Month: March 2019

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On November 28, 2001, two experienced backcountry skiers left Eldora Mountain Resort, a small ski area outside Nederland, Colorado. Joe Despres, 29, and Peter Vaughn, 47, skinned up the Jenny Creek Trail to Yankee Doodle Lake, on the east side of Rollins Pass, to take advantage of the new snow after a dismal early season. This was their third outing in as many days; they knew the conditions and carried avalanche rescue equipment—beacons, probes, and shovels.

Despres and Vaughn dug a snow pit to assess conditions and decided to proceed with caution. They would ski one at a time, with one always keeping eyes on the other from a safe vantage point. Around 1 p.m., Vaughn watched as Despres made his third or fourth turn. Then the slope released beneath them.

The 400-foot-wide avalanche roared across the summer road and onto Yankee Doodle Lake. It plunged through the ice, creating a wave that reached 20 feet back up the bank.

Vaughn was caught in the slide. He came to a stop in the lake, nearly 200 feet from the shore, with his skis and backpack missing. His partner was gone. Vaughn managed to get himself ashore, but his nightmare was far from over. He still had to hike five miles back to the ski area with only the frozen clothes on his back.

By 4 p.m., Vaughn had made it back to Eldora to report Despres as missing. Rescuers headed to the site of the avalanche. Around midnight, aided by a full moon, searchers got a signal from Despres’ beacon, which had continued to transmit from beneath three feet of icy water.

The story of Vaughn’s ordeal and Despres’s tragic death is one of 208 narratives in the fifth installment of The Snowy Torrents, a collaborative effort of the American Avalanche Association (A3) and the Colorado Avalanche Information Center (CAIC). Each case study includes some of the same information: conditions leading to the accident, an account of the incident, investigators’ findings, comments and analysis. But the collection is more than the sum of its parts—the stories have a way of lingering in the mind, becoming their own sort of risk-deterrent in the process.

When someone dies in the backcountry—whether in a preventable climbing accident, as a result of unpredictable rockfall, or in an avalanche—the outdoor community scrambles to find meaning in the death. We investigate, look for clues, talk to friends and witnesses. We try to understand the why and the how. The Snowy Torrents series is one attempt to answer those questions.

The most recent volume, written by Knox Williams (CAIC cofounder and former director) and CAIC forecaster Spencer Logan, was published in May 2017 after a hiatus of more than two decades. I copyedited Volume 5, which meant reading each report a dozen times. As the book came together, I spent months parsing through the minutiae of the worst days of people’s lives. The details have stuck with me—which is the whole idea. 

“We have a long history of people looking at accidents in the mountains to learn from them,” says CAIC Director Ethan Greene. “With more people going into the backcountry and the rise of human avalanche involvement, having these stories out there is important.”

A3 Executive Director Jaime Musnicki agrees. “When there’s a story to follow, it gives us a way to ground what’s otherwise theoretical.”

The avalanche accidents covered in this installment range from ice climbing on Mount Washington in New Hampshire to snowmobiling in Alaska’s Turnagain Pass, from near misses to accidents with more than a dozen people caught and six killed.

Some of the victims were professional ski patrollers; some were out with their families. All are referred to by name. “When we use people’s real names, ages, something about their background, it helps readers relate and say, ‘That could have been me,’” explains Williams.

“The power of this book,” says Logan, who maintains the CAIC’s avalanche fatality database, “is having 200-odd accidents in the same format, so a casual recreator can pick out common patterns.”

The authors identify common errors: lack of rescue gear or education, traveling alone or with multiple skiers on a slope, riding above terrain traps or in dangerous conditions. Sometimes—as with Vaughn and Despres, for whom there’s now an annual avalanche awareness fundraiser at Eldora—there was no error in judgment. “We find no criticism of these two. They were prepared in every way for the risk they were taking,” the authors explain. “We have no problem with high risk tolerance, so long as the risk-takers understand the stakes.”

Still, there’s something to be learned. I ski the east side of Rollins Pass a few times each winter. It’s impossible, now, not to look at Yankee Doodle Lake and think of Despres and Vaughn, to imagine what those moments were like. It doesn’t stop me from skiing there, but it does give me pause to think about the risks and whether I can—and want to—manage them.

There are the basic components of risk management in the winter backcountry: carry a beacon, a probe, and a shovel; take an avalanche course; check the forecast. But The Snowy Torrents volumes add another layer. The tragedies revisited in Volume 5, both real and narrowly avoided, make it possible to imagine vividly the consequences and aftermath of an avalanche. The trick to staying safe, it seems to me, is to let those experiences live in the back of my mind, where they can help remind me that no set of turns is worth my life.

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Last year, a good friend of mine caught chronic giardiasis. The diarrhea that resulted was unpredictable, frequently sending him scrambling for a bathroom. For most of the year, that meant his dating life was totally on hold and he couldn’t travel. Already a thin guy, the resulting weightloss caused him to look visibly ill. To him, the worst part was the embarrassment all this caused, all from a parasite he caught on a camping trip here in California.

Which is why I want to address a story that ran last week. Writing in Slate, Ethan Linck rehashed an eight-year-old study that found that contaminants in backcountry water sources are exceedingly rare. Using that evidence, he argued that you don’t need to clean water on camping trips in the U.S. and Canada. “The idea that most wilderness water sources are inherently unsafe is baseless dogma, unsupported by any epidemiological evidence,” Linck claims. He goes on to suggest that the outdoor recreation industry has pushed sales of water filters in order to sell campers on added complication they don’t need. He says he long ago stopped purifying his own drinking water while camping.

The study Linck cites reaches similar conclusions: “There is no good epidemiologic evidence that North American wilderness waters are inherently unsafe for consumption,” author Thomas R. Welch argues. The study tested a water source in a high-use area in the Sierra Nevada mountains, in central California—the kind of place you’d expect to find contaminants. Researchers found only trace amounts of giardia there: one would have to drink more than seven liters of the water to get sick, they said. In other, less frequently used areas, the study found no harmful bacteria or protozoa.

