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During a speech on Wednesday that was closed to both the press and public, Acting Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt announced plans to remove gray wolves from the list of species protected by the Endangered Species Act throughout the Lower 48. The move immediately drew condemnation from conservation groups.

Why is the Trump administration taking this action now and what does it mean for the species? Let’s run through the details. 

Around two million gray wolves used to roam the entirety of the North American continent. But European settlement largely extirpated the species from what are now the Lower 48. When ESA protections were granted to the species in 1975, only about 1,000 of the animals remained in a small area around the Great Lakes. (About 60,000 wolves remain in Alaska and northern Canada.) 

In 1995, 66 wolves were re-introduced to Yellowstone National Park and Idaho. That recovery plan also allowed for the natural dispersal of wolves into the area from Canada. Since then, the population in the American portion of the northern Rocky Mountains and westward has grown to about 1,700, which now live in Montana, Wyoming, Washington, and Oregon. They're even starting to spread into northern California. 

Since the ESA listing, the population of wolves around the Great Lakes has grown to about 4,000, but that number is disputed by pretty much everyone involved. 

As an apex predator, wolves create a trophic cascade of benefits in the ecosystems they inhabit. As we all know from listening to Elton John sing in The Lion King, the natural world is a complex web of interconnection; change something as small as a species of grass, and it can have wide-reaching impacts that imperil even large animals. Change something as important as a wolf, and it can alter the course of rivers. 

That’s exactly what’s happened in Yellowstone National Park since that 1995 wolf reintroduction. There, they corrected an overpopulation of elk, fixing an imbalance caused by that species voracious appetite for plants. As a result, everything from beavers to birds of prey returned to more balanced population numbers. Plus, wolves achieved that management of ecosystems far cheaper and much more effectively than humans alone would have. For people who like wolves, it simply makes sense to return them to as much of their former habitat as possible. 

Wolves like to kill and eat stuff that you and I also like to kill and eat. That might be a lamb or calf, putting them into conflict with ranchers, or it might be the aforementioned elk, putting them into conflict with hunters. In addition, ESA protections for wolves may restrict the activities of big businesses like industrial agriculture or oil and gas extraction in places where wolves live. 

Some people also consider wolves scary, despite overwhelming evidence that they pose virtually no threat to human life. 

It’s not just the Trump administration that wants to see wolves taken off the list of animals protected by the Endangered Species Act. Efforts to do that have been ongoing since at least 2003. The short answer as to why? Politics. Politicians in red states see a wolf delisting as a way to appeal to their rural audiences. Every politician who takes money from the agriculture or oil and gas industries is under pressure to remove protections for the species. 

Of course, the ESA is intended to rehabilitate the populations of threatened species, so it contains a mechanism for withdrawing its protections from a species once it has reached a predetermined level. Ensuring that this function is maintained may also remove political threats to the ESA itself. 

Wolf populations in specific areas may have reached sustainable levels, but wolves have only returned to a very small portion of their historic range. For those who see the value wolves bring to wider ecosystems, it makes sense that retaining listed status will help them continue to expand their ranges. 

Removing them from the ESA won’t strip wolves of all protections. States like Washington and California have robust wolf management plans in place, and are likely capable of offering the species adequate protections within their borders. But wolves range widely and aren’t constrained by lines on a map. A population that crosses the border from Washington into Idaho, for instance, will also be crossing from a state where they’re protected to a state actively attempting to reduce wolf populations. And that may impair the species’ ability to sustainably occupy the region. 

Despite the rhetoric put forward by big industry lobbying dollars, hunting, trapping, or poisoning wolves has actually been demonstrated to increase their predation on livestock, increasing conflict with independent ranchers. Wolves live in complex social systems which can be thrown into disarray by the loss of an individual member. Look at a wolf pack as a single entity, rather than a group of individual animals, and that pack effectively behaves like an injured animal that’s unable to successfully hunt its natural prey if it loses an important individual or individuals to a hunter. This is what often causes a pack to turn to an unnatural food source: Livestock. 

People who like wolves argue that it’s much more effective to employ non-lethal deterrents like livestock guardian dogs, range riders, or even flags, balloons, or inflatable bendy men to help reinforce in wolves that they have no business entering the territory of men. 

And wolves bring benefits beyond simply taking care of ecosystm managemnt for us. In Yellowstone, for instance, wolf-related tourism brings $35 million a year to the local economy. 

While Bernhardt announced his intention to strike wolves from their ESA listing Wednesday, the plan must still be opened for public comment before it can move forward. When that happens you should give your government your opinion. If you feel strongly about protections for wolves, then you can also donate to organizations like the Center for Biological Diversity, which will be challenging the measure in court. And in the long term, you can support candidates and legislation who are trying to get corporate money out of politics. Ninety percent of Americans support the Endangered Species Act, but corporate donations have been shown to coincide with attacks on it from the politicians we elect. 

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Last September, we declared Free Solo to be the best climbing movie ever made. Now, it's on the verge of another prestigious achievement. Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s film documenting climber Alex Honnold’s historic rope-free ascent of El Capitan's Freerider in Yosemite is the favorite to take home the statue for Best Documentary Feature at this year’s Academy Awards on Sunday night. 

Free Solo follows Honnold as he prepares for the climb and deals with “the circus” of being the sport’s most recognizable figure, someone who’s been living mostly out of a van suddenly having a camera following his every move for months on end. It’s that insight into Honnold that forces the audience to confront bigger questions about life, death, and risk-taking and make this much more than just another climbing flick.  

In an interview with Outside in September 2018, Vasarhelyi described the film as a story about “this kid who is so scared of talking to other people that it was easier for him to climb alone, with no ropes, than to ask for a partner. I feel like we all have something in our lives like that. It was really important to see Alex’s eyes before he did it. What did his eyes look like the morning he set off?”

That approach goes a long way toward explaining why Vasarhelyi and Chin have a good shot to be on stage together accepting the Oscar this weekend. 

If you haven’t seen the film, or just want to see it a second (or third) time, you can watch it online right now. It’s available for purchase on all the major streaming services, including iTunes, Amazon Prime Video, YouTube, and Google Play.

National Geographic, which funded and distributed the movie, will broadcast the film on its cable channel on Sunday, March 3. Check your local listings for times.

And if you can see it on the big screen, you definitely should. It’s still showing in theaters around the country, and it’s set to expand to even more movie houses after the Oscars.

Here’s a full listing of theatres showing it.

A new study suggests that running on autopilot is the most efficient approach.

Have you ever tried to explain to someone how to tie your shoes? It’s a task you do smoothly and automatically—so smoothly, in fact, that you may find it impossible to break it down into a series of discrete steps that you can teach someone else. The best way to tie your shoes, it turns out, is not to think about it, and simply let autopilot take over. And some new research bolsters the controversial claim that, in this respect, running is a lot like tying your shoes.

The new study, published in the Journal of Sports Sciences, was led by Linda Schücker of the University of Münster. Twelve runners ran at a moderate pace on a treadmill in a virtual-reality set-up with a large video screen simulating the experience of running on a path around a lake. Their running economy, a measure of much energy you burn to maintain a given pace, was measured in three different conditions: when they were told to focus on their running form, their breathing, or simply on their virtual surroundings.

The experiment was designed to test a theory in motor learning that distinguishes between directing your focus internally or externally. A large body of research suggests that focusing externally, on the consequences of your actions rather than on the actions themselves, produces better results. For example, you’ll do better shooting a basketball free throw if you’re told to focus on seeing the ball go through the rim than if you’re told to focus on the angle of your elbow or the motion of your wrist. Focusing internally on the details of your movements disrupts the “automaticity” of these familiar actions.

Back in 2009, Schücker published a study very similar to the new one which suggested that the same thing applies to running. When runners focused on their running form, they ran less efficiently than when they simply watched the scenery go by; when they focused on their breathing, they got even worse. That’s exactly what the new study found, too. On average, they burned 2.6 percent more oxygen when focusing on their form, and 4.2 percent more when focusing on their breathing.

The twist in the new study was that Schücker tried to understand what made the runners less efficient. When they thought about their running form, they had more vertical oscillation from stride to stride, which may have cost extra energy. There were other subtle differences in individual runners; several, for example, bent their knees more when they thought about form. When they thought about breathing, they took longer, slower breaths: just 28.7 per minute compared to 34.0 in the scenery condition.

