SPRING GEAR! THE FASTEST ROAD BIKES AND RUNNING SHOES LIVE BRAVELY
T R IPS Y E A R O F
FITNESS WHY YOUR BREATHING IS HOLDING YOU BACK
FUEL THE ATHLETE’S GUIDE TO COLLAGEN
T H E
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NEW IDEAS FOR
ADVENTURE
EPIC
INSIDE A 6,000-MILE ULTRA RUN
T R AV E L
HEALTH DO MEN NEED WILDERNESS THERAPY?
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GOLF, AN APOLOGIA DAVID QUAMMEN BY
Outside Magazine
Contents
03/04.20
Features With a résumé full of wins at kayaking’s most prestigious competitions and historic first descents of the planet’s deadliest whitewater, Nouria Newman is considered one of the greatest paddlers around. So why can’t she turn her passion into a sustainable career? BY KYLE DICKMAN
74 The Best a Man Can Get? Men suffer higher rates of depression, suicide, and drug abuse than women. Many are anxious and lonely—and, as a result, they’re all too often angry and violent. Wilderness Collective thinks the solution lies in open spaces, UTVs, and fireside talks. CHRIS COLIN rides along to find out if the outdoors can save guys from themselves.
82 We Are Gone
RED BULL CONTENT POOL
Artist Eric Bealer was living the remote, rugged good life in coastal Alaska with his wife, Pam, an MS sufferer, when they made a dramatic decision: to exit this world together, leaving behind precise instructions for whoever entered their cabin first. EVA HOLLAND investigates the mysteries and meaning of an adventurous couple who charted their own way out.
90 Golf at Last An apologia BY DAVID QUAMMEN
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P H OTO G R A P H B Y
Erik Boomer
Less weight. More trailblazing. Int rodu c in g Tra il S eri es™ – 2 5% lig hte r
hydroflask.com
Outside Magazine
Contents
03/04.20
42
Dispatches 14 BIG IDEA Forever Camping: America’s
homelessness crisis is spilling onto public land—where it’s an even more challenging issue to solve. BY MARC PERUZZI
18 THE OUTSIDER Noé Álvarez: In the new book
Spirit Run, the Latino writer and ultrarunner recounts the 6,000mile journey that transformed his view of the world.
20 EXPOSURE Portfolio: Anna Filipóva
documents climate research in the remotest tundras on earth.
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30 MEDIA The Big Screen’s Best Friend:
What Hollywood gets right—and wrong—about our favorite sleddog stories. Plus: Park Service artists-in-residence create unsettling works to inspire action.
32 GEAR Men’s Bike Commuting:
How to look good and ride safe. Rough Road Bikes: A trio of steeds for the path less taken. Road Runners: Six pairs of pavement gluttons. Trail Running:
Make tracks in the dirt.
40 STYLE Here Comes the Sun: Shoulder-
season travel goods.
42 FITNESS 18
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Training: New technology is striving to make power the next great metric for runners. Moves: Improve your balance with six essential exercises— no beam necessary. Lab Rat: Could proper breathwork be the key to boosting athletic performance? Fuel: The buzziest supplement on the market just might live up to the hype.
50 TRAVEL The Best Trips of 2020: We asked
our experts where they want to go this year. Their answers will surprise and inspire you. Presenting 27 wild adventures to get you out in the world.
6 BETWEEN THE LINES 104 PARTING SHOT 4
C O V E R P H OTO G R A P H B Y
Quin Schrock
C LO C K W I S E F R O M TO P L E F T: H A N N A H M C C A U G H E Y ; C O M S TO C K / G E T T Y I M AG E S ; A A R O N R E D D E C L I F F E / T W O D U S T Y T R AV E L E R S ; S A N T I N U N E Z / S TO C K SY ; C A S S A N D R A K LO S ; C O U R T E SY O F M AG N U S K L A N G
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Outside Magazine
Between the Lines
03/04.20
In January of 1994, when I was a sophomore in college, I walked over to the student union after the holiday break to check my mailbox. Inside I found a copy of Outside, the first issue of a gift subscription my parents had given me for Christmas. I immediately fell in love with the writing, and then, in the ensuing years, with one writer in particular: David Quammen. Every time I received a new copy of Outside, I’d start flipping the pages to find his Natural Acts column, where Quammen spun fascinating yarns out of seemingly dry topics like plant ecology. As I look back, reading his stories acted as a kind of invisible hand on the steering wheel that gradually changed my career trajectory, prompting me to veer off my premed track and pursue a degree in environmental science. I had ambitious dreams of working for Outside someday, and perhaps I even entertained the idea of assigning stories to David Quammen. But
PHER KEYES ( @KEYESER)
Changing Tides Anna Filipóva, whose work we feature on page 20, is an internationally renowned photojournalist who documents the work of scientists tracking disappearing Arctic ice. We asked her advice on living in an era defined by climate change.
1. Don’t flush your contact lenses or rinse them down the
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sink. They’ll end up as microplastics in our waterways. 2. Read This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein, which examines the way capitalism and climate change are inextricably linked. Though it came out in 2014, it’s as relevant as ever. 3. Donate to Polar Bears International. It’s a great nonprofit that protects arctic wildlife and educates the public.
Feedback Snippy Remarks This winter, Outside Online columnist Wes Siler wrote “I Got a Vasectomy Because of Climate Change,” calling the surgery “the most powerful personal action” he could make to limit his carbon emissions. The piece spurred gratitude, skepticism, and some breathless anger. I want to let you know how much it meant to me to read Wes Siler’s piece. This is something I’m planning to do, and I applaud him for making this struggle personal. His actions have a quantifiable impact on the world. Dylan Jones Connecticut
We also heard from readers who thought “The Arctic Job” (January/ February), about a bank robbery in Norway’s remote town of Longyearbyen, should have focused more thoughtfully on the mental health of the man who committed the crime.
Or we could raise children who will also raise children who will change the way humans impact the planet. We are part of the earth’s ecosystems. Choosing no more humans means choosing to have no hope. Meglantyne Allison Facebook
Maksim Popov is not a bank robber. He was suicidally depressed and committed a crime so that he could avail himself of the help he knew he needed. A bank heist is an interesting hook, but so is mental illness, and that element was totally overlooked. What is especially confounding is that the very next article [“Running in the Dark”] is about an athlete who struggles with deep depression. Outside failed to connect the dots. Byrne Sherwood New Orleans, Louisiana
A handful of companies are responsible for most of the pollution. Overpopulation is a distraction, and big companies need to be held accountable. Ryan Moore Facebook
C LO C K W I S E F R O M TO P L E F T: G R AYS O N S C H A F F E R ; C O U R T E SY O F A N N A F I L I P Ó VA
Unforeseen Events
I’m certain I never imagined that during this fantasy tenure, we’d assign him an essay on the beauty of golf. But here we are. On page 90, that’s exactly what you’ll find: “Golf at Last.” Like all media outlets, Outside has long understood the value of counterintuitive ideas, but this piece isn’t an exercise in calculated provocation. Quammen, despite being a true outdoorsman, has really become obsessed with golf. And his logic makes sense. As we age, our physical limits change, and so does our ability to interact with the world outside. We evolve and adapt, discovering new outlets for our passion. The same could be said for Outside itself. The world of adventure has changed slowly but radically over time, as have the ways people recreate and intersect with wild spaces. As a result, the topics we cover are constantly shifting. (Just look to the eighties, when we gave a disturbing amount of coverage to beach volleyball and rollerblading.) This month’s issue is a showcase for our ongoing evolution. Alongside the unexpected ode to golf, Marc Peruzzi wrestles with the perplexing rise of homeless camps on public land (“Forever Camping,” page 14). In his profile of whitewater paddler Nouria Newman (“World’s Best Kayaker Seeks Full-Time Employment,” page 66), Kyle Dickman explores what it’s like, not to be the greatest woman kayaker alive, but the greatest kayaker alive who happens to be a woman. And Chris Colin tries to unpack the odd success of a travel company selling wilderness as therapy to men (“The Best a Man Can Get?” page 74). There’s never really been a typical Outside story, and—sorry, David— maybe that’s the real reason I was hooked by Outside from the beginning. —CHRISTO-
Go where love takes you. Welcome to the all-new 2020 Subaru Outback. ®
The Outback will take you as far off the beaten path as you care to go, all without leaving the creature comforts behind. It’s loaded with tech, along with 8.7 inches of ground clearance + standard X-MODE with Hill Descent Control. For even more go, opt for ®
the available 260-horsepower Direct-Injection Turbocharged SUBARU BOXER engine. ®
Outback. Well-equipped at $26,645.*
Subaru, Outback, SUBARU BOXER, and X-MODE are registered trademarks. *MSRP excludes destination and delivery charges, tax, title, and registration fees. Retailer sets actual price. Certain equipment may be required in specific states, which can modify your MSRP. See your retailer for details. 2020 Subaru Outback Onyx Edition XT shown has an MSRP of $36,740.
Outside Magazine
Between the Lines
03/04.20
“On the riverbank, she broke into sobs. Then she switched on her GoPro, snapped her skirt back onto her boat, and slid back into the current
:KDW :H·UH :DWFKLQJ
Go With Us Outside GO just added two adventures to its roster of Ready Set GO trips: the Galápagos Islands and Machu Picchu. All you need to do is pick a destination and send in your dates; the team will plan every part of your journey. Combine the two for the ultimate South American experience. Visit outsidego.com/ready-set-go for more information.
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Legendary snowboarder Danny Davis brings together the best snowboarders in the world in Peace Park, an eight-part series about the eponymous gathering from Outside TV. Athletes will ride innovative features at Woodward Tahoe, at Boreal Mountain Resort. This year, for the first time since the event was established in 2011, the field will include women. Watch it on the Outside TV app.
Boys to Men
The Woodshed
Chris Colin’s feature on Wilderness Collective (“The Best a Man Can Get?” page 74), an outfitter that specializes in backcountry trips for men, changed shape quite a bit between the initial pitch and the final draft. He first proposed the idea nearly a decade ago, when the company was founded. Here’s how the story evolved over the years:
In Jan/Feb, “New Under the Sun” miscredited a photo of Baja’s Espíritu Santo Island to Justin Bailie. The photo is by Ron Watts (Getty Images). The story also incorrectly stated the price per night at Cabrits Resort and Spa Kempinski Dominica. And “The Arctic Job” misstated the distance from Longyearbyen to the North Pole, which is about 800 miles. Outside regrets the errors.
2011
2012
2016
2017
Wilderness Collective launches with the unofficial slogan Legendary Adventures for Men. Colin proposes joining a snowmobile trip through Alaska.
Colin and his wife, Amy, have a son, Casper, who Colin calls “a laboratory for all my theories about how to create a good man.”
Wilderness Collective rebrands. Its motto is now what Colin describes as a “hazy but seemingly incontrovertible ideology”: Wilderness Makes You Better.
#MeToo rekindles Colin’s curiosity about male enclaves and what it looks like when men head into the woods in search of self-improvement.
2019
Colin and Casper drive into the desert to find out whether a backcountry trip does, in fact, make a better man—and what better actually means.
C LO C K W I S E F R O M TO P L E F T: C O U R T E SY O F I N K AT E R R A M A C H U P I C C H U P U E B LO H OT E L ; L A U R A G E R W I N ; P E T E R C I R I L L I ; C O U R T E SY O F I N K AT E R R A M A C H U P I C C H U P U E B LO H OT E L ; C O U R E SY O F G A L Á PA G O S S A FA R I C A M P
—KYLE DICKMAN, PAGE 66
THE BIGGEST RISK IN LIFE IS NEVER TAKING ONE. You can raise children by helicopter, bulldozer or even tiger. But when everything in their life is so structured, and things always go according to plan, they won’t be prepared for what will quickly become the “real world.” Med school will not make someone a more empathetic human being. Liberal arts won’t transform worldviews the way the outdoors can. And even the best MBA program can’t teach true leadership. Instead, consider what really allows a child to mature (both personally and professionally)—time spent doing things for real. Rather than reading about stuff
NATIONAL OUTDOOR LEADERSHIP SCHOOL NOLS.edu 1.800.710.6657
confined inside a classroom, they’ll learn by trial, and more importantly, error. We call it experiential education. We believe the wilderness naturally fosters personal growth with the demand for decision making, perseverance through unexpected adversity and the constant need for clear communication. Whether it’s a gap year, a semester away or even a summer expedition with NOLS, your kid will come back more resilient and confident in their ability to lead others. All because they’ve finally learned to trust the most important person of all: themselves.
AROUND THE WORLD
AL ASK A / EAST AFRICA / INDIA / MEXICO / NEW ZEALAND / NORTHEAST / PACIFIC NORTHWEST / PATAGONIA / ROCKY MOUNTAINS / SCANDINAVIA / SOUTHWEST / YUKON
Outside Magazine
Between the Lines
03/04.20
Brave the Elements
1. GROUP RUNS
5. CLIMBING WALL
2. PADDLING CLINICS
6. ADVENTURE-VEHICLE TOURS
3. FISHING LESSONS
7. BIKE DEMOS
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ITEMS OF GEAR TESTED, FROM GLOVES TO HELMETS.
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NORTHERLY ISLAND, CHICAGO | MAY 16–17, 2020
Outside Experience Just Got Better For the second annual Outside Experience, we’re taking over Chicago’s iconic Northerly Island for a weekend full of running, climbing, paddling, fishing, music, special guests, and more. Get your tickets at outsideexperienceshow.com.
Leave nothing but paw prints.
Here in Marathon, we’ve always shown unconditional love for our surroundings. Our stewardship shows. So whether you’re strolling the beach, swimming with dolphins, snorkeling, fishing, kayaking, hiking or biking, caring for the environment will be second nature to you as well. fla-keys.com/marathon 1.800.262.7284
216 MILES BIKED AROUND SANTA FE.
FOUR WINTER SNOWSTORMS CYCLED THROUGH.
M A P : J U L I A WA L L E Y
4 . FOOD TRUCKS
For “About Town” (page 32), gear director Will Taylor performed a thorough test of bike-commuting gear to parse his favorite essentials. Here’s a breakdown of his months-long investigation.
F R O M L E F T: C O U R T E SY O F K AT I E C R U I C KS H A N K ; C O U R T E SY O F J O E M O R A H A N
Katie Cruickshank and husband at Ski Santa Fe
in it, but I sure can rip zipper bump lines.” —Abigail Barronian, assistant editor An Old Prom Dress “Nine years ago, I attended the first Powder magazine prom in Sun Valley, wearing an eighties prom dress. I still wear it skiing at least once a year, including this past season at Ski Santa Fe for my 35th birthday.” —Katie Cruickshank, marketing manager
Closing Time As the ski season comes to an end, locals love to make winter’s last turns in retro ski gear and wacky outfits. We asked three staffers to share their most prized costume-box items.
A Tiny Onesie “My Nils suit is definitely from the 1980s: the top is hot pink, voluminous, and shoulder-padded, and from the waist down it’s so tight I have to dance (preferably to Whitney Houston) to get it on. I can’t spread-eagle
A Rad Headband “My mom knitted me a Coloradoflag headband. It’s supremely practical for touring and crosscountry skiing, and it has the right kind of retro, down-home flair.” —Maren Larsen, assistant editor
By Our Contributors After Outside correspondent Eva Holland totaled her car in rural British Columbia, she spent the 12-hour bus ride home thinking about fear: Why do we experience it? And what can we do about it? In Nerve, out April 14, she dives into the science and psychology of fear, confronting her own anxieties in the process. Whether she’s jumping out of a plane to deal with her heights phobia or coping with the loss of her mother, Holland is witty, relatable, and humane as she deals with uncomfortable feelings.
Daredevil Dad Head to Outside Online for an exclusive video, produced in partnership with Ford Explorer, of BMX legend turned Hollywood Stuntman Mike Escamilla as he explores the world with his six-yearold daughter, Luna. outsideonline.com/ mikeescamilla
Redesigned from the stakes up The new Copper Spur HV UL Vestibule Awnings, TipLok Tent Buckles, Lighter yet Stronger Fabric, and more
Got it made in the shade, San Juan Mountains, CO Photo: Noah Wetzel
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Published by Outside Integrated Media, LLC • Outside was founded as Mariah in 1976
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FOUNDER/CHAIRMAN LAWRENCE J. BURKE EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT/CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER ANGELO GAZIANO EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT/CHIEF DIGITAL AND STRATEGY OFFICER ANNE MOLLO-CHRISTENSEN EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT/CHIEF REVENUE OFFICER SCOTT PARMELEE VICE PRESIDENT/EDITOR CHRISTOPHER KEYES VICE PRESIDENT/CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER WILLIAM SCHUDLICH VICE PRESIDENT/DIRECTOR OF MARKETING SAM MOULTON Editorial Offices: 400 Market St., Santa Fe, NM 87501; 505-989-7100. Advertising Offices: 122 E. 42nd St, Suite 3705, New York, NY 10168; 212-972-4650. Submissions must be accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope. Outside cannot be held responsible for unsolicited material. Subscriber Service: For the fastest service, visit us online at outsideonline.com and click on “Subscriptions” on our home page. Or write to Outside, Box 6228, Harlan, IA 51593-1728 and enclose a copy of your mailing label, or call 800-678-1131 (outside U.S., 515-248-7680; fax 712-623-5731). A scent-free subscription is available upon request. Back Issues and Special Issues: Call 800-678-1131 or enclose a check or money order for $7.95 per issue and mail to: Back Issues, Outside, Box 6228, Harlan, IA 51593-1728. Copyright ©2020 by Outside Integrated Media, LLC. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. Views expressed herein are those of the author exclusively.
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O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 03/04.20
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Dispatches
Big Idea
03/04.20
Forever Camping AMERICA’S HOMELESSNESS CRISIS IS SPILLING ONTO PUBLIC LAND— WHERE IT’S AN EVEN MORE CHALLENGING ISSUE TO SOLVE BY MARC PERUZZI
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along China Hat Road unveils itself slowly as you drive southeast out of Bend, Oregon. At first the ponderosa pine and sage Forest Service scrubland seems to offer a healthy dose of rugged nature just beyond town. But as you roll in the direction of China Hat butte, you begin to feel that something’s wrong. Turn down a dirt road and you might spot a tarp camp. Keep going and you could see a weathered RV parked next to an old pickup. The owner is a carpenter who commutes to jobsites in Bend. Nearby, a pop-up camper, tucked into the brush, looks like it will need to be towed out come spring; dusty propane tanks reveal the resident’s heat source. Farther from the road, children’s toys lie near a fire ring. Old tables and plastic sheeting are scattered over an acre of land. Shell casings litter the ground where a tree was shot down.
THE DIASPORA
This composite portrait of China Hat, derived from the kinds of observations that rangers have made on Central Oregon’s Forest Service and BLM holdings, hints at the scope of the homelessness problem on America’s public land. There are numerous locales like China Hat, most of them in rough country on the outskirts of towns across the Mountain West. The people living more or less fulltime in these areas represent a dizzying array of demographics. Some work in nearby communities where they can’t afford housing. The Forest Service term for the entire category is nonrecreational campers—a euphemism that takes the sting out of the situation. And while people end up living spread out in the woods for the same reasons that others cluster together on city streets, the difficulties they face can be harder to gauge and more difficult to address.
I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y
Sally Deng
Dispatches
Big Idea
03/04.20
Concerned about a looming crisis, the Forest Service published a report in January 2019 aimed at both highlighting the issue and helping employees understand the social and economic forces at work. “I think what’s happening with homelessness in the broader society is also happening in our national forests,â€? says lead researcher Lee Cerveny. The report included a survey that produced some unsettling ďŹ ndings. Though nonrecreational camping is concentrated in western states, more than 46 percent of rangers and law-enforcement ofďŹ cers surveyed nationally reported that the problem is increasing in their districts. One of Cerveny’s goals was to get a handle on the types of people living on public land. The answer: a diverse cross-section of the U.S. Ranger surveys cited transient retirees, informal gatherings of homeless adults, seasonal workers, forest workers (think mushroom pickers), university students, families, teens, gang members, fugitives, runaways, and communal groups like the Rainbow Family. There are also addicts and the mentally ill, along with separatists with survival skills. How big is the problem? It’s hard to say. Even in large cities like San Francisco and Portland, censuses of the homeless population notoriously undercount. Now try surveying campers in open country. What we do know is that people are being driven to public land by the same forces that have led to the proliferation of tent encampments up and down the West Coast. The Homeless Leadership Coalition, based in central Oregon, estimates that 60 percent of the homeless in the area are economic refugees. Minimum wage in mountain towns like Jackson can be as low as $7.25 an hour, while the rents there, which have been transformed by second-home owners and the rise of vacation-rental sites like Airbnb, average $874 a month for a studio apartment. Not surprisingly, some people decide against handing over the lion’s share of their income to a landlord, choosing instead to live in cars and tents. In Jackson, Wyoming, line cooks and alpine guides can end up sleeping alongside the rest of the displaced. In Colorado, it’s raft guides and ski-area lifties. In the Dakotas, it’s oil-ďŹ eld workers. The most desperate individuals, those without wages and with little or no resources, are the toughest challenge for homeless advocates. These people take refuge on public land on the fringes of communities (“urban proximateâ€? forests, in government parlance) for a number of reasons. First, many small towns don’t have shelters, and the shelters that do exist are often at capacity. According to James Cook, cochair of central Oregon’s Homeless Leadership Coalition, a recent count in the region’s three counties tallied 880 homeless, most on public land, though he believes the real number is above 2,000. Meanwhile, this past winter, Bend’s
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shelters, plus some facilities made available during the coldest months, offered about 200 beds. When shelters are full, advocates have bought sleeping bags and propane for people and pointed them toward the woods. Cook notes that some homeless believe the backcountry is safer than the street, especially for women and young kids. Mandee Seeley moved to Oregon with her husband, two children, and dog in 2016, and the family promptly became homeless. “We didn’t know about the housing crunch until we got here,â€? she says. “We spent seven months in a tent in the forest, moving every two weeks, and another year in an RV.â€? Seeley has been employed for the past few years with the Sisters Park and Recreation District, and the family is staying in a friend’s house while members perform volunteer work in hopes of earning their way into the limited supply of affordable housing. Camping on federal public land for extended periods does offer a certain freedom. While many city and county parks departments forbid overnight stays in open space, campers on Forest Service and BLM land generally have two weeks before they need to vacate a site. But in districts like Bend–Fort Rock, enforcement is spotty and the rules are open to interpretation. Will you be cited for failing to relocate the ofďŹ cially required ďŹ ve miles away if you’re meeting the intent of the regulation? It’s not difďŹ cult to game the system and live on public land indeďŹ nitely. Unfortunately, land managers are woefully unequipped to deal with long-term squatters. As Cerveny’s Forest Service study pointed out, homelessness has historically been handled by social-services agencies. Bend–Fort Rock district ranger Kevin Larkin, whose oversight includes China Hat, summed up the challenge: “As you encounter camp after camp, you reach this tipping point where you’re like, ‘This is more than we can take on.’ â€? One snag when it comes to addressing homelessness on public land is that people struggling with basic needs are geographically distant from help. In cities, organizations offer meals, bathrooms, beds, counseling, and medical attention. It’s difďŹ cult to support those suffering from addiction or mental-health disorders, but urban advocates are at least able to keep tabs on where homeless sleep and can help keep them alive when bad weather hits. There isn’t much of a safety net on public land. Oregon rangers encountered one family 15 miles deep in the forest. Last winter, a homeless man camped outside Sisters was found dead on top of his collapsed tent after a blizzard. On his feet were plastic bags over multiple pairs of socks. His body had possibly been there for weeks or even months. In 2018, a man, possibly high on something, lost his infant son near the China Hat site where he’d been camping in a car with the child’s mother.
“You reach this tipping point ZKHUH \RX¡UH OLNH Âś7KLV LV more than we FDQ WDNH RQ ¡Ο says ranger Kevin Larkin. There’s a clear environmental impact to go along with the humanitarian one. Cindy Williams, board president of the Central Colorado Conservancy, told me that she’s seen full-time RVers set up sprawling summer campsites and use creeks to wash their laundry and dogs. At China Hat, rangers stashed a dumpster near the main road for volunteers to deposit refuse. “Garbage begets garbage,â€? says Larkin. There are no easy ďŹ xes. The lack of affordable housing is a massive, growing issue across much of the western U.S. Simply closing swaths of public land to camping and rousting intruders isn’t a viable option. Doing so would merely displace the homeless to other areas. Land managers recognize that it solves nothing. As members of the communities they serve, they have no desire to simply make homelessness somebody else’s problem. Meanwhile, community groups are taking what steps they can. In Chaffee County, Colorado, homeless advocates modiďŹ ed an app designed to monitor land use so that it allows volunteers to collect data on nonrecreational campers and share it with social-services providers and land managers. In Jackson, employers rent parking spaces for employees in the lot adjacent to the rec center, which offers bathrooms and showers. In central Oregon, advocates lease lots in RV parks for homeless people with camper vans and trailers, then do what they can to transition those folks into stable housing. The effort has gotten a number of kids out of the woods and back into schools. The impact may be limited, but publicland managers are seeing the value of deeper engagement with those who depend on our country’s open spaces. “The Forest Service is really good about caring for the land,â€? says Dave Halemeier, a ranger in Oregon’s Willamette National Forest, which has initiated outreach efforts to homeless campers. “But we just aren’t trained for the social parts of this issue. We need to become better students of serving the people.â€? O Contributing editor Marc Peruzzi wrote about search and rescue in the January/ February issue.
