Month: March 2019

>

I was atop Mount Nyiragongo, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, when the 11,385-foot volcano started launching geysers of red lava into the air. “Follow in my footsteps, Jessica,” said my teammate Sibusiso Vilane, who appeared out of nowhere. Being a novice climber, I sighed with relief. Vilane is the first black man to have summited Mount Everest, a mountain he’s topped twice, and one of 61 people in the world to have achieved the Explorers Grand Slam, which entails climbing the Seven Summits and trekking to the North and South Poles.

We were three days into a mountaineering expedition last winter to summit seven of Africa’s highest peaks. While the rest of our team—composed of African mountaineers, photographers, and guides—sped down Nyiragongo’s rocky slopes, Vilane, a 47-year-old South African, and I, a 35-year-old magazine editor from New York, set a steady pace together in back. He also stuck with me on peaks in Rwanda, Kenya, and Uganda.

It’s been four months since we parted ways. Now, as I write this, Vilane is somewhere on the south side of Everest, clad from head to toe in South Africa–based First Ascent gear (one of his sponsors), with his trademark buff wrapped around his wrist or neck, as he waits to attempt a third summit, his first without supplemental oxygen.

---

Vilane was born in 1970 in rural South Africa. When he was four years old, he moved with his family to Swaziland, a small landlocked monarchy that borders South Africa and Mozambique. He didn’t get his first pair of shoes until he was ten. He went to school for the first time at 11. While his stepfather helped to pay for his early schooling, Vilane needed to support himself by the time he reached high school. He began doing yard work for an expat Canadian couple, and they put him through high school, giving him the education he needed to qualify for game-ranger training. In 1993, Vilane was hired to work in Swaziland’s mountainous Malolotja Nature Reserve, a 44,500-acre wilderness area filled with leopard, zebra, and wildebeest. There, in 1996, his life changed.

That’s when John Doble, a British high commissioner to Swaziland, wandered into the park. Doble, an avid hiker, outdoorsperson, and philanthropist, had arrived in the country two days before and wanted to join a walking group, but there wasn’t one. Vilane had a day off the following Saturday and offered to take him. The weekend ramble turned into a regular meetup.

One day, they were hiking in a gorge, and Doble dropped his favorite Zulu walking stick. It clattered down a cliff and got caught in a bush above a 200-foot drop into the Komati River. He started to climb down, but Vilane stopped him. “Don’t move another inch!” Vilane said. “I’ll get it.” As he went to retrieve it, Doble noticed how agile Vilane was on the rock.

“You climb with such ease and agility, and you don’t show any fear,” Doble told Vilane. “You would have made a good mountaineer.” Doble pointed out that in the more than 40 years since Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had climbed Mount Everest in 1953, no black person had summited the famous peak. At the time, Vilane had never seen a picture of Everest or read a book or article about it.

“That conversation sparked the interest,” Vilane recalls, “because I thought, ‘There’s a chance you can represent your continent.’”

Vilane wondered why no one like him had attempted it. While Africa does have a mountaineering culture, with gifted guides and porters on such peaks as Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro, Kenya’s Mount Kenya, and in Uganda’s Rwenzori Mountains, alpinism in Africa is seen as manual labor, not as a hobby or career. But the main impediment, Vilane concluded, is that finances limit many Africans from adventuring. (The average Everest expedition costs tens of thousands of dollars.) “It tends to be the mental block that stops people from exploring,” he says. “Growing up, you’ve got your mother and your grandmother trying every day to put food on the table, and others are striving to send their children to school. Why would anyone part ways with money to climb a mountain?”

Doble asked Vilane if he would attempt Everest if he had the money. “Absolutely,” he said. Climbing to Earth’s highest point would be a way for him to show his fellow Africans that anybody can do anything if they commit to hard work.

---

Before Vilane could attempt Everest, he needed to train. The first mountain Vilane climbed was 19,341-foot Kilimanjaro, in 1999. The expedition, which Doble paid for, was muddy, wet, and slippery. “Primitive and tough,” Vilane says.

Doble retired from his position in Swaziland in 1999 and returned to England, where he discovered that the UK-based outfitter Jagged Globe was putting a team together to climb Everest in 2003, on the 50th anniversary of Hillary and Norgay’s achievement. After conversations with Doble, the company agreed to let Vilane join, provided that he first attempt a 2002 Jagged Globe Himalayan expedition to climb Pokalde, Island Peak, and Lobuje, all 19,000-foot-plus summits in Nepal. “I do remember thinking Sibusiso was woefully inexperienced,” says American Robert Mads Anderson, Jagged Globe’s Everest trip leader. “But John Doble said I should wait until I meet him.”

While still working as a ranger,Vilane trained for the 2002 trial Himalayan expedition by running and scrambling up hills near his home. He arrived in Nepal without mountaineering gear; it wasn’t widely for sale at the time. Waiting in his hotel was a duffel filled with equipment he’d never seen before. “My heart was pounding when I opened the bag,” Vilane says. “I thought, ‘What is all this stuff? Which one is a jumar? How does a locking carabiner lock?’”

The climbs were cold, windy, and icy. One person from another team fell off a cliff and disappeared, and two climbers in Vilane’s team got altitude sickness and had to be airlifted out. “The climb was a shock to my system,” Vilane says, “but it prepared me for the big one.”

Vilane proved to be a quick study. “As much as he had little crampon or high-mountain experience, he had a balance and an ability to move over the earth that is rare,” Anderson says. “He is a naturally talented and a superbly fit athlete and moved very quickly and easily into the new environment.”After Vilane summited all three Himalayan peaks, he got the green light for Jagged Globe’s 2003 Everest expedition. The only question was how he would pay for it. A friend of Doble’s who wishes to remain anonymous ended up funding Vilane’s trip.

Attempting to summit from the south side, the Jagged Globe team was pushed back twice by weather, but after 60 days on the mountain, they topped out on a third try. On May 23, six days before the 50th anniversary of the peak’s first known ascent, Vilane stepped into history as the first black person to reach the top of the world. “For me to be able to do that,” he says, “it was amazing.”

Anderson attributes Vilane’s success to the time he spent in the wildness of the African bush. “Running around with the lions did really stand him in good stead in the big peaks,” says Anderson, who also cites Vilane’s lightness of spirit. “We shared climbing, tents, and much time together,” he says. “And he bonded well with our Sherpa team.”

Vilane went back to Everest in 2005 with a team that included England’s Sir Ranulph Fiennes and the South African explorer Alex Harris. He was climbing to raise money for three African children’s foundations. This time, after 73 days, Vilane summited from the north side. “It was the longest and the toughest in the Himalayas, conditions-wise,” he says. “High winds on the mountain were prevalent and stopping people’s attempts. We summited on the third of June.”

In 2006, Vilane summited Argentina’s Mount Aconcagua, Russia’s Mount Elbrus, and Papua New Guinea’s Carstensz Pyramid. The following year, he tackled Antarctica’s Mount Vinson, and then, from November 2007 to January 2008, Vilane and Harris trekked for 65 days across 745 miles to the South Pole to become the first South Africans to complete the journey without additional support. Vilane topped Alaska’s Mount Denali in 2008, and, in 2012, after 14 days and 70 miles, reached the North Pole, giving him exclusive membership to the Explorers Grand Slam club.

His current Everest attempt without supplemental oxygen is being led by the outfitter Asian Trekking and is sponsored by First Ascent and Sport for Social Change Network. Vilane, who lives outside of Johannesburg with his wife and four children, is climbing to raise money for African women’s education. He also has a thriving career now as a motivational speaker—primarily to corporations in South Africa, where interest in his story boomed after his second Everest summit—and he co-wrote a memoir in 2008 called To the Top from Nowhere. “I learned quite late in my life that it’s not about the money or the resources that you need,” Vilane says. “It’s about the desire and the interest. Money won’t buy you an accomplishment.”

