My father’s e-mail didn’t make much sense, but he seemed to be saying that pirates had boarded his boat. “Being kidnappedby filmcompany Deep south blackcult took over steering,” it read. “Ship disabled.”

He sent this to my mother, Martha Carr, at 4:30 a.m. Pacific time on May 28, 2017, a Sunday. She was at home in Los Angeles, asleep, and she wouldn’t see the message—and a couple more like it—until 8:30 a.m. For several hours, my dad, 71-year-old Richard Carr, must have thought they weren’t getting through.

Dad was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, on his way from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to the Marquesas Islands, 26 days into a single-handed, 2,780-mile crossing that was to be the first major leg of a lifelong dream: sailing around the world. It was 3:30 A.M. where he was, near the equator, an hour behind Pacific time. He was 1,160 nautical miles from the Marquesas, 1,975 from Hawaii, and 1,553 from Mexico—about as far away from land, and help, as you can get.

His boat was a 36-foot Union Cutter called Celebration, built in 1985. It had a white hull, faded teak decks, brass portholes turning turquoise, and forest green sail covers that always reminded me of summer camp. Climbing into the cabin was like disappearing into a hobbit hole—a dark, welcoming space with oak cabinets and big cushions.

Just six hours before Dad sent the pirate alert, late in the evening on May 27, he had used his satellite text messager and tracking device to wish Mom a happy 39th wedding anniversary. He also wanted to ease her concerns that his boat was pointed the wrong way, something she’d noticed on a map that indicated his position based on the messages he sent.

“Hey Hon. I’m fine,” he wrote. “I have enough food, etc. The watermaker is still working. Pulling over & parking in a storm (heave to) is a good skill to have & practice.” He signed off with a smiley face.

The smile was gone now. Ten minutes after his 4:30 message, he e-mailed one of his younger brothers, John Carr, an aerospace engineer in Orange County. “Being kidnapped by pirates,” he wrote. “Talk to martha.” John was asleep, too, and didn’t see it.

About two hours later, Dad followed up with this message to John: “Apparently, I’ve been spared.” A few minutes after that, at 6:54, he messaged Mom: “Hugewind pirates left. I’m fine. Talklater.” He said he’d sent out an SOS and an alert from his EPIRB, an emergency device that transmits a satellite signal to rescuers when a boat is in distress. He asked her to call and cancel them.

At 7:54, shortly after sunrise where Dad was, he wrote Mom: “Message me as soon as u can. I’m really shaken.” Then he tried John again: “Very scarey. Thought I would not see day.” For Dad, sunrise meant nearly 13 hours of sitting in humid 80-degree weather in the doldrums—an area near the equator with fickle conditions that leave sailors becalmed one minute, huddled in squalls the next, and then scrambling to catch a big gust of wind.

Around eight in L.A., Mom went outside to do some gardening before it got too hot. She still wasn’t aware of the e-mail Dad had sent. “Richard usually messaged me in the afternoon, and I would write back,” she told me later. “So I didn’t check my e-mail when I got up.”

At 8:30, the phone rang. It was John calling to discuss the strange e-mail he’d received. She ran upstairs to her laptop. It was then, roughly an hour after Dad sent his final message of the morning, that he finally heard back from the family. Mom’s first message to him said: “Omg-what do u need? Are u ok?”

She phoned my brother, Tim, who lives in Culver City, about 45 minutes from her house, with his wife, Jen, and their two young boys. Tim messaged Dad, asking if he was all right and giving him instructions for canceling an SOS. Then he drove to Mom’s. Once there he called me in Woodstock, New York, where I live with my husband, Ian, and our two small daughters.

Before leaving, Dad had given Mom a list of emergency contacts. She called a California branch of the Coast GuardÌęand was advised to try Honolulu instead, because that part of the Pacific is their territory. A woman answered. After listening to the details about Dad, she checked for an EPIRB alert from him. When she came back, she said, “There’s been no signal.”

What was going on? There were various possibilities, and none of them seemed good. We scrambled to find answers, knowing there might not be much time.

Richard Carr grew up in the 1940s and ’50s near the Erie Canal just outside Buffalo, New York. As was typical in that area at that time, he was one of seven kids in a hardworking family with stern parents, all of them crammed into a three-bedroom house.

The boys in the family were often out all day, until dinner, and Richard was no different. He taught kids to swim and fish for the local Boys’ Club and built a canoe with his older brother to explore the canal’s feeder creeks. He and his best friends played Lost Boys along parts of the Niagara River, when he wasn’t diving in it with members of the scuba club he started.“He was an optimist,” my uncle John recalls. “He always had the outlook that there was something to do and it was always good.”

In 1963, Richard was offered a full scholarship to study marine biology at the University of Miami, but his father refused to divulge the family’s income on the required forms, so the aid fell through. Ready for some distance from his hometown, he caught a free ride to L.A., where he took classes at a community college to make himself eligible for residency tuition at California universities. To save money, he worked at a Laundromat and sometimes lived off ketchup packets mixed with water. (“Tomato soup,” he joked.) He was shy, but he had a sunny, magnetic smile.

Mom saw him for the first time in 1969, at Oakwood, her private high school in L.A. Born Martha Gold, she was a popular tenth-grader, with long red hair, parents who worked in the film industry, and a horse that she jumped in competition. Dad was interviewing to teach seventh-grade science. By that time, he’d earned a degree in anthropology from UCLA and was interested in psychology. They didn’t start a relationship until 1975, when Mom was at UCLA as a psych major. They met in a professional group, and though Mom declined his invitations for a while, she finally gave in and agreed to go out with him.

“I was an anxious person and didn’t have a lot of relationship experience,” she says. “He helped me work through my resistance and wasn’t put off by my weaknesses, so that showed me a lot about his devotion.”

They married in 1978; by the next year, Mom was pregnant with Tim. Dad, who had learned to sail in California, sold a boat he owned—a 31-foot Mariner ketch called Cortez—and bought an old Spanish-style house in the San Fernando Valley, where Tim and I grew up and where Mom still lives. My parents were busy raising us and tending to clients in their therapy practices, but sailing was always on Dad’s mind. He often tried to convince Mom that the family should sail around the world together, but she wanted her kids to have a normal upbringing.

My parents shared an office suite in Hollywood, across from the famous Capitol Records building. As a kid, I’d sometimes sit in the waiting room while one of them finished a session. I’d sort my Mom’s tea collection and watch gem-toned fish flit about in Dad’s saltwater tank. Over the years, in addition to his practice, he became deeply interested in research. He explored the neurology of babies in the womb and wrote a book about the .

Though Dad was devoted to his work, our coffee table was never without an issue of . On some weekends during my childhood, we sailed a rented boat to Catalina Island, a half-day’s trip from L.A. We often camped and skied, and also traveled to Hawaii, snorkeling and listening to Dad tick off the names of the fish we’d seen.

More recently, as he prepared to depart on his circumnavigation, I thought about taking sailing lessons and joining him somewhere tropical. Father-daughter time felt sacred by then, because we hadn’t lived in the same state for almost ten years. The occasions we spent together—a ski trip to Mammoth, a daylong sail off Los Angeles Harbor—established our dynamic. We dipped comfortably into troughs of silence crested by deep conversations about life.

Dad’s quest to sail the world got serious on March 16, 2010, when he made the final payment on a boat he found in the San Francisco Bay Area called Celebration. It had a crack in the bulkhead, a rusted mast step, and a hull full of blisters. He planned to devote the next few years to readying it.

The boat had been known as Pelican, until the previous owner changed it. According to legend, renaming a boat enrages the sea gods if you neglect to do various ritualistic things, like burn the old ship’s log. I have no idea if the prior owner adhered to that tradition, but we do know that he made it only as far as San Diego on his own around-the-world attempt. There he suffered a stroke and was sidelined. Seven years after purchasing the boat, my dad bought a carved pelican figurine at a stop in La Paz, Mexico, and mounted it in the cabin as a talisman.

During the summer of 2010, once Celebration was fit to use, it was temporarily docked in Oxnard, 60 miles northwest of L.A., and my parents spent weekends sailing to the Channel Islands. Mom enjoyed the trips but had no interest in big ocean crossings. Instead of joining Dad on his circumnavigation, which would play out in stages over several years, she planned to meet him in various ports around the world.

That fall, Celebration found its new long-term home in busy, industrial Los Angeles Harbor, at a small, homey marina called . It was tucked into the terminus of a maze of massive cranes playing Tetris with container ships.

Dad spent weekends fastidiously working on Celebration, but eight hours a day was a lot for him. “He wasn’t a carpenter or a mason or a plumber,” says Thor Faber, a boat repairman who sold Dad equipment to prepare for long sails. “It’s taxing for somebody who is 40 or 50, but for someone who is 60-plus it’s a big adventure.”

Still, Dad couldn’t stay away, and the more time he spent on the boat, the more obsessed he became with getting everything done. When his professional work got in the way, he grew frustrated and cranky. Marty Richards, Dad’s liveaboard neighbor, says he could never suggest a fix for something without inviting a lengthy back-and-forth.

“Your dad was a stubborn guy,” he told me. “Kind of a self-taught guy, and I think he pretty much lived his whole life that way, right? He wouldn’t take anything on faith unless he could understand it intuitively. He just wouldn’t believe it.”

Dad hoped to depart in late 2015, but an El Niño weather forecast loomed for that winter. Plus, the boat wasn’t seaworthy yet. The delays felt monumental to him. It was as if sticking to the schedule was the primary goal, and he couldn’t see that being patient would allow him to practice and prepare. I think he also sensed that, at this stage of his life, getting ready for such a trip might require more time than he had left.

