rising to the challenges inherent to startup culture. He was the most beloved colleague in the building. I will miss knowing JA is not on this earth but rejoice in knowing his spirit remains with all who knew him. —Lawrence J. Burke, founder and chairman of Outside

C LO C K W I S E F R O M TO P L E F T: G R AYS O N S C H A F F E R ; O U T S I D E M AG A Z I N E A R C H I V E S ; J O DYO. P H OTO S /J O DY OV E R S T R E E T

Easy Does It

Our story meetings sometimes involve heated debates about the merits of certain ideas, but this concept resonated with everyone at the table. After an immediate green light, we started shaping our approach. We began by asking contributing editor Florence Williams to investigate the topic of burnout, examining what researchers have found about the downsides of our overextended lives (“We’re Calling Time Out,” page 44). And then we recruited writers and staffers to volunteer as human guinea pigs to try out some of the most effective strategies we could find for de-stressing. These approaches include several well-known practices (reducing screen time, bonding with a pet, and building better sleep habits), as well as a few unexpected options backed by new research (knitting, activating your vagus nerve, and— gasp!—quitting caffeine). Finally, for some big-picture perspective on what it takes to radically change your overall lifestyle, we connected with Rich Roll. A former entertainment lawyer who was on the verge of burnout by his late thirties, Roll eventually quit his thriving career and reinvented himself, first as an ultra-endurance athlete and then as the host of a wildly popular podcast. The result is a series of stories loaded with options for rethinking your downtime and chilling out. But don’t worry, you don’t have to do it all. The big takeaway: less is more.

HOW DO YOU SAY,

“THANKS FOR BEING MY FURRY BFF”?

TM

MADE IN THE USA

© 2019 Tyson Pet Products, Inc.

ALL NATURAL

REAL CHICKEN

Outside Magazine

Between the Lines

:KDW :H¡UH Watching

*R :LWK 8V Escape winter with one of Outside GO’s ďŹ ve safari trips to Africa. Journey through Uganda’s Valley of Apes, spot big game in Kenya, or relax at an idyllic waterfront retreat in Mozambique. From $5,100

Tune into Outside TV for A Matter of Time, a documentary chronicling the rise of Mikaela Shiffrin. Throughout the four-episode series, viewers can tag along with the Olympic champion as she juggles a demanding schedule, newfound fame, and family obligations, all while working to introduce ski racing to more people around the globe. Watch on the Outside TV app, available everywhere.

The Woodshed In December, our Holiday Gift Guide misspelled the brand Merrell’s name. Outside regrets the error.

1RUWKHUQ +RVSLWDOLW\ In April, Norwegian photographer Helge Skodvin headed to Longyearbyen, one of the most northern settlements in the world, to photograph “The Arctic Jobâ€? (page 58). “I have never been so cold as the ďŹ rst night I was out shooting,â€? he says. “The next morning I was at the store for warmer boots and one more layer with wool.â€? Still, he enjoyed getting to know the hardy locals, who stunned him with their unparalleled generosity. “I needed a car, and there are not a lot of rentals in town,â€? he says. “So a lady gave me the keys to her pickup and said, ‘It’s yours for the week.’ â€?

%\ 2XU &RQWULEXWRUV Follow author Joshua Hammer as he tracks the unbelievable

saga of globetrotting egg smuggler Jeffrey Lendrum in his new book, The Falcon Thief ($26, Simon & Schuster). Expanding on his 2019 Outside feature “The Egg Thief� (Jan/ Feb 2019), Hammer recounts Lendrum’s daring thefts of raptor eggs and the police sting that ultimately brought him down.

In Sickness and In Health When assistant editor Abbie Barronian sought inspiration for her essay on the calming effects of tai chi (page 58), she only had to look outside her front door. “Twice a week, a bunch of people in matching clothing would gather in the park across from my house in Santa Fe

and practice,� she says. “I was usually rushing to go mountain biking or climb and would think, That looks nice.� In October, Barronian joined the group for a month, at just at the right time. “I had a really bad cold for two weeks. Tai chi is the perfect low-key activity when you’re feeling under the weather.�

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Save the Date Mark your calendars for the second annual Outside Experience, held May 16–17 in Chicago’s Northerly Island Park for a weekend of adventure, gear, music, ďŹ lm, and inspiration on the shore of Lake Michigan. Get more details and advance tickets at outsideexperience show.com.

1HZ +HLJKWV Head to Outside Online for an exclusive video following Hilaree Nelson, the most accomplished ski mountaineer of all time, as she plans and trains for her next epic expedition. outsideonline.com/hilaree-nelson

C LO C K W I S E F R O M TO P L E F T: C O U R T E SY O F H O U S E I N T H E W I L D ; C O U R T E SY O F T H E U S S K I T E A M ; C O U R T E SY O F N I C K U L I V I E R I P H OTO G R A P H Y ; C O U R T E SY O F J O E M O R A H A N ; C O U R T E SY O F H E LG E S KO DV I N

01/02.20

NEW VICKS VAPOPATCH

Non-medicated. Use as directed. For Ages 6+.

© Procter & Gamble, Inc. 2019

S O OT H I N G V I C K S VA P O R S F O R T H E W H O L E FA M I LY.

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Editorial Offices: 400 Market St., Santa Fe, NM 87501; 505-989-7100. Advertising Offices: 122 E. 42nd St, Suite 3705, New York, NY 10168; 212-972-4650. Submissions must be accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope. Outside cannot be held responsible for unsolicited material. Subscriber Service: For the fastest service, visit us online at outsideonline.com and click on “Subscriptions” on our home page. Or write to Outside, Box 6228, Harlan, IA 51593-1728 and enclose a copy of your mailing label, or call 800-678-1131 (outside U.S., 515-248-7680; fax 712-623-5731). A scent-free subscription is available upon request. Back Issues and Special Issues: Call 800-678-1131 or enclose a check or money order for $7.95 per issue and mail to: Back Issues, Outside, Box 6228, Harlan, IA 51593-1728. Copyright ©2020 by Outside Integrated Media, LLC. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. Views expressed herein are those of the author exclusively.

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O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 01/02.20

Outside Sweden EDITOR DANIEL BREECE breece@outsidesweden.se PAID CIRCULATION OVER 675,000 MEMBER OF THE AUDIT BUREAU OF CIRCULATIONS AND THE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS ASSOCIATION

Printed in the United States

M A Y 1 6 + 1 7, 2 0 2 0

N O R T H E R LY I S L A N D | C H I CA G O A WEEKEND OF ADVENTURE, GEAR, MUSIC, FILM, AND

Presented by

INSPIRATION ALONG THE SHORES OF LAKE MICHIGAN

NORTHERLY ISLAND

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F E ATU R I N G : NEW DATES EARLIER IN THE SUMMER NEW OUTDOOR VENUE MORE SKILLS CLINICS AND DEMO AREAS

GEAR VILLAGE, WELLNESS ZONE, RUNNING RACES, AND DOG COMPETITIONS CLIMBING, CYCLING, FISHING, PADDLING, HIKING, AND MORE

Dispatches

Big Idea

01/02.20

This Is an Emergency WITH AMERICANS SURGING ONTO PUBLIC LANDS LIKE NEVER BEFORE, SEARCH AND RESCUE OPERATIONS ARE BECOMING OVERWHELMED—AND HELP IS NOT ON THE WAY. BY MARC PERUZZI

12

OUTSIDE MAGAZINE

ON A WARM JULY day in 2013, a 48-year-old

Texan named Nancy Allen and her 18-yearold daughter, Sara, set out to climb Mount St. Helens from the Climber’s Bivouac trailhead. The five-mile hike to the 8,365-foot summit of this famous Washington State volcano, which became 1,300 feet shorter after it erupted in 1980, is a strenuous route up rough terrain. But the pair reached the top without incident, presumably gazing into the crater with wonder and a sense of accomplishment. Unfortunately, the Allens got lost on the way down, and Nancy fell from a small outcropping, injuring her leg. At 8 P.M. she called 911, and the Skamania County sheriff’s office dispatched a well-trained crew of search and rescue volunteers called the Volcano Rescue Team. A few hours later, SAR specialists reached the Allens and assessed the situation. According to subsequent news reports, the hikers were still high on the mountain, with temperatures already dipping into the

low fifties. They were wearing shorts and Tshirts, and Nancy was unable to walk. The rescuers decided to give the women extra clothing and blankets and called additional team members to hike up with a litter, so they could carry Nancy down the mountain. The trailhead was just a few miles away, but the physical rigors of hauling out an adult meant that the extraction would take anywhere from seven to fifteen hours. After a couple of hours of this, Nancy asked if it would be possible to call a helicopter. It was: there was a private heli service in Oregon, based just over the state line. But the county sheriff’s office decided the situation didn’t warrant a lift. If she wanted a helicopter, she’d have to call one herself. “I have a credit card,” she reportedly said. By 6:30, the Texans were in a private bird. Now unburdened, the SAR team quickly descended. They wouldn’t say whether they cracked celebratory beers that night, having dodged a tough slog. All in all, it was a happy ending—until the story made the news, with reporters taking aim at Nancy Allen’s choice to pay for the easy way out. “Rich Texas woman hires private helicopter to get her off 8,000-foot mountain after deciding rescuers lugging her down on stretcher are ‘too slow,’ ” the UK’s Daily Mail announced. Cue the social-media firestorm. The derision was patently unfair. If Allen had been in similar circumstances 50 miles north in Mount Rainier National Park, the climbing rangers may very well have called in a helicopter that wouldn’t have cost her a dime, because Rainier has a contract that covers such expenses. Same goes if she’d been in Yosemite, Grand Teton, or a handful of other national parks that pay to have helicopters on call. Nancy’s problem wasn’t that she was too spoiled to tolerate a painful extraction from the wilderness. It was that she ran into trouble in a place where air support was limited. SAR operations in the United States are a patchwork. Depending on where you are when bad luck strikes, you might be saved by a commando squad with a chopper on speed dial, carried out quickly by a talented group like the Volcano Rescue Team, or forced to wait for hours, even days, until well-meaning volunteers with limited resources reach you in the backcountry. Historically, this was a reasonable approach, with the level of rescue services available in a given area generally matching the demand. These days, though, demographic and cultural shifts have led more people into the wild, putting emergency operations in some places under enormous stress. Which is why it’s time to reevaluate our approach to SAR before things get worse. WITH OUTDOOR recreation surging, it’s no surprise that we’re in this pickle. The Forest Service reports that in 2016, some five million more visitors hit the 193 million acres of public land it manages compared with a decade earlier. The fastest-growing residential areas in the country are in so-called wildland-urbaninterface zones, where locals have easy access

P H OTO G R A P H B Y

Hannah McCaughey

BUILT TO RUN

FĒNIX 6 ®

SERIES

Dispatches

Big Idea

to adventure. Outdoor tourism in places like Colorado’s Front Range is spiking as people seek out whitewater rivers and alpine peaks. Meanwhile, some SAR leaders report changes in the kinds of rescues they’re doing: there are more Instagramming adventurers getting in over their heads, more mushroom hunters in flip-flops losing their way in the woods, and more people navigating with their phones until the battery dies. Responses vary by situation. In a handful of national parks, climbing rangers (or their equivalents) can call on contracted helicopters capable of short-hauling injured parties off hanging faces and out of glacial terrain. (That’s the dramatic stuff. The truth is that most rescues are far more mundane, usually involving lost or tired hikers.) In good weather during daylight, SAR can be on the scene in as little as 25 minutes on Mount Rainier’s trade routes or an hour on the West Buttress of Denali, the standard way up the Alaskan peak. Public-land rescues outside national parks depend largely on volunteer teams under the command of a sheriff’s office, and some of these outfits are exceptionally skilled. Oregon’s Mount Hood, for example, is serviced by two famed volunteer groups: the Crag Rats to the north and Portland Mountain Rescue to the south, both packed with alpinists certified by the Mountain Rescue Association, a national organization that requires members to pass stringent field tests. Like other volunteer units across the country, these rescuers don’t have immediate access to a helicopter, so they turn to the military or private operators for air support, which can dramatically slow response times. Over the past three years, the fastest that Portland Mountain Rescue has gotten a helicopter to the scene is 45 minutes. Sometimes it can take four hours. “The difference is that at Rainier, we have more of a limo with a driver parked in front of our house and ready to go. On Forest Service land, the sheriff’s office has to call a taxi,” says Glenn Kessler, Mount Rainier’s aviation manager. In some of the nation’s most popular outdoor playgrounds, operations are becoming overwhelmed. The 70-member Rocky Mountain Rescue Group, in Boulder County, Colorado, is the most active volunteers outfit in the nation, and one of the most talented. But it’s now handling close to 250 missions a year, up from an average of 170 over the past decade. Jeff Sparhawk, a longtime team member who’s also president of the Colorado Search and Rescue Association—a nonprofit that helps coordinate and support the state’s many local teams—told me in the fall that 2019 was shaping up to be the group’s second busiest on record. “People who work nine-to-five jobs are getting paged out of work at least 150 times a year,” he said. “That’s a tall ask.” Not surprisingly, the team can have problems getting members to join multiple missions. In more rural and remote areas, SAR services tend to be limited. Again, this used to

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make sense. In the past, the relatively small number of adventurers who planned a climbing expedition to, say, a faraway mountain like Montana’s Granite Peak, the state’s highest summit at some 12,800 feet, were typically more capable of saving themselves, or at least of stabilizing their situation until help arrived. In Stillwater County, home to one of four sheriff’s offices that might get called to coordinate rescues on Granite Peak, the ten-person volunteer SAR team is now called for about 35 missions annually, a big jump from the ten or fewer the group used to do in the early 2000s. Helicopters are hard to come by—the closest available private-rescue option is 400 miles away in Whitefish. Rescuing someone on foot in the rugged Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness around Granite Peak can require a two-day walk just to reach the victim. Other places simply lack capable personnel. Multiple sources told me that in some locations, volunteer teams just don’t have adequate skills for certain kinds of rescues. Economics can be a factor. SAR experts estimate that it costs volunteers anywhere from $1,000 to $10,000 a year—mostly for gear, gas, and meals connected to rescues and training— just to be part of a team. In rural communities where incomes are lower, that’s a huge sacrifice. “Ranchers, farmers, and foresters might not have the time or money available,” says Marcel Rodriguez, a board member with Pacific Northwest Search and Rescue, an Oregon City volunteer group. UNFORTUNATELY, there’s no easy fix for all this, and having rangers with helicopters on all our public lands isn’t realistic. Cost is one hurdle, though the price tag isn’t as insurmountable as you might think. In 2017, across

all our national parks, we spent only $3.4 million on rescues. Even if the cost to develop a nationwide approach to SAR was 100 times more, that’s only a fraction of the country’s $400 billion outdoor-recreation economy. Still, the logistics of such a system are likely out of reach. The national parks that employ rangers with strong climbing skills and contract with helicopter services have centralized command centers that can handle the relatively manageable chunks of terrain under their watch. But covering, say, Colorado as a whole would require a network of stations and a massive staff of professional rescuers. Even then, response times would be relatively slow in remote wilderness areas. Outside the U.S., there’s an enviable model to aspire to. In Switzerland, you can spend about $30 per year for a rescue card issued by the legendary nonprofit group Rega, which was created after World War II. In many cases, the card covers the cost of extracting you from the mountains on a helicopter, with a doctor onboard, and delivering you to a hospital. In 2018 alone, Rega orchestrated 12,500 missions with helicopters, and today it maintains a fleet of 18 helicopters and three ambulance jets, and it’s currently testing a reconnaissance drone. “My friends doing that work whine that they are only making $500 a day,” says veteran guide Martin Volken, a Swiss native who trained in Switzerland and founded the Pro Guiding Service, an international company based in North Bend, Washington. “Meanwhile, in the U.S., the volunteers might get a deal on a Gore-Tex jacket.” A nationwide Rega-style organization is unlikely in the U.S., mostly because of the same geographic realities that prevent us from expanding the Park Service climbing-ranger

COLEY GENTZEL

01/02.20

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Big Idea

01/02.20

Diné educator and Arizona native NIKKI COOLEY has always had a desire to help protect the earth. After working with tribes across the country, the climate change program coordinator felt compelled to come back home to Arizona, where she now lives and works in Flagstaff.

model. “Switzerland is a little country,” says Renny Jackson, a retired Grand Teton National Park rescue specialist. “Compared with the Alps, we have vast sections of terrain with very few people. Look at the Red Desert of Wyoming or the Beartooths in Montana. Connecting helicopters and professional rescuers to those places is inherently challenging.” Besides the daunting logistics of the American landscape, there’s another issue: Americans still don’t require the sheer number of rescues needed to support a nonprofit like Rega or compel the federal government to deal with the problem. The French government, by contrast, runs excellent SAR operations because it desperately needs to. Every summer, the Chamonix Valley, France’s extreme-sports capital, is inundated by more than 100,000 tourists, including a large number of mountaineers, paragliders, and BASE jumpers. It’s been widely reported that 100 people a year die on the greater Mont Blanc massif alone. Even if that number is inflated by avalanches that took out villages, it’s still considered one of the world’s deadliest ranges. In comparison, the U.S. national park system sees an average of 150 to 170 accidental deaths annually. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do everything we can to improve our approach to SAR. The volunteer teams that serve as the backbone of operations in the U.S. need additional support. “Search and rescue at the community level is headed in the wrong direction,” Sparhawk says. If changes don’t happen in the next five to ten years, he warns, the Colorado SAR system will no longer be sustainable. IN AN EFFORT to turn things around, the

To learn more about Nikki’s work, and what makes Flagstaff, which sits at 7,000 feet and is surrounded by ponderosa pines and craggy mountains, such a unique place to live and visit, check out outsideonline.com/unrealarizona.

Colorado Search and Rescue Association has been gathering data from the state’s teams and studying SAR models in numerous locations around the country. It’s investigating the possibility of getting more state and federal funding to cover the cost of rescues and mental-health support for volunteers. This would at least allow for the compensation of overtapped volunteers when they’re deployed on challenging multi-day missions. Sparhawk says they’ve also looked at adding fulltime paid professionals to the busiest volunteer crews. As this story went to press, the board was preparing to present its preliminary findings to the state legislature, requesting more funding for a comprehensive study that could help inform fundamental changes in how Colorado pays for and manages SAR. In the meantime, fee-based initiatives can at least help reimburse volunteers for gas, sandwiches, and gear. For well-intentioned reasons, people are only rarely charged for their rescues in the U.S. Emergency professionals have long argued that charging fees would lead to delayed calls for help and thus more urgent and dangerous rescues. But states shouldn’t shy from encouraging outdoor adventurers to drop some money in the hat. Starting in 2015, New Hampshire, one of a handful of states with laws enabling it to bill people for rescues in the event of negli-

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Ultimately, $PHULFD LVQ·W likely to get a major search and rescue overhaul until more people die. gence, has offered a $25 Hike Safe card, with proceeds supporting state SAR operations. In 2018, the card brought in $134,000. A similar program in Colorado generates about $350,000 a year. Eventually, the free market could play a role. Annual memberships with New Hampshire’s Global Rescue start at $329. For that, the company will take charge of orchestrating your evacuation from all kinds of dangerous locations around the planet. In the U.S., it typically coordinates rescues much like sheriff’s departments do: by working the phones. Mount Rainier’s Kessler says that creating private—and, like Rega, prepaid—SAR outfits, complete with helicopters, has been a frequent topic of conversation among rangers. And where the market won’t save the day, philanthropy might: in Whitefish, a wealthy benefactor named Mike Goguen launched Two Bear Air, offering his helicopter to any SAR outfit in the region at no cost. The most achievable short-term improvements in American search and rescue will probably come from smarter utilization of existing resources. A standout example exists in Teton County, Wyoming, where a partnership among the sheriff’s office, the Forest Service—which manages all the terrain on Teton Pass—and Grand Teton National Park allows the groups to share a helicopter during summer months that the Forest Service originally brought in for wildland firefighting. Ultimately, America probably won’t get a major SAR overhaul until more people die in the outdoors. That’s a cynical take, but it’s the same gruesome calculus that motivates road crews to add guardrails only after enough drivers plummet to their deaths on dangerous mountain highways. On St. Helens, a unique agreement among three surrounding counties uses property-tax revenues to help fund emergency services, including salaries for the coordinators of the Volcano Rescue Team that respond to Nancy Allen. The inspiration for this setup? The 1980 eruption, which killed O around 60 people. Contributing editor Marc Peruzzi writes about adventure, recreation, and the environment for Outside Online.

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Dispatches

Exposure

01/02.20

Sticks and Cones POND HOCKEY HAS A SOUL, AND IT’S IN MINNESOTA Every January for the past 15 years, hundreds of competitors from across the country have descended on Minneapolis for the U.S. Pond Hockey Championships. In 2019, photographers Kennett Mohrman and Sheldon Sabbatini set up a portrait studio on Lake Nokomis, the championships’ home since 2007, and watched as hockey was played the old-fashioned way: in high-stoke contests on crinkled pond ice with no goalies. Temperatures were well below freezing—so cold that youth-night games were canceled—but that didn’t dampen spirits. “People were drinking beer and skating at eight in the morning until six at night,” Mohrman says. “It felt like a bunch of kids having fun with their friends.” —MADELEINE LAPLANTE-DUBE

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In years past, former NHL journeymen like Ryan Malone (Pittsburgh Penguins, Tampa Bay Lightning) and John Madden (New Jersey Devils, Chicago Blackhawks) have made appearances at the championships. But most players, Mohrman says, are “mildly competitive people� taking their beer-league energy up a notch.

Portfolio by Kennett

Mohrman

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Players across seven divisions compete for the Golden Shovel, a prize that the organizers jokingly claim dates back to ancient Viking hockey tournaments.

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Exposure

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Exposure

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Some of the better squads bear the name of a sponsor, including the 2019 Open Division winner, team RJ Ryan Construction. But most embrace the event’s amateur spirit, with names like He Suits He Scores and Screeching Pterodactyls. “They’re all individual, goofy characters,” Mohrman says. “They’re not worried about being too cool.”

