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CONTENTS

08.09

the guide 46 RELOCATE, REBOOT, RELAX

In our most scientific whereto-live survey yet, we put America’s 100 largest cities under the microscope to present you with the ten healthiest—physically, mentally, and economically. PLUS: Ten idyllic small towns near the big boys, and relocation advice from wandering man Aaron Eckhart.

70 THE MEGA THEORY OF EVOLUTION

74 HELLO KITTY

For Bob Burnquist, the world’s greatest skateboarder, the formula for success demands a colossal ramp, deadly risks, and many, many pairs of hemp shoes. JOSH DEAN gets airborne with one of the most creative and daring athletes alive.

Caring for an orphaned fawn is one thing. But a full-grown, 260-pound jaguar? You’d have to be a little nuts, and you’d have to go to the world’s unlikeliest animal sanctuary.

THAYER WALKER heads to the Bolivian jungle with a not-long-enough leash.

80 DON’T WIN IF YOU DON’T WANT THE TATTOO

That’s the caveat for anyone who dares enter the screwball comedy that is the Single Speed World Championships.

Into this breach we sent the anonymous BIKE SNOB NYC, the world’s greatest (and funniest) cycling blogger.

62 FROST FREE

As its ice cap recedes, Greenland rises. For locals, global warming has an upside, revealing vast, untapped mineral and oil wealth—and a longdormant independent streak.

BY McKENZIE FUNK

46

pg.

“If I’m going to put in my vote for best town, I’ll say Bozeman. The outdoor potential, in every season, is absolutely incredible.” —AARON ECKHART

Photograph by Sam Jones

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Outside 3

CONTENTS cont.

pg. 40

pg. 93 pg. 26

Where to Find It

departments 18 DISPATCHES >First Look: Hucking 100-foot waterfalls

87 THE ESSENTIALS >Covet: A custom-made, hand-built (by

is suddenly the big thing in kayaking— which means the sport is in big trouble >News from the Field: Animal Planet’s Dave Salmoni sleeps with lions; the Leadville ER prepares for bonking bikers >Drawing Board: How a covert documentary team captured a secret Japanese dolphin slaughter on camera for The Cove >XX Factor: American swimmer Laurin Weisenthal aims for the English Channel speed record

you) wooden kayak

30 DESTINATIONS >Spot On: Sunny Manzanita, Oregon’s

columns

(thankfully) forgotten coast >Get Lost: The Great Lakes region is big, flat, and sometimes cheesy—and full of cheap, wild adventures. We pick the Lakes’ seven best trips. >Journeys: British Columbia’s Queen Charlotte Islands are a world away from mainland Canada. Which is why they’re so wicked, eh.

Muskies: They’re called the fish of 10,000 casts. Why? Because it’s worth that many to catch just one. By Michael Perry

>Running Shoes:

93 BODYWORK

The third in our four-part Pillars of Fitness special: Building power, not bulk

36 OUT THERE

42 OUT OF BOUNDS

Rollerblading, that neon, spandex-clad fad of the eighties and nineties, is alive and well—in France, of course By Eric Hansen plus

40 STYLE

This summer’s best watches do more—way more—than just tell time

6 EXPOSURE 10 BETWEEN THE LINES 116 PARTING SHOT

+ O

Under the Cover

Turns out actor Aaron Eckhart wasn’t always the Adonis he is today: He rocked a perm—for three years!—while moonlighting as a surf bum in Hawaii. “I’d get out of the water and have this cowlick, so I got a tight perm,” he says.“I wouldn’t have to comb it or do anything. And I’m not even ashamed of it. When the curl relaxes, you look cool. It becomes wavy.”

Sure it does, Aaron. Sure it does.

4 Outside

Cover photograph by Sam Jones

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The best new road and trail kicks to keep you moving >Outfitted: All the fly-fishing gear you need for a summer on the water >Deconstructed: There’s more going on inside an MTB cleat than meets the eye

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EXPOSURE

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KRYSTLE WRIGHT “BASE jumping is such a fast sport,” says Wright, who shot Ben Gibbs backflipping off this 1,500-foot cliff in Australia’s Blue Mountains National Park, west of Sydney. “This photo is just a moment in time. When you see them jump in real life, it happens so much faster.” The Blue Mountains, a sandstone plateau divided by a series of gorges, is a favorite of Aussie hikers, cyclists, climbers, and, of course, BASE enthusiasts—though the sport isn’t exactly legal in the park. “The jumpers tend to not tell the park rangers when they’re jumping, and the park rangers tend to turn a blind eye, as long as they’re not causing any hassles,” says the Sydney-based Wright. “Of course, some guy drove a mini-motorbike off the cliff. That wasn’t good.” THE TOOLS: Canon 1D Mark II, 24–70mm f/2.8 lens, ISO 100, f/10, 1/320 second

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EXPOSURE

CHRISTIAN PONDELLA On a five-day trip to a remote section of British Columbia’s Tweedsmuir Provincial Park last February, Pondella captured climbers Will Gadd (on lead) and EJ Plimley (partially visible beneath him) making a first ascent of 1,000-foot Hunlen Falls.

The falls are a popular spot for summer tourists but become a dangerous amphitheater of ice in the winter, when spray freezes to the nearby rock, breaking free in giant chunks without warning. “It’s like a glacier, constantly calving house-size blocks of ice,” says the Mammoth Lakes, California–based Pondella. For Gadd, who led all six pitches of the climb, the route was particularly challenging. “We mainly used rock gear; the ice screws didn’t hold,” he says. “On one pitch, I was worried about an avalanche, so we raced up it as fast as we could. It was probably the most demanding thing I’ve ever climbed.” THE TOOLS: Canon 5D Mark II, 70–200mm f/2.8 lens, ISO 200, f/4, 1/500 second 8 Outside

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BETWEEN THE LINES Middle Ground When it comes to selecting adventure getaways, I will reluctantly concede to the rampant accusations: Yes, we tend to be regionalists. We fixate on the Rocky Mountains and the coasts, while frequently dismissing the American Midwest. Maybe we’ve been trying to compensate for our magazine’s Chicago origins. Maybe we’re just annoyed by Garrison Keillor. Whatever the reason, we can’t deny that our editorial stance toward the Midwest has historically been, to use a trendy expression, “Meh.” This month, we’ve set out to correct this oversight, a change that has as much to do with our belief in equality as with the demographics of our masthead—namely, senior editor Sam Moulton (Wisconsin), online editor Joe Spring (Minnesota), contributing editor Stephanie Pearson (Minnesota), and research editor Ryan Krogh (a.k.a. the only North Dakotan I know).

This group, known around our offices as MidPAC, never hesitates to lobby on behalf of their lake-infested, cheese-curdled homeland. Last year, they staged a sit-in after we finished our umpteenth spotlight on the Southwest, relenting only after we offered the Midwest similar treatment—and threw in a six-pack of Leinenkugel’s. Starting on page 32, you’ll find their (surprisingly awesome) adventure picks in and around the Great Lakes. What’s more, you’ll discover a few moving odes to their favorite regional customs, including sentimental songwriting, giant statues, and (in this month’s Out There column, penned by Wisconsin’s Mike

Perry) musky fishing. So, to all of our readers in the American Heartland, we sincerely apologize for our past slights. But, no, we are not interested in the “totally overlooked” cat skiing in the Upper Peninsula.

—CHRISTOPHER KEYES

>QUOTED

Vernor

>THE EDITORS’INBOX FROM: McKenzie Funk RE: Hospitality,

Greenland Style On my trip, I used couchsurfing.org for the first time, since Greenland is so damn spendy. I stayed in the living room of this awesome local, Rikka. He fed me whale, and we swapped tons of music (hip-hop for Greenlandic pop, mainly).

Turns out he went to the U.S. once. Baltimore.

Nice harbor there, he says.

That’s what he did: He walked around the harbor.

[See“Frost Free,” page 62, and view a gallery of photos at outsideonline.com/ greenlandphotos.]

>“Musky hunting seems to transcend all other forms of fishing,” says Michael Perry, who profiled the species, and the people who chase them, for“Passion Fish”(page 36).“It brings out the Ahab in all of us.” Surprisingly, Perry, a Wisconsin native, doesn’t count himself among the devoted.“My favorite form of fishing is shooting carp with a bow and arrow,” he says.“It combines hunting and fishing. It’s like the Wisconsin biathlon.”

Before shooting last Au-

gust’s Single Speed World Championships for“Don’t Win If You Don’t Want the Tattoo”(page 80), Brian Vernor spent four months in Africa filming a movie about a bike race from Cairo to Cape Town. It was a good warm-up.“They’re both fun and extremely hard at the same time,” says the Santa Cruz, California–based photographer.“But at the Single Speeds, they ride bikes without gears, in their underwear, and drink ...a lot. It definitely weeds out the squeamish.”

“In cycling, there’s always someone who’s stronger than you, and there’s always some piece of equipment that’s better than what you already have.

You’d think this would humble us, but instead it only drives us to try harder and spend more. Cycling is full of competition, whether you’re riding for the green jersey in the Tour de France or you’re riding to out-green your smug neighbor with the Prius. I write anonymously about cycling because sometimes it’s important to forget about who’s who and remember that all this gram- and leg-shaving is really pretty funny. If we forget that, then we’re just a bunch of Lycra-clad gamecocks.”

—Bike Snob NYC [See “Don’t Win If You Don’t Want the Tattoo,” page 80.]

10 Outside

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: RYAN HEFFERNAN; GETTY IMAGES; BENNY ZENGA; WOODS WHEATCROFT

BIKE-AHOLICS ANONYMOUS

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Interactive Map: Find Your Dream City Tired of the same old scenery and stale faces? Check out our online map of this year’s Best Towns (page 46), plus an archived list of our favorite cities from the past six years, and then get packing for greener grass. outsideonline.com/besttownsmap

Video & Photos:

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: JOSE MANDOJANA; HEATH ROBBINS; NOAH FRIEDMAN-RUDOVSKY

JAGUARS REALLY DID RIP MY FLESH After learning that both writer THAYER WALKER and photographer NOAH FRIEDMAN-RUDOVSKY had separate jaguar“incidents”at an animal-rehabilitation center in Bolivia (“Hello Kitty,” page 74), we had to know: Who got it worse? >FRIEDMAN-RUDOVSKY: Well, I got proof of my run-in with Amira. She was trying to get at the lens in my pocket. After four months, the gashes are still healing. You say Rupi stood on top of you, but I haven’t seen the damage. >WALKER: Mental scars, Siegfried, mental scars. They take much longer to heal than your superficial scratches. >FRIEDMAN-RUDOVSKY: I’ll give you that. I imagine I’d have nightmares, too, if Rupi’s giant jaws were opened up on

my face, body, and groin.

Good thing you didn’t put the cup on. He would have figured it was a toy. >WALKER: Oh, jeez, I forgot about that. Can you imagine Rupi discovering a protective cup for the first time? How bad would that have been?

[See a gallery of FriedmanRudovsky’s images and a video of Walker walking his cat at outsideonline.com/ jaguar.]

USB SLEEP-AND-CHARGE: Leave your chargers behind. With Sleep-andCharge, you can use your USB ports to charge all your portable devices, even while your laptop is asleep or turned off.

Video: XX Factor American Laurin Weisenthal (page 26) offers advice on long-distance swimming. outsideonline.com/ laurinweisenthal

Video: Rafting 101 Editors Grayson Schaffer and Alicia Carr demonstrate nine neophyte rafting tips, learned the hard way on Colorado’s Gunnison River. outsideonline.com/rafting101

Toshiba has made every effort at the time of publication to ensure the accuracy of the information provided herein. Product specifications, configurations, prices, system/component/ options availability are all subject to change without notice.

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Information Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.

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LETTERS Insults, Back by Popular Demand

part of your counter-culture uniform, this does not give you the street cred to rail against the general population of cyclists.

Grow up.

When we published Jason Gay’s lamentation on the demise of the angry bike mechanic (“The Day the Insults Died,” The Big Idea, June), we expected that some readers would take exception. What we didn’t expect?

That several of you would pick up the wrench and go after Gay yourselves. —The Editors

JESSE MERKEL CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

ROBERT FERGUSON GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN

Hey, Tay Tay I really enjoyed your June 2009 issue, featuring Taylor Kitsch. I was wondering if you have contact information for him. I appreciate your help and look forward to more interesting issues of your magazine.

TERESA HAINO BLOOMFIELD, NEW JERSEY

Sure ya do. Fan mail for Kitsch should go to: Beth Morris, Rogers & Cowan, 8687 Melrose Ave., 7th Floor, Los Angeles, CA 90069

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JEFF LIPSKY

Jason Gay argues that being treated rudely will lead people to learn about bike repair on their own? He obviously does not grasp the very basic concepts of pedagogy. I have a further message for Gay: You may want to impress people with your weak and infantile defense of angry bike mechanics, but in reality your story is a vehicle for simple-minded snobbery. Just because you miss the good old days when you could wear a De Rosa cycling cap to a party as

Hilarious. Thank you. If I may, I’d like to steer you toward the last silverback of angry midwestern bike mechanics. Grand Rapids Bicycle Company, a fine shop, keeps chained up in its back room a grizzled wrench-turner with more ink and a fouler mouth than a merchant marine. He recently scolded me for neglecting my bottom bracket and then nominated my abused rear derailleur for a medal of honor. If you’re looking to breed these guys for reintroduction, you know where to find him.

Packing in the Parks We’ll Make a Man Out of You Yet I’m a dedicated 13-year-old reader of Outside. I loved Nick Heil’s May Lab Rat column, “You Don’t Know Squat.” I’ve just begun conditioning for freshman highschool football, which includes weight lifting. Squats are by far my least favorite exercise, but this story gave me new purpose by helping me realize the benefits of my torture. Thanks for such a great magazine.

MATTHEW STURGELL MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE

ILLUSTRATIONS BY CHRIS PHILPOT

P.S. I’m also a newbie mountain biker and enjoyed drooling over the 2009 Bike Special.

Speaking of Drooling In your June Essentials, Grayson Schaffer includes Danger, his $1,550 chocolate Labrador. There are millions of healthy dogs awaiting adoption right now in animal shelters. And they are priced far less than Schaffer’s vanity animal.

BRADFORD F. KELLY LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

Schaffer responds: Vanity animal? I’m glad Danger was bred for thick skin and a resilient spirit. Yes, you can find some excellent pets in shelters. For a discussion on when to adopt and when to buy, visit outsidek9.com/13year-commitment.

In May, Congress passed legislation that reinstates rules to allow concealed and loaded firearms in national parks. Reader Bill Wenger, from St. Paul, Minnesota, sent us these helpful ideas for people who think their climbing gear isn’t providing enough security. < Zip 9mm ice ax with optional bayonet mount

One Man’s Freedom Fighter I’m disappointed that you gave Paul Watson (“Brinkman’s Ship,” by Michael Roberts, Dispatches, June) more publicity than he gets already. He and his gang are terrorists acting on the hunch that Japan is whaling for reasons other than research. He endangers the lives of his crew and the Japanese whalers alike. He’s no different from any other terrorist in that he thinks what he’s doing is justified. I hope he is arrested and serves time in prison.

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Published by Mariah Media Inc. • Outside was founded as Mariah in 1976 FOUNDER/CHAIRMAN LAWRENCE J. BURKE EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT/CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER ANGELO GAZIANO VICE PRESIDENT/BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT ANNE MOLLO-CHRISTENSEN VICE PRESIDENT/PUBLISHER SCOTT PARMELEE STRATEGIC PLANNING/SPECIALTY PUBLISHING DIRECTOR CHRISTINE SALEM

Editorial Offices: 400 Market Street, Santa Fe, NM 87501; 505-989-7100. Advertising Offices: 420 Lexington Ave., Suite 440, New York, NY 10170; 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 “Manage My Account” on our home page. Or write to Outside, Box 7785, Red Oak, IA 51591-0785 and enclose a copy of your mailing label, or call 800-678-1131 (outside U.S., 515-246-6917; 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 7785, Red Oak, IA 51591-0785. Copyright ©2009 by Mariah Media Inc. 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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DISPATCHES >first look

Money Shots Whitewater’s brightest stars are launching bigger drops than ever. But it’ll take more than sweet photos to right this fading sport.

BY GRAYSON SCHAFFER “THE IMPACT WAS HEAVY,” says 23-year-old

Montanan kayaker Tyler Bradt of his 80-mileper-hour entry into the pool at the bottom of eastern Washington’s 186-foot Palouse Falls this past April. “I took a huge hit to the chest, which knocked the wind out of me and jackknifed me against the back of my boat. I had so much adrenaline going through me, I didn’t know if I was hurt or not.”

Since March, kayakers have broken world waterfall records three times, raising the takeoff height an astounding 78 feet and making a serious media splash. After his plunge, Bradt appeared on Anderson Cooper 360 o. The previous month, Brazilian Pedro Oliva, 26, debuted footage of his March 4 run over his home country’s 127-foot Salto Belo on the Today show, where Ann Curry touted “the growing popularity of extreme kayaking.”

On Mother’s Day, Christie Glissmeyer, 30, of Hood River, Oregon, launched off 108-foot Metlako Falls, setting a new women’s record.

At least a dozen others—including Brendan Wells, who’s 15—have now broken the 100foot mark.

Ask any of these huckers the obvious question—um, why?—and you get everything from “For my personal progression” (Bradt) to “It was close to my house” (Glissmeyer).

Given all the press coverage, it’s tempting to agree with Curry that the sport is booming, but in fact just the opposite is true. White-

water kayaking is in serious decline, with American paddlers spending some 50 percent fewer days on the water than at the beginning of the decade, sponsorship dollars drying up, and the once-raging pro freestyle tour all but gone. For elite athletes, launching huge waterfalls may be the new frontier, but it’s also one of the few remaining ways to scratch out a living in a boat.

It’s been a long, hard fall for a pursuit that used to define adventure-sport cool. The boom cycle really took off in 1997, when designers at kayak manufacturer Wave Sport popularized a radical new boat, the X. It had a flat-bottomed hull, like a surfboard, and it enabled paddlers to spin and slide sideways on river waves. Freestyle river rodeos began drawing huge crowds and big-money sponsors like Subaru and Nike. In 2001, Outside put then-19-year-old kayaker Brad Ludden on the cover, teasing a story about the dream life of pro paddlers: “Take two hotdoggers, hand them the keys to a brand-new Subaru, stock it with boats and cash, and send the lucky bastards off with two words: Find water.

Wouldn’t you want to be a rodeo kayaker?”

Yes, please!

Mike Steck, who ran Dagger Kayaks’ Team D from 1996 to 2005, remembers bidding wars with Wave Sport for elite athletes, who were stringing together sponsorships amounting to more than $100,000 per year. High schools like the roving World Class Kayak Academy sprouted to hone the country’s top talent. It was continued on page 28

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Brendan Wells, 15, a long way from the bottom of Oregonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Metlako Falls

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NEWS FROM THE FIELD

Did you ever consider giving up?

Halfway through, I called Animal Planet and said, “I don’t think I can do this.

I don’t want to be a blip on the Fox News ticker: DAVE SALMONI EATEN TODAY. But you stayed.

Yeah. If I went home, the lions would be shot. There had to be a solution where we both got to live.

COLD CALL

Herding Cats For six months last year, Canadian Dave Salmoni, 34, a bigcat expert and the host of Animal Planet’s Predator Versus Prey and After the Attack, lived in Namibia among a pride of “last-chance” lions. The cats had been relocated to a private game park after repeatedly harassing humans on unmanaged lands. Salmoni’s project, documented for the new series Into The Pride, debuting August 13, is to teach the animals to tolerate eco-tourists. If Salmoni succeeds, the lions become the main attraction of 175,000-acre Erindi Private Game Reserve.

—MICHAEL ROBERTS If he fails, they’ll be euthanized.

OUTSIDE: This sure sounds like Timothy Treadwell with lions.

SALMONI: He gets a lot less respect than he should. You can’t watch Grizzly Man and not think, That guy is on a fine line. And that’s what animal interaction is: Knowing where the line is and not crossing it. He failed. I think he was crazy, too.

Some might say the same about you.

I was out there to have fun, but I probably learned more about lion behavior than any scientist has learned in 30 years.

Any really scary moments?

I was getting charged ten times a day. I’d scream and

And did the lions finally accept you?

By the end, we’d park next to them in the Land Rovers and they’d be dead asleep.

Tourists were leaving with huge smiles, because they got a picture of a male lion in beautiful light.

NICE GET

Trail Tread Vasque’s Sundowner, the iconic one-piece-leatherupper hiking boot, turns 25 this summer. But there’s no anniversary reissue. No special limited edition.

Just the same design from 1984. Talk about a good last. $180; vasque.com

We Don’t Need No Water Campfire skills to save your life and impress your friends Lighter Fluid

Jack NotSo-Nimble

Jack Be Nimble

Tour de Suffer This August, the 16th annual Leadville Trail 100 mountain-bike race kicks off in America’s highest city. An expected record of 1,300 competitors will climb more than 14,000 vertical feet at an average elevation of two miles. Lance Armstrong says he’s returning, and Levi Leipheimer has committed too, both hoping to dethrone six-time winner Dave Wiens. But for most riders, the main goal is to not end up sucking air from one of eight oxygen bottles spread out along the course.

—KYLE DICKMAN

2,565 More vertical feet Leadville cyclists ride than Everest climbers ascend from Base Camp to the summit

2,500 People who applied for this year’s entrance lottery, which fills the race’s 1,400 slots, a 25 percent increase over last year

THE LINE

Grease Bomb

>the stack-up

Ten-Prong WienerRoasting Stick

Castaway Skills

4,000 Dollars twice offered to race director Ken Chlouber for a spot in the race (he declined)

25% Portion of riders who don’t finish

eleven A MAULING BY SMOKEY

EARNS YOU

MAN SCOUT MERIT BADGE

Expected cases of post-race high-altitude pulmonary edema Illustrations by Chris Philpot

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FROM TOP: CHRISTOPHER WADSWORTH/COURTESY OF ANIMAL PLANET.’ SHANA NOVAK. PREVIOUS SPREAD: ERIK BOOMER

wave my stick, and the lions would lose their nerve.

Afterwards, I’d think, That sucked. I could’ve died.

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California, French and Italian Table Wine, Š2009 Frei Bros. Vineyards, Modesto, CA. All Rights Reserved.

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DRAW ING BOARD 6. Cruickshank and Krack plant an UNDERWATER “BLOOD CAM” close to shore.

10. A HELICOPTER, shipped in pieces from the States, zips over the fracas, scoring the film’s climactic shot.

4. At night, a film crew for The Cove, dressed in black, sneaks into the surrounding hills and plants SURVEILLANCE CAMERAS housed in fake rocks to record the slaughter.

J A PA N

Taiji

8. Filmmakers attempt to launch a 30-foot, camera-equipped Minizepp BLIMP shaped like a dolphin. Police stop the crew near the main inlet. The blimp doesn’t get any aerial footage, but it provides a diversion.

7. Hidden onshore cameras capture Japanese FREEDIVERS retrieving harpooned dolphins from the bottom.

3. Fishermen harpoon some 2,300 dolphins per year in the killing cove.

2. A local dealer picks a handful of dolphins to sell to aquariums and animal parks.

5. Also at night, elite freedivers Mandy-Rae Cruickshank and Kirk Krack plant two HYDROPHONES at 55 feet to record the dying dolphins’ cries.

9. Meanwhile, six surfers, including actress Hayden Panettiere and Aussie ASP rider Dave Rastovich, paddle out and form a BOARD CIRCLE to honor the dolphins, further distracting authorities.

1. Japanese fishermen herd dolphins into the inlet.

Cove Ops How a stealth documentary crew revealed Japan’s secret dolphin slaughter BY ABE STREEP BETWEEN SEPTEMBER AND MARCH, the coastal town of Taiji, Japan, plays host to a gruesome theater: Fishermen drive dolphins into a small inlet and close off the exit. A dealer selects a few animals, selling them to aquariums around the world, then the leftover dolphins are herded into a secluded side cove and harpooned for meat. The fishermen defend the slaughter as traditional practice while local police guard the cove from the public. But in 2005, an unlikely duo decided to shed light on Taiji’s secret. That’s when activist Richard O’Barry, who made his fame training the TV dolphin Flipper, and Louie Psihoyos, a photographer and the executive director of the nonprofit Oceanic Preservation Society, teamed up to make a documentary about the dolphin harvest. They raised $2.5 million, enlisted a team of activists and freedivers, and snuck Hollywood-engineered cameras into Taiji. Result: The Cove, an ecoespionage flick that won the Audience Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and hits theaters July 31. Here’s how the drama unfolded.

Illustrations by L-Dopa

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Outside 23

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THE XX FACTOR

Putting off med school to train for the English Channel swimming record? Now that’s a gap year. San Francisco–based Laurin Weisenthal, 25, who helped her Harvard swim team win an Ivy League championship and break into the NCAA’s top 25, plans to make her attempt at the 25-mile, 58-degree crossing from Dover, England, to Calais, France, this September. She’ll have to do better than 7:25 to beat current women’s-record holder Yvetta Hlavacova, of the Czech Republic. Weisenthal plans to fuel herself with Gu, jasmine tea, and baked potatoes—but no wetsuits allowed.

—GRAYSON SCHAFFER OUTSIDE: How’d you start open-water swimming?

WEISENTHAL: My grandfather is a lifetime swimmer. He’s 96 and holds a lot of age-group world records. We were members of Fountain Valley’s Los Caballeros Sports Village.

I joined the team when I was six and walked up to the coach the first day and said, “I want to be on a Wheaties box.” She said, “You got a little ways to go, but sure.”

Are you fast enough to break the record?

At first, breaking the record wasn’t even in my head. I was like, Dude, I just want to swim the Channel. But I have this ability to get on a pace and stay on it.

Steven Munatones, the guru of open-water swimming, told me he thought I could do it in under eight hours. Cutting 35 minutes off that? It’s just training and mentality. And whenever you have a goal, training is easier and more fun.

Fun? Swimming in frigid water sounds miserable.

You have to both physically and mentally adapt. Exposing the body to repeated cold increases your brown fat. White fat is the stuff that makes people look bigger and bulkier. Brown fat surrounds the internal organs. Brown fat is more related to muscle than white fat. It’s got mitochondria in it. Mitochondria are the cells that make ATP. ATP is energy, and making it generates heat.

Does knowing that make you feel warmer?

It’s kind of like a confidence builder.

What about the body grease?

In theory, it’s supposed to keep you warmer. I’ve tried using Vaseline, and it doesn’t really insulate. It helps with chafing, though. Some Channel swimmers have used lanolin, which, I think, is sheep’s fat. It reeks.

Photograph by Andy Batt

26 Outside

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Laurin Weisenthal

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>Measuring

Madness 186 feet Palouse Falls Tyler Bradt, 2009

F IRST LOOK WHITEWATER continued from page 18

182 feet Niagara Falls Jesse Sharp, 1990 (died)

127 feet Salto Belo Pedro Oliva, 2009 108 feet Cascade Falls Paul Gamache, 2008

107 feet Alexandra Falls Ed Lucero, 2004 98 feet Upper Johnston Falls Tao Berman, 1999

Bradt, moments before vanishing into the curtain at eastern Washington’s Palouse Falls

Making matters worse, the dominant marketing strategy during the boom period was to sell kayaking as extreme. It made for some gnarly catalog covers but likely drove away a large crop of weekend warriors put off by the idea of drowning upside down in a tiny boat.

