Indholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2024 i Outside

IF YOU’VE NEVER heard the legend of Blowhole, I can tell you all about it, because I was there from the start. My husband and I are dogsledders. Wisconsin-based, though we travel; when your life revolves around sled dogs, you’re always chasing snow. We met Blowhole in April 2018. I had entered the Kobuk, an unsupported, 440-mile race between seven remote villages in the Alaskan Arctic, and I’d borrowed dogs from a few friends to fill out my team. One of them was a shaggy black and white two-year-old owned by Inupiaq musher Ryan Redington. Like most modern sled dogs, he was an Alaskan husky: a thick-furred, super-athletic mutt. He was named for the vicious wind tunnels that form on the Bering coast, the ones that threaten to throw you…

SAN DIEGO CHEF Claudette Zepeda never slows down. You might just as easily find the Top Chef alumna, James Beard Award semifinalist, and founder of Chispa Hospitality and Viva la Vida traversing the border towns of Mexico for her upcoming cookbook, Borderlands, or exploring recipes with Selena Gomez on the Food Network. But when Zepeda seeks solace, she grounds herself in simple outdoor grilling and smoking. “Outdoor cooking is a ritual I will never get tired of. It keeps me connected to the earth,” she says. “I always want to take my shoes off. I’m very feral when it comes to cooking outside.” From smoked pan sauces to the pit cooking of her Mexican ancestors, Zepeda falls back on a few basic techniques that can work for anybody. Brine the…

THE WALL OF DEATH, a cylindrical wooden stage where talented riders pull off all sorts of stunts on motorcycles, was once a mainstay of American carnivals. Only a handful are in use today, passion projects for a few dedicated fanatics. “You’re not going to make too much money doing this,” says New York City photographer Jay Kolsch. “You have to maintain it while you’re on the road, and build it up and take it down everywhere you go. It has to be something you care deeply about.” Kolsch went to a carnival in upstate New York to document Danny Weil’s Wall of Death over several days in the summer of 2022. At the time, a back injury prevented Weil from riding the Wall he’d built in his Florida backyard, but…

ON A WARM APRIL morning, I gaze at a ghost tree towering above me. Its leafless canopy seems to be staring up as well, in similar disbelief, at the 500-foot-high sandstone cliffs surrounding us. There’s a cluster of 70-foot-tall cottonwoods on this river-bottom spot, dead for decades yet seemingly frozen between the worlds of the living and the dead. Their trunks are black and encrusted with white sediment, but somehow this ancient desert forest is still standing—like a phantom reminder of what we’ve lost. The base of the tree trunk is swallowed by oozing, fine-grained silt that matches the palette of the walls. This cliffed cathedral is hidden inside a drainage arm of the Escalante River, which flows south into Glen Canyon, and for much of my life until recently,…

THE TURNING POINT, for me, was Eliud Kipchoge’s smile. In the late miles of his 2017 sub-two-hour marathon attempt at a racetrack just outside Milan, as the effort mounted, he kept flashing a beatific grin. It was a deliberate tactic to help work through the pain, he later explained. Kipchoge’s reputation as the Yoda of endurance was just taking off, and I was torn between wide-eyed admiration of his mental game and my own long-standing skepticism of anything you can’t easily measure. Then, a few months later, sports psychologists in Northern Ireland published a study in which they asked runners to smile and measured a 2 percent drop in energy consumption. Kipchoge was right—and by extension, I reasoned, sports psychology was a real and measurable thing. Since then, I’ve become…

Dear Gear, I’ve been a confident skier, mountain biker, and climber for over three decades. I’m also a woman. For some reason, most of the guys in my life seem to think it’s OK to mansplain how to use my gear to me, and it makes me want to scream. What’s the best way to handle this situation so I don’t blow a gasket? —FRUSTRATED FEMINIST Dear Frustrated, First of all, do you know what blowing a gasket actually means? I’d be happy to explain it to you—I’m kidding! All of us gals have been in your shoes at one time or another. And while the outdoors are far less biased than they used to be, there’s work to be done when it comes to educating menfolk on how not…

