Adventure
ArchiveOutside magazine, March 1995 Hard Parts A skeletal view of trilobites and other objets d’art By David Quammen Let me pose an intrusive but well-meant question: When you pass from this life, what will you leave behind? And don’t try to tell…
Outside magazine, April 1997 Continued Cool, with Occasional Tsunamis Is it us, or do things seem to be getting a little less pleasant out there? By Debra Shore Golly, it was a super year, wasn’t it? We’re speaking of…
Outside magazine, June 1995 Books: The Dumbo Complex By Miles Harvey When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals, by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy (Delacorte Press, $23.95). In what might be considered a most idiosyncratic book, controversial Freud scholar Masson teams…
Outside magazine, June 1996 The Little Freshman Who Could Living up to preseason predictions declaring her American sport climbing’s next great hope, 15-year-old Katie Brown won the season-opening U.S. competition last March in Tucson, Arizona. Brown’s victory, her first in adult competition, was impressive, particularly since…
Outside magazine, October 1996 Be Like Sri By Lolly Merrell Hey, kids, try this at home. If you want to start your own mystical, spiritual movement, consider Sri Chinmoy. In order to carve out his particular niche–especially after his knees grew sore from running–he…
Outside Magazine, April 1999 Would You Be, Could You Be, Won’t You Be, (And Why in the Hell Does Anyone Want to Be) My Neighbor? What happens when cabin fever sets in and the whole town lives…
Outside magazine, January 1997 A Watery Grave Life sprang abundant from the Philippines’ Boac River. Then something killed it. By James Hamilton-Paterson The Philippine province of Marinduque is a heart-shaped island roughly 30 miles by 20. It lies in the middle…
Dispatches, July 1997 C A R E E R S A Not-So-Golden Parachute Your humble tour guides: former cycling greats By Andrew Tilin Whither the retired professional cyclist? Times were tough enough while carving out a spot in the…
Outside magazine, October 1996 Deeper To the peerless Moles, practitioners of the gloomily claustrophobic sport of freshwater spelunking, the ultimate accomplishment is finding a virgin cave By Bucky McMahon It’s a horror hole, just a depression full of springwater with a…
Out Front, October 1997 To Do: Hang Out at Mall, Torture Little Brother, Save World A few young go-getters who’ll soon be making headlines By Brad Wetzler Don’t worry, we know your type. sure, you’re interested in what happened during…
Dispatches, October 1998 Public Relations No Wonder the Reception’s So Good at the Statue of Liberty A few modest proposals for ways the cell-phone industry might dress up its towers By Bruce McCall The purveyors of cellular communications,…
Outside magazine, December 1997 Sport: From Tabula Rasa to Pipeline Masters Shaping a few winning boards with the North Shore’s humble Picasso-of-the-planer By William Finnegan E A R T O T H E G R O U N…
Dispatches, June 1997 Diversions: Because It’s…Absurd and Illegal The latest sport to take London by storm: sewer canoeing By Denise Dowling Given that most British celebrities — David Bowie, Brenda Blethyn, His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales — tend…
Outside magazine, March 1996 The Virtuoso: Front-Suspension Symbiont, Meet Ms. Controlled Abandon Cross-country world champ Alison Sydor shows how you and your bike can achieve that elusive two-part harmony By Ken McAlpine When it comes to bike handling, there are…
Outside magazine, June 1996 O My Preppy Soul! Hours from anywhere but on the edge of nowhere, the rough Down East passages welcome the well heeled and unpedigreed alike By John Skow We had rounded schoodic point some hours before, or so…
Dispatches, June 1997 Science: If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, De-Clone ‘Em A revealing look into a future clouded by double vision By Bruce McCall For The Record Just Smush It…
Outside magazine, August 1995 Solitude on the High Seas By Lawrence Burke There are few sporting events on earth more taxing of mind and body than the BOC Challenge, the around-the-world solo sailing marathon that ended late last spring in Charleston, South Carolina. During…
Outside Magazine, November 1994 Citius, Altius, Picabo On her way to downhill glory and a country and western singing career, Picabo Street, force of nature, brakes for no one By Lynn Snowden Picabo Street, the 23-year-old downhill skier who won a silver…
The Downhill Report, December 1996 Ski Like Picabo, Dress Like a Partridge Seventies style is back–and it’s groovier than ever By Katie Arnold Pea green matched with deep mustard rust. Mile-wide stripes. The dare-me look of animal print on nylon. Welcome…
Outside magazine, October 1995 Leeward Islands By Matthew Joyce, Tom Morrisey The islands of the Lesser Antilles' northern chain may share a location sheltered from prevailing northeasterlies, but that's about all they have in common. Name your sport, then pick your island.
