Outside November 2019

The last time I saw kayaker Scott Lindgren was June of 2007. We were at a Los Angeles photo studio shooting the cover of Outside’s 30th anniversary issue, for which we’d gathered some of the biggest stars in the outdoor industry. Most of them were household names: then retired (and not yet infamous) cyclist Lance Armstrong, legendary climber Lynn Hill, snowboard pioneer Jake Burton, mountaineer Ed Viesturs, surfing superstar Kelly Slater, Olympic swimmer Amanda Beard, big-wave giant Laird Hamilton, and musician Ben Harper. Lindgren, it’s fair to say, was the least known of the bunch, and that day he seemed starstruck in the presence of so many adventure icons. There’s no question, however, that Lindgren belonged among these luminaries. He was then—and perhaps still is—the world’s most accomplished kayaker, having completed…

Lost Boy In our September/October issue, Alex Perry revisited the story of John Allen Chau, a young missionary who sought to convert indigenous people living on a remote island in the Indian Ocean to Christianity (“The Island of No Return”). Not many readers were surprised by the fact that the islanders killed him. Others wondered why the piece sparked so much anger against Chau. Do not elevate this boy in any way. Stop talking about him. He was a prideful fool with a god-complex who ignored decades of research and firsthand experience that fully explained the risks. He could have gotten everyone on the island killed, so they killed him first. Elizabeth McCabe Facebook The real story is that he was so hell bent on forcing Christianity on people who just want to be left…

JULY 2019 WAS officially the hottest month ever recorded, but if you only paid attention to the political headlines last summer, you’d be forgiven for thinking the biggest environmental threat we face is plastic straws. For that we can thank Brad Parscale. “I’m so over paper straws,” the Trump 2020 campaign manager tweeted after suffering a straw blowout while boarding a JetBlue flight on July 18. The tweet, which included the hashtag #LiberalProgress, garnered more than 7,000 likes. It also gave Parscale a novel fundraising idea. Almost immediately, the Trump campaign began selling ten-packs of plastic Trump Straws for $15. When the first batch sold within 24 hours, the national media took notice, and not long after that the president himself was asked to weigh in. “I do think we have bigger…

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, writer Richard Louv was on Alaska’s Kodiak Island to visit a remote lodge where his son worked as a guide. Walking from his cabin to dinner, he stopped briefly to double check that he had money in his wallet. A moment later, when Louv looked up, he was greeted by “two piercing eyes” watching him from a few feet away—a black fox. He and the fox stood frozen for a moment, locked in a staring contest. Louv eventually moved to continue his walk, but the fox followed along, disappearing back into the woods only when Louv arrived at the main lodge. “Today I recall few significant details about most of the people I met in that Alaskan camp,” Louv writes in the introduction to Our Wild Calling…

IN 2017, photographer and archivist Brian Kelley found a Grand Canyon National Park brochure from 1964 on eBay. The geometric illustration of warm-hued cliffs was unlike any national park literature he’d seen, prompting him to keep digging for other surprising designs. In the following months, Kelley amassed 600 maps, pamphlets, and other informational ephemera from national parks, monuments, seashores, and battlefields. The materials date back 100 years and range in style from romantic Ansel Adams–esque photography to colorful modernist illustrations. Design-focused publisher Standards Manual, which previously worked with Kelley on a photo book of New York City Subway miscellany called New York City Transit Authority: Objects, preserved his new collection in Parks ($55), out in October. The book chronicles how the graphic identity of the National Park System’s materials—often produced by…

If You’re Body Positive: The Body: A Guide for Occupants by Bill Bryson ($30, DOUBLEDAY) A huge amount of research went into this top-down introduction to the workings of the human body, covering everything from the skin and the skeleton to aging, reproduction, and death. But Bryson has a unique ability to camouflage his hard work and depth of knowledge with a light and self-effacing voice, which fans of his Appalachian Trail classic, A Walk in the Woods, will instantly recognize. He uses it to deliver an avalanche of surprising and eminently sharable facts about how our bodies—“a product of three billion years of evolutionary tweaks”—are built. (Ever wondered how many species of bacteria live in your belly button? Read on.) Like your favorite teacher, Bryson is someone who loves his subject. Before he’s…