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THE EXPLORER’S EXPLORER. T H E

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s a kid, Eric Larsen did a lot of camping and canoeing with his family in Wisconsin, so it makes sense that he’d grow up to be outdoorsy. But a ski-tothe-North-Pole-by-yourself kind of adventurer? That’s a level Larsen found entirely on his own. If you’re not already familiar with Larsen, here’s a quick highlight reel. One of

the greatest polar explorers of our age, he’s been to the South Pole four times and skied to the North Pole during summer, when the melting sea ice is especially treacherous to navigate—a first-of-its-kind expedition. He’s been to the poles more than any other American and is the only person on the planet to have skied to both poles

and summited Everest in the same year. Of course, when you go as big as Larsen does, you’re going to have some hiccups along the way. Like in 2005, when he was a week into his first summertime expedition to the North Pole, pulling what he calls an “impossibly heavy” 400-pound sled across the southward-drifting ice

pack. He ended up 30 miles farther south than where he started—and was forced to abort. More recently, in January 2019, due to heavierthan-average snowfall, Larsen had to abandon an unsupported solo crossing of Antarctica, a 700-mile journey he’d hoped to complete in just 24 days, which would have set a

new speed record. “Doing difficult things that nobody has ever done before—the chance of success is pretty minimal,” Larsen reflects. “So I’ve probably failed more often than I’ve been successful.” He’s certainly done lots of both. At 12, he got a paper route so he could afford a road bike and explore Wisconsin’s back

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“I don’t miss seeing a movie or eating a hamburger when I’m out there. I miss my family. They’re the most important thing in my life.”

roads—often 80 miles at a time. By college, he was getting lost in the Boundary Waters, moving without a compass, suffering through storms, figuring out the details as he went. At age 24, he was mushing teams of dogs across frozen Canadian tundra. “By the time I did my first polar trip, I’d busted my ass so many times that I was going from 95 to 100, not zero to 100,” Larsen says. “I still fail, but I’ve seen so much that I tend not to get terrified anymore.” These days, Larsen spends more of his time closer to home, in Crested Butte, Colorado, educating people about the polar regions and setting out on multisport sufferfests across entire states (he calls them StateAthons). So far he’s done Wisconsin, Colorado, and New York. But you’ll most likely find him exploring the wilderness right out his backyard with his wife, Maria, and kids. The latter, he says, is especially important. It’s through family camping trips and after-school bike rides that Larsen has seen his kids—Merritt, seven, and Ellie, four—glean many of the same lessons that have defined his life. And for an explorer-slash-father searching for balance, that’s validating. “When you’re on an expedition, you remove everything from your life, and existence becomes very stark,” says Larsen. “But that’s when you more sharply realize what’s important. I don’t miss seeing a movie or eating a hamburger when I’m out there. I miss my family. They’re the most important thing in my life.”

BUILT FORD PROUD Whether adventure is your life’s work or just a weekend pursuit, gear up with nothing less than the greatest exploration vehicle of all time: the 2020 Ford Explorer. Built to explore. Built Ford Proud. Learn more at ford.com

Dispatches

Cabin Comfort

01/02.20

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Hygge Life NEXT-LEVEL WINTER COZINESS BY JOE JACKSON A. Duluth Trading Company Woolpaca Shawl Collar cardigan $170 Nothing wears finer than a Mr. Rogers sweater. This one delivers an impressive amount of warmth. B. California Cowboy High Sierra shirt $148 With its soft modal

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lining, classic plaid print, and comfy fit, this versatile shirt comes with a winning extra: a low-back pocket designed to carry a beer bottle. C. Talisker 18-YearOld $160 This scotch lives in a cask for 18 years, developing a complex

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yet balanced smokiness and subtle sweetness. D. Glerups Slip-On slippers $95 Burying your feet in heavily insulated slippers is a recipe for sweat. These slip-ons offer woolly warmth and are breathable enough to avoid overheating.

E. Fjällräven Greenland Down Liner vest $190 The timeless styling of this lightly insulated vest matches everything in our closet and feels right at home in a five-star lodge or rustic hut. Bonus: it’s made from recycled polyester and ethically sourced down.

F. L.L.Bean Ragg Wool gloves $40 Don’t let the rugged deerskin-leather palms trick you into thinking these gloves are all business. They’re primarily made of soft wool yarn, and once you’ve finished shoveling the driveway, you’ll want to keep them on for an afternoon walk. G. Citizenry Sheepskin throw $95 This thick sheep fur feels so good on your skin that you’ll have trouble getting up.

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H. Faribault Cabin Wool blanket $200 This classic is made from 100 percent merino, and it’s just the right size to invite impromptu snuggles by the fire. I. High Camp Firelight 375 flask $95 Most flasks have ridiculously narrow openings. Not the insulated Firelight 375. Its wide mouth makes it easy to fill and it closes with a no-spill cap. The included stainless-steel tumbler magnetically attaches to the flask for easy transport.

Inga Hendrickson

Craig DeMartino Climber

Arc’teryx specializes in technical, high-performance apparel, outerwear and equipment. Design is our way forward. Make it yours.

Arc’teryx Equipment | Vancouver, Canada | arcteryx.com

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Roll Up in a Fatty CHALLENGE WINTER’S CHILL WITH THESE INSULATED JACKETS BY KELLY BASTONE AND FREDERICK REIMERS

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Expedition Ace A. RAB THE INFINITY LIGHT $450 Rab isn’t taking any chances with the Infinity Light. To fortify the excellent warmth-to-weight ratio of 800-fill down, it’s treated with hydrophobic Nikwax, swaddled in water-resistant Gore-Tex Infinium Windstopper, and made with minimal seams. Articulated arms, a cavernous hood, and a hip-length hemline safeguard you in the most adverse winter conditions. 1.2 lbs (men’s, pictured) / 1.1 lbs (women’s)

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Ski-Touring Standout B. NORRØNA LYNGEN GORE-TEX INFINIUM DOWN850 $599 Waterproofing a puffy usually means using heavy and stiff fabrics. For its 850-fill Lyngen parka, Norrøna used Gore-Tex’s Infinium, a supple, breathable fabric that stands up to everything short of falling into a creek. The jacket weighs just over a pound, making it perfect for ski tours. Our only gripe: no women’s version. 1.1 lbs

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Resort Ripper C. STIO COLTER DOWN $399 On frigid powder days, the Colter keeps you on the slopes: two-layer waterproof polyester stands up to heavy snow and shouldered skis, while moistureresistant 650-fill down provides warmth during lift rides. The cuffs Velcro over mittens, a zippered interior chest pocket preserves your phone’s battery life, and hip-to-pit side zips drop warmth. 1.9 lbs (men’s, pictured) / 1.6 lbs (women’s)

Midweight Climber D. PATAGONIA MACRO PUFF HOODY $399 Goose down is the perfect lightweight insulator—until it’s wet. Then it’s useless. Patagonia stuffed this jacket with a synthetic insulation that mimics down’s shape and function but stays lofty and dries quickly. The plumped-up fill gives the Macro Puff a warmth-to-weight ratio on par with the downiest midweight puffies. 15.3 oz (men’s, pictured) / 12.6 oz (women’s)

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Cold Soldier E. BLACK DIAMOND VISION DOWN $399 The nuclear option for frigid conditions, this expedition jacket features a clever solution to the fragile-fabric problem. The Vision’s ultralight nylon permits maximum loft for its responsibly sourced 800-fill, moisture-resistant down, while liquid-crystal polymers woven into the fabric make it tough enough to spar with tools and rocks. 1.3 lbs (men’s) / 1.1 lbs (women’s, pictured)

Uphill Wizard F. OUTDOOR RESEARCH VIGOR HYBRID HOODED $179 Fleece-puffy hybrids aren’t new, but OR’s VerticalX Air synthetic insulation pushes the Vigor to the head of the pack. The low-loft fill (across the chest, upper back, and hips) provides just-right warmth during sustained climbs. The thing is also impressively breathable, thanks to the fleece across the back and arms. 12 oz (men’s) / 10.7 oz (women’s, pictured)

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Multisport Maven G. ORVIS PRO INSULATED HOODY $229 Water-shedding DWR on the cuffs’ exterior and interior keep them dry when dunked in wet snow or streams. Smart distribution of two different types of synthetic insulation helps dump heat and sweat while still keeping you cozy on snowy summits. And the stretchy ripstop nylon shell defies snags. 15.7 oz (men’s) / 13.4 oz (women’s, pictured)

Ultralight Eco-Warrior H. MOUNTAIN HARDWEAR GHOST WHISPERER/2 DOWN HOODY $325 Since its debut in 2012, the Ghost Whisperer has been the gold standard in ultralight down, with gossamer fabric, 800-fill insulation, and the ability to pack into its own pocket. This year’s updates—100 percent recycled exterior fabrics and certified-responsible down fill—make it the green standard, too. 8.8 oz (men’s) / 7.8 oz (women’s, pictured)

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Dispatches

Winter Workout

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The North Face Gore CloseFit Fleece gloves $50 Lightweight, slimfitting gloves for when you need a thin barrier. The fabric is windproof, breathable, and touchscreen compatible.

Pearl Izumi Men’s Interval AmFib jacket $185 This cycling soft shell fends off the elements, while a fleece interior insulates sans bulk. Chest vents shed heat when you’re cranking.

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liner allows heat to escape, and the soft shell sheds precipitation.

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A. La Sportiva Kaptiva GTX running shoes $159 The Kaptiva performs like a beefy trail runner, but it weighs just 9.5 ounces (women’s, pictured) and has the profile of a stripped-down road shoe. Testers loved the glovelike fit, Gore-Tex, and grippy lugs, which hold traction on patchy snow, mucky trails, and ice.

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B. Fischer Adventure Spider 62 nordic skis $240 These lightweight classic skis are equally at home on groomed terrain and during off-track cruises. A stable platform and steel edges make them an attractive option for cross-country newbies, while veterans will appreciate the traction on steep grades.

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to the light conditions, so you can leave them on all day, whether you’re biking, running, or touring.

C. Julbo Aerospeed glasses with Reactiv lenses $210 These sleek-framed glasses have a wide field of vision and photochromic lenses that adjust shading

D. Arc’teryx Norvan SL Insulated jacket $400 It’s easy to start a run in a puffy when it’s cold, only to end up overheating. The lightly insulated Norvan will keep you warm, its permeable

E. Petzl Swift RL headlamp $120 The rechargeable Swift weighs in at 3.5 ounces, delivers 900 lumens, and automatically adjusts brightness based on ambient light. You’ll never wonder if there’s enough charge to make it through a run: a gauge lets you know how much battery you have left. F. Fischer Urban Cross boots $190 Unlike most nordic boots, these are stylish enough to wear to the bar. On the snow, you’ll appreciate the warm synthetic insu-

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lation, waterproofbreathable membrane, and molded interior heel caps for stability. G. Patagonia Wind Shield pants $159 A polyester-spandex panel on the back helps evaporate heat during cardio, while the soft-shell fabric on the front and calves fights moisture. These pants are great for running and biking and have zippered leg openings for sliding over boots. H. Skida Men’s Alpine hat $36 This close-fitting fleece-lined cap keeps your head warm under a helmet or on an evening run, and it won’t look out of place in town.

Inga Hendrickson

Dispatches

Go Bag

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Pineapple Express

Nomadix towel $55 The Nomadix packs smaller than the average beach towel and has endless uses: sand-repellent blanket, no-slip yoga accessory, and, yes, ultra-absorbent shower towel.

WHAT YOU NEED FOR AN ADVENTUROUS TROPICAL GETAWAY BY GABRIELA AOUN

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A. OluKai Nohie Olu sandals $115 Your feet will love these slip-ons, which are extra comfy, with a cushioned footbed and generous leather straps. B. Yellow 108 Stevie Palm straw fedora $104 This unisex straw hat features a light build

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for maximum airflow that will keep you cool. C. Croakies Original sunglasses strap $9 For more than four decades, this simple neoprene device has saved us from losing our shades when we’re on adventures.

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D. Smith Cheetah sunglasses $129 This update on a classic eighties style combines a feminine cat-eye look with polarized, tapered lens technology in a super light and durable frame.

E. The Outlaw Ocean, by Ian Urbina $30 The ideal beach read for those who like their surf and sand with a side of intrigue: sinister reallife tales of pirates,

smugglers, and poachers from a New York Times reporter.

fit, and it’s 100 percent renewable and biodegradable.

F. Jungmaven Aspen dress $188 What’s better than oversize pockets? Oversize pockets with secret compartments inside to keep your valuables safe. Constructed from 100 percent hemp, this dress is durable and more comfortable than cotton in hot weather.

H. Mollusk Left Point bikini top and bottom $63 and $55 Mollusk’s roots as a surf company come through in this stayput swimsuit that will keep you playing in the waves, not fidgeting with your bikini straps.

G. Outerknown Woolaroo trunks $125 More boardshorts should be made of wool. The Woolaroo offers natural odor resistance and a retro

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I. Patagonia Black Hole 25 tote $59 This lightweight tote, made using 100 percent recycled polyester ripstop with a DWR finish, resists water and sand. The bag stuffs into its own pocket for easy suitcase stashing.

Inga Hendrickson

Dispatches

Media

Lost and Found TWO BOOKS EXPLORE THE UNIQUE HORROR OF MURDER IN THE OUTDOORS BY EVA HOLLAND ONCE, YEARS AGO, I tried to report a story about a girl who’d gone missing on the outskirts of a small town located in the wilderness of British Columbia. I hiked a footpath a quarter-mile from where she was last seen, then peered down the long gravel driveway where she vanished. I remember feeling chilled. My notes say things like: “Tree trunks wearing mossy fur coats.” “Fireweed in the ditch.” “Lonely.” I never wrote that story, but I never forgot the girl. There’s something especially haunting about people who disappear in the outdoors or are found dead there from unnatural causes. These tales get under our skin. What frightens and rivets us, I think, is the apparent randomness: What are the odds of

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a person crossing paths with a killer on an empty trail? City dwellers are inured to the violence on the evening news, but an unexplained disappearance in a place that’s supposed to be a safe retreat? It can feel like a lightning strike. Two new books tell the stories of people who, each for their own reasons, couldn’t let go of someone killed in a wild or forgotten place. In Yellow Bird ($28, Random House), journalist and first-time author Sierra Crane Murdoch follows an Arikara woman named Lissa Yellow Bird who is determined to solve the mystery of a missing white oil worker on the North Dakota reservation where her family lives. The book offers a gripping narrative of Yellow Bird’s obsession with the case, but it’s also about the harsh history of the land where the man vanished, how it was flooded and remade, first by an uncaring federal government and then again by industry. Yellow Bird teaches us that some things aren’t random at all—that a crime, and its resolution, can be a product of a time and a place, and a

history bringing together the people involved. Philadelphia-based writer Emma Copley Eisenberg’s The Third Rainbow Girl ($27, Hachette) is also deeply rooted in time and place. It looks back at the so-called Rainbow Murders: two young women shot to death in West Virginia in 1980 while hitchhiking to the Rainbow Gathering, an annual counterculture festival held in national forests across the country. Nearly three decades later, Eisenberg moved to the area to work for a youth organization and became fascinated by the killings. Her book vividly recounts the lives of the two murdered women, what’s known of their last days, and the twists and turns of the police investigation as it unfolded over many years. But it also describes her own time in mountainous Pocahontas County, her immersion in the community, and her experiences there with men and women and sex and consent. Young women aren’t murdered in a vacuum, she reminds us—and the stories we tell about their deaths grow out of our culture, too.

N E W S PA P E R C L I P : LO N G I S L A N D P R E S S . C R I M E P H OTO S : L E I C E S T E R M E R C U R Y/ M I R R O R P I X / G E T T Y I M A G E S . L I S S A Y E L LO W B I R D P O R T R A I T: R A U L G O M E Z . O P E N B O O K : C H E T C H A I M A N G K H A L AYO N /A L A M Y S TO C K P H OTO. P O L A R O I D F R A M E : LU K A S _ Z B /A L A M Y S TO C K P H OTO . F I L M F R A M E : M A R K M E R C E R /A L A M Y S TO C K P H OTO.

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F R O M L E F T: C O U R T E SY O F N E O N ; C O U R T E SY O F N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C ; C O U R T E SY O F S TAT E M E N T P I C T U R E S / C N N F I L M S / N E O N

For Your Consideration SOME OF OUR FAVORITE FILMS ARE IN THE RUNNING FOR THIS YEAR’S BEST DOCUMENTARY OSCAR —PHILIP KIEFER AND LUKE WHELAN

HONEYLAND A beekeeper and her ailing mother in rural Macedonia develop a relationship with a nomadic family that moves in next door.

Outside’s take: A meticulously shot look at someone whose livelihood still depends on her relationship with the environment. SEA OF SHADOWS In the Sea of Cortez, environmentalists, journalists, and the Mexican government launch an effort to rescue the vaquita, a porpoise on the brink of extinction. Their adversaries? A cartel trafficking fish bladders to the Chinese black market. Outside’s take: An eco-documentary with the pacing of a thriller.

APOLLO 11 Director Todd Douglas Miller turns a trove of previously unreleased 70-millimeter footage of the Apollo 11 mission into an immersive look at the first moon landing. There’s no narration, just archival audio and shots from the launch of the Saturn V rocket in front of a million spectators, Neil Armstrong’s first step, and the return of the team to Earth. Outside’s take: A stunning visual experience that, 50 years later, conveys anew the magnitude of this historic feat.

Dispatches

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01/02.20

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P H OTO G R A P H B Y

Hannah McCaughey

BRANDED CONTENT

How Burton Became Snowboarding’s First Certified B Corporation For those not familiar with the certification, B Corporations are businesses that balance profit and purpose by meeting the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability. Becoming one is a huge deal—and yet another example of the legendary snowboarding company’s larger mission to make a positive dent in the world. A SOLID FOUNDATION Almost by necessity, Burton was built on being positive ambassadors for the sport. When Jake Burton Carpenter founded the brand in 1977, snowboarding was banned at ski resorts nationally. So he convinced one Vermont hill to give snowboarders access and, within about a

decade, 95 percent of U.S. ski areas followed suit. The brand’s change-making ethos was later exemplified when it announced equal payouts for women competing since the first U.S. Open of Snowboarding—38 years ago. Additionally, the brand partners with Protect Our Winters (POW), the leading climate advocacy group for the winter sports community. A CULTURE OF GOOD At company headquarters in Burlington, Vermont, fresh organic fruit is left out each morning for the crew, organic garden plots dot the property, and solar panels cover the roof. The company gets everyone out for a day of snowboarding at least once a season and gives its global workforce two paid days

off each year to volunteer for a cause in line with its values. “The benefits are similar across the world for Burton employees,” says Jenn Swain, Burton’s global senior sustainability manager. “We closed our entire business down for the Global Climate Strike on September 20, which gave everybody in the company ownership of sustainability, even if their day jobs don’t directly involve sustainability initiatives.”

its production facilities to renewable power sources. “One factory has already installed a solar array, and we’re trying to get additional partner factories to do the same,” says Swain. Burton is also trying to take care of the full life cycle of its products, and while it works on a recycling solution for snowboards (a notoriously tough nut to crack), it’s launched a take-back program that refurbishes used boards and then sells them at deep discounts, extending their lives in the process.

HOLISTIC SUSTAINABILITY To reduce its production footprint, Burton now sources 100 percent Forest Stewardship Council–certified wood for its cores, ensuring responsible forest management and biodiversity conservation. It also assembles boards using Super Sap, a plantbased resin, and is in the process of transitioning

IT DOESN’T END WITH CERTIFICATION B Corp status brings Burton into a family of more than 3,000 companies that balance values with profits. Sharing

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Community garden at Burton HQ; used gear trade-in station; fair-labor production facility; lobbying with POW on Capitol Hill; FSC-certified wood core construction; solar array atop Burton HQ

best practices and learning from that community might be the biggest upside. And Burton will strive to be better than even B Corp demands. “We want to take what we learn from the B Corp community and help lift the entire outdoor and winter sports industry,” says Swain. “Sustainability should be noncompetitive—unless we’re competing for the betterment of the world.”

To learn more, visit burton.com

Dispatches 01/02.20 travel special

warm weather escapes

New Under the Sun want to avoid the post-holiday blues? These warm adventure remedies are here to help, from mountain biking in Baja to hiking Dominica.

R AC H I D DA H N O U N / C AVA N

A view of the Dominica coastline from the Waitukubuli National Trail

C LO C K W I S E F R O M TO P L E F T: C O U R T E SY O F M AT I A S S A U T E R A N D DA N I E L A L I N A R E S ; D AV I D YAWA L K A R / E Y E E M ; J O H N S E ATO N C A L L A H A N / G E T T Y I M A G E S ; C O U R T E SY O F J E N N I F E R H A R T E R / N A N T I PA ; R YA N K R U E G E R / TA N D E M

Clockwise from top left: Hotel Aguas Claras; Cahuita National Park; a wooden bridge near Puerto Viejo; Hotel Nantipa; a break near Manzanillo, south of Puerto Viejo

Surf Uncrowded Breaks ON COSTA RICA’S CARIBBEAN SIDE BY JEN MURPHY

Costa Rica has become one of the world’s most popular surf destinations, and with that status have come concerns that the country could lose its pura vida vibe. The once sleepy towns of Tamarindo, Nosara, and Santa Teresa are on surfers’ radars, and on the Pacific coast in Pavones—which boasts the second-longest left break in the world—the waves are often packed. But you should still go, and consider the less visited Caribbean side. In the small coastal town of Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, four hours southeast of San José, you’ll find 50 miles of white-sand beaches, coral reefs, and waves for every skill level. The main draw is Salsa Brava, a heavy, barreling reef break reminiscent of Oahu’s North Shore. But Playa Negra

is perfect for foam-top-riding newbies, and Punta Uva for intermediates craving easy rides without drama. Those who want to test the waters before trying out Salsa Brava can hire a boat in Limón to reach Uvita Island, a punchy reef break. Stay at the year-old Hotel Aguas Claras on Playa Chiquita (from $290, breakfast included). The vision of Costa Rican artist Elizabeth Steinvorth and her daughter Elena Rohrmoser, it has six suites and six bungalows perched in tropical gardens, a restaurant, and bars and nightclubs nearby. Given the area’s rainforest, you’ll have no shortage of options if the surf’s not up. Kayak or SUP the Punta Uva River in search of monkeys and toucans, or get close to sloths and wildcats on a walk at the Jaguar Rescue Center. Cahuita National Park is a 30-minute drive from the hotel and laced with well-marked hiking trails that lead to snorkeling spots rich with marine life. From May to October, you’re likely to glimpse leatherback turtles hatching on the beaches.