Mom became anxious as the departure date got closer. Their lives had been intertwined for decades, and he was about to leave on a voyage that could go on for years. The repairs—which came to nearly half the cost of the boat—caused frequent arguments. But she had to accept that he wasn’t going to give up his dream, so they moved forward, at times clumsily, toward his ultimate adventure.

The start of 2016 brought a major new expense: °ä±đ±ô±đČú°ùČčłÙŸ±ŽÇČÔ’s decks were rotting and had to be replaced. After that repair was completed, in Marina del Rey, Dad motored down the coast toward L.A. Harbor. En route, the engine started smoking, and it blew a head gasket, requiring a partial rebuild. Crucial time to test gear and practice single-handing was slipping away.

Finally, Dad refused to delay any longer. He forced himself to get going by signing up for the , a two-week cruising rally with 130 other boats that ran from San Diego to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, at the end of October. He would go with his marina mate Marty Richards.

Dad and Richards made their way to San Diego, and the whole family gathered there to say goodbye. Mom kept her nerves under control by orchestrating dinner. Dad’s anxiety peaked as he tried to clear years of collected junk from Celebration—piles of pencils, rulers, and other dead weight.

I was nervous, given Dad’s track record with mishaps like the overheated engine, which required a Coast Guard tow. But I also understood the exhilaration he felt on the water. Over the years, as part of my career, I’ve snowboarded backcountry terrain and climbed in the dark with thousands of feet of exposure. I was proud that Dad was going for it. I knew there was a chance that he wouldn’t come back, but I’d rather he try—risk and all—than live with regret.

One night in San Diego, after the kids were asleep, Tim and Ian went to the hotel bar. A sailor there started talking about pirates along the African coast, an area that Dad would eventually find himself in as he sailed around the world.

“That really alarmed us and made us question if Richard knew what he was doing,” Ian remembers. “We were crying into our scotch. We knew he was going no matter what.”

“I remember feeling impressed at how brave he was and proud of him for going, but I was also terrified,” Tim says. “I gave him a hug on the boat and told him I was afraid he wouldn’t come back.”

When it was time to pull away from port, Mom ran off briefly to put something in the car. When she got back, Celebration was gone. “That was when I really started to worry,” she says. “How could he forget to say goodbye?” She called his mobile. After fueling up, he turned around, docked, and said a proper farewell before rejoining the rally.

Problems ensued as Dad and Richards made their way south. Among other things, they had to fix a leaky bilge pump, which had caused an alarming amount of steam to pour from the engine compartment. New noises kept Dad awake on the first night. “He was so sleep deprived he was slurring,” Mom recalls of their phone conversation the next day. “His thoughts were all over the place.”

And his eyes were playing tricks on him. At one point in the night, he thought he saw a forest of trees rising from the water, illuminated by phosphorescence. “Despite knowing they couldn’t be real,” he wrote later on his blog, “I had to wait 
 and watch the branches dissolve into fragmentary illusions.” Hallucinations worried us, but we also knew that they’re not uncommon among sailors on overnighters.

Even so, Dad had some hard things to face. “The real journey, which had been more challenging than my conjured fears before we started, left me needing to reflect and redefine my trip,” he wrote. “Questions tormented me… When Marty’s gone, who will I talk things through with? How will I hold up sailing day and night on long runs? Am I really ready to single-hand this trip? A reality that had been an idea just a few days before was unfolding according to its own design as the life I’d agreed to.”

Cabo Corrientes, rocky and pointed like an arrowhead, is the last piece of land jutting into the Pacific at the base of Mexico’s horseshoe-shaped Banderas Bay. Head east and you’ll hit Puerto Vallarta, the bass-thumping spring-break destination. Head west and you’ll hear nothing but wind and the slap of the ocean against your hull.

I can picture Dad clearing that spot on the morning of May 3, 2017, his hands loosely gripping the boat’s metal wheel and his blue eyes surveying the horizon. He would have uttered anÌę“młŸ±èłó” to mark the moment before he went back to winching and charting and setting angles. “My sea journey has really begun,” he texted as he moved out. “Only ocean to the Marquesas. Lite winds. Breakfast time.”

The huge expanse ahead would be his first ocean crossing, and it would also be the hardest leg of his planned route, judging by the likely weather patterns and duration—an estimated 27 days. When I asked what scared him most about the trip, he said it was sleep deprivation, an inevitable issue for single-handed sailors, who often are so busy that they can rest only in chunks.

Dad had spent the month and a half before departure in La Cruz de Huanacaxtle, prepping to join the , a migration of boats that cross from the Americas to French Polynesia, mostly during March and April, when the winds are strong and storms are rare. But April came to a close, and he still had repairs to make. Fortunately, the weather window remained favorable for a few extra weeks, and there were at least a half-dozen boats crossing at the same time. On May 2, the birthday of his first grandchild, Brendan, he set sail.

Celebration, a slow but sturdy boat, was equipped with solar panels, a wind generator, a watermaker (or desalinator), a four-man life raft, a self-steering device, a flare gun, a $1,300 survival suit designed for dangerous Alaskan fishing conditions, and provisions for three months, among other items.

“It’s an easy boat to handle,” says Mike Danielson of PV Sailing, a Puerto Vallarta–based marine service center that helped Dad rig. “If you’re in a gale, that boat can heave to and weather it out.”

Heaving to—a maneuver used to slow a boat’s progress and basically park it—is a skill Dad would practice often on this trip, especially when he was in the Intertropical Convergence Zone, where the north- and southeast trade winds meet near the equator. This region is infamous for chaotic weather that alternates between rain squalls, shifting winds, thunderstorms, and dead calm. The patterns become more frenetic as summer approaches. “It’s feast or famine out there,” says Danielson. “Getting across the convergence zone at that time is a lot of work.”

I was due to have my second baby a week before Dad’s estimated arrival in the Marquesas on May 29. Both of us would be facing difficult challenges thousands of miles apart—me in labor, him single-handing—and that made me feel close to him. Our family had preliminary plans to meet in New Zealand for Christmas.

On May 3, as Dad sailed west and Cabo Corrientes slipped below the horizon, my water broke—three weeks early. Later that day, I delivered my second daughter, Wyatt.

“Congrats on new daughter,” Dad wrote the next morning. “Delivered with your special drama, flair and courage to do all U can.” As he headed into the empty Pacific—wishing he’d been present for Wyatt’s birth—seven birds kept him company, perching on the bowsprit, falling, scrambling, honking, and perching again.

At first the trip was a dream. Every few days, Dad would let us know how great the conditions were. “Lovely light air sailing,” he wrote. It filled me with relief and joy to know that, after years of hammering and tinkering that had left Dad’s hands greasy and raw, the boat was finally living up to its stout reputation. He was really doing it.

Eventually, the seas got bigger and rougher. Dad’s self-steering wind vane—which allowed him to leave the helm to cook or clean or sleep—was overwhelmed by winds and swells, and he had to stay on deck and help steer. Exhaustion set in, and the less than ideal wind direction he was trying to harness required vigilance.

By the time he was ten days in, averaging a slow, steady 80 to 90 nautical miles per day, he was getting to know himself in isolation. He told Mom that he was having a lot of internal dialogue, which for him was a normal way to deal with demanding situations.

As the days went on, the frequency of Dad’s messages slowed, as did his forward progress: he was making only 77 miles a day now, and his overall trip time was recalibrated to five weeks. Because of rough seas, he was having trouble eating without spilling. Worse, his watermaker had stopped functioning shortly after he left Banderas Bay. Mom relayed repair notes from Thor Faber; after two weeks, during which he probably drank from the backup supply, Dad got it working again.

In his third week out, on May 20, he wrote that “gear & wind & wave” had knocked two pairs of glasses off his face, leaving him with a single damaged but wearable pair. “A bit scarey couple of days,” he said. “Adveture & learn or die trying ;}};.” He followed with this cryptic note: “Horizontal winds that turn ranbows sideways pose question of how does one sail in that? Very carfully!”

For days the weather flopped between foul and calm. On May 26, two days before Dad sent his first message about pirates, he made a sharp turn south toward Hiva Oa—the second-largest island in the Marquesas—but storms blew him back 20 nautical miles.

“No joy!” he wrote. He told Mom that he was reevaluating everything. “It’s the whole plan,” he said. “Boat and I r not really going.” His next message read: “Damn t.” The weather router had just told him it would take 24 to 48 hours for the winds to become more favorable.

In the doldrums, time slows down. Explorer Jason Lewis, who has sailed in that part of the Pacific, described it like this in Jonathan Franklin’s book , an account of the saga of Mexican fisherman Salvador Alvarenga, who survived being lost at sea in the Pacific for well over a year: “The lightning comes down to the water. You’ll see these thunderstorms developing, and they’ll be very dark and foreboding. You watch them for hours, rolling toward you. 
 Every day out there feels like a week 
 and every week feels like a month, a month felt like a year.”

In the same book, explorer Ivan Macfadyen says: “If you start to imagine saber-toothed tigers in the corner of the room, then suddenly they’re all over you. The fear factor is overpowering.”

Dad was never a complainer, but he was worried about the calm conditions. “This not a little thing,” he texted. “It’s over a week of lite adverse winds.” His fuel tank was nearly full—he could have motored most of the way to Hiva Oa—and he seemed to be forgetting that the weather wouldn’t always be like this.

“Big challenges going on,” he wrote on the 26th. “I need some new ways of approaching them. Strangest thing just happened. Too odd & Long for InReach. Involved scam moviemaking.”