---

I was walking alongside Vilane up the rolling foothills of Mount Kenya on our attempt to reach the 16,355-foot Point Lenana when Nelson Mandela’s name came up. As a young man, watching Mandela take on apartheid helped Vilane believe he could reach for his dreams.

“Most kids growing up in Africa are so focused on just one thing, like going to school or looking after their dad’s cattle or goat herd,” he says. “They never think that their world is bigger than the area where they were born,” pointing out that he’s almost always the only elite black climber on a mountain. Sophia Danenberg made history in 2006 as the first black woman to climb Everest, but beyond Sophia and Sibu, it’s hard to find other examples like them in the alpinism community. Journalist James Edward Mills chronicled this issue in his book The Adventure Gap: Changing the Face of the Outdoors, which notes the accomplishments and efforts of climbers and explorers of color, but also acknowledges that a dearth of role models has kept the numbers low in mountaineering. “I was never interested in climbing or hiking, not necessarily because I didn’t like it,” Vilane says, “but because I wasn’t exposed to it.”

“My main motivation to keep doing what I’m doing is to inspire young people in Africa,” he continues. “I think there will be one young person out there who will look at me and feel encouraged and inspired and do things in their own way.”

It was only after I got back to the United States and talked to Doble that I learned Vilane has met Mandela, who asked to see him after his first Everest climb. “Mandela said to him, ‘It is so good of a famous young man like you, who has achieved so much and everyone wants to talk to, to find time to come and see an old has-been like me!’” Doble recalls. “For Sibusiso to meet Mandela, he said that meant more to him, by far, than climbing Everest.”

Then, in 2012, at a 250-person party at Buckingham Palace celebrating Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee, Vilane was one of two people singled out to chat with the monarch. You’d never know it from his humble demeanor. “He shoulders the responsibility of being a generational icon with humility and gets on with the job,” Alex Harris says.

Whether or not he’s successful on Everest this month, Vilane will no doubt take the longer view. “Life is a mountain,” he says. “How you climb your own personal Everest is the same as climbing a real mountain. You’ve got to identify with it, know how big is it and how much support you need, and you need to know that you’ll have enough to persevere. There will be times it doesn’t work and times you don’t achieve what you want, but you can never give up.”

Click:高仿奢侈品包包
Seven adventurers on their favorite legal performance enhancer

Caffeine fuels expeditions far and wide, from ultra races and endurance cycling events to Mount Everest summits and months-long thru-hikes. It’s a performance enhancing, do-it-all supplement that requires you to break zero rules of competition.

“Caffeine is fascinating because it does so many things in the body,” says Louise Burke, head of sports nutrition at the Australian Institute of Sport and coauthor of the 2011 book Caffeine for Sports Performance. It can increase alertness and power, improve brain function and reaction time, and make you a happier person. But, for athletes, the most important thing it does is mask fatigue. “It translates very well to sports performance,” she says.  “You’re able to continue to work at your optimal pace or keep doing what you were previously doing for longer before you get tired.”

While the traditional appreciation of caffeine comes from its role as a stimulant, Burke says caffeine acts in more subtle and complex ways as well. “It may change muscle contraction. It may have an effect on how efficiently you use your energy. In some people it may help to spare glycogen.”

With such a wide range of possible effects, it’s  important for you to find out what works best for you and your sport, Burke says. Otherwise, risk incorrect application and possible side effects like jitteriness or inability to focus. There are many different ways to get a jolt, and things like dose, source, and timing will significantly impact the way your body responds.  

We spoke with a few of today’s best endurance athletes to get a sample of the their tried and true caffeine routines.

Jim Walmsley

Ultrarunner

Jim Walmsley, one of the fastest and most dominant ultrarunners alive, reserves caffeine for when he needs it most—in the middle of a race. He gets it into his body in the most efficient way possible: a pill. His go-to is 1st Endurance PreRace capsules, which contain endurance-enhancing chemicals Citrulline Malate and Taurine in addition to caffeine. “Even though it’s called PreRace, I’ll take it in a race if I’m feeling a little tired or if the legs are feeling a little heavy,” he says. “I’ll typically take two at a time.”

Krystle Wright

Photographer

Aussie photographer Krystle Wright is in near constant motion, jetsetting from Antarctica to Switzerland to French Polynesia. Shockingly, she does this all without the aid of coffee. “I barely have any caffeine in my diet at all,” she concedes. But her hot chocolate habit provides just enough caffeine to keep her going. “If I’m on a cold expedition, I'm constantly found with a hot chocolate in hand,” she says. “I got the nicknames Hot Choc Monster and Miss Double Hot Choc. 

Stephanie Violett

Ultrarunner

Right before a race, North Face ultrarunner Steph Violett indulges in a different kind of caffeine fix. “I will sometimes eat chocolate for a quick pick me up. My favorite is chocolate plus peanut butter,” she says. Adding the peanut butter provides a bit of sustenance in the form of protein and fat to her pre-race jolt. “I normally just alternate a handful of chocolate chips and spoonful of peanut butter right out of the jar.”

Mark Healey

Big wave surfer

Despite the adrenaline rush of chasing 60-foot waves, the Oahu-based waterman Mark Healey prefers a milder buzz in the morning. He turns to Yerba Mate, a tea consumed frequently in South America that contains roughly half the amount of caffeine as coffee. For years Healey has worked with the California-based company Guayaki, which makes canned chilled yerba matte. “It’s my go to,” he says. “It gives me the caffeine boost without the crash or shakiness of coffee.”

Nick McNutt 

Big mountain skier

Whistler-based skier and climber Nick McNutt starts most of his days before sunrise—better known in mountain towns as an alpine start. Fittingly, he also relies heavily on an instant coffee brand of the same name, Developed by professional adventurer Matt Segal, Alpine Start gears its products specifically towards endurance and outdoors athletes, and guarantees that its cup of instant brew will taste nothing like the watered down, flavorless stuff you're used to drinking when you're camping or climbing. "It's my favorite," says McNutt. "It tastes like real brewed coffee but there's no fuss—all you have to do is boil water." 

Rory Bosio 

Ultrarunner

Rather than compete at the iconic ultra races this summer, Bosio completed a 128-mile traverse of the French island of Corsica, which she later described as "unrelentingly brutal." To survive 50 hours and 48,000 feet of climbing, she drank a homemade concoction of two-thirds Coke, one-third water, and two scoops of raspberry Skratch Labs hydration powder per every liter of soda. "I don't drink soda in everyday life, but I discovered the magic of Coke years ago while racing in Europe where the only fluids at the aid station were that, water, and broth," she says. "I found that it worked great and didn't upset my stomach the way some sports drinks do." 

>

If you crossed paths with Maureen Wilton Mancuso in Toronto, it would be easy to give nothing more than a passing glance to the 64-year-old woman running trails with her dogs. Sure, she glides over the terrain with ease, but you would never know that at one point she owned the women’s marathon world record. Then again, very few people even knew her name when she set that record, in 1967.

There are many possible causes for Mancuso’s relative anonymity.Maybe it’s the fact that she was a tiny 13-year-old running her first marathon and stepped unnoticed onto the unpaved Eastern Canadian Marathon Championships course. Or perhaps she got lost in the headlines, because two weeks earlier, Kathrine Switzer had become the first woman to officially enter and run the Boston Marathon. Or it could be simpler: After Mancuso smashed the record by more than four minutes (she ran 3:15:22, breaking the 3:19:33 set by New Zealand’s Mildred Sampson in 1964), she returned to life as usual and largely dropped off the radar.

Amby Burfoot, winner of the 1968 Boston Marathon and a former Runner’s World editor, says it’s crucial to put Mancuso’s run in historical context. “She was running a race in Toronto that no one had heard of, at a time when no one was covering marathons,” he says. “Most people only knew about Boston, and the overwhelming attitude was that distance running was bad for women.”

