Outside January/February 2019

Uphill Battle In October, Brian Mockenhaupt wrote about the suicide of his friend Dan Sidles, a Marine Corps veteran and mountaineer who was unable to fully heal his mental wounds in wilderness-therapy programs (“Dan in Real Life”). Readers were touched by Mockenhaupt’s search for understanding. I have worked with vets suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder for 35 years. The ugly truth is that some suicides cannot be stopped. The question isn’t “How could he do this?” but “How could he not?” I say this to lighten the load for the family members, military brothers, doctors, and clinicians who heroically tried to save Dan’s life. Christina Neumeyer Carlsbad, California I was deeply saddened by the news of Dan Sidles’s passing. I met him and a group of wounded warriors on the trail in 2010. Though we…

For the past 11 years, the cover story of our January issue has explored some aspect of health, fitness, or happiness—and often all three. This isn’t exactly revolutionary. January print issues arrive just in time for New Year’s resolution season, the heady period when readers are craving major lifestyle changes after six weeks of holiday gluttony. As such, plenty of other magazines deliver on this same demand. What makes our own approach different is that we often immerse ourselves in the very lifestyle fixes we’re proposing. Internally, we call these lab rat packages, collections of stories in which we offer up our editors and writers as test subjects. Last year that meant nearly a dozen of us mailing fecal swabs (a verb-adjective-noun combination I’d hoped to never write again) to…

IF THE CURRENT effort to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling succeeds, then no protected lands in America are safe. That’s not hyperbole. For almost 40 years, the fight over drilling on ANWR’s 1.6-million-acre coastal plain has been at the epicenter of our nation’s conservation debate. High-profile drilling bills were thwarted in the eleventh hour in 1989 (thanks to the Exxon Valdez disaster), 1995 (a Bill Clinton veto), and 2005 (a filibuster by Senate Democrats). This time the stakes are even higher. Instead of trying to win public support, pro-drilling forces are opting to bypass our democracy. Their tactics undercut existing laws, ignore legitimate science, and greatly diminish the role of the American people in the decision-making process. The short game is drilling for oil in the…

DAVID GOGGINS’S new memoir, Can’t Hurt Me, is written in part as a self-help manual, but the opening line delivers some uncommonly blunt advice for a genre better known for telling us we just need to learn to love ourselves: “You are in danger of living a life so comfortable and soft that you will die without ever realizing your true potential.” It’s an apt summation of Goggins’s worldview. The retired Navy SEAL has spent the past two decades exploring the outer limits of human performance, both as an elite Special Operations member and an accomplished ultra-endurance athlete. But earning that résumé required overcoming an abusive childhood, a murder in the family, rampant racism in his small Indiana hometown, a learning disability, obesity, and more—a catalog of obstacles that might…

In early 1944, French photographer Frédéric Lagrange’s grandfather, Louis Lagrange, was a German prisoner of war. After a few months, a battalion of Mongol soldiers fighting for the Soviet Union attacked the camp, setting the soldier free. “They saved him,” says Frédéric, “and ultimately they saved my life. That’s something that has stayed with me.” Seven decades later, the photographer, who is now 48 and spends his days shooting ad campaigns for companies such as Kodak and Walt Disney, traveled to Mongolia to meet the people and document the rapidly changing East Asian country. After 17 years, 13 trips, and 1,260 rolls of film, Lagrange collected his images into his first book, Mongolia. As a young photo assistant, Lagrange saved up enough money for his first trip to Mongolia in 2001.…

ITZ’ANA RESORT Belize Opening in April, this retreat is a perfect base camp for exploring the best of Belize. Night-hike the world’s only jaguar reserve in search of the nocturnal cats? Check. Swim with whale sharks during their annual migration? Check. Sail to empty isles for private snorkeling sessions? Check. Float in the waters of the iconic Great Blue Hole? Check. Cast for wahoo lurking beyond one of the planet’s largest barrier reefs? Check. But good luck prying yourself away from Itz’ana’s lush 20-acre property. The 30-suite resort sits on the Placencia peninsula, a 16-mile-long finger of perfect white sand that separates a mangrove-lined lagoon from the Caribbean. It’s all too easy to spend your days bouncing from the Great House, offering one of the largest rum selections in the country, to…