Month: March 2019

It’s only going to happen once in our lifetimes—better make sure you don’t screw up your soundtrack

Just about everyone I know is talking about the August 21 eclipse. I’ve also started exhibiting symptoms of ecliptomania, a term coined (I believe) in 1991, when an eclipse in Hawaii drew 60,000 people to the island. Like so many interstellar preppers, I’ve armed myself with cheap paper shades and newfound Scrabble winners, from “annularity” to “umbra.” As the otherworldly overlap approaches, I’m making anxious internet searches and phone calls to friends, perusing Google Maps for two-lane back roads that my wife and friends and I might take to get ourselves into the eclipse totality area from the 99.5 percent occluded area near our home in Newberg, Oregon, exactly five miles from the edge of the approaching shadow of the moon.

There’s just one other detail that will make our once-in-a-lifetime experience complete: music. The hippest ancient philosophers Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle advanced the idea of musica universalis—the music of the spheres—that the movements of the sun, moon, and planets thrum with interplanetary harmonies that we can’t hear but shape our reality. Hence, it feels necessary to consider the ten most fitting musical numbers for the core of the eclipse, which, like the greatest pop songs, is a few minutes long. Coincidence?

“Cosmogony,” Bjork

Bjork’s music (and live shows) took a trippy, outer-spacey vibe with 2011’s Biophilia album, as evidenced by gorgeous tracks like “Cosmogony.” It’s a dreamy, woozy, gut-stirring lullaby, by turns searching, calming, and full of pathos: And they say back then our universe / Was an empty sea, until a silver fox / And her cunning mate began to sing / A song that became the world we know.

“Don’t Bother They’re Here,” Stars of the Lid

Stars of the Lid, a drone duo from Austin, Texas, weaves aural tapestries ringing with mesmerizing harmonies that are simultaneously tender and taut. Their entire 2007 double album, And Their Refinement of the Decline, would be a fitting soundtrack, but start with this track and “A Meaningful Moment Through a Meaning(less) Process.”

“Dreamlove,” The Bright Light Social Hour

The Austin-based psychedelic rockers released their second full-length album, Space is Still the Place, in 2015 after years of touring the United States and cranking tunes in their van. Inspired in name by Afro-futurism pioneer Sun Ra’s 1974 film, Space Is the Place, the whole record’s blistering, tranquil, and futuristic harmonies rumble with a cavalcade of meaty riffs on Hammond organ and electric guitar. Spacing out like a desert mirage one second, pulsating like a house music DJ the next, “Dreamlove” is interspersed with dreamy synths and layered, eerie vocals that will have you bobbing your head as you watch the sky.

“The Planets,” Opus 32, Gustav Horst

Written around 1916, this seven-movement suite for orchestra is a truly beautiful trip, especially the second movement, also known as “Venus, Bringer of Peace,” a shimmering skyscape of harps, flutes, oboes, glockenspiel, and solos on violin. With its mournful ascending French horn intro, one can’t help but hear the influence on American composer John Williams—specifically the first few bars of “Ben’s Death and TIE Fighter Attack,” and “Leia’s Theme” from Episode IV: A New Hope.

“Also Sprach Zarathustra,” Richard Strauss

A classic in many forms. Whether it’s a recording of Strauss’ eery, 30-minute tone poem written in 1896 (the version known from Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, 2001: A Space Oddyssey), Deodata’s funky interpretation featured in the iconic Peter Sellars movie Being There, or one of jam band Phish’s improvisatory takes (like this one recorded in 2010), the composition is an ideal soundtrack for celestial travels.

“Moonbuilding 2703 AD,” The Orb

The ambient house music pioneers led by Dr. Alex Paterson are best known for the early ’90s track “Little Fluffy Clouds,” the first on their debut 1991 record, Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld. Some 25 years later, the Orb would release this spacey paean to lunar bodies, meandering yet crisp and skittering with staccato, upbeat rhythms.

“Peace Piece,” Bill Evans

From Evans’ 1959 landmark jazz record, Everybody Digs Bill Evans, “Peace Piece” is a pastoral soundscape of vivid, chirping notes overlaid on an ostinato, an oscillating two-tone background played on the bass keys with sedative tranquility, building the contrasting voices to a serene conclusion. Black Ray-Ban Wayfarers not included but recommended.

“Dark Star,” Grateful Dead

The music never stops. Fifty years since they formed, the band’s appeal lives and grows, as evidenced by Amazon’s recent, six-part Long Strange Trip documentary, Dead and Co.’s stadium shows, and more and more music remastered for fresh ears. Countless jams by the “band beyond description” would be apropos, but “Dark Star,” the band’s famously long, searching fugue, is a good place to start.

“Eclipse,” Pink Floyd

Could it be any other? Whether or not you believe in the urban legend that it’s a psychedelic soundtrack to The Wizard of Oz, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon can be synced pretty perfectly as an eclipse soundtrack. The whole record’s lyrics, soaring guitars, sociopolitical dissection, and rousing choruses were spawned from the band’s haziest, most creative era. Turn it on 40 minutes before totality to hear “Eclipse,” Roger Waters’ grand, two-minute-three-second climax at the big moment. And all that is now / And all that is gone / And all that’s to come / And everything under the sun is in tune / But the sun is eclipsed by the moon.

“Here Comes the Sun,” The Beatles

Inevitably, when the sun reemerges from behind the shadowing moon, eclipse watchers report rapturous feelings of oneness with Mother Nature, the cosmos, and our fellow humans. Then the party really starts. What better time to pump up George Harrison’s ode to optimism, recorded for Abbey Road in 1969 at Eric Clapton’s house. Here comes the sun. It’s alright!

