Month: March 2019

Why? Because there’s no good reason for them not to.

In December, a London-based hobby runner named Maud Hodson started an online petition to “equalize cross-country races for men and women in England.” The initiative, and the accompanying #runequal hashtag, has since gained significant traction and over 2,000 signatures. It’s not hard to see why. At a time when debates about gender equality have a tendency to turn social media into an opinion sphere Gomorrah, Hodson’s idea is refreshingly uncontroversial. To paraphrase: At present, in many major cross-country meets in England, the men’s races are longer than the women’s races. Since men and women already contest the same distances on the road and on the track, this discrepancy feels antiquated and patronizing. Hence, cross-country courses for men and women should be the same length.

That’s more or less it.

Unfortunately, the imbalance in the distance of cross-country courses persists on our side of the pond. At the NCAA Cross-Country Championships, for instance, the men’s race is 10K, while the women run only 6K (before the year 2000, it was 5K). The same is true for the USATF National Club Cross-Country Championships, the biggest cross-country race of the year at the club level. 

As Hodson has herself pointed out, it’s been 50 years since Kathrine Switzer proved that she could run an entire marathon without falling into a coma. In 2018, women should no longer be relegated to racing a shorter course in major cross-country competitions.

For many, this probably feels like an open-and-shut case. Hodson’s proposal, however, received Twitter pushback from an unexpected place. For Paula Radcliffe, the British marathon world record holder and multiple cross-country world champion, the #runequal campaign sounded like much ado about nothing:

“Equality actually means Equal Rights and Respect for every person on this earth. It does not mean we must make everything we do exactly the same as men in the name of equality. Many things we already do better. Leave them be. #concentrateontherealissues #XCworksbest8k,” Radcliffe tweeted on Tuesday.

For the uninitiated: 8K has long been the standard distance for the women’s course at the IAAF Cross-Country World Championships, while the men run 12K. As of last year, however, both sexes now run a 10K course in the “senior”—i.e. age 20 and over—race, though the “junior” women will still ran a 6K course, as opposed to the junior men’s 8K.

This post prompted a (miraculously civil) Twitter discussion that included top American runners Kara Goucher and Lauren Fleshman, among others.

Before anyone tries to throw Radcliffe under the double-decker bus for being a stodgy traditionalist, her point is worth considering. After all, there’s no intrinsic reason why a 12K is somehow more prestigious than an 8K, or even that a 12K necessarily constitutes the more challenging race. (I wrote an article about the idea that “longer does not mean harder,” which was received with near-unanimous contempt.) Perhaps the #runequal movement should be careful what it wishes for. Lauren Fleshman, who was a multiple NCAA cross-country All-American at Stanford in the early aughts, echoed this point in a tweet of her own:

In an age where women have smashed the glass ceiling in professional cage fighting and hot dog-eating competitions, it’s easy to see where Fleshman is coming from. But the current cross-country debate, as Hodson has stressed on Twitter and elsewhere, isn’t about women running longer distances, so much as women running the same distances as the men when the competitive context is the same. The main counterargument to making this change appears to be the eternally suspect refrain of “it’s tradition,” which, more often than not, is a hollow defense of the indefensible. For seventy years, it was tradition for the Boston Marathon to be men-only. Until it wasn’t.

There can certainly be debates about what constitutes the ideal distance for a cross-country race. Factors will include terrain, or, more broadly, how the sport of cross-country fits into the larger framework of races that a particular governing body puts on—be it the NCAA, the IAAF, or USATF. Always mandating that women run a shorter course, however, is a needless undervaluing of their athletic potential. (The fact that it really is needless is significant. I can already see the mental midgets cuing up the feeble counterpoint: “Then why even have separate races for men and women?”)

“I think when the women are always running less, it sends a message that we aren’t quite strong enough to do what the men are doing,” Kara Goucher told me in a recent phone call.

“We have females that excel in every single endurance sport: ultra running, triathlon, marathons. So why are we still holding back on this one thing?

Good question. Your move, NCAA.

A new ad campaign from two major nonprofits aims to break children free from their dependence

The smartphone backlash is in full swing. Last week, the Center for Humane Technology, an organization founded by former tech execs, announced that it was launching an ad campaign called Truth About Tech. The goal: shift the culture from one that’s tied to its screens to one that understands just how dangerous all that screen time can be. “Tech companies are conducting a massive, real-time experiment on our kids, and, at present, no one is really holding them accountable,” said James Steyer, founder of Common Sense, an organization working on the campaign with the Center for Humane Technology, in a press release.

The campaign will specifically focus on kids to educate them on just how harmful our devices can be. According to the press release, one researcher found that eighth graders who are heavy users of smartphones and social media are “56 percent more likely to say they are unhappy; 27 percent more likely to be depressed; and 35 percent more likely to have a risk factor for suicide.”

And despite federal regulations requiring youth to be 17 years old to open a social media account on YouTube and 13 on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, marketing firm Influence Central’s 2016 report found that 39 percent of kids get their first social media account at age 11.

The organizations aren’t alone in thinking it’s past time for a significant shift in the way we think about technology. On January 8, two major Apple investors published an open letter warning of the dangers of tech addiction among youth and pressing the company to create stronger parental controls on iPads and iPhones, citing studies that link the use of electronic devices with higher risk factors for suicide. On January 30, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood filed a petition to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, urging the company to discontinue Messenger Kids, a social media app designed for kids under 13. And last June, Colorado announced a ballot initiative to ban the sales of smartphones children under age 13; if the measure gets the 100,000 signatures needed to appear on the ballot in 2018, it will be the first such age limitation on cellphones in the country.

The problem, as the Center for Humane Technology sees it, is that social media and smartphones are designed to hook us with a mix of instant gratification, insecurity, and vicarious thrills—sort of like Doritos’ irresistible ratio of salt to sugar. In our mad quest for on-demand entertainment and validation via likes and shares, it’s almost impossible to stop even if we wanted to. The result is a system that demands our captive attention 24/7, increases stress and anxiety, puts a premium on virtual relationships and not real ones, and distorts our sense of reality. In the open letter to Apple, the authors cited a study finding that 50 percent of teens with smartphones reported feeling “addicted” to their devices.

“I would avoid the word ‘addictive,’ because it has a very specific meaning, but the technology can be habit forming,” says Larry Magid, founder of the Silicon Valley–based nonprofit Connect Safely. “Social media can create compulsive behavior. It’s the surprise factor, like opening a box of Cracker Jacks. You don’t know what you are going to find. There’s always a chance that something great is going to happen—maybe you’ll get likes or an email. And there’s also the fear of missing out on what your friends are doing and what people are saying.”

The Center for Humane Tech offers easy workarounds for reducing the addictive allure of smartphones: Convert your home screen from bright, seductive colors to grayscale (find it in the Settings menu); turn off all notifications except from real humans; edit your home screen so it shows only the essentials and launch all other apps by typing into the search bar. The extra step will make you pause and decide if it’s really worth your time.

