Adventure
ArchiveOutside magazine, September 1994 Mining: Big Gulp Some call it fun. Some call it a huge, rubbly mess. News from the prospecting frontier. By Jonathan Weisman Glistening in a wetsuit and diving gear, 56-year-old Chuck Tabbert splashes to the surface in a section of…
Travel Guide, Winter 1995-1996 The Outside Yenta Says… 1. If you consistently selected (a), you are a HOPELESS AMPHIBIAN. Your body requires moisture at all times. Bring your scuba gear, surfboard, sailboard, or sea kayak to Bonaire–Plummeting coral walls just 100 feet from…
Outside magazine, September 2000 Page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 Anatomy of…
Outside Magazine, February 1995 Politics: Ask Not What They’ll Do for Your Countryside Face-to-face with the environment’s newest movers and shakers in Washington By Ned Martel (with John Galvin) Pumped with Gingrich fever, Congress promises to take up environmental issues with newfound…
Outside magazine, April 1996 Books: Dead Men Don’t Wear Drab Mystery writer Nevada Barr’s stiff-brimmed recipe for murder By John Galvin It’s after midnight on rural Mississippi’s Natchez Trace Parkway, and Ranger Nevada Barr is cruising solo on the scenic road’s loneliest…
Outside magazine, March 1995 Ride With Pride: Mountain Bike Skills: Let the Missile Guide You Missy Giove’s hard-won lessons in fat-tire control By Kiki Yablon “The best way to monitor your speed is by gauging the amount of control, or lack thereof,”…
Outside magazine, March 1995 Sport Climbing: Tres Bon, Robyn By Todd Balf (with Jim Kelly, Martin Dugard, and Alison Osius) Robyn Erbesfield has no peer in sport climbing. Period. At the World Cup finale last December in Birmingham, England, she out-jousted France’s Natalie Richer…
Dispatches, April 1999 Sport Spiked Almost Off the Map By Tim Zimmermann Let’s begin with a flashback. Atlanta, Georgia. July 1996. Beach volleyball is making its Olympic debut while serving as party central for a…
Outside magazine, September 1995 Personal Security: And for That Commute to Headquarters… By Jon Gluck Anyone with the corn-fed twang of Bob Seger’s “Like a Rock” lodged in his brain knows that a sport-utility vehicle can handle anything the backcountry can throw at it.
Outside magazine, September 1995 Buying Right: Bodacious Rooftop Boxes By John Lehrer Adding a cargo box to your roof rack is like building a new room on your car. All of the things that crowd your backseat when the trunk overfloweth–backpacks, ski boots, cooking…
Outside magazine, October 2000 21st-Century Blues TOO OFTEN, the media only skim over politicians’ positions, neglecting substance for candidate babble. So I enjoyed “Campaign 2000” (August), Outside‘s package on the environmental records of this year’s candidates. The environment is…
January 1996 Features: The Outside Prognosticator Every time period has its ups and downs, but 1996 will be something else. Are we thrilled to our toes about the Atlanta Olympics? Yes, but we’re cringing about Izzy, the Games’ purple-hided mascot, who will lead a schlock…
Outside magazine, March 1995 Ride with Pride Finding a Bike That Fits Stop straddling that tube and adjust your saddle, road cowboy By Dana Sullivan It Pays to Keep a Level Head How to wear…
Outside magazine, May 1994 Literature: Holy Roll Casting Hooking spirituality in trouting’s deep, deep pools By Donovan Webster Bait fishermen approach water with a simple thought: “Bite, you rascals.” With fly fishermen it’s more like “Ommmm.” We refer to man’s–well, fly-fishing…
Destinations, July 1997 Life on the Far Edge Tromping about on Spain’s unique western shore, where fjords abound and vino is a breakfast staple By Bruce Schoenfeld Carnival in Rias Come for the seafood. Stay for the bagpipes and…
Gone Summering, July 1998 All Hail the Lizard You don’t have to see Colorado’s most famous reptile. Just head out on the trail and trust that he’s there. By Rob Story Altitude with Attitude…
Outside magazine, October 1997 Contributors As this 20-year occasion reminds us, a pleasant consequence of an extended publishing run is the opportunity it affords to see writers develop, change, grow long in tooth and short in hair. Some of the following have been with…
Outside magazine, October 1997 Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot … Together again: the noble, the menacing, the triumphant, the pratfalling, and other unforgettable elements of the outdoor universe Attention: the Editors Have Left the Building Celebrating two…
