Outside October 2018

Fountain of Ire In our July issue, writer McKenzie Funk explored the controversial views of Liz Parrish, who served as the guinea pig for a potentially dangerous gene-therapy experiment with the goal of warding off the aging process (“I Am Patient Zero”). Readers were skeptical, finding her actions to be unrealistic, ill-informed, and selfish. Your readership deserves better than the pseudoscientific hype served up in this story. An “ordinary mom” could never eliminate aging by searching the internet, going to a few meetings, and then flying to Bogotá for “secret” injections. Death is as much a part of life as birth. Someday we may develop new treatments that will make growing old easier, but the changes will come from the National Institutes of Health, not some foolish huckster. Mike Maffett, M.D. Lake Burton, Georgia I’ve…

In 2009, on his first assignment for Outside, contributing editor Brian Mockenhaupt traveled to Afghanistan’s remote Kunar province, where he embedded with an Army platoon at a site called Observation Post Hatchet. The collection of spare plywood huts was home to 24 soldiers tasked with rooting out elusive Taliban soldiers in some of the country’s most rugged terrain. Mockenhaupt was the ideal reporter to capture the scene: he’d served two tours as an infantryman in Iraq before returning to a career in journalism, and as a result, the soldiers were quick to accept his presence. Not long after we published that story (“Fire on the Mountain,” November 2009), we sent Mockenhaupt back to the mountains to cover an expedition in Nepal comprised of experienced guides and military veterans. At the time,…

I DON’T REMEMBER exactly when I started following Sierra Quitiquit on Instagram, but it was several years ago. Since then, I’ve occasionally found myself scrolling her feed in a trance, getting pulled dozens of photos deep by her seemingly charmed life. Quitiquit, a 29-year-old professional skier from Utah, appears to be a laid-back woman who’s up for anything. One moment she’s lounging in her Dodge Ram van on a road trip through the Rockies, the next she’s playing a ukulele on a beach in Mexico or taking a cold plunge in a mountain stream. Not surprisingly, in the age of #influencers, these impressions are meticulously crafted. Quitiquit has more than 91,000 followers on Instagram, and like many other social-media personalities, she’s paid to tag brands in some of her posts. As…

River Jordan was 12 years old when his family moved onto a sailboat in 2000 and spent three years traveling through South America and the Caribbean. In the 18 years since, he’s made a career out of exploring the world, photographing the people and landscapes he encounters. “I have this real connection with the ocean,” he says. Jordan still travels widely from his home in Austin, Texas, though he doesn’t always go abroad to find good stories. In 2017, in Santa Barbara, California, he met John Hoadley, a sea urchin diver who invited Jordan to dive with him and document his wild, often dangerous undersea workplace. “Here’s a guy who jumps off his boat, way off the coast of California, into water that may not even have 15 feet of visibility,…

“I’M NOT AN EXPERT on birds,” says artist Jane Kim. “I’m an expert on the 243 birds I painted, in the position that I painted them.” Kim is referring to the work that went into From So Simple a Beginning, one of the world’s most ambitious natural-history murals. Covering a 2,500-square-foot wall in the Cornell Lab of Ornithology visitor center, it depicts avian species from every modern bird family, plus 26 extinct ancestors. Starting in 2013, Kim, a scientific illustrator, spent two and a half years researching and painting the feathered specimens in precise detail. “We saw the project as reaching a broad audience—people who care about art, birds, or just nature,” she says. “I didn’t realize the insanity of it until it was done, and then I was like, Holy…

ZARIA FORMAN Forman’s pastel drawings are often mistaken for photographs—which is impressive, given that her subjects are complex natural formations like vast glaciers and crashing waves. In 2016 and 2017, NASA invited her on two flights with Operation IceBridge, a multiyear campaign to monitor the poles and the effects of their changing climates. Forman produced drawings of rarely seen icy formations that she photographed while over Antarctica and the Arctic. An exhibit featuring these works opens at New York City’s Winston Wächter Fine Art on October 25. JENNY KENDLER Kendler’s Birds Watching is a breathtaking outdoor sculpture that consists of 100 oversize bird eyes arranged side by side. According to the artist-activist, the 40-foot-wide flock of peepers, made of colorful reflective film mounted on aluminum, represents species threatened by climate change. The piece…