Month: March 2019

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The island of Borneo has long conjured powerful Western fantasies of the exotic—a place of steep mountains, impenetrable forests, and Stone Age tribes. A place where spirits lurk, and where men can simply vanish. It’s proven to be the perfect backdrop on which to project romantic notions about Rousseau’s natural man and the noble savage, as well as an irresistible beacon to those seeking to leave modern life behind.

In The Last Wild Men of Borneo, out March 6, journalist Carl Hoffman recounts the lives of two Westerners who heeded the island’s siren song in the 1970s and 1980s, whose lives were defined by the island, and who in turn helped define the island to the outside world.

The first, Swiss Bruno Manser, lived among the nomadic Penan for the better part of a decade, becoming as close to being a member of the tribe as a white man ever has, eventually organizing them against the logging companies decimating their home forests and becoming an icon of the international conservation movement before disappearing without a trace in 2000. The second, American tribal-art dealer Michael Palmieri, left California on the hippie trail, bouncing from Mexico to India to Nepal to Afghanistan, learning the smuggling and black-market game along the way, before alighting in the paradise of prelapsarian Bali. Once there, he began exploring the most remote parts of Borneo, acquiring pieces of tribal art that now reside in museums and private collections around the world.

Hoffman is himself an accomplished wanderer. His previous book, Savage Harvest, investigated the disappearance of another Westerner gone native (Michael Rockefeller) on an enchanted isle (New Guinea). As such, he brings a level of understanding and empathy, as well as a whole lot of dogged shoe-leather reporting, from commissioning translations of Manser’s journals and letters to spending weeks traversing Borneo with Palmieri and further weeks in the jungle with the Penan themselves. The end result is partly a twin biography of these two men, partly a sociological and historical account of Borneo, and partly a first-rate adventure story. It’s a lot of ground to cover, and the toggling between the men’s stories doesn’t always work seamlessly, but in the end it adds up to a compelling, readable book. (Disclosure: Hoffman and I are professional acquaintances, and I was thanked in the acknowledgements section of Savage Harvest for some limited advice I offered on traveling in the region.)

Initially, Manser and Palmieri appear to be complete opposites. The ascetic Manser, after conscientiously objecting to military service, left his Basel home and spent a dozen years high in the Alps as a shepherd, living in a shack without modern conveniences, sewing his own clothes, and giving himself a full practical education in pastoral self-sufficiency, all while undertaking ever more daring explorations of peaks and caves in the surrounding area and beyond. When Manser saw a picture of a Penan tribesman in a library book, a fuse was lit: here was a people living in harmony with the forest, drawing all they needed from it, fully apart from the materialism of the Western world. In 1984, after inviting himself on a British caving expedition in Borneo, Manser walked off into the jungle to find the Penan and didn’t look back. He learned the language, adopted their manner of dress—loincloth, rattan bracelets, and a curious mullet-style haircut—and became adept at hunting. Before long, he had fully integrated into Penan life.

Manser, Hoffman writes, “had a purity, a recklessness that attracted people,” a gift for inspiring others to join his cause, and he was soon helping organize Penan anti-logging efforts, mostly in the form of human-chain roadblocks across the newly cut dirt roads. The timber interests and their government sponsors were not amused, and he was soon a wanted man with a price on his head. Manser evaded arrest, and gunfire, twice, spending years hidden in the jungle by the Penan, before finally escaping and returning to Switzerland in 1990, where he began rallying greater international attention to the cause of Borneo’s deforestation and set up the Bruno Manser Fund. He became the (white) face of the cause, and as his celebrity grew, there was no shortage of acolytes and profiles. In 1991, Manser was named “Outsider of the Year” by this magazine for his conservation work.

Palmieri, by contrast, was a proto-hippie, a movie-star handsome California surfer who headed south from Mexico in the early years of the Vietnam War to dodge the draft and ended up moving from Paris to Goa to Kathmandu to Kabul, trafficking in various goods along the way. He was a naturally gregarious force of nature and made friends by the dozen wherever he went, among them the Afghan crown prince Shah Mahmood Khan, who, Palmieri claims, engaged him to smuggle the crown jewels out of the country to Europe as the royal family fell out of favor. (In a classic hustle, he preferred to return to Kabul each time overland, driving a newly purchased Mercedes, which the prince helped him sell for a tidy profit on arrival.)

Finally, he arrived in Borneo and began collecting rattan baskets from the Dayak people of the upper Mahakam River and elsewhere. He sold them quickly to the other hippies then beginning to flow into Bali and began returning to Borneo frequently, quickly working his way up to bigger objects and increasingly daring adventures. He soon became a regular presence in the longhouses up and down the region’s rivers, hustling, cajoling, and buying items that were increasingly valuable in the booming market for “primitive art.” Palmieri would become one of the world’s foremost dealers of such art, spending his life in the ethical gray area that such objects often inhabit. As Hoffman writes, “All tribal art is sacred art.”

The lives of Palmieri and Manser intersected just once, in an open-air café in Kuching, Sarawak’s capital city. It was 1999, just a year before Manser disappeared. “There was a guy sitting at one of the tables alone…A little guy with funny glasses,” Palmieri told Hoffman, while sitting with him at the same café. He didn’t know it was Manser until afterward, and though initially he was standoffish, Palmieri broke the ice. “It was nothing, really. We didn’t say anything profound. Just shot the shit. Two travelers out there in the world.” The account has a bit of the pixie dust of many of Palmieri’s tales—could such a meet-cute really have happened?—but then that’s part of the magic of this book: that in the hazy equatorial airof a place peopled by such outsized characters, anything was possible, or at least many things were.

The yin and yang aspect of this pairing is obvious—the idealist and the buccaneer, the monk and the hedonist, the ascetic and the capitalist, one focused on going in, the other on bringing things out. Manser is described early in the book by his best friend as “a collector of experiences” rather than things, and Palmieri was the consummate collector of things. But of course it’s not that simple—nothing in Borneo, it seems, ever is—and the odd coupling is sort of the point: in the end, though they viewed the world through different lenses, a similar impulse drove them both.

“They had sprung from a group, a tribe, that they didn’t feel a part of any longer,” Hoffman writes, and their search for a place where they belonged led them both to the mythical island of Borneo, with all of its spiritual power and complications. (One other thing the two men had in common, and which helps the book immensely, is ego: neither of them was shy about documenting and discussing their exploits.)

At times, as Hoffman bounces back and forth between the two stories, the reader will be left wanting more of one or the other, or perhaps even wishing the entire book was focused on just one of them. But the pairing yields surprises and a number of insights, many sprung from the fact that both Manser and Palmieri arrived in Borneo at what Hoffman rightly calls a “pivotal moment.”

“Modernity was creeping upriver” in the form of Christian missionaries, timber companies, and government officials bringing notions of “progress” that would gradually erode the very things that drew them there. Palmieri was in some ways a harbinger of the future, a realist who brought the market to Borneo’s prehistoric villages and has, despite the ethical murkiness of that market, helped preserve a part of a cultural legacy that might otherwise have been destroyed, burned, and forgotten. These pieces, Hoffman writes, are “physical manifestations of a lost world, a lost way of living.” (The ethics of that market, and the way those objects are viewed by museumgoers in places a world away, are fascinating subjects touched on briefly in the book.)

