Indholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2023 i Outside

Happy to Be Here By Alex Heard (@ALEXHEARD) My first exposure to Outside was in my twenties, during a beach-house weekend on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. I was talking to a friend nicknamed Bear, a fisherman and paddler who’d once been a bartender in Steamboat Springs, Colorado—a fact that produced gnawing envy, since I’d never experienced the West in classic ski-bum fashion. Bear was a fan of the magazine, and as he talked, he tossed around names I knew and didn’t know: Edward Abbey? Check. Others associated with Outside back then? Uhhh… My takeaway from Bear was that Outside had great writing and reporting on exploration, adventure sports, and travel, and a strong literary voice. It sounded incredible. It also sounded out of reach, since I lived in a different…

IN SEPTEMBER 2012, when I was 26 years old, my father, Randy, sent me an email with a subject line that read, “Go to this rock.” He wrote: “Someday, I want you to go to this rock. It’s in a stunning place. I call it the Universe Clock. It needs to be ‘wound’ or rocked once a year to keep things in harmony.” The Universe Clock is in Wyoming’s Wind River Range. Perched on a narrow rib of the Continental Divide, the Clock is a large slab of granite—approximately nine by eleven feet—balanced on a stone fulcrum like a seesaw. My dad described it as his favorite place in the entire mountain range. He stumbled on the Clock during an off-trail hike, near what would be the end of his…

YIELDS 12 SMALL BROWNIES These superdense ganache-topped brownies are the stuff of dreams. Daniella Luchian and Kristy Kirsch, the bakers behind the weekly Sierra Bakehouse pop-up in Truckee, California, report that these decadent treats always sell out. Make them and you’ll understand why. INGREDIENTS 4 large eggs1 scant cup granulated sugar1 cup tightly packed brown sugar1½ tsp vanilla extract8 oz unsalted butter, melted1½ cups best-quality cocoa powder (such as Valrhona)⅔ cup all-purpose flour½ tsp kosher salt8 oz good-quality semisweet chocolate chips orsemisweet chocolate cut into pieces½ cup heavy cream INSTRUCTIONS Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spray a 13-by-9-inch metal baking pan with cooking spray, and line with parchment paper. Spray paper with cooking spray. Blend eggs, sugars, and vanilla in a mixer on medium until light and fluffy, about three…

Whether you’re a visitor or a resident, places like Mammoth Lakes, California, Crested Butte, Colorado, and Sun Valley, Idaho, are spectacular—but in this era of climate change, raging wildfires, and sky-high housing prices, making a life there has gotten hard. We asked our writers to imagine a glorious, sustainable tomorrow for these one-of-a-kind destinations. Join us as we dive into their recommendations, starting with… 1. Meet the New Queen of Slopeside Fun KATIE BURRELL has developed a brand around teaching winter-sports experts and strivers to chill out and share a laugh. Her upcoming film, Weak Layers, revives the old party-hard ski comedy—with women at the center of the action. by MEGAN MICHELSON photographs by MICHELLE GROSKOPF LE CHAMOIS, WHICHLOCALS IN LAKE TAHOE, California, call the Chammy, is one of those ski-town…

A MONSTER TRUCK fashioned from a hearse. A Geo Metro made of two front ends welded together. A red SUV with a fire-breathing dragon’s head fused to the hood. If you saw these DIY vehicles tearing through the high desert of central Oregon, “you could mistake it for a scene from a Mad Max movie,” says Brian Kaiser, a 43-year-old photographer from Ohio. But the Gambler 500, which Kaiser attended along with some 2,000 others last June in Redmond, just north of Bend, isn’t a postapocalyptic cinemascape. First staged in 2014 by a ragtag group who explored the woods in cheap cars, the annual off-road rally doubles as a massive trash cleanup. For three days, drivers in imaginatively revamped rigs clear large pieces of garbage—mattresses and couches, abandoned boats and…

We’ve all experienced meaningful friendships in our lives, and during her 30 or so years on her 120-acre ranch in Colorado, Pam Houston has been blessed with many—her horses Roany and Deseo, a pair of ornery miniature donkeys, a few angry rams, a now elderly ewe, and several generations of wolfhounds. Along the way, she has been reminded again and again that our most fulfilling connections aren’t always with fellow humans. Those bonds can also cut across species, proving all the richer. Houston chronicled that deep love in her 2019 memoir Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country. She made sure that her ranch would always serve as a refuge, putting it under a conservation easement in 2019. She spoke by phone with contributing editor Elizabeth Hightower Allen on…