There are a few very obvious problems with all this:

1. While it's correct that there is little scientific evidence of significant pathogens in wilderness water sources in the U.S. and Canada, there’s also very little scientific study on the subject. The most thorough research cited by Welch appears to have been conducted two decades ago by the editors of Backpacker magazine. 
2. Not all backcountry water sources are created equal. Welch’s work relies on water testing conducted only in a single highly-protected mountain range in a single highly-regulated state— California's Sierra Nevada. Do studies conducted there translate to Minnesota’s Boundary Waters, or Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp? To suggest that they might is ridiculous. It's also worth noting that pathogen levels are constantly in flux—variables like rainfall, temperature, season, and animal behavior all play a role. The level of pathogens recorded at a single water source will vary month-to-month and year-to-year. 
3. The study makes no account for how different people recreate outdoors and how they define that recreation. “Backcountry” may mean the High Sierra to Linck, Welch, and me, but something else entirely to a Cub Scout troop on the East Coast. As Welch details in his study, water sources adjacent to a sewer outlet have plenty of documented cases of spreading pathogens.
4. Linck’s assumption that cleaning backcountry water requires a “$99.95 microfilter pump” is simply wrong. Cheaper, simpler methods can actually be more effective, and don’t place a heavy financial or weight penalty on the user. Simple chlorine dioxide tablets will kill any protozoa, bacteria, cyst, or virus you’ll find in North America, and cost around 50 cents a tablet. Boiling water is free, if you have a stove, and 100 percent effective.
5. The low rates of infection reported by Welch’s study don’t control for whether or not any water purification methods were used by the study group. As Linck argues, virtually every backpacker is using a purification method of some kind, so the reported infection rates are misleading in this context. The low rates of infection reported could actually be a strong argument for the use of purification techniques and products. 

Together, those issues create a highly misleading and arguably irresponsible conclusion. There is not sufficient scientific evidence to tell people not to filter their water—only enough to prove that some water sources in the Sierra Nevada may be safe to drink without treatment. 

The irresponsibility of the don’t-filter argument is exacerbated by two things:

1. While most giardia,  e. coli, cyrptosporideum, and waterborne pathogens induce fairly minor illnesses in adults, the effects can be much more severe if the infected person suffers from immunosuppression, is very young or old, or, as with my friend, is simply unlucky. In children, for instance, the CDC says giardiasis can may lead to symptoms as severe as delayed physical and mental growth, slow development, and malnutrition.
2. Effective treatment options are affordable and easy to use. Use an expensive filter because you're short on time or like cleaner tasting water—cheaper methods will keep you just as healthy. 

Both Welch and Linck argue that the failure to wash hands after taking a poo is responsible for more infections than drinking unpurified water. But while that is an argument for taking some hand sanitizer along, it is not an argument against water treatment.

The next time you go camping, you should do both.

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If you live in the U.S., you’ve surely heard an oral history of naughty cyclists. There’s a widely held perspective that city and suburban streets are overrun with lawbreaking riders—a swarm of oblivious, entitled cyclists rolling red lights, blasting through stop signs, slaloming down one-way streets, then (hypocritically!) flipping off drivers. 

As someone who has driven hundreds of thousands of miles over the past 34 years, and ridden a bike for even longer, my point of view is different. Everyone seems to break the rules, whether they’re on two wheels or four. The big difference is that some do it on an 18-pound bicycle and some do it in a 4,000-pound SUV that can cause exponentially greater harm. 

But people who don't bikedon’t see it that way—they just see people on bikes charging through those stop signs. And it’s nearly impossible to combat their perceptions or even engage in meaningful debate without hard evidence of a different reality. And to date, very little research has produced quantifiable data comparing how drivers and cyclists actually behave on the road.

That’s why a new study—commissioned by the Florida Department of Transportation and conducted by scientists at the University of South Florida’s Center for Urban Transportation Research—is so damn interesting. The report, the largest of its kind ever attempted, concluded that cyclists were slightly more compliant with traffic laws than drivers. 

Conducting what’s known as a naturalistic behavior study, the researchers outfitted the bikes of 100 cyclists with multiple sensors and cameras, then recorded data as those participants went about their normal riding lives, pedaling roughly 2,000 hours in the Tampa Bay metro area. After the test period ended, the researchers and their grad students scrutinized the video footage and sensor data, tabulating how often cyclists and drivers failed to yield, rolled through stop signs, or otherwise broke the rules of the road. They paid special attention to instances in which a crash or a close call occurred. 

In the end, the results indicated that cyclists were compliant with the law 88 percent of the time during the day and 87 percent of the time after dark. The same study determined that drivers who interacted with the study subjects complied with the law 85 percent of the time. In other words, drivers were slightly naughtier than the cyclists—even without measuring speeding or distracted driving.

In a conversation with three of the researchers who conducted the study, I asked if they had any insight into why the findings vary so significantly from public perceptions about scofflaw cyclist behavior. “Many drivers simply don’t know the rules that concern people on bikes,” says Cong Chen. “About how much space to give cyclists, for instance, or when riders should get the right of way.”

Even more damning, 20 of the 21 close calls that were recorded involved a driver who failed to yield properly while turning, or didn’t give a cyclist the three feet of space mandated by Florida law. “The bikes were equipped with proximity sensors,” says research associate Achilleas Kourtellis. “So we could measure exactly how close the cars got to the cyclists. Some of them were really close calls.” (In the only exception, a cyclist had a near-miss after crossing a street while a “Do Not Walk” pedestrian signal was blinking.) 

“Even though the cyclists in close calls were almost always compliant with traffic rules, there still were instances where they could have been more cautious,” observes Program Director Pei-Sung Lin, who led the study. “I mean, it’s obviously not foolproof to assume drivers will follow the rules.” 

There was only one crash during the study period, and that too was caused by a negligent driver. In that case, a motorist rear-ended a cyclist as she waited to make a left turn. In the published study, researchers noted, “The driver was impatient and tried to pass at a relatively high speed since the oncoming traffic was about to stop for the bicyclist to turn.”

In another component of the same research project, participants were asked to complete a detailed questionnaire about their cycling behavior. The goal was to examine how cyclists describe their own behavior on the road—how and when they might take risks, for instance, and what kinds of situations might distract them while they ride. 

The resulting data was largely unsurprising with one big exception: these self-evaluations revealed that young riders (between the ages of 18 to 25) took more risks and were more frequently distracted than older cyclists. And riders who had completed formal rider-training courses (from the organization CyclingSavvy) were even more compliant with regards to traffic laws. 

Another interesting point: Female cyclists who completed the self-assessment rated themselves as greater risk takers and as more frequently distracted than their male counterparts. The study authors acknowledge that this data is counterintuitive, as numerous studies have documented the higher likelihood of risk-taking behaviors in young men, but speculate that women may more honestly assess their behavior or attribute more risk to a given action than men.

In any case, based on the study findings, the researchers offered a number of recommendations to help mitigate the frighteningly high rate of close calls. For infrastructure improvements, they suggested wider and protected bike lanes; reflective green markings on bike lanes; improved lighting on roadways that see significant bicycle traffic; and so-called "through lanes," which reduce conflicts between bicyclists and turning vehicles at intersections by letting riders be safely positioned before cars turn. “Based on what we saw and measured, we recommend measures that promote separating more than sharing,” says Kourtellis. “We think creating buffers between cars and bikes is smart.”