Dispatches
The Outsider
03/04.20
The Detour IN THE NEW BOOK SPIRIT RUN, NOÉ ÁLVAREZ RECOUNTS THE 6,000-MILE JOURNEY THAT TRANSFORMED HIS VIEW OF THE WORLD BY MOLLY MIRHASHEM “I BECAME A WRITER for a reason,” Noé Álvarez tells me a few moments after we meet. “So I wouldn’t have to talk too much.” The 34-year-old is quiet but friendly, wearing a beanie and a flannel shirt. We’re at a coffee shop in Boston, where he lives, discussing his forthcoming memoir, Spirit Run, a remarkable account of a 6,000-mile ultramarathon relay through North America. Álvarez was raised working class in Yakima, Washington, the son of two Mexican immigrants. Early on in Spirit Run, he laments the impact that years of labor in an apple warehouse had on his mother’s body, explaining how he’d internalized a singular idea: his parents’ existence was a painful one, and making it to college was his only way out. In 2003, Álvarez earned a full scholarship to Whitman College in Walla Walla and figured he’d secured a more comfortable future. But on campus he struggled, falling behind on his classwork while feeling like an outsider among the largely white student body. In the spring of his freshman year, he attended a student conference and found an escape from academics—the Peace and Dignity Journeys, an organized run that passes through hundreds of indigenous communities in Canada, the United States, Mexico, and Central America over the course of several months. According to a PDJ brochure quoted in the book, the intent of the relay is to “participate in spiritual practices and traditions; spark dialogue on the issue of peace and dignity for indigenous peoples; model their responsibility to Mother Earth, Father Sky, communities, and themselves; and receive the community’s prayers.” The run takes place every four years, and the route changes each time. Leaders and elders in the communities the runners pass through tell the story of their area, so the group can develop an awareness of the land, its people, and its history. The run is sometimes referred to as “the longest prayer in the world.” Álvarez’s grandfather is of Purépecha descent, and he felt drawn to explore that piece of his heritage. “It was described as an indigenous spiritual run, and I couldn’t really make sense of that, but somehow it just pulled me,” Álvarez says. “Like, ‘I have to do this. This is crazy. I don’t have the money to do this. I’m going to do this.’ ” He was seduced by the PDJ’s promise of community, but also by the opportunity to buy himself more time. So in the spring of 2004, Álvarez dropped out of Whitman to join. The main conflict in Spirit Run revolves around Álvarez’s identity. When he first
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meets the PDJ runners at the relay’s start in British Columbia, he doesn’t quite fit in. He’s overeager—wearing bright yellow shoes, volunteering for extra mileage, and running his early legs too quickly. Many in the group intimidate him; some are outright bullying. Álvarez is hesitant to speak negatively of the other runners now, and he attributes much of the conflict to the fact that most of them were going through struggles of their own. But it’s clear from the book that tensions ran high. In one scene, he describes being deprived of water for extended periods by one of the run’s leaders. “I was just so out of my league,” he tells me. “For a lot of these people, the run was a lifelong commitment. Why is this outsider coming in, asking a lot of questions, fumbling things, not knowing how to put up a tent?” In middle school Álvarez ran track, and in high school he would jog along the Naches River in Yakima to clear his head. But long-distance running was new to him. And he learned quickly that measuring time and distance is not a priority on the PDJ. Usually, each relay participant runs their stage alone, with limited info on the route, while the rest of the group rides in a van, often along a different road. At some point, another runner takes over. (Most average between ten and thirty miles each day. They can choose their own mileage, but the group leaders often intervene to keep the run on schedule or push newer participants.) Álvarez struggles in the beginning—on his first morning, he wakes up late and is almost forced to run with his pack on—but soon the journey begins to change him. He learns to navigate the prickly group dynamic and becomes close with a few of the more welcoming runners. Álvarez’s descriptions of the role that running plays in his evolving self-concept contain some of the book’s most powerful writing. Recalling the early stages of the PDJ, he writes, “I am ... submerging myself in pain like I did when working in the warehouses alongside my mother, so that I may control the turmoil within me. But unlike any other labor, running relieves me of the weight that I should become better than my parents, my people.” The farther he runs, the more he realizes that he doesn’t need to reject his history.
“It really complicated my narrative,” he tells me. “It gave me this sense of self-love that I didn’t have. That it was OK to be proud of where I came from, that it was OK to be working class, that it was OK to be Latino, that it was OK to be from farm country.” Álvarez ran four months of the six-month journey before being forced to drop out in Guatemala, after a doctor warned him that he was at risk for permanent damage if he continued to push through the severe knee pain he was experiencing. He was devastated, but on some level he still got what he set out for. Upon returning to Yakima, he writes, “I know now that every bit of earth contains the sacredness of another person’s existence.” After the run, Álvarez tried to regroup. He eventually found his way back to school, finishing his degree at Whitman and completing a fellowship at Princeton in public policy. He devoted his time to social work and the odd service job. It wasn’t until the fall of 2011, when he took a memoir class in Seattle, that he seriously considered writing about his experience with the PDJ. He’d been a diligent journaler during the run, and at one point during our conversation he pulled out his notebook from that time. There’s a sticker with the PDJ logo on the front, and inside the pages are filled with cramped entries—material that he shaped into a book. Today, Álvarez seems more self-assured than the young man he describes in Spirit Run. But he still harbors some insecurities about being seen as an authority on the PDJ. When I ask him about his transition from being an outcast on the relay to becoming something of a spokesperson for it, he bristles. He insists that the book is only his perspective, and is unsure about how the other runners might react to it. “I didn’t want to take on that weight, because the run is a different thing to every person,” he says. The next several months will be busy for Álvarez: His book tour is coming up, and he hopes to invite some of the runners from the 2004 journey to a few of his events so they can share their stories. He also plans to run portions of this year’s PDJ, aiming for British Columbia, where it all began for him. Running remains a significant part of Álvarez’s life, and he tries to get out regularly on the trails near his home. He prefers to go alone, and he longs for less crowded, more rugged terrain than what’s available in Boston. But he’s doubtful he’ll attempt the full PDJ again. “I’m in a different place,” he says. “It’s a part of my history that I will carry forward, but I’m a different person now.”
“It really complicated my narrative. It gave me this sense of self-love that I GLGQ·W KDYH μ
P H OTO G R A P H B Y
Cassandra Klos
OUTSIDE MAGAZINE
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Dispatches 03/04.20
At the End of the World HOW ONE PHOTOGRAPHER MAKES A LIVING DOCUMENTING CLIMATE RESEARCH IN THE WORLD’S MOST REMOTE TUNDRAS
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Exposure Portfolio by Anna
For Anna Filipóva, the earth’s poles aren’t lonely, inhospitable places—they’re more like home. The photojournalist has spent the past decade cataloging the lives of researchers above the Arctic Circle, from Greenland’s isolated Summit Station to northernmost Lapland, Finland. (In late 2019, she added the Antarctic peninsula to her assignment itinerary.) Filipóva strives to convey the urgency of climate change without the shock and awe utilized by many documentarians. “I choose to show the beauty,” she says, “then the devastation.” The mundane appears amid the endangered to paint a fuller picture of what’s at stake. “I care about the Arctic,” she says. “What happens there affects us all.” —MADELEINE LAPLANTE-DUBE
Filipóva
From top: A tabular iceberg in Antarctica rises 150 feet above the sea; LC-130 Hercules operators stand in the open cargo door
B E YO N D T H E PA R K YO U K N O W, E X I S T S A W O R L D YO U D O N ’ T. ZION | SAND HO LLOW | SNOW CANYON | GOO SE B ER RY MESA | E LEP HA N T A RCH | CA NDY C LI FFS Ìäñçü Ìïìģö £ íøö÷ òñè òé ÷ëè êõèä÷ èûóèõìèñæèö òø÷öìçè ÷ëè óäõî Üò êò äëèäç èûóïòõè ä ïì÷÷ïè Ïìñç üòøõöèïé úëèõè ïìéè ìö êõèä÷èõ
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Dispatches
Exposure
03/04.20
Clockwise from top left: The U.S.-funded Summit Station research facility, which sits near the highest point of Greenland’s ice sheet, just over 10,500 feet above sea level; a ski-equipped LC-130 Hercules plane (the only way to reach Summit Station is by air); AdÊlie penguins traverse an iceberg in Antarctica.
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Dispatches
Exposure
03/04.20
Clockwise from top: Chinstrap penguins, named for the ring of black feathers on their faces, on the Antarctic coast; a researcher at Summit Station; an Argentinian research base on the Antarctic peninsula; a cousin of NASA’s Mars rover sends radar waves into the ice to give scientists a clearer picture of what’s going on beneath Greenland’s melting ice sheet.
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WILDLIFE
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Olympus Explorer Brooke Bartleson
YOUR TRIPOD.
Dispatches
Exposure
03/04.20
Clockwise from top left: A Summit Station researcher; an AdÊlie, one of the smallest Antarctic penguins, known for taking on predators, stealing rocks from neighboring nests, and slapping researchers with their wings; Elephant Island, an outcropping in Antarctica’s South Shetland Islands.
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CARGO PANTS YOU CAN DRIVE. T H E 2 0 2 0 F O R D E X P L O R E R
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or adventurer Hilaree Nelson, work-life balance means something vastly different than it does for the rest of the world. For most of the year, the 46-year-old mother of two lives in Telluride, Colorado, where she captains The North Face Global Athlete Team remotely and raises her two sons, Graydon, 12, and Quinn, 10. But every two to four months, the tall,
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sinewy expedition climber and skier packs crampons, ice axes, and skis into several enormous red and black duffels and jets off for places like Nepal, India, and Pakistan to notch historic first ski descents on 8,000-meter-high peaks like Lhotse, Everest, and Papsura. Then, four or five or six weeks later, when the mission is complete,
she flies back home and resumes her role alongside all the other hard-charging parents—taking shifts for the car pool, cranking out nutritious dinners, and taking the boys out to ski, camp, and hike every chance she gets. That’s about as normal as it gets for the boys and Nelson. And that’s how they like it. It’s a good thing, too, since Nelson’s trajectory isn’t
changing any time soon. The most accomplished female ski mountaineer of her generation, she’s been on more than 40 expeditions—and ticked off her most ambitious lines and most noteworthy expeditions since she’s had kids. Maybe you heard how in 2012 she climbed both Everest and Lhotse, the fourth highest peak on the planet, in one
24-hour push—meaning she summited the first, and, with basically no break, summited the second. Or how, two years ago, she returned to Lhotse, this time to link turns down one of the most prized highaltitude lines in the world. Between these feats, Nelson led an ill-fated attempt to scale Hkakabo Razi, a remote peak in a subrange of the Himalaya
in Myanmar, that required a long approach through the jungle and was plagued by infighting and a lack of food. And in 2017, just because she wanted to, she and her partner, Jim Morrison, headed to another obscure peak, 21,165-foot Papsura, in India, where they skied an icy 3,000-foot, 60-degree face, notching yet another first descent and realizing a dream two decades in the making. Along the way, she received a National Geographic Explorers grant and was selected as a 2018 National Geographic Adventurer of the Year. This pace of life can be frenetic, but it’s one Nelson thrives in. “I’ve always had this fear of every day being the same,” she says, “and if I dig really deep, that’s my motivation—to get outside, to train, to be in my sport, and to forever continue learning.” Ski mountaineering in far-flung places obviously gives her that, but so does raising Graydon and Quinn. While both love skiing, climbing, and hiking, they have different personalities. “Quinn is a slow burn,” she notes, “while Graydon pops out of bed, very energetic.” So while she might be a superhuman in the mountains, she still does all the normal mom stuff too, like tickling Quinn to get him out of bed for school and playing board games after homework on Wednesdays. The only difference: when the boys are snug in bed, she pulls Google Earth up on her computer and starts planning where to adventure next.
Dispatches
Media
03/04.20
7KH %LJ 6FUHHQ·V Best Friend WHAT HOLLYWOOD GETS RIGHT— AND WRONG—ABOUT OUR FAVORITE SLED-DOG STORIES BY BLAIR BRAVERMAN BETWEEN THE winter release of Disney Plus’s
Togo and 20th Century Fox’s The Call of the Wild, old-school sled dogs—and their grizzled dudes—are having a cinematic moment. That’s great for people who love a cheesy dog story (that is, people with a soul), good for anyone who wants to geek out over vintage toboggans and parkas, and less great for those discouraged by the general whitewashing of mushing’s heritage. Both films manage to break down and build up misconceptions about the history of America’s north, with plenty of adventures and fluffy husky butts along the way. Togo, streaming since December on Disney’s new on-demand platform, stars Willem Dafoe as legendary Norwegian musher
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Leonhard Seppala. In the winter of 1925, children in rural Nome, Alaska, fall ill with diphtheria, so Seppala and his team, guided by lead dog Togo, cross 260 miles of mountainous terrain and cracking sea ice in blizzard conditions to help carry antitoxin to the village and prevent an epidemic. It’s a true story that’s most famous, outside Alaska at least, for a dog named Balto, who led the last few miles into Nome and, until now, snagged the public glory that Togo rightly deserved. Most of the dogsledding scenes feel (at least to this musher) hilariously realistic, including one in which Togo, as a mischievous puppy, leads a team at full sprint after a herd of caribou. The choice Seppala faces, years later, in asking 12-year-old Togo to overwork himself to deliver the antitoxin will break your heart. The Call of the Wild, in theaters February 21, is a relatively cheery adaptation of the violence-laced Jack London novel you probably read in eighth grade. It stars Harrison Ford alongside computer-animated Saint Bernard mutt Buck, making their way—with plenty of mishaps—through the 1890s Klondike gold rush. Expect lots of gorgeous scen-
ery, thin ice, and meaningful canine eye contact as Buck grows progressively feral. Both films give a glimpse of the evolution of sled dogs: the Seppala Siberians, a line of friendly, compact dogs bred by Leonard Seppala, and the gold-rush mutts who survived long enough to shape the majority of today’s sled dogs. However, the films mislead on the human side, starring white men in an era when most North American mushers were indigenous. For deeper context—one that honors the cultural history of the sport and not just the dogs themselves—check out PBS’s recent documentary Attla, about champion Athabascan musher George Attla’s mission to pass the tradition on to younger generations. You don’t have to cross the Yukon with a team of huskies to recognize that familiar canine and human bond. Pet dogs pull us from the depths of despair; sled dogs pull us from the depths of the frigid Norton Sound. It’s the same thing, really. Watch with your pooch on the couch beside you, because you’ll want to hug them every other scene. And then you’ll want to go outside and play in the snow.
C LO C K W I S E F R O M L E F T: C O U R T E SY O F D I S N E Y E N T E R P R I S E S © 2 0 1 9 ; B E T T M A N N / G E T T Y I M AG E S ; C O U R T E SY O F T W E N T I E T H C E N T U R Y F OX
Clockwise from left: Willem Dafoe in Disney Plus’s Togo; musher Gunnar Kaasen holds up his famous sled dog Balto in 1925; Harrison Ford in The Call of the Wild
Parks and Crafts
From left: Keller’s 2019 graphite drawing Pa’Rus; Shoreline Flipper, a 2018 acrylic by Reading
Zoe Keller
Mariah Reading
Juniper Harrower
Keller’s graphite drawings make even the scaliest creatures seem beautiful—and that’s the point. Through her work, Keller hopes to show the value of all species. In 2019, she created a series of works on biodiversity in Zion National Park that includes its snakes and turtles. This year, Keller will be at Acadia National Park in Maine, where she’ll explore its diverse varieties of lichen. “I might be part of the last generation of artists who will be able to draw these species while we’re still sharing the planet with them,” she says.
Reading takes the expression “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” to heart in her recycled landscape scenes, which she paints on reclaimed trash found in national parks across the country. Most of the scenes depict the location where the object was found. Her 2018 residency at Denali highlighted the park’s trash initiative. (Reading says it’s the cleanest park she’s visited.) At the end of January, she went to Antarctica, where she conducted research for a 2021 show about climate change and tourism at the poles.
Harrower’s abstract paintings and charming stop-motion animation reveal an unsettling truth: climate change is killing the beloved Joshua tree. During her residency at Joshua Tree National Park, the ecologist and multimedia artist created the animated short A Joshua Tree Love Story, which explores the effects climate change is having on the relationship among the trees, root fungi, and pollinator moths. She built mini Joshua trees and dolls out of paper clay, watercolor, yarn, wood, and wire, and painted the sets herself.
Mount Nebo Monument Trail, Dardanelle
F R O M L E F T: Z O E K E L L E R ; M A R I A H R E A D I N G
Every year, the National Park Service sponsors dozens of artists in residence at parks and monuments around the country, welcoming creators of all backgrounds to develop work using inspiration from natural wonders. Below are three of our favorites. —MAURA FOX
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Osprey Metron pack $160 This 26-liter number features a spot-on adjustable fit, sits snugly on your back, and tapers from top to bottom to keep the load tight. A shoe compartment, a helmet carrier, and an integrated rain cover make it a convenient daily hauler.
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$ERXW 7RZQ KIT TO LOOK GOOD AND RIDE SAFE BY WILL TAYLOR A. Bontrager Ion Pro RT/Flare RT light set $180 Brightness and ease of use are crucial when it comes to bike lights. This durable pair for front and back delivers on both, with simple push-button controls, long battery life, and plenty of power (1,300 lumens in the front, 90 in the rear) to help keep you visible any time of day. B. Showers Pass Trailhead hoodie $125 An ideal layer for a variety of
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conditions. The downy bamboomerino fabric ventilates well and provides light insulation under a shell. The hood fits under a helmet, while the kangaroo pocket has zips on both sides.
your most prominent and important body part on display for every driver to see. The safety yellow is unmissable during the day and reflects like a street sign when hit by headlights at night.
C. Fjällräven Keb Touring jacket $330 The Keb Touring is made of stretchy soft shell, so the fit gives when you’re cranking. Burly fabric at the shoulders and hem protect against wetting out, and large pit zips dispose of excess heat. The roomy hood fits over a helmet.
E. Rapha Brevet Reflective gloves $110 The Brevets make you want to ride. Credit the memory-foam padding and suede palm for their comfort and durability. The back of the hand is fully reflective, but tastefully so, which means you’ll be visible in the best possible way.
D. Smith High Vis Network helmet $170 Visibility is paramount while riding on the road, and the Network puts
F. Spy Helm 2 sunglasses $110 The Helm 2 stays put on your face and looks good off the bike. We loved the gold Happy Lens
technology, which lends the world a cheery flaxen light and provides sharp clarity. G. Pearl Izumi Blvd vest $190 The Blvd is equal parts pure comfort and pure performance. Merino-nylon side panels dispose of sweat and heat, while the polyester chest and back block the wind. H. Arc’teryx A2B Commuter pants $139 No one at work will know you’re wearing stretchy, articulated bike pants at the Monday meeting, but everyone on the road will see you thanks to the hidable reflective tabs on the back pockets and inner cuffs.
P H OTO G R A P H B Y
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Dispatches
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03/04.20
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%XPSV $KHDG A TRIO OF STEEDS FOR THE PATH LESS TAKEN BY JOSH PATTERSON 1. Specialized Roubaix Expert $6,000 The Roubaix, Specialized’s speedy endurance road machine, was recently revamped with the second iteration of the company’s Future Shock suspension. This system, mounted above the headtube, serves up 20 millimeters of travel to the front of the bike, taking the edge off bumpy roads while still providing confident handling. But don’t call this a comfort bike: the sleek carbon frame and 38-millimeter-deep carbon wheels slice through the wind. Our testers appreciated the Roubaix’s quick acceleration and responsive touch as much as its silky-smooth ride.
3. Look E 765 Gravel $7,000 Look’s E 765 isn’t your typical e-road and gravel-bike hybrid. The electric system combines a 400-watt motor and battery into a single removable package housed in the bike’s down tube. With the battery installed, this all-road machine weighs a respectable 29.5 pounds. The weight sits low, so the E 765 handles much like a standard gravel bike. Removing it to ride unassisted sheds nearly ten pounds, and a cargo box fits in its place, with enough storage for a rain jacket, spare tube, repair items, and even a burrito. (Yes, we checked.)
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entures v d a n i a rr : All-te BEST FOR
3. BEST FOR: Off-road versatil ity
F R O M TO P : C O U R T E SY O F S P E C I A L I Z E D ; C O U R T E SY O F D E V I N C I ; C O U R T E SY O F LO O K C YC L E I N T E R N AT I O N A L
2. Devinci Hatchet $3,299 Devinci’s top-of-the-line Hatchet is a well-rounded gravel bike with a clean design and handling closer to a mountain rig than a road bike. It features Shimano’s new gravel-centric GRX component group, and while the 1x11 drivetrain does limit top-end velocity and requires standing and mashing on steep climbs, it still has ample range for most excursions. We loved the KS Lev seatpost’s 65 millimeters of drop, which inspired confidence when cornering during speedy off-road descents. The Hatchet has clearance for 50-millimeter 700c tires, a game changer on harsh gravel roads.
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Skechers GoRun 7+ Hyper $135 How do you improve Skechers’s 2018 Gear of the Year winning road shoe? By giving it a more secure upper while increasing durability. The Goodyear outsole gives maximum grip and confidence. Efficient strides come naturally, thanks to the ultra-responsive midsole and a design that fosters midfoot striking. 7.7 oz (men’s, pictured) / 6.3 oz (women’s); 4 mm drop
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Topo Athletic Zephyr $130 This performance-oriented speedster won over the hearts and feet of our testers. It’s made with a rigid plastic plate in the midsole, and the firmness was a bit unyielding at first. But the Zephyr quickly felt like a fun, responsive, high-speed trainer. Testers enjoyed the spacious forefoot, which allowed toes to splay naturally. 9 oz (men’s, pictured) / 7.4 oz (women’s); 5 mm drop
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New Balance Fresh Foam 1080v10 $150 Your feet take enough abuse. Make concrete less punishing with the 1080v10. Bask in the luxury of New Balance’s top-of-the-line midsole, but don’t be fooled by the maximal cushion: compared with its predecessor, it has half an ounce of weight reduction, and testers reported that it’s much peppier, too. 9.9 oz (men’s, pictured) / 8.4 oz (women’s); 10 mm drop
Brooks Transcend 7 $160 Like a good running partner, the Transcend 7 supports and comforts over the long haul. This iteration, the seventh, integrates lateral support into the midsole for a smooth ride. Combined with major cushioning and an internal bootie that secures the plush upper perfectly around a variety of feet, this shoe is a superb choice for runners who need stability. 10.7 oz (men’s); 9.5 oz (women’s, pictured); 10 mm drop
361 Spire 4 $155 This neutral trainer has plenty of cush, but testers said the Spire 4, which debuts the company’s proprietary midsole EVA, is great for fast tempos and hill repeats. “It’s perfectly responsive,” said one. “Energizing!” said another. It also softened impact on descents, and we loved the secure knit upper. 10 oz (men’s); 8.2 oz (women’s, pictured); 9 mm drop
Mizuno Wave Inspire 16 Waveknit $135 This shoe won us over by offering a touch of stability in a midweight package. Our test crew found the ride snappy and a tad stiff, so we suggest keeping it to runs under ten miles. The new fully knit upper hugged our feet— a little too much for fuller-volume dogs, but just right for others. 10.1 oz (men’s); 8.5 oz (women’s, pictured); 12 mm drop
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Janji Runpaca SS shirt $54 A cotton-alpaca blend delivers the best of both fibers in this shirt: the supple feel of cotton and the odorfighting capabilities of wool. You can wear it many times before you even think about throwing it in the wash.
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8OWUD 5XJJHG MAKE TRACKS IN THE DIRT BY ANNA CALLAGHAN A. Salomon S/Lab Ultra 2 shoes $180 Who says trail runners have to be bulky? This unisex shoe with eight millimeters of drop is incredibly light, and allows you to aggressively tackle technical trails. You’ll never worry about your shoes coming untied: the laces tighten with a tuck-away pull tab. B. Stance Uncommon Run socks $18 These light, thin socks are thick enough to feel cushiony without bunching up inside your shoe. They wick and breathe like a dream.
