If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide or self-harm, call theÌęÌętoll-free from anywhere in the U.S. at 1-800-273-8255. (To reach theÌę, press 1.)

Dan Sidles grew up in northern Iowa, where the cornfields stretch to the horizon without a blip of elevation and the roads run bullet straight for miles through towns like Pocahontas (“the Princess City”) and Mallard (“We’re friendly ducks”).

He detasseled corn in those fields in the summers and hauled beer kegs out there with friends. He wakeboarded on Five Island Lake and played football for the , where he was a standout on offense and defense. After a directionless year in community college, he left Iowa for the Marine Corps in 2001.

His older sister still lives in the area, and I stopped by her house to pick him up. “I have Daniel ready for you,” Amy Gilderhus said and handed me a small Folgers coffee container with strips of duct tape securing the plastic lid. The weight surprised me, heavier than I had imagined. An urn decorated with an American flag held the rest of his ashes; it sat on a living room shelf next to a picture of Sidles and a large frame that displayed a folded flag and his medals from the Marines.

Gilderhus wanted some of her brother’s ashes spread on the mountains he had climbed, the places where he seemed happiest. I had offered to help get them there, together with some of Sidles’s other friends and climbing partners.

We started a few weeks later, on a July day in 2016 in the , the giant slabs of tilted sandstone that rise up along the western edge of Boulder, Colorado. They were a favorite climbing destination for Sidles. He’d scrambled up them scores of times, usually alone, wearing his earbuds and a red bandana, and often shirtless, revealing a thickly muscled tapestry of tattoos.

I had climbed the Second Flatiron with Sidles a few years earlier. That was my first time on something so high without a rope. I begged off the last short stretch, which required a move back onto the face near the top—heady for a new climber. Sidles continued, breath quick and heart drumming. Afterward he wore a giddy smile, still riding the adrenaline spike. “I haven’t felt like this since the last time I was in a firefight,” he said.

Now I started up the slab again, with a half-dozen others who had shared climbs with Sidles. Just ahead of me, Erik Weihenmayer, the , danced his hands across the rock and settled on a hold. In 2010, he and several friends from that Everest expedition had guided 11 wounded Iraq and Afghanistan veterans up a 20,075-foot peak in Nepal. I wrote about the expedition for șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, which is how I met Sidles. We spent hours talking on the trail. He was curious, self-aware, and determined to find some peace in his life. A natural storyteller, he punctuated the serious with humor and a laugh that a high school friend described as “a little girl getting licked to death by puppies.” Of the veterans—a mix of men and women with amputations, traumatic brain injuries, and post-traumatic stress—he seemed to be the person who gained the most from the trip. Sidles reveled in the physical challenge and believed that the outdoors might offer him a way forward.

In Nepal and afterward, Sidles spoke with remarkable clarity and insight about himself, his motivations and shortcomings. He knew that he’d been self-destructive and mired in self-pity after two tours in Iraq, and that many who cared for him had suffered because of it. He spoke not as someone lost in the darkness but as one emerging into the light. “I’m not going to give up, even on the roughest days. I don’t want to be a statistic, someone who resorts to doing drugs and drinking my face off to deal with my problems,” he told me. Perhaps other veterans would find some hope in his story. “Maybe they’re thinking about hurting themselves,” he said. “Before they run for the razors, maybe they’ll run to someone who can get them into something like this.”

He went on to climb in Ecuador, Alaska, and across the West. He summited in Russia and in Argentina. Gilderhus figured she might get a call one day that Sidles had been in a terrible accident in the mountains. An avalanche. A fall. But not that he’d killed himself.

I didn’t ask why. Few of us did. We knew Sidles had been struggling. But plenty of questions remained. He had participated in so many outdoor programs, most of them geared toward veterans and meant to help them reintegrate, find fellowship and purpose, and overcome some of war’s damages. For years he’d used the health care services offered by the Department of Veterans Affairs. Why hadn’t he seen more progress?

Many of those who knew him thought they’d failed him. Had they? Had the VA failed him? Had the country failed him, with its inability to understand what people like Sidles lived through?

Was this conclusion inevitable—dead at 34, a decade after he’d taken off the uniform? Or might things have turned out differently? And might his story tell us something about how to heal other combat veterans? To know that, I needed to understand what had happened to him.

But first we would return some of Sidles to one of his favorite places. After 1,000 feet of mellow climbing, we gathered near the top. Matt Murray opened a sleeve of Clif energy chews and passed them around, a toast of sorts. “Dan ate these like candy,” he said. Bald-headed, with a booming baritone voice, Murray flew A-10 attack jets in the first Gulf War. He had climbed with Sidles occasionally for the past several years, but mostly he had been his friend’s unwavering supporter. Sidles had twice lived with Murray and his wife for several months.

I pulled a small glass jar from my pack, containing a portion of Sidles’s remains that his sister had given me, and handed it to Murray. He tipped the jar and pale ash poured out. Some lifted on the breeze. Pebble-size pieces of bone and teeth tinkled down the rock face.

“There he is,” Murray said. He dragged his fingertips across the fine gray pile, then rubbed them together.

I have known several veterans who killed themselves, and many more who tried, some of whom I served with in Iraq in the Army infantry, and others I’ve met since. It sometimes seems I know more combat veterans who have considered suicide than haven’t.

kill themselves every day. While that tally presents the problem in scale, it obscures the fantastic complexity of each story. Cure a disease and millions might benefit from the same protocol. Not so for suicide, its causes and preventions so highly personalized. There can be myriad factors unrelated to war or military service: crumbling relationships, lost jobs, terminal illness, depression. And what pulls one veteran back from the edge might not help the veteran sitting next to them.

Despite the common portrayal of service members and veterans who die by suicide as young and battle scarred, most recent victims did not serve in Iraq or Afghanistan. According to , 65 percent were aged 50 or older when they died—though they could still have been dealing with combat trauma, which sometimes doesn’t manifest for decades. Among the younger veterans, who die by suicide at a higher rate than older veterans, more than half didn’t go to war. And of those who deployed, many didn’t see heavy combat.

But Sidles did.

Assigned to weapons company, , he rolled into Iraq on March 20, 2003, in the turret of a Humvee. The .50-caliber heavy machine gun he manned fired half-inch-thick bullets that could tear a man in half and shear off limbs. Twenty-one years old and a couple of hours into his war, he shot up a car full of fighters, sending it off a bridge and into the water. He’d fire more than 1,000 rounds on that first day of the invasion. He and his friends fought north toward Baghdad, the invasion wound down, and they went home, where they drank themselves senseless and acted the part of victorious Marines, cocky and belligerent.

Sidles and two buddies all got the same tattoo: Unscarred. After surviving the war, they imagined themselves untouchable. Sidles got another postwar tattoo, inked across his chest: Laugh Now, Cry Later. “Looking back,” he told me, “it’s almost like I had the feeling that what we were doing over there was going to haunt me. The first time was so easy compared to what happened the second time. We used to laugh and be filled with pride when we killed. Then you get out and no one understands how you could do that. People you would die for think you’re a psycho, and that makes you cry.”

The following spring, Sidles was back in Iraq, this time outside Fallujah, a city boiling with tension. Days after he arrived, , killing them, dragging their charred bodies through the streets, then stringing them from a bridge over the Euphrates river. Sidles’s unit went out that night and cut down the corpses.

In response to the killings, the Marines encircled and then pushed into Fallujah to clear it of insurgents, engaging in house-to-house fighting. On the city’s outskirts one afternoon in April, Sidles and two other Marines climbed atop a tower with an M240G machine gun and several belts of ammunition to observe enemy movements. But on the flat roof, in the full light of day, they were observable, too, with barely a concrete lip for cover. As they settled in, gunfire erupted from buildings and streets to their front and on both sides. Bullets snapped overhead, inches away, and several rocket-propelled grenades whooshed past, just missing them. If they stayed on the roof, they would die. The only way down was a ladder exposed to all that gunfire. Sidles ordered the other Marines off the roof while he covered them. He’d soon shot through nearly all 400 rounds, and he didn’t see how he’d get down alive.