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The shacket might be the most versatile piece of clothing in your closet. Thicker than a button-down and lighter than a coat, it makes a great mid-layer for resort days and can be a stand-alone piece during shoulder season’s awkward weather when it’s too warm for a puffy but too cold to venture out without a layer. We scoured the internet and picked the best looking and most versatile shirt jackets for spring.

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The Maritime looks and feels like a classic thanks to the use of Italian lambswool (blended with nylon for durability), which is both warm and water resistant. It’s thinner than some of the jackets on this list, but still heavy enough to stand alone on a spring day.

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Flylow took your favorite flannel and boosted it with 40 grams of synthetic insulation. It’s super soft, super comfy, and now super warm.

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Nau’s version of the shirt jacket isn’t cheap, but we’re smitten with how they took a work shirt and turned it into a performance beast, with 700-fill goose down and a durable water repellent finish.

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Puffy shirt jackets have become ubiquitous, but Rab’s version stands out from the crowd thanks to the slim cut and western-inspired details in the buttons and pockets. The Downtime also has technical chops as it's stuffed with 650-fill down and coated with a DWR finish. 

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Sometimes you just want to drink whiskey and chop wood. Enter the Stilson, a blend of nylon and thick performance wool with a woven poly liner for silky comfort. You could opt for a more muted gray color, but we say go for the red checkered pattern.

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Last year, the S-Lab Sense Ultra became Salomon’s bestselling S-Lab product to date. The shoe, co-designed with John Muir Trail FKT holder and two-time Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc champion François D’Haene, was the brand’s first foray into an ultra-specific line of shoes.

On Thursday, the French brand launched an updated version, called the S-Lab Ultra. (The shoe launched online last month and is now available in retail stores.)

This shoe is made to support ultra-distance-style pounding.To that end, it features a graduated stack; sizes above nine have increasingly higher levels of cushion to account for the fact that taller runners put more stress on their feet. It also has a polyurethane insert, intended to help prevent the shoe from packing out and breaking down over the course of a long race. 

The new version is largely the same, with slight updates to the upper. Most noticeable: a striking red-and-purple graphic and an external cinching system, which tightens around the foot when you draw the laces in. Like all of Salomon’s S-Lab shoes, the S-Lab Ultra is unisex.

D’Haene famously wore a single pair of the S-Lab Ultras on his way to victory at the 2017 UTMB, a 106-mile race around the Mont Blanc massif in the Alps. To celebrate D’Haene’s victory and the launch of the new shoe, Salomon has also released a special-edition version with D’Haene’s signature and the UTMB course profile printed on the heel. The brand made just 171 pairs to commemorate UTMB’s 171 kilometers.

Unfortunately, the special-edition shoes are available only in Europe, so U.S. readers won’t be able to partake. However, the regular S-Lab Ultra is now available worldwide, and a more consumer-friendly Pro version ($150) is set to launch in August. The Pro will be slightly wider and not as lightweight, due to differences in the upper and the last.

I haven’t had the chance to test the new Pro version yet, but I’ll have my hands on a pair soon and look forward to sharing my first impressions.

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If you’ve ever topped out on a peak in Alaska’s Brooks Range, or floated through Idaho’s Frank Church/River of No Return Wilderness, you’ve perhaps had the sensation that the surrounding wild country rolls on forever.

It’s a pleasant feeling. It’s also a feeling that has never been more misguided.

Studies published in the last few years have arrived at the same blunt conclusion: the world’s last, big wildlands are disappearing, even faster than researchers expected.

“We are running out of wilderness,” James Watson, director of the science and research initiative at the Wildlife Conservation Society, told fellow scientists last summer at the International Congress for Conservation Biology in Cartagena, Colombia. Watson, an associate professor fellow in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Queensland, Australia, pointed to a 2016 study in which he and colleagues described “catastrophic declines” worldwide in the extent of terrestrial areas that remain mostly free of human disturbance and retain their ecological and biological integrity.

“Our calculation is that there will be no globally significant wilderness in 50 years time,” Watson told Outside recently. “There will be patches of green, but there will be nothing big, anymore.”

In the series of studies starting in 2016, Watson and colleagues found that nearly 10 percent of the world’s terrestrial wilderness has been lost in about 25 years. That’s an area half the size of Australia. Much of the land that remains nearly untouched is desert, tundra, boreal forest “and the most remote moist tropical forests of the Amazon and Congo Basins”—in short, land that doesn’t yield easily to agriculture.

One bright spot: More than 80 percent of this wilderness still lies in large, contiguous chunks of at least 6,200 square miles, the authors found. (It’s an arbitrary number, they acknowledge, but of a size they consider globally significant for the functions it can perform.) Even so, the authors found “substantial erosion” of these big areas over the past two decades. Seventy-four percent of the blocks had shrunk. Many of the earth’s terrestrial biomes, or natural communities of flora and fauna, have little to no globally significant wilderness remaining, they wrote.

These 2016 studies aren’t the only ones to record such grim losses. Not long ago, Peter Potapov wondered how some of the planet’s least-touched forests were faring. Potapov, a research associate professor at the University of Maryland, and his colleagues used satellite images to compare how these intact forests had changed between 2000 and 2013.

What they found was sobering. The extent of these landscapes worldwide shrank by more than seven percent in just 13 years. That’s a loss of 571,000 square miles—or more than twice the size of Texas—according to their 2017 study, “The Last Frontiers of Wilderness.” These large, intact forests are still found around the world. About half of what remains lies in the world’s tropical regions, the authors said. Most of the losses occurred there—mostly in Brazil, though also in Africa. But the Northern Hemisphere lost forest, too. More than one-third of the world’s remaining large intact forest acreage lies in the boreal forests of the far north, mainly in Canada and Russia. Canada lost 88,000 square miles during that period, while Northern Eurasia lost 70,000 square miles, the study found. Elsewhere, Romania lost all of its large intact forest. Paraguay lost almost 80 percent. At the current rate, about 20 countries—including Bolivia, Congo, and Myanmar—will lose all of their large forests in the next 60 years, the authors predicted.

