The sun had risen above the asthmatic haze of California’s San Joaquin Valley, and the disaster tourists would soon be arriving at the edge of Tulare Lake to take their selfies. It was a Saturday, two days before Memorial Day. County health authorities had warned the public to stay out of the contaminated water, an unwholesome brew of pesticides and animal waste. As for the Kings County sheriff, during media interviews he had informed would-be gawkers that the lake bottom—a vast depression at the southern end of the nation’s breadbasket—was private property. Trespassing rules would be strictly enforced.

Our shuttle driver, Vincent Ruiz—a 360-pound trucker, originally from Guadalajara, who owned a 13-acre farm a few blocks from the flood zone—steered around a ROAD CLOSED sign without a care. “Damn, I hadn’t seen this,” he said with quiet awe as we gazed upon acres of flooded pistachio trees. All goners.

We crossed a narrow bridge on 16th Avenue, which ran south from the city of Lemoore, and parked at a high spot, just before the pavement dipped into the drink. Tom Fowlks, my partner in crime, was there waiting in his baseball cap and sun shirt. A swollen cow pie swayed in the brown water next to our kayaks. Vincent leaned against the hood of his Jeep and said it was better us than him; no way he was getting in that water. My Tacoma would be safe next to his chicken coop until we returned, whenever that might be.

Though I had no interest in tangling with Johnny Law, I recognized this unusual spring for what it was: a once-in-a-generation opportunity to travel, by way of the federally navigable waters that all Americans have a stake in, 200-plus miles from the heart of these floods, a natural disaster by any measure, to the man-made disaster that is the Delta of San Francisco Bay. Between January and March of 2023, a total of 31 atmospheric rivers dumped nearly 60 feet of snow on Donner Pass and rain everywhere else. The last time that much snow fell in the mountains was 1952—the year I Love Lucy wrapped up its first season on television.

The storms resurrected the lowland connections among the valley’s water-starved rivers, whose flow had long been hijacked by farming barons, now trading their acre-foot allotments like crypto. (The main difference is that water, unlike Bitcoin, doesn’t usually get cheaper.) Some 326 billion gallons of liquid would be cascading down from the Sierra Nevada, undercutting homes, drowning multimillion-dollar almond orchards, and putting towns at risk of becoming fishbowl dioramas. The maximum-security prison in Corcoran, where Charles Manson had been held until his death, was protected by a 188-foot levee authorities feared was still too low to guard it from this normally dry lake, which now rivaled Lake Tahoe in surface area. (Tahoe covers 191 square miles.) Sheriffs in five counties were trying to keep people out of the surging rivers with emergency orders that reeked of nanny-state overreach in a part of California where the politics were more West Texas than West Hollywood.

The post My Wild, Wet, and (Sometimes) Miserable Paddling Trip Through the Heart of California appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Dody Fugate lives in a creaky, low-ceilinged prefab on seven acres of scrub outside Santa Fe. It was dark inside when I visited nearly two years ago. Navajo rugs were thrown over beige carpet matted with woodstove ash and animal feed. Mason jars were tucked into dusty bookshelves packed with cookbooks, novels, and archaeology texts.

In the garage sat a Ford pickup, the tires flat, which Dody and her husband, Paul, had driven home from the dealership in 1971. No pictures of Paul were anywhere that I could see, but his presence was all around. There was the old nameplate from his desk: “Paul B. Fugate, Park Ranger.”ÌęAnd pinned to the wall was a bumper sticker, white letters on a forest green background. “Where is Paul Fugate,” it read. The absence of a question mark suggested less an inquiry than a demand.

It wasn’t until my second full day here that Dody—an elfin woman in her late seventies with hip-length hair streaked gray—talked about the wrinkled work shirt and pair of jeans hanging on the back of a chair. She said they were Paul’s “civvies,” the street clothes he would have changed into after finishing work on the last day he was ever seen, four decades ago. She had no idea how long they’d been there. “People respond to these traumas in many ways,” she said when I commented on the disordered state of her home. “For a long time, I went into another dimension. I went nuts.”

Paul was last seen around 2 P.M. on Sunday, January 13, 1980, when he stepped out of the visitor center at Chiricahua National Monument, in southeastern Arizona, wearing his standard Park Service uniform and Red Wing boots and carrying a green down parka. “I am going to do a trail,” he announced to an aide. If he wasn’t back by 4:30, she should close up without him.

Paul was a monument naturalist who answered visitors’ questions, curated exhibits, and put together trail guides and plant lists. He was 41 then, and had a Texas twang, blue eyes, a woolly brown beard, and a ponytail that ran to his shoulders like a middle finger to his superiors. He was also known to smoke a joint when the mood struck him, and he chafed under the buttoned-down Park Service of that era. “Give ’em a bad time” was the Fugate family mantra. He had been fired from the monument once before but successfully sued to get his job back, to no one’s great pleasure—not even, really, his own.

Paul loved mountains as much as he despised bureaucracy. The Chiricahuas are part of a chain of isolated “sky islands” that rise more than 5,400 feet above the Sonoran Desert floor. Eroded tuff spires known as hoodoos peek out from ridgetop forests; spotted cats prowl the stone labyrinth below. The monument is named for the Chiricahua Apache, whose most revered leader, Cochise, waged a long war with the U.S. government in the late 1800s.

For all the monument’s hideouts, there were only so many areas one would normally patrol, with just an eight-mile-long, dead-end road, a single campground, and a system of trails that could be hiked in a single day. Paul didn’t bother taking his radio, ID, or billfold, or $300 worth of cash and checks. He didn’t even take his trusty pocket glass for examining plants.

The post The Search for a Ranger Who Was Lost and Never Found appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

The post Patrick Cummins Just Wants to Ride His Hardtail appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

On a Thursday in late April, Melissa Trent, a single mother in Colorado Springs, Colorado, logged into her account on the dating website and had a new message from a user called “lovetohike1972.” “I can’t believe a woman as pretty as you is on a site like this,” he wrote.

Trent clicked open the man’s account. The photos showed a smiling, clean-shaven guy in a Marmot puffy with chunky glasses and shaggy hair curling up from under a baseball cap. Trent thought he looked cute. There were shots of him atop Pikes Peak, hanging out with thru-hiking buddies at a hostel in Seattle, and climbing into a tractor in Montana. “I love adventure,” he wrote in his profile. “Anything in the outdoors.” His interests included hiking, biking, skiing, craft beer, and the occasional toke.

Trent, who is in her 40s, hadn’t had much luck with online dating, but this guy seemed promising. He was smart and good-looking and she especially liked that he was outdoorsy. After exchanging a few messages, she gave him her number. When he called that evening, he introduced himself as Jeff Cantwell. He said he was born on Kodiak Island, Alaska, and had recently moved to Colorado Springs, where he was training to be an arborist. Most guys Trent had spoken to from dating sites were gross, bringing up sex during a first phone call. “Jeff didn’t do that,” she says. “He wanted to know about my favorite flower.” They ended up talking for ten hours.

Two days later, Trent and Cantwell met for burgers. The connection they made on the phone seemed to deepen in person. They talked about Pikes Peak, which he claimed to have climbed over 200 times, and he also told her how he had lost his parents in a car crash when he was 18. When the bill came, Cantwell paid. A few days later he came over and made spaghetti with meatballs for Trent and her two daughters.

Over the nextÌęweek, they texted and talked every day. To Trent, it seemed like they grew closer with each conversation. She asked if he had ever been married, and Cantwell revealed more about his history of heartache and loss. During the car accident that killed his parents, his fiancĂ©e, and his five-month-old baby were also killed, he said. He enlisted in the army and deployed to Afghanistan, where he was the victim of a severe knife attack. He apparently found some consolation in nature, however. He showed Trent tattoos on his calves that he said he earned for completing hiking’s so-called Triple Crown—the Pacific Crest Trail, the Continental Divide Trail, and the Appalachian Trail.

That weekend, when Cantwell said his bank card had stopped working, Trent lent him a couple hundred dollars. She trusted him. On Monday morning, when she let him borrow her blue Audi A4 to go get a new bank card, she figured he wouldn’t be gone long. About 30 minutes later, however, Cantwell texted that he’d need to go to the branch in Denver, more than an hour away. He asked if he could use the credit card she left in the car to get gas. Trent gave him the go-ahead, but now she was getting nervous. She didn’t remember leaving her card there.

Cantwell’s behavior grew stranger that afternoon. He claimed the bank in Denver had already closed by the time he got there. “I’ll have to sleep in the parking lot,” he told Trent. She knew something wasn’t adding up, but she didn’t want to believe the worst. “I thought we had a connection,” she says.

When Cantwell’s texts became increasingly erratic that night, Trent finally called the El Paso County Sheriff’s Department. They used Cantwell’s cell-phone number to identify him as 44-year-old Jeffrey Dean Caldwell, a Virginia native who’d been locked up in three states for seven felonies, including burglary, writing bad checks, and attempted escape. Most recently, he’d beenÌęparoled in September 2016, after serving time in Colorado for identity theft. But in April, shortly before he met Trent, he had stopped reporting to his parole officer.

Still, Trent couldn’t quite convince herself that the man she’d met had such a dark side. “Can I hear your voice one more time?” she begged him in a text. Part of her wanted to trick him into returning the car. Part of her still believed the man she’d fallen so hard for had to exist somewhere. “I don’t want you to go to prison. We have to figure out a way out of this. Can we leave the state?”

Caldwell did call her one last time, but when she started sobbing, he hung up. “I’m sick in the head,” he texted her. “Write to me in prison.”

The cops put out aÌęwarrant for Caldwell’s arrest, but he wasn’t known to be violent and no one expected he’d be locked up any time soon. “These con men are transient and move around a lot without any way to track where they are,” says Lieutenant James Disner of the Larimer County Sheriff’s Office, which had arrested Caldwell almost a decade ago. “I have been successful in a few of these types of cases, but only by reaching out to the communities they prey on.”

Caldwell’s victims typically fell into one of two communities: elderly people and women, whom he often found by participating in Facebook and Meetup groups for hikers, by using the website , and by hanging around trailheads, hostels, and outdoor gear stores. By the time he met Trent, he had been traveling across the West, presenting himself as a free-spirited outdoor archetype, for over a decade. On his Couchsurfing account, he used the name John McCandless, the same middle and last name as Christopher McCandless, the charismatic wanderer profiled by Jon Krakauer in .

A pattern emerged with each of Caldwell’s cons, too. He’d scope out a victim, share his tale of woe, then enthrall her with his adventures (“31 wolves talking to each other!”) and quixotic pursuits (“I’m buying land. 155 acres. You can come stay with me. Ìę. . putting up a yurt”). Next, he’d give her a sentimental gift—say, an Alaska shot glass or an Appalachian Trail patch—and send her selfies from the mountains. Finally, he would orchestrate a personal crisis that ranged from the plausible to the bizarre, and finish it off by asking for a small loan or else he’d just steal what was lying around. The con might be over within days. In a few cases, he was able to stretch out such aÌęrelationship for years.

At the end of each con, he would apparently be wracked by regret, sending messages to victims that often began with him sounding apologetic and self-pitying, then switching to angry and entitled. “You were a means to an end. Adios,” he wrote one woman. “No crime done, just sniveling broads.” The moment the authorities caught Caldwell, he would confess everything.

As I learned about Caldwell’s exploits, I wondered if there was something about the outdoor community and our sympathy for such wanderers that may make us especially easy marks. When we see a man with a trail-worn Gore-Tex jacket and a decade-old Dana Designs backpack, we instinctively trust him. We can’t help but envy his authenticity, his freedom. He’s not just a weekend warrior—he’s living the life we want. Or at least, that’s how it seems.

For six weeks, I texted Caldwell at a number that Trent had given me, but he never responded. Then, on June 27, he finally sent me a text along with a photo of himself sporting a blue flannel shirt while lounging on a rolled-up fleece in a pine forest. When we spoke on the phone a couple days later, I could hear birds chirping. At first he told me he was in northern Arizona. Later, he claimed he was near the popular Barr Trail on Pikes Peak. “I know Pikes Peak,” he said, “I can hide on this mountain for a long time.”

