Month: March 2019

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Last week, I was in Telluride, Colorado, for Mountainfilm. I’m incredibly honored that my short film, Follow Through, showed at the film festival. I’ve always wanted to tell my story and I’m proud of how my film turned out.

Yet even with all the success of the film, I’m shocked that I still have to address rumors and heavy criticism that undermines my competency in the mountains.

This fall, the week before the film was released, I heard that people in the guiding industry in the Wasatch were questioning whether I hired a guide to help me complete The Chuting Gallery project. It was hard for me to cope with these doubts. I felt so angry: the fact that people were second-guessing my accomplishment clearly mapped out the systematic sexism that exists in outdoor sports. 

I’ve spent over a decade honing my steep skiing skills, and I spent half a decade working on the project, equipping myself with the technical tools to be a confident leader on rock, snow and ice. During the project, I wore a lot of hats, not only deciding when to ski each line and how to do it, but also coordinating with ski partners, videographers, the production team and sponsors. I worked in a team, yes, but I was the leader—because it was my project. The assumption that I didn't complete the project myself was deeply insulting. (On a broader scale, I have completed over 11 international human-powered backcountry ski and ski mountaineering trips over the past nine years, many of which I’ve planned and led myself.)

During The Chuting Gallery Project, I skied a handful of the lines with friends who are guides, but they were with me as partners, not guides, and were not paid or traded. We did use a paid guide one day to help with some of the rigging for the videographer. On a single line, where we had a guide help the film team, the guide initially put the rope up, I followed. And then I re-led the pitch. Every pitch of ice and rock, I led. I might add that it’s standard practice for mountain guides to run safety on ski films. This was not a typical ski film, and I was in charge of my own safety and risk management. I am confident in my skills to interpret weather and plan routes in complicated terrain. 

In many cases, I trust my own expert intuition as much as, or more than, mountain guides. I know that trusting a perceived expert leads people to take more risks in the backcountry. I know that one of the best things I can do when I'm in the backcountry to manage risk is to speak up to my group and express my concerns. And I will not let these rumors silence me.

In some ways, I’m grateful for these doubts because they give me the opportunity to set the record straight. I don’t want my accomplishment diminished. I am not addressing this for validation. I am not even getting paid to write this article. I'm writing this to prevent my accomplishment from being unwritten in the court of public opinion.

And frankly, I’m frustrated that I even have to address these rumors about “guiding buddies”—rumors that are simply a way to invalidate my accomplishments in the mountains. The misogyny and sexism in the Wasatch backcountry and ski mountaineering community is real. I’m sick of it.

But I will not be defeated.

Before I met my friend Liz Daley in 2012, I had no idea that mountain guiding was even a profession. I didn’t know about the American Mountain Guides Association and the process to get certified. Liz opened my eyes to this world. Skiing with her, I learned about the amazing skills that mountain guides possess. I loved being with her in the mountains as an equal partner. And I wanted to find more friends who had her same level of technical expertise. Liz, who was killed in an avalanche, showed me an image of what I could become, and it is important for me to find partners like her—not to replace her, but to keep her memory alive. 

I realize that ski mountaineering is one of the most dangerous sports you can undertake, so I want to do everything to stack the odds in my favor. I also want to keep growing my knowledge base. I’ve taken courses in Avalanche Levels 1, 2, and 3; Rock Rescue Levels 1 and 2; and Ice Rescue. I have a Wilderness First Responder certification and do regular crevasse rescue refreshers.

I also make a conscientious effort to recruit partners who take their technical training as seriously as I do. Why wouldn’t you do everything you can to stack the odds in your favor?

On another international trip, I hired a local guide to help us with some of the trip logistics. Because of the difficulty of the ski line I was attempting, I had to clarify, in writing, that the guide was joining us as a climber and skier, not as a guide, and we were each individually responsible for our decisions to continue or not. She was compensated a modest fee for her time in pre-trip logistical organization. She did join us on the mountain, and since that trip, has become a good friend and mountain partner. Again, international ski mountaineering expeditions are dangerous. Why not equip yourself with information from a local guide to help set you up for success?

I wish I didn’t have to write this statement, to address these lies that people are spreading. They don’t just frustrate me or hurt my feelings, they hurt my career. Last winter, when I took my Avalanche 3 course, one of the pieces of feedback I received to justify my failing grade was: “If you want to make the transition from pro skier to mountain guide, stop hiring guides and traveling with others that make decisions for you. Put yourself in situations where you are required to put it all together, apply these skills and observations and form your own opinion everyday, and don’t just regurgitate the opinions of others.” I have no idea where the evaluator got the idea that I was skiing as a guided client. These lies had become so pervasive that they were part of the reason I didn’t pass the course, and they are simply untrue. I was also told: “She talks when she should listen and is strongly defensive from the start. Remember respect is earned and never given. By having such a large social media presence, you set yourself up for added criticism and comment, silence your critics through action and decisions, not words.”

When I wrote about this encounter with bias, a woman sent me a note sharing a similar story. She had received equally unprofessional and unhelpful feedback from an instructor during an exam. She said, “Your implicit bias post is a big part of the reason I stopped guiding.” My situation is far from unique.