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C. Jaybird Vista wireless earphones $180 The lightweight Vistas deliver great sound and stay put even when you’re pounding down trails. Our testing showed that they’ll withstand getting dropped, dusty, sweaty, and wet. Plus, they last up to six hours on a charge. D. Suunto 9 Baro watch $599 Boasting a whopping 120 hours of battery life with the GPS on, and featuring 80 sport modes, the 9 Baro has you covered from trail marathons to backpacking. It monitors the weather and has a simple touchscreen. Use the iOS app to plan your route and review detailed stats. E. Tracksmith Allston tights $118 A wide waistband prevents these tights from slipping down as you run. And a blend of nylon and
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elastane provides compression and breathability for long outings in a variety of shoulder-season temperatures. Four pockets stow a phone, keys, wallet, and snacks. F. Lululemon Free to Be Long Line sports bra $58 The buttery Free to Be is the highrise jeans of athletic bras, featuring a long, comfortable cut and a thick band that hits the narrowest part of the torso, so it stays put without digging into your rib cage. Best for A and B cups. G. Salomon S/Lab Sense Ultra 8 vest set $170 With 12 stretchy pockets that expand when you need them and lay snug against your body when you don’t, the Ultra 8 can handle almost any run. The vest closes with elastic cords that hook across the chest, which provides
a comfortable fit without chafing or pressure points, no matter how big your load is. H. Black Diamond Distance Carbon Z running poles $170 These superlight sticks stow easily in your pack, help propel you uphill, and aid your balance on the way down. Breathable grips are comfortable on high-mileage days, and the joints are stiffer and more durable than previous versions. I. Patagonia Airshed Pro pullover $129 This versatile wind layer has moisture-wicking material on the sleeves and hood that traps sweat and airs it out. A DWR finish sheds mild rain, the tightfitting hood can be used in lieu of a hat, and extended sleeves with thumbholes protect your hands.
P H OTO G R A P H B Y
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N O R T H E R LY I S L A N D | C H I CA G O A WEEKEND OF ADVENTURE, GEAR, MUSIC, FILM, AND
Presented by
INSPIRATION ALONG THE SHORES OF LAKE MICHIGAN
NORTHERLY ISLAND
Adventure Films Speakers Live Music
F E ATU R I N G : CLIMBING, CYCLING, FISHING, PADDLING,
NEW OUTDOOR VENUE MORE SKILLS CLINICS AND DEMO AREAS
HIKING, AND MORE
AD DITION AL S P ON SORS
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Style
03/04.20
Here Comes the Sun
12. Aether Griffith vest, $325; 13. Aether Clarke pants, $250; 14. Smith Roam sunglasses, $209
PUT WINTER BEHIND YOU WITH THESE SHOULDER-SEASON TRAVEL GOODS 1 2 3
1. Fjällräven High Coast Foldsack pack, $100; 2. Aesop Déodorant spray, $35; 3. Hydro Flask Trail Series bottle, $45; 4. Blundstone 550 Chelsea boots, $205; 5. The North Face North Dome 2 jacket, $129; 6. Peak Design Travel duffel, $130; 7. Fossil Three-Hand Date Silicone watch, $129; 8. Goop G.Tox travel kit (shampoo and cleanser shown), $40; 9. Victorinox Edge Packable pack, $75; 10. Merrell Boulder Range shoes, $120; 11. Patagonia Torrentshell 3L jacket, $149
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P H OTO G R A P H B Y
Hannah McCaughey
MAY
OND M H C I R | 15-17
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W O M A N R U N N I N G : J E F F D I E N E R . E L E C T R I C M E T E R : C O M S TO C K / G E T T Y I M A G E S .
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Training
03/04.20
Hit Your Stride NEW TECHNOLOGY IS STRIVING TO MAKE POWER THE NEXT GREAT METRIC FOR RUNNERS BY ALEX HUTCHINSON
tunnel in the opening mile of last fall’s Chicago Marathon garbled the pace data on her GPS watch, Nicole Lane didn’t panic. The 25-year-old was aiming to dip below the threshold of two hours 45 minutes to qualify for this year’s Olympic Trials in Atlanta, but she wasn’t too concerned about splits. Instead, her coach, former 2:16 marathoner Steve Palladino, had given her strict instructions the night before: aim for a power output between 218 and 219 watts. “There were definitely times when I felt pretty good and thought about speeding up,” she recalls, “but seeing the power get higher than what Steve gave me, I would slow down.” The first wearable power meter for running, from a Boulder, Colorado, startup called Stryd, was launched in 2015. Since then, engineers and biomechanists have been squabbling over the true definition of running power—and curious runners have been checking it out on the trails. Heavyweight competitors Garmin and Polar have now joined the fray with running power apps that harness the monitoring abilities of their existing devices, and Stryd recently launched a radical revamp of its foot pod that enables it to measure and correct for the effects of wind speed in real time. Power, in other words, is making its bid to be the new running metric of choice. And for Lane, who crossed the finish line in 2:42:26 and secured her trip to Atlanta with an average power of exactly 218 watts, the verdict is already in. The golden promise of power—in physics terms, the force with which your foot smacks the ground multiplied by its velocity at the moment of contact—is that it tells you exactly how hard you’re working at any given moment. “It’s the best proxy we have for quantifying perceived effort,” says Tom Schwartz, coach of the Tinman Elite running group in Boulder. Pace is affected by hills and wind and footing; heart rate can be skewed by factors like dehydration and sudden pace changes. But power doesn’t lie. Collect enough data during your training sessions, the theory goes, and the algorithm will tell you exactly which target power you can sustain over a given distance. In cycling, where power meters are well established, they’ve more or less lived up to the promise—so effectively, in fact, that in 2018, Tour de France race director Christian Prudhomme floated the idea of banning them in competition, because they “annihilate the glorious uncertainty of sport.” But measuring power in cycling is relatively straightforward, since it simply depends on how hard you’re mashing the pedals. The picture is murkier with running. Do
WHEN A 400-YARD
you count the power required to swing your leg forward through the air, or only the power against the ground? How do you account, from one side to the next, for the “free” energy stored in the spring-like tendons whose contribution to your forward motion changes when you go up or down hills? All these factors affect the relationship between how hard your body is working and the number that appears on your power meter. So far, every player in the market has chosen a slightly different way of quantifying running power (see “Surge Detectors,” below), but it’s not clear whether the differences matter in practice. Austin O’Brien, a 27-year-old Iowa-based marathoner coached by Schwartz, says that his Stryd numbers—beamed wirelessly to his watch from a foot pod attached to his shoe— remind him to slow his pace during recovery runs when a headwind or hill might push his effort too high. But the biggest benefit, he says, is being able to compare how much power he sustained in training runs with varying routes and conditions. “I believe it’s the most accurate way to track improvement over time,” he says. That sort of post-run analysis is also how Alexi Pappas, who represented Greece in the 10,000 meters at the 2016 Olympics, uses Garmin’s Run Power app, which connects to a chest strap or a waist-mounted pod to monitor your body’s accelerations. “I look at the data later,” she says, “because I’ve always been told not to think too much about form and data during runs.” The latest iteration of Stryd’s device, released last June, incorporates a wind port, analogous to the tubes used to measure airspeed on planes. (Garmin uses local weather forecasts and barometric sensors in the watch to estimate the impact of winds.) That new feature came in handy for O’Brien at the Indianapolis Monumental Marathon in November. Based on the power data collected
during previous training and at races, Stryd’s algorithm had predicted he could sustain between 384 and 399 watts for 26.2 miles; his most recent marathon-effort workout averaged 393 watts. (Power numbers are proportional to both pace and body size, which is why O’Brien’s target was so much higher than Lane’s.) With three miles to go at the Indy race, his pace started dropping, but his power meter assured him that he was pushing at an appropriate intensity, and the pace drop was simply due to a headwind. He hung on for a time of 2:18:38, just under the 2:19 Olympic Trials standard, with an average power of 392 watts. While Stryd won’t reveal sales figures, it reports that the number of runners uploading its power data from the six World Marathon Majors races around the world has doubled each year since 2016. Garmin estimates that about 60,000 people are using Run Power. But is there anything lost by outsourcing your pacing to an algorithm? In race situations, it might be better to ignore the power meter— even if that means pushing into the red zone temporarily. “Sometimes going with a move may be a tad over your head, but it’s also easier to hang on and be in the race than to come back later,” notes Steve Magness, a track and crosscountry coach at the University of Houston. Schwartz agrees that in a competitive context, you sometimes need to surge. He can even quantify it for any given runner and race scenario: you might be able to hold a threewatt surge for 90 to 120 seconds, for example, or a five-watt surge for 45 seconds. But the best outcome, he says, is when you’ve trained enough with the power meter that you internalize the feeling of the right effort level. “To me, one of the keys to success as a runner is self-awareness,” he says. “You learn to lock in. And then you don’t need to look down at the watch anymore.”
Surge Detectors Power tracking, three ways A seven-minute mile is a seven-minute mile. But what does 300 watts mean? The movements involved in running are so complex that there’s no universal agreement on how to measure and quantify power. Here’s how three trackers approach it.
and other sensors measures the motion of your feet to calculate power and sends the data to your watch or phone. Stryd’s algorithm adjusts on hilly terrain to ensure that a given power number always corresponds to the same rate of energy expenditure.
Stryd: A foot pod equipped with tiny accelerometers
Garmin Run Power: This free app works with any
recent barometerequipped Garmin watch, combined with a chest strap or waist-mounted pod equipped with accelerometers to measure the motion of your center of mass. Unlike Stryd, Garmin reports the power applied to the road regardless of the terrain, and doesn’t tweak the output on hills to match energy expenditure.
Polar Running Power: Polar’s tagline is “running power from the wrist.” It estimates power using only the speed and elevation as reported by the GPS and barometer in certain Polar watches, which adds convenience at the expense of more directly measuring the power you’re applying to the road.
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Dispatches
Moves
03/04.20
1. Static Balance (easy)
Keep It Steady IMPROVE YOUR BALANCE WITH THESE SIX ESSENTIAL EXERCISES— NO BEAM NECESSARY BY HAYDEN CARPENTER IT DOESN’T matter how fit
you are if you can’t stay on your feet. A good sense of balance is crucial for both performance and injury prevention, regardless of how you choose to play outside. “When we train our balance, we’re really trying to improve proprioception, your body’s sense of itself in space,” says Alex Bunt, strength and conditioning trainer to skiing legend Lindsey Vonn. “The better total-body awareness you have, the better athlete you’re going to be.” Bunt suggests these six moves, which target three main balance categories: static, dynamic, and stepping or landing. Do one set of one exercise from each category barefoot at the end of every workout, with no rests between exercises. Repeat, pausing up to a minute between rounds if needed. Close your eyes for an added challenge.
1. Static Balance Easy: Single-leg balance Stand on one leg with a soft knee and a flat, relaxed, responsive foot. Try to keep as still as possible. Make it harder by standing on a balance device, such as a foam pad, stability disc, BOSU ball, or pillow. Hard: Single-leg balance with medicine ball and torso rotation Stand on one leg on a balance device. With both hands, hold a medicine ball or dumbbell in front of you at shoulder height, with a slight bend in the arms. Keeping your lower body and chest still, slowly rotate your arms with the weight from side to side. Volume: One or two sets, 30 to 60 seconds on each leg.
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2. Dynamic Balance Easy: Multiplanar single-leg balance reach Stand on one leg and lower into a half-squat as you reach your other foot forward an inch from the ground. Stand and return your free leg to the center without touching the ground, keeping your hips level and square throughout the movement. Repeat, bringing the leg to the side, then directly behind, then diagonally behind (like a curtsy). Increase the challenge by standing on a balance device. Hard: BOSU single-leg hip hinge Stand on one leg on the dome side of a BOSU ball with a soft knee and your arms loose at your sides. Hinge forward at the hips and lower your torso toward the floor as you lift your free leg directly behind you in the same plane as your upper body. Reach your arms across your body toward the floor, keeping your back flat and hips level and square throughout the movement. Go as low as you can without breaking form. Volume: One or two sets of 5 to 10 reps on each leg.
1. Static Balance (hard)
2. Dynamic Balance (easy)
3. Stepping/ Landing Balance (easy)
3. Stepping/ Landing Balance Easy: Box step-off Stand on a 6-to-12-inch-tall box, then step forward off the box. Land on one foot with a soft knee, your kneecap in line with your second toe and your other foot off the box in a 90-degree angle behind you. Hold your balance for up to five seconds. Repeat, alternating legs with each rep. Once that becomes too easy, step to the side of the box, then off the back. Hard: Single-leg hop Stand on one leg and hop forward as far as you can, sticking the landing with the same leg. Hold for three seconds. Continue hopping on the same foot without touching the ground with your raised foot. Complete all reps on one leg, then switch sides. When that becomes too easy, hop from side to side on the same leg, reverse, then add rotations (spin 90, 180, or 360 degrees with each hop). Make it harder by hopping over hurdles. Volume: One or two sets of 5 reps on each leg.
2. Dynamic Balance (hard)
3. Stepping/ Landing Balance (hard)
I L L U S T R AT I O N S B Y
Moron Eel
*Same electrolytes as regular Gatorade. ©2020 S-VC, Inc. GATORADE and the G BOLT Design are registered trademarks of S-VC, Inc.
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Dispatches
Lab Rat
03/04.20
By the Nose COULD PROPER BREATHWORK BE THE KEY TO BOOSTING ATHLETIC PERFORMANCE? BY GRAHAM AVERILL
at the gym. We’re four hours into the Art of Breath clinic, run by coach and trainer Rob Wilson, and right now I’m “dry-land swimming,” which involves carrying kettlebells across the floor with no oxygen in my lungs. Turns out that’s really freaking hard. Practicing breathwork isn’t exactly groundbreaking. The ujjayi breath, with its dramatic “ha”-sounding exhale, is an integral part of yoga, and athletes have been limiting their oxygen intake during workouts for decades. Wilson developed the Art of Breath four years ago to help deliver a mix of these drills to the masses. During a one-day session last November, he taught me and 41 other participants how to perfect this basic life function with innovative exercises like dryland swimming and inflating a balloon while holding a static pull-up. I went to see if such drills could help me get faster on the bike and stronger in the gym. According to Wilson, it’s possible. But only if I stop breathing through my mouth. For many, mouth breathing is instinctual. As carbon dioxide builds in the body during workouts, it makes us hungry for air. Breathing through the mouth offloads more carbon dioxide than breathing through the nose, quieting the alarm bells going off in the brain. But a 1976 study from Kanazawa University in Japan suggests that tolerating higher levels of carbon dioxide in the body may signify a higher level of fitness. Subsequent studies have corroborated the benefit of training your body to handle more CO2, showing an increase in athletes’ maximum oxygen uptake after they practice restrictive breathing. The dry-land swimming drill was Wilson’s way of showing participants how much carbondioxide buildup they could tolerate, and how fit they really are. (I walked 20 feet before quitting. Most people in the clinic went twice as far.) Mouth breathing has other drawbacks, too: it has been associated with poor sleep and lower stamina during exercise. Meanwhile, breathing through the nose does increase carbon dioxide in the blood, but it’s also been shown to release nitric oxide, which helps deliver more oxygen to cells. That heightened oxygenation is a natural performance enhancer, according to Patrick McKeown, a clinical director at the Buteyko Clinic, a breathing institute based in Ireland. I’M DROWNING
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Box Breathing DO THIS EXERCISE TO RELIEVE ANXIETY, IMPROVE FOCUS, AND BUILD CARBONDIOXIDE TOLERANCE, ALL WHILE SEATED AT YOUR DESK
“Mouth breathing is an epidemic,” McKeown says. “Any athlete who trains while nasal breathing will, after several weeks, exceed their personal best, regardless of their sport.” McKeown recommends combining nasal breathing with breath-hold exercises similar to the dryland swimming drill. Repeat at least Research coming out five times. Work to of Europe demonincrease the duration strates the athletic of each step, up to promise of this type ten seconds. of training. One 2018 study, published in the European Journal of Sports Science, looked at 21 rugby players who did sprint tests over a four-week period. The group who held their breath during the exercise increased the average number of sprints they could do during a timed session from nine to fifteen. The control group showed no improvement. (Obviously, performing breath holds and nasal breathing 1. Sit upright, with your shoulders above your hips. 2. Breathe in through your nose for four seconds. 3. Hold for four seconds. 4. Exhale for four seconds. 5. Hold with your lungs empty for four seconds.
during workouts isn’t for everyone. People with a heart condition, lung problems, or high blood pressure should probably skip it.) After the Art of Breath clinic, I spent a month practicing various breathing exercises, some of which went more smoothly than others. Box breathing (see left), which stimulates the vagus nerve that runs from the brain to the abdomen and tells your body to calm down, helped me relax at work. I talked to a surfer who claimed that taping his lips shut before bed helped improve his sleep and performance. It took me a few days to work up the courage to try it, but when I did, most nights I fell asleep fast and woke up feeling refreshed and alert. It didn’t even hurt when I pulled the tape off my mouth in the morning. At first I struggled with nasal breathing while exercising. But after some encouragement from Wilson, I now breathe through my nose during the majority of my five-mile runs. I recover faster post-workout, and while I’m still not great at dry-land swimming, I’ve seen improvement—instead of drowning at 20 feet, I start drowning at 30. Recently, I completed a mile-long treadmill workout at ten miles per hour. It’s a speed that typically leaves me completely out of breath. This time, I felt like I could keep going.
P H OTO G R A P H B Y
Hannah McCaughey
THE NEW GLYCERIN 18 The new Glycerin 18 is made with DNA LOFT cushioning, our softest midsole ever—so you can turn even your hardest runs into the softest ones.
Dispatches
Fuel
03/04.20
Bounce Back THE BUZZIEST SUPPLEMENT ON THE MARKET MIGHT JUST LIVE UP TO THE HYPE BY CHRISTINE BYRNE ADD COLLAGEN to the growing list of trendy sup-
plements. But unlike other products that have failed the science test (remember fish oil?), this one seems backed up by research: clinical studies suggest that consuming 10 to 15 grams of collagen daily could support bone and skin health, improve strength, speed recovery, encourage tendon health, and reduce joint pain. All of this good news has led to a market that’s expected to grow by over $2 billion in the next five years, to a projected $6.6 billion. Most collagen products are derived from either beef or fish and are composed of partial proteins called collagen peptides. When consumed after exercise, these peptides are easier for our bodies to pick up and use to build our own collagen proteins. From powders to broth, these are the five best options to add to your cabinet.
RSP Nutrition Chocolate AvoCollagen Made with grass-fed bovine collagen, this powder is the perfect addition to a chocolate lover’s pre- or postworkout smoothie. There are no artificial ingredients, and each scoop has ten grams of collagen, plus a good dose of fiber and healthy fats. $35 for 14.1 oz Bonafide Provisions Frontier Blend Bone Broth Bonafide’s thick, flavorful broth is made by simmering beef, turkey, lamb, and bison bones for over 18 hours. It’s a savory base for soups and stews, and each cup delivers nine grams of protein, much of which is collagen. $12.50 for 24 oz Obvi Cinna Cereal Super Collagen Protein Powder A scoop of this powder mixed into some 2 percent tastes just like
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a glass of cereal milk. There are ten grams of grass-fed bovine collagen in every serving, plus a day’s worth of vitamins C and E. $40 for 13.1 oz Vital Proteins Strawberry Lemon Collagen Water Tangy yet agreeable, this beverage includes ten grams of bovine collagen peptides. Strawberry and lemon juices contribute to its flavor, while monk fruit extract adds a little sweetness. $18 for four 12 oz bottles Sports Research Unflavored Collagen Peptides Unflavored collagen powder might seem a little boring, but you can stir it into pretty much anything—even iced coffee. This one packs 11 grams of bovine collagen peptides in every scoop and dissolves easily. $30 for 16 oz
P H OTO G R A P H B Y
Hannah McCaughey
When
my mom was diagnosed with cancer, I towanted her have access to the best treatments available.
SONEQUA MARTIN-GREEN Stand Up To Cancer Ambassador
Photo By MATT SAYLES
THAT’S WHY I’M SO PASSIONATE ABOUT EXPANDING AWARENESS OF CLINICAL TRIALS You want the best treatments for your loved ones. My mom’s cancer was treated using a therapy made possible by clinical trials. I want all people diagnosed with cancer to have access to the treatments that will make them long-term survivors, like my mom. Cancer clinical trials may be the right option for you or a loved one. The more information you have about clinical trials, the more empowered you will be to seek out your best treatments.
Learn more at StandUpToCancer.org/ClinicalTrials Stand Up To Cancer is a division of the Entertainment Industry Foundation (EIF), a 501(c)(3) charitable organization.
Ready. Set. Go. WE MADE IT
EASY FOR YOU.
WE ASKED OUR
TRAVEL EXPERTS WHERE THEY WANT TO GO
IN 2020. THEIR
ANSWERS WILL SURPRISE AND INSPIRE YOU.
PRESENTING 27 ADVENTURES TO GET YOU OUT IN THE WORLD THIS YEAR.
Lagoa do Fogo, on the island of São Miguel in the Azores
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JAPAN, THREE WAYS
Maruyama River, Toyooka In the city of Toyooka, five hours west of Tokyo by train, the Japanese national rowing team trains on the Maruyama River. Rent a kayak from Maruyamagawa Park (from $4 per hour) to paddle it, or head four miles north to San’in Kaigan Geopark for a guided kayak tour through stunning rock formations with Mother Earth (from $64).
Hoshinoya Guguan in Taiwan; below, Billy Motel in West Virginia
WEST VIRGINIA
Still Wild as Hell The Mountain State may be the most underrated adventure destination in the country, with everything from multi-pitch climbing up towering cliffs to Class V whitewater. Most of the action happens around Monongahela National Forest, a.k.a. the Mon, 921,000 acres of terrain that’s uncharacteristically rugged for the eastern seaboard. After the region’s Snowshoe Mountain Resort hosted the UCI World Cup mountain-biking finals last fall, word started to get out: the Mon can play. Snowshoe’s lift-served bike park was recently named a bronze-level IMBA Ride Center and has resurrected old-school (translation: gnarly) backcountry singletrack. After a few days of riding, move north to Seneca Rocks, a 900-foot-tall crag that’s a hotbed of trad climbing. Finish your trip hiking through Dolly Sods Wilderness, 17,000 acres of red spruce forest. Base out of the recently renovated, ten-room Billy Motel in the town of Davis (from $110). The midcentury design and craft cocktails will make you think you’re in a hipster enclave, but rest assured: you’re in West, by God, Virginia. —Graham Averill
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O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 03/04.20
TAIWAN
A Mountain Mecca As Asian nations go, this tiny, teardrop-shaped island off mainland China isn’t known for its mountains. But 70 percent of the country is covered with lush tropical peaks teeming with trails and hot springs. Taiwan’s compact size means that adventure is never more than two hours away by bullet train from any major city. Our recommendation? From Taipei, head for Taichung Valley to the new Hoshinoya Guguan, a tranquil, 50-room resort located along the Dajia River (from $573). It’s an ideal launch point to hike 12,966-foot Jade Mountain, the tallest peak in northeast Asia. Or try nearby Snow Mountain, with its razor-edged cliffs and hiking routes, including the Holy Ridge Trail, a 9.3-mile technical route up and down scree slopes to the 12,749-foot summit. —Devin Gordon
Southern Daisetsuzan Traverse, Hokkaido There’s more to Japan’s northernmost island than skiing at Niseko. The region, a 90-minute flight from Tokyo, has plenty going on in summer, too. Tackle the Southern Daisetsuzan Traverse, a 22-mile path along a string of active volcanoes. Trek on your own, staying at campsites within Daisetsuzan National Park, or book a guide with Travel Hokkaido (from $387). Michinoku Coastal Trail, Tohoku In the mountainous Tohoku region, northeast of Tokyo, there’s the 637mile Michinoku Coastal Trail. For a day hike, opt for the 7.7-mile OkuMatsushima and Urato Islands Course. There you’ll find Matsushima Bay, which is filled with 260 small pinecovered islands.
F R O M TO P : C O U R T E SY O F H O S H I N O R E S O R T S ; C O U R T E SY O F J . R YA N B R U B A K E R / T H E B I L LY M OT E L . O P E N I N G PA G E S : R A Z VA N C I U C A / G E T T Y I M AG E S .
