Innehållsförteckning för July/August 2022 från Outside

We’ve Been Doing It Wrong One of the hoariest clichés in the outdoor universe inspired our cover story this month: Food tastes better outside. I am not ashamed. When an expression crosses the line from clever to hackneyed, it’s usually because it’s absolutely true. Food does taste better outside, even if there’s not a single scientific paper to back it up. I’ve been fortunate enough to dine in some incredible restaurants during my adult life, but ask me to recall my most memorable meals and the ones I enjoyed in nature spring to mind first. Ramen noodles mixed with peanut butter eaten from a dirty bowl on an outcrop in Washington’s Goat Rocks Wilderness. Chili mac and cheese shared with my two eldest kids at the base of New Mexico’s…

THAT MONOLOGUE running inside your head—you know, the one that can unfurl at a rate exceeding several thousand words per minute—has been having a moment of late. It’s the topic of numerous sports-psychology studies and the star of the 2021 bestseller Chatter, by University of Michigan psychologist Ethan Kross. Taking control of one’s inner voice has transitioned from pat self-help bromide to battle-tested, evidence-based performance hack. That’s what we’ve been led to believe, anyway. In practice, once you get past the basic claim that the words inside your head matter, evidence that they can be turned to your advantage gets pretty thin on the ground. What exactly should you say to yourself? How often? And in what circumstances? These are the sorts of practical questions researchers are aiming to tackle.…

Backpacks help me stay prepared for anything. By Annastasia Sewell IN THE SUMMER of 1995, my fam-ily headed to Wyoming’s Medicine Bow Peak for a quick 30-minute hike. Between all of us, we carried two granola bars in our pockets and three bottles of water in our hands. After seven hours, two boulder fields, and a lightning storm, I found myself limping across the vast wilderness, vowing never to leave the house without a fully stocked daypack again. I’d learned my lesson: any adventure can go awry. And that’s exactly why I carry a backpack instead of a hip pack. Even a daypack has enough space to hold the absolute essentials (and more), while a hip pack is most lacking in precisely this area. My ten-liter Osprey Raven ($140) is…

THE FIRST PIECE OF VOLLEBAK CLOTHING I EVER HELD IN MY HANDS WAS THE PLANET EARTH HOODIE, which landed on my New York City doorstep in late February 2020. The 30-person company was founded in London in 2015 by twin brothers Steve and Nick Tidball, who’d come from the world of advertising and displayed a penchant for highly technical, highly conceptual adventure clothing. The brand is small—“We’re not going to give Nike any sleepless nights,” Steve said—so the brothers rely on fervent word of mouth and offbeat marketing. In 2019, for example, to launch their incredibly niche Deep Sleep Cocoon—a “self-contained microhabitat” to help the wearer shut out the noisy world of long-haul space flight—they rented a billboard across the street from SpaceX, in Hawthorne, California, that read: “Our jacket…

A month before my 30th birthday, I start getting hives whenever I’m in the water. And during that summer, I am always in water. My boyfriend, Matt, and I are taking a big road trip, from the coast of Rhode Island all the way up to the Bonaventure River in Quebec. He is a fly-fisherman, and I want to learn. But each time I stand knee-deep in the water, my feet begin to itch. The hives form in a line up a vein in my foot. It’s confusing, not to mention alarming. I get out of the water and say, “But it can’t be the water. It has to be something in the water, right?” We’ve been saying this ever since we left Rhode Island, where we were certain it…

BACK IN 1989, I was restless college freshman looking for a spring break alternative to South Padre Island. So I hopped in a van crammed with several fellow geology students and one brave professor, and we drove 1,400 miles from Minnesota to Big Bend, the first national park I had the opportunity to visit. The 1,252-square-mile southwest Texas expanse was stupefying in its beauty and immensity. We felt like we had the whole place to ourselves, which was almost true; that year, Big Bend recorded 281,728 visits, an average of less than one person per square mile per day. In 2021, the park received 581,000 visits, more than double the 1989 figure. Along with 43 other national parks, it set visitation records last year, driven largely by widespread cabin fever…