Manser, for all his organizing and proselytizing and sneaking in and out of Borneo throughout the 1990s, had been unable to stem the tide and grew increasingly despondent. The logging continued, and the Penan were still endangered, and he was still a white outsider. In the period before he disappeared in 2000, his friends tell Hoffman, Manser seemed to have lost all hope, so when he disappeared in the vicinity of a peak called Batu Lawi, in the Kelabit Highlands, those closest to Manser believe it was at least partly intentional. He’d gone too far, become a man with a foot in two worlds but a home in neither. It was six months before an extensive search was mounted, but by then it was too late. No trace of him was ever found. By the time Hoffman comes onto the scene, in 2016, the trail is even colder and cracking the Manser mystery isn’t even a remote possibility.

“The art of life is to grow old but not lose your beliefs as you do. Or, if you lose them, to find new ways to be glad to be alive,” says Georges Ruegg, one of Manser’s closest friends from his shepherding days. “But Bruno lost all his beliefs and he crashed. He couldn’t evolve, and that’s the tragedy.”

Palmieri was better able to roll with the punches. He remains in Bali, still trading in antiquities, still able to summon the old joviality and spin a fantastic story, though some of the magic seems to have gone out of it for him. Bali is choked with tribal-tattooed tourists seeking enlightenment through beachfront yoga, and the mountain jungles of Borneo are now mostly denuded, replanted with hundreds of thousands of acres of palm oil plantations. Hoffman accompanies Palmieri on a buying trip across Borneo, and it is hard not to be struck by the sadness of it all, by the futility of hunting for treasure in a world where it’s all been found, hauled out of the longhouses and the caves and the tombs by Palmieri and the legions of copycats who came in his wake. “We were combing through the wreckage of acculturation,” Hoffman writes of their journey, during which the primary use for Palmieri’s finely tuned eye was in plucking the few real pieces from the sea of increasingly crafty fakes.

But Palmieri is, in a way, as trapped by the parameters of his own outsized life story as Manser was. He, too, straddles a line between worlds. He watches American college football on satellite TV, but he hasn’t been American for a long time. He’s a refugee both geographically and temporally, a man out of step with time. “You could never go back. Not in time, not in culture, not to your old home country where you hadn’t lived for any extended time in 50 years,” Hoffman writes of Palmieri. “But you could enjoy the ride, and I had to admire Michael’s stamina and his passion for life.”

It is in the book’s final section where the stories come together and Hoffman’s strengths really shine. He recounts his walkabout with one of the last Penan families still clinging to the nomadic way of life, moving through some of the same jungles Manser traversed, guided by the descendants of those whom Manser knew. This Penan family is a remnant, most of their fellow tribesmen long settled in longhouses and villages, with Christianity and satellite TV. But here was a glimpse of the forest dynamos Manser had lived among, a glimpse of the living poetry of their daily life, and also its hardships. “The Penan had nothing, but they had everything.” Though they and their territory are diminished, and their walk takes them across logging roads and into cellphone range, and they are confined to ever smaller quadrants of forest, the Penan are not an illusion. The way of life they show Hoffmanoffers some sense of what’s been lost and of what Manser and Palmieri found all those years ago.

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Several years ago, some wildlife researchers had concerns about the highly controversial trophy hunting of grizzly bears in British Columbia. The B.C. government said that the management and harvest of the big bears was founded on science. But previous work done by the researchers found that there were some question marks surrounding key grizzly information—basic details such as how many of the animals roamed B.C. and how many were killed each year by poachers. The uncertainty made it harder to know what was an appropriate level of bears to hunt.

Even so, the province increased the number of bears that could be harvested annually.

So was that government decision an anomaly? Or were other wildlife managers in the U.S. and Canada making similar calls based on similarly incomplete data? Those were questions researchers, including Kyle Artelle, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Victoria, started asking. What does it mean, anyway, when agencies claim to abide by “science-based management?” Artelle wondered.

The answer? Science doesn't play as large a role in so-called "science-based" wildlife management as one might think, Artelle and his co-authors contend in a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.

“[A]gencies and hunters often justify management approaches by claiming that they follow the so-called ‘North American Model of Wildlife Conservation,’ which has a central tenet that ‘Science is the proper tool to discharge policy,’” the authors wrote in a release. “This new research casts doubt on the extent to which this tenet is followed.”

The authors examined the public documents of 667 wildlife management systems across 62 U.S. states, territories, and Canadian provinces. These documents pertained to hunted species in both countries, from moose in Alaska to mule deer in Washington State to alligators in Florida.

The researchers looked in the plans for the presence of what they called the four hallmarks of science.

• Measurable objectives (That is: Is there a clear, trackable goal?);
• Evidence (hard data);
• Transparency (an ability for the public to see the work);
• Independent review (Did someone, including a third-party, check an agency’s work?)

Why look for these elements? They are the pillars of good scientific approach, says Artelle, who is also a biologist at B.C.’s Raincoast Conservation Foundation, an environmental group that uses science to further conservation objectives. “If you knock out any of them, the foundation is compromised.”

What researchers found—or more precisely, didn’t find—surprised them. “In most cases, 60 percent of cases, we found fewer than half of the criteria we were looking for,” Artelle says. “And we set the bar low. We tried to give easy A’s.”

That wasn’t the only deficit. Only 11 percent of wildlife systems explained how hunting quotas are set. This uncertainty is notable given that for many hunted animals, “adult mortality from hunting exceeds mortality from all other predators combined,” the study pointed out.

Fewer than 10 percent of the systems the study looked at reported that they undergo any form of review, even internally. Fewer than six percent subjected their systems to review by outside experts. “This deviates substantially from scientific processes,” the authors wrote.

And only 26 percent had measurable objectives—to say what defines success or a bad outcome. 

“These (and other) findings raise doubts about whether North American wildlife management can accurately be described as science-based,” the authors concluded.

Artelle acknowledges that because the authors couldn’t find some information doesn’t mean that agencies don’t have it or don’t use it in their decision-making. (The authors asked agencies to fill in gaps about missing info, and sometimes they received it.) But this information needs to be shown to be part of the process, he says. “‘Trust us’ is fundamentally not how science works.”

Robert Garrott, director of the Fish and Wildlife Ecology and Management program at Montana State University in Bozeman, disagreed with the authors’ contention that more scientific rigor, though always welcome, would protect both wildlife and the agencies that oversee it from conflict—whether social, legal, or political. “The premise of this paper doesn’t reflect the reality of how wildlife is managed,” Garrott says. “Science does not dictate goals for wildlife. Society does that….It comes from the messy process of politics, because everybody owns [wildlife] and everybody has a say.” The authors seem to argue that “if we had more science, we wouldn’t have social and political conflict,” he says. “That isn’t how it works in North America.”

Artelle agrees with much of that critique. “We do not think that science alone should drive wildlife management,” he says. “Science can only tell us how the world works, it doesn’t tell use how it should work.”

The authors are most concerned about the cases where agencies claim that they’re using science in management decisions, but where in fact it’s just rhetoric, Artelle says. More scientific rigor could show where the science ends and the politics begin—be it lobbying by hunters, or ranchers, or animal-rights activists.

What we (shouldn’t) talk about when we talk about running

There’s a George Carlin bit called “Fussy Eater” in which the late comedian riffs on the idea that some foods are unappetizing because they have questionable names. (For example, squash: “It sounds like somebody sat on my dinner.”) Of course, it’s hardly a secret that certain language can trigger a specific emotional response. Environmentalists have lamented that “climate change” sounds too innocuous to stir people into action. Meanwhile, branding gurus earn a living by dreaming up evocative names so you’ll buy a particular kind of pickup truck or yogurt.

