Innehållsförteckning för November/December 2022 från Outside

I HOPE NEVER to take a plane again. I’ve flown in my share, and I never collected miles, so I don’t have any to use up. To me, rewarding frequent fliers with miles is like giving well-behaved inmates the perk of spending more time in jail. I remember when comedians used to make jokes about airplane food—if only! Now the semi-undeclared civil war that our country is currently engaged in takes place vividly and luridly in the aisles of commercial flights, with cursing, spitting, brawling, and the assault of flight attendants. I want to miss as much of this rage-filled period of our history as I can. Today I do my traveling on foot, aided by public transportation. I live in New Jersey, and a great wilderness for adventures lies…

//Annemiek van Vleuten THE TOUR DE FRANCE FEMMES’ FIRST CHAMPION By Frederick Dreier Dutch cyclist Annemiek van Vleuten was already a towering figure in professional cycling prior to last summer’s inaugural Tour de France Femmes. Van Vleuten, 40, has three world titles, and she’s won nearly every major race on the women’s circuit. Her gold-medal ride in the individual time trial at the Tokyo Olympics took place just days after she’d taken silver in the road race, making her the only cyclist in more than a decade to medal in both road-cycling events at the same Games. Yet on July 23, Van Vleuten could not contain her emotion after crossing the finish line atop the Super Planche des Belles Filles climb in eastern France to clinch her overall victory at the…

One’s vagina should be steamed in the upright position. In a room that’s wall-to-wall with real, actual jade, a woman (OK, me) dressed in a satiny, royal purple sheath that attaches just under the armpits—like the world’s least flattering strapless gown—sits atop a throne. The throne is wood and looks like a toilet, with a deep, dark hole in the middle. The gown goes over the body and the throne, creating a little biodome. Once you’re seated, steam from a container of mugwort tea and herbs rises and slithers up to its target. Meanwhile, infrared light is shot up at said same target (the vagina, in case you forgot), and it is those two things, the tea and the light, that combine to allegedly—big fat allegedly here—regulate hormones and “disinfect” the…

On September 26, renowned ski mountaineer Hilaree Nelson summited 26,781-foot Manaslu with her climbing and life partner, Jim Morrison. Shortly after they stepped into their skis and began their descent, Nelson was knocked over by a small avalanche and fell 5,000 feet down the south slope of the Nepalese mountain. After two days of searching in a helicopter, Morrison and a rescue crew retrieved her body. Nelson, 49, was a giant in her field. She was one of the most accomplished ski mountaineers in the world, a mother of two boys, a mentor to many, and an inspiration to more. The remote high-alpine regions she thrived in are inherently inhospitable to human life. Her discipline, ski mountaineering, has claimed the lives of numerous dedicated acolytes, but something about Nelson—her formidable…

THIS SUMMER I traveled back to Nepal to report on high-altitude mountaineering for Outside, and I witnessed a sea change in global alpinism. On the world’s tallest mountains, climbing’s historical values had further given way to a brand of peak bagging turbocharged by social media. Climbers pursued speed records by ascending multiple 8,000-meter peaks in a single season, an effort that seemed impossible only a few years ago. As always, crowds returned to Mount Everest, but this year the familiar congestion and conga line of summiters materialized on other mountains as well. As images and videos of climbers appeared in a continuous stream across multiple social media platforms, venturing into the Death Zone felt more like an Instagram meetup than the serious and dangerous endeavor it is. The origins of…

Block Shop Textiles Parasol robe $155 The fabric of this unisex, organic-cotton full-length robe is made by master printers in Jaipur, India. The fifth-generation artisans use hand-chiseled blocks to create unique designs, delivering an aesthetic that only care, earthy azo pigments, and a little elbow grease can produce. STYLE A. Fjällräven Expedition Pack Down anorak $350 A slightly relaxed fit and large kangaroo pocket give this vintage-inspired anorak some serious Scandinavian style. And the 700-fill down insulation and high neck will keep you warm in Swedish-level cold. B. Toast Cashmere scarf $270 Toast makes everything to withstand both the elements and the whims of fashion. This scarf is no exception: created from 50 percent cashmere, 50 percent sheep’s wool, it provides plenty of real estate to keep the luxury seeker on your list…

