Table of contents for October 2017 in Outside

Persistence. Resolve. Imagination. Fortitude. Hope. All these attributes and more can be used to describe the extraordinary group of people assembled here. From veterans to cancer survivors, they all have one thing in common: They’ve chosen to transform their personal struggles and stories into actions that are bigger than themselves, inspiring millions of people along the way. CHRIS VAN ETTEN U.S. MARINE VETERAN In 2012, Van Etten lost both legs from an IED while serving as a U.S. Marine in Afghanistan. As part of his healing process, he started going to the gym every day. Today he’s a spokesmodel for Jockey underwear and appears in the brand’s #ShowEm collection of inspirational stories from everyday heroes. IMPACT MOMENT: One day, after a woman asked to work out with me, a friend…

10. 1978: Arlene Blum leads the American Women’s Himalayan Expedition up Annapurna, the first American summit of the 8,000-meter peak. 9. 2002: Scott Lindgren, Steve Fisher, Mike Abbott, Allan Ellard, Dustin Knapp, and Johnnie and Willie Kern make the first descent of Tibet’s Yarlung Tsangpo River, which passes through one of the deepest canyons on earth. 8. 1987: At the height of the Cold War, Lynne Cox swims across the Bering Strait in two hours five minutes. 7. 2015: Cyclist Bradley Wiggins demolishes the hour record by nearly two kilometers when he rides 54.526 kilometers around London’s Olympic velodrome. 6. 1994: Over 52 days, Norwegian explorer Borge Ousland makes the first solo, unsupported journey to the North Pole. 5. 1993: Following several years when some of the strongest male climbers…

CALL OF THE FERRET JOHN RASMUS, EDITOR, 1979–1990 “The King of the Ferret Leggers” (February-March 1983) sorely stress-tested some advice I’d gotten from one of Outside’s founders, Tim Cahill: Don’t pander to the readers. Find great writers and let them do the stories they want to do. So. In 1982, Don Katz, a friend and highly accomplished longform journalist, proposed a story on Reg Mellor, the 72-year-old champion of an odd English competition called ferret legging. The sport was simple: contestants stuffed panicky, razor-toothed ferrets down their baggy pants, cinched them up, and endured the resulting mayhem as long as possible. According to Katz, Mellor was unexcelled at “keepin’ ’em down.” Ralph Steadman, the famous gonzo artist, would illustrate it. “And,” Katz assured us helpfully, “it takes place outside.” Done.…

147: Number of countries we’ve sent writers to. 27: Number of countries we’ve sent editor at large Grayson Schaffer to. 5: Continents Schaffer has thrown up on. 1,056: Miles correspondent Will Grant has ridden on a horse while reporting three features. 12: Minimum number of times we’ve sent someone looking for a person or thing that may or may not be findable (including Amelia Earhart, Forrest Fenn’s hidden treasure, and, of course, Bigfoot). 1: Times we found said thing. Last year, contributing editor Peter Frick- Wright discovered the black box from Eastern Air Lines Flight 980, which crashed in the Bolivian Andes on New Year’s Day in 1985. 725: Approximate number of bikes contributing editor Aaron Gulley has tested for the magazine since 2004. 24: Bikes Gulley currently has in…

INTO RAREFIED AIR MARK BRY ANT, EDITOR, 1990–1999 When you’re the editor of Outside, you get a canvas at least as big as the world, so singling out one most memorable piece is no easy call. But a story that continues to resonate more than 20 years later is “Into Thin Air” (September 1996), Jon Krakauer’s account of the May 1996 tragedies on Mount Everest. It might seem prescient, and ironic, that the magazine sent Jon to warn against the dangers that would lead to eight deaths, four from his own six-person summit team: a growing commercialization that translated into too many climbers with more money than expertise. But what compelled us was the enormous responsibility that came with having sent a writer and dear friend into harm’s way, and…

THE HUNT IS ON TERRY M CDONELL, EDITOR, 1977–1978 We were working on the startup of Outside at the Rolling Stone offices in San Francisco. I had landed my first real editing job by promising that I would get interesting young novelists to write about the natural world. Tom McGuane was at the top of that list, but when I called him in Livingston, Montana, he said: “You probably don’t want anything about hunting.” He was right, but I said hunting would be fine, wonderful really. I figured that whatever he wrote would be literary and ambitious, and just getting him in the inaugural issue would send the right signals. The problem was that hunting was looked on as animal murder by most of my new colleagues, as well as…