In several of my avalanche courses, I’ve been offended by sexist material that instructors put in slideshows (think women in bikinis with a slide about risk). On one ski tour, I overheard an instructor brag about how he only dates women who have martial arts experience so they can fight back when he beats them. As the only woman in the course, how would this not put me in a defensive position? The reason I’m writing this is because I want to get to a place where women’s accomplishments can be accepted and celebrated without bias. I want female mountaineers to get the same recognition and credit as their male counterparts. The way these local guides have fabricated a story about the style in which I climbed and skied the lines in The Chuting Gallery illustrates the kind of toxic masculinity that runs rampant in our culture.

This habitual sexism is part of the reason that only 10 percent of mountain guides are female, and why fewer than 25 percent of sponsored snowsports athletes for major outerwear brands are female, despite the fact that over 40 percent of skiers are female.

Also, while I’m speaking about statistics, it’s worth noting that 85 percent of snowsports fatalities happen to males in their late teens to late 30s. This is the demographic that on a broader level, engages in high-risk behavior and suffers the majority of unintentional death from injury.

We need more female representation, especially in dangerous sports like mountaineering. It’s not enough to get women outside. We need women to get to the highest levels. At every turn in my career, I’ve battled sexism and harassment. I will not back down and disappear, giving in to the belief that I don’t belong. I will not distance myself from the world of ski mountaineering that I love so much. I will continue to show up and speak up.

I also want to help create a more inclusive outdoor community, where people are free to be who they are. I’ve noticed that in order to succeed in male-dominated fields such as mountain guiding, many women have had to adopt the traits of masculinity. I want to be an example to other women that you can be feminine and a strong leader. I also want to challenge the belief that in order to teach someone, you need to bully and belittle, haze, or break them down to build them back up. It’s a way of thinking that is not only outdated, but down right dangerous—and in many states, illegal.

To change the tides, I believe we need to do two things to start: first of all, mountain guiding companies need to consider putting their guides through implicit bias training to understand how to create an inclusive culture that doesn’t automatically de-value women’s skill. The AMGA has demonstrated great leadership in this arena by giving their instructors this kind of training. 

And my call to action to you, the reader, is to examine your own implicit bias and preferences. As a society, we are so habituated to sexism that women are often biased against other women. Do the stories you tell discredit the efforts and achievements of women in the workplace or in the mountains? Are you part of the problem? When you hear someone saying something to diminish another person, do you call them out on it?

Use your words carefully, and remember this isn’t a battle of the sexes. The mountains are for everyone.

This article originally appeared on Caroline Gleich’s website.

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Alaska already has one famous 800-mile pipeline, which brings oil from the Arctic to tankers waiting in the south. Now the state is vigorously pursuing a plan to build a second one to carry the far north’s vast, untapped reserves of natural gas to a growing China.

The pipeline proposal is as ambitious as its predecessor, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System. Starting at Prudhoe Bay, on the Beaufort Sea, the proposed 42-inch-diameter pipeline would extend south for 825 miles to Nikiski, on the Kenai Peninsula, southeast of Anchorage. The price tag for such a project is bogglingly high—an estimated $43.4 billion, including a $9.3 billion contingency fund. It’s unclear whether the project will find financial backers to help foot the bill, though.

The idea is controversial for other reasons, too: building a natural gas pipeline would extend the world’s reliance on fossil fuels and lead to more climate change-causing gasses, critics point out. It also could spur future energy development in the Arctic.

What’s not in dispute is that an enormous amount of natural gas lies beneath the nation’s Arctic—roughly 200 trillion cubic feet of so-called conventional natural gas, counting the gas beneath the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, says David Houseknecht, senior research geologist for the U.S. Geological Survey. (For comparison, total U.S. consumption was 27 trillion cubic feet last year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency.)

With no pipeline to bring gas to market, the gas has been “stranded,” says a spokesman for the gas line effort. A pipeline would change that, says USGS’ Houseknecht, “There’s no doubt that a pipeline would make the gas resources economically viable to develop, because right now the gas’ worth is economically zero, or nearly zero,” he says. What’s more, once a main gas pipeline is in place, more new gas exploration, and pipelines connecting the new wells the main pipeline, would appear over time, he predicts—rather like branches on a Christmas tree

That worries many environmentalists. “This is a horrible idea,” Nathan Matthews, a staff attorney for the Sierra Club, told Outside. In a filing with FERC, Matthews wrote that “Sierra Club members everywhere will be affected by the greenhouse gases emitted by the increased natural gas production induced by the project.” The Center for Biological Diversity wrote in a similar filing that “the Project will result in increased natural gas drilling in the Arctic….increasing air pollution, diminishing wildlife habitat, and exacerbating climate change.” A completed pipeline would make several river crossings, and would pass for 28 miles beneath Cook Inlet, which is home to endangered beluga whales.