“I just accepted the fact that I was about to die. And when you do that, when you believe that, your life goes poof!—right in front of your face,” he told me one morning in Nepal as we sat on a stone wall outside a mountaintop monastery. “Every choice I had made in life led me to that rooftop, and it was all over. I don’t think you’re ever the same after that. A piece of you is taken.”

As bullets pinged around him, Sidles scurried down the ladder and made it to safety. He still had six months to go.

Most U.S. combat deaths and injuries in Iraq were a result of improvised explosive devices. Insurgents hung them from highway overpasses and stuffed them into dead dogs along the road. They hid them in trash piles and car trunks, and most often, they buried them in the dirt. One of these exploded under Sidles’s truck on a scorching-hot July day. The blast burned and bloodied his face, mangled the medic’s arm, and took off the gunner’s hand. What Sidles would remember most, for years, was the terrible screaming.

As he walked into the chow hall hours later, with his own blood and that of his friends still on his uniform, a senior Marine told him he’d need to change before entering. The pettiness and lack of understanding enraged Sidles.

On his next patrol, four days after the blast, another Marine in Sidles’s Humvee noticed a battery half-buried near where they’d parked. He dug in the dirt. “Dan, we’ve got to go,” he said. “We’re on top of an IED.”

The bomb had malfunctioned. The truck’s weight had engaged the pressure plate, which should have ignited the massive artillery shells buried beneath it. The disposal team later told them that had the IED exploded, they’d all be dead. “What do you do? You just shake it off,” Sidles told me. “You can’t dwell on that stuff. Until years later, when it starts to really set in, what you’ve been through. That’s when it starts to screw with you.”

He spent his last year in uniform instructing new recruits in rifle marksmanship, then returned to Iowa. In the Marines, he and his buddies had relished their image as fighters and killers. Back home, in a world where people didn’t understand where he had been or what he had been doing on their behalf, the ground seemed to shift. Sidles, who had grown up with a lazy right eye, was already sensitive to people’s stares. Now it was all he could see. Judgment. He compared himself to a tiger on a chain, gawked at by strangers: “ ‘Hey, he’s been to combat. Want to go talk to him, want to go touch him?’ You just feel like this wild animal, and it’s like, oh man, I’m a human being.”

He’d sit in a bar in Emmetsburg, wearing a brooding mask of meanness, and wait for someone to start eyeing him. Drunken fights became a pastime. He spent a few nights in jail and missed out on more because the cops knew him and knew he’d been to war.

He still hung out with a few close friends from high school, but those trusted relationships had changed, too. James Davis, for one, felt a yawning distance. “He was talking to me, telling me a story, but he was just looking right through me,” Davis said. Sidles told him that people didn’t understand how crazy the war had been or how hard it was to readjust to life afterward. “It felt like a script he gave people,” Davis said. “Like he was trying to placate me.”

“He’ll always be my best friend,” Sidles told me. “He’ll bring up things that, no matter how many times he said it, always made me piss my pants. And now when I’m back, he’ll bring it up: Remember that time? And it’s not even funny to me. For him I’ll try to fake it. But he can tell.”

Sidles knew he was alienating people but felt helpless to stop the spiral. A drunk-driving charge earned him two weeks in jail. “I was throwing my life away, but I didn’t know why,” he said. “I didn’t know what was causing it.”

He moved from Iowa to Phoenix, but the change didn’t help. He couldn’t escape the aimlessness and boredom. Nothing matched the terrible excitement of the war. His social worker at the VA had an idea. She connected Sidles with Weihenmayer, who invited him to join the team that would climb Lobuche.

War veterans have long found relief in the solitude, perspective, and physical challenge of the outdoors. Earl Shaffer, who fought in the Pacific in World War II, told a friend he was going to “walk the Army out of my system, both mentally and physically” and became the , in 1948. Paul Petzoldt, who started the (NOLS), fought in Italy during World War II with the Army’s storied Tenth Mountain Division, as did , the first executive director of the , and the founders of several American ski resorts.

with a formalized program meant to calm the mind and salve the wounds of combat. Rheault fought in Korea and Vietnam with the Special Forces and retired in 1969 in a haze of scandal after his men killed a South Vietnamese double agent. He retreated to the outdoors and worked at the in Maine for 32 years. In 1983, he started a program for Vietnam veterans that promoted the physical challenge and camaraderie of the military in the mountains of New Hampshire. “We need each other to share the heavy loads, to help a vet who is hurting, to lend a hand across a dangerous or difficult spot in the trail, to make camp in the wild,” he wrote in . “The experiences duplicate everything except the shooting, the wounding, and killing.”

Despite promising results, nature-based programs for veterans didn’t gain wide interest until the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan gave us a new generation of struggling veterans. Today that landscape is crowded with groups offering everything from sailing and surfing to horseback riding and ice climbing. Many of these programs are event based, not built around continued engagement. Some are meant just to be fun outings, a “Thank you for your service.” Others, like Weihenmayer’s group, have more elaborate ambitions to ease PTSD symptoms and help the injured overcome limitations.

For the Nepal expedition in 2010, Weihenmayer and his climbing buddies reasoned that mountaineering could mimic the best parts of military service: teamwork, a sense of mission, and a shot of adrenaline. That’s what Sidles found when he strapped on a pair of crampons and slogged toward the Lobuche summit. He liked the rush he felt in the mountains, outside his comfort zone, a little bit scared and not wanting to let down those around him. “It takes courage to face your fears,” he told the filmmaker Michael Brown, “and if there’s no fear, there is no courage, you know what I’m saying?”

Brown, who has summited Everest five times, ran what was then called the . Students usually made their own short movies during multi-day backcountry trips, but on the Nepal expedition they all worked together to film the veterans. The resulting documentary, , prominently featured Sidles. After the expedition, Brown interviewed Sidles in Phoenix and filmed him in a boxing gym. Murray, a longtime friend of Brown’s, had climbed with us in Nepal and helped Brown with the follow-up interviews for the film.

“I feel like now that I know what I’m capable of, I just want more,” Sidles told them. “That feeling of just being alive.”

Brown and Murray both lived in Boulder and encouraged Sidles to relocate to Colorado. A few months later he moved into Murray’s basement, with mountains now in his backyard. He started climbing with a friend of Murray’s who had taught bouldering and mountaineering at NOLS. Sidles wanted to work as a guide and figured that attending NOLS could be a good route. He enrolled in the outdoor-educators course—three months of skiing, canyoneering, climbing, and wilderness first aid meant to prepare students for outdoor careers. That program now draws two dozen vets a year; Sidles, who used his GI Bill benefit to pay for the course, was one of just two who took part in early 2012.

Kyle Drake, a field instructor that semester, was Sidles’s adviser. Sidles told him about the Marines, his time in Fallujah, and the years that followed. Most of the other students were just out of college, and at times Sidles grew frustrated with their immaturity. He argued with a fellow student during a skiing exercise, so Drake positioned himself near Sidles, should he need to intervene. “I wasn’t sure what his life experiences had done to him,” Drake told me. “Is he a ticking time bomb, or is he just going to be angry?” But Sidles knew he needed to remove himself from the situation and find release through exertion. Duckwalking in his telemark skis, he charged ahead, dragging his sled—upside down—through the snow.

“Hey Dan,” Drake called. “Do you need help?”

“No,” Sidles said. “I’m good.”

During the canyoneering section, with two weeks left in the semester, Sidles again argued with a fellow student. In the Marines, that sort of confrontation—stern voices and threats—wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow. But this one, while not physical, concerned the instructors enough that they sent Sidles out of the mountains early. NOLS awarded him a certificate for completing the course, which was necessary for the VA to reimburse the cost under the GI Bill.

The chance to use his new outdoor skills came soon after. Weihenmayer organized another expedition for wounded vets, this time to Ecuador’s 19,347-foot Cotopaxi. Several veterans from the Nepal trip, including Sidles, would serve as mentors. Matt Burgess, a military policeman who fought in Iraq, credits Sidles with keeping him on the expedition. Disillusioned by the physical demands, Burgess had wanted to quit. Sidles told him of his own doubts in Nepal. “He’d pull me aside on a daily basis. ‘You doing OK? You still glad to be here?’ ” Burgess told me. “At one point I fell and slipped. It was Dan who stopped me. Knowing he was there and had my back was extremely comforting.”

