Indholdsfortegnelse for September/October 2019 i Outside

As I’ve noted before in this space, the realms of adventure and exploration have changed dramatically in the past two decades. The most significant firsts were all achieved during the previous century, including reaching the North and South Poles, summiting all 14 of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks, and running the planet’s gnarliest rivers. Now that we’ve probed Mars and used satellites to map every square inch of our own planet, the very concept of earthly exploration has become anachronistic. Adventure, on the other hand, is alive and well. Yet the state of the art is increasingly defined by speed or style, the latter requiring levels of esoteric nuance that are hard for the general public to appreciate. All this was on our minds as we selected stories for this month’s…

HERE’S SOMETHING you probably didn’t know: the construction business accounts for an estimated 23 percent of the world’s carbon-dioxide emissions—5.7 billion tons, according to the most recent estimates. Much of this comes from the use of concrete and steel, the two biggest contributors to emissions in the building sector. As the BBC has reported, if the concrete industry were a country, it would be the third-largest emissions producer, behind China and the United States. And there’s no end in sight: the United Nations Environment Program predicts that humans will put up the equivalent of a new Paris every week for the next 40 years. In the U.S., an architectural publication predicted that some 1.9 billion square feet of new structures will be built in the next three decades. If only…

A. Simms Freestone Stockingfoot waders $280 The four-layer construction is tough enough for scrambling through bushes on the approach but sufficiently breathable for midsummer heat. B. Hatch Outdoors 9 Plus Gen 2 Finatic reel $800 The nightmare of all saltwater anglers: equipment failure just when you’re about to land a lunker. This reel can run heavier lines and has a water-resistant drag system, so it won’t let you down. C. Sage Spectrum LT reel $375 The Spectrum’s aerospace-grade aluminum frame and sealed-carbon drag system are strong enough to stop anything in fresh water, while its large knob makes for easy handling. D. Howler Brothers Aguacero jacket $199 If the forecast looks questionable, reach for the Aguacero. This 2.5-layer shell takes up minimal space in your pack but will keep you…

DRUNK RABBIT STEW 1 rabbit, dressed and butchered2 cups chicken broth15 ounces Guinness3 medium potatoes, peeled and cut into one-inch cubes1 large yellow onion, diced6 carrots, peeled and sliced½ cup olive oil½ tablespoon garlic salt¼ cup butter Salt and pepper to taste16 ounces egg noodles, cooked and buttered Place the rabbit in a slow cooker or Dutch oven, then pour in the chicken broth and Guinness. Add the potatoes, carrots, and onion. Drizzle with oil and sprinkle with garlic salt. Cook on low heat for four to six hours, until the meat is falling off the bone. Remove the meat, debone, and return to the pot. Mix in the butter, salt, and pepper. Ladle over the egg noodles. Serves four.…

Krystle Wright In 2010, Wright wanted an aerial photo of a BASE jumper leaping from Moab’s 400-foot Castleton Tower. She couldn’t afford to charter a helicopter, and the era of drones hadn’t yet begun. So she enlisted the help of a few friends and a local motorized-parachute pilot. Wright formulated a plan with jumpers Michael Tomchek and Mick Knurbin the night before and was in radio contact with them just prior to her takeoff. But once in the air, the noise from the chute’s engine made communication impossible. “It’s hilarious to look back on how chaotic it was,” says Wright. “It was sheer luck that Michael leaped as we flew past the tower.” —EMILY REED Renan Ozturk Ozturk went to Bears Ears National Monument in 2018, shortly after the Trump…

PART ONE ON NOVEMBER 21, 2018, Dependra Pathak, director general of police in the Andamans and Nicobars, an archipelago of paradise islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean, issued a press release headed “Death of US National.” Pathak, a short, mustached man with the paunch of 28 years’ service in the Indian police, wrote that his office in the island capital of Port Blair had received an e-mail two days earlier from the U.S. consulate in Chennai, 850 miles away on the mainland. The consulate, Pathak said, had been contacted by an American woman, the mother of “one Mr. John Allen Chau … about her son’s visit to North Sentinel Island and attack by the tribesmen.” Upon receiving the e-mail, “a missing report was immediately registered” and a “detailed…