One of the best tricks, though, is something the center left off its list: simply going outside to play, every day, and whenever possible. Our daughters know that when we leave town for a long weekend hut trip or a river trip in the backcountry, there’s no option for screens or Wi-Fi. After school, we ride bikes. TV watching is limited to one hour after school on Friday afternoons (still way less than the hour a day my sister and I were allowed to gorge on Three’s Company and Little House on the Prairie). They’re always fussier with each other and with us after they watch TV and happier when they’re building forts in the arroyo. If I have to choose between keeping them busy—possibly too busy—and letting them idle in front of a screen, I’ll choose activities every time.

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No one did more to explore and document the space between the Grand Canyon’s rim and the river than Harvey Butchart. Between 1945 and 1983, it’s estimated that he spent 1,025 days of his life hiking more than 12,000 miles and claiming 28 first ascents of high points in the area. In 1963, Butchart became the first person to hike the entirety of the canyon by foot. “For Grand canyoneering, Harvey will always be the undisputed king of backpacking and hiking. Even though people have had more miles, more climbs, more canyoneering descents, he did it in an era where there was not a big safety net,” says Tom Meyers, co-author of Grand Obsession: Harvey Butchart and the Exploration of Grand Canyon.

Butchart rarely used a rope. He carried 30 pounds or less in his pack and hiked in bargain boots he purchased at Kmart. Many young explorers interpreted his wool sweaters as a sign that they could keep up with Butchart, but they were promptly and severely humbled. He was the first white settler to hike nearly every trail between the rim and river. (Though the Puebloan people had traversed them generations before.) His three guidebooks—the first written about the area—are mind-numbingly dense with information.

“The ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s was an era when people were focused on the river. A river created the Grand Canyon, but most of the Grand Canyon is a desert between the river and the rim,” says Kevin Fedarko, author of The Emerald Mile, who himself hiked 650 miles through the canyon with photographer Pete McBride. “Harvey didn’t care about the river. He wanted to explore and take notes of that landscape. In that way, he was kind of revolutionary.”

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Long associated with cookie sales and friendship bracelets, the Girl Scouts of the United States of America (GSUSA) recently announced a new adventure-oriented collaboration with The North Face. With 12 new adventure badges, it will be the largest national organization to offer skills like trail running, mountaineering, rock climbing, and backpacking specifically for girls.

Still in the development and piloting phase, the badges will be available to earn as early as summer 2019 for girls from kindergarten to senior year of high school. The North Face is developing the programming alongside GSUSA, offering its outdoor expertise to the 106-year-old organization. The partnership bolsters The North Face’s Moves Mountains initiative, which aims to elevate the stories of female role models in the outdoors and beyond. GSUSA, for its part, seem to be responding to continued requests for more adventurous and skill-based curriculum.

“When we were looking at how we could truly enable the next generation of female explorers, our way forward was really clear,” says Cara Williamson, senior brand manager at The North Face. “We wanted to partner with the longest-running and most-established organization in support of the next generation of women. And that was the Girl Scouts.”

To earn the badges, the girls will take turns leading and learning teamwork as they discover new outdoor skills. As with all GSUSA programming, girls will meet each requirement at their own pace to complete each badge. According to the Girl Scouts, these new adventure badges will continue to allow girls to take a hands-on role in their accomplishments. GSUSA has yet to release further details on what skills will be offered.

The new badges come at a time of change for both the Boy and Girl Scouts: The Boy Scouts of America started allowing girls into limited programming in October, then changed its name to Scouts BSA in May. The Girl Scouts remain, in the organization’s words, “all-girl, girl-led, and girl-friendly.” And while it has sometimes been criticized for not serving girls as well on the outdoor-adventure front, GSUSA has a well-documented history of being the organization more willing to make changes for inclusivity. “[The Girl Scouts] always had more badges than the Boy Scouts. Their variety of activities have always been pretty vast, and this seems like a continuation on this path of variety,” says Kathleen Denny, whose 2011 research explored the implicitly gendered content of Girl Scout and Boy Scout handbooks and manuals. “This doesn’t really represent a dichotomous shift from a black to white, A to B, or yes to no. I think it seems like a pretty consistent or not totally unexpected continuation of [the Girl Scout’s] evolution, which has been ongoing for some time.”

The new adventure badges are also unique in that they factor socioeconomic or cultural barriers to the outdoors into a girl’s successful completion of the program. For example, while GSUSA owns 427 outdoor camps and more than 180,000 acres of land throughout the country where girls can get outside, scouts can also earn these new badges in less-traditional outdoor environments. “Girls can do the badge steps with inexpensive, common items they might already own and just go outside,” says Jennifer Allebach, vice president of girl experience at GSUSA. “Or they can complete them with more sophisticated equipment.”

GSUSA also offers outdoor acclimation programs for kids who have never left an urban environment or spent much time in nature. The organization’s 112 regional councils throughout the country determine the needs of each of the troops in their area. Girl Scouts of Greater New York, for example, brings girls from the city upstate to Camp Kaufmann to “understand and find their balance in nature,” says Meredith Maskara, CEO of GSGNY, in a video about the group’s trip. “Instead of just bringing girls directly from the city and throwing them out here in the middle of the woods, we need to acclimate them,” she says.

While the focus of the new badges is on the outdoors, the skills girls will learn through this new programming will extend far beyond the trail or crag. “It’s definitely not restricted to the outdoors, and it shouldn’t be,” says Williamson of both the GSUSA partnership and Move Mountains. “If we can lead the way in the outdoors, because that’s our world of credibility and authenticity, then fantastic, but we want it to go further.”

By expanding the definition of exploration and encouraging outdoor adventure, the new outdoor badges offer Girl Scouts hands-on experience with problem-solving, risk, and creative-thinking skills.

“From the Girl Scout perspective, if you can get girls outside to be comfortable in their own skin and develop leadership qualities, those skills are in direct correlation to the experiences they can bring into social settings with their family and friends, even to the boardroom,” Allebach says. “We’ve always had the outdoors as a cornerstone of our movement, but we have also always been very interested in and committed to really shaping them into confident women. That’s our whole goal. That’s what we’re trying to build.”

Traveling far and wide for powder doesn’t have to be an awkward nightmare, thanks to this cleverly designed carry-on

Whether you’re flying or driving, there’s nothing worse than showing up to ski without all your tools. Ask ski journalist Iain MacMillian, whose checked baggage got lost on a trip we recently took to Tazewako, a small ski area in the Japanese Alps. It was snowing three inches an hour when we arrived, but Iain’s bag was still somewhere in Russia, which meant that while he stood in the rental line for an uncomfortable pair of boots, I was lapping Ja-pow and thanking my newest ski travel essential, Osprey’s Snowkit.

