Outside - January 2014 USA

J
e
e
p

i
s

a

r
e
g
i
s
t
e
r
e
d

t
r
a
d
e
m
a
r
k

o
f

C
h
r
y
s
l
e
r

G
r
o
u
p

L
L
C
.


2
.
4
L

I
4

F
W
D

M
o
d
e
l
s
:

E
P
A

e
s
t
.

2
2

c
i
t
y
/
3
1

h
w
y

M
P
G
.

A
c
t
u
a
l

m
i
l
e
a
g
e

m
a
y

v
a
r
y
.

J
e
e
p

“
M
i
d
-
S
i
z
e

S
U
V
”

s
u
b
-
s
e
g
m
e
n
t
a
t
i
o
n

b
a
s
e
d

o
n

1
3
M
Y

c
r
o
s
s
-
s
h
o
p

a
c
t
i
v
i
t
y
.

E
x
c
l
u
d
e
s

v
e
h
i
c
l
e
s

w
i
t
h

t
h
i
r
d
-
r
o
w

s
e
a
t
i
n
g
.

*
A
v
a
i
l
a
b
l
e

o
p
t
i
o
n
a
l

f
e
a
t
u
r
e
s
.
I NTRODUCI NG THE ALL- NEW 2014 CHEROKEE
RI GHT HE RE , T HE NE W STANDARD OF BE ST- I N- CL ASS 4X4 CAPABI L I T Y* E ME RGE S.
WI T H SE L E C-T E RRAI N
®
AND JE E P ACT I VE DRI VE L OCK DE L I VE RI NG T HE RE NOWNE D
T R A C T I ON A ND T OR QUE MA NA GE ME NT OF T HE T R A I L R AT E D
®
B A DGE , A C L A S S -
E XC L USI V E NI NE - SP E E D T R A NSMI S SI ON A ND A N I NT E RI OR F E AT URI NG AVA I L A BL E
LE ATHER-TRI MMED SE ATI NG AND 8. 4" TOUCH SCREEN COMMAND CENTER,* THE 2014
JE E P CHE ROKE E T RAI L HAWK I S RE ADY F OR ADVE NT URE ON ANY T E RRAI N.
JEEP. COM/CHEROKEE

EVERY
WHERE
STARTS HERE
-

4 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE Cover photograph by PEGGY SIROTA
CONTENTS 01.14
G
R
A
C
E

C
H
O
N

HAPPINESS REPORT
50 THE PURSUIT
OF HAPPINESS
Scientists are discovering
what many of us have known
for years: the keys to joy and
wellness lie in healthy doses
of sunlight, exercise, and
outdoor play. Kick off your
New Year with these life-
changing strategies. PLUS:
The perma-grin secrets of
ultrarunner Hal Koerner.
62 IT’S MILLER TIME
Bode is back—and in love.
The newlywed has weathered
knee surgery, a bitter child-
custody battle, and the death
of his brother, Chelone. But
now, with pro volleyballer
Morgan Beck by his side, he’s
hungry for more Olympic
gold. BY RACHEL STURTZ
68 FUKAI YUKI SAIKO!
That’s Japanese for “great,
deep powder.” And it’s what
you’ll find every January in
the fabled resort of Niseko,
which typically sees nearly
15 feet during the first month
of the year. Is there such a
thing as too much snow?
ERIC HANSEN investigates.
74 DR. FEELGOOD
Who tracks down all the
exotic plants that boost our
vitality and turn us on? Chris
Kilham, medicine hunter,
that’s who—and he’s happy
to tell you all about it. STEVE
HENDRICKS joins the horny
explorer in the Amazon on a
search for the next hot thing.
80 MAN UNDER
At a Tough Mudder event
last April, Avishek Sengupta
stepped off an obstacle called
Walk the Plank and disap-
peared into a murky pool.
Eight minutes later, a rescue
diver brought his limp body
to the surface. His death
has racers questioning the
safety of one of the country’s
fastest-growing sports.
BY ELLIOTT D. WOODS

Overheating is underperforming. So now there’s Polartec
®
Alpha,
®
the first-ever breathable
puffy fabric. It allows a free exchange of air, so when you’re active you stay warm, dry and
comfortable. Developed for the U.S. Special Forces and now available for outdoor enthusiasts,
it takes protection, performance and you to a whole new place. Discover more at POLARTEC.COM
Polartec
®
and Polartec
®
Alpha
®
are registered
trademarks of Polartec, LLC. ©Polartec 2013

6 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE
PAGE 94
PAGE 48
FROM LEFT:
FILSON JACKET,
BONOBOS TIE,
PATAGONIA SHIRT
CONTENTS
01.14
C
L
O
C
K
W
I
S
E

F
R
O
M

T
O
P
:

I
N
G
A

H
E
N
D
R
I
C
K
S
O
N
;

C
O
U
R
T
E
S
Y

O
F

T
H
E
Q
;

C
O
U
R
T
E
S
Y

O
F

H
O
T
E
L

D
O
M
E
S
T
I
Q
U
E
;

A
N
D
R
E
W

T
O
B
I
N
/
F
O
C
U
S

I
M
A
G
E
S

L
T
D
HEALTHY
ESCAPES,
PAGE 36
22 DISPATCHES
First Look: Just when you thought
minimalist running shoes had taken
over, the ultra-cushy Hoka One One
bigfoots the party.
Primer: The best little stoner town
in Colorado.
Rising Star: For skier and model Sierra
Quitiquit, the snow always comes first.
Epic: Lonnie Dupre’s quest to tackle
Denali—alone, in the dead of winter.
Media: McKenzie Funk on the profiteers
who stand to get (really, really) rich
from global warming. Plus, Antarctica
on your coffee table.
Covet: Sledding, all grown up.
36 DESTINATIONS
Training: Hit reset this New Year with
a fitness-focused vacation, from cycling
in the Canary Islands to spa time in
sunny Mexico.
Base Camp: Off the grid in Jordan, the
Middle East’s oasis of peace.
Weekend Plan: Round up friends. Book
hut. Ski powder. Rebook next year.
Go List: ’Tis the season for good rum;
how to avoid ATM fraud; and a 3G-
enabled, waterproof, pocketable
point-and-shoot.
88 ESSENTIALS
Tech: Nikon’s AW1, the first everything-
proof interchangeable-lens camera.
Spectrum: From down super-puffies
to breathable shells, jackets for every
winter sport.
Stress Tested: Next-gen portable char-
gers keep your gadgets juiced on the go.
Base Layers: The art and science of
layering, explained.
94 STYLE
Pure and Simple: Boiled, blended, or
doubled up, wool is the season’s choice
for performance and good looks.
plus
8 EXPOSURE
16 BETWEEN THE LINES
112 PARTING SHOT

GNC—BEST PRODUCT. BEST
EXPERI ENCE. BEST RESULTS.
COME I N OR VI SI T US AT GNC. COM FOR
HEALTH AND WELLNESS SOLUTIONS TODAY
TRIPLE STRENGTH FISH OIL 1240
40% smal l er. 1000mg of t he omega-3s
EPA and DHA promote heart, joi nt, brai n,
eye and ski n heal t h. Pur i f i ed 5 t i mes.
Enteric coating helps reduce fishy burps.
^

^Each softgel capsule is enteric coated which allows the softgel
to break down and absorb in the small intestine. This controls or
reduces fshy burps. These statements have not been evaluated by
the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to
diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. Call 1.800.477.4462 or
visit GNC.com for the store nearest you. ©2013 General Nutrition
Corporation. May not be available outside the U.S.
THE ALPHA OF ALL
OMEGAS
TO GET THE TRUTH ABOUT FISH
OI L, VI SI T GNC. COM/ FI SHOI L

8 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE
0
1
.
1
4
THOMAS SENF
To shoot climber Stephan Siegrist scaling a frozen
waterfall near Eidfjord, Norway, last February, Senf
set up three pocket flashes, triggered them by remote
control, and captured this single image before the
lights burned out a few seconds later. “We’d planned
on installing a whole lighting system around the falls,
which would have given us more time to work, but the
conditions were too dangerous,” says the Interlaken,
Switzerland, photographer. “By the time we packed
up 30 minutes later, the flashes were covered in ice.”
THE TOOLS: Nikon D3, 24–70mm f/2.8 lens,
ISO 1,250, f/5.6, 1/2 second

Exposure

10 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE
GRANT GUNDERSON
Last March, after a blizzard dropped nearly ten feet of snow on Washington’s Mount
Baker, Gunderson and ski partner Josh Daiek headed into the backcountry and dis-
covered a series of short cliffs near the resort. To get this shot of Daiek dropping off
the rocks, the Bellingham, Washington, photographer positioned himself high on a
ridge 400 feet away. Between him and Daiek: an avalanche path. “I was a little ner-
vous to finish the line in the danger zone,” says Daiek, of South Lake Tahoe, California.
“But I stayed on my feet and blasted right through to the safety of the trees.”
THE TOOLS: Canon 1D X, 70–200mm f/2.8 lens, ISO 320, f/5, 1/1,000 second
Exposure
0
1
.
1
4

FROM SORTI NG GEAR TO SUMMI TI NG I N FREEZI NG RAI N, THERMOBALL I S THE BREAKTHROUGH
ALTERNATI VE TO DOWN I NSULATI ON. SEE WHY AT THENORTHFACE.COM/ THERMOBALL
12 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE
Exposure
0
1
.
1
4
GREG VON DOERSTEN
While in Valdez, Alaska, last
March, Von Doersten knew
he couldn’t miss the chance
to photograph big-mountain
skier Griffin Post carving this
rarely attempted 2,000-foot
line in the Chugach Moun-
tains. “Bad conditions shut us
down twice the week before,”
says the Jackson, Wyoming,
photographer, who waited
out the weather to get this
image. “But the curve of that
spine is so striking.” Says
Post: “It was incredibly sharp,
but I knew I had to ski it. I’m
going to remember that run
for the rest of my life.”
THE TOOLS: Canon 1D Mark
IV, 400mm f/4 lens, ISO 100,
f/5.6, 1/2,500 second

Wear it. Mount it. Love it.
™
GoPro App

Published by Mariah Media Network LLC • Outside was founded as Mariah in 1976
FOUNDER/CHAIRMAN LAWRENCE J. BURKE
EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT/CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER ANGELO GAZIANO
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT/CHIEF BRAND DEVELOPMENT OFFICER ANNE MOLLO-CHRISTENSEN
VICE PRESIDENT/PUBLISHER SCOTT PARMELEE
VICE PRESIDENT/EDITOR CHRISTOPHER KEYES
VICE PRESIDENT/CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER WILLIAM SCHUDLICH
VICE PRESIDENT/MANUFACTURING EILEEN RHINE
STRATEGIC PLANNING/SPECIALTY PUBLISHING DIRECTOR CHRISTINE SALEM @jchristinesalem
Editorial Offices: 400 Market Street, Santa Fe, NM 87501; 505-989-7100.
Advertising Offices: 420 Lexington Ave., Suite 440, New York, NY 10170; 212-972-4650. Submissions must
be accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope. Outside cannot be held responsible for unsolicited
material. Subscriber Service: For the fastest service, visit us online at outsideonline.com and click on “Cus-
tomer Service” on our home page. Or write to Outside, Box 6228, Harlan, IA 51593-1728 and enclose a copy
of your mailing label, or call 800-678-1131 (outside U.S., 515-248-7680; fax 712-623-5731). A scent-free sub-
scription is available upon request. Back Issues and Special Issues: Call 800-678-1131 or enclose a check or
money order for $7.95 per issue and mail to: Back Issues, Outside, Box 6228, Harlan, IA 51593-1728. Copyright
©2014 by Mariah Media Network LLC. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written per-
mission is prohibited. Views expressed herein are those of the author exclusively.
PAID CIRCULATION OVER 675,000
MEMBEROFTHEAUDITBUREAUOFCIRCULATIONS AND THE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS ASSOCIATION
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
CHAIRMAN/EDITOR IN CHIEF LAWRENCE J. BURKE
EDITORIAL
VICE PRESIDENT/EDITOR CHRISTOPHER KEYES @keyeser
DESIGN + PHOTOGRAPHY DIRECTOR HANNAH MCCAUGHEY @hannahoutside
DEPUTY EDITOR MARY TURNER @marylturner
SENIOR EXECUTIVE EDITOR MICHAEL ROBERTS @ultimateeditor
EXECUTIVE EDITOR SAM MOULTON @moultonsam
FEATURES EDITOR ELIZABETH HIGHTOWER ALLEN @ehightowerallen
COPY CHIEF SEAN COOPER @scooperoutside
SENIOR EDITORS GRAYSON SCHAFFER @graysonschaffer, ABE STREEP @abestreep
ASSOCIATE EDITORS KYLE DICKMAN @kyledickman, RYAN KROGH @ryankrogh
JONAH OGLES @jonahogles
ASSISTANT EDITORS MEAGHEN BROWN @meaghenbrown, MATT SKENAZY
COPY EDITOR ALETA BURCHYSKI
EDITORIAL DIRECTOR ALEX HEARD @alexheard
Editors at Large
TIM CAHILL, DAVID QUAMMEN, HAMPTON SIDES, RANDY WAYNE WHITE
Contributing Editors
BRUCE BARCOTT, DANIEL COYLE, KEVIN FEDARKO, IAN FRAZIER
BILL GIFFORD @billgifford, JOSHUA HAMMER, ERIC HANSEN
PETER HELLER , ROWAN JACOBSEN, MARK LEVINE, PETER MAASS
BRIAN MOCKENHAUPT, STEPHANIE PEARSON @stephanieapears
STEVEN RINELLA, MARSHALL SELLA, BOB SHACOCHIS, PATRICK SYMMES
@patricksymmes, ANDREW TILIN @atilin, TOM VANDERBILT @tomvanderbilt
BRAD WETZLER, FLORENCE WILLIAMS @flowill
Contributing Photographers
HARRY BORDEN @harrybordenuk, CHRIS BUCK, JAKE CHESSUM
JIMMY CHIN @jimkchin, DANNY CLINCH, ANDREW HETHERINGTON
@ahetherington, SAM JONES, ANTONIN KRATOCHVIL, JEFF LIPSKY
MATT MAHURIN, PAOLO MARCHESI, KURT MARKUS, ROBERT MAXWELL
CHRIS MCPHERSON @chrismcpherson_, SEAMUS MURPHY, DAN WINTERS
Correspondents
MARK ANDERS, KATIE ARNOLD, JON BILLMAN @jonbillman
W. HODDING CARTER, SARA CORBETT @yocorbett, JASON DALEY
JOSH DEAN @joshdean66, CHRISTIAN DEBENEDETTI @aletrail
DAVE HAHN, JACK HITT, BARRY LOPEZ, BUCKY MCMAHON
GORDY MEGROZ @gordymegroz, BRAD MELEKIAN @bradmelekian
TIM NEVILLE @tim_neville, MARC PERUZZI, KATE SIBER
TIM SOHN @tfsohn, CHRISTOPHER SOLOMON @chrisasolomon
PETER STARK, MIKE STEERE @ipaterfamilias, ROB STORY
MARK SUNDEEN, WELLS TOWER, THAYER WALKER @thayerwalker
DONOVAN WEBSTER, ELIZABETH WEIL @lizweil, TIM ZIMMERMANN @wetass
ART
ART DIRECTOR JOHN MCCAULEY @jm_mccauley
SENIOR DESIGNER JULIA AMIRZADOV @jamirzadov
PHOTOGRAPHY
PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR AMY SILVERMAN @silvermanamy
ASSISTANT PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR SARA BIELECKI
INTERN SHAYLA BLATCHFORD
STUDIO PHOTOGRAPHER INGA HENDRICKSON
OUTSIDE ONLINE
SITE DIRECTOR TODD HODGSON @toddhodgson
ONLINE EDITORIAL DIRECTOR NICK HEIL @nickheil
MANAGING EDITOR CATY ENDERS @catyenders
ASSOCIATE EDITOR WHITNEY DREIER @wdreier
ASSISTANT EDITOR SCOTT ROSENFIELD @scottrosenfield
EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS STEPHEN WAYNE KASICA @bystephenkasica
NICK KELLEY @nicwitit
INTERN ERIK TORMOEN @eriktormoen
WEB PRODUCER DANIEL D. SNYDER @danieldsnyder
WEB DEVELOPER BEN VORAN @bgreater
PRODUCTION
VICE PRESIDENT OF MANUFACTURING EILEEN RHINE @eileenrhine
AD PRODUCTION MANAGER JESSICA LYON
ART PRODUCTION MANAGER TRISH HUG
CLASSIFIED PRODUCTION MANAGER DON VALDEZ
CIRCULATION
CONSUMER MARKETING DIRECTOR PAUL ROLNICK (PROCIRC)
SUBSCRIPTION OPERATIONS DIRECTOR KAREN KING
AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT MANAGER JESSICA CEPEK
ADVERTISING
VICE PRESIDENT/PUBLISHER SCOTT PARMELEE
New York
DIGITAL SALES DIRECTOR CECELIA MAGNANI
NEW YORK ADVERTISING DIRECTOR TJ RAAB
PUBLISHER’S ASSISTANT DIANA QUINTANILLA
420 Lexington Ave., Suite 440, New York, NY 10170
212-972-4650, fax 212-949-7538
Atlanta
ED KOBYLUS (THE DICARLO GROUP)
SOUTHEAST SALES ASSISTANT TRACIE GARREN
320 Maxwell Road, Suite 400, Alpharetta, GA 30004
770-667-9500, fax 770-667-9700
Boston
ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER JENNIFER PALMER @jpalms
79 Blue Hills Parkway, Milton, MA 02186
617-690-3212, fax 617-690-3267
Boulder
ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER CICI SHICK
ACTIVE TRAVELER/DIRECT RESPONSE DIRECTOR LESLI LAWRENCE
FIRST GEAR/DIRECT RESPONSE DIRECTOR
BRITTANY GARRISON-PEGUES
DIGITAL ADVERTISING MANAGER ANNA HORSCH
DIGITAL ADVERTISING COORDINATOR ANNIE ENGLER
WESTERN ADVERTISING COORDINATOR SAMANTHA HILLE
2601 31st St., Suite 200, Boulder, CO 80301
303-440-2722, fax 303-440-3517
Chicago
ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER JANET MCKEVITT
SALES + MARKETING COORDINATOR MEGAN GOGGIN
444 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 3350, Chicago, IL 60611
312-222-1100, fax 312-222-1189
Detroit
MIKE PETERS, JAMES MCNULTY (FUEL DETROIT)
ADVERTISING ASSISTANT JILL RANDALL
2150 Butterfield Ave., Suite 230, Troy, MI 48084
248-649-3835, fax 248-649-5638
Hawaii
DEBBIE ANDERSON @dmh2200 (DESTINATION
MARKETING HAWAII)
3555 Harding Ave., Suite 2C, Honolulu, HI 96816
808-739-2200, fax 808-739-2201
Los Angeles
ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER NICOLE OZMAI
43 Oakcliff Dr., Laguna Niguel, CA 92677
949-464-5776, fax 949-607-4951
San Francisco
ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER KATE PARKER MULLER
P.O. Box 620854, Woodside, CA 94062
650-529-1350, fax 650-529-1352
Texas/Oklahoma
KAILEY LATTERI (WNP MEDIA)
HALEY DORAN
4217 Camden Ave., Dallas, TX 75206
214-824-9008, fax 214-824-9009
Latin America
PATRICIA ECHENIQUE (PLANMARKETING)
Sonora 1030, Colonia El Manglito, La Paz, Baja California Sur CP 23060,
México; tel 011-52-612-145-1061, fax 011-52-55-5004-4450
MARKETING
DIRECTOR OF MARKETING JENNIFER WITTMAN @wittjen
RESEARCH DIRECTOR TIM BROWN
MARKETING ART DIRECTOR NATHAN MUELLER @ntmueller
ADMINISTRATION
HUMAN RESOURCES DIRECTOR MARY LOU ORTEGA-SHAW
ACCOUNTING MANAGER CYNTHIA THORNTON
DIRECTOR OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY JUAN BERNARDEZ
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ADMINISTRATOR ADAM JENNÉ
ACCOUNTING CHRISTIE MICHAEL
OPERATIONS ANALYST DOUGLAS HILL
BUILDING MANAGER MARCOS GUERRERO
EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT NICOLE MARTINEZ
SECURITY CHIEF LENA SAMSON
FOREIGN EDITIONS
Go Outside Brazil
EDITOR ANDREA ESTEVAM
@gooutsidebr
[email protected]

Outside China
EDITOR YANG BO
[email protected]
Outside Sweden
EDITOR GLENN MATTSING
[email protected]
Follow us on Twitter
1.800.446.5938 skicb.com/deals
4th night & 4th day
Buy 3 nights of lodging and
3 days of lift tickets and your
4th night and 4th day are FREE
Available Jan. 3 – Mar. 8, 2014. Blackout dates &
restrictions apply. Call about air travel discounts!
P
h
o
t
o
:

A
l
e
x

F
e
n
l
o
n

P
h
o
t
o
:

J
C

L
e
a
c
o
c
k
incomparably
Te last great Colorado ski town
TM
1.800.446.5938 skicb.com Real. Easy.
TM

16 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE
F
R
O
M

T
O
P
:

G
R
A
Y
S
O
N

S
C
H
A
F
F
E
R
;

M
I
C
H
A
E
L

K
A
R
S
H
;

L
I
A
M

D
O
R
A
N
;

C
O
U
R
T
E
S
Y

O
F

E
L
L
I
O
T
T

D
.

W
O
O
D
S
;

M
A
T
T

P
O
W
E
R
“MACA IS A FOOD FOR EPIC SEX. AMONG THE HOT PLANTS, MACA IS AS HOT AS THEY GET.”
—MEDICINE HUNTER CHRIS KILHAM, PAGE 74
Happy Now?
Between the Lines
0
1
.
1
4
SOFTER, SLOWER, SADDER, SLEEPIER
In “The Pursuit of Happiness” (page 50), we recommend 37 strategies for elevating your
mood and increasing your quality of life. Curious, we decided to gauge our own happiness
levels. Outside staffers responded to a survey of lifestyle habits, and we compared the
answers with national averages. The result? We need to take our own advice.
ELLIOTT D. WOODS
Iraq-based writer Woods has reported on conflicts in Afghanistan,
Egypt, and Gaza. For this month’s “Man Under” (page 80), he con-
fronted a different kind of tragedy: the April 2013 drowning of 28-year-
old Avishek Sengupta during a Tough Mudder event in West Virginia.
Woods spent six months digging through sheriff’s reports, interview-
ing risk-management experts and Tough Mudder officials, and talking
to Sengupta’s friends and family, who were preparing a multimillion-
dollar gross-negligence lawsuit as Outside went to press. The resulting
story recounts the disturbing details of Sengupta’s death and pres-
ents a troubling picture of safety practices at obstacle races. “I still
think participants can get a lot out of them,” Woods says. “But after
reporting this, I doubt I’ll ever run one.”
DIGITAL
EXCLUSIVE
Our online snow
report features gear
reviews, lodging
suggestions, fitness
tips, and more.
outsideonline
.com/snow-report
National average Outside average
Hours of sleep
per week
46.9
41.6
Hours of screen
time per week
39
55.8
**
Hours of
exercise per
week
2
6
***
Alcoholic
beverages per
week
4
6.9
*
Qualifying responses:
* “Halloween party,” “It was my birthday,” “Go Sox!”
** “Eight hours a day for 14 years. Ouch.”—Senior executive editor Michael Roberts
*** “Bocce ball counts, right?” —Associate editor Kyle Dickman
Last February, Outside Online posted a brief
News from the Field item titled “Study: Bike
Commuters Are Happiest.” The story drew
a ridiculous amount of traffic for something
just 117 words long, but perhaps that’s not
surprising. Americans may not rank in the
top ten on the UN’s annual Happiness Index
(in the 2013 report, we’re down at number
17 of 156 nations), but if the survey gauged
obsession with the topic, there’s no question
we’d lead the category. Thomas Jefferson pro-
claimed in the Declaration of Independence
that chasing happiness was our God-given
right, and over the centuries we’ve come to
interpret this as a moral obligation—with
libraries full of self-help books to prove it. If
we’re not happy, something must be wrong,
and action must be taken!
Which is probably why the news that bike
commuting can make you happier got the
attention of so many readers. It had a similar
impact around the office: the revelation was
one of the seeds for this month’s cover story,
“The Pursuit of Happiness” (page 50). We
spent the past several months sifting through
a large quantity of new research to compile a
list of small habits that offer a shortcut to the
good life. When I read the finished piece, I got
up from my desk to fill a water bottle (being
hydrated makes you less pessimistic),
launched iTunes on my computer (music
releases dopamine), and cooked up a big slab
of elk meat on the camp stove on my desk.
(That last part’s not true, but elk really does
help synthesize serotonin.) It feels good to
know that fulfilling our national duty is so
much easier than we thought.
—CHRISTOPHER KEYES (@KEYESER)

THE NEW VISA
®
BLACK CARD
MADE OF STAINLESS STEELSM
Black Card Members Enjoy: An Industry-Leading Rewards Program § Exclusive 24-Hour Concierge Service
VIP Treatment at over 3,000 Properties § Unlimited VIP Airport Lounge Visits
Members Only - Black Card Magazine § Luxury Gifts from the World’s Top Brands
BLACKCARD is a registered trademark used under license. © 2007-2013 Black Card LLC. Patent Pending. Visa Black Card is issued by Barclays Bank Delaware.
APPLY NOW AT BLACKCARD.COM OR CALL 866-BLACK CARD.

©2013 Balance Bar Company 13-BB-1043ra
D
A
N

W
I
N
T
E
R
S
these men, and
loved these men.
This is by far the
best article I have
read about what
happened. I want
to thank you for
giving us a no-fault,
no-finger-pointing
account. Something
0
1
.
1
4
into any situation.
They were the best
at what they did. For
a lot of critics, the
decisions made that
day are pretty easy
to examine and pick
apart three months
after the fact, but
things are a little
different in the field,
with nothing more
than a split second
to make a life-or-
death decision.
MATT DEMENNA
ONLINE
Since it arrived
in the mail, the
November issue has
haunted me from
the coffee table.
Each time I pass it,
carrying a baby in
my arms, I see the
image of the hotshot
on the cover and my
heart breaks. Seeing
must be learned
from all this, but
that doesn’t mean
we need to belittle
our brothers’ mem-
ory. I worked under
Eric Marsh and Jesse
Steed and would
have blindly fol-
lowed either of them
my nine-year-old
son’s gangly legs
peeking out from
behind that gut-
wrenching cover as
he reads “Sun King”
(November), I feel
a pang of unease.
Each of those 19
men were once
someone’s baby,
someone’s crazy
son, wild-eyed and
in love with the out-
doors. And with that
simple, aching truth
lodged in my mind, I
cannot bring myself
to read “Nineteen.”
STEPHANIE PAIR
INDIALANTIC,
FLORIDA
As a firefighter who
served on hotshot
crews for years, I
know how difficult it
was for Dickman to
capture not only the
FEEDBACK
THE FIRE
THIS TIME
Associate editor
Kyle Dickman’s
November cover
story, “Nineteen,”
about the deadly
Yarnell Hill Fire in
Arizona, inspired
some of the longest
and most passion-
ate reader response
we’ve seen in years.
I worked for Granite
Mountain in 2012.
I knew these men,
worked with these
men, lived with

BY THE NUMBERS
$800
Price per night to stay in Bode Miller’s four-bedroom, three-bath “estate”
in the mountain town of Carroll, New Hampshire (airbnb.com/rooms/
1352710). Read more about Bode’s final quest for Olympic gold in Rachel
Sturtz’s “It’s Miller Time” (page 62).
Between the Lines
TM TM
C
O
U
R
T
E
S
Y

O
F

A
I
R
B
N
B
events leading up
to the deployments
and subsequent
deaths, but also the
family stories before
and after. At some
point, I’m sure he
felt like he couldn’t
go on with it. Yet he
saw it through, con-
stantly hoping for
a different outcome,
knowing that it was
not to be.
TED
STUBBLEFIELD
RIDGEFIELD,
WASHINGTON
MOTHER
KNOWS BEST
The loss of life and
the destruction of
property detailed
in both “Down By
the Seaside with
Dr. Doom” and
“Nineteen” were
poignantly de-
scribed. Going back
a number of years,
there were experts
who warned about
climate change and
the consequences
of coastal devel-
opment. Decades
ago, other experts
warned about the
consequences of
residential and com-
mercial develop-
ment in many areas
of the West, due to
water challenges
and the possibility
of wildfires. In each
case, the experts
were ignored.
Loss of life and
extensive prop-
erty damage will
continue if people
ignore lessons from
the past and rebuild
in areas that are
not safe. When will
we learn the hard
lessons that Mother
Nature is attempt-
ing to teach us?
FRANK MICHAEL
BOLOGNA
HOUSTON, TEXAS
WISH GRANTED
Last year I applied
for the Outside
adventure grant.
Though I didn’t
get picked, in May
I quit my job to go
on the adventure I
had planned for the
grant. It lasted three
months and brought
me to 13 countries,
CONTACT US:
[email protected], facebook.com/
outsidemagazine, @outsidemagazine

20 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE
F
R
O
M

T
O
P
:

H
A
N
N
A
H

M
C
C
A
U
G
H
E
Y

A
N
D

G
R
A
Y
S
O
N

S
C
H
A
F
F
E
R

(
2
)
;

C
O
U
R
T
E
S
Y

O
F

L
O
L
L
I
P
O
P

(
5
)
0
1
.
1
4
two continents, and
countless cities. I
watched bullfight-
ing and flamenco
dancing, took city
walking tours, saw
my first opera in an
open-air garden
lit by candles, saw
dozens of open mar-
kets, haggled prices
with locals, and ate
everything I possibly
could. I took a five-
hour cooking class
in Thailand, learned
about pearl mining
in Vietnam, took
a historical tour of
Scotland, and spent
FEEDBACK (CONT.)
some time volun-
teering in Laos.
I was mugged
in Malaysia and
Cambodia. And
without fail, I ran
at least three miles
in every country,
often finding myself
lost beyond reason.
I thank you for
helping me make a
decision I’d wanted
to make for years.
I’m looking ahead
with uncertainty but
with bright eyes.
JESSENIA ELIZA
BROOKLYN,
NEW YORK
Between the Lines
JUST SHOOT US
For our November Style section, featuring citified performance apparel from classic
American brands (“Even Better than the Real Thing”), we photographed assistant
editors Matt “Triscuit”Skenazy and Scott “Ritz”Rosenfield in $3,230 worth of clothing.
Some of you liked their looks. Others didn’t.
BY OUR CONTRIBUTORS
Last August, photographer Joshua Paul, who has shot for Outside in Tibet and Mozambique, and designer Tom Brown, who created
the look for our November ski report, introduced Lollipop (lollipop-gp.com), a magazine that dedicates each issue to a single Formula
One Grand Prix race. “We’re treating them as historical documents,” says Paul, “a collector’s photo journal of the event.”
Jeffrey Lawn Dude, seriously? Is this Hipster Barista Monthly or Outside magazine?
Like · Reply · 2 · October 18 at 9:42am
Tony Locken Is he wearing a purse?
Like · Reply · October 18 at 8:57am
Susan Bloch Marhoffer They can both eat crackers in my bed…
Like · Reply · 6 · October 18 at 8:54am via mobile
THE WOODSHED
In “The Disrupters”(December), we
mistakenly identified BASE jumper Felix
Baumgartner as Australian. He is Aus-
trian. And in “Down by the Seaside with
Dr. Doom”(November), we incorrectly
identified a flooded roller coaster as
located in Sea Bright, New Jersey. The
coaster is located near Seaside Heights,
New Jersey. We regret the errors.