For elite kayakers coming of age in the past few years, the meltdown led to tough times even before the recession struck. Bradt and other recent graduates of the World Class academy, like Rush Sturges, Lane Jacobs, and Ian and Evan Garcia, feel like they missed out on the party. “Athletes were getting paid lots of money,” says Bradt. “I came in on the tail end of that. When I was 17, Dagger gave me a few thousand bucks and four kayaks, which is more than anything I’m getting now.”

Which brings us back to those waterfalls.

With no viable pro events tour, the alternative is to produce and sell your own footage.

Bradt and his cohorts use what little sponsor money is available to buy plane tickets and film themselves inventing new moves on remote rivers—and, of course, making insane

waterfall drops, the sport’s equivalent of the slam-dunk contest. It’s gone well enough so far—nobody has died launching a 100-plusfoot fall since Jesse Sharp tried to run Niagara Falls in 1990—but the one-upsmanship will likely end soon, perhaps tragically.

Meanwhile, kayak companies have a decidedly less frightening plan to dig themselves out of their hole. The rebuilding effort, say many company leaders, depends on spreading the message that paddling can be a safe and easy activity. “For Teva, pushing the envelope means greater accessibility,” says Joel Heath, the river-footwear company’s marketing director. “It doesn’t mean hucking your meat bigger.” Heath points to the ski industry, which focuses on groomed cruiser runs, as a good model, and notes that one benefit of kayaking’s boom years is the resulting dozens of urban whitewater parks.

And there are still the classic Class III floats through the wilderness.

On that score, even Bradt agrees: “We just got off the Middle Fork of the Salmon and o had a killer time.”

28 Outside

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ERIK BOOMER

all going so well. Then it wasn’t. According to the research firm Leisure Trends Group, whitewater kayaking hit its peak in 2002, with 3.9 million paddlers spending 14 million days on the water. By 2004, the last year before LTG changed its survey methods, kayaker days had fallen by half.

“The industry really messed things up,” concedes Jim Moss, a board member of the Trade Association of Paddlesports. As Steck puts it:“Whitewater went in the shitter.”

So what happened? The half-dozen athletes and industry insiders I spoke with had many theories, but three things came up again and again. First, kayak manufacturers pushed R&D so hard and so fast that they choked on their own ambition. From 1996 through 2002, each year’s new designs were significantly better than the last. “If you didn’t innovate, you were dead,” says Steck.

Paddlers bought new $900 boats every year, then unloaded them at the end of the season for peanuts. In the short term, this fueled a rapidly expanding business, but the discarded boats—built to last—would come back to haunt their makers. When the technology finally plateaued, around 2003, the dam broke and old boats flooded the market.

“I don’t know anybody who’s bought a new boat in a long time,” says Moss. Indeed, many top kayakers acknowledge using models that are now five years old.

The industry also undercut itself with a rash of mergers, acquisitions, and new ventures. In 1998, Watermark, a holding company, bought Dagger and Perception. Confluence, another holding company, then bought Wave Sport from its colorful founder, Chan Zwanzig, in 1999. Two key players at Perception, Woody Callaway and Shane Benedict, helped start Liquidlogic in 2000. Wave Sport ace Eric Jackson splintered off from Confluence in 2003 to start Jackson Kayak, and in 2005 Confluence bought Watermark’s watersports division. Today, Dagger and Wave Sport are the same company, Perception has dropped its whitewater line, and Jackson is quickly overtaking them all.

The athletes blame the mergers for placing non-kayaking managers at the helms of the companies, while industry types like Steck say the startups as well as foreign imports sliced and diced the kayak market’s “fragile pie.” In either case, plummeting new-boat sales combined with smaller market shares forced companies to slash their budgets and disband their salaried teams and—Poof!—nobody wanted to be a rodeo kayaker anymore.

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DESTINATIONS >spot on

Slow Coast After a coffee, a pastry, and some literary-mag browsing at an open-air espresso joint, we stroll to the Pacific. Waves and wind have already welcomed kiteboarders and surfers, but I opt instead for a jog south along 3.5 miles of sweeping, hard-packed beach. I pass dog walkers, kids sandcastling, beach bikers, and even a few people on horseback. They’re all here in the summer but so spread out it hardly matters; Manzanita, Oregon, is crowded the way Reykjavík is a big city.

And there are action options aplenty. Aside from activities requiring a bike or a wetsuit (rentals available at Manzanita Bikes and Boards; manzanitabikesandboards.com), you can rent a motorboat and three crab rings from the Jetty Fishery (from $75; jettyfishery.com), in nearby Nehalem Bay, and go scare up dinner. Or hike three miles up densely forested, 1,600foot Neahkahanie Mountain for Pacific vistas that reach south to Tillamook Bay. (The well-marked trailhead is just 1.7 miles north of town on Route 101.) In the evening, retreat to Coast Cabins (from $210; coastcabins.com), a collection of five newly renovated, mod-woody cottages surrounded by a bamboo-and-juniper garden. The three “tower cabins” deliver an ethereal feeling of living in a treehouse, and the view out the window shoots down Laneda Avenue to the —DAVID WOLMAN ocean—a single-frame preview of tomorrow’s day of play.

JOHN CLARK

Scouting Manzanita, Oregon’s surf

30 Outside

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GET LOST: GREAT LAK ES

It’s in theWater

The Great Lakes region is flat and kitschy—and full of adventure options. Three passionate natives pick the midcontinent’s best trips.

>Paddle Pukaskwa

>Fly-Fish Michigan In Michigan, you’re never more than 90 miles from a Great Lake, which is the reason, I suppose, it’s nicknamed the Great Lakes State. By those standards, it should also be dubbed the Unbelievably Sick Trout-Water State. The Au Sable, the “Big” and Little Manistee, the Muskegon—there are quality rivers everywhere. But there are also anglers.

Avoid combat fishing by hitting the Jordan River, in the northwestern part of the state.

It’s small water, but the browns grow to

Smoking the J-stroke

impressive size (20-plus inches), and the brookies will go for any beat-up dry fly hanging from your cap. (Grab flies and licenses at the Northern Angler, in Traverse City; 231-933-4730.) Some of the best water is near Graves Crossing, outside Elmira. Just string your rod and fish below the bridge. Grab dinner at Terry’s Place, in Charlevoix (terrysofcharlevoix.com). It’s stuffy for waders, but the sauteed perch— hey, it’s the Great Lakes State, after all—is damn good. Beforehand, shower up at the Weathervane Terrace Inn (doubles, $120; weathervane-chx.com). —RYAN KROGH

>Dive Thunder Bay Lake Superior’s notoriously fickle weather, plus a few centuries’ worth of shoddy navigation, have turned Thunder Bay into a graveyard for schooners, yachts, and even a Confederate blockade runner. As a result, it’s a diver’s paradise. Wally Peterson, owner of Wally’s Thunder Country Diving (thundercountrydiving.com), has been diving here

ODE

Gordon Lightfoot’s“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”

Does it bother me that some of my friends think it’s schmaltzy? Or that the greatest song about an American shipwreck was actually written by a Canadian? Or that I can’t name one other song by Gordon Lightfoot? No, uh-uh, and nope. Nothing bothers me about the song except its length. It’s six and a half minutes long. I wish it were 12.

When I listen to it (which is often, in the car, alone), I want to stand defiantly in the face of a raging storm on some rocky outcropping. I want to grow a mustache. Or, because I look terrible with a mustache, round up all my buddies from Wisconsin, head out to one of the warm and welcoming bars that dot the Northwoods, and get schnockered. —S.M.

since 1976 and can serve up coordinates for everything from shallow wood wrecks for intermediate divers to deep, technical dives like the Gunilda, a yacht that sank three miles offshore in 1911 and is still remarkably well preserved. (Thirty-eight-degree water can embalm anything.) Peterson offers divingcertification lessons and guided day trips on Superior (lesson,US$340; trips from US$90).

Crash at the Dockside Bed and Breakfast, a restored 38-foot Downeaster docked in Thunder Bay Marine Park (doubles, US$118; sailsuperior.com). Ask nicely and captain Gregory Heroux will take the inn for an —STEPHANIE PEARSON evening sail.

>Minnesota Medley Minnesota may have 10,000 lakes, but it’s 1,000 miles from the nearest coast. Luckily, there’s Lake Superior’s North Shore, an area featuring jagged peaks, short, powerful rivers, and access to a 31,000-square-mile freshwater ocean. Bring every piece of gear you own to Tettegouche State Park, 60 miles northeast of Duluth. In a hiking mood? Lace up your boots for a seven-mile round-trip trek to Palisade Valley Overlook (trail information available at the park’s ranger station; 218-226-6365). Looking to climb? Break out the ropes and ’biners on Palisade Head, a headland rising 200 feet above Lake Superior; there are dozens of 5.10-plus routes up the cliffs. Kayaking? Got that too. Rent a boat from Sawtooth Outfitters, in nearby Tofte

32 Outside

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ALAN SIRULNIKOFF/GETTY

With sandy beaches and sheltered coves, the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, on Lake Superior’s southwest shore, is a welcoming place to launch a sea kayak. The opposite side of the lake? Not so much, especially the coastline of Canada’s Pukaskwa National Park. It’s just as pretty but far more rugged, meaning it’s harder to find a friendly beach if you get in trouble. Only a handful of kayakers paddle under its steep cliffs every summer, and there isn’t a single road for the entire length of the park’s 50-mile coastline. In other words, it’s one of the wildest places to paddle in North America. You’ll want to savor it, like Naturally Superior Adventures’ guided eight-day trip does (US$1,560; naturallysuperior.com). Because the trip averages a relaxed nine miles per day, there’s plenty of time to poke around. Which is a good thing: From red-and-orange-striped basalt formations to woodland caribou on Otter Island, there’s a lot to see. Start and end your trip at NSA’s Rock Island Lodge (from $95; rockislandlodge.ca), near Wawa, Ontario. It’s the only hotel in the area with rooms —SAM MOULTON overlooking the lake.

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ODE

($50 per day; sawtoothoutfitters.com), and paddle five miles from the marina at Silver Bay past Palisade Head to the mouth of the Baptism River. When you’ve had your fill, the 47 lakefront rooms at Cove Point Lodge (doubles, $128; covepointlodge.com), in Beaver —R.K. Bay, are a good place to recover.

>Mountain-Bike Wisconsin My home state is pretty flat. Except where it isn’t. Like in Kettle Moraine State Forest, which, thanks to a 10,000-year-old glacial grudge match, is downright hilly. I grew up cycling in the state forest’s Northern Unit, but the Southern Unit, with more than 30 miles of mostly singletrack, is the best place for knobby tires. My favorite ride: “Blue,” a tenmile singletrack loop with just enough switchbacks and rock gardens to keep things interesting. Like all of the trails here, it’s hardpacked and fast—and popular. But while these trails do see heavy use, they’re also in great shape, thanks to meticulous upkeep. Backyard Bikes and Ski, in LaGrange,

Huge Statues In no other part of the country do the Welcome to World’s Largest Paul Bunyan statues, giant Michigan musky statues, and six-pack-of-beer statues proliferate the way they do in the Great Lakes region. They are beacons born out of the Field of Dreams presumption: Build it large enough, and close enough to the road, and someone just might come.

They reside in out-of-the-way towns like Pequot Lakes, Minnesota (fishing bobber), Ishpeming, Michigan (chain saw), and Mercer, Wisconsin (loon). They’re protected as historic landmarks and adopted as symbols of community spirit. But that’s not why I love them. I love them because they make me picture the eureka moment down at the pub in Vining, Minnesota, when someone said, “You know what this town really needs? A giant square knot,” and then set to it. —R.K.

that rise out of red granite. Straddling these two geographic superlatives is Killarney Mountain Lodge, a classic fifties-era resort.

Sign up for the property’s guided day trip to 1,800-foot Silver Peak, which includes a boat ride, canoe paddle, and trek to the highest point in the La Cloche range. Sailors: Book a day on the Stormy Night, a 46-foot sailboat docked at the lodge. The trip includes a stop on a remote island for a swim. The 46bedroom lodge offers two-person cabins and hotel-style rooms. Go with a cabin (from US$150; hiking and sailboat day trips, $90 per —S.P. person; killarney.com).

>Canoe Algonquin Provincial Park It would take a lifetime to explore Ontario’s Algonquin Provincial Park—the area, three

hours north of Toronto, has 1,500 lakes and nearly two million acres of forest. But since you don’t have that kind of time, head directly for the park’s remote western portion. The easy way to explore: Let Algonquin Outfitters design a guided canoeing-and-hiking trip based on your preferences (US$75 per person per day, plus a $200 daily guide fee; algonquinoutfitters.com). The more interesting method: Score an entry permit through the park’s Web site for access point 3, on Algonquin’s western edge (US$11; ontarioparks .com), and paddle and portage eight miles to Little Trout Lake. Pick one of the lake’s two islands, throw up your tent, and go Tom Sawyer underneath towering white pines. Algonquin Outfitters will set you up with a canoe rental, plus food and all the requisite camping gear —R.K. (from $65 per person per day).

Wisconsin, 1.5 miles from the main trailhead, rents single-speeds, 29ers, and full-suspension rigs (from $30 per day; backyardbikes .com). Rent a cottage at Scenic Ridge Campground, on nearby Whitewater Lake (from $120; scenicridgecampground.com). —S.M.

>Sail Georgian Bay There’s a reason yachties flock to Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay: It’s considered the best cruising water in the world after the Caribbean and the Mediterranean, thanks to 30,000 islands, consistent wind, and deserted beaches. Hikers flock to Killarney Provincial Park’s La Cloche Mountains in the same spirit: The three-billion-year-old range offers undulating hiking through pine forests

Algonquin Provincial Park’s Little Doe Lake

34 Outside

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Ripping Kettle Moraine State Forest

The times, they are A-Cha-Chinging.

This is the year to take advantage of great deals on vacations.

2008

2009

Back in 2008, a four-star flight+hotel ight+hot vacation to Hawaii cost quite the large handful 545 on average. of change — $1,545

These days, you can get the same Hawaii Haw four-star flight+hotel vacation for only $730 a ching is right! on average. Cha-ching

Back in 2008, the price of a Las Vegas four-star flight+hotel vacation wasn’t something to shake a stick at — $767 on average.

Today, you can get that same Las Vegas four-star flight+hotel vacation for only $373 on average.

So long, high price!

Back in 2008, the Travelocity Guarantee always alw had your back, k making sure your hotel with an open pool, did indeed have an open pool. If it didn’t, we made it right, right away.

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Now w you can book your tri trip today, day, without worrying aboutt a lower price tomorrow, tomorrow thanks hanks to PriceGuardian – a tool that automatically refunds you the difference if the same Travelocity vacation is booked at a lower price.*

I’m an even handsomer chap in 2009!

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by Michael Perry

Musky mania: Sometimes people get married between the teeth.

OUT THERE

Passion Fish The musky is the alpha male of the aquatic world, feared by children and hunted compulsively by grown men. And, yes, catching one really is worth all the fuss.

JIM SARIC NEEDS to catch a musky. The fish is out there somewhere, torpedo-smooth and moody beneath 40,000 acres of slate-gray chop, a prehistoric-style killing machine working the shoreline on a slow, malevolent cruise, sometimes stopping to suspend sniper-still in the murk. The fish knows it can whip anything in the pond and will not be hurried. A musky (muskie in some regions— both short for muskellunge) does not bite until it’s good and ready. This makes it tough to catch. “Fish of 10,000 casts,” the old-timers call it.

And bite doesn’t quite cover it. A musky operates with overwhelming force. Trimmed out like a subaquatic Phantom jet, it leads with a flat snout nestled into a protrusive mandible. As the largest member of the pike family, the fish looks perpetually truculent.

When kill time comes, its mandible gapes, unsheathing a jawful of straight-up gatory shivs, perfect for the initial smash-andgrab. In contrast, the roof of the mouth is a twisted thicket of suture-needle teeth, all angled backwards to keep the victim gulletbound. A musky does not bite. It engulfs, clamps, and then chokes its meal down whole.

It has been known to eat ducks, muskrats, and—so they say at the tavern—the occasional dog-paddling poodle.

Jim Saric needs to catch a musky because he is the host and executive producer of the Musky Hunter television show. He’s been fighting the wind and waves here on northern Minnesota’s Lake Vermilion for two days.

He’s already landed two muskies for the camera, but he needs one more to fill the third and

final spot between commercials. Over the past 25 years, Saric has boated more than 140 muskies exceeding 50 inches in length—the largest weighing 53 pounds. He has won seven professional musky-fishing tournaments.

He’s also the editor of Musky Hunter magazine and co-author of The Complete Guide to Musky Fishing. He has produced training videos including Musky Hunter Tactics, Muskies at the Next Level, and Precision Musky Presentations. He has numerous corporate sponsors, a $60,000 powerboat loaded with the latest full-color digital gadgets, and—in case you’re thinking “Bubba”— a master’s degree in hydrogeology.

He will bring all these things to bear to catch that final fish.

And then he will let it go.

W H E N I WA S A K I D in the country, we

caught panfish for dinner, bass for kicks, and carp for no good reason. We sat on docks and flipped worms at lily pads in the sun. But when talk turned to muskies, we pulled our toes from the water and spoke reverentially of the handful of locals we knew who had caught one. The road past my family’s farm led to a lake known for muskies, and every evening around suppertime, a man named

Charles Hanson would shoot past in his pickup, boat in tow, bound to hook one. He made that trip regularly for 16 years before he caught his first. “November 10, 1968!” he says. You wonder if he can rattle off his wedding anniversary as readily.

Hanson and several pals started a muskyconservation group and began stocking and creating musky habitat in local lakes. Today, thanks to people like him, the musky population is thriving. “Musky anglers have definitely been leaders in fishery conservation,” says Tim Simonson, a fisheries biologist with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources Bureau of Fisheries Management.

“Voluntary release of muskellunge has grown steadily since the early 1970s, to the point where many avid musky anglers now release every fish they catch.” Of the 200,000 or so muskies now caught annually in Wisconsin, all but around 5,000 were returned to the water. (Legally, a musky must be at least 34 inches long to keep.) Quite a switch from the early days. “We used to shoot muskies,” Hanson says ruefully. “My buddy had a .38 auto mounted on a .45 frame. You didn’t even have to hit ’em to kill ’em . . . just come close!”

Nowadays the fish are found in 37 states, up from 24 in 1978. “Minnesota is probably Photograph by Tom Fowlks

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the greatest success story,” says Saric.

“Twenty years ago, half the current musky fisheries didn’t exist.” He also cites Colorado, Utah, and Washington as states where the fish is gaining ground, and says that musky fishing in Canada is “awesome.” The bottom line, according to Saric: “This is no longer the fish of 10,000 casts.”

“It’s now the fish of 3,000 casts,” agrees Patricia Strutz, a musky hunter who owns a guiding service in northern Wisconsin. “But that’s still a lot of casts!”

What, then, compels hordes of freshwater Ahabs to froth the waters so? Strutz credits the musky’s twin auras of menace and indif-

across the lake to our first stop. Selecting a large bucktail lure—a spinner and hooks dressed with a wad of tinsel—Saric addresses the camera to record one of the many talking points he’ll later splice into the show.

“Right now we’re fishing yesterday’s wind,” he says, explaining that early-morning muskies are still patterned on the previous day’s weather conditions. A slim, brown-haired man with a direct gaze and matter-of-fact tone, he has a knack for breaking things down.

Saric works his reel hard, horsing the bait back through the water at a steady crank.

The rod he’s using is fairly flexible and

Amusky engulfs,clamps,and then chokes its meal down whole. It has been known to eat ducks, muskrats, and—so they say at the tavern—the occasional dog-paddling poodle. ference. “They eat when they want to eat,” she says. “To have a huge fish follow your lure and then turn away ...” And when the tension does break, it breaks huge. “Muskies fight more like saltwater big game,” says Strutz. “They jump completely out of the water, dance across the surface on their tails, thrash wildly, and dive beneath the boat.”

More than one angler has taken hooks to the face when a musky has risen from the depths, rattled its bony gills, and spit the lure straight back at the boat. “Salmon fight harder,” says Richard Minich, author of Becoming a Musky Hunter, “and smallmouth bass are more exciting pound for pound. But who’s afraid of a salmon or a smallie? If there’s a chance to go fishing generally, I might go. If there’s a chance to go fishing for muskies, I go.”

“Musky fever is a true addiction,” says Strutz. “I’ve seen grown men shake violently, mumble for ten minutes incoherently, and even cry when they lose a big one.”

I caught a musky once—accidentally.

I was young and it was tiny. I released it and failed to contract musky fever. I wonder if I’m immune? “ S T E P I N T O M Y O F F I C E ! ” Saric booms,

ushering me off the dock and into his 20-foot 620VS Ranger Fisherman. We’re joined by his cameraman, Jim Lucy, and Dick Heckel, who’s fishing as Saric’s guest. Saric fires the 250-horse Mercury outboard and we roar

between seven and a half and eight and a half feet long—the combination allows for longer casts and better control—and threaded with a fine, no-stretch braided line capable of holding 80 pounds before breaking. When the lure is six feet from the boat, he dips the rod tip, driving it underwater to stir a figure eight in the water. Muskies are notoriously finicky, more famous for following the bait than taking it. But they can be provoked. The figure eight is a tease intended to trip some primordial neural trigger. Saric estimates that it generates 20 percent of all strikes.

Just as things settle into a groove, Saric says “Next!” and fires up the boat to send us roaring back across the lake. A red line on a dash-mounted LCD traces our progress in real time. The display is linked to a sonar unit containing a map chip tied into a GPS system. Saric can view the underwater topography in three-foot slices and place navigational icons on the screen. When he catches a musky, he’ll log the coordinates, length of the fish, lure, weather conditions, wind direction, temperature, time of day, and moon phase. “Muskies are triggered by environmental factors,” Saric says. “I’m trying to figure out what fish do over time. Not just where I can catch them but when.” Two of Saric’s favorite triggers are sunset and moonrise. “They create a 15-minute window of strong feeding,” he says. “We know they’re going to bite before they know they’re going to bite.”

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OUT THERE

We glide to a stop along a new stretch of shoreline. Each time the lures hit the water, a puff of spray hangs in the sunlight. “Next!” yells Saric, and we cut another red line across the sonar screen.

We fish for several hours, buzzing all over the lake. The lures go out, the lures come in.

There is the whistle of the unspooling line, the muted grind of the reel, the thump of waves on the hull, the rocking of the boat.

“The water’s warming up,” Saric says at one point. “It was 61.9 degrees; now it’s 63.8.”

The temperature rise can spike a musky’s metabolism, which sometimes is all it takes to trip the switch. The conversation ebbs and flows as we watch the water for that swirl, that roll of a slimy back, that flash of a white maw. After so many fruitless retrieves, it’s hard to visualize the eruption, but that’s what we’re in for should the musky decide to get with the script. All morning, Saric and Heckel have been telling musky stories, and not once have I heard the word bite. “They eat those topwater lures!” “That fish just blew up the bait!” “He T-boned it!” “He crushed it!” The air is filled with exclamation points. Not so the water.

“Next!”

THE LARGEST MUSKY in the world is 145 feet long and dominates the grounds of the Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame, in Hayward, Wisconsin. Entering near the anus, visitors climb the innards of the fish and emerge in the mouth, four and a half stories above the ground. Sometimes people get married between the teeth.

Wisconsin, and Hayward in particular, has long been the epicenter of musky fishing in America. The three top worldrecord muskies were taken in Wisconsin, and two of those were pulled from the Chippewa Flowage, a 15,300-acre tangle of water and wilderness formed by the installation of a dam in 1923, just outside Hayward. The current record fish—69 pounds 11 ounces and 63.5 inches long— was caught in the Flowage by Hayward local Louie Spray in 1949. Louie lost the crown in 1957 when a New Yorker fishing the St. Lawrence River caught a musky weighing 69 pounds 15 ounces.

However, the Hall of Fame deposed the New York fish in 1992 after analyzing a photograph in which it appeared much smaller than claimed. Not coincidentally, a vocal contingent of the musky world believes Louie Spray’s fish is also fraudulent. Among

other things, they point out that the man who initiated the disqualification of the New York fish owns a resort on the lake where Louie caught his, and also that he has written a book about Louie’s exploits.

Piscatory conspiracy theorists have a lot to chew on. An adversarial report filed by the World Record Musky Alliance (WRMA) features 49 pages of sworn statements, affidavits, diagrams, expert photo analysis, legal opinions, comments from a Canadian crime-scene investigator, and a profusion of professionally worded aspersion culminat-

trail of tiny bubbles. We’re working a small island surrounded by large rocks, many of them barely submerged. It’s quiet again. Not much talking. Just the tinny jingle of the propeller blades and the rattle of the treble hooks when a lure is flying, followed by the burbly putt-putt of its return.

“There’s one!” I yell. I’ve been doing my level best to remain the silent observer, but when a big fish rolls just behind and below Heckel’s lure, I blurt without reservation.

The image stuck to my retina is of a graygreen curve—no head, no tail, just the flank

More than one angler has taken a hook to the face when a musky has risen from the depths, rattled its bony gills, and spit the lure back at the boat. ing in the accusation that the Hall of Fame is covering for its hometown boy. In 2006, it rejected the WRMA report and reconfirmed Louie’s record.

There is much at stake. A replica of Louie’s musky—the original was lost in a fire—is on display at the Hall of Fame, and the Flowage’s reputation attracts customers for area guides, who can charge up to $350 a day. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources estimates that musky anglers spend $425 million in the state annually. The average Musky Hunter reader spends nearly $3,500 a year on the pursuit, and that’s not including the purchase of boats, motors, and trailers.

When I ask Saric about the controversy, he remains politic but says he fears musky fishing will become like boxing, with different sanctioning bodies keeping different records and anointing different champions.

There is only one way to resolve the Hall of Fame dispute: Somebody has to catch a 70-pounder.

BY LATE AFTERNOON the water is busting

the sun into a million little twinkles. Still no fish. Saric ties on a lure the size of a squirrel.

It’s made of fluorescent orange rubber and wiggles through the water like an overgrown salamander. “Sometimes, when things are slow, you have to use a ‘shocker’ bait to rouse the fish,” he says. Not to catch them, he explains, just to raise them.

Heckel has turned to throwing a topwater bait, a buoyant, torpedo-shaped plug trimmed with a silver propeller that spins half in and half out of the water, leaving a

of the fish curling back on itself. Suddenly the day is galvanized. Heckel saw the fish, too, and he’s nearly dancing. He flings his bait again. Nothing. But Saric wants to keep working the spot. “The idea that muskies are a ‘loner fish’ is a myth,” he says. “Five, six, seven muskies in the same spot is common.

It’s like a wolf pack. Maybe you’ll get one real big one on its own, but generally they hang out together.” After a few more fruitless passes, we move on.

