Innehållsförteckning för December 2013 från Outside

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…

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…

OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA “THE SHIFT FROM fossil fuels to renewables is one of the biggest wealth-creation opportunities of our time,” says 32-yearold Solar Mosaic cofounder Billy Parish, “and we all should be part of it.” Does that sound like a hard sell? Or a Pollyannaish one? Consider that since Parish officially launched Mosaic in January, the company, which acts as a bank to vet and back solar projects, has attracted $5 million in capital from more than 2,000 investors. Those who wish to do good and turn a profit can just go to Mosaic’s website, sign up, and commit increments of $25 to projects as small as a 645-kilowatt bee farm in California and as large as a 55,000-panel solar installment on a military housing development in New Jersey. The investments…

VENICE, CALIFORNIA THE LIST OF recent documentaries that have fundamentally altered public attitudes about an important issue is short: The Cove, Super Size Me, Chasing Ice. Add to it Walker’s The Crash Reel, which opens in theaters across the country this month. The film, a feature about snow boarder Kevin Pearce’s recovery from a traumatic brain injury, makes an unassailable case that action sports are as dangerous as the NFL—and promises to change the way we see the X Games, super pipes, and the very concept of big air. “It’s like we were breaking a story,” says Walker. “There were a lot of things that we realized nobody had talked about before.” Among them: an almost willful ignorance about the symptoms of head injuries and their prevalence in the action-sports…

AFTER DECADES of skiing and hiking, Anne Bujakowski’s knee was toast, and she needed surgery—badly. So the 45-year-old Californian made a surprising decision: she flew halfway across the world for the operation. “It was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Bujakowski says of her 2010 knee replacement in Singapore. Bujakowski had health insurance, but her employer, Snow Summit Mountain Resort, in California’s San Bernardino Mountains, had just launched a program offering employees significant savings on copays and other costs by going abroad for surgery. Insurance paid for the Singapore trip, including airfare, meals, and ten nights in a luxury hotel while she completed her physical therapy. Her out-of-pocket costs? Nothing. In the U.S., they could have been as high as $20,000. Traveling abroad for surgery is now a…

IN JULY, nearly 300,000 people tuned in live on ESPN2 to watch 26-year-old Rich Froning and 31-year-old Samantha Briggs win the Reebok CrossFit Games, the last two standing after out-muscling 138,000 global participants in three rounds of competition. For their efforts, which included CrossFit mainstays like burpees and deadlifts, Froning and Briggs walked away with $250,000 each and the title Fittest on Earth—at least according to CrossFit. Buoyed by the games, CrossFit’s highintensity workouts have exploded in popularity. There are now roughly 10,000 CrossFit-branded affiliate gyms—or boxes, as they’re called—around the world. But behind the competitive, pukeinducing workouts is a growing list of injured participants, many of whom suffer from telltale injuries: slipped disks, torn rota tor cuffs, knee tendinopathy. Neither the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) nor any…

IN 2010, THE PEOPLE OF RUSSIA were asked to design an Olympic mascot, and the people responded—creating 24,000 cartoon bears, tigers, saints, snowflakes, witches, and wolves in just three months, a forest of candidates, a seeming triumph of democracy. The upcoming 2014 Winter Olympics, in the southerly city of Sochi, had until then been Vladimir Putin’s pet project. The new Russia was to be showcased at the president’s favorite Russian ski area and coastal resort, with facilities in the Caucasus Mountains and along the Black Sea built from scratch by his most favored oligarchs. “Sochi is a unique place,” Putin had told the International Olympic Committee in 2007, when his personal touch helped Russia beat out Austria and South Korea for the chance to host the Games. “On the seashore,…

That’s a Wrap Holiday shopping can be a brutal chore. This is especially true when friends and family members are highly discerning adventurers. This year give them something they’ll use. To help, we curated 65 tools and toys, organized by character type. Consider it our gift to you. Glazed meats. Spiked eggnog. Chocolate everything. When the celebratory gluttony passes, treat your most indulgent loved one to a BluePrint Juices cleanse ($65 per day; blueprintjuices.com). There are three levels to choose from, including one with an array of fruit juices and another focusing on kale and celery. Each involves drinking six bottles per day—delicious concoctions squeezed from twenty pounds of organic fruits and vegetables, delivered to their doorstep on ice. It’s as if the milkman were reincarnated as a yogi. Photographs…