Perhaps some of these language wizards can help the sport of distance running improve its messaging—especially since the “running boom” has been ebbing over the past few years. At the very least, we should consider excising the following words from the sport’s lexicon.

Corral

There shouldn’t really be any debate on this one. Standing in the midst thousands of nervous, pungent strangers before setting out on an orchestrated stampede is unnerving enough without an explicit livestock reference. The Gold Coast Marathon in Australia uses the term “start zone.” Much more dignified.

Mileage

Every time I meet up with my local running group, someone will inevitably refer to their weekly or monthly mileage when discussing their training routine. As with “corral,” “mileage” has a dehumanizing effect. It’s not great for motivation; I may be alone here, but I don’t fancy talking about myself as if I were a used Subaru. “Modern exercise makes you acknowledge the machine operating inside yourself,” Mark Greif wrote in a 2004 essay for n+1 that reads as a caustic take on the hollowness of contemporary fitness culture. “Mileage” is a case in point.

Fueling

Obviously, we can’t lament the pervasiveness of “mileage” and let “fuel” and “fueling” off the hook. The machine analogy persists! Also, since eating is one of life’s principal joys, it seems advisable not to describe running-related consumption habits with a word connoting gasoline. To be fair, I can understand the tendency to think of in-race sustenance as fuel, rather than food; at the end of the day, the gel packet you sloppily imbibe at mile 23 doesn’t have much in common with mom’s home cooking. Still, I think we can do better. Is “competition foodstuffs” too much of a mouthful? Probably.

Carbo-loading

Apropos of foodstuffs: There’s something vaguely disgusting about the expression used to describe the process of consuming copious amounts of carbohydrates, typically during the week leading up to a big race. Imagine if you knew nothing about running and, after a bit of preliminary research, found out that “carbo-loading” was a widespread practice. Does that seem like a culture you’d want to be a part of? Carbo-loading sounds like an unpleasant form of forced gluttony. My vote is for a verbified iteration of “pastapalooza.”

(Race) Bib

Growing up, I spoke German before I spoke English. Even though I consider myself reasonably proficient in the latter language by now, occasionally there are moments that make me have my doubts. Like when I’m at a race expo and a volunteer informs me where I can pick up my bib. Excuse me? (I thought this was a ten-miler, not an all-you-can-eat seafood buffet?) I’m probably being overly sensitive here, but it’s my understanding that most people, when they hear “bib,” think of a mealtime accessory for babies. Seems less than ideal for road race organizers who want to create an atmosphere of serious competition.

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Flying home from a ski trip a few weeks ago, I put my keychain, wallet, and sunglasses in the dog dish, then sent them down the conveyor belt into the bowels of the TSA X-ray machine. When the dish came out the other side, the glasses were gone. I begged, cajoled, and attempted to bribe the agents to find them. I even offered my incredibly bright FourSevens Mini Mk2 to aid in the efforts. But they were gone, eaten by bureaucracy. 

I was distraught. Not only were they my favorite glasses of all time—the Aether Explorers—but this was my third pair, after breaking one (well, Wiley broke them) and losing the other while paddling the Sea of Cortez. At $600 a pair, I couldn’t justify a fourth.

After a suitable period of self loathing, I set out to find a replacement. I’d fallen in love with the Aether’s glare-blocking side shields, their incredibly clear Zeiss glass lenses, and the light weight. So I knew I wanted similar features, just in a much more affordable package. 

I looked at Revo, but most of their glasses are just too flashy for the city. Then I remembered the classic Julbo Vermont—basically the original mountaineering glasses.

Julbo remains an independent brand based out of Chamonix, France. I liked its history, and the functionality and quality of its products, but otherwise excellent products like the Explorer 2.0 just look a little too Dame Edna for my taste. The leather shields on the Vermont had always appealed, but the round lenses gave them a mad scientist air I wasn’t sure I could pull off. They also came only with extremely dark lenses designed to cut the brightness of high-altitude snow and ice, which means they’re too dark for most mundane situations, like driving my truck.

I was playing around on Julbo's website, wishing for a better looking version of the Vermont, when I saw the Chams. And they were exactly what I was looking for. Leather shields? Check. Lenses suitable for sub-alpine wear too? Check. Good looks? Double check. $170 price? Sold.

My biggest concern while I waited on the Amazon delivery was that the polycarbonate lenses wouldn’t be as clear or as nice to look through as the Zeiss glass I’d gotten used to with the Aethers.

The package arrived the afternoon before a 4×4 trip to Death Valley. So, I threw them in my old Land Rover, and put them on for first wear as the sun rose over the Mojave desert. I was immediately taken aback by my vision clarity, and also by how much light they cut. They’re every bit as clear as the Aethers, but where those glasses had perforated shields that still allowed some light through, the leather on these totally seals out all light that doesn’t come through the lenses. The effect was transformative—when I wear them I can feel my eyes being more open and more relaxed, without even the tiniest bit of squinting in bright desert light.

When I ordered them, I hadn’t really understood what the flexible temples were, but that part has really helped improved both comfort and retention. The back half of each temple is covered in grippy black rubber, and flexes like heavy-gauge wire. You can leave them fairly flat, for easy on-off through casual wear, or twist them tightly around your ears. Doing that holds them tightly to your face through physical activity, meaning not only will they not fall off, but also that they won’t shift. After the looks, this is my favorite thing about the Chams.

So far, they’ve worked great while driving, hiking, doing some moderate rock scrambling, and even skiing. I’ve also gotten compliments on them from virtually everyone, with the notable exception of my girlfriend. Her specific objection is to the leather shields—my favorite part—which is why I haven’t yet told her that they detach.

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The most unsettling part is the loss of purpose

One morning, in the spring of 2011, I was pool running in Berkeley, California. As I bobbed through the water, I watched the morning light creep over the hills. The predawn air was dank and chilly. Above the pool, fog rolled off San Francisco Bay, splashing against the hills like aerial sewage. When it’s especially foggy in the Bay Area, the sun doesn’t rise. Instead, it smudges into the sky in a monochrome blur.

At least, this was my grim perspective from the pool. I was groggy and uncomfortable. I felt ridiculous, pumping my legs in a maniacal facsimile of running, tepid water occasionally splashing into my mouth. The visceral urge to stay fit despite the injury was enough to get me into the pool. But I still wondered, “Why is cross-training so awful?”

Six weeks earlier, I had broken my foot while running on the Northern California trails. It happened suddenly: One moment, I was whipping through the woods, contemplating lunch. The next, I could barely walk. I limped the last three miles back to my car, pain shooting through my foot with every step. I had never broken a bone before; I figured it was just some bad tendonitis.

It was still painful a week later. Eventually, an X-ray revealed that I had completely broken my second metatarsal. The bone was displaced; the fractured ends skewed away from each other. And so I found myself cross-training.

Injuries are often heart-wrenching. The pain of physical trauma is often matched by the social and psychic toll that comes from losing your daily routine and training friends. And the effort to cling to your fitness through cross-training can feel like salt in the wound. Of all the ways to cross-train when injured, I truly loathe pool running. I dislike tinkering with flotation belts, goggles, and garishly colored Speedos. I hate the smell of chlorine and that initial shock of cold water engulfing your genitals.