Designed specifically for the airplane cabin, the Snowkit allows you to carry on every piece of ski gear besides your boards. It’s a welcome alternative to goggles, gloves, and helmet blistering out the sides of a backpack while ski boots knock together on my shoulder. Trapezoid-shaped and with 45 liters of storage, the Snowkit has a large compartment for ski boots that’s vented to allow drying, a pocket at the other end that perfectly fits a helmet, and organizing sleeves for gloves, ski pants, and base layers. There’s an exterior pouch for pens, memory sticks, and charge cables, plus well-padded backpack straps that are easy to stow away or clip into place when you’re hoofing it across the air terminal.

Most important, the bag’s tapered shape slips into all but the tiniest overhead bins without a fight, even when it’s overstuffed. Between missions, the Snowkit keeps my kit contained and organized. Using it even when I’m not traveling saves gear-herding time before dawn-patrol departures and ensures that I arrive in the parking lot with my goggles every time.

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Scientists make the case for a new real-time measure of endurance effort

If you could design the wearable tech of your dreams for endurance training and performance, what primary data would you choose to display on the face of the device? Would it be heart rate? Heart rate variability? Cadence and stride length? Real-time pace? Mechanical power? Blood lactate level? VO2?

The possible choices are pretty much endless, and each of those options has pros and cons that provide fodder for spirited debate. But there’s another, less heralded pick that doesn’t get much attention—and according to a recent article in Frontiers in Physiology, it may trump them all. Well-known cycling expert Louis Passfield of the University of Kent’s Endurance Research Group, along with Italian researchers Andrea Nicolò and Carlo Massaroni, make the case for “respiratory frequency,” or breathing rate, which is simply how fast you’re panting.

The gist of the argument is that breathing rate offers a surprisingly accurate estimate of how hard you’re working—something more typically quantified by asking an athlete to subjectively rate their effort on a scale of 1 to 10 (or 6 to 20, an effort scale that is more often used for historical reasons). Unlike VO2 (the amount of oxygen you’re using, which requires fairly cumbersome lab equipment to measure), breathing rate is easy to measure with a chest strap, although most current wearables don’t bother to record or display it. And unlike heart rate, your breathing rate responds rapidly to sudden changes in effort like you’d see during an interval workout.

Normally, respiratory physiologists focus on the total amount of air you’re breathing in and out, which depends on both your breathing rate and the depth of each breath. But those two factors have distinct behaviors during exercise. The size of each breath increases primarily in response to the metabolic disturbances in your muscles and blood, like the rising levels of lactate produced by hard exercise. Your breathing rate, on the other hand, seems to depend more on the outgoing signals from your brain to your muscles. And that’s important, because perception of effort—according to some but definitely not all scientists—is also determined by the magnitude of these outgoing signals from the brain.

The scientific debate about the neuroscience of “effort” is interesting, but from a practical perspective, what’s more relevant is that, empirically, effort and breathing rate seem to be very tightly linked. This remains true, the authors of the new paper argue, even when you change the conditions in various ways, such as raising body temperature, prefatiguing your muscles, and so on.

And breathing rate responds so rapidly that it’s a good marker even during sprint interval training. Here’s some data showing the relationship between breathing rate and perceived effort during 30 minutes of cycling continuously or during sprint intervals of 40, 30, or 20 seconds. The breathing frequency is presented as a percentage of maximal, all-out breathing frequency:

In addition to real-time monitoring of breathing rate, there’s a lot of sophisticated post-workout analysis you can do with it, as the paper (which is free to read online) goes on to demonstrate. You can analyze how much of a workout was spent in different breathing zones. You can get an overall picture of how hard a workout was by calculating your average breathing rate for the entire session. Since breathing rate responds so much more quickly than heart rate, this average will give you a more accurate view of your session’s difficulty, especially if you had lots of pace changes.

There are, however, some challenges to using breathing rate as a training indicator. While the research is conflicting, sports like running and rowing tend to have somewhat different breathing responses, because some athletes unconsciously match their breathing rate to their stride rate—a phenomenon known as entrainment. In swimming, you have to sync your breathing to your strokes to avoid drowning. Obviously that’s not the case in running, but the jarring impacts of each step do shake your breathing muscles and make it more likely that you’ll synchronize your breathing to some multiple of your step rate, though there’s a lot of variability from person to person. That means breathing rate may be pulled up or down by your stride rate, rather than being perfectly proportional to your sense of effort. For those reasons, analysis of breathing rate may be best suited for cycling.

There’s also what I think of as the “I’m aware of my tongue!” problem, in reference to a 1963 Peanuts cartoon in which Linus suddenly becomes uncomfortably aware of the presence of a strange object in his mouth. Breathing rate is something you can choose to control, if you want. Unless you’re really maxed out, you can choose to slow your breathing down (and your body will automatically compensate by breathing more deeply) or speed it up (resulting in shallower breaths). My general opinion is that you’re better off letting your body dictate when and how you breathe, but once you start tracking your breathing rate and perhaps even choosing to accelerate or decelerate based on its value, I suspect it will be hard to avoid becoming uncomfortably aware of your ability to alter it.

So, to return to the question I posed at the top, if I were designing my dream wearable tech, it probably wouldn’t have breathing rate as the primary display screen. Still, Passfield and his colleagues make a strong case that the metric should be in the conversation. If it’s easy to build the measurement into future wearables, it seems like an interesting extra source of data to slice and dice after a workout.

The authors note one other point in passing: “Anecdotally, athletes report monitoring the breathing sounds of their opponents as a gauge of their physical effort during endurance competitions.” If, as the research seems to suggest, breathing rate really is a subtle gauge of effort, this means you can also monitor the breathing of your competitors, listen for changes, and be confident that you’re getting some real insight into how much longer they can hold on. Unless, of course, they’ve read this article, too.

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My new book, Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, is now available! For more, join me on Twitter and Facebook, and sign up for the Sweat Science email newsletter.

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Courtney Dauwalter refused to believe she was going to win the famous Western States 100 until she set foot on the Placer High School track in Auburn, California, where the race ends, just before 10:30 p.m. on June 23. She had been in first place for the last 45 miles, but a lot can happen in the second half of a 100-mile race.

When she crossed the finish line, in 17 hours, 27 minutes, and 2 seconds, she secured the second-fastest women’s time in the race’s 44-year history, gapping second-place finisher Kaytlyn Gerbin by more than an hour and finishing 6 minutes and 54 seconds behind the tenth place man.

Dauwalter’s athletic résumé is nothing to scoff at: Western States was just the latest in a string of major trail ultra wins for the 33-year-old Coloradonative, including back-to-back wins at the 2017 Run Rabbit Run 100 and Moab 240. (She won the Moab 240 outright, gapping the first-place male finisher by more than ten hours.) But it’s Dauwalter’s humble personality and relaxed approach to training and racing that have made her a fan favorite in the ultra community.

Even if you have no plans to attempt an ultra, all endurance athletes can learn from Dauwalter’s philosophy on competition.

