is stoked.

He’s almost always stoked—he even signs his emails “Stay stoked, Doug.” But today he is especially stoked, because we’re skiing a foot of freshly fallen snow at one of his favorite resorts, ±«łÙČčłó’s Powder Mountain. I follow Fish through a line of evergreens onto a wide-open, nearly untracked slope, making effortless turns all the way down.

“Best run of the year!” he says at the bottom, giddy and out of breath. The other two in our foursome agree: Kevin Mitchell, the general manager of Powder Mountain, and a guy named Erik who has tagged along. Apparently, he’s some sort of tech entrepreneur. “That was like heli-skiing!” Erik exclaims as we wait for a shuttle to drive us back up the mountain.

At the top, Mitchell peels off and heads back to work. Erik also vanishes, leaving me with Fish. “Another lap?” he asks. Obviously. We’re supposed to be doing an interview, but that would kill the stoke. Later I’ll learn why Fish has millions of reasons to be stoked today, but for now there’s pow to be shredded.

Doug Fish is 67, with a wavy-gravy mane of white hair and a matching beard. A long-time ski-industry marketing guy, he’s also the founder of something called the Indy Pass, an unconventional alliance of small, independent resorts that has unexpectedly become the hottest ticket in skiing.

The Indy Pass entitles holders to ski two days at each of more than 180 smaller resorts. Launched in 2019, the pass initially cost $199 for adults and $99 for kids. A family of four could ski all season for less than the cost of a single Epic or Ikon Pass, the “megapasses” offered by Vail Resorts and Alterra Mountain Company, respectively, the two corporate giants that dominate the ski-resort industry. “We’re kind of the opposite of Vail,” Doug tells me, understating the point considerably.

The Indy Pass is aimed at skiers who aren’t interested in racking up 30-dayÌę seasons at ultra-expensive, big-name resorts like Vail or Deer Valley. They don’t need to be whisked uphill on high-speed chairlifts to ski wide, groomed runs with more traffic than the New Jersey Turnpike. They just want to have fun on a pretty, un-crowded mountain.

The pass wasn’t terribly popular initially. The first winter, 2019–20, pass holders clocked all of 9,000 skier visits to the forty-some resorts on the pass. (Vail Resorts alone recorded nearly 13 million skier days that year.) But then two things happened: the pandemic hit, and everyone went skiing.

The following year, the COVID-19 winter of 2020–21, the big resorts on the Epic and Ikon passes got maxed out. Images of serpentine lift lines and miles-long traffic jams filled social media. Staffing shortages made a day on the slopes feel like flying Spirit Airlines, and savvy skiers began eyeing the smaller, quirkier resorts left behind by industry consolidation. Indy caught on. Pass sales grew tenfold, and dozens more resorts signed up. (I bought one for $259 in 2022, when Indy offered a discount to Epic and Ikon holders.) Fish started to think that his crazy startup might work.

The Indy business model is simple. When someone buys a pass—now priced at $399 for adults, $199 for kids—the money goes into a big pot. Show up at a partner resort to redeem one of your two ski days and that resort receives a percentage of its daily walk-up lift-ticket price, known as the yield, from the big pot of money. Indy pays out 85Ìę percent of what it takes in back to the resorts, using the rest to cover overhead like credit-card-processing fees, staffing, and customer service.

It’s still a shoestring operation. “Right now our assets consist of four laptops and a Toyota 4Runner,” Fish tells me during a chairlift ride between powder runs.

As the day progresses, the wind picks up and we seek shelter in the trees. Despite his years, Fish keeps charging. “It might be steeper over here, let’s check it out!” he yells before disappearing into a gladed bowl. A few minutes later, I watch him bounce off a buried stump and cartwheel into several feet of powder. “I’m all right,” he says. “Maybe my knee.” The charging continues.

After a couple more runs, we head to the Powder Keg, a cozy on-mountain bar that’s buzzing. We find seats near a live band. A woman is dancing to “Lovely Day.”Ìę Everybody’s happy. We drink pilsners and relive the day. It’s skiing.

I drive home, still stoked.

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I heard the rumbling before I saw anything. My first thought was that it might be a military jet dipping low through the alpine valley, as sometimes happened. But that didn’t make sense; it had been snowing all day, and clouds still hung over the Elk Mountains of Colorado, just outside the ski-resort town of Crested Butte.

Late in the afternoon, after alpine skiing all day, I’d decided to go for a quick cross-country jaunt on one of my favorite trails, a forest road leading to an old ghost town now used as a biological-research station in summer. In winter the road is closed to vehicles, and it’s a fun four-mile out-and-back ski. I was pushing it, but figured I’d make it back by dark.

At the time, I lived in the East and had little notion of what can happen when new snow falls on top of old snow in big, steep mountains. I clicked in and followed the tracks, gliding through stands of aspens and, without realizing, crossing two active avalanche paths along the way.

Eventually, the trail emerged into a big meadow, right at the base of Gothic Mountain, so named because its rocky flanks resemble cathedral buttresses and drop steeply down into the valley. It’s only 12,000-some feet high, not much by Colorado standards, but it’s one of my favorite peaks, nature’s answer to Chartres. I started across the meadow, planning to tag the edge of the ghost town and then head back.

±ő’v±đ loved cross-country skiing since I was in third grade. Even as a little kid, I preferred the quiet of the woods to launching off jumps at Greek Peak, our local alpine hill in upstate New York. At the time, in our comfortable university town, it wasn’t great socially to have parents who were getting divorced. I got sent to the principal’s office a lot. The snowy woods held more appeal than the playground.

What’s that sound?

My eyes moved up the flanks of Gothic. The entire side of the mountain, a vast snowy bowl, seemed to be moving, as if all the snow had decided to flow downhill at once, from top to bottom. A cloud formed at the leading edge of the slide, billowing up like the foam of a breaking wave. Oh right, I thought: This is an avalanche. I’m actually seeing one. Shit.

The cloud billowed higher and the roaring got louder as the snow funneled down to a narrow choke point right above a cliff face. For some reason I expected it to stop there, but of course it didn’t. The funnel concentrated the slide’s energy, and the river of snow poured over the cliff wall with unbelievable force, like water blasting out of a dam. It kept going, plowing through the trees now, heading in my general direction. I took five frantic strides back up the trail, but it was clear the avalanche was too big to outrun if it had the momentum to reach me. I stopped and watched it come.

This was not your ordinary release; it was a massive deluge. A person caught in it would have no chance. I felt ordinary and small, like a wild animal that knows, deep inside, that Nature doesn’t care whether it lives or dies.

I was experiencing what the University of California at Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner defines as awe: “Being in the presence of something vast that transcends our current understanding of the world.” That it did. Keltner says that awe is at the root of religious feeling and creative inspiration; it’s essential, he believes, to maintaining our emotional equilibrium. We need this connection to something larger—to things we can’t understand.