The message seems pretty straightforward here: you know instinctively how to run and how to breathe, so stop trying to tinker with the details. But there are some important caveats. A few years ago I had a chance to chat about this area of research with Noel Brick, a psychologist at Ulster University who studies what endurance athletes think about while running, cycling, and so on. One of the points he made was that not all ways of thinking about running form are equivalent. In Schücker’s experiments, the runners are told: “Pay attention to the push-off and the forward movement of your legs.” Does that correspond to advice that any running coach would actually give? Perhaps it’s the specific details of this advice that hurt your efficiency, and you’d get a different result from thinking, say, “Take short strides and don’t lean too far backwards.”

Another point raised by Brick is that even staunch advocates of trying to change your running form don’t suggest thinking about form all the time. Instead, it’s something you might do as part of a periodic self-check: run through a list of form cues that you’ve identified as important for you personally, rather than generic guidance to pay attention to the forward movement of your legs. Then relax and think about something else.

There are two other caveats that always come up in discussions of changes in running form. One is that trying to alter your form may make you less efficient in the short term, but more efficient in the long term as the new motion becomes automatic. The other is that efficiency may not be the outcome you care most about. Lots of people might be willing to accept a 2-percent penalty in efficiency if it makes you less likely to get injured. Both of these points are entirely reasonable; but both assume that you know what changes to make to your form to make yourself more efficient and injury-proof—a proposition that remains hotly disputed among running researchers, to put it mildly.

Another important distinction in the motor-learning literature is between novices and experts. Actions like tying your shoes, shooting a basketball, or putting a golf ball all begin as a series of discrete steps that you have to consciously focus on. As time goes on and you get better at it, the sequence gets combined into a single step stored in your procedural memory, which no longer requires conscious control. That distinction has interesting consequences. If you tell novice golfers to hurry up, they’ll sink fewer putts than if you tell them to take as much time as they want. They need to focus on the discrete steps of their putting motion to be successful. In contrast, if you tell expert golfers to hurry up, they’ll actually sink more putts. They do best when they rely on their internalized procedural memory, rather than thinking too hard about the detailed steps of their motion.

With this in mind, I think there’s a high bar to clear before you tell experienced runners to start messing with their form. They may have apparent imperfections in their motion, but to improve on their current form you’ll need to overcome deeply ingrained motor patterns that have already been self-optimized to some degree. The unanswered question is whether less experienced runners count as novices or experts. You could argue that we’ve all been running for most of our lives; but you could also argue that someone who’s been mostly sedentary and then takes up running as an adult is essentially learning a new skill—or at least, is capable of learning from scratch in a way that someone who’s been running daily for a decade no longer is.

In the end, it’s probably best to steer clear of absolute pronouncements. Thinking about form isn’t always bad; neither is it always good. But I do think this research should tip the default option toward just getting on with it. Unless you’ve got a good reason to think your form can be improved, and a solid basis for knowing which changes to make, you’ll be fighting an uphill battle. And as for breathing, where the potential benefits of meddling are unclear, I think the case is even stronger: stop thinking about it and just do it.

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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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Late last week, a nonprofit organization originally established to advocate for women in the outdoor industry did a seemingly wondrous thing. Camber Outdoors announced an expansion of its CEO Pledge, a gender-equity initiative launched in 2015, to include equity, inclusion, and diversity. More than 50 industry brands, including powerhouses like REI and Patagonia, have signed on to the covenant, renamed the CEO Outdoor Equity Pledge, which Camber initially touted as the “first of its kind.” 

But here’s the rub: a group of people and organizations of color launched the similarly named Outdoor CEO Diversity Pledge in July 2018. The Trail Posse, a nonprofit media entity that I founded, is a member of this pledge’s steering committee.

Camber Outdoors and several of its eventual signatories declined to work with us, but we have 28 brands on board, the most recognizable being Marmot, which was the first to commit. These companies are each working with a member of our steering committee to establish actions on workforce diversity and representation in media, marketing, and with brand ambassadors. The companies agreed to be held accountable for those actions.

The steering committee is unpaid. We have no umbrella organization or funding behind us. We are connected by our mutual blackness or brownness, our passion for the outdoors, and our drive to elevate access and equity. We are trying to negotiate space in a world that, frankly, mostly indicates it doesn’t want us.

The initiative by Camber Outdoors and its allies did not make us feel any differently. It launched on February 1, the first day of Black History Month. With great fanfare, they created the optic of a large group of white-led outdoor brands signaling a preference to follow a white-led organization on diversity instead of an alliance of organizations of color organized by a black woman, Teresa Baker of the African American National Park Event.

From the outside, it might be tempting to dismiss this latest tempest as a mere dustup between trekking-pole-wielding tree huggers. But the outdoor industry generates annual consumer spending of $887 billion and 7.6 million American jobs, according to the latest projections by the Outdoor Industry Association. The sector accounted for 2.2 percent ($412 billion) of the 2016 U.S. gross domestic product, according to the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis.

With so much at stake, it’s no wonder the space is fraught with conflict over equity and inclusion. But because outdoor brands are private, it’s difficult to gauge just how lacking in diversity they really are.

The conservation and environmental sector is most similar to the outdoor industry in its employment and leadership—and its numbers are dismal. According to a 2018 report by Green 2.0, an initiative dedicated to increasing racial diversity in environmental organizations, foundations, and government agencies, nonwhites comprise 26 percent of full-time foundation staff, 4 percent of senior staff, and 21 percent of foundation board members. Those numbers actually could be underselling the racial divide since they are based on self-reported data. Outdoor-industry insiders will admit that the lack of diversity in its companies is likely far worse. And that lack of diversity can lead to bad decisions and misguided actions.

Responding to the outcry, Camber Outdoors issued a statement on February 4 in which its executive director, Deanne Buck, apologized for characterizing its initiative as “first of its kind.” But in that same press release, Camber still described itself the “first and only authority… advancing opportunities… for everyone” in the outdoors.

Amanda Jameson, a black long-distance hiker, was among those who found Camber’s apology disingenuous. Jameson is one of three women of color who work for Camber—at least until her last day later this month. She resigned her position as program manager on Monday.

“If you’re an organization that is interested in change and some authentic negotiation, some authentic diversity, and some authentic being in that discomfort, it’s important to be clear,” Jameson told me. “It’s important to be open. Certainly, in [Camber’s] response to this particular issue, that’s not what I’ve seen.”

The apparent hollowness of the gesture left outdoor advocates of color with the familiar gut punches of appropriation, erasure, and lack of self-determination that stung our ancestors, on whose shoulders we stand. They were the recipients of this country’s original sins as it slaked its thirst for claiming and cleansing public lands and establishing a culture of recreation that values solitude, respite, and inaccessibility. We find these appeals at odds with our immigrants’ culture of extended family, our historical ghettoization, and our wont for congregation because of safety and social reasons.

As we have been pointing out for centuries, we are outside, of course, but even in its glorious light, we seldom feel seen.

“Privilege has the privilege of not seeing itself,” said Carolyn Finney, an author, cultural geographer, and member of the Outdoor CEO Diversity Pledge steering committee. “I believe actually that [the Camber pledge] was a big risk, but they don’t see it. The risk is losing all of us folks of color who they deem to care about and say they want to help elevate and include. So either they don’t care, or they are just so clueless.”

Many in the outdoor industry seem to hold onto the false notion that there is a dearth of nonwhite candidates to hire, models of color to feature in ads and catalogs, and minority consumers who want to buy gear. This persistent people-of-color-are-not-outside narrative is reinforced by statistics such as those showing low visitation to national parks (about 22 percent of visitors are nonwhite) or low participation rates by nonwhite groups in some outdoor activities like bird-watching (7 percent, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service). But a lot of us feel like we don’t count because we aren’t properly counted. Some of our immigrant tongues don’t have equivalent terms for words like camping or trailhead that make up the American lexicon for outdoor recreation. For others, our history in this country has conditioned us to believe that we don’t look or act like outdoors people, so we might call “out for a walk” what a white person would readily identify as a hike.

Finney, the author of Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors, reviewed issues of Outside magazine published between 2001–1991 and found that only 103 of the magazine’s 4,602 pictures of people contained African Americans. She says that while things have improved since then, underrepresentation remains significant. John Robinson, a black former Forest Service biologist and a longtime birding advocate, says the self-perpetuating nonwhite scarcity in certain outdoor activities results from what he calls the “Don’t Loop”: People of color don’t (insert activity) because people don’t engage in an activity in which they don’t see people like themselves.

The question is: How is this loop disrupted?

In a big way, it just was.

Our history tells us that conflict usually is required to catalyze meaningful change. While the Camber pledge didn’t involve snarling dogs or battering batons, it was the public exposure of the kind of appropriation and erasure that takes place all the time in the darkened corners of what I call the “organized outdoors”—recreation, conservation, and environmentalism, as defined by the U.S. mainstream. This time it was greeted with significant backlash.