The most breathable Eddie Bauer freeride jacket ever built, available
in award-winning shell and insulated styles. Constructed with durable,
3-layer waterproof Polartec
®
NeoShell
®
fabric that breathes to regulate body
heat. Guide built and trusted by Eddie Bauer snowboarder Wyatt Caldwell.

22 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE
DISPATCHES
NEWS FROM THE FIELD

OUTSI DEONLI NE. COM 23 Photograph by INGA HENDRICKSON
01.14
Sole Power
HOW A CUSHY CLOWN SHOE
IS UPENDING THE MINIMALIST-
RUNNING REVOLUTION
by Gordy Megroz
IN 2010, A FRENCH adventure racer named
Nicolas Mermoud approached Karl Meltzer,
the accomplished American ultrarunner,
and asked him to try out a pair of running
shoes he’d designed. They looked bizarre,
like moon boots, and were wider, thicker,
and softer than typical running shoes—
two and a half times beefier and 30 percent
cushier. Meltzer, who had been training
with conventional running shoes, was
skeptical, but he laced them up and cruised
around his Sandy, Utah, neighborhood. He
was shocked by how forgiving they were.
Halfway through the run, he was sold.
Within three months, Meltzer dropped
his sponsor, La Sportiva, which specializes
in lightweight trail runners, and started
competing in Mermoud’s creation, the
Hoka One One. The shoes gave Meltzer’s
career new life, and by April 2011, he’d won
his first race in a year—a brutal 26.2-mile
trail run in Utah. Three weeks later, he won

24 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE
First Look
0
1
.
1
4
a 100-miler in Virginia, followed by a victory
at Alabama’s Pinhoti 100 in November. “Peo-
ple thought they looked like clown shoes,
but I didn’t care,” he says. “I could float over
rocks and not feel anything.”
Meltzer’s wins came at a time when bare-
foot running, the biggest fitness trend in
years, was hitting its zenith. Sales of mini-
malist shoes had exploded by more than 400
percent. But he was just one of many max-
cushion converts. In the past two years, more
than a dozen elite ultrarunners have begun
racing in Hokas, including 38-year-old Darcy
Africa, who won the 2013 Hardrock 100 in a
pair, and Dave Mackey, who captured two
victories last year at age 43. A growing num-
ber of amateurs have followed their lead. In
2010, the first year Hokas were available to
the public, the shoes were being sold in 80
specialty running stores worldwide. In 2013,
over 350 dealers were stocking them, includ-
ing REI and Road Runner Sports, with 32 U.S.
locations. At Utah’s Speedgoat 50K last July,
a third of the 275 runners who crossed the
finish line were sporting Hokas. All of which
has industry insiders wondering if Mer-
moud’s creation will derail the minimalist
running revolution.
“When the minimalist movement hit,
people were excited to try it,” says Mark Sul-
livan, editor of Running Insight, which cov-
ers the industry. The surge of interest caught
many by surprise. In 2010, minimalist run-
ning shoes represented a third of the overall
market. Then the blowback began. A num-
ber of runners who made the switch without
adopting proper form— leaning forward and
taking shorter strides—suffered injuries. By
2013, market share had fallen to 15 percent.
Runners who just wanted to head out the door
and not worry too much about technique
began gravitating back to traditional shoes.
“Most runners are looking to feel healthy and
have fun,” says Sullivan. “For them, a shoe
that’s more forgiving is a better shoe.”
Mermoud and his business partner, Jean-
Luc Diard, didn’t set out to take down mini-
malist running when they launched Hoka in
2009. The duo had been competing in adven-
ture races and envisioned a shoe that would
be the equivalent of a downhill mountain bike
or a powder ski. “Mountain bikes addressed
tough terrain with big tires and shocks, and
oversize skis allowed you to float,” says Diard,
56. “We wanted to make a shoe that worked
the same way.” Their first obstacle was cre-
ating a foam that was thick and soft but also
light. For that they tapped a chemist at a
Chinese shoe manufacturer, who set about
reimag ining the squishy ethylene vinyl ace-
tate found in most shoes—using proprietary
chemicals and applying different baking
methods—until he’d created a sole with
29 millimeters of cushioning, a 19- millimeter
boost over traditional shoes, without any
added weight. Then they included extra
rocker to the sole, allowing for better forward
propulsion. The resulting shoe, the Hoka One
One (named after a Maori phrase meaning
“to fly”) appeared at a moment when ultra-
runners were growing in number. “They were
our first adopters,” says Diard, “But we’re
seeing more and more athletes from different
sports using our shoes for training.”
In October 2012, Hoka was acquired by
Deckers Outdoor Corporation, the billion-
dollar company behind Teva and Ugg. At the
time, Jim Van Dine, the man put in charge of
the new division, said that Hoka could be-
come a $100 million brand, putting it on par
with Keen or Merrell. Since the takeover, sales
have spiked by 400 percent, from $2.2 mil-
lion to over $10 million, despite the fact that
a pair of Hokas run $160—twenty or thirty
dollars more than typical running shoes. The
success has spurred a handful of competi-
tors to rush development of their own max-
cushioned shoes. In December, Altra debuted
the Olympus, with a 32- millimeter sole. The
similarly sized Brooks Transcend and New
Balance Fresh Foam come out in February,
and the Vasque ShapeShifter Ultra in March.
Hoka’s latest model, the Conquest, is avail-
able in January.
To date, there has been almost no sci-
entific research on the benefits of oversize
soles. Anecdotally, runners report a more
relaxed ride and reduced recovery times after
long runs or races. And many runners with
chronic injuries say the shoes have let them
run comfortably for the first time in years.
Not surprisingly, diehard minimalists
aren’t buying into Hoka’s bigger-is-better
concept. Some critics contend that the soft
foam absorbs too much of the energy runners
use to propel themselves forward, especially
on the flats. “Minimalist shoes teach you to
use your body to cushion impact,” says Irene
Davis, director of the Spaulding National
Running Center at Harvard Medical School
and a close colleague of Dan Lieberman,
barefoot running’s founding philosopher.
“These shoes don’t teach you that. As the
cushioning wears out after 200 or 300 miles,
the aches and pains will start.”
Of course, that sounds a lot like what tra-
ditional runners were saying back when the
minimalist movement was taking off. That
injuries have been a part of the trend has
done little to slow sales. Whether or not
max-cushioned shoes ever get as popular,
despite higher cost and the possibility of in-
jury down the road, is the billion-dollar ques-
tion. “Every body is watching this category
closely,” Sullivan says. “If it continues to be
successful, we’ll see just about every brand
with some version of these shoes.” O
“Most runners are looking to feel healthy
and have fun,” says Mark Sullivan, editor of
Running Insight. “For them, a shoe that’s
more forgiving is a better shoe.”
SOLE
THICKNESS
MARKET
SHARE
(2013)
2%
Traditional
6 to 18 millimeters
83%
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z 15%
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
z
Minimalist
Less than 6 millimeters
Max Cushioned
More than 18 millimeters
SOURCES: Leisure Trends Group, Running Insight


26 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE Illustration by MARK TODD
It’s the Joint!
WELCOME TO TELLURIDE, THE BEST
LITTLE STONER TOWN IN AMERICA
by Jonah Ogles
STARTING IN JANUARY, it’s legal to
smoke marijuana recreationally in Colo-
rado. You can buy it, carry it, admire its
crystals, and use it in private without fear of
getting busted by state or local authorities.
(It’s technically still illegal under federal
law, but the Justice Department has said it
has little intention of getting involved.) In
response, Centennial State entrepreneurs
are launching weed-tourism businesses,
from pot-farm tours (my420tours.com)
to a toker-friendly airport-to-resort shut-
tle (coloradohighlifetours.com). Among
mountain towns, tiny Telluride (pop. 2,300)
is doing the most to welcome red-eyed ski -
ers and snowboarders. The former mining
hub has four—four!— recreational dispen-
saries, and unlike Breckenridge, which is
forcing its pot shops out of the downtown
area, Telluride is stoking legal-weed busi-
nesses by fast-tracking permits and allow-
ing operators to grow plants within city
limits. Here’s a street-level guide to the
new Rocky Mountain high.
A N S W E R S : 1 . B E A V E R C R E E K O 2 . V A I L X
3 . I N D I C A B L E N D J J 4 . T E L L U R I D E X X
5 . A S P E N O 6 . S A T I V A B L E N D J 7 . I N D I C A B L E N D J J J
8 . B R E C K E N R I D G E X X 9 . I N D I C A B L E N D J J J J
1 0 . S A T I V A B L E N D J J J
THE QUIZ
SKI RUN OR POT STRAIN?
(EXTRA CREDIT: GUESS THE POTENCY)
Primer
0
1
.
1
4
THE ENDORSEMENT
GO SMOKE-FREE
Among enlightened
skiers and snowboard-
ers, the toking tool of
choice is the vaporizer,
which heats up the
bud without burning
it—so you can inhale
the THC without taking
in the toxins that come
with breathing smoke.
Ploom’s Pax ($250;
ploom.com) offers a
sleek design, and unlike
vaporizers made for
ganja-oil concentrates,
it works great with
standard-issue dried
buds (or, you know,
so we’ve been told).
Just pop open the
oven and wait for the
light to turn, yes, green.
1. Gold Rush
2. Genghis Khan
3. Blue Thunder
4. Happy Thought
5. Dipsy Doodle
6. Deadman
7. Endless Sky
8. Devil’s Crotch
9. Silver Tip
10. White Haze
RULES OF THE REEFER
PARSING COLORADO’S NEW MARIJUANA LAW
1. If you’re over 21 and a resident, you’re allowed to purchase an ounce at a time. If you’re just visiting,
it’s a quarter-ounce. Either way, it’s illegal to have more than an ounce on you.
2. It’s illegal to smoke in public, so no bong hits at the local park, bar, or concert venue. Same goes
for most ski areas, since they operate on federal land.
3. Cops can give you a DUI-D (for drugs) if a blood test shows more than 0.5 nanogram of THC per
milliliter. And leave your stash in the trunk to avoid an open-container ticket.
Last Dollar
Saloon
For a late-night
thirst quencher,
the Buck (as
locals refer to it)
has $2 PBRs. 100
E. Colorado Ave.
Alpine Wellness
Directly above
Telluride institu-
tion Maggie’s
Bakery and Café.
Order the Blue
Widow, then go
downstairs for a
sticky bun. 300
W. Colorado Ave.
Delilah
Grows its own hybrids,
like the ultra-strong
Blue Dragon. 115 W.
Colorado Ave.
Mountainside Inn
It’s practically
ski-in, ski-out,
with a big, lightly
patrolled patio
and hot tub.
333 S. Davis St.
Telluride
Green Room
Two words:
pot brownies.
250 S. Fir St.
Baked in Telluride
Warning: not a
dispensary. But
the Boston cream
donuts are out
of this world.
127 S. Fir St.
River Trail
Follows the
San Miguel on
city property
and is secluded.
Just saying.
Brown Dog Pizza
The best in town,
and it’s open until
midnight during ski
season. 110 E. Colo-
rado Ave.
Telluride Bud
Company
Carries more than
30 strains, includ ing
Heavenly Haze, a
mellow sativa blend.
135 S. Spruce St.
Dispensary
Bar/restaurant
Lodging


28 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE Photograph by GRAYSON SCHAFFER
Rising Star
0
1
.
1
4
Ice Princess
SIERRA QUITIQUIT
SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH
by Megan Michelson
MODEL/SKIER. That’s the label most
often used to describe 24-year-old Park
City, Utah, native Sierra Quitiquit. But unlike
most women who’ve tried to straddle those
two worlds, Quitiquit is actually holding
her own in both. Last winter, while she was
skiing 4,000-foot lines in Iceland for War-
ren Miller’s latest film, Ticket to Ride, her
image was plastered on a billboard in New
York’s Times Square, part of her gig with
the apparel brand American Eagle. Last fall,
the five-foot-ten-inch
former Freeskiing World
Tour competitor also
appeared in Sweetgrass
Productions’ Valhalla,
where she plays a free-
spirited woodswoman.
ASCENDANCY: Quiti-
quit grew up ski racing
in Utah, and she spent
winters in a modified
15-passenger van with her parents and
three brothers. “It was not a normal child-
hood,”she says. “It was a bit like being raised
by wolves.”
FREE BIRD: In 2012, the international talent
agency Ford Models called to offer Quitiquit
a contract in Chicago. At the time, she was
living on a cherry orchard in Hood River,
Oregon, skiing constantly, and earning her
room and board with small modeling gigs.
She turned the offer down. “Moving to the
city and pounding the pavement sounded
like misery to me,” she says.
THAT BASTARD: In 2011, while living in
Jackson, Wyoming, Quitiquit skied Fat
Bastard, an infamous line in the Jackson
Hole backcountry that ends with a 50-foot
air over a cliff. She nailed the landing, then
later hit town wearing a dress and her hair
down. “This guy approached me and was
like, ‘You must not be from around here. I’d
love to take you skiing and show you the
ropes,’ ” she says.
UP NEXT: Quitiquit is practicing tricks on
trampolines, with plans to work freestyle
moves like backflips and 360s into her big-
mountain lines, especially when she heads
to Alaska this winter. For now, modeling is
a summer gig. Says Quiti quit: “Skiing will
always be my first priority.”
150
HEIGHT, IN
FEET, OF
QUITIQUIT’S
BILLBOARD
IN TIMES
SQUARE


30 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE
Photograph by TODD MCCLELLAN
Dead of Winter
IF ALASKA’S 20,320-foot Mount McKinley is unforgiving during the spring climbing season, North America’s highest peak is downright
lethal in winter, with 100-mile-per-hour winds and temperatures so low they turn stove fuel into Karo syrup. This year, polar explorer
Lonnie Dupre aims to become the first person to summit the peak solo in January, via the West Buttress route. And if anyone knows how
to prepare for a dark, frigid slog, it’s 52-year-old Dupre, who has crossed the 3,000-mile Northwest Passage in winter, circumnavigated
Greenland, and skied from Canada to the North Pole. So why does he keep heading back to Denali? “It’s the ultimate proving ground,” he
says. “But it’s also selfish. I want all that beauty to myself.” Above, what Dupre carries to stay alive. —CHRIS SOLOMON
BACON
Dupre will carry in
60 pounds of food
to last the entire
trip. His favorite:
deep-fried, thick-
cut, double-smoked
bacon dipped in
maple syrup and
vacuum packed.
OVERSIZE BOOTS
“I have size 8 feet, but I bring
size 12 mountaineering boots,”
says Dupre. “I stuff them with
synthetic-felt liners. My feet
are still chilly, but I’ve never
gotten bad frostbite.”
FUR GLOVES
For finger protec-
tion, Dupre wears
wolverine-fur mitts
lined with wool from
Faroe Island sheep,
which have a pro-
tective lanolin that
helps wick moisture.
BAMBOO WANDS
Dupre will bring
175 of these, a quarter
of which have reflec-
tive tape, to mark his
route. “A little piece
of that tape may save
your life,”he says.
CUSTOM SKIS
To negotiate the
lower mountain,
Dupre uses eight-
foot-long home-
made skis carved
from birch trees
that grow on his
property in northern
Minnesota.
ONESIE
To keep out drafts,
Dupre zips into a
one-piece, goose-
down- insulated suit.
Epic
0
1
.
1
4

32 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE Photograph by SIAN KENNEDY
Media
0
1
.
1
4
Melt Money
There have been plenty of books documenting the myriad ways that climate
change will take us all down. In Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warm-
ing (Penguin, $28), Seattle journalist and frequent Outside contributor McKenzie
Funk takes a contrarian approach, reporting on the people—and, in the case of
Greenland and Canada, countries—that are poised to profit handsomely from
the coming chaos. Funk tracks down Arctic oil strategists, Israeli snowmakers,
arable-land grabbers, and those cunning enough to privatize public services, from
water delivery to firefighting. So is it pragmatism, opportunism, or pure steely
greed? FLORENCE WILLIAMS caught up with Funk to discuss the new boom.
OUTSIDE: How did you figure out there
were so many people trying to make a
buck off global warming?
FUNK: In 2010, I read that there was a
Canadian military mission asserting the
country’s claim on the Northwest Passage.
My first thought was, That’s absurd. Who’s
afraid of the Canadian military? My second
was, Hey, they’re looking for an opportunity.
The effects of climate change are real, and
there’s a rush up there in the Arctic. I decided
to look at how others are repositioning for
the new reality. Some were predictable, like
the burgeoning movement in Greenland to
Wall Street has its own set of morals. I write
about an American investor partnering with
a feared warlord in South Sudan to buy
land. As a libertarian, he believed in what he
was doing beyond just making money. He
thought that private investment was more
stable than aid. Would I go partner with a
warlord so he would burn down the city of
Juba to create a libertarian peace? No. But
this investor has a poodle, a wife, kids he
loves. He was a nice guy. There aren’t that
many perfect villains in the world.
You note that the same oil companies
that created the climate catastrophe
will also be the ones to profit from it.
That’s not very satisfying. Where’s the
retribution narrative?
Climate change is a moral failing for the
rich, but it’s a moral failing for the rest of
us, too, because we haven’t done anything
about it. It takes a lot of complacency to build
a seawall around New York and let the prob-
lems pile up on the other side of the world.
We’re going to save ourselves first. A lot of us
don’t have that much to worry about, and
that raises the moral stakes. You’re screwing
someone else if you’re American.
attain independence from Denmark, based
on revenue from oil under the melting ice.
Others were more surprising, like oil compa-
nies buying up water rights in the American
West for oil and gas extraction.
You write, “There is something crass
about profiting off disaster, certainly,
but there is nothing fundamentally
wrong with it.” Why not? Aren’t you a
jerk if, like some Wall Street bankers,
you buy up Ukrainian farmland from
peasants in exchange for vodka?
I found that example the most difficult.
SOUTHERN EXPOSURE
Most of us will never see the wildest intact
marine ecosystem on earth, Antarctica’s
Ross Sea. Which is why Boulder, Colorado,
photographer and filmmaker John Weller
has spent the better part of a decade
shooting there, to illustrate what would be
lost to warming seas and overfishing. The
results of that dedication are out now, in
the form of the activist documentary The
Last Ocean and a photo book of the same
name (Rizzoli, $50). The film is a bit slow
and hard to find, airing at international
festivals, but the book is worth a spot on
your coffee table: a foreword by ecologist
Carl Safina adds gravitas, and the photos
are urgent and wild. —ABE STREEP
>See an exclusive gallery from The Last
Ocean at outsideonline.com/lastocean.

The new TomTom Runner GPS Watch uses easy to read, full-screen graphics to help
you achieve your personal best time. So you can focus on your run, instead of on
your watch. tomtom.com/sports
SEE MORE. ACHIEVE MORE.
T
y
y

Drop
-
ins are always welcome. Drop
-
ins are always welcome.
0
1
.
1
4
Photograph by INGA HENDRICKSON

Taos Ski Valley Taos Ski Valley
Covet
All Downhill
SLEDDING GROWS UP—ALMOST
by Ryan Krogh
WHEN SELECTING a craft, sledding purists such as myself are guided by
a time-honored principle: less control equals more fun. Thus our predilection
for saucers, toboggans, and other wood and plastic artifacts from mountain
sports’ pre-helmet era. Today’s contraptions have too many moving parts,
high-tech materials, and cumbersome safety features. I recently encountered
a sled that was designed to be ridden on one’s knees in order to facilitate
halfpipe-style tricks. No, thanks.
But I am willing to make one sop to modernity, in the form of Hammerhead’s
Pro XLD—an elegant, high-performance machine capable of frighteningly fast
descents. Polycarbonate skis make pinpoint turns easy, and a four-foot-long
aluminum frame with tensioned webbing allow proper position for a steer-
able sled: belly down, headfirst, with a POV like Mario Kart. Included in the
instructions is the cautionary “Not a toy.”
Maybe, but the XLD is built for fun. I like to hike up my local ski hill at
dawn, before the chairlifts open, then bomb down the freshly groomed runs
at 40 miles per hour, carving wide arcs and, if I must, braking by dragging
the toes of my boots in the snow. Skidding to a stop in front of the lift line, I
usually get blank stares and the occasional “Sickbird!” Recently, a helicopter
mom who’d been busy triple-checking her eight-year-old’s mitten leashes
raised her head long enough to shoot me a disapproving glare. The kid stared at
me like I was Batman. “Don’t worry,” I said as I stood up. “You’ll be old enough
soon.” $349; hammerheadsleds.com

36 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE
mile hauls up some of the same steep, green-
pastured cols that the pros ride in the Tour
de Romandie. After that, guests jump off the
bike for a run on soft trails through pine for-
ests and a swim in an outdoor pool with views
of snow-dusted peaks. The camps are offered
all summer, but sign up now for the one that
begins on May 14, which culminates in an
Ironman-worthy test piece: the Cyclotour du
Léman, a 112-mile loop around Lake Geneva,
where riders practice their peloton skills
while taking in the spectacular, steep-peaked
scenery. From $1,900; brevet.cc
CHILL STATE
Tecate, Mexico
Think of Rancho la Puerta, an hour south-
east of San Diego, as a data-driven relaxation
retreat. For years, stressed-out Californians
have come to the 3,000-acre property to hike
the desert, learn yoga and mindfulness, get
deep-tissue massages, and linger over mostly
vegetarian meals sourced from the six-acre
organic garden. Last April, Rancho la Puerta P
A
T
I
T
U
C
C
I

P
H
O
T
O
DESTINATIONS 01.14
WHERE TO GO NOW
Climbing the
Wetterhorn
HIGH ROAD
Lausanne, Switzerland
The hardest thing about training for a tri-
athlon is the tedium. Mix it up with one of
Brevet’s new five-day training camps in the
Swiss Alps, based in the small towns of Les
Diablerets and Lausanne. Coaches offer tips
on training, recovery, and technical skills like
descending switchbacks on daily 25-to-50-
Dream Bigger
DON’T TACKLE THAT RESOLUTION ALONE. THESE TRIPS WILL TEACH YOU
SKILLS, LEAD YOU UP SUMMITS, AND LEAVE YOU PLENTY OF TIME TO RELAX.
by Kate Siber

PERSONAL BESTS
BUILT WITH CHOCOLATE MILK
Studies show what elite athletes like the U.S. Women Ski Jumpers have known for years:
Chocolate Milk has high-quality protein to build lean muscle and nutrients to refuel your body
after a hard workout. Whatever you’re building, build it with Chocolate Milk.
W
O
M
E
N
’
S

S
K
I

J
U
M
P
I
N
G

U
S
A
.

©
2
0
1
3

A
M
E
R
I
C
A
’
S

M
I
L
K

P
R
O
C
E
S
S
O
R
S

38 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE
C
L
O
C
K
W
I
S
E

F
R
O
M

T
O
P

L
E
F
T
:

S
U
R
F
E
R
S

V
I
L
L
A
G
E
;

J
U
L
I
E

M
I
K
O
S
/
R
A
N
C
H
O

L
A

P
U
E
R
T
A
;

C
O
U
R
T
E
S
Y

O
F

O
M
N
I

H
O
T
E
L
S
;

S
T
E
V
E

M
A
C
A
U
L
A
Y
added a wellness program in conjunction
with San Diego’s Lifewellness Institute. Stop
at the facility before you cross the border, and
a team of doctors will conduct a five-hour
barrage of exams, from eye and ear screen-
ing to flexibility testing to a cardiometabolic
stress test. Then La Puerta’s nutrition and
fitness experts will use the data to devise a
custom-tailored healthy-living plan. From
$6,950 per person per week, including
screening; rancholapuerta.com
PADDLE OUT
Jaco, Costa Rica
Stand-up paddleboarding has become the
fastest-growing ocean sport in decades be-
cause it’s both incredibly fun and a serious
workout, requiring a combination of bal-
ance, core strength, and arm power. There’s
no better place to learn the basics than in the
warm Pacific waters in Jaco, where seven-
time Costa Rican national surf champion
Alvaro Solano Delgado runs his Vista Guapa
Surf Camp. Delgado offers basic surf lessons,
but for the past five years he has also taught
guests the art of open-ocean SUPing. Nov-
ices learn on small waves in flat, protected
bays, while more advanced paddlers seek
out head-high swells and get tips from vis-
iting pros like Dave Kalama and Brennan
Rose. Between sessions, campers do group
core workouts and yoga, go hiking in Manuel
Antonio National Park, or take part in Vista
Guapa’s mountain-bike clinics. Of course,
it’s also perfectly acceptable to pass out in a
hammock at one of the camp’s TV-free bun-
galows before the whole group pilgrimages to
a local restaurant for slabs of fresh tuna, rice
and beans, and cold Imperials. From $1,700;
vistaguapa.com
ISLAND SPIN
Gran Canaria, Spain
The Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago
off Africa’s northwest coast, are warm year-
round and have steep hills, some 6,000 feet
of vertical relief, and a buffet of smooth
pavement with epic views of the Atlantic
Ocean. Which is to say, it’s the perfect place
for a life-list winter cycling trip. Go with
Massachusetts-based outfitter Ciclismo
Classico, which recently debuted a Gran
Canaria trip that hits the most scenic—and
most demanding—roads on the island. Rid-
ers pedal more than 3,000 vertical feet to
volcanic peaks and cover up to 40 miles per
Training
0
1
.
1
4
Vista Guapa
Surf Camp,
Costa Rica
Post-SUP
Imperials
Rancho
la Puerta,
Mexico
Tucson
relaxation
STAY AND PLAY
Ten years ago, you were lucky
to find a delapidated treadmill and
some greasy mats in a hotel gym.
Today, more than 84 percent of
hotels have fitness facilities, many
of them state-of-the-art. “Travelers
expect it as part of the overall
experience,” says Taylor Cole, a
spokeswoman for Hotels.com. “And
they want high-end stuff like yoga
classes and elliptical machines.”
The result is an arms race of
upscale gyms, in-room equipment,
and outdoor fitness programs.
Here’s who’s getting it right.
Last July, KIMPTON HOTELS
fielded a fleet of three-speed city
bikes from San Francisco company
Public that are free for guests to
use at each of Kimpton’s 60 U.S.
locations. kimptonhotels.com
TRUMP HOTELS loan out iPod
Shuffles loaded with playlists,
stock rooms with yoga mats and
stretch bands, and provide maps
of popular local running routes.
trumphotelcollection.com
WESTIN HOTELS AND RESORTS
recently announced its first running
concierge, Chris Heuisler, a trainer
and veteran marathon runner who
travels to hotels near major mara-
thons to lead guests on training
runs, offer tips on race strategy, and
advise on nutrition. westin.com
In early 2014, a chain devoted to
wellness, EVEN HOTELS, will
be open for business in Norwalk,
Connecticut, and Rockville, Mary-
land. The facilities will have sprawl-
ing gyms, healthy room-service
menus, in-room equipment like
exercise balls and foam rollers, and
local fitness recommendations,
from yoga studios to running paths.
evenhotels.com

chase.com/sapphire Chase Sapphire Preferred
®
2X POINTS ON TRAVEL AND
DINING AT RESTAURANTS.
FIND THE FOOD THAT WAKES UP YOUR SOUL.
Purchase and balance transfer APR is 15.24% variable. Cash advances and overdraft advances APR is 19.24% variable. Penalty APR of 29.99% variable. Variable APRs change with the market based on the Prime
Rate, which was 3.25% on 08/15/13. Annual fee: $0 introductory fee the first year. After that, $95. Minimum Interest Charge: None. Balance Transfer Fee: 3% of the amount of each transaction, but not less than
$5. Note: This account may not be eligible for balance transfers. Cash Advance Fee: 5% of the amount of each advance, but not less than $10. Foreign Transaction Fee: None. Credit cards are issued by Chase
Bank USA, N.A. Subject to credit approval. You must have a valid permanent home address within the 50 United States or the District of Columbia. Restrictions and limitations apply. Offer subject to change. See
chase.com/sapphire for pricing and rewards details. © 2013 JPMorgan Chase & Co.
INTRO ANNUAL FEE OF $0 THE FIRST YEAR, THEN $95

wiegele.com
1.800.661.9170
[email protected]
#wiegelepowder
0
1
.
1
4
Arizona
twilight
George
Hincapie in
the South
Carolina hills

Two hands are better than one, so use your head and
get the H15S Wave rechargeable headlamp. With 250
lumens of white light, three output modes, and 36
hours of useful runtime, it’s the perfect choice for
any challenge you face in the outdoors. For the
ultimate hands-free experience, switch to the infrared
hands-free mode. Simply swipe your hand in front of
the headlamp to turn it off and on. So whether you’re
building a fire, setting up camp, or administering
first aid, be prepared with the versatile H15S Wave.
Dominate your night environment. olightworld.com/H15S
YOU’VE GOT
TWO HANDS.
NOW USE THEM.
f
a
c
e
b
o
o
k
.
c
o
m
/
o
l
i
g
h
t
w
o
r
l
d
O
P
P
O
S
I
T
E

P
A
G
E
,

F
R
O
M

L
E
F
T
:

C
L
I
N
T

D
A
V
I
S
;

A
B
R
A
H
A
M

K
A
R
A
M
HOTBED
Tucson, Arizona
In the past decade, this southern Arizona
city of 520,000 has become one of the
nation’s premier training hubs for endurance
athletes, who flock here for the 70-degree
winter days and easy access to high-altitude
hikes and rides in the Tucson and Santa
Catalina mountain ranges. What’s more,
Tucson hosts a thriving cottage industry
of fitness- minded hotels and training cen-
ters. Our pick: the Omni Tucson National
Resort (from $169; omnihotels.com), which
has casitas with bike storage and kitchens,
a sports complex with tennis courts, sand
volleyball, and yoga classes, plus the Santa
Catalinas out the back door. Cyclists: take to
the Loop, a growing web of 100-plus miles
of paved trails through the city and desert
and build to the famous 28-mile climb up
9,157-foot Mount Lemmon. Trail runners,
head to Saguaro National Park and the Gar-
wood Loop. Want a training partner? Go
to Sonoran Desert Mountain Bicyclists for
a ride in Catalina State Park (sdmb.org) or
Southern Arizona Roadrunners for a run in
Sabino Canyon (azroadrunners.org). Then
refuel at Proper, which dishes up organic
fare ranging from healthy stuff like chickpea
sandwiches to awesome guilty pleasures like
pork-belly sliders (propertucson.com).
VITAL SIGNS
Vail, Colorado
Want a high-tech approach to fitness?
Consider the Vitality Center at Vail Moun-
tain Lodge. In 2013, the slopeside property
partnered with the University of Colorado
at Denver’s Anschutz Health and Wellness
Center to offer the kind of diagnostic blood
testing currently used by pro cyclists, the
Denver Broncos, and the NHL’s Colorado
Avalanche. After a two-hour assessment by
a doctor, including performance tests like
VO2
max and lactate threshold, guests meet
with Vitality Center trainers, who prescribe
individualized training and nutrition plans.
That’s likely to include time at the property’s
20-foot-tall indoor climbing wall, in the
yoga studio, or in the powder in Vail’s leg-
endary back bowls, which are conveniently
located right out the back door. From $509,
plus $1,500 for performance and blood test;
vailvitalitycenter.com
Training
day, including steep, twisty descents from
pine forests to the beach. In the evening,
you’ll recover at spots like Parador de Cruz
de Tejeda, a 43-room hotel with views of the
mountains and the sea. $4,195 per person;
ciclismoclassico.com
GO PRO
Travelers Rest, South Carolina
There’s a reason George Hincapie chose to
open Hotel Domestique, his new cyclist-
focused retreat, in the foothills of South
Carolina: hundreds of miles of low-traffic
mountain roads are accessible year-round,
and winter brings cool days in the fifties.
Guests have access to a bike valet, an on-site
shop with a mechanic, and a high-end fleet
of BMC rental bikes, each with a GPS loaded
with Hincapie’s favorite routes. The former
pro coaches monthly five-day, four-night
climbing camps ($5,000). The hotel itself is
more Tuscan villa than Southern plantation,
with 13 sleek rooms, a patio overlooking a
vineyard, and a farm-to-table restaurant
with meals like rabbit with porcini mush-
rooms. From $279; hoteldomestique.com
—GRAHAM AVERILL

42 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE
ACCESS
Book your flight to
Amman and reserve
a ride in one of the
lodge’s 4x4 pickups
for the three-hour
drive to Feynan.
Deluxe rooms, $140;
feynan.com
FEAST
Crib the secrets of
making falafel and
manakish, a type of
flatbread, and stirring
the right spices into
lentil soup and tab-
bouleh with a Bedouin
cooking class. $42
CLIMATE:
JANUARY
68° HIGH
48° LOW
DETOUR
Set out on foot or
by truck for Petra,
the famed city of
ornate tombs carved
into red sandstone
canyons. The guided
41-mile, four-night
trek traverses the
Sharah Mountains
on Bedouin shepherd
trails. From $1,700
FEYNAN: 30° 38’ 23”N, 35° 30’ 34”E
Jordan
+Amman
Base Camp
0
1
.
1
4
B
A
S
H
A
R

A
L
A
E
D
D
I
N
/
F
E
Y
N
A
N

E
C
O
L
O
D
G
E
LOCATION IS EVERYTHING. Which is why Jordan—long a hub for hiking, mountain biking, and exploring
historical ruins and Bedouin culture—has seen a 22 percent drop in tourism since the tumult in neighboring
Egypt and Syria began. But the Middle East has been rife with conflict for decades, and Jordan has remained
calm. The Global Peace Index ranks Jordan above France and Argentina in key areas like security and the
potential for violence. The upshot of the surrounding unrest is that you can have the sprawling, multicolored
canyonlands of the Dana Biosphere Reserve—closer to Israel and Saudi Arabia than to Syria or Egypt—all to
yourself. Explore it from the Feynan Ecolodge, a 26-room hotel that’s totally off-grid. The lodge generates
hot water through solar panels and is lit almost exclusively by candles. And because it has next to no light
pollution, its outdoor patio and rooftop (the latter equipped with a ten-inch telescope) are perfect stargazing
spots. Plus, Feynan offers daily, complimentary sunset hikes, and guests can book a guide for full-day excur-
sions into the Dana’s slot canyons and Neolithic archaeological sites ($26). The guides are local Bedouins
who know the area, and when you’re done they’ll cook up platters of makloubeh that are so rich, you won’t
even notice they’re vegetarian.
Desert
Oasis
WHILE THE REST OF
THE MIDDLE EAST
BOILS, JORDAN’S EPIC
CANYONLANDS ARE
QUIET—AND EMPTY
by Frederick Reimers

toyota.com/tundra Prototype shown with options. Production model may vary. ©2013 Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc.
TOW. HAUL. BUILD ANYTHING.