Detour: New Adventure Bases Kasiiya Papagayo This off-the-grid eco-retreat on Costa Rica’s northern Pacific coast is set on 123 acres of untouched jungle, with trails that lead to two empty beaches. Between the wildlife viewing (howler monkeys in the trees, eagle rays and turtles in the sea) and five palatial tented suites, Kasiiya rivals the most over-thetop African safari stays. From $615 Senda Monteverde Hotel If spotting a jeweltoned quetzal and two-toed sloths are on your wish list, then this new 24-room lodge,

three hours northwest of San José, is a dream base. A hanging bridge connects the property to Aguti Wildlife Reserve, or drive 15 minutes to Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve, which is home to more than 400 species of birds, 2,500 plants, and jaguars. From $260 Hotel Nantipa The project of three Costa Rican friends, this 15room beachfront hotel is steps from some of Santa Teresa’s best surf breaks. If you aren’t a surfer, swap your sandals for hiking boots and explore nearby Montezuma Waterfalls and Cabo Blanco Nature Reserve. From $320

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Dispatches 01/02.20 travel special

Shred New Trails ACROSS BAJA’S SIERRA CACACHILAS BY STEPHANIE PEARSON

When it comes to Baja, most people think humpback whales, monster Pacific swells, and jalapeño-spiced margaritas sipped on empty beaches. Now mountain bikers eager to escape winter can add their own fantasy: cycling an expanding system of singletrack at Rancho Cacachilas, a solar-powered adventure resort with access to 34,600 acres in the Sierra Cacachilas between La Paz and kiteboarding hub La Ventana. Since 2014, an International Mountain Biking Association–trained, 15-person crew has been building what will eventually be

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43 miles of singletrack on the ranch, with an eye toward erosion control and water management, which means the trails won’t be washed away in the next flash flood. Twenty-five miles are complete, giving intermediate and advanced riders a few days’ worth of exploration in a trail system that feels like an arid Fruita, Colorado, with saguaro cactus and killer ocean views. The ten-mile Sky Trail will be finished in June and peaks at a summit that overlooks the sea before spilling into a giggle-out-loud downhill. Rancho Cacachilas also offers hiking and birdwatching, as well as on-site workshops in cheesemaking and seed storage. Or just kick back by the pool with a cocktail and take in the expansive view of Cerralvo Island in the Sea of Cortez.

Access and Resources With a direct line to the trails, Rancho Cacachilas’s rustic main lodging area Chivato has eight safari-style glamping tents and four rooms, plus outdoor showers and a small pool overlooking the sea. The minimum stay is two nights (from $175), which includes accommodations, food, and activities. The ranch is open from October 1 to May 31. For a change of pace, guests can sign up for ROW Adventures’ eightday Sea to Mountains Adventure, which involves four days of sea-kayaking the wildlife-rich waters near Espíritu Santo Island, followed by four nights at the ranch (from $2,040). Or take a six-hour camp ($399) or two-hour private lesson (from $190) with Evolution Kiteboarding in nearby La Ventana. Don’t bother renting a car—shuttle buses are available from Los Cabos Airport to La Paz; from there, guests catch a private shuttle to the ranch. The Mountain and Bike Hub, an on-site rental and repair shop, offers high-performance dual-suspension rides (from $46 for four hours).

F R O M L E F T: C O U R T E SY O F R A N C H O C AC A C H I L A S ; J U S T I N B A I L I E

The Santa Rosa Trail at Rancho Cacachilas; right, Espíritu Santo, the first destination on ROW’s sea-kayaking trip

warm weather escapes

C LO C K W I S E F R O M L E F T: J E N N I F E R A D L E R / G E T T Y I M A G E S ; TO M S TAC K /A L A M Y S TO C K P H OTO ; P E T E R P O N TO N E

Clockwise: Divers in Blue Hole, Ichetucknee Springs State Park; Herlong Mansion; Ginnie Springs

Get Wet SNORKELING AND DIVING THE SPRINGS OF NORTHERN FLORIDA BY TONY D’SOUZA

As an aquatic wonder, Florida is overlooked. Some 700 freshwater springs fed by mineralrich aquifers bubble up from the limestone sponge the state sits on. From ground-level pools that reach down 100 feet to caverns created by sinkholes, these crystalline lagoons look like a cross between a Yucatán cenote and a Caribbean reef. And at a constant 72 degrees, they’re always the ideal temperature for snorkeling and diving. The small northern outlets of Branford, Fort White, Mayo, and Old Town are prime places to start exploring, due to their close proximity to the springs and to places to stay. An hour and a half west of Jacksonville, 2,669-acre Ichetucknee Springs State Park is a great entry point, with breamfilled cerulean pools and a diveable openceiling cavern called Blue Hole. Thirty minutes west of Ichetucknee, less visited Troy Spring

State Park features a sunken paddle-wheel riverboat, scuttled by Confederates as Union soldiers advanced in 1863, that makes for a good wreck-diving site. The park’s main pool, a 70-foot-deep cavern, is shaped like a funnel, with limestone formations that resemble brain coral. A dive here usually attracts hundreds of yellow-bellied slider turtles that swirl around you. Ginnie Springs, a 35-minute drive southeast from Troy Spring, has a series of seven aquamarine pools along a two-mile trail that runs parallel to the Santa Fe River, filled with large gar, bass, and turtles. Plan a full day to snorkel or dive the springs. For technical divers, there’s also the Devil’s Spring system, with more than 30,000 feet of underground tunnels. Forty miles south, Devil’s Den Spring and nearby Blue Grotto, in the town of Williston, attract scuba and cave-certified divers, respectively, who come to explore the ancient fossil beds. Devil’s Den is a naturally lit underground pool, while Blue Grotto is 100 feet deep and has a passage to a 300-yard-long chamber.

Access and Resources Ichetucknee Springs Campground (from $20) is a mile from the park’s northern entrance, but consider a 20-minute drive to stay at Smoakhouse Ranch (from $100) south of Branford. There are three cabins and a three-bedroom farmhouse on-site; book Earl Cabin, a cyprus-clad 19thcentury shotgun house. Snorkeling gear is sold at the general store near the south entrance, but you’ll need to bring your own diving equipment. Primitive camping sites (from $23) dot 200-acre Ginnie Springs, many of them along the Santa Fe River. The three-bedroom Ginnie Cottage (from $175) is also located in the park and has a large deck and a fully equipped kitchen. The park’s dive center rents equipment. In the historic Old Florida town of Micanopy, 20 minutes south of Gainesville, the 11-room, two-cottage Herlong Mansion (from $125) makes a great base for divers headed to Blue Grotto and Devil’s Den Spring. Both sites offer full gear rental.

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Dispatches 01/02.20 travel special

Clockwise from top left: Bonefish at Garbutt’s Fishing Lodge; Copal Tree Lodge; the fruit platter at Copal Tree; a footbridge in Rio Blanco National Park; Hunting Caye in Sapodilla Cayes Marine Reserve

Sight Cast IN BELIZE TO LAND SOME OF THE CARIBBEAN’S MOST EVASIVE FISH BY CHRIS SANTELLA

The small fishing town of Punta Gorda in southern Belize offers some of the most elusive catches on a fly. At the edge of Port Honduras Marine Reserve, the area’s flats have a thriving population of permit, as well as big schools of bonefish and tarpon. Better yet, Punta Gorda, a 50-minute turboprop flight south from Belize City, still feels undiscovered. For more than 15 years, the Garbutt brothers—Dennis, Eworth, Oliver, and Scully—have been slowly putting the town on the map. Former commercial

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fishermen, the brothers now run a sportfishing charter company, dive outfit, and three-cabin lodge overlooking Joe Taylor Creek, from which their boats depart (from $1,340 for three nights). The day starts with a breakfast burrito as you motor to spots chosen by the Garbutts— sometimes a small island in the Gulf of Honduras, sometimes coastal marshes, depending on tides and wind. Aboard a 23-foot super-panga with casting decks and poling platforms, your guides will propel the skiff into the shallows while searching for fish. Along the way, it’s common to spot manatees, lemon sharks, and dolphins. The brothers also have exclusive access to Lime Caye, a shallow flat 40 miles east of Punta Gorda known for its bonefish, permit, and diving sites.

Access and Resources If the three cabins at Garbutt’s Fishing Lodge are booked, Copal Tree Lodge (from $179) has 16 spacious suites and a three-bedroom villa overlooking a 12,000-acre nature reserve. The hotel transports you by car to a nearby dock that the Garbutt brothers use to pick up anglers and divers. There are plenty of nonfishing adventures. At the southern edge of the Belize Barrier Reef, 36 miles east of Punta Gorda, snorkel or dive with manta rays, sea turtles, and, from March to June, whale sharks at Sapodillas Cayes Marine Reserve. The well-preserved Lubaantun ruins, a 19-mile drive from Punta Gorda, date back to 730 A.D. After, cool off with a swim in Hokeb Ha Cave about ten miles southwest. December through April is high season in Belize, with clear skies and temperatures around 80 degrees. Permit and most fish species are present all year. While the Garbutt brothers have a few rods to loan, most anglers bring a nine- or ten-weight and floating line. Bauer and raghead crabs are popular flies.

C LO C K W I S E F R O M TO P L E F T: C O U R T E SY O F W I L L P H E L P S / Y E L LO W D O G F LY F I S H I N G ; C O U R T E SY O F M U Y ’ O N O R E S O R T S ( 2 ) ; T I M H E S T E R /A L A M Y S TO C K P H OTO ; J A D DAV E N P O R T/ N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C I M A G E C O L L E C T I O N /A L A M Y S TO C K P H OTO

warm weather escapes

C LO C K W I S E F R O M L E F T: R A C H I D D A H N O U N / C AVA N ; T R U E W O R L D/ G A L L E R Y S TO C K ; M AT T H E W WA K E M / C AVA N

Clockwise: A hiker on the Waitukubuli National Trail; Dominica’s shoreline; kayaking in Scotts Head Marine Reserve

Detour:

Hike an entire island ALONG DOMINICA’S WAITUKUBULI NATIONAL TRAIL BY GINA D E CAPRIO VERCESI

This volcanic island between Martinique and Guadeloupe was well on its way to becoming the Caribbean’s top adventure destination when Hurricane Maria hit in 2017. Many of its neighbors are focused on rebuilding as quickly as possible, but Dominica is working toward a different goal. Following the hurricane, prime minister Roosevelt Skerrit pledged to make the small country of 73,000 the world’s first climate-resilient nation. In the past few months, long-awaited eco-hotels like Jungle Bay and Cabrits Resort and Spa Kempinski opened, and the country’s biggest draw, the 115-mile Waitukubuli National Trail, is expected to be complete by January, with final clearing efforts by volunteers, the government, and the private sector. The entire length can be broken up into day hikes ranging from four to 11.2 miles,

each showcasing a different aspect of Dominica’s dramatic topography. The first segment (4.7 miles) begins in Scotts Head Village, at the island’s southwestern tip, and traverses a wildlife-rich volcanic area and a series of hot sulphur springs. The trail culminates in the seaside village of Soufrière, where you can snorkel Soufrière–Scotts Head Marine Reserve, a bay filled with underwater fumaroles and colorful reefs. On segment four, a challenging eightmile rainforest route, you’ll hit lookouts with views of five of the island’s peaks and traverse a deep gorge in the heart of Morne Trois Pitons National Park, home to the famous Boiling Lake, set in a lunar landscape. Follow that with segment ten, a 4.3-mile meander through a forest that connects to the Syndicate Nature Trail. Join the island’s chief ornithologist, Bertrand “Dr. Birdy” Jno Baptiste, for a one-mileloop detour to spot parrots endemic to the island, like the red-necked Amazon, or jaco, and the Imperial Amazon, or sisserou. Even if the rarest birds stay hidden, Dr. Birdy will make sure you spot at least a few dozen of the island’s 167 species.

New Eco-Lodges Jungle Bay After being destroyed in 2015 by Tropical Storm Erika, Jungle Bay, a boutique wellness resort overlooking Soufrière–Scotts Head Marine Reserve, reopened in June. Run by a Dominican couple leading the charge on sustainable practices, the lodge uses solar energy (emitting 30 percent less carbon than traditional resorts) and has 30 eco-villas with bamboo furnishings and biodegradable bathroom products. The Waitukubuli National Trail is just an eight-minute drive south. From $294 Cabrits Resort and Spa Kempinski Set adjacent to Cabrits National Park, this 151-room resort opened in October with two dining options and four swimming pools. The hotel gets an estimated 60 percent of its food from local farmers and fishermen, and it uses solar energy and a gray-water treatment system, diverting waste water to irrigation. Nearby, you can visit some of the island’s most spectacular beaches, SUP or snorkel crystal-clear Toucari Bay, and access Waitukubuli National Trail’s segment 12. From $37

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01/02.20 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E

45

,W ZDV JHWWLQJ GDUN ZKHQ , KLW WKH Ă€UVW ULIĂ H RI P\ WULS GRZQ 8WDK¡V *UHHQ 5LYHU LQ D FDQRH 0\ SODQ ZDV WR VHW RXW ZKLOH LW ZDV FRRO DQG ORJ VRPH PLOHDJH EHIRUH QLJKWIDOO EXW GXVN FDPH RQ TXLFNHU WKDQ , WKRXJKW %HFDXVH ,¡G EHHQ LQ D UXVK WR ODXQFK my gear wasn’t tied down very well. I had trouble reading the water in the fading light, hit some shoals, and barely came out upright. Shaking, I pulled over to camp on a scruffy pile of gravel near the highway for a night of bad sleep and excoriating self-recrimination. It all seemed a ďŹ tting metaphor for the way I’d been hurtling through life. In the previous two years, I’d written a book, recorded a dozen podcast episodes, zombie-marched through a 14-city book tour, gotten sick a few times, and missed more of my kids’ dance recitals and cross-country meets than I care to remember. Hoping for recovery and insight, I’d embarked on an ambitious vacation: a 120-mile solo paddle with a tight deadline for a resupply and another tight deadline for a water taxi to pick me up at the end. A vacation with deadlines! The insight, at least, was becoming obvious: what I really needed was to slow down. I’m not alone in my overreach. Most of us have a hard time refusing to set goals. In this age of 5G hyperconnectivity, performative workaholism, personalized coaching, biohacking, Strava posturing, and supplement swilling, we’ve internalized the imperative to optimize every aspect of our lives. We feel lost without a plan, guilty for slouching, regretful of every injury, scuttled workout, and to-do item left unticked. Even our so-called leisure activities require frantic preparations and logistical ops reminiscent of Caesar’s army. We don’t just have fear of missing out, we have dread of slacking off. It’s telling that so many of us push to the edge of our endurance in order to feel good about ourselves. We’ve equated recreational difďŹ culty and socialmedia posts of summits with self-worth, and that’s a precarious and unsustainable place to be. SO HOW IS putting our heads down and

suffering in the name of glory working out for us? Not so great. Americans are, by and

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O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 01/02.20

discipline, delayed gratiďŹ cation, obsessive time management, constant self-analysis, long-range planning: they were just as vital to race training as they were to arbitrage or corporate litigation,â€? Gottlieb writes in Public Seminar magazine. The alpha-dog self-optimization trend has now permeated youth sports, too. Some coaches admit that they’re complicit in creating burnout. “For many sports, there is no longer an off-season, no time off, competitions all year long, nonstop, and that’s trickled down to kids,â€? says Ken Vick, the CEO of Velocity Sports Performance. “The demands are ridiculous.â€? large, fried. Depression and anxiety rates Millennials are helping us understand are soaring, we’re experiencing high levels burnout in a new way, because they’re inof loneliness, and we’re not engaged in as sisting—in their insistently millennial fashmany community activities as we used to be. ion—that we recognize its impact and the Anne Helen Petersen, a 38-year-old jour- urgency of learning how to back off, both nalist and long-distance runner in Missoula, in the workplace and in the rest of our lives. Montana, remembers the days when her col- For many of them, years of working hard lege pals graduated and became ski bums for has failed to delivered measurable gains in a while or worked odd jobs in national parks. wages, affordable real estate, or even job Now, she says, that’s rare. Younger millen- security. And they are not happy about that. nials and Gen Zers, anxious In an article that went viral over the gig economy and last year on Buzzfeed News, QUICK FIX helicoptered by their parPetersen wrote, “Burn out ents, fear veering too far and the behaviors and weight off script into experiences that accompany it aren’t, in that offer unquantifiable fact, something we can cure ,W KHOSV WR UHVHW \RXU personal gains. The result? by going on vacation. It’s not FLUFDGLDQ UK\WKP DQG Malaise, disaffection, dislimited to workers in acutely SURYLGHV D VHQVH RI connection. high-stress environments. ZHOO EHLQJ ZKHWKHU Last year the World And it’s not a temporary afic\RX¡UH LQ \RXU EDFNHealth Organization extion: It’s the millennial condi\DUG RU RQ D PRXQpanded its entry on burntion. It’s our base temperature. WDLQWRS 2U JODPS LW out in the International It’s our background music. It’s XS LQ D EHDXWLIXOO\ Classification of Diseases, the way things are.â€? sited tent just outside defining it as a syndrome O F COU RS E , every recent D QDWLRQDO SDUN ZLWK resulting from “chronic generation is at least pass8QGHU &DQYDV D workplace stress that has ingly familiar with burnout. FRPSDQ\ ZLWK ORFDnot been successfully manThe sometimes inspiring, WLRQV IURP =LRQ WR WKH aged.â€? It is characterized by sometimes soul-sucking rally 6PRN\ 0RXQWDLQV feeling depleted, cynical, toward achievement, selfand unmotivated. Many reliance, and optimal effiexperts also understand it as a concept of charging too hard without ciency has been dogging us since the dawn adequate recovery in other spheres of life, of industrialization. As early as 1807, Wordsincluding parenting, exercise, and passion- worth lamented, “The world is too much with us.â€? He preferred to leave it behind, based volunteering. Leisure pursuits used to be about, well, walking some 180,000 miles in his lifetime leisure. Running, for example, emerged as a across alp, glade, ďŹ eld, and fen. The overburdening of the individual can recreational pastime in the sixties and seventies largely as a way to bliss out, accord- exact a real cost on both physical and emoing to Princeton historian Dylan Gottlieb. tional health. As sports psychologist MiBy the early eighties, though, “running, chael Gervais bluntly puts it: “The way the and marathon training in particular, dove- human organism responds to chronic stress tailed with the same habits that yuppies is fatigue, staleness, and even death.â€? He honed in their white-collar jobs. Personal points to the effects of the stress hormone

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.HWDPLQH IRU 6WUHVV Used in medicine as an anesthetic, ketamine has come a long way from its nineties reputation as a club drug that offered a pleasurable disconnection from reality. More recently, it’s been hailed as a wonder treatment for depression. In 2019, federal regulators approved a purified version that’s now available as a nasal spray to treat depression when other drugs have failed. (The approved version is administered only in controlled settings.) Meanwhile, ketamine clinics are popping up across the country as doctors tout infusions to help with anxiety and other uses that don’t yet have the FDA’s stamp of approval. Rebecca Brachman, a fellow at Cornell Tech in Manhattan, is advancing another intriguing application for the drug. Her hypothesis: because low doses of ketamine appear to act as a prophylactic against stress-induced psychiatric disorders, like a sort of mental-health vaccine, then it might be effective at preventing PTSD and improving stress responses. Brachman’s studies have been conducted only on rodents so far, and there’s a lack of consensus about ketamine’s effects on the human brain. Nonetheless, she and her colleagues have found compelling evidence that the drug makes mice better able to manage future stress. “It’s not necessarily about chilling out,” Brachman says. “It’s really about having resilience.” But Michael Grunebaum, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, says that in his clinical trials, many patients don’t find that the drug relieves anxiety. “Ketamine is just a really distinct, weird, spacey feeling,” he says. Brachman doesn’t envision the drug eliminating our feelings of stress altogether, but she’s hopeful that if her hypothesis translates to human subjects, it could open up an entirely new way of fine-tuning the body’s response to the abundance of life’s stressful situations. —Peter Andrey Smith

