Innehållsförteckning för December 2021 från Outside

This summer, a series of unprecedented megafires burned through California’s forests. Well, unprecedented isn’t entirely accurate; the world watched the state go up in flames in the summer of 2020, too. As I write this, California has already withstood 11 named wildfires in 2021, including the Dixie Fire, the Monument Fire, and the Calor Fire—enough to make us numb to the horrific imagery and steady, unfathomable cataloging of acres burned. On October 4, however, my longtime friend and former Outside colleague Grayson Schaffer posted a series of photos on Instagram from Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks that still managed to take my breath away. Schaffer was there, along with Outside contributing editor Kyle Dickman, to film the Arrowhead Hotshots, one of the crews tasked with trying to save some…

In the early months of the pandemic, Americans took up bird-watching like depraved raptors. It is a surprisingly delightful passion that also happens to pair well with skiing. Sign up for Alta’s Birding on Skis tour and you’ll head out on a half-day adventure into Utah’s Little Cottonwood Canyon to look for resident populations of rosy finches, mountain chickadees, and, if you’re lucky, perhaps a pair of the mating golden eagles that frequent the area below 10,920-foot Devil’s Castle. Tours start with a 9 A.M. ride up Alta’s Collins Lift over epic black-diamond terrain and end at noon at the Albion base area. A conservation ecologist from Salt Lake’s Tracy Aviary will be along to help distinguish nuthatches from creepers. Because you’ll be contributing to a bird survey of the…

Most destination ski resorts need a robust real estate scene and high occupancy rates to help fund all the improvements that keep us coming back. This winter brings a slew of new places to snooze at some of the country’s most iconic resorts. Aspen Snowmass will see the opening of Viewline, a mid-mountain luxury complex that includes an Ayurvedic spa, 254 rooms, and 20 suites featuring sheepskin throws and awesome ski-in, ski-out access (from $329). Meanwhile, in Park City, Utah, the Pendry (from $1,500) opens in Canyons Village with 152 rooms and the city’s only rooftop pool. The project making the biggest splash is one of the largest of its kind ever to land in Montana: the Montage at Big Sky (from $1,395). Clocking in at a whopping half-million square…

For all the fresh air, exercise, and soul resetting that sliding down snow-covered mountains offers, resort skiing can be pretty rough on Mother Nature. So it’s worth mentioning that Alterra, Boyne, Powdr, and Vail—some of the biggest resort conglomerates in the game—banded together over the summer to fight climate change by signing an agreement aimed at reducing impact while lobbying for policy changes that make renewable energy the norm in the resort industry. This winter, Park City will take a big step toward fulfilling that goal by tapping into the Elektron Solar Project, an 80-megawatt solar farm southwest of Salt Lake City that will provide every last drop of electricity to the resort by 2023. —T.N.…

IF ALL YOU know is store-bought stock, wait until you discover how versatile and delicious the homemade variety can be. It’s also a smart way to reduce food waste: chicken carcasses, beef bones, carrot tops, potato skins, and herb stems are fair game. Just be sure to store them in the freezer until it’s cooking time. Jackie Dikos, a registered dietitian and the author of Finish Line Fueling, loves chicken and beef stock for their amino-acid profiles. Glutamine supports the body when it’s stressed and promotes recovery, while glycine aids digestion. Vegetable broth, meanwhile, is rich in minerals. Magnesium helps with energy production and is a known stress reducer, while zinc and copper support the immune system. Dikos simmers her stock in a slow cooker overnight or starts it first…

Growing up in Bellevue, Ohio, just south of Lake Erie, Brian Kaiser heard stories about locals who went ice sailing, gliding their boats across the frozen Great Lakes during winter’s most frigid months. In January he got a chance to learn more about this obscure sport at the North American championship, in which DN iceboats—a class of vessels conceived in the U.S. that feature a minimal hull and a perpendicular crosspiece with attached skates, or “runners”—raced across Black Lake, in Michigan. He donned crampons to tread the eight-inch-thick ice and taped a hand warmer to his camera after it began to freeze amid the zero-degree conditions. “This sport is a labor of love,” Kaiser says. “The weather is incredibly fickle, and some have to travel hundreds of miles in the…

