Índex per September 2014 a Outside

While waiting in the lineup for the start of the 2014 Fiji Women’s Pro competition near the island of Tavarua last May, Walsh watched surfing icon Laird Hamilton paddle into a wave on a SUP. “Because of the fisheye lens I was using, it looks like I’m some distance away, but it was maybe two feet,” says the photographer, who lives in New South Wales, Australia. “I got the shot without running into him, and we both made it out of the barrel.” THE TOOLS: GoPro Hero3+ Black Edition, 2.8mm fisheye lens, ISO 400, 1/4,000 second Jeremiah Watt Last June, while traveling through Zion National Park in Utah, Watt captured Cincinnati’s Ben Ritchey making his way up a ladder-like series of depressions in the 140-foot sandstone face of Kolob Canyon.…

REBELS WITH A CAUSE JOHN SA LAT HÉ A Swiss blacksmith, Salathé first visited Yosemite on doctor’s orders in the early 1940s. (Salathé believed his wife was poisoning him.) He pioneered several iconic routes in the valley and invented the modern climbing piton. In his later years, he joined a religious cult and roamed the mountains, surviving on wild plants. WA RREN HARDING The original bad boy of Camp 4, Harding lived hard—drinking, carousing, and otherwise fulfilling his motto, Semper Farcisimus! He completed some of Yosemite’s boldest firsts, beating his rival, the purist Royal Robbins, up the face of El Capitan in 1958. BEVERLY JOHNSON Big Wall Bev arrived at Camp 4 in the late sixties. In 1973, she participated in the first all-female ascent of El Cap, then completed…

MIKE FOOTE MISSOULA, MONTANA Rising Star TEN YEARS AGO, ultrarunning was a solitary pursuit for fifty-somethings working their way through a midlife crisis. But as the sport has grown—participation has nearly tripled since 2007—and big-ticket sponsors like the North Face and Salomon have begun backing it, the balance has shifted toward younger, more competitive racers. Enter 30-year-old Mike Foote, a former shoe salesman who has quickly made his mark in the grueling sport. FINDING HIS WAY: Foote ran his first ultra in 2009, fueled by Fig Newtons, and got lost for two and a half hours after taking a wrong turn. “I finally caught up with the last-place guy, who was carrying a halfgallon of orange juice and a large bag of Twizzlers,” says Foote. “I had no idea what…

KEEPING HYDRATED, ESPECIALLY DURING SHORT BOUTS OF EXERCISE, IS JUST AS IMPORTANT AS REPLENISHING ENERGY WITH GELS OR BARS. HERE ARE THE BEST BLADDERS, BOTTLES, AND BACKPACKS FOR EVERY ACTIVITY. 1. Ultimate Direction AK Race Vest 2.0 This lightweight vest has chest pockets for two 20-ounce bottles and room for an optional 70-ounce reservoir in back, so you can carry enough fluid for a full day in the mountains. A huge bungee on the back straps down clothes as you shed them. $100; ultimate direction.com 2. Profile Design Aero HC Hydration System The handlebar-mounted Aero HC was designed for speed. A power meter can be attached behind the bullet-shaped, 28-ounce bottle, a flip cap makes for quick refills, and the straw is even aerodynamically tapered. Most important: you don’t have…

WINNER: DULUTH, MINNESOTA TOTAL VOTES: 221,350 On a recent summer morning at the Duluth Rowing Club on Park Point, a seven-mile sandbar that separates the town’s harbor from Lake Superior, roughly 40 high school athletes gather to launch their sculls into the bay. Despite the 50-degree temperature and 25-mile-per-hour winds whipping up whitecaps on the big lake, which a few surfers are exploiting, the kids on the harbor are wearing shorts and T-shirts. This morning’s wild weather is nothing after having skied through a winter that set a new town record for the most consecutive days—23—with temperatures below zero. Duluthians seem to thrive on extremes. The city of 86,000 stretches for 26 miles along the westernmost tip of Lake Superior and has 6,834 acres of city parkland, 178 miles of…