Weihenmayer and the other guides from the Nepal trip had all summited dozens of other challenging mountains. They knew the stresses of expeditions. For the veterans, they surmised, success in the mountains could be taken back to their daily lives. “We were overconfident. We tried it again, and the whole thing almost fell apart,” Weihenmayer said of the Ecuador trip. “There’s a fine line between an adventure and the chaos of retriggering some of the wounds they were there to fix.”

In a lodge halfway up Cotopaxi, Sidles and another veteran mentor nearly came to blows over Sidles’s contention that the other man wasn’t pulling his weight. Sidles also had strong words for the guides, who he felt were underprepared. That day a guide had misjudged a route, turning a four-hour acclimatization hike into an all-day grind. The rancor soured the overall mood, which worsened a few days later when only half the group summited. “We should have been more prepared,” Weihenmayer told me.

His group, now called , has since run dozens of veteran trips. They’re done on a smaller scale, with an emphasis on the overall experience rather than reaching the summit. The staff receives three days of suicide-prevention and crisis-management training, and a staff social worker checks in with the veterans before the trip and for several months afterward to see how they’re integrating the experience into their daily lives.

The problems on Cotopaxi highlight the shortcomings of some programs, which can be heavy on good intentions and skills acquisition, but light on mental-health expertise and a deep understanding of the physical and psychological issues veterans often face. And many of the programs might not be reaching those who could most benefit.

“It’s much easier to work with a veteran who has his shit together, who shows up, has a good time—you can take some pictures, and you don’t have to deal with them again,” Joshua Brandon told me. Brandon used to run the program, which takes veterans mountaineering, rafting, climbing, and fishing. Most of the vets who came on his trips didn’t have what Brandon calls “hardcore” issues. “It’s the guys and gals who are the most self-destructive, and destructive to the people around them, who are the most work,” he said, “but they also need the most help. And they’re the ones we should be helping.”

Brandon met Sidles on a climbing trip and thought he could be a good leader for the Sierra Club’s program. He understood Sidles’s struggles—the alienation, despondency, and wrecked relationships. He had dealt with the same challenges after three combat tours in Iraq, which earned him a Silver Star and two Bronze Stars with Valor. He and some fellow soldiers taught themselves to climb on Washington’s Mount Rainier and found that the adversity, risk, and teamwork eased their minds in ways therapy and medication alone couldn’t.

But while therapies like yoga, meditation, and virtual reality have been validated by studies and utilized by the Pentagon and the VA, there has been little research about the benefits of nature for veterans. In a for the Sierra Club, in which veterans participated in canoeing, rock-climbing, backpacking, and skiing trips, the 98 subjects reported improvements in psychological well-being, more social connectedness, and a more positive life outlook, though a month after the trips the benefits had largely dissipated. “Nature is a momentary fix,” Brandon said. “Much like medication, you have to keep dosing.”

Brandon left the Sierra Club but still puzzled over how best to reach veterans like Sidles. He believes that ongoing outdoor experiences built around tight community and self-examination, rather than just escape and thrill, can help. Working with a team of researchers at the University of Washington—and backed with a $100,000 grant from REI and additional support from —Brandon designed a pilot study that started earlier this year. Veterans recruited from the Seattle area met regularly for small-group excursions and casual social gatherings to augment traditional treatments and medication.

If the results are positive, Brandon hopes to see programs like this incorporated as a core element of treatment protocols. But he recognizes the difficulty of shifting institutional mindsets and working with volatile veterans. “You really have to care about someone to put up with some of that, to fight through and not take offense at some of their bullshit,” Brandon said. “It’s the same issues we’re trying to help them with that are causing them to lash out at friends and family.”

For Sidles and many vets like him, it’s not just the combat that wrecked them. While his battlefield experiences alone would have been enough to twist his sense of self and derail his relationships, Sidles’s war started long before he set foot in Iraq.

“I taught myself to tie my shoes, for fuck’s sake,” Sidles told Brown in a documentary interview. No one bothered to show him, and he feared asking for help, so he figured out his own system of loops and knots, which carried through to adulthood. He was the youngest of four siblings by eight years, with 16 years between him and his eldest sister. “My dad pretty much told Daniel that he was a mistake,” said Gilderhus, who is 48. “He didn’t have parents. They were old and sick.”

Their father had a heart transplant in 1998, and their mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis around that time. To be closer to medical care, the family moved from Graettinger to nearby Emmetsburg, a town five times bigger, with 4,000 people. In high school, Sidles excelled in sports, but academics came harder. “You got this douche dad who says, ‘You’re a no-good punk who’s not going to amount to nothing,’” he said. “A test or something comes up in school, and you say, ‘I’m not going to study, what’s the point? I’m just going to fail. My dad tells me that all the time.’ And then what happens? You take the test and you fail. And he gets the report card and says, ‘Yeah, that figures.’”

Neglect and emotional abuse, shaping a kid’s sense of identity and self-worth, can damage them as much as physical or sexual trauma. To gauge exposure to these negative events, mental-health providers use a ten-question survey about family instability and incidences of physical, sexual, or emotional abuse. Divorced parents? One point. Parent in prison? Another point. Two questions stood out to me as particularly relevant to Sidles: “Did a parent often swear at you, insult you, put you down, or humiliate you?” and “Did you often feel that no one in your family loved you or thought you were important or special?” Based on what I know of Sidles’s childhood, I figured his score at a four.

Male veterans of today’s all-volunteer military as their civilian counterparts to have endured difficult childhoods, which wasn’t the case during the Vietnam War, when the draft selected more broadly from the population. (Female veterans and civilians have similar numbers of negative childhood events, and while female veterans are half as likely to kill themselves as male veterans, they’re more than twice as likely as female civilians to do so.) Many people, like Sidles, join the military to escape a crappy home life and for the camaraderie and opportunities they didn’t have growing up. But unresolved childhood trauma can stack the deck and cause bad experiences later in life to do far more damage. “The guys who come in with a lot of emotional baggage, it just gets compounded, especially with combat tours like we had,” Ryan Thompson, Sidles’s section leader during his Iraq deployments, told me.

Compounding trauma increases the likelihood of suicide. of male veterans in an inpatient program for combat-related PTSD, more than 40 percent reported four or more adverse childhood experiences. Those with a greater number of ACEs were significantly more likely to have thought about suicide or tried it. But if the military screened out those with bad childhoods, it would lose an enormous chunk of the recruitment pool. The services have a hard enough time filling their ranks. Most young Americans——a°ù±đ , too sick, or perform too poorly on aptitude tests for military service, or they have disqualifying histories of crime, drug use, or mental illness.

In many ways, Sidles was an ideal recruit: strong, driven, devoted, and searching for belonging. The Marines offered him respect, adventure, and a sense of purpose and worth far from small-town Iowa and far from his family. If he had had a different job in the military—say, helicopter mechanic—things might have turned out much differently. He’d be a couple of years from retirement today. But he chose the infantry.

“I adapted to war really well,” Sidles said. “A lot of people who join the military come from broken homes like me. I’m no exception. So you’ve got some anger. You can’t deny that. It’s there. And then the Marine Corps just adds to that.”

Sidles felt bullied by his father and elder brother, and he considered terrorists the biggest bullies of all, so he channeled that anger. Friends who were injured or killed stoked the flames. “The fire just keeps burning and burning and burning,” he said. “And then you come back here and try to put it out, and it’s, like, impossible.”

During my two Iraq tours with an Army infantry company, I had some close calls, but I didn’t see anything like the combat Sidles did. Even if I had, my upbringing better prepared me to deal with the ramifications. I left for war knowing that my family loved and supported me, and I returned to the same. Within several months my violent dreams, startled responses, and irritability eased as my mind readjusted to life outside a war zone.

