Month: March 2019

Others were faster, but nobody was better

On Sunday, November 5, Mebrahtom “Meb” Keflezighi will conclude his career by running the New York City Marathon for the eleventh time. Even for a man who has built his reputation on staggering feats of perseverance, the fact that Meb is still competing among the world’s elite at age 42 feels like a small miracle. No recent American distance runner, save perhaps Bernard Lagat, can match his longevity at the top level. When Meb won his first USATF National Championship, Bill Clinton was still in office.

It wasn’t even his first major triumph at the national level. At UCLA, in the mid-1990s, Meb won four NCAA championships, though this was a mere overture for the highlights to come: a U.S. record in the 10,000 meters; four Olympic appearances (including a silver medal in 2004); victories at the New York City (2009) and Boston (2014) marathons; and that most American of accolades, a running shoe that bore his name.

Not that the essence of any great athlete’s career is ever adequately distilled by simply reeling off a laundry list of achievements. This is true, in particular, for Meb Keflezighi. Because when he dropped his final challenger upon entering Central Park that morning in 2009—wearing a “USA” singlet that the race organizers had given him in acknowledgement of his Olympic medal—it was enough to make even the most cynical among us a little misty-eyed. The first American man to win the New York City Marathon in 27 years felt like an affirmation of everything this country could be at its best. Meb moved to San Diego with his family in 1987 as a refugee, fleeing the violence of the decades-long Eritrean war for independence. Although he spoke no English, Meb’s talent as a runner (discovered, as the story goes, when he ran a 5:20 mile in middle school PE class) led to an athletic scholarship at UCLA. He became a U.S. citizen in 1998 and made his first Olympic team two years later. In a stroke of patriotic serendipity, Meb’s New York City Marathon win coincided with the best showing of elite U.S. men in decades: six finishers in the top ten.

“It was a great day for me and a great day for us American guys,” Meb told the New York Times after the race.

Us American guys.

This is a line worth pondering for a minute, especially since, after Galen Rupp’s impressive triumph at the Chicago Marathon earlier this month, LetsRun.com chose to emphasize the significance of Rupp’s being the first “American-born” man to win in Chicago in 35 years. The nativist subtext of this didn’t sit well with everybody. At least from where I sit, if taking vicarious pride in an American triumph makes any sense at all, it’s because we belong to a society that enables a 12-year-old refugee kid to develop into one of the best runners in the world. Meb never took this for granted, and it’s becoming increasingly apparent that neither should we.

Then again, Meb is the kind of guy you would root for regardless of what country he represents. Typically not the fastest runner in the field, he excels at tough, strategic affairs like Boston, New York, and other unpaced “championship-style” marathons like what we see at the Olympics. In other words, Meb’s preferred competitive milieu is actual racing—as opposed to pacemaker-aided attempts to run a ridiculous time.

But even on days when things didn’t work out so well for him on the racing front, Meb always handled himself with grace and, perhaps more endearingly, a sense of humor. Among the sports clichés we like to impress upon young athletes is something along the lines of “true character” coming out not in victory, but in defeat. It’s one of those stories we wish we could believe. Luckily, athletes like Meb make it a little easier to keep the faith. In 2013, he had an awful day at the New York City Marathon but didn’t drop out. A top amateur runner who was also having a rough time of it caught up to him late in the race. They agreed to run the last few miles together, finishing hand-in-hand. (The local runner was so moved that he wrote an essay about the experience.) At the 2016 Olympic marathon last summer, an upset stomach undermined Meb’s bid for another medal; he puked seven times en route to 33rd place. Inches from the finish, he suddenly slipped on the wet pavement and crashed to the ground—a final “fuck you” from a forgettable day in Rio.

Unfazed, Meb took the opportunity to do a few light pushups before rising to his feet, waving to the crowd, and stepping across the finish line.

>

We’re finally getting an understanding of how important outdoor recreation is to the nation’s economy. The Bureau of Economic Analysis released its first comprehensive study of the industry in February (the verdict: outdoor spending accounts for 2 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product, at $373.7 billion), and the Outdoor Industry Association (OIA) has since been pumping out reports with state- and local-level data.

The latest study from the OIA breaks down outdoor spending by congressional district. “These reports show that all districts have something to gain when our federal and local policymakers support our public lands and waters and invest in outdoor recreation,” association president Amy Roberts said in a statement. The report also brings to light a seeming contradiction: Districts with high levels of outdoor recreation spending, which correlates to public land access, are represented by some of the most anti–public land congresspeople out there.

Using the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) scorecard, which grades politicians from 1 to 100 percent on their public land support, here are a few representatives who might want to pay closer attention to how much money recreation brings to their home districts.

Resident spending on outdoor recreation: $1.85 billion
Number of outdoor companies: 247
Bishop’s lifetime LCV score: 2 percent

Rob Bishop chairs the House Natural Resources Committee, which gives him tremendous power over measures that affect public lands. He has long championed greater oil and gas freedom on public lands and has introduced legislation to weaken the Endangered Species and Antiquities Acts. His district, however, relies heavily on outdoor recreation. Ogden, its largest city, has remade itself as a hub for outdoor companies.

Resident spending on outdoor recreation: $4.39 billion
Number of outdoor companies: 73
Young’s lifetime LCV score: 8 percent

Like Senate colleague Lisa Murkowski, Don Young has pushed to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling and to build a road through Izembek National Wildlife Refuge. He has wasted little time during the Trump administration in attacking public lands: On the first day of the congressional session, Young introduced legislation that would have conveyed 2 million acres of national forest to the state. Alaska’s heritage may be in mining and timber, but that economic system is losing steam, as evidenced by budget shortfalls. Meanwhile, tourism and sustainable fishing are increasingly important sectors of the economy.

Resident spending on outdoor recreation: $1.69 billion
Number of outdoor companies: 65
Amodei’s lifetime LCV score: 3 percent

Mark Amodei’s major campaign donors include gold and petroleum companies, and he represents Nevada’s northern district accordingly. This session, he has submitted legislation that would allow mining firms to skirt certain National Environmental Policy requirements. The economic engine of Amodei’s district, however, is the Reno-Tahoe area—a tourism-heavy market. With variable snowfall and intense wildfires worsened by the drought in the Sierra Nevada, this region is showcasing the effects of climate change, yet climate-friendly legislation is absent from Amodei’s office.

