Innehållsförteckning för January/February 2022 från Outside

Feel the Burnt Whenever I meet new people, and, inevitably, they ask me what I do for a living, answering that I am the editor in chief at Outside magazine elicits a near universal response: “Wow, that must be an amazing job!” And it is, but not because I’m gorging on an endless buffet of plum assignments in the field—which is what most of these folks seem to imagine. I send writers to exotic locales way more than I travel myself. And I’m OK with that. I’m grateful to have a job that constantly taps into my creative passions. But the reality is that working as an editor at Outside involves a lot of time spent indoors. Put another way, I wrestle with the same work-life-balance issues that most American…

It’s never a good sign when a coworker handpicks you for an assignment about achieving a shorter workday, adding: “It’s because you’re the most stressed-out person I know.” But there was some truth to the superlative, and I knew I wasn’t alone. I jumped at the chance to address a problem that affects many of us. The inspiration: a study by time-management expert Laura Vanderkam showing that people who clocked a traditional workday (about 8.6 hours) felt less productive and more time crunched than those who worked shorter days. The sweet spot, apparently: 7.6 hours. Setting boundaries with work has always been a challenge for me. I cut lunch breaks short, stay at my desk past six, bring work stress home and even take it to the trails. For years,…

Cami Árboles prefers to talk about movement rather than exercise. Whether it’s pole dancing or yoga, movement is a necessary conduit for self-expression, a natural way to create and release energy. The 23-year-old founded the online community Mind Body Spirit Collective in 2020 to share this philosophy. “Movement should be a means unto itself,” she says, “instead of to a physical end.” Árboles came onto the internet wellness scene in the spring of 2020, when the pandemic brought her final semester at Yale to an abrupt end and disrupted her after-college plan to move to New York City. She was stuck at home in Los Angeles, uncertain about what the future held. So she turned to yoga and pole dancing. She installed a pole in her aunt’s living room and…

The team at Outside is made up of people who usually rise to the challenge, whatever it is. We are ultrarunners, backcountry skiers, parents to neurotic dogs. So a simple test—take a lunch break, every day, for two weeks—didn’t seem like all that much to ask. We wanted to explore rest’s relationship with productivity and encourage leaning a little further into the life side of work-life balance. Alas. Lunch breaks are supposed to be good for productivity. A 2011 study in the journal Cognition found that brief diversions from tasks are revitalizing and impart better focus when we get back to work. And a 2019 survey of 1,600 North American workers found that employees feel more productive and satisfied with their job when they take lunch breaks. When I followed…

SIGNAL BOOSTER At campsites with cell service, I used my SureCall Fusion2Go Max ($500) to boost my bars and turn my phone into a hotspot, often resulting in faster Wi-Fi than at libraries and coffee shops. STANDING DESK Working from bed or while hunched over a laptop is terrible for your back. Stand Steady’s X-Elite Essential Standing Desk Converter ($200) turned my kitchen counter into an adjustable platform—a lifesaver. E-READER Though I packed plenty of paper books, it was my Kindle Paperwhite ($140) that I used most on the road. A must for bookish vanlifers short on space. —M.L.…

A funny thing about China’s Xiaohaituo Mountain, where Olympic ski racing will take place in February: until recently, it was just a mountain, not a ski resort. Few professional racers had ever been there. Xiaohaituo sits some 60 miles from Beijing and tops out at a relatively modest 7,215 feet of elevation. The men’s downhill will cover 3,000 feet of vertical drop. And while it’s not unusual for Olympic hosts to create new facilities for the Games, including built-from-scratch ski areas, the real challenge in Xiaohaituo is meteorological: It doesn’t snow much there. As few as two inches per season. And there’s very little water nearby to make snow with. To address these challenges, several years ago engineers and professional snowmakers designed a system that pipes water in from area…

Photographer Kari Medig knows snow. His hometown of Nelson, British Columbia, gets more than 450 inches of the white stuff every year. So Lesotho, a small highland country nestled entirely within the borders of South Africa (average annual snowfall: about four inches), seemed an unlikely destination for a ski trip. With climate change making for drier winters in the region, the only flurries Medig expected to see were those coming from the snowmaking equipment at Afriski, a six-run resort in the Maluti Mountains. Initially intending to capture the contrast of a single strip of white in an otherwise arid landscape, Medig was forced to recalibrate when he woke up the day after arriving in August of last year to the biggest powder dump the area had seen since 2016. “I…