If you’re heading to the Olympic Games this summer, we’ve got your adventure detours covered —Kassondra Cloos
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COLORADO
Go with a Legend
ARIZONA
PAKISTAN
A Cyclist’s Dream
A New Trek to K2
While its better-known California cousin Joshua Tree attracts three million visitors a year, Saguaro National Park, divided by Tucson, sees barely a million and is a biker’s paradise. From downtown Tucson, the 131-mile Loop gets you within two miles of the park. In winter, when temperatures hover in the mid-sixties, this region is a training ground for professional bikers. At the park’s eastern Rincon Mountain District, mountain bikers will find a section of singletrack that links to more than 800 miles of dirt riding along the Arizona Trail. Overnight at the RV-friendly, 130-site Gilbert Ray Campground (from $10), or book a room at the Posada (from $185), a new five-suite inn from the couple behind Instagram sensation Joshua Tree House. Better yet, book a trip with Backroads, which recently launched Tucson’s Blue Sky and Saguaro National Park five-day tour ($2,699). It showcases the best riding in Rincon, with the option to tackle Mount Lemmon, a bucket-list climb that ascends 5,500 feet over 20.8 miles. —Jen Murphy
If the Lifetime Achievement Award of Adventure Travel were a thing, World Expeditions would be a strong contender. The Sydneybased outfit started in 1975 and quickly accrued a litany of world firsts—first commercial cycling trips in China, first commercial descent of Tasmania’s Franklin River, first group treks in Mongolia. Along the way, it developed a knack for edgy destinations, among them Pakistan’s Karakoram Range, where the highlight was the literally breathtaking ascent to K2’s 16,500-foot base camp. Then sectarian violence rocked the country and tourism all but vanished. Now, nine years after pulling out, and with security vastly improved, World Expeditions is back with a 25day itinerary to base camp ($6,390). You’ll be guided by Australian mountaineer Andrew Lock and camp under peaks like Masherbrum and Trango Tower. Also, in June, the company plans to introduce the 28-day Karakoram Exploratory, a loop up the Nobande Sobande Glacier and the Braldu Glacier, with views of K2’s west face (from $7,990). —Tim Neville
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Steve “Doom” Fassbinder is known for completing nearly impossible adventures, like biking and rafting 1,000 miles across Tajikistan. The guy has an uncanny ability to suffer—early in his career, he was a repeat 24-Hour mountainbike-racing world champ. Since leaving the racing scene, Doom has made a name for himself by piecing together creative multi-day routes around the world that require mountain bikes, pack rafts, and the occasional llama. Now his distinctive style of adventure is available stateside with his new outfitter, Four Corners Guides, which takes clients through the deserts, canyons, and rivers of southwest Colorado. The customized tours launch from Fassbinder’s 35-acre Scullbender Ranch, which has canvas glamping tents and its own mountain-bike trail system and pump track. One of the trips includes special access to nearby Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Park, 125,000 acres of protected lands adjacent to popular Mesa Verde National Park, with a fraction of the visitors. You’ll bikepack for three days through the park’s dusty canyons, fording the Mancos River to meet Wolf, a Ute Mountain Ute guide who’ll take you up wooden ladders into Native cliff dwellings. The tour finishes with a 40-mile gravel grind back to the ranch, hitting tiny downtown Mancos, where a craft beer at Mancos Brewing Company awaits. Because what’s a bike ride without a post-ride beer? From $895 —G.A.
C LO C K W I S E F R O M L E F T: P E T E R WAT S O N /AT L A S A N D B O OT S ; S P E N C E R J . H A R D I N G ; R I C H A N D S A R A C O M B S
Clockwise: K2’s peak from base camp; Colorado’s Ute Mountain Tribal Park; Posada, a new hotel in Arizona
blur the line between wander and wonder.
This is Nevada, the weirdest, wildest west. An otherworldly frontier waiting to be explored, Nevada gives you all the space you need to roam and climb and laugh and dream. Here, you'll learn the most fulfilling parks are the ones without themes. Don't let these days get away-let your adventure begin.
The Blue Trail on the Ilulissat ice fjord in western Greenland
THE ADVENTURER Essentials for rugged travelers —Janna Irons
GREENLAND
PUERTO RICO
The Great Wide Open
Always Under the Sun
Greenlanders will proudly tell you that their 836,000-square-mile country is not for sale. They do, however, welcome visitors to their wild Arctic frontier, marked by 11,000-foot peaks, polar bears, and Jakobshavn, the planet’s fastest-moving glacier. Roughly one-third of Greenland’s 55,990 residents live in the western capital of Nuuk, which means there’s a lot of empty space to explore. Big Mountain Bike Adventures launched a seven-day, 73-mile summer bikepacking trip on the Ilulissat ice fjord along the island’s western edge ($4,354). For a less strenuous trip, stay at the new Erfalik Lodge, south of the town of Sisimiut (three-day minimum; prices vary with activity). The Scandinavian-style property sits on the bank of the Erfalik River, one of the world’s best Arctic char fisheries. Summer is for fishing; fall and winter are for hiking the tundra in search of caribou and the northern lights; and winter is for heli-skiing the surrounding peaks. —Stephanie Pearson
Between 2017’s Hurricane Maria and January’s earthquakes, parts of Puerto Rico are still recovering. But the capital of San Juan is up and running, and the north coast remains untouched and ready for exploration. Surfers usually head to the western town of Rincón, but the north coast is also packed with adventure. In Vega Baja, the hurricane cleared the vegetation covering once unnavigable mountain cliffs, allowing the outfitter 21 Climb and Tour to open the Roca Norte Outdoor Climbing Gym. In Arecibo, you can rappel 250 feet into Cueva del Arco and tube through 1,000 feet of cave systems along the Tanamá River. Nearby, 1,000acre Cambalache State Forest has eight miles of hiking trails. The north coast is also home to spectacular beaches, especially Dorado, an emerging surfing hub. Splurge at the recently reopened Dorado Beach Ritz-Carlton Reserve (from $1,299), or check out the Parador El Buen Café (from $107), a family-owned property with 50 rustic rooms. —Kathleen Squires
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Uncharted Supply triage kit, $50 Designed with input from more than 100 professional adventurers, this kit makes preparedness super portable. It has everything you need, including bandages, an emergency blanket, duct tape, and essential medications, all weighing in at less than four ounces. Pelican 1535 Air travel case, $310 Made to withstand underwater submersion, abuse from baggage handlers, and temperatures from 160 to minus 60, Pelican’s new line blends legendary du-
rability with modern conveniences. This carry-on is crafted with the same lightweight material and watertight O-ring gaskets as the brand’s classic cases, but with new features like quietrolling stainless-steel wheels, mesh organizational pockets, and packing cubes. LifeStraw Go waterfilter bottle, $40 This 22-ounce, BPAfree bottle allows you to sip from virtually any stream or spigot, with a two-stage filter that removes bacteria, parasites, and microplastics, while reducing chlorine and other chemicals. Unlike iodine tabs or other purifiers, it’s built to last through numerous uses: the filter is good for 1,000 gallons or up to five years.
B E N H A G G A R / B I G M O U N TA I N B I K E A DV E N T U R E S LT D.
IN THE BAG
NEW ZEALAND
C LO C K W I S E F R O M TO P L E F T: M AT T B A N S A K / R U B Y M O U N TA I N H E L I C O P T E R E X P E R I E N C E ; C O U R T E SY O F L AC H L A N G A R D I N E R /A D V E N T U R E S O U T H N Z ; C O U R T E SY O F D A N A A L L E N / W I L D E R N E S S S A FA R I S
South Island Gravel Grinding Among cyclists, the South Island of New Zealand needs no introduction. But sharing the country’s narrow-shoulder roads with traffic can get dangerous, so New Zealand resident Phil Wyndham, who oversees a “mad keen” team of bikers at outfitter Adventure South NZ, dove into a simple question: How could they ride to their favorite backcountry locations while limiting exposure to cars? The answer: old gravel roads. “We knew they existed,” says Wyndham. “We just needed to link them up with some of our favorite spots to stay or eat and drink.” In April, New Zealand’s first fully supported, multi-day gravel excursion comes to life in Adventure South’s eight-day, inn-toinn romp from Christchurch to Queenstown. Expect to spin up to 55 miles a day, cruising along rugged inlets, past award-winning vineyards, and into soaring alps. Along the way, you’ll granny-gear it up Danseys Pass through the 5,000-foot Kakanui Mountains, soak in hot springs, and tuck along portions of the Alps 2 Ocean Trail, a dedicated bike path from Mount Cook to the Pacific. Day seven includes nearly 6,000 vertical feet of climbing over 45 miles up and down Duffers Saddle, the highest public road in the country. You’ll fuel up at classic Kiwi pubs and stay in places like Dunstan House, a 1900s stagecoach stop in Clyde, where you can sample velvety pinot noirs from Clyde Village Vineyard before catching a ferry across Lake Wakatipu to Queenstown. From $2,575 —T.N.
RWANDA
Beyond Gorillas
Clockwise: Magashi Camp, Rwanda; Nevada’s Ruby Mountains; Otago Central Rail Trail, New Zealand
NEVADA
Yes, There’s Heli-Skiing
As the story goes, it was the 1970s, and a ski patroller from Snowbird, Utah, named Joe Royer would drive back and forth along Interstate 80 between Salt Lake City and his hometown of San Francisco. It was hard to miss the dramatic, toothy peaks that spike up in the middle of the Nevada desert just south of that route. The Ruby Mountains are a big range—90 miles long, 10 to 13 miles wide, with ten peaks that top out above 10,000 feet—but they fly totally under the radar. There’s no resort, but there’s plenty of snow. So in 1977, Royer and two business partners opened Ruby Mountains Helicopter Experience, Nevada’s first heli-ski operation. For decades, they stationed guests at a house they rented in the ranching town of Lamoille. But in 2015, they bought more than 1,000 acres on their 200,000-acre guiding tenure and started building a proper base camp. Named the Ruby 360 Lodge, the ten-bedroom homestead opened three years ago and offers winter access to some of the most remote, rugged ski terrain in the lower 48. The helipad is steps from the lodge, with the closest skiing a two-minute flight away. By day, ski off 11,000-foot peaks with narrow chutes, aspen groves, and wide-open bowls. By night, dine on chef-prepared meals and soak in the outdoor hot tub. From $1,655, including heli-skiing —Megan Michelson
Central Africa’s mountain gorilla success story—the population increased from 786 to 1,000 over the past decade—will always be a major draw. But there’s much more to the region than communing with hairy apes. Rwanda has three national parks, including Akagera, where you can track the Big Five. On the border of Tanzania in northeastern Rwanda, the 433-square-mile park is Central Africa’s largest protected wetland and boasts more than 520 species of birds. And years of conservation efforts have restored its populations of elephants, lions, black rhinos, and leopards. Wilderness Safaris’ new solar-powered Magashi Camp (from $470) is an intimate way to experience Akagera; six tents surround a beautiful lodge on the lush shoreline of Lake Rwanyakazinga, which has one of Africa’s highest hippo densities. The country’s fourth national park, Gishwati Mukura, is due to open to tourists this spring between Volcanoes and Nyungwe National Parks to create a thriving wildlife corridor. On your way out of the country, spend a day or two in the vibrant capital city of Kigali at the art galleries, coffee shops, and bars that now line its streets. Be sure to visit the gut-wrenching Kigali Genocide Memorial, the final resting place for more than 250,000 victims of the conflict, which happened 26 years ago. —S.P.
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UTAH
THE AZORES
A New Climbing and Biking Hub
A Vast Adventure Playground
Most visitors consider Saint George nothing more than a pit stop on the way to Zion National Park. But the town is coming into its own as an adventure hot spot. The riding is similar to Moab, but with more variety, from slickrock paths to high-alpine singletrack. There’s plenty of flow, too. In Bloomington, five miles southwest of downtown, the Bearclaw Poppy Trail offers easy routes with optional drops, while the Barrel Trail, in Green Valley, has huge features. Drive an hour northeast to the Brian Head Resort, which spent two years turning the mountain into a world-class lift-served playground. When your legs need a rest, there’s year-round climbing within an hour of town. Skip the Zion crowds and head 90 minutes southwest to Lime Kiln Canyon, a 350-foothigh cliff offering multi-pitch sport routes. Stay at the new 60-room Advenire downtown (from $209), or try Gooseberry Lodges (from $50), 30 miles east. Each of the 12 cabins comes with a mechanic’s stand. —G.A.
It’s perplexing that the Azores, an archipelago 900 miles west of Lisbon, aren’t better known. The islands are surprisingly accessible—a less than five-hour flight from Boston. And they feel like the love child of Hawaii and New Zealand, with cascading waterfalls, pounding surf, and emerald cliffs. Each island has its own draw— Pico for diving, São Jorge for surfing, Flores for hiking. But São Miguel, the largest island, is a one-stop shop for a multi-adventure trip. Yearround breaks, like the perfect swells at Praia de Santa Bárbara, attract surfers looking to avoid mainland Portugal’s crowds. Near the southern town of Vila Franca do Campo, a submerged volcanic islet makes for great snorkeling. Ten minutes northwest is Lagoa do Fogo, a crater lake reached via a 6.8-mile hike. Or check out the views from a technical two-mile bike trail called Cathedral. Don’t miss the hot springs of Furnas half an hour east. Stay at the 12-suite Sul Villas and Spas (from $134), owned by local surfer Rodrigo Herédia. —J.M.
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IN THE BAG
THE WEEKENDER Necessities for a quick getaway —J.I. Boundary Arris pack, $290 This pack’s genius is in the ultralight molded back panels, which have cushy pads and shoulder straps that conform to men and women from five foot four to six foot two. Its 34liter capacity lets you haul everything you need for a weekend, with organizational features like a removable shoe bag and add-ons including a laptop sleeve and tech pouch.
Duer Weightless jeans, $120 Weighing less than half what the average pair of jeans do, these slim-cut pants are made from an antimicrobial, moisture-wicking, temperaturecontrolling fabric. Nikon Z 50 camera, $860 This compact mirrorless shooter combines pro-level features (time-lapse, slow-motion, advanced auto mode) with a flip-down touchscreen for selfies. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity let you post straight to your feed.
C LO C K W I S E F R O M L E F T: DA N A A N A N D R E W/A L A M Y S TO C K P H OTO ; R O B E R T B R E S S E R / K A P T U R E D T R AV E L I N G ; A I C A C I A YO U N G
Clockwise: São Jorge, the Azores; the drive-through arch in Utah’s Dixie National Forest; Lime Kiln Canyon, Utah
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A 72 Hour Cabin on Västra Götaland
IN THE BAG
THE LONG HAULER Tough gear for extended expeditions —J.I. Patagonia Black Hole 100L duffel bag, $350 A beloved bag gets greener: the Black Hole is now made with 100 percent recycled polyester ripstop and nylon webbing. It combines the functionality of a suitcase and the durability of a duffel, with structured sides and interior pockets for ample gear hauling, a flat-bottom design that enables it to stand, and sturdy, oversize wheels.
SWEDEN
Cabin Heaven
Swedes have mastered the art of being outside and harnessing the healing properties of nature. Now they have the research to prove the health benefits of their simple, sustainable way of life. In 2017, five stressed-out people, including a French taxi driver, a German police officer, and a British broadcaster, spent 72 hours on a private island in the middle of Lake Animmen, in southwestern Sweden, residing in glass cabins. Built on stilts, large enough for a bed, and surrounded by fresh water, trees, and stars, the stunning cabins had an impressive effect on the visitors. After three days, all five showed a measurable decrease in systolic blood pressure, a drop in heart rate, and an increase in creativity and feelings of well-being. The experiment was such a success that there are now nine 72 Hour Cabins in Dalsland province that anyone can book to swim, fish, paddle a canoe, hike, take a sauna, or do as the Swedes do and just be in nature (from $697 per person for three days, including meals). —S.P.
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Osprey Ultralight Stuff pack, $35 Weighing a mere 3.2 ounces, and packing down small enough to fit in your palm, this multifunction bag punches well above its weight. Fill its 18 liters of ripstop nylon with snacks and layers for a day hike, a camera and a jacket for running around town, or a bunch of groceries.
C O P E N H AG E N W I L D E R N E S S /J U I L A C AT H R I N E T H I S
Unbound Merino T-shirt, $65 This lightweight V-neck is a traveler’s best friend. It’s wrinkle-free and can be worn for weeks without developing a smell. Available in men’s and women’s styles, it’s constructed from Australian merino wool, with durable reinforced seams to help it last through any adventure.
GO THE DISTANCE Three long walks to take you into remote, stunning landscapes —G.A.
F R O M TO P : C O U R T E SY O F H O U S E I N T H E W I L D ; C O U R T E SY O F I N G A L L S P H OTO G R A P H Y/ B L AC K B E R R Y M O U N TA I N
Outside GO’s 11-day Kenya safari; below, a Watchman Cabin at Blackberry Mountain, Tennessee
Australia’s Northern Territory 40 miles, 7 days Many of the continent’s highlights are in the Northern Territory, an area left unscathed during the recent devastating wildfires. To hit them all, hike the Larapinta Trail along the West MacDonnell Ranges for 140 miles. Do the entire route in 12 days, camping in designated sites, or sign up for a sevenday, 40-mile trek with World Expeditions. From $2,999
TENNESSEE
Your Own Private Park Blackberry Farm resort in Walland, Tennessee, set the standard for upscale southern hospitality when the Beall family opened it to overnight guests in the seventies. Now they’re taking on adventure with Blackberry Mountain, a 5,200-acre property next to Great Smoky Mountains National Park that opened last February. Half the property is set aside in a conservation easement, protecting eight miles of ridgeline and offering guests hiking, mountain biking, and rock climbing, and earning it the reputation of feeling like a private national park. You can stay in a multi-room home, a stone cottage, or one of six Watchman Cabins atop the mountain (from $1,045). Start off with an early hike to the property’s new restaurant in a restored fire tower for a sunrise view of the surrounding forest and an egg bowl of wilted greens and sweet potato hash. Blackberry Mountain’s guides will lead you to various hidden treasures on the property, whether it’s a flowy piece of singletrack or a sculpture by renowned Danish artist Thomas Dambo nestled off a hiking trail. Set aside a day to pedal 33-mile-long Foothills Parkway, a recently finished two-lane blacktop six miles south of the resort with long-range views into the Smokies. The hotel can arrange for carbonfiber road bikes. Just be sure you make it back for a cocktail—the Mountain over Manhattan, a rye and rosemary-syrup concoction, uses spices foraged locally. —G.A.
Canada’s Yukon Territory 30 miles, 9 days Tombstone Territorial Park in northwestern Canada is considered the Patagonia of the north due to its granite spires, massive peaks, and big game. A hike led by Great Canadian Trails will have you spotting grizzlies and caribou while trekking below peaks like 7,000-foot Mount Monolith. You’ll carry your own gear, but this isn’t a sufferfest. The daily distance is between three and seven miles. From $1,999
KENYA
The Ultimate Safari No one knows how to get you closer to wildlife than our in-house travel experts Sandy and Chip Cunningham at Outside GO. On this 11-day journey, you’ll stay at three family-run ranches that have made huge progress in conservation-based tourism. The trip starts in Nairobi National Park, where rhinos, giraffes, and lions wander wide-open grass plains. Then it’s west to House in the Wild, a lodge on the edge of the Masai Mara, where guests can explore the Enonkishu Conservancy, a consortium of Masai communities. Next up is Ol Malo, a 5,000-acre sanctuary owned by the Francombe family. Here you’ll get to meet neighboring Samburu families and witness the impact the Francombes have had on wildlife conservation. The final stop is Lewa House, a cluster of cottages on the 61,000-acre Lewa Wildlife Conservancy. Populations of black rhinos, elephants, and the endangered Grevy’s zebra have all made dramatic comebacks here, and in 2018, the conservancy invested nearly $1.7 million in local education and community projects. From $9,285 —S.P.
The Canary Islands 40 miles, 8 days This Spanish-governed archipelago, a 2.5-hour flight southwest from Portugal, is a hiker’s playground, known for huge sand dunes, 6,400-foot peaks, and black-sand beaches. Most visitors stick to Tenerife, the largest island, but a new trek with outfitter CanariaWays explores lesser-known La Gomera. The eightday trip hits the coast, rocky peaks, and banana plantations. Stay in a new village nearly every night, from sleepy mountain outposts to the bustling beach town of San Sebastián. From $1,904
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GUATEMALA
GUYANA
Coffee, Volcanoes, and Ruins
The Land That Time Forgot
It’s now possible to bike or hike between the 16th-century colonial city of Antigua and the volcano-ringed Lake Atitlán, 50 miles to the west. Old Town Outfitters has been operating cycling tours in Guatemala for more than 20 years and cherry-picked the best backcountry riding for a challenging new three-day itinerary full of steep climbs and technical singletrack (from $455). The payoff is riding above the Maya ruins of Iximché, unsung views of Lake Atitlán and surrounding volcanoes, and stays at out-of-the-way inns, like an old flour mill turned luxury B&B. Prefer to be on foot? The owners of Trek Guatemala spent two years researching a hiking route between Antigua and Lake Atitlán, meeting with locals to share their vision and ask permission for access. The result is a four-day trek (from $796) averaging seven to nine miles a day through thick tropical forests, coffee fincas, and Maya villages. Along the way, you’ll visit a women’s weaving cooperative, learn how to make tortillas, and hunker down at beautiful glamping sites, one of which has front-row views of Fuego, a very active volcano. —S.P.
The spotlight is on this English-speaking gem, one of six countries that make up the Guiana Shield, a biodiverse geological formation believed to be crucial for the planet’s survival. And Guyana is doing tourism right, deploying green initiatives and small-scale community involvement to preserve its natural resources and cultural heritage. In the south, new lodging has opened to accommodate adventure travelers, including the Wichabai Ranch, a familyrun guest house (from $90) where visitors can go horseback riding with vaqueros (local cowboys), canoe a nearby river, and track wildlife. There are also small, locally owned lodges in the forests and at the edges of rivers. At Rewa (from $16), where you can stay in a hammock or a rustic cabin, anglers catch and release the world’s largest scaled freshwater fish, the arapaima. Be sure to explore the savannas and wetlands of the south-central Rupununi region, home to the Makushi people, who have been here for millennia. With a jungle smorgasbord to nosh, it’s a place where jaguars, green anacondas, giant otters, and bird-eating Goliath spiders thrive. —Norie Quintos
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CALIFORNIA
A New Preserve on the Central Coast It’s no secret that San Luis Obispo is blessed with mountains and Pacific Ocean access. But things just got even better on California’s central coast with the opening of the Pismo Preserve, just off Highway 101. Closed to the public for decades as a private ranch, the 880-acre nature preserve has 11 miles of quality multi-use singletrack that traverses woodlands and coastal ridgelines, allowing the adventure hungry to spread out into new terrain. Stay in downtown SLO at the industrialstyle Hotel Cerro (from $285) or at Hotel San Luis Obispo (from $300), which has a rooftop bar. —Kathryn Romeyn
C LO C K W I S E F R O M L E F T: J U S T I N M U L L E T/ S TO C K SY; C O U R T E SY O F TA N V E E R B A DA L / H OT E L S A N L U I S O B I S P O ( 2 ) ; C O U R T E SY O F D AV I D D I G R E G O R I O
Clockwise: Volcán de Agua, Guatemala; bedroom and steak at Hotel San Luis Obispo, California; Iwokrama Canopy Walkway, Guyana
C LO C K W I S E F R O M L E F T: M A R T I N M AT E J / S TO C K SY; C O U R T E SY O F A L L I S O N B A I L E Y/ W I L D S P I R I T W O L F S A N C T U A R Y; C O U R T E SY O F T I E R R A D E L V O LC Á N
Clockwise: Morocco’s Aït Benhaddou; New Mexico’s Wild Spirit wolf sanctuary; Tierra del Volcán’s at Hacienda El Porvenir
NEW MEXICO
ECUADOR
MOROCCO TO PORTUGAL
The Howling Episodes
Back to the Future
History on Two Wheels
Two hours west of Albuquerque, you can spend time with wolves, some of them named by benefactor and New Mexico resident George R. R. Martin after his Game of Thrones characters. The Wild Spirit sanctuary is home to 65 wolves, wolf dogs, coyotes, Australian dingoes, and red foxes. Most were rescued from the exotic-animal trade. Visitors can book a feeding tour and watch the wolves get breakfast, and even pet and interact with the animals (prices vary with activity). Stay under wideopen skies at the sanctuary’s 15-site campground ($15), or book its cozy cabin ($125) or the lodge ($150). Add in a couple of days to explore the surrounding region. El Morro National Monument is 20 minutes away and home to some 2,000 carvings by Ancestral Puebloans and Spanish and American settlers. Hike the two-mile Headland Trail to the top of a bluff overlooking the Zuni Mountains and the volcanic craters of El Malpais National Monument. At El Malpais, explore one of many lava tubes, like the easy-to-access Junction Cave. Then visit nearby Zuni Pueblo for a tour. —Anna Callaghan
Jorge Pérez, the owner of Tierra del Volcán, a sustainable-travel company with lodges in Ecuador’s volcano country, has created a new trip for travelers to ponder their evolutionary path. Pérez’s Twenty Five Seconds trip unfolds over 15 days from the Andes to the Galápagos Islands, and includes activities designed to spur travelers to think about where they came from and where they’re going. The journey begins in the Amazon inside the Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve, a 2,330-square-mile swath of primordial jungle teeming with ten monkey species, tapirs, and pink dolphins. Here you’ll partner with indigenous people to harvest cassavas, fish for food, and communicate only with gestures. From there it’s off to the Galápagos to hike, snorkel, and contemplate the miracle of life. You’ll visit islands like Santa Cruz and Isabela and either camp on the beach or sleep on a sailboat. Finally, the future arrives in the Andes, at the ranch Hacienda El Porvenir, which translates as “the future,” where you’ll spend 24 hours venturing no more than 30 feet from a tent, alone, with a journal. From $4,989 —T.N.