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…

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…

BOULDER, COLORADO IN 2010, when the recession was walloping gearmakers, the Coupounases, who founded GoLite in 1998, came up with a novel response: they took over an empty office space in Boulder for ten days, filled it with lightweight tents, sleeping bags, and apparel, and sold $1.2 million in merchandise—all at wholesale prices. “People flew in for this, slept outside the door to be first, paid cash, all because they knew about and bought into our system,” says Demetri, 47, a longtime champion of the fast-and-light backpacking movement. “It showed us that we had thousands of customers who weren’t being served by traditional retailers.” That became the spark for a bold move. The Coupounases had long been frustrated by the outdoor industry’s standard practices—hiring sales reps all over the country,…

SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH YOU MAY NOT recognize his name, but you’ve almost certainly been sucked into one of his massively popular online videos—“Word’s Largest Roping Swing,” “The Human Slingshot,” “Zipline Catapult.” To date, Graham’s YouTube channel, Devin Super Tramp, has racked up more than a quarter-billion page views, making him by far the most successful of a new breed of YouTube auteurs—filmmakers who pump out viral video after viral video. Born into a conservative Mormon household in Provo, Utah, Graham, 30, originally wanted to make features but fell in love with online videos while studying film at BYU. “I’m my own boss, and it’s only my audience that determines how I do,” says Graham, who dropped out during his senior year and has been supporting himself through YouTube ever…

ELEVATE YOUR SKI-SEASON SKILLS WITH THESE FOUR TRAMPOLINE EXERCISES SINCE THE early days of freestyle skiing, trampolines have been key training tools for elite athletes looking to develop new aerial tricks. More recently, as terrain parks have become standard fare at mountain resorts, trampoline training has become more popular—and more accessible. A cadre of facilities now offer classes that guide amateurs through skills progressions for building strength, flexibility, and aerial awareness, even if you’re only looking to add a little pop to your powder turns. Among them, San Francisco’s House of Air (houseofair.com) is the most sophisticated, with a huge octagonal trampoline designed for bouncing while strapped into skis or a snowboard, time-delay cameras that capture your jumps for display on a large screen, and a trampoline wall for halfpipe-style…

MEMBERS ONLY Performance nutrition has finally taken a cue from wine and cigars: energy-bar-of-the-month clubs. A small collection of upstart companies will send a monthly care package—often personalized to your sport or taste preferences—directly to your door, eliminating last-minute grocery-store runs and giving you the chance to sample a range of different items. Here are the best we’ve seen. Kona Kase: Each box comes with a selection of bars, gels, and granola, as well as nutrition and training tips. $15 per month; konakase.com YouBar: With its VIP program, you get biweekly, triweekly, or monthly shipments of 12 energy bars you create yourself from more than 50 ingredients. From $38; youbars.com NatureBox: This monthly package, which changes regularly and includes items like honey mesquite almonds, fresh vegetable chips, and whole wheat…

INTERIOR SECRETARY SALLY JEWELL HAS AN IMPRESSIVE RÉSUMÉ: OIL GEOLOGIST, BANKER, PRESIDENT OF REI. BUT TODAY’S WASHINGTON IS A LANDSCAPE WITHOUT MAPS, AND IN THIS AGE OF CLIMATE CHANGE AND KEYSTONE, THE MAJOR BATTLES ARE TAKING PLACE OVER AT THE EPA AND STATE. IS GREATNESS STILL POSSIBLE AT INTERIOR? THE INTERIOR SECRETARY RECOGNIZED THE JACKET AND BOOTS I WORE TO HER OFFICE. FOUR MONTHS EARLIER SHE’D BEEN SELLING THEM. “They let you in here wearing that?” Sally Jewell said, giving the once-over to my North Face soft shell and Zamberlan hiking boots. Jewell, the former REI chief executive who is now in charge of one-fifth of the U.S. landmass, 700 million acres of subsurface mineral estate, 1.7 billion acres of offshore territory, 401 national parks, 561 national wildlife refuges, 476…