He agreed to speak with me because he hoped that, by coming clean in public, he wouldn’t be able to take advantage of anyone ever again. “There has got to be a reason why I’m here,” he said. “There’s got to be. It can’t be to keep scamming people.”

Over the next week, we talked for several hours and exchanged hundreds of text messages. “Living like this gets lonely,” he said. He estimated that he’s conned 20 to 25 people over the course of his life, but it doesn’t seem like there are clear lines in his head between a friend, lover, or potential victim. “I don’t go into meeting somebody thinking I’m going to use them,” he said. “It just happens when I’m down and out.” He wasn’t always honest with me, minimizing some of his crimes and the extent to which he manipulated people. Still, he was more transparent than I expected, providing me with access to his email and Facebook accounts. I checked everything he told me with public records and through interviews with dozens of people who had met him.

Caldwell was born in Roanoke, Virginia, on October 26, 1972, the son of a Navy captain and an office worker. His parents split when he was 10 months old, and he and his mother, Susan, moved to southern California. Money was tight and Caldwell says his mother was too busy with boyfriends to give him much attention. (I couldn’t confirm this, as Susan Caldwell died in 2015.) As a teenager, Caldwell says he became a troublemaker. Skipping school, breaking windows, and staying out all night became routine.

When Caldwell was around 16, Susan turned him over to the , a family services organization in Virginia that bounced him between foster families and group homes. He never finished high school and the day he turned 18, he set off on his own.

Caldwell spent his first few weeks of freedom camping out in a creek bed in the woods behind the Hanging Rock Golf Club in Salem, Virginia. But he felt unmoored. In August 1991, he enlisted in the Army Reserve. After 13 weeks of basic training, the Reserves just required him to report to duty for one weekend each month over the next two years. (He’d be honorably discharged after two and a half years.) The rest of the time he was back in Roanoke, sleeping on couches and attaching himself to a group of outdoorsy potheads who were starting college or working day jobs. Caldwell didn’t have his own car, but he had a knack for picking up young girls who could shuttle him around. “I liked him and he was fun to hang out with,” recalls one friend, Heather Riddle.

In June 1993, Caldwell finagled a job as a tennis instructor at Virginia’s oldest girls’ camp, Camp Carysbrook, by presenting himself as a student at . Toward the end of the summer, he snuck into a shed by the lake and stole some camping and rock climbing gear and sent it back to Roanoke with a friend. Then, he says, he hiked a section of the Appalachian trail from McAfee Knob north to the James River. It’s a distance of only 60 miles, but Caldwell spent three weeks out there with friends. “We weren’t pushing for miles,” he says.

When Caldwell returned to Roanoke, he says he started betraying the people closest to him. He snagged a checkbook from one buddy. From another, he stole a camera. The Camp Carysbrook theft caught up to him that winter when a friend’s mother ratted him out and he was handed his first prison sentence—two-and-half years in Tazewell, Virginia.

After Caldwell was released in 1996, he worked odd jobs in the Missouri Ozarks yet failed to pay the restitution he owed. A year later, he got arrested again, this time for writing a bogus $10.16 check to a convenience store from a bank account that didn’t exist. He could have wiped out the resulting three-year sentence with three months in prison under the state’s “shock incarceration” program, which tries to rehabilitate nonviolent offenders. But he violated the terms of his parole three times and got locked up again each time.

In 2004, Caldwell fled from his parole obligations once again and took off to Topeka, Kansas, where he met a woman who was working at the homeless shelter he was staying in. According to Caldwell, they went on a camping trip to Colorado, fell in love with the Rockies, and made plans to move there. But when she became pregnant, he balked at the idea of marriage. Her family convinced them to move back to Kansas to have the child, but his heart wasn’t in it. “Everything started to go downhill after that,” he says. (Through her family, the woman declined to speak about the relationship.)

The couple never married andÌęCaldwell drifted in and out of his daughter’s life over the next three years. He failed to pay child support, according to court records. One night, drunk on margaritas, he broke a window, got arrested, and was sent back to Missouri. In May 2004, he forfeited his parental rights.

Not surprisingly, Caldwell’s actual backstory was quite different than the one he shared with Trent and other victims, even if some of the details, like the name Cantwell, had some vague connection to reality. He wasn’t an injured war veteran, but he had been in the Reserves. He hadn’t lost a child in a tragic accident, but he was a father. And his family wasn’t dead. Well, of that he wasn’t sure. But he imagined they were. It was easier that way. “I didn’t want to tell people the real story,” he says.

In the summer of 2006, Paul Twardock was at his office at Alaska Pacific University in Anchorage, where he’s a , when his phone rang. He glanced at the caller IDÌęand was surprised to see that it was from Missouri’s King County Correctional Center.

Jeff Caldwell introduced himself as an incoming student—his high GED scores had made him eligible for a full financial aid package—and he said that he was eager to get some academic advice. “While we were talking, I asked him what he was doing in jail,” Twardock recalled recently. Caldwell admitted that he had passed some bad checks. “He seemed remorseful.”

By the time he arrived in Alaska, Caldwell, then 34, was styling himself as a real adventurer, sporting mountaineering boots when he strutted into Kaladi Brothers, the local coffee chain. Caldwell says he genuinely wanted a fresh start, butÌęcouldn’t handle the class schedule. HeÌędidn’t even last a semester.

Within weeks, he was stealing from friends and roommates, marking the start of his strategyÌęof flattery and deception. He says he wasn’t motivated so much by the money or adventure. He longed to get close to people—almost exclusively women—to be swaddled, pampered, and mothered by them. “They keep offering to help, so you say ‘OK,’” he says. “It’s so comfortable. I am a nice person, but I have that evil person that’s also there.”

Con men like Caldwell have been known to spend years pretending to be someone else, building a relationship for a financial payoff that is, quite often, dwarfed by the investment in time. Maria Konnikova, psychologist and author of says that the true motivation of the swindler is never money. “They want to have power over other people,” she says. “What is more controlling than the most intimateÌęthing of all?”

Caldwell eventually left Alaska, staying ahead of the law for a while as he hopped across the West. In August 2007, he met Erika, a mountain biker with long blonde hair who had just started graduate school in Montana and needed a friend. (Erika asked that her last name not be used in the story.) “He was kind of a charmer and had these amazing stories,” she says. “I was enamored by the idea of living in the middle-of-nowhere in Alaska.” They hiked to the “M” overlooking town, and Caldwell brought a bottle of red wine that they shared at the top.

Yet over the next month, Caldwell never invited Erika into his place. That seemed odd to her. He tried to brush off her questions about it, but he also got clingy, showing up at her place late at night or meeting her after class with flowers. When she confronted him about his behavior, he said he was working undercover for the DEA and taking her to his house would put them in danger. Caldwell says he didn’t want to tell her that he was really living at the Poverello Center, a homeless shelter downtown. He was in love with her. “I was nervous about telling her the truth,” he says.

A month after they met, she loaned him her truck while she was in class. When she got home, he had stolen her backpack and an enormous jar of change. He left the truck in the parking lot of a nearby grocery store—the keys in the ignition and a “Thank You” note in the cab.

The grifts continued. The next year, Caldwell swiped a credit card and $1,900 in cash from a woman he met at a bar in Fort Collins, Colorado. He took a train to Lynchburg, Virginia, then used the stolen credit card to load up on $800 of camping gear, including a JetBoil stove and a Steripen. The cops learned that he had checked into a motel that night, but by the time they arrived, he had made a dash for the Appalachian Trail.

Caldwell says he spent the next month hiking south more than 500 miles—a breakneck pace which, if you believe him, would require climbing and descending an average of 4,500 feet over 20 miles every day. “I can do 10 by lunch,” Caldwell insists. On October 30, he was coming out of a grocery store in Robbinsville, North Carolina, when a cop ran his ID and arrested him for the theft in Colorado.

Caldwell spent the next six yearsÌęin and out of prison and halfway houses, but he never dropped his outdoor persona. While he was on parole in July 2015, he headed to in Colorado Springs and had the three thru-trail symbols inked on his calves. Then, thanks to theÌęwestern chapter of the , he flew to Portland, Oregon. The group had given him their thru-hiker scholarship to attend their annual gathering because he claimed to have just completed the Triple Crown. He told people his trail name was “Mr. Breeze,” but even that wasÌęstolen. He had evidently lifted it from another hiker. Caldwell convinced an older couple at the conferenceÌęto loanÌęhim $500, which he never repaid. “Being in the trail community, I couldn’t believe that somebody would do this to another hiker,” says ALDHA-west president Whitney LaRuffa.

Caldwell used the money to buy a train ticket to Whitefish, Montana. He hiked around and answered a Craigslist ad for a live-in caretaker at the All Mosta Ranch, a livestock rescue center run by Kate Borton, a woman in her 60s who goes by “Granny Kate.”

Borton says she knew something was off about Caldwell the moment she let him stay with her. He talked about wanting to hike around Europe and about buying an off-the-grid property, but she doubted he had the wherewithal to accomplish any of it. After a few months, she and her husband asked Caldwell to move on. They later discovered he had used her credit card without permission, but she didn’t resent him. She felt sad. It seemed like he was following someone else’s dream, Borton says, going through the motions of a life that he could never truly live.

“What was missing?” she says. “The heart.”

We all create narratives about ourselves, about who we are, where we come from, and who we want to be. Caldwell told me he lied about the Triple Crown because it was “an accomplishment that people are amazed by,” but it was “a useless lie like most lies I tell.” He said he didn’t necessarily target people in the outdoors community: they just happened to be the people he liked to spend the most time with.

Whenever I asked Caldwell to explain what motivated him, he seemed unwilling or unable to reflect on his behavior. Maybe he manipulated people simply because he could. He told me he became better looking in his 30s, discovering then how much he could get away with. When I said it seemed like he’d given up on a normal life, he scoffed. “Whos EVER going to give me a chance at a decent job, Brendan? No one. I’m a modern day leper,” he texted.ÌęI pressed him again a few days later. “U asked why i tell lies? Pretend to be someone else,” he wrote. “Ever heard of self aggrandizement? If not, look it up(:”

In late June, as we corresponded, Caldwell was still driving around in Trent’s car and told me his goal was to make a little honest money before he turned himself in. He asked if I would pay for a motel or help him out in any way, but I said I could only pay for us to talk on the phone. I knew he was starting to see me as another mark, but I still felt guilty about saying no. I saw how easy it was to be charmed by him. He was bright and had a self-deprecating sense of humor. When I broke the news to him that his mother was dead, he told me he was despondent. “Im truly alone,” he texted. He longed for something better for himself, and I wanted to believe that he was ready to turn his life around.

I didn’t hear from Caldwell for a few days. He had assured me he wasn’t leaving the state, but on July 1, he was arrested coming out of a coffee shop in Spearfish, South Dakota, where he’d gone to work aÌęcarnival. I reached him a couple days later at the Deadwood Jail. “I’m glad this is over, actually,” he said. As a repeat offender, heÌęwas potentially facing 25 years in prison for stealing Melissa Trent’s car and joyriding in it. He was almost looking forward to the prison time. “Maybe, deep down, I’m comfortable in there.” He told me he’d texted Melissa Trent to apologize. “I do feel bad for everything.”

A few weeks later, when he was transferred Washington County Jail in Akron, Colorado, he wrote me several letters. He was on an antidepressant, Wellbutrin, and taking three classes: Time for a Change, Healthy Relationships, and Anger Management. “Being a writer for șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű magazine must be an exciting job,” he wrote. “I had so much potential. I could’ve possibly been in the cubicle next to you working on my next story.” In the next letter, he sounded optimistic about his case and planned to plead not guilty. “[Melissa] gave me the keys and she got her car back with no damage. We’ll see!”

That’s one way to put it. After all, it was the cops in SpearfishÌęwho gave her back the car after he was arrested. Trent says it was a mess. He had blown out the speakers and the engine had to be replaced because he had driven it for so long while it was low on oil. His dirty clothes were in the trunk and there was part of a condom wrapper under the front seat. Trent’s ex-husband helped her clean it up and scrape off all the brewery and gear-company stickers that Caldwell had plastered on the back windshield. As she went through Caldwell’s things, she found a little black notebook of Caldwell’s in the backseat. It contained all of his contacts and even some of his passwords.