The culprits, of course, are humans, with our unprecedented reach and our ever-increasing appetite for land, whether to access timber, food, minerals, or energy. Loss of large wilderness typically follows a pattern. First, industrial logging opens up the land. The plow then follows the axe. “In the Brazilian Amazon, 16 percent of logged areas are cleared for agriculture in the first year following logging, with further losses of more than 5 percent per year for the next four years,” Watson and his colleagues noted in their work. Roads appear—frequently built for mining and energy exploration—that further fragment the landscape. By one estimate, more than 15 million miles of new roads will be built globally by 2050. Invasive species hitch a ride.

This cascade alters the land and its ability to function forever. Restoration can help, even a lot. But protection efforts are failing to keep pace: loss of wilderness worldwide is nearly double the rate of conservation, Watson and his co-authors found.

The research suggests that the land will never be the same, at least not in human lifetimes. And the implications we face because of this loss include effects on climate change, extinction of species, and the spread of disease. “The continued loss of wilderness areas is a globally significant problem with largely irreversible outcomes for both humans and nature,” Watson and his co-authors wrote.  

For one, there’s growing evidence that big pieces of nearly unaltered land, and intact forests in particular, mitigate climate change. More than one-quarter of all the CO2 that humans have contributed to the atmosphere since 1870 has come from deforestation and degradation of forests. “Intact forests store more carbon than logged, degraded or planted forests in ecologically comparable locations,” Watson and his colleagues reported in a new paper in Nature Ecology & Evolution. Intact forests function as major “net carbon sinks,” sequestering carbon in trees, plants and soil. If the world wants to hit the goals of the Paris Agreement, it needs these forests, the authors wrote.

These areas also regulate the weather. Air that passes over intact tropical forests “produces at least twice as much rain as air that passes over degraded or non-forest areas,” scientists have found. In Australia, some research found that the degradation and loss of intact forest increased the number of dry and hot days, decreased daily rainfall intensity, and increased drought duration during El Niño years.

Wildlife depends on intact forests. Watson called these places “arks” and “strongholds,” and said they provide refuge and genetic diversity—key as areas elsewhere are squeezed. And we depend on them, too. “At least 250 million people live in forests,” he his co-authors said in the new paper, “and for many of them, their cultural identities are deeply rooted in the plant and animal species found there.” Forests continue to be the source of new medicines for humanity. And several infectious diseases associated with forests, including Ebola, dengue fever, and Zika “are undergoing changes in risk to humans due to deforestation, forest degradation and human encroachment,” the authors wrote.

Which is not to say no progress is being made. Potapov’s study found that 12 percent of intact forest landscapes were protected to international standards. And, encouragingly, in some places, erosion of forests was up to four times higher outside of protected areas than within them.

But protections were more successful at stopping timber harvesting than agriculture, Potapov’s study found. And protections are only as good as the enforcement. In Indonesia, for instance, there are “paper parks” that exist mostly in name, Potapov told Outside. Russia built major facilities in Sochi National Park so it could hold events for the Sochi Winter Olympics—an intrusion that introduced a bark beetle that’s now decimating the region’s trees, he said.

What should be done?

The U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity calls for at least 17 percent of the world’s land and inland waters to be conserved by the year 2020. The same convention calls for halving the rate of loss “of all natural habitats, including forests”—and where possible, reducing the loss to near zero. Only a handful of countries are on track to meeting the ambitious so-called “Aichi target” of 17 percent, however. 

Preservation advocates say that international policies and incentives often emphasize the extent of forest protected, rather than the quality of the forest protected. What’s more, most countries don’t set goals for wilderness protection. “We’re arguing that not all forests are equal,” said Watson, and that intact forests are worth prioritizing for conservation. Policies and incentives need to shift to take into account the value of these last wild places, he and others argue.

Enforcement of recent anti-deforestation efforts needs to be bolstered, so it’s clear that trees from intact forests aren’t entering the world’s supply chain, they say.

In the past, the U.S. has been progressive in protecting large tracts of land. Take the 1964 Wilderness Act and the 2001 Roadless Rule, the latter of which prohibits road-building and timber harvesting on nearly 60 million acres of inventoried roadless public lands. However, those who advocate for large areas of wilderness suggested the country has backslid of late, pointing to recent actions such as Congress’ vote to drill on the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski’s attempts to open up the old-growth forests of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest to timber harvesting.

There are some, though, who see a problem with this clarion call to protect the world’s wilderness. Robin Chazdon, a research professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, doesn’t argue that the world needs to conserve its last big, wild places. But the traditional Western scientific approach is to put nature first, then figure out how people can accommodate nature, says Chazdon, who is also the executive director of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation. “That kind of scientific approach to policy making has failed,” she says. If you want to have areas that are off-limits to larger-scale development or exploitation, she says, “You have to provide these countries other ways of meeting their needs.” Otherwise, the call for conservation just looks like a bunch of white men from rich countries—however well-intentioned they may be—telling poorer countries what to do, she says. 

One promising path with wide support is giving indigenous communities title and management over their traditional lands. “For instance, the creation and management of indigenous territories has reduced (although, as with protected areas, not halted) deforestation across the Amazon Basin,” Watson and his colleagues wrote. Similar management is underway with First Nations governments in the Peel Watershed of Canada’s Yukon. It helps that, in February, the government of Justin Trudeau marked $1 billion in its 2018 budget to protect land and water over the next five years to help the country reach its Aichi targets.