Of course, there are other cross-training options for the injured runner. Most of these involve joining a gym filled with very different athletes than are found on running trails, tracks, and roads. Muscle-bound lifters moan over free weights. Instructors in bright spandex shout microphoned imperatives. There is a different vocabulary in gym: “cardio,” “Zercher squats,” and whatever the CrossFit people are saying these days. Above it all, fluorescent lights illuminate rows of exercise machines propping up sweaty bodies transfixed to their smartphones.

One can hardly blame folks for distracting themselves on exercise machines. Hopping onto a stationary bike or elliptical can be absolutely mind-numbing. Yet the static boredom of exercising indoors doesn’t fully explain, for me, why cross-training is so terrible. While many dislike the monotony of a treadmill, I don’t mind it that much. It’s not too different from running intervals around a track or jogging at night. I can achieve a meditative headspace. Even on a treadmill, the sport provides more than fitness. It offers a sense of direction, even when I’m running in place.

So while there are differences in scenery and company, the most unsettling part of cross-training is the deferred sense of purpose. Cross-training, especially when we’re injured, forces us to dramatically shift our reason for training. We must adopt a maintenance mindset. Injury usually necessitates that runners stop thinking about improvement or forward progress. Forced by circumstance into a position of preservation, the cross-training runner no longer works toward new goals or a better self. Training becomes mere exercise, a fight against our deteriorating fitness—a desperate struggle against entropy. Cross-training is about becoming less lesser; it’s about treading water, or breaking even.

People quip that the quickest way to the funeral home is through retirement. Take away a person’s sense of purpose, a reason to wake up in the morning, and eventually they stop waking up. Running is no different. Cut off progress toward an end, and activity becomes much more difficult.

One day, during the 2011 injury, I was overwhelmed by questions of purpose. I was again in the pool. It was another gray day, but this time the skies opened, and it began to rain. As cold drops of water clapped onto my head, I wondered aloud, “Why in the world am I doing this? How is this making me a better runner?” Beyond the pool, I noticed my shower towel was soaked. I’d be damp for the rest of the morning. “Fuck it.” I got out of the pool and limped to the locker room, wet towel in hand. It was a few days before I worked up the motivation to return to the gym.

Given the choice, I’ll always opt for a run. I’ve had many more injuries since 2011, and they remain frustrating. I’ve broken more bones, inflamed more tendons, and strained more muscles. But with experience comes perspective, and I’ve worked over the years to be less cynical about substitute activities. Movement is itself a privilege.

This past summer, I fractured a rib from a tumble in a trail race. After a couple weeks of total rest, I spent a few sessions on a spin bike to ease my legs back into activity. It wasn’t fun; I was bored after a single hour in the saddle. But as I spun my legs and even cranked up the resistance to dance on the pedals a bit, I had to admit that it was pleasant just to put my legs into motion.

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When I interviewed Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke at Denali last year, he complained about how Interior’s revenues from natural resource commodities had crashed over the decade since President George W. Bush left office. “In 2008, just offshore, the DOI made about $18 billion a year,” he said. “Last year was $2.3 [billion].” Total oil and gas revenues were $21.6 billion in 2008, according to the Office of Natural Resources Revenue, compared to $4.3 in 2016, so there’s no doubt: It was a huge drop. As I mentioned in my profile of Zinke in the January issue of Outside, I asked him what caused the shortfall.

“The price of oil and gas declined. True, no doubt,” Zinke said. “But also, the regulatory framework in some cases became punitive and arbitrary.”

Zinke has a quick fix for this discrepancy: Hold a fire sale of public land and offshore energy leases and get government regulation “out of the way.” With these silver bullets, Zinke says he can drive revenues back toward the high-water mark, and he intends to: Zinke says he’ll use the windfall to pay for nearly $12 billion worth of deferred maintenance in the national parks.

Zinke calls this plan the Public Land Infrastructure Fund, linking it to President Trump’s pledge to rebuild America’s highways and bridges. On March 7, a mostly Republican group of senators introduced a bill modeled on the concept. “Our parks and refuges are being loved to death,” Zinke said in recent comments about Trump’s 2019 budget, which would cut Interior’s funding by close to $2 billion, or about 13.3 percent. The budget also zeroes out most conservation grants to the National Park Service and the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which Zinke went to bat for as a Montana congressman. But not to worry: The Public Land Infrastructure Fund initiative, according to Interior’s fiscal year 2019 Budget Justification, “has the potential to generate up to $18 billion over ten years” for parks and other public lands infrastructure.

The idea that Americans should throw open the gates on public lands and the seafloor to energy developers, inviting landscape and habitat degradation in order to raise funds to fix roads and bathrooms in the national parks, is a tough sell. Especially when we’re asked to entrust this plan to what may be the most overtly anti-conservation administration in history. On the economic side, it’s also a fantasy.

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For starters, the years Zinke cites as his bookends are not representative. In 2008, when Interior brought in $15.7 billion in oil and gas revenues, oil hit an all-time high of more than $140 per barrel. Then the global recession sharply reduced demand and sent prices tumbling to about $40, a collapse that was compounded by OPEC manipulations and an oil glut caused by rapid expansion of fracking operations. North American natural gas prices took an even wilder ride, tumbling from a peak of about $15 per MMBtu in 2005 to less than $2 at the lowest point in 2016. Oil prices have since climbed back above $60, and gas prices are hovering around $3, but not much of any of this has to do with deregulation, federal energy policy, or Trump.

“Ryan Zinke can talk as much as he wants about energy dominance, and they can offer the entire West for lease,” says Jesse Prentice-Dunn, advocacy director for the Center for Western Priorities. “But just saying that is not going to make that happen.”

This is where Zinke’s dreamscape is most vivid: In the low-price environment of a saturated energy market—especially one in which the biggest plays are on private land—there’s not much demand for new public land and offshore energy leases. If there aren’t many bidders, there won’t be many new leases, which means there won’t be much in the way of new production or royalties.

“The market is screaming, ‘We don’t want these leases,’” says Collin O’Mara, president of the National Wildlife Federation. O’Mara highlighted the recent lease offering on the Northern Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A) as an example. In October, the Bureau of Land Management offered leases on 900 tracts in the NPR-A totaling 10.3 million acres. Only seven tracts, amounting to about 80,000 acres, received bids, generating a grand total of $1.16 million in fees, half of which went immediately to the state of Alaska. The same thing happened last August, when the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management offered the biggest offshore lease sale in U.S. history: 14,220 blocks totaling 76 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico. The government received successful bids for just 90 tracts totaling about 500,000 acres. O’Mara says that what’s being bid on now is “a fraction of nothing.”

Zinke increased available onshore acreage sixfold from the previous year but ended up leasing fewer acres for about the same amount of money. Lack of market-driven competition means low bid prices, and data assembled by the Center for American Progress shows that 29 percent of lease sales in 2017 received only the minimum bid. Bonus money paid on the front-end of a lease sale—roughly equivalent to the bid price—is often the only significant government revenue from a lease. That’s because companies develop only some of the leases they take on, which is one reason factoring royalties from future production borders on the impossible. The other reason is that no one can accurately predict energy prices a year from now, let alone five or ten years out.

