Innehållsförteckning för September/October 2023 från Outside

THERE’S NOTHING like a fight in which different states and regions square off about who’s better at producing a popular food. One of the most energetic rivalries involves barbecue, pitting Tennessee (where pork is the thing) against Texas (land of beef, and brisket in particular). If you’re loyal to North Carolina or Kansas City, please know that I’m aware these places make good barbecue, too. No need to call and scream at me. This sort of competition turns up all over the place. There’s an old episode of The West Wing in which windbag president Jed Bartlet, a former governor of New Hampshire, is appalled when he sees that Vermont maple syrup is on the menu at an upcoming official breakfast. (“New Hampshire syrup is what we serve in this…

WILMINGTON, DELAWARE Wilmington, says resident and Outdoor Afro volunteer leader Tracey Duffy, is “a small, hidden wonder.” Situated within reach of Philadelphia (a 20-minute train ride), New York City, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., this place prides itself on outsize access to the outdoors. Locals love its walkability, abundance of parks (nearly 70), revitalized downtown and riverfront, and proximity to mid-Atlantic beaches. Residents have long valued greenspace. In the 1990s, Wilmingtonians fought development of a shopping mall and formed a coalition that worked for 25 years to build the Northern Delaware Greenway Trail; its 10.4 paved miles link numerous parks, playgrounds, historic estates, the Brandywine Zoo, museums, commercial zones, and schools. Other major recreation areas include 178-acre Brandywine Park, 134-year-old Rockford Park, and Alapocas Run—a 415-acre, pawpaw-tree-filled park with hiking and…

Max Lowe has overcooked the short ribs. He announces this before I’ve taken my first bite. “Sorry, I forgot to turn the oven down,” he says glumly. I’m sitting at a table in Max’s backyard in Bozeman, Montana, at the house he shares with his fiancée, a sunshiny nurse named Lia Argyrakis. Max’s mom, Jennifer Lowe-Anker, has arrived for dinner carrying salad in a wooden bowl. Jenni, now in her late sixties, is an artist with a long, gray braid and a thing for wildflowers. She lives across the street in the same craftsman where Max grew up. The room where she paints bright, textured canvases of bears and honeybees was Max’s childhood bedroom. It has robin’s-egg blue walls and a tiny twin bed that’s hard to believe could ever…

When a British woman named Claire Bye plunged into the Yacuma River in the Bolivian Amazon last January to frolic with pink river dolphins, she couldn’t have conjured a more Disneyesque scene. She was three months into a life-altering journey across Central and South America, and she found herself surrounded by tropical birds, humming cicadas, and swimming companions that seemed as dreamy as unicorns. It was heaven—until it wasn’t. Someone in her tour group picked up a baby dolphin, and the pod became agitated and commenced ramming people. Wisely, Bye climbed out of the water and watched from a pontoon. But when she jumped in later to retrieve a wayward water bottle, one of the creatures chomped her foot and held on. She started screaming. “Oh, my gosh!” blurted out…

ON JULY 30, 2021, the fastest female sprinters in the world bounced out their nerves and adjusted their blocks in preparation for the semifinals of the 100 meters at the Tokyo Olympics. Amid the prerace tension, in the center of the track, lane five sat conspicuously empty. Just hours before the event, Nigerian sprinter Blessing Okagbare had received a provisional suspension from the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU), the anti-doping organization that oversees international track and field. Leading into the Games, the then 32-year-old Okagbare had run the 100 faster than ever, clocking multiple sub-11-second times and equaling the world record at the Nigerian national championships. (The times were unofficial, as judges deemed them wind-assisted.) Without the last-minute sanction, says Travis Tygart, CEO of the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), “she…

THE NEXT FRONTIER in training science, currently being debated in publications like the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, sounds like it was torn from the pages of Robert Pirsig’s 1974 road novel, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig’s narrator is obsessed to the point of madness with the seemingly intractable question of how we know what is good. “Some things are better than others,” he proclaims, “that is, they have more quality.” That’s true of training, too, according to Norwegian sports scientist Thomas Haugen: some workouts are better than others, in ways that aren’t necessarily indicated by stats like pace, power, heart rate, and cadence. Earlier this year, Haugen, a professor at Kristiania University College in Oslo, published a paper with colleagues attempting to transform this…