Much of the natural gas lies in areas where there already are existing wells, says Houseknecht, pointing to Prudhoe Bay and Point Thomson, the latter about 60 miles to the east near the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Tapping that gas wouldn’t require developing a lot of new ground.  Other areas where large amounts of natural gas have been found, however, don’t have any significant development. For instance, exploratory wells over the years in the foothills of the Brooks Range in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, or NPR-A, have found significant gas there, he says.

Not all environmentalists see the natural gas pipeline in a negative light. “I don’t think the environmental ramifications of the gas line are as great as others seem to think if it is built with minimal leakage and follows existing rights of way,” says Lois Epstein, Arctic program director for the Wilderness Society and an engineer who hasserved on the federal government’s oil pipeline federal advisory committee for a dozen years. “I don’t see NPR-A development happening for gas for decades, if ever.” Epstein added that the pipeline would be able to bring cleaner natural gas to communities such as Fairbanks, which now have horrific air quality in winter due to wood-burning.

Ultimately, the outcome will come down to money. The new pipeline would provide gas to China, whose demand for natural gas is expected to surge in the coming decades, according to the Energy Information Agency. Alaska hopes to attract Chinese investors to the project. Last November, Alaska Governor Bill Walker went to Beijing and signed a deal between his state and three Chinese entities, including a major state-owned petroleum company and the Bank of China, to advance the pipeline. The deal was non-binding, but the groups hope to have a formal agreement on financing and investment by year’s end, according to a spokesman for the Alaska Gasline Development Corporation, which was formed by the state of Alaska to pursue the project.

Even with Chinese backing, the pipeline might not make sense financially. An August 2016 report by Wood Mackenzie, an energy consulting firm, found that Alaska’s LNG project “one of the least competitive” of several projects that could serve northern Asia with natural gas. A big reason was its huge construction costs. (The report also suggested ways the project could boost its competitiveness.)

Meanwhile, the cost of renewable energy—wind, solar—continues to fall. Natural gas is often touted as a “bridge fuel” to a cleaner future. It’s unclear, however, how long that bridge is.

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After 22 years selling other brands gear, Backcountry.com announced in late March that it would be making its own proprietary apparel and equipment. We were intrigued. Would decades of experience matching customers with the ideal gear for their needs lead it to offer innovative, high-quality products?

An array of apparel went on sale last month, and Backcountrys first tent and sleeping bag hit virtual shelves today. After getting in some time with the gear, were impressed but not blown away.

At 5.3 pounds, the Lodgepole is far from the lightest in its class, but it has the simplicity and ease of use that I look for in a summer car-camping tent. The body uses a pair of crisscrossed poles joined by a swivel joint and open C-hooks, which means its quick to raise, even solo. I had the tent and fly up and guyed out in less than ten minutes on my first try, without looking at the sewn-in directions. There are two C-shaped doors, and you can stake out the nylon fly to create a pair of vestibules, one large and one small. 

Inside, the Lodgepole is sparse on details, with a small mesh storage pouch on either side. Sizewise, the Lodgepole is a true two-person tent, with enough space for a pair of sleeping pads and bags placed side by side, but not a ton of extra room for gear (or stretching out) in between. In other words, its the kind of tent Id share only with someone I know very, very well. 

—Ariella Gintzler, assistant editor

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The Pluma 0 is rated to zero degrees and would work well for expeditions, multi-day ski touring, and winter camping. The nearly full-length metal zipper (it stops about six inches from the bottom, creating a nice foot box) is beefy, with long, easy-to-grab pulls. There are amply stuffed baffles around the neck and collar and an elastic cinch strap to keep out frigid air. Inside, a zippered chest pocket is big enough for a phone, while a Velcro pocket at the other end can hold a foot warmer.

The downside: to achieve its temperature rating, Backcountry stuffed the bag with nearly two pounds of 650-fill duck, and all that fill adds up. The Pluma 0 is 3.5 pounds, heftier than my favorite winter bags, the Feathered Friends Snowbunting EX 0 and Mountain Hardwear Phantom Torch 3, both of which weigh under three pounds. But at $300—half the price of the former—the Pluma 0 is a solid option for warm comfort on a cold night.

—Ben Fox, associate editor

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Backcountry.coms apparel line leans toward the lifestyle side of the spectrum, featuring an array of graphic and plain T-shirts, long-sleeve shirts, and tank tops, as well as stretch khakis, a sweatshirt, a flannel, and a raincoat. I’ve been wearing the Super Stretch pants ($85), Airy shirt ($70), Bonfire hoodie ($90), and Fresh Air T-shirt ($45), and they’re all comfortable, well-cut pieces that capably cross over from campsite to town. The Bonfire is one of the coziest sweatshirts Ive ever pulled on, thanks to thick cotton fabric and an asymmetrical zipper that keeps the cold metal away from my chin. The Super Stretch pants are pliant enough for climbing, with the pockets and seams of everyday pants. The plaid Airy shirt and polyester and linen tee fit great, though neither really stands out from the pack. Ultimately, Backcountry’s new collection isn’t groundbreaking, but it’s a welcome addition to my wardrobe.

—A.G.