Awe has fallen on hard times lately, in part because we can all witness such wonders—avalanches, giant waves, breaching whales—on our phones. I didn’t have a phone with me that day, or a camera. But I can replay the memory as vividly as if it happened yesterday.

The snow cloud billowed across the valley, pellets of ice stinging my face. I turned away to breathe, bracing myself. Would the river of white reach me? Or would it lose momentum first? It petered out on the flats, but the flying snow took a while to settle. It was getting dark, but I could see the trail well enough to follow the tracks back toward the trailhead, crossing those other avalanche pathways I didn’t know were there. Eventually, I could see the lights coming on in big ski houses, twinkling between the trees. My car was the only one left in the parking lot.

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Out in ±«łÙČčłó’s barren West Desert, past the hazardous-waste landfill and the military bombing range, on the far side of the Great Salt Lake, sits a silent, mysterious structure that will make a great ruin someday. Scratch that: it already is one.

The three-story industrial building was hastily erected in the late 1980s, at a cost of $60 million, to house a pumping station with an urgent task: to suck water out of the Great Salt Lake and spew it into the desert flats farther west. The lake was then at record-high levels, threatening to flood railway lines, ­interstate highways, and farmland. The pumps were in operation for about two years before nature took over and the lake receded on its own.

More than three decades later, the Great Salt Lake has the opposite problem—too little water. Twenty years into a once-in-a-millennium drought, exacerbated by the ­effects of climate change, the lake level has declined to record lows. Marinas have closed, migratory birds are struggling, and high winds whip up massive dust clouds.

In January, a group of scientists and environmentalists warned that what was once the largest lake in the West could disappear completely in as little as five years. “Examples from around the world show that saline lake loss triggers a long-term cycle of environmental, health, and economic suffering,” they wrote in a . “We are in an all-hands-on-deck emergency.”

Translation: shit is getting real. How real? Even Republicans recognize that we have to do something to save the lake—that’s how real.

The Great Salt Lake crisis has spurred a novel and extreme idea: Why not build a pipeline to bring in water from the ocean to revive and replenish it?

The concept sounds like something dreamed up by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, but it seems to have originated with the Utah legislature’s powerful Water Development Commission, which placed the pipeline idea on its annual agenda last May. “There’s a lot of water in the ocean, and we have very little in the Great Salt Lake,” noted commission chair David Hinkins.

Environmentalists were urgently dismissive; the Salt Lake Tribune called it a “loony idea.” But the loony idea persisted. In ­December, President Biden signed a bill that will provide $5 million per year in federal money to study possible ways to resurrect the Great Salt Lake and dozens of other saline lakes in the West. One option is the aforementioned ocean pipeline. “We must do whatever is necessary to save [the Great Salt Lake],” said Utah senator Mitt Romney, who sponsored the bill.

Which raises an urgent question:Ìę What is going to be necessary to enable us to survive climate change? And how much of that are we actuallyÌę willing to do?

“My oil and gas friends tell me we build oil and gas pipelines all the time,” Romney told me by phone, “and water is more important than that.”

But the water pipeline is a much bigger deal than an oil or gas pipeline.

The problem, or set of problems, is not only relevant to the American West. Other places are preparing to spend boatloads of money to mitigate the effects of further climate change. New York State has budgeted $52 billion to armor its pricey coastal real estate against rising sea levels and ever stronger storms. Israel is exploring ways to deliver water from the Mediterranean to its own dying saline lake, the Dead Sea. Scientists in the Netherlands and elsewhere are developing salt-tolerant potatoes and other food crops that are less reliant on fresh water.

To climate scientists, Great Salt Lake and its basin, including the greater Salt Lake City area and famous ski resorts like Park City and Snowbird, offer a perfect little case study in doomsday planning, because the region is a largely self-contained water system. Snow falls on the surrounding mountains in winter, accumulating into a high-elevation snowpack that can measure 20 feet deep. When the snow melts in late spring, the runoff flows down via creeks and rivers into Great Salt Lake, raising its water level. As the summer wears on, a great deal of that water evaporates, and the lake level goes back down. (The water leaches salts and minerals from the soil as it runs down from the mountains, but none of the water flows out to other places, or to the ocean, which is why the lake is salty.)

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±ő’v±đ written for this magazine on and off for 30 years, and here’s a confession that might end my run: I don’t like tents very much. In fact, I dislike almost everything about them. The cramped quarters, the zippers, the moistness. The swish-swish sound nylon makes when you brush against it, which sets my teeth on edge. The lone mosquito that always seems to sneak inside.

Lately, however, my tent-phobia has become a problem I need to work on. I live in Utah, surrounded by idyllic campsites, yet it’s been at least a year since my partner and I have slept outside. We have a multitude of reasons and excuses for this, but when the subject of tent camping comes up, there’s always a moment when we look at each other and decide: I’d really rather not spend the weekend crammed into a Hefty bag with you, love. And that’s that.

This attitude started to change when I came across the wondrous family of all-canvas tents. Last May, I wandered into a prepper show in Salt Lake City, which was kind of like Outdoor Retailer for the Apocalypse. (Appropriately, the state GOP convention was happening right next door.) There were the usual intense hucksters pushing water purifiers, solar panels, food dehydrators, combat-grade wound care products(!), and, of course, lots and lots of guns.

Then I came across something unexpected: two millennial hipster guys who were showing off nifty compact stainless-steel , which were designed to be used inside real, large, honest-to-goodness Boy Scout–style canvas tents—which, it turned out, they also made, right there in Salt Lake City.

Their names were Pace Measom and Jordan Nielsen, and I arranged to interview them by phone two days later. “We’re not preppers,” Measom hastened to point out when we started talking. A couple years ago, he explained, he and three partners, including Nielsen, bought an old-school canvas tent company called Springbar, which had been quietly operating in Salt Lake City since 1961. Their tents are simple but classic, with elegant lines and solid canvas construction, and they’re all sewn by hand in a Salt Lake City factory. “It’s like the Airstream trailer of tents,” Measom said. I liked the sound of that immediately.

In the past few years, Springbar’s designs have gained a devoted following, not only among nostalgic Americans like me, but across the Pacific. A quick search for or pulls up some stylin’ glamping setups, many from places like Korea and Taiwan and —and we’re not just talking about individual campsites, but entire hootenannies of Springbar fans and their beloved tents. If you want one for yourself, you have to sign up and wait months—possibly longer, if you’re picky about the color.

Springbar tents were the creation of a World War II naval draftsman named Jack Kirkham, who went home to Salt Lake City after his discharge and started making canvas awnings for buildings. When the rise of air conditioning weakened the awning biz, he began making tents that he designed himself, starting in 1961. He created a handful of standard looks, from a two-person Boy Scout–style tent all the way up to a modular design called the Leisure Port, which you can add rooms to as needed. (Useful in Utah, where people have lots of kids.)