IT’S 8:00 a.m. ON A JANUARY MORNING IN
NORTHERN ARIZONA. Humphrey’s Peak arcs
against the cobalt winter sky; the snowfields of
the Kachina Peaks Wilderness spread blazing
from its flanks. Your mug of cofee steams
as you fit your cross-country skis. A bit of
lingering gold on a nearby aspen quivers in a
puf of icy wind. You glide of in perfect silence.
An hour south, a friend sorts her climbing
rack on an already warm sandstone shelf in
Sedona. Above her soar the vermillion and
rose rock formations, lumpy and hunched or
cathedral-like, grand, sublime: half cartoon,
half myth. A mountain bike whizzes by, drops
out of sight over the steep red edge; the quiet
returns, filled only with the gently clanking
carabineers, the fragrant rustle of creosote.
You’ll meet up for a late lunch in Flagstaf: her,
flushed with desert sun; you, alpine cold.
Arizona has everything—every climate,
every adventure, every natural wonder—all of
the time. In the midst of a scorching Tucson
July, the 9,157-foot peak of Mount Lemmon
stays cool, inviting sport and trad climbing,
mountain biking, and hiking. In January,
the white granite of Cochise Stronghold and
the twisted organ pipe cactus of the Sonoran
Desert bake under a mild winter sun. If you
ditch your winter gear in the high country at
noon, you can go for a breezy ride on the trails
that rim the Colorado Plateau, rack up for Oak
Creek Canyon’s splitter cracks, or head south
for a hike in the Superstition Wilderness. Have
your evening brew outdoors at Goldfield Ghost
Town, or sample some spicy New Southwestern
cuisine at an outdoor bistro in Scottsdale. Start
your day in skis; end in sandals.
The state is a map of variety and beauty. A
bike is a fast and fun way to see a lot at once:
the Arizona Trail runs the full length of
the state, from the rugged North Rim of the
Grand Canyon to the wild sky islands of the
southern Chiricahua Mountains. “Variety,”
says one biker, “is the single greatest quality
to Arizona’s mountain-bike-trail oferings.
People can ride from desert to pines in a single
ride and spend an entire day in the saddle
without ever riding the same trail twice.”
And biking, like climbing, kayaking, golfing,
and even birding, introduces you to a whole
community of like-minded locals happy to
show you around.
You can also map the state by water.
Though the land is synonymous with dry—
mountain, canyon, and desert—it is shaped
by water. Raft the Colorado River through the
magnificent Grand Canyon. Float a tube down
the Salt River outside Phoenix. Or swim in
any of the hundreds of lakes and ponds you’ll
encounter backpacking in the eastern and
northern wilderness.
Or go by foot—your two feet, or maybe four
horse feet—over trails sparkling with moonlit
mica in the Bradshaw Mountains; through the
sunset hues of the Painted Desert, through
the old ruins of the Canyon de Chelly, deep
underground in Kartchner Caverns.
And these are just the natural wonders.
That map is overlaid with an equally varied
and beautiful map of culture, from old artist
communities like Jerome to luxurious, world-
renowned golf courses. Arizona’s American
Indian heritage can be felt everywhere—in
the food, the music, the art, and in the land
itself. So too with the history of gold, war,
vigilantism, ranching, and farming: the old
ghost towns and abandoned railways invite
exploration. There are wonders of the palate—
fry bread, for-real spicy Mexican-influenced
cuisine, Southwestern fusion, and of course
haute French, Thai, and delicate sushi.
You can’t be disappointed in Arizona.
Whatever you want: hot, cold, rugged, snowy,
brilliant with saguaro and sun, shady with
Ponderosa Pine, artisan and traditional or
state of the art, wild and precipitous or mellow
and rolling, family-friendly or expert only, the
state has it. Only seven wonders of the natural
world? Come count for yourself.
They say there are seven wonders in the natural
world. They haven’t spent enough time in Arizona.
WONDERS
NEVER CEASE
ADVERTISEMENT

Hit the open road. Discover the Arizona less traveled.
Visit arizonaguide.com/culture or call 1.866.226.8927.
You can see for miles and miles.
Without driving too many.
SONOITA, AZ

Ouray Ice Festival
Ouray, Colorado;
January 9–12
STAY: Box Canyon
Lodge puts you within
walking distance of
the festival. From $116;
boxcanyonouray.com
EAT: Head to the
Beaumont Grill for
French onion soup
and rib-eye steak.
SOAK: Hit the
red wood tubs over
the hot springs at
Box Canyon.
Sundance
Park City, Utah;
January 16–26
STAY: The hotels
are booked by now.
But plenty of locals
rent out their homes
through the town’s
visitors bureau.
visitparkcity.com
EAT: Avoid the long
lines at the town’s
multi-star restaurants:
the cafeteria at Park
City Medical Center is
good and cheap.
SCHUSS: While the
crowds pack screen-
ings, the slopes are
empty. Try Stein’s Way
at Deer Valley.
Winter X Games
Aspen, Colorado;
January 23–26
STAY: The Viceroy is
the most dog-friendly
five-star hotel we’ve
ever seen. From $540;
viceroyhotelsand
resorts.com
EAT: Takah Sushi is
just as good as Mat-
suhisa, without the
pretentiousness.
PARTY: The raucous
crowds head to bars
like the Red Onion
and 39 Degrees, but
we prefer the Belly
Up, which plays host
to artists like B.B. King
and Langhorne Slim.
COMPLETE THE CIRCUIT
Do January’s festivals right
Touring the
Tetons
46 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE
F
R
O
M

L
E
F
T
:

M
A
T
T
H
E
W

H
A
W
K
I
N
S
;

J
E
F
F

D
I
E
N
E
R
Gimme Shelter
WHO NEEDS MUESLI AND MULLED WINE? THE U.S. HUT SCENE IS GAINING
GROUND. THESE DIY TRIPS PUT YOU IN THE BEST OF THE BACKCOUNTRY.
by Devon O’Neil
Weekend Plan
0
1
.
1
4
Harry Gates
Hut, Colorado
SKI HUTS IN the Alps are like small castles—
most employ caretakers who greet you with
beer or wine and cook you hot meals. The
U.S. may not have the luxury or the sheer
numbers (Switzerland alone has 213 hüttes),
but we’re getting better. Last year, the newly
formed, Colorado-based Grand Huts Asso-
ciation opened the Broome Hut at Berthoud
Pass near Denver, and there are plans to add
eight more linkable huts in the next decade.
Until then, there are plenty of other options.
At least ten states from Maine to Oregon
have huts. With a little planning, you can
piece together a world-class trip without the
transatlantic flight.
Rocky Top
The 10th Mountain Division hut system in
Colorado remains the premier—and most
popular—network in America, and its 20
well-stocked cabins (with little avalanche
danger along the access trails) are ripe for
three-to-five-day powder trips. The best is
a 28.5-mile route between Vail and Aspen.
Start at the Polar Star Inn (elevation: 11,040
feet) and milk the tree skiing on the western
flank of New York Mountain, located just
above it. It’s 8.2 tough miles from there to
the Peter Estin Hut, but prime bowl skiing
nearby makes the slog worth it. End with a
seven-mile ski to the Harry Gates Hut, which
sleeps 16 and is perched on a bench facing
Avalanche Ridge. The next day, ski out to your
car on Fryingpan Road. From $33 per person
per night; huts.org
Teton Traverse
When people think of the Tetons, they al-
most always think of the range’s east face
over Jackson Hole. But the west side holds
rarely touched, navel-deep powder. Begin
by climbing 5.5 miles through the Jed Smith
Wilderness to Baldy Knoll, a Mongolian-
style yurt operated by Teton Backcountry
Guides and surrounded by prime face-shot
terrain. The next day, skin nine miles along
Alpenglow Ridge at 10,626 feet to Teton
Backcountry’s Plummer Canyon yurt; if it’s
a whiteout, take the lower route through the
trees. Once there, you’ll appreciate the amply
spaced aspen-grove heaven. Looking ahead:
a 314-square-foot yurt with bunk beds, a
pellet stove, and a full kitchen is opening in
Teton Canyon next winter, so you can tour an
extra day. From $355 per night for the yurts,
which sleep six to eight; skithetetons.com
Sierra Stash
More than 50 years ago, the Sierra Club built
a series of huts above Lake Tahoe’s west shore.
The best time to link them up is in late Janu-
ary, when Tahoe catches the best snow. The
most feasible route begins at Donner Summit
and travels six miles south to the Benson Hut,
which is perched at 8,350 feet, sleeps 12, and
offers high-alpine terrain. Then it’s four miles
south to the Bradley Hut, an A-frame with a
detached two-story outhouse that often gets
buried in deep winters. The Bradley doesn’t
have beds or cookstoves, so come prepared.
$20 per person per night; sierraclub.org


48 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE
C
L
O
C
K
W
I
S
E

F
R
O
M

T
O
P

L
E
F
T
:

C
O
U
R
T
E
S
Y

O
F

T
H
E
Q
;

A
S
T
E
R
I
X
0
5
9
7
/
G
E
T
T
Y
;

R
I
C
H

G
O
O
D
W
I
N
;

C
O
U
R
T
E
S
Y

O
F

H
O
T
E
L

S
T
.

F
R
A
N
C
I
S
RUM DIARY
Premium rums are
back. Colorado’s
Montanya Distill-
ers, Panama’s Caña
Brava, and Jamaica’s
Appleton Estate are
making rums with
superior ingredi-
ents, from organic
Hawaiian sugarcane
to mountain spring
water. Our favorite
winter drink is the
Tom and Jerry, with
rum, eggnog, and
brandy. Order it in
these ski-town bars.
—JENNY ADAMS
MONTANYA
DISTILLERS
Crested Butte,
Colorado
Made with Mon-
tanya Oro dark rum
distilled on-site
using water, yeast,
sugarcane, and
Colorado honey.
THE ROSE
Jackson Hole,
Wyoming
House-made
eggnog with El
Dorado 12-year
rum, from Guyana,
and Pierre Ferrand
Ambre cognac.
SECRETO LOUNGE
Santa Fe
Organic eggnog
with Appleton
Estate V/X rum and
a cinnamon stick.
THE AIRPORT ATM in Recife, Brazil, looked
like any other, so I withdrew $400 and left for
a remote island to dive with turtles. Two days
later, my bank e-mailed me. Had I really just
withdrawn $1,700 from two ATMs hundreds
of miles away? No, I had not. I’d become the
latest victim of skimming, a growing multi-
million-dollar crime; one ring in New York
City stole $1.5 million in 2012. It works like
this: Thieves install a duplicate reader in an
ATM’s card slot that sucks the information
off the card’s magnetic stripe. Then they get
the pin from a hidden camera and program a
new card. The practice is on the rise, and not
just abroad: 3-D printing technology makes
it easier to mount bogus faceplates on gas
pumps and ATMs stateside, too.
There’s no foolproof way to safeguard your
hard-earned dollars. The best approach, says
special agent John Mazza of the U.S. Secret
Service, which protects the country’s finan-
cial system as well as the president, is vigi-
lance. His advice: (1) Avoid ATMs in touristy
areas. (2) Cover the keypad with your hand in
case there’s a camera. (3) Give the card slot a
good wiggle. Anything loose? Go somewhere
else. (4) If it looks like someone peeled a piece
of tamperproof tape off the gas-station card
reader, that could be a sign that a fake one
was installed. Use a different pump.
In Brazil, I got lucky. The bank canceled my
card and issued me a temporary credit within
days to replace the stolen funds, though I
had no way of accessing them from a remote
South American island. Next time I travel, I’ll
bring some cash.
SOCIAL SKILLS
TheQ may be the most
convenient travel cam
we’ve ever seen. Available
in nine colors, it’s water-
proof, free of distracting
knobs and menus, and
capable of uploading
photos to Twitter, Face-
book, and other social-
media sites instantly via
AT&T’s 3G network (new
or existing data plan
required). Plus, a flash
rings the f/2.4 wide-angle
lens, so you get great
shots even in low light.
$199; theqcamera.com
—MEAGHEN BROWN
Rip-Off Artists
CROOKS MAY BE EMPTYING YOUR
BANK ACCOUNT WHILE YOUR ATM
CARD IS IN YOUR WALLET. HERE’S
HOW TO PREVENT IT.
by Tim Neville
Go List
0
1
.
1
4
The Rose
Secreto
WORLD PARTY
This month, the profligate correspondents of the Matador
Network travel blog publish 101 Places to Get F*cked Up Before
You Die ($14), an ode to overindulgence that’s also a surprisingly
handy travel guide. BRIAN KEVIN spoke with Matador senior
editor David Miller about inebriation as ritual.
OUTSIDE: The title seems a bit fratty. Is this a guide to
traveling or partying?
MILLER: We’re not advocating drinking for drinking’s sake. We’re
speaking to that more introverted traveler who feels the need
to hold back during their travels. The subtext is: just go for it.
Are you making a case for getting tanked as a form of
cultural exchange?
There’s a definite universality to the way people celebrate,
and events can be transformative. Isn’t that the whole point
of ceremony?
How did you decide which places made the cut?
I’d like to be able to say there was some kind of sophisticated
algorithm, but we went with the stories that felt real, like the
authors weren’t trying to prove anything. Some of the places
are notorious, but my favorites are the ones I’d never considered
in a party context, like Cairo or the Yukon’s Dawson City.

50 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE

the pursuit of Happiness
CUTTING-EDGE NEUROSCIENCE IS PROVING WHAT MANY OF US HAVE KNOWN
FOR YEARS: THE KEY TO BEING HAPPY STARTS WITH A BALANCED MIX OF
EXERCISE, NUTRITION, AND OUTDOOR PLAY. BUT THERE’S MORE TO FINDING
HAPPINESS THAN THAT. TO LAUNCH YOUR NEW YEAR, WE’VE BROKEN THE
PURSUIT DOWN INTO SIMPLE, LIFE-CHANGING STRATEGIES.
PLUS: THE SECRETS BEHI ND ULTRARUNNER HAL KOERNER’ S PERMA-GRI N.
2014 healthy & happy

52 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE
THE TENDENCY TO BE HAPPY OR NOT IS AN INHERITED TRAIT,
but the good news is that this is less than half the story. According to a 2012 study
of identical and fraternal twins conducted by a team of scientists from top uni ver-
sities around the world, only about a third of our happiness level is determined
by genes. The rest is up to us.
Looking for drivers of well-being, the researchers zeroed in on a gene that aids
in the transport of the neurotransmitter serotonin. In the biochemistry of mood,
serotonin plays a role much like the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz, bringing
brightness and cheer, and regulates stress levels, sleep, and pain, among other
things. The study found that those who’d inherited longer variations of the gene
had a slight increase in overall happiness, but surveys of the twins suggested
that genes get only a minority vote when it comes to mood.
Other research indicates that how happy you are can influence the ways your
genes are expressed. In a 2013 study, researchers at UCLA and the University
of North Carolina reported that happiness levels have powerful effects on genes
and our health. But there was a catch: the specific kind of happiness mattered a
lot. The unselfishly happy, whose feelings of well-being involved a deep sense of
purpose in life, had a strong expression of antiviral and antibody genes. Happy
hedonists, meanwhile, wrapped up in materialistic pleasures, had weaker immune
systems, resulting in inflammation that can lead to cancer, heart disease, and dia-
betes. “Even pleasures that seem virtuous, like looking at a sunset, can be hedonic,
because they involve one’s own emotional gratification,” explains UCLA professor
of medicine Steven Cole, the senior author of the study. “The real distinction is
whether your happiness is tied into purpose and meaning outside yourself.”
Bottom line: like so many things, how happy you are comes down to how you
choose to live your life. We’ve rounded up the latest beta on how to show your
DNA who’s boss. —MIKE STEERE
desk; it’s the freedom to make
choices. “Our findings highlight
just how important free time
is to an individual’s well-being,”
wrote psychologist Richard
Ryan, the study’s author. Ryan
and his colleagues also found
that you can get even more out
of your time off if you spend
it with people you care about
and get outside, which “adds
to vitality.” Bonus: you can get
doses of that weekend buzz on
weekdays, too. Here’s how.
>Lunchtime workout. Start
a regular run or bike ride
with coworkers. You’ll build
relationships while releasing
endorphins.
>Be spontaneous. One night
every week, schedule at least
two hours away from home,
but don’t plan anything. The
spontane ity and freedom will
give you a TGIF buzz.
>Bivouac! Pitch a tent in a
nearby patch of woods. Just
get up in time to take a shower
at home before work.
4. CRANK
the TUNES
That emotional rush you feel
when you listen to your favorite
songs? It’s chemical. In 2011,
neuroscientist Valorie Salim-
poor and her colleagues at
Montreal’s McGill University
conducted a study demon-
strating that hearing music
causes the brain to pump out
dopamine, a neurotransmitter
associated with pleasure and
anticipated reward. Music lov-
ers in the study chose what to
play—everything from classical
to Led Zeppelin to techno—
then the researchers used a
combination of technologies
to scan their brains while they
kicked back and listened. The
dopamine surge was greatest
just before and during favorite
parts of a song.
READY,
SET, SMILE
13 SCIENTIFICALLY
PROVEN METHODS
FOR LIVING ON THE
BRIGHT SIDE
1. RISE WITH
THE SUN
Most adults require seven to
eight hours of sleep per night.
Less than that and we’re
crankier, dumber, sicker,
and even fatter. But that’s
no excuse to sleep in. The
American Academy of Sleep
Medicine notes that more time
awake in daylight increases
your levels of vitamin D, which
researcher Christopher Lowry
injected mice with dirt-dwelling
Mycobacterium vaccae and
found increased serotonin in
the critters’ prefrontal cortex.
Getting your own dose is as easy
as taking a walk in the wilder-
ness or planting something. You
don’t need to wait until spring:
even in the dead of winter you
can sprout basil seeds in a pot
on your sunniest windowsill.
3. MAKE EVERY
DAY SATURDAY
You don’t need science to tell
you that you’re happier on the
weekends, but a 2010 Univer-
sity of Rochester study of
74 adults explains why that’s so.
It’s not just time away from a
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
2014 healthy
&HAPPY
-
the body synthesizes when
skin is exposed to the sun. The
vitamin, according to Boston
University medical researchers,
gooses genes that play a role
in resistance to autoimmune
and infectious diseases, as well
as cancer. Think you’re wired to
sleep late? Think again. Doctors
at Beth Israel Deaconess Medi-
cal Center in Boston looked at
variations in a gene responsible
for circadian rhythms and found
differences in natural wake
times of only an hour tops.
2. GET DIRTY
Dirt may be the new Prozac.
Working in soil raises your
spirits, in part because you
pick up cheerful germs while
digging. University of Colorado

T
O
P
:

J
F

C
R
E
A
T
I
V
E
S
/
G
A
L
L
E
R
Y

S
T
O
C
K
ACT LIKE IT’S THE WEEKEND.
FIND A PLACE TO DISCONNECT.

5. DRINK UP
Dehydration makes you cranky.
A 2012 study by a consortium
of researchers that included
the U.S. Army showed that
even a mild case of it made
healthy young people gloomy
and pessimistic. When subjects
fully hydrated, then exercised
or took diuretics to lose, on
average, 1.4 percent of their
body weight, their moods
slid, possibly because certain
neurons can detect dehydra-
tion and may alert parts of the
brain that manage mood. How
much do we need to drink to
stay happy? One rule of thumb
is to halve your weight and
drink that many fluid ounces
54 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE
daily—i.e., a 180-pound man
would drink 90 ounces, or
about 11 glasses. Of course,
the need to rehydrate soars
when you exercise. One reliable
gauge: your pee should be
clear or pale yellow, more pinot
grigio than Gatorade.
6. HIT THE
BEACH
It’s not just the oiled bods.
Research has found that
people with depression, heart
disease, and Alzheimer’s all
lack vitamin D, which your
body produces when your skin
is exposed to direct sunlight.
And recent British studies have
confirmed that views of the
ocean and other blue spaces
make us happier than other
landscapes. Some researchers
think the reason could be
evolutionary, that our biggest
step was learning to catch fish,
which added omega-3 fatty
acids to our diet. (Omega-3’s
have been known to lower rates
of depression.) Others, like
Wallace J. Nichols, a scientist
and author of BlueMind, a
forthcoming book about how
water improves our health
and mood, point to the feelings
of awe and wonder we have
when we gaze at oceans, lakes,
or rivers. “It spurs the brain
to release a mix of dopamine,
oxytocin, and endorphins,”
Nichols says. “It gives us a sense
of oneness with the universe.”
You know, like Ommm.
7. PLAY MORE
Because having fun means
you’ll keep at activities that are
good for you. After surveying
college students, researchers
at Southeastern Louisiana
University found that enjoying
an activity—whether play-
ing on a soccer team, training
for a triathlon, or taking long
hikes—is the best method for
staying motivated and sticking
to a routine. “Pure enjoyment,”
wrote Marcus Kilpatrick, the
study’s lead author, “is a strong
predictor of future behavior.”

8. GO
SCREENLESS
How bad are your screens for
mood and productivity? Let
us count the ways. A 2013
study published by the Public
Library of Science showed
that more use of Facebook
meant less sense of well-
being and more feelings of
envy. Responses to National
Geographic’s True Happiness
Test survey in 2011 suggested
that the happiest people
GAME PLAN
LIVE BY BIKE
Never mind the health and environmental benefits. It’s good for the soul.
BY MICHAEL ROBERTS
Early last year, a Ph.D. candidate at Portland State University in
Oregon made headlines when he presented findings to the national
Transportation Research Board showing that riding a bike makes us
happy. According to his survey of more than 800 commuters, bikers
rated higher on a well-being index than people using any other form
of transportation, including walking. To the country’s growing legions
of everyday cyclists, the news was hardly a surprise. A new kind of
cycling lifestyle is on the rise. In cities large and small, bike lanes are
being built, bike-share programs are taking off, and people who’d
never considered pedaling around town are saddling up to save money
on gas and get a little exercise. The positive results—less automobile
traffic, cleaner air, better public health, surging commerce along bik-
ing routes—are grabbing the attention of public officials: Chicago
mayor Rahm Emanuel has called bike lanes “an integral part of my
economic development strategy.”
That’s all good news. But a simple pleasure has gotten lost in the
data: hopping on a bike is still the best way to turn everyday outings
into unpredictable adventures. Need a few things from the grocery
store? Grab a backpack and go. Meeting people at a bar? Don’t forget
your U-lock. Got a date? If she agrees to ride to dinner, how bad could
it be? When we take to the streets on two wheels under our own power,
we transform from commuters and errand runners into explorers. We
take wrong turns and discover new places. We notice friends along the
way—and pull over to talk to them. We don’t answer our phones. Freed
from the confines of cars and the schedules of trains and buses, we are
inspired to roll in bold directions. To be late. To have fun. To not worry
about parking tickets.
More Reasons to Saddle Up:
>It’s safe. There are now
nearly 150 miles of protected
bike lanes in the U.S.—with
physical barriers between
cyclists and traffic —and
many more in the works.
>It’s convenient. More
than 30 U.S. cities offer bike-
share programs (check out
bikeshare.com), making some
17,000 of them available for
shorter rides.
>It’s communal. Cargo
bikes like Yuba’s El Mundo
(from $1,300; yubabikes.com)
allow you to take the family
with you wherever you go.
>It’s easy. With an electric-
assist bike, you can get
where you’re going without
breaking a sweat. The Spe-
cialized Turbo (from $6,000;
specialized.com), the Tesla
Roadster of e-bikes, has a
250-watt motor capa ble of
up to 28 mph on the flats.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
2014 healthy
&HAPPY
-
POP QUI Z
Q. WHO’S HAPPIER: DOG OWNERS OR CAT OWNERS?
A. Dog, cat, lizard, pig—doesn’t matter. A 2011 study published in the Jour-
nal of Personality and Social Psychology found no consistent differences
between owners of different types of pets, only that having one makes
us healthier and happier. The study also concluded that pet owners have
greater self-esteem and tend to be less fearful.

F
R
O
M

T
O
P
:

A
N
N
E

M
E
N
K
E
;

L
I
L
L
Y

D
O
N
G
KEEP ANIMAL FRIENDS CLOSE.
DROP IN.

were those who watched
less than an hour of television
a day. And in 2009, Harvard
Business School professor
Leslie Perlow, author of Sleep-
ing with Your Smartphone,
asked a team at the Boston
Consulting Group to unplug—
no e-mail, texting, or client
calls—one night a week. Five
weeks in, the consultants
were functioning better as
a team and did more work in
less time. Four years hence,
the weekly disconnect remains
company policy.
depressed, and have enhanced
feelings of well-being. “The
important thing is that people
feel they are getting something
out of it,” Richards says.
10. TRAIN WITH
A TEAM
In 2009, researchers at Oxford
University discovered that
exercising in a group makes
you train harder and leaves you
with a higher level of endor-
phins than when you exercise
alone. Another study, in 2010,
by the University of Ballarat
in Australia, found that those
who played club sports (base-
ball, basketball, soccer) had
better mental health and were
more satisfied with their lives
than those who didn’t. Don’t
know where to start? Try Team
in Training (teamintraining.org),
the world’s biggest club of
endurance athletes.
11. GET HIGH
ON CHOCOLATE
A 2010 study published in the
Journal of the American Medi-
cal Association showed that
people who are depressed eat
more chocolate. Why? Other
research found that chocolate
contains valeric acid, a relaxant
and tranquilizer. The smell of
chocolate slows down brain
waves, helping us feel calmer.
And certain compounds in
it spur our brains to release
endorphins, neurotransmitters
that have a similar effect on
well-being as opiates.
56 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE
don’t seem as large anymore.”
The best volunteer experiences
are those that connect to your
passions, says Suzanne Rich-
ards, author of a 2013 study at
the University of Exeter Medi-
cal School that found that
volunteers live longer, are less
9. GIVE
YOUR TIME
Multiple studies have shown
that volunteering increases
well-being while also lowering
cholesterol and reducing mor-
tality rates among volunteers.
“It’s like going to a chiropractor
for your soul,” says Brad Ludden,
founder of First Descents, which
offers outdoor adventures to
kids and young adults diag-
nosed with cancer. “It realigns
everything, and your problems
GAME PLAN
BREAK A SWEAT
Exercising consistently is the best thing you can do for your brain BY ERIN BERESINI
Scientists have long known that happiness and stress are two sides of
the same coin: the less stressed you are, the happier you’ll be. They’ve
also known that exercise lifts mood by releasing feel-good chemi-
cals like endorphins and dopamine into the brain. But last spring,
researchers at Princeton University made a startling discovery—the
mood-enhancing benefits of exercise aren’t temporary. Exercise, they
found, actually rewires your mind.
The finding came out of the researchers’ bid to reconcile a perplex-
ing paradox. Exercise triggers the creation of highly excitable neurons
in the hippocampus, the region of the brain associated with memory,
learning, and emotional responses. This speeds up overall brain func-
tion, but because of the new neurons’ excitability, it should also make
the brain more susceptible to anxiety. Yet it doesn’t.
To find out why, the Princeton team split lab mice into two groups.
One group had access to a running wheel (with the mice averaging an
impressive 2.5 miles per night), and the other did not. After six weeks,
the researchers intentionally freaked out all the mice by dunking
them in cold water, then looked at their brains with an fMRI machine.
Almost immediately, they noticed that the two groups reacted differ-
ently. The brain cells of the inactive mice became agitated and leaped
into a frenzy, while those of the active mice did not. The reason: the
active mice were able to produce and release more of the neurotrans-
mitter GABA, which helps sedate jumpy neurons.
The discovery, published in May in The Journal of Neuroscience,
marked a breakthrough in understanding how exercise helps the brain
regulate anxiety. In essence, exercise creates new, faster neurons, but it
also reinforces the physiological mechanism that prevents those uppity
brain cells from firing during times of stress.
“When you exercise, you change 20 things at the same time,” says
Dr. Emrah Düzel, director of the Institute of Cognitive Neurology and
Dementia Research at Germany’s University Hospital Magdeburg.
“There’s no medication that can achieve that.”
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
2014 healthy
&HAPPY
-
OUTSI DE TESTED AND APPROVED
RUN TOGETHER
SIXTY-SIX PERCENT OF RUNNERS BELIEVE THAT THEY HAVE
MORE SEX AFTER HITTING THE ROAD OR TRAIL WITH THEIR
SI GNI FI CANT OTHER, ACCORDI NG TO A 2013 SURVEY FROM
BROOKS RUNNING.
Brain-Boosting Workouts:
>Go aerobic. “You have
to improve cardiovascular
function in order to see the
effects,”says Düzel. Cardio-
vascular function means
getting up to 50 percent of
your max heart rate, which
causes oxygenated blood
to circulate more rapidly
through the brain, forming
new neural connections.
>Make every minute count.
Just four to six minutes of
regular exercise makes a big
difference. A Brazilian study
found that aging rats that ran
for that amount daily for five
weeks reversed age-related
memory impairment and
increased neurotrophic factor,
a substance essential for the
growth and survival of neurons.
>Push longer and harder. In
a 2012 survey, Penn State re-
searchers found that physically
active students who pushed
themselves during workouts
were more likely to report over-
all life satisfaction. The reason
may be simple: exercise burns
off the stress hormone cortisol.