Sidles didn’t come home to that kind of safe harbor. “The love I didn’t get at home I got from my friends. I felt that a lot in the Marine Corps,” he said. “There’s no situation that’s too tough as long as you have people who care about you, and you care about them, to go through it with you. Once I got out of the military, I realized I was really, really on my own.”

His own choices may have led him to that rooftop in Fallujah— most prominently, enlisting in the Marines—but other factors beyond Sidles’s control played a part, too. He understood this, and it fueled his resentment toward his father. “He told me I would never make it in the Marine Corps, I wouldn’t even make it through boot camp,” Sidles said. “I did two combat tours, Purple Heart, awards that say things like courage under fire, and he tells me I did nothing in Iraq.”

“Daniel wanted one thing from my dad: a sincere apology,” Gilderhus recalled. “For everything.”

“You don’t have to forget,” she told her brother, “but you might have to forgive a little to go on.”

Sidles tried to repair the relationships, but it was short-lived. Family wounds aren’t easily mended, and the hurt ran deep. His mother, for whom he cared greatly, died while he was living in Phoenix. His family didn’t call. A friend told him several days later. He wanted to confront his father at the funeral home, but Gilderhus stopped him. She invited him to her home for Christmas. Trying to navigate the bitter family emotions, she decided to have a gift exchange with her father at her mother’s graveside, then celebrate with her brother later. But Sidles learned of this. He drove to the cemetery, saw his father, and kept driving. After an argument with Gilderhus that night, Sidles left. The last of the frayed family threads had snapped.

I last saw Sidles in July of 2013 while in Boulder for Michael Brown’s wedding. The morning of the ceremony, I climbed the with Murray. We were just starting the initial pitch when Sidles passed by on the trail, hiking down from the top. I called to him, but he didn’t hear. Or maybe he did. He just kept charging down the path.

Later I sent him a text asking if he’d like to get a beer and catch up.

“Fuck no,” he wrote back. “I’ll go ahead and skip story telling time.”

The message stung. Storytelling time. I read this as an indictment: he saw me not as a friend but as a journalist, someone else who had taken advantage.

“He thought we used him,” Brown said. “And we did.”

Like Brown, my relationship with Sidles began as a lopsided exchange. Journalists and filmmakers are gatekeepers of our subjects’ most personal experiences, and the transaction is tilted decidedly against them: Tell me your story, with all its intimate, painful, and embarrassing details, and I’ll share it with the world. The interview itself can retraumatize, a possibility I wrestle with routinely when writing about people who’ve been emotionally and physically scarred. For this they receive no compensation, only the possibility that someone somewhere might be exposed to their story and moved by it.

When he first saw my șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű piece about the Lobuche climb, Sidles worried about how others would view him. “Then I had gotten a couple hits on Facebook from a couple guys who had been to combat,” he told Brown, “and they basically told me that they felt exactly how I felt, and it was almost like a thank-you for speaking up.” This prompted Sidles to open up more for the documentary. “Instead of worrying about how I was going to look,” he said, “I threw that aside and said, You know what? I’m going to be honest. I’ll let people see how I live and how I think.”

I helped with some of the editing, and as we reviewed the footage, Brown mentioned several times that he wished he could make a whole film about Sidles, so eloquent, honest, and funny were his reflections and insights. We both loved spending time with him. “If he smiled or laughed, and you were at the other end of that, it was the best feeling in the world,” Brown said.

He showed Sidles the documentary before almost anyone else had seen it. “Yeah,” Sidles told Brown. “It’s all true.” But he came to regret his involvement. He felt like some of the guides on the trip had used him as a prop—look how we’re helping these wounded veterans. He also nursed resentment toward some veterans in the film who hadn’t been wounded in combat or, he felt, had embellished their experiences.

Though the infighting on the Cotopaxi expedition had exacerbated these frustrations, Sidles continued to take part in veterans outdoor programs. He wanted the opportunities but seemed to resent it at the same time, as though his participation confirmed that he couldn’t help himself. Yet he believed that the outdoors had been truly good for him, and he wanted to use his experiences to help other vets. Climber , who cofounded the adaptive program , worked with Sidles to market himself to the professional climbing and outdoor-recreation communities. In 2014, Sidles at a Paradox ice-climbing event in Ouray, Colorado, and though he was racked with nerves beforehand, the talk went well, and he enjoyed the experience.

But the rhythms and demands of everyday life confounded him. He felt he had been at his best in Iraq, fighting alongside his brothers. Back home, where people’s reactions to him ranged from curiosity to wariness and concern, he seemed to long for the war’s simplicity and the sense of worth and purpose it brought him.

“Dan seemed like he was still a gunner in Iraq,” Nick Watson told me. “He was just stuck there. He never made that leap to having an identity in the civilian world, having something to get up and look forward to.” Watson, a former Army Ranger, runs Veterans Expeditions (), which has taken thousands of former military men and women climbing, rafting, mountain biking, and mountaineering. He linked up Sidles with a former special-operations Marine who runs rafting trips and offered to train Sidles as a guide. “I thought it was perfect,” Watson said. But Sidles didn’t last the day. Watson’s friend told him Sidles bristled at interacting with the younger guides.

Another friend of Sidles in Colorado had connected him with an assistant guiding job on Denali. I figured this could be a good step, moving him away from his primary outward identity as a war vet. As a guide he’d be expected to check his emotions, work with a team, mitigate conflict, and meet the needs of paying clients. But this turned out to be another false start. He enjoyed the work and got along well with clients, but he argued with the lead guide. He didn’t work another Denali expedition.

Watson climbed with Sidles several times over the years, both on Vet Ex trips and just the two of them. Sidles eventually cut off contact with Watson, but even before that, in the months leading up to Sidles’s decision to distance himself, Watson had sensed a shift. “The outdoors wasn’t fun to him anymore,” he said. “The thing that was keeping him going, he lost that.”

After texting me that afternoon in Colorado, Sidles sent Murray a note berating him for giving me his new phone number. “Every time I hear about you and everyone living their happy lives,” he texted, “it reminds me of what a piece of shit I am.”

Sidles stopped talking to Murray, apparent punishment for the breach of trust. He apologized months later, and their friendship resumed. Over the next two years, I often asked Murray about him, but I didn’t reach out myself. Before Sidles died, and many times afterward, I wished that I’d set ego aside and written to him or called, to let him know that I valued him as a friend and hoped to share a trail or rope with him again soon.

After the NOLS course, Sidles moved into an apartment in Gunbarrel, just outside Boulder. As he had while living in Phoenix and in Murray’s basement, he spent much of his time alone, playing guitar, watching history documentaries, and reading. When he was still talking to Gilderhus, he would sometimes call her late at night and tell her about episodes of Dr. Phil he had seen, how the analysis might apply to his own life.

He had worked for a few years as a personal trainer after the Marines and enjoyed the autonomy and the one-on-one interaction with clients. He couldn’t imagine himself in a regular job, beholden to a company’s norms, rules, and schedules and forced to deal with coworkers and customers. The VA agreed, deeming him unemployable, which qualified him for monthly compensation in addition to his disability benefits. Still, he wanted to work, and the verdict of his inability to support himself weighed heavily, Gilderhus said.

The gym offered refuge. For hours he lifted weights and exhausted himself with boxing drills, a Sisyphean attempt to quiet his mind. While living in Boulder, he scrambled up the Flatirons alone several times a week, sometimes every day. He often climbed the First Flatiron, where a fall, though unlikely for a decent climber, could be catastrophic. Climbing without a rope freed him from the need for a belay partner. He could climb when he wanted, without coordinating schedules, without judgments or expectations. But soloing also offered risk and thrill, the ever present what-if?

Sidles told his Marine buddy Adamn Scott that he liked the high stakes. “You screw up and you die,” he said. Scott sensed that this also bothered Sidles—being so drawn to the danger, the same craving they felt for the rush of combat.

“Don’t you ever get nervous being by yourself?” Scott had asked him. “What if something happens?”

“Who cares?” Sidles said.