But something has changed. Saric and Heckel both raise muskies on several of our next stops. They don’t bite; they just slide behind the lure or—and this puts a catch in your breath—rise into view right beside the boat. Saric isn’t worried that they’re not hitting. “On a nice, bright day, you’ll get a lot of lookers. That doesn’t mean you won’t get one to come and eat, but the conditions have to be right.” He’s happy we’re seeing these fish. He knows they’re there. And when the conditions are right, he’ll be back.

For the next two hours, though, the action stops. Then we rework a stretch of shoreline where a fish followed earlier in the day, and Heckel is hollering again.

“There’s one! There’s one!” He figureeights like mad. “Take a longer sweep!”

Saric commands. Heckel extends his stroke, and suddenly there’s an explosion. “I got ’im!” Heckel yells. Saric is barking instructions and scrambling for the net. “Bring him around the front! Drive his head down!

Drive his head down!”

And then the thing is netted and in the boat. It’s a python-bellied lunker. “Whoo!”

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the perfect summer mix says Heckel. “Whooooo!”

Moving quickly, Saric measures the fish.

Forty-nine inches. Nowhere near a record, but a fine musky nonetheless. Facing the camera, Saric congratulates Heckel and works in a seamless talking point about the importance of returning to spots where you’ve had follows. Then he looks directly at the lens and says, “Join us next week on a big fish adventure on ...The Musky Hunter!”

And then the fish is back in the water and we roar off to the next spot. The sun sinks; Saric and Heckel continue to fish. On the horizon, the red lights of a faraway radio tower pulse slowly and ever brighter in the sky. When the rods are finally stowed, night is fully upon us. The horsepower thunders us home and the sonar glows against Saric’s face as we cut a final red line through the crisscross day.

THERE ARE LESS INTENSIVE approaches to catching muskies. “I fish out of a 70-yearold boat,” says musky guide and row-trolling advocate Dave Schnell. Rather than roar around flinging lures, Schnell and his clients use oar power and mostly trail their lures behind the boat. “Row trolling is quiet, great exercise, and you get a real sense of accomplishment when you row for five hours and then hook into a big fish,” Schnell says.

Somewhere between the extremes of Saric and Schnell, you find musky hunters like my old neighbor Charles Hanson. A week after my outing with Saric, Hanson and I push away from the dock of a small lake in Chippewa County, Wisconsin. The boat is small and there is very little gear—not even a depth finder. “On large lakes you fish spots,” he says. “Here we can fish the whole lake.”

Hanson, whose curly hair turned white long ago, is fishing a bucktail specially constructed to slip through weeds without snagging. He designed the lure himself, but as he points to a tackle box jammed with lures of every concoction, he says, “There’s nothing new under the sun ... everything’s a variation on a theme.” His take on all the doodads available to today’s musky hunter is equally dismissive. “I used to study solar tables, lunar tables, subscribe to all the magazines, learn all the theories. Now my theory is that the best time to go musky fishing is whenever you can make it!”

For three hours we just drift, fish, and talk.

With no TV show to fill, the pressure’s off.

Finally, Charles looks at the sky, overcast and spitting rain. “Let’s fish that first stretch

one more time,” he says, pointing to the shoreline where we began the day.

It’s not the wildest spot on earth: pine trees and brush broken by lake-house lawns and the few docks that haven’t been pulled for the season. A few short weeks ago the water was flotsammed with vacationers. Now they’re mostly gone, and the only signs of life come from two guys grinding a tree stump.

I was asleep at the switch on the first follow and went to the figure eight way too slowly. A swab of green-gray and then the musky was gone. Forty yards down the shoreline, I have another follow. I figureeight immediately, but again the fish demurs. Then I hear an exclamation from Charles—the musky is now snapping at his figure eight.

And then nothing. Somehow it missed the hooks.

We cover another 40 yards of shore, but nothing happens. Casting toward a boat lift, I misjudge the distance and brake the reel harshly to prevent the lure from clanking into the cross-members. The line jerks and the bait drops clumsily, a vertical knuckleball nearly clipping the dock. It ain’t pretty, but I take only two cranks before I feel an electric b-bump-bump-TUG coming up through the line. Like a kid I yelp, “There he is!”

“Set the hook!” says Charles, and I horse the rod once, twice, like I’m pitching forkfuls of cow manure over my shoulder, and then I focus on getting the fish to the boat.

Charles is ready with the net, but just when the musky looks as if it’s pointed in the right direction, it takes off around the front of the boat and I can hear Saric’s voice in my head: “Drive his head down! Drive his head down!” I jam the rod tip into the water, half guiding and half following the fish in as it semicircles the bow. I get my first good look at it now, and the best I can muster is, “Shnikies!”

And then it’s in the net. Charles is grinning ear to ear, and me the same. Just goofy with the thrill of it all. When I hold the fish up for a pre-release picture, I can smell it, murky and fresh in the same whiff. It measures 33 inches—nowhere near the legal length—but as it courses away from the boat to fight another day, it is a good place to be: this lake, this boat, this gray musky day. o

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Outside 39

ORIS KAZUKI NAKAJIMA LIMITED EDITION Designed for Japanese Formula 1 racer Kazuki Nakajima (whose number, 8, is popped on the minute scale), this conservative watch has ghostly black features that are easy to read in sunlight, not so much indoors. Comes in an edition of 1,088, with each piece individually numbered. $1,650; oriswatches.ch

>The New Black This summer’s coolest timepieces share a slick dark palette and sport an array of new features

BY WILL PALMER

TAG HEUER AQUARACER 500M CALIBRE 5 Winner of the coveted European Red Dot design award, Tag’s latest dive watch gets more serious with the addition of a helium escape valve. The hefty, confidence-inspiring piece, with steel bezel, is rated to 500 meters—and is game for any watersport, while looking suitably industrial. $2,450; tagheuer.com

BELL & ROSS BR01-93 24H GMT From sometimes blingy Bell & Ross, this dual-time instrument (the bold orange hand shows the time back home) might be a status symbol if its oversize face, aviation-style numerals, and heavy rubber strap weren’t so extremely, well, tasteful. $4,500; bellross.com

TX T3C310 LINEAR CHRONOGRAPH As the company describes it, the T3C310 is “liberated from the tradition of circularity,” in that its four-hour chronograph uses a 30-minute linear scale that, with a daggerlike orange hand, is surprisingly user-friendly. The functions are controlled by four separate motors, and this model has a tough steel case. $650; txwatches.com

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SECTOR COMPASS CHRONOGRAPH Italy’s Sector hopes to make it big (literally) in the U.S. market with this attention-grabbing, jumbo-faced compass watch. You’ll either love it or hate it: With a chronograph on the main dial and a devoted dial off to the left for a second time zone, it demands serious real estate on your wrist. Either way, it’s unlike any compass watch we’ve ever seen. $395; sectornolimits.eu

SWISS ARMY INFANTRY VINTAGE CHRONO Amid a general trend toward heavier, fatter watches, this latest iteration of the 1940s-throwback Infantry line is a handsomely thin diversion.

Its coolest feature? A telemeter around the dial. Soldiers once relied on them to gauge their distance from artillery fire; civilians can use them to measure the gap between lightning and thunder. $595; swissarmy.com

Photographs by

Shana Novak

OAKLEY 12 GAUGE Swiss-made but all surfin’ USA with its ocean-blue face, Oakley’s 12 Gauge has a superstrong case made of corrosion-resistant 316L stainless steel, plus alarm, stopwatch, and a smooth rotating bezel for a second time zone. The band is made of the same grippy “Unobtainium” rubber found on the nose and temples of Oakley sunglasses. $1,195; oakley.com

CASIO G-SHOCK GW2000BD-1A With its tachymeter and Mach 1 indicator (as if), this classic G-Shock masquerades as an aviator watch. We love it because it does so many of those Casio things—atomic timekeeping, solar power, stopwatch, alarms, etc.—while being stylish enough to wear with a suit. $350; gshock.com

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Outside 41

by Eric Hansen

OUTOFBOUNDS

Revenge of the Nerds Paris is romantic, cultured, and sophisticated—and teeming with rollerblading fanatics?

An investigation into France’s most mysterious obsession. the banks of the Seine are bustling. Tourists carrying drippy ice-cream cones parade past the antique booksellers, couples from the Sorbonne lounge between the willow trees, and in the wall-mounted trash cans, mixed in among the sandwich bags and half-eaten macaroons, are the first of the season’s champagne bottles. It’s springtime in Paris.

The fashion is clearly changing, too. At the Pont des Arts, an iron bridge near the Louvre, I stumble upon a photo shoot overseen by a white-haired man in a high white collar and fingerless gloves. It’s clothing designer Karl Lagerfeld. He takes one sip from a goblet of red wine and has his assistant throw the rest in the river. Out with last month’s scarves and the color violet; in with hot pants!

I climb the stairs to the 17th-century Hotel des Invalides, and there I find them: a handful of les rollers, the rollerbladers, weaving around little pink cones. They look just like they might have a decade ago, but with less neon.

They swoop and twirl and glide across the glassy-smooth square. A shirtless guy in his mid-twenties, flabby belly jiggling, weaves through the cones on toes and heels, his arms waving like those of a competitor in rhythmic gymnastics. He accidentally knocks over a couple of cones—blonk, blonk—but continues his balletic performance unperturbed, dancing for no one but himself. The winged horses and trumpeting angels of the Pont

Alexandra III stare off in the other direction.

I sit down on the esplanade’s carved stone bench and ask myself the question I will ask over and over during the next four days: Rollerblading?

A 60-year-old skater with yellowing eyes, wearing the full complement of pads, introduces himself as Marc Delalain. A former oil-futures trader, he started skating roughly a year ago. He practices here several hours a day and just recently took up the slalom. He says that because trinket sellers have displaced skaters from the gentle slopes of the Trocadéro, near the Eiffel Tower, this is now the best place for slalom.

“Slalom is not so easy,” he opines, “but with the roller we join another world for the body. Walking, legs are in front; with the roller, legs cross.”

His Franglish hangs in the air for all to ponder. When I hint that rollerblading just ain’t so cool in America, he looks injured, and I immediately feel bad.

“What do you like about it?” I ask.

“With two feet on the floor, in shoes, you are a lonesome cowboy,” he explains. “But with the roller, you are not like that man.

Young, old—in roller, we are all the same tribe.”

WERE THE SAME TRIBE, I want to correct.

Last year, only 3 percent of Americans rollerbladed even once, roughly the same number as those who swatted a badminton birdie, and if a man wasn’t training for hockey season, he was more likely to cop to singing along at a Coldplay concert than meeting up with buddies and going ’blading.

But it’s worth remembering how popular the sport once was. In 1996, it was one of the fastest-growing pastimes in U.S. history, and soon bike lanes on both coasts were being repainted with boot symbols.

Pro skaters like Eddy Matzger were making six-figure salaries while pulling off feats such as ’blading the rocky slopes of Kilimanjaro. Bottles of chocolicious Yoo-hoo showed a rollerblader sliding a rail about a foot off the ground. Six Flags theme parks featured rollerblading stunt shows, while movies like Prayer of the Rollerboys, starring a bandanna’d heartthrob named Corey Haim, depicted the 21st century as a battle between good versus evil—on wheels.

Rollerblading was the spandex-clad future!

Then it wasn’t. In the late nineties, about the time the last Aerobie snagged in the branches of a tree, seemingly everyone

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DAVID CRAUSBY/AURORA

What is irrefutable is that Parisians are not ashamed to skate in public.

AT FIVE P.M. ON A THURSDAY,

donated their skates to Goodwill. In 2004, the 13-year-old International Inline Skating Association disbanded, handing over administration of its Web site to a generalinterest travel-tour operator in Montana.

Why the precipitous decline? The reasons are many. A lack of smooth surfaces to skate on. The blistering fit of early rollerblades.

Hills, potholes, speed bumps, and what could be called “the stopping problem.”

But, most important, it just fell out of fashion, says Doug Urquhart, creator of the 2007 rollerblading documentary Barely Dead. While Urquhart is quick to point out that he rollerblades daily with his dogs and that a tiny cadre of radical skaters have solidified into an edgy subculture, he thinks the main appeal of recreational rollerblading was its novelty—hey, we can skate outside the roller rink!—and after a while that simply wore off. “When rollerblading first came out,” he remembers, a twinge of nostalgia in his voice, “no one knew it wasn’t cool.”

So what happened in Paris? There, in arguably the world’s most trend-conscious city, it not only survived but thrived, attracting more participants per capita than anywhere else in Europe or the States.

Never mind the rainy winters and the cobblestone streets, the walls of bumbling pedestrians and the drivers drifting across lanes: Paris now hosts so many styles of rollerblading in so many locations that it will take me two days just to sample them.

What is it about rollerblading that so appeals to the Parisian soul? Or did they just not get the memo? With all this in mind, I cinch my rental skates and begin my investigation at the birthplace of the scene: Le Friday Night Fever.

LE FRIDAY NIGHT FEVER is an organized skating tour, or randonnée. Randonnées wind through the city almost daily—from the Rando de la Lune, which takes place under full moons, to the randonnée that goes to various sites important in the life of Edith Piaf. But Le FNF was the original.

It was created in 1993 by now 38-year-old engineer Boris Belohlavek, originally from Poland, and his 36-year-old friend Tanao Terra, a naturalized Madagascan. Le FNF begins outside the wide glass-and-steel entrance to the Gare Montparnasse train station at 10 P.M. every Friday, year-round, unless there’s a downpour. The routes change weekly but are usually 18 miles, with police and dozens of organizers in yellow

jerseys stopping cars to let an average of 8,000 skaters enjoy a nearly uninterrupted three-hour tour.

People had told me it was an “aggressive” skate, but I didn’t really take them seriously. This is rollerblading; a patch of gravel stops anyone.

Looking around at the 3,000 folks at the start, I’m not worried. They’re 20 to 40 or so, slender as any Europeans, most wearing typical fitness clothes. Pushing up all four lanes of Boulevard Saint-Germain, the crowd stretches out in a leisurely marathon-like start, but after Boulevard Henri IV and the sight of Notre Dame, the City of Lights becomes a fever dream, and our rolling tour of the northeast arrondissements turns into a melee.

Three hip-hoppers in baggy gray sweats swarm around me in a disorienting typhoon.

A train of guys in race position, one in a white, skintight uni-suit, cut through the crowd with arms swinging like machetes.

The pace settles in at about 13 miles per hour, shoulder to shoulder.

“What about the crashes?” I ask.

“Yes, I like that,” he replies.

“You do?”

“Yes, it presents the adrenaline,” he says.

“Why do you skate?”

“I skate to make sport, to feel good, to go fast—for the liberty.”

His friends nod in hearty, helmetless agreement.

THERE’S NOTHING LIBERATING about a hospital visit, so the next day I leave my skates behind and walk to the Palais Royal.

The clerk at the Nomades skate shop suggested I check out the “freeriders” there.

After the randonnées, freeride is the most popular style of skating, and it involves sprinting, jumping, and sliding without really going anywhere.

Any afternoon at the Pont au Double, off Île de la Cité, jumpers might throw back layouts off a quarterpipe ramp, or a guy called Rollerman, who invented a bodysuit that has wheels at every joint, might skitter

Then the tour turns into a melee. Three hip-hoppers swarm around me in a disorienting typhoon. A train of guys, one in a white, skintight uni-suit, rollerblade past me with arms swinging like machetes.

I’m a decent skater, once even skated regularly, but no matter how hard I push I end up sucked to the back of the pack . . .where there’s no sag wagon, only the first-aid vans that form the rear guard, their lights shining on me like an escaped convict, and a wiry old yellow-shirt in tiny jean shorts yelling “Allez, allez, allez!” like a coxswain. I have never felt so lame in such a large group.

The whole thing comes apart on the gradual and winding descent from the 300-foot “summit of Paris,” in Belleville. Racing at 30 miles per hour or more, the skaters— helmetless kamikazes, all of them—ping off curbs and topple over speed bumps and crash in sliding clumps, each of the five or so falls threatening a peloton-style pileup.

Maybe one-tenth of the starters finish.

The rest, I’m sure, have died. Those who survived, of course, thought it très sportif.

“Very nice,” says one skater, a twentysomething computer programmer known to other skaters as Raoul in Ze Zone. Raoul in Ze Zone wears a uniquely dorky black sweat suit lined with green flexi-tubes of light.

around like a crab. Beginners prefer to teeter across the Place Henri Frenay, opposite the Gare de Lyon, or study the art of braking at one of the handful of schools, like the Roller Squad Institut.

Half a dozen groups of twenty-something males congregate for extreme underground “suicide skates.” Calling themselves Les Randos Sauvages (“the Wild Skaters”) and Les Randos Belettes (“the Weasel Skaters”), they blast through tight alleyways and down subway-station escalators, flouting the law and generally behaving like the bad-boy gang in a Broadway musical. I know this because I watched them on YouTube. An unemployed graphic novelist predicted, correctly, that this would be the only place I’d see ’em. “The Sauvage are everywhere,” he said, very Frenchily, “but most of the time, they are alone.”

Street-style skaters, essentially tricksters, prefer the angular architecture of Bercy (the Ministry of Finance building) or La Defense (the business district) or the skate parks at Porte de la Chapelle and Jules Noël.

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One could argue that the scene is so big and varied because Paris itself is one big skate park. But, then, I’m not sure this isn’t also true of, say, Houston. What is irrefutable, however, is that Parisians are not ashamed to skate in public, especially at the Palais Royal.

At the square beside the art deco Métro stop, some 20 skaters have taken over, and shoppers exiting the subway find themselves pushed down the stairs by a recoiling crowd of spectators.

A pasty white Gaul lines up to jump over shipping palettes, an Indian in a Cosby sweater tries to attempt daffies over a line of police tape, a rainbow of slalomers moonwalk through the cones, and one gangly white kid practices his skid, throwing his forward skate sideways and sliding ten yards, over and over and over.

But the kings of the square are the 20-to35-year-olds playing the acrobatic freeride game Épervier—“Sparrowhawk,” or what American ten-year-olds call Shark in the Middle. They dodge and weave and skid and arc their backs and face off and juke and hop left, lean right. The exhausting game of tag is mesmerizing and, I gotta admit, pretty cool.

I fall into talking with a local illustrator about the relative hipness factor of Paris’s few skateboarders (high) versus its hordes of rollerbladers (no conclusion), until one of the athletic skaters, a 35-year-old data processor from the Côte d’Ivoire, overhears our conversation. Alexis isn’t interested in debating cool. He wants to point out something else entirely.

“Roller is for everyone,” he says, nodding toward the rainbow of different races skating in the square. “Algerian, Tunisian, me, Jewish ...”

He’s right; it’s a melting pot. And, yeah, a concern with cool is, well, not cool.

OR IS IT? On my final sojourn, I return to Nomades for the Sunday-afternoon Rollers & Coquillages randonnée, supposedly the easiest and quite possibly the dorkiest in the city. Near the sign-up, people grab a description of today’s route, named Humankind, and free Love Kits, including a Durex condom and Play Lubes gel.

The crowd is a hoot: a guy in a floppyeared bunny outfit, others in manpri’s and homemade roller skates, couples dressed for church, a chubby skater in full pink and yellow and blue spandex.

Before the start of the event—a roughly

mile-long stream of skaters following two volunteers holding a streetwide banner—an expat toy designer and longtime R&C volunteer named Peter explains the carnival mood.

The key, he says, is in rollerblading’s rebellious history. In the early nineties, before this or Le FNF, the cops were unable to suppress the informal bandit randonnées, which were kind of like today’s suicide skates.

So in 1995, when a citywide bus-andsubway strike swelled skating’s ranks, the police grew worried. The authorities talked with Boris and Tanao in 1997 and agreed to form the Brigade de Roller, or the rollerskating cops, to accompany the increasingly popular randonnées.

Hundreds of policemen completed rigorous rollerblading tests, including jumping over curbs and hockey-stopping, and eight were selected for the elite corps. (The athletic, crew-cut members now number 36, live in their own compound, and train daily on an obstacle course. “We’re always on skates,” laments one. “I don’t skate so much for fun anymore.”)

The only catch was, the government wanted randonnée participants to fund the Brigade de Roller. Skaters disagreed. An agreement couldn’t be reached, so naturally, being French, Le FNF organizers went on strike. On July 14, 2000, some 20,000 skaters without a plan or a leader flooded the touristy Latin Quarter. The next day, the government agreed to fund the brigade. And this, says Peter, is the spirit that the organizers of the Rollers & Coquillages wanted to capture.

Indeed, the idea of joyous defiance is imprinted in the word coquillage, or “seashell.” Back in the sixties, leftist protesters justified prying up cobblestones and throwing them at the police by saying that there was a beach under the cobblestones and they were simply looking for seashells. So the Rollers & Coquillages is not only a silly skate but one with a subversive element, the whole thing pushed along by the force of history.

All of this heady Frenchiness makes me really excited. I feel part of the tribe, am ready to join another world for the body!

With its dopey friendliness, its freedom to go insanely fast, and its bizarre connections with justice and equality, rollerblading appeals to the deepest, most philosophical part of the Parisian soul.

“Liberté, égalité, fraternité—rollez!”

I want to holler. I check my wrist guards and elbow pads and knee pads and shuffle o toward the door.

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BEST TOWNS 2009

The Drifter

When you’re as well traveled as Aaron Eckhart, picking a favorite town isn’t easy Like a lot of Hollywood stars, Aaron Eckhart’s been around.

No, not that way. We mean he’s worked and lived, well, just about everywhere. “I’ve shot films in Santa Fe, Albuquerque, New York, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Seattle . . .” he says, then lists half a dozen more locations. “And I’ve lived in California, Utah, England, Australia, France, and Switzerland.”

Wherever he is, he makes time to ski, surf, fish, and hike, all of which more than qualifies him as this year’s guest expert for our annual Best Towns feature.

Just don’t ask him to pick his favorite spot. We tried, and he settled on 11. —SAM MOULTON

It was the perfect life. ¶ I have a place in Santa Barbara now, too. It’s a dilapidated old barn, really, but it’s close to some very good surf. One of my brothers lives in L.A., and whenever I’m in town we surf there as much as we can. ¶ What other towns do I dig?

Well, I was just in Seattle for the first time. The air of adventure there is impressive. ¶ If I

could live in any town right now, it might be Mendocino, California. I went on a road trip there last year and just fell in love with the northern coast.

It’s so beautiful, and there’s surf, horses, bikes, everything. ¶ But if I’m going to put in my vote for best town, I’m going to say Bozeman. I’m going to stick with that. It always makes me feel at home, and the outdoor potential is absolutely incredible. It’s also a college town and a farming community with a rich history. It’s a gateway to

Yellowstone . . . . I can understand being in a big city when you’re younger, but there’s something special about being in a smaller place, where people take it a little bit slower. The older I get, the more I’m thinking about making a permanent move to Montana. It’s in my blood. We’ll see. I might go there and hate it, but I don’t think I will.

AARON ECKHART’S NEWEST FILM, LOVE HAPPENS, IS DUE OUT THIS SEPTEMBER.

“I’m going to say Bozeman. I’m going to stick with that.”

There are two places I want to be. One is Montana. My whole family’s from Montana, and I’m building a cabin outside of Big Timber as we speak. Or I’d like to move to Paris. My formative years were in Europe, and I miss it. ¶ I miss the slow, kind of languid lifestyle in the south of France, especially in Aix-enProvence. I lived there for four months, and it’s my favorite place in France. ¶ I also have a love affair with Switzerland and would love to have a place there to ski. The problem with the movie business, like the sports business, is that you can’t afford to hurt yourself, so I don’t snowboard as much as I used to. ¶ I went to college at Brigham Young, in Salt Lake City, and skied a lot, mostly at Snowbird. ¶ I think St. George, Utah, is a cool little town. ¶ While I was a student at BYU, I lived for two semesters on the western shore of Oahu. I owned a 1972 Plymouth Valiant that we bought for $125. It was infested with cockroaches and geckos—it was its own little ecosystem. I surfed every day.

Photograph by Sam Jones

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Cities, Slicker

MINI-ME

1) Colorado Springs There’s a reason 1.3 million people have rushed to Colorado’s Front Range in the past two decades: With 249 annual days of sun, an ascendant, heavily tech-based economy, and quick access to nearly four million acres of Rocky Mountain wilderness and a dozen world-class ski resorts, it’s simply a pretty awesome place to live. And while we love Denver’s laid-back vibe (see right), the Springs simply outscored it this year.

list, and, most important, blew away the Morning competition when we in Garden of the Gods Park compared average income to cost of living. The city is experiencing something of a cultural resurgence, too. Colorado College’s ten-month-old, $33 million performingarts center has begun drawing national classical music and dance groups, and this year the city launched its own roots-and-blues festival, Meadowgrass.

But you don’t come to the Front Range for the music. You come for 14,117-foot Pikes Peak (directly KEY STATS 617,000: Population (metro) above town); $180,000: Median home price (Boulder the Arkansas’s A: Multisport grade Class IV rapids wasn’t large 1,200: Number of Olympic ath(two hours enough to letes who live in town to train at the U.S. Olympic Complex qualify.) Conwest); worldsidering that class athletic the town is base camp for both facilities (Carmichael Training the Air Force Space Command, Systems is based here); and 260 miles of multisport trails NORAD, and ultra-conservative available within a ten-mile raadvocacy groups like Focus on the Family, it may be a bit condius. Sure, there are a few other servative for some. But regardtowns with this many outdoor less of your political bent, it options, but they generally cost scored extremely high in our twice as much—or, like Boulder, require you to shave your legs. education category, has the —SEAN BRANDER best weather of any city on our

How We Ranked Them First, we started with the 100 most populated cities in America, using public data to rank them on factors like cost of living, unemployment, nightlife, commute time, and access to green spaces. (Thanks again, interns!) Then we took the 28 candidates with the highest overall averages (sorry, San Fran, you’re just way too expensive) and put them through a second round of number crunching, comparing things like the percentage of the population with college degrees, income level in relation to home prices, and weather. The wild card? Our own (trademarked and proprietary) multisport factor, which rated each of our finalists on a scale of 1 to 5 for quality and proximity to biking, running, paddling, hiking, and skiing. After adding it all up—and bumping Houston (see page 56) and Denver (see right), because other cities in their respective states outscored them—we (finally) had our top ten. Numbers don’t lie, people. Still think we screwed up by not picking your town? Let us know at outsideonline.com/besttownsforum.

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Salida, Colorado

Think of Salida (pop.

5,000) as a ski hub without a resort—the nearest hill is the underrated, overpowdered Monarch Mountain, 20 minutes away. Which means residents of this unpretentious, bike-friendly town can take advantage of 12 nearby fourteeners, the Class III–IV Arkansas River, which runs through town, and epic mountain biking on the Monarch Crest Trail—without Aspen home prices.

Graduation Day at the U.S. Air Force Academy

Denver,We Still Love You You scored extremely well in our multisport and green-space categories, but, thanks largely to its extremely low cost of living, Colorado Springs (left) edged you out. That said, we still can’t decide which is cooler: your downtown whitewater run or the fact that your park system (the country’s biggest) boasts more than 850 (!) miles of bike lanes and paved trails. But we’re just as impressed with your cityfied ways—especially your ever-expanding light-rail network, which will reach Boulder and Longmont by 2015. And then there’s your deep respect for our favorite beverage: Deciding to honor the Great American Beer Festival (the world’s largest, held here every September) with a weeklong, citywide Beer Fest? Brilliant!