B
O
T
T
O
M
:

T
O
M

S
C
H
I
E
R
L
I
T
Z
/
T
R
U
N
K
BREAK THE RULES.
TRAIN IN TANDEM.

12. EAT HAPPY
MEALS
What you ingest can have a
huge impact on the level of
neurotransmitters in your brain.
Here are the top feel-good
foods and active compounds
that lift your spirits.
>Elk. Elk meat is rich in trypto-
phan, an amino acid that helps
the body synthesize the happy
neurotransmitter serotonin.
Also packing high levels are
spirulina, spinach, turkey, egg
whites, black beans, split
peas, pumpkin seeds, walnuts,
cashews, and almonds.
>Greens. They’re rich in
folate, a benevolent B vitamin
13. RAISE A
GLASS
Turns out that moderate
drinkers—people who imbibe
no more than 14 alcoholic
drinks a week—are healthier
and happier than abstainers. A
2012 Boston University School
of Medicine study tracked a
panel of middle-aged men and
women for 14 years and deter-
mined that moderate drinkers
had fewer chronic conditions,
such as cardiovascular disease
and cancers, and higher levels
of HDL, the good cholesterol.
More surprising still: the study
showed that quality of life
actually went down among
those who curbed their intake.
And other research demon-
strated that beer and liquor are
just as good for you as wine.
We’ll drink to that.
REPORTED BY:
ERIN BERESINI, FREDERICK
REIMERS, JEN SCHWARTZ,
MIKE STEERE
58 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE
production of serotonin. In
a 2013 study at the Baylor
Research Institute in Dallas,
500 milligrams of curcumin
twice a day proved to be as
effective an antidepressant
as Prozac.
>Healthy fats. In particular,
docosahexaenoic acid (DHA),
the most abundant fatty acid
in the brain and an important
moderator of mood and
mental health. A 2011 study
of military personnel found
that suicide risk was highest
among those with the low-
est DHA levels. Where to
get it? Cold-water fish such
as salmon, mackerel, sardines,
and tuna, plus shrimp and
other shellfish.
GAME PLAN
TELL BETTER JOKES
Proven strategies for getting laughs, plus some always winning punch lines
BY IAN FRAZIER
>Practice. Tell jokes to yourself when you are alone. The middle of nowhere is a good place for this, but
it can also be done while driving, lying in bed, etc.
>Remember a forgiving rule of comedy, which is that a person trying really hard to be funny is kind of
funny, just by definition, regardless of the funniness of his joke.
>Pick your audience. This cannot be overstressed! Terry Bradshaw will enjoy a joke that won’t go over
well with Rachel Maddow. A joke tends to be funny in inverse proportion to the number of people it is
appropriate to tell it to. Mistakes in choice of audience can be catastrophic. If you’re not sure, don’t tell it.
>Ignore the previous rule if you enjoy funny catastrophes.
>Streamline your jokes. Wit is brevity, as we know. Hone them down until eventually they become only
punch lines. Here are some jokeless punch lines you are free to borrow:
“Run, Harold, run!”
“European!”
“Any sumbitch that can eat that much ice cream, I don’t want to mess with.”
“Vhat are you sinking about?”
“But when it became aroused, it read, ‘Shorty’s Pizzeria and Delicatessen, We Deliver at Night, We
Deliver in the Morning, Our Telephone Number Is Biloxi Two Five Six Eight Hundred, We Do All
Our Baking on the Premises…’ ”
>There is a very good visual joke involving a fake sneeze and a thick rubber band that almost always
gets a laugh. I leave you to figure it out for yourself.
that also aids in synthesizing
serotonin and helps ward off
cancer and the degenerative
diseases associated with aging.
Follow Popeye’s lead: amp up
your intake of dark leafy veg-
etables like spinach and collard
and turnip greens.
>Gamma-aminobutyric acid.
Nothing we eat actually con-
tains GABA, a neurotransmitter
known as nature’s Valium for
its calming effects, but certain
foods contain its building
block, the amino acid gluta-
mine. Among them: pork,
beef, sesame and sunflower
seeds, oats, cabbage, spinach,
and parsley.
>Indian food. Curcumin, a
compound in turmeric, boosts
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
2014 healthy
&HAPPY
-
OUTSI DE TESTED AND APPROVED
PLAN MORE TRIPS
YOU DON’T EVEN HAVE TO TAKE THEM ALL. DUTCH RESEARCHERS SURVEYED 1, 530 VACATIONERS
AND FOUND THAT THEY GOT A HAPPINESS BOOST FOR UP TO EIGHT WEEKS BEFORE THE DEPAR-
TURE DATE, PROBABLY DUE TO RELEASES OF THE NEUROTRANSMITTER DOPAMINE, A COMMON
OCCURRENCE WHEN WE ANTICIPATE A POSITIVE EXPERIENCE. CALL IT A PRE-ESCAPE ESCAPE.
POP QUI Z
Q. WHO’S HAPPIER:
MEN OR WOMEN?
A. At the moment, men. This is
according to the General Social
Survey, an ongoing look at social
behaviors and attitudes conducted
by the University of Chicago’s
National Opinion Research Center
since 1972. First-year data indi-
cated that women were slightly
happier than men. In 2012, the
most recent year for which figures
are available, men were 3 percent
happier. What changed? Accord-
ing to sociologist Arlie Hochschild,
many women now work two
shifts—one at the office and
another at home—which means
they have greater responsibilities
and more stressors. Men, mean-
while, have cut back on unpleasant
stuff like household chores.

IMAGINE A GETAWAY.
GO BLUE.
F
R
O
M

T
O
P
:

T
O
S
S

H
O
N
E
Y
S
E
T
T
/
G
A
L
L
E
R
Y

S
T
O
C
K
;

B
E
N
E
D
I
C
T

R
E
D
G
R
O
V
E
/
G
A
L
L
E
R
Y

S
T
O
C
K


60 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE

OUTSI DEONLI NE. COM 61
2014 healthy
&HAPPY
-
GAME PLAN
RUN LIKE HAL!
Ultrarunner Hal Koerner has a formula for fitness
and life that keeps him winning and smiling. So
follow his lead—just don’t try and keep up.
What makes Hal Koerner so damn happy? Ask him that—or any ques-
tion, really—and you’ll get an answer that betrays the simple truth. He
speaks in meandering run-on sentences that defy the normal rules of
grammar yet somehow always cross the finish line, concluding with
the same, infectious takeaway: I love to run! And you should, too!
Indeed, an image search on Google yields hundreds of photos of the
37-year-old flashing his hundred-tooth grin while suffering through
grueling races like the Hardrock 100 (2012 winner) and the Western
States 100 (champ in 2007 and 2009). He’s turned that passion into a
career, opening a retail store, Rogue Valley Runners, in 2006, that has
helped make the tiny town of Ashland, Oregon, a training epicenter
for the booming sport of ultrarunning. Young phenoms like the Skaggs
brothers, Anton Krupicka, and Jenn Shelton have all moved there to
train with—and often work for—Koerner, hoping to soak up the secrets
of a man who has stayed competitive for nearly two decades. Shortly
after his second win at Arizona’s Javalina Jundred last October, he
shared some of that wisdom with CHRISTOPHER KEYES.
Traditional shoes, minimal-
ist shoes, Hokas—there’s a
place for all of them. The most
important thing is to run on
trails instead of roads. That
will do more for your longevity
than worrying about how much
cushioning you’ve got.
Before every race I wake
up, have a bowl of oatmeal,
eat a banana, and down
some kind of sports drink.
It’s simple, but it works for
me and I haven’t changed it.
Smiling is infectious. Even
when I’m suffering on the
course, when I see people out
there, I always want to smile.
It gives me a little boost of
positive energy.
I like to go to the start line
thinking I’ll win.
I kind of cringe when I have to
tell people I’m an ultramara-
thoner. I just know I’m about to
get pummeled with questions.
But I understand the curiosity.
stops flowing to the brain and
I’ll think, Dang, what was all
that great stuff I was thinking
out there?
When I first started out,
ultrarunning was still tiny,
and I mostly trained alone.
Oddly enough, when I would
ask someone if they wanted to
go for a four- or five-hour run,
there weren’t many takers!
Then I started running with
Scott Jurek and others, and
that’s when things stepped
up for me. You have to push
yourself when you see what
others are doing.
Our house is ultra talk all
the time. My wife, Carly,
runs ultramarathons, too. She
had an off-year being preg-
nant, but I imagine we’ll be
running together a lot more
now. Get the baby jogger and
see how it goes.
I’ve run enough ultras to know
that it takes all shapes and
sizes and you can’t discount
anyone. After we opened
the store and we started our
100-mile race, the Pine to Palm,
I had people signing up who
you would never identify as
runners. I remember thinking
about this one woman, There’s
no way that lady is going to
finish. And then I was at the
finish line handing her a medal.
That really hit home for me.
Racing changes people’s lives.
After a big win, University
of Oregon track coach Bob
Bowerman used to tell guys
like Steve Prefontaine and
Phil Knight, “The next day,
you just start again. Nobody
cares what you did the
day before.” I think about
that after big races.
People say I’m crazy, but I
think selling shoes is the best
job in the world. You never
really know what’s going to
walk through the door. Whether
I’m talking about someone’s
blister issues or their first
marathon, every day I love it.
I used to get up early each
morning and fret about making
a certain amount of mileage.
Now it’s not such a big deal.
Getting older and feeling the
miles a bit more makes you
realize it’s OK to take days off.
If you’re disciplined about what
you eat, that carries over to
other aspects of your life. That
said, I’m a sucker for pop-
sicles. Give me one and I’ll eat
the whole box.
I do more weight training
than most guys in the sport.
Push-ups, sit-ups, dips,
biceps curls. I’ve always felt
that you need to be all-around
strong to run 100 miles.
Ride on the edge and see
what happens.
Young runners look up to
me, and it’s one reason I work
so hard. I should probably give
more advice, but, you know,
I still want to compete, maybe
put them in their place.
There’s still a wow factor, even
for me. I ran 100 miles. That’s
pretty ridiculous.
I’m notorious for being late.
A couple of times I’ve pulled
into the parking lot at the start
line and the racers have already
left. But I don’t get too worked
up about it. I figure I have
100 miles to catch up.
Swing your arms on long up-
hills. That generates momen-
tum for each stride.
Some of the greatest think-
ing I’ve had about life and
work happens on runs. But I
need to remind myself to write
things down immediately, be-
cause I get back and the bliss
POP QUI Z
Q. WHO’S HAPPIER: A MARRIED PARENT OR A SINGLE, CHILDLESS ADULT?
A. Almost every study shows that married people are happier than their single peers, but a growing body of research
suggests that this reverses once married couples become parents. And Mom and Dad’s happiness appears to decline
further with each successive child. Why? Probably stress, says Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, author of Stum-
bling on Happiness. At least there’s a light at the end of the parturitional tunnel: parents with grown children report
higher levels of happiness than their childless counterparts.

Bode Miller (skier) and Morgan
Beck (volleyballer) have had
a few rough moments as a
couple, including a bitter
child-custody battle with an
ex-girlfriend and the death
of his younger brother, Chelone.
But as Bode plunges into the
most ambitious ski season
of his career, he’s already met
his match—a woman who, like
him, seems to thrive on a little
craziness. BY RACHEL STURTZ
Photographs by
AMANDA
FRIEDMAN
Bode and Morgan
living large in
Southern California


“IF YOU
ASK ME, I’LL
SAY NO.”
—Morgan
“CHECK
AAAAAND
MATE!”
—Bode

taken up golf, hooked a tee shot directly into
Morgan’s left eye—an injury that required
more than 50 stitches and resulted in what
may be permanent vision impairment. That
day, Morgan established herself as one of the
all-time gamers by tweeting a picture of her
swollen, bloodied mug and the message “I’m
not feeling so hot. Line drive to the face today
with a golf ball from my darling husband. I still
love.” Bode kept his message short and con-
trite: “Hit wife w golfball. #worstfeelingever.”
Bode’s lament came in the wake of a pretty
bad November. That month, Bode and Mor-
gan began a bitter custody battle for a baby
boy Bode had conceived with an ex- girlfriend
before he met Morgan—a now resolved dis-
pute that brought him plenty of negative
media attention (“Bode Miller’s Baby Mama
Sara McKenna Claims: ‘He Never Offered to
Use a Condom’ ”). By that time, Bode already
had custody of a five-year-old girl he’d con-
ceived with a different ex-girlfriend. Later, in
January 2013, Morgan miscarried what would
have been their first child. A few months after
that, Bode’s brother, Chelone “Chilly” Miller,
died of a seizure at the age of 29.
It was the kind of year that might incline
even Romeo and Juliet to call the whole thing
off, but the couple remain undaunted. Ebul-
lient, even. Publicly, you can figure that out
from the kissy-face emoticons they post
on Twitter. Get a glimpse of their personal
life and you see it in their glass-half-full
handling of marriage’s many challenges.
“Ninety- nine-point-nine percent of people
would have walked away by now,” Morgan
says, “but if you look at the bigger picture,
our lives are amazing.”

BODE WAS KNOCKED sideways the first time
he saw a picture of Morgan in the offices of the
New York sports agent they share. A snap shot
of a blond, six-foot-two California beauty
will do that to a man.
He wrangled her number in May 2012 and
swung by a volleyball tournament in Florida
where she was playing a couple of weeks later.
At the end of her match—which she won, a
breakthrough moment for her fledgling AVP
career—Bode watched her cry. In that out-
pouring of raw emotion, he says, he saw every-
thing he wanted in a woman.
“She was trying to be macho and hide it, but
I saw it,” he tells me, his stubble now speck-
led with gray. “When everything is stripped
away—it happens in sports or when someone
is stressed—you see who a person really is,
even someone like Morgan, who has as thick
a wall as anyone I’ve ever met.”
“He said that’s when he knew I was his soul
mate,” Morgan says, feigning gushiness and
leaning into him in a booth at Bambara, a Salt
Lake City bistro where we’re having dinner.
“No, I didn’t know that until June,” says
Bode.
“We met on May 26,” Morgan points out.
The lovebirds flew in from very different
habitats. Bode, famously, had a Huck Finn
upbringing in the New Hampshire woods,
with hippie parents who let their four chil-
dren self-police, get dirty, get lost. At 11, he
was five-two and a scrappy 115 pounds; he
fought to keep up with older, bigger skiers as
they sped down the mountain.
Morgan grew up in Coto de Caza, a 5,000-
acre gated community in Southern California,
in a family that Bode calls “the white Cosbys.”
Her father, Ed Beck, was a pioneer in software
financing, which made him very, very rich.
They were definitely on the grid: Morgan
was given a Mercedes as her first car and got
grounded if she didn’t blow-dry her hair. By
age 11, she was already more than six feet tall.
She ended up playing volleyball at UC Berke-
ley and turned pro in beach volleyball in 2011.
Since Bode has achieved so much in sports,
he can shrug off a bad race, a bad Olympics,
and even a bad breakup with the U.S. Ski
Team. (Which he quit between 2007 and
2009, in part for not supporting him during
controversies like his flop at the 2006 Olym-
pics.) Morgan is a midlevel pro whose dream
is simply to compete in the Olympics some-
day, and she has trouble shaking off a bad
practice. During one early match at the Salt
Lake City Open, where she and Nielsen ulti-
mately placed ninth, Morgan slammed her
fists into the sand after hitting a perfectly set-
up ball into the net. It took some tough love
from Bode to keep the negative moment from
bleeding into the next game.
“Morgan’s emotions are her biggest
strength,” says Bode. “But she’s also a domi-
nant and very powerful woman—most guys
aren’t ready for the brunt of that.” Bode rev-
els in it. She expresses the highs and lows for
him, the constant, analytical half; he reels
her back to rational when she needs it.
People think that Bode lacks perspective,
but that’s not really true, as he’ll show you
during the wandering analytical conversa-
tions he’s known for. At one point, Bode com-
pares the range of emotions he and Morgan
experience to liquid moving through a drink-
ing straw. He holds out his hands and mimes
a straw with a huge opening, the diameter of a
basketball. That’s Morgan’s “volume.” He
64 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE
As in: he has thrown his Sölden cap to the
floor, his head is in his hands, and he’s vis-
ibly shaking. It’s August 2013, and Bode is
in Salt Lake City’s Liberty Park watching his
wife, 26-year-old Morgan Beck Miller, lose
in a tournament put on by the Association
of Volleyball Professionals (AVP). A couple
of friends sitting near him in the VIP section
look worried. It doesn’t help that the families
of the winning players—who just beat Morgan
and her partner, Kaitlin Nielsen, two games to
none—are only a few feet away, whooping and
clinking beer cans. Bode probably wants to hit
something. Instead, he has to sit there, itchy
in this moment of athletic impotence.
At 36, Bode is on the old side for an athlete,
but when he’s around any kind of competi-
tion the adrenaline still flows. It’s a blood
rush that has allowed him to ski on pure guts,
ignor ing personal safety and technical grace
for balls-to-the-wall plummets down the
toughest racecourses in Europe, Japan, and
North America. He’s the same unleashed
wild man who, over a 17-year span, became
the most decorated male skier in U.S. history
and one of the most electrifying athletes to
watch anytime, anywhere. Bode has won five
Olympic medals, 33 individual World Cup
races, six event titles, and two overall World
Cup crowns. (He has so many trophies and
cups that he sometimes uses one to marinate
chicken wings.) Going into the 2013–14 ski
season, he was recovering from microfrac-
ture surgery to his left knee that kept him off
the slopes last year, but he was thinking big:
his goal was to win the overall World Cup title
and, in February, collect more gold at the
2014 Sochi Olympics. Even now, Bode brings
it to the mountain like a Red Bull–chugging
16-year-old. It’s as if nothing’s changed.
Except everything has.
In Salt Lake City, Bode quietly picks up his
hat. He knows that if Morgan sees his bare
head, she’ll figure out that he lost his temper
and he’ll hear about it later. He doesn’t mind
throttling things down on her behalf, though,
since he’s quite clearly a man in love, for better
and for worse.
Bode said goodbye to his playboy lifestyle
when he married Morgan in October 2012,
and his first year with the 26-year-old ath-
lete and model has been a mix of pure joy and
terrible pain for both of them. An incident in
mid-December was typical: Bode, who has
B
O
D
E
M
IL
L
E
R
IS AT A BEACH VOLLEYBALL
MATCH, AND HE’S PISSED.
B
O
D
E
M
IL
L
E
R

shrinks it to the size of a marble: that’s his.
“Our personalities look black-and-white,” he
says. “But we require each other to get the full
spectrum out of life. Neither of us would be
the same otherwise.”
Morgan shoots me a glance. “Not one con-
versation remains on the surface,” she says.
“Every day is a therapy session.”
“She knows she can talk about stuff with
me and I won’t just address it,” Bode says. “If
there are 30 layers there, we’re going to start
from the bottom.”

LAST APRIL 7 in New Hampshire, Bode’s
mother, Jo Miller, entered a room making
the most pained sounds that Bode had ever
heard from a human. He and Morgan were
playing with his daughter, Dacey, and at first
he almost laughed, because he thought it was
a put-on. Then Jo told Bode that Chilly was
gone. He’d died in Mammoth Lakes, Cali-
fornia, inside his van, of a seizure stemming
from a motorcycle crash he’d suffered years
earlier. Chilly was a professional snowboarder
and was hoping to join Bode at Sochi in Feb-
ruary. For the next 90 minutes, Bode couldn’t
stop sobbing and sweating.
Neither Bode nor Morgan will expand much
on that day, but they both say the full impact
of the loss didn’t hit until Chilly’s absence
at August’s annual, family-heavy BodeBash
in his hometown of Franconia, New Hamp-
shire—a fundraiser for Bode’s adaptive- and
youth-sports nonprofit, the Turtle Ridge
Foundation. Bode has since said that he feels
he has his brother’s energy with him and that
Chilly’s spirit will be there in Sochi.
Leading up to that possible final Olympic
Games, Bode’s goal was to win all four alpine
races—downhill, slalom, giant slalom, and
super-G—at every World Cup event, which
meant regularly defeating the reigning giant-
slalom world champion, Ted Ligety, and the
super-G and downhill world champion, Nor-
wegian Aksel Lund Svindal. Bode is working
with Chris Krause, a technician for retired
Swiss World Cup star Didier Cuche, and his
hope is to win the overall World Cup, set a
points-total record, and come home with a
few heavy necklaces from Russia.
“It’s a lot,” Bode admits. “I have way more
understanding of what it takes to train and win
in four events than anyone else in the world.
Whether my body puts up with it…”
“It’s ambitious,” says Forest Carey, head
multicoach for the U.S. Ski Team and the man
overseeing both Bode’s and Ligety’s bids for
the overall World Cup. “Is it possible? Yes.
Is Bode capable of doing it? Yes, he’s done it
before. Is it likely this year? Ummm.”
At the opening World Cup race in Sölden,
Austria, in October, Ligety took the GS title.
Bode finished 19th. “Wasn’t my best skiing,”
he tweeted later. “But happy to be back.” It’s a
respectable start, though, and Carey antici-
pated that Bode would take a few races to really
get under way. He thinks there’s no reason that
Bode can’t be competitive all season.
Bode has dropped 20 pounds and says
he feels lighter and springier than ever.
Technically, this is also the first time he’s had
a fully functional body since 2001, thanks to
OUTSI DEONLI NE. COM 65
Morgan says
every day
with Bode is
“a therapy
session.”
“I’M NOT FEELING SO HOT,” MORGAN TWEETED. “LINE DRIVE TO THE FACE
TODAY WITH A GOLF BALL FROM MY DARLING HUSBAND. I STILL LOVE.”
“HIT WIFE W GOLFBALL,” BODE WROTE. “#WORSTFEELINGEVER.”

the surgery in spring 2012. Last August, at
his first training camp in New Zealand, Bode
came back skiing fast, but he left early be-
cause of swelling in his left knee. If it turns
out that his body can’t handle the four events,
Bode says the first to go will be giant slalom
and, after that, slalom. “I’m old enough and
mature enough to know that you get old, and
if your knee fucking hurts, it’s time to let go.”
Bode could be hard to beat in the downhill
and super-G. Older skiers excel at those two
races. The fast-twitch muscles required for
the slalom and giant slalom, however, favor
youth. “Taking on the slalom and giant sla-
lom is like being a running back,” Carey says.
“You have to be explosive on your feet. Past 33
years old, not a lot of guys get better. And with
Bode coming back from a microfracture sur-
gery—there’s a lot of chattering, jarring, and
slamming in those courses. I want to say that
Ligety can beat him handily in slalom, but…”
He pauses. “I’ve learned to never bet against
what Bode’s capable of doing.”
FROM THE STANDS in Salt Lake City, in the
stifling, godless heat of a Utah August, Bode
watches Morgan’s matches like a stage mother:
worrying aloud, pointing out mistakes, text-
ing her tactical ideas mid-match, and talking
volleyball semantics with other AVP players
and their coaches between events.
“Bode comes to every single practice,” says
Morgan. “I’m not kidding. One day, four of
us were working on pulling drills when Bode
brought practice to a halt. He wanted to show
us—and this includes a fifteen-year volleyball
veteran—how to do it better.”
Bode has a knack for picking up the invis-
ible pulses of a game, gaining an intuitive
playbook of moves and responses through
observation. (He’s a first-rate amateur tennis
player and has become a good golfer.) He also
has a knack for being a no-filter know-it-all,
which doesn’t always fly with others. “Being
married to Bode requires a lot of patience,”
Morgan says. “I swear to God, he has said to
me, ‘If people listened whenever I told them
what to do, they’d be so much happier.’
“There are days I’d like him to play in traf-
fic,” she admits. “But the worst part? Ninety
percent of the time he’s correct. Do you know
how that feels? It’s obnoxious.”
The way she smiles when she talks about
Bode isn’t the passive acceptance of a newly-
wed, but genuine amusement about the man
she married. So she gives him a pass on the
small things. She lets him pick her entrée at
dinners and her dress for the ESPYs, and after
some argument, she gave him her blessing to
build a regulation-size sand volleyball court
in their yard in Coto de Caza, where the pair
ended up after they got married and Bode sold
his yacht for (literally) a more stable home.
Because of the volleyball court, Morgan
barely has time to finish her morning coffee
with her parents—who are living with the
couple for now and watching their pets and
plants when Bode and Morgan travel—before
Bode turns to her and says, “Let’s go, babe.”
Her daily practices have become decidedly
more intense, but as Morgan points out, when
Bode is training hard, he often keeps going
until he pukes.
“I’m super stubborn and patient,” Bode
says during dinner in Salt Lake City. “I know
sports. I know nothing happens overnight. If
I make a suggestion, I trust that if it doesn’t
happen immediately, it might sink in later.
That’s how I got Morgan to marry me. I always
have two or three strategies going at once.
I have the immediate attack that I focus on,
and that has three or four ancillary carryovers
that help the other three or four attacks—”
“You’re getting some insight here,” says
Morgan. “Relentless.”
Bode bought Morgan an engagement ring
in Chicago during the Jose Cuervo Pro Beach
Volleyball series in July 2012, part of a “two-
prong attack.” First, he found a diamond guy
and had the ring sized. When he and Morgan
walked into the jewelry store, Bode had the
seller bring out the cushion-cut diamond
ring. She turned white.
“She said, ‘If you ask me, I’ll say no,’ ” says
Bode. “And I said, ‘I know. I haven’t asked
you yet.’ ”
“It was a month and a half into our relation-
ship,” Morgan says.
“I took the ring home, and we didn’t talk
about it,” says Bode. “We had it for so long that
I was carrying it around in my backpack when
we were in London for the Olympics. She got
so flustered, because she was convinced I was
going to lose it, and was like, ‘No! You give
it to goddamn me.’ So here she was, carrying
around her own ring.
“I knew”—Bode switches to a more schem-
ing voice here—“that the strategy was work-
ing to perfection.”
At this point, all of Morgan’s friends knew
about the ring, and the thought of it drove her
crazy. Finally, one night, she lost it.
“I told him, ‘If you’re not going to ask me
to marry you, return the ring and buy it when
you have the balls to propose,’ ” says Morgan,
throwing her hands up.
“And I said, ‘Will you marry me?’ ” Bode
says, beaming. “She said, ‘No… Yes… Ugh.’
Check aaaaand mate!”
Morgan interrupts to say it didn’t happen in
quite this order. But that doesn’t matter: Bode
has his story, and he’ll probably stick to it.
MORGAN WENT IN with her eyes open when
she married Bode. There was the good: his
daughter, Dacey, would become a part of her
life. Bode’s been friendly with her mother,
Chanel Johnson (who has since married),
ever since she was born, and he helped name
the little girl. Then there was the bad: the risk
of more ex-girlfriends and the negative pub-
licity that seems to follow Bode around like a
zombie entourage.
Three weeks into his relationship with
Morgan, Bode found out he was going to be
a dad for the second time. Morgan says she
placed an awkward phone call to the mother,
Sara McKenna, a former Marine and fire-
fighter now living in New York City, who
Bode had met through a high-end dating
service, went out with a couple of times, and
66 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE
The couple’s
backyard volley-
ball court

last saw a few days before he met his future
wife. Morgan told McKenna she knew about
the baby and reassured her that Bode would
help take care of her. This was three weeks
into Bode and Morgan’s relationship.
“I could write a book about this year,” says
Morgan, swiping through her phone’s pic-
tures to find a few of Bode and McKenna’s
cherubic son, Samuel Bode Miller-McKenna,
a tiny doppelgänger of the skier, right down to
the piercing blue eyes.
When Bode and Morgan got engaged, the
tone of McKenna’s tweets shifted from “Con-
grats to @MillerBode and I, 8 more months
and we will have a baby him or baby me! 99%
sure it’s a boy already! :)” (in June 2012) to
“Cheers to all the guys that man up and care
about their babies. You guys deserve a gold
medal, unlike some” (in September).
Later that fall, Bode filed a paternity suit for
joint custody. (He did the same with Chanel
Johnson for Dacey.) In response, McKenna,
who could not be reached for comment, hired
a publicist and released everything to the
media on January 19, 2013. Three hours later,
Morgan had her miscarriage. She was eleven
weeks and two days in. She blogged about
going through the devastation; among the
heartfelt replies were a few comments saying
she deserved it.
McKenna provided reporters with text
messages allegedly showing that Bode had
been willing to walk away from the baby and
give her a lump sum of child support. She
claims he wanted her to get an abortion, that
she almost miscarried from stress, and that
Morgan harassed her online, using the Twit-
ter handle @anaappert. McKenna, who filed
for a restraining order against Morgan last
spring, says she was responsible for threat-
ening tweets like: “There will be a warrant for
your arrest for kidnapping the moment you
go into labor so throw boulders bitch.”
Morgan flatly denies these charges.
“What’s really hard is that it was all false,”
she says. “She sold pictures of the baby to
the media and was posting all these things
on Facebook. We’ve had to deal with it and
not fight back.”
That changed on November 15. In May, a
judge had ordered McKenna to return to Cal-
ifornia for the custody proceedings—where
she was living when Bode first filed the suit—
from New York City, where she was enrolled
at Columbia University on the GI Bill. Once
the battle was back in California, Bode and
Morgan won primary custody of the six-
month-old boy and renamed him Nathaniel.
He lived with the couple for three months,
until November 14, when a New York County
judge reversed the ruling to bring the battle
back east.
The next day, Morgan posted a diatribe
on her blog about McKenna and McKenna’s
alleged desire for “revenge, attention and
money.” Two days later, Morgan deleted it.
As one commenter pointed out, “Why would
you post this in the middle of a custody bat-
tle?” Bode’s lawyers probably agreed, since
there may be a nasty fight ahead. Morgan
declined to talk to me about her on-again,
off-again post.
FOR NOW, MORGAN and Bode are settling
in with their new family, content to wait on
a child of their own. At dinner, Bode points
out that his mother was a midwife and that
he was in attendance for a few births, includ-
ing his sister’s and brother’s. He notes that he
studied his mother’s midwifery books during
his years of homeschooling. This leads to the
obvious question: Will Bode deliver Morgan’s
first child?
“No,” says Morgan.
“I think so,” says Bode.
Morgan looks at him, horrified. “I will be
in a hospital. He doesn’t want me to be in a
hospital.”
“I was there when my daughter was born,”
Bode says. “I’m very comfortable around that
stuff. It’s so raw. There’s no ego. You’re right
in the moment. Things get so calm. It’s awe-
some.” Morgan is clearly appalled. The subject
changes to Bode’s retirement.
“I would have been happy retiring in 2009,
but I realized I had to leave this sport in a bet-
ter condition than when I came in,” Bode says.
He goes on to say that, these days, he wishes
he’d been more diplomatic during his career,
but he still believes in the importance of a
freewheeling style in the sport. When Didier
Cuche and Aksel Svindal—with their techni-
cal, meticulous form—started winning, Bode
took it personally.
“It felt like I had allowed the World Cup to
prove my style was a fluke,” says Bode, who
came back for the 2010 Olympics to give peo-
ple what he calls a “whoa” feeling again. And
he did, winning gold in the super-combined,
silver in the super-G, and bronze in the down-
hill. When he got to the starting gates, people
told him they could feel the energy shift.
“My attitude was, ‘I’m going to go like
you’ve never fucking seen before, and there
will be nothing left,’ ” he says. “But I’m not
alone in that anymore—other skiers have
picked up the torch. Ted Ligety, for one.” He
also praises Austrian slalom specialist Marcel
Hirscher, who skis “like a little jackrabbit.”
“Unfortunately, your legacy tends to be
your whole legacy,” Bode concludes. “You
don’t get to pick the time later in life when
you under stood things better. It includes the
times when you were a dick, too.”
Should Bode retire, his future will include
horse racing—he co-owns two thorough-
breds with trainer Bob Baffert—his founda-
tion, and golf, but all that will take a backseat
to parenting. “I’m ready to retire,” says Bode.
“I’m so much happier watching Morgan play
sports than doing them myself. I really want
her to do well.” He believes Morgan can be one
of the top four players in the world, whether
that means her first Olympics is in Rio in 2016
or Tokyo in 2020. Either way, she knows her
coach will be at her side.
“I can’t wait for the day when I win a gold
medal at the Olympics and you’re like, ‘Thank
you, thank you,’ ” Morgan says, imitating his
future bow.
“Yep! They’ll be putting the medal around
your neck, and my head will pop up—” Bode
leans closer to Morgan and raises his head up
between her collarbones to scoop the medal.
They laugh. But don’t be too surprised if it
happens. O
RACHEL STURTZ WRITES FOR ESQUIRE,
RUNNER’S WORLD, AND OTHER PUBLI-
CATIONS. SHE LIVES IN DENVER.
OUTSI DEONLI NE. COM 67
A
L
E
X
I
S

B
O
I
C
H
A
R
D
/
G
E
T
T
Y
Miller in 2012,
rac ing in the down-
hill at Chamonix
“IS IT POSSIBLE?” SAYS U.S. SKI TEAM
COACH FOREST CAREY OF BODE’S GOALS
FOR 2014. “YES. IS BODE CAPABLE OF DOING IT?
YES, HE’S DONE IT BEFORE. IS IT LIKELY
THIS YEAR? UMMM.”

