NEARLY 12 YEARS after the infamous Into Thin Air tragedy, books about Everest’s ever-increasing chaos are still being squeezed out like freeze-dried sausages. The latest is High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed (Hyperion, $25), by Michael Kodas, a Hartford Courant writer who made an unsuccessful attempt to climb the world’s tallest mountain in 2004. Here, once again, the gist is that bad behavior runs rampant at 29,000 feet. But Kodas takes it further, arguing that not only is Everest rife with commercialism, greed, and general asshole-ism but it actually becomes a crime zone each spring, when a few bad apples show up at Base Camp and commit fraud, theft, extortion, and perhaps worse. Kodas tells two stories: that of Nils Antezana, a climber who was allegedly left to die by his Argentinian guide during their descent in 2004, and his own experience on the 2004 Connecticut Everest Expedition, a trip beset with petty disagreements that devolved into rock throwing and death threats. The discord seems largely due to the behavior of team leader George Dijmarescu, whom Kodas describes as being tyrannical, volatile, and even violent. Of course, it didn’t help matters when Dijmarescu caught Kodas dishing about the team’s woes on the Courant‘s Web site. Though the book’s structure is disjointed at times, Kodas’s writing is clear and forceful, and he creates several gripping moments of suspense. In the end, there’s no getting around his conclusion: Everest, now more than ever, is a place any sane person would avoid.

High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in the Age of Greed by Michael Kodas

Want it? Get it .

The post The Madness Continues appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

JACQUES COUSTEAU has been dead ten years, but that, it seems, hasn’t stopped him from releasing another book. He began his latest, The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus: Exploring and Conserving Our Natural World (Bloomsbury USA, $26), co-written with National Magazine Award winner Susan Schiefelbein, back in the eighties, but the pair didn’t put the finishing touches on it till just before his 1997 death. (An unauthorized version was published in French, but this is the first time it has appeared in English.) More “manifesto,” as the publisher describes the work, than whopping autobiography, the memoir doesn’t reveal much new about the red-stocking-capped explorer’s life aquatic that hasn’t been said in his previous 75 books and countless documentaries. But it’s still full of both untold and already told undersea adventures (remember the time Jacques and a mate were attacked by that behemoth longimanus shark with the “long flippers like the wings of a fighter plane”?).

Jacques Cousteau

The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus

At times, especially in the book’s plodding middle section, the joint writing is too apparent and the voice lacks the brio we associate with the man. But the opening and closing chapters are remarkable and moving, and Cousteau’s familiar themes—that life originated from the sea, and, thus, we must protect the oceans for our children and grandchildren—have gained new urgency. Since Cousteau died, Schiefelbein writes in the epilogue, the world’s condition has gone “critical.” About 20 percent of the oceans’ fisheries have collapsed, she notes, and we’ve lost about 90 percent of the earth’s carnivorous fish, including cod and tuna. In a way, the book’s poetic title refers to that decline: Of the most sophisticated plants, invertebrates, and vertebrates on the planet, only humans, Cousteau believes, seem hell-bent on self-destruction. “Our abuse, not just of other human beings but of the natural world as well,” he writes, “makes one wonder if the complex human brain is itself a lethal mutation.”

Vanishing Worlds

For the past two years, Kenya–based photojournalist Elizabeth L. Gilbert has explored some of the most remote regions of Africa in search of nearly extinct cultures. With more than 100 of her rich black-and-white portraits, Tribes of the Great Rift Valley (Abrams, $75) is a gorgeous tribute to the disappearing societies she encountered—from the Basua Pygmies of Uganda, who camouflage themselves with vines and leaves in the lush Semliki Forest, to the Yao people of Malawi, shown here celebrating Jando, a circumcision ceremony and rite of passage for young men. —Christina Erb

Lost in Transliteration

Jagshemash! Following the success of his blockbuster 2006 film, Borat Sagdiyev (a.k.a. British comic Sacha Baron Cohen) is back with a twofer travel guide. Borat: Touristic Guidings to Minor Nation of U.S. and A. (Flying Dolphin, $25) is an astute look at America’s cultural wonders, including details on our greatest cities (New York and “Londons”). Flip the book over to read Borat: Touristic Guidings to Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, an intimate portrait of the fatherland “containings over half the photographs, maps, and writings ever produced” there. Both books promise to be as helpful as anything from Lonely Planet: When was the last time they offered good advice on getting your wife’s cage through customs?—Jason Daley

BY OUR CONTRIBUTORS
In one of World War II’s most grueling marches, 1,200 men from the U.S. Army’s 32nd Infantry Division trekked 130 miles through the jungles of Papua New Guinea to fight the Japanese. James Campbell retraced their steps in 2006 and wrote about his journey in ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø (“Chasing Ghosts,” May 2007). For the complete story, pick up his new book, The Ghost Mountain Boys: Their Epic March and the Terrifying Battle for New Guinea—The Forgotten War of the South Pacific (Crown, $26). Environmental writer Bill McKibben takes on a more modern battle, urging all of us to defend the planet (and showing us how) in Fight Global Warming Now: The Handbook for Taking Action in Your Community. McKibben co-wrote the book with the Step It Up team, a New Hampshire– based group of young global-warming activists he helped found in January 2007. And journalist Steve Friedman explores the personal demons that fuel more than a dozen champion athletes, from cyclists and runners to boxers and bowlers, in The Agony of Victory: When Winning Isn’t Enough (Arcade, $26). “Here,” he writes, “are men and women driven neither by the will to win nor by the love of competition but by an existential terror most can’t even acknowledge—a burning need to prove themselves and all too often a corrosive certainty that they are beyond redemption.” —Dianna Delling

The post A Voice from the Deep appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

IT WAS THE WORST STORY IDEA idea an editor could come up with, let alone assign to a real human being. That’s how I felt on Saturday, May 11, 1996, the day I heard Jon Krakauer had disappeared while reporting for ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø on the growing phenomenon of commercially guided trips up Mount Everest a story I’d conceived and helped make happen by dealing with an endless stream of logistical headaches. None of that mattered when I heard Krakauer was missing in a deadly high-altitude blizzard. Had I sent him to his death?

Just 24 hours earlier, of course, I’d considered myself a genius. On the morning of May 10, Mark Bryant, ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø‘s editor, made an announcement at the daily editorial meeting in our Santa Fe office. “I have news from Jon Krakauer’s wife,” he quietly told some two dozen staffers. “Early in the afternoon, Nepal time, Jon made it to the summit of Everest.”

A cheer went up; there were high-fives. I pictured Everest, a three-sided granite pyramid jutting into the jet stream, ice crystals pluming off its top. Krakauer was up there in a snowsuit and oxygen mask, taking pictures and notes as he gazed out over the sprawling Tibetan Plateau and, in the opposite direction, the deep glacial basin known as the Western Cwm.

“How long will it take him to get down?” asked Leslie Weeden, a senior editor who tended to get right to the point.

“We’ll probably know something tomorrow,” Bryant said. Then he added, “Remember, he’s not down until he’s really down. A lot can happen on the descent. Keep Jon and all the Everest climbers in your thoughts.”

I cruised the hallways with a tremendous feeling of relief. At various times it had looked as if the project might fall apart. Trying to put a deal together with the guiding companies was a tenuous and maddening process. Krakauer, a longtime ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø contributor with a reputation for being meticulous and brooding, was game from the start, but he needed occasional coaxing. Over a 12-month period, while he debated the risks, Bryant and I made the arrangements, eventually placing him with Rob Hall, owner of the New Zealand based guiding company ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Consultants. Needless to say, I was happy when Krakauer decided to go.

EARLY ON SATURDAY, my wife, Dianna, and I drove to the apartment of Alex Heard, a senior editor who was moving to New York and who, with his wife, Susan, was unloading stuff at a yard sale. We were pulling out to leave when Heard came running up, looking panicked. He’d gotten a phone call. Something catastrophic had happened on Everest.

“There was a big storm yesterday,” he said. “Climbers are missing. Scott Fischer is dead. They didn’t have any information about Krakauer.”

I felt disoriented, then my stomach flopped. “Krakauer is missing?”

I was too rattled to drive, so Di zoomed us through the adobe-lined streets to the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø building. Within 15 minutes, other staffers started drifting in. I burst into Bryant’s office, spouting the grim facts to his back. He turned away from his computer and looked up, stunned.

“Say that again?” he said.

People react differently to bad news. I almost started crying. Katie Arnold, an editorial assistant who did much of the fact-checking on “Into Thin Air,” would tell me later that she was seriously spooked after the news broke, she had nightmares in which climbers were immobilized in the clouds near the summit of Everest.

In the hallway, I heard muted giggles the news having inspired a bit of nervous black humor. John Galvin, an assistant editor, was talking to a few people about the Patch, a white rabbit pelt, purchased at our local Hobby Lobby, that Krakauer had carried to the summit as an odd souvenir for us deskbound editors. To make a long story short, the Patch had been used prior to Krakauer’s climb in a jokey nighttime ritual held near the Santa Fe ski basin, a quasi-pagan exercise designed to bring on a season of heavy snow. People couldn’t help wondering whether the Patch had worked too well. Krakauer didn’t know about the Patch’s origins when he took it up, but he admitted later that the coincidence slightly weirded him out.

Sick humor? Yes, but tension works itself out in strange ways. For my part, I spent the rest of the afternoon on the phone, trying to learn whether Krakauer was still alive.

TODAY, WHEN I THINK of that Saturday, I think mostly of the night, which I remember as being black, eerie, and still. There was a going-away party for the Heards at the home of Hampton and Anne Sides Hampton was an ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø senior editor at the time and by 8 p.m. their back patio was full of buzzing people downing chips and designer beer and talking about you-know-what. The usual going-away stuff had been arranged a fortune-teller, a guy in a chicken suit but Everest hung over everything.

Early in the evening, a local woman who’d done some high-altitude mountaineering showed up, and Heard bluntly told her that Scott Fischer the charismatic, ponytailed leader of Mountain Madness, the other commercial group that made its summit attempt the same day as Krakauer’s was dead. He wasn’t aware that this woman and Fischer knew each other through climbing circles. She instantly burst into tears.

That night I was a bearer of good if frustratingly incomplete news. Late in the afternoon, Bryant had stepped into my office and told me what Linda Moore, Krakauer’s wife, had related to him a moment earlier: Jon was now listed as accounted for. She had no additional details; later we found out that Krakauer made it to his tent just as the storm hit and spent the night shivering and delirious.

