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Designed directly from the data
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CONTENTS
54 Love Me Some
O U T S I D E M AG A Z I N E
03.16

Plus-Size
Waves and fish, that is. From
the age of 14, when he was a
freckled runt surfing 30-footers
at Waimea, Mark Healey has
sought out oceanic thrills. Now
he’s freediving beneath the
swells, tagging hammerhead
sharks in the name of science.
BY THAYER WALKER

62 Haute Times
Potrepreneur Jordan Lewis
landed in Aspen, Colorado,
with a dream: grow and sell the
finest organic marijuana in the
country. But even as Silverpeak
Apothecary set a high bar as the
state’s toniest weed store, his
downvalley neighbors wanted
his business to go up in smoke.
BY CHARLES BETHEA

68 The Devil Is in
the Details
What will it take to end
the wilderness wars over
federal lands? Some serious
horse trading, believes Utah
congressman Rob Bishop, the
Republican working to bring
environmentalists, ranchers,
Native Americans, and energy
companies under the same tent.
BY CHRISTOPHER SOLOMON

76 Carb Unloading
For years, runners and triathletes
pounded pasta and sports drinks
to improve performance. Then
came Mark Sisson, the paleo
prophet whose Primal Blueprint
converted millions by promising
to burn fat, bust inflammation,
and boost energy. T. J. MURPHY
asks: Will it work for me?

2 Outside 03.16 COVER AND THIS PAGE, PHOTOGRAPHS BY Carlos Serrao

CONTENTS 20
O U T S I D E M AG A Z I N E 0 3 . 1 6

COVER: STYLING BY KELLY MCCABE/ART DEPARTMENT; GROOMING BY NICOLE BUSHNELL. THIS PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: HANNAH MCCAUGHEY; CLAUS GEISS; KLAUS THYMANN;
25

20 Dispatches
First Look: Simone

BROWN CANNON III/INTERSECTION; COURTESY OF VOLVO; COURTESY OF GRAYL; HENRY LEUTWYLER/CONTOUR BY GETTY; COURTESY OF GETAWAY; INGA HENDRICKSON.
Origone drives 160 miles
per hour. On skis.
Games: Jackson Hole,
Wyoming, hosts the
world championship
of beer chugging.
Gear: Jungmaven’s new
hemp T-shirt will last a 26
decade—or longer.
Media: E. O. Wilson
makes a moral case
for setting aside half
the planet.

30 Destinations
Beach Adventures:
The piña coladas can
wait when you’re surfing,
fishing, or kiteboarding 35 46
some of the best spots
on earth, from the Outer
Banks to the Seychelles.
Go List: New England
“We don’t
cabin porn, cheap air- have to plant
fare, and a crowdfunded
travel jacket. the white
Base Camp: Safari
living at India’s Jamtara
flag and
Wilderness Camp. start setting 44 35 30
38 Essentials ourselves
Cars and Trucks:
A sporty diesel Range
up for the 38
Rover. A mightily effi- destruction
cient Chevy truck. A
hybrid Volvo SUV. The of the living
options for rolling to
and from your favorite
world.”
playgrounds have never —E. O. WILSON,
PAGE 26
looked better.
Style: Tough watches
for the modern explorer.

SPECIAL
46 Bodywork
Life Hacking: Sure,
you could stick with
your old routine. Or you 8 Exposure
could break out of your
rut with our experts’ 14 Between
healthier, more effective the Lines
ways to eat, sleep, focus, 96 Parting
and train. Shot

4 Outside 03.16
 br anded content

REI believes that a life outdoors is a life well lived,

and this year we collaborated with them on a three-part series
dedicated to people deeply connected with trails. Last month,
we kicked off the series with a story about endurance runner Errol
Jones. This month, we bring you the inspiring stories of trail angel
Paul Stiffler and mountain biker Lael Wilcox.

days, he’ll head

to the trail with
a cooler and gas
grill and cook up
an impromptu
picnic. “In the past
few years people
have gotten a
hold of my phone
number,” Paul says.
“Southbounders
will meet me and
give my name
and number to
northbounders.”
Although

Trail Angel Although

the moments
the moments Paul spends with hikers
can often be fleeting, the bonds are
long-lasting, and the effects on him have
Helping out Appalachian Trail Paul spends been profound. Ten years ago, debilitated
with hikers by PTSD stemming from an abusive
through-hikers has allowed can often childhood, Paul suffered a meltdown. His

“Ponytail Paul” Stiffler to find
peace in his own life
N
ot far from Dover-Foxcroft,
Maine, where Paul Stiffler lives,
the Appalachian Trail enters
what’s known as the Hundred-Mile
Wilderness, widely regarded as the most
remote and rugged stretch of the trail.
The nearby town of Monson is the last
civilization northbound hikers will
pass through as they close in on Mount
Katahdin. For southbound hikers, it’s their
first chance to call it quits.
As a result, the area is rife with so-called
“trail angels,” locals who have taken it
upon themselves to buoy the spirits of
hikers by performing what’s known as trail
magic—random acts of kindness, often
in the form of fresh fruit, cold drinks, or a
ride into town.
Paul, or “Ponytail Paul” as he’s known
for his recognizable ponytail, is one of
the area’s most tireless trail angel. He’ll
spend an entire day hiking in caches of
food to resupply hikers in the middle of
the Hundred-Mile Wilderness. Other
be fleeting, woodworking business went under, and
he became a recluse. “The hardest part
the effects
on him
was just trying to look normal when your
whole world is on fire,” he says.
have been For Paul, the only medicine that has
profound.
The iconic worked is being outside and helping
Appalachian others. “I’ve been in the woods my whole
Trail stretches
life, so the best thing for me was to be in
2,185 miles from
Georgia to Maine. the woods as often as possible. It’s very
rewarding, and it helps me get outside of
myself.” He’s working in his shop again
and planning to hike the entire trail wih
his son next year. “The trail draws out
a power in people,” says Paul. “I’ve seen
it change a lot of people’s lives in very
positive ways. It’s changed mine, and I
haven’t even done it yet.”
To watch short films about Paul Stiffler
and Lael Wilcox (launching February 21st)
and learn more about the Appalachian and
Arizona Trails, including the people working
to protect and preserve them, please visit
REI.com/trails.
 br anded content

Fast
Forward
Lael Wilcox tests
her speed limit on
the unforgiving
Arizona Trail

L
ael Wilcox has a $20 flip phone. At
29 years old, she still doesn’t know
how to drive a car. She doesn’t
own a GoPro. What she does know is her
bike. For the past seven years, she’s been
semi-nomadic, spending roughly half the
year exploring the planet by bike—logging
thousands of miles
and visiting dozens
of countries from
South Africa to
Slovenia.
Last summer,
Lael, a former start of the race in Banff, Alberta, a 2,100- The Arizona Trail
collegiate runner mile journey. The “warm-up” did her right: is an 800-plus-
mile National
and preternaturally Not only did she go on to win the Tour
Scenic Trail
gifted athlete, Divide, but she also shaved a whopping that winds from
confirmed what two days off the previous women’s record. Mexico to Utah.
she has probably Buoyed by her success and looking for
always known: her next challenge, she set her sights on
She’s extremely the Arizona Trail Race, an unsanctioned
fast and thrives endurance event in the same vein as the
in situations that Tour Divide. “It’s not really a race,” Lael
push her mental says. “It’s more a gentleman’s agreement
and physical limits. After blowing away to show up and ride your hardest to the
the competition on an 850-mile race in end.” Spanning the entire length of the
Israel, she decided on a whim to enter the Arizona Trail, the newly created, 800-mile
Tour Divide: an unsupported 2,745-mile wilderness trail that bisects the state
race from Canada to Mexico over rugged, from north to south, the race traverses
remote terrain that’s been dubbed the everything from desert to boreal forest.
toughest mountain-bike event in the Which is exactly what she set out to do
world. Even more impressive, she decided last fall. But on the second day, nearly 200
to ride from Anchorage, Alaska, to the miles into the race, she began wheezing
and got progressively sicker. Hunkered
down at 9,000 feet—at Snowbowl Resort
outside of Flagstaff—she simply couldn’t
go any farther.
While abandoning the attempt was
hard, Lael didn’t dwell on it long. She
already has plans to race again, and hopes
to compete in the Trans Am Bike Race, “I don’t
the longest self-supported road race in the have a car
U.S., in June. But her focus remains the or a house,”
same—traveling the world by bike. “I don’t says Lael.
have a car or a house,” she says. “But I’ve
“But I’ve
got a bike. I have what I need.” A few weeks
after she felt better, she and her boyfriend got a bike.
headed off on a bike-packing trip in I have what
Mexico with a few friends. I need.”
 ExposurE

Jasper Gibson
Last November, Gibson
captured professional
kayaker Ben Marr run-
ning a 70-foot waterfall
on the Jalacingo River
in Veracruz, Mexico. It
wasn’t an easy place to
reach—the two had to
bushwhack through the
jungle for a mile and a
half. “To get into posi-
tion, I climbed down a
steep canyon wall full of
gnarly trees and wiggled
my way through the
mud,” says Gibson, 23,
who paid for the five-
week trip with money
he’d earned as a wild-
land firefighter in White
Salmon, Washington.
“Getting there was a
struggle, but the shot
came easy.”

THE TOOLS: Canon

6D, 16–35mm f/2.8
L II lens, ISO 1,250,
f/3.5, 1/1,000 second

8 Outside
 ExposurE

John Haynes
Haynes, an avid cyclist
from Minneapolis, saw
the city in a new light
after a wrist injury
forced him to switch
to running. “On a bike,
you’d fly right past these
things,” the 32-year-old
photographer said of
this staircase near the
University of Minne-
sota, where he shot fel-
low runner Brigette Gay
last January. Despite
the 20-degree weather,
Haynes insists it was the
perfect time to be out-
side. “We were all about
it,” he says. “Finally, we
know where there’s a
good set of stairs to run.”

THE TOOLS: Nikon D810,

50mm f/1.4 lens, ISO 400,
f/4, 1/500 second

10 Outside 03.16
Sponsored by the San Diego Tourism Authority, funded in part by the San Diego Tourism Marketing
District Corporation with City of San Diego Tourism Marketing District assessment funds.

A N S W E R T H E C A L L AT S A N D I E G O . O R G
F L O AT I N G I S easy W H E N Y O U S TAY lighthearted.
ExposurE
ExposurE

Jim Martinello
It took more than four hours of
skinning through rock gardens and
unpacked snow for Martinello to reach
the remote cliffs of North Joffre Creek,
in southwest British Columbia. There
he captured professional climber Tim
Emmett on a first ascent of a 210-foot
route, during Emmett’s first visit to the
area. “When you get a cold spell, you
want to go out and ice-climb, but the
conditions made it a lot more challeng-
ing,” says the photographer, who lives
in nearby Squamish. “It was definitely
a day we had to earn.”

THE TOOLS: Canon 7D, 24–105mm

f/4 lens, ISO 320, f/9, 1/320 second

12 Outside 03.16
WHEN SNACKS & DESSERT COME TOGETHER,
YOUR TASTE BUDS WIN.
NEW PLANTERS™ DESSERT-INSPIRED MIXES. DELICIOUS NUT
BLENDS INSPIRED BY YOUR FAVORITE DESSERTS.
© 2016 KRAFT FOODS
BETWEEN the LINES feedback
on constitutional
grounds, the right of
the federal govern- Breaking Out of respect
ment to own the land Away for Searvogel, I
in the first place. On January 4, won’t say that
The battle over the cyclist Kurt any other athlete
West has apparently Searvogel broke perfectly nour-
reached the trench- a 76-year-old ished would beat
warfare stage. record for the him, but records
It was amid simi- greatest distance are made to be
larly grim circum- ridden in a year, broken. Kurt
stances that long- ultimately cover- says he has got-
time contributing ing 76,076 miles ten weaker, not
editor Christopher on his Cervélo P2 stronger, as the
Solomon pitched us road bike. It’s an ride has gone on.
an entirely differ- extraordinary, What if he were
ent story last spring. borderline crazy missing a trace
Solomon had been achievement. But mineral or nutri-
following the prog- what most divided ent that would
ress of Utah Repub- readers about allow him to gain
lican congressman “Hello, I Must Be fitness instead of
Rob Bishop, who has Going,” our De- losing it? What
spent nearly three cember 2015 pro- if, in the future,
years meeting with file of Searvogel, other cyclists
environmentalists, was the equally make an attempt
ranchers, and the insane amount of on his record
energy industry to food—fistfuls of and, because of
Bargain Hunting piece together the doughnuts, fries nutrition, grow
The narrative of terminal gridlock in all Public Lands Initiative—a grand bargain that by the pound— stronger?
branches of state and federal government has aims to settle some of the most contentious that he consumed KEM KOUGH
become so widespread over the past two de- land-use battles in Utah (“The Devil Is in the to achieve his goal. Oasis, Nevada
cades that it’s hard to muster much optimism Details,” page 68). As this issue went to press,
about America’s ability to solve big problems. Bishop’s initial proposal involving massive
That’s particularly true when looking at the land swaps had just been made public, and
near constant battle over how to manage our environmentalists were immediately outraged
public lands. If the stories that make national by many of the details. It’s still early in the pro-
headlines are any indication, we’ve been cess, however, and to focus solely on the mer-
permanently divided into two camps—those its of the first draft is to lose sight of the amaz-
who want to protect the land for wildlife and ing trend Solomon highlights. Throughout
recreation, and those who want the federal the West, including the very county in Oregon
government to get out of the management where Citizens for Constitutional Freedom are
business altogether and clear the way for holed up, opposing camps have been increas-
resource extraction. These two sides exist in ingly willing to come to the table to hammer
separate universes, talking over one another out deals that keep protracted land battles out
with distinct sets of facts and coming together of the courts, where each decision and appeal
only to do battle in the courts. Or worse. As I is an inevitable zero-sum game. The process is
write this, a group of armed men have taken often messy, but it’s a dialogue, and in today’s
over the headquarters of Oregon’s Mal- America, that alone is cause for optimism.
heur National Wildlife Refuge, challenging, —CHRISTOPHER KEYES ( @KEYESER)
Considering that You have a year FROM TOP: GRAYSON SCHAFFER; ALEX TEHRANI; GABE ROGEL
most pro cyclists off work, an RV,
ride about 30,000 and a girlfriend.
miles per year, You could explore
Christopher Solomon are 20 years his America, meet
junior, and have lots of cool people,
After 15 years writ- tried to comprehend
ing athlete profiles, the massive terri- teams of sup- and learn a hun-
adventure stories, tory—28,000 square porters falling all dred new skills.
and ridiculously miles of land—that over themselves Instead you spend
savvy gear reviews is at stake. “The to help, Searvo- 12 hours a day
for Outside, Solomon issues at play are gel must be one riding to nowhere
tried to make sense incredibly important, of the toughest so you can break a
of the fight over but they can be very sumbitches who “record” that only
Utah’s limboed abstract, because
ever lived. Who five other people
wilderness areas for they happen across
“The Devil Is in the massive swaths of cares if he’s fueled in the world have
Details” (page 68). the American West,” by Pop Tarts? even heard of?
Solomon logged the Seattle-based LARRY SMART KEVIN FLOWERS
1,000 miles on writer says. “It was Tower Hill, Santa Cruz,
the odometer of the hardest story Illinois California
his rental car as he I’ve ever written.”

14 Outside 03.16
BETWEEN the LINES feedback

Grime Wave trail traffic “will

I just finished disappear with
teaching my the snow in the
ninth-grade biol- coming year.”
ogy students how How can you set
important bacte- out with the goal
ria are to main- of getting more
It’s About Time taining a healthy people outdoors,
We can’t explain why Mark Healey (above), who just got back from a death-defying conserva- body. I shared then complain
tion mission in Japan, is only now making it into the pages of Outside. “I’ve known about Mark’s Alex Hutchin- when people are
exploits for 20 years,” says Thayer Walker, who wrote about Healey’s latest project in “Love Me son’s article on out doing exactly
Some Plus-Size” (page 54). “Among surfers, spearfishers, and freedivers, there’s no one who the subject (“Ac- what you wanted?
can do as many things as he does at so high a level.” Here are a few of the accomplishments
tive Ingredients”) Can’t have your
that apparently failed to catch our attention before now.
with my female cake and eat it too!
students and said MELISSA
1998 2004 2008 2010 2013 they should tell MARQUARDT
Got his first Starred in the Triumphed at Won the Todos Left sponsor their boyfriends Hazen,
paycheck acclaimed the World Cup Santos Big Quiksilver to help that they can’t North Dakota
as a pro surf movie of Spearfishing Wave event in start apparel use mouthwash
surfer—at Islands in the in La Paz, Mexico; was company because it can kill I was not a fan of
the age of 17. Stream. Mexico. paid in Patrón. Depactus. beneficial bacte- your item about
ria. They might Kaylee and Matt
have bad breath, Moniz in What’s
but at least they’ll Next 2016. I
“My landlord loves Peter Tosh,” Lewis said, pointing be preserving im- would be much

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: CARLOS SERRAO; COURTESY OF WORLD VIEW; PETER BOHLER
portant microbes! more intrigued
to a mural of the reggae legend. “As do I. But that ALLISON with kids doing
wasn’t the image I was trying to cultivate here.” SILL BOWDEN
Charleston,
interesting things
and figuring it out
—CHARLES BETHEA, PAGE 62 South Carolina themselves in-
stead of wealthy,
Cloudy privileged kids
Forecast whose parents
Running into the Ground I’m disappointed can pay the bills.
Like paleo evangelist Mark Sisson, whom he profiles in “Carb Unloading” (page 76), writer that the author I, too, would like
T. J. Murphy (below) was once a dedicated triathlete who followed a high-carb diet and a high- of What’s Next to take my son to
mileage training regimen. “Mark comes from where I came from,” says Murphy, who lives in 2016 expressed Antarctica, but
Boston. Both suffered pain and frequent injuries before seeing the light and ditching two-hour the hope that that probably
jogs for high-intensity interval training. But that’s where the similarities end. the effects of won’t happen.
films like Wild TRENT
Youthful at Triathlete as handrails and A Walk in MARSHALL
Pastime magazine. in office full of the Woods on Online
Murphy: Circuit Sisson: Doping triathletes.
training, learned czar; Olym- Sisson: Enjoy-
from Iowa foot- pic liaison for ing retirement,
ball coaches. International plays Frisbee THE WOODSHED
Sisson: Run- Triathlon Union. with field of In “Hello, I Must Be Going,” we identi-
ning sub-2:20 Millennials. fied the Ultra-Marathon Cycling Asso-
marathons. Fish-Out- ciation as the group that runs the Race
of-Water Lingering Vice Across America. While UMCA and
Longest Moment Murphy: Dog- RAAM share some of the same found-
Job Held Murphy: Sore fish Head IPA. ing members, the two are unaffiliated.
Murphy: from training, Sisson: Down- Outside regrets the error.
Editor in chief uses shelves ton Abbey.

16 Outside 03.16
BETWEEN the LINES
The Tally King Kush
WHAT OUTSIDE For “Haute Times” (page 62), Atlanta-based
READERS WROTE writer Charles Bethea (right) got to know Colo-
TO US ABOUT rado pot grower Jordan Lewis and visited Silver-
THIS MONTH peak, Lewis’s high-end dispensary in Aspen. “You
have all these options,” Bethea says. “It’s as if
you’d been hanging out at the same bar for two
decades where there are only two beers on tap
and then someone took you to an incredible craft
brewery.” We asked Bethea for his tasting notes.

Granddaddy orange. Mild halluci- Pairs well with

Purps (indica nations may include bruschetta, vouvray,
hybrid; California): visions of skipping and Wiz Khalifa.
Berry aroma with through a meadow.
hints of grape. Occasional numb- NYC Diesel
19% May result in ness of extremities. (sativa hybrid;
“This summer ten-hour naps. California;): Grape-
I’m going to [great Golden Goat fruit and lime. I feel
adventure in remote Durban Poison (sativa; Kansas): good. Do you feel
and scenic place]. (sativa; South Hints of red pepper good? Let’s play
You should let me Africa): Anise and and tropical fruit. with finger paint!
write about it!”

8%
“Can you pass a fan
letter to Tim Zim-
Quiz: Who
mermann? I just read
‘Eating Right Can
Wrote It?
MATCH THE
Save the World,’ and QUOTE TO THE
I’m never eating any- CONTRIBUTOR

FROM TOP: DAVE LAURIDSEN; COURTESY OF CHARLES BETHEA; COURTESY OF THE TAILOR; COURTESY OF MORGAN’S ROCK
thing but heirloom
chia seeds again.”
1. “Disappearing on
72% our bikes didn’t just
“Why doesn’t the give us more freedom.
Outside Buyer’s It gave us the oppor-
Guide feature more tunity to fuck up.”
women’s gear?”*
2. “ ‘You didn’t really
1% push him off, did you?’
“Have you heard Karen asked. She still
of bacon-scented had the pistol against
underwear? Allow his head, and had
us to send you a switched hands.”
sample.”**
3. “She continued
* Starting this to toss handfuls of
summer, we’ll high- ashes saying ‘goodbye
light women’s gear mother.’ How could her
throughout our mother become ashes?
semiannual Buyer’s She reminded herself of
Go With Us
Guides instead of in the ways of the earth.”
In 2016, Outside GO tralia. Whether you’re youngest volcano, or
a separate section.
wants to help you chip looking to swim with ride a mountain bike on
** Available in the trails of Kangaroo A. David Kushner,
away at your bucket dolphins off the Marl-
men’s and women’s list, offering all-new voy- borough Sounds, sand- Island, this is your year. Alligator Candy: A
sizes from JD’s Foods ages to New Zealand, board down the side Learn more at outside Memoir ($26, Simon
($20; jdfoods.net). Nicaragua, and Aus- of Central America’s go.com/bucketlist. and Schuster)

B. Jim Harrison,
The Ancient Minstrel
outsideonline.com/howtobuyit ($25, Grove Press)

C. Rick Bass,
ONLINE EXTRAS For a Little While
No matter how you play outside, there’s never been a better time to get the gear that will take your ($28; Little, Brown)
game to the next level. Starting this month, Outside Online will feature a How to Buy It guide for 1. A; 2. C; 3. B
the labyrinthine world of mountain biking, with advice on how to pick the perfect bike, clothing, and Answers:
accessories, plus tips on underrated trail destinations like Sedona, Arizona.
 Facebook Comment Follow us on
of the Month: Twitter &
Instagram

CHAIRMAN/EDITOR IN CHIEF Lawrence J. Burke

Stephen Reich Thanks for the tip
Gnar Gnar. Talking about good bars
with women. Not stoned chair lift
attendants. I’ll take Vail on a powder
day for a couple hours Gaper. Outside
Mag is for gapers. Gape gape gape. Off
to Squaw where they invented gapers.
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dispatches NeWs
<
F R O M

FieLd
t h e

F I RST LOOK

The
158-Mile-
Per-Hour
Man
SIMONE ORIgONE IS
THE SPEEDIEST SKIER
ON EARTH. JUST HOW
FAST CAN HE gO?
by Devon O’Neil

laST aPRil, Italian skier

Simone Origone set the
world record for the fastest
ski run, in an avalanche-
prone couloir in Vars, France,
called Chabrières. He was
one of 21 competitors at
the annual Speed Masters,
where contestants descend
at the highest velocity pos-
sible. Perfect conditions at
Chabrières are rare, despite
the site being maintained by
a winch cat, and the top of
the track was in such poor
shape that Origone opted
not to start from the pin-
nacle for fear he’d be thrown
off course, which can prove
fatal at high speeds. Instead,
the 36-year-old mountain
guide from northern Italy’s
Aosta Valley was lowered
into the chute by a rope, then
stabilized by a race official,
who was also roped up.
Chabrières’s pitch is
so precipitous—in some
spots, it’s as steep as 47
degrees—that when Ori-
gone pushed off, he began
accelerating almost as fast
as a Formula One race car.
Seventeen seconds later,
crouched in an aerodynami-
cally perfect tuck, he was
clocked at 156.978 miles per
hour—the fastest anyone has
traveled on land without the
assistance of a motor. At the
end of the kilometer-long
track, he made S-turns to
slow himself down. (Virtually
all other competitors wedge
continued >

20 Outside 03.16
 <
Origone’s
aerodynamic
crouch

03.16 Outside 21
dispatches

2
3 1

Resistance
Is Futile
The wind-
cheating gear
that helps
Origone go fast

1. Helmet
Origone’s is de-
signed to cover
his shoulders,
reducing drag.

2. Suit
The design of his
nearly friction-
less suit, which
is made from
air-tight latex,
has remained

previOus pages: claus geiss. this page, frOm left: jOhan gustafssOn; claus geiss.
unchanged for
15 years.