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One day in July 2017, the shake machine, which tests water resistant properties of hydrophobic down, had been going for 2,000 minutes. Samantha Lee, a then 21-year-old intern at bulk down supplier Sustainable Down Source (SDS), knew she was onto something. So far, the test results indicated that 33 hours of rain wouldn’t rob the feathers, which had been treated with a eco-friendly Durable Water Repellent (DWR), of their insulating properties.

But there wasn’t time for Lee to celebrate. Just as she realized she might have found the answer to a question that’s been plaguing the outdoor industry for years, a lightning bolt struck the company’s headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio, setting part of the building on fire and causing some of the company’s electronics to go haywire. 

Everyone evacuated, including Lee, who forgot her lab notebook. She texted her manager, Caroline Zapf, chief sustainability officer for SDS, which produces hydrophobic down under the name DownTek, something to the effect of “Well, the good news is, the shake machine’s still going and has surpassed 2,000 minutes. Bad news: the building’s on fire.”

It’s a story with a happy ending—or, perhaps, a beginning. Lee had scored big.

She had created a DWR treatment that performed extraordinarily well: it was third-party tested to withstand 33 hours of constant rain, compared to DownTek’s original formula, which was only rated for 16.7 hours. More remarkably, it contained zero PFCs, (short for perfluorocarbons), the harmful and non-biodegradablechemicals that the outdoor industry had heavily relied on to make apparel water resistant up to this point, but performed just as well if not better.

Down’s weakness is moisture. Get it wet and it compresses, losing its renowned insulating powers. Companies have long turned to DWR treatments that contain PFCs to bolster it against moisture, but at an environmental cost. So a PFC-free treatment that actually repels water is somewhat of a holy grail.

This wasn’t Sustainable Down Source’s first attempt at PFC-free. The company created a ZeroPFC line in 2014, which was environmentally successful but less effective at repelling water. They spent several years researching alternative, PFC-free down coatings to replace the ZeroPFC line. Lee came up with her formula, which uses Bluesign-approved(rated safe for both humans and the environment)chemicals, in one summer’s worth of work. Moving forward, DownTek will produce only PFC-free down filling, treated with Lee’s DWR. The company will nix PFCs from the production of about half a million pounds of hydrophobic down this year alone. (It's worth nothing that many major brands, including Big Agnes, Brooks-Range, and L.L. Bean, use DownTek in their products.)

This isn’t the first brand to release PFC-free DWR, either. Nikwax launched its PFC-free hydrophobic down in 2013, in collaboration with Rab, but has long made PFC-free DWR treatments. The brand looked into PFC chemistry in the ‘90s, when it started proliferating in the industry for its performance, says Heidi Dale Allen, marketing VP at Nikwax. But then research indicated that PFCs are harmful for people and the environment. Since Nikwax is an after-market care product that people apply themselves in their homes, they decided the risks outweighed the benefits, and they steered in the opposite direction. Fjällräven stopped using PFCs in its rain shells in 2015. DownTek debuted Sustainable Down Source’s ZeroPFC in 2016, though it performed about one-third as well as its original formula. Last year, Columbia released its first PFC-free rain jacket, the Outdry Ex Eco Rain Shell, and this year, Marmot came out with its own.

In the grand scheme of the mounting horrors we inflict on the environment every year, DownTek is just one so-called “ingredient brand” in one fairly small industry. Even the whole of the outdoor industry is barely a blip on the scale of the work that needs to be done to eliminate PFCs in manufacturing and chemical production, says Chris Dreszig, head of marketing and communication for Bluesign. Since PFCs are extremely effective at repelling water, grease, and stains, they’re ubiquitous in household items like pots, pans, and carpets, as well as in technical apparel and coatings on airplanes.

Still, progress is progress.

“We should really be leading the entire consumer goods market,” says Dale Allen. She added that even though DownTek is a direct competitor of theirs, she still sees their new formula as a win. “As long as we’re all working in the same direction, that makes me happy.”

Patagonia doesn’t use DownTek—or any hydrophobic down—in its line of gear, but it has committed to jettisoning its use of PFCs by the year 2020. A few other brands have made such goals publicly. VF Corporation—which owns Smartwool, the North Face, Jansport, Eagle Creek, and other iconic brands—plans to be PFC-free by 2025. Burton and Jack Wolfskin plan to be PFC-free by 2020.

But there’s no set goal for the industry, says Beth Jensen, senior director of sustainable business innovation of the Outdoor Industry Association. That’s in part because DWR that uses PFCs is still used in so much gear. We’ve come to expect maximum performance as a baseline for satisfactory gear. It’s great to hear that a jacket has been rain-room tested for 24 hours without fail, but few of us ever even come close to pushing our gear to those kinds of limits. In some ways, we’ve forced some over-engineering of outdoor apparel, says Dreszig. 

Jensen acknowledges that brands are challenged by customer expectations as they work to find greener solutions. Educating them is a big part of this process. Right now, many brands say they’re more internally driven and motivated by like companies than they are being pushed by customers to use greener materials or chemistries. Regulations have also changed. As research has proven the harmful impacts of chemicals like PFCs, certain forms have been banned by government agencies in the U.S. and abroad.