I arrived at the party with bad news as well. Rob Hall was stranded at 28,700 feet near the South Summit, trying to hang on in windchill temperatures estimated at minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Apparently Hall had stayed with a client who was having trouble getting down the Hillary Step. (It was Doug Hansen, we later learned.) People at Base Camp, talking to Hall via radio, pleaded with him to stand up and move his legs, but he couldn’t. As Hall’s wife, Jan Arnold, would tell Krakauer: “He sounded like Major Tom . . . like he was just floating away.”

THE FEELING WAS BEYOND BIZARRE. Hall was up there dying, and I was standing around with a beer in my hand. I thought about an issue that would be aired more than once in the months ahead: the culpability of ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø‘s editors. Of me.

Both Fischer’s and Hall’s companies had competed hard for the right to guide Krakauer to the top, but, clearly, they also seemed to have been competing on the mountain. It appeared that each man had ignored his turnaround time so he could get the most climbers to the summit. Were they motivated by a desire to show each other up in the magazine? Whatever had happened, I couldn’t help wondering whether our presence on the mountain had created the environment in which the disaster played out.

A few minutes later, I heard Hampton Sides’s voice from the kitchen: “Phone call for Mark.” I followed him inside. It was an editor at ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online, our Internet partner, with updated information about Krakauer. He confirmed that Jon was alive. At the moment, he was descending the Lhotse Face with the storm’s other survivors, on their way to Camp II. From there, it would take them a few days to reach Base Camp.

Mark returned to the patio and shared the good news. And then he passed along the sad part of the story that everybody sensed was coming. “I’ve just been told that Rob Hall quit responding to radio calls a few hours ago,” he said. “Base Camp is presuming that he died.”

I went to the backyard, sat down on the lawn in the darkness, and listened to more of what Mark had to say. Unfortunately, the story he told was as black as the night.

The post Something Happened appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

They say the rain that falls in Nevada stays in Nevada, never reaching the Pacific Ocean. Personally, I didn’t even know it rained in this state, but, man, was I wrong. As I sit here at tree line on the rocky shoulders of 13,063-foot Wheeler Peak, Nevada’s second-highest mountain, slushy droplets are soaking me mercilessly. I’m OK with it, though. I’m wearing a black trash bag with a hole cut out for my head, borrowed from the nice people at the Great Basin National Park ranger station. It’s keeping me pretty cozy, and the views of Snake Valley and Wheeler’s own glaciated amphitheater are enthralling. Best of all, there’s not another soul around.

Nevada travel

GHOST WORLD: Totems from a harsh and beautiful highway landscape.

Nevada travel

GHOST WORLD: Totems from a harsh and beautiful highway landscape.

Nevada travel

GHOST WORLD: Totems from a harsh and beautiful highway landscape.

Nevada travel

RARE JEWELS: Near Eureka, a famous 19th-century silver town, with the Diamond Mountains in the background

Nevada travel

BLAST ZONE: An aerial of the bombing range at western Nevada’s Fallon Naval Air Station

Nevada travel

LONELY ROAD: An abandoned railroad station near Ruth, Nevada

I didn’t realize before I came here that many of Nevada’s highest mountain ranges are dripping and fertile, like steep tropical sky islands rising from an arid, sagebrush sea. This particular island is in the Snake Range—in eastern Nevada, near the Utah state line—and it’s teeming with plants and animals. I particularly like the bristlecone pines, which I’m spending some quality time with right now. They’re the official state tree, and they’re fascinating, even spiritually stirring. Rooting themselves in improbably rocky soil, they live up to 5,000 years—making them the oldest living trees on earth. They often appear to be lifeless, with limbs stripped of their branches and their trunks looking like petrified wood. But if you peer closer, there are usually one or two small live branches with green needles. The oldest bristlecone, a tree dubbed Prometheus, lived on this very mountain and was 4,900 years old when it was cut down in 1964 by a graduate student trying to figure out how old it was.

The bristlecone I’m sitting under is multi-trunked, gnarled and twisted. I’ve chosen it as my special homie and given it a name: Gil, after Gilgamesh, the ancient Babylonian ruler who dreamed of living forever. That’s a little corny, I’ll admit, but I’m sticking with it. This tree was putting down roots when Jesus got fitted for his first pair of sandals. It deserves a bit of reverence.

Alas, though, I’m going to have to say goodbye to Gil. The rain is turning to snow, and it looks sunny and warm down in the valley. It’s time to ditch the trash bag for shorts, sunglasses, and flip-flops.

BARRY LOPEZ HAS WRITTEN that the Great Basin—the topographical area that makes up nearly all of Nevada, plus small slices of Utah and Idaho—”is one of the least novelized, least painted, least eulogized of American landscapes.” In other words, I was on my own when it came to finding role models for a long, rambling road trip through Nevada, one that would encompass both its nullity and its undeniable and still-mysterious somethingness.

But that approach works fine, too. In his introduction to Stephen Trimble’s The Sagebrush Ocean, a rich natural history of the Great Basin, Lopez also says the only way to really know Nevada is to spend long days driving its highways and hiking its deserts and mountains, letting your imagination go to work on the landscape—and letting the landscape work on you. It helps to apply the same kind of footwork to learning about the state’s people, who’ve been forged by the harsh, exposed rock, endless sagebrush, and green alpine peaks. Cowboy. Gambler. Mormon. Transplanted California hipster or eastern adventure seeker. These and other types bounce around like teenagers crammed into an old pickup as it skitters down a Nevada dirt road, with the bright lights of Las Vegas glowing in the distance.

My vehicle was a late-model Ford Bronco. It ran on unleaded, while I ran on little cans of Starbucks DoubleShot espresso. My main worries during several weeks on the road: not getting any sleep at all, trying to cover too much ground (the state is nearly 111,000 square miles—that’s more than 14 New Jerseys), succumbing to the magic-poppies effect that driving through long stretches of desert can induce, and forgetting to fuel up at that last town and running empty 100 miles from the nearest gas station.

In Las Vegas, where I stayed the night before heading out, I spoke to a local—a casino waitress with a tattoo ringing her biceps—who didn’t think any of it sounded good. “Me?” she said. “I never stray from Vegas and my boyfriend’s party boat on Lake Mead. I have no idea what’s out there—and I don’t really want to know.”

That’s one way to look at it, because Nevada is terra incognita, a place where a person with four-wheel drive and sturdy boots can actually explore, seeing and doing things that have never been seen or done before. And since about 90 percent of the state is owned by the federal government, most of Nevada’s wonderlands will always be accessible to the motivated explorer.

MY FIRST MORNING, I WAKE UP early and go, zooming south and east past Vegas’s identical red-tile-roofed apartment complexes until development yields to the color brown and a matrix of evenly spaced creosote bushes. I veer toward Lake Mead, at 247 square miles the world’s largest man-made lake and a favorite spot for college kids gone wild. I shadow the shoreline for about 50 miles, stopping once at an Indian trading post, where I stock up on fireworks. (Hey, everybody’s doing it—and besides, I tell myself, a Roman candle might come in handy if I get lost in the desert.)

A few minutes later, I’m staring at a garden of eroded sandstone monoliths, colored every shade of red you can imagine. This is Valley of Fire State Park, and, like an acidhead’s dream of Hell, these surreal arches, walls, pinnacles, and domes provide a vivid example of what happens when sand dunes get fossilized, uplifted, tumbled, carved by water and wind, and tinted by iron-oxide-laced groundwater.

I feel like I’m steering the Mars Pathfinder as I park the Bronco and exchange sandals for a pair of Merrells. I head out on a warm-up hike to Mouse’s Tank, a catch basin surrounded by rock walls that naturally collect and hold water. I’m amazed by the astounding number of petroglyphs I see. Ancient rock art is found all over the Southwest, but every time I take in an image I haven’t seen before—an octopus or a butterfly or something that looks like an airplane—it leaves me in a trancelike state, trying to get inside the mind of the artist who left it.

I think about which totems I would carve: a laptop, hiking boots, Funyuns? I climb up the back side of one of the house-size rocks overlooking the spot and look down at Mouse’s Tank, a muddy puddle named for an 1890s Paiute fugitive who hid out here after murdering a couple of miners. Mouse lasted just a few weeks, living off the slimy green water until he left the area, got cornered by the law in Muddy Springs, Nevada, and was shot to death.

On the hike back, I meet a guy from Montana. His dog, Sadie, discovers a rare desert tortoise, but before she can play with it, the tortoise does its disappearing act and Sadie is left holding the bag. When I get back to the car, the sun is setting, and the sandstone looks even redder than it did this afternoon, as if the Great Spirit has been blowing on hot coals.

HOOVER DAM PLUGS the Colorado River like a giant art deco sink stopper, holding back Lake Mead and parceling out just enough water on the other side to create a friendlier, tamer Colorado River. Today I’ll kayak that friendlier river, drifting through the great natural spectacle known as the Black Canyon Wilderness Area.

I meet my guide, Shawn Coleman—he’s with a company called Boulder City Outfitters—in the sprawling parking lot of the Hacienda Hotel and Casino, where, at 6 a.m., crusty gamblers are still at it from the night before, smoking, drinking, and throwing quarters into the Wheel of Fortune slot machine. Shawn is puffing on a butt himself and clutching a box of still-warm glazed doughnuts. He looks a little round, not at all like your typical hyperfit kayaking guide. But then the Colorado River below the dam is not the frightfest that it is about 200 miles upstream in the Grand Canyon, and Shawn is just fine with that.

“The lazy water lets you see more nature, look for petroglyphs, and hang out in hot springs,” he says amiably.

We put in at the bottomless shadow of the dam, where more than a hundred workers lost their lives during construction in the 1930s. The paddling is easy. Sometimes we float right down the middle; sometimes we run our hands on the canyon wall as we quietly slip by. After a few hours, we drag onto a sandbar and explore a steamy man-made cavern called Sauna Cave, which was dug in 1931 as a potential geothermal power plant. This water still weeps from a crystalline back wall, and we sit for a while, taking deep breaths of the soggy, 120-degree air.

