I first started running in 2013. At the time (read: pre-parenthood), looking like a core athlete, without looking like I cared about being core athlete, was extremely important to me. Being a professional gear tester elevated the egotistical quandary: I needed to take advantage of the trail miles I was logging by testing high-end running tops for work, but frankly, I was embarrassed by how shiny, tight, and nipple-revealing the majority of them were. I took circuitous routes from my apartment to the trails that splinter out of downtown Ashland, Oregon, to avoid seeing buddies or receiving comments from the buskers who play music around the town’s plaza. I have since lost that self-consciousness but have also found the perfect tee to solve my previous hangups: Patagonia’s Capilene Cool Trail Shirt.
I’ve been testing the Trail Shirt for six months now, and it’s the tee that I grab most for both exercise and regular wear. I have worn hundreds of synthetics over more than six years at Outside and Capilene Cool is currently my favorite material. Why? It mimics the soft feel and casual look of cotton while maintaining the moisture-wicking benefits of synthetic better than any shirt I have tested so far. The result is a tee that’s plenty comfortable for long hot trail miles and can seamlessly swap in for your relaxed cotton shirt.
On top of being built from amazing material, it fits extremely well. The Trail Shirt nicely toes the line between athletic and relaxed. The result is flattering for my sub-perfect dad bod without being overly boxy during burpees or sprint exercises. And the gusseted armpits have delivered zero chafing over the hundreds of miles I’ve run in it.
The HeiQ odor control also works shockingly well. The tech is a recycled silver chloride—which is a common antimicrobial addition to textiles—that Patagonia claims does no harm to the skin and will last the lifetime of the shirt. I planned to wash the Trail Tee after soaking it during an 18-mile long run with nearly 3,000 feet of elevation gain last weekend but didn’t get around to doing laundry before my wife and I had scheduled to photograph it. I pulled it out of the bottom of my laundry hamper where it had been marinating in my sweat for four days, and had no problem wearing it again for the shoot. It was so fresh, in fact, that I am still wearing it two days (and two runs) later as I write this review in a coffee shop. While I recognize re-wearing this much is a testament to my lack of personal hygiene, the fact that people are sitting next to me right now speaks volumes to the odor mitigating technology.
I love this tee because it quietly does everything I expect from a technical layer extremely well while still looking good. I plan to wear it during a trail marathon in November and I’m confident that it will remain comfortable, wick sweat throughout and not chafe. And it’ll look like I’m just wearing a plain old tee.
Lisa Zaccone was racing her coworkers to Chicago. Except, not really. They were tracking the number of steps they took each day, converting those steps into approximate mileage, and competing to see who, in a hypothetical trip starting at their office in Ann Arbor, Michigan, would arrive first in the Windy City.
Doing those calculations every day for everyone in the office was a lot of work, so Zaccone asked her son, John, a 31-year-old software engineer, to create an app that tracked the progress of their footrace for them.
John didn’t say no, even though he had never developed an app before. He wasn’t that kind of software engineer. But his mom was asking, and who can turn down their mom? So he began working on a way to track those steps. However, John thought he could do better than the imagined road walk from Michigan to Illinois that his mother and her coworkers had come up with. Instead, he coded the Appalachian Trail.
Today, John’s mom has 2,000 people to thru-hike with—virtually. That’s how many people have downloaded the app, called Walk the Distance, since June, and it’s not far off the total number of thru-hikers (2,272) who successfully completed the actual trail during its first five decades of existence. Currently, the app is only available for iOS, but John’s developing an Android version, which should be ready next year.
The app connects to your iPhone’s Health app, which measures the mileage you’ve walked while carrying your phone, even when the app isn’t in use. John’s app uses that information to then show you where you would be on the Appalachian Trail if you were thru-hiking. And you’re not hiking alone. Literally every other user is visible on the same map, passing you and getting passed by you.
“Some people tell their friends to download the app at the same time, and then they’re motivated to keep up with each other,” John says. “I want it to be a social experience.”
Having thru-hiked the Pacific Crest Trail last year—physically, not virtually—I was intrigued when I first heard about the app. It’s the latest example of technology finding a window into the world of thru-hiking, much like the navigation apps that many actual thru-hikers now rely on. I love the idea. Not everyone has the time, money, or ability to hike the Appalachian Trail, even if they like the idea of thru-hiking. Hiking virtually might not be as good as the real thing, but it’s a lighthearted and easy way to connect with the trail and get a sense of how long it takes to hike 2,000 miles.
(Photo: Courtesy Walk the Distance)
“I went to school in Blacksburg, Virginia, which is basically right off the Appalachian Trail,” says John, who has backpacked a few sections of the AT. “I really wanted to make an app for the people who have the inspiration or the dream to hike the whole trail.” As users progress, they pass virtual signposts, which include shelters, scenic points, and trail-volunteer information. The first 150 miles are free, then it costs $3 to walk the rest of the way to the trail’s northern terminus in Maine, Mount Katahdin.
For a person walking 10,000 steps a day, John calculated it would take an average of 440 days to hike the entire trail on Walk the Distance. That’s more than twice as long as it would take most thru-hikers, and it doesn’t take into account elevation change or a heavy pack. But it’s still an impressive achievement, given that the average adult in the United States only walks about 5,000 steps per day. In 2020, John says, he wants to challenge people using his app to walk the entire trail within the calendar year, which would be slightly more than 12,000 steps a day.
But he isn’t content with just the Appalachian Trail. His next coding project? The Pacific Crest Trail. Who knows, maybe one day you can become a virtual triple crowner.
One of the toughest nights of Steve Fassbinder’s life was spent stuck in an emergency bivy on the 19,000-foot Sim La pass in northern Pakistan, waiting out a midnight storm while his fat bike hung from an ice screw two pitches below his tent. Fassbinder and his expedition partner, Andrew Burr, had traveled there in 2017 to ride fat bikes around the Latok mountains. But at that point in their trip, they hadn’t pedaled a single stroke. After spending a week acclimatizing and getting sick at a 15,000-foot base camp, he and Burr spent a full day pushing their bikes through an ice field booby-trapped with deadly crevasses. Then it got too steep to push, so they pulled out their axes and crampons and climbed ten pitches to reach the pass, tugging theirbikes on ropes behind them. At midnight, they set up camp and passed out, exhausted. The following morning, they pushed on for four miles, over glaciers topped with a thick layer of slush, a safety rope connecting them in case one of them fell into a crevasse. “It clearly wasn’t a bike loop,” Fassbinder says. He and Burr completed the 110-mile expedition in five grueling days, most of that spent walking instead of pedaling.
Locals tried to tell him that they’d never seen a bicycle in those mountains. But Fassbinder has pulled off the impossible before, earning himself the nickname Doom.The 45-year-old is a former professional mountain biker who dominated 24-hour solo races in the early 2000s, racing his singlespeed through the night on technical looped courses. He won three 24-hour solo world championships during his racing career and was eventually inducted into the 24-Hour Solo Mountain Bike Racer Hall of Fame. And he did this all while holding down a full-time job, working either as a bike messenger or in construction during the years he raced professionally.
After leaving the racing scene behind in 2009, Fassbinder carved out a niche for himself as an adventurer, with a talent for multisport expeditions that combine mountain biking with pack rafting and climbing. On one trip, he took a small plane deep into Utah’s desert to bike through slot canyons, nab the first ascent of a steep crack called the Pinnacle, then pack raft down the Dirty Devil River. In 2018, he biked and rafted a collective 1,000 miles across Tajikistan. Most recently, he and a few friends traversed the San Juan Mountains by bike, llama, and raft, covering 300 miles in nine days, including 65 miles of floating the Rio Grande.
From his racing days to his latest expedition, one thing remains constant with Fassbinder: the man knows how to suffer. Which explains how he was able to push through the absolute crap conditions in Pakistan. It explains why he and Burr continued, trudging through misery and uncertainty, until the morning of day three, when they woke up to bluebird skies and a landscape that had refrozen overnight to reveal endless miles of grippy ice, frozen in waves and berms, now spread out before their fat tires. “It was like the biggest skate park you could imagine,” Fassbinder says. “We hauled ass, pedaling our bikes and descending from 17,000 feet in elevation to 13,000 feet.” After crawling over 12 miles in the first two days, the duo covered 60 miles in a day and proved one of Fassbinder’s guiding principles in life: if you’re willing to put up with some pain, you’ll probably get rewarded.
