Outside December 2020

In 2020, my family spent more summer weekends camping than we have in any year previously. This year I built a raised garden bed, grew vegetable starters from seeds, and harvested my first (largely unsuccessful) homegrown crops. This year my wife raised chickens and we stopped buying eggs at the grocery store. This year, after nearly two decades living in Santa Fe, I discovered three local hikes I never knew existed. This year I hosted a party in my driveway and got to know all of my neighbors. This year I discovered a new way to work out—in my living room. This year I started playing tennis. This year I drove 40 hours roundtrip to Montana and was reminded of the impossibly vast amount of natural beauty America possesses. This…

On the Hunt For our September/October issue, food writer Rachel Levin tagged along with hunters and Instagram stars Rihana Cary and Amanda Caldwell for a bowhunting trip in the Arizona backcountry (“#SheHunts”). While some women hunters were excited to see the piece, others were disappointed with how Levin portrayed her subjects. Awesome article. I got into hunting as an adult, and I love the experience as much as the successful outcome. We certainly need more diverse voices in hunting, and women like Amanda and Rihana definitely are helping to expose more women to the sport. Kristen Reifenstein Facebook This should have been a great piece about two very accomplished hunters who push back against harmful stereotypes about women in hunting, both online and in the field. But somehow the author landed on a bizarre narrative…

In 2015, Frédéric Lagrange traveled to northern India to photograph the Ladakh region. The 49-year-old French photographer, who lives in Brooklyn, New York, was eager to learn about the area’s rich Buddhist history and visit the many monasteries that dot the Himalayan landscape. As a foreigner, Lagrange wasn’t allowed to travel too close to the border of the region, which has long been the subject of a dispute between China, India, and Pakistan (and which this year was the site of a violent confrontation between Chinese and Indian troops). Instead he started his journey in the city of Leh, a popular tourist destination that sits at 11,500 feet, before making his way through the mountains to the remote Nubra Valley. “There are very few people living in the valley,” he…

EVEN THE LAZIEST cooks can do better than store-bought pickles. With just a little prep work, you can make your own, adding flavor and crunch to salads, sandwiches, and more, while netting health benefits from the produce and the juice. Another bonus: you probably have most of the ingredients already. Pickle brine, typically made with salt, sugar, and vinegar, brims with electrolytes that can help combat dehydration and cramping, explains Maddie Alm, a registered dietician, runner, and owner of Fueling Forward, a sports nutrition business in Boulder, Colorado. (Alm says you can take a few sips as soon as you feel a cramp coming on, or combine it with some water in place of a sports drink.) And while certain methods of cooking reduce or eliminate water-soluble vitamins in veggies, cold-pickling…

MY FIRST LESSON in electrical muscle stimulation (EMS) is this: it won’t work if you’re not wet. That’s how I found myself, on a recent Friday afternoon, swapping my gym clothes for a skintight shirt. Personal trainer Connie Ruiz then buckled me into a soft-shell carbon-fiber jacket and matching shorts, each equipped with electrodes. The layers were presoaked, but for good measure, Ruiz fired off a few more squirts of lukewarm water into both the jacket and shorts. Ruiz is the owner and operator of Personal20, an exercise studio just outside Washington, D.C., that specializes in one-on-one EMS training. Ruiz guides everyone from gym novices to fitness junkies through 20-minute strength workouts while delivering low-frequency currents to their muscles via an E-Fit muscle-stimulation machine: a metal box with an LCD, ten dials,…

FEW PEOPLE are as quick as they want to be. We’re not just talking sheer speed—we’re talking about reaction time, the fraction of a second it takes to respond to a stimulus, such as a skier cutting you off on a slope or a squirrel darting in front of your mountain bike. “There aren’t many sports where reaction time isn’t important,” says York-Peter Klöppel, a sports psychologist at Red Bull’s Athlete Performance Center near Salzburg, Austria. “The environment can change in a split second. There are a variety of different responses to every change, so every reaction is also about quick decision-making.” A number of factors can affect a person’s reaction time, including age, level of recovery, and anxiety level. But even accounting for those external influences, it’s possible to develop…