After that we paddle some more, the river’s 54-degree water dripping on my lap as one arm reaches high to make the stroke and the other stays low. Shawn points at three desert bighorn sheep tiptoeing across a narrow ledge about two-thirds of the way up. We stash our kayaks on a different sandbar and start sloshing up a narrow slot canyon running with 98-degree water. Shawn is like a ballet dancer in his Tevas, scrambling over boulders that lie between us and where he wants to go. I follow him up a boulder and onto a ledge 15 feet above the river. That’s when my Tevas fail me and I slide down the wall. I splash into a deep, aqua-blue pool—warmed by geothermal activity deep inside the rock—blinking and spitting out water. Shawn is a good sport, and when he sees me he jumps off the ledge and splashes into the pool, too, saying, “Let’s soak here awhile.”

The last three miles go fast, and the canyon opens up to a crepuscular dome of sky. Our last stop is a spot called Emerald Cave, where the sun’s rays don’t reach the water, but the water glows a vivid aquamarine, as if lit from below. Shawn points to the muddy work of cliff swallows on the rock above and to a red-tailed hawk that’s angrily castigating a trespassing bird. We about-face and paddle back against the wind to Hoover Dam.

THE NORTH COUNTRY. Sagebrush country. Cow country. Up here, well north of Highway 50—the so-called Loneliest Road in America—cows outnumber humans two to one. At the Cottonwood Guest Ranch, a working cattle outfit and lodge in no-man’s-land about 68 miles north of Wells, the stats are more like 200 to 1. It’s a good place to be, because how could I hope to get under Nevada’s skin without a stint on a ranch?

This morning a cowboy named Mike Murray and I are tracing the icy sparkle of a creek on horseback, on the trail of a big, ornery bull that’s gotten himself stuck in some willows and cottonwood saplings. At the base of the rugged Jarbidge Mountains, the Cottonwood Ranch lies in spacious O’Neil Basin, once home to the quick-shooting cattle-rustling O’Neil family. The current owners, the Smiths, play fair, raising 900 head of cattle a year without shooting anybody. At an elevation of 6,200 feet, the ranch is blessed with air that’s crisp and cold. The whole mood up north is different, less desperate than in the south, but here, too, they’re always praying for rain.

Mike is a lean, solemn cowboy, and, like most real cowboys, he mends fences, brands calves, and drives cattle across pastures of scruffy vegetation. Right now he’s barking orders in every direction, but I gather that all he really wants me to do is sit on my horse and block the only escape route the bull has. The serious work is being done by a sprightly black-and-white Border collie named Jessie. He forges through the reeds and nips at the bull’s heels.

After a few minutes, Mike arrives back at my side, looking flummoxed because the dog has chased the bull deeper into the weeds.

“Ah, the hell with him,” he says, lifting his hat and wiping his brow with the cuff of his sweatshirt. “It’s pretty nice out here, isn’t it?” he says, without looking around. “Let’s come back tomorrow after supper.”

BUT THERE ISN’T A TOMORROW. The next morning, I head west on I-80 toward the Ruby Mountains, southeast of Elko, home of the annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Gathering. I’ve been dreaming about the Rubies for two weeks. Guidebook writers like to call them “the crown jewels” of Nevada’s mountain ranges, but that image seems too delicate—they are tall, toothy peaks, with molars and incisors rising out of pine forests and fields of sagebrush. In the winter, these mountains get dumped on by snow storms and are home to some of the best powder skiing in the world, plus a top-notch heli-ski operation.

That night I consume a fabulous Basque-style steak at the renowned Star Restaurant in Elko, a town that still has a large population of the Basques who originally came here to herd sheep. I listen to two grumbling, Wranglers-wearing cowboys at the next table who seem to be at odds with the federal government, referring to the feds, with acrimony, as “they.”

I leave the men to their obsessions and drive up Lamoille Canyon until the road ends. I’ll take the Ruby Crest Trail to my goal, Liberty Pass, which looks over Ruby Valley to the east and Lamoille Valley to the west.

I begin my hike next to a rushing stream, picking my way through thorny bushes in search of the trail. I find it, and soon I’m climbing up switchbacks on the north side of the canyon. Each successive zigzag gives me a better view of the lush Lamoille Canyon. After passing the Dollar Lakes, I hear the gurgle of a stream and then see Lamoille Lake, a shallow mountain tarn in a glacial bowl, with steep talus slopes cradling it. I’m not in the mood for frigid swimming at 10,000 feet, so I remove my shoes and wade in up to my knees. I’ve been hiking and mountain biking for two weeks, and the cool water soothes my feet.

After lunch, I start walking again, upward, above tree line, and then the switchbacks kick in. More switchbacks. High above the trees, I get a perfect view of Ruby Dome. Down in Lamoille Canyon, cottonwood trees explode in yellows and golds, and a blanket of pine trees laps at the granite peaks. Gilgamesh would dig a place like this. I never imagined Nevada had this kind of beauty.

OF COURSE, MY WAITRESS FRIEND back in Vegas had a point. There’s a time for everything, and at the end of my road trip I decide it’s time for the Strip. On my last night in Nevada, I ride the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino’s elevator up to the top floor, the 51st, to the VooDoo Cafe & Lounge. I gorge on crab cakes, crispy coconut-battered shrimp, and “hellfire” hot wings.

The waiter suggests a VooDoo Blue, a $10 vodka drink, and I tell him to bring me one in a hurry. After dinner, I walk onto the rooftop patio to finish it and catch some air. The desert heat mugs me. A thousand feet up, I see the city, animated by swarms of pinks, blues, yellows, and greens—every bright color you can imagine—with armies of cars and taxies pumping through this weird creation’s veins and arteries. The VooDoo Blue is having its promised effect, and I stand there against the railing, soaking in the rays from below.

I think back on all the places I visited—and all the places that I don’t have time to tell you about, such as Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge and Amargosa Dunes. Nevada is not unknowable, but it is stubborn about revealing itself. My odometer testifies to that: I’ve driven more than 3,000 miles, eaten countless homegrown steaks, and hiked and mountain-biked hundreds of miles.

My eyes move to the edges of the city, where the lights fizzle out and disappear into blackness. That, I know, is where the coyotes, mountain ranges and basins, petroglyphs, and jackrabbits begin. The term mysterium tremendum pops into my mind, learned from a recorded lecture by climber and philosophy professor Willi Unsoeld, member of the first team of Americans to climb Mount Everest. It refers to the simultaneous feeling of awe and dread one experiences when confronted with the tremendous power of nature or, for some people, God. It might happen when you’re facing rapids that are beyond your comfort zone. Or maybe it’s a tiny yellow flower peeking through a dark, ice-covered climbing wall thousands of feet off the ground. In my case, it’s the entire state of Nevada.

[Cottonwood Ranch] Sixty-five miles north of Wells in the lofty Jarbidge Wilderness, you’ll find a working cattle ranch and some leathery souls willing to school you in the art of roping and riding herd. $200/day; 775-752-0871,
[Ruby Mountain Helicopter Skiing] Since 1977, RMHS owner Joe Royer has led clients into some of the best and least-known terrain in the lower 48. Though the Rubies top out at just over 11,000 feet, they produce a perfect wintertime combo of powder and bright sun. $3,200/three-day package; 775-753-6867,
[South Fork of the Owyhee and the Jarbidge River] Draining northern Nevada’s Independence Mountains, these rivers provide two of the most remote weeklong wilderness whitewater trips in the country. About $300/day; River Odysseys West, 800-451-6034,
[Great Basin NP] Nevada’s only national park, six hours northeast of Las Vegas, Great Basin is home to bristlecone pines several thousand years old, the limestone stalactites of Lehman Cave, and three alpine lakes near the slopes of 13,063-foot Mount Wheeler.
[Red Rock Canyon] Fall is the ideal time to grab a guide and head for the sandstone crags 22 miles west of the Las Vegas Strip. The American Alpine Institute offers instruction in sport, trad, top-rope, and lead climbing: $295/day; 360-671-1505,
[Tahoe Rim Trail] Ringing Lake Tahoe for 165 miles atop ridgelines, through meadows and forests, and along the shore, Lake Tahoe’s Rim Trail provides some of the most scenic hiking, mountain biking, and horseback riding in the U.S.
[Black Canyon Wilderness Area] The Colorado River isn’t all roiling rapids. Below Hoover Dam, you’ll find placid flows, wildlife, and hot springs like those in Gold Strike Canyon. Boulder City Outfitters offers full-day kayak tours. $150; 800-748-3702,

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THE ENGINE BUZZED noisily as I taxied the Diamond Evolution single-prop airplane toward south-facing runway 17—the correct way to be aimed this morning, since the wind was coming from that direction at ten miles per hour. I steered using a pair of brake pedals: Stepping on the left one pulled us left, while the right one sent us right. My instructor—the appropriately named Spencer Bird—radioed other pilots in the area to make sure the runway was clear. As we rounded the taxiway at Double Eagle II Airport, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and pulled onto the apron at the start of 17, I released my death grip on the stick just long enough to wipe my sweaty palms on my pants. Bird, 27, told me to move the throttle all the way forward. I did, the engine buzzed louder, and the two-seater started down the tarmac.

The Cessna Skylane

FLIGHT CLUB: The Cessna Skylane, a true classic of American aviation design

My stomach somersaulted. I’d done reasonably well during my first lesson—which mostly involved doing midflight turns after Bird had gotten us airborne—but takeoff was different. Within seconds, the Evolution was weaving like a car with a drunk at the wheel. I struggled with the pedals and nearly ran us off the runway. The engine buzzed louder. We were all over the place and approaching 50 miles per hour.

Bird kept his cool: “Pull back on the stick.” I hesitated. “Pull back on the stick!” he yelled, sounding a little less cool. I willed my arms to follow his order, and the plane jumped into the air like an eager toad.

I’LL NEVER FORGET my first takeoff. You won’t forget yours, either, and if you’ve ever had a yen for true travel independence—free of security pat-downs and the related frustrations that define commercial air travel in America today—there’s never been a better time to join the ranks of the 600,000 licensed pilots flying in the United States. That’s especially true for adventurers, who can expand their options exponentially by charting their own course. Just ask professional kayaker Brad Ludden, 24, who frequently tucks his playboat into his 1962 Cessna Skylane 182 and barnstorms all over the West, scouting and paddling obscure rivers. Another frequent flier is triathlete David Lee, the 36-year-old CEO of AirShares Elite, which sells partial-ownership shares of aircraft.

“Three friends and I fly down to Florida, Hilton Head, Savannah, and Key West to do our ocean training swims and compete in triathlons,” says Lee, who’s based in Atlanta and usually pilots a Cirrus SR-22 or Piper Malibu. “We’re a six-hour drive from the ocean, but only a 70-minute flight, so we get up at seven in the morning, head for the coast, swim until 10:30, take a quick run and grab a bite to eat, and we’re back in Atlanta by two in the afternoon.”