“That trip was horrible, with some of the lowest points I’ve ever had on any adventure, but the highs were super high,” he says from his home in Durango, Colorado. “I know that there’s always going to be a bad spot on my trips. That bad spot might last for an hour or it might last for three days. But I also know there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe it’s a good piece of trail or a remote lake. There’s always that carrot that keeps me moving.”
Fassbinder typically knocks out one large international expedition a year; he’s currently planning a big trip to Canada’s Baffin Island, which will include bikepacking, pack rafting, and—a twist—conducting some climate research. But he spends most of his time exploring the American West, where the terrain isparticularly well suited to his skills in biking, rafting, and climbing. The development of pack rafts over the past decade has opened up landscapes that were previously off-limits to Fassbinder by bike. “A pack raft is like a giant key that gets you into places,” he says. “When the road ends, you blow up your boat and continue down that river or lake, seeing things you’d never see if you only stuck to the trails and roads.”
Unlike most professional expeditioners, Fassbinder completes his adventures “off the couch,” without any focused training. It’s a mentality he’s had since his earliest days of racing mountain bikes. “I was never a training guy,” he says. “I never tracked mileage, never had a peaking calendar. When I worked as a bike messenger, I just rode my bike all the time. If I was working construction, I’d ride my bike to the job site every day.”
Although Fassbinder doesn’t ride as muchthese days, he still takes an off-the-cuff approach to his adventures, focusing more on learning the destination’s terrain or culture than increasing mileage in the saddle. He insists that anybody who’s reasonably fit can take a similar approach to big, multi-day trips—the key is to change your expectations. “You just won’t be fast,” he says. “But it doesn’t matter. You’re not racing. For these expeditions, you don’t have to have this go-to-the-gym kind of attitude.”
The right mindset helps, too. Fassbinder thinks that being able to power through adversity is a skill anyone can learn, the same aspedaling a bike or paddling a raft. In fact, he’s banking on it and has started a new guide business with his girlfriend, Lizzy Scully, that will take clients on multi-day day trips biking, canyoneering, and pack rafting through central Utah. “I won’t make my clients suffer the way I like to suffer, but it’ll be super exciting stuff,” Fassbinder says.
His goal, both for his clients and anyone watching, is to show that his favorite kind of adventures—riveting, lengthy, and sometimes grueling—are attainable for almost anyone. “It’s a mental thing,” he says. “True, people have different abilities to ignore pain, but if you set your mind to something, you can do it.”
The job of a base layer is to regulate temperature and move moisture away from your skin. When combined with other layers, it keeps you comfortable. But in warmer temperatures, or during high-output activities, base layers can provide too much insulation. That’s a problem Smartwool has set out to solve with its new Intraknit range of men’s and women’s merino-wool base layers. Smartwool has incorporated ventilation zones designed to dump excess heat. And in the process, the brand came up with a new manufacturing technique that’s less wasteful, too.
I first wore the base layers during an elk hunt here in Montana in early September. For those of you who don’t harvest your own healthy, sustainable meat, that means I wore them all day, every day, while hiking lots of miles in big terrain with a very heavy pack. That they worked with the rest of my layers to help keep me warm and dry in wet and cold conditions wasn’t surprising—we’ve all worn merino base layers before. What was surprising was how they performed when the cold morning suddenly turned into a hot afternoon. After chasing a herd of animals in and out of steep ravines for a couple hours, my buddy and I declared defeat and hiked back to the trucks. Changing into jeans and a T-shirt for the drive home, my friend was surprised to see me stripping off base layers. It was probably 60 degrees, sunny, and we’d been putting in serious effort. I hadn’t even thought about them, I’d just been comfortable and mostly sweat-free all afternoon.
I started to explain it away by saying that they were lightweight items. But that wasn’t true. At 200 weight, these Intraknits provide enough insulation for very cold conditions. They’d just kept me cooler and drier than I’ve learned to expect from light, 125-weight merino. What was going on? As soon as I got home, I sat down to figure it out.
It turns out that Smartwool has adopted 3-D knitting technology similar to that used by Nike and other shoemakers to produce the latest generation of knit uppers on athletic kicks. Whereas traditional manufacturing processes involve textile mills producing massive rolls of fabric, then clothing makers cutting up those sheets and stitching them together, 3-D knitting means that individual pieces of clothing can be knit from strands of yarn. There are four major benefits to this technique.
It’s essentially the 200-weight merino fabric you’re used to, combined with more open, ventilating sections (the gray). There are no seams between the two areas. (Photo: Smartwool)
Seamless Construction: For the first time, an entire pair of base-layer bottoms, or a shirt, can be knit together without seams. No seams means less chafing, more comfort, and smooth transitions between different zones of fabric.
Ventilation: Intraknit layers are able to transition seamlessly from a thick, sturdy, and insulative construction to areas that are made from a more open weave designed to vent excess heat and moisture. Smartwool arrived at these male- or female-specific zones by conducting a 1,200-person study beginning back in 2011. Results mapped skin temperatures that varied by activity level and ambient temperature across men and women.
Articulation: The 3-D knitting machine is able to create ribbed articulation panels to cover the knees and elbows, allowing the layers to bend with those joints without creating bunches or restriction.
Less Waste: Traditional cut-and-sew methods see curvy patterns cut from square fabric stock, resulting in wasted material. Smartwool previously addressed this issue by creating a lofted insulation material from the excess, but not producing waste in the first place will prove a better solution. Smartwool has not yet calculated how much material it will be able to save by using this technique, but it’s expected to be significant and will include savings in shipping rolls of fabric from mill to factory, too.
The end result is base layers that feel like a good pair of quality athletic socks. Some areas are thick and backed by terry loops for extra trapped air space, while others are thin and porous. This is the first time such socklike construction has been achieved in a more complicated, made-from-merino garment.
This season, Smartwool will offer both men’s and women’s Intraknit pieces in 200 and 250 weights. The 200’s are made from a blend of 53 percent merino, 45 percent polyester, and 2 percent elastane, which will be less absorbent and better for active pursuits in cool-to-cold temperatures. The 250 weights are 100 percent merino and more suitable for static wear or very cold temperatures. If my experience is anything to go by, both will insulate as well as you’d expect for their weight but wear much cooler when you need them to. Basically, they’re everything we love about merino—just more.
Professional chef Eduardo Garcia and fly-fishing guide JT Van Zandt are two anglers who appreciate a deep connection to their food. In this episode of the Hungry Life series from Yeti, they visit one of Van Zandt’s most prolific fishing grounds—Laguna Madre, in Texas.
On the evening of June 23, forestry worker Dee Gallant, 45, was walking with her 115-pound husky retriever, Murphy, on a remote logging road a half-hour’s drive from her home in Duncan, on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. It wasn’t long before she realized they weren’t alone.
Here’s her story as told to Outside.
I’m not into dog parks, so I like to go up the mountain with my dog, where there aren’t other people. The trail I was on this time is in a gated area and not publicly accessible, but I used to work up there, and the crew doesn’t care.
It was already dusk when I started, but I thought I’d go anyway, because Murphy needed his walk.
A couple of kilometers up the road, I could feel something watching me. You know when the hair goes up on the back of your neck, and you just know something’s wrong? Over to my right, I saw this brown, rusty patch of ground that didn’t look right. Then I realized it was a cougar. Just a minute before, about 25 feet back down the trail, I had had to pee, so I had stepped off the trail and copped a squat. If I had waited another 15 feet, I would have been crouched down and in a really vulnerable position when it showed up.
My first thought after seeing the cat was, This is so awesome. My second thought was, It’s coming toward me. This is not awesome.
I raised my arms and waved them to try and look big, but it kept coming. So I stopped and looked at it and said, “Hey, you stop!” And it did.
(Photo: Jason Daley)
Then I slowly pulled my phone out of my pocket to get a picture of it, but it was accidentally set on video, so I started recording.
It didn’t go away. It locked eyes and stayed there with me for probably five minutes, but it seemed like an eternity.
Murphy was on a really long Flexi leash, so I pulled him in close so we looked bigger together. But Murphy didn’t see the cat—I guess he was sniffing around looking for bunnies, which was probably for the best.
The cougar and I just stared at each other as I told it off. I called it a bad kitty, said I’d fight him, and yelled other things at it to see if it would leave. I wasn’t super scared at that point. But I wanted to be on my toes. I’m a pretty tough, Harley-riding kind of girl. I do kickboxing. I knew I’d get hurt if I had to fight it, but I wasn’t going to just give up.