The Don’t Loop can be further disrupted by marked improvement in representation of nonwhites in the industry workforce, marketing and advertising, and ambassadorships. The usual industry ploys—inviting people of color to serve on panels, sharing our social-media posts, and plying us with high-margin gear that provides the illusion of value—are inauthentic avenues to claiming commitment to diversity by association.

Recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and retaining people of color requires real commitment, real work, and real resources. More than just the right thing to do, equity and inclusion should be viewed as business imperatives, a survival strategy in the face of rapidly changing demographics in this country. The alternative, in which people of color create our own outdoor companies to serve our growing communities, would not offer a bright future for legacy brands.

Glenn Nelson founded the Trail Posse to cover the intersection of race and the outdoors.

Big Sky Country has one of the highest concentrations of hot springs in America. Here’s where to find the best ones.

With most visitors flocking to Montana to fly-fish, ski, backpack, or ride horses, Big Sky Country’s hot springs largely fall under the radar. Which is a shame, because with 61 known springs, from high-end resorts to natural pools deep in the wilderness, the state is home to one of the highest concentrations of these geothermic wonders in the United States. With most of the springs clustered around the southwest portion of the state, they’re begging for a mini road trip this fall. We rounded up our favorites, so grab a swimsuit and fill up your tank.

Bozeman Hot Springs

Bozeman

One of the few hot springs on our list near an urban center, this oasis, eight miles west of Bozeman, is a popular hangout for everyone from local high school kids to the occasional visiting celeb, including Justin Bieber and Arnold Schwarzenegger. With eight indoor pools, four new outdoor pools, and a full fitness facility, the 128-year-old resort is perfect for socializing or working out. On Thursdays and Fridays, you can enjoy live music on the outdoor stage from the comfort of your deck chair. This is a dry facility, so you have the perfect excuse to visit the other kind of watering hole in downtown Bozeman afterward. Our favorites? Crystal Bar and the Bozeman Eagles Club.

The Boiling River

Yellowstone National Park

If you’d rather skip the resorts, head into Yellowstone National Park to take a dip in a section of the Gardner River that’s heated by overflow from a natural hot spring known as the Boiling River. Located just a few minutes from the park’s northern entrance, near the town of Gardiner, this is one of the few places you can actually enjoy a thermal soak inside Yellowstone. It’s open year-round except during spring and early summer, when high water from snowmelt makes it too dangerous. You likely won’t have the river to yourself, but in fall the crowds are smaller and it’s easier to enjoy the rushing water and steam clouds that rise from the rocky shores. While in the area, be sure to check out the bison in Lamar Valley, or head deeper into the park to snap some pics of the stunning Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.

Norris Hot Springs

Norris

Once known for its crazy party scene, this funky little spot located 35 miles west of Bozeman in the Madison River Valley now attracts a laid-back and eclectic crowd looking for an off-the-beaten-path experience. You’ll spot everyone from families to leather-clad bikers enjoying the 30-by-40-foot wood pool, which was built in the 1880s. The geodesic “music dome” hosts live bands on weekends, and the adjacent grill pairs wine and Montana microbrews with everything from burgers and burritos to rainbow trout and lamb kebabs. Most of the grub at Norris Hot Springs is locally sourced; the veggies are even grown on-site by the owner, who lives next door. Pitch a tent in the on-site campground and you’ll have the perfect base camp for rock climbing Revenue Flats, floating or fishing the Madison River, or grabbing a pint at Pony Bar in the nearby town of Pony, which looks like it’s straight out of your favorite Western film.

Chico Hot Springs

Pray

This historic all-inclusive resort, located 35 miles north of Yellowstone National Park, may be the state’s most famous hot spring. Centered around two shimmering outdoor pools with views of the surrounding Absaroka Mountains, Chico Hot Springs has an 18-hole disc golf course, a private wine cellar with a chef’s tasting menu, horseback riding, covered-wagon glamping, and a range of cabins and lodge rooms. For a true Montana experience, fly-fish for trout on the Yellowstone River, then drop by the Old Saloon in nearby Emigrant for a drink and live country bands rocking a large outdoor stage as the glowing Montana sun sets in the background.

Quinn’s Hot Springs Resort

Paradise

Nestled in the national forest about 90 miles northwest of Missoula, Quinn’s Hot Springs Resort originally opened in 1885. Today, it’s a favorite getaway for local couples, thanks to adults-only cabins tucked along the banks of the Clark Fork River, where you can relax on your porch swing after a soak and listen to the water while stars wink into existence. The resort’s out-of-the-way wilderness location encourages exploration. Scout for buffalo at the nearby National Bison Range, hike the 734 miles of trail at Glacier National Park two hours to the north, or paddle Flathead Lake, the largest natural freshwater lake west of the Mississippi.

Expert Essentials

Athletes’ Favorite Adventure Bags

We’ve found the perfect gear totes to help you reach your destination, however far-flung

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Oct 22, 2018

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Oct 22, 2018

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

We’ve found the perfect gear totes to help you reach your destination, however far-flung

Playing outside isn’t all beach yoga and summit pics. It usually requires some unsexy schlepping between home and that secluded cove or secret powder stash. Whether you’re lugging a soggy swimsuit or a quiver of skis, you’ll need the right bag for the job. We’ve rounded up five athletes’ favorite carryalls that will get your gear where it needs to go.

Osprey Transporter 65 ($140)

James Mills, Adventurer, Author of ‘The Adventure Gap’

This bag is good for any activity. Adventurer and mountaineer James Mills uses his 65-liter Osprey Transporter to travel, haul gear to the crag, and stash his boots and hip waders when he’s heading to the river to cast a fly rod. “It pretty much goes wherever I go,” Mills says. “It’s tough as hell, with 840-denier nylon fabric that’s coated for good water resistance.” The bag can be carried like a regular duffel bag with its shoulder strap or like a backpack with its hideaway suspension system. Plus, Mills says, “It’s super roomy on the inside,” with a side compartment that’s perfect for wet clothes or shoes.

Buy Now

 

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L.L.Bean Women’s AT 38 Daypack ($169) and Adventure Pro Duffel, Medium ($129)

Kikkan Randall, Cross-Country Skier, Five-Time Olympian and Gold Medalist

When Kikkan Randall—five-time Olympian and winner, along with Jessie Diggins, of the first-ever U.S. gold medal in cross-country skiing—heads out for a day on the trails, she uses this women’s-specific 38-liter daypack as her boot bag. The top-loader offers plenty of room to carry extra layers, boots or shoes, snacks, and a water bottle. “I also use it as a backcountry ski pack, because I can strap my skis onto the side, and it works great for longer day hikes with the family,” says Randall, who is also an L.L.Bean ambassador.

For off-season workouts and dry-land training, Randall uses this 44-liter duffel made from weather-resistant 420-denier ripstop nylon. “I love the versatility of this bag,” she says. “It’s great for throwing in all the possible gear I would need for a training session, and it has compartments for keeping wet gear and smaller stuff organized.”

Daypack Duffel

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Burton Rider’s 25L Backpack 2.0 ($100)

Caitlin Pascucci, Yogi, Founder of Sangha Studio

Caitlin Pascucci, founder of Sangha Studio, Vermont’s first and only nonprofit donation-based yoga studio, doesn’t bother with a typical yoga mat bag. When she’s on the move, Pascucci hitches her mat to this backpack using vertical-carry straps originally designed to haul snowboards. Why? “A lot of yoga mat bags are horizontal, which makes it hard to fit through doorways,” she says. And while yoga mat bags usually can’t hold much, this 25-liter pack fits a change of clothes, towel, and water bottle with plenty of room to spare.

Buy Now

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L.L.Bean Sportsman’s Rolling Gear Bag, Medium ($199)

Lynne Cox, Long-Distance Open-Water Swimmer

In 1987, Lynne Cox became the first person to swim the 2.7-mile Bering Strait between the United States and the Soviet Union. She’s also been searching for the perfect bag ever since she began crossing the globe as a teenager. “Most of my life is spent traveling and swimming, so I need a bag that can be used for both activities,” she says. This 52-liter duffel bag on wheels meets most airlines’ carry-on dimensions and is her favorite pick so far. “Its configuration works well for me. I can put my damp swimsuit, swim cap, and goggles in one side compartment to keep them away from my dry clothes in the central compartment,” Cox says. She also likes the bag’s soft 1,000-denier nylon construction and the fact that it comes in several colors. “I can squeeze more clothes into it than into a hard suitcase,” she says. “And I can choose a color other than black, so I can find it easily.”