“This is such a big deal in our industry,” says Matt Dwyer, director of materials innovation for Patagonia. Patagonia customers have no issues asking hard questions, but “by the time a customer is asking us for something like this, we’re too late.” 

It’s unclear how long the road is to being completely PFC-free, largely because the industry doesn’t want to rush into solutions without longevity, Jensen says. The best thing you can do for the environment is to buy stuff that lasts long enough that you won’t need to replace it, preventing more products from being made later down the line.

“If you use a product only once, the impact is very high. If you can use it 10, 100, or 200 times, that’s better,” Dreszig says. “It’s not just a step back, [brands] have to produce products that are really needed by consumers. When sustainability starts by design, designers should actually think much more about what they’re doing in terms of sustainability.”

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“Ryan and I had been dreaming of this moment for months,” Rebecca Means wrote in a 2010 journal entry as her husband landed their aluminum boat on a beach in Everglades National Park. “It’s the beginning of a grand adventure, the culmination of so much work!” She was about to step onto the most remote spot in their home state of Florida. It was the first stop on what they were calling Project Remote, a quest to visit the most remote spot in each of the 50 states.

Then the couple went ashore. The sand was crisscrossed with tracks from someone dragging a cooler. Motorboats whizzed past on the Gulf of Mexico. People fished. A ship from Princess Cruises went by. It was the first in a string of disappointments in what has become an 11-year project.

“You cannot get more than five miles from a road within the vast majority of America’s wilderness,” says Ryan, an ecologist with the Tallahassee, Florida–based nonprofit Coastal Plains Institute. Less if you count trails and cabins. He and Rebecca, a wildlife biologist also with the institute, are the only people to have stood at the remotest coordinates in almost all of America’s backcountry. The two banter back and forth as they frame their shared disappointment differently. Her bubbly enthusiasm tries to put a positive spin on Ryan’s inclination to call things “bullshit,” and his easygoing surfer-dude accent carries an edge of not-easygoing cynicism. But his voice loses the edge for a moment when he reminisces about the day in 2009 that sparked Project Remote.

“I was walking down a very crowded Florida beach on a training hike,” Ryan says, “and I was in my late thirties. Something was welling up inside me. I knew I wanted to do something grandiose that’d never been done, and then I thought, ‘How can I get as far away from this circus as possible? Remote.’ And the word keep reverberating in my head over and over.” He and Rebecca, as wildlife scientists and serial backpackers, decided they would stand at the most remote point in every state and document the wildest parts of our national wildernesses.

The first hurdle was to define remoteness. The Means decided fuel-burning vehicles and industry affect the environment and the subjective feeling of isolation more than hiking trails, so roads and towns would count against a point’s measure of remoteness, while footpaths wouldn’t. “We’ve defined remoteness quantitatively so that we can make comparisons state by state,” says Ryan, acknowledging that they might have missed out on a more remote-feeling spot in one state or another because they focused on roads and towns. “There are so many ways remoteness can be defined,” he says, “but they all have pitfalls and difficulties associated with them.”

Rebecca, a pro with the graphical information system (GIS) satellite cartography tool, calculated the coordinates in each state farthest from roads and settlements. The Means began hiking to them and recording data, like whether the spot had cell service and visible human impacts. “We’ve been in lightning storms, snowstorms, hailstorms,” Rebecca says. “Extreme cold, extreme heat. We haven’t had a real vacation since 2009.”

The Means began the project in Florida with high hopes. But things quickly went downhill.

Four miles from a road and just a few feet off a hiking trail, Ryan found Tennessee’s remote spot. In the couple’s journal, he wrote, “I couldn't help but wonder if this place was truly remote, and whether the presence of an Appalachian Trail shelter should skew the remote spot calculation. As if that weren’t enough, two hikers emerged from the shelter to greet us. This made me feel queasy.” Next was South Carolina. On a sandy barrier island in Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge, a lighthouse blinked nearby. A lost flip-flop and abandoned oil containers rotted slowly in the sun. Ryan pulled out a phone and, to prove a point, made a call. Like most remote spots, South Carolina’s had cellphone coverage. “After those three states, we realized you can’t get very far away from people, their effects, their influences, their footprints,” Ryan says.

Now, after 35 states, the Means' data seems to show that the wilderness is too built up to consider wilderness anymore. The remotest spot in America’s lower 48 is in Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park, 21.5 miles from a road, a half-mile from a privately owned cabin, and a half-mile from a foot trail. “It wasn’t a single event that solidified our disappointment,” Ryan says. “It was the gradual realization that nowhere in the United States, apart from Alaska, stood up to what most outdoor-loving people would accept as being truly remote. Of the 35 remote spots we’ve stood at, we’ve found signs of human presence at every single one. We calculate these remote locations and go to them, and then hear a motor in the distance or see a cabin a mile away.” He says something that begins as a laugh and ends as a sigh, “Feeling remote isn’t actually being remote.”

Funding Project Remote themselves, the Means expect to wrap up the last 15 states within two to three years. Early on, they hoped Project Remote would convince legislators to push through a law saying there’d be no net gain of roads in public lands—but that prospect is increasingly looking like a pipe dream.

