Outside Podcast

John Orth is a violin maker from Colorado. Andrew Shapiro is a college kid from Virginia. They have little in common except that for the last two years they’ve been trading back and forth the world record for the most pull-ups in 24 hours. Over the summer, they both set their sights on 10,000 pull-ups. It’s a number that would have been unthinkable two years ago; a number that seemed like it would reveal the very limits of what the human body can do. Instead, they found a different limit.

In this first episode of a new series exploring how gear gets made, we investigate the origin of arguably the most refined fork in history. When designer Owen Mesdag was a graduate student in the late-1990s, he fell in love with a particularly clever spoon. Engineered by outdoor brand MSR, it doubled as a stove repair tool. Mesdag was enamored with it and he thought, I want to make a matching fork. And how hard could that be, really? A fork is a fairly simple tool. Except Owen’s fork didn’t just have to be good, it had to be perfect. His obsessive attention to detail meant that he kept going back to do more testing, taking more trips to Asia, and redesigning the fork again and again, because it was never quite right. Producer Alex Ward has this story explaining why the business end of a fork tells us a great deal about the tireless designers who make our favorite things.

The new movie Free Solo is arguably the greatest film about climbing that’s ever been made. In just over 90 minutes, it chronicles Alex Honnold’s astonishing no-ropes ascent of the 3,000-foot sheer face of Yosemite’s El Capitan, which he completed one morning in June, 2017. Even more impressively, it captures the unique mindset of Honnold, a perfectionist whose years-long obsessive pursuit of his dream gets complicated by an ever-present camera crew and his growing love for his new girlfriend. As you might guess, being the focus of a deeply personal Oscar-caliber documentary and then answering probing questions by a constant stream of reporters and fans has had an impact on the guy. Outside executive editor Michael Roberts chased Honnold down on his film tour to ask about the risks and rewards of telling your whole story.

Journalist Laura Krantz doesn’t believe in Bigfoot. She’s trained to be skeptical, and all the best Sasquatch sightings and photos have been debunked. Except, then she heard about Grover Krantz, a serious academic and long lost relative who had spent his career researching the possibility that an upright, bi-pedal homonid had once roamed the forest. Some of the evidence was pretty compelling, and so Laura dove into the subject headfirst. The result is Wild Thing, a nine-part series that takes a good hard look at what exactly we know and what we don’t know about Bigfoot, and why some form of this legend persists all over the world.

Maybe you saw the fire coming, maybe you didn’t. Maybe you were ready for it, maybe you weren’t. Maybe you did everything right. Maybe not. Maybe you just lost everything. Maybe that’s not even the worst of it. For this final episode of our  wildfire series, we asked fiction writer Joseph Jordan to imagine the experience of someone whose home has been destroyed by flames. He came up with a haunting story that captures our modern relationship with wildfire, in which a single catastrophic blaze is neither the start or end of anyone’s troubles.

To reduce the intensity of megafires in America, we’d need to treat and burn about 50-80 million acres of forest. So, how do we do it? What would it cost? How long would it take? Is it possible? In this episode we look at whether or not there’s anything we can do about wildfires in the West and the likelihood that we’ll take action on potential solutions.

How do you protect yourself from wildfire on a warming planet? You burn everything on purpose. No, seriously. Thanks to climate change, the whole world is a tinderbox. Fire season now starts sooner and ends later, and scientists say lightning will become more frequent, and winds more powerful. Our only defense may be intentional fires. In this episode, our friends at Outside/In take a close look at the ecology of prescription burns. Why are our forests so dependent on wildfires? And why did some plants evolve to become more flammable?

There are between eight and ten thousand wildfires in the United States each year, but most quietly burn out, and we never hear about them. The Pagami Creek Wildfire in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area was supposed to be like that. It was tiny and stuck in a bog that was surrounded by lakes. It was the kind of fire you could ignore. Computer models predicted that it would just sit there. But those models didn’t account for a rare convergence of atmospheric events had prepped the forest for an unprecedented burn. And Greg and Julie Welch were camping right in its path. In the first of four episodes investigating American wildfires, we tell the Welch’s extraordinary story and look at the factors that lead to this unexpected blaze.

Carina Hoang grew up in a wealthy family in Vietnam. She had a nanny to take care of her and a maid who cleaned up after her—she didn’t even wash her own hair. But when the Vietnam War broke out, she and two siblings fled the country on a boat, landing on Kuku beach, in Indonesia. It was supposed to be a refugee camp, but it was actually a deserted island. No food, no water, no buildings, people, or tools. Just sand and jungle. Produced in collaboration with Snap Judgment, with funding from the International Women’s Media Foundation, this is a story about Carina’s decades-long struggle to leave Kuku Island behind.

Most of the time, when lightning makes the news, it’s because of something outlandish—like the park ranger who was struck seven times, or the survivor who also won the lottery (the chances of which are about one in 2.6 trillion), or the guy who claimed lightning strike gave him sudden musical talent. This is not one of those stories. This is about Phil Broscovak—who was struck by lightning while on a climbing trip with family in 2005—and the confounding, bizarre science that can’t fully explain what Phil and other survivors endure in the aftermath of a strike. Originally broadcast in 2016, this episode is one of our favorites.

Everyone gets older, but not everyone bows out of competition in middle-age. Journalist Jeff Bercovici wanted to know: Why? Why do some athletes flame out in their 30s and 40s, while others are still going as senior citizens? Is it genetics? Special training? Diet? And could amateur athletes achieve similar results? Outside editor Chris Keyes talks with Jeff about his new book, Play On: The New Science of Elite Performance at Any Age, and what it takes to reverse the effects of getting older.