It's evident something needs to change to keep riders safe, at least in the area where the study took place. The two counties included in the report saw a total of 1,084 bicycle crashes and 22 fatalities in 2013. And as the study notes, cyclist fatality rates in Florida are three times the national average. According to the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, a total of 7,077 bicycle crashes in 2014 left 135 cyclists dead and another 6,680 injured—78 percent more fatalities than in 2011. 

“There’s no doubt there’s a problem with safety here in Florida,” says Kourtellis. “That’s why the DOT asked us to do this study—to help figure out what we can do to change people’s behaviors. There are too many people getting hurt.”

From $30,000 Airbnb rentals to animal sacrifices to 25,000 sometimes-naked umbraphiles, this is the weirdness that went down in the Wyoming resort town leading up to last week’s astrological dance

Two Years Until Totality

Before the rumors of cult gatherings, the flock of nudists, and the threat of animal sacrifices, there was an eight-page memo. It was July 2015, and it appeared on the desk of the Jackson, Wyoming, town council. Written by Roman Weil, an emeritus professor of business at the University of Chicago, it warned that Jackson Hole—the region that encompasses the towns of Jackson, Wilson, and Teton Village, as well as the Grand Teton National Park—was dramatically underprepared for what was to come.

In two years, on August 21, a total solar eclipse would occur in the continental U.S. for the first time since 1979. It would be visible along a 70-mile-wide path known as the path of totality, which would stretch from Oregon to South Carolina. Jackson Hole, Weil’s memo explained, was not only on that path, it would likely be one of the more popular places to view the eclipse since it has a nearby airport and typically favorable weather during that time of the year. In addition, Weil wrote, “Of all the accessible places, Jackson has the best other tourist attractions.”

Weil’s memo went on to caution that eclipse-chasing “umbraphiles,” latin for “shadow lovers,” would arrive in droves, swarming the region like a bunch of bespectacled, telescope-toting zombies. Casper, Wyoming, he said, was expecting 50,000 to 60,000 tourists—and they’d been planning for two years. Jackson Hole was way behind.

The local media got a copy of Weil’s memo and began bracing locals for the worst. The area’s already overtaxed infrastructure—hour-long traffic jams in the summer are typical—would be brought to its knees by star-gazing nerds. The town could see up to 100,000 tourists, it claimed. (A regular busy summer day in Jackson gets about 25,000 people.) Grocery stores could run out of food. Gas stations could run out of fuel, even though L.A.-like gridlock could render cars useless anyway. It would be a sort of Y2K-meets-Comicon scenario.

Around the same time, umbraphiles began calling and emailing businesses throughout Jackson Hole, looking for lodging and the best places to watch the event. One such eclipse chaser was Tony Crocker, a retired actuary from Los Angeles, who emailed Anna Cole, the communications manager at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort. “The top of the tram at JHMR is perhaps THE best spot in America for this eclipse,” wrote Crocker, who has traveled the world to see ten total solar eclipses. “When viewed from a very high vantage point like the top of the tram, viewers will see the shadow crossing the earth from nearly 100 miles to the west, passing directly over them, then passing over Jackson Hole as it moves to the east.” Crocker sent more emails to Cole and others at the resort, writing so passionately about the event that he made it sound as though seeing the total eclipse was as life-changing as watching the birth of your child.

Many locals, however, were unimpressed, and I was one of them. I didn’t get it. I’d moved to Jackson two years earlier and was now plotting my eclipse escape. And I wasn’t alone. Disinterest, coupled with the impending doom we were being promised by Weil and others, caused many locals to start making vacation plans two years in advance. The most common question among Jackson Hole residents—myself included—wasn’t how they could best watch the astronomical phenomenon. It was how much could they get for their place on Airbnb.

200 Days Until Totality

On February 1, the Jackson Town Council and and Teton County board of commissioners hired Kathryn Brackenridge as the town’s eclipse coordinator. Buckrail, a local website, posted the news on their Facebook page, noting that she’d earn $50,000 for the job for eight months of work.

“In time of tight budgets for Wyoming/Teton county we choose to spend $50,000 on an event planner for the eclipse?!?! Really?” one person commented.

“Not just an eclipse, but one that lasts for a whopping 2.5 minutes,” another replied.

“Two people told me right to my face that they thought the position sounded ridiculous,” says Brackenridge. Even she wasn’t sure what she’d gotten herself into. She’d worked in marketing and public relations, but she was given a clear directive from town and county officials: do not promote this event. “Our town doesn’t need promotion,” she says. “It’d be a waste of resources.” Instead, her job would be to help various departments—from emergency services to public works—coordinate efforts, as well as ease the concerns of locals.

The idea for the job had come about the previous October, when Rich Ochs, the emergency management coordinator for Teton County, and Carl Pelletier, the town of Jackson’s special event coordinator, drove five hours east to Casper for a symposium where they gleaned tips from seasoned eclipse experts. There they heard from Kate Russo, an Australian psychiatrist and eclipse chaser, who had helped communities organize around eclipses in Australia and the Faroe Islands. Russo had dealt with negative media surrounding eclipses before. She knew it could demoralize towns located in the path of totality and cause locals to flee. That created a bigger problem. Locals comprise the workforce; if they leave, there’s nobody left to provide services for the tourists. Her recommendation: Hire someone to coordinate and reassure the locals.

Almost immediately, Brackenridge, who became known around town as “Eclipse Girl,” began putting in 60-hour weeks, doing everything from nailing down a staging area for the Red Cross—in the event of, say, "a lightning strike or fire evacuation," says Brackenridge—to lobbying the local government to ease restrictions on the places that people could park. She also began fielding phone calls from concerned locals and visitors. 

One such call was from Huntley Dornan, who owns and operates Dornans, a popular restaurant inside Grand Teton National Park. He was anxious that his establishment would be overwhelmed by the masses. Brackenridge assured him that, if needed, the county would step in and help with Port-o-Potties, direct traffic, and get police there quickly in case a fight broke out. “I got lots of these calls and I just tried to let everybody know that we would try to have everything covered,” she says.

Brackenridge also became a main resource for umbraphiles. One day, she received a ten-minute long voicemail from an elderly gentleman in New York. He was concerned that when the eclipse happened, all the streetlights in the town of Jackson, which activate when it becomes dark, would turn on. The light pollution, he was afraid, would ruin the experience. “That wasn’t anything we’d thought of,” she says. “And the fact is, we looked into it, and it wasn’t anything we could fix.” 