Those who head into the backcountry—hunters, hikers, climbers, bikers, paddlers, and fishers—do so to feel remote, and a spreadsheet that says we’re not getting away as far as we think is sobering. “Go hiking in the wintertime if you want to feel remote,” Rebecca says. “There are still places, for sure, where you can go out and feel isolated, and seasonality has a huge impact on that.” Alaska and Canada, Ryan adds, are two of the last places that qualify as truly remote without the need for any subjective justifying. But the two are disappointed at what their project has proved.

“Being an American is as much about the tenets of freedom as it is about wilderness,” Ryan says. “It feels like we’re not America anymore.”

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Joshua Tree National Park and, to a greater extent, the surrounding Mojave Desert, has always had a morbid vibe. In the early 1900s, it was a lawless place where miners killed each other over claims. In the 1960s, Charles Manson plied his followers with acid at nearby Barker Ranch in Death Valley National Park. And not much later, Gram Parson’s buddies hauled his body and casket out to Joshua Tree and set it all on fire. Death seems drawn to this desert, so it should come as little surprise that bodies are constantly being dug up here.

Five years ago, after the four bodies of the McStay family were pulled from the ground, former deputy chief of San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department Keith Bushey said, “If there were to be a cross everywhere someone dumped a body, the desert would look like Forest Lawn.”

In the past month, at least two more corpses were dug up within Joshua Tree’s boundaries. The first was skeletal remains, discovered in early May by hikers near Stubbe Spring Loop, a 13-mile trail over fairly difficult terrain. “It was all bones,” says George Land, the park’s public information officer. Forensic specialists investigated the scene, and the remains are now with the Riverside County Coroner’s office until they can be identified. Land says he’s waiting on DNA tests to come back and that there are a few open missing-person cases they think could match. At this point, they’re working on the assumption that the death was accidental. That was certainly not the case with the second body.

A hiker discovered those remains near Big Horn Pass Road, partially buried about two feet down. “As the gases release and putrefaction sets in,” Land says, “we have a number of scavengers out here, like coyotes and vultures, and they were digging at the lower half.”

As Land points out, bodies don’t bury themselves. So when rangers arrived on scene, they shut down the area while police investigated. The case is now in the hands of Riverside’s Central Homicide Unit.

Two bodies in the span of a month is certainly abnormal, but it’s not shocking. The same qualities that have made the desert around Joshua Tree ideal for a weekend getaway—a combination of ease of access and remoteness—also make it a convenient place to dump a body. The entire Mojave Desert is about 50,000 square miles, and its defining geographic characteristics are the Joshua trees, of course, and its otherworldly desolation. It’s a few hours from any major city, but three interstates connect it to metropolises like Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Las Vegas.

For a long time, the Mojave, though not specifically Joshua Tree, was the rumored cemetery for Vegas mobsters. (As Joe Pesci said in the mafia movie Casino, there are “a lot of holes in the desert, and a lot of problems are buried in those holes.”) No corpses have been found in the Mojave rolled up in carpet recently (not since 2000 at least), but in 2014, a 19-year-old woman was strangled by her lover and her body was found dumped at the bottom of an abandoned mine shaft just outside Joshua Tree. Last fall, a couple was found in a remote region of the park, dead beneath a Joshua tree and locked in what seemed to be a last loving embrace as they tried to cool themselves in the shade. It later turned out their deaths were a murder-suicide.

Of course, not all bodies end up in the desert through suspicious means. Like many parks these days, visitation in Joshua Tree is way up. More than 3 million people are expected to fight for its 3,000 parking spots and wander the trails this year—double the visitors from five years ago. Some blame the recent boom on the nearby Coachella music festival and the social media–induced “loved to death” syndrome that’s plaguing so many of our parks. (U2 certainly deserves some blame as well.) Meanwhile, staffing in Joshua Tree has remained the same. About 110 paid employees watch over 1,200 square miles of land, some of the hottest in the United States, where it’s easy to become lost in the famous red-stone mounds that give Joshua Tree its Martian look. All those extra visitors mean more people whowander off the trail—and some of them die. In April, a 76-year-old man named David Sewell was lost for three days. Rescuers miraculously found him by following the circling vultures overhead. When they spotted Sewell, he was on death’s edge, covered in dirt and curled around a rock.

Sewell was lucky. But as we’ve written here before, about 1,600 other people who’ve gone missing on public land weren’t so fortunate. The thing that sets Joshua Tree and the Mojave apart from all the other places where people disappear, however, is the stunning regularity at which their bodies resurface.

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It’s safe to say we’re obsessed with overlanding. Combine the self-sufficiency of the pursuit with the sweet gear needed to live out of your truck for days on end in the middle of the wilderness, and we’re smitten. Mason Schreck understands the allure of overlanding as much as anyone. He’s the founder of Los Angeles–based Pacific Overlander, a first-of-its-kind company that rents off-road-capable and fully equipped trucks and SUVs.

“We’ve been building out trucks so we could sleep in them on surf trips through Big Sur and Baja for years,” Schreck says. “We just didn’t call it ‘overlanding’ back then.”