On July 26, Trent used the information from the book to access his Facebook account, which had become, in recent years, a living record of the man that Caldwell longed to be. Trent decided to start editing it, to make it reflect, more clearly, the man who he truly was. She took down the profile picture of him as a bearded mountain man and replaced it with a shot of him in an orange prison jumpsuit. “I am a conman,” she wrote under his introduction. “I befriend people posing as a nice, hiking fellow. I steal from them then disappear.”

Then, she added a post about Caldwell’s next adventure. “Going to prison,” it read. “Hopefully, they’ll put me away for a very long time.”

Brendan Borrell () is an șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű contributing writer. Katherine Lam is an șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű contributing artist.

The post Inside the Mind of Thru-Hiking’s Most Devious Con Man appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Downhill mountain bikes weren’t designed to go up. They’re heavy as hell and have the wrong gear ratio, and the best that you can hope for is a ride on a chairlift or in the back of a truck. Failing that, you’re pushing. Which, for most of us, is no fun.

Than again, most of us aren’t . It’s early October, and she’s on the side of a grassy slope in northern England, rolling her powder-blue Trek alongside her as though it’s filled with helium. Her full-face helmet hangs from her handlebars, and her frizzy blonde hair is twisted into a bun. Atherton, 29, has a smile on her face, the kind of contented smile that comes when you’re the and have just wrapped up a perfect season.

And today, she just gets to ride. It’s the warm-up for the , a mass-start race where 220 women will set off down a track as Atherton tries to overtake them from behind. “I’m amazed by how the women all feed off each other,” Atherton says. “The main thing I want to get across is how confident it makes you feel to tackle a whole mountain on a bike.”

At the base of the hill, many of the competitors have boyfriends or husbands in tow, schlepping baby carriages and fetching energy bars from the base. , a 36-year-old mother and amateur racer, points to her 15-month-old daughter, Phoebe. “She’s been coming to bike events since she was five weeks old.”

Signing up for the is like getting a backstage pass to Atherton. Everywhere she goes, competitors pull her aside for selfies, to which she unfailing responds with a “Yes, please!” At a slippery off-camber section of the course, where the racers are sliding into one another in three-bike pileups, Atherton pauses to hold court. “Drop your outside foot, and then this foot is in the air or dabbing along and you can lean in loads,” she says. A few seconds later, a rider comes flying down. “Nice! Nice, nice! Holy mother! Yeah, woo!” she hollers.

Atherton has been winning bike races since her teens, but she really grabbed the mainstream’s attention last year with , amassing 13Ìęconsecutive World Cup wins, something no one—female or male—had ever done before. In September, she topped it off with a victory at the world championships. The next month, Atherton appeared on the cover of , while called her “the greatest champion you’ve never heard of.”

Not only did Atherton win all of her races, she also navigated certain hairy sections more quickly than many men. When she was clocked flying through the speed trap at event at more than 45 miles per hour, Atherton was going faster than all but three of the 78 male riders, including . Helmet-cam footage from her run shows her plowing a laser-straight line over chattering rock gardens and five-foot drop-offs as spectators clang cowbells. She’s a guided missile in body armor.

All of which is evidence of Atherton’s indisputable talent. Yet as the little sister to and —mountain bike celebrities who helped catalyze a knobby-tire boom in Britain over the past decade—Atherton has had to fight for recognition. When a race commentator suggested that she’s so fast because she rides with her brothers, she . “Why not say the truth?? Because I work DAMN hard!!” she wrote. “I am, along with all the other women, athletes in our own right, bike riders because WE have the SKILLS, not because we blindly follow the boys with our eyes closed.”

Atherton grew up watching Gee and Dan ride their BMX bikes near their home in England’s West Country, yet she found her own path to the sport, beginning with a fierce love for competition. Her father, Simon, a school headmaster, would take three kids to BMX races on the weekends. Although Atherton’s training consisted of riding her bike to school, racing clicked inside her eight-year-old brain. “I was all about the racing,” she says. “I was happy going to a race and then coming home and not riding my bike.” There were so few girls in the BMX events that officials wouldn’t separate the field by ages. Atherton was often the tallest by a foot or more, winning by a wide margin. By the time she was 11, she and her brothers had moved on to mountain biking.

Rachel’s parents split up in the late 1990s, and her mother, Andrea, moved with the children to a farmhouse in North Wales, close to the mountains and their trails. Around this time, Dan started to attract the attention of magazines and filmmakers through his stylish freeriding, while Gee began to dominate the competitive circuit. Both left school at 16. Rachel remembers Dan telling her that she, too, had the potential to be a world-class downhiller. “You’ve got to learn to wear goggles in your helmet,” he told her. “And you’re going to have to ride more.” When Rachel was 14, she showed up at the as an unknown and stole the race from the top youth riders. She repeated her performance for the next two years.

When the school headmaster told her she couldn’t skip a day of school for a race, Atherton walked out. “Rachel was my last hope of having a child go to university,” Andrea says. “But she told me, ‘Mom, you can’t treat me any differently because I’m a girl.’”

Mountain biking—and downhill in particular—remains overrun by bros. The reports that just 13 percent of its members are women. Men outnumber women three to one on the pro downhill circuit. “They give us shit all the time,” says . “I don’t think guys in the industry have been very supportive, but that’s changed a lot in the last five years.”

Atherton has done more than any rider in recent history to inspire women, especially Brits, to don a full-face helmet. Counting her, three of the top five female riders hail from the United Kingdom, notable considering there are only two lift-served mountain bike parks in the whole country. Through the Atherton Academy, Rachel has helped support , and she has gotten sponsors from Trek to Oakley to donate gear to women who podium at the . “She’s an inspiration to all women in mountain biking,” Hannah says. “We are all motivated to beat her.”

Considering all the recent attention that has been shed on Atherton (she was named ), it’s easy to forget that she was considered little more than a footnote when she won her first world championship nine years ago. “All the magazines wanted to talk about was Gee,” says Gill Harris, PR representative for Team Atherton. And while Dan has appeared on the cover of Dirt magazine multiple times, Rachel’s first and only solo appearance came in 2014.

“If she were a dude, she would be getting enormous amounts of press,” says who has spoken out against sexism in the industry. Batty has noticed that commenters belittle Atherton’s achievements by pointing out how many fewer competitors she faces than men, conveniently ignoring the fact that the second- and third-place finishers are just seconds behind her and have sometimes bested her in qualification runs. “There’s a level of resentment that exists toward Rachel specifically and toward women who excel in downhill in general,” says Batty.

Yet as the number of women in the sport is increasing, bike manufacturers are showing new interest in attracting female riders. This in turn has suddenly made Rachel the most marketable star in the Atherton family. “Her name is in the limelight,” Dan says.

It’s a position that Atherton is just starting to get comfortable with. Women athletes face different pressures than men, she says. While Gee’s bat ears have earned him the affectionate nickname “the Vulcan,” it just seems nastier when she reads internet comments about what she calls her “wonky teeth.” During one photo shoot, she found herself torn between wanting to smile and wanting to hide her teeth. “It used to really bother me, but you learn to get thick skin,” she says.

And while Gee had no qualms about , the request to pose nude felt more loaded to her. “No matter what you do, there are people who say good things and bad things,” she says. In the end, the deciding factor was that Atherton wasn’t confident enough with her own body. “If I was way more muscley, I would do it,” she says. “I am proud of what my body has achieved.”

Atherton says the greatest sexism she has faced has come from the media, but the birth of social media has helped leveled the playing field. “You don’t have to wait for a filmmaker to put you in a film,” she says. “The girls have just as big of a following as the guys.”

Actually, hers is bigger. Rachel currently has 166,000 followers on Instagram, compared to Gee’s 144,000 and Dan’s 77,000. It’s not a zero-sum game, of course: each of the siblings’ ships rises as the Atherton stardom grows. Their decision to brand themselves as a family contributed to each becoming bankable celebrities.

But before they got there, they first had to figure out how to get along as professionals and as siblings. In 2006, the Atherton clan was still living with their mother, who cooked and cleaned for them. Between their race schedules, filming projects, and a string of bike-related injuries, the situation was chaos. “We had tarpaulins strung up under the trees like gypsies,” Rachel recalls. Andrea finally reached her breaking point after a scare during a night filming project when she mistakenly thought Dan had crashed again. “I screamed blue murder,” she says, “I could no longer stand this crazy mountain bike life.”

By the time Andrea moved out, in 2008, the Athertons realized they had to start professionalizing their brand. They hired Dan Brown, an old friend, to be the team director. Brown saw an opportunity to market the trio as a family and began filming the goings-on at their headquarters, posting the clips on , like the Real World on two wheels. In one harrowing episode, Ìęon camera after bailing from his bike in midair. For the next six months, he had a to wear a halo traction device that Gee and Rachel would hang their laundry from when he wasn’t looking.

Today, the Athertons have enough name recognition to support their own line of bike components, and Brown says the team budget hovers around $1.3 million. Since 2015, Trek has been their title sponsor, while Jeep supplies them with the latest SUVs. Red Bull supports marquee family events, such as the Foxhunt and Hardline, a downhill competition that Dan runs.

Yet despite the outward appearance of fully making it, their mother’s departure and the constant spotlight let loose deep tensions among the siblings, particularly those between Rachel and Gee. When they’d travel together, they fought over hotel rooms. When they were at home, they fought over household chores. Gee could be anal. He thrived on precision and order. Rachel, by contrast, would show up at a race with stinky shorts. She’d lose track of her shoes or her helmet. Once, at the last minute, Rachel discovered that her dog had chewed up her goggles. “Three top athletes under the same roof was always a recipe for disaster,” Atherton says. “We had a lot of arguments, and the arguments lasted a long time.”

In 2015, Atherton moved out, a choice to which she credits, at least in part, her record-breaking winning streak over the past two years. Atherton and her boyfriend, Olly Davey, who builds trails and racecourses, bought a home in the . “That was sort of a turning point,” she says.

With their exhausting travel schedule, the couple still haven’t had time to fix up the house and still spend much of their time at Dan’s place, an off-the-grid farmhouse down the road. Sometimes Gee comes over. The three siblings still ride and train together, but the bickering doesn’t seem to have died down. It probably never will. “It’s always been up and down,” Rachel says.

Atherton’s lowest point came in January 2009. The three siblings were riding road bikes on a narrow, little-used road in Santa Cruz a few days into their annual pilgrimage to California to train. Rachel was on her CervĂ©lo and, as she flew around a corner, a pickup truck appeared. Rachel and the driver both swerved the same way, and . When Gee saw her on the road, motionless and covered in blood, he was certain she was dead. She had dislocated her right shoulder and was in so much pain that she couldn’t move. Atherton would eventually undergo multiple operations, including a nerve graft, which would leave the shoulder chronically weak.

The experience transformed her. During her recovery, Atherton began to wonder whether racing was even worth it. “When I was younger, I was willing to win at any cost,” she says. She resolved to train harder and to worry less about the competition. The downtime also allowed Atherton to realize, for the first time, that she loved riding for riding’s sake. “I’ll always ride a bike, because it makes me feel like I’m a better person,” she says.

Atherton and her brothers began working with Alan Milway, a mountain bike and motorcross fitness coach, who would travel to their headquarters and lead training camps. Rachel rode with an aggression and fluidity that he had never seen before in a female downhiller. But she was still suffering physically from the accident and tended to run out of juice by the end of a race. “I liken her to a V8 engine,” Milway says. “The power is there, but it drains quickly.”

Milway worked with Atherton to build her upper body, especially the injured shoulder. “I changed the way I trained and got physically strong,” she says. While Milway created separate workout programs for Rachel and Gee, he kept them in the same room. “You’d get the best results by having them on the same exercises as they both wanted to impress the other,” he says.

Atherton would bounce back a totally changed rider, with much more maturity and nuance. In 2012, 2013, and 2015, she took home the overall World Cup title and one world championship. “Ironically, you start winning more because you are more relaxed,” she says. For Atherton, relaxed is relative. Before every race, she still tends to doubt herself, to focus her energy on the negative, convinced her luck has run out. She’ll question her diet, her training, her health, her injuries. Atherton has dreams about her nemesis, the .