If that agenda sounds appealing, there are two hurdles ahead: earning your wings and buying or securing access to an aircraft. Neither goal is a snap, of course, but they’re more doable than you might expect. There are 3,500 flight schools in the U.S. To earn a private-pilot certificate, which allows you to fly a single-engine plane, you have to be at least 17 years old, write and speak English, and pass an FAA physical. You also need to log 40 hours at the controls: 20 with an instructor, ten solo, three at night, and three while wearing a hood that blocks your view out the windows, simulating instrument-only flight. You have to complete a pair of long-haul trips with an instructor—one at night—and a 150-mile solo jaunt. Finally, you have to pass a 60-question written test, plus a check ride—the airborne equivalent of a driver’s-license road test—with an FAA examiner riding shotgun.

It sounds like a lot of work, but it can be accomplished during a two- to three-week course for around $8,000. Incredibly, you might find yourself soloing after just 12 to 15 hours in the air—less than halfway through the program.

Then there’s the question of your ride. The current generation of single-engine airplanes, made of high-tech, lightweight composites, are safer and easier to fly than planes from a generation ago, and they go faster, fly farther, and burn less fuel. And though aircraft aren’t cheap—a new base-model Cessna Skylane 182 runs more than $250,000—you don’t have to be a successful real-estate investor, like Ludden, or the chief executive of a thriving company with branches up and down the East Coast, like Lee. A variety of financing schemes (see ““) can clear you for takeoff with an investment similar to what you might make for a second home.

TO GET A TASTE of the training, I signed on for a three-day familiarization course with Albuquerque’s West Mesa Aviation. With Bird looking on, I performed the preflight check on the altimeter, tachometer, and the rest of the instruments; I walked around the aircraft, eyeballing flaps and ailerons for structural damage. He taught me how to read the weather, what to do if I found myself staring down a massive thunderhead (“fly at least 20 miles away from the storm”), and how to select a runway based on the current wind conditions (you always want to take off with the wind in your face; ditto for setting it down).

By day three, I’d absorbed so much charlie-alpha-bravo jargon that my head ached, but that was a good thing, because the morning agenda involved a “cross-country” trip of about 100 miles, from Albuquerque, across the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range, to the small railroad town of Las Vegas, on the mountains’ eastern slope. It was during this lesson that I discovered something that instruction can’t prepare you for: turbulence. After an hour of pitching and rolling like a yacht in big seas, I was turning green.

Nothing seemed to rattle the Birdman. He calmly produced a white paper sack.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “it happens to the best of us up here.” I flew the Evolution with one hand on the stick and the other clutching the bag. Thankfully, nothing ever came of it. An hour and a half later, Bird took the controls back and gently set us down back at our home base.

Maybe someday I’ll learn how to land an airplane, but I was really jazzed about what I’d accomplished in just three days. I folded up the bag and tucked it behind the seat.

“We’ll save that for the next newbie,” I told the Birdman.

The Sports Car

THRILL RIDE: Cirrus SR20-G2 With sweeping lines and the most advanced safety features available in single-engine aviation, the Cirrus SR20 is part Volvo, part Alfa Romeo, and all purring sex appeal. “It’s a fresh design, and it’s such a pleasure to fly,” says Mike Radomsky, 52, president of the Jupiter, Florida–based Cirrus Owners and Pilots Association. “It looks like a modern plane on the ramp, whereas others look like they did 40 years ago.” This aircraft’s exceptional style, maneuverability, and speed have propelled relative newcomer Cirrus to wild success; over the past 21 months, the company has sold more planes than it did in the previous three and a half years combined. Strap into the cockpit and you’ll see why: Color LCD displays convey crucial flight data, while a side-mounted, joystick-style yoke evokes a jet-fighter setup. Maximum cruising speed: 156 knots (180 mph) Maximum range: 882 nautical miles (1,015 miles) Capacity: Pilot plus three passengers Carrying capacity, including fuel: 930 pounds Flight time, San Francisco to Reno: 64 minutes Bonus: Should something go very wrong, a Cirrus pilot can pull a red handle to deploy a 55-foot-wide parachute that will float the entire aircraft, occupants and all, back to earth. The company says the system has saved eight lives to date. $236,700;

The SUV

Cessna Skylane 182

Cessna Skylane 182

RUGGED ICON: Cessna Skylane 182 The Skylane 182 combines burly functionality with practical adaptability; 25-year-old versions of the plane are still at work in the Canadian backwoods and running charters in the Caribbean. Its fixed landing gear can handle the rough treatment of gravel and grass airfields common in places like rural Wyoming and Alaska, and thanks to its combination of raw horsepower and aerodynamic design, it needs less runway to take off. Entry doors on both sides of the fuselage mean easy cabin access—made even simpler by over-the-cockpit wings—and pilots with seaplane certification will be happy to know the Skylane accepts floats or amphibious landing gear (that is, pontoons with retractable wheels). Goddard, Kansas–based professional pilot Charles Lloyd has racked up about 1,500 hours in various Skylanes, and his dream plane is his updated 1966 model. “It’s a faithful airplane that just keeps going,” says Lloyd. “With four people aboard, it easily gets in and out of Leadville, Colorado, at 10,000 feet.” Maximum cruising speed: 149 knots (171 mph) Maximum range: 968 nautical miles (1,114 miles) Capacity: Pilot plus three passengers Carrying capacity, including fuel: 1,213 pounds Flight time, San Francisco to Reno: 67 minutes Bonus: You never have to go far for spark plugs—Cessna operates more than 235 repair-and-maintenance centers in the Unites States alone. $258,500;

The Luxury Sedan

FULLY LOADED: Beechcraft Bonanza G36 This is one spiffy ride, boasting leather upholstery, a mahogany-trimmed snack table, a digital audio entertainment system, and an optional satellite weather-monitoring system. Bonanza pilots appreciate the trimmings but really love the handling and reliability. “It has an unparalleled combination of consistent quality and handling characteristics that make it so enjoyable to fly,” says Tom Turner, 44, the technical-services manager for the American Bonanza Society. Beechcraft has been perfecting its formula for a long time; introduced in 1947, the Bonanza has been in production for more than five decades—one of the longest pedigrees in aviation. The plane also offers one of the largest cabins in its class, with generous headroom and 137 cubic feet of total interior volume. And with removable cabin seats—so you can swap out passengers for duffel bags—the Bonanza is an outstanding gear hauler. Maximum cruising speed: 176 knots (203 mph) Maximum range: 922 nautical miles (1,061 miles) Capacity: Pilot plus five passengers carrying Capacity, including fuel: 1,133 pounds Flight time, San Francisco to Reno: 57 minutes Bonus: Starting in 2006, the onboard Garmin GPS-and-avionics system will include a terrain-and-obstacle-warning feature; fly too close to mountains or buildings and the onscreen map will turn yellow, then red. $690,910;

First Class, With Economy

Getting a license is one thing; getting a plane is another. Here's how to start.

IT’S NEVER EXACTLY CHEAP to claim your own piece of the sky—with 10 percent down, payments on a Cessna Skylane will run about $2,000 a month, and maintenance, insurance, fuel, landing fees, and storage add thousands a year. Fortunately, there are alternatives to buying, and flying, solo; below are three cash-saving schemes that could help smooth out the financial turbulence.

FRACTIONAL OWNERSHIP
The Deal: In this arrangement, a company offers shares of an aircraft for a fixed price and then takes care of everything else, from storage to changing the oil. Ourplane () and AirShares Elite () both offer partial ownership of single-engine planes. The two firms have similar requirements for prospective clients: Pilots must hold a license, they must pass a flight test, and most will have logged more than a hundred hours of flight time.
Bottom Line: An entry-level buy-in on a Cessna 182 at Ourplane runs $40,000. Tack on an additional $400 a month for insurance and storage, plus $125 for each hour of operation.

PARTNERSHIPS
The Deal: It’s simple—you and a few buddies go in on a used airplane together, share the costs, and take turns at the stick. Don’t know any fliers? Look to Web sites like that maintained by the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (). Strike your own agreement and make sure you iron out all the vital details, like who gets the bird on which long weekends.
Bottom Line: A used 1980 Piper Warrior II runs about $59,000. Divided four ways, that’s $14,750, plus insurance, fuel, storage, and maintenance.

RENTING
The Deal: A final option is to rent your ride by the hour. Flight time is monitored by a type of aircraft odometer called a Hobbs meter, which means that pilots pay only for the time that the propeller is actually spinning. At Kissimmee, Florida–based SunState Aviation Flight School, pilots renting the Cessna 182 are required to have an instrument rating and 300 hours of flight time, plus an instructor’s endorsement.
Bottom Line: Cessna Skylanes rent for $159 per hour for fewer than ten hours, fuel included.

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Looking to rachet up your mojo, sans synthetics? University of Massachusetts explorer in residence Chris Kilham, 52, has spent 25 years traveling the world to study native uses of medicinal plants. Despite having zero formal training in botany, the plucky adventurer and author—known to fans of his herbal guides and travelogues as the Medicine Hunter—has become a leading promoter of alternative healing. For his 13th book, (Griffin, $13), due in bookstores in October, Kilham traveled from Siberia to the Amazon to experience firsthand the uplifting power of ten easily purchased botanical “remedies.”

Chris Kilham

UP FOR ANYTHING: Kilham brandishing a length of tongkat ali root near his home in Leverett, Massachusetts

OUSTSIDE
: So what are “hot plants”?
KILHAM: Natural agents that enhance sexual experience. They increase sensitivity and make sex more urgent. Men get better erections. Women benefit, too. Your orgasms are like Chinese New Year fireworks.


Testing them must make for some interesting experiences.
Believe me, I’ve wound up obsessively horny in every remote place I’ve been. I’ve woken up with a raging erection on every continent. But sex with strangers is not without its hazards, so sometimes I travel with a partner.


Given the success of drugs like Viagra, why should anyone consider herbs?
If you can use a plant and not an alien substance, that’s a good option. These plants deliver the goods—otherwise they wouldn’t be used after thousands of years. Plus, they’re cheap.


Do you have a favorite hot plant?
Tongkat ali, from the Malaysian rainforest. It’s one of the most powerful aphrodisiacal plants on earth. Animals eating tongkat ali copulate three to four times more frequently than normal.


