Month: March 2019

A long-standing debate on how to optimize your endurance efficiency gets a new infusion of data

There’s a striking parallel between two of the most famous case studies ever published about elite endurance athletes.

In 2005, University of Texas physiologist Edward Coyle published a longitudinal study that tracked Lance Armstrong’s lab data over a seven-year period. The title of the article conveyed the most remarkable finding: “Improved Muscular Efficiency Displayed as Tour de France Champion Matures.” By the time he was 28, Armstrong reportedly needed 8 percent less energy to generate a given power output on his bike than when he was 21.

The following year, University of Exeter physiologist Andy Jones published 11 years of lab data from Paula Radcliffe—and he too pegged a steady improvement in efficiency as one of the crucial adaptations that enabled Radcliffe to set the still-standing marathon world record of 2:15:25. Between 1992 and 2003, Jones reported, Radcliffe’s VO2max remained relatively unchanged, but her running economy—a measure of how much energy is required to run at a given pace—improved by 15 percent.

On the surface, the takeaway from these studies is straightforward. To perform at your best as a cyclist or runner, it’s not enough to make your engine more powerful; you also have to make it more efficient. But how? For decades, scientists have struggled to pin down what determines exercise efficiency and how to change it, with little consensus. In fact, it’s far from clear that it’s even possible to significantly increase cycling economy, which (along with all the other rumors swirling around back then) made Armstrong’s results even more controversial.

This lingering debate is what makes a new study on running and cycling efficiency from researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder, published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology, particularly intriguing. The authors have plenty of scientific and athletic cred: Rodger Kram, the head of the university’s Locomotion Lab, led the external testing of Nike’s Vaporfly 4% shoes last year; visiting student Wannes Swinnen was an elite triathlete in his native Belgium; Shalaya Kipp, a graduate student in Kram’s lab, is an Olympic steeplechaser.

The study itself is fairly straightforward. The research team assembled three groups of well-trained endurance athletes: ten runners, nine cyclists, and nine triathletes. All were highly experienced, training for about nine hours a week on average—virtually all running for the runners, all cycling for the cyclists, and 5.6 hours of cycling and 3.9 hours of running for the triathletes. The researchers measured their efficiency while running at 8:00 mile pace and cycling at 200 watts. (There are a number of different ways of measuring efficiency and different terms like “running economy” and “cycling economy” that have specific mathematical meanings. For the purposes of this article, I’ll use the general term “efficiency”; if you improve your efficiency, you need less energy to sustain a given pace.)

There are two headline results in the new study. The unsurprising one is that the runners were more efficient than the cyclists at running (with the triathletes somewhere in the middle). On average, the cyclists had to burn 21 percent more energy than the runners to maintain the required pace. That’s partly because the cyclists were a bit heavier on average, but even if you correct for weight, they were still 10 percent less efficient. The more surprising headline, in contrast, is that the cyclists weren’t more efficient than the runners or triathletes at cycling. Statistically, all three groups were pretty much the same in the cycling test.

Those are the facts. What it all means, on the other hand, is a bit of a Rorschach test. Over the years, numerous theories have been proposed to explain how or why exercise efficiency changes. Jones’ paper on Paula Radcliffe, for example, notes that a training-induced transformation of fast-twitch muscle fibers into more efficient slow-twitch fibers could improve efficiency. Radcliffe’s flexibility also got worse over the years, a factor that has been linked to better efficiency. And she did weight training to improve her strength and power, which may have translated into better efficiency through improved neuromuscular signaling.

What’s interesting here, though, is the difference between running and cycling. It’s pretty well-established that experienced runners are more efficient than newbies. The fact that well-trained cyclists don’t get more efficient at running suggests that this effect isn’t simply a consequence of better fitness or of some general internal adaptation like more slow-twitch muscle fibers. It’s something specific to the act of running.

The temptation, of course, is to assume that experienced runners are more skilled at the act of running. They have less vertical bounce, or they overstride less, or move their arms more smoothly, or whatever. There may be some truth to this. But there are also more subtle possibilities. When I pressed Kram and Swinnen for their preferred explanations, they pointed out that efficient runners use their stretchy tendons and ligaments to store elastic energy to be “recycled” from stride to stride. The push and pull between tendon and muscle is so finely tuned that your muscles stay roughly the same length throughout the stride instead of shortening and lengthening with each contraction. Optimizing this aspect of running is invisible to the naked eye and beyond conscious control, but it may be one of the crucial skills that improve with experience.

Cycling, on the other hand—and bear in mind that I’m a lifelong runner writing this—is relatively simple. Your legs are constrained to move along a specific path. There’s very little contribution from stored elastic energy and very little movement in the rest of your body to be optimized. Numerous studies over the years have investigated whether experienced cyclists are more efficient than beginners or whether efficiency improves with training, and the results have been mixed. This new study, which found no difference between cyclists and noncycling runners, is by no means the final word on the topic—but it adds to the impression that any efficiency improvements you get from becoming a more skilled cyclist are small at best.

(A caveat: The cycling in the new study was performed on stationary bikes at a predetermined cadence. It’s possible that the benefits of experience and bike-specific training would be more noticeable on the open road at a freely chosen cadence.)

From a practical perspective, the journal article concludes with this somewhat provocative sentence: “Cyclists who typically spend many hours riding their bike could seemingly replace some time-consuming cycling training with shorter sessions of running training without experiencing negative effects on their [cycling efficiency].” My intuitive reaction to this is that it’s a bit silly—after all, the direct training benefits of cyclists are far broader than just efficiency. But when I try to think of specific counterarguments—“cyclists who replace some of their training with running would miss out on X, Y, and Z”—the case doesn’t seem quite as obvious.

Sure, bike-handling skills and situational awareness are important. And there’s a bit of evidence that improvements in other physiological parameters, like VO2max and lactate threshold, are specific to the mode of exercise you’re most familiar with. But maybe there really is some merit to the idea of cyclists putting on running shoes for cross-training, particularly those whose full-time jobs prevent them from spending six hours a day in the saddle. Conversely, it seems like runners who supplement their training with cycling are missing out on some potential efficiency gains (though that “loss” may be more than compensated for by the ability to rack up more aerobic training without incurring injuries).

So many caveats and on-the-other-hands. Is there anything we can say for sure? How about: Yes, you can get more efficient at running. You probably can’t get more efficient at cycling—at least not by an amount that’s worth spending a lot of time fretting about. Which means that the “better efficiency” narrative is still plausible as an explanation for how Paula Radcliffe developed into a world-beating athlete. For Lance? Not so much. But then, Oprah could have told us that.

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

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Controversy has tailed Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke practically since he assumed the job and hoisted his specially made flag above his office. As head of the Department of the Interior, he oversees 500 million acres of public land—about one-fifth of the United States—and is charged with both preserving our nation’s natural resources and managing them for commercial use. A former Navy SEAL and an avid hunter, Zinke considers himself an outdoorsman in the style of America’s 26th president. “I’m a Teddy Roosevelt guy,” he has said. “You can’t love public lands more than I do.”

But what would Roosevelt, a celebrated conservationist who created five national parks and 18 national monuments, really think of Zinke’s efforts? To answer that question, we created this helpful tracker, which judges noteworthy moments in Interior Secretary Zinke’s tenure as they happen, rating each on a scale from Perturbed Teddy to Angry Teddy to Raging Teddy.

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Secretary Zinke decided the Department of Interior should do away with a policy called “compensatory mitigation.” It was introduced to act as a give and take between extraction industries and environmentalists by asking companies to offset damage in one spot by funding conservation in another. For example, if a company wanted to expand its operation on public lands in one area where unavoidable damage to a stream was likely, the company might back a wetland restoration project in another area. Zinke's announcement came just a few days after the Trump administration said it wants to overhaul the Endangered Species Act (primarily to make it easier for companies to work in protected habitats), and environmentalists saw this as another move to hack away at protections in favor of industry. “These companies have been asked to pay for the damage they are doing to our public resources on our public lands. And now the Trump administration is saying you don’t need to pay that bill,” Tracy Stone-Manning, associate vice president of the National Wildlife Federation, told Bloomberg.

