Outside May 2018

I love your website. I am an out-of-shape, somewhat unhealthy, 63-year-old American Indian woman. I am also currently the chair of the National Tribal Caucus, an advisory committee to the EPA, and have been a tribal environmental director for years. I grew up on subsistence living. I remember my brother catching brown trout just outside Yellowstone and fishing for salmon for a month near Neah Bay, Washington. I’m telling you this so you will know that I appreciate all you report on. It is near and dear to everything I have ever lived and worked for. Keep going. PAULA BRITTON Willits, California MERIT BASED I am a 14-year-old Boy Scout working on my communication merit badge, and my family has subscribed to your magazine for years. I have always enjoyed your stories about amazing…

Plans for Expansion Last May, we dedicated an entire issue of Outside to the topic of women in the outdoors. The move was as overdue as it was historic for us. In the years preceding, readers had filled our inboxes with e-mails asking us to address the gender disparity in our coverage. We took their concerns seriously, and the May 2017 issue was a step toward tackling that imbalance, though we knew we were far from finished. Every month since, in print and online, we’ve made a company-wide effort to tell more stories about women and to seek out more women writers, photographers, and illustrators to feature in our pages. The angry letters have eased a little, and while there’s still room for improvement, we’re making progress. We also undertook that initiative…

EARLY THIS WINTER, the hundreds of climbers making plans for spring-summit attempts on Mount Everest suddenly faced a new set of rules. In December, the Nepalese government decreed that it would no longer issue permits to blind, solo, or double-amputee mountaineers for any of its high peaks. Furthermore, all expeditions would have to employ at least one Sherpa and would be forbidden from using helicopters to reach high camps. The regulations fit a pattern established by Nepal’s Ministry of Tourism, which in the past few years has issued a series of proclamations—climbers must announce plans to set records, trekkers must carry location beacons—that suggest improved management of its high-altitude peaks. Each new declaration generates a rash of international news reports about authorities making strides toward addressing safety at the top of…

TOM WALTON parks his bike and surveys the surrounding terrain. Where I see modest hills sheathed in uninspiring winter brown, he sees cycling gold. “The return on investment that we’ve had,” says Walton, kicking at the Arkansas dirt with his mountain-biking shoe, “proves that building urban singletrack is a great model for rural America.” Tom and Steuart Walton are both cycling nuts, and they’re trying to do for mountain biking what the family business did for retailing: change everything. In case you’re wondering: yes, Tom is one of those Waltons, grandson of Sam, founder of Walmart. And the modestly contoured Arkansas hills he’s hyping—maximum elevation maybe 1,500 feet—neighbor Bentonville, headquarters of the $500 billion company. The 34-year-old and his brother, Steuart, 36, are both cycling nuts, and they’re trying to do for…

WHEN YOU LIVE far from the city, it can feel like there are only two options: move or be forgotten. Yet a pair of new books—one set in the red-rock canyons of Utah, the other in the pastures of Pennsylvania—suggest a third possibility: adapt. In The Last Cowboys ($27, W.W. Norton), John Branch tells the story of the Wrights, who settled in southwestern Utah 156 years ago. Today patriarch Bill Wright tends to a couple hundred cattle. He and his wife, Evelyn, have 13 children and a herd of grandchildren; each year the family reunites to brand the new calves. Branch, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter at The New York Times, describes the action expertly—the noise, the dust, the smell of scorched flesh. “It smells like money,” one participant says. Maybe, but it…

Mountain, a new documentary by Australian director Jen Peedom, is more like a concert than a movie. That makes sense, given its conception as a visual collaboration with the Australian Chamber Orchestra. Scenes unfold without plot or context, keeping the focus on high-altitude cinematography, handled by mountaineer-filmmaker Renan Ozturk, and the score, created by ACO artistic director Richard Tognetti. There is no dialogue, just Willem Dafoe’s gravelly voice reciting a threadbare script by Robert Macfarlane, author of the climbing memoir Mountains of the Mind. “Some people don’t really get the film at all,” says Peedom, who also directed the 2015 documentary Sherpa. “For others it’s like a religious experience.” Screening this month at the Telluride, Colorado, Mountainfilm festival, Mountain has become the third-highest-grossing Australian documentary since it hit theaters there last…