6:12 p.m. NEAR GRIFFITH OBSERVATORY, GRIFFITH PARK On Brad: Hardshell jacket by Rapha ($390; rapha.cc); Commuter T-shirt by Levi’s ($34; levi.com) from dusk till dawn ADAM MAST ERS “L.A.’s outdoor access is underrated,” says Masters, 27, who raced for Wonderful Pistachios Pro Cycling for two years and now lives in Pasadena. “I can ride my bike 7,000 feet up into Angeles Crest National Forest, boulder with friends, and catch a ride back to town.” Though Masters climbs often in Angeles Crest and in nearby Joshua Tree, riding is his primary passion. When not guiding trips in Utah or Oregon for L.A.–based Cycling Escapes, he works at Pasadena bike shop Incycle. 7:03 p.m. THE BLACK TOP, GRIFFITH PARK On Adam: Commuter Hooded Trucker jacket by Levi’s ($128; levi.com); Gilroy shirt by…

A Simple Act The summer between my sophomore and junior years in college, I took a job on a student work crew building and repairing trails in the Frank Church–River of No Return Wilderness in Idaho, one of the largest roadless areas in the continental U.S. To get to the site, we had to fly 53 miles in a Cessna and land on a patchy runway at the Indian Creek guard station. Then we hiked a few miles to a pristine floodplain along the banks of the Middle Fork of the Salmon River and set up camp. I remember nearly every detail of the 55 days that followed. Getting up at 5:45 for breakfast. The mountain lion I saw lapping water across the river while I fished for cutthroat. The…

ON SEPTEMBER 13, in Beijing, drivers will take their positions at the premier event of the world’s newest motor-sports league, the FIA Formula E Series. TV viewers—as many as 100 million, by some estimates—are bound to focus on what’s missing: the decibels. Though the new e-cars look almost identical to their IndyCar siblings, they sound more like hushed jet engines. In a testament to how far electric cars have come, the muted roar may be the most significant difference. The engines under the hoods were developed by British racing outfit McLaren, and their batteries have enough juice to power the e-cars for roughly half the one-hour race time, at which point drivers switch vehicles during a pitstop. Fully charged, the cars can reach top speeds of 150 miles per hour.…

Epic IN SEPTEMBER, serial adventurer Mike Horn, 48, will weigh anchor on one of the world’s last undone firsts: a motorless circumnavigation of the earth via the two poles. True to form for Horn, who walked to the North Pole in 2006 in winter, the expedition is daunting. He will sail a 105-foot reinforced ketch, the Pangaea, south from Monaco to South Africa, where he’ll pick up a fourperson crew for the leg to Antarctica. There Horn will disembark, with a pair of skis and a 450-pound sledge, to shuffle 3,600 miles across the continent, negotiating mountains nearly 11,000 feet high. (Sir Ranulph Fiennes and Charles Burton made the crossing on snowmobiles during their 1979 to 1982 motored circumpolar navigation.) Once reunited on the opposite coast, Horn and company will…

AGE 31 5 FEET 11 INCHES 155 POUNDS EASTHAMPTON, MASSACHUSETTS CYCLOCROSS, essentially an obstaclecourse race on two wheels, is booming. American participation in the sport, in which competitors careen down grassy slopes, carry their bikes over railroad ties and sand pits, and endure heckling from well-lubricated spectators, has grown by 250 percent since 2005. That’s an additional 12,000 racers annually. None are better than Jeremy Powers, the two-time national champion. After ten years as a competitive road cyclist, he turned his attention exclusively to dirt tracks. Next month he begins his assault on the World Cup overall cyclocross title, a seven-event series that kicks off in Valkenburg, in the Netherlands. BY GORDY MEGROZ “Just about every afternoon, I take at least a 30-minute nap. When you sleep, you produce healthy…

in early September, in a clapboard house situated on 43 acres just outside a small town in northern Vermont, two boys awaken. They are brothers; the older is 12, the younger 9, and they rise to a day that has barely emerged from the clutches of dark. It is not yet autumn, but already the air has begun to change, the soft nights of late summer lengthening and chilling into the season to come. Outside the boys’ bedroom window, the leaves on the maples are just starting to turn. School is back in session and has been for two weeks or more, but the boys are unhurried. They dress slowly, quietly. Faded and frayed thrift-store camo pants. Flannel shirts. Rubber barn boots. Around their waists, leather belts with knife sheaths.…

