Month: March 2019

Missing winter? Here’s where to get your shred on well into July.

If you’re a dedicated skier or snowboarder, summer can feel like a long, hot wait until winter’s glorious return. Sure, you could fly to South America or Australia to find some snow, but it doesn’t have to be a slog to grab some turns during the year’s warmest months. We rounded up the best—and easiest—places to pretend it’s winter in the thick of summer.

Timberline

Mount Hood, Oregon

Timberline never really closes. This ski area on the flank of Mount Hood, an hour from Portland, Oregon, has extensive winter operations and continues to run its Palmer Express chair all summer long. Race and freestyle camps take up much of the space—Timberline is an official summer training site for the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Team—but there’s a groomed public run and terrain park in the Palmer Snowfield on the mountain’s south face. Tickets cost $71. Stay on-site at the historic Timberline Lodge (from $250), or grab a bunk or private room (from $22) at Mazama Lodge down the hill.

Hintertux

Tux, Austria

Each summer, Hintertux Glacier, Austria’s only year-round ski resort, keeps open a whopping ten lifts, two on-mountain restaurants, and plenty of steep terrain. You’ll top out at 10,600 feet, with views of the Dolomites in the distance. Lift tickets start at $27, and there’s plenty to do here besides skiing. You can swim or kayak through an ice cave, mountain bike nearly 2,000 vertical feet below the snow line, or hire a guide to climb the 11,404-foot Olperer Mountain, which towers over the Zillertal Valley. Fly into Innsbruck, 50 miles away, and book a room at the aptly named Hotel Eden (from $90), where a ski bus stops right outside.

Saint Mary’s Glacier

Arapaho National Forest, Colorado

If you’re craving snowy turns in July, you can usually score them at Saint Mary’s Glacier, an hour west of Denver, off Interstate 70, near the town of Idaho Springs. This high-elevation backcountry zone holds snow well into summer. There are no chairlifts, and backcountry knowledge is a must. You’ll be rewarded with views of Saint Mary’s Lake just below the snowfield and James Peak in the distance. It’s free to ski here; parking costs $5. There are lodging options in Idaho Springs, but we recommend booking a stay at the Forest Service’s Squaw Mountain Fire Lookout, an hour away, for $80 a night.

Beartooth Basin

Beartooth Pass, Montana

Beartooth Basin doesn’t even operate in winter. This summer-only ski area, located outside Red Lodge, Montana, on the Beartooth Highway, opens every year around Memorial Day with a raucous party. This year, it’ll close down on July 8. There’s no lodge, and you’ll buy your $45 lift ticket from an old bus. Two Poma lifts powered by a biodiesel generator bring skiers to the Twin Lakes Headwall for 600 acres of above-tree-line bowl skiing, including cornices to huck and rails to slide. The terrain is steep enough to host freeskiing competitions each summer. Bring a grill to tailgate in the parking lot, and grab a beer afterward at the Red Lodge Ales Brewing Company.

Blackcomb Mountain

Whistler, British Columbia

You can grab some of North America’s coolest T-bar-accessed glacier skiing until July 15 at Blackcomb Mountain’s Horstman Glacier. In midsummer, it’s mostly kids and teens here for summer camp, but there is one public lane with jumps and rails, plus a groomed slope. Lift tickets cost $51, and don’t miss the outdoor barbecue at the mountaintop Horstman Hut. You can make it a multisport weekend by riding Whistler Bike Park, lower on the mountain, before or after you ski. Stay at Aava Whistler (from $114), located a short walk from the gondola, and you’ll get a free bike rental and a tasty breakfast spread.

Antinutrients are the buzzy new word in nutrition, but they’re not quite what their name would imply

Antinutrients—compounds found in otherwise healthy foods that can inhibit your body’s ability to use good-for-you nutrients—have been generating buzz in the health and wellness world since Steven Gundry, MD, an American cardiac surgeon, came out with his book, The Plant Paradox, last year. In it, he claims that lectin, an antinutrient found in vegetables like tomatoes and peppers, is a major cause of everything from autoimmune disorders to heart disease and diabetes. Antinutrients, Gundry claims, could be “the hidden danger lurking in your salad bowl.” Since then, the frenzy has led wellness warriors to abandon once-loved tomatoes and switch from brown to white rice.

While antinutrients do play a role in the body, the research to support most of these claims is thin (if not nonexistent). If you’re eating a balanced, varied diet, antinutrients likely aren’t affecting your health—but understanding the science behind the hype will help you make informed decisions about your nutrition.

What Are Antinutrients?

Antinutrients are naturally occurring compounds in plant foods that limit the bioavailability of vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients during digestion, says Lauren Minchen, a nutritionist based in New York City. Common antinutrients include phytates and lectics (found in grains, beans, legumes, and nuts) and polyphenols (coffee, tea, and wine). Some vegetables, including eggplant, tomatoes, and peppers, also contain antinutrients. In living plants, the compounds act as a natural defense system against disease by bonding to molecules in the cell walls of invading fungi, bacteria, and pests. When we consume them, instead of binding to molecules in the cell walls, antinutrients bind to micronutrients. For example, phytates bond to carbohydrates, and lectins bond to minerals. When that happens in the gut, the body is unable to absorb those nutrients efficiently.

The Antinutrient Paradox

Despite the name, these compounds aren’t all bad. Some antinutrients function as antioxidants, which can have a positive effect on the body, preventing damage from free radicals in the environment. You can’t focus only on the disadvantages, stresses nutritionist Sharon Palmer, because other compounds in the food offer numerous benefits.

For instance, tomatoes contain high levels of lectins, which can cause stomach issues and block absorption of nutrients in the gut. Despite that, tomatoes are healthy. “Studies show people who eat more tomatoes have lower inflammation and oxidative stress levels and lower disease risks. We also know that eating tomatoes in a single meal decreases the inflammatory and oxidative stress levels immediately,” Palmer says. Similarly, an overload of phytates from grains can inhibit the availability of calcium and zinc, yet hundreds of studies show the benefits of eating whole grains. In some cases, the antinutrients themselves could actually be beneficial—polyphenols in tea, coffee, and wine, for instance, fight inflammation and support a healthy immune system.

When to Be Concerned

While antinutrients can block nutrient absorption, it would take a very specific, homogenous diet to create a real nutrient deficiency. “Athletes and active people naturally require higher levels of vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients than the average person, because their bodies need more fuel to support their activity level,” Minchen says. So, while carbo-loading is an effective way to fuel up for long days, for instance, it could actually contribute to mineral depletion if you’re doing it, say, several times a week.

This can lead to nutrient deficiencies and the associated health conditions that can come along with them, Minchen explains. Lectins have been tied to zinc deficiency, which “can lead to a decreased immune system, a greater incidence of colds and flu, and a breakdown of skin barrier,” she says. If you have nutrient deficiencies that show up in lab testing, you might consider the role of antinutrients, and people who eat a vegan or raw-food diet may be at greater risk for overconsumption.

Beyond nutrient absorption, most studies on antinutrients are done on raw foods in a laboratory setting, not within the context of a diet pattern, so we need more science to put their role in the body into perspective, Palmer says.

How to Avoid Antinutrient Overload

If you’re already eating a diverse diet, you’re likely off the hook here. If you eat mostly or entirely plant foods, it’s easy to ensure that you’re not getting too many antinutrients. Sprouted or soaked grains, beans, nuts, and seeds can help reduce phytate content. You can buy these at the store, but it’s easy to sprout and soak at home, Minchen says. (If you buy dried beans, you’re probably already doing this.)

For veggies with high antinutrient content, lightly steaming or sautéing can reduce antinutrient content, allowing for greater absorption, Minchen says. Cooking veggies can lower some nutrients, like vitamin C, so Minchen recommends a 50/50 approach: Half of your veggies should be raw, the other half cooked. Overall, if you’re eating a balanced, varied diet, you shouldn’t worry about antinutrients.

