Month: March 2019

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On a late-summer morning, two surfers pull off their wetsuits in a parking lot in Portage, Indiana, a massive U.S. Steel finishing facility as their backdrop. The beach, managed by Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, is home to one of the best surf spots on Lake Michigan’s south end.

Peter Matushek and Steve Haluska, Indiana natives who both took up surfing a decade ago, have just come in from the water and lean against Matushek’s black Mazda, a South End Surf Club bumper sticker on the tailgate. They’re part of a small but dedicated band of Lake Michigan surfers who endure freezing winter temperatures, unpredictable conditions, and the occasional illness.

Roughly three years ago, Matushek got a kidney infection that kept him in the hospital for weeks. His medical history also includes multiple urinary tract infections. “It only started when I started surfing,” he says. Still, he tries to get out on the water whenever his schedule as a high school math teacher allows.

Other local surfers have also seen an uptick in ailments. Mike Calabro had a rash that took weeks to heal, as well as eye, ear, and throat infections. Timothy Driscoll had skin rashes and eye infections. Many of them think they know where their health problems are coming from.

In April 2017, the U.S. Steel plant released nearly 300 pounds of hexavalent chromium, a chemical coating used to make stainless steel last longer. The chemical, which is the same carcinogen famously brought to light by Erin Brockovich, can cause stomach cancer and skin irritations. After the spill, a blue plume spread from Burns Ditch, a narrow waterway next to the Portage beach, into Lake Michigan. Beaches closed. Regulators shut down one of the lake’s drinking water intakes 20 miles away as a precaution. The spill wasn’t the company’s first or last. U.S. Steel released another 56 pounds the following October, this time asking state regulators to keep the incident quiet.

Matushek and Haluska, as well as a number of other Lake Michigan surfers, are now part of a lawsuit against U.S. Steel for violating the Clean Water Act. Under its pollution discharge permit, the company can release only 0.51 pounds of hexavalent chromium a day. “They just take advantage of the region,” Matushek says. “I hope it makes them change. We want them to fix what they’re doing wrong.” (U.S. Steel did not respond to requests for comment.)

When U.S. Steel spilled the dangerous pollutant in April 2017, the Chicago chapter of the Surfrider Foundation was already mapping pollution sources in the lake, an effort prompted by Judith Miller, a surfer and a law professor at the University of Chicago. Miller, who was considering having a baby at the time, wanted to know what she might be exposed to when she went surfing. “I’m not against business or industry by any means, but the idea that I’m getting in the water right next to these various facilities, and I didn’t know what the water quality was and whether they were polluting, that made me feel unsafe,” she says. Miller approached Mitch McNeil, chair of Surfrider’s Chicago chapter, one day after surfing and connected him with her co-workers.

Surfrider, represented by the AELC, filed its suit last November. The city of Chicago signed on a week after. The Department of Justice fined U.S. Steel just $900,000, a pittance compared to what it could have levied on the company, says Rob Weinstock, the lawyer at the AELC representing Surfrider.

The Justice Department also got to work on a consent decree, a legal agreement between the federal government and U.S. Steel that would require the company to improve its facility and monitoring systems in order to detect a potential spill earlier and comply with the Clean Water Act. In April, the agency published a draft and received more than 2,700 letters during the comment period. But the information U.S. Steel provided on how it would prevent future spills was inadequate, the EPA and the Indiana Department of Environmental Management said. The Justice Department is reviewing the public comments and hasn’t published a revised agreement.

Meanwhile, a judge put Surfrider’s and Chicago’s lawsuit on hold until the consent decree is finalized. Even if the federal government and U.S. Steel reach an agreement, however, it won’t address all the issues at the plant, the lawyers say. On September 13, clinic attorneys Mark Templeton and Rob Weinstock asked a judge to impose stricter financial penalties, and Surfrider is prepared to resume its lawsuit.

“Big, old-school environmental problems of big companies dumping poison into public waterways, that’s not over,” Weinstock says.“If we allow our regulatory agencies to be underfunded, captured by industry, or made into political pawns, we are jeopardizing our public health and safety.”

