Everything
Duffel bags have no shape. Packs are meant to carry, not serve as suitcases. And wheelie bags have their limitations on stairs and over cobblestones, not to mention that they’re awkward in the overhead compartment. After over 1,000 flights dissatisfied with his suitcases, Nathan Kukathas joined…
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA Kate Rawles on her Mexico-to-Canada tour. Photo: Chris Loynes Kate Rawles is an outdoor philosopher. That is a title she coined herself, and it is accurate in more than one way. She spends her professional life thinking about, talking about,…
Condit Dam demolition complete after nearly 100 years
Tundra buggies resemble a kind of double-wide, offroad school bus, with plush suspension, a massive 460 International Diesel engine, and tires that run at 12psi to float over mud and snow. They’re jacked up about 10 feet, partly for clearance, but mostly to prevent any curious polar bears from climbing…
“Alaska Marshals,” the newest show from the Discovery Channel, takes viewers inside the barren Alaska wilderness where law enforcement successfully tracks down hundreds of fugitives each year.
Michael Brown’s documentary, which grew out of an Outside Adventure Film School project, follows a group of 11 wounded United States veterans as they scale a mountain in the Himalayas.
One of the ironies of Churchill is that its residents, who have so much to lose from climate change, often have to drive for their own safety. Signs emblazoned with the silhouette of a polar bear warn pedestrians not to walk in certain areas…
Just back from the front Kachin Independence Army soldiers take a rest in front of the Laiza hotel MYANMAR'S LAST WARAs Adam Skolnick observes in “The Jesus-Kissed, War-Fringed, Love-Swirled Rangers,” Myanmar's government is engaged in a complicated dance: freeing political prisoners on the one hand, while launching attacks…
To reach the clandestine training camp where he photographed “The Jesus-Kissed, War-Fringed, Love-Swirling Rangers,” South Africa-based lensman Jonathan Torgovnik was smuggled across the Burmese border in a pirogue. Then he was guided at night through a jungle laced with land mines. At the camp, Torgovnik met a…
The NYC Marathon, cancelled for the first time in race history. Photo: Steve Broer/Shutterstock I don't live on the East Coast. I'm landlocked in the high desert, where it is 65 degrees, sunny, and cloudless today, as it has been all week. We have not…
Some stories take a day to report. Others, like Joe Spring's profile of Navajo cross-country coach Shaun Martin, “Running Down a Dream,” are a bit more involved. “The best stories sometimes take the longest to report,” says Sam Moulton, who edited Spring's piece. For…
A view of the changed coastline in New Jersey. Photo: NASA Goddard Instead of gathering a widespread assortment of the week's best articles, videos, and photos, I've included the most thought-provoking and eye-opening articles on Sandy and her aftermath. Some…
In the winter of 2002, three friends and I headed out of bounds from the Santa Fe Ski Basin for an afternoon of sidecountry skiing in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Our destination was a set of relatively mellow chutes that drop from a ridge just above timberline into…
What's it like to watch the Storm of the Century hit your home from 2,000 miles away?
After wandering to a bar in Sandy's aftermath, Jason Diamond was reminded of the best parts about living in New York
The 29-year-old Swedish ski-mountaineer with an elegant outlook on life discusses fear, risk, and that one time he broke his neck in an avalanche that swept him 400 meters down ice, rock, and snow
In this weekly roundup, we scour the Web for our favorite long-form articles, collecting them here and on Longreads and Twitter. This installment focuses on climate science, Vikings, and the 1992 Olympic Dream Team.
With Manhattan slowly coming back to life after Hurricane Sandy, Outside’s East Coast editor joins the leader of Long Island Search and Rescue for a tour of places the cops haven't made it to yet, where looters prey on homes in communities that will take years to rebuild
One pair of thin-to-midweight ski-specific socks is all you need. We’re fans of Wigwam’s Xenon Pro.
A German Shepherd is found at 13,000 feet, and rescued after surviving seven nights in the cold. How did she get there, and what happened to her owner?