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A lot of factors add up to your name-brand synthetic down jacket’s $249 price tag.

There are the raw materials, the research and development, and the marketing, of course. But if you’re looking for a comprehensive explanation, says retail analyst Matt Powell, it comes down to a mindset. “The industry is entirely focused on the ‘pinnacle consumer,’” Powell, a vice president at the NPD Group, says. The jacket’s materials are impossibly packable yet breathable; its prototypes were tested and retested in labs and real-world conditions; maybe someone like Conrad Anker wore the thing on the face of Meru. Add it all up and you get an extremely high-quality down jacket for the cost of a car payment.

That’s what makes walking into Decathlon’s first U.S. store such a discombobulating experience.

When I entered the French outdoor retail mega-chain’s downtown San Francisco shop this fall, the first product I saw was a ten-liter backpack, with a few simple pockets and a passing glance at style. Above it, a poster announced the price in large script: just $3.49. The shock and awe pricing continued: ski poles for $8.95, wetsuits for $16.90, tents for $48.90, down jackets for $57.90. For an American raised in the cult of carbon fiber, a worshiper at the altar of brand-name gear, it was dumbfounding.

Ange Diaz, Decathlon USA’s chief financial officer, has seen this reaction before. In the two decades he’s been with the company, it has conquered markets around the world (including Mexico, Colombia, and Malaysia, most recently). America is just the latest target. Compact and well dressed for my tour of the inaugural U.S. store, Diaz reacted to my aw-shucks disbelief with Gallic bemusement.

“Some brands in America only focus on the expert sports athlete—that’s their niche,” Diaz said. “So we focus on making sport available and accessible from the beginner to the expert. We try to offer all the range of products.” The company’s tagline: Sports for All, All for Sports.

Although relatively unknown in the U.S., Decathlon is a behemoth overseas. The company has some 1,400 warehouse-size stores in 48 different countries. It sells only its own brands; no North Face or Arc’teryx here. A 700-person-strong R&D department designs products for every sport you can think of—cycling, climbing, badminton, Basque pelota—and releases, on average, a staggering 2,800 new products each year.

But despite the garage-sale prices—actual garage sale, not REI Garage Sale—Diaz recoils when I suggest that the gear is cheap. “People, when they see the product, they are amazed by the price, the value,” he says. But Decathlon, he argues, makes entirely capable gear at a price regular people can afford. “The big thing we are learning is that we have to focus on explaining the value of the product.” Clearly, it’s an approach that has resonated abroad: last year, Decathlon sold more than a billion individual items while generating over $12 billion in sales. In terms of revenue, it’s now more than likely the largest outdoor retailer in the world.

As exciting as cheap stuff is, though, Decathlon’s beachhead on our shores raises a question: With environmentally conscious buyers increasingly fetishizing gear crafted to last a lifetime and brands like Patagonia priding themselves on fair wages and ethical supply chains, is now the right time for this mass producer of cheap, fast gear to conquer America?  

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Certainly, the idea that quality gear can be had for cutout-bin prices goes against decades of retail experience for most American buyers.

Simeon Siegel, a senior retail analyst at Nomura who covers high-end sporting companies such as Nike and Under Armour, says that top-tier producers price their gear high for a reason. “That group of companies, they are technical innovators of products,” he says. “But at the same time, they are among the strongest marketers in the world.” The high-end companies, Siegel says, allocates an average of 10 to 12 percent of their revenue for marketing, while a typical apparel company spends perhaps 3 to 6 percent. “They pioneered the use of the influencer—they just called them athletes,” he continues. “They pay endorsers a lot of money to create a halo around the brand and help get customers to believe that the technical innovation behind these products will actually make you jump higher, play better, and run longer.”

Decathlon, unsurprisingly, doesn’t do influencers or splashy ad campaigns. Its stores, in the words of its CFO, are “not luxurious.” The San Francisco shop is fluorescent and lined with cheap shelving; the shopping experience feels more Payless than Patagonia. Elsewhere in the world, Decathlon is frequently compared to Aldi, the discount supermarket chain that sells eyebrow-raisingly cheap groceries. (One Yelp reviewer, commenting on Decathlon’s San Francisco store, wrote “think REI meets Trader Joe’s.”)

When I ask Powell about how REI, Dick’s Sporting Goods, and other presumed competitors in the U.S. market will react to Decathlon’s presence here, he corrects me. Decathlon’s real competitors, he says, are Target and Walmart—where most consumers buy their gear. “I’ve been hammering the industry about this for some time. They keep making the products for the pinnacle consumer when the good-enough, everyday consumer is where the money is,” he says. “Ignoring that market is unwise. Some people look down their noses, but family camping is a huge business, car camping is a huge business. Not everybody is interested in doing a three-week hike-in.”

And just because Decathlon’s products are priced to move, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the quality is suspect. “You can make a sneaker that costs $10 wholesale—that’s not hard to do,” Powell says. “If you go to Walmart, you’ll find $20 shoes.” But instead of marking up the cost of each pair dramatically, Decathlon aims to make its money by selling millions and millions of cheaper shoes at smaller profit margins. Surfing over to Decathlon’s website, I see that, 80 years after Mary and Lloyd Anderson founded REI on the idea of selling reasonably priced ice axes, Decathlon sells one for 47 percent less than REI’s lowest-priced model.

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At the San Francisco shop, near a filth-strewn block of Market Street, Diaz and a couple of press people lead me through the company’s product line. Decathlon sells gear and clothing for 60 different sports in the U.S., including baseball and Ping-Pong. The company has about two dozen house brands, and the gear is separated into tiers. The most affordable tier—the stuff priced to compel beginners to try new sports and to titillate deal hunters—is not designed for performance, Diaz says. The $4 running shirts, for example, he says, will get someone interested in taking up running through a nice short-distance jog; tackle a half marathon in the thing and you might experience some chafing. And the ski pants are designed assuming that the wearer will spend a significant amount of time on his or her ass, and are thus more waterproof but less breathable)than more expensive models.

The step-up, intermediate level improves material quality, but I wouldn’t mistake Decathlon’s $9 rash guard for something produced by, say, O’Neil. Then comes the advanced equipment, which is still around 30 percent cheaper than name-brand competitors but has familiar bells and whistles. This stuff, Diaz argues, is directly comparable to what big-name companies produce. The $109 70-liter pack reminds me of the REI Co-op intro-level offerings, if a little heavier. The wildly popular $28.90 full-face snorkel mask, which I later bought for myself online, exceeded my expectations (several strangers asked to try it out during a subsequent trip to SoCal’s Cardiff Reef). The high-end bikes, which start at around $1,100, are “absolute cracker” value for the money, per a review by Bike Radar.

Indeed, in part due to its disconcertingly low prices—a ski helmet for $18.90?—the company has serious admirers. “Decathlon has a reputation for selling quality bicycles and cycling accessories at very sharp price points,” the UK’s Cycling Weekly noted. Hit the trails anywhere in Europe and you’ll be bombarded with Quechua garb—Decathlon’s in-house mountaineering brand. Even Outside’s own gear team is sold. “We wanted to know whether this startlingly cheap gear was any good, so we got our hands on a sampling of hiking and camping products,” Ariella Gintzler and Emily Reed wrote. “In short, we were pleasantly surprised by how solid everything seemed.”

When I tell Diaz that the prices of some goods are so cheap that they make me question the value of everything in the store, even the high-end stuff, he explains that that’s part of the model. “Sometimes people say, ‘Why don’t you raise the prices so people will understand the quality?’” he says. “But that’s not who we are. At the beginning it’s difficult, we know, but after trying the products, people will continue to buy them. Why buy other products for twice the price?” The customer who comes in for the $6 running shorts, Diaz says, will eventually move their way up to the $27 compression socks and $78 shoes.

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But Decathlon’s bargain prices do come at a cost, critics say.