AT THE SUMMIT of Mount St. Helens early one June morning, I went through the familiar process of swapping climbing equipment for ski-descent gear. Baseball cap into the pack, helmet out. Sweat-soaked gloves traded for dry ones. But the final, and perhaps most critical, piece to make the transition to downhill mode? An oversize dark blue-gray T-shirt that drapes to the middle of my thighs and sports a larger-than-life illustrated wolf’s face, complete with peaked ears and stern yellow eyes. This 100 percent cotton shirt isn’t windproof or sweat wicking. It’s not very warm or particularly breathable, and when it’s wet it quadruples in weight. But it’s my go-to for spring skiing and mountain-bike rides, quick after-work outings, and big, all-day objectives—basically anytime I’m in the mood for a rowdy,…

At times it seems like the earth is so upset about what happened to the American buffalo that it literally vomits up the remains. It’s amazing how bones continue to pop out of the ground. I found my first skull in 1999, poking up from the soil at 9,000 feet above sea level in the mountains of southwest Montana. Radiocarbon dating placed the year of the animal’s death at around 1770, a time when there were still perhaps 30 million of the animals on the American landscape. Back then the famed hunter Daniel Boone was still encountering buffalo, now known to scientists as Bison bison, as far east as Kentucky and North Carolina. Native Americans living in the vicinity of where I found my skull were largely unaware of the…

When Indigenous activist and model Quannah ChasingHorse was three, her family moved to a small village in Mongolia, where her mother, Jody Potts-Joseph, had taken a job teaching English. During supply trips to a nearby town, Jody would often find Quannah in front of their hotel’s small television, transfixed, watching a channel that showed nothing but high-fashion runway shows. “My memories start in Mongolia,” Quannah, now 21, says of those years. “There’s a picture of me sitting, with my legs crisscross, just staring at the TV in awe. Ever since then, my dream was to be a model.” That dream is now a reality. Quannah—whose mother is Han Gwich’in and is from Eagle Village, Alaska, and whose father is Oglala and Sicangu Lakota (tribes based in South Dakota)—has gone from…

ON MY 21ST BIRTHDAY, my father bought me a pair of hiking boots and I held a man’s hand while he died. We’d been driving on back roads from New Hampshire home to Maine when we pulled over at the scene of an accident. An elderly man in a red truck had gone into cardiac arrest and driven off the road; there was no ambulance in sight. A group of people were standing by and someone helped my dad and me, both EMTs, lift the man from the driver’s seat and lay him down in the grass. He was gasping like a swimmer in the last yards of a race. His tongue was turning gray. His hand was big and warm and stiff, and I held it as if I…

LIKE MOST YOUTUBE videos posted by Nathan Florence, a 29-year-old surfer known for riding the world’s scariest waves, the clip posted on April 12, 2019, leads with cuteness. Titled “Full Day of Surfing with My Brothers and John Gives Me a Board to Try!!! || Nate’s Big Adventure,” it opens mid-frame like a raw home movie. You see Florence barefoot and giggling in surf trunks on green grass, shaggy brown hair cut in a DIY-looking mullet. Then he’s snuggling a fluffy cat and whispering, “Tell the viewers hello. Show them your pretty blue eyes.” Unlike most of Florence’s videos, this one hints at the elephant in the room of Florence’s life, and also at the brilliant solution that has made him the unlikely breakout star of surfing’s most surprising new…

More Gear Equals Bigger Fish BY GREG THOMAS Outside’s Gear Guide fly-fishing expert Although I admire Huck Finn’s devilry and consider him a first-rate literary character, I don’t see any reason why, in the 21st century, I should fish like him, with nothing more than a twig and length of twine. Which is to say that I am steadfastly against tenkara, perhaps the most significant regression in fly-fishing history and a thumb of the nose to 500 years of innovation. When I’m on the water, I have a singular goal: to catch the largest fish possible in the most efficient fashion. A high-modulus graphite rod paired with a machined, large-arbor reel and slick-coated fly line allow me to cast as far as I need to, often to the opposite bank.…