In today’s running landscape, where the top female marathoners are widely celebrated (and with good reason), it seems a bit sad that Mancuso never had her day in the sun. But in talking to her, it becomes clear that fame and admiration were never her goals and that a marathon career was not in the cards.

Today, Mancuso puts it bluntly: “I didn’t really enjoy marathons. They weren’t my thing.” She admits, however, that the distance was a natural fit. “I didn’t train much for that first one,” Mancuso says. “But I had a talent for being able to keep going.”

Prior to lining up that morning, Mancuso was a devoted and talented cross-country and track runner, training five or six days a week with her brother and the local running club. She first pulled on a pair of spikes at age ten after expressing interest in the sport to her parents, who wholeheartedly supported but never pressured her.

The idea of her running the marathon originated with her coach, Sy Mah, who spotted her talent for endurance. He turned to the Amateur Athletics Union (AAU) for permission—the governing body did not officially permit women to run marathons until 1972—and while the federation didn’t explicitly deny Mancuso’s entry, it did try to discourage it.

Mancuso went into the race knowing she could break the world record by running 7:30-mile pace. “That seemed easy to me, because I was accustomed to running so much faster for track and cross-country,” she says. Mancuso stayed steady (within seconds of that pace) throughout the first 25 miles, she says, based off the splits yelled out from race officials at mile markers. Her mother was also watching the clock and determined that Mancuso was running too slow for the record—she shouted to her daughter that she needed to speed up. Mancuso obliged and clocked six minutes flat for her last mile. She crossed the finish line well in control. A race physician checked her heart rate right away, noting how much less winded she seemed compared to her older male counterparts.

Mancuso’s achievement was underappreciated from the very beginning. Despite her showing that day, she says the officials didn’t even name her run a world record at the finish line, because she was too young to qualify for records. “They called it a ‘world’s best performance,’” Mancuso says. “It wasn’t until years later that they named it a world record.”

---

Mancuso was one of only two women in the field that day in Toronto. Knowing how much controversy Switzer had caused in Boston, Mah invited her to join Mancuso for support. While the two women didn’t run together for long—the 20-year-old Switzer was still not recovered from Boston a few weeks earlier—her presence gave Mancuso comfort. “I was happy to have another woman in the race,” Mancuso says. “The AAU didn’t stop me from running, but we knew they weren’t happy about it.”

Switzer says that accepting Mah’s invitation was a no-brainer. “My boyfriend, my coach, and I had been expelled by the AAU after Boston, so it felt like a protest to go run another,” she says. “Plus, Sy gave us money for gas.”

In the end, Switzer crossed the line an hour or so after Mancuso, and she remembers complimenting the “little girl” on how well she had run. “Like a typical 13-year-old, she didn’t care about the race,” Switzer laughs. “She wanted to show me her Monkees poster instead.” (Mancuso also remembers this interaction and considers it normal teenager behavior. “My friend had just drawn this picture of [Monkees member] Peter Tork for me,” she says. “That’s where my attention was.”)

On the drive back to the states with her boyfriend and coach, Switzer says, the conversation turned to Mancuso. The three of them discussedwhether the young phenom would continue running. “I speculated that she would be finished with it by 18,” Switzer says, “because that’s what happened with kids and running. They burned out.”

Switzer’s instincts proved to be true. Despite Mancuso’s talent for the distance, her heart belonged to the track and shorter road distances. “I really preferred a five- or ten-mile race,” Mancuso says. “For a 13-year-old, three hours is a long time to run—it just felt boring to me.”

Boredom wasn’t the only obstacle to Mancuso’s running future. Immediately following her marathon, she and her family hopped in the car and headed north to their cottage for two weeks. When she returned, it wasn’t to accolades or glory, but to largely negative attention. “There were media calls coming in from all over the place,” Mancuso says. Numerous articles pointed to the potential harm that running 26 miles could cause a young girl. Some claimed that the women’s marathon would never catch on and that Mancuso’s effort was “without purpose.” One reporter went so far as to ask her to prove she was indeed female. The headlines were hard for a 13-year-old. “All I could see was the negativity toward me,” Mancuso says.

While the marathon already wasn’t her favorite distance, Mancuso says the controversy over her race didn’t help. “I think if there was any enthusiasm to do another, that probably killed it,” she says.

Burfoot isn’t surprised by the reactions to Mancuso’s race. “We were a long way from understanding what women could do,” he says. “It took many more women and years of fighting to prove that running wasn’t bad for the female body.” Despite the controversy, Mancuso had a good support system. “I had strong friendships in my club, and my coach and parents were behind me,” she says. “The reporters weren’t the important people in my life.”

Mancuso returned to her track and cross-country training and competed at the World Cross-Country Championships in Scotland when she was 15. She gave the marathon two more shots in 1968, but because they weren’t a priority for her, Mancuso didn’t properly train for them and didn’t come close to matching her previous performances.

Mancuso’s running career was largely over by the time she finished high school—a combination of burnout and dead ends. “All my friends were quitting the club, and, really, it was enough for me at that point,” she says.

In the ensuing years, Mancuso’s running largely became recreational, and she went through stretches where she gave it up for reasons of injury and time restraints. Mancuso’s life post-competitive running has been largely dedicated to raising her two children. Ever humble, she didn’t even share her running history with the children until her then-nine-year-old daughter came home from running with her school club and asked her mother if she had ever run. “I sat her down and told her about the marathon,” Mancuso says. “That was a special day for both of us.”

These days, you’ll mostly find Mancuso—who works as a dog groomer—out running with her four-legged companions. After a spate of injuries over the years, she’s added strength training to her routine and credits the practice with keeping aches and pains at bay.

While Mancuso remains unassuming, there’s been a recent renewed interest in her accomplishments. A new book about her life, Little Mo: The Story of a Forgotten Young Running Revolutionary, will be released next year. In 2010, the Canadian Broadcasting Company reunited Mancuso and Switzer to run the Toronto GoodLife Half Marathon. “It was like meeting the Rip Van Winkle of running,” Switzer says. “Maureen had been out of competitive running for so long that I had to tell her what a chip was and teach her about the bag check.”

Aside from her unfamiliarity with modern-day racing, Mancuso still pulled off a decent finish. “She still had the goods,” Switzer says. “I was out of shape and struggled to run a 2:13. But Maureen ran a 1:48. She’s a natural.”

It’s long overdue that we started talking about it, and it affects all of us

On November 29, we posted an anonymous survey to Facebook about sexual harassment in the outdoors and outdoor industry. We hoped to hear from readers about their experiences and take an honest look at a small portion of this global problem, from those who were willing to share their stories. And we were grateful to get lots of thoughtful feedback from many of you. However (and, of course, we were expecting this) we heard from a disturbing number of Facebook commenters—mostly men, unsurprisingly—and anonymous survey respondents who thought this was too political, too unrelated to the outdoors, and worth making light of. 

Readers, we really value you here at Outside. You’re the reason we work to write great adventure stories and report on issues that will make the outdoors a better place for everyone.

But if you think that sexual harassment isn’t a real problem or if you like making jokes about people getting harassed in the outdoors, do us a favor: Unsubscribe. Make good on your threats to stop reading.

We’ll let a sampling of comments speak for themselves. 

Anonymous Survey Comments: 

“I would like to be flashed by a girl at some point in near future in the mountains.”

“I’m so mad that you guys are doing a poll like this. I read your magazine to get away from the life. I love looking at nature and being surrounded by it. I enjoy reading about other people’s adventures and gear reviews. I get enough political bull shit when I turn on my tv or log into social media and at work. Do what you guys are good at. I would love to talk to someone from outside about how I can cancel my subscription.”

“Bitches always be catcalling me for looking so sexy when I'm skiing. Plus women ski naked sometimes and that makes me feel really uncomfortable.”

