Innehållsförteckning för January/February 2024 från Outside

DOUG FISH IS STOKED. He’s almost always stoked—he even signs his emails “Stay stoked, Doug.” But today he is especially stoked, because we’re skiing a foot of freshly fallen snow at one of his favorite resorts, Utah’s Powder Mountain. I follow Fish through a line of evergreens onto a wide-open, nearly untracked slope, making effortless turns all the way down. “Best run of the year!” he says at the bottom, giddy and out of breath. The other two in our foursome agree: Kevin Mitchell, the general manager of Powder Mountain, and a guy named Erik who has tagged along. Apparently, he’s some sort of tech entrepreneur. “That was like heli-skiing!” Erik exclaims as we wait for a shuttle to drive us back up the mountain. At the top, Mitchell peels…

Arc’teryx Alpha jacket $700 A packable lightweight shell is a must for long days in the backcountry. The Alpha fits the bill with an impressive warmth-to-weight ratio, courtesy of ultralight gridded nylon face fabric anda Gore-Tex membrane. Testers stayed dry while wearing it in relentless Pacific Northwest storms. The Alpha dumps heat via accessible pit zips when you’re working hard to earn your turns. (Men’s XS–XXL; women’s XXS–XXL) Mammut Haldigrat Air HS pants $449 Testers raved about how comfortable these pants were on a four-day hut trip in the Tetons. The 40-denier polyamide face fabric is buttery soft, it’s breathable, and it makes the pants easy to move in. One tester managed to stay completely dry after a full-day tour in a storm. Two thigh pockets are large enough to…

On June 18, 2020, Carine McCandless got a call from Alaska’s Department of Natural Resources. Corri Feige, the commissioner at the time, wanted to give her a heads-up: the abandoned bus where Carine’s brother, Chris, had briefly lived and then died was at that moment dangling in midair below a Chinook helicopter, on its way to a flatbed trailer and then to storage in a government facility. The bus made famous by Into the Wild was finally being hauled out. Carine didn’t have a clue that this might be coming, but she wasn’t entirely surprised. The bus, which sat roughly 20 miles down a rough 4x4 trail from the nearest highway, had been a source of concern to Alaskan authorities for years. Too many visitors, inspired by her brother’s story,…

EVERY JANUARY, tens of thousands of ski-racing fans flock to Kitzbühel, Austria, for the Hahnenkamm Races, an event photographer and lifelong skier Kari Medig calls “the Wimbledon of ski racing.” But instead of swatting a fuzzy ball back and forth, athletes hurtle down icy slopes and through blind corners at upward of 75 miles per hour. And rather than don swanky “smart casual” attire, spectators come decked out in vintage ski gear. The downhill race is the start of a three-day spectacle that includes slalom, super-G, and sprint competitions. Integral to the scene are the crowds themselves: the events draw up to 50,000 attendees. Austria’s biggest newspaper sends a couple dozen reporters to document the frenzy, and military cadets work long days shoveling snow and prepping the courses. Growing up…

I GOT DUMPED last April. Technically, we were never really together—in the blurred lines of the dating world today, we were exclusive, meaning we weren’t seeing anyone else, but he refused the title “boyfriend.” After three months of acting like he was my boyfriend, he did what everyone is frustratingly entitled to do—he changed his mind. When something like this happens, I turn to the women in my life. First I called my sister, Cricket. There’s nothing more validating than hearing her tell me I’m smart and beautiful and deserving of love. After her I spoke to my friends. I live in Bozeman, Montana, with two wildly independent, hilarious women, and our stories of dating ski instructors, hunters, and backcountry firefighters could easily fill a book. Finally, I reached out…

This year I really want to soak up winter to the fullest—and not just on the slopes. I want to become an expert après-skier. What gear do Ineed? Is anything besides a beer necessary?—SOCIAL ANXIETY Dear Anxiety, “Need” is a strong word in this context. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, après-ski is defined as “the social activities and entertainment following a day’s skiing.” Technically, all you need to meet that definition is your friends and to have performed the act of skiing. But in my humble opinion, the very essence of après is joyful exuberance, which our dictionary definition does not cover. To successfully execute an après-ski session with gusto, there are three rules you should follow. The first and most boring rule: you should be outside, which means…

BEST PLACE To See Wildlife DOMESTIC: American Prairie, Montana Spying the magnificent bison roaming the Great Plains might be the quintessential American wildlife experience. This is the largest mammal in North America, with males standing up to six feet tall and weighing as much as 2,000 pounds, and their numbers are rebounding on land managed by American Prairie, a public-private conservation partnership that plans to connect 3.2 million acres. Some 800 buffalo call these ranges home, along with growing populations of elk, deer, and pronghorn. The 1.1-million-acre Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, which straddles the Missouri River in the state’s northeast, is the system’s anchor, with all manner of outdoor activities, from hunting and hiking to birding and boating. But for some of the best wildlife viewing, head to…