As an archeologist with a passion for Roman history, Sam Wood excavated his way around the Mediterranean. But that didn’t leave him much time to ride his bike. Then, in 2009, the BBC sent the Australian native to ride more than 2,200 miles from Spain to Italy for a documentary following in the footsteps of the conqueror Hannibal. Shortly after, Wood combined his two loves by founding Bike Odyssey, a touring company that explores history by bike. This summer, to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II, Wood will send a group from Normandy to the Rhine along the path the Allies took to Germany (from $5,785). It takes weeks to complete the entire route, so Wood offers shorter stages, too. Or sign up now for the 2021 Othello tour, named after Shakespeare’s tragic Moorish general. It begins in Marrakesh, Morocco (thought to be Othello’s homeland), then heads to Spain and Portugal. You’ll gasp for air spinning up Spain’s 11,148-foot Pico Veleta, but recover in places like a 15th-century convent in Évora, Portugal, which happens to serve some of the country’s best wines. From $7,378 for 14 nights —T.N.
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Charlotte. A lot of pockets of this city are simply begging to be explored. You’ll quickly ďŹ nd that those who wander are never lost in this humming metropolis surrounded by natural beauty that boasts lush landscapes, natural havens, and even, whitewater rapids. Plan your trip at charlottesgotalot.com.
Newman in Voss, Norway, the day before the European Championship
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in India, in August 2018, she used her paddle to sweep animal dung out of an abandoned stone hut. The then 25-year-old French kayaker was alone at 13,467 feet in the Himalayas. “It’s gonna be the bedroom,” she announced, whisking the space with a mix of mild altitude sickness and bliss. That day she had put on the Tsarap River and kayaked mostly flatwater through mountains too high for trees to grow. Day two would bring elevated flows and mellow rapids—Class III, she’d been told. “It’s beautiful. It’s beautiful. I’m so happy,” Newman said the next morning, announcing her state of mind into her GoPro as she
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paddled through a canyon whose walls were layered like stacked pancakes. Shortly after, she heard the unexpected roar of difficult whitewater ahead. Paddling alone is as rare in kayaking as free-soloing is in climbing. It’s also gaining attention. Last year, in a descent many kayakers compared to Alex Honnold’s historic ropeless climb of Yosemite’s El Capitan, Spanish paddler Aniol Serrasolses soloed British Columbia’s notoriously difficult Stikine during the highest flows any kayaker had ever seen on the river. Before arriving in India, Newman was one of the world’s most accomplished paddlers, but she had never
soloed anything significant. For her first attempt, she picked a 233-mile section of the Tsarap, Zanskar, and Indus—three connected rivers that help form what some call the Grand Canyon of Asia—because she’d heard it was well within her abilities, and because she wanted time to think. Over the previous two years, Newman had graduated from a top school in France with a master’s degree in journalism, been let go from a job in that field, and been cut by the French national slalom team. Though she’d won an individual silver medal at the 2013 World Championships and team gold in 2014, team officials had tired of her pursuit of a career in whitewater, outside the narrow confines of slalom racing. Throughout the two decades Newman had kayaked, she’d paddled in 46 countries
ERIK BOOMER
The nig ht befo re Nou ria New man nea rly drow ned
NEWMAN PADDLED HARD TO THE RIGHT TO CROSS BACK INTO THE MAIN CURRENT, BUT IT WASN’T ENOUGH. HER BOAT MET ROC K, AND SHE BEC AME WEDG ED BETW EEN
and, in 2014, became one of only ten people to kayak Site Zed, a formidable rapid on the Stikine that most boaters elect to portage around. She had run 80-foot waterfalls and claimed wins or top-ten finishes in nearly every noteworthy extreme whitewater competition in the world. “For the first time ever, the world’s best kayaker is a woman,” professional expedition paddler Ben Stookesberry, one of the sport’s elder statesmen, said. Despite growing accolades, getting fired from the French team in December 2017 had left Newman feeling adrift. At the time, she was living in her mom’s apartment in the South of France and owned little more than she could pack into her perpetually damp gear bags. On a whim, she bought a ticket to India to compete in an event at the Malabar River Festival, on India’s southwest
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THE BOULDER AND THE FORCE OF THE CURRENT,
DIR ECT LY ABO VE THE SIP HON ’S MOU TH. coast. She won the race, then began plotting her next move. When the police prevented her from paddling flooded rivers in India’s southeast, Newman flew north to attempt the Grand Canyon of Asia alone. From the seat of her kayak that second morning on the Tsarap, the rapid she was approaching didn’t look like a mellow Class III. The river narrowed and slipped into a gorge, where Newman could see the tops of boulders. The rapid roared like big water, but it was too late to get out and scout. When she hit a wave forming upstream of a boulder, it broke and, like a reset typewriter, pushed Newman to the left. The view opened up. Just beneath her bow was a cauldron that sucked down through a funnel between two massive rocks. This was a siphon, where water can pull a paddler below the surface. Siphons kill kayakers. Newman paddled hard to the right to cross back into the main current, but it wasn’t enough. Her boat met rock, and she became wedged between the boulder and the force of the current, directly above the siphon’s mouth. For four minutes she stayed there, still upright, but with the river surging over her shoulders. Finally, she pulled her spray skirt and flung her drybag, with all the supplies she’d need to survive, onto the rock island beside her. She then leaned forward to clip a tether to her kayak’s bow, hoping it would enable her to climb onto the island, pull the boat up behind her, and scout the remainder of the rapid. She never made it out of the kayak. When she shifted her weight, the river poured into the open cockpit, and Newman, still in her boat, flushed into the siphon. Underwater she had time enough to think, You fucking idiot. Fortunately, there were no obstacles to trap her, and she was quickly flushed downstream. After another quarter-mile of big water, six minutes after she first got pinned, Newman reached the shore. By the time she’d returned upstream for her drybag and reran the rapid, 45 minutes had elapsed. On the riverbank, she broke into sobs. Then she switched on her GoPro, snapped her skirt onto her boat, and slid back into the current. “I’m cold. I’m scared,” she said between shaky breaths. “And it’s time to keep going.”
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Newman on the first rapid of the Rio Blanco in Patagonia, February 2019
“SORRY I’M LATE,” Newman says. It’s the
end of June, and one hour after our scheduled meetup. Newman, having lost track of time while running a classic Class V gorge on the slate-gray Raundalselva River outside Voss, Norway, is slogging up the trail at the takeout. She’s in a blue drysuit carrying her blue Jackson kayak over her shoulder. A dozen or so feral-looking paddlers—nearly all shirtless dudes—are basking and snacking in the sun. Newman drops her boat by the VW van she’s been living in for the past two weeks and says, “At least we didn’t have to go to the emergency room today.” They’d seen two accidents in the past two days: a friend following Newman’s lead paddled an inflatable unicorn off a 35-foot drop and nearly broke his coccyx, and another boater Newman was paddling with landed on her head at the bottom of a two-tiered, 60-foot waterfall and thought she’d dislocated her shoulder. “There were cameras there,” Newman says. “You should never step up your paddling because there are cameras there.” Newman has come to Voss with Ciarán Heurteau, a 32-year-old French-Irish filmmaker who, like Newman, retired from a successful slalom career to pursue extreme kayaking. They’re shooting a video series for Red Bull to highlight the world’s top paddlers: Newman, Serrasolses, Dane Jackson, and Ben Marr. The fjords surrounding Voss offer rivers and creeks with an absurdly high density of waterfalls and the type of unforgiving whitewater you’d expect to see in a Red Bull flick. The town’s other draw is the Extreme Sports Festival, a gathering and competition that attracts top athletes in climbing and kayaking, as well as BASE jumping, cliff diving, and other fringe sports. Between shoots of her running enormous rapids, Newman hopes to claim her throne in the downriver race at the European Championship, a whitewater event that will take place three days from now on a nearby river. Kayaking includes a variety of disciplines, and Newman is the rare athlete who excels at nearly all of them. She got her start in slalom racing, an Olympic event. In fiberglass boats that are as long, thin, and fragile as they are fast, paddlers race both upstream and down
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through a series of gates hung above the rapids. Freestyle competitions are held on standing waves or holes. In stubby plastic or carbon-fiber boats analogous to surfing’s shortboards, competitors utilize surges in the river to coax their kayaks into complex aerial maneuvers. Then there are extreme whitewater events like the one here in Voss. Boaters race heavy kayaks roughly the shape of bratwursts down waterfalls, boulder gardens, or high-volume rapids. Newman is the clear favorite. After changing outside Heurteau’s van, Newman peels the lid off a can of tuna and slurps the liquid off the top. She’d recently told me she was “trying to get out of the dirtbag cycle this year,” but clearly she hasn’t achieved her goal. Not that anybody really makes a stable living from kayaking these days. Two decades ago, when companies like Subaru and Nike fueled the sport’s short-lived boom, top kayakers could make six figures. But by the mid-2000s, the industry had contracted and the money dried up. Now it’s ruled by a handful of small but hearty brands that kick down gear and whatever cash they can afford, usually not more than a few thousand dollars, to the dedicated athletes who rep their products. Barring independent wealth, the only reliable way to paddle full-time is to attract a mainstream sponsor. For Newman, that’s Red Bull. Since 2013, she’s been sponsored by the energy-drink company, which now pays her around $13,000 a year. She makes another $8,600 or so from industry sponsors—Jackson, Kokotat, Sweet Protection— and scrapes together a bit more income from guiding and the occasional speaking gig. (In July, she delivered a motivational talk on risk to outdoor retailers in Munich for about $330. “Really good money!” she called it.) Despite the tight budget, Newman manages to paddle more days out of the year—upwards of 250—than almost anyone else in the sport. In 2018 alone, she kayaked in 16 countries. In the two months leading up to our meeting in Norway, Newman ran rivers in France, Slovenia, Austria, Germany, Italy, and Iran. During that last stop, she taught local kids to paddle at the behest of the International Canoe Federation. It’s an enviable travel schedule, but lately, scrimping by has made Newman wonder how long she can keep it up. That’s one reason that, instead of Norway, Newman would prefer to be in the United States right now, competing in the GoPro Mountain Games in Colorado and then the North Fork Championship in Idaho—two of the sport’s biggest races. With wins there, thanks to prize money and performance bonuses in her Red Bull contract, she would nearly double her annual income. She was
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the heavy favorite at both events, until the State Department rejected her visa request. The official rationale was that Newman didn’t have enough money in her bank account to prove she could support herself. True enough. But Newman suspects the real reason was that Iranian jets had recently shot down a U.S. drone in the Gulf of Aden, and a recent stamp from the Islamic Republic of Iran looked suspicious. Newman spent a good portion of what she usually makes in a year to hire a lawyer to reapply for a visa. Near the end of the process, she wrote to friends and associates in the States asking them to support her application. “I feel incredibly lucky to get to do what I love most and what I do best,” she wrote. “But it turns out Mr. Immigration Officer is right about something. Whitewater kayaking isn’t a proper job.” NEWMAN GREW UP an only child in Le Vil-
laret du Nial, a small village near a ski resort in the French Alps. Her father, an English expatriate, worked in tourism. Her mother, who was born in Paris, held various jobs, which included renting skis and packaging chocolate. In a small town full of skiers and hunters, Newman was an outsider. “The other kids would bring marmot pelts to school,” Newman remembers. “I wanted a marmot pelt to bring to show-and-tell.” She brought a venomous asp shoved into a bottle of liquor instead. Every summer, the Newman family traveled abroad, visiting Costa Rica, Thailand, or Cuba for extended periods, usually with no fixed itinerary. The one time she joined an organized tour, with her grandfather, Newman grew bored, like they’d forfeited adventure. “I still struggle with structure and authority,” she says. She recalls skidding her bike through a neighbor’s freshly graveled driveway for the sheer thrill of defying them. Newman started paddling around age four, not long after seeing a plastic kayak for the first time. “I thought it was a huge Playmobil toy,” she says. “The coolest, biggest plastic toy.” When she asked her parents if she could try kayaking, they said yes, but not until she’d learned to swim. So Newman took swimming lessons. In the U.S., most paddlers are taught to kayak by family or peers. In France, the pathway is more formalized. Paddlers pay to join a local slalom club that gives them access to gear, coaching, and a competitive circuit. Newman won her first race when she was eight. At ten, when the World Championships were held on her local course, she made necklaces with little kayaks on them. She and a friend sold several hundred to spectators, earning Newman enough to buy
a playboat to use when she wasn’t slalom training. She also skied, mountain-biked, and climbed, but the river meant something more. “Taking away kayaking was the only thing that worked when my parents threatened me with discipline,” she says. In 2006, at age 14, Newman entered the French Championships, competing against adults. The event was held 30 minutes from home, in nearby Bourg-Saint-Maurice, on a glacial river—steep, frigid, and intemperate—with a course that Heurteau calls the world’s hardest. Newman took fifth in the women’s division. When she was 18, Newman earned one of three spots on France’s senior slalom team. She had just moved south to start her master’s degree in journalism at Sciences Po Toulouse, an esteemed school near one of the team’s training centers. A few years later, Newman remembers her coach telling her, “You’re fast. If you pull down a good run, you can be a world champ.” Newman had never considered that possibility, though she was already a disciplined athlete. She structured entire practices around fundamentals, spending hours and hours on forward strokes alone. On weekends or rest days, she’d trade her carbon race boat for a plastic freestyle or downriver kayak and chase whitewater for fun. She guesses she paddled 20 percent more than her teammates. The effort paid off. In 2013, she won silver at the World Championships in Prague. The win felt good, but slalom wasn’t enough to sate Newman’s fierce appetite for paddling. Few slalom boaters can run whitewater at Newman’s level. The athletes who prioritize the raw speed and performance required for slalom don’t typically have the stomach for the danger, unpredictability, and adventure of whitewater. But while pursuing Class V rapids away from racing, Newman started to build a community of fellow big-water diehards. The year before she moved to Toulouse, Newman met Louise Jull, a Kiwi slalom racer who also excelled in whitewater. They soon formed the core of a loosely knit, all-women international kayaking crew that would grow to seven members. Newman, Jull, and the others competed against one another in slalom or extreme races, then logged notable descents in places like Norway and Chile. Newman was thrilled to have the camaraderie. “Lou was easy,” she says. “Like I wouldn’t see her for months, and then we’d pick up exactly where we’d left off.” Still, Newman was struggling with her dual pursuits. “How do you match the hemispheres of slalom and kayaking? How do you fit all that in while trying to go to school?” she says. While training for the slalom World Championships in Maryland in 2014, New-
man awoke early one day for a practice session. She found a sign hanging outside the entrance to the now dry concrete riverbed: THE RIVER IS CLOSED.
In a gesture of defiance against the rigidity of competition life, she impulsively bought a ticket to British Columbia. A day later, Newman showed up on the banks of the Stikine, where she became the first woman to kayak Site Zed. Feats such as these made her a minor celebrity in kayaking, and for a while she seemed to be thriving despite her divergent passions. She and her team claimed gold at the World Championships a couple of weeks later. Nonetheless, the French Canoe and Kayak Federation, which manages the national team, saw something in Newman they didn’t like. Her focus was drifting. MORE THAN ANY other factor, what drove Paddling Norway’s Raundalselva River
Newman to trade her slalom career for the endless pursuit of whitewater was a string of devastating tragedies, starting in the fall of 2014, that forced her to recalibrate her
“I FEEL INCREDI BLY LUCKY TO GET TO DO WHAT I LOVE MOST AND WHAT I DO BEST,” NEWMAN WROTE TO FRIENDS, REQUESTING HEL P WITH HER U.S. VISA APPL ICAT ION. “BUT IT TURN S OUT MR. IMMIGRATION OFFICER IS RIGHT ABOUT
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’T A PRO PER JO B.” SOM ETH IN G. WH ITE WAT ER KAY AKI NG ISN priorities. That November, Newman was recovering from surgery on her left rotator cuff when she had a bad reaction to a routine dose of morphine, leaving her unconscious for three days. When she awoke, she learned that a friend of hers, Peruvian paddler Juan de Ugarte, had died in a kayaking accident. Six more of Newman’s friends would die within the next 12 months, including Jull. In the spring of 2015, Jull was training in New Zealand when she flipped and swam a rapid. The grab loop on her spray skirt caught on a log and she drowned. When she received the news about Jull, Newman was still regaining her strength from surgery and reeling from grief. She says she considered quitting kayaking altogether, mourning the fact that she’d missed out on so much time with friends and family. Eventually, she visited a psychologist, who she remembers telling her to let go of her regrets and focus on the things she could change. Newman realized that she was no longer compelled by the singular pursuit of competition. “It changed my life drastically, because I always thought that getting medals
was something really important,” she says. “But then I got a medal and it didn’t change a thing.” Around that time, when she found an old note Jull had written her, she was struck by one particular line—“Always remember the most important thing: fun.” She had it tattooed on her forearm (though she left out the word fun, keeping the most important thing to herself). In May of 2015, Newman made a trip to the U.S. to paddle and to compete in extreme kayaking races. Still recovering from surgery, she won the women’s competition at the GoPro Mountain Games in Vail, Colorado, and finished an astonishing eighth overall (including men and women) in the North Fork Championship. Those were significant performances that came with financial perks, but even better were the opportunities they presented to travel. She linked up with some American extreme kayakers and maximized her three-month visa camping and paddling the West’s best whitewater. Newman views those experiences, along with her time in therapy, as “the beginning of the end” of her slalom career. Rather than
“doing loops on artificial courses like a goldfish,” she thought maybe she should pursue whitewater full-time. In 2016, Newman graduated with her master’s degree, and the following year the French Kayaking Federation made the decision for her. “They fired me,” Newman says. The elite training program dictates that if an athlete fails to produce results, they can be cut from the team, and after her surgery, Newman’s results had been inconsistent. But it was more than that. “You quit slalom three years ago,” Olympic silver medalist Vávra Hradilek told her. Newman knew he was right; her real passion had become whitewater. Still, the dismissal left her feeling like she’d failed at the thing she’d dedicated her life to. So she responded the way she always had in hard times: she went kayaking, this time alone, on a river high in India’s Himalayas. After the near drowning in India, Newman had more than 200 miles of whitewater to paddle. She slowed down. She scouted rapids. A few times, fear and disorientation turned to tears. What the hell am I doing here? In the end, after seven days, Newman had paddled some 20 Class IV and V rapids, a breed of whitewater that’s like riding a fire hose through a minefield. “It was like one of those tribal rituals where a child becomes an adult,” Heurteau says. “When she came off the river, something had triggered in her. She’d decided on a new path, and that path was to push harder than ever.” Newman’s most ambitious goal now is to team up with Ben Stookesberry to complete China’s Tsangpo, a Himalayan river that some
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paddlers have called the sport’s equivalent of Mount Everest. In 2002, Scott Lindgren and a team of seven whitewater legends made a historic descent down the Tsangpo, though some controversy lingers over their accomplishment, because the team left the lower section of the river unrun. Newman and Stookesberry hope to one day make a complete descent. Money is as much an obstacle as the river itself. Including permits and transportation, the expedition will cost somewhere in the range of seven figures. Stookesberry thinks that if any kayaker can raise that sort of money in the sport, it’s Newman. The reasons, he says, have as much to do with her skills as a communicator as with her gifts as a paddler. THREE DAYS BEFORE the European Championship in Norway, Newman and Heurteau are collecting more footage for their Red Bull film. Newman is standing at the edge of an ice-blue creek outside Voss that’s rushing over the lip of Nosebreaker, a 30-foot drop that frequently earns its name. The current makes an S-shaped turn, bouncing left, then right, then left again, before falling some three stories into the pool below. If you approach on the outside of the S, your boat will be shoved into the right wall: broken nose. If you’re too far inside, the river will shove you left and send you flat into an eddy, with similar results. Having considered Nosebreaker for a few minutes, Newman appears unfazed. She describes it as “straightforward.” As Heurteau’s drone hums over the drop, Newman lowers herself into her kayak, splashes her face, and enters the rapid just left of a small V-shaped wave that marks the start of the first halfcircle in the S turn. When she hits the main curler about 15 feet downstream, she leans hard into it, and the water shoves her much farther right than she’d anticipated—nearly against the wall. Newman disappears over the lip and lands with an empty boof. Newman walks back to the top of the drop to run it again. This time she makes a subtle change. She enters the rapid at the same place but angles her boat a few degrees left, then leans into the first lateral with less force. The current carries her into the strongest flow in the center of the river. After a full stroke that lifts her bow, Newman arcs out beyond the waterfall and lands in the pool below with a series of silky skips. Her hair would still be dry if she hadn’t missed her first line. What strikes me is how quickly she makes decisions. Heurteau compares a kayaker’s ability to read a river to a musician interpreting sheet music; the art comes down to how one executes within the understood structure. “Nouria has great water awareness,”
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“I wish girls had more ego to stand up and show the world how good they actually are.”
he says. “It’s not that she’s going to stick her line every time, but she knows exactly what she will do if she doesn’t.” Perhaps because of her journalism background, Newman has the uncommon ability to translate some of this knowledge for a general audience. In Tibet in early August, she diagrammed an entire half-mile rapid in her journal and posted it on Instagram. She broke the big-water Class V into some 25 steps and annotated the lines: “Keep left on the crushing wave,” “Stay balanced, aware of where you are,” “Boof for Jesus.” Though hard to read (Newman writes in chicken scratch), these dissections help dispel the persistent myth that kayaking is an extreme sport ruled by knuckleheaded adrenaline seekers who don’t think before they huck. There’s real planning behind her dangerous feats. “I’m not a stuntwoman,” she says. “I wouldn’t run these things unless I was sure I’d be OK.” Newman has more than 38,000 followers on Instagram, a healthy number for a kayaker, though not extraordinary. (Dane Jackson, another Red Bull paddler, has 139,000.) But Newman’s feed offers something distinct from the bro-brah image of risk-taking promulgated by most pro kayakers, who typically post huck shots from photogenic drops like Washington’s Spirit Falls or famed rivers like the Stikine and not much else. By con-
trast, Newman, who now posts nearly every day (because “the data demands it”), features a mix of lifestyle shots, envy-inducing travel images, a few photos of terrifying rapids, and portraits of friends. Each photo includes a short but well-considered caption. “Nouria is the latest addition to a long line of exceptional female kayakers,” says Mariann Saether, a professional paddler from Norway. What separates her from the rest, she says, is social media. Within the small community of elite paddlers, Newman comes across as one of the adults in the room—sometimes the acerbic one. Stookesberry says her honesty isn’t universally popular among kayakers. In 2018, she wrote an op-ed in Kayak Session magazine that gently clowned Rush Sturges, one of the sport’s biggest names, over his conversion to veganism. “We shouldn’t be too judgmental towards one another. We are all in between swims, vegan or not,” she wrote. Her point was that all choices are justifiable but self-righteousness never is. One night while we were walking back from a party in Voss, Newman was incredulous about a top paddler’s recent career change to life coach. “He meant extortionist,” she laughed. Still, it’s hard to imagine an athlete with a similar collection of talents struggling to make a career in almost any other sport. No
wonder, then, that Newman is irritated that she hasn’t been able to turn her passion into a sustainable career. “Why do I get half as much as the boys when I paddle expeditions and win races?” Newman asks. “I have to be a fucking asshole to advocate for myself.” Saether, who is in her late thirties and has been sponsored for twenty years, agrees that Newman deserves to earn more, but she doesn’t think gender bias is the issue. There’s just not much money to go around, she says. Newman doesn’t disagree, but she thinks women have to fight harder for their slice of a shrinking pie. She once threatened to walk away from a deal with Sweet Protection helmets if they didn’t compensate her. (They now give her about $1,665 a year.) She says that Jackson Kayaks pays some of its male athletes more than her. When I reached out to then president Eric Jackson, he conceded that a few top men make more than Newman but said she’s paid the average for their male paddlers. “We would love to do more, but we have been making cuts at JK. Nouria’s compensation isn’t a male/female thing. Her team manager, Emily [Jackson, Eric’s daughter], wouldn’t tolerate it.” It’s not just sponsors that Newman has to battle. In June, a few weeks before the European Championship, Newman was planning to enter Italy’s King and Queen of the Alps race. At the time, the competition had two events, a marathon course and a sprint final, but there was no women’s division in the sprint and therefore half the available prize money. The reason for the disparity, according to the race directors, was that in prior years no women had elected to compete in the more challenging sprint event—but they weren’t barred from entering it. Newman showed up to the King and Queen of the Alps planning to compete in both marathon and sprint, but when she received her official registration form, it stated that only the top 20 male finishers in the marathon would be allowed to compete in the sprint final. She discussed her concerns with the directors, who proposed a solution: they would ask the other women if they wanted the chance to race in the final, and if none did, Nouria could compete with the men. In the end, three other women wanted to compete, and the company sponsoring the event ponied up 300 more euros in prize money for a women’s category—the same amount as the men. Newman won the race. “I wish girls had more ego to stand up and show the world how good they actually are,” Newman says. “Kayaking is a reflection of society.” A few days after I watched Newman run Nosebreaker, we’re sitting in the living room of a small apartment she’s sharing with six
other kayakers who are here for the races in Voss. It’s around 10 P.M. the night before the European Championship, and Newman’s phone buzzes. It’s a text from a transgender woman she recently kayaked with: Can Newman help her lobby the race directors to let her compete in the women’s division at future events? For twenty minutes, Newman struggles with what to do. At the root of the trouble, she explains, is the question of what gender means—why it even matters. In the end, she decides to ignore the text, concluding that she doesn’t know enough about the topic to be an advocate. “I really feel for her,” she says. “But at the same time, I’ve competed enough to know that if you want to be accepted, if you want to be a part of something, maybe competition is not what will make you feel better.”
taken the course. “We don’t even have to watch to know who wins this. She’s too fast,” says a young, shirtless spectator with dreadlocks and bare feet. Newman’s first lap, not her best, would have qualified her for the men’s final. But when her boat skips into view after the first drop, something’s off. She’s too far right to catch the fast water flowing on the left side. From then on, the mistakes pile up. She gets stuck on a rock in the flat stretch and is too far left when she launches from the 20-foot drop, causing her to land in slack water and lose time pulling herself out of an eddy. “Huh,” the guy with dreads says. “Things are getting interesting.” At the finish line, Newman collapses in exhaustion. Despite what she called her ugliest race ever, she finished less than a second behind the eventual winner.