Losing people is part of highaltitude climbing, and it’s really tough. If you were close to the person who died and there with them when it happened, the guilt is very hard to overcome. It’s just, Why did I make it through when they didn’t? For me, though, there was never a question about getting right back to climbing. I was just too driven. It grabbed me. But last year, we went back to Tibet and reattended to the bodies of Dave Bridges and Alex Lowe on Shishapangma. The guilt came back in the weeks beforehand, then afterward there was PTSD from putting to rest friends who had been missing for 17 years and who I was the last person to see alive. It unsettled my life again for a…

WHEN YOU’RE A KID, THE WORLD SEEMS BIG AND ORDAINED. THINGS ARE AS THEY ARE BECAUSE THEY ARE. EVEN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD SEEMS BIG AND ORDAINED, UNTIL YOU OUTGROW IT, DEPART, AND CONSIDER IT AGAIN FROM A DISTANCE. THEN YOU MIGHT START TO SEE ITS DEEPER DIMENSIONS—ITS LAYERS OF TIME, CONTINGENCY, AND MEANING. YOU MIGHT NOTICEhow geography and history, as well as sheer chance, played a role in making the place what it was. You might discover the turbulent boundary between nostalgia and revelation. That’s the boundary I discovered, almost 60 years after the fact, when I looked at my childhood through Google Maps. There was a house on a street in suburban Cincinnati. The street, barely more than a mile long, was called Belmont Avenue. Belmont: beautiful mountain, though this…

L.L.BEAN MAINE HUNTING SHOES … Upon his return from a rainy hunting trip in rural Maine in 1911, Leon Leonwood Bean was fed up with his old leaky boots, which did little to prevent his feet from becoming cold and damp. He took to the basement of his brother’s apparel shop and called on a local cobbler to stitch together a hardier boot, combining a comfortable leather upper with a durable, waterproof rubber sole. The first version tended to split at the seams. But Bean had already instituted his now legendary satisfaction-guaranteed policy, and when 90 of the first 100 pairs were returned, he fixed them himself, securing a core of diehard fans. Though the Bean boot, as it’s affectionately known, was designed to aid hunters during long treks, it…

WHEN I LOOK OUT MY KITCHEN WINDOW, I SEE A HORSESHOE OF SNOW-COVERED PEAKS, ALL OF THEM HIGHER THAN 12,000 FEET. I SEE MY OLD BARN—OLD ENOUGH TO HAVE STARTED TO LEAN A LITTLE—AND THE HOMESTEADERS’ CABIN, WHICH HAS SO MUCH SPACE BETWEEN THE LOGS NOW THAT THE MICE DON’T EVEN HAVE TO DUCK TO CRA WL THROUGH. I SEE THE BIG STANDof aspen ready to leaf out at the back of the property, ringing the small but reliable wetland, and the pasture, greening in earnest, and the bluebirds, just returned, flitting from post to post. I see Isaac and Simon, my bonded pair of young donkey jacks, pulling on opposite ends of a tricolor lead rope I got in Patagonia. I see Jordan and Natasha, my Icelandic ewes, nibbling…

IT TOOK US 60 MILES AND TWO DAYS ON THE PONY EXPRESS TRAIL TO LOSE OUR HORSES. THAT MORNING, THE FOUR OF US HAD HAULED OUT OF GRANGER, WYOMING, NEAR THE UTAH STATE LINE, WITH A TAILWIND BLOWING SCARVES OF DUST BEFORE OUR CAVVY OF NINE HORSES.We were rich in horseflesh but shy on experience, and we took our horses’ quiet demeanor as evidence that all nine had settled into the ride. We were mistaken. That night’s camp lay on the east bank of the Green River. We rode in from the west, with the setting sun at our backs, and found the water running dark and dangerous. We crossed over the river on Highway 28, where the road narrowed to a two-lane bridge with no real shoulders and a…

TIM CAHILL, EDITOR AT LARGE That’s my mother, sometime in the late 1940s, at Nagawicka Lake in Wisconsin, and as you can see, she was beautiful. I spent my summers on the lake, and learned to swim early, in a time before my memories begin. Dad said he just tossed me off the pier into the lake, which is how you taught a kid to swim in those days. Apparently, I sank like a stone. My father had to dive in, fish me out, and explain that the idea was to stay on top of the water and breathe. I guess that made sense to me, and I spent most of my summer days in the lake. When I told my parents that I wanted to travel, they suggested I…