A DECADE AGO, Cheryl Strayed had $85,000 in credit-card debt. She was a working mom taking care of two small children and grabbing whatever time she could to write. In April of 2012, while on a book tour for her new memoir, she got a text from her husband saying the rent check had bounced. The book she was promoting was Wild, her account of a 1995 hike covering 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail—from the Mojave Desert in Southern California to the Bridge of the Gods, which crosses the Columbia River between Oregon and Washington. During the hike she was 26 years old, on the trail alone, and fleeing the demons of divorce, heroin, and the untimely loss of her mother to cancer. She was carrying so much…

ROUTE: Big Sky, Montana, to Jackson, Wyoming [179 MILES] PARK: Yellowstone Yellowstone is best known for its valley-level sights—roaming wildlife and hydrothermal features—but the park’s mountains, which rise to 11,000 feet, are just as astounding. Many of the tallest lack established trails to the top, but 10,574-foot Avalanche Peak, on the quieter eastern border, is an exception. A 2.1-mile trail affords views of the Absaroka Range, Yellowstone Lake, and even the Grand Teton. You will likely have those views to yourself, but you’ll have to work for them, as the route ascends more than 2,000 feet. Need to know: You can climb Avalanche Peak without a permit. ADVENTURE: Teton Pass Highway 22 connects the towns of Jackson and Victor, Idaho, and tops out at Teton Pass, where crews built a…

EARLIER THIS YEAR, I was sitting in Los Angeles traffic lamenting that my pathetic seat heater has only three settings, and listening to a podcast hosted by an outdoorsman. At one point, the guest casually mentioned Henry David Thoreau, and the host all but jumped on him, repeatedly and derisively calling Thoreau a lightweight because his most celebrated work, Walden, didn’t involve Thoreau staying deep in the wilderness. “He was still walking home to his mom’s every other day!” the host insisted. “He was a total candy-ass!” I powerfully admire Thoreau, but I wasn’t angered. Instead, I wondered if this guy was aware of the naturalist’s storied toughness—his inner circle of friends knew him to hike for many miles, often with wet feet, and to have little use for those…

It took a few minutes for passengers aboard the hot-air balloon to notice that their pilot had gone silent. Brian Boland was no longer pointing out ridgelines rising above recently mowed fields in the Connecticut River Valley, or the land curvatures where geologists believe Africa was once connected to the North American continent. Instead, he was stuffing his hands into the back pockets of his cargo shorts, feeling around for something, then patting the ones in front, as if he must have been mistaken and whatever he was looking for had to be in them. If there was panic in his eyes, no one recognized it. Not immediately. Boland, 72, was a pilot of astounding experience and knowledge and a relentless creator of handcrafted hot-air balloons. He’d launched them over…

1. CREATE THE PERFECT OUTDOOR KITCHEN Ashley Rodriguez has taught cooking classes, worked at Wolfgang Puck’s Spago restaurant in Beverly Hills, California, and done professional food photography. She also writes and hosts Kitchen Unnecessary, a James Beard Award–nominated YouTube show that she created about cooking outdoors with wild ingredients. That’s how we found her. “I have made smoked clam carbonara, with the waves of the Salish Sea lapping at my fire, and spiced buttery biscuits cooked until golden on top of rosy-hued apricots in the Cascade Mountains,” says the chef, who is based in Seattle. These days, Rodriguez is putting together her third cookbook (she offers a multitude of outdoor-cooking recipes on her website), and she was recently certified as a nature-and-forest-therapy guide. “Cooking outside is a beautiful way to…

The Maui surfer girls love each other’s hair. It is awesome hair, long and bleached by the sun, and it falls over their shoulders straight, like water, or in squiggles, like seaweed, or in waves. They are forever playing with it—yanking it up into ponytails, or twisting handfuls and securing them with chopsticks or pencils, or dividing it as carefully as you would divide a pile of coins and then weaving it into tight yellow plaits. Not long ago I was on the beach in Maui watching the surfer girls surf, and when they came out of the water they sat in a row facing the ocean, and each girl took the hair of the girl in front of her and combed it with her fingers and crisscrossed it into…