OUT IN UTAH’S barren West Desert, past the hazardous-waste landfill and the military bombing range, on the far side of the Great Salt Lake, sits a silent, mysterious structure that will make a great ruin someday. Scratch that: it already is one. The three-story industrial building was hastily erected in the late 1980s, at a cost of $60 million, to house a pumping station with an urgent task: to suck water out of the Great Salt Lake and spew it into the desert flats farther west. The lake was then at record-high levels, threatening to flood railway lines, interstate highways, and farmland. The pumps were in operation for about two years before nature took over and the lake receded on its own. More than three decades later, the Great Salt…

RECENTLY, WHILE sifting through some of the excruciatingly detailed performance data he’d collected over decades as a Colorado-based triathlon coach, Alan Couzens noticed a pleasing symmetry. All else being equal, the amount of aerobic fitness his athletes lost by getting a year older was almost identical to the amount they gained by adding an hour per month of training time. Want to freeze the biological clock from one birthday to the next? Find a spare 15 minutes per week and fill it with running. The long-haul practicality of this approach is debatable: after a decade, that additional training time would total 2.5 hours a week. But the underlying premise of what we might call the Couzens Immortality Quotient taps into a fertile area of debate. How much of the aging…

SOMETHING MAGICAL happens when runners transmit energy through their feet to the ground, and some of that magic rubs off on their shoes. Over time, as the runner becomes fitter, faster, and more confident, the shoes become associated with this transformation, and simple rubber, foam, and fabric take on a mystical glow. So it is that a pair of 1994 Reebok Racer X’s sit on a shelf in the back of my closet—even though I haven’t worn them in more than 20 years. The uppers are stained from Gatorade spills, finish-line puke, and bloody toes. The outsoles are embedded with the dust of Central Park paths and European streets, and the forefoot tread is almost completely worn off. But these shoes are, to me, objects of reverence. I found the svelte…

Last winter, laid up in bed with a severe bout of the Omicron variant, I began obsessively watching Martijn Doolaard’s YouTube channel. Doolaard is a 38-year-old Dutchman who, about a year earlier, had bought a set of primitive shepherd’s cabins in the western Italian Alps for less than the price of a decent new car. He had the immediate intent of fixing them up, and a broader, more abstract goal of living simply in nature. The first video he posted, in October 2021, laid out what might be called the Doolaard style: A Kubrickian drone shot, gliding over a wooded, fog-enshrouded mountaintop, backed by a minimalist orchestral score. The shot then cuts to the back seat of his car, and we see Doolaard driving through the forest, en route to…

I moved to a mountain town from the city and feel completely lost when it comes to style. I considered myself stylish in college and into my twenties, but with this move—and now that I’m hitting my thirties—I feel out of touch. Help!—MILLENNIAL HIPSTER Dear Millennial Hipster: There’s much to unpack here, but I’ll try. First, I’m sorry to inform you that even by asking the question, you’re already losing the battle. Why? Because fashion is about being on the cutting edge, not wondering where it is. What’s important to keep in mind is that mountain-town chic is just as fickle and fluctuating as the intermountain snowpack. One season, everybody’s wearing beanies above their ears, and the next, everybody’s wearing them over their ears. (Note that while it takes years…

And there’s no better backcountry map out there than Gaia GPS. For the ten hiking routes featured here—many of them in places where cell service may be nonexistent and advanced beta on terrain and logistics could be a lifesaver—you can download detailed Gaia GPS trail maps for offline use, so you always find your way. Gaia Topo’s interactive maps set the standard for clarity and detail, and help you locate campgrounds, scenic overlooks, water sources, and summits. Precise weather forecasts are available by tapping the map, and you can leave a breadcrumb trail of your progress, in case you want to take that detour to a waterfall and still find your way back. Once you’re home again, relive the whole experience in 3D on gaiagps.com. Bonus: Outside+ members get access…

Ian Dille’s “The Murder of Moriah Wilson” first appeared on our website in late January and generated starkly different responses. Many readers praised it, saying it was written with skill and sensitivity. Longreads, a prominent aggregator of nonfiction story-telling, said that Dille’s “detailed reporting sheds a light on the close-knit biking world and human relationships at the root of this case.” But others detested the story and made their opinions known on social media and to various Outside editors. Some described it as true-crime porn that wallowed in these events for no constructive reason. Others were angered by the fact that Dille knew one of the principal characters, Colin Strickland, casually referring to him as “a buddy of mine.” To these readers, the entire feature was little more than an…

Last summer, I put my old roan horse in the ground. But there’s way more to the story than that. Thirty-nine years on the planet, 25 of those with me. I bought Roany the same year I moved to a ranch in Creede, Colorado, because Deseo, my alarmist Paso Fino, who had lived outside Fresno, California, most of his young life, was deciding that Colorado was the scariest place he’d ever been. First off, there was snow—a whole damn lot of it. The predator-to-livestock ratio was not to his liking, and the pasture was surrounded by hundred-foot spruce trees that often sang in the wind. The first thing I noticed about Roany was that he had a kind eye; the second was his size—just under 17 hands at the shoulder.…