AT FIRST GLANCE, Pattie Gonia’s Instagram profile (@pattiegonia) looks a lot like every other glossy adventure feed, with dozens of shots of dreamy outdoor landscapes. In her first Instagram video, Pattie wears a green technical shirt and matching hat while carrying hiking poles and a backpack, with the mountains of Colorado’s Never Summer Wilderness looming in the background. Scroll down too quickly and you’ll miss the twist: her patent-leather boots with six-inch heels. Pattie, whose name is a play on you know which brand, is the drag-queen alter ego of 27-year-old photographer Wyn Wiley. (Wiley refers to himself with male pronouns and to Pattie as she or her.) In that first post, from October 3, 2018, Pattie eats hot Cheetos, dances to Fergie, and declares herself the world’s first backpacking…

The Pulaski Is Mightier than the Sword Late in the spring, Outside Online published an article by Marc Peruzzi entitled “Trail Runners Are Lazy Parasites,” which argued that participants in the rapidly growing sport aren’t doing their share when it comes to volunteer trail maintenance. The piece generated an enormous reaction, with many readers contesting the central premise or taking offense at the tone. (Subsequently, we published a follow-up by writer and ultrarunner Stephanie Case, who countered Peruzzi’s assertions.) This is narrow-minded and woefully uninformed. As an avid trail runner and cofounder of the West Michigan Trail Runners, I am officially insulted. We trail runners are the sole group that maintains arguably the most difficult trail in West Michigan. @DirtyRob33 Twitter I guess he has little trail-runner dolls that he…

The turning of the leaves is the flame-hued chemical evidence of light waning and temperatures cooling before branches are made bare by cold, blue months of hibernation. This is our cue to shed shorts and tees for knits and twill, to turn off the A/C and throw open the windows, to walk to work and take the long way home. Get out of town, revel in the crisp air, find a nice spot to watch the sun set. The days are only getting shorter. What are you waiting for? —ALETA BURCHYSKI A. Filson Colville Long Sleeve shirt dress, $165; B. Best Made Field shirt, $138; C. Aether Men’s Seattle jacket, $450; D. Bonobos Stretch Organic Cotton chinos, $68; E. Fjällräven Greenland Re-Wool cardigan, $160; F. Aesop Departure toiletry set, $53;…

THE HARDEST marathon workouts I’ve ever done involved sitting in an office chair, tapping buttons in response to letters and shapes that flashed across my computer screen. For 12 weeks before the Ottawa Marathon back in 2013, I spent as much as 90 minutes at a stretch alone in my room, testing out a protocol for brain-endurance training. By race day, I no longer cared whether BET worked. I just knew that I never wanted to experience that kind of mental fatigue again. The theory behind that cognitive torment seemed reasonable enough at the time: just as repeated physical exertion forced my muscles to adapt, routine bouts of mental taxation would push my brain to get better at resisting weariness when exhaustion loomed, helping me run a faster marathon. But…

YOU PROBABLY don’t need another rea-son to start your morning with a cup of joe, but here goes. Caffeine’s potential to improve athletic performance is well established: numerous studies have found that it has positives effect on strength, power output, and endurance. Now companies are targeting athletes by infusing their java with ingredients like mushrooms and algae that may carry other performance benefits. Here are six of them. Strong Coffee Company Original Developed by athletes, Strong Coffee is a sugar-free instant latte that includes collagen protein, which may benefit joint health and speed injury recovery, and powdered MCT oil, a fatty acid that could help boost endurance. It’s sweetened with cacao for a hint of chocolate flavor. $45 for 12 oz Laird Superfood InstaFuel This mixture is modeled on Laird…

IN 2012, Kirstie Ennis was on her second tour as a helicopter door gunner in Afghanistan when her chopper crashed. She lost her left leg, sustained spinal injuries and brain trauma, and had extensive facial lacerations. Four years and 43 surgeries later, she took her first step. “It was the moment I knew it was going to be OK,” she says. Ennis, now 28, didn’t grow up as an outdoor athlete; she played team sports as a kid. But after her recovery she started climbing, mountain biking, snowboarding, and mountaineering near her home in Glenwood Springs, Colorado—anything to get away from hospitals and pain meds. She spent hours welding and tinkering with prosthetics to better suit her increasingly ambitious goals. In 2017, she decided to complete the Explorers Grand Slam…

HOWSE PEAK is a 10,800-foot twin-tipped spire rising from the Continental Divide between British Columbia and Alberta’s Banff National Park. The area is remote, no cell service or snack bars, although Howse is plainly visible from lonely Icefields Parkway, which bisects Banff just a few miles from the mountain. Only the most serious climbers would consider ascending its east face, a sheer 3,000-foot wall of sedimentary rock marbled with an intricate network of snow and ice. Its most fearsome route, M-16—echoing the name of the machine gun, because of the frozen detritus that routinely showers down it—has only been completed once, 20 years ago, by a three-man team during a perilous five-day effort. One of the men, Steve House, later wrote that the climb entailed “one of the hardest pitches…