That’s when I decided I needed to do something a little bit different, because it wasn’t going away. I stopped recording and started swiping through my music library looking for songs that have a real punch-in-the-face kind of start.I went past Norah Jones and Jack Johnson, the mellow stuff. Then I saw “Don’t Tread on Me” by Metallica. That was perfect, just what I wanted. I turned my volume all the way up and hit play. After being so fixated on me and looking so confident, the cat just turned and bolted into the bush as soon as it heard the music.
I didn’t know how large it was until it turned sideways—it was a lot bigger than I thought. I wouldn’t be able to take that kitty. I got nervous. I wasn’t sure where it was at that point or if it was going to jump out at me.
Murphy and I continued our hike since we were already there, but I kept my phone in my hand, music ready to go. I talked really loud to Murphy and stayed in the middle of the road the whole way. He kept looking at me like I was losing my mind. But we made it out and went home.
The video went viral when I posted it on Facebook. The following week, I got a message from the artist-liaison service for Metallica, telling me that one of the band members wanted to reach out. Soon after that, I was sitting at my desk at work and got a call from a number I didn’t recognize. I almost didn’t answer since I was at work, but my boss said it was OK. When I picked up the phone, this super deep voice said, “Hi Denise, this is James Hetfield from Metallica.” I almost fell off my chair. We talked about what happened, dogs, and the places we live.
I’ve had a lot of people tell me they won’t go hiking without Metallica on their phone, and I tell them that’s great, by all means go buy one of their albums on iTunes. I can’t guarantee it will work—don’t sue me if it doesn’t—but it certainly did for me. I’m glad to be alive.
Our country, it should come as no surprise, is increasingly polarized. The divide is worsened by the bubbles we live in, and the internet makes it easier than ever to only associate with like-minded people. As a result, we become more entrenched in our views and less likely to interact with “the other.”
I want to offer a simple solution: work out at your local gym.
Not the fancy one that’s more country club than training facility. Not the hipster one where everyone looks the same. Not the boutique one where classes cost $35. And definitely not in front of a screen on a $2,500 stationary bike. I’m talking about the gym that has been in your community forever, the one that offers financial assistance to those who need it and attracts people of all types. For me, it’s my local YMCA in Oakland, California.
Are there gyms around me that have nicer equipment, posher locker rooms, and perhaps even more interesting classes? Sure. But none of them offer the same kind of community, diversity, and opportunity to engage with people I wouldn’t normally interact with.
On the top floor, where I strength-train, you’ve got dudeswith full-body tattoos deadlifting 500 pounds next to tiny 80-year-old women curling three-pound weights. While bench-pressing, I’ve been spotted by gay people, trans people, and straight people, big people and small people, white people and black people. On the second floor, spin classes attract community members of all shapes, sizes, and abilities, including those who are blind and missing limbs. The basketball court, meanwhile, is usually buzzing with pickup games consisting of white, black, Indian, and Asian people, some of whom seem like they are an inch away from playing in the NBA, and others who seem like this is the first time they’ve handled a ball. The bottom floor houses the yoga room, where, unlike every other yoga studio I’ve ever been to, you see all kinds of bodies—not just 20-to-40-year-old slim, white ones. And then there are the kids (a surprisingly rare site in metropolitan gyms these days) running around pretty much everywhere. Everyone is respectful to each other. Everyone gets along.
In her forthcoming book The Joy of Movement: How Exercise Helps us Find Happiness, Hope, Connection, and Courage, Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonigal writes about research that shows that engaging in physical activity with other people connects us. Some of this, explains McGonigal, is biological—the release of feel-good neurochemicals like endorphins and oxytocin. But equally potent is the humanizing power of working your body hard while seeing others do it, too. “It is as if our biology is tuned to recognize and respond to common humanity,” writes McGonigal. When you are pushing yourself in the presence of others doing the same, you connect with them on a visceral level.
It’s true that some of my experience could be related to Oakland as a whole, which is an exceptionally diversecity. But I’ve visited other gyms and workout facilities in my area, and none of them look anything like the YMCA. They all lack the wide range of age, race, gender, and ability. I’ve also visited YMCAs in other states, most recently inMichigan and North Carolina, and they had a very similar vibe to my own. I’ve come to conclude that whatever I lose out on from not going to an upscale or hyperspecialized gym, the YMCA makes up for, because it gives me a much broader sense of community and allows me to interact with people—in real life, no less—who I otherwise wouldn’t.Does this solve all of the world’s problems? Of course not. But I think it’s a small step in the right direction.
Brad Stulberg (@Bstulberg) coaches on performance and well-being and writes Outside’s Do It Better column. He is bestselling author of the books The Passion Paradox and Peak Performance. Subscribe to his newsletter here.
Here in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Outside’s offices are headquartered, the leaves have fallen, but the snow hasn’t—and we’re anxiously awaiting. Summer is behind us, and we’re ready to throw on our ski bibs and hit the slopes. Naturally, our ears perked when we heard about Backcountry’s Gore-Tex winter gear collection, which launched this fall. Backcountry’s in-house apparel and gear impressed us this summer (we reviewed its climbing line, as well as some pieces in its travel and bike collections.) Although we haven’t had a chance to get waist deep in powder this season, we decided to take a peek at Backcountry’s new collection.
The first thing you'll notice about this bib is that it's convertible: a zipper around the waist converts it into a pair of pants, and back again. If you’re on the fence between the two options, that versatility is a plus. Three-layer Gore, taped zippers, and heavier-weight fabric have me hopeful that it canstand up against Pacific Northwest wetness and Montana cold. We haven’t put it through the wringer, but burly reinforced cuffs and a 100 percent nylon face nod towards durability.
(Photo: Jeremy Rellosa)(Photo: Jeremy Rellosa)
The cut feels reminiscent of workwear—it’s flattering but practical, with ample room for strong thighs and articulated knees for movement. Vents on the inner thighs are a smart feature that would come in handy during high-output days, but I wouldn’t take this bib out for a long tour—there are a lot of details that add weight, warmth, and chafe potential. Overall, this is a solid, good-looking in-bounds bib. - A.B.
My one gripe with ski and snowboard shells is that too often their constructions feel boxy and stiff, like super rigid rain shells. I understand why: truly waterproof material often has a burly, heavy build. Those jackets feel more like a tarp than a piece made to move with you in the snow. I can't say the same about the men's Cottonwoods jacket—it was flexible and felt "broken in" out of the box. Although it was designed to be paired with multiple layers, it was comfortable to throw on top of just a single long sleeve layer on first wear. That's partially due to the interior: it's soft and silky to the touch, and it has a forgiving cut around the sleeves and shoulders which doesn't feel constrictive. Like the other pieces in the collection, this jacket is fully-seamed and built with Gore-Tex for waterproofing.
Similar to Abigail's takeaways from the women's bib, I most likely wouldn't use this on the early mornings I'm huffing it up the ski hill for a quick skin. The thick membrane would be a bit too heavy for those sessions, but I can see this as a solid jacket for the resort. The thumbhole cuffs, deep pockets at the chest, near the waist, and on the arm make it a feature-rich package that's ready for downhill adventures. -J.R.
Despite all the noise surrounding Eliud Kipchoge’s astounding sub two-hour marathon on Saturday in Vienna, the bigger surprise came the following day. At the Chicago Marathon, Kenya’s Brigid Kosgei smashed Paula Radcliffe’s previously untouchable marathon world record, which had stood for over sixteen years. Before Sunday, the closest any woman had come to Radcliffe’s time of 2:15:25 (set at the 2003 London Marathon) was Mary Keitany’s 2:17:01 (London, 2017). Kosgei ran 2:14:04 in Chicago, improving her own personal best in the marathon by over four minutes.
If there was any lingering doubt that we have entered a new era in marathon running, we can now dispense with such foolishness. Seven of the ten fastest women’s marathon performances have occurred in the past two years. (On the men’s side, meanwhile, the top five times have all happened in the past thirteen months.)
Kosgei’s minute-and-a-half improvement on the previous world record mirrors Kipchoge’s obliteration of the official men’s mark in last year’s Berlin Marathon. But while Kipchoge is in the twilight of his career, Kosgei is only 25 and believes that she hasn’t yet exhausted her potential.
