Outside Magazine, Oct 2002

Remember the rainforest? Fourteen years after the martyrdom of Brazilian activist Chico Mendes, environmentalists are once again being murdered, while illegal logging pushes deeper into the world's last great tropical jungle. In this investigative report, Patrick Symmes follows the money, the mahogany, and the mafias—and goes underground to join a brave ne

Predicting the future of exploration is a risky proposition, but SARA WHEELER is ready to cut loose with a few bold guesses

A look at the shimmering swag of tomorrow

One of climbing’s most famous survival sagas began on the night of July 13, 1977, after British mountaineers CHRISTIAN BONINGTON and Doug Scott completed the first ascent of Pakistan’s 23,900-foot Baintha Brakk—a beastly massif known as The Ogre. During his rappel down, Scott swung wildly across the face and broke…

“I looked down to find my crotch on fire.” Tom Kluberton holds up gutted pants as evidence. “OK, they’re crotchless, but they are still good Carhartts.”

Set loose in the land that invented terrorism ten centuries ago, Tim Cahill finds crumbling castles, legends of hash-smoking hit men, and Iranians who won't stop being nice. You call this the axis of evil?

Dreams of Bengal tigers and visions of imminent extinction led Peter Matthiessen to a predator's last stronghold in the jungles of India. It was a place, the author discovered, where not seeing is believing.

A quarter-century after he changed everything by summiting Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen, Reinhold Messner is looking fit, feeling adventurous, and acting about as mellow as a snapping turtle. Ah, well: Great men aren't always sweethearts—and Messner is still the best there ever was.

Uh, we'll get back to you on that

From Outside's screwup files, a tale of epic miscommunication

Be the first to bag the Seven Plummets—the deepest spots in each of the Seven Seas

By Marshall Sella BEFORE HE VANISHED in Mexico in 1914, never to be heard from again, the formidable writer Ambrose Bierce, whose short stories often explored themes of horror and death, cobbled together his Devil’s Dictionary. It was a fiercely satirical work, filled with definitions such as “fidelity…

“I don’t even think of Tony as an adult,” said Phil Jennings, a 12-year-old I met at the HuckJam. “He doesn’t act like the big man. He’s one of us.”

The scientists were clinging to the side of the ice they’d been standing on, 50 feet above the waterline. In a few seconds, the berg had gone over on top of them.

“I want to get off my pills someday,” Roger says. “I think that if I stay around regular people a lot, maybe that will help me.”

For newcomers—meaning most of us—they are merely picturesque. But for Native Americans, the sacred places of the Great Plains and Northern Rockies are alive with centuries of memory and meaning—and something much, much bigger.