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cortisol, a get-up-and-go neuropeptide us from being present, tuning into the needs that is adaptive in spurts but should not re- of our own bodies, and enjoying the people main elevated all day. around us. Relying on technology like sleepWhen we’re pushing hard for an extended tracking apps may only stress us out more. period of time, we do indeed get stuff done. “You’ll become one of those people roadWe pass the test, win the race, meet our raging on the way to yoga class,” she says. deadlines, make money for shareholders. But as scientists are now learning, those who are THE GOOD NEWS is that while elite coachexposed to prolonged stress are more likely ing may have contributed to the burnout epito develop dense arteries, cellular inflam- demic, it also points to a solution. “We spend mation, and unraveling of the telomeres, more time now talking about recovery,” says those protective casings at the end of a cell’s Gervais, who has coached amateurs, Olympians, and, increasingly, burned-out execuchromosomes. Even if we’re incredibly fit, we can inflict tives. “To go the distance, to do extraordinary collateral damage on two of our most health- things, nobody does it alone, and nobody promoting systems, sleep and relationships, does it when deeply fatigued.” It’s easier to warns Rob Kent de Grey, a social neuro- prevent burnout than to treat it, he says. But scientist at the University of Utah. “One way we shouldn’t be stress avoidant, because it’s or another, there’s a cost to overdoing it,” he stress that drives us to perform and to excel. says. “You’ll eventually suffer performance The trick is to toggle between what Gervais decrements, and you don’t always get to calls “running to the edge of our capacity” and recovering on a daily basis, with emphachoose where the decrements are.” The relentless pursuit of achievement sis on the daily. Two-time Olympic volleyball silver medis also counterproductive to many of our values, says Christie Aschwanden, a for- alist Nicole Davis learned this the hard way. mer nordic ski racer and the author of Good After the London Olympics, as she was to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can training for the 2013 professional season, she Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery. says, “I would take stress home with me and “High-achieving people almost uniformly bring it to others.” After a poor practice sesdon’t prioritize sleep,” she says, “and they sion, she was more impatient, grumpier, and are kidding themselves, because that’s the quicker to anger. Ultimately, she had to acsingle most important thing you need to knowledge that her emotional state affected be good at anything.” Researchers at Har- her performance back on the court. “Fear and anxiety are a wet blanket for vard demonstrated that adequate nighttime sleep significantly improves motor-skills passion,” she says. So she worked with Gerlearning and memory consolidation. And a vais to “decouple my identity from just being 2014 review of 113 studies found that sleep an athlete” and to reexamine her core values, deprivation likely reduces motivation and including her relationship with the sport. It made her realize that attitude endurance, while a study is a big component of stress. from Australia found that QUICK FIX “We are firing on a lot of cyla lack of shut-eye increases inders all the time,” she says. tension and worsens mood “Fatigue is inevitable. Burnout before competition. is not.” A 2014 report from re-XVW GRQ·W FDOO LW Both Gervais and Davis, who searchers in Sweden conMRXUQDOLQJ 5HVHDUFK now coach together, believe cluded that people exVKRZV WKDW D GDLO\ that mindfulness meditation periencing symptoms of ULWXDO RI ZULWLQJ GRZQ can play a major role in daily burnout had poorer neural \RXU IHHOLQJV LV RQH recuperation, along with sleep, connections between their RI WKH EHVW VWUHVV nutrition, and hydration. A brain’s amygdala—or threat PDQDJHPHQW WRROV combination of these basics, center—and the anterior they say, can apply to anyone cingulate cortex, which at risk for depletion in work helps regulate emotions. Translation: they let stressful events get the or sport. “Meditation,” Davis says, “creates best of them. Another study from Sweden, more presence and a lengthened perception published in 2015, found that chronic oc- of time.” Who doesn’t want a more expanded sense cupational stress accelerated aging in the medial prefrontal cortex, whose function is of time? In fact, it appears that for many of critical for decision-making, judgment, and us there’s an inverse relationship between scheduled productivity and bliss. Not that self-concept. To put it simply, we’re becoming jerks we can’t be in a flow state at work or while and prematurely aging ourselves. Burnout exercising, but it happens despite the strivand exhaustion, Aschwanden says, prevent ing, not because of it. Bliss occurs when we

are emotionally at ease, in the moment, and well rested. But it wasn’t until I read How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, by another disaffected millennial, Jenny Odell, that I realized that perhaps the recovery experts are asking only part of the question. Rather than attending to our own optimization, what would happen if we attended to something else altogether—say, each other? Or the natural world? Thoreau suggested as much in his famous essay “Walkingâ€?: “But the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise ‌ as the Swinging of dumb-bells or chairs; but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day.â€? Reorienting in a meaningful way requires a fairly radical upending of capitalist norms, not to mention our relationship with social media and information itself, but Odell, a Bay Area artist and an art and art-history lecturer at Stanford University, says it’s worth it. Even simply loaďŹ ng about outdoors, with no goals in mind, is “an act of political resistance,â€? she writes. “I’m suggesting that we fiercely protect our human animality against all technologies that actively ignore and disdain the body, the bodies of other beings, and the body of the landscape that we inhabit.â€? Odell says she does this by wandering around and looking, slowly, at birds and plants she’s learning to identify. It’s not that she isn’t busy, and she hasn’t sworn off Twitter, but she also takes three-day retreats several times a year—by herself and unplugged—to minimalist rental cabins in the mountains. “I call them hermit trips,â€? she says. “The whole point is that they help me maintain a sense of interiority.â€? The deep thinking that follows can help drive her creativity. She ďŹ nds it funny that apps like AllTrails rate spots by scenery over natural history, biodiversity, and general loafability. “I like to look for metaphors in nature, and those are not in an AllTrails review,â€? she says. (For more on how Odell does nothing, see page 50.) After sustaining a couple of injuries from overtraining, runner Anne Helen Petersen no longer clocks her workouts or races, although she still enjoys participating in organized events. “I’ll track distance, but not while I’m running,â€? she says. Without her Garmin, she says, she’s gotten better at sensing how her body feels, and she’s stronger because of it. She takes her earbuds out and listens to the sounds of the mountains instead. THESE ARE LESSONS that don’t come easily

for many of us raised in late-stage industrialism. One day last spring at an artist retreat, my neighbor, Robbie Q. Telfer, asked me

if I wanted to join him for a short hike near ually make our way toward the Bonneville Georgia’s Chattahoochee Hills. I glanced Shoreline Trail. A sign on the arboretum’s from my computer screen to the pulsing Floral Walk reminded us to notice microcliburst of springtime outside. I considered mates by paying attention to how the trail’s the number of pages I had left to write and sunny spots felt on our skin. In the cool fall the number of days I had left to write them. morning, they felt great. That made me breathe more deeply. The I sighed and turned him down. toads and birds were riotTelfer, whose performance QUICK FIX ous, including a hummingpoetry often centers on the bird that darted around a natural world, came back red yucca. We leaned over to many hours later looking very inhale a silver sands lavenpleased with himself. On the +DQJ WLPH LV HDV\ der shrub and admire blue trail, he’d stopped to study a DQG SRUWDEOH ZLWK globe thistles as tall as our map when a retired schoolWKH (QR 'RXEOH armpits. teacher sidled up to him and 1HVW ,W¡V VPDOO DQG But as two people often asked, “Would you like to see light enough to do when they’re out for a pond full of baby salamanEULQJ RQ DQ\ DGYHQa hike, we soon forgot to ders?â€? Uhhh, OK? The pond WXUH HDV\ WR VHW XS smell things and landed turned out to be full of amDQG URRP\ HQRXJK deep in conversation. And phibians of all kinds, and there IRU WZR that’s OK, Kent de Grey aswere sci-ďŹ carnivorous plants sured me. Social connecand two killdeer having sex. tion is perhaps the most He was giddy recounting all this to me. When I asked how far he walked, important factor for happiness. He was Telfer looked wounded: “I don’t consciously geeking out explaining what he’s learned record my mileage. My main rules are to let about how psychosocial factors influence the experience unfold and don’t get lost.â€? He health and disease. The upshot is that when and the teacher have since become pen pals. we allow ourselves to wander a bit, we beScience tells us that harnessing a spirit of come better at aligning our everyday acplay helps us bounce back from life’s stress- tions with who we are and who we want to ors and put disappointments into manage- be, and we boost our cellular health at the same time. able perspective. “Shall we sit for a bit?â€? I asked, feeling a “We take ourselves so seriously,â€? says Lynn Barnett-Morris, associate professor desire to shore up my telomeres. “Yes!â€? he said. The bench was high off in the department of recreation, sports, and tourism at the University of Illinois. “Playful the ground, and we swung our legs like little people have more resilienceâ€?—because they kids. A hawk circled overhead. The scent of know how to ďŹ nd amusement, defuse stress- sage wafted from the hot slopes. I felt like I ors, and solve problems creatively. “We think was sitting in the sweet spot of stimulation, playfulness can be an antidote to burnout,â€? not too much and not too little. Kent de Grey passed me a water bottle and she says. “Things roll off you.â€? As Telfer, a fan of nonlinear creativity, ex- adjusted his UTE PROUD cap. “We’re not built for unrelenting stressors,â€? plained it to me, “If I see a path going off, I’ll he said. “What the science points to is this: take it.â€? I decided I needed to go look for some the very act of doing nothing is important.â€? We stood up, stretched, and started out nonlinearity. So a few weeks after my trip on the Green River, I asked social neurosci- again, in a random direction. I was liking it. entist Rob Kent de Grey to join me for a re- I could see what Wordsworth and Thoreau laxed hike in Utah’s Wasatch foothills. The knew, and what millennials like Odell are 34-year-old postdoc knows a thing or two rediscovering—that cruising around at the about the trade-offs we make, sometimes pace of human locomotion may be the persubconsciously, in the push to achieve. He fect riposte to modern life. When we want to feel powerful, it’s good spent his graduate-school years in thrall to a looming corkboard in his ofďŹ ce, on which to remember that humans are the only stridhe tabulated the 30 research projects he was ing bipedal mammals in the world. This, right here, is our superpower. working on in various stages of comple–Florence Williams tion. While collecting data, publishing, and studying for his exams, his immune system ďŹ zzed out, his relationships faltered, and the CONTRIBUTING EDITOR FLORENCE only time he could ďŹ nd for pleasure reading WILLIAMS IS THE AUTHOR OF THE NATURE FIX: WHY NATURE was while brushing his teeth. For a full sensory wake-up, we decided to MAKES US HAPPIER, HEALTHIER, start our hike in Red Butte Garden and grad- AND MORE CREATIVE.

7KH %LJ &KLOO

6XUSULVLQJO\ HDV\ VWHSV WR D KDSSLHU OHVV VWUXQJ RXW OLIH $FWLYDWH <RXU 9DJXV 1HUYH IT’S THE SECRET TO CALMING DOWN

Activate what now? Stick with us: The vagus is the largest and longest of the 12 nerve ďŹ bers emanating from your brain. It branches out to reach every major organ in your body, making the mind-body connection a literal one. Researchers hypothesize that the vagus is part of what’s known as the microbiota-gut-brain axis, and John Cryan, an Irish neuroscientist, has identiďŹ ed the nerve as one way that microbes in your gut send signals to your brain. Which, as he likes to say, proves that what happens in vagus does not stay in vagus. Why should you care? Because the vagus nerve is a link to your parasympathetic, or “rest and digest,â€? nervous system. When stimulated, it slows down your heart rate, switches off your ďŹ ght-oright response, and relaxes you. Things like yoga, deep breathing, massage therapy, and moderate exercise can activate it, which might help explain the positive feelings we get when we do them. In an effort to trigger my own vagus nerve, I began searching for a quick and effective technique. Beyond stimulation therapy, in which surgeons implant a device that sends electrical impulses to the

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brain, there are no other FDAapproved methods to get the health beneďŹ ts. “I’ve yet to ďŹ nd a piece of scientiďŹ c evidence that doesn’t get extrapolated well beyond where it should be,â€? says Mike Tipton, a professor of environmental physiology at England’s University of Portsmouth. I ruled out any method that required surgery, hiring a specialist, chanting, or gagging (the vagus nerve is connected to the throat muscles), as well as long-term investments like changing the composition of my gut microbiota or developing more meaningful friendships. The technique I kept returning to was cold-water face immersion. A number of experiments have shown that dunking your face in cold water reduces your heart rate and blood pressure. Even Tipton agrees that it’s “a legitimate way of stimulating the vagus nerve,â€? but notes that the therapeutic beneďŹ ts are currently unproven. A group of scientists in Luxembourg recently tested wearable devices that cool the vagus nerve via a patch of skin above the clavicle, but you don’t need to buy any new gadgets. Simply submerge your face in cold water for a few seconds. I tried it for several days, using water at about 55 degrees, and found the experience refreshing and, after the initial shock, somewhat calming. Even a

O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 01/02.20

quick splash can work. Ahhhhh. Feel that? That’s vagus-nerve stimulation. —P.A.S.

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places like the Bay Area where there’s an active community of users. And I ďŹ nd it heartwarming to know that someone else is paying attention to the same thing as me and cares about it.â€?

JUST GO OUTSIDE. THAT’S IT.

The crux of Jenny Odell’s argument in her book How to Do Nothing is that a narrow deďŹ nition of productivity, which plays out on devices and social-media platforms, has monopolized our minds. Her solution? The 33-year-old Stanford lecturer urges us to pay attention to the natural world wherever we are— whether that’s the wilderness or the middle of the city. We asked Odell what that looks like. —Molly Mirhashem

“I considered myself to be in conversation with the outdoors as I worked on the book. Whatever environment I was in played an active role in how I formed my thoughts. It sounds cheesy, but I considered parks a collaborator, just like if you had a partner on a project who you talked through your ideas with.�

/HDUQ D 1HZ 6SRUW IT’S GOOD FOR YOUR BRAIN

“I don’t spend time outdoors to think about myself. It’s not about self-improvement. It’s about fundamentally reďŹ guring your relationship to everything around you.â€? “My book isn’t anti-technology. I teach digital and internet art, and there are amazing things online. But within the attention economy and social media, time feels very stunted. You’re trapped in an endless urgent present. When I think about how it feels to go for a walk around the block and just look at things, it’s almost the direct opposite.â€? “I use the crowdsourcing app iNaturalist to help identify local ora and fauna. It works well in

Each time we acquire a complex skill, our brains spring into action, shifting gray and white matter around in a process sometimes referred to as activation-dependent structural plasticity. To use an analogy from running, it’s like trading a steady 5K jog for a series of high-intensity sprints. It might be painful at ďŹ rst, but it makes your brain stronger. Even more appealing, developing new abilities may make us less stressed. I reminded myself of this one morning last fall as I stood on the deck of the Wild Pigeon, a J/24 keelboat with a jaunty red hull owned by the Manhattan Yacht Club—which, despite its name, is continued on page 54

Hit Snooze YOU NEED MORE SLEEP

I’ve always been a morning person. I set my alarm for before dawn and head to the trail or gym when most people are still asleep. Then I shower and sip coffee while I catch up on the news or sift through e-mail. But a few months ago, I started to feel sluggish during those sunrise jogs, and I watched my mile times slow. As I yawned through the day, I wondered whether I was a morning person after all.

It turns out a lot of us feel tired. According to a Gallup poll, 40 percent of Americans report getting less than the recommended seven hours of sleep per night. The fewer z’s we get, the more our bodies and brains are compromised. “You might see a significant decline in physical performance over a period of three or four days,” says W. Christopher Winter, a sleep researcher, neurologist, and author of The Sleep Solution. “And you’re likely to make three times as many mental errors.”

So I vowed that for two weeks, I would sleep in. I reset my alarm from 5 A.M. to 6:30, kept my regular bedtime of 11:30 P.M., and meticulously tracked how every day went. It didn’t go well. Each morning, I woke up before my alarm and forced myself to close my eyes again. When the alarm went off, I’d bolt upright, race to the shower, and start my day feeling unprepared. That frazzled state stuck with me as I hurried to meetings. Yet I did notice that I was

more engaged at work and made fewer mistakes. I started running in the evening and shaved five seconds off my mile time. While sleeping later isn’t for me, it confirmed that my body feels healthier and my brain sharper when I’m getting at least seven hours. So I’ve set my alarm for 5 A.M. again, and I now have a second alarm that chimes at 10 P.M., telling me to go to bed. What I needed all along was to get more overall rest, something a lot of us could use. —Abigail Wise

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,W¡V 1HYHU 7RR /DWH

5LFK 5ROO JXUX RI UHLQYHQWLRQ NQRZV IURP H[SHULHQFH WKDW \RX FDQ DOZD\V VWDUW RYHU RQ WKH SDWK WR D PRUH EDODQFHG OLIH %< 3(7(5 9,*1(521 ,Q 2FWREHU just before his 52nd birthday, endurance athlete and podcast host Rich Roll offered up the short version of his life story on Twitter: I didn’t reach my athletic peak until I was 43. I didn’t write my ďŹ rst book until I was 44. I didn’t start my podcast until I was 45. At 30, I thought my life was over. At 52 I know it’s just beginning. Keep running. Never give up. And watch your kite soar.

He ended with two emojis: a hand giving a peace sign and a plant. (Roll is vegan.) If this kind of self-help poetry makes you squirm, you’re probably not among the rabid fans of the Rich Roll Podcast, which is one of the most popular interview shows in the world, with some 68 million downloads and counting. In an era of high-paced everything and outsize personalities, his appeal is his patience and humble inquisitiveness. His guests range from elite athletes (climber Alex Honnold, Olympic triathlete Gwen Jorgensen) to meditation acolytes (Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, comedian Russell Brand) to spiritual leaders (yogi Guru Singh, pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber). With everyone, Roll is “unrushed and caring,â€? says entrepreneur and life coach Jesse Itzler, who has been on the show twice. “He’s like the endurance-athlete version of Oprah.â€? Roll’s approach grew out of the personal journey he outlined in that tweet. He was a talented swimmer at Stanford but developed an alcohol problem that later ended up destroying his ďŹ rst marriage—during the honeymoon—and nearly derailed his career as an entertainment lawyer. He sobered up after a stint in rehab, then became a workaholic, spending the next decade toiling toward burnout. At age 40, realizing that he was miserable and dangerously unhealthy, he went vegan and started endurance training. Two years later, he ďŹ nished 11th at the Ultraman, an infamous three-day swim-bike-run sufferfest in Hawaii. He wrote a book about his transformation, 2012’s Finding Ultra, quit

his job, and started recording conversations for a podcast. Back then nobody listened to him. Now lots of people do: mostly because nobody does a better job of helping us understand how we can improve our lives by being more patient and less, well, maxed out. I spoke with Roll inside his recording studio at his home in Southern California’s Santa Monica Mountains, where he lives with his wife, Julie Piatt (a vegan-cookbook author and host of her own podcast), and the youngest two of their four children.

crack my head wide open for what? I was laying there and Julie asked me, ‘If this was the end, do you regret it?’ I said, ‘No, this is what I want to do.’ Somehow, my compass was being calibrated.� “A lot of people read self-help books and think that they’re changing their lives, but they’re not implementing any of the advice. Mood follows action. It’s not how you feel. It’s not the ideas that you have. It all boils down to: What are you doing to improve your life?�

“What happens in the secret-society rooms of addiction recovery stays there. What I can say is that you become a skilled listener. You develop a huge capacity for empathy. And you learn how to be vulnerable. It’s not a mistake that QUICK FIX a lot of successful podcast hosts are in recovery.�

“Having everything go your way isn’t a learning experience. My second Ultraman was the perfect race for me. After leading by ten minutes on the ďŹ rst day, I crashed my bike, ending any chance at the podium and shattering my ego. But I still had to pick it up and finish. I “I don’t think of myself as a love everything about how that member of the wellness inended up.â€? $YRLG WKH VWUHVV RI dustry. I’m just following DLUSRUW OLQHV DQG my curiosity.â€? “After my book came out, we GHOD\HG Ă LJKWV DQG spent years being totally broke. EH D WRXULVW LQ \RXU “When I got sober, I was inWe couldn’t pay our mortgage. RZQ WRZQ tent upon becoming a proWe had our trash cans taken ductive member of society. away because I couldn’t afford I repaired my relationships the garbage service. I was talkwith family and friends. I became a success- ing about spiritual principles and how you ful corporate lawyer. I drove a sports car and have to trust your heart, but my faith in those lived in a very nice house. From the outside, ideas was tested. At times I thought, I’m full it all looked really groovy. But on the inside, I of shit. These journeys can be gifts, but was coming to terms with the fact that I was when you’re experiencing them, you chasing somebody else’s life.â€? feel like you’re going to die.â€? “I’m constantly dispelling this myth that I’m some crazy gifted athlete. In my first half-Ironman, I barfed during the swim. By the time I got off my bike, my legs were so cramped up that I ran 100 meters and just stopped. It was a DNF. My beginnings in triathlon were very humble—but I loved it.â€? “I had a bad bike crash in the spring of 2009 and ended up in the ER. It really made me question what I was doing. I’m going to

“It’s all about emotional connection. The information is secondary. With each guest on my show, I need to ďŹ gure out a way into this person so that I can understand them.â€? “Left to my own devices, I would not be doing any of these things. I’m very rational. But my wife has shown me the limits of that operating system—and the expansiveness that comes when you believe in possibility, trust your intuition, and act on inspiration.â€?

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continued from page 50

located at Jersey City’s Liberty Harbor Marina. I was here to learn to sail, but also to explore the broader upside of doing so. In instructor Krista DeMille, I had an encouraging role model. She started sailing only a few years ago. A classically trained dancer and actor who also led river-rafting trips, she was a walking advertisement for the polyvalent self. With the metallic clang of nearby construction as a backdrop, DeMille kicked off the two-day intensive course by guiding me through sailing’s dizzying multitude of terms. I struggled to keep up with the flurry of hanks and clews and halyards, my Scrabble arsenal expanding by the minute. Next

we moved to knots: square knots, slipknots, figure-eight stopper knots. To teach me the bowline, DeMille used a little story of a rabbit and a tree. Then she had me raise the jib and mainsail and fix the trio of tensioners, each with its own dynamics. It felt like doing a full-body workout while standing on a balance board. This dockside training was a tonic for my brain, suggests Denise Park, director of research at the University of Texas’s Center for Vital Longevity. There is “some evidence,” she says, that engaging in “cognitively demanding tasks over a sustained period of time” keeps our brains sharp as we age. The ideal task is something “intellectually challenging and pref-

SHOULD I TAKE IT?

CBD for Anxiety Among the numerous purported benefits of cannabidiol is anxiety relief. Cinnamon Bidwell, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, is conducting a study on CBD and anxiety. (The trial ends in 2021.) If you’re looking to experiment, here’s her advice. —P.A.S. Be wary if a product claims to cure anything. While data on laboratory animals suggests that CBD could ameliorate anxiety and reduce inflammation, such benefits are still largely unproven. The FDA has approved only one pharmaceutical-grade CBD product, Epidiolex, to treat certain types of seizures. Dose size and purity matter. Make sure the product has been lab tested for the concentration of active ingredients and for impurities like heavy metals. In a 2011 study conducted by Brazilian researchers, a dozen college students reported reduced anxiety when speaking in front of a mock audience after taking a single dose of CBD, com-

pared with a group who took a placebo. The catch is that the study used 600 milligrams of 99.9 percent pure CBD, which far exceeds the 10 to 30 milligrams found in many products. No to vaping. Vaping cannabis products of unknown origin is a bad idea, given that we still don’t know why people have died from vaperelated lung ailments. You might not pass a drug screening. Some drug tests can’t differentiate CBD from THC. Moreover, CBD oils can have up to 0.3 percent THC and still be called THC-free. Even that small amount can show up as a prohibited substance.

erably novel.” As much as the the surface. Ultimately, sailing brain likes a mental workout, seemed like a metaphor for it also likes physical exertion: learning itself: something that exercise has been shown to takes you to new places and enhance cognition. uses the power of nature to DeMille took us into New make you feel better. —Tom Vanderbilt York Harbor, one of the world’s busiest, filled with a staggering array of large vessels, most of which seemed to be bearing down on us. “Raise the jib!” she IT ISN’T MAKING YOU shouted. I clambered toward HAPPIER the bow and began hoisting. Caffeine is the world’s The sail unfurled a few feet and most popular psychoactive then refused to budge. DeMille substance—Americans alone took a look. “Sailing,” she told me, “is about problem-solving.” spend $72 billion on coffee each year. But surprising research Eventually, she found that I’d suggests that it doesn’t work shackled the line not only to the the way we think it does. Acgrommet (correct), but also to cording to Jack James, former the forestay (incorrect). editor of the Journal of Caffeine Once that was sorted, she Research, if you’re a regular handed me the tiller, and coffee drinker, caffeine doesn’t all that previously abstract make you sharp, improve mood, instruction became very real: or perk you up. And some of the we were a crew of two, and world’s leading drug researchthe winds were robust. Sailing ers, including David Nutt at demanded all my attention. Imperial College London and This itself, in an age of endless Peter Rogers at the University distraction, has benefits. While of Bristol, have at the tiller, I confirmed couldn’t reach for that caffeine my phone or think QUICK FIX doesn’t boost about the sources wakefulness of anxiety in my above baseline life (bills, story for those who deadlines, middle are dependent school applicaExposure to biodiverse on it. They tion forms). No soil is good for your explain it surprise there. But microbiome, which this way: You the fact that I was has been correlated feel fatigued also learning a with improved mood. as your first new skill provided Plant a tree, start a espresso wears its own form of garden—or off, and you stress reduction. dig in at the Many start going into As a recent study Hands Peace Farm withdrawal. So in the Journal of in Highlands, North your next jolt Applied PsycholCarolina, where guests is really just ogy on stress in learn and practice rebringing you the workplace generative agriculture. back to norsuggests, learning mal. “That’s gives us powerpleasant and ful psychological encourages caffeine consumptools to combat job stressors, tion,” Rogers says, “but it’s building our feeling of compenot providing a net benefit to tence and enlarging our sense functioning.” Given that, and of self. the fact that caffeine can cause In my case, I’d studied sevsleep disruption and elevate eral things at once: knots, navblood pressure, it may be time igation, the wind, the etiquette to wean yourself. Life really is of the sea—the 100-question possible without it. certification test I took after—P.A.S. ward (I passed) only scratched

Put Down That Espresso

5HLQ ,Q <RXU 'LJLWDO /LIH THREE SIMPLE STEPS

Jennifer Stewart is a cofounder of Gateway Productivity, which coaches business owners on how to be digitally organized. She shares the core principles that help her clients. —A.B.

