Sixty-two days into a planned thousand-mile journey across Antarctica, Henry Worsley, 55, a retired British Army officer, is near exhaustion. It’s January 2016 and he’s trying to complete that Sir Ernest Shackleton didn’t get to a century earlier. It’s been tough going.

“Each time he exhaled the moisture froze on his face,” David Grann. “A chandelier of crystals hung from his beard; his eyebrows were encased like preserved specimens; his eyelashes cracked when he blinked.” Because Worsley had climbed to 10,000 feet above sea level, where the thin air is brutally cold (nearly minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit), capillaries in his nose have burst and “a crimson mist colored the snow along his path.” With each step he takes on a pair of cross-country skis, he might accidentally punch through a crust of snow and “vanish into a hidden chasm.”

Grann is the author of the terrificĚýThe Lost City of Z and the terrific and appalling Killers of the Flower Moon, which is about the systematic murder of land-owning Osage Indians in the 1920s. He could not have typed up Worsley’s ordeal more vividly if he’d been there. But of course he wasn’t. Worsley is alone. And that turns out to be a crucial point of the story.

Worsley is traveling “unsupported,” which is to say without any outside help or resupply caches along the way, and without anyone else on hand to cheer him up, provide first aid, or check his dangerous ambition. (He did, however, have a satellite phone that he eventually used to call in a rescue plane—a form of support that Shackleton definitely lacked.) He’s taking a challenge that is already incredibly hard and making it that much harder in order to see how he’ll fare. (Spoiler alert: not well. This effort will cost him his life.) “He had to haul all his provisions on a sled,” Grann explains, “without the assistance of dogs or a sail. Nobody had attempted this feat before.”

Those italics are mine, because if you blinked you’d miss a thin-slice qualifier that keeps the next sentence technically true but has some polar veterans wondering if Grann and The New Yorker’s fact-checkers are in the tank for the Crown. Reading Grann, you’d barely know that anyone who isn’t a British subject, or who isn’t from the Golden Age of polar exploration, matters much when it comes to the history of expeditions on Antarctica. And by sticking to Worsely’s justification of his historic “first”—as şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍřĚýhas also done repeatedly—Grann plays into the British knack for romanticizing their polar tragedies at the expense of the far more clever, and undeniably more successful, Scandinavian exploits at the ends of the Earth.

In an article of 20,000-plus words, there’s plenty of room for Worsley’s hero, Shackleton, but none for several modern explorers who Worsley consulted for advice, foremost among them Børge Ousland, a Norwegian hardman who became the first person to ski alone across Antarctica in 1996-97. For all practical purposes, two other soloists also have done what Worsley failed to do: Ousland’s countrymen Rune Gjeldnes, who pulled off an astonishing solo traverse in 2005-06, and the Swiss-South African Mike Horn, who did it last year. All three of them skied and used small sails during portions of their trip—Ousland estimates that a sail helped rip him along for about a third of the distance. (Imagine a kite-surfing rig, only you’re on skis and towing a capsule-like sled.)

While we’re at it, another pair worthy of note is Cecile Skog, a Norwegian woman, and Ryan Waters, an American, who crossed Antarctica together in 2009-10. Like Worsley, they man-hauled—that is, dragged everything they needed in a sled—and they didn’t use sails. Don’t they count?

“It’s just ridiculous to say that Worsley would have been the first,” says Douglas Stoup, the founder of Ice Axe Expeditions, a polar outfitter that has led many trips to both poles. “It’s like there’s a loophole that allows these British guys to say no one’s done it, when it has been done.” Roald Amundsen, who led the first party to the South Pole in December of 1911, , used dogsĚýto get there. “So was he not first?” Stoup asks.

Stoup says he met and liked Henry Worsley. Super-nice guy. But he believes that Worsley and others, like , another Brit with an Antarctic obsession, have used subtle qualifiers to assert that something has “never been done” or is a “first” because doing so helps attract sponsors and drives publicity. That’s how this game is played. But Stoup finds such casually misleading claims unfair to the real polar trailblazers.

In November of 1996, Ousland set out from the coast of Berkner Island for the second time in an effort to cross Antarctica solo without any help. (He’d aborted the same mission the year before because of frostbite.) He didn’t warm up inside the South Pole science station when he passed by, for fear of getting “too cozy.” On the leg from the South Pole to the Ross Sea, he opted for a longer, but safer, route through the Axel Heiberg glacier. In all, he completed 1,768Ěýmiles. When he arrived at McMurdo Station, on the Ross Sea, he’d been alone on the ice for 64 days and had survived temperatures as low as minus 62ĚýFahrenheit. Remarkably, he still had all his fingers and toes and his nose. To Stoup, Ousland set a new standard for self-reliance and “had done some of the richest living you could do.”

So in what way was Worsley’s mission unprecedented? Well, unlike Ousland, he refused assistance by sail. And according to rules concocted several years later by an adventure-tracking online site called , use of a sail means that Ousland’s trip was “supported”—by wind—whereas Worsley could claim in a mission statement to be “solo …Ěýunsupported, and unassisted.”

Launched in 1999, Explorer’s Web filled a niche that the Royal Geographic Society and the National Geographic Society have not bothered with, trying to vet and record the increasingly specialized firsts on peaks and at the poles now that all the major geographic discoveries have been done.

Created by Tom and Tina Sjogren, a Swedish-American couple who’ve been to both poles, the site has often stirred controversy, with many wondering who these self-appointed gatekeepers think they are. “Why the hell do they make the rules?” asks Stoup. “And what if you’re tired and a stiff wind stands you up? Is that support? What about GPS? What about a tent? Are they supports, too?”

No, says Tom Sjogren, and neither are snowshoes or a pair of skis. Reached in the Mojave Desert, where he and his wife are now busy building their own space rocket for two, Tom defended their choice of declaring wind to be an expeditionary aid. He drew an analogy to ocean travel, where a sailboat is “sail-supported” but a rowboat is human-powered. Though Tom agreed that ski-sails are difficult to master and dangerous in their own right—Horn broke his shoulder after being slammed to the ice by his—he believesĚýthey’re game-changers. With a stiff tailwind, they can increase the potential distance you can cover in a day by a factor of five, or even ten.

A sensible person might say that being able to travel farther in a day—in minus-40 degree temperatures—is a smart idea, as are comrades. For the first Trans-Antarctic crossing, completed in 1957-58, British explorer Vivian Fuchs had 11 otherĚýmen along and relied on Sno-Cats and dog teams.

But we get the idea: Explorer’s Web celebrates and respects extremes. To set the bar for future Antarctic efforts, they should probably define “unsupported” even more starkly. No sails, no Sno-Cats, no horses, no oxen, and especially no dogs could be used. (Nixing dogs is easy. They’re no longer allowed on Antarctica; all non-endemic species except humans are forbidden now.) To cross Antarctica in pure style, you’d have to man-haul a sled with all your rations, no food caches or drops. Only boots or snowshoes would be permitted—nothing that eases the physical challenge of completing your journey. (Skis do make travel easier: skiing requires much less effort than postholing.) It’s OK to have a tent, of course, but no GPS, no iPod, and noĚýsatellite phone like Worsley carried. (Modern communications tools provide too much physical and mental aid. You might as well bring an emotional support penguin.) Once you leave, you’re off the radar until you show up at the other end.ĚýOh, and you’ll have to pick a new route that isn’t merely the shortest distance you can possibly trace to cross the continent.

Which leads to another sticking point about Worsley’s plan. Before he left for his fatal 2015-16 expedition, he spoke with Ousland, who says the discussions were “always in a friendly tone.” But they had to agree to disagree about some things, including the route Worsley proposed. Ousland completed a traverse that was truly coast-to-coast and, as such, more than 600 miles longer than what Worsley set out to do. Worsley and other Brits, Ousland says, favor “the short version.”

“They end the trip where the mountain meets the shelf ice, called the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf on the Weddell side, and the Ross Ice shelf on the Ross side,” Ousland says. “These huge ice shelves are 600 to 800 meters thick, and they’ve been there for more than 100,000 years, long before countries like Denmark and the Netherlands existed.” In Ousland’s view, the ice shelves are part of the continent. If you don’t cross them, you haven’t crossed Antarctica.

“These U.K. guys are saying theirs will be a first because they do it a bit different, but that is stretching it,” says Ousland, now 55. Speaking from his home in Oslo, he searches for an American term of art. “It’s a bit of fake truth,” he says.

In a 2015 interview for National Geographic, the climber and author Mark Synnott asked Worsley about Ousland’s 1997 precedent. “What he did was amazing,” Worsley replied. “And I’m not worthy to clean his shoes, but he did use a kite. Maybe it’s a British thing not to use kites. [Robert Falcon] Scott might have well frowned on the use of kites [as he did on the use of dogs], yet Amundsen would use as many dogs as he could, I expect, and not care what anyone said.”

Dogs! Kites! All of this might seem absurd, and it is. But there’s more to it than just hair-splitting.

While Scott might have frowned on the “support” of dogs and kites, in 1911Ěýhe brought tractors and ponies to Antarctica to help him in his race against Amundsen and his crew to the South Pole. Both forms of travel failed miserably, but Scott would have used them if they’d worked. His man-hauling expedition—call it Plan C—was a disaster, ending in the death of him and four other men. And yet when Amundsen beat Scott, he found his methods—which included eating exhausted sled dogs—disparaged. It was as if, by paying careful attention to the Inuit, and learning how to travel efficiently in polar regions from native people who knew how to do it right, the Norwegians had somehow cheated.

For his part, Grann obviously meant no disrespect to any unnamed polar explorers. “I was really interested in Henry’s story, and his worship of Shackleton, so it felt more important to know more about Shackleton,” he told me. “I was interested most in the tension between a devoted family man and his need to push to the limits of endurance.” Also, GrannĚýsaid, adding more context about contemporary explorers would have added words to the article, “and it’s pretty long as it is.”

Worsley, Grann writes, would often ask himself “What would Shacks do?” Shackleton is venerated—justly so—for rescuing his men when things went sideways during his 1914Ěýexpedition aboardĚý·ˇ˛Ô»ĺłÜ°ů˛ą˛Ôł¦±đ. But what Shacks didn’t do was claim a single polar prize. In seeking to emulate him, Worsley appears to have learned at least one wrong lesson: to make the trip harder than it needed to be. With a sail, Worsley might have made it and lived to tell his story to Grann in person.

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“Just occasionally you find yourself in an odd situation. You get into it by degrees and in the most natural way but when you are right in the midst of it you are suddenly astonished and ask yourself how in the world it all came about.” So begins Thor Heyerdahl’s , his account of putting to sea on a balsa-log raft in 1947 to test his theory that ancient Peruvians were the first to populate Polynesia. And the blithe spirit of that opening line is a good mindset for approaching , a terrific new dramatization of the 4,300-mile voyage.

Heyerdahl, who died in 2002, is said to have approved an early treatment for the movie, and Kon-Tiki is faithful to him, if not blind to his faults.

“Just occasionally you find yourself in an odd situation. You get into it by degrees and in the most natural way but when you are right in the midst of it you are suddenly astonished and ask yourself how in the world it all came about.”

Kon-Tiki verges on corny at times, and there are a couple of occasions when the camera lingers too long on Hagen as he experiences some intense emotion.

A hit in Heyerdahl’s native Norway, it was the country’s entry for best foreign film at the 2012 Academy Awards. Now it’s being released in the States by the Weinstein Company, a studio so adept at winning Oscars that one wonders if the film will be entered again. It’s that good.

Because the original expedition was an international sensation—the book has sold 50 million copies—the filmmakers aimed for a global audience by producing two versions, one in Norwegian and one in English. °­´Ç˛Ô­-°Őľ±°ěľ±â€™s lack of subtitles will be a boon for those bringing dates; six men hanging out on a raft is, after all, not the most promising plot.

Directors Joachim Roenning and Espen Sandberg move us briskly through critical backstories: a childhood accident that explains (spoiler alert) why Heyerdahl never learned to swim, and the year he spends with his bride, Liv, on an island in the Marquesas in 1936. It’s there that he hatches his Polynesian hypothesis. Soon we’re off to late-1940s New York City, where Heyerdahl shops a book version of his big idea but can’t get publishers to take him seriously—until, that is, he proposes crossing the Pacific on a raft, at which point they think he’s insane. Kon-Tiki is beautiful to look at, beginning with Heyerdahl, played by Pal Sverre Hagen—think of a Viking Ryan Gosling. There’s a feeling-infinitesimal-under-the-stars set piece to give all but the most jaded viewers gooseflesh and a whale shark scene so vivid, one half expects to hear from Richard Attenborough.

Heyerdahl, who died in 2002, is said to have approved an early treatment for the movie, and Kon-Tiki is faithful to him, if not blind to his faults. It’s less kind to Herman Watzinger, his trusted second-in-command. This has caused some controversy in Oslo. The movie Watzinger (Anders Baasmo Christiansen) is Heyerdahl’s chief underminer. Imagine a big-budget in which Buzz Aldrin turns on Neil Armstrong. But the directors have admitted to taking dramatic liberties. Most viewers will be glad they did—the confrontation between the two men forms the movie’s psychological climax.

Kon-Tiki verges on corny at times, and there are a couple of occasions when the camera lingers too long on Hagen as he experiences some intense emotion. There’s also the niggling fact that Heyerdahl was simply wrong about the anthropology. Fifth-century mariners probably didn’t cross the Pacific, but Heyerdahl proved that they could have, and more to the point, he rescued his unread manuscript from Manhattan publishers’ slush piles in heroic fashion. Like the expedition itself, Kon-Tiki is a farce. But what a gorgeous farce!

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“This creed of the desert seemed inexpressible in words. And indeed in thought.” —T.E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Evolution of the man: 1989.

Evolution of the man: 1990.

Evolution of the man: 1993.

Evolution of the man: 1997.

Evolution of the man: 2003.

Evolution of the man: 2011.