3. Poles
The short poles
< are custom-built
Origone to fit Origone’s
in italy, tucked body and
2015 help him stay
balanced and in
good position.

their way to a halt.) It was just enough to break his previ- oriented man at camp four and led him down the mountain 4. Fairings
ous record, 156.868 mph, set in 2014. from 25,000 feet. Aerodynamic foils
Because a higher start can translate to more speed, Ori- As accomplished as he is in the mountains, no one can behind his shins
increase his top
gone believes his compromised toe-off last year in Chab- touch him when it comes to speed—he has won eight FIS
speed by an esti-
rières means he could have gone even faster. In March, World Cup titles and five world championships. (Origone
mated four to five
Origone will return to Vars and attempt to hit 158.45 mph. has no Olympic medals because it’s not an Olympic sport.) miles per hour.
Forty years ago, Origone’s records would have made “He knows that if he makes no mistakes, he can’t lose,” says
him famous. In 1975, countryman Pino Meynet earned a Bastien Montes, a 30-year-old French racer who survived 5. Skis
small fortune and was feted on national television after the fastest crash in history, a 151-mph slide that left him Longer than
setting a record of 120.785 mph. But the days when speed with fourth-degree burns from shoulder to buttocks. Olympic downhill
skiers were celebrated like heroes are gone. Origone, who Speed skiing has been around in some form since at skis and extremely
has held the world record for ten years and has broken his least 1867, when a California woman named Lottie Joy set flat for stability, his
own mark twice, is practically anonymous outside the an unofficial benchmark of 48.9 mph. Races became more 238-centimeter
sport. Even in Italy, many know him only for rescuing a widespread in the mid-20th century, and from the 1960s Atomics have dull
Pakistani climber while attempting K2 without supple- to the 1980s, the world record seemed to change hands edges to prevent
mental oxygen in 2014; after conceding his own summit almost monthly. American skiers Dick Dorworth, Steve catching on snow.
bid just below the infamous Bottleneck, he found the dis- McKinney, and Leif Nelson were crowned in places like

22 Outside 0 3 . 1 6
 Silverton, Colorado; Portillo, Chile; and Les Arcs, France.
The International Olympic Committee staged a speed-
skiing demonstration at the 1992 Winter games in Albert-
ville, France, but tragedy upset the momentum when
Swiss racer Nicolas Bochatay collided with a snowcat dur-
ing a warmup run and was killed.
Origone, who comes from a family of hoteliers and ski
instructors (his younger brother Ivan is his roommate and
biggest rival, with a top speed of 155.77), epitomizes the
sport’s current conflict. Speeds keep getting faster; rewards
keep getting smaller. When Origone set his first record, in
2006, he received roughly $11,500. Now not even the four
FIS World Cup races offer prize money. “That’s shit,” Ori-
gone snorts.
Still, it hasn’t affected his year-round devotion to the
sport—or that of the approximately 80 other men and
women competing at its highest levels. Indeed, Origone
is one of the lucky few among them: the Italian Ski Fed-
eration covers his expenses, and Atomic gives him skis.
(Most racers compete with little financial backing.) “You
spend every penny you’ve got to do this,” says six-time
U.S. champ Don Strickland, 53, who works as a carpenter
in glenwood Springs, Colorado, and has often been the
lone American in the elite World Cup standings in recent
years. “You train all year long for ten minutes of combined
run time each season.”
Origone practices in a wind tunnel and follows a rigor-
ous physical regimen that includes holding his tuck on
a slackline with 30 pounds of extra weight. One of the
brawniest men on tour at six-foot-one and 195 pounds,
he has reigned largely because he keeps his skis flat and
maintains his tuck—and thus his speed. Origone has been
criticized for lubricating his suit to improve wind resis-
tance but denies it gave him any advantage.
If he gets a smoother track this month at the Speed Mas-
ters than he did last year, when tiny bumps bucked many
racers off their lines, he thinks he can again make history.
“My only target,” he says, “is to go faster and faster.” O

< Velocity
Origone Kings
training at Other non-
italian auto motorized
company records
pininfarina’s
wind tunnel

27.79 mph
Running; Usain
Bolt, 2009

61.3 mph
Windsurfing;
Antoine Albeau,
2008

80.74 mph
Skateboarding;
Mischo Erban,
2012

95.69 mph
Ice luging; Manuel
Pfister, 2010

126.1 mph
Land sailing;
Richard Jenkins,
2009
frOm tOp: Olivier mOrin/afp/gettY; pininfarina

156.978 mph
Skiing; Simone
Origone, 2015

A Brief
1965: The sport’s 1974: Swiss skier 1992: During an 2005: Italian 2007: In Les Arcs,
History of first death was Jean-Marc Begue- Olympic exhibition Marco Salvaggio British racer Caitlin
Speed-Skiing Walter Mussner, lin kept his head in France, Nicolas hit a small rock Tovar lost control
Fatalities who fell just before tucked too long Bochatay of Swit- while approaching near the start, slid
EVEN MINOR the finish line in and was killed after zerland died after the starting line off the track, and
MISTAKES CAN Cervinia, Italy, and veering off course hitting a snow- and suffered fatal fell 3,000 feet to
BE DEADLY later died. in Cervinia. grooming vehicle. head trauma. his death.
dispatches

<
the 2015
gA MES gelande

The Super Bowl of Après Quaff finals

THE gELANDE QUAFF HARKS BACK TO THE TRUE
SPIRIT OF SKIINg—HAVINg A DAMN gOOD TIME
by Stephen Krcmar
iN laTe wiNTeR, skiers and snowboarders
will descend on Wyoming’s Jackson Hole
Mountain Resort to compete in the ninth
annual gelande Quaff World Champion-
ship, in which teams of four slide mugs of
Pabst Blue Ribbon down a ten-foot slab
of melamine, catch them midair, and slam
them while spilling as little as possible.
Legend has it that the activity, locally
referred to as “quaffing,” dates back to 1986,
when a storm closed the tram and a hand-
ful of locals were knocking back beers at a
now defunct bar that slid suds-filled mugs
to patrons. (The “gelande” part is derived
from the german word for ski jumping.)
When one almost got away, a skier grabbed
it midair and drained it. Thirty years on, the
contest, formalized in 2008, has become
the epitome of après. “gelande quaffing—
there is none more awesome,” says Benny
Wilson, cofounder of the Jackson Hole Air
Force, a group of brazen hometown heroes
who led the charge to open up Jackson’s lift-
served backcountry in 1999. “It’s the great-
est drinking game on earth.”
Teams of four (you must qualify at a re-
gional event) rotate around the table in an
attempt to drink as much as is humanly
possible in 60 seconds. Drinkers must
stand two feet beyond the table. One point
So You Think You
Can Quaff?
A taxonomic guide to the kinds
of maneuvers witnessed in the
freestyle round
long, and teams must complete a handle
catch, a spin catch, and an under-the-leg
catch. A freestyle catch (see “So You Think
You Can Quaff?,” right) is worth up to five
points, awarded at the judges’ discretion.
Last year’s winners, Quaffstafari, a Boul-
der, Colorado, team of four dudes in red,
gold, and green tracksuits, went so far as
to enlist a coach. Jade Lascelles, a former
dancer and choreographer, measured which
combinations of pitcher and catcher were
most effective. Then she had them con- The Bromance The Helping Hand
sume more than a keg of beer over two five- two teammates the catcher pokes
catch one beer his arm through his
hour practices each week, during which
each, lock arms, fly, nabs the beer, and
they developed double-black-diamond
and drink. pours it into a team-
tolerance. “It’s important that the whole mate’s mouth.
team can handle their beers, both in terms
of intoxication and volume,” says Lascelles.
But it was their freestyle ability that really
set the Quaffstafarians apart. “We devel-
oped a choreographed trick round that
allowed us to use props and equipment in a
time-efficient way,” says Lascelles.
Cheers!
the victorious get custody The Smokestack The Magnum opus
price chamBers (2)

of this giant metal stein contestants take three beers are slid.
is awarded for nabbing the stein and down- on skis. it holds about five a hit from a suds- instead of drinking
ing it, two for doing so via the handle; the pitchers of beer and comes filled bong, chug them, quaffers spit
team with the most points at the end of with goggles and a snorkel the beer, and blow them into a jug and
the round advances. As the competition that doubles as a straw. out the smoke. slide it back for the
continues, increasingly advanced moves pitcher to chug.
are required. The final round is two minutes

24 Outside 03.16 iLLUstRatiONs BY Todd Detwiler

 <
This shirt from
Jungmaven is
constructed of
100 percent eight-
ounce hemp. $78;
jungmaven.com

Built
to Last
Ranking products
by life span, as
experienced by
Outside editors.

1 year
north face trail shoes

5 years
rab shell

12 years
patagonia water shorts

43 years
stormy Kromer hat

gEAR iN My THiRD yeaR as a whitewater guide in Oregon, I made an assumption that would haunt me for the rest of the
The Last season: that the waterproof jacket I had relied on for the past two years would continue to keep me dry. Those four
T-Shirt soggy months revealed to me a singular problem. Though manufacturers have tried to root out animal cruelty and
wasteful packaging, they’ve ignored how quickly many shirts, jackets, and other performance apparel wear out.
You’ll Thankfully, that’s starting to change.
Ever Buy “There is a lively debate right now around how to design for longevity,” says Jason Kibbey, CEO of the Sustainable
THE OUTDOOR- Apparel Coalition, which helps textile companies measure environmental impact.
APPAREL INDUS- It isn’t just ecological concerns driving the trend. Companies realize that thirtysomethings look at their closets
TRY’S SURPRISINg differently. “They want to do more with less,” Kibbey says, crediting technologies that enable us to use fewer tools to
EFFORT TO gET accomplish more tasks.
YOU TO PURCHASE There is a trade-off: cost. Items like Jungmaven’s Hemp shirt (above) have a hefty price tag compared with compet-
LESS STUFF ing wares. But the company is betting that consumers won’t balk at paying more for something that lasts. “I’ve had our
by Joe Jackson 8.75-ounce shirts for ten years,” says Jungmaven founder Robert Jungmann, 46, referring to the heavier-than-usual
fabric used. “I’m not sure how long our new ten-ounce shirts will last, but I have a good feeling about them.”

phOtOGRaph BY Hannah McCaughey 03.16 Outside 25

dispatches

M ED I A

Captain Planet
IN HIS LATEST BOOK, PULITzER PRIzE–WINNINg SCIENTIST EDWARD O. WILSON ARgUES
FOR A BOLD STEP IN CONSERVATION by Dean Kuipers

Few PeoPle know more about biodiver-
sity than Edward O. Wilson. The 86-year-
old Harvard biologist and two-time Pulitzer
Prize winner helped popularize the term in
a groundbreaking 1988 report of the same
name. So when he argues in his new book,
Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life ($26,
Liveright), that species loss is a critical threat
and that we need to turn fully half the planet’s
land surface into biodiversity reserves, it’s
more than an idle thought experiment.
“To let things continue at the present rate,
we could easily be down to half the species
left on earth,” Wilson told me from his home
in Lexington, Massachusetts. “We could lose
millions just in the next few decades.”
Like many scientists, Wilson believes that
the planet is currently experiencing a “sixth
extinction,” during which species are disap-
pearing as much as 1,000 times faster than
they did before humans were around. And we
have yet to even encounter the vast majority of
life-forms among us. We’ve named approxi-
mately two million species, but the best esti-
mates are that another 6.7 million, give or take
a million, have yet to be discovered.
Slowing the rate of extinction has long been
a crusade for Wilson. More than ten years ago
he calculated that, in order to stop or signif-
icantly slow species loss, 50 percent of the
earth’s land must be protected. (Currently,
only 15 percent is formally preserved.) “The
only way we’re going to save the situation is
by radical means,” he says.
His Half-Earth proposal is certainly that.
Many of the world’s preeminent naturalists
helped him compile a list of areas with high
biodiversity—not just the rainforests of the
Congo and the Amazon, but also little-known
spots like the church forests of Ethiopia and
the just-opening wildlands of Myanmar. (See
“Earth, Protected,” below.)
Safeguarding an additional 35 percent of the
earth comes with logistical challenges: Would
people in preservation areas be relocated, or
would they be allowed to stay? Would govern-
ments agree to such protections? Oddly, Wil-
son skips over these issues and instead spends
a portion of the book criticizing “new conser-
vationists,” a small group of individuals who
believe that smart economic development
rather than high fences is the best strategy to
preserve what’s left of the wild.
Wilson lambasts people like Peter Kareiva,
current director of the UCLA Institute of the
Environment and Sustainability, who has
advocated higher living standards as a way to
save nature. Fearing a loss of emphasis on the
nonhuman, Wilson uses his book as a club in
this internecine fight. “I do believe they are
dangerous,” he says. “I had to come down
pretty hard on them.”
Kareiva, for his part, admires the Half-
Earth idea. “Wilson has been a crusader for
biodiversity unlike any other scientist,” he
says. But he thinks the antagonism is mis-
placed. “If you sat us in a room and put a map
in front of us and asked us what do we want
the world to look like in 2050, we might end up
with very similar maps.”
Indeed, in the second to last chapter of
Half-Earth, Wilson makes the case for smart
and fast development. Human population,
he believes, will peak at around 11 billion near
the end of the current century. (It now stands
at 7.3 billion.) Technology will help transform
the global economy from extensive (requiring
large amounts of money, people, and natural
resources) to intensive (boosting both pro-
ductivity and efficiency). And energy produc-
tion will continue to become less connected to
fossil fuels. In short, over the coming decades,
humanity will achieve a smaller footprint and
leave room for other species. It’s the kind of
argument a new conservationist might make.
“We’re finally seeing conservation starting
to get more on point,” says Michael Shellen-
berger, president of the Breakthrough Insti-
tute, which has rattled mainstream environ-
mentalism in part by arguing that it needs to
embrace “ecomodernist” development to fix
the planet. Shellenberger has his own critique
of Wilson: “He doesn’t address the dirty,
bloody work of conservation on the ground.”
Nor did he intend to. Half-Earth is less
detailed plan than aspirational goal. Wilson is
leaving it up to us to figure out how to do it,
and after looking at the technological and eco-
nomic trends, he believes we will. “The reason
is that we are thinking organisms trying to
understand how the world works,” he writes.
“We will come awake.”
Wherever Wilson presents this idea, he is
wildly cheered. He considers that evidence
of a generation prepared to make tough deci-
sions. “Many young people see in this some-
thing worthwhile to dedicate themselves to,”
says Wilson. “This book is saying we don’t
have to yield. We don’t have to plant the white
flag and start setting ourselves up for the
destruction of the living world.”

Earth, Protected
Though the book doesn’t include a compre-
hensive map of proposed sanctuaries, Outside
assembled an approximate guide to the best
places in the biosphere, according to Wilson
and other scientists. —Nicola PayNe

Homeland Security unrelenting decima-

The redwood for- tion by human hands
ests of California, in recent years.
the South’s longleaf
Hot Spots
pine savanna, and
Wilson and others
the Madrean pine
believe that certain
oak woodlands of the
countries possess
mountainous South-
such rich biodiversity
west are crucial
that the majority of
North American
their land is worthy
ecosystems.
of study and protec-
Under Siege tion. These include
The Amazon River Bhutan, Cuba, the
basin, the forests of Dominican Republic,
the Congo basin, and Haiti, Myanmar, Mada-
the church forests of gascar, New Guinea,
Ethiopia have faced and South Africa.

26 Outside 03.16
 “We are thinking
organisms trying
to understand
how the world
works,” Wilson
writes. “We will
e. O. Wilson come awake.”
cOntOur BY gettY

phOtOGRaph BY Henry Leutwyler 03.16 Outside 27

 branded content

The Art of Adventure

For climber And ArTisT Jeremy collins, every expediTion
change the experience
dramatically and launch
from 13,000 feet in
the Annapurnas of
Nepal? With pilot Nick
oFFers A chAnce To illusTrATe The deeper sTory Greece, I drew for 45
minutes midair this
mixing it up backcountry on varied it all when I get back year. I blame it on my season. We delivered
When someone on a terrain but still able to home. I do it because electric skateboard. I hit coats, blankets, and
plane asks what I do pop into the brewpub that experience can’t 25 mph on it regularly, art supplies to remote
for a living, I say “the at the end of the day be replicated. When I and I’ve put over 500 villages obliterated tools, canvases, and
jumpsplits” (see right). without looking or pull out my sketchbook by the April 2015 even desks went out my
Usually they want to feeling like I just came and start drawing in a earthquake. art studio door. I had
know more. The truth down from Everest. village, the language to simplify. Now it’s
is that it’s hard to and taboo barriers are Keeping it simple just my sketchbooks,
summarize. I travel the broken. It’s an invitation Last year I gave away pens, watercolors, and
world, find stories, climb to share, create and everything I couldn’t passport. If it doesn’t
rocks, run a company, engage. remember using. fit in my backpack, it
make art, films, Hundreds of paints, doesn’t fit in my life.
write, and yes, do the necessities
jumpsplits often. Three things I’m never
without: my sketchbook,
objectives my iPhone, and a pair
My favorite routes of shoes that can do
tend to be above it all. I transition from miles on it so far in 12
treeline—desert towers mountain to rickshaw to cities, three countries,
or steep alpine granite. airport to coffee shop to and nine National Parks. To learn more about Keen ambassador Jeremy Collins,
I need everything to be breaking Trail trail run to studio and Now I’m trying to figure visit jercollins.com. To grab some of his art on wood,
light and right, from When doing first ascents need a pair of kicks that out how to make it solar visit themeridianline.com. For more information on
harness to rack, and on a remote expedition, won’t slow me down. powered. the Versatrails, and the rest of Keen’s ambassadors,
from nutrition to, of adding an hour or two check out keenfootwear.com.
course, my shoes. a day for drawing on Traveling light Gaining perspective
Keen’s Versatrails are location can be trying My accountant wants to Drawing on location
the perfect mix for what for my travel mates. know why the mileage gets me fired up, but
I do—in and out of the Of course I could do is so low on my van this what happens when you
As an avid rock climber, artist, and filmmaker, Jeremy Collins is essentially an
outdoor renaissance man. On any given day, Jeremy is out collecting stories and
inspiration from the world around him—whether that be his own backyard or deep
in the Amazon rainforest. In his travels and constant exploration, he depends on
products that can perform in a variety of conditions. Versatility in both style and
function is paramount. Like Jeremy, our Versatrail Collection is about anytime style
and anywhere performance.
 Approaching
the Seychelles,
in the Indian
Ocean

wHere to
Go now
antHony lanneretonne/offset

Into Ditch the paperback and lounge chair for one

the of these off-the-beaten-path beach adventures,

from surfing rowdy east Coast breakers to
Blue fishing among tiny African islands

30 Outside 03.16
Be there when India
bursts into color
Celebrate the culture and history of a country unlike any other.
Feel the warmth of Indian hospitality and say hello to making
new friends in every language. Fly Emirates to 10 destinations
across India and join the nation’s many festivities.

emirates.com/us

53 destinations in Asia w 22 destinations in Africa w 7 destinations in Australasia

D e sstti innaatti o
ionn
ss

Douglas
micHiGan

Mendocino 4
CALIFORNIA
Knock a qualifies. The yellow
Few Back shack looks like it
Good beachfront could collapse at
dives offer a magic any second, a condi-
combination of tion made worse by
cheap, strong drinks, the weight of the
access to water, and signs, stickers, and
a crowd that tran- hippie detritus cov-
scends demographic ering every available
categorization. So surface. The patrons
even if the Red Dock are a mix of Chica-
1 is on Saugatuck goans, kayakers,
Harbor, where the and the occasional
Kalamazoo River Birkenstock-wearing
2 enters Lake Michi- poet, all ordering the
gan amid towering same high-octane

clocKwise from top left: miles ertman/roBertHarDinG/corBis; miKe moriconi; serGei BacHlaKoV/XinHua press/corBis;
dunes, we say it rum punch and sing-
ing along to what-
Perch run, mountain-bike, ever band is playing
Over the or ride horseback 1. inn at newport that night. In short,
Pacific on 30 miles of trails ranch it’s like somebody
At the Inn at built from a network 2. mendocino cliffs extracted the best
Newport Ranch, of old logging roads. 3. ten mile Beach, parts of Key West—
the ranch part is Return for an even- near fort Bragg the mellow vibe, the
meant literally: the ing soak in the roof- 4. the red Dock come-as-you-are
new luxury property top hot tub as the 5. Getting geared attitude—except
is part of a 2,000- sun dips into the up in squamish you’re wasting away
acre working cattle ocean, then enjoy 6. squamish on Lake Michigan. So

Darryl leniuK/masterfile/corBis; DaViD fenton; DaVe matHews/inn at newport rancH

operation, one that the ranch’s home- shreddage expect more plaid.
just happens to grown vegetables —JONAH OGLES
abut 50-foot cliffs and local Dunge- 3

plunging into the ness crab for dinner.

Pacific near Men- There’s an inn with and a private deck Go Like
docino. Since this three guest rooms, overlooking the sea. the Wind
is cowboy country, but you should From $300; theinnat In British Columbia,
start the day off splurge on the entire newportranch.com surfers head to
with a hearty west- Sea Drum House, —STEPHANIE Tofino, skiers drive
ern omelet, then with four bedrooms PEARSON up to Whistler,
and kiteboarders
go to Squamish.
The town’s name
comes from the
First Nations word
for “mother of the
wind,” and nowhere
is that more appar-
ent than the Spit. 5
This narrow piece
of land juts into the dreds of kiteboard- will get you going
Squamish salty water where ers and windsurfers, with lessons from
BritisH columBia the Squamish River their colorful rigs $250 (squamish
enters Howe Sound racing through the kiteboardingschool
and creates a natu- shadow of Stawa- .com). They’ll supply
ral launchpad for mus Chief, the iconic all the gear you need,
wind sports, blasted granite dome tower- including a wetsuit—
by strong thermals ing 2,000 feet above this isn’t the Carib-
from downvalley. It the water. Squamish bean. —CHENEY
6 regularly draws hun- Kiteboarding School GARDNER

32 Outside 03.16
 Kitty hawk
I Got Your Crabs
Santa Cruz
california
1
outer Banks
Kill Devil hills 2
Brewing station
Jockey’s ridge
3
state park

Alligator river
national Wildlife ROANOKE
refuge SOUND
s-Turns
5 rodanthe 1

NORTH
2

20 miles

hatteras
6 Stop Over-
ocracoke The
thinking It 1. a santa cruz
The Outer and Learn commute
hatterasman
Banks 8 to Surf 2. pacific swell
nortH carolina ocracoKe To the landlocked,
AT L A N T I C
islanD surfing Northern and a rainbow
9
California brings to arced over the set.
portsmoutH
islanD
7 OCEAN mind big, cold waves
and surly locals. But
Book a room at the
oceanfront Dream
it’s an ideal destina- Inn (from $225; jdv
The Graveyard
of the Atlantic tion for beginners. hotels.com), fuel up
The important thing with a sour beer at
is to stop making the Sante Adairius
from top: Brown cannon iii/intersection pHotos; maciej toporowicZ/Getty

excuses and paddle brewery in nearby

Explore the Rowdy Atlantic out. When my boy- Capitola (rusticales
Drive Highway 12 from top to bottom—from Kitty Hawk to Ocracoke—and you can friend finally agreed .com), and head out
surf overhead barrels, dive for shipwrecks, explore deserted islands, and wander the to teach me to surf into the sea. Cow-
East Coast’s most pristine beaches. Here’s how to do it right. —GrAhAm AVerILL on a trip to Santa ell’s offers lessons
Cruz, everyone we ($90; cowellssurf
1. The local delicacy on the East Coast Shop (rentals from camping on OBX.
knew warned us shop.com) at the
is the soft shell crab at Jockey’s ridge $15; hatterasisland Pitch your tent in the
sandwich, and the state park. Call surfshop.com). sand at the National that it was a bad beginner-friendly
best one is at I Got Kitty Hawk Kites for Park Service’s Ocra- idea. An uncannily break of the same
Your Crabs, in Kitty a lesson (from $99; 6. In the small hamlet coke Campground timed post on the name, but don’t be
Hawk. Be sure to pick kittyhawk.com). of Hatteras, head to ($28; nps.gov/caha), surf website Beach afraid to play around
up a souvenir T-shirt the hatterasman for a right by some of the
Grit cautioned on your own. Rent
for your most obnox- 4. Alligator river pulled-pork sandwich emptiest, most wide-
ious friend. igotyour national Wildlife and hush puppies. open white-sand against schooling a wetsuit and a
crabs.com refuge is home to two beaches we’ve ever one’s significant board at Cowell’s
apex predators. Paddle 7. The Graveyard of laid our eyes on. other. (Headline: (or invest in an
2. The outer Banks the marshy inlets by the Atlantic, off Cape “The Dumb Things inexpensive foam
Brewing station in day and you’ll see Hatteras, hides more 9. portsmouth Surfers Do.”) But board like Costco’s
Kill Devil Hills is the gators; at night you’ll than 2,000 ship- Island is home to
country’s first wind- hear red wolves howl. wrecks (plus myriad an eerily preserved
Matt was a patient $100 Wavestorm)
powered brewery. sharks that now call ghost town—the last instructor, and when to get started—until
Get the Lemongrass 5. s-Turns, just north them home). Ghost- residents left in the he pushed me onto the day comes when
Wheat Ale and grab of Rodanthe, is the Fleet Charters has 1970s—and the only my first tiny wave, you graduate to a
some cans to go. best surf spot on the trips to check out legal beach camping I rode it all the way shortboard, head
obbrewing.com Outer Banks, with big, both (ghostfleet on OBX. Hearty souls
powerful barrels that
to the beach. A light into bigger waves,
divecharters.com). kayak the six miles
3. Get your Wright break close to the from Ocracoke. The rain was falling, and stare down
Brothers on by launch- beach. Rent a board 8. ocracoke Island, rest catch the ferry in a nice Australian out-of-town kooks
ing a hang glider from and get advice at accessible only by the town of Atlantic woman cheered me like me. —MEAGHEN
the tallest sand dune Hatteras Island Surf ferry, has the best car ($14 round-trip). on from the lineup, BROWN

03.16 Outside 33
 D e sstti innaatti o
ionn
ss

Cosmoledo
tHe seycHelles

Land a Big One

talweG creatiVe/yeti coolers (2)

The view from the air makes it clear that the Seychelles, an island nation of about 90,000 located 800 miles off the east
coast of Africa, are less an archipelago than a sparse collection of outcroppings spanning an area practically the size of
the American Midwest. The outer atoll of Cosmoledo—a coral reef that formed on top of a collapsed, seven-mile-wide 1. chicken of
volcano—has lately become the world’s most coveted spot to fly-fish for giant trevally. A ravenous three-foot-long the sea
gangster of a fish, the GT lives in deep water but provides the ultimate sight-casting target when it cruises knee-deep 2. Hooking up
flats on the changing tides hunting for bonefish and other prey. Even the reef’s tiger and lemon sharks won’t mess off cosmoledo
with it. Cosmoledo is an untouched wilderness—the same as it was when it emerged from the sea. But development
is imminent. The atoll will likely see construction of a small lodge within a few years, making it more accessible and
a little less wild. For now anglers pay nearly $15,000 per person for a week to live aboard the Maya’s Dugong, a 150-
foot retrofitted research vessel that anchors off Cosmoledo and sends its outboard skiffs into the flats and the jade-
colored lagoon. The season runs from about November until April, with no more than a dozen clients booked per week.
alphonsefishingco.com —GRAYSON SCHAFFER

34 Outside 03.16
 GO LIsT

Take the Plunge

Skip the bottled H2O and
treat even the sketchiest tap
water with the Grayl Ultralight
system, which lets you scrub
a pint with an easy French-
press-like motion. Equipped
BY The with Grayl’s travel filter, it
nUmBers handles bacteria, protozoa,
The and viruses, and is good for
Airline 300 uses. $60; thegrayl.com
Industry —CHRIS COHEN
IT’S A GREAT
TIME TO FLY.
(SERIOUSLY!)
LOW OIL
PRICES MEAN
LOWER FARES.