Kirkham’s son, Jack Jr., told me that his dad wasn’t exactly what we think of as an outdoorsman today. “He , he liked painting outside, but he was a little more from the generation where camping was not a real vacation,” he says. A man after my own heart.

In 1962, a Springbar Traveler tent cost $83.62, according to an old catalog. Now that same model runs $1,299. It’s nice and roomy, ten feet on a side, and more than tall enough to stand up in. It also weighs about 60 pounds and comes with very substantial steel poles, so you’re not backpacking this thing anywhere. (Another plus.) The design hasn’t changed in 50 years. “It works,” says Jack Jr., “so we kept it the same.”

Springbar was around but struggling when Measom and Duncan approached Jack Jr. about buying it in 2018. The company was still making tents by hand in Salt Lake City, but production was slow and the brand was fading. “We were always out of stock,” Jack Jr. says. At the time, the tents were a side business connected to Kirkham’s Outdoor Products, a camping store that the two Jacks founded in the late 1970s. The shop did well at first, as interest in outdoor sports surged, but business slowly dwindled over time when big-box retailers like Cabela’s and REI moved into Utah.

Having grown up in Utah, Measom knew about Springbar, and their products reminded him of other iconic outdoor brands like Filson and Pendleton that sold well-made old-school gear at boutique prices. But nobody outside Utah seemed to have heard of Springbar. At the time, Measom was a marketing writer for Backcountry.com, and he sensed an opportunity to revive the brand. Measom’s father, Ty, knew the Kirkhams from the outdoor business—Ty had , makers of backcountry and backyard cooking and grilling devices, in 1990—and a deal was struck with Jack Jr. (Jack Sr. died .)

The tents themselves are sewn in an unmarked industrial building south of downtown Salt Lake City, which I visited on a hot June morning in the summer of 2022. At 9:15, shop boss Pam Russell announced the next run of tents: 46 Travelers, 32 of which would be labeled for export to Korea. There were about 20 employees on the floor, a mix of old-timers who’ve been with Springbar for decades, arts-and-craftsy young people, and immigrants of all ages from Chile, Uganda, and Afghanistan.

Russell asked if anyone had anything they’d like to say, and a middle-aged guy in a headband piped up. “I wanted to sing a song about our unsung heroes, the inspector dudes,” he said. “They’re awesome. And I think we can help them by getting things right the first time.”

Everyone applauded. The “inspector dudes” set up each and every tent as it was finished, to check the stitching and other details, like metal stake loops and the rope sewn around the tent bases. If the tent passed muster, they signed the label, right next to the name of the employee who led its production, and it was bagged and readied for shipping.

This was the last stage in a long but carefully thought-out process inspired by the way Toyota makes automobiles, a system called “lean production.” The way it works, Measom told me, is that each sewer or group of sewers works on a single part of the tent. One person will be putting together a wall while someone else works on the roof, or a window, and yet another person does the floor, and so on.

When all the pieces are ready, they’re joined to form a whole. Then the “inspector dudes” step in to check out the finished product. Measom says it’s all about efficiency. “You’re looking for these time savings of one minute here and five minutes there,” he explains. “It adds up over a week, or a year. But there’s a reason nobody does this anymore. It’s too hard—it’s much easier to just have it come in a box.”

As Russell finished up the morning meeting, Sheryl Crow came blasting through the speakers: “All I wanna do is have some fun.” Everyone stood and stretched, paying special attention to backs, wrists, and fingers. Sewing tents is repetitive manual labor, and no one wants to get sidelined by carpal tunnel. The song ended, replaced by the percussive sound of industrial sewing machines. Time to get back to work.

U.S.-made Springbars cost anywhere from about $650 (for the two-person Compact) to $1,500 for the 10×14-foot Family Camper, which has a big door and windows and even a porch-like awning. The company also makes some of its models in China, at a slightly lower price point. Most of those are imported to the U.S., while a substantial fraction of the Salt Lake City-made tents are shipped overseas. “We make tents in America for people in Asia, and we make tents in Asia for people in America,” MeasomÌęobserves wryly.

In Asia, as well as eastern North America, rain is more of an issue than in the American West. The canvas that the company uses is advertised as “,” because the fibers in the canvas expand in the presence of water, tightening the weave and making it waterproof in all but the most brutal downpours, says Measom. The cloth is treated with something called Sunforger to resist both moisture and mildew, while remaining breathable. Still, it’s essential to let the tent dry before rolling it up and stowing it in its bag. “The only thing you can do to ruin a Springbar tent is to store it wet, which will mold it,” Measom says.

Jack Jr. is working on designs for stove-friendly “hot tents” that will enable campers to visit national parks in off-seasons, when the weather is cold but crowds are absent. They also work in desert heat: he’s just back from a week outside Canyonlands. “But I spend many nights, and days, in a tent just in my backyard,” Jack Jr. admits. Sometimes he uses his backyard sprinklers to test the waterproofing. “And sometimes I’ll just go sit in there and have a margarita.”

Sounds like a great idea to me. After my visit to the factory, I take a loaner tent home—the 8×10 Vagabond—and roll it out in the yard. The first step is simple: pounding in 15 stakes around the edges. Next, I’m supposed to thread in bent metal bars that give the tent its structure. This part is something I just can’t seem to figure out. It’s about to turn into a cussin’ job when I take a break, consult YouTube, and figure out the simple move required to tension the bars. (The trick is in how the two pieces of the main crossbar are joined together; hence the name “Springbar.”)

All that’s left to do is install the two side poles and raise the roof. Boom: ±ő’v±đ got a home outside my home—a good thing, since our kid just tested positive for COVID, and we need quarantine space. The roof bars tension the whole tent nicely, pulling against the stakes, so there’s no slack in the walls and no sag in the roof. The almond-colored canvas is soft to the touch. There’s no swishing whatsoever. The thing is solid.

I set up a couple wicker chairs and a table, open a beer, and settle in to read a magazine and listen to the backyard birds. I have half a mind to throw in an air mattress and Airbnb the thing for $200 a night.

A couple weeks later, we escape the Utah heat for a remote-working stint at a condo in Sun Valley, Idaho. One afternoon, we shut the laptops and drive to a lake, where we set up the Springbar by the shore, in the shade of tall spruces. We spend the remainder of the day and evening paddleboarding and swimming in the crystal waters, returning to land to lounge in the tent with an icy canned Paloma before heading back out again, followed by a deluxe picnic. It’s the best day of the summer.

As the sun begins to sink, we watch a mama duck shuttling her babies around the glassy lake. The tent looks classic, like it belongs there. We take a few pics for the ’gram, and they draw likes from around the world. It’s nice to get back to nature with a little bit of style.

There is the minor detail of a “No Camping” sign nearby, but my defense is airtight: We’re not camping. We’re tenting.