MAY 1, 2022, SUNNY. Seventy degrees at dawn, heading to the mid-eighties. Perfect Lake Mead weather. Out on the water, @onechickentaco hits the throttle and his boat rises up on a plane, gliding over smooth Lake Mead glass. Real name: Nathan Hollister. His wife, Shawna, is beside him, wearing her usual boat attire: bikini and sunglasses. Damn gurl, he writes on Instagram. Green lake, blue sky, tan cliffs, jagged brown mountains—just right. “My goal is to have more fun than everyone around me at any given time,” his site bio says. Slight hassle getting out there today. The boat ramp had to be extended a quarter-mile across the sand. Climate change, megadrought. A sign warned: DANGER LAUNCH AT YOUR OWN RISK LOW WATER LEVELS After cruising around for a bit,…

IN THE MID-1960S, a researcher at the University of Florida named Robert Cade went to a bank and borrowed $500 to buy sugar and salt. The homemade drink he’d devised for the university’s football team, dubbed Cade’s Cola—or Gatorade—was attracting widespread attention, and he wanted to mix a big batch of it to sell. The sugar provided crucial fourth-quarter energy for the players, and the salt—well, scientists and athletes are still debating what role the salt in sports drinks plays in athletic performance. The question lurks in the background of a new study published in the European Journal of Sport Science, by sports nutrition researcher Alan McCubbin of Monash University in Australia. The study uses a mathematical model to determine exactly how much sodium is required during exercise of varying…

1. Ride the Winter Trains In Switzerland, most everyone takes the train to the ski mountain. There are a few locomotive options on this side of the pond, too. The Winter Park Express from Denver to Colorado’s third-largest ski area is back this season. Trains with baggage compartments for skis and boards leave Denver’s Union Station every Friday through Sunday, January through April, starting at 7 A.M. During the two-hour trip ($29 each way), you’ll roll through 31 tunnels and view the Continental Divide. Returning trains depart Winter Park at 4:30 P.M. Even cooler, if you time your flights right, you can hop the A Line train—with commuter service between Denver International Airport and Union Station—and skip the rental car. For a more vintage vibe, board the Mount Washington Cog…

OLIVIA BEE BEGAN WATCHING THE IDITAROD on TV with her parents when she was a first-grader. “We would pick a musher, and make a little sled out of popsicle sticks, and hope that the musher we picked would win,” says Bee, who lives in eastern Oregon. The 28-year-old photographer largely forgot about her childhood love for dogsled racing until an unexpected backcountry escapade with her husky mix in early 2020: she was wrapping up a day of cross-country skiing when the puppy bolted, and she held on to the leash as he pulled for what felt like miles through the snow. The episode got her thinking about mushing again. “I know what it’s like to get through extreme weather with an animal,” says Bee, who herds cattle on horseback at…

IT WAS AROUND 3 A.M., and you could’ve heard a pin drop—or, more to the point, a stalactite drip. We had been floating in the cave on a wooden raft for six or seven hours when I solemnly chose to accept the challenge: $50 if I could fart on pitch, specifically the G above middle C. This jocund wager was put forth by one of my fellow actors, Cristin Milioti (star of stage and screen, particularly known for her killer pipes as a singer), who clearly was more than ready for this tedious working “day” to end. Initially, she’d offered me $500, but quickly retreated to one-tenth of that amount when she registered the lack of hesitation and the stone-cold élan with which I’d agreed. When I first learned that…

The year 2017 may seem too recent for an Outside Classic, but it’s ancient history to those of us living through a pandemic, when wellness has been redefined as something more fundamental: not super-spreading COVID germs on the subway. But Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s story, which appeared in Outside magazine’s 2017 Women’s Issue, came from a golden age of goat yoga and jade vaginal eggs, when all of us were eating clean and milking nuts and spending our paychecks on spa treatments with no inkling of the looming pandemic. Since then, Brodesser-Akner has profiled Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop empire for The New York Times Magazine (a story that included the nightmare scenario of having to field a call from her kids’ carpool while she was at Gwynnie’s house) and examined mindfulness (along with…