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Trains have long endured as a fixture of American industry, transporting goods and people across the country and forging what has become the United States as we know it. They still do a lot of that stuff, but long ago they stopped being a primary mode of long-haul transportation. Now they’re mostly fun to gawk at while you match their speed from the highway.

Trains are more expensive than buses and cheaper than airplanes. They’re definitely more spacious than both, and they chug along at just the right speed—slow enough to take in scenery and fast enough not to be bored by it—through mountain canyons, over fields of grass the settlers once trod on horseback, past decaying factory towns and deep forests.

“These secret pleasures of a railroad summon forth a vision of a sweet pastness, a lost national togetherness,” wrote author Tom Zoellner in his book Train: Riding the Rails in the Modern World. “The train is a time traveler itself, the lost American vehicle of our ancestors, or perhaps our past selves.”

We pulled together some of the most scenic trips from all over the country. If you’re looking for a relaxing ride that’ll take you back in time, here are a few that will connect you with the lost art of train travel. (Keep in mind that just like airplane prices, the cost can vary with the dates you book.)

This train takes off from New York City and travels the green byways of the Northeast, following the tail of Lake Champlain north for most of the ride. It’s a ten-hour trip that passes through some towns you can explore. Saratoga Springs is famed for thoroughbred racing and home to the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame. It’s also the home of Fort Saratoga, where American colonists won two naval battles against the British during the Revolutionary War. Once you’ve had your fill of green hills and history, the end of the line is the French-speaking Canadian city of Montreal.

If trains can take you back in time, then this is one route that certainly will. The trains departs from Williams, Arizona—about 30 minutes west of Flagstaff—and travels about 4.5 hours round-trip.

The journey begins in northern Arizona’s ponderosa pine forest. The train is a refurbished locomotive from 1923 called the French Fry Express. While you’re waiting to reach the Grand Canyon’s South Rim, employees share a bit of local history and some songs and even stage a mock train robbery. If that’s not your thing, just stare out the windows and take in all that high-desert scenery.

Decades after the California gold rush, another crush of humanity migrated toward fortune. This time north—way north: 100,000 people sought their share in the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s, and rail sprang up to accommodate the hordes of miners and panners. It’s still there. The most popular tour departs from Skagway and travels 3,000 vertical feet past the furious boil of waterfalls and places like Dead Horse Gulch.

If you’re looking for a day trip to explore the famous scenes of Cape Cod, this 27-mile trip hauls passengers through salt marshes, cranberry bogs, sand dunes, and the Cape Cod Canal. The rail system’s history goes back to 1848, when tracks were laid for the Boston and Sandwich Glass Company. The line now runs from May through October.

As long as you’re getting into train travel, why not go big? This route is a 76-hour trip that hauls travelers through some of the most geologically eye-catching scenery in the United States. Tickets on Amtrak can often be had for $186 and include a dining car but no bed. (That costs extra.) The train takes off from a station just outside San Francisco, in Emeryville, California, and makes its way to Salt Lake City, then Denver, along the way passing through the beautiful scenery of Donner Pass, redrock country, and the towering Rocky Mountains. After that, it heads over the plains to Chicago and finally New York. Clocking in at nearly 3,500 miles, this trip might call for more than a few stopovers along the way.

It used to be that we all slowed down with time. Not anymore.

Let’s start with a few numbers: 36, 34, 38, 36, 35, 35.

These are the respective ages at which Shalane Flanagan, Des Linden, Meb Keflezighi, Roger Federer, Serena Williams, and Anthony Ervin recently dominated major international championships. Whether those ages seem young or old to you may depend on where you’re at in your own life’s journey. In sports, however, where research shows that athletes tend to peak in their mid-twenties, these champions are kind of like dinosaur unicorns: They ought to be extinct, but here they are—winning.

And although these athletes are notable examples, they aren’t alone. “When you look at things like average age or number of players over 30 or 35, there’s been a pretty clear upward trend across most major sports over the past 30 years or so,” says journalist Jeff Bercovici, author of the new book Play On: The New Science of Elite Performance at Any Age.

There’s no doubt that winning world championships at any age requires a certain kind of genetics. But it’s also true that all of us can take advantage of the strategies the elites are using to extend their careers in order to extend ours. I recently caught up with Bercovici for an in-depth discussion on how to do just that.

Forget Fitness—Think Freshness Instead

“For decades, the prevailing ethos has been bigger, stronger, faster. But all that extra conditioning work comes at a cost. If you’re fit but not fresh—which is to say, adequately rested and recovered—you’re not only not going to perform to your full capacity, you’re also at greater risk for injuries, which, more than anything else, are what limit the length of athletic careers.

“These days, it’s more common to hear star athletes bragging about how much sleep they get than how much they can squat. Federer started skipping the clay season and went back to winning majors; Des Linden took five months off last year and won the Boston Marathon. Really, there’s no such thing as fitness without freshness. When athletes understand that, time slows down.”

But Don’t Recover Too Much

“Athletes have a powerful urge to channel their discipline into ‘doing stuff.’ Now that most of us know it’s not a good idea to work out until exhaustion every day, recovery is filling up a lot of those free hours. It’s mostly harmless, but there is such a thing as too much. You don’t want to do cryotherapy after every workout for the same reason you don’t want to pop Advil every day: Anything you do to tamp down inflammation can also suppress adaptation to training.

“So what should you prioritize? Sleep as much as you can and have a regular bedtime. (And don’t buy the myth that you need less sleep as you get older—if anything, you need more.) Eat after workouts to replenish glycogen stores and build muscle tissue. And move lightly versus sitting around and tightening up.”