Last year, after winning the first six World Cup races, Atherton tweaked her back during a practice run in Andorra and texted Brown, the team director, that she was considering skipping it to better prepare for the world championships.

“I don’t know what to do browny!” she wrote. “Shall I ride or not? What if I make it worse and it’s not better for next week? It’s so painful sometimes.”

Brown wanted her to race. She’d still have enough points to win the World Cup title if she skipped it, but not the bragging rights and the psychological advantage of finishing a perfect season. “U need to try, I know it’s hard but so is handing it to the other girls,” he wrote back. “U rode real good this morning give it another pop.”

“But if I fuck it up for next week it’ll be even worse handing that to them,” she replied.

Atherton’s insecurities evaporated by the time she was standing at the start gate and greeting the start man. It’s always the same start man, smoking like a chimney, easing her stress with his friendly banter. Three minutes, he said. One minute. Thirty seconds. Goggles on. Deep breath. Her mind went blank. She ended up winning—a full eight seconds ahead of the next-place finisher.

The post Rachel Atherton Is the World’s Best Downhill Mountain Biker appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

On the morning of July 13, 2015, Rich Sayre and his family arrived at the thatched-roof reception center of , a treetop adventure park outside of Chiang Mai, Thailand’s second-largest city. Sayre, who leads Nike’s footwear quality team, lived in the country in the late 1990s and was back for a vacation with his wife, Lisa, their two daughters, and a Thai exchange student they had hosted at their home in Oregon. This was to be the highlight of the girls’ trip: zooming from one canopy platform to the next along three miles of braided-metal cables suspended up to 100 feet above the forest floor.

In the past decade, zip-lining has become one of the most popular activities in Chiang Mai, which attracts more than 8 million tourists each year. Out of 14 local zip-line parks, Flight of the Gibbon is the oldest, most widely touted, and—at about $100 per person—the most expensive. The a half-mile cable that representsÌę“one of Asia’s longest single zip-line flights” that its zip lines “exceed qualifications for the highest safety standards in the world.” At the time of the Sayres’ visit, the company’s website noted that “attention to every detail of this protocol has allowed us to fly hundreds of thousands of people on our zip lines without incident.” The company runs two other zip-line parks in Thailand and a third located near Angkor Wat, Cambodia’s ancient temple complex. Trip Advisor awarded Flight of the Gibbon its Certificate of Excellence for earning high reviews five years in a row, from 2011 to 2015.

At the Chiang Mai reception center, the Sayre family donned helmets and harnesses and received a safety briefing in which they were instructed how to rideÌęthe lines. Then they headed into the fragrant tropical forest. They ascended a staircase to the first platform, where they watched as one of their guides, called Sky Rangers, clipped in to a short cable and glided over to the next platform. The guests followed one by one, with a second Sky Ranger bringing up the rear. They sailed across several lines and crossed a hanging bridge. Lisa was enjoying herself when, she says, a Sky Ranger instructed her to pick up the pace. “What’s the rush?” she thought. “I wanted to wait and talk to my family.”

A Zip Line Accident from Hell

After about an hour, the group arrived at a 980-foot cable that sagged across a wide valley. The setup was designed to use gravity to slow riders on approach so that guests need only raise their legs for a clean landing. Peering across, Rich couldn’t see the landing platform through the dense vegetation. “You are basically jumping blind,” he says.

A Chinese woman in the group clipped in and disappeared into the greenery. The Sky Ranger radioed his partner at the other side to alert him that she was coming. Without waiting for a response, he signaled for Lisa to go, according to a criminal complaint against Flight of the Gibbon filed by the Chiang Mai public prosecutor. She took off with a running start. A moment later, Rich heard an awful smack, like a wooden bat hitting a baseball. “The sound was horrible,” he says. Lisa came back into view, dangling from the line in her harness, unconscious and limp. The Sayres’Ìędaughters began screaming. After 30 seconds, Lisa kicked. “We knew she was alive,” Rich says.

The Chinese woman, Zi Lei, who goes by Hazel, had stopped just short of the landing platform, according to a written statement she later provided to the Sayres. The Sky Ranger told her to seize the overhead cable while he tried to finagle her onto the platform with his legs. But the cable dug painfully into her hand and she let go, drifting backward to the low point in the line, out of sight of the launch platform. A moment later, Lisa came rocketing across. The collision knocked out both of them. When Hazel came to, the first thing she saw was Lisa’s bloody face, inches from her own.

Over the next half-hour, guides retrieved the women and laid them out on the landing platform. Hazel was disoriented. “I felt a lot of headaches and a lot of pain in my body. I couldn’t move,” she wrote in her statement. Lisa remembers nothing after the collision. She was having trouble breathing and couldn’t see out of her right eye, which was developing a nasty purple bruise.

Jessica Bienstock, a physician with the who was on another tour nearby, heard the commotionÌęand hurried over to the platform. She was horrified to see the Sky Rangers encouraging Hazel and Lisa to get up. Lisa had broken six ribs, as well as her tailbone and pelvis, and had suffered a partially collapsed lung. Moving could have killed her. Bienstock asked the guides to bring a backboard and call the “ambulance”—a Toyota pickup with a metal canopy on the back. Someone brought a first-aid kit, but, according to Bienstock, there was almost nothing in it except gauze, medical tape, and Band-Aids.

After a pit stop at a nearby clinic to drain fluid from her right lung, Lisa finally made it to the hospital two hours later. Doctors there discovered damage to her optic nerve. In hopes of saving her vision, the family paid $20,000 to have her flown to in Bangkok, about 300 miles to the south. Lisa was in the intensive care unit for three days while Rich debated whether to approve a risky surgery to save her vision that would involve cutting open her skull. “Ultimately, we decided not to do it,” he says.

Gary Searle, Flight of the Gibbon’s current managing director, disputes the Sayres’ account but declined to comment in detail because of pending litigation. The Sayres have filed a $1.4 million lawsuit against the company.

Rising Injuries and Deaths

Before they were tourism attractions, zip lines were used to ferry people, goods, and livestock across remote jungle ravines. American biologist Donald “Monkey Man” Perry the first canopy zip line for research in 1979 using 1,200 feet of polyester rope that connected three tree crowns high in the Costa Rican rainforest, where he was studying primates.

In 1996, Canadian entrepreneur Darren Hreniuk adapted Perry’s concept to launch the self-proclaimed in the cloud forests of Monteverde in northern Costa Rica. As an aerial alternative to familiar attractions like whitewater rafting or nature hikes, zip-line parks exploded in popularity. Today, there are dozens in Costa Rica alone, and hundreds, if not thousands, strung up in tropical destinations around the world. , the longest zip line on earth is the 8,300-foot Monster at Puerto Rico’s , which sends riders careening at 93 miles per hour.

Now they’re coming to a city near you. In the past five years, hundreds of commercial zip-line parks have opened in the United States. At least 400 are open nationwide, and more are on the way. You can in New York . In Paso Robles, California, you can ride the zip line over the Santa Margarita Ranch vineyard. You can even zip-line in your own backyard using DIY kits from companies like Slackers and Ripline.

It may seem straightforward to send one person at a time over a fixed line, but the risks of zip-lining are more in line with whitewater rafting than riding a roller coaster. A found that the number of zip-line injuries in the United States has increased from a few hundred per year in the late 1990s to more than 3,600 in 2012. (Unfortunately, no one tracks total participation, so it’s impossible to determine an injury rate per capita.) Researchers at Ohio State University found that almost 12 percent of zip-line injuries resulted in fractures or other injuries requiring hospitalization, making zip-lining mishaps at least .

There is no central repository of fatalities, but more than a dozen news reports describe people dying on zip lines in the United States since 2006. In 2015, a after her tether snapped over a 40-foot canyon. The same year, an after a gruesome fall when his neck became entangled in the safety harness. Last May, a woman after colliding with a falling tree. In August 2016, a woman fell to her death in Delaware. By comparison, more than 300 million people visit amusement parks each year, and only 3.8 deaths occur annually, from the .

The relatively high rate of injuries and deaths from zip lines may be due to the fact that and haven’t kept pace with the growing industry. “Right now, it’s kind of a patchwork of regulation that varies from state to state,” says Shawn Tierney, executive director of the (ACCT), one of three industry organizations that publishes voluntary standards. “Most zip-line regulations come from amusement rides, and that doesn’t quite fit,” he says.

How Are Zip Lines Regulated in the U.S.?

In about half of all U.S. states, primarily those in the Midwest and on the East Coast, commercial zip lines are overseen by state agencies responsible for oversight of roller coasters or elevators. In most places, including Illinois and Georgia, the state labor department oversees zip lines. In Florida, the task falls to the Department of Agriculture. In Connecticut and Maine, it’s the state fire marshal. And in states like Arizona or Virginia that lack state oversight, zip lines may be subject only to city or county regulations. In Shenandoah County, Virginia, for example, building inspectors are responsible for vetting zip-line platforms.

However, regulators don’t typically inspect individual zip lines in person. According to a compiled by zip-line vendor Experiential Systems, officials often review only engineering plans and operation manuals for permit approval and licensing and simply require operators to undergo annual third-party engineering inspections. Zip line accidents in North Carolina and Hawaii have spurred calls for in those states, but such measures are unlikely to include state inspectors on the ground. “We don’t have enough manpower,” an official told .

The ACCT’s goal has been, in part, to fill that gap by laying out uniform safety standards. In January 2016, the , an umbrella organization that oversees voluntary standards for everything from chairlifts at ski resorts to carabiners for climbing, accredited the ACCT’s zip-line-specific standard, which lays out specifications for things like braking systems and staff training. Several states have already begun to incorporate it into law. , which passed in 2011, requires operators to “construct, install, maintain, and operate all ziplines and canopy tours in accordance with ACCT [standards].”

But without official safety statisticsÌęand consistentÌęregulations, it’s not easy for consumers to know whether a zip line is safe to ride. The ACCT does not vet zip-line courses directly, but it does for inspectors and maintains a list of accredited vendors that design and consult with zip-line parks. Tierney recommends that potential riders ask operators whether they’ve had accidents, whether the zip line was built and inspected by an accredited vendor, and whether they are licensed by the government. “This is where the ‘buyer beware’ adage comes into play,” he says. “People have to do their homework.”

Done safely, zip-lining can be a family-friendly activity, but it’s not necessarily something that should be undertaken on a whim where information may be scant and regulations lacking. Ken Jacquot, president of in North Carolina, an ACCT-accredited vendor that has inspected zip lines in the United States and Central and South America, says the industry is improving overall, but he’s seen plenty of shoddy designs. “When you have people flying at certain high rates of speed, you want to make sure you slow them down in time,” Jacquot says. “There are people putting stuff up that doesn’t necessarily do that.”

Zip Lines Abroad

If regulations and oversight are inconsistent domestically, they’re almost nonexistent internationally. Flight of the Gibbon, with its stellar online reviews and polished English website, appears to be a safe, well-oiled operation. Yet its complicated history is enough to engender concerns about nascent zip-line enterprises around the world.

Flight of the Gibbon was the brainchild of New Zealander David Allardice, an adventurer with first descents on rivers in Myanmar and Tibet under his belt. In 1999, he co-founded a that offered bungee jumping, canyoneering, and a high ropes course. Chiang Mai, Allardice thought, would be the perfect place for a zip line. “It’s one of the best ways that kids and people of all ages can experience the jungle,” says Eric Southwick, who worked closely with Allardice as the operations manager at Flight of the Gibbon’s Chonburi location, which opened in 2009.

In 2007, according to former employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity, Allardice joined up with an American businessman named Steven McWhorter, whom he met through the expat network in southeast Asia, and Steve Saunders, a Brit who owns the Sanctuary spa resort in Koh Phangan, in southern Thailand. The men identified a site for a zip line just north of Chiang Mai. Over the next year, the three men erected more than a dozen zip lines in the forest, along with hanging bridges and abseil stations, former employees say.