One thing we know is that companies aren’t usually excited to spend large amounts of capital on new production in slow markets. After all, adding supply only widens the glut. This partly explains why oil and gas producers were sitting on more than 7,500 unused onshore drilling permits at the end of 2015, while in 2016, less than half of the country’s 27.2 million acres of leased land was in production. And while those companies sit on the land, Judith Kohler, communication manager for the National Wildlife Federation, says the “BLM will often refuse to manage areas for recreation, conservation, and wildlife.” In an example from a recent Colorado planning process, Kohler says, “BLM decided against managing lands for protection of wilderness characteristics in the Grand Hogback unit based specifically on the presence of oil and gas leases, even though the leases were nonproducing.”

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In Denali, Zinke told me something I’ve heard him repeat elsewhere, including in his recent remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC): “It is better to produce energy here, under reasonable regulation, than watching it produced overseas with no regulation…If you want to watch how energy should not be produced, invite people to take a tour of the Middle East or Africa.”

Zinke seems to want to burden Interior with the same “resource curse” that plagues producers like Iraq, Nigeria, and Libya. “In general, the idea of using resources to develop infrastructure in national parks isn’t a bad idea,” says Mark Haggerty, a researcher and economist at Headwaters Economics, a Montana-based land management think tank. “But in practice, what it leads to is that you become dependent on that revenue stream, and you can’t afford to not develop [those resources]. You start to make poor choices on how to manage land you privilege extraction over other options that might have better economic outcomes. That dependence can actually discourage economic diversification and growth.”

You don’t have to go to Nigeria to understand the resource curse. Go to Scranton, Pennsylvania, and ask about the collapse of the anthracite coal industry. Travel to the Iron Range of northern Minnesota and see the hollowed-out port cities of Lake Superior. Go to Youngstown, Ohio, and ask about the decline of American steel. Or read in a newspaper today about the budget crises states like Wyoming, Oklahoma, and Alaska are currently experiencing because of their overly energy-dependent economies.

“The West has done a really good job of moving forward with a burgeoning recreation economy and diversification, and what this administration seems to be doing is wrecking any semblance of balance and multiple use,” says Robert Godby, director of the Energy Economics & Public Policies Center at the University of Wyoming. “This Interior Department is turning back the clock to a time that the West had really moved past, when extractive industries were king and all communities in the West were held hostage to that boom and bust cycle.”

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At CPAC, sharing the stage with Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, Zinke said that “we produce here today about 10.3 million barrels a day in this country, and for the first time in 60 years we’re a net exporter of liquid natural gas, and that’s President Donald Trump.”

Zinke was misrepresenting some pretty basic facts. While Trump’s pro-energy, pro-pipeline, and deregulatory policies may have thawed a few investors still reeling from the recent slump, it will be a long time before we’ll know whether deregulation and lease sales have moved the needle one way or the other.

The fracking boom happened during the Bush and Obama administrations, and the United States was going to become a net exporter of liquid natural gas no matter who won in 2016. According to a report by Deloitte, the consulting and financial advisory company, optimism about the U.S. energy industry is focused on cost-reduction strategies, including new technology, that cut the break-even price for frackers in half.

To push revenues to 2008 levels, Zinke would have to do more than sell leases and help companies shortcut environmental regs. He would also have to figure out how to wield OPEC-like control over the global energy market, and that would probably mean looking for ways to clamp down on current production, not ways to increase it.

Since early 2017, OPEC has been ratcheting down supply to drive prices toward a goal of $70 to $80 per barrel, and while its disciplined cuts have played a large role in oil’s tepid recovery, U.S. supply expansion has had the opposite effect.

Even if the United States could turn the global energy market on a dime, an increase in oil prices to the $140 per barrel mark that helped generate $15.7 billion in revenues in 2008 would make fuel heinously expensive, putting a gallon at or above $4. In such an environment, Americans at the middle and lower ranges of the income spectrum suffer most. Americans feeling the pinch at the pump are less likely to pile their kids in the car and head to the national parks, and they’re less likely to spend the money along the way that drives the outdoor recreation economy, which now amounts to $887 billion, and which has helped cure western states of the resource curse.

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You can always see an upside somewhere if you squint hard enough, but Zinke’s deregulatory and leasing frenzy just doesn’t make sense if you take him at his word—that he strives to be the “steward of our greatest holdings,” inspired by the conservation ethic of Teddy Roosevelt and founding U.S. Forest Service director Gifford Pinchot. It only makes sense if he’s doing favors for the industry lobbyists he’s surrounded himself with at Interior, and for the companies whose interests they serve.

Only then does it make sense to open the entire Pacific and Atlantic seaboards to oil leasing against the wishes of millions of citizens and numerous governors; or for Zinke to kill the Obama-era methane rule, which holds oil and gas producers responsible for gas wasted by leaky pipes and excessive flaring; or for Zinke to reduce the minimum royalty rates for shallow-water oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico from the 18.75 percent proposed by the Obama administration to 12.5 percent—a gift that Zinke now wants to extend to deepwater operations.

And only if Zinke is concerned more for the welfare of industry than the multiple-use stewardship of public lands does it make sense that Zinke would fight to help coal companies continue to skirt royalty reforms designed to stop them from dodging fair-value payments.

Zinke essentially confirmed where his loyalties lie at an energy conference in Houston earlier this month, saying, “Interior should not be in the business of being an adversary. We should be in the business of being a partner.”

This could not be further from the Roosevelt-Pinchot model of multiple use. Roosevelt believed limited resource extraction could occur on federal lands and waters while still safeguarding resources and wildlife, but it was the latter prerogative that dominated his conservation ethos. “As a people we have the right and the duty…to protect ourselves and our children against the wasteful development of our natural resources,” Roosevelt said at a White House conference on conservation in May 1908. Teddy would have blown his lid at the suggestion that Interior should be “in the business.”

Zinke’s job is not to increase the competitiveness of federal land in the natural resources market. His job is to steward the nation’s prized public lands, waterways, and oceans and our tremendous wealth of wildlife. His job is to defend our natural resources against corporate exploitation and to jealously guard our last remaining refuges from an increasingly noisy and chaotic world.

Overseeing development is part of the job, but it’s nowhere near the heart of it.

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Nothing rivals the love I feel for my pup, Charlie. We’ve been together since he was three months old—he’s nearing three years old now—so I’ve had a few years to iron out all of my gear needs. As any normal parent would, I’m constantly checking to see if my dog has everything he needs to be comfortable. Here are my picks for the best dog gear I use every day.

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I love this dog collar because it doesn’t leave an indent in his fur. I’ve had it for almost three years and replace the rope every year to keep it looking fresh.

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This LED collar has two easy settings, one strobe and one solid, making it hard for your pup to wander off in the dark. You can trim the collar for a custom fit. 

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I use this bag as a permanent food storage solution at home. It holds 10 pounds of kibble and has a magnetic pour-spout for easy dispensing. When heading out on weekend adventures, I throw the whole bag in the car. 

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I try to show my Chaco love wherever I go, and this leash helps me do just that. The buckle adjusts to easily go around my waist, trees, restaurant tables whenever I want Charlie to lounge. 

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This is the perfect solution for having your dog around your campsite. String the line up in between two trees and attach the leash to the included swivel locking carabiner. It lets your dog explore without letting him wander around bothering other campers.

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I own three of these bowls and I bring them everywhere. They pack down small, so it’s easy to toss them in my bag and bring them to work or the crag. It’s also safe to throw in the washer so it’s easy to clean. 