Two years ago Klymit launched its Variable Warmth Technology in a vest with sealed air/gas chambers that the wearer could inflate with his own breath, or Argon (the gas used to insulate between glass layers in your home's windows). Its premise: bodies change…
This year's Red Bull Rampage may have been overshadowed by Felix Baumgartner's record-breaking free fall, but the fact that it takes a 128,098-foot sky dive to upstage this event should tell you just how severe downhill mountain biking has…
World's youngest ski patroller? Taylor Justice on the job at Aspen. Photo: Taylor Justice There are overachievers, and then there is Taylor Justice. The 12-year-old skier/climber/straight-A student started shredding double-black diamond chutes when she was eight. Three years later, she joined the…
Fire Season. Photo: Ecco/Harper Collins On Thursday, Banff announced that Fire Season won the Grand Jury Prize in its 2012 book competition. Written by…
Photo: PublicDomainPictures I saw my first polar bear of the trip before I even boarded my flight from Chicago to Winnipeg. Submerged in water up to its snout, it stared at me from a World Wildlife Fund poster hanging by the men's bathroom in Concourse F. …
There were no shortage of heroes as Hurricane Sandy made its way from the Caribbean, up along the coast of the southeastern United States, into New Jersey, and then across Pennsylvania. Hospital personnel evacuated patients from at least one facility that lost power. Firemen…
Let’s start with nature’s wünderfabric. Not only is merino wool (sourced mostly from sheep in New Zealand’s Southern Alps) a sustainable, bio-degradable fabric, but gear makers have figured out how to make it softer and thin enough to wear on a hot summer day.
If you ski mostly in wet snow, like the stuff in Northern California and the Pacific Northwest, then you need something waterproof. In drier climes, like the Central Rockies, a water-resistant soft-shell glove should suffice. The more leather it has, the more waterproof it’s going to be.
Choosing the right bindings is just as important to your snowboard experience as your board and boots. We've selected three of our favorite bindings to help you find what's right for you.
Scaling rock and ice in the winter is serious business. Bring the right stuff.
We put 70 jackets through the wringer—running, skinning, skiing, and hiking. After nitpicking over pocket placement, breathability, and ever other detail under the sun, we settled on these six.
Frigid temperatures, biting wind, blowing snow—if you’re well outfitted, it doesn’t really matter.
From minimalist speedsters to winter-ready mountain scramblers, we’ve got you covered.
Got Gaiters? Our favorites are still Outdoor Research's light, packable, breathable Verglas.
From avoiding a "golden shower" to how much money—yes, money—to bring.
After months of torture-testing the latest crop of outdoor gear, we've compiled a list of our eight favorite items, from the Never Summer Proto CT/CTX snowboard to the Atlas Race snowshoes
The movie poster. Photo: Courtesy of Messner One of the biggest films that screened at the 2012 Banff Mountain Film Competition was Messner, a 108-minute German documentary with English subtitles directed by…
A composite image of Sandy making landfall at night. Photo: NASA/Goddard The death toll from Sandy in the United States has risen to 75, according to the Associated Press.
State-of-the-art prosthetic will be tested at Chicago's Willis Tower
Here is a view of Sandy's life from above. It was recorded by NASA's GOES-13 Satellite. It begins on October 23, when Tropical Depression 18 morphed into Tropical Storm Sandy. Before that, on October 22, at roughly 11:00 a.m., about 320 miles southwest of Kingston, Jamaica, a hot towering…
Waiting out the storm. Photo: Lonnie Dupre Lonnie Dupre has attempted to climb Denali in January each of the last two years. Both times he hit bad weather. So he huddled inside…
After sticking out Hurricane Irene, Maksim Charnyy didn't think Sandy would be any different. Ignoring mandatory evacuation orders, he stayed in his building with 70 or 80 percent of the other residents. And then the water came.
Whether you’re at the resort or deep in the backcountry, if your boots don’t fit properly you’re miserable. Not sure about size or which brand fit you best? Consult a fitter. To narrow your choices, match the boot to the binding you’re pairing it with.
