Adventure
ArchiveOutside magazine, August 1996 Presumed Redundant Concluding a chain of events that resembles something out of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, U.S. marshals have finally located fugitive river guide William Stoner in Sydney, Australia, and are now pressing for his extradition. Stoner, you may recall,…
Outside magazine, October 1994 Classics: The Dutch Oven By Donovan Webster These days, camp fashion demands equipment that glitters like NASA nuggets and weighs less than helium. Which is important if you’re making a very classy through-hike of the Appalachian Trail, but not so for lesser…
Outside magazine, November 1995 Embraced by the Strangler Fig Cut loose with the world’s most maddeningly optimistic adventurer By Randy Wayne White After surviving a hideous car crash in 1980, my friend Tucker Comstock experienced a spiritual refurbishment that helped her shed…
Review: Hardware and Software, November 1996 Books: Postcards from the front By Miles Harvey Aftermath: The Remnants of War, by Donovan Webster (Pantheon Books, $23). “All around us, human bones poke from the ground,” writes Webster. He is looking out over…
Outside magazine, November 1997 Books: Season’s Gleanings Ready for the annual fall book blitz? You are now. By Miles Harvey The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier, by Bruce Barcott (Sasquatch Books, $24). Barcott grew…
Women Outside, Fall 1998 Regimens Armed and Dangerous? America’s freestyle diva can help with the first part. The rest is your business. By Gretchen Reynolds (with Lea Aschkenas) GEAR | TRAVEL |…
Outside magazine, January 1992 Triathlon: An Iron Grip By Todd Balf (with Martin Dugard) The Ironman World Championship didn’t appear to have much going for it. Mike Pigg, the short-course maestro, decided to skip the October 19 race and a confrontation with defending…
Outside magazine, April 1995 The Big Showdowns By Sara Corbett The Calgary Stampede: July 7-16, Calgary, Alberta. Chuck wagon races, street dancing, and full-throttle carousing make this something of a cowboy Mardi Gras. A hefty cash purse lures top riders. Call 800-661-1260.
Dispatches, May 1998 LOST CAUSES Take My Monuments, Please! An Antarctic obsessive desperately tries to give his treasures away By Michael McRae ‘I guess it’s kind of a white elephant,” Warren Pearson admits, gazing at the hand-tooled copper…
Outside magazine, May 1999 Lowe and Behold With most media attention on mainstream athletes like Michael Jordan, Mark McGwire, and John Elway, it was so refreshing to read your profile of climber Alex Lowe (“The Mutant and…
Outside magazine, July 1995 Sport: The Next Best Thing to Arena Football John Vande Velde says your town needs his portable cycling league By Dan Gindling “We’re Americanizing the sport of cycling,” says John Vande Velde, the 46-year-old creator of the Vandedrome,…
Dispatches, August 1997 B U S I N E S S Come Spew on Us How best to lure industry to New York State? With a license to pollute, of course. By Bill Donahue…
Dispatches, August 1998 Sport Same Ball, Little Different Spin Beach volleyball’s emerging phenom wants his sport to look more like America By Sarah Freidman When Dain Blanton explodes from the sand and smashes a scorching spike over…
Outside magazine, November 1997 Croco%#@! Dundee All across Australia, hapless wild beasts cry out: oh no, not him again! By Randy Wayne White Steve Irwin, the khaki-wearing bloke known to millions of television viewers around the world as…
Women Outside, Fall 1998 Recovery Yo, Mommy, Drop and Give me 50 Postpartum drills for mother and Chumley By Gretchen Reynolds GEAR | TRAVEL | FITNESS | HEALTH…
Outside magazine, January 1996 The Outside Prognosticator: Be All That You Can’t Be It lets you move freely and enjoy the sights,” says Michael Sneath, an underwater trainer for Belaqua, which manufactures the Breathing Observation Bubble, a $10,000 submersible motor scooter fitted with a Jetsons-style breathing…
Outside magazine, January 1996 The Outside Prognosticator: Heeere, Cujo! “They realize, after their couch has been destroyed and their neighbor's dog mauled, that they really don't want it anymore,” says Deborah Warlock, a Los Angeleno who operates a shelter for pet wolves abandoned by their owners. Sadly, the wolf-as-Fido…