Prior to Sunday, the suggestion that 2:10 was attainable “for a lady,” would have sounded even more far-fetched than breaking the two-hour barrier for the men, given that it was over five minutes faster than a seemingly unbreakable record. But in our current era of optimized time trial experiments and trampoline shoes, who’s to say what’s feasible? Perhaps 2:10 in the women’s marathon is the new frontier.
In 2017, during the lead-up to Kipchoge’s initial “Breaking2” attempt, Outside published an article by Samantha Larson, which suggested that Radcliffe’s world record from 2003 was the women’s equivalent of a sub two-hour marathon. As part of her argument, Larson references the Mercier scoring system, which uses averages from the top-100 track and field performances between 1995 and 1998 to create a statistical model for comparing race times between genders. In the Mercier calculator, Radcliffe’s time converts to a 1:59:55 men’s marathon. Kosgei’s new world record, meanwhile, converts to 1:58:57. (For what it’s worth, Kipchoge’s official world record, 2:01:39, converts to a women’s marathon time of 2:17:54—a mark which has already been bested seven times.)
What’s more, as ultrarunner Camille Herron pointed out on Twitter, Kosgei’s converted sub-two performance is doubly impressive when one considers that she was running in record-eligible conditions—i.e. in an official race, rather than Breaking2-style event. (Although, to be fair, one advantage that world-class women have in this regard is that they can potentially use male pacemakers for the whole race, as Kosgei did Sunday in Chicago.)
If there’s a mood killer here, it’s that Kosgei’s manager is Frederico Rosa, who has represented several prominent runners who have failed doping tests in the past. (Although it’s hard to believe that this guy would ever break the rules.) These include multiple-time Boston Marathon winner Rita Jeptoo, who is currently serving a four-year ban, and defending Olympic Marathon champion Jemima Sumgong, who has been banned for eight years. Rosa has also represented 1,500-meter superstar Asbel Kiprop, who in 2016 defended his manager with the following bizarre and retrospectively hilarious statement: “If there was doping, they would have given me [the illegal drugs] first because many times I have attempted to run the world record and I'm not getting it.” Earlier this year, Kiprop received a four-year ban for testing positive for EPO.
Of course, none of that proves that Kosgei has done anything wrong. But it does perhaps make it a little harder to be enthusiastic about her meteoric rise in the marathon. Prior to 2017, Kosgei held PRs of 1:14:08 and 2:24:45 in the half and full marathons. This year, she ran the two fastest times in history for both distances, though her 1:04:28 in the Great North Run last month is not world record-eligible due to the course profile. That’s a lot to chalk up to Vaporfly magic.
Or maybe Kosgei is that once-in-a-generation talent who, as she matures as an athlete, will take the women’s record further into the stratosphere. Maybe it’s time for a “Breaking 2:10” event.
Oiselle founder Sally Bergesen raised this idea in a 2017 Outside op-ed: “Where is the women’s Breaking2? Was it never even considered because, like the four-minute mile, we lack a goal with numeric roundness?”
Full disclosure (and at the risk of losing all 600 of my hard-won Twitter followers): when I first heard this idea, I was skeptical. It’s enough of a challenge to get non-fans to care about arbitrary time goals. Part of me suspects that it would be difficult to generate excitement around the 2:10 barrier when a man has already run under two hours. I’ve also always believed that the emphasis should be on racing, rather than chasing records—and here, women might have the edge. In recent years, I’ve certainly seen more competitively intriguing races on the women’s side of the sport.
But maybe it doesn’t have to be one or the other. What if Breaking 2:10 somehow pitted Kosgei against four-time NYC champion Mary Keitany? It would be Nike vs. Adidas. The “mixed” world record holder vs. the “women only” world record holder. (The IAAF distinguishes between world records set with male pacemakers and those set without.) In the unlikely event that this ever comes to pass, let’s hope that Keitany can get Adidas to hook her up with some trampoline shoes of her own.
In a tribute to his road-tripping grandfather’s adventurous spirit,Justin Jacob Fountain loaded up a backpack and his guitar to hitchhike from Colorado to Alaska. His film Only Music // Alaska documents the people he met, the places he saw, and the conversations he had on his 3,800-mile trip.
Hey, come on. I work hard all week. And I don’t have 41 teammates waiting for me and the whole world watching. I can turn the alarm off and snooze for an extra 1 hour, 59 minutes, and 40 seconds if I need to. Actually, two and a half hours.
2. Procrastinated Emptying the Dishwasher
What do I look like, some sort of super athlete who has spent their entire life training for this moment to make history? Seriously, it can wait. There are plenty of clean coffee mugs to use while I get up the motivation to put the dishes away 1 hour, 59 minutes and 40 seconds from now. Or so.
3. Made Dinner from a Recipe That Was Only Supposed to Take 45 Minutes
I don’t know who writes these recipes, and who they think they’re bullshitting with this “Prep time: 20 minutes/Cook time: 25 minutes” stuff. Do they have a sous chef at home to help them chop all these vegetables? It takes me 10 minutes just to peel the garlic. I was led to believe that this was going to be a pretty quick and easy weeknight meal, but it turns out that in the time it takes me to double the recipe, prep, cook everything, forget to cook the rice until way late, and tell everyone “it’ll just be a few more minutes, have some more chips and salsa” four to six times, a superhuman can apparently run a marathon.
4. Cleaned Part of My Garage
OK, so I’ve been saying I’m going to get around to this all summer, and I finally got it cleaned up, partially. Look, it’s a big job. Not exactly something that can be accomplished in a single Saturday morning. I mean, give me 41 guys and a pace truck and yeah, this place would be spotless, but all by myself? One hour, 59 minutes and 40 seconds is barely enough to figure out where all these tools go. At least I swept the floor, where it’s visible.
5. Watched the New Brad Pitt Space Movie
Ad Astra is two hours and four minutes. Add in the previews, and it takes longer for me to get through that than it took Brigid Kosgei to run the Chicago Marathon. Pretty good movie, though.
6. Read Through Twitter and Wondered if I Should Formulate an Opinion About Eliud Kipchoge’s Marathon Besides “HOLY SHIT, THAT’S AMAZING.”
The first year of my baby’s life was nothing like I’d imagined. I envisioned daily walks on the trails near our house, with Josephine snuggled in a wrap against my chest. In reality, she was born into a scorching drought, and the only time it was cool enough to wear her while walking was in the wee hours of the morning—when I was too sleep deprived to consider hiking anyway. Instead, I spent hours online, researching baby sleep and perusing Instagram, wondering whether I would ever be as cool as the guy who posted photos of his twin infants on a backcountry ski trip.
Still, despite weather-related challenges, the exhaustion of being a new parent, and all the reasons it would’ve been easier to stay indoors, my daughter and I spent time outside almost every day of her first year, in every season and type of weather. We played on California beaches, canoed down a Utah river, camped in below-freezing temperatures, and climbed mountains near our home in Colorado.
In many cases, the gear that made so much outdoor time possible wasn’t the $1,000 bike-ski-jog stroller that parents clamor over. (Although we did buy a used one, and it is, admittedly, awesome.) It was the relatively inexpensive items that would be easy to give or receive at baby showers. So if you need a gift for an outdoor-loving parent-to-be, please skip the baby-wipe warmer and choose something they’ll actually use.
Best for Sun Protection
It’s impossible to overstate how much effort I’ve put into keeping my bald, fair-skinned child from getting sunburned. I’ve sampled an absurd number of hats, sunglasses, and sunscreens and found these items to be the best for protecting Jo from the strong Colorado sun. The I Play Brim sun-protection hat ($13) has UVB protection. Optic Nerve Lil’ Pro sunglasses ($29) have rubbery frames that actually seem comfortable to wear. Super Salve Sierra Madre sunscreen ($13) is so sumptuous that you’ll want to use it on your own skin, too.
Best for Cold-Weather Everything
We used our hand-me-down Patagonia Down Sweater Bunting suit($150) for all kinds of activities: winter stroller rides, cross-country skiing, and sledding. It also works as a makeshift sleeping bag when you zip the legs together. The only “down” side is that this particular style is discontinued; the latest model has legs that can’t be zipped together into a sack.It’s still great for cold weather, but if you can find the older model on Patagonia’s Worn Wear site or a local used-gear store, you’ll find it’s even more versatile.