On a cloudy, moonless night in Port-Gentil, Gabon, on Africa’s west coast, Peter Hammarstedt watched as the red and green running lights on a pair of motorboats slid across a mangrove-fringed estuary. He clicked his two-way radio. “Keep coming,” he said, guiding the rigid-hulled inflatable boats, or RHIBs, to the dock. Huddled in the dark behind the 38-year-old director of campaigns for the ocean conservation group Sea Shepherd Global were three Gabonese fisheries officers, six Gabonese marines with AK-47’s slung over their shoulders, two academic researchers, and me. After we’d all climbed in, the pilots switched off the running lights, pointed their bows west, and gunned the twin 200-horsepower engines straight into the dark. Somewhere ahead of us drifted the Bob Barker, a 171-foot Sea Shepherd ship named after the…

ARAMINTA “MINTY” ROSS was born into slavery in 1822 on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. As a girl, she dreaded doing domestic work that kept her indoors under the hawkish eye and often abusive hand of a mistress. As a teenager, she was hired out to do the kind of grueling agricultural labor usually assigned to men, and she later worked alongside her father, a lumberman, learning how to forage and to follow waterways. Eventually, she used the survival skills and physical endurance she’d developed not only to escape north to her own freedom, but also to lead more than a dozen successful missions to liberate over 70 enslaved people. Ross navigated for those groups under cover of night and in freezing winter conditions. She hid people in swamps,…

We Don’t Need Another Spork BY MIYO MCGINN Outside assistant editor Lobster-claw gloves are the spork of cold-weather apparel: hybrid gear that accomplishes none of its tasks as capably as the standalone equivalent. A spork is a leaky spoon with tines too short to spear anything; the lobster claw is—take your pick—a chilly mitten or a glove with lousy dexterity. Where skiing is concerned, I want a full-finger design when I know I’ll be doing stuff (ripping skins, swapping layers), and mittens when warmth is paramount. What I don’t want is a mashup that nods at both without delivering on either. I also see no need for a single glove or mitten to cover both scenarios, since I always tour with two pairs of gloves anyway—one for the uphill and…

“This was one of the first recipes I brought home from France,” Alecia Moore says, offering me a pour of rosé. “In 2015, I went to Scamandre, in the south. It’s fully sustainable, regeneratively farmed. It’s beautiful. It’s wild.” While she was at the vineyard, a grower named Franck Renouard gave her a glass of delicately colored, aromatic grenache rosé. “I did not want to put out a pink wine,” Moore quips. “Though Costco would’ve really liked that!” She asked Renouard about his process. “‘Well, you’re American, you’re a woman, and you’re a pop star,’” he said, skeptical of her ability to master it. “‘Absolutely!’” “So he gave me the recipe,” Moore says. “I’m like, ‘OK, fucker, watch this.’” We take a moment to go through the steps of tasting…

CRUNNNNCH! SKKKZZRRRR! JJJUUUGGGGLLLLZZZZZ! In my balls, I could feel the violent vibrations as layers of Epifanes spar varnish, quite dear in both price and labor, were mercilessly toothed from the hull of my canoe by river rocks. To be fair, I could also feel the scraping tremors in my feet, legs, and buttocks as we banged along the river bottom in yet another stretch of shallow water. But it was my familial plums that spoke with the most immediacy, because there was something existential going on that afternoon in L.A. In the 25 years I’ve called the city my home, I’ve done a great many things that I would categorize as fun. I have, of course, worked as an actor. But I’ve also been paid to build various decks and…

Damn, this mustache feels right. After a month of patient hair farming, it has really come into its own. Bushy like a caterpillar, the blond chevron stretches from my nose to just below the corners of my mouth, leaving a little peekaboo of rosy upper lip. It tingles in the downy warmth of a Colorado summer night. I pinch my thumb and index finger together and spread them across its ample length. Redford would be proud, I’m thinking. For that matter, so would Steve Prefontaine, Burt Reynolds, and “magic man” Doug Henning. It’s 2:30 A.M., and I’m on my way up a dark forest path toward the 14,255-foot summit of Longs Peak, in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park, when I happen to fall in with a thirtysomething guy from Denver…

We spoke with Mr. Out of Bounds about a writing life that ranged from stunt comedy to investigative reporting—and led to a new career in international health The subhead read: “Outside was born into a far-out bicentennial world of Coors, cutoffs, and bright orange tents. Maybe there’s a reason they say, ‘Don’t look back.’” But we did anyway. For the magazine’s 30th anniversary, celebrated in 2007, Outside sent Eric Hansen on simulated time travel to 1976, the year the magazine was founded, by having him dress like a dorky outdoorsman from that era and do his wild and crazy things in the modern world of Boulder, Colorado. Hansen was the perfect choice for this embarrassing assignment. Having started as an intern in 1999, he’d proven his mettle with his inaugural…