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Inside Alex Honnold’s Tricked-Out New Adventure Van
Back in 2014, pro climber Alex Honnold gave us a tour of the 2002 Ford Econoline E150 he used as his mobile base camp. That van served him...
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You might be thinking more about snow than water right now. But that means it’s a great time to invest in off-season gear. And a bunch of BO...
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No one wants to have to use first aid. But everyone wants the goods when bad stuff goes down in the backcountry. You don’t have to try to f...
Sunday, March 31, 2019
Hooked up on this beautiful Ōmilu yesterday. First in a long while, caught, and released.
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Trending: Our Top Outdoor Stories This Week https://ift.tt/2I3pYR2
A recap of popular stories this past week, March 24-30, 2019.
1) New Route Up Everest: Nat Geo Photographer to Attempt Massive Feat
Next month, Cory Richards and Esteban “Topo” Mena will attempt to summit Everest along a route that has “never been touched by humans before.”
2) Best Men’s Running Shorts of 2019: My Favorite Come From a Little-Known Brand
Looking for the best running shorts for men in 2019? Here are the best men’s running shorts, budget running shorts, long-distance running shorts, and a buyer’s guide.
3) Hack the Dividend: REI ‘Member Coupons’ Offer Huge Discounts
REI dividends are in the mail. So how do you decide what to spend your annual member rewards money on? Let us help.
4) Crazy Rooftop Tent Weighs Just 55 Pounds, Floats on Rivers
At 55 pounds and less than 6 inches deep when stowed, GentleTent’s inflatable rooftop tent may be the lightest on the market. Oh, and it also floats on water.
5) Grand Canyon Tourist Falls 1,000 Feet to Death, 2nd Park Fatality This Week
One member of a tour group from Hong Kong reportedly fell Thursday while attempting to take a selfie near Eagle Point. Park officials also recovered another body in a different area of the park earlier this week.
The post Trending: Our Top Outdoor Stories This Week appeared first on GearJunkie.
from GearJunkie https://ift.tt/2I3pYR2
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Ice Climbing Proves It's Worthy of the Olympics
Late last month, Denver’s Civic Center Park hosted the sixth and final UIAA Ice Climbing World Cup of the 2019 season. And for the first time in the competition circuit’s 19-year history, the action took place in a large metropolitan city center.
Thirty-eight men and 26 women from 15 countries fought their way up a 50-foot-tall arch for a spot on the podium and for the overall World Cup title. An estimated 25,000 people came out to watch over the weekend—more than an average Denver Nuggets game and the largest-ever live audience at an Ice Climbing World Cup.
The event was an experiment of sorts. Most Ice Climbing World Cups are held in small mountain towns, such as Saas-Fee, Switzerland, or Rabenstein, Italy. But as rock climbing prepares to make its debut at the 2020 Olympics, officials at the International Climbing and Mountaineering Federation (UIAA), the governing body for competition ice climbing, see an opening for their sport. The goal is the 2026 Winter Olympics.
“Before Denver, the biggest attendance at an ice-climbing competition was 2,000 people,” says Phil Powers, CEO of the American Alpine Club, the organization that hosted the competition. “So I think we’ve proven a point.”
Attendance at the event got a boost from a concurrent festival on the same grounds called Barbegazi, named for the mythical French and Swiss gnomes. Spread out in the park before the climbing tower were about a dozen stations for weird and wintry activities, such as human curling (on snow tubes), ax throwing (hatchets, really), lumberjack games (sawing logs), arm wrestling, fat biking, snowskating, a snowball slingshot, an obstacle course, and a mini ice maze. Entry to the festival, and to watch the climbing competition, was free.
Ice-climbing competitions can use all the help they can get. Even within the climbing community, ice climbers are a tiny minority, and competition ice climbers are a fraction of that. So it’s no wonder that ice competitions have never garnered much attention. Still, competition ice climbing is arguably more exciting to watch than competition rock climbing. Like in rock competitions, ice also has lead and speed disciplines (bouldering is left out for the obvious reason that landing on the ground with sharp, spiky ice tools in your hands and crampons strapped to your feet is a recipe for disaster).