Dauwalter has excelled at slower, more mountainous races like the Run Rabbit Run 100. A fast 100-miler like Western States, where the overall winner routinely finishes well below 16 hours (compared to Run Rabbit Run’s 17 or 18 hours), was out of her wheelhouse. But Dauwalter didn’t put much thought into devising a race-specific training plan. “I just kept doing what’s already been working,” she says.

When asked for details, Dauwalter admits she doesn’t really have a set training schedule. “I just leave my door and see where my legs take me for the day,” she says. “Some sections of trail I will do a bit faster—informal interval stuff. But there’s not much structure to it.” This way, she leaves herself the freedom to take a day off or cut a run short when her body needs it, or go longer when her body is feeling good, without feeling guilty for modifying the plan.

Dauwalter carried that same mentality over to race day. Many athletes spend the days before the gun studying their goal paces and going over strategy. Dauwalter passed that time playing cribbage with her crew. “I didn’t want to go into the race mentally exhausted from worrying about splits or other runners,” she says. As always, Dauwalter toed the line with no strategy at all. “I like to see how the day unfolds,” she says, “and do what feels comfortable and natural.”

Leading up to the race, Dauwalter was getting advice from a lot of other runners who told her that sauna sessions and sweat-suit training were the best ways to prepare for the triple-digit temperatures she would likely encounter on race day. She tried a few sauna sessions but felt “drained and destroyed” afterward. After a few stints in the sauna, Dauwalter decided she had to find another way to prepare.

“I’m pretty good at listening to my body,” she says. So Dauwalter logged some afternoon runs in the Colorado heat, but mostly she worked on her mental game. “I just focused on acknowledging that the day was going to be hot, and that was going to be OK,” she says. “The heat wasn’t going to destroy my day, because I wasn’t going to let it.”

Dauwalter knew she would face a lot of unknown variables on race day, most notably a field of fast, experienced women she had never raced before, including former Western States champs Stephanie Howe Violett, Kaci Lickteig, and 22-year-old Aussie phenom Lucy Bartholomew. Dauwalter made a conscious decision not to worry about things that were out of her hands. “I had no control over how the day unfolded for anyone else but myself,” she says. “I just had to be ready to react to it.”

When she passed Bartholomew around 55 miles into the race and moved into first place, Dauwalter’s nerves kicked in. Fear told her to react to the threat of the entire women’s field now behind her and to start moving faster, but Dauwalter knew that would only lead to a blowup.

“If I got caught, that would be what it was,” she says. “But I was going to make them work to catch me.” To do that, she had to control the things she could: eating, pacing, staying calm. “I was taking time at aid stations, making sure to still get in calories, moving efficiently but also not blowing it by going too fast.”

At her first 100-mile attempt, in 2012, Dauwalter DNFed at mile 60. She was in pain and didn’t yet understand that lows pass if you wait. “Not finishing that race got me really fired up,” she says. Dauwalter signed up for another 100-miler the following year and spent the next 12 months mentally preparing to not give up. She finished the Superior Fall Trail Race 100 in second place and walked away with newfound confidence that her legs knew how to keep running even when in immense pain.

Dauwalter carries that baseline trust in her body’s capabilities and a fierce determination to the start line of every race. “Forward motion is the only way to get to the finish line,” she says. “You can do it if you just decide that there are no excuses good enough to make you stop.”

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OtterBox is branching out from cases and coolers. On Tuesday, the company announced its new Yampa dry duffel collection. The dry duffels, which went on preorder Tuesday, come in three sizes: 35, 70, and 105 liters, ranging from $250 to $400. The steep prices, and the bags’ burly design, put them in the same league as Yeti’s Panga series. 

I got my hands on a sample of the 70-liter Yampa ($300), which seems protective and durable without sacrificing ease of use. (I haven’t had the chance to take it on any adventures yet.)

Constructed out of TPU-coated nylon, this bag is made to endure rocky shorelines and brambly bushwhacks. A watertight zipper keeps everything dry, and an internal layer of low-density foam means you can haul, toss, and drag your gear without fear of damaging it.

Durability is nothing new when it comes to duffels, which have been getting more and more overbuilt as companies like Yeti, Sea to Summit, and NRS have iterated on their waterproof adventure haulers. But user-friendliness is where OtterBox’s bag truly shines. A fold-over harness system lets you swap between backpack and duffel carry by clipping the buckles to one side or the other. Unlike the Panga, which has a smaller opening that makes the interior difficult to organize, the Yampa has an extra-wide opening that shows you all your gear quickly.

The convenience of a large opening does come with a trade-off, however: OtterBox had to add buckles to hold down the extra material at either end when the duffel is zipped shut. The two massive buckles are a bit unwieldy and difficult to work in a hurry. I had to use two hands to undo each buckle, which felt clunky. Thankfully, there is an external water-resistant pocket where I can store essentials I need to reach in a flash. It’s not fully waterproof though, so I’m careful with what I choose to store here.

In many, if not most, outdoor adventure situations, this duffel will be more than you need. But people who do a lot of backcountry water travel may find that it’s just tough enough to inspire confidence on long portages and rough waters.

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A primer on who to start reading and who you’ve been overlooking for too long

Women who write about the wild cannot be easily labeled. They are conservationists, scientists, and explorers; historians, poets, and novelists; ramblers, scholars, and spiritual seekers. They are hard to pin down but for their willingness to be “unladylike,” to question, and to seek.

The following list is in no way definitive, but if you want a primer on some of the best nature writing you probably haven’t read yet, you’d do well to start with these 25 women. We present them in order from historical to contemporary.

Susan Fenimore Cooper

Henry David Thoreau is considered to be the father of American environmentalism, but he owes much of his philosophy to nature writers who came before him—and one writer in particular is overdue for credit. For his 1854 book Walden, Thoreau consulted Rural Hours, written in 1850 by Susan Fenimore Cooper, daughter of novelist James Fenimore Cooper. Rural Hours is a record of a year around Cooperstown, New York, where she lived, and it’s the first American book of place-based nature observations.

Despite its anonymous publication “by a Lady” and Cooper’s status as an amateur naturalist, the book caught the attention of leading scientists of the time. Cooper lamented the changing landscape and anticipated concepts central to ecology when few others did. And she did so personally and lyrically: “The varied foliage clothing in tender wreaths every naked branch, the pale mosses reviving, a thousand young plants rising above the blighted herbage of last year in cheerful succession.” Choose the 1998 University of Georgia Press edition of Rural Hours—the 1968 version cuts 40 percent of the original text and much of Cooper’s environmental commentary.