The street lights were among Brackenridge's smaller conerns. A week into her tenure, a massive windstorm swept through Jackson Hole, knocking out power for several days in Teton Village and shutting down roads in and out of the area. It was a wake-up call. “It made me realize, this is Wyoming, anything can happen,” she says. She quickly went about producing a survival guide for visitors, warning them about everything from forest fires to bear attacks. She also produced heart-shaped stickers that she distributed on Valentine’s Day that read: “Total Solar Eclipse: the Town of Jackson and Teton County, Wyoming Would Love Locals to Be Prepared.”

Meanwhile, many locals were preparing in a different way: by fleeing town. Several friends and acquaintances had already scored on the crowd-sharing rental market. Two-bed condos were going for as much as $1,500 per night. Four-bed houses were fetching up to $3,250 per night. One high-end three-bedroom house with a guesthouse went for $30,000 for the week. “For me, it was almost three-month’s mortgage,” says a friend who rented her condo. “It was a no-brainer.”

7 Days Until Totality

The week before the event, town seemed oddly quiet. “Sort of a calm before the storm,” said Lieutenant Matt Carr, the local police officer in charge of law enforcement for the eclipse, when I spoke with him earlier this month. Along with Ochs and other department heads, he’d helped create a 293-page incident action plan for the event that addressed everything from dangerous weather events to how to deal with communication outages. In a few days, he’d add 12 police officers to the force, all sworn in just for the eclipse. “Nobody knows exactly what to expect and tensions are high,” he said.

Locals started worrying that, when the tourists did arrive, they’d wipe out food supplies. One friend posted an Instagram story, a photo showing a shopping cart overflowing with eggs, milk, and toilet paper. “$500 worth of groceries!” she wrote. “Stocking up for the eclipse!” By the end of the day, Smith’s grocery store was completely cleaned out, and photos on social media began appearing showing empty shelves.

In the meantime, strange stories began to surface. The Jenny Lake climbing rangers inside Grand Teton National Park got a call inquiring about their policy regarding nudity during the eclipse. (It was allowed.) Bridger-Teton National Forest officials also received a request asking for a permit to do animal sacrifices. (Not allowed).

Days later, I found out that one group was planning a ceremony of some sort around the eclipse. “Did you hear?” somebody asked me. “There’s a cult at Toppings Lakes and they’ve fenced themselves in.”

“I do not recall ever seeing or hearing any references to animal sacrifices during a total solar eclipse,” Bryan Brewer, author of Eclipse: History. Science. Awe., wrote me. “Of course, some folks will have a tendency to attribute all kinds of strange or paranormal effects to an eclipse—a sign from God, a cosmic message, an astrological omen, etc.”

24 Hours Until Totality

At around noon, I hopped in my car and headed toward Toppings Lakes in search of the eclipse cult. The popular campsite is located inside the Bridger Teton National Forest, and to get there from the town of Jackson, you need to drive through the Grand Teton National Park. On the way, you pass the Jackson Hole Airport, where I watched private plane after private plane land on the tarmac: I’d later find out that 15 extra commercial flights had been added between August 18 and 23, and that 280 private planes landed in Jackson between August 19 and 22, a 50 percent increase over the same period last year. 

I wasn’t sure what I’d find at Toppings Lakes, but my knowledge of cult gatherings that correspond with astronomical events was grim. In 1997, 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult committed suicide by overdosing on an epilepsy drug because they believed that, in doing so, they’d be teleported to a spaceship that was flying in the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet.

Inside the campgrounds, I ran into one of the forest rangers and asked him if he knew of a group that had built a fence around their campsite. “You mean the Crystal Skull group?” he asked. “Yeah,” I said. “That sounds right.” The ranger pointed me in the direction of the group’s campsite. “Just be careful,” he said. “We’ve had some trouble with them.”

I walked into the campsite, a gravel parking lot but with a direct and spectacular view of the snowcapped Grand Teton. I noticed a few tents and several RVs, but no fence. A group of six people were sitting in foldable camping chairs on the site’s vista-facing perimeter, drinking beers and chatting.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Is anybody here aware of some sort of cult in the area?”

“The Crystal Skulls!” shouted a girl who looked to be in her 20s. “Have a seat,” said a man with graying hair and a British accent. 

He explained that the group believed they had reserved the entire camping space. In fact, what they had was a permit to conduct their ceremony. Angry, they left. “But they said they’re coming back for their ceremony,” he said. “They’re bringing a crystal skull and they're going to energize it with the eclipse. Will you come back?”

I told him I had other plans but would follow up.

(Turns out the supposed cult wasn’t really a cult. After spending several hours tracking down the group that was holding the ceremony, I spoke to Adam Shield of the Feather. Adam and his brother Izzy travel the world holding spiritual ceremonies. This one, which ended up happening with 20 people at Cunningham Cabin, inside Grand Teton National Park, did, in fact, involve a crystal skull made of paleozic quartz. It’s about the size of a normal human skull and weighs 11 pounds. Adam, who used the skull in his ceremony, believes it, and quartz in general, help energize the spiritual circle. He also says some people believe the skull was made in zero gravity. “What do you mean?” I asked. “Like, in space? By aliens?" There's a reason this theory sounds familiar: it's the premise for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.)

3.5 Hours Until Totality

At 8 a.m. on the day of the eclipse, I rode Jackson Hole Mountain Resort’s famous red tram to the top of the resort, at around 10,000 feet. There I met Tony Crocker, who wore large-rimmed glasses and a white polo shirt silkscreened with a half moon and balancing rocks—a keepsake from the eclipse he attended in Zimbabwe in 2002—and Liz O’Mara, a strawberry-blond product development consultant dressed in a white lace dress and white go-go boots.

The older couple met in 2010 via a listserve for eclipse chasers. O’Mara, who was living in New York at the time, wrote a post asking if anybody was going to watch the total eclipse on Easter Island and wanted to join her for a ski trip afterwards. Crocker, an avid skier, was watching the eclipse from a cruise ship and then skiing in New Zealand, but continued emailing with O’Mara. Finally, the two connected at Mammoth Mountain in 2011 and began dating. O’Mara moved to LA in 2013. She’s seen eight total eclipses, just two shy of Crocker’s tally.  

For the Jackson eclipse, the two had organized a group of 57 people, many of whom pored over weather maps the night before. “I think it made Liz’s blood pressure go up,” Crocker said. The forecast for Jackson had been questionable right up until the early morning hours, and several people from Crocker’s party had decided to head a few hours away to Idaho, where cloud cover seemed less likely. For those who remained in Jackson, Crocker and O’Mara had a surprise: after totality, they’d be getting married on the mountain. 