1. Focus on one thing at a time. Multitasking is a myth, Stewart says. She recommends that you turn off all notifications except texts and phone calls and consider installing an app and website blocker like Freedom, which forces you to choose when you digitally engage.

2. Put all your to-do items in one place. “We hold everything in our head, and that causes stress,” says Stewart. “Pick a place where all those things can go. That way your brain can relax.” Things 3 is a simple management tool that allows you to sort and schedule your chores.

3. Account for your time. Wonder where the day went? Try Toggl, a piece of time-tracking software. You record how you spend your work hours. After a few days, you’ll have a clear sense of where your energy is going and how you can adjust.

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QUICK FIX

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7DNH WR WKH Needle WANT TO RELAX? TRY KNITTING. SERIOUSLY.

Last winter, bucking gender stereotypes and the derisive looks of my 11-year-old daughter, I became a proud knitter. But let’s back up. It all started as I was preparing for a podcast interview with Cal Newport, the author of Digital Minimalism, a bestselling book that examines the pitfalls of our screen-addicted lifestyles. My work project quickly evolved

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into a self-help mission. Newport’s book described a litany of bad habits—tuning out the world with music, mindless social-media scrolling—that sounded eerily familiar. So I decided to commit to his prescribed “digital declutter�— 30 days without recreational screen time. Newport is careful not to call his plan a detox, a word he worries implies a short-term break rather than the transformation of one’s relationship to technology that he’s promoting. “One of the things

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I’ve noticed is that the people who succeed actually took advantage of the 30-day break to think seriously about what they really want to do with their time,â€? Newport told me. “You have to have a positive thing to replace this with.â€? In other words, you need a hobby— something you value that can ďŹ ll the time you once spent scrolling through your Instagram feed when the monthlong moratorium expires. That’s when I picked up knitting, essentially by default. It was February, so gardening and

other outdoor hobbies were a no-go. I love reading, but I knew my passion for dense nonďŹ ction would inevitably be overrun by the lure of Twitter’s more snackable nuggets. Woodworking sounded cool, but I have few tools and zero carpentry skills. Knitting? That seemed doable, perhaps even easy. I picked up two pairs of needles and two balls of yarn, recruited my wife to join me, then briey broke my digital fast for a quick YouTube tutorial. For the next month or so, we set aside our phones and plopped on the couch for nightly sessions of knit one, purl one. As soon as I had the basics down, I found that the repetitive, mindless task was relaxing and meditative, helping me to decompress from ofďŹ ce life. Turns out research backs that up. In 2013, British well-being coach and knitting advocate Betsan Corkhill teamed up with an occupational-therapy researcher to survey more than 3,500 active knitters from 31 countries. Their conclusion: people who knit more than three times a week report improved moods, reduced anxiety, and less stress. When the weather improved and the days got longer, I confess I put away my needles. But I plan to be a knitter for life. Winter is here, and there’s a yard-long stretch of stitches in my closet yearning to become a scarf. —Christopher Keyes

(PEUDFH <RXU ,QMXU\ REST IS AN OPPORTUNITY FOR REINVENTION

No one likes getting hurt, but sometimes the forced pause leads to much needed downtime and an opportunity for introspection. Last May, professional ultrarunner and coach Megan Roche ruptured her hamstring when she stepped into a prairie dog hole while training near her home in Boulder, Colorado. Initially, the prognosis was that she’d never compete at the same level again. But Roche found a surgeon who told her that a reconstructed tendon could make her stronger than she was before. She had surgery soon afterward. “It was a crazy moment in my athletic career, because I fully contemplated what my life would look like without having that competitive outlet,� 29-year-old Roche says. “I went through every stage of the grieving process before ultimately getting the news that I should be OK.� The episode made her acutely aware that she didn’t want her identity wrapped up in something that could vanish in an instant. Roche, who also has a medical degree, says that her injury woke her up to the fragility of her career and inspired her to go back to school to pursue a Ph.D. in epidemiology. Roche also points out that an injury often leads athletes to come back to their sport with a more well-rounded training approach. She appears to have found a middle ground: her research centers on bone health and the genetic predictors of sports injuries, and she plans to continue to coach and run. —Martin Fritz Huber

'HFHOHUDWH THERE’S A REASON TAI CHI HAS BEEN AROUND HUNDREDS OF YEARS

I’m a skier, biker, and climber with a full-time job, which means I obsessively cram my

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free time with as much highimpact activity as possible. But lately, recreation has felt less like fun and more like an urgent invitation to beat myself up, so I decided to slow things down. Which is why, on a sunny Friday afternoon, I ďŹ nd myself standing at the back of a martial-arts studio, relearning how to walk. Jill Basso, a tai chi instructor for more than 20 years, comes over to correct my form. I’m moving forward too much, she says. Which until now I considered the primary goal of walking. Tai chi, however, isn’t really about getting anywhere. The ancient Chinese martial art has been steadily growing in popularity in the U.S. over the past decade, boosted in part by support from the medical community. Research about its potential to build strength, balance, and stability, particularly in older practitioners,

has led doctors to prescribe it to their patients. But those beneďŹ ts probably extend to young people as well, explains Elizabeth Eckstrom, a professor at Oregon Health and Science University who has been studying tai chi in a clinical setting for nearly two decades. The practice can improve sleep, teach mindfulness, and help athletes advance in their sport. “It’s a good partner for all the things we do,â€? says Eckstrom. A typical session involves a slow series of movements. In Basso’s class, the mostly over-60 students move uidly and conďŹ dently through side steps, lunges, and sweeping arm motions. Without the goal of getting faster or going bigger, I learn about smaller limitations: my ankles are rigid, my quads allow my knees to bend only so far, my hips catch with certain movements. My limits are internal.

I have a complicated relationship with exercise. It’s deeply tied to my sense of self-worth, and if I haven’t gotten my heart rate somewhere near 180 in a few days, I can get manic. It’s something I’m trying to change, healing my relationship with physical activities that are supposed to be enjoyable but have become a form of selfagellation. Tai chi, on the other hand, kept my heart rate around 80. It plugged me into a welcoming community of people who are tending to their bodies like a slow-growing garden. I started going to class twice a week, moving as deliberately as my body would allow. I learned that my sports habits and tai chi actually have the same goals— mental calm, physical strength, and overall well-being. And tai chi doesn’t put me at risk of broken bones or a bruised ego. —Abigail Barronian

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MAKSIM P O P OV NEEDED A GUN. It was late fall 2018, and the single, unemployed 29-year-old was descending into darkness. He was living in Volgograd, the large industrial city in southwestern Russia where he’d grown up, and as he later explained, he’d become desperate, even hopeless. It’s not clear what caused his downturn or if he’d sought help, but at some point he decided he wanted to shoot himself. To get a firearm legally in Russia required a psychiatric evaluation, which is presumably why Popov found himself online, reading about a remote outpost in the Arctic that’s popular with Russian tourists and is also one of the easiest places on the planet to rent a gun: Longyearbyen. The tiny town of some 2,200 residents is among the northernmost settlements in the world, situated about 600 miles from the North Pole on the island of Spitsbergen, in the isolated Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. Nestled at the end of a mountainous valley where it meets the shore of a small fjord, Longyearbyen was for centuries an icy base for whalers and trappers. Beginning in the early 1900s, it became a lonely coal-mining community populated by Norwegians and Russians, closed to visitors because of the limited infrastructure. But after the Svalbard airport opened just outside town in 1975, Longyearbyen emerged as a tourist destination, and today some 150,000 travelers come each year by plane and cruise ship. Russians have been especially interested in seeing the archipelago, with their numbers jumping 500 percent since 2016. Many venture into the frozen wilderness on snowmobiles or dogsled tours. Others visit the most famous structure in the Arctic: the Global Seed Vault. Built inside a mountain, the so-called

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Doomsday Vault opened in 2008 and stores nearly a million samples of plant seeds, so that crops might be restored following a global catastrophe. Then there are the polar bears: at least 2,000 of them live in the region, and the local tourism board likes to claim that they outnumber the residents. A number of outfitters run expedition cruises to observe the animals safely from the water. On the edges of Longyearbyen, warning signs dot the snowy plains: GJELDER HELE SVALBARD (“All Over Svalbard”), they proclaim below an illustration of a polar bear silhouette. People are required to carry a rifle for protection when leaving town, and tourists frequently walk the streets with guns slung over their shoulders, though they are supposed to be unloaded in town. The grocery store, city hall, bank, and other establishments post no-rifles signs outside and provide lockers in their foyers for storing weapons. If a visitor is at least 18 years old, renting a rifle for protection from bears requires only the completion of a simple permit application and the ability to remain sober long enough to visit either of the sporting-goods stores in town that supply firearms. For Popov, it seemed like the perfect place to end his life. THERE’S A CLASSIC Norwegian children’s

story called “Folk og rovere i Kardemomme By,” which translates as “When the Robbers Came to Cardamom Town.” It’s about an idyllic village where the locals live in peace until thieves arrive and cause a bit of trouble, then are arrested and change their ways. (Ultimately, they become heroes when they put out a fire.) Many Longyearbyen residents have felt as though they lived in Cardamom

themselves. With its bright, candy-colored homes and buildings laid out neatly against a mountainous backdrop, the town has the look and feel of a Dr. Seuss drawing. As Trond Hellstad, the chipper manager of the local branch of SpareBank 1, the only bank in Longyearbyen, told me one bright day in March, “It’s a fairy-tale town.” Longyearbyenians share an unusual, adventurous lifestyle. With few roads for cars, they get around on snowmobiles and skis. During the interminable winter, when the sun doesn’t rise for four months, the northern lights frequently paint the starry sky. When daylight returns in the spring, residents celebrate with the weeklong Solfestuka, or Sun Festival, dancing to live music,

Longyearbyen has the feel of a postapocalyptic frontier town at the frozen top of the planet: everyone is running either from or to something.

swilling local beers, and joining the facepainted kids’ chorus to sing “Here Comes the Sun” on the steps of an old burned-out hospital on the outskirts of town. Summer brings endless hours of light for hiking, biking, boating, and fishing. Reindeer and arctic fox roam the island’s interior, while whales, walruses, and seals frolic in the fjord. Hellstad is a clean-cut, middle-aged dad who favors khakis and pressed button-down shirts. Originally from Nyksund, in northern Norway, he’s among the majority of residents who dropped out of conventional life to chase a far-out existence in Svalbard. There is no indigenous population in the archipelago, but the islands have a surprisingly diverse demographic, with more than

50 nationalities represented, though Norwegians dominate and English is the most commonly shared language. There’s a feeling in Longyearbyen that everyone is running either from or to something. Many who come last only a while, with the average stint running about seven years. Hellstad fell in love with the natural beauty of Svalbard during a family vacation, and in 2010 he eagerly pursued an opportunity to transfer from a SpareBank 1 in the Vesteralen Islands, off the coast of northern Norway, to manage the branch in Longyearbyen, where he relaxed into the ease of extremely small-town life. He spent his days meeting with locals and tourists in his corner office, a taxidermied arctic fox perched

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on his wall with a ptarmigan in its jowls. “You can leave your door open here and the key in the car. Everybody knows each other,” he tells me in his lilting Norwegian accent. “There’s almost no crime at all.” Besides the occasional pub fight or drunken snowmobiler, the most common transgression, according to Longyearbyen police chief inspector Frede Lamo, is stolen boots. Over coffee at a restaurant called Gruvelageret, Lamo explains this oddity. The walls are crowded with old black-andwhite photos of miners. Around us, diners dig into dishes of whale carpaccio and reindeer in lingonberry sauce. Lamo has shaggy blond hair, a graying beard, and tattoos snaking down his arms. Around town, he says, it’s customary to remove your shoes when entering a building. The tradition goes back to the mining heyday of the 1950s, when, according to local legend, a barracks maid named Olga insisted that workers leave their grimy footwear outside. Today most establishments are BYOFS—bring your own fuzzy slippers— which you slide on like Mr. Rogers after politely removing your boots and leaving them in a cubbyhole, where they’re vulnerable to the occasional theft. Lamo moved to Longyearbyen from Oslo in 2012, after tiring of the traffic and chaos of urban life. A part-time wildlife photographer and guide, he also wanted to live closer to nature. “As soon as you leave town,” he says, “you can be by yourself as long as you want without seeing a single human being.” Still, as he learned, you can’t completely escape civilization anymore. After relocating, Lamo spent several months working as a field inspector, a job that had him acting as a kind of environmental-protection cop. He was stationed in an old hunting cabin on the rugged northwest coast of Spitsbergen, tasked with looking out for interactions between cruise ships and wildlife. While there, he witnessed a mysterious and alarming dynamic: human skulls emerging from the rocky ground. Soon he saw other bones— ribs, femurs, hips—along with splintered shards of wood. Because of climate change, the permafrost supporting a whaling graveyard from the 1600s was melting, causing the dead to be expelled. The remains that could be gathered were sent to the Svalbard museum, but the macabre dilemma continued in Longyearbyen, where melting permafrost pushed bodies from a town cemetery to the surface. Besides the spook factor, this presented a public-health concern, since corpses can retain deadly pathogens. For this reason, burying the dead has been illegal here since 1950. Locals like to joke that it’s illegal to die

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in Svalbard. When I meet the town’s scruffy mayor, Arild Olsen, one morning in his office, I ask what the punishment is for violating this law. “Death,” he deadpans. AFTER SOME 18 hours of travel, Popov

landed at the Svalbard Airport on December 17, 2018. It was the middle of what locals call the dark season, the stretch between late October and mid-February when the sun never rises above the horizon. After stepping off the plane, he would see his first polar bear within minutes: stuffed, it stands on all fours in the center of a baggage-claim carousel. Most travelers who arrive by plane catch a bus for the short ride to town. From his seat, Popov would have seen a faint outline of the mountains lining the valley and probably snowmobilers zipping by with the lights on and rifles in tow, just in case. Once in town, he checked into a hotel and spent a couple of days exploring the town, with its one snow-covered road of restaurants and shops. Some locals made their way down the strip on dogsleds, panting huskies pulling them to Fruene, a popular café, where they warmed themselves with coffee

You are required to carry a rifle for protection when leaving town, and people frequently walk the streets with guns slung over their shoulders. and ate egg salad sandwiches and lingonberry scones. At night they filled the handful of restaurants and bars to swap stories over beers. Anyone dropping into this scene would be struck by the eclectic mix of characters from many different countries. Longyearbyen has the feel of a postapocalyptic frontier town at the frozen top of the planet. But Popov hadn’t come here to explore or to socialize. Eventually, he got down to the business of securing a gun. Across the parking lot from the town grocery—whose offerings include polar bear mugs, polar bear mittens, polar bear booties, and polar bear refrigerator magnets—was a store called Longyear78 Outdoors and Expeditions. For 190 kroner per day ($20), Popov could rent

a rifle capable of takClockwise from ing down a charging top left: Longyearpolar bear. ben’s SpareBank 1; Before he’d left branch manager Volgograd, Popov Trond Hellstad; had filled out an apSvalbard airport plication for a riflebaggage claim; rental permit, using chief inspector a Svalbard govern- Frede Lamo; hillside homes; resident ment website. He’d been approved, and Daria Khelsengreen; the bank entrance; now, inside LongKim Holmen, interyear78, he handed national director over his ID and lisat the Norwegian tened as the clerk Polar Institute; gave him a detailed polar bear signs explanation of how to operate the weapon. After that, he was free to walk out the door with it slung over his shoulder, like everyone else in town. Once Popov held the gun in his hand, the reality of his plan hit him. He had come thousands of miles to kill himself. He had a rifle. The time had come, but he was losing his nerve. So he put it off. That night, back in his hotel room, he mulled over his options. There was no sun, and he was far from home, in a very strange place. He was sure he didn’t want to go back to Russia, but he didn’t want to die, either. As he would later claim, a new solution dawned on him: he would do something that would allow him to get help, right here in Norway. He eyed his rifle, already loaded, and thought about the lone bank in town. Then he sat down at the laptop he’d brought, typed the phrase “Eto ogrableniye” into a Russian translator, and hit enter. Almost instantly, the English wording appeared: “This is a robbery.” A COUPLE OF YEARS before Popov came

to Longyearbyen, Mark Sabbatini was getting ready for bed in his apartment in town when he heard what sounded like a gunshot. Scruffy and thin, with silver-framed glasses and an unruly salt-and-pepper beard, Sabbatini is the one-man publisher-writereditor of IcePeople, the northernmost alternative weekly in the world. Sabbatini grew up in Colorado and says he came to Longyearbyen because he wanted to cover the news at the end of the earth. “It’s isolated in pretty much every possible sense,” he tells me one afternoon at Fruene, “other than the fact that we’ve got a great internet connection.” The sound he heard in his apartment was his mirror cracking. As soon as he saw the broken glass, he knew that melting ice was destabilizing the ground under buildings. Over the coming days, his floor buckled, windows wouldn’t shut, cracks began scarring the apartment’s edifice. According

to a report commissioned by the Norwegian Environment Agency and released last winter, Svalbard is among the fastest-warming places on earth, with annual temperatures rising more than seven degrees between 1971 and 2017. Most structures in Longyearbyen are mounted on permafrost, which is a far easier and cheaper solution than digging potentially hundreds of feet down to anchor the foundation in bedrock. As a result, melting has put many buildings at risk. “Everything that is not bolted to the solid ground is moving,” Mayor Olsen says. “Houses, roads, critical infrastructure—everything.” Higher temperatures have also brought more rain and floods. In October 2016, unusually heavy downpours caused water to leak into the entryway tunnel of the Global Seed Vault, spurring a brief media panic. (As it turned out, the seeds were never at risk.) Rain can also destabilize the snowpack in the mountains bordering town. In December 2015, an avalanche on Sukkertoppen, a nearby peak, buried 11 homes. Lamo and others rushed to the scene with shovels and dug out their neighbors, though a 42-yearold man and 2-year-old girl died. Another avalanche, in 2017, destroyed two apartment buildings and forced the evacuation of 75 residents. The city subsequently spent $15 million erecting snow fences to protect the most vulnerable structures. Meanwhile, some 140 homes have had to be permanently evacuated due to the danger. The Norwegian Environment Agency report predicts more of the same, with annual temperatures predicted to rise as much as 18 degrees by 2100 and rainfall increasing by up to 65 percent. Besides transforming how humans live in Svalbard, the changes will have devastating effects on wildlife. One afternoon during my visit in March, Kim Holmen, the international director of the Norwegian Polar Institute, takes me out for a snowmobile tour to show me changes in the local habitat. A native of Sweden, he has a long gray beard and wears dark sunglasses and a pink knit hat given to him by a former student. He also carries a rifle over his shoulder, in case we encounter any bears. We stop at the edge of the fjord, which is devoid of ice. “At this time of year, we would have been on a snowmobile belting across to the other side, but now it’s just open water,” he says. In the seas surrounding Svalbard, historically important species like polar cod and ringed seals are moving north as the waters warm, while mackerel and blue whales are making their way in. After proceeding for half an hour across soft, silent snow into a vast white valley, we see two reindeer. We watch as they struggle to find food. Rainfall has caused a layer of

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ice to form between the snow and the underlying grass, so the reindeer must punch through the ice to get at the vegetation. “It’s just single leaves that they might find,” Holman says. “It’s hard work.” Changing climate has made life harder all around. Sabbatini had to move out of his teetering apartment. As a journalist, he’s covered the many ways that Svalbard is transforming, and he fielded media calls when the Global Seed Vault leak became an international news story. He never expected another event to steal the spotlight. ON DECEMBER 21 at just before 9 A.M., Hells-

tad trudged happily over the crunchy snow to the one-story building, hanging with icicles, that houses the Longyearbyen post office and SpareBank 1. He greeted his two-person staff, then sat at the desk in his corner office to enjoy the steam rising from his coffee. At 10:40 A.M., teller Kristine Myrbostad, an outdoorsy young mother, was standing behind the counter in the lobby when a large, dark-haired man came in carrying a rifle. There were no other customers in the bank, and Popov aimed the rifle at her, speaking the English phrases he’d learned online. “This is not a joke,” he said in his thick Russian accent. “This is a robbery. I need hundred thousand.”