Ěý

It took some convincing to get me to , even though—or because—friends couldn’t shut up about it. Their pictures were intriguing, sure, but the camp back then resembled nothing so much as the costumey parking lot of a Grateful Dead show.

Not a sell for me. And I like people fine, but when I go camping I generally hope to see fewer of them. Finally, worn down by heartfelt entreaties—and especially the assurances from my great friend John Law, a main mover in the festival’s start-up era—I drove overnight from San Francisco and made the Black Rock Desert shortly after dawn.

What I will never forget about that first trip to northwest Nevada was striking out onto the playa, the vast, vacant deceased lake bed. It was 1994—the ninth Burning Man, the fifth in the desert—a time before cell phones, and the map of the area I was headed to was blank. Directions? Look for the second traffic cone and a line of those small red-flag wire thingies. Leave the road. Drive eight miles, turn right for two more. Really, that was it.

Five minutes out, I found myself in an alkaline whiteout, partly of my own making because of the rooster tail of dirt I was kicking up. When I finally made camp it felt like an achievement, and I had adrenaline to burn. So, despite being sleep deprived, I wrapped a kaffiyeh around my head and took off on a walk.

Immediately, I started to get what I’d been missing: the almost gravitational communal spirit (needed for survival) and the permission, even insistence, to get your freak on. Everyone seemed busy: erecting tepees, hanging wind socks, painting their bodies. It was Montessori for grown-ups, in the most astonishing void.

Eighteen years later, tens of thousands have made the pilgrimage, some a bit too avidly, it’s fair to say. As the event grew, a pop-up metropolis formed—Black Rock City, whose population this year may top 60,000. The outfit that stages the festival, Black Rock City LLC, is now a $23 million-per-year concern with 40 full-time employees, hundreds of volunteers, and a non-profit arts foundation that doles out grants. Demand for tickets is so great, the organizers used a lottery system this spring. That turned out to be a mistake. Big-time artists and veteran volunteers were shut out, while scalpers ran the tickets ($250 face value) up to $1,000 on eBay.

For Burning Man’s principals, the ticket fiasco was merely the latest crisis they’ve had to overcome to keep the dance going. They’ve been faced with such challenges every year, it seems, and somehow they’ve always managed to meet the task—or to finagle someone who could.

In this light, Burning Man is partly the story of a half-dozen eccentrics—an unemployed landscaper (Larry Harvey), an art model (Crimson Rose), a struggling photographer (Will Roger Peterson), a dot-com PR gal (Marian Goodell), an aerobics instructor (Harley Dubois), and a signmaker (Michael Mikel)—who made good. Less charitably, it’s the tale of a group of slackers who grabbed hold of the one thing that brought them notice—and, eventually, a paycheck—and have ruthlessly ridden it for all it’s worth. The truth contains elements of both, of course, but one thing’s for sure: it’s never boring.

IN THE BEGINNING: 1986–1989
Before it drew thousands of determined pilgrims to the Nevada desert, Burning Man consisted of a small group of friends torching an effigy on San Francisco’s Baker Beach, just west of the Golden Gate Bridge. Was it a summer solstice party? Guerrilla art? Or, as legend had it, one man’s attempt to exorcise his heartbreak?

LARRY HARVEY (co-creator and executive director of Burning Man): My friend Mary Grauberger had done a celebration down on Baker Beach for years. In 1986, she’d decided not to do it again, and I thought we’d recreate that, but in our own way. I really wasn’t an artist. I was hanging out with these famous latte carpenters, all of whom, in their spare time, were writing novels or painting pictures or playing music. I think Jerry [James] may have asked me to repeat my statement on the phone so he understood what I was telling him: “Let’s burn a man on the beach.”

JERRY JAMES (co-creator): There wasn’t much more to it than that. Larry called me and asked, “Do you want to build a figure and go burn it for the solstice?” OK, sure.

FLASH (born Michael Hopkins, Burning Man jack-of-all-trades): Larry and I met on a double date. I was dating the daughter; he was dating the mother. He was smart and didn’t see the mother after that. [laughs] But I remember thinking: Whatever happens on this date, I like this guy. Later he tells me he’s going to do some ritual on the beach. Everyone had their thing. You helped on their thing, they’d be there for yours.

JAMES: The first one was just a little stick figure. Scrap wood from Flash’s mother-in-law’s garage, I think. I started by crafting a rib cage with dimension to it and trying to figure out how to do a head. So, a pyramid shape.

JOE FENTON (member of the Black Rock Rangers, Burning Man’s security team): I didn’t go to the burns on the beach, but I did a paper about them for a college course on the anthropology of festivals. Larry told me very specifically that the figure was an effigy of his ex-girlfriend, the mother of his son. He told me he wanted to burn her out of his memory. He moved off that soon afterward. I guess he figured it wasn’t very politically correct, and now that idea is actively suppressed.

FLASH: Of course it’s a woman! Look at the hips! It freaks people out when I tell them that, because they’re so serious about it now. They’re on their journey to the sacred. But what does it matter? The Man is what you need him to be.

HARVEY: The idea that it was over a breakup—I actually made that observation once, to a reporter from şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř [“Black Rock FlambĂ©,” September 1993]. That was not a conscious thought in my mind at the time. That was the result of introspection. But people like a simple story; it gets them off the hook. It’s over a love affair. Oh.

JAMES: It was June. A typical dark, foggy, windy night on a San Francisco beach. Besides our little group, there were really only about four other people around, and they came over when we ignited this thing. One of them had a guitar or a tambourine, and that was sweet. But it wasn’t like people just fell upon the Burning Man. I think they wanted to get warm.

HARVEY: To some it represented a guerrilla action, and that was kind of inspiring. But it wasn’t really a criminal thrill. We wanted to do it, and we had to do it sort of undercover, because the authorities would never permit a fire of that magnitude.

JAMES: By the second or third year, the Man had grown to 40 feet, and I needed help getting it set up out there. Larry wasn’t a builder. He had ideas for the design, but I needed bodies. I’d read about the Cacophony Society, so we contacted them.

MICHAEL MIKEL (co-creator, founder of the ): Our motto at the Cacophony Society was “We’re a randomly gathered network of free spirits, united in the pursuit of experiences beyond the pale of mainstream society.” We got a lot of our philosophy from the Suicide Club, which did things like climb the Golden Gate Bridge in the middle of the night. But the Suicide Club was so far underground, I couldn’t find them. I decided Cacophony would be much more open. We started listing events in the newsletter, and it just grew.

STUART MANGRUM (publisher of the , the first Burning Man newspaper): The Cacophonists were like this magic network, turning their imaginary friends into real friends, people who otherwise were too unusual to unite with others. Some of them were really feral. But the critical thing was, Cacophony turned you from a talker into a doer.

P. SEGAL (writer whose apartment at 1907 Golden Gate Ave. served as Cacophony headquarters): Typically, whenever we wanted to make something happen, we had a party. That’s how John Law made his entry into my life: climbing through a third-story window that had no fire escape. I met Carrie [Galbraith] that same evening. She really brought together all these people who became pivotal in making Burning Man happen.

JOHN LAW (co-creator): There were a few philosophical underpinnings to Burning Man, but the one that got us to the desert was the Zone concept Carrie came up with. The idea was that you would cross an imaginary barrier, and after that you’d be in an alien land where anything could happen.

CARRIE GALBRAITH (Cacophonist): The concept for the Zone came from my infatuation with the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, specifically Stalker and the book it was based on. In Cacophony, we took turns leading the others on Zone Trips, where you didn’t know where they were taking you. For the first one, I just put an event write-up in the newsletter. “We’re going to the Zone. Meet at my place at 11 p.m. on Friday night. We’ll be back on Sunday.”

LAW: We did two Zone Trips to L.A., and at least one to Mexico. The idea for a Zone Trip to the Black Rock Desert came from Kevin Evans.

SEGAL: Kevin was young, like 19, but he was such a good artist, so we invited him to live with us at 1907. Another of my roommates was very good friends with this guy Mel Fry, an alias. Mel grew up near the Black Rock Desert, and he would do these events out there. The most famous was the Croquet X Machina game, which my roommate had gone to in 1988. Later we went to something called the Wind Sculpture Festival. Kevin and I and two friends built a canopy bed on wheels and went out there to sail it around and had an absolutely amazing time.

KEVIN EVANS (artist and animator): The Black Rock’s this sea of nothingness, and setting art on the desert reminded me of these sculptures in the mudflats of Emeryville [east of San Francisco] that I admired as a kid. When the Man didn’t burn at the beach in 1990—because the police and fire department shut it down—I suggested taking it to the Black Rock.

HARVEY: I don’t remember the exact words they used to describe the desert, but I imagined something extraordinary. And it turned out to be that.

THE FIRE AND THE GLORY: 1990–1995
Burning Man on Baker Beach was a bonfire, but Burning Man in the Nevada desert quickly became something more: an itinerant carnival, bacchanal, and no-walls art showcase.

VANESSA KUEMMERLE (co-creator): When you reach the point where you can see the desert open up, it’s amazing. We’d piled into this station wagon and thrown some potatoes on the manifold to cook, and when we got to the edge of the playa there was nobody there. Nobody anywhere. We got there at dusk, which is my favorite time. You look out, it’s like the goddamn surface of the moon.

WILL ROGER PETERSON (Burning Man board member): The life-changing experience has to do with the place itself. You weather a few dust storms, see a few rainbows, look at the sky at night. It’s like being on a boat on the ocean, except it’s not. You can walk on it.

FLASH: Black Rock City has greeters now, did you know that? Like you just entered Walmart. “Welcome home, Burner!” they say. Are you kidding me? This isn’t home. This is not Shangri-La. Why it was funny in the first place was that we had no business being there.

MIKEL: We survived on granola bars. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner—it was what we had. Now you can get seven-course gourmet meals. You can have sushi on a naked woman.

FENTON: The first thing you learn when you arrive is that you’re not done yet. You have to figure out shelter, you have to figure out shade. You don’t just come, drop your plate of vegetables, and get your party on. There’s work. I really responded to that.

WILLIAM BINZEN (artist): Larry asked me for ideas about the layout of the camp. I said I thought we should have circles within circles, like a target, with four sections: north, south, east, and west. From the beginning, I told Larry that Burning Man should be much more than just a blowout barbecue party—that we should make it about art. Because art is a way that we define who we are in time and place and share an experience we would not otherwise have.

CRIMSON ROSE (Burning Man board member): When Larry first called to ask me if I’d do something for the project, I snobbishly turned him down. But the next year, in ’91, I saw the Man in San Francisco and something clicked. I knew I had to go.

MIKEL: I started the Black Rock Rangers in ’92. That year, Burning Man was way up on the north end of the desert, miles and miles away, and if you missed it by a couple of degrees you could go veering off and get lost. So I got together with a bunch of friends and formed the Rangers. Back before we banned driving cars in camp, we had one guy who had been reckless, so we let the air out of his tires and left a note saying “Air pressure is a privilege.” That was our frontier justice.

FENTON: Our idea for the Rangers was, don’t be such an idiot that the real sheriffs have to get involved. We were going to protect you from yourself.

LAW: Everyone contributed based on what they knew how to do. I did neon at a sign company, so I did neon for the Man. Nothing was set in stone at all. , the first band to play out there, was the last band you would ever expect to hear in the desert—this retarded nerd rock. It was like the absolute antithesis of what anyone would imagine to be a spiritual experience.

KUEMMERLE: We pretty much always wanted there not to be drum circles. We never quite got that one to fly.

LAW: Yeah, we made bumper stickers: NO DRUM CIRCLES. It was a joke, mostly. As early as ’93, we were joking about Burning Man becoming a religion.

FENTON: Later there was this idea that those of us with guns didn’t care about safety, but that’s bullshit. We were the first to recognize when firing weapons wasn’t safe anymore. In 1993, I did the Drive-By Shooting Range and the Golf Skeet, and they were both 10 to 15 miles outside camp. For the Golf Skeet, we had one guy with a 12-gauge and one hitting balls with a sand wedge, and you’d get points every time you hit the ball. The Golf Skeet died when this guy showed up with an M1 Garand, which is a .30-06 rifle that can shoot a mile.

CHRIS RADCLIFFE (Cacophonist): As a kid in Yosemite, I’d seen this thing where they lit a cord of firewood and dropped it over Bridalveil Fall, so you had a river of sparks pouring down. I found this rock wall at the top of the playa. Everyone had their semiautomatics, mostly AK-47’s, and on my signal we emptied a clip into the plate rock. As much ammo as you can, and there’d be this shower of sparks cascading down, followed by a freight train of echoes. A waterfall of fire. Beautiful.

KEVIN KELLY (a founding editor of magazine): They’re burning stuff, exploding stuff, there was the primeval draw of flickering flame—but it felt safe to me. In 1994, I took my two daughters, who were six and eight. They were the only children I saw at that time, but there was a feeling that outside the tribe you were vulnerable, but inside you were safe.

“CHICKEN” JOHN RINALDI (director of Circus Redickuless, a 1990s punk talent show): Burning Man wasn’t a church, it was a possibility engine. It wasn’t about who makes great art, it was that everyone is making art. That’s the greatest thing.

FENTON: My first year, 1991, it’s 100 people. The second year it’s 400, and the third 800. At that point it wasn’t so much that there were a lot of people but that there were a lot of people you couldn’t vouch for. Some came to party, some came looking for an art event, and some were Mad Max reenactors. Then, in ’94, we called it the Black Rock Arts Festival, and we had real artists doing real art, like Pepe Ozan. That’s the same year the theme-camp idea came about.

HARVEY: Peter [Doty] has been celebrated for Christmas Camp, the first really funny one. It was a spoof of a mall Santa. Peter was Santa, and he played Christmas carols constantly and guilt-tripped everyone: “Santa gives and he gives, and what does he get?” He served eggnog in 95 degrees and then complained bitterly when you wouldn’t drink it.