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On a perfect day in Park City, Utah, I got off the lift, removed my skis, and began hiking up a snowy ridge leading to one of my favorite steep stashes. I soon found myself stuck behind a middle-aged woman who was clearly struggling, and whose husband was barking at her to hurry up. “I’m coming!” she yelled, in an accent that spoke of proximity to the Garden State Parkway.

My slight annoyance soon turned to genuine concern. What worried me was the way she carried her skis: clutched to her chest, making an X across her body, the metal edges just inches from her throat. My ski-snob sense told me she had no business being up here. On the other hand, getting in over your head is part of the thrill and the learning curve. I watched to make sure the two of them got down safely.

Seasoned skiers will tell you that there’s only one “right” way to carry skis: clamped together by the brakes, hoisted over your shoulder with tips forward, the toepiece of the binding resting behind a shoulder, one arm draped across the front end of the skis for balance, and the other using the poles as a walking stick. But as I looked more closely into the subject, I realized that this, too, is notÌęalwaysÌęthe best way to go.

Learning to ski requires picking up a host of new skills that are completely unnatural, like getting on and off chairlifts and walking down a set of stairs in rigid boots. Making matters worse is the attitude of some (not all) other skiers, who seem to believe that if you’re not following certain unspoken rules, you have no business being on the mountain.

That’s a genuine barrier to participation for people looking to get into this expensive and clubby sport: it’s difficult enough without having to deal with secret rules made up by self-appointed gatekeepers. In November 2020, skier Brooklyn Bell pushed back on this front with an exasperated that shows her carrying her skis,ÌęinÌęair quotes,Ìę“wrong.”

“I will carry my skis however I please,” she wrote. “Cause I don’t need to be perfect to access this space.”

This is true—all you need to do to be a skier is ski. At the same time, unlike some of the sport’s less functional unspoken rules (“There are no friends on a powder day” is exactly wrong; also, it’s perfectly fine to ski in jeans, as long as they’re cutoffs), mastering this particular skill can actually make the experience better, particularly for people who are new to skiing (unlike theÌęÌęBell). Carrying skis effectively helps you start the day with comfort and confidence, and is safer for you and everybody around you. But it’s tricky to nail, because skis are awkward things that are designed to be skied on, not schlepped around.ÌęAnd nobody bothers to teach it, soÌębetween the parking lot and the lifts, novice and infrequent skiers are left to figure it out.Ìę“It’s not part of the ski-school curriculum,” says , a veteran instructor in Jackson, Wyoming.Ìę“And you don’t want to seem too judgmental.”

Unfortunately, many of the most obvious ways to carry skis are clumsy, painful, and potentially hazardous. Back when pro freeskier Colter Hinchliffe worked at a ski shop near the Aspen gondola, he and his buddies bestowed names on the many different styles they observed,Ìęwhich he and fellow pro Tim Durtschi later immortalized in a Teton Gravity ResearchÌę. Their favoritesÌęincludedÌęthe Offering, in which you hold the skis in your arms, across the body, like firewood, and the Oklahoma Suitcase, in which the pole straps are wrapped around the skis and the poles act as a handle.ÌęThat lady I saw on the ridge at Park City was employing the Decapitator, a surprisingly popular option.

Hinchliffe and DurtschiÌędubbedÌętheÌę“proper” carry the Local, because that’s how locals tend to do it. But the Local has its own drawbacks, as I realized one weekend after I tried teaching it to my girlfriend and herÌę14-year-old son. She felt unbalanced and top-heavy; he couldn’t take the pressure of the heavy skis digging into his shoulders. The tears welling in his eyes told me that I was being a dogmatic jerk. I had to find a better way.

The Local has otherÌędrawbacks. The most obvious is that the tails of your skis are waving around behind you, bonking into your friends’ helmets,Ìęand making the skis positively deadly inÌęcrowdedÌęspacesÌęlike a gondola line.

I needed expert advice, so I called Hinchliffe, who confessed that his preferred carry is not the Local but a simpler, easier method he calls the Escort. First you clamp the skis together by the brakes, base to base. (Always do this when carrying or stowing skis.) Next, grab them between the bindings and bring them to waist level, parallel to the ground, tips forward. Then, he says, wrap your arm around and under the skis, between the toe and heel on the bindings, and proceed as if “you’re walking your daughter down the aisle.”

On a recent trip to Alta, IÌędecided to give The Escort a try. The local bros looked at me funny as I strutted acrossÌęthe parking lot, but the joke was on them. It was easy, painless, balanced, and, most important, safe. My ski tails were not waving around in anybody’s face. Setting the skis down did not require any potentially sketchy aerial catches or sudden drops.

I felt comfortable, and it wasÌękind ofÌęliberating to not care what other skiers thought. Going forward, I’ll not only do it, I’llÌęalso (gently)Ìęshare it.

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Kevin Perry was riding his bike near the Great Salt Lake when the first bullet whizzed over his head. A couple seconds later, a second round plunked into the sand a few yards from his feet. He hit the ground, crawling under a trailer he was towing. Terror battled confusion: Who the hell was shooting at him, and from where?

It was October 2017, and he was alone on the playa, a wide-open, waterless lake bed that extended for miles in every direction. The nearest cover or vegetation was more than a mile away, and Perry knew this part of the lake was popular with target shooters, so it was not a good place to be exposed. “They just saw something moving out there and decided to take a couple of shots at it,” said the 53-year-old University of Utah associate professor. “After that I was always decked out head to toe in hunter’s orange.”

Perry is an atmospheric scientist, and he was on an obsessive quest: he was pedaling a fat-tire bike, stopping every 500 meters to collect soil samples, as part of a project in which he would cover the entire perimeter of the Great Salt Lake. All told, he would ride more than 2,300 miles, in snowstorms and baking summer heat, starting early and often not getting home until midnight. His trailer sometimes sank to its axles in oozy mud that looked perfectly dry. More than once he wanted to cheat, to shorten the project, but thinking about the ridicule he would face kept him going.

Perry was doing the kind of boring science that suddenly becomes not so boring if certain bad things happen—for example, studying coronaviruses prior to November 2019. The largest natural lake west of the Mississippi, the Great Salt Lake is roughly four times saltier than the ocean and five times bigger in surface area than Lake Tahoe—for now, anyway. In the 1980s, the lake’s water levels rose high enough to flood highways and threaten railway lines; today it’s flirting with all-time lows, brought on by a period of drought that has parched the Southwest since the early 2000s. Some models predict that the lake, an iconic feature of the Intermountain West and a contributor to ±«łÙČčłó’s legendary snowfall, could disappear almost entirely in the next few decades.