“This is not a joke,” Popov said in his thick Russian accent. “This is a robbery. I need hundred thousand.” Terrified, Myrbostad walked with Popov to Hellstad’s office. At first, Hellstad didn’t realize what was going on. He assumed Popov had simply missed the sign telling visitors not to bring guns into the building. “You need to leave the bank,” Hellstad said. “You’re not allowed to have a weapon in here.” Popov, bundled in layers of wool and down, eyed him solemnly, sweat dripping down his forehead. The Russian aimed his rifle at Hellstad, who felt the shock of fear. Popov repeated his earlier warning: “This is not a joke. This is a robbery. I need hundred thousand.” Hellstad tried to get Popov to understand his circumstances: he was in the middle of nowhere, in frozen darkness, in an outpost

with one small airClockwise from port. A single phone call could close the top left: Mark Sabentire town, so there batini. publisher of IcePeople; Trond was no chance of Hellstad’s bank ofgetting away. “This fice; snowmobiling is not a good idea for tourists; sled dog; you,” Hellstad said. local Lene JeaPopov repeated the nette Dyngeland; road sign outside other English words the airport he’d practiced. “I need money,” he said. “You have to give me money.” Hellstad called out to his other employee, Svenn Are Johansen, who was working in the back of the bank, and told him to do what Popov said. Johansen nervously grabbed a stack of multicolored kroner, worth about $8,000, and put it on a table in the lobby. Popov stuffed the pockets of his winter coat, then walked out into the pitch-black day. This was not a fairy tale. A robber had come to Longyearbyen for real. WHEN OFFICER Frede Lamo was first told about the robbery at SpareBank 1, which was down the hill from the police department, he figured it was a mistake. “It’s not something we’re used to here at all,” he says. After learning that it had really happened, he mentally sped through the protocol of what he should do. The officers would need weapons and a plan for surrounding the bank. It’s a small town—where will people be at this time? Lamo recalls thinking. What if they run into this man? A call was made to the nearby grade school to keep the children indoors. Roughly 15 minutes after Popov had first entered the bank, Lamo and four other officers pulled up in police cars. They didn’t see a robber. Of course, the criminal couldn’t have gone far. Even if he had a vehicle, the road through Longyearbyen doesn’t afford much of an escape. A few miles in one direction and it ends at the airport; a few miles in the other and it stops at a tree. As Lamo looked around in the midday darkness, he figured there was only one thing to do if you’re running from the law in the northernmost town in the world: jump on a snowmobile and ride into the wild. Except Popov wanted to be caught. After leaving SpareBank, he was eager to get rid of his gun. He didn’t want the gun. He wanted help. He walked across the parking lot and back to Longyear78, rifle in hand, where the clerk reprimanded him for carrying a loaded weapon around town before taking it back. Panicked, Popov needed to hear a familiar voice. He called his mother in Volgograd and told her he’d just committed a robbery. “She advised me to run, but I told my mom that I was on a desert island,” Popov would say

months later at his criminal trial, according to a reporter. Instead he walked back to the bank. He would claim in court that he intended to return the cash. Lamo and the other cops had just arrived when Popov approached the building. He didn’t have a gun, just the kroner stuffed in his coat pockets. From behind the bank’s locked doors, Hellstad watched as Lamo and the others ordered the Russian to the ground and cuffed him. ON MAY 8, 2019, a district court in mainland Norway convicted Popov on counts of gross threats, coercive force, and illegal use of arms. He was ordered to pay 20,000 kroner, about $2,300, each to Hellstad and the two other employees of SpareBank 1, and sentenced to one year and two months in a prison in Tromsö. When Popov is released, he will be expelled from Norway.

“He was quite remorseful,” says Hellstad, who watched the sentencing on a livestream. “He didn’t want to hurt anybody. I’m happy this case is behind us.” But the aftershocks remain. “I never thought I’d see the day when this happened here,” Sabbatini says. “I mean, what was he thinking?” Coinciding with the robbery, Sabbatini says, there’s been a broader uptick in crime. One acquaintance had fuel canisters swiped from his yard; another had an engagement ring lifted from a locker. Sabbatini no longer leaves his laptop unattended at Fruene. “People have started locking their cars and their homes,” he laments. Toward the end of my visit, I snowmobile with Holmen to the top of Longyearbreen glacier, a sweeping slope of ice cutting through the valley outside town. The wind whips up a whiteout as we climb the snowcovered surface, but when we reach the top

it clears, affording us a stunning view of the multicolored homes far below and the churning fjord in the distance. Holmen tells me that the glacier, which is thousands of years old, is melting at roughly one foot per year. Looking down at Longyearbyen, it’s impossible not to imagine a very different life here in the near future. It may still be a beacon for people seeking to get away from it all, but it’s going to change. It already has. For Hellstad and others, the robbery feels like a menacing omen—a sign that this version of the fairy tale might not have a happy ending. “It’s like the big cruel world is coming to town,” he says. “Like the story of Cardamom, this place where nobody is doing any harm—but that is now kind of broken.” O CONTRIBUTING EDITOR DAVID KUSHNER WROTE ABOUT VIDEO-GAME ADDICTION IN NOVEMBER 2019.

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“ I wa s a f r a i d to l e av e h i m . H e d i d n ’ t t e l l m e , ‘ I ’ m t h i n k i n g a b o u t k i l l i n g m y s e l f. ’ But I didn’t want to leave him alone during a several-week patch.” Christina Bauer sits with her hands clasped, and her posture is perfect. She’s worked all day in an office advising community-college students. It’s a job she never expected to love, but back when she was in college and having a hard time, she took a semester off to do Outward Bound, the outdoor-leadership program for youths. She learned how to read a map and navigate without trails, how to find water and leave no trace. There was something about doing hard stuff outside that changed how she saw herself. At first she thought she’d seek out a career in policy and protect the wild places she loved, but then she worked at a camp doing conflict resolution with troubled kids, and that was it. She’s been a counselor, in some capacity, her entire adult life. She was the first person Rob Krar told. About going in the hole. Krar is sitting next to his wife, and his shoulders are hunched forward. In the red metal chair around the small metal table on their impeccable garden patio, which is lined with flowers and herbs and vegetable plants, not a weed in sight, the man who has repeatedly dominated the most competitive 100-mile trail races in the country looks small. As if his body is closing in on itself, compensating for how exposed his mind feels. He is trying his best to explain the worst part of himself, but at times there is a heartbreaking absence of energy in his voice. Sometimes he gives a short laugh, like you do when you know that what someone is saying is exactly the truth. Or a short exhalation, like you do when you know—have known your entire adult life—that something is true and you still can’t quite believe it. They are looking at each other. The sun is setting, and it’s getting cooler. There is a soft glow coming from inside the house. Occasionally, one of the cats meows, begging to be let out. It had been the perfect storm: Issues in their marriage. The knee injury. The looming question of whether he’d run again, let alone

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compete. The worry about what might come next. The singular, circular devastation that comes when you’re most unkind to those you love and you hate yourself for it. He fell so far down the hole, there wasn’t a sliver of light. She sits even straighter, her voice is stronger. “I was just really afraid.” “Yeah,” he says softly. “Probably justifiably.” KRAR RARELY GOES into the hole during his ultrarunning camps. It’s the fifth year that he and Bauer, 40, have been hosting them in their adopted hometown of Flagstaff, Arizona: a sevenday summer experience, a five-day retreat in fall and winter, and now, in June 2019, a new three-day version. During the weeks leading up to the camps, while they’re happening, and for a while after they’re over, Krar is focused. In the moment. Engaged. He’s not thinking about the powerlessness and the hopelessness and the despair. He’s not thinking about ending his life. He’s checking boxes. Swag: check.

ment—the inaugural three-day All-Comers camp—the tables in the conference room, with the spectacular views of Arizona’s San Francisco Peaks, are all meticulously set. A bag of granola, a box of bars, a water bottle, and a lip balm are all precisely positioned around a branded swag bag at each place setting. Pens are offset just so from each arrangement, writing ends pointing to the left. There are ten campers, four women and six men. They come from Kansas, California, Colorado, Canada. Four live in Arizona. One travels the world and lives out of her backpack. There is a firefighter, a nurse, and

a Ph.D. student. Two have suffered traumatic brain injuries, one from a fall over a waterfall, another—the traveler—from a baseball line drive to the head. Most of them are new to ultrarunning, but they all want to improve—to learn how to avoid bonking and how to pace themselves, to better negotiate tricky terrain and ascend monstrous climbs. They could learn all this at any number of training camps. They’re here because they want to learn it from Rob Krar. KRAR, 42, IS SLIGHT and coursed with lean

muscle. His otherwise closely shaved brown hair is peaked into a fauxhawk, his beard is trimmed short, and he has the kind of smile that feels rare and special, even if you don’t know his story. Krar grew up in Hamilton, Ontario, and started running in sixth grade. He got good fast. He ran in high school and raced triathlon during the off-season; he was good at that, too, twice representing Canada as a teenager in the ITU Junior World Triathlon Championships. He was a quiet kid, but mostly he was a happy kid. He loved traveling to meets with his friends and really loved how running pushed both his body and his mind. In 1996, he got an athletic scholarship to attend Butler University, a Division 1 school in Indianapolis, where he ran cross-country and the 800 and 1,500 meters. In his sophomore year, he was accepted into Butler’s demanding pharmacy program, and when he wasn’t running he was studying. The pressure mounted. He was soon overwhelmed with the demands and time commitments of his studies, and it was during that year when something inside him changed. Running wasn’t carefree and it wasn’t fun anymore, his course load was oppressive, and there was no time to be a college kid. He wasn’t happy, but it was more than that. Happiness began to feel like an elusive thing. After his final track meet at Butler, he threw his spikes in a trash can, relieved that he wouldn’t have to run again. When he graduated one year later, in 2002, he moved to Phoenix to work as a pharmacist. But he hated the heat, customers’ tempers were short, there was always a line at the counter, and when you do the kind of job where a mistake could harm or even kill someone, the stress builds quickly. He started working the more relaxed flow of the graveyard shift—9 P.M. to 7 or 8 A.M., seven days on, seven days off. He had few friends in the area, a relationship that wasn’t working out, and a growing realization that he’d chosen the wrong career. So when the low-grade unhappiness that had started at Butler seemed to get worse, it was easy to rationalize. He rarely ran, and when he did think about run-

ning, he sometimes thought it might make him feel better. But it was just so hot. When his three-year contract was up in 2005, he took a graveyard shift in the mountain town of Flagstaff, where he’d been a few times to ski and mountain bike. The cool air and tight, competitive endurance community got him excited about running again. Soon he was logging 80-mile training weeks around his 72-hour workweeks, and 100 miles on his off weeks. Eventually, at age 30, he ran the 2007 Boston Marathon, during a nor’easter, in 2 hours 25 minutes 44 seconds. After that, Krar ramped up hard, training with guys who’d been running professionally for years. He was still working nights at Walgreens. “He’d come into the shop and be like, ‘Dude, my feet are killing me,’ ” says Vince Sherry, 39, Krar’s friend who worked at the running store Run Flagstaff and now owns it. “We would fit him with shoe after shoe, trying to figure out what he could wear during his shifts and still be able to go run with guys who literally run, nap, run, eat, go to the gym, then go to sleep.” Sherry remembers Krar getting crushed in a local event after working all night, by a guy who had no business crushing him. “He was so bummed,” Sherry says. “I said, ‘Dude, you just worked ten hours with no sleep, then came out to run a 10K at nine in the morning.’ I’m thinking, How are you still standing?” In 2009, Krar started preparing for the TransRockies Run—a six-day, 120-mile partner stage race—with his friend and roommate Mike Smith. After years of pounding the roads, Krar loved how training in the mountains placed him in front of forever views that stopped him in his tracks; how sufferfests in the Grand Canyon were transcended by the sheer scope and beauty of the place, once bringing him so close to a soaring California condor that he swore he could hear the wind in its feathers. He and Smith won the TransRockies, despite Krar’s near constant pain from Haglund’s deformities in his heels. The visible bumps irritated his tendons and altered his stride so much that he developed sciatica. The race wrecked his body, but it introduced him to Christina Bauer. Bauer was also racing the event, and he talked to her a few times after the stages. Krar learned that the tall, lean woman with the wide smile had through-hiked the Appalachian and Pacific Crest Trails solo, and that she had worked as a field counselor in Utah, sleeping in a tent for weeks in the wilderness, helping kids who were struggling with depression or drug use or self-harming behaviors. She is such a badass, he thought. They e-mailed for a few weeks, then he drove nearly nine hours to Salt Lake City to see her, and shocked himself by telling her

Krar near SP Crater, north of Flagstaff, Arizona, in October 2019

about the hole. The darkness that began at Butler and followed him to Phoenix hadn’t lifted, and he knew something was wrong. Because now he loved his town and had good friends and was running well, yet he struggled to feel joy. But there was joy on that drive back to Flagstaff. “It sounds almost too corny to believe, but a part of me was like, Holy shit, I think this is the woman. I think I’m falling in love,” Krar says. AS JILL WHEATLEY crests the steep pitch,

she takes one look at the panorama to the east and thinks, This is why I run in the mountains. It’s day two of All-Comers, and the trail took the campers from beneath towering Ponderosa pines to this clearing at 8,500 feet, with its perfect view of snowcapped Mount Humphreys. The faster runners have long since passed through, but Krar is waiting for Wheatley and the others in the rear. He likes to start at the front of a group and make his way back, spending time with each person. When he first started his running camps, his main focus was the organizational component, making sure everything happened exactly as he planned it at exactly the right time. The camp and his role in them was

simple: talk about training and nutrition and racing, and lead kickass runs. But then three men wept during a run at the very first summer camp in 2015, and Krar was completely taken by surprise. What’s going on here? he thought. He continued to market the events as running camps, but he began to realize that he was drawing runners who were coming for other reasons, too. That he was, however inadvertently, creating a safe place where people could open up. Wheatley walks over to Krar, who turns to check out the view of Mount Humphreys with her. “We’re just so fortunate to be out here, in these magical places, doing what we’re doing,” he says. Then he turns to face her. “I just want to thank you for coming to camp, and for trusting me.” Like Krar, Wheatley is also from Canada. Her long brown hair is in a ponytail, and her eyes are hidden behind sunglasses, as they almost always have been since she was struck with a baseball in 2014, when she was in her mid-thirties and working as a teacher. She spent two years in the hospital, recovering from a traumatic brain injury, and her right eye never reopened. Since getting out, she’s been running mountains around the world, immersing herself in nature to help her heal. Social anxiety made her hesitant about attending the camp, but she came in part

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Clockwise from because she wanted to learn how they do feel something, it’s anger. top left: camp Krar navigates his own dark times. Or sadness. Or shame. There’s soup prepared Krar started talking publicly nothing to point to, no trauma by Christina Bauer; camper about those times in 2014. In a to blame. And so it becomes this Anna Davis; video titled “Depressions,” he terrible additional burden of Krar and Bauer; runs through the Grand Canyon feeling awful about feeling awful. camper Jennifer Arrowsmith; and talks about how the disease Standing next to Krar, Wheatcampers after a and running go hand in hand, and ley feels none of the hopelessness run; Krar near how the dark place he enters at that on her darkest days seems SP Crater the end of a race echoes the darkinsurmountable. He reached out ness of his depression. In 2018, to her prior to camp, assuring her he did a haunting video with the Movember he could accommodate whatever she needed. Foundation, a charity devoted to preventing Her anxiety subsided that first morning. suicide and other mental and physical health “From the moment I met Rob, then sharissues among men. In it, Krar runs through ing time on the trail with him, I felt cona barren, otherworldly landscape outside nected and comfortable,” she says. Flagstaff. He reveals how he thought about The legendary runner standing next to her ending his life after a devastating knee injury feels like a friend. in 2017, and how opening up to Bauer about “Hey,” she says, “do you mind if I get a his struggle made him a better person, more photo of us together?” Then she smiles mistrue to himself. chievously. “Just a couple of Canadians getFor many of Krar’s campers, including ting high in Arizona.” Wheatley, those videos finally put words to how they felt. They know about overwhelm- BEFORE KRAR could dominate the ultra ing hopelessness. How it has a weight to it scene, he had to quit running. In 2010, at age 33, even walking hurt, and that’s so immense they feel rooted to the ground. How life feels like it’s happening he finally had surgery on his heels. But he in slow motion, and the simplest tasks— tried to come back too soon, and when the sitting up in bed, emptying the dishwasher, pain returned he figured the procedure had putting one foot in front of the other—are failed. So he stopped running. Bauer moved overwhelming. They know after they fin- in with him that summer and taught him ish a race, or anything they’ve worked hard how to sport climb, and they both started for, that they should feel happiness, a sense ski mountaineering. After all that time skiing up and down of accomplishment. Relief. Joy. Something. But all they feel is emptiness. And often, if mountains, Krar got very fit, and his feet fi-

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nally healed. In 2012, he dropped into a 33K just to see what would happen. He won that race, then won three out of five other events he ran that year. That same year, in June, he and Bauer were married in a meadow. He kicked off 2013 by winning the Moab Red Hot 55K. “This guy was just prancing over the slickrock,” says John Trent, 56, a journalist who has covered the ultra scene since 1987. “He’s so light on his feet, and he’s got textbook running form. He gets his chest out in front of him, with his arms down low, and his legs just eat up ground, not overstriding, but just going incredibly fast. A lot of times you look at fast people and there’s not that nimbleness, that ability to shift with the terrain. Rob’s got that. I was like, Wow, he’s gifted.” Just over two months later, Krar, then 36, lined up for the Leona Divide 50-miler in Santa Clarita, California, on the hottest day in the race’s history. It was 110 degrees, but Krar was so fast he reached one of the aid stations two hours earlier than volunteers anticipated, and all they had to offer was water. “The volunteers were blown away, because all he did was thank them,” says Keira Henninger, 43, race director of the Leona Divide. “He’s just very humble and incredibly kind.” Krar ran 5 hours 53 minutes 51 seconds, crushing the course record by nearly seven minutes and earning himself an entry into the Western States Endurance Run, the most competitive ultra in North America. In that race, his first 100-miler, he ran next to the guy whose record he’d destroyed at the

Leona Divide. Dylan Bowman was ten years younger than Krar but had been running ultras for several years. He’d raced Western States once before, and when he and Krar fell into a similar pace early on, he started giving Krar beta on what to expect from the course. “I could sense he was the stronger runner,” says Bowman, 33, who like Krar is now sponsored by the North Face. “He’s very efficient, and at the aid stations he’s incredibly methodical. He’s not coming in thinking, Maybe I should change my shoes and socks. He knows he’s going to change his shoes and socks, and he does it without wasting time or energy. And he’s got this silent intensity. We spent hours together, but I did 90 percent of the talking. He pulled away from me around mile 60, then absolutely kicked my ass and beat me by over an hour.” Krar ran the race in 15 hours 22 minutes 5 seconds, finishing second, less than five minutes behind the winner. Bowman’s part in his 100-mile debut convinced Krar that the ultrarunning community was unlike any other. “I was just overwhelmed with how kind my fellow competitors could be in a race,” says Krar. “All he wanted to do was help me.” That fall, Krar signed with the North Face. In 2014, he won three 100-milers (Western States, the Leadville Trail 100, and Run Rabbit Run) in less than three months. He was still alternating 72-hour workweeks on the graveyard shift. The following year, however, at the age of 38, he left Walgreens for good, won Western States again, and cemented his reputation as one of the best ultrarunners the sport has ever seen. “He’s obviously very talented, but there are a lot of very talented people who don’t win Western States,” Bowman says. “You have to have the willingness to go to the deepest, darkest places in order to pull out victories in the most competitive races. Rob has been really open about his depression, so it could be that he’s just not afraid to put himself in a dark place. And when you pair that with a unique talent, you’ve got an absolute world-class athlete.” That ability to push through the darkness led to Krar’s singular performance at Leadville in 2018. The previous year, a misstep during a race dislocated his kneecap and sheared the cartilage off the back of his kneecap and upper femur. It was a rare injury for a runner, and it required a novel surgery with no protocol for recovery—and no promise of a comeback. Unsure of whether his body could withstand 100 miles, Krar didn’t commit to starting the race until four days before it. Then he ran a stunning 15:51:57, less than ten minutes off the course record and more

than 90 minutes ahead of second place. “It’s one of the great performances in ultrarunning history,” says Trent. The darkness Krar went through to get to that point, however, was profound. It was his knee injury that contributed to the perfect storm. The storm that plunged him so deep in the hole that one weekend, when Bauer went to visit her family and left him alone, after all the years of thinking about ending his life, he actually spent time Googling just how he might do it. “WHEN I’M having my worst episodes, it’s a

2019 Mustang Bullitt. (“This is the funniest part—he just likes to accelerate quickly and then go the speed limit, because he’s Canadian,” Bauer says. “That’s not true!” Krar says. “There are spots where I’m very confident there are no cops and I drive extremely fast.”) And most of all, he has her. When Krar told Bauer about his depression in 2009, he couldn’t even say the word. It was the first night they’d ever hung out. He’d spent the day helping her move to a new place in Salt Lake City, and he’d been amazed at how disorganized she was. All she had were a few boxes that didn’t have flaps

very dark, dark place,” Krar says. “But I think a good way to describe my depression is an inability to feel happiness. It’s just this gray zone. I have this beautiful life that I can’t appreciate.” He has his friends, who have crewed all his 100-milers. Who drive “I think a good for hours to lay out everything he might need way to describe at each aid station per my depression the photo references he sends them: gels, lube, is an inability to bars, socks, shoes, water, feel happiness,” wipes—all exactly positioned so he knows within Krar says. “ I t ’ s an inch where everything shirt pulled down low j u s t t h i s g r ay will be. Who pace him over his face. He felt and know exactly how zone. I have sad, embarrassed, a much to talk and how little angry. “I go into t h i s b e au t i f u l much to push. the hole sometimes,” life that I can’t He has friends like Ryan he said. He’d never told Whited, Krar’s trainer, anyone that before, but a p p r ec i at e . ” who went to every docshe deserved to know tor’s meeting with him what she might be getafter that knee injury in ting into. She listened. 2017. Who knew Krar was It was all he wanted. slipping into depression again and wasn’t Things were mostly good until 2015, when afraid to get up in his business. “I think a lot he started talking about what it would be like of people tend to leave him alone, which is to end his life. She knew he often thought what I used to do, because he’s so private about it, but now he was saying it out loud and can look so brooding,” says Whited, 46, and in a way that worried her. He began talkwho also owns Paragon Athletics, a gym in ing about how they should pick a date to die. Flagstaff. “But you need the annoying friend “It started as a joke,” she says. “Because who cares about you and sends you annoy- Rob is so logical and we were talking about ing texts and ridiculous GIFs.” retirement planning. He was like, ‘If we He is still competitive. “Rob has had prob- knew when we were going to leave, we’d lems with injury, so he hasn’t raced a lot in know exactly how much we can spend”—she the past couple of years,” Bowman says. “But laughs—“every year.’ ” if he shows up, he’s somebody you have to “I said, ‘Then we can retire earlier,’ ” Krar take very seriously as a contender.” recalls. He laughs softly. “It kind of makes He has his sponsors, like the North Face sense.” and Gu, who enable him to travel the world. “It was a joke for a little while,” she says. He has a beautiful home and three cherished She’s no longer laughing. “And then it just rescue cats, Mo, Little Bit, and Bee. He loves got this underbelly that wasn’t a joke.” fast cars—can in fact talk at length about Something had to change. He was willIndyCar, Nascar, and Formula One. (“When ing to try medication but not therapy. She you’ve got 30, 32 cars all flooring it, whew! got him an appointment with a psychiatrist, It vibrates your body.”) He owns a superfast who diagnosed him with depression, and he’s

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been on meds ever since. He doesn’t have a Because of who she is, Bauer can undergreat answer for why he doesn’t want to go to stand his frustration. When she talks about therapy. “I just don’t want to do that,” he says. mental health and suicidal ideation, she is The refusal is tough on Bauer. “I still think firmly in her wheelhouse, and she is dispasit would be helpful, but I know I can’t push sionate. But she is also talking about the man it,” she says. she loves. She recognizes the signals well by now. “But, like, I often—” she starts to say, then There’s the bitter sarcasm. The shorter fuse. pauses. “Often, when I’m away, I feel a little It’s a silly example, but she’s always putting bit worried, and I frequently send texts, and the toilet-paper roll on wrong. (We all know I often use a joking tone. But if I don’t receive it goes over the top.) When he’s in a good a message back within an hour or two, I get place, they can laugh about those things; concerned.” when he’s not, they take on a harder edge. She stops, and for a long moment looks at “What’s tricky is, when he’s in a bad place, him. Before they got married, she came to he’s sometimes not very nice. And I don’t terms with the fact that someday she might know if that means he’s slipping into a place lose him. She chose to build this life with that’s not good, or if he’s just really fucking him. This beautiful, hard life. annoyed with me,” she says. “I try to stack “I’M AFRAID OF heights,” says Kiley Reed. up, How often has this happened lately?” Mostly, though, she feels his darkness in “And I don’t like to hike!” Reed, 35, is bent over, hands on her knees, her gut. Which was why, during that perfect storm in 2017, when the two of them were laughing at herself. She’s only 20 feet from trying to work through stuff in their mar- the rim of the volcano, but for every two steps up through the riage, when recovery ankle-deep cinders, she from his knee injury slides back a step. Krar seemed uncertain, told the campers earlier when he was getting I t ’ s n o t a lw a y s this morning that the stuck in what she calls stretch up the 800-foot the black-and-white clear what lifts SP (“Shit Pot”) Crater thinking that goes K r a r f r o m t h e would be “the slowest something like, Well if 0.2 miles you’ve ever I can’t run, I’ll have to hole. But during run.” go back to pharmacy, this most recent Krar knew the climb wasn’t easy for Reed, so d e s c e n t, a s i s when he passed her on often the case, the way up, he made sure he said something that it was this camp. wouldn’t require a response. “Looking great!” he told her. “You’re almost there!” Now Reed is nearly at the top, and the entire crew—campers, guides, Krar, and Bauer— are rallying for her. She straightens up and looks out over the treeless, undulating world of extinct volcanoes and jagged mountains. Above it all hovers the moon, a faint spot in a cloudless sky. This is amazing, she thinks. Reed is an emergency-room nurse who Krar is frustrated now with how others have used that fact to characterize him. recently moved to Flagstaff with her hus“This has been blown way out of propor- band and three young kids. She has short, tion,” he says with impatience. “It’s not hard dark hair and blue-green eyes, and jokes to look up on Google how to kill yourself with about how she doesn’t like running (“I want a gun. Sure, that was the first time I did it, to be a runner, but it hurts”). But since movbut it’s not like I hadn’t thought about it be- ing to Flagstaff, Reed has seen how confore. I had a rough night. I don’t want it to nected her husband feels to the ultra scene, be bigger than it was. I think a lot of people and she wants to be a part of it. “The whole think about how to kill themselves. Every community just draws you in,” she says. She takes her final, plodding steps to article since is like, ‘Rob, who suffers from suicidal tendencies…’ I don’t believe that I the rim, and when she gets there everyone do. There needs to be an agreeable gray-zone cheers and starts high-fiving each other. “We did it!” definition of that thought process.”

