Innehållsförteckning för September 2018 från Outside

Set Our Children Free I still get a twinge of panic when I think back to the first time my kids rode their bikes to school on their own. I watched them roll slowly down our driveway, hauling backpacks that seemed half as big as their little bodies, then stop at the bottom, just as I had instructed dozens of times. They looked both ways—twice—before Olive, then eight, glanced back at Cash, six, as if to say, All set? Then they stepped on their pedals, took a wobbly right turn, and disappeared from view. I visualized every detail of how their short ride would unfold from there: a stop sign at the end of our street, a right turn, another stop sign half a block up a hill, another right,…

Bose Quiet-Comfort 35 headphones $350 With three levels of noise cancellation, you can select how much to tune out. SteriPen Pure+ UV water purifier $70 A UV purifier that gives you peace of mind without wasting space in your carry-on. Away The Bigger carry-on $245 An internal battery makes searching for an airport outlet a thing of the past. Skyroam Solis Global hot spot $175 This tiny Wi-Fi hot spot connects to five devices at once and will keep you online for up to 16 hours on a single charge.…

A. Patagonia Middle Fork Packable waders $349 Though extremely durable, these 1.6-pound waterproof-breathable waders scrunch down to the size of a camp pillow, so they won’t overwhelm your pack on treks to remote waterways. B. Ross Evolution LTX 4-5 weight reel $385 We like to think of the LTX as an upgrade to the classic Evolution LT in the form of a larger arbor (to retrieve line faster) and a stronger drag (it puts the brakes on baby tarpon as well as football-size trout). But Ross’s commitment to precision machining hasn’t changed. The LTX feels as sharp as ever and still produces that beloved quiet click. C. Fishpond River Armor El Jefe net $230 Made of fiberglass covered with a protective Kevlar and carbon-fiber skin, the El Jefe is light…

IN FEBRUARY 2014, the Canadian women’s soccer team realized it needed more juice in the gym. So management called in an electrician to redo the wiring in the team’s makeshift workout room in suburban Vancouver, to prevent two rented industrial heaters from blowing the fuses. “The plugs just couldn’t handle it,” recalls César Meylan, the team’s head sports scientist. Then, for five straight winter days, Meylan put the squad through grueling 90-minute circuit-training sessions with the room kept at a toasty 95 degrees. Each player swallowed an ingestible sensor that allowed Meylan to monitor core temperature in real time, and he doled out brief periods of rest or snippets of encouragement to any player whose reading deviated too far from the goal of 101.3 degrees. That fever-like temperature, he says,…

WHEN ENDURANCE COACH Joe Friel published the first edition of The Cyclist’s Training Bible in 1996, serious riders had few resources to help guide them to peak performance. The book quickly became a classic and is one of the bestselling training manuals ever published. Given its popularity and influence, it was no small decision when, in late 2016, Friel decided to rewrite the entire thing. “So much had changed since the first book, I felt like I was just applying Band-Aids in later editions,” says Friel, who is now 74. “I decided to scrap the old manuscript and start with a clean sheet of paper.” The all-new fifth edition ($27, VeloPress) was released earlier this year. Here’s a look at how Friel’s advice has evolved based on the latest science…

BY THE TIME my eldest son, Fin, turned six, the age at which he might reasonably have been expected to enter the public-education system, my wife, Penny, and I had long since determined that neither of our children (Fin’s brother, Rye, is three years younger) would darken a schoolhouse doorway. As if this wasn’t recalcitrant enough, we’d also decided to pursue a self-directed, curriculum-free educational style known as unschooling. This meant that at the age when most American children are busy memorizing the alphabet, our sons were running wild in the fields and forests surrounding our rural Vermont home, belt knives and bow drills at the ready. Like many of our contemporaries in the unschooling movement, we placed our faith in the freedom and trust that more-formal learning institutions are…

It’s easy to talk about pulling the kids out of school, selling the house, and riding off into the sunset. It’s a lot harder to learn what this kind of bold choice really requires. One smart strategy: give your imagined escape a test run with a vacation that will provide lasting memories, even if you decide to beat a retreat back to the comforts of home. –J.B. Set Sail If you’re a certified sailor but hesitant about taking an international adventure, veteran outfitter Sunsail offers weeklong flotilla trips to destinations including Italy and the British Virgin Islands. You’ll captain your own boat, but you’ll have backup from a professional crew that offers daily chart briefings. Never hoisted a jib? Sunsail’s starter courses, available for cruises along Croatia’s Dalmatian Coast or…