Schreck started Pacific Overlander in 2016 after a surf trip through Chile in a less-than-optimal camper van that didn’t have the 4WD capabilities to handle rough terrain or a burly enough rooftop tent to handle strong winds.

“The idea was to build and rent fully capable vehicles so people don’t have to own their own,” Schreck says, adding that he started the business with his own personal vehicles—his dad’s Defender, his wife’s Land Cruiser, and his own Tacoma. He now has a fleet of six Toyotas and Jeeps, and they’re fully equipped with the best overlanding gear on the market. Here are Schreck’s top picks for the gear to put on your own truck, in his own words.

This tentdeploys in seconds and packs up nearly as fast. It’s also really comfortable and pretty reasonably priced for a top-of-the-line clamshell tent.

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Loose silverware is a problem when you’re bumping down desert roads. You can build a custom case to carry your utensils, or you can get this full set that includes all the cutlery and serving utensils needed to cook and feed four people. The roll-up design is packable and secure.

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Having a fridge in your truck means you can have cold beer on day four of your trip. Since this ARB model is also a freezer, it means you can also have ice cream. The 37-quart size is big enough for a week but not so big that it takes up all your space.

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You may never have to use them, but these plastic trays warrant a place in your truck for the peace of mind they provide. Slide them under your tires when you hit sand or mud, and they will give your vehicle the traction it needs to get out of a sticky situation.

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This is the upgrade that will transform your stock Forerunner into a capable off-road vehicle. The tires are versatile enough to be on your truck every day, but they give you really good clearance for off-road. These are on all of our rentals.

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This chair folds up into a sleek square, so it doesn’t take up a lot of space, and it’s really lightweight and nicely made. It’s a great chair at half the price of others out there.

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Yeti’s Panga waterproof duffels have become a favorite among boaters, fishermen, and anyone who spends a lot of time around water or in foul weather. The tubular gear haulers are made out of thick, laminated nylon that’s virtually impossible to rip or tear, and they’re sealed with zippers that live up to their waterproof billing.

Recently the company announced it was adding a backpack to the Panga line. We got our hands on the new Panga Backpack 28 ($300), which, true to its heritage, is just about as protective as you could want.

The 28-liter pack is made of the same super-durable nylon as the duffels, with hefty nylon daisy-chain lash points on the front, carry handles on the top and both sides, and the same waterproof zipper that’s on all of Yeti’s duffels and soft coolers. Because of an unfortunate drought here in New Mexico, we haven’t had the chance to test the backpack’s waterproofness in the wild, but we did perform a home test, stuffing a towel in the pack and submerging it under water for four minutes. The towel came out bone dry.

The pack’s design is simple: just one cavernous main compartment with a small zippered mesh pocket and a laptop sleeve inside. Without padded straps or a supportive hipbelt, the Panga doesn’t ride as well as a technical hiking pack, but for its intended use (fishing, boating, or generally toting around when the weather is nasty), it does the job. It swallows a lot of gear, and the long zipper means you won’t be struggling to hold the pack open to see what’s inside.

Thanks to the burly material, the pack holds its shape, stands upright, and won’t flop when partially filled. Alas, this also means it doesn’t compress well when you need to shove it into tight spaces. If you’re on a long kayaking trip and want to maximize hull space, you’re better off with a traditional drybag. But if you’ve got space to spare and are more concerned with comfortable all-day carry—say, for a day of fly-fishing or sailing—the Panga Backpack is a promising choice.

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Northern California’s Rubicon Trail—one of the most iconic and difficult off-road routes in the world—makes a typical driver totally pucker. But John Williams is not your typical driver. The Ford Performance Racing School instructor and owner of the Utah-based Impulse Off Road build shop is an expert at picking the safest, most efficient way through the giant boulders and off-kilter terrain one comes across on the stunning road that meanders through the Sierra Nevada outside Lake Tahoe.

“Once you get good at reading a line, it becomes second nature,” Williams says. “But it definitely takes a lot of practice and comes through experience.” That last bit is key: What follows isn’t something for the novice overlander to try right out the gate with a brand-new Jeep. Successfully navigating this kind of terrain takes years of practice, and if you really want to go full bore into the off-road world, you’re best off taking a professional class first.

But before you sign up for one, here are some helpful guidelines from Williams to keep in mind. Here’s how he navigates the roughest roads on the planet.

Before tackling technical terrain, Williams always walks around the vehicle to look for markers on the hood that can help him properly position his tires. For example, the hood latches on a Jeep usually line up with the inside of the front tires. Knowing this, Williams can use the latches as a guide to help him place his tires exactly where he wants them. On the Jeep he just built (pictured above), the driver’s side windshield fluid dispenser lines up with his front differential, which he wants to keep far away from rocks.

Williams always seeks out the line that will give his tires the most traction—even if it doesn’t look like the easiest route. The key here is maximizing surface area. Check out the photo above, for example. An inexperienced driver might chose to keep his car as low as possible, keeping all four tires on the even, though chunky, middle path. Williams chose instead to tilt his Jeep up on the slab to the right. He knew the rock under the driver’s side wheels would offer a smooth contact patch and thus lots of grip. He also knew that if he kept the Jeep fairly low on that rock, he wouldn’t risk tipping over.