68 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE
Sean Pettit
outside Niseko

OUTSI DEONLI NE. COM 69
*TRANSLATION: GREAT, DEEP POWDER!
In a typical January, the fabled Japanese resort Niseko
gets more snow—nearly 15 feet—than any other ski area
in the world. Is there such a thing as too much? We sent
ERIC HANSEN to find out.
Fukai
Yuki
Saiko!

After a couple of group photos, Mucchan
and the others call it a day and head in to the
lodge, where most of my fellow skiers are
already posted up around yards of beer like
so many oil derricks.
So I ski alone, poofing through fluff and
leaping off pillow drops and never sharing a
chair, all while bits of white drift toward earth
and swirl skyward, dye-in- water style, on an
almost imperceptible breeze. “Aoooooooo!” I
howl, bringing my skis to a hissing stop after
another half- dozen untracked runs. I can’t
see or hear another human being.
I’m alone in the whiteout, accompanied by
little more than the tinny sound of Motown
being broadcast from one of the lift- mounted
speakers common at Japanese ski resorts.
(“Upside down, boy you turn me,” Diana Ross
sings—or maybe it’s a Japanese cover band.)
I pause to count how much time elapses be-
fore a fellow powder hound appears. Ten chilly
minutes pass, and I have my answer.
It’s a little after 2 P.M. on a Saturday after-
noon, at the height of ski season, in a storm
that will deposit some two and a half feet of
frozen H’s and O’s in 24 hours, and my lone
companion, the only other skier sharing
my stoke on this part of the mountain, is a
hunched old Japanese man, moving slowly
and concentrating on every pole plant.
I turn downhill and ski after him. In Niseko,
everyone’s a friend on a powder day.
UNLIKE UTAHANS, whose license plates
read “Greatest Snow on Earth,” or Colora-
dans, who in Steamboat have trademarked
the term champagne powder, the Japanese
in Niseko do not flaunt, or often even appre-
ciate, what they have. But even the most ex-
otic powder stashes eventually get sniffed
out, and over the past ten years the resort has
quietly become the stuff of legend among the
skiing cognoscenti.
Though only about 5,000 Americans visit
Niseko each year, I had read their rhapsodic
accounts, had seen their otherworldly pic-
tures and hypnotic movie clips. I dismissed all
the face shots as the result of patience or good
fortune or smart editing. I didn’t truly under-
stand how special Niseko is until I called up
Tony Crocker.
70 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE
P
R
E
V
I
O
U
S

P
A
G
E
S
:

M
A
T
T
I
A
S

F
R
E
D
R
I
K
S
S
O
N
After three sunny days,
Niseko is finally getting back
to normal. It’s snowing.
The village of Hirafu,
with Yotei in the
background
Photographs by KOSUKE OKAHARA
I’m with a dozen members of a snowboard
club from Tokyo, and together we zip down a
short run covered in fairy dust, then ride the
lift back to the top of the mountain, only to
discover that, in the ten minutes we spent on
the chair, a fresh sifting of white has com-
pletely filled in our tracks.
“The run reset,” says Mucchan, a member
of the club.
We traverse into a glade of snow- pasted
birch—what some here call juhyo (“ice trees”)
or snow monsters, for the way the clumps
of powder that stick to their limbs can leap
down and startle you when disturbed—and
then shimmy onto a second pitch where
more dandruff of the gods awaits. There’s no
rush. Despite the abundance of great snow,
Mucchan and Kenchan and Tsunota and the
others and I wait for each other at the bot-
tom of every pitch. “Psycho!” someone says.
High fives are traded. A plan for the next run
is agreed on. Our communication is slowed by
their choppy English and my desire to speak
using a second hand Japanese phrase book,
but even so, I have never experienced a pow-
der day anywhere close to this peaceful.
I shouldn’t be surprised. Niseko lies some-
where between a full-blown destination resort
and a laid-back locals’ hill. Called Niseko
United, it’s technically four separate resorts,
whose braids of pistes all radiate from the
same volcano on the northern island of Hok-
kaido, a short 1.5-hour flight from Tokyo.
Combined, the resorts are as big as Alta and
offer a respectable 3,000-foot drop. But it’s
the consistent nature of the storms here that
sets Niseko apart. Before the recent three-day
drought, for example, snow fell constantly, an
average of seven inches a day, for three weeks.
And that’s only slightly better than a typical
start to the season.
Mucchan doesn’t share my astonishment,
though.
“Have you ever skied Whistler?” she asks.
I tell her that I have, and I acknowledge
that, yes, Whistler’s big-mountain terrain
trumps the mellower slopes of Niseko, but
I also try to point out the obvious, how the
flakes are now coming down so thick that
it’s obscuring the horizon, how the air is so
thoroughly snow-fogged that the lift opera-
tors have turned on halogen floodlights—the
kind most resorts use only for night skiing.
No luck. Her mind wanders, the blizzard too
banal to merit discussion.
“Have you skied in Aspen?” she asks.

Crocker is a 60-year-old insurance actu-
ary from Glendale, California, and the num-
bers savant behind Bestsnow.net, the most
thorough collection of normalized snowfall
records and precipitation trends for North
American ski resorts. “I never saw snow fall
out of the sky until I was an undergrad at
Princeton,” Crocker told me. He became ob-
sessed with it during the record-setting bliz-
zards of 1978 and has been chasing powder
ever since.
As a passionate skier long trapped in New
York City, I’d hoped Crocker could help me
figure out the statistically best week to visit
one of North America’s more powder-blessed
resorts. While Crocker had lots of numerical
insights—Jackson Hole peaks in January, Utah
in February, most of Colorado in March—he
couldn’t pin down a specific window.
If there’s anything that his decades of re-
gression analysis and standard deviations
have taught him, it’s that predicting the
weather is really hard. “The bottom line is, if
you’re serious about powder, move to within
a day’s drive of one of those resorts,” he said.
Then he added the magic qualifier: “Unless
we’re talking about Niseko.”
Blanketed by 580 inches a year, Niseko
averages twice as much snow as most resorts
in North America. Only Mount Baker, with 652
inches, sees more. But while this fact is fairly
well-known, virtually every ski movie, trip
report, and barroom tale misses one key detail,
Crocker explained. Unlike most ski resorts,
Niseko gets the overwhelming majority of its
tremendous snowfall in December and Janu-
ary. On average, it receives 45 percent more
snow in January than Mount Baker. And the
water content of that snow is about the same
as at Alta, which typically sees the driest
powder in the U.S.
Scientists call it ocean-effect snow. In early
December, supercooled air starts blowing in
from the frigid plains of Siberia, sucking up
moisture from the Sea of Japan and dropping
the results on Hokkaido’s lonely volcanoes.
The coldness of the January air, combined
with Niseko’s prime, snow-catching location
on the western side of the island, creates what
is essentially a monthlong, uninterrupted
storm. Nearly 15 feet of fukai yuki saiko land
on the humble mountain in January alone, an
average of almost six inches a day.
Visit Niseko for ten days in January and
you will ski nearly five feet of fresh snow—
more than most resorts receive in a month.
Venture into the glades or go cat skiing and
you’ll almost certainly experience movie-
quality powder. When professional freeski-
ers J.P. Auclair and Chris Benchetler skied
there in January of 2009, for the ski-porn
film Reasons, the cloudlike snow wasn’t “epic,”
as they boasted in the film, it was statis tically
normal. And when Crocker quit Trans America
Insurance, where he had worked his entire
professional life, he didn’t go heli-skiing in
Alaska or move to Salt Lake City. “When I re-
tired,” he said, “the first trip I took was to
Niseko in January.”
Sold. A week later, I booked a ticket.
OUTSI DEONLI NE. COM 71
Typical powder-
day crowds
The entrance to
Bar Gyu, a.k.a. the
Fridge Door Bar
The Barn, a
French bistro
Visit Niseko for
ten days in Janu-
ary and you will ski
nearly five feet of
fresh snow—more
than most resorts
receive in a month.
Venture into the
glades or go cat
skiing and you’ll
almost certainly
experience movie-
quality powder.
Hirafu food
truck

Japanese-ski-resort-decay porn. In Hok-
kaido, many surviving resorts now appear
frozen in time.
Niseko is the exception, thanks largely to its
growing popularity among Australians, who,
after 9/11, realized that the region receives
more snow than Whistler and is much closer
to home. The resort is made up of three base
areas: Annupuri, Niseko Village, and Grand
Hirafu. (Hanazono is technically a fourth, but
it has little more than a day lodge.) Annupuri
is the smallest and most relaxed, with a seven-
ties feel and a cluster of wooden chalets, funky
coffee shops, and restaurants. Niseko Village
is dominated by an enormous Hilton hotel
shaped like a giant soda can, which towers
over the base area, and offers unusual winter-
sport activities like snow rafting, in which a
snowmobile pulls a rubber raft full of people
around a groomed field. Hirafu sits at the his-
toric heart of the resort and is now a compact,
architectural hodgepodge village teeming
with hordes of young Aussie holidayers.
Despite the development, Niseko remains
pastoral, surrounded by rectangular farms
and patchwork forests, and the vibe is down-
home. Pure water bubbles up from seemingly
everywhere in the form of onsens, or geother-
mal hot springs, and community-maintained
mineral springs, where restaurants fill their
water jugs nightly. On the mountain, scan-
nable passes are about as modern as things
get. Many lifts are doubles or even singles. A
winter farmers’ market does a steady business
selling organic turnips, pickles, rice, and sake.
ATMs are scarce, and when I finally find one,
it doesn’t recognize my card.
The other thing that makes Niseko unique
is that it’s one of a handful of resorts in safety-
conscious Japan with an open-boundary pol-
icy. Nine gates along the periphery give way
to hundreds of acres of uncontrolled terrain.
Often referred to as “local rules,” Niseko’s
unusually lax policies have spawned a half-
dozen backcountry guiding services, and the
area is home to three cat-skiing operations.
When I arrived in Niseko on January 21,
snow was suffocating the town. Driving
around, I saw an excavator teetering on a
mound of snow taller than a mini-mart, while
up the street a front-end loader dumped great
avalanches of the stuff into a line of idling
18-wheelers. Snowblowers tunneled out
side walks, and hotel maintenance workers
scurried from room to room, heaving shim-
72 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE
THE JAPANESE HAVE a deep and abiding love
for skiing, even if most of them don’t techni-
cally shred. The country’s two most moun-
tainous islands, from the frigid northern tip
of Hokkaido to the subtropical southern tip of
Honshu, are dotted with some 600 resorts.
(The United States, by comparison, has about
425.) Japan has hosted the Winter Olympics
twice: in Sapporo, 60 miles east of Niseko, in
1972, and in Nagano, 130 miles northwest of
Tokyo, on Honshu, in 1998.
After World War II, during Japan’s eco-
nomic heyday, families cut down trees and
strung up single lifts, mom-and-pop-style,
just about anywhere they could, including
Niseko. But the sport didn’t take off until the
big-money eighties, when hotels were built
and schools started busing entire classes to
the hills for instruction. Then, in 1990, the
Nikkei crashed and development stalled.
Enough ski resorts were simply abandoned
that photographers dedicate entire blogs to
Taro Tamai,
founder of
Gentemstick
Niseko Supply
Company
Carving
Niseko
Niseko remains pastoral. Pure water
bubbles up from seemingly everywhere
in the form of onsens, or geothermal hot
springs, and community- maintained
mineral springs, where restaurants fill
their water jugs nightly.

mering flurries off the balconies. Keeping
Niseko accessible until the bamboo pokes
through in March costs the local government
over $1 million a month. They don’t pray for
snow, they look for places to put it.
On my first full day, under atypical bluebird
skies, I signed up for a day of backcountry
skiing on another nearby volcano, Yotei, with
the Niseko Powder Company, a laid-back
bunch of beer-drinking Japanese dudes who
wouldn’t be out of place in Crested Butte.
“You are very lucky,” said Mako, a tall,
broad-shouldered guide who had spent much
of his early twenties snowboarding in Alaska.
“We haven’t seen sun in three weeks.”
My companions were three young couples,
professionals from Tokyo, and we dropped
one by one down Yotei’s wide west face, which
was covered in a couple of feet of light, un-
tracked snow. After especially great pitches,
everyone would clap or shout “Sugoi!”—
making it tough to remember that these were
urologists, video-game producers, and 2-D
illustrators. But, generally, the couples re-
mained quiet, keeping a lookout for tanukis—
dog-like animals that have faces similar to a
raccoon’s and, according to folklore, shape-
shifting powers. The riders all shared a rec-
ognizable style. Whenever possible, they’d
make enormous swooping turns, their arms
outstretched like wings, and in gullies they
buried the nose of their boards and kicked out
the tail, sending up sparkling waves of spray.
I finally asked the illustrator in the group
what was up.
“Surf style!” was his enthusiastic reply.
Surf style, I would later learn, was almost
a Zen kind of riding. According to Muchan, it
was “about blending with the energy of the
mountain,” and it was the predominant way
of snowboarding in Niseko, thanks to a local
former pro named Taro Tamai.
In 1998, unhappy with the punky direction
snowboarding was taking, Tamai decided to
launch his own line of handmade boards,
with distinctive split tails, minimal graphics,
and bindings mounted far back of center, so
riders could weight their front foot, even in
deep powder. Gentemstick, as he called his
hobby business, took off, and the surf style
his boards inspired became the soulful center
of Niseko riding. Every decent rider in Niseko
pilots a Gentemstick, including each of the
eight snowboarders with me on Yotei.
You pretty much have to visit Tamai’s
showroom if you want your own Gentemstick,
though that’s starting to change. A few small
stores in Europe sell them now, and the Levi-
tation Project, a boutique snowboard shop at
the base of Utah’s Big Cottonwood Canyon,
will have a couple in stock this season.
ON MY SECOND DAY, the sun was once again
shining. I was starting to worry that Crocker
had cooked his books and I might have to suf-
fer the indignity of consulting a weather fore-
cast. But instead I trusted fate and skied a few
laps in the resort, threading my way through
swarms of students in matching rental uni-
forms and groups of Chinese speakers who
fell over often and seemed to lie there for an
abnormally long period of time. I paused for
noodles at a midmountain
OUTSI DEONLI NE. COM 73
ACCESS +RESOURCES
Round-trip flights from New York City to
Tokyo run about $1,000, and from Tokyo
to Sapporo (60 miles from Niseko) about
$100. Once you’re there, the skiing is very
affordable. A four- mountain pass costs
$50, and older but perfectly comfy lodg-
ings, like the slopeside Hotel Koropokkuru
( niseko-koropokkuru.com), start at about
$50 per person per night. (Note: in Japan,
room fees are often calculated on a per-
person basis. So a room like one at Koropok-
kuru will cost $100 per night if two people
are staying in it.) For something swankier,
try Hotel Shiki Niseko (doubles from $565;
shikiniseko.com), which opened last winter
with a Michelin-ranked restaurant and super-
mod rooms. Daylong guided backcountry
trips with Niseko Powder Company start at
$100 per person (powcom.net). A day of cat
skiing with Niseko Adventure Centre is $350
(nisekoskischool.net). For everything else,
including photos of every in-bounds run,
check out 360niseko.com.
The base
at Hirafu
Bar Gyu
après
Curry soup,
a Niseko
specialty
continued on page 96

Kilham in La
Parada market,
Lima, Peru

NO J UNG L E OR R I V E R I S
T OO R E MOT E F OR S E L F-
D E S C R I B E D ME D I C I NE
HUNT E R C HR I S K I L HA M,
WHO T R AV E L S T HE G L OB E
L OOK I NG F OR P L A NT S T O
B OOS T OUR V I TA L I T Y,
E A S E OUR PA I N, A ND T UR N
US ON. S T EVE HE NDR I CKS
J OI NS T HE K I NG OF
S UP P L E ME NT S I N T HE
A MA Z ON ON A S E A R C H F OR
T HE NE X T B I G T HI NG.
Manufacturer:
Issued:
Out side Magazine
January 2014
Photographs by:
Ivan Kashinsky
M O
M O

76 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE
for the bark, above all, is prized locally as an
aphrodisiac.
The round, vaguely lascivious stall keeper
gave Kilham a free pour of LPM in a plastic
cup. The Medicine Hunter ventured a swig and
passed the rest around among our little party.
The concoction tasted liqueur-ish—sweet,
but not cloyingly so. LPM, the round man
said, stood for Levántate Pájaro Muerto—Arise
Dead Bird. None of the male drinkers in our
group, however, reported such a rise. Kilham’s
wife and business partner, Zoe Helene, the sole
woman among us, felt no stimulus either.
“It’s not meant to take effect immediately,”
Kilham offered. “With most of these prepara-
tions, you’re supposed to take them for weeks
to see results.” It sounded like a good business
model—the Prozac plan.
Among the chuchuhuasi potions compet-
ing for shelf space were ¡Para! ¡Para! (Stand
Up! Stand Up!), Levántate Lázaro (Arise
Lazarus), Tumba Hembra (Female Tomb,
more liberally translated as Knock Her Flat),
and “SSVS,” short for Siete Veces Sin Sacarla
(Seven Times Without Pulling Out). It is the
custom the world over to market sex enhanc-
ers to men, but many of these brews were said
to have a good effect on women, too. I asked
Kilham how many, in his estimation, actu-
ally worked.
“Some of these shamans,” he said, choos-
ing his words with care, “do a better job with
ingredients and processing than others. And
so some will be more effective.” He looked
thoughtful, then added, “You know, there’s
a place for reductive scientific thinking.
There’s a need for lab work and peer-reviewed
research. But with this”—he gestured at the
potions before us—“I’m open to the idea that
any of this stuff might work.”
“Dragon’s Blood. Latin binomial Croton
lechleri. It’s been used for ages for just about
anything bad that can happen to skin—bites,
burns, sores, rashes, you name it.”
We paused at stalls offering cat’s claw,
a woody vine that studies show is an anti-
oxidant and possibly an anticarcinogen; sap
from the catahua tree, used as both a poison
for darts and a purgative for the stomach; and
a pile of bright red achiote seeds advertised
as aids to the prostate.
A few paces farther along, Kilham came to
a full stop. Before us were a couple of tables
with a prodigious quantity of strange brews.
The stall next door was also well bottled, and
so too the next and the next and the next.
“We have arrived,” he said, spreading his
arms wide. “Welcome to Aphrodisia.”
The forest of bottles bore the tattered and
stained labels of Inca Kola, Fanta, Trapiche
Malbec, and other assaults to the palate. Kil-
ham zeroed in on one whose second label—
each bottle bore a new one, plastered over the
remains of the old one—announced its con-
tents, cryptically, as “LPM” and its brewer as
El Chamán de la Selva, the Jungle Shaman.
LPM contained what Kilham had come to
Peru for: chuchuhuasi. Pronounced chew-
chew-wah-see, it is a towering canopy tree so
little known in the West that, until last year,
it had no entry in that great registry of human
fact, Wikipedia. The Shipibo people, native to
the region, regard the tree’s bark as a general
tonic, an anti- inflammatory, and an analgesic
for the relief of rheumatism, arthritis, men-
strual cramps, and back pain. “Studies show
that it’s also an immune-system modulator,”
Kilham said.
I was glad for this knowledge, but my in-
terest in chuchuhuasi was more prurient,
in th
e
peruvian
am
azon,
in the city of Iquitos, there is a soiled water-
front barrio called Belén, within whose borders
strains a vast market. Among its cacoph onous
lanes is a passageway, freckled with fish guts,
fly-covered watermelon rinds, and mysteri-
ous oozes, known as Witches Alley. When the
sun is savage, which is to say when it is up,
the keepers of its stalls string tarps overhead
in a patchwork defense. Against the humidity
they have no counterattack, although some-
day a go-getter here will probably find a way
to bottle humidity and make a killing in the
export trade. These vendors tout powders and
potions no less wondrous.
Plant hunter Chris Kilham, explorer in
residence at the University of Massachu-
setts Amherst, was strolling Witches Alley,
explaining its wares. Kilham is just over 60,
with the (relatively) unlined skin and (decid-
edly) trim form of a man in his upper forties.
He has been variously employed as a yoga
teacher, honorary consul to the U.S. for the
Republic of Vanuatu, child star of a Welch’s
grape juice commercial, and author of a New
Age book that offers second-life insurance to
those who fear an undesirable reincarnation.
For the past two decades, he has made his liv-
ing as a medicinal-plant hunter, one of a small
cohort of scouts who ferret around obscure
parts of the world to bring wellness, vitality,
and, just perhaps, sexual potency to Western
consumers. His chief employer is Naturex,
a French company that is one of the largest
processors of plant extracts in the world and
has bestowed on him the somewhat orotund
title of sustainability ambassador.
Navigating Witches Alley with Kilham was
an unhurried affair, since every stall offered
a didactic opportunity. He spoke in the mea-
sured cadences of someone who knew he was
saying slightly unbelievable things that would
be more believable the more level his delivery.
Plying his trade on television has abetted the
habit. Kilham discovered years ago that TV
networks, like universities, enjoyed having a
botanical Indiana Jones around, so he chris-
tened himself the Medicine Hunter, complete
with logo, and now appears regularly on-air
as the Fox News Medicine Hunter. He col -
lects honorifics the way some people collect
fridge magnets.
Kilham stopped at a stall with caiman skulls
the size of desktop computers and picked up
a bottle of viscous crimson liquid.
“Sangre de Drago,” he said admiringly.
A vendor of
chuchuhuasi bark
in Witches Alley

OUTSI DEONLI NE. COM 77
Various of Kilham’s wives have also aided
in his research. Forty-nine-year-old Helene,
who styles herself the Cosmic Sister, is his
sixth wife; theirs is both his longest marriage
(six years), and his last, the couple insists. A
former marketer raised in North Carolina and
New Zealand, Helene runs their sprawling
website, MedicineHunter.com, helps with
Kilham’s travel logistics, and sometimes ac-
companies him on the medicine trail. On her
own time, she blogs about environmental
devastation, most notably the plight of New
Zealand’s endangered Maui’s dolphin, of
which a mere 55 survive.
“A lot of people think medicine hunting is
all Chris trekking through the jungle,” she told
me. “Or, for that matter, the chiefs and elders
he works with. The men get
the headlines. But it’s women
behind the scenes who are
doing the planting and har-
vesting and chopping.”
Helene was a planter, har-
vester, and chopper. Kilham
did not disagree in the least.
As for his own job descrip-
tion, he was frank that he’s no
scientist, just a self-taught
guy who doesn’t so much
evaluate plants (though he
thinks he does OK with that)
as evaluate what people
think of them. As he sees it,
if a tribe or nation has used
a plant for ten or twenty or a
hundred generations because
they think it does X, then
more often than not it probably does some-
thing like X. Why else would they use it?
“It’s not rocket science,” he said. “But it’s
patient, necessary work, and it helps the local
people, who make a little better living be-
cause of it, and it helps people in the West,
who are getting this health-giving plant. It
helps Naturex make money, too, which some
people reflexively don’t like, but they have
to make money if they’re going to work with
these plants, right? And since we give people
what they need to harvest the stuff sustain-
ably, it’s good for the environment, too. I see
what we do as win-win-win-win.”
Kilham’s work has earned the approval of
wellness-popularizing doctors like Andrew
Weil, who hails him as “a trustworthy guide,”
and Mehmet Oz, who has given him repeated
segments on The Dr. Oz Show. James A. Duke,
a retired USDA botanist who authored The
Green Pharmacy, the herbal-supplement
standard, says, “He’s quite knowledgeable.
Of the products that he’s worked on, the ones
that I know of at least, I approve. They’re real,
and he’s right to advocate for them.”
Not everyone sees it thus, including some
remedies, with a particular passion for what
he calls “hot plants”—aphrodisiacs. In Malay-
sia, he found tongkat ali, a slender tree whose
name means “Ali’s walking stick” and whose
root has been shown to increase testosterone.
In central Africa, he encountered yohimbe,
an evergreen whose bark stimulates nerves
in the lower spine, with animating conse-
quences for the loins. In China, he studied
epimedium (horny goat weed), which yields
firmer and longer-lasting erections, and in
Lebanon, he came across zallouh, a shrub
that, legend has it, enabled King Solomon to
give pleasure nightly to a substantial fraction
of his 700 wives and 300 concubines. Many
of these herbs tested favorably in indepen-
dent modern studies: in one Lebanese trial of
zallouh, for example, 80 percent of men with
erectile dysfunction reported improvement.
Kilham, who is dutiful in his investiga-
tions, has self-experimented with these and a
great many other herbs. In his 2004 book Hot
Plants: Nature’s Proven Sex Boosters for Men
and Women, he describes a Ghanaian feast at
which two hostesses offered him a yohimbe-
based drink, after which the trio repaired to
a more secluded spot. (“The night wore on,
happily and delightfully,” he synopsized.)
WELLNESS THROUGH plants does a boom-
ing business in the United States. About one
in five American adults takes a supplement
with at least one herb in it. The yearly sales of
all those pills, powders, and tinctures—most
of them unregulated by the Food and Drug
Administration—total roughly $30 billion in
the United States and $100 billion worldwide.
Someone has to find all those plants, and Kil-
ham is one of the foremost someones.
He has been stalking herbs for a quarter-
century. An indigenous Bostonian with a
bachelor’s degree from UMass Amherst
in mind-body disciplines, a curriculum of
his own designing, Kilham spent the 1980s
running the nutrition departments of the
natural-foods chain Bread and Circus, even-
tually rising to vice president
for marketing. Along the way,
he wrote books like The Com-
plete Shopper’s Guide to Nat-
ural Foods and, what remains
his most popular work, The
Five Tibetans: Five Dynamic
Exercises for Health, Energy,
and Personal Power, which
has been translated into 26
languages since its publica-
tion in 1994.
Kilham’s first big sortie into
medicine hunting came the
next year, when he went to
the South Pacific to investi-
gate a root called kava. Long
used by Melanesians as a
sedative, kava had been sold
in the West, but meagerly,
before Kilham convinced Pure World Botani-
cals to send him to Vanuatu to look for a good
supply. Pure World, which was bought by
Naturex in 2005, was a refiner of raw ingredi-
ents for makers of herbal products. If you used
ginkgo biloba or St. John’s wort or ginseng at
the time, odds were fair that it had passed
through Pure World’s New Jersey plant. Kil-
ham secured a supply of the root and spent
the next few years talking up kava in lectures,
interviews, and a book, Kava: Medicine Hunt-
ing in Paradise.
“To become a star, every herb needs a
prophet,” a Wall Street Journal reporter wrote
in 1998. “In the case of kava, it is Mr. Kilham.…
He has become a one-man public relations
agency for the herb.”
Demand for kava soared. By the late nine-
ties, Kilham estimates, worldwide sales were
in the ballpark of $200 million. Vanuatu’s
gross national product grew by about 8 per-
cent. The tribespeople of one island made
Kilham an honorary chief, and he served as
one of Vanuatu’s consuls to the United States
from 1997 to 2000.
Kilham went on to popularize more herbal
A MONG T HE P OT I ONS
COMP E T I NG F OR S HE L F
S PAC E WE R E ¡ PA R A !
¡ PA R A ! ( S TA ND UP ! S TA ND
UP ! ) , L E V Á NTAT E L Á Z A R O
( A R I S E L A Z A R US ) , A ND
T U MBA HE MB R A ( F E MA L E
T OMB , MOR E L I B E R A L LY
T R A NS L AT E D A S K NOC K
HE R F L AT ) .
The
barrios of
Iquitos

78 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE
and Whole Foods stores, and websites dedi-
cated to it sprang up. American TV crews
flew to Lima, and traders from Europe and
Japan got into the game. Worldwide sales
have now reached something like a quarter-
billion dollars. Today, Naturex is one of the
world’s leading processors of maca, which
is among its ten bestselling botanicals. Still,
it is far outsold by nonsexual extracts like
cranberry (marketed for its antibacterial
properties), ginseng (for mental acuity), and
bilberry (for vision). Indeed, sex enhanc-
ers as a whole make up a mere 15 percent of
Naturex’s U.S. sales, leading one to conclude
that, contrary to the old adage, sex doesn’t
sell. Kilham says not so.
“The demand for sex enhancers is vast,” he
explains. “But so is the number of products.
Guy walks into the supplements aisle, he
doesn’t know what works and what doesn’t.
Even with a product like maca, which he may
know is legitimate, a lot of companies can’t
guarantee that each dose they’ve processed
will have a standardized amount of the ac-
tive compounds. So maybe he buys a product
that’s not so good and it doesn’t do anything
for him, and he tells everyone, ‘This maca
stuff is a waste of money.’ ”
To relieve problems of trust, Kilham teamed
up with the manufacturer Purity Products to
buy Naturex’s maca, turn it into capsules, and
market it as Chris Kilham’s Vital Maca, with
his respected face on the label. It is attrac-
tively priced at $34.95 for a month’s supply.
Purity also makes Chris Kilham’s Vital Bril-
liance ($54.95), Chris Kilham’s Vital Focus
($39.95), and Chris Kilham’s Vital Rest ($44).
At $2,086.20 per year, attaining full Kilham-
ian vitality is not for the faint of budgetary
Pure World commissioned a team of Chi-
nese researchers to see whether rodents
agreed with him. Maca-dosed rats had sex far
more often than their non-dosed confreres,
and in one study even castrated rats that were
fed maca got erections as quickly, when elec-
trically stimulated, as some intact, similarly
stimulated testosterone-fed rats. A modest
amount of maca, in short, could rival testicles
and testosterone.
Preliminary human trials were promising
as well: In studies at Australia’s Victoria Uni-
versity and Massachusetts General Hospital,
women who had lost libido after menopause
or while taking antidepressants reported
a stronger sex drive on maca. In a Peruvian
trial, healthy men who took maca reported
heightened sexual desire. In Italy, men with
erectile dysfunction reported improved
turgidity. And in the UK, in a test of maca’s
effect on general stamina, eight cyclists rode
40 kilometers, then took maca for two weeks
and rode the distance again. They averaged a
minute faster.
Pure World contracted with Peruvian farm-
ers to grow, harvest, and dry the maca, then
the company refined it into powders called
Maca Pure and Maca Tonic. These it sold to
herbal-supplement manufacturers like Na-
ture’s Bounty and EuroPharma to put into pills
or bottles for retail sale.
To the press, meanwhile, Kilham hailed
maca as “Peru’s natural Viagra” and a beget-
ter of “Chinese New Year’s fireworks in your
pants.” (This was not exactly how the Andean
highlanders I spoke to put it. They lauded
maca, but not as feverishly. On the other hand,
James Duke, the USDA botanist, told me,
“When I first heard of maca, I thought it was
bullshit. But I tried it and felt some stirrings.
Me—in my eighties! It’s real.”)
Maca proliferated on the shelves of GNC
mainstream medicine men who would prefer
Kilham not peddle plants until they have been
proven safe and effective by double-blind
human trials—trials that are, of course, rather
expensive. One such critic, Steven Novella, a
neurologist at the Yale School of Medicine
and founding editor of ScienceBasedMedi-
cine.com, cites Kilham as an example of what
happens when “ideology trumps logic and
science.” Novella writes on his website, “I
think he is too soft on botanicals and too harsh
on the pharmaceutical industry.”
OF ALL THE HOT plants that Kilham has
promoted, perhaps the hottest is a South
American tuber called maca. Kilham began
hearing enticing things about it in the mid-
1990s and eventually told Pure World that
if even half of what he was hearing was true,
maca could make the other plants in Pure
World’s garden look like so many dandelions.
Maca resembles a turnip that got confused
and sprouted mustard leaves. It grows high in
the Peruvian Andes, rarely below 8,000 feet,
sometimes above 15,000. The Incas seem to
have thought it a gift from the gods: it was
said to inflate stamina, vitality, and virility.
According to legend, the Incas gave maca to
warriors before battle, but after a conquest
they took it away to protect vanquished
women from maca-fueled lust. Another story
holds that the Spaniards, after conquering the
Incas, gave it to their livestock, which had be-
come barren in the high altitude, and the ani-
mals became fertile again. But it was not until
the end of the last century, with the swell of
interest in alternative medicine, that maca
spread beyond the highlands.
Kilham went to Peru for Pure World in 1998
and came back convinced. “Maca is a food for
epic sex,” he summarized. “Among the hot
plants, maca is as hot as they get.”
Checking out
a rare giant
ceiba tree
Natural medi-
cines for sale in
Contamaná