Ski resorts spend years—decades even—building out their terrain. The wait is generally worth it, with new glades, bowls, and buttery runs to christen. This season in Colorado, Telluride is getting 40 new acres of beginner and intermediate terrain, including the Grouse Glades, while Beaver Creek will open 250 acres of easy skiing, with two quads and 17 new trails in the bowlish McCoy Park. Last February, Idaho’s Sun Valley pulled the curtain back on 380 acres, but due to COVID-19 restrictions, many weren’t able to ski it. This is your year. The biggest expansion is at Bluebird Backcountry, located near Steamboat Springs, Coloado, and the only no-lift, all-backcountry ski area in the U.S. It will open 12 new runs, for a total of 25. This includes four gullies that are…

The mountain-town housing shortage intensified after a pandemic-fueled real estate boom drove out longtime residents and decimated the local workforce. Summer visitors to these locales report long waits and fewer services due to staffing shortages. Where does that leave us this ski season? Resorts planned ahead. Starting this winter, Aspen, Solitude, Sugarbush, Vail, and others will pay non-tipped employees at least $15 an hour, more than twice the federal minimum wage. Mount Bohemia, in Michigan, will trump them all by paying $20 an hour. But finding an affordable place to live is as tricky as ever, especially if you want to settle down. Enter the Big Sky Community Housing Trust, a newly formed nonprofit that makes the Montana haven of 3,000 full-time residents and some 4,000 vacation homes one of…

IN THE FALL of 2016, Michael and Shari Cantor were on a group cycling trip in Europe, riding along the Danube, when they heard about a $2-a-month pill that could potentially slow down the aging process. They might have dismissed those fountain-of-youth claims if it wasn’t for who was making them, fellow cyclist Nir Barzilai, an MD and the director of the Institute for Aging Research at New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine. As the group pedaled past castles, brewhouses, and Riesling vines, the Cantors chatted with Barzilai about metformin—an inexpensive drug commonly prescribed for diabetes—and his research on its ability to ward off a range of diseases associated with old age. The conversation piqued the couple’s curiosity enough that they eventually sought out prescriptions for themselves. Shari, who…

SEARCHING for the next great fitness tool? Look no further than your feet. Adding a stair-case to your exercise routine can build muscle and decrease your risk of injury, says Chris Lee, a strength coach and the owner of Kinesis Integrated in Boulder, Colorado. Compared with on-the-ground body-weight workouts, stairs amp up the difficulty (thanks, gravity) and better mimic the undulating terrain you encounter outdoors. In turn, you become a more dynamic, resilient athlete. Lee developed the following workout expressly for Outside. Perform each exercise as instructed, then rest 30 to 45 seconds before moving on to the next. After you’ve completed all five, rest for two minutes, then repeat the circuit. Do this two or three times a week for noticeable results. 1. COPENHAGEN PLANK How: Get into a…

BACK WHEN she was a young girl growing up on Oahu, Carissa Moore stood before the family video camera and announced her desire to become a pro surfer, so she could chase amazing waves around the world with her friends. You could be excused for thinking that such pronouncements were merely the stuff of childhood fantasy. You would be wrong. In the ensuing years, Moore racked up nearly every junior surfing title that mattered, until at 17 she had nothing left to do but become the pro she’d long dreamed of being. In 2010, she joined the World Championship Tour, won two out of eight events, and took Rookie of the Year. The following season, at the age of 18, she became the youngest surfer, male or female, ever to…

In many ways, Jim Jaffee and Ari Marsh have a lot in common. Both are lifelong surfers in their fifties who have traveled the world chasing waves off four continents. Both are environmentalists. And both live near the beach in north San Diego County, a pillar of American surf culture—Jaffee in Solana Beach, Marsh in Encinitas. But when they met for the first time, in July 2018, on the 85-foot bluff overlooking Beacon’s Beach in Encinitas, what stood out were their differences. The scene that evening was classic Beacon’s. With the sun low over the Pacific, surfers schlepped their boards up and down the long switchback trail connecting the clifftop parking lot with the beach below. From the bluff’s edge, parents chatted over post-surf beers, kids bounced around in wetsuits,…