“I was hiking the PCT. I'm a male. On several occasions, one or more female hikers approached me from behind. A few times, they said ‘hello’ as they passed. It made me very uncomfortable.”

Facebook Comments:

To these readers and any others who agree with them, we’ll make our stance perfectly clear: we care about sexual harassment. We’ll keep reporting on it—it’s long overdue we kept this conversation going, and the outdoor industry is far from exempt. The unfollow button looks like this: 

>

The sinking of the SS El Faro, on October 1, 2015, was America’s worst maritime disaster in decades. El Faro was 790 feet long and hauling 25 million pounds of cargo from Jacksonville, Florida, to San Juan, Puerto Rico. About halfway through its voyage, the ship ran into Hurricane Joaquin’s 130 mile per hour winds and 40-foot waves. None of the ship’s 33 crew members survived.

El Faro slowly became a rich subject for writers. The National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation of the sinking turned up thousands of documents, and there were weeks of public hearings trying to figure out what went wrong. Most important, there were 26 hours of audio straight from El Faro’s bridge, preserved on a black box and retrieved from the wreckage nearly three miles underwater by a robot submarine.

When El Faro’s two defining traits come together—the tragedy and the archive—they create an incredible true story of nautical disaster, of real human beings facing things the rest of us can’t imagine. So it makes sense that, this spring, New York publishers are releasing three different nonfiction books on the ship. The books’ titles make for a morbid Venn diagram of overlapping words: There’s Boston-based journalist Rachel Slade’s Into the Raging Sea, Miami-based journalist Tristram Korten’s Into the Storm, and New York–based author George Michelsen Foy’s Run the Storm.Thankfully, all three avoid sensationalism and offer serious looks at the sinking, though one does emerge as the most insightful exploration of this unthinkable disaster.

When people think of them at all, most of us think of cargo ships like El Faro as indestructible. They are so big, so federally regulated, so fortified by modern technologies of navigation and weather forecasting. How could this happen in 21st-century America?

For a lot of reasons, it turns out—most of them small. When El Faro left Jacksonville on September 29, captain Michael Davidson knew about the coming storm. He had a good reputation in his industry. (“A by-the-book mariner,” William Langewiesche called him in a recent Vanity Fair feature.) But Davidson also seemed to be angling for a promotion, and he didn’t want to annoy his bosses at TOTE Maritime Inc. by asking for more time and fuel. The bridge microphones caught him reassuring his crew: “You can’t run [from] every single weather pattern.” So the ship followed its normal route with only minor deviations, even as it moved closer and closer to the storm.

That storm kept growing stronger, eventually becoming a Category 4 hurricane. But a software glitch left El Faro’s officers with weather data that was hours old; the ship’s anemometer had broken weeks before, which meant they couldn’t tell how fast the winds were blowing. A few people on the bridge tried to convince Davidson to change course, but they didn’t try hard enough, or he didn’t listen hard enough—as in any workplace, it’s difficult to know the histories behind a decision. “I think he’s just trying to play it down because he realizes we shouldn’t have come this way,” said Danielle Randolph, the second mate, when the captain wasn’t on the bridge. “Saving face.”

The bridge audio abounds with moments like that, simultaneously humanizing and heartbreaking. When Davidson finally decided to ring TOTE’s emergency call center, he got stuck in the sort of loop you’d expect if you were calling about problems with your cable box. (What’s your best callback number? Can you explain the problem again?) Even near the end, El Faro’s crew seemed more shocked than terrified. When Randolph finally saw the storm on the horizon, all she said was, “There’s our weather.”

The end, when it came, came quickly. The waves and wind became too much even for a ship the size of El Faro. It began to list severely, taking on water until it lost its engines, until the cars in its hold were bobbing around themselves. The ship continued to tilt and started to sink; Davidson gave the order to abandon ship, but in the middle of a hurricane, lifeboats and immersion suits were useless. The air was so saturated with rain and spray that it would have been as impossible to breath above the water as below it.

All three books capture the tragedy and suspense of El Faro. The timing might make this seem like a ghoulish scramble, something the publishing industry has certainly managed before. (A deadly 1998 yacht race in Sydney, Australia, also produced three different books.) But each El Faro volume finds a unique angle, even if their titles all sound the same. Slade spends the most time with the crew’s families and their persistent grief. Korten broadens the narrative to include the M/V Minouche, a smaller ship hit by Joaquin, and the Coast Guard’s attempts to rescue the crews of both.

Foy does the best job. He tells the story briskly and confidently while working in helpful asides: how cargo containers are fastened to a ship deck, how forecasts are determined, how huge ships stay upright (and how they don’t). Run the Storm is too dense in a few spots, especially in its footnotes, but it gracefully covers everything you’d want to know about El Faro’s sinking and the 33 lives that went with it.

Still, the most moving parts in all three books come from those recordings. Take the end of the tape, right before the audio cuts out—when Davidson and his helmsman, Frank Hamm, were the only ones left on the dramatically slanted bridge, with the ship’s alarms ringing in the background, with their voices rising into screams. All three authors have the good sense to basically quote it verbatim:

Hamm: “My feet are slipping. I’m going down.”
Davidson: “You’re not going down.”
Hamm: “I need a ladder.”
Davidson: “We don’t have a ladder. I don’t have a line.”
Hamm: “You’re gonna leave me.”
Davidson: “I’m not leaving you. Let’s go.”
Hamm: “I need someone to help me.”
Davidson: “I’m the only one here.”
Hamm: “I can’t. I can’t. I’m a goner.”
Davidson: “No, you’re not.”
Hamm: “Just help me.”
Davidson: “Frank, let’s go. It’s time to come this way.”

At the end of Moby-Dick, after Ahab and his ship have vanished, Melville describes the ocean enduring: “Then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled 5,000 years ago.” The sea still rolls, but one thing that’s changed is the technology that records it. This technology isn’t perfect—software still hiccups, anemometers still break—but El Faro’s black box has commemorated the crew in a way nothing else could. The lines remain so powerful because they are freighted with the knowledge that the speaker will soon be dead.

>

When you buy something using the retail links in our stories, we earn an affiliate commission that helps pay for our work. Read more about Outside’s affiliate policy.

Outside has reviewed backpacking tents for 40 years, and during that time we’ve tested a lot of well-designed models. But if we had to choose the best all-around tent to take backpacking right now, we’d buy the Sierra Designs Flash 2 FL. We love the Flash 2 FL because it’s fast and simple to set up, easy to get in and out of, weighs less than two pounds per-person, packs up compact, and has held up to years of use from out testers. To find out more about why we'd recommend the Flash 2 FL, and gain some useful tips for how to find your own perfect tent, read on.

Imagine a spectrum of tents lined up according to size and weight. On one end you’d have ultralight shelters. These fragile and minimalist abodes are like rain jackets for your sleeping bag. They’re designed to shave ounces, usually at the expense of comfort, and are popular with folks like thru-hikers who want to travel light. Spending a night in one means getting intimate with your tent mate. At the other end of the spectrum are car camping tents. Heading toward palatial, these mobile homes focus more on interior space and comfort. They’re too heavy to carry more than a 100 yards, hog serious backpack real estate, and often require teamwork to set up.

A good backpacking tent should fall somewhere in the middle. They’re compact enough to carry on your back for miles, but are made of tougher fabrics than an ultralight tent, have more square footage and elbow room. And they also come with small luxuries like pockets. Compared to car camping mansions, backpacking tents are smaller, lighter and easier to set up. They’re versatile tents designed for adventure.

Of course, there are several types of backpacking tents. We recommend a double-wall style. Typically, these include an internal tent body made from bug-proof mesh or lightweight nylon, and an external, waterproof fly. The gap between the body and fly encourages airflow to prevent moisture buildup inside. And if any condensation does collects on the inside of the fly, the gap keeps your sleeping bags and clothing from getting wet. All of our top-choice tents listed below are a double-wall style.