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…

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…

TRUMANSBURG, NEW YORK STEINGRABER IS HARDLY a newcomer to the environmental scene: people have been comparing the former biology professor to Rachel Carson since 1997, when she published Living Downstream. The book examines how illness is linked to pollution, and it grew out of Steingraber’s experiences battling a form of bladder cancer that may have been caused by industrial runoff. But over the past three years, Steingraber, 54, has emerged as one of the country’s top experts on the hot-button issue of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. And here’s the really surprising thing: at a time when everyone from big green groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council to President Obama is touting America’s newfound natural-gas glut as a bridge to energy independence, Steingraber has prevailed in her efforts to keep…

SPREAD OUT As skiers increasingly seek out new terrain, resorts are stepping up with expanded acreage, guided trips, and new lifts. Peak 6, at Colorado’s Breckenridge, is adding two new chairlifts, providing access to 543 additional acres across three high-alpine bowls—boosting the resort’s skiable terrain by 23 percent—and offering private, guided tours above the tree line (from $730; breckenridge.com). This winter, Crested Butte begins guided tours of a new back-side, expertsonly zone called Teo 2, featuring 60 acres of north-facing chutes filled with cliff jumps and pillow lines. In Montana, Big Sky and Moonlight Basin officially merged. The two have always shared a mountain, but now one lift ticket lets you access 5,750 acres of steep, varied terrain—the second-highest acreage in the country—and an enormous 4,350 vertical feet from top…

EVERY YEAR, NEW RESEARCH ratchets up doubt about the health benefits of milk, including a 2012 study linking dairy consumption to Type 1 diabetes. Even more troubling: the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Disorders estimates that some 50 million Americans are lactose intolerant, a condition that causes everything from minor bloating and cramps to inflammatory bowel disease—and helps explain the booming market for nondairy alternatives. Last year, soy and almond milk brought in nearly $1 billion in combined sales, a 30 percent increase since 2010. But not all milks are created equal, and many are low in calcium and protein. Here’s how the most popular alternatives compare. MAKE YOUR OWN Hemp Milk INGREDIENTS: ½ cup shelled hemp seeds 4 cups water 3 tablespoons sweetener 1½ teaspoons vanilla…

ON MARCH 24, 2012, SALLY FRANCKLYN SKIED THROUGH THE SOUTH BOUNDARY GATE AT JACKSON HOLE MOUNTAIN RESORT, IN WYOMING, HEADING FOR 10,150-FOOT CODY PEAK. Once on the ridge, the four skiers in her party—including her boyfriend at the time, Jeff Brines—could have descended the backcountry line Pucker Face, but on inspection it looked icy, rocky, and as unpleasant as its name implied. A safer option would have involved down-climbing the back of Cody Peak and skiing one of the mellower pitches farther along the ridge. Instead, the four decided on a chute known as Once Is Enough. The entrance to Once Is Enough is 20 feet wide and pushes 55 degrees. Dropping in is a major commitment, but once you do there’s no real crux. The fall line, however, is…

NO ONE HAS EVER TREKKED THE LENGTH OF THE NILE ON FOOT. LEVISON WOOD PLANS TO. IF ANYONE is up for walking the 4,175-mile Nile River, it’s Levison Wood. Among other adventures, in 2004, at the age of 22, he hitchhiked from England to India, along the way walking across Afghanistan, where he later fought as a British Parachute Regiment captain against the Taliban. In 2010, he delivered ambulances from London to Malawi, driving through 27 frequently hostile countries. But deciding to walk the Nile, says Wood, now 31, is the craziest thing he’s ever tried. Until the early 20th century, malaria killed almost everyone who attempted it. More recently, countries like Uganda and Sudan have been too dangerous to pass through. But with effective anti-malarials and South Sudan’s independence…