YOUR VERY OWN BACKCOUNTRY PLAYGROUND Europe has always had something America doesn’t: an Alpine ski route connecting a network of full-service, premium lodges. That’s about to change, as San Juan Mountain Guides in Ouray, Colorado, launches the ultimate hut-to-hut tour in a stunning setting. We sent Devon O’Neil to check it out. PERCHED ON SKIS at the top of Bullion King Basin, I admired a wide barrel of spring corn glistening below me. I’d been waiting for this moment. It was my reward for suffering through a five-hour traverse between two backcountry cabins in southwest Colorado’s San Juan Mountains. We started that morning at the OPUS Hut near Ophir Pass, just west of Silverton, which we’d skinned up to the previous afternoon. Now we prepared to descend to Highway 550…

This winter will see the unveiling of arguably the most technologically advanced butt hauler on this side of the Atlantic. Introducing the Kancamagus 8, a.k.a. Kanc 8, at New Hampshire’s Loon Mountain Resort, the first eight-pack in the East and one of only a few such behemoths in the country. This particular beast features heated ergonomic seats that look like something out of a SpaceX rocket, a locking safety bar, individual footrests, and, of course, a tinted bubble to stave off that icy New England wind. The extra-wide chairs can be spun up to 12.5 miles per hour—making the Kanc 8 the fastest lift of its size in the U.S.—and can haul 3,500 skiers per hour to a mid-mountain station in 4.5-minute increments, which is barely enough time to cool…

There’s so much in Colorado and Utah to be excited about this winter, with new lifts at Breckenridge, Keystone, and Snowbasin—to name a few—and a cat-skiing operation opening in Loveland Ski Area’s Dry Gulch. But if you have the time and means for only one trip, make it count by going to Taos Ski Valley. The New Mexico resort, perhaps the least corporate of the major resorts in the Rockies, averages 300 inches of snow per year and has a smattering of new offerings this season. For starters, you can sign up for an exclusive three-day learning session with Olympian Deb Armstrong (gold, giant slalom, Sarajevo ’84), who will personally coach you out of your poor angulation or whatever it is that ails you. She’s in high demand, though, so…

I’M BIKING AS FAST as I can down a mile-long ribbon of singletrack in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains, navigating roots, lips, a miniature rock garden, and an abundance of turns—everything from big, swooping corners and twisty hairpins to fall-away berms. My breathing is heavy as I try to maintain my pace. When I arrive at the bottom, I check my time: a solid three minutes and 13 seconds, for an average speed of 17.8 miles per hour. But I want to go faster. And in a week or so, I absolutely expect to. The day before, I downloaded Givego, an app that lets duffers like me get personalized tips and advice from world-class athletes and coaches. Users upload a 20-second video of themselves doing their activity of choice, then choose an…

Bose Noise Cancelling 700 headphones $379 One ear cup acts as a touch pad on these Bluetooth headphones: swipe up or down to adjust volume, and double-tap to play and pause. You can also control them via voice. The noise cancellation mutes hubbub, and they’re comfortable enough for all-day wear. Madre Espadin mezcal $40 This mezcal is made by hand in Oaxaca, Mexico, with the same techniques that have been used for generations. The result is an immense herbal flavor and just-right smokiness for sipping. WELLNESS CHECK A. Vuori Mindset bra and Rib Studio leggings $54 and $84 Vuori’s ultrasoft polyester-elastane fabric makes this set comfortable for any intensity of movement. Four-way stretch in the leggings permits a wide range of motion, and the super-high-rise, ribbed waist keeps everything tucked…

WHEN I FLEW TO ALASKA IN JULY FOR AN ALL-WOMEN BACKPACKING TRIP, I wasn’t feeling my most confident, centered, or fit. I wasn’t entirely sure I still liked hiking. Or going places, or doing things, or meeting people. Sixteen months of a global pandemic can do that to you. But I had gotten on the plane, and now I’d either reconnect with my dormant adventurous self or have a terrible time trying. I arrived in Anchorage early in the morning on the Fourth of July, a day before my group and I would be shuttled up to Talkeetna by van and then deposited in the backcountry by floatplane. That night I had dinner at a downtown brewpub. All I wanted was to eat some halibut at the bar and read…