Outside August 2018

When you examine the long history of the cutthroat retail-sales industry, it becomes clear that one era’s bully often becomes the next one’s victim. In 2000, when I first moved to Santa Fe, the city’s population hovered around 70,000 and, if memory serves, there were six independent outdoor-gear shops in town. Eighteen years later, only one of those is still in business. What happened? A major recession and the shift to online shopping were certainly contributing factors, but most locals would probably offer a more concise explanation: in 2008, REI opened a 28,000-square-foot location in Santa Fe. This wasn’t a novel event. Throughout America, for nearly as long as specialty shops have existed, bigger national chains offering more inventory and lower prices have been moving into towns and squeezing out small…

A Breath of Fresh Air Contributing editor Florence Williams joined former victims of sex trafficking who went on a four-day wilderness-therapy session in Colorado in hopes of finding solace in nature (“The Survivors,” May). Williams’s reporting on the topic struck a chord with our readers. This made me cry out of anger at the injustice in the world. I’m so glad the women got outside and found themselves. Even in my non-traumatic life, I feel exhilarated when I am mountain-biking through the woods or hiking on a snowy mountain. Jane Sodders Amherst, New Hampshire This article showed the power of the outdoors to help women reconnect with their own power. I appreciate that you included it along with athlete profiles and gear articles. But I appreciate even more that it was handled so deftly, with…

You don’t always need a fancy piece of equipment to get the job done well. Take photographer Nancy Jo Iacoi. She photographed Joe Miller for “The Purest Form of Bike Angel” (page 70), which profiles Miller’s efforts to earn points for distributing Citi Bikes to docking stations. Except instead of a DSLR, she used her iPhone and ran the resulting images through a Polaroid filter app. Iacoi says using the phone fits the spontaneous style she prefers. “I’ll be walking down the street and it’s just, boom,” she says. “So instead of carrying a camera around, which I don’t normally do, I’ve got my phone.” What We’re Watching Outside TV and Jeep’s new series A Road Few Travel features people like surfer Jon Rose, who travels the world on a mission to…

IT’S FRIDAY, and your weather app is all blue sky and sunshine icons. You shout: “Let’s go car camping, kids!” But where? You pull up the website for a nearby state park. The page is gray, seemingly designed by Czech bureaucrats. It doesn’t say much about options for hiking, swimming, or fishing, so you open 17 more browser tabs, researching like somebody from the Adderall generation. You finally settle on a campsite and plug in today’s date. That’s when your weekend goes to hell. The booking page tells you that all the reservable campsites are taken. Grimacing, you remember reading something about the best campsites being grabbed six months out. “It’s OK!” you say as tears well up in your offspring’s eyes. “The park holds spaces for people who just show up!…

Growing up in Omaha, Nebraska, Jen Edney visited plenty of Midwestern lakes, but she never thought she’d make a career out of being on the water. “I always had a fear of the ocean,” says the 35-year-old photojournalist. Edney cured that trepidation after college, when she spent a month with Outward Bound on a 150-foot schooner in the Caribbean. That’s where she fell in love with nautical photography. After stints at the Summit Adventure Photography Workshop and the Brooks Institute, Edney now travels as much as nine months of the year on assignment. Most recently, she embedded with the 2017–18 Volvo Ocean Race—an eight-month, round-the-world yachting competition—where she served as an onboard reporter, covering the teams’ progress for the event website. The Volvo is one of sailing’s most dangerous races.…

1. PAVE PARADISE (JUST A LITTLE) DEVELOPERS WANT RIVERS LINED WITH HIGH-RISES AND ENVIRONMENTALISTS WANT REINTRODUCTION OF NATIVE GRASSES. A SUCCESSFUL WATERFRONT REVITALIZATION NEEDS BOTH. Few civic projects transform a city like a rejuvenated shoreline. But competing visions often doom these ventures before they even start, says Alex Krieger, a professor of urban design at Harvard and contributor to the book Remaking the Urban Waterfront. Should it be a nature preserve? An office park and shopping center? Something more residential? Deciding what to do can be harder than actually doing it. “That situation exists almost everywhere,” Krieger says. “The solution is to remember that rivers are long. People actually want diversity, so create different segments—some that draw people and development, others that make sure development stays away. Find ways to make each bank…