Asked if he was optimistic about the future, Watson said technology, such as satellite imagery, now gives politicians and scientists more information about wilderness, so they could do the right thing and save it. He was less optimistic they would do so, however. “The good news is that we still have time,” Watson says. "Quite frankly, the next 20 years count." We still have time, he says, but it's running out. 

The books, movies, music, and podcasts we couldn’t stop talking about

We’ve been doing a lot of reading and listening in September, because who has time to sit down and watch things when you need to pack all the fun into the final days of summer?

What We Read

I read My Absolute Darling, by Gabriel Tallent. A note to the reader: This book is dark. A conspiracy nut/survivalist-type father is raising his daughter, Turtle, alone on the Mendocino coast, where he both trains her to become an expert marksman and outdoorswoman and repeatedly rapes her. Grim, yes. But Turtle is one of the all-time great characters in literature. To watch her grapple with her future, her father, her place in the world, makes for the most arresting book I’ve read in years. I can’t stop telling people about it. Tallent’s description of the California coast is breathtaking, too.

—Jonah Ogles, articles editor

Quartz launched a newsletter this month called Quartz Obsession, which zeros in on a different topic every afternoon. I’ve been reading it since its launch and can confirm it’s something to be obsessed with. Topics thus far have included fatbergs, 808 drum machines, and elevator buttons.

—Jenny Earnest, assistant social media editor

I just read Sour Heart, a book of short stories by Jenny Zhang. Based on the early reviews, my expectations for the book were pretty high, but that turned out to be a nonissue. Each story is written from the perspective of a different Chinese-American girl, and Zhang brings poignant observations and a blunt sense of humor to all of them. Her characters are endearing and often hilarious, even when tackling heavier elements of their experiences as immigrants. I’ve been impulsively buying books since I finished this one but haven’t found anything else that I’m as excited to read.

—Molly Mirhashem, associate editor

I’m admittedly behind the times on this one, but I cannot stop reading Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies. The Pulitzer Prize–winning book is a biography of cancer that’s as gripping as it is terrifying.

—Scott Rosenfield, digital editorial director

I’ve been reading Christine Burke’s new book, The Yoga Healer. Christine has been teaching yoga for 17 years and has an awesome studio in Los Angeles called Liberation Yoga. I’ve always wanted to go, but now I can get a taste of it from this book, which is set up with really clear instructions and helpful photos for each pose. (Full disclosure: Christine is the daughter of Outside founder Larry Burke, and I’ve known and admired her for years.)

—Mary Turner, deputy editor

I finally read John McPhee’s Coming into the Country this year, and it gave me this jealous feeling that I’ll never see anything with as much detail and clarity and sharp sense for the interesting parts as he does. Unfortunately, John McPhee is not as enamored with himself as the rest of us, so he rarely does interviews. Except for this week! Sam Anderson’s profile of McPhee in the New York Times Magazine is fun and confirms that McPhee actually is as scarily smart as he sounds. I’m now excited to read McPhee’s new book, Draft No. 4, which is all about his writing process. Probably won’t help my jealousy.

—Erin Berger, associate editor

I’m reading the newly released, 1,146-page, 17th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style. Exciting, right? Yet it’s essential for anyone who works, as I do, in a word factory, extremely useful for writers aspiring to be one of the next generation’s senior editorial darlings, and a nerdy source of linguistic trivia for the next time you need to entertain a crowd of English majors. Here’s a little-known nugget, sure to impress: The verb “decimate,” which dates back to Roman times, literally means “to kill every tenth person.” You know you can fit that into conversation somehow.

—Tasha Zemke, copy editor

What We Listened To

After Harvey, and Irma, and Maria, and Charlottesville, I’m listening to Krista Tippett’s podcasts On Being and Becoming Wise, hoping I can replace my daily diet of tweets.

—Elizabeth Hightower Allen, features editor

I, along with much of the world, have been digging Odesza’s new album, A Moment Apart. It’s not as immediately catchy or revolutionary as their first album, In Return, but that’s often the case with second releases that flow into an already established sound. Nonetheless, there are still some banger songs, several of which have been the soundtrack of my daily bike commutes and a recent trip to California. I’ve yet to see the band live—because I’m a dad of two and have no time—but there’s no one else I’d rather pay $100 (maybe even $200) to blow my mind onstage.

—Jakob Schiller, online gear director

Mike Powell has been a fixture in the ski industry for more than two decades and has worked for brands like K2, Red Bull, and Powder magazine. In his weekly podcast, The Powell Movement, his humorous interviews with professional athletes shed light on the past, present, and future of the action-sports industry.

—Ben Fox, assistant editor

I am a shameless First Aid Kit fan. I never even got tired of “My Silver Lining” after its run in ski season 2014. So I was very excited when the Swedish folk-pop duo came out with their first single in three years. “It’s a Shame” has the expansive harmonies, twangy guitar, and percussive beat that will scratch the First Aid Kit itch you forgot you had. Fingers crossed that this means a new album is around the corner!

—Luke Whelan, assistant editor

What We Watched, Read, and Listened to at the Same Time

I’ve been liking The Vietnam War on PBS. I learn something new every single episode. It’s incredible.

—Madeline Kelty, deputy photo editor

There’s something about Vietnam in the zeitgeist right now. Ken Burns’ and Lynn Novick’s The Vietnam War (on PBS) pairs really well with new podcast LBJ’s War, which features audio of President Johnson calling friends, advisers, and cabinet members to discuss the war from its beginning to the end of his presidency. Tack on Michael Herr’s Dispatches and Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, and you have a great primer on one of the most consequential events in American history.