IT’S NOT JUST SPONSOR S THAT NEWMAN HAS TO BATTLE. IN JUNE, SHE WAS PLANNING TO ENTER ITALY’S KING E, TH E AND QUE EN OF TH E ALP S RAC E. AT TH E TIM
r
COMPETITION HAD TWO EVENTS, A MARATHON COURSE AND A
r
SPRINT FINAL, BUT THERE WAS NO WOMEN’S DIVISION IN THE SPR INT AND THE REF ORE HAL F THE AVAI LAB LE PRI ZE MON EY. IT’S NOW THE final heat of the European
Championship, and Newman is waiting in a pool beneath a 20-foot waterfall on Norway’s Myrkdalen River. She already has a several-second lead over the four women she’s competing against. Prepping for her second run, Newman pantomimes each move on the course like a downhill skier outside the starting gate. A left stroke off the right side of drop one. Down the V forming just left of the rock island. Vertical strokes through the flats. And center-left off the second drop, a 20-foot waterfall. There are about 100 kayakers and spectators positioned on the banks of the Myrkdalen. Techno music pumps from a speaker, and when competitors near a bridge doubling as a viewing platform, the crowd roars and shifts from the upstream side to the downstream side. As extreme racecourses go, this isn’t an impressive one. The river level is so low that racers scrape bottom at one part of the run. But if it isn’t particularly dangerous, racing the Myrkdalen today is technical. Along the half-mile course, the river drops over six distinct ledges that vary in size from a threefoot, river-wide hole to a twenty-foot waterfall that shoots kayakers into the pool below like they’ve been fired from a T-shirt gun. The emcee announces that Newman has
Newman is gracious in defeat. “And the one that showed anything can happen today, Beth Morgan!” says the emcee as they take the podium. Newman showers Morgan with champagne, but afterward she sounds devastated. “I can’t believe it, I fucked up,” she says. “I started thinking about what went wrong, trying to compensate. I think it’s time to take a step back and relax.” And so she does. For a whole hour and a half, Newman doesn’t kayak—doesn’t even really consider it. Then a friend asks if she wants to run something mellow close by. Oh, why not, Newman thinks. It’ll be good for me. Before the year ends, she’ll deliver the talk to outdoor retailers in Munich, teach clinics for kids at the Freestyle World Championships in Spain, notch three significant highwater descents in three weeks in Tibet and Nepal, swing through Paris to pick up a credit card to replace the one she’s worn out, then jet to Quebec for two weeks for a first descent, and finally to Indonesia for three weeks of exploratory paddling. She’s still mulling over that full-time job. But by now, she’s learned to count on something better O coming along first. KYLE DICKMAN WROTE ABOUT SNAKE ANTI VENOM IN THE JUNE 2019 ISSUE.
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MEN
SUFFER
SUICIDE,
HIGHER
AND
RATES OF
DRUG
ABUSE
DEPRESSION, THAN
WOMEN.
MANY ARE ANXIOUS AND LONELY — AND,AS A RESULT, THEY’RE
ALL
TOO
OFTEN
ANGRY
AND
VIOLENT.
WILDERNESS
COLLECTIVE
THINKS
THE
SOLUTION
LIES IN OPEN SPACES, UTVS, AND FIRESIDE TALKS.
PHOTOGRAPH
BY
CHRIS VELASCO
CHRIS COLIN RIDES ALONG TO FIND OUT IF THE OUTDOORS
CAN
SAVE
GUYS
FROM
THEMSELVES.
03/04.20
OUTSIDE
MAGAZINE
75
O
TENDER
CHILD
OF
BUT
SIX
YEARS: MAY THIS MASSIVE MOTOCROSS-STYLE
HELMET,
COMPLETE
WITH 14 INTAKE VENTS, FIT AND PROTECT YOU, FOR I UNDERSTAND NOT
THE
SIZING
WAYS
OF
THE
ONLINE
CHART.
I clicked purchase, and two weeks later my son, Casper, and I were roaring across a high sage desert, darkness falling, canyons plunging, chunky rocks looming, frigid wind howling, expensive epic of cinematic masculinity unfolding. What in the end does a father want for his child? I wanted Casper to not get pneumonia on the first fucking day of our trip. But in his infinite wisdom, the god of the utility terrain vehicle (or UTV) forsook windshields, windows, climate control, and, for that matter, an effective muffler. I draped my coat across the boy’s little lap. “Don’t let this blow away!” I yelled. “What?” “Don’t let this blow away!” “What?” Our conversation might’ve continued in this vein had I not been so caught up in staying upright. I’d been driving this bizarre vehicle—essentially a small, high-octane dune buggy—for an hour now and was steadily getting worse at it. We were in northwest Arizona, sloshing along a canyon somewhere between the Colorado Plateau and the Mojave Desert. Yucca and scrub oak blurred past as we fishtailed wildly across gravelly BLM two-track. The natural thing to do would be to slow down, but the light was fading, and we had another hour, or maybe five, until we reached camp. So I gunned it, swerving into the lonesome western landscape, hunched dementedly over the wheel, an off-road, neon-helmeted Neal Cassady. I FIRST HEARD about Wilderness Collec-
tive, the group putting on our mechanical foray, when it launched in 2011. Ostensibly, the Los Angeles outfitter offers $3,500 high-horsepower adventures for stylish urban dudes. But that’s only the wrapper. The essence of the brand is the invisible skein of brotherhood and truth stretched between the snowmobiles and dirt bikes. “Wilderness makes you better”—that’s the motto. During trips to Yosemite, Alaska, and Death Valley, men rev into a higher echelon of manhood, growing closer as fathers and
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sons and friends and bros. Whatever ails us is no match for the improving power of wild lands plus loud machines. In 2019, the group launched its first child-friendly outing, “a four-day off-road adventure to the Grand Canyon designed for fathers and their kids to have the adventure of a lifetime.” Each day would involve two to four hours of driving, periodic stops, and backcountry camping in Nevada, Utah, and Arizona, and eventually we’d end at the North Rim. Four staffers would prepare our food and document us assiduously. Along the way, a dozen dads would undergo unspecified man-growth. “Don’t roll your vehicle,” Martín Vielma, our chill, ponytailed guide told us at the start of the voyage. We dads and our kids, most under ten, had fanned out around him in a giant UTV warehouse in Saint George, Utah. We were a mostly white group, middle-aged, and all straight, as far I could tell: some sporty Dallas guys who went to church together, some LA guys with tattoos, a tech guy from San Francisco. Vielma reviewed a few additional points of UTV operation, but the essence was: don’t be stupid. In the run-up to the trip, I had envisioned long days of contemplation and connection. The scrubby hills and low plains of redbrown, the washed-out stretches of prickly pear and cholla—this is the type of country where you figure out a thing or two. The minute I punched the gas, I realized the idea was laughable. The drone of the motor and DURING
TRIPS
TO
slightly less than I did. That’s a heavy burden in its own right; add a widespread overhaul of masculinity to the proceedings and things get extra complicated. In Heart of Maleness, the French philosopher and sociologist Raphaël Liogier describes the strange fog men find themselves in after #MeToo, “struggling to redefine our ambitions as men, our fantasies as men, our behavior as men, our desires as men. In short, our place in the world.” Frankly, anyone so disoriented by the current landscape strikes me as either willfully obtuse or weirdly dim. Toxic masculinity, as we now call it, has always oozed through civilization. For your average halfwayreflective guy, the recent wave of bad-men stories shined a new kind of light on an old situation. The challenge isn’t knowing our place in the world, it’s helping each other get there, starting with the youngest among us. I suppose this is a good opportunity to acknowledge the leftist San Francisco bubble in which I raise my children, a realm where progressive values are de rigueur and offroad-vehicle riding happens only in commercials, which we don’t actually see because we’re busy watching documentaries about tofu. Casper, for his part, is just a normal kid in this world, kind and thoughtful and funny and rambunctious. He has a guileless jack-o’-lantern smile, and his dreams generally feature Messi. He dictated sweetly off-message signs when I took him to the Women’s March (TAKE CARE OF SNOWY OWLS ), and once I heard him ask
YOSEMITE,
ALASKA,
AND
DEATH
VALLEY, MEN REV INTO A HIGHER ECHELON OF MANHOOD, GROWING CLOSER AS FATHERS AND SONS AND FRIENDS AND
BROS.
WHATEVER
AILS
US
IS
NO
MATCH
FOR
THE
IMPROVING POWER OF WILD LANDS PLUS LOUD MACHINES.
the roar of the wind obliterate everything— every thought, every idea, every word spoken. We were quivering husks when at last we rumbled up to a small plateau in Mohave County, Arizona. While I pitched our tent, the Wilderness Collective crew built a fire nearby, and in time everyone drifted over for dinner and warmth. I let Casper get to know the other kids—mostly boys, though not all—as the grown-ups chatted around the blaze. There was talk of jobs, motorcycle projects, whose kid was killing it in soccer, and, as occurs on every guy trip, epic adventures past. But we were here for the future. A father thrums with a deep and weary hope, after all: You, my child, shall fuck things up
his big sister how her day was. He’s also a kid in a changing world. At six, he has more trans and queer people in his life than I did in my first 20 years. His first-grade class talks about conflict resolution, intent versus impact, and equity versus equality. But healthy masculinity is about more than simply not groping your way up the ladder. I want my son to be joyful, emotionally mature, resilient, giving, and actualized— just like his elder sister. Already among his little friends, I see cruddy guy tics creeping in: a flash of fragile ego here, a facade of invulnerability there. I try to model the good stuff, but sometimes it seems that stronger medicine is needed. Which is how we ended up sitting around a fire with a bunch of
C LO C K W I S E F R O M TO P L E F T: C O U R T E SY O F D R E W M A R T I N / W I L D E R N E S S C O L L E C T I V E ( 3 ) ; C O U R T E SY O F M A R T Í N V I E L M A / W I L D E R N E S S C O L L E C T I V E ; C O U R T E SY O F W I L D E R N E S S C O L L E C T I V E ; C O U R T E SY O F M A R T Í N V I E L M A / W I L D E R N E S S C O L L E C T I V E
BOTTOM RIGHT: THE AUTHOR AND HIS SIX-YEAROLD SON, CASPER, OUTSIDE SAINT GEORGE, UTAH
strangers on a cold night in Arizona. I don’t know what time we staggered off to bed—step one of a Wilderness Collective trip is surrendering your phone. A wind had risen, and it howled along the desert floor, shaking our tent. I pulled the boy close, his little frog legs tucked against his chest. WILDERNESS MAKES you better. It’s writ-
ten on the company’s mugs and shirts and hats, on the artsy yet rugged magazine it publishes, and on the short films it produces about its trips (nearly 100 so far). It’s a small empire of betterness that founder Steve Dubbeldam runs from his office in LA. Dubbeldam, 37, is an everyman for our times, if every man were handsome and also a former clothing entrepreneur. He’s laid-back, friendly, and eminently reasonable—that is, Canadian—and one day nearly a decade ago, he looked up and spotted a troubling gap in the cultural landscape. Where there should be character improvement plus machinebased adventure for sophisticated young men, he saw nothing. “There’s an idea I throw around: Adventure is a shortcut into guys’ hearts. It’s a chink in the armor. You can go deeper faster,” Dubbeldam later told me. (Having just done a trial version of the Dads and Kiddos trip with his three-year-old, he was sitting ours out.) Where other men’s groups might devote more time to explicit emoting, Wilderness Collective guys mostly shred all day, capped by a check-in around the fire about what brought them there. That conversation, in turn, generally opens onto larger ones about how life is going. Then: more shredding. “I understand the paradox, exploring masculinity while doing these traditionally manly activities,” Dubbeldam says. “The idea is to put a new idea in a familiar container. New idea, new container—that’s too much for people.” He wanted to start finding answers to questions not getting asked enough. What does it mean to be a good man? What about a healthy and balanced one? How can we wake up a bit? Something, after all, is clearly wrong. Men suffer higher rates of self-harm than women, ditto addiction, ditto incarceration. Men with mental illness seek help less often than women. The men perpetrating the vast majority of violence—they’re suffering, too. And then there’s whatever small-bore distress doesn’t rise to the level of measurement. For all these concerns, Dubbeldam says, “I didn’t see a lot of people elevating the conversation about men.” That has changed, of course. The past few years have been marked by greater interest in the subject, if interest is the word for blearily noticing a global sprawl of garbage fires. But
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for guys not Weinsteining their way through life, nuanced conversations about man stuff seemed to be trickier business. What if you’re just, like, partly broken? Aside from not being an asshole, how does one improve? Which helps explain the cottage industry that has emerged in recent years, devoted to various areas of neglected growth. Picking up where men’s groups of the eighties and nineties left off—the mythopoetic movement, for example, forever associated with Robert Bly–style drumming sessions— organizations like Evryman, Junto, and Wilderness Collective have blossomed, creating communities where men can discuss their anger, achieve “emotional mastery,” or otherwise evolve. These exist against a broader cultural backdrop of podcasts, books, assorted articles heralding “the new masculinity,” and that inexplicably controversial Gillette ad that dared to suggest that bullying, catcalling, brawling, and other boys-will-beboys pursuits aren’t actually “the best a man can get.” In one mode or another, everyone’s suddenly talking about masculinity. I have carefully avoided that shit. In my experience, the guys most preoccupied with manhood invariably have the screwiest ideas A
SIX-YEAR-OLD
PARENTAL
BOY
DECISION
we consoled him during a tantrum, was that respecting his natural sensitivity or encouraging male brittleness? When we told him to stop kicking the seat, were we stifling some important inner boyhood energy, or were we helping teach a future man about impulse control? A six-year-old boy is a laboratory, every parental decision a political and ethical minefield. If it seems ridiculous that a fourday UTV romp might help navigate a segment of that minefield, well, parents are ridiculous. ONE CAN GET a handle on UTV operation,
but the insane noise never goes away. I had many things I wanted to say to Casper— geology things, camping things, whatdo-you-think-of-this-trip things—but it was impossible. Was this a giant metaphor for fatherhood and its rivers of unspoken words? I was pondering this on day two when an abandoned dollop of civilization appeared on the featureless horizon. It was in 1917 that homesteaders first arrived in these parts, and the Mount Trumbull schoolhouse became the center of civic life. Doubling as a town hall, church, and dance hall, it saw the population peak in the thirties, then gradually plummet, as it occured
IS A
A
LABORATORY,
POLITICAL
AND
EVERY
ETHICAL
MINEFIELD. IF IT SEEMS RIDICULOUS THAT A FOURDAY UTV ROMP MIGHT HELP NAVIGATE A SEGMENT OF THAT MINEFIELD, WELL, PARENTS ARE RIDICULOUS.
about it. What’s more, the broadly defined men’s movement has a tortuous intellectual history, swerving from a generally feminist sensibility into beleaguered victimization, and often moving into outright misogyny. As a result, you never know when a benign chat about gender will veer into crazy town. (“Yeah, fatherhood is tough! Anyway, my white-nationalist flat-earth newsletter comes out monthly.…”) More to the point, explorations of masculinity tend to be tediously abstract. Discussing “how to be a good man” strikes me as an outdated way of discussing how to be a good person, and I already had a rough answer for that: be kind, redistribute all forms of power, and learn an instrument. Beyond that, who had time to ponder manliness when there’s dinner to be cooked? This was my jam until the birth of my son converted the theoretical topic of masculinity into an array of actual concrete questions. When Casper’s sister egged him on and he went ballistic, was that on her or him? When
in many such places. The last full-time resident left in 1984. The single-room building we rolled up to was simple and white, and had been unused for decades. As the kids explored some rusty playground equipment out back, the dads looked inside the building. We could’ve been in any western ghost town. During Mount Trumbull’s heyday, a thousand other Mount Trumbulls sprang to life, and with them a certain version of maleness, born of an earlier masculinity crisis. The closing of the American frontier in 1890 marked a peculiar pivot in the young nation’s psyche. With the most savage and fearsome territories officially tamed, the conquering impulse was replaced by something closer to nostalgia. “Ideas of the American West became increasingly idyllic,” Laurel Braitman writes in Animal Madness, a book that’s only partly about nonhuman mental illness. Suddenly, new anxieties arose. Who were men without their ruggedness? What would they do without bears
C LO C K W I S E F R O M TO P L E F T: C O U R T E SY O F B R I A N F E R N A N D E Z / W I L D E R N E S S C O L L E C T I V E ; C O U R T E SY O F C H R I S V E L A S C O / W I L D E R N E S S C O L L E C T I V E ; C O U R T E SY O F D R E W M A R T I N / W I L D E R N E S S C O L L E C T I V E ; C O U R T E SY O F C H R I S V E L A S C O / W I L D E R N E S S C O L L E C T I V E ; C O U R T E SY O F D R E W M A R T I N / W I L D E R N E S S C O L L E C T I V E ; C O U R T E SY O F A L E X R I T Z / W I L D E R N E S S C O L L E C T I V E
WILDERNESS COLLECTIVE FOUNDER STEVE DUBBELDAM (TOP RIGHT, WITH HIS SON, JUDAH) BELIEVES ADVENTURE IS “A SHORTCUT INTO GUYS’ HEARTS.”
and Indians to defeat? By 1910, the Boy Scouts had been created, in part a bulwark against the softening of our citified young lads, and gradually a new ideal of American maleness—arguably the floormodel American man—took shape. If you’ve seen a John Wayne movie, a Marlboro Man billboard, or any of the ten million slightly less cartoonish variants that permeated the culture for decades, you are familiar. The way Dubbeldam sees it, a better version of man is within reach. What’s more, getting there isn’t all that complicated— merely being away from our phones and humbled by nature will kick-start the process. Deep talks are not required, breakthroughs not necessarily evident; the metamorphosis happens beneath the surface. Having put in my time with the homeopaths and the acupuncturists, I know what it’s like to await a cure that might never present itself. Was it working? Was this snake oil? On we hurtled, madly yet hopefully selfimproving, through assorted terrified habitats. Think Walden meets Mad Max.
don’t mean we foresaw #MeToo or the ascension of Brett Kavanaugh. It was our own fates we prophesied. We anticipated, with the bitter clarity of youth, the vacancy and inflexibility that take hold of men as they age, perhaps even blooming from within. We saw the unaccountable anger and emotional stuntedness posing as stoicism. The isolation and the defensiveness and the joylessness. The technological bewilderment and the many World War II books. The weirdness around women. The weirdness around men. We did not like this, but like Wilderness Collective, we had a plan. Staving it all off was just a matter of locking in some inoculative habits: regular conversation, emotional accessibility, pushing back on each other when necessary. By the end of the night, a monthly gathering had been willed into existence. This past year, we marked the 20th anniversary of our Man Club, and for all our efforts, I’m not sure what we’ve achieved. No corpse of ingrained maleness lies at our feet; we do stupid man stuff all the time. So what does that bode for men’s groups in general?
THE
LIKE
WHOLE
THING
SEEMED
MAN
SOLEMN
WHEN
APPROPRIATE,
BUT
ABOVE
IF
ARE
A
GONNA SCREWED
WANNA
BE
YOU
MAN.
THEMSELVES
UP
That afternoon, after a decent rumble south of the schoolhouse, one of the staffers waved for us to make another stop. One by one, the dads pulled their vehicles off the dirt road and everyone climbed out. A brief period of sandwich eating and football tossing followed, and then Vielma announced that we’d be taking a walk. We crossed a narrow gully and made our way to a wall of boulders. Vielma pointed up. Here and there on the sides of the rocks were some ancient-looking markings—the Nampaweap petroglyphs. A child’s natural relationship to 1,500year-old rock art is one of casual defacement. But we reeled them in quickly, and then we stood there taking it in. It was hard to know what to make of it. Was it heartening, seeing that people all those centuries ago had thoughts and feelings just like us? Was it sad, seeing how far we haven’t come in the intervening years? “They all look like the Stüssy logo,” one of the dads said after a while. MANY YEARS AGO, at a dark bar in San Francisco, some friends and I fell into a troubled conversation about the future of men. I
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AND
FOR
MAN.
ASPIRATIONAL.
HIP
AD
CALLED IS
IS
AN
ISN’T IN
THE
A
BRASH,
MAN ALL
MAN,
THAT
BRAND MAN
YOU’RE
HOW
FIRST
IS
MEN
PLACE?