Outside magazine, March 1994 My Malaria Adventures in delirium. Or, why I’m on a steak and gin-and-tonic diet, for my health By Tim Cahill I was eating breakfast on the terrace of a small restaurant near Santa Fe, New Mexico, when…
Outside magazine, December 1995 Confessions of a Cosmic Resonator Fie on sunspots! Damn those katabatic winds! I’m weather sensitive, and I’m just sick about it. By Sallie Tisdale “Plaguey twelvepenny weather,” said Jonathan Swift, and I know just what he meant. We…
Outside magazine, April 1996 U.S.Å., U.S.Å. By Todd Balf and Paul Kvinta In what may spur twin national crises in Norway and Sweden, two American nordic skiers upstaged the Scandinavians at their national championships. Nina Kemppel of Anchorage, Alaska, who trains and races with…
Outside Magazine, August 1999 The Big Sweep Beyond L.A.’s tangle of freeways, you can pedal, snorkel, and kayak your way to a truly great outdoors weekend. Honest. By Mike Steere Everybody’s going surfing: A…
Outside magazine, September 1994 The Gargantua File By Byron Ricks Every region has oddities that befuddle even the locals. In the Pacific Northwest, the flora and fauna follow the example of the region’s geologic features, often growing to eccentric proportions. We asked Ann Saling, author of…
Outside magazine, December 1995 Operation Forest Storm By Todd Balf and Paul Kvinta With bar-code scanners blazing, biologist Dan Janzen and a band of about 200 taxonomists will fan out across Costa Rica’s 463-square-mile Guanacaste Conservation Area next month to conduct what may be…
Outside magazine, September 2000 Page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 THE OTHER STUFF All Aboard A LONGBOARD REVOLUTION swept the surfing world in the…
Outside magazine, April 1995 Keeping America’s Trees Safe From Small-Curd Bubble Wrap Down the postflood Mississippi, beating the bushes for the mother lode of trash By Ian Frazier In New York City, where I live, plastic bags get stuck in trees. Especially…
Outside magazine, January 1996 The Outside Prognosticator: Psychic Swein: Yes! I See It! Prognostications ’96 Last year was a mixed bag for Swein Macdonald, Scotland’s most famous psychic. In this space, he accurately predicted that Florida would be hit by a June hurricane and…
Outside magazine, March 1995 Ride With Pride: …And Manage the Pressure By Alan Cote The easiest yet most profound way to change a bike’s performance involves nothing more than a pump and a valve. A difference of as little as ten pounds per square…
Outside magazine, March 1995 Big Weather: Lightening No place to escape the white sizzle, coming in at 200,000 amps per bolt By E. Annie Proulx What a fiery summer, no rain, the well gone dry. I was trying to finish the house.
Dispatches, April 1999 Environment Sprawl? Smog? The New California Says No. Only in la-la land could the same By Melba Newsome Only in La-La Land could the same society that embraced bumper-to-bumper traffic and…
Outside magazine, July 1996 Reuse, Recycle, Repeat Refrain It could only happen in the land that spawned grunge. The Garbage Gurus, a trio from Portland, Oregon, have pioneered a new rock genre, “garbage music,” created by banging on old kitchen sinks and plucking stringed instruments fashioned…
 Outside magazine, September 1995 Death in the Ruins They come to Cambodia for the cheap living, the cheap grass, the chance to flirt with a dangerous part of the world. But these days, young Western travelers have been paying the price for straying…
Outside magazine, April 1996 Science: It’s Matter, but it’s Not. Antimatter. Get It? A thimbleful of nothing sets the physics world atwitter By Bill Donahue After four years of trying, a team of physicists in Geneva has produced a thimbleful of…
Outside magazine, January 1997 Adventure Travel Special Professor Cahill’s Travel 101 He’s been trotting the globe for more than two decades, and yes, along the way he’s picked up a thing or 20. Tips to happier trails…
Outside magazine, April 1999 Books: Eyewitnesses By James Zug KAYAKS | BUYING RIGHT | THE OTHER STUFF | BOOKS Tigers…
Outside magazine, June 1996 Paradise Fouled Year after year, it was a perfect, unchanging place. And then it wasn’t By Randy Wayne White On my return to what was once the best place in the world, I was reminded of an…