The Downhill Report, December 1996 Hey, Nice Curves! Those shapely new skis will do the carving. You just have to let them. By Katie Arnold The long afternoons of cursing your skis through quad-burning turns are over. Everyone, let’s welcome the…
 Outside magazine, December 1997 Humbly Goes the Mountain Man A decidedly unheroic trip up Kilimanjaro By Chip Brown Access & Resources From the Savanna to the Snowfields This way to…
Outside magazine, June 1996 Don’t Shoot, or We’ll Shoot Don’t Shoot, or We’ll Shoot Supporters of a California ballot initiative to manage the state’s growing cougar population through sport hunting not only suffered a crushing defeat in the March referendum–they’ve become targeted game themselves. State…
Outside Magazine, February 1995 Skysurfing: Beware Falling Cameramen By Todd Balf (with Martin Dugard) Question: If a person skysurfs at 13,000 feet and nobody is there to see it, does it happen at all? Well, for all intents and purposes, no. At October’s Freestyle…
Outside magazine, May 1995 Where the Deer and the Presidents Play From the ranger desks at our national parks, spectacular questions posed by a curious citizenry By Debra Shore With summer approaching and our thoughts returning to wide-open spaces, we residents of…
Dispatches, June 1997 Surfing: www.bythepowersvestedinme.com By Sarah Horowitz If there’s anything more romantic than a traditional June wedding, it’s a June wedding alfresco, vows exchanged beside a gurgling stream or beneath a weeping willow. But how best to find that magical spot?…
Outside magazine, July 1999 BOOKS The Perfect Sell Buy this book! Adventure books have gone so mainstream over the last two years…
Outside magazine, September 1996 Goatsucker Sighted, Details to Follow Strange beast plunders Puerto Rico, Florida, Mexico Livestock drained of blood, entrails Citizens ignore authorities’ appeal for calm By Bucky McMahon CANØVANAS, PUERTO RICO–An unwelcome anniversary is being celebrated here, one…
Outside Magazine, November 1994 Broadcasting: Goooood Mooooorning, Ends of the Earth! For an elite corps of ham-radio buffs known as DXpeditioners, making small talk from nowheresville is serious business By Jonathan Weisman Everything about the expedition had been carried out according to…
Outside magazine, December 1995 The Archdruid in Winter By Larry Burke Years ago a developer wisecracked that David Brower worshiped trees and sacrificed human beings, thus tagging him with a nickname he’s carried proudly ever since: the archdruid. A mountaineer and editor who became…
Outside magazine, March 1997 While Visions of 2,200-Pound Burritos Dance in His Head Not to mention spinning kayakers, tap-dancing marathoners, and flying haggis. The Keeper of the Records for the Guinness Book explains how to make a run at immortality.
Outside magazine, May 1996 Wildlife: Would you stuff this into your suitcase? Renowned bird-lover Tony Silva’s ugly fall from grace By Gretchen Reynolds “Nature has certain rules you don’t violate,” Tony Silva told a reporter in 1985. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, intense, and at…
 Outside magazine, June 1999 Culture Clash Journalist Philip True hiked into Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental seeking meaningful contact with the native Huichol Indians: an exotic trek with a little reporting thrown in, an encounter with an ancient…
 Outside magazine, August 1995 Without a Trace Jeff Wandich learned a hard lesson from his tragedy at sea: Human nature doesn’t allow people to vanish without a trace By Randy Wayne White Late on a windy night, in a hundred feet…
Outside magazine, August 1996 Cycling: Odds That… Rebecca Twigg will win the 3,000-meter pursuit……3-2 Lance Armstrong will ride away with a gold……..5-1 Miguel Indurain will medal…….10-1…
Outside magazine, May 1995 Speed Skating: Bonnie Blair’s Entirely Predictable Farewell Tour By Todd Balf Rarely does an athlete bid farewell to a sport while at the top of his or her game. But at 31, Bonnie Blair has just wrapped up one of…
Brad Pitt's in Tibet. Steven Seagal's flacking his lama creds on Letterman. Dharma's rampant at the local U and Buddha has settled in the East Village. With America sweatily grasping all things Shangri-La, it's a virtual Lamapalooza out there. But will the true cause benefit?