Get small:
Getaway’s
pint-size cabins
$15.7
BILLION The Amazing
are cozy but come ESTIMATED U.S Multifunctional
fully equipped CARRIER PROFITS Dream Coat

8%
IN 2015.
The Cozy
palpatine:
Deploy the
integrated
Tiny-House Fantasy
from left: courtesy of Getaway (6); courtesy of Grayl

neck pillow
and eye
DROP IN AIR- mask.
Who hasn’t toyed preneurship lab, New York City and
FARE BETWEEN
with the idea of comes in. It’ll let you San Francisco are The Discreet
OCTOBER 2014 Buzz: A neoprene
radically downsiz- live the tiny-house in the works.) Part
AND OCTOBER insulator pocket
ing to a picturesque fantasy with less of the reason for keeps a stashed
2015, ACCORDING
cabin, complete with commitment: $99 secrecy is to prevent can of beer cool.
TO AN EXPEDIA
blond-wood floors, gets you a night you from stressing
STUDY.

two
stainless-steel appli- in an Instagram- over your trip. Get-
ances, and assorted worthy, 160-square- away doesn’t even The Tablet
Kangaroo:
design magazines? foot retreat tucked want you to have Store your iPad
Usually, the day- into the woods. The to shop: they’ll stash like a marsupial.
dream ends when catch: you don’t ingredients for meals MONTHS PRIOR
you remember that know where you’re for an extra fee. TO DEPARTURE
you need a place to going until the day Book a spontaneous YOU SHOULD BUY The BauBax travel jacket is Kickstarter’s most
put your books and before, only that it night or two, then DOMESTIC TICK- funded piece of apparel ever—it raised over
ETS TO SCORE $9 million. What makes it so special? More
skis and children. will be a secluded return refreshed than a dozen travel-specific features. But the
That’s where Get- location within a to your regular-size THE BEST PRICE, names of those features (“drink pocket,”“neck
away, founded out two-hour drive of life. getaway.house ACCORDING TO pillow”) are a little weak. So we came up with
of Harvard’s entre- Boston. (Plans for —DENNIS KEOHANE THE SAME STUDY. some of our own. —C.C.

03.16 Outside 35
 D e sstti innaatti o
ionn
ss

INDIA

Jamtara
Wilderness
Camp

Access:
fly indiGo airlines
from Delhi to nagpur;
jamtara will arrange
the three-hour
transfer to the camp.
base camp from $300, includ-

Tiger Woods ing safaris; jamtara

wilderness.com
Jamtara Wilderness Camp brings the safari to India Temps:
courtesy of jamtara wilDerness camp

50° f to 86° f
FArmers In pArTs of central India have slept in the open on elevated platforms for decades, to guard their crops (march)
from sloth bears, chital stags, and the occasional Bengal tiger. At the new Jamtara Wilderness Camp, founder Amit Detour:
Sankhala turned that tradition on its head, with an outdoor four-poster bed that can be reserved by guests on clear Hop on a bike and
nights to welcome nocturnal wildlife encounters. The camp’s focus on wildlife tourism has provided surrounding ride the half-mile into
landowners with the incentive to protect rather than scare off the native animals. Sankhala has conservation in his the town of jamtara
genes—he’s the grandson of Kailash Sankhala, the famed naturalist who helped establish the first tiger reserves to watch sugar cane
in India—and he set his three-acre camp just outside 183,000-acre Pench National Park’s less traveled northern processed into jaggery
boundary. That means your chances of seeing a tiger in the wild—there are estimated to be 55 in the park—have in 20-foot-wide pots.
never been better. Centered near a sprawling banyan tree, the main camp’s ten luxe tents have wooden floors repur- Indulge:
posed from old sailing ships and are outfitted with writing desks salvaged from the Supreme Court of India. Guests the laal maas, lamb
explore a different kind of wild India here: activities range from a game drive through a forest full of leopards and curry cooked with red
stags to lazing on a chaise next to the infinity pool listening to a Malabar pied hornbill. Rest assured that the day will chiles, is especially
close with a sundowner. —sTephAnIe peArson hot here.

36 Outside 03.16
 Z THE WORLD

THE UPGRADED CHACO Z/SANDAL

More Traction. More Comfort. More Possibilities.

chacos.com
Available for Men, Women, and Kids
 03.16
adventure tools, tested & reviewed

essen-
tials

cars a n d t ruck s Range Rover Sport Td6

Four Wheels of The Test: The rest of the world has been driving diesel Land Rover SUVs since the mid-eighties, and with
good reason. First, diesel delivers extraordinary torque at very low RPMs. Off-road, that translates to easier
Freedom crawling at slow speeds, which afforded us sure footing while using the Brit barge to climb 40-degree rock-
strewn track in southern Spain and wade through two feet of standing water. A feature called All-Terrain
twelve of 2016’s best rigs to
Progress Control brakes for you and applies just the right amount of throttle to each wheel, never exceed-
usher you to crag or campsite— ing the available traction. All the driver has to do is steer. On-road confidence shouldn’t be discounted,
or ferry you cross-country— either. While it’s generous to label this a sport SUV, the driver gets enough feedback so that zipping around
plus pointers for injecting life town is downright enjoyable. The other bonus of diesel is that the three-liter Td6 nets 32 percent better
into your old adventure steed fuel economy than the V-6 gas version. One gripe: the mighty 11 inches of ground clearance pinches cargo
space down to only 62 cubic feet—though it’s still enough to fit skis and bikes for two.
by Grant Davis The Verdict: Incredible off-road talents, minus the gas-guzzler stigma. $66,450; 22 mpg city/29 hwy;
and Michael Frank landroverusa.com

38 Outside
 1

Trucks 27 miles per gallon

on our hill climb and
never had to hunt for
the right gear when
off-road adventure we were creeping up
up the Stinger. Inside, a pass in the shadow
Extra! Extra! the cabin boasts of Washington’s
For the digital low- Chevrolet amenities like 4g Mount Rainier. The
down on these and
Colorado (1) LTe wireless hot spot Tacoma boasts fea-
four more cars, like capability and Apple tures like Multi-Terrain
the intelligent Fiat The Test: After top-
CarPlay connectiv- Select and Crawl
500X and sleek ping out at 4,533 feet
ity—just plug in an Control: choose the
Toyota Prius, check on the Stinger—an
iPhone and access surface (mud, sand,
out outsideonline arduous ten-mile 3
contacts, maps, or rock), dial in the
.com/bestcars2016. climb to the top of
music, and Siri from speed (up to three
Southern California’s
the eight-inch dash- miles per hour), and
Mount Figueroa on on the truck’s front rolling base camp.
board touchscreen. steer. The traction
cameras for a clear The Verdict: Plenty
Chevy’s excellent mode for each type
view of the terrain of truck to handle
clean diesel is a hefty of terrain is calibrated
1 immediately ahead, shuttle duty for
$3,730 over its gas- to allow just enough
and stepped on it. decades to come.
powered brethren, wheel spin to keep
The massive five- $40,000; estimated
but compared with you going forward
liter V-8 turbo diesel 19 mpg combined;
the four- and six- without any fishtailing
engine churned to nissanusa.com
cylinder gas options, drama. We tried it
life and easily pulled
the Duramax engine on a barely hikeable
the 8,990-pound
unleashes the Colo- Class 4 rock scramble,
monster to the top
rado’s true potential and the Tacoma easily
without breaking Toyota
as a 500,000-mile, clambered up. Also,
long-haul trucker.
a sweat. Thanks to Tacoma (3) Toyota significantly
Downsizing 555 pound-feet of
The Verdict: A The Test: The 2016 refined the interior
torque, the XD sits
midsize, four-door Tacoma is undoubt- with better-grade
in that sweet spot
The SmaLL crumbling tarmac,
4x4 pickup that
between basic truck
edly superior in every plastics and fabrics
keep gravel, and double-
punches above its
and commercial-
way to its 2015 pre- that feel less utilitar-
weight. $35,080; decessor—no small ian, added a goPro
GeTTinG track—we were sold
20 mpg city/29 hwy;
grade super-hauler,
feat considering last mount, and made
SmaLLer on the Colorado’s new
chevrolet.com
and it would have no
year’s model outsold the entire truck
2.8-liter four-cylinder problem scrambling
Two years ago, Detroit every rival two to one. more aerodynamic
turbo diesel engine. It its way to a remote
touted a new genera- The new 3.5-liter V-6 for less wind roar.
purred up grades top- riverbed packed with
tion of fuel-efficient is smaller but delivers The Verdict: A
equipment, dogs,
yet robust V-6 engines
ping 15 percent, up a Nissan 42 more horsepower stem-to-stern reboot
long freeway incline and friends. nissan
as viable alternatives at 65 mph towing a
Titan XD is catering to the
(for a total of 278), that was well worth
to the iconic, gas- 1,500-pound trailer, Pro-4X (2) trailhead camper
and it’s mated to a the wait. $30,765;
guzzling V-8. The smoother six-speed 19 mpg city/24 hwy;
and over wheel- The Test: Facing with the XD’s optional
reason? Boosting fuel transmission that toyota.com
sucking sand off-road. a steep 40-foot- locking cargo boxes
economy ahead of the But towing power high trail of mixed ($985), which provide
government’s man- and braking controls rock and sand leading handy storage in the
date that manufac- equal to pickups into the mountains bed yet still allow for
turers’ fleets average twice its size are only east of Scottsdale, a sleeper-shell setup.
54.5 miles per gallon half of the Colorado’s Arizona, we put nis- Ambient LeD lighting
by 2025. This year appeal. The other san’s giant new pick- and a 110-volt outlet
marks the next step half? eye-popping up into four-wheel near the tailgate
as automakers roll out efficiency numbers. drive, locked the rear make the XD seem
brawny four-cylinder We averaged nearly differential, turned purpose-built as a
engines in pickups,
SUVs, and vans.
Take Ford: it joined
the V-6 movement 2
with a version of its
F-150 with a 2.7-liter
six-cylinder turbo
that pumped out only
12 pound-feet less
torque than its mas-
sive five-liter V-8 and
ALL IMAgeS COURTeSy OF The MAnUFACTUReRS

delivered four more

miles per gallon. now
the company has gone
even further, dropping
a tiny 2.3-liter four-
cylinder turbo in its
2016 explorer SUV.
That’s smaller than
the engine in a 1,400-
pounds-lighter Fiat
500X. With that kind
of power now avail-
able in such a wee
package, we’re ready
Nissan outfits the Titan XD Pro-4X with off-road-tuned shocks,
to consign the V-8 to
steel skid plates to protect the undercarriage, and aluminum-
the dustbin of history. alloy wheels that lend strength without adding much weight.

Outside 39
 adventure tools, tested & reviewed
Green Machines
essen-
tials

Autopilot

Our experts
on the rise
of driverless
technology

handS
Free
I changed my mind
about the benefits
of a car that can
drive itself while I
was speeding the
new honda Pilot
(page 43) west
across Wyoming
Chevrolet Volt on the interstate
The Test: With a full charge on a balmy fall day, we blitzed deep into the Rockies from Denver at dusk. The cruise
to see how far the Chevy Volt could travel using only its battery. We made it uphill to 8,615 control was set
feet and 47.3 miles before it switched smoothly from electric to hybrid mode. not bad. The to 85 mph, and I
improvement over the old 38-mile range is achieved partly through an upgraded battery needed to swap
and drivetrain. The Volt’s four-cylinder, 1.5-liter backup engine is now more powerful and out my sunglasses
fuel-efficient. On our trip back down from the high country, we could barely believe the for regular glasses.
numbers: the onboard computer claimed it used only 0.6 gallons of fuel by the time we got I pushed the Lane
home. That’s 78.8 miles per gallon. Bummer: it took us 20 hours to recharge a fully depleted Keeping Assist
battery using a standard 110-volt household outlet. button on the
The Verdict: This electric car with benefits—a gas engine—keeps getting better. $33,995; steering wheel,
106 MPGe city/hwy, 42 mpg combined city/hwy (gasoline only); chevrolet.com reached into
my pack on the
passenger-side
floor, exchanged
glasses, and sat
U p G r A D E Yo U r C l U n k E r
back up. Mean-
while, honda’s
arsenal of sensors
Get new A quality set of tires can mean the difference between making kept the vehicle
Shoes it to your destination and calling for a tow in its lane on a
sweeping curve,
Best For: Sticking in Snow Best For: Tackling Any Terrain Best For: Chewing Up Dirt and adaptive
Below 32 degrees, summer and even Most off-road tires stink on pave- Falken’s Wildpeak A/T3W is more cruise slowed
all-season tires turn harder than ment, and they’re not necessarily aggressive than the goodyear, with the car down to
a rod of P-Tex, which means less good in the snow and wet, either. But sidewalls designed for improved bite. 80 mph to match
traction for stopping and corner- the Goodyear Wrangler All-Terrain It’s meant for trucks and very much the speed of a
ing. Bridgestone’s Blizzak DM-V2 Adventure is cleverly designed for targeted at sand and desert heat. As pickup ahead.
remains pliable in sub-freezing condi- all of the above, with thin slits that such, it’s the ideal upgrade for the The entire pro-
tions and has hydrophilic tread that squeegee away surface water on Toyota Tacoma and Chevy Colorado. cess took six sec-
siphons the thin film of water off snow ice and biting edges to claw through It also comes in 54 sizes, so it’ll work onds, but that’s all
and ice for better grip. $157 per tire; mud. A central Kevlar belt lends for most crossovers. From $150 per it required to sell
bridgestonetire.com puncture resistance. From $173 per tire; falkentire.com me on the technol-
tire; goodyear.com ogy’s future. —G.D.

40 Outside 03.16
 It’s all about the parking: the Smart Spots app
the way up to 50 mph (free; Android and iOS) crowdsources spaces
in eV mode. Coupled in major cities where only a Smart car will fit.
with a 13-mile range,
that means you can
tackle many of your
daily chores using Benz gLC300 4matic
no gas at all. Another (page 42). It also
neat trick: the XC90 smokes the city fuel
Volvo is relatively short, so economy of the Benz—
XC90 T8 (1) it handles adroitly though we wish it had
The Test: With a at speed. yet Volvo more range in electric-
nearly $70,000 price managed to squeeze only mode and the
tag, this is the sole a whopping 32 inches option to plug it in
seven-passenger of knee room into the to charge. Crave the
SUV that includes an third row. That wise XC90’s pedestrian-
electric-only mode use of space also detecting tech? Up-
and also comes stan- applies to the XC90’s 2 grade with the Safety
dard with all-wheel 86 cubic feet of cargo System + ($635),
drive. And unlike other capacity—24 more which will adjust your
hybrids, we were able than the Range Rover Smart Fortwo feels $14,650; 34 mpg steering line should
to get the XC90 all Sport Td6. Collapse confident. That’s city/39 hwy; smart you start to stray from
the third row, fold
Smart partially thanks to a usa.com your lane. Want the
down the second Fortwo (2) wheelbase that’s four taut feel of a Mazda
row’s center seat, The Test: The awe- inches wider than CX-3 (page 43)? get
and stow skis for four someness of the the outgoing model’s. the F Sport edition
Lexus RX
are we passengers as well Smart Fortwo’s petite no, it’s still not large
450h AWD (3)
($55,645), which
as boots and garb for 22.8-foot turning circle enough for weeklong offers a more engag-
There road trips, with just ing ride and better
an entire weekend isn’t apparent until The Test: The RX
yeT? escape to the slopes. you whip a U-turn on enough room behind 450h is full of surprises. handling. Still, the
(nope.) And lest we forget, a two-lane road in the two front seats for This hybrid version of cargo space (56 cubic
you get pedestrian- downtown Portland a couple of suitcases. the five-passenger feet) was lacking.
Autopilot features
and cyclist-detection without scraping the Flip the front pas- RX 350 crossover is The Verdict: Cleaner
will save lives even-
features that can curb. And the short senger seat forward very fast and off-road for the city but can
tually, but at pres-
fully stop the XC90 9.7-foot length means and you gain a hair capable, with two still get grimy in the
ent they’re hit or
in the event of an you’ll find parallel more, but it’s not quite more inches of ground country. $52,235;
miss. One car I
impending impact. parking everywhere. enough for a mountain clearance than the 30 mpg city/28 hwy;
tested, with emer-
The Verdict: A hybrid While tiny cars usually bike. Still, this fuel stock Mercedes- lexus.com
gency-braking
ride for transport- deliver a skittish ride— sipper with a diminu-
assistance, wrongly
ing the family, along the prior edition was tive 0.9-liter engine
detected a steep
with everything else. downright terrifying is perfect as a cheap,
on-ramp as a 3
$68,100; 53 MPGe; on the highway—the useful commuter that
wall, stopping so
volvocars.com entirely revamped happily makes day
abruptly that I
trips to the trailhead
nearly ended up
and back.
with someone’s
The Verdict: America’s
bumper in the back-
tiniest two-seater gets
seat. Others failed
slightly less tiny and
to work in rain or
a lot more confident.
snow. Toyota, which
debuted pedestrian
detection in its
vehicles this year,
says the idea is to
assist motorists,
not do the driving
for them. The prob-
lem: once vehicles
start pitching in,
our attention tends
to drift, and we
blithely believe we
no longer need to
make split-second
decisions. Further-
more, picture
grinding to a 4x4-
access-only swim-
ming hole. now
imagine that ex-
perience scrubbed
of drama, of asking
yourself: Will we
make it? That’s the
automated future,
where driving is akin
to an Imax movie,
bled of real adven-
ture. —M.F. 1

03.16 Outside 41
 SUVs/Crossovers
Mercedes-
Benz
GLC300
4matic (1)
The Test: Finally, a
Benz SUV perfectly
sized for the U.S.
Mercedes beefed up
the cargo space, man-
aging to get slightly
more (56.5 cubic feet
in all) into the gLC300
than Lexus put in the
RX 450h, while still
keeping it lighter by
over 700 pounds. It
remains a compact
crossover, but it’s
wider and longer, so it
offers far more elbow
room on road trips.
And this Benz feels
quick on its toes on
the highway and back
roads, with surprising
acceleration from the
two-liter turbocharged
four-cylinder engine.
It’s not sports-sedan
fast, but it’s plenty
speedy to keep pace
with rivals in this class.
And we love the stan-
dard Crosswind Assist
feature, which uses
the stability control to
1
42 Outside 03.16
on vehicles costing
$5,000 more. Among
them: a hands-free
powered trunk hatch,
a back-up camera,
and rear cross-traffic
correct the steering and Sport mode— alert. Combine that
angle in a gale (or perks not found in with a spacious back-
when an 18-wheeler other value-minded seat that’s suitable for
blows by). A worthy compact crossovers— six-footers and a cargo
investment: Air Body made quick work of area that can easily
Control suspension twisty stretches. you’ll swallows dogs, bikes,
($1,900), which allows save at the pump, and weekend packs
you to manually adjust too, since unlike many and you’ve got a well-
the ground clearance turbos, the Tucson outfitted vehicle at
between 7.2 and runs on regular fuel, a killer price.
8.2 inches. not premium. For the The Verdict: The
The Verdict: Luxury money, the midlevel only car you’ll need
you’d expect from Tucson Sport with through years of
a Mercedes that AWD is the model to lifestyle changes and
holds its own as choose, as it over- adventure pursuits.
an affordable adven- delivers with a quiver $27,550; 24 mpg
ture rig. $40,950; of standard features city/28 hwy; hyundai
24 mpg city/21 hwy; more commonly seen usa.com
mbusa.com
Hyundai 2
Tucson (2)
The Test: The Tucson
is a perfect example
of doing more with
less. hyundai paired
a tiny 1.6-liter four-
cylinder engine with a UpGrADE
seven-speed gearbox, Yo U r
and a turbocharger ClUnkEr
boosts horsepower to
an adequate 175. On
hills and muddy farm Grease
roads winding through
Hyundai’s optional Blue Link system ($99 per year) lets you
it and Go
western Wisconsin,
sync the Tucson to your Android or iOS phone or smartwatch Ryan Thomas is a
its AWD system
and use voice commands to start the engine, lock the doors, five-time winner of the
or find your car in Black Rock City after a week at Burning Man.
Baja 1000, a race down
the inhospitable desert
peninsula of western
Mexico. he has also
trained U.S. and foreign
military on how to drive
off-road. One of the
dangers of leaving the
pavement, he says, is
taking it slow for too
long. engines cool faster
while moving quickly, so
crawling along on sand
or chunky gravel can
cook the motor. here
are his recommenda-
tions to avoid burning
out your jalopy.
1. Switch to a good
synthetic oil. It’s more
tolerant of high-heat
conditions than the
conventional stuff.
2. Bring a spare quart
with you into the wild.
(Make sure it’s the
same grade.)
3. Check the oil and
coolant levels regularly,
and top up both so
you don’t find yourself
high and dry.
 looking Glass

adventure tools, tested & reviewed

QUiCk hiTS
essen-
essen- The skinny
tials
tials on three
other cars
we’re eyeing
this year
TESlA MoTorS
MoDEl X
The Good: A
250-mile range,
autonomous driv-
ing, and zero-to-60
acceleration that
bests Corvette’s.
The Bad: Falcon-
wing rear doors
make it all but
impossible to haul
boats, bikes, and
skis on a roof rack.
The Ugly: The
price tag. entry-
level models start
at $80,000, though
that didn’t stop
tens of thousands
3 of buyers from
preordering.

VolkSWAGEn
six-speed transmis- clearance is what we 80-plus mph. Credit for muddy, sandy, or
GolF
sion, and stiffening expect on a compact. honda’s new hyper- snowy conditions. An
Mazda SporTWAGEn
the suspension for The Verdict: The efficient 3.5-liter, unexpected treat is
CX-3 (3) performance. even driving enthusiast’s 280-horsepower honda’s Lane Keeping
AllTrACk
The Good: The
The Test: As we with our aggressive choice for practical V-6 engine and Assist System, which
4Motion AWD
discovered on the driving, the CX-3 AWD transport. nine-speed gearbox autopilots for roughly
system switches to
tight asphalt winding delivered 27 miles per $19,960; 27 mpg city/ (available only in the ten seconds at a
front-wheel drive
up the Santa Monica gallon. We only wish 32 hwy; mazdausa.com high-end Touring and time—long enough
on mellow surfaces
Mountains, the Maz- there had been snow elite trims). Shedding to whip out a pair of
(for improved fuel
da’s feel for the road on the ground to test 250 pounds of bulk sunglasses or plug
efficiency) and
is more sports car Mazda’s proactive from the previous your phone into the
than budget-minded AWD system: it uses
Honda edition doesn’t hurt, charger. (See “hands
sends power to rear
crossover. That makes 27 sensors to gauge Pilot (4) either. The result is a Free,” page 40.)
wheels on crud.
The Bad: Recent
sense, since the new slip, air temperature, The Test: We were behemoth of a honda The Verdict: A
emissions flubs
CX-3 shares the same precipitation, and blown away after that handles more like luxurious, all-season,
have us wonder-
two-liter, four-cylinder how quickly the logging 27.9 miles per a premium sport SUV. tech-packed carriage
ing whether a truly
engine as the new steering wheel is gallon in the Pilot. Also new for the Pilot disguised as, well,
clean (and peppy)
MX-5 sports convert- being turned, then de- That’s an impressive is an AWD system a honda. $46,570;
diesel option will
ible. On paper, its 146 termines whether to number for any cross- that can modulate 19 mpg city/26 hwy;
be in the offing.
horsepower doesn’t power all four wheels. over, yet we averaged gearing and traction honda.com
The Money:
inspire awe, but Perks aside, there’s it navigating through
Smart, understated
Mazda wrings more hardly enough space 3,100 miles of city
styling typical of a
juice out of it by plant- (44.5 cubic feet) traffic in Portland and
4 Volkswagen.
ing the engine in the to jam in a bike with Seattle, and cruising
lightest vehicle in its the rear seats down, through Montana
MInI CoopEr
class, installing a crisp and at 6.1 inches the and Wyoming at
ClUBMAn
The Good: A
wider, longer chas-
sis means more
room for cargo.
U p G r A D E Yo U r C l U n k E r The Bad: It’s
expensive for its
size ($24,100)
Slap a rack on it For when you simply can’t cram all that gear into the trunk compared with the
competition.
Best For: Car-Top Camping Best For: Days at the Hill Best For: Hitching Your The nutty: Big
Yakima’s CoreBars are 60 percent The magic in Thule’s Snowpack4 Two-Wheeled ride headlights and
more aero than some of its other comes from a clever expandable 1Up USA’s offerings for bikes are dashboard dials
models and built to handle 220 hinge, so you can rack skis in pairs sleek—dual arms grip the tires, give the Clubman
pounds. That’s too much heft for rather than singles to fit up to four not the frame. Its Double Bicycle that quirky Mini
many vehicle roofs, but if you’ve got a sets side by side. And it takes up only Super Duty Quik can haul up to feel, which we hope
pickup with mounts designed to hold half the roof, leaving the rest open for three 29ers, or 225 pounds max. the brand never
a tent, grab these. $119; yakima.com a storage box. $220; thule.com From $559; 1upusa.com outgrows.
 1

Watch
1 Me Now
2
Our Eight FavOritE Luxury timEpiEcEs
inspirEd by ExpLOratiOn

1. Big Crown
4
4
ProPilot
chronograph by
3
Oris ($3,400;
oris.ch)

2. AirBoss

3
Mechanical
Black Edition
chronograph
by Victorinox
Swiss Army
($2,095; swiss
army.com)

3. BR126
Carbon Orange
chronograph
by Bell and
Ross ($4,800;
bellross.com)

4. Aerospace
Evo chronograph
by Breitling
($5,290;
breitling.com)

44 Outside
 03.16
adventure tools, tested & reviewed
5 essen-

Style
tials

5. Pelagos
by Tudor
($4,125; tudor

6
watch.com)

6. Field Valjoux
Automatic
chronograph by
Luminox ($2,400;
luminox.com)

7. Carrera
Automatic
Tachymeter
chronograph
by TAG Heuer
($4,750; tag
heuer.com)

8. Chemin
Des Tourelles
Squelette
by Tissot
($2,050; tissot
watches.com)

7
8
photograph by Inga Hendrickson Outside 45
 There Has to Be a Better Way
e at
train
work
A n d t h e r e i s —t o e At, t r A i n , w o r k , A n d s l e e p. i t s tA r t s w i t h A s k i n g t h e r i g h t
sleep
c h A n g e s t o yo u r dA i ly h A b i t s. t h e r e s u lt : A w h o l e n ew l ev e l o f p e r fo r m A n c e ,

