Outside June 2018

There is something eternally compelling about reading stories of humans who are confronted with the worst that nature dishes out and make it through alive. Which is another way of saying that survival stories have long been a mainstay at Outside. Most years we package up a handful of these into a single themed edition. And most of our other issues contain a survival story of some kind. The unsurprising result is that we’re inundated with story ideas that wrestle with this theme, yet only a small number of them ever get to the assignment stage. This month we happen to have two of them, and each is exceptional. “Rattled” (page 86) is Kyle Dickman’s harrowing first-person narrative about getting bitten by a rattlesnake while hiking with his wife and infant…

Pushing Upstream In the March work issue, we ran a story by Krista Langlois about sexual harassment occurring in the outdoor industry, especially among rafting guides, and from our inboxes to our social-media feeds, the responses universally agreed with the story’s headline: it’s time to change the culture. Part of the solution has to be that the burden and risk of reporting abuse can’t fall entirely on women. All of the good, respectful guys out there need to be encouraged to step up and say something when they witness harassment. Susie Adams Oxford, Mississippi I was appalled to read about the prevalent sexual harassment experienced by female river guides. My family has taken several rafting trips, all of them—perhaps coincidentally—with female guides. In every case, my preteen daughter was in awe of these strong, capable…

1 Pack Extra Snacks! Our editors love traveling with their canine companions so much that we featured a roundup of the best gear to keep dogs happy and healthy on the trail in this year’s Summer Buyer’s Guide (on newsstands and Outside Online in May). But after attempting to load six of the staff’s pooches into a single Jeep for the guide’s Parting Shot photo, we learned a valuable lesson: don’t ever run out of treats. “We didn’t bring enough and had to start using peanuts to keep them from knocking over $20,000 worth of equipment in the studio, not to mention the $30,000 camera,” says associate photography editor Leah Woodruff, whose pup, Finoula, was featured in the shoot. “I had to walk her three times that night—not fun.” 2 There’s Always…

LIKE A LOT OF people who’ve reached middle age, when I picture myself, I still see an invincible 20-year-old kid, ready to charge up mountains. Fortunately, I’m aware enough to know that at 44, I’m better off relying on my wisdom than my muscle, whether at work or at play. I’m more cautious these days, but also more precise. My experiences have served me well and I’ve evolved. I wish I could say the same of the Endangered Species Act. Like me the act was born in 1973. Passed at the height of the postwar environmental movement with overwhelming bipartisan support and signed by President Richard Nixon, it was a law as well as an ethical statement: no species of animal or plant should ever be permitted to go extinct. In the…

KATE BRANDT has always been an overachiever. Two-sport athlete. Voted most likely to succeed in high school. An Ivy League graduate. So it’s not surprising that at 33 she’s now charged with turning Google into the world leader in environmental practices. No big deal. Especially when you consider that her previous employer was Barack Obama. Early on a busy Monday morning in March, at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, Brandt is already bouncing from one meeting to the next. Most days she’s on her computer by 7 A.M. while riding the company’s shuttle to work. Today she’s plugging away at a new Google initiative to build cities based on the model of circular economy, a concept that aims to eliminate waste and pollution by emphasizing renewable materials and design. “We feel…

In 2003, Ilona Szwarc spent a year as a high school exchange student in the Texas Panhandle town of Canadian. For Szwarc, who was born and raised in Warsaw, Poland, going to the rodeo every week and visiting her girlfriends on their ranches was novel. “It made me think: What does it mean to be a girl here?” she says. After studying photography in New York City—focusing on how young women construct their identity as they mature—she decided to return to the Panhandle in 2012, where, for the first time, she noticed girls barrel racing, goat tying, and team roping in the junior rodeo. Szwarc, now 33, decided to spend 12 weeks following the cowgirls on the circuit, capturing them as they got ready in their trailers, competed in arenas,…