Up the Protein

“There are a lot of star older athletes eating weird diets they credit for keeping their bodies young (like Tom Brady), but when you look closer, the odd aspects of those diets seldom have anything to do with what makes them beneficial for performance. A healthy diet is the same for any age: mostly vegetables and whole grains and not too much sugar or red meat. The only major change to that formula for older athletes is they should probably increase their protein intake after they turn 40 or so to combat the effects of something called anabolic resistance, which makes it harder to build and maintain muscle.”

Don’t Let Tech Become a Distraction

“Technology can help with tracking and measuring activity, and even some newer devices claim to assist in managing fatigue. But you’ve got to be mindful in your use of these things. Whether you’re an elite competitor or a working parent who’s trying to stay in shape, time is probably your most valuable commodity, and you want to spend it on the three things that matter most: training, fueling, and sleeping. Anything else you throw into that mix should have a pretty high ROI. I love scrolling through my segment data on Strava after a ride, but after about 30 seconds, it’s probably not time well spent.”

Remember, Your Mind Will Get Fitter

“In so many sports, success isn’t just a matter of being the fastest or strongest. James Galanis, who coached Carli Lloyd, arguably the best female soccer player on the planet, told me he had to teach her to play slower. Rafael Nadal’s coach said something similar. When there’s a lot going on, quick minds and sound strategy beat quick feet.

“There’s also some research suggesting older athletes experience fewer unwanted emotions during competition—or, in psychology-speak, they gain more emotional control as their careers unfold. Another trick, and one that anyone can borrow from successful older athletes: Focus on the stuff that’s hardest. For example, research shows that elite masters runners are able to maintain the same level of expertise with less practice as they age because they focus their training on stuff they need to work on, whereas younger athletes tend to spend more time on what they’re already good at and consequently enjoy more.”

Brad Stulberg (@Bstulberg) writes Outside’s Do It Better column and is the author of the book Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout, and Thrive with the New Science of Success.

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Garmin’s Fenix family of watches just got another upgrade. On Monday, the tech company launched the Fenix 5S Plus ($800 to $850), Fenix 5 Plus ($800 to $1,100), and Fenix 5X Plus ($850 to $1,150), an update to the three existing Fenix 5 watches (5S, 5, and 5X).

The three new watches all come in the same sizes as their predecessors, with 42-, 47 and 51-millimeter faces, but with narrower bezels and larger screens—20 percent bigger, in the case of the 5S. All the same top-end sport and smart features remain, like GLONASS and GPS activity tracking, barometric altimeter, wrist-based heart rate, on-screen topo maps, and quick notifications.

What’s new? Wallet-free payments, music storage, expanded navigation capabilities, and, perhaps most significant, a pulse oximeter to measure blood oxygen concentration on the 5X Plus—the first sports watch with that capability.

Let’s start with the navigation features. The 5 Plus family now has navigation features previously exclusive to the 5X, including full-color topo maps and the ability to auto-generate routes from your current location based on how far you want to go. (Use the round-trip function to select your sport, mileage, and the direction you want to head, and the watch produces a list of courses to choose from.) The watches also show you nearby businesses, hotels, gas stations, and restaurants, and allow you to set your own route on the watch face, save it, and follow it.

Custom route setting is not a new feature for the industry. Other Garmin watches and comparable models from companies like Suunto have had those functions for years. But in the past, you had to set the routes on your computer via the company’s app, then download them to the watch (unless you had the 5X). In theory, the ability to set a course directly on the watch face means less time spent on your computer and more time outside doing your sport. In practice, however, setting up a custom course on the Garmin Fenix 5 Plus still takes several minutes at best, since you have you find and select specific individual waypoints using the up, down, and select buttons.

If you’re going far in complex, mountainous terrain, it’s probably just as fast (and safer) to map out your route at home. But if you’re on a route, facing an unexpected detour or need to change course and find a bailout route, the ability to set a new course in the moment could be game changing.

The other big update, the pulse oximeter, is primarily useful for excursions into the alpine. The pulse-ox on the Fenix 5X Plus uses the same laser technology as those hospital finger clips. It shines two beams through your wrist and measures how much light reaches a detector on the other side. In the case of sports, it helps determine how your body responds to high altitude, where oxygen levels are lower. Sitting in our office, the watch told us our oxygen levels were at 100 percent. That reading dipped significantly on a run here in Santa Fe—which makes sense after five miles in 75-degree heat at 7,000-plus feet above sea level. But without comparing it to a hospital-grade sensor, we can’t say how accurate those readings were.

Battery life suffers a smidge for the added features (seven hours instead of nine in nontracking mode for the 5S Plus). Still, the Fenix 5 Plus series overall is a subtle yet significant upgrade to its predecessor, not just for the added navigation features and pulse-ox sensor but also for the bigger screen size, which means all that data is easier to read on the go. The average athlete certainly doesn’t need to know their blood-oxygen saturation, but that tech has huge implications for people at the top end of mountain sports—and the maximized screen size on the 5S has huge implications for people with small wrists.

Buy now (5S Plus) Buy now (5 Plus) Buy now (5X Plus)

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Before I tell you why I loved reading Chas Smith’s delightful new book, Cocaine + Surfing: A Sordid History of Surfing’s Greatest Love Affair, I wish to raise two points of order.

First, a matter of personal disclosure: I do not know Chas Smith, and I have never so much as emailed the man, but I once practiced the very surf journalism that animates much of Smith’s self-loathing in Cocaine + Surfing, and I am personally acquainted with three of Smith’s main characters. Matt Warshaw, a dear friend of mine, appears as a Yoda-like surf historian who gamely points out that surfing and cocaine were both potentially born in Peru about 3,000 years ago.