—J.O.

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Patagonia wants everyone to know they’ve been lied to. Three months ago, the California-based outdoor apparel maker responded to the shrinking of what was then called Bears Ears National Monument with the headline “The President Stole Your Land” across an all-black homepage. Today, it added a new message. As of Thursday afternoon, the black-and-white display, which disappeared for a time, now includes the phrase “And You Were Lied To.”

Along with the updated website, the brand published a blog post accusing President Donald Trump and the Department of the Interior of lying to the American public about the role that energy extraction interests played in the downsizing of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante national monuments. “The redrawing of boundaries was deliberate and directly influenced by an industry that spends millions of dollars lobbying the government to get what it wants,” the post reads.

This is the latest salvo in a protracted war between Patagonia and congressional lawmakers and the White House over public lands. Patagonia, along with other outdoor companies like the North Face and Black Diamond, was a key player in the decision to relocate the Outdoor Retailer Trade Show from Salt Lake City to Denver, as a protest against Utah lawmakers’ anti-public-lands polices. In December, after reductions were announced for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante, Patagonia published the first iteration of the all-black homepage. A few days later, the House Natural Resources Committee responded with a tweet mocking the original message, and prompting some to ask: Was GOP congress calling for consumers to boycott Patagonia?  

https://twitter.com/NatResources/status/939236821971734530

Next came an invitation from Utah Republican Representative Rob Bishop to Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard to testify before Congress on the national-monuments restructuring. Chouinard passed on Bishop's offer.

While all this was playing out, Patagonia also joined a lawsuit filed by five Native American tribes in December to block the President's shrinking of the two national monuments. As that moves through court, Patagonia is calling on its customers to get some skin in the game. “It is your voice and your vote that are the two most important tools we have to remind elected officials that Americans—everyone from sportsmen and women, to outdoor enthusiasts, to conservationists and the tribes who have known these lands longer than anyone—want public lands protected.”

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In early December 2017, Dawa Yangzum Sherpa, along with her brother and two other Sherpas, set off to attempt Mount Langdung, an unclimbed peak in Nepal’s Rolwaling Valley. They’d do it alpine style—without the use of fixed ropes and big camps—carrying everything on their backs. After a few days of climbing, they stood on top of the 20,856-foot peak, successfully completing a first ascent.

That’s exactly the kind of moment mountaineer and businesswoman Masha Gordon had in mind when she founded nonprofit Grit and Rock’s First Ascent Award, which gives out $10,000 annually to women-led mountaineering teams. Nearly 99 percent of first ascents on high-altitude peaks are done by men, according to Gordon’s figures, and only 5 percent of the 7,600 ascents of Mount Everest have been made by women. The nonprofit is an attempt to start leveling that playing field.

“When I looked through at the Piolets d’Or [the Oscars of alpine climbing], I saw there have only been two women who have won it, and they were part of male teams,” says Gordon. “I’m a businesswoman. We’ve had this situation in the boardroom and in management. We call it the glass ceiling. Here we have an ice ceiling.”

Gordon, an accomplished mountaineer herself, holds the female speed record for the Explorer’s Grand Slam (summiting the highest peak on every continent and reaching the North and South Poles). She believes in the mission of Grit and Rock so much that she has personally endowed the award for ten years. And while the award is where Grit and Rock has received the most attention, Gordon’s primary focus is on interesting teenage girls, many of them in the United Kingdom, in climbing through a yearlong mountaineering program. Between the two initiatives, Gordon hopes to tip the scales of female first ascents by creating role models for young climbers, who will then apply for funding opportunities to make big climbs and then become role models for the next generation.

The award is open to women-led teams (the team must be at least 50 percent female) of all nationalities. Dawa Yangzum Sherpa was one of the 2017 award winners in the “apprenticeship” category, receiving $1,500 to put toward her expedition. She had climbed serious peaks like K2 and Everest in expedition style; the award gave her the chance to up her alpine-style skills for future first ascents.

The winners are chosen by a panel of four judges, including Gordon, in three categories: performance, exploration, and apprenticeship. Grit and Rock announced the 2018 winners in February; each will receive between $1,500 and $4,000. This year’s list includes a three-woman international group that will attempt Nepal’s Mugu Peaks, two 7,814-foot spires that have never been climbed.

In the performance category, last year’s winners were Marina Kopteva, Galina Chibitok, and Anastasia Petrova, who planned to summit the 19,268-foot Cameron Peak in China’s Sichuan Province via a new route. “It was an epic, seven-day journey,” Gordon says. After climbing a nearly 1,000-foot ridge, on day three they lost the haul bag that contained most of their food. Instead of turning back, they pressed on, even when it became clear the route was more difficult and would take longer than expected. Four days later, they reached the summit.

The exploration category is meant to help fund expeditions to remote areas for the purpose of finding a new route or mapping the region. Last year, Natalia Martinez and Camilo Rada set off on a three-week expedition to explore the uncharted Cordon Aysen, an unmapped part of the northern Patagonian Ice Cap. They made a first ascent of Cerro Enroque and created a topographic map of the area for public use. “We like this category because it allows women to just go explore,” says Lydia Bradey, who in 1988 became the first woman to climb Everest without oxygen. “They don’t have to climb 5.14; they could just be competent mountaineers going into a remote area where there is no map. We can give them the experience of figuring it all out.”