Land use is becoming an ever more volatile topic in this administration. But policies like this were actually designed to help the environmentalist and pro-extraction camps work through arguments. Now that compensatory mitigation is gone, the gridlock and frustration on both sides will probably get worse. 

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Zinke may have violated conflict-of-interest laws when a foundation under his name worked on a real estate deal with Halliburton chairperson David Lesar. The Interior Department’s internal watchdog opened an investigation—the 11th to date during Zinke’s 16 months at his post—because the secretary stood to personally profit from the deal. Halliburton is one of the largest oil drilling and fracking companies in the world, with projects highly affected by DOI policies.

Politico is covering the complicated investigation in detail. The short version is that Zinke met with Halliburton executives at DOI headquarters in August, and they discussed the interior secretary’s Great Northern Veterans Peace Park Foundation, which is trying to build a park in Zinke’s hometown of Whitefish, Montana. A month later, Zinke’s wife signed an agreement allowing a developer connected to Lesar to build a parking lot on land the foundation owns. Lesar is also backing commercial development in Whitefish, including retail shops, a hotel, and microbrewery, that would be set aside for Zinke and his wife. Plus, with all the development nearby, the land Zinke owns would greatly increase in value.

It’s a deal that is potentially rife with the kind of elitist profiteering Teddy opposed.

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As a Montana congressman, Zinke was an adamant supporter of the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), a program that Whit Fosburgh, president of the Teddy Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, called the “the single most important program for protecting threatened access and opening up new access that the government has.” Even when his Republican colleagues turned their backs on the LWCF, Zinke stood up for it. “I know what is at stake if we lose this critical resource. This isn’t about politics,” he said in 2015. Fast-forward three years, and Secretary Zinke is urging the U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations to slash the LWCF to less than 1 percent of its maximum allotment, essentially disabling the program.

As Outside contributor Elliot Woods wrote, “If Zinke does not find the nerve to speak up publicly for the LWCF, or if Congress doesn’t intervene, the fund will lapse into its most meager state since its creation.”

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When Zinke created his “Made in America” Outdoor Recreation Advisory Committee, he staffed it with manufacturing executives, the heads of companies with national park contracts, and people who want to increase park privatization. Three of the committee members were even flagged by DOI staff for having conflicts of interest because they stood to gain financially from their influence on national parks policies. Meanwhile, none of the Outdoor Industry Association’s nominees were selected. If the goal was to increase the profitability of parks and focus on how they can earn private interests more money, Zinke assembled a crack team.

This was a blatant move by Zinke to put private interests over the preservation of public lands.

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Zinke had egg on his face after it was learned his office planned to spend $139,000 on a new set of doors. Granted, the DOI headquarters was built in 1936 and has been undergoing a decade-long renovation. But still, what kind of doors cost that much? Apparently the price was for two sets of double doors, including a pair that led to—of course—the balcony in Zinke’s office. When news of the cost broke, Zinke claimed not to have known about the contract. He later told the House Committee on Natural Resources that he’d talked the contractor that bid for the job down to $75,000.

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Late last year, President Trump reduced the size of Bears Ears (by 85 percent) and Grand Staircase-Escalante (by half) national monuments. Zinke played a major part in the decision. In April 2017, Trump tasked Zinke to review 27 national monuments; the interior secretary’s ensuing report suggested shrinking six, including Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante.

Trump and Zinke both said the decision had nothing to do with pleasing extraction industries. But that’s hard to believe given that just days after the new boundaries took effect, we learned that uranium company Energy Fuels Resources strongly lobbied Utah Republicans and the Interior Department to shrink Bears Ears, even going so far as to prepare maps that pointed to the areas it wanted removed from the monument. In the months leading up to the decision, Energy Fuels execs had even met with Zinke’s office and reportedly came away thinking the DOI was “pretty positively disposed” to what they had to say.

One assumes this action would make Teddy Roosevelt livid. After all, he was the president who signed the Antiquities Act that gave presidents the power to create national monuments.

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Speaking to an oil industry group, Zinke complained about the strictures of the Endangered Species Act, saying he wanted to deregulate environmental protections as quickly as possible but was facing pushback, in part, because 30 percent of his employees were not “loyal to the flag.” The implication was that not all of his 70,000 employees were on board with the Trump administration’s sprint to enact business-friendly policies.

There’s no problem with making jobs a priority. And, yes, government regulations can be burdensome. But as head of the DOI, Zinke seems singularly focused on using the land he controls to generate revenue. In contrast, during Roosevelt’s time, there was a great national debate about how the United States might run out of natural resources, as well as a growing recognition that pollution is a serious threat to health. This is what led Roosevelt to listen to environmentalists like John Muir and drove him to conserve wild lands in the first place.

Zinke seems unaware of the fact that a major part of his job is to conserve public land in a natural state. DOI staffers who adhere to the full mission of the department shouldn’t be called traitors.

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After Alaskan senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan—both Republicans—voted no on President Trump’s Obamacare repeal, they got a phone call from Zinke. According to Murkowski, the interior secretary told her that “the president is really disappointed in what he perceives to be as your lack of support for health care reform”—and then Zinke raised the subject of energy projects in her state. Murkowski, a proponent of big extraction projects, said the implication was that dissent might come at a cost. Sullivan had a similar experience. “We’re facing some difficult times, and there’s a lot of enthusiasm for the policies that Secretary Zinke and the president have been talking about with regard to our economy. But the message was pretty clear,” he said.

Zinke would later call accusations that he threatened the two senators “laughable.” But they were plausible enough for the DOI’s Office of Inspector General to open an investigation. It was later dropped after the two senators refused to cooperate.

Roosevelt was a maverick in his time. Hell, he created his own political party. Zinke, however, has repeatedly shown that he’s willing to bend ethical boundaries and side with the Trump administration even when doing so contradicts his own beliefs.

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During his first summer on the job, Zinke started to stretch the ethical perks of his position—the sort of thing that would later land EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt in hot water. In June 2017, Zinke flew to Las Vegas to give a speech to the Golden Knights hockey team that had nothing to do with DOI business. His office would later describe it as “sort of an inspiration-type speech, one that a coach might give.” When Zinke left Vegas for his home state of Montana, he booked a $12,375 charter flight and billed it to taxpayers. The DOI’s Office of Inspector General opened an investigation, and it turned out the hockey team’s owner had donated to Zinke’s first congressional campaign in Montana. The OIG gave Zinke a strong wag of the finger, saying although the flight had been approved by DOI ethics officials, they likely only did so because Zinke didn’t give them enough information about the trip and his connection to the team’s owner.

Despite the 26th president’s aristocratic upbringing, he was a man of the people. Spending taxpayer money to hobnob with wealthy campaign donors is very un-Teddy-like.

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On Friday at 6 p.m. in Chamonix, France, a gun will signal the start of the 2018 Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc (UTMB), a 100-mile race around the Mont Blanc Massif through Italy, Switzerland, and France. The race is one of the most competitive ultras in the world, as well as one of the most demanding, with more than 32,000 feet of elevation gain, including four passes that top out over 7,800 feet. Last year, runners endured snow, rain, and hail on their run through the high alpine, which is why race directors require every competitor to carry, among other things, an emergency blanket, a hat, gloves, and a rain shell. Here’s the other gear some pros plan to carry during the race.

The UTMB crown has proven elusive for American men, but Mammoth, California–based runner Tim Tollefson has gotten close, finishing third two years in a row. He finished second at the UTMB’s little brother, the 100K Courmayeur-Champex-Chamonix (CCC), in 2015.