Outside magazine, July 1997 Come On, Baby, Light My Gerb It’s bang-up time again at the firework freaks’ annual whiz-pop powderfest By Mike Steere Ekaterina V. Korneeva — a PH.D.-level laser scientist known as Kathy to her new American friends…
Outside magazine, July 1998 Field Notes: Today Boulder, Tomorrow the World They’re making noises about reviving U.S. distance running. Is anyone listening? By Bruce Schoenfeld The front range of the Rocky Mountains rises with little warning off a prairie…
Outside magazine, October 1997 The Soloists Why? Not even they can tell us. By Robert Stone Isabelle Autissier, a 38-year-old French marine biologist and marathon sailor, rides her dismasted, jury-rigged 60-foot racing yacht through the…
The Downhill Report, December 1996 One Giant Leap for Grommetkind Snowboarding’s new step-in bindings make getting on a snap. By Susanna Levin It was the last bastion of skier superiority, the ability to smugly glide from chair to slope while the…
Outside magazine, May 1999 He’s Big, He’s Bad, He’s…Japanese? Running wild with C. W. Nicol, proud citizen, silly celebrity, and stubborn environmentalist By Jeffrey Bartholet We’re in basho territory, yet nothing seems quite right. It’s not…
Outside magazine, January 1998 Due Process: Or Maybe We Get a Gigantic Shop-Vac… How to drain Lake Powell? Punticilious minds want to know. By Bruce McCall Though you won’t find mention of it in your local papers, Congress recently…
Outside magazine, March 1996 Hey, Vous, Get Offa Our Boats By Todd Balf and Paul Kvinta (with Brian Alexander and Steve Law) Now that France is winding down its nuclear chest-thumping in the South Pacific, Greenpeace has retreated to take stock and plan its…
Outside magazine, June 1996 Ah, to Be Young, in Love, and Freakishly Huge “He’s a mistake of nature,” Robert DeLong states plainly, like a seasoned district attorney. “He’s been so destructive. I feel this is the best way.” The accused in this case is a 1,600-pound…
Outside magazine, June 1999 A Lethal Dose of Salvation Plutonium was born to kill at the Hanford Site, but its birthplace gave life to a perfect stretch of river By Tim Cahill It was the greatest…
Outside magazine, September 1996 Niagara, Eat Your Heart Out In yet another example of a Montana town’s unusual tourist attraction (see “As the Snake Did Away with the Geese,”), the 3,000 citizens of Columbia Falls this month will unveil a 40-foot-tall answer…
Attempting Mount Fuji, where nature, religion, sport, and schlock form the most holy of alliances
Outside magazine, March 1997 Oh, Brothers When trouble came to the happy but peculiar Isle of Sark, it took the form of twins By Richard Todd Although, as it turned out, there are far better reasons for going to the…
Outside magazine, May 1996 Comebacks: The Big 4:00 Miler Steve Scott’s post-op dreams of one more for the record books By Todd Balf After doctors diagnosed U.S. mile record holder Steve Scott with testicular cancer in May 1994, he was given two…
Outside magazine, May 1996 Reality Bites The honeymoon for Yellowstone National Park’s new gray wolf population appears to be over. In February alone, a string of incidents reminded federal officials just how tough predator reintroduction can be: On February 5, officials were forced to destroy…
Outside magazine, June 1999 Wave Good-bye to the Fiberglass Moose Beyond the yacht clubs and the outlet malls, you’ll find the Maine that’s worth stopping for My Delta, Myself |…
Outside magazine, August 1995 Voice Part for a Duet The biology and mystery of monogamy By David Quammen Two intriguing statistics recently grabbed my attention. They concern that remarkable form of social behavior known as monogamy. Roughly 92 percent of all bird…
Outside magazine, September 1997 Onward, Fluffy Soldiers Getting down and dirty with Swampy and his mates in an untidy but very British war By Bruce Schoenfeld At the edge of a rolling meadow in England’s Bollin Valley, on a bright…
News from the Field, February 1997 Snowboarding: No, Seriously…I Am the World Champ Jeff Greenwood’s Olympic-size struggle to prove he’s the best By Mike Finkel It was snowy mayhem: a pack of boisterous, red-cheeked boys, Jeff Greenwood’s teammates on the U.S.