In a single-wall tent, the body and fly are the same thing. Eliminating the mesh cuts weight, but single-wall tents tend to be hot, and condensation can be an issue. This style of tent is usually reserved for mountaineering. A third style combines the two into a hybrid design. Taking the best of both can create excellent tents, like our favorite backpacking tent the Sierra Designs Flash 2.

 

We think there are seven key aspects to consider when buying a tent. Each person will weigh those aspects differently, but it’s good to know them all.

Tent Capacity

One of the first questions to ask before buying a tent is, how many people do you need to house? We used to recommend spacing up, or buying a three-person tent if there were two of you, and so on. But nowadays, tent designers have found unique ways to add extra elbow room without adding weight, so now we recommend buying a two-person tent for two people.

The exception is when you’re solo camping, or camping with kids and dogs. Solo campers could buy a one-person tent, but we often prefer a lightweight two-person shelter for the extra space and minimal weight gain. Campers who have kids, and or dogs,should consider that smaller body a full-size adult body to ensure enough space. Two adults with a kid, or two adults with a dog, should buy a three-person tent. Two adults with a dog and a kid, or two adults with two kids, should buy a four-person tent. Larger groups should consider dividing into smaller tents.

The best way to measure whether you’ll fit comfortably in a particular tent is to climb in a demo model. If that’s not an option, there are a few things you need to know about the ways manufacturers describe tents. First, your standard two-person tent should have about 30 square feet of internal floor space. Some tents will be a little longer; a good choice if you’re well over six feet tall. And a newer category of tents called “plus size” or high volume, add extra floor space and headroom to give a roomier feel without much weight penalty. Peak roof heights average around 42 inches. That’s enough for most people to sit up without brushing their heads. Other things to look for: pole structures that create vertical walls, particularly cross poles, multiple hubs, and pre-bent or “kneed” poles that create vertical walls, and high peak heights and large vestibules for storing gear outside of the tent.

However, none of this data alone tells you what it’s like to hang out, play cards, or even put on a pair of pants in a tent. To understand that requires the hard-to-measure variable of useable volume: aka elbow room. NEMO, Marmot, Sierra Designs, and SlingFin have all taken a stab at measuring and displaying this (NEMO does it best), but we still stand by our recommendation to get in your tent if possible.

 

Tent Weight

Weight is often the most talked about variable. It’s easy to quantify, and you’ll feel it every step of the trip. But there’s actually not much of a weight spread in today’s tents. The lightest backpacking tents usually weigh just under two pounds per-person, while the most budget-friendly tents usually weigh less than three pounds per person. That’s less than one fuel bottle or the difference between an empty and half-full water bottle. It’s not a lot.

Heads up: when you’re comparing weights make sure it’s apples to apples. Tentmakers will often list more than one weight per-tent. For instance, they’ll list minimum, packaged, pack, trail, maximum, etc. All these weights are measured slightly differently. For your reference, all the weights we list on our recommended tents were recorded using our own Park Tools bike scale, and those weights include the tent, fly, stuff sacks, and eight pegs.

Tent Price

We think the sweet spot for backpacking tents in the $200 to $500 range. Tents under $200 tend to be heavy, not very durable, often lack a full fly (so there aren’t any vestibules), and come with suspect waterproofing. Above $500, the law of diminishing returns tends to apply. With a few exceptions, these pricey tents use expensive fabrics and materials that won’t significantly impact your backpacking experience.

In that range, you’re going to notice differences in weight, quality of materials, and quantity of features. Up at $500, the tents will have lots of pockets, vents, multiple peg out points, top-notch construction, vertical walls, two doors and two vestibules, and they’ll still weigh in around two pounds per-person. Down at $200, the tents will be heavier or more fragile, will come with fewer features and less elbow room, and will probably only have one door.

Tent Packability

All tents are bulky, but the smaller they pack down, the more chocolate and Scotch you can bring. Or, with a well-packed tent, maybe you can carry a lower volume pack, which cuts weight. Tents vary in size, but most two-person tents should pack into a cylinder about 20-inches long and six inches in diameter.

 

But don’t just look at the tent’s packed size, also take into account the length of the poles and the size of the stuff sack. Shorter pole sections are easier to stash inside a pack. Compact stuff sacks look great in the store but can be difficult, or nearly impossible, to wrangle closed. We like that Kelty shortened the poles and switched from a cylindrical to a cube-shaped stuff sack for their budget-friendly TrailLogic TN2 Tent. MSR uses a rope-bag-style cinch sack for some of its tents, including the Access 2 and Hubba series, to facilitate stuffing. These innovations are a big deal because an easy-to-pack tent will get you on the trail faster.

Tent Durability

Higher quality materials make a tent last longer. But higher quality materials also drive up the price. Fabric and poles are the two easiest to understand in terms of toughness. Tent makers use lots of different nylons, mesh, and polyesters on the body and fly. In general, the higher the denier (a weight based on 9,000 meters of yarn), the stronger the fabric. But you should only make denier comparisons between the same types of fabrics since each fabric performs differently.

Most backpacking tents use aluminum poles, typically made by DAC or Easton. Sometimes the quality of the aluminum is also listed—frequently it’s 6,000 or the slightly stronger 7,000. Some high-end tents use carbon fiber poles. These poles are lighter, thinner and tougher, but harder to repair if they break.

Three other metrics to watch for: stitch count, and the quality of zippers and webbing.

Ease of Setup

Nothing’s more frustrating at the end of a long day than wrestling tent poles into position or even worse, setting a tent up wrong and having to start again. Things that make set up faster and easier include: color-coded poles, grommets and webbing, symmetrical designs, simple pole structures, and poles that attach to the vestibule rather than the tent.

The easiest tents are domes or A-frames. With only two or three straight poles, they’re simple but the compromise is elbow room. Multiple hubs and pre-bent pole structures, on the other hand, are often confusing the first time you set them up, but get you more room.

 Most tents use a two-layer structure, where the poles attach to the tent body and then the fly is clipped over the tent. A faster pitch style of tent is one where the fly and tent are integrated and the poles attach outside the fly. This eliminates one step in the setup and keeps the inside of the tent dry when setting up or taking down in the rain.

How poles attach to the tent matters, too. Few tents use sleeves anymore because pushing and pulling the poles through the tubes of fabric often results in snags or the poles coming apart. Instead, clips are now the standard and what we recommend because they’re fast and secure. The binding, where the poles attach to the tent, can vary from a simple ring to a ball and socket system that snaps together. The latter are nice, especially for solo setups, because the pole won’t pop out unexpectedly.

Free-standing tents are the best: once they’re set up they stand on their own without the need for pegs and ropes. They’re easy to set up, even by yourself, and can be picked up and moved. Non-freestanding tents need to be pegged and use ropes to tension at least some, if not all the walls. With fewer poles, they tend to be less expensive and lighter weight, but require more fiddling and sometimes help from another person.

Tent Features

Tents tend to be fairly basic, but there are some with built-in lighting like the Big Agnes Rattlesnake SL3 Mtnglo, and the Big Agnes Krumholtz UL2 MtnGlo comes with its own lighting, solar power, battery bank, and fan. Keep in mind that features like these tend to increase the price, so consider which conveniences you really need. We think it’s worth extra to pay for two doors, two vestibules, multiple pockets, two-way zippers, and vents in the fly to help with air flow. We’re also fans of extra guy-out points that all you to attach ropes to your fly to tighten it for better performance in the wind and rain. Tip: reflective guy-out lines prevent tripping in the dark.

 

A new trend is stargazing flies or tent flies that don’t have to come off but can instead roll partially back so you can see the stars through the tent mesh. Lampshade pockets are another new feature we like. These pockets are usually on the roof and are designed to hold a headlamp and diffuse its light across the whole tent.

And finally, you have footprints. These are ground sheets that go under the tent and protect your tent floor from dirt and tears. They’re usually an add-on, and we don’t find them necessary. However, they will extend the life of a tent.