Hoka Evo Mafate ($170)

“This shoe is an all-around shredder with fantastic cushioning, quick responsiveness, and top-notch durability,” Tollefson says. The five-millimeter Vibram lugs offer just enough traction to excel on singletrack without sacrificing performance on fire roads and pavement, while Kevlar supports in the forefoot provide a secure fit.

Buy now

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Drymax Running Lite-Mesh Socks ($13)

Thanks to venting panels on the top of the foot and under the arch, these socks breathe well, keeping feet comfortable and dry. “I have worn them for over 20 hours without a single blister,” Tollefson says.

Buy now

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Black Diamond Distance Carbon Z Trekking Poles ($170)

Made entirely of carbon, with a quick-deploy system that allows you to unfold and stiffen the pole with one motion, the Distance Carbon Z poles are “a must for late-race ascents up nasty cols,” Tollefson says. They are at home in a mountain race, where weight and fast transitions matter. 

Buy now

A road marathoner turned trail runner, Magdalena Boulet competed for the U.S. Olympic team and U.S. Cross-Country team before transitioning to trail ultras in 2013. She has since run her way onto podiums at many competitive U.S. ultras, including the 2015 Western States 100, her debut 100-miler. She finished 19th at the 2017 UTMB.

Hoka Speedgoat 2 ($140)

Designed in collaboration with ultra legend Karl Meltzer, the Speedgoats marry ultra-distance comfort with a responsive midsole. “They are incredibly cushioned while still being lightweight enough to actually race in,” Boulet says. “They also have an aggressive outsole for the technical trails.”

Buy now

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Stance Run 360 Uncommon Solid Run Crew Sock ($18)

“I love the fun designs and comfortable feel, and the slight compression they provide really helps keep the swelling down over 100 miles of running,” Boulet says. She’ll bring several different patterns and make a race-day decision about which pair suits her mood.

Buy now

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Gu Fedora

This tan straw hat has become Boulet’s signature—she rarely races without it. “It protects my face from the sun, keeps me cool during the heat, and reminds me to have fun during some difficult miles while racing,” she says. UTMB will be no exception.

Buy now

South African–born Ryan Sandes has notched wins at races from Hong Kong to Australia to the U.S., including the 2011 Leadville 100 and 2017 Western States 100. He finished 21st at the 2017 CCC; this is his first time racing the full UTMB.

S/Lab Ultra ($180)

Salomon designed this shoe for former UTMB champ Francois D’Haene, who wanted kicks that could handle 100 miles of pounding without packing out. It’s no surprise they’re Sandes’s choice for this year’s race. “The shoe is lightweight but still gives me enough support for a long race and enough flexibility for technical terrain,” he says.

Buy now

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Salomon Bonatti Pro Waterproof Jacket ($200) and Pant ($120)

Each racer is required to carry a waterproof jacket and pants. Sandes’s choice: the Bonatti Pro models from Salomon. “They’re waterproof and really lightweight but still offer breathability, so that running doesn’t get super hot,” Sandes says. He’ll also have on hand the S/Lab Light, a lighter, thinner wind layer. “It’s great to take on and off during the race as conditions change,” he says.

Jacket Pants

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Suunto 9 Watch ($600)

The newest sports watch from Suunto offers 25 hours of battery life in its least-efficient setting—“crucial for an ultra,” Sandes says—and up to 120 hours in the most conservative battery-saving mode. FusedTrack technology aggregates speed and direction of travel to retain navigational accuracy, even in settings that reduce the frequency of GPS pings to save battery life.

Buy now

Clare Gallagher has a history of winning races the first time she enters them: in 2016 she won the Leadville 100, her first crack at that distance, and last year she won the 100-kilometer CCC, her first major European trail race.

Honey Stinger Ginsting Gels ($36 for 24, or $1.50 for one)

These honey-based gels with a ginseng kick will be an essential element of Gallagher’s fuel menu on race day. “I brought 50 of them,” she says. Another nutritional necessity: Coke. Gallagher estimates she’ll consume at least four liters.

Buy now

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Petzl Nao+ Headlamp ($200)

“I can’t see shit at night,” Gallagher says. With its 700-lumen bulb, the Nao “is clutch” for navigating UTMB’s many technical sections in the dark without getting injured.

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With two Western States 100 podiums (one of them a win), a former Speedgoat 50K course record, and a top-ten UTMB finish under her belt, Howe Violett has enough ultra experience to know that she doesn’t need to stress over gear, though she says there are a few items she’s particular about. 

Nathan Vapor Howe Pack, 12L ($180)

Launched in 2017, the Vapor Howe is Howe Violett’sideal pack—because she helped design it. “Everything from the sizing to the fit to the location of the pockets” is made to Howe Violett’s specifications. The rear kangaroo pocket makes for quick access to stashed layers without losing stride.

Buy now

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The North Face Ultra Endurance Shoe ($120)

With its welded TPU upper and burly TPU toe bumper, the Ultra Endurance spells protection and durability. “It has enough grip, without big lugs that don’t work on wet rock, which is pretty important for UTMB,” with its high-alpine terrain and conditions, Howe Violett says. “There are a lot of lightweight shoes that would get destroyed in this race.”

Buy now

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Clif Shot Bloks, Salted Watermelon ($36 for 18)

Howe Violett, who has a Ph.D. in nutrition, knows a thing or two about food—and she’s learned through years of racing what works for her. Salted watermelon Shot Bloks are a staple. “I can eat them all day,” she says. Post-race, she’ll have her eye on some nachos. “The one thing I need after a race is salty food,” Howe Violett says. She’s already arranged for her friend, former UTMB champ Rory Bosio, to have a plate waiting at the finish line.

Buy now

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Our gear editors scoured the floor of Summer Outdoor Retailer 2018 for the most interesting products under $50. Here’s what they found.

Alchemy Goods made a name for itself with packs and belts made from old bicycle tires. The Bellevue (pictured above) is made from recycled billboards. Each is a unique, one-of-a-kind piece and features six slots for credit cards and a large bill pocket. It’s a familiar design with just a bit more flair.

—Ben Fox, affiliate reviews director

With a stretchy, moisture-wicking band and slim, lightweight housing, BioLite’s new 320-lumen HeadLamp—the brand’s first wearable product—is all-day comfortable. Not only is the fabric soft next to your skin, but the lamp’s feathery profile means it won’t slip down over your eyes.

—Ariella Gintzler, assistant editor

Portable power is a necessity. Hell, I’m lucky if my phone battery lasts a full day, especially at OR. So I was happy to see the new Sherpa 15 from Goal Zero. Its svelte 4.6-ounce frame fits in your pocket but still provides enough juice to charge a phone twice, a GoPro camera up to three times, and a headlamp up to four times. Consider it a smart outdoor insurance policy.

—Will Egensteiner, senior editor

A climber’s dream, this kit comes with two rolls of tape, fingernail clippers, a sanding block for calluses, and a balm to soothe cracked skin. Plus, Black Diamond packaged it in an ultralight waterproof stuff sack, so you don’t have to worry about getting it wet.

—Emily Reed, assistant reviews editor

When Lil Wayne said “I'm on a 24-hour champagne diet,” we felt that. Apparently so did Corkcicle, which introduced this portable, durable way to enjoy your favorite bubbly beverage at picnics and on fancy backpacking trips. Champagne sold separately.

—Abbey Gingras, social media editorial assistant

Traveling with kids comes with its own set of challenges. Cost shouldn’t be one of them.

Vacationing with children can be the best and the hardest thing in the world. The upside? Experiencing new wonders through their eyes. But then there are the meltdowns, the exhaustion, the endless stream of “Are we there yet?” With little ones in tow, a delayed flight, a lost bag, or a too-small hotel room can feel disastrous. Which is why you need destinations that are convenient, offer heaps of activities for kids, and, most of all, won’t break the bank.