Marcus Sanders, an occasional surfing companion of mine who occupies the in-law apartment in my San Francisco home, appears as a fellow surf journalist demanding that Smith remove a certain photograph from Smith’s tabloid-style website Beach Grit.

Finally, Brad Melekian, an English professor at the University of San Diego and a former surf journalist, has been a longtime correspondent of mine on the core existential question of Cocaine + Surfing: whether or not self-respect is even possible for someone whose job description is “surf journalist.” While writing for Outside, Melekian broke the most important drugs-plus-surfing story of all time, about the role of substance abuse in the death of former world-champion-surfer Andy Irons. Surf culture and the surf industry are both so allergic to anything resembling unvarnished truth that Melekian got widely and viciously attacked by, among others, Smith himself, who wrote that Melekian should go to hell.

Now for my second point of order: Cocaine + Surfing is not really about cocaine and surfing. That’s a good thing, because although Cocaine + Surfing makes for a catchy title and a smattering of salacious anecdotes, it’s a stupid idea for a book. It’s an even stupider idea for a book conceived in the way that Smith initially (although not ultimately) conceived of it—as, to quote his equally-catchy subtitle, “a sordid history of surfing’s greatest love affair.” There have indeed been drugs in the surf world over the years, including a fair bit of cocaine, but cocaine is absolutely not surfing’s greatest love affair. (Waves, anyone? Weed?) Smith’s attempt to duct-tape over this awkward detail by defining “real surfers” as belonging to the minuscule subset-of-a-subset of surfers who may once have had a statistically meaningful propensity for cocaine use—rich-and-famous pros and corporate tools in the surf-industrial complex—is equally absurd, not to mention offensive to the millions of dedicated surfers like myself who don’t give a rat’s ass what any of those people do with their time.

Despite this horribly misguided premise—or, rather, because of it—Cocaine + Surfing is a dazzling page-turner, highly-recommended beach reading, and absolutely the funniest book ever written about surfing. To hold those contradictions together in one’s mind, it helps to recognize that Smith’s literary models do not include serious works like my man Warshaw’s scholarly History of Surfing or William Finnegan’s Pulitzer-Prize winning Barbarian Days; A Surfing Life.

Cocaine + Surfing belongs, rather, to the honorable lemons-into-lemonade lineage that begins with Ross McElwee’s cult-classic 1986 documentary film Sherman’s March: A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love In the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation, in which McElwee tries to make a film about the civil war but ends up interviewing all his ex-girlfriends instead, and Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence, an unforgettable book about not writing a book about D. H. Lawrence.

In the same spirit, Cocaine + Surfing is a book about a self-loathing surf journalist getting the seemingly-brilliant idea to write a book about cocaine and surfing, hitting the road for research in various corners of the surf industry, discovering that it’s actually a stupid idea, and wondering how his once-promising life came to such a sad pass.

Or, as Smith puts it, “I was supposed to have waved goodbye to this shallow end of the swimming pool years ago. I was supposed to be a Pulitzer Prize-winning war reporter by now, spilling valuable words on the plight of Syrian refugees while dodging bullets. Or maybe in the White House briefing room being shouted down by the press secretary for speaking truth to power. Or front row at the Fendi show in Paris, across from Anna Wintour … anywhere but here.”

Smith titles the chapters in Cocaine + Surfing after the classic stages in the so-called Hero’s Journey, the standard Hollywood-screenwriter’s plot template: The Call To Adventure, Refusal of the Call, Supernatural Aid, Road of Trials and Tests. Hewing faithfully to format, with himself as questing hero and peace with his own dubious life choices as Holy Grail, Smith travels from Warshaw’s office in Seattle (of all places) to a wake for the defunct Surfing magazine, to a surf-movie premiere, surf contest, and “lifestyle fashion” sales convention. Along the way, Smith riffs amusingly on the relative histories of the drug and sport in question, and he does drum up a few reasonably scandalous cocaine-plus-surfing tidbits.

The surprising joy of this book, though—and it really is a joy—has nothing whatever to do with cocaine. It lies entirely in Smith’s brilliant skewering of surf culture, the surf industry, his own complicity in both, and the frailty of the human ego.

This includes bewilderment at ludicrous surf fashion items like Reef’s Mick Fanning signature beer-bottle-opening flip-flops. “Yes, Reef literally and honestly makes a sandal with a bottle-opener on the bottom,” Smith writes. “Like, you walk down the street to your friend’s BBQ, walk through dog urine or bum urine or horse urine … grab a beer, take your sandal off and use its bottom to pop the cap. Literally. Honestly.” Smith also delights in deep inside-baseball stuff like his repeated reference to the formerly-terrific Australian surf magazine Stab as “the fake version of Beach Grit” when everybody knows that his own Beach Grit is in fact a fake version of the original Stab.

Smith is also quite good on the insane recalcitrance of many young pro surfers around journalists, combined with their equally insane behavior in front of same—as if the culture has somehow deluded young pros into thinking that journalists are only allowed to write down whatever you say during a formal question-and-answer interview, so it’s fine to treat journalists like garbage and behave like a racist intoxicated cretin in their presence so long as you answer all of their direct questions with meaningless platitudes. (Notable exceptions, in my experience, include Kelly Slater and Laird Hamilton, honorable men who give reliably terrific interviews).