This year’s winners of the exploration award are U.S. alpinists Katie Bono and Ilana Jesse, who will make a first ascent in the Hayes Range in Alaska. Bono set the women’s speed record in 2017 on Denali, and Jesse has climbed several major routes in the Alps. The mission of Grit and Rock is especially appealing to Jesse because she recognizes how the cycle of inspiration can have a real impact. “I find myself inspired by other women who are hard-charging in the mountains,” Jesse says. “I hope to one day inspire other women, including my daughter, to explore the unknown, to challenge fear, and to build a respectful relationship with nature.”

The rest of this year’s winners:

Anna Toretta (Italy), Cecilia Buil (Spain), and Ixchel Foord (Mexico) received $4,000 to make an attempt of the Mugu Peaks in Nepal. Josie Mckee (U.S.), Whitney Clark (U.S.), and Caro North (Switzerland) were awarded $3,000 for a new route on India’s 20,439-foot Mount Arjuna. Twenty-year-old Alena Panova (Russia) and 22-year-old Nina Neverov (France), both from the Siberian town of Irkutsk, won $1,000 to attempt a new route on Chon-Tor in Kyrgyzstan.

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About nine years before he died, the Swiss mountaineer Ueli Steck had already thought a lot about risk and how much of it he was willing to take as a climber who used no ropes. Back then, in 2008, Steck was just beginning to gain real fame for having free-soloed some of the Alps’ most fearsome faces in record times. For him, it all came down to fitness and knowing exactly what he was capable of at any given moment. Crossing that line was unthinkable.

“I don’t have a death wish,” Steck wrote in 2010. “On the contrary, I’m hanging onto my life like never before.”

Steck died last April after suffering a fall on Nepal’s 25,791-foot Nuptse, where he was climbing alone in preparation for an Everest bid. We may never know what happened that day, but his posthumously published English-language biography, Ueli Steck: My Life in Climbing, offers revelations about the climber’s later years. One troubling takeaway: Steck’s relationship with risk had changed dramatically since 2008, and not for the better. At his darkest moment—which coincided with one of his most remarkable climbing achievements, in 2013—Steck makes clear that if he did not have a death wish, he also did not care if he lived.

My Life in Climbing isn’t a canon-worthy work of mountaineering literature so much as it is a bound collection of what feel more like journal entries. It first hit European shelves in 2016 as Der Nächste Schritt, or The Next Step; Mountaineers Books released the English translation in February 2018. Billi Bierling, assistant to the late Himalayan climbing historian Elizabeth Hawley, was just wrapping up the translation when she learned that Steck had died.

What the book lacks in overall narrative grace, however, it makes up for in the access its 224 pages give into the mind of one of the planet’s best mountaineers. We see Steck race up summits in order to be back at a mountain hut before the cake sells out. We see him team up with über-athlete Kilian Jornet for a leisurely ten-hour door-to-door ascent of the Eiger from the valley floor—a 10,000-plus-vertical-foot day. All the while, death swirls around him. On a 2014 climb in Tibet, two friends are swept away in avalanche on Shishapangma, just feet from where Steck is standing. “I felt like crying,” Steck writes rather flatly.

Steck wasn’t always the most emotive or even approachable guy when it came to giving interviews to strangers, and he often drew a strict line between his professional and personal selves. The book erases that line and begins with a key pivot point in his life that sets up his battle with risk: the Sherpa fight high on Everest in 2013 that made headlines around the world.

To recap, Steck had been climbing with Simone Moro and Jonathan Griffith when a team of Sherpas fixing ropes on the Lhotse Face grew irate with the climbers for being on the same face at the same time. Things escalated. A Sherpa mob formed, and Steck, who dodged a rock to the head and took a punch to the face, was certain he would die. Instead, the Westerners were given an hour to leave the area.“We went to sleep wearing our helmets and holding our ice axes,” Steck writes.

Steck explains in his own words what happened that day while offering suggestions as to why, but that’s all very much secondary to the big takeaway from that affair: “I had always been aware that my life could be over in an instant, that there was no guarantee,” he writes. “What I struggled with was people’s behavior and the aggression I encountered.” In short: “I had lost faith in humanity.”

That might sound melodramatic or even earnest, but for someone as calculating as Steck, this loss of trust flattened his world. What ensues is a spiral of depression and angst that Steck attempts to overcome through climbing and training, but it doesn’t really work. He soon understands that he has suppressed emotions from the encounter that haunt him. It is only months later, in this increasingly fragile mental state, that Steck heads back to Nepal, this time to Annapurna, where he pulls off the most audacious climb of his career: a solo ascent up the south face.

Annapurna, the world’s tenth highest mountain at 26,545 feet, had nearly killed him in 2008, when falling debris crushed his helmet and sent him tumbling 1,000 feet down the south face. (He escaped badly bruised but relatively unscathed.) It is on his final visit there that Steck’s demons finally burst free, and reading about it is at once horrifying and exhilarating. He pushes for 28 hours over wildly exposed terrain at hostile elevations where a rescue would be impossible. He carries no sleeping bag and goes for the summit with only a coil of six-millimeter cord on his back, a water bottle, and a few chocolate bars. When some spindrift nearly knocks him off the mountain, Steck’s reaction is frightening: “I couldn’t have cared less if I fell to my death,” he writes.

Four months after he is safely home, Steck is struggling. He can’t understand why he was willing to take such big risks on Annapurna, and he feels ashamed about it. He can’t sleep and pops pills to help. He repeatedly envisions someone at the foot of his bed, ready to bash in his skull. “Nights became one single nightmare,” he writes. Worse, he seems to know that his new who-cares M.O. might actually kill him: “I had no guarantee that I would not take such great risks again. In fact, I was afraid I would,” Steck writes. “I had to get this under control. I was a climber and not someone wanting to commit suicide.”