BINZEN: Some of the most astonishing moments came from Kimric Smythe, one of the early pyrotechnic people. As Exploding Man, he and his wife, Heidi, both had these big spinning armatures strapped
to their backs, with fireworks and sparks shooting off. It was inspiring to see what unexpected things people could do. We’d go to their camps afterward to congratulate them before hunkering down in the quiet of the desert—until the first rave camp came to the desert and cranked it up.

MANGRUM: After ’94, Larry wanted a theme for the entire festival. I made fun of him: What, like Enchantment Under the Sea? Like it’s a prom? But there were getting to be some real tensions. In 1995, there was the first rave, and it went 24/7 and kept people up. So I think Larry thought a theme would help define it.

APOCALYPTO: 1996
In a series of pre-festival events in San Francisco, artists and Cacophonists hatched various plays and subplots, all based on Dante’s Inferno and all supporting a central story about a hostile takeover of Burning Man by Helco and Papa Satan, its CEO.

MIKEL: The whole theme was a parody about commerce. The idea was that the devil was going to take over Burning Man. He ran a fictitious company called Helco, and it was like the end of the world.

HARLEY DUBOIS (Burning Man board member): We were always looking for the tipping point. When does it not work anymore? In ’96, we found it.

KUEMMERLE: We talked about it many a time. When does a group of people become a mob and lose a sense of responsibility for their actions and the wellbeing of all?

MIKEL: It started during the setup days. Michael Furey, a neon artist, was in the town of Gerlach, drinking at the bar. Toward dusk he got on his motorcycle to go back to camp, and people tried to convince him to put his bike in a truck, but he declined. There was somebody in a van driving back at the same time, and Michael started doing these runs at the van to see how close he could get.

KUEMMERLE: It was that twilight hour. I had gone into town and was at a gas station where there were a whole bunch of people trying to figure out how to get to Burning Man. There was a caravan of maybe 10, 20 cars. Beautiful sunset. At some point I see a flashing light out on the playa. Is it really far away? Close? And then all of a sudden, whoom!—I see that it’s John [Law]’s white van. A guy called SteveCo was driving. I pull over and stop the car. SteveCo stops the van and just looks at me and goes, “Mike Furey’s dead.” Furey had been playing chicken with the van and was basically decapitated by the side mirror. There wasn’t any ambiguity there.

LAW: Furey killed himself, but it was Larry’s response that made me certain I was done after that year.

KUEMMERLE: We’re waiting for a coroner and the sheriff. An SUV comes up, or a minivan, and Larry and a few other people get out. Larry bursts onto the scene and he says—I swear to fucking God—four times in a row: “There’s no blood on our hands!” My jaw was on the playa. It was one of those moments of looking into someone’s mind and not being too excited about what I saw.

FENTON: Larry’s way of dealing with 1996 was to try and control what was getting to the media. When Furey died, the first thing Larry did was look at his watch. He made sure to say it happened at 11:30 the night before the event officially began. So it didn’t happen at the festival but before the festival, as if Furey’s death was somehow not related. It was a stupid, alcoholic, moronic death. But you couldn’t deny that he chose this event to die at.

RADCLIFFE: Burning Man had become Larry’s whole life, so for John to say it’s over—that was a problem. Larry started politicking during the festival, telling me that John was handing out speed to volunteers. I told him if he repeated that, I’d strangle him. And he did. So I did.

HARVEY: That is an invention. Chris never threatened me with violence. He’s a fertile source of ruses. When it came down to it, there was this argument in ’96 that divided myself and others. John was among them. There were members of that crowd who put out a T-shirt that said BURNING MAN: WOODSTOCK OR ALTAMONT? YOU BE THE JUDGE. You could tell they were secretly rooting for Altamont.

ALAN “REVEREND AL” RIDENOUR (head of Los Angeles Cacophony): In ’96, Burning Man was at its peak. We did the Damnation of Tinseltown and the flaming Helco tower. Burn Night felt like a scary, transformative ritual. Flash played Satan, and he came through with a gas can and doused Doris Day and John Wayne. I was on acid when I heard Flash’s booming laugh. He was Satan.

ELIZABETH GILBERT (author of who wrote about Burning Man ’96 for ): Honestly, I was scared of it. I remember the way the camp turned from this playful thing by day—beautiful and fanciful and Narnia-like—to this menacing thing at night. Being around all that fire, people with guns, and a lot of people on drugs, I was like, “They’ll be eating each other soon!” And in some ways they were—more sexually than anything else. I understood that Burning Man was waking something up. That awakening might lead to transcendent creativity—or it might be savage and ungovernable once it’s released.

HARVEY: What finally occurred in ’96 was a question about two different visions of what Burning Man should be. Should it be civilized? Or should it be, essentially, a repudiation of order? If it’s a repudiation of order and authority, and you’re the organizer and it involves thousands of people, what does that mean for you? What kind of a moral position is that to be in?

LAW: Of course it had to change. We knew better than anyone, because we worked hard to keep everyone safe. But there was an opportunity there to say, Don’t make it bigger. Why does it need to be thousands? Keep it to a size where you know who you’re dealing with.

CHICKEN JOHN: We didn’t finish cleaning up that year until October 3, a full month later. When Larry left—I think it was the second morning after the burn—I was actually relieved. But back in the city, he was telling a bunch of artists that they’d see $500, or $300, or $200—and that John Law would give them the money when he got back. Only John spent everything he had left on dumpsters and keeping us alive out there. It got personal. Larry wasn’t doing the work, we were. All while he was setting John up.

BINZEN: Many of the old-timers who no longer participate really liked Larry at first but came to see him as a classic manipulator, a user from behind the Oz curtain.

KUEMMERLE: I remember going to a post-event meeting in October 1996, and there were accusations pointed at John and me that we had stolen money and were doing crazy shit. We’d just killed ourselves cleaning up this mess, only to come back to San Francisco to hear others bitch and moan. That was it for me.

MIKEL: There was a second serious accident in ’96, the morning after the burn. Someone drove over a tent with a couple in it and then crashed into another car, scalding a third woman with radiator fluid. The couple had to be medevaced, and the burned woman had to be driven all the way to Reno.

LAW: No one who goes to Burning Man today is going to care about a bunch of old farts who are mad at each other because the band broke up. But they should know who they’re dealing with. Larry’s no saint. He’s also no visionary.

MIKEL: That was the year John Law decided not to do it again, and the accidents were really traumatic for those of us who’d responded to them. But afterward I looked at everything that had happened and realized that, by and large, people there had an incredibly wonderful time. I decided to keep that perspective. Rather than not do Burning Man anymore, we needed to keep it going.

OUT OF THE ASHES: 1997–1998
After 1996, the Bureau of Land Management wouldn’t allow the event back on Black Rock Desert, so it was moved onto private land 10 miles northwest of the old site, on the grassy Hualapai Playa. Two women—Marian Goodell, a.k.a. Maid Marian, and Harley Dubois—stepped in to revamp the festival’s logistics.

FENTON: If it hadn’t been for Marian and Harley, it would have fallen apart.

MARIAN GOODELL (Burning Man board member): I came in as Larry’s companion, so I went to the meetings with public officials, and I had a fresh perspective. We’d been like cowboys with our hats tilted sideways, and that wasn’t the best approach.

DUBOIS: There was a new appreciation for organization. Most of the infrastructure that people see when they come to Burning Man today, I created. I created Playa Information Services, which maps out where all the theme camps go. I developed the New Earth Guardians, the environmental arm that teaches people about Leave No Trace.

GOODELL: Even on private property, Nevada has to approve mass gatherings, and since the event was partially held on scrub-brush land, $350,000 had to be designated to Washoe County for fire protection. We didn’t have that. We made an agreement that 25 percent of every ticket would go into an escrow account. When they found that the escrow balance was low, the sheriff started taking the entire gate home every day.

BRIAN DOHERTY (author of ): While it definitely changed after ’96—it was way more planned—that didn’t keep it from being amazing. Before then, a lot of the art was discards. Stuff cobbled together, old doors or signs, or Steve Heck’s surreal collection of junk pianos. As it went on, the art was commissioned. It may have become more of a theme park, but people were still making the theme park as they went along.

MICHAEL CHRISTIAN (artist): What I found is that whatever you needed, you could get, and the joy of building out there was not knowing where your project was going exactly, but adapting to what’s “provided.” I was always surprised by what you could find. You’d put the word out: we need a physicist who knows these sorts of calculations. Well, there’s so-and-so at camp blah de blah. You’d go down there, and they’d tell you, “The electric polarity of your blah de blah is off….” Really, did that just happen? And that happened a lot.

DOHERTY: It isn’t as if all the danger went away, either. In ’97, Jim Mason did his Temporal Decomposition sculpture, which he all but killed himself making, with 60,000 gallons of cubic ice in a massive sphere. He also had his Veg-o-Matic—this flamethrower on a tractor that shot fire 40 feet. He drove around on Burn Night looking for stuff to torch, burning whole camps, it seemed, and then ended up attacking his ice ball—this epic battle between fire and ice. Ice won: he ran out of fuel.

GOODELL: Everyone agreed private land had sucked. After the ’97 burn, we got more tactical. Flash created the Empire and Gerlach Chamber of Commerce, with a phone number that rang at a bar where he worked. I found an ally at the BLM, and we had a letter-writing campaign. It took all winter, and I remember I was standing in a snowstorm outside the BLM office when we got the news that we’d get the permit. We were going back to the playa.

FLASH: Help wasn’t easy to come by in Gerlach, and I hired this woman on as a cook, and … well, if I’ve learned only one thing in life, it’s this: never tell a chick she can’t cook a chicken. She’s serving it, and it’s still bleeding. So I fired her. Next night, she came after me with a .38. I was walking along, and she yells at me. I turn, see she has the gun, and she shoots at me. I hit the deck, but she’s walking toward me, so I get to my feet and scramble into Bruno’s bar. I get in there, and my leg’s hit. I figure I’ll go out like in a western. I yell, “Boys, some bitch just shot me! Give me some whiskey!” The bartender gives me two shots of Jack Daniel’s. Unfortunately for the woman, she was a bad shot. She got five years. I got famous.

TENDING THE FIRE: 1999–2012
Back on the playa after 1998, the organizers established a template that has endured since, even as lawsuits among board members and an act of sabotage tested the event’s integrity.

GEOFF DYER (author of , among other books): By the time I went, in 1999, a lot of people were already lamenting that it wasn’t the anarchic free-for-all that it had been. I stopped going myself in 2005, but I feel very sure that the people who started going in 2006 were as absolutely wonderstruck as I was.

JESS HOBBS (artist): The '90s were known more for the art of these guys who created dangerous machines—on fire. The Flaming Lotus Girls started in 2000 with 12 girls who wanted to make more interesting large sculptures with fire. To say Burning Man changed my life is a cliché, but I didn’t build large-scale art before I went, and now that’s a big part of my life. That happened for a lot of us.

KELLY: It became a venue where technologists and artists introduced new things. Like el-wire—this neon wire. Out of nowhere comes this glowing outline of a galloping horse. It was the most brilliant thing I’d ever seen.

FLASH: El-wire. LEDs. Lasers. There’s so much light, it’s a strange version of Vegas now.

DYER: The second year my wife and I went, in 2001, we were aware that there was this sort of sex dimension at Burning Man. Somebody mentioned this place called the Fornication Station. We found the tent and started queuing up, and there was this incredibly muscular guy in bondage-like wear. In a lovely, soft voice, he explained what the rules were. This really cool woman said, “Oh, I’ll just see if there’s a table for you.” If you went now, it would probably be full of Europeans.

ADRIAN ROBERTS (publisher of ): This year will be my 20th, and by far the best burn ever was in 2007, when someone burned the Man a week early. It was at the start of the week, maybe 10,000 people were in camp, and all of a sudden you’re like, Is the Man on fire? It was spontaneous. It was exciting. It was everything that the burn hadn’t been in years.

DUBOIS: I slept through it, and when I woke up in the morning somebody said to me, “Harley, whoever lit the Man has red and black paint on their face.” I said, “Paul Addis.” Because I knew him. I’ve known him since ’94. I totally understand that old-school mentality, but he probably wasn’t on his medication, which he needs to stay on.

ROGER: I was not amused. There’s a difference between doing a prank and arson. It cost us thousands of dollars to build a new Man in just a few days. We took him to court over the damages.

CHICKEN JOHN: But they didn’t have to make it a felony! Addis was not well, and the board knew that. They sent their sick friend to prison, for what? No one got hurt. He burned firewood—wood that was intended to be burned. And it was funny. It was like going back to the beach. And yet [Will] Roger showed up in court with every receipt he could find to make sure it amounted to a felony.

ROBERTS: Part of the reason I’ve been going to Burning Man for 20 years is that I’ve never gotten too close to the source of the flame, so to speak. Practically every person I know who works close to the board gets burned out, because they kind of get used.

DUBOIS: It’s been difficult. All of us have wanted to quit at times. But as an organization, we’ve gotten better at managing the cycle. And we’ve weathered all the interpersonal stuff, too.

MIKEL: After the 1990s, Larry built a political power base, and he chose to keep only yes-people around. I was the only person during the 2000–01 period who was willing to say, “No, Larry, this is not right.” That power struggle came to a head in 2003, when Larry decided to take complete ownership of it all. I called him on it and filed a lawsuit. John Law sued him, too. Eventually, everything got settled, and it got to a point where board members could stand up for themselves.

FLASH: If you want the real story of the founders in a nutshell, it’s this: We’re friends. Here’s the money. Here’s a knife. That’s it.

GOODELL: One time, I think it must have been 2004, I told Michael Mikel that I thought I was going crazy. He told me, “We’re all going crazy.” And I was like, “That isn’t helpful!” I was worried that I was caught up with a bunch of people and that Larry’s vision had manifest as something potentially evil. My dad didn’t like Burning Man—well, he eventually did, but he was very cautious. He looked at the website, and when he saw Larry’s bio he said, “That’s a messianic personality.”