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Charlie is a baby when it comes to having his nails clipped and I’ve found the process is easier when I use this dremel. The tool has two-speed settings so you go fast or slow, depending on your pups liking.

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This powder is essential for all outdoorsy dog owners. If your dog snags his nail on a rock or cuts his paw, this powder will stop a bleed until you can get to a place to clean out the wound.

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I’m a big proponent of buying pre-made first aid kits. Unless you’re medically trained, it can be a bear to compile a first aid kit correctly on your own. This kit has everything you need for a hike for you and your dog.

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This brand is known for producing high-quality sled dog harnesses that are designed to pull weight over long distances. This is my go-to around town and trail running harness for my dog. It distributes the weight perfectly and allows him to pull effectively if I decide to take him skijoring. 

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As a responsible dog owner, I religiously pack out my dog’s business. For the longest time, I struggled with knowing how to best store it—until I found the Turdlebag which seals the used bags inside a waxed-canvas stuff sack.

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Raiding troops of baboons face off against city employees armed with paintball guns on a regular basis. And it brings into question the very way we coexist with nature.

May 9 was like any other day at the Happy Valley homeless shelter near Cape Town: tranquil—until the baboons arrived. At 10 a.m., several residents sat smoking hand-rolled cigarettes beneath the trees, gazing out over the smooth waters of False Bay. The baboons had gathered on a ridge high above the gorge, clambering over sandstone boulders against a backdrop of silver cloud.

“Soon they’ll be down here,” said supervisor Patrick Msakayeya, 29, sitting in his office with the screen door latched shut. He watched the baboons, still dark specks in the distance. “They know what time we serve food. Usually they come right before lunch.”

(Shaun Swingler)

(Shaun Swingler)

(Shaun Swingler)

Two hours later, the troop had descended. An alpha male with the physique of a small bear squatted on the kitchen roof, waiting for a gap to enter. Two juveniles leaped up to join him, adding to the collection of muddied paw prints on the walls. A mother baboon paced in front of the building with an infant clutching her breast, glowering at anyone who dared approach her. “It’s always like this,” said Msakayeya.

This interspecies battle recurs daily on Cape Town’s southern peninsula, a crooked rocky finger that curls into the Atlantic. Confined to a narrow mountain range by urban sprawl, ten chacma baboon troops, each comprising between 20 and 70 individuals, engage in an incessant quest to rob food from adjacent neighborhoods. They rifle through trash, break into homes and cars, and threaten residents with their inch-long fangs. To repel them, the city employs rangers armed with flares and paintball guns, but the baboons are persistent. When the rangers open fire, the troops retreat to the hills, circling back as soon as they can. These running battles have become a flashpoint for deeper tensions in wildlife conservation, spawning bitter disputes not just about baboon management but also about how to coexist with nature.

As human settlements expand across the earth’s surface, conflicts with wildlife are increasing. According to a review in the journal Animal Conservation, this represents “one of the most widespread and intractable issues facing [conservationists] today.” Researchers have been paying closer attention to these clashes: The number of scientific articles published annually about human-wildlife conflict (ranging from grain theft by rodents to farmers being trampled by elephants) increased from zero to more than 700 between 1995 and 2015, as indexed by Google Scholar. There have even been calls to coin an entire new discipline for studying the issue: anthrotherology, combining the Greek words for human (anthropos) and wild animal (ther). To understand the anthrotherologist’s dilemma, look to other countries’ parallels, like Japan’s wild hog problem or, closer to home, many national parks’ issues with bears. Humans—whether shooting animals or feeding them junk food or advocating for their rights—always complicate things.

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Spearheading the resistance to Cape Town’s baboon management is Jenni Trethowan, an activist whose relationship with environmental authorities has run to ruin in the past 25 years. A slender, middle-age woman, Trethowan once ran baboon monitoring programs on behalf of the city, but today she is excluded from all management decisions, instead occupying a self-styled watchdog position at the periphery.

Known by many Capetonians as “the baboon lady,” Trethowan has an abiding reputation as an expert and wields considerable influence outside scientific circles, appearing regularly in newspapers and on radio shows. Her mistrust of prevailing anti-raiding protocols like aiming paintballs at baboons, which she deems ill-conceived and inhumane, has spurred groundswells of opposition among locals and, via social media, a growing international army of online activists. “The heart of the problem is that baboons get easy rewards in residential areas,” Trethowan told me. “We’re a wasteful species and throw away huge quantities of food. We should be focusing on that, not killing healthy animals for raiding.”

Researchers and conservationists say that although Trethowan’s efforts are rooted in genuine care, they spread misinformation and ultimately undermine baboon welfare. The city asserts that its approach is essential for sustaining viable troops on the peninsula, where baboons have established strong raiding traditions and lost their fear of humans. Once baboons learn to associate residential areas with food, they seldom revert to natural foraging, their intelligence and dexterity predisposing them to becoming pests.

“If we’re going to coexist with baboons in this highly transformed landscape, we’ll need to keep making unpopular decisions,” says Justin O’Riain, an ecologist at the University of Cape Town who founded the Baboon Research Unit (BRU) in 2006. “Wildlife management can be ugly.”

While it remains legal to hunt baboons in many part of South Africa, the peninsula’s baboons have been formally protected since 1998. This has not stopped residents from responding violently to raids, with scenes often assuming a nightmarish tilt. In 2011, an elderly man fatally shot a baboon, claiming it had attacked his wife after nine other baboons stormed their kitchen. Last year, at a naval barracks, a raiding juvenile died after being shot with pellets and stoned.

To quell skirmishes, the city has resolved to chase troops from urban areas, with strictly governed provisions for culling particularly troublesome individuals. Baboons that commit serious offenses—attacking humans, breaking into homes, raiding more than five times in a single week—are placed on observation and their behavior is written up in detailed case files. Animals deemed irredeemable are killed by lethal injection.

Since 2009, officials have culled 65 baboons for posing threats to public health and safety, a practice that Trethowan’s nonprofit organization, Baboon Matters, considers abhorrent. A message on the organization’s website pledges: “We will continue to provide a voice for baboons…to ensure that lethal management becomes a thing of the past.”

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(Shaun Swingler)

(Shaun Swingler)

(Shaun Swingler)

Trethowan first got involved in baboon conservation in the early 1990s, a few years after officials culled an entire troop near the small beachside town of Kommetjie, where she still lives today. By 1998, Trethowan was running the city’s first baboon monitoring project, training unemployed men from a nearby township to “hold the line” and ward burgling troops away from Kommetjie. She also set up a small ecotourism venture called Baboon Stories, advertising guided walking tours. On several occasions, while visiting the animals, Trethowan had the sensation of communicating with them directly. When she was invited to give an introductory speech when the primatologist Jane Goodall visited South Africa in 2008, Trethowan approached one of the troops for advice.

“I walked up to Eric, one of the alpha males, and asked him what I needed to say. I got the message as clear as daylight: ‘You are a wasteful species. You are wasteful with your emotions, with your things, with your knowledge,’” she says. “What I said to Jane Goodall came straight from Eric the baboon.”