Scott had been with Sidles through boot camp, infantry school, and both tours in Iraq. They shared the same Unscarred tattoo.

“When we first got out, I couldn’t function in society ,” Scott said. Every day a sight, smell, or sound reminded him of Iraq. He tried the VA, but like Sidles and so many others, he felt that the therapists couldn’t understand his time in combat and were more interested in medicating him. “What helped us the most was getting together and talking about it,” Scott said. Each summer he’d invite a half-dozen Marines to his house in Bloomfield, Iowa, for a few days of beers, grilling, and catching up. Sidles always attended.

Sitting around the fire, they talked about how they were getting by since they left the Marines. They talked about the war, and they talked about suicide. “We’d all thought about it,” Scott said. Sidles told him he’d never do it. “He called it the pussy way out,” Scott said. They had talked about it in Iraq, too, in a broader conversation about heaven and hell, and where they, as killers of men, might be headed. “Dan was of the understanding that you didn’t go to heaven if you commit suicide,” Scott said.

During a visit a few summers ago, they spent the day out on a boat, skiing, wakeboarding, and drinking beer. Back at the house, they drank into the night. In Scott, Sidles saw everything he didn’t have: a good job, a loving wife, kids, a house.

“Dude, your life is the shit,” Sidles told him.

“You could have this, too,” Scott said. He hoped Sidles would return to Iowa one day and buy a house near him.

“Nobody’s going to want me,” Sidles said. “I’m a broken old piece of shit.”

Scott wasn’t buying it. “I just chose not to be miserable anymore,” he told Sidles, and chided him for not being more grateful for what he had, traveling the world to climb mountains, often with other people funding the trips.

Then Sidles punched Scott, and Scott punched back, the two men bloodying each other’s faces.

Other Marines tried to reach him as well. After Sidles guided on Denali, he stayed for a few weeks with Ryan Thompson, his old section leader, who lives in Anchorage. They would spend hours talking. “He still had a lot of deep-seated anger,” Thompson said. Anger at himself for leaving the Marines and for getting arrested, which closed off job opportunities. Anger at civilians for not understanding him. Anger at his family.

“I had some pretty frank discussions with him about how self-destructive he was and how he needed to find a more positive path in his life,” Thompson said. “One time I even asked him: Are you going to hurt yourself? Are you thinking about suicide?”

“No,” Sidles said. “I’ve got too much fight left in me for that.”

Sending soldiers to war is far easier than bringing them home. More than 15 years of continuous warfare has flooded the VA with men and women struggling with physical and mental wounds. Of the 2.7 million who have deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, have been diagnosed with PTSD. They are often prescribed medication and offered one of two widely used treatments. In , the veteran writes a detailed account of a traumatic incident, like a bomb explosion that might be causing nightmares, irritability, and substance abuse. The story is recorded and then played back, over and over, until recalling the incident doesn’t cause distress. In , a veteran describes a traumatic incident, then discusses it with a therapist to identify irrational beliefs associated with the trauma, such as guilt that a bomb wasn’t spotted before it exploded.

. More than half of the veterans who start prolonged-exposure or cognitive-processing therapy don’t complete the 12-session regimen. And for veterans like Sidles weighed down by multiple traumas, focusing on one incident often isn’t enough. Plenty of veterans have received excellent medical and mental-health care. But with an institution so big, the demand so great, and individual needs so complex, not all veterans get the specific help they need.

Sidles also complained about therapists who don’t know war—“like me giving mothering advice to a mother,” he said. Group therapy was hard for him as well. He wasn’t interested if it meant sitting in a circle with people who hadn’t been in combat pulling triggers. Each negative therapy experience compounded the problem: open up a few times, see poor results, and lose incentive to dig in and tell the story again.

But Sidles still relied on the VA for medical care. He needed knee surgery and had been prescribed medications for depression, sleep, and pain in his shoulder, knee, and hips from military and sports injuries. A VA doctor advised him to quit climbing or he risked needing hip replacements. Sidles figured he’d be better off with his own therapy regimen—smoking weed and climbing.

On a fall day in 2014, he called the VA’s outpatient clinic and was soon yelling at a nurse about an upcoming appointment. Patricia Alexander, the clinic’s supervisor of mental-health services, took the phone. “We couldn’t sort through the obscenities,” she told me. “I got tired of it and hung up.” An hour later, Sidles was sitting in the clinic. Alexander, five feet tall and 100 pounds, stood in front of him. “Hi, I’m Dr. Alexander. How can I help you?”

“I want to talk to the motherfucker who hung up on me,” Sidles said.

“I would be that motherfucker,” Alexander said. “How can I help you?”

The response threw him off, and calmed him. They went to her office to talk, the first of what would be six visits in all. They established something of a pattern in their relationship, with Sidles testing and Alexander pushing back but not rejecting. “I could just pick you up and snap your neck, and there’s nothing you could do about it,” he told her in a session a few weeks later.

“Yeah, but could you wait?” Alexander said. “I just got custom ski boots and I’d like to use them.”

Sidles laughed at this and relaxed.

“I never felt I was in danger from him,” Alexander said. “Never once, even when he was raging.” The clinic director, Kris Johnson, who served eight years as an Army doctor, told me he interpreted Sidles’s comment more as a statement of frustration than a threat. “I’ve seen so many people like that. They’re pissed at the world, not you specifically,” Johnson said. “At some point they give up. This is just some other fucking VA doc who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

The VA had previously diagnosed Sidles with borderline personality disorder, characterized by impulsive behaviors, extreme emotional responses, and unstable relationships. The military considers this a preexisting condition, not service related—war didn’t break them, they were screwed up already—and has used the diagnosis to discharge service members and deny disability benefits to thousands of combat veterans. “Someone who didn’t know what they were doing gave him that diagnosis,” Alexander said. “I got that overturned. Dan had untreated PTSD.” She also got Sidles’s PTSD disability rating bumped up to 100 percent.

In Alexander, a former Air Force and Army psychologist, Sidles had a passionate advocate. Her youngest son had served a violent tour in Afghanistan as an Army paratrooper, and afterward he boozed and fought. Alexander told me that a therapist at the Denver VA identified his PTSD symptoms but did little to alleviate them. Alexander could sense her son’s mounting hopelessness and devised her own treatment regimen, outside VA channels, including , yoga, , and . “Without it,” she said, “I think he would be dead.”

She thought Sidles was headed down the same path and figured he could be helped by a similarly tailored intervention. Alexander recognized the importance of addressing Sidles’s childhood, which she said is too often overlooked within the VA. Many providers don’t understand or appreciate how early trauma compounds war trauma, or they’re hamstrung by the handful of treatments they can offer.

The first few sessions with Sidles were triage. Alexander sketched a human brain and explained to him how traumatic memories are stored and the neurological effects of too much stress. She wanted to get Sidles a brain scan, to show him how PTSD and his injuries had altered his neurological function, influencing behaviors.

Adrenaline, a critical component of our fight-or-flight response, heightens our senses, dulls pain, and curbs our need for food and sleep. It’s designed for short bursts. But if the brain is chronically stressed—by childhood abuse, combat, or a toxic mix of the two—adrenaline stays high, masking the commensurate drop-off in other brain chemicals that regulate emotions and sleep. Boxing and climbing the Flatirons without a rope offered a little shot of adrenaline, a fix to calm the mind and body. “He was raised on fight-or-flight, so he was going to be drawn to things that would push that adrenaline up. Fighting. Screaming. Thrill seeking,” Alexander said. “He was trying to manage that incredible imbalance in his system. Then you add traumatic memories and losses, and no one explains it to you, you’re going to get hopeless real fast.”

To help Sidles, she needed to regulate that roller coaster of hormones. “What could we do to calm your brain down?” she asked him.

Skiing, he said.

He didn’t have the equipment, or money for a ski pass, so Alexander worked on getting him both. Others at the VA told her to stop because it wasn’t an appropriate treatment, Alexander said. She refused, and Sidles eventually obtained equipment through , a nonprofit supporting veterans. “It was a totally appropriate treatment,” she told me. “He needed to be outside.” Sidles got the skis, but their next meeting was their last.