Resident spending on outdoor recreation: $2.5 billion
Number of outdoor companies: 55
Labrador’s lifetime LCV score: 4 percent

Raul Labrador has sponsored legislation that would transfer control of federal forests to the states, as well as many other bills that would weaken federal management of cattle grazing and logging. Twice he has sponsored bills that would exempt Idaho from Antiquities Act designations. Support for public lands and waters could benefit the area greatly, however—Labrador’s district boasts some of the best whitewater rafting, mountain biking, and skiing in the West.

Resident spending on outdoor recreation: $1.89 billion
Number of outdoor companies: 291
Stewart’s lifetime LCV score: 2 percent

How can a representative who wants to create a national park be against public lands? Well, when his national park consists of the gutted remains of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Like the rest of Utah’s delegation, Chris Stewart has been staunchly opposed to any public land protections coming from Washington, DC. But in a district that encompasses Capitol Reef and Zion National Parks, plus huge swaths of USFS and BLM land, Stewart’s constituents could use some extra public land support.

Resident spending on outdoor recreation: $1.69 billion
Number of outdoor companies: 16
Gosar’s lifetime LCV score: 5 percent

Paul Gosar could choose to bolster protection of Grand Canyon and the surrounding areas, but he’s been more concerned over the years about allowing mining in sensitive areas that are sacred to Native Americans. In 2011, Gosar orchestrated the transfer of land rich with Apache archaeological sites to a copper mine. He’s now an advocate for ending a 20-year ban on uranium mining in an area where the Havasupai Tribe’s water source is located.

Is riding with headphones really such a big deal?

America is a strange place. From bloomers to hip hop to the iPhone, we've been the driving force of cultural change for much of the world. At the same time, we can be profoundly uptight—and there are few things we're more uptight about than riding bikes.

Granted, we mostly get cycling as an athletic pursuit, but we're considerably less comfortable when confronted with people riding bikes who appear to be…comfortable. You know, cruising around in a carefree fashion, like Pee-wee Herman before his bike got stolen. Ours is a land of skyscrapers and mountains and big cars and guns, so when we see someone who is simultaneously vulnerable and at ease with his or her own vulnerability, we feel contempt for them. The thinking seems to go like this: "Look at that fool out there on the bike, happy as can be. Shouldn't he at least be taking himself as seriously as I do in my GMC Acadia?"

It's not just a driver thing either. In fact, few people are less tolerant of comfortable cycling than cyclists. Yes, there's helmet shaming, but you don't even have to forego a foam hat to elicit the ire and self-righteousness of the safety brigade. All you have to do is stick a pair of headphones in your ear before hopping on your bike and people will act like you just signed your own death warrant.

What's the big deal with riding in headphones anyway? Well, it's not hard to understand why it worries people so much: it's dangerous! Cycling requires awareness, and if you're plugging up your ears in traffic, then you're introducing an unnecessary level of impairment that could mean the difference between life and death. Right?

Oh, please.

The person riding around with their quick release skewers undone and their v-brakes unhooked? That worries me. But riding in headphones doesn’t even register on the Concern-O-Meter. As far as stuff that’s dangerous to do while riding a bike, I’d rank wearing headphones somewhere between picking your nose and picking a wedgie. (No doubt someone somewhere has crashed badly while attempting to pick one or the other or perhaps even both at the same time.)

“So are you cool with motorists using headphones too?” you may ask. That’s the first thing I was asked when I tweeted my utter lack of concern for CWE (Cycling While Entertained) not too long ago.

No, not really. I’d also like drivers to wear motoring helmets, to be perfectly honest. (Car crashes are a major cause of TBI and the leading cause of fatal head trauma in teens after all.) But it doesn’t really matter whether or not I’m cool with drivers sticking tiny speakers in their ears, because they do it anyway. Half the drivers I see are wearing some sort of Bluetooth headset or just the headphones that came with their phone, and the other half have decided “screw it” and are talking right into the actual phone.

Then there are the cars themselves. The cabins are soundproofed and insulated to isolate the drivers from bothersome noise, like road buzz or the shouts of the cyclist they almost killed. Indeed, quiet interiors are a major selling point and a hallmark of luxury. And, of course, on top of all that they’re equipped with lavish sound systems to drown out whatever sonic intrusions still manage to infiltrate the driver’s consciousness. Cool with drivers wearing headphones? They might as well drive around in that sensory depravation tank from Altered States: a rarefied, womb-like driving experience is the culturally accepted state of affairs.

“Well, all the more reason not to wear headphones while riding,” you might be thinking. “If drivers aren’t aware of their surroundings, you damn well better be.”

Absolutely true. But how much does listening to headphones interfere with your ability to do so? Sure, blasting Slayer's "Reign In Blood" at top volume directly into your skull while riding is probably a bad idea (especially since it’s all too easy to confuse sirens and Kerry King solos), but it's also a bad idea off the bike, too, since your smartphone is probably capable of producing enough volume to cause hearing damage. But once you bring things down to a reasonable volume, are you really taking a risk? Doesn’t it stand to reason that as long as whatever you’re listening to doesn’t drown out the sounds of your environment you should be okay?

The truth is there’s been very little study in this area, but a test conducted by the Australian magazine RideOn in 2012 revealed, among other things, that a rider wearing earbud headphones and listening to music at a reasonable volume not only hears fellow cyclists perfectly well but also hears more than someone inside a car listening to no music whatsoever.

Of course, like any taboo, there are workarounds when it comes to listening to music while cycling. One option is the handlebar-mounted Bluetooth speaker, which combines poor fidelity with the sadistic pleasure of foisting your musical choices on others. Then there are bone-conduction headphones, which are supposedly okay because they don’t go directly directly into your ear, evoking the kind of odd workarounds and mental (and physical) gymnastics that religious people engage in so that they can technically remain virgins. I once tested a helmet that incorporated bone-conduction speakers in the straps and basically pumped the music from your phone via Bluetooth into your cheekbones, and while I don’t see how this setup kept me any safer than those ubiquitous white earbuds, I can assure you it sounded terrible.