My name is Ryan Stuart and I directed this entire review. I’ve been backpacking for the last 25 years and have also worked as a backcountry guide where I spend months on end living out of tent. At Outside, I review 20 to 30 tents each year for the summer Buyer’s Guides and have probably tested over 100 tents total.

For the Buyer's Guides, I set up every tent myself and run each one through a series of tests in my yard. I spray them with a hose, expose them to storms and rain, climb in and out, and even work on my laptop from inside. Each tent also goes camping for a real-world test. I take most of them, but also seed some out to other testers who take them on family canoe trips and multi-week expeditions. At the end of the test period, I gather all the feedback and compare specs. Then, I pass my findings by Outside’s editors, who also live the life and test gear all the time. Together we pick the best tents of each year.

Afterwards, the testing continues. I want to see how our favorite tents stand up to years of use and abuse, different environments, and the constant pace of innovation. I also look at what other people are saying. By reading online comments, reviews from at Backcountry.com, REI.com and other sites and talking with retail staff and other professional gear reviewers, I see how my picks stack up.

When I review tents for the magazine, I'm looking at the latest releases so I can stay on top of new developments.For the review you’re reading right now, I picked the top-performing tents for specific categories (two-person, one person, rainy climates, etc.) without worrying about whether the tent was new. What I’m suggesting here are the best tents, period. Even if they’re a couple years old, I think these tents still out-perform the newer competitors.  

To ensure my reviews were fresh, I went back to my notes, but also tracked down all the suggested tents and slept in each one again. I also left them up in the rain and wind, sprayed them with a hose once again, and set up a couple air mats and sleeping bags and played cards with my daughter to gauge roominess. Then I packed them all up, checked in with my editor, and started writing.

---

Best Overall Backpacking Tent: Sierra Designs Flash 2 FL ($400)

I have a lot of tents in my basement, but for the last five years, my favorite go-to has been the Sierra Designs Flash 2 FL. The biggest reason: its unique design. The tent and fly are integrated, and to pitch the tent, you just clip the poles to the outside of the fly and the tent rises in one step instead of two like most other tents. This makes the Flash 2 quick to pitch and it also means the inside of the tent is never exposed to rain. On a backpacking trip with friends, we all started setting up our tents at the same time. I was inside in almost half the time and my tent was dry while everyone else had a damp floor.

The pole structure can be confusing to the uninitiated: it’s a dizzying single pole, three-hubbed hoop system. But it’s actually pretty simple. It creates vertical walls at either door and a 43-inch peak that runs from one door right across to the other, rather than one high point, creating a nice airy feeling.

The most unique feature is a lack of vestibules at the doors. Instead, the fly overhangs the weatherproof door, sort of like a foot-long awning. In anything but sideways rain, the overhang keeps the rain off the door. When the wind is whipping, the door keeps everything dry inside. The point was to create a super easy entry and exit and eliminate clunky vestibules that can be hard to crawl through.

Don’t fret, though, because the tent still had plenty of outside gear storage. Two “gear lockers,” or mini vestibules hang off the sides and will store your pack. They’re accessed through zippers on the inside of the tent.

Our other preconceived concern—condensation with the hybrid wall—turned out to be a non-issue too. With plenty of mesh on the doors and over the center, air moves freely and condensation never collected in a place that it could contact a sleeping bag.

The FL is a lighter weight version, ditching a pound for about $100. I think it’s worth the extra money, but if you can’t afford the splurge, you still get all the same design features in the regular Flash 2.

Buy Now

Best Affordable Backpacking Tent: REI CoOp Half Dome 2 ($200)

With you the Half Dome 2 you get an ultra-dependable, two-person, five-pound tent that packs down reasonably well for $200. That pricing is thanks to REI’s power as the nation’s largest outdoor retailer. Don’t expect anything fancy or innovative or cutting edge in this long-time REI favorite, but you will love the performance.

All the Half Dome 2s I’ve tested were made from durable nylons that stood up to abuse without a leak or tear. The hubbed aluminum pole set up is simple to pitch solo, and the symmetric design means there’s no confusion about how to lay out the fly. A friend who hadn’t set up a tent in years figured the Half Dome out in minutes without instructions.

The pole system lifts the tent to a 40-inch peak and creates 32 square-feet of floor area—both of which are average for the category—while a cross pole at the peak pushes the side walls close to vertical. On a drizzly evening I hung out in here with two friends without feeling claustrophobic. (If you want more room check out the “plus” version, which adds more space in every department.)

There are other “budget” tents that have similar stats, but the Half Dome stands apart because it’s more feature rich. At this price point we expect minimalism, but the Half Dome has several pockets and hang loops for organizing the interior. Guylines in all key areas on the fly help snug up the pitch. Each of the two oval doors opens into an eight-square-foot vestibule. The fly rolls up for star gazing and then quickly flips back into place if the weather changes. You can bring the fly, poles, and the optional footprint for a super light set up. And, you can choose from six different fly colors, a rare customizable option in tent buying.

If you backpack a lot, you might look elsewhere for a lighter tent. But if you just head out a couple times each year, there’s no better tent for the money.

Buy Now

Best One-Person Backpacking Tent: Nemo Hornet 2 ($370)

As the “2” suggests in the names, this is a two-person tent, but I think it makes more sense as a roomy one-person shelter. The single pole structure creates an A-frame feel, which makes things cramped for two people. Let’s just say you’d want to be intimate—or hoping to—with a tent mate: two adults couldn't sit up at the same time without touching noggins. But solo this ultralight tent feels palatial without weighing you down.

At about 2.4 pounds, and 19 inches by 5 inches when packed into its cylinder case, it was no burden on a Canadian Rocky Mountains backpacking trip. Nemo achieved the impressive weight by using the lightest aluminum available for the poles and small gauge nylon on the fly (10-denier), floor (15-denier) and canopy (20-denier). Those are pretty standard deniers for an ultralight tent, but the materials need to be treated gently to make them last. And by that I mean you shouldn't worry too much about everyday use, but you don't want to drag any of them against a tree.

The one-pole design is semi-freestanding; once the tent is clipped in place with the poles it stands on its own but still needs pegging to get the full area spread out. It’s easy to set up solo with a few pegs. The fly reaches to the ground for total coverage of the all-mesh body. During a windy storm at an exposed camp, not a bead made it inside. A tester reported the steep walls and a few well-positioned guy-out points dumped the deluge away from the tent.

The two vestibules are small and slightly difficult to climb through, but that’s typical for small tents. Once inside, there’s plenty of room for a bed down the middle and space on both sides for stuff sacks and gear. One of the pockets held my headlamp and book. The other, a beanie. I stored my pack in one of the eight-square-foot vestibules, leaving the other unencumbered for an entrance. 

Buy Now

Best Backpacking Tent for Families: Marmot Tungsten 4P ($340)

When you’re camping with your partner and a kid, or two, and maybe the dog, you could bring two tents. But I think piling into one tent is better. Half the reason I camp with the family is to enjoy time together. And with the Tungsten 4, you won’t be sleeping on top of each other when the bonding stops. At 8.8 pounds it’s going to feel heavy if you carry it all, but it’s one of the lightest tents available for its square footage, at just over two pounds per-person. Two main poles, running diagonally corner to corner, are bent to create more volume at the head and feet. Two cross poles push the door walls towards vertical.

You get 53 square-feet of space and a 52-inch peak. That’s enough area for four, 22-inch wide sleeping pads with a couple extra inches on all sides, and enough height for kids to stand and adults to kneel. There’s also enough elbow room for two adults and two kids to sit up and play cards without banging heads. Add two vestibules with a combined area of 18 square feet and the Tungsten felt just right for a family of four.