Smith is also an astute observer of surf culture’s exhausting repertoire of secret (and moronic) codes of cool, as in, “Don’t walk down the beach with your leash attached to your leg. Don’t hype a hurricane swell … Keep your hands in your armpits in the lineup. Don’t keep your hands in your armpits in the lineup if another surfer already has his hands in his armpits. Don’t rub sand in your wax before paddling out. Sometimes rub sand in your wax before paddling out based on thirty distinct factors.” At one surf-industry gathering, Smith sees a young woman dressed scantily in Monster-Energy-branded clothes, working a Monster Energy Drink booth, and wonders “if she was once excited to be a Monster Girl. Like, if that was once her dream.” He runs into a brand representative “who is old now and has slowly slid down pole of relevant surf brands, Rip Curl wetsuits to On A Mission surfboard bags and is now shilling wax and skateboards. He should know better. He should have gotten out forever ago but the whole damned surf thing is a trap and he asks me, ‘You seen Dill-dog? Somebody said that bro is here but I swear he Christian Baled an hour ago. How’s that? I told him this party was gonna be on like Donkey Kong …”

My personal favorite is Smith’s introduction of a prominent filmmaker as having once made vampire softcore porn for Showtime. Smith then describes this guy ordering “Mexican coffee with extra Mexican” and quotes him as saying, to Smith, “Why do you always tell people that I directed vampire softcore porn for Showtime? I’ve had films in Cannes, in Sundance. I’ve won awards.”

What makes all this winning instead of cruel is that the true target of Smith’s ridicule is Smith himself. He holds himself above nobody, implicates himself in all of surf culture’s dopiness, and caps his book with a mea-culpa—meeting Melekian and conceding 100 percent that Melekian showed journalistic bravery in exploring the more painful aspects of the Andy Irons story. Reflecting on his own public abuse of Melekian, all those years earlier, Smith can only say, again of himself, “Oops … What a dick. What a prick. Trivializing cocaine abuse and writing myself into a story I’m not a real part of.”

Near the end of the book, Smith looks forward by looking inward, asking, “How does a surf journalist look at sixty? Does he look like an asshole? Does he just completely cave and wear the Mick Fanning beer opening sandal?” Put another way, Smith wrestles with the universal question of how to reconcile the life we once dreamt of living with the one in which we now find ourselves.

I won’t spoil the plot by telling you how Smith answers that question except to say that he ends with the classic Hero’s Journey finale as Master of Two Worlds. And also that it involves a sandal, a beer, and the unmistakable taste of something unsanitary.

Expert Essentials

The Best Training Watches, According to the Pros

The feature-loaded, do-it-all smartwatches that give elites a competitive edge

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Mar 26, 2018

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Mar 26, 2018

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

The feature-loaded, do-it-all smartwatches that give elites a competitive edge

A watch is no longer just a timepiece. It’s a training tool, a workout partner, and a coach. Try one of these six expert-tested options to see big gains in your workouts.

Epson ProSense 347 ($299)

Camille Herron, Ultrarunner

Camille Herron was looking for a watch that could go the distance and found it with this model. “It’s the Energizer bunny of watches,” says Herron, the 2017 Comrades Marathon champion and 100-mile world record holder. “It has a 46-hour battery in GPS mode, so it’s incredibly dependable.” Another cool feature: You can set up alerts to remind you to fuel and hydrate during a training run and throughout the day. “The watch is like a training partner in that way,” Herron says. “I like that the alerts are loud enough to catch my attention, even if I’m totally vegged out.” Herron, who is an Epson athlete, set up her watch to sync automatically with her phone, making tracking intervals and progression runs simple. “This watch just makes my life easier,” she says.

Buy Now

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Suunto Ambit3 ($259)

Nik Miller, Sprint Paracanoeist

There is a lot that Nik Miller, the American sprint paracanoe record holder in the 200 meters, likes about the Ambit3: “I like that the battery lasts for multiple training sessions over multiple days. I like being able to customize the screen so I can see heart rate, pace, time, and splits all at once. And I really like that this watch holds up. I’m hard on equipment, and despite getting beat up in the boat sometimes with bagging or saltwater, there’s no corrosion.” The two other features Miller values most: the strap-based heart rate monitor—“I’ve tried wrist heart rate systems, but the strap is much more accurate”—and the precision of the tracking system. “I break down the 200 meters, my race distance, into 50-meter intervals to see how low I can hit that distance [around ten seconds] and have had lag time with other watches, but not this one,” Miller says. “This watch is anything you want it to be. Long intervals, short intervals, high reps, low reps, you make it your own,” he says.

Buy Now

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Garmin Fenix 5 Sapphire ($644)

Karissa Lamb, Gearhead at Backcountry.com

“If you’re a data geek, this watch can help you take your fitness to the next level,” says Karissa Lamb, who gives product recommendations at Backcountry.com and has been handling calls for the past two years from Type A athletes asking about the latest innovations. This watch boasts GLONASS technology (top-of-the-line GPS navigation), wrist-based heart rate monitoring, preloaded full-color topographical maps, and an indestructible crystal face, so you can put it through the ringer. And the screen resolution? “Crazy nice,” Lamb says. “It’s cellphone quality.” The watch links with your phone for texts and other notifications, tracks your sleep, and can tell you how many calories you’ve burned. But Lamb says its coolest feature is the new performance tool that analyzes your workout history and offers feedback on the quality of your training. “I never thought I’d recommend a pricey watch,” Lamb says, “but you pay a ton for something like your car, so why not for your body?”