KEITH LADZINKSI/AURORA; LARRY DOWNING/CORBIS

Healthy. That’s the word we kept coming back to. And we don’t mean a fit or skinny population; we’re talking about a city’s cultural vibrancy, economic well-being, and overall quality of life. So how did we use that criteria? To learn more about the methodology—and mathematical genius—behind this year’s top-ten list, see “How We Ranked Them,” below. And because everyone has a small-town fantasy, check out our ten favorite adventure burgs, in the MINI - ME boxes throughout. Big or small, east or west, red state or blue state, your new town is here. What are you waiting for?

The Columbia City neighborhood

7.5-acre mountain-bike park with rock chutes, switchbacks, and ladder bridges. There are four ski resorts within two hours, while Index crag, an KEY STATS 3.3 million: Population (metro) hour and a half $315,000: Median home price utes of town, and there’s ample northeast, is B+: Multisport grade fishing, hiking, and camping perfect for 80: Percentage of Seattleites at Mount Baker–Snoqualmie future-trending sport and trad with a library card National Forest, 42 miles to corporations climbing. The the east. A little rain never hurt like Amazon, Microsoft, and BoeSkykomish and Snoqualmie nobody. —IVAN MILLER ing, and unemployment leveled rivers are both within 90 minoff in March, helping the city avoid a major collapse in housing MINI-ME prices. Leaving nature-hungry Leavenworth, Washington At first glance, the Bavarian-themed buildings that line downurbanites free to conduct busitown Leavenworth (pop. 2,100) might strike you as kitschy, the ness as usual: There’s Discovery kind of architecture that’s made for tourists. But crack-climb on Park, a 534-acre trail runner’s the granite cliffs of nearby Tumwater Canyon, ski on the 37 feet dream that overlooks the of snow that fall annually on Stevens Pass, or raft the Class IV Cascade and Olympic ranges, Wenatchee River—all within half an hour of town—and you just might find yourself looking at real estate. And yodeling. and kayak-filled Puget Sound.

There’s the I-5 Colonnade, a Some sun and sailing on Lake Union

2) Seattle

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: CONNIE COLEMAN/GETTY; RACHEL OLSSON; JIM RICHARDSON/CORBIS; ANDREW KORNYLAK/AURORA

Forget about the rain already.

No place in the U.S. marries urban cool with a healthy lifestyle like the Emerald City.

It’s got world-renowned restaurants, outstanding theaters, and a bevy of museums, all tempered by the signature Northwest flavor of weekend farmers’ markets, artist sanctuaries, and aggressively wireless coffeehouse culture. The recession arrived late in Seattle, thanks to

3) Atlanta

and Delta anchor a strong economy that— as evidenced by recently LEED-certified Phillips Arena, the first sports stadium of its kind in North America—is investing in sustainability. The Brick Store, a classic gastro-pub, and the Porter, a new beer bar, offer some of the best brew lists in the country, while nearby music venues like the Earl debut major indierock and hip-hop acts. Home prices remain affordable throughout much of the city, especially in the up-and-coming Eastside neighborhoods. While commuting by car is a legitimate gripe, the recently launched Beltline Initiative will help ease some

The Palisades area

Don’t call it “Hotlanta.” Locals will sigh and tell you there’s much more to this southern metropolis than sultry summer nights.

The Chattahoochee River— home to some of the best trout fishing in the South—flows through the city, offering everything from boating (the KEY STATS 5.3 million: Population (metro) Class II Devil’s $115,000: Median home price Racecourse) to B-: Multisport grade cliff jumping 0: Net carbon emissions generated by the Corner, a part of (the Palisades Virginia Highland, the city’s area). Atlanta is famous singleiconic nightlife district also less than track. (Moun90 minutes tain biking from the beginning of the Apdebuted here as an Olympic palachian Trail, in north Georgia, sport in 1996.) Local blue chips and half an hour from Conyers’s like Coca-Cola, Home Depot, MINI-ME

Charleston, South Carolina Chucktown is affordable (median home price, $235,000) and small (pop. 110,000) but comes with the vitality of a metropolis, thanks to its kaleidoscopic heritage and a happening downtown.

And since it sits at the confluence of the Cooper and Ashley rivers and the Atlantic Ocean, it’s also prime watersport territory: There’s sailing in the harbor, sea-kayaking through the marshes of the Intracoastal Waterway, and surfing at Folly Beach.

congestion: A 22-mile-long “livework-play” corridor—including parks, trails, and green space— it’s one of the most progressive urban-planning projects in the country. Until it’s finished, there’s 189-acre Piedmont Park.

Just a short walk from downtown, it’s the big city’s green jewel. —CHARLES BETHEA

The Chattahoochee

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BEST TOWNS 2009

MINI-ME

Alpine, Texas At 4,481 feet, Alpine (pop.

4,800) avoids the smoldering heat of the West Texas lowlands and, partly thanks to the presence of Sul Ross State University, is home to a vibrant, thriving main street (think a kindergarten version of Austin’s 6th Street). Davis Mountains State Park (30 minutes away) offers year-round camping and cycling, while Big Bend National Park, 90 miles southeast, offers some of the most rugged backcountry hiking and mountain biking in the country.

Charlie Sexton playing Antone’s

4) Austin

Lady Bird Lake

its affordability: Bars like Ginny’s Little Longhorn still serve $2 Lone Stars, taco vendors hand out three for a dollar, and the bus routes around the center of

town still cost 50 cents. Which means that for the price of a Manhattan power lunch, you can practically eat and drink all month. —CAITLIN MEREDITH

Houston, We Have a Problem Yes, thanks to the robust oil-and-gas industry, your economy is holding steady, and you’ve got low unemployment (6.3 percent) and affordable homes (average median price, $145,050). Plus we applaud you for turning all those crappy parking lots into Discovery Green, a 12-acre park bustling with concerts, festivals, and farmers’ markets.

And you’ve got really awesome bars, like Etta’s and Valhalla, and surprisingly good barbecue and soul food. But here’s the thing: You’re congested, sprawly, hot, and flat, and you scored miserably on our multisport factor (grade: D). What can we say? If we could more readily do some of the things we love to do outside, we’d, like, totally be BFFs. Until then, we’re sticking with Austin.

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SARAH WILSON (3)

really does live up to the hype, Yes, the originator of the KEEP the running and biking commu[your city’s name here] WEIRD nities are just as lively. Not only bumper sticker is still plenty does local running shop RunTex kooky, but it’s also young and relead training groups around markably acLady Bird Lake tive. With every weekKEY STATS 1.6 million: Population (metro) Barton Greennight; it oper$182,000: Median home price belt—800 ates free water B-: Multisport grade acres of wilderstations for 92: Number of annual music ness—in the anyone—runfestivals held in town heart of downners, bikers, town, a lunchtime bike, kayak, or walkers, even pooches—who swim is standard practice for needs a cool drink. Bikers the techies, hippies, cowboys, can get a tune-up at Lance and students (the University of Armstrong’s gleaming new Texas is here) who call Austin 18,000-square-foot skinny-tire home. While the music scene emporium, Mellow Johnny’s, before riding to bikein movies at Café El Chilito, a Mundi or tackling popular taco joint in East the city’s impressive Austin array of lanes and paths, which will expand to an astounding 900 miles by 2020. The economy is just as robust: Austin has proven to be, if not recessionimmune, at least recession-resistant, thanks to big names like Dell and Whole Foods and a booming software industry.

But what makes Austin stand out is

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Located in Forest Park, a 5-acre park in the middle of Portland, this 6.2-mile trail allows hikers a chance to enjoy nature without leaving the city. Take a break from your packed schedule and experience the serene forest along Aspen Trail.

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For the adventurous, this 8-mile loop offers an opportunity to prove your endurance on steep climbs and descents. Reward yourself with beautiful views of the Willamette River as you cross Sellwood Bridge near the end of the hike.

Recommended Footwear: Merrell Intercept GORE-TEX (Men’s)

(Women’s)

WATE R FRONT PAR K WALKWAY Skill Level: Easy Portland’s Waterfront Park entices those looking for a walking trail through the downtown area.

This paved walkway offers easy access to bridges that cross over the Willamette River, along with r e s t a u r a n t s a n d s h o p s fo r t h e urban traveler.

Recommended Footwear: MBT Chapa GTX

E NTE R FOR you r chance to WI N A Wee ken d g etaway Go to outsideinfo.com/goretex and enter now for your chance to win a trip for two to one of Outside’s 2009 best towns and great Gore-Tex® gear.

Plus, learn more about the best urban trails, walks and adventure tours.

(Men’s + Women’s) For complete details, rules, and entry, visit outsideinfo.com/GoreTex. Contest officially begins at 12:01 AM EST on July 23, 2009 and ends at 11:59 PM EST on November 23, 2009. No purchase necessary. Must be 18 years of age or older. Total retail value approximately $3,000.00. Winner selected at random. © 2009 W. L. Gore & Associates, Inc. - GORE®, GORE-TEX®, and designs are trademarks of W. L. Gore & Associates 1-800-GORE-TEX

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Photos: From Top, Larry Geddis, R. Lord (bottom left and right), John & Amy Osaki (bottom center)

E xpert Advice by Amy Osaki

n

BEST TOWNS 2009

Early morning on the Charles

5) Boston

MINI-ME

New London, Connecticut As in the gritty port town known for the nearby submarine base? Well, yes. New London (pop. 25,923) is rebounding, with a surge in housing development on the Thames River and new restaurants, art galleries, and jazz bars near the waterfront.

Home prices are a fraction of what you’ll find in nearby Fairfield County, but the sailing on Long Island Sound is just as good.

KEY STATS

845,000: Population (metro) $182,000: Median home price B: Multisport grade 278: Average number of sunny days each year

The International Balloon Fiesta

6) Albuquerque A few cities in the Southwest enjoy their own versions of Albuquerque’s main attractions: a surplus of sunshine, mild weather, and easy access to

trails, rivers, and mountains—like the 10,678-foot granite escarpment above town. But what sets the Duke City apart these days is stability. Off the speculators’ radar, Albuquerque was rela-

tively unscathed by the circustent collapse of the housing market, even as its economy— bolstered by growth in the hightech, film, and renewableenergy industries—has remained stable. The upshot? It now boasts the fifth-lowest unemployment rate among major U.S. cities. And when all those workers are ready to blow off some steam, the city welcomes them with more green space per capita than any on our list— including easy-access singletrack and the 38,000-acre wilderness just east of the city.

Plus three ski areas (including the steeps of Taos), fly-fishing in the Jemez Mountains, and Class IV whitewater are all within day-trip range. Take that,

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Phoenix. It’s also a good place to save: The low cost of living and reasonably high wages in professional fields put Albuquerque fifth on Salary.com’s list of the best U.S. cities for building personal net worth— meaning you’ll have all the more means to gear up for time off the clock. —JUSTIN NYBERG

MINI-ME

Taos, New Mexico Picture Colorado. Now remove most of the people; sprinkle with artists, hippies, eccentric ski bums, celebs, and the occasional nuclear scientist and you’ve got Taos (pop. 5,800).

With the Class IV–V drops of the Rio Grande, a dozen fun little trout streams, and some of the country’s most challenging in-bounds terrain (Taos Ski Valley) all within a quick drive, the access here rivals that of any Rocky Mountain town.

FROM TOP: HEATH ROBBINS; HIROYUKI MATSUMOTO/GETTY

now topped by the Rose FitzgerWith its storybook brownstones ald Kennedy Greenway, a mileand brick sidewalks, Boston is long series of parks and gardens still very much a product of its in the heart of downtown. More past. But thanks in part to its ingreen space means more time ordinately high spent outside. student popuWith the KEY STATS 4.5 million: Population (metro) lation—more Boston Athletic $290,000: Median home price than 80 colAssociation, B: Multisport grade leges and unisponsors of the 7,250: Members of Community Boating, the largest public sailing versities are city’s namesake program in the U.S. based here— marathon, and collective leading the smarts (along with Seattle and charge, you’ll find runners (and Minneapolis, it’s one of the nabikers) galore along the Emerald tion’s most literate cities), it’s Necklace, 1,000 acres of intercertainly not stuck in it. Environconnected parks and trails. Plus, mentally friendly communities within three hours, you can be like the Davis Square Lofts are mountain-biking the Berkshire popping up in renovated indusMountains or skiing at Loon trial warehouses, and medicalMountain, New Hampshire, one research jobs are burgeoning, of the East Coast’s best resorts. thanks to forward-thinking orOf course, you could always just ganizations like the Dana-Farber pick up some Sox tickets and Cancer Institute. The Big Dig, get schnockered at Fenway— which redirected I-93 underBostonians’ favorite pastime.

—ALICIA CARR ground, is (finally) done—and

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In downtown Portland

7) Portland

The Boom Island lighthouse

8) Minneapolis

area of three million people but Minnesota native Garrison Keilhas the ethos of small-town lor, in his radio program A Prairie America. It’s also got verve: Home Companion, says of his The city that gave rise to the fictional town Lake Wobegon Replacements is now home to that “all the women are strong, a thriving music scene in clubs all the men are good-looking, like First Avenue and Varsity and all the chilTheater. Eat dren are above Street is KEY STATS 3.2 million: Population (metro) average.” We packed with $174,000: Median home price feel the same a variety of B: Multisport grade way about impressive 22,737: Number of canoes and Minneapolis. international kayaks registered in Minneapolis zip codes It’s a metro cuisine. And

tough in liberal-arts fields. So look before you leap. The biggest employers are in technology, health care, education, and sportswear (Nike, Columbia, et al.), and home prices post-crash are on the rise again. But you get what you pay for: fertile arts and

The Hawthorne Bridge

music scenes, world-class food and drink, and an extensive public-transit system amid plenty of wilderness, big water, and mountains. —JEREMY SPENCER

MINI-ME

Ashland, Oregon Ashland (pop. 23,000) is an anomaly: It’s got the Northwest’s first-rate recreation (you can bike or trail-run right from town in the surrounding Siskiyou Mountains, and the nearby kayaking is incredible) and culture (famous Shakespeare Festival) but not the rain (196 days of sunshine annually). And with its Napa-style vineyards, this border town is a bit Cali—in a good way.

downtown has the Upper Midwest’s largest farmers’ market.

All of which is gravy: Minneapolis made our list largely because of affordability, education, and its diversified economy. (Seventeen Fortune 500 companies call the metro area home, including Target, Best Buy, and 3M.) Sure, it’s cold in the winter—the average low is five degrees—but with 27 miles of groomed nordic-ski trails within city limits, two designated (and wicked fun) sledding hills, and a highly competitive pond-hockey tournament on Lake Calhoun, it’s anything but dreary. And in

The start of a Minneapolis triathlon

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the summer, the Twin Cities’ parkland, all 181,691 acres of it, plus 750-odd lakes—including the paddle-friendly Chain of Lakes—is perfect for making the most of the long, warm nights. Call it the Twin City Effect: Everything is twice as good here. —RYAN KROGH MINI-ME

Ely, Minnesota There’s a reason iconic outdoorsmen like polar adventurer Will Steger and nature photographer Jim Brandenburg call Ely (pop. 3,700) home: It’s the main gateway for the 1.3-million-acre Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. As such, main street is lined with outfitters and outdoorequipment stores, and even the local radio station, WELY—a quirky polkaand-rock channel—incorporates a North Woods twist: They broadcast daily “wilderness shoutouts” to people camped out in the backcountry.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: JORDAN SIEMENS/CORBIS; JAN SONNENMAIR/AURORA; CAROLINE YANG; SCOTT KEMPER/AURORA

Or, as we like to call it, Velo City.

With cycling advocates in high places, the highest concentration of custom bicycle builders anywhere, and a 300-mile bikeroute network set to triple in length over the next two miles away; the Columbia and decades, Oregon’s biggest city Willamette rivers border and definitely lives bisect the city, up to its rep as respectively; KEY STATS 2.2 million: Population (metro) the most the coast is 80 $248,000: Median home price cycle-friendly miles east; and A: Multisport grade place in the 5,000-acre 2 million: Number of volumes at U.S. But it’s Forest Park is Powell’s, the largest bookstore in the world not just about just one of 250 bikes. Indeed, green spaces in the assorted natural playtown. But Portland’s coolness grounds of PDX’s Pacific Northdraws coveted creative-classers west setting have long lured like freshmen to free beer (there multisport types in search of a are 29 breweries within city limtemperate paradise. Mount its, by the way), and that magHood, centerpiece of a millionnetism is partly responsible for plus-acre national forest with the relatively high unemployyear-round skiing, is only 30 ment rate, with competition

n

The Great American Ball Park, home of the Reds

BEST TOW NS 2009

MINI-ME

Yellow Springs, Ohio

Originally built as a spa town to capitalize on the nearby mineral springs, Yellow Springs (pop. 3,800) is as outdoorsy as Ohio gets. The limestone gorge and rolling hills of nearby John Bryan State Park offer climbing, mountain biking, and paddling on the Little Miami River. And while the recent closure of Antioch College dealt a serious blow to the economy, it’s still commuting distance to Dayton (25 miles) and Columbus (55 miles).

9) Cincinnati

FROM TOP: WILLIAM MANNING/CORBIS; RYAN KURTZ/CINCINNATI MONTHLY; PETER BRENTLINGER

With its low cost of living and resilient and well-balanced blend of industries (everything from aerospace to advertising), Cincinnati topped our charts for best economy. But what about actually living there? For a local perspective, we turned to former Outside staffer Jay Stowe, a Cincinnati native who’s now editor in chief of Cincinnati Magazine, for a (mostly) objective opinion. For starters, Stowe says, it’s an incredibly easy city.

The downtown is “very urban and completely walkable,” and the city is ringed with green spaces, parks, and lush hillsides.

The city council and mayor are trying mightily to get a streetcar line running through the urban core, a long-term cycling-infra-

10) Charlotte Charlotte’s been rising. Its population has doubled over the past 20 years, and eight Fortune 500 companies now call the greater Queen City area home.

Today, suit-and-tie bankers polish off sushi on bustling corners where vendors used to hawk catfish fresh from the cityside Catawba River. But while skyscraper-dense Charlotte is now

structure plan ment that will KEY STATS 2.1 million: Population (metro) that will include change the $106,000: Median home price a downtown face of the city.

B-: Multisport grade bike-commuter For its size, 1 million: Pounds of goetta—a German dish consisting of pork, complex is in Stowe says, beef, and steel-cut oats—conthe works, and Cincinnati sumed locally each year ground has boasts “cool been broken on architecture, the Banks, an $800 million genuinely awesome independmulti-use riverfront developent restaurants, and neighborhoods full of affordable, eclectic houses—and one of the counThe Esquire Theater, in the try’s biggest Oktoberfests, Clifton area where people willingly don

legitimately cosmopolitan—the Ritz-Carlton will open its doors uptown this fall—it hasn’t forgotten its southern roots: The city is renovating the 100-yearold brick buildings of Uptown Village, and Dale Earnhardt Jr. just opened a new bar in the 267,000-square-foot Epicenter.

The same blend of old and new applies to public transportation: While the city continues to ex-

MINI-ME

Boone, North Carolina

When Lance Armstrong launched his comeback to pro cycling in 1999, he was holed up in a spartan cabin in this sleepy (pop.

14,200), affordable college town (Appalachian State University). While the winding country roads are still a road cyclist’s dream, that’s just part of the recreational picture: Within minutes you can be rock climbing, peak bagging, whitewater rafting, and even skiing.

lederhosen and do the Chicken Dance totally unironically.” Then there’s its proximity to what Stowe refers to as a “vast inland adventure empire,” by which he means Kentucky and West Virginia. The city is just two hours from Kentucky’s Red River Gorge, a world-class climbing area (and a great place to hike and camp), and four hours from Fayetteville, West Virginia, the whitewater hub of the East Coast. —SAM MOULTON

Urban rapids at the U.S. National Whitewater Center

KEY STATS

1.7 million: Population (metro) $171,000: Median home price

of trails in the pand its lightB: Multisport grade Pisgah and rail system, it’s $1 billion: Amount the NASCAR industry pumps into Charlotte’s Nantahala naalso spending economy annually tional forests. $421 million to refurbish the While Charlotte its 20th-century trolleys. Anhas been particularly hard-hit other high priority is recreation. by the recession—Bank of The U.S. National Whitewater America is based here—there’s reason for hope: Duke Energy’s Center, just 15 minutes from new 48-story headquarters, downtown, is home to the to be completed in 2010, sits world’s largest man-made in a cultural corridor that will rapids and the country’s best include two museums, a peroutdoor climbing gym. And two forming-arts center, and Wake hours to the west is multisport Forest College’s latest business mecca Asheville, where you can hike and bike 2,000 miles extension. —KYLE DICKMAN OUTSIDEONLINE.COM

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The entrance to Greenlandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Black Angel Mine; opposite, secession theorist Mininnguaq Kleist

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Global warming isn’t bad news for everybody. In Greenland, the big melt could mean a flood of new revenue from mineral and oil deposits—previously trapped under ice. Flush with prospects, the locals are talking about making a final break from their benevolent colonizer, Denmark. Call it the Thaw Revolution. STORY & PHOTOGRAPHS BY M C KENZIE FUNK

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Outside 63

KLEIST BECAME GREENLAND’S

NATIONAL

BADMINTON CHAMPION BUT BEFORE HE OFFICIALLY BECAME A PHILOSOPHER, well before he took the helm at the Office of Self-Governance, he discovered secession theory: the study of whether one country has, or doesn’t have, the moral right to break free from another. At the time, he was a master’s candidate without a thesis topic. He’d been frantically searching for six months, and the problem was getting almost as bad as his first philosophical crisis, when he’d tried to apply the Aristotelian ideal of the good life to every little thing in his real life and ended up paralyzed, staring into a theoretical abyss.

Mininnguaq’s discovery of secession theory, like his discovery that not every action can be moral, was a revelation.

“I found arguments that are never used up here,” he says. Over the next year he wrote his thesis, “Greenlandic Autonomy or Secession: Philosophical Considerations,” at his university in Denmark, the colonial power that has ruled Greenland for nearly 300 years. He wrote it in Danish, and he pushed arguments that beat back the colonizers using their own rules, even as they ran slightly counter to those laid out in the nineties by the father of modern secession theory, Duke University philosopher Allen Buchanan.

“According to him, you have to be wronged to justify it,” Mininnguaq says. “Denmark has to wrong Greenland in a really bad way before we break away. I don’t agree with that part.

Sometimes you have to view this as a marriage: adults, consenting people, divorcing of their own free will.”

I first meet up with Mininnguaq in the Kangerlussuaq airport, a building on the tundra of western Greenland that feels like a ski lodge in the Alps: lounge chairs, huge windows, a cafeteria with trays, rich tourists in Gore-Tex. Mininnguaq lopes in with a badminton friend, Kim, a handsome Dane with an iPhone who happened to be on his inbound flight, and we sit in the cafeteria and reminisce about their sporting years. “He always beat me,” Mininnguaq says. “Except in our last match.”

Among his friends, Mininnguaq goes by “Minik.” He’s 35. He wears horn-rimmed glasses—“my old-school Ray-Bans,” he calls them—and brown hipster kicks with thick blue laces. He has black hair and aquiline good looks that locked up the teenage-girl vote during his one, failed bid for political office, in 2007, when he ran to represent Greenland in the Danish parliament. He lives in a trendy part of Nuuk, Greenland’s 15,000-person

capital city, where he recently blew thousands of Danish kroner on a tube stereo system.

Friends come over and they all just sit there and listen to it. It sounds awesome.

To its natives, Greenland now officially goes by the name Kalaallit Nunaat—“the Land of the People.” As a colony, it’s been part of Denmark since 1721, when Lutheran missionary Hans Egede showed up and started saving souls. The first Danes taught the Inuit that Hell was very hot rather than very cold. They taught that communal living—shared food, shared hunting trips, shared wives—was sinful. They taught that rocks and birds were not endowed with spirits. Greenlanders had no bread or concept of bread, so Egede translated another pillar of Western belief—the Lord’s Prayer—to fit Greenlandic reality. “Give us this day our daily harbor seal,” they prayed.

After 290 years, Greenland is oddly, lopsidedly modern—Scandinavian by design but not always by nature. Kim, whose wealthy family runs an electronics chain in Nuuk, is on his way to mainland Europe, where he went only a few months ago, hanging out at the Cannes Film Festival on Russian yachts with beds that rotated 360 degrees—“just for the views,” he marvels. Minik, meanwhile, is heading up the west-central coast to Upernavik, a thousandperson town with no sewage system, where, several mornings a week, the streets are lined with yellow bags of excrement waiting to be picked up by sanitation teams.

Upernavik is the first stop on the second leg of a road show led by the Office of Self-Governance, a department local authorities set up at the end of 2007 to bring independence— or at least the idea of it—to the people. It’s now early September 2008, and by November 25 he wants to have reached nearly all of

Greenland: 57,000 people spread out in 57 villages and 18 towns across an area of 836,000 square miles, three times the size of Texas and 50 times the size of mainland Denmark. November 25 is the date of an islandwide vote, a referendum on divorce from Denmark. If it passes, then on June 21, 2009, the summer solstice, Greenland will wake up to a new reality. Not secession, exactly, but a big step in that direction.

In chemistry, there’s the concept of activation energy: Add heat, get a reaction. In Greenland, there’s the reality of global warming: Add heat, get an independence movement. Warming is melting Greenland’s ice, which is extending its shipping season and revealing massive oil and mineral deposits, which is making possible a mining boom and the royalties that go with it, which is convincing Greenland’s people that eventually they may not need the $600 million in annual subsidies they get from Denmark—more than $10,000 a person. Which is convincing Greenlanders that soon they may not need Denmark at all.

Climate change means oil finds and zinc mines and also better fishing: cod, herring, halibut, and haddock migrating north as the ocean warms. It means disaster tourists: people coming to see glaciers slide into the sea. (Since 2004, cruiseship arrivals have jumped 250 percent.) It means farming: potatoes and broccoli and carrots growing where they didn’t grow before, more grass for more sheep. It means gushing rivers: an endless supply of freshwater that Greenland proposes to sell to a thirsty world.

Of course, it also means doom for distant countries like Tuvalu and Bangladesh, which may go under because of Greenland’s melting ice cap. The cap covers 81 percent of the island, and if it melts entirely—something that’s unlikely to happen before the end of this century—global sea levels could jump 20 feet. Since 2003, the cap has shrunk by more than a million tons, so much that the underlying bedrock rises four centimeters each year, like a ship slowly unweighted of its cargo. The land is rising faster than the sea.

It is climate’s role in the independence movement—the possibility that people could be set free by embracing a crisis, that for all the countries destroyed by global warming, one will be created—that’s brought me to Kangerlussuaq. Before we board our next flight, Minik introduces me to a pack of Greenlandic politicians, two women and three men who are part of his revolutionary road trip. They wear backpacks and street

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MAP BY ANDREW BERRY

FIVE YEARS AGO, AFTER MININNGUAQ

New icebergs near Ilulissat, on Greenland’s west coast

clothes: jeans, fleece, tennis shoes. One man carries a video camera. I wonder, for a moment, if I’m staring at people for whom global warming serves a higher good.