White Mountains, New Hampshire

The Appalachian Mountain Club operates more than a dozen huts and lodges throughout the Northeast. At the Lonesome Lake Hut (from $105 per adult per night), accessed by a mellow 1.6-mile hike into New Hampshire’s White Mountains, you’ll get views of Franconia Ridge and a hot breakfast and dinner included each day. Go during spring or fall and you can save money by packing in your own food. You can take guided hikes with an AMC naturalist or play board games in the hut. Not sure if your kids can handle the approach yet? Check out New Hampshire’s Cardigan Lodge (from $91), reachable by car and just two hours from Boston, which has a swimming pond, nature trail, nearby beaches, private family bunk rooms. Breakfast, bag lunch, and dinner come included with your stay. Get this: At both Lonesome and Cardigan, kids stay and eat free from June 15 to August 23.

North Cascades, Washington

The North Cascades Institute’s Environmental Learning Center, located on the shores of Diablo Lake in the center of North Cascades National Park, is not only a place to learn about conservation and stewardship but also a great getaway to relax and have fun. There are several multiday family weekends each summer (from $280 for adults; $180 for children older than two) that feature guided hikes, arts and crafts, campfire storytelling, and orienteering in the old-growth forest. You’ll stay in one of three bunkhouses, eat organic communal meals in the lakeside dining hall, and spend your days exploring the park or paddling out to islands in a Salish-style 18-person canoe.

Estes Park, Colorado

YMCA of the Rockies rents out private cabins (from $109 a night) on a sprawling 860-acre property in Estes Park, the gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park. The cabins range from two to four bedrooms, with optional fireplaces and loaner travel cribs. While you don’t have to be a YMCA member to rent, book early because these spots fill up quickly for summer. Kid-friendly activities include a swimming pool, game and craft rooms, horseback riding, outdoor climbing, mini golf, and more. Parents can indulge with a post-hike massage or yoga session.

Blue Ridge Mountains, South Carolina

At 3,000-acre Table Rock State Park, you’ll find two lakes, bluegrass jam sessions, and an extensive trail network that connects to the Foothills Trail, a 77-mile jaunt through the neighboring Blue Ridge Mountains. Pitch a tent or book one of 14 recently renovated cabins (from $95 a night), which feature fire pits, stocked kitchens, and enough beds for the whole family. There’s on-site dining in the park’s historic lodge, bass fishing, kayak rentals, and a playground to keep the kids busy. Thirty minutes away, in Greenville, you can visit the local children’s museum and grab a bite at Seedlings, the museum’s kid-focused farm-to-table restaurant.

Lava Hot Springs, Idaho

Thanks to the geothermal hot springs, the floatable Portneuf River, and an outdoor water park, a visit to the town of Lava Hot Springs can be done entirely in your swimsuit. But there are plenty of other attractions worth putting on a shirt. In summer, mountain bike or hike miles of local trails or fish for rainbow trout in the Blackfoot River and nearby reservoirs. Come in the winter and you can ski Pebble Creek Ski Area—which has only three lifts but boasts 2,200 vertical feet of terrain—for just $47 a day for adults and $5 for kids five and under. Book a hut (from $85 a night) at Bristol Cabins and breakfast and a communal kitchen come included, or sleep in a vintage camper at Lava Campground (from $15).

Mendocino, California

Most visit this sleepy coastal town for a quick escape—it’s just three hours north of San Francisco but feels light-years away. At Mendocino Grove, a 37-acre property that opened in 2016, you’ll sleep in deluxe canvas tents (from $120 a night) on a bluff overlooking the Pacific. Each shelter comes with a redwood deck, picnic table, and fire pit; family tents have queen beds for you and bunks for the grommets. You’re just a short drive to downtown’s charming shops and restaurants, hiking trails through the redwoods, and the Big River Estuary, where you can paddle or bike along its banks before it flows into Mendocino Bay. Rentals and guided tours can be booked at Catch a Canoe and Bicycles Too, located in the Stanford Inn by the Sea eco-resort.

Kennebunkport, Maine

Maine is nicknamed Vacationland for a reason: The state just makes you want to throw on flip-flops and crack open a book. Sandy Pines Campgrounds, which opened in Kennebunkport in 2017, is just a short walk from the three-mile-long Goose Rocks Beach. It has a pool, kid’s craft tent, bicycle and paddleboard rentals, general store stacked with s’mores fixings, and steamed lobster dinners. This summer, Sandy Pines is debuting tiny A-frame cabins and old-fashioned wagons turned into overnight campers in addition to its glamping tents and standard camping sites. Better yet, the family tents come with a smaller children’s tent equipped with two twin beds so you can get a little peace and privacy.

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One day after Walmart announced the launch of a new Premium Outdoor Store, Black Diamond has issued a cease and desist order, demanding that the big-box retailer remove all Black Diamond trademarks, logos, and copyrighted product photos from its website.

The climbing- and ski-gear maker says Walmart’s use of brand logos and product images were “likely to confuse consumers into believing that Walmart is an authorized dealer of Black Diamond or that the new outdoor Walmart.com site is otherwise associated with or sponsored by Black Diamond.” In fact, Black Diamond says it has never sold through Walmart, never signed a dealer agreement with Walmart, and has no plans to sell through Walmart in the future.

In a press release Black Diamond claims it had no knowledge of Walmart’s new online gear platform until it launched yesterday, with Black Diamond headlamps and climbing gear listed among the curated offerings for sale. “We did not see or approve the statement which Walmart released Monday,” John Walbrecht, Black Diamond’s president, said. “Black Diamond remains committed to our specialty retail partners and we do not plan on deviating from this strategy.”

Black Diamond has sold through e-retailer Moosejaw for ten years. But Moosejaw was purchased by Walmart in 2017, and worked with Walmart to launch the new premium gear shop online, selling a collection of items from high-end outdoor brands including Therm-a-Rest, Pacsafe, Deuter, Danner, Klymit, and, of course, Black Diamond. To Outside's knowledge, no other brands have ordered Walmart to remove their gear from its new site.

Walmart would not comment on the details of the conflict with Black Diamond. “I can only tell you we would never activate a brand without their permission,” a corporate spokesperson told Outside.

“The decision to be part of this new experience will continue to be up to each brand, and our hope is that brands, and even other retailers, share our commitment to driving a truly inclusive outdoor industry,” the spokesperson said. “As we grow the Premium Outdoor Store, we will continue to look for leading brands and retailers that want to reach a new, wider audience.”

At the time of publication, several Black Diamond headlamps were still listed on Walmart's gear site, though they were listed as out of stock.

A nostalgia-filled trip into the Grand Canyon

Ten years ago last weekend, my old friend Jarrett didn’t have cancer anymore, so I thought it would be a good idea to take him to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and back. One Saturday in 2008, we hiked down, and by that Sunday afternoon, I was pretty sure it was a terrible idea—the shoulder strap on Jarrett’s backpack was painfully chafing the chemotherapy port he still had in his chest, it was hot, we were all tired, and, of course, climbing 4,500 vertical feet on the second day of basically your first backpacking trip ever is fairly exhausting.

We survived, and I added “sandbag your friend who has very recently finished cancer treatment” to my list of things to never do again.

Jarrett and I became friends in high school, back in New Hampton, Iowa, and on the surface maybe didn’t really have much in common: he was a wrestler, I wasn’t. He was well-behaved, I wasn’t. At age 17, he was mature enough to be the lawyer he’d eventually become, and I was … well, getting kicked out of my creative writing class. We went to different colleges and visited each other, and then stayed in touch as we both moved around and eventually out west, he and his wife landing in Phoenix.