March 1996 Features: The Highly Civilized Fat-Tire Primer Front-Suspension Symbiont, Meet Ms. Controlled Abandon Cross-country world champ Alison Sydor demonstrates the essential riding skills. By Andrew Tilin More Bike for the Buck…
Outside magazine, May 1996 Gone Reading By Larry Burke Few genres of writing can match the world of outdoor literature for richness, exuberance, or sheer eclecticism. Whether it’s the novels of Herman Melville or the travel epics of Paul Theroux, the Boy Scout Handbook…
Outside magazine, May 1996 Mastering the Finer Points For Robyn Erbesfield, precision is the surest route to perfection in any discipline. “Think of the best athlete in your sport,” she says. “It’s the precision that defines the distance between our level and his.” What she…
 Outside magazine, June 1999 A Long and Brutal Assault First fiction 93 years ago, Frederick Cook became the first person to reach the difficult summit of Mount McKinley. Presumed fact Actually, he faked it. Second fiction…
Outside magazine, June 1999 Lifestyle Home on the Range—for Just $5 Million a Pop America’s newest haven for the ultrarich prepares to say, “Howdy, neighbor. Can I see your wallet?” The massive stone-and-lodgepole…
Outside magazine, August 1995 The Marvelous, Manic Drive of Juli Furtado What fuels the world’s most dominant mountain-bike racer? Doom and gloom and a steady flow of French roast. By Sara Corbett “On my god,” Juli…
Outside magazine, December 1996 Better Get a Big Sleigh Not even the Grinch could make off with this season’s bounty By Bob Howells Harley-Davidson Limited Edition by GTSettle into the soft leather saddle, grab those swept-back bars, strap a…
Shwoosh! All You Need is Dirt The Hysterical Parent A medical emergency You would be a fool to venture into the wilderness without someone in your party being certified in first aid. Call your pediatrician or hospital for information…
Outside magazine, July 1996 Mountaineering: Who, Moi? A year after Alison Hargreave’s tragic death on K2, Chantal Mauduit stakes claim as the sport’s newest star By Lolly Merrell “I admired her, but you see, we are very different,” says French alpinist Chantal…
 Outside magazine, April 1995 In Hunza They Live Forever Is it the water? The apricots? The sublime mountain scenery? Is it all in their heads? High in the Himalayas, looking for a prodigal son who might have the answer. By Rob…
Why does Miguel Indurain keep winning the Tour de France? In Spain, at the start of the season that could bring an unprecedented fifth straight victory, only one answer makes sense.
Outside magazine, September 1999 MARKETING Hakkalüugi Be Thy Name The etymological quest to conceive hot new taglines for the latest gear Yes, it’s that time of year again: the gear world’s annual silly season, when companies must conjure up…
Outside magazine, September 1999 FRONT LINES The Wild Bunch A dozen threatened Edens, peaceable kingdoms, and unspoiled Nirvanas: Outside’s roster of great places that deserve the ultimate protection—wilderness designation POLITICS |…
Horse Sense Cowboy vs. Dude By Ryan Underwood t h e f u n f i l e: Outback Boredom Busters Watch Birds Pack binoculars…
Outside magazine, October 1995 Scandal: Cook, Cook, He’s Our Man… By Laura Billings Fifty-five years have passed since Frederick Cook–polar explorer, former Leavenworth inmate–stepped onto that great ice floe in the sky, but a steadfast brotherhood is still working to thaw his reputation. This…
Outside magazine, November 1995 Cycling: Now He’s Won One By Todd Balf (with Joe Glickman) At the U.S. Cycling Federation’s glitzy Night of Champions last year in Hollywood, Lance Armstrong was introduced as the best one-day classics rider that America has ever produced. To…
Outside magazine, February 1996 Books: The Feral Sons By Miles Harvey Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer (Villard, $23). In the January 1993 issue of Outside, in an article that was nominated for a National Magazine Award, contributing editor Krakauer…
Outside magazine, March 1999 Review: Always in Touch (if, That Is, You Want to Be) The latest mobile electronics put the backcountry online By Brent Hurtig ELECTRONICS |…
Outside Magazine, December 1998 Winter? These Guys Made Winter. Seven Olympic venues, one charming Main Street, and a host of High Peaks — it all adds up to Lake Placid, America’s original snowbound resort By Bill McKibben Lake Not-So-Placid All…
Family Vacations, Summer 1996 Howdy, Dude Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys–but it’s okay to pretend By Nancy Debevoise Our Favorite Places | The Hysterical Parent | Inside…
Dispatches, July 1998 Rodent Rights Why Is Everybody Always Pickin’ on Me? They’re cute and furry, yet they get no respect. A look at the star-crossed plight of the American sod poodle. Yes, it’s now official: prairie dogs have become…
Outside magazine, July 1996 Sloth: Then Again, There’s Always Pop-Tarts By Adam Horowitz With apologies, I ask all you connoisseurs of fine food to hold the outrage. Blasphemous though it may be, someone has to stand up for the more practical-minded among us.