ROSE: It’s still worth it, because it gives artists the chance to realize their vision.

CHRISTIAN: A lot of fun stuff still happens, but it’s not what it used to be. Not that I’m pining for the good old days, but Burning Man itself doesn’t really have any original ideas. They’re just kind of steering the ship, and not exactly in the way most people I know would recommend. It’s become a lot more like Mardi Gras, people coming out to go to a great party. But it is a great party.

GILBERT: I’m too old to be surprised by failed utopias. It’s more amazing that it continues at all. And I’m glad it endures. I’m always happy to hear people say they’re going. They always invite me, for some reason. I always say, “Next year—I’ll go with you guys next year.”

Additional reporting by Meaghen Brown.

(), a former senior editor at şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř, is executive editor of .

The post An Oral History of Burning Man, the Biggest, Weirdest, Most Clothing-Optional Desert Carnival on the Planet appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

FIRST OFF—YEAH, it’s weird that Liam Neeson, who lost his wife, Natasha Richardson, to a ski accident in 2009, would elect to star in a movie as a man devastated by the loss of the woman he loves. In fairness, though, , a big-budget, Hollywood-does-Wrangell wilderness-survival epic that opens this month, is no meditation on life imitating art imitating mourning. His character’s grief is there for the same reason it is in a vintage Mel Gibson action flick: to establish our anti-hero’s state of desperate cunning. The greater mystery is why Neeson bit on co-writer and director Joe Carnahan’s script, a mashup of monster movie, psychodrama, and mawkish bromance.

Neeson plays Ottway, a sharpshooting wolf exterminator for a drilling operation somewhere above the Arctic Circle. In voiceover, Ottway tells us that the remote outpost attracts “outcasts, rejects, convicts, assholes—men unfit for mankind.” Strap in, folks, for a subzero ! When their flight back to Anchorage crashes, seven of these hard-luck bastards are left to fight for their lives in the backcountry, besieged by a pack of royally pissed-off gray wolves—the only animal, we’re advised, “that will seek revenge.” Next morning, we’re down to six.

From here the action takes a turn for the preposterous. We’re not just talking standard moviemaking concessions like hoods down and coats blowing open in a minus-50-degree gale (so we can see the actors better). We’re talking hand-to-hand combat with animatronic wolves that behave less like canines than like frenzied barracuda. We’re talking uncalled-for stunts like a running leap off a cliff when a simple rappel would suffice.

This sort of thing—demonized wildlife, –style acrobatics—can be entertaining, of course, as long as no one takes himself too seriously. If only. Carnahan (, ) seems determined to prove that he’s deep, and he’s anxious that you not miss any of that depth. Carnahan has one ex-con yell at the wolves, “You’re not the animals, we’re the animals!” This same dude, as he dies, is revealed to have NO MAS tattooed on his neck. No, really. And his demise follows an exchange in which the men, tearing up, share their first names for the first time—a scene, you think, that must have been workshopped at America’s last Iron John retreat.

If any of this is a shame, it’s because cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi’s haunting Alaskan wilderness (actually Smithers, British Columbia) hints at a version of The Grey that could have been a fraction as violent and twice as frightening, and because Neeson, despite it all, turns in a first-rate performance. The Irishman’s face was pained long before his family tragedy, and it’s ideally suited to Ottway’s predicament. Neeson even manages to remain convincing as he recites, for the third or fourth time, a poem attributed to Ottway’s dad, an eighth-grader’s parody of the Bard’s King Henry V: “Once more into the fray.… To live and die this day.”

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Strel, 49, doesn’t look like Aquaman: At five foot 11 and 230 pounds, he’s a potbellied fireplug. But for 58 days on central Europe’s Danube, in 2000, 68 days on the Mississippi, in 2002, and 24 days on Argentina’s Paraná, in 2003, Strel—wearing a wetsuit and goggles, swimming freestyle, and escorted by a support team in kayaks and a motorboat—stroked an average of 12 hours and 40 miles a day. Along the way, he racked up world records for the longest nonstop swim (313 miles over 84 hours, set on the Danube) and the longest continous swim (the 2,360 miles he stroked down the Mississippi).

On all three rivers, Strel allowed himself just one daily creature comfort: a bottle of Slovenian wine called Cvicek, half of which he drank during onshore lunches to wash down his energy bars, the other half with dinner at a hotel. “I like it,” he says, “because it doesn’t get me drunk right away.”

Even with a buzz, marathon swimming is rough. One dark morning on the Danube, Strel collided with a barge and was trapped underwater for more than a minute. On day 41 of the Mississippi swim, lightning struck a buoy three feet from Strel, blasting him halfway out of the water. (He kept going.) Two weeks later, a stomach infection forced him to switch to the backstroke so he could roll to one side and barf.

Strel says he first began dreaming of epic swims as a young boy. At 23, he quit teaching guitar and began racing in open-water swimming events, but didn’t feel “psychologically mature” enough to take on extreme distances until 1997, when, at 42, he raised $50,000 to make a 48-mile crawl from Cape Bon, Tunisia, to the Italian island of Pantelleria.

Thousands of miles and millions of dollars in sponsorships later, Strel says the swimming will continue until his body falls apart. “It’s taken me over like a drug,” he admits. He’ll get his next fix this summer in China, where he plans to swim 2,610 miles of the Yangtze—and down ten gallons of Cvicek along the way.

Walking the Seven Seas

RĂ©my Bricka: Stalking the 7 Seas

RÉMY BRICKA FIRST CROSSED the Atlantic Ocean in 1972, sailing luxury-class aboard France, a 1,035-foot passenger steamer. For his second trip, he decided to walk.


The French-born Bricka, then 38, left the Canary Islands on April 2, 1988, with his feet lashed to a pair of 14-foot fiberglass pontoons. Behind him, he towed a raft outfitted with a coffin-size sleeping compartment and carrying fishing tackle, compass, sextant, and three portable water desalinators. Walking 50 miles a day with a precarious upright rowing technique that made him look like a drunk nordic skier, Bricka aimed for the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, subsisting on fish and plankton he scooped up from drifting schools.


Strange as it seems, given these foolproof preparations, there were problems. Two of Bricka’s desalinators bonked halfway through his stroll, so he supplemented his hydration with a daily quart of seawater. Two months in, a Japanese trawler plucked him from the Caribbean near Trinidad. Emaciated and hallucinating (“I saw trolls attack my legs!” he recalls), he’d dwindled from 160 pounds to 110.


The feat—a 3,502-mile hike over open ocean—earned Bricka a Guinness world record but grabbed few headlines in France, where he’s famous for another form of performance art. Clad entirely in white, Bricka tours the country with two dozen instruments strapped to his body and a pet dove and rabbit riding shotgun on his shoulders. He’s known to one and all as L’homme Orchestre, or the One-Man Band.


So far, the only person to challenge Bricka’s water-walking record is Bricka himself. In April 2000, he left Los Angeles, planning to walk the Pacific and arrive in Sydney in time to crash the Summer Olympics. Stoeffler, a French deli-foods company, donated an 11-pound tub of sauerkraut and put up $100,000 for equipment, including freeze-dried meals, an Iridium satellite phone, and a GPS unit.


En route, Bricka ran out of food and his Iridium service shut down. A cyclone packing 50-foot swells thrashed his raft. Using a handheld messaging device, he e-mailed a plea to his wife, in Paris: “Come pick me up now or I’ll have to hitchhike.”


Ten days later, an American tuna boat found Bricka 500 miles south of Hawaii. He’d failed, but it was a grand failure: The oompah man of the sea had covered 4,847 miles in 153 days.

Jogging for 27,705 Miles

Genshin Fujinami Ajari: Jogging for Buddha

“THE ONLY ADVICE I GOT before setting out was to keep my feet warm,” says Genshin Fujinami Ajari, a 46-year-old Buddhist monk in Japan. “Of course, the day before I started, it snowed. I thought to myself, Oh, this is going to be tough.”


Well, nobody ever said enlightenment was easy. Last September, Fujinami, a member of Japan’s devout Tendai sect, finished the ultimate ceremonial slog: a seven-year, 27,705-mile series of laps around the five peaks northeast of Kyoto. He’s only the 49th monk since 1585 to complete the Hieizan Sennichi Kaihogyo, or “Mount Hiei Thousand-Day Circumambulation Practice”—and when you break down what he did, it’s easy to see why so few have triumphed.


For 100 consecutive days in each of his first three years as a pilgrim, Fujinami rose at midnight, prayed, ran and walked 18 miles (stopping 250 times to pray), did chores back at the monastery, ate, and hit the sack. In years four and five, he upped his total to 200 consecutive days. Year six saw him complete a 37-mile course every day for 100 consecutive days, then endure the doiri—seven days without food, water, or sleep while sitting upright and chanting 100,000 mantras. In year seven, he trekked 52 miles a day for 100 straight days, usually from 1 a.m. to 5 p.m., then 18 miles a day for 100 consecutive days.


Fujinami looped Mount Hiei through sweltering humidity, typhoons, and snowstorms, wearing only white cotton layers, straw sandals, and (when needed) a straw raincoat. He also carried a rope and a knife—so he could hang or stab himself if he failed on his quest. (Records don’t indicate whether a Tendai runner has ever killed himself, but you’re required to be ready to take this step.)


“The fourth, fifth, and seventh years were the toughest times,” says Fujinami, who hasn’t visited his family since 1996 and won’t for another five years. “No. The sixth year was the toughest, actually, because of the doiri. But also the seventh year: The distance was extended, so that was the hardest part, also.” Pause. “Actually, there was no year that was easy.”


“But,” chirps the saintly master of the severe practice, “I’m thinking of going back to walking the 100 days this year. Why? Because it’s so beneficial to my appreciation.”

Running Seven Marathons in Seven Days on Seven Continents

Sir Ranulph Fiennes & Dr. Michael Stroud: Marathon Madmen

ON JUNE 7, 2003, famed British explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes, 59, suffered a heart attack so severe that he underwent immediate double-bypass surgery and didn’t come to for three days. And yet on October 21, 2003, with only two and a half months of training under his belt—and post-op wires still in place to keep his chest cavity shut—Fiennes and his longtime comrade-in-extremes, Dr. Michael Stroud, 48, stashed a defibrillator in a duffel, flew to Chilean Patagonia, and set out to complete seven marathons on seven continents in seven days.


“Originally, I’d rung Mike up to see if he might have any interest in climbing Everest,” says Fiennes, a gallant gent who insists you call him “Ran.” “But when he learned you can’t do it in under three months, he proposed the marathons instead, to keep it short and sweet.”


Short and sweet? Only for a pair who in 1993 spent 95 days dragging 500-pound sleds across Antarctica. On the marathon trip, air transport alone would have crushed most mortals: 11 flights, 45,000 miles, and 75 hours in the sky.


British Airways helped by comping the men with first-class seats, but Fiennes and Stroud still had to make their flights if they were going to stay on track. Twice, they had only six hours to land, get through customs, run a marathon, and catch their next plane. Their itinerary took them on an east-north-west horseshoe, from Tierra del Fuego, in Chile, out and back to the Falkland Islands (a last-minute substitute for Antarctica’s South Shetland Islands, where a storm had halted flights), then on to Sydney, Singapore, London, Cairo, and, finally, New York, for the only formal, everyone-else-is-doing-it marathon of the lot. They ran their first marathon in 3:45; they crossed the finish line in Central Park in 5:25. Both men nearly quit after the heat and humidity of Singapore, where Stroud started passing “brown muck” in his urine.


“Myoglobin,” he recalls. “My muscle-tissue destruction had reached 500 times the normal rate.” A gastroenterologist, Stroud is one of the world’s leading experts on physical responses to extreme conditions. He says he and Ran made fine guinea pigs for his research, which, he points out, suggests that some runners may not require extended periods of recovery.


“The day after we returned, I went straight back to work,” he says. “Not a problem.”

Heinz StĂĽcke: Pedaling the Planet

Heinz Stucke: Pedaling the Planet

IN 1962, 22-YEAR-OLD tool and die maker Heinz StĂĽcke rode out of Hövelhof, Germany, on a three-speed bicycle, with $300 in his pocket and a plan to see the world. After 42 years and 300,000 miles, there’s still more he wants to see. Sometime in the early eighties, after two decades with no fixed address, StĂĽcke decided to extend his trip to every country on the globe.


“It was clear that I wasn’t going to stop,” he says. “One day I said, ‘I am going to drop dead on my bicycle.’ ” So in 1996, when he notched his last country—the Seychelles—he just kept going.


At first, he pedaled simply to “see around the next corner.” But as the years piled up, he was driven as much by not wanting to return home, citing “the fear of going back to the factory, and to the very small-minded people in my village.”


StĂĽcke, a compact man with a friendly smile, says he averages 68 miles a day, lugging 80-plus pounds of gear. He’s spent around $130,000 in all, funding his travels with sales of an autobiographical booklet and photographs, and occasional donations—including, in 1963, $500 from Ethiopia’s emperor at the time, Haile Selassie. Along the way, he’s been hit by a truck in Chile’s Atacama Desert, chased by an angry Haitian mob, beaten unconscious by Egyptian soldiers, detained by Cameroon’s military for “slandering the state” (“I have no idea what I did wrong,” says StĂĽcke), and attacked by bees while bathing in a river in Mozambique. But even when Zimbabwean rebels shot him in the foot, in 1980, StĂĽcke never considered quitting. “In the middle of Africa, you don’t have a choice, anyway,” he says. “You don’t go to the nearest airport and fly home.”


Now 64, StĂĽcke has set up temporary shop in Paris to sort through souvenirs, photos, and letters he accumulated during his days on the road. Since 2001, finances have limited his travels to half the year, but he’s chasing the 22 or so remaining territories—like Greenland and Christmas Island—that he needs to capture the title of world’s most traveled person.


“It is not my real ambition, but it is something to keep your eyes on,” he says of the record. “Which is what we all need, isn’t it?”