I wandered around Corbet’s Cabin, the tiny restaurant near the tram that serves waffles smeared with peanut butter, nutella, or brown sugar and butter. Outside, a small bar served Red Bull, vodka, and beer, including the limited edition Eclipse Ale from local brewer Snake River. The resort had sold 800 tram passes that day for $100 each and most of those people now gathered atop a windswept, dusty-brown knoll, where they’d set up telescopes and high-powered cameras.

I walked down to Corbet’s Couloir, the famous ski descent, where Red Bull had set up a slackline 150 feet above the rocky ground, spanning 75 feet from one side of the couloir to the other. During totality, Red Bull athlete Alex Mason, a 20-year-old from Berkeley, California, would walk across it, attached to the line via a harness. Obviously, this was a photo op for the media giant, a chance for viral views. But Mason told me a different story. “This was my idea,” Mason said. “Slacklining is a huge significant thing to me and the eclipse is a huge significant thing. I want to share what I love with the world at a very significant place at a very significant time.”

1 Hour Until Totality

Most people atop JHMR could not have cared less about what was happening in Corbet’s Couloir. The real show for them was in the sky. Any lingering clouds had moved into the valley. As darkness began to creep across the upper right corner of the sun, somebody in Crocker’s group with a portable speaker started blasting Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon.” I looked behind me to see hundreds of people wearing protective cardboard glasses, their heads craned skyward, looking as though they’d sat too close to the screen at a 3D movie.

“Jesus, this is cool,” shouted a man in a purple tie-dye shirt and cowboy hat. I watched him turn to his wife and son. “You guys are everything to me. Thank you for sharing this with me.”

45 Minutes Until Totality

As the moon sliced the sun into a crescent, O’Mara walked over to me. “If you wear a pirate patch over one of your eyes about half an hour before totality, your eyes will adapt to the darkness and you’ll be able to see more detail in the corona,” she said. “So I’m going to give you this patch.” She handed me a red plastic patch with a white skull and cross bones on it, something you’d pull from a treasure chest at the dentist’s office. “Dark Side of the Moon” played again. “Just turn it off about 15 minutes before totality,” said Crocker. “So we can experience everything.”

20 Minutes Until Totality

“Do you think it’s become colder?” I heard a woman ask. It had. The temperature had dropped a good ten degrees. I looked up and saw that the sun was about 75 percent covered by the moon. The man playing Floyd turned off his sound system and people began bundling themselves in puffy coats and putting on hats.

4 Minutes Until Totality

Somebody from Crocker’s group let me look through their binoculars, which had been covered with a protective filter. The sun was just a sliver in the sky. The breeze picked up. I shivered and zipped up my coat. My hands were cold. My nose was cold. I removed my eye patch. Everything around me looked darker. Not like during a sunset, but rather as though somebody had placed a giant pair of sunglasses over the sun. People began howling. Wavy lines of shadows rippled across the mountain’s gravel road.

Totality

As the diamond ring of fire appeared around the moon, the sky turned dark blue and stars appeared. A shadow raced across the ground and swallowed the mountain where we stood. The cloudy horizon turned copper. It got much colder but I was no longer cold. I stared directly at the moon, paralyzed with wonder. A bat flew by. It was the shortest two minutes of my life. As the sun returned, so did my senses. 

For plenty of people in the Jackson Hole community who stayed, the eclipse was one of the more phenomenal things they’ve ever experienced. My friend Andy Bardon, a hardened mountain man and adventure photographer, told me he wept. Others told me they screamed. I was simply awed. The experience seemed otherworldly. My friends in other parts of the country, those who’d seen partial eclipses that day, couldn’t understand. Now I did. 

The headlines can be misleading, particularly with track’s most famous doper

For the majority of spectators on hand for Saturday night’s IAAF World Championships 100-meter final, it was supposed to be the Usain Bolt show—a glorious last hurrah for the fastest human in history. It seemed a forgone conclusion. In the lead-up to the race, one journalist had to gall to ask Bolt what would happen if he lost.

“I can’t believe you’re asking me that,” Bolt said, according to The Guardian. “We won’t have that problem, don’t worry about it.”

Alas, we now have that problem.

As anyone reading this is already aware, Bolt didn’t win—which means that he lost. Unable to recover from a poor start, he finished third in his last competitive (non-relay) race. To make matters worse for the 56,000 in attendance, the spoiler was none other than Justin Gatlin—the veteran U.S. sprinter who has served not one, but two doping suspensions. The race came down to a photo finish. After it became clear that Gatlin had won, the stadium erupted in boos.

A headline in The Sun summed up the general mood:

“GAT-CRASH Usain Bolt sunk as drugs cheat Justin Gatlin ruins golden goodbye by storming to 100m gold.”

Needless to say, Gatlin had few allies last weekend in London Stadium (though Usain Bolt congratulated his rival and allegedly told him that he did not deserve to be booed). However, the retired American sprinter and BBC commentator Michael Johnson argued that the media was perhaps partially responsible for making Gatlin a scapegoat for all that was wrong with professional athletics. "I think we have presented him as a villain," Johnson told BBC Sport.

For his part, Gatlin was surprised by the boos, and said that he wasn’t booed when he competed in London at the 2012 Olympics. Of course, in 2012 Gatlin did not yet pose a serious threat to Usain Bolt. That would change once Gatlin began reeling off personal bests in 2014 and 2015—an impressive late-career renaissance for a sprinter in his 30s. Around the time of the 2015 IAAF World Championships, there was such an influx in Gatlin-bashing in the British media that sports lawyer Mike Morgan felt compelled to write an article taking a closer look at what was actually known about Gatlin’s case.

In the wake of Saturday’s boo fest, it’s time for a refresher.

To this day, there has been no ruling that Gatlin ever knowingly took performance-enhancing drugs. He has not publicly confessed to doing so. That does not mean that he is innocent, but it’s a fact that should be kept in mind when the presumption of innocence is one of the most firmly ensconced ideals of our legal system. 

Gatlin was issued two suspensions, one in 2001, the other in 2006.

In the first case, he was a 19-year-old college student whose urine samples tested positive for the banned stimulant amphetamine at the USA Track and Field Junior National Championships. The presence of “small amounts” of the substance was attributed entirely to Gatlin’s Adderall medication, which he had been taking since age fourteen to treat the attention-deficit disorder (ADD) that he was diagnosed with as a nine-year-old. Since amphetamines are not prohibited by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) outside of competition, the common course for most athletes is simply to discontinue use of medication a few days before racing. That is what Gatlin did prior to the USATF meet, even though, as the American Arbitration Association (AAA) Panel that handled his case noted, he would probably have been granted an in-competition exemption had he sought it.