FEW THINGS SCARE Caroline Paul. Not scuba diving with sharks, nor flying a motorized gyrocopter that looks like a dubious cross between a bobsled and a whirlybird. The 60-year-old adventurer has been chasing risk since she was a girl growing up in Connecticut. At 13, she attempted to break the world record in crawling—12.5 miles—but was thwarted at mile 8.5 by skinned knees and hypothermia. That same year, she went whitewater rafting on Connecticut’s Housatonic River, in a boat she and her twin sister made out of milk cartons. Paul writes candidly about her lifelong relationship with risk in her new book, Tough Broad: From Boogie Boarding to Wing Walking—How Outdoor Adventure Improves Our Lives as We Age. I first connected with Paul, who lives in San Francisco, in 2016,…

Your Trustiest Stuff Deserves Loyalty BY HUGH KLEIN Former junior ski team parent When it comes to gear, there’s a saying that will always resonate: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Even better: “If it is broke, fix it yourself!” Why not duct-tape your ski gloves once they sustain a few tears? If nothing else, mine are more waterproof now. If you have a ski with anything short of a blown-out edge, it’s amazing what a good base grind and edge sharpening can do. When I freeheel away from lift-served terrain, I’m still using my ancient telemark gear: 25-year-old K2 World Pistes. They’re wet noodles on hardpack but work fine in backcountry snow. You can save a ton of money rescuing old gear from local shops. And someone please…

Paka Men’s T-shirt $55 Paka’s fabric, which blends 15 percent baby alpaca fiber into 85 percent pima cotton, is a revelation. It’s softer than our usual merino favorites but feels every bit as durable, and it’s delightfully airy and lightweight. Another plus: it’s machine washable, and suffered no ill effects when laundered with the rest of our athletic wear. (Men’s XS–2XL) Outdoor Research Essential fleece hoodie $125 On brisk mornings and in A/C-cooled studio sessions, testers fell in love with this hoodie’s delicious lightweight fleece. “It’s half as heavy as my winter warm-up sweatshirt,” said one tester, “so it moved nicely during hip circles, arm raises, and cat-cows.” There’s a crewneck version ($99), but one tester made a compelling case for the hooded style, which had him feeling grounded during…

PUERTO RICO WHY NOW: After rebounding from a series of devastating earthquakes in 2019 and 2020—and Hurricane Maria in 2017—this U.S. territory (read: no passport required for Americans) quickly became one of the hottest destinations in the Caribbean. Although it has long been a favorite with surfers, 36 years have passed since Puerto Rico hosted the sport’s world championships. But in February, the Atlantic town of Arecibo, an hour west of the capital city of San Juan, welcomed the 2024 International Surfing Association’s World Surfing Games, the final qualifier in the run-up to the Summer Olympics, putting its shores’ serious swells back on the map. It’s easier to get there now, too. In recent months, three affordable carriers have begun nonstop service to San Juan—Avelo Airlines, from Philadelphia and New Haven,…

THE DARKNESS HAS A NAME, BUT I DON’T KNOW THAT YET. ALL I KNOW IS THAT I’M SCARED. I’m sitting with my feet in a creek in the scrubby mountains southeast of Ashland, Oregon, watching how the water spills over gray rocks into a shallow pool. All day long, I’ve been alone and unplugged, doing my best to savor moments like this one. I note how the sunlight filters through the black oaks and flickers in the water like coins in a fountain. Colors get special attention: the denim-blue lupines, the amber grass, and the plum-colored mountains around me. I squirrel these images away to return to later, like nuts before winter. A forgettable dirt road follows the creek out of Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, which surrounds this place, but that’s…

TALON VANCE, 13, LIVED IN AN APARTMENT COMPLEX IN SUBURBAN COLORADO SPRINGS WITH HIS MOM AND AUNT. OTHER RELATIVES LIVED NEARBY. Typically, he spent much of the week with his father, half brother, half sister, and grandparents, all of whom lived together not far away in a different town. All of that would change in August 2022: Talon’s mother, Rebecca Vance, had hatched a plan to disappear from Colorado Springs and go permanently off-grid. Talon’s paternal grandmother, Marilyn Burden, still seems shell-shocked by his sudden departure. Her extended family lives in a ranch-style house on a small cul-de-sac; when I stopped by for dinner last September, there were plenty of people on the street, and lights were on in every home. Eric Burden, Talon’s father, stood in his driveway speaking…