Mom, alarmed, responded within minutes: “Scam moviemaking? Are you in contact with others? Food and water holding out?” She told him she wanted to hear more about the challenges he faced. He didn’t respond.

On the afternoon of May 27, around 1:15, he wrote: “Rain—Intense at times, moments horizontal. my decks are relatively clear, not sails. Happy Anniversary 39 years of bliss. Re movie scam. Maybe my Beautiful Mind ala My Sailing Mind. Take this as possible book idea. As real dilemma. After2 days sleep dep, Banderas Bay, Shortwave radio playng unknown to me made me think I was in trouble. Then thought to check it. Had a laugh.”

Mom wrote back: “Happy Anniversary Lover! I wondered if hallucination re Movie Scam but thought maybe u r listening to something bizarre over shortwave
SLEEP!”

Then she got the message that made it clear his boat was facing the wrong way. “I was in rolling seas, storm cells encroaching & gusts to 28Knts, so I heaved to,” he wrote. “Parked. Big storm Moving north.
 Adverse til next Friday. Can u believe it. Obstacles at almost every step. The communication difficulties o”

The text ended there.

On the morning of May 28, once Mom had read the “deep south blackcult” pirate messages, the family started reaching out every ten minutes: “Are you okay?” “On phone with coast guard.” “Trying to find you.” “PLEASE ANSWER.”

We got nothing.

The Coast Guard tried to raise Dad by text, but he didn’t reply. Tim wrote: “Please respond to John Mom or Ali ASAP.
 Want to know you’re safe and unhurt. Maybe you’re sleeping?”

Four hours of silence passed before Dad emerged at around 12 p.m. his time. “It’s part of being put in my pjace Southern style,” he wrote. “More later.”

But nothing followed that provided any clarity. Instead, roughly an hour later, he wrote: “I’m fine now. One of those nearby fishing boats was in empjoy of a southerq boss. Who, unbeknost to me, wanted to put me in my place. Long story.”

Why was he being so murky? Had he been kidnapped by pirates and someone else was sending these messages? Was he trying to communicate in code? Mom asked for his radio frequency so she could relay it to the Coast Guard in Honolulu. “You need to reply 
 NOW. What you are saying makes no sense. Anything stolen?” The Coast Guard messaged boats in the area via satellite, asking them to keep a look out for Celebration.

An hour went by before Dad said he’d try the Coast Guard over the SSB, a long-range radio favored by open-ocean sailors. He apologized for not responding, then said: “Nothing stolen No one hurt, No info on boat. Was inside deciding best action.”

We were relieved but confused. Would pirates allow him to stay inside to review his options while they were aboard?

At 2:55 p.m. Dad’s time on the 28th, after he reported that the radio channels were occupied, Mom sent him the Coast Guard’s e-mail address and wrote, “I have been hysterical today. Tim with me all day. What did the fisherman do exactly? Also, what language?”

At 3 p.m., the Coast Guard texted him again. He sent his coordinates—N 6 35.9712’ W 127 17.7952’—and then messaged them: “This is vessel. Celebration WDJ4510 needing to confirm cancellation of epirb 2DCC7B512CFFBFF this morning 5/28/17 around 6:30AM. Cannot reachUSCG on SSB.”

Tim let Dad know that no emergency signal had been sent or received, adding that we were glad he was OK but this was scary for everyone. He signed off: “Love you!!! Be safe.”

We were still baffled. Dad’s abrupt shift—from giving us vague information about pirates to providing lucid housekeeping details to the Coast Guard—made no sense. Why couldn’t he be clear about what had happened to him?

An hour later, he wrote Mom: “Still may be in trouble if myinfo gotinto public record.” She responded that nothing had been made public. At 5:08, he told the Coast Guard: “I’m sea beigwatched.”

“We don’t understand your message,” they replied. “Are you in distress? Did anyone come aboard your vessel? What is deep south black cult?”

Tim’s wife, Jen, wanted to confirm that someone else wasn’t pretending to be him. “Tell me something only you would know about me. What do I do for a living?” she wrote.

“Physical sports therapy,” he said. Correct.

Mom pressed for details about the pirates, with minutes passing between responses. “We spoke about Phyllis’ disability She’s retarded or speech disabled,” he wrote, referring to someone we’d never heard of. “She thought Iwas afriendwho should stay. I refused.”

“Who spoke with you about Phyllis?” Mom asked. “Was she related to one of the fishermen? I have no context. This sounds bizarre. Did they board your boat? Threaten you?”

“I luv u always,” he said. “Marni ashes buried at sea Al’s too.”

That was a gut punch. Marni and Al were Mom’s mother and stepfather. They’d both died in the two-year period before Dad sailed. One of his goals was to spread their ashes in the ocean.

“When I saw that message, I thought, Uh-oh. He’s going to do something,” Mom said later. “It was like he was taking care of business.”

A year earlier, Dad was sitting bedside with my mom’s mother as she lay dying of cancer, her body withering into a feather. “I don’t know how to die,” she whispered.

“You don’t have to. Your body knows what to do,” he said into her ear. “You can choose to go anywhere else in your mind. Think of a childhood memory, think of something that you love.” She thought of a camping trip with her sisters. A few hours later she was gone.

Now it was Mom’s turn to talk to him. “Thank you sweetheart,” she wrote at 6:06 p.m. “I am feeling alarmed you aren’t responding to my other questions. It’s safe to send message. Do u want to go to Hawaii instead?”

Three minutes later he responded:

“Killers. Watch yourback sorry
”

A few minutes after that:

“Hawaiisoundsqood barbeque at sea.
 Sorry about insuance.”

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” Mom wrote. “You are scaring me. What is happening? Sounds like you are going to hurt yourself! Do you need help? Say yes or no.”

“Thesepeople r killers it’s nott beautiful mind,” he said.

All that day, Dad had moved, slow but steady, on his southwesterly route toward Hiva Oa. But now the map, which updated his position with each message, showed him heading due west. He was drifting off course.

At 6:59, he wrote: “Hekilled hisdaughter well not himhis aid. Poison crack. She’s dying These r old south. People will say I sucided. Better thanwhat he intends,I’ll wait. Miss u.”

“Is your ship disabled?” Mom wrote. “Company?”

“No not in significantway. Listen talk speakers with remote personne.”

“Listening on radio? Who is talking to you?”

“Listeningtome&hisdaughtr talk& re-porting back.”

My sister-in-law broke in, saying she was worried. “So am i notlookingto die,” he wrote. “Don’t want to be killed or enslaved.”

At this point, the Coast Guard requested that he type a simple Y or N to this question: “Is your life in danger?”

“I believe so,” Dad responded. A few minutes later, he wrote to our family: “Goodby.”

“You come home! NO!!!” Mom begged. Ten minutes later, he said, “I’D loveto-buthearboats&Needtoact fast.”

Over the next hour, his responses slowed. At 8:48, Tim wrote: “Satellite shows nearest boat is many many miles away. This isn’t just a lack of sleep right?” At 9:08, with no new message from Dad, Tim begged: “Hit SOS please.”

Family members kept messaging late into the night, but no one heard from Dad after 8:30 his time. The final e-mail from him read: “Not able stop Patjustgot news she’s toberescued&instijtutionalized byher- boy friend.”

All this was happening in the late afternoon and evening where Dad was. In New York State, I was four hours ahead. The last I’d heard, from the message relayed by Tim and Mom (“I’m fine now”), he seemed OK. By the time the situation started deteriorating, I was asleep for the night with our new baby. Mom didn’t know which messages were getting to me, and she didn’t call because she knew it was late on the East Coast.

At 2:30 a.m. my time on the 29th, I woke up to feed the baby and decided to check my phone—something I usually don’t do, but I felt an overwhelming need to message Dad, to let him know I was sending love.

The next morning, I found this e-mail from Mom. “I know you will be getting up before us and will see some scary e-mails from dad last night,” she wrote. “Coast guard says there are no boats near him. He sent us a few more e-mails after the one that says goodbye. But we don’t know what this means yet. We will loop you in as soon as we are up. Just hope he didn’t do something stupid out of paranoia. We messaged him to go to sleep. Hope he read.”

I called Mom and Tim and asked them to forward the messages. What I read looked schizophrenic. I studied them over and over; the fear in his words was tangible.

The Coast Guard hadn’t been able to find any instances of piracy in the area where Dad was. Later research, using records from the , showed that of the 204 reports of piracy and armed robbery worldwide in 2017, only three occurred in the region where Dad was sailing. All involved large container-style ships and had happened in Peruvian and Ecuadorean ports.

By the end of the day on May 29, we hadn’t heard from Dad for 24 hours. During a conference call with the Honolulu Coast Guard, I asked about the possibility that he had run into hostile fishermen in the early-morning hours of the 28th.

“Maybe he crossed their nets and they had to come on board to detangle his boat in the middle of the night,” I said. “That would be terrifying—it would be dark, he hadn’t seen people in weeks, and most likely they spoke another language and were angry.”

The Coast Guard didn’t rule it out.

Another question loomed: Had anything at all happened to him? Dad said he’d sent EPIRB and SOS signals, but he hadn’t. And what had he meant by “barbeque at sea”? The message “sorry about insuance” showed up immediately after that. Was he telling Mom that she wouldn’t be able to collect insurance money because there would be no body to recover?

This was so far from how I envisioned Dad leaving this world. I yearned to know what his face looked like, what his heart felt like in those rawest of moments. His words didn’t tell us. As darkness fell around me on the 29th, my mind looped the same haunting questions: Dad, where are you? What did you do?