Although the company talks a big game when it comes to its sourcing and supply chain, promising to put people first and ensure that pay is fair and working conditions safe, some international labor activists disagree. “They are lagging far behind the industry forerunners,” says Paul Roeland, of the Clean Clothes Campaign, an alliance of garment-industry labor organizations and unions. While Patagonia, for example, has worked to improve human rights at the factories and farms that produce its garments and raw materials—even fessing up publicly when it found wage slavery in its Taiwanese contract factories—Decathlon doesn’t talk much about specifics, activists say.

And although the company doesn’t make it easy to figure out which factories make its goods, when a reporter from the German newspaper Die Zeit visited a Decathlon supplier in Sri Lanka, she found conditions that didn’t gel with the company’s stated values. Pay was around 150 euros a week—a sum that makes it hard to afford basics like shower gel—laborers lived in single-room, barracks-like lodgings, and legally mandated benefits like sick pay and days off for holidays were not enforced. “That is a recurring theme: nice words, vague promises, but a complete lack of verifiable, transparent information and concrete, enforceable improvements,” Roeland says.

Decathlon disputes that its ethics—laid out in its code of conduct—are toothless. The company contracts with suppliers in 49 countries, all operating under a tapestry of different labor laws, and says each “must comply with all applicable laws, regulations, and general principles related to environment, labour, safety, and human rights.”

“Decathlon regularly audits suppliers’ sites, using both internal and external assessment teams. In our manufacturing centers, we have a team of managers—Sustainable Development in Production Managers—dedicated to ensuring standards are achieved by our suppliers,” the company wrote in a statement to Outside. “These managers are local recruits who understand the country’s culture and languages and are continually working with production teams to improve the tools and methods they use to ensure requirements are met.”

Still, Nayla Ajaltouni of Collectif Éthique sur l'étiquette, a French pressure group that’s part of the Clean Clothes Campaign, says that although Decathlon appears to have good intentions, its business model prevents it from paying fair wages to international laborers. “It’s based on minimizing production costs and thus wages—that’s the basis of selling large quantities of cheap garments,” she wrote in an email. This is why companies like H&M, Primark, and other producers of fast fashion will never be labor leaders. “Up to now, we’ve had no improvement of working conditions and salaries in garment-producing countries, because this business model is profitable and decision makers in the company have not decided to change it.”

Decatholon says that it has lofty environmental goals, too, and that it aims to use only sustainable cotton and polyester by 2020. It’s a laudable target, though the company’s 2017 sustainable-development report showed that the company was a long way from reaching its goals, using less than 10 percent sustainable polyester and 55 percent sustainable cotton.

Rather than focus on the price of its products, Decathlon and its employees like to talk about accessibility. “What is the sport you always wanted to try?” its advertising asks. “We’re a gateway into learning new sports, because sports can be so expensive,” Diaz says. And in an era when the outdoor industry has wokento its upper-middle-class whiteness, the point is a good one. “We want people to start sport, to practice sport,” Diaz says. “If we can offer them the product at a lower price, it works for us.”

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As my tour of the San Francisco store winds town, Diaz and the PR team walk me through Decathlon’s expansion plans. The downtown location is just a foothold. The next store, across the bay in Emeryville, will be a whopping 47,000 square feet. After a year of operation in the States, talking to consumers and working with local sports clubs, the retail team believes it has a better idea of what Americans want—and how to convince real athletes that Decathlon is worth a shot. “If a person comes in for the $3 backpack and it lasts more than the two weeks they expected, they’ll come back in and look around,” Tom Mulliez, Decathlon’s head of outreach, told me. “All of a sudden, selling them on a $159 jacket is not all that inconceivable.”

On the way out, as we exchanged pleasantries, Diaz and the team gifted me one of those backpacks with a grin. Go to town on it, they told me, it’s got a ten-year guarantee.

Humor isn’t something you’re born with—it takes work

Probably every other time my friend Lee and I came to the end of an approach hike at the base of a climb, dropped our backpacks and looked up, he cracked the same joke:

“I think we’ll bivy here and go for the summit in the morning.”

I laughed the first time he said it, and chuckled every time after, even though I’d heard the joke before. It was funny because when he said it, we’d never walked more than three hours from the car, sometimes only a half hour, and the climb itself would only require a few more hours before we’d start walking back to the car. Bivying at the base of the climb would be ridiculous because a) the climb wasn’t nearly a big enough effort to require sleeping for a night at the base; b) it was usually 8 or 9 a.m. when he said this, and we had 10 or 12 hours of daylight to complete the climb; and c) of course neither of us had brought sufficient food, water, or gear to spend a night at the base of a climb.

Lee and I were a good match as climbing partners for many reasons, but largely because things almost never got so serious that we couldn’t regularly try to make each other laugh. We both wanted to be climbers, and we both wanted to be funny. And really, climbing and being funny have something common: In order to succeed in either of them, you fail a lot, and both are lifelong processes.

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I don’t think anyone is born funny, just like no one is born a climber. You can be born into a funny family, which some people might assume is genetic. I don’t believe that’s correct. I think you’re just surrounded by people who are trying to be funny, and you join in, just as you are not born loving asparagus, but if your family cooks asparagus all the time, you might develop a taste for it. Except being funny is a much more universally useful life skill than cooking asparagus well (just my opinion), though I’ve only started to learn how to cook asparagus very recently, because my family focused on other things.

We got together with my mom’s side of the family as often as we could, seven brothers and sisters raised with an Irish Catholic sense of humor. I can’t say I remember much about the food my grandmother served at dinner, but I remember my face hurting from laughter, and being very young and thinking, “Someday, I’m going to make my Uncle Dan and Uncle Steve laugh.”

This goal took years. I probably started speaking up every once in a while at family dinners when I was seven or eight, saying things that young kids think are funny but adults don’t, and my uncles didn’t laugh. For a long time. In my head, this didn’t mean that I was not a funny person. It meant that I wasn’t funny yet.

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I probably learned how to tell jokes mostly from my dad, who could find something clever to say in almost any situation, and was a fan of classics like this one:

Dad: Does your face hurt?

Son: No, why?

Dad: It’s killing me.

My dad spent most of his weekday hours working with people, managing the meat department of a grocery store. His job was, of course, to maximize sales of a product for a company, but from what I saw, his No. 1 goal was to make sure people smiled or laughed when there were within 20 feet of him. No. 2 was sales. He seemed to believe that work is work, but we might as well have a good time while we’re doing it.

In his 1993 book SeinLanguage, comedian Jerry Seinfeld wrote about growing up in a family that valued humor:

When I was a kid my father used to take me around with him in his truck. He was in the sign business on Long Island and he had a little shop called the Kal Signfeld Sign Co.

There were few people as much fun to watch work as my father. There has never been a professional comedian with better stage presence, attitude, timing, or delivery. He was a comic genius selling painted plastic signs that said things like “Phil’s Color TV” and cardboard ones like “If you want to raise cattle, why do you keep shooting the bull?”

The thing I remember most about those afternoons is how often my father would say to me, “Sometimes I don’t even care if I get the order, I just have to break that face.” He hated to see those serious businessmen faces. I guess that’s why he, like me, never seemed to be able to hold down any kind of real job.

Often when I’m on stage I’ll catch myself imitating a little physical move or certain kind of timing that he would do.

“To break that face.”

It was a valued thing in my house. I remember when Alan Kind would walk out on the Ed Sullivan Show, hearing my mother say, “Now, quiet.” We could talk during the news but not during Alan King. This was an important man.

My father lived to see me start to make it as a comedian and he was always my most enthusiastic supporter. He taught me a gift is to be given. And just as he gave it to me, I hope I am able to give it to you.

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In elementary school, I cracked jokes whenever I could: in answers to teachers’ questions, in classrooms where teachers didn’t mind the occasional wisecrack (or just completely ignored me), at the lunchroom table, to the person sitting next to me or in front of me. In school, you always have an audience. When someone laughed at something I said, it was like getting a test answer correct, only better. Everyone could study and get a test answer right, but landing a joke was creative, too. It was something I could do that was unique.