Hiking Britain Naked

Steve Gough: Go Nude

“THERE’S A PART OF ME that says, Don’t be stupid,” Steve Gough confided to a reporter from the Glasgow-based Sunday Herald shortly before he strode into the hamlet of John o’Groat’s, at the northern tip of Scotland, this past January 22. “Just sort of go home and sort of be normal. But part of me thinks, Go on, Steve, go on.”


Seven months earlier, in June 2003, the rangy ex–Royal Marine turned New Ager, then 44, had departed Land’s End, Cornwall, on a bold mission—to walk the 900-mile length of Britain wearing naught but boots, a hat, and a rucksack, regardless of weather—and John o’Groat’s was the end of the road. The man Fleet Street calls “the Naked Rambler” had been arrested 14 times, spent nearly five months behind bars, had his nose broken by a gang of thugs, and suffered public excoriation at the hands of his estranged common-law wife, Alison Ward, for deserting their two children, ages six and seven. (Her tart assessment in the Scottish Daily Record: “I think he was struggling with the anonymity of his life.”)


There’s no law in the UK against public nudity (Gough was arrested for breaching the peace, among other charges), but in recent years emboldened nudists—including one who chained himself to a gate at Prime Minister Tony Blair’s London residence—have adopted the language of the American civil rights movement, aiming to “stop the segregation” of people who prefer to let it all hang out. In line with this loosely knit group, the soft-spoken, occasionally stuttering Gough insists he’s neither streaker nor naturist but an advocate of “the freedom to be yourself.”


“If there was a catalyst, it was one summer when I was looking after my children,” says Gough, speaking by telephone from his girlfriend’s London flat. “They’d strip off and run around naked, and I thought it was great. But I started to notice how often other adults would suggest, in subtle ways, that they put their clothes back on. It really galvanized me. I realized that most of us are damaged in that way from childhood—taught to feel shame.”


What’s next for Gough? A documentary, a book deal, and, no doubt, ongoing legal hassles. “The walk hasn’t ended,” he insists. “The question—do I want to be me or what others want me to be?—didn’t end at John o’Groat’s. It continues.”

Vacation in War-Time Iraq

Derick Williams & Harvey Gough: “Baghdad Sounded Like Fun”

“THERE I WAS, OUTSIDE the Palestine Hotel, sitting in front of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle and sipping an Amstel tall boy,” recalls 35-year-old Texan Derick Williams of his first hours cruising wartime Baghdad, in April 2003. “Then somebody started shooting at us. It was a little surreal.”


Probably so. At the time, Baghdad had just fallen and was rife with looting and potshots. Some 135 U.S. soldiers had been killed and another 495 reportedly wounded. Williams wasn’t in town as an aid worker, journalist, or human shield—he was a freelance risk enthusiast, making him a prime candidate to be shot or arrested. But Williams, a burly Dallas home restorer, didn’t mind at all. “I went for the adventure,” he says, “and I just felt like everything would be OK.”


Williams was traveling with a partner, a 65-year-old Army vet, superpatriot, and burger-joint tycoon named Harvey Gough, who was on a quest to find a Saddam Hussein statue to match the one of Vladimir Lenin perched outside his Dallas restaurant. (“I went because Tommy Franks said I couldn’t,” scowls Gough. He served with the original leader of Operation Iraqi Freedom during the first Gulf war, when Franks was an assistant division commander in the First Cavalry.) After flying to Jordan, the two hired a driver and a Chevy Suburban and bluffed their way into Iraq, claiming to be from a Texas food bank. Their first stop was an isolated airstrip called H3, which was guarded by U.S. Special Forces in tricked-out dune buggies.


“They were big, buff guys in caps and sunglasses, and their guns were drawn,” Williams says. “They were really edgy.”


Other highlights from the five-day tour included browsing for AK-47s at the Baghdad souk and whistling their way into the heavily guarded HQ of the Army’s V Corps. Their hairiest moment came during a day trip to Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit, when Gough tried to swipe a flag from an abandoned police station. A pissed-off mob chased him away. “That was Harvey’s thing,” sighs Williams. “These guys thought he was being disrespectful, and I thought they were right.”


In the end, Gough didn’t find his statue, but Williams certainly scored a lifetime of adventure. “I’d do it again,” he says. “In a second.”

The post Let Us Now Praise Crazy Mofos appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

For decades, no one has dared to run the treacherous lengths of the waters that helped launch the modern age of exploration. Civil war, freelance rebels, capricious bandits, irascible hippos, surly crocs, billions of malarial mosquitoes, and scores of rapids so deadly they're rated a suicidal Class VI—all have conspired to keep paddlers from navigating the full 4,160 miles of the storied, sacred, and cursed river Nile.

But this spring, two separate expeditions on the world's longest river—one led by Americans shooting an Imax film, the other by hardcore international paddlers backed by the global humanitarian group CARE—are well on their way to bagging a pair of historic prizes: the first simultaneous source-to-sea descents of the Nile along its two main tributaries.

On Christmas Day 2003, six paddlers on the four-month, 2,700-mile Imax/Nile First Descent Expedition launched from Lake Tana, Ethiopia, the headwaters of the Blue Nile, in an attempt to be the first to run the river all the way to the Mediterranean. On January 17, CARE's five-month, 3,473-mile Settle the Nile trip set out from Lake Victoria, the legendary source of the White Nile: The seven teammates plan to punch through more big water en route than anyone else on record, riding the river from Uganda to Khartoum, Sudan, where the White Nile and the Blue Nile converge, and on through Egypt to the coast.

Considering that both the White Nile and the Blue Nile have Everest-like ratings on the adventure scale, the efforts will be inspiring, even if the teams wash out.

“I can't begin to explain how incredible it's been already,” says Imax paddler Pasquale Scaturro, 50, a Colorado-based geophysicist and adventure guide, who led the 2001 expedition that put blind climber Eric Weihenmayer on the summit of Mount Everest. “We've had a couple of flips,” Scaturro told şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř from Khartoum, Sudan. “We've had a hippo surface right in front of the raft. We've been shot at by shiftas [bandits]. We got arrested in the highlands.” (Ethiopian authorities didn't like the look of their travel permits.) “And a croc,” he added, “chomped one of our oars.”

Over on the CARE trip, Natalie McComb, a 31-year-old New Zealander, reported by e-mail that the crew has survived “frighteningly big water,” particularly in Uganda's Murchison Falls National Park, where there were “upwards of 35 to 40 rapids, and crocodiles and hippos by the dozen in each pool.” Couple that with the Sudanese war zones, she added, and it's no wonder these rivers still offer some unclaimed prizes.

If that seems improbable, it's important to remember that the Nile has stymied travelers for ages. Great explorers of the 19th century—people like British notable John Hanning Speke, who in 1858 discovered the source of the White Nile—struggled for years to map the river (or, in the case of David Livingstone, died trying). But by the 20th century, navigation was the sticking point: Rafters could run the river—but only with lengthy portages.
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Today's teams are equipped with 16-foot self-bailing, inflatable rafts (along with hardshell kayaks), and they generally have to portage around only unbeatable obstacles like dams and some of the worst whitewater imaginable.

Harder to negotiate is the AK-47 factor. Sudan, through which both crews must travel, is embroiled in a 25-year-old civil war—between government forces and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement—a conflict in which civilians have been killed, maimed, and raped indiscriminately. The war has claimed an estimated two million lives in the past decade; before the recent lull in hostilities, securing safe passage through the country was nearly impossible. Both teams hired armed guards.

And though paddlers today often play on parts of the river—the White Nile in Uganda is a favorite kamikaze kayak spot for big-wave surfers like Brad Ludden—there's been a virtual shutdown of long-distance Nile trips for nearly 40 years, according to Richard Bangs, cofounder of California-based outfitter Mountain Travel Sobek. As a director of the Imax movie, slated for release in 2005, Bangs helped scout the gnarliest parts of the Imax journey.

A British military team completed a Blue Nile descent in 1968 but covered much of the journey on foot. And no one has tackled the entire White Nile since 1951, when American John Goddard and two friends made it to the sea from Lake Victoria's remotest headstream, in Burundi, but were forced to walk around the nastiest whitewater. “Taking nothing away from Goddard's accomplishment,” Bangs said, “there is no way he could have run Class V and VI rapids in the collapsible kayaks he had.”

Potentially fatal risks remain. The Imax paddlers—who plan to reach the coast by May—have been forced to portage several rapids and rappel down the side of Tis Isat (“Smoke of Fire”) Falls. The CARE crew (slated to finish by July) has had similarly scary spills, plus croc attacks.

Still ahead, though, are mammoth swamps, staggering heat, Egypt's Lake Nasser (famed for its headwinds), and the Aswan Dam (a tricky portage, to say the least). But the teams seem prepared for any challenge. Before setting out, Scaturro—afraid he'd get dinged for ignoring the real source of the Blue Nile—hiked up the Ethiopian Plateau to the river's trickling (unraftable) wellspring. Joining scores of pilgrims carrying gourds and canteens—many consider the water holy—Scaturro filled a Nalgene bottle and taped it shut.

“And I'm going to bring it with me,” he said, “the rest of the way.”

The post Nile Takedown appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

Beyond the museums and Brie, Europe is a wild continent packed with adventure hot spots, where you can follow a day of hard play with a vintage Chateau Margaux. From Chamonix, France’s alpine-sports hub, to Girona, Spain’s cycling-mad town, we uncover five hamlets with unstoppable spirit and Old World Class.


High Times in the High Alps


Where the Nors Gods Play


Gnocchi by the Lake


Lance’s Spanish Retreat


Austrian Allure
PLUS: Europbash!
and

The Mountain Magnet

Fast times in Chamonix, France, the once and future epicenter of high-alpine daredevilry

SOME PRONOUNCE THE X. Others don’t. But Chamonix was extreme long before there were X Games. The highest mountain in Western Europe, 15,771-foot Mont Blanc, sits like a brooding Buddha next to one of the deepest valleys in the Alps, creating an almost Himalayan altitude difference between village and summit. Jagged, needlelike peaks called aiguilles line the valley, shadowy and menacing in the morning but inviting when they glow in the afternoon sun. This irresistible dichotomy has drawn Europe’s most serious mountaineers to the Haute-Savoie region since 1786, when Jacques Balmat and Dr. Michel-Gabriel Paccard became the first to summit Mont Blanc. But this burgeoning alpine town of 10,000 (which swells to upwards of 100,000 in the summer) is no mountaineering museum; it’s still the jumping-off point for hardcore climbing in the Alps—if you can penetrate the inner circle of the Chamonix climbing elite, that is. But don’t let the cliques intimidate you. At Chamonix, ±ôľ±˛ú±đ°ůłŮĂ© remains the dominant spirit.
WHERE TO PLAY Unless you’re comfortable with multipitch alpine routes, stay away from the Dru, perhaps the signature climbing peak in Chamonix. Instead, head north up the opposite side of the valley for the non-technical hike up to Le Lac Blanc, a high-alpine lake at 7,717 feet, halfway up the Aiguilles Rogues, and soak in the spectacular views of the Mont Blanc massif. The Chamonix tourist office (011-33-450-53-23-33, ) can connect you with mountaineering schools. Coquoz Sports (011-33-450-53-15-12, ) is a good place to rent or buy mountaineering equipment.

APRÉS–ADVENTURE For a fine French filet mignon, head to Le Panier des Quatre Saisons (011-33-450-53-98-77). Microbreweries have been slow in arriving, but the Micro Brasserie de Chamonix (011-33-450-53-61-59) sets a good precedent. The burgers are anything but micro, and if you’re lucky, local band the Crevassholes will be playing.
WHERE TO STAY At the Hameau Albert Premier (doubles, $208 to $286 per night; 011-33-450-53-05-09, ), an 11-acre estate tucked away in the center of Chamonix, you can choose from one of 27 sleekly furnished hotel rooms, a chalet that sleeps six, or a restored farmhouse with 12 rooms, cavernous baths, and rustically elegant furnishings. There’s also an indoor-outdoor pool and a climbing wall, and spa treatments can be arranged.
HOW TO GET THERE Chamonix is a little more than an hour’s drive from the Geneva airport, which is served from the U.S. by Air France (800-237-2747, ). Rent a car at the airport or catch an ATS shuttle (011-33-450-53-63-97, ), which runs vans to Chamonix for $50 one-way.

Go Berserker

Nothing is too wild for the adventure pilgrims who converge on Voss, Norway, for summer thrills

SIXTY MILES INLAND FROM BERGEN, in western Norway, the rustic ski village of Voss (pop. 14,000) sits quietly at the base of 3,825-foot Groseda Mountain on the shores of Lake Vangsvatnet. Until, that is, the annual Ekstremsportveko (“Extreme Sports Week”) comes to town. From June 22 through 27, boaters and mountain bikers will swarm the festival tent to see if their killer moves made the daily highlight DVD, and Norway’s best pop bands, like Surferosa, will take the stage. The annual expo features national competitions in downhill mountain biking and bouldering, but there are clinics for newbies, too. The truly intrepid should inquire about the local delicacy—smalahove, a sheep’s head served eyes and all. Clearly, the berserker spirit is alive and well.
WHERE TO PLAY Voss offers up every variation of extreme you can imagine: Class III and IV rivers for rafting, Class IV and V rapids and waterfalls for steepcreeking, fjords for sea kayaking, scenic launchpads for sick air sports, and plenty of trails for trekking and mountain biking. Notch a first descent on a roadside creek, or huck off 30-foot Nosebreaker Falls. Kit up at the Voss Rafting Senter (011-47-56-51-05-25, ). For a full-day mountain-bike ride, jump the train to Finse, rent a rig at Finse 1222 (two-day rental, $56– $70; 011-47-56-52-71-00, ), and pedal 55 miles home via the Rallarvegen, an abandoned dirt road with plenty of hills.