The book never truly reveals head-on whether Steck bounced back from those darker places, though he does say he sought professional help, got on medication, and took time off to climb with his wife, Nicole. Soon, though, he heads back to Nepal, where he once again gets himself into dicey situations on Nuptse. Near his home, climbing on the Eiger, he refuses to acquiesce to Nicole’s request that he no longer solo the north face. “If I can no longer live this part of me, I’ll wither like a spent flower,” he writes.

In recent interviews, friends have said that Steck was very much on the mend, that he had found joy just in being in the mountains again, and that the guardrails with risk had returned. “He was talking like it was over after Everest,” says Dan Patitucci, a photographer who counted Steck among his best friends. “Ueli had a job, like an actual job as a product manager, and he was so proud of that. He’d turned 40 and was like, ‘I’m OK with this.’ He would say how he wanted to be an old climber.”

By the end of the book, a certain peace does prevail. Steck heads back to the Eiger, but he doesn’t ascend slowly. Instead, he reclaims his broken speed record on the north face with a time of 2 hours, 22 minutes, and 50 seconds, all while keeping his heart rate below 165 beats per minute. He doesn’t seem to much care about that. He’s done with “exhausting” his potential. He doesn’t want to scare himself like he did on Annapurna ever again. He realizes he can have fun with a rope, a partner, and even by moving more slowly.

“The most important thing was to stay aware of the risk at any given moment and control it,” he writes. “If I managed to do this, I would certainly be able to experience more exciting and beautiful moments in the mountains without killing myself.”

Sadly, those moments would be far too few.

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Think that ice-blue water pouring out of a beautiful mountain glacier is safe to drink untreated? Think again. It could be full of decades-old poop from mountaineers . 

Poop, and how you avoid drinking water contaminated by it, have been in the news recently. First, Slate published a woefully misinformed article, incorrectly suggesting that readers don’t need to filter their water in the backcountry. I pointed out the errors in it. After that, Andrew Skurka revealed to the world that drinking potentially poop-filled water is one of his many hobbies, then offered tips on how to do it best. (Eww.)

Those stories prompted one of our readers to send me a study conducted on Denali. The research suggests fecal bacteria can survive inside glaciers for much longer than previously thought, flowing downhill with the ice, and potentially infecting water sources tens of miles away. 

You see, until recently, it was common practice for climbers on Alaska’s tallest mountain to simply hurl their poop into deep crevasses, where it was assumed freeze-thaw cycles and the grinding action of the flowing ice would make it disappear. Climbing that mountain along its most popular West Buttress route is a two-week endeavor, and it’s estimated that, since 1970, 34,000 climbers have deposited 66 metric tons of poop in the mountain’s Kahlitna Glacier.

Turns out that being buried in ice actually preserves poop and fecal bacteria. D’oh.

“Everything we’ve got points toward the poop and bacteria lasting indefinitely when it’s buried in the ice,” explains Michael Loso, a National Park Service geologist who helped put together Glacial Transport of Human Waste and Survival of Fecal Bacteria. Rather than destroying the poop, the chilly but relatively constant temperatures of deep-glacier ice actually help shield poop and its bacteria from the forces that would destroy it quickly at the surface—UV radiation, wind, and rain. And being deposited in such large volumes exacerbates bacteria growth in the fertile feeding ground. 

Loso’s team tracked poop moving downstream in the glacial flow, calculating that historic deposits left high on the mountain should emerge on the surface in about 70 years, after traveling 17 miles in the flowing ice. In fact, tests of streams flowing from the glacial melt already show trace amounts of fecal bacteria that likely came from human climbers far up the mountain. Loso is quick to point out that while bacteria like E. coli and fecal enterococci are now showing up in local water sources, they’re only doing so in trace amounts that don’t pose a risk to human health—or at least not yet. The study also points out that this may change when large deposits of poop start reaching the surface decades from now. Because climate change is speeding the pace at which glaciers are melting, the study found it could speed up the process by which old mountaineer poop emerges from glaciers. 

Curious if this fate awaited other glaciated mountains, I called Loso to find out. He explained that Denali’s West Buttress route is relatively unique, in that climbers spend most of their time in its accumulation zone, where snowfall is adding to the glacier’s mass. As more snow falls, more glacier forms. If there’s poop in that snow, or in the crevasses, it becomes part of the glacier, and is preserved. According to Loso, most other popular glacial mountains see climbers deposit their waste in ablation zones, where the glaciers are losing mass. There, the poop is simply washed away or destroyed by extreme mountain weather. Although the seasonal surface pollution created by all that poop does make melted snow on popular routes unsafe for climbers to drink untreated.

I explained the premise of Slate’s article to Loso, and asked him if his work could be extrapolated to show that human poop could be infecting wilderness water sources elsewhere. “Absolutely,” he says, going on to explain that any time poop is deposited inside snow or ice so that it stays there beyond the seasonal freeze-thaw cycle, “it can persist for a long time.” I asked him if there was a limit for how long poop could remain infectious while preserved in ice, and he explained that if there was one, he hasn’t yet found it.

So the bottom line is that just because a water source was previously frozen does not mean it is inherently safe to drink. In fact, Loso has found snow and ice are capable of preserving poop and fecal bacteria “indefinitely,” which means that you need to consider the provenance of your melt water carefully. Has a human ever pooped on that mountain? If the answer could be yes, then you should probably filter your damn drinking water.

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When she showed up in Kabul for the first time, five years ago, Sarah Menzies thought she’d be making an upbeat short film about young women in Afghanistan learning to ride bikes. Easy. Fast. Maybe a ten-minute short at most. The women on the nascent Women’s National Cycling Team of Afghanistan had just started going to international races. They’d also been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in the beginning of decade, when the power of the dangerously gender-biased Taliban was limited. They were on the leading edge of independence in a country where it was widely considered immoral for women to ride bikes. But as Menzies got to know the young women on the team, the country slipped back into Taliban control, and cycling for women once again became fraught.