In May 2007, Jarrett found out he had Stage 3 Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, and then two weeks later, he found out he had non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma as well, an extremely rare diagnosis that challenged even his Mayo Clinic doctor. During his chemo, Jarrett lost all of his hair, so I shaved my head in a gesture of solidarity. His treatment worked, and shortly after he was able to say he was cancer-free, we started planning that first Grand Canyon trip: Jarrett, his older brother, Jeremy, his younger brother, Nolan, and me. I think we were all a little surprised at how physically demanding it was, afterward stiffly limping into the pizza place in Tusayan on Sunday evening to replace the calories we’d burned before driving back to Phoenix.

And then, 10 years went by like it was nothing.

In 2017, Jarrett mentioned to me that he was thinking we should do another backpacking trip in the Grand Canyon in April 2018 to sort of commemorate 10 years of him being cancer-free, and would I like to join? I, of course, said yes, thinking: 1) what kind of jerk would I have to be to say no to that, and 2) if it turned out to be the worst experience ever this time, it would not be my fault at all.

We met at the Grand Canyon Visitor Center parking lot last Saturday, joined this time by the guys’ dad, Joe, and our friend Josh, who had become an oncologist and a father of four kids since the last time I saw him at Jarrett’s wedding. Joe, now 64, said the Grand Canyon was on his bucket list. I joked that we would do our best to get him back out of the canyon so it wouldn’t be his final bucket list item.

We started down the South Kaibab Trail, dust and sand blowing up into our faces, and talked about careers, mortgages, families, travel, and who had the heaviest backpack. Since the last time, Jeremy and I had both gotten divorced, Nolan had gotten married, Jeremy had gotten re-married, and Jarrett and his wife Angie had become parents to four kids. Our 2008 trip was my first time below the rim of the Grand Canyon, and since then, I’d spent more than 40 days down there.

Backpacking is one of the least eventful outdoor pursuits, but one of the best for conversation—especially if you’re not in a hurry. There’s plenty of time—and oxygen—to catch up, to fall into old patterns of jokes, and to remember what it was like when you all first met. I’m going to be 40 next year, and I’ve already forgotten a lot of things, and other things have faded. On our hike down, Jarrett said something about conversations that could jog your memory, and in talking with three guys I had grown up with, scenes suddenly popped back into my head: splitting late-night frozen pizzas, standing at the pencil sharpener in math class and discussing last night’s Welcome Back Kotter rerun with Jarrett, sitting at Joe and Sharon’s kitchen table and cracking jokes and laughing with whoever was in the house at the time. We sat around a picnic table at the Bright Angel Campground eating dehydrated meals, and I missed cheap frozen pizzas and being young.

The Grand Canyon is a wonderful place for a lot of reasons, but one of my favorite things about it is that after a certain amount of descending into it, you lose any hope for a cell phone signal. People you were friends with in 1995, when no one could be distracted by the text messages, email, and social media in their pocket, can now, in 2018, spend a few hours or days without those distractions. And those memories can come back, and you can act the way you did when you were young and didn’t know shit about anything. But you can also simultaneously be the people who have put their heartbreak, successes, mistakes, and red-letter days on their resume of life and hope it’s all going somewhere. It’s a hard truth of getting a little older when one day, or over the course of a few years, you realize that you’re not in the physical shape you were in when you were a football player or wrestler in high school—but it’s a wonderful thing if you can get together with old friends and have your cheeks hurt because you’re laughing the same way you did back when you had way fewer responsibilities.

We plodded up the Bright Angel Trail on Sunday, slowly climbing up to the South Rim—back to cell phone service after only a little more than 24 hours away—so everyone could get back to their jobs and families. It wasn’t long enough, but no matter how long you’re down in the canyon, it never seems like enough, and you just hope you can get back soon.

In 2008, I thought the story of Jarrett’s cancer survival and the Grand Canyon might make a good story for a magazine. I only pitched it to one publication, and the editor said thanks, but we have a lot of Grand Canyon stories. So I never wrote anything about it. Ten years later, I don’t care. I have a lot of Grand Canyon stories too now, and this is one of my favorite ones. 

Based on firsthand experience, the performance payoffs make the investment worthwhile

It has become common—fashionable even—to complain about the price of bikes. There’s some good reason for that. Pretty much every manufacturer on the market offers rides that approach or exceed $10,000, which is more than the minimum mortgage down payment on a quarter-million-dollar home. “You can buy a motorcycle for less, a used car even,” disgruntled buyers complain. All of that is perfectly true. But rising prices also reflect added technology and improvements, which translates into bikes that are more comfortable, refined, and easier to ride.

This came into sharp focus for me at the Sedona Mountain Bike Festival, which I attended for a story about how cyclists can use such an event to demo and find the right ride. For that piece, my parents-in-law—lifetime cyclists who were in the market for new bikes—demoed half a dozen new models, which they compared against their 10- and 14-year-old machines.

Don, my father-in-law, has been riding a 2008 Ibis Mojo SL since he bought it new. At 21.8 pounds, this bike was state of the art back then, with 140 millimeters of front and rear travel; a complete 3x Shimano XTR group set, including 26-inch wheels (remember those?) sporting then-chunky 2.2-inch tires; a fixed seatpost (yep, droppers weren’t a thing yet); and a 120-millimeter flagpole stem. And with a 69-degree head angle and tight 429-millimeter chainstays—still fairly modern numbers—the Mojo was ahead of its time. Retail was a cool $6,400, which bought you one of the lightest, supplest, and most capable bikes then on the market and was precisely why we named it Gear of the Year for 2008.

In Sedona, Don tested, among other models, a Pivot Switchblade. The Pivot has a 67-degree head angle with 428-millimeter chainstays, which might not seem like a huge difference, but the top tube is almost two inches longer and the stem stubbier (50 millimeters) to result a position that’s farther back, making descending more comfortable and steering less twitchy. Components-wise, the Pivot is beefier all around: 29-inch wheels, 2.5-inch front tires, 2.4-inch rear tires, 135 millimeters of travel in the rear and 150 millimeters up front, and 36-millimeter fork stanchions. Plus, the Fox Transfer dropper post allows the saddle to be lowered by six full inches. There are other, less noticeable differences, including wider hub spacings on the Pivot, wider bars, bigger tube shapes, brawny linkages for stiffness, and internal cable routings.

Don went into the demo skeptical that he needed a new bike. But within just a few test laps on newer models, it was clear just how much of a difference the modern technology made. Aboard his Mojo SL, Don was nervous and halting and repeatedly dismounted at steep sections and rocky obstacles. And no wonder: The high seatpost and long stem had him far forward with lots of weight on his hands and front wheel, which feels like a setup for going over the bars. In rock gardens and rough terrain, the 26-inch wheels caught up and slowed down to the point where he would occasionally come to a full stop. Aboard the Switchblade, Don cruised through steeps and obstacles that had previously stymied him. He rolled through jangly sections, keeping his momentum. And while he completed the lap 50 percent faster than he had on the Mojo SL, Don said he felt more confident, more comfortable, and far more at ease aboard the Switchblade.

I chalk up the improvements to two primary differences. First, geometry and positioning: The Switchblade is lower and slacker for descending stability, and the dropper post allows you to get back, unweight your hands, and approach technical sections without fear of Supermanning. Second, the bike carries momentum and smooths out the trail courtesy of those 29-inch wheels. Obviously there are lots of other nuanced improvements: The wide bars make for easier, calmer steering; the fatter tires add grip and confidence; and the stout fork improves stability.

When asked about the experience, Chris Cocalis, owner of Pivot, said he wasn’t surprised at all. “The larger wheel sizes, big improvements in suspension performance, more stable and confidence-inspiring handling, plus the invention of the dropper post, has made bikes more fun and, in many cases, more capable than downhill bikes a decade ago.”