And even though some surfers take a chance on the water, others won’t. Miller hasn’t been back to the Portage beach since she found out she was pregnant nearly two years ago. She seeks out other places on the lake to surf but is still disappointed by the lack of information on what she could be exposed to. “It’s kind of devastating,” Miller says. “When you put it all together, how dangerous is it? How much of a risk would I be taking?”

Four years of race data from a professional cycling team unveils some differences between the sexes

Sure, with a total distance of 2,081 miles in 23 days, including 26 major mountain climbs and a longest stage of 144 miles, last month’s Tour de France looked fairly grueling. But did you realize that for roughly 25 percent of the race time, the cyclists weren’t even pedaling? In a month-long Tour, that’s like a week of paid vacation. That’s just one of the details that emerges from a detailed analysis of four years of race data from a professional cycling team, recently published in the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance. And there’s plenty more.

The study was led by Dajo Sanders, a sports scientist at Stirling University in Scotland, and Teun van Erp, the head of scientific research for the Germany-based Team Sunweb, and delves into race data for 20 men and 10 women, all top-level professional cyclists with “a current World Tour professional cycling team.” While the article doesn’t identify this team, I think we can safely assume that it was Team Sunweb, whose top rider, Tom Dumoulin, finished second in this year’s Tour de France, and which also has one of the top women’s squads in the world.

Pro cyclists, needless to say, spend a lot of time cycling, typically covering about 15,000 to 22,000 miles a year for men, and 8,000 to 11,000 miles for women, according to the researchers. A lot of that time is spent racing: up to 100 days a year for men and 65 days a year for women. For most of those racing days, the team’s science crew collected three complementary pieces of data: heart rate, which gives a sense of physiological strain; power output, which gives an impartial reading how hard the rider is pedaling; and perceived exertion, which gives a subjective take on how hard the race was.

In total, over a four-year period, the team collected data on 3,640 days of racing by the 30 riders in the study. The aggregated results give some sense of what’s required to race a bike at the top professional level, which is certainly interesting. But the real goal of the study was to compare the men’s and women’s data, to get a sense of whether the demands of the men’s and women’s tours are sufficiently different that the riders should train differently.

Some basic background info: the average distance of a race day for the men was 114 miles, which took four hours and 45 minutes; for women it was 72 miles, which took three hours and 14 minutes. This combines multi-day stage races and one-day races into one big data set. The men sustained a slightly higher average power, at 3.0 watts per kilogram versus 2.8 for the women. The amount of time spent in different 0.75-watt power zones was roughly similar in men and women—with the largest amount of time, as I noted at the top, spent between 0 and 0.75 watts, corresponding to no pedaling.

But the most surprising difference was in heart rate. The women sustained an average heart rate of 152, which corresponded to 79 percent of their maximum heart rate. The men, on the other hand, sustained an average of just 133, which was 69 percent of their max. (For the record, the average max for women was 185, compared to 180 for men. But the calculations of average heart rate percentages aren’t simple, because not all riders raced the same amount.)

If you divide heart rate into five zones (above 50, 60, 70, 80, and 90 percent of max), here’s what the respective distributions look like:

It’s clear that women are spending substantially more time in zones four and five, the highest intensity zones. On the surface, this is very easy to understand. Their races are only 63 percent as far, so they’re able to ride at a higher intensity for this shorter amount of time. Interestingly, when you look at perceived exertion, which is assessed on a subjective scale that runs from 6 to 20, both men and women had an average rating of 15.4. This suggests that the intensity of women’s races is higher by exactly the amount needed to balance the shorter distance—which makes sense if you believe that we ultimately judge our limits based on perceived effort.

One of the shortcomings of the study, the authors acknowledge, is that their heart rate zones are based on arbitrary percentages of maximum heart rate. You’d get more meaningful training zones by dividing your training based on time spent above or below actual physiological cutpoints like the lactate or ventilatory thresholds. Is it possible that women, on average, have thresholds at different heart rate percentages? In a quick glance at the literature, I wasn’t able to figure out if there’s a consensus on this, particularly among well-trained athletes. Or to put it another way, if you ask men and women to exercise at, say, 85 percent of maximum heart rate and then rate their perceived exertion, will both groups give roughly the same answer?