“It was much more complicated than ‘I’m going to get on a bike and ride,’” Menzies says. “These women were young and idealistic. Their families told them, ‘You’re the generation that’s going to change this country.’” And they believed that, but as the Taliban gained power, things have gotten more complicated. “As soon as the country starts to slide backward, it’s women’s rights that go first.”

The film grew in scope as the girls on the team faced threats, physical violence, and corruption from coaches. As things got worse, some of the members stopped riding and others fled the country. Menzies dug into the history of the Taliban, traced the marginalization of Afghan women, and continued filming as that changed the way the team was able to ride. She ended up with a feature-length documentary, which she’s now submitting to film festivals. The forthcoming Afghan Cycles follows team members as they break cultural norms.

“It’s developed into a story I never would have envisioned,” Menzies says. “Sometimes I forget that we’re making a movie about cycling.” Now, instead of just being a narrative about learning to ride, it’s about the choices Afghan women face when their freedoms are taken away.

Menzies says she remembers being fascinated by war-zone reporters as a kid. She studied broadcast journalism at Gonzaga University in Washington but went straight into environmental nonprofit work after graduation. While Menzies was documenting the effects of the 2010 Gulf oil spill, she decided she liked the documentary part of advocacy work best, so she decided to try making a living as a filmmaker.

“I quit my job. I didn’t have much money, but I bought a little DSLR—which I still have—and I sailed with some scientists from Namibia to Uruguay studying plastic pollution,” Menzies says. “As a sailor, I was in heaven. As an environmentalist, I was in heaven. As a new filmmaker, I was in heaven.” But when she got home and tried to put a film together, the footage was shaky and she didn’t have a narrative. After beating herself up for weeks, Menzies abandoned the idea of the plastics film and resolved to learn everything she could about shooting and storytelling. Her next big project, in 2013, was Catch It, aten-minute film about French surfer Léa Brassy, who moved to Norway to follow winter swells. It won best short at the San Diego Surf Film festival and spent years on the outdoor film festival circuit.

The success of Catch It came with a wave of insecurities. Menzies worried that she’d fallen into the role of token female filmmaker in an industry that tends to be male-dominated, especially in the outdoor world. “I constantly had this voice in the back of my head saying, ‘It’s only doing well because I’m a woman and festivals are getting shit for not having enough women and this is a film about a woman by a woman,’” she says. “It took me a really long time to quiet that voice and accept that people might actually like the film.”

People liked Catch It for the same reason Menzies was drawn to Brassy’s story. It’s a portrait of obsession without ego and working toward a goal that came without much acclaim. “It’s not intentional that most of my films have centered on women. I try to think, ‘If I came across this story not as a filmmaker, would I still be interested,’” Menzies says. “You look at whose stories aren’t being told, and often it’s women.”

She has a knack for finding those untold stories. This fall, Menzies put out a film about Mirna Valerio, a self-identified fat black ultrarunner. The Mirnavator focused on an email Valerio received 27 miles into a 50K race, which she read during a rest stop when Menzies happened to be filming. It was filled with vitriolic body shaming and threats. Menzies’ film is about the harassment and the microaggressions Valerio encounters by just showing up to run and how narrow the scope of the outdoor world can be—and how Valerio unflinchingly deals with that. Valerio says she and Menzies clicked as soon as they met, and they’d like to work on more projects about race in the future.

The previous May, Menzies released A Steelhead Quest. She tailed amateur angler Terry Myers on her mission to catch a wild steelhead in a different North American river every month of the year, even though steelhead populations have dropped off by more than half since the 1980s. Myers, who is in her sixties, has the same focused drive and self-deprecating sense of humor that Menzies’ other subjects have. And by focusing on her, Menzies is able to subtly tell a bigger story about climate and rivers.

Meanwhile, Menzies is closing in on the end of her own quest. It’s not easy to make a five-year-long, independently funded film about women’s sports in a conflict zone. She says Afghan Cycles is almost done, but it’s taken five times longer than she thought it would. There have been endless rounds of fundraising to make sure she could pay the camera operators and editors on the crew. Travel plans have crumpled—Menzies says she’s often told by fixers or interviewees that it’s not God’s will for her to shoot—and the plot has completely changed. And then there’s the guilt that comes with being able to leave a war-torn country when the people you’re covering are forced to stay.

She’s thought about canning it but says the film feels even more pressing now because of the Trump administration’s attack on Islam. “It started as this short, happy film about women riding bikes, but now I want to contribute to fighting Islamaphobia. We’re told to be afraid of Islam, but in my experience, these people are the people on the ground actually suffering because of the Taliban.”

Menzies says she feels a huge amount of responsibility, especially as an outsider, because the girls have entrusted her with their story and because they’ve risked so much to be able to ride. “The work that I’ve been the most proud of, the common thread is that the person is willing to do anything for their passion, whether that’s Léa trudging through snow or the girls risking everything to ride a bike. I don’t think I’m that passionate about anything,” Menzies says, after talking about five years of sleepless nights and editing struggles. She’s worried she won’t be able to do justice to the persecution the girls faced. It has consumed her to the point that Menzies’ partner has to remind her to break away from her editing cave on nights and weekends to say sane.

But that’s exactly the kind of story Menzies likes: the obsessive ones that take over everything else. As Brassy says in Catch It, “It’s not just surfing a wave. It’s the whole surf experience I’m looking for.”