Best for Hiking
At one point, we had no fewer than six contraptions for carrying our baby, some of which run hundreds of dollars. My favorite happened to be the most affordable. The Infantino Flip 4-in-1 convertible carrier ($33) is lightweight and packable and flips between inward-facing (for young babies and trail-time naps) and outward-facing (for babies who want to see the world). You might want a backpack with more bells and whistles as your baby grows into a toddler, but for the first year or so, this is all you need to hit the trails.
Best for Early Walkers
Native Jefferson kids’ slip-ons ($35) are wonderful for water and sand in summer, and Baby Bogs boots ($35) get the job done in the snow and wet of winter. Most important, both pairs accommodate all sorts of foot shapes, and they stay on.
Best for Biking Around Town
Whether you put your kiddo in a bike seat or tow her in a trailer, the Giro Scamp MIPS helmet ($60) has the industry-leading multidirectional impact protection system to guard the brain in case of a crash. Plus, it fits the smallest-circumference heads of any quality bike helmet I’ve found.
Best for Sleeping at Campgrounds or Airports
Once upon a time, I swore I wouldn’t be dependent on a white noise machine to put my child to bed. Those days are long past. Now, like so many other parents, I’m lost without white noise to drown out background sounds and lull my childto sleep. What do I do when we’re in a tent and friends are laughing a little too loudly around the campfire? I use the LectroFan Micro white noise machine ($30), which charges via USB and can run without electricity for 16 hours.
Best for Dining Al Fresco
You know the gross plasticky taste of a new hydration bladder? I once took a swig from Josephine’s cheap plastic sippy cup, and that’s what it tasted like. So we splurged on a Hydro Flask kids’ water bottle ($30), which, if we can manage not to lose it, will last for years. It pairs especially well with the Hiccapop camp chair ($30), which has a detachable tray for mealtime and wide feet to make it extra sturdy.
Best Base Layer
If you’ll be outside for more than a few hours in cold weather, your child needs non-cotton base layers. L.L.Bean Infants’ Wicked Warm Underwear ($35) is durable and easy to stick under a snowsuit in winter or wear alone in the shoulder seasons.
My fiancee Virginia and I first met Teddy in a cold, windswept junkyard. Following not much more than a whim, we’d driven six hours across Montana to take a look at what a rescuer believed was a Great Pyrenees-German Shepherd mix. But the dog we loaded into the truck 15 minutes after meeting her would turn out to be an Anatolian Shepherd.
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That was a year ago this week. The dog we’d eventually name Teddy was so malnourished, unhealthy, and just plain awful smelling that I feared she’d never be able to live a healthy, active life. But sometimes a puppy’s big, sad eyes are just so hard to resist that they overwhelm common sense. She spent the entire ride home sitting backwards in the middle of the truck’s front bench, staring at us, unsure of what was going on. She wouldn’t stop trying to lick our faces—a sign of fear and submission—but while that tugged at our hearts, we were afraid to let her because her breath smelled powerfully of poop.
The first thing I did when we got home was put her in the bath. This was probably the first one she’d ever had. The water ran black with dirt, but even peppermint Dr. Bronners couldn’t do much about her smell. Adding to that difficult first night were our two older dogs, who we’d dragged along on the trip to meet her, and though they’d shown positive initial signs in the junkyard, but who were now trying to demonstrate ownership over their house, and their humans. Teddy tried to lick them too, but she was met either with a display of dominance from Wiley, and some overenthusiastic attempts at play from Bowie; she interpreted both as aggression, and would roll on her back and totally shut down with every interaction.
The next day, I took her to the vet for a checkup. He looked at her teeth and her hips, listened to her heart, and assured me there was nothing major wrong with her. We took her to the pet store for a collar and tags, and figured the mile home would be a good first walk. That must have been the first time she’d ever been leashed, because she immediately planted her paws, and wouldn’t budge. I half carried and half dragged her home, with periodic breaks so she could bury her head in the snow and hide from what was happening.
At this point, 24 hours in, we hadn’t named her, or even told anyone that we’d gotten a new dog. I’d ignored Virginia’s reservations about the adoption (was obviously bad partnering), and we were overwhelmed by what we’d bitten off. Would the new dog ever stop smelling? Would she stop eating poop (a pleasant surprise we’d discovered when we got home)? And, what the hell was an Anatolian Shepherd anyways?
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We identified Teddy’s breed when a reader later saw a picture on Instagram. One look at breed photos and it was obvious we had an Anatolian. Some Googling described a livestock guardian breed from Turkey that grew to massive proportions, was extremely aggressive, and “as agile as a rattlesnake.” None of that seemed to describe Teddy who still didn’t look healthy, tripped over her own paws, and was scared of the wind. She was starting to get pretty big though.
Nevertheless, we decided on a name, and started rolling Teddy into our everyday routine. After refusing to eat for a day or two, she figured out that the raw meat we feed all our dogs was delicious, and began to dance with enthusiasm as we prepared it. I got tired of keeping her leashed during hikes in that first week, so let her off. Initial trepidation of her just running off quickly turned to confidence as she resolutely stuck to the other dogs’ tails. Wiley kept ignoring her, or growling if she got too close, but Teddy did manage to figure out how to play with Bowie. She watched the other dogs get treats during their daily obedience training, decided she wanted some bacon too, and eventually got the hang of how to earn it by copying Wiley and Bowie’s responses to various commands. Slowly, but surely, she became a part of the family. And, as we cleared whatever it was out of her system with healthy food, she stopped stinking too.
Teddy, and the rest of the pack. She still doesn't like being carried around, but she'll at least tolerate it. (Photo: Stuart Palley)
But there was one thing Teddy just struggled to understand: affection. It was clear that she wanted it. All the licking was just a cry for reinforcement that she was loved. She watched the other dogs curl up next to us on the couch, or in bed, and would hop up there too. But, the proximity to us made her nervous, so she’d awkwardly hover over us, trying to lick our faces, then flee to the security of her dog bed the second we tried to put our arms around her.
And that limited the amount of love we could show her. While the two other dogs would curl up with their heads in our laps while we watched TV, Teddy would stare dejectedly from the other side of the room. I know you shouldn’t anthropomorphize dogs, but we couldn’t shake the feeling that she felt like a redheaded stepchild.
One night, probably six months after her adoption, we got her to lay down next to us in bed for a solid 15 minutes. It was such a huge sign of progress that both Virginia and I teared up in relief. Every night since, we’ve tried to make that time longer. It actually seemed to help when one of us would go out of town. Maybe because Teddy felt the loneliness, or maybe just because there was more room in the bed. I was on one of those trips this summer when Virginia texted me that Teddy had stayed in bed all night, sleeping with her head on my pillow. It was a huge step.
Having dogs sleep in bed with you might seem silly, or even gross. Especially if the dog in question comes with an overwhelming stench of poop. And, there’s a bunch of training manuals and general dog advice out there that spell out some quasi-scientific theories about how it can make your dog confused about the pack order. All that alpha dominance stuff has never made much sense to me, and my dogs have always curled up in my bed. They usually don’t stay there all night; it’s just some bonding time in which our loving connection can be reinforced. (But yeah, wash your sheets.) It was something we thought Teddy should learn to benefit from.
The benefits of learning the confidence it takes to cuddle can be seen elsewhere, too: as Teddy has become more comfortable in our family, she’s also become a more confident, happier dog. Outdoors, she’s learning that it’s safe for her to spend a few minutes venturing off on her own; we’ll be there when she gets back. Around town, she’s showing more confidence around strangers and other dogs; she’s learning read us and tell that we’re relaxed, so she can feel relaxed too. At home, she’s figured out that, even if we leave, we’re going to come back; we’re starting to trust her not to chew rugs and furniture when she’s unsupervised. As our relationship with Teddy becomes stronger, she’s empowered to become a happier, better dog.
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And that progress shows in her relationship to our other two dogs. Bowie and Teddy decided they were best friends just a few months in, and have been inseparable since. When Virginia and I plan our various trips and activities, we sometimes have to split up dogs. These days, it’s Bowie and Teddy, or Wiley. We just can’t bear to separate the younger two. And, Teddy’s slowly learning to play with Wiley too, or maybe he’s learning to accept her. The other morning we woke up to what we thought was an earthquake, but it was just Teddy throwing down play bows hard to attract Wiley’s attention.
Right now, we’re planning Halloween outfits for our dogs. We’re not quite sure what to do with Wiley and Bowie, but Teddy’s outfit is obvious: she’s going as Nana, the big, overly-mothering dog from the original animated Peter Pan. That’s just her newfound personality in a nutshell; caring and protective in her intentions, even if she’s still fallible in her execution.