Gene Stratton-Porter

At a time when most women were homemakers, Gene Stratton-Porter was a prolific novelist, naturalist, and conservationist. She also wrote at a time when the Limberlost wetlands and swamps of her native Indiana were vanishing: 13,000 acres of this biodiverse area were drained for agriculture by 1913. Before they disappeared, Stratton-Porter captured the wetlands’ rich habitat by setting her internationally popular fiction there. This includes two novels: Freckles (1904) and A Girl of the Limberlost (1909), the latter of which influenced many young girls, including author Annie Dillard, profiled below, and was adapted to film four times. The self-reliant teenage heroine, Elnora, loved the outdoors, especially hunting moths. Stratton-Porter made a fortune from these romantic novels, with a stunning 10 million copies sold by 1924. She also wrote ten natural history books between 1907 and 1925. Stratton-Porter was the first American woman to form a movie and production company, Gene Stratton-Porter Productions, Inc., and used her position to help conserve parts of the Limberlands you see in Indiana today.

Mary Austin

Anyone interested in the natural history of Southern California—what came before sprawl, smog, and Kardashians—should pick up Mary Austin’s 1903 classic The Land of Little Rain. More than a century ago, Austin presciently captured a disappearing cultural and physical landscape: the people, plants, politics, and sense of place in California’s Owens Valley. She did so ten years before the city of Los Angeles diverted the Owens River in 1913, a period in history known as the California Water Wars and immortalized in the film Chinatown. Austin disregarded prescribed gender roles about how women should explore and talk about the natural world, and she did it with wit, verve, and lyricism. You can hear her wry voice here, channeling Jane Austen: “It is the proper destiny of every considerable stream in the West to become an irrigating ditch.” She is known for writing essays, poetry, plays, and novels; for her pioneering work in science fiction; and as an advocate of indigenous cultures.

Karen Blixen-Isak Dinesen

Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke was also Baroness Badass: She shot lions, had a love affair with English game hunter Denys Finch Hatton, and was enamored with the idea of vultures picking her remains clean when she died. She wrote under the pen name Isak Dinesen in Danish, French, and English, including the superlative Out of Africa, her 1937 memoir made into a film about running a 4,000-acre coffee plantation in British East Africa, now Kenya, from 1914 to 1931. Though some readers feel that a European arrogance appears at times in her writing, she wrote with great feeling and affection about the people and landscape of the African continent: “The sky was rarely more than pale blue or violet, with a profusion of mighty, weightless, ever-changing clouds towering up and sailing on it, but it has blue vigour in it, and at a short distance it painted the ranges of hills and the woods a fresh deep blue.”

Nan Shepherd

“It’s a grand thing, to get leave to live.”
—Nan Shepherd

Men have written hundreds of mountaineering books, but who wrote one of the best? A Scottish poet and novelist named Anna “Nan” Shepherd. The Living Mountain is her meditation on high and holy places: a walk into rather than up mountains, a caress rather than a conquer of peaks, a whisper of “let’s see closer” rather than a testosterone-fueled bugle of “I did it!”

She writes, “Often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination but have gone out merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend, with no intention but to be with him.” Shepherd was a localist who deeply immersed herself in the Cairngorms, Scotland’s eastern Highlands. She swam in streams, watched wildlife, and slept outdoors—a deep engagement recounted in luminescent prose. The Living Mountain was written during World War II, when Shepherd often went “stravaigin”—a Scottish term for wandering. For reasons unknown, she left the manuscript in a drawer for nearly 40 years. It was published late in her life, in 1977. Today, Shepherd’s writing is justifiably experiencing a renaissance—so much so that the Royal Bank of Scotland issued a new £5 note with her portrait in 2016.

Rachel Carson

“The sedge is wither’d from the lake, And no birds sing.”
—John Keats, “La Belle Dame sans Merci”

Rachel Carson’s day job was in marine biology, and she wrote the prize-winning book The Sea Around Us (1951), which spent 86 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. But Carson is best known for her 1961 book, Silent Spring, which directly led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. With a title inspired by a Keats poem, Silent Spring originated when dead birds began turning up in the garden of one of Carson’s friends after rampant spraying of the pesticide DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane). A landmark in the environmental movement, Carson’s book demonstrated the harmful environmental effects of pesticides including DDT, leading to its ban. In the book, she asks, “Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home of insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintance who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?” In 2006, Discover named Silent Spring one of the 25 greatest science books of all time.

Ann Haymond Zwinger

Ann Haymond Zwinger was studying for a doctorate at Harvard when she met her husband, an Air Force pilot. As a military wife, she raised three daughters during their transfers around the country, finally settling down in Colorado Springs in 1960. When the couple bought 40 acres, Zwinger started cataloging and illustrating plants she discovered there—the beginning of a career writing natural histories of mountains, rivers, deserts, and canyon lands of the American West. Over 30 years, she wrote more than 20 books about her quiet observations of the wild. Meticulous and graceful, Zwinger’s writing integrated geology, botany, archaeology, and history along with personal reflections. Start by reading her 1975 book, Run, River, Run: A Naturalist’s Journey Down One of the Great Rivers of the West. You’ll feel as if you’re in the boat with her: “Raw, open sand dunes spread over the right bank, white prickly poppy and masses of yellow mustard and sand-verbena blooming across them.”

Annie Dillard

You feel as though you’re sleepwalking through life. You decide you need to get off the grid. As you head for the solitude of a cabin, bring Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. It is, like Thoreau’s Walden, a “meteorological journal of [her] mind” (in her own words), a meditation, and a nonfiction book about seeing the world more intimately. At age 29, Dillard won a Pulitzer Prize for Pilgrim, and the book remains one of the finest in nature narratives. What sets Dillard apart is her desire to behold the sacred and divine along a creek in the Virginia woods. She observes her own way of seeing in poetic, scientific, mystical ways: “I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.” Edward Abbey called Dillard the “true heir of the Master” (Thoreau), and she has been compared to Gerard Manly Hopkins, Virginia Woolf, John Donne, and William Blake.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

“What it takes to dazzle us, masters of dazzle, all of us here together at the top of the world, is a night without neon or mercury lamps.”
—“Mt. Lemmon, Steward Observatory, 1990”

Descended from the great American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, Alison Hawthorne Deming is a rare interdisciplinary cross-thinker: a poet who writes about science. From the miniscule to the stellar, she explores science, the physical world, and poetry with exquisite observations and memorable juxtapositions. With seven volumes of poetry and five collections of essays, there is no one best place to begin exploring her work, though the essay “Science and Poetry: A View from the Divide” is a good one. As the title suggests, it coalesces Deming’s thinking about the creative process and shared language of the two disciplines. Also good: Writing the Sacred into the Real (2001), in which she writes passionately about the importance of nature writing in reconnecting people to the natural world and enhancing our spiritual lives, and her most recent work, Stairway to Heaven (2016), a collection of poems reflecting on the loss of her mother and brother.

Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich debuted in 1985 with The Solace of Open Spaces. It is a bareback, elegant collection of essays—a mix of memoir, meditation, and poetry—set in Wyoming and capturing the stoic people who call the arid landscape home. After the death of the man she loves, Ehrlich throws herself into hard ranch work—delivering lambs and calves, punching cattle, learning to ride. You can practically smell pungent sagebrush and feel the texture of dirty sheep’s wool as she works to regain personal happiness. To herd sheep, Ehrlich observes, “is to discover a new human gear somewhere between second and reverse—a slow, steady trot of keenness with no speed.” She has a knack for describing the people and places of Wyoming with mystic expression: “The lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties into an unquenchable appetite for life.” Ehrlich’s 11 other books shimmer with a keen perspective on travel and place, including her 1991 narrative nonfiction, Islands, the Universe, Home—ten essays on ritual, nature and philosophy—and A Match to the Heart (1994), an unsentimental account of healing after being struck by lightning.