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Some of the recent arrivals wander off to stare into the 300-foot-deep crater at the center of the volcano. Others are engaged in the endlessly amusing (for runners, anyway) topic of GI issues—in this case, farts—and are laughing like crazy. “Let’s get together for a group photo,” says Krar. As he waits for everyone to grab a spot on a boulder, Krar starts nerding out about the upcoming anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. “Do you know that every human who has ever set foot on the moon has trained in northern Arizona?” he says, delighted to share this bit of trivia. “It’s true! Just below Sunset Crater, right over there, because apparently the landscape is similar to the moon’s.” He pivots to point at the moon, then drops his arm and stares at the sky. “Where the fuck did the moon go?” Maybe it’s the heat. Or the exertion. But that line slays everyone in the same way. The moon that was there just minutes ago is gone, and nobody knows where the fuck it went, and for some reason that’s utterly hilarious. It’s a moment that exemplifies what Krar delivers with his running camps—trails, community, and connection. Sometimes to profound effect. “This camp literally saved my life,” says Jim Mollosky, 44, a massage therapist, trainer, and strength and conditioning specialist from Buffalo, New York. Mollosky wasn’t at the All-Comers event, but he’s been to four of Krar’s camps. He initially started coming simply to get better as a runner. He never discussed his depression until he met Krar. “To see the openness and freedom that he lives with, even while struggling with depression, made me feel like I wasn’t alone in this,” he says. After that first camp, Mollosky wrote a Facebook post, apologizing to his friends for times he’s been distant. He told them about his struggle, and about how much it meant to him knowing that he wasn’t alone. Some of them thanked him for sharing, he says, and the post has had a ripple effect. “They said they feel more comfortable dealing with issues themselves now.” Mollosky now tries to stick around longer after races and socialize. He practices meditation and writes a lot. He runs, of course, because on the bad days that’s something he can accomplish. Most important, he allows himself to feel hopeful. “Before that first camp, I wasn’t sure how much longer I was going to live, to be blunt about it,” he says. “But after going and meeting everyone, I feel that even when I have rough days, I can make it through. I do see there’s hope. If I can just keep one foot in front of the other and keep moving.”

ON THE LAST night of All-Comers, the run-

“The most important thing is letting people know they’re not alone.”

KRAR’S BIGGEST FEAR has long been that

his depression will get worse. And it has. The past 12 months or so were his darkest yet. He spent more time in the gray zone, more time in the hole, and about a month prior to this camp, he says, was his single worst week since the perfect storm of 2017. According to Strava, he ran only ten miles that week. Before it hit, he had traveled nearly seven weekends straight. Krar enjoys traveling, but it also wipes him out. He likes routine and loves being home, but being on the road for races and appearances is part of his job. When he returned to Flagstaff after those seven weekends away, he was exhausted and wanted to shut down and be alone. It made total sense to Bauer, but she’d missed him and wanted to talk. He’d missed her, too, but he just didn’t have the energy to engage, and that made him feel bad, and it all just sort of snowballed from there and dropped him in the hole. A line Krar often repeats is, “I love running once in a while, I like it a lot of the time, I dislike it a lot.” Because it’s his livelihood, it’s a double-edged sword, he says. “More commonly, when I’m running well, my mental health is better, and when I get injured, I’m more likely to go into it. But

they’re not joined at the hip,” he says. “I can be having great times and still fall into the hole. That’s the pressure of being a professional athlete.” But in running—specifically, running 100-milers—he also finds meaning. There are few other times when he can be in the moment, not thinking about the desperate, awful powerlessness. And when it gets emotionally dark and really starts to hurt late in a race, he chooses to stay with it. And he’s grateful for the ability to make that choice. Grateful that he’s able to work his ass off to get to that moment. There will be more such moments. Krar says he plans to race a competitive 100-miler in 2020. “I’m also laying the groundwork for an attempt at a well-known fastest known time, which will push me well beyond anything I’ve attempted in the past,” he says. It’s not always clear what pulls Krar out of the hole. But during this most recent descent, as is often the case, it was this camp. There was so much to organize. So many boxes to check. The momentum built and the focus sharpened and it carried him out of the darkness. He had to craft an experience—an experience, he has come to learn, that has layers of meaning for others, and for himself.

ners are sitting before a screen inside Paragon Athletics. Krar is barefoot and drinking a beer. Bauer sits on the floor near him, and she’s barefoot, too. For 45 minutes or so, he shows slides and tells his story. Then he plays the Movember video, the one featuring the same lonely landscape and volcanic crater they ran just hours earlier. When the video is over, Krar stands up. He tells them he doesn’t have the answers. But he feels fortunate to have the platform that allows him to share and connect. “There’s still a strong stigma around depression and mental health,” he says. There is not a sound in the room other than his voice. “I think it’s OK to reach out to someone and have a conversation with them. Talking about it is going to make a difference in removing that stigma. The most important thing is letting people know they’re not alone.” Krar thanks them all for coming. Then, as most of the campers start getting up, Krar walks over and sits next to Ben Kammin, who is trying hard to hold it together. Kammin, 45, is a Ph.D. student in ethnomusicology in Boulder, Colorado. He’s lean, with a bald head and a graying goatee. He’s thoughtful and not much of a talker, and right now, with Krar sitting quietly beside him, he can’t say a word. If he opens his mouth, he’ll lose it. And there’s so much he suddenly wants to say. He wants to say he’s struggled with manic depression for around 15 years. That when he’s going into a bad place—“absolute hopelessness”—he can feel the darkness crawl down the back of his neck. That hardly anyone knows this about him, even friends he’s had for 25 years. That a year ago he started running, and while it’s not a cure or a substitute for his meds, he calls it his miracle drug, because it gives him hours of clarity and productivity. He wants to say that sometimes he weeps when he runs. That he just gets overwhelmed with gratitude for this thing that does so much for his body and mind. He wants to say that he thinks his illness is getting worse, but he’s doing everything he can to be healthy, because he knows his time is precious. He wants to tell Krar that after just three days, he feels like he found his people. That the runners he met are imperfect just like him, and that they are the most amazing, beautiful people because of those imperfections. And that soon he will start thinking of life before camp and after camp. But he doesn’t have to say these things. O Because Rob Krar gets it. CHRISTINE FENNESSY ( @CHRISTINE FENNESSY) IS A FORMER EDITOR AT RUNNER’S WORLD. THIS IS HER FIRST FEATURE FOR OUTSIDE

If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide or self-harm, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline toll-free from anywhere in the U.S. at 1-800-273-8255.

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there is no worse getaway vehicle than a recumbent bicycle. Particularly on any sort of climb. At least that’s what Alan* and I discovered as we crept up a desolate stretch of Arizona highway, necks craning behind us to see if the knife-wielding drunkard was gaining any ground. Alan, an amiable psychologist in his late sixties, was the one turning his recumbent’s pedals as fast as he could. I was on a traditional bike, but as the leader of this group tour across the U.S., I was duty bound to ride at the back, to help with any mechanical issues. Not today. Today Max rode at the back. I could see his neon jacket a hundred yards behind us, from where he was trying to close the gap. An hour earlier, from his perch on a picnic table at the edge of the sad RV park we’d called home for the night, he unceremoniously announced his plans to murder us all. It was 5 A.M., and he was on his second 12-pack of Old Milwaukee, having never unloaded his bike nor set up his tent the night before. Instead, it seems he’d visited the town liquor store while we slept. Crushed beer cans formed a barrier reef around the table. Something in the morning chorus of sleeping bags being unzipped had stirred Max’s drunken rage into action. Red-faced, he barked obscenities and sexual slurs, most of them at me. And then came the death threats. Bleary-eyed and not yet caffeinated, I scanned the empty horizon for anything resembling a cell tower and the possibility of a phone signal. Then I took the only course of action available to me: I politely requested that he leave the tour. Now we were engaged in the world’s slowest chase scene with a middle-aged psychopath in high-vis spandex. The rest of the tour’s participants, a ragtag band of 16 cyclists from all over the U.S., had long since hightailed it from camp to tackle the day’s first climb. I was out of water and in need of coffee, and my stomach was growling a song about pancakes. But Alan and I kept pedaling, determined to die somewhere more sce* Names have been changed to protect me from retribution. In fact, I’d probably change my own if Outside would let me.

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nic than the side of a baked desert highway, next to an empty bag of Cool Ranch Doritos and the dried-out remains of an armadillo. It was March 2009. We were just eight days into a guided cross-country bike tour, and things had already started to unravel. The trip, run by a national bike-touring organization, would take us from San Diego to the coast of Florida over the course of two months. Each day we’d pedal anywhere from 50 to 80 miles. Each night we’d set up our tents at campsites along the way. But things had gone sideways from day one, when a young man who’d suffered a severe brain injury in a motorcycle crash years before showed up to tackle the ride on a rusty singlespeed cruiser. When I questioned the

soundness of the bike, his mother stabbed her finger in my chest and said, “He can do anything he puts his mind to.” The frame snapped into two pieces that afternoon, one mile into our prologue ride. I scrambled to find him a replacement in time to remain on the tour. At some point during the first week, I stopped thinking of the group as a band of fellow adventurers and more like cast members on a partially scripted reality show designed to bring out the worst in everyone. This morning hadn’t been the first hint that Max was cast to be the angry one, or, in reality-TV parlance, the one “not here to make friends.” Earlier in the week, he’d uncapped a fire hose of rage-fueled expletives the night sprinklers came on underneath his tent. Out of shape and unable to keep up with the other riders, he’d allowed his exhaustion to slide into simmering resentment that escalated into a brawl with a sprinkler head. But today was the first time he’d threatened violence against anyone in the group. He was hot on our wheels, with a multitool and nothing to lose. Had anyone considered running background checks on any of these people?

BELIEVE IT OR NOT, bike touring had once been my greatest love, and not just the conceit for the survival-based elimination show I now found myself living. Four years earlier, when I was a somewhat adrift 25-year-old bike messenger, I’d left my home in Portland, Oregon, for a 2,600-mile ride to Missouri with a bunch of used camp gear and a ratty T-shirt that read TWO WHEELS, NO RULES. My body felt electrified with possibility as I rolled past the Portland city limits, ready to chase some vague spirit of adventure I felt had long been denied me by the canon of great road-trip novels that only told stories about men. The things I experienced on that trip— the beauty and bleakness of small-town America, the awe of pedaling up and over a mountain range, saddle sores that crippled my romantic life for half a decade—changed me profoundly, in ways I never expected. Months of having no one to talk to except for elderly roadside gawkers brought out a gregarious, assertive side I didn’t even know I had. I left Portland a painfully shy queer kid with disheveled hair and a distrust of strangers. I came back wiser, bolder, more openhearted, and with even messier hair. But returning to the monotony of daily life was like quitting an antidepressant cold turkey. I spent the next six months in an adventure-come-down fog, broke and dreaming of my next touring fix. My once thrilling job as a messenger no longer felt fun, dangerous, or freeing. It had become as predictable as a morning paper route. On the road, I pedaled all day and wrote in my journal into the night, detailing my misadventures by the glow of a headlamp inside some of America’s sketchiest campsites. Each day was different and surprising. Would I find rustic, shaded forestlands to sleep in, or an abandoned Lions Club park by the side of a seven-lane interstate? Might I encounter a smooth, winding descent alongside a river, or a series of 19percent-graded climbs guarded by feral pit bull mixes? How long could the human body subsist on peanut butter and banana sandwiches alone? Better yet, how long could I continue to go without showering before being added to some sort of national-parks watch list? Back in Portland, dreams of the open road haunted me. The mountains. The desert. The crush of gravel under my tires. The satisfaction of tracing my finger across a map and realizing my legs could take me anywhere, given enough time and carbohydrates. Even the memories of waiting hours by truckstop pay phones for my girlfriend to call me back struck me as timeless and romantic. As I shuttled documents to and from law offices

and courthouses, I mentally relived those long, sweeping downhills and misty forest back roads—basically, I fantasized that I was Jack Kerouac with a helmet mirror. It was while deep within this state of longing that I found myself susceptible to some truly bad baby-boomer advice. Not of the “Go back to school and get a degree in something practical” type. That would have been helpful. This was more like an empty platitude someone’s mom might’ve been wowed by because it was delivered by a charismatic stranger sitting next to her on a plane. OK, it was my mom. She called shortly after her flight landed, eager to share. “Do what you love and the money will follow,” she said. It was one of those nuggets of wisdom you only hear from people with monetizable assets—or the right ratio of talent, luck, and privilege to have landed a dream job that actually came with a paycheck. But in the swampy darkness of a Portland winter, the idea resonated. I adopted it at face value. There had to be a way I could get paid to keep hauling everything I owned across the country by bike. After all, I didn’t need a lot of money to follow from doing what I loved—just enough to support my cat while I searched for America out on the open road. That spring of 2006, I signed up for a biketouring leadership course. Being an outsider in the touring world would work in my favor for landing a job. I was young and female in a scene dominated by kind-eyed, gray-bearded men in zip-off cargo pants. I came to the course preloaded with my funniest bike-messenger anecdotes and a talent for lightning-fast flat-tire fixes. A month later, I was offered my first gig leading a tour. WHEN I PICKED UP the phone, all I could hear was screaming and sirens. I was in Spokane, Washington, sweaty from the effort of unloading 44 duffel bags from an oversize box truck. A pack of cyclists were gathered around me, anxious to get their bags and take showers at the end of a long day of riding. “There’s been an emergency,” my coworker finally said over the sound of a woman’s wail. My heart began pounding. Still, I hoped: a few broken bones, a concussion, a ruined vacation at worst. “Drive back here and find the other tour leaders,” he instructed me. “And put Arthur’s bag back into the truck.” I was working my first cross-country tour as a leader, and we’d left Seattle five days earlier. The format of the trip was different than usual for the touring company, which typically ran small self-supported excursions: groups of about a dozen participants

who rode, camped, and cooked together, with a professional leader planning and organizing it all. On this trip there were 40 riders, and I was one of five leaders. It was supported, which meant there was a luggage truck and vans to haul water and food. It was my job to drive one of those vehicles three out of four days, and ride on the fourth day. I took to the role with enthusiasm and a fervent conviction that I would do anything to make the trip a success for the participants, who had been promised more of a luxury experience than the standard pannier-laden ride. But the two-month trip was doomed. When I drove back to meet the other leaders after that phone call, I learned that one of the riders had been struck by a car and killed, on the side of a long, mostly flat stretch of Washington highway. The screams I’d heard on the phone were from the woman riding next to him—the two had been happily making small talk right until the moment of impact. It was one of the worst days of my life. On the previous day, I had gotten to know Arthur, and now he was gone. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was responsible by virtue of my role as a coleader, though I was nowhere near the site of the crash when it happened.

The rest of the trip was a disaster. The group was traumatized. Many of the riders agreed that leadership was to blame for choosing a heavily trafficked road. My colleagues and I scrambled to make things right, hustling to find safer side roads to ease fears. We drove the route each night and spray-painted arrows on all the new turns. No longer would we ride every fourth day or take a day off—now our days and nights were spent driving, researching, spray-painting, and serving as targets for the justifiable fears and less grounded, petty complaints of the shell-shocked clients. When the trip was over my body fell apart, and I was waylaid for weeks with illness and grief.

For some reason, I went back. Over the next three years, I led three smaller selfsupported cross-country rides. There were no follow vehicles, and I could actually pedal my bike every day. All were months long, with no escape time to be alone. And all pushed my resolve not to quit in diverse and challenging ways. Many of the people I met on those tours changed my life for the better, and I’ve stayed in touch with them to this day. But the troublemakers were as bizarre as they were inescapable. There was the man who told me in explicit detail why he hated lesbians so much, on the second week of a three-month tour—not recognizing that he was delivering his manifesto to one. There was the mysterious tent urinator, who found a way to pee on the side of another man’s tent every night for six straight weeks (and whose identity is an as-yet uncracked case). The man who always took photos of me changing flat tires to send home to his wife, because “she was never going to believe that a woman could do this.” The woman who had never ridden a bike before the trip. The daily hitchhiker who “didn’t do climbs” and thumbed for rides up hills. The racer who wanted everyone else to ride farther and faster each day. The relapsed gambling addict who snuck into town every night and couldn’t be trusted with group funds. The sexual harasser who hounded me daily with lewd comments unfit to print. And in every group, there was always one person who tried to rile up a mutiny because he wanted out of the cooking rotation. It was hard to know who these people were in their daily lives, when they weren’t pushing their bodies to the limit and sleeping on the ground. I had to imagine that the mysterious tent urinator wasn’t similarly taking out his frustrations on a coworker’s office chair. Maybe all that misdirected rage could be chalked up to exhaustion, homesickness, and electrolyte imbalance? I wasn’t at my best, either. I had to do all the planning and campsite reservations each night, pedal all day, stop to help everyone who had a physical or mechanical problem, hand over all my food and water if someone needed it, and continue to put out group-dynamic fires once we’d reached the campsite. As a young woman (and, on some trips, the only woman) who was barely half the average age of the groups I led, I struggled to command authority. I faced the classic conundrum of trying to lead while being female. Not wanting to seem “pushy” or “aggressive,” I tried to be “fun” and “chill” instead. That didn’t inspire confidence from the older male participants, who would talk over me while I continued on page 85 >

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HUGO SANCHEZ Aurora borealis on full display over Wiseman, Alaska; opposite, Hugo Sanchez

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The clarity sends Hugo Sanchez into high gear. Tugging a neck warmer up over his nose, he grabs two tripod-mounted cameras and starts trudging across a snow-covered field toward a riverbank. It’s around 12:45 A.M. on a February night. The temperature is minus nine degrees, but a steady wind blowing over interior Alaska’s Middle Fork of the Koyukuk River makes it feel more like minus 20. Behind us, silhouettes of the scattered log cabins that comprise the hamlet of Wiseman look like something out of a different century. Hugo keeps walking, pushing farther from our small group and the log fire that most of us are huddled around. One of the tour guides, a burly man in a snowsuit, follows Hugo and me toward the river’s edge, then asks that we stop. The frozen river is probably safe to walk on, but unnecessary risk doesn’t pair well with tour operations in absurdly remote and frigid locations. After setting and resetting his tripods in the snow half a dozen times, Hugo is finally satisfied. He angles the cameras, and then we wait. Before long we’re stomping in place and swaying subconsciously, the body’s automated reply to the brain’s insistence on staying out in this outrageous cold. The Milky Way is aglow, illuminating the forest and snow-covered roofs. We haven’t yet seen what we came here for, but conditions couldn’t be better. Every now and then, Hugo bends to look through a viewfinder. Forty-eight years old and standing about five foot seven, he has large brown eyes and a slightly purplish nose. He’s partially deaf in one ear, the result of a long-ago infection, and his English, although fluent, is tinged with the Spanish of his native El Salvador. Growing up in Central America, Hugo had never heard of the northern lights: la aurora was a phrase used only to describe the special glow of dawn. But since relocating to Edmonton, Alberta, nearly 30 years ago, he’s had scores of sightings of what he sometimes calls Lady Aurora. Nowadays, when the forecast looks good or half decent, Hugo will load up his 2007 Mazda and drive, alone and often in the middle of the night, to Elk Island National Park, about 40 minutes