As that emotional and psychological progress is taking place, Teddy’s also maturing physically. At about 17 months old, I think she’s probably reached peak height, but will still gain more muscle over the next year or so. I still wouldn’t draw any comparisons to a rattlesnake, but with the lean, long body of an Irish Wolfhound, and the head of a Mastiff, she’s starting to look like our fastest dog, if still not the most agile. And man, her deep, full bark is incredibly intimidating. The only real expectation I brought into any of this was that she’d eventually prove to be a reliable, happy member of the family—and that she’d add to our ability to avoid grizzly bears when we’re out in the mountains. She’s still a year or two from physical and emotional maturity, but has already exceeded our hopes.
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Why am I telling you all this? Because I’m committed to the belief that rescues make better dogs than anything you can purchase. Our other two rescues both came home at eight weeks, but Teddy is a worst case scenario. With a history of abuse and neglect, and arriving in shockingly poor condition, this is a dog that most people would have turned their noses up at. But look at her now.
Teddy, finally finding her happy place. (Photo: Wes Siler)
Living in a big city doesn’t mean you don’t have access to the wild outdoors. The National Wildlife Refuge System, an initiative within the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, manages 567 national wildlife refuges, including 101 urban national wildlife refuges located within 25 miles of cities housing populations over 250,000—serving the 80 percent of Americans who live in and around metro areas. We’re talking about massive plots of lands, immense networks of trails, and thriving biospheres of animals and plants in 36 states, all within an hour of places like Detroit or Birmingham, Alabama.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
(Photo: Courtesy USFWS/Ian Shive)
John Heinz
11 miles from the Liberty Bell
John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge at Tinicum,located within Philadelphia’s city limits, was our country’s first urban refuge, established in 1972. Known for its focus on education, it enlists community members to convert unused lots into urban-pollinator gardens and hosts local students for in-the-field environmental courses and summer internships. There’s incredible wildlife spotting along the 285-acre freshwater tidal marsh, including bald eagles, beavers, and deer. (You can borrow binoculars from the visitor center for free.) Or opt to paddle a canoe down the 4.5-mile tidal segment of Darby Creek or hike 10 miles of trails that traverse the site.
Albuquerque, New Mexico
(Photo: Courtesy USFWS/Ian Shive)
Valle de Oro
7 miles from the Albuquerque airport
Wildlife and habitat restoration are priorities at Valle de Oro National Wildlife Refuge, set along the eastern banks of the Rio Grande just a few miles from downtown Albuquerque. Park staff are currently teaching theABQ Backyard Refuge Program, where people learn how to rebuild habitats and garden to reintroduce wildlife in their own backyards. The 570-acre swath was created in 2012 on a former dairy farm, making it one of the country’s newest urban wildlife sanctuaries and the first in the Southwest. Come for a visit and you’ll score views of migratory birds, like snow geese and sandhill cranes, with the Sandia Mountains as a backdrop. There are also guided walking tours on newly built trails and stargazing sessions.
New Orleans, Louisiana
(Photo: Courtesy USFWS/Ian Shive)
Bayou Sauvage
46 miles from the French Quarter
If you want to spot American alligators close to New Orleans, head to the marshes ofBayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge—Joe Madere Marsh is one of the best places for viewing this endemic species. You can learn about the importance of marshes and wetlands in protecting New Orleans from storm surges, fish for largemouth bass or catfish in its freshwater lagoons and bayous, or launch a canoe and paddle the canals and small lakes that dot the property. Short boardwalk trails are also popular with hikers and nature photographers. More recently, students from the University of New Orleans have been learning to plant trees and marsh grasses to help rebuild wetlands here.
San Diego, California
(Photo: Courtesy USFWS)
San Diego Bay
13 miles from the San Diego Zoo
San Diego Bay National Wildlife Refuge stretches over 12,300 acres, offering easy access to wilderness for the millions of residents in this metropolitan area. The park has trails for hiking and mountain biking, restored grasslands and oak woodlands that were once damaged by wildfire, and endangered butterflies and waterfowl that stop over during their winter migrations. The San Diego Zoo facilitates educational programs here, and theSan Diego nonprofit organization Outdoor Outreach, which connects local kids to outdoor activities, leads excursions at the refuge like fishing, biking, and kayaking.
Portland, Oregon
(Photo: Courtesy USFWS/Ian Shive)
Tualatin River
15 miles from Powell’s City of Books
Just outside Portland, within the floodplain of the Tualatin River, you’ll find a peaceful sanctuary in an otherwise busy urban area. The Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge, southwest of downtown, is a stopover for migrating waterfowl and songbirds on the Pacific Flyway and home to a number of mammals, including coyote, deer, and bobcat. Several miles of trails are open to hikers. In the fall,admire thechanging foliage and migrating geese and swans. The park hosts well-loved events, like the annual Tualatin Bird Festival in the spring or youth-oriented programs through I’m Hooked, an organization that encourages wilderness education and community involvement for local schoolchildren.
Minneapolis, Minnesota
(Photo: Courtesy USFWS/Ian Shive)
Minnesota Valley
Less than 2 miles from the Mall of America
Smack in the middle of the Twin Cities, Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge covers 14,000 lofty acres and 70 miles along the Mississippi River. Paddle the waterway in a canoe, or hike or run 46 miles of winding trails. The refuge hands out free loaner binoculars, fishing gear, and snowshoes at its visitor center,and local kids can borrow snow clothes and boots when they show up midwinter. An on-site art gallery showcases nature-inspired work from hometown and rotating artists.
Denver, Colorado
(Photo: Courtesy USFWS/Ian Shive)
Rocky Mountain Arsenal
14 miles from Mile High Stadium
Spot bison, deer, bald eagles, prairie dogs, songbirds, and endangered black-footed ferrets at the 15,000-acre Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge, located between Denver International Airport and downtown’s skyscrapers, with views of the Rocky Mountains. Hike the ten miles of trails or motor along Wildlife Drive, an 11-mile loop where you can see bison and deer. Fishing is big here: there’s bass in Lake Mary or Lake Ladora, as well as youth fishing clinics and an adaptive fishing program for those with disabilities.
While I’m no apocalypse prepper, I do love daydreaming about how I could utilize my garage full of gear to survive—and perhaps thrive—if brain-eating zombies were to descend on my hometown of Ashland, Oregon. My Hokas would allow me to run at a just-faster-than-zombies pace for miles and miles. After a long day of undead evasion, I could fire up my Jetboil and make some morale-boosting and delicious Bibimbap from Good to Go. And while just about every piece of high-end camping gear would make the zombie apocalypse cozier, there is one piece in my garage that will be non-negotiable while navigating the end of days: Buck’s Compadre Froe.
This hatchet/machete lovechild is a beast for processing wood at camp (Buck's Froe is confusingly not shaped like a traditional froe, which is L-shaped, but they're used for the same purpose). The Compadre has a 10-inch blade and weighs in at nearly a pound and a half. Coupled with its full tang—the metal runs all the way through the handle—it feels like you are wielding a medieval weapon when you swing it. On top of feeling sturdy in hand, the blade is built from 5160 carbon steel, which has a little bit of chromium added to make it extremely durable, meaning it can handle decades of abuse. Plus, it’s straight badass. The wooden handle and leather sheath make it feel more on-trend when swinging from my belt loop than any other survival tool I’ve tried.
The Compadre has been extremely capable as a camping companion over the four years I have used it. It fits nicely in my car camping bin and has proven worth carrying on trips time and again. Rather than replacing a knife, I look at the Compadre as a substitute for a more unwieldy hatchet. The slight forward-sloping angle of the blade off the oversize handle, combined with the ample swing weight, make the Compadre a kindling-making machine. The nine and a half inches of edge mean it’s tough to miss a target no matter how wild the swing. It absolutely eats up kindling thinner than a couple inches thick, slices shavings with no problem, and can split quarters of wood with the help of another log for leverage. I am a snobby campfire builder—I consider the use of products beyond a lighter cheating—and the Compadre means I rarely have to resort to such measures.
Those characteristics inspire confidence while building a fire but also on the self-defense front. While I wouldn’t know how to defend myself with a four-inch EDC knife to (literally) save my life, I feel like I would be a formidable adversary using the Compadre against a campsite axe murderer.