Watching Don’s progression from old bike to new reminded me of the revelation I had years ago when I upgraded from long, skinny skis to short, fat, shaped ones. The improvements in modern bikes are that dramatic. Indeed, despite his initial skepticism, Don wound up having so much more fun on the modern model that he purchased a Switchblade within a week of the event.

Now let’s talk about prices. Whereas Don’s top-of-the-line Mojo SL went for $6,400 new, the most premium build on the Switchblade is $9,400. That 47 percent increase in just ten years is well more than the 15 percent inflation rate, which seems to underscore everyone’s complaints over exorbitant costs. But there are two major differences in the new premium Switchblade: First, it has Reynolds carbon wheels, which are light, stiff, and add a ton of cost because of the labor involved in laying them up. Second, that price tag buys a dropper post and XTR Di2 electronic shifting, which is way more technology than was available in 2008. Do these advances improve ride quality? Absolutely. Are they necessary? No.

What’s more, if you compare apples to apples, prices actually haven’t risen. A Switchblade with alloy wheels and mechanical XTR, which is on a par with the old Ibis, costs $6,400—exactly the same as the Mojo SL. The Switchblade thus equipped, like the one Don tested, is a far better bike. (And if you calculate that cost over ten years, which is how long Don rode his Ibis, you’re looking at about $1.80 per day. People happily spend double and triple that on their daily coffee.) You can even get an XT-level Switchblade for $5,100, and I’d argue it’s still a far more advanced bike than any ten-year-old model out there.

Following that logic, and the idea that development and features trickle down, even less expensive bikes these days—and there are great models to be had for $2,500 and $3,000—are a lot more bike than you would have gotten for the same cost (or even more) a decade ago. As for the $10,000 models, consider them in the context of cars: Sure, you can go buy a brand-new, fully loaded Subaru Outback for north of $50,000, but you can also get a base model for about half that, and it’ll still be a great car. Expensive bikes are about niceties and extras—maybe you value those, maybe you don’t—but you still get the base frame and component technology advancements no matter what level you purchase. Cocalis underscores the point: “In 2008, our cutting-edge aluminum bikes cost about 25 percent more than our aluminum models today. And today’s aluminum bikes are better in every way.”

As for Don, ever since he got his new Switchblade, he’s called me regularly from his home in Moab to exclaim over how much it has improved his riding. “Stuff that I had to walk before is now a piece of cake,” he told me on one recent call. For Don, at least, the returns of an enjoyable ride, now and for years to come, make the costs of the new technology well worth the money.

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Four years ago on a sunny July day in Paris, former pro cyclist Kathryn Bertine wheeled up to the starting line of La Course by Le Tour de France. She still remembers feeling the energy on the Champs Élysées that day and hearing the scrape of cleats on cobblestones. She’d spent years negotiating, petitioning, and organizing to bring about the event and finally she’d arrived, along with a roster of the best women cyclists in the world. 

La Course was the latest attempt in a decades-long fight to create a lasting, prestigious women’s stage race to run alongside the Tour de France. Such events have come and gone through the decades, beset by financial struggles, organizational roadblocks, lack of media coverage, and good old-fashioned sexism. But Bertine thought that this time, she could make it stick. 

The first attempt at a women’s Tour took place in 1955, when 41 women competed in the five-day Tour de France Féminin, put on by French journalist and race director Jean Leulliot. Despite mockery from the press and photographers, who allegedly tried to surprise competitors in their dormitories, the women finished the race. But without stable financial backing, the race disappeared the following year.

The Tour de France Féminin returned in 1984, this time organized by the group behind the men’s Tour de France. The idea was to create a truly equal event: during the three-week tour, women rode the same routes as their male counterparts, albeit slightly shortened to ensure they finished ahead of the men’s peloton. But a lack of prime-time attention hurt the race: cycling publications largely ignored the women. After two years of a full-length tour, organizers cut the Tour de France Féminin down to two weeks.

By that point, the business of professional cycling had started to change dramatically. TV coverage of the Tour de France increased, turning sponsorships and ads into a lucrative business. In 1989, the Tour organizers dropped the women’s race entirely in order to capitalize on the much larger men’s audience. “We could have been watching women since 1989," says Bertine. "But instead they sold the TV rights for the men and got rid of the women.”

There were other attempts from other organizers: the Tour de l’Aude Cycliste Féminin, a women’s stage race held in south-central France that was founded in 1985 as a four-day event and grew into a multi-day tour that by 2006 had ten stages; the 1992 La Grand Boucle FémininInternationale (so named because organizers of the Tour de France prohibited any reference to “the Tour” on the grounds of trademark infringement), which lasted for 12 years and linked epic stages; the 2004 Grand Boucle Féminin, which lasted till 2010; and the 2006 Route de France Féminine, which became one of France’s most prestigious women’s races until it was canceled in 2017 due to a scheduling conflict and the UCI’s decision not to give the race WorldTour status. 

Over and over again, the same fatal cycle repeated itself: Without robust media coverage, the audience wasn’t big enough to attract sponsors to fund big events. Without big events, no sponsors were interested. After all, people can’t want what they cannot see—nor can advertisers buy it.

That was the problem La Course, which was the result of years of lobbying the UCI, sought to address. It would piggyback on the infrastructure and media attention of the Tour de France. Live on 24 channels, the race was watched by millions of viewers in at least 150 countries. Dutch phenom Marianne Vos would go on to sprint for the win and earn part of the $30,500 purse—a prize equal to the amount men receive for winning just one stage of the Tour.

Lots of people hailed La Course as a massive step forward for women’s cycling. But critics called it a token event to quell the increasingly vocal complaints about gender inequality in cycling. It was only a one-day race instead of a multi-day tour—a curtain raiser for the men, who were still very much the main event, they said. The 55-mile race lasted just over two hours and covered 2.5 percent of the Tour de France course.

“We intended the race initially be three to seven days the first year, and it would grow incrementally from there as the financial structure of women’s cycling grew,” says Bertine. “We saw it as getting our foot in the door.”

The UCI, the sport’s international governing body, seemed to echo this thought. “Our job now,” said Brian Cookson, then newly minted president of the UCI, in 2014 “is…to make sure that women’s road cycling develops in a way that is sustainable, that builds on each successive step with another successful step.”

That never happened. After repeating the one-day event on the Champs-Elysees in 2015 and 2016, the Amaury Sports Organization (ASO), which puts on the Tour de France, added a second day to La Course in 2017. But the format changed. Day one was a mountain stage, a climb to the Col d’Izoard—the men’s final mountain stage in the Tour. But while the men rode 103 miles, the women’s stage was a paltry 41. And only the top 20 finishers of this stage were allowed to participate in day two, an unorthodox pursuit-style individual time trial. “If you follow cycling, that’s ridiculous!” Bertine says. “Why would you take the top 20 climbers and put them in a time trial? It’s a totally different event. It was a show pony event.”

The disappointment was evident. “We took it as seriously as we felt the organizers took us,” sats British rider Lizzie Deignan, who pointed out that she couldn’t even find a women’s toilet at the race start. “To warm up for a time trial not knowing where the closest bathroom is—if there is one at all—It’s difficult to take that seriously.” Retired German cyclist Judith Arndt, two-time winner of the Tour de l’Aude, was more blunt. She called the new format “pathetic and humiliating.”

This year, the event was once again shortened. The one-day race was another truncated version of the men’s Stage 10 of the Tour de France, a 159 kilometer ascent in the Alps with four major climbs. La Course covered 118 kilometers of that route, omitting two of the four climbs.