In the lead event, difficulty is the game. Athletes climb a route of plastic and metal holds with their ice tools and kick their crampons directly into the plywood wall wherever they want. Their goal is to make it to the top of the route, or as high as they can, within a set time, generally between four and eight minutes. The route gets progressively harder the higher it gets.
Speed climbing, on the other hand, is usually on real ice. The speed wall in Denver was imported from Austria and made from eight-inch-thick panels of ice. In speed, two competitors race side by side up the wall, then switch sides and repeat. Top competitors’ times range between seven and 15 seconds. Picture vertical running up a featureless skating rink.
While rock climbing is very precise and subtle, ice is barbaric. It’s full of swinging and kicking and flying shards of ice. It requires precision and brute force. From a nonclimber’s perspective, it’s easier to grasp. “Not only is ice climbing a legitimate international sport, it’s also wild and crazy, and the athletes are doing these interesting, acrobatic actions 40 and 50 feet off the ground with spikes on their hands and feet,” Powers says. “The struggle is more obvious, and the falls are dramatic—there’s real risk involved.”
Over the course of the weekend, at least two competitors stabbed themselves with their own ice tools during the speed competition. David Bouffard of Canada punctured his thigh badly enough to need to go to the hospital, yet he still managed to take home a silver medal. American Marcus Garcia gashed himself in the thigh during the semifinals (and kept climbing) and again in the arm during finals. “He should have gone for stitches both times, but he just kept competing,” Powers says. Officials had to shovel the blood out of the snow at the base of the wall.
Ice climbing was an exhibition sport in the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics—the competition wasn’t included in the medal count, but it took place during the Games to show off and promote the sport. Several now classic Winter Olympic sports debuted as demonstrations and later evolved into medal events: curling, freestyle skiing, and short-track speed skating, to name a few. If last month’s World Cup was any indication, we might see ice climbing earn its own place as an official Olympic sport sooner than we think. And even though the Olympics won’t have a Barbegazi festival, Powers isn’t worried.
“The Olympics want things that are attractive,” he says. “And ice climbing is attractive.”
from Outside Magazine: All https://ift.tt/2CMvdAO
Inside the Mind of a Hurricane Chaser
Around 7 A.M. on September 20, 2017, the wind has become a roaring white wall. In his hotel room, Josh Morgerman presses his hand flat against the trembling glass of the patio door. He’s filming, and his left hand appears in the shot, heavy with the skull-shaped biker ring he bought on the Sunset Strip and the pinky ring he had made in the shape of his brand logo—a lowercase i over the meteorological symbol for a cyclone. The glass flutters under his palm.
Outside, Hurricane Maria churns over Humacao, Puerto Rico, a Category 5 storm, winds moving at the speed of a jet at takeoff. He feels the familiar gut clench of fear: primal, perfect.
An older woman, a young woman, and a boy are huddled inside his bathroom. Strangers. The windows in their room exploded hours ago, and they took shelter here. Morgerman’s camera flicks back and forth between their grim faces and the chaos outside. He’s narrating, handing them pillows: “I always say the bathroom’s the best place to be during the really bad winds.” They look as if they’re at a funeral. He sounds like he’s at a birthday party. The wind rattles the glass.
“Got to be some of the strongest winds of the morning,” Morgerman says. He should stay in the bathroom with them, but, as always, he can’t stay far from the storm.
At 49, Morgerman has survived the inner cores of nearly 50 hurricanes—by choice. He is one of a small cadre of men (they’re all men) who chase giant tropical storms around the world: wherever residents are trying to evacuate, Morgerman is usually on an inbound flight. If he’s lucky, he will be able to place himself underneath a huge rotating lathe of air and water driven by the energy from heated oceans, spinning around a single cyclopean eye that can be as small as five miles wide.