If you’re taking all these enhancers, you must be randy 24/7.
Well, I’m used to being charged up, so it doesn’t feel like I’m just bug-eyed all the time. These botanicals help keep me healthy and strong, which is great, because this line of work is very demanding. You start early. You finish late. It’s always go, go, go.

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“We’re going to space,” Team RE/MAX copilot Bob Martin announces, picking at a rough spot in the aluminum. “And this pod is going to keep us alive.”

That, of course, is all that any explorer in search of truth in a cold and hostile universe can ever wish for from his trusty vessel. Yet at least one part of Martin’s bold pronouncement is not strictly accurate. The fact is, Martin and two fellow explorers will not be going to space — not exactly. No roaring rocket booster is going to fire Team RE/MAX’s three-man crew into the inky-black weightlessness of Earth orbit. Sometime late this month or early next month, however, if all goes according to plan, the trio of civilian aeronauts will soar to the very edge of space, as high as the upper reaches of the stratosphere. The space shuttle may orbit about 10 times as high, but Team RE/MAX will be circling 24 miles above Earth’s surface, and it’ll be flying through a deadly, nearly airless realm of freezing temperatures and burning heat. At 130,000 feet, skimming above 99.6 percent of Earth’s atmosphere, it might as well be in space. What’s more, Team RE/MAX may encounter hazards that NASA and its cushy shuttle never worries about. Deflating, for one. Because Team RE/MAX plans to kiss outer space not with a rocket ship, but with a balloon.

As part of a scheme to achieve what may be the last of the big firsts — to circle the globe by balloon — Martin, an Albuquerque television news reporter, along with 53-year-old Denver real estate executive Dave Liniger and 42-year-old Australian balloonist John Wallington, is going to use a helium balloon to lift this pressurized pod beyond the reach of the capricious weather that has so far frustrated 17 previous attempts to win ballooning’s ultimate prize. Riding the smooth currents of the stratosphere, Team RE/MAX hopes to navigate a 22,800-mile route around the Southern Hemisphere while dangling beneath the biggest manned-balloon envelope in history.

Exactly how big becomes clear when Martin waves a visitor across the pod bay to a schematic drawing mounted on the wall of the GIF, located in a cavernous building on the outskirts of Albuquerque. The drawing looks to be that of a Lilliputian ant (the pod) hanging by threads from a Brobdingnagian football (the balloon). “It’s as tall as the Empire State Building and larger than the Astrodome,” Martin says proudly, ticking off superlatives. The envelope will be made of 13 acres of thin, clear polyethylene, only 0.8 millimeters thick in places, or about half the thickness of a human hair. The balloon will need more than 170,000 cubic feet of helium to launch, a volume that will expand to 40 million cubic feet in the upper stratosphere, 571 times larger than a standard expeditionary hot-air balloon. It’s being manufactured by the Texas contractor that makes NASA’s high-altitude research balloons.

The 650-pound pod, on the other hand, is a one-of-a-kind, do-it-yourself project that will pack a lot of hardware into a small package, as Martin makes clear when he pokes his head in through an open hatch and begins pointing out the amenities. The hull has been welded from plates of aluminum alloy and will be insulated against the night cold with a two-inch Ethafoam coating. The pod features three supposedly crashworthy seats, a climate-control system that pipes in oxygen and nitrogen from exterior tanks, and a high-tech scrubber to prevent a dangerous buildup of carbon dioxide. There will be only two ways to control the balloon from inside the gondola: by dropping some of the 1,300 pounds of ballast to go up or by venting helium to go down. In the event of a slow leak, the crew members will don pressure suits. If necessary, they will strap parachutes on over the suits and bail out.

The point of all this technology, of course, is competition — and it’s heating up. No fewer than six other balloon teams are planning an attempted circumnavigation of the globe this winter; all have plotted conventional low-altitude courses and plan to leave sometime between November 15 and February 15. Team RE/MAX has vowed to make its own attempt even if one of its rivals succeeds before it departs.

And so, possibly as early as Christmas, technicians in Alice Springs, Australia, will begin unfurling the gigantic envelope and piping helium into it. At 5:00 a.m. the crew members will climb into the gondola and seal the door behind them, technicians will release the balloon, and Team RE/MAX will begin its ascent. Two-and-a-half hours later, having passed through the troposphere and tropopause, they’ll break the previous manned-ballooning altitude record of 113,739 feet on their way to topping out at 130,000 feet. Traveling westward at a daytime speed of about 80 miles per hour and slowing to 35 miles per hour at night, Team RE/MAX will cross the Indian Ocean, southern Africa, the Atlantic, South America, and the Pacific before arriving back in Australia 16 to 18 days later. “A pretty tidy operation,” Martin says.

Indeed. At a time when so much discussion about adventure is centered on meaningless firsts, Team RE/MAX is truly operating out at the edge. At a time when adventure is packaged and precooked, Team RE/MAX has unwrapped the package entirely and is biting into the raw meat. If none of the three pilots is a rocket scientist, that is, in a way, the beauty of the thing: it will be adventure for adventure’s sake.

“A lot of people say this can’t be done,” Martin declares. “That’s OK with us.”

If Team RE/MAX were only about scientific-sounding know-how and a heedless can-do spirit, the enterprise would have never, figuratively speaking, gotten off the ground. As with so much else in life, the key to success was salesmanship, starting with the tireless efforts of pitchman Bob Martin.

These days Martin is on sabbatical from his job as a television news reporter for Albuquerque’s CBS affiliate, where he covers science, the occasional war, and with the aid of his helicopter pilot’s license, car accidents and the like. But the balloon idea came to Martin on the job nine years ago, when he reported a story on New Mexico State University’s high-altitude ballooning program, which studies cosmic rays and other elusive phenomena. “I started thinking, if they can send their machines to the edge of space, why couldn’t a person ride along?” Martin recalls. “The around-the-world part came to me a little later.”

In a way, Martin’s brainstorm offered an opportunity to assuage an earlier disappointment. In the mid-1980s, he had applied for one of NASA’s citizen-astronaut slots, and was waiting hopefully for his chance when the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff in 1986, killing schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe and six other crew members.

Having resolved to get to space on his own, Martin dubbed his project the Odyssey Expedition and, in 1993, began to solicit backers. Hat in hand, he outlined his idea to Rotary Club meetings and eventually to fellow science enthusiasts at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lockheed Martin. Modest amounts of seed money trickled in, but large backers were reluctant to sign over the necessary millions. It wasn’t until Martin hooked up with John Wallington, a thin, self-deprecating Aussie with considerable ballooning experience, that he began to make real progress. Wallington owns a business that offers scenic balloon tours of Canberra, and he and a companion were the first to balloon across Australia. Soon enough, Martin and Wallington had their first major sponsor, Dymocks Booksellers, one of the biggest book chains Down Under, and the Odyssey Expedition project was rechristened the Dymocks Flyer.

Unfortunately, Dymocks doesn’t possess the really deep pockets necessary to fully fund the $2 million quest. For a time, Martin and Wallington’s dream languished. Noting their balloon’s uncanny resemblance to a certain hygienic product, Martin even pitched the project to several condom manufacturers, but to no avail.

Meanwhile, however, the man who was to become their financial angel and copilot had been contemplating his own jump into the around-the-world balloon scrum. Dave Liniger, the multimillionaire founder and chairman of RE/MAX International, the Colorado-based real estate giant, was studying the possibility of mounting a stratospheric balloon trip as a solo endeavor when he heard about Martin and Wallington’s plan. A deal was struck, and this May, Liniger signed on as the third pilot and chief sponsor, and saddled the mission with the name Team RE/MAX. And so it was that while other tycoons — such as Chicago options trader Steve Fossett and Virgin Atlantic Airlines mogul Richard Branson — have become fixtures in the culture and science of ballooning through patient, committed involvement, Liniger has skipped all that.

“Life is an adventure!” Liniger exclaims, speaking loudly and clearly into a speakerphone in his sixth-floor office near Denver. “It’s all about how many experiences, how many memories, you can acquire.”

When he is not managing, with his wife, Gail, an empire that encompasses 3,000 offices and nearly 50,000 agents in 26 countries — a job that requires him to work 20-hour days, fly 270 days a year, and give more than 200 motivational speeches annually — Liniger is scuba diving, or adding to his collection of Arabian horses, or suddenly taking up golf and building his own private 18-hole course, or becoming (as he did over the last two years) a NASCAR driver who races stock cars nearly every weekend.

According to the Team RE/MAX promotional literature, Liniger “has been involved with ballooning since 1978.” That year, he reluctantly commissioned a red-white-and-blue RE/MAX hot-air balloon to fly at marketing and charity events, and over time he built a fleet of some 90 balloons based in 30 states. But in truth, before this summer the sum of Liniger’s personal in-flight experience was a single 10-minute excursion.

This doesn’t bother his teammates. “You can make fatal mistakes where we’re going,” Bob Martin says. “But Dave is a quick study. With just a few flights, he’ll be very proficient in ballooning.”

Liniger’s enthusiasm for his newest hobby seems boundless, but he is clearly banking on the fact that the flight will also pay pragmatic dividends. He has let his army of RE/MAX agents know that the trip can be an invaluable inspirational sales tool, and RE/MAX headquarters has distributed thousands of brochures titled “Why Go Around the World by Balloon?” to its franchisees. In question-and-answer format, the brochure explores concerns such as “Isn’t it dangerous to fly so high?” and “What happens if the capsule comes down in one of those oceans?” The brochure answers the second question with a comforting “the capsule floats.” But danger, even in sales material, inevitably raises its inconvenient head. “Obviously,” the brochure notes, “if the capsule develops a leak or other malfunction, chances of crew survival are low.”

After studying Team RE/MAX’s plans, examining its equipment, and talking with the key participants, a skeptical observer must soon confront a single overwhelming conclusion: These guys are going to die.

Alice Springs, we have a problem.

To hear Martin, Liniger, and Wallington tell it, they’re fully prepared for the worst that near-space can throw at them. If the balloon tears after liftoff, as it ascends through the tempestuous jet stream, the aeronauts will activate explosive bolt cutters that will sever the pod from the balloon, and the pod will deploy its own safety parachute. If any of the high-altitude life-support systems fail, the three can don their pressurized space suits. (Having failed to procure suits from NASA — apparently there were liability concerns — Team RE/MAX is buying Russian suits built to the same exacting standards as those used aboard the Mir space station.) “Sure, some people say it should be more highly designed, that it’s not up to NASA snuff,” Martin says of his equipment. “But the space shuttle had 17,000 people working on it and it still blew up.”