Kathleen Norris

“Nature, in Dakota, can indeed be an experience of the Holy.”

Don’t shut the book if you feel a prairie wind blow through you while reading Dakota: A Spiritual Geography by poet and essayist Kathleen Norris. It may happen. The book is a prairie-based spiritual meditation about learning to see more in less. In 1974, Norris and her husband moved from New York City to her grandparent’s farm in isolated Lemmon, South Dakota, where she discovers a community of Benedictine monks and revives her Protestant faith. “Maybe the desert wisdom of the Dakotas can teach us to love anyway, to love what is dying, in the face of death, and not pretend that things are other than they are.” Norris’ spiritual quest continued beyond this book when she became a Benedictine oblate in 1986 and wrote The Cloister Walk in 1997 and Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith in 1999.

Diane Ackerman

A grad school friend once argued, “Diane Ackerman is just too lush.” And I said, “That’s precisely why I’d like her.” If you’re in the mood for a velvety, layered wine by someone who revels in playing with language as much as writing about the physical world, reach for Ackerman’s books. One of the finest narrative nonfiction writers (you may know her bestselling book The Zookeeper’s Wife or Pulitzer finalist One Hundred Names for Love), Ackerman also ponders diverse subjects in natural history. In The Natural History of the Senses, she encourages readers to see the common with fresh eyes: “Don’t think of night as the absence of day; think of it as a kind of freedom. Turned away from our sun, we see the dawning of far flung galaxies. We are no longer blinded to the star coated universe we inhabit.”

Leslie Marmon Silko

Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony is the story of a shell-shocked World War II veteran trying to regain his peace of mind. When first published in 1977, it deeply resonated with returning Vietnam vets and has gained more relevance as mental health and post-traumatic stress syndrome in vets is better understood. The story follows Tayo, a vet of mixed Laguna-white ancestry who has returned home to his reservation, having lost his will to live after enduring the 65-mile Bataan Death March and a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. Alternating between prose and poetry, the book tells the events of Tayo’s life and shows how ancient Laguna rituals reconnect him to his Pueblo people, plants, and animals. Silko is regarded as the premiere figure in the Native American Renaissance. A Laguna Pueblo, Mexican, and white storyteller, she infuses all her work—novels, poems, films, short stories, and essays—with concerns for traditional Native American culture and the restorative power of ancient rituals. Raised in the sparse beauty of a New Mexican plateau and a debut recipient of a MacArthur Genius Award in 1981, Silko deftly explores complex relationships between humans and nature.

Robin Wall Kimmerer

Robin Wall Kimmerer blends her scientific understanding as a professor of environmental and forest biology with her heritage as a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Her first book, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, won the prestigious John Burroughs Medal for nature writing. Her second, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants, won the Sigurd F. Olsen Nature Writing Award. In both books, Kimmerer weaves close observations of nature with indigenous views that invite us to reflect on our relationship with plants, animals, and the land—“an ancient conversation between mosses and rocks…About light and shadow and the drift of continents…an interface of immensity and minuteness, of past and present, softness and hardness, stillness and vibrancy.” Kimmerer manages to invoke ecological spirituality while never veering toward unsubstantiated facts (that’s the scientist in her).

Amy Stewart

Earthworms, wicked bugs, deadly plants. The flower industry. Botanical ingredients of the world’s great drinks. These are subjects of Amy Stewart’s bestselling books. For Stewart, a Texas transplant in California with a trademark wit, the story of the natural world is the grandest and most important human story. “Our quest to understand the natural world, to preserve it, and even to profit from it and make use of it, is in some ways the only story,” Stewart said in an email exchange. A personal favorite of mine is The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World’s Great Drinks, filled with liqueur recipes and horticultural history. We learn how to plant citrus and sloes, and how to make a Sloe Gin Fizz or a Red Lion Hybrid. It’s neither easy nor recommended, but I now plant my garden with a cocktail glass in one hand and a spade in the other.

Carolyn Finney

What percentage of visitors to America’s national parks are black? Seven percent, according to a survey commissioned by the National Park Service. If black people comprise twice that percentage of the U.S. population, why don’t more people of color venture into America’s public lands, and does that mean they aren’t engaged with the natural environment? These are potent questions of race, identity, and connection that Carolyn Finney, a writer, performer, and cultural geographer, addresses in her 2014 book, Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors. A mixture of scholarship, memoir, and history, the book is an academic yet probing read, braiding analysis with interviews to trace the environmental legacy of slavery, racial violence, and Jim Crow segregation while also celebrating contributions black Americans have made to the environment.

Terry Tempest Williams

“I am slowly, painfully discovering that my refuge is not found in my mother, my grandmother, of even the birds of Bear River. My refuge exists in my capacity to love. If I can learn to love death then I can begin to find refuge in change.”

By 1994, nine members of Terry Tempest Williams’ family had undergone mastectomies. Seven died of cancer. In Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, her sixth book, Williams weaves memoir and natural history to tell the dual narrative of her mother’s cancer from atomic testing and the flooding of the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge. Rooted in the sprawling landscape of her native Utah, the book pivots between the natural and unnatural, between a family devastated by exposure to 1950s atomic bomb testing and a bird refuge despoiled by developers. And she writes in such a shimmering manner that decades after reading Refuge for the first time, I can still see the egrets, owls, and herons on the Great Salt Lake. It’s also there that Williams once found a dead swan, placed its body in the shape of a crucifix with two black stones over the eyes, and wrote, “Using my own saliva as my mother and grandmother had done to wash my face, I washed the swan’s black bill and feet until they shone like patent leather.” Refuge has become a classic of American nature writing in its meditative search for meaning in the rhythms of life and death.

Janisse Ray

“My homeland is about as ugly as a place gets,” writes Janisse Ray at the beginning of her first book, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (2000). That home was a junkyard in rural southern Georgia, where Ray writes about growing up in a poor, white, fundamentalist Christian family. It’s also a book about the longleaf pine ecosystem, 99 percent of which is gone. Ray mourns the apocalyptic deforestation of these pines, a valuable tree to merchants and the U.S. Navy. It grew from Virginia to Florida to Texas and has been replaced by faster-growing commercial pines. The author of six books, Ray focuses her work on rural life, agriculture, human rights, and environmental sustainability. What sets her apart as a nature writer? “Southerners in general have a deep relationship with land, history, and place,” Ray said. “Which makes nature very important to the Southern psyche. Because of the terrain, our emphasis is more botanic than geologic, more rural than urban, and more deeply rooted in story rather than statistic, generally speaking.”