Having a great dataset like this is the first step to answering some of these questions about potential differences between men and women. If you’re a female cyclist, don’t be surprised if your heart rate during races is higher than what male cyclists report. It’s possible, the researchers suggest, that women should train differently than men, incorporating more high intensity interval training to prepare for racing at higher intensities. It’s also possible (and this is me just spitballing here) that women’s races should be the same length as men’s races. But that’s a whole different discussion.

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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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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.

If you like to put your money where your morals are, United By Blue is a great place to shop. United By Blue fishes a pound of garbage out of oceans and rivers for every item it sells. Right now, REI has a bunch of United By Blue gear on sale—most of it 50 percent off.

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Paired with some slacks, the Primrose can easily be dressed up, but the relaxed, sleeveless fit makes it great for lounging in as well. The organic cotton and Tencel blend is to-die-for soft.

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The Cartwright pants pair casual comfort with weather protection, thanks to their DWR treatment that will repel light sprays and rain. And, of course, they’ve got a little stretch. 

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It seems that every day there are more natural—and unnatural—disasters to be worried about. Whether the threat is nuclear war or rising sea levels, creating a proper bug-out bag can give you peace of mind. We combed through Adventure Frog, an online retailer that specializes in survival gear, and put together the ultimate bug-out bag for just $240.

To save on space in your bag, look for tools that have multiple uses, like this shovel. A unique design lets you attach the handle to different tools, including a hacking blade, bottle opener, saw, ax, pickax, and nail puller. 

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Made out of a reflective polyester film, this bivy sleeping bag is bright orange to help rescuers find you. Use this alone or inside a sleeping bag to boost the temperature rating by 20 degrees. 

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This three-season tent is great as a backup shelter or even for a lightweight through-hike option. Weighing just 2.9 pounds, the tent is fully waterproof and packs down small enough to store in a backpack.

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This 3.8-ounce backpacking stove is incredibly easy to use—simply unfold it, insert a fuel tablet, light it up, and then place your cooking pot on top. You’ll have a hot meal in no time and you won’t have to carry the weight of traditional stove fuel. 

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This kit will help you start a fire, no matter the conditions. A waterproof case holds the magnesium slab, a compass, a 150-decibel whistle, gel fire starter, 20 weatherproof matches, and a tin of tinder.

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Invest in these USB-rechargeable AA batteries, which can be recharged up to 500 times. Simply plug their USB ends into your computer, solar panel, or wall outlet, and pop them into your electronic device once they’re done charging.

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This collapsible lantern packs down small enough to fit in your pocket or store easily in your bag. Using the integrated solar panels and USB ports, you can charge the lantern and any electronic device.

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This electric hand warmer gives off between 104 and 140 degrees Fahrenheit of heat depending on which setting it’s on. It also doubles as an external battery pack to power your devices.

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Chaco sandals are our favorite shoes for everything from boating and fishing to everyday summer wear. Right now, REI has tons of styles on sale—men’s, women’s, and kids’—and most of them are 50 percent off. 

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In her adventure memoir, Kate Harris offers a fresh new voice on what it means to be an explorer in the 21st century

Kate Harris is at the controls of a Cessna 172, flying above the Yukon’s frozen Lake Laberge on a bluebird late-winter day. Her instructor, Jessica, is in the copilot’s seat, ready to take charge if need be. Harris is learning to execute steep turns, and as she practices the sharp 45-degree maneuvers, I watch the horizon twist itself into a near vertical line from the back of the plane. “Now pull, hold that nose up,” Jessica says. “Keep that bank angle, a little more bank.”