46 Outside 03.16 PhotograPhs by Klaus Thymann

q u e s t i o n s o f t h e wo r l d ’s t o p e x p e r t s ( w e d i d t h At pA r t ) A n d e n d s w i t h yo u m A k i n g s o m e s i m p l e
p ro d u c t i v i t y, h eA lt h , A n d h A p p i n ess. By Will Cockrell

03.16 Outside 47
 how they eat—and the OilEd up
important ways their
rituals around food The fact that
determine what ends high-quality extra-
e at
up on their plates. virgin olive oil has
train
work the clearest lessons become a hipster
rage is both ex-
sleep come from America’s
tremely annoying
blue Zone, loma
and a good thing for
linda, california, heart health: EVOO,
outside los Angeles— as it’s known, is
home to one of the among the healthi-
highest concentra- est fats. But how
tions of seventh day does one tell a
Adventist christians premium oil, with
in the world. resi- its superior nutri-
dents there live up to tion and flavor, from
a decade longer than all the pretenders
other Americans, and and then use it
rates of heart disease properly? We asked
and cancer are more Greg Bernarducci,
than 60 percent lower. co-owner of New
“what the Adventists York pour-your-own
teach us is more about EVOO bar O Live
social networks,” says Brooklyn, for his tips.
buettner. “the reason 1. The number
they can eat well for a one thing to look
lifetime is that they for in a premium
hang out with other olive oil is a crush
Adventists.” date or harvest
the Adventist diet date. If it’s within
is inspired by the bible the past year, you
MY WAY You Are Who You Eat With and resembles what
your hyperfit yoga and
most likely have a
good bottle. The
“The biggest t h e s e c r e t t o A h e A lt h y d i e t t h At ultrarunning buddies best-by date is
challenge I face e n d u r e s ? f i n d yo u r t r i b e . graze on: lots of fruits
meaningless.
is maintaining and vegetables, small 2. Avoid major
energy on big Dan Buettner’s 2008 book, The Blue amounts of dairy, smaller amounts of meat, brands. Those
days. I don’t Zones, spelled out the nine common habits and almost zero added sugar. their ability bottles have been
drink coffee, of the world’s longest-living communities, to maintain this menu while living in the sitting around on
because the from sardinia, italy, to okinawa, Japan, to land of the happy meal has everything to shelves for God
spike is too hard, costa rica’s nicoya peninsula. it was an do with the fact that healthy eating has knows how long.
but I found this instant bestseller that endeared buettner become institutionalized in loma linda, 3. Don’t worry
wild-harvested to the talk-show circuit and converted him where the largest grocery store doesn’t even about where it
Ayurvedic supple- into a unique kind of foodie. stock meat. comes from. We
ment called the prescriptions for longevity detailed “like the Adventists, you want to shape carry olive oil from
Hanah One. It in The Blue Zones ranged from guidelines for your environment so it becomes easier to all over—Italy, Spain,
helps me with physical activity (moderate exercise is better eat the right things—your kitchen but also Portugal, California.
mental acuity, than rigorous training) to family time (make your social environment,” says buettner. 4. Olive oil goes ran-
and it’s also an it a priority) and even religion (participating “eating and shopping with friends who eat cid. After 12 months,
immune booster. in spiritual community is crucial). but it was the way you want to will have a substantial throw it out.
I live on it now— the dietary lessons that had the most last- influence.” this means always stocking
5. The notion that
ing personal impact on buettner. his latest up on the same staples, like beans, sweet
and I’m the you can’t cook with
book, The Blue Zones Solution: Eating and potatoes, oatmeal, and honey; mastering
biggest skeptic, Living Like the World’s Healthiest People, a handful of plant-based recipes you love;
it at high heat is
because I’ve had is the result of his quest to understand ex- and, whenever possible, sharing meals with
wrong. That’s only
everything put true of low-quality
actly how our meals affect our lives. in it, people who support your goals. oils. High-quality
in my face.” buettner reveals some surprising nuances to structuring your life to create predict- oils are low in free
Jimmy Chin the familiar mediterranean diet, decodes the able meals may sound boring, but buettner fatty acids and have
Climber, photographer, spice racks of okinawans, and trumpets the insists that the repetition creates healthy— a higher smoke
filmmaker power of that ubiquitous costa rican dish and pleasurable—rituals. “growing food point. You can cook
gallo pinto. but the most compelling dis- and preparing, serving, and eating meals are with them up to
coveries weren’t what these cultures eat but all sacred practices in blue Zones.” 420 degrees.

YOu cAn HAcK iT: resources for rapid improvement

> MarK’s DaILY aPPLe The gospel of paleo guru Mark Sisson (see “Carb Unloading,” page 76), from nutrition strategies to recipes to training regi-
mens. marksdailyapple.com > Kitchen hacKs: how clever cooKs Get thinGs Done Published by the folks behind Cooks Illustrated, this
368-page book offers more than 1,000 tips to help you improve your homemade meals. The most important one: how to make the best bacon. $12
> @tInaeMeLIe Follow elite Swedish ultrarunner Emelie Forsberg’s Twitter feed to get recipes for delicious and effective post-race recovery foods.

48 Outside 03.16
THE WAYs Of
THE WArriOr
practice like a ninja
A wo r ko u t r e g i m e n d e s i g n e d fo r A n i n sA n e t v o b s tAc l e
ChrIs WILCzeWsKI’s FavOrIte c o u r s e g i v e s yo u ex Ac t ly w h At yo u n e e d : vA r i e t y
nInJa WarrIOr WOrKOut MOves
Over the Past couple of years, American
Ninja Warrior has gone from a cable-tv cult
favorite to a full-blown phenomenon. there
are now more than 30 ninja warrior fitness
centers in the u.s.—up from five in 2013—and
many crossfit and climbing gyms are adding
Ninja Warrior–style obstacles. “this could
quickly reach the level of crossfit,” says chris
wilczewski, a six-time competitor and the
owner of movement lab, a ninja warrior gym
in hainesport, new Jersey. “people are realizing
that it’s a really fun way to work out.”
indeed, the novel physical demands that have
enabled climbers to excel on the Ninja Warrior
course—last year, isaac caldiero of boulder,
colorado, became the fastest person to com-
plete all four stages—are central to its allure.
but, says wilczewski, “you can’t be good at
just one thing. climbers struggle with balance,
crossfitters with footwork, and parkour ath-
letes with upper-body stuff.”
research has shown that varied routines
motivate you to train more often, and a 2015
study in the Journal of Strength and Condition-
ing Research found that switching it up resulted
in bigger gains than simply increasing the load
in an existing workout.
As wilczewski sees it, the effectiveness of
ninja warrior training comes down to one fact:
“you’re always trying something new.”

MY WAY

“Our research
shows that techni-
cal apparel, like
compression tights,
towel hangs step-ups
isn’t necessar-
Why: Improves Why: Develops ily boosting your
grip strength. single-leg blast- physical ability.
how: Swing a off power. But it provides
towel over a bar how: Place your sensory feedback
or beam and forefoot on a knee- that shifts what
hang until failure. or thigh-high box, you believe to be
Do three or four keeping your other possible. If you feel
times, resting as foot on the ground.
lighter, chances
little as possible Explode up off the
(no more than box and then re-
are you’ll run
30 seconds) verse the motion faster.”
between reps. on landing, com- tom Waller
ing down first on Director of innovation,
Bicycle Kicks your lead foot, research, and devel-
Why: Builds a then on the other opment at Lululemon
rock-solid core. foot. Do four sets Athletica
how: Lying on of 25 reps per leg.
your back, with
your head and Kipping Pull-ups
legs off the ground Why: Boosts
and your hands dynamic upper-
near your head body strength.
(but not behind how: Hang from e at
your head or neck), a pull-up bar. Snap train
touch one elbow your hips forward work

to the opposite and your head sleep

knee, then do the back to power up

same thing on to the top of the
the other side. bar, then return to
Repeat rapidly a hanging position.
until failure. Rest Aim for three to
for about a min- four sets of five
ute and repeat. to ten reps.

> the rICh rOLL PODCast Roll, a two-time ultraman—essentially a double-Ironman-distance triathlon—and evangelist for vegan athletic perfor-
mance, mines the deepest recesses of the wellness universe, returning with tactics for a better, healthier life. richroll.com > @DrMJOYner Mayo Clinic
physiologist and performance expert Michael Joyner filters the never-ending river of research on sports science and posts the relevant, interesting, and
valuable stuff on Twitter. > the tIM FerrIss shOW The podcast of the life-hacking superhero, in which he gets all manner of A-listers, from elite
athletes to investors to entertainers, to share their strategies for success. fourhourworkweek.com

IllustratIons by larry Jost 03.16 Outside 49

 e at
Go LonG
train or Go
MY WAY work HoMe
sleep scott
“I’m a big fan Johnston’s
of working out formula for
in the morn- endurance
ing. It sets a training
good tone for
the day and 90%:
makes it easier Low-
to reward your- Intensity
self when aerobic
threshold
you’re done
Efforts of an
with work by hour or longer
going out with at the fast-
friends and not est pace you
worrying about can maintain
being lazy.” breathing
only through
Julia Mancuso
your nose.
Four-time Olympic
skiing medalist 20%:
technique
Basic tech-
nique prac-
rOll tice—say,
perfecting
YOur OWn your cross-
country kick
the Greatest
and glide—
DIY enerGY-
should be
Bar reCIPe
done during
After years spent low-intensity
field-testing every workouts.
bar, gel, and chew
out there, alpinist 5%:
Steve House and his high-
wife, Eva, decided to Intensity
create their own. The Interval
Protein Hero requires training
zero cooking, is soft Sprint-pace
on your tummy, and efforts.
is easy to customize. 5%:
strength
Ingredients:
½ cup roasted,
Embrace Turtle power and Flex-
s p r i n t wo r ko u t s m Ay s e e m l i k e t h e fA s t t r Ac k t o f i t n e s s, ibility
unsalted almonds Your focus
½ cup cashews b u t e n d u r A n c e At h l e t e s g e t m o r e f ro m g o i n g s l ow should be on
24 fresh dates (they the muscles
should be gooey) eLIte traIner and exercise expert scott sweat. And while you might improve your you use most
1 teaspoon bee Johnston has been delivering a lot of bad pace in sprint efforts, Johnston cites studies in your sports.
pollen news lately. All too often, he has to break it showing that interval training can actually
Salt to taste to clients that high-intensity interval train- reduce aerobic function and that elite endur-
ing (hiit)—short, super-intense workouts ance athletes spend more than 90 percent of
Directions:
widely promoted to time-crunched ath- their training time at low intensity.
Blend everything
letes—isn’t a shortcut to aerobic fitness. “it’s “when you do a quick lunch workout, it’s
in a food processor,
then flatten be-
been a popular myth that you can substitute great to go back to the office feeling like you
tween two sheets intensity for duration,” says the coauthor of did something hard,” he admits. “but when
of wax paper. Cut the 2014 groundbreaking book Training for you work on speed, you might improve per-
into bars, wrap the New Alpinism. “that’s a huge mistake formance by only a couple of percentage
them individually in for most endurance athletes—it will make points. with low-intensity work, you can
foil, and refrigerate. you go backward.” improve performance by tens of points.”
Too dry? Add more it’s a hard habit to break, says Johnston, see “go long or go home” (right) for
dates. Too gooey? because those hiit workouts feel so good, Johnston’s tips on allocating training time
Add more nuts. releasing happy chemicals and buckets of for maximum endurance benefit.

YOu cAn HAcK iT: resources for rapid improvement

> traIn rIGht The coaches at Carmichael Training Systems have worked with more than 10,000 Olympians, Ironman champions, and amateur
athletes. Their blog provides weekly bulletins for clients (example: “Is hyperoxic training the next big thing?”), but you can read it for free. trainright.com
> MaGness anD MarCus On COaChInG Steve Magness and Jonathan Marcus have coached at the highest levels of track and field. Their pod-
cast provides an insider’s view on training elite runners. scienceofrunning.com > sWOrKIt University of Florida researchers reviewed 30 coaching apps
to determine which adhere to the principles of the American College of Sports Medicine. Sworkit scored the highest. Free; Android and iOS

50 Outside 03.16
 THree
CUreS For
sit down and shut up dEsK take a seat on the
floor, extend your
CUBICLe
s tA n d i n g d e s k s m Ay b e A l l t h e r Ag e , b u t l e A r n - JOcKEY legs straight out,
FeVer
i n g t o p ro p e r ly e m b r Ac e yo u r c h A i r i s t h e b e s t and press your head,
taYLOr spine, and sacrum
wAy t o su rv i v e t h e wo r k dAy hatCher’s against the wall.
ruLes FOr Don’t: Let your
aLIGnMent eXPert taylor hatcher wishes we’d give it a rest with sMarter eyes pull you for-
the standing desks already. sIttInG ward. The body
As the owner of the dynamic Alignment training center in new follows the eyes, so
york city, hatcher specializes in working with elite athletes who also it’s important that
log big Apple hours at their day jobs. A former division i basketball they remain straight
player, she understands why we’re drawn to the idea that standing will ahead, not pointed
Inbox Walk
improve fitness and stave off injury, but she warns that being on your down at a screen.
Do a chunk of
feet for hours often causes a different set of problems. proper form is e-mailing during a
critical, hatcher explains, whether we’re upright or seated. “A lot of Do: Make sure
stroll with a smart-
your ribs are nei-
people who stand all day have really tight ankles and calves,” she says. phone voice assist-
ther tilted up nor
instead, hatcher encourages many clients to simply sit properly. ant like Google
compressed down.
“i call it my desk-jockey program,” she says. “it’s about alignment Now (Android), Siri
Adopting a wall-sit
points—sitting with your head over your heart without flaring your ribs position should
(iOS), or Cortana
up. if people lift their head and translate it back, it changes everything.” ensure this, too.
(Windows).
hatcher emphasizes that to achieve proper sitting form, you need Don’t: Puff out your
to do work outside the office, particularly wall sits (see “desk Jockey,” Do: Maintain align- chest and squeeze
right)—“they’re especially good before your regular workout, because ment of your head, your shoulder blades
you’re about to put a lot of force on your body”—and stretches that middle back, and together: “That’s the
target hip flexors, calves, hamstrings, and neck. sacrum (lower worst thing you can
the goal is to stay relaxed when you’re seated in front of a com- back). Train your do,” says Hatcher.
puter for hours on end. “tension from holding a position means you body with one- “You’re creating a
aren’t breathing right,” she explains. “And if you’re not breathing right, minute wall sits muscle imbalance.”
you’re probably not getting any work done.” before a workout:
Do: Keep your
sit bones pointed
hijack
straight down into
Workspace
your chair. Extending
Relocating to that
your hands down
sofa in the lobby
to your knees with
e at or bench in the
your back straight
train atrium for non-
will help you find
work computer tasks
sleep
this position.
will force you to sit
Don’t: Tilt your
in a new position.
pelvis back, creat-
ing a slouch, or lean
forward, which
hyperextends the
lower back.

Do: Position your

knees so they’re
just forward of the
front of your ankle,
where your shin
stealth Workout
meets your foot.
Rows train back
Your second toes
muscles that aid
should point for-
alignment. Attach
ward with your legs
a resistance band
hip distance apart.
to the wall behind
Don’t: Sit at a
your desk. Pull
height that causes
either side back
your thighs to be
until your elbows
at a steep angle
hit 45 degrees, hold
to the floor (they
a few seconds,
should be parallel)
and repeat. Do
or your heels to lift
three sets of ten.
off the ground.

> OMnIFOCus There are all kinds of productivity apps out there, and most of them are useless. We like OmniFocus for the way it turns a brain dump
of projects, goals, and ideas into a list of things to do right now to accomplish more. $40; iOS > traIL POrn Spending time outside does many dif-
ferent good things for your overall health and well-being. But recent research shows that even just looking at a beautiful landscape improves focus and
productivity. Don’t worry, Trail Porn is totally SFW. trailporn.com > sMart FaKe CaLL Need an escape hatch from a painful work meeting or awkward
social event? This app sends a preprogrammed “urgent call” from someone on your contact list whenever you time it to go off. Free; Android and iOS

IllustratIons by larry Jost 03.16 Outside 51

 CrASH
CoUrSe
tures in Africa and south America were able three common
MY WAY Zzz Top to thrive on 5.7 to 7.1 hours of sleep per night. causes of a poor
night’s rest
“With sleep w h e n i t c o m e s t o s lu m b e r ,
that’s not to say that modern humans
I binge function optimally with minimal shut-eye.
q uA l i t y m At t e r s J us t A s research shows that getting less sleep leaves Going hard
and purge. Working out to
m u c h A s q uA n t i t y us prone to illness and poor decision making.
Some days exhaustion may
but sherlin argues that your sleep should be
I’ll get When LesLIe sherlin studies the brains of approached much like your diet, with many sound like a recipe
only a few athletes like three-time volleyball gold med- ingredients that ultimately determine what’s for sinking into your
hours, then alist kerri walsh Jennings and former major healthy. one reason preindustrial communi-
pillow, but pushing
I’ll catch past your limits
league baseball all-star carlos quentin, one ties might have been able to get away with less actually spurs a
up and get shared attribute always stands out: elite ath- sleep is that the rest of their lifestyle contrib- number of physi-
13. After a letes are elite sleepers. “they report increased uted to peaceful slumber—physical activity ological processes
big trip, I’ll ability to fall asleep and more efficient or pro- was an intrinsic part of their day, and they that can disrupt
flop on the ductive sleep,” he says. didn’t spend hours staring at screens emit- sleep (and dimin-
couch and sherlin is a psychophysiologist, and at his ting blue light that scrambled their sleep hor- ish muscle recov-
watch TV— company, senselabs, a startup that develops mones. that’s why, if you’re feeling sleep de- ery). Track your
you have to mobile brain-training apps, he and his team prived, lying down for more hours every night exercise carefully
be able to recently began exploring how to teach people may not make much of a difference. instead, and look for corre-
turn off.” to sleep better. their starting point was the sherlin advocates logging a range of variables, lations with rough
belief that people focus far too much on the from obvious influencers like caffeine, exer- nights. And pay
Caroline
amount of sleep they get instead of the nature cise, and the darkness of your bedroom, to attention to when
Gleich you train—if after-
Professional ski
of that sleep. “the biggest misconception out subtle indicators that require more attention,
there is that there’s some magical number of like your heart rate and core temperature. work sessions keep
mountaineer you up, try switch-
hours and that sleep quality equals sleep time, sherlin stresses that all these variables
or even time in bed,” he says. sherlin cites a are individual and that you need to under- ing to dawn patrol.
high-profile 2015 study published in Current stand how each one influences the quality Core Body
Biology that revealed how preindustrial cul- of your rest. developing good sleep hygiene, temperature
as he calls it, requires Your temperature
discipline. thus, the shifts with your
sensesleep app (free; circadian rhythm,
ios) functions like a falling when your
fitness hub, captur- body wants to
ing metrics from data sleep and rising
when it wants to
trackers and other
wake up. Take your
apps, and prompting
temp regularly.
e at you to record infor-
Notice a drop of
train mation like how you a couple degrees
work
feel first thing in the around 10 P.M.?
sleep
morning and what Give up Jimmy
you’re eating, so you Fallon. Don’t be
can begin to notice surprised if you
patterns. it also offers start rising earlier—
breathing exercises to and recording an
calm you down before elevated tempera-
you hit the sack. ture when you do.
make careful obser- Diet
vations for several Minor sensitivi-
weeks and you’ll de- ties—particularly
velop a sense of how to inflammator-
various factors affect ies like corn and
your sleep and how dairy—can lead to
to make adjustments immune responses
when one of them is that cause sleep
compromised. “you’ll disturbances and
be able to deal with even insomnia. Cut
things like travel or these out of your
missed workouts,” he meals, then slowly
says. “no one thing add them back
will ever put you over one at a time and
the threshold if the log your reactions.
rest are in order.”

YOu cAn HAcK iT: resources for rapid improvement

> tWILIGht Adapts your phone or tablet screen to sync with the time of day, stripping out blue light—shown to disrupt sleep hormones—in the
evenings with a soft red filter. Free; Android > reLaX anD rest GuIDeD MeDItatIOns This app offers three different sessions: a five-minute
breath-awareness exercise to give your mind a break, a 13-minute meditation to calm you down before sleep, and a 24-minute whole-body relaxation
exercise. $2; iOS > BeDJet Everyone sleeps best at a specific temperature, usually around 68 degrees. The BedJet sleep system pumps air into your
sheets, helping you dial in a precise temp without constantly layering blankets or sticking your feet out the sides. $399; bedjet.com

52 Outside 03.16
 THERE’S NO
APP FOR THIS.

Go to visitgreaterpalmsprings.com/adventure
to watch the video.

palm springs | desert hot springs | cathedral city | rancho mirage

9 resort cities. One adventurous oasis. palm desert | indian wells | la quinta | indio | coachella
54 Outside 03.16 portraits by Carlos Serrao
Healey
surfing Jaws,
on Maui’s
love
north shore.
Opposite:
In San Diego,
November

me
2015.

Mark Healey
surfs sixty-
foot waves,
perforMs
Hollywood some
stunts (He’s
in tHe point
Break reBoot),

plus-
and can Hold
His BreatH
underwater
for six— six! —
Minutes. now
He’s freediving
to tag HaMMer-
Head sHarks size
for science.
By Thayer
Walker

03.16 Outside 55
 the island of
Mikomoto is a
barren, windswept,
wave-battered
chunk of basalt
infested with
sharks and scoured
by current,
and looks as if it erupted from the fever dream
of a malarial sea captain. Six miles offshore
of Japan’s quiet port town of Minami-Izu,
its waters are so treacherous that the 25-acre
uninhabited island was chosen in 1870 as the
site of one of the country’s first stone light-
houses, a 75-foot tower wrapped with black
stripes. For Mark Healey, these are all the
ingredients of a good time.
“This should be fun,” he says as the Oto-
maru, our 40-foot chartered fishing boat,
pulls into a rocky cove.
Clad head to toe in a three-millimeter
camouflage wetsuit with fins to match, he
looks like he just swam out of a Special Forces
unit. He has a black GoPro camera (one of his
many sponsors) strapped to his head; it’s an
accessory so common in his daily life that it
may as well be a permanent appendage. A
knife is cinched at the hip to his weight belt,
along with a trio of two-pound lead weights,
custom-made to reduce drag in the water.
A black glove protects his left hand. In his
naked right he holds a four-foot teakwood
Riffe speargun.
Healey takes a giant stride off the Otomaru
into the 80-degree water. After a few min-
utes of deliberate breathing, he bends at the
waist and dives. His fins—three and a half
feet long for freediving—break the water with
a gentle splash, then slide beneath the sur-
face. One, two, seven long, smooth kicks take
him down to 30 feet, at which point the lead
weights take over, pulling him deeper. One
minute in—a point when even strong divers
would head up—Healey scans the depths and
glides down to 80 feet.
A 34-year-old professional big-wave
surfer, Healey has built a career chasing
down the dangerous and nearly impossible.
He’s a perennial finalist in the World Surf
League’s Big Wave Awards—the discipline’s
equivalent of the Oscars—having won the
top prize in the Biggest Tube category in
2009 for a barrel in Oregon and the Biggest
Paddle-In Wave in 2014 for a 60-foot mon-
ster at Jaws, on Maui’s north shore. He once

56 Outside 03.16
b at t l i n g a h e av y s w e l l a n d s t r o n g c u r r e n t s,
H e a l e y w i l l d i v e a s d e e p a s 1 3 5 f e e t, s n e a k
i n t o a s c H o o l o f u p t o 1 0 0 s H a r k s, s H o o t
a f e w o f t H e m w i t H s at e l l i t e o r a c o u s t i c
r a d i o ta g s, a n d t H e n s w i m b a c k t o t H e
s u r fa c e — a l l o n a s i n g l e b r e at H o f a i r .