The names of McWhorter, Allardice, or Saunders do not appear on company documents filed with the Thai Department of Business Development. Flight of the Gibbon’s Gary Searle claims that McWhorter was a consultant and deniesÌęthat he has been a partner or manager. Saunders, Searle says, advised the company but is currently not a shareholder.Ìę(McWhorter did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Saunders could not be reached for comment.) McWhorter’s wife, Supaporn “Nina” Chumsri, registered a company called Tree Top șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Co. Ltd. in 2007 to obtain a tourism license for Flight of the Gibbon and remains listed as a principal shareholder of Tree Top. Her Thai relatives also established Fire Fly Services Co. Ltd. and, later, Sky Walk șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűs Co. to pay foreign employees of Flight of the Gibbon, including managers and safety officers, who required work permits, according to former employees.

Allardice took safety seriously—training employees, requiring drug tests, and making them sign a strict protocol—according to Southwick and another zip line expert who worked at Flight of the Gibbon and asked to remain anonymous. He was also fastidious about pruning trees to ensure that Sky Rangers had clear line of sight between platforms. On longer lines, Sky Rangers were required to provide radio confirmation that the line was vacant before sending riders down. Allardice had test customers secretly ride the zip lines to make sure standards stayed high. But according to several former employees, without constant oversight, Sky Rangers were often lax about safety, lowering customers too quickly during abseils and clipping a second rider onto a line before the first one had been properly transferred to the platform, according to several former employees. In response to these accusations, Searle told șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, “We work with people, and people are not perfect. They never are.” He also noted that safety has been a priority since he became part of the company’s board last year.

Zip Line Accidents and Lawsuits (or Lack Thereof)

In 2012, disaster struck. A woman from Bangkok named Khun Poo stalled out on a 2,600-foot line during a heavy rainstorm and was struck by a second customer. She broke her hip, requiring two operations. She still needs a cane to walk. The same year, a Taiwanese businessman named Parry Lin also failed to reach the landing platform on an 980-foot line—the very same where Lisa Sayre would have her zip line accident. A Sky Ranger careening down the line crashed into him, feet-first. Lin suffered seven broken ribs and two broken vertebrae, according to a report filed with the Chiang Mai Tourist Police. The company paid his Thai hospital bills, according to Lin’s wife, Christine Liaw, but it took Lin a year to recover in Taiwan, and he still has trouble working a full day. “It is like a nightmare in our mind,” Liaw told șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű.

Following that zip line accident, Allardice emailed Liaw. He wrote that he wanted to gather as much information as possible to “make sure it does not happen again.” But she didn’t respond, and he never followed up with her. On April 25, 2013, at age 56, Allardice died of melanoma on his visit to a zip line he was building in Cambodia. Flight of the Gibbon posted a glowing remembrance of him on the website, praising him for “making our company the best it could be.”

If an accident like this happened on U.S. soil, we might expect a lawsuit, negative publicity, and a flurry of new regulations from local authorities. But when tourists are far from home, in a place like Thailand or Ecuador, typically they don’t take the time to file lawsuits or campaign for change, which would involve navigating foreign bureaucracy. And since there isn’t direct oversight of zip-line parks in many developing countries, it’s easier for accidents to occur without consequences.

Southwick stopped working for Flight of the Gibbon after Allardice’s death. The current safety manager, Bryan Schwartz, who previously worked under Allardice, said in an email to șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű that Flight of the Gibbon has kept up the late co-founder’s high standards. “The basics of all our safety procedures were designed by him, and they have been continually updated to meet international standards.” Schwartz wrote. “I take considerable pride in our operation, particularly in our safety.”

The Consequences

On March 29, 2016, the two Sky Rangers who led the Sayres’Ìętour turned themselves in to the police during a criminal inquiry into Lisa Sayre’s accident. In October, they pled guilty in court to charges of “negligence and causing grievous bodily harm” by failing to properly communicate with each other using their radios. The moment was bittersweet for Rich and Lisa, who traveled back to Thailand to testify at the Sky Rangers’ trial. “It doesn’t matter which guide is guiding the trip,” Rich says. “These horrific collisions keep occurring.”

That’s one reason the Sayres filed a $1.4 million civil lawsuit against Flight of the Gibbon in Buriram Provincial Court in September. They allege that the company is liable for the negligence of its employees, and they’re seeking $85,000 for medical expenses paid in Thailand plus $560,000 in future expenses they anticipate in the United States. TheÌęSayres are also seeking $560,000 for disability and loss of work, along with $140,000 for the company’s failure to take responsibility for the accident. A civil trial against the company and one of its main agents, a relative of McWhorter’s wife, is scheduled for March.

Lisa, who is 58, remains blind in her right eye. She can walk and has started taking dance classes again, but she still suffers from back pain. Her CT scans indicate that she had two strokes shortly after the accident. Lisa stumbles over words and has trouble following conversations. “Life is more challenging than it used to be,” Rich says of Lisa’s disabilities. “She’s 58. What’s life at 68 or 78?”

Flight of the Gibbon isn’t the only Chiang Mai outfitter having trouble keeping tourists safe. Two deaths at other zip lines there have drawn the ire of local authorities. In June 2015, a Chinese tourist at wasn’t attached to a safety line and fell off a 90-foot platform . Then, in October 2015, a tourist reportedly broke her neck during a bizarre accident at , when two tourists were . Last April, under pressure from the Ministry of Tourism and Sports, all zip-line operators in Chiang Mai , which included better training for guides, improved brakes, and the use of two safety lines.

In an interview with șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű in August, Searle said Flight of the Gibbon takes safety seriously through third-party inspections by engineers, quarterly visits from EMS officers, and thorough training of Sky Rangers.Ìę“Our safety record places us among the very best zip-line courses in the world,”Ìęhe said.ÌęThe company’s website now touts its adherence to ACCT standards, and Searle says it plans to be the first in Thailand to employ a full staff certified by the ACCT. “We are really sorry that somebody got hurt,” Searle says. “At the end of the day, we are constantly improving.”

Such assurances may ring hollow to three Israeli tourists who visited the park on December 16. According to the Bangkok Post, all three visitors, including a seven-year-old boy, collided with one another on a line and were taken to the hospital. The most seriously injured was a 40-year old woman, Orit Rov, who was placed in intensive care and has since been released. Flight of the Gibbon shut down for two weeks, and the police promised an investigation. (Requests to Rov for comment were not returned.)

By mid-January, Flight of the Gibbon was back in operation. The company has updated the . It no longer features a claim about its unblemished safety record.

The post Just How Dangerous Are Zip Lines? appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

In the fall of 2013, Finnish climber Nalle Hukkataival took a trip out to Lappnor, Finland,Ìęa new bouldering area about an hour east of Helsinki on the country's forested southern coastline. When he arrived, his old friend, Marko Siivinen, pointed out a nameless hunk of rockÌęthe size of a bus that looked like it was about to topple over.

With just a few obvious holds on the flat face, Hukkataival, 30, could see the line to the top immediately. It looked like a V14 problem—expert-level but not impossible. He stepped up to the wall and gripped two vertical ridges, compressing them as though he was closing a sliding door. But the moment he dabbed his right foot onto the wall, he plopped onto the padded mat beneath. It was the first sign that this project wasn’t going to be as easy as he’d thought. “If it looked as hard as it is, I wouldn’t have even tried,” Hukkataival says.

Over the next four years, Hukkataival would make an estimated 4,000 attempts on theÌębouldering project before finally conquering it last October. “I thought he was going crazy at some point,” Siivinen, 36,Ìęsays. “I was feeling guilty that I showed it to him.”

Hukkataival has given it a V17 grade, which—if given the nod by future climbers—would make it the hardest bouldering problem in the world. As a self-professed guardian of the integrity of the grading system, it’s not a claim he makes lightly, and top climbers who have visited the boulder agree it has potential. “I’ve been traveling for 12 years non-stop,” Hukkataival told șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű. “The whole time I’ve been looking for something with the perfect level of difficulty.” (So far, no other top climber has repeated the ascent, which is the next step in corroborating the V17 rating.)Ìę

To put things in perspective, a V0 bouldering problem is like climbing a ladder. Problems in the V4 to V5 range have skimpier handholds and require the technique and finger strength of a dedicated amateur. V9 and above are pro-level, the kind of problems featured in climbing competitions. Currently, the number of climbers in the world who have scaled a V15 is . A V16? Just five.

This boulder—which Hukkataival christened Burden of Dreams after a 1982 documentary about director Werner Herzog’s monomaniacal quest to move a steamship over a mountain in the Amazon—stands alone. It is like Yosemite’s Dawn Wall writ small, an exercise in frustration that Hukkataival documents in a short film called the , which will be out February 8. The problem consists of just five or six hand movements to the top with funky moves like a piano match, where Hukkataival has to lift his index finger from a crimp to fit his other hand on securely. The footwork may be even more critical. In the beginning, Hukkataival couldn’t even do some of the individual moves, let alone string them together. In total, the climb is a combination of precise, dynamic lunges to sloping holds and powerful body-tensioning static moves.Ìę

Hukkataival is the best climber you’ve never heard of. He’s earned the respect of the sport’s elite, but he’s not a household name like Alex Honnold or Sasha DiGiulian. Part of the reason for his relative anonymity is that he abandoned the competition circuit early and works almost exclusively on smaller canvases: boulders not cliff faces. “It’s the purest form of a pushing yourself where you're not tied down by all this equipment,”Ìęhe says.Ìę

He grew up in Helsinki but always loved spending time at his family’s cottageÌęin the FinnishÌęArchipelago. At 12, he started climbing in the gym, where the routes quickly grew too easy for him. Skipping holds felt contrived. He gave up climbing for more than a year until a friend took him to an outdoor crag. It was a revelation. “You just go from the bottom of the rock to the top,” he says. “No one tells you what you can do or not.” In 2006, at the age of 20, he was invited to the Arco Rockmaster Competition. He won it and nabbed his first sponsorship from La Sportiva.

But instead of sticking with comps, Hukkataival bought a VW van and spent the next five years in it, exploring crags around Europe, then farther from home. During that time, he conquered some of the world’s most legendary boulders, including Dreamtime in Switzerland, once the gold standard V15, and Livin’ Large, a highball boulder in South Africa, where a 26-foot fall from the top would likely be fatal.

While scoring ascents on some of the world’s hardest routes, Hukkataival developed a deep skepticism of the scoring system. In March 2010, he wrote a Ìęabout the exaggeration—and subsequent demotion—of bouldering grades for new problems. “We can all be throwing out big grades and flashy numbers and get on magazine covers, get better sponsorship and then a few months later watch our problem getting downgraded,” he wrote.Ìę

It seemed like every time someone made a first ascent of a challenging boulder problem, they would claim it deserved a V15 grade, a milestone that was first crossed in 2000 (or 2002, ) andÌęby 2010Ìęhadn’t been surpassed. But as more people climbed a problem, the grade would slump to a V14. Hukkataival argued for a more conservative, wait-and-see approach to the grading system. “I totally agree that we need to move up on the scale soon, but I'm not sure if the necessary (big) step has been reached yet,” he wrote.

In 2011, when climbers first started throwing out V16 grades, Hukkataival maintained his miserly outlook. After he made the third ascent of Gioia, a possible V16 in Italy, whether it really deserved that grade.Ìę

So how to justify his V17?

Calling it a V16 would have been a cop-out, Hukkataival says, a calculated move to avoid criticism or the sting of the next successful climber downgrading his problem. He wanted to push the grading system forward, and Burden of Dreams felt like the right boulder with which to do that. It’s unquestionably harder than anything he had ever successfully climbed before. He estimates he went to Lappnor more than oneÌęhundred times, filming his attempts sometimes with the help of a cameraman, sometimes on his own.Ìę

By the fall of 2015, Hukkataival felt like he had reached a pinnacle of readiness, and was moments away from sending the problem. Then the snow came. “I stuck around for three weeks looking out the window,” he says. Come spring, he started anew. Fumbling. Struggling. Falling.Ìę

As spring turned to summer, his sweaty fingertips foiled the friction he needed to cling to the wall’s slight bulges. Top climbers, including Daniel Woods and Jimmy Webb, made pilgrimages to Lappnor and agreed that it lay on that thin line that divides the possible from the impossible. “Weeks and months turned into years of uncertainty and self-doubt,” Hukkataival later wrote on Instagram. “Trying to keep that little spark of hope in the back of your mind alive.”