Climbing was Shelma Jun’s fallback sport. A snowboarder and mountain biker, she found her way into a climbing gym after injuring her shoulder and looking for an activity where she wouldn’t risk more impact. As a friend told her, you can’t fall very far if you’re attached to a rope. In 2014, she created an Instagram account called Flash Foxy to celebrate the crew of hard-charging New York women she’d begun climbing with. After gaining thousands of followers, she co-founded the Women’s Climbing Festival, which sold out in under a minute last year. In our final installment of this series looking at inclusivity in outdoor communities, James Edward Mills spoke to Jun about the influence a rising generation of female athletes is having on a sport long dominated by men.

Knox Robinson grew up watching his dad run and went on to race track himself at a Division I college, but he was never defined by the sport. He’s more of a renaissance man. For years, he gave up athletics, studying and living in Japan, then managing rock stars and rappers in New York City. It was only as an adult—and after having a son of his own—that he returned to running, eventually co-founding a running collective called Black Roses NYC. Grounded in New York street culture, the group seeks to build community and promote physical and mental health among black men and women. In this third installment in a four-part series looking at inclusivity in outdoor communities, Outside contributor James Edward Mills talks to Robinson about his journey, and how running through diverse urban neighborhoods can be a powerful way to project a message of vitality and togetherness.

Ayesha McGowan came late to competitive cycling. An accomplished violinist, she didn’t enter her first organized biking event until after college. Despite riding an old steel bike with a milk crate on the back and wearing jean shorts in a peloton of spandex, she impressed the other women, who encouraged her to start competing. A year later, she took fifth place in her first race, then kept winning on the amateur circuit. Now she’s aiming to be the first African American female cyclist on the pro tour, and gets closer to that goal every day. In this second installment in a four-part series looking at inclusivity in outdoor communities, journalist James Edward Mills sits down with McGowan to talk about her fast road to success.

When Mikhail Martin started climbing at a Brooklyn gym in 2009, he was one of very few African Americans to rope up. Today, his group, Brothers of Climbing, is working to change that. BOC is tackling diversity in rock climbing, which includes bridging the gaps in lingo, jargon, and etiquette that keep people of color out of the sport. Nobody understands these issues better than journalist James Edward Mills, author of The Adventure Gap, a book that looks at the challenges minority groups face when engaging in outdoor recreation. In this first episode in a four-part series looking at inclusivity in outdoor communities, Mills asks Martin about his personal journey and the progress he’s achieved with BOC, and where we go from here.

In 2014, the federal government rounded up Cliven Bundy’s cattle over a matter of unpaid grazing fees. So the Bundy family gathered a posse and took them back at gunpoint. Two years later, they took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. The Bundys are making a habit of taking on the federal government and winning. For the past two years, reporter Leah Sottile has been following this story, trying to figure out what all this means for the future of public lands in the American West, and wondering what happens next?

Kellee Edwards had a dream of getting her own show on the Travel Channel. She also had a plan. As a black woman trying to break into the overwhelmingly white and male world of travel television, she figured she would have to be overqualified to get noticed. So she got certified as a scuba diver, learned to pilot her own aircraft, and traveled solo to remote corners of the planet. In just a few years, she went from working as a bank teller to hosting the Travel Channel show Mysterious Islands. Outside contributor Stephanie Joyce wanted to know: What’s that trip been like? This episode incorrectly states that Kellee Edwards pitched her show, Mysterious Islands, to the Travel Channel. In fact, the production company Departure Films pitched the project.

Distance runner Alexi Pappas is the rare dual-threat of Olympic athlete and movie star. In the 2016 film Tracktown, which she wrote, directed, and plays the lead character in, she set out to capture the running-obsessed culture of Eugene, Oregon—a place where recreational runners share the trails with pros, and local farms and butchers step up as beef and vegetable sponsors for hungry athletes. Outside contributor Stephanie Joyce talked to Pappas about how her life as an Olympic hopeful translated to the big screen, and why so many people connect with her as an artist and a runner.

One day in 2005 or 2006, a young wolf in Idaho headed west. He swam across the Snake River to Oregon, which was then outside the gray wolf’s range. After he established a territory, he became the most controversial canid in the state. Dubbed OR4 by Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, he was the alpha male of the first pack to live in Oregon in more than half a century. For years, biologist Russ Morgan tracked him, collared him, counted his pups, weighed him, photographed him, and protected him. Environmentalists rejoiced. Cattle ranchers called for his death. OR4 continued making bold raids on livestock and became known for his enduring competence as a hunter, father, and survivor. But nothing lasts forever.

Maverick’s, the monster surf break off the Northern California coast, has long been a proving ground for the world’s best big-wave surfers. But the contest held there most years has never included women, despite the fact that female surfers have been dropping in on giant swells for decades. In fact, the inaugural event at Maverick’s, held in 1999 and called Men Who Ride Mountains, took place several weeks after Sarah Gerhardt caught her first wave there. She wasn’t a professional surfer—she was a graduate student at the nearby University of California at Santa Cruz, where she had just started a Ph.D. in chemistry. Fast forward to today, and Gerhardt was one of six women invited to compete in a Maverick’s event. Outside contributor Stephanie Joyce caught up with the pioneering athlete to talk about her remarkable path.