won the Surfer magazine poll

>
Tagging for Worst Wipeout, crashing
hammerhead on a punishing wave at Tea-
sharks off
Japan’s hupoo, in Tahiti, that would
Mikomoto have vaporized most surf-
Island
ers. But Healey isn’t in Japan
to ride waves—he’s here to
swim with sharks.
As a member of a six-person scientific
expedition, he has come to Japan for two
weeks to tag an endangered population of
scalloped hammerheads that congregate
around Mikomoto. The sharks have plum-
meted in numbers by as much as 90 percent,
largely due to overfishing and an insatiable
appetite in Asia for fin soup. The scientists
hope that the data they record, such as pop-
ulation sizes and migratory patterns, will
improve conservation policies regionally
and globally.
Between Austin Gallagher, the 30-year-
old marine ecologist and founder of the
conservation nonprofit Beneath the Waves
who assembled the group, and the other sci-
entists, there are enough degrees on board
to rival a thermometer. Yet Healey, a man
whose traditional schooling ended after the
seventh grade, is the linchpin of the proj-
ect. He’s a champion spearfisherman and
freediver who can hold his breath for an
astounding six minutes underwater, and the
scientists can’t tag these notoriously hyper-
sensitive sharks without him.
“Hammerheads are nearly impossible to
catch on a line without killing them,” Galla-
gher says. “They need to be tagged on their

photograph by

Kanoa Zimmerman
turf, underwater. Because they’re so skittish,
they stay away from the noise and bubbles
created by scuba divers.”
Battling a heavy swell and strong currents,
Healey will dive as deep as 135 feet, sneak into
a school of up to 100 sharks, shoot a few with
satellite or acoustic radio tags in the nonin-
vasive area behind the dorsal fin, and then
swim back to the surface—all on a single
breath of air.
The hammerheads the team is after, which
can grow to eight feet and 200 pounds, are
small fry compared with the beasts Healey
has previously pursued. In 2011, he traveled
to Mexico’s Guadalupe Island to dive with
great white sharks for a National Geographic
television shoot. On the first day, after 30 min-
utes watching a trio of the one-ton animals
arc through the water, Healey swam away
from the safety of the boat and joined them.
The biggest shark in the group interrupted
its meander and made toward Healey like a
guided missile. Is this a bad idea? he won-
dered, all the while holding his ground. As
the shark swam beneath him, Healey ex-
tended his arm in a terrifying handshake and
grabbed its dorsal fin.
The shark didn’t flinch any more than
if Healey had been a remora. He wasn’t
prey—he’d become an object for the sharks
to use in competition for dominance. When
he was paired off with one shark, the others
stayed away. When a shark began to dive,
Healey would let go. “The last place you
want to be is kicking 70 feet back up through
the water column. That’s when they eat
you,” he told me.
During one ride, Healey was piggybacking
on a shark as it approached a floating tuna
head. He could feel the beast begin to open
its giant mouth. Alarmed at what a feeding
great white might do if it felt his full weight
when it broke the surface, he slid off.
But after hours in the water in Japan,
58 Outside 03.16
Healey hasn’t yet seen a shark. “It’s a num-
bers game,” he says during a post-dive recov-
ery float. “The more time I’m underwater,
the more likely we are to find hammerheads.”
He takes a few more long breaths and disap-
pears beneath the surface.
SCALLOPED hammerheads are famous for
congregating in huge schools around sea-
mounts. Thought to be attracted to the mag-
netism of volcanic islands like Cocos and the
Galápagos, in the eastern Pacific, and Miko-
moto, they may use underwater rock forma-
tions as resting and social centers during the
day and as points of reference for nocturnal
hunting. Their distinctive heads could help
them detect the electromagnetic signals of
the earth and other animals.
> help maintain healthy oceans and
The scientists aboard
>
the Otomaru want to un- from left:
Surfing with his
derstand the very basics father on Oahu,
of these hammerheads. 1982; fishing
Why do they come to with his parents,
1983. Opposite:
Mikomoto, what are they Demonstrating
doing here, how long do moves from the
ginástica Natural
they stay, and where do training program.
they go next? By iden-
tifying their habits and
highways, the scientists can maximize con-
servation efforts.
Gallagher has put together an inter-
national group for the expedition. David
Jacoby, a postdoctorate at the Zoologi-
cal Society of London, studies shark social
networks and once bred 1,000 cat sharks in
captivity. Yannis Papastamatiou, also from
the UK, is a jujitsu black belt who special-
izes in using underwater acoustics to study
shark movement as an assistant professor
at Florida International University. Yuuki
Watanabe, an associate professor at Japan’s
National Institute of Polar Research, is our
local lead. Tre’ Packard, executive direc-
tor of a Hawaii-based art and conservation
nonprofit called the PangeaSeed Founda-
tion, suggested the expedition to Gallagher
in the first place, having dived at Mikomoto
before with one of only a handful of com-
mercial operators that run trips here.
Our plan makes the long, hot August days
on a small fishing boat almost civilized. At
night we stay at a traditional Japanese guest-
house in Minami-Izu, eating delicious local
fare as we sit on tatami-mat floors. Each
morning we board the Otomaru by 8 A.M. and
hit the water 30 minutes later. As an experi-
enced freediver myself, I often follow Healey
down but have no illusions of keeping pace.
Healey’s been on a previous research ex-
pedition, in 2014 in the Philippines, where
he tagged nine thresher sharks. On this trip,
he’ll use two kinds of tags. Satellite tags
will record the sharks’ seasonal
migration, then pop off after six
to twelve months, sending GPS
data of the animal’s path from the
surface. Smaller acoustic tags will
stay on for up to a year and trans-
mit local data when the shark
comes within a few hundred feet
of an underwater receiver, which
the scientists will moor to the
seafloor. The team plans to return
annually to swap out the receivers,
collect a year’s worth of acoustic
data, and tag more sharks.
Studying these animals is not
simply an academic exercise.
Healthy hammerhead populations
economies. A 2007 study in the
journal Science correlated a more than 90
percent decline in hammerheads and other
sharks along the eastern seaboard of the
U.S. with an explosion in the population of
page 55: freD pOMperMayer. THIS page: cOurTeSy Of THe Healey faMIly (2).
their prey, cow-nosed rays. The rays then
consumed enough bay scallops to collapse
North Carolina’s century-old fishery. “Peo-
ple get so riled up about sharks for the same
reasons they get riled up about politics and
religion,” Healey says. “It’s all about power
and control.”
Which we don’t seem to have a lot of thus
far. Though we’ve been casting Healey over
the side each day like a fishing lure, we still
haven’t seen any hammerheads. To make
matters more difficult, two Category 4
typhoons are spinning our way, threatening
to cut our trip a week short, and the condi-
tions at Mikomoto are deteriorating, bring-
ing wind, rain, and seasickness. On the bow,
one of the scientists heaves into the pitching
waves, a fluorescent yellow blend of miso
soup and stomach bile. Healey, astern and
at ease, pulls out a tin of chewing tobacco,
packs a dip, and awaits marching orders.
The four-person Japanese crew of the
Otomaru—a captain, two sailors, and a dive-
master—are eager to return to harbor as the
boat gets nailed from all sides by the growing
swell. But the team needs a win and decides
on setting a receiver.
Gallagher, Jacoby, and Papastamatiou
clamber into scuba gear. They plan to set the
receiver a few hundred yards from shore.
Once it’s secured, they’ll fire a float to the
surface, where the boat can take a GPS read-
ing to mark it. The captain, however, doesn’t
want to risk bringing the boat that close to
the island. “I’ll do it,” says Healey, volun-
teering to swim to the float with his handheld
GPS. “Back into wardrobe.”
The float pops up 20 minutes later, and
Healey swims a quick 400 yards out and
back. Wind and rain lash the deck and our
faces; the black ocean is colored with white-
caps. Gallagher, Jacoby, and Papastamatiou
surface and are swept toward a jagged house-
size rock shaped, appropriately, like a shark
fin. Inching toward them, the Otomaru gets
pounded by waves.
“This is bad,” Papastamatiou says in the
water.
Gallagher looks concerned.
a t 1 4 , H e a l e y r o d e 3 0 - f o o t wa v e s
“Are we going to be OK?” he
a t wa i M e a a n d h a s b e e n i n t h e
asks. world’s scariest lineups ever
A deckhand throws a rope s i n c e . “a s a wa t e r m a n , m a r k i s
to the divers as the captain u n r i va l e d , ” s a y s l a i r d H a m i lt o n .
slams the boat in reverse to “wHen it comes to riding giant
avoid hitting the rock. The wa v e s , d i v i n g d e e p, a n d h u n t i n g
Otomaru pitches like a rock- f i s H , H e ’ s t H e t o t a l pa c k a g e —
ing chair. One moment the u n i q u e e v e n a m o n g u s.”
gunwale is ten feet in the air,
the next it’s slamming into the
water. Healey helps haul the
divers in one by one, a tumble of fins, tanks, ing heads in the surf world for two decades.
and regulators. At the age of 14, he made a splash riding 30-
“That was an education,” Papastamatiou foot waves at Waimea Bay. He cashed his first
says. The scientists are shell-shocked, and paycheck as a professional three years later
the crew is angry. The captain cranks the and has been a fixture in the world’s scariest
throttle to head back to shore. Healey throws lineups ever since.
his arms toward the heavens triumphantly, a “As a waterman, Mark is unrivaled,” says
grin stretching from here to the mainland. big-wave icon Laird Hamilton. “When it
comes to riding giant waves, diving deep, and
STANDING JUST five foot nine and 153 hunting fish, he’s the total package—unique
pounds, with ginger freckles, narrow-set even among us.”
eyes, and a chiseled jaw, Healey looks like a A knack for doing the right thing in the
blend of Richie Cunningham and Aquaman. wrong place has landed Healey stuntman
Though new to field biology, he’s been turn- gigs on Chasing Mavericks and the reboots
03.16 Outside 59
of Hawaii 5-0 and Point >
Break. About a year after Hitching a ride
on a great white
walking away from his near Mexico’s
longtime sponsor Quik- guadalupe
Island in 2011.
silver, he helped launch Opposite:
the surf-apparel company practicing his
Depactus in February 2015 underwater
breathing
as a minority partner and technique.
the face of the brand. But
despite his success on a
surfboard, it’s not his first love. “People al-
ways think of Mark as a professional surfer,”
says spearfishing record holder Cameron
Kirkconnell, “but the truth is, he surfs to
support his diving habit.”
Healey learned to swim before he could
walk and estimates that he’s spent “a third
of the year with a dive mask on since the
age of 12.” He was born and raised and still
resides in Haleiwa, on Oahu’s North Shore.
His father, Andy, is an avid waterman who
would wrap his tiny toddler in a life vest, give
him a mask and snorkel,
and pull him through the “tHere are a lot of tHings From below, a shadow appears. Two more
water clinging to a fishing working against people in arrive, then five, then dozens. Healey stirred
buoy. “He took to it imme- t H i s s p o r t, ” H e a l e y s a y s . “ i t ’ s up a school of Galapagos sharks loitering in a
diately,” Andy recalls. b e c o M i n g a p pa r e n t t h a t t h o s e cloud of fish spawn.
Fishing was a way of life odds are coming up around me. Six feet long and too curious for my taste,
in the Healey household, a once you’ve seen one of your they approach from all directions, darting
passion born from a love of f r i ends die, can you keep going? within inches of me, probing for weakness
d o y o u s t i l l wa n t t o d o i t ? ”
the ocean and the need to like a pack of street punks in a dark alley.
eat. On calm evenings, they One of the biggest sharks has a distinctive
would paddle a half-mile wrinkle on its tail fin and approaches with its
out to a lonely rock in the gills puffing and dorsal fins down, a display
Pacific and cast lines until sunrise. “There North Shore lifeguard Dave Wassel heard of aggression. All I see is toothy biomass, but
always had to be some element of misery to stories of this bobble-headed young gun Healey’s reading the fine print. “The domi-
it,” Healey remembers fondly. who was riding giants. One day, while surf- nant ones are usually highest in the water
Money was tight. Andy was a carpenter ing at Pipeline, he noticed Healey “just own- column,” he explains later. “They’re the ones
who pounded nails for a living and a boxing ing it” in surf two stories tall, breaking in that will test you. If you can trick them into
bag for fun. Healey’s mother, Bitsy, cleaned water two feet deep. In the parking lot after- thinking you’re the boss, the rest generally
houses so she could keep an eye on him while ward, Healey did something else Wassel had fall in line.”
she worked. “It was hard to find a babysit- never seen. He pulled out a stack of phone The key word is trick; Healey’s well aware
ter who could keep up with him,” she says. books and put them on the driver’s seat. “He of what even sharks like these can do to a
They shared a three-bedroom house with couldn’t see over the steering wheel!” Was- femoral artery. Still, he doesn’t pass up the
termites and holes in the floor. Bitsy would sel says. “The kid was 17 years old, charg- opportunity for play. Seeing that one of the
cover the latter with throw rugs, which Mark ing the heaviest waves in the world, and he sharks has a fishhook and line in its mouth,
turned into traps, baiting friends into a chase needed a booster seat to drive home!” he takes the opportunity for a little benev-
and laughing as they fell into the mud below. olent dentistry, swimming down and yank-
Mark and his brother, Mikey, bounced be- BY DAY FIVE, we are in desperate need of ing it out.
tween public and private school until Bitsy some of that Healey magic. Photographer On the boat, preparing for another round
began homeschooling them in 1994. Kanoa Zimmerman and I float on the surface, of diving, I ask Gallagher if it makes sense to
Pale, blond, freckled, and undersize, watching Healey dive. Four stories down, he start tagging the Galapagos sharks. Water
Healey suffered a phenotype cursed in his swings into a hover, scanning the murk for temperatures are hovering around the low
poor, rural neighborhood. He didn’t crack shadows. A stiff current nudges him off- eighties, which makes for easier diving but
100 pounds until long after he’d gotten his axis, but he levels himself with a twitch of a challenging hammerhead hunt. When the
driver’s license. Bloody noses and black eyes the left fin. His movements are balletic, part ocean is this warm, the sharks stay deep
weren’t uncommon. He would never be able of a subtle dance in which the slightest shifts to stay cool. The boat has a fish finder, but
to fight all the bullies, despite boxing train- are made with the greatest intention. “Most it doesn’t do much good tracking the fast-
ing from his father and martial-arts classes. people have the ability to be calm some- moving schools. Gallagher’s assurance at the
MIke HOOver

“If you didn’t confront a situation, it would times,” Laird Hamilton told me, “but Mark’s beginning of the trip that we were heading to
fester for years,” Healey recalls. “The only calm all the time. That’s very useful in high- Mikomoto during a “miracle season,” when
way to get any respect was to do things in the risk situations, whether riding giant waves or schools of 100 hammerheads are common,
ocean that other people couldn’t.” diving with sharks.” was starting to feel more like a taunt than

60 Outside 03.16
encouragement. But the recent Galapagos
sighting fuels optimism. “Save the tags for
the hammers,” he says.
The crew of the Otomaru don’t share Gal-
lagher’s enthusiasm. “Storm coming,” says
the captain, swinging the boat back toward
the mainland.
We’ve been in Japan nearly a week and
haven’t tagged a single hammerhead, and the
conditions will likely continue to worsen
because of the impending typhoons. “There’s
a very good chance that if we don’t get a tag
on a shark in the next 48 hours,” Healey says,
“this whole thing is a bust.”

AT THE GUESTHOUSE after dinner, Jacoby

and Papastamatiou sit on the floor preparing
mooring lines for more receivers. The mate-
rials should last years, Jacoby explains, “but
that depends on the waves.”
“Forty feet deep should be fine,” Healey
says. “The biggest wave I’ve ever seen broke
in 60 feet of water.”
“Where was that?” I ask.
Healey, who’s constantly tracking storms
and taking last-minute flights in search of
the world’s biggest swells, pauses, weighing
how much of this hard-won information to
share. “Africa,” he replies.
I press. “Is that your cagey way of say-
ing, ‘I’m not going to tell you, because that’s
where I might find a 100-foot wave’?” He
considers a reply, then thinks better of it,
shaking his head as he walks away.
Healey knows each giant ride is a life or
death proposition, and he’s seen the high
cost of this obsession. In December 2005, pro
surfer Malik Joyeux took an awkward wipe- day that it is, I won’t want to do it anymore.” eration that gives high-paying and high-
out at Pipeline and didn’t surface. Healey ran Healey trains by surfing and diving most profile clients the chance to explore the
into the water, swimming laps through the days, doing a variety of workouts on the ocean like, well, Mark Healey. Two-week
lineup until he finally helped pull Joyeux’s beach and in the pool, and hiking and bow guided experiences start at $100,000 and
body off the reef. “His brother watched the hunting in the mountains. He recently have Healey teaching clients how to swim
whole thing,” Healey recalls. “I’d run back up started doing a program a few times a week with sharks, surf waves far beyond their
the beach, and when I passed him, I could see called Ginástica Natural, a hybrid of yoga comfort zone, spear giant tuna, or partake of
his expression changing from confusion to and jujitsu focusing on movement and any other saltwater adventure conceivable.
shock. I was probably the last person to shake breath. Still, he’s no stranger to carnage, From tech moguls to Arab royalty, his client
Malik’s hand.” Five years later, after Hawaiian having split his kneecap in half, broken his roster is a Fortune 500 list of ocean enthu-
surfer Sion Milosky drowned at Maverick’s, heel, and ruptured his right eardrum four siasts. (Thanks to HWO’s nondisclosure
Healey accompanied his widow to California times, which left him disoriented under- agreement, Healey is as tight-lipped with
to retrieve his friend’s body. water, nearly causing him to drown. Despite names as he is about surf breaks.)
“There are a lot of things working against the dangers, he calls life as a professional Volunteering for expeditions is also part
people in this sport” Healey says. “It’s be- surfer “the greatest scam on earth.” But he of his expanded career plan. Remote seas are
coming apparent that those odds are com- knows the ride won’t last. Now in his thir- expensive to explore, and trips like this are a
ing up around me. I take my preparation ties, he has entered the decade that most way to scout locations for other adventures
very seriously, but there are so many factors pros call retirement. “The surf industry will and deploy his skills for a commendable
to longevity besides the odds of surviving bro you into bankruptcy,” he says. “I would purpose. “I love having the opportunity to
something bad. There’s the mental aspect. rather light myself on fire than go begging for incorporate old knowledge like spearfishing
Once you’ve seen one of your friends die, can pennies as a grown man.” Instead of doubling into modern conservation and scientific dis-
you keep going? Once you’ve helped their down on contests and sponsorships, Healey covery,” he says.
families and have seen the grief it causes, do is venturing into waters most surfers don’t:
you still want to do it? You have to be born building businesses. THE SKY brightened the next morning.
with a certain personality type to keep com- In addition to Depactus, in 2014 he “Mark, it would be great if we could get
ing back. But it will never be safe. And the launched Healey Water Ops (HWO), an op- some data on their continued on page 87 >

03.16 Outside 61
 uetes
htiam
Jordan Lewis runs the ritziest pot store in the country: Aspen, Colorado’s Silverpeak Apothecary, where
sommelier-like “budtenders” sell gourmet ganja in a designer showroom. But soon after he arrived, he found
himself under siege from locals worried about that skunky smell wafting over their mountain valley. It’s enough
to drive a man to toke.
by charles bethea

photographs by dave lauridsen

62 Outside 03.16
Lewis at High
Valley Farms, in
nearby Basalt,
where he grows
Silverpeak’s supply.
Opposite: The
25,000-square-
foot operation.
03.16 Outside 65
for under a million, shop at Whole Foods,
and sip locally distilled vodka. The air here
is just as fresh as that of its upvalley neigh-
bor. Usually.
High valley Farms, which lewis opened
last winter after outgrowing a retrofit-
ted prefab house in nearby redstone, is a
25,000-square-foot hydroponic operation
housing 6,000 cannabis plants in various
stages of growth. By law, each one has been
tagged with a government iD number. By
practice they’re spread across four houses,
so any biological threat isn’t likely to wipe
them all out at once. Unlike conventional
grows inside windowless warehouses using
artificial light and tap water, High val-
ley Farms uses sunlight, fresh river water,
mountain air, and helpful mites (instead of
pesticides) to produce, at great expense, a
product that lewis believes is “the best in
the industry.” (Most of aspen’s six other
pot shops grow their product in traditional
warehouse spaces, mainly in Denver.) He
doesn’t enter his weed in competitions like
the Cannabis Cup because he’d rather “let
the word spread organically.”
lately, the wind has done most
of the work for him.
Holland Hills is the small subdi-
vision directly across the highway
where most of the complaining
neighbors live. “From the begin-
ning,” lewis told me, “a vocal mi-
nority there said we were going to
destroy the neighborhood, bring
cartels there, run over their dogs.
One woman told my wife, ‘You’ll
be responsible for the deaths of
children.’ ”
“We don’t know what all these
emissions could cause us,” a sep-
tuagenarian neighbor named Joan
Mecseri told me last fall. “i’ve
had these funny little headaches
that i never used to have.” Mostly,
though, a few dozen people just
hate the smell. One summed it up this way
in the Aspen Times last March: “When you
step outside, it’s like you’re stepping into a
bag of weed.”
Soon after High valley Farms began grow-
ing plants, the website roaringForkSkunk-
Smell.com popped up. “This has nothing to
do with the morality of marijuana,” the home
page reads. “Break out the pink Floyd and
Ben & Jerry’s and enjoy. Just don’t inflict the
smell of industrial skunk on your neighbors.”
Within months angry residents had posted
more than 200 comments.
When i first reached out to lewis over
the summer, he was having a rough time.
a major proposal—partnering with North-
well Health to become a provider of medical
66 Outside 03.16
marijuana for New York hospitals—had not
come through. “it was a gut punch,” lewis
said. “everybody around me had been say-
ing, ‘You’re a shoe-in, you’re a shoe-in.’ You
start believing it.” The money he’d made up
to that point still couldn’t even be put in the
bank. “i had a guy in his mid-thirties,” said
lewis, “with an MBa from Harvard—i called
him Moneybags—and his job was to literally
walk around and manage the cash pool all
day. What a joke! But it’s necessary, because
marijuana businesses can’t safely use federal
banks.” By the time i arrived in September,
his mood had improved. He’d spent $2 mil-
lion—a good chunk of Silverpeak’s capital—
to fix the skunk smell in advance of a critical
hearing with the pitkin County commis-
sioners, who had threatened to revoke High
valley Farms’ business license at an earlier
hearing in June.
“We were developing this hydroxyl solu-
tion, a neutralizing agent that had never been
used this way,” lewis told me, “and the Hol-
land Hills people had a urologist from Johns
Hopkins stand up and say a lot of ridiculous
things about THC being airborne and dan-
I listened intently. My
eyes felt wide open and
focused. My heart beat a
little faster than normal.
The gold aspen leaves
were stunning. Really
stunning. Had Lewis
brought any snacks?
gerous. We knew we couldn’t assuage their
concerns. We’d been working on that solu-
tion for months—we weren’t just spraying
Febreze—but we scrapped it.”
The commission gave lewis three and
a half months to fix the smell. lewis cold-
called an odor-mitigation expert from the
University of Cincinnati. “You don’t have
an odor problem,” rakesh Govind told him,
“You have a math problem.” lewis flew him
to aspen the next day. “it was just a design
flaw,” lewis explained. “When you force air
in somebody’s direction, you’ve got to give it
time to dissipate.” Govind reconfigured the
airflow to expel more slowly and installed 88
new carbon filters, clustered in four banks,
costing $600,000 before installation.
During the fight, bigger players in the
nascent industry lent political support.
Michael Brubeck, president of Centuria
Natural Foods, the largest raw-cannabis
importer and processor in the U.S., wrote
a letter to the commissioners urging them
to give lewis a chance. “it is my belief that
the work being done at High valley Farms
will save the state’s cannabis industry,” he
stated. “it’s one year into a research pro-
gram on the key issues that would normally
be handled by a growers association,” like
genetics, farming technologies, and costs.
“it’s imperative that this research continues
or there won’t be a Colorado cannabis in-
dustry in five years.”
Outside i stood beside one of the carbon
filters facing the river. From two feet away,
i detected a faint weedy fragrance. Once
i stepped back, it was gone. lewis smiled
warily: “Now if people smell it from across
the street, it’s their problem.” The next hear-
ing would take place in two days.
Before entering the facility, i had to hand
over my driver’s license to a door guard and
step into sterile booties. The greenhouses
were immaculate. lewis urged me to get
down on my hands and knees. “look around,”
he said. There wasn’t a speck of dirt below
the rows and rows of budding female plants,
which lewis inspected and caressed with
great tenderness. Silverpeak chief operating
officer Mike Woods calls High valley Farms a
botanical art gallery. Different strains of weed
displayed different textures and colors, from
deep forest greens to bright purples and high-
lights of tangerine.
“Beautiful, right?” said a young guy filling
giant plastic bags with product. His face was
paralyzed in a Cheshire cat grin.
“i don’t have a policy against being high on
the job,” lewis said.
i SpeNT a Week in aspen with six vials of
Silverpeak cannabis staring at me from my
bedside table. Dragon, a “giggly” sativa, in
the parlance of reviewers, became my favor-
ite. i found it uplifting and energizing: it made
me want to go for a hike, which is what lewis
prefers to do when he smokes. (He also uses
cannabis as a general stress reliever and as a
sleep aid after his three young kids, ages three
to eight, go to bed.) Death Star just knocked
me out for ten hours straight, with my clothes
and the television on.
i mostly smoked on my balcony at the
viceroy Snowmass, since it’s still illegal to
light up in public. like ellen Haas, i used a
little chillum. i looked out at the leaves in the
afternoon and the hot-air balloons above
the valley at dawn. i thought about a world
in which using marijuana was tantamount to
sipping craft beer. i thought about what i’d
eat in town that night. and i thought about Lewis
lewis’s long, strange trip to becoming the outside
High Valley
cannabis king of aspen. Farms
He grew up in Manhattan in the eighties,
the younger of two sons of real estate baron
Stanley lewis, whose holdings included a
34-story tower on the edge of Times Square
that housed the Hotel Novotel, and Judith
lewis, who co-owned and operated nurs-
ing homes. The family lived in a sprawling
ninth-floor apartment uptown, which lewis
described as “a dysfunctional house in the
sky.” His father, lewis said, offered high ex-
pectations but little affection: he hoped that
one day his sons would manage the family’s
portfolio. But Jordan, whose real loves were
animals and agriculture—he discovered both
on a farm in pennsylvania when he was 12—
had other ideas.
at Tufts, where he studied neuropsy-
chology and began smoking a little pot
in the early nineties, lewis suffered from
sometimes crippling depression. City life in
Boston exacerbated his problem, so he took
a semester abroad in the Turks and Caicos
islands and enrolled in a marine-biology
program. “i was sitting on the beach one day
with this student from UC Berkeley,” lewis
told me, “and he was explaining how he grew
marijuana hydroponically. He picked up a
stick and drew a basic system in the sand.
as clear as yesterday, i remember the light
going on: Holy shit, it’s so simple.”
already fascinated with growing food,
lewis began educating himself on marijuana in when Stanley lewis was diagnosed with “i took over the subbasement,” he told me,
cultivation. He checked out books and sub- leukemia in 1997. Soon, lewis began to “which was this dungeon. and i turned it
scribed to Growing Edge magazine, published spend long days at Memorial Sloan ketter- into a marijuana grow. right there beneath
by legendary Oregon grower Tom alexander. ing Cancer Center. everybody’s nose.”
During his junior year, he flew to California to “i was dealing with depression,” he said,
attend a hydroponics convention in a Holi- “and i was watching these gravely ill people, THe BaSeMeNT took up the better part of
day inn: ten guys, including alexander, and the horrible effects of chemotherapy. Can- a city block, but lewis carved out a smaller
a booth. “i go up to alexander, who’s a folk nabis was the only thing helping my state of workspace among the sewage ejector pumps
hero to me,” lewis said. “i was this clean- mind: it got me out of bed some mornings. and steam pipes. He brought in equipment
cut, preppy guy. and i was like, ‘Tom! Hey! and i realized, in talking to the nurses, it was at night, including a high-pressure-sodium
What do you think about ebb and flood ver- the one thing helping a lot of patients, too.” lighting setup. The building used so much
sus drip?’ and he’s like, ‘i cannot confirm Quietly, he began giving patients cannabis. power, he reasoned, that this additional drain
nor deny...’ i said, ‘i flew all the way out here. His father was one of the few who wouldn’t wouldn’t be detected. He also took postbac-
You’re my hero and you won’t talk to me?’ partake. “He died from chemo in 2000, not calaureate classes in medicine at Columbia
The rest of them stonewalled me, too, think- cancer,” lewis said. “He went blind, inconti- and began to volunteer one day a week at the
ing i was a cop.” nent. and that was the therapeutic treatment Bronx Zoo.
Growing marijuana became lewis’s secret he’d chosen. He wouldn’t take the cannabis “My brother, Mr. Big Shot, had an MBa
project. “Nobody taught me,” he said, “be- that i offered him, the one thing that would and was focused on doing his thing from the
yond that sand diagram and a few books.” have helped his state of mind. it made no penthouse corner office, where our father
He felt a moral necessity to not sell what he sense. He was wasting away. He was an extra- used to work,” lewis said. “i was up there
grew. “i never wanted to be a drug dealer. So ordinarily controlling guy, the source of my by day, but i was in the basement at night.
i gave it away. i was pretty popular for that.” rebellion. When he passed, that was the start a close friend and i would go down, and the
leaving Tufts one credit shy of graduat- of my adult life, at 27.” lewis had spent three smell of the plants got all over us. So we’d
ing—“i said, Fuck it, i don’t need a degree”— years caring for his father. “The sun came strip down to our underwear and work for a
lewis kept growing back in New York, trying out,” he said. week straight, 12 to 14 hours at a time.” (While
to improve his technique. at the same time, lewis and his brother were left in charge lewis admitted he grew “a lot” of weed dur-
he was learning to fly small planes upstate of the Times Square building. That’s when ing this period, he wouldn’t discuss whether
and working for his dad. real estate was the lewis realized he could take his hobby to the they ever sold any of it.)
last thing he wanted to do. But he felt locked next level—while flouting his father’s ghost. in 2001, lewis continued on page 82 >

03.16 Outside 67
 gutter credit tk

photograph by TK Photographer
page 68 Outside Magazine 03.16
de 2./7.
1./6. the

tails

vil
8.
Utah congressman rob bishop, a conservative republican who has long opposed
federal management of western lands, has emerged as the unlikely architect of a grand
compromise, one that would involve massive horse trading to preserve millions of
acres of wilderness while opening millions more to resource extraction. Is this a trick,
or the best way to solve ancient disputes that too often go nowhere?
by C h r I s t o p h e r s o l o m o n

4./5. is/n

3.

