Outside September/October 2022

Trusting the Process Working in the media business requires getting comfortable with a wide range of story-telling speeds. In the digital realm, being the first to report on a story is almost as important as getting it right, and a news event that happens at 8 A.M. often has to be turned into a published piece within an hour or two. Print, of course, lies at the opposite end of the spectrum. It’s not unusual for a year to go by between assigning a longform feature to a writer and sending the finished product off to the printer. Delayed gratification is part of the job, but I can’t remember a piece that tested my patience—or the author’s perseverance—more than this issue’s profile of Kurt Steiner (“School of Rocks,” page 82), the…

NINE YEARS AGO, when my oldest son was in kindergarten, his 6.5-hour school day included just 15 minutes of outdoor recess. That paltry interval was typical of our Minnesota public-school district. Worse, bad weather periodically meant that kids were kept inside to play, sometimes on screens. By first grade, our five-year-old, who was brimming with energy he should have burned through on the playground, started getting in trouble for wrestling his classmates. His punishment: staying inside during recess. I still get angry when I think about all this, because it was clear then, as it is now, that time outdoors is good for children’s physical and mental health. In recent years, the evidence has only increased: studies consistently show that getting outside boosts kids’ test scores, reduces stress, and improves behavior…

WHEN L. RENEE BLOUNT joined an expedition to scale Tanzania’s Kilimanjaro at the end of last year, her mission was to have fun and share her experience with others through photography. “I wanted to capture the joy of the journey. It’s not only the summit that matters,” says Blount, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was invited on the adventure by Andrew Alexander King, a 34-year-old mountaineer from Los Angeles who’s training to climb the Seven Summits. Blount trekked 45 miles over three and a half days through farmland, rainforest, bogs, an alpine desert, and arctic zones, and she suffered a bout ofaltitude sickness at 15,000 feet. “I couldn’t keep anything down and just kind of soldiered through it,” she says. Blount and King reached the top of…

A FEW YEARS AGO, I spent a week cycling through the Italian and French Alps with a deluxe tour group whose selling point was a pre- and post-ride dose of electric brain stimulation. Protocols were based on what the Bahrain Merida cycling team was trying at the time, zapping neurons to enhance performance and recovery. I wanted to know whether the technology worked, but I was also wrestling with a more nebulous question: Would reaching each day’s summit a few minutes sooner actually make my trip better? If I was one of the Bahrain Merida riders in that summer’s Tour de France, the answer would be obvious. Winning races is a lot more fun than the alternative. But any competitive edge is short-lived. “Once an effective technology gets adopted in a…

ROLAND WELKER brushes burning coals from the blackened carcass of a porcupine roasting over a crackling campfire. “I did manage to graduate high school for Mom and Dad,” he says, as a video camera captures him tending to the dead rodent. “But since then, I’ve been running it hard. I wasn’t around much for them.” The footage is from the History Channel survival show Alone, in which ten wilderness junkies live in complete isolation in the great outdoors, assisted by ten survival items. They film themselves hunting, making shelter, and enduring months of solitude. The last one to quit takes home $500,000. The seventh season, in which Welker appears, was filmed in the fall of 2019 on the banks of Canada’s Great Slave Lake. Prior to the porcupine cookout, the hunting guide…

THERE’S A DISH my grandmother used to cook, and my mom after her. We called it Grandma Helen’s Hash Brown Casserole, and you probably devoured some version of it if you grew up in the Midwest before “organic” was a thing. Made with two pounds of frozen hash browns, two sticks of butter, a pint of sour cream, 12 ounces of cheddar cheese, half a box of cornflakes, and the obligatory can of cream of chicken soup, Grandma’s casserole was a staple at holidays, family reunions, and church potlucks. It was also so popular at memorial services that my Indiana in-laws still refer to it as Funeral Potatoes. Sure, it was an artery-clogging cholesterol bomb, but it soothed the soul like no kale salad ever could. What does this have to do…