Buy Now

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Thule RoundTrip Ski Roller ($260) and Boot Backpack ($100)

Chris Davenport, Big-Mountain Skier, Ski Guide

Traveling with ski gear is a monumental pain, but having reliable bags can make a world of difference, says Chris Davenport, the first person to ski all 54 of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks in less than a year. He uses this ski bag with “bomber” zippers and wheels, stiff structural support that prevents sagging, and internal padded dividers and straps that keep cargo safe. “I’m on the road most of the year, so my luggage has to be durable, spacious, and easy to haul around,” Davenport says. “This bag has withstood dozens of international flights.” It’s also roomy—he can fit at least two pairs of alpine skis or three pairs of lightweight touring skis, ski poles, extra layers, and equipment like shovels, ice tools, and ropes.

When rolling through town or the airport, Davenport attaches the Boot Backpack to the top of his ski bag. “It’s my carry-on for flights when I can’t risk losing my luggage and need the essentials with me,” he says. Davenport stashes his ski boots, shell, pants, goggles, hat, and gloves in the bag, which has separate compartments for hard and soft goods and a protected goggle case.

Ski Roller Boot Backpack

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To understand any budget, all you need to see are the numbers. And when you look at the Trump administration’s 2020 budget proposal for the Department of the Interior, those numbers paint a pretty clear picture.

Despite rhetoric about allocating more money for fire suppression and to address the National Park Service’s overwhelming maintenance backlog, the reality is that, if this proposal were to move forward, there would be less cash to go around for virtually every line item that isn’t directly related to oil and gas extraction.

The good news? The President doesn’t set the federal government’s budget; Congress does. And, according to House Natural Resources Committee Chair Raúl Grijalva, “This isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on, it’s dead on arrival in Congress, and printing it was a waste of time.”

But, as an indication of the Trump administration’s priorities, the balance sheets in this budget are about as truthful as it gets. The administration is committed to slashing funding for our national parks and public lands. Let’s cut through the bullshit. 

The Rhetoric: “One of Interior’s highest priorities remains to address the deferred maintenance backlog on Federal lands," reads the proposed budget. "At the end of 2018, Interior’s backlog was over $16.0 billion, about three quarters of which is in the National Park Service’s (NPS) crumbling roads, bridges, water systems, and facilities.” 

The Reality: The total NPS budget would be cut by $494,946,000. This includes cuts to the operations budget of $52 million, a $31-million cut to the National Recreation and Preservation fund, a $64-million cut to the Historic Preservation Fund, a $113-million cut for the construction and major maintenance budget, and a $176-million cut for land acquisition and state assistance programs.

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The Rhetoric: “The 2020 budget request includes more than $1.5 billion to support infrastructure maintenance and construction. Funding focuses on projects to address critical health and safety concerns as well as repair existing infrastructure. Complementing this request is the Administration’s legislative proposal to invest $6.5 billion over 5 years into a Public Lands Infrastructure Fund to significantly reduce the deferred maintenance backlog. The Fund will support infrastructure improvements through an allocation of 70 percent for national parks, 10 percent for national forests, 10 percent for wildlife refuges, 5 percent for BIE [Bureau of Indian Education] schools, and 5 percent for lands managed by BLM.”

The Reality: As of last year the NPS’s differed maintenance backlog was $11.6 billion, a number that was expanding at a rate of $275 million per year. That was before the 35-day government shutdown, which saw national parks remain open with reduced staffing. We won’t have a full account of how much that situation added to the backlog until next month, but this budget includes no money to address shutdown-related damage. 

Crunching the administration’s numbers, they’re suggesting a budget of $910 million per year, for five years, to address that backlog. In a best-case scenario, that would only get us $4.55 billion into that ever-increasing backlog, before we talk about the proposed $113 million-per-year reduction in the NPS’ regular maintenance budget. And, as with last year’s budget, that alleged funding relies on oil and gas leasing rates and sales to remain stable, and is only available if other budgets outside of the DOI, which are given priority access, don’t require that money first. It’s Monopoly money, basically. 

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The Rhetoric: “In the FWS [Fish and Wildlife Service] budget, funding supports safe and reliable access to outdoor recreation for over 55 million visitors. These outdoor recreation opportunities, along with special events and outdoor education programs, annually generate $2.4 billion in economic activity and support more than 35,000 jobs.” 

The Reality: The FWS’s budget is slashed by $267 million. This includes cuts of $21.8 million to the resource management budget, a $13-million reduction in the National Wildlife Refuge Fund, and an $84.5-million cut the bureau’s endangered species conservation fund. There's even a $10,000 cut for migratory bird conservation funding. 

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https://twitter.com/DOIDepSec/status/1105156055422722048

The Rhetoric: “Decades of poor forest and vegetation management practices nationwide have contributed to deadly and destructive wildfires… Active fuels management is a necessary and important tool to combat these threats, save lives, and protect property.”

The Reality: The total wildland fire management budget is cut by $28 million. While its fuels management budget is increased by $10 million, this is more than offset by the program’s cuts, which include a $5.7-million cut for suppression operations, an $11-million cut for burned area rehabilitation, an $18-million cut for fire facilities, and a $3-million cut for fire science. 

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The Rhetoric: “Another central component of Interior’s stewardship mission is to ensure the availability of water to communities, farmers, ranchers, and residents across the West. The 2020 budget includes $1.1 billion for Reclamation’s water resource programs to ensure millions of customers continue to receive the water and power essential for daily life, healthy local economies, and resource management.” 

The Reality: The Bureau of Reclamation’s budget is slashed by $462 million. This includes cuts of $451 million for “water, and related resources.”

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The Rhetoric: “The USGS is responsible for monitoring and notification of earthquakes, volcanic activity, and landslides in the United States and collaborates with partners to improve hazard monitoring, explore vulnerable interdependencies, and speed disaster response. Research USGS conducts on minerals, energy resources, and global mineral commodity reports supports national security, provides information to manage energy resources, and informs the understanding of international trade issues. USGS provides essential information for stewardship of the Nation’s lands and protection from biological threats.”

The Reality: The USGS’s budget is cut by $165 million. $164.9 millionof that comes out of the surveys, investigations, and research budget.  

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Professional BASE jumper Miles Daisher needed a new roof on his house in Twin Falls, Idaho. So Daisher, who regularly teaches BASE-jumping courses, posted a trade offer online: help install his roofing and he’d teach a qualified person how to BASE jump. Which is how, in 2013, a 23-year-old skydiver from Florida named Jay Rawe and two friends ended up piling into a three-seater pickup truck and driving across the country in 36 hours from Florida to Idaho to learn how to BASE jump.

“I recall Jay as being very eager, with big eyes and a thirst for learning and going big,” says Daisher. The three guys worked for a couple of weeks on Daisher’s house, and in exchange, he coached them at Twin Falls’ Perrine Bridge, one of the few structures you can legally BASE jump from in the United States. “I was hooked right away,” says Rawe.

After that, Rawe moved to Draper, Utah, where he worked as a bartender at a steak restaurant and continued to BASE jump whenever he could. A year later, on March 24, 2014, Rawe, then 25, and his friend Austin Carey, then 23, showed up at the Perrine Bridge. After two flawless jumps, they decided to try something different: a tandem jump, a move that’s not uncommon in BASE jumping.

Carey stood on the edge of the bridge, and Rawe climbed onto his friend’s shoulders. But then, as they leaned forward, Carey’s parachute wrapped around Rawe’s leg, tangling their chutes. Both men fell 480 feet, hitting the ground below. In a video of the accident captured by their friends standing on the bridge, all you can hear are loud gasps and the words “Oh my God.”

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When Rawe was a kid in Bradenton, Florida, anytime he went missing, his teachers would say, “Look up.” He was usually hanging from the monkey bars. “He was always on top of something,” says Jay’s mom, Teresa. “When he was three, he climbed on top of the refrigerator.”

She enrolled him in gymnastics so he’d learn to fall gracefully. Later he wrestled, skateboarded, and had dreams of becoming a Hollywood stuntman. “I’ve always had an inclination to do flips and jump off things,” says Rawe, who’s lean and clean-cut, with a square jaw, friendly blue-gray eyes, and neatly cropped brown hair.

At 21, he learned to skydive at a popular drop zone in Zephyrhills, Florida, an hour and a half from where he grew up. “I started researching BASE jumping and found out that you had to be a skydiver first,” Rawe says. “I always wanted to fly, and the safest way to do that would be with a parachute. But you have to have 200 skydives before anyone will even teach you to BASE.”