>
A map
of utah
showing
county
lines

03.16 Outside 69
page 69 Outside Magazine 03.16
the american West is our handsome
conundrum—too beautiful to use, too useful
to be left alone, as a Colorado journalist
once put it. In the past, the landscape seemed wilderness wars. He said to them, simply: never solve it by trying to make it smaller,
so enormous that conflicting dreams could Tell me what you want. He proposed using but if I make it big enough I can begin to see
find room in its whistling emptiness. Now their responses to frame an ambitious the outlines of a solution.”
there’s not much left that we haven’t “grand bargain” designed to end the state’s eventually, any such plan will be intro-
touched, and we argue about how to manage wilderness disputes. In Bishop’s hoped-for duced into Congress as a bill that spells out
what remains—a quarrel over whose dreams compromise—officially known as the Pub- what’s being traded for what. And in theory,
should come first. lic lands Initiative—everybody would get a grand bargain that has the support of all
Nowhere is the argument louder than in some of what they desired, as long as they sides would stand a decent shot of navigat-
the creased country of eastern Utah, a place were willing to negotiate. Conservationists ing the hyper-partisan halls of Congress to
you know even if you’ve never been there: could potentially protect the largest amount become law.
stone arch and sunburnt canyon, perfect of wilderness acreage in a generation— A few years ago, if you had asked which
desert sky. The area is home to marquee a Vermont-size array of wildlands that politician would emerge as the Great Com-
national parks like Arches and Canyonlands, would be free from development forever— promiser on wilderness, Bishop wouldn’t
but much more of it exists as sprawls of fed- including places whose names are talis- have been anybody’s first choice. Now
eral land that, taken together, are larger than manic to desert rats: Desolation Canyon, 64, he’s a seven-term congressman from
many eastern states. Some people look at Indian Creek, labyrinth Canyon. And the Utah’s First Congressional District, which
the region’s deep slots, peaks, and antelope conservative counties of eastern Utah would stretches across the top of the state. The
flats and are inspired to protect them from get some assurances that more motorized federal government manages nearly two-
development. Others hunger thirds of Utah’s land, and Bishop firmly
for what lies beneath: natural believes Uncle Sam is terrible at the job.
gas, oil, and potash. He has likened federal ownership to Soviet
If conservation is a tricky In Congressman collectivism, and he argues with a pungent
project in today’s rural West, eloquence—he’s a former high school debate
with a resurgent Sagebrush bishop’s grand bargain, coach—that the government should get out
Rebellion leading to events like conservationists could of the stewardship game and revert the land
the armed takeover of a federal potentially protect the
to local management.
wildlife refuge in Oregon, it’s “When you try to control the land from
particularly confounding in l a r g e s t amount of wilderness a four-, five-hour flight away, the people
Utah, where, for the better part acreage in a generation— always screw up,” he told me. He has repeat-
of a century, a war over wilder- edly fought to weaken environmental laws
ness has been fought. Recently,
a Vermont-size array and neuter federal agencies like the Bureau
during travels through small of wildlands that of land Management, the National Park Ser-
eastern Utah towns like Moab would be free from vice, and the Forest Service.
and Vernal and Blanding, I met yet Bishop is no wild-eyed back-bencher.
more than one Utahan whose development forever. He’s chairman of the powerful House Com-
pioneer ancestors had arrived mittee on Natural Resources, with sway
by wagon train and who still over issues ranging from energy produc-
couldn’t bring themselves to tion to mining, fisheries, and wildlife across
utter the word “wilderness,” famously de- recreation and future development would one-fifth of the nation’s landmass. last fall
fined in the 1964 Wilderness Act as “an area be allowed to happen on other public lands, he helped kill renewal of the 51-year-old
where the earth and its community of life are along with the economic benefits those proj- land and Water Conservation Fund—which
untrammeled by man, where man himself ects promise to deliver. raised billions for recreation and state and
is a visitor who does not remain.” Instead late last fall, during a telephone interview federal land acquisition, until it could be
previous pAges: nAtionAl mAp compAny

they called it “the W-word,” and they spat from his offices on Capitol Hill, Congress- overhauled. (The fund was reauthorized in
it out when they said it. In Utah more than man Bishop told me that he decided to pur- mid-December, but for only three years.)
other states, environmentalists and their sue the grand bargain when he realized that The league of Conservation Voters has given
foes wield just enough power to stymie each the old conflict-based manner of tackling Bishop a 3 percent lifetime rating. Still, he can
other. The toll has been great: enemies have disputes had failed. “I’ve got to break para- be a powerful ally, as his work on the grand
grown gray squatting in the same trenches digms and try something new,” he said. But bargain shows. Bishop’s effort is a genuine
their fathers dug, and still the land remains why something so ambitious in a place so attempt to solve the kinds of long-stewing
unconquered by either side. difficult? Bishop invoked a favorite quota- western land-use conflicts that, at their
tion, one that he and others often attribute, worst, devolve into potential violence.
IN eARly 2013, a conservative Utah con- perhaps apocryphally, to Dwight eisen- Time is running short for Bishop, how-
gressman named Rob Bishop sent a letter to hower: “Whenever I run into a problem I ever. The Obama administration has given
more than 20 groups in both camps of the can’t solve, I always make it bigger. I can him room to cobble together a deal with

70 Outside 03.16
 maze district,
canyonlands
national park
conservationists, ranchers, Native Ameri-
cans, energy companies, and others—the
kind of huge, grassroots pact that most par-
ties would prefer. But if an agreement isn’t
reached soon, the president appears poised
to step in and do some preservation of his
own, in the form of a major new national
monument in eastern Utah called the Bears
ears. The clock is ticking.
For some critics, though, the deal strug-
gling to be born is a devil’s bargain. And it
has exhumed a pressing version of an age-old
question: How much can you compromise
before you sacrifice the very thing you’re
momo viyusich/gAllery stock
trying to save?
lAST SePTeMBeR, nearly three years after
Bishop sent out his letter, I traveled to east-
ern Utah to check on the progress of his idea.
Initially, Bishop had asked various groups—
everyone from the Utah Farm Bureau to the
Nature Conservancy—to put their wish lists
to paper within a month. In the years since,
more than 1,000 meetings have been held,
involving dozens of interested parties, as
counties worked on detailed proposals to
submit to the offices of Bishop and his con-
gressional colleague, representative Jason
Chaffetz, a Republican whose district in-
cludes southeastern Utah. Now everyone
was waiting to see how the congressmen
would merge these often conflicting dreams
into one plan without pissing off everybody.
Deadlines have come and gone. “It’s a total
mess,” one staffer told me, referring to the
difficulty of the process.
Still, it’s easy to see why several environ-
mental groups are interested. Over the years,
Utah’s deeply red political culture has often
kept the state’s enviros on the defensive,
simply trying to prevent losses. The South-
ern Utah Wilderness Alliance, or SUWA, has
filed so many lawsuits to stop development
on state and federal land that its enemies call
it “Sue-ya.” From 1930 to 1980, more than
half the lands in Utah that environmen-
talists would have called wilderness and
are managed by the BlM—some 13 million
acres—were lost to drilling, roads, and other
development. Since 1980, however, greens
have held the line. less than 2 percent of
would-be wilderness acres have been lost,
thanks to efforts that have included land
exchanges, lawsuits against oil and gas drill-
ing, and other tactics, SUWA says.
“Utah has always been hard,” says James
Morton Turner, author of The Promise of
Wilderness, a history of modern wilderness
politics. “It is the trail that wilderness has
never been able to get to the end of. It is
steep, straight uphill, hot and dusty.” Utah
received no designated wilderness under the
1964 Wilderness Act; even today the state
has fewer wilderness acres than Florida. The
conflict over land and what to do with it has
simmered for decades.
But Bishop’s idea strikes a chord with
SUWA’s 58-year-old executive director,
Scott Groene, who sees an opportunity to
03.16 Outside 71
gain the kinds of permanent protections heads. This is Uintah County. On the same he sees it. The feds own nearly 60 percent of
the group has long sought. A huge chunk of day Bishop sent his first letter to groups like his county, including many of those poten-
Utah—more than three million acres—exists SUWA, he sent a second, different letter to tial future oil lands, where would-be drillers
in a limbo state known as wilderness study the elected commissioners of Uintah and are subjected to Washington’s bureaucratic
areas. These places are neither fish nor fowl; every other county in Utah—the level of red tape, the shifting energy policies of suc-
Congress has granted WSAs wilderness-like government that, to Bishop, best serves cessive presidential administrations, and
protections while they’re studied for perma- the ideal of local control. Bishop acknowl- lawsuits, all of which can make drilling on
nent status. But some WSAs have been in a edged the long stalemate over their pub- federal lands more difficult and uncertain
holding pattern for upwards of 35 years. lic acreage. Then he told the locals how to than drilling on state lands. If counties like
Groene believes that haggling to protect break it. Wilderness, he wrote, “can act as Uintah compromise, officials want depend-
lands that already enjoy a degree of protec- currency”—chips that can be cashed in, able assurance that companies really will be
tion is “just a waste of our time.” Millions of in exchange for projects like drilling pads, able to drill.
additional acres of unguarded BlM lands mines, and airports. “The more land we’re McKee stands before a rainbow-colored
are still out there, unprotected even by WSA willing to designate as wilderness, the more map in a conference room. It shows the new
status, according to environmentalists’ sur- we’re able to purchase with that currency.” protections that Uintah County officials
veys. Greens also have their eyes on gaining This was new, and it would change the way think they can stomach and what they want
wilderness protection for some Forest Ser- wilderness skeptics looked at the W-word. in return. The map is the outcome of dozens
vice lands in eastern Utah. of meetings involving everyone from snow-
Traditionally, the Forest Ser- mobile groups to the Wilderness Society,
vice’s guiding principle has McKee explains, and similar maps have been
been embodied in the slogan “Utah has always been cobbled together all over eastern Utah. Up in
land of Many Uses, which hard,” says James morton one corner, there’s a new wilderness area
means allowing everything in the Uinta Mountains. Another is marked in
from sheep grazing to tim- turner, author of the the south, for Desolation Canyon. (“Their
ber harvests to mountain promise of Wilderness, ultimate prize,” McKee says of environmen-
biking. Wilderness protec- talists. “A spectacular area.”) Negotiations
tion, by contrast, is the most
a history of modern are ongoing about the possibility of turning
stringent status available for wilderness politics. “ I t i s Dinosaur National Monument into a national
federal lands. Motors and the trail that wilderness has never park. And a blob of gray covers roughly half
mountain bikes are prohib- the map—a proposed new “energy zone,”
ited; resource extraction is b e e n a b l e t o g e t t o t h e e n d o f. It where current or future oil or gas drilling or
allowed only in cases in- is steep, straight uphill, tar-sands operations could occur.
volving preexisting mining It might be hard to find enough common
claims and leases. envi-
hot and dusty.” ground to facilitate any huge deals simply
ronmentalists have shown by swapping lands. But Utah has something
a willingness to be flexible, else to grease the bargaining wheels. During
though, by considering less the statehood processes that occurred when
restrictive designations, such as national The counties of eastern Utah, which had the West was settled, the federal government
conservation areas, which block drilling but been bloodied and economically frustrated gave new states land, arranged in a checker-
allow some other uses. by wilderness stalemates as much as any board pattern, most of it to be logged, mined,
Still, the wish list is long. For example, counties in the state, took notice. or grazed, with the proceeds largely helping
above Moab, environmentalists want wilder- No place illustrates this better than to fund state schools. In Utah today, these
ness status for the forested la Sal Mountains Uintah County. Millions of years ago, the trust lands make up 6.5 percent of the entire
that serve as the town’s watershed, now Uinta Basin was a vast, shallow inland sea. state—millions of acres. But since they are
national forest. To the north, they want pro- Today, beneath the ground, there’s an ocean still arranged in checkerboard patterns,
tection for the Book Cliffs, one of the larg- of hydrocarbons that could make Uintah many sit inside federal lands that are now
est nearly roadless places left in the lower one of the next global hot spots for energy wilderness study areas; they’re like holes in
48. They also want protection for places of extraction. The county, which is nearly the a doughnut. Critics, including Bishop, say
staggering beauty and lonesomeness such size of Connecticut and covers much of this effectively makes the land undevelop-
as Bowknot Bend, where the Green River the basin, already has more than 7,100 oil able, leading to underfunded schools. (The
coils back on itself at the bottom of a canyon and gas wells—and a world-class pollution real cause of that problem, many believe, has
of sun-fevered rock. In his most optimistic problem—but that’s nothing compared with been Utah’s tax-averse citizenry.) However,
moments, Groene, a former “hippie lawyer” what boosters hope for. The ground holds these state lands can be legally mined and
who now wears dad plaids, allows himself to huge amounts of additional oil and natural drilled, and the federal government has to
dream of a day when his group could shut its gas, plus oil sands and oil shale. The energy allow access to them, even through potential
doors, its mission all but accomplished. isn’t found only in Uintah: in 2012, the most wilderness. That’s why Groene calls them
productive oil well in the lower 48 was located “a ticking bomb.”
BUT WHAT WOUlD cause the other side to outside Moab, and as many as 128 more wells Many on both sides would like to see them
budge? could appear in the area in the next 15 years, on the trading block. environmentalists want
To look for an answer, I fly into Salt lake the BlM projects. the development threats removed. Counties
City and drive due east, past the ski resorts In Vernal, the Uintah seat, I speak with and state legislators want the parcels traded
of the Wasatch, until the land flattens and county commission chairman Mike McKee, out for other lands that are more accessible.
bleaches and oil jacks nod their equine an ex-farmer who explains the problem as Both sides have something to gain.

72 Outside 03.16
 DURING THe TIMe I spend researching the
grand bargain in Utah, many people tell me
that what is unfolding might represent the
future of land conservation in America.
“This could be a model for other states to
resolve these issues in a constructive way,”
says Mike Matz, who directs wilderness
conservation projects for the Pew Chari-
table Trusts, one of the nation’s largest con-
servation groups. Utah’s collaboration has
spurred counties in Wyoming to try to settle
the future of hundreds of thousands of WSA
acres there. Whether this trend should be
applauded is hotly debated, however.
land conservation in the U.S. is harder to-
day than ever. The easiest places to protect—
the high country of peaks, pines, and pikas—
have already been taken care of. What gener-
ally remains are lower-elevation lands that
have more claims on them, whether from
off-road drivers, mountain bikers, or energy
companies, according to Martin Nie, direc-
tor of the Bolle Center for People and Forests
at the University of Montana. Add a highly
polarized Congress that won’t pass anything
even remotely controversial and you’ve got a
formula for inaction. “The market is dictat-
ing that tactics need to change,” says Alan
Rowsome, the Wilderness
Society’s senior govern- > it required the feds to sell more than 103,000
ment-relations director from top:
representative
for wildlands designation. rob bishop;
enter collaborative san Juan county
commissioner
dea l ma k i ng. Col lab- phil lyman;
orations have their roots wilderness
advocate
in the watershed groups scott groene
that formed in the late
1990s, during the Clinton
administration. Collaboration often comes
down to stakeholders—ranchers, loggers,
ATV groups, environmentalists—sitting in a
room and negotiating about lines on a map.
The goal is to strike a balance between the
needs of nature and the ever greater demands
of people. Over the past 15 years, some of the
nation’s largest and most respected envi-
from top: tom smArt/Ap; rick bowmer/Ap; christy cAlvin
ronmental groups—including Pew, the Wil-
derness Society, and the Sierra Club—have
played active roles in collaborations around
the West. At its best, collaboration has helped
break logjams in stubborn public-lands con-
flicts and has created a new way forward to
protect significant chunks of the map.
But some environmental watchdogs, wil-
derness specialists, and academics worry
that the approach is also setting dangerous
precedents. In their pursuit of land preser-
vation and wilderness, critics charge, envi-
ronmental groups frequently horse-trade
inappropriately with the public’s lands—
shutting out dissent, undercutting their
conservation mission, and even eroding
bedrock environmental laws.
Many say the new collaborative trend
began in a remote place in eastern Oregon
called Steens Mountain. In 2000, environ-
mentalists and ranchers brokered a complex
agreement that involved new wilderness
and land exchanges, and also created a novel
management area on public land that would
be overseen in part by the ranchers them-
selves. Some environmentalists praised
the compromises, but to Janine Blaeloch,
founder and director of the watchdog West-
ern lands Project, the deal smelled funny.
Blaeloch was particularly concerned about
how conservationists gained protections
around Steens only if they “paid” for them
with outright losses of other public lands
or by agreeing to reduced protections else-
where. Blaeloch dubbed it “quid pro quo
wilderness.”
The trend soon gained popularity in
Nevada, where four-fifths of the state is man-
aged by the federal government. Having had
success with a deal in Clark County, which
surrounds fast-growing las Vegas, Demo-
cratic senator Harry Reid tackled a more
collaborative effort in a large county to the
northeast, lincoln. At first glance, the 2004
lincoln County Conservation, Recreation,
and Development Act seemed like a success:
it created 14 wilderness areas covering nearly
770,000 acres. The bill had the support
of the Wilderness Society and the Nevada
Wilderness Coalition, the latter supported
financially by a Pew-backed group called the
Wilderness Support Center.
But a closer look revealed a disturbing deal.
Nowhere did the lincoln County bill break
more with the past than by going against a
long-standing government policy of trying to
keep federal lands in federal hands. Instead,
according to historian James Morton Turner,
acres of public land at auction.
Twenty years ago, when environmen-
talists haggled over protecting lands, they
sometimes compromised in a way that tem-
porarily returned hoped-for wilderness acres
to the kitty while they continued fighting to
protect them at some future date. In Nevada,
the environmental groups hadn’t simply
delayed protection for public lands; they
allowed them to be sold off entirely.
INSPIReD By lincoln County, other col-
laborative efforts followed, including a
controversial 2008 deal across the state line
in southwest Utah’s Washington County
and another in the dry Owyhee country of
southwest Idaho in 2009. And why not?
“Collaboration” sounds great. It suggests
consensus and compromise—the idea that
everyone will be heard and their ideas made
part of the finished product. But as George
Nickas, executive director of Wilderness
Watch, has said, compromise sometimes
means “three wolves and a sheep talking
about what’s for dinner.”
In short, whether collaboration is a good
thing or not depends a lot on where you
stand—and what you stand to gain. A 2013
study found that the groups most likely to
collaborate are large, professional environ-
mental organizations that often represent
diverse agendas. According to Caitlin Burke,
a forestry expert in North Carolina who has
03.16 Outside 73
studied collaborations, if such trends con-
tinue, “we will see a marginalization of
smaller, ideologically pure environmental
groups [whose] values will not be included
in decision making because they are unable
or unwilling to collaborate.”
Idaho’s Owyhee Initiative, for instance,
which steers issues like ranching in southwest
Idaho, has banned from participation groups
that have successfully litigated to reduce
grazing in areas of the
Owyhee. The initiative,
however, preserves a role for
more mainstream groups
like the Nature Conservancy
and the Wilderness Society.
Despite appearances, col-
laborations are undemo-
Initiative
cratic, argue critics like Gary efforts at lobbying president
Macfarlane of Friends of the
Clearwater, an environmen-
tal group in northern Idaho.
The public already has a
process for how changes can
be made to our public lands,
Macfarlane says: the 1969
National environmental
Policy Act. Macfarlane de-
scribes it as “a law that tells
federal agencies to look before you leap” and new deals embrace a more insidious type of
says you have to allow all interested parties compromise, not just about where wilderness
mental groups have been willing to make
sometimes disturbing compromises, critics
say—even to the Wilderness Act itself.
Compromise has long been a central
part of wilderness politics, of course. The
1964 Wilderness Act took eight years and
65 bills to become law, and the final act
grandfathered in some grazing and mining.
But the old compromises were largely about
boundaries—what’s in and what’s out. The
the Bears ears Coalition
was formally withdrawing
from the public lands
and throwing all its
obama for a national
monument, c i t i n g m i s s e d
deadlines, delays, and “no
substantive engagement”
with its concerns.
ingly feel pressure to make wilderness more
palatable to opponents—and that means
watering it down, says critic Chris Barns,
a longtime wilderness expert who recently
retired from the BlM.
The number of special provisions—
exceptions added to a wilderness bill, almost
always leading to more human impact—has
increased in the past several years, according
to a 2010 study in the International Journal
of Wilderness. The lincoln County deal was
saddled with a raft of such provisions. The
Owyhee deal, given a thumbs-up by such
groups as Pew and the Wilderness Society,
lets ranchers corral cattle using motorized
vehicles, which is supposed to be forbidden
in wilderness. The result of such compro-
mises, Barns and others say, are areas known
as WINOs—”wilderness in
>
> name only.”
the bears Another problem with
ears, site of
a proposed these exceptions is that they
new national become boilerplate for future
monument;
drilling pads in
bills, Barns says. A provision
eastern utah that first appeared in 1980
has since turned up in more
than two dozen wilderness
laws. Such changes might seem small, says
Barns, but they erode, bit by bit, America’s
last wild places.
The large environmental groups involved
in these deals say such criticisms are off
base. “For us, what it comes down to is, as
the nation grows, there are less and less wild
places left in America,” says Alan Rowsome
of the Wilderness Society. “And we want to
protect them as soon as possible, because if
you wait ten years or fifteen years or twenty
years, that place may not be protectable. It
may not be as wild a place, or as open, or as
important to protect.”
As for the criticisms about horse trading,
Pew’s Mike Matz says, “I would submit that
these deals have always been complex. At the
end of the day, we are entirely comfortable
with the deals we have struck.”
But Athan Manuel, lead lobbyist for the
Sierra Club on federal-lands issues, acknowl-
edges some of the criticisms. “We don’t have
to get some of these bad deals just because
we think the atmosphere is going to be worse
next year,” Manuel says. “I think we some-
times suffer a crisis of confidence in the
Al hArtmAnn/salt lake tribune/Ap

to participate. The act also mandates that the will be, but also about how it will be managed. environmental community.”
best available science be considered. Col- “Our fear is that some conservation groups Which brings us back to Utah and the
laborations don’t have to do that, says Randi look at the 1964 act as the place to begin a grand bargain. With Pew and the Wilder-
Spivak, director of the public-lands program new round of compromises,” says Martin ness Society heavily involved throughout
for the Center for Biological Diversity. Nie. That shift, he adds, “could threaten the much of the process, critics were watching
Then there are the concerns about wilder- integrity of the system.” and worrying. Though Bishop hadn’t yet
ness. Designation of new wilderness areas In collaborative efforts, large conservation unveiled his final proposal, some didn’t like
has often been a centerpiece of collabora- groups that badly want to protect wilder- what they were hearing—that green groups
tions over the past 15 years. But in order to ness must deal with groups that sometimes were willing to swap out Utah’s school trust
push wilderness through, the big environ- loathe the idea, so conservationists increas- lands for parcels located elsewhere, so that

74 Outside 03.16
 wildlands could be consolidated and the
state could more easily drill for oil and gas.
“It’s wilderness for warming,” Randi Spivak
says. “We should be keeping fossil fuels in
the ground.”
“It’s painful,” SUWA’s Groene acknowl-
edges, “because everything you give to Utah
you have to assume will be sacrificed.” But
the kinds of ethical dilemmas that collabo-
rations have posed elsewhere? He’s still
waiting on them. “The whole goal was to be
put in that terrible place where we had to
decide” those kind of things, he says. But they
aren’t even there yet.
WHeN I ASKeD people for a place that ex-
emplified the challenges and promise of the
grand bargain, many pointed to San Juan
County, which anchors Utah’s bottom-right
corner. Though larger than New Jersey, it has
only 15,000 residents, many of them conser-
vative sons of Mormon pioneers.
The current county-commission chair-
man there is a man named Phil lyman, who
google eArth
for the past three years has spearheaded the
county’s public-lands advisory council, a
citizens group that is charged with helping
officials craft a proposal to give to Bishop.
In the midst of that work, lyman was con-
victed of leading an illegal ATV excursion
into Recapture Canyon, an area that had
been partly closed to protect ancient Native
American ruins.
lyman lives in Blanding—at 3,600 peo-
ple, the county’s largest town—which was
founded by his great-grandfather in the
1890s. It has a bowling alley, a bank, and a few
wide streets that seem designed to take tour-
ists elsewhere. On Main Street, old ranchers
limp in and out of the San Juan Pharmacy.
Down the block, I find the door to lyman’s
accounting office open. A sign inside invites
visitors to take a complimentary copy of the
Book of Mormon.
To environmentalists, lyman, 51, symbol-
izes all that is backward in Utah. To others,
he’s a hero for resisting government over-
reach. The day I meet him, he’s still waiting
to find out if he’ll go to prison over his convic-
tion for conspiracy and trespassing. (He was
already fined and in mid-December would be
sentenced to ten days in jail.) He scratches his
head at the furor he has caused. It was all a
misunderstanding, he claims.
“I’m the poster child for gun totin’, beer
drinkin’, ATV drivin’,” he says. “I’m an accoun-
tant!” He doesn’t even own an ATV. “But I do
have a fire in the belly about hurting innocent
people,” he says.
We drive into the sagebrush desert in
lyman’s pickup, and he tells the same story
I’ve heard elsewhere about how reluctant he
was at first for his county to join the grand
bargain. All it would do is stir up trouble for
years, with no resolution—and the county
was already trying to start talks with a Navajo
group. But once he decided to get on board,
swayed by his elected duty to give the ap-
proach a try, lyman threw himself into it.
To everyone’s surprise, people with dif-
ferent viewpoints actually started talking to
each other, lyman continued on page 83 >
03.16 Outside 75
carb
un load-
photographs by Randi Berez

ing
Lately, he’s been telling his followers that they can even relax on the dietary

Can it really be this simple? T. J. MURPHY bought in for a year and achieved
Mark Sisson, one of the biggest names in fitness, has preached for years that
a neo-paleo combination of protein and fats is the ultimate performance diet.

guidelines a bit—while getting outside to play more.

shockingly positive results.