a. Adsum Classic Logo sweatshirt $165 Your athleisure drawer would be understocked without a durable cotton sweatshirt. This heavy crew is beautifully simple, and the brushed-cotton interior made it cozy enough to keep on for an entire three-day weekend. (S–XL) b. Fjällräven Abisko tights $175 These don’t look out of place in any hip coffee shop, but they’re decidedly high-tech. A polyamide blend, plus reinforcements in the knees and rear, make the Abisko the only casual wear testers will be using for ski mountaineering come spring. (Women’s XXS–XXL, men’s XS–XXXL) c. Rabbit Men’s EZ Tee shirt $45 The EZ Tee was the plushest and highest-performing shirt we tested, thanks to its ridiculously supple and stretchy polyester-spandex fabric. Although it looks like a casual cotton tee, it kicked butt on runs…

BEFORE I BECAME a journalist, one of the best jobs I had was waiting tables at a barbecue restaurant atop a little bump on Snowmass Mountain called Sam’s Knob. My daily commute involved riding a high-speed chairlift, and I was guaranteed an hour and 15 minutes of snowboarding every morning before my shift. Tips were good, so I could afford to work four days a week, thus netting myself another three days to snowboard. Sam’s was where I learned that fresh snow made a sound when you were surfing through it: shhhh, softer than a whisper. The way I felt about that job was the polar opposite of how I’d felt about the job I left not long before it, the one I worked right out of college, as a…

Like so many Americans, Casey Johnston was indoctrinated online—as a lifter, that is. In 2014, after years of viewing exercise as “necessary torture for staying ‘small enough,’” Johnston ran across a viral Reddit post documenting a woman’s six-month weight-lifting journey. She was impressed by her muscle mass, sure, but more so by her lifestyle: “She was working out way less than I was, and eating way more,” Johnston recalls. Taken with this approach to building muscle, she hit the gym and got hooked. Johnston, 34, isn’t a doctor, dietitian, or nutritionist. She’s just a writer who likes to get jacked. Her health-advice column, Ask a Swole Woman, which has bopped around the internet for five years—running at various times on The Hairpin, Self, and Vice—now exists on Substack as She’s…

“We’re in this mentality of everyone eats too much,” says Shana Minei Spence. “But what I’m noticing the more I counsel people is that, in general, people don’t eat enough.” OK, we’re listening. Spence, 37, is an anti-diet-culture dietitian. Based in Brooklyn, she works for the New York City Department of Health and has a side gig helping clients, but she’s also big on Instagram (@thenutritiontea), where she has accumulated more than 175,000 followers over the past two years and consistently breaks down misconceptions about dieting, food science, and wellness. That includes tackling euphemisms for diet like clean eating (“What does that even mean? Washing potatoes?”) and detoxing (“You know you have organs for that, right?”), and rejecting claims that ethnic cuisines such as Chinese, Indian, and Mexican are unhealthy.…

Well for Culture began in 2013 as an online project by Chelsey Luger and Thosh Collins, two fitness enthusiasts who were eager to spread information about nutrition, wellness practices, and Indigenous values. Sharing workout tips, recipes, and cultural knowledge on social media channels eventually morphed into a new career for them as wellness educators and consultants. Luger and Collins, 34 and 39, respectively, now rewrite modern narratives regarding Native health while addressing complex histories and ongoing disparities. “The media portrays Indigenous people through the lens of poverty porn and down-troddenness, but we have a culture that proves our strength and resilience,” says Luger, who is Lakota and Anishinaabe, enrolled in the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. “We have a long history of living active and balanced lifestyles, and a symbiotic…

THE DIVE CABO PULMO NATIONAL MARINE PARK In the 1990s, Cabo Pulmo, a three-by-nine-mile reef off Baja California’s East Cape, was so damaged by overfishing that the local community petitioned the federal government to protect it. In 1995, Cabo Pulmo National Marine Park was established, relying on a patrol of dedicated locals to enforce the strict no-take fishing policy. This partnership marked the beginning of the most successful reef regeneration project in the world. By 1999, the fish biomass on the reef had increased by 463 percent, and every formerly endangered species, like the gulf grouper, had rebounded. Today the reef is a stunning spectacle of hard corals and sea fans. The park’s public-use program requires anyone working there to pass a test and follow best practices. The result is…

1. With the exception of water usage, Olympic organizers have taken a couple of key steps to minimize the Games’ environmental footprint. All of the venues will run on electricity generated by renewable energy. And at least five large structures—including the national stadium—will be repurposed from the Summer Games in 2008, the last time the Olympics were held in Beijing. 2. Eileen Gu, a freestyle skier who grew up training in Lake Tahoe but who competes for China, could be the breakout star of the 2022 Games. Gu, 18, has solid medal chances in women’s halfpipe, slopestyle, and big-air contests. 3. Of the seven events on the Olympic lineup for the first time in 2022, men’s and women’s big-air skiing seem most likely to captivate viewers. (The others are women’s…