THE FIRST MEETING takes place inside the community sports hall in Upernavik, and its high point is a funny story about a whale. It’s told by Jens B. Frederiksen, the leader of the Democrats, the only one of Greenland’s four major political parties arguing for a “no” vote in November. Frederiksen was a policeman here in the nineties, and the story goes like this: The police chief gets a call from a citizen. The citizen is a fisherman. He’s caught a whale. He doesn’t know what he should do with this whale. The chief says to the citizen, “Put it in the boat. We’ll take care of it tomorrow.”

Put it in the boat! Take care of it tomorrow!

The crowd, roughly 60 people, roars with laughter. Minik doubles over. I try to get my translator to explain why this is so funny, but he doesn’t understand why I don’t understand, and the moment passes.

Frederiksen is the most controversial politician here, a punching bag for nationalists. He speaks Greenlandic, but his ancestry is mixed.

AS COLONIZERS GO, THE DANES WEREN’T BAD. THEY TOOK WHALES AND FISH AND HARVESTED COAL; THEY GAVE BACK HOSPITALS, R O A D S , AND FREE UNIVERSITY EDUCATIONS IN EUROPE. AND THEY DID IT WITH THE SMUG CERTAINTY THAT GREENLAND COULD NEVER MANAGE ON ITS OWN. His party has the support of many ethnic Danes, who make up 10 to 15 percent of the population, but it’s still one of the island’s smallest. Earlier this afternoon, he and I walked around Upernavik—past the white crosses and artificial flowers of its hillside cemetery, past an unmarked liquor store, past wooden houses painted in beautiful primary colors—while he explained his party’s unpopular stance.

“We want self-governance, too, but we don’t have the economy right now to go forward,” he said. He ticked off the basic services that Greenland hopes to take over: policing, education, immigration, mining, courts.

Thirty-two areas in all. This will require money—if not Denmark’s, then somebody

else’s. We crested a hill on Upernavik’s main, paved street, where teenagers congregate, blasting hip-hop from their cell phones, the boomboxes of Greenland.

“Yes, we want oil,” Frederiksen continued.

“We will jump and be happy when we find oil.

I also really hope to win the lottery but can’t count on it.” His argument isn’t about nationhood. It’s all about the numbers—pure economics—and that may be why hardly anyone is listening.

Even nationalists agree, however: As colonizers go, Denmark has never been all that bad. In Canada, Inuit were given numbered, dog-tag-like IDs because they had no surnames, and they were moved to barren islands to reinforce sovereignty claims. But in the OUTSIDEONLINE.COM

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Outside 65

Danish colony, the crown declared as early as 1782 that the Greenlanders’ welfare should “receive the highest possible consideration, [overriding] when necessary the interests of trade itself.” Denmark established paternalistic rules about alcohol and intermarriage, and even its most controversial program— an effort in the sixties to move families from traditional villages to centers like Upernavik, where services could be concentrated—was meant to improve lives.

In the Upernavik sports hall, we’re at nearly 73 degrees north. The small town is seasonally frozen out of all ship traffic, sits on treeless tundra 600 miles from the capital, and yet has this: a gym with a digital scoreboard, a hundred-foot-high ceiling, and long wooden beams five feet thick.

Upernavik has a hospital staffed by Swedes and Danes, a price-subsidized Pisiffik supermarket, a strong cell-phone signal, and paved streets—not the mud tracks one finds in the Inuit towns of Canada and Alaska.

Nearby, a mountaintop has been lopped off, turned into a mesa: Upernavik’s airport, its link to the world. The airport has a handicapped-accessible toilet.

This is what the Danes did. They harvested whales and fish and some coal, but they gave back homes and schools and hospitals. In 1953, they gave full Danish citizenship to every Greenlander. They gave students like Minik a free education at the university of their choice in Europe or North America. And they did it all with the smug certainty that Greenland could never manage on its own.

At the meeting, I watch Minik watch the politicians. He’s supposed to be impartial— his office’s job is to inform,not persuade—and in his presentation, he’d simply delivered the facts. Up for a vote on November 25 is “selfgovernance”—namminersorneq in Greenlandic, selvstyre in Danish. Though not full independence, it’s far closer than the limited home-rule system in place since 1979, which gave Greenland authority over a handful of government ministries. As agreed to in principle by Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen and Greenlandic premier Hans Enoksen, Greenlanders will have a recognized right to self-determination. They will take over responsibility for almost everything but foreign affairs and defense. At first they’ll keep the $600 million annual grant from Denmark, but as petroleum and other mineral revenues go up and up, the grant will go down and down. Until it hits zero. Greenland can secede anytime along the way. It could take decades.

While Frederiksen talks, Minik grimaces.

He’s standing alone in the back of the hall, near a table with coffee and tea and crumble cake. “Remember this,” Frederiksen says: “The Democrats did not say ‘no’ to self-gov-

Qaarsut village, one stop in the secession-vote road show

ernance. We just said ‘no’ to this agreement.”

Minik crosses his arms and mouths words to himself. When Kuupik Kleist, the popular leader of the leftist, pro-independence Inuit Brotherhood, speaks in favor of self-governance, he allows himself a smile.

“We would like to take care of ourselves,” the politician says in his booming voice, and everyone claps. “If we want to reach something, we should be ready to sacrifice something.” This idea—that Greenland may suffer after it takes over but that a little suffering is worth it—isn’t one that every leader will voice out loud. Now only Minik is clapping.

The next afternoon, the politicians set out for a day trip to the tiny whaling village of Kangersuatsiaq, where they will sit in a red community center and rehash their debate in front of a new audience. Minik and I follow in a 22-foot fishing boat piloted by Upernavik’s mayor. We motor inland, cutting through waves at 25 knots. The temperature drops ten degrees as we move closer to the ice cap. We skirt a sheer, 3,000-foot cliff of dark basalt that drops straight into the fjord, staying away from its base to avoid rockfall.

Minik, bundled in a black Arc’teryx ski jacket, points out young guillemot birds—relatives of the puffin—floating in the water.

They’ve just left the nest. They’re too fat to fly, so they have to just bob there for a few more hours or days until they’ve lost weight, and we have to weave around them. A pattern

develops. Every time we pass a bird, Minik points it out, and then he giggles maniacally as it vainly flaps its wings.

MY LODGING in Upernavik is a yellow two-

story house just off the main street. I found it by e-mailing a guy who told me to call some other guy, who sent an Inuit woman to meet my flight. She put my bag in a taxi, drove me to the house, wrote down the number of kroner I owed her (450, about $90), and then handed me a key and left. A few hours later the door opened again, and the woman ushered in my surprise roommates: a young Dutchman and an older Dane, both scientists with GEUS, the Danish geological survey. So it was that I got my free helicopter ride.

The scientists had come to retrieve an instrument left on the ice cap at 76 degrees north—some 200 miles and two hours of flying time away. It’s a ten-foot-tall metal tripod with a hard drive, a solar panel, and various sensors meant to track glacial melt, but it stopped working, and the patch of glacier it was monitoring isn’t all that interesting anyway. Still, GEUS is spending tens of thousands to get it back.

Chartering a heli in Greenland is pricey, and it’s increasingly hard to do, because miners

OO For more pictures from Funk’s visit to Greenland, go to outsideonline.com/greenlandphotos

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book them all. But any kind of flying here is expensive and fraught; a typical commercial flight can easily become a triple-layover ordeal. At the moment, the Land of the People’s premier, Hans Enoksen—who planned to join Minik’s road show in Upernavik—is fogged in somewhere to the south. So, instead of hanging out with Enoksen, learning why Greenland should be free, I end up going on a side trip with the Europeans, hearing all about why it should not.

The helicopter is a single-rotor Bell 212 painted an immaculate Air Greenland red.

One morning, just after dawn, we climb in and it lifts us above the town, above the fjords.

Out the window are fog banks and empty islands, then a single iceberg in a windswept bay, then hundreds of icebergs, then thousands. The pilot, a Norwegian, flies between them, yards above sea level, before we climb again and follow the ice cap north. Where glaciers are calving, spilling into the ocean, the seawater has frozen over during the night. On

the ice cap itself, the surface is heavily crevassed and endless, a pattern of thousands of parallel cuts. I look out and see blues and grays and whites and browns, the red of the rocks, the orange of the rising sun.

I share my window with a Dane who heard about the helicopter’s free seats. His name is Nikolaj, and he’s a lab tech at the Upernavik hospital. He and the pilot also co-own a kayaking business that rents out boats, drybags, satellite phones, and polar bear protection in the form of .30-06 rifles. During the summer that just ended, 15 foreigners came, including two Israelis who camped out on an island for a month.

We stop for a mandatory refuel in the village of Kullorsuaq—the only sign of life is the howling of sled dogs—and I quiz Nikolaj about the hospital. The doctors are all foreigners, he says. “They come for one month at a time.

Obstetricians, maybe one week. It’s like a vacation for them.” I ask what he thinks about the referendum. “People here are spoiled,” he

I ASK GREENLAND’S PREMIER WHETHER

INDEPENDENCE

FROM DENMARK SIMPLY MEANS A NEW DEPENDENCE ON FOREIGN CORPORATIONS. HE’S HEARD IT BEFORE. “IF OIL IS DISCOVERED, FOREIGNERS WILL COME NO MATTER WHAT,” HE SAYS, “BUT AFTER WE VOTE ‘YES,’ THEY WILL BE WORKING FOR US.”

Danish and Dutch scientists in the far north, retrieving a defunct glaciermonitoring device

says. “They don’t give a shit. They have no idea how much things really cost. Housing. Boats.

Fishing. Everything. They don’t understand that, without support, it could never be.”

The pilot suggests that Greenland should stick with Denmark and keep the oil money. I wonder aloud if Denmark is really so willing to give up 98 percent of its territory, so enlightened as to give up all that oil. “That just tells you something about the Danish people,” says one of the GEUS guys, proud of his country’s selflessness. We spend 90 minutes on the ice cap, long enough for the tripod to be taken apart and stuffed into a wooden crate.

Then we fly back to Upernavik just in time for me to make the next leg of Minik’s road show.

That afternoon, Enoksen catches up with us on the way to Uummannaq, a 1,300-person island town that’s famous here as the home of Sisissoq, a metal band that sings in Greenlandic about the slaughter of African mammals. The next afternoon, I watch the premier take part in a four-on-one smackdown of Jens B. Frederiksen inside a firehouse-red high school. The school’s main hall is bright and angular and modern, with vaulted ceilings and walls of art—triptychs of icebergs, a painting of bananas and grapes.

Enoksen is stern and primal, slowly pumping his fist in the air as he speaks.

The leader of Siumut, the party in charge of the home-rule government since it began in 1979, Enoksen is a former town grocer who was elected in 2002 after serving as Minister for Fisheries, Hunting, and Settlements. He is the first premier who wasn’t educated in Denmark, who doesn’t speak Danish or English. He’s not especially good at politics: In Nuuk, a rival minister is challenging him for leadership of Siumut, and some of his appointees are facing a corruption scandal. But in the villages, he is loved. Every summer, he pilots his fishing boat alone up the coast, checking in on community after community.

He wants self-governance to be his legacy.

Enoksen hires a blue powerboat the next day, and we head off to visit villagers. We pull out of Uummannaq’s harbor, past its heli-pad and heart-shaped, 3,800-foot landmark mountain, and into a broad channel between sheer cliffs of stratified granite. After a while he turns to me. “The American ambassador in Copenhagen has been very supportive of self-governance,” he says, Minik translating.

“Much more than any before him.”

I tell him I’m not surprised. In 1946, the American government was so impressed with Greenland’s strategic potential that it secretly tried to buy the island from Denmark for $100 million. The U.S. military still runs Thule Air Base, a Cold War–era installation in Greenland’s far north. Now that we’ve learned Greenland has a lot of oil, U.S. companies are buying up exploration blocks near OUTSIDEONLINE.COM

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Outside 67

was a presentation about water exports. Bottled-water buyers know next to nothing about Greenland, a speaker explained, but what they do know is promising. “Their knowledge of Greenland is limited to ‘ice’ and ‘cold,’ ” he said.

Angus & Ross CEO Nick Hall showed photos of Black Angel and explained its history.

The zinc deposit, one of the richest on the planet, was discovered in the thirties, explored in the sixties, and mined between 1973 and 1990 via tunnels dug near the Angel high above the fjord, reached by cable car. Then it was abandoned. His company took over the lease in 2003, when zinc prices were about to

IN NIAQORNAT, WE’RE HOSTED BY A GREAT VILLAGE HUNTER

WHOSE WALLS ARE DECORATED WITH NARWHAL TUSKS AND WALRUS SKULLS. WE’RE SEEN OFF BY CHILDREN WAVING LITTLE GREENLANDIC FLAGS. THIS VILLAGE WILL LATER VOTE 100 PERCENT FOR SELF-GOVERNANCE; HERE, THERE ARE NO DOUBTERS. Disko Bay, about 100 miles southwest of us.

I wonder if giving up Denmark means embracing America. Not necessarily America as overlord but America as capitalist ideal.

Americanism—complete with the vagaries of the free market. I put the question to the premier: For Greenland, doesn’t independence from Denmark simply mean dependence on foreign corporations? He’s heard it before. “If oil is discovered, foreigners will come no matter what,” he says, “but after we vote ‘yes,’ they will be working for us.” He pounds his fist against his chest three times, then raises it to the sky. “This is what will change under me,” he says.

TO VISIT ONE of the sites that will fund

Greenland’s future, the Black Angel zinc mine, I again motor out of the Uummannaq harbor, into the same broad channel, but this time the boat captain is Danish, and he’s working for the British. We leave the channel and cross a choppy stretch of open water, then hug another set of cliffs. We enter a long fjord, where we wave at fishermen and slow down to watch a village woman butcher a seal on a rock. The fjord narrows and the water becomes glassy. Two hours after leaving Uummannaq, the namesake Angel rises before us:

a Rorschach blot of ghostly black zinc, 2,000 feet up, on the side of a mostly white cliff.

I’ve wanted to see Black Angel since I heard about it at the first annual Greenland Sustainable Mineral and Petroleum Development Conference, which was held in May 2008 at a Radisson in Copenhagen. The mine’s owners, British firm Angus & Ross, hadn’t tried to hide the fact that they were profiting off global warming, which caught my attention. Otherwise, the conference had been a parade of speakers—mostly white and male and middle-aged, nearly all in blue or white dress shirts—discussing Greenland’s tough logistics and “world-class commercial terms.” If you could get there, the speakers said, Greenlanders would let you drill anywhere.

There was a presenter from Alcoa, which plans to dam two West Greenland rivers and build one of the world’s largest aluminum smelters—340,000 tons a year. There was a GEUS presentation about Greenland’s petroleum prospects: On the west coast, eight oil leases were just sold off to firms including Chevron, Exxon, Canada’s Husky Energy, and Denmark’s DONG Energy. On the east coast awaited the 19th-richest of the world’s 500 known petroleum provinces: an untapped Gulf of Mexico in the North Atlantic. There

The good citizens of Niaqornat as the premier’s entourage heads home; left, their village

rise, and in 2006 two geologists on a day hike discovered a deposit as pure as the original at the edge of the retreating South Lakes Glacier. Until now it had been hidden by a wall of ice. Along with the extended shipping season, it was, Hall admitted, the “upside of global warming.”

When I arrive at Black Angel, the mining camp is nearly empty. It’s the end of the summer work season, the beginning of a global recession, and credit is drying up while zinc prices are falling. Australian Tim Daffern, my host, quit a successful consulting job to run operations at the mine—and now he’s hanging on by a thread. Black Angel will bounce back in January 2009, and in April Angus & Ross will even expand its holdings to include the Nalunaq gold mine, in Greenland’s far south. But at the moment I’m witnessing the danger, for him and for Greenland, of betting everything on the commodities market.

The camp is a series of prefab buildings on a man-made plateau, surrounded by the crumbling concrete and rusting machines of the original operation. Next to the harbor sits

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the cabin of a cable car—purchased secondhand from the Swiss ski area Disentis—that will span the mile-wide fjord to reach the mine. The buildings contain bunk rooms and a lounge with couches, a widescreen TV, and a Wi-Fi connection. Inside the lounge, Daffern tells me his company’s game plan.

They’ll start with the two tons of zinc left in the original mine: the support pillars, mainly, which they’ll replace with cement columns.

“That’s enough for five years of mining,” he says. Next they’ll focus on the deposit at South Lakes Glacier, which is certain to keep retreating—they commissioned a study by GEUS and some British scientists to be extra sure. South Lakes will buy them another decade. A third deposit could buy two more years, a fourth three more—glaciers shrinking all the while. “Anywhere the ice retreats,” Daffern says, “we’ll explore.”

Daffern’s predecessors dumped their tailings in the fjord. The waste was 0.2 percent lead, 1 percent zinc, and it rusted before it could sink into the anoxic depths. Every spring, a rush of melting water spread the waste farther. It was ingested by blue mussels, and fish ate the mussels, and seals ate the fish, and on it went up the food chain. After 17 years of mining, it took another 17 years for the fjord to recover. The home-rule government has toughened regulations—mining companies have to put money in escrow to cover possible clean-up costs before they can get a license—and Daffern promises to do things differently. He also promises, just as everyone did at the mining conference, to hire as many locals as possible.

Daffern and I take a walk in the rain, climbing above the mining camp until we have views of the entire fjord, the fog banks, the seracs of the Alfred Wegener Glacier. I venture into an old mine shaft until its slope steepens and becomes a sheet of ice. Daffern points out another shaft where they found bags of chemicals that had been dumped and then sealed in by a bulldozer sometime in the eighties. When we return, we eat an incredible five-course lunch prepared by the camp cook, a guy named Johnny, who is Filipino.

ON DAY SEVEN of the tour, after seven meetings in seven villages and towns, the politicians relax in a government guesthouse outside the Qaarsut airport, waiting to go home. The flight isn’t until 4:30 P.M., and we have the entire day off. There’s a buffet with muesli, yogurt, and fresh-baked bread. The TV is on; we pull out cell phones and laptops and flip through the newspaper. Then the premier walks in and announces that a hunter’s boat is ready to take us on a quick visit to the village of Niaqornat, population 68, more than an hour up the Nuussuaq Peninsula. Going out again is masochism.

Only Minik and I agree to join him.

The open boat is maybe 15 feet long. We hop in at a gravelly beach below the airstrip, timing the surf so our feet don’t get wet. Minik puts his laptop in a plastic bag. He and I keep low out of the biting wind, but the premier, wearing jeans, thin gloves, and a baseball cap, stands in the back of the boat, watching the coastline zip by.

The water is smooth, and there are beaches the whole way; above them,slopes rise steeply to 6,000-foot summits already covered in snow. We pass seals and house-size icebergs and finally loop into Niaqornat’s natural harbor. The village is stunning, on a spit of lowlying land between an oceanside turret of rock and the white peaks of the peninsula. There are bright wooden houses but no cars. There are racks where villagers are drying junk fish for the sled dogs and strips of halibut and seal for themselves. Open boats and icebergs share the harbor. The sun is shining. It is, for once, the Greenland of my imagination—and perhaps that of the premier’s as well.

The meeting is held in the schoolhouse, and a quarter of Niaqornat shows up, if you count the baby. To make a projector screen, they flip a big map of Greenland and hang it over the blackboard. Above the map are classroom diagrams depicting everyday items and their Danish names: balloon, spaghetti, anorak, radio, king, pizza, cigarette. As the premier talks, I check out a poster showing eight local whale species and their specs: weight, top speed, length, amount of time they can hold their breath, etc. A man in a T-shirt that reads DEEP SEA SHARK FISHING asks about money, and Minik flips through some slides I haven’t seen before: projections of mineral revenues skyrocketing into the future. One shows the oil blocks that Greenland has already sold to foreign firms. They’re just on the other side of the peninsula.

We have lunch in the home of one of the premier’s supporters, a great hunter whose walls are decorated with narwhal tusks and walrus skulls and pictures of dead polar bears.

He lays out dried, jerky-like whale meat, then serves us cold narwhal skin, which his daughters and the premier slice into chewable chunks. His CD collection and computer are in the corner, along with his daughter’s pet gerbil. His teenage son walks in with a premade sandwich and sticks it in the microwave.

The premier gorges on narwhal.“If we did not eat what the sea gives us,” he says, “we would not be here.” When we reach the dock to meet our boat, the village has gathered to see us off, and someone has distributed little Greenlandic flags, which the citizens wave back and forth until we’re out of view.

A few months from now, Niaqornat will become one of a handful of villages to vote 100 percent in favor of self-governance. The

referendum will pass by 75.5 percent across Greenland, but in tiny Niaqornat, there will be no doubters. Just in time for the solstice, at the start of this new era, the premier will lose his job to Kuupik Kleist. This will only accelerate the drive toward independence: Kleist’s party wants it all the more, and even his partner in the new governing coalition, Jens B. Fredriksen, will be stirred to patriotism.

“We have one goal,” he tells reporters. “The ultimate independence of our country.”

EARLY IN OUR TOUR, Minik worried that he was forgetting much of the philosophy he’d studied.“I’ve been too much into politics,” he told me. But during our last conversation, he becomes a philosopher again, pondering not just the morality of secession but the means to this end. We’re in Ilulissat, Greenland’s big tourist town, where we have a final layover.

Nearby is the fastest-sliding glacier in the Northern Hemisphere, Sermeq Kujalleq, which spits 35 trillion liters of ice into Disko Bay every year.

I spend the early evening on the boardwalk of the Hotel Arctic, a cliffside landmark that happens to be hosting the Nordic Council’s Common Concern for the Arctic conference: European dignitaries in nice suits fretting abstractly about the warming north. Peering into a bay full of icebergs at sunset, I hear one of them chat up an attractive blonde by rattling off facts about the coming doomsday. His tone is solemn, his voice almost a whisper. “I don’t mean to scare you,” he murmurs. It’s the first time I’ve heard someone try to use climate change to get someone else into bed. “I really don’t mean to scare you,” he says again. She doesn’t look scared at all.

Upstairs, Minik and I order hamburgers and stare at the lights of Ilulissat. We contemplate the future. “It’s so strange,” Minik says. “The more the ice cap melts, the more Greenland will rise. These other countries are sinking, and Greenland is rising. It is literally rising.”

Below us, the dignitaries file into their banquet. “We know Black Angel was really bad for the environment the first time,” Minik continues.“It ruined the fjord. Is it OK to ruin three or four fjords in order to build the country? I hate to even think this, but we have a lot of fjords. I don’t know. That’d be utilitarian philosophy, wouldn’t it?”

He shakes his head.“We’re very aware that we’ll cause more climate change by drilling for oil,” he says. “But should we not? Should we not when it can buy us our independence?” I look at him. I can see he doesn’t really know the answer, either. o

MCKENZIE FUNK’S BOOK ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE, BEST LAID PLANS, WILL BE PUBLISHED BY THE PENGUIN PRESS. OUTSIDEONLINE.COM

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photographs by mCpherson

Bob Burnquist on his backyard mega-ramp in San Diegoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s North County

chris

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Outside 71

t s i u q n r u Bob B is a professional skateboarder, but to let that be his definition is a little reductive.

The 32-year-old resident of Vista, California, is, by many tangible measures and especially by metaphysical ones, probably the best all-around skateboarder in the world, able to win X Games gold medals on the halfpipe or lay down eye-popping street segments for videos, as well as to consistently redefine what is considered possible in his sport. He might do this by riding completely around the inner circumference of a metal pipe (which includes skating upside down) or riding inside a pipe with a gap (which requires jumping upside down) or doing these tricks—or any of his tricks— switch (meaning backwards), or especially by doing the kinds of things he does on the infamous mega-ramp, a 360-foot-long, 75foot-high plywood leviathan that has pushed skateboarding into terrifying new territory since appearing on the scene in 2003.

There are only three mega-ramps on earth. One is in storage and comes out for the X Games’ “big-air” events, which Bob has won the past two years. Another is in Brazil, where Bob was born and lived until age 18. He built that one for a 2008 contest that he coproduced via his Encinitas, California–based production company, Zoobamboo Entertainment, and also won.It aired live on Brazil’s TV Globo, to an audience of millions. The third mega-ramp is in Bob’s backyard.

Bob didn’t invent the mega-ramp; that honor goes to his pal Danny Way, a professional skater who jumped the Great Wall of China a few years back. The mega-ramp is a difficult contraption to envision until you’ve seen it in person, but imagine a wooden ski jump leading to the biggest kicker you can possibly conjure, one so tall and steep that your average professional skateboarder gets jittery just peering over its edge. The most basic jump goes something like this: You roll in from a platform about the height of a fivestory building, reach 40 or 50 miles per hour on the 180-foot approach, then launch over a 50-foot gap—there’s trapeze netting if you don’t make it—land on a downslope, and zip toward a 30-foot-high quarterpipe that propels you another 15 to 25 feet into the air.

You’ll need to land back on the near-vertical face of that quarterpipe, and not on the deck up top or the flat bottom below, either of which spells almost certain injury.

You might recall this was the fate of Australian skater Jake Brown, who took a welldocumented fall during the 2007 X Games.

Jake wobbled slightly after landing a 720 (his first ever on the mega-ramp), which threw off his timing on the quarterpipe.

Accidentally pushing himself away from the ramp as he went airborne, he fluttered and dropped 45 feet to the wood deck below, landing so hard that both of his shoes popped off. Bob, who was waiting his turn to go, thought his friend was “dead, paralyzed, in pieces. I was screaming, crying, freaking out,” he says. Jake lay still for eight minutes, then suddenly, miraculously stood up and walked away (with a broken wrist, mild concussion, and bruised liver and lungs), and Bob thought, Oh, shit, I’m next.

OK, Jake, this is for you. And he rode on down the ramp and won gold.

At this point, Bob can navigate the megaramp with ease, regular or switch. He can spin (many times), land just over the gap on a short platform known as a manual pad, perform a quick trick, then continue on toward the quarterpipe, where he might fly up and grind the soccer goalpost he sometimes places atop the deck, just for kicks. He can do a front flip over the gap, which no one else has even attempted.

Tony Hawk says he is “glad” the megaramp wasn’t around when he was competing, and that it “has tested the human limits of riding a skateboard.” Of Bob, Tony says, “Besides creating tricks previously thought impossible, he’s taking existing moves and doing them at dangerous heights and over frightful distances.” He’s also unique, Tony says, because “his motivation is progression; not fame or fortune.”

That’s not to say, of course, that Bob won’t compete. He shows up at competitions, mostly because his sponsors encourage it, and he tends to win: So far he’s taken home 15 X Games medals (including six golds), was last year’s World Cup of Skateboarding vert skater of the year, and was again the favorite in the big-air event at the 2009 X Games. But what actually drives Bob is something else: He’s an athletic freak with a creative mind who’s treating his sport more like a blend of math problem and art project. Bob Burnquist wakes up most every morning with one question on his mind: What else can I do?