Buy Now

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Apple Watch ($339)

Kate Courtney, Mountain Biker

“I typically move from one workout to the next, so it’s important for me to have a watch that I don’t need to take off,” says Kate Courtney, a national mountain bike champion and member of Team USA cycling. “The Apple Watch is waterproof, so I can go straight from a ride to the shower and still be wearing it when I head to the gym.” Courtney uses the watch’s training feature mostly for strength circuits at the gym, where she values the alerts. “I like being able to put my phone away to avoid distractions and get the most out of the workout but also not miss a message from a coach or family member,” she says. Courtney wears the rose gold face and light pink athletic strap for a splash of fashion.

Buy Now

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Fitbit Ionic ($298)

Dean Karnazes, Ultrarunner

“The Ionic is utilitarian,” says Dean Karnazes, best known for conceiving and executing his own epic events, like a 350-mile continuous run and 50 marathons in 50 states in 50 consecutive days. “It does everything well. I can see texts or alerts, and the screen is incredibly bright, which I like because it’s visible in sunlight.” Karnazes also appreciates the battery life (ten hours in GPS mode), the altimeter, the downloadable maps and, importantly, the watch’s storage capability. “I don’t run with a phone, so to be able to put audiobooks on the watch and listen via wireless earbuds is big for me,” says Karnazes, who is sponsored by Fitbit. Bonus: The Ionic reminds you to start the chronograph if you forget, and you can personalize it with 150 different watch faces, including Karnazes’ favorite, the pug face.

Buy Now

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Garmin Forerunner 935 Tri Bundle ($649)

Jenny Fletcher, Triathlete

“My love for this watch borders on obsession,” says professional triathlete and model Jenny Fletcher. “The data capability is just endless.” The multisport functions let her track swim, bike, and run workouts in all their variations and measures performance variables in each discipline: laps and strokes during a swim, velocity and turnover during a run, and output on the bike, all of which automatically uploads to your phone. “It’s probably more data than I need, but it’s fun to compare numbers across workouts, see where the fatigue was, and how I might address it,” she says. Fletcher overtaxed herself last year, competing in six half Ironmans and three full Ironman events, and she says all that information, along with the wrist-based heart rate monitor, is helping her approach training and racing more deliberately this year.

Buy Now

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Weighing just 5.6 ounces in size medium, packing down to the size of an apple, and totally impervious to rain while also breathing tremendously well, the Sitka Vapor SD jacket ($299) is the best ultralight hardshell jacket available for 2018. 

It’s the Gore-Tex ShakeDry fabric that makes all that possible. Where traditional waterproof-breathable fabrics sandwich a thin, fragile membrane between an inner and outer layer of fabric for protection, ShakeDry employs a more robust membrane that can go without the outer face, making the top more breathable and lightweight. 

Remember how water used to bead up and run off your old Gore-Tex shell when you first got it, but after years of use, it now soaks in and makes the jacket clammy inside? That’s because the DWR coatings used on the exterior face of three-layers never really lived up to the “durable” part of their name. And once they were destroyed by abrasion, weather, and body oils, the now-damaged DWRs allowed that outer layer to fill up with water, blocking the internal membrane from breathing, and causing your sweat vapor to collect inside the jacket. 

ShakeDry, with its more durable membrane, permanently retains the ability to stop water on its outmost surface—causing it to bead up and run off. That means you can simply shake a wet ShakeDry jacket to knock the water off (hence the name). 

Sitka, which, like Gore-Tex, is a division of W.L. Gore, maximizes the benefits of ShakeDry by endowing the jacket with a minimal but smartly-chosen feature set. Both the cuffs and hood perimeter are wrapped in elastic, rather than velcro or drawcords, to cut weight and maximize packability. The jacket is cut close to fit an athletic body, yet allows full arm articulation without exposing your waistline. A thin drawcord with a single toggle allows you to cinch the rear of the hood down over your head or loosen it to fit over a puffy mid-layer. The YKK zips are robust and extend to the hand pockets, giving you a secure place to store essentials. Because the ShakeDry membrane is black, the jacket only comes in black. 

Unlike its arch-rival—Polartec NeoShell—which remains the most breathable waterproof-breathable membrane on the market, ShakeDry is fully windproof. That means ShakeDry doesn’t passively flow air like NeoShell, and isn’t quite as breathable as a result, but in my testing, the two technologies feel very similar as exertion levels rise. The imperviousness to wind also means ShakeDry will be the better option for staying warm through cold nights in the mountains. 

As a technical note, there are no industry standards for measuring fabric breathability, and it’s very hard to objectively compare one membrane to another as a result. Gore is particularly reluctant to release any metrics, but it does claim that ShakeDry is currently its most-breathable waterproof membrane.  

Sitka—a hunting brand—advertises the Vapor SD as “an insurance policy for stormy skies,” emphasizing its weight and packability over its performance. But while it’s not as feature-rich or as quiet as other Sitka hardshells, and while the thinner fabric won’t stand up quite as well to abuse, I think it’s an ideal primary hardshell for summer adventures.

Ultralight backpackers in particular should really appreciate the jacket’s incredible packability and small ounce count, while benefiting from more, not less, weather protection than they’re used to from similarly minimalist shells. The fabric is reasonably robust for activities that don't involve belly crawling through dense brush, and its excellent breathability pairs well with the total wind blocking when using the jacket as part of a layering system. It works great over a lightweight merino t-shirt during high exertion activities in chilly, wet weather, and helps get the most out of an ultralight down sweater when nighttime temperatures drop a little more than expected. All in a package you can shove in the pocket of your cargo pants with room to spare. 

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Shortly after Alex Honnold and Tommy Caldwell broke the speed record on the Nose route in Yosemite last week, I spoke with John Long, who made the first one-day ascent of the Nose in 1975. "As this record gets lowered," he said, "the only way to do it is to take increasingly hairy risks. All these guys are operating at the same level. The fluency on rock is self same. What's speeding this thing up is increasing the compromises they're living with in the safety system."