Dispatches, August 1998 Exploration Hello … Anybody Out There? Two climbers get first dibs on an untouched wilderness of peaks By Hampton Sides Dave Briggs got his first aerial glimpse of Greenland’s Sweizerland Mountains from a Bell 210 helicopter…
Kamchatka, east of Siberia. As the curtain rises on the new frontier of adventure outfitting, attendees include your guide (he's the one with the armored vehicle), the local businessman (he's the one with the machine gun), the UN environmentalist (he's the nervous-looking one), and your fellow tourists (they'll be arriving any moment now). Please enjoy the show
Outside magazine, September 1999 TECHNOLOGY Heavy Breathing A device for improving lung capacity has athletes in a lather For years, the quest to gain stamina and speed by developing bigger, stronger lungs has led athletes of all stripes…
Outside magazine, November 1995 Showdown in the West By Larry Burke Nowhere is our national distrust of Washington more extreme than in the West, where ranchers, loggers, and miners lately have been playing brinkmanship with the federal government, whose environmental laws often cramp their…
Family Vacations, Summer 1997 Come Along, Little Doggie All you need to know before bringing your best friend to the backcountry By Ron C. Judd A sk any good trail dog: When slopes get steep and…
Outside magazine, October 1994 Why This Man Isn’t Smiling As if fuming Republicans weren’t enough… A pocket primer on Bruce Babbitt’s iffier “allies” from the Democratic aisle. By Ned Martel With two long, strange years behind him, Bruce Babbitt will find himself on familiar…
Dispatches: News from the Field, November 1996 Beach Bumming: Hey, That Isn’t Karch Kiraly! With geriatric stars and a familiar milieu, sand soccer makes its move By Julian Rubinstein For years, the Association of Volleyball Professionals, purveyor of the popular beach…
Dispatches, March 1998 PARCEL POST Neither Rain, nor Sleet, nor Hungry Hawk … Oops Need to see yourself in all your whitewater glory? A plucky fleet of pigeons will try its damnedest Forget liability woes and pricey river permits. It…
Outside magazine, April 1995 Intake: Backcountry Dining Without Regression By Ami Walsh For Tim Loveridge, program coordinator of the Boston-based Appalachian Mountain Club, a trip into the backcountry is an excuse to indulge in the sort of grub most of us haven’t stocked the…
Outside Magazine, November 1994 Books: Ravage of the Rainforest By Andrea Barrett The Hot Zone, by Richard Preston (Random House, $23). Mess with the rainforest and see what you get: predatory viruses that tear into the human species like a tiger through a…
Outside magazine, June 1999 HONK IF YOU’RE IRRATIONAL They called it an unmapped drive through Indiana. But it really was a silent cry for help. My Delta, Myself | A…
Outside magazine, August 1996 Women’s Sprints: Odds That… Gwen Torrence will win three gold medals……..2-1 Merlene Ottey will shake the winner’s hand…..50-1 The U.S. women will take all sprinting gold…..4-1…
Outside magazine, April 1995 Environment: No, Uh, Cooperation in Defense of Mother Earth Can’t anybody organize this thing? How backroom feuds led to this month’s Earth Day chaos. By Bill Gifford Nobody organizes Earth Day,” former senator Gaylord Nelson said last summer…
Outside magazine, July 1994 Havana in the Rearview Mirror A final, heartbreaking trip through la revolucion By Randy Wayne White Land, sea, or air, 90 miles is 90 miles, except when describing the water space between Havana and Key West, a distance protracted by…
Outside magazine, August 1996 Middle Distance: Odds That African runners will claim every gold……..9-1 Gebrselassie will set at least one world record………10-1 An American will medal……….15-1…
Outside magazine, August 1996 Promise Kept Natascha Badmann served notice on the multisport community last November, first winning the Duathlon World Championships and then finishing a respectable sixth in the short-course triathlon worlds a week later. This May, she followed through in impressive fashion, annihilating the…
Outside magazine, October 1995 Wilderness Education Gone Brutally Wrong By Larry Burke The idea that nature forges sound character is one of man’s oldest convictions. It was this basic belief that gave rise to, among other things, the philosophy of John Muir, this magazine,…
 Outside magazine, November 1995 A Darkness on the River What the son found in the Peruvian jungle was a terrible truth. What his father found there months later was a way to begin again. By Tim Cahill The Marañón River drops…
 Outside magazine, November 1996 The Volcano Runners No elite runners train at higher altitude, or suffer more, than the human lungs who roam these oxygen-starved slopes. And yet Mexico’s great marathoners still labor under a faint cloud,…
Outside magazine, November 1997 YURI TRICYS TREE PLANTER Should Tree-Planting Become a Medal Sport, Here’s Your Winner Looking for some real athletes? You know, the kind without massage therapists and sports psychologists and closets full of shoes? Good, because rather than wasting energy…
Out Front, Fall 1998 Endurance Queen of Pain There’s only one way to break the tedious swim-vomit-swim cycle: Pray for an underwater visit from Santa By Martha Corcoran “I know physically I can swim the distance. I don’t take…
