Indholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2023 i Outside

My early experiences with outdoor awe seem fairly ordinary now, but they were magical at the time. I was a 13-year-old on a Boy Scout trip in which a bunch of us were ferried by church bus from Mississippi to New Mexico and then Colorado, giving me my first look at the Rockies. (Seeing huge mountains on the horizon was awe hit number one.) During a particular stretch near Red River, New Mexico, we camped alongside a beautiful mountain stream, and I couldn’t stop staring at the water and wading in, as if it were a tidal pool. Every river or creek I’d ever seen was muddy; this one was clear and bubbling, and its vibrancy was immediate. Trout nosed around the bottom, hummingbirds whistled overhead, and skimmer birds swooped…

IN THE SHORT STORY “The Orrery,” Barry Lopez writes about a strange encounter in the Sonoran Desert. We are “north of Tucson and east,” a place where the winds are so ethereal that they feel as though someone has “exhaled through silk.” A nameless narrator meets a recluse who performs what sounds like the ultimate party trick: he conjures a luminous model galaxy by levitating thousands of glowing stones into the night sky. The narrator is unnerved, but the hermit reassures him: “‘If one is patient,’ he said, ‘if you are careful, I think there is probably nothing that cannot be retrieved.’” That’s the last line of the story; the act of sorcery is left unexplained. It’s wonderfully obscure. “Retrieved” can have an extractive connotation, but it can also mean…

I lie half naked and miserable in a puddle of my own sweat. I open the tent flap to breathe but there’s no relief, even at midnight. Who comes to the Guatemalan jungle in July? Yesterday’s hike was rough, but the 15 miles today were raw pain. The mosquitoes were so vicious that by mile two even our local guides had asked to borrow our 100 percent deet. Bugs here suck down lesser repellent like an aperitif. Nothing provides complete protection. Our destination is La Danta, one of the largest pyramids on earth. It’s located in the ruins of El Mirador, a centerpiece of Maya civilization from 800 B.C.E. to 100 C.E. that was abandoned nearly 2,000 years ago. There are no restrooms, no gift shops. In fact, the site…

AMERICAN CYCLIST Matteo Jorgenson can trace his participation in the 2022 Tour de France back to an email he sent in the winter of 2017. Jorgenson was 18 at the time, a top racer in the U.S. junior cycling ranks, the sport’s version of Little League baseball. He sought a career in cycling’s highest echelon, the WorldTour, but big-league teams showed little interest. So Jorgenson spent several months emailing squads in Europe’s development scene asking for a job. “Every day I’d try to write three emails after my training rides, because I was trying really hard to market myself,” Jorgenson told me. “I was spending an hour on each.” One finally generated a lead. After notching an impressive racing result in France with the U.S. national team, Jorgenson messaged a…

SPRING 1988. I was spreading the gospel of climbing throughout the country by presenting a slideshow about a pair of international climbing events, one a monthlong women’s exchange in France, the other a meet in Australia. Times were simpler back then, and my payment for a Berkeley, California, appearance was a tent—an aqua-blue North Face Bullfrog. I was delighted. The last tent I had was a droopy four-person A-frame that I used for weeks in Yosemite’s Camp 4. It blew down easily and filled like a bathtub when it rained. A few weeks after receiving the Bullfrog—a two-person, three-pole, freestanding structure—I had occasion to use it just prior to attending the first international climbing competition in the U.S., in Snowbird, Utah. I had no gym to prepare in; back then…

MICHAEL AMSTER ARRIVED at the Flying J truck stop in Lebec, California, carrying a loaf of homemade pumpkin bread. His orange puffer vibrated in the wind as he climbed into the Toyota Tacoma that would ferry us up into the foothills of the Tehachapi Mountains of the Central Valley. We buckled up. A wintry mix of rain and snow lashed the windshield. The bread wasn’t warm, but it was soft. “It’s gluten-free!” he announced. I’d invited Amster here because I hoped we could experience some classic, mind-blowing awe, and I wanted him to explain exactly what was going on in our brains and bodies while we did. Amster is an MD and a coauthor of the recently published book The Power of Awe, and my challenge today was to find…