OUTSI DEONLI NE. COM 79
have fit on a basketball court with room to
take a few jump shots. Every so often, men
would pull up on the riverbank in skiffs and
haul huge bundles of roots or bark over to the
open-air shed, where their contents would be
spread to dry on pallets before being shipped
up or down the river for sale.
Maldonado was a short, polite woman
who parted with her words on an as-needed
basis. After Kilham’s four-day journey from
Amherst to Hartford to Newark to Lima to
Pucallpa to Contamaná, I had expected some
serious bargaining—maybe an appraisal of
the crop or a gentle but probing interrogation
of the harvesters or haulers along the chain
of supply. A few years earlier, Kilham had
entered negotiations with a Shipibo chief to
supply Naturex with botanicals, only to dis-
cover that the chief was a con man with noth-
ing to deliver. Even with an honest broker, he’d
told me, it was often hard to know whether the
person could deliver goods in the right quan-
tity, of the right quality, at the right time.
But today Kilham merely told Maldonado
that Naturex’s interest in chuchuhuasi was
becoming acute and the company would
probably order a batch in a few months. Could
she deliver? She said she could. And that was
that. The discussion took about as long as it
takes to get a tamperproof seal off a vitamin
bottle. It seemed awfully little to come so
far for, and I asked Kilham later whether he
couldn’t have just picked up the phone.
“I know it doesn’t seem like much that
we’re doing here,” he replied, “but no, you
can’t just make phone calls. If you don’t come
in person, the people don’t know you’re seri-
ous, they don’t trust you, maybe they sell their
stuff to someone else. And you don’t learn
whether you can count on them.”
This was no doubt true, but it didn’t quite
sound like the whole truth. I recalled an ex-
change Kilham had had some years ago with
a reporter who asked, “What does maca need
for people to start using it?”
“It needs you,” he had answered.
The Medicine Hunter had gotten his you
on this trip. I had thought I was coming to
the Amazon to watch him do fieldwork, but it
gradually dawned on me that the bulk of the
work was working me. It is a virtue of Kilham,
however, that he is candid when questioned,
and when I asked him about it later, he ac-
knowledged unhesitatingly that medicine
hunting and publicity hunting were of a piece.
“At least half of my work involves getting
messages out to the world,” he said. “If I can
show you what is going on—the deforesta-
tion, the loss of habitat, the absolutely hor rific
marginalization of native people, the benefit
of these plants—then maybe, just maybe, you
will write about it. And just maybe that will
make a difference.”
ammo. You want a lot.”
“The pirates here don’t really hurt people,”
Cam reassured us. “They usually just slap you
around and tie you to the boat and take your
stuff. They don’t sink it or kill you—just leave
you to drift. Someone will find you.”
As it happened, we had more pressing con-
cerns. The Apus sailed her first and last un-
eventful hour before getting stuck on a mud
bar. The crew pulled out long wooden two-
by-two’s and after 15 spirited minutes heaved
us free. A half-hour of calm sailing ensued,
then the engine made a sudden racket like a
lawn mower running over a pile of branches
and died. We learned then that the Apus had
no anchor, which seemed an odd choice to a
landlubber, so we drifted aimlessly until the
boat lodged itself on a submerged hummock.
Here, a broken water pump was diagnosed,
and the pump from a small secondary engine
was cannibalized, with the hope of limping
the remaining miles to Contamaná. It was not
clear how many, because the boat had no GPS.
We could not radio for help because there was
no radio, another arresting feature of the Apus.
When the pump was at last installed, a noise
resembling a motor rang out triumphantly.
But only after four or five men, including Kil-
ham, jumped overboard and shoved on the
hull in chest-high water for an hour and a half
were we set free.
Kilham alone looked more refreshed than
worn on returning to the boat. He was an ad-
vertisement for herbal living. “Rule number
one of medicine hunting,” he said, toweling
off, “you will have transportation problems.
You just don’t know what or when.”
IN THE END, we made the remaining five
hours to Contamaná in a mere thirty. It was an
attractive little town, with crumbling build-
ings and a couple of leafy plazas. Maldonado’s
compound consisted of a warehouse, drying
shed, house, and fence, all of which could
heart. His own ledger is enhanced by royal-
ties from these and other products by about
$125,000 a year—not opulence, but neither
will he starve.
NATUREX WOULD NOT object if chuchu huasi
became the next maca. But with no scientific
research yet on the bark’s sex benefits, Naturex
and Kilham are emphasizing its analgesic and
anti-inflammatory properties, for which there
is a small body of supporting science. Kilham
thinks the bark may someday be a common
salve for the aches of arthritis sufferers and
through-hikers. His self- experimentation
suggests that chuchu huasi is on par with ibu-
profen for anti- inflammation—and perhaps
with maca for sex.
All of which was good enough to merit a
trip deep into Amazonia. A few days before
we visited Witches Alley, Kilham led our
party up the remote Ucayali to meet a Shipibo
trader who, if all went well, would supply chu-
chuhuasi to the world. It is 270 scrubby, heav-
ily logged miles upriver from the timber port
of Pucallpa to Contamaná, where the trader,
Margarita Maldonado, lives.
Our vessel was the Apus, a small two-
decker owned by Kilham’s trading partner,
Sergio Cam. (“Absolutely every thing I do
down here, I do because Sergio makes it hap-
pen,” Kilham said.) Cam, Kilham’s junior by
six years, is a man of ample cheer and circum-
ferences: waist, chest, and head. If his face
lacked its breadth, the smile that habitually
plays across it would have to hang in the air.
Our trip was the maiden voyage of the
Apus, collectively anyway: her decking, to
judge from its wear, might have been scav-
enged from the Niña, and her motor could
have been known to the Merrimack. Cam had
cobbled her together to bring Naturex’s raw
goods out of the jungle and, on the empty
trips in, to bring a free, floating dental clinic
to the villages where Naturex traded. Naturex,
via Cam, had set up a similar clinic in the re-
gion that supplied its maca.
“Do we do this just because we’re nice
guys?” Cam said. “No, man. We do it because
it’s smart business. If the people know we’ll
help them, they’re gonna like us, and they’re
gonna be good back to us and give us a reli-
able supply.”
It didn’t seem the worst form of self-
interest. The Apus shoved off with 14 crew
and passengers, including Kilham, Helene,
Cam, and a medicine man who dressed like
Tiger Woods and gave cranial rubs with his
thumbs that felt like having five-irons bored
into your skull. There were also three gentle-
men with sidearms and bullet loops strapped
to their thighs.
“For pirates,” Kilham explained. “The qual-
ification you look for in guards down here is
A S K I L HA M S E E S I T,
I F A T R I B E OR NAT I ON
HA S US E D A P L A NT F OR
T E N OR T WE NT Y OR A
HUND R E D G E NE R AT I ONS
B E CAUS E T HE Y T HI NK I T
D OE S X , T HE N I T P R OB -
A B LY D OE S S OME T HI NG
L I K E X . WHY E L S E WOUL D
T HE Y US E I T ?
continued on page 111

The drowning of Avishek Sengupta at a Tough Mudder event
last April was ruled an accident, but his family and friends
believe race organizers did a terrible job of monitoring safety
at a water obstacle called Walk the Plank. ELLI OTT D.
WOODS looks at the life of a r emarkable amateur athlete
and explains why his tragic death may lead to a multimillion-
dollar legal fight.
U N D E R
MAN

OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE 81
P
H
O
T
O
G
R
A
P
H

B
Y

A
m
y

S
i
l
v
e
r
m
a
n
OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE 81
Racers jumping off Walk
the Plank at a 2012 Tough
Mudder in Toronto

always been stocky, but in his post-college
years, long hours hunched over a keyboard
combined with a fast-food diet had made
him obese. Avi stood at five foot six, and
he’d hit his maximum weight of roughly 215
pounds in 2011 while living in Philadelphia
and working at Dreamscape, an Internet
marketing firm founded by his lifelong friend
Daniel Gemp. In January 2012, he decided to
change his ways.
He started eating better and jogging. He
ran a mile or so at first but added distance bit
by bit until he could run for an hour without
stopping. On weekends, he would go home to
stay with his parents in Ellicott City, which
is near Columbia, and climb at EarthTreks, a
rock gym where he’d been an instructor since
high school. Within two months he’d lost
25 pounds. In March 2012, he moved back to
Maryland, took the job at WebMechanix, kept
up his training, and occasionally gave in to old
food temptations. He had a particular weak-
ness for football-size Chipotle burritos.
Still, Avi kept shedding pounds, and by the
day of the Tough Mudder he’d slimmed to a
thick-necked 165. For years, Avi had worn
a scruffy goatee and styled his thinning hair
with gel. As part of his makeover, he started
shaving his head and face. Gemp, who had
known Avi since kindergarten, was aston-
ished by the transformation. “He looked kind
of badass,” Gemp told me. “Like the badass
version of Avi.”
IT WAS THE NEW AVI, dressed in red shorts
with black stripes, a black T-shirt, and a pair
of bright yellow sneakers—which his friends
described as “hideous”—who traveled to West
Virginia, predicting that he would beat every-
body in his group. (In Tough Mudders, partici-
pants aren’t timed, and there are no official
winners, but people who head out together
often race each other for bragging rights.) The
teammates had missed their assigned start
time by about two hours, but Tough Mudder
officials allowed them to jump in with the
noon group. Being late had an advantage: the
temperature had climbed into the mid-fifties
after a chilly morning in the low forties, and
the sun was shining.
Keen tore her pants on the first obstacle, a
low crawl underneath barbed wire called Kiss
of Mud, but the rest of the team were unfazed.
Muskin playfully slapped a dirty palm print
on Avi’s shiny scalp, and they all moved on
together. A few minutes later, they were slog-
ging through Mud Mile, a series of trenches
filled with knee-high water. Mirshah scram-
bled onto a slippery berm and attempted to
reach down to help pull Avi out of a trench,
but Avi was fine and bounded past him with-
out a glance. At the third obstacle, a 15-foot-
tall haystack called Bale Bonds, it was Avi, the
climber, who reached the top first and offered
a hand to the others.
A half-hour in, the teammates ran into their
second traffic jam of the day: a human bottle-
neck at a water obstacle called Walk the Plank.
The group chatted as they shuffled along with
about a hundred other participants toward a
near vertical wall of two-by-sixes that rose
to a platform 15 feet above a man-made pool
of muddy water that was roughly 40 feet wide
and 15 feet deep. When they reached the top,
they would have to leap in and swim to the
other side.
The mood was less relaxed on the platform,
where the teammates became separated from
one another amid a mass of nearly 30 other
participants jostling toward the edge. “It was
nerve-racking,” Rahimi told me. “There was a
lady with a bullhorn yelling something. Even
when I got up there I couldn’t tell what she
was saying.” Muskin heard someone counting
people off at the top but said there was also
someone at the bottom trying to do the same
thing. “They were not working together,”
Mirshah recalls, adding that he didn’t hear
any directions at all. “I had no idea there was
someone up there directing. I had no idea how
many people were supposed to go at once.”
Rahimi reached the edge first. Worried
that the platform might tip over, he leaped
for the relative safety of the water as soon as
he heard someone yell “Go!” Someone else
counted down, and Muskin jumped, alone.
When it was Mirshah’s turn, he peered over
the edge and considered climbing down.
Instead, he took a deep breath and jumped.
Keen followed.
Wilkinson reached the top of the platform
on Avi’s heels. “I remember Avi asking me if I
wanted to go before him, and I said, ‘No, you
go first,’ since he got up on the platform be-
fore I did,” Wilkinson said. “And I remember
he kind of calmed down a little bit, and then
he jumped in.”
Nobody realized it at first, but Avi didn’t
82 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE
Part of a throng of more than 13,000 obstacle
racers who would hit the course in staggered
waves that weekend, they sang the national
anthem and listened to a speech about how
their efforts would serve as a defiant response
to the Boston Marathon bombing a week ear-
lier. “This is how you fight back!” the starter
shouted into his microphone. Sengupta and
his friends and an adrenaline-charged crowd
of strangers jumped and whooped. “Leave
no Mudder behind!” the starter yelled, then
counted down from ten and blew his whistle.
In a haze of orange smoke, they were off.
The morning had begun just after eight in
Columbia, Maryland, a leafy suburb halfway
between Washington and Baltimore, at the
parking garage of an Internet marketing firm
called WebMechanix, where five of the six
teammates worked. Sengupta, whose friends
called him Avi, was one of the first to arrive.
Soon he was joined by a coworker named
De’Yonte Wilkinson and their boss, Arsham
Mirshah, who had launched WebMechanix
in his father’s townhouse. The other three
teammates, Josh Muskin, Sam Rahimi, and
Kimberly Keen—the only one in the group
who didn’t work at WebMechanix—showed
up about a half-hour late. They piled into
two cars for the 90-minute drive to Martins-
burg, West Virginia, where they would hop a
shuttle to the Peacemaker National Training
Center, a private firearms range in nearby
Gerrardstown that Tough Mudder had trans-
formed into a ten-mile track strewn with
its trademark obstacles. Avi made himself
comfortable in Wilkinson’s gray 1997 Honda
Civic. If he was nervous about participating
in what Tough Mudder advertises as Probably
the Toughest Event on the Planet, he didn’t
show it. Rahimi remembers that Avi was
“chilling in the back of D’s car with his shoes
off, just good to go.”
They all had hangups about certain obsta-
cles—Mirshah had been taking cold showers
to prepare for the ice bath at one called Arctic
Enema, and nobody was excited about get-
ting zapped at Electroshock Therapy, where
contestants run through a field of dangling
live wires—but they were all in good shape,
including Avi, who had worked especially
hard to be there.
For Avi, the oldest of the group at 28, doing
a Tough Mudder was the culmination of 16
months of dogged self-improvement. He had
The wind was blowing hard at noon on
Saturday, April 20, when Avishek Sengupta and his
five teammates gather ed near the starting corral of the
2013 Mid-Atlantic T ough Mudder.

OUTSI DEONLI NE. COM 83
F
R
O
M

L
E
F
T
:

C
O
U
R
T
E
S
Y

O
F

T
H
E

S
E
N
G
U
P
T
A

F
A
M
I
L
Y
;

E
L
L
I
O
T
T

D
.

W
O
O
D
S
resurface after his plunge. He was under-
water and sinking to the bottom, passing out
at some point, for reasons that are still un-
known. When he was next seen on the sur-
face, at least eight and a half minutes after
he’d jumped, he would be unconscious and
in the arms of a rescue diver.
Four months later, in August 2013, when I
visited the teammates at the WebMechanix
office in Columbia, it was still difficult for
them to discuss that moment. They described
the horror of seeing Avi’s bloated abdomen
and the deathly hue of his skin. “He looked like
a crash-test dummy,” Mirshah said, his voice
trembling. “His head was off to the side with
white foam coming out. I was bawling.”
Mirshah paused to regain his composure.
“Every part of us wanted to believe that he
was pulled out in time,” he said, “but the logi-
cal side of us knew that he wasn’t.”
ON THE AFTERNOON of April 20, Avi’s
mother and father, Mita and Bijon Sengupta,
were at a relative’s home in Bozman, on
Maryland’s Eastern Shore, hosting a bridal
shower for Avi’s younger sister, Priyanka.
They were just about to have lunch when
Mita’s cell phone rang. “You know sometimes
when you hear something, and your heart
starts pounding so hard that you can’t even
hear?” Mita asked me, sitting in the airy living
room of the family home in Ellicott City. “All
I heard was, ‘Is your son Avi shek Sengupta?
There has been an accident.’ ”
Minutes later the family was racing to
Inova Fairfax Hospital, in northern Virginia,
where Avi had been airlifted from Martins-
burg. They were greeted at the hospital’s
entrance by a social worker, and they knew
what that meant. “The only time they send
the social workers is when they want to pre-
pare you for the bad news,” Mita said, tears
welling in her eyes.
Avi had always been a great kid. Mita and
Bijon couldn’t remember a single time he’d
bad-mouthed anyone. As Mita recalled,
“Even when I would say something about
someone, he would say, ‘You don’t know,
Mom, maybe he had some reason.’ ” Avi’s co-
workers at WebMechanix concurred, saying
they never once heard Avi use profanity. He
was the guy whose hearty laughter filled the
office, who stopped by everyone’s desk to say
hello before starting his day.
Mirshah’s only complaint—a good-
natured one—was that he could never get
Avi to kick back with a cold draft during beer
Fridays at the office, where there was always
a kegerator filled with Shock Top. Avi never
drank or smoked. Uninterested in college
partying, he had moved home from the Tow-
son University dorms after his first semester
in 2003 and spent a lot of his free time playing
Cranium and Trivial Pursuit with his parents
and Priyanka, who is now 23. Approaching
30, Avi was in no hurry to move out. “He
loved his family,” Mita told me with a smile.
“He liked hanging around us.”
In the year before Avi’s death, the Sengupta
family grew even closer as they prepared for
Priyanka’s wedding. Late-night eating had
always been a family ritual: Mita would bake
a frozen pizza or warm some leftover Indian
food, and everybody would stand around the
kitchen island, snacking and discussing the
day. But when Avi moved home from Philly in
late 2011, he’d begun dieting and exercising,
and he wasn’t up for snack sessions anymore.
Using the prospect of Priyanka’s wedding
photos as a motivator, Avi convinced Mita
and Bijon to go on a diet, too.
Mita first remembers hearing about Tough
Mudder at the dinner table in February 2013,
when she reminded Avi to mark Priyanka’s
bridal shower on his calendar. He told her he
couldn’t come, because he was running the
course with his coworkers that day. Mita was
disappointed, but she was happy to see his
enthusiasm, so she let it go. Bijon, who was
normally very protective, decided not to dis-
courage Avi either. “He was getting into bet-
ter shape, and that was a positive thing,” Bijon
said. “He was really looking good.”
DURING THE FIRST 24 hours at Inova, the
waiting room grew so crowded with Avi’s
family and friends that the security guard had
to ask people to leave—there wasn’t enough
room for other patients’ relatives. In the ICU,
Avi had a pulse, but there was no brain activ-
ity. “I just saw him, and it wasn’t him,” Bijon
said, his voice barely above a whisper. On the
afternoon of Sunday, April 21, Bijon told the
doctors to take Avi off life support. “We left
the room, and it took a few hours,” Bijon said.
“His heart was very strong.”
Suddenly, Mita and Bijon had to make
plans for both a wedding and a funeral. Look-
ing back, they’re grateful for the distraction
of endless errands. They were also buoyed
by the turnout at Avi’s memorial service on
Avi Sengupta
in 2012
Bijon and Mita
Sengupta in
Avi’s old room
“He look ed lik e a crash-test dummy,” Avi’s
friend Mirshah said of the moment when Avi
was brought to the pond’s surface at Walk the
Plank. “His head was off to the side with white
foam coming out. I was bawling. ”

April 24, when dozens of young people they’d
never met came to tell them how Avi had
touched their lives.
Whatever relief they felt was overshad-
owed by the dawning sense that something
had gone terribly wrong in West Virginia.
In the immediate aftermath, Mita and Bijon
were in a state of shock, and they had no time
to give any thought to Tough Mudder’s offi-
cial statement on the matter: Avi’s death had
been a tragic accident, a fluke that couldn’t
have been prevented, despite the presence of
more than 75 safety personnel on the course.
That view was bolstered for the public in late
May, when the Berkeley County sheriff’s
office released its incident report, calling the
death an accidental drowning. The report
made it seem unlikely that Avi had been
jumped on by a fellow Mudder, stating that
there was no evidence he was “struck or suf-
fered some other contact to his body prior,
during or after entering the pool area.”
But the report also quoted witnesses who
said the response time by Tough Mudder’s
safety officials was inexplicably slow. One
of them, a spectator named Michael Cardile,
had called Inova on the day of the incident
and asked the ICU nurse to give his number to
the Senguptas. When the family called a few
days after Avi’s death, Cardile told him that
he’d seen Mirshah pleading with lifeguards
for several minutes before they ordered the
rescue diver in. “He was really, really mad,”
Bijon said of Cardile. “That made us think
that something definitely went wrong.” By the
time the sheriff’s report became public, Mita
and Bijon had also spoken in depth with Avi’s
teammates. The accounts prompted them to
hire lawyers to prepare a multimillion-dollar
gross-negligence suit against Tough Mudder
and a company called Amphibious Medics,
which helped manage safety procedures at
water obstacles like Walk the Plank. At press
time, nothing had been filed in court, in part
because the Sengupta family and Tough
Mudder were in talks about a possible out-
of-court settlement.
Soon after Avi’s memorial, Mirshah mus-
tered the courage to pay his respects at the
Senguptas’ home. He told Avi’s parents that
he and the others were ashamed that they
hadn’t done more to help on the course that
day. Bijon and Mita reassured Mirshah and
later invited the rest of the team to the house.
There, the teammates told them disturbing
details about the lack of urgency displayed by
a rescue diver who was assigned to the Walk
the Plank pool, and how a safety official on the
shore had argued with Mirshah, challenging
his assertion that Avi hadn’t resurfaced. Last
August, at the WebMechanix office, the team-
mates recounted the same details for me.
Wilkinson was the first to sense that
some thing was wrong, noticing soon after
Avi went in that he hadn’t come up. Within
30 seconds, he said, he began trying to get
Mirshah’s attention, gesturing at the water
and shouting, “Where’s Avi?” Mirshah had
seen Avi jump but was distracted by the sight
of a lifeguard dragging someone else to shore.
For a second he thought it might be Avi, but it
wasn’t. Moments later, when he looked back
up at the platform, Wilkinson was in a full-
blown panic.
“I hear De’Yonte yelling, pointing down
to the water,” Mirshah recalled. “And I don’t
know what he said, so I walked a little bit
closer up to the edge of the pool to hear him,
and I thought he was saying, ‘How deep is it?’
And I’m like, ‘It’s deep, man. Just get in. It’s
cool, it’s deep.’ Then I listen closer, and he’s
yelling ‘Avi! Avi!’ And as soon as I hear it, his
name, ‘Avi,’ I’m like, Oh shit. I look around.
No Avi. And then it hits me—he’s saying Avi’s
still down there.”
Mirshah ran to the first lifeguard he could
find. “I’m like, ‘Hey, my man! We got some-
one down there! My friend’s still down there!’
And his first response to me was, ‘Are you
sure?’ ” The lifeguard peppered Mirshah with
questions: Did you see him go in? Did you
see him come out? People were yelling Avi’s
name, but Mirshah said that when it finally
dawned on the lifeguard that Avi might be
submerged, he wandered off “aimlessly,” as if
he were looking for someone else.
All the while, the lone rescue diver was sit-
ting on the edge of the pool without his fins,
tank, or mask on. When the lifeguards ordered
the diver into the water, more than two min-
utes after Avi jumped, “there was virtually
zero rush,” Muskin said. The diver, Travis Pitt-
man, who was subcontracted for the event by
Amphibious Medics, could not be reached for
comment. But he later admitted to the Berke-
ley County sheriff’s department that he was
not geared up at the time of the incident and
that he initially went into the water with only
his mask. “Mr. Pittman said this is not nor-
mal protocol for safe diving,” Sergeant Ted
Snyder, the investigating officer, wrote, “but
in the interest of time, he elected to enter the
water to conduct a quick search.”
Frustrated, Rahimi dove into the pool him-
self. “Among the panic and the cold, I realized
I couldn’t go very far without having some
serious trouble,” he told me. And so Rahimi
turned back and watched helplessly with the
others, wet and shivering, as the minutes
dragged on.
84 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE
E
L
L
I
O
T
T

D
.

W
O
O
D
S
Avi’s WebMechanix
teammates, from left:
De’Yonte Wilkinson,
Josh Muskin, Sam Rahimi,
and Arsham Mirshah
“Deep, murky, cold water above your head is
an unacceptable risk,” says Mario Vittone, a
r escue-swimming expert who has been hir ed
by the Sengupta family’s lawyers, “particularly
when ther e’s no value added except for fun. ”

EVERY STRENUOUS outdoor pursuit carries
risk. In a typical year, roughly 40 people die
at lift-served ski areas, and there are a hand-
ful of deaths and hundreds of injuries among
people who do marathons and triathlons.
Whether obstacle challenges are more or less
dangerous than other sports is difficult to say,
because there’s no governing body for these
events and nobody keeps precise statistics.
But an informal survey conducted by Outside
indicates that, per participant, obstacle rac-
ing is actually less likely to end in death than
marathons, triathlons, recreational skiing, or
bicycling. (See “Risk Factors,” page 87.)
Obstacle challenges are operated by pri-
vate companies large and small—among
them Tough Mudder competitors like Spar-
tan Race and the creators of smaller, local
events like the Freak 5K—who stage them for
profit and require participants to sign stan-
dard liability waivers. What we know about
casualty rates is gleaned mainly from news
reports that appear when something goes
wrong at a race. After Avi’s death last spring,
Ryan Krogh, an editor at Outside, surveyed
the industry and found a few other deaths
(including two from heatstroke at a 2011
Warrior Dash outside Kansas City) and a host
of serious injuries, including several cases of
paralysis resulting from falls or dives. Other
common mishaps include hypothermia,
lacer ations, electric shocks, burns, and bro-
ken bones. (See “Field of Screams,” above.)
At the Tough Mudder where Avi died, the
Martinsburg City Hospital’s emergency room
was swamped with event participants that
weekend. They treated two heart attacks,
orthopedic and head injuries, and multiple
cases of hypothermia. Jennifer Andersen, a
40-year-old mother of two, was admitted for
complications resulting from a near drown-
ing. Andersen passed out from exertion on an
obstacle called Pirate’s Booty. She fell about
15 feet, colliding with another participant
on the way down and landing face-first in a
pond. She was rescued by fellow participants.
The response by Tough Mudder in the wake
of Avi’s death has been consistent: We are
OUTSI DEONLI NE. COM 85 Illustration by BRYAN CHRISTIE DESIGN
FIELD OF SCREAMS
A look at common obstacle-race features that have
caused severe injury or death BY MEAGHEN BROWN
Paralysis
MUD FREAK; FLORENCE,
SOUTH CAROLINA
March 2013: A Georgia
man slips on a cargo-net
climb and tumbles
15 feet to the ground.
Heart Attack
Tough Mudder’s Electroshock Therapy,
said to pack 10,000 volts, can cause cardiac
arrest, but no deaths have been reported.
Lacerations
Cuts and scrapes
are among the most
common injuries. The
most common cause?
Barbed-wire crawls.
Drowning
ORIGINAL MUD RUN;
FORT WORTH, TEXAS
April 2012: A Dallas
man’s body is recovered
from the Trinity River
after he fails to emerge
on the opposite bank.
Paralysis
WARRIOR DASH;
FLINT, MICHIGAN
July 2011: A Michigan
man is paralyzed after
diving headfirst into
a mud pit.
Burns
These can be incurred
regularly at Spartan
Races and other events
with fire jumps or runs.
Fractured Ankles
EXTREME K MUD RUN;
SILVERDALE, WASHINGTON
January 2013: Three women
break their ankles on Grav-
ity’s Revenge, a two-story
slide into a rocky ravine.
Dislocated Shoulders
They happen most commonly
on monkey bars and other
obstacles that require hanging.
Hanging
TOUGH MUDDER BUFFALO;
ANDOVER, NEW YORK
August 2013: A man clothes-
lines and nearly hangs himself
while running through Electro-
shock Therapy.
Heatstroke
At an August 2011
Warrior Dash in
Kansas City, Mis-
souri, two men died
after being rushed
to the hospital on a
95-degree day.
Hypothermia
Many events use
severe weather as
an obstacle. Others,
like Tough Mudder,
feature an ice bath
that can contribute
to the condition.
Dehydration
As in many sports,
this happens at
nearly every event,
at various points
along the course.
Symptoms are
usually minor.
AND IF THE OBSTACLES DON’T GET
YOU, THE CONDITIONS WILL

heartbroken by this occurrence, but we’re
also proud of our safety record. “As orga-
nizers, we take our responsibility to provide
a safe event to our participants very seri-
ously,” company CEO Will Dean said in a
press release issued the day after Avi died.
“Tough Mudder is devastated by this tragic
accident.” The release went on to say that the
West Virginia Tough Mudder “was staffed
with more than 75 ALS, EMT, Paramedics,
water rescue technicians and emergency
personnel” and that Avi was “the first fatal-
ity in the three-year history of the company,
after over 50 events with more than 750,000
participants.” Just two months earlier, in
February, Dean told Inc. magazine, “Statis-
tically, it’s amazing. You take that number
of people, and if they were sitting at home
that day, statistically, we should have had a
few heart attacks. I have to tell the team, it’s
coming. We have to accept that it’s going to
happen at some point and work to ensure it
never does.”
With litigation a possibility, Dean isn’t
commenting further, and Tough Mudder
declined my requests to see internal docu-
ments relating to safety procedures. Com-
pany officials did invite me to Tough Mud-
der’s Brooklyn, New York, headquarters last
summer to discuss safety issues, and I was
told repeatedly that Tough Mudder is and
always has been committed to participant
safety. “We did everything we could,” chief
operating officer Don Baxter said about Avi’s
death, adding that “it’s impossible to remove
risk entirely from these events.”
Mario Vittone, a retired U.S. Coast Guard
rescue-swimmer instructor and aquatic-
risk-management consultant based in Vir-
ginia Beach, sees it differently. Vittone has
been hired as an expert witness by the Sen-
gupta family’s lawyers. He argues that Tough
Mudder could have done much more to miti-
gate the risks in West Virginia, and that what
Dean calls the company’s “amazing” safety
record may have been the very thing that
blinded it to inadequacies.
“Mistaking the lack of failure for success
is a really common human error,” Vittone
explained. “It’s like texting and driving. If the
teenager texts, he’s just learned that he can
do it and not get in a wreck,” and so he’s likely
to do it again.
Tough Mudder declined to address this
and other criticisms made by Vittone. Baxter
told me that Tough Mudder’s safety record is
important to its branding but that safety isn’t
just about marketing for the company, which
will net approximately $100 million for 2013.
“Part of what makes Tough Mudder different
from much smaller mud runs is that we have
the resources to be able to invest in making
things like these obstacles better, and in mak-
ing sure we’ve got as good a quality of medical
care as possible,” he said. “We just have a duty
of care to everyone who comes through.”
Ben Johnson, Tough Mudder’s communi-
cations director, emphasized that the com-
pany spends hundreds of thousands of dol-
lars annually on safety training for employees
and is projected to incur “significantly more
than $4 million” in external event-safety
costs in 2013.
From Vittone’s perspective, though, it
doesn’t matter how much money Tough
Mudder spends if it fails to apply military-
grade risk management to what the company
markets as a military-style obstacle course
“designed by British Special Forces.”
“The training done by elite military combat
professionals involves a lot more than setting
up an obstacle course and sending the troops
in,” Vittone wrote on April 23 in a widely cir-
culated blog post. “They go through months
of buildup and monitoring, the training is
extremely well supervised, and their emer-
gency response plans are well thought out,
practiced, and proven. By comparison, an
event like Tough Mudder is a free-for-all.”
BEFORE THE INCIDENT in West Virginia,
Vittone had never given much thought to
Tough Mudder. Intrigued by news stories
about Avi’s death, he began searching for
participant videos on YouTube. As he stud-
ied the deployment of safety personnel and
the crowd-control measures used for Walk
the Plank at various Tough Mudder events,
his immediate reaction was harsh. “This isn’t
planned out,” he told me. “This is hoping.
This is throwing people in the water, throw-
ing out a couple of lifeguards or some guys
in kayaks, and hoping for the best.” When
a video of the entire West Virginia incident
at Walk the Plank appeared online last June,
shot by a participant named Brett Brocki,
Vittone’s convictions hardened.
“There didn’t appear to be any standard
operating procedures,” he said. “Even within
the few minutes that the video shows, there’s
a difference in the way people enter the water
from the first second of the video to the last
minute of the video.”
Something as simple as managing the way
Tough Mudder participants enter and exit a
muddy pool may seem trivial, but Vittone
says that military-style SOPs, or standard
operating procedures, are a vital element in
risk management, because they help control
variables, ensuring that the only risks posed
by a hazardous activity are the ones that
can’t be eliminated.
In the case of Walk the Plank, where par-
ticipants plunge into cold water over their
heads, it would be impossible to eliminate the
inherent risk of drowning. But Vittone says
that properly designed SOPs could stop many
other calamities: collisions between partici-
pants in midair or in the water, lifeguards get-
ting distracted by disorganized crowds, or a
participant drowning without being seen.
In Vittone’s opinion, all of those additional
human-error risks were in play on the day
Avi drowned, and those factors combined to
make an effective rescue impossible.
When I asked Vittone how he would re-
form Walk the Plank, he said it was simple:
he’d shut down the obstacle entirely. “Deep,
murky, cold water above your head is an unac-
ceptable risk, and it can’t be effectively man-
aged,” he said, “particularly when there’s no
value added except for fun.” When I pressed
him for a more compromising position, he
said, “I would at least expect them to follow
86 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE
C
O
U
R
T
E
S
Y