His mom admits she was constantly nervous about her son’s level of risk-taking, especially once he learned how to BASE jump. “He wouldn’t tell me until after he landed that he was climbing on top of a tower,” says Teresa. “He’d take pictures of sunrises and text me afterward to say, ‘Look what I saw today.’ I voiced my opinion that it was unsafe, but there’s only so much you can do.”

After hundreds of successful skydives and then a year of BASE jumping with instruction from Daisher, Rawe made that one major mistake. Usually, that’s all it takes. That dual jump off the Perrine Bridge in 2014 could have killed both him and Carey, but instead it broke both of the young men’s backs.

It was a miracle he wasn’t paralyzed. Rawe suffered a burst fracture of his L1 vertebra—basically a severe compression of his spinal cord—and underwent surgery that night. He spent a week in the hospital in Idaho, then months in a rehabilitation center in Florida. He had severe nerve damage, and doctors weren’t sure if he’d ever retain full movement. “I tried to stay positive. I never once had bad thoughts,” Rawe says. “Doctors told me, ‘You might never walk again. You have to accept this as your new life.’ Inside, I was like, ‘No, I’m going to be jumping again.’ I was very confident in my ability.” After months in rehab, Rawe was back on his feet, walking with a cane.

Seven months after the accident, Rawe actually did do another BASE jump, off the New River Gorge Bridge in West Virginia. He did a few more jumps and skydives after that, but things had changed. “There was definitely more fear there,” Rawe says. “I think time made the fear bigger.”

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Two years after his accident, Rawe was depressed. Despite his attempts to return to BASE jumping, the nerve damage in his left leg and his spinal injury were just too much. He couldn’t really do the things he was used to doing—skydiving, snowboarding, and riding his bike were challenging, to say the least.He was back home living with his mom in Florida, and his life felt stalled. “He wasn’t able to do anything exhilarating and challenging, and his quality of life wasn’t the same,” says Teresa.  

So when Rawe and his girlfriend set out on a cross-country drive in the winter of 2016, Teresa suggested they stop in Breckenridge, Colorado, and visit the town’s adaptive-sports facility, the Breckenridge Outdoor Education Center. There, Rawe learned to use a sitski, a device that enables those with debilitating injuries to sit in a bucket-like seat and slide down snow on a single ski, using outriggers on your arms for balance. Rawe had learned to snowboard as a kid on occasional family trips to the mountains, but the sitski was an entirely new beast. “I was back on the bunny hill,” he recalls.

Rawe took more lessons that winter in Utah at Wasatch Adaptive Sports in Snowbird and the National Ability Center in Park City, spending a total of eight days that season in a sitski. Not bad for a guy who lived in Florida. He eventually applied for a grant from the High Fives Foundation, an organization based in Truckee, California, that helps people with life-altering injuries, which covered the cost of his physical therapy. He saved money for a year to buy his own sitski, which cost about $5,000.

In November 2017, Rawe moved to Lake Tahoe; he wanted a change of pace and he had some friends there. That winter he quickly went from skiing groomers at Squaw Valley to venturing into the terrain park on his sitski. “I rode over the little boxes and rails and slowly progressed to the jumps,” he says. He talked to veteran adaptive skier Bill Bowness, who works as an instructor at Achieve Tahoe, the area’s adaptive-sports program. Bowness offered him tips on landing and balancing his sitski. “I was going over little side jumps and wrecking,” Rawe says. “Bill told me, ‘Don’t lean forward. Whatever direction you’re leaning is the way you’re going to go.’”

At the end of last winter, Rawe met another sitskier in the park at Squaw Valley, a 26-year-old named Trevor Kennison, who broke his back snowboarding in the backcountry of Vail, Colorado, in 2014. The two pushed each other to learn new things. “It’s rare to see another sitskier in the park,” Kennison says. “There’s not many people who do what Jay and I are trying to do, and his stoke level was high.”

By sitski standards, Rawe’s moves were groundbreaking. He progressed gradually, from regular airs to shifties, then 180s, then a quarterpipe trick he calls a pole-plant alley-oop, a 180 where he spins uphill. He was hitting cliffs on big-mountain lines, and in spring 2018, he stuck his first backflip off a jump in the park. In the process, he skied about 80 days and broke 11 skis (not the pricey bucket-seat contraption but its single ski, which he’d replace with hand-me-downs from friends). 

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Canadian Josh Dueck became the first sitskier to throw a backflip, in 2012. “A lot of people are like, ‘I want to do that.’ Then they get out there and realize how hard it is,” says Dueck. “It’s exhausting.” For years there’s been ski racing for adaptive skiers but little in the way of freeride programs. Dueck teaches a freeride adaptive camp through Canada’s Live It Love It Foundation, but beyond that, there’s not much in the way of organized big-mountain or park-and-pipe skiing for adaptive riders. The X Games introduced an adaptive ski-cross event, called Mono Skier X, in 2007, but it hasn’t taken place in several years due to a lack of potenital participants.

But now there seems to be a growing demand for competitionsamong rising adaptive freeriders like Rawe and others, who operate on their own but could benefit from an organized program. There’s Kennison, who has considered entering Freeride World Tour qualifier events.Then there’s a skier named Rob Enigl, who’s doing first sitski descents around Montana, and a Marine sergeant named Trey Humphrey, who lost his right leg after stepping on an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan and is now doing sitski backflips into foam pits. 

Rawe would like to see more of this progression among adaptive athletes. He and Achieve Tahoe instructor Keagan Buffington have an idea for a first-of-its-kind adaptive freeride festival, where skiers with varying disabilities could get together and shred big-mountain terrain or throw tricks in the park or pipe. Maybe it’d be a competition, maybe a clinic, or just a gathering of new friends. “We thought, Let’s get a bunch of the best sitskiers who want to ride steep terrain together and see where this goes,” says Rawe.

Achieve Tahoe’s executive director, Haakon Lang-Ree, says the organization is open to the idea of hosting an event like this, but a date hasn’t been nailed down (though it could happen as early as next winter). “We’re not going to have 12 people throwing backflips. These are great ideas and dreams, but this type of riding isn’t for everyone,” says Lang-Ree. “But the more models you have, the more people will try new things and look at more terrain. Once you have mastery of the mono-ski, you’re about as limitless as anyone standing up on two skis.”

As for Rawe, he’s still working on his own moves. “The hardest part is working up the nerve to hit a jump for the first time,” he says. “It’s this big unknown, but then you do it and you’re fine, and you know: I can do this. All outcomes are possible.”

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Ama Dablam sits in the heart of Nepal’s Khumbu Valley, just a few days’ walk from Mount Everest. Trekkers heading to Everest Base Camp will spend the better part of two days staring at its 22,349-foot summit. From the trails that snake through the valley, it looks foreboding, dramatic, improbable.

The first time I really saw Ama Dablam was on Google Images—a shark’s fin of rock capped by a swath of steep snow runnels leading to the mountain’s apex. Pictures of tents precariously perched at camp two are basically designed to give your grandpa a hernia. Footage distorted by GoPro’s infamous fish-eye lens renders ridgelines perilous tightropes at 20,000 feet.

“I want to climb that one,” my boyfriend and climbing partner, Mike, said last spring. The idea kind of made me want to throw up, which was how I knew I was going to say yes. A few days earlier we’d had a few too many beers and impulse-bought cheap flights to Nepal for the coming fall. We hired a logistics company to handle our porters and base-camp support, but Mike is a professional mountain guide, so we planned to climb on our own. After a few months spent ironing out details, we wired a large sum of money to the company and finally hopped a flight to Kathmandu in mid-October.

The type-A part of my personality comes out aggressively before I do anything big. Before running the Leadville 100 in 2017, I spent weeks fine-tuning a detailed four-page Google doc for my support crew. My Ama Dablam doc was 19 pages long. I’m inclined to be embarrassed about what that might say about my anal retentiveness, but I consulted it often and found it useful. One thing I read about a lot were accidents on the mountain. I wanted to understand the worst-case scenarios ahead of time. So, I wondered, when people die on Ama Dablam, what tends to go wrong?

There are any number of ways to die in the mountains. On peaks 6,000 meters and higher in Nepal’s Himalayas, death occurs most often by falling (39 percent), avalanche (28 percent), or acute mountain sickness (7.6 percent). Between 1959 and 2018, 32 people have died attempting the climb on Ama Dablam, according to the Himalayan Database, which keeps track of such things. Fifteen deaths resulted from a fall, five from illness, three from falling rock or ice, seven from avalanches, and one from a failed BASE jump (the cause of one death is unknown). In 2006, the Dablam avalanched. (The Dablam is a huge hanging glacier that gives the mountain its name; Ama Dablam means “mother’s necklace.”) It killed a team of six in their sleep at camp three. That camp has been considered too dangerous to use until recently. Many of the falling deaths seem to be a result of human error: not testing ropes before committing to them, clipping an old rope instead of a new one, rappelling off the end of a rope, failing to use gear correctly or employ proper safeguards.