True. But does it make sense, then, to brave space travel in a canister outfitted in an Albuquerque garage and carried aloft by what is essentially a huge dry-cleaning bag?

Dwight Bawcom, manager of the National Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, Texas, has launched more than 1,700 unmanned balloons for NASA and has lent technical advice to Team RE/MAX. “We know Bob Martin, and we all have an affinity for him and wish him well,” Bawcom told a reporter recently. “But there isn’t anybody around here that’s going to crawl into that capsule with him.”

Don Towner, a retired Air Force officer and a veteran survival instructor for pilots flying the SR-71 Blackbird, is listed as an official member of the Team RE/MAX technical-support staff, but he sounds more like a dubious bystander when you ask about safety issues. Those space suits, for instance: There’s no use in bringing them, he says, unless (1) the pilots have had an intensive, long-term course of training in how to use them properly and (2) they wear them throughout the trip. “These aren’t just suits, but complicated systems,” Towner points out. “If there’s a decompression, there will be fog and roaring winds, just like in the movie Airport.” Before they can zip each other up, Towner says, they may become confused from the lack of oxygen. Hypothermia might set in; they might experience the bends. Then, if they get their suits on properly and have to bail out, they will face a free fall at speeds of more than 500 miles per hour (with its attendant risk of entering a 465-revolutions-per-minute death spin). If they survive the free fall and remember to pull their rip cords in time but land in the ocean, they’ll probably drown long before help arrives, Towner says.

Then there is the question of the team’s casual approach to the human factor. Will these undertrained, overfed guys survive nearly three weeks in a tin can without one of them having a coronary or a panic attack or going on a homicidal rampage? (“We get on quite well over the phone,” Wallington said this September, before the pilots had managed to get together more than once or twice. “Hopefully that will translate into good rapport in the capsule.”) The total lack of privacy will almost certainly prove trying. “When somebody has to go, we’ll set a small Porta Potti right here in the middle between the three of us,” Martin explains. “We’ll be real close by the end of this. It’s sort of like camping in a really small closet.”

Of course, campers sleep easy at night knowing that if their tent rips a hole, their eyes won’t be sucked out of their skulls and their blood won’t fizz like a just-opened can of soda. Unpleasant though such thoughts may be, Team RE/MAX will have to fend off these and others like them every moment it’s aloft. And then there is the ticklish problem of landing. Nobody has ever landed a balloon this size (“Its first flight is its test flight,” says Martin), and according to the official rules of the million-dollar around-the-world contest, as laid out by the Federation Aeronautique International, you don’t win if you don’t land — and stay alive for 48 hours afterward. “If they pick up too much speed trying to punch down through the tropopause during their descent,” Bawcom warns, “terminal velocity is a risk.”

But enough of the nay-saying. Where would Virgil “Gus” Grissom be if he had heeded all those niggling concerns about the Gemini program or the Apollo program? Perhaps alive, but we’ll never be sure. Thus there is always the chance that all will go according to plan with Team RE/MAX. Ingenuity and pluck may triumph over Murphy’s Law, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and the revenge of unintended consequences.

For instance, if the scrubber fails, no problem. One afternoon at the Gondola Integration Facility, a technician explains to a group of visitors that the pilots can always avert a toxic buildup of CO2 (remember Apollo 13?) by grabbing a spare packet of lithium hydroxide and pouring some of the chemical out into the pod. The excess carbon dioxide will bond to the white powder and the air will become breathable again. To demonstrate, the technician produces a rusted paint can full of the chemical, pries the lid off with a screwdriver, and waves the open can in the air. Moments later the visitors begin to cough, then to hack, then to bend over in a veritable side-splitting seizure of respiratory distress. Within seconds, the technician is also making barking noises. “Believe me,” he croaks, hastily covering up the can, “the carbon dioxide levels have now dropped considerably in this area of the room.” After another paroxysm passes, he adds, “But I can assure you, this chemical does not cause any long-term damage.”

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I should definitely rent Jackass: The Movie, says Chuck, a cheerful 18-year-old with thick, shaggy hair. As he looks out a bus window at the prairie and cows whizzing by, he tells me about the Party Boy scene, which he calls “outstanding.” One of the Jackass dudes, wearing only a thong, goes inside a Japanese electronics store and starts dancing wildly to the techno music playing on the sound system. This makes management and customers uncomfortable, so they try to shove him out the door. Pretty much all the kids from Chuck’s hometown of Hastings, Nebraska, think it’s hilarious.

THE GOOD LIFE: Some of the Hastings kids—like Julie, center—opted not to ski, but alpine magic still got into their souls.

GREEN RUN: Krista (left) and Chuck on the slopes at Breckenridge.

CIGAR AFICIONADOS: Saturday night before the off-piste action got intense.

PARTY BOYS: Grant (left) and Drew, doing the Jackass shuffle.

Before we hit the road, we got a few final instructions in the parking lot of St. Cecilia, a blocky brick structure that’s home to 205 students in grades 9 through 12. As the bus idled and a choking cloud of exhaust wafted through its open door, Father Scott Courtney, a soft-spoken 30-year-old school priest with a shaved head, recited a prayer, calling on God to watch out for the students and for the kids to “make good choices” during the long weekend ahead. He put extra emphasis on good.

Then, with the sun just above the horizon, we shoved off from the crowd of waving parents, past the school sign with its inspirational message (TURN AWAY FROM SIN AND BE FAITHFUL TO THE GOSPEL), and lit out for the westbound on-ramp to Interstate 80.

The plan is to pack a lot of living into four short days. Today, a Friday in late March, we’ll make the nine-hour drive to the Breckenridge Ski Resort, a large family-fun zone superimposed on a quaint, Victorian-era mining town, 80 miles west of Denver. Tonight we’ll do some sledding. On Saturday and Sunday we’ll get up early to ski. On Monday the bus will take everyone home.

It will be a quick trip, the chaperones have said, but a rich experience. Head chaperone Susan Sondag—a chirpy 52-year-old mother of two whose devout 18-year-old daughter, Liz, is on the trip—has told me her goals are “to expose these kids, most of whom have never skied, to an exciting new sport, let them stay in nice condos right on the mountain, and let them get to know each other better. And hopefully to do it in a hassle-free way.”

Sounds good. But I can’t help wondering about—how to put this?—the exuberance that high school ski trips are famous for unleashing, particularly off the slopes. From my own youth, I know a little about such outings. If the chemistry is right, they can be fun, rowdy, and filled with a bit of harmless debauchery. If it’s too right, you can get Fellini Satyricon. It’s as if the thin air and the endorphins released during a hard day’s skiing combine to make idle synapses pop like Independence Day fireworks.

Teens, who are locked in mortal combat to prove they can fly all by themselves, are plenty susceptible to these chemical forces. From the moment I hear the Party Boy dance being evoked, I know this group will be no exception. The chaperones must know it, too, and while it’s possible to put a maximum-security lockdown on ski-trip antics, they don’t seem inclined to go that route. Instead they’ve decided to give the kids some room, some trust, and the benefit of the doubt—just the sort of treatment they would have wanted when they were young.

And if the kids violate all that and go nuts anyway? Well, it will be like skiing itself. As least they’ll learn how to fall properly.

AT FIRST, LIFE aboard the SS Good Life is placid—everybody goes to sleep, sprawled on top of each other. Around nine, the pale winter sun streams through the gray-tinted windows and the bus heats up like a sauna. The kids, looking like adolescent vampires who’ve been caught off guard by daybreak, begin to stir. They crack open cans of Mountain Dew, the antifreeze-colored elixir that fills in for coffee among teenagers, and the world suddenly becomes less fuzzy.

“I’ve never been more than an hour west of Hastings!” somebody shouts from the back of the bus.

“Dude,” replies somebody else, “we’re gettin’ outta Dodge!”

Hastings, population 24,064, is less than an hour’s drive north of the geographical center of the United States. Today’s Hastings residents, many of them descended from German-Catholic immigrants who settled in the 1870s, have digital cable and high-speed Internet access, but the town remains old-fashioned: Farmers still drive their tractors slowly along the shoulders of the road, and the best place to hear news of the day is downtown at Bert’s Rexall Drug. Hastings is solid Bush country, but it’s even more solid Nebraska Cornhuskers country. There’s a highway named the Tom Osborne Expressway, after the fabled Huskers football coach who won three national championships and is now a Republican congressman from Nebraska’s Third District, which includes Hastings.

A little more than half of the St. Cecilia senior class is on board the Good Life, and everybody is from either Hastings or a farm nearby. All in all, it’s a typical group of heartland kids. Among them is Katie, an alpha girl with an X-rated vocabulary who is constantly in the doghouse for acting up. Julie is a smart tomboy who rarely takes off her black Vans stocking cap. Tyler is a stylin’ football star with spiked, gel-slicked hair. Drew is a class clown wearing a let’s hump T-shirt. And then there’s Nathan, a quiet and well-groomed seminary-student-to-be. He and Liz Sondag head up the class’s openly pious wing, a group that other students sarcastically call the Holy Rollers. Since we left Hastings, Nathan’s been sitting all alone, silently speed-reading the New Testament.

Meanwhile, Tim Russell, the Good Life‘s onboard chaperone, is at the front of the bus, still snoozing. The rest of the adult-supervision posse—Mark and Blair Driscoll, Ann Russell, Dave Bialas, Colleen Vacek, and Susan Sondag—are in the SUV. Judging by their happy smiles when we see them on the highway, they’re glad not to be amid the Good Life‘s din of complaints, dumb jokes, funk, and noise, which gets louder as we roll into midmorning.

“Are we going to make a rest stop soon?” somebody whines.

“You better not fart on me again,” one kid warns another.

“What time are we going to get to the condominium?”

“Did somebody just say condom?”

Everybody laughs.

“Watch your language back there,” barks Russell, who by now is wide awake.

“Sorry, Mr. Russell!”

“Hey, Mr. Russell, will you play a CD for us?”

A rock-and-rap mix CD is passed forward, and Russell slides it into the player. The bus sound system starts rattling from the metal-rap racket of Linkin Park. The kids shout out the surly, angst-ridden lyrics.

“Mr. Russell, now play song number ten!”