Students laughed often enough that I kept going. I continued through junior high, and my 7th grade geography teacher, Mr. Button, asked if I would like to write for the school newspaper, which was at that time about 20 xeroxed sheets of pastel-colored paper stapled together. I said yes, and was given a monthly column—in which I tried to be funny—and some article assignments, in which I also tried to be funny first and convey a story secondly.

In writing for the school newspaper, I discovered a new audience of people to try make laugh, without the risk of being there when a joke fell flat. In writing, if no one laughs, you don’t hear the awkward silence.

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In high school, I tried hard at a lot of things: sports, getting good grades, padding my academic record with lots of activities so I could get into a “good” college. But I always stayed focused  on trying to be funny in every situation I could force it into: lobbing jokes up from the back of the class, in the locker room, washing dishes in the back of a restaurant, at the lunch table, in the hallway between classes, in my English writing assignments.

High school can be a tough audience. Even if you’re funny, lots of times your fellow students are focusing on learning and don’t appreciate your wisecracks (this is a 100 percent appropriate response). Other times, they don’t feel like they should laugh in class or they’ll get in trouble (also true). And lastly, your teachers’ job is to help students learn, not to provide the best audience for your jokes that can’t wait until after class, so they often get annoyed at the smartass in the third row (again, 100 percent appropriate), and sometimes to the point of removing a student from class (also appropriate). I spent a lot of time in detention and in the principal’s office. Looking back, I think a lot of people like myself probably owe a lot of teachers apologies.

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“I used to think that humor was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is. … But now I think it’s the opposite. Humor is a way of shrinking from that wonderful and terrible world.” —Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

The thing is, constant humor can be a way of distancing ourselves from dealing with the real world, or internal sadness. The world is wonderful and terrible, and our constant access to news and viewpoints can sometimes make it feel like it’s growing more terrible every day. But creating humor can also be a way of dealing with personal suffering.

In 1975, in a study published in The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, Samuel S. Janus interviewed and psychologically tested 55 full-time comedians, who had been working in the field of comedy for an average of 25 years. In the study’s conclusion, Janus wrote:

The early lives of all the subjects were marked by suffering, isolation, and feelings of deprivation. Humor offered a relief from their sufferings and a defense against inescapable panic and anxiety. The presence of these same needs and fears almost universally accounts for the success of these particular individuals as humorists. The fact that humor is a language of protest appears to mitigate their anxiety and permits them to function. However its role as an aggressive expression in its own right is particularly appropriate for this age.

It is felt that comedians are able to convert their rage from physical to verbal assault and that for many their comic routines are a form of acting out. For the most part, comedians are shy, sensitive, fearful individuals, who fight their fears constantly and who win for only short periods of time, needing repetitively to do battle with the enemy both within and without. They are keenly sensitive people who have an uncanny perception of the needs and fears of their audience. For the most part they are men and women who are empathic and are able to convert fear to humor and terror to laughter.

Everyone has darkness in their lives, no matter how happy their personal story appears from the outside. My life has certainly been no exception, and although the down times have come and gone and it’s definitely not been anything like a Dickens novel, I’ve always used humor to change situations. If I’m uncomfortable, I joke. If I’m anxious about something (often), I joke. When I’m doing a public speaking gig, I joke to try to take the temperature of the crowd: Are they listening? Do they like me? How about now, two minutes later? Do they still like me? At the root of all of it is probably a deep insecurity or lack of self-confidence, and because of that, I joke. If you laugh, I feel OK about myself for a few minutes, and we both win.

My 86-year-old grandmother was literally on her deathbed in June of 2014. I was in the hospital room holding her hand and watching the cardiac monitor, along with my mother, my Uncle Dan, my Uncle Steve, and my Aunt Nora. We all knew that it was probably going to be it for Grandma, and I spent most of the afternoon alternating between trying to swallow a softball-sized lump in my throat and laughing at my aunt and uncles and my mom joking about colonoscopies and Catholic school.

No one was sure if Grandma could hear anything, but we talked to her anyway, and Aunt Nora made up ridiculous song lyrics and sang them while holding Grandma’s hand. For once, I was a little shocked that no one seemed to be taking it quite seriously enough. “Don’t you think I have a lovely singing voice, Brendan?” Aunt Nora said, after one of her songs, and then laughed, and I laughed too.

When I was a kid, I didn’t really understand that I came from a family of goofballs until I had been out of my parents’ house for a few years. I kind of assumed everyone’s dinner conversations were sort of a contest to see who could tell the best story, or make everyone laugh harder than they did at the last person’s joke. Eventually I found out that not everyone acted the way my mom’s family did, which was kind of a bummer. I don’t know how other people handle deathbed situations, but apparently in my mom’s family, we can’t even cry without trying to make each other laugh. There was plenty of crying, but plenty of laughing too. And even if it seemed a little inappropriate, it felt right.

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In college, I started writing a weekly column for the campus newspaper. I didn’t have a beat, or a theme; just whatever I thought was funny that week. At some point, a fellow student recognized me on campus or at a bar and told me they liked my column in the newspaper that week and it made them laugh, and my marketing career went away just like that. Eleven short years later, I became a full-time writer, finding a space where most people weren’t trying to be funny—climbing and the outdoors—and writing essays about it.

I started a blog and wrote a post every single week whether I felt like it or not, trying hard to give people something to laugh at. Just like in elementary school, some people laughed, and some people didn’t. I always stuck to one principle: Always make fun of “us,” not “them.” I figured we all had enough negative stuff to pull us down on a daily basis, and I didn’t want to be another source of that.

Some weeks, it really took off, and thousands of people read my blog. Some weeks, crickets. I learned to just shrug it off and come up with new stuff for next week. With humor, you’re never going to please 100 percent of the people 100 percent of the time. Some people are going to think you are funny, and some people are not going to think you’re funny. Some people are going to think you are funny, and some people are not going to understand your jokes. Some people are going to think you are funny, and some people are not going to be in the mood. And sometimes, your joke is only funny to you. Which is a learning opportunity. But if people don’t think you’re funny, at least try to keep it so they don’t think you’re an asshole.

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A few weeks ago, I sat at a table at the Monday night jazz jam at Denver’s Meadowlark Bar, watching the drummer in a four-piece band: a youngish man who was in absolute command of the drumset, never looking at where his sticks landed; only at the bass player, guitar player, or trumpet player. Awed and a little envious, I wondered how he got that good, and how long it took him for the drumset to become an extension of his body. Probably hours of playing every week, for years. I imagined dedicating myself to something so fully. Maybe instead of playing high school football I should have stuck with band, picked up a guitar or a trumpet, and kept practicing through my adult years. Imagine: being able to walk into a jam session with an instrument, sit down for a minute or two to get the feel of it, and then just joining a sort of conversation. That seems like a pretty magical way to live life. If only I had spent more time on learning to play music over the past, you know, 35 years …

Then I thought: I probably spent all that time trying to learn how to be funny.

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Humor, I believe, will always be important work, and not just for professional comedians, writers, and actors. Weekly staff meetings need humor, and so do meals with friends and family, and transactions with clerks and servers. I don’t know the meaning of life, but bringing joy to other people seems like a decently noble pursuit. At the end of the day, not much of what we do in our daily lives adds up to much more than folly. Being a goofball, although it may seem like you’re not taking life (or your career) seriously enough, is no more ridiculous than most of the things that take up our time.

Here’s my favorite joke ever, appropriate for all ages and all situations. It’s somewhat dependent on confident delivery and timing, so it’s a great joke to use to practice on people if you don’t think of yourself as particularly funny (but maybe would like to be someday):

A polar bear walks into a bar. He goes up to the bar and says to the bartender,

“I’ll have a gin and ….

…

…

… tonic.”

The bartender looks at the polar bear and says, “What’s with the big pause?”

The polar bear says, “I don’t know. My dad had ’em too.”