LANCE ARMSTRONG IS TELLING A STORY. HE IS SEATED AT A BOISTEROUS TABLE IN A BARBECUE JOINT IN ASPEN, COLORADO, ALONG WITH HIS FIVE CHILDREN, AGES 6 TO 17, HIS FIANCÉE, ASSORTED FRIENDS, AND A REPORTER. BEHIND THE RESTAURANT RISE THE LUSH GREEN SLOPESof 10,000-foot Buttermilk Mountain, which in late spring is still partly covered with snow. Because Armstrong’s conversation is, as usual, peppered with profanity, his eightyear- old son, Max, occasionally shouts across the table, claiming a dollar for every f-bomb. This is their agreement. “We were driving to the golf club, just minding our own business,” Armstrong says. The familiar face is older now, more deeply creased, the famously electric, hazel-blue eyes offset with traces of gray hair. “And this guy pulls up alongside and flips us off.…

I TIED IN AND STARTED UP THE CLIFF. THE ROUTE WAS RATED ONLY 5.6, AND BECAUSE ONE OF MY FRIENDS HAD LED IT A FEW MINUTES BEFORE, I HAD A TOP-ROPE BELAY. IT WAS THE FIRST TIME IN 15 MONTHS THAT I HAD CLIMBED OUTDOORS—THE LONGEST SUCH HIATUS OF MY ADULT LIFE.Two years earlier, the 70-foot pitch would have been a trivial warm-up before I tried something “real.” Now it was all the challenge I dared face. In July 2015, I was diagnosed with Stage IV throat cancer. During the next four months, I got zapped with 35 doses of radiation and seven weeks of chemotherapy. Confined to a hospital for a third of that time, I thought I was about to die on three occasions, and at one low…

THE HARDEST THEY COME HAL ESPEN, EDITOR, 1999—2006 When I became the editor of Outside in early 1999, the 22yearold magazine was riding impossibly high—and falling apart. In one of those mysterious temperamental spasms that sometimes grips even thriving publications, most of the editorial team that had brought so much success and acclaim in the nineties abruptly decamped for opportunities elsewhere, taking key contributors and vast stores of institutional memory out the door. As part of the reboot, I took one of my luckiest steps on the way to reimagining a 21stcentury Outside by hiring a darkhorse freelancer named Mark Jenkins as a monthly columnist, making a bet that he could uphold the heroic standards of predecessors like David Quammen, Tim Cahill, and Randy Wayne White. It paid off. Jenkins—climber,…

Going forward, I only see evolving—learning more and becoming more efficient and focused. As you get older, you can take your destiny into your hands and define for yourself what success means. I love the concept of doing what I haven’t done instead of doing something again just to prove that I can still do it. I was in Peru this summer and surfed the longest waves I’ve ever ridden—just under six and half minutes for almost two and a half miles. My mentor is 84 years old, and we’re about to take a heli-snowboarding trip to Chile. The people I admire stay full speed ahead into the unknown and are relentless in their pursuit of life. You just don’t stop.…

In 1973, after my second tour in Vietnam, I was hiking in Yellowstone during an autumn storm with my friend Ed Gage. We crested a hill and looked into a valley filled with steam and some 300 elk. They were churning in confusion, avoiding something. Then we saw it: a grizzly on a bull carcass. Over the past five years, nearly 200 grizzlies had died in the Yellowstone ecosystem, and the population was in danger of collapsing. Watching the bear, I realized I’d do anything to protect it. Soon after, Gage gave me a Bolex camera and told me to make films—so I did. I never considered it coincidental that I got mixed up with the grizzly during my little quest into the wilderness to lick my battle wounds. Protecting…

TENZING NORGAY WASN’T BUYING IT. NEITHER WERE THE FIVE OTHER SHERPAS WHO’D SUMMITED MOUNT EVEREST SINCE 1953, WHEN TENZING AND EDMUND HILLARY FIRST KNOCKED THE BASTARD OFF. THE EUROS HAD BEEN TOO FAST—TOO FAST TO HAVE CLIMBED THE MOUNTAIN WITH BOTTLED OXYGEN,let alone without it. But such was the claim that Italian Reinhold Messner, then 33, and Austrian Peter Habeler, 35, were making about their Everest summit on May 8, 1978. They said they’d reached the top of the 29,035-foot peak from Camp IV—which sits at 25,938 feet on the South Col, the saddle between Everest and neighboring Lhotse— in just under eight hours. They’d spent 15 minutes on top, then returned individually, Hab eler in an hour and Messner in an hour and 45 minutes. If true, they’d not…