This fall, Outside Online is launching a column focused on those occasions when outdoor adventures go very, very wrong—something that many of our thrill-seeking staffers have experienced firsthand. Or so they claim. When we polled the masthead for survival tales, we got a number of questionable anecdotes. Can you tell which of these is more imagined than real? A. During his first solo backpacking trip, reviews editor Jeremy Rellosa neglected to stow his food properly before going to sleep, attracting what he thought was a menagerie of wild animals. “I stayed up all night clutching my knife after I heard howling and footsteps outside my tent,” he says. “Turns out it was just some foxes.” B. Back when he was an intern, marketing director Sam Moulton spent a winter weekend…

Today’s fly rods are a far cry from the bamboo beasts found lurking in the corners of your great granddad’s lake house. Astonishingly light and smartly engineered, they are exceptional tools that are also beautiful to behold. Even better, the many options available now means there’s an ideal rod out there for every kind of angler, regardless of budget, ability, or age. Take the A. TFO Bug Launcher ($170), which is candy-apple red and has a thin-diameter cork grip and extended reel seat, allowing young anglers to use both hands if need be. Steelhead fishing is about covering a lot of water. The ceramic stripper guides and large fore and rear grips on the B. Sage Two-Handed X Spey ($1,200) allow it to handle a variety of shooting-head lines and…

OUTSIDE: Is there anything about hunting you wish you had known before you started? RINELLA: I wish that the minute I was done sucking on a bottle, my mom had shoved a game call in my mouth. I wish I had spent more of my life learning animal calls instead of waiting until my thirties. Which game animal would you say is the most underappreciated? In the East, squirrel is grossly underrated, but it’s one of my favorite things to hunt. In most states, squirrels are in season more days than not. I like to make an approximation of hot wings with them—it ends up being way better than chicken. The meat is darker and more flavorful, and it has a better story. If somebody had the opportunity to hunt…

BURKE, VERMONT Mountain biking, downhill skiing, craft beer Locals in the small town of Burke started riding singletrack 30 years ago. The area is blessed with rock-free soil, and its Kingdom Trails network stretches almost 100 miles. Burke has become a destination for northeastern riders, and the area is home to pros including cross-country Olympic medalist Georgia Gould. A U.S. Ski and Snowboard Team development site, Burke Mountain has 2,000 feet of drop, lift-served all-mountain terrain that’s steep and technical up top, and a bike park spanning lower elevations. You’ll find natural and man-made singletrack, flow trails, cross-country, berms, jumps, rollovers—you could ride here for a week and never repeat yourself. Post-ride, quaff a Fiddlehead IPA at Mike’s Tiki Bar in East Burke, or make a 45-minute pilgrimage to the…

Sswitch’s Soma NPT app for iOS utilizes dozens of cognitive tasks to target focus, reaction time, vision, and other performance-oriented traits. Here’s how endurance athletes can benefit. Baseline: To give you something to chart your progress against, and to periodically assess mental readiness, start with the classic Psychomotor Vigilance Task, which is considered the gold standard for measuring neurophysiological fatigue. Simply tap the screen whenever a circle appears. Post-workout: Hit the mental gym for 20 to 30 minutes after physical training sessions. In the Switched Stop Audio drill, you tap the left or right button, depending on whether a left- or right-facing arrow appears on the screen, and refrain from tapping if you hear a beep just after the arrow appears. During intervals: Ramp up the demands of your interval…

WHEN SOUTH KOREAN mountaineer Kim Chang-Ho stood at the 29,029-foot summit of Mount Everest in 2013, he set a new record for the fastest time climbing all 14 of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks: seven years, ten months, six days. It’s a stout record, and achieving it was expensive and a feat of planning. It was also treacherous, racing the clock in the Death Zone. Still, Nirmal Purja, a 34-year-old Nepali climber, is on track to shatter Kim’s record. Last spring, Purja summited Annapurna, Dhaulagiri, Kanchenjunga, Everest, Lhotse, and Makalu, knocking out those last three in just 48 hours. If all goes as intended, he’ll finish the remaining eight peaks by November 1, just seven months after he began. That’s one 8,000-meter peak every two weeks for just over half a…