Table of contents for August 2014 in Outside

CHARLIE MUNSEY Munsey knew he’d snagged a classic shot when he captured Canadian kayaker Katrina Van Wijk dropping over 80-foot Toketee Falls on Oregon’s North Umpqua River last March. “The falls are runnable only a few weeks out of the year because of hydro-project diversion,” says the White Salmon, Washington, photographer. “Katrina was the first woman to ever tackle it.” Van Wijk’s line was clean, but the entry was harder than she expected. “She broke her nose on the deck of her boat when she hit the water,” says Munsey. “She’s one tough woman.” THE TOOLS: Nikon D700, 70–200mm f/2.8 lens, ISO 800, f/5, 1/640 second JEREMY KORESKI Despite freezing December tempera tures, Koreski couldn’t miss the opportunity to scramble an openair floatplane and shoot aerials of longboarders waiting for…

IN 2007, Boston was ranked the worst biking city in the U.S. by Bicycling magazine—for the third time. There were plenty of reasons: lack of lanes, poor road conditions, boorish drivers. Today, Boston is on its way to becoming one of the country’s most bike-friendly cities, and it’s the first to create a public bike program targeting low-income communities. The main reason for the one-eighty: former Olympian Nicole Freedman. Freedman grew up in the Boston suburbs, rode professionally for 12 years (she won the national road-racing trial in 2000), and holds a degree in urban planning from Stanford University. In 2007, when Freedman was tasked with heading up the city’s newly launched Boston Bikes program, the city had zero bike lanes and a dismal safety record. In 2006, there were…

RIGHT ABOUT NOW, you might find your mind (or VRBO search) drifting toward the beach. But where does our obsession with the sea come from? Sure, there are obvious recreational draws—big surf, small bathing suits—but why, Darwin might ask, do we pay a fortune to flock to an environment we can’t drink or inhabit? That’s the question driving a new field of research—and two of the summer’s more prominent books. Marine biologist Wallace J. Nichols’s answer: “Water provides the most profound shortcut to happiness out there.” Nichols has spent years recruiting brain scientists, biolo-gists, surfers, and artists to build a movement he calls neuroconservation. The idea is that if we can figure out why the sea makes us happier, we can save it. Nichols has an annual conference, Blue Mind;…

Out of Bounds FINLAND Woodsy, hilly, and peppered with lakes, Finland feels a lot like Maine but with more saunas. To experience the best of it, fly to Helsinki and get a room at the five-star Hotel Haven—berry breakfasts!—and spend an evening at nearby Kaurila, a traditional wood-fired sauna set inside a 19th-century cottage ($125 per hour for up to six; 011-358-50-597-3359). From there, hop an 80-minute flight north to Kajaani and the start of an eight-day guided canoe and hiking trip along the Russian border (from $2,000; guildtravel.com). You’ll start off trekking eight to fifteen miles a day through Martinselkonen Nature Reserve and the surrounding spruce forests, home to bears, moose, and wolverines. Farther north, you’ll paddle canoes while looking for reindeer near the rivers and lakes of Hossa…

TRAIN WITH A BUDDY CLAY EMGE, 30 IRONMAN BONA FIDES Last year, Emge, an engineer at an oil and gas company in Tyler, Texas, won the 25–29 age group at the Ironman World Championships in Kona, Hawaii. HOW HE DOES IT Emge has always been a strong runner—he completed a onehour his multisport performance through committed training: 6 A.M. swims at the YMCA, lunchtime runs and strength training, and grueling evening bike rides. But when he missed qualifying for Kona by just ten seconds in 2012, he decided to ramp up his approach—especially on the bike, his weakest discipline. “Realizing I was that close to something most triathletes only dream of made me dedicate myself to making it the following year,” he says. Emge began riding with a friend who…

I BOUGHT A STRIPED SKUNK SKULL ONLINE FROM A MAN NAMED TERRY. It arrived yesterday from Duluth, Minnesota, in a nondescript cardboard box that weighed almost nothing. I opened the box and removed the skull from a cocoon of bubble wrap. I hold it in my hand now. It’s much smaller than I expected. It fits comfortably on the screen of my smartphone. I sit at my desk, turning the skull over to inspect its ridged surfaces, tracing my finger along the delicate zygomatic arches. I count its white teeth. Meanwhile, at the end of my overgrown backyard, beneath a small garden shed, skunks are sleeping among the roots, hidden in the cool earth, waiting for the night to come. IN MY HOMETOWN of Grand Rapids, Michigan, a pleasantly average…