In its initial decision, the AAA imposed a two-year ban, as mandated by IAAF rules, but only with the knowledge that Gatlin would be applying for early reinstatement. The AAA expressed concern (rather wistfully, it now seems) that “Mr. Gatlin’s reputation not be unnecessarily tarnished” since he was guilty of, at most, a “paperwork violation.”

Two months after the AAA decision, in July 2002, Gatlin was reinstated by the IAAF on the grounds that he had a “genuine medical explanation for his positive test.”

In 2006, at the Kansas Relays, Gatlin’s urine sample tested positive for the banned “substance testosterone or its precursors.” In his defense, Gatlin said that he had been tested 35 times, before and after the Kansas relays, and that the 2006 result was an aberration. Gatlin claimed to have never knowingly taken a banned substance, and that the only possible explanation he could think of was that his physical therapist, Christopher Whetstine, had rubbed testosterone-spiked cream on his legs prior to competition. As a motive, Gatlin submitted that Whetstine had recently been denied a bonus for his services, and was apparently aware that he would soon be fired. Whetstine denied the charges. Since Gatlin had no significance evidence, he was handed a four-year suspension, which was lifted in May 2010.

Considering the facts of these two cases, and as Mike Morgan makes clear in his article, the charge of “two-time drug cheat,” one frequently leveled at Gatlin in the press, is incorrect and possibly libelous. The 2001 AAA decision is unambiguous: “The Panel specifically notes that, in this case, Mr. Gatlin neither cheated nor did he intend to cheat. He did not intend to enhance his performance nor, given his medical condition, did his medication in fact enhance his performance.”

Gatlin’s 2006 explanation of testosterone cream sabotage, by contrast, seems much less innocent, especially since, to my knowledge, there have been no high-profile instances of this occurring in professional athletics. (That said, in 2015, when Propublica published its findings about the questionable goings-on at the Nike Oregon Project, it was revealed that head coach Alberto Salazar’s son was apparently used as a guinea pig to determine how much testosterone cream could trigger a positive result. Fear of sabotage of OP athletes was the alleged motive.)

All the same, it’s worth noting, as Morgan does, that one of the three AAA Panel members who made the decision on Gatlin’s case in 2006 found his claim plausible: “Mr. Gatlin’s accusation of sabotage was far from frivolous. He presented strong evidence that the trainer had a motive and an opportunity to sabotage him,” the panel member stated at the time. However, barring a confession or video evidence, an accusation of sabotage is very difficult to prove; hence, this Panel member also agreed that suspension was the right course of action.

It’s also very difficult to prove non-sabotage. The reason Gatlin was sanctioned was because he was unable to provide convincing evidence as to how the testosterone had entered his body. In the legal world of anti-doping, the burden of proof has to fall on those who fail drug tests—otherwise athletes can always claim innocence unless they are caught red-handed: EPO? I must have been injected while I was asleep.

That’s why suspending Gatlin was the right thing to do. But how many people booing him in the stadium the other night would have known the details of what led to his suspension? Probably not many.

As Mike Morgan recently put it to me over the phone: “At the end of the day, the general public gets its information about athletics from the BBC. Here in the UK, it is the home of athletics. If they are going to point out that this guy has a doping violation, which of course it’s their right to do and perhaps even their obligation to do, it’s also their obligation to explain the circumstances.”

How to alert walkers, hikers, and runners to your presence—and why “On your left!” needs to die, already

There is a fundamental truth in cycling, and it is this:
 
When riding on a trail, it’s virtually impossible to pass a walker, runner, or hiker from behind without scaring the living shit out of them.
 
This puts us in something of a bind. After all, the cyclist-pedestrian relationship is a fragile one, and in some communities our trail access hangs in the balance. However, what are we supposed to do when our very presence is all it takes to frighten people out of their shoes?
 
No doubt this has been an issue since the very first velocipedist called out,  “Ahoy!” And over the years our fair warning cry has evolved thusly:

“On your left!”

It’s one of the most common utterances in cycling, but to me it's also one of the most cringe-enducing phrases in the entire English language, right up there with “Welcome to TGI Friday’s!” and “OK, I’m going to check your prostate now.”
 
Of course, giving people a heads-up when you’re about to overtake them is often a good idea, and in this regard “On your left!” has certain things going for it. It’s concise, it conveys your position relative to the passee, and it consists of three monosyllables for weight savings and enhanced stiffness.
 
The problem, however, is in the delivery. Too many bike-path cyclists handle it as awkwardly as they do their carbon time-trial bikes. “On your left!" they bellow imperiously, their hips rocking on their maladjusted saddles as they push a way-too-large gear into the distance.
 
In this sense, “On your left!" is like a Godfather impression. Sure, some people can pull it off, but the vast majority sound like idiots. For this reason alone, it deserves to die.
 
Of course, the fact remains that you’re almost certainly going to scare (or at least annoy) people regardless of how politely you warn them of your approach. I know this because I’ve been conducting pedestrian passing experiments for years. Moreover, I’ve been doing so in and around New York City, which as the most densely populated metropolitan area in the United States makes it the CERN lab of passing studies. Here are some warning techniques I’ve applied, with varying degrees of success:

Polite Discourse

If you’re riding somewhere so crowded that you’ve got to warn other trail users and all you’ve got time for is “On your left!", then you’re riding too fast. Slow down and use your grown-up words. The rules of polite discourse don’t change just because you're riding a bike, and if you wouldn’t say it in a supermarket aisle or on an escalator then you probably shouldn't say it at all.

Bell Ringing

In theory, the delightful chime of a bell would evoke a Buddhist monastery and elevate both you and your fellow trail users to a state of mindfulness. In practice, it can be jangly and irritating, plus there’s just something about ringing a bike bell that can make you feel like an idiot.
 
This is not to say the bell has no place on a bicycle. After all, if you want to communicate your imminent approach from a distance, it’s a whole lot better than shouting. Plus, there are all sorts of fancy bike bells now that are just as at home on your race bike as they are on your townie, so it’s not like you’ve got to ride around with a great big saucepan on your handlebars.
 
Still, depending on the circumstances, your bell might only be slightly less likely to startle someone than an “On your left!” and the only time it gets a uniformly positive response is when you use it to greet large groups of schoolchildren.

Using Your Bike

To some extent, warning people that you're going to pass is less about not startling them and more about choosing when to startle them. Do you want to scare them shitless with the bell from 50 feet away or do you want to do it at point blank range when you finally enter their peripheral vision? (Generally you want the former so they don't veer directly into into your path, but in a way it’s all like waking a sleepwalker anyway, so what’s the difference?)
 