Most speed attempts involve a variety of unconventional techniques. One of the main ones is known as simul climbing, which eschews the typical pitched out climb with anchored belays in favor of both members moving at the same time attached together by a rope and protected from a fall by a few pieces of gear. "If one person comes off the wall," Long said, "they're hoping the gear catches them. There's really no room for error."

Honnold told me that one of the reasons he wanted to climb with Caldwell was that he "can really trust him. Tommy cares about safety. He's a family man and won't do anything crazy up there." Still, the risks of climbing at speed are clear. In the lead-up to the record attempt, the pair climbed the route eight times in two weeks to practice. At one point Caldwell, arguably the best trad climber alive, took a 100-foot fall, though he walked away unscathed. The same was not true for Hans Florine, who set the speed record on the Nose in 2002, 2008, and 2012. In May, Florine was running a quick-but-not-record-pace lap when a small piece of gear popped on the 22nd pitch. He fell 25 feet and broke bones in both his legs. Last fall, Quinn Brett, who once held the women's speed record on the Nose, took a fall on the boot flake, a prominent feature on pitch 17. She broke her 12th thoracic vertebra and was paralyzed.

"There's a shadow side to this thing that the world should be very aware of," Long said. He was referring specifically to the Nose record, but might as well have been talking about anyone looking to move increasingly fast up large rock faces. On Saturday morning, the dangerous reality of speed climbing was brought into focus when two veteran Yosemite climbers, Tim Klein and Jason Wells, fell 1,000 feet to their deaths from the lower pitches of the Salathé wall, adjacent to the Nose. The pair were extremely experienced. It would have been Klein's 107th one-day ascent of El Cap. Wells holds the speed record on Colorado's 650-foot Naked Edge: 24 minutes, 29 seconds. The two climbers appear to have been simul climbing on relatively easy terrain.

Which isn't to say they were moving at the same ludicrous speed that Caldwell and Honnold move at. It doesn’t look like they were going for any kind of record, but they were moving fast and likely using some similar tactics.

“I’ve been worrying about this speed game for awhile. The faster you go the more dangerous it is,” Ken Yager, founder of the Yosemite Climbing Association told Climbing magazine over the weekend. “With speed climbing you don’t have time to double check your systems. It’s all fun and games until you lose a party like this. It’s horrible.”

After the deaths, Long wrote a comment on the climbing forum SuperTopo.

"It's starting to be clear that speed climbing…needs to be reconsidered," he wrote. "I offer no solution or even recommendation per speed climbing but if it keeps maiming and killing the best among us it deserves a close look… If nothing else this and recent accidents will make perfectly clear what [the] risks are. Then the choice is yours."

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Boundary Supply may have perfected the one-backpack quiver. The Utah-based company launched on Kickstarter in 2017 with the Prima pack system, a modular commuter-adventure crossover bag that funded over 1,000 percent of its goal and netted $1.6 million in preorders.

Now Boundary is making a lighter and sleeker pack, called the Errant ($99). The work-travel-photo-hike-bike-commute bag is built with the promise of being the only everyday bag its customers will ever need, in terms of functionality, durability, and aesthetics.

That’s a lot to promise out of one pack. But after three days, I’m convinced that the Errant has a better blend of class, function, and durability than any commuter bag I’ve seen. The pack is made out of Bluesign-approved, burly 500-denier fabric and includes a wealth of well-thought-out features, none of which feel unnecessary or overbuilt. And at $99, it’s cheaper than most of its competitors. 

Building off of the success of the Prima, Boundary made user-friendliness a big design focus for the Errant. The pack has one main compartment with two openings: a U-shaped top zipper for stuff-and-go access and a full-zip back panel for strategic packing. (An optional side clip stops the back-panel zipper halfway so you can pull out your laptop without opening the whole bag.) A six-liter wet-dry storage pocket on the bottom holds gym clothes or running shoes, and a hidden passport pocket along the back paneladds security for small valuables.

The Errant is also full of small but significant details, like magnetic buckles, water-resistant zippers, a Nywool-lined laptop sleeve for scratch protection, a built-in magnetic keychain that clicks in and out with ease, and a hidden webbing strap that buckles over the backpack straps, keeping them tight to the pack during airplane travel. Both the hipbelt and sternum straps are removable. And the bag is compatible with Boundary’s line of modular storage cubes and camera cases, which attach to the inside of the pack via Velcro and magnets.

All in all, these design elements translate into one of the few backpacks I’ve encountered that transitions from the office to the gym to the bar to the trail without significant compromise. It has the elegance and clean design I look for in a work pack, yet it’s also tough and comfortable enough to ride or hike in and has the storage capacity to fit gear for work and play.

Admittedly, the 22-liter capacity is a tad small for a post-work grocery run or a two-sport day, and it lacks a helmet carry for folks who don’t want to leave their lid on their bike. But the pack wins for looks, versatility, and ease of use.

The Kickstarter campaign to fund production launched on June 25, and it has already reached $326,446 of its $45,000 goal. The campaign ends August 10, and packs ship in September. 

When your home-on-wheels is in the shop for multiple days, take the opportunity to explore someplace new on foot

My wife, Jen, and I do as much of our own Airstream maintenance as we can. But a winter of driving washboard roads led to service items above our handyman pay grade: rattling rocker panel, broken door lock, frozen toilet flap. So when we scored an appointment at the newly opened Airstream of Scottsdale, Arizona, albeit two months out, we resigned ourselves to a week of “tenting.” (Aside: If you need service on a trailer or RV, plan ahead. With the explosion of retired baby boomers on the road, it can take months to get an appointment, and many places are so busy they won’t even return your calls.)