A few nice touches make it even more livable. The poles, clips, and fly are color coded. I still needed help wrestling the long poles into place, but at least the symmetric design was simple and quick to set up. The footprint is included, adding longevity to the floor—a big bonus with kids that often forget to take their shoes off before climbing in. There are a few organizing pockets for keeping books, headlamps, and other essentials handy. And the lampshade pocket near the peak is designed to hold a headlamp and spread out the light. It created a nice ambient setting for cards before everyone crashed out for the night.

Buy Now

Best Backpacking Tent for Rainy Climates: MSR Access 2 ($600)

I awarded the MSR Access 2 Gear of the Year in Outside 2017 Buyer’s Guide because it’s a storm-worthy shelter that weighs the same as a lightweight backpacking tent. In fact, the Access 2 is the only tent that made our favorites list that I’d take winter camping. And, while most four-season tents push four pounds per-person, this one weighs about four pounds total. At $600 it is pricey, but if you plan to camp above treeline, push three seasons of use, or live in a particularly stormy part of the country, I think the price is worth it. And in some ways, you might save money by not having to buy a lightweight summer tent and a winter-worthy shelter.

The robust performance comes from the pole structure and tent body. The two poles are Easton Syclones and made from composite materials that are stronger, stiffer, and lighter than aluminum. The main pole, double-hubbed and symmetric, runs front to back and props the tent upright. The second pole is a single hoop over the center that’s pre-bent to push the walls vertical. The poles do a good job of simultaneously lifting the tent to its 42-inch peak height, creating a strong structure that will stand up to several inches of snow, and slanting the front and back enough to shed rain and snow. In a 20-hour torrential PNW rainstorm, testers stayed cozy and didn't notice the river flowing under the tent until they emerged to pee. And at an alpine camp, 40-mile-per-hour gusts shook the tent but didn't ruin my sleep. The fly includes generous vestibules (17 square-feet total) in front of both D-shaped doors for plenty of outside storage. Unlike the rest of the tents here, the body is not mesh, but a light ripstop nylon that blocks chilly winds. Inside, you get 28 square-feet of floor area. With the vertical walls and a couple of pockets for each person, it feels roomy and easily accommodates two adults and all their winter clothing. 

Buy Now

>

This winter was the third-warmest on record for U.S. ski resorts. Consider the data:

• Tahoe’s Squaw Valley saw 367 inches, down from 669 the year before.
• Colorado’s Crested Butte Mountain Resort saw 145 inches of snow, down from 335.
• Telluride saw 159 inches, down from 294.
• Vail saw 171 inches of snow, down from 215.
• New Mexico’s Taos Ski Valley saw 78 inches of snow, down from 192.
• Ski Apache saw 27 inches of snow, down from 43.

A single down season isn’t rare, but this year should still be a harbinger. While precipitation has remained flat in recent years, the snowpack at ski resorts is shrinking. Temperatures are warming. The Climate Impact Lab, a research institution with scientists all over the country, released an analysis this year showing that if warming trends continue, resorts should expect to lose a month of the season within the next two decades.

Resorts are reacting as expected to the dismal ski season—and as they have in the past. They’re revamping snowmaking and grooming, building snow fences to harvest windblown snow, installing extracurricular activities to entertain guests when the snow isn’t cooperating, and growing summer amenities. They’re also expanding into different regions and selling season passes that have skiers shouldering some of the financial risk of a down season. Mostly, they’re hoping somehow next year is much better.

That might not be enough for some resorts, like those in New Mexico. Visits to the Land of Enchantment’s nine downhill areas fell 29 percent this season, from around 750,000 to 534,000. That’s a ten-year low and a dip that likely cost the state close to $100 million. And it’s almost definitely to blame on the weak snowfall, which at 55 inches was nearly 90 inches below the five-year average.

“I’d say the biggest message from this for all our ski areas is that snowmaking is vital, and they are putting more money into that, trying to curb the possibility of not having tons of snow,” says George Brooks, director of Ski New Mexico. “We are also recognizing that the days of having a ski area open five, six months and then shut down for the rest of the year, those days are gone. It’s not just looking at a winter season and a summer season, either. It’s about a winter, spring, summer, and fall.”

James Coleman, the investor who is transforming Durango’s Purgatory ski area alongside a quiver of southern resorts in New Mexico and Arizona, had a rough season on paper. All his resorts suffered record-setting weak snowfall. But Coleman says visits didn’t reflect that dryness.

Thanks to his snowmaking crews and groomers, runs were open and skiing well. It wasn’t powder, but then not all vacationing skiers are hunting face shots. “Purgatory had a fantastic product almost the entire year, but the perception wasn’t great, and perception is reality,” Coleman says, noting that Purgatory’s 120 inches of total snowfall ranked as the worst in 41 years and the second-worst ever. “People were happy, but when they went to town and told their friends that the skiing was good, their friends would say, ‘I don’t believe you.’”

The odd thing is that at Arizona Snowbowl, Coleman says that despite the area suffering the fourth-worst snowfall season in its history, visits were among the top three highest. This might have something to do with its elevation, which at 11,000 feet ranks with many of Colorado’s famous resorts.

When the weather is warm, skiers often go higher. That seemed to be the case for much of Colorado, which suffered its fourth-worst snowfall season on record yet still did OK, thanks to pass sales. Vail Resorts, which owns Vail, Breckenridge, Keystone, and Beaver Creek, reported that the season showed a slight downturn in visits across its continental network of resorts but an increase in lift-ticket revenue, largely due to sales of its popular Epic Pass. And winter sales tax revenues from eight Colorado resort towns hardly indicate that snowfall was less than abundant.

What sales don’t change is the clear lack of snow on the hill. Analysts who spend time studying the long-term trend, like Auden Schendler, vice president of sustainability at Aspen Skiing Co., say emergency tweaks such as greater snowmaking capacity and better grooming won’t solve the bigger problem. “I think the industry has fundamentally acted as if they were defending their image versus defending the climate,” Schendler says. “I think there’s a core of management in the ski industry that still hasn’t said this is a priority.”

The ski industry actually has a real opportunity, Schendler says. The nonprofit climate-change organization Protect Our Winters recently published a report that totaled up the ski industry as a $72 billion economic powerhouse with 695,000 employees.

“We are the people who can bring attention to this problem and help solve it,” Schendler says. “The outdoor industry is huge, bigger than Big Pharma, and we have wielded absolutely no power. What are you if you have the ability to solve a problem and choose not to? The outdoor industry and the ski industry can be the NRA on climate. We have to be.”

You don’t need to get kitted up before every ride

Once upon a time, kids grew up riding bicycles—by themselves. Exploring the neighborhood, fleeing from the bigger kids who wanted to steal their bikes, discovering a series of supernatural tunnels beneath their small town…wait, sorry, that's the plot from "Stranger Things."

I was fortunate enough to have caught what was probably the tail end of that age, when my bike was the embodiment of freedom and adventure, all rolling on a pair of sweet mags.

I was also fortunate enough to catch the tail end of the BMX boom. When I was about 12 or so someone told me about a track on Long Island, and I showed up to race in a skateboard helmet, ripped jeans, and a Circle Jerks T-shirt I'd drawn myself. I was trembling with anxiety at the start, but as soon as the gate went down, I was hooked.

I was also, I soon realized, woefully underdressed. Sure, I did okay out on the track, but as my nerves steadied and I was able to size up the competition, I began to notice that with their motocross pants and full-face helmets, they looked just like the racers in BMX Plus! magazine. I also noticed that they were looking at me funny, possibly because they didn't know who the Circle Jerks were, but just as likely because they did and I'd drawn their logo really badly.

Clearly I had to up my game.

Having thus far spared my father the time and expense of participating in organized sports, he indulged me by taking me to my favorite bike shop for some new apparel. I chose some padded and embroidered nylon pants, a perforated jersey, and a formidable helmet. Now I was the real deal.