APRÉS–ADVENTURE The town’s best nightclub is Pentagon, at the Park Hotel Vossevangen (011-47-56-51-13-22, www.parkvoss.no/english), but the best midsummer nights are reserved for a bonfire with friends on the beach, where you can watch the sun…stay up. Skinny-dipping is strongly advised.
WHERE TO STAY Fleischer’s Hotel (011-47-56-52-05-00, www.fleischers.no) looks like it did when it opened in 1864, but its 90 rooms are bright with antique furniture and paintings by local artists. Better still, bring a small posse of two to four people and rent one of Fleischer’s 30 kitchenette apartments right on Lake Vangsvatnet. Doubles run $217; apartments cost $145 to $235 per night.
HOW TO GET THERE To make the most of your stay in Voss, fly to Bergen on SAS (800-221-2350, ) or Iceland Air (800-223-5500, ), then rent a car so you can launch your kayak into inviting whitewater or take classic walks—like one along the rim of Sognefjord, Norway’s Grand Canyon. Visitnorway.com is an excellent site for planning your trip.

Espresso Yourself

Arco, an Italian lakeside paradise, has steady breezes, a clifftop castle, and classic climbing crags

arco italy

Kingdom come: The 12th-century Castello Di Arco

SINCE THE TOWERING LIMESTONE WALLS of north-central Italy’s Basso Sarca valley were discovered by climbers in the early 1980s, the ancient Roman village of Arco, 50 miles north of Verona, has been a hot spot for European adventurers. Situated where the Dolomites meet the palm trees and oleander of northern Italy’s lakes region, Arco and the 9,000-foot peaks of the Pre-Alpi not only offer some of the continent’s best sport climbing, but the steady breezes on nearby Lago di Garda (Italy’s largest) draw windsurfers from around the world. Trails like the 19-mile Tremalzo (etched into solid rock by Italian and Austrian soldiers during World War I) provide world-class mountain biking, while the valley’s roads frequently host the Giro d’Italia cycling race. With a crenellated castle overlooking its cobblestone streets and ancient piazza, Arco looks downright medieval—until you discover its well-equipped outfitting shops, its outdoor cafĂ©s, and the 82-foot Rock Master wall, Europe’s tallest artificial climbing structure and home to an international free-climbing competition that draws the likes of Lynn Hill and Japan’s Yuji Hirayama each September.
WHERE TO PLAY Start by heading to the Climber’s Lounge, two blocks north of the city center at the base of Monte Colodri, where you can visit the Friends of Arco Mountain Guide Service for beta on the best local climbing (011-39-333-1661401, ). You’ll find some 135 bolted routes at Massone, a 90-foot limestone crag two miles northeast of town; advanced rock rats can consider 5.10 to 5.14 multipitch routes up nearly-1,000-foot Monte Colodri. Rent a mountain bike at Bike Shop Giuliani (011-39-0464-518305, ) and pedal up to 5,463-foot Tremalzo Pass, which overlooks shimmering Lago di Garda. Or tackle the 25-mile Arco Bike Nature route, which winds above the olive orchards of Massone to 4,000-foot Monte Velo. For windsurfing gear and lake access, visit the Conca d’Oro Windsurfing Center, in nearby Torbole (011-39-0464-506251, ).

APRÉS–ADVENTURE Enjoy strangolapreti, or spinach gnocchi, beneath the frescoes at Alla Lega (011-39-0464-516205, ). Afterwards, hang out with the windsurfers in Torbole, where Discoteca Conca d’Oro (011-39-0464-505045) cranks Latin dance tunes till 4 a.m.
WHERE TO STAY If pitching a tent in one of Arco’s campgrounds—Campground Citta di Arco has a pool—isn’t your style, do what Lynn Hill does and rent a one- or two-bedroom apartment in the Arco Guesthouse ($119–$150; 011-39-3355-241312, ). Each newly renovated suite has a kitchen, wood floors, and DSL access, and on the lower level there’s a sauna and a bouldering wall.
HOW TO GET THERE Arco is an hour and a half’s drive from Verona and a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Milan. Both cities are served by British Airways (800-247-9297, ) from the U.S. Or take a bus from Verona’s Porta Nuova train station to Riva (two and a half hours) and then on to Arco (20 minutes).

My Girona

Downshift into a Mediterranean pace and spin like Lance in Spain’s Catalonian hideaway

TEMPERATE, TRANQUIL, AND EQUIDISSTANT from mountains and sea, the Catalonian city of Girona (pop. 80,000) is the nesting ground of an elusive migratory species: the professional cyclist. Every winter, 10 to 15 of them—including five-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong—descend on Girona, establishing seasonal headquarters and stretching their shaved legs on forest roads in the Pyrenean foothills or along the sunny Mediterranean coast.
Girona proper is steeped in the history of its medieval old city, a cobbled labyrinth of narrow alleys and watchtowers separated from the city’s modern business district by the smooth-flowing Onyar River. But that’s not to say it’s a backwater. Girona is to Barcelona what Boulder is to Denver: an adventure-sports utopia just an hour’s drive from a major metropolis. Girona’s foothills, like Boulder’s, quickly ascend to high-altitude skiing and climbing. But what puts Girona in a league of its own is the Costa Brava, a white-sand stretch of Catalonian coast less than an hour’s drive east, overcrowded by sun worshipers in summer but serrated by a procession of deep coves perfect for secluded diving, kayaking, or romancing.
WHERE TO PLAY Start with the VĂ­as Verdes (“Green Paths”), part of a countrywide network of more than 500 miles of dirt and gravel railroad tracks turned biking trails. Sixty-five miles of VĂ­as Verdes radiate from Girona, highlighted by the 50-mile out-and-back route to the coastal port of Sant Feliu de GuĂ­xols. Refuel on tapas and then power the short climb to the hermitage of Sant Elm, a lookout point with a grand view of the Mediterranean. Bike rentals are available in Girona at the Centre BTT de Catalunya (011-34-972-468-242, ). Visit for VĂ­as Verdes information. If lactic acid has your quads in knots, give your upper body a workout in the sea. Kayaking Costa Brava (011-34-972-773-806), headquartered in L’Escala, 25 miles northeast of Girona, rents gear and offers a full menu of guided trips, including a demanding six-hour tour of the Cap de Creus, a 54-square-mile reserve, the marine portion of which teems with fish ($60, including all gear and guide fees).

APRÉS–ADVENTURE In Girona, grab a beer in your bike shorts along the Rambla de la Libertat, a river walk lined with casual restaurants, bars, and cafĂ©s. For serious dining, change into your evening finery, then cross the pedestrian Sant Agusti bridge to the Plaza de la Independencia, where you’ll find Boira, a river-view restaurant serving specialties like arroz de lobregant, spiced rice and seafood (about $63 per person for three courses; 011-34-972-203-096). Nights go off at nearby Platea (011-34-972-22-72-88, ), a sprawling 1929 theater transformed into a thumping dance club.
WHERE TO STAY With medieval stone walls, antique wood furniture, and bougainvillea cascading from every balcony, Pension Bellmirall (doubles, $70, including breakfast; 011-34-972-20-40-09) is a seven-room boutique hotel glowing with old-city charm.
HOW TO GET THERE Girona is 60 miles northeast of Barcelona. Delta (800-221-1212, ), among other airlines, offers direct flights. Frequent and speedy trains ($16 round-trip, as many as three per hour) make the Barcelona–Girona run in less than 90 minutes. Added bonus: You can haul your bike at no extra cost.

The GemĂĽtlichkeit Glow

Pull on your lederhosen and go looking for kicks in Mayrhofen, Austria’s Tyrolean treasure

FORTY MILES SOUTHEAST OF INNSBRUCK, in southwestern Austria, Mayrhofen is what so many American mountain towns aspire to be. The authentic Tyrolean chalets (dating back 400 years), 3,600 year-round working-class residents (including cowherds in honest-to-god lederhosen), and absurdly picturesque location—in the nook of the spiny Ziller and Tuxer mountain ranges—exude what locals proudly call ˛µ±đłľĂĽłŮ±ôľ±ł¦łó°ě±đľ±łŮ: a warm, friendly, welcoming vibe. But once you leave Mayrhofen’s quaint cobblestone streets—and the German tourists drinking Zillertal Bier on sunny cafĂ© patios—the atmosphere changes dramatically. Atop the 10,000-foot mountains, storms move in and out quickly, adding a touch of excitement even to hiking. In the Zimmer Valley, the buzz comes from outings on the wild, glacier-fed Ziller and Zemm rivers. What you find in Mayrhofen is every Euro traveler’s dream: a charming Alpine village where ˛µ±đłľĂĽłŮ±ôľ±ł¦łó°ě±đľ±łŮ meets adrenaline rush.
WHERE TO PLAY Mayrhofen’s most popular activities are whitewater rafting and peak-to-peak hiking; local guides can also take you paragliding, horseback riding, mountain biking, climbing, and glacier skiing. Pick up a trekking map at Tourismusverband Mayrhofen (011-43-5285-67600, www.mayrhofen.com), the tourism office in the Europahaus on Dursterstrasse, then choose from hundreds of miles of trails, many of which eventually return to bus stops in the valley. For a warm-up outing (and awesome views of the glaciated spires in the heart of the Alps), hike the Steinerkogl trail, a steep two-mile climb gaining 3,500 feet from downtown to the shoulder of Brandberg Mountain. Serious thrill seekers can sign on for a guided canyoneering tour and spend an afternoon climbing waterfalls and rappelling into gorges. One-stop shopping for all activities starts with Action Club Zillertal (011-43-5285-62977, ).

APRÉS–ADVENTURE You can always slug flaming schnapps with young Austrians, Swedes, Aussies, and the odd Canadian at the downtown Scotland Yard Pub (011-43-5285-62339, ), but the best summer nightlife is found in restaurants, not bars. At Brugger Stube (011-43-5285-63793), you’re likely to share chateaubriand and a beer with a 70-year-old farmer from nearby Hollenzen. Don’t miss the Wirtshaus zum Griena (011-43-5285-62778, ), a 440-year-old tavern with soot-stained timbers and fewer than 20 tables, where local specialties like wilderer sandel (braised venison served with bread dumplings) are perfect for end-of-the-day refueling.
WHERE TO STAY The English-speaking Hubers—third-generation residents of Mayrhofen who also lead tandem paragliding flights—built Apparthotel Veronika (doubles, $135; 011-43-5285-633470, ) as a traditional chalet in 1985, and they’ve recently added a lavish, modern spa. Of the ten apartments, all with kitchens, 700-square-foot Suite Zillertal has the best views, overlooking the Zillertal Valley.
HOW TO GET THERE Fly to Innsbruck on Austrian Airlines (800-843-0002, ) or Lufthansa (800-645-3880, ), then catch one of the hourly trains east to Jenbach ($5, 30 minutes), where you’ll transfer to a southbound Mayrhofen train ($6, one hour). Train seats can easily be booked at the station; contact Austrian Federal Railways () for more information.

Small Is Beautiful

Want remote, tiny, and far off the beaten track? Search out these cozy pockets of Old World tradition and scenic soul.

INVERIE, SCOTLAND This northwestern burg, on the edge of Loch Nevis, is so far off the road network that the only way to get here is by boat. If there’s any action in town, you’ll find it at the Old Forge, which The Guinness Book of World Records says is the most remote pub in mainland Britain. Surrounding Inverie is some of the most Wordsworth-worthy hiking in the world. The craggy 2,612-foot knoll Sgurr Coire Choinnichean overlooks the village; close by are the taller peaks of the Munro Range, including 3,412-foot Sgurr na Ciche. The Pier House (011-44-1687-462347, ), a 19th-century stone lodge—its motto is “We have no TV, no shops, and mobiles don’t work here”—sleeps eight; doubles cost $170 and up per night, including breakfast and dinner.
CALA GONONE, ITALY As one of Italy’s prime vacation spots, Sardinia is hopelessly overrun in the summer. But one quiet corner on the east side is Cala Gonone (cala means cove), which has some of the best beach-based climbing in the world. The limestone routes range from 5.8 to 5.13, and an hour’s walk inland you’ll find Tiscali, a mysterious 3,000-year-old Nuragic village, surrounded by more climbable cliffs. Cala Gonone’s Hotel Nettuno (011-39-0784-93310, ) rents doubles from $69.

STARY SMOKOVEC, SLOVAKIA The High Tatras boast some of the best hiking in Eastern Europe, and the diminutive ski town of Stary Smokovec is your gateway. In the summer, the hills offer a full range of mountain-biking opportunities, from serious alpine to cross-country routes. Tatrasport Adam and Andreas (011-421-52-442-52-41, ) is a gear shop right in town that rents skis and bikes. Kick back at the luxurious, Bavarian-style Grand Hotel (doubles, $64–$126; 011-421-52-44-22-15456, ) with a little tokay wine while listening to Carpathian folk music.
Ă…LAND, FINLAND Some 6,500 islands and rocks off the southwestern coast of Finland make up the semiautonomous Ă…land Islands. (Swedish, not Finnish, is spoken here.) Known as one of Northern Europe’s most stunning rural retreats, the archipelago offers plenty of walking and canoeing. Anglers can make a pilgrimage to Kokar, a tiny islet about 50 miles off the mainland, hire a boat and guide, and pull a 25-pound Baltic pike from the shallows. Afterwards, retreat to the Brudhäll Hotell (doubles, $80–$108; 011-358-18-55955, ) for a glass of mead and some Karelian hot pot, a pork-beef-and-lamb stew.
MONSTER, HOLLAND Who knew that windsurfing rocks in the Netherlands? The North Sea roils just off the former hippie village of Monster, 40 miles southwest of Amsterdam. You can find hotels up and down the coast, but the best place to stay is in very cool Rotterdam, 20 miles east. The Stammeshaus Bed and Breakfast (doubles, $57; 011-31-10-425-4500, ) is a homey cottage with a garden in a quiet neighborhood, just a short walk from the Netherlands Architecture Institute.