On October 23rd, Hukkataival was out there all alone. He set up his camera and stepped up to the boulder. Everything came together in that one moment. That perfect sequence of moves. Four years flashed before his eyes. He mantled over the lip and couldn’t believe it. When he got down, he texted his friends in Finnish: “Se meni.” It went.Ìę

It was over.ÌęWhether or not the V17 grade sticks,ÌęHukkataival is already onto his next punishing mega-project. Over the winter, he spent some time in Yosemite with eyes not on the big walls, but on a wet, moss-covered boulder in the valley.

The post The Crazy Hard Boulder Problem That Took Four Years to Send appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Timothy Yates woke up on Saturday, February 20, prepared for victory. The 45-year-old tech CEO from Williamsburg, Virginia, had some of the top slalom times in his region, but fate had repeatedly robbed him of the Southern Alpine Racing Association’s championship masters title. Last season, he was disqualified for missing a gate. This year, the competition was taking place at the Timberline Four Seasons, a family-run resort in West Virginia. Yates had tuned his race skis, honing them with four different stones until they were as sharp as samurai swords. “I’m going to win this one,” he thought.

At 8:30 a.m. EST, Yates hopped on the Thunderstruck lift for a course inspection. Thunderstruck rises 1,000 vertical feet to the 4,268-foot summit of Herz Mountain, named after the family of Timberline owner Fred Herz. It’s an old three-seater that was installed in 1985 by Borvig, a New York–based company that went out of business eight years later. The chairs hang fixed to a metal haul rope running between a series of black towers. Atop each tower sit the crossarms that support a train of grooved discs—or sheave wheels—that rumble whenever a chair hanger rolls over them. That day, as Yates approached Tower 12, he gazed in disbelief as the crossarm tipped away from him in slow motion. The haul rope slipped free from the wheels, and his chair plummeted toward the ground 30 feet below.

Yates doesn’t remember what happened next, but witnesses saw the chair recoil on the rope after the initial freefall, like a rubber band pulled taut, and released, slingshotting him and his two fellow passengers 25 feet into the air. He left a foot-deep impression when he face-planted into the soft snow. As Yates marveled that he was conscious and still alive, his chair whipped a few feet overhead before smashing to pieces against the tower. His pain came later, once the shock wore off. He skied down with the help of ski patrol and an ambulance took him and his daughter to the hospital. He would later learn that he had three broken ribs and elevated liver enzymes, suggesting organ damage.

Yates wasn't the only skier injured that day. Approximately 25 people fell from Thunderstruck, including Yates’s then 17-year-old daughter. More than a hundred other riders had to be evacuated over two tense hours as the towers groaned. The championship was postponed for a week and relocated to another resort. Yates’s doctor made him skip it. Today, his right elbow hurts so badly that he can’t pound more than one nail into wood at a time. “I may be able to ski with a bum arm like that, but I won’t have a good start,” he says. His friends at his home resort of Wintergreen gave him a trophy at the end of the season to make up for the bad luck: Men’s Aerial, First Place.Ìę

Mechanical lift failures remain exceedingly rare in the United States, but when they do happen, they raise troubling questions about how well many of the country’s approximately 3,000 lifts, gondolas, and trams are maintained. And some experts fear that failures will become more common as the country’s ski infrastructure continues to age. Just days after the West Virginia accident, Vermont officials shut down a 40-year-old Borvig lift at Suicide Six Ski Area after Ìęin two towers where the crossarm meets the tower head. According to ,Ìę176 Borvig lifts remain in operation in 26 U.S. states and three Canadian provinces. Another lift manufacturer,ÌęDoppelmayr, recently issued warnings about cracking in towers installed in the mid-1990s: British Columbia’s Big White Ski Resort had to on its Doppelmayr lift.

For decades, ski resorts have resisted calls for greater governmental oversight, arguing that their voluntary standards and self-inspections are rigorous enough. According to statistics compiled by the National Ski Areas Association, a passenger is five times more likely to die riding in an elevator than on a ski lift and eight times more likely to die in a car. “We haven’t had a fatality from a lift malfunction in 23 years,” says David Byrd, the association’s director of risk management. “I think that’s a pretty remarkable safety record.”

But in an era where ski resorts are often as starved for cash as they are for snow, maintenance standards and equipment quality vary. Most lift-related injuries have occurred at smaller resorts with skimpier budgets, some of which have lifts in operation dating to the Eisenhower presidency. Five years ago, a chair with two teenagers fell from a .

In industry presentations, Gary Mayo, a customer support manager for Doppelmayr USA in Salt Lake City, has compared the nation’s aging lifts to the iceberg that struck the Titanic: on a bluebird day, you sit back on your lift and look around, and all you see are the majestic snow-covered mountaintops. But beneath your seat is a clunky machine patched together from components that could be housed in the Smithsonian. “The earliest detachable lift installations in the United States have already surpassed the initial targeted life expectancy!” reads a summary of Mayo’s talk about planning for aging lifts from the . “What is lurking out there to sink YOUR ship?”

Since 1996, the average age of our nation’s lifts and gondolas has risen from 17 to 27 years old, according to a database compiled byÌę, founder of Lift Blog. Today, approximately two-thirds are more than 20 years old, and half of those are older than 35. Almost 100 lifts in operation were first installed more than 50 years ago, including Mad River Glen’sÌę, which was installed in 1948 and has been extensively refurbished. The NSAA and manufacturersÌędecline to put a number on the lifespan of a lift. “The analogy we like to use,” says Byrd, “is that they are like an old car: if they are maintained and you have parts that are replaced, they can run for decades.”

But keeping that 1971 Mercury Comet running reliably isn’t a straightforward proposition, particularly as off-the-shelf parts become unavailable and seasoned mechanics retire. “If it runs good, you don’t think about it,” says Jim Vander Spoel, who runs a lift maintenance program at Gogebic Community College in Ironwood, Michigan, and manages operations for the Porcupine Mountains Ski Area. He teaches his students how to diagnose and solve acute mechanical issues, but it’s harder to spot problems like metal fatigue and wear that develop after decades of use. “There haven’t been many failures yet,” he says. “It’s coming.”

There are also myriad variables to consider when assessing the health of an aging lift. A lift in a mild climate may last longer than one that gets encrusted in ice every winter, and a part-time lift on the back of a mountain will see less wear than the workhorse on the front, according to slides from Mayo's Doppemayer presentation. But by the time a lift gets to be about 25 to 30 years old, the cost of replacing all the fatiguing components, including the chairs and grips, could be 85 to 90 percent of the cost of installing a modern lift. “It makes more sense to buy a new one,” says Jim Fletcher, a ropeway engineer withÌęconsulting firm SCJ Alliance.Ìę

That’s an investment many small ski areas may not be able to afford. “The maintenance guys in the field are saying, ‘We need to do this,’ and the boss is saying, ‘How much does it cost?’” says Porcupine’s Jim Vander Spoel. Thirty years ago, it may have cost $200,000 to install a new lift. It costs around $1.5 million today. “A lot of these smaller operations would be out of business if they had to replace this stuff,” he says.

One of the worst chairliftÌęaccidents in recent history underscores the challenges of maintaining older lifts. On December 28, 2010, Michael Katz, a 48-year-old anesthesiologist and Delaware state senator, loaded the Spillway East lift at Sugarloaf Resort with his two daughters. As the 1975 Borvig double began the ascent, Katz heard a humming noise, then the lift abruptly stopped. The humming was the sound of the metal haul rope coming off a sheave wheel on Tower 8 and rubbing against a flange designed to limit the rope’s movement.

Noah Lake, a maintenance man in his 20s, climbed up the tower to fix it. After Lake tightened a metal turnbuckle that pressed against the wheels, he radioed the operator to restart the lift. Katz’s chair lurched forward, but the rope still was not seated in the grooves, and the lift stopped again. Thirty-five feet above the ground, Katz’s chair swayed. Before trying a new repair strategy, the lift operator decided to run the lift at slow speed to unload skiers.

Five seconds later, Katz felt a jolt, and then everything went black. The rope had fallen from the tower, bringing five chairs down with it. “I remember gaining consciousness on the ground, and there were people working on me,” Katz says. In addition to a head injury, he broke his back and several ribs, and sustained a torn spinous ligament and collapsed lung, which filled his chest cavity with blood. The accident resulted in four other serious injuries. Katz’s older daughter, Abigail, had a lumbar compression fracture, and both daughters sustained concussions that were serious enough to prevent them from returning to school for three months. Today, Abigail, 18, has a herniated disk that will require surgery.

An from Maine’s Board of Elevator and Tramway Safety called the resort’s maintenance records “inadequate” and found no evidence that it had removed and checked the sheaves every four years as recommended by some Borvig manuals.

Sugarloaf had modified the original sheave assemblies, adding turnbuckles to stiffen them in the wind. But the stiffeners weren’t designed to be adjusted with a loaded lift, and the older workers who knew that fact had all retired. When the lift was restarted that day, the force snapped the turnbuckle, catapulting the haul rope onto a cable catcher. Because the resort lacked an automatic shutoff switch on the uphill side of that tower, the lift continued to run, and the rope slipped from the catcher.

Katz’s family sued Sugarloaf, eventually settling for undisclosed terms. “We didn’t ski for two years,” says Katz, who owns a home on the mountain. “We slowly got back into it, but we still have a lot of fears about being on lifts.” His worries weren’t unfounded. On March 21, 2015, several chairs on Sugarloaf’s King Pine lift—a Borvig lift installed in 1988—, stopping only when the lift operator activated the emergency brake. Seven skiers received minor injuries.

In , John Burpee, Maine’s chief lift inspector, surmised that a “gear appears to have failed some time before the March incident but went unnoticed.” This maintenance oversight caused the gearbox to disengage and an automatic brake to fail. Burpee also suggested that ski areas consider upgrades to make their lifts safer. “Older lift systems may not be as reliable as new systems designed to fulfill the same function,” he wrote. Sugarloaf says it has tightened its operations and invested $1.5 million in upgrading older lifts over the past year. “It’s not the way you want to learn lessons about your lift maintenance program,” says Sugarloaf spokesperson Ethan Austin.

“Skiing is an inherently dangerous sport,” reads the boilerplate on a typical lift ticket. Indeed, being a skier means accepting a long list of risks, but of the tens of thousands of emergency room visits and dozens of deaths that occur at ski resorts each year, most happen when one skier collides with another or takes a tumble on dangerous terrain.

Chairlift accidents happen, too, but the greatest dangers on lifts come from inexperienced skiers slipping during loading, or children and distracted riders falling to the ground. In December 2014, a woman caught her ski on a support pole at Hunter Mountain in New York and . Colorado is one of the few states that require resorts to report injuries resulting from lift falls. In the past five years, 74 people were injured falling from lifts in that state, according to numbers provided to șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű by the . The agency classified three of those as the lift operator’s fault.

Lift malfunctions that result in fatalities are extremely rare. In its 2014 , the NSAA lists 12 deaths and 73 injuries resulting from 10 lift malfunctions in the United States since 1973. (Over that same time frame, there have been at least 102 fatalities at European resorts from lift malfunctions—nine times the fatality rate at U.S. ski areas.) The last time someone died in the United States following a malfunction was in 1993, when a sheave wheel fell off a tower on the Slingshot, a at the Sierra Ski Ranch (now Sierra-at-Tahoe). The malfunction caused an empty chair to get hung up. When the next chair, carrying a nine-year-old British boy named Michael Roper, slammed into the empty one, Roper was flung from the lift, and he died from head trauma.

But here’s the rub: because there is no national requirement to report injuries, the NSAA’s numbers are not comprehensive. Only after șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű began asking questions did the NSAA update its fact sheet to , Philip Giles. He also fell from the lift and was hospitalized in “serious but stable condition” from “facial injuries and a bruised liver,” according to the San Jose Mercury News.Ìę

For the most part, ski resorts regulate themselves. The NSAA is the secretariat for the committee that maintains , a standard for the design, maintenance, and inspection of ski lifts and trams. The standard was developed in July 1956, shortly after a corroded chairlift cable at New Hampshire’s Gunstock Mountain snapped, killing one and injuring seven others. The tragedy was a wake-up call at a time when ski areas were rapidly expanding and lifts were being . The standard has been updated sporadically since its inception, according to Byrd, and specifies maintenance protocols, such as monthly brake tests and annual lift inspections by an outside engineer—albeit one paid by the resort.

