Outside December 2013

ROBERT BENSON Each January, 10,000 people gather at Gull Lake in Brainerd, Minnesota, for the Brainerd Jaycees $150,000 Ice Fishing Extravaganza, the world’s largest ice-fishing tournament. This year, despite temperatures of minus 40 with windchill, Benson, of San Diego, spent 12 hours shooting the spectacle on the ground and from a helicopter. “I was nervous about driving out on the ice with the weight of all those people,” he says. “But one of the organizers told me that if I kept my windows open, I’d be fine if the ice gave in.” THE TOOLS: Canon 5D Mark III, 70mm f/2.8 lens, ISO 400, f/8, 1/2,500 second GREG MIONSKE This August, Mionske shot Colombian Orlando Duque diving into Boston Harbor during the 2013 Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series. Competitors jumped…

Progression. It’s a word uttered constantly in action-sports circles, and one you’ll hear ad nauseam in interviews with snowboarders and freeskiers when the Sochi Olympics kick off in February. As in: “It’s all about progression.” The word is the most valued currency used to measure an athlete’s relevance, which these days is based on the ability to go bigger and higher and faster in order to stay atop the podium. Progression gives the superpipe drama, but it has a downside. Increasingly, action-sports athletes are putting their lives at risk to entertain us and earn medals. Much has been written about football’s concussion crisis, but as Marc Peruzzi reports in “After the Crash” (page 68), there’s an equally disturbing trend of traumatic brain injury, or TBI, in the sports Outside readers…

CHANGEUP In October, we blew up the usual architecture of the magazine to make the Life Issue. We knew it would cause a stir. What we couldn’t have guessed was that “Your CV Can Wait,” about adventure-filled summer jobs, would generate the loudest response. I became a raft guide because of an Outside article I read in 1995. I guided for ten years, and the experience was incredible. JESSICA STEWART SHEPHERD ONLINE Please reconsider your recommendation of arborist as an ideal summer job. Between 1992 and 2007, over 1,200 workers died performing tree care and maintenance in the U.S. Hazards that result in fatalities include falls, being struck by felled limbs and trees, contact with power lines, and being pulled into wood chippers. Just last month, a 14-yearold in Florida…

ALEX HONNOLD NORTHERN CALIFORNIA CLIMBING’S BIGGEST NAME MAKES HIS BID FOR INTERNATIONAL STARDOM BY RISKING DEATH ON LIVE TV IN OCTOBER of 2012, Alex Honnold, 28, and filmmaker Peter Mortimer, 39, were talking about making a new kind of climbing film: one that featured Honnold scaling an immense skyscraper. “We thought, Wouldn’t that be a rad next thing to do,” recalls Mortimer, a founder of the production company Sender Films, “soloing a big building?” Then Austrian BASE jumper Felix Baumgartner leaped from the edge of space in a Red Bull spacesuit on live television, and the pair got a better idea. They started discreetly calling networks with a bold plan: Honnold wanted to free-solo—climb without ropes—the exterior of one of the world’s great skyscrapers on live TV. The National Geographic…

FAIRFAX, CALIFORNIA YOUR HYDRATION drink may be dehydrating you. So says Sims, a 40-year-old exercise physiologist at the Stanford School of Medicine who is pushing for a new paradigm in sports nutrition. “We have this fixation with not bonking, so the industry pumps drinks full of carbohydrates,” Sims explains. “But these sugary drinks force your body to move water into the GI tract to facilitate digestion—and out of your blood and muscles. In other words: dehydration.” The fix, according to Sims, is simple. And it harks back to a commonsense approach used by most athletes in the sixties, before the rise of products like Gatorade. “Separating hydration from fueling—liquid from calories—is the most effective way to address each,” she explains. According to Sims, athletes should get their calories from solid…

PORDIC, FRANCE ON THE EVE of this year’s Tour de France, Vayer, a journalist and former trainer for the Festina cycling team, published an electronic report and subsequent book, Not Normal?, that all but accused some of the biggest names in cycling of doping. In the publication, Vayer, 51, compared the power outputs of active riders with those of 21 Tour de France winners since 1982, including known dopers Lance Armstrong and Jan Ullrich. Vayer’s theory: if a rider passes a certain threshold of power on a given section of the Tour, chances are he’s cheating. Those he implicated include retired riders who have never been caught, such as five-time Tour winner Miguel Indurain (Vayer described his 1995 win as “mutant”), as well as supposedly clean active racers like Andy…