At noon on May 28 in California, as Mom and Tim were waiting for a sign of life from Dad, the Coast Guard had asked about his mental-health history. Mom told them that he’d never had any problems. But judging by his reaction to sleep deprivation during the Baja Ha-Ha, she said, he may have been delusional from exhaustion.

The Coast Guard began scouring for resources—boats, planes, anything—to get eyes on him. The nearest boats were 200 nautical miles away, more than a day’s journey. A cargo plane could have reached him, but he was so far out that the crew would have only ten minutes to search before they’d need to turn back.

At 11 p.m., a staffer at DeLorme, the maker of Dad’s texting and tracking device, confirmed that it had stopped accepting messages at the exact moment he’d sent his final one. The device had either been turned off, malfunctioned, or been destroyed.

At 1 p.m. on Monday the 29th, the Coast Guard reached the U.S. fishing vessel –American Enterprise, which was 140 nautical miles southeast of Dad’s last known location. The skipper agreed to head to that position immediately.

To construct a search grid, the Coast Guard uses a program called the Search and Rescue Optimal Planning System. It gathers information such as a boat’s size and -location, plots 5,000 corresponding points on a map, and creates simulations of likely drift patterns. The Coast Guard usually sends a boat or plane to cover these drift points -immediately. If it can, it drops a self-locating data-marker buoy, which uses the current to validate the system’s predictions. In Dad’s case, he was too far away for either of those options.

Through all this, my family tried to figure out what else we could do. Mom e-mailed the Tahitian authorities. I called the most experienced sailor I knew. He suggested I try to contact fishing and commercial vessels in the area. Uncle John scoured real-time ship traffic online. Mom asked if there were any satellites taking pictures that might show us the boat or, worse, its debris. (There weren’t.) Tim e-mailed the IMB Piracy Reporting Center. But everything we were doing had already been tried by the Coast Guard.

On the evening of Tuesday, May 30, American Enterprise, along with its onboard helicopter, began a grid search southwest of Dad’s last known location. By the evening of May 31, three days since we’d heard from him, they had searched an area the size of Connecticut, with no sign of either the Celebration or any debris.

Meanwhile, a 688-foot Panamanian boat joined the search 240 nautical miles to the southeast—an area where the Coast Guard hypothesized that Dad might be. No sightings were reported.

By June 2, we were becoming desperate. We knew that Dad, even if he was still alive, probably couldn’t survive much longer. On June 4, a week since we’d heard from him, two more boats searched but saw nothing.

A day later, there was a glimmer of hope: the Coast Guard’s satellite data showed what looked like a sailboat headed south, which aligned with initial hypotheses about the boat’s course. Its length and color matched Celebration. The Coast Guard speculated that the boat was harnessing the trade winds south and would make a hard right at Hiva Oa’s latitude.

Unfortunately, by the time satellite data hits the Coast Guard’s desk, it’s 24 hours old, making a moving target nearly impossible to find, especially among scattered clouds and whitecaps.

American Enterprise, which was now the closest ship to the unidentified boat, sent up its helicopter again. The crew saw nothing.

On the 6th, the Coast Guard queried Tahitian hospitals to see if Dad had been brought in. Negative.

On June 8, Dad’s 72nd birthday, the Coast Guard again spotted an unidentified boat along the southern course—about 30 degrees off a Marquesas route. It was getting closer to Hiva Oa, traveling at four knots. Assuming it might be the same boat as before, the Coast Guard used the new data to create a third potential position.

Finally, on June 13, two weeks after my dad’s last communication, the unidentified boat was close enough that the Coast Guard deployed a plane from Hawaii.

After staging in Tahiti for a day, the C-130 Hercules would fly out, loaded with a communicator, a life raft, and other droppable supplies. The eight-hour round-trip flight would leave only two hours to search at the site, but at least it was something. The Tahiti coast guard’s Falcon surveillance plane would also search.

On the 15th, the planes took off from Tahiti. They scoured the boat’s path. Three vessels were spotted, and one remained unidentified, because it had no electronic signature. However, it didn’t match the description of Celebration, and radio contact confirmed that it had two people aboard.

Subsequent searches found nothing, and on June 21 the Hercules was sent back to Hawaii. On June 22, the Coast Guard suspended the search. All told, it had covered 59,598 square miles over 24 days.Ìę

In the 17 months since Dad vanished, no trace of his boat has been found. I doubt it ever will be—although one drift-analysis expert suggested that, if Celebration is still floating, it could hit New Guinea in two years. But I believe that the boat—or what’s left of it—is at the bottom of the Pacific, with Dad’s last coordinates serving as his only headstone.

I’ve spent hours trying to imagine what happened in the end. I’ve pictured Dad in an altered state: eyes glazed over, stoically moving about the boat as he completed necessary tasks, like dealing properly with my grandparents’ ashes. Or maybe he was sobbing—heartbroken to know he would never see his family again. Then he either set the teak deck on fire or cut an intake hose, filling the boat with water and sinking it.

If he did any of these things, it was because sleep deprivation had driven him mad, making him believe that suicide was the only way to escape the pirates he’d conjured, the only way to prevent them from killing him.

He didn’t have a gun on board, as far as we know, so he would have died either by fire or in the sea. Did he stay on deck as flames rose around him? Tim doubts it. He thinks Dad started a blaze, dove off the side, and swam straight down. I picture mottled moonlight reflecting on his pale skin as he descends into darkness.

The idea that sleep deprivation made Dad take drastic action may sound fantastical, but there are countless precedents. It’s known that exhaustion, fatigue, and isolation at sea can create extreme levels of delusion. Experienced sailors told me stories of mates who were rendered incapacitated just a few hundred miles offshore, with no obvious cause.

One of the most famous sailing mysteries is the case of Donald Crowhurst, a Briton who single-handed in the 1968 Golden Globe around-the-world race and never came home. He set sail on October 31—the same date Dad set off from San Diego—and was out for 243 days before he succumbed to mental collapse, writing a 25,000-word manifesto on the subject of the cosmic mind and why he had to leave this world. His boat—and log—were found floating in the Atlantic Ocean.

John Leach, a professor with the Extreme Environmental Medicine and Science Group at the University of Portsmouth, England—and an avid sailor and former military psychologist who specializes in prisoners, hostages, and others who’ve experienced isolation—described the perils of survival in the book 438 Days: “It’s okay living inside your own head, provided it doesn’t slip into psychosis.”

When I speak to Leach about my dad’s case, he describes to me how a mind can become unmoored. “Psychosis in simple terms is a breakdown in reality,” he told me. “When you are in isolation, and sleep deprived and water deprived, which I suspect he would’ve been, you take in the information around you and interpret it to fit the model in your head. If he thinks he’s being chased, he’ll hear waves and the wind as engines.”

The cluster effect of sleep deprivation, dehydration, fatigue, duress, and perceptual and sensory deprivation could have resulted in cognitive disorganization that was reflected in his language, Leach explains. In other words, Dad’s signals may have been misfiring, skewing his perceptions. And the timing didn’t help.

“There is something around about the three-week period in isolation that I’ve recorded too many times to dismiss,” Leach says. “Even people without psychiatric problems get a sudden crash psychologically, and for the first time they start thinking about suicide.”

My mother, sure that Dad was suicidal, had tried to reply to him in ways that would bring him off the ledge.

“Your dad used to tell me that the brain is the only organ in the body that doesn’t tell you when it’s malfunctioning,” she says. “I was afraid to say to him that’s what I thought was happening—that it was a hallucination—but I couldn’t figure out how to do it. I didn’t want him to feel abandoned and stop talking. Hearing each other through a sat phone would have helped, but he didn’t have one.”

When I ask if she has regrets, she laments not being more involved. “I felt so angry about him wanting to do this and spending so much money and he was going to leave me. I had to say, This is just his,” she says. “I didn’t want to go but I didn’t want to be alone, either. And he would’ve resented me if I had said, ‘You are not going.’ ”

Distancing herself mentally from the boat, the trip, and the departure date was a coping mechanism—the less she had to do with it, the less fearful she was. But she still wanted to be a brave, supportive wife, so she helped by packing and provisioning the boat in San Diego. Now she wonders if that was enough: “If I had educated myself about what he would face out there, I might have been more persuasive about him not going alone.”

Then Mom tells me something I didn’t know. “He always felt like we got the life I wanted, not the life he wanted, filled with adventure—diving and sailing,” she says. “He didn’t care about living in a nice house. He cared more about living in other places and exploring.”

“When he talked about buying the boat, I tried to offer him alternatives to make life more exciting,” Mom says. “But he couldn’t be swayed.”

Eventually, they were too far along to turn back. “It felt like the boat was in charge of him,” she says. “I know it wasn’t personal but still, the fact that he went off on this trip felt like I wasn’t enough. Ultimately, the boat won.”

Dad loved us—that’s why he compromised on how he wanted to live. His obsession with the boat and the trip suddenly made sense to me. He wanted to reclaim his life.

In the end, my family can go around and around on what happened and why. We’ll never really know. We can feel guilt, regret, and anger. But we’ll always return to this: maybe Dad wasn’t experienced enough to chase his goal, but he had to try or he’d die wondering, resenting his own life. It’s hard to say that anyone should die this way. But the question remains: If you have a lifelong dream, and time is running out, what would you do?

I’m standing in a single-wide trailer that serves as the office of the Nuevo Vallarta marina. It’s the checkout point for boats departing Mexico in the Nayarit region, 30 minutes north of Puerto Vallarta by car, and the last place Dad docked before setting out to sea.

Under fluorescent lights, I see “Richard Irwin Carr” scribbled across a photocopy of his departure papers and recognize his compact, jaunty handwriting. I know it intimately from birthday cards and school notes and phone messages on our brick-colored kitchen counter.

