Outside September/October 2019

As I’ve noted before in this space, the realms of adventure and exploration have changed dramatically in the past two decades. The most significant firsts were all achieved during the previous century, including reaching the North and South Poles, summiting all 14 of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks, and running the planet’s gnarliest rivers. Now that we’ve probed Mars and used satellites to map every square inch of our own planet, the very concept of earthly exploration has become anachronistic. Adventure, on the other hand, is alive and well. Yet the state of the art is increasingly defined by speed or style, the latter requiring levels of esoteric nuance that are hard for the general public to appreciate. All this was on our minds as we selected stories for this month’s Adventure…

The Pulaski Is Mightier than the Sword Late in the spring, Outside Online published an article by Marc Peruzzi entitled “Trail Runners Are Lazy Parasites,” which argued that participants in the rapidly growing sport aren’t doing their share when it comes to volunteer trail maintenance. The piece generated an enormous reaction, with many readers contesting the central premise or taking offense at the tone. (Subsequently, we published a follow-up by writer and ultrarunner Stephanie Case, who countered Peruzzi’s assertions.) This is narrow-minded and woefully uninformed. As an avid trail runner and cofounder of the West Michigan Trail Runners, I am officially insulted. We trail runners are the sole group that maintains arguably the most difficult trail in West Michigan. @DirtyRob33 Twitter I guess he has little trail-runner dolls that he sticks pins in when he’s…

This fall, Outside Online is launching a column focused on those occasions when outdoor adventures go very, very wrong—something that many of our thrill-seeking staffers have experienced firsthand. Or so they claim. When we polled the masthead for survival tales, we got a number of questionable anecdotes. Can you tell which of these is more imagined than real? A. During his first solo backpacking trip, reviews editor Jeremy Rellosa neglected to stow his food properly before going to sleep, attracting what he thought was a menagerie of wild animals. “I stayed up all night clutching my knife after I heard howling and footsteps outside my tent,” he says. “Turns out it was just some foxes.” B. Back when he was an intern, marketing director Sam Moulton spent a winter weekend trapped in…

HERE’S SOMETHING you probably didn’t know: the construction business accounts for an estimated 23 percent of the world’s carbon-dioxide emissions—5.7 billion tons, according to the most recent estimates. Much of this comes from the use of concrete and steel, the two biggest contributors to emissions in the building sector. As the BBC has reported, if the concrete industry were a country, it would be the third-largest emissions producer, behind China and the United States. And there’s no end in sight: the United Nations Environment Program predicts that humans will put up the equivalent of a new Paris every week for the next 40 years. In the U.S., an architectural publication predicted that some 1.9 billion square feet of new structures will be built in the next three decades. If only there…

THE DISASTROUS effects of hot-boxing the atmosphere were once problems for the future. Welcome to the future. And yet many people in the U.S., including its most powerful man, continue to deny that there’s a problem. How can we get the frightening reality across? Have we run out of options? Acclaimed Russian director Victor Kossakovsky’s film Aquarela, which hits select theaters on August 16, is a bold, thoroughly weird, high-def attempt to reimagine the climate-change message. Set to a jarring mixture of gut-crunching cello-metal tracks and the sounds of water in various stages of infuriated flux, Aquarela (“watercolor” in Portuguese) is meant to be uncomfortable. There’s no scripted dialogue. Instead, the only human conversation comes in the beginning, when we are placed at the center of a terrifying scene on southern…

Today’s fly rods are a far cry from the bamboo beasts found lurking in the corners of your great granddad’s lake house. Astonishingly light and smartly engineered, they are exceptional tools that are also beautiful to behold. Even better, the many options available now means there’s an ideal rod out there for every kind of angler, regardless of budget, ability, or age. Take the A. TFO Bug Launcher ($170), which is candy-apple red and has a thin-diameter cork grip and extended reel seat, allowing young anglers to use both hands if need be. Steelhead fishing is about covering a lot of water. The ceramic stripper guides and large fore and rear grips on the B. Sage Two-Handed X Spey ($1,200) allow it to handle a variety of shooting-head lines and casting styles.…