But only some states'Ìęagencies have adopted parts of the standard in their regulations, and it’s enforced by even fewer. Colorado and Vermont, home to 18 percent of the nation's lifts, are that have tramway safety boards who either have full-time staff members or hire contractors to conduct annual inspections, but they are largely spot checks. “My inspectors don’t climb every single tower,” says Stephen Monahan, head of Vermont’s .“Ski area maintenance people are supposed to do that.”

Ski areas in the other 11 states with tramway safety boards are only required to hire a certified inspector to sign off on their lifts. West Virginia, which has 27 lifts, doesn’t even have that level of regulation. And the ANSI B77 is not legally binding. Idaho, Oregon, New Mexico, Minnesota, Montana, and Wyoming also lack state safety boards, although those that operate on U.S. Forest Service land may receive a cursory check from a recreation ranger. (The Forest Service banned detachable Yan lifts in 1996, following a deadly accident at Whistler in Canada.)

Often, the only independent inspections are conducted by the ski area’s insurer, but these checks are about as in-depth as your annual car inspection. “The insurance company has their own set of goals, and it’s not necessarily the same as a public agency,” says Benjamin Gideon, a personal injury lawyer at Berman & Simmons in Lewiston, Maine, who represented Katz and other clients with claims against Sugarloaf. Their ultimate goal is to ensure that the premiums they receive outweigh the payouts. “Remember ?” he says. “Ford made the decision that it was more cost-effective to pay clients than to fix the problem.”

The NSAA says it supports efforts to make the ANSI B77 code standard for states and that the insurance inspections are only one part of a broader process of maintenance and oversight.

In the days following the accident at Timberline, Tim Yates learned firsthand about the flaws in the regulatory system. He read a about a service bulletin that Borvig’s president, Gary Schulz, sent out in 1987 . “In the course of last year’s winter operation two ski areas had discovered weld cracks in the tower cap located below the crossarm,” Schulz wrote. The company would pay for the installation of U-bolts to reinforce the crossarms before the next operating season. “We feel that it is essential for a safe operation.”

When Yates looked at his photos of Thunderstruck, he didn’t see the U-bolts, and he became fixated on digging up more information. He polled two resorts with similar lifts and found they had both completed the retrofit at the time. According to Gary Schulz’s son Hagen, who is the president of Partek Enterprises Inc., which servicesÌęBorvigÌęlifts, his companyÌęcoordinated repairs to add the missing U-bolts the week following the accident at Timberline. “No one ever verified that the modification was done, and 28 years later, lo and behold, the failure surfaced,” he says. “The maintenance people that work there are good people, but do I think they have the resources to do their job properly? The answer is no. That is a problem throughout the industry.”ÌęÌę

, Timberline says the tower failed due to a “hidden defect” and that the resort “adheres to every precautionary and professional standard in the industry.” The resort did not respond to specific questions related to the U-bolts. “For us and our public, it’s no longer a story, and we are moving on,” says Tracy Edmonds Herz, vice president of Timberline.

In response to questions about lift safety, the industry often maintains a circle-the-wagons mentality. On the morning of May 3, David Byrd gave the keynote talk at the conference with a bullet point reminding ski area employees never to talk to the media. “The miscues in our lift operations and maintenance are magnified and sensationalized beyond their true impact, but the damage to our industry and the sport is often disproportionate to the actual incident,” Byrd warned in his abstract, noting that “the media’s initial reaction only leads to eventual legal and regulatory headaches.”

Byrd also alerted them to this article, which he suggested was going to be hard on the industry. One lift operator told șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű that he came away from the the talk fearing that he would lose his job and never be able to work at a ski area again if he was named in this report. Others have also been wary about sharing information with the media. While Gary Mayo initially provided șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű with a copy of Doppelmayr’s aging lifts presentation, he later wrote that the information contained within it was “proprietary” and “may not be used in any way,” referring further questions to the NSAA or to Doppelmayr’s president.

Byrd declined to comment on the failings of individual resorts, but the NSAA frequently . “There’s an atmosphere in the industry of us versus them,” says Dick Penniman, the chief research officer at the , who has worked as an expert witness for injured skiers for more than 30 years. Penniman says he was kicked out of the NSAA's 1986 annual convention at Disneyland Convention Center for talking about ski safety regulations. “As long as customers aren’t aware of the problem and don’t know that things aren’t as good as they look, there’s no pressure on them,” he says. The NSAA says that no group would allow someone who testified against it to attend its meetings. “It is estimated that he has been paid well over $1 million (if not twice that) by plaintiffs and their lawyers for offering uninformed opinions in litigation,” Byrd wrote șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű in an email. “It is laughable how little actual experience and understanding he has of ski area operations.”

While dedicated skiers may sneer at the SnowSport Safety Foundation’s , which rates features like signage and padding on poles, Penniman says it’s not trying to turn Kirkwood into Disneyland but instead wants consumers to be able to make informed decisions. The foundation helped craft the California Ski Safety Bill, which would require ski resorts to post a safety plan and report serious injuries and deaths. The state legislature passed the bill in 2012, but thenÌęGovernor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed it, arguing it would place an “.” In 2013, GovernorÌęJerry Brown vetoed a similar bill.

If the industry has been allergic to some forms of regulation, Jim Vander Spoel says that attitude is not coming from lift mechanics. “I always look forward to having another set of eyes on my work,” he says. Vander Spoel sits on the ANSI B77 committee, which is preparing to publish a new standard, likely in 2017, and he suggests that skiers in every state encourage their legislators to make it legally binding. “I would like to see this adopted nationwide,” he says.

Others say the industry could go further, following the practice in France and the Canadian province of Ontario, where lifts must receive an in-depth mechanical evaluation after 15 or 20 years in service to bring them up to current standards. Hagen Schulz, of Partek, would like to see a mandate that parts be checked for wear and replaced at regular intervals, as is required with aircraft. “There’s been a lot of talk about it, and the pushback comes from the resorts,” he says. The NSAA points out that the ANSI B77 standard already requires that ski areas adhere to manufacturers’ recommendations and that they are free to include such schedules in their manuals.

For now, without consistent regulations, skiers must decide whether they canÌęcontinue trusting the lifts at the local ski hills they know and love. The clock is ticking for many small ski areas and the message is clear: upgrade or bust. “That’s the lifeblood of our industry,” Vander Spoel says. “I’d hate to see all these small guys disappear.”

The post Is Your Local Chairlift a Death Trap? appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Around noon on Tuesday, Olivier GoumasÌęwalked to the front door of 123Mountain—theÌęoutdoor shop he owns in Frisco, Colorado,Ìęwhich șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűÌęwrote about in February—to find it guarded by the Summit County Sheriff’s Department. Inside, a crew of eight were gathering the store’s inventory, including brand-new Leki ski poles and Camelbak water bottles, and hauling it out to a Budget rental truck. Goumas was allowed in briefly to identify his personal property.

The goods will be auctioned off to pay 123Mountain’sÌędebt of more than $30,000 to Greg Gantzer, who has won two judgments in Summit County, Ohio, related to website work he did that GoumasÌęnever paid for. Gantzer estimates that the gear they took would sell for $250,000 at retail value.ÌęDuring theÌęcourt-orderedÌęseizure,ÌęheÌęspotted Goumas outside in a black knit cap and puffy jacket. “We saw each other, but exchanged no words,” Gantzer says.Ìę“I feel like some kind of justice was served, and it will prevent him from injuring other people.”ÌęGoumas did not respond to repeated calls and emails for comment.

As șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű previously reported, Goumas—who has operated aÌęstring of ski and gear retailers in France and the U.S.Ìęover the last decade—has angered consumers, gear manufacturers, and even his own employees by not deliveringÌęgear or paying for products and services rendered. GoumasÌęhas never been charged with a crime, but his luck seems to have run out. Even before the seizure, he was being evicted from the Frisco store.

While Gantzer had a court on his side, another vendor recentlyÌętook the law into his own hands.ÌęLast fall, Bradford Peterson, the Denver-based co-founder of , sent Goumas 15 pairs of hand-stitched gloves with elaborate beadwork. He was disturbed to find 123Mountain listing Astis’s entire glove line online at prices $20 below its competitors. When Peterson complained to Goumas about what he believed to be a deceptive practice to lure customers, Goumas was unapologetic. “I don’t recall you have bought my website?” Goumas wrote in an email to Peterson. After talking to friends in the industry, Peterson worried he would never be paid for the gloves he already sent, which were worth more than $2,000 at retail prices.ÌęOne afternoon before Christmas, he went to the Frisco storeÌęto take back his mittens. “You haven’t paid for them, and I’m taking them,” he told Goumas. The two wrestled in the middle of the store and Peterson eventually returnedÌęto his car with 12 of the 15 mittens.Ìę

While the recent seizure represents aÌęblow to 123Mountain, Goumas hadÌęalready begun rebranding himself. According to Nancy Clark, a partner at the Unleaded Group, a web design firm in Denver, he has been preparing to launch a new site, Summitwearhouse.com. A Frisco-based eBay user “summitwearhouse” has sold over 200 outdoor-related items during the last 12 months and has mostly stellar reviews on the auction site.

One reviewer, however, questioned whether their Dynafit ski bindings were really unopened and in the original packaging as promised. “Shifty seller,” they wrote. “Would not do business again.” Another warned: “Unreasonable. No communication. Beware of this seller.”

The post Summit County Sheriff Seizes Gear from E-Retailer 123Mountain appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

In early November, Leigh Attwood, a 32-year-old Brit living in Manhattan, was hunting online for the Moose Knuckles 3Q jacket—an $895 puffy with a fur-trimmed hood. Searching on Bing, he found a black one in extra small that was listed as “available” on the website of aÌęstore called 123Mountain, whose twoÌębrick-and-mortar outfits in Colorado wereÌęowned and operated by Frenchman Olivier “Oliver” Goumas and his Swedish wife, Anna Sofia. With large banner ads, great deals, and a no-questions-asked return policy, the site—which featured everything from Völkl skis to Alpine Aire precooked couscous—looked like any other online outdoor retailer.

Attwood noticed that if he purchased a $50 premium membership to 123Mountain, he could get fiveÌępercent off the jacket’s price, plus two-day shipping. On November 7, he paid for the membership and ordered the jacket for $824. A week later, he still hadn’t received the product, so he contacted the company through its Chat Live feature. A customer service representative named Peggy told him they had already sent him two emails notifying him that he should expect his order between November 9 and November 29.ÌęAttwood, annoyed byÌęthe delay, told Peggy that heÌęthought the item was in stock and would ship promptly. Peggy explained that available items are available for order rather than inÌęstock, and that most ship to the customer within nine business days. Attwood responded that this policy was “very dishonest,” but he resolved to keep waiting for the jacket since he had already paid for the membership. “I was stuck,” he told me.Ìę

Then, on December 8, 123Mountain emailed him a preorder receipt billing him for 15 percent of the jacket’s price, orÌę$123.60. The company said it still expected to ship his jacket between November 9 and 29, butÌęthis time, the email specified a year: 2017. When Attwood tried to cancel the order, he says he was told he would lose the $123.60 as a cancellation fee, a stipulation specified in the site’s surreal list of , which alsoÌęprohibited reselling items to “your Russian cousin” andÌęcompared any errors in prices or photos to a cat named Misse having anÌę“accident.”

“In another wordÌęyou have accept rule of the game now we stick to theses rules,” a company representative wrote Attwood in broken English.