Diana Graber’s eldest daughter was in eighth grade in 2010 when her school had its first cyberbullying incident. It was nothing major—just some kids being mean to each other on Facebook. But to Graber, who had recently finished a master’s degree in media psychology and social change, it was a missed opportunity for a teachable moment. So she started visiting her younger daughter’s sixth-grade class to talk about digital citizenship. Two things became clear to her. First, middle schoolers are woefully unprepared for the addictive nature of smartphones and the complex ethics of social media. Second, with guidance, kids can grow into healthy users of devices and have a positive influence on virtual communities. Intervention is desperately needed. Surveys show that teens, whose developing brains make them more susceptible to…

ONE DAY A FEW YEARS AGO, Lisa Donahue’s then six-year-old son was lying next to the family’s retriever, Jack. The boy was stroking the dog’s fur. He said, matter-of-factly, “Mommy, I don’t have a heart anymore.” His startled mother asked him what he meant. He answered, “My heart is in Jack.” This permeability of the heart (or soul or spirit or neurological connection—whatever we wish to call it) occurs naturally when we’re very young. Some people continue to experience it throughout life, though they may lack the words to describe it. They experience it with their companion animals and, if they have a chance, with wild animals. This essential connection with other creatures can be a fragile thing. It needs nourishment to survive. In recent months, a wave of alarming…

It would take months to travel the entire Route of Parks. Bite off a two-week stretch by driving to any of the seven accessible parks along the Carretera Austral. Or fly farther south to Punta Arenas to trek in Torres del Paine or kayak Bernardo O’Higgins. —S.P. WHEN TO GO: The weather is unpredictable in Patagonia. September through February is the spring-summer high season. There’s more snow in the fall and winter months (March through August), but the region is far less crowded then. GETTING THERE: Latam offers daily flights from Santiago to Puerto Montt, Punta Arenas, and Balmaceda—the three airports with the best access to points along the Route of Parks. Aerovias DAP offers flights to Tierra del Fuego’s Puerto Williams. GETTING AROUND: Some of the major car-rental companies…

“What is that, 16 pairs of cycling bibs?” This is the question Mac Bishop asks as we survey the morass of spandex spread across my bed. “Something like that,” I say sheepishly. “And I think there are a few pairs in the laundry.” It’s a weirdly humbling experience to have another man, a Birkenstock-clad, practicing minimalist from Portland, Oregon—one you have just met (and who, at 29, is some twenty years younger)—sift through your clothes. It’s like sitting naked with a stranger in a metaphysical Turkish bath of the soul. I suddenly find myself explaining, too vehemently, why my closet is the way it is. That blue shirt from Uniqlo? I liked it so much I bought five. That Breton-striped pullover with the weird sleeves? I thought, you know, if…

Nail-Biting Tales If nothing else, Outside readers love adventure. Our June issue featured accounts of close calls in the great outdoors. Whether it was writer Earl Swift’s account of a crab boat’s run-in with disaster on the Chesapeake Bay (“The Sea Is Come Up”) or contributing editor Kyle Dickman’s near death encounter with a rattlesnake (“Rattled”), you told us to keep bringing the wild stories. I’m not sure I should have read “Rattled.” On vacations I mostly hike solo, sometimes trekking 60 or more miles through the backcountry and down into canyons. I’ve often wondered what would happen if I were struck by a rattlesnake. Now I know—in detail. I’d probably die. One thing I always do is hike in jeans, no matter how hot it is. But Kevlar shin guards…

KAYAKING 101 Instructor: Otter Bar Lodge Kayak School Tuition: $2,390 There may be no better place to learn how to whitewater kayak than this 37-year-old institution, hemmed in by 8,000-foot peaks on the shores of California’s remote Salmon River. Newbies taking the weeklong Beginner Kayaking class will learn to roll on the property’s ponds before progressing to the Class II–IV Salmon or the mellower Klamath River. With one instructor for every three paddlers, you’ll be on the water several hours a day (interrupted only by sushi lunches), learning strokes, river safety, and how to move downriver with the control of a water spider, as founder Peter Sturges says. By week’s end, attentive students should be able to handle themselves in Class III rapids. WILDERNESS SURVIVAL 101 Instructor: Boulder Outdoor Survival…