Harris, 36, is the author of the thoughtful and compelling new memoir Lands of Lost Borders ($25, Dey Street), and she’s no stranger to adrenaline-inducing adventure. The book, out in the U.S. on August 21, is already a bestseller in Canada, and it tells the story of a 14-month-long cycling trip Harris took tracing the Silk Road with her childhood best friend. But it’s also about much more: the seemingly arbitrary ways that history, geography, and politics can throw up borders between us, and what it means to be an explorer in the modern era. She moves beyond the old definitions, so closely tied to conquest and colonialism, and presents exploration as a way of seeing the world. “We long our whole lives for things we’ve never known, places we’ve never been, abstractions that come alive to us in unexpected ways,” Harris writes. “Perhaps the great task of modern explorers is not to conquer but to connect, to reveal how any given thing leads to another.”

Harris grew up in rural Ontario, playing outside and plowing through books about the men and women who forged paths through the world’s remote places. Her dream to become an astronaut-scientist took her to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, then to Oxford and MIT. It also sent her to a Mars simulation in the red dust of Utah and, once disillusionment with laboratory life chased her from academia, led her down the Silk Road by bicycle. Her recollection of that journey is beautifully written, a vivid conjuring of landscapes most readers have never seen. Of Marco Polo, her predecessor on the Silk Road, she writes: “All [he] did was travel to lands new to him but old to others and write about what he saw. Could it be so simple? The idea gave me strange hope.”

Hope is the right word. Lands of Lost Borders is fundamentally optimistic and uplifting, and Harris is funny and generous. So many adventure memoirs detail seemingly superhuman feats of endurance that are off-limits to most mortals. Harris, instead, suggests that anyone can become an explorer simply by taking a long walk—or a bike ride—and paying close attention to the world as it passes by. Her enthusiasm is contagious.

Those flying lessons were another form of exploration. When her hour was up on that day back in March, Harris set us down gently on the runway at the Whitehorse airport, a couple hours north of the off-grid cabin where she lives—reading voraciously as she did as a child and plotting her next adventures. Safe on the ground, she broke her silent focus with an exclamation: “I don’t want to stop!” I felt the same way when I turned the last page of her book.

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Erin Parisi’s trek up Mount Kilimanjaro last March wasn’t easy. Recovering from food poisoning and contending with almost continuous rainfall and the aches and fatigue that accompany six days of climbing, she tried to maintain a positive attitude as she sat in her tent at Barafu camp, approximately 15,358 feet above sea level and 36 hours from the summit.

After all, she had done it before. But the first time Parisi ascended the 19,340-foot peak, in 2011, her name was Aron.

In 2016, at age 39, after living as a man her whole life, Parisi came out to the world as a woman, went through a complicated divorce, and underwent facial feminization surgery and larynx reconstruction, the latter of which left her mute for a month.It was during her month of silence, buoyed by the support she received from her family and community, that the Denver resident set herself a new goal. Parisi wanted to complete the Seven Summits, climbing the highest peak on every continent.

Parisi had done her fair share of mountaineering before her transition, summiting fourteeners in Colorado and making winter ascents in Canada. “I don’t consider myself a technical route bagger,” she says. “Being in the mountains is more important to me than keeping a list.”

In March 2018, Parisi also started a nonprofit, TranSending 7, to advance transgender rights and encourage other transgender people in sports. “It’s important for us to show that we have the same goals and aspirations that we had before,” says Emma Shinn, the board chair of TranSending who is also a lawyer, a former infantry leader and judge advocate in the Marine Corps, and a transgender woman.“We may look different, we may sound different, but we’re still the same people underneath.”

The organization will also help fund future summit attempts for Parisi, who works at CenturyLink and has so far self-funded her trips. She summited her first peak in February 2018: the 7,319-foot Mount Kosciuszko, Australia’s highest point. She topped out on Kilimanjaro on March 8, International Women’s Day. In June, Parisi stood atop Europe’s highest peak, the 18,510-foot Mount Elbrus.