What I wasn't was comfortable. The jersey was okay, but the pants were stiff and whooshy, and the helmet obscured my vision and felt like it weighed more than my bike. Still, I refused to admit that it felt much better to race in my jeans and T-shirt, and I wore my padded clown suit for the rest of my BMX career.

Then came adulthood. And road racing. And Lycra.

Of course, the roadie ensemble differed from the BMX gear in one crucial respect—which was that it was light and comfortable. After all, a 50-mile road race in jeans and a T-shirt would be less than ideal. At the same time, putting it on was no less of an obligation. In fact, it was even more of an obligation, since at least in my BMX days, I'd still wear regular clothes the rest of the time. Now I couldn't get near a bike without putting on my superhero costume first. Maybe I'd commute in street clothes, but everybody knows your commute isn't a "real ride."

Why did I think this way? Well, part of it was that I was way too proud of being on an amateur bike racing team, like Ralph Kramden was of bowling for the Hurricanes. Another problem: I put too much stock in the popular ideas about cycling and clothing, including but not limited to:

• Don't worry about using a comfortable saddle, just ride with padding sewn into your shorts at all times; 
• Cycling in underpants is for noobs and will cause your crotch to explode in saddle sores and fungus; 
• Cotton is no good for riding, it won't wick the moisture, and in winter you'll freeze to death and die. 

And so I persisted in this state of profound weeniedom until I had kids and more or less stopped racing, which is a fairly typical sequence of events. But while you'd think this would curtail my riding, it had the opposite effect. For one thing, when I did find time to ride, I made every second count. For another, when you're making every second count, you learn not to squander them on selecting exactly the right racing silks. Sometimes a window opens up unexpectedly and you strike out for a ride in the very clothes on your back.

When it came to breaking my addiction for cycling-specific attire on every ride, I caved first with mountain biking. I'd already been commuting in streetclothes past some local mountain bike trails and thinking to myself, "Wow, I'd sure like to take a detour through there if only I were dressed for it." Then I realized it was a county park and not a Bar Mitzvah and I could wear whatever the hell I wanted. So I started commuting on my mountain bike once in awhile and working some singletrack into my commute, and when my crotch didn't explode and I didn't die, I found myself forsaking the bikey clothes more and more often. 

Yes, cycling clothes are great, but they're also expensive and limiting and chances are you need to wear them less often than you think. You know what's a nice cool-weather cycling garment? A $130 Rapha Core Long Sleeve Jersey. You know what's also a nice cool-weather cycling garment? That wool sweater you've had for like 15 years. As for cotton, you spent your entire childhood running around in a T-shirt and jeans, and apart from marketing, there's nothing stopping you from doing that now. You sweat, it gets wet, then it dries. Big deal.

And what about riding in underwear, anyway? Granted, a hundred nonstop miles in August might be asking for trouble, but other than that it's really not such a big deal. Bike fit, saddle choice, and hygienal common sense are more important than bib shorts and chamois. Nevertheless, the first thing we teach the noobs is to never wear underwear with cycling shorts, even though we've totally lost sight of how to ride a bike without first putting on cycling shorts.

I'd never ditch my cycling clothes altogether. But if you too were lucky enough to grow up riding, you may remember the joys of moving seamslessly from activity to activity without having to execute a complete wardrobe change each time. Sure, you can't time-travel, but you can totally recapture the freedom and excitement of ripping around town in jeans and a T-shirt.

>

Last year, Outside reported that the Hillary Step, the iconic feature 200 feet below Everest’s summit, had been fundamentally altered by the 2015 earthquake that shook the mountain. The reporter based his findings on first-hand accounts from mountaineering guides Garrett Madison and Ben Jones. But rumors of the Step’s demise began before that.

Early in the 2016 season, five-time south side summiter David Liano posted on his blog that the Step was gone. Then, last year, guide Tim Mosedale posted on Facebook: “The Hillary Step is no more.” Finally, the Nepalese Government weighed in. Gyanendra Shrestha, from the Nepal Tourism Board, and Ang Tshering Sherpa, the President of the Nepal Mountaineering Association, were quoted in CNN saying that Mosedale was mistaken. Shrestha said the Step had just been completely covered by snow so it “made it easier for climbers.”

This year, I reached out to several long-time guides and asked them to take a picture of what the Step looks like now. I received a shocking reply from one, who wished to remain anonymous:

We’re not supposed to be talking about the Hillary Step. I guess they have been telling westerners in the ministry briefing not to talk to the media about it. That has to be the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard out of the ministry.

The government of Nepal, of course, says the rule is in good faith. “Our intention is not to stop the dissemination of news,” Dinesh Bhattarai,  the Tourism Department chief, told the Kathmandu Post. “However, for some controversial issues, prior approval should be obtained from the government.” 

In my view, it looks like the Ministry continues to believe that the Hillary Step—with all of the delays and safety issues it causes—is more of a marketing tool than a liability. If it changed, it changed—that’s reality. Mountains change. As proof, here’s a photo of the Hillary Step of old, an offwidth crack ascending a steep boulder:

And here’s an image of the Step in 2018, taken by guide Casey Grom:

One of the reasons I wanted to get this photo was to show the silliness of the Nepal Ministry of Tourism telling climbers and guides this year that they were not allowed to talk about the Hillary Step. While this is an iconic part of an historic route, being transparent about the change only enhances their credibility, otherwise they will continue to struggle to get rules through that will increase safety, reduce crowds and deaths. 

From here on out, maybe we just call it the Hillary Stairs.  

>

A massive storm in the Alps took climbers and skiers by surprise over the weekend and has killed more than a dozen people so far.

The storm followed several weeks of warmer-than-usual weather. The blinding fog and icy winds dropped temperatures to below freezing levels and caught many people on the mountains off guard. In all, the Italian newspaper La Republica reported that 14 people died during the storm, with victims reported in the Italian, French, and Swiss portions of the Alps. 

The single-largest tragedy befell a group of 14 mainly Europeanskiers, including an Italian guide, making their way along the Haute Route, a circuitous path that begins in Chamonix below Mont Blanc and ends just below the Matterhorn at about 10,000 feet. The group had set out on a six-day tour. On Sunday, as they approached the Vignettes Hut at the foot of the Pigne d’Arolla peak, the storm engulfed the skiers. 

The group’s guide, Mario Castiglioni, went for help but he lost his way in the storm, fell over a cliff, and died. The rest of the group huddled down and had to spend the night outside in the blowing wind. “Hell can only be a night like that and cold like that,” one survivor, an Italian named Tommasi Piccioli told local media. When daylight arrived and the storm passed, the group found that one person had died in the night. They also realized they were only a five-minute ski from the hut.  Helicopters flew the survivors to nearby hospitals, where three more passed away. By Tuesday, a total of seven of the skiers were dead, most from hypothermia.

Elsewhere in the Alps, two French skiers died in separate incidents. Two climbers went missing for a day and were later found after a days-long rescue effort. A Russian climber, still missing, has been presumed dead in the Valais Alps, a connected range just to the west. Two Swiss hikers were also found dead. A French hiker died after being taken to the hospital. And two French skiers died in an avalanche at the foot of Mont Blanc. 

The Local, a Swiss news website, reported that it’s the deadliest few days in the Alps since 1999, when 12 people died in an avalanche near the Swiss city of Evolène. 

At 15,777 feet, Mont Blanc is the highest mountain in the Alps and the tallest in western Europe. It’s also the most deadly. Estimates put the average death toll on the mountain around 100 per year. What makes Mont Blanc so deadly is not its height or technical climbing—it’s the easy access. Guides in the area sometimes advertise trips as if they were day hikes. As writer Lane Wallace pointed out in The Atlantic six years ago after another rash of deaths, gondolas even haul hikers up to 9,000 feet, dropping sometimes inexperienced people in an overwhelming environment. In the spring and summer, Mont Blanc and the surrounding mountains can seem unassumingly attractive to the would-be adventurous—some of whom may be unprepared for a freak storm.