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make peace with existence and its cruelties. Yet he has managed to do so, thanks in large part to photography and his quest to capture the northern lights. I first connected with Hugo more than a year ago, when a NASA scientist sent me the names of a few aurora aficionados who share their images with the scientific community. After learning a little about his story, it felt like a good idea to take him someplace he’d never been—a place known for clear skies, stunning vistas, and tourism infrastructure catering to aurora chasers. My thinking was that really getting to know this photographer, elementary school custodian, and philosopher-poet would require a dream trip. So in February of last year, we met up in Anchorage to begin our journey into the heart of an Alaskan winter.

from his home on the northwestern edge of Edmonton. There he’ll set up and wait. It’s a calming place, he says, where he can reflect on what he’s been through, what he’s lost, and what he still has. Before peeling off from the group, Hugo and I listened to a Wiseman local give an informal lesson about the physics of auroras. He stood outside a cabin filled with furs and mining-era memorabilia, and, with mit- HUGO WAS RAISED in San Salvador, in the tened hands gesturing toward the sky, ex- northern part of the capital, not far from plained how nonstop nuclear fusion in the the University of El Salvador. One of his sun sends electrons and protons zooming neighbors was a baker, and Hugo can recall into space—the solar wind. Some of these happy mornings traveling in the back of the charged particles make their way into earth’s man’s pickup to deliver fresh bread around upper atmosphere, where they smash into town. He enjoyed soccer after school and on weekends. His family often went oxygen, nitrogen, to the beach, buying a watermelon and other gases. to have on the way and returning The collisions emit CHARGED home with fresh fish or crab. But visible light: greens mostly, with cam- PA R T I C L E S F R O M T H E Hugo’s teenage years were defined by the civil war that ravaged El eos from pink, vioSOLAR WIND SMASH Salvador for 12 years starting in let, blue, yellow, I N T O AT M O S P H E R I C 1980. Decades of tension between and red. an impoverished citizenry and an They’re visible, G A S E S . T H E oppressive right-wing governmind you, if it’s dark ment erupted into full-scale conand no fog, clouds, C O L L I S I O N S E M I T flict that spring, after government snow, or light pol- V I S I B L E L I G H T : snipers opened fire on a crowd lution impede your gathered for a funeral, killing 42 view. The show is G R E E N S M O S T LY, people and injuring hundreds best in an oval re- W I T H C A M E O S F R O M more. In response, leftist insurgion that surrounds gent groups united to form a guerearth’s magnetic P I N K , V I O L E T, B L U E , rilla army intent on overthrowing poles at high lati- Y E L L O W, A N D R E D . the regime. tudes. Situated at The year 1980 was also the 67.4 degrees and perched on the edge of Gates of the Arctic height of the Cold War and the dubious noNational Park and Reserve, Wiseman is as tion that drove much of U.S. foreign policy in the region: “spheres of influence.” Turning front row as it gets. A few people huddle around the fire out- a blind eye to the Salvadoran government’s side a cabin; others stay indoors, sipping in- barbarity, the U.S. gave military support to stant cider, trying not to nod off, and trust- its counterinsurgency campaign. A decade ing that someone will alert them if there’s of fighting, marked by widespread humanlight from above. Not Hugo. He stays at his rights violations, rape, torture, and disapoutpost nearly the entire time, close to three pearances, left an estimated 75,000 dead. At the start of the war, Hugo was more hours. I worry that he’s colder than he lets wide-eyed than frightened. When he was on, but this is his element. In 2016, Hugo’s ten-year-old son, Emilio, about 12 and visiting his grandparents, he died from complications caused by pro- and his cousins would lie on a hill and watch found developmental problems. Through- government helicopters fire at guerrilla out the challenges, pain, and sadness of that camps on the forested slopes of a mountain decade, Hugo struggled, as anyone would, to named Guazapa.

G A R R E T G R O V E ( 2 ) . O P E N I N G PAG E S , F R O M L E F T: G A R R E T G R OV E ; H U G O S A N C H E Z .

Sanchez after his mushing excursion; below, gearing up for a big night out

“It was so cool to see the lights, the gunshot fire in the sky,” he recalls. But soon the skirmishes between rebels and U.S.-backed government forces began closing in on San Salvador. Hugo remembers seeing dismembered corpses on roadsides, dead bodies in a dumpster. Entering the university at 17 helped him avoid military recruitment, but it always felt like he was just a sideways glance away from execution. By 1989, explosions, gunshots, and murders were the norm. Hugo, not yet 20, was already married and had a baby daughter. Fearful of crossfire, no one left their houses for days on end. Hugo’s family passed the time with marathon sessions of Monopoly as food supplies dwindled. Then, on November 11, Hugo awoke to shouts: “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!” (“The people united will never be defeated!”) Gunshots echoed up and down the street. It was the beginning of the opposition fighters’ final offensive against the government. The house shook as helicopters fired rockets and sprayed gunfire into nearby buildings. Hugo’s mother-in-law was already in Canada, and her church had been sponsoring immigrant applications for friends and

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relatives back in San Salvador. The process took more than a year—documents, medical exams, interviews—but Hugo, his wife, and the baby were finally approved for Canadian residence. In September 1991, they flew 3,000 miles north to start their new life in Edmonton. Despite support from the church group, Hugo struggled to adjust; the language barrier was intimidating, and he could only get low-paying jobs doing painting or landscaping. The cold weather didn’t help, and his marriage was strained. In 1998, Hugo and his wife had another child, but by 2004 it was clear their relationship wasn’t working, so they split up. At a bar one night in 2005, Hugo met Jamie House. She was a lot younger than him, but they appreciated each other’s nonchalant vibe and shared easy laughs while playing pool. “Our sense of humor kind of clicked,” Jamie says. The two dated for about a year before Jamie got pregnant. “I loved him and wanted to have a child with him,” she says. “When you’re young, you want your happy ending, and that was where I saw it.” Emilio was born on May 24, 2006, seriously ill from the start. “They rushed him into intensive care because he wasn’t breathing properly,” Jamie recalls. “I didn’t get to hold him until he was two days old.” Emilio didn’t leave the hospital for five months, following multiple surgeries on his trachea and abdomen. Over the next few years, Emilio went back and forth between home and hospital. His doctors never came up with a comprehensive diagnosis, but he had difficulty breathing and eating, could barely see or hear, and never walked or talked. He would come to endure dozens of trips to the emergency room and still more surgeries. Caring for a child like that, one of Hugo’s close friends told me, is like trying to tread water with an anchor around your neck. OUR PLAN IN ALASKA was straightforward:

hopscotch to different aurora-viewing hot spots, linking up with local tour operators who know the best places, the ones far from the lights of civilization and set against dramatic backdrops like fjords and abandoned mining buildings. We started in the south, outside Anchorage, then made our way to the interior, first to Fairbanks and then another 270 miles north to Wiseman. Over the course of a week, we stayed out most nights, checked the forecast compulsively, and did a lot of marching through knee-deep snow. The chase itself began around 9:30 P.M., when the local guide we were working with phoned to give us an update about the prospects of seeing auroras. This input was based

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on weather conditions and something called me a sideways peace sign as he whooshed the Kp-index, a numeric scale conveying across a meadow of untracked snow. When the intensity of the solar wind, with lower he was finished, he took a knee with the boisnumbers (1, 2, 3) indicating less geomag- terous dog team. “I have to thank them!” he netic razzle-dazzle and higher numbers (4 said, hugging each one and giggling at their to 9) indicating more. frenzy of affection. Seeing an aurora on a Kp 9 night is like a When darkness arrived and it was time to religious epiphany—or so I’m told, because try our luck, Hugo’s unassailable good mood that’s very rare and it didn’t happen for us. was a balm for frustration when the skies But the truth is, seeing an aurora at a 3.5 or a didn’t deliver. On one of our first nights, at 4, on the right night and in the right setting, a spot along the Seward Highway southeast is so magnificent that it leaves you laughing. of Anchorage, we were coming up on two The forecasts mattered little to Hugo. hours with nothing to show for our efforts. He’d seen many auHugo and our guide were roras on nights when unfazed, chatting about conditions were supthe best camera settings for posed to be poor, and E M I L I O ’ S D O C T O R S capturing aurora reflections he’d come up empty N E V E R CA M E U P W I T H on water, and discussing when forecasts looked how photography is simulA COMPREHENSIVE great. The only guartaneously an expression of antee is that you won’t D I AG N O S I S , B U T H E H A D the self but also a way to see anything if you connect with others. D I F F I C U LT Y B R E AT H I N G don’t show up. If the “To me, it’s not because midnight trek to an A N D E AT I N G , C O U L D I want to be Insta-famous,” old mine, the drive to Hugo said. “No. I want to B A R E LY S E E O R H E A R , the top of a dark ski show people how beautimountain, or any of A N D N E V E R WA L K E D ful the earth is. The magic. our other frigid ad- O R TA L K E D. They can call it whatever ventures yielded no they want—creator, God, reward, at least we science.” For Hugo, witwould know that we tried. nessing an aurora is a kind of meditation. The other thing about an aurora quest is But the sight, the image, is a gift that should that there’s a lot of downtime during the be shared. “That’s why I love photography,” day—in February in Alaska, you get roughly he said. six to nine hours of daylight in the state’s Another night, near Fairbanks, we rode in northern areas—and Hugo was hell-bent a snowcat with a small group to a remote hillon making the most of it. During a stop top, where we were engulfed in a soupy fog. at Chena hot springs, outside Fairbanks, A yurt stocked with a supply of instant cocoa we rode a couple of beat-up snowmobiles and oatmeal provided relief from the cold, but around, laughing our asses off when I rolled as the night wore on, the air grew thick with mine and Hugo did the same about 30 sec- disappointment. True aurora chasers, like onds later. Afterward we toasted our snow- true fishermen, have to be zen about coming machine rides with appletinis poured into up empty. It happens. But that’s easier said glasses made of ice while sitting on ice stools than done for travelers who have come from at a bar also made of ice, inside a building far away, paid thousands of dollars, and may made of ice and decorated with scattered not have this opportunity again. caribou furs and—go figure—medievalHugo was never down. One night he themed ice sculptures. joked about the weather with a tourist from Make time for hot springs? Check. We China. “You know Mother Nature!” he said. also went to the University of Alaska Fair- The man laughed and finished the thought banks’s Museum of the North, where Hugo for him: “Anything is possible!” Hugo patmade goofball faces in front of a stuffed griz- ted him on the shoulder like an old friend. zly. He also sat quietly in a room filled with “Ohhh, yeah,” he said. music created from satellite data measuring WHEN EMILIO WAS three, Hugo and Jamie the particles of the solar wind. The next morning, in a Facebook Live ses- made the wrenching decision to place him sion with friends, Hugo previewed our after- in the Rosecrest Home, a full-time care fanoon plan. “My next adventure is going to be cility. Hugo and Jamie could visit whenever one of my dreams,” he said. “We’re going to they wanted, but they could also try to regain some balance in their lives. (By this point, go dogsledding. I’m ready to mush, mush!” It was a crystalline day, and the setting was Jamie and Hugo had split up, but they rea pristine river valley. Hugo, wearing a GoPro mained friends.) A rare happy memory from that time came and lying low in a cocoon of blankets, threw

when Hugo first saw the northern lights. He and Jamie were driving on Highway 2 between Calgary and Edmonton, far from any cities, when they saw a glow rising from the horizon, gradually lighting up the sky. Even to Jamie, who had seen many auroras, it was stunning. Later she told Hugo that her people, the Cree First Nations, believe “the northern lights are dancing spirits of loved ones who have passed on.” Jamie hated Rosecrest and the sense of failure it symbolized. “It was difficult having people tell me how my son was doing and how he did overnight and stuff,” she says. “It should have been me.” But for Hugo, Rosecrest had the opposite effect. He believed Emilio was happy there, and he could see that the boy’s quiet charm had won the hearts of the staff and other families. Rosecrest also gave Hugo, for the first time in years, just enough personal freedom to pur-

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Sanchez and Emilio in 2014

sue a new interest. A few years earlier, a friend had loaned him a camera, a Canon T2i. He went to a nearby park and photographed Canada geese on small ponds. He went again a few days later, and again to explore other parks. “Day in, day out, I was photographing what any amateur photographer would,” he says. “Flowers, ducks, benches, birds flying around.” Money was always tight, but the next year, using his Christmas bonus, Hugo bought a Canon T3i. “I had a new toy, and I wanted to play with it,” he says. He borrowed photography books from the library, watched tutorials on YouTube, and stole away to practice. He began visiting Elk Island National Park in the daytime, zooming in on bison, deer, and owls. His job required him to be at school around 7 A.M.,

so he would take pictures of the Edmonton cityscape at dawn. He began posting his favorites on Facebook and Instagram, enjoying likes and praise from friends and family. Meanwhile, through Rosecrest, Hugo made a connection that would change his life. Tom Braid, then the photo editor at the Edmonton Sun, had a son whose condition was similar to Emilio’s. Tom’s boy died before Emilio got to Rosecrest, but Tom and his wife had stayed close to the community there, helping with the family support group and fundraising. One night, at a send-off party for a Rosecrest doctor, Hugo volunteered to take pictures. He and Braid struck up a conversation, and Braid asked what he did. Hugo told him he was a custodian at a local Catholic school but that his passion was photography. “What kinds of pictures do you take?” Hugo handed him his phone and Braid started scrolling, mostly through shots of wildlife and landscapes. “Whoa, these are good!” Braid said. “Really?” “Yeah. Really.” Braid made a point of supporting budding photojournalists, and before long Hugo had a press pass and was doing assignments for the Sun around town—fairs, farms, fireworks. One day in the spring of 2013, Hugo heard there was going to be a meteor shower. He’d been experimenting with taking longexposure images at night, so he headed out of town. He failed to capture a single picture of a meteor, but when he got home and uploaded his images, he saw that he’d taken a hazy shot of the northern lights without knowing it. The photograph was unimpressive, but Hugo was hooked. He loaded his phone with apps for aurora forecasting and began reading about strategies for taking pictures. During the daytime and early evening, when he wasn’t shooting for the Sun, working his regular job, or caring for his other children, Hugo was at Rosecrest with Emilio. They would usually watch movies together—Emilio’s favorite activity—and rub noses in greeting, “which he loved so much,” Hugo says. After leaving, Hugo would go home to fetch his gear. If it was still early, he might grab a nap or visit the Azucar Supper Club, a Latin-themed nightclub owned by longtime friends. Then, come 11:30 P.M. or so, he would head out to hunt for the northern lights.

OUR DAYLONG DRIVE out of Fairbanks began at 8:30 A.M. at the airport, where we joined a tour group and settled into our seats on a small bus pointed north. Outside town, the bus merged onto the Dalton Highway. The scenic and treacherous artery, built during the seventies to support construction of the 789-mile Trans-Alaska Pipeline, stretches from Prudhoe Bay to Livengood, not far from Fairbanks, and is the setting for the reality show Ice Road Truckers. By early afternoon, with daylight dwindling, we reached the Yukon River, where we stopped at a lonely outpost for a salmonsoup lunch. A few hours later, we pulled off beside a sign marking our arrival at the Arctic Circle, 66° 33’ latitude. We piled out of the bus to stretch and take pictures. Our fellow aurora chasers included retirees from Oklahoma, a couple from North Carolina, and about a dozen people from China. By this point, Hugo was already a favorite of the group, talking cameras with one elderly man, using his phone to share photographs of auroras, exchanging e-mail addresses with a woman from China, and linking up on social media for future friendships. It was the same throughout our week together: while we explored the mountains outside Anchorage, visited the ski town of Girdwood, or ate burgers in downtown Fairbanks, Hugo was open to talking to anyone about his life, including the story of his son. Yet it never struck me as oversharing. Being around Hugo made me wonder if the rest of us are sharing too little. Around 9:30 P.M., we reached Coldfoot Camp at the foot of the Brooks Range. Consisting of a truck stop, a diner, and a motel cobbled together from the same portable structures once used to house workers constructing the pipeline, the place scarcely exists, and there’s no real reason to visit in winter except for the one big exception that we all hoped to see. In the diner, Hugo bought a few souvenir magnets for friends back home, then we sat down to eat. Afterward, it was so cold outside that we had to cover our hands and faces just for the walk across the parking lot back to the motel, where we prepped our gear, then rendezvoused in the lobby at 11:30 P.M. for the 16-mile drive to Wiseman. EMILIO’S DEATH was both sudden and expected. There had been so many close calls, so many times when Hugo and Jamie thought, This could be the day. Then, on December 9, 2016, they each got a call from Rosecrest. Paramedics were already on their way. Hugo was wrecked. “I wanted to see no one and talk to no one,” he says. After saying goodbye to his son, Hugo

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The light show over Wiseman

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O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 01/02.20

the show on full display, we can hear cheering from the rest of the group back near the cabins. “These guys,” Hugo says, referring to our guides, “they want to hire me to be their lucky charm.” A few minutes later, Hugo steps away from his cameras. He looks up at the sky, alive with color and motion, and takes a deep breath. “I’m happy to see you, Emilio,” he says, sniffling, his voice cracking slightly. “I miss you, buddy. And I love you. Mom loves you, too. So, thanks for everything you’re doing lately because this is…” he says though O tears. “I love you, buddy.” DAVID WOLMAN ( @DAVIDWOLMAN) IS AN OUTSIDE CONTRIBUTING EDITOR AND THE COAUTHOR OF ALOHA RODEO. Volume XLV, Number 1. OUTSIDE (ISSN 0278-1433) is published monthly except for combined issues Jan/Feb, Mar/Apr, Jul/Aug, and Sep/Oct for a total of 8 times per year, by Outside Integrated Media, LLC, 400 Market St., Santa Fe, NM 87501. Periodical postage paid at Santa Fe, NM, and additional mailing offices. Canadian Goods and Services Tax Registration No. R126291723. Canada Post International Publications Mail Sales Agreement No. 40015979. Subscription rates: U.S. and possessions, $24; Canada, $35 (includes GST); foreign, $45. Washington residents add sales tax. POSTMASTER: Send U.S. and international address changes to OUTSIDE, P.O. Box 6228, Harlan, IA 51593-1728. Send Canadian address changes to OUTSIDE, P.O. Box 877 Stn Main, Markham, ON L3P-9Z9.

HUGO SANCHEZ

called Braid, who suggested they meet at a lava but flowing upward and across the sky. coffee shop. They sat for hours, talking and It grows steadily, morphing into the shape crying, two fathers of dead children. They of a mountain, then sending streams burstdiscussed how kids like Emilio and Braid’s ing and shooting into the heavens. To our son, Nicholas, are “born pure, live pure, and left, over the Middle Fork of the Koyukuk, die pure.” Braid reassured the sky looks like fire, Hugo that he and Jamie had then a dragon, then done right by Emilio. “He I T ’ S A B O U T 1 : 2 0 massive flickering pink is proud of you,” Braid said. and green columns, But now? Now is the time to A . M . W H E N H U G O F I R S T rolling, brightening, go and live. “Emilio wants S P I E S A T H I N , I C E and fading. you to be free.” I give Hugo space as G R E E N T R A I L OV E R T H E Hugo decided to visit he works quickly with family in Atlanta. The trip T R E E T O P S B E H I N D U S , his cameras, setting up helped a little. God did, too, exposures, repositionLOOKING ALMOST LIKE but Hugo still felt broken. ing tripods. I wonder Where he did find solace L AVA B U T F L OW I N G if he’s nervous about was in nature photography. getting the shot, or not U P WA R D A N D AC R O S S He started going back to his getting it, like skiers favorite parks and roadside T H E S KY. who get stressed out pull-offs at all hours of the on a powder day. But day or night. He would go to work the next he isn’t. “I don’t even know what to shoot day, sometimes having slept only a few hours, anymore!” he shouts, holding his arms up and keep one eye on the forecast. Jamie could to the sky, delighted. see it. “He was chasing something,” she says. Over the past few days, Hugo had been saying, half joking, that we would see aurora IT’S ABOUT 1:20 A.M. in Wiseman when in Wiseman. He just knew it. Even earlier in Hugo first spies a thin, ice-green trail over the evening, when clouds threatened to fill the treetops behind us, looking almost like the sky, he gave me a sly smile. Now, with

CYCLING

continued from page 77

delivered map notes for the next day’s ride. When tensions arose, I typically (and ineffectively) defaulted to unrelenting chipperness and a handful of platitudes about the spirit of adventure to patch things up. Ultimately, I realized that my job wasn’t to ride my bike; it was a service position with round-the-clock expectations for less than minimum wage. The outdoor industry calls this getting paid in sunsets—which wouldn’t actually sound so bad if those sunsets weren’t being blocked by a pair of fullgrown adults fighting over whose turn it was to wash the group spatula. I had wanted freedom and adventure. What I got instead was too much responsibility.

BUT LET’S GET back to the hill, the mad-

man, and the day I realized I was done trying to make bike touring work full-time. As I stared at the back of Alan’s head and willed his recumbent cranks to turn faster, I began to realize that no amount of tailwinds, sunsets, and campfire Uno tournaments could make a day like this worth it. If I survived to the end of the tour, I was going back to school to find a job that didn’t involve mediating nightly septuagenarian conflicts about tent placement. Max never caught us—for an hour I watched as he got closer and then started to recede, before later zooming past us in the bed of a pickup truck, middle fingers extended skyward. For weeks he kept calling me and the bike-touring company, threatening to sue for being ousted from the tour, but there were too many witnesses to what he’d done to that sprinkler head. I lost sleep worrying he’d show up along the route packing something more formidable than a Leatherman. But we never saw him again. Two months later, ten of the original 16 of us rolled into Saint Augustine, Florida, and triumphantly dipped our front wheels into the ocean. I flew back home to Portland knowing I would never ride my bike from coast to coast again.

Getting paid to do what I loved made me realize that I needed to find something new to love. Something useful, perhaps—turns out there are only so many ways to make money on a bike when you’re not particularly strong, fast, or good at it. At 30, I went back to school and chose journalism. Instead of life on the road, I began writing about people undertaking their own transformative journeys. It’s been ten years since that final crosscountry ride. Today I have a family, a home that isn’t staked to the ground, and more than three shirts. I’m also a more relatable friend now that all my stories don’t end with me sucking the sugar coating off an Advil for the calories, sleeping in a stranger’s treehouse, or drop-kicking a campsite raccoon (it was self-defense). The money hasn’t exactly followed, nor has the dream of endless freedom and adventure that I pedaled away from home in search of. But there will always be some part of me looking back and hoping they might be there, holding tight to my rear O wheel, trying to catch a draft. CAITLIN GIDDINGS ( @CAITLIN GIDDINGS) IS A FORMER EDITOR AT BICYCLING. SHE LIVES IN AUSTIN, TEXAS.

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