GORUCK SANDBAGS Designed by a former Green Beret and his civilian partner, these bags are sewn in the USA from supertough reinforced Cordura and feature padded handles. Huck one over a shoulder, grab two for a farmer walk, or carry the 120-pound monster with your teammates. From $65; goruck.com TRACTOR TIRE Chances are you’re going to have to flip a tire during a race. The best training tool is—surprise!— a tire. Search your local tire store’s scrap pile for a big round of rubber, or find a smaller tire for endurance training. The flipping motion works every muscle in your body. GENERAL MANUFACTURING TYBEE JUMP ROPE Jumping rope is a decidedly simple way to get fit. This pared-down, durable version is all you need, with wrapped walnut handles and a…

Group Therapy For most of my adult life, running has been my exercise of choice and largely a solo ritual. Wake up early, throw on some shorts and shoes, and head out the door. The routine was my sanity, fueling me with a steady drip of endorphins to vanquish any stress the workday threw at me. Morning runs were as ingrained as brushing my teeth, and even after I had kids, I simply adapted. Both of my children spent a large part of their infant and toddler years cruising along with me in a jogging stroller. Eventually, however, the day came when they grew tired of my routine, and my morning run became harder to squeeze in. Suddenly, I was arriving at work without my endorphin fix. That’s one reason…

WALMART, ALREADY one of the country’s largest distributors of organic foods, will gobble up additional market share this summer, thanks to a deal it struck with Wild Oats to carry more than 100 of the natural-food chain’s house-branded products. The agreement, coming on the heels of Target’s Simply Balanced line, which is 40 percent organic, marks a new era. One obvious benefit is that prices for organic foods should drop nationwide as production increases and competitors are forced to match big-box discounts. But the supersizing of organic comes at a cost. When the term first gained traction, in the 1980s, it was mainly used by small farms supplying local markets. In 2000, when the Department of Agriculture created the USDA Organic label, its standards included a list of roughly 100…

EARLIER THIS YEAR, Terry Dubois, an elementary school reading coach and member of the Los Alamos Mountain Canine Corps, a search-and-rescue outfit in northern New Mexico, went hiking with a few friends and four dogs. They were on U.S. Forest Service land, three miles from town and on a wellestablished trail that leads to some Native American ruins, when her 12-year-old heeler, Jetta, suddenly began shrieking. “It was like nothing I had ever heard before,” says Dubois. “She was screaming and crying, and I hardly recognized it was her.” The jaws of a foothold trap, baited with bobcat urine, had snapped shut on Jetta’s right front leg. The group scrambled to try and release her. “By some miracle, one of my friends had just watched a video that showed how…

IT’S A SAD FACT: winter is shrinking. The Rutgers University Global Snow Lab reports that the Northern Hemisphere has lost more than a million square miles of snow since 1970. That’s why the hottest trend in the winter-sports industry is warm-weather activities. In April, the U.S. Forest Service implemented a new system that makes it significantly easier for resorts to get permits for things like canopy tours and ropes courses. Here are four of the best excuses to get back on the lift—this time in shorts and a T-shirt. Walk the Razor’s Edge FERNIE, BRITISH COLUMBIA Fernie has long been overshadowed by provincial brethren like Whistler and Revelstoke, which is fine by locals—the serious alpine terrain is largely empty. Try the ridge traverse across the breathtaking Lizards Range crest. Start…

There’s a reason exiles dreaded being packed off to Siberia. While retracing the path of a doomed 19th-century U.S. polar expedition in the Russian High Arctic, HAMPTON SIDES encounters swarming mosquitoes, a few Kalashnikovs, an island lost in time, the burial site of ten brave men, and a haunting beauty like nothing he’s ever seen. DA, DA, THERE IT IS,” Andrey says with a smile as he idles the outboard engine. HE PUFFS A CIGARETTE and points at a bulge on the horizon. “Amerika Khaya––America Mountain.” I look where Andrey is pointing, but I’m distracted by clouds of insects. In this part of the Siberian Arctic, there are only two seasons: Winter and Mosquito. Right now we’re in the middle of Mosquito. The ravening swarms work their way under our…

THE REASON you take pictures with your smartphone is easy: you have it with you. The reason you spend 20 minutes in Snapseed editing those pictures is that your phone’s tiny lens barely lets in any light. Enter the Moment, the most streamlined smartphone lens we’ve seen. A near paper-thin metal mounting plate snugs onto your Galaxy, iPhone, or Nexus with a rubberized adhesive (and fits under your phone case), so the Moment clicks into place just like a DSLR lens. Attach, shoot, detach, keep rolling. But while the ease of use got our attention, it’s the quality that impressed us most. The two lens options, a 2x telephoto and an 18-millimeter wide-angle, were designed by engineers of hi-def cinema lenses, and they sweated hard to eliminate edge distortion and…