The Downhill Report, December 1996 Free Skiing! And a slew of other ways to hang on to your cash By Meg Lukens Noonan The next time you hear someone gripe about the high cost of skiing, speak up. You could say,…
 Outside magazine, October 1997 Roof of the World, Center of a Universe Jostling between the spiritual and the secular in Kathmandu, once and future base camp for all manner of quests By Bob Shacochis “And the wildest dreams…
 Outside magazine, December 1996 Come to Happyland Discover Burma, the dictators say, Southeast Asia’s most beautiful and friendly country. And so he did. A visit to an anesthetized state. By Michael Paterniti In the monsoon twilight, the clamor of Rangoon…
In the telecentric world of the X Games, only when it's not on the tube
Dispatches, September 1998 Law Blue Eyes, Medium Build. Last Seen Heading West on a Vintage Hartail. What does a mountain-biking pioneer do when his cocaine-smuggling past finally catches up with him? He rides like hell. By Hampton Sides There’s…
Outside magazine, November 1995 Ballooning: Let the Hot Air Begin By Todd Balf (with Joe Glickman) Get out your telescopes: No fewer than three international teams are scheduled to lift off this month in hopes of becoming the first to circumnavigate the world nonstop…
Outside magazine, June 2000 Peter Bray in the Drink: A play-by-play account of the plucky kayaker’s 30-hour attempt to keep his leaking boat afloat By David Friedland At about 8 PM on June 17th, Peter Bray…
Travel Guide, Winter 1995-1996 Just Don’t Call Us Shredders By Eric Blehm Snowboarders despise hearing people yell things from the lifts like “Dude, shred it up!” almost as much as they despise the snowless summer. Why? Because the terms are usually out of date.
Outside magazine, March 2001 Down with Ed THANK YOU FOR your enlightening profile of Ed Viesturs (“The Immovable Object Meets the Unstoppable Force,” December). As a novice mountaineer with a family of my own,…
Adventure Special, March 1999 The Alpha Class A few more unrivaled masters By David Roberts The Explorer: Borge Ûusland If any explorer deserves to inherit the mantle of Roald Amundsen ù regarded as the finest…
Outside magazine, May 1997 Letters: Island Life Tad Friend’s article “Lost at Sea” (March) speaks the truth about a would-be paradise. The Marshall Islands could attract tourists, but first the islanders need to be freed from the intoxicating effect of Uncle Sam.
 Outside Magazine, November 1994 Bill Stone in the Abyss His life’s obsession has been to get to the bottom of the world’s deepest cave. Two team members have already died. How much farther is he prepared to go? By Craig Vetter…
Outside magazine, June 1999 Don’t Get Used to It. Get Good at It. Falling happens, but it doesn’t have to hurt Good balance is essential, sure, but as spectacularly demonstrated by the…
Dispatches, August 1998 Cuisine How ‘Bout We Just Nibble on Them a Bit? In Vietnam a scourge of rats puts the crimp on fine feline dining By Jonathan Birchall Ok, it’s now official: by formal government…
Outside magazine, April 1995 Cowboy Nation: King of the Yee-Hah He knows everything there is to know about life in the saddle. Catch him at a 100-mph gallop, and he’ll tell you all about it. By Tim Cahill Four or five…
Outside magazine, July 1994 Not As Bad, But Still Not Nice Seven other places where you can expect the unexpected By Debra Shore Great Smoky Mountains National Park, North Carolina and Tennessee This is a drive-through park, so it’s not surprising that…
Outside magazine, August 1996 Are you Ready for the Bubbalympics? With a skybox rife with sponsors and a slate of flashy new events–plus 10,000 supremely gifted athletes–the pinnacle of sports breaks from its past. By Paul Kvinta There’s a reason they…
Outside magazine, August 1996 Will Work for…Several Million Bucks With Lance Armstrong dominating the Tour DuPont last May, many wondered why his team’s sponsor, Motorola, chose the occasion to declare that it wouldn’t be backing the squad in ’97. Actually, the timing for the announcement…
Outside magazine, October 1994 Essentials: Dry-Land Precautions By John L Stein It’s not the wear that usually ruins dive gear–it’s the care, or rather the lack thereof. Some precautionary tips to keep things in good working order above the surface, so you’ll encounter no surprises below:…
Outside magazine, November 1995 Books: War of the Green Soothsayers By Miles Harvey In a Dark Wood: The Fight over Forests and the Rising Tyranny of Ecology, by Alston Chase (Houghton Mifflin Co., $29.95); The Rarest of the Rare: Vanishing Animals, Timeless…
Review: Hardware and Software, November 1996 Audubon CD-ROM Bird Guide By Gregory McNamee Identifying the avian cackling in your campsite or the little brown jobs swarming around the feeder on your deck–often a befuddling endeavor–just got easier. The tower of ratty field guides…
Outside magazine, December 1995 Expeditions: These Sneaks Were Made for Atoll-hoppin’ An encompassing chat with the World’s Most Traveled Man By Michael Finkel Seventy-year-old John D. Clouse, who holds the Guinness Book of Records title of the World’s Most Traveled Man,…
Women Outside, Fall 1998 Strategies Teglamaniacal The secret of the world’s top marathoner: It’s not how far; it’s how fast By John Brant GEAR | TRAVEL | FITNESS |…