Because the Great Salt Lake is so shallow—imagine pouring water onto a cake plate—even a small drop in levels exposes large areas of its bed to the elements. Thus, while the lake once covered some 1,750 square miles, its waters now dampen barely more than half that area, leaving a zone of playa larger than the San Francisco Bay. Perry’s mission was to check for heavy metals in the soil, and to determine whether this vast swath of newly exposed sediment could end up fueling apocalyptic dust storms and render Salt Lake City all but uninhabitable.

That would suck, obviously, but I was more intrigued by what Perry łóČč»ćČÔ’t seen during his circumnavigation: other people. For company as he worked, there were huge flocks of migrating waterfowl, herds of grazing cattle, knots of deer, soaring hawks and eagles, a fox, even pelicans, and he saw tracks left by coyotes and cougars—but there were no humans, other than a couple of angry ranchers. Even the guys who shot at him didn’t stick around to say sorry.

“People don’t go out there,” Perry told me. “I’d lived here 15 years and had barely explored the place. When I started to, I was like, Oh, my gosh, this is amazing.”

“It’s kind of like on Antiques Roadshow, where you might have a book that doesn’t look like much,” says Marjorie Chan, a professor of geography at the University of Utah. “And my job as the appraiser is to tell you that you have an extraordinary book. It has all this history and tells you so much about the world. Even though you don’t think it looks like the Grand Canyon or Zion, this is an extraordinary place. It’s one of a kind. And we just take it for granted.”

As I would find out, the Great Salt Lake has that effect on certain people. But not many. In the spring of 2020, as the pandemic deepened and stir-crazy hordes piled into ±«łÙČčłó’s national parks and mountain trails, I decided to head in the opposite direction and explore this strikingly weird, sometimes disgusting, almost always beautiful, and seriously endangered resource.

Ultimately, I was escaping one crisis only to go down the rabbit hole of another, far more serious one: the climate-change-fueled extreme drought that has taken hold across the Southwest. But at the time, I had a much smaller question: Why does nearly everybody hate this place?

The post The Great Salt Lake Is Desolate. It’s Also Divine. appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

As a lifelong cyclist, ±ő’v±đ always sort of hated running, on some deep biological level. Oh, sure, I may have entered a handful of 5Ks and 10Ks in my time, and even finished a half marathon (once). But I remain convinced that the reason bicycles were invented is because running sucks.

There is one thing I really envy about runners, though, specifically male runners: they get to run shirtless. When it’s warm out, they just whip their tops right off and prance along in nothing more than their tiny little flappy shorts. I resent them deeply for it.

Because for some reason, “serious” cyclists are not permitted to do this. It doesn’t matter that we ride around in skintight, crotch-hugging outfits—what former pro rider and Education First team boss Jonathan Vaughters calls “the functional equivalent of underwear.” On a very hot day, we might unzip that too-small Lycra jersey for a smidge of ventilation. But no matter what, said jersey must remain on, at all times.

Among the Lycra set, shirtless bike riding is seen as a big sin committed only by , along with unworthies like , , and . But if you look around, you realize that Shirtless Bike Dude is everywhere—including the tracks of the and the streets of Venice, which they wheel downÌę. If you showed up for a group ride sans jersey, or took it off halfway through a century ride (again, I’m talking about men here), “real” cyclists would shun you like a drunk at a Mormon wedding.

Don’t get me wrong: I, too, once judged shirtless bike riders quite harshly. I kept a folder ofÌęphotos I’d snapped of the most flagrant offenders. Occasionally I’d make fun of them on Facebook. But then I tried it myself, peeling off my jersey on a long rail-trail ride a couple years ago on the first really warm day of summer. There were few people around, and it was hot, and I longed for the feel of sun on my skin. I came home a changed man.

Not long ago, CNN tracked down notorious Joseph Mercola as he was leaving the beach near his Florida home. The 67-year-old osteopath was not only , he was shoeless, too. He pedaled away without comment, just another Florida man wobbling off into the sunset. But while Mercola may be wrong about COVID-19 (and much else), he and I are on the same page about shirts and bikes. Riding the latter does not require wearing the former. As the muggy, smoky summer winded down, I became convinced that sometimes you just need to take off the shrink-wrap jersey and enjoy the breeze.

On yet another hot Tuesday in Salt Lake City, a week before Labor Day, I headed out on a noonish bike ride. I’d meant to start earlier, but nagging work email detained me. I set out on one of my typical lunch loops, a short urban cruise with some punchy climbs. A few blocks from home, I realized that it was already damn hot. And I was sick of being hot.

There was only one thing to do. I pulled over in a church parking lot, took off my fancy Rapha T-shirt, and stuffed it in my saddlebag. Then I set off again, feeling self-conscious.

It’s difficult to overstate the hatred that cycling cognoscenti have for shirtless bike riders. Earlier in the summer, when I’d started to become shirtless-curious, I took a quick trip through various cycling-oriented message boards. “There’s something about a guy that rides shirtless that really kinda pisses me off,” wrote one commenter on MTBR.com, a mountain-bike forum. “Unless you’re a hot chick, leave it on,” another moron opined. “Every time I see guys riding shirtless, I feel a strong urge to pick a fight with one of ’em.”

Recently, a “somewhat new to cycling” rider, who lives and rides in Houston’s unbearable heat, innocently posed this question on : “Do you guys think it’s socially acceptable to ride shirtless?”

“No one wants to see your naked 57-year-old body,” one commenter predictably shot back. “Wear a fucking shirt like an adult.”

“Only if your first name is Mario and your last name is Cipollini,” another wiseass replied.

Ouch. That reference was to the Italian sprinter from the 1990s, known as much for his outrageous riding kits (including a bodysuit and a costume, both of which got him fined by Tour de France officials) as he was for winning races. A quick check of revealed that Cipollini, now a retired 54-year-old, does often ride shirtless, displaying his Arnold-esque physique to the world.

Among us mortals, the bearer of the torch is . A legend in Los Angeles cycling circles, Shirtless Keith is a burly man of indeterminate age who rides around hilly Palos Verdes wearing work boots, denim cutoffs, and no shirt. He’s as strong as an ox, splendidly tan, and able to drop many of L.A.’s Type A roadies on local climbs, despite pedaling a single-gear bike that weighs twice as much as a fancy road rig.

My own goals were more modest: I wanted a workout, plus some vitamin D and a dose of mildly transgressive freedom. This wasn’t going to become my lifestyle, nor was I trying to impress anyone on social media.

I sailed down the street and into a busy city park, headed for my favorite bike path. I braced myself for scornful looks, maybe even shrieks and catcalls, possibly even a fight—but no one noticed, except for a jerk in a Subaru who shot me a disapproving smirk. He had a reason to be sad: He was stuck driving, while I was riding my bike. Shirtless. I was free. A pleasant breeze riffled through my patchy chest hair, and my love handles jiggled happily, soaking up the sun. It felt freaking awesome.