TO O BS E RV E BO B is to watch a man who seems to have just left yoga class. He’s a walking noodle—six foot two and 180 pounds of skinny limbs, with close-cropped black

hair. Danny Way, Bob’s close friend and only true rival (or perhaps the only human crazy enough to want to be), says he has “cat genetics” and calls him Gumby. It appears as if soft pretzels have replaced his bones.

It’s a warm spring afternoon when I visit Bob at his spread in the arid foothills of the San Marcos Mountains, in San Diego’s North County. Rancho Bob Burnquist, or Rancho Burnquisto, as it’s come to be known, is 12 acres and has many amalgamated parts: The first thing you see is Bob’s traditional vertical ramp and bowl, where he shoots film segments and practices for events. Around it are what he calls his “monuments,” little-used or retired specialty ramps cooked up for one-off tricks like the loop-de-loop or the corkscrew. Not far past them is a nice stucco house with two adjoining cabanas, one for his office and gym and another for his toys, including a stack of surfboards, numerous skydiving rigs, and literally hundreds of skateboard decks. There’s a small pool and patio, a plot of organic vegetables, a paddock for livestock, and, on a large, scrubby parcel at the rear of the property, the mega-ramp.

The rancho is hilly and lush with vegetation. It’s not easy to tour by foot, so Bob climbs aboard his two-seat Yamaha Rhino utility vehicle. There’s a subtle unkemptness to the place—pieces of old ramps and deteriorating gym mats are lying around, along with some unexplained dogs. Only one, Dois, an Australian shepherd mix bearing the scars of 14 puncture wounds (the work of local coyotes), belongs to Bob. “There’s also a cat around here somewhere,” he says.

Bob maneuvers around a manure pile— courtesy of Rio, the family horse—and toward a stand of banana trees, where we find his wife, Veronica, 40, a beautiful blond physical therapist from Brazil. The two have a one-year-old daughter, Jasmyn, and each has a daughter from a previous relationship, Bob’s being nine-year-old Lotus, whose mother is the pro skater Jen O’Brien.

At the rancho, Bob has re-created a little slice of São Paulo, where he grew up middleclass and bilingual, the son of an American father and a Brazilian mother. The whole family is here, in fact, though his parents are divorced. There’s a Brazilian nanny, a yurt for his dad, Dean. His sister Rebecca shares a house up the road with their mom, Dora, who paints and sculpts and makes mosaics. (“I can live with my dad,” Bob says, “but my mom ... .”) Dora’s work is all over the rancho, including several oversize paintings of Bob in action that dominate the living room.

He gives Veronica a kiss and asks me to move to the Rhino’s dusty bed to make room as we all drive out to visit Rio and his

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Burnquist throwing a switch 180 over the mega-ramp’s 50-foot gap

Bob can imagine a corkscrew launch into a mega-ramp, and maybe even a double

JAMIE MOSBERG

loop, like a real-life version of what kids build for Matchbox cars. Is that even possible?

“I don’t know,” he answers. “I think it is.” paddock-mates,two goats and a chicken.Bob and Veronica chatter briefly in Portuguese (she’s still learning English) about the moringa-based organic soap made by a woman who rents a cabana on the property.

“It’s an amazing material,” he tells me.“When I had my wisdom teeth out, I put some powder on my teeth and woke up so much better.”

Nothing about this scene—or any of Bob’s life, really—is what you’d expect from a skateboarder. The same goes for his business interests away from the sport, most of which fall under the umbrella of an amorphous venture called Burnquist Organics, which even he struggles to define. This would include farming here on the rancho, which has been stalled commercially since his organic restaurant, Melodia, closed, but he’s in talks to begin providing produce to local branches of Chipotle Mexican restaurants. He plans to

kick off a line of organic products with an energy bar later this year. You’ll also soon find a Burnquist Organics logo on a number of Bob-approved products, including the first Oakley shades made with recycled materials; a bamboo Flip skate deck (still in testing stages); an iPath all-hemp skate shoe; a Brazilian line of hemp-and-organiccotton Hurley clothing; and a foam-free Keahana surfboard.

In the adrenalized world of the X Games, where athletes tend to be tattooed, caffeinated, and more concerned with their style of footwear than their carbon footprint, Bob is an anomaly. The green projects, along with his New Agey tendencies—he’s a follower of the nonsectarian Christian Spiritism movement and is prone to stoner speechifying about “fluidic rhythms”— have led to a perception among fans that

he’s a vegetarian. He’s not. But he does enjoy smoothies and drive a Prius. He also refuses to take sponsorship dollars from any product he doesn’t feel comfortable with, most notably the buzz-drink labels—Red Bull, Monster Energy—that are the ubiquitous cash cows of action sports. (“I hate that stuff,” he says.) Instead he gravitates toward deals that satisfy his inner hippie: Stonyfield Farm, Sambazon açaí-based beverages, and Toyota, which in 2005 made Bob its first athlete paired specifically with the Prius. (He was the company’s first action-sports athlete.)

There are plenty of other professional athletes speaking out on global warming and sustainability, but few, if any, have actually managed to enact real change in their sport. Bob co-founded the Action Sports Environmental Council in 2001 and, in 2007, took his skateboard to the Capitol to lobby Congress about climate change—becoming, if you’re a fan of useless minutiae, the first person to ride a skateboard inside those hallowed halls. That same year, he gathered major action-sport brands for the industry’s first conference on how to go green. It was at his behest that the X Games shifted to Forest Stewardship continued on page 100 OUTSIDEONLINE.COM

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Outside 73

Amira, a jaguar at Ambue Ari park

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Hello Kitty At a Bolivian animal-rehab center, volunteers can adopt a rescued jaguar and take it for daily walks on leash. Brave and compassionate, or just plain stupid? THAYER WALKER discovers that it may be all three.

And heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s got the scratch marks to prove it.

Photographs by Noah Friedman-Rudovsky

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Outside 75

Of the world’s 36 species of wild cats, NONE HAS A MORE POWERFUL BITE THAN THE JAGUA R . and wrapped with muscle, I S E N G I N E E R E D T O C RUS H . I T S S N O U T, short and

Its skull, wide like a cinder block

compact, generates enough leverage to crack a tortoise shell L I K E A N E G G .

The author with his 260-pound jaguar

With these tools, the jaguar has perfected a devastating method of dispatch: the cranium crunch. Wrapping its jaws around its prey’s head—in some cases nearly as large as its own—the cat drives its two-inch canines through more than half an inch of bone to puncture the brain. On other occasions, a jaguar pierces the skull through the ear canal, leaving no visible entry wound.

Until recently, the mechanics of a jaguar’s bite were little more to me than an academic abstraction. That changed quickly when I visited a Bolivian animal-rescue organization called Comunidad Inti Wara Yassi (CIWY).

CIWY rescues wild animals like monkeys, birds, pumas, and jaguars from Bolivia’s black market; the animals might come from abusive situations or well-intentioned people who simply can’t care for them. One of CIWY’s goals is to rehabilitate the animals and, when possible, to release some of them within the park. But that’s not done with the big cats, in part because of the potentially severe consequences of a mishap.

A handful of Bolivians steer this ark with the help of international volunteers, and to

make the cats’ life sentences more enjoyable, the organization promotes a practice called “direct contact.” For six to ten hours a day, live-in volunteers—many of whom have no more expertise with animals than what they’ve gleaned from a family dog and Animal Planet—walk these predatory felines on a leash through the jungle. For the next 11 days, I will, too.

Shortly after arriving at Parque Ambue Ari, CIWY’s 1,991-acre jungle compound in the central-Bolivian department of Santa Cruz, I am assigned to Jaguarupi. His name is derived from an indigenous word that means “little jaguar”—the same ironic humor that lends itself to 300-pound bouncers nicknamed Tiny.

“Rupi” came to Ambue Ari from a private residence as a cub in 2003, soon after the park opened, and now he’s the biggest cat on the block, a 260-pound alpha male. At least two volunteers work with Rupi, so after signing a waiver stating that jaguar wrangling “leads to an inherent risk of injury or accident,” I’m paired with 23-yearold Adir Michaeli, who’s one month into a three-month stay and therefore our team expert. With a sturdy chin and thick black eyebrows, Michaeli looks like an Israeli Colin Farrell. Having spent four years as an explosives specialist in the Israel Defense Forces, he has chosen jaguar walking as his method of relaxation.

On our way to Rupi’s cage, Michaeli launches into a safety briefing: Don’t touch the jaguar. Don’t yank on his leash. When he jumps you, don’t fight back, as it will only encourage him (and you won’t win). Never turn your back on him. Try not to let go of the leash. Don’t let him smell your fear. And don’t ever, ever forget: He could kill us both in seconds. Have fun.

I am now qualified to walk a jaguar.

WHEN WE ARRIVE AT Rupi’s enclosure, a 12foot-tall chain-link fence wrapped around more than 1,700 square feet of jungle, he is sitting sphinxlike on a raised wooden platform.

Even from a distance he looks massive.

Two sets of doors stand between us.

Michaeli opens the outside gate, closes himself inside, and opens the inner gate. Rupi joins Michaeli and eagerly licks his hand while he clips the leash—20 feet of rope with a cara-

biner at the end—to his collar. At Michaeli’s signal, I swing the outer gate open and hold my breath. Rupi ignores me.

Michaeli holds on to the front of the leash near Rupi’s collar and instructs me to follow close behind and wrap the end of the rope around my hand in case Rupi decides to bolt. The next 90 minutes pass quietly, with Rupi sniffing, spraying, and trotting through his territory, roughly two miles of jungle trail cut something like a figure eight.

When I take Michaeli’s place at the front of the leash, things get interesting. Rupi starts to run, and I slacken the leash to avoid choking him, freedom he takes to leap on a tree and use the trunk as a springboard to launch back at me. He slams me to the ground, and every sharp part of his body touches every vital part of my own.

Rupi wraps his mouth around my thigh and then my neck; he brushes my crotch with a claw and then buries his face in my stomach, as if sniffing my intestines through my belly button.

Then the world turns a slobbery black. Rupi spreads those skull-crushing jaws wide and wraps them around my face. His canines press into my temples and into my cheekbones just below my eyes. His hot breath seeps through my eyelids. When his tonsils finally cease to blot out the sun, I see the jaguar standing on my chest with his head, golden and spotted, held aloft in victory.

Michaeli plays the rodeo clown and rustles about enough to distract the cat so I can sit up. Still, Rupi begins the preliminary steps of arthroscopic surgery on my knee with his mouth. My best defense, Adir has told me, is to cram my forearm in his mouth (“If your arm is in his mouth, it means your head isn’t”). After two minutes of jaguar jujitsu, Rupi rolls off me and resumes his walk, as if nothing has happened.

This has been not a bloodthirsty attack but an act of play and dominance, and despite the fact that the cat nearly swallowed my face, I stumble away unscathed, save a small scratch on my hand. As we finish our walk, with Michaeli again in front, I ask if mine was a typical introduction.

“I’ve never seen that before,” says the explosives expert. “Usually the person ends up on the cat, not the other way around. That was really special.”

AS FOUNDER JUAN Carlos Antezana tells it, the origin legend of Comunidad Inti Wara Yassi is nearly as fantastic as its day-today operations. It begins with a drunken spider monkey.

Antezana is a loquacious 51-year-old, round, excitable, and oddly reminiscent of the spectacled bear, Balu, that lives at one of

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A volunteer and a jaguar rest during a walk

his parks. In 1985, he began teaching local orphans and poor children subsistence skills, like sewing and cobblery, around his home in La Paz. He’d take the kids on camping trips, and in 1993 he led thousands through the streets of La Paz to celebrate Earth Day. In the following years, Antezana toured the country with a youthful congregation, preaching environmentalism.

On one such trip, the group passed a bar where a beer-drinking spider monkey provided the in-house entertainment. The kids pooled their money, bought the monkey, and released it in the forest outside of town.

Drunk, disoriented, and dying for a stiff drink, the monkey, they later learned, stumbled back to civilization. It had no other home.

The Bolivian black market teems with wildlife, so in 1996 Antezana, along with CIWY vice president Tania “Nena” Baltazar, created Parque Machia, a 93-acre jungle reserve on the fringes of the town of Villa Tunari, as a place for Bolivia’s legion of mistreated once-wild animals. “We learned by doing,” says Baltazar, 35, who, like Ante-

OO To watch Thayer Walker care for—and lose a pair of pants to—a big cat, go to outsideonline.com/jaguar

My partner launches into A

SAFETY

Don’t touch the jaguar.

When he jumps you, don’t fight back. A N D D O N ’ T E V E R F O R G E T : He could kill us both in seconds. H AV E F U N .

BRIEFING: D O N ’ T YA N K O N H I S L E A S H .

zana, has never had any formal animal-care training. “We had no money, a sleeping bag, four monkeys, and a lot of love.” Soon, they had more company.

When a circus rolled through Villa Tunari, Antezana got wind of a pair of mistreated macaws. He wanted to rescue them, so he followed the circus from town to town for 15 days before he finally found authorities sympathetic to his cause.

The circus also had a young puma that, says Antezana, the ringleader had been forcing to leap through hoops of fire. When the puma refused, his back legs were broken. Antezana saw the injured animal, scooped him into his arms, and sped to the city of Cochabamba in a 4x4. There he bought two bus tickets—one for him and one for the feline—and spent four hours

sitting next to the 60-pound puma on a crowded coach bound for Machia. Inti Wara Yassi had its first cat.

Over the past 13 years, CIWY has rescued thousands of animals, and it opened a third park this summer. Largely funded by volunteers and private donations, the organization does not receive monetary support from the Bolivian government, though animals seized by government raids often end up in its care. In 2006, Antezana was chosen as one of five passionate conservationists featured in Animal Planet’s Jane Goodall’s Heroes, and received $5,000 to continue his work.

CIWY posts fliers at travelers’ hostels throughout South America, and word of a Real World–meets–Grizzly Man parallel universe has percolated through the backpackOUTSIDEONLINE.COM

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Outside 77

ing community. I heard about it from my cousin, who spent three months at Machia.

Anyone who plunks down $280 or so to stay for a month purchases room, board, and the privilege of walking a cat. The cats get exercise, the volunteers get an unforgettable experience, and CIWY gets a steady flow of income to care for the animals.

Everybody wins. All you have to do is leave better judgment at the door and step into the jaws of a jaguar.

Exotic-cat sanctuaries abound in the United States, but there’s nothing like CIWY. Organizations range from roadside attractions where people can get their picture taken with a tiger to refuges that are closed to the public and keep cats in large enclosures without human contact. The U.S. Department of Agriculture prohibits the “exhibition of such animals without sufficient distance and/or barriers between the animals and the general viewing public.” In Bolivia, the country’s Ministry of Biodiversity and Protected Areas announced new regulations last spring that will require rescue centers to adhere to certain licensing and infrastructure standards—the first step in a long process of adapting laws to hold animal-rescue centers to an enforceable standard—but CIWY volunteers will still be allowed to walk cats. Bolivia has animaltrafficking laws but until May had no policy governing operations like CIWY. Not a single expert I spoke with regards the concept of inexperienced volunteers walking apex predators through the jungle as even a distant relative of a good idea. “I would never let anyone I care about do something like this,” says Toronto-based zoologist and cat trainer Dave Salmoni, most recently the host of Animal Planet’s Into the Pride. He’s spent months trailing a pride of

wild lions on foot and trained captive-bred tigers for release into the wild. “Cats are pure predators. Their body tells them that they want to kill. There are too many stories of hand-raised cats behaving well their entire lives—until they kill someone.”

In 1999, Salmoni nearly met that fate when a lion he’d worked with for about a year tried to tear his throat out. Last January, at Maryland’s Catoctin Wildlife Preserve and Zoo, a jaguar mauled a zookeeper after the animal’s enclosure was left unsecured. In 2007, a zookeeper at the Denver Zoo suffered fatal neck and spinal-cord injuries from a jaguar attack.

Perhaps the most famous cat mauling occurred in 2003, when a hand-reared tiger dragged Roy Horn, of the Las Vegas magic act Siegfried & Roy, offstage by the neck, nearly killing him.

“There’s risk for people working in Darfur,” says Jonathan Cassidy, director of Quest Overseas, a British travel company that has sent more than 250 volunteers to CIWY since 2003 and helped finance the purchase of Ambue Ari the year before. “The important thing is to manage expectations.”

When asked about their own perceptions of danger, CIWY volunteers replied with surprising naïveté and chilling prognostications.

“It’s just a big cat,” says one. “It’s only a matter of time before someone gets seriously hurt,” counters another.

THE CAMP AT AMBUE ARI exists in a sub-

lime equilibrium of disrepair and expansion: Brick-and-concrete buildings, half complete, stand near wooden structures in near collapse. Even a moderate burst of rain turns the compound into a shallow marsh, and due to limited water pressure, the outdoor faucet and the indoor shower have a frustrating relationship of inverse functionality.

Volunteers sometimes sleep with the animals—before he died, Faustino the howler monkey lived in one dorm, and jungle pigs hole up beneath another—and the mosquitoes are a biblical plague.

The park, CIWY’s second, opened in 2003, and when I arrived it housed four ocelots, five jaguars, 13 pumas, and a menagerie of monkeys, birds, and other South American creatures, all cared for by more than 40 international volunteers. Noemi Castaños, the Bolivian general coordinator, oversees volunteers and the cats, and park director Zandro Vargas is the round-the-clock veterinarian. Despite the tough conditions, CIWY estimates that more than 35 percent of the volunteers return to the parks, and some people have spent years with the organization.

Mornings at Ambue Ari begin with hard labor, and the afternoons offer little relief.

In addition to animal care, volunteers are responsible for upkeep of the property; at 7 A.M. sharp, while women tend to feeding chores, men carry 100-pound wood planks into camp, cut from deadfall, to be used as building material.

The walks begin around 9 A.M. and last three and a half hours, or until Rupi feels like going back into his enclosure. (We coax him in every day with a raw egg.) Each cat has its own trail, so we don’t run into other cats and volunteers. There are no fences around the park’s perimeter, and Rupi, like other cats, has broken free from volunteers—and returned—numerous times. After lunch, we walk Rupi for another three or four hours until he’s ready to get back in his cage for dinner: nine pounds of raw chicken or steak.

The routine helps the animals and the volunteers become more comfortable. “If you work with these animals for long enough,

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From left: playtime; volunteers cover head to toe to protect from mosquitoes; Faustino, a rescued howler monkey; a daily jungle walk

Michaeli bends down A N D O F F E R S his head to the jaguar, W H I C H G E N T LY R E S P O N D S B Y using his face as a salt lick. “ Y O U ’ R E J U S T S H O W I N G O F F,” I J A B .

“I know what I’m doing,” he fires back. “ L E T M E E N J O Y my cat.” you lose your fear,” another Israeli, 26-yearold Jonatan Karny, tells me one humid night as we sweat off a dinner of overcooked starch in the camp’s dining block. “I think of it like I’m a construction worker on a skyscraper.

My job is to walk on this beam. I respect the beam, but the less scared of it I am, the safer I will be.”

After just a few days at Ambue Ari, as Rupi and I get familiar, my persistent fear of death subsides into sporadic bursts of nervousness. Rupi keeps a casual but constant pace. On the hottest days, he swims in the river and lolls around on the bank, but these breaks rarely exceed 20 minutes.

The behavior is instinctive. The jaguar is a great wanderer. With a range from northern Argentina to the southwestern United States, the world’s third-largest felid (behind tigers and lions) is the only widely dispersed big carnivore that has not divided into subspecies. These rambling ways have allowed them to spread their DNA throughout the New World, and there is little genetic difference between a jaguar in Arizona and one in the Pantanal.

Rupi has no doubt about his standing atop the food chain. He moves with the confidence and nonchalance of royalty and commands the same respect. Whereas other cats readily show affection by licking, cuddling, and even napping with their volun-

teers, Rupi’s displays of warmth are generally limited to a playful head butt to the crotch. He is a king, not to be fawned over but to be admired.

He does, however, offer fleeting moments of tenderness, most commonly as I let him out of his cage. In the tight quarters between the double doors, he’ll rub his cartoonishly huge head on my knee—my signal to cop a quick feel through his short, coarse fur and massage the thick folds of his skin with my fingers.

Michaeli enjoys an even more intimate relationship with Rupi. One afternoon, while taking the cat out of the cage, he bends down and offers his head to the jaguar, which gently responds by using Michaeli’s face as a salt lick.

“Now you’re just showing off,” I jab.

“I know what I’m doing,” he fires back between slobbery osculations. “Let me enjoy my cat.”

IN AUGUST 2006, CIWY received a jaguar

that would change the organization irrevocably. She was an ill-tempered two-yearold whose disposition was molded by a cruel life of confinement in a small steel cage. La Paz authorities had seized the cat from a private residence and turned it over to CIWY on the conditions that the organization would get government permission if it wanted

to move her and would alert the government when she died.

CIWY named her Katie and gave her the largest cage at Machia. But even that luxury proved restrictive, since the jaguar was too dangerous to let out. In April 2007, CIWY attempted to transfer her to Ambue Ari, where she’d have more space. Katie never made it out of Machia; she was tranquilized for the move and never woke up.

CIWY hadn’t notified the government about the transfer attempt and didn’t tell it about the death—even though they claim the cat was killed by what should have been a safe dose of anesthetic. A CIWY autopsy revealed an unknown preexisting condition that contributed to her demise: Dead tissue covered the cat’s shriveled left lung and half of the right one.

Several weeks later, CIWY obtained a new jaguar and named her Katie. The incident remained buried at Machia until the spring of 2008, when a disgruntled former worker alerted Animales SOS, a local animal-rights group, which leaked the story to the press.

Accusations of a $200 payment for the new jaguar emerged, and an organization dedicated to animal rescue was suddenly being accused of animal trafficking.

Baltazar maintains that the new cat was donated, that the only money that exchanged hands was for the cost of transporting the animal, and that CIWY named her Katie to honor the deceased. The only mistake CIWY made, she insists, was not telling the government about the death.

“We panicked,” says Luis Morales, a longtime vet who recently retired from CIWY. “It was a great mistake not to have informed the government.”

Animales SOS director Susana Carpio worked with CIWY for years continued on page 103 OUTSIDEONLINE.COM

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Outside 79

DONâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;T WIN IF YOU

Cross-dressing and indecent exposure are pretty much de rigueur at the SSWC.

80 Outside

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DON’T WANT THE TATTOO

The Single Speed World Championships is the wildest mountain-bike “race”on earth, where Halloween comes early and sobriety is akin to doping. To infiltrate this derailleurless debacle, we would need a thoroughly mediocre racer who could stomach the sight of way too much beer-addled flesh and report back. So, naturally, we recruited BIKE SNOB NYC.*

* The undisputed lord of the cycling blogs, a mercilessly critical, incredibly popular, very prolific wordsmith whose secret identity we’re sworn to protect (lest he turn on us).

PHOTOGRAPHS

BY BRIAN VERNOR

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A MAN IN A BORAT UNITARD RIDES PAST ME LIKE SOME SORT OF GRAVITY-DEFYING, SEXUALLY PERVERTED SUPERHERO, easily climbing the rocky Northern California incline up which I’m struggling to push my bike. I paw at my dusty water bottle and watch his bethonged ass shrinking in the distance. In about an hour he’ll be named the 2008 Single Speed World Champion. All I want to do is survive.

What the hell am I doing here anyway?

Well, it all started years ago, when my mountain bike’s rear derailleur decided to disassemble itself during a ride. Naturally, this occurred when I was as far from the trailhead as possible and, shrewdly, had packed none of the tools I’d need in order to make the thing rideable again. Even if I had, the various pulleys and bolts had scattered themselves along the trail like so much gorp. So as I hiked through the woods, back to the relative civilization of suburban New Jersey, walking my bike up climbs and then coasting down, I resolved to convert it to a single-speed.

A single-speed, if you don’t already know, is a bike with a single gear ratio: one chainring up front, one cog in back. Like a BMX. No shifters or derailleurs to fail on you, no granny gear to bail you out, and nothing to think about while you’re riding except riding. Instead of hunting for the right gear on hills, you attack them at speed so your momentum carries you to the top, and on all but the steepest and most technical climbs you get up there faster and more effectively. Basically, single-speeding is both totalitarian and meritocratic, in that it offers you neither choices nor a safety net.

Over the years, the single-speed “movement” has attracted a large number of mountain-biking devotees, whose intricate facial-hair patterns and tattoos counterbalance the simplicity of their bicycles and whose disdain for things like officially sanctioned races, spandex, and sobriety runs as deep as their aversion to gears.

It’s in this spirit that the Single Speed World Championships were born, best anyone can guess, in 1995. Despite the name, the SSWC is sanctioned by no organization except for a consensus of dedicated single-speeders, and every year it bounces from international locale to international locale like the fugitive from decency and legitimacy that it is. This time around, it’s in Napa, at Skyline Wilderness Park.

When you win the SSWC, you don’t get a jersey, a trophy, or cash. You get a tattoo. It’s mandatory; you pick the spot. And while the

SSWC is a party, it’s also very hard and, believe it or not, highly competitive. The 2007 winner was national cross-countrymountain-biking champ Adam Craig, who’s in Beijing competing in the Olympics while we’re here in Napa. It’s tempting to think a race like this isn’t as difficult as a “real” race, but the fact is it’s even more difficult. An epic-length mountain-bike contest is going to hurt, even if, like some kind of Lycra-clad Mormon, you’ve been watching your diet, going to bed early, and tapering according to Chris Carmichael’s instructions in Bicycling magazine. But doing one hungover and ill-prepared, as SSWC custom dictates, is absolutely excruciating.

Especially when there’s nothing between you and your torturous race saddle but a pair of cotton briefs. Ridiculous costumes are an SSWC tradition. Accoutrements like frilly dresses, neon unitards, Helga wigs, fishnets, feather boas, and faux fur almost outnumber traditional cycling kits—and that’s just on the men.

IF PRO CYCLING IS RIDDLED with dopers,

amateur cycling is riddled with whiny, preening, posturing people who take their sport and themselves waaay too seriously.

(And also with dopers.) And while I love to race, I have a particular disdain for the noxious atmosphere of pretense that permeates bike racing. You’ve got to try to relax and have fun on the bike.

So it was that on the evening of Friday, August 22, I found myself standing in front of American Cyclery, a bike shop at the edge of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The big race would be taking place on Sunday, and the shop was hosting a “pre-event rally [and] fiesta … a unique opportunity to mingle with the seedy underbelly of San Francisco’s bicycle culture and ride with them off-road in the urban environ.” If things like gratuitous tattooing and stickers reading ONE F * CKING SPEED count as culture, then this was nothing short of a renaissance.

The sidewalk was brimming with 40 or 50 riders, from as close by as the Mission District and as far away as Europe, who were passing the time chatting boisterously and guzzling beer. Nearby, someone produced a joint and was immediately pounced upon for a hit. “It’s got tobacco mixed in with it,” he warned, but the pouncer was undeterred.

This being San Francisco, it started to

get legitimately cold after a while. Thankfully, everybody soon mounted up and, with a great deal of whooping, wheelies, and merriment, headed the wrong way down Stanyan Street to begin an assault on Golden Gate Park, which was massed with people awaiting a Radiohead concert. As was clearly apparent from our riding, a good percentage of us were intoxicated.