I should confess that I almost never wear headphones while riding. However, this isn’t because I think doing so at a conservative volume is especially dangerous; rather, it’s simply because music or other entertainment doesn’t enhance my riding experience. I prefer to take my cycling neat, like my Scotch. However it’s clear that a great many people do enjoy a cocktail of riding and music, or podcasts, or whatever else people listen to while out on the bike. So, your local laws notwithstanding, I say go right ahead.

Just be sure to enjoy responsibly.

Click:Geotextile supplier
>

In the first climb that author Jan Redford narrates in her debut memoir, End of the Rope: Mountains, Marriage, and Motherhood (Counterpoint Press; $26), she’s an adventurous 14-year-old enraged by yet another broken promise from her hard-drinking father. She charges out of her family’s vacation cabin in eastern Canada and into the woods, where she discovers a rock cliff four times the height of a house. Still fuming, Redford spontaneously scales the formation, scaring the wits out of herself and forgetting her anger at her dad.

So begins Redford’s complicated relationship with bothmen and climbing, a struggle that will continue for at least the next two decades. It’s one of several threads in her memoir, recalling her gritty coming-of-age and her goal of becoming a professional guide—which she achieved in 1986, at a time when there were few other women guiding in North America. The book is a welcome addition to mountain literature, where women’s voices (and stories like lactating all over yourself in the woods while on the job) are still noticeably rare.

In a departure from typical climbing narratives, Redford doesn’t write about her greatest accomplishments on the rock—while she was a talented climber, she didn’t make first ascents or do expeditions on mountains like Everest. Instead, she shares her worst moments, from nearly rappelling herself off the end of the rope on 3,000-foot El Capitan to panicking while guiding a group of army cadets up what should have been a routine alpine summit in the Canadian Rockies. “I wasn’t writing about the things I did right, the climbs I breezed up and had a beer at the bottom,” Redford explained over the phone from her home in Squamish, British Columbia, the rock-climbing capital of Canada. “I was writing about the things I learned from.”

This includes her personal life and her early dirtbag days after catching the climbing bug. Redford officially learned to climb after high school, at the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) in Wyoming. As she writes of her 19-year-old self, “I felt like I’d been sleepwalking through my life, and climbing propped open my eyes. Made me fully alive.”

After NOLS, Redford goes full-bore climbing bum. She waits tables and works seasonal jobs doing ski patrol and tree planting in Canada to support her lifestyle. She dreams of becoming a professional guide but settles for dating them while she accrues more experience in the outdoors. The men she’s attracted to are always older. They’re also masters over their chosen outdoor dominion: alpinists, big-wall climbers, kayakers. Much as Redford is drawn to these men, she’s also dubious of softening, of losing her position as a foul-mouthed, tobacco-chewing, one-of-the-guys badass. Describing this apprehension after meeting a man during one of her five seasons climbing in Yosemite, Redford writes, “Rik was 25, four years older than me, and he was such a good climber that I knew I’d follow him around like a baby duck if I slept with him.” She maintains this straight-shooting style of self-awareness throughout the book.

Redford starts to crave more stability when she meets Dan Guthrie. A big-wall climber, ice climber, and alpinist, Guthrie is arguably Redford’s first real love, and they’re soon living together at his place in Banff, Alberta, where Redford considers “getting my shit together” and attending university in nearby Calgary. In 1987, when Guthrie dies tragically in an avalanche while climbing in Alaska, Redford derails. Two days after the memorial, she ends up in bed with Guthrie’s good friend and climbing partner. Redford gets pregnant and chooses a shotgun wedding over an abortion.

Up until this point in the book, Redford has been following a storyline popularized by female adventure memoir authors like Cheryl Strayed: one that puts a greater emphasis on gaining control of our emotions than on mastering anything in the external landscape. While Redford continues to deftly handle this form in the second half of the book, she complicates her own narrative because she isn’t ultimately healed by the outdoors. More the opposite.Redford loses not only the love of her life to the mountains, but also one of her best girlfriends, Niccy, who falls to her death while teaching rock climbing in the Cascades. By age 30, Redford is an uneducated, unhappily married mother of two, living in a podunk logging town in British Columbia with her equally miserable climber-turned-logger husband. Redford eventually finds her way out of her failing marriage and dead-end life by leaving the mountains, moving to Calgary, and finally attending university.

In that way, Redford’s book tells the story that rarely makes it into an exciting adventure memoir—that of a person whose life isn’t magically transformed by climbing or who sometimes feels the betrayal of the wild more strongly than the benefits. The book is often more relatable than aspirational, and that can be a good thing.

While reading about another of Redford’s crippling episodes of self-doubt on the rock, I wanted to reach into the book and shake her. In retrospect, I may have been seeing a little too much of myself in Redford during those moments. Similarly, her mini epiphanies, on the rock and in life, resonated with me. In the epilogue, Redford writes about getting past fear while climbing: “If I can control my body, I can control my mind. I always thought it was the other way around. But if I put my body in motion, my mind has to follow.”

Much of Redford’s narrative may not strike readers as awe-inspiring in the way of the typical mountain-conquest story or as motivating as the increasingly typical healed-by-the-outdoors story. But it will resonate with anyone trying to find her path in a confusing world that still sends women far too many mixed signals about who or what we should be.

>

An interesting footnote to the recent NBA playoff matchup between the Toronto Raptors and the Cleveland Cavaliers was that the series featured two players who have unintentionally emerged as mental health ambassadors for the league. It began during All-Star weekend in February, when Toronto guard DeMar DeRozan elicited widespread media attention for a cryptic seven-word tweet about his depression. Inspired by the candidness of his fellow hooper, Cleveland’s Kevin Love subsequently published a personal essay on the Player’s Tribune about suffering a mid-game panic attack. The article went viral, and Love received thousands of emails in response. The NBA, perhaps feeling the pressure to issue a response of its own, recently announced that it would be creating a new position for a director of mental health and wellness. The recent focus on psychological well-being feels like a welcome change of tack for the league.