He calls it an addiction. “It’s like a hunger for food or sex,” he says. “It’s very innate, it’s hard to verbalize, and it drives you.”
It’s a weird time to love hurricanes. Over the decades that Morgerman has been chasing them, the conversation around these storms has shifted. Scientists say it’s still unclear exactly how our rapidly warming climate is affecting the normal on-again, off-again hurricane cycle. Still, a series of absolutely catastrophic hurricane seasons for the U.S. have changed how we think about these storms—and perhaps about the kind of person who would spend their life chasing them.
Puerto Rico’s first people, the Taino, knew Juracán as a god. Petroglyphs thousands of years old show a howling mouth and flailing arms, spinning in the same vortical spiral familiar today from satellite imagery. This part of the world has always been under the whim of weather.
But Morgerman grew up in a gentler latitude. A child of the suburbs outside New York City, he had the misfortune of having been born in 1970, a lull in the hurricane cycle. The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation is a roughly 20-year weather pattern that alternates between warm periods, when storms are common, and cool periods, when they’re rare. The 1940s and 1950s had been a warm period, with ferocious storms. But in the cold period of the seventies through the early nineties, storms were rarer and smaller—what one meteorologist called “nice, well-mannered, housebroken hurricanes.”
In 1976, Hurricane Belle swept over the Long Island house where six-year-old Morgerman was sleeping. It wasn’t much of a storm, but he remembers waking the next morning to find the world transformed: trees down, his family’s garden destroyed, everything strange and gleaming in the poststorm sunlight.
“I was like, ‘What the fuck happened?’” he recalls.
That pretty much started his obsession with extreme weather. (At least, that’s how he remembers it. His mother traces it to watching The Wizard of Oz when he was four.) “People see me as this adrenaline junkie,” he says, “but the genesis of it is, I’m really a Category 5 nerd.”
Growing up, he sent a steady stream of pencil-and-paper letters to the National Hurricane Center in Miami, just to ask questions. Sometimes its staff even wrote back. He researched old storms and tried to work hurricanes into his school reports.
In 1985, Hurricane Gloria swirled up the coast, the first major cyclone to hit New York in 25 years. Newscasters called it “the storm of the century.” Morgerman was 15; he’d been waiting for a storm like this since he could remember. He tracked the eye as it crossed the Atlantic, barreling closer and closer. Finally, it was nearly on top of his Long Island suburb. “The wind starts to go nutty, the house is shaking, trees are being blown down. Holy crap, I was so excited,” he recalls. As Morgerman and his family watched from indoors, the ground of their backyard heaved, and an enormous willow tree uprooted, a felled Goliath.
Morgerman’s mother started to cry.
“She loved that tree,” he says. “It was the biggest tree in the whole neighborhood, a hundred-year-old giant tree. And I remember—I felt really bad.”
Then Morgerman’s father turned to him and said something he never forgot: “This is what you wanted, right?”
This is what he wanted: it’s almost dawn in Humacao, and outside his hotel room, the wind has started to hurl itself against the glass door. Sometimes in a storm this bad, Morgerman forgets it’s just a natural process happening on the planet, just a bunch of moist air that rose too quickly. Instead it seems as if it’s something with a mind, something angry. A monster. Or a god.
When he talks about being this close to a storm, he uses language that he knows is frankly erotic and a little creepy. “That inner core, to me, it’s almost like pornography,” he’ll say later. “When I look at a radar shot of a really perfectly formed hurricane, I just imagine getting inside that.”
He’s currently single but says he always makes it clear to prospective partners that his hurricane habit is nonnegotiable. “It’s why I’m not married and I don’t have kids,” he says. “It sounds very selfish. I just didn’t want to be encumbered.”
