Outside May 2020

It’s Personal Generally speaking, a U-shaped curve on a graph that tracks fatalities over time is a sign of an emerging public-health issue that warrants serious concern. That’s exactly what you find when looking at cycling deaths in the U.S. over the past three decades. From 1988 until 2010, fatalities dropped 32 percent, from 911 to 623. From 2010 to 2018, they increased 38 percent, to 857, the highest number since, well, 1988. After 30 years, despite an uptick in helmet use and improvements in infrastructure, the grim totals are virtually the same. Of course, statistics can be misleading. There are more people riding bikes now than there were in the late eighties, so a rise in fatalities doesn’t conclusively mean that cycling is more dangerous. But we do know that the…

CHAIRMAN/EDITOR IN CHIEF Lawrence J. Burke Editorial VICE PRESIDENT/EDITOR CHRISTOPHER KEYES @keyeser DESIGN + PHOTOGRAPHY DIRECTOR HANNAH MCCAUGHEY @outsideartdept DEPUTY EDITOR MARY TURNER @maryturner505 SENIOR EXECUTIVE EDITOR MICHAEL ROBERTS @ultimateeditor FEATURES EDITOR GLORIA LIU @thats_my_line DIGITAL MANAGING DIRECTOR ABIGAIL WISE @abigailwise ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR ALETA BURCHYSKI @little_fawna DIGITAL DEPUTY EDITOR MOLLY MIRHASHEM @mollyshirreen ARTICLES EDITOR MATT SKENAZY GEAR DIRECTOR WILL TAYLOR SENIOR RESEARCH EDITOR LUKE WHELAN @luke_w_whelan SENIOR EDITORS ERIN RILEY, RYAN VAN BIBBER @justrvb ASSOCIATE EDITORS XIAN CHIANG-WAREN @xiancw, ARIELLA GINTZLER @abgintzler KELSEY LINDSEY @kelseyalindsey COPY EDITORS SEAN COOPER, IRIS SUTCLIFFE @irissutcliffe, TASHA ZEMKE ASSISTANT EDITORS ABIGAIL BARRONIAN, MAREN LARSEN @marenlarsen14 KAELYN LYNCH @kaelyn_lynch, SOPHIE MURGUIA @sophiemurguia REVIEWS EDITOR JEREMY RELLOSA @jrellosa DIGITAL PROJECT MANAGER JONATHAN VER STEEGH EDITORIAL ASSISTANT CLAIRE HYMAN @hyimclaire EDITORIAL FELLOWS WILL BOSTWICK, MAURA FOX @maura__fox EDITORIAL PRODUCTION FELLOW WUFEI YU @wufei_yu EDITORIAL DIRECTOR ALEX HEARD @alexheard Art & Photography ART DIRECTOR PETRA ZEILER @petrazeiler PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR KYRA KENNEDY @kyrajkennedy DIGITAL VISUALS…

LAST OCTOBER, Alex Honnold and Tommy Caldwell teamed up to tackle a new free climb on El Capitan, Yosemite’s premier granite big wall. Though the duo made headlines for climbing the Nose route in a gobsmacking one hour and fifty-eight minutes in 2018, fast enough to break the speed record, this project was something entirely different. Establishing a new free climb requires spending weeks at a time on the wall, carefully plodding and strategizing. Honnold and Caldwell’s route, called Passage to Freedom, shares a popular sleeping ledge with the Nose, called El Cap Tower. As the men worked on the line for nearly a month, they spent five nights bivouacking on the ledge. “Every time we showed up, there were already six people sleeping there,” Caldwell says. “It smelled like urine.…

FLYING BACK TO Oregon from the 2007 New York City marathon on a Nike corporate jet, Kara Goucher could picture her future perfectly. At 29 years old, the Minnesota native had just surprised the track world with a bronze medal in the 10,000 meters at the World Championships in Osaka—the first medal for an American in 15 years. She was a star, and Nike let her know it. There were banners with her face splashed across them on the company’s sprawling campus in Beaverton. There were full-page ads in national newspapers before her races. More important, she felt she was part of the Nike family. Goucher imagined that someday, when she retired, her kids would play with the grandchildren of Alberto Salazar, her coach at the Nike Oregon Project, the…

In 2019, Danish photographer Martin Johansen traveled from his home in France to Nagaland, a northeastern Indian state on the Myanmar border. He was headed to the remote Mimi village to document members of the Yimchunger tribe, who scale the region’s cliffs on homemade bamboo ladders to gather honey and wax from giant honey bees. But when he arrived, there was a problem: Mimi’s cliffs, usually a beekeeping hotspot, were all but barren. “I began to stress,” says the 49-year-old. The Yimchunger have always left a large part of the honeycomb intact so that the bees don’t need to rebuild from scratch. Even so, the area’s bee population has been falling steadily for years, a possible consequence of deforestation and climate change. “Yimchunger elders told me that in the old days,…

PIANO TO ZANSKAR “Making pianos is the most boring thing that you could possibly ever do,” says piano tuner Sir Desmond Gentle at the beginning of Piano to Zanskar. We then follow him as he travels 5,000 miles from his London shop to hand-deliver a 176-pound instrument to a remote village in the Himalayas. His goal is to enable music lessons at a local school, and if Gentle completes his expedition, he’ll have placed the highest-altitude piano in the world. Dry humor and charming musical breaks accompany terrifying scenes of a Sherpa team chasing piano parts down scree-filled mountainsides. The film, which won the grand prize at the 2019 Banff Mountain Film Festival, is a meditation on worthwhile tedium, the spirituality of music, and hard-to-reach places. —Erin Berger REBUILDING PARADISE The first nine…