One might wonder, however, why it’s still a big deal when two professional basketball players open up about an issue that affects millions of people in a country reputed to have the highest rate of antidepressant use in the world. Mental illness, it seems, is ubiquitous in America. But among the nation’s sporting elite, the subject still feels like a repressed secret.

“I think that’s the biggest burden on American sport culture,” says Brent Walker, an executive board member with the Association for Applied Sport Psychology. “I’ve heard repeatedly from professional and elite athletes how they don’t want to admit having to having a weakness—mental [illness] being one of those.”

While it obviously isn’t only a burden in America, other countries seem to be doing more about it. Late last year, the Canadian Centre for Mental Health and Sport was founded at the University of Ottawa, with the hope of “designing, implementing, and evaluating a novel mental health care model for Canadian competitive and high-performance athletes and coaches.” Meanwhile, in March, the British government’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) announced via press release that it would be implementing a Mental Health and Elite Sport Action Plan to “break down the stigma around mental health.” The move was partially inspired by a number of prominent British athletes, including former Team Sky cyclist Josh Edmondson, opening up about their struggles with depression. At its core, the initiative is a push to provide better resources for athletes by educating coaches and national governing body officials about the telltale signs of mental illness and by making psychological support more widely available.

What might “breaking down the stigma around mental health” look like in practice?

I put that question to Emma Boggis, one of the architects behind the British plan and chief executive of the Sport and Recreation Alliance. Boggis, whose organization works with national governing bodies to support both professional athletes and weekend hobbyists, cited a program by England Athletics (essentially the UK equivalent of the USATF) called #runandtalk. The campaign asked running clubs throughout the country to designate mental health ambassadors as a point of contact for members who may be suffering from anxiety or depression. While #runandtalk is meant to help athletes at all levels (not only elites), it’s an example of how the national sporting infrastructure can be infused with a mental health agenda.

“We want the system to be requiring things,” Boggis says, explaining that an action plan ultimately has the best chance of succeeding when its components are mandated by government policy.

In this respect, the UK has a distinct advantage over the United States. Across the pond, it’s common for organizations like England Athletics to be government-funded—which is rather useful when the government is trying to enforce an idea like the Mental Health and Elite Sport Action Plan.

“It almost becomes a condition of onward funding that organizations demonstrate that they are taking mental health seriously and that they are doing some of the things set out,” Boggis says. “It’s what we might call a ‘stick approach.’ While that maybe isn’t the best motivation, you can see how, practically, it can be quite a strong motivation for some.”

From an American perspective, the whole concept of the government providing more health resources for athletes might seem, well, foreign. Unlike many other countries, there is no sports ministry in the United States. (The Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs is the closest thing we have, but its projects tend to fall more under the category of “sports diplomacy”—that is, the practice of enlisting celebrity athletes to serve as cultural ambassadors abroad.) Instead, athlete health programs are provided, with varying degrees of effectiveness, by the individual leagues and governing bodies, like the NBA or NCAA. In theory, the absence of government bureaucracy could make these organizations more nimble in dealing with issues of mental illness, but only if they are willing to recognize these issues in the first place. If Kevin Love’s example is any indicator, some sports still have a ways to go—and not only the bastions of old-school machismo like pro football and basketball.

“Probably 75, 80, 90 percent of athletes coming off an Olympic Games go through some kind of post-Olympic depression. And that’s something we have to be able to figure out and help people get through,” Michael Phelps recently told David Axelrod in a podcast interview.

“I’m somebody who’s gone through at least three or four major depression spells after games that, you know, I’ve put my life in danger.” Phelps added, before calling out the U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) for not doing more to help Olympic athletes reenter civilian life. Given the USOC’s reputation for not always providing Olympic athletes with the support they need—financial or otherwise—it’s encouraging that Phelps, arguably the most famous Olympian of all time, is putting pressure on the organization to do better.

Perhaps that’s what the American version of the “stick approach” to forcing better athlete care looks like: high-wattage megastars like Phelps using their clout to improve the status quo in their respective sports. But while the celebrity pulpit may be a useful way to get the ball rolling—after all, the UK action plan was also initiated thanks to some highly publicized cases of pro-athlete depression—it’s up to the governing bodies to act.

Of course, these individual governing bodies are still going have vastly different resources at their disposal. And for certain sports, like ultrarunning, no governing body exists. The fragmented nature of the American athletic landscape poses a central challenge to tackling an issue like mental illness. It’s great that a billion-dollar league like the NBA has decided to hire a director of mental health and wellness or that the NCAA can offer support to collegiate athletes—but ultimately that’ll be of little use to the 24-year-old who wants to make it as a pro runner. This is the sort of person who would benefit greatly if something like the Canadian Centre for Mental Health and Sport existed on our side of the border.

“I think it has incredible potential,” Rob Krar, Canadian ultrarunner and mental health advocate, told me about the new initiative in his native country. Krar has lived in the United States since 1996; reflecting on the situation in his adopted home, he added, “So many semiprofessional athletes, they come out of college and they’re dead broke trying to make a living out of running. I’m sure there are a lot of younger athletes out there who don’t seek treatment just because they can’t afford it.”

This is a complicated issue, and it hardly seems irrelevant to this debate that Canada has universal health care while the United States does not. And even if it were feasible to replicate here, a top-down, far-reaching action plan like what we’re seeing in the UK may have its limitations. But the very existence of these initiatives implies that these countries are taking athlete mental health more seriously than before. It’s about time we followed their lead.

>

The 2018 Everest spring season is underway. While we’re excited for some of the record-setting attempts, there’s already the usual hand-wringing about overcrowding, trash, and deaths. Here’s a rundown of everything you need to know as the climbers begin to settle in at Base Camp.

This year is expected to have a similar number of climbers as last year, when over 800 attempted the world’s highest peak. In 2017, six people died and 648 successfully summited—237 from the north side and 411 from the south side. As a long-term trend, the popularity of Everest continues to grow. In 2000, there were just 145 summits. By 2013, a record 661 mountaineers stood on top of the peak. Almost all of that growth is due to a rise in climbers from India and China, two countries with burgeoning mountaineering scenes. 