At home in West Hollywood, Morgerman keeps a constant eye on computer models like Global Forecast System, which predict weather systems weeks ahead of time. When he catches the scent of a storm, he undergoes a werewolf-like change. “I start getting into hunting mode,” he says. “The closer it is to hurricane time, more and more adrenaline, less and less appetite, less and less sleep.”
Now he hasn’t slept in 24 hours, riding a mixture of terror and joy. Everything feels sharp and real. This is the feeling he’s always chasing. This is the feeling he always feels guilty about later, when the sky clears and he can sleep again.
Behind him, the older woman says something in Spanish, but the wind drowns it out as he slides the door open and steps out into the storm.
In 2004 and 2005, hurricanes started demolishing American cities again. “It’s a ‘new era’ of hurricanes,” CNN reported after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans: “Hurricanes aren’t behaving like many of us are used to them behaving. They’re bigger and meaner, and more numerous than many people have seen.”
The pendulum had swung back, the hurricane cycle switching from cold to warm. That was normal, meteorologists said. Max Mayfield, then-director of the National Hurricane Center, testified before a Senate subcommittee in October 2005 that these destructive new storms were the result of “natural fluctuations,” and “not enhanced substantially by global warming.” Another NHC meteorologist assured the senators that the effect of climate change on hurricanes would be “minimal for the foreseeable future.”
At the time, Morgerman was 35 and living in landlocked Prague. He hadn’t become a meteorologist; instead, at his father’s insistence, he’d gone to Harvard for a liberal arts degree, and eventually started his own brand consultancy with a friend. Post-Soviets were good clients—they needed all the branding help they could get—so he had moved to the Czech Republic, which was fine, but he pined for storms.
In the past, he’d occasionally tried to deliberately place himself in the path of a hurricane. The first time was in 1991, when he was still in college; he’d taken a train to Rhode Island in hopes of catching up to Hurricane Bob. He didn’t quite make it. His second attempt was in 1999. Morgerman had called his business partner, Michael Horton, and disclosed a desire he’d never told anyone about before. “He very shyly confessed he wanted to chase these storms,” Horton recalled. Horton told him to go.
So he went—to Texas, where he was able to intercept Hurricane Bret. It was his first taste of a real Gulf hurricane, a wilder creature than the neutered East Coast hurricanes he’d experienced as a kid. He drove into the eye and stood in the fury of the storm. He was hooked.
He flew to the Everglades to chase Hurricane Wilma in 2005. Two years later, he headed to Mexico for Hurricane Dean. In 2008, he was in Texas again for Hurricane Dolly, then Louisiana for Gustav, then back to Texas for Ike. Chasing storms, first a hobby, became a vocation.
“He invented it for himself,” Horton recalled.
By this time, there were other weather nerds hanging out together on message boards. Anyone with a Midwest address and a truck could chase a tornado. But there were only a handful of storm lovers who had the means and the liberty to chase hurricanes across the globe, and over the next decade and a half, Morgerman would become one the most prominent members of that small club. To finance his habit, he made a second career of it: since 2014, his chases have been completely funded by media companies like CBS, the Weather Channel, and WeatherNation, and later this month, he’ll star in Hurricane Man, a documentary show from UKTV and BBC Worldwide.
He also started recording video footage and taking atmospheric readings. He’s not a scientist, he stresses, but sometimes he’s the only person there to do it. A 2018 report in the Los Angeles Times detailed how the data Morgerman recorded during Hurricane Odile (from under a desk in a hotel lobby as the windows imploded) ended up disqualifying Mexico from a desperately needed insurance-bond payout. Morgerman had measured the pressure at the center of the storm at 943.1 millibars, nine millibars too high for the terms of the bond.
Morgerman agonizes over being painted as a disaster tourist or a meddlesome amateur. At the same time, the brand consultant in him recognizes that any coverage builds his profile.