None of these things are surprising, and are easy enough to write off as a cost of doing business in the mountains. You can’t plan your way out of everything. Accidents happen. Objective hazards exist. Was the climber being irresponsible, or were they just unlucky? In this way you can rationalize risk to skeptical family members—and to yourself. You can hang out in the territory between naivete and acceptance, by believing it won’t happen to you while also knowing that it just might.

The trade route on Ama Dablam follows the southwest ridge, a rocky spine that sends climbers up exposed rock faces, around gendarmes, and up mixed couloirs to steep snow and ice pitches that lead to a surprisingly expansive, flat summit. The climbing is varied, and the position is spectacular. Sir Edmund Hillary once called it “unclimbable,” but today it’s one of the country’s most frequently permitted peaks. It’d likely still be considered unclimbable for most mountaineers if not for the climbing Sherpas who fix ropes from camp one to the summit at the beginning of every season. Ropes or not, though, the margin for error on Ama Dablam is close to zero. The exposure is huge, and there’s almost always a few thousand feet of air beneath your boots. 

You can’t control objective hazards, but you can control your own preparation. To that end, I spent the spring and summer fine-tuning skills. I did practice laps at the climbing gym while simultaneously sliding an ascender, a progress-capture device, up a fixed rope. The point of this was to replicatethe peak’s Yellow Tower, a 40-foot rock face that goes at around 5.8, which some call the technical crux of the climb. Mike and I climbed routes like Mount Baker’s North Ridge, a committing and exposed 3,000-foot route in Washington’s North Cascades that’s steep enough to frequently require two ice tools. For exposure therapy: lots of multipitch rock routes and airy rappelling. Statistically, most mountaineering accidents happen on the descent, when climbers are tired. And to descend Ama Dablam, you’ve got to do at least 20 rappels. I wanted to be able to do it efficiently in my sleep, or in an altitude-induced haze. (We heard a story about climbers leaving the summit last fall who’d never rappelled before, if you can imagine.)

We flew to Lukla in October, and after two weeks of trekking, we made it to camp one, at 18,500 feet. The trail there is a nontechnical slog and can be done in four to five hours. We set up camp on one of the few remaining flattish slivers of dirt amid a field of boulders. Due to the risk of petty crime (seriously), we padlocked our tent’s doors to protect our water, food, and fuel before returning to base camp to plan our ascent and wait for a weather window.

Camp two sits on top of a rock pillar that drops off thousands of feet on either side. Real estate is limited. You can fit roughly a dozen tents up there, none of which will be comfortable and all of which will be close together. It’s a smelly, high-altitude slumber party. Teams rotate through the tents that are already set up, so individual climbers have to figure out if a tent is free during their desired summit bid. After asking around, we still hadn’t found any openings, and were talking about summiting from camp one instead, when a pair of Romanians approached us. They offered to sell their Black Diamond Firstlight, which was already pitched at camp two, for way too much money. But it looked like our best option, so we reluctantly forked over the cash. What’s the going rate for a tattered nylon roof on a rocky, off-kilter piece of dirt at 19,700 feet? Two hundred dollars, after a round of hard bargaining. Our Sherpa friends thought this sort of Ama Dablam Airbnb thing was ridiculous, and they had a good laugh about it.

We got to camp two just before sunset and found our expensive neon green hotel room tied to a small ledge. The ledge cliffed out just a few steps from the front door. It was imperative that we watched our step when going to pee, or really when doing anything at all. If you’ve never seen a Firstlight, they weigh nothing and are incredibly tiny. Ours pitched left at about 20 degrees, and the two of us slept more or less in a pile. We waited until all the other climbers left camp so we could climb alone up the Grey Tower, a few loose pitches of blocky 75-degree granite where the route turns from rock to ice and snow.

It’s sections like this where you wouldn’t want someone above you making desperate or careless steps and accidentally knocking down rocks. We had watched some people learn how to use their gear for the first time at base camp and so had a healthy skepticism of other climbers on the mountain. In some instances, we saw climbers approach an anchor and then wait for their Nepali guide to transfer all their safety gear for them. It was impossible to know if the person above you was experienced or if this was all new. You can’t control other climbers.

We took a quick break to gnaw on frozen Snickers bars just as the sun was starting to coat the surrounding peaks in pink. From there we ascended a few short ice cliffs to camp three before continuing up onto the steep snow pitches that led to the summit. A little less than nine hours after leaving camp two, we stood alone on top, all smiles (and maybe a few tears) with unreal 360-degree views of the tallest peaks in the world.

To descend, we swapped our ascenders for belay devices. The terrain on the upper snowfields is less than vertical, maybe 70 degrees, so the rappel is essentially a quick backward walk downhill. We fell into an easy rhythm, with Mike about one anchor ahead. Maybe five rappels down the snowfields, the fixed line curves back to the right and around a slight corner. Below us was another 1,200 feet of snowfield that flattened out to camp three, followed by a steep face that dropped to the valley floor another 5,000 feet below. Just as I approached the corner, the anchor I was weighting—a single metal picket driven into the snow—blew out. I fell about ten feet, swinging out left before the rope went tight again. I was fine, but spooked. It’s unnerving to fall suddenly like that in such an exposed position. Luckily, the ropes that make up the fixed lines are mostly all tied both together and to each anchor. Had that not been the case, there’s no way I would’ve been able to arrest that fall. Mike, who has some 50 pounds on me, had just used that same anchor, as did all the people who’d summited before us that day. I was rappelling gently.

During the fall 2018 season, two people died on Ama Dablam. I read about what happened once I’d returned home. Steven Biem, a 47-year-old American, died of high-altitude pulmonary edema at camp two, and Australian Michael Davis died in what was called a “freak accident” when rockfall severed the rope that attached him to the mountain. Their deaths don’t seem to be the result of inexperience. You can technically do everything right and that can still not be enough.

Reading the news didn’t make me feel like I’d skirted death, even though I’d slept at camp two, where Biem had died, and rappelled the same rope below the same rock that killed Davis just ten days after I’d been there. It only made me feel sorry.I think most would agree that no mountain is worth dying for, or even worth losing a single fingertip over, but that line of thinking just compels climbers to turn around when it gets too dangerous to continue, and it’s not meant to dissuade them from trying at all. To go and try something challenging that you’re not sure you can do is sort of the whole point.

Death in the mountains, and the deaths on Ama Dablamlast season, don’t really make me think about mountaineering any differently. Not because I don’t think something like that could ever happen to me, but because I think that it very well could.

She won Olympic gold in a sport that chose her. Can she do the same in the one she truly loves?

Gwen Jorgensen felt calm. Happy, even. It was an odd pre-race emotion for the 30-year-old triathlete, especially considering she was minutes away from starting the most important race of her life, at the Rio Olympics.

Since she raced her first triathlon, just six years earlier, plucked from a tax accounting job at Ernst & Young by USA Triathlon’s nascent Talent ID program, Jorgensen had qualified for two Olympic Games and earned two world champion titles. This was all during a 13-race winning streak from 2014 to 2016—the longest in the history of the sport for a female athlete. She crushed a qualifying event in Rio the year before the games, and now the world expected her to win again, this time to much greater fanfare.

Jorgensen, her lean 5'10" frame putting her a head above many of her 54 competitors, coolly adjusted her goggles and almost grinned while the other women shook out their legs, arms, and nerves. In the minutes before the athletes all ran down Copacabana Beach into the turquoise saltwater, the TV cameras hung on Jorgensen for a second. Soon they’d turn their focus to the Red Bull–sponsored Wisconsinite and keep it there for most of the run as Jorgensen kicked away from her closest rival with roughly two kilometers to go. She never looked back until she broke the tape. Then, for the first time ever at a finish line, she cried.

“I enjoyed those moments after Rio. I wanted to soak in those four years of hard work,” Jorgensen says. Her immediate post-race goal was to start a family, she said, as her Swiss rival and Rio silver medalist Nicola Spirig had done after the London Olympics in 2012. Jorgensen and her husband, Patrick Lemieux, got tested for Zika and waited the doctor-recommended three months before trying to conceive. Their son, Stanley, made his appearance almost exactly one year to the day after Jorgensen won gold.