We’ve been without Artemis once or twice since we’ve owned her, so we knew what we’d be missing. First, there’s the irony of trading a new mattress I’d slept on maybe a week for the trusty Therm-A-Rest NeoAir. Plus, simple tasks like cooking dinner and washing dishes are double the effort without a kitchen, as is trying to keep up with work when you have to set up your laptop in the shadeless desert heat. So, in advance of the drop-off, we made a plan to shut down for a few days and see something we otherwise might not.

The Superstition Wilderness, a range of wild and scraggly purple mountains that rise from the desert haze southeast of Phoenix, is a place that’s been calling us for years, partly because the dark emptiness is confounding next to the sprawling glitz of Arizona’s capital. In Exploring the Superstitions: Trails and Tales of the Southwest’s Mystery, a new release that I stumbled across, author John Annerino built up expectations with lore of gold treasure dating to the mid-19th century and all the fortune-seekers, adventurers, plane crashes, and deaths that followed it. Compared with the 295 deaths on Everest to date, Annerino writes, the Superstitions have claimed the lives of 654 or more people. They are a brutal and stunning collection of sharp volcanic peaks and even sharper vegetation, including ocotillo, two-story bouquets of thorns known as “the devil’s walking stick,” and poison-spine-tipped century plants cursed as Spanish Daggers. Edward Abbey called the Superstitions “a dry corner of the continent,” and said that range attracted “gun happy cranks, touchy old prospectors, truculent treasure hunters from far-away cities…coming here to live out their childhood fantasies of the Wild West.”

In our absence from Artemis, Jen and I decided to join the line.

We loaded up our backpacking gear and hiked from the Peralta Trailhead, at the end of Gold Canyon, which sounds alluring but is actually just a bedroom community catering to RVers. Based on the parking lot overflowing with hikers on a Wednesday morning, Abbey would have to add health-nut retirees to the list of Superstitions seekers. Despite the crowds, however, the moment we headed east, away from the hallmark Peralta Trail, we felt as alone in this wilderness as we might have a century ago. We made a 20-mile loop through rugged country covered in stones so hot from the sun you couldn’t pick them up and scrappy creosote bushes that tugged as we passed. Eventually, we came across a clear spring tucked into a deep canyon where we could replenish and soak our weary feet. Jen even spied a little skunk, the only sign of life we encountered in these bleak hills.

Over the course of the next three days, we took our time wandering this backcountry, poking up tight canyons, clambering through thorny thickets of palo verde, brittlebush, and globe mallow, with buds just barely aflame for spring, and scrabbling to the top of volcanic stacks. On our final night, we slept beneath Weaver’s Needle, a fang of stone that’s said to be the landmark on several centuries-old maps as the spot where gold still waits. Of course, we found none, but the quiet escape in this fortress of solitude and rock was plenty of treasure, even if the pale light of Phoenix to the west all but drowned out the night sky.

The time away dulled our misgivings of not having Artemis for a little while. We love the transient life, no doubt, but having a home base, even a rolling one, is vital to keeping us rooted and productive. But this escape worked so well that we’ve resolved to make it a tradition. From now on, well ahead of our annual service, we’re going to look at the map for somewhere not on our agenda, and then seek out a nearby dealership that can do the work.

At the same time—while I wouldn’t trade those days in the Superstitions for anything—after a week on my back in the dirt, I was ready for that new bed and a good night’s sleep.

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In a car crash at 35 miles per hour, an unrestrained 60-pound dog becomes a 2,700-pound projectile. The force of that impact could kill both the dog and the car’s human occupants. Yet many of us drive around every day with our dogs just sitting on the back seat, or even on our laps.

“Securing a dog is kind of like buying a fire extinguisher,” says Patrick Kruse, the founder and R&D director of Bend, Oregon–based dog gear brand Ruffwear. “Most of us don’t plan on testing a dog safety harness, but if you ever do, it really becomes apparent that having a dog restrained is a good thing.”

I own two dogs and regularly drive with them in the car. Given their roughly 15-year life span, odds are that at some point in their lives, we will have an accident while driving together. I’d like them to survive such a circumstance, so I set about researching how I could keep them safe.

Kruse has been designing harnesses, backpacks, and other products for active dogs for 24 years. In 2013, he began designing a product that could save dogs from injury in car crashes. Ruffwear’s resulting Load Up safety harness was a pioneering product and remains the industry leader when it comes to in-car dog safety.

Kruse describes three main things you need to consider for keeping your dog safe when driving: preventing distractions, managing the dog’s deceleration rate upon impact, and keeping the dog restrained post-crash. All that needs to be achieved with speed and convenience if you’re actually going to bother using the system every time you load a dog into the car. Plus, the system needs to be comfortable for the dog.

Going into this research, I wasn’t aware of the importance of making sure a dog is restrained in the aftermath of an accident. But it makes sense. Kruse told me stories of dogs panicking and fleeing accidents through a broken window, only to be lost or hit by incoming traffic. He also explained that sometimes a panicked dog may delay treatment for its incapacitated owner. “With a rattled dog, some emergency responders are saying that they can’t get access to the human because the dog won’t let them get close,” he says.

Probably the easiest way to secure a dog in a car is with a divider between the back seat and the load area of a wagon or SUV. Just load the dog into the back of the car, and it’s contained in a safe area, away from the human occupants. A crate takes containment one step further and would work even if the rear window gets broken in an event like a rollover. Of course, not all dividers and crates are created equally. Many load dividers install only under tension and are built from flimsy materials. Kruse recommends looking for one that bolts to the frame of the car. “If you can rip the thing out with your hands, it’s probably not going to sustain an impact,” he says.