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BEFORE TRAVELING back to the Peruvian Andes for the first time in 17 years, Joe Simpson recalls, friends suggested the trip would do him good. “Because that’s what people believe, don’t they? That it’s cathartic to go back to where you had a horrible, painful time, so you can get over it.” He scoffs, “What a load of bollocks!”

Mountaineering, Touching the Void, Peru, Andes

“I’ll always be known for cutting the rope”: Yates, in Penrith, England

Mountaineering, Touching the Void, Peru, Andes

“What happpened in Peru didn’t push us apart”: Simpson, in Kendal, England

Mountaineering, Touching the Void, Peru, Andes

Stills from Touching the Void:Clockwise from left, Actor Brendan Mackey as Simpson trapped in the crevasse; a moment of hope after the improbable escape; Siula Grande.

The 44-year-old British mountaineer had agreed to fly to Peru in 2002 with his former climbing partner, Simon Yates, 40, to shoot scenes for Touching the Void, a new film based on Simpson’s 1988 book of the same name, a million-plus bestseller and modern adventure classic. The $2 million film, directed by Academy Award winner Kevin Macdonald and distributed by IFC Films, is one of those rare documentaries to see national theatrical release, kicking off in select cities on January 23 and expanding through February and March. Rarer still, it actually gets mountaineering right.


“For once, someone’s done a feature film about climbing very, very well,” says Michael Brown, 37, an accomplished Himalayan mountaineer and director of Farther Than the Eye Can See, şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Television’s documentary about blind climber Erik Weihenmayer and his 2001 ascent of Mount Everest. “Usually, it’s so far from reality, you just sit there and laugh. But this movie has credibility right from the start.”


Faithful to the book, Touching the Void chronicles Simpson and Yates’s 1985 perilous first ascent of the 4,500-foot west face of 20,853-foot Siula Grande. Climbing alpine style—fast and light, with no set camps—they took on bitter winds and heavy-laden cornices of snow but summited in three and a half days.


On the descent, however, Simpson fell down a 20-foot ice cliff. With his right leg shattered, he relied on Yates to lower him down the mountain 300 feet at a time, on two knotted ropes. They made slow progress for a few hours, a blizzard descending upon them. But when Simpson slid over a second cliff, Yates, unable to see his partner or haul him up, fought for over an hour to keep both of them from plummeting into the void. As a last resort to save himself, Yates made the only choice he could: He cut the rope.


Miraculously, Simpson survived a 150-foot fall into a deep crevasse. Yates, who couldn’t hear Simpson’s shouts, gave his partner up for dead. Plagued by guilt, Yates made it back to their base camp while Simpson endured an agonizing self-rescue, escaping the crevasse and dragging himself over the glacier and rocky moraine for three and a half days, crazed with thirst, and desperately following Yates’s footprints even as fresh snow erased them. (Upon returning to England, Simpson underwent six operations and two years of rehab before resuming climbing in the major ranges.)


Macdonald, 36—a Briton who won the Oscar for One Day in September, a 2000 documentary about the Israeli athletes murdered at the 1972 Munich Olympics—struggled at first with how to tell the highly psychological story. “I’m a purist,” he says. “I don’t like casually blurring the lines of documentary and drama.”


He settled on a clearly delineated docudrama. A reenactment of the climb and Simpson’s self-rescue—featuring British actors Brendan Mackey, as Simpson, and Nicholas Aaron, as Yates, as well as several stuntmen—was filmed at three locations in the Alps during punishing snowstorms. Those sequences are intercut with London studio interviews featuring Simpson, Yates, and Richard Hawking, a fellow Brit who tended their base camp. The three narrate the action, their faces and voices revealing not only what it felt like in the moment but what it’s been like to live with the memories. Yates stammers as he describes the instant he remembered he had a knife in his pack; Simpson’s eyes well up when he recalls his near-death loneliness.

For the film’s few Peru segments, Simpson and Yates doubled as their younger selves for long-distance shots of the snow-fluted couloirs of Siula Grande. They didn’t stay long. “Seeing those landmarks, the dread came screaming back,” Simpson says. “It was deeply unpleasant.” Two weeks after returning home, Simpson was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. During the shoot, Yates lost patience with Macdonald’s multiple takes. By the end of their time in Peru, he and the director weren’t speaking. “He accused me of having repressed emotions about what happened,” Yates recalls, mystified. “I was just ready to be done with it.”


For both climbers, the film promises renewed—and bittersweet—notoriety. Following the 1988 publication of Touching the Void, Simpson became a much-sought-after corporate speaker, and he went on to write five more books. Yates encountered mixed reviews upon returning home in 1985. As the story played out in the press, not everyone got it straight: UK newspaper The Mail on Sunday wrote that Yates “had tried and sentenced his best friend to death.” However, once Yates and Simpson published their own accounts, most climbers took up Yates’s defense. “Anyone who’s critical of Simon hasn’t got a clue,” says British climbing great Sir Chris Bonington, 69. “If you have a grasp of the circumstances, you appreciate that he had no choice.”


Despite the flak, Yates didn’t miss a beat. Two months after the Peru epic, he was in the Alps; he’s never lacked for climbing partners, and today he runs Mountain Dream, an international guiding business. For all that, though, he remains the Guy Who Cut the Rope.


“You’ve got to laugh at it,” Yates says. And he does, in The Flame of şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř, his second book, published in 2002 by The Mountaineers Books. In it, he describes the hazing he endured at a London construction site where he worked—often roped up—to pay for trips. Nicknamed “Slasher,” he arrived one day to find SLASHER WAS ‘ERE penned across a poster showing a fallen high-rise worker dead in a pool of blood.


In his book, Simpson describes Yates as “everything I would like to have been…dependable, sincere, ready to see life as a joke.” But over the years, the two drifted apart, teaming up on only one foreign expedition, to India’s Garhwal Himalaya, in 1991. “What happened in Peru didn’t push us apart,” Simpson says, “but it didn’t make us closer, either.” The new film appears to have had the same effect: As it toured festivals late last fall, the two had a brief falling out over promotional duties.


“It’s two-edged, isn’t it?” Yates says of the odd fame the rope cutting still brings him. “I make my living around mountaineering, so it’s helped. It’s gotten my name out there. But it is strange. Whatever I do in life, I’ll be known for that.”

Typically, when Hollywood goes to the mountains, strange things happen: Climbers leap from helicopters with nitroglycerin strapped to their backs and Sylvester Stallone fires a gun that shoots bolts into solid granite. All of which is good for high-velocity viewing but makes real mountaineers smack their foreheads in stupefaction. Below, we critique four screen moments best enjoyed with a climbing buddy and a few heady stouts.


Vertical Limit (2000)
The Reel Story:
On K2, Chris O’Donnell leaps over a massive gap and instantly glues himself to a far wall with his ice axes.


The Real Story:
His arms would have been torn from their sockets, perhaps making this film worth watching.


Mission: Impossible 2 (2000)
The Reel Story:
Tom Cruise solos unroped up a cliff, performing an unlikely series of dynos and crucifix-style deadman hangs.


The Real Story:
Cruise did the climbing, but there was a cable holding his ass to the wall—they just digitally erased it.


Cliffhanger (1993)
The Reel Story:
On a Tyrolean traverse over a canyon, Michelle Joyner’s metal harness buckle breaks and she plunges to her death.


The Real Story:
Bad Michelle—too many doughnuts! Those harnesses are rated to only 3,372 pounds of force!


The Holy Mountain (1926)
The Reel Story:
Cut from a dancing Leni Riefenstahl to two climbers on an icy ledge. One produces an accordion and starts to play; a bit later, his cohort falls off.


The Real Story:
Mein Gott! He must have dispatched his partner with the sinister HAPE (high-altitude polka execution) method!

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Ten years and tens of millions in the making, the Manhattan Waterfront Greenway, a 32-mile round-the-island circuit for bike riders, officially opens in August. We took a test ride on the route, a hodgepodge of new trails, established paths, and city streets offering 22 miles of waterside touring and a good three-plus hours of urban adventure. The biggest tip? You won’t need a bodyguard, but a patch kit can’t hurt.

Illustration by Mark Todd

1.) Start at Battery Park and follow the East River north.


2.) At East 37th Street, detour around the United Nations and head up First Avenue. Beware: The far-right lane is for express buses. They’re big; you’re small.


3.) A portage greets you at East 81st Street—up 57 steps to the walkway above FDR Drive.


4.) Be wary of the GUYS CASTING FOR STRIPED BASS along the promenade in the East 90s, unless you don’t mind impromptu navel piercings.


5.) COOL OFF IN HARLEM with a ±ôľ±łľĂł˛Ô shaved ice from a pushcart vendor ($1); the cup is ideal for slurping while you pedal.


6.) Need a burger ‘n’ beer detour? Hit the Tubby Hook CafĂ©, at 348 Dyckman, near the Hudson River. Don’t be fooled by an apparent short cut down the old carriage trail south of the parking lot—it dead-ends (literally) on Amtrak’s very active rails.


7.) In the West 60s, dig the abstract piles of rusted metal and exposed timber remains of ancient wharves.


8.) From the West 20s south, expect traffic—oblivious in-line skaters, clueless pedestrians, and a few barrel-chested day traders who think they’re Lance. If one of them extends a middle finger because you didn’t get out of the way fast enough, don’t sweat it. This may be the Greenway, but it’s still New York.

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CYCLING THE AEGEAN

The whitewash wonders of Greece

ISLAND HOPPING IN GREECE AND TURKEY—ON TWO WHEELS
After 30 miles of biking along the jagged shores of the Aegean Sea, my seven companions and I rolled into GĂĽllĂĽk, a sleepy port on the southwest coast of Turkey, about 600 road miles south of Istanbul. We walked into a bar, where a grizzly fisherman put down his glass of raki, an aniseed-flavored Turkish alcohol, and swaggered up to us, laughing. “Good!” he roared, gold teeth flashing, while plucking at my spandex tights. “°Ő±đ˛ő±đ°ě°ěĂĽ°ů!“—thank you—I yelled back, striking my best superhero pose. The bar erupted, raki spilling everywhere.
GĂĽllĂĽk was our second stop on a trip that began at an ancient mausoleum in the Turkish town of Bodrum and ended ten days and 350 miles later at a nude beach on the Greek island of Naxos. A bike route that begins with crypts and ends with public nudity might seem odd, but in Greece and Turkey the ghosts of the past and the pleasures of the present happily coexist. Combining small portions allowed us to explore two cultures, and our criteria were simple: ocean views and ancient ruins.
After an olive-and-tomato breakfast in GĂĽllĂĽk, we continued north and soon hit the Laba Dagi Mountains. We’d creep uphill, negotiating a steady slalom of sheep dung, and then race down the other side at 40 mph before hitting the next hill. At the end of our second 40-mile day we turned off the main road at a rotting wooden sign that indicated the village of Kapikiri. Instantly, trucks gave way to donkey carts, tinkling cowbells replaced blaring horns, and pantaloon-wearing women harvested vegetables in boulder-strewn fields. Dead tired, we checked into the Pelikan Pansiyon, a rustic inn just beyond the village’s medieval walls, and slept until we had to pedal off early the next morning. Over the next two days we worked our way 50 miles north through mountains and along ragged coast to the port town of Kusadasi, our launching point for Greece.

Greek ferries were made for bike touring. On a bike, you’re always the first on and the first off, blowing past waiting cars. On deck, you’re treated to an intimate view of Greek life: grandmothers unwrap tin foiled family feasts while teenage lovers neck behind the snack bar. After two hours, we stepped onto the sultry island of Samos, famous for its orchids and sweet wine. We ditched our panniers at the Hotel Samos, near the ferry terminal in the main town of VathĂ­, and set off to explore.
Ten miles over the island’s hilly spine we arrived in Pythagorio, where Pythagoras, the man who tormented generations of students with a2+b2=c2, was born 2,500 years ago. From Pythagorio we headed west, winding through olive groves and hill towns on one of the best 20-mile rides of our lives.
After sampling Samos, we jumped a ferry west to the Cyclades Islands and disembarked five hours later on Naxos, a windswept island that supplied the ancient world with marble. Checking into the Hotel Adriani was like dropping in on friends. The cheerful owners, father and son, welcomed us with a toast of kitron, a lemony elixir distilled only on the island.
The next morning, four of us biked 20 grueling mountain miles to Apollonas, on the island’s lonely northern tip, only to find that all the residents had left to attend a funeral. We headed back, parched and slightly delirious, stopping at a nude beach. With the cove to ourselves, we stretched out on the hot pebbles and soaked up the fading warmth of dusk. In that sublime moment I felt—like the bohemian writer Lawrence Durrell before me—”rocked and cherished by the present and past alike.”