Dispatches, May 1997 Physics: Bloody Idiotic, As You Chaps Might Say The (possibly apocryphal) tale of British Rail’s chicken cannon misadventure By Shane Dubow By now, anyone who’s gone on-line knows the Internet is great at hatching all manner of…
Outside magazine, August 1996 Rowing: Odds That… The U.S. women’s eight will break six minutes…..3-1 The U.S. men’s eight will win a gold medal……..10-1 Redgrave and Pinsent will remain undefeated…….1-1…
Outside magazine, August 1996 Politics: Eat Your Heart Out, Al Gore Meet Sherry Boehlert, the man environmentalists can’t do without By John Galvin “He may well save the republicans in spite of themselves,” intones Mark Childress, vice-president of the Environmental Working Group,…
Outside magazine, October 1994 Endurance: Get With it, Guys By Todd Balf (with Greg Child and Dan Dickison) Last July, Ann Trason won her sixth straight Western States 100 women’s title, beat all but one of the men, and bettered her own course record by 37…
Outside magazine, October 1995 Mountain Biking: Eyes for Mammoth By Todd Balf (with John Alderman) Mountain-bike professionals are no strangers to tough conditions, but July’s World Cup stop on California’s Mammoth Mountain was in another realm: The course was buried in ten feet of…
Features: Election Preview ’96, November 1996 The Boy Scouts Find A Compass In the shrink-wrapped politics of the environment, it’s not how far you go, but in what direction By The Editors “Clinton knows that if he wins in ’92, he’ll…
Outside Magazine, 1999 Annual Travel Guide Doing the Wild Thing Eight bush camps and jungle lodges where the floor show is fierce Temple Tiger Jungle Lodge, Nepal Milk and musk: That’s what a Royal Bengal tiger smells like. So said…
T H E H O L I D A Y G I F T G U I D E Shop for THE JOCK Shop for THE WANDERER Shop for…
Dispatches, April 1998 RETAIL One Giant Leap for Suckerkind How to buy lunar real estate, and other “bargains” on the World Wide Web By Katie Arnold As though there weren’t already enough distractions on the Internet, virtual malls are…
News from the Field, February 1997 Tinseltown: Alas, Mr. Speilberg has declined to direct By Adam Horowitz OK, here’s the plot: A dream team of Hollywood titans–one an avowed environmentalist–announces plans to build a 1,000-acre studio atop some of L.A.’s last wetlands. Unbowed…
 Outside magazine, May 1998 The Jungle Took Her Twenty-seven years ago a young Canadian woman went to Borneo seeking a sort of paradise, a place where she could study the mysterious red ape, gather science, garner respect…
Outside magazine, May 1999 Epitaph for a Crusader Terry Freitas lived for a cause, a place, a people, but he died for no good reason at all. When Terence Freitas returned to the United States on…
 Outside magazine, June 1994 The Hydroponic Dreams of Laird Hamilton He was born in a bathysphere, baptized in surfboard resin, raised in the rainforest in Hawaii. Who else is ready to ride the biggest wave on earth? By Bucky McMahon…
Outside magazine, July 1995 Windfishing: Call Me…Dude By John Galvin Though catching air off the lip of big waves is Jeff Olson’s first love, he’s also been known to tell a pretty good fish story. “When this one hit, he pulled my board backward,”…
Vacation Special, August 1997 R A F T I N G T H E G A U L E Y The Hillbilly Autobahn The best swimming in Mexico: Ocean? By Stephanie Gregory…
Outside magazine, October 1995 A Spin Around the Gab Galaxy By Sara Corbett “America loves a female athlete with a big personality,” says Kathy Dasilva, a producer of MTV Sports. “Someone who’s a force field unto herself, who’s all-around big.” Of course, the…
Dispatches, November 1998 Breakthroughs So Can I file a Patent on My Wife’s Panty Hose? And other modest proposals from the cutting edge of science By Denis Faye Once, there was a world without velcro, devoid of Gore-Tex, and…
Women Outside, Fall 1998 Toys Sharp Objects The best ways to slice, carve, chop, whittle, and otherwise be a cutup By Michael Kessler GEAR | TRAVEL | FITNESS |…