I HAVE A MEMORY that’s both fleeting and fixed. I remember, surrounded by my third-grade classmates, the sticky business of peeling the skins from apples and then chopping the exposed flesh. Our knives, borrowed from the cafeteria, were sharp enough for rough cuts but too dull to imperil clumsy kid fingers. When we’d amassed a mound of haphazardly cubed fruit, we added it to a large stockpot along with water and cinnamon. Then we did the same with a flat of fresh apricots. This was more than a school activity: we were making fruit leather for an upcoming camping trip. I grew up in Aspen, Colorado, where outdoor education was built into the curriculum, and for this trip we were headed to a campground at the base of Independence Pass—just…

The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth By Elizabeth Rush ($30, Milkweed Editions) For a chunk of ice containing enough meltwater to raise the oceans two feet, not much is known about Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier. That is why, in 2019, Elizabeth Rush joined an international group of scientists on the first expedition to its calving edge. “I wanted to stand alongside that massive glacier,” she writes in The Quickening, “wanted to witness freshly formed bergs dropping down into the ocean like stones, so that I might know in my body what my mind still struggled to grasp: Antarctica’s going to pieces has the power to rewrite all the maps.” The journey takes place as Rush is about to start a family, and she grapples with the…

Pasang: In the Shadow of Everest The inspiring, ultimately tragic story of Pasang Lhamu Sherpa is a lesser-known chapter in mountaineering history. Pasang perished while descending Everest in 1993, after becoming the first Nepali woman to summit. Director Nancy Svendsen first met Pasang’s daughter, Dawa Futi Sherpa—an executive producer on Pasang: In the Shadow of Everest—a dozen years ago. Together they deliver a subtle, sensitive tracing of Pasang’s life against the backdrop of Nepal in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Those were pivotal years in the country’s quest for democracy and in the development of modern commercial climbing on Everest, which is powered largely by the hard work and heroism of unheralded, underpaid teams of Sherpas. Pasang was an uneducated Sherpa woman from a small village; her vast ambition…

OFF THE COAST of Rhode Island, a ten-square-mile speck in the Atlantic hosts an annual treasure hunt. Each year hundreds of handblown glass fishing floats—clear balls the size of oranges—are hidden across Block Island’s picturesque beaches and walking trails. Since Eben Horton started the Glass Float Project in 2012, the art installation has gained worldwide recognition. He and his wife, Jennifer Nauck, make the orbs at their studio in the nearby coastal town of Wakefield. Then, from June to October, a top-secret group of hiders stash the spheres. “For a long time, he was hiding them on his own. But then people became familiar with him, and they would follow him around,” says New England photographer Philip Keith. Keith traveled to Block Island by ferry six times this summer, tagging…

There is a horse auction establishment on South MacArthur in Oklahoma City. It’s a big white building with a dirt arena inside. Actually, there are two arenas, a large one where the horses are exercised and a smaller one that has a stage with seats around it. I mention this place because it was there that the 50 Miss Rodeo America contestants made their first public appearance. They ate the barbecue in the large arena, and then were introduced by state in the small arena with the seats. In the large arena there was an open bar, but the contestants were not allowed to drink. “They should let us,” said Miss Rodeo Pennsylvania, “to see who gets crocked and who doesn’t.” Then Miss Rodeo Utah introduced herself. She had on…

On the day in June when I was scheduled to interview E. Jean Carroll, it had been less than a month since she’d won a federal civil trial in New York against Donald J. Trump for sexually assaulting her and defaming her during a widely publicized campaign of verbal abuse. Consequently, the demands on her time had become rather intense. Among her many to-dos: • Dealing with media requests from all over the world. • Writing her Ask E. Jean column on Substack and cowriting a serial romance novel with Mary Trump—the former president’s niece and a prominent critic of his conduct and politics—while creating an online platform, with her attorney Robbie Kaplan, for women who’ve been sexually assaulted. • Introducing her new rescue dog, a Great Pyrenees beauty named…