As my late husband, Doug, always used to say, it was one of those one-in-a-million marriages that was life changing for both of us. To have that extraordinary love between us and be working in these wild and isolated circumstances, it was definitely unusual. We were always based wherever the projects were, so it was quite nomadic. Doug was a bush pilot, and we flew almost every day. That’s how we got around. When I was little, I wanted an extreme life—to be living on the ChampsÉlysées in Paris or under a bridge. And in many ways, that absolutely came true. I like intensity. It’s not for everybody.…

I had all these big plans for after the Sochi Olympics, but then I didn’t win and it all went out the window—and it was awesome. My whole world had been built on winning, and I lost. It was very humbling, but it allowed me to finally have a life. At first I was playing with this band, but we had some differences and that stopped. It was about a year after Sochi that I wasn’t playing music, I wasn’t snowboarding or skating, and I went, Well, shit, what if I just stayed at the beach and lived? I own a house in Malibu, and I had friends over to surf and barbecue and hang out. It was amazing to realize that there was life after competing. Now, going into…

TO GET TO THE SHARKS AT THE MAUI OCEAN CENTER YOU MUST WALK THROUGH A SET OF JAWS THAT SERVE AS A DOORWAY, THEN WIND DOWN A LOW-LIT GULLET OF A CORRIDOR, PAST A FLOOR-TO-CEILING LAVA LAMP OF JELLYFISH. AT THE END OF THE PASSAGE,casting a cool blue gloom, is a 750,000- gallon tank filled with hundreds of large, toothy fish—sleek reef sharks, alien hammerheads, purposeful tigers, burly ahi and trevallies, silvery milkfish—and broad-tailed stingrays sweeping around all of them like kites. Among the crowds, there was pointing and shrieking and exclamations of wonder, toddlers clutching plush sea turtle dolls, teenagers trying and failing to look bored, and an overexcited guide barking into a micro phone about how someone he knew “had all his fingers ripped off” by a giant…

In my very first race, when I was about seven, I went around one of the gates the wrong way. No one saw it, but I knew I had to go to the referees and tell them to disqualify me. I wasn’t very good in the beginning—my coach would call me a turtle. That changed when I met Picabo Street. I was nine, and she was a huge role model for me. I realized I wanted to be in the Olympics. Then, when I was 16 years old, I had a season where I didn’t finish 50 out of 55 races. I almost quit. Instead I decided to recommit everything to skiing. I hired a trainer and made the U.S. Ski Team and then the Olympic team. That’s when I…

SAMUEL MASSIE WASN’T SUPERSTITIOUS UNTIL THE DAY HE SAW THE CROWS. TWO OF THEM, GLIDING ABOVE THE ANTARCTIC PLATEAU. SURE, HE’D HARDLY SLEPT IN 48 HOURS, AND IT WAS 60 BELOW, AND HE WAS 18 YEARS AND THREE MONTHS OLD, WHICH IS TO SAY HE KNEW NOTHING,and he hadn’t heard from his three shipmates in days. When you’re that cold, that tired, you see things. There were 188,000 square miles of flat white ice, and Samuel and his 33-year-old captain, Jarle Andhoy, were somewhere in the middle of it. If they didn’t find their way to McMurdo Station in less than a week, they’d be stranded for the entire Antarctic winter of 2011. Samuel didn’t know that, at this very moment, the Norwegian and New Zealand governments were working to…

NOW, ON THE MATTER OF MY DEATH IN THE GRAND CANYON ON THE COLORADO RIVER, SPECIFICALLY AFTER AN ALARMING SWIM IN LAVA FALLS—UNIVERSALLY CONSIDERED THE CANYON ’S NAST IEST AND MOST DIFFICULT RAPID—I CONFESS THAT I MISCALCULATED BADLY. I MISCALCULATED PREVIOUS TO THE RUN AND THEN AGAIN IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE EXCITEMENT TO COME.I had been thrown out of the raft at the top of the rapid, ambushed by some bit of rogue hydraulics, and recall attempting to swim against forces entirely beyond human control. I was using reserves of energy that, as it turned out, could have been better used later. Best really to just go with the flow. But the river seemed to yank me directly down as if by the feet, and I was looking up…

LAWRENCE J. BURKE, CHAIRMAN AND EDITOR IN CHIEF I think this photo is from 1963. One of my fraternity brothers, Charlie Dole, took it in Tucson while we were at the University of Arizona. That was my bike, and if I remember correctly, it was an English-made Greeves Hawkstone Scrambler, a 250cc two-stroke that I used for local events or just tooling around in the desert. Later I bought a 650cc Triumph, which my then wife made me sell when she caught me riding around with our infant daughter on board.…