Are we really the ones who can change us? Stephen James thinks so. A psychotherapist and leadership consultant in Nashville, he takes his clients on Wilderness Collective trips—something about them, he told me, helps the guys be more open, honest, brave, and understanding. In addition to running a private practice, James is the author of Wild Things: The Art of Nurturing Boys. As he sees it, these trips counteract the atomization that both suburban and urban living have wrought in men. We live too internally, he said, and no longer “have strong voices inspiring us to be wholehearted men.” I felt that old tingle at first—was “wholehearted” code for some kind of essentialist patriarchal nonsense? But what followed felt uncontroversial: modern domestic life has gotten too comfortable for some men, and they are the worse for it. “We’re numb to celebration and protected from struggle,” he said. “Our lives get sanitized, and that leads to anxiety and depression. Our hearts are made to live a bigger life than comfort.” Dubbeldam described his job as waking guys up—getting them to pay attention to their lives and not just their work, their
phones, or whatever else we pour too much of our lives into. “One of my biggest goals on these trips is to spark introspection,” he said. “Get them to stop and think, What direction am I going in? If I keep sailing at this angle, where does that get me in ten years?” As Dubbeldam sees it, men are prone to tunnel vision—“I’m not going to take a breath until I get fired or acquired,” as he put it. Even more troubling, he explained, is the tendency “to wait until something really terrible happens before doing some introspection.” Though, when that’s the case, Wilderness Collective is there for them. Dubbeldam and James told me of campers past admitting to explosions of heartache: illness, the unraveling of a marriage, the loss of a child. Meanwhile, there’s the everyday man stuff that makes everything harder. “There’s a way men struggle with shame that’s different from how women do,” James said. “Do I measure up? Is my value what I achieve? Men seem to identify with those questions more. The question they have is, If I take my mask off, am I the same as you?” Some time back, Dubbeldam was on a Grand Canyon expedition with a client who nine months earlier had lost his wife after a long illness. The man’s life had essentially been on hold for years as her condition worsened. Then, on the third day of the trip, something changed. “He was driving around this corner, and he took it way too fast and rolled his machine down a ravine,” Dubbeldam told me. “I saw him crawl out of the bushes. Thankfully, he was OK. Around the fire that night, it woke him up. He was vibrating. Crashing and basically destroying his machine was the best thing that could’ve happened to him. He’d spent the past six or seven years playing it safe. And finally he wasn’t.” I thought about that man for a long time. On the final night of our trip, we camped 15 feet from the edge of the Grand Canyon. (About that 277-mile-long, six-millionyear-old chasm I will only say: it’s worth a look.) But nobody rolled their machine that day or any other, nobody vibrated with newfound feeling. One of the guys confessed to me that he had something of a reading addiction; otherwise we kept it on the surface. After the long trek from the canyon to the UTV warehouse in Utah, we parted with more handshakes than hugs. We agreed to keep in touch, but we haven’t. A FEW WEEKS LATER, just as the trip was
fading, Casper and I clicked a link that appeared in my inbox. Immediately we were walloped with the opening licks of “Voodoo Chile” screaming over jagged shots of
C LO C K W I S E F R O M TO P L E F T: C O U R T E SY O F M A R T Í N V I E L M A / W I L D E R N E S S C O L L E C T I V E ; C O U R T E SY O F S A M S O N H ATA E / W I L D E R N E S S C O L L E C T I V E ; C O U R T E SY O F A L E X R I T Z / W I L D E R N E S S C O L L E C T I V E ; C O U R T E SY O F C H R I S V E L A S C O / W I L D E R N E S S C O L L E C T I V E
PSYCHOTHERAPIST STEPHEN JAMES (BOTTOM LEFT, WITH HIS SON, ELIJAH) BRINGS CLIENTS ON WILDERNESS COLLECTIVE TRIPS TO HELP FOSTER “WHOLEHEARTED” MEN.
our machines whipping along the edge of a mountain and bouncing up rocky paths. The film version of our trip was highly professional, gorgeously shot, and strangely jarring. Mundane moments—waiting for dinner, grabbing a beer—had been stylized into something visually familiar but viscerally alien. The vibe pivoted to elegiac indie rock and grainy sunset shots. There was Casper lighting a fire with Vielma; what felt nice the first time suddenly looked weirdly meaningful. Rather than garden-variety dads who’d forked over money for a fun weekend, we were heroes of a now legendary adventure. Watching our Wilderness Collective friends tool around in their vehicles was a hoot. But it was hard not to see how desperately epic everything looked. Manliness for the camera, manliness for the subsequent anecdotes, manliness for reclaiming some inner human void. What felt strange wasn’t the marketing of adventure but the market-
ing of the emotions that accompany adventure. The whole thing seemed like an ad for a brand called Man. Man is hip and brash, Man is solemn when appropriate, but above all Man is aspirational. If you are a man, you’re gonna wanna be Man. I found it all a little perturbing. Driving a wedge between our real selves and some anxious idealized version of us—isn’t that how men screw themselves up in the first place? Were it that simple, we’d have our masculinity crises solved in half an hour. But this much was also true: somewhere around mile 17 on the last day of our trip, Casper and I hit a bump and my inner purist bounced right out of the vehicle. For reasons I did not grasp, the cameras and the engine noise and the occasionally forced bonhomie melted away in that final hour. Zipping along a bouncy road at 60 miles per hour, hand on Casper’s knee, I found that I was having a ball. But not just any ball. I was a boy again, speeding through
the woods near my childhood home on a brisk fall afternoon, branches whipping my arms and untold Virginia ecosystems yielding to my BMX. It’s possible I’d had passing thoughts about my life, my parents’ separation, or some confounding teen behavior I’d glimpsed in the 7-Eleven parking lot. But mostly I had no thoughts at all. I was free. I’m not saying that men should start acting more like boys. We more or less built a civilization on that, and look. But maybe I was looking at things all wrong out there with Casper. Instead of teaching him how to be a good man, maybe I needed to figure out how to be a child. There’s a tiny window of our lives before all the brokenness of our warped society seeps in, a window where the world is just big and strange and wonderful—and exalting in that world is purer than anything. At the start of our trip, I had offered Casper a dollar continued on page 97 >
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Eric and Pam Bealer at their Pelican homestead in the early 2000s
Artist Eric Bealer was living the remote, rugged good life in coastal Alaska with his wife, Pam, an MS sufferer, when they made a dramatic decision: to exit this world together, leaving behind precise instructions for whoever entered their GEFMR Ă VWX investigates the mysteries and meaning SJ ER EHZIRXYVSYW GSYTPI [LS GLEVXIH XLIMV S[R [E] SYX
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It was late March 2018. Bealer, an Alaskan artist who specialized in intricately detailed wood engravings, had just traveled for two days from his homestead on Lisianski Inlet, through the rough winter waters off the western edges of Chichagof and Baranof Islands, to the relative shelter of Sitka Sound. His skiff, built by hand using materials harvested and salvaged from Alaska’s coast, was jam-packed with his work: old prints, new prints, even the ink-stained, delicately carved wooden blocks used to make the prints themselves. There was so much art filling the little boat that, during his overnight layover en route to Sitka, Bealer had no room to lie down. He slept onshore, on the ground. Eugene Solovyov met him on the dock in Sitka’s Crescent Harbor. Solovyov, owner of the Sitka Rose Gallery, had known Bealer for more than two decades, ever since the artist walked in one day in the mid-1990s, looking to place his work. Solovyov was immediately impressed with Bealer’s depictions of Alaska’s landscapes, the state’s flora and fauna. It wasn’t just the technical proficiency, the fine detail. Bealer’s images, wild and moody, made you feel something. And they were the kind of art almost anyone could afford: prints sold for $25, or $40, or $45. Bealer went on to become the gallery’s most popular artist with both visitors and locals. In their twenty-plus years of acquaintance, the pair had became much more than gallery owner and artist, vendor and producer. They were close friends. Every couple of years, Bealer would travel to Sitka by plane or boat for a gallery show. He stayed in Solovyov’s apartment, and they’d catch up over a few beers. Sometimes, Bealer’s wife, Pam, came along, too, although her visits were less frequent after she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disease that attacks the nerves in the brain and spinal cord, with effects ranging from manageable problems like pain and numbness to serious physical disabilities. As the years passed and Pam’s symptoms worsened, she and Solovyov kept in touch by e-mail, trading photos and stories. Solovyov later told me that, when he saw
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the little boat crammed with art that March day, he should have known. For years, the couple had talked with close friends about their intention to die together when Pam’s time came. She did not wish to see her disease through; Eric did not plan to live without his wife. But it was one thing to talk about this in the abstract. It was another for Solovyov to stand in the harbor and realize that his friend had prepared his last exhibition. “He brought everything with him,” he said. The show went well. Bealer’s work sold briskly, as it always does, and when he motored out of the harbor and headed home, his boat was a great deal lighter. Throughout that summer, the Bealers traveled back and forth between their main homestead, a few miles outside the small village of Pelican, and their more remote
The note said, in part: “We have gone to some effort to hide our bodies, as we do not want them found. Please do not waste
time or money looking. It would serve no purpose.”
cabin nearby, on the west coast of Yakobi Island. They planted their vegetable garden and cared for their chickens. They worked on their art. In early September, they headed to the cabin again. Isolated as the cabin was, they had a neighbor there, and his place had Wi-Fi, which they were able to use even when he was away. So they were generally in touch with people by e-mail. When that communication stopped, in mid-September, their friends took notice.
They put the word out to folks in Pelican: If anyone was heading for Yakobi Island, could they look in on the Bealers? On October 5, a pair of Pelican-area residents, a married couple, made the trip to the island. Leaving his wife in their boat, the husband hiked up a trail to the Bealers’ cabin. The screen door to the covered porch was open. He went in and found a plastic bin filled with packages and letters, and a note taped to the glass window of the main door, which was locked. On one side the note read: “Hello, if you are looking for the Bealers… Please read this. If you found this, please mail the attached packages. It will go to the people who will know what to do next and take care of things. Please accept the cash as a gift to pay you for your trouble, and postage for these packages and envelopes.” On the back side it said, “To the world and all concerned: This is to officially notify you that Eric and Pam Bealer, by their own choice and free will, have committed suicide. We are dead, gone, and free from this physical world. Free. We have gone to some effort to hide our bodies, as we do not want them found. Please do not waste time and money looking. It would serve no purpose. We are gone, leave us to our peace.” Below their declaration was a passage attributed to Richard Bach, which said: “Why, instead of suffering and fighting it, don’t people reach a time when they decide, ‘Done! We’ve finished everything we came to do. There are no mountains we haven’t pretty well climbed, nothing unlearned we wanted to learn, we’ve lived a nice life.’ And then they just sit themselves down under a tree or a star, lift themselves out of their bodies, and never come back?” Underneath the poem was one more note from the Bealers: “Why indeed?” ERIC WAS BORN on June 6, 1960. Pam An-
derson came into the world the very next day, and their eventual meeting felt like fate. After growing up in Pennsylvania, in his
O P P O S I T E : C O U R T E SY O F S I T K A C O N S E R VAT I O N S O C I E T Y. P R E V I O U S PAG E S : C O U R T E SY O F J I M H O R TO N .
Eric Bealer
Surge Bay Puffins, a 2008 woodblock engraving by Eric Bealer
early twenties Eric traveled throughout the northeastern United States, an itinerant artist showing his work. During the same period in the early eighties, Pam nursed her mother through a long, slow death from cancer. The day after her mother passed away, friends persuaded her to get out of the house, try to have some fun. While she was out, she met Eric. Together they explored and enjoyed the wilderness, seeking self-reliance and a sense of isolation. They moved to rural Vermont and then, in 1989, to just outside Haines, Alaska, a gorgeous small town on the northern end of the Inside Passage. They were married in 1990. Soon, though, even Haines—reachable only by ferry, small plane, or a two-lane road that climbs over the mountains from Canada’s Yukon— seemed too accessible to the rest of the world. In 1999, they bought four acres on the shore of Lisianski Inlet, in the maze of
islands west of Juneau, a few miles outside the tiny fishing village of Pelican. “Got a fix-er-up-er cabin on the beach,” Eric wrote a friend. “Three miles from town in the middle of the Tongass National Forest at its best. Rainforest too. We get over 130 inches of rain a year! And I’m having so much fun building, fishing… Well, let’s just say I feel like a kid again.” He was looking forward to settling in and then getting back to cutting blocks. “There is no shortage of subject matter out here,” he wrote. The property became a monument to the Bealers’ skills and values. They created a water-collection system. They acquired workhorses, sheep, and chickens; wool sheared from the sheep became yarn for homemade clothing and Pam’s fiber arts. They planted a large vegetable garden—the usual suspects for northern latitudes: potatoes, carrots, beets, kale—and fertilized it with manure and seaweed. Fall meant harvesting, can-
ning, and filling the root cellar. They gathered what they could from the forest—Pam became an expert on Alaska’s wild plants, their uses in food and medicine. In the early years, Eric hunted deer and fished the inlet. As time passed, they were more likely to trade favors for fish and game from friends. Once they got settled, Eric turned to an important issue. He needed a new press to create his prints, but getting that kind of item delivered to a rural homestead would be a major challenge. Enlisting a friend to put a 60-year-old, 1,149-pound Vandercook #3 on a barge from Seattle was the easy part. The barge, carrying everything from food supplies to construction materials to hay bales, along with one 1939 printing press, arrived as winter loomed. With help from a crane and a forklift at Pelican’s loading dock, Eric was able to wrestle the press into his skiff. He putted home carefully, then, over several strenuous hours, managed to get the press
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from boat to dock to dry land, and finally into the house. He later described the operation as “a master of orchestration involving me, my wife, a strong neighbor, some slab lumber, four metal rods, and two come-alongs.” The episode was vintage Eric: achieving something others might consider extraordinary through resourcefulness and ingenuity while keeping a sense of humor about it all. The couple didn’t need much from town— flour for bread, bags of beans—and there wasn’t a lot on offer anyway. Pelican is a
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young settlement. It was founded in 1938 by a Scandinavian immigrant named Kalle “Charlie” Raatikainen. He and a group of fellow fishermen built cold storage and a cannery here, situated between the ocean and the mountains, and the village grew around it. Named after Raatikainen’s boat, the Pelican, the community was incorporated in 1943. Its motto is “Closest to the fish.” Today, a sign on the wall of the harbor office, at the top of the ramp leading up from the docks, puts Pelican’s population at
“about 60.” The village is built on stilts above the edge of Lisianski Inlet, leaning against the green and gray of densely forested cliffs, the tide flowing in and out below the main boardwalk that connects each building to its neighbors. The harbor hosts a collection of charter fishing boats and commercial rigs, small skiffs, and visiting sailboats. In a normal summer, the Alaska state ferry sails in once every two weeks, and small floatplanes connect Pelican to Juneau three times a day, weather permitting.
MA P B Y
Mike Reagan
It’s the kind of place where the harbormaster is also the librarian and teaches school, where everybody knows not only your name but your business. It’s a place that seems willing to be lighthearted, even in sad times: in the little gazebo that houses Pelican’s memorial to its dead, people are remembered with monikers like “Grooviest Chick Around,” “Doctor of the Freezers,” and “Mechanical Genius.” There’s a town pigeon—a stray that flew in one day, maybe storm blown, and stayed. Pam named it Dragon, and it still struts along the boardwalk railings, cooing, staring down the eagles and the resident heron, Ziggy, which picks its way through the harbor muck at low tide. The Bealers could go weeks without motoring up the inlet and into the village’s small harbor. Still, they were well-known there, and well-liked. They were regulars at Pelican’s now defunct Boardwalk Boogie, a raucous festival of music and art; Eric created posters and art each year, and he and Pam competed hard in the dirty-song contest, performing original, bawdy lyrics. (A friend couldn’t remember for sure if they ever won the event, but, he said, “They should have.”) Eric shared his self-taught boatbuilding skills with people in need, and one man remembered Pam giving him an embroidered portrait of his dog after it died. Their isolated lifestyle might suggest standoffishness, but Eric was warm and charismatic, with a presence that swept you up in his energy. (“I love your aura!” he would declare to a new friend at Pelican’s pub, Rose’s, before settling down to draw them.) Pam balanced Eric’s hyperactivity with a calm reticence. In his art, Eric often depicted his wife as a bear, cool and dignified, and himself as a squirrel, manic in comparison. “I’d never known a couple more in love,” Kate Landers, a close friend and a yearround Pelican resident, told me. “In love, and a part of each other.” They were “just… fused,” another local said. Sharing goals and dreams, but bringing their own skills and temperament to the life they were building together, they balanced each other perfectly. Pam received her MS diagnosis sometime in the mid- to late aughts. Her disease didn’t change things too much, at least not right away. But gradually the Bealers began to scale back. Pam, who had once been able to hike the mountains surrounding her house, told friends that she was barely able to make it to the top of nearby hills. When the horses and sheep died off, they weren’t replaced. As Pam’s symptoms and pain advanced, the Bealers began to make plans for the future. A few years after the diagnosis, they purchased their second, more remote property on Yakobi Island, withdraw-
ing further from the world. The new place, serene and wild, at the very edge of the Pacific, seemed to help Pam, at least for a while. THE WAY WE die is changing. So, too, is the
way we think about dying—and about the opportunity, even the right, to die at a time and place of our choosing. Today, the default assumption, or hope, is that we will live as long as possible, and
In the outdoor community, death can feel like a looming presence in ways it doesn’t in day-to-day city life.
Death isn’t necessarily more likely, but it’s an ongoing part of our conversation.
that a life taken before an advanced age is a tragedy. But there was a time when almost nobody lived long enough to die from the accretion of ailments and slowdowns that we call old age. In the 1500s, the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne wrote that “to die of age is a rare, singular, and extraordinary death, and so much less natural than others.” Then came the Enlightenment, the scientific method, the beginnings of modern medicine: sterilization procedures, antibiotics, and surgeries, chemotherapy and pacemakers and blood transfusions and everything else that intervenes to keep us alive when disease and injury come calling. Suddenly, old age was the only kind of death that seemed natural. As the how of death changed, so did the where. By the middle of the 20th century, most American deaths still took place at home, but by the 1980s only 17 percent did. Most people spent the end of their lives in hospitals, under fluorescent lights, with tubes and wires and monitors beeping. That change led to a backlash, a growing belief that we should be permitted to decline those interventions and, sometimes, to decline them on behalf of our loved ones who can’t do so for themselves. Instead of merely asking if doctors could extend our lives for a few
more months or weeks or days, we began to ask if they should. You can read the horror stories in shelves’ worth of books on euthanasia and the right to die: The octogenarian widow or widower, institutionalized, repeatedly expressing a readiness to let go, refusing to eat and then being force-fed against their stated wishes just to keep them alive a little longer. The medical teams keeping comatose patients on life support for years while loved ones beg for their release. The pain and suffering inflicted in the name of longevity. The social and legal reaction to such cases led to an array of new rights and options. Now people can sign a do-not-resuscitate order, declining life-saving intervention when their bodies begin to shut down. We can create advance directives and living wills. We can say no to that last round of chemo and opt for pain management instead. More radically, in a handful of countries and several U.S. states— Oregon, Washington, Vermont, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, and New Jersey, along with the District of Columbia—the terminally ill can request what is sometimes called death with dignity, assisted suicide, or medical assistance in dying. Generally, this means that a doctor provides a fatal dose of medication to a qualified patient, to take at a time of their choosing. This change has roots that go pretty far back: five of those states and D.C. passed their laws only in the past five years, but a euthanasia bill was drafted and failed to pass in Ohio as long ago as 1906. What became known as the right-to-die movement gathered steam through the 1970s and 1980s, and by the late 1990s, when Dr. Jack Kevorkian was openly assisting with dozens of illegal suicides, public opinion had largely turned. There have been dissenters along the way. “It has become, in my view, a bit too trendy to regard the acceptance of death as something tantamount to intrinsic dignity,” paleontologist and author Stephen Jay Gould wrote in 1985, after he was diagnosed with cancer. “Of course I agree with the preacher of Ecclesiastes that there is a time to love and a time to die—and when my skein runs out I hope to face the end calmly and in my own way. For most situations, however, I prefer the more martial view that death is the ultimate enemy.” More recently, as legal assisted suicide has spread, some have worried that its existence might discourage the growth of palliative and hospice care, narrowing our options late
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in life instead of opening them up. Others object to the practice on religious grounds or because it seems to violate the prime directive of being a physician: do no harm. MY THOUGHTS about the right to die began
to form in the mid-1990s, shaped by two high-profile Canadian cases. The first was the death of Sue Rodriguez, a woman with ALS who had fought all the way to the Canadian Supreme Court for the right to receive medical assistance in dying on her own timetable. The court turned her down five to four, but Rodriguez found a stillanonymous doctor who was willing to break the law to help her. She died February 12, 1994, from an overdose of morphine. Around the same time as the Rodriguez case, a farmer in Saskatchewan named Robert Latimer put his 12-year-old daughter, Tracy, in his truck and filled the cab with exhaust, killing her. Tracy had a severe case of cerebral palsy—she couldn’t speak or walk, among other limitations—and over a chorus of outrage from disability-rights advocates, Latimer defended his choice by saying that he was sparing her further agony. He was found guilty of second-degree murder. I was in junior high when these stories played out. I didn’t have any strong feelings about Rodriguez’s case, just a vague, unexamined sense that she was right. Tracy Latimer, unable to speak for herself, was much more complicated. But I latched on to something I’d heard on the radio: that she suffered as many as a half-dozen seizures a day. At the time, I was newly diagnosed with epilepsy, and the three full-body seizures I’d experienced before medication brought them under control were the worst experiences of my young life. I remember sitting at a table at school with a few friends, talking about the Latimer case, and while I didn’t pretend to know what Tracy thought or felt, I knew one thing for sure. “If you told me I’d have six seizures a day, every day, for the rest of my life,” I said, “I would beg you to kill me.” So I grew up broadly sympathetic to the idea of choosing one’s own time and place. But on three occasions I also felt the particular, sickening sadness of learning that a classmate has died by suicide. I’ve read about suicide clusters and suicide contagion. I know that it can be a corrosive act, leaving grief and anger in its wake. Our choices can have ripple effects far beyond our own lives. Years later I became part of the outdoor community, a world where death can feel like a looming presence in ways it doesn’t in day-to-day city life. Death in the outdoors isn’t necessarily more likely—car accidents and cancer can take us anywhere—but it’s an ongoing part of our conversation. We weigh
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risks and consequences, and there’s an acknowledgment at least of the possibility of death. A friend who helped the Bealers prepare their wills later told the troopers that he believed he was doing so because the couple wanted to be prepared for the risks inherent in their lifestyle. After all, he figured, they could have died any time they steered their skiff through the wild offshore waters to reach their cabin. In his essay “27 Funerals and a Wedding,” climber Geoff Powter reflects on the losses experienced in three decades of roping up. The climbing community is not alone in
“I think it’s very important that, for them, suicide was not a negative,” Eugene Solovyov says. “They were very cheerful. They were sure that they would step over to the other side.”
seeing death up close, he writes, but “adventurers may be unique in the way we consecrate the activities that kill us as great and noble pursuits.” He contrasts his mother’s eventual death with those of his friends in the mountains: “Unlike any other death I’d experienced before, she was able to say, ‘It’s time.’ ” Assisted suicide is not yet legal in Alaska, and Pam Bealer wouldn’t have qualified for it anyway—most legal frameworks require the patient’s death to be imminent. Eric’s choice goes beyond what most right-to-die advocates envision. I wasn’t sure how to feel about what they’d done. WOOD ENGRAVING applies the tools and
techniques of metal engraving to hard pieces of end-grain wood. End grain is what you get when you cut a tree crosswise, sawing through its rings at 90 degrees, rather than lengthwise like lumber. Doing so creates a much more durable surface, one harder than, say, a pine plank. This allows for incredibly detailed work—strokes of a blade so careful that, when you touch the carved surface, it
feels no more deeply scored than the whorls in your fingertips. In the 19th century, wood engravings became a common form of illustration in newspapers and books, created by growing numbers of apprentice and master engravers, artisans whose trade would be eclipsed by the rise of photography in the early 20th century. Today it survives as a niche art form, and Eric, self-taught as always, was a master of its techniques. “He’s right up there with the best American engravers ever,” says Tony Drehfal, the editor of Block & Burin, the newsletter of the Wood Engravers’ Network. Eric created a text-heavy engraving that explained the technique for the benefit of gallery viewers. “Small hand-engraving tools are used to cut away the surface of the block,” it says in tiny carved letters. “Like a negative image all the white is cut away. Ink is then rolled on the surface of the block and it is put through a hand-operated press to produce each individual print.” Engravings are printed in limited, numbered editions—40, 80, 100 copies—and are not intended to be reproduced further. Each print is numbered and signed by the artist. Eric studied traditional illustrations, looking at the hundreds and thousands of microscopically fine lines used to create the textures of restless ocean wavelets, or a gloomy, darkening sky, and applied them in his own work. His prints were distinguished by their detail—he could spend eight weeks on a single small block of wood. (Other modern wood engravings tend to be simpler, with bolder lines and more white space.) Alaska was his muse, both its vistas and small details: the massive, corrugated face of a glacier and a dewy spiderweb strung from gnarled wood. Swans in flight, a heron at rest, an orca breaching. But his work went beyond earnestly beautiful landscapes or depictions of wildlife—he liked to add a little twist of whimsy to the world he saw around him. One print of a sea lion on a rocky shore was titled Bachelor Pad. In some of Eric’s last pieces, created in the final months before his death, he carved hints of his and Pam’s plans. In The Crossing, Pam is pictured on a bridge over a forest stream, taking what seems to be a last look back. In Step Over, a bear peers down into a glassy stream. Trees and a soaring bird are reflected in the water; so are several shadowy, ursine footprints tracking across the surface. Another engraving, showing a bird soaring through sunbeams above a rugged coast, is titled Letting Go. A final print, of a
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sailboat receding in the distance, is labeled The Door Is Opening. Later, after the Bealers were gone, several of their friends would receive a note that echoed those themes. Unsigned, but in Pam’s handwriting, it was included among the packages and parcels that had been left to be mailed. “I have found a dimensional doorway,” it read in part. “I have left this physical body behind, and I have stepped through.” The Bealers’ preparations had been as meticulous, as finely detailed, as one of Eric’s engravings. Beyond the note, the cash, and the initial box of packages and letters at their Yakobi property, they had left their affairs in order at the homestead outside Pelican. When two state troopers arrived there, they found a note on the stairs that said, “Look up here.” On the second floor, in the bedroom, they found another copy of the same suicide note that had been taped to the Yakobi cabin door, several pre-addressed boxes to be mailed, and another envelope full of cash. (“To pay for the shipping. Keep the change!”) In notarized wills, the Bealers left their artwork to Eugene Solovyov and their land, boats, and estate to the Sitka Conservation Society’s Living Wilderness Fund, “so that they may continue to help protect this land that I so love.” There were no loose ends. The troopers wrapped up their investigation, and after a court proceeding, the Bealers were legally presumed dead. Still, the people who loved them were left to grapple with their choices. Even those who’d known about their intentions hadn’t expected the Bealers to leave so soon. At least one friend was angry; others were simply sad. Most people were broadly understanding of Pam’s situation but less sure about Eric’s decision. “He should have stayed around,” says one friend, who’d tried to talk Eric out of the idea years earlier. “But then again, I don’t really know what a soul mate is. I don’t have a soul mate.” Kate Landers inherited the fruits of the Bealer garden. She went out to the property to harvest soon after she heard that her friends were gone. Gathering the vegetables offered a kind of goodbye, and she distributed much of what she picked to other friends of the Bealers. Landers understands the desire to go out on your own terms. “I don’t want to die in a hospital where I have no control, and just watch all the things that I love fall away from me,” she says. “This is life as we know it. We don’t know what’s next.” The Bealers, she was aware, believed there was something more— something next. She took comfort in the idea that they were able to seek it together. After Eugene Solovyov heard the news, he went for a drive to think things over. On the
Pam and Eric at a gallery opening in 1993
outskirts of Sitka, he spotted a bear at the side of the road and pulled over. As he sat there, thinking of Pam, a squirrel popped into view. “It was an emotional time, but I’ve accepted their choice,” he says. “That was what they wanted to do. You can’t really tell somebody else how to live their life, or how to end it.” “I think it’s very important that, for them, suicide was not a negative,” he says. “They were very cheerful. They were very convinced that they would step over to the other side. And she kind of talks about that in the suicide note. But also, she doesn’t want to explain further, because people who don’t understand this sort of thing, it doesn’t matter how long she tries to explain. And for people who do, no explanation is necessary.” I WASN’T SURE which category I fell into. As
Solovyov and I talked over the buzz of a Sitka hotel bar, the stereo played Heart’s “Magic Man,” Ann Wilson wailing her way through the lyrics: “Try to understand, try to understand, try, try, try to understand…” Later, still trying, I kept circling back to the ethos of wood engraving as Eric had explained it—that felt like it offered a clue. “To be an original print,” he’d written, “the block must be designed, executed, and printed by the artist.” You had to see each piece through from beginning to end. It reminded me of something the surgeon and author Atul Ga-
wande emphasizes in Being Mortal, his bestselling book about end-of-life decisions. “All we ask is to be allowed to remain the writers of our own story,” he writes. “Whatever happens, we want to retain the freedom to shape our lives in ways consistent with our character and loyalties.” Looking through the remaining Bealer prints in Solovyov’s gallery, I’d felt a nagging sadness about what would happen when they were all gone, each numbered edition sold, vanished into living rooms or drawers or storage lockers. I wanted a way to fix the problem. Couldn’t Solovyov copy them? I thought, even as I heard the plaintiveness of my own internal dialogue. Couldn’t he make just a few more? Surely we had the ability to extend their lives in this way. But wood engravings are intended to be finite. Part of learning to work within the art form, or even appreciating it from the outside, means finding a way to accept that. O OUTSIDE CORRESPONDENT EVA HOLLAND ( @EVAHOLLAND) IS THE AUTHOR OF NERVE: ADVENTURES IN THE SCIENCE OF FEAR, OUT IN APRIL FROM THE EXPERIMENT. If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide or self-harm, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline toll-free from anywhere in the U.S. at 1-800-273-8255.