Since 1983, when American Dick Bass conceived of the idea, hundreds of people have undertaken the quest for the Seven Summits. According to the most recent list, published in 2016, 416 people have succeeded; of those, 71 have been women. It’s hard to say with 100 percent certainty that Parisi will be the first transgender person to complete the Seven Summits, butit is likely. “One factor that makes my push unique is I am pursuing the Seven Summits under the IOC guidelines for a trans athlete to compete in the female category,” Parisi says. “This means I’ve suppressed testosterone and documented those levels for a year. At these levels, the IOC has determined I have no athletic advantage for being pronounced male at birth.”

When Parisi underwent her transition, some people asked if she would still be able to do what she loved—traveling and climbing—now that she’s out as a woman. “Oftentimes, cisgender friends feel like they didn’t really know you, because you had this identity that wasn’t really public,” Shinn says. “People ascribe all of these gender norms immediately to youand say, ‘Well, girls don’t like hiking or backpacking.’ Those gender norms are part of what we’re fighting against. Not just ‘women can be climbers,’ but ‘trans women can be climbers.’”

Parisi had apprehensions when she returned to Kilimanjaro in March. Tanzania is not friendly to the LGBTQ community, and she was worried about being discovered.In a twist of fate, she ended up trekking with the same tour leader and cook who had accompanied her up Kilimanjaro seven years earlier—but they didn’t recognize her. Parisi’s summit attempt was an even more emotional journey than anticipated, but at the top, she gleefully unrolled her TranSending7 banner and took photos.

“It takes a special person to bite off a task like this,” says Kim Hess, an American who completed the Seven Summits in February 2018. “[Parisi is] taking on physical, mental, and financial challenges, but she’s also walking a life that not everyone accepts or understands, and that’s unnerving.”

Parisi underwent surgery again on her larynx in September; the first procedure didn’t work due to complications during recovery. After another month of silence, she’ll spend the next 100 days training and preparing for her next peak, Argentina’s 22,837-foot Aconcagua, in February 2019. From there, she’s shooting for Denali in May or June 2019, Mount Vinson during the Antarctic summer (November through February), and Mount Everest in 2020.

Parisi believes that mountaineering—the quest to summit the highest peaks—allows society to, quite literally, lift itself up. She hopes that her Seven Summits bid will do the same for the transgender population.

“You can’t accuse me of hiding if I’m standing on the top mountain of every continent saying, ‘Here I am,’” she says. “For a population that has, to some extent, been pushed into the shadows, going to the place where there is nothing to cast a shadow on you and saying ‘I’m here, and I’m proud to be here,’ that’s the message I want to send out.”

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Nowhere does consumer perception lag further behind on-the-ground reality than in the car world. And that’s a problem, because your outdated beliefs, loyalties, and superstitions are probably costing you money and compromising your safety. 

We discussed just that last year, when I told you that running winter tires matters way more than buying an all-wheel drive car. But that article had one major flaw: I neglected to explain why studded tires are so vastly inferior to the modern studless alternative. And readers have since indicated that they are actually running studded tires in conditions that don’t merit them. This is my attempt to fix that. 

If you don’t read any further, the fact that studs only provide additional grip on clear ice is probably the most important takeaway I can give you. Studs themselves are small, sharp metal protrusions installed into the tread of a tire. Because they get between the rubber and whatever surface you’re driving across, they need to be able to poke into that surface and momentarily stick there, resisting lateral forces, in order to provide grip. 

Picture other winter surfaces: in packed, loose, or deep snow, the studs will definitely penetrate, but they won’t find the resistance necessary to actually add grip. In slushy or wet conditions or on bare pavement, the tire needs to come into contact with the road surface in order to find traction—and the metal studs actually get in the way of that. 

So studs help on bare ice only, do nothing for you in snow, and actually make you less safe in other conditions. 

For last year's article on all-wheel-drive versus better tires, I interviewed Woody Rogers, the head of Tire Rack’s testing team. Because Tire Rack is the largest online tire retailer, Rogers tests virtually all makes and models of tires and his job is to be as objective as possible. Tire Rack doesn’t care about selling you a specific tire; they care about selling you the best tire for your needs. “Drivers can’t dictate the surfaces they drive on,” he told me. “They just need a tire that works across all the hazardous conditions they face in winter months.” And that’s not studs. 