We turned onto some dirt footpaths where signs informed us that cycling was strictly prohibited. The guy in front of me, riding a brakeless fixed-gear with cyclocross tires, was quickly undone by the sandy terrain. He wiped out almost immediately, taking others down with him. No sooner would we dart into a copse of trees than we’d emerge back onto the pavement, much to the bewilderment of the many pedestrians on their way to hear the plaintive whimpering of Thom Yorke.

As we swarmed toward the Golden Gate Bridge like angry bumblebees, I was elated to be riding in San Francisco with a bunch of half-crazed cyclists, but I felt a little pang of

82 Outside

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Blood, sweat, and beers: clockwise, tighty-whiteys; Sycip Cycles pre-party; nasty strawberry; American Cyclery pre-party; pro rider (and“golden boy”) Barry Wicks, third place; the 7-Eleven bandito; rides; lederhosen

guilt every time we tore past some fleecevest-wearing, designer-dog-walking couple trying to enjoy an evening stroll in the park unmolested. But, then, the pedestrians didn’t really seem all that upset. Some even found us amusing: Small gears, though perfect for technical trails, leave you spinning with a comical urgency on pavement.

We crossed the bridge and made a left, immediately hitting a pretty steep paved climb into the Marin Headlands, where there was supposed to be a cookout. By this time gaps had formed in the ride, so at the top of the climb we stopped long enough to regroup and consume more beer. Once back together and further emboldened by alcohol, we blasted heedlessly down a steep and twisty fire road to Kirby Cove, a small clearing on the bay with a beautiful view. There we found not a grand feast but a pathetic offering of cold veggie dogs. Fortunately, someone passed around a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and another busted out

a joint nearly as fat as his top tube.

The sun began to set, turning the fog and the Frisco skyline orange. Ibis Cycles founder Scot Nicol showed up in a jacket emblazoned with a talking acorn, which suggested that onlookers should S U P E R - R E L A X . As it got darker, all that was left was to climb the long, steep fire road back to the bridge, a preview of the many arduous climbs that would follow.

As I headed back, I thought I’d finally settled into the spirit of the event. I’m usually wary of anything bearing the hallmarks of adolescence, including “movements,” “cultures,” and wearing costumes, but I was happy to be on my bike, dazzled by my surroundings, and somewhat drunk and stoned.

I will not worry about acting like an adolescent, I told myself. I will do as the talking acorn commands. I will super-relax.

W I T H M O R N I NG CA M E sobriety and the drive up to Napa, and with sobriety came apprehension. This was no jaunt to the

FRILLYDRESSES,HELGA WIGS,FISHNETS,AND FEATHERBOAS ALMOST OUTNUMBER TRADITIONALCYCLING KITS—ANDTHAT’S JUSTONTHE MEN.

Marin Headlands; this would be something like 30 miles of steep, technical climbs and descents on a former World Cup mountainbike circuit. And while I had no designs on a high finish, I still wanted to acquit myself well, and to me that meant finishing—and not in last place. The prospect of returning to New York without a finisher’s SSWC bottle opener was horrible to contemplate.

My apprehension was not assuaged by a painful pre-ride of the course after checking in. I picked up my number plate (literally a paper picnic plate with a numeral scrawled on OUTSIDEONLINE.COM

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Outside 83

it with a crayon) and post-race burrito ticket, then headed out. There were course markers, but they were contradictory, and querying others revealed that nobody really knew exactly which route the course would take. The only sign that made any sense was the one that warned you to beware of mountain lions.

I followed some red arrows and found myself on a very long, very steep ascent. The previous evening’s festivities didn’t help my performance, and the air and terrain were so dry, I was afraid the slightest pedal strike would set the entire park ablaze. Finally, after stopping numerous times, I reached the top of the climb, surveyed Napa Valley as forlornly as the guy in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road surveys the road, and began a nasty, rocky descent that felt a lot like riding down a spiral staircase.

I was reminded of an entry on the SSWC blog that had asked, “How do you feel about feeling like shit the next day? Like it? Go rigid.” Despite this, I had opted to ride a rigid fork, partly to be badass but mostly because I don’t own any suspension forks. As I picked my way gingerly through the stony switchbacks, I realized that I would indeed be feeling like shit. The pessimist I thought I’d left in San Francisco had returned.

Tomorrow,he predicted,is going to be ugly.

Nonetheless, I arrived the following morning ready to do battle with the terrain, dehydration, mountain lions, common sense, and hundreds of other single-speeders. Unlike a great many of the men, however, I was wearing neither a dress nor ladies’ undergarments.

At a nearby 7-Eleven, I queued up behind a man in black—i.e., a black bandito mask, cape, and bikini—purchasing a bear claw. By the time I fastened my number to my handlebars, I’d also seen a skin-tight orange bodysuit, a leopard-print leotard, a Mexican wrestling mask, and a golden Speedo with, of course, matching cape. Almost half the field was campily attired, and many of them were dangerously close to exposing their genitals.

It was to be a Le Mans start, so race organ-

I HADTO HAVE ONE OF THOSE BOTTLE OPENERS.IWOULD HAVETO BE COMPETITIVE. I GLOWEREDAT ANEARBYMAN INABRA AND BUNNYEARS.

izer Curtis Inglis had us all go about 200 yards out, deposit our bikes, and return to the start. He then gave us a briefing on the course and informed us that only the first 150 finishers (out of 350 entrants) would get a bottle opener with their placement number on it.

“What?!” I gasped. As I’ve mentioned, I had to have one of those bottle openers. Now I would actually have to be competitive.I glowered at a nearby man in a bra and bunny ears.

Inglis then announced that there were some tighty-whitey briefs with the SSWC08 logo printed on the rear end. Anyone who wanted a pair had to race in them, with Branded! the best finish scorCan’t win your own SSWC tattoo? Here’s three ing $600 in swag. other chances to leave a mark. —JAMES Y. LEE A group of riders r u s h e d f o r wa rd , THE TAT: THE TAT: THE TAT: grabbed their undies, a n d we n t o f f to change. I winced at the ungodly crotchal chafing and taintal bruising they would THE TASK: Finish THE TASK: Make it THE TASK: Round an Ironman. to the Games—and Cape Horn, in soon experience.

Kona diehards say actually compete— the world’s most Then, after a few theirs is the only and nobody will treacherous more words, Inglis one that earns ink, blink, whether you sailing waters, like called out “Go!” but we don’t. medal or not.

Schouten.

And off we went.

THE ENSUING hours of hot, dry, ugly undulation I can compare only to (1) being trapped in a Carl Decker with sauna full of corduroyhis just reward clad, dry-humping college students on ecstasy and (2) moving a love seat into a five-story walkup by yourself on a hellish summer day.

Once I found my bike, which I’d strategically left next to a tandem, I hit the fire road. I’ve been in many races in my life, and, being a rider of meager skills, I’ve been forced to stare at lots of posteriors, but never have I beheld such an assortment of grotesquely attired ones. I’m thinking particularly of the ones wrapped in official SSWC08 briefs, which almost immediately became soggy, saggy, misshapen, and brown.

The first climb was too steep for most of us, so we dismounted and trudged up it, finally reaching a flattish section of “flowy” singletrack that could have passed for the Serengeti had it not been for the bagpiper by the fork in the trail. Next came the twisty, technical, gnarly descent I’d ridden the day before, which was lined with spectators in all manner of ridiculous attire.

Some cheered, others heckled, and pretty much all of them appeared drunk. It was like a bizarro Alpe d’Huez, in that, instead of going up, on a road, in France, we were going down, on a rock-strewn trail, in wannabe France.

It was around this point I realized that, for the first time in my racing “career,” I was truly a part of the main event. I’ve raced (poorly) in national championships, but always with my age group. I’ve raced in the most competitive category at an event, but only at local races, early in the morning, when nobody’s watching and nobody cares.

I’ve raced at a track during a cookout. I’ve even raced cyclocross in the middle of a state fair, but the only spectators besides friends and family were bemused passersby. Never before had I been an essential component of the thing that everybody had come out to see, one of the hundreds of people who’d surrendered themselves to humiliation and pain all for the love of the bike. At last, I was part of the show.

It dawned on me that, pain notwithstanding, I was actually super-relaxed and having fun. It didn’t hurt that the trail was gorgeous. Due to the extremes in elevation, the course took us through continued on page 106

84 Outside

Illustrations by Chris Philpot

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N 42.0 8

W â&#x20AC;&#x201C;113.70

Vehicles shown with aftermarket accessories from an independent supplier are not covered by the GM New Vehicle Limited Warranty. GM is not responsible for such alterations. Š General Motors Corporation, 2009.

HUMMER.COM

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October 4-9 Outdoor & Travel Photography Paolo Marchesi

October 4-9 Photographing People Jeff Lipsky

Learn from the Pros

September 27October 2 The Art & Craft of Portraiture Jake Chessum

Outsideâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s world-renowned contributing photographers Jeff Lipsky, Paolo Marchesi, and Jake Chessum lead workshops in Santa Fe, New Mexico, this fall for beginners to professionals.

September 4-6 Mastering Digital Workflow Using Adobe Lightroom with Jerry Courvoisier September 27-October 2 The Basics of Digital Photography with Rick Allred (in partnership with)

>For complete details visit outsideonline.com/workshops

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the essentials The Best Gear, Tested

>covet

Wood Craft

RICHARD BERGEN

Wooden kayaks weigh significantly less than most modern fiberglass boats, so they are easier to handle on land and faster on water. The catch? These handcrafted works of art can cost as much as a new car. A red-cedar-strip Guillemot Kayaks Night Heron, like the one pictured here, takes Connecticut designer Nick Schade more than 300 hours to build and costs $22,000. (This one is owned by New York’s Museum of Modern Art.) While even Schade’s baseline models are pricey (from $10,000; woodenkayaks.com), there is another option: Make one yourself. With household tools, 30 clamps, and a little space in the garage, you can build your own with a kit from Redfish Kayaks for $1,495 (redfishkayak.com). Get working now and you’ll be paddling, in style, by next spring.

—JUSTIN NYBERG

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ESSENTIALS <NIKE LUNARGLIDE+

Outside Editors’ Choice

In a word: sproing! These were the most responsive trainers we tested, capable of turning every road run into an all-out dash.

The key: Nike’s new midsole compound, made of rubberized foam. Though it’s airy light, testers found it surprisingly energetic.

It is also set at an angle, so runners with a neutral foot strike or mild pronation got the support they needed—without the chunky block of denser foam you find in most stability shoes. As for fit? Seamless and soft— like a slipper. 10.9 oz; $100; niketown.com

>running shoes

Swift Kicks

The best road and trail shoes let you forget about your footwear and just enjoy the run

BY JUSTIN NYBERG

ECCO BIOM B> The Bioms are all about tough love. The heel and forefoot are extra firm, designed to encourage you to land on your midfoot, like a barefooter. Some of our test team, mostly lighter runners, adapted to the new concept and embraced the soft-stepping gait it fosters. Others found the shoe a little jarring, particularily on long runs or downhills.

If you have a biomechanically correct stride and time to ease into them, you’ll probably love the Bioms. But if you live for cushion, probably not. 11.2 oz; $198; biomproject.com

<SALOMON XT HAWK If your trails are mellow and your gait is quick, the Hawk is your shoe. With a lowprofile tread, medial posting for pronation control, and a pace-pushing forward lean, the Hawk performs like a road shoe, albeit with toe protection and a gusseted tongue.

While faster runners gave it high marks for its flexible, low-to-the-ground forefoot and low overall weight, it’s not ideal for gnarly terrain: The pull-tab laces don’t secure the foot well enough for tight cornering or steep downhills. 11.2 oz; $115; salomonsports.com

Photographs by Shana Novak

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<THE NORTH FACE WOLF RIDGE Pronators usually get snubbed when shopping for trail-running shoes—there simply aren’t that many options out there. But the Wolf Ridge offers real medial support for long, flat trails and stretches of tarmac on the way to the trailhead. The extra support and low weight make longer, base-building, and fitness runs a delight, especially for runners with low arches. Our only quibble: While the shoe is solidly built, the upper’s mesh and liner seem a little cheap for the price. 12.3 oz; $110; thenorthface.com

ADIDAS SUPERNOVA SEQUENCE 2> What’s the Sequence’s secret ingredient?

We’d guess butter. The richly cushioned midsole and padded upper are about as comfortable as they get. Add in a gently corrective medial post and a deeply grooved, shock-absorbing heel and you’ve got the smoothest running shoe of the test.

The result: Slower and longer runs are a breeze. However, as with the ASICS model below, faster runners may want more responsiveness.11.8 oz; $100; shopadidas.com

<ASICS GEL-PULSE New to running? Minding your budget?

The Gel-Pulse is a reasonably priced version of ASICS’s top-tier road trainers, designed for nonpronators who want a lot of cushioning. The combination of a luxuriously soft but still very lightweight midsole drew rave reviews from most of our Gear Army testers, especially heavy heel-strikers and slow-and-steady types who crave comfort over speed. For the price, it’s simply a steal. 11.5 oz; $85; asics.com

OO How did we test these shoes? We mobilized our Gear Army—in this case, 30 experienced runners with varying foot types and training levels—and had them log several weeks in their assigned shoe. To enlist, go to outsideonline.com/geararmy.

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Outside 89

ESSENTIALS 5

3

6

4

1 2 7 8

>outfitted for

Fly-Fishing

All you need to cast away BY RYAN KROGH AND ABE STREEP 1. ALL-PURPOSE ROD If you can swing only one trout rod, make it Winston’s nine-foot, five-weight Boron IIX, which has the company’s trademark smooth action but enough muscle to cast accurately across long runs. $670; winstonrods.com 2. SMALL-STREAM ROD The

seven-foot three-weight in Scott’s new wallet-friendly A3 series was easy to maneuver in the narrow canyons of New Mexico’s Guadalupe River, scoring a creel’s worth of eager browns. $335; scottflyrod.com 3. WADERS Waist-mounted suspenders on Patagonia’s stretchy Guidewater waders allow you to roll the chest fabric down and cool off on hot days. $425; patagonia.com 4. NET Orvis’s 20-inch Clearwater is sturdy and well balanced and clips easily to a pack or vest. $55; orvis.com 5. HIP PACK No more annoying, mud-clogged zippers. The easyaccess compartments on William Joseph’s new Surge pack are sealed with (truly) watertight magnetic strips. $109; williamjoseph.net 6. SHADES Of all the sunglasses we tested, Smith’s Riverside, with polarized, scratch-resistant glass lenses, cut surface glare the best. Go with the copper tint. $159; smithoptics.com 7. BOOTS The dilemma: Felt-soled boots, while offering superior traction, make it easy to unwittingly spread invasive species. The solution: Simms’s sturdy Guide Streamtread, with a new, much-hyped Vibram rubber sole that really does work as well as felt. $200; simmsfishing.com 8. REEL Bauer’s new large-arbor Rogue 2 is cork-light (4.3 ounces) but burly enough for any trout, with an easy-to-use drag. Five-to-six-weight, $345; bauerflyreel.com 90 Outside

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FIT To pull every watt of power out of your legs, your shoe needs to fit perfectly (slop = wasted energy). Four plastic pieces like this one (at the heel, instep, arch, and little toe) are heatmolded to your foot at the bike shop for a custom fit.

DURABILITY It looks like a piece of your lunch bag, but this is actually a thin strip of fiberglass that maintains the shape of the heel. Unlike preformed heel cups, the fiberglass doesn’t stretch out—the main reason most shoes need replacement.

>deconstructed

A MountainBike Shoe WEIGHT The carbon-fiber outsole reduces weight over typical nylon outsoles by up to 25 percent, while stiffening the shoe for greater power. The drawback? The material is also twice the cost: about $152 per pair.

What’s going on inside a top-level MTB cleat? We dissected this $380 model to find out. BY ALICIA CARR INSULATION A wishbone-shaped piece of mesh wraps the pieces of thermomoldable plastic in the heel to keep the foam from being scorched by the 200degree temperatures it will be subjected to during a custom fitting.

EFFICIENCY The number-one way you lose power? Heel slip. This tacky, metal-infused polyester, placed at the back of the shoe, is textured like a cat’s tongue—smooth in one direction, grippy in the other—and helps lock your foot in place.

>THE VICTIM

Shimano’s SH-M310 ($380; shimano.com)

COMFORT Most shoe tongues are just floppy fabric. These Band-Aid-like strips of PVC plastic give the M310’s tongue an arch that matches the shape of your foot, adding both comfort and a touch of power-enhancing rigidity.

CUSHION Party mustache? Nope.

This piece of high-density foam in the heel conforms to foot contours for a blister-free fit, but springs back to its original shape afterwards, losing only 5 percent of its puff over the life of the shoe.

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Outside 91

Gear Up for

www.amazon.com/outdoors

365 Days of Adventure

Introducing

amazon.com/outdoors Explore thousands of products from top outdoor brands in Amazon’s new Outdoor Recreation Store.

Shop today for special offers on gear and apparel for every adventure.

Preview THE NATIONAL PARKS – America’s Best Idea, a film by Ken Burns airing this fall on PBS Pre-order the DVD at amazon.com/outdoors before July 31 and PBS will donate 5% of proceeds to the National Park Foundation

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Discover your Parks! Visit www.nationalparks.org

bodywork Fitness, Health & Nutrition

>the pillars of fitness

Part Three:

Mobilize Your Strength

You don’t need a mirrored gym or fancy equipment to build the right muscles. You need a whole new workout. BY MARC PERUZZI

>

special fold-out section

SCOTT MCDERMOTT

COMING SOON Part 4: Agility [November]

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Up or down, the GEL-Pulseâ&#x201E;˘ cushions every step along the way.

asics.com

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BODYWORK Every sport we do as outdoor athletes demands that the full body participate.

Build Power, Not Bulk IF YOU’VE BEEN FOLLOWING our Pillars of Fitness series (“Building a Base,” March, and “Speed Up,” May), congratulations. By now you’ve dedicated yourself to sustainable, yearround conditioning and pushed yourself harder in pursuit of your summertime endurance goals. As the dingos say, good on ya, mate. (Need to catch up? Check out our previous installments at outsideonline.com/bodywork.)

Now, with the cooler, shorter days of autumn approaching, and your long summer runs and rides coming to an end, it’s time to rebuild the muscle mass that atrophied while you focused on endurance. Here’s why: As any contestant on America’s Gargantuan Loser could tell you, lean muscle burns more energy. You’ll keep the weight off easier this fall and winter if you remember that. More important, as the seasons change, so do your athletic needs. That 50-mile bike ride won’t be much help when you need to hold an icy edge on the steeps at Killington. Fall soccer, skiing and snowboarding, surfing vacations, drunken pond hockey—they all demand strength that an exclusive cardio routine won’t give you.

The good news? Building real strength no longer means paying membership fees and standing in line for a sweaty Nautilus machine glistening with staph bacteria. This month, our experts have designed a mobile strength routine—envision the athletic form of Jackie Robinson, not the ’roided-up Barry Bonds—that challenges your balance more than your biceps and delivers total-body power. All you need are a few simple pieces of equipment (see “Create Your Own Fitness Center,” opposite) and a couple of hours a week.

It’s time to awaken your dormant athleticism.

Step 1: Skip the Gym Your favorite machines and lifts are designed to destroy you. I’m a walking test case.

In high school, I lifted weights at a meat locker of a gym in the X: the run-down, tattoo-parlor-and-dollar-movie section of Springfield, Massachusetts. The gym, Big Daddy’s, had recently produced 1983’s Mr. Universe, Jeff King. Just about every thumb breaker in the greater Springfield area chalked up and grunted at the place.

Big Daddy’s was my introduction to strength training. In theory, I was there to get stronger for sports, but recreational power lifting became a sport in itself. I favored bench press above all. Then seated military presses, seated leg presses, and seated preacher curls. By

NANNA L. MEYER: A doctor of exercise physiology with the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, Meyer serves as the sports dietitian for U.S. Speed Skating. This month she provides dietary guidelines for strength training. ERIC MINKWITZ: A former professional football player, Minkwitz is an independent sports-performance trainer who’s conditioned hundreds of athletes, employing a range of mobile-strength moves that don’t require complex equipment or expensive gyms.

PER LUNDSTAM: As the strength-and-conditioning coach for the U.S. Ski Team, Lundstam has helped oversee the team’s transition from “correlative” strength training (building bigger quads and glutes to theoretically improve skiing power) to “supportive” strength training (strengthening the core and muscles that actually improve skiing) and its current emphasis on mobile strength training.

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CORBIS UK/FANCY/ALAMY

MEET THE EXPERTS

overpowered my hamstrings in a turn and pop! Blame the seated leg press.

The worst part? All those exercises failed to make me stronger in a useful way. Michol Dalcourt, a longtime professional hockey trainer in Canada, witnessed this dynamic firsthand when he compared the performance of seasoned pros, placed on machinedependent workouts, with rookie skaters just off the farm. “Ask a farm kid what they do and it’s ‘Chores,’ ” says Dalcourt.

“Moving stuff. Shoveling. The body is stronger as a whole than the sum of its

CREATE YOUR OWN FITNESS CENTER Five months of health-club dues buys all the mobile-strength-training equipment you’ll ever need. This will get you going.

1) FLEXBANDS: These inexpensive bands replace the complicated cable systems at the club and add resistance to hundreds of moves. $10–$30; jumpstretch.com 2) DOUBLE-GRIP HANDLE BALLS: Most medicine balls don’t help hand and forearm strength. These do. $40–$55; jumpusa.com/doublegrip 3) TNT POWER CABLES: Better than the flexbands (above) for rows and pulldowns, these cables can go with you on trips. $35; performbetter.com 4) BOSU HOME BALANCE TRAINER: Too many uses to list here, but this home-gym staple challenges balance like no other device. From $100; bosu.com 5) WEIGHTS: Look for secondhand dumbbells and plates on Craigslist. Or get some bags of sand at the hardware store and shove them into an old pack.

“When we first start to move as babies, we learn to coordinate everything together in basic movement patterns,” says Lee Burton, director of athletic training at Averett University and a pioneer of the mobility-before-strength movement.

“But isolating moves like leg presses and knee extensions don’t communicate enough with the rest of the body. This creates asymmetries that set you up for injury, and that disrupts the entire body.”

Here’s what all that anti-mobile lifting got me: During a frigid mogul-skiing contest in New Hampshire, my left humerus squirmed from its cozy socket on a misplaced pole plant. I credit the shoulder injury to the military presses, which, with their extreme range of motion, stretch and degrade the ligaments that are intended to hold your shoulder in place.

Shortly thereafter, I herniated a disk in my lower back, a condition that had me nearly crippled for most of my twenties.

Thank you, bench press, which makes your lower back weak relative to your chest, arms, and shoulders. Much later I would blow an ACL skiing powder in Canada. Didn’t even fall. My quads simply

parts. They never set foot in the gym, but they were stronger.”

A 2008 study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research validates that anecdotal evidence. In the study, one group of participants worked out for 16 weeks on machines with fixed ranges of motion, while the other group used freeform weighted cables. The result? The fixed-machine group increased strength by 57 percent, while the free-form group increased by 115 percent. But even more telling, the free-form group’s balance improved a staggering 245 percent, compared with 49 percent for the fixed group.

Which brings us to the state of the art in strength training. Mobile strength means training the body to produce power in an endless range of real-world movements to build supple and flexible muscles in sync with the kinetic chain (i.e., your entire body). It’s the natural evolution of the functional-strength movement, and some refer to it as “usable” strength training. Whether you brand it farm-boy strength or mobile strength, it’s based on the notion that the only strength that matters is the strength you use. Because you can’t pump iron at Big Daddy’s forever.

Some of the strongest athletes never set foot in a gym.

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BELOW: PATRIK GIARDINO/GETTY. RIGHT: WYLIE MAERCKLEIN/GETTY.

my freshman year of college, I could bench 310 pounds—twice my body weight—and military-press 225 pounds behind my head a couple dozen times.

What I didn’t know then was that my favorite machines and free-weight lifts were destroying me. Those contraptions and benches are designed to isolate and supersize muscles. But isolation is the enemy. Every sport we do as outdoor athletes demands that the full body participate. You don’t biceps-curl your way up an ice climb or bench-press your way down a river.

Step 3: Build With Balance Ditch the machines. These moves engage multiple muscle systems for realworld power. (For reps and frequency, see “Mapping Your Workouts,” opposite.)

Two eggs, 30–60 minutes before a workout, will give you all the protein you need.

Step 2: Eat for Strength Lifting on empty does more harm than good. Here’s how to fuel up for your next workout.

BEFORE> For endurance, it’s best to eat

carbs two or three hours before exercise; for strength training, you’ll need a mix of protein and carbs 30 minutes to an hour beforehand. Muscles need amino acids and glycogen for energy and to limit the damage you’re doing under load. “Strength training in a fasted state will have a negative effect on muscle regeneration,” says Meyer. “Six grams of protein—one egg, a glass of milk, or a cup of yogurt—is probably enough, but 10 to 15 grams is ideal. More protein than that would slow down the digestive process.” As for carbs, 30 grams will do. That’s what’s in most exercise bars or a small bowl of cereal.

DURING> Water is fine unless you foolishly skipped that pre-workout meal, in which case a sports drink with a mix of carbs and protein should get you through.

AFTER> As with endurance recovery, the first 30 minutes after strength training are crucial, but don’t go overboard with heavy shakes loaded with 50 grams of protein.

“More is not better with protein,” says Meyer. “It seems that repeated, smaller amounts is more effective. This lets the muscle pick up the amino acids it needs without getting overloaded trying to clear out the extra.” What you ate before your workout (yogurt, chocolate milk, cereal) works here, too, but be sure to revert to your normal diet of lean proteins, veggies, and whole-grain carbs later.

3) UNDERHAND MEDICINE-BALL THROWS

Again, stand with feet hip-width. Hold the medicine ball between your knees like you’re shooting a granny-style free throw. Tapping into the power of your hips, launch the ball at a 45-degree angle.

(Bounce it off a wall for easy retrieval, or just lob it toward North Korea.)

4) DONKEY

>LOWER-BODY STRENGTH 1) STRETCH-BAND DEAD LIFTS

Standing on a stretch band with your feet hip width apart, reach down and grab the middle of the band with both hands in an overhand grip. With your hips high, your abs contracted, and your spine neutral (not arched or bowed), initiate the dead lift by driving your hips forward, keeping the band tight against your body through the full movement.

To finish, flex your glutes and squeeze your shoulder blades tight.

2) MEDICINE-BALL SQUAT AND THROW

With your feet at hip width, raise a medicine ball to your chest, keeping your spine in a neutral position. Now squat, bending your knees to 90 degrees while keeping them behind your toes, and rotate your torso so the ball is positioned over one quad. Driving forcefully out of the squat, throw the ball at a 45-degree angle up and away from your body—making sure the cat is safely out of the way first.

KICKS

Running and cycling favor quad strength over glute power. But in sports like skiing, glutes balance the load and provide explosiveness. Starting from a standing position, move into a downward-dog yoga stance, being sure to contract your abs as you do so. Lift one leg and slowly bring the knee toward your chest. Drive your heel back explosively with a strong glute contraction, like a kicking burro.