Linkin Park’s crunchy guitars are replaced by mariachi-style horns. It’s Johnny Cash singing “Ring of Fire.” The kids seem to like him just as much as they do the rappers.

In a fit of inspiration, a sweaty guy named Jeff starts playing air guitar. Chuck does an oddly contrapuntal kung fu chop in the aisle. And a redheaded goofball named Grant sticks his fist in his mouth. Then he grabs a giggling girl next to him and sticks her fist in his mouth. Those sitting nearby chant, “Farther, farther!”

All this and it’s not quite 11 a.m. The students rev faster as we thump across the unevenly jointed highway. A few miles west of the town of Ogallala, we roar past a sign that reads leaving nebraska—eliciting cheers. Fifteen seconds later, another sign zooms into view, welcoming us to COLORFUL COLORADO.

By 10:04—Rocky Mountain time!—we hit a service stop, the Colorado Welcome Center at Julesburg. The kids file out of the bus, and several immediately light up cigarettes. (On this trip, smoking is allowed for anyone who’s 18; drinking is not.) The others head for the restrooms or skulk to the vending machines for a resupply of chips and Dew.

We’re still 250 miles from Breckenridge, but already the prairie seems different. The amber fields look wrinkled, and little hills and valleys—the first signs of the earth starting to heave up into the Rockies—extend into the distance as far as you can see. Three boys climb the staircase to a second-floor observation deck to soak in the view.

“Where are the mountains?” one says.

“Yeah, I was expecting the Rocky Mountains to be a little rockier than this.”

“I was thinking the same thing. That John Denver was full of shit, man.”

IF YOU’RE A FLATLANDER, you probably recall the transformative moment when you first set eyes on the high country. I grew up in eastern Kansas, and I certainly remember my initiation. It was a 1976 ski trip to Breckenridge, with my family and 50 residents of my hometown, Prairie Village. We packed into a bus and rode west all night on I-70. I was ten, and I vividly recall curling up in the overhead luggage rack, listening to the boozy babble of hard-partying adults in the back. Early the next morning, after passing through Denver, the bus seemed to take off like a jet as it ascended the Front Range. At first, the altitude made my head pound. But it abated once we reached the condo. I can still summon up the wax-scented rental office, the hair-raising first lift ride, the chili at the summit restaurant. My notion of mountains would never be the same.

So it goes for the kids of St. Cecilia, who wake up on Saturday morning to find Breckenridge’s four molarlike mountains—Peaks 7, 8, 9, and 10—shrouded in thick, chunky clouds and the air outside a stinging 15 degrees. Inside the chaperones’ condo, it smells like breakfast as the bleary-eyed students huddle around the table and sit on the couch and floor, staring blankly at their food.

“Eat up!” says Susan Sondag, who’s already dressed in a tricolored turtleneck and black ski pants. “You’ll need the energy on the mountain, guys.”

The trip is still young, but it’s been pretty righteous so far. We arrived at 3 p.m. yesterday, and the kids eagerly invaded the piney, three-level Tyra condominium complex. The girls were assigned to one four-bedroom condo upstairs, while the guys shared a couple of three-bedroom condos downstairs. The chaperones settled in next door to the boys.

After outfitting their respective lairs with stuffed animals, boom boxes, and bags of Doritos, the students piled into the bus and went night-tubing on the slopes at Keystone, a resort 25 miles from Breckenridge. Later, back at the ranch, the Swiss Miss flowed freely, and as I shoved off for bed I could see that the kids, looking buzzed from all the high-altitude activity, weren’t about to pull the plug on the fun.

I was right about that. At breakfast, I hear all about the low-key revelry of the night before. The big news is that two kids swapped spit for a half-hour, setting off serious rumors.

“Who hooked up with who?” asks Katie as she slurps Cheerios. A girl named Melissa provides two names. “Gross,” Katie says. Then she thinks about it and corrects herself. “That’s not gross. That’s totally nasty.”

The other news is that half the kids, for various reasons, have decided not to ski. Some can’t afford it, some don’t want to get hurt, and some just feel like sleeping in, watching movies, and going shopping on Main Street. Sondag seems really disappointed but explains to me that if the kids want to deprive themselves of an opportunity to have fun and become more worldly, “it’s their decision, not mine.”

“OK,” she calls out, “who wants to go skiing?”

Chuck, the Jackass fan, is first on his feet. A big, sturdy guy who played football for the St. Cecilia Blue Hawks, he’s wearing camouflage hunting pants and bulbous amber goggles—making him look like the Jolly Green Giant under chemical attack. He waddles toward the door with his skis and poles banging the walls and ceiling, causing tiny plaster chips to fall like snow.

“Dude, what are you hiding from?” asks Juan, a dapper exchange student from Mexico.

“Huh?”

“Those pants—they aren’t going to work in the snow, bro.”

AT THIS POINT, the group of 25 divides into its natural cliques. The jocks, many of whom stayed up all night eating Cheetos and drinking pop, are surfing the TV and chewing tobacco. A few of the girls are still asleep. The parents who aren’t going skiing clean up the kitchen. Chuck and four others—Katie, Melissa, Liz, and a quiet girl named Krista—head to the Snowflake Lift and catch a ride up to Peak 8 to start carving turns. Another gaggle of skiers take their time finishing breakfast, then head toward Peak 7. Susan Sondag, Ann Russell, and I follow Nathan and two bundled-up girls, Andrea and Robyn—nervous neophytes all—to the base of Peak 9, where they’ll get a ski lesson.

The morning is foggy and cold; the sky looks like soapy dishwater. None of the 12,000-foot peaks are visible yet. All you can see are tree-covered mountain shoulders gently sloping up from the valley—and condos, most of them concrete monsters built in the seventies and eighties.

“How deep is the snow here?” asks Nathan, tapping it with a pole. “I bet it’s three feet deep.” He contemplates the sheer volume of the stuff, shaking his head in disbelief.

Before long, a tanned, sixty-something instructor wearing a crimson parka and reflective shades clomps up and introduces himself. His name is Geno Morse, and he gives off a warm Dr. Phil-as-surfer-dude vibe. He pauses to memorize the kids’ names, then tries to allay fears by explaining that he’s “the most experienced instructor on the mountain.”

Geno starts lecturing on ski boots—why they’re so stiff and how they fit into the bindings. He has each student practice stepping in until they hear a click. “Now we’re humming,” he says.

Next he dives into an explanation of wedging, offering a physics lesson on why skis are so darn slippery.

The students aren’t giving Geno 100 percent attention; they’re distracted by the parade of skiers sliding around, trudging up stairs, and relaxing on the observation deck. On display are casual, tattooed twenty-somethings in their New School-style baggies, along with over-forties who dress like it’s Aspen circa 1980, their buns shrink-wrapped in tight pants. A group of middle-aged Oklahomans are lolling around, sipping Bloody Marys. Near them a screaming kid has spilled hot chocolate all over himself.

Geno moves to the next topic: riding a Poma lift. The group ski-shuffles to the boarding area, where they get a first leery look at this contraption, which consists of platelike seats attached to an overhead cable that drags you up the mountain.

“OK, put the platter up close and personal with your privates,” Geno instructs, “then lean back.”

Robyn, a sturdy, athletic blonde, looks doubtful and approaches the Poma unsteadily as the seats keep moving by. Geno has seen this before, and he sweeps in for the save. As Robyn’s eyes well up, she gets some tough love.

“You’re thinking too much,” Geno shouts over the grumble of the bull wheel. “This thing is harmless. C’mon, step up here and let the platter take you for a ride.”

They get the hang of it, and soon they’re hobbling around on top of the bunny hill. They hunker into their wedges and start creeping down the mountain.

These guys are on their way, I think, so I say au revoir and catch the closest lift to find the more experienced skiers. It’s snowing hard, but I spot them from the lift and ski to where they’re gathered, on a flat spot in the middle of the Four O’Clock run. They aren’t doing much skiing. Mostly, they’re standing around Chuck, who is sprawled on the snow, waiting for him to get up after the latest of his gonzo wipeouts. He’s hyperventilating.

“Chuck’s getting quite a workout,” says Sondag, who caught up with this group earlier.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” says Chuck, a twisted heap of limbs and poles. “I was better last year.”

It turns out that Chuck is not quite the intermediate skier he said he was. After getting on his feet again, he heads down a run, does a pirouette on his third turn, yells “Shit!” and, presto, the big man is back on his ass. His ski mates swarm around him.

“This is so lame,” Katie mumbles.

“I swear I was better than this last time I went skiing,” Chuck says. “Serious.”

“HOT TUB!” SOMEBODY YELLS from inside one of the boys’ condos. As the afternoon light casts long shadows, a parade of nearly naked bodies advances from the condo to the outdoor tub like deer to a watering hole. Girls in bikinis and tank suits, guys in baggy swim shorts. They tease and poke one another.

“We’re, like, the naked class,” shrieks a tall girl named Amanda. “Everybody has seen everybody naked, so nudity is no big deal to us. In fact, we’re so close as a group that it doesn’t matter if we see each other naked.”

I remain at a safe distance from the tub. Thankfully, everybody keeps their swimsuits on, but it’s not always so. A kid named Josh leans over and whispers, “You should have seen last night what they were doing! They were totally flashing each other.”

As I’m exiting the hot tub area, Sondag appears tubside, clapping her hands and urging the kids to get ready for six o’clock Mass. A half-hour later we’re sitting near the back of St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church on French Street, downtown. The priest’s sermon, recalling his youthful days as a missionary, doesn’t garner much attention as the kids use stubby pencils to play hangman on the backs of their programs. Afterward, on the bus ride home, Tyler asks Tim Russell a question.

“Mr. Russell, if you drank a buttload of wine from Mass and then you went driving in your car, could you get stopped for a DUI?”

“What?” Russell asks, perplexed.

“You know, the wine is Jesus’ blood, right? So if you drank a whole buttload, could they nail you for a DUI?”

“That’s a stupid question,” somebody says from the back.

“No, it’s not,” Tyler counters. “It would be a concern if you were a priest and you had to drive somewhere after Mass.”

A second boy named Drew—the son of two chaperones, the Driscolls—changes the subject. “Hey, can we get in the hot tub naked tonight?”

“No,” Mrs. Driscoll says from the front of the bus. “You can’t go in the hot tub naked, because Dad and I will already be in there naked.”

The group likes this answer: “Yeah, baby!”