On May 2, 2017, in the early evening, Dad filled out the line labeled Voyage Plan: “Sail to South Pacific and around world.” It reads like a fantasy, like a little boy trying to catch smoke with his fingers.

I can picture his face, flushed from a combination of pride and embarrassment as he handed the papers back to the clerk. Then he would have stuffed his hands into his jeans pockets.

Ian and I walk down to the spot where he had his boat—A-23, the only unmarked stall in the marina and the one most often used for short-term, transient vessels. I touch the cleat where his rope was last unfurled. I’m sure that the sounds around us are no different than they were on the day he left: children playing at a nearby preschool, a boat being sanded, birds chirping, and the occasional large yacht motoring past the marina to sea.

Being here makes it hard to imagine the drama of Dad’s last hours. I think back to the text he sent for Mother’s Day, nearly two weeks into his crossing. I told him I’d thought of him during Wyatt’s birth, and he said: “Think of me often. I’m an interesting person who loves you as a person as well as my daughter. And I find that gratifying!”

A few days later, Ian and I charter a sailboat from the dock in La Cruz where Dad parked for a month and a half before he headed to Nuevo Vallarta. Palm trees and bougainvillea stand out against the white stucco of the thatch-roofed buildings surrounding the marina. The Sunday craft fair is a fiesta of coconut popsicles, fish tacos, and fresh juices.

The deckhand is a young, thin Mexican man in his twenties named Eddie. He looks like many of the skater boys I went to high school with in L.A., wearing Vans and a chain wallet. He puts on Def Leppard and Weezer as we sail into Banderas Bay. His English is excellent. I explain why I’m in town, and when I mention Celebration he grows quiet.

“I remember your dad,” he says. “Short, with gray hair.” Eddie had helped him rig his sails. Then he says, “I offered to go with him.” Eddie had been looking for work as a paid deckhand.

Dad had hoped to find mates to sail with during parts of his circumnavigation—he once wrote on his blog that the experience would feel incomplete without sharing it—but he was anxious about the laws in the South Pacific. He told my mom that he didn’t want to be financially responsible for his crew, potentially made up of strangers, and any medical needs they might have once they hit the ocean. Being beholden felt too risky to him.

As we sail out toward Cabo Corrientes, I take in the horizon, cupping my hands at my eyes like blinders. I want to imagine what it’s like to see only the edge for days on end. I shake my head at the knowledge that Dad turned down Eddie’s offer. He would probably still be alive.

Back home, people ask if going to Mexico was hard. Maybe I was in denial or just numb, but it wasn’t. Being there made me feel close to Dad. The hardest part was leaving, like I wouldn’t feel his presence again unless I returned for a visit.

The other hardest part is that he’ll never know Wyatt. She’s a risk-taker. My first daughter would sit quietly on the bed or changing table, while my second wants to swan-dive off it. I can see her natural inclination to push things out of the way and investigate everything around her.

A writer I know who has interviewed some of the most daring athletes in the world—people who have both flourished and perished in their edge-of-peril pursuits—told me that, at some point, if we feel the itch in our soul to explore, we have to go. Some will consider Dad’s behavior reckless, arguing that he was underprepared (I can’t argue) and irresponsible (maybe, though he waited until his children were grown before setting off). But to assert that he was wrong to go, my writer friend said, is “to deny a potent ingredient that made him who he was—the joy in him, perhaps.” I agree. Maybe I’m like Dad and I would have gone, too.

At the memorial we held five months after he vanished, a family friend talked about the grudge she felt when he first explained his plan to sail around the world.

“How dare he do what he feels like doing,” she said with a chuckle. She told me that she realized her anger was a manifestation of envy and admiration. She respected his doggedness and willingness to do what most are too frightened to.

Patients from his practice—some who had seen him for more than 30 years—-introduced themselves and told stories about times when their lives would’ve gone south if Dad hadn’t been there. I was meeting them for the first time, but they felt like relatives. Their gratitude for him, and for his unrelenting determination, matched what I felt.

Just like his granddaughter, Dad kept pushing things out of his way to get to the horizon. He had a burning thing inside that inspired him to look over the edge. And for a few days at least, he sailed with abandon, the wind at his back.

Like any adventurer, Dad didn’t know how it would end. He had to sail away to find out.

Ali Carr Troxell (), a former editor at șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, is the managing editor of the magazine Gear Patrol.

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In the winter, we can’t get enough of these insulated wool snap-down shirts. They’re way more streamlined than many Stay-Puft-Marshmallow jackets, which means they wear well out to dinner, and they layer neatly under a storm shell when the forecast delivers wet, sloppy slush instead of light, dry flakes.

The WoolCloud Snap Shirt caught our attention not only for its good looks. , Duckworth’s tailored collection of wool apparel is made entirely in the United States by the founders of former wool fashion apparel brand .

Follow Duckworth’s manufacturing process and you’ll see that it’s unlike the majority of wool-apparel makers, which source their wool from Down Under (most often Australia or New Zealand), send it to China to be turned into clothing, and then ship it to the U.S. to be sold.

Duckworth has beat this manufacturing process by sourcing all of its wool from the in Montana and then sending it to the Carolinas, home toÌęsome of the few remaining textile factories in the U.S. The climate of the Rockies in Montana—hot, dry summers paired with freezing winters—nurtures wool that’s not only soft and breathable, but is naturally more crimped than other wool on the market, aiding its durability.

A jacket that can handle the trail but looks tailored enough for a dinner in Aspen—and is 100-percent American? We can’t think of a better package.

$200,

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Big dogs need space. Space to run, eat, and sleep, of course, but also space to drool, shed, and poop. Because canines are not always the most hygenic house guests, they're often not allowed in hotels, which can make traveling tough—for owners and pets alike. But thankfully, some lodges are making exceptions, by not only allowing furry visitors, but also by offering amenities such as dog beds, food bowls, and special treats.Ìę

These ten hotels not only welcome labs, St. Bernards, and dogs of all sizes with open arms, they're also perched in places that are primed for adventure. From Moab's red arches to boundless miles of Washington coastline, here are our favorite places to bring our four-legged pals—toÌęlet them (and us) unleash.

Sorrel River Ranch

Moab, Utah

Your number-one reason for hitting Moab probably doesn’t involve doggie adventuring: the world-class climbing and mountain biking there might be great for humans, but it’s dangerous for pooches.

Stay atÌę, though, and you'll likely change your mind. Situated 19 miles from downtown, on the banks of the Colorado River, the 160-acre resort has an organic vegetable garden, great views of Moab’s salmon-colored spires, and a barn that houses four kennels, so you can easily leave your pup and hit the trails. Or, head to Negro Bill Canyon Trail, one of the town’s best dog-friendly hikes, just down the road. A three-mile hike along the trail’s shadyÌęstreambedÌębrings you to a 243-foot-long arch known as Morning Glory, the sixth-largest natural rock span in America.

Back at the ranch, a dog-washing station makes it a cinch to clean up at day’s end. Although Sorrel’s 55-room property might remind you of an old Western (its wooden cabins have cozy front porches), the interiors are contemporary and well-appointed. Rooms start at $329, plus a $100 pet fee per stay (includes dog beds, bowls, treats, and more).

If you want to get on the water,Ìę, located on the edge of town, will set you and your four-legged friend up for a day on the Colorado River. The 15-mile float from the Moab Bridge to the Potash take-out includes a self-guided canoe trip down the sandy-bottomed Class II river, complete with views of striped canyon walls and famed climbing spot Wall Street. You’ll even spy a few sandstone arches along the way. $75, plus a $7 van-cleaning fee (bring your own canine life jackets)

Iron Springs Resort

CopalisÌęBeach, Washington

Located two and a half hours from Seattle’s airport,Ìę’s 28 rustic-yet-modern cabins nestle high on a cliff overlooking the misty shores of piney coastline. Its relaxed, summer-camp feel makes for ideal reading and couch-lolling as waves churn below. Equally ideal are the miles of wide-open sand, where your dogs can sprint, dig, roll, and swim off-leash. This all-but-empty stretch, with its sea stacks and sandpipers, is home to the state’s only beach-based airstrip (don’t worry, though: it’s rarely used). Should you ever need a brief break from the beach, you can hike through old-growth evergreens on the resort’s six miles of trails. When you and your furry posse have had enough clam-digging and shell-hunting for the day, each cabin at Iron Springs has a water spigot to rinse sandy paws.

This resort is relatively remote and lacks a restaurant, so plan on bringing your own meals. (The cabins have nice kitchens.) Rooms start at $149, plus $20 a night for each pet (includes bowls and towels)

Devil's Thumb Ranch

Tabernash, Colorado

Six thousand acres of former ranch land, now turned recreational playground, is whereÌęÌęcalls home. Running along the Continental Divide, between Winter Park and the gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park, Devil’s Thumb’s 65 miles ofÌęnordicÌętrails make it a cross-country ski hub for Front Range residents. Five of those miles are designated forÌęskijoringÌę(cross-country skiing with your canine). Not sure how to skijor? The ranch offers clinics, including gear rentals (from $30). After the sporty fun, grab a burger and a beer at Heck’s, sit by its hexagonal fireplace, and look out over the ranch’s pond and trails.

In summer months, the ranch offers dog-friendly hiking through its grassy meadows and aspen-filled hills. Cabins start at $315, plus $50 a night for each pet (includes dog beds, treats, and leashes)

Healdsburg Modern Cottages

Healdsburg, California

An hour and 15 minutes north of San Francisco, by way of Sonoma,ÌęHealdsburgÌęis the little wine town that could. This off-the-beaten path farm-to-table-style weekend getaway is full of artisanal,Ìęchef-helmedÌęrestaurants, tasting rooms at local vintners, and a farmers’ market bursting with local goods. It’s flanked by grassy, rolling hills, vineyards, and some of the best road cycling in California. Bring your bike and head west from town, under Highway 101, to get on theÌębackroadsÌęthat wind through this pastoral wine country.