O
F

T
H
E

S
E
N
G
U
P
T
A

F
A
M
I
L
Y
Tough Mudder says it’s committed to participant
safety. “We did everything we could,” Don Baxter,
the company’s chief operating officer, told me at
company HQ in Brooklyn, New York. “It’s impos-
sible to r emove risk entir ely from these events. ”
Avi with his
sister, Priyanka
To see video of Avi Sengupta on Walk the Plank,
go to outsideonline.com/walktheplank.
oo

the same safety protocols that are followed at
water parks with clear water and ten-year-
olds—one person in the pool, one person out.”
If it were up to him, Vittone said, he would
require eight divers at Walk the Plank—two
separate teams composed of a diver, a back-
up, a dive tender, and a dive master, rotating
frequently to prevent fatigue and inattention.
When Avi drowned, Travis Pittman was the
only diver on hand.
Vittone conceded that Tough Mudder
could probably reduce risk at Walk the Plank
to an acceptable level, but doing so would
create long waits. “The list of things I would
put in place are doable, but then you can’t run
20,000 people through it in a weekend, not
without building five of them,” he explained.
“So it’s one of those things: to do that safely,
you can’t do it fast, and therefore I would
suggest against it.”
FOR NOW, TOUGH MUDDER has no plans
to remove Walk the Plank from its obstacle
lineup. Baxter told me the company applies
“a rigorous data-driven approach to mak-
ing sure that risk is minimized,” and the data
shows that relatively few injuries occur at
Walk the Plank. People get hurt more often at
obstacles like Balls to the Wall, which requires
participants to climb over a 12-foot vertical
wall, leading to many twisted ankles and the
occasional broken leg. To reduce risk, Tough
Mudder added wall cleats and spread mulch
at the base to soften landings.
Baxter couldn’t think of any modifications
they’d made to Walk the Plank based on in-
jury data in the three years leading up to Avi’s
death. Sitting in Will Dean’s office at the
Tough Mudder HQ, he had a sheaf of papers
spread out before him, including schematics
of obstacles and metrics showing coursewide
and obstacle-specific injury data. “Walk the
Plank does not feature in any of these,” he
said. “I hazard to say it’s not in our top ten in
number of injuries.”
While Tough Mudder has not admitted
to any fault in Avi’s death, the company has
taken significant measures in the months
since it occurred to improve safety manage-
ment at Walk the Plank. In midsummer of
2013, it altered the description of the obstacle
on its website to remove this sentence: “Don’t
spend too much time pondering your leap—
squadies at the top of the platform will chew
you out, or worse, push you into the freezing
depths below.” Ben Johnson told me that this
comment was “clearly made in jest” and “not
something we did on-site.” But Amy Cohen,
a teammate of Jennifer Andersen’s, says that
when she hesitated at the top of Walk the
Plank, a Marine volunteer told her, “If you
want, we can push you.” A moment later, she
says, someone shoved her hard from behind.
She hit the water in a panic and had to be
rescued. (As it happened, the change in the
description on the site was only temporary—
the old language was restored in September.)
More substantive and lasting changes have
involved implementing a standard construc-
tion plan for Walk the Plank and a carefully
managed deployment of safety person-
nel. Prior to Avi’s death, standards appear
to have been inconsistent. A quick search
online turns up photographs of at least half
a dozen iterations of Walk the Plank’s con-
struction design, with as many variations
in the arrangement of safety workers. One
of the first meaningful steps Tough Mudder
took, according to Baxter, was to standardize
the design and create a new set of SOPs. “It’s
part of us analyzing how we can improve on
the back of West Virginia,” he said.
In the current design, participants climb to
the platform in single-file lanes separated by
handrails. Up top, there are places for volun-
teers to stand, sectioned off by two-by-fours.
Each volunteer is responsible for two lanes
and actively directs jumpers on either side of
his position. In the pool below, there’s a one-
to-one ratio of lanes to lifeguards. Before
allowing each participant to jump, the vol-
unteer on the platform communicates with
the lifeguard below to make sure the previous
jumper has resurfaced and cleared the lane.
Tough Mudder’s improvements reflect
suggestions made by MedPrep Consulting
Group, a New York firm hired in May 2013 to
do a full audit of the company’s medical ser-
vices. Stu Weiss, MedPrep’s CEO, is an emer-
gency physician who has served as medical
director of the New York City Marathon and
the New York City Triathlon. He said he was
impressed by Tough Mudder’s eagerness
to improve. “Obstacle races are sort of like
running was 15 years ago,” Weiss told me over
coffee one after noon. “If you look at races ten
years ago, all the big races, even the New York
City Marathon—the medical delivery system
was Band-Aids and Vaseline. Over the past
ten years, it’s really developed into some-
thing where now we deliver state-of-the art
care.” These days, major marathons and tri-
athlons have mobile triage centers on-site,
staffed with ER doctors and nurses. Weiss
said he plans to bring that standard of care to
Tough Mudder, and he hopes other obstacle-
challenge companies will follow his lead.
WITH VITTONE’S comments in mind, I
asked Weiss about the importance of SOPs.
He said they’re crucial, adding that he per-
sonally reviewed and improved existing SOPs
for all Tough Mudder obstacles as part of the
spring audit. Safety personnel and volun-
teers now receive “obstacle cards” detail-
ing the actions they should take during an
emergency. On the morning of the first day
of each two-day event, volunteers and staff
run through real-time drills to ensure they
understand their roles.
At the Tough Mudders Weiss had attended
as of last August—Pittsburg, Philadelphia,
and Buffalo—he found
OUTSI DEONLI NE. COM 87
RISK FACTORS
The statistics aren’t exact, but obstacle racing appears to cause fewer deaths per
competitor than several better-known action sports —M.B.
SOURCES: Sport associations, industry organizations, and published studies. All figures are 2010–12 and are estimated.
Skiing statistics include deaths at ski resorts but not in the backcountry.
continued on page 98
DEATH RATE
(PER 100,000)
TOTAL
FATALITIES
TOTAL
PARTICIPANTS
1.5M
TRIATHLON
1.5M
MARATHON
19.8M
SKIING
2.4M
OBSTACLE RACING
TRIATHLON
1.9
SKIING
0.5
MARATHON
0.2
OBSTACLE
RACING
0.18
TRIATHLON
28
SKIING
89
MARATHON
3
OBSTACLE
RACING
4

88 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE
ESSENTIALS 01.14
ADVENTURE TOOLS, TESTED & REVIEWED
Photographs by INGA HENDRICKSON
Kill Shot
A SERIOUS CAMERA
GETS TOUGH
by Michael Frank
PROBLEM: RUGGED cameras usually sacrifice shooting chops for durability. Solution: Nikon’s new
AW1. It’s the first digital interchangeable-lens camera that’s waterproof (to 49 feet), shockproof (up to
6.6 feet), and worthy of being a pro shooter’s kit. The reason it takes such remarkably crisp photos is
what’s under the hood. The giant CMOS sensor refuses to pixelate, even in shots that blend bright white
snow and forest shade, and it can capture 15 frames per second at shutter speeds up to 1/16,000—see
falcon in flight, freeze falcon in flight. Nikon gave the camera rubber gaskets that seal underwater, and
the whole body is packed into a polycarbonate-lined steel frame to insulate it from shock. The AW1 is
also equipped with a GPS that tracks where photos were shot, and an on-screen dial lets users switch
among six shooting modes with one hand, useful for photographers who need to keep one eye on the
action and the other glued to the LCD. $800; nikonusa.com

100+ STORES | REI.COM | MOBILE
DON’T TELL STORIES
IN THE LODGE.
SHOW THEM.
MOUNT YOUR GOPRO TO GIRO’S NEWEST HELMET
The new Edit isn’t just Giro’s lightest full-featured snow helmet ever—it also features a sleek
GoPro-compatible camera mount. Which means you can capture and back up every crazy
thing you do. Find the Edit and lots more innovative gear at REI stores and REI.com.

90 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE
0
1
.
1
4
1 2
4 5

OUTSI DEONLI NE. COM 91
Spectrum
BEST FOR: DROPPING THE HAMMER
1. Mammut Eigerjoch
Light $300
You can wear this trim-fitting
insulated jacket around town or
as a warmth-boosting midlayer
on chilly resort days, but it prefers
charging up mountains. Stretch
panels on the sides and back
let our arms swing freely during
hard runs in Jackson Hole, and
the high collar blocked biting
wind. But the reason it’s both the
most breathable jacket on these
pages and way warmer than its
14 ounces suggest comes down
to Polartec’s new Alpha syn thetic
insulation. It’s lofty for extra heat
and features an airy, open struc-
ture that dumps perspiration.
14.4 oz; mammut.ch
BEST FOR: MATING CALLS
2. Helly Hansen Svalbard
Thermo $140
Forty years after Helly Hansen
released its first classic quilted
jacket, the company updates
it with lightweight synthetic
PrimaLoft fill and a wind-and-
water-resistant polyester exterior.
The result isn’t as breathable or
tricked out as the other insulated
jackets here, but that’s not the
point. The Svalbard Thermo is
that rare combination of Steve
McQueen style and on-slope
functionality. Bonus: elastic at
the cuffs and collar kept out
wind as we biked from one bar to
the next. 16 oz; hellyhansen.com
BEST FOR: STORM SKIING
3. Arc’teryx Caden $650
The Caden is part of Arc’teryx’s
new Whiteline family and is
cut a bit looser than the brand’s
other ski shells. But this is no
baggy freeride jacket. While
there’s extra fabric around the
shoulders and elbows for mobil ity,
and just enough room to com-
fortably contain a micro-puffy
or several other insulated layers,
the fit is still trim and athletic.
That cut, plus an outer made of
Gore-Tex Pro (a lighter, stronger,
more breathable iteration of the
classic fabric), is ideal for hard
chargers at wet, stormy resorts
like British Columbia’s Whistler.
1.3 lbs; arcteryx.com
BEST FOR: FRIGID LIFT RIDES
4. Columbia Millennium
Flash $330
Conventional wisdom says the
thicker the jacket, the warmer
you’ll be. That’s often true, but
insulated shells like the Millenium
Flash can be deceptively toasty.
Aluminum microdots embedded
in a layer of breathable polyester
reflect heat back to your body,
and the roomy cut and strategi-
cally placed stretch panels allow
for maximum movement. If you
need to shed weight, zip off the
hood and powder skirt. To release
heat, pull open the huge pit zips.
2.2 lbs; columbia.com
BEST FOR: POLAR CONDITIONS
5. The North Face
Point It Down $350
Water-resistant down gives ski-
ers the go-ahead to wear puffies
without worrying (as much)
about overheating or wet snow.
The North Face makes it even
more attractive with a slew of
ski-specific bells and whistles:
interior mesh drop pockets, teth-
ered goggle wipe, helmet-size
hood. Then it adds what counts.
Moisture-prone zones—hem,
pits, collar—get synthetic insula-
tion, which retains heat even
when wet. The rest is stuffed with
700-fill treated down, making this
the warmest jacket here. 1.8 lbs;
thenorthface.com
BEST FOR: BACKCOUNTRY MISSIONS
6. Outdoor Research
Valhalla $350
Soft shells are comfortable,
stretchy, and breathable,
but they tend to value pared-
down design over user-friendly
features. The Valhalla is fully
decked out. OR rigged this
Gore Windstopper jacket with a
Recco reflector, a touchscreen-
compatible smartphone pouch,
and cargo pockets big enough
to stash climbing skins. The most
innovative features, however,
are the silicone piping along
the shoulders, which prevent
wear from pack straps, and pit
zips that extend all the way to
the hemline for unmatched
ventila tion during climbs. 1.4 lbs;
outdoorresearch.com
Coats of Armor
SNORKELING POWDER, ELBOWING UP TO THE BAR—EVERY
WINTER HOBBY IS BETTER WITH THE RIGHT JACKET
by Frederick Reimers
3
6

92 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE
Stress Tested
0
1
.
1
4
Alternative Energy
RECHARGE DEAD BATTERIES OFF THE GRID WITH THESE
PORTABLE POWER PLANTS
by Brent Rose
EVERY FEW MONTHS, another travel-ready charger appears that’s
intended to replenish your mobile phone when you’re miles from the
nearest wall socket. Be it solar, wind, or hydrogen, the devices work
by converting energy to electricity and charging a USB-connected
handset in real time. (They can also store power in an internal cell
or an external battery pack.) Most generate enough juice for a few
clutch texts or calls, and that makes them potential life savers—
whether it’s an off-the-grid vacation or Hurricane Katrina. We paired
a dozen of the gadgets with a Samsung Galaxy SIII. Some worked
faster than others; these four stood above the rest.
1. GOAL ZERO
NOMAD 7 $120
How It Works: The
magazine-size panel
weighs less than a
pound and is perfo-
rated with eyelets, so
it can be hung from a
branch or strapped
to a backpack. When
it’s exposed to
direct sun, you can
either connect your
phone directly or fill
an optional battery
pack ($40) that,
once charged, can be
tapped after sunset.
It’s the smallest, most
flexible solar panel
we’ve seen.
Charge Time for One
Call: 12 minutes
For Full Power:
6.5 hours
X Factor: Partly cloudy
with a chance of rain.
goalzero.com
2. ETÓN BOOST-
TURBINE 4000 $80
How It Works: This
kinetic-energy gen-
erator uses magnets, a
gear box, and mechani-
cal motion—a hand
crank—to charge an
internal battery. It’s the
only device here with
a two-way USB port:
power up the battery
from an electrical
socket before leaving
the house and it’s good
for two full cell-phone
re-ups. Start cranking
when the stored power
is exhausted.
Charge Time for One
Call: 6.5 minutes
For Full Power:
3.8 hours
X Factor: Since it’s
human powered, the
BoostTurbine is the
most reliable we tested
for quick charges, but
don’t plan on generat-
ing enough juice for
a full battery.
eton.com
3. BRUNTON
HYDROGEN
REACTOR $150
How It Works: The
prototype we tested
looked like a smaller
version of the canisters
used to fuel camp
stoves, except that
it uses hydrogen to
generate power. Twist
on a 2.3-ounce bottle
and the gas is slowly
released, flowing past a
platinum catalyst that
separates the hydrogen
ions from the electrons.
The resulting electricity
is transferred by USB.
Charge Time for One
Call: 10 minutes
For Full Power:
6.1 hours
X Factor: Each refill-
able canister costs
$15; run out and you’re
on your own.
brunton.com
4. BIOLITE
CAMPSTOVE $130
How It Works: This
wood-fired camp
stove converts heat
to electricity through
a thermoelectric
generator. The energy
is transferred via USB
and excess is stored
in an internal battery.
Bonus: An optional
grill ($60) lets you
sear steaks while
your phone feeds.
Charge Time for One
Call: Eight minutes
of hot fire
For Full Power:
Four hours
X Factor: It chews
through wood rapidly,
so gather plenty
before igniting.
biolitestove.com
BIKE POWER?
It’s a brilliant idea:
charge your phone
by pedaling your
bike. Trouble is, none
of the four models
we tested seemed
to work very well.
They’re shockingly
inefficient (one
took 70 minutes for
a 4 percent charge).
But with Siva
Cycle’s forthcom-
ing Atom ($130;
sivacycle.com), out
in April, change may
be coming. The
device claims to
generate 80 percent
more juice than
competing models,
which would put
it squarely in the
range of useful.
Watch this space.
4
1
2
3

OUTSI DEONLI NE. COM 93
TECH TIP: Wool’s fibers absorb moisture and
slowly release it through evaporation. Hydro-
phobic synthetics suck it away from your skin
and deposit it outside the garment. That’s why
synthetics are the preferred next-to-skin layer.
Best For: Lift Riders
5. Mid Top
Stretchy, high-wicking
polyester in the arms,
shoulders, and sides
in Merrell’s Alpino
($109; merrell.com)
provides flexibility in
the areas you move
most. The reason it’s
the best option for
the lift: thick wool-
and-polyester panels
on the back and chest,
which focus warmth
in your core.
Best For: Dry Cold
3. Mid Bottom
Black Diamond pairs
light and heavy fleece
in the Co-Efficient
($109; blackdiamond
equipment.com). The
result is an amply
insulating piece that
breathes like some-
thing half its weight.
When temperatures
drop below zero, wear
it with a light under-
layer; when they climb
to 32, use it alone.
Base Layers
TEMPERATURE
RATING:
ALL
TEMPERATURE
RATING:
35
˚
TEMPERATURE
RATING:
-
15˚
Best For: High Output
4. Light Top
We sweated through
Outdoor Research’s
Torque ($59; outdoor
research.com), and
within 20 minutes of
stopping it was bone
dry. Credit the perfor-
mance of its quick-
wicking Polartec Power
Dry material. Bonus:
the long-sleeve version
($69) has venting
mesh side panels and
fold-down hand covers.
Best For: Mountaineers
6. Heavy Top
Synthetic Polartec
Alpha fill around the
core of the North Face
DNP ($180; thenorth
face.com) makes it
warmer than the other
layers here—perfect
for cold-weather hiking
and snowshoeing. It
works as a standalone
on the way up and,
paired with a shell, has
enough insulation for
the descent.
Mix and Match
WHETHER YOU’RE RUNNING OR SKIING, LEARN THE OPTIMAL COMBINATION
OF COLD-WEATHER GEAR WITH OUR GUIDE TO WINTER LAYERING
by Joe Jackson
BEST FOR: Everyone
1. Briefs
Compression shorts
are about moisture,
not warmth. CW-X’s
LiteFit ($35; cw-x
.com) are made of a
proprietary quick-dry
fabric that wicks
moisture away from
your nethers in dry
cold and wet heat.
Bonus: silver fibers in
the fabric kill bacteria
and neutralize odors—
adios, junk funk.
BEST FOR: Fall Runners
2. Light Bottom
We tested dozens of
bottoms, and none
of them combined
form, comfort, and
durability as admira-
bly as SmartWool’s
NTS Micro150 ($65;
smartwool.com). Made
of 100 percent merino
wool, they feature low-
profile, flat-seam
construction along the
hips, thighs, and calves
to eliminate chafing.
When the
mercury
drops, reach
for thicker
socks. Fits’
Light Ski
OTCs ($24;
fitsock.com)
keep feet
snug down to
zero degrees.
Protect your digits with REI’s
Powerflyte gloves ($25; rei.com).
The soft-shell material keeps
hands warm down to 20 degrees.
1
2
3
4
5
6
TEMPERATURE
RATING:
0
˚
TEMPERATURE
RATING:
-
10
˚
TEMPERATURE
RATING:
-
5
˚

94 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE
Style
0
1
.
1
4
Photograph by INGA HENDRICKSON
Bonobos gets
tartan right on
its Canning tie
($85; bonobos
.com), which
feels modern
and classic at
the same time.
With boiled wool
bonded to a cotton
twill liner, Filson’s
updated Seattle
Cruiser jacket ($495;
filson.com) is built to
the same specs as
its famous Mackinaw
Cruiser—but with a
slimmer cut.
Patagonia’s Gerard
shirt ($129; patagonia
.com) is made from a
sturdy wool-polyester-
nylon blend and adds
the tiniest bit of flair:
a climbing-rope-like
closure at the collar.
Merino wool is the
magic ingredient in
Icebreaker’s versatile
Seeker pants ($180;
icebreaker.com) and
Ugg’s Westly chukka
boots ($160; ugg
australia.com).
Natural Selection
WHETHER IT’S A NEW JACKET OR A
SMART-LOOKING TIE YOU’RE AFTER,
YOU CAN’T GO WRONG WITH WOOL
The stripes on
SmartWool’s
Double Insignia
socks ($21) are
just for show, but
the rolled ear band
on its Pattern
Cuffed beanie
($28; smartwool
.com) is there to
boost warmth.
The collaborative
Old Growth
Collection from
Woolrich x Danner
includes the classic
Danner boots, a
hefty shirt-jacket,
a cozy blanket, and
this scarf ($55;
danner.com).

I S I T REALLY BRAGGI NG
I F SOMEONE ELSE CALLS US “THE BEST?”
Normally we wouldn’t call ourselves “the best.” But when Outside magazine (yes, the
very publication you’re holding) named Park City, Utah—drum roll, please—“2013
Best Town Ever,” we decided to go with it. And the accolades don’t end here. SKI
magazine’s readers ranked all three of our resorts—Park City Mountain, Deer Valley
and Canyons—in the Top Ten of North America’s best ski resorts. No brag, just fact.
So make haste for The Greatest Snow on Earth®, our famed Utah Olympic Park
and Park City’s Historic Main Street. Remarkable restaurants, bars, shopping and
galleries abound—all just a quick flight away followed by a 35-minute, scenic ride
from Salt Lake City International Airport. It’s called an Easy Escape. Learn about
it, and enter to win a trip and winter gear, at ParkCityEasyEscape.com.

restaurant and accepted an invitation from an
older Japanese couple to carve perfect figure-
eight turns.
Annoyed by all the vitamin D and the glo-
rious blue skies, I called it a day early. I had
accommodations that evening at a health spa
called Kanronomori, or Sweet Dew of the
Forest, located at the edge of Annupuri. The
place has four onsens, and when I entered the
vast lobby, sonorous music surrounded me. So
did thick clouds of cigarette smoke. The spa
had fully embraced the Japanese love of chain-
smoking and ashtrays, and smokers in robes
abounded. Getting into the mood, I plopped
down in my suite, lit up, and let the program-
mable massage chair squeeze my thighs as I
balanced one of the half-dozen ashtrays in
the room on the vibrating armrests.
The next few nights I was booked at a hotel
in Hirafu, which felt like another dimension.
There were nouveau-hippie-artist whiskey
bars in the center of town, multimillion-
dollar homes on the outskirts, and Aussies
everywhere in between. They ordered scones
at the Niseko Supply Company, tandoori
chicken at the Indian food truck, and pints
of Guinness at Paddy McGinty’s. I just about
dropped my fork one night when a diminutive
Japanese waitress referred to me as “mate.”
“So many people with golden hair!” said a
Hong Kong travel agent on her first visit to
Hirafu, and I had to agree.
The flakes started to fall late on the third
night, which is when I met the Tokyo snow-
board club at a cozy and boisterous izakaya
restaurant at the bottom of town. They kindly
agreed to show me around the next day and
even waited 30 minutes after the appointed
time, until we finally found each other in the
crowd of Asians and golden hairs.
After our excellent day of dodging snow
monsters, my legs needed rest, but I had to
celebrate. So I headed out for a drink at a log-
cabin bar a couple of blocks from my hotel.
Unbe knownst to me it was Australia Day, the
sunburnt continent’s version of the Fourth of
July, and the bar was packed with young men
chugging beers out of kegger-style cups.
Many of them had wrapped themselves in
the Australian flag, while others were draped
around the pool table wearing fuzzy, under-
sized kangaroo costumes.
“So what’s Australia Day all about?” I asked
the first guy I meet.
“It’s about gettin’ hell drunk and fightin’, ”
the kid said.
Ten minutes later, he made good on the
statement. I stepped outside to find him
shouting taunts down the otherwise peaceful
street, until his equally drunk foe decided he’d
had enough, removed his shirt, and proceeded
to punch the kid in the back of the head.
“At least he didn’t get glassed,” the bar-
tender said as I related the story.
Glassing, he explained, is when a bogan, or
Australian redneck, smashes a beer bottle into
another bogan’s head or face. According to the
bartender, glassing has become a full-blown
Australia Day tradition in Niseko.
“Why do you think we’re serving in plastic
cups?” he asked.
FOR THE NEXT four days, I tour Niseko Vil-
lage, ski powder at night under Hirafu’s
impres sive constellation of lights, and hunt
down the virtually untouched snow that re-
mains just outside the resort’s gates. Though
it snows only two afternoons, finding fresh
powder is almost never a problem.
Even so, I’ve grown spoiled. When I’m
forced to ski cut-up waist-deep powder, I get
grouchy. Feeling entitled, I sign up for a day
of cat skiing with Niseko Adventure Centre,
a newly opened operation based out of an
abandoned resort behind Niseko. The only
other guest is a retired Canadian CEO on a
round-the-world ski trip. For six hours, we
leave trails of cold smoke down a long, shal-
low bowl and blast through wind lips and fly
out exit drainages. It is one of the best powder
days I’ve ever experienced.
This is especially remarkable when you
consider that my week has, by Niseko stan-
dards, been arid. A mere two and a half feet
of snow have fallen, a full foot below average.
Even so, I’m convinced that Niseko is prob-
ably the best ski resort in the world, so long as
you can look beyond the bogans glassing each
other on ’Straya day. And don’t gaze too far
into the future.
Thanks in part to the 2008 Chinese block-
buster Fei Cheng Wu Rao, a rom-com in which
a beautiful stewardess shows a rich business-
man the rugged beauty of Hokkaido, Chinese
interest in the island has been piqued. Never
mind that the Chinese and Japanese intensely
dislike one another, a reported 80 percent
of all condo buyers in Niseko two years ago
were Chinese and Singaporean, and the list
of swanky new accommodations catering to
them is long, culminating, in five to ten years,
with the opening of a $1.5 billion project that
will feature 3,000 luxury condos, a Louis
Vuitton store, and hot-air-balloon rides.
This mega-development will likely sour
Niseko’s chilled-out vibe, a fact that concerns
some of the locals I skied with over the course
of the week. But my concerns are more imme-
diate, like the fact that somehow I managed to
visit just two onsens, roughly five fewer than I
should have. And I haven’t soaked at the leg-
endary Goshiki onsen, a lonely tub overflow-
ing with hot spring water at the end of a back-
country run. Before I left for Japan, multiple
pro skiers had insisted I visit.
So at two o’clock on my last day, despite
the fact that another storm is blowing in,
I’m determined to ski off the back side of the
summit to Goshiki. I tromp into the clouds. In
a whiteout at the top, I manage to find the ski
patrol’s emergency hut, push open the ice-
encrusted door, and wait. I’m not sure exactly
how to get to Goshiki, so I hope that I can
Jedi-mind-trick any savvy locals who might
appear. A half-hour later, skinny Nami oka, a
software programmer, and plump Tetsushi,
his boss at a company that automates oil
refineries, arrive.
I ask them how to reach Goshiki onsen and
they carefully and clearly explain, in decent
English, all the landmarks and turns.
“Do I have to make any turns?” I ask.
“Yes,” says Tetsushi, explaining again.
“So I go this way?” I ask, gesturing vaguely
into the clouds.
As I hoped, Namioka and Tetsushi offer to
ditch their plans to ski back to the resort and
instead agree to accompany me to Goshiki.
The skiing is horrible. At the top, we make
survival turns around a field studded with
hip-high ice clumps, then descend a wind-
corrugated ridgeline. We chatter and side-
slip down a long off-camber face, then drop
into a forest where the clouds dissipate and
the snow softens and we savor a couple hun-
dred feet of the good stuff.
We land right at the brown building of the
onsen. It’s as brilliant as described, a shallow
limestone and larch-wood pool, half indoor,
half out, with a thick cornice of snow hang-
ing from the flat roof. Aside from the atten-
dant in his little booth, we have the place to
ourselves. We undress, wash, and slip into
114-degree water.
“We thought you were suicide,” Tetsushi
says with a laugh, recalling my insistence on
heading blindly into the backcountry during
a full-on blizzard.
We place snowballs on our heads to keep
cool, soak our tired legs, and chat about surf
style and tanukis, whose scrota are, according
to legend, bigger and floppier than a blood-
hound’s ears.
Afterward, we buy Kirin tall boys from a
vending machine and relax in the onsen’s
tatami room, with brown woven mats on the
floor, sitting cushions, and a low wooden
table. Outside, the storm relents. But the
respite is short-lived. The day after I leave,
it will start snowing again, an average of six
inches a day for a month. Ultimately, my week
in Niseko will prove to be the resort’s worst
between Decem ber and mid-February. But
who gives a damn about statistics? O
ERIC HANSEN WROTE ABOUT HIS PAR-
ENTS’ DECISION TO JOIN THE PEACE
CORPS IN THE OCTOBER ISSUE.
96 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE
NISEKO continued from page 73