Back in 2001, Washington State conducted an exhaustive study into the performance of studded tires. One of its most interesting conclusions was that, while studs do grip clear ice very well, they only do so under a very specific set of circumstances."Studs are most effective on ice at or near 32 degrees F and lose their efficacy as temperatures drop and the ice becomes too hard for the studs to grip or when temperatures rise and ice melts to slush or wet pavement,” the study reads. The minimum effective temperature for studs? Zero degrees Fahrenheit, according to the study. 

And that’s a huge problem, because bare ice in those temperature ranges where studs help only exists on roadways for a very small amount of time. In Washington, the study found that conditions where studs work only exist one percent of the time. In Alaska, those conditions occurred just six percent of the time during winter months. In Connecticut, that number is just half a percent. In Ontario, bare ice between zero and 32 degrees accounts for less than two percent of vehicle miles traveled. 

Go back to Rogers’s quote above, and you’ll see why having a tire that only works as advertised in such specific, rare circumstances will be problematic. I called him back up for help with this article. “There is absolutely a time and place where a studded tire is a superior solution,” he tells me. “But I don’t know a place in the U.S. where conditions merit studs all winter. So, you have to consider managing the tradeoffs.”

Tiny metal spikes don’t grip pavement as well as soft, pliable rubber. So, by getting between the rubber and the road, studs actually reduce grip, and therefor safety, in slushy, wet, or dry conditions. 

A study conducted in Alaska in 1994, soon after the advent of modern studless winter tires, compared the braking, acceleration, and cornering performance of studded, studless winter, and all-season tires across packed snow, clear ice, and bare pavement. Studded tires demonstrated some advantage in braking and acceleration on bare ice, were actually out-cornered by studless winter tires, and were demonstrated to reduce grip in all tests on bare pavement. Consider the small fraction of the time in which conditions merit studs and you can see that you are sacrificing grip—and, again, safety—throughout most of the winter. 

And that's assuming your studs are in good condition. “Think about how much of your driving here in the U.S. is spent on non-snowpack roads,” says Rogers. “And that is wearing at the studs, blunting the sharpness of them, and wearing them down. That takes away some of the traction advantage.” 

How much grip is lost as studs wear? “When stud protrusion diminishes to 0.024 in. (0.6 mm), the frictional effect from the studs becomes negligible,” concludes the Washington study. It found that after just 1,000 miles of driving on bare pavement, the braking distance of studded tires increased by 12 percent. 

Studs aren’t the only things that wear when they’re driven on bare pavement. The road surface itself is also torn to pieces. By damaging pavement so significantly, studs actually create a significant amount of pollution, throwing microscopic asphalt and concrete particles into the air. In Japan, concerns about this type of pollution led to the development of moderns studless winter tires in the early 1990s. Studs are now banned in that (very snowy) country. 

“And then there’s the noise,” says Rogers. “The noise is crazy. I still remember the first time we drove on studded tires as part of a test here, I was in a caravan with other cars, and we had a studded car and a studless car. I was an eighth of a mile behind the studded car, and even with the windows up, I could here the noise from the tires of the car ahead of me.”

All that for a small advantage in one specific circumstance that only accounts for a tiny fraction of the miles you’ll log during the winter? 

Back in the 2000s, when it was my job to test new cars, I once crashed a Corvette into a bank of frozen snow way up in northern Sweden. Why? Well, because I’m an idiot, obviously. But part of the reason was also due to the unique handling characteristics of studded tires, which I failed to fully account for. 

“With a studded tire, what we’ve found particularly during braking and acceleration, is that once the tire spins, the studs cut a groove in the ice," says Rogers. "Then the next stud that comes along behind it comes right through that same groove and has nothing to grab onto.” It only takes about a quarter of a revolution for that effect to take place, and once it occurs, grip disappears instantly.  