ADVENTURE TOOLS, TESTED & REVIEWED Natural Selection THE ULTIMATE PUFFY Stuffed with feathers from the nests of Arctic ducks, Black Diamond’s Hot Forge Eiderdown jacket is the magnum opus of the down world. Coveted for its durability and thermal density, eiderdown sticks together like Velcro, giving it a superior warmth-to-weight ratio, meaning Black Diamond was able to achieve a high temperature rating with fewer feathers. Alas, this level of coziness isn’t cheap. When the world’s entire harvest can be carried in a single truck, you’re more likely to get your hands on a Bugatti. $1,000; blackdiamond equipment.com INTELLIGENCE SMART GEAR FOR A BRAVE NEW WORLD THE SEE-IT-ALL ACTION CAMERA The tomato-size 360 Fly mounts anywhere a GoPro can and captures video from every direction simultaneously, letting the viewer pick the…

Still Rockin’ I WAS STANDING at Glacier Point, one of Yosemite National Park’s most iconic vistas, at 5 A.M. during this summer’s peak tourist season. The campgrounds were full. In a few hours, shuttles would be circling in a slow parade. But here at sunrise, a crime was about to unfold, and I had received a tip that I should come witness it. After a few minutes, a man emerged from the woods behind me. He wore a wingsuit, a parachute pack, and a mask. The man walked to the edge of a cliff and onto an overhanging rock. He paused and said, “Three, two, one—see ya.” Then he leaned toward the chasm. This year marks Yosemite’s 150th anniversary, an event commemorated by no fewer than 200 Park Service–sanctioned programs…

IN THE 1970S and 1980s, Texaco extracted more than a billion barrels of oil from the Ecuadorean rainforest but spilled an estimated 400,000. In 1993, locals filed a class action against the company. That case is ongoing—it’s a legal version of the Amazon, serpentine and vast, with the company still fighting an Ecuadoran judge’s record-setting $19 billion verdict—and is the subject of Paul M. Barrett’s serious but uneven book Law of the Jungle: The $19 Billion Legal Battle Over Oil in the Rain Forest and the Lawyer Who’d Stop at Nothing to Win It (Crown, $26). Barrett, a senior writer at Bloomberg Businessweek and author of the bestselling book Glock, focuses on the activist lawyer, Steven Donziger, who turned the case into a no-holds-barred crusade against Chevron, which acquired Texaco…

IN APRIL 2013, after many years of trying, I completed the Arizona Trail 300, a self-supported mountain-bike race held on isolated singletrack in the Sonoran Desert. I rode hard and finished first of 52 starters in a record time of 51 hours 59 minutes. But I missed my goal of finishing in under two days. That got me wondering about what else I could do to improve my time. For amateur athletes like me, there’s a whole new world of fitness devices and apps that can track key metrics, from speed and mileage to heart rate and power output. But as I learned through experimentation, simply recording data doesn’t do all that much for you. I needed a way to interpret the numbers and tailor my training accordingly. I didn’t…

IT’S CONVENTIONAL wisdom that what you eat before, during, and after exercise effects both performance and recovery. So it’s no surprise that energy bars and gels have become an $80 billion global industry, one that has grown by nearly 10 percent in the U.S. in each of the past two years. With such a saturated market, it can be impossible to distinguish between what’s good for you and what’s little more than a fancy Rice Krispies treat. After exhaustive testing, these passed the bar. BEST FOR: RECOVERY PICKY BAR Studies show that a four-to-one ratio of carbs to protein, the same one found in Picky Bars, is optimal for restoring glycogen in tired muscles. Even better: they’re made with easyto-digest whole organic foods like dates, apricots, and sunflower seeds. Calories:…

DAWN LIGHT, mouse gray in the woods. Gazing north into the trees through the bedroom windows, I can see hours of daylight waiting for me. Time for a recalibration walk. I’ve been living in my head too long. I’ll wait a few hours, then call my young friend Tyson, a wilderness ranger with the Forest Service. I’ll suggest we hike in to a place like Quaking Aspen Swamp or some other, similar corner of the Three Sisters Wilderness Area. I find it safer these days to have a companion on such walks, and he’s good company. He knows how to say nothing. I’ve got to get up and check the weather. AS AN EIGHT-YEAR-OLD, growing up in agricultural Southern California, I thought the eastern Mojave Desert wilderness enough for me.…