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When the partial government shutdown took effect 22 days ago, Seth Zaharias walked into a Walmart and bought $100 worth of toilet paper to stock the bathrooms at Joshua Tree National Park, in anticipation of the flood of holiday tourists who would descend with only a skeleton staff left to manage them. That first purchase quickly grew into a grassroots effort to keep the beloved desertscape pristine in the face of the National Park Service furloughs. “It was the best hundred dollars I’ll ever spend on toilet paper,” Zaharias says.

Zaharias and his wife, Sabra Purdy, who together own the Joshua Tree climbing company Cliffhanger Guides, teamed up with nonprofit Friends of Joshua Tree National Park to spearhead a campaign to prevent destruction. Soon, they had recruited enough volunteers to clean all of the park’s 80-odd accessible toilets almost every day of the shutdown and haul out thousands of pounds of trash. The volunteers come from all over the state and country—one of Cliffhanger’s clients from New York spent his extra days of vacation taking in the scenery while sweeping out pit toilets and emptying dumpsters.

“I feel pretty good about what’s going on in the park and the state of it now,” Zaharias says. “They only have between five to seven regular maintenance staff. On a big day, we had just shy of a hundred people come out. Our park was ours again.”

https://www.facebook.com/JoshuaTreeRockclimbing/posts/2195708953814636?__xts__[0]=68.ARBNXn9bde7X1R5QKSrW6mkzyjp8JDcIXmC_bEKVy87qUwLFO5QyPYvz_wu_77jpojyNlvYldjFDssU45MIkoi3KH_kDmx5b3ymHZF5MyfjDtf-GytOjjjxf8JCAhdWd-cCKIUqfIq6Lf79nfnUWM5jCABM6Ut8uWzGjbZ9n7H3DWbYiXXAeQleC6aXKBWglk21r2Iu759M45WsT2RT-8vM03L96HzAACt_ud5dBggYlepmUR_FCu7UStxz2Qd2hFMyHaBaFL3Y6SJWkXSJsGbllaYV_iVyFltL3rSjHEzaOPXOVpxeI8gN7sfDUVDRhxrRJoSI6HszhnMBCA3utV6T87g&__tn__=-R

What’s happening at Joshua Tree isn’t an anomaly. Across the country, a rag-tag group of volunteers have banded together to take the reins from furloughed NPS employees. Since the shutdown, there have been dozens of headlines (including ones on Outside) about damaged parks overflowing with human waste and trash, though some local volunteers insist the more apocalyptic stories are overblown. “There has been some resource damage, but nowhere near to the level that the media is reporting,” Zaharias says. “The ratio of good people to bad has been incredibly low.” (He notes that the overwhelming majority of the trash they cleared out was in dumpsters or bins.) Still, Zaharias and others saw the need to spring into action. “I’m not going to let D.C. wreck my spiritual connection to this place and my economic backbone,” he says.

While Zaharias rallied the Joshua Tree community, a group of local workers in Yosemite National Park, distressed by the overflowing trash bins and human waste left behind by holiday revelers, contacted the Yosemite Climbing Association (which organizes its own clean-up each September) to ask for supplies. Soon after publicizing their efforts on social media, the YCA was flooded with requests from other concerned visitors who wanted to help, so the group drove a red pickup and covered white trailer stocked with supplies to a pullout off Highway 140,near Yosemite’s entrance. Allyson Gunsallus, a YCA event coordinator, estimates that around 100 people have volunteered—a number that includes not only people who already had plans to visit the park, but also ones who came specifically to engage in the effort.

“It’s been amazing how many people have reached out,” Gunsallus says. “It’s been a silver lining on the dark cloud of the shutdown.” Thanks to the volunteers, Gunsallus says they were able to clear up all of the park’s excess litter that had accumulated over the holidays. She now says they plan to speak to NPS employees to find out where the most need is, and direct eager hands accordingly.

On January 5, the Department of the Interior released a plan to keep the parks open by diverting funds meant for long-term projects to everyday maintenance, meaning that all-volunteer forces like those with the YCA and at Joshua Tree can theoretically hand their duties back over. But with staffing at a minimum and visitors still pouring in, some organizations feel the need to continue with their efforts.   

On January 2, the same day the Yellowstone effort began, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Youth Association was alarmed by media reports about the state of the national parks. Within 48 hours, their local chapters had organized a weekend cleanup at five parks throughout the country. “Cleanliness and service to our country is a part of Islam,” says spokesperson Salaam Bhatti. “So we enmeshed those two teachings to clean up our nation as part of our service.”

Some 70 volunteers—Muslim and non-Muslim—hauled away truckloads of trash from the Everglades to the National Mall. They plan to hold more events this weekend, including one at Olympic National Park in Washington State.

Beyond organized groups, countless unnamed individuals have also gone out on their own clean ups, often posting their intentions under the hashtag #leavenotrace. In at least one case, in the temperate wilds of the Great Smoky Mountains, that effort led to an even larger one. Marc Newland was heading out for a day of hiking with his young daughter, Erica. When he mentioned how the shutdown was affecting the parks, the 10-year-old suggested that they spend their day cleaning up the area instead—unsurprising, given that Newland and his wife Wendy have spent the past 15 years involved in trail clean-ups and almost always carry garbage bags and grabbers with them. On a popular short hike to Laurel Falls, the pair hardly got past the parking lot. They spent hours filling bags with diapers, broken pieces of strollers, and beer bottles.

Newland posted photos of the pair on the Hike the Smokies Facebook group, hoping a few likes would encourage his daughter’s positive behavior. Instead, the post blew up. Spurred on by the media attention, he worked with the environmental group Keep Sevier Beautiful to organize a larger cleanup along the Spur—a major thruway—on Thursday. “To see 100 people show up at 8 a.m. in 20 degree weather and haul out 160 bags of trash was just incredible,” he says.

Since the school year started back up again this week, Erica was not among them—but plans to be out cleaning again with her parents this weekend. For his daughter, Newland says, the lesson learned from the experience boils down to a mantra that has defined the shutdown volunteer efforts: “If we all do a little bit now, we won’t have to do so much later.”

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Ask yourself: Is that french press really necessary for the backcountry?

I once packed a can of chili ten miles into the backcountry. It weighed 15 ounces and it only contained 560 calories—about as much as two Snickers bars (which weigh 12 ounces less). I was younger, hungry, and didn’t care how much my pack weighed, since it already had a full rack of climbing gear in it.

That was several years ago, and I’m not as young. If I’m not wiser, I certainly have less tolerance for needlessly heavy backpacks. I’ve started to embrace the tactics of the ultralight backpacking practitioners and evangelists, and although I’m not a full-on card-carrying, gram-counting ultralighter, I have identified some ideas and principles that I think will help anyone who’s interested in not compressing their spine under the crushing weight of their superfluous gear, fears, and anxieties:

1. Don’t Pack a Bunch of Shit You Don’t Need
2. You Probably Don’t Need Most of That Shit
3. The More You Know, the Less You Need. This adage, often attributed to Yvon Chouinard, has definitely proven to be true for me as I have amassed more and more days in the backcountry, as it probably has for everyone as they gain experience: When you don’t know, you pack everything, just in case. The more experience you acquire, the more things you can eliminate from your pack. Maybe you realize you always pack rain pants but have rarely worn them, or that there’s no point to packing your tent in the bag it came in, or that when you have a tent and sleeping bag in your pack you really don’t need to carry a space blanket.
4. You Can Have a Really, Really Light Pack or Be Really, Really Comfortable, But Not Both. Your plush sleeping pad, pillow, and comfy camp shoes, are, wait for it—heavy. Are your hiking boots (better yet, hiking shoes; even better yet, trail running shoes) really so uncomfortable that you have to remove them immediately after finding a campsite and put on other shoes? The lightest camp shoes are ones you pack in on your feet.
5. You Can Always Go Lighter. A few years ago, I was talking to climber Bryan Gilmore about a “Light and Fast” climbing clinic at the Red Rock Rendezvous. I asked him what he covered in the clinic and he joked, “I just had everybody leave their packs in the parking lot and we free soloed everything.” Which is funny, but also illustrates a point: if you’re really hardcore, you could go “backpacking” with nothing but a knife to kill your food with—and that’s truly ultralight. Most of us won’t do that, but there are always more ways to cut weight.
6. You Will Probably Have to Get Geeky. If you seriously want to eliminate weight, you have to know what you’re packing. If you ever weigh your pack before a trip, you might be surprised to see how heavy it actually is, and how easy it is to eliminate a few pounds. If you seriously, seriously want to eliminate weight, you will probably—like serious ultralight backpackers—buy a postal scale and make a spreadsheet of the items in your pack and how much each one weighs. No way, you say, that’s soooo geeky. Sure it is, but so is fantasy football, and Strava, and a bunch of other things we do but probably don’t list on our Tinder profiles.
7. Everything That Possibly Can Should Do Double Duty. A mug is a mug, but a mug can also be a bowl so you can leave a bowl at home. Trekking poles are also tent/tarp poles. A puffy jacket shoved into a stuff sack is a pillow. Your toothbrush is … actually, your toothbrush should probably just be single-duty. But don’t bring a whole tube of toothpaste.
8. It’s Not a Fashion Show. Ever end a backpacking trip and realize you had a clean pair of pants, and/or a clean shirt, and/or a clean pair of socks that you never wore? That’s a lot of weight. You probably don’t need “changes” of clothes—you just need different layers for different conditions. Rain jacket for when it rains or when the wind picks up, puffy jacket for cold evenings, et cetera.
9. Smelling Good Is Heavy. Wet wipes, unlike almost every other consumable thing you bring, stay heavy. A deodorant stick is heavy and bulky no matter what. A little bottle of biodegradable soap doesn’t weigh that much, does it? Weighs a hell of a lot more than just getting used to the idea of not smelling good, which is weightless. If you simply can’t stand the smell of your own B.O. after a few days in the backcountry, by all means, knock yourself out. But probably no one’s expecting you to smell good out there.
10. The Ratio of Pack Weight to Comfort is Only Limited by How Hardcore You Want to Get. For example: 


• Heavy: Camping French press with ground coffee
• 
Lighter: Instant coffee packets
• 
Ultralight: Chewing coffee beans
• 
Savage: Going without coffee for the entire trip

Wrap your head around something like chewing coffee beans, or going without coffee altogether, and you can probably achieve great things in regards to pack weight. Only you can decide what’s going too far.

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A little over a year after Outside published my profile of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, he’s finally on his way out.

Like many reporters who’ve followed Ryan Zinke’s tumultuous tenure at Interior, I’m surprised he was able to hang in there for so long. Zinke seemed impervious to the kind of flak that brought down his colleague Scott Pruitt, the departed Environmental Protections Agency secretary who shilled for oil and gas companies in his previous role as Oklahoma attorney general, along with former Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price.

According to the Washington Post, Zinke’s scandals became too much for theAdministration, which forced Zinke to resign by the end of the year or be fired. His resignation comes amid an avalanche of investigations into his official conduct—one of which, involving his shady real estate dealings with the chairman of Halliburton, was formally referred to the Justice Department in October.

Zinke’s office has been scandal-plagued from the outset, drawing scrutiny from nonprofit watchdogs, whistleblowers, and Interior’s inspector general for missteps big and small—from ordering a $139,000 set of doors for his office to shuttling his wife Lola around in government vehicles to paying $12,000 for a charter flight from a speaking engagement in Las Vegas to his hometown of Whitefish to commandeering a National Park Service helicopter to deliver him to a horseback date with Mike Pence to threatening Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski over her vote against advancing the House’s Obamacare repeal-and-replace legislation.

Amid potentially serious ethics violations, Zinke also gained notoriety for his willingness to be a bulldog in defense of his boss. It was in that capacity that the former Navy SEAL, who claimed he would run Interior as a military command, broke a bedrock maxim of military leadership: Never undermine the troops’ morale. In September 2017, he told a group of oil and gas executives, “I got 30 percent of the crew that’s not loyal to the flag.”

Considering the audience, it was clear he was not referring to the American flag—he was referring to Trump and to himself, implying that a rogue coterie of Interior employees was working at cross purposes to the Administration’s aggressive pro-industry and anti-conservation agenda. But those oil and gas executives need not have worried that mutinous Interior employees might sabotage Zinke’s plans to open millions of acres to onshore and offshore energy leases and to roll back environmental regulations for the benefit of their bottom lines. Under Zinke’s leadership, Interior scientists and field staff whose research into climate change and controversial wildlife issues put them at odds with local power brokers and with Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda found themselves involuntarily reassigned—essentially, exiled to Siberia.

Joel Clement, a senior Interior employee and climate scientist who claims he was reassigned because of the nature of his work, filed a whistleblower complaint that summed up the sentiment among concerned civil servants and citizens. “I believe that every president, regardless of party, has the right and responsibility to implement his policies. But that is not what is happening here,” Clement said. “Putting citizens in harm’s way isn’t the president’s right. Silencing civil servants, stifling science, squandering taxpayer money and spurning communities in the face of imminent danger have never made America great.”

Zinke marched on, undeterred, making reductions to the Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments that conveniently facilitated access to oil, gas, coal and uranium deposits; scaling back requirements for extractive industry companies to mitigate the damage they cause to public land; searching for a way to relieve oil and gas companies of the burden of complying with the Obama Administration’s requirement that they capture a certain amount of methane instead of flaring it off and thereby wasting a publicly-owned resource; pursuing offshore oil leasing on nearly the entirety of the Atlantic and Pacific seaboard against the wishes of citizens and governors; opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to energy exploration and expanding leasing in the equally fragile ecosystem surrounding the National Petroleum Reserve Alaska; reversing the twenty-year moratorium the Obama Administrationput on mining at the edge of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota; pushing for the dismantling of federal sage grouse management plans that identify priority breeding habitat across eleven Western states in order to open millions of acres of public land to energy development.

Zinke’s detractors alleged that all of this was being done for the exclusive benefit of extractive industries and the politicians who do their bidding, and Zinke said as much himself. Speaking to yet another group of energy executives in Houston, he said, “Interior should not be in the business of being an adversary. We should be in the business of being a partner.” Facing withering criticism, Zinke appeared unfazed. “You know what, I do my job,” he said. “I disregard the B.S.”

Many of the Zinke scandals recounted above were underway back in 2017 when I was reporting on Zinke for the Outside profile. Only a few months into his tenure at the time, Zinke was already a disappointment to the conservation organizations that applauded his nomination (less so because they were genuinely enthusiastic about his self-styled Teddy Roosevelt Republicanism, and more so because they were appalled by the other names on the list: Sarah Palin, fracking kingpin Harold Hamm, oil products tycoon Forrest Lucas, et al).

While Zinke’s inability to properly rig a fly rod generated the most buzz of anything I reported in the story, it was an exchange with Sarah Greenberger—an advisor to outgoing secretary Sally Jewell who worked on the now-embattled sage grouse plans—that seemed most prescient and troubling to me:

“Decisions made now can reverberate for decades,” [Greenberger] said. “We are at a place where species, wildlife, and habitat are facing really significant stress from population growth, habitat fragmentation, development, and climate change, and unless we are thoughtful and strategic about the decisions we make at this moment, there’s a lot of damage that can be done that’s hard to unwind,” she said.

“How much damage can he do?” I asked.

“I think a secretary could create long-lasting and irreversible damage,” she said.

With Greenberger’s assessment rattling in my head all these months, I have watched Zinke’s downward spiral with trepidation. Constant media exposure and a litany of investigations did not slow the pace of destruction, and his departure does not imply a pro-environment reorientation at Interior. After all, Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt—an industry insider and skilled political operative—has probably been steering the ship all along. Now he’s in charge.