You now have two choices when it comes to telemark bindings: 75mm (traditional duckbill) and the newer NTN. The former is favored for its simplicity, lower cost, and greater variety of boot choices, but NTN is vastly more powerful and releasable, and it’s better-suited to driving today’s fattest skis.
Rather sort your sock drawer than run on a treadmill? Us too. Here’s the gear you’ll need to keep running outdoors all winter long.
While the minimalism trend has shifted the center of the running universe toward lighter, more neutral designs with lower heels, shoe buyers are still faced with one crucial question: Performance or comfort?
It’s all about fit. Too loose and your head is a yolk inside an eggshell. Too tight and you’ll get migraines from all the pressure points. Most of today’s helmets have features that allow you to maximize fit.
Most goggles feature fog-resistant double lenses, but the cheap ones are built flat and bent into the frame, creating distortion, which can cause headaches. Invest in optically correct spherical lenses. Polarization? It cuts reflected light, but it can mask ice, too.
We tested out the best backcountry and alpine boots to help you find the best fit for your ski experience.
Dynafit-style tech bindings, like the Radical and the La Sportiva RT, are the only ones that offer a true free pivot, meaning there’s no hardware attached to your boot heel or sole. They have fewer moving parts, ice up less, and require 15 percent less energy from you than other bindings.
My friend always races triathlons in a red unitard because he says it’s his lucky outfit and wearing red makes him faster. I think he looks like a crazy malnourished Santa, but he always beats me. Can the color of my kit really affect my performance?
I can’t get my dog to stop knocking over the trash. You got anything fuzzy and “positive” for that?
Surfers along the East Coast, from Florida to New England, used the conditions generated by Sandy to catch bigger waves than they'd normally see. Florida did not suffer the damage from Sandy that states further north…
NYC, Avenue C at East 6th Street, Oct. 29, 2012. Photo: David Shankbone/Flickr The loss of life and property damage from Superstorm Sandy is still being tallied, but the catastrophe is pointing a spotlight on the need for cities to adapt…
A rough map of Linsdau's route Photo: AaronLinsdau.com In a Monday blog post, American skier Aaron Linsdau reported from South America on the gear he was packing into Antarctica. One picture stands out. It shows two of his five duffel bags…
Outside's East Coast editor visits the town he grew up in, situated on the west side of the Hudson River about 25 miles outside of Manhattan, in the middle of Hurricane Sandy
An Olympic sport at the turn of the 20th century tries to find its way back into the modern Games
For a secure, three-closure fit, try the Infuse snowboard boots.
If it’s been a while since you bought telemark or alpine touring gear, you’ll notice that the game has changed quite a bit. Skis that used to be fat are now narrow, almost every new model has some degree of rocker, and Dynafit and Dynafit-style bindings are becoming increasing common at the resort.
Traction, bindings, and weight—these are the biggest differentiators. Let’s start with traction. For steep, icy, or rocky terrain, go aggressive with as many underfoot claws in as many locations as you can get, as well as a heel lifter to save your calves on steep climbs.
If it’s time for an upgrade, start by answering this question: Do you ski almost exclusively at resorts? The defining characteristic of the ones reviewed here is that they’re built for comfort, not aerobic speed.
First things first: your pack will be heavier. You’ll be packing more food, fuel, and layers. As for shelter, if you’re not expecting high winds or heavy snowfall, you probably don’t need to upgrade to a four-season tent; a sturdy (read: not ultralight or mostly mesh) three-season model should see you through.
As backcountry skiing has boomed, so has splitboarding. In the past five years, participation has quadrupled, and companies from Black Diamond to Burton to K2 have tossed their hats into the ring with split-specific gear.
The first question to ask yourself is: Down or synthetic? Synthetic insulation is water-resistant, dries quickly, and is usually not as marshmallowy as its natural counterpart, which makes for better layering.
The nimble, lightweight Velvet Guru stands head and shoulders above the competition in a park setting.
Like riding in slippers, the Boa Coiler is one comfy boot.
Our testers raved about the great energy transfer that the DVa delivers.