When you’re not cycling, walk to the town square, located less than a quarter mile from the dog-friendly cottages, and sign up for a paddling trip withÌę. A nine-mile run from Memorial Beach toÌęWohlerÌęBridge in inflatable kayaks lets pups romp, swim, or boat along. $50, plus $10 per dog

Hungry? Grab a smoked beer brat at Wurst, near downtown, or go upscale atÌęScopa, and order a sausage-arugula pizza. The low-key quartet of abodes atÌęÌęmakes a perfect base camp for roughing it in comfort: minimal furnishings, gas fireplaces, a swimming pool, and a shared, fenced-in, yard let you and your pup hang inside or out with few hassles. Rooms start at $250, plus $50 a night for each pet

Hotel Madeline

Telluride, Colorado

There’s no question that Telluride—tucked in a box canyon along the craggy San Juan Mountains in southwestern Colorado—is dog-friendly: you’ll often find pups waiting for their owners outside shops and restaurants along Main Street, or hanging out by the ski lift, sans leash. The town’s mellow vibe seems to have rubbed off on its pooches, who are unusually well behaved and happy to follow any rules. Maybe it’s all the exercise—dozens of hiking trails thread the mountains straight from town in all directions, including along the valley floor.

The 123-roomÌę, located above town in Mountain Village, is only a dog-welcoming gondola ride away from Telluride proper, but it offers more space than some of the options in town. Also, because Mountain Village is propped about 750 feet above the valley, you’ll get a head start if you want to walk your dogs up Telluride Ski Resort, just around the corner from the hotel. Trails wind through the trees between ski runs until you reach theÌęridgeline, where you can turn around to take in views ofÌęfourteenersÌęand other toothy mountains. In winter, chill out with your dog under the stars by the one of the cozy fire pits in Mountain Village. Rooms start at $279, plus $25 a night for each pet (includes dog beds, bowls, and toys, if desired)

The Allison Inn & Spa

Willamette Valley, Oregon

One of the newest hotels in Oregon’s pastoral wine country, theÌęÌęisn’t about rugged adventure. But it’s the perfect weekend escape from urban Portland (a 45-minute drive away) that gives visitors access to some of the state’s best road cycling. Seven miles from the hotel,ÌęChampoegÌęState Park acts as the northern hub for the 132-mile Willamette Valley Scenic Bikeway, which culminates in Eugene. The ride through the valley is as quaint as the inn, passing hop farms, vineyards, coffee shops, andÌębrewpubs.

After your ride (and maybe a couple of drinks), it’s time for some pampering. The Allison’s 15,000-square-foot spa is just the thing (at the end of your service, they’ll tell you how to massage Fido). A pet-specific meal from the hotel’s restaurant—fresh steak and steamed vegetables, perhaps, or a homemade, bacon-laced treat—will win your pet over as well.

The 35-acre, 85-room inn has trails connecting its seven acres of vineyards with the rest of the forested property. Rooms start at $330, plus $50 a night for each pet (includes bowls, filtered water, and home-baked dog treats)

Pronghorn

Bend, Oregon

Recently crownedÌę, Bend, Oregon, is littered with dog-friendly restaurants, businesses, trails, and off-leash areas. Among its 17ÌęmicrobreweriesÌę(that’s in a town with a population of fewer than 80,000), it even has its own canine beer:ÌęDawgÌęGrog. A stay at the localÌęwill introduce your canine toÌęBoneyardÌęBrewery’s magic elixir, made of malted barley, water, liquid glucosamine (for joint health), and organic vegetable broth.

The resort—known mainly for its Jack Nicklaus golf course—is a pooch-centric place to post up for your adventures in Bend. Just 16 miles north of the town, the resort is perfectly situated for hikes at Smith Rock State Park, 20 minutes away. When you’re not getting vertical in this iconic climbing playground, where more than 1,000 bolted routes look over the meandering Crooked River, hike the 3.8-mile Misery Ridge loop. It ascends more than 1,000 feet to the summit of theÌęeponymouslyÌęnamed ridge—with views of the Monkey Face self-standing rock pillar and Oregon’s Cascades—which cuts through Smith Rock State Park. Another option: walk your dogs to the resort’s two 1,000-foot-long lava tubes. Rooms start at $195, plus a $75 pet fee (includes dog beds, bowls, dog bags, and a walking map of the property)Ìę

Ìę

Loews Coronado Bay Resort

San Diego, California

It might not be every canine’s cup of, well, bones, but how about a day in the waves with a board—for your pooch? Yup, thanks to a partnership between the Coronado Surfing Academy and the Coronado Dog Beach,ÌęÌęhas been offering dog surfing lessons for the last eight years. No need to bring a life jacket—they’ll be provided for you and your dog. Just drive five miles down the road to Coronado Dog Beach and for $60, your pup will get a one-hour lesson in the waves. According to the Surf Academy, dogs who dig water—like labs and English bull dogs—are always wagging away. The instructors take the dogs and owners out into waist-deep water and push them into gentle three-foot waves.

After hanging ten together, head to the hotel’sÌęBay Terrace restaurantÌęfor surf and turf—your canine companion’s dinner includes salmon or beef, rice, and veggies.ÌęOr order room service from the hotel’s pet menu.

Rooms start at $219,Ìęplus $25 a night for each pet (includes dog beds, bowls, and treats)

Ìę

El Portal Sedona Hotel

Sedona, Arizona

Steve and Connie Segner’s property,Ìę, is so pet-friendly, your dogs will stay for free. TheÌęSegners, with a background in pet shops and pet-food development, have four basset hounds of their own—two of which are the “hotel” dogs.

Located on Oak Creek, in the Southwest’s red-rock central, many of the resort’s 1,000-square-foot rooms have their own enclosed yards for easy doggie-bathroom breaks. Though the resort itself has more than 16 miles of walking paths, theÌęSegnersÌęare happy to shuttle you and your dogs to a trailhead nearby. Their recommendation? Marg’s Draw, just two miles from the hotel. The 2.5-mile trail traces crimson rock formations before ending as giant slabs of red rock in a bowl surrounded by mountains.

Have your own car? Try the West Fork Oak Creek trail, nine miles out of Sedona in the Coconino National Forest. The 14-mile trail winds you through the canyon via boulder-hopping, wading, and swimming. Or sign up for theÌęÌę($79) through the hotel grounds—pets are welcome to come along. This can get as rugged as you want, but its main goal is putting you in the backcountry to see such area claims to fame as vortexes,Ìępetroglyphs, stunning spires, and hundred-year-old wagon trails.

Rooms start at $179 (includes dog blankets, dog bags, and treats)

The Resort at Paws Up

Greenough, Montana

If nearly 40,000 acres aren’t enough to wear out your four-legged companion, nothing will. The luxuryÌęÌęproperty is all that—a working cattle ranch in Lewis and Clark territory, 35 miles east of Missoula. Meadows, streams, rivers, and mountains trace through the property, making it the ideal place to explore on foot. As a matter of fact, the Resort at Paws Up hosts theÌęÌędog run in September to benefit the Humane Society of Western Montana with two-mile, five-mile, and half-marathon-length routes on its own land. The Wine & Bitch dinner, held the night before the run, welcomes owners and dogs alike.

The vast acreage contains luxury homes that are run by the resort, as well as thick-canvas, off-white tents (for when you feel likeÌęglamping, not just camping). Although dogs aren’t permitted in the tents around the property, they can stay either in the houses or at the resort’s “last best doggie bed”—an outdoor dog kennel under the stars. They can order, say, a peanut butter, yogurt, and banana refreshment from the in-room menu, then receive a canine-specific spa treatment (an ear, head, and snout massage, for instance, or a paw massage with organic, edible foot salve). Houses start at $760, plus $50 a night for each pet (includes bowls, treats, toys, collars, and dog bags)

Rover.com

Can’t bring your dogs along? You can always either board them or book your favoriteÌępetsitter. If you don’t know any sitters in your area, check outÌę—an online hub for connecting dog owners with sitters across the U.S. In the world of smart online startups, this one tops our list of favorites. Sift through sitters’ profiles, rankings, and reviews, then check out their certifications: they receive “badges” for volunteering at humane societies, responding quickly, willingness to do last-minute stays, and subscribing to the site’s protection package (which includes a 24-hour ask-a-vet service), among other things. All arrangements set up through Rover.com are covered by the site’s pet insurance for emergency vet bills up to $25,000. In addition, if a sitter backs out at the last minute, Rover.com guarantees a backup.

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Women’s-specific backpacks have been on the market for years. And I don’t mean packs that are pink or purple or flowered or BeDazzled—although, they occasionally have one of these things (come with a removable flower adornment). Women’s-specific packs are ergonomically designed to the fit the average female shape, taking into account curves, bosoms, shorter torsos, narrower widths, and the like. In general, women’s packs have shoulder straps—usually narrower—that sit differently on the shoulders than men’s. Pack frames are shorter because less length is needed in the torso and hip belts—also narrower—are flared to accommodate curves.

The truth of the matter is that “average” is an operative term. To state the obvious, we are all different shapes and sizes—some men have short torsos and fit into women’s packs, some women have long torsos and fit better in men’s packs. The thing that women’s-specific packs brought to the world is a plethora of new sizing options: more people will find a better-fitting pack.