As for Zinke, he’s handed out a lot of favors, and he probably has a trailer full of golden parachutes emblazoned with energy company logos to choose from. He’s gone for now, but I doubt we’ve seen the last of him. 

Click:hiding screws in woodwork
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The holidays are fast approaching and if you’re like us, you’re probably scrambling to gather last-minute gifts. Thankfully, the REI Holiday Clearance Sale is here so you can score up to 50 percent off on quality gear for the outdoorsy person on your list. Here are nine products that we think are worth gifting. 

Bring some holiday spirit to your next campsite with the Color Essence inflatable solar lantern. Choose between ten different color light settings and deflate it when the night is over to save space around camp.

Buy Now

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There are a bunch of Yeti tumblers on sale. They’re a staff favorite for morning coffee, afternoon tea, and everything in between. The red and white colorways are currently 25 percent off. Note: you have to add them your cart to see the discount.

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Yakima’s Skyrise 2 has a wall-to-wall, 2.5-inch thick mattress that puts your traditional backpacking sleeping pad to shame. Unlike other popular rooftop tents, which bolt onto your roof rack, the SkyRise uses simple but sturdy plastic clamps, making it the easiest-to-install rooftop tent we've tested. (Need a little more space? The three-person model is also on sale.)

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If you’re taking your family out next spring, give the kiddos a little more space with the six-person Base Camp tent. It sets up in minutes, has two doors, and the dome-style construction offers lots of headspace. 

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Never lose contact with your friends in the woods again with this communication set. The Mesh lets you send texts, view maps, and share GPS locations from your smartphone without cell or Wi-Fi service.

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Have a prepper on your list this year? If disaster strikes, this Urban Survivor kit has everything they need to survive for at least 72 hours. It includes a full medical kit, an emergency blanket, fire starters, 10 packets of water, and four food bars.

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If you want to go fast and light, the Quarter Dome 2 tent is your ticket. Weighing in at three-pounds five-ounces, it has two vestibules and two doors so two adults can comfortably get in and out without bothering the other party.

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Made from sturdy but buttery-soft bison leather, the Chopper mittens will be the first things you reach for to chop firewood—or really any other task when the mercury drops below freezing.

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Each February for the past ten years, Outside and Mountain magazine have met up at Snowbird, Utah, to test skis. This year we met with reps from 25 ski companies and set out to test dozens of new models. Over three days, our testers sample as many as 18 pairs of skis each. For this review, we’ve focused on skis that performed well in a wide range of conditions and terrain types. Our favorite pair of skis for all-mountain use, Völkl’s M5 Mantra, was one of the most versatile skis in this test, equally as comfortable on hardpack as it is in fresh powder. Here’s a deep dive on the M5, plus six other models more specialized to either hardpack or powder but with the versatility to perform on any day.

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Völkl M5 Mantra ($700)

Völkl has been building and revising a ski called the Mantra for 12 years. This year’s version, the M5, is brand-new, and we think it’s the best new ski of the year. Over the past decade, the ski industry has tried to turn every ski into a powder ski, and in keeping with that trend, the Mantra grew steadily fatter and more rockered. In reality though, most all-mountain skis need to rip groomed or packed snow about half the time, and fat, heavily rockered skis aren’t great at that. The new M5 reflects this understanding. Its sidecut is a bit deeper, it has camber underfoot, and its 96-millimeter waist is now four millimeters narrower than last year’s version. These changes give the M5 more rebound on hard snow and let it glide better and maintain more contact with the snow while up on edge.

What makes it stand apart from others in its class is its physical construction. Völkl is famous for building damp, stable skis with wood cores sandwiched between two sheets of titanium alloy. For the M5, Völkl developed what it calls Titanal Frame, a sandwich setup with the metal installed around the perimeter of the ski’s fore and aft sections, shedding weight from the center line. As a result, the M5 is a modest but noticeable 50 grams lighter in each ski compared with its predecessor. Meanwhile, the tip has some carbon fiber, consistent with current industry trends, which makes it a little easier to initiate turns.

Out on the hill, the M5 was the most versatile ski of the test. It’s damp, meaning it doesn’t chatter or transmit vibrations, but still lively. It floats in resort powder but carves like a ski built for hardpack. “It’s lightweight and precise at the same time,” said one of our testers. “I expected it to carve well, but I was surprised by how well it runs off-trail. Any skilled skier could excel on it. The sweet spot is huge.” Dimensions: 134/96/117

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Blizzard Bonafide ($700)

Last year, Blizzard introduced a freeride line of skis designed to be surfier and more playful than its line of all-mountain freeride skis. The Bonafide, with its longer effective-edge length and deeper sidecut, is part of the all-mountain line, and we thought it remained fun in deep snow while becoming noticeably more stable on hardpack.

Like the M5 Mantra—and just about every modern all-mountain ski—the Bonafide has carbon fiber in the tips to reduce swing weight, and its profile includes both rocker and camber. The difference between these skis is power output. While the Mantra accommodates a wider range of skier types, the Bonafide is built for skiers who charge hard. You either need to be big, fast, or both for this ski to perform. “You can go full tilt off-trail or on,” said one tester. And while plowing through chunks of unruly snow, said another, “the Bonafide is a cruel steamroller.”

The Bonafide is built with a beech and poplar core and two sheets of titanium alloy. We’d recommend it as a daily driver for skiing in the West, where we’d expect to use it 70 percent of the time off-trail, slashing turns in chalky alpine snow or using those lightweight rockered tips to pivot through loosely spaced steep bumps. On trail, it arcs a fun GS turn, but even with the added sidecut, it’s not an all-day carver so much as an all-day high-speed cruiser that can really lay it over in a turn. With a 98-millimeter waist, it’s not a powder ski, but it’s a pretty good one-ski quiver if you live in a place where the snowmaking equipment only comes out in the fall and if you’re willing to sacrifice a little performance on the truly deep days. Dimensions: 135/98/119

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Kästle BMX105 HP ($1,149)

The first thing to address about the BMX105 HP is that it’s at least $300 more expensive than the average ski in this category. That fact left a few broke ski testers wondering how they’d ever buy a pair. According to Kästle, the sticker price reflects a high level of handwork, and the materials come out of an elite race-room shop in Austria (HP stands for high performance). Kästle constructed the BMX105 HP with silver fir and beech cores instead of cheaper woods, and the bases are cut from the same sintered graphite that World Cup athletes run. (Sintering means baking a powder into a solid.) Even the sidewalls and edge material are spec’d from high-grade stock. Ultimately, that should produce a long-lasting ski that delivers energy return and stability after other skis have gone soft and dead. We’ve put three years of hard skiing on a pair of Kästles with this same build, and they’ve shown no loss of life.

But durability wouldn’t matter if the BMX105s didn’t ski well, and they did, earning the second-highest scores in our all-mountain powder test at Snowbird. The Hollowtech tips (swing-weight reduction again) make them nimble, and the big-turn radius (21 meters in the 181-centimeter length) lets you run them in breakable crust and weird alpine snow without feeling hooky. Said a tester: “Ripped everywhere and was super forgiving even while it displayed no speed limits. It’s easy to initiate turns, and it doesn’t mind if you want to drive the tail through the transition. You could ski it in a big-mountain comp or just cruise around.” So who should buy it? Anybody with resources, first of all. But especially people who spend most of their ski days at big western resorts that see ample snowfall, like Fernie, Jackson, the gems of Little Cottonwood, and Squaw Valley. Oh, and that person should be adept at avoiding rocks and keeping their gear well honed for the long term. As for body types, the 105 has range: our biggest, strongest, and fastest skier had it as his top pick, as did a lightweight tester who prefers to slash rather carve his turns. “Stable at all speeds, but slices and dices pow in the trees, too,” said a tester. “If you like a ski that never gets bucked around, look here.” Dimensions: 134/105/123

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Rossignol Experience 88 Ti ($750)

Rossignol’s redesigned Experience 88 Ti is a top pick if you live and ski in New England, or even Summit County, Colorado, during a dry year.