WORDS MATTER, and they especially matter when you’re writing about Bethany Hamilton. The world knows the story of how a marauding tiger shark changed the course of Hamilton’s life in 2003, taking her left arm while she was surfing on Kauai’s north shore. She was 13 years old, a wildly talented grommette with her eye on a professional surfing career. Descriptions of that encounter invariably use words like victim and tragedy, but in the aftermath, Hamilton has served notice that neither label applies. Even as the media referred to her as “shark-bite girl” and tried to categorize her as a disabled athlete, Hamilton, now 28, has never thought of herself in those terms. “At that time in my life, being so young and resilient, and a charger at whatever came…

THERE’S SOMETHING to be said for hanging your line off the back of a motorboat, waiting for a monster to bite, then wrestling it aboard and whacking it into submission with an old table leg. But on balance, I prefer a more sporting arrangement: angler versus fish from the cockpit of a small human-powered craft. The 38-inch-wide Hobie Mirage Pro Angler 14 affords stability when you stand to cast, and at 13 feet 8 inches long and 120 pounds, it stows easily in the garage. Hobie’s lauded MirageDrive—two foot pedals that spin flippers under the hull—is far more responsive than a propeller, allowing you to maneuver and properly fish an eddy while keeping your hands free to cast or reach for your gaff. Throw in an extremely comfy removable seat…

Heart: Chris Minson has shown that eight weeks of hot-tubbing produces “really profound changes” in markers of cardiovascular health like blood pressure and artery stiffness, perhaps due to increased blood flow when you’re hot. Brain: Recent data from a multidecade study of 2,300 Finnish men found that those who hit the sauna four or more times a week were only a third as likely to develop dementia or Alzheimer’s compared with those who took just one sauna a week. Muscle: In a 2017 study from Qatar, participants showed a 17 percent boost in muscle strength after 11 days of sitting in a heat chamber at roughly 120 degrees for an hour at a time. The technique might be particularly relevant for injured athletes or those recovering from surgery as a…

CHAGA, reishi, cordyceps, and lion’s mane mushrooms have been staples in Eastern medicine for hundreds of years. Now they’re going mainstream, popping up in unexpected places like cold-brew coffee and energy bars. Early research suggests that these four mushrooms may be especially beneficial for performance. A recent study in the Journal of Dietary Supplements found that cordyceps could improve endurance, while other data has shown that reishi may help reduce fatigue and prevent the onset of overtraining symptoms. Mushrooms of all kinds contain high amounts of the antioxidants ergothioneine and glutathione, both of which protect hemoglobin from damage and reduce inflammation. The latest crop of mushroom-based products feature other flavorful ingredients, so you can get a boost without the earthy taste. Rebbl Reishi Cold-Brew This drink blends coffee, coconut milk,…

In March, Utah’s governor signed legislation specifying that caretakers cannot be charged with neglect for allowing unaccompanied children to do things like play in local parks or bike to the corner store. The bill, a reaction to cases in which parents were referred to child-welfare agencies for letting their school-age kids roam their neighborhoods, was the first of its kind in the U.S. (New York and Texas are contemplating similar laws.) Though a victory for the so-called free-range-parenting movement, government action alone won’t reverse a cultural shift that has American youth spending so much of their leisure time indoors. “You can’t just snap your fingers and say, Do what I did when I was a kid,” says Mike Lanza, a Silicon Valley father of three and the author of Playborhood:…

When photographer Jesse Burke first started snapping pictures of his five-year-old daughter Clover Lee, he often lost his patience. “I realized very quickly that she wasn’t going to listen to me, and I found it incredibly frustrating,” he says. One day, while taking photos of her on the shore of Campobello Island, in New Brunswick, he grew so angry that he took the rope she was playing with and threw it away. But later when he reviewed the images, he realized that the best ones were of her playing the way she wanted to, not his preconceived compositions. “It was an epiphany,” he says. “The key is to relinquish some control to her.” He went from being his daughter’s stubborn director to being her collaborator. Over the next five years,…