That brings us to how to fit a pack. Regardless of whether you’re buying a women’s or a men’s pack, the fitting process is the same.

First, determine what you’ll be using the pack for. Recent innovations in frame design (as well as lighter, more compressible sleeping bags, pads, and such) mean more efficient functional space and sturdier loads in smaller sizes—you can now swap your go-to multi-day 65-liter heffer for a more svelte 55-liter pack that can do the same work.

Next up: your torso. Have a friend measure the length of your spine on your back while you stand up straight—start from the top of your hipbones and measure to the knobby vertebrae at the base of your neck. Most brands have size charts on their websites so you can match your spine length with their sizing systems.

The hip belt is the third factor to consider. Since it’s the true workhorse of the pack—carrying the load’s weight—it should fit snugly across the middle of the hipbones.

Lastly, check the harness fit. You want to make sure there isn’t any unnecessary rubbing that could cause chafing. The harness should allow for a few inches below the armpit and the shoulder straps should wrap over your shoulders and down the start of your back.

The good news: Packs have become more and more adjustable. Many brands offer adjustability in everything from hip belts to torso harnesses in order for multiple people to use the same backpack. The biggest rule of thumb is simply to head to the store and try on a variety of sizes until you find the one that is most comfortable.

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Take any second level or higher Vinyasa class and you might encounter Crow Pose—an arm balance in which you stack your knees on the backs of your upper arms while balancing on your hands with your hips lifted towards the sky. Crow is a good entry point, but all arm balancing can be challenging. Not because it takes a lot of pretzel-like flexibility (which people most often associate with yoga), but because it requires a solid amount of functional core strength and, perhaps the biggest challenge, the willingness to let go.

The position is awkward and requires a little bit of trust at first. Most people will fall while learning the posture. But, as in life, we take tumbles once in a while and more often than not, bounce back. Plus, as șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű contributor Christopher Solomon recently wrote in a New York Times story about why he’s : “The colors are always a little brighter if a place draws a little blood first.” (That’s proverbial blood, of course. You shouldn’t bleed from any stumbles while learning Crow.)

How to do crow pose:
Start by getting into a yogi squat. ÌęFrom standing, bend your knees and drop your tailbone towards the floor as you sit down in a squat. Make sure all four corners of your feet stay firmly planted on the floor.Ìę Bring your hands into prayer position in front of your heart and use your elbows to push against the insides of your knees, lifting the crown of your head towards the sky and drawing your tailbone towards the floor to lengthen your spine.Ìę

Now, we’ll prep for crow. Plant your hands on the floor in front of you, shoulder-distance apart—fingers pointing away from you, spread wide to protect your wrists. Make sure you aren’t tenting your fingers and that your palms are pushing against the floor as much as your fingers. Bend your elbows towards you to create platforms with your upper arms, bringing your face towards the floor just in front of your hands. Next, work your knees onto your upper arms, getting as close to your armpit as you can. Draw your navel in, keep breathing, and make sure your weight is centered over your arms. Bringing your face closer to the ground (the scary part!) will help you shift your weight forward.

Try lifting one foot off the floor, then the other. You may only be able to lift one foot for a few seconds and then the try the other. Or you may be able to hold it and try the other foot at the same time. Wherever you are in your practice is perfect for you. The further you lean your face towards the ground, the easier it will be.

Once you have your feet lifted, bring your gaze to the floor in front of you and try to straighten your arms. Your knees should be so far up your arms that they’re almost resting where your shoulders meet your triceps.

Take crow a step further:
If you want to take it a step further, you can take crow pose into a tripod stand inversion. Bring the crown of your head to the floor in front of your hands so that you create a triangle between your hands and your head. Draw your elbows towards each other so they stay parallel and don’t bow out. Pull your navel in and tuck your tailbone as you simultaneously start to lift your hips up to the sky to align them with your shoulders. Once hips are over your shoulders, bring your feet towards the ceiling straightening your legs, engage your thighs and flex your toes, pushing energy through the balls of your feet towards the ceiling. When you are ready to come out of it, try to control your descent with your core and bring your legs back to crow pose.

Trouble-shooting tips for crow:
To get more comfortable with balancing on your arms, play with lifting one foot off the floor at a time. The more you do it, the longer you’ll be able to hold it until you get both feet off the floor at the same time.

Bringing your face to the floor can be scary stuff—it looks like you’re taking a nose dive. Baby step your way there by placing a block under your forehead. That way, you can get comfortable with the sensation while mitigating the possibility of falling on your face.

How long will it take to achieve crow pose:
There’s no real way to answer this. Some people will get it on their first try and some might take six months, a year, or may never get it. That’s okay—the world isn’t going to stop turning because you don’t have crow pose in your repertoire. But, like anything, the more you practice, the more likely you are to achieve your goal. Most students can handle a second level Vinyasa class within their first year of practicing and many can hold crow pose within a few months of a regular level two Vinyasa practice.

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Outdoor Research Trance Dress

Because the Ìęis made from polyester-spandex, has a built-in bra, and a sporty racerback design, its also one for the trails. It’s stretchy and quick-drying so it will easily work with you during any active endeavor. But, because of its tight, flattering fit and cut, it can also transition into your out-to-dinner dress without much fuss. The good news: The smooth silky fabric won’t wrinkle in your suitcase. The bad news: It runs big, so size down

Nux Caroline Wrap Dress

The is as well suited to a trip to the yoga studio as to the beach. But because this polyester-rayon-spandex dress is so luxuriously soft, you’ll probably want to sleep in it as well. Throw it on over a bathing suit on your way to the surf break, or layer it over leggings and a sport tank for breakfast after your morning run. It’s also tiny so it won’t take up much room in your luggage.Ìę

Icebreaker Villa Dress

We know and love the benefits of merino wool—it negates stink-factor and regulates temperature, keeping you cool and dry, particularly while exercising. Any good travel dress should do the same. That’s why Icebreaker—makers of merino wool active goods—came out with the . While testing, the Villa Dress never harbored stink—which made it great for multi-day trips without laundry-access—and it never held wrinkles. We love its waist-hugging cut and broad color options.Ìę

Eddie Bauer Travex Aster Convertible Skirt/Dress

Packing light is always a good thing. It saves you money with the airlines, it means less to schlep, and you’ll never earn the nickname “Chief Manybags,” as one șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű editor did on a staff ski trip to Utah. That’s why we love versatile pieces like the . This soft polyester-spandex skirt, with UPF 50 and wicking properties, converts from a comfortable skirt to a bandeau-style dress in one unroll of the waistband.

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Salomon Endurance Ÿ Tight

Multiple testers agreed the Ìęwere incredibly comfortable for everything from a 5K to a Nike training workout led by an iPhone app. “The waistband and the bottom cuffs stayed in place,” one tester reported, also noting their level of compression added just the right amount of support.

On a 40-degree day, they lent just the right amount of coverage and when the mercury rose, they dumped heat equally well, never causing testers to overheat. The length and fabric make them ideal for long trail runs (“They didn’t rub,” was one remark) and for misty running in wetter climes, like Seattle.

Our only gripe? The back pocket annoyed one tester because she kept getting scratched by it every time she put her phone away—although she praised the fact that it was perfectly sized to hold her iPhone without any bounce.

Helly Hansen Long-Sleeve W Pace œ Zip

Helly Hansen’s base layers have been incredibly popular among skiers and snowboarders looking for moisture management and breathability in one. The company takes their baselayer technology and applies it to the creating a shirt that’s breathable enough for long runs but also offers warmth when it’s needed.

As one tester put it, “It was comfortable for cold mornings that quickly heated up.” That’s thanks to mesh panels on the back and sides of the shirt, which allowed us to dump heat once we picked up the pace or the sun crested the mountains washing warmth over our running path. The synthetic fabric pulled moisture away from the skin is designed to keep you dry and comfortable.

Moving Comfort Endurance Dress

At first look, the Ìęwas really cute for a running dress. And, with a built-in bra, we figured it would offer action-ready support.

What it did do: breathed really well. The keyhole on the back and open shoulders helped it remain as airy as a dress should.

Its downfalls: Unfortunately, testers found the fabric was too heavy to run in, making the skirt bounce around as we moved. And, it ran big making for a frumpy appearance. That said, it did offer the support we expected—just make sure you size down.Ìę

Arc’teryx Senna Tank

“Freaking love!” were the first words on a tester’s report card after she tested the . Her main praises were for the soft polyester-spandex fabric, its moisture management while running and during mat training workouts, and the built-in bra’s support (up to a b-cup).

The multiple straps aided in the tank’s comfort but definitely eliminate it as a backpacking top because the tank rode up when worn with a pack. The one downside: the fabric is a little thin to wear without a bra underneath if we’re talking modesty. And if you have to wear a bra underneath, why have a built-in bra at all?

Skirt Sports Redemption Run Shorts

Kudos to Skirt Sports—makers of running skorts—for making a pair of shorts. While skorts can be incredibly comfortable for running, they aren’t for everyone. The Ìęare attractive not only because of the wide selection of colors, but in their design, with its wide yoga-like waistband and simplistic short cut.

The fabric is thin and airy—as running short fabric should be—with UPF 50 protection and quick-dry, wicking capabilities.

Bummer: some of our testers felt that the built-in full-cheek coverage undies felt weird while running—enough to make them waddle back home.

The post Women’s Spring Running Essentials appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

If you haven’t heard of Jill Kintner, it’s only because female mountain bikers rarely get the attention they deserve. In 2008, the 31-year-old brought home the bronze medal in BMX from the Olympics after multiple championships in the discipline. She’s since moved on to prove herself in slalom and downhill riding with a handful of national championships within the past three years along with a scattering of single-race wins. She just came off a serious win in dual slalom in Monterey’s Sea Otter Classic.