OUTSIDE: We’ve been very eager to talk with you, because the magazine is doing a story about the science of awe. →SHATNER: It’s a feeling rather than something scientific, wouldn’t you say? But for your purposes, let’s go along with that. You’ve certainly had a number of awe experiences in your life. I’d like to ask about your fascination with space. When did it start? →At a summer camp outside Montreal. I was a city boy, and I was sitting on a log. It was night, and I was looking up into the stars. There was no light pollution! I stared up and fell over backward on the log, fell right on my back. I was so awed by the panoply. I don’t know what it was—more than anything else,…

I HEARD THE RUMBLING before I saw anything. My first thought was that it might be a military jet dipping low through the alpine valley, as sometimes happened. But that didn’t make sense; it had been snowing all day, and clouds still hung over the Elk Mountains of Colorado, just outside the ski-resort town of Crested Butte. Late in the afternoon, after alpine skiing all day, I’d decided to go for a quick cross-country jaunt on one of my favorite trails, a forest road leading to an old ghost town now used as a biological-research station in summer. In winter the road is closed to vehicles, and it’s a fun four-mile out-and-back ski. I was pushing it, but figured I’d make it back by dark. At the time, I lived…

WE CARRIED THE enormous, sacred rice cake up the stone steps of the trail to the Shinto shrine and, exhaling and squatting, placed it gingerly upon the modest, low wooden altar, me doing my best not to slip a disk. There my friend Mike and I left the XXL-pizza-size offering to… well, the elements, I guess? To whatever birds and critters populate a Japanese mountain? I tried to ask our host, the priest Kumagai-san, what would now happen to this massive flapjack, but he simply smiled and nodded, then directed us to ring the substantial, ancient brass bell hanging from the top of the shrine. This required use of a log suspended from a pair of ropes hanging next to the bell. After winning a wordless session of You first;…

IF THE PHRASE “kuplink, kuplank, kuplunk!” rings a bell, you’re not alone. In the classic 1948 children’s book Blueberries for Sal, the main character wanders from one blueberry bush to another, eating more berries than she drops into her bucket. Sal is set in Maine, but you don’t have to live there to try growing your own, and it’s worth the attempt. The health benefits of blueberries are well-known: they’re a cancer-fighting superfood, can help lower blood pressure, and are said to boost concentration and memory. But as mighty as these berries are, they can be tricky for home gardeners, especially in the West, where natural soils usually aren’t acidic enough. Planting season is the spring, but for best results, start making plans and getting your soil dialed in now.…

ANSEL ADAMS WILDERNESS Location: Straddling the Great Western Divide of the Sierra Nevada, CaliforniaWhy we chose it: When summertime crowds make a beeline for Yosemite Valley, serious hikers, anglers, and backpackers skip the more popular national park in favor of this 232,000-acre expanse of sky-high granite ridges, sparkling alpine lakes, and high-altitude meadows bursting with wildflowers.Favorite adventures: I’m a massive fan of any trails leading toward the toothy spires of the Ritter Range, most of which lies within the Ansel Adams Wilderness, and this area boasts 350 miles of those trails. Looking for a workout to make your calves burn? Grab a permit and strike out on a seven-mile (each way) overnight trip to the serrated fins surrounding Minaret Lake, with a quick detour to marvel at Devils Postpile. Prefer…

“I DON’T FEEL anything,” I say. “Give it a couple of minutes,” says Catherine Boyd, a psychiatrist in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I live. A few moments later, I begin one of the wildest adventures I’ve ever taken, only this one is inside my head. I’m sitting in a reclining chair in Boyd’s office, wearing an eye mask and listening to a soothing playlist, having just been injected with my first round of ketamine, a dissociative drug that’s used for the treatment of anxiety, depression, PTSD, and addiction, among other mental health conditions. Boyd checks in with me soon after and asks how I’m doing. I tell her that it feels like a dentist is using a Waterpik to clean out my neural pathways. Then I feel like I’m…

Jules Jimreivat, who splits her time between Washington and Oregon, is a seasoned cyclist, climber, and skier. One morning in January of last year, she drove two hours to Oregon’s Celestial Falls to learn more about a sport she was unfamiliar with. “Kayakers are a different breed—fearless and calm, but also giddy,” Jimreivat, 28, says. The roar of the waterfall made timing this shot challenging. “I had to crouch in the mud as minutes ticked by, finger on the trigger, ready to grab frames the second I saw a colorful blip make its way toward the drop,” she says. After spending a week exploring Smith Rock State Park in central Oregon, Irene Yee, 35, knew that this was the shot she wanted. But it wasn’t until she climbed Sky Ridge…