The most common namby-pamby objection to shirtless bike riding goes like this: What about sunburn? To which I say, have you ever been on a beach and seen ? Those are worse than any sunburn. Plus there’s this stuff called sunscreen. Problem solved.

Objection two is usually along the lines of: What if you fall? Having crashed many times, I can testify that a cycling jersey isn’t much help when you fall; it’s much more important to wear a helmet. Even more important is to not crash. My personal rule is this: if high speeds or sketchy singletrack are likely to be involved, wear the jersey.

There’s a third objection, which starts with the fact that cycling jerseys play an important role in bike culture. Your jersey tells other riders who you are, for better or . The nicer ones are made of fancy wicking fabrics, and they can cost a lot of money as well, so why not wear them?

Because the ultimate wicking fabric is—wait for it—no fabric. As I cruised along bare chested, my sweat actually cooled me off via evaporation, just as evolution intended. And I felt extremely aerodynamic, even if I didn’t necessarily look it. My lack of jersey announced to the world who I had become. I had become Shirtless Bike Dude.

As I turned onto a road that leads to a popular local climb, some other road riders actually waved to me. I couldn’t believe it. Roadies never wave. I sat up, proudly pushed out my skinny chest, and gave them a big wave back.

Now that Labor Day is past, Shirtless Bike Dude’s days are numbered (well, except in Florida). Soon he’ll go into winter hibernation, getting pasty and battling seasonal affective disorder like the rest of us. If you see him, be sure to wave.

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The first time I met Jonathan Vaughters, founder and manager of the U.S.-based cycling team now known as EF Education First, he had a secret. Actually, he had several secrets. It was August 2006, immediately after the Tour de France, and like every other sports journalist who covered cycling, I was desperate to get an interview with Floyd Landis, who had won the Tour only to test positive for testosterone. Vaughters and I met for dinner in New York’s West Village, and he surprised me by casually admitting, off the record, that he had used EPO, the doping cyclist’s drug of choice—and that he had watched Lance Armstrong inject himself with the same substance. I blinked. This was huge.

What Vaughters didn’t say was that, as we sat there sipping our Cîtes du Rhîne, Landis was just a few blocks away, holed up in the townhome of Vaughters’s team sponsor, real estate investor Doug Ellis. They were protecting their friend from the media, and perhaps from himself, but they were also trying to persuade Landis to come clean about doping. Landis held the key to the change that they both believed cycling desperately needed. But of course, he was not yet ready to tell the truth; that wouldn’t happen until nearly four years later, when Landis revealed not only his own drug use, but that of Armstrong and most of his U.S. Postal Service/Discovery Channel teammates. We all know what happened after that.

This is one of several revelations in Vaughters’s long-awaited memoir, , which was published July 1 in the UKÌęand will appear in the U.S. on August 27. One-Way Ticket tells two dovetailed stories about Vaughters: the coming of age of a young American bike racer, a misfit kid from Denver who found solace on long, lonely rides in the mountains and pursued his dream of racing in Europe at the highest levels; and his subsequent journey from corruption to redemption, when he became a leading force in the movement to clean up cycling. Let’s just say it was worth the wait.

Part personal history, part confessional, One-Way Ticket is also a love letter to a beautiful, brutal, hopelessly corrupt, yet paradoxically pure sport. It chronicles Vaughters’s saga as an athlete, but there are many more layers to the story, and that’s what makes it essential reading for any cycling fanÌęand for anyone who followed Armstrong’s rise and fall. It covers the deep history of American bike racing in a way that has never been done. And it’s an honest, unflinchingÌęlook at cycling’s darkest eraÌęfrom someone who fully lived it.

The 46-year-old “J.V.,” as he’s universally known in the cycling community, belongs to the generation of American riders who grew up watching Greg LeMond’s three Tour de France victories. Despite those triumphs, cycling remained a stubbornly obscure sport here; for a time in the early 1990s, Tour coverage consisted of a one-hour weekly summary on ESPN. You had to be different to want to become a professional cyclist. By his own account, Vaughters was a misfit in high school, bullied and ostracized. He chose cycling as an escape, but at first he was hopelessly bad at it. He persisted, though,Ìęand eventually found himself thrown into races and team camps with the most talented young riders in the country, including George Hincapie, Bobby Julich, Chann McRae, and a kid from Texas named Lance.

Vaughters’s anecdotes are vivid and often hilarious. In the late 1980s, after Lance the newcomer blows up the entire field, and eventually himself, in a junior road race in Moab, Utah, Vaughters tells a competitor, “Well, Lance sure is strong, but man, is he stupid.” To which McRae, Armstrong’s friend and a fellow Texan, responds, “Duuuude, I’m telling Lance you said that, and he’s gonna kick your little skinny ass, motherfucker.”

Which more or less sets the tone for their relationship over the next 25 years. Lance becomes by turns Vaughters’s rival, teammate, neighbor (in Spain), friend/frenemy, and ultimately his bitter foe.

When the Americans went over to race in Europe in the mid-1990s, they were in for a rude awakening. Suddenly, they were getting crushed by riders who were using reckless quantities of EPO, which increases the oxygen-carrying capacity of blood. At first, Vaughters recounts, the Americans were outraged—Lance most of all. “The bizarre truth is that in 1995, Lance was an incredibly talented but very angry cyclist who was having his career stolen from him by dopers,” Vaughters writes. “He was vocally against the use of EPO, called it an epidemic, and wanted there to be a test found to catch the cheaters who were taking it.”

It clearly angers Vaughters that Lance won by doping, but at the same time, Vaughters admits that he eagerly joined the EPO generation and became an expert at sticking himself with needles. It worked: he got fastÌęand became a contender in major races again. (“My dream was back,” he writes.) His results let him make the jump from a crappy little Spanish team to a new outfit sponsored by the U.S. Postal Service, with many of his fellow AmericansÌęand eventually his old nemesis, Lance. After recoveringÌęfrom cancer, Lance had been transformed into a potential Tour contender himself—with plenty of chemical help.

On paper, Vaughters had the right attributes for a Tour de France contender: he was a climber who could time trial. And there is a sense, throughout this tale, that Vaughters at some point believed he should have been the next American to win the Tour. But Armstrong was clearly the chosen one. Power struggles ensued, as they always did with him. Eventually, the U.S. Postal team gets new management, new riders, and a much more aggressive doping strategy, which resulted in Armstrong winning the Tour.

At the same time, much of the peloton was actually easing off ofÌęperformance enhancers, spurred by new drug-testing rules and the Festina scandal of 1998. Vaughters finds himself on the outs, disillusioned with Postal’s frat-party culture and looking for a way to stop doping. His great moment of glory, winning a time trial up the feared Mont Ventoux in a 1999 race, should have been the best day of his life. Instead he felt hollow inside. “This is a joke,” he thinks, standing on the winner’s podium. The magic was gone.