He gives a similar warning about plastic travel crates. “If you’re strapping something down that’s supposed to take a 2,700-pound hit, but it’s made from plastic you can kick in with your foot, it’s probably not going hold up in a crash,” Kruse says. The Center for Pet Safety recommends the Gunner Kennel G1.

Dividers and crates may help keep human occupants safe from flying dogs in a crash, as well as help keep dogs safely inside the vehicle, but they do nothing to actually protect the dog during the crash. “We don’t die from the car crash,” Kruse says. “We die from what’s called third-space impact. The car hits a brick wall—that’s the first-space impact. Your chest hits the steering wheel—that’s the second space. Your internal organs hit your rib cage—that’s the third space, and that’s where the damage is done. If you’ve got a dog in a crate, and they’re bouncing around like a marble inside that crate, then the damage is being done.”

The trick is to manage the deceleration rate of the animal in question—be it human or canine—which means decreasing the force with which the heart, spleen, brain, or other organs get squashed against something hard. That’s what seatbelts and airbags do for humans, but until the past few years, there was no such product available for dogs, no standards defining what these products should set out to achieve, and no procedures for testing them.

That all changed in 2011, when New Jersey made it a violation of its animal cruelty laws to carry your dog unrestrained in your car. That helped create demand for effective dog restraints. That same year, Lindsey Wolko, whose dog had been injured by an ineffective restraint, founded the Center for Pet Safety. Wolko realized that without a testing methodology, there could be no assurance of effectiveness, and without that assurance, consumers could not know which products would work and which ones wouldn’t.

This video shows a compendium of products failing the CPS test.

The Center for Pet Safety (CPS) adopted Federal Motor Vehicle Standard 213 (FMVS 213), which regulates child-restraint systems, as its guide and developed a methodology for testing dog restraints to that standard. The initial results on existing products were eye-opening. Of the devices it tested, 100 percent failed. CPS lists four problems it found in that initial batch of testing:

• Extremely low likelihood of survivability for the animal.
• Danger to humans when the dog becomes a missile.
• Choking and/or other bodily harm to the animal when harness materials cinch tightly upon impact.
• Extensive damage to fixtures within the vehicle caused by the projectile animal.

“The dog would actually slingshot or cantilever through those systems, becoming entangled, and in some cases rip parts off the crash-test mannequin as it was catapulted through the windshield,” says Kruse, who would eventually use the CPS’s test center and methodology to develop his Load Up harness.

By employing FMVS 213 in its testing, CPS’s major concern is keeping the dog from hitting the back of the front seats. (Dog safety harnesses are designed to attach to the seatbelts in the back seat.) So it’s no coincidence that the most effective harness ended up being one designed to hold a dog in the same position as a child sitting in its car seat. Kruse describes this approach as “human-centric” and expresses concerns about how convenient such a system would be for a human to load a dog into and how comfortable such a device would be for a dog to ride in. It’s also limited in its ability to handle dogs that are larger than a human child.

Kruse already knew how to design a dog harness—he’d been doing it for 24 years. But here he had to figure in much greater forces than those that a climbing or pack harness would ever have to deal with. He spec’d thicker nylon webbing and metal buckles rated to thousands of pounds of force. But where to attach the seatbelt? In CPS’s testing, Kruse saw that attachment points between the shoulder blades were effective at keeping dogs from colliding with the seats in front of them, but they were also flipping dogs over and directing forces through their bodies in unnatural ways. Watch the testing video above and you’ll see exactly that occur. Harnesses that eventually received the CPS certification are stronger and limit the dog’s forward travel but still violently flip them over.

“If they jump off a high rock and onto the ground, the dog’s internal organs are supported by the chest or rib cage,” Kruse says. “Most of the power of a dog is developed through the front legs, and they support the bulk of that up in their chest area.” He found that the most effective way to correctly support a dog was to pull through its chest and back toward its tail, so Kruse placed the seatbelt attachment for the harness back between the hips, over the tail. The elasticity of the nylon webbing and the padding in the harness then provide the deceleration essential to making the crash survivable, and the dog remains in the proper orientation throughout the crash.

One problem: In this biomechanically ideal position, there isn’t enough room in the back seat to prevent larger dogs from hitting the front seat. “When you put a 120-pound malamute in the back of a Subaru, their chin comes to your forehead,” Kruse says. “They’re already in contact with the back of the front seats, just due to the size of the dog.”

For that reason, Kruse’s Load Up harness passed the CPS tests in sizes small and medium (dogs up to 32 inches in girth behind their front legs) but failed in larger sizes because it allows big dogs to come into contact with those front seats. You can find a list of CPS-certified products here.

Despite his design’s lack of CPS certification, Kruse still believes it represents the best possible solution, given the limited space inside passenger cars. He explains, “We’re keeping the dog from rattling around inside the car. We’re keeping the dog from going out the windshield. In the event of a rollover where the windows get broken out, the dog is restrained and not running away. It’s not just whether or not your dog gets a bloody nose from impacting the seat—it’s all these things.”

But, Kruse laments, “We’re building cars for humans, not dogs.” Currently, there’s no way to support a larger dog in the way Kruse believes is ideal while keeping them from slamming against the front seats in a crash. Keeping your large dog safe is a compromise between their body shape and the limited space inside your car.

Until someone designs a car with dog safety in mind, this is the best we can hope for. If you want to keep your dog safe in your car, then a harness like the Ruffwear Load Up is your best option.