“How’s it going?” Alexander asked as they sat down in her office, and that set him off. He yelled and pounded on a metal bookshelf. Other staff heard the commotion and stepped into the hallway. Someone called the police, and Sidles left. Johnson and Alexander wanted to continue seeing him, but others at the clinic felt unsafe. The VA’s disruptive-behavior committee in Denver, which reviews the cases of veterans who may be a threat to staff or other patients, banned Sidles from the Golden clinic and said he would need a police escort at the Denver VA. Sidles thought it was Alexander who had banned him. Another person he trusted had let him down.

“If we could have kept him here, I think we could have made a difference in his life,” Alexander said.

In 35 years as a psychologist, and many years working with combat veterans, Alexander has had many clients kill themselves. But she thinks most often about Sidles. “I feel like we failed him,” she said. “We’re losing a generation, and I can’t stand it anymore. We’re not doing our job.” Alexander retired from the VA last December and has joined a Denver-based nonprofit, , which will offer veterans the kind of treatments that helped her son—­treatments she feels could have helped Sidles.

The VA has made suicide prevention its top priority, this year allotting $500 million to pay and resources. But even if the VA filled every job vacancy, the fix assumes that doctors and therapists are providing the right care at the right time to the right people. As Sidles’s case shows, that isn’t always so.

“We give it our best guess, and then we start throwing medication at people,” Alexander said. “People lose hope and become suicidal when they can’t fix it and they don’t know why.”

Over the course of several months of talking with people about Sidles for this story, I had become increasingly discouraged; so many told me that they had been aware of his struggles but had felt helpless to stop the slide. If nothing could have been done, digging into his life felt grotesquely voyeuristic. But Alexander and Johnson helped me understand two critical pieces of Sidles’s story: his path was not inevitable, and he was not an exception. His actions may have seemed extreme to those with a frame of reference based on a better childhood and more conventional adult experiences. But Alexander and Johnson found his story far too familiar.

Several combat veterans expressed the same thing to me. “A lot of people look at Dan like he was some fucked-up outlier,” Brandon said. “No. He could be any one of us.” Good treatment was critical for Brandon, but so was community, and Sidles’s increasing isolation left him without that.

“The community piece is huge,” Brandon said. “Loneliness is a fucking killer.”

Kremmling, Colorado, sits on a high plain 100 miles northwest of Denver. The old mining and ranching town of 1,500 doesn’t have much charm, but it’s cheap and well situated for climbing and skiing in the surrounding mountains. Another try at a fresh start.

In December of 2015, after briefly moving back into Murray’s place in Boulder, Sidles relocated to the Kremmling Apartments, a two-story building in the center of town with a couple dozen units. He was glad to be away from the Front Range congestion and from Boulder, where he felt out of place. But this put him far from what remained of his support network. His physical remove mirrored his growing emotional isolation.

If he wasn’t out climbing or skiing, Sidles was often at , a mixed-martial-arts gym in Granby. He worked out alone, pounding the bags, sweat pooling on the floor. At home he’d drink beer, maybe smoke some weed, play guitar.

Kremmling isn’t very welcoming to strangers, and neither was Sidles. A confrontation, whether just likely or inevitable, occurred on the evening of February 4 outside his apartment. Sidles said it wasn’t his fault; the police disagreed. He had yelled at a woman as she smoked a cigarette outside her apartment, accusing her of messing with his car. The woman’s brother heard the commotion and approached Sidles, who knocked him down with a punch that broke a tooth.

The police charged him with third-degree assault and disorderly conduct. A Breathalyzer test said he was plenty drunk. Deputy Jesse Stradley, the sheriff’s department’s veteran-liaison officer, served in the Navy and worked at the jail. He first met Sidles the night of his arrest. “I told him not to come toward me,” Sidles told Stradley, referring to the fight. “Why would a guy pet a barking dog?”

A barking dog. A tiger on a chain. A disposable razor. Sidles saw himself in many ways, few of them good.

Sidles was released the next night on $1,500 bail and assigned a court date the following month. He and Stradley met again by chance a few days later. After that they got together at least once a week for lunch or a workout. Sidles called or texted him most days, often to vent his frustrations about his landlady, how old he felt, or how people didn’t understand him.

He also reached out to Duane Dailey. As a medic and surgery tech in Vietnam, Dailey had repaired soldiers’ bodies; as the veterans service officer for Grand County, he helped them repair their lives, connecting them with VA programs, medical benefits, and employment. In March, Sidles asked Dailey for a ride to pick up his car at the mechanic. “Why are you living in Kremmling?” Dailey asked as they drove. “It’s a sucky town unless you’re a cowboy or you love to fight.”

Close to the mountains, Sidles said.

As he did after all his veteran interactions, Dailey jotted down brief notes about his phone calls and meetings with Sidles.

March 7—He wanted to be in a small town to get away from the bullshit.
 No one understands. He’s very lonely and has no friends. Needs meds for depression. He informed me he understands why so many vets kill themselves.

March 18—Dan is very depressed, despondent, paranoid.

Sidles appeared in court on March 21, and the case was continued to May 2. Dailey found Sidles a cheap apartment in the nearby town of Parshall and helped him move some belongings into a storage unit, preparations for Sidles’s new plan: an eventual move to Thailand, where a Marine buddy owned a mixed-martial-arts gym.

“I’d like to go out with a girl and just talk to her, be like a normal person,” he told Dailey as they drove. “That doesn’t work. I can’t do it.”

At the storage unit, Sidles beat his fists against the door and wept.

“Dan,” Dailey said, “we need to get you some help.”

Dailey reached out to a friend, Kris Johnson, who told Dailey he already knew Sidles from the Golden clinic. Johnson planned to be in Kremmling later that month for a town-hall meeting on veterans’ benefits. If Sidles wouldn’t attend, he and Dailey would stop by his apartment to see him.

But that was three weeks off, and the pressure was building. With a court date looming, Sidles oscillated between pragmatism and despair.

“Totally serious, can you work out in jail?” he texted to Stradley. “Do you get to bring books, etc?”

Stradley told Sidles that jail time in Grand County would be easy. The food was good, the atmosphere relaxed. He could read books and do body-weight workouts.

The assault charge carried a maximum sentence of two years in jail and a $5,000 fine. Someone with no criminal record might not get any jail time, but Sidles was looking at 30 days and a bill for the man’s broken tooth. Brett Barkey, the district attorney for Grand County, felt jail might be good for Sidles. “Sometimes that’s enough to encourage them to take a different path,” he said.

Dailey disagreed. “He’s like a caged animal now,” he said. “If you put him in a real cage, it will make it worse.”

Barkey, a retired Marine colonel, served three tours in Iraq. That he had worn the same uniform and still wanted him locked up felt like another betrayal to Sidles.

“For him to expect to get a pass because I’m a Marine is misplaced,” Barkey told me. “Folks who aren’t held to account end up exhibiting these behaviors that are counterproductive and dangerous. I’m not going to be an enabler.”

Many of those who pushed back against Sidles found themselves cut out of his life. But the arrest thrust Sidles into a realm he couldn’t simply turn his back on.

April 11—Vet has no friends. No one cares about him. He will kill himself if he has to go to jail. He’ll break the neck of man who he assaulted. He understands why so many vets kill themselves.

While awaiting his court date, Sidles stewed in Parshall, a has-been town with a couple of bars and a few dozen people. The apartment building wasn’t much: a long, single-story cinder-block building next to the post office, divided into five units. Sidles had two small rooms and a walk-through bathroom, furnished with a bed, a small table, and a couch, for $500 a month.

He told Dailey he was happy with the new apartment, away from gawking neighbors in Kremmling, but within days he complained to Stradley about the isolation, neighbors slamming doors, and spotty cell phone service.

As Sidles spiraled, Chad Jukes, another veteran from our 2010 Nepal climb, was back in the Khumbu Valley, headed toward Mount Everest. In Iraq, a roadside bomb had damaged his right leg, which was later amputated below the knee. Like Sidles, Jukes had climbed all over the world. He’d gained a few gear sponsorships, often spoke to groups about his experiences, and taught ice climbing—a life Sidles had imagined for himself. The Nepal trip had seemed like a launching pad for Sidles as well, but almost six years on, the two men couldn’t have been in more different places or states of mind.