Helen MacDonald

“Vast flocks of fieldfares netted the sky, turning it to something strangely like a sixteenth-century sleeve sewn with pearls.”

By page 50 of H Is for Hawk, savoring each sentence like pearls on a string, you realize you’re holding a new classic in nature writing. H is the third book for Helen MacDonald, a British poet, illustrator, falconer, and historian. Her first, Shaler’s Fish (2001), is a collection of poetry, and her second, Falcon (2006), is nonfiction—and it didn’t just put her on the map, but rocketed her to international acclaim. The book masterfully chronicles the collapse of reality when MacDonald’s father, who shared her passion for birding, unexpectedly dies on a London street. To deal with her grief, she throws herself into taming and training a goshawk, a bird she calls “a Victorian melodrama” and “as muscled as a pit bull, and intimidating as hell.” Taking seven years to write, H is, simply, a masterpiece. It also stands apart from much nature writing genre for its dark, sweary, and funny bits—traits practitioners of more traditional nature writing often shy away from, but shouldn’t. What can we expect next from MacDonald? She hasn’t decided yet. “Whatever it will be,” she told me, “I think it will build on one of the deepest themes in H Is for Hawk: investigating how we unconsciously use the natural world as a mirror of our own selves and concerns, and how this relates to the way we give value to particular landscapes and creatures.”

Camille T. Dungy

“I am never not thinking about nature,” Camille T. Dungy wrote in an email, “because I don’t understand a way we can be honest about who we are without understanding that we are nature.” A professor at Colorado State University, Dungy has written four poetry collections and edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009). This widely influential anthology features nearly 200 poems, from 18th-century slave Phillis Wheatley to recent poet laureate Rita Dove. It challenges the notion that the tradition of nature writing has been solely grounded in the pastoral or wild landscapes of America and Europe. The voices within the collection show nature as a devastating legacy of slavery, with people forced to work the land; at the same time, portraits emerge of writers who saw nature as a source of hope, with seeds of survival. Dungy’s poetry is vivid, personal, and lucid and stays with you long after you close the book. The poem “Trophic Cascade” appears to be about a changing ecosystem after the introduction of wolves to Yellowstone, but the last lines deliver a curveball: “All this life born from one hungry animal, this whole, new landscape, the course of the river changed, I know this. I reintroduced myself to myself, this time a mother. After which, nothing was ever the same.” Her debut collection of personal essays, Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, was published in June.

Andrea Wulf

“All my books are about the relationship between humankind and nature,” said Andrea Wulf, a historian and writer living in Britain. “I dislike the categories that are imposed upon books, such as ‘biography,’ ‘history of science,’ ‘garden history,’ or ‘nature writing.’ I hope that we can transcend these artificial boundaries.” A prize-winning writer, Wulf is the author of five natural history books, including The Brother Gardeners (2008) and The Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation (2012). It is her detailed and arresting 2015 book, The Invention of Nature: How Alexander von Humboldt Revolutionized Our World, that has garnered the most attention. Wulf pulls the explorer von Humboldt from oblivion and writes in great depth about why his ideas were so astonishing in the mid-19th century yet commonplace now: “It is almost as though his ideas have become so manifest that the man behind them has disappeared."

Katharine Norbury

Following a miscarriage, a breast cancer diagnosis, and a letter from her birth mother, English writer and film editor Katharine Norbury set out on a journey: to follow rivers from sea to source in the Llyn Peninsula of Northwest Wales in the company of her nine-year-old daughter. This walking journey was meant to be a kind of family memory book that Norbury felt she might bind with leaves and shells, but it grew into an exquisite and profound reflection on the healing power of nature during times of grief and loss. The Fish Ladder: A Journey Upstream is Norbury’s life-affirming personal narrative about marriage, motherhood, adoption, and self-discovery. Part travelogue and healing meditation, Norbury’s place writing is lush, sensual, and vivid: “Each retreating wave was an apnoeic gasp, gravel lungs filled with water, drowning without panic.” Her next book—untitled as of yet—is about the circus and belonging.

Melissa Harrison

The British are obsessed with walking, weather, and the countryside. It’s not surprising that a very good book about moody mists, damp drizzles, and downright deluges would be widely embraced and showered with praise. That book is Rain: Four Walks in English Weather (2016) by English novelist and journalist Melissa Harrison. A patient and poetic guide, she invites readers to explore and reimagine one of the essential elements of our world, reminding us that to “experience the countryside on fair days and never foul is to understand only half its story.” Her third book, Rain, was nominated for the Wainwright Prize, an award given to the best writing on the outdoors, nature, and UK-based travel writing. Harrison has also written two nature novels: Clay (2013) and At Hawthorn Time (2015), the latter shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award. Hawthorn examines old secrets and a crumbling marriage against the unchanging backdrop of nature: “He remembered the graceful elms,” she writes. “So did the rooks, you could hear the loss of them in their chatter still. Things didn’t always turn out as you feared, though; the countryside was still full of saplings, but fugitive, sheltered in hedgerows and abetted by taller trees.”

Elena Passarello

A poet, professor, and actor, Elena Passarello is one of the finest essayists working today. Her second book, Animals Strike Curious Poses, is an exquisite collection of 16 essays weaving human and animal history together in narrative nonfiction that is playful, poignant, and deeply researched. Readers of this book as well as her first, Let Me Clear My Throat (2013), will not be surprised to learn that Passarello is a recipient of the Whiting Award for Nonfiction, a literary prize given to emerging writers with great promise. In Animals Strike Curious Poses, she takes us on a journey to a breathtaking range of places: the imagined mindset of an “endling” (the last of a species), the seemingly lost “crucial glance” between humans and wild animals, and her own childhood memories of “Lancelot the Living Unicorn.” In typical good humor, Passarello told me she brings to the practice of nature writing “a layperson’s sense of uncertainty, wonder, and often wrongheadedness.” What fascinates her is the nature of human thought and obsession, be it a song, a speech, or a salamander. “That’s why I’m as likely to write about the social practices of birdwatchers as I am the birds they seek.” What’s she writing now? Passarello said her next venture will take her outside “to do something a little crazy, something for which I have to undergo training.” Watch for it.

Amy Liptrot

After years of hedonism and drowning in booze in London, Amy Liptrot washes ashore on her native Orkney Islands in Scotland to try to save herself. Her debut book, The Outrun—winner of the 2016 Wainwright Prize for best nature, travel, and outdoor writing—is raw and beautiful, a painful rehab memoir. It follows Liptrot’s recovery and reconnection with the landscape she sought to escape for years. In atmospheric writing, she describes swimming in the cold sea, tracking puffins and arctic terns, and observing the night sky: “I’ve swapped disco lights for celestial lights but I’m still surrounded by dancers. I am orbited by 67 moons.” The best descriptive writers have close, repeated observations of particular place; Liptrot watches tides, winds, clouds, wildlife, and more. Learning folklore and rural traditions of the islands also enhances her new, celebratory sense of place.