However, if (and this is a big “if”) the person you're passing is not wearing headphones, you may be able to gradually enter their consciousness without frightening them by using the mechanical properties of your bicycle. For example, certain boutique hubs emit a loud ratcheting sound while coasting, and that may be enough to gradually get someone's attention without startling or angering them—assuming they're not suffering from PTSD after a killer bee attack. Gratuitous shifting might also offer enough of a subtle warning, though if you’re running an electronic transmission the whirring of the servos might make them think they’re being stalked by some sort of killer robot.
 
Or, if all else fails, you can pop your rear wheel up and down and hope for some chainslap.

Using the Environment

If it’s an unpaved trail, you may be able to ride over some twigs or rustle through the underbrush. The best-case scenario is they stop and stand stock-still like a deer. The worst-case scenario is they go scampering into the forest like a deer.

Waiting Silently for an Opportune Moment to Strike

If the walker, hiker, or runner is hearing-impaired due to the application of some form of in-ear speaker, then you may have no choice but to follow behind until there’s room to pass and then pounce. The danger here is that the person you’re passing will almost certainly bolt, so make sure you wait until there’s plenty of room to minimize the risk of collision. Also, in these situations, you can be sure the person will tell you off for not warning them—and loudly, because they’ve got to shout over the music.

In the End You Can't Win, So It's All About Your Attitude

Sure, the indignant suburban power-walker or the headphone-addled runner may be annoying, but do you really want to live in a world where people can't relax and zone out once in awhile? As long as they’re not operating heavy machinery, what’s the big deal? And in the absence of motor vehicles, it’s you who's operating the heavy machinery, so act accordingly.
 
And save the “On your left!” for warning people about impending animal attacks.

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Flying is tough. This is a fact GoPro has learned the hard way. On Monday morning, the California company announced that after it sells off its remaining inventory of Karma drones, its first and only UAV, it will exit the aerial market. The writing was on the wall last week as GoPro laid off a few hundred employees, most of whom were in its aerial division.

When the Karma drone was first announced in late 2015, it entered a competitive world. Led by behemoth DJI—which is to drones what, well, GoPro is to POV action cams—the consumer drone market was already extremely crowded. But I was still initially excited about the Karma, as it was one of the first foldable drones, making it more portable than anything in DJI’s lineup. Unfortunately, just days after its release, DJI announced the Mavic Pro, which was far smaller, lighter, more compact, faster, had visual sensors, and a far longer battery life.

Still, there were some things about the Karma I really liked. It used a Hero5 as its camera, making the machine incredibly versatile and giving it stellar image quality. You could also pop off the camera and use it solo. The integrated three-axis gimbal was also removable, allowing it to work as a handle-held device. Essentially, you got two industry-leading pieces of technology for the price of one. 

Unfortunately, the Karma, as a drone, proved to be too big and too heavy to compete with the svelte DJI Mavic. To make matters worse, just two weeks after it launched, the Karma suffered a full recall as several drones spontaneously fell out of the sky. The problem, it turned out, was a simple loose battery latch.

When Karma relaunched a few months later, the damage was done. According to a recent statement from GoPro, “Karma reached the #2 market position in its price band in 2017…”—which might well be true, but there was a lot of space between number one and two. Neither GoPro nor DJI has ever released actual numbers on market share, though. 

The Karma will remain on sale until they’re sold out, and GoPro has pledged to continue support for the drone, although it’s unclear for how long. The drone itself is now going for the discounted price of $600. If you want it bundled with the new Hero6 Black camera, it’s $1,000.

As GoPro leaves behind drones, the company said it will go back to focusing on its cameras. After slow sales leading up to the holidays, the company reduced the price on its Hero6 Black and last year’s Hero5 Black to $400 and $300, respectively. That move reportedly increased sales figures by the end of the year. GoPro also reported more demand for its first 360-degree camera, the Fusion, than it had expected. 

Despite this, profits aren't as high as the company and its investors had hoped for. According to the statement GoPro released on Monday, it plans to post $340 million in Q4 revenue from last year, which would be down 37 percent from Q4 of 2016. To compensate for this, GoPro said it is targeting an $80 million reduction in operating expenses. Last week the company laid off over 250 employees—more than 20 percent of the company's workforce. At the same time, founder and CEO Nick Woodman announced that his annual salary for 2018 will be $1. 

But the real eyebrow-raising news came out this morning when it was revealed that GoPro is publicly considering a partnership, or potentially a sale, with a larger company. Woodman has since claimed that the company is not actively seeking a buyer, but he told Bloomberg that "if there were an opportunity for GoPro to partner up with a larger organization that could help us scale the company, that’s certainly something that we would consider. But it’s not something that we’re actively engaged in at the moment."

Obviously, the company has to take care of its employees and investors, and perhaps merging with a larger company is the best way to do that. Still, I liked GoPro as an independent company. It’s been fun watching them go from tiny start-up to a brand that created the action camera market. 

Brent Rose is a freelance writer, actor, and filmmaker, currently traveling the U.S. living in a high-tech van, looking for stories to tell. Follow his adventures on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and at ConnectedStates.com

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In 2006, I sat in the library at the Outside offices and made my case for why the magazine needed a feature story on ski racer Julia Mancuso. Earlier that year, Mancuso had surprised everybody who pays any attention to ski racing by winning the gold medal in the giant slalom event at the Olympics in Torino, Italy. She hadn’t done a whole lot before, but she seemed on the brink of breaking out. She could be the first American woman to win an overall World Cup title in 25 years, I argued. Moreover, I thought that, due to her ability, sass (she wore a tiara in one of her races at the Olympics), and good looks, she could transcend the sport, taking on Maria Sharapova-like fame. 

“OK,” said Chris Keyes, the editor of the magazine. “So who are we gonna get to write it?” I was an associate editor and I’d never been sent outside the office to report a story. “Um, how about me?” I responded. Mancuso spent her offseason surfing, paddleboarding, and hiking around Maui. Going down there and tagging along seemed like a pretty great first assignment—and Keyes bit.

As it turned out, Mancuso played as hard as she ski raced. And she insisted that I play just as hard. After four days in Maui, I left black and blue and even more impressed by Mancuso, whose breeziness was infectious. As my colleague Grayson Schaffer later wrote, “Mancuso is the Olympic champion you’d want to drink a beer with.”

Julia Mancuso retired Friday after a remarkable 18-year career. She didn’t quite achieve everything that I’d predicted she would, but she still leaves the sport as one of the most important figures in the history of American ski racing. Because of her success at the important, high-pressure events, she earned a reputation as a big-race skier. She went on to win three more Olympic medals (two silvers and a bronze), making her the most decorated American ski racer in Olympic history. In addition, she won five World Championship medals and reached the podium in 36 World Cup races, winning seven.