On April 3, Sidles posted a Facebook link to a story about a bid by Jukes and another veteran to become the first combat amputees to summit Everest—which Jukes would do on May 24, , veteran reintegration, and suicide. Above the link Sidles wrote: “All you I fought with in Fallujah, this is a real hero.” He didn’t mean it as a compliment; Jukes was wounded running convoys in Iraq, not kicking down doors and hunting insurgents. Sidles found the distinction extreme. “If you want to be inspired by this ‘look at me fuck’ I’ve seen guts this girl doesn’t have,” he wrote in the comments.

In one of his last Facebook posts, dated April 22, Sidles shared a link about an Army veteran who had killed herself. “I’m sorry life didn’t work out the way you deserved,” Sidles wrote. “If there’s an afterlife, protect us. We’ll see you soon.”

He left Dailey a voice mail on April 26, telling him that he was depressed. Dailey called him the next day, but Sidles didn’t answer.

The following day, Dailey brought a local Marine veteran to visit him. Sidles’s gray Toyota FJ Cruiser was parked outside. They knocked; no answer. Dailey could guess where this was headed. He had had one other suicide, a few years earlier. Police found the veteran in his car along a remote road, dead from a shotgun blast, with Dailey’s card in his pocket. On the back, the Marine had written “My only friend.”

Stradley was worried as well. He hadn’t heard from Sidles since a text on April 25. “He said to me once that he’s not going to make it,” Stradley told me. “It was sickening to me, because I didn’t know how to help.” Sidles told him that just having someone to talk to, someone to listen, had been a great help. “I considered him a friend, and I told him that,” he said. “You don’t push a person if they don’t want to be pushed. I didn’t want him to delete me as a friend. Being up here, you need somebody.”

The day after Dailey’s visit, Stradley called his boss, who dispatched deputies for a welfare check.

They found him in the bedroom.

Sidles, who so often climbed without a rope, without that umbilical to keep himself anchored to the earth, to save himself should he fall, had ended his life with a tether. He unlaced his boxing gloves and looped a noose around his neck, and in his small closet he tied the other end to a bar on the back wall, about four feet off the ground. This was not a quick or inevitable death, with agency withdrawn and the course set after an initial action: a trigger pull, a step off a bridge, a leap from a rock face.

Instead, Sidles fought. He fought against himself, against the world, until his very last moment. With his feet propped against the wall, Sidles pushed. He pushed so hard that the bar bent nearly into a U.

They found him on a Friday, and by Monday, news of his death had migrated to Facebook. Messages flooded his page. Grief and shock, but anger, too.

“Dude we talked two weeks ago about all this shit going on in your life and when I asked you if you were good you said yes. So you lied to me which is why I’m disappointed. I’m angry with myself for not flying up there and making your ass come home with me.”

“I’m pissed that you bitched out on the rest of us and now there’s one more brother I have to let go of. We’re all hurting inside from the past that haunts us and the memories that can never be forgotten But I’m going to walk this one out until my days are ended but not by my own hand.”

“One of the baddest motherfuckers that ever set foot on Gods green Earth
 I’m fucking heartbroken.”

Tami McVay, who served in the Marines and dated Sidles briefly after our Nepal trip, had been doing a push-up challenge popular on Facebook—22 push-ups a day for 22 days, to raise awareness about veteran suicide. “About midway through, I shared a little bit about Dan in a post. I said, ‘My friend has gotten into mountaineering, he’s doing really well,’ ” McVay recalled. “And then three days later this happened.”

Sidles left a note. Gilderhus hasn’t let anyone read it, but she told me some of it: “I tried to get help, and this is what happened. I’m sorry for hurting everybody, especially the ones I love.” He also figured not many people would care about his passing. “There will only be a few people at my funeral, maybe 20,” he wrote.

He was wrong about that. Dailey and Stradley spent a few days organizing a memorial, and on May 5, . Climbers crowded next to local veterans and law-enforcement officers. More than 30 Marines who served with Sidles gathered from across the country. Several had been in touch over the years; others hadn’t seen Sidles, or each other, in a decade.

A bagpiper played the “Marines’ Hymn” and the American Legion honor guard fired a three-volley salute. Led by the Marines, everyone filed past the table and laid a hand on the box that held Sidles’s remains. In the minds of many people at the memorial, his was a combat death, the same as if he had fallen in Fallujah.

His Marine buddies gathered that afternoon in a pub down the road. They drank and laughed and traded stories about Sidles, about the war, and about everything afterward. Some military units have been stalked by suicides, but Sidles’s was the first for his company. The Marines implored each other: Reach out. Don’t let this happen again.

For the next two years, Sidles’s friends would carry him around the world, to the places most meaningful to him. A cousin who is also a Marine spread some of his ashes this spring on a memorial hill at , in California, where Sidles had been stationed, and Gilderhus is coordinating with to have some of his remains interred there, which she expects to happen this fall.

Last fall, Kevin Noe, who climbed with Sidles in Colorado and on Aconcagua, spread some ashes on Lobuche, where Sidles’s life in the mountains had begun. A few months before that, Noe and I tucked a bottle with ashes into a backpack and headed for Mount Elbrus in southeastern Russia for our own unfinished business.

On our first Elbrus attempt, in 2012, Noe and I climbed with Sidles, Murray, and Steve Baskis, who had been blinded by a roadside bomb and had been with us in Nepal. Halfway to the summit, still two hours before dawn, Murray fell ill. He tried to continue but didn’t have the energy. He said he could turn back alone, but we quashed that. In the dark, with one blind and one sick climber, we figured it was safer to move as a group. Sidles felt strong, and we encouraged him to continue with the other climbers—a Russian woman and two Chinese with a Russian guide. We wished him luck, and the beam of his headlamp faded as he trudged higher up the mountain.

As we headed down, a spitting snow rose into a swirling, howling whiteout. We lost our way and veered far off the route. After dawn, during a brief break in the snow and clouds, we could see base camp a half-mile away. We started for it and walked into a vast crevasse field obscured by a layer of fresh snow. With a thunderstorm parked overhead and charging the air, we roped up and picked our way through the field. Noe walked point, poking a trekking pole into the snow to search out solid ground. Hours later, exhausted, we staggered back into camp.

Sidles fared better. The Chinese climbers turned back with their guide an hour after we had turned back, but the Russian woman climbing with Sidles said she’d been to the summit before and that they should continue. They climbed on, with daylight bringing only slightly better visibility. In the clouds and the snow, they could just make out the sporadic wands along the route. A summit marker and small shrine told them they had reached the top of Europe.

Now we walked the path Sidles had taken five years earlier, across the broad saddle between the two summits and onto the slopes of the higher peak. The wind dropped to a mild breeze, and the rising sun warmed us.

We stepped onto the summit under a clear sky, mountains stretching to the horizon. I thought of Sidles standing here in the clouds and the snow, never seeing the world spread out before us now. And I thought of the chaplain’s blessing on the grassy, windy hilltop in Colorado. “It seems fitting that we should leave our comrade to rest under the arching sky, as he did when he pitched his tent, or laid down in days gone by, weary and footsore,” he’d said. “May each of us, when our voyages and battles of life are over, find a welcome in that region of the blessed, where there is no more storm-tossed sea or scorching battlefield.”

Every moment, every choice, for the living and the dead alike, had led us here.

Noe tipped the small bottle, and the ashes poured out, pale gray on a field of white.Ìę

Contributing editor ”ț°ùŸ±ČčČÔÌęČŃŽÇłŠ°ì±đČÔłóČčłÜ±èłÙ wrote about nature therapy for prison inmatesÌęin September 2016.

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Rain-swollen and cloudy, the McKenzie River ran fast, and fat drops from a flint-colored sky dimpled the water. Brian* pushed his way along an overgrown trail to a small clearing on the riverbank.