CASEY BROWN IS STANDING ON A STEEP DESERT SLOPE in southwestern Utah, just outside Zion National Park, staring down at a man-made, 20-foot-high dirt jump that she intends to hit on her mountain bike. Brown, a New Zealand native who now lives in Revelstoke, British Columbia, will descend 200 yards at around 40 miles per hour, soar some 50 feet through the air, and then—she hopes—safely land on a modestly pitched runout. Brown has launched from hundreds of similar jumps, often on her way to victories at Crankworx competitions, where riders are judged on how well they can make their bikes perform like stunt planes. But this one is making her nervous. The wind is gusting hard enough to knock an airborne rider off-kilter. If that happens, Brown will probably slam…

WHEN I BUY a gadget, I expect it to work as advertised. This sets me up for a lot of disappointment. Inaccurate GPS trackers, counterintuitive interfaces, and—most frustrating of all—batteries that die well before they’re supposed to leave me forlorn. Thus, it was with much trepidation that I decided to try the Lunar smartwatch. The solar-powered activity monitor launched on Kickstarter last September with a simple promise: never worry about battery life again. But could a small startup crack the all-day-use problems that still plague giants like Apple and Samsung? In bright, sunshiny New Mexico, where I live, the answer is yes. The watch needs only an hour of daily light exposure to go on working forever—and the company says artificial indoor light works just as well as the sun.…

A. Icebreaker 200 Zone One Sheep onesie $220 Steeze aside, one-piece base layers are ideal for frigid missions. Icebreaker’s features mesh panels for breathability and a long zipper for fuss-free bathroom trips. B. Smartwool Merino 150 Base Layer tank top $65 This buttery-soft piece is form-fitting enough to layer but loose enough to wear alone. Hike in it, throw a fleece over it, fall asleep in it. C. Fabletics Tess Warp Knit bra $35 The full-coverage design is forget-you’re-wearing-it comfortable, courtesy of a wide chest band that doesn’t dig in. D. Ridge Merino Inversion Midweight leggings $55 When the temperature drops, these full-length bottoms are the ticket. The exposed-elastic waistband minimizes bulk. E. ExOfficio Give-N-Go Sport Mesh Hipkini underwear $24 The Hipkinis offer full coverage in the back without the…

OUR CHILDREN are in crisis. Let’s start there. Sure, adults have, since roughly forever, bemoaned “kids these days” as spoiled and incapable. Earlier this decade, the trendy parenting argument was that by giving our offspring too many things and not enough responsibility, we were creating a generation of entitled wimps. That’s still the prevailing wisdom, but even as we try to land our parental helicopters, there’s growing awareness that we face a far more ominous challenge. Today, America’s kids are caught up in one of the largest mass migrations in human history: the movement indoors. Only recently have we begun to spend our lives penned in by walls, staring at screens. Increasingly we don’t touch, look at, or even speak to each other, connecting instead through apps. When we do…

Children are much more likely to enjoy outdoor activities—and stick with them—if they start out at the right moment in their physical and cognitive development. Kids also do best when they’re allowed to explore, instead of being cajoled into ever more challenging situations. “Too many parents approach sports with a fixed mindset, saying, We’ve got to get to the end of this trail,’” says Paul Dreyer, CEO of Avid4 Adventure, which instructs kids ages three and up at camps in Colorado and California. “You’ll have a lot more success if you say, ‘Let’s go get better at the two skills you learned last week.’ ” Here, he offers guidelines for introducing kids to four common sports, but his overarching advice to focus on fun and go slow applies to all manner…

CADEN FUCHS can’t tell me what he did in the sweat lodge. “It’s secret,” says the 14-year-old. “But,” he offers, “it’s a little bit like I went in a boy and came out a man.” A statement like that might freak some parents out, but Caden’s folks rolled with it. They knew he was out there with a tight group of friends and a few trusted adults in a Northern California outdoor program called Vilda. The mysterious sweat lodge was part of a yearlong coming-of-age curriculum that also included backpacking, leadership skills, a 24-hour solo fast, and an emotional ceremony with all the parents. Caden’s belief that something profound about him had changed was very much on target. In many ways, he was intentionally and thoughtfully leaving behind parts of…