Outside magazine, April 1998 The Outside Portfolio When the Giant Sequoia Talks, People Listen A guide to green investing in an uncertain, tail-of-the-bull age By Nelson D. Schwartz THE OUTSIDE PORTFOLIO: When the Giant Sequoia…
Hardware and Software, February 1997 Books: Rough Edges, Terminal Dreams By Miles Harvey Letting Loose the Hounds, by Brady Udall (W. W. Norton, $22). “There are times,” explains a character in this sinewy collection of short fiction, “when the only way…
Outside magazine, May 1998 Anatomy of a Big One Riding huge surf is simple, really: Know how the wave works, time your entry right, and, um, hope for the best. By Daniel Duane Something Wicked This Way…
Outside magazine, May 1999 Endurance 113 Miles to Go? Pull, Dammit! To dream up the world’s toughest rowing race, it helps to be called The Hammer If you happen to wake at dawn some…
Outside magazine, June 1994 Mountain Biking: Iron Johnny By Todd Balf (with Martin Dugard and Eric Hagerman) The buzz at March’s Cactus Cup wasn’t so much about former world champion John Tomac’s win as the way he looked doing it. He was buffed…
Dispatches, August 1997 M E T E O R O L O G Y Say, Brother, Can You Spare a Huge Windfall? One woman’s high-priced offer to save us from nature’s wrath By Sarah Horowitz…
Dispatches, August 1998 Esoterica Games (Really Weird) People Play By Katie Arnold It’s surely no secret that Europeans, enthusiastic practitioners of such dubious activities as snooker and ferret-legging, possess a flair for peculiar sports. But it is in August, when…
Outside Magazine, November 1998 Review: No Halfpipe Can Hold Me For those with all-mountain aspirations, a freeride board is the answer By Mark North SNOWBOARDS | BUYING RIGHT | THE OTHER…
Women Outside, Fall 1998 Yellow Pages: Resources for the Adventurous Athlete Fitness By John Brant, Gretchen Reynolds and Lea Aschkenas GEAR | TRAVEL | FITNESS | HEALTH |…
Outside magazine, January 1996 The Outside Prognosticator: Hey, Isn’t That Al Oerter? Maybe you aren’t going to the summer Olympics because you can’t get tickets. Or maybe it’s just jitters about Atlanta’s style–after all, do you really want to see waiflike foreign gymnasts get razzed off…
The Outside Prognosticator: The Chicken Little Machine Just when you thought the weird weather of recent years was simmering down, 1995 had TV forecasters quaking under their shoulder pads again. As 1996 kicks off, prepare to hear more about a mysterious Defense Department installation–the High Frequency Active…
Dispatches, February 1999 Business “We Will Win, and Earth Will Win!” And other emissions from America’s greenest CEO By Erik Stokstad When Ray Anderson threw a 24th birthday bash for his billion-dollar carpet-manufacturing company, Interface, hundreds…
Outside magazine, December 1995 Offering Oneself to the Fat Boys Even to a man with a powder pedigree, skis with girth provide the gift of flotation By James Salter I can’t remember when I started to ski powder–when I had to, probably.
Outside magazine, May 1998 Access & Resources Montserrat, minus the lava By Katie Arnold Another Day Under the Black Volcano Once you get over the fact that two-thirds of Montserrat is now buried under a thick…
Outside magazine, June 1994 Mountaineering: New Route, Same Dangers By Todd Balf (with Martin Dugard and Eric Hagerman) Because of a well-earned reputation as the world’s most dangerous 8,000-meter peak, K2 doesn’t see a lot of new routes–the old ones are tough enough.
Outside magazine, July 1996 Innovation Within Reason Seattle legend-in-the-making Monque Barbeau looks to expand the boundaries of trailworthy cuisine Seattle legend-in-the-making Monique Barbeau looks to expand the boundaries of trailworthy cuisine One of the reigning queens of the current Northwestern culinary scene is Monique…
Outside magazine, September 1994 Milestones: Xaver Bongard, 1964-1994 By Todd Balf (with Martin Dugard and John Alderman) Xaver Bongard, one of climbing’s most colorful of big-wall specialists, died on April 15 when both his parachutes failed to deploy during a BASE jump near Interlaken, Switzerland. The…
Travel Guide, Winter 1995-1996 Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Part I Ten questions to help you find that perfect mountain By Paul Kvinta If you’ve ever been beaned by a flying snowboarder, failed to score the perfect lodge martini, or found that the only diversion…
Outside magazine, September 2000 The Naked Truth I’M SURE YOU’LL TAKE some flak for having a naked girl in your magazine (“Marla Streb’s Mind-Body Problem,” July), but Andrew Tilin’s article (as well as the pictures) rocked, and that’s what mountain…
Winter Olympics Preview, February 1998 THE FIGHTERS A Brawl of Their Own Does women’s hockey have finesse? Sure. Quickness? Certainly. Good fights? Oh, baby. By Julian Rubinstein THE DOPE ON Men’s Hockey The Contenders: After…
Outside magazine, March 1996 The Aficionados: Because It’s Stronger, Faster, Lighter…and Looks Really Cool The latest and greatest in accessories, as flaunted by the gearheads of Cycle Club Basingstoke By Alan Coté In the inevitable race for first-kid-on-the-block status, it helps to…