As the guide market fragments into low, mid, and high-priced expeditions, clients have more options, especially with the local Nepali and Sherpa-owned companies. Seven Summits Treks, a Sherpa-owned outfit, is attracting large numbers with its $30,000 price tag. (The average price of a guided Everest climb is between $45,000 and $50,000.) Seven Summits Treks may have over 60 clients this season on the Nepal side alone. 

As is customary for Everest, headlines in the mainstream media will be focused on the weather and the crowds. While extremely early in the season, it has been a bit colder with more snow than in previous years. Time will tell what the conditions are like high on the peak. One geographic feature that will come under scrutiny is the Hillary Step, the iconic section of steep rock at 28,000 feet. This section has been a bottleneck for both ascents and descents, creating severe problems, in past years. After the 2015 earthquake, the Step was rumored to have collapsed. Climbers in 2016 and last year found that the topology had in fact changed but were uncertain if it just looked different due to unusually high snow. Climbers last year simply walked over what seemed more like a snow ramp than the Step. Some jokingly renamed it the Hillary Slope. This mystery may be solved this year.

The Chinese, who control the north side of Everest, were reported to be building a Mountaineering Museum about 30 miles from base camp. It will serve as the base for Chinese tourism, skiing, paragliding, climbing, and other adventures. Most important to climbers would be the access to helicopter rescues on the Chinese side, a potentially life-saving perk that has only been available on the Nepal side in the past. However, it’s unclear how much of the construction has actually been completed. 

New for 2018, the Chinese are requiring a trash deposit of $5,000 per team. In addition, they are enforcing a new rule that each climber bring down 17 pounds of old trash from the mountain. The penalty for non-conformance is unclear. Nepal has had a similar requirement since 2013 but has never enforced it. This rule, while easy to mandate, is more difficult to enforce. Much of the trash high on the peak—old ropes or other gear—is frozen solid into the mountain. It takes a strong person, with amazing aerobic capacity and sufficient time, to recover just a tiny piece of tent fabric stuck in the mountainside, much less a body (which is, alas, also considered trash). 

Back on the Nepal side, there has been a concerted effort to provide basic medical training for well over 200 Sherpas who will aid foreign clients this spring. This program will supplement the climbing skills training at the Khumbu Climbing Center in the village of Phortse, which has graduated over 1,000 guides since 2003. This has provided highly skilled support for novice clients.

These two fisherwomen are ocean advocates and clothing designers during the off-season

Sisters Emma Teal Laukitis and Claire Neaton were baiting fishing lines at the time most girls their age were going to soccer camp or ballet recitals. They were born into a commercial fishing family in Alaska and spent summers aboard their family’s commercial boat, fishing for salmon in Prince William Sound and for halibut in the Aleutians. Both went off to college but couldn’t resist the call of the sea. “We feel most at home in wild places,” says Claire. “My dream was to sell seafood, but I realized no job was going to let me take five months off to go commercial fishing.” The sisters decided to return home to Alaska after graduating to continue working on a boat. During the long winter off-season, however, they needed something to occupy their time. Emma learned how to screen print while attending art school in Italy and started selling shirts and bags with ocean-inspired designs on Etsy. “Young fishermen in our Alaskan community were excited to have something to wear that represented their livelihood,” she says.

Encouraged by the positive feedback, the women formed Salmon Sisters in 2012. The brand now sells nautical-inspired apparel and housewares, ranging from fish-patterned XtraTuf boots to T-shirts sporting the mantra “Know Your Fisherman.” They also flash-freeze and ship more than 2,000 pounds of wild halibut, sablefish, Pacific cod, and salmon throughout the United States. This summer, the sisters opened a Homer, Alaska–based flagship shop in a shipping container that, no surprise, once transported fish, and they took their seafood on the road to remote Alaskan communities via a mobile pop-up shop. “We’re so crazy fortunate this little Alaskan community raised us,” says Claire. “Salmon Sisters is our opportunity to give back.”

Ages: Claire, 27, and Emma, 26
Job: Commercial fisherwomen and business owners
Home Base: Claire: Homer, Alaska; Emma: Seattle, Washington
Education: Claire studied business and nutrition at the University of Vermont; Emma studied English and art at Williams College and is currently pursuing a masters in design at the University of Washington.

On Growing Up Off the Grid

Emma: “We grew up on a homestead in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. It ran on alternative energy, and we grew all of our own food. Claire and I would bounce between the garden and Dad’s boat. We’d be gathering firewood for the smokehouse, farming food, digging clams in the tide pools. By middle school, we were working on the boat. Life was simple but good, and early on we learned to work hard.”

On the Qualifications Needed to Work on a Boat

Emma: “There’s no manual or test to pass to work on a fishing boat. Captains will hire a green crew. It’s the crew’s responsibility to teach each other. You have to be able to tie certain knots and dock the boat, but all those things you can learn on the fly, and then you do them ten times. It’s a lifelong learning process.”

Claire: “If you want to get into commercial fishing, involve yourself in a coastal community. Find a mentor. You might start in a fish processing plant or at a commercial fishing lodge or on a charter boat. The key is to familiarize yourself with the people and place.”

On Their Daily Rituals

Emma: “Fishing is a very repetitive job. I wake up and check the marine forecast every morning to be one step ahead of the weather. We take our rain gear on and off at least three times a day. Food prep is a huge part of each day. The crew spends a lot of time thinking about what we can cook. Halibut tacos are always a hit, and the Crock-Pot is a staple.”

Claire: “When I get up, I always make sure our funky little coffeepot is going. The boat consumes a lot of coffee.”

On Embracing Discomfort

Emma: “Sometimes people get shaken up by things they can’t control, and at sea, it’s hard to control most things. If you’re a person who likes to know exactly what’s going to happen, this isn’t the job for you. You need to be tough to the core and flexible.”

On One Thing They Can’t Live Without

Claire: “Burt’s Bees face wipes are a godsend. You are always covered in salty sea spray, sweat, fish blood, jellyfish goo. We keep communal bottles of Ursa Major face tonic and sunscreen onboard.”

Emma: “I always bring a full iPod of music. Podcasts are key for sanity.”

What People Don’t Understand About the Job

Emma: “The land hustle. When you aren’t fishing, you’re advocating for your fishery—going to meetings, writing letters—just to make sure your job is there in the future.”

