Outside November 2018

Kindred Spirit For “The Monk’s Tale” (August), writer Bill Donahue explored the life of his late uncle, a Benedictine monk who left the church for a quiet life in a Pyrenees village. One reader felt a kinship with William Joseph Donahue. I think we’re all a bit unconventional like Uncle Bill. I’ve served as a state-prison chaplain, a hostage negotiator, and an EMT. Many of us experience intimacy with our Creator by being outdoors with His creation. Father Bob Povish Boyertown, Pennsylvania Can’t Hold Water Mark Sundeen fails to consider facts on southern Utah’s water supply and demand and the economic benefits of the Lake Powell Pipeline (“The Green Green Grass of Home”). The incomplete reporting misleads readers to believe the project is not necessary. It is. Most of southern Utah relies on a single water…

A six-year-old boy goes missing in the woods of northeast Oregon and must travel miles through the rugged backcountry to find his way home. A young couple from South Carolina encounters a murderous stranger on the Appalachian Trail. A group of teenagers on a school-sponsored climb takes shelter in a tiny snow cave as a relentless storm traps them in a whiteout high on Oregon’s Mount Hood. And a California retiree, pursuing his lifelong dream of sailing solo around the world, begins to go mad in a remote part of the Pacific Ocean. This month’s issue of Outside will drop you into some truly terrifying narratives, ones that are as beautifully told as they are haunting. Indeed, they are exactly the kinds of stories we were looking to tell when we…

IT’S TEMPTING for those of us who love the outdoors to think of ourselves as belonging to one of two groups. There’s my own crew of sportsmen and women, known as the hook and bullet crowd; and then there’s the outdoor recreationists or “nonconsumptive users,” a term for hikers, climbers, kayakers, birders, mountain bikers, and others who might enjoy being around wild creatures without ever eating one for dinner. From cold shoulders at the trailhead to outright hostility, the tension between these groups can be traced back to at least 1903, when the preservationist John Muir asked President Theodore Roosevelt, a dedicated hunter, when he was going to get beyond “the boyishness of killing things”—a glib question to put to a man whose hands-on relationship with nature later inspired him to…

A DUTCH PHOTOGRAPHER HAS SPENT A DECADE CAPTURING INDIGENOUS IDENTITY As a young boy, Jimmy Nelson lived with his father, a geologist and explorer, in developing countries around the world. Now 51, he speaks of those years as the most uncultivated of his life—a time when he hung from trees and ran naked with his friends. But when he turned seven, he was sent to a Catholic boarding school in England, where he studied for the next ten years. For a free-ranging kid, the difference between those two worlds was jarring, and Nelson describes his work photographing tribal communities as a search for that lost wild self. His first book, Before They Pass Away (2013), sparked global conversation: the tribal-rights organization Survival International was a loud critic, arguing that it…

1 ARNHEM LAND, NORTHERN TERRITORY INDIGENOUS CULTURE, ART, BEACHES The best thing about traveling in Australia’s far north is connecting with the Aboriginal people who have roamed these canyons and coasts for some 65,000 years. Nowhere is their culture more alive than in Arnhem Land, a 37,500-square-mile preserve with rusty red coastlines, rugged escarpments, and croc-filled oxbow lakes. You can camp on the Cobourg Peninsula with a permit, but it’s easier to leave the planning to professionals. On Intrepid Travel’s seven-day trek through the region, you’ll camp and stay in lodges, eat bush foods like mud crabs and tart billy goat plums, and listen to Aboriginal guides tell Dreamtime stories about everything from creation myths to morality. After spending the last two nights in an oceanfront cabin on Bremer Island, a haven…

SURROUNDED BY sweeping views of Ruth Glacier and the jagged Alaska Range, the Sheldon Chalet welcomed its first guests in February, but its debut has been nearly half a century in the making. In the 1970s, trailblazing bush pilot Don Sheldon and his wife, Roberta, had lofty dreams of bringing adventure tourism to their almost five-acre homestead in the shadow of North America’s tallest mountain. Four decades later, their children discovered Don’s blueprints for a hexagonal structure and reimagined the building with a level of luxury that early Alaskan pioneers could never have fathomed. Guests arrive by helicopter from Talkeetna and are welcomed with champagne, oysters, king crab legs, and knockout views of Denali’s 20,310-foot summit, ten miles to the northwest. Don might have rolled his eyes at the faux-fur throws…