More realistically, my wife and I were car camping on BLM land miles outside of the South Rim of the Grand Canyon a few years ago when we heard a pack of coyotes surround us and slowly—but quite yippily—kill an animal about an eighth of a mile from our vehicle. My wife was pretty spooked, and while she refused to believe we were safe in the rooftop tent, she perked up when I climbed down and got her the froe. “If they get close, just pop them in the nose with this,” I said. “Oooh, that actually does make me feel better,” she said.
So whether it’s the real morale booster of building a fire to stay warm or the imaginary confidence I’d get from holstering my froe after defending my family from zombies, the Compadre has earned a permanent spot in my camping quiver.
“OK everyone,” Derek Barkeim announced to the loaded van of kids, “this week we’re going to do three things: Build a semipermanent shelter. Do some hide tanning—it’s called brain tanning, but we’re not going to use the actual brain. And we’re going to butcher a lamb.”
The hand of a ten-year-old named Jonah shot up. “Can I shoot the lamb?”
“No. We’re not going to shoot the lamb.”
Jonah was silent for a second, then said, “Can I decapitate the lamb?”
Barkeim chuckled a little, then turned around and drove.
We left the town of La Crosse, Wisconsin, where the kids had been dropped off by their parents that August morning, and drove over to Minnesota and headed up the Mississippi River. In the van were ten boys and one girl, ages 9 to 14, on their way bushcraft-skills camp. It’s one of many day camps Barkeim offers as part of his Seeker’s Wild summer program, which he started in 2014. Each week he brings a new group of kids (and sometimes college-age interns) into the woods to teach them the lost arts of survival.
When we arrived at a farm in southeastern Minnesota half an hour later, we piled out and marched into an unnamed wooded valley. At the head of the line, Barkeim swung a stick, clearing a path through an ocean of stinging nettles. Some kids got stung. Some complained. But Barkeim walked on. After a quarter-mile or so, he looked around.
“What do you all think of this spot? What would you want to look for if you were going to build a shelter here?” Barkeim asked.
“Widow-makers!” a Seeker’s Wild veteran shouted. (It’s poor bushcraft to get killed by a falling tree in the night.)
“That’s right: widow-makers. Look up around you. You see any dead trees?”
“No!” several campers shouted.
Barkeim ran through a few more points for locating a good campsite (don’t put your shelter in a dry riverbed, check for poison ivy, look for resources). Then he hauled out a bag of knives for anyone who hadn’t brought their own.
“What do you need when you’re carving?” he asked.
“A blood circle!”
“Right.” He held his knife out at arm’s length and spun in a circle to demonstrate. “Make sure no one steps into your blood circle when you’re carving.” He went over a few other safety points about knives (carve away from you), then machetes and hatchets (bigger blood circles), and breaking sticks for a fire (“Not by banging! The broken end will become a projectile.”). With safety pretty much covered, survival began.
“OK, we need some diggers, and we need some gatherers!” A few kids fanned out through the woods to find timber for the small shelter. Others grabbed shovels and sliced into the ground where it would be built.
“Welcome to the Seeker’s Wild!” said one kid to no one in particular. “You’ll be issued a machete and a hatchet!”
“And a knife!” added another.
I’d first heard about Seeker’s Wild the year before, when I attended the Driftless Outdoors Show, put on by the La Crosse Visitors Bureau to highlight sports on both sides of outdoor recreation: hunting and hiking as well as fishing and fat biking. It filled a small convention center with booths housing mountain-bike makers, kayak fishermen, bow hunters, and disc golfers. There were reps from the Wisconsin Canoe Heritage Museum for traditionalists and from Nose Jammer shampoo and body wash for deer hunters (“Wrong wind? Jam ’em!”).
It was, in a sense, the kind of unification I’d been hoping for. For years I watched as two separate outdoor cultures emerged in America. One climbs rocks, runs, bikes, paddles, and hikes, while the other hunts and fishes. One shops at REI, while the other shops at Cabela’s. One reads Outside, while the other reads Outdoor Life. One wants preservation, while the other wants conservation. Both love the wild, but they have different goals there: One wants to play. The other wants to eat. One wants to visit. The other wants to partake.
Lately, I’ve grown more uncomfortable with this division. Like Barkeim, I grew up in hunting country just up the river from La Crosse, running around these same hills, swimming and fishing, playing and eating. I’d worked as a camp naturalist and a trips director and, more recently, I’ve been a trail runner. I’d had a foot in both worlds and had always been a fan of great writers like David Quammen, Thomas McGuane, and Randy Wayne White, who were avid hunters and fishermen. I loved Hemingway and Harrison, for whom there wasn’t such a stark line between recreation and harvest. And I’d always believed in what Aldo Leopold called the “spiritual danger” of thinking your food came from a grocery store.
But as our country has become more divided, so has our outdoors. And now, with public lands under assault, wild places more fragmented, and hunting in decline, this division matters more than ever, as does finding a bridge across it.
(Photo: Frank Bures)
In the grassy field just outside the Driftless show, a young man in his early twenties crouched over a bow drill. He drew his arm back and forth, his bow wrapped around a spindle, turning it into a plank of soft wood. Wisps of smoke rose from it.
I asked where he learned to make a fire without matches.
“I just learned it this week at Seeker’s Wild, with this guy, Derek Barkeim,” he said. “He runs a summer camp for kids. I’m doing my practicum with him.” He went on to describe Barkeim’s fishing 101 camp and river-rats camp, where he’d take youngsters hunting for frogs and then feed them fried frog legs at the end of the day.
This didn’t sound like any summer camp on offer when I was a kid. More importantly, it sounded even more like the kind of convergence I wanted. Eating and playing. Enjoying nature and being part of its cycles. Maybe at Seeker’s Wild I could find the bridge I was looking for.
On the second day of camp, we pulled into the farm and drove through a cornfield.
“Hey, look!” yelled Jonah. “Corn! Kill the corn! Kill the corn! Kill the corn!”
“Hey, Jonah,” Barkeim said from the driver’s seat, “remember to find that positive balance. We’ve got a lot of negative jokes about killing going on.”
Jonah paused for a minute, then changed his chant. “Eat the corn! Eat the corn! Eat the corn!”
“You’re still killing the corn,” observed Brody, a 14-year-old Dungeons and Dragons fan and reader of high fantasy. He wasn’t the most outdoorsy kid you could imagine, but the campers came from both sides of the outdoor divide. Some were mountain bikers. Others had already shot their own deer. Each morning the parents dropped their kids off in all manner of vehicles: fancy Jeeps, modest sedans, Ford F-150’s, and a host of minivans. I suspected many, like myself, spent time on either side.
We drove on.
This was Barkeim’s sixth year putting on Seeker’s Wild. His first year, there were 14 kids. Now he was pretty much maxed out at 88 campers over the course of 10 to 12 weeks in the summer, and he was trying to decide whether to hire staff outside of the occasional intern and keep growing or to keep running it himself. He went to college a little north of here, in Winona, where he majored in recreation and tourism studies. That’s also where he met his wife, Ariel. After graduation they moved to Portland, Oregon, for a few years so she could study naturopathic medicine. There, Barkeim worked at Trackers Earth, an outdoor school and summer camp, taking kids out to state parks and patches of woods and teaching them survival skills.
This was during the height of the “zombie-apocalypse–Walking Dead craze,” as he calls it. (They would occasionally dress like zombies and wait to surprise commuters at Portland’s light-rail stations.) Such end-of-the-world survivalism was great fun, getting paid to play outside and do something meaningful. It also made him think: I could do this myself.
When he and Ariel came back to Winona in 2014, he set up shop. Seeker’s Wild wasn’t meant to be any Tom Brown–esque survival cult or a school for roadkill-eating rewilders. It was something simpler: “The heart of Seeker’s Wild,” Barkeim says, “is getting people outside and reconnected to the natural world and making sure kids get their share of ‘vitamin N.’” At his camp, kids learn how to build shelters, make fire, clean fish, skin frogs, make turtle soup, and other useful skills. (He also has a more lighthearted Goonies Camp, with treasure hunts, maps, caves and, of course, a viewing of the film at the end.) Barkeim’s pedagogic approach consists largely of laying down some basic rules, handing out matches and knives, and letting the kids learn by doing. So far the only serious injury has been to an intern, who stabbed himself in the hand trying to open a bottle with a knife tip.