Exasperated, Attwood began searching online for reviews of 123Mountain. Some customers,ÌęparticularlyÌęin 123Mountain’s early days, had receivedÌęthe gearÌęthey ordered. But AttwoodÌęfoundÌęmany more complainingÌęabout the company on social media,Ìęto sites like the Better Business Bureau,Ìęand in forums on Mountain Project and Backpacking LightÌęfor more than two years. “Avoid 123Mountain at all costs,” Jeremy Monahan .ÌęAt Ripoff Report, a customer named Jeff the company sent a collections agency after him when he disputed a credit card charge for an item that was never shipped. “I order a lot of things online and have never AND I MEAN NEVER encountered anything as shady and backhanded as this Colorado-based Internet company 123Mountain,” he wrote.
Ìę
On Yelp, 123Mountain now has a one-star rating, with customers reportingÌęthey haveÌęreceived the wrong items and have been refused returns and exchanges. Others said they were asked to pay using Bitcoin or Chase Quickpay, neither of which offer buyer protection. Sara Benson, an Oakland-based writer for Lonely Planet and other publishers, spent four months requesting a $365.98 refund for a Big Agnes tent she never received. 123MountainÌęissued her a check via eCheckDirect.com, but when she tried to cash it, the company'sÌębank refused to honor the payment. A bank representative told Benson that 123Mountain’s account had been restricted due to fraud.Ìę

The companyÌęignoredÌęBenson’s emails and phone callsÌęuntil she tried to shame them on Twitter.Ìę“This is a legit check issue by a legit website from a legit bank account with legit fund on,” @123mountaincomÌętweeted back before blocking her. Benson submitted a complaint with the police department in Lakewood, Colorado, but she saidÌęthey declined to pursue criminal charges because flying Benson in to testifyÌęwould be too costly.

SergeantÌęAna Brun, who handles economic crimes for the Lakewood Police, says she has received nineÌęother complaints against 123MountainÌęsince 2013, but the knotty terms and conditions that customers agreed to when making purchases online made it impossible to charge the couple with a crime. “I have one investigator who would have loved to get good charges,” Brun says. “We are outdoorsy people and can understand the frustration.”

In a world of crowdsourced review sites and marketplaces like Amazon and eBay, it might seem surprisingÌęthat a company like 123Mountain could string along angry customers for so long. But while the maturation of e-commerce has given customers a wealth of buying options, murky businesses still persist in the Internet's back alleys, advertising their wares alongside legitimate players. Gear junkiesÌęare particularly prone to getting seduced by screamingÌędeals and hard-to-find equipment, which can lead them to place orders on lesser-known websites. The Goumases’ seemingly infinite inventory has luredÌęonline customers from farÌęandÌęwide, while theirÌęstores, based in Lakewood, Copper Mountain, and then Frisco,ÌęhaveÌęgivenÌęthe company mountain-town credibility.

It wasn’t just customers who had complaints: gear manufacturers and professionals have also alleged that 123Mountain never paid them for products and services. In September, won a $109,281 default judgment against the companyÌęin the Colorado District Court in Summit County. , the Finnish parent company of Salomon and Arc’teryx, won an $11,065 default judgment from 123Mountain in May from the Colorado District Court in Jefferson County. Lafuma outdoor furniture, Deeluxe snowboard boots, and Dragon Sunglasses have also filed suits in Colorado courts, and a collections lawyer says he knows of several other companies that are considering doing the same. In May 2015, aÌęKorean buyer named Duk Sang Yu won a default judgment for $316,003 in a Summit County Court over 160 Valandre brand high-altitude and ultralight sleeping bags that 123Mountain never shipped. “Mr. Goumas has used and continues to use 123 Mountain in its corporate form to perpetrate a fraud,”Ìęreads Yu’s legal complaint.ÌęThis pastÌęJanuary, Wisconsin-based ski apparel company ArcticaRaceÌęissued a “”Ìęabout the company on its Facebook page, warning customers, “If you place an order for an Arctica product with them you will not receive it despite what they tell you.” Sources told șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű that the consumer fraud division of theÌęColorado Attorney General’s Office opened an investigation at the start of thisÌęyear with a list of 200 potential witnesses. Leigh Attwood is one of them. “To him, it’s all a game,” Attwood says of Olivier Goumas. “Every dollar he can get from people, he will.”

During the reporting for this piece, the Goumases declinedÌęto respond to multiple emails and calls to their cellphones, whileÌęrepeated calls to 123Mountain’s business number went unanswered. In a conversation with șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű using the site’s online chat feature, Peggy, a customer service representative, denied that Goumas worked for the company or that there were any complaints. (According to Colorado Secretary of State business records, the Goumases are the registered agents for Ìęand their brick-and-mortar stores.)ÌęÌę

“Look like you don’t have the right info,” Peggy wrote. She explained that the chat feature was for customers only. “Journ[alist] and you cannot read?” she wrote. “Sorry but I have real customer to take care,” she added before ending the chat.

Interviews, public records, and archived websites, however, demonstrate that 123Mountain isn't theÌęGoumases'Ìęfirst business to attract a long line of angry customers. In 2000, Olivier Goumas, then in his mid-20s, became engaged to Sofia, according to his Facebook page.ÌęBusiness records show that theyÌęstarted a ski shopÌęthat yearÌęcalled Tignes and Temptation (TNT) Mountain Shop in Tignes, France. Seven years later, he began selling gear and clothing online at . But in June 2009, TNT went bankrupt, and the Goumases left France for Colorado. Message boards from the period show Ìęabout skisÌęthey but . The Goumases next venture, , seemed to rack up the . The business claimed to beÌębased in London but customers reported receiving items shipped from the U.S.ÌęJean-BaptisteÌęDorgal, a nurse in Lyon, France, told șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű that he received the wrong pair of Patagonia Alpine Guide pants from the siteÌębut never got a refund after he sent them back.ÌęThe site shut down in late 2012, according to cached web pages from the Wayback Machine.

On September 24, 2010, Sofia registered the trade name 123Mountain with the Colorado Secretary of State, and the couple opened their first store in Lakewood, seven miles southwestÌęof Denver. That winter at the , Olivier met Greg Gantzer, an outdoor sports and travel marketer who owns and designs websites for the industry. Gantzer says they soon signed a contract to build 123Mountain’s website. By late May, however, Olivier became testy when the site, with its massiveÌęinventory of 50,000 products, was not yet complete. In an email, Olivier wrote that if Gantzer took until June 6 to finish, he’d beÌępaid only 75 percent of his quote for the job. “After June 6, you are a joke,” he added.Ìę

“I think we may be having problems with our conversation due to cultures and language,” Gantzer wrote back in an email he showed to șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű. “I’d really like to discuss this with you on the phone so that we understand.”Ìę

Instead, OlivierÌęchanged the password on his server, effectively taking control of Gantzer’s work up to that date. “Your are fired,” Olivier wrote in his slapdash English. Gantzer sued in theÌęSummit County, Ohio, court, alleging breach of contract, unjust enrichment, and fraud, among other charges. Olivier provided a hodgepodge of defenses, countering that Gantzer had caused damages “in excess of $500,000.” In January 2014, a judge decided in Gantzer’s favor and awarded him $16,564.ÌęGantzer has yet to see any of the money.

“My hope of collecting from this guy is close to zero,” he says now. “Our hope is to do something so that he can no longer rip people off.”

In late 2012, the Goumases opened a secondÌę123Mountain store at the Village at Copper Mountain Resort. In an Ìępublished in the local newspaper Summit Daily, Sofia Goumas declared, “We start at where REI ends.” She explained that they would focusÌęon high-end brands, including European gear, and that customers could expect personalized service. “You’re going to get one of us on the line, and we’re going to try to help you any way that we can.”

OlivierÌęallegedlyÌęcounteredÌęnegative feedback by posting positive reviews of his stores under both his real name and the handle “Mountainblack,” according to one former employee.ÌęGoogle andÌęFacebook reviews appear to be swamped by dozens of positive ratings from bots—fictitious profiles that shareÌęan identical sequence of links and reviews.

Locals in Lakewood and Copper Mountain recall Sofia spending her days chain-smoking cigarettes while Olivier fueled up withÌęcup after cup of espresso. According to former employees, theÌęcouple periodically made their stores membership-only and created new rules to exclude customer visits,Ìępreferring to focus on online customers.

Employees weren’t happy with the Goumases either.ÌęDaniel Fluharty began working at the Lakewood shop not long after it opened in late 2011 and was responsible for packaging and shipping orders and responding to customers online.ÌęHe quickly became concerned about the number of customer complaints. One day, an irate customer showed up at the store with a lawyer and said that a jacket he paid for had never shipped. Fluharty was disturbed enough by the incident that he quit after four months. His final paycheck, he says, had been docked $350 for a ski pass that he believedÌęOlivier had given to himÌęas a bonus.

In 2014, another employee, Bogdan Peleszynski, won a default judgment against the couple after they failed to pay him $1,082.79 for his last two weeks of work. (Goumas denied the claim in emails and court filings, arguing that the check was lost in the mail, and offered to send Peleszynski a new check minus a $50 cancellation fee.)

Nevertheless, the Goumases had integrated into the Summit County ski community. Their two daughtersÌęjoined Team Summit, a nonprofit youth ski program that 123Mountain sponsored with $10,000 annual payments. The company logo appeared on team jackets and the team website, but the relationship soured in 2014, according toÌęcurrent and former employees of Team Summit. After the 2014–15 jackets were printed, Goumas failed to pay his sponsorship money or his daughters’ enrollment fees.

Instead, Goumas sent Team Summit a hefty bill for failing to promote 123Mountain weekly on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube—as stipulated in a contractÌęGoumas had penned and Team Summit’s executive director had signed. Both parties dropped their claims against each other in late 2014.ÌęTeam Summit’s bylaws allowed it to revokeÌęmemberships with or without cause and, in January 2015, the executive board voted to kick the Goumases’ daughters off the team.

Over the past year, 123Mountain's luckÌęseems to have run out. In early 2015, Copper Mountain began eviction proceedings against the shop because of consumer complaints and late rent paymentsÌębut dropped the lawsuit after the couple agreed to end their lease, according to GavinÌęMalia, development manager for Resort Ventures West, Copper Mountain’s property management firm. The couple is being sued for over a thousand dollars allegedlyÌęowed to the Copper Mountain Resort Association for dues that supported trash pickup, recycling, and fire service. The couple’s new outpost in downtown Frisco, which opened in June, was shuttered over the 2016 Martin Luther King, Jr., weekend, one of the biggest saleÌęweekends of the year. A sign on theÌęfront door listing the store hours reads: “Opening hour may vary if we are skiing or not. General rule less than 3″Ìęno changes. 4″-5″Ìęat least an hour delay. 6″Ìęand above until legs get tired.”

Their Frisco landlord, Larry Feldman, says they haven’t paid their $4,500 monthlyÌęrent for December or January. The Goumases, he says, argued they were withholding it because of problems with the lighting and carpet. Even before they quit paying, Feldman says they kept passing him bad checks, and he plans to evict them. “I’ve thought about locking up their merchandise,” he says. The original Lakewood shop closed sometime before Christmas, according to locals, and the GoumasesÌęput their $500,000 home Ìęon January 15.

If there’s a lesson that consumers can learn from the 123Mountain saga, it’s that it’s alwaysÌęworth double-checking the credentials of unfamiliar businesses online before handing over aÌęcredit card number. Rather than relying exclusively on one review site, such as Yelp, perform a general search for consumer complaints that might lead you to a troubling comment thread in forums.ÌęCredit card protections are the strongest tool consumers have when things go south, so don’t be lured into sending checks or Bitcoin payments to out-of-state businesses. Trying to recoup a couple hundred bucks through the legal system is unlikely to be successful and hardly worth the time.ÌęStoresÌęcan always hide behind the fine print, and consumer protection agencies may take years to build a case strong enough to nail even the most egregious scammers.ÌęToday, 123Mountain’s products are still listed on Google Shopping, which gives the store three-and-a-half stars.ÌęAnd there’s little stopping them from popping up again elsewhereÌęwith a new name and a clean slate.

As for Sara Benson, she ended up buying her tent from REI. Leigh Attwood cancelled his order with 123Mountain,Ìędisputed the $123.60ÌęchargeÌęon his card to Visa, and complained to Moose Knuckles about the jacketÌęfiasco. The company told him that they were aware of the complaintsÌęand offered him the jacket at 50 percent off. It arrived in early January, and Attwood loves it. “I saved $450 in the end,” he says.Ìę

The post The Husband-and-Wife Team Behind the Internet’s Most Infuriating Outdoor Retailer appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.