Like a mountain biker, Williams is always scanning ahead, even when he’s in the middle of a tricky section. That’s because if he clears one boulder field, he still needs to set up properly so he can get over the next one (and the next and the next). “At this point, after lots of experience, I’m able to drive a section and also simultaneously start to memorize what’s up ahead so I can be as fluid and prepared as possible,” Williams says.

This is a tricky technique to master, but Williams uses it often in technical terrain. In his Jeep, which has an automatic transmission, Williams will roll up to a tricky line with his right foot on the gas and his left foot on the brake. By lightly pressing the brake as he gives the Jeep a little bit of gas, he forces the nose of the car down, putting pressure on the front tires and increasing his traction. Slight pressure on brake also ensures Williams doesn’t come rocketing off an obstacle if he gives the Jeep a bit more gas.

In technical sections, get someone outside the vehicle to help guide you. The spotter can see your entire vehicle and all four tires, and then give you precise directions on how to line everything up and tell you if any rocks have shifted as you’ve moved forward. When Williams works with a spotter, he makes sure the person knows the trail well, understands his vehicle, and communicates clearly.

Ultimately, Williams tells people to practice a lot, constantly work on getting a feel for their vehicle, start on significantly less technical lines, and take it ludicrously slow at first. There are no points in recreational driving for taking a line fast, just satisfaction in reading the line correctly. “I always tell people I’m teaching that you have to learn how to go fast at one mile per hour before you can learn to go slow at two miles per hour,” he says.

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If you’re heading somewhere with lots of insects—say, a swamp in the Everglades or the Amazon—you’ll likely want to use an insect repellent. Studies have shown that the most effective insect repellent on the market today is DEET, but others have raised questions over the potential health and environmental impacts of the stuff.

DEET, known to chemists as N,N-diethyl-meta-toluamide, was developed in the 1940s by and for the U.S. Army. It’s since become widely used by everyone from hunters and campers to fishermen and long-distance hikers to combat mosquitoes and ticks. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency both say DEET is safe for use and causes no known environmental or health risks, as long as it’s used properly per the directions on the label.

But there’s one thing DEET is likely bad for: your outerwear. According to the National Pesticide Information Center, DEET, a plasticizer, can cause damage to other plastics, including synthetic or treated fabrics. (It won’t damage natural fibers, like cotton or wool.) Spray DEET on a Gore-Tex jacket, for example, and the repellent could break down the plastic polymer that makes up the membrane, the thin layer that keeps your jacket waterproof and breathable.

“Insect repellents made for skin application are not developed for clothing, so you don’t want to put DEET on any clothing except cotton,” says Vern Schrum, product manager at Tender Corporation, makers of insect repellents like Ben’s and Natrapel. “If your jacket has some kind of membrane that allows it to breathe, DEET could damage that, sealing it up so it doesn’t work as well.”

It doesn’t require dumping your jacket in a vat of DEET for this to happen—any prolonged contact with even traces of the chemical can degrade plastic-based membranes and affect the breathability of your coat, Schrum says. “It takes time to set up, so if you get a bit of DEET on your jacket, you can wipe it off no problem,” he says. “But it doesn’t take much—even a small amount can cause damage.”

Gore has performed tests that show that after 24 hours of exposure to DEET, its specific membrane doesn't break down. But not many other tests are being done on DEET's impact on technical clothing, so hard data on prolonged exposure is tough to find. “We have many tests where we spray on fabric to see if mosquitoes will still bite through the fabric. But the impact on the clothing? We don’t study that,” says Hansen, an associate professor of biology at New Mexico State University who studies the efficacy of insect repellents.

You can still use DEET—just apply it to your skin and don’t spray it near your $600 three-layer hard shell. And if you really want the extra protection of repellent-coated clothing, what can you do instead? In 2016, Consumer Reports tested the efficacy of insect-repellent clothing from brands like L.L.Bean and ExOfficio, which are pretreated with the insecticide permethrin, an alternative to DEET that’s intended for use on clothing. The report found that permethrin-treated clothes were not as effective at preventing insect bites as a shirt sprayed with DEET, but they did ward off some bugs. You can treat your own clothes with permethrin by using a clothing-specific spray from brands like Ben’s or Sawyer. The downside: Permethrin is far more toxic to aquatic invertebrates—bugs found in streams and lakes—than DEET. According to a statement from ExOfficio, home permethrin treatments are riskier due to chemical runoff and overuse, but that’s not the case with pretreated garments.

Plenty of other clothing alternatives offer varying degrees of longevity and effectiveness in protecting from insect bites. Natural repellents made with essential oils like citronella, lemon eucalyptus, and soybean are considerably gentler than DEET (though, again, not as effective). In 2005, the CDC approved the use of picaridin, used in products from Natrapel and Sawyer, which is safer on gear and still provides up to 12 hours of protection from biting insects. Hansen says DEET is the most effective and long-lasting of the repellents, but oil of lemon eucalyptus is nearly comparable. “Many of the natural products are very good,” he says. “They just don’t last as long.”