Pronouncements such as these—mixing gut-feel reasoning with a lack of factual evidence—have placed Trethowan at odds with the scientific community, with whom she has been embroiled in an acrimonious spat for more than a decade. In the beginning, the two sides were natural allies; Trethowan’s advocacy played a key role in obtaining protected status for the peninsula baboons in 1998. “We were great friends at first,” says O’Riain, the ecologist, who has since become one of Trethowan’s fiercest sparring partners. “She really brought attention to the plight of Cape Town’s troops, which were in decline due to human development.”

Yet disagreements about how to manage the animals soon formed a split. The trouble started, O’Riain says, when one of his students reported Trethowan’s monitors for throwing rocks at the troops while herding them from town. Trethowan accused the student of lying and then laid cruelty charges against O’Riain, who had fitted several baboons with GPS collars to map their home ranges. When the story ran on the front page of a prominent local newspaper, senior university officials hauled in O’Riain for questioning. (A faculty ethics committee had already cleared the project.) His relationship with Trethowan has never recovered.

“She cares deeply for animals, just like I do, but we have completely different approaches,” says O’Riain. “She seems to want to hold and protect them. I want them wild and at a distance, doing their own thing.”

In time, their dispute widened into an ideological gulf that splits many other conservation movements globally—like the eradication of invasive mammals from Atlantic Islands or deer culling in the United States. When O’Riain’s students released data showing that Cape Town’s baboon population was expanding at an average rate of 4 percent each year, Trethowan maintained that the animals were still at risk. “Baboon troop growth is either stagnant or declining,” she told National Geographic in 2016, more than a decade after the first studies were published.

Of course, she vehemently objected when, in 2012, researchers first proposed keeping raiding animals at bay with paintball guns. As the fight roiled on, O’Riain convened a public meeting, inviting UC San Diego professor Shirley Strum, an anthropologist and global baboon expert, to share her views. According to O’Riain, Strum told the audience that Cape Town’s troops were a “disgrace.”

“She’d never seen such terrible raiding behavior,” says O’Riain. “She said that people opposed to scaring the baboons were complicit. Her exact words were: ‘They’ve been loving the baboons to death.’”

Trethowan was not invited to that meeting. She’d lost her baboon monitoring contract to a rival company in 2009 and had been banned from conducting walking tours, which she’d been conducting without a permit. “People hate us,” she says. “Baboon Matters has zero say in decisions anymore.”

Yet the organization has a large social media presence, with more than 21,000 followers on Facebook alone. When a mountain fire killed 12 baboons in 2015, Baboon Matters blamed monitors for herding the troop into burning areas, filming a conspiratorial YouTube video that briefly went viral. When a young baboon died from injuries sustained in a separate fire this January, the organization accused authorities of negligence, provoking a heated public outcry. “You cruel bitch! You should have died in that fire,” a passing motorist yelled at one baboon monitor soon afterward.

The city has struggled to counter many of these claims, tangled in unwieldy bureaucratic procedures. When controversies break, the city often fails to respond before Baboon Matters. Media releases are carefully vetted, slowing communication. A blanket ban on filming baboons or accompanying monitors, imposed after documentary crews baited troops with food, inhibits reporting. (For this story, we skirted the ban by locating a troop ourselves and observing their raid, with permission, on private land.) “It is regrettable that factually inaccurate information is disseminated to the public,” said Brett Herron, a councilor for the City of Cape Town. “But lobby groups exist in every sector of society, and they have a right to express their views.”

This January, the city’s current monitoring contractor, Human Wildlife Solutions (HWS), attempted to hit back on Facebook. “Beware fake news! The [Cape Town baboon] population is not at risk or in any danger.” The post was shared twice, while a response from Baboon Matters was shared more than 40 times.

Amid all this, HWS has been more successful in decreasing raids: According to its comprehensive monthly reports, the 11 managed troops, numbering some 420 individuals in total, have spent less than 2 percent of their time in urban areas since 2012. These figures obscure raids by individual baboons, painting a slightly rosier picture than many residents experience, but nevertheless represent a striking success. “The problem is largely under control now,” says O’Riain. “But certain areas are still a disaster.”

Directly opposite Happy Valley, at a grim naval barracks, the baboons have begun scaling the walls. Most of the apartment windows are wide open, defying regulations issued by the city to deter raiding—an oversight both Trethowan and HWS have repeatedly pointed out. By the time the monitors arrive, several animals have swung inside and are rummaging through cupboards and garbage. They scatter over the roofs as the city monitors yell and pump paintballs, many baboons dropping their loot and tumbling 30 feet to the ground.

One of the monitors pursues a breakaway group up a hill, passing one of the homeless shelter’s large dormitories. A small plaque marks the spot where, in 2010, an elderly man died after being knocked over by a fleeing baboon. A few residents stand at the entrance, drawing the doors shut after driving an animal from their room. “I can’t stand this shit anymore,” one of the men mutters. “It’s impossible to live like this.”

Leaving them behind, the monitor ascends a stony hill behind the building as one of his colleagues approaches from the left, driving a separate band of raiders from the military flats. It falls suddenly quiet at the edge of the property, the dark cliffs sweeping into the sky. Another monitor wipes sweat from his eyes after firing off a final round. “They never stop trying,” he says.

Five exercises that will guarantee you have the strength to adventure all weekend, well into your eighties

Like most athletes who would rather be outdoors running, riding, swimming, or hiking, I don’t set aside much time for the gym. Yet I fully realize the importance of building general strength and mobility—not just to support my outdoor activities, but also for everyday health and fitness. I’d like to be able to unload groceries, haul suitcases up and down stairs, and bend over to put on my shoes well into my eighties. That means I have to go to the gym a few days a week. But when I’m there, I try to focus solely on the essentials. (If you’re willing to buy a kettlebell, some dumbbells, and a pull-up bar, you don’t even need to leave your home.)

Thinking I might be on to something good—but far from sure—I recently worked up the courage to put my 35-to-40-minute routine to the ultimate test: Twitter.

Minimalist workout for all-around strength:
-3×6 pull-up
-3×8 goblet squat
-3×16 push-up
-3×8 lunge
-3×8 single-leg deadlift
(2-3x week)

— Brad Stulberg (@BStulberg) August 11, 2017

The response was overwhelmingly positive, and a handful of experts liked or retweeted the post. I wanted to learn more about why they agreed, so I reached out to some of the best in the business for details.

• “What you have designed is an effective ‘minimalist’ workout that travels well, easily adapted to many different environments with minimum equipment necessary,” says Vern Gambetta, a veteran strength coach who works with numerous world champion athletes and professional sports teams.
• “Simple beats optimal,” according to Brett Bartholomew, a strength and conditioning coach for NFL football players and the author of Conscious Coaching. “Habits work. Consistency works. The simpler something is, the more indelible it becomes.”
• “This workout hits four major basic movements: push, pull, squat, and hinge,” comments Michael Lord, a sports chiropractor who treats and trains elite athletes in Northern California. “It also uses full ranges of motions, so it’s accomplishing mobility work within a strength routine.”

Here’s a closer look at the routine and some additional insight from the pros. Lord recommends going through this workout at least twice a week, starting by doing three sets of each exercise (with one to two minutes of rest in between) before moving to the next. As for how many reps you should do in each set, Lord says to pick a number that will leave you fatigued by the end of the last set, but not so tired that your form is falling apart. For the exercises that involve dumbbells, select a weight that will put you in the six-to-12-rep range, he says.