>UPPER-BODY STRENGTH 1) PUSH-UPS PLUS

A cornerstone of the L.A.-based Sports Medicine Institute’s training programs, this modified push-up should forever replace your bench press. Set up in a push-up position with your hands slightly narrower than shoulder width. Descend toward the floor, squeezing your shoulder

POWER OUT OF THE GATE Per Lundstam’s four keys to stronger skiing 1) Look at strength training as a way to support your skiing, not as a goal in itself.

“Instead of just trying to develop isolated strength, we develop the supportive components to build strength on skis,” says Lundstam. “There’s not much correlation between performance and the strength gains you make under a bar at the squat rack.”

2) Don’t let your baseline aerobic fitness slide. “Our athletes work year-round on stationary bikes. That aerobic efficiency lets them recover quickly. And when they’re tired or injured from racing, we can train on the bike for strength and explosiveness.”

3) Build muscle only where you need it. “We do body-shape analysis to gauge an athlete’s needs in different disciplines. If the athlete needs more muscle, we try to promote that muscle growth on the lower extremities for the low center of gravity that supports skiing. The focus is on the core and down. We only train the upper body with medicine-ball throws for injury prevention.”

4) Mobility trumps strength. “This is the biggest change in how we approach training. You need mobility to use the force you’ve developed. So we do a lot of work combining strength with mobility: deep single-leg squats; a lot of overhead bar work to address mobility and flexibility in the hips; physioballs and Bosus.

Often we don’t even use weight—could be broomsticks and light bars. The idea is to use your force in as many situations as possible.”

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blades together, until your elbows reach a 90-degree angle. Press up and return to the straight-arm starting position.

Now raise, or “wing,” your shoulder blades, and then, without bending your elbows, close them again. (To make it harder, string a light exercise band from hand to hand over your back.)

up (left) by conditioning the upper back. Wrap a stretch band around a post or tree trunk, then sit upright on the ground. Level your chin, pull your abs in, and grasp the band with an underhand grip. Close your shoulder blades and row until your upper arms are vertical and the band meets your belly.

2) PRONE

your left leg a little forward and on top of a Bosu ball. Grasp the cable with both hands at hip level and initiate a chopping motion, from low left to high right.

The key is to contract your abs and stabilize your entire body throughout the motion. Hold the chop at chest level for five seconds and repeat.

3) KICK, SLIDE,

>TORSO AND BALANCE MOVEMENTS

SHOULDER CIRCUIT

A few weeks of these shoulder circuits, from the Athletes’ Performance Institute in Tempe, Arizona, will hone your back and shoulders like no machine could. Lay prone on the ground, face down, and position your arms so you form the letter Y. Your thumbs should be pointing skyward. With your shoulder blades closed, move your arms to a T position before bending your elbows to form the letter W. Repeat.

Anchor a heavy stretch band over the top of a tree limb or pull-up bar and grasp the band with an overhand grip. Lean back so your body is at a 45-degree angle to the ground. Lift one foot a few inches, and dig in with the heel of the other. Now employ your upper-back muscles to “row” your chest toward the band.

3) STRETCH-BAND ROW

2) CABLE CHOPS WITH BOSU

Here’s a homespun version of the low row favored by gym gorillas. The goal is not to build huge shoulders but to balance the strength gains of the push-

This exercise can be done with a cable machine or light exercise band anchored beneath a door. Stand sideways to the cable in a staggered squat, with

1) STRETCHBAND SUPINE PULLS

PUNCH

Begin in a staggered squat, with your left foot set back somewhat and a medicine ball held at your chest like you’re about to pass a basketball. Keep your shoulder blades closed, elbows bent, and abs tight. To begin, quickly step back with your left foot and land on the ball of your foot.

Keeping your chest square to your hips, and without twisting any joint (especially not your rear ankle or knee), slide your right foot partway back so your feet end up staggered again. At the same moment, punch the medicine ball forward with an explosive outward push, before pulling it back to your chest.

Mapping Your Workouts Got the moves down? Here’s how to put them all together in a six-week program that will deliver results. Do one set of each exercise, following the recommended number of reps below. For resistance, pick medicine balls and stretch bands that leave you feeling worked by the final rep. To avoid soreness, make sure you train at least two days per week, but not more than three, and remember to rest after intense sessions.

Week

1 2 3 4 5 6

Focus

Reps

Goals

Strength Endurance

15–20

Using little to no weight and high repetitions, this phase builds your base and lets you focus on technique before intensity.

Basic Strength Initiation

8–10

Cut the frequency back to moderate and gently ramp up the weight and intensity. This preps the body for the harder weeks to come.

Basic Strength

4–6

Boost the intensity by adding incremental resistance while reducing reps.

Incorporate the more complex exercises you’ve avoided.

Strength Power

3–5

This low-volume, high-intensity week encourages the type of stress that leads to peaking and generates usable power and speed for outdoor sports.

Active Recovery

0

Run, bike, play, and rededicate yourself to nutrition, stretching, and self-massage.

Strength Endurance II

15–20

Revert to high reps and low intensity for maintenance. It should feel easy.

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BOB BURNQUIST continued from page 73

Council–certified wood for its ramps and then donated that wood after the event to build skate parks in blighted neighborhoods like Compton. His current pet project is Bob Burnquist’s Global Cooling Challenge, an environmental-education program for middle- and high-school students.

Bob is fortunate to exist in the moment when an athlete can translate activism into dollars and not simply into the occasional box of complimentary granola bars. He’ll lecture for 15 minutes on the hypocrisy of Kobe Bryant shilling for fast food while acknowledging “it’s easy for me to say that, because I can afford to be choosy.” Bob won’t indulge me in the issue of his finances, but it’s safe to say his annual income is well into the six figures.

As we putter the Rhino back toward the vert bowl, Bob spies Dora outside her studio.

I ask her what she thinks of her son’s version of art—all the ramps and jumps and stunts.

“I think it’s crazy,” she says. “I don’t watch.

But I hear, because people call me.”

Bob didn’t warn her about his most dangerous stunt ever, in 2006, when he flew off a ramp built on the rim of the Grand Canyon, grinded a rail over the precipice, then BASEjumped 1,600 feet to the bottom. But Dora’s a mom; she knew.

“It was terrible,” she says, but she’s more bemused than concerned. “Lotus is still scared today.”

“She’s not scared,” Bob says, pulling me away. “Of course she was worried. She’d say, ‘My dad likes to jump off cliffs. He’s crazy.’”

BOB KEEPS A SPIRAL-BOUND notebook of dreams in his home office. It’s full of ideas for ramps and bowls and pools, some in bizarre geometric shapes cooked up by him and Danny Way, who’s also his bandmate in the indie-rock group Escalera (Danny on guitar and Bob on drums) and the only other person who understands his twisted vision.

Both Bob and Danny operate outside the established professional paths of street and vert skating. Most pros are street skaters, because it’s easier to learn; all you need is some blacktop. Vert skaters require expensive ramps, which means sponsors, which means pressure to win competitions. Bob and Danny participate in these competitions and demos, but they spend much of their time one-upping each other with outlandish stunts. Danny is most famous for jumping the Great Wall, in 2005, and for dropping from the top of the 82-foot-tall guitar at Las Vegas’s Hard Rock Cafe a year later. Last November, he set the Guinness land-speed record for a towed skateboard, reaching 74 miles per hour while being pulled behind a vehicle driven by pro skater and MTV star

Rob Dyrdek in the California desert.

It was skateboarding’s improvisational nature that drew Bob to begin with. His dad gave him his first board at 11, when severe asthma kept him from excelling at soccer.

Bob was immediately drawn to the “whole individual thing” of skating. “Whatever I did was on my own merit—if I fell, it was my fault,” he says. Young Bob quickly became obsessed; he was winning competitions in Brazil by his early teens, but he remained off the radar in the U.S. until 1995, when, at 18, he won the Slam City Jam, in Vancouver. In 1997, he won his first X Games medal, a bronze on the vert ramp, and was Thrasher magazine’s skater of the year. He moved to the rancho in 1999.

Bob plops into a rolling chair at the desk in his office cabana and walks me through his notebook. He stops first at early scrawls of the 2006 Grand Canyon trick. It was just a wild notion until the producer of the Discovery Channel series Stunt Junkies called.

Bob explained his concept and the producer howled, “I love it!”

“That one was on paper for six months,” Bob says. “Sometimes ideas are in here for a couple years.”

He flips onward, past one sketch for a jump over a Boeing 747 affixed with a rail, and another for a 100-foot drop off a statue in São Paulo that would best Danny’s Hard Rock Cafe height. “I’m extending the offer to Danny to come with me so it’s not like I’m breaking his record,” he says.

As Bob tells it, he’s lucky to have Danny around. Without a competitor talented enough to attempt such maniacal pursuits, his rarefied airspace could get very lonely.

“When I make stuff, I call him and say, ‘Dude, you know what I just did?’”

He switches over to his iMac and spools up clips of his upcoming, three-years-in-themaking part in the Flip Skateboards video Extremely Sorry. Bob obsesses over videos like these because they maintain his credibility in the skate world, which might otherwise regard him as a stunt guy who cashes in at the X Games once a year and then retreats to his ranch to roll around in flaxseed. The film segments—shot on the mega-ramp or in pools and skate parks around the world—are mind-blowing even to jaded pros. In one sequence, he launches across the 50-foot gap, lands on the manual pad, kickflips his board 180 degrees while going 50 miles per hour, then drops in toward the quarterpipe—all without breaking rhythm.

Bob’s riding is so “technical”—the word used over and over (and over) to describe him—that to show it to someone with an untrained eye, like me, he actually has to slow down the tape. Chris Stiepock, general manager of the X Games, says that Bob’s

subtlety, his emphasis on absurd intricacies, is almost impossible for a casual fan to appreciate. It’s one reason Bob may never be as well known as Tony Hawk.“You would see [Bob’s] run and you wouldn’t be terribly impressed.

And then somebody would say, ‘By the way, he just did that switch.’ The things that he’s able to do from a technical standpoint are really what makes him spectacular.”

Bob dials up a video of his loop-with-gap trick on YouTube. We watch him roll up and around the inside of a pipe, jump inverted across a gap at the top, and speed down the other side. The video has, at last count, 1.6 million views. I point out a comment that reads, “You are clearly an idiot.”

“I love the comments,” he says, laughing.

“They’re the best. A lot of ’em—like in the case of the Grand Canyon—say, ‘All right, why? I don’t see any reason.’

“Someone always answers for me. ‘Why not?’”

O N A N Y G I V E N DAY, it’s possible to find

some pro skating on Bob’s mega-ramp or, just as likely, quivering in its shadow. North County is home to many of the biggest brands in action sports—Hurley, DC Shoes, Quiksilver—and also its biggest stars, including Way, Hawk, Shaun White, and dozens of other skaters, BMX riders, and motocross stars, many of whom can’t resist the gravitational pull of the monster that lurks behind Bob Burnquist’s house. It’s like having the Maverick’s surf break in your backyard.

The mega-ramp’s arrival was a seminal moment in skating history. Danny Way had spent a year building the behemoth in secret, with funding from DC Shoes (co-founded by his brother, Damon), at a remote camp in the California desert known as Point X. He told no one what he was up to and then introduced the ramp to the world in the 2003 film The DC Video. Stiepock remembers being at the Winter X Games in Aspen when someone burst into his office clutching the DVD. “There it was in all its glory,” he recalls. “It was one of those moments where you think, I can’t believe what I’m seeing here.”

When Bob saw the footage, his head practically exploded. As explained in the 2005 skate film The Reality of Bob Burnquist, he couldn’t fathom that his friend had concocted the monster in secret and was “just out there skating it alone.” As Bob put it, “Not that many people have that kind of motivation.”

He immediately rang Danny and said,“I gotta skate this thing.” Then he headed to the desert, became the second man to master the mega, and, by the time he’d come back down to earth—physically and otherwise—thought, I need one of these.

Today that prototype ramp is dismantled, and Danny and Bob together own “Mega

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Ramp LLC,” which holds the trademark and builds ramps for various events. Bob built his version for the rancho in 2006 for a reported $280,000 (paid for largely by Oakley and Hurley), using roughly 400 sheets of plywood. Because of the topography, where a hillside backs the roll-in, you can climb a few stairs to the top, whereas the X Games ramp is accessed via the Staples Center elevator.

Bob’s is also the only mega-ramp that stays up between competitions, making it a frequent destination for film crews, who have to knock on his door to ask permission to ride it. Recently, the motocross star Travis Pastrana backflipped a Big Wheel over the 70-foot gap for his MTV show, Nitro Circus.

The street skater Pat Duffy had a less pleasant experience in 2006. Duffy, a highly regarded pro, cleared the 50-foot gap but then lost control as he approached the top of the quarterpipe. He sailed into the air, his legs spinning in place like the Road Runner’s as he dropped 30 feet to the deck. As Duffy would later describe it, his femur “jackhammered” his tibia, breaking the bone in three places.

Up to that point, Bob says, “Street skaters called all the time.” But for a while after that, “all calls just stopped.”

Nonetheless, people remain curious. While I’m at the rancho, Bob’s friend and fellow pro Pierre-Luc Gagnon, or PLG, pops by with some fresh meat: a street skater known as Lizard King (Mike Plumb to his relatives), who’s wiry and abundantly tattooed, with a raspy smoker’s voice and the bug eyes of a man who gets amped for a living.

Bob greets them in the driveway and tells PLG to take Lizard out to the ramp “just to see what he’s getting into.”

Minutes later, Lizard King comes back looking as if he’s seen a ghost. He can’t stop pacing. “I’m not even over there looking at it and I’m having a heart attack,” he says.

“Exactly—because you know what you’re about to do,” says Bob. PLG and Bob discuss a trick Bob’s been working on; I can’t begin to follow the jargon, but Lizard King hangs on their every word. “You guys are fucking out of your minds,” he squeals. “I don’t get how you are like the most mellow people I’ve ever met, because you’re total fucking nutcases.”

Lizard King snatches a bag of pads from PLG’s Mercedes and comes back. “I’ve never been more intimidated by anything in my entire life,” he says, then exhales deeply.

“I wanna get you psyched,“ Bob says. “I’ll go out there with you.”

And so Bob, wearing no pads or helmet, performs step one of mega-ramp desensitization: the crash landing. He tears down the roll-in, sails off the kicker, and ditches the board over the gap, landing on his butt and

sliding to a stop on the transition. Then, because he can’t just leave it at that—bad karma, dude—he hops in the Rhino and rides back to the top, rolls in again, jumps, lands, and grinds the coping of the quarterpipe, just because. When he’s in the air, you can hear the hiss of his wheels, spinning so fast it seems they might fly off.

Lizard King practically collapses. Here he is, terrified, and Bob has casually dropped in as if this were a backyard pool, wearing nothing but jeans and a T-shirt.

“Fuck it, dude,” Lizard yells, rolling toward the edge. “Live life.”

His first attempt isn’t pretty, but he has gusto. There are many whoops and hollers and “Holy shits!” as he rockets down the roll-in, up the launch, and through the air, dropping his board and flying along like someone leaping off a bridge into a lake. He lands awkwardly but safely on his knee pads and slides to the base of the quarterpipe.

“I love you, Bob!” he howls as Bob and I walk back toward the house. “This is the funnest thing I’ve ever done in my life!

Thank you for building this!”

About an hour later, Bob’s phone buzzes.

It’s a text from PLG: Lizard nailed it. “He’s got the right mentality,” Bob says. “Or the wrong one, depending how you look at it.”

BOB’S LOVE OF FLYING is not specific to skateboarding. He’s had his pilot’s license for years, has completed more than 500 skydives and 14 BASE jumps, and has recently begun to experiment with the wingsuit, which is essentially the architecture of a flying squirrel applied to humans.

You don’t have to tell Bob that he can be a walking (skating, jumping) contradiction.

He’s well aware. “I skydive, I fly, I travel to skate. There’s no way I’m carbon-neutral.

Look at all the wood I use.” He says this from the helm of his hybrid Toyota Highlander, en route to a small airport where we’re picking up a rented Cessna for an afternoon flight.

“What I do is live my life, do my thing, and try to make progress toward something,” he adds. “I do more than the average guy, but I definitely need to do more.”

Bob does most of his flying out of a small airstrip close to Lotus’s school. We hop into a vintage white Cessna with blue stripes and he fires the old bird up. He’s in an abundantly pocketed vest that holds a flashlight, his asthma medication, energy bars, maps, flares, and a hydration reservoir—basically everything he’d need to survive if he were to crash-land in the wilderness. We roll onto the runway and, just like that, are airborne.

It is sub-prime central below; the ghosts of stillborn developments haunt the landscape. Some are half built, and you can see the lines of tract-home plots slowly being

reclaimed by the land. There are many empty driveways. “It’s good for us,” Bob says. “Lots of pools.”

We head south and bank over the former site of Point X, where Danny designed the mega-ramp, then Bob loops back and aims the plane toward the Pacific, which glimmers in the distance. He points out—visible from God knows how many miles out—his very own private monster. “Mega-ramp at 12 o’clock,” he says. “Pretty cool, right? I love flying over it.”

As we buzz past the rancho, Bob talks about some of his latest notions. He might like to skate-jump from one skyscraper to another, then launch off the second and BASE-jump to the street below. He can also imagine a corkscrew launch into a megaramp, and maybe even a double loop, like a real-life version of what kids build for Matchbox cars.

Is that even possible?

“I don’t know,” he answers. “I think it is.”

That same question has long been a motivating force for other fringe athletes, including freeskier Shane McConkey, who died in Italy’s Dolomites in March while filming a stunt combining skiing and BASE jumping in a wingsuit.

“We all know what we’re getting into,” Bob says when the subject is broached. “You live with that much risk so you can have that much fun. I can guarantee you Shane experienced some stuff that no human will experience. That’s progression. We can’t hold back progression, and we can’t hold back evolution. We keep going, and we don’t know how to say no.”

Watching Bob smoothly pilot the plane, I’m struck by how much he reminds me of Philippe Petit, the eccentric French tightrope walker who casually strolled back and forth between the World Trade Center towers in 1974. Physically, they’re analogs—living Plastic Men—and they share a disarming calm, what Danny Way calls Bob’s “Zen, one-with-ramp mode.”

Bob tells me he hasn’t seen Man on Wire, the documentary about Petit’s Twin Towers walk, so I explain that what stood out to me most wasn’t the guy’s courage or the physical completion of the feat but that he stopped in the middle, on the wire, thousands of feet above Manhattan, savoring the moment with a smile, as if he didn’t want it to end.

“That’s it,” Bob says. “That’s what he lives for. If I had time, I’d be smiling in the middle of the air, too.”

He thinks for a moment. “Actually, I am, o but you’d have to hit pause to see me.”

JOSH DEAN WROTE ABOUT ANDY RODDICK IN JULY 2008.

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JAGUAR continued from page 79

before the Katie incident, but she now sees the event as an example of wider practices of irresponsibility and cruelty at the park.

“They do a terrible disservice to the animals,” says Carpio. “It’s a big clown show, and because of this clown show, animals are dying.”

Because it failed to honor the agreement signed when Katie went to CIWY, the park has been temporarily prohibited by the government from releasing, accepting, or transporting animals without permission.

“We are cooperating with the investigation and presenting everything that we have,” Baltazar says.

“The veterinarians who work here are very professional,” she says. “Many of the animals come to us abused and mistreated, and we do absolutely everything we can to keep them alive. We’re not negligent in any sense.”

Still, some have chastised the organization. Zoologist Dalma Zsalako, a volunteer coordinator at Hacienda Santa Martha, a wildlife refuge in Ecuador, abhors the idea of wild animals being treated like pets. “I am against putting leashes and collars on wild animals,” she says. “We are a rescue center. We are trying to rehabilitate these animals, not domesticate them. We have dogs and cats for that.”

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Ambue Ari is underequipped to handle any major emergency that might arise. All the parks have full-time vets who treat animals and volunteers’ minor injuries, but Ambue Ari is off the grid. There’s no communications system—the nearest phone is a five-mile hitch or bus ride away—and, when I was there, no evacuation vehicle either, other than a motorcycle.

Whenever I asked Baltazar and Castaños about past cat-related volunteer injuries, they would offer some variation on “Just a few stitches” or “The monkeys are more dangerous than the cats.” I polled dozens of volunteers past and present, and no one shared any horrific tales. But there is a written record that alludes to slightly more.

Every cat has a notebook that volunteers write in for the benefit of those who follow.

One night, flipping through the book on Sama, a jaguar that volunteers are no longer allowed to walk, I came across a 2003 entry that described a volunteer who suffered, among other injuries, a deep cut on the inner thigh, which required 17 stitches. Six months later, the book notes, another volunteer required five stitches.

When I inquire about these incidents, Baltazar says, “I don’t remember everything, or maybe I remember only the good things.”

Meanwhile, CIWY’s supporters vociferously defend the organization. A group of Chilean veterinary students were in the midst of 16 days of practical work at Ambue Ari when I arrived, and they lauded the conditions. “The quality of life these animals enjoy is better than any zoo I’ve seen in South America,” said 22-year-old student Francisco Cordova.

My impression of Ambue Ari was that of a group of hardworking, well-intentioned people with limited resources doing the best they could to rehab wild animals. I saw no signs of abuse or animal mortality. Though CIWY clearly needs more infrastructure and scientific expertise, its rescue centers for black-market animals are the largest in the country and serve a crucial role. “The ministry supports these kinds of initiatives,” says Omar Rocha, director general of the Ministry of Biodiversity and Protected Areas, “but we need them to comply with legal and technical requirements.”

“Animal welfare is at the bottom of Bolivia’s list of concerns,” says Quest director Jonathan Cassidy. “What they have pulled off is a minor miracle.”

WALK WITH A JAGUAR long enough and you begin to think like one. Landmarks cease to exist within their own context, usurped by OUTSIDEONLINE.COM

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In 2006, we perfected the pushup.

In 2009, we perfected it for you.

06.01.09 A V A I L A B L E O N LY AT

JAGUAR

the role they play in the cat’s universe. That log on the trail isn’t a fallen tree but a hardwood scratching post that Rupi gleefully reduces to sawdust with naked claws. The meniscus of flooded lowland isn’t just a marsh; it’s Rupi’s bathtub, where he dips on a hot afternoon.

My fourth day with Rupi begins with a storm. It’s a welcome respite from the thick equatorial heat, but Michaeli predicts it could spell difficulty for our walk. We are joined by a third volunteer, Australian Aaron Zycki. I grab the front of the leash, and ten minutes into the walk, with Rupi sniffing around—crack!—a rotting 25-foot tree falls, and Rupi bolts. Falling trees and panicked cats are not in the jaguar training manual. In a split second, I decide to release the leash, which proves to be a good thing.

Rupi narrowly escapes being smashed by the trunk, though some of the smaller branches hit his flank.

Michaeli, Zycki, and I stand frozen with fear: If Rupi’s idea of a pleasant salutation borders on feline rape, what’s his response to getting hit by a falling tree? Rupi drops his head and stares us down. No one moves. Rupi takes a slow step toward us, shakes it off with a little shimmy, and proceeds with the walk as if nothing has hap-

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pened. Good cat. Good, good cat.

Like the court jester who constantly tempts fate with his volatile king, it’s hard for me to leave a situation that any fool knows could end badly. Walking Rupi is humbling, energizing, addictive—any trepidation is overwhelmed by the narcotic effects of mainlining 1.5 million years of predatory instinct through a frayed leash cinched at my wrist.

A few days later, Rupi rips out the crotch of my pants with his teeth. I happen to be wearing them at the time. It’s a warm, calm morning, but Rupi makes no secret that we’re in for a wild ride. Lying on his side at the edge of a clearing, he springs into the air with half an effort, clears the top of an eight-foot-tall stand of plants, and takes off down the trail, with Zycki and me following behind. A few minutes later, he leads us back to the clearing, leaps on Zycki’s back, and then turns his attention toward me. He sweeps me to the ground, sinks his teeth into the fabric of my pants, and shreds the crotch.

This is just play for Rupi, but I’ve never seen him so riled up. He bats me around on the ground for several minutes until Zycki finally clips the leash to a tree and I manage to escape when the rope pulls taut. We let him unwind for half an hour, until he finally

calms down enough to return to his cage.

Back at camp, I run into an English volunteer named Rob, who’s on his way to walk a 170-pound jaguar he’s been working with for nearly a month. I tell him what happened and then pose a question I’ve been grappling with since my arrival: Is Ambue Ari a black hole of rational thought, a crazy patch of jungle where common sense goes to die? Or is this a center of enlightenment, where compassionate people care for animals with tortured pasts and repent for the sins of humanity?

“It depends on the kind of day you’ve had,” he replies. Then he walks into the jungle, o where his jaguar awaits.

CORRESPONDENT THAYER WALKER WROTE ABOUT SPEARFISHING IN MARCH 2009.

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SINGLE SPEED continued from page 84

a variety of landscapes, and had I not been concentrating so intently on staying upright I might have taken more time to savor them. But even in my anaerobic state I was moved. At its lowest, the trail took us across streams and through deep, dark woods. At its highest, it led us over arid, white, rocky peaks with sweeping views of the valley.

Spectators served to further distract.

There were sexy women, dressed as referees, administering spankings. A guy in dreadlocks and a blue leisure suit displayed ambiguous cue cards in the manner of Bob Dylan in Dont Look Back. Most distressingly, when I was forced to run up a small incline after not carrying enough speed through a stream crossing, a guy in a pink rabbit suit called me a “failure.” I felt like a madman degraded by hallucinations.

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AT SOME POINT, the 7-Eleven bandito blows by, his cape fluttering imperiously in the wind. The masked man, I’ll later discover, is pro rider Carl Decker. When I encounter him, he’s lapping me en route to victory.

As I complete lap two, I’m hurting. The trail has become the world. But I still have a rhythm and am in the proverbial groove.

Number three, however, is a slog. I know I’ll finish, so I tell myself to treat it as a victory lap, but I’m hemorrhaging strength. And the spirit of the event has become significantly less buoyant: By the time I’m deep into my last lap, many of the spectators have already moved the party back to the start/finish, to shower the first finishers with beer as they roll in. What’s more, all those rocky descents on my rigid fork have finally turned my arms to overcooked linguini. I’m getting sloppy.

A little while back, an English guy asked me how many times I’d crashed. I refused to answer, because I haven’t crashed at all and, in my cosmology, talking about crashing makes you crash. Nevertheless, I soon crash at a rocky switchback. Fortunately, the lap is almost over. Decker and women’s winner Rachel Lloyd are almost certainly already getting tattooed. I successfully negotiate the final and most treacherous descent and then, like only half of those who started, cross the finish line. Somebody hands me the item that’s been guiding me through the race like a lodestar: the bottle opener. It’s wonderful, as if my pain has manifested as a small piece of machined aluminum, like an irritating grain of sand transformed into a pearl.

Ironically, the many, many beers I cono sume all come in a can.

THE SNOB POSTS REGULARLY AT BIKESNOBNYC.BLOGSPOT.COM. HIS FIRST BOOK IS DUE OUT NEXT SPRING FROM CHRONICLE.

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