Claire: “You cannot be complacent. It takes an army—mechanics, net vendors, processors—to have your boat and equipment functioning and efficient.”

On the Importance of Having a Side Hustle

Claire: “Commercial fishing can be extremely lucrative, or you can totally strike out. The people who make it work create a lifestyle to deal with those fluctuations. They might captain on one operation and crew on another. You have to be able to live in the present rather than stress about the future.”

Emma: “Last year, we had one of the worst salmon seasons in our fishery in a long time. It was really hard on people, especially those trying to make payments on their boat. You have to save your money, anticipating that every year won’t be a good year. If you don’t, you can end up in a troublesome spot. You have to diversify, fishing in different areas or fishing for different things. For Claire and me, Salmon Sisters was our way of diversifying.”

On the Sea-to-Table Dilemma

Claire: “The lack of labeling and transparency is a huge problem and challenge. We fish for pink salmon and, on average, get 30 cents a pound for it. It’s sad to think our product is valued in cents, not even dollars. I wish we could have a beautiful fish market and traceable seafood. If people knew the characters catching their seafood, they’d see it as an artisanal product, not a commodity.”

On Their Success

Claire: “We never expected Salmon Sisters to take off like it did, but I think Alaskans are looking for a connection to the land and ocean. They wear Salmon Sisters like a badge as if to say, ‘We believe in these things, too.’”

>

A few years ago, before I began a Ph.D. in ornithology, I studied nomadic parakeets in Ecuador. I planned to track them with GPS devices, but I didn’t know the birds’ exact weight. Weight might seem like a trivial detail, but it’s incredibly important when you need to put a small GPS tracker on one. Existing literature didn’t help much. Luckily, I found my answer at the Ecuadorian Museum of Natural Sciences in Quito, home to two specimens of the Golden-plumed parakeet. As I turned them over in my hands and read through their specimen labels, I was surprised to learn that both were collected near my study site, in the early nineties. The female weighed 22 grams more than I expected, and the male 32 grams more. Suddenly I had more options for heavier tracking devices, opening up new possibilities for my research. 

Since then, I’ve lost count of how many times, and in how many ways, museum collections have proven invaluable to me. Natural history museums are often described as “libraries of life,” and each specimen, also known as a voucher or study skin, is an indispensablepiece of the biological record. The more complete the library, the more we can hope to understand and protect. 

In The Feather Thief (Viking, $27), Kirk Wallace Johnson tells the true story of Edwin Rist, a manwho is wholly unaware of the value of scientific collections. The book opens in 2009 with Rist, a giftedstudent the Royal College of Music, robbing London’s famous Tring Natural History Museum in the dead of night. He hops a wall, breaks in through a window, and wheels a suitcase down a dark hallway to cases of historic bird specimens, some of which were collected by Darwin’s contemporary, Alfred Russel Wallace. Rist targets some of the world’s rarest and flashiest birds; the “blue chatterer” (Spangled Cotinga), “Indian crow” (Red-ruffed Fruitcrow), Resplendent Quetzal, and King Bird-of-paradise. He steals 299 precious skins that he sells to finance a new gold flute. The judge who oversaw the case called the heist a “natural history disaster of world proportions.” 

To many, the crime is absurd: Why steal dead birds? The answer is that Rist has a passion greater than music; he is a world-renowned salmon flytier, trained in the classic Victorian practice and resolute in his desire to revive the antiquated art. In Victorian days, fly-tying manuals detailed intricate “recipes” for catching salmon that called for the dazzling feathers of rare and endangered birds. But after the Victorian feather craze died down and stricter laws passed, including the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) and the Endangered Species Act, rare feathers became increasingly hard to procure. Yet, in the underground world of fly-tying, the art lives on.Zealousflytiers and obsessed hobbyists go to incredible lengths—searching online fly-tying forums, scouring eBay, paying exorbitant amounts—to obtain the iridescent and brightly colored feathers of exotic birds. 

Rist once wrote in an article for legendary hookmaker Ronn Lucas’s website, “Fly-tying is not merely a hobby, it is an obsession we seem to devote a substantial part of our time to…, examining feather structure, designing flies, and coming up with new techniques for getting exactly what we want out of a fly.” 

Wallace Johnson gives a detailed and accessible overview of the many worlds that collide in Rist’s theft: he describes Victorian “feather fever,” the quirky history of fly-tying and flytiers, early British ornithological collections, and Alfred Russel Wallace’s invaluable contributions to science through his journeys to South America and the Malay Archipelago. Understanding the lengths that early explorers went to obtain each specimen makes the theft feel even more visceral: Alfred Russel Wallace endured food rationing, swollen ankles, and disease to acquire each specimen. He once defended his painstaking efforts, describing each species as “the individual letters which go to make up one of the volumes of our earth’s history; and, as a few lost letters make a sentence unintelligible, so the extinction of numerous forms of life which the progress of cultivation invariably entails will necessarily render obscure this valuable record of the past.” 

After Rist’s successful heist, he brings the stolen birds back to his apartment, where he plucks the most colorful feathers from each study skin and cuts parts of each bird into small pieces for illegal online sales. As I read this, my stomach knotted in pain. Each bird had been studied by scientists for decades, a priceless time stamp in the biological record; yet, when Rist finished with them, he tossed each skin into a cardboard box by his closet. More heartbreaking still was that he cut many of the tags off the specimens, rendering them effectively useless without their locality, date, and identifying information. 

It’s hard to overstate the tragedy of destroying irreplaceable scientific objects. Natural-history collections are vital to our understanding of biodiversity, evolution, and environmental change, and they only grow more valuable with time. In the late 1960s, museums were critical to discovering the link between the pesticide DDT and eggshell thinning. This research convinced the U.S. government to ban DDT to protect declining populations of birds of prey. Last year biologists used more than 1,300 bird skinsto produce a timeline of air quality in the U.S. manufacturing belt from the early to mid 20th century, filling a large gap in the historical record. At my own institution—the University of New Mexico’s Museum of Southwestern Biology, which houses over four million vouchered specimens from around the world—researchers used historic vouchersto identify the deer mouse as the reservoir for the deadly hantavirus, and they confirmed the virus’s presence in populations nearly 15 years prior to the 1993 outbreak. It was only because deer mice had been archived in the museum dating back to 1979 that scientists were able to answer questions over one decade later that no one imagined would need answering, underscoring the importance of scientific collections. 