Ask a
group of
marathoners
why
they run, and then count how many of them say, half­seriously, “So I can
eat as much as I want.” The wish list usually includes carb­heavy foods like
pasta, fruit, mac and cheese, pancakes, and cap’n crunch. For decades
now, the value of carbs for improving performance and preventing bonks
has been drummed into the heads of runners, cyclists, and triathletes by
Ph.D.’s like ed Burke, Tim Noakes, and ed coyle.
The way these experts framed it, high­mileage runners weren’t eating
enough sugars and starches, no matter how hard they tried. Whenever
a new diet came along that opposed this basic carb­loading idea, as the
paleo diet famously began doing a few years ago, runners tended to yawn
and make a third trip to the pizza bar. Paleo was especially easy to ignore
given its restrictions: no pasta, no legumes, no bread, no dairy. No beer.

76 Outside 03.16
-
>
Sisson at
his home
in Malibu,
California

03.16 Outside 77
 Through diet crazes like the Zone, atkins,
and paleo, I too stuck with carbs, chugging
sports drinks on a daily basis. at the aid sta­
tions of Ironmans, I chased PowerBars with
Gatorade and coke. During a period when I
dug into a bag of chips ahoy several times
a day, I weighed 158 pounds and could run a
2:38 marathon. My belief was in sync with
other running geeks: just burn it off.
Perhaps the first to break ranks with this
way of thinking was Mark Sisson, who was
once a 2:18 marathoner and an elite Iron­
man triathlete. Sisson says the high­carb
doctrine is disastrously wrong, for runners
and everyone else. over the past decade,
he’s been using his popular blog, Mark’s
Daily apple, to warn people that such a diet
will sooner or later rob you of health. Sisson
believes that regular payloads of carbs dis­
rupt the body’s hormonal balance, leading to
chronic inflammation, insulin resistance, and
even leaky gut—porous, nutrient­wasting
intestines. These are complications you
won’t be able to cure by running farther.
Sisson was 28 when his health collapsed,
despite 30 hours a week of exercise. he’s 62
now. Instead of distance runs and bike rides,
his weekly routine consists of a couple of
trips to the gym for workouts that may last
as little as 15 minutes, an Ultimate Frisbee
game with twentysomethings, and maybe a
long hike on the trails of Zuma canyon, near
his hilltop home in Malibu, california.
“Sometimes I think about going for a run
the way I used to,” he says, “but I get about a
half­block before I think, What’s the point?”
and yet, Sisson’s body­fat level, around
10 percent, is roughly the same as it was
when he was a young athlete. his secret, he
says, is that he eats a diet composed mostly
of animals and vegetables, free of cereal and
grains, relatively high in fat, and low in carbs.
Somehow this has reengineered his cells to
make them super­efficient at burning fat.
These days, Sisson earns a very good liv­
ing by selling a modified caveman lifestyle to
fitness buffs, defined by ten “primal” laws,
including “Move around a lot at a slow pace,”
“Get lots of sleep,” and “Play.” Mark’s Daily
apple gets two million hits per month, and
Sisson has sold more than 400,000 copies
of his book The primal Blueprint. Though his
wavy hair has gone from surfer blond to gray,
he looks just as fit now—maybe fitter—as he
did when he appeared on the cover of run-
ner’s world in 1986.
I STaRTeD PokING around Sisson’s blog
early last year. I’d been frustrated by a chronic
achilles­tendon injury in my left leg, and
I had moved from the Bay area to Boston,
where blizzards limited my exercise to occa­
sional walks around the block with my wife,
78 Outside 03.16
our infant son, and our dog. That, coupled up with changes in the foods we consume.
with a few workouts at an overpriced cross­ “Grok cannot teach us how to live or eat,”
Fit gym, put me in a funk. TV and Dogfish Jabr wrote. “he never existed. Living off the
head IPa became appealing countermea­ land or restricting oneself to foods available
sures, and the consequences soon rolled in. before agriculture and industry does not
at my annual checkup, I stepped on a scale guarantee good health.”
and watched the pointer go past 200. My even so, I felt drawn to Sisson’s ideas.
body­mass index was around 27 percent. he’d been a runner—a good one. he quit
Sisson caught my eye because of an old competing after coming down with osteo­
blog post he wrote that pinpointed my arthritis, a series of respiratory infections,
excuse for not exercising—the expense. he and irritable bowel syndrome. he apparently
touted a “prison workout” that required “no had reverse­engineered his problems and
specialized equipment, no gimmicks, no concluded that diet and “chronic cardio”—
late­night infomercial tchotchkes, no gym doing obsessive amounts of cardiovascular
membership.” all you needed was a cell­size exercise—were to blame.
amount of space and the will to work hard.
“It is you against everyone else in prison, so IN MaRch oF last year, I talked to Sisson on
you better get in shape,” he barked. the phone, asking him how I could use his
The basic routine involved lots of burpees. Primal Blueprint diet to get back in shape.
Back in the 1940s, an exercise physiologist “Body composition is 80 percent the result
named Royal Burpee invented this full­body of your diet,” he told me. “The first thing
exercise, which was used to assess the fit­ it’s going to do for you, T.J., is get rid of that
ness of U.S. army recruits. From a standing twenty­pound backpack you’re wearing.”
position, you drop down Stick to a low­carb diet
into a squat, then thrust for 21 days and I would
your legs backward so begin to transform my­
that you land in the push­
Sisson earns a self from a sugar burner
up position. You do the very good living by into a fat­burning beast,
push­up, then jump back selling a modified as he put it. This gets
to upright and stand for to the why of paleo: if
a count of one. Then you caveman lifestyle the human genome has
do it all again, and again, to fitness buffs, changed little in the past
fatigue building rapidly as 10,000 years, then we
you go.
defined by ten have the hunter­gatherer
aside from pared­down “primal” laws, genes encoded within
exercise regimens, Sisson’s including “Move us. according to Sisson,
main sell was his take on carb deprivation would
the paleo diet, which stems around a lot switch my genes into
from a belief that modern at a slow pace,” fat­burning caveman
humans would be much survival mode. after this
healthier if we ate the way
“Get lots of sleep,” “fat­adaptation phase,” I
our ancestors did thou­ and “Play.” should experiment with
sands of years ago, before intermittent fasting.
agriculture gave us wheat, “once you’re fat adapted,
grain, and, more recently, you’re not chained down
packaged foods made with by hunger,” he said. It’s
vegetable oils and high­fructose corn syrup. no big deal to miss meals when your liver is
Sisson’s advocacy of paleo initially made me efficiently breaking down fat into usable
reluctant to buy in. I had talked to a few paleo energy, including ketones, which your brain
crossFitters at the gym before, and they’d can use when glucose levels are low.
droned on and on about all the bacon they ketones sounded like something out of
ate. But Sisson wasn’t like that. Dune, and reengineering cells sounded like
he has his share of critics, those who something out of Philip k. Dick. But every­
say that this style of nutrition is baseless. thing Sisson told me seemed to be supported
a 2013 article in scientifi c american, “Why by research. oddly enough, it turned out
the Paleo Diet Is half­Baked,” attacked that the most influential sports scientist in
Sisson and the archetype he created in his the endurance world, Tim Noakes—an M.D.,
writing: “Grok,” a male hunter­gatherer a professor emeritus at South africa’s Uni­
living 10,000 years ago in the central Val­ versity of cape Town, and the author of The 
ley of california. The article, by prominent lore of running—had become a proponent
science journalist Feris Jabr, claimed that of low­carb diets. after talking to Sisson, I
Sisson and his ilk were wrong to suggest that Skyped with Noakes, and he confirmed the
human evolution hasn’t been able to keep change of heart.
“Make
choices that
will allow
you to enjoy
your life,”
Sisson says.
 “For 30 years I was part of the problem,”
Noakes said. Then, after failing to control his
weight with running, he adopted the low­
carb diet and lost 22 pounds in eight weeks.
he put his Type 2 diabetes into remission.
he’s been on the low­carb warpath ever
since, despite calls for his head from col­
leagues who think he’s promoting a lifestyle
that will cause cardiovascular disease.
one reason endurance athletes like to
do workouts of two hours and longer is to
improve the body’s fat­burning efficiency.
The idea is to spend enough time exercis­
ing at a low intensity that you burn through
muscle glycogen stores and shift to burning
fat. But Sisson—as well as Noakes—argues
that carb restriction is the superior path.
Paleo advocates point to ultrarunner Tim
olson as evidence that you can achieve elite
performance on a low­carb, high­fat diet.
olson broke the 15­hour barrier in 2012 at
the prestigious Western States 100­mile
run—the first to do so, and he still holds
the record—after adopting a high­fat diet
devoid of sugar, grain, and wheat. on long
training runs, he doesn’t carry any food or
bottles. “If I’m thirsty,” he says, “I’ll drink
from a stream.”
Sisson suggested I give Sami Inkinen a call
if I needed any more convincing. Inkinen
is the cofounder of Trulia, the online real
estate network, and a triathlete good enough
to win his age group at big races like Wild­
flower. he used to follow the standard high­
carb diet. “Sometimes I bonked in a race,” he
told me. “I was always a little sick, always a
little sore. I thought it was normal.”
Blood tests showed that he was pre­
diabetic. concerned, he started experi­
menting with changes in his diet and kept
a vigilant eye on his blood­glucose levels.
he looked at research by Steve Phinney and
Jeff Volek, two Ph.D.’s who have focused on
using a high­fat, low­carb diet to increase
fat­burning capacity in endurance athletes.
By simply flipping the carbs and fat intake,
Inkinen says, he became a better fat burner.
To demonstrate what he gained, he paddled
a kayak with his girlfriend for 2,750 miles,
from the coast of california to hawaii, living
for six weeks on a diet with a carb content of
between 6 and 8 percent.
“The most amazing thing for me was that,
after being on a boat for three months, I won
a 103­mile bike race that had a lot of heavy
climbing,” Inkinen said. “and I’m not a good
climber. The high­fat diet is like a perfor­
mance­enhancing drug.”
IN aPRIL, I crossed a footbridge over
the colorado River in downtown austin,
Texas, on my way to the annual PaleoFX
conference, where Sisson was scheduled to
80 Outside 03.16
appear. I smiled at the fact that this gather­ clutching a spear in an outstretched arm
ing of leading ancestral­living experts was while making a Nijinsky leap, with bold­
being held in the Palmer events center, a faced words stamped below: LIVe LoNG.
shiny quadrangle with hyperbolic curves DRoP DeaD. an impromptu line formed in
and silver solar panels. It looked like a front of Sisson before he took the stage. he
stranded spaceship. graciously accepted people’s thanks and lis­
The paleo diet is largely attributed to Loren tened to their stories, tales of how a hundred
cordain, an exercise scientist and professor pounds had been lost or celiac disease had
emeritus at colorado State. cordain based been pushed into remission.
his work on a new england Journal of Medi- on stage an enormous picture filled the
cine article from the 1980s called “Paleo­ screen: it was Sisson’s son, kyle, soaring
lithic Nutrition.” his hope was that Stone age through sea spray to catch a Frisbee above
dietary principles could reverse the obesity the surf. LIVe aWeSoMe, the slide read.
epidemic that, according to current centers (Sisson and his wife, carrie, have been mar­
for Disease control and Prevention estimates, ried 25 years and also have a daughter,
now affects more than 78 million americans. Devyn.) Most of the pictures I had seen that
It took only a few minutes of lurking around related to Sisson’s Primal Blueprint were
PaleoFX to be reminded of how the move­ of Sisson himself. his blog is flooded with
ment has expanded from a cult diet into a life­ them: Sisson playing ultimate Frisbee; Sis­
style industry: the first thing that caught my son, shirtless and showing off a 12­pack,
eye was a couple wearing doing an L­sit chin­up
flintstones costumes. I under a dock; Sisson smil­
weaved through a giddy ing, arms outstretched,
crowd to peek over shoul­
Sisson’s fans wore crossing a slackline strung
ders at the stuff being T-shirts bearing between two trees in his
sold in booths. I could an illustration of Malibu backyard. If you’re
buy things like cave­ wondering whether Sisson
the fabled Grok,
man coffee, MegaSpore might have an ego thing
Biotic, and protein bars clutching a spear going on, he won’t argue.
made with crickets. I in an outstretched “I’m vain,” he confessed on
saw a paleo dentistry his blog in 2010. “I want to
arm while making
booth and a probiot­ look good naked.”
ics skin company that a Nijinsky leap, with In his talk, Sisson’s mis­
used the slogan “Bac­ bold-faced words sion was a bit different.
teria Is the New Black.” stamped below: everyone in attendance
The idea here was that was a believer, so there was
our skin hosts trillions LIVE LONG. no need to sell them on the
of microorganisms. Be­ DROP DEAD. gospel itself. Rather, his
cause of daily showers keynote was designed to
and constant hand sani­ rein in extremists.
tizing, we don’t have all “We embraced the move­
the microbes we need for ment so much we became
healthy skin and hair, so it’s necessary to rub almost militant about it,” he said, pacing the
them back on. at one booth, a Mother Dirt stage, ticking off the ways in which some
product was selling for $49. paleo fanatics had gone too far. “We became a
I met up with Sisson just before he went on pain in the ass to dine with.”
for a talk. he was dressed in Banana Republic Sisson emphasized the need for flexibility
casual—slightly faded blue jeans, a cotton and perspective. If you decide to fast every
polo, and a nice watch on his tanned left arm. time you can’t find the perfect “grass­fed,
he has the body of a soccer player, with a wild, line­caught, pasture­raised” food you
waist I’d estimate to be around 30 inches. In want, then you’re missing the point. The
a slightly surreal moment, his face appeared point, he said, is to enjoy life, great health,
on a JumboTron above a stage adjacent to and good food, not to adhere to rules at all
the exposition space while I was talking to costs. You’re at a kid’s birthday party and
the real thing. on the screen, he was savor­ somebody offers you a piece of cake? eat it.
ing bites of a wrap made with an avocado­oil “We stopped having fun,” Sisson said.
mayo he sells. The voiceover was his voice, “We got too attached to the numbers.”
and I would see this commercial about 20 Too many blood tests, too many wearable
times over the next couple of days. devices, too much data. “We’re starting to
The conference was one of the few chances see what happens if you take the dogma and
that Sisson’s fans got to see him in person. push it too far.” The paleo obsessed were
They were here in force, wearing T­shirts even becoming unhealthy, not to mention
bearing an illustration of the fabled Grok, miserable. Sisson suggested an alternative:

rather than judge the quality of your life by
the degree to which you obey an arbitrary
doctrine, stay loose and see what you can
get away with. “Make choices that will allow
you to enjoy your life,” Sisson said. “Do it.”
Back hoMe, loaded up with info and inspi­
ration, I focused on the basics. The Primal
Blueprint starts with food but expands
into other dimensions of Grok’s life, like
the various ways he got exercise. (Walking
long distances, lifting heavy objects, occa­
sionally sprinting away from tigers.) You’re
advised to get lots of rest and sunlight and
avoid things that are poisonous or otherwise
might kill you.
I got going on the food, loading my kitchen
with vegetables, grass­fed beef, olive oil,
berries, and butter. (Unlike many paleos,
Sisson is not automatically anti­dairy.) My
running injury was healing, but I was still too
fat, so I tried my version of the prison work­
out. I joined a sullen, broken­down gym,
Blast Fitness in Medford, on the outskirts of
Boston. The place smelled iffy and the music
was bad, but it cost just $10 a month.
Per Sisson’s advice, I tested myself to
establish baseline numbers: maximum
pull­ups (a good measure of strength) and
max burpees (stamina). I managed five pull­
ups, which wasn’t bad, but the burpee test
was ugly. I set a countdown timer for 15 min­
utes and started. Before long I felt like I was
going to throw up. I could only do 50.
Mark’s Daily apple is loaded with nutri­
tion strategies, recipes, tips, hacks, and sup­
plements. It was overwhelming. I zoomed
in on what Sisson says makes the biggest
difference: carbs. every day I ate as many
calories as I wanted, with olive­oil dressing,
macadamia nuts, and avocados providing
plenty of fat. But I tried to consume no more
“Twenty years
ago he prob-
ably went to a
Tony Robbins
seminar,” one
critic says of
Sisson. “The
rest is history.”
than 100 grams of carbs—in Sisson’s world,
this is the basic secret to losing body fat and
weight, with or without exercise.
The diet wasn’t especially difficult. I
ate meat, fish, vegetables, and berries and
avoided high­carb stuff like pasta, bread,
and beans. (No more Dogfish head IPa for
me, alas.) Sisson’s plan allows for some
flexibility, too. With a happy shrug, he puts
heavy cream and a teaspoon of sugar in his
coffee every morning. at night I enjoyed red
wine and dark chocolate. I just kept an eye
on the overall carb count.
The only annoying thing about Primal
Blueprint was the flood of marketing offers
that began hitting my inbox once Sisson’s
company knew that I existed. I got suck­
ered into a deal that sounded too good to
be true: $1,033.97 worth of books, referred
to as “the bodyweight bundle,” for just $37.
all I really wanted continued on page 86 >
03.16 Outside 81
MARIJUANA continued from page 67
finished at Columbia, having also earned
his BS at Tufts. But he still felt existentially
tethered. “i don’t know if it was more ritual
or ceremony or what,” he told me, “but what
came next had to be a physical act. i had to
fly around the world.” So he did, leaving his
best friend in charge of the grow. Through
the Bronx Zoo’s director of field operations,
lewis had learned that there was a need for
bush pilots to help with conservation proj-
ects in africa. late that year, he headed over.
“i remember landing in kenya pretty much
deaf, because i’d been in an airplane for
weeks. My ears were ringing, and i was lying
in this hut just laughing my ass off. That was
the first moment i realized: everything you
think is reality is not. almost everything i’d
done was because i’d been pressured to do it.
i needed to figure out my own desires.”
For two years, he bounced around africa,
conducting aerial tracking of poachers and
radio-collared animals for Conservation
international, elephants Without Borders,
and the laikipia predator project in kenya,
Mozambique, Botswana, Sudan, eritrea, and
Djibouti. He felt free, finally. Then two of
his best friends, both pilots, died in separate
plane crashes, including the one who had
helped him with the basement grow.
Set adrift, lewis returned home to the
U.S. to pursue a career as a wildlife veteri-
narian. He’d been accepted to the Univer-
sity of pennsylvania’s veterinary school
and moved to philadelphia with his fiancée,
elizabeth Granger, whom he’d known since
seventh grade. He left the basement opera-
tion in the hands of a close friend and even-
tually shut it down.
in the spring of 2009, lewis was at a dif-
ficult crossroads: 36 years old, the holder of
a veterinary degree, and the father of a baby
boy. He couldn’t exactly take off for africa
and treat elephants. “i thought my hands
were tied career-wise,” he said. “Then i had
lunch with a friend who mentioned that
marijuana laws were loosening in California.”
The light went on, just as it had with
hydroponics. “i locked myself down for two
months,” he said. He compiled the mari-
82 Outside 03.16
juana laws from every state. He called law-
yers and accountants. and he narrowed his
search down to two states where it would
make sense to invest: Michigan and Colo-
rado. He figured he’d start a small medical-
marijuana business and then get back to vet-
erinary work.
That July, lewis was on a conference call,
sitting in his car on 52nd Street, when the
Colorado Department of public Health and
environment rejected limitations on the dis-
tribution of medical marijuana, effectively
approving dispensaries.
He and Granger booked a flight for Colo-
rado the next day, visiting Boulder, Denver,
vail, and Steamboat Springs over a week and
a half. “Then we got to aspen,” lewis said.
“i’d only been once and always teased my
wife: ‘i’ll never live in aspen. Those fucking
rich assholes.’ But this time it made sense.
i was enamored with the beauty. i learned
about the history and the law-enforcement
mentality”—the longtime home of Hunter S.
Thompson is known for lenient enforcement
of drug laws—“and that sealed the deal. pit-
kin County was a safe harbor.”
ON THe MOrNiNG of the big county-
commission hearing, i took a puff of Space
Queen—a happy, heady sativa with notes of
pineapple—and ambled over to city hall with
kim Herold, Silverpeak’s publicist. She’d
spent the previous day prepping lewis for
the hearing. “it’s like working for Seagram’s
after prohibition,” she said.
in recent weeks, Herold had gone door-
to-door in Holland Hills, trying to convert
what she called “the Reefer Madness crowd.”
She was chased back to her car once. “i’m
not letting Jordan go down for what’s been
fixed,” she told me. “The smell is gone!”
There was reason for optimism beyond
the new airflow system at High valley Farms:
Greg Derosa, head of the neighboring roar-
ing Fork Club, a private golf and fly-fishing
community, had decided to support extend-
ing lewis’s license. He and his members
generally thought Jordan could get rid of the
stink permanently.
aspen was, in theory, full of supporters.
pitkin County backed amendment 64, the
2012 Colorado ballot initiative that legalized
recreational marijuana, by more than 75
percent. But the vibe in the city hall meet-
ing room was tense. Nearly a hundred people
crowded into the small space. “We never get
crowds like this,” said Michael Owsley, one
of five members of the board, into his micro-
phone. He tried lightening the mood with a
story as the room continued to fill up: “The
fraternity house i was in had the reputation
for smoking too much dope....”
Just before noon, right on time, lewis
walked in with a light sweat and his lawyer.
“We’ve solved the problem,” he announced
when the proceedings began. “But it was a
painful learning process. We literally bet the
farm on this carbon-filter solution.”
Over the next few hours, 35 citizens spoke.
“Why not let them operate where we’re not
being constantly experimented on when
something breaks down?” asked Holland
Hills resident Bonny Deweese. another resi-
dent, Dee Shuler, said the odor had caused
“nausea, sinus problems, headaches, sleep-
less nights.” She’d been to doctors. it was,
her neighbors echoed, a “lost summer.”
Others doubted whether the new filtration
system would work in winter.
Those in favor of renewal cited Silver-
peak’s wages (“Whole Foods pays $13 an
hour, and Jordan starts at $15”), sunk costs
(“i moved across the country to work for this
man”), faith in lewis (“He’s trying his best
to bring a sustainable business to the val-
ley”), tax dollars raised, and even the older
age of dissenters (“They probably won’t be
here in 40 years”). One of the funnier com-
ments came from adam phillips, a former
employee: “as someone who grew mari-
juana illegally for a long time, i bet my live-
lihood on carbon. it’ll work.”
a churchgoing, drug-abstaining bud
trimmer at High valley Farms drew the
greatest applause. “How many failures were
there before we got a guy on the moon?”
asked larry Jordan. “Jordan lewis has tried,
he’s failed, he’s tried, he’s failed. He’s got
it right this time. He’s got the man on the
moon. everybody here has needed forgive-
ness a time or two in their life. God bless you
all. God bless Jordan lewis.”
after more than four hours, the board
voted four to one in favor of renewal, though
they made it clear that Silverpeak’s license
could be quickly revoked if the stench
returned. “i’m the naughty child,” lewis told
me, “that’s been put on a short leash.”
For the next few months, the online pro-
tests slowed but didn’t stop. “Strong skunk
smell outside my home,” wrote Bronwyn
anglin, vice president of the Holland Hills
property-owners association. “Hard to enjoy
sunset from deck!”
ON a laTe afternoon, lewis and i got pleas-
antly buzzed on Durban poison, an ener-
gizing, citrusy sativa from South africa, and
took a hike above aspen. lewis talked about
his kids. “There’s nothing to hide,” he said.
“i’ve always told them, ‘Daddy’s building
a farm. We’re growing plants for grown-
up medicine there.’ ” He chuckled. “Mason
came home from kindergarten one day with
a when-i-grow-up thing that said, ‘i want
to sell medicine like my daddy.’ i asked liz,
‘Did the teacher hand this to you with a
straight face?’ ”
I listened intently. My eyes felt wide open
and focused. My heart beat a little faster than
normal. The gold aspen leaves were stun-
ning. Really stunning. Had lewis brought
any snacks?
“I became a vegetarian when I was 12 years
old,” lewis continued, apropos of nothing.
“If you ask me why, I’ll tell you that I had a
sincere interest in animals. Not that I have
any moral high ground: I use leather and
don’t necessarily think hunting is bad. Any-
way, I went off to college and everyone’s a
vegetarian! I wouldn’t talk about it. I didn’t
want to be part of that whole thing. I feel that
way about marijuana now. It’s getting a little
mainstream.” He laughed, acknowledging
how that sounded coming from a canna-
bis entrepreneur. “My original interest in it
wasn’t driven by what was cool or what made
money. That’s where the opportunity is now
obviously. But it was originally about some-
thing else.”
He paused and asked me, “How are you
feeling?”
“like I should move to Colorado.”
We walked a few minutes in silence.
“What would have happened,” he said,
“if I’d gotten the New york hospital deal?
I would have been the proverbial dog that
caught the truck or the train or whatever.
Then what? My family is here. I’m miserable
in New york. I love Colorado. I love hiking
and skiing.
“I’m an entrepreneur,” he continued.
“And at the end of the day, this is going to
be a fantastically big and deep market across
the country. The low-hanging fruit are sleep
and pain remedies. I have an infused product
in the works; we just have to make it accept-
able to the medical community and reliable
for patients. I don’t think anyone has taken
it to that level, although a lot of smart people
are trying.”
He packed the pipe one more time and said,
“I think I’ll be the one to do it.”
He was high, and so was I, but it seemed
plausible. Then we floated down to the trail-
head. I went back to my hotel and began to
pack. I couldn’t fly home with what I hadn’t
smoked, so I left a gram for the maid at the
Viceroy and another with the valet, who ac-
cepted it with a knowing smile. I gave the last
to a drifter sitting at the intersection of Owl
Creek Road and Highway 82. He opened up
the little green bottle and took a long, deep
whiff. “Good shit,” he said. O to environmentalists, he says, “then all the
CHARLES BETHEA ( @CHARLESBETHEA)
WROTE ABOUT THE JAPANESE RITUAL
OF MISOGI IN JANUARY 2015. HE LIVES
IN ATLANTA.
bargain continued from page 75
says. Around eastern Utah, cooperation was
in the air. The Wilderness Society joined the
grand bargain early on. So did Pew, though it
generally pursued its own track. In the spirit
of mediation, greens told Bishop that in
some places they would be willing to accept
less proscriptive national conservation areas
instead of a stricter wilderness designation,
which many counties feared.
Working county by county, the collabo-
rators nailed down the first tentative deal—a
single puzzle piece in the larger grand bar-
gain—in the fall of 2014 in Daggett County,
a smaller county in northeastern Utah.
(Individual deals like this, the hope went,
would eventually be submitted to Congress
as one overarching Utah lands bill.) Among
other things, the agreement designated over
100,000 acres of wilderness and conserva-
tion areas in exchange for the acquisition of
a large natural-gas facility and future devel-
opment of a ski area.
Momentum was building. Summit County,
home to Park City, asked to contribute to the
Public lands Initiative. An election in Grand
County, home to Moab, saw ultraconserva-
tive commissioners voted out and a more
receptive slate voted in. At various times, as
many as eight counties across eastern Utah
were in play.
But just as the grand bargain looked most
promising, the wheels started to come off.
One month after Daggett County inked its
deal, elections swept very conservative can-
didates back into power there. The new
county commission reneged on the agree-
ment that had just been celebrated. As
Groene sees it, Bishop had made a crucial
error by telling county officials that they
had the power to stop any negotiation if
they didn’t like how it was going. If you’re a
small-town politician in rural Utah and you
strike a deal that makes a lot of concessions
people you know are going to yell at you in the
grocery store the rest of your life. Politically,
they can’t play that role in these small towns.”
When Daggett County reneged, Bishop
didn’t seem to have a Plan B to keep momen-
tum going elsewhere, Groene says. Bishop
calls this criticism “terribly unfair.” After all,
he says, “anyone can walk away” from this
process—even the environmental groups.
last summer, lyman’s San Juan County
was the last of seven counties to hand in its
blueprint to Bishop. It called for 945,000
acres of protection, a mix of wilderness
and national conservation areas. Parts of
famous geologic landmarks such as Cedar
Mesa, Comb Ridge, and Indian Creek, with
its world-class rock climbing, would get
bolstered protection. It was far more than
many people expected—or that many oth-
ers could tolerate.
“No one would have predicted that San
Juan County would’ve come up with a pro-
posal that included a million acres of land
protection, and part of that protection uses
the W-word,” says Josh ewing, director of
the group Friends of Cedar Mesa.
yet the proposal still needs a lot of work,
conservationists say. For one thing, the
county’s plan (along with several others’)
contains language inoculating it from the
Antiquities Act. This law gives the president
the power to preserve landscapes by creat-
ing national monuments on federal land
without requesting local input or consult-
ing Congress. Because San Juan County and
other eastern Utah counties are more than
60 percent owned by the feds, many state
politicians hate the act, calling it the epit-
ome of government overreach. While the
county sees the exemption as insurance that
its hard work won’t result in a monument,
conservationists consider an exemption a
deal breaker.
Then there’s the Native American issue.
About half of San Juan County’s residents are
Native Americans, and about one-quarter of
the county is reservation land. Because of a
general lack of outreach, but also by their own
choosing, only a few Native Americans par-
ticipated in the county’s grand-bargain plan-
ning. “It’s a trust thing,” lyman acknowl-
edges. “I don’t blame any Navajo personally
who doesn’t trust the white community, the
federal community, the county.”
lyman drives up Highway 95, the road
where Seldom Seen Smith yanks survey
stakes in edward Abbey’s 1975 novel The
Monkey Wrench Gang, and turns onto a
dirt road. He stops the truck among Mor-
mon tea and sagebrush, where the earth is
slowly reclaiming the ruin of an old uranium
mill. Bones of rebar poke through concrete.
lyman tells me that his grandfather once
owned the nearby uranium mine, one of the
richest around.
Conservationists want protection here.
But under the county’s proposal, this would
be an energy zone. Right now, lyman says,
03.16 Outside 83
bargain
there isn’t a mine operating anywhere from
Durango to Hanksville. “let’s really draw the
line,” he says. “West of here would be the
wilderness they want, and east of here would
be the really productive public lands, man-
aged intelligently. Real people, good jobs,
putting food on the table.” He toes a loose bit
of concrete and squints into the hammered
brightness of a desert noon. “When you’re
from here, and your ancestors were part of
this,” he says, grabbing his chest, “you ask
yourself, What am I doing? What’s our leg-
acy? Do we have anything to leave and show
we were effective?”
IS THIS PlACe God’s cathedral or man’s
quarry? I’m reminded that how you answer
depends on where you stand and where your
grandfather stood before you.
On my other morning in San Juan County,
I head out with Josh ewing to see an alter-
nate future for this place. After a 90-minute
bounce over rough roads, ewing stops his
truck and disappears among old-growth
juniper. I jog after him. We’re atop Cedar
Mesa, a massive high plateau whose edges are
fissured with canyons and that once was the
northwestern frontier of a prehistoric civili-
zation, home to the ancestors of today’s Hopi,
Zuni, and others. ewing—bespectacled, fast
talking, a climber who fell hard for the red-
rock country and is now director of Friends
of Cedar Mesa—hustles through the sage and
sand. “It gets in your bones,” he says as we
walk past yucca and prickly pear, ripe with
purple fruit. “It’s got that beauty combined
with the archaeology.”
The junipers part, and the earth yawns
open in a canyon of tall sandstone walls
striped like candy. High on one wall perch
several ancient cliff dwellings. We follow
steps hacked into the stone that lead to
ledges—the ground falling away 500 feet—
until we reach walls, stone rooms, a granary.
In the dimness of a kiva, or ceremonial room,
a half-dozen gnawed corncobs stand upright
as if in an artist’s still-life. ewing guesses the
place is 800 years old.
ewing shakes his head: this side canyon
and its relics aren’t protected in the plan
San Juan County submitted to Bishop, he
says, and they won’t survive another mil-
lennium without help. “Things don’t stay
the way they are by not doing anything,” he
says. Here was that difference again: while
lyman wanted to leave a legacy by devel-
oping the land, ewing and other conserva-
tionists wanted to do so by protecting it. His
group estimates that there are more than
100,000 archaeological sites in the greater
Cedar Mesa area—cliff dwellings, burial sites,
kivas, petroglyphs, and pictographs. “There
84 Outside 03.16
are probably closer to a quarter-million.”
I tell ewing how, all that week in places
like Moab, environmentalists said that the
grand bargain was already on life support.
The counties’ proposals were totally unre-
alistic, they said. even Pew recently stepped
back from talks, saying it couldn’t abide an
Antiquities Act exemption. ewing is more
optimistic.
“I don’t think a legitimate negotiation
has started yet,” he says. Only after Bishop
unveils his draft proposal, he predicts, will
the real, painful trade-offs happen. Why
would he force his conservative constituents
off their positions any sooner?
And if that movement doesn’t happen? I
ask ewing.
Then this play is over, he replies, at least
as far as the legislative effort is concerned.
At the cliff’s edge, we talk about the possi-
bility of a Plan B. For years conservationists
have been working two tracks, also prod-
ding President Obama to declare a massive
national monument in eastern Utah before
he leaves office. The prospect infuriates
many rural Utahans, who still feel stung by
Bill Clinton’s creation of Grand Staircase–
escalante National Monument in 1996. The
pressure has given an urgency to the process.
ewing sweeps an arm before us to intro-
duce the leading monument candidate:
the Bears ears, a 1.9-million-acre triangle
of land that would encompass all of Cedar
Mesa, including more than 40 mini Grand
Canyon systems that few people ever visit.
(The name comes from the twin rock towers
that rise over the landscape.) Twenty-five
Native American tribes, some of them his-
toric enemies, have united to urge Obama to
create the monument.
As SUWA’s Groene sees it, the old battle
lines are being drawn again, pitting cowboys
against Native Americans and environmen-
tal groups. On one side are the counties,
supporting a flawed grand bargain. On the
other, tribes and greens pushing a monu-
ment that county officials hate. This time,
however, the Great White Father in Wash-
ington, D.C., is black. He has declared or
expanded more national monuments than
any previous president and, sources tell me,
is ready to give an underserved people what
they want. (The White House did not respond
to requests for comment.)
The night before I leave San Juan County, I
have dinner in the village of Bluff with Mark
Maryboy, the first Navajo to serve as a county
commissioner there. Maryboy is as tall and
lean as a piece of jerky, and he wears the
pointed boots of a former rodeo bronc rider.
I ask him why the Bears ears is so important
to Native Americans.
Maryboy doesn’t answer directly. Instead
he tells stories. He says his grandparents used
to live on Cedar Mesa. He says the Navajo
have stories about everything—about the
horned toads on the mesa, about how the
sun is called Grandpa, about the male and
female winds that live just north of the Bears
ears, and how, when a person has a breathing
problem, he will seek out the right one to heal
it. There are hundreds of stories, he says.
Only after I leave him do I understand what
he meant. He wasn’t talking about acres. He
was talking about a way to live.
ON JA N UA Ry 20, Bishop and Chaffetz un-
veiled their draft proposal. It would give
added protections to about 4.3 million acres
of Utah, roughly split among 41 new wil-
derness areas and 14 national conservation
areas, as well as seven “special management
areas.” To try to address Native Americans’
concerns, the proposal would create a nearly
1.2-million-acre conservation area for the
Bears ears, to be managed by federal agen-
cies and advised by a commission containing
some native people. It would expand Arches
National Park and add more than 300 miles
of wild and scenic river protection.
On the other side of the ledger, the pro-
posal would release nearly 81,000 acres of
WSAs, meaning that they could no longer
be considered for wilderness status. It would
create large zones for energy development.
It would hand over some 40,000 acres of
federal land to state and local governments.
And it would give Utah right of way to a large
majority of those contested 36,000 miles of
dirt tracks that spiderweb eastern Utah’s can-
yon country, often on federal land—clearing
the way for the state to open them to off-
road vehicles, or improve them, or even pave
them, despite the wishes of Uncle Sam. As
for the Antiquities Act—that part, curiously,
was not addressed, so the counties will be
able to suggest their own wording. The final
bill “must include language that guarantees
long-term land use certainty,” Bishop’s office
wrote in a summary of the proposal.
everyone was destined to be unhappy with
aspects of the draft, lynn Jackson, a Grand
County commissioner, tells me, adding:
“This is what compromise looks like.”
It may also be what failure to achieve
compromise looks like, because reviews by
environmentalist were rapid and negative.
To the eyes of SUWA’s Groene, the deal
would give the farm to counties, off-road
users, energy companies, and the state of
Utah in exchange for little sacrifice on their
part. “Those are swell-sounding numbers,”
he says of the wilderness acreage, “but this
whole thing falls like a house of cards when
you look at what those numbers mean on the
ground.” Several of continued on page 93 >
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 Sisson continued from page 81
was amazing feets!, Sisson’s book on how to
switch over to a barefoot­dominant lifestyle.
But damn, what a bargain.
Turns out it was too good to be true. I paid,
received a bundle of e­files, and discovered
that I couldn’t even find amazing  feets!,
which was buried in the folder somewhere.
one of the so­called “books” was only seven
pages long.
So, yes, that was irritating. But the low­
carb program? That started working right
off. Weight sizzled away.
IN MaY, a work trip took me to Southern
california, and I dropped by to meet with
Sisson at his clifftop house in Malibu. I
passed a shiny black Maserati on the way to
his doorstep, circled a fountain, and brushed
past a half­dozen palm trees in the front
yard. Sisson greeted me, smiling, and asked
me in. a baby grand piano sat in the foyer.
(Sisson’s bucket list includes learning to play
well enough to earn tips at a lounge bar.) Just
past the piano was his office. I could see a
stand­up desk and a computer.
We made our way to the back patio, pass­
ing his kitchen, freshly remodeled with
white marble. on the far side of the center
island, Sisson had installed refrigerated
drawers, something I never knew existed.
on the base of the island itself was a shelf
crammed with paleo cookbooks. “I don’t
cook,” Sisson confided. “I use the books to
point out to the housekeeper what I’d like,
and she makes it.”
The backyard had a pool, a whirlpool, and
a fireplace filled with glass crystals. There
was a canyon view. I walked near the edge
and could see what looked like an equestrian
ranch. “Laird hamilton lives just over there,”
Sisson said, pointing.
I asked Sisson about his path to Malibu
dreamland. he opened an old folder full of
yellowed clippings from his glory days as a
runner and triathlete, starting back in the
late 1970s. Sisson was elite in an era when
the U.S. was awash with sub­2:20 mara­
thoners—the golden age of Bill Rodgers and
alberto Salazar. In 1980, Sisson fi nished
86 Outside 03.16
fifth in the U.S. National Marathon cham­
pionships. In 1982, he finished fourth in the
hawaii Ironman. Then the high mileage
started to get to him.
Sisson was a serial entrepreneur from the
beginning. after a stint when he painted
houses for a living, he started making money
as a trainer, using his Ironman cred to charge
$100 per hour for his services. he signed on
with the governing bodies of triathlon, ulti­
mately serving for 15 years as the anti­doping
chairman for the International Triathlon
Union, during a time when triathlon had
made it into the olympic Games. Watching
young triathletes brutalize their health in
pursuit of olympic gold got Sisson into the
business of selling antioxidant supplements.
he started Mark’s Daily apple in october of
2006, eventually developing a large online
following. In 2009, he self­published The  Gatorade or eating any gels the entire race.
primal Blueprint. he has also published a
line of cookbooks.
Later that day, we buzzed down highway 1
in his Maserati. Sisson drove us to a private
beach entry, and we walked down wooden
steps to the white sands of Paradise cove.
We headed west, arriving at the spot where
charlton heston falls to his knees in the orig­
inal planet of the apes.
We plodded along in the bright sunshine,
into a light, salty breeze, the rocky bluffs to
our right and the blue­green Pacific to our
left. I was thinking about a post I had read
on LetsRun.com, where a discussion of Sis­
son was lit up by the following topic: Is he a
legitimate athlete?
a correspondent using the handle
Whirled Pees bypassed the question and
attacked Sisson directly. “he’s in the busi­
ness of selling you his ideas, so you will buy
his products, thereby increasing his income,”
he wrote. “Twenty years ago when he was
poor, and only good at running, he probably
went to a Tony Robbins seminar … and the
rest is history.”
There’s a point to the snark: Who are you
supposed to trust? on one hand, Sisson is
offering all sorts of advice on his blog, but
how can you not observe that much of it is
directly tied in to what he sells? Walking on
the beach, Sisson told me about a new res­
taurant chain he’s working on and various
angel investments he has going in the paleo
universe. If paleo doesn’t fade quietly away,
like atkins and Zone, then Sisson may be the
reason why.
You can certainly connect the dots and
follow the money—Sisson’s evangelism on
behalf of paleo could sustain and maybe
even grow the movement, increasing prof­
its. But if what he says actually works, what’s
wrong with that?
I talked about this with an M.D. friend
of mine, Leon chang, an anesthesiologist
who believes in Sisson’s diet. “I learned
absolutely nothing about nutrition in medi­
cal school,” he told me. “You have to do your
research and consider the source, whether
it’s from a doctor or not. and make sure
they look the part and walk the walk. Sisson
checks out.”
My results were certainly checking out.
at three the next morning, I drove down to
San Diego. a friend had decided not to race
in the Rock ’n’ Roll Marathon and gave me
his number. The only “training” I had done
was carb restriction, Primal Blueprint style,
along with my Blast workouts and a couple
of runs to test out the achilles. My weight
was down to 188.
That day I ran slow, in the back of the
pack, but I made a point of not drinking any
If I had failed to make progress with Primal
Blueprint, I would surely bonk. But as I de­
scended Pershing Drive into Balboa Park,
with just a couple of miles left of the 13­mile
run, I hadn’t felt so much as a hitch in my
energy. I finished with ease.
People like me—there are 29.8 million
runners in the U.S.—are a big part of Sisson’s
newest commercial wave. his next book is
aimed at changing the minds of stubborn
sugar addicts in the endurance crowd.
IN JUNe, I hit a snag. Progress had been
steady—I was getting fitter from my prison
workouts and decided to add sprinting to
my schedule. Sprinting is a Primal Blueprint
specialty; Sisson says it can turbocharge
your training. But during the second session,
I pushed it too hard and limped home.
oddly, the best part of my experience in
Primal—or paleo or whatever you call it—
happened in early July. I dropped my son off
at day care and went to Blast. Movers were
carting the TVs out to a truck. “We’re closed,”
a woman at the desk said with a glare. closed
for good.
on the drive home, I pulled over near a
public soccer field, which had brittle, dying
grass and hard ground. July in Boston. hot
and humid. I mashed together a prison work­
out—sets of burpees, air squats, and push­
ups. The sun was punishing and good.
I followed up with a Grok stretch, and I felt
great. a bit jarred and sick to my stomach,
but great. I couldn’t fathom why I’d been
doing my workouts in a junky fitness center
to the sound of Pandora playlists. I told Sis­
son about it. “You’re starting to get the idea,
T.J.,” he said. “You’re being intuitive.”
By the end of august, my weight had
dropped to 179 pounds—24 pounds lighter
than when I started. During my max pull­
up test, I did 12—more than I’d ever done in
my life. Then I did 182 burpees, another
personal best, and this on a day when I
ate less than 50 grams of carbs. According
to the conventional wisdom I’ve always
lived by, I should have lost steam because
of the low carb intake. Granted, I really did
want to throw up, and I felt light-headed,
but my engine ran full throttle the whole
way. Along with the half-marathon ex-
perience, this workout convinced me that
the low-carb, high-fat protocol worked.
Energy was not only plentiful but consis-
tent. Even if my training program sagged,
I stayed lean. My wife told me that I was a
different person than that grumpy dude I
had been last winter. “Night and day” was
how she put it.
There were parts of Sisson’s program I
struggled with. For one thing: minimalist
shoes, which he recommends, just don’t
work for me. I get injured. Maybe I’m
too beat up or too old or too impatient,
but there are times when it’s best to stick
with what you know. In my case, a pair of
heavy-duty trainers allowed me to run
without pain.
Running reminded me of the most im-
portant lesson I got from Sisson: Let go,
have fun. I had been freed from a rigid
structure that limited what I got out of ex-
ercising. Along with being liberated from
a gym, my running had been unboxed. It
used to be that a one-hour run was a one-
hour run—something I simply did, roboti-
cally recording the distance and pace in a
logbook.
But the Sisson way changed me. I went
out for a run on a wooded trail and spotted
a pipe that supported a telephone pole. I
jumped up, grabbed it, and did some pull-
ups. On the trail, I started dropping down
every two minutes for a set of ten push-
ups. Later I did sets of step-ups onto a
chunk of exposed granite. I wasn’t leaping
through the air in a grass skirt with a spear
in my hand, but it was a start. O minutes later, he’s swimming back to the
T. J. MURPHY ( @BURNINg_RUNNER)
WROTE ABOUT SEALFIT CAMP IN
JANUARY 2015.
Volume XLI, Number 2. outside (ISSN 0278-1433) is
published monthly by Mariah Media Network LLC, 400
Market St., Santa Fe, NM 87501. Periodical postage
paid at Santa Fe, NM, and additional mailing offices.
Canadian Goods and Services Tax Registration No.
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HEALEY continued from page 61
behavior and get close to these animals,”
says Jacoby, the expert on shark social net-
works. Healey taps the GoPro on his fore-
head in affirmation.
We plunge into the ocean, which is still and
blue, with 50-foot visibility and little cur-
rent. The bathymetry is spectacular, a jigsaw
of basalt domes, craggy ridgelines, and wide
channels. The water explodes with life—
there’s so much to see that it’s hard to focus.
Thick schools of seven-inch-long fusiliers,
blue with sunburst yellow racing stripes
down their backs, swim in tight formation
appropriate to their military namesake. Two
pilot fish, the size of thumbnails and dressed
in the black and white stripes of a convict,
choose me as their escort.
Suddenly, a cry comes from the Otomaru.
“Mark!” Gallagher yells. The unmistakable
falcate dorsal fin of a hammerhead cuts the
surface, but it’s a football field upcurrent
from Healey. He’s got no chance.
Healey climbs back aboard. Gallagher
and Papastamatiou, staring down a shutout,
finally tell him to start targeting Galapagos
sharks, too. “It’s valid data,” Papastamatiou
says with a hint of desperation. “No one’s
ever done that out here.”
We motor toward the fin sighting, but the
shark is long gone. We drop Healey into the
water at the mouth of the cove where we
moored the receiver a few days ago. Fifteen
boat. “Got a hammer,” he says quietly. The
boat erupts in cheer.
While the scientists slap backs and high-
five, Healey sits alone on a far edge of the
gunwale. He’s all business now, hunched
over, elbows on his knees, hands cradling
his chin. He doesn’t even bother to take off
his mask between dives. Usually verbose,
he replies curtly when asked what he’s seen
down there: “Sharks and darkness.”
We head to the east side of the island.
Zimmerman, Healey, and I jump in near an
exposed rock and begin our drift. Zimmer-
man probes down to 40 feet where, beneath
the layer of murk, he sees the spectral out-
lines of hammerheads. He follows the sharks
and signals us to follow him. Healey’s only
halfway through his rest cycle, but the cur-
rent will blow us off the school if we don’t
move now. He dives, pauses to scan the
water column four stories down, and con-
tinues toward the bottom. I trail, a minute
behind and 30 feet above him, straight into
a school hundreds thick.
They’re beautiful animals of inspired
design—slate gray with a white underbelly,
sleek and powerful, and wonderfully freak-
ish. Their long, undulating brow is broken
by right angles—they have a “divergent body
plan,” as Gallagher describes it in one of his
papers. The term hammerhead, if evocative
branding, seems a misnomer. Flat and wide,
the shark’s cephalofoil is more reminiscent
of a chisel. Its mouth, usually the focus of
hysterical phobia, is comparatively small
and set downward, just north of its stomach,
in the perfect place to feast on squid.
They move in concert, swaying through
the water with silent grace. They are crea-
tures that want to swim together and be left
alone. Toward the center of the school, one
of the larger females rolls on her side, flash-
ing her pale underbelly in a mating display.
Healey glides into the back of the school,
takes aim at a seven-footer, and fires.
It’s a direct hit, right behind the dorsal fin,
but it bounces off. With a few quick flicks of
the tail, the shark disappears into the crowd.
Healey grabs the tag as it sinks toward the
bottom, then heads to the surface. He’d fixed
the tag to the tip of the gun with a rubber
band, which didn’t break. The setup needs
tweaking, but Healey gets a second hammer-
head before the afternoon wraps.
The last two days are an exercise in target
practice. Healey tags Galapagos and ham-
merheads with both acoustic and satellite
transmitters. The scientists set three more
receivers, and by the time the typhoons wash
Mikomoto in surge, we’ve tagged ten sharks
and set five receivers—a successful tally for
a year-one expedition being cut short by
nearly a week.
The scientists’ plan for their remaining
time in Japan: temples in Kyoto, ramen and
skyscrapers in Tokyo. Healey’s got other
ideas. Just about every big-wave surfer in
the western Pacific has been watching the
buoys, and tomorrow is calling for 30-foot
surf near Chiba, about 40 miles southeast
of Tokyo. Healey has a friend flying in from
Hawaii with an extra nine-six. There’s a
train leaving in an hour. His hair isn’t even
dry from diving, but if he hurries he’ll be
in Chiba by midnight. It’s the biggest swell
Japan has seen in five years. O
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 ®
TOUGH
Clear, Repair
bargain continued from page 84
the new wilderness areas, for instance,
would lie within existing national parks,
where the lands already enjoy significant

Anything
MEN’S HEALTH protections. Taken together, Groene says,
the proposal “actually means less protection

TAPE.
than currently exists, advancing the state of
Utah’s quest to seize our public lands and
igniting a carbon bomb.”
So what now? everyone will demand
changes. The congressmen will take those
demands and reemerge with a final proposal.
“My name is on it,” Bishop told me last fall.
“I’m not playing games with it. I’m not put-
ting in stuff that I’d be willing to barter later.”
CLINICALLY TESTED INGREDIENTS The timeline for all this? Bishop seemed eager
to keep things moving. He was clearly exas-
perated with the grinding process.
But environmentalists are no longer in the
mood to play ball. “The bill is unacceptable
and unsalvageable,” Groene says. “If they’d be
willing to have a do-over, we would be will-
ing to have discussions.” In San Juan County,
Groene’s group won’t negotiate at all—they
want the Bears ears National Monument.
Another significant defection happened
three weeks before Bishop’s draft appeared,
when the Bears ears Inter-Tribal Coalition
announced that it was formally withdrawing
from the Public lands Initiative and throw-
ing all its efforts into lobbying Obama for a
national monument, citing months of mis-
sed deadlines, delays, and “no substantive
engagement” with its concerns. “We don’t
feel we can wait any longer,” the group said.
Weeks earlier, before all this, I asked
Bishop if he was still optimistic about his

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so much work, the proverbial win-win was
still within reach. Now that seemed more
Tarps/Awnings/Covers Cracked Smartphones unlikely than ever. The Native Americans had
been alienated. And despite Bishop’s assur-
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thing through Congress during an election
year, even with the support of powerful Utah
senator Orrin Hatch.
The only certainty was that even the play-
ers on this stage didn’t know what was com-
ing next—whether it was the end of Utah’s
wilderness wars or just the close of yet an-
other dyspeptic chapter.
“Make sure you’ve got popcorn,” said
For the Toughest Jobs
on Planet Earth®
Casey Snider, Bishop’s legislative director.
“It’s going to be quite a show.” O

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