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D AV I D
QUAMMEN PHOTOGRAPHS BY
JESSE RIESER
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GOLF IS A CONCEPT, like death, seldom contemplated by the young. Or so it seemed to me for the six decades during which I declined to contemplate it, except as this: a peculiarly slow sporting activity that could be left to one’s golden years. I hadn’t come from a country-club childhood. So far as I knew, none of my friends played golf in high school or college. As a boy, during my brief caddying days, my pal Mike Karbowski and I somehow came into possession of a nine-iron or two, which we used to pitch shots through neighboring backyards, at some risk to windows. So I knew roughly how to swing a club, and I knew that hitting such a small, hard ball high and long (regardless of where the hell it went) could deliver a peculiarly satisfying sensation. But I never played an actual round on actual fairways and greens. I never lofted a six-iron shot toward a flagstick. I never sank a putt. The notion that Mike and I might step onto the first tee at Clovernook Country Club in Cincinnati—the course where we climbed over the back fence from our own scruffy neighborhood to caddy—would have seemed absurd, comically transgressive, like Spanky and Alfalfa sneaking their homemade wooden car onto the Daytona Speedway. Unlike sandlot baseball, and bicycle dodgeball, and tree climbing, and the other athletic amusements we used to pass our afternoons and break our noses and teeth, golf was a game for grown-ups. It was another world, not ours, so never mind, no hurry. As an adult, throughout my twenties, thirties, and forties, I continued to see it that way, and my conclusion went like this: When my aging body is too decrepit for running and jumping and other rambunctious hurlyburly—Rollerblade crashes, face plants on skis, cartwheels off mountain-bike trails— then I might turn to golf. There were exceptions to the geriatric demographic, I knew—the 12-year-old prodigy, the ace of the high school team, the twentysomething guy who hit huge drives. My own eventual golf mentor, Gene, the man who invited me into the sport (after I married his daughter), had started at eight; he carried a two handicap in high school and has happily played for 70 years now. My college roommate Skip started at 13—this I learned only later—and golfed avidly until some scumbag stole his clubs from a locker room, souring him on the sport for decades. He then returned to it, at 50, with the zeal of a thickening athlete, and now, as a retiree, owns an apartment in St. Andrews. My buddy Whisperin’ Jack, the famous medical researcher and bon vivant, started at ten and
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made the golf team at Dartmouth as a freshman, then went half a lifetime without playing much until he reengaged with such ardor that, in a moment of hysteria, he bought a house in Palm Springs. Several others from my gang started young, too, a piece of personal history they mostly kept on the down low. But I always saw older people as the golf crowd, white-shoed burghers of a certain tax bracket and sociopolitical tribe, for whom fast heart rates and Gore-Tex and physical risk were not part of the desired recreational experience. A LIFETIME OF ROBUST sports—a life-
time of mock-epic engagements with nature—flows on its serpentine route but ever downhill, drawn by gravity, pushed by time, as inexorably as the Mississippi runs to the sea. Your body changes. Muscles get better with vigorous use, all things being equal, but
time and the incentive of discouragement, I broadened my literary efforts, turning to nonfiction; my fishing efforts broadened, too, into nymphs and emergers and all manner of other arcane enticements based on my studies in ichthyology and aquatic entomology. I caught fish: gorgeous rainbows, handsome broad-backed browns, native cutthroats, and—rarely but unforgettably— arctic grayling, with their luminous dorsal fins that glowed turquoise and lilac and green, until you lifted them out of the water and they began to die. So I put them back in. I became licensed to help others catch fish. I’m sure I wasn’t the only Montana fishing guide in the past 40 years with one published novel and three others buried under rejection slips, but this was a joyous phase of life, even amid the paying of dues. And then, after my second or third summer of guiding, an odd thing happened. I suddenly fell
A lifetime of robust sports—a lifetime of mock-epic engagements with nature—flows on its serpentine route but ever downhill, drawn by gravity, pushed by time, as inexorably as the Mississippi runs to the sea. Muscles get better with vigorous use, but joints get worse. joints get worse. Your hunger for conquest fades, your appetite for risk and tolerance for contusion diminish. Even if the engine under your hood—your heart and lungs— remains in good tune, your fenders start to rattle and your brake pads wear thin. It’s only natural that there be a progression from one sport, one form of exhilarating foolhardiness, to another. Bodily depreciation doesn’t always deliver you onto a golf course, but a person could do worse. A good round of golf is more strenuous than deck shuffleboard on a cruise to Aruba, after all, or lawn darts at the retirement community. My first sporting obsession as an adult was fly-fishing, which brought me to Montana in 1973. For a decade, my life revolved around two thrilling struggles: trying to make a living as a writer (after a precocious first novel), and trying to deceive trout with bits of feather and floss and thread wound onto small hooks. At first I wrote more novels and tied mostly dry flies. Trout went for the flies, but editors didn’t go for the novels. With
out of love with fishing, because I had fallen too deeply in love with trout. When fishing was work, I found myself hoping that my ham-handed and meat-hungry clients wouldn’t catch anything. When it was play, it no longer felt playful. These animals were frantic, fighting for their lives. Forget the catch-and-release clause. Sometimes they got hurt. So I quit. There was a related factor: a shift from one river sport to another. I had discovered the tumble-washed ecstasy of whitewater kayaking. I started paddling the same waters I had fished, splashing down riffles, zipping into eddies, thrilled by the liquid choreography and relieved by the knowledge that, if anyone were injured or killed by this activity, it would be me, not some innocent trout. Having squeaked through one sobering misadventure during my beginner phase, upside down in a busy Class IV rapid with a broken paddle and my chest pressed against a rock, I signed up for a week of lessons (paid for by this magazine) at a fa-
mous whitewater school in North Carolina, raised my game, and spent much of the next 20 years paddling rumbustious rivers from Montana to Tennessee to New Zealand, with only a couple of other near-death experiences. One came on the Futaleufú in Chile, amid a seething Class V rapid known as Terminator, which I ran largely upside down, never mind why. Finally I rolled up, breathless, exhausted, then fell into a recirculating hole, exited my boat, and had to swim. A friend watched from shore while the hole started to suck me forward, and as he told me later, he thought I was a goner. But I did one thing right—grabbed the tail loop of my boat as it bobbed away, pulling me back into the current— and I was rescued. My kayak career came to an end soon after a Grand Canyon trip in September 2001, when I was 53, amid a pending divorce, feeling unmoored, my shoulders starting to get iffy. While my friends and I were deep in the canyon, nearly incommunicado for 17 days, 9/11 occurred. When we emerged, America had changed. It seemed the right time for me to change, too. In winter I still had telemark skiing and ice hockey. Telemark as a means of downhill travel over snow is like flyfishing: less efficient than some alternatives, but it feels beautiful to do. Feels beautiful, that is, so long as your knees are healthy; my 25 winters on tele skis probably help explain the medical circumstances (about which more below) that pushed me toward golf. City-league ice hockey, which I played for ten years with great pleasure and not much skill, had the merits of team camaraderie and another form of fluid motion. But I discovered that the fine art of puck handling, while you skate fast between charging bodies, is so difficult that you should start learning it at age six, ideally on a rink in Minnesota— certainly not at 49 on a flooded tennis court in Bozeman. Having become part of a team at an indoor rink, with refs and a clock and
uniforms and good ice, I skated wing with enough clumsy gusto to acquire the nickname Dozer, because I knocked people down, inadvertently, while contesting the puck. It was a no-check league, supposedly, and I was the city’s most eggheaded goon. But then I turned 60, and the league expanded to hold a hundred more players, including too many from Minnesota boyhoods, and I became useless. I retired but
Baker’s cyst. Meniscus tear. Arthroscopy. Physical therapy. More punishment, more hard use, more hiking through jungles and swamps, not for recreation but in the necessary course of my work. I was on the downside of my seventh decade, and the only consolation to that fact was Medicare. On a bad day, I walked like an elderly duck. Then it was back to an orthopedic surgeon, whose physician’s assistant, a tall young fellow wearing a short beard and a long white jacket, looked at my X-rays and said, cliniThe author at cally: “Your knees are shot.” the Phoenician So, golf. Golf Club, Scottsdale, Arizona
took with me two life skills of rare value: I could do backward crossovers, and I could drive a Zamboni. By now I was happily remarried, and as my 65th birthday approached, my wife, Betsy, asked: How do you want to celebrate? Let’s climb the Grand Teton, I said. I’ve lived in the shadow of that peak for 40 years, and before my wheels fall off, I’d like to stand on its summit. So we did, with the help and fine company of an overqualified friend named Conrad Anker. That summer lark was followed in autumn by a walking tour in Wales, at the end of which my left knee swelled like a grapefruit and I fetched up lame.
RIGHT about now I can
hear you saying, “That’s great, DQ. But what about the environment?” I won’t deny that golf has a lot to answer for, not just in its bourgeois ethos but in its footprint: pesticide use, water use, fertilizer use, energy use, landscape conversion, impacts on biological diversity, and the rest. If the land in question has been converted from agricultural fields to golfcourse acreage, the net impact of those other factors might actually be lessened, but that’s a wan exculpation. It wasn’t always like this. The modern history of golf traces back to Scotland in the 18th century, when it was played on windswept links laid upon the natural contours of coastal dunes, with “grasses on sandy stretches … fertilized by the droppings of seabirds and cut short by grazing rabbits,” according to one account. That tradition survives today on many British links courses, where the rough is rougher, the sand is native, the fairways are patchy landing zones and not continuous carpet, the diversity of birds and insects is still good, and the golf is more feral. At the opposite end of the spectrum is Augusta National, site of the Masters each April, so exquisitely manicured for television that, according to some critics, the place inflicts an Augusta National Syndrome on the expectations of golfers and managers at less grandiose courses. There has been an effort among some of the sport’s organizations, including the
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United States Golf Association, to promote mitigation strategies—less mowing, less watering, less poisoning, more accommodation of wild plants and animals—but no golfer should pretend that enough has been done. We should be playing on uniquely American links courses, where the ponds harbor alligators and the woody roughs are patrolled by black bears, copperheads, cougars, woodpeckers, and mosquitos. We would lose a lot more balls, but the R&D people at Titleist or Callaway ought to be able to make a biodegradable version, appetizing to squirrels and raccoons. For all its flaws, golf is still about beautiful landscapes. It’s about the flat, grassy pad where you start and the metal cup at the end of each hole, true, but it’s also about the hills you climb, the trees you klonk or don’t klonk, the thickets you skirt, the swamps that engulf you, and the ponds into which you go kerplunk. Note that I say “you” do those things, not “your ball,” because the ball is your avatar, your effigy, it is you, traveling one leg of this perilous journey after another. That’s why your playing partners say “You’re away,” not “Your ball is farthest from the cup,” when they’re telling you to get busy and putt. That’s why they say, with a pitying cringe masking their schadenfreude, “You’re wet,” after your ball has failed to clear the creek. You’re gone. You’re out of
ing point of the Corps of Discovery in Saint Charles, Missouri. The round took him an entire summer and part of fall, more thousands of strokes than he bothered to count, hundreds of cheap range balls lost in the marshes and riverside woods, until he teed up for his final shot in a small park by the riverbank in Saint Charles, near the Lewis and Clark Monument, and hit his last ball into the river. He called it wilderness golf, and I think that’s the right spirit. Sure, most of us confine ourselves to 150 acres of groomed and sculpted “wilderness” at our preferred local course, but the psychological dimension is the same. THREE REASONS GOLF should be easy, ac-
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The duck hook, the banana slice, the topped dribble, the no-explode explosion shot, the arboreal ricochet, the sky ball, the majestic OB, the pondside scuff-and-splash, the deepgrass squirt, the cart-path shank, the skull, the fat hit, the thin hit, the stubbed putt…
cording to me: 1. The ball isn’t moving. 2. You can hit it as many times as you want. 3. And (this one highlighted by my hockey experience) there’s no checking. But golf isn’t easy, it’s very hard, and there are obvious reasons for that. The first is that it’s so unforgiving of imperfection. Ted Williams batted .406 in 1941 for the Red Sox, and no baseball player since has broken .400 for a season. But imagine if a professional
If it weren’t for the learning curve angled so gently upward, and the laughter, and the astonishing moments of pure swing with a ball rocketing off toward its intended target, and the fact that even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while, I wouldn’t play. bounds. You bounced three times on the cart path and were last seen on a fast roll toward the irrigation ditch. Take it personally: you. Drop another you and try again. The journey continues. Bill Vaughn, a deft writer and Montana native son, understood that truth more than 20 years ago when he published a piece in this magazine about golfing the Lewis and Clark Trail (“How the West Was Bogeyed,” July 1996). Vaughn teed off with a five-iron from a shallow Missouri River sandbar, just south of Great Falls, on what he reckoned would be a 2,140-mile course, over land and water, traveling by raft and car when he wasn’t walking between shots, to the start-
of 250 yards counts as one stroke. A tap-in putt, after two other putts, counts as one stroke. Perversity. But the difficulties can yield moments of mirth, as elegantly noted by the late John Updike, a devoted though mediocre player, in his 1982 essay “The Bliss of Golf.” Bad shots, he wrote, “are endless fun—at least the other fellow’s are.” Notably:
golfer made good contact on, say, only four shots of every ten. His handicap would be 43, he’d be laughed out of every clubhouse on the PGA tour, and St. Andrews wouldn’t even let him step onto the Old Course. Intermittent proficiency is one thing. It’s not that difficult, even for a duffer like me, to hit two or three good shots. But it’s unimaginable to hit 72 in a row. The second point is that every single shot, no matter how short, registers as an equal unit on your score. You can reach all the greens in regulation, hitting superb tee balls, making good approaches, and avoiding the traps and the trees, and still card a lousy number simply by three-putting every hole. A straight drive
Each bad shot is produced by a momentary lapse, an imperfect swing, and the laws of physics. And yet there is transcendence to be achieved, as Updike’s title suggests, even under the pressure of unachievable perfection—or at least consistency—and even for us weekenders who give far less time, passion, and money to the sport than Updike did. The bliss of golf resides not in victory over partners, nor in breaking 80, but in hitting one terrific shot, a shot so good that a pro would be satisfied with it. This is possible in golf, for some reason. I could never hit a curveball coming off the fingers of Justin Verlander, no matter how long I tried, but I can hit an inspired and lucky gap wedge from 60 feet out that goes in the hole. Not often, but it happens. This is what keeps a person with middling skills and embarrassing scores coming back to the game. I usually shoot in the nineties or worse, but I remember the blissful moments, however rare, more vividly than the foozles and flops. Case in point: One day on the 12th hole at Cottonwood Hills, the unpretentious public course in Bozeman that serves as my local, I was playing with a group of friends that included Timothy, my spiritual adviser in golf, a lanky fellow with a white ponytail bundled behind his avuncular smile. Timothy is almost exactly my age, but he’s more practiced and skilled, with the additional advantage of a Scottish Presbyterian (preacher’s kid) background, which somehow nurtures his aplomb on the course. Also with us was Thomas, a Czechborn architect who plays in a straw hat and with a nimbus of heedless enthusiasm, and whose approach to golf is: “Hit the ball as hard as you can, then go try and find it!” Cottonwood’s 12th, which I sometimes call Everest, is a 541-yard par five, gently doglegging left, then climbing more than a hundred feet to a green you can’t even see.
Out-of-bounds on the right there’s a grainfield, where I often push my drive. Along the left are knolls and trees, preventing any decent second shot if your first lands over there. The approach slope to the green would make a good ski hill: 50 feet up it, you still can’t see the top of the flagstick. On this day, I hit an unusually solid and straight drive. Then, surprising myself, I hit a seven-wood and got all of it, leaving my ball halfway up the approach. I lobbed a pitching wedge toward where I reckoned the cup might be, my ball disappeared over the horizon, and gloriosky, when I climbed up there, it was 15 feet from the pin. I putted, gently, then watched, amazed, as it rolled, curled left, and dropped. Timothy, who had been busy tracking his own shots, gave me a big smile and a fist bump, saying: Good par, brother. I said: Actually, that was a birdie. And I was left to wonder, all winter: If it feels so easy when done right, why do it wrong? AS MY KNEES have gone to
bone on bone, as I’ve moved toward double replacement surgery, my interest in golf has increased more quickly than my skill. Yes, it’s a hard game—fortunately, because if it were easy, it would be stupid and dull. Hitting straight drives consistently, no hook, no slice, is hard. Hitting fairway woods without scuffing out grounders is hard. Little chip shots from thick, short rough, five feet off the green, are hard. Putting downhill is hard, but then so is putting uphill, especially those threeor four-footers you need to make after putting downhill. Updike wrote a whole essay about missing them, calling such moments hateful. He was kidding, of course. The game is never hateful; it’s just fiendishly frustrating and comically humbling, except when it’s weirdly, unforeseeably sublime. There’s that old saw about golf, apocryphally credited to Mark Twain, calling it a good walk spoiled. But the walk isn’t spoiled by hitting 80 or 90 or even 100 golf shots along the way, not if three or four of them fly true, and not if your company on the stroll is excellent. That last part is crucial. “Don’t play golf with assholes” is a rule Thomas the architect has learned to live by. Don’t play with
people you dislike, or who bore you, or who will come at you with a competitive edge. Whisperin’ Jack knows this. His playing partners sometimes suggest that they “put a little money” on each hole to “make it more interesting.” Jack answers: “Bet? No. I want all you guys to shoot birdies on every hole.” If it weren’t for good company, such as Jack and Thomas and Gene and Skip and Timothy and the other Mike (not Karbowski but my doctor, six foot ten and hits the ball a mile) and Kathryn and John and Ira and Earl and the others, I wouldn’t play. If it
its intended target, and the fact that even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while, I wouldn’t play. If it weren’t for the numinous, brief moments in which a whacking, chunking, shanking, dribbling striver like me is vouchsafed a taste of what golf can be, I wouldn’t bother. Another case in point: I was playing at Cottonwood several years ago with Timothy and his friend Andy, a captain on the local police force, an amiable guy, and a solid golfer. I had stunk up the first seven holes, during which Andy and Timothy breathed not a wisp of condescension. I was doing my best, they knew, and we were having fun. Also, I had explained I could only play the front nine that day, because of an appointment back in town. On the eighth, a short par three that drops down over a creek to a round green looped by a bend of the same creek, with the pin on this day placed right, I landed my tee shot on the left fringe. From there I stubbed a chip barely onto the green. I was still the away man, about 25 feet uphill from the cup. I studied the putt and felt like I saw the line. I tapped. The ball rolled and rolled and angled and rolled and then, to the shock of us all, went in. Andy and Timothy, whooping, awarded me high fives. A saved par, the hard way. So far, so good. On the ninth, a par four straight uphill to the clubhouse, I hit a good drive followed by a long, floating six-iron that left me, “I remember the saints be praised, several feet onto blissful moments, however rare, more the green. I’d never before made vividly than the this green in regulation. Now foozles and flops.” came a 20-foot uphill putt. The line looked obvious, and I was in a mindlessly confident zone, so I weren’t for companions like Robert, a great just stepped up and gave the ball a bonk. It storyteller, especially when it was his turn to rolled and rolled and homed to the hole like hit, who left us early because of pancreatic a gopher and dropped in. Birdie. cancer, I wouldn’t play. (Approaching what This time Andy bent double in disbelief might be an eight-iron shot, Robert would and grabbed his head with both hands. Then say, “My eight-iron goes 126 yards,” and he straightened and, warmly amused, aware then be mildly surprised if it didn’t. After his of my schedule, plus trying to spare me the funeral, by decision of his wife, I inherited inevitable disillusionments of the back nine, that eight-iron and the rest of his clubs, now said: “You should definitely quit now.” serving as physical tokens for remembering Quit? I thought. I’m just getting started. O him as I play. The eight-iron sometimes goes 126 yards.) If it weren’t for the imper- EDITOR AT LARGE DAVID QUAMMEN fectability of golf, especially my own game, ( @DAVIDQUAMMEN) WAS OUTSIDE’S I wouldn’t play. If it weren’t for the learn- NATURAL ACTS COLUMNIST FROM 1981 ing curve angled so gently upward, and the TO 1996. HIS MOST RECENT BOOK IS laughter, and the astonishing moments of THE TANGLED TREE: A RADICAL NEW pure swing with a ball rocketing off toward HISTORY OF LIFE.
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a day for his observations. It was a way to wrangle thoughts out of a sometimes circumspect soul, plus I figured he’d appreciate an assignment, given all the UTV-driving monotony. “A lot of dry grass and a lot of trees. You let me drive sometimes,” he told me on that last day. We’d made a final pit stop. Scrub and parched earth stretched out to red canyon walls in the hazy distance. The light was saturated, everything extra vivid, like an acid trip. “And do you think you’re getting better?” I asked. “You know how all those signs say WILDERNESS MAKES YOU BETTER. ” “What do they mean, makes you better?” Casper asked. “What do you think?” “Better at camping?” “Maybe. Or a better man? What do you think being a good man means?” He was quiet a while. I thought maybe he’d lost interest. But then he rattled off, “Being nice, not selfish, liking nature, knowing how to swim, knowing how to camp.” “I like those!” I said. “Is that different from what a woman should be?” “No. What do you mean?” Then one of Casper’s buddies came over with a stick, which meant it was time to start whacking weeds. That’s what they did for a good 15 minutes, the dads all watching them, making small talk about football and work as O we did. CHRIS COLIN ( @CHRISCOLIN3000) IS THE AUTHOR OF WHAT TO TALK ABOUT. HE WROTE ABOUT RIVER RIGHTS IN JUNE 2018. Volume XLV, Number 2. OUTSIDE (ISSN 0278-1433) is published monthly except for combined issues Jan/Feb, Mar/Apr, Jul/Aug, and Sep/Oct for a total of 8 times per year, by Outside Integrated Media, LLC, 400 Market St., Santa Fe, NM 87501. Periodical postage paid at Santa Fe, NM, and additional mailing offices. Canadian Goods and Services Tax Registration No. R126291723. Canada Post International Publications Mail Sales Agreement No. 40015979. Subscription rates: U.S. and possessions, $24; Canada, $35 (includes GST); foreign, $45. Washington residents add sales tax. POSTMASTER: Send U.S. and international address changes to OUTSIDE, P.O. Box 6228, Harlan, IA 51593-1728. Send Canadian address changes to OUTSIDE, P.O. Box 877 Stn Main, Markham, ON L3P-9Z9.
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03/04.20
AGED NINE YEARS OUT OF PRINCIPLE, NOT OBLIGATION. WE’RE NOT MEETING REQUIREMENTS. WE’RE EXCEEDING STANDARDS.
KNOB CREEK® KENTUCKY STRAIGHT BOURBON WHISKEY AND STRAIGHT RYE WHISKEY 50% ALC./VOL. ©2020 KNOB CREEK DISTILLING COMPANY, CLERMONT, KY.