Don’t underestimate these worthy steeds

Bike coverage for Outside and the Summer Buyer’s Guide is largely a democratic process. I put a dozen testers on the year’s crop of new bikes, and the bikes that a majority of riders preferred are the ones we recommend. But those picks don’t always perfectly align with my tastes. Here are a few models that I rode and loved but, for one reason or another (too niche, liked by some riders but not others), just missed the cut. That doesn’t mean these aren’t great rides though.

Pivot Mach 6 Carbon (From $5,200; $8,400 as Tested)

Enduro 27.5ers comprised over 20 percent of our test fleet, making the category one of the fastest growing this year. The revised Mach 6, which gets a longer front center and lower stance than the previous edition for even more aggressive handling, was one of my favorites. Two things set this bike apart. First, Pivot’s use of the DWLink suspension makes the Mach 6 climb exceptionally well for a 155-millimeter trail shredder. And second, the company’s attention to detail—super-clean cable routings, ports to accommodate any and every build you might ever want, and rubberized frame protection on the down tube and bottom bracket—is maybe the finest on the market. The Fox suspension, including DPX2 piggyback shock and 160-millimeter 36 Factory fork, proved both stout and silky. And the lightweight Reynolds Enduro carbon wheels took a nasty beating but came away unscathed. If you favor big drops, sketchy terrain, bike parks, and shuttling over long days of pedaling, you cannot go wrong with this burly bike. Oh yeah, it’s also the best-looking Pivot I’ve ever seen and probably the sexiest mountain bike in the entire test.

Guerrilla Gravity Trail Pistol (From $2,995; $5,695 as Tested)

Based in Denver, Colorado, where all of this company’s rides are designed, built, and assembled, Guerrilla Gravity is reviving the idea that small-scale, American-made bikes are legit by offering value, customization, and—most important—a great ride. Most of the company’s bikes are longer-travel and downhill-oriented, a design ethos that obviously influences this 120-millimeter trail 29er’s slack head angle (66.6 degrees), steep seat angle, short chainstays (429 millimeters), and long reach. Taken together, it makes for a bike that feels plenty efficient yet confident enough to get rowdy. Guerrilla Gravity sells three spec builds of the Trail Pistol, or you can pick and choose exactly what you want, including paint color and stickers. The bike the company built for us couldn’t have been more spot-on: The 130-millimeter MRP Ribbon fork proved infinitely adjustable and incredibly supple in the small bumps. The Cane Creek DBCoil IL shock made of the most stable ride of any bike in the test. The Industry 9 Trail270 wheels are as appealing and high-performance as alloy hoops get. And unlike some of the more niche machines out there, this is a bike I would ride on any trail in any part of the world in every condition.

Salsa Deadwood (From $3,800; $6,000 as Tested)

Thanks to its monster wheels and big-truck feel, the Deadwood was either adored or hated by testers, with very few in between. For me, it was one of the standouts of the test, partly because it is the only full-suspension 29+ bike on the market. Those huge hoops make this bike plow like a steamroller. And I think it’s perfect for the desert Southwest—it pushes through rocky chunder, grips like Velcro on loose climbs, and floats when trails turn sandy, which is frequent. This year’s model keeps the short, 91-millimeter rear travel of the previous edition but gets a beefier 120-millimeter fork for a slacker front end and more assertive riding. I did regret that Salsa downgraded from full three-inch rubber last year to 2.6-inch Maxxis Rekons. These tires are some of my favorite, but I’d rather have the bigger variety since full plus-size is what sets the Deadwood apart. With a pretty long wheelbase and a somewhat heavy build (29.5 pounds), this bike isn’t the most playful and won’t appeal to everyone. But I enjoyed smashing around in the backcountry with it.

Look 795 Light RS ($8,500 as Tested)

Like the Salsa, this aero carbon superbike won me over not only for its composed ride but also because it is so different than any other bike on the market. The tubes are all airfoil shaped, but the aerodynamic gains don’t stop there, thanks to Look’s innovative integration. The top tube extends straight into the proprietary stem, which can be adjusted from minus 13 degrees all the way up to 17 degrees to preserve the bike’s sleek lines. The Zed 3 Crank is constructed as one piece, which makes for exceptional stiffness and some of the best power transfer I’ve felt. (The flip chip at the pedals to adjust the crank between 170 and 175 millimeters is also a neat little bit of design.) Finally, the integrated seat mast makes for clean airflow, but Look has also built in elastomers that help smooth the ride. All together, it makes for a powerful-feeling bike that’s best on rolling terrain and confident descending, without the harsh edge of some of the competition. The truth is you can get an aero bike that’s lighter and cheaper from some of the bigger manufacturers, but I liked this as much as any of them for its distinctiveness.

Breadwinner G-Road ($6,395)

The G-Road (G for gravel) was another polarizing bike among testers. To understand how a steel 650B road bike can be this costly—one of the big put-offs for some testers—you must appreciate the heritage of Breadwinner, which is a collaboration between Ira Ryan and Tony Pereira, two of the most renowned men in the hand-built bike world. Each of the company’s bikes, including every G-Road, is custom built and finished to a client’s riding style, preferences, and geometry. Apart from its bespoke nature, the G-Road comes with 2.1-inch Schwalbe G-One Bite tires on Stan’s Crest MK3 rims, wide flaring Thomson Dirt Drop bars, front and rear thru-axles, and a 1x SRAM Force group set, including the company’s hydraulic disc brakes, all of which suggest taking on very burly terrain. The myriad braze-ons on the Igle segmented fork and the Breadwinner rear dropout hint at the big loads this bike is built to carry. The G-Road was happiest muscling along the fire roads and dirt corduroy outlying Tucson, where the relatively low bottom bracket lent a rooted, super-stable ride. It did OK on trails, too, though the steering seemed slow for really quick stuff. As such, this is a pretty niche machine, best for those who like their roads chunky and their backcountry adventures big—and want the most beautiful bike available for the job.

Cervélo R3 Disc ($5,200)

The Canadian company has had a bit of a reputation for producing somewhat expensive, slightly traditional (some would say stuffy) bikes over the years, so it’s nice to see Cervélo bring disc brakes to the venerable and longstanding R Series. Unless you choose the safety vest yellow colorway—indeed a bold departure for Cervélo—there’s nothing showy or flashy about this bike. Instead, it’s just a nicely built disc roadie with great parts (full Ultegra Di2) and fleshed-out geometry. Every time I climbed aboard this bike at the test, I felt as though I was settling into a bike I’d been riding for years—that’s how comfy it is. It’s not the lightest (17.5 pounds) nor the fastest, but it just feels good on whatever terrain you throw at it. Turnover is quick when climbing out of the saddle, handling is sharp but not nervous, and descending is so stable that I felt totally fine taking my hands off the bars for water on the 50 mph descent of Mount Lemmon.