A few weeks later, in the second stage of that year’s Tour, which Armstrong would eventually win, Vaughters crashed hard along with 50 other riders on the Passage du Gois, a cobblestone road that is submerged at high tide. He got up, bloodied and battered, but climbed off his bike and quit the Tour a few miles later.

“I wanted nothing more to do with the race, I wanted nothing more to do with the team, and I wanted nothing more to do with Lance,” he writes. “The world thought I was brave for even trying to finish. I knew I was a coward.”

The second time I met J.V., we were spat on. It was June 2007, and I had finagled a ride in his team car at an important one-day race in Philadelphia. As we made our way up the famed Manayunk Wall, lined with screaming, half-drunk fans, a perfectly aimed glob arced out of the crowd and landed on the windshield, right in front of his face. Nobody said anything, and I still don’t know whether it came from some random asshole or an anti-Vaughters partisanÌęduring the open war that was then raging in American cycling. Not a lot of fans were neutral about J.V. at that point. On one side, you had the hordes of yellow-wristband-wearing Lance worshippers. On the other, you had people who were beginning to resent the corruption that pervaded the sport.

The “coward” actually turned out to be quite brave. After retiring in 2004, Vaughters started a junior-development team in Denver, with a handful of young riders. As they matured, he fretted that they would have to make the same choice he had made: to cheat or leave. When he brought up his concern with Doug Ellis, Ellis said, “Well, how can we change that?”

The , as it was then known, became the first to take a vocal stance against doping—and to try and back it up with proof. Its mission was to enable riders to compete without having to use banned substances and methods. A six-figure chunk of the budget paid for blood and urine testing of the team’s own riders. Many of them were former dopers, notably David Millar, although not all had been caught or outed. The team emphasized competing clean over winning races, which gave it a kind of underdog chic, and cultivating good relations with the press was a big part of the plan. I sometimes covered cycling in that era, and I can say that the openness and quirkiness of Slipstream was a refreshing change from the thuggish vibe of U.S. Postal and many of the major European teams.

According to Vaughters, all of this got under the skin of a certain former teammate. Lance had retired in 2005, but he saw Slipstream as a tacit rebuke to his legacy. The implication that he had cheated obviously bothered him a great dealÌęand may have been one reason for his spectacularly ill-advised comeback in 2009. Vaughters says that Armstrong worked behind the scenes to torpedo the Slipstream project, luring away star riders like then teenageÌęprodigy Ìęand even trying to poach his chief backer.

Vaughters fought back. Disgusted by the behavior of his former teammates, especially , who had tested positive for a blood transfusion in 2004, he wentÌęto the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) and recountedÌęeverything he’d done and everything he knew. When Floyd Landis eventually confessed, in an epic e-mail to the USADA, and serious investigations began, Vaughters made his riders available to testify, with no fear of repercussions. Many of them were former Armstrong teammates, and their testimony was pivotal in the USADA’s 2012 “reasoned decision,” which ended Armstrong’s career and cost him his Tour titles. Probably the most amazing claim in the book is that Lance was actually offered the same deal by the USADA that his teammates accepted: tell all and receive a minimal suspension. According to Vaughters, Armstrong “turned it down cold.”

(șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű contacted Armstrong to ask about this and other details in Vaughters’s book. His reply: “My only response is that I just checked my calendar and it’s 2019. The fact that people are still sitting around writing about this is a sad reflection on them, and it serves no good, especially for the sport of cycling.”)

I may be giving the impression that One-Way Ticket is some kind of score-settling tell-all. In fact, the doping saga takes up less than a third of the book. On the whole, it’s actually a fun read, with entertaining stories packed in among the drugs and the darkness. Vaughters covers a lot of ground, and he’s as hard on himself as anyone else.

He’s also insightful about the weird economics and politics of cycling, which helped me finally understand why such a globally popular sport has always seemed so Podunk, sponsorship wise. The problem, he points out, is that there’s no equity value in a cycling team; unlike with an NFL franchise, there’s nothing of value to “own.” As a result, teams tend to rely on bike-industry sponsorsÌęand medium-sized corporations with CEOs who happen to love cycling. Vaughters’s own team has gone through nearly a half-dozen major sponsors, from Garmin to Chipotle to Sharp to Cannondale to Drapac (an international property-investment group). Now it’s backed by a for-profit learning company that specializes in international language courses and travel.

One downside of this haphazard system is that well-funded newcomers can essentially buy their way into professional bike racing and snap up all the best riders. Case in point: Team Sky, whose first order of business was to try and poach Vaughters’s best rider, . Wiggins was the first legitimate star who Vaughters was able to recruit, and he cultivated Wiggins’s ambition and talent, helping him make the unlikely jump from the track to the Tour, where he finished fourth in 2009—just behind Lance, whose third place has since been disqualified.

What’s interesting about the Wiggins story is that it highlights one of Vaughters’s strengths as a team director, which is his ability to spot talent before it becomes obvious to everyone else. Many previously unknown riders have emerged as major stars during or just after a stint on Vaughters’s team. But Wiggins was the only one (so far) with the ability to win the Tour, and Vaughters was crushed to lose him to the hyperaggressive Team Sky in 2010, after only one year. Wiggins would go on to win the Tour in 2012.

There are some loose ends here, which is not surprising in a book that attempts to cover so much ground. Vaughters does say, somewhat surprisingly, that he believes Lance was clean during his 2009 comeback season. But he doesn’t address the elephant-in-the-room question that continues to loom: Is cycling finally clean? Or at least cleaner? He doesn’t offer an opinion. Perhaps he feels that the mere existence of his team, and its survival, speaks for itself.

TowardÌęthe end, Vaughters mentions the recent discovery that he has Asperger’s syndrome, which he blames for his second divorce and other personal difficulties. This is brave of him, and he describes his occasional inability to handle or express his own emotions. But his condition surely deserves further exploration, at a time when mental-health issues among athletes are finally receiving long-overdue attention. Anyone who’s familiar with the world of competitive cycling knows that, for some athletes, the sport is a means of escaping, or salving, or expiating, tremendous inner pain. Not all of them succeed, as the tragic suicide of Olympian showed.

The most indelible scene in the book, hands down, remains the story Vaughters told me back in 2006, ofÌęLance injecting himself inside a hotel room at the 1998 Vuelta a España.

“You’re one of us now, J.V.,” Lance says, looking him in the eye. “This is the boys club—we all have dirt on each other, so don’t go write a book about this shit or something.”

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Once again, Lance Armstrong has worn out everyone else. This time, instead of his Tour de France rivals—who he and his jacked-up teammates ground down relentlessly—or his many real and perceived foes, it was the federal government’s brigade of lawyers, who their $97 million fraud case for $5 millionÌęplus another chunk in fees. That's chump change for a guy who,Ìęaccording to anÌęșÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűÌęprofile by S.C. Gwynne, reportedly told his friend his net worth was around “100 milski.”ÌęAnd of course, the settlement outraged many who believe that much of Armstrong’s fortune was utterly ill-gotten.