But Barkeim also has a more subtle agenda: to make his campers feel like they belong outdoors. Occasionally, he’ll have campers do a “sit spot” in the woods, where they stay in one place in silence for 10 or 15 minutes. Other times he talks to them about the “boredom monster” or the “fear monster” and about exercising their “patience muscle” to make it stronger. He wants them to settle into a calmer rhythm than the one created by the constant thrum of technology.
In Barkeim’s ideal world, his campers will learn that nature isn’t some pristine place to take a vacation or something apart from us. “I want to break down that perceived void,” he said, “that idea that humans are here and nature is there. Because we are part of nature. We are nature. That’s just the world.”
At camp, Barkeim’s immediate concerns were less philosophical. He gathered everyone around and mapped out the day’s goals: gather logs and dig a hole for a chimney. The kids broke off into groups. They lit fires and looked for sticks. For much of the day, the camp was filled with the smell of smoke drifting through the trees. The forest was quiet except for the sounds of machetes hacking and young voices cajoling, complaining, arguing, and laughing. Later in the afternoon, after digging most of the hole and building the chimney, their energy started to flag.
“OK,” Barkeim said, “why doesn’t everyone get three sticks to put on the shelter, then we can call it a day.” The kids grudgingly left their fires and walked out of what was beginning to look like a small village. “Sometimes it’s fun to just sit back and watch them,” Barkeim said.
On the third day of camp, Barkeim brought his bow-drill sets to the park where the kids got dropped off: there were bows, spindles, sockets, and bearing blocks for starting a fire without matches. He dumped them out and announced that before each kid received their own box of matches, they needed to learn to spark an ember without them.
The kids started sawing and spinning. No one got an ember. Barkeim took a set and soon had one.
“How do you do that so fast?” asked camper Brody.
“Easy,” said Jasper, an 11-year-old who’s been to Seeker’s for the last five summers. “He’s a professional survivalist.”
There was a fair amount of smoke, but no fire, so Barkeim changed his criteria to “try to get an ember” and handed out matches. Within 15 minutes of our arrival at the camp, several kids had spent every single one trying to spark flames. A couple managed to start fires, then spent all day tending them. At lunch someone busted out a pack of hot dogs to roast.
“I pricked my wiener!” yelled someone, after putting one on a stick. “My wiener tastes good!” came a response.
Barkeim remained calm. “OK guys, let’s not go too far with that. Remember, humor is an art.”
After lunch the kids settled into building the shelter. They wove the few sticks they’d collected together, put ragweed on the roof, and gathered clay. They scraped the hair off the deer hide. The day was quiet and slow. It all had a relaxed feel. The kids cooked their food and fed their fires, carved sticks in their blood circles, and played in nature. No one took out a phone. The boredom monster was nowhere to be seen.
This was exactly what I remembered about being outside as a kid and what I love about it as an adult: the feeling of total escape, the enveloping sounds and rhythms of the wild. That’s the feeling that draws us players back to camp, to hike, to explore.
“Well,” said Jasper at the end of the day, “mostly we just roasted marshmallows and hot dogs. This was the best day of Seeker’s Wild I’ve had in five years!”
Ari, 12, looked at the shelter and marveled. “I can’t believe before yesterday this was just a pile of weeds,” he said. Far overhead, a small plane buzzed through the sky. “Imagine if someone crashed their plane here and stumbled on us,” Ari said. “They would be amazed!”
On the fourth day of camp, when we arrived at the farm, the lamb was hanging from a tree. A stream of blood dripped from its nose. The owner of the farm had shot it not long before we arrived, and now it spun slowly in the wind. Today was field-dressing day.
The campers stood back subdued, almost reverent. Of all the things that separate the two outdoor cultures, this may be the biggest: killing. It’s something that humans have done forever but that recreationists rarely do personally. Unlike the outdoorsmen of the past, we don’t take part directly in this process. Most of us bring our packaged meals into the woods. Barkeim’s hope is that this will help the kids appreciate the animal, the life, the process, and the fact that we’re part of this chain.
(Photo: Frank Bures)
“Has anybody here ever killed a living creature before?” he asked. Hands went up. “What have you killed, Maddox?”
“A deer.”
“How about you, Brody?”
“I’ve killed some insects.”
“Preston?”
“Deer and turkey.”
“Has anyone felt bad after killing something?” Barkeim asked. They nodded. “That’s probably some empathy creeping in, which may not be the most fun feeling, but it’s useful. It helps us realize that this animal’s life ended so we could have food,” he said. “Now I know each of you might have some personal beliefs about life and death. But we want to be respectful to the animal.”
“Can we sword-fight with the legs?” Jonah asked.
“Do you think that would be respectful?”
“If you were fighting to honor the lamb.”
“Maybe. But I think we’re going to skip the sword fighting.”
Barkeim explained that we were going to take the skin off, remove the organs, then cut and package the meat to take home. He started slicing the connective tissue at the ankles. “Who wants to jump in here?”
Some stood back. Others, like Brody and 9-year-old Gracie, the lone girl at camp that week, jumped in. With their knives, they started cutting away the hide and pulling it down with Barkeim’s help. Other kids rotated in. A few opted to play on the tire swing across the field. But eventually, they, too, came over to watch and even help as the inner animal was revealed, a puzzle of red and white lines, curves, and stilled movement.
“Can someone grab this stomach?” asked Barkeim.
“Can we cut it to see what it ate?” said Jonah.
“Let’s hold off on that. We don’t want to stink up the area. Who wants to pull the liver out?”
Hands shot up. “Me!” “Me!” “Me!”
In an era obsessed with safety and hand sanitizer, there was something beautiful about these kids handling the muscles, tendons, and bones like normal, natural things. One by one, pieces of meat came off and were taken over to a table that Barkeim had set up. An assembly line formed. The cuts were wrapped and put into a cooler.
“I’ve never seen meat before,” said Brody.
“Yes, you have,” said Ari. “If you walk into a grocery store, you see meat.”
“Yeah,” he said, “but not like this.”
Driving though the farm on Friday, Barkeim pointed to a row of blooming yellow flowers. “That’s goldenrod,” he said. “You know what’s in there?”
He stopped the van, jumped out, then grabbed a stalk with protruding bulb. He cut it off. “OK, who wants to join the grub club?”
“Me!” “Me!” “Me!” “Me!”
With his knife, Barkeim cut the bulb open and pulled out a wiggling white grub. He handed it to 11-year-old Owen, who popped it in his mouth and swallowed without a second thought. Then he cut a few more and passed them around like candy bars.
Today was the last day of Seeker’s Wild. After this, the kids would go back to civilization, to their screens and batteries and games. But before they left, there was much to do: clay to harvest, branches to gather, a wall to build, a hide to dry.
The work proceeded slowly. Gradually the roof was covered in dirt. The clay pit was filled and the clay mixed with wood-nettle fibers. Fires were started. Someone carved a face on a small log and called it King Fred. Soon another log was dubbed Queen Felicia, and these idols were alternately burned and rescued from the fire. As morning crept by, there was a sense of winding down.
“What time is it?” one camper asked.
“12:15,” someone said.
He looked at the shelter. “OK, we can get this done.”
Others had the same realization that the end was near. A few kids climbed down into the creek bed and formed a fireman’s line to move clay up to Gracie. Oscar grabbed a shovel and threw more dirt on the roof. Piece by piece, the wall came together. As the day ended, the last holes were filled.
“You guys, I’m really impressed,” Barkeim said. “You crushed it! You remember how this place was before we came here? It was just like that patch of nettles over there.”
The campers looked at the stinging nettles that stretched across the valley floor. Barkeim then tried to put their small shelter into a bigger picture.
“It’s kind of a two-sided coin,” he said. “Humans have this innate desire to conquer and develop.”
“It will grow back!” someone yelled.
“Yes, and that’s a good lesson about how resilient the earth is. But if you were going to stay here, what would be your next steps?”
“Put on a door.”
“Yes. And you’d also want to secure your water and food supplies,” said Barkeim. “And what would you do for entertainment?”
“Fortnite!”
“No, not Fortnite. Has anyone played cornhole? You could create that kind of game with rocks and holes in the dirt. And what about art?”
“Carving wood?”
“Exactly. OK, who wants to put their name in the wall?”
They all rushed over to leave their mark.
“All right,” said Barkeim when they were finished. “Say goodbye to your shelter.”
The campers gathered their things, packed their bags, then marched out of the woods. Next year some of them will come back to build a new shelter in the valley. By then the nettles will have returned. The shelter’s roof will have fallen in. The holes will have filled. Without the kids here, nature will claim this place.