But a baby announcement was just the beginning of Jorgensen’s headline news of 2017. She had something else percolating that would shock her fans, sponsors, coaches, and even her family when she finally let it out: Jorgensen didn’t want to be a triathlete. She just wanted to run. And not only did she want to run, she announced on Twitter that fall, but she wanted to win gold in the Olympic marathon.

The triathlon and running worlds immediately began armchair analyzing everything from collegiate stats to her body type to decide which sport was right for her. Jorgensen ignored it all. “I just wasn’t motivated to do the same thing again,” she says. “My heart wasn’t in it.” Lemieux puts it more bluntly: “It’s no secret that triathlon found Gwen. She was never super in love with it.”

Her husband is right. But pursuing triathlon glory transformed Jorgensen from a conservative accountant into a risk-taking, unbreakable champion. It gave her the confidence to risk giving up everything from sponsorships to prize money and follow a different path. And if she could win gold in a sport she merely liked, what could she achieve in one she truly loves?

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Gwen Rosemary Jorgensen grew up the younger of two sisters in Waukesha, Wisconsin, a bucolic working-class Milwaukee suburb where high school life is defined by the typical Midwest football games and homecoming parades. Her mother, Nancy, taught choir at the local high school and had a reputation for baking a mean sourdough focaccia. Joel, her father, worked as a handyman, installing custom countertops and shower basins, usually getting started before sunrise.

Elizabeth was the gabby, somewhat rebellious sister. Gwen, three years younger, was a quiet rule follower. “She let her sister do the talking for her,” says Nancy, who required the girls to play a musical instrument through high school. They both chose violin. Gwen wasn’t passionate about it, Nancy says, “but she had to do it well. She’s always had this personality where she doesn’t do anything unless she does it well.”

Jorgensen developed an early affinity for water at her grandma’s pool, which evolved into becoming a competitive swimmer at age eight. Over the years, that dedication would dictate every choice she made through most of her college years.

“There was something about being in the water,” Jorgensen says. “I’m an introvert, and being immersed in the water—it’s a very solo thing. I liked getting the work in and knowing that I was the one helping myself improve.”

Jorgensen also showed promise in running, though she’d only ever do it if it didn’t interfere with swimming. In elementary school PE—the only class she ever got a C in, because she couldn’t do a somersault—she had to run a mile around the school track. In a story her family loves to retell, she ran it so fast that her teachers didn’t think she’d completed all four laps and made her run one more.

When Jorgensen started high school at Waukesha South High, the track coach, Eric Lehmann, noted her effortless stride as well-suited for distance running. He asked Elizabeth, a senior on the team at the time, if she thought her sister would join. “I thought, good luck getting her to run!” Elizabeth says. “She’s going to swim.”

In those days, Jorgensen was known to have faded Sharpie marks permanently staining her forearms, remnants of where she’d inked her heat, lane, and event for swim meets. In her blue bedroom, among photos of her swim team, Jorgensen had arranged phosphorescent stars on the ceiling to write “5:15,” her goal time in the 500-yard freestyle. She fell asleep flat on her back every night looking up at the glowing numbers. Her priorities were clear.

Lehmann understood that swimming had to come first and allowed her to pop in for running workouts as she could, training during swimming’s off-season. It was the beginning of a lifelong pattern of people making accommodations for Jorgensen because, as Elizabeth says, they recognized her innate talent as a runner.

In swimming, Jorgensen was more determined than naturally gifted. She had her sights set on going to the Olympics as a swimmer, though she rarely scored at the state meet, which meant she couldn’t get a swimming scholarship to college. But she chose her school based on her swimming goals anyway, knowing the only way she’d improve was to swim with women who could kick her ass. Despite being an introverted homebody, Jorgensen initially thought she'd branch out for college. But she fell in love with the campus at The University of Wisconsin-Madison, and that settled it.

Jorgensen threw herself into swimming during her first three years as a Badger. While out of the pool, she discovered her analytical personality was a good fit for accounting. But at the end of her junior year, she found herself questioning her athletic goals for the first time. All of Jorgensen’s roommates were going to NCAAs, but she hadn’t placed high enough to score a spot at the national meet. “I felt like I had put everything into it, and I wasn’t improving,” she says. “I honestly got sick of swimming.”

Lehmann put a call in to the Wisconsin running coaches, even though Jorgensen was equivocal. She knew what it took to go from high school to college swimming. “I thought there’s no way I could make that jump to college running when I haven’t run in three years,” she says. But it turned out the Wisconsin coaches had already been talking about her.

“Her swim coach came into my office one day and said, ‘Hey, I think I’ve got a runner for you,’” says Jerry Schumacher, the men’s head cross-country coach and assistant track coach at Wisconsin at the time. (He left in 2008 and eventually became the head coach of Nike’s Bowerman Track Club.) Jorgensen’s passion for swimming was sapped, but her coach knew she loved to run and that she was built for speed on land.

Schumacher had no idea if Jorgensen had what it took to run Division I, but he spoke with the head coach of the women’s track and cross-country teams, Jim Stintzi, who gave Jorgensen a call, asking her to do a time trial of 400-meter repeats. Her efficiency and natural leg speed impressed him, so he threw her into the 1,500 meters in a meet the following week. “Not sure exactly what she ran,” Stintzi says, “but it was good enough that I was confident she had very solid potential. By the end of the season, I knew she could be really good.”

Jorgensen stayed on at Wisconsin for her masters in accounting, giving her two years of running eligibility, during which she accomplished more than she ever had in swimming. She earned All-American honors in both track and cross-country. She became the Big 10 champ in the 5,000 and 3,000 meters and went to the NCAA championships three times in track and twice in cross-country. It was a gratifying experience, but not one that led her to consider pursuing sports beyond college.

“I wasn’t good enough to go to the Olympics in swimming, so I gave up on my dream to go to the Olympics at all,” Jorgensen says. She had interned at Ernst & Young as a grad student and had a job offer lined up as a tax accountant. She settled into a post-collegiate routine of working 80-to-90-hour weeks and hobby jogging, hoping to pick up a few hundred dollars here and there at local 5Ks.

Then a representative from USA Triathlon reached out and planted the idea that she still had a shot at the Olympics—in a sport she’d never raced.

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USA Triathlon was struggling after the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. American triathletes hadn’t won a single medal, and the governing body had missed its most prominent opportunity to fulfill its mission to “grow and inspire” the triathlon community. It was experiencing a crisis of spirit, and it was also potentially missing out on extra cash from the U.S. Olympic Committee. (The organization favors proven winners and high-profile sports, and triathlon was neither.) USAT’s system for developing world-class athletes wasn’t optimal, and its recruitment strategy needed an overhaul.

“Top athletes from other sports just sort of found us,” says Scott Schnitzspahn, USAT’s sport performance director at the time. “We thought, let’s stop being lucky and go find these athletes.”

Leading the recruitment charge was Barb Lindquist, a 2004 U.S. Olympic triathlete who began to ping college running and swimming coaches across the country. One of her first finds was Jorgensen, whom she met in June 2009 at the NCAA championships.

It seemed like an opportune time to suggest triathlon; a stress fracture had forced Jorgensen to drop out of her last big collegiate meet. But Jorgensen already had her job lined up at Ernst & Young—an accomplishment not lost on her as a millennial graduating into a recession—and the pragmatist refused to be swayed: “I said I’m not going to be an athlete if I can’t support myself financially,” she says. Plus, she had officially put the pool behind her. And there was the not-so-small detail that she’d never ridden a road bike.

“It had to be a soft touch with her,” says Lindquist, who didn’t mind Jorgensen’s lack of cycling know-how. Think of Olympic triathlon as basically one long struggle to make it to the run in a good position. To have a shot at winning, an athlete has to be fast enough to stay with the lead pack through the 1.5K swim so they make it into the lead pack of cyclists. The 40K bike leg is like one big draft-legal circuit race. (As opposed to the typical amateur triathlon, in which athletes must not draft off other cyclists.) Drafting makes it difficult to break away and forces competitors to make tactical decisions: Should they pull away or tuck in and conserve energy? If a participant comes off the bike in the lead group, it all comes down to how fast she can run the final 10K, making Olympic triathlon favor those, like Jorgensen, whose strongest sport is running.

Lindquist tried to get Jorgensen into triathlon that fall, but she refused, not fully understanding that Olympic triathlon was vastly different than the ultra-distance Hawaii Ironman highlighted annually on NBC. She finally acquiesced in early 2010, thanks to Lindquist’s persistence and reassurance that it didn’t have to interfere with her job. Jorgensen could have a local coach and do the training in her own time. If she didn’t like it, she could walk away. Lindquist sealed the deal with a heartfelt truth: “I told her that, on paper, she had more potential than I did at draft-legal triathlon.”