But despite landing on magazine covers (including Outside's, in 2014), she didn’t reach mainstream celebrity status. That honor, of course, went to Mancuso’s teammate, Lindsey Vonn. If it wasn’t for Mancuso, though, Vonn might have never enjoyed the success that she has.

The two grew up racing against each other, constantly pushing each other to be better. Though their personal relationship always seemed a bit frosty, Vonn thanked her rival Friday. “If it wasn’t for Julia Mancuso,” she said, “I wouldn’t still be here and wouldn’t have been so successful. We pushed each other for so many years.”

Mancuso skied her final race Friday in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, the place where she scored her first World Cup podium. Still sassy as ever, she wore a red cape, her tiara now airbrushed onto her helmet.

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On Wednesday, a fire sprung up in the Sepulveda Pass, adjacent to the 405 freeway, just as rush hour hit. It was just one of multiple fires that have now burned over 300 homes, and forced 200,000 area residents to evacuate. As I'm typing this, another fire just started in Malibu. 

https://twitter.com/WLV_investor/status/938410022538682368

Why are these fires spreading so fast? During the late fall and early winter, Southern California is affected by the Santa Ana winds, which race down out of the Great Basin deserts far to the northeast. They're dry, warm, and powerful, sucking any remaining moisture out of the already dry vegetation, fanning flames, and spreading embers. On ridgelines, gusts have reached 70 miles per hour. And the wind is expected to continue through Friday. 

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The Santa Anas are especially dangerous right now, as last winter's heavy rain caused grass and brush to grow like crazy. That wet winter and early spring then turned into an exceptionally hot summer, which killed and dried out all the new growth. So far this fall, there's been no rain, so all that biomass is just laying around on hillsides, waiting for a spark. It starts easily, burns quickly, and spreads fast. In the steep canyons of local hills, that makes these fires very, very hard to fight. 

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Burning in the city's fanciest neighborhood—Bel Air—the Skirball Fire is producing many of the headlines, and some scary photos and videos. But it's the Thomas Fire near Ojai and Ventura that's causing the most damage. This morning, my girlfriend and I laid in bed and pored over maps and read headlines to determine which of our friends and favorite businesses up there (including Patagonia) may be under threat or already destroyed. 

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Patagonia's headquarters are in Ventura, and yesterday they served as an evacuation center, before they also had to be evacuated. 

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Many of the areas impacted by these fires are made up of ranches, farms, and fancy houses. That means many animals, including dogs and horses, are under threat. I just called shelters in the affected areas, and the only one that didn't have a busy signal reported that they were overwhelmed with new intakes. Once I finish writing, my plan is to drive up there and grab a dog or two to foster until this is all over. If you'd like to do the same, just show up at the West Valley or East Valley shelters—they're processing the fostering paperwork on the spot and have a special need for homes that can take large dogs. 

https://twitter.com/VCAnimalService/status/938508848330981376

Here in Hollywood, we're under no threat of wildfire, but even though the winds are pushing the smoke out to sea, it still smells very smoky. We can hear fire engines racing west down Sunset to help in Bel Air about once every half hour. Traffic across the entire region is abysmal, as major highways are intermittently being closed and opened as the fires spread. 

https://twitter.com/RedCrossLA/status/938789807274180608

Local social media feeds are filled with offers of guest bedrooms for people and pets displaced by the fires. 

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When I wrote this on Thursday morning, the winds appeared to be calm, but forecasts predicted they could pick up again in the evening, reaching speeds of up to 80 miles per hour. 

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In the end, what it comes down to is this: Choosing to have wonder in your life, or not

Hilary and I drove four hours to stand on a gravel road north of Scottsbluff, Nebraska, for two minutes of magic on Monday. A couple dozen other cars were parked on the same quarter-mile of road, full of people doing the same thing: standing and looking up at the sun, waiting for the moon to move completely in front of it for about 99 seconds.

The daylight dimmed around us and the temperature dropped. In the seconds just before totality, shadow bands rippled across the dirt road at our feet. We pulled off our cardboard glasses and stared at it—a black circle with a glowing ring around it. A sort of 360-degree sunset painted the horizon pink all the way around us. From the far end of the road, where most of the cars had parked, cheers erupted. 

People were cheering for the solar system. We usually cheer for sports teams, speeches, live performances, but rarely do the sun and the moon get applause. It was a ridiculous and wonderful moment to share with a bunch of strangers, and then it was over. The sun came back out and people jumped in their cars and drove away, to wherever home was. 

As Hilary drove, I scrolled through social media, seeing what everyone saw: great photos of the eclipse taken by skilled photographers, photos of families in cardboard sunglasses, friends who had all made pilgrimages to watch the sun and moon do their thing. It was a phenomenon. 

And then I discovered on Facebook that even the solar eclipse has haters. People wrote their own takes on it: “Underwhelmed.” “That was it?” “Lame.” “I should have lowered my expectations.” It was like people were going on Yelp to rate a new restaurant in their neighborhood, or reviewing a film that just came out, as if something could be done to meet their personal needs better next time. Universe: Two stars out of five.

Who are we complaining to here? The manager of the solar system? The PR company responsible for all the hype about the eclipse? The company who sold us this rare astronomical event? What would we like for our trouble, a refund? 

Not giving a shit is helpful in a lot of circumstances: not caring about non-constructive criticism of your work, not reading hundreds of very similar news articles per day that cause you to think the world is ending and take over all your productive hours and conversations with friends, focusing on what makes you truly happy instead of working yourself to death just to have a house/car/lawnmower that looks as good as your next-door neighbor’s. 

But apathy is largely pretty useless and unproductive. Being “too cool” for everything is not establishing your impeccable taste, it’s establishing you as a person with a shitty attitude. I don’t know about you, but I’ll tell you who doesn’t get invited back to do fun stuff most of the time: the person who, when everyone else is standing around in the parking lot talking about what a great ride/climb/ski day they had, has to talk about how last Tuesday was better/last time they rode that trail was better/they really don’t see what all the hype is about.

Yeah, spending nine hours in the car for two minutes of eclipse was not fun, nor was the traffic. But between the possibility of making a once-in-a-lifetime memory or staying home and pooh-poohing the whole thing, I’ll take my chances on the former. 

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather look back on my life and remember having my mind blown, whether it’s an Arctic sunset, seeing the Grand Canyon for the first or twentieth time, or a solar eclipse. The next morning, after seeing the deluge of photos, videos, and other reactions to the eclipse, positive and negative, Hilary said: “I think you can choose to have wonder in your life, or not.”

Read more from Brendan Leonard at Semi-Rad.com.