We liked former versions of the Experience line, but it had grown dated, largely because of an extended sidecut that brought the widest part of the ski to the very tip. That made for fun carving, but off-trail that much sidecut made the Experience line tough to handle. The fix: taking a cue from its 7 Series powder skis, Rossignol built the new Experience line with subtle tapering in the tip and tail. With the new design, it’s actually more fun to rip around on groomed snow, and it’s way more nimble off-trail in variable snow and terrain, which allowed testers to butter and dump speed or redirect to a better line.

The ski has been improved with what Rossignol is calling line control technology (LCT). LCT is a central rail that reduces the counter flexing of the ski at the apex of the turn, smoothing out the ride and boosting edge grip. Another update includes new dampeners made from a viscous compound, which we thought may have added to the 88’s ability to hook up and hold on. “Perfect carving on-trail,” said a tester. “It absolutely rails turns, but the flex is smooth and accessible, and you can sluff the tips and tails around if you need to bail out.” As for who should buy it, the door is open. It’s a one-ski-quiver tool for the biggest chunk of the market, but if you already own a pair of fat skis (over 100 millimeters underfoot), the new 88 will complete your quiver and make days with packed snow all that more fun. “This ski rips,” said a tester. “So easy to get up on edge, but you can slink through bumps and trees, too.” Dimensions: 140/86/130

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Black Diamond Boundary Pro 107 ($749)

It’s been awhile since a ski from Black Diamond has impressed our testers. Recently, however, BD shifted its ski production from China to Blizzard’s factory in Austria, and the quality of the finished product improved fivefold.

The Boundary Pro 107, which was redesigned with a poplar core, has a comfortable sweet spot—you can easily find the center of the flex—coupled with a damp but lively ride and solid edge hold. (The same could not be said of previous BDs.) We’re featuring the Boundary Pro here as a backcountry crossover ski because it’s lightweight enough for touring and because of its shape. The more you ski off-trail, the less sidecut you want, as deep sidecuts get hooky in weird wind- and sun-affected wild snow. In the 184-centimeter length we tested, the turn radius is a long 20 meters. But here’s the thing: the Boundary Pro’s ample tip and tail rocker, abetted by tapering in the same zones, made it easy to pivot and smear at will. These are vital qualities in the backcountry, where the tightest trees are often the only safe way down. On hardpack, you can check turns with confidence, but you can’t settle into a deep arc. It’s a touring ski for folks who care far more about shredding than setting uphill speed records. We’d pair it with a Salomon Shift binding (the best crossover binding ever built) and ski it all day long in places like Revelstoke or Silverton. “One of the top off-trail skis of the day,” said one tester. “Loose and slinky in tight places, damp and easy to steer in the wide-open alpine, tons of rocker and taper for surfing pow.” Dimensions: 138/107/123

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Typically, around 25 ski manufacturers bring their entire fleets to our annual test, which means more than 250 pairs of skis. For three days, testers grab skis from a rack, quickly adjust the bindings, skate to the lifts, burn a lap on varied terrain appropriate for the category, swap skis, and repeat, all the while taking notes. This happens up to 18 times a day, for something like 100,000 vertical feet of shredding. It usually dumps powder on us, which is the best perk. Back at the home office, we pour a mountain of data into spreadsheets and tabulate winners and losers.

Buying skis can be confusing. But it gets easier if you read the above reviews and ask yourself two key questions:

Am I adding to a quiver or replacing the daily driver that I ski on 80 percent of the time?

If you’re looking to round out a quiver, you’re probably in the market for a specialty ski built wide for powder or thin for carving turns on hardpack—skis that are beyond the purview of this review. Such skis excel in very specific conditions but tend to flounder in routine all-mountain conditions. But if you ski a ton, pure powder and pure frontside skis can really liven up your ski action. If you’re looking for a one-ski quiver, it’s time for question two, which is a two-parter.

Where do I ski the most, and what are my favorite conditions?

How you answer these prompts determines whether you’re in the market for an all-mountain powder ski (around 105 millimeters underfoot), an all-mountain ski (around 95 millimeters), or an all-mountain frontside ski (around 85 millimeters). These versatile skis are all built similarly, but they’re distinguished by waist width and depth of rocker. If you live near a steep and deep resort like Alta, Alpine Meadows, Jackson, or Mammoth, and ski off-trail most of the time, a chubby all-mountain powder ski with a healthy dose of rocker might be your daily driver. If you live in a place with moderate snowfall (Summit County, Colorado, we’re looking at you), then look for an all-mountain ski, one that’s a touch skinnier and with less rocker, which will let you mix up on-trail and off-trail skiing. And if you live where machine-groomed hardpack and chalky tree skiing is more common than bottomless blower—say, the East Coast—you should start with all-mountain frontside skis with just a hint of rocker and a waist width that makes for easy and powerful edging. They’re still all-mountain skis, they just let you better rip carved turns, bumps, and tight trees when you aren’t storm skiing.

Stiffness

Back in the day when everyone skied on modified slalom and GS skis, stiffness was often the deciding factor in ski selection. Today, though, unless you’re either extralarge and powerful or petite and laid-back, almost all recreational all-mountain skis are built with a round-turn flex that’s accessible to most skiers. (Meaning you don’t need to actively muscle them to get them to arc turns.) Think you need a softer or stiffer ski? Before you change models, consider changing lengths. See the next entry.

Length

Thanks to a smart blend of rocker, taper, sidecut, and new materials, modern all-mountain skis are stable but lively, surfy but powerful, and dynamic but not demanding. A side benefit to all that innovation? We can ski them shorter than skis made 15 years ago. But don’t throw out all reason in the process. Ski-size charts like this one are a good place to start, but while they’re close to spot-on for easy-skiing intermediates, they tend to run five to ten centimeters short for aggressive experts. Also know that flex patterns (stiffness again) typically change with length, so if you want a stiffer ski, you might want a longer ski that’s designed for a bigger skier, too, and vice versa.  

Sidecut

Sidecut is the hourglass shape of a ski. When you put a ski on edge and bend it into a carved turn on packed snow, the depth or radius of that sidecut helps to determine if you’re going to make a short (14-meter) turn or a long (20-meter) arc. Counterintuitively, in powder, bumps, and trees, less sidecut can make for quicker turns: in those conditions, you aren’t carving so much as pivoting or floating your turns, and in soft snow, less sidecut helps a ski cut loose. In general, though, opt for more aggressive sidecuts if you live for arcing race turns on groomers, and opt for less cut if you prefer to ski off-trail in soft snow. Backcountry skis typically offer the least amount of sidecut, because excessive hourglassing can cause the ski to catch unexpectedly in weird backcountry snow.

Rocker

It’s subtle on most skis, but rocker is that three-dimensional shaping reminiscent of the upturned nose of a surfboard or the hull of a rodeo kayak. Just a hint of rocker makes it easier to tip an all-mountain ski on edge to carve turns. Deeper rocker, meanwhile, helps float a ski to the surface of soft snow and gives a ski a surfy or slashy feel in powder. As with width, you want more rocker for pure powder skiing and less rocker for pure carving, where it can make a ski feel less stable at high speed.

Weight

All skis are getting lighter these days, and in general we think that’s a good thing. Women are now able to run gear that’s proportionally more in line with their body weight. In-bounds skiers who hike for their turns benefit from skis that are easier to shoulder. Backcountry skiers obviously need lighter skis for touring uphill. And slightly lighter skis can feel more playful off-trail in soft snow. But unless you’re a ski-mountaineer racer, buying skis based solely on weight is a bad idea. Eventually, shaving weight comes at the expense of stability and dampness, and many skiers know that feathery backcountry planks tend to skitter on resort hardpack. And of course, even the heaviest wood and metal skis don’t feel heavy when you’re riding lifts and going 45 miles an hour on groomers. If you rarely hike, weight isn’t much of an issue.