Comparing himself to a rock musician, he says, “I feel like a season is an album, and each chase is a single. There is that pressure every year as a chaser, that you’re only as good as your last smash, your last chase, your last hit.”
Then he adds: “I probably sound like a dick, describing as smash hits these events that kill people.”
His greatest chase—and the worst death toll he’s ever seen—was Super Typhoon Haiyan in 2013.
In Tacloban City, Philippines, Morgerman was shooting footage of the monster storm when he heard people screaming for help from his hotel’s ground-floor windows as the storm surge rushed in. When a family emerged from the fragile building across the way and stumbled into the waist-high, filthy water, he put down the camera and staggered out to aid them. His memory, he says, is a blur—but film shot by another stormchaser shows him pulling a grandmother across the water on a raft, carrying a weeping girl up the darkened hotel stairs to higher ground.
Later, he’d stay in touch with this family, even donate money to help rebuild their house, something he’s never admitted publicly before. “I wanted it to be a righteous act,” he says.
What he does remember, though, are the corpses he saw after the cyclone passed. Over 6,000 people were dead. Morgerman went back to streets he’d walked the day before, where there was now nothing but wreckage. His high had disappeared. When he got home to L.A., he’d be a mess. But for now, he shut down whatever he was feeling.
It’s what he does sometimes with strong emotions: he freezes them. Like when his father died unexpectedly in 2008, and their last conversation had been a stupid, petty argument. “The grief I had was so toxic, so profound, the only way I could manage was, OK, I feel this, but I’m going to put it away, how that day I wasn’t a good son,” he says.
As he surveyed Haiyan’s damage, he did the same thing, packing away his emotions. Now wasn’t the time to react to the horrors he was seeing.
Soon he realized his hand felt too light. The flood water had stripped off his father’s ring—the one he’d worn since his father died. He felt a pang, an echo of loss, but it seemed stupid to him to grieve over losing an heirloom when everyone around him had lost everything.
Then someone called out to him: Hey, look over there! He looked. There in the mud and wreckage was a gleam of gold. It was his father’s ring. The storm had given it back.
On the other side of the world, the United Nations Climate Change Conference was meeting in Poland just as Haiyan struck. At the conference, Filipino UN delegate Yeb Sano, in tears, led a hunger strike, calling for action to prevent “a future where super typhoons become a way of life.” Others declared the storm a “climate injustice.”
Scientists who had been cautious to comment on whether climate change was having an effect on hurricanes were starting to be more bold. “In a warming world, [scientists] say,” one reporter from The New York Times wrote recently, “hurricanes will be stronger, for a simple reason: warmer water provides more energy that feeds them. Hurricanes and other extreme storms will also be wetter, for a simple reason: Warmer air holds more moisture. And, storm surges from hurricanes will be worse, for a simple reason that has nothing to do with the storms themselves: sea levels are rising.”
It’s still impossible to determine how any individual cyclone might be shaped by global warming, and different models lead to different predictions. But it’s becoming clearer and clearer that the climate is changing in a way that will lead to fiercer, more devastating storms.
Morgerman stresses that he’s not a climate-change skeptic—but he doesn’t take a position on climate justice or its lack thereof. “I just hunt the hurricanes,” he said.
It’s daylight in Humacao.
At some point, the family huddled in the bathroom left with the hotel staff. He never learned their names; he will never see them again.
Outside, the sky is clearing. The wind has slowed. Rubble covers the streets: roof tiles, bits of metal, tree limbs. On the hillsides, there are no leaves left on any of the trees, just a skeletal range of jagged branches. He films everything.
His heart rate is slowing, exhaustion coming on. The high is fading, but it’s all right. There will be more storms to hunt. They will only get stronger.
from Outside Magazine: All https://ift.tt/2V8tMnE
R
Here’s What Etsy Says Will Be Hot For 2019 (and It’s Different From Other Trend Reports) https://freshome.com/etsy-2019-home-trends/
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Saturday, March 30, 2019
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