Dispatches, April 1998 ENVIRONMENT When We Say Roadless, We (Kinda) Mean It The Clinton administration’s latest bold move could spell the end of subsidized logging … or not By Alan Freedman It’s the timber industry’s oldest maxim: If you…
Outside magazine, January 1996 Ma Sparker By Bill Donahue The story seemed almost biblical: 60-year-old Charmian Glassman so loved her prodigal, forest-fire-fighting son, Jason Robertson, that she ventured into the dry, manzanita-specked hills near her Mount Shasta home and reportedly set the forest ablaze,…
Outside magazine, February 1998 Out There: OK Gorillas, No Belching During the Pledge of Allegiance Bringing a little jungle indoors, to a fresh generation of primatologists By Tim Cahill LISTEN UP! Tim Cahill speaks on Outside Radio…
Outside magazine, April 1996 The Town That the A-Bomb Built By Lawrence Burke Last summer’s 50th anniversary observances of the trinity blast, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki understandably focused on the world-historical transformation brought about by the atomic bomb. Considerably less was said about the here…
Outside magazine, April 1996 The Case for Speed By Todd Balf and Paul Kvinta Will mountaineering’s next era be all about linking the premier routes of yesteryear in nonstop climb-a-thons? Marc Twight thinks so. Best known for his ice-climbing prowess and tortured poetry (see…
Outside magazine, August 1999 Thicker Than Blood It takes some good old boys to show you the primo secret woods By Larry Brown Two years before my father died, when I was 14, my…
Travel Guide, Winter 1995-1996 Rack It Up Who says you can’t take it with you? By John Lehrer What to look for in a car rack? Ease of use (for example, can you open the ski/ snowboard holder with frozen fingers?), durability…
Outside magazine, December 1995 Introducing the Particle-Accelerating Bohunk Next Door By Todd Balf and Paul Kvinta Uh, meet Brian Scottoline. Stanford biochemist. HIV researcher. Sweaty pinup boy in the 1996 Studmuffins of Science calendar, on sale now in most university bookstores. Really. “I’m…
News from the Field, January 1997 Marketing: Salty, Salty, He’s Our Man… Some free advice for the organizers of the 2002 Winter Games By Bruce Mccall The Utah Winter Olympic Games are still five years away, but to sell those millions…
Outside magazine, March 1995 Ride With Pride: Well, It Won’t Fix Itself: Part 1 How to straighten a bum rim By Scott Sutherland As disheartening as it looks, a wheel that’s been banged into a shape that’s slightly suggestive of a taco…
Outside magazine, January 1996 The Outside Prognosticator: Wooood-y! Wooood-y! We’re drinking bottled water, We’ll soon be drinking bottled air… In 1991 he caught our ear by warbling these earnest lyrics. In 1996, as Outside names Woody Harrelson the Embarrassing Enviro Celeb of His…
Outside magazine, March 1995 Swimming: In our ongoing search for masochists… By Todd Balf (with Jim Kelly, Martin Dugard, and Alison Osius) Call Guy Delage a dreamer, but on December 16 the 42-year-old Frenchman left the Cape Verde Islands in a heroic bid to…
Outside magazine, April 1999 Near to the Ground It hasn’t been a bad decade for the environment, all things considered. But before you send those huzzahs ù and your checks ù to those far-off groups in Washington,…
Outside magazine, September 1995 Duathlon: Stop Your Whining By Todd Balf (with Martin Dugard) Heinous weather was just about the only thing in hot pursuit of top-ranked duathlete Maddy Tormoen at the season-opening Powerman Duathlon in Zofingen, Switzerland, on May 14. Tormoen clobbered the…
Outside magazine, July 1996 Self-Reliance: Shopping on Location By Doug Peacock I cook (like everyone else) for therapy, and when out on the land, where you have to make do with what’s at hand, one of the best antidotes to an impending disaster…
Outside magazine, December 1995 Transcendental Perspiration The road to the Little People starts with near-suffocation in a sweat lodge By Randy Wayne White Even though it implies a spiritual linkage that I’m reluctant to acknowledge, any explanation of why I attended a…