“I did get the feeling from ASO that they were annoyed by the hassle of having to deal with women wanting a race and then having to arrange a women’s race,” British World Champion Emma Pooley told VeloNews. She pointed to the OVO Women’s Tour, a five-day, 650-kilometer women’s stage race in the United Kingdom as a model that shows the audience does exist for women’s events. VeloNews reported that the 2017 race, according to organizers, attracted 500,000 spectators and 1.4 million UK TV viewers.

At this year’s La Course, the women delivered a thrilling show with a hold-your-breath ending. After a high-speed descent from the Col de la Colombiere, Anna van der Breggen, the Dutch Olympic gold medalist who won the women’s road race at the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro, appeared to have won the race. Then, in the final 300 meters, fellow Dutchwoman Annemiek van Vleuten (who led the race in Rio before a horrific crash that knocked her out cold) began closing the gap. Just 50 meters from the finish line, van Vleuten passed van der Breggan, winning La Course by one second.

It was yet another reminder of how exciting women’s pro cycling can be. And yet, the live TV coverage in the United States was a joke wrapped in an insult and deep-fried in indignity. “Only the last kilometer was televised,” Bertine says. “In the States, the only way to see the whole race was to buy a subscription to NBC Sports Gold [a stand-alone online streaming service for $49.99. Why do we have to pay 50 bucks to see the women?”

“If we want to rise above the inequality, it’s the women who have to rise up together and say, ‘No more. This is not okay. I deserve exactly what the men have,’” she says. “Standing on that start line [in 2014] gave me the hope that yes, we have the power to effect change. You know, I’m not famous. I’m not wealthy. I’m not an Olympic medalist. But if I helped make this happen, then we all have the power to make change happen.”

The Democratic candidate and son of the Burt’s Bees founder is seeking a win in Maine’s rural 2nd District with a simple message: The recreation economy can bring back jobs

When Lucas St. Clair woke up at Lunksoos Camp, on the East Branch of the Penobscot, and discovered that Ryan Zinke’s staff had TPed his tent, he knew his plan was working. It was a chilly June morning in 2017, the end of the Secretary of the Interior’s visit to Maine’s Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument, one of 27 that President Trump was considering dismantling. Zinke had been met with vociferous protests at monuments like Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante in May 2017. St. Clair decided to take a different approach to protect the 87,500-acre monument he had worked for five years to create out of land purchased by his mother, Burt’s Bees founder and philanthropist Roxanne Quimby.

He encouraged supporters to show up at the airport with welcome signs and to be seen hiking, biking, and even plein-air painting in the monument when Zinke visited. The 40-year-old St. Clair personally toured the secretary through Katahdin Woods and Waters: fishing his favorite stream, canoeing the East Branch of the Penobscot, and camping at the Lunksoos Camps. The charm offensive seemed to work—Zinke’s staff pranked the affable St. Clair by wrapping his backpacking tent in toilet paper, and the secretary told the press, “From what I hear, I think all sides love the land, everyone appreciates public access, and everyone appreciates that jobs matter. And who cannot say this is a beautiful site.” When the secretary’s review appeared in December, Grand Staircase-Escalante was cut in half and Bears Ears was shrunk by two-thirds; Katahdin Woods and Waters was left unmolested. “I knew we had to appeal to his ego,” St. Clair says.

The saga of Katahdin Woods and Waters has been widely told. Quimby began purchasing the timberlands just east of the Appalachian Trail’s northern terminus on Mount Katahdin almost two decades earlier, but she encountered stiff opposition from locals to her plan to turn the property into a national park. Many saw that as a threat to the region’s traditional logging and paper-milling industries, as well as an emblem of federal government overreach. Worse, Quimby’s approach was uncompromising and tone deaf—more grassfire than grassroots. “Ban Roxanne” stickers were pasted onto bumpers across Maine’s northern “woodbasket” region.

In 2011, Quimby passed the baton to St. Clair, one of her twin children. (His sister, Hannah, is director of the Quimby Family Foundation.) Over the next five years, in an effort to reverse public opinion, he met with a majority of the 10,000 or so residents of the towns surrounding the proposed monument. He met a grocery store owner in the walk-in cooler because the owner didn’t want to be seen talking to St. Clair. When people insulted his family or the proposed monument on Facebook, St. Clair knocked on their doors and asked to have a face-to-face discussion instead. His approach, which he calls the “happy warrior,” is based on projecting warmth, open-minded listening, and, he says, “fighting for what I feel is right while remaining optimistic that we can both get what we want.” The message was almost always that the new monument could revitalize the economy of the region, which was struggling with the paper industry’s collapse.

It worked. By August 2016, President Obama felt there was enough local support to designate Katahdin Woods and Waters a national monument. That consensus was strong enough to withstand Trump’s work to pare public lands, but it is almost completely absent from national political conversations.

St. Clair thinks he has a solution to that as well: He’s now running for Maine’s solidly purple, almost entirely rural 2nd Congressional District, which includes the monument. If he wins the June 12 primary, St. Clair will face Republican incumbent Bruce Poliquin, a fierce monument opponent. With the economic power of outdoor recreation at the core of St. Clair’s campaign, his candidacy is a test of whether the business of the outdoors really can unite our country’s bitter partisan divides.

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It’s a clear March Sunday in Farmington, Maine, and St. Clair is greeting guests at the first of the day’s three campaign events. About 30 people have appeared at an afternoon house party in the slanting, book-filled 1857 farmhouse of O. Henry Prize–winning writer Bill Roorbach. The guests removing their shoes at the front door include several college professors and the mother of Olympic gold-medalist snowboarder Seth Wescott. St. Clair, in socks, stands next to a large woodstove. He is tall—six foot five—with thick dark hair and a trim black beard and is wearing a shawl-collared fisherman’s sweater.

“I grew up in Dover-Foxcroft,” he says, a Maine town practically in the middle of the state. “My parents were back-to-the-landers who had $5,000 in savings and wanted to buy 30 acres,” St. Clair tells the crowd “Maine was the only place you could do that.” That was 1974, and his parents spent several years clearing their property and building a saltbox house with hand tools. Lucas and Hannah were born in 1978 and raised in that house, without running water or electricity. “My mother describes her parenting style as ‘benign neglect,’” he says, to laughs. “It was a magical way to grow up, playing in the woods from dawn to dusk, using our imaginations, and lighting a kerosene lamp to read.”

In variations of the stump speech I saw him give five times over two days, he always starts with the story of his austere northern Maine childhood—the family was on food stamps for a few years in the 1980s—in order to combat his opponents chief critique that he is a rich pretty boy “from away,” as they say in Maine.

As St. Clair continues his speech, he talks about how the twins’ parents split up in 1983. “A year later,” he says, “my mother was hitchhiking home from her job as a waitress at the Dexter Motor Lodge when she was picked up by a beekeeper named Burt, who gave her some honey and beeswax. She used the wax to make stove polish and candles and eventually hit on the idea of lip balm. The rest, as they say, is history.” That history: Quimby grew the company over the next 23 years and in 2007 sold it to Clorox for $913 million.

By then, St. Clair had hiked the Appalachian Trail, taken a NOLS semester course in Patagonia, attended culinary school in London, owned a restaurant in Maine, and ridden his motorcycle to Seattle to woo his now-wife, Yemaya, whom he’d met during the NOLS semester. The couple started a family in Washington, and St. Clair worked as a fly-fishing guide and sommelier before deciding to move back to Maine to take over the foundering Katahdin Woods and Waters campaign.

What worked in that campaign—and what he’s banking on in this one—is that St. Clair is warm and funny in front of crowds, even as he takes on serious issues. On gun control questions: “I’m a duck hunter, and by law I’m only allowed three shells in my gun,” he says. “That’s a gun control law we’ve been living with for years. So why do we allow people to put 45 high-caliber bullets into a semi-automatic weapon? Are we prioritizing the lives of ducks over our children?”