Jill Kintner

Jill Kintner

With her teammate (and fiancĂ©) by her side, men’s acclaimed downhill racer Bryn Atkinson, Kintner is feeling more ready than ever to dominate the 20-stop tour World Cup tour, which kicked off last month.

The sport seems to be opening up for women. Do you see these events growing?
There are a ton of women these days. About 40 will show up at any given event in Europe. The bike parks are so accessible now—about a third of the field is female.

What’s your favorite race on the tour?
It’s the event in Scotland—everyone’s favorite race. Fifty thousand people show up, and it’s just loud. The crowd can’t even see you except on Jumbotrons until this one jump. As the racer, you go over it and come into this valley and it just explodes in cheers. That’s when you know you’re at the finish line—it’s really exciting.

You guys just switched apparel sponsors.
We just switched to , a Vancouver-based company. There are only two or three good companies for women’s bike apparel. I care about fit and style and Sombrio delivers that as well as cool, funky colors. Their designs are not too busy or too frilly. Plus, riders own it so they get the technical side of it.

What gear couldn’t you do without?
I have this merino wool and I wear it every single day as a scarf or over my face while riding. I’m not sponsored by Buff—I actually bought it. I always joke it’s going to be a bitchin’ doo-rag.

I use my —also not a sponsor—every day because of . I can record all of my workouts, my heart rate, map trails, and all sorts of other stuff. Plus, we’ve been testing the new bike tire size—650B. We use the data from our Garmin to determine how the tires are performing by looking at our heart rates and trail and weather conditions in comparison to rides with standard 26-inch tires.

What do you think of the new tire size, 650B?
With 26-inch tires, you have every compound and every tread pattern. But with 650s, you only have two tires to choose from. One is really heavy, and the other is not good as a front tire. One day, I said screw it, put them on the front and rear—and I lost it a few times and crashed. They need to come up with a new tire option. But, it is easier to ride with bigger wheels.

You and Bryn lead camps to help riders advance their skills. Anything new coming up with that?
We just partnered with —the only chairlift-operated resort in Washington. They just put together a pro team and it’s four of us World Cup riders—Bryn, myself, Luke Strobel, and Kevin Littlefield. Bryn and I are going to offer a Pro Package that’s all-inclusive. Clients will stay in Leavenworth, a cool little Bavarian town near Steven’s Pass, and they’ll be all set up with a hotel, food, transportation, and bike riding with us.

Any tips for women riders?
Definitely. Women learn better when they ride together, which is what makes my camps so awesome. We’ll work on things like position: You want a neutral wrist and your index finger to be the only thing using the brake. The joint at the end of your finger should be doing the breaking. For arm position, I like to model it after a push-up, which is your strongest position. And we also work on pedaling efficiency and stability on the bike.

What sort of cross-training do you try to work in?
We’ve been climbing at an indoor gym, which is good for your mind because you think of new strategies and use different muscle groups.

I also snowboard—and I play Pickle Ball. Unless you’re from here, you’ve probably never heard of it, but it’s like mini-tennis on a badminton size court with a wooden paddle and a plastic wiffle ball. You run around for two or three hours and it’s really fun. There are a couple of national champions at my gym that I play with.

In Seattle, it’s important to have a dry activity. There’s only so much bike washing I can handle—once a day is enough.

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It’s no secret that women’s splitboards—snowboards that unhinge into two ski-like pieces in order to ascend snowy terrain in the backcountry—have come a long way. In the last two years alone, we’ve seen them multiply at least five-fold, giving women more options in terms of how they want to get into the backcountry than ever before. , for instance, has been making women’s splitboards for longer than most, but it wasn’t until recently that we saw a model from them in a size under a 152. For a petite woman like me (at 5’2”) anything above a 150 is really too big. And since the average height for women is 5’5”, it’s likely too big for a good number of female riders. Luckily, their splits are now available to a 147.

Antisocial.

But that’s not true for most. Other noteworthy boards include , the , and the . There are only a few other splitboards for women on the market besides these three. And these three—from the most core snowboard companies of the splitboard-makers out there—are only available down to a 152.

Every year, I seem to get giddier because more attention is being paid to women in the backcountry and the equipment we need. But, every year, I’m reminded that the industry is moving too slowly. So I’ve been taking matters into my own hands. For the last year, I tried an alternative. I tried riding a men’s splitboard. Because the Spliff (based on the Nug’s technology) is shaped to be ridden 8-10 centimeters shorter than you would normally ride, it’s available in a 148. Sure, it was designed to ride more like a 156, but I figured I would give it a try. After two splitboard tours, I was handing it over to a good male friend whose normal snowboard size is in the high 150s. It was simply too wide and stiff for me to maneuver through tight trees—which was, well, scary.

Instead of waiting for the perfect splitboard to be manufactured, I’ve decided I need to make it myself. Or, at least give that task to an expert. Enter —makers of custom skis and snowboards out of Telluride, Colorado. Every year, they make more and more custom skis and snowboards for customers who want equipment that can match their style, strength, weight, and mission on snow. For some, buying custom skis or snowboards offers the best return on investment because they know, as experienced skiers or snowboarders, that what you’re buying will work for them.

Luckily, I’ve known Pete Wagner, the founder and owner, for a few years now and have even been to his factory. I’ve seen how much care and love goes into each pair of skis or snowboard (even a snowboard with a huge image of bacon on it) and that, because more time is spent with each piece of equipment, the craftsmanship and quality is higher than what you might typically expect. Plus, customers can pick out or even create their own custom graphic for a top sheet.

After a quick phone call with Pete, during which I explained my favorite women’s all-mountain snowboards (the and the ) and what type of terrain I would need the splitboard for (variable terrain, trees, steeps, powder), he sent me a link to their . Over a series of eight questions, I filled him in on physical attributes (height, weight, age), what type of terrain I want the board to work best in, where I’ll be using the board (backcountry, powder at the resort, etc.), what type of bindings I’ll be mounting on the board, my background (which playfully labels a possible skill level beyond expert as “immortal”), details on my favorite snowboard, and what it is I’m looking for.

As I work through the process with Wagner Custom, I’ll fill you in on the details and—of course—the end result. That final post will also expand on buying a custom board versus a manufactured one. Have you ever bought a custom snowboard or skis? What was your experience like?

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Product developers are always trying to come up with new ways to insulate jackets. Sometimes they pair synthetic and down insulation. Sometimes they play with baffle designs. And sometimes they pair light synthetic insulation with stretchy, aerobic-built fabric. There are a number of concoctions out there, and each of them has its benefits and drawbacks. But they all have a common goal: keep you warm when you need it and cooler when you don’t.

Men’s Thrym Jacket.

H2 Flow Jacket.

Panorama Jacket.

is a new take on insulation. By creating positive and negative space using insulation (or lack thereof), the jacket can regulate temperature more efficiently. I had the chance to test the new technology in Vail, Colorado, in late January when temperatures ranged from -10 degrees Fahrenheit to the high 20s. What did I think? Read on.

Helly Hansen makes two types of H2 Flow technology. They have a version with more positive space than negative—like in the H2 Flow Jacket ($175). Take a look at the inside of this jacket and you’ll see—through a mesh interior layer—that the foam-like insulation has been hole-punched with golf ball-size holes. The holes are the “negative” space.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, they make a version that has more negative space then positive. The Fall 2013 Women’s Panorama Jacket ($600), for instance, has pods filled with down in strategic areas to keep your core warm. In both instances, the negative spaces fill with your body’s warm air and trap it there, insulating in a new, innovative way.

I wore the H2 Flow jacket as a mid-layer on the coldest days in and then wore it as my outer layer on a backcountry tour in the Santa Fe National Forest in February on a 40-degree day. In both conditions, it worked exactly how I needed it to—keeping me toasty in Vail and releasing heat as I worked the powder in Santa Fe. I’m the type of person who gets really cold, so I always layer up, and my mid-layer usually consists of something puffier than the H2 Flow Jacket. So I was surprised at how much heat I generated (and retained) while wearing it in Vail. The black, ripstop nylon exterior blocks wind and is water-resistant, which made it the ideal outer layer for a bluebird, but soft day in the New Mexican backcountry. When I got too hot, I opened up the side-body zippers (which are more central than normal pit zips) and the heat lofted right out. And, while in the lodge at lunch in Vail, I loved its track jacket styling.

While in Vail, I also got to test an early sample of the Panorama Jacket, which comes out next fall. While it’s not exactly my style—I usually wear snowboard-inspired outerwear and I’m a total klutz (for me, white is a bad idea)—but its flattering, feminine cut and (removable) faux fur grew on me. The softshell fabric was completely waterproof as a heavy blizzard rolled through Vail while we were exploring the resort’s luscious back bowls. Because the softshell has a lot of stretch in it, I was able to hike for some extra vertical feet and push the powder around without feeling restricted. My favorite part was the H2 Flow goose down-insulated pods around my core. Because there’s less insulation, this piece is lighter in weight than equally warm jackets. But the negative space captured my body heat and kept me seriously cozy throughout the day—even bright and early when the thermometer read -10 degrees during a First Tracks mission. The cinched-in sides of the jacket give it a nice shape, but they’re also stretchy and not prohibitive. My only gripe was that, compared to the torso, my arms felt relatively cold. There is some light insulation in the arms, but it would be nice if there were a little more.

I’ll be excited to see this technology trickle down into less expensive options in the coming years. It’s an innovation worth keeping around.

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