In a just world, a cheat on Armstrong’s scale should have to give back most or all of his gains. The question has always been: Give back to who? The competitors he beat? Not exactly angels—thoughÌęof courseÌęthere are varying degrees of evil. The teammates who had to put up with his shit? Maybe, though many of them were cheating, too. The enemies he tried to destroy, even when he knew they were telling the truth? It would have been nice to see the Andreus and the LeMonds get something for what he put them through. At least Floyd Landis gets $1.1 million. But it’s still half a milski less than the $1.65 million that Landis’s own lawyer gets.

It was only a year ago that the federal judge in the case swatted down Armstrong’s motion for summary judgment, allowing the dispute to head toward trial. One can reasonably assume that Armstrong badly wanted it all to go awayÌęand had made settlement offers well north of what he ultimately paid. Why would the Department of Justice, which was heading pell-mell for trial, suddenly decide to cash out five years’ worth of holy war for five cents on the dollar? No one knows, although the statement released by the Armstrong camp on April 19 mentioned “several significant court rulings rejecting and limiting the plaintiffs’ damages theories.”

Whatever the case, it hasÌęalways been difficult to see how the U.S. Postal Service was actually harmed by Armstrong’s doping. Perhaps in the form of his performance bonuses, which Armstrong consigliere Bill Stapleton liked to work into many of his contracts? Regardless, the USPS has much bigger problems now, such as whether it will exist in five years. But imagine how those contract negotiations might have gone if Armstrong had performed as poorly as he had in his first Tour outing, where he won a single stage and then dropped out before Paris. Andy Hampsten finished eighth that year. America yawned.

Also, there was the matter of the government’s whistleblower and lead plaintiff, Landis, who could charitably be described as a flawed witness. He literally told a book’s worth of lies, and sought donations from the fans who still believed him, before he came clean. (Why he ruined his life basically to protect Armstrong, and didn’t tell all when he was caught, has always puzzled me.) He paid the price with his dark days of substance abuse before he decided to spill the beans. A million bucks seems about right. (Although heÌęagreedÌęto refund the money to donors to the Floyd Fairness Fund, which was set up to help pay for his legal defense,Ìęto avoid criminal prosecution.)

It’s worth remembering that Armstrong has lost a lot more than the $6 million or so in this settlement: all his sponsorships, private settlements with other parties, and much of his future earning power, along with his ability to compete in most public events, are gone. Imagine where he’d be if he łóČč»ćČÔ’t made the mistake of coming back to cycling in 2009 and stirring up aÌęhornet’s nest in a sport that believed it was free of him and his toxic shtick. Governor of Texas? The U.S. Senate? Now he’s got a podcast.

Some people dislike Armstrong because he cheated; others argue that his real crime was being a jerk. When the history of sport in this century is written, though, I think he’ll be remembered for something else: helping transform athletics into something that more closely resembles organized crime. He’ll take his place between BALCO and the Russian state-sponsored doping machine for his part in driving the institutionalized corruption of sports.

Only he was smarter. Marion Jones played small ball and she went to jail. The Russians are pariahs forever. Team Lance, meanwhile, was pulling off the perfect long con. ArmstrongÌęcame in at the precise moment when the sport was already reeling from doping scandals and somehow convinced the world that he was clean because he was AmericanÌęand a cancer survivor. He used science, via the brilliant Dr. Michele Ferrari, to transform himself from a one-day rider—about whom nobody but hardcore U.S. roadies would give a crap—to a guy who could win the Tour, then leveraged his incredible survival story to make himself a wealthy global celebrity.

His thuggish associates kept the truth contained, at least for a while. Yet somehow, with regard to Landis and also Tyler Hamilton, he failed to learn the key lesson of The Sopranos: if you’ve got a guy on the outside who’s disgruntled and knows too much, you either buy him off or take him fishing. Instead he let them hang. That obviously didn’t work out. On the other hand, Armstrong got out this mess for a relative pittance.

Meanwhile, the Tour de France is coming up, clouded by the fact that another recent champion, Team Sky’s Chris Froome, isÌęin the crosshairs of suspicion. The similarities are uncanny. The sketchy aura of secrecy around the star, the lame denials and suspicious minor positive test (Froome for an inhaler drug, Lance for a corticosteroid in 1999), evenÌęthe tactics, which are out of Postal’s playbook: amassing a really strong team, doping them to the gills (allegedly, in Sky’s case), and then grinding down the opposition. (During one particularly blatant year, 2003, U.S. Postal riders swept four of the top ten spots in the race’s final time trial.) It never ends.

Meanwhile, Lance is going gray and shaggy, working on being a dad, sending his son off to play football in the fall, andÌęin all likelihoodÌęspending more time at his home in Aspen. Floyd is a chubby weed magnate in Colorado. They seem relatively happy, all things considered. It’s probably a good thing that they, and we, can finally move on.

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It was the oldest play in the book, and I fell for it hard. I’d taken time off from college to travel in Europe and Africa, working my way from Paris to Morocco. Within two hours of getting off the ferry from Spain, I found myself in a rug shop, deep in the city of TĂ©touan. Apparently, I was there to nego­tiate for a rug, whether I liked it or not.

±ő’v±đ always been horrible at bargaining, and by the time I stumbled out of the shop, I realized that I’d just spent more than half my remaining cash. I liked the rug I bought, a striking red and black kilim, but I didn’t actually possess it. Like a fool, I’d agreed to let them ship it home for me. Blowing that much money all at once was dumb, but this episode ended up changing my whole way of traveling.Ìę

At the time, I was a pensive undergraduate poet. Naturally, I’d been going solo, mostly avoiding locals and other travelers. But I couldn’t afford that luxury any longer, and I wound up connecting with a trio of Canadian farm boys I’d met on the ferry. They were fun, friendly, and hilarious.

Also, poor like me. This altered the economics radically: we could easily split a $12 hotel room and have a local woman cook us a tagine for a few bucks more.Ìę

The four of us roamed the country, drinking in (and sometimes smoking) everything it had to offer. We stayed with hashish merchants in the north, hiked the Atlas Mountains with shepherds, and crashed on a beachside rooftop in Essaouira. Together we braved a locals-only hammam in FĂšs. We rode the cheapest buses on journeys up precipitous mountain roads, climbing onto the roof to help load bags (and the occasional goat). I struck up conversations in my bad French and got to know army officers, students, and families on holiday.Ìę

I filled my journal with observations about places that were so much more vivid and real than whatever was going on in my mopey adolescent mind. And when I finally returned home, there was a mysterious brown package waiting for me. It was the rug. ±ő’v±đ kept it ever since, a reminder of the moment when I opened my eyes and became a writer.

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