IF YOU FOLLOW climbing, you’re aware of the tragedy of Alex Lowe. The 40-year-old Montana climber was a star of his generation, alternately referred to as a mutant and “the secret weapon” by his climbing partners and those up on his résumé. And then, just like that, in October 1999, he died in an avalanche on the south face of 26,335-foot Shishapangma, along with cameraman David Bridges. Lowe’s death shook the climbing world and made national news. He left behind a wife, Jennifer, and three young boys—Max, 10, Sam, 7, and Isaac, 3—in Bozeman. Alpinism is brutally efficient at converting sturdy, tight-knit families into grieving widows and traumatized children, but what happened next raised the story to the level of myth. Within a year, Conrad Anker—Lowe’s feral and boisterous climbing…

a. Arc’teryx Sentinel AR jacket $675 A bomber shell with a subtle, warm flannel backing, the Sentinel AR is an ideal all-rounder. It’s light enough to cram into a pack and cozy enough for lift rides. Bonus points for generous pockets you can access with a waist belt on. (XS–XL) b. Eddie Bauer Guide gloves $149 These gloves have been a tester favorite for four winters running. They keep hands warm in cold, stormy weather but aren’t too heavy during any uphill push. Goatskin leather at the palms and fingers adds durability. c. Ortovox Diract Voice avalanche transceiver $380 Ortovox simplified the search process with optional voice commands. Marking functions accommodate up to four buried devices at once, and three antennae offer a 50-meter search-strip width. d. BCA Stealth 300…

There’s a steam room tucked away in the back corner of the men’s bathroom at Outside’s offices, a product of a vanished time when the magazine had a fully equipped gym. The latter perk is long gone (it’s a photo studio now), and the tiled enclosure, while still functional, has fallen into disuse. “We used to have an IT guy who used it, but that was years ago,” a colleague told me. “He’d walk down the hall in his robe at midday like he was at a spa.” I’d always been intrigued by this abandoned luxury. Then, on a gloomy day last winter, I did some research about how to cure my seasonal blues. I was burned out at work, navigating relationship troubles, and weathering the lonely pandemic. I learned…

Organized is not a word I would use to describe myself. Do I get my work done? Yes. Is it pretty getting there? That depends on how closely you look. I’m good at meeting deadlines, but as I’ve become a manager with broad-ranging duties, I’ve realized that my organizational game needs to level up. I still use a prioritized to-do list, which I’m often overwhelmed by; on an average day, I have 15 to 20 things on that sheet. If I’m lucky, I’ll get to half of them—while adding five to ten more. This does not lead to a solid sense of accomplishment. So when I was asked to map out an entire workweek in Google Calendar for this package, I was actually thrilled. While clinical studies on the subject…

FOR STARTERS, THERE’S THE FOOT-LONG, PLATINUM-BLOND BRAID THAT TRAILS IN THE AIR BEHIND JESSIE DIGGINS, SMACKING AGAINST HER BROAD, CHISELED LATS AS SHE ROCKETS DOWN THE ROAD. IT’S AS IF SHE’S PRODUCING MORE ENERGY THAN HER SKIS CAN USE, AND THE EXCESS IS COMING OUT THE TOP OF HER HEAD. Then there’s the noise. As Diggins begins her descent toward where I’m standing at the side of the road, a grunt is barely audible above the rhythmic clacking of carbide pole tips against pavement. It’s 80 degrees and sunny on a late-June Monday in Peru, Vermont. Which means that Diggins and ten of her teammates from the Stratton Mountain School T2 club team are on roller skis—roughly three-foot-long cross-country boards with wheels at either end. At best a mere approximation…

Too early on a Saturday, high in the hills of Appalachia, Ben Kable and I creep along a mountain road in his SUV, eyeing the passing evergreens like burglars casing a neighborhood. Kable eases to a stop beside a stand of stubby conifers, their roots gripping the roadside gravel like mossy fingers. “This looks like a good spot,” he says. “Let’s take a quick peek.” We stop the car, and Kable opens the back to free his Rottweiler, Daisy. He makes a clicking sound with his mouth. “Go get ’em, Daisy.” She charges into the trees, giving the base of each trunk a cursory sniff. Kable keeps one eye on his dog while he pulls a pH meter from a pouch, sinks the long metal stick into the ground, and…