Innehållsförteckning för May/June 2023 från Outside

This issue is filled with terrific storytelling about a core Outside topic: journeys. To kick things off, I assigned an essay to Mississippi writer W. Ralph Eubanks (“I Feel Like Going Home,” page 26). Eubanks, who like me was born in Mississippi, explores his deep attachment to a particular place: the Delta, a culturally and historically rich group of 13 counties in the northwest part of the state, near the Mississippi River. Unlike me, Eubanks is Black, and for him the process of reconnecting with the Delta involved a combination of physical travel—he loves to drive around, hike, bike, and canoe in the region—with the kind of transformation and change inspired by journeys of the mind and spirit. As Eubanks explains, the Delta is an important locale in the history…

Be Brave and LearnHow to Run Clips BY HENRY LANMAN Founder, Rocket Ramps If you call yourself a serious mountain biker and you don’t run clipless pedals (or “clips,” as the cool kids say), it’s time for a rude awakening. When you first start trail riding, clipping in is a no-go—I get it. You’re trying to learn braking, shifting, and how to hold momentum; the last thing you want is to encounter a sticky situation and not be able to unclip. However, as you progress, continuing to shun clips is the equivalent of keeping a diaper on after you’ve learned to flush. The benefits provided by clips are legion. Run flats and you get roughly half a pedal stroke’s worth of power. With clips you can push down on one…

“THERE ARE NO OTHER EVERGLADES in the world,” conservationist Marjory Stoneman Douglas wrote in 1947 in The Everglades: River of Grass. “They are, they have always been, one of the unique regions of the earth, remote, never wholly known.” To sisters Melanie and Evie Metz, who grew up in a small town near Everglades National Park, the only way to know this river of grass is to wade through its boggy expanse. “Walking into the swamp brings you off the paved trails and into the canopy of trees, where you’ll hear, smell, touch, and see the Everglades in a much more intimate manner,” Evie says. For the portfolio on the following pages, the two photographers wanted to join as many park-ranger-led “slough slogs,” as they’re called, as possible. During these…

LAST AUGUST, when my husband’s friend Dale was visiting from New York, I read in the paper that the Perseid meteor shower was about to happen. Dale claimed to have never seen a shooting star, so we dragged him out to a hiking trail a few miles east of our Bay Area home to perform this summertime ritual. We kept him up until 2 A.M. We made him lie down in the dirt. After half an hour and a few wan streaks, Dale looked over at us. “You said it was a shower.” In the meteor shower of one’s imagination, there is no downtime. You expect them to come in by the dozens, a catapult siege against the king’s ramparts. You expect to go home stunned and awed and talking…

MEAT CAN BE PART of a balanced omnivorous diet, and cuts from grass-fed animals taste better and are better for you, too. Ruminants like cows, bison, and lambs are so categorized for their unique ability to extract nutrients from fibrous, mineral-rich plants. Unfortunately, modern farming practices often put grazing animals in indoor feedlots, where they’re given a buffet of cereal grains to build the flavorful white fat known as marbling. In fact, beef quality is graded prime, choice, or select based on the quantity of fat in the muscle—a dire indicator of overall poor health. Without the intramuscular fat that melts during cooking, grass-fed meat can taste dry and lack richness. So if you cook with such beef, you’ll be taking on a challenge. Most recipes are geared toward meat…

How to Book It: The per-person cost is $998 for the full six-day, five-night trip; $809 for a four-day, three-night trip; and $729 for a three-day, two-night trip. See more details and booking information at aquariustrail.com. How to Get There: The best option for most guests is to fly to Salt Lake City or Las Vegas, rent a car, and drive roughly five hours (from either city) to Escalante, Utah, then book a hotel room for the night; check out Yonder Escalante and Escalante Yurts. Fisher’s company offers a shuttle that leaves from its shop, Escalante Cyclery, at 8 A.M. for the two-hour drive to the start of the trip at Brian Head. Best Time to Go: The entire six-day, 190-mile hut trip is available from July 1 to October…

ONE SUMMER DAY a few years ago, I was enjoying a lazy solo paddle on the far end of a midwestern lake my family has been going to for decades, idling a couple of miles from our dock, marinating in the robust silence. Sitting in my kayak, I could hear the steady drone of cicadas and tree frogs nestled beneath overhanging boughs of pine, oak, maple, and birch. I was, as they say, blissing out. It was almost as if I’d smoked a joint or downed a powerful Belgian ale, but all I had ingested was breakfast and coffee. I’d never before heard this suggested, but I think I just might have been high on… nature? Life? Nah, couldn’t be. Unfortunately, my delight was short-lived. The wind picked up, and…

IN THE EARLY 1990s, Kristine McDivitt, then the CEO of Patagonia, was at a café in El Calafate, Argentina, when a man named Doug Tompkins sat down next to her. “Hey, kid, how ya doing?” he asked. Doug was the best friend and climbing buddy of her boss, Yvon Chouinard, and he was known as a brilliant, arrogant bon vivant. In 1964, Doug had cofounded the North Face with his first wife, Susie Tompkins Buell. Seven years later, the two started another clothing company, Esprit. After cashing out, he moved to Chile to live alone in a small cabin. Kristine, a free-spirited California girl who had worked her way up the ladder at Patagonia after an entry-level, two-dollar-an-hour “assistant packing” job in her teens, knew Doug’s reputation. So when he…

IN DARKNESS there is light, but I wouldn’t deign to carry one. Not since I’ve seen the light. Why lug around a cumbersome AceBeam or Maglite dumbbell when I can affix a bright bulb to my forehead? Raised in the Boston suburbs in the eighties, I grew up with the same faint and flimsy red plastic flashlight everyone else did. It was a boyfriend of mine, a rugged Aussie named Rupert, who introduced me to the practicality of the hands-free headlight. That was the early aughts, which meant his iteration was giant and clunky—not the sleek little LED numbers we see today. He’d take it everywhere he took me: hiking, camping, and fishing around Northern California. He wore it while frying trout over his propane stove in the Sierra Nevada,…

The dry valleys outside Lima, Peru, evoke the feeling of being on another planet. Dust as fine as talcum powder washes the landscape in desolate browns, and bromeliads cling to the west side of rocky slopes, facing the direction that mist blows in from the ocean. Columnar cacti the size of telephone poles resemble hands outstretched toward the sky—puffy, like surgical gloves filled with water. I was sitting in the middle seat of a battered van snaking up switchbacks to the summit of Tinajas Valley, tires inches from the edge of steep drop-offs. Next to me was Peter Kaestner, one of the world’s most prolific birders. “I can see why I haven’t seen this bird before,” he said, speaking loudly as the van rumbled over dirt and rocks. “It’s not…

My favorite spot on the East Antarctic plateau, the planet’s highest, driest, coldest, windiest, deadest desert, is the Love Shack—an uninsulated plywood box the size of a modest bathroom, painted black to absorb the 24-hour sunlight, furnished with a chair, a desk, a cot, and a pile of coarse cotton blankets. Rumor has it that researchers and laborers at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, which sits about two miles away, occasionally require a refuge for romance, something I tried not to think about when I was in there. Like a prep school or military base, the station is insular, a cheek-to-jowl compound of laboratories, workshops, dorms, and supply depots, and the 250 inhabitants during the austral summer are hard-pressed to find privacy sufficient for their (ahem) needs. In my case—that…