1. NIXON TANGENT The Tangent is made from the same burly material used in the fins of big-wave surfboards. It comes with a simple tide dial, and Nixon smartly moved the crown to the nine o’clock position to reduce wrist bite while paddling out. $500; nixon.com 2. SEIKO ASTRON This titanium-body watch uses GPS to calibrate the exact time, zone, and daylight-savings status. And because it doesn’t use atomic clocks, it can also set itself—precise to one second every 100,000 years—at any point on earth. The only caveat: it uses solar power to take a daily reading, so you do need to be outside at least once in a while. $1,750; seikousa.com 3. FREESTYLE MARINER TIDE This easy-toread watch takes Freestyle’s Mariner sailing model, turns it into a great tool…

TEN YEARS AGO, kiteboarding pioneer Don Montague hatched a plan to become the fastest person to circumnavigate the globe. His idea was to use a 65-foot catamaran, cabled to a large parafoil, that would fly some 250 feet in the air. Essentially, he would supersize the typical kiteboard rig. A few months into the project, he gave a preview to a couple of kitesurfing friends, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. “I was showing them how much power was actually available at higher altitudes, and I said, ‘Look, I can even generate electricity,’” says Montague, who had worked with a Dutch astronaut to build a kite-power prototype. “They said, ‘Don, don’t waste your time sailing around the world. Let’s save the world.’” So Montague and his partners set about…

WHEN 21-YEAR-OLD Lukas Verzbicas turned pro as a triathlete, he got death threats. As a teenager, he’d been billed as the next great hope in American running, becoming only the fifth high school star to break the four-minute barrier in the mile. As some runners saw it, he’d betrayed their sport. But according to Verzbicas, triathlon, something he’d pursued since he was 11 years old, was always his true passion. In 2011, he graduated early from high school and set his sights on competing in the sport at the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro. 20% AMOUNT OF BODY WEIGHT VERZBICAS LOST WHILE RECOVERING THE CRASH: Verzbicas had already picked up two Olympic-distance wins on the World Cup circuit when, during a workout in July 2012, he lost control…

GROWING UP in Sedona, Arizona, my friends and I were true pros at shirking responsibility. We spent entire days in the national forest building BMX trails, and in the summers we’d hang around swimming holes. One of the best was Grasshopper Point, a couple of miles up Oak Creek Canyon. The place has since been recarved by floods and placarded with warnings so the tourists won’t sue, but at the time it was our secret slab of rock, a place where the world couldn’t catch up to us. So the day we graduated from high school, we did what countless teenagers had done before us: we stole some Coors from our parents’ refrigerators and went to Grasshopper Point. We popped an Oingo Boingo tape into our Pioneer boom box—the one…

ICELAND IS SO FULL of adventure, it can be hard to know where to dive in. Plenty of lodges offer great accommodations, but few can match Hótel Glymur’s access and views. A quick 45-minute drive from Reykjavík, Glymur is set amid the countless hikes, rivers, and volcanic fields around 20-mile-long Whale Fjord. The lodge has 22 rooms and three suites, but we suggest splurging on one of the six villas, which have floor-to-ceiling views of the fjord, state-of-the-art kitchens, and private geothermal hot tubs outside. From there, head 13 miles east to the highest waterfall in the country (and the hotel’s namesake), which cascades 643 feet in a single drop from the Botsna River over the side of Hvalfell volcano. Inaccessible by road, the waterfall is one of Iceland’s least…

1. Boots Up AT 3 A.M., Lhakpa Gyalgen’s alarm went off at Base Camp, but he dozed until 3:07, when Tenzing Chottar rattled his tent fly. “He had been reading holy books and prayers,” said Lhakpa Gyalgen, who is from Thame, in Nepal, and was a lama at Kathmandu’s Kopan monastery before becoming a climber. Tenzing Chottar, 27, grew up in Ylajung, a mile up the Bhote Kosi River from Thame, and had a wife and a four-month-old boy. Lhakpa Gyalgen, 30, also had a young son, a twoyear-old born blind. He and Tenzing Chottar lived near each other for most of the year in Kath mandu’s Sambala neigh borhood. Lhakpa Gyalgen, who is five foot nine, with closely set eyes that have trouble focusing, had worked on Mount Everest…

1. Batten wear’s 100 percent cotton Overhang shorts ($207; battenwear.com) look like casual sixties surf trunks, but they’re cut to move: an extra diamond-shaped panel in the inseam allows for deep knee bends. Add a nylon belt and zippered pocket in the front, and you’ve got the only layer you need for that beach-volleyball-bouldering-BBQ triathlon. 2. Camp chairs are typically uncomfortable or heavy or clunky—or all of the above. Not the Helinox Chair One ($100; bigagnes.com). With minimal effort, it transforms from a hoagie-size bag into a sturdy mesh lounger. The aluminum poles are strong enough to hold a 320-pounder, while the chair itself weighs only two pounds. Most important, it’s damned comfortable. Taut shock cord makes the bomber seat feel spring loaded, and the backrest has just the right…