Hiking the Dingle Peninsula

Getting lost—and found—on Ireland’s ancient tangle of trails

Rock on: a coastal vista along the trail

The path cut through undulating hillsides of green gorse and purple heather. Sheep danced away as we neared. We had walked alone for hours—lost—when two hikers appeared ahead. We prayed that they were shepherds who could guide us back to civilization, but instead we met two schoolteachers from New Hampshire, also lost. Our lyrical guidebook, The Dingle Way Companion, read, “Cross the field diagonally, clear a stile set in a stone wall and drop down through boughs of fuchsia, entwined as if in prayer. . . .”
Recreational hiking is still an emerging sport in Ireland, where working the fields once left little time for constitutionals. Nobody knows that better than Joss Lynam, the 78-year-old author and patriarch of Irish hiking, who led the push to expand the National Waymarked Ways (just Ways, for short), which link about 1,910 miles of ancient bog paths, goat spoors, and fisherman’s trails. “If you’re chasing sheep over the hills five days a week, you don’t want to do it on the weekend,” said Lynam. That’s changing. In 1991 there were only 12 Ways. Today there are 33. But Lyman was no help to us now, and in a late-afternoon routine that we repeated daily, we hitchhiked, wet, hungry, and happy back to our hotel.
There are no huts along the Ways, but farmers allow camping, and trails often pass through or near towns with hotels, hostels, and B&Bs. On this trip last fall, my wife and I fell for the village of Dingle and its cobblestone streets; blue, green, and orange row houses; and dark pubs. So instead of hiking the entire 95-mile Dingle Way, which hugs the perimeter of southwest Ireland’s Dingle Peninsula, we stayed for three days on the outskirts of town at spacious, modern Greenmount House, an inn with ocean views. We took daily hikes averaging 14 miles, crossing green fields and stark beaches. Mornings began with a buffet of smoked salmon and homemade breads and jams before we headed west from the inn through intermittent rain. We would survey Dingle’s harbor, looking for the wild but fish-begging dolphin named Fungi, then pick a direction and go.
On the flanks of 1,693-foot Mount Eagle, about five miles west of Dingle, we stood among the cattle and wildflowers, watching the morning mist rise to reveal craggy islands to the west and 3,000-foot Brandon Mountain to the north. We stopped to pluck blackberries. We stopped at the medieval ruins of Menard Castle and Celtic stone huts called clochain. We stopped to watch gannets dive from their cliffs into the water below, and we stopped to check the “guidebook.” Eventually we found a road and stuck out our thumbs.
On our final day, we walked through spongy, shoe-sucking peat bogs to the tip of Dingle Peninsula. Atop sandstone cliffs we looked down 500 feet to islets and caves. Later, when we were lost—again—we stumbled onto Kruger’s pub. After an hour of listening to the Gaelic tongue of farmers, we forged on, content to let the landscape lead the way. Finding our inn was a bit less important after the pub’s cool Guinness and hot whiskey.

Mountain Biking in Provence

Meet the Moab of France—sweet singletrack enhanced by olive groves and better wine

C’Est magnifique: the vineyards of Provence

At some point along a meandering ridge trail called the Grande RandonnĂ©e 9, the thought took hold: The region around Apt, in southern France, is a kissing cousin to that mountain-biking mother lode, Moab. Both areas are sun-drenched convergences of startling geology, sudden inclines, and long vistas, crisscrossed with technical trails. Apt even shares Moab’s Mars-colored riding surfaces—the powdery, ocher-infused dirt of Provence glows as lustrous as Utah’s sandstone. It just hurts a lot less when you biff on it.
But I had to set my revelation aside when the GR 9 turned abruptly to the right, sauntered among the stone ruins of a castle, plunged down an ivy-laced ravine, and skirted olive groves. When the ride finished in a town with cobblestone streets so narrow my bike could barely pull a U-turn, Moab’s fast-food franchises and prefab motels seemed, well, an ocean and a continent away.
Like the Impressionist painters who moved to Provence for the astonishing intensity of its light, mountain bikers also find much to their liking here. With more than 300 days of sunshine a year and frost-free winters, Provence’s riding season is long and hassle-free. The widely spaced trees—cedar, oak, juniper, and eucalyptus—keep trail duff and deadfall clutter to a minimum.
I first rode Provence three years ago. Near Nostradamus’s hometown of Salon-de-Provence, I snuffled down singletrack brimming with rosemary and thyme. On my second trip, I ventured farther inland to the Parc Naturel RĂ©gional du LubĂ´ron, 637 square miles encompassing the 11,500-person village of Apt, as well as winemaking estates, lavender fields, rugged slopes as high as 3,690 feet, and startlingly phallic ocher formations.
A stop at Gassou Shop, on the west side of town, got me pointed to Apt’s trademark playground, Le Colorado Provençal, a canyon six miles to the northeast. The Colorado Provençal ride is one of many possibilities; hundreds of miles of riding trails surround Apt. Ridable chemins (roads) and sentiers (trails) spider up, down, and over the 31-mile-wide LubĂ©ron range.

Once at the canyon, I followed the yellow markings that denote mountain-bike-friendly trails, spinning up a gentle grade to the rim. Birdsong and golden light made the preserve’s wind-eroded dirt pillars appear celestial, but still damn weird. As in Arches National Park, cyclists are banned from pedaling sensitive formations; unlike in Utah, the sights loom yards, not miles, away. The seven-mile loop concludes with a rollicking descent.
Each evening, I returned to the affordable (about $40 per night) HĂ´tel L’Aptois, on Apt’s eastern edge, to prepare for French post-ride refueling. Among several unpretentiously good restaurants, Au Petit Saint Martin stands out: a romantic room inside the chef’s house, tucked into a labyrinth of backstreets that a certain automobile-obsessed nation would have bulldozed long ago. On Saturdays, Apt hosts a bustling outdoor market where your euros buy fresh cherries and criminally good $4 bottles of CĂ´tes du LubĂ©ron wine.
Eight days in Apt coated my bike with grit the same hue that Provence native Paul CĂ©zanne used in his palette. Too bad that when I flew home, U.S. customs officials washed the bike to keep our shores free of hoof-and-mouth disease—I wanted to spread ocher dust all over home.

Paddling the Tromsø Archipelago

The search for an Arctic Eden beneath Norway’s midnight sun

The arctic landscape of Norway

Catch a break from the North Wind, paddle 24 miles, and trust the advice of a modern-day Viking named Bent, and we just might make it to Eden. That’s the plan as Tim Conlan, the leader of our sea-kayaking expedition, spreads his nautical charts out on the dune grass inside our lavvu, an indigenous Scandinavian tepee. Twig in hand, he sketches the route to a long, sandy beach on the island of Rebbenesøya. There, in a crescent-shaped bay, awaits Eden, or at least that’s what Conlan’s sailing buddy Bent indicated on the chart. And as we were besieged at our first campsite by voracious sheep, thwarted the next day by a headwind so fierce it took us an hour to paddle a mile, and kept off the water by heavy gusts on our third day, this idyllic campsite—beachfront property, with freshwater streams and majestic ridges—sounds like Valhalla. We agree to an early start (4:30 a.m.) and pray that the wind abates.

We’re four days into a ten-day kayak tour through the thousands of mountainous islands west of Tromsø, well above the Arctic Circle and about 1,100 miles north of Oslo. The Tromsø archipelago covers about 450 square miles, and the rugged coast reminds me of the High Sierra, only with the valleys flooded by the sea. The region’s wide fetches and channels leave us exposed to the wind, and our progress has been slow. In fact, by the end of the trip we’ll have managed only 64 miles of a planned 100. Fortunately, the hilarity of tackling language barriers and debates about everything from polar bears to taxes to Zimbabwe strongman Robert Mugabe will have gelled our international team during the wind-enforced downtime.
Ten of us—four Americans, three Swedes, a German, a Brit, and an Afrikaner-Canadian—signed on for this Nordic ramble with Crossing Latitudes, Conlan’s Bozeman, Montana-based guide service. For seven years, Tim and his Swedish business partner and wife, Lena, have led kayak trips south of Tromsø, threading the granite towers of Lofoten and island-hopping the skerries of Vester&3229;len. The Conlans wanted to know what’s around the next fjord, so they arranged this exploratory, as outfitters call trips they have yet to complete themselves and run with experienced clients to gauge feasibility.
Aside from paddling, we’ve played spirited matches of the Viking game kubb (think horseshoes with rocks) and hiked to the top of Haaja, a 1,600-foot peak with a dead-drop to the breakers below. Aside from the sheep incident, our campsites have been untracked, snug in the curve of dunes or perched on low bluffs, and we’ve taken full advantage of the midnight sun. Last night, sensing a lull after dinner, we hit the water and covered 18 miles between 9 p.m. and 1 a.m., all the while reveling in the strange, affecting glow. It may cause insomnia, but the midnight sun sustains you, too, as if you were a plant in bloom. The one thing you don’t want to do here is flip your kayak: The water is a frigid 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
It takes about seven hours of paddling over two days to get there, and then, finally, we surf a two-foot break into the deserted beach on Rebbenesøya, and Bent’s Eden is, well . . . fallen, but beautiful. Several detonated mines from World War II lie half buried in the dunes. We beachcomb and scramble up the ravines behind camp and drink from snowmelt streams that trickle through mountain birch. Scores of bright forget-me-nots, carnivorous sundews, and budding multe (cloudberries) crowd our feet. Above us, a sea eagle soars.
Conlan concedes he won’t rush to add Tromsø to his outfitted trips. Nevertheless, he’s considering a second Troms” exploratory trip for 2003, farther north, where the archipelago hides more-secluded coves of glacier-smoothed rock and sun.
Access and Resources:
Crossing Latitudes (800-572-8747, ). Offers guided kayak trips in Sweden and Norway. Wilderness Center (011-47-77-69-60-02, ) and the VesterĂĄlen Padleklubb (011-47-776-12-40-73) in Troms” rent kayaks and/or provide transport for put-in and take-out. For relatively inexpensive lodging in Troms”, try Ami Hotel bed and Breakfast (doubles, $81-$93 per night; 011-47-77-68-22-08, ). For information, contact the Norwegian Tourist Bureau (212-885-9700, ). For backcountry planning, contact the Oslo offices of Den Norske Turistforening, the Norwegian equivalent of the Sierra Club (011-47-22-82-28-00, ).

The Power to Move You

More self-propelled adventures

(SKATING)
THE ELFSTEDENTOCHT // THE NETHERLANDS
The Elfstedentocht (meaning “11 cities tour” and pronounced however you see fit) ice-skating race covers a stupefying 124 miles over the frozen canals, lakes, and streams of the northern Dutch province of Friesland. Of course, to have a 124-mile race, you need 124 miles of ice—a winter-weather miracle that has happened only 15 times since 1906 (the last time in 1997). To guarantee your go at the course, forget the ice skates and try in-line instead. The race route is a clockwise loop from Leeuwarden, Friesland’s capital, past flower-filled meadows, pristine lakes, and quaint villages—particularly Hindeloopen, a conglomeration of windmills and clock towers. You’ll skate mainly on perfectly paved, wide-berth bike paths, and when you do have to mix with traffic, Dutch drivers will always brake for you. Nonetheless, if your plan is to tick off all 124 miles, sign up with Amsterdam-based Skate-A-Round (011-31-20-4-681-682, ), which offers self-guided tours of four or five days for about $123 and $237 respectively, including hotels and some meals (the five-day tour stops at more-expensive hotels and includes more meals per day). You roll solo but get the convenience of luggage transport, maps, and an information guide on what to see en route.

(TREKKING)
THE GR 20 // CORSICA
One look at Corsica’s coastline, its time-forgotten villages, and its mountainous middle and you just might join the local separatist movement to boot French rule so you can keep the Mediterranean isle for yourself. Yes, politicos do get shot here, but the 26-year-old insurgence involves mainly nuisance attacks: wee-hour, low-power bombings that target government outposts—never tourism, the island’s bread and butter. The best spot for your tour of duty is the GR 20, a 125-mile Grande RandonnĂ©e (really big walk) that cuts a diagonal path from Calenzana, in the northwest, to Conca, in the southeast. This is one of the most stunning—and challenging—mountain hikes in Europe. It’s segmented into 15 stages of six to seven hours each, loaded with dense pine forests, moonscape plateaus, glacial lakes, and flowery valleys. The route is meticulously marked and well traveled, especially in July and August, but beware: By trail’s end, your total altitude gain will be nearly 35,000 feet, much of it over rocky and exposed terrain. There are bare-bones hostels and campgrounds at the end of each stage, but no provisions—and very little water—in between. For help planning your route, visit the tourism office of the Parc Naturel RĂ©gional de Corse (011-33-4-95-51-79-00, () in Ajaccio, the island’s capital. French travel agency Nouvelles Frontières () offers eight- or 15-day guided trips for $700-$1,250.

The Power to Move You

More self-propelled adventures

(CANOEING)
THE GAUJA RIVER // LATVIA
Sandwiched between Estonia and Lithuania on the Baltic coast, Latvia is a growing blip on the ecotourism radar. And for good reason: More than half the country, which is slightly larger than West Virginia, is unadulterated nature. Much of the terrain is languid and low-lying—sprawling pastures, wooded groves, marshlands crowded with cranes and peregrines—but things turn dramatic at the town of Sigulda, 31 miles northeast of Riga, Latvia’s vibrant capital. This is your gateway to 227,000-acre Gauya National Park, and particularly to the Gauja River, which cuts a choice 56-mile path through dolomite cliffs and sandstone ravines. Makars Tourist Agency in Sigulda (011-371-924-4948, ) arranges three-day self-guided canoe trips for $62 per boat, including transportation to and from the river, gear, and camping fees. The trip starts in the northern bounds of the park, at the village of Valmiera, and you float back to Sigulda along the Gauja’s broad, rapids-free waters. Certain sections practically boil with trout and salmon, and the banks are thick with beavers, otters, and the occasional lynx. You’ll stop at riverside campsites, some of which have hiking trails that meander into the park’s deep forests and valleys.

(CAVING)
THE TATRAS MOUNTAINS // POLAND
Straddling Poland and Slovakia, the Tatras Mountains are an irresistible draw for European tourists. They come for the alpine summits (the highest is Mount Rysy, 8,198 feet) and world-class skiing. But if you want to get off the beaten path, go under it—into one of the range’s stalactite-studded caves, the patient result of carbonic acid eating away at the mountains’ limestone base over the millennia. Try the handful of easy-access caverns open to the public on the Polish side, notably the Mrozna cave, a horizontal jut 1,676 feet long. A one-hour underground tour follows a high-ceilinged path amid startling stalactites and trickling streams. The tourist office at the gateway town of Zakopane (011-48-18-201-22-11, ) is central intelligence for cave information and tour outfits. Tatras Mountain Rescue Team (011-48-18-206-34-44) is your ticket to serious spelunking if you have a modicum of fitness and don’t mind a tight squeeze. In addition to conducting searches, these mountaineers lead trips into hard-to-access or otherwise off-limits areas, particularly the Wielka Sniezna cave, the biggest specimen in the Tatras at 2,670 feet deep and 11 miles long. Guide services cost $100-$200 per day, by reservation only.

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