It’s not charisma or wit that will get him elected in Maine, though—it’s a focus on jobs and the economy. Northern Maine is Trump country—he won the 2nd District by 11 points, elected by those most impacted by the decline of shoe, textile, and paper manufacturing jobs. Once an employer of 5,000 people, East Millinocket’s Great Northern Paper Company closed in 2008; by 2014, the population had plunged 42 percent. Parts of the district have had unemployment rates pushing 20 percent.

St. Clair’s solution, and the heart of his stump speech, is business innovation based on Maine’s strengths, much like his mother’s success in building a small Maine agricultural business into an international brand. “Maine’s natural beauty is a powerful, renewable resource,” he says. Upon taking over the monument campaign in 2011, one of St. Clair’s first actions was commissioning an economic analysis to prove that donating the land to the park service could revitalize the region’s faltering economy. That analysis, by Headwaters Economics of Bozeman, Montana, found that Katahdin Woods and Waters could create as many as 450 jobs and spur “new travel and tourism activity; the ability to attract people, retirees, and businesses across a range of sectors; economic growth including higher-wage jobs; and increases in non-labor sources of income.”

In just two years, that prediction is already proving true. Hotel bookings are up. Long-slumping real estate sales have risen 30 percent for two years running. New businesses are opening, including two guide services, Millinocket’s Turn the Page bookstore and wine bar, and the Design Lab, a four-person marketing firm that opened in 2015 in a former Oddfellows Hall. St. Clair likes to say that the outdoor recreation economy isn’t just “making burritos and renting bicycles; it’s attracting high-end businesses whose employees want to live in Northern Maine for the outdoor recreation lifestyle. Design Lab moved to the northwoods even though Maine has the 49th slowest internet in the country.” Everyone in the room nods.

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The most pressing topic for primary voters, however, is how he plans to beat current officeholder Bruce Poliquin. Reelected in 2016, Poliquin is the only Republican congressman in New England and a stepping-stone in the Democrats’ quest to take control of the House this fall. Polls show St. Clair in a neck-and-neck race for the June 12 primary with Jared Golden, a state representative and Marine Corps veteran of the gritty sort the Democratic Party has been grooming to recapture voters who flipped from Obama to Trump in the last election. If there’s any edge in the race, it’s that the Bangor Daily News, the region’s largest newspaper, last week endorsed St. Clair based on his work on the monument.

“We ran the monument campaign directly at Bruce Poliquin, and we won,” St. Clair tells 100 people assembled in a school lunchroom for the Franklin County Democrats’ monthly meeting. “Most of our campaign staff worked on that initiative. We know his vulnerabilities. We know his staff. We know how he behaves. We know how to beat him.”

Poliquin, along with senators Olympia Snow and Susan Collins, opposed Katahdin Woods and Waters, as did Maine’s bombastic Tea Party governor Paul LePage, who still wants to rescind it. Only Chellie Pingree, the Democrat representing Maine’s more urban, coastal 1st District, supported the plan. Mike Michaud, a former Great Northern Paper Company worker and Democrat who represented the 2nd District before Poliquin, also opposed it—at least he did at first. “After listening to Lucas, I said that I wanted to see an economic analysis to see what kind of impact a monument might have.” When he did, Michaud was convinced.

It’s those conversations that St. Clair is banking on—even if they’re not always pretty. Upon purchasing the land she intended to donate to the park service, one of Quimby’s first acts was to close it to uses the paper companies had always allowed but were incongruent to her idea of a national park: hunting, snowmobiling, and leases on vacation cottages. Quimby evicted people from cottages that had been in their family for decades, and then burned them down. One cottage belonged to Peter Ellis’ father. St. Clair traveled to meet Peter and his brother John in the family market’s walk-in cooler. It was one of hundreds of meetings he scheduled with people living near the proposed park.

“If someone is close enough to drive their finger into your chest, they are close enough to have a conversation,” St. Clair says of those meetings. Of the dozens of people I interviewed for this story, every one of them pointed out St. Clair’s remarkable unflappability and eagerness to communicate even with angry opponents. “I always try to focus on the 80 percent we agree on,” he says.

It’s a trait St. Clair has had since he was a boy. “Lucas was always an optimist,” Quimby says. “I ask him if criticism from opponents bothers him. He says, ‘No, they just don’t know me yet. If they knew me, they’d have a different opinion.’”

St. Clair convinced his mother to reinstate hunting and snowmobiling on half the land. “That was the turning point for me and a lot of people,” Peter Ellis says. “After a lot of discussion, I felt like I could trust that the park would do right by locals.” Eventually, when Zinke showed up, the Millinocket Chamber of Commerce wrote a letter in support. St. Clair’s campaign rallied supporters to show the interior secretary how much the monument was wanted. Even Congressman Michaud, the former East Millinocket mill worker, came around. “Lucas did a great job addressing people’s concerns. I’m glad it was designated a monument.”

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On my last day on the campaign trail with St. Clair, I witness the happy warrior in person. It’s the second-to-last stop of this three-day, ten-stop swing: a visit to a popsicle stick and medical swab factory in Guilford. What St. Clair and his field manager expected would be a standard hard-hat tour of the factory floor turned into a formal, and tense, audience with the company’s CFO, president, and co-owner of the 100-year-old business.

When we arrive, we are ushered into the conference room to talk to company CFO Scott Wellman, who is as tall as Lucas but with a shaven head. Wearing a white button-down shirt, Wellman gives us a quick rundown of the company and its problems: finding people to work (“People come in for two weeks, and then they quit”), electricity (which is exorbitantly expensive), and locating supplies of birch trees for the popsicle sticks (a byproduct of logging evergreens for paper and lumber—a sputtering industry in Maine, as St. Clair well knows). “We wanted to know where you stand on things,” Wellman says.

“Power isn’t going to get cheaper,” St. Clair says. “There will be a carbon tax in my lifetime—it’s happening in Canada; it’s happening in the European Union. We have to stay ahead of the curve and invest in things like wind, solar, and biomass generators.”

Then James Cartwright, the company co-owner, brings up the new monument. “I’m 62 years old. I’ve seen every damn tree in the state,” he says. “If you were going to pick 100,000 acres in Maine to make a park, that’s the last goddamn place I’d pick. The only thing up there is eight-inch-wide spruce trees.”

Suddenly, St. Clair is grinning. It’s the same argument Governor LePage had used when asking for the monument to be rescinded, telling a congressional committee that tourists would never visit the monument, which was in “the mosquito area.”

“You should come up there with me sometime,” St. Clair says, smiling. “Wassataquoik Stream is the most remote stream in the state, beautiful, with granite substrate. There are 7,000 acres of silver maple spanning the river.”

“If it was on the coastline somewhere, it could have been so much better for business,” Cartwright says. “Look at all the shops and hotels around Acadia [National Park.]”

“I think it’ll come,” says St. Clair, hitting his stride. “In 2016, 700 people drive Loop Road. In 2017, after monument status, 30,000 people drove it.” He describes how four new businesses have opened, and how, already, real estate sales and prices have risen and bookings are up at area hotels. “The folks at Shin Pond Village didn’t like me at all,” St. Clair says, referring to a hotel catering to snowmobilers. “We figured out a path forward together, and now they are big fans of the monument. And I’m big fans of theirs because they were willing to take the time and have open and honest conversations.”

Cartwright nods and says, “Right,” his demeanor softening.

“At the end of the day, a lot of this is about trust,” St. Clair says. “I want people to think I’m an honest broker. I’m sure there are things we disagree on.”

“What gave you that impression?” Wellman says, and everyone laughs, the tension gone. “Whoever is representing the 2nd District, we want to be able to call them,” he says. “It sounds like you’d be the same way.”

St. Clair is late for his next appearance and hustles to the car. “That was great,” he tells me, a swagger in his step. “It doesn’t get much more fun than that.”