At the Museum of Southwestern Biology, our collection includes extinct species like the Carolina Parakeet and Eskimo Curlew, type specimens (the original specimenupon which a new species name and description is based), and rarities that are hard to find anywhere else. The collection plays an integral role in courses; public outreach; and our team’s research on the evolutionary adaptations of birds to high-altitude environments, and how bird ranges might be affected by climate change. It’s impossible to predict what questions about environmental change, population genetics, or evolution we may want to ask 20 years from now; specimens provide important historic baselines, and new technologies will only increase the breadth of questions we can address using these samples, a point made strongly by leading scientists. 

One of Rist’s most tragic admissions is that he doesn’t understand why the Tring (or any museum) needs “so many” of each study skin; he admits he thinks they’re useless if they just sit in drawers. Similarly, one might ask: Why does a library need so many books? But unlike a book, each specimen represents a singular, unique record in time. A King Bird-of-paradise collected by Alfred Russel Wallace in 1858 has a much different value than one collected in 2018, because the information we can glean about genetics, evolution, and ecology corresponds to time and place. By robbing the Tring of something that can never be restored, Rist did truly irreparable damage to the biological record. 

Wallace Johnson succeeds in conveying the gravity of this natural-history “heist of the century,” and one of The Feather Thief’s greatest strengths is the excitement, horror, and amazement it evokes. It’s nonfiction that reads like fiction, with plenty of surprising moments beyond the crime and its aftermath. Wallace Johnson’s writing style is honest and reflective at times. In one nod to forgotten history, he emphasizes the critical role that early feminists played in bringing an end to feather fever: “In an era when women were expected to remain at home and had yet to be granted the right to vote or own property, the abolition of the feather trade was ultimately their work.”

The Feather Thief is a compelling blend of mystery, quirky salmon flytiers, and dogged natural-history enthusiasts, and it highlights the obsessive lengths that people will go to destroy—and protect—some of the world’s most valuable treasures. The book’s main drawback is that the suspenseful tone and diligent quest for answers isn’t matched by the rather abrupt ending, acknowledging that the underground fly-tying world and illegal feather sales are still flourishing. Then again, perhaps the unfinished feeling is justified: How do you conclude a real-life mystery when many stolen specimens haven’t yet been recovered, and likely never will be?

>

Suunto is known for its high-end watches and top-tier technology, most of which is geared toward hardened mountain athletes and data nerds. Last week, the Finnish brand announced the newest addition to its line: the Suunto 3 Fitness.

Launching April 25 and retailing for $200 (the white and black colorways retail for $230), the 3 Fitness is a more affordable, approachable watch—a first for the company. It won’t have a barometric altimeter, GLONASS satellite navigation, or built-in GPS (though you’ll be able to connect it to your phone for GPS). Instead, it’s designed for a general fitness audience, with all the niceties like sleep tracking, wrist-based heart rate monitoring, step counting, and built-in training guidance.

Sound familiar? Suunto is far from the only sport-watch brand to come out with a less-technical, lifestyle-oriented product that provides general health and fitness tracking without things like built-in GPS—think Fitbit Versa, Polar A370, and Garmin Vivomove HR.

Initially, I was skeptical: Suunto, the company that pioneered the multifunctional sports watch, was going basic. But then two weeks ago I got my hands on a sample of the 3 Fitness and was pleasantly surprised. This doesn’t feel like a high-end sports watch with its guts ripped out. It’s technical in its own right and rich with features that both hardcore and recreational athletes can appreciate.

One of this watch’s best qualities is its simplicity. It has a clean, classic look and isn’t riddled with unnecessary apps. In fact, there are no apps at all. This is a sports watch with some smart features, rather than a smartwatch with some sports features. Like most of its competitors, the 3 Fitness will connect to your phone to give you quick notifications (if you want). However, it doesn’t have a touchscreen and won’t make wallet-free payments, play music, or offer you stress-reducing breathing exercises. It just tracks your sleep, your heart rate, and your exercise.

The 3 Fitness pulls the customizable activity tracking feature that’s been a staple of Suunto’s Spartan line for years, with the option to set pace, heart rate, distance, and duration targets. Say you want to run one hour at a nine-minute pace or two hours at a heart rate between 120 and 130 beats per minute—just click a few buttons, and your watch will buzz to keep you on pace or in your goal HR zone. A progress meter shows you how much of the planned workout you’ve completed. You can also set an interval counter to manage reps, interval duration, and recovery time. These details seem small, but as a recreational runner who’s never quite been able to internalize what an 8:50 pace feels like, the added guidance is a huge boon.

The watch’s main hallmark is its adaptive training plan, which resets every day based on how hard you went the day before and how well recovered you are. After my first run with connected GPS, the watch estimated my V02max and spat out a seven-day training plan to improve my score. The plan looked something like this:

• Monday: 50 minutes moderate
• Tuesday: 25 minutes moderate
• Thursday: 45 minutes easy
• Saturday: 35 minutes very hard

The built-in training plan is certainly a nice feature, particularly since it’s not a fixed, cookie-cutter schedule. And because Suunto calculates V02max based on a combination of your max heart rate, how long you can sustain it, how quickly you recover, and the variation between your heartbeats, I’m confident I can trust the number it’s giving me (more so, at least, than watches that use a more basic measure of heart rate and pace or some combination of age, height, and weight).

Many teched-out sports watches are guilty of information overload—they tell you how you slept, what your V02max is, how fast you ran, how much time you need to recover—but unless you’re a coach or one of those data nerds, it’s hard to know what to do with all that information. The 3 Fitness weaves the data together into something you don’t need an Excel spreadsheet to use.

Of course, I’d love it if this watch had built-in GPS, though that would add to the cost. However, among its fitness-oriented, integrated-GPS-less peers, this one hits pretty close to perfect. It looks like an actual watch, it’s comfortable and stylish enough to wear all day, it’s not trying to take the place of your phone, and it still gives you the benefit of all that trademark Suunto accuracy. In other words: It’s ideal for those who want a basic, less expensive fitness watch that focuses more on quality fitness tracking and less on add-on lifestyle features.