As you get stronger, increase the weight or up the reps. According to Bartholomew, doing so will help promote continuous adaptation. If you want to add an aerobic boost to the workout, Gambetta suggests either adding 30 seconds of rope jumping or running in place between each exercise or making the workout a circuit. (In other words: Rather than doing three consecutive sets of each exercise with prolonged rest between each set, do three rounds, going from one exercise to the next, with only ten to 15 seconds of rest.)

Pull-Up

Grip the bar with your palms facing out and hands slightly wider than shoulder-width apart. Pull yourself up so your chin is above the bar. Hold for one second. Then extend all the way down so your arms are straight and elbows are locked. Throughout the movement, focus on keeping your core taut. You’ll know you’re achieving this because your legs won’t be swinging around. “Pull-ups are foundational, akin to eating your fruits and vegetables,” says Lord. “They include major muscles of the shoulders, upper back, and torso and train postural strength and core stability as much as the shoulders when performed properly.”

Goblet Squat

Stand with your legs slightly wider than shoulder-width apart, feet pointing slightly out. Hold a kettlebell by the horns, or a dumbbell with palms facing up, close to your chest. Squat down, keeping your heels on the ground. At the lowest point, your butt should be parallel to or just below your knees. Then push up to a standing positioning, locking your knees at the top. “This movement carries a low risk of injury and helps keep your body in alignment,” says Bartholomew. “Since the weight is held close to your chest, not only is it a great tactile reminder to keep proper posture while squatting, but it also allows you to easily put the weight down if fatigued.”

Push-Up

Begin with your chest down and palms pressing into the ground, thumbs at or a little outside of your nipples. Press up, locking your elbows at the top. Lower your back all the way down, so your chest hovers just a centimeter or two off the ground. Press up. Repeat. Be sure to tuck in your stomach and keep your core tight throughout the movement so you have minimal arch in your spine. “It seems simple, but when you break it down, a push-up is a great expression of core stability and connecting the upper and lower body,” says Lord. “A push-up is not only about strengthening your shoulders and chest, but also about strengthening your core; it’s like a dynamic plank.”

Standing Lunge or Split Squat

Stand straight, toes pointing forward, feet about six inches apart. If you’re using dumbbells to increase the challenge, hold an equal weight in each hand at your sides, arms straight. Step forward with either foot so your knee is above your ankle. Push through the heel of the forward leg to return to an upright standing positioning. Repeat, this time stepping down with the opposite leg. “Lunges target multiple muscle groups and transfer to many movements in daily life,” says Bartholomew. “You can also experiment with lateral lunges. It’s the same idea as a straight lunge, only you hold a single dumbbell at your chest and step out horizontally, lunging from side to side. This takes you out of straight-line movements, working other muscle groups that are often neglected by runners and cyclists.”

Single-Leg Deadlift

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Stand on one leg, keeping your knee slightly bent. If you’re using dumbbells, hold them on the same side as the leg you’re standing on. Bend forward at the hip, extending your free leg straight behind you for balance. Continue lowering until your chest is parallel with the ground, dumbbell almost touching the floor. Then press back to an upright position. “This exercise brings it home as it combines the challenges of single-leg stability, lower-body mobility, strength, and posture,” says Lord.

Brad Stulberg (@Bstulberg) writes Outside’s Science of Performance column and is the author of the new book Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout, and Thrive with the New Science of Success.

Who knew state parks were this good?

National parks are our nation’s treasures, for sure. But in the country’s more popular national parks (we’re looking at you, Grand Canyon and Yosemite), you often have to deal with crowds, traffic, sold-out campsites, and pricey entry fees just to get a partial view of the North Rim or Half Dome. So here’s a thought: Make a trek to a stunning state park instead, and there’s a good chance you’ll have the place entirely to yourself. Here are some unheralded classics.

Chugach State Park, Alaska

Alaska’s Chugach State Park is massive—495,000 acres—making it bigger than both Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park and Utah’s Zion National Park put together and one of the four largest state parks in the country. Plus, it’s absurdly accessible, located just seven miles east of Anchorage. You can spot glaciers, ice fields, and moose; explore 280 miles of trails via mountain bike or cross-country skis; and if you’re brave enough, surf the Bore Tide when the waves are big enough in Turnagain Arm. Rent a year-round backcountry cabin or yurt from the Eagle River Nature Center (from $70), where you’ll hike more than a mile in and can watch the Northern Lights from your porch.

Curt Gowdy State Park, Wyoming

Located between Laramie and Cheyenne, Curt Gowdy State Park has made a name for itself in recent years as a major mountain biking destination. The park’s 35 miles of purpose-built singletrack were awarded Epic status by the International Mountain Biking Association in 2009. Pitch a tent in the campground overlooking Granite Springs Reservoir. Not a mountain biker? You can paddle a canoe, fish for rainbow trout or kokanee salmon in one of three reservoirs, or trail run for days. Don’t miss the new Dad’s Café in Cheyenne for breakfast tamales or a post-ride Reuben.

Smith Rock State Park, Oregon

Smith Rock State Park, in the tiny central Oregon town of Terrebonne, is known as the birthplace of U.S. sport climbing in the 1980s. Today, there are about 2,000 routes for all levels, with more than 1,000 bolted routes for sport climbers. This 650-acre park has ample recreation for nonclimbers, too, including preinstalled slacklines and a dozen hiking trails. The popular walk-in campground, called the Bivy, is first-come, first-served, or you can book a luxury tent and outdoor fireside massage at Panacea Resort (from $350), 15 miles away.

D.L. Bliss State Park, California

While the hordes of Lake Tahoe tourists congregate at nearby Emerald Bay State Park, you can sneak off to D.L. Bliss State Park, also on the west shore of Lake Tahoe, for a gorgeous white-sand beach, summertime camping with easy lake access, cliff jumping, bouldering, and the trailhead of the eight-mile Rubicon Trail, which traverses a bluff along the lake all the way to Emerald Bay. Grab supplies like gourmet marshmallows, cheese, salami, and craft beer at the West Shore Market as you leave Tahoe City, or pick up pizzas to eat on the beach at West Shore Pizza in the sleepy town of Tahoma. Book a lodge room or private cabin at the Cottage Inn (from $165), where breakfast and happy hour come included, and you’ll be 20 minutes from the park.

Franconia Notch State Park, New Hampshire

Located deep in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, Franconia Notch State Park has a little something for everyone. Backpackers can set out on the Appalachian Trail. Boaters can rent a canoe on Echo Lake. Hikers can spot waterfalls in Flume Gorge. In winter, you can ski the longest vertical drop in New Hampshire on the slopes of Cannon Mountain and even winter camp at the park’s Lafayette Campground. Hit up One Love Brewery in nearby Lincoln for beer and a burger after a day in the mountains. Book a room at the Woodstock Inn (from $101), and you can sign up for a morning yoga class in the on-site brewery.

Eldorado Canyon State Park, Colorado

Eldorado Canyon State Park, or Eldo, as locals call it, is a climber’s haven on the outskirts of Boulder, with more than 500 mainly trad routes up sheer, golden sandstone walls. The trails are good—three main hiking trails and some limited mountain biking—but you’ll come for the climbing or to sit by the shores of South Boulder Creek and look up at the steep canyon walls. Follow the climbers to the cash-only Southern Sun afterward for grub and an IPA. You can’t camp in the park, but there’s plenty of camping nearby, or get a hotel room with a bouldering wall at Basecamp Boulder (from $299).