“That leads to what you felt in the Corvette,” Rogers tells me. “Grip, grip, grip, grip, grip, then whoops—who pulled the rug out?”

Even if you’re not lapping a car around a race track carved onto a frozen lake, this lack of communication from studded tires could impair your ability to drive safely in winter conditions. Whereas studless tires lose their grip progressively, communicating to the driver that they’re nearing the limits of available grip, studded tires lose grip suddenly, without warning. You won’t know you’re driving too fast for the conditions until you end up in a ditch. 

The simple answer is that studs are an outdated technology that's no longer relevant in the vast majority of driving conditions. 

“The traction of studded tires is slightly superior to studless tires only under an ever-narrowing set of circumstances,” the Washington study concluded—way back in 2001. “With…the advent of the new studless tire, such as the Blizzak, since the early 1990s, the traction benefit for studded tires is primarily evident on clear ice near the freezing mark, a condition whose occurrence is limited. For the majority of test results reviewed for snow, and for ice at lower temperatures, studded tires performed as well as or worse than the Blizzak tire. For those conditions in which studded tires provided better traction than studless tires, the increment usually was small.”

This winter, will you drive in extreme cold? Will you drive on snow? Will you encounter bare, plowed highways? Winter driving is defined by its unpredictability. Fortunately for all of us, there is a device designed to deal with all of it: The modern studless winter tire. 

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Jackets are expensive so taking advantage of a sale is the best way to stock up your closet. Here are the best deals on the best jackets sold at REI during Cyber Week. All sales are valid through December 2. 

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Stuffed with synthetic insulation and covered in a waterproof shell, the Covert is best used for skiing and snowboarding. 

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The ThermoBall is one of our favorite insulated jackets thanks to the revolutionary synthetic filling which is hydrophobic and stay warm when wet.

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With a lightweight Gore-Tex shell and underarm vents to dump heat, this jacket is ideal for high-output hikes during all seasons. 

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A lightweight 2.5-layer shell to layer over your kit for rainy day rides. 

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Looking for an everyday rain jacket? The Essential is it. 

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Not many jackets are stylish enough to wear on the slopes and downtown. The Woodland is. 

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Lined with toasty polyester high-pile fleece lining, the Weslo is a versatile piece for cold-weather adventures.

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The Welton’s two-layer polyester is coated with a DWR finish that will keep you dry on wet excursions. Bonus points for the stylish kangaroo-style pocket in the front.

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Details like a ski pass specific pocket, adjustable powder skirt, and pit vents make this jacket ideal for skiing and snowboarding. 

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A magnitude 7.0 earthquake with an epicenter just eight miles north of Anchorage struck Alaska at 8:29 a.m. this morning. Damage is still being assessed, but local police have said it caused "major infrastructure damage across Anchorage." Photos from the scene show heavy damage to buildings and roadways. Thankfully, a tsunami warning that followed the quake has since been canceled. 

https://twitter.com/HeatherHintze/status/1068577253905203200

The quake occurred along the fault line between the Pacific and North American tectonic plates, which produced the largest earthquake in American history. The 1964 Great Alaska Earthquake measured 9.2 on the Richter scale and took 3,000 lives.

Complete reporting on today's quake is not yet available, but the U.S. Geological Survey estimates a low probability of fatalities. Still, it says there could be $100 million to $1 billion in damage. 

https://twitter.com/sarahh_mars/status/1068569322434351104

Significant aftershocks continue, including one measuring 5.8. 

https://twitter.com/ThorneSC/status/1068569351840763904

Damage to the area appears to include significant power outages, collapsed bridges and overpasses, structure fires, and sinkholes. 

https://twitter.com/MeganMazurek/status/1068567142021312512

In response to the now-canceled tsunami warning, Alaskans fled low-lying coastal areas to head inland, but their progress was frustrated by the damaged roadways. Traffic throughout the region is said to remain snarled. 

https://twitter.com/APDInfo/status/1068624427091288064

Tsunami warnings remain in effect elsewhere across the Pacific. Consult the National Tsunami Warning Center for details.