Buy now

>

On Monday, retail giant REI announced a new set of sustainability standards, which will apply to all 1,000-plus outdoor brands it sells currently, and all the ones it will sell in the future. The standards address a broad range of social and environmental concerns, with minimum requirements and a set of preferred or suggested practices.

Effective immediately, companies will have to adhere to a code of conduct, pledging to uphold environmental and social responsibility in the supply chain.Companies don’t have to write their own codes of conduct; REI encourages brands to use either REI's own factory code of conduct or a code of conduct that’s aligned with internationally recognized best practices, like those published by the International Labour Organization. Companies will also have until 2020 to remove BPA, oxybenzone, long-chain PFAs, and certain dangerous flame-retardant chemicals from their products, and to make sure all their down and wool is sourced humanely. If a company refuses to make these changes, REI says that it will find similar products from another one that does.

In addition to the minimum requirements, REI lists a host of “preferred attributes,” which are voluntary: Bluesign approval (certifying a chemically clean manufacturing process); fair trade certification; use of the Higg index (a metric designed by the Sustainable Apparel Coalition to enable companies to measure their own sustainability attributes); adoption of the Responsible Wool Standard and either the Responsible Down Standard or the Global Traceable Down Standard (all third-party auditing groups that certify humane treatment of animals and best use of the land they graze on); use of organic cotton; and use of recyclable or compostable packaging.

REI’s product sustainability manager Greg Gausewitz says the preferred attributes will be one of the many factors REI takes into account when considering creating a relationship with a new company. They’re also intended to call attention to the brands that are using those certifications, educate customers about why those certifications matter, and “build demand and loyalty for those products." An online search function and special in-store merchandising will highlight, say, RDS or Bluesign products, so customers can easily identify them.

The various certifications and standards themselves aren't new. The Outdoor Industry Association’s Sustainability Working Group, which REI has been involved with since the group’s inception, has had resources available on its website for companies interested in getting more sustainable, including a suggested OIA code of conduct and a social responsibility toolkit. “What REI did is come up with their own guidance for those tools,” says Beth Jensen, OIA’s senior director of sustainable business innovation. “They’re outlining how they expect brands to use those tools, and providing a timeline for implementation.”

Of course, sustainability has proven to be good for business in the outdoor industry. Take Patagonia, which has led the charge on responsibly sourced down, socially conscious supply-chain management, and organic cotton, and been extremely vocal on the public lands front. Its sales have skyrocketed. Likewise, Jensen calls sustainability a “big area of opportunity” for retailers, who can turn themselves into resources for eco-conscious customers who don’t have time to vet products on their own. “I absolutely think that REI stands to gain customers and increase customer loyalty with this announcement,” Jensen says. 

Starting last summer, REI consulted with roughly 60 brands as it drafted up the new standards. “We wanted to make sure the standards were feasible, not just for big companies like Patagonia but for up-and-coming brands, too,” says Gausewitz. “We didn’t want to leave any brands behind.” For Nemo Equipment, which was one of the brands that weighed in, the standards are a welcome relief. “As a small brand, it’s difficult to carve out time and resources to figure out what you should be doing on the sustainability front,” says Theresa Conn, Nemo’s supply chain and sustainability coordinator. “With these standards, we can easily pick the top 10 things to spend our energy on.”

Evan Currid, CEO and co-founder of Tepui tents, which was not consulted during the drafting process, reacted to the new standards with more cautious optimism. “While we are still getting our heads around the breadth of the requirements and resources, we are aligned with the spirit of the program,” he says. Yet Currid adds that as he looks to expand the company’s offerings beyond its mainstay of rooftop tents, “this certainly will have implications in regard to time and cost to market.”

Just how much money is it going to take for companies to comply with the standards? Ali Kenney, vice president of global strategy and insights at Burton, says the costs are only high if you try to implement change right away. “The cost thing is real,” she says. “But if you take a longer-term view, the costs are lower.” That’s because companies often do product development two seasons ahead. To implement supply-chain changes now would mean switching up the manufacturing process for items that are already in production, possibly re-prototyping and perhaps even switching factories, none of which is easy. Implementing a change two years in the future, on the other hand, means the company has time to start from scratch with its new line.

Of course, the real cost in going sustainable comes from the factories. They have to pay for site cleanup, replacing machinery, changing the chemicals they use, and the way they deal with waste. “Factories are going to come up with every reason why they shouldn’t change,” Kenney says. “They’re afraid of the cost and afraid of the unknown.” Negotiations can take months or years, and often require additional human resources. “It would take a full-time employee just to calculate man hours and dollars broken out only for sustainability,” Kenney says. Between 2011 and 2018, the company went from having zero dedicated sustainability staffers to four. 

Nearly everyone Outside spoke with explained that the more companies that request sustainable practices from their factories and suppliers, the easier those facilities are going to be to convince. “There’s strength in numbers,” Gauswitz says. “So many brands use the same factories, and if they’re all going to those factories asking for sustainable practices, it’s easier to effect change. Indirectly, we can get a large number of suppliers working toward common positive outcomes.” Kenney explains that certified products will also become cheaper. If one company asks a down farm to get RDS certified, the supplier will pass along the certification cost to that one company; if 20 companies ask that same facility to get RDS certified, they’ll each shoulder only a fraction of the cost. In theory, at least, REI’s new standards could actually make it easier and more affordable for companies (of all sizes) to adopt sustainable manufacturing processes.

Danielle Cresswell, sustainability manager at Klean Kanteen—a small, relatively young company that is a 1 Percent for the Planet member and certified B-corporation—is well aware of how much sustainability costs. When it launched in 2004, there weren’t resources or guidelines for going green. “We found partnering with high quality factories was a critical investment” because they’re able to meet more stringent environmental standards, she says. Naturally, those factories are more expensive. But she's adamant that this cost shouldn’t be prohibitive, nor used as an excuse. “Every company must make trade-offs and choose where to put limited resources,” she says. “Looking around, it’s hard to miss the imperative for creating socially and environmentally responsible business no matter the age or size of a company."