Jorgensen started getting up between 3:30 and 4 a.m. to train before work. When she couldn’t make it to the local aquatic center, she’d tether herself in the pool at her downtown Milwaukee condo complex and swim in place. USAT set her up with Wisconsin-based coach Cindi Bannink, who largely sent workouts through the digital coaching platform TrainingPeaks for Jorgensen to execute on her own. Bannink also sent Jorgensen on group rides to work on her shaky bike-handling skills. On one of those rides, in June 2011, she met Lemieux, a pro cyclist from North Dakota who was getting in a workout as he passed through town. He was intrigued, and after post-ride burgers at Milwaukee’s Café Hollander, she was too. The two eventually began long-distance dating.

Soon after that, just 17 months after racing her first triathlon, Jorgensen placed second at a test event for the 2012 London Games, securing a spot on the Olympic team. “When I got back, I sat down with USA Triathlon and someone said to me, ‘Do you want to go?’” Jorgensen says. “I thought, ‘Wow, I have a choice. I don’t have to go—but if I do, I want to prepare, and I want to be successful.’” She took a leave of absence from her job and dove into training full-time. She hasn’t worked in an office since.

Heading into London, the United States looked to Jorgensen for a medal. Her family, who had rarely traveled until that point, came to London wearing T-shirts emblazoned with her face, which Jorgensen found terribly embarrassing. But she flatted on the bike, her first-ever flat in a race, and it killed her shot at the podium. She ran hard for a disappointing 38th place.

Jorgensen and Lemieux discussed next steps. “I said I wanted to go to Rio and I wanted to win gold,” Jorgensen says. With Lemieux’s help, she realized that wouldn’t happen while training alone in Wisconsin. Once again, she’d have to surround herself with athletes better than she was to get to the next level—to make the leap from a natural talent to a true champion. She’d also have to rewire her stereotypical accountant’s cautious mindset. “To do that,” she says, “We knew I had to take some big risks.”

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Jamie Turner is an affable New Zealander known for building mentally unbreakable athletes. The 46-year-old former triathlete, now a bit soft around the edges, loves to speak in metaphors gleaned from lifelong study of performance. He picked up his favorite from legendary San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich (who got it from turn-of-the-century journalist Jacob Riis): “I go look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the 101st blow, it will split in two, and I know it was not the blow that did it but all that had gone before.”

Jorgensen had worked out with Turner’s squad when she was in Australia for a race. After interviewing coaches around the world, she felt she identified best with Turner’s mental strength–focused training method. He thought Jorgensen had the potential to be one of the best in the world—if she would commit to living in a daily performance environment with other dedicated athletes. She put the next four years of her life in his hands.

She packed up for Australia with Lemieux, who by then had quit his job as a cyclist to support her. (They weren’t yet engaged, but a proposal would come nearly a year later during a snowy mountain bike ride in St. Paul, Minnesota. They married in October 2014.) Lemieux sensed that Jorgensen needed the emotional support. “I just knew my not being there wasn’t helping her performance on race day,” he says, citing Jorgensen’s fourth-place finish at a race in Madrid. He’s certain she would’ve won if he had been there to help her adjust to the new, foreign environment before the race.

Jorgensen joined Turner’s squad of eight Olympic hopefuls from around the world, who had dubbed themselves the Wollongong Wizards, after the coastal city south of Sydney where they lived during the U.S. winter. Then she got to work.

Turner encouraged her to start a journal, documenting every day what she had done well and what she could improve upon, focusing on process rather than outcome: “I executed to the best of my ability” versus “I won.”

Turner asked her tough questions she’d never asked herself: Are you going to go last on the bike or will you be more assertive? What are you willing to change? He taught Jorgensen to see her decisions—to join the team, to leave her family and the comfort of home, to dedicate her life to Rio—as an investment, rather than a sacrifice. “We worked to move her away from the accounting mold into someone prepared to take risks and be accepting in her mentality, never to block something out,” Turner says. “We can accept that we’re not feeling very good and—not but—be able to perform.”

The results started coming that summer, when Jorgensen won a race in Stockholm, Sweden, on a technical bike course that tri pundits would have said didn’t favor a conservative rider like Jorgensen. “That race, I was like, ‘Wow! I’ve become a world-class swimmer, a world-class biker, a world-class runner,’” she says. But despite the gains she’d made physically and mentally, Jorgensen was already dreaming of ditching her bike and swimsuit to run full-time. Starting in 2013 and right on through the start of her winning streak, she was calling up running coaches to ask what they thought of her prospects as a pro marathoner.

Several said it would be an impossible task, but one left the door open: former Badger coach Jerry Schumacher, now one of the most lauded and respected coaches in the country.

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When Jorgensen runs, it’s perhaps the only time she seems relaxed, her long, fluid stride balancing out the tension in her shoulders. Just like she had once loved the water for how it left her alone with her thoughts, she’s most comfortable out on remote roads with Lemieux towing Stanley in a bike trailer behind her. When she talks about marathoning, her voice perks up. “There’s something so special,” Jorgensen says, “about an entire city shutting down to let you do something that you love.”

Schumacher doesn’t mince words when he talks about why he brought Jorgensen into his Bowerman Track Club team, home of top American marathoners Amy Cragg and Shalane Flanagan. “Ninety-nine percent of the time, I wouldn’t be interested in doing this,” he says of bringing an athlete from another sport onto the team. Schumacher knows it would be a cute story to say it’s because they’re from the same hometown or because of the Badger connection. “But the truth of the matter is she carries herself with such a high level of professionalism. She wants to do everything right and be the absolute best she can possibly be.”

Flanagan says Jorgensen’s dedication and big goals helped their friendship develop quickly and allowed Jorgensen to fit in naturally with the rest of her training group. “She wants to be pushed by other women. Not everyone wants that.”

But Jorgensen’s switch to running wasn’t without concrete consequences. In the three years up to and including Rio, Jorgensen averaged about $220,000 a year just in prize money, not counting a sponsorship with powerhouse sports brand Red Bull. Jorgensen speaks diplomatically about her tri sponsors, but it’s clear from her popular Instagram feed that Red Bull is no longer involved. “I’m a gold medalist in triathlon, not in marathon,” Jorgensen says. “It would be naive of me to expect the same salary. I’m chasing after the dream, not the money.”

Still, several sponsors stayed with her as she inked a deal with Nike, including Specialized, Oakley, and Polar. In the secretive world of pro running, it’s also tough to tell whether appearance fees could cover the prize-money income lost—but when it comes to winnings, Jorgensen would have to break the tape in at least two major marathons annually to get close to the pay she was enjoying as a dominant triathlete.

So far, Jorgensen’s switch to full-time running has yielded impressive results. In February, she ran a 15:15.64 5K, 35 seconds faster than her best collegiate time, and one that only nine U.S. women have beat this year. She followed that up with a 10K win at the Stanford Invitational in March, then finished fourth at the USA Track and Field Half Marathon Championships in May. For her first “real” shot at the marathon distance, Jorgensen’s tackling the Chicago Marathon on October 7. (In 2016, roughly two months after Rio, Jorgensen ran the New York City Marathon on little distance-running training, but she doesn’t consider it her official debut at the event. “I have harsh memories from the NYC Marathon, and I’m excited to run another marathon where I have properly trained,” Jorgensen says.)

Rather than setting a time goal for Chicago, the objective is to pace it right so Jorgensen has some speed left for the final 10K. Even with late scratches from top American contenders Cragg and Jordan Hasay, this edition of Chicago features a highly competitive elite women’s field, including two-time champion Florence Kiplagat.

Despite Jorgensen’s promising times so far, some members of the running peanut gallery may insist that her chances at dominating the marathon are slim. “It’s not about mindset,” says Robert Johnson, co-founder of the running website LetsRun.com and a former Cornell University cross-country and track coach. “Usain Bolt couldn’t even make himself the best 400-meter runner. You have your own event that you’re good at.”

Still, if Jorgensen could pull it off, Johnson says, “It would be the most amazing athletic feat of my lifetime.” One he believes even her greatest naysayers are internally rooting for. “Part of you wants to believe it’s possible, like it’s reminding us of what we dreamed as a little kid. That’s the goal: to dream big.”

Whatever happens in Chicago, Jorgensen’s fast-growing fan base will be proud. “I think people see in her what they want to do themselves—like those people working a job they’re good at but don’t love,” Lemieux says. “Here’s a woman who was literally the best, and she left to do something that she’s probably not going to be the best at.”

But then again, maybe she will be.