98 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE
drowning—is clear enough. Hence the pres-
ence of a rescue diver and lifeguards at the
obstacle on the day Avi drowned.
To prove that Tough Mudder breached
its duty of care, the Senguptas’ lawyers will
need to demonstrate that a reasonable person
would have managed safety at the obstacle
differently. They believe Travis Pittman’s slow
response and his decision to neglect “normal
protocol for safe diving” will constitute a major
element of a wrongful-death complaint, and
the video evidence showing the bungled res-
cue effort could be difficult to challenge.
The Senguptas’ complaint extends to the
larger problem of ineffective crowd control.
Using Mario Vittone’s testimony, the Sen-
guptas’ lawyers will argue that failure to con-
trol the flow of participants moving through
Walk the Plank resulted in a disorganized
environment in which it would have been
impossible to carry out a rescue within the
two-minute period required by industry-
standard lifesaving manuals.
The Senguptas’ lawyers will also question
why the company failed to employ SOPs based
on the recommendations found in the United
States Lifesaving Association Manual and
the American Red Cross Lifeguarding Man-
ual. Both emphasize the need for SOPs that
encourage constant vigilance by lifeguards,
particularly during times of high activity.
David Judd, an event photographer who
was stationed at Walk the Plank on April
20—from the time the first participants came
through, at about nine in the morning, until
the obstacle was closed after Avi’s drown-
ing—told me he witnessed 20 to 30 rescues
over the course of the day. He said that the
scene in the moments before and after Avi
jumped was “chaotic.” There was a large in-
flux at midday, but the layout of lifeguards
and volunteers did not change.
Judd, who says that in October he was
barred by Tough Mudder from shooting future
events, told me, “I just couldn’t believe the
amount of people jumping in that were resur-
facing after jumping in and had to be immedi-
ately rescued; they were basically drowning.”
By the standards of the U.S. Lifesaving As-
sociation Manual, such a high volume should
have triggered a “special operation mode,”
requiring extra lifeguarding resources or the
closure of the obstacle. By keeping the obsta-
cle open, Tough Mudder put volunteers and
safety personnel under extraordinary pres-
sure and increased the likelihood that they
would fail to respond ade quately to a report
of a missing person.
In the event of a missing-person report in
deep water with reduced visibility, the U.S.
Lifesaving Association Manual requires im-
mediate surface dives by lifeguards “spaced
in a line close enough to see, or touch, each
guard helps a struggling swimmer to shore. By
now, Wilkinson is pointing frantically at the
water, shouting, “Sham! Where’s Avi?”
Three more people jump. Then another
and another. Fifty-five seconds after Avi’s
jump, Mirshah’s voice bursts in—“Hey! Hey,
my man!” Five more people jump.
When Pittman, the rescue diver, finally gets
into the water—two and a half minutes after
Avi jumped in—he does not have his mask on
or a regulator in his mouth. Pittman swims
out until he’s beneath the center of the plat-
form, then passes his mask up to a lifeguard
on shore, ostensibly to have it cleaned. Thirty
seconds later, still with no mask, Pittman
starts yelling at frustrated participants, in-
cluding Rahimi, who’d begun diving into the
water to search on their own. Twice he yells,
“I don’t need anybody else in the water!” fol-
lowed by, “I’m a rescue diver, back off!” Four
minutes after Avi jumped, the diver descends
for the first time. Wilkinson can be seen pac-
ing on the platform above the pool, hands on
his hips, flanked by three Marines.
Weiss’s reaction to all this as he watched?
His jaw hung slack. “Wow,” he said. “That’s
nothing like I’ve ever seen.”
I started to describe some of the things
Avi’s teammates told me that weren’t clear
in the videos, but Weiss shook his head. “In
my emergency training, you have a minute,
or 30 seconds—some short amount of time
to find that person,” he said. “Better to have
a false alarm than to have somebody lying at
the bottom for a long time. So there is not
a delay, there is no questioning. Somebody
says ‘My partner didn’t come up,’ they clear
the event. In the divers go.”
I started to ask Weiss how he would react if
he were to attend a Tough Mudder and wit-
ness a situation similar to what he saw in the
videos, but he stopped me short.
“That would not happen at an event that
I’m running,” he said.
TOUGH MUDDER won’t discuss its strategy
for the Senguptas’ legal action—nor will any-
one from Amphibious Medics—but if the suit
goes forward, its lawyers will likely stress the
fact that Avi signed what Tough Mudder calls
a Death Waiver, exculpating the company of
liability for certain acts of “ordinary negli-
gence” and “inherent risks,” such as “inad-
equate or negligent first aid and/or emer-
gency measures” and “errors in judgment by
personnel working the event.”
But the Boston-area firm Gilbert and
Renton, representing Avi’s estate, will likely
argue that such waivers do not relieve Tough
Mudder of the legal “duty of care” that ex-
ists whenever a business knowingly creates
predictable hazards for the public. In the case
of Walk the Plank, the predictable hazard—
that Walk the Plank had been set up exactly
the same way each time. There had been a
one-to-one ratio of lifeguards to lanes, and
the volunteers on the platform were in con-
stant communication with the lifeguards be-
low to make sure the lanes were clear. Weiss
said he emphasized order to volunteers and
safety staff: “You do not let the next person
go until you see a person jump, come up, and
swim to shore.” There was always at least
one diver by the pool in full gear, ready to hit
the water. A second diver had to be nearby,
though not necessarily geared up. Johnson
confirmed that Weiss’s description matches
the new written SOP for Walk the Plank.
Later, when I looked at participant videos
from the events Weiss mentioned, there were
a few discrepancies between the efficiency he
described and what I saw. For example, one
video from Pittsburgh shows four lifeguards
watching nine lanes. In videos from all three
events, there is no discernible communica-
tion between the platform volunteers and the
lifeguards below.
But in Avi’s case, the issue is the standards
used on the day he ran the course. Video evi-
dence and witness descriptions seem to sup-
port Vittone’s assertion that there were no
SOPs in place on April 20. Weiss told me that
he had not discussed the West Virginia inci-
dent in detail with Tough Mudder and had not
seen the video of Avi’s jump and the subse-
quent rescue effort. So I pulled out my laptop,
and we watched two of the three videos sup-
plied to the sheriff’s department.
In the first, a wave of jumpers plunges in,
and Avi steps to the edge of the platform. By
my count, there are 27 other people on the
platform with him. A uniformed Marine with
a loudspeaker to Avi’s right, on the far edge of
the platform, begins a countdown from three,
then breaks off and looks down at someone
on the ground. Avi looks in the Marine’s
direction and backs away from the edge—
waiting, perhaps, for instructions. Then the
Marine yells, “Line up! Three, two, one, go!”
A man to Avi’s left leaps, and then Avi steps
off, left foot first. Arms above his head, he
plummets into the water. Five others jump
on the same count.
A sixth jumper, a brunette woman in a red
tank top, goes off a split second after Avi, a
half-step to his right. Rather than look down
to ensure the pool is clear, the Marine with the
loudspeaker works his way into the middle of
the crowd atop the platform and counts down
again, sending off another group of five.
At 59 seconds into the first video, Avi has
been submerged for 14 seconds, and his team-
mate Wilkinson clearly knows something is
wrong. He starts pointing down at the water.
A whistle blows to halt jumpers while a life-
TOUGH MUDDER continued from page 87

NoOppWasted.com
The World’s Best
ENERGY BARS
For the
TRAIL
For a
SNACK
All Natural
Gluten-Free
Chia Seeds
Manuka Honey
A3action.com
Ы
o
f a
ll y
o
u
n
g
ste
rs’ c
a
lo
rie
s c
o
m
e

fro
m
sn
a
c
k
s. M
a
k
e
su
re
th
e
y
’re
n
o
t
ru
n
n
in
g
o
n
e
m
p
ty
!
For
ADVENTURERS
Available at
4
to 1 C
ar
b
to
P
r
otein R
atio
A
c
t
io
n
S
n
a
x
In
tro
d
u
c
in
g
n
e
w
, h
e
a
lth
y
, a
n
d

g
r
e
a
t ta
s
tin
g
A
3
B
a
r
s
fro
m
...
N
o
O
p
p
o
rtu
n
ity
W
a
ste
d
.

100 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE
the moment on video with her phone—Avi
singing, Mita cracking up.
“That was his present for me,” Mita said.
“Two days after that he was gone.”
When Avi reached the Tough Mudder
parking lot in West Virginia, he sent Bijon a
text that said “Reached.” That was his last
communication to his family.
The pain of Avi’s death made Priyanka’s
wedding bittersweet. Avi was going to escort
his sister down the aisle. He was also a grooms-
man and had volunteered to plan the bachelor
party for Priyanka’s fiancé, Seth Marple. The
worst came after the wedding, when all the
supportive friends and family had returned
home. Priyanka and Seth left for a honeymoon
cruise in the Mediterranean, and Bijon and
Mita had to cancel the flights they’d booked
to London for the post-ceremony vacation
they’d planned with Avi.
“It hit us hard after the wedding,” Bijon
said, “when it was finally just the two of us.”
“It’s not being able to sleep. It’s just crying
at any little thing, feeling like you have an
actual wound,” Mita said.
We walked upstairs to see Avi’s bedroom.
Avi had been dead four months, but the way
things were laid out gave the impression that
he’d just been there. His box sets of “Magic:
The Gathering” cards were stacked neatly by
the door. His old stuffed animals—Tigger and
Winnie the Pooh—were resting on the pillows
of his twin bed. Against one wall, there was
a wooden rack with a black Stratocaster and
four acoustic guitars.
“Most of them have a string missing,” Bijon
said, allowing a chuckle. “You can strum it, but
it will never play quite right.” That’s what their
lives are like now, Bijon said.
A framed poster of Muhammad Ali throw-
ing a right jab hung above the guitars, with the
words, “I’m so fast that last night I turned off
the light switch in my hotel room and was in
bed before the room was dark.” On the oppo-
site wall, by a window, there was a James Dean
poster with another quote: “Dream as if you’ll
live forever, live as if you’ll die today.”
Maybe these were the quotes that kept Avi
moving in the early days, when he could barely
run a mile without walking. O
ELLIOTT D. WOODS (@ELLIOTTWOODS)
WROTE ABOUT SKIING IN BAMIYAN,
AFGHANISTAN, IN DECEMBER 2012.
den release of adrenaline and an increase in
heart rate, and can reduce an average breath-
hold time of one minute to just 15 seconds.
What we do know, unequivocally, is that
Avi drowned. When cold water hit the back of
his throat, it caused his larynx to spasm. As his
vocal chords tightened, Avi would have pan-
icked and attempted to inhale, which would
have caused chest pain and may have trig-
gered fear of death. His sealed larynx tempo-
rarily prevented him from taking water into his
lungs but did not prevent him from swallow-
ing large quantities, causing his stomach to
bloat. Avi’s brain quickly used up its available
oxygen, and he slipped out of consciousness,
causing his larynx to release. Though he was
unconscious, his heart was still beating. He
inhaled water. After three minutes, his brain
cells began dying rapidly. For two additional
minutes, there was a chance that he could
have been recovered and resuscitated with
only minor brain injuries. When five minutes
passed, and Avi’s lungs were still filled with
water, his brain began to die from lack of oxy-
gen. When the diver finally dragged Avi out,
he had suffered catastrophic brain damage.
MITA SENGUPTA saw her son for the last
time on the Friday night prior to the Tough
Mudder event, just before she stepped out
to visit with friends. When she came down-
stairs, Avi was standing in the kitchen.
“Hey, you look pretty!” Avi said.
“Thank you,” Mita replied.
When she returned around midnight,
Avi was already asleep. Bijon woke up early
the next morning to have breakfast with Avi
before he left to meet up with his teammates,
but Mita decided to stay in bed another hour.
She had a grueling morning of bridal-shower
preparations ahead of her and wanted the
extra sleep. Standing at the kitchen island
where they’d shared so many late-night
meals, Bijon told his son to walk around any
obstacles that he didn’t feel confident about.
Avi promised to be careful.
“He was a big hugger,” Bijon said, with an
attempt at a smile, “so we hugged.”
Mita’s face lit up as she recalled how Avi
would sneak up and give her “surprise hugs”
in the morning. Startled, Mita would feign
annoyance, and Avi would say, “One day
you’re going to miss my hugs.”
Mita’s strongest memory of Avi in the days
before his death is a happy one. Priyanka,
Mita, and Bijon had just returned from a craft
store with vases and floral materials to make
centerpieces. Avi had been out to a movie
with a friend, and when he came home he
found his family inundated in flower petals.
Without any explanation, he walked over to
Mita, took her arms, and started dancing and
singing “Stayin’ Alive.” Priyanka captured
other while on the bottom,” and the Red Cross
Lifeguarding Manual recommends that they
be equipped with masks and fins. On April
20, Pittman conducted his search for Avi
alone while at least five lifeguards stood on
the shore, with no masks or fins in sight. The
pool may have been too deep and too cold to
allow for effective surface dives anyway, and
this is another fact that Tough Mudder’s law-
yers will have to contend with.
IN THE AFTERMATH of the incident, the
comments sections beneath news stories
covering Avi’s death were often sympathetic,
but there was also speculation about his level
of fitness, with some critics making the claim
that he must have drowned because he didn’t
know how to swim or because he didn’t
belong on the course in the first place.
Some argue that the injuries are the result
of Tough Mudder’s aggressive marketing,
which has fueled extraordinary growth—
from 20,000 participants in 2010 to a pro-
jected 750,000 in 2013—and expanded the
participant base beyond the narrow segment
of hardcore CrossFitters and other assorted
gluttons for punishment. The injuries, they
say, are the inevitable outcome when you
invite desk jockeys into an elite arena.
The Senguptas’ lawyers are unlikely to
blame participants for what they see as Tough
Mudder’s failure to operate the event safely.
They will likely argue that, as Tough Mud-
der’s participant base exploded, the company
prioritized good crowd flow over safety pro-
cedures, and that the protocols at Walk the
Plank stayed the same—inconsistent and
ineffective— until a fatality occurred.
The details of what happened under the
water in the moments after Avi jumped in are
unknown. Dr. Alan Steinman, a former
director of health and safety for the U.S. Coast
Guard, who has been hired by Gilbert and
Renton as an expert witness, told me that the
autopsy report shows that Avi had a contu-
sion on his groin, suggesting (in contrast to
what the sheriff’s report said) that someone
could have landed on him. Under the surface,
where the sunlight was blocked by the murky
water, Avi may have become disoriented,
causing him to swim diagonally instead of
upward. If he did, he would have placed him-
self directly in the landing zone of other par-
ticipants. A blow to the groin would have
added to any aquatic distress Avi was suffer-
ing and reduced his ability to hold his breath.
His breath-holding ability may also have
been reduced by a cold-shock response,
which can happen anytime someone’s head is
submerged in cold water. (Steinman estimates
that the water temperature that day was
around 50 degrees.) Cold shock causes a sud-
Volume XXXIX, Number 1. OUTSIDE (ISSN 0278-1433) is
published monthly by Mariah Media LLC, 400 Market St.,
Santa Fe, NM 87501. Periodical postage paid at Santa Fe, NM,
and additional mailing offices. Canadian Goods and Services
Tax Registration No. R126291723. Canada Post International
Publications Mail Sales Agreement No. 40015979. Subscrip-
tion rates: U.S. and possessions, $24; Canada, $35 (includes
GST); foreign, $45. Washington residents add sales tax.
POST MASTER: Send U.S. and International address chang-
es to outside, P.O. Box 6228, Harlan, IA 51593-1728. Send
Canadian address changes to OUTSIDE, P.O. Box 877 Stn
Main, Markham ON L3P-9Z9.
TOUGH MUDDER

Shed the Layers. . .
Keep the Warmth
sporthill.com/3SP 800-622-8444
Retailers Nationwide – Ask for SportHill 3SP
®
All Winter Long—One layer with all the benefits:
heat control, moisture management and wind
protection. Our 3SP
®
fabric’s unique fiber structure
is windproof to 35 mph, yet still breathes, wicks,
and stretches, keeping you warm and dry.
Exclusively SportHill.
“I have been wearing SportHill 3SP pants
for years and love them. Style, warmth, and
durability – thank you for designing such
a great piece of outdoor clothing!”
Ellen Miller –1st American woman to summit
Mt. Everest from both the north and south sides.
SM
3SP
®
Tights, pants, tops and gloves for Men and Women
Pinnacle
XC Zip
Top and
Callaghan
Pant
Made
in USA

Aut omot i ve Accessor i es
Acura · Audi · BMW · Buick · Cadillac · Chevrolet · Chrysler · Dodge · Ferrari · Ford · GMC · Honda · Hummer · Hyundai · Infiniti
Isuzu · Jeep · Kia · Land Rover · Lexus · Lincoln · Maserati · Mazda · Mercedes-Benz · Mercury · Mini · Mitsubishi · Nissan
Oldsmobile · Plymouth · Pontiac · Porsche · Saab · Saturn · Scion · Subaru · Suzuki · Toyota · Volkswagen · Volvo · and more!
Accessories Available for
Order Now: 800-441-6287
Canadian Customers
WeatherTech.ca
American Customers
WeatherTech.com
European Customers
WeatherTechEurope.com
© 2013 by MacNeil IP LLC
Cargo/Trunk Liner
PLEASE JOIN US.
www.protectourwinters.org
#ourtimeisnow


GEAR, APPAREL, & EQUIPMENT FOR THE ACTIVE LIFE
VISIT OUTSIDEINFO.COM
FIRST GEAR
VISIT OUTSIDEINFO.COM/FIRSTGEARGIVEAWAY
ENTER TO WIN
MICROspikes
®
footwear traction
from KAHTOOLA.
Demerit
®
Wear
demeritwear.com
Demerit®Badges
#
0
8
2


“
I
n
v
olu
n
t
a
r
y

3
6
0
”
C
o
m
m
e
m
o
r
a
t
i
n
g
Y
o
ur Stu
p
i
d
i
t
y

S
i
n
c
e

2
0
0
7
800.245.5676 concept2.com
The Concept2
Model D Indoor Rower
and SkiErg
TRAIN
HARD
TO
PLAY
HARD
AB-CARVER
™
©2013 Implus Corporation. Perfect
®
is a division of Implus Corporation. 9.13
$39.90
800-582-3929
buyabcarverpro.com
CORE
RIPPED ABS + SCULPTED ARMS
CARVE
KINETIC ENGINE
Carbon Steel
Spring
turbo charges
ab and arm
workouts
YOUR
rugged denim.
comfy bean bag.
jaxxbeanbags.com
outdoor_jaxx_4.759x3.05.indd 1 9/25/13 4:55 PM

COMFORT. IT’S THE KEY TO A BETTER RUN.
CARRY THE ESSENTIALS WITHOUT THINKING ABOUT IT.
[PHONE+KEY+MONEY+ID]
HOW FAR WILL YOU
RUN TODAY?
TO ADVERTISE IN FIRST GEAR, CONTACT BRITTANY GARRISON | 303-440-2722 | [email protected]
(866) 330-8030 • kahtoola.com
P
H
O
T
O
:

J
O
H
N

B
U
R
C
H
A
M
NOW WITH
MORE
TRACTION
P
The Tanita IRONMAN monitors are the perfect training companion. Displaying 9 to 28 body
composition measurements, they have been a trusted resource for athletes of all levels to
monitor and improve their performance. Can you afford to ignore this COMPETITIVE EDGE?
Use promo code: OUT114 and get 10% off at: www.thecompetitiveedge.com
*
Ironman, Ironman Triathlon, and M-Dot are registered trademarks of World Triathlon Corporation. 2013 TheCompetitiveEdge.com. All rights reserved.
* All prices and product offerings are subject to change without notice.
No matter what activity you enjoy, to get the maximum satisfaction from it you need to maximize your
personal performance. Whether your objective is general ñtness or task oriented ñtness, you cannot
achieve your goal without the proper nutrition, exercise and rest. Monitoring your body composition is
the most effective way of analyzing health and ñtness. Knowing the amount of fat, muscle, water (and so
much more) in your body, and the changes that occur over time, provides you with a roadmap to success.
Maximize your personal performance using a body composition monitor from Tanita.
When only the best will do, trust Tanita to provide you with
clinically researched and FDA cleared body composition technology.
®
BODY COMPOSITION ANALYZERS
IN BODY COMPOSITION MEASUREMENT

GEAR, APPAREL, & EQUIPMENT FOR THE ACTIVE LIFE
Selk'bag, the most mobile and comfortable
sleepwear system ever.
C
M
Y
CM
MY
CY
CMY
K

S
h
o
w
n
:

R
u
b
y

V
e
l
o
u
r

L
o
u
n
g
e

S
e
t
this
Christmas!
It’s a gift
you’ll both love!
1.800.GIVE.PJS
PajamaGram.com
Send her a
Choose from hundreds
of great styles, each
delivered in our
exclusive gift
packaging along
with FREE extras
she’ll love.
1000’s Of Gold Sites. Full
Color Topographic Maps.
Western U.S. from Alaska to Montana to
Colorado to Arizona. Gold sites taken
NZWU WNÅKQIT ZMKWZL[ IVL QVKT]LM[ /8;
KWWZLQVI\M[ /07;< <7?6; [PW_V
/ZMI\ 5IX[ NWZ TWKI\QVO 5-<)4
,-<-+<16/ IVL /74, 8)6616/
[Q\M[ 8TIKMZ OWTL [Q\M[ [PW_V WV UIX[
www.GoldTrekMaps.com
- HOTSPOT -
THE OUTSIDE
NEW GEAR AND EPIC ADVENTURES
ENTER
THE OUTSIDE HOTSPOT
SWEEPSTAKES
TO WIN AN ADVENTURE
WITH ISLAND EXPEDITIONS
VISIT
FACEBOOK.COM/OUTSIDEMAGAZINE
FOR RULES AND DETAILS.
BELIZE
FloorLiner
™
800-441-6287
WeatherTech.com
Use Coupon Code OUTMAG10
for 10% off at our website
WWW.ROADHOLLAND.COM
Serious And Stylish Cycling Wear
www.roadholland.com
SERIOUS AND STYLISH CYCLING WEAR

TO ADVERTISE IN FIRST GEAR, CONTACT BRITTANY GARRISON | 303-440-2722 | [email protected]
1.866.YAKTRAX | WWW.YAKTRAX.COM
RUN WITH CONFIDENCE
THIS WINTER
Softcover: $16.95 plus shipping and tax.
Learn more and order online at
www.PeakExperiencesTheBook.com.
Enter coupon code OUTSIDE for free (book rate) shipping.
Also available for Kindle and Nook.
PEAK EXPERIENCES
– a true adventure by Manson Boze
Sheer Rock Walls
Big Mountains
Icy Glaciers
Competitive Rock
Climbing
Father/Son Bonding
Makes a Great Gift

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO YOUR NEXT GREAT ADVENTURE
VISIT OUTSIDEINFO.COM
ACTIVE TRAVELER
EXPLORE MONTANA
Horse Pack Trips in the heart of the
Bob Marshall Wilderness
A Lazy H Outfitters
Choteau, MT
800-893-1155 www.alazyh.com
RAFT RANCH BIKE SEA KAYAK Spectacular scenery,
impeccable service, delicious meals and priceless memories
are all yours on a Holiday Expedition. Enjoy the best rafting on
the Colorado, Green, Yampa, San Juan and Salmon Rivers. Or,
experience Utah mountain biking, family raft/ranch vacations,
Baja sea kayaking and women’s retreats. For a free catalog call
HOLIDAY EXPEDITIONS
1-800-624-6323 www.HolidayExpeditions.com
THIS COULD BE YOU
sc.org/sc-outings
Get Outside Today!
1.800.446.5938 skicb.com/deals
Based on double occupancy. Some restrictions apply. P
h
o
t
o
:

A
l
e
x

F
e
n
l
o
n
4 nights lodging,
2 days guided backcountry intro
course, & 1 day lift ticket
$
599
Starting at
per person, tax and fees not included.
BASI CS
LEARN
THE

COLORADO
BACKCOUNTRY
TO ADVERTISE IN ACTIVE TRAVELER, CONTACT LESLI LAWRENCE | 303-440-2722 | [email protected]
THE BEST RIVERS, THE BEST RAPIDS Join us for the trip
of a lifetime on one of the premiere rivers of the West. We offer
a variety of exciting rafting adventures on the Salmon River in
Idaho and on the Colorado River though Cataract Canyon or
the Grand Canyon. Come and experience thrilling rapids,
spectacular scenery, mouth watering meals and tons of fun!
Call us today or visit us online.
TOUR WEST | 800-453-9107 | www.twriver.com
BELIZE
Explore the Nahanni, Tatshenshini,
Alsek, Firth and other remote
wilderness rivers. Mountains and
glaciers, abundant wildlife, incredible
scenery and superb hiking.
CANADIAN RIVER EXPEDITIONS 800-297-6927
Trips of a lifetime. Since 1972.
P
H
O
T
O
:
B
r
u
c
e

K
i
r
k
b
y
www.nahanni.com ^^^UHOHUUPJVT
Canoe
Canada’s Arctic
www.canoearctic.com
Blue River, BC Canada
1 800 661 9170
wiegele.com
Elevate your
Experience
888-862-8881 Un-Cruise.com
Kayak. Snorkel. Hike.
t "MBTLB t )BXBJJBO *TMBOET
t .FYJDPT 4FB PG $PSU¹T
t $PBTUBM 8BTIJOHUPO
Unrushed. Uncrowded. Unbelievable.
“
AAI is the Harvard of
climbing schools”
– Matt Mooney, NYTimes
Accredited leadership
programs in 6 states
& 16 countries.
American
Alpine Institute
t AlpineInstitute.com
ALASKA’S PREMIER SMALL GROUP SAFARIS Great
Alaska’s upscale lodge and remote outcamps provide
Alaska’s widest range of wildlife, wilderness, and
angling adventures. Wild bear viewing, whale watching,
glacier hikes, flightseeing, kayaking, rafting, combined
with world class salmon, trout and halibut
fishing. Total Experience-in comfort.
P
h
o
t
o
b
y
A
n
d
r
e
w
H
o
l
t
800.544.2261 www.greatalaska.com
[email protected]
10
wrangellmountainair.com
Explore Alaska’s
Wrangell - St. Elias National Park
Fly-In Hiking, Rafting
& Glacier Flightseeing
1-800-478-1160

THE

ULTIMATE

GUIDE TO YOUR

NEXT GREAT ADVENTURE
- HOTSPOT -
THE OUTSIDE
NEW GEAR AND EPIC ADVENTURES
VISIT
THE OUTSIDE HOTSPOT
FOR
MONTHLY GIVEAWAYS
AND PROMOTIONS
GO TO
FACEBOOK.COM/OUTSIDEMAGAZINE
I REDISCOVERED MY LOVE OF CYCLING
AWESTRUCK BY BRYCE CANYON NATIONAL PARK
RECONNECTED WITH MY POTENTIAL
JUST BOOKED MY NEXT TOUR
THANK YOU
DEAR BICYCLE
ADVENTURES,
DAVE STRONG, 55
ACCOUNTANT
PORTLAND, OREGON
10 YEAR BICYCLE
ADVENTURES ALUMNI
WWW.BICYCLEADVENTURES.COM
800.443.6060
:8CC ( /'' --( 0'.*
=FI PFLI =I<< 9IF:?LI<
XZk`m\X[m\ekli\j%Zfd
E<N Q<8C8E;
?@D8C8P8J
JFLK? 8D<I@:8
- Smull group, udventure truvel
experts since (00-
- 8cc$`eZclj`m\, hund-crufted
itineruries with exceptionul
personul service
- Legendury B`n` _fjg`kXc`kp
producing u ´trip of u lifetime´
every time!
N\ ZXe
`dd\ij\
pfl `e k_i\\
Zfek`e\ekj
AdventureLife.com
800.344.6118
Award Winning
Private Journeys
Expedition Voyages
Learn ‘the way of a ship,’ explore legendary islands and enjoy
the ideal gap year sailing as crew on our famed tall ship. Cur-
rently en route to Pitcairn, the Marquesas, Tuamotus, Society
and Cook Islands. No experience needed.
Barque PICTON CASTLE
www.picton-castle.com (902) 634-9984
SAIL THE WORLD WITH US

OUTSI DEONLI NE. COM 111
“Plus,” he said, “every once in a while
you make a serendipitous find. You never
know when you’re going to make it, but
you will make it if you keep coming back.”
Indeed, he made just such a find in Con-
tamaná—an oil called copaiba that he’d
been seeking for months. Copaiba is sooth-
ing to the skin, but it usually comes out of
the tree as a dark gum, which is about as
appealing as tar to cosmetics companies.
However, from the depths of her com-
pound, Maldonado produced a bottle of
copaiba in milky amber.
Kilham held it like a kid with a report
card that said all A’s. “This could be a big
thing,” he said. “A big, big thing.”
IN THE MONTHS after our trip, I received
periodic e-mail updates from Kilham.
He’d visited Morocco’s Atlas Mountains
for the olive-leaf harvest (“olive leaves are
anti- viral, anti-fungal, antibacterial”), the
Ivory Coast (“tons of army guys with ma-
chine guns stopping us constantly, great
food, wonderful people”), Namibia, South
Africa, Hong Kong, and the Peruvian Ama-
zon again. He would soon be off to Siberia,
he wrote, to check out a powerful anabolic
plant called maral root. (“There are wild
horses that eat the stuff regularly, and they
look like the Incredible Hulk. You’ve never
seen horses like these. They make Clydes-
dales look like anorexic runway models.… I
expect very big things from this, to take the
market by storm.”)
It was about what you’d expect of a
man who has logged three million miles
by air alone. I liked thinking about Kil-
ham among Clydesdale-dwarfing steeds,
or having guns trained on him at military
checkpoints, or shoving a boat out of the
Ucayali mud, whenever I took an echinacea
pill or drank ginseng tea or, truth be told,
popped a maca capsule.
One day not long ago, I received a small
package containing a bottle of chuchuhua-
si tincture from Kilham with the note: “It’s
happening.” Over the next few weeks I par-
took of it with some liberality, but I could
not pass judgment on its effects. My sexual
appetite seemed normal, but then again, it
waxes and wanes, like everyone else’s.
Chuchuhuasi still stands today where
maca did a quarter-century ago—tradi-
tion’s drug, not the lab’s. Perhaps 25 years
from now it will achieve a maca-like re-
spectability, backed by a young but grow-
ing science. Or perhaps it will have joined
Spanish fly and rhinoceros horn in the
dustbin of erotic history. The Medicine
Hunter has proposed; science, if inclined,
can dispose. O
KILHAM continued from page 79
Order your FREE copy of our
NEW Europe brochure
utracks.com
1.800.567.2216
Stay tuned for more exciting adventures
self guided | small group guided
walk, cycle, boat & barge, mountaineering
34 ]earº ol araz|rg vo]ageº¦ Sou|| Pac|l|c, Car|ooear,
0a|apagoº, Ved||errarear, Auº|ra||a, |eW Zea|ard, laWa||,
CA, P||ca|rr, Ar|arc||c, Arourd ||e wor|d. F|re ]ac||º lor
|rd|v|dua|º & groupº.
1709 ßr|dgeWay, $ausa||to, 0A 949ê5
+1·415·332·4ê81 WWW.oceanvoyages.com
sa||Qoceanvoyages.com
ADVENTURE SAILING WORLDWIDE
OCEAN VOYAGES INC.
BIKING | HIKING | MULTISPORT
800-GO-ACTIVE
www.backroads.com/outside

Costa Rica
Costa Rica
With over 25 years
experience Costa Rica Experts makes
the difference between a good trip and a lifetime
memory. Custom design your trip to include
adventure, wildlife and pristine beaches.
800-827-9046
www.CostaRicaExperts.com
Ask us about
Panama &
Nicaragua!
Fifteen sports in one week
on a private island.
www.slickrock.com 800-390-5715
TO ADVERTISE IN ACTIVE TRAVELER, CONTACT LESLI LAWRENCE | 303-440-2722

112 OUTSI DE MAGAZI NE
MAMMOTH MOUNTAIN, CALIFORNIA
Photograph by PATRICK BRANCH
Parting Shot
0
1
.
1
4