Saturday-night dinner—cheesy lasagna brought across the prairie in the SUV—is soon served in the adults’ condo. Once the food is gulped down, the room empties and the kids collect in the girls’ condo. A couple of guys have brought cheap cigars, which get passed around on the back deck. Inside, the boom box blasts Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott, and the conservatively appointed living room becomes a hip-hop dance floor.

“Is it worth it, let me work it / I put my thang down, flip it and reverse it / If you got a big [grunt], let me search ya / To find out how hard I gotta work ya.”

“Missy Elliot rocks!”

“St. Cecilia’s class of 2003 rocks!”

Around this time a couple of kids notice that Brett—a muscular athlete with dyed-blond hair and a botched tattoo depicting the Chevrolet logo with flames—is holding a tall, clear drink in his hand. Several kids scurry over to take a whiff.

“It’s real,” confirms Melissa.

“There’s more where that came from,” Brett says.

“Whoa, you’re going to get busted,” says Juan, who asks Brett where he scored.

“Can’t say, but put it this way: He’s a very cool dude.” Some of the kids grab a glass of orange juice, and Brett spikes their cups.

Word travels fast that bad behavior is about to go down in the girls’ condo. A stream of curious kids—the naive and the not-so-naive—file into the room to gawk, as if they’re about to witness a train wreck.

After a few minutes, the cocktails take effect. “Let’s play Fuck the Dealer,” Katie blurts. “You know, the drinking game. It gets you totally fucked up!”

A handful of kids grab seats around the dining room table as Katie deals the cards.

“This is the best ski trip ever!” she says.

MORNING HAS BROKEN, and the faint smell of barf lingers in the hallway as I make my way to the chaperones’ condo. Inside, the situation seems dire. A lot of long faces. Some kids are having a hard time getting the ol’ eggs to go down the gullet. But there are perky souls in the group—those who abstained from drinking, including the Holy Rollers.

Apparently, the alcohol flowed freely after I left last night. At one point, things turned nasty when Katie, claiming to have overheard Julie talking trash about her earlier, called for a cageless death match right in the middle of the condo living room. Violence was averted when Brett muzzled Katie, though she managed to bite him on the arm several times. Tyler, Grant, and Drew-the-class-clown paraded into the living room wearing women’s thong underwear—stolen from the girls’ luggage. They started doing the Party Boy dance and singing AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long.” A return trip to the hot tub followed, during which Tyler slipped on the deck and developed a bleeding welt on his back. All the while, the Holy Rollers were watching TV in the condo next door, occasionally peeking inside the party room and shaking their heads. Finally, around midnight, Nathan couldn’t take it anymore. He knocked on the chaperones’ door and showed them an empty vodka bottle.

Busted!

Sondag and the other parents rushed in and found several kids passed out or throwing up. They ordered everyone to bed, promising to deal with this debacle in the morning.

But after breakfast, the outrage seems to have faded. Sondag limits her remarks to one gloomy observation.

“There were a lot of bad decisions made last night,” she says.

FORTUNATELY, ALL IS NOT LOST. By noon, the sun has peeked out for the first time all weekend, and though the atmosphere of looming repercussions persists, everybody starts having fun again. The parents seem to have welcomed their prodigal sons and daughters back into the fold. The skiers—even the hungover ones—don their sticks for some bright, spring-style downhilling. Chuck, always a gamer, hits the slopes again and gets another drubbing.

In the evening, the parents agree to drive the kids partway up the mountain, then pick them up at the bottom, so they can sled for a full mile on the Four O’Clock run. Using cheap plastic sleds from the condos, they slide downhill in darkness, traveling way too fast, barely missing trees and occasionally crashing into one another. One by one, they glide to a stop at a street corner in town, then they climb in the SUV for another trip up.

The car, its windows clouded with condensation from heavy, excited breath, is filled with giddiness and braggadocio as the kids take turns describing how “sick” their last run was, how they got going faster than anybody in the history of sledding. In less than 24 hours they’ll be back in Hastings, doing homework, going to school, and surfing the Internet. But at the moment, all that matters is gaining a little more speed on the next run and feeling the cold, pinpricking wind against numb cheeks. That, and being together in the Rocky Mountains, laughing their heads off one more time before they have to go.

Julie, usually Miss Sarcasm, can’t stop smiling. After her last run, she comes to a stop in front of the van, stands, and proclaims the good news. “This,” she says, holding her arms as if to embrace the whole snowy valley, “was definitely better than an orgasm!”

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HOLD ON TO YOUR CRAMPONS. May 29 marks the 50th anniversary of the first successful summit of Mount Everest, by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. Record crowds of climbers, trekkers, and gawkers are expected to cram the mountain’s two main base camps—on the south side, at the foot of Nepal’s Khumbu Icefall, and on the north side, along Tibet’s Rongbuk Glacier. The latest predictions put 500 people on the mountain for what is to be an informal celebration, but close to 1,000 may show up, assuming the conflict between the Nepalese government’s forces and Maoist rebels doesn’t escalate in the Khumbu region. The list of folks hoping to summit the Big E in 2003 would’ve made P. T. Barnum proud: 32-year-old Sean Burch, who plans to take Viagra to study its effects as an altitude-sickness preventive (studies indicate that it increases blood flow to the lungs); the Everest Peace Project, whose ten members represent eight world religions; a party of disabled Texans; Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico; polar explorer Børge Ousland; the five winners of Global Extremes, a reality TV show on the Outdoor Life Network; and at least 30 other expeditions from around the globe. At Everest’s primary Base Camp, on the Khumbu Glacier, climbers will enjoy the first Everest cybercafé and the mountain’s first semi-permanent medical clinic. At the Rongbuk base camp, climbers can resupply at tents selling beer, Coke, cigarettes, and anything else they might crave. Even if 2003 represents a spike in the hype, the climbing culture around Everest is bound to continue changing, as it has since the first expedition, in 1921. What does the future hold for the world’s highest mountain—five, ten, or even 25 years down the line? Though it’s unlikely that hovercraft will be ferrying climbers over the Icefall, the crystal ball is both bright and worrisome.


Purists already complain about overcrowding on the mountain, and guides estimate that in future seasons the two base camps could house more than a thousand climbers and trekkers. With the government of Nepal collecting approximately $10,000 per climber on the Southeast Ridge route, and Chinese-controlled Tibet pocketing roughly $5,000 per climber on the North Ridge, neither is likely to put a cap on the number of mountaineers allowed each year. Two schools of thought weigh in whenever the issue of crowds is raised: those who’d like to turn back the clock and allow fewer teams and those who see Everest as an alpine Wild West, where all who dare to try their hand against it should be given the opportunity. “As long as people are prepared and understand the risks,” says 47-year-old filmmaker and mountaineer David Breashears, “I think everybody who wants to should be allowed their shot at glory on Everest.”


Eric Simonson, 48, co-owner of the Ashford, Washington-based International Mountain Guides, isn’t convinced that crowding will necessarily ruin the Big E either. “There are a lot of teams on the mountain these days,” he says, “but I’ve noticed lately that the teams are really cooperating and planning their summit days to not interfere with each other.”


Others don’t have such an optimistic view. Teams typically set different summit days, but poor weather can result in a logjam—as was the case in 1996, when eight people died during a single storm. “Once you start getting 40 or more people on the summit ridge at the same time, you’re going to have a bottleneck, primarily at the Hillary Step, and that can turn deadly,” says 43-year-old American climber and Everest veteran Ed Viesturs. “Now, you’re already starting to see the bottleneck happening on big summit days.” Despite the mounting crowds, almost everyone agrees that guided climbs on the mountain will become even bigger business as more Walter Mittys choose to test their will and VO2 max on the world’s tallest peak.


With crowding comes the issue of development, and efforts to make the mountain more comfortable are getting off the ground. One of the more ambitious projects is a hotel at the Rongbuk base camp. The idea was dreamed up by New Zealand guide Russell Brice, who is building the lodge, complete with bottled oxygen for guests, and is being developed in cooperation with the Chinese government. The hotel, which may begin construction in the next few years, will cater mainly to tourists, who’ll drive 380 miles on a shoddy road—currently being widened and improved—that links Lhasa to the camp. Development at the popular Khumbu Base Camp is less aggressive, but few doubt that a hotel will someday spring up near the foot of the Khumbu Glacier. The primary obstacle to building on the south side is the lack of a road. Currently, a trail that takes two weeks to negotiate on foot separates the camp from the nearest airstrip, at Lukla. And so far, nobody has had the will to cut a road over the treacherous path.


The other major obstacle to building a structure at Base Camp is the fact that it sits on a glacier that moves up to 200 feet per year, which would rip any building apart. Most of the development is happening in the valley below, on the 32-mile trail between Lukla and Gorak Shep, where teahouses, some with as many as 15 rooms, offer dry, warm accommodations and hot meals. As the Khumbu Valley fills with hostels, pitching a tent during the two-week trek to Base Camp becomes less necessary.


On the environmental front, the news is mixed. According to Brent Bishop, 36, who has overseen five environmental cleanup expeditions on the south side—known a decade ago as the world’s highest dump—the mountain is cleaner than it has been in years. Teams are packing out their trash, including oxygen bottles and human waste. Last spring a Japanese team carried down the last empty oxygen tanks from the South Col. An initiative by the Tibetan government, started in 1991, has significantly cleaned up the north side.


Not all the mountain’s problems can be solved with a garbage bag. Since 1953, global warming has changed the face of the peak. Though some argue that the warming trend has made Everest easier to climb because it’s made the Icefall less dangerous, meltwater is creating potential problems for locals. According to several studies in the Journal of Glaciology, the runoff collecting in glacial lakes, some as deep as 400 feet, is putting pressure on moraines that act as natural dams, which threaten to burst and obliterate the villages below.


And what about Everest’s evolving status as the world’s tallest publicity machine? No doubt the record breakers will keep coming. While Nepal has established a minimum age of 16, the mark for the oldest summiter, which was set in 2002 by Tomiyasu Ishikawa, a 65-year-old Japanese climber, will surely be upped. The records for most summits, fastest climb, and most hours on top are all likely to be broken. As Christine Boskoff, owner of Mountain Madness, a Seattle-based guiding company, points out, the sky’s the limit on firsts: “We haven’t seen the first naked climber.”


Even if summiting becomes more common, Everest will remain the ultimate adventure—at least for a few more decades. Breashears describes the mountain’s allure best: “At cocktail parties, the person who solos a new route on an 8,000-meter peak will always play second fiddle to the person who just came back from Everest.”

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