He stepped onto the trunk of a fallen, half-submerged snag and edged along the rain-slick bark, a tightrope walker with a fishing pole a few miles outside Eugene, Oregon. At 39, he had spent much of his adult life in prison, mostly for drugs and theft. He had just finished a yearlong sentence for possession and wasn’t yet fully free, locked down at night but allowed out during the day for work release—or for an activity like this, which is considered therapeutic. The water on his right was quick. He flipped his fly into the deep water to his left, near the bank, and drifted it through the calm pocket.

“The solitude is such a good thing for me, and being away from the prison politics,” he said as he watched the water. “Being able to talk to normal people, who aren’t preying on people, talking shit, loudmouthing.” He brought in his line, the rod tip hovering just over the water. A trout nibbled, and he flicked his wrist to set the hook, but too soon.

“You’re never alone. No privacy, no time to think. Even when you’re lying in bed, there’s someone making noise right next to you,” he said. “That’s something people take for granted, the solitude to reflect without reacting to something all the time.”

He worked the hole a while longer, then retreated down the path to rejoin the half-dozen others, more of society’s outcasts. Together they had spent decades in prison for everything from assault to failure to pay child support. Mike, 60 and heavy through the middle, with a deep voice, accounted for a good chunk of that tally: 34 years broken up over several stints. Among other crimes, he once threatened to kill President Bill Clinton. He now spends much of his spare time fishing and camping, and serves as a mentor for the recently released.

“No matter what society labels us, we’re free,” he told them. “We weren’t born with tags on us.” He’d been out of prison seven years and acknowledged that it hadn’t been easy. “At times,” he said, “I wanted to throw in the towel and go back.”

“Seven years?” Brian said. “That’s pretty good. I can’t go a year without getting caught back up in some shit.”

“What makes you fail?” Jen Jackson asked. Jackson runs the mentorship program at , an organization in Eugene that helps the formerly incarcerated relearn life beyond prison. For the past several years, she has organized regular outdoors trips, too.

“I hit the gate running, feeling like I have to make up for lost time,” Brian said. But the drugs and partying and poor choices had beat him down so far that he was looking for a change. “I’m trying to do some of these things,” he told Jackson, referring to today’s outing, “instead of getting back into the bullshit I was in.”

At least if he was fishing, he said, he wouldn’t be chasing dope.

Nearby, on a grassy patch along the river, Eric was dressed more for a coffeehouse poetry slam than a fishing trip, with black jeans and a turtleneck, wavy brown hair brushing his shoulders. At the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem, where he served three and a half years for cashing counterfeit checks, a concrete wall blocked the views of the surrounding area. Many mornings, Canada geese landed in the yard, and he imagined himself among them, flying away and over the land to places like this. “There’s something about the sound and flow of water, the wind in the trees, the colors, the freedom, that gets a person to reflect on what’s important to them,” he said, “and maybe get back to the basics with their needs and the needs of the people around them.”

That sentiment captures what science reconfirms almost weekly in study after study: nature is good for us. It can ease anxiety and depression, pull us from spirals of negative thinking, boost brain function, and improve our physical health. Just a short walk in the woods is enough to see benefits. Today there are countless programs that combine the restorative power of the natural world with outdoor activities—horseback riding, rock climbing, surfing—to promote well-being and even treat mental and physical traumas. So it makes sense that some experts are beginning to believe that time in the outdoors could also help stanch criminal behavior. Options abound for at-risk youth, from confidence-building challenge courses to extended wilderness trips paired with group therapy. Studies have shown that these can reduce a young offender’s likelihood to commit more crimes, improve judgment and decision making, and reduce depression, anxiety, and stress in adolescents with mental-health problems.

We generally regard children and teenagers as deserving of a second chance, their clay not fully sculpted. Adults who have served time receive far less understanding. “You have this scarlet letter on you,” a Sponsors client told me. “You feel everyone will do their utmost to hold you down. No one is going to forgive you. You’ll be forever judged.” Nature can provide an injection of calm. We know this as we breathe in the quiet of a park or flee the city for a weekend in the backcountry. We extol the power of the outdoors to bring balance and perspective. But is that benefit due only to the well-adjusted and trouble-free? Because here is a group that perhaps needs it more than any other. They are locked away from nature, sometimes for decades, then ostracized upon their return to society, where they often struggle to find housing, jobs, and friends. Yet Sponsors runs one of the only programs in the country that takes formerly incarcerated adults into nature as part of a reintegration program.

This needs to change. As you’ve likely heard, America has a prison problem, with too many people behind bars and too little help as they try to rebuild their lives on the outside. The U.S. accounts for 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of its prisoners. That’s 2.2 million people held in federal, state, and local facilities. The vast majority aren’t serving life without parole, which means they’ll eventually be our neighbors. If we want to keep them out of prison and prevent them from committing more crimes, if we want to help them succeed, we need to rethink how they’re treated. And bringing offenders into the outdoors—even while they’re still locked up—may vent just enough steam from the pressure cooker to get them back on track.

Ìę

Tony stabbed and wounded a man, served five years, and left prison in October 2013 with a cardboard box that held the entirety of his worldly belongings: his legal paperwork, some cards and letters from family, a coffee mug, a few toiletries, some pictures of friends and fellow inmates, and the black Nikes he’d bought at the commissary. All the rest—his clothes, furniture, family photos—were thrown away when the landlord cleared out his apartment.

After an 11-hour ride from eastern Oregon, the bus dropped Tony in Eugene, where he’d grown up, and he stood on the street alone. His mother had died while he was inside. Boyhood friendships had faded. But someone had come for him: the manager at Sponsors, who took him to Taco Bell for three tacos and two bean burritos, and then to 7-Eleven, where Tony bought a Coke Slurpee with some banana syrup mixed in.

From there they drove to a light-industrial area on the outskirts of Eugene, to a small compound of brightly colored buildings surrounded by rich landscaping meant to counter the drab tones of prison. Tony would live here for the next 90 days. He had heard about Sponsors while incarcerated and wrote a letter asking for a spot, figuring it was his best chance for success after his release. The executive director, Paul Solomon, served time two decades ago for drug possession and bank robbery. He receives 50 such letters a week but has far fewer slots available. The wait list to join the program, in which clients pay a nominal fee for food and rent, is now about six months. Solomon wants applicants to show motivation to change their lives, but he accepts only those who are considered most likely to reoffend, based on what corrections experts call criminogenic risk factors: Do they have antisocial values, such as blaming others and a lack of remorse? Are most of their friends also criminals? Did they grow up in dysfunctional families? Do they have a history of substance abuse?

“Think about it. You just spent five or ten years in prison, you have no family support, no money, you’re walking out the door with a bus ticket and a mandate to meet with your parole officer and find housing,” Solomon told me. “How do you do that when you’ve got nothing?”

The compound’s main building, three stories high and meticulously maintained, can hold 60 men. They share two-person rooms, large common areas, and kitchens where they cook their own meals. A dozen men live next door in “honors housing” apartments, where they can stay on for up to a year. Sponsors has another five locations around the city with 78 more beds, including one site specifically for women and their children. Many clients receive cognitive behavioral therapy, in which counselors help them reframe and redirect negative thoughts and behaviors. Approximately 80 percent of clients also have drug and alcohol problems; to live in a Sponsors facility, they must attend treatment programs and abstain from using. Roughly 33 percent are sex offenders, who contend with added restrictions on where they can live and spend time—away from parks and schools, for example.

But just having a felony conviction, as an estimated 20 million Americans do, can be problem enough. In several states felons can’t vote, and until the recent Ban the Box campaign, most had to disclose their status on job applications, which is often a shortcut to the trash can. Landlords can reject them, too. In some areas, felons are excluded even from setting foot in public housing, which means they can’t visit family living there. “It’s a life sentence,” says Ann Jacobs, who runs the Prisoner Reentry Institute at New York’s . “You’re still a former felon. These civil penalties almost never go away.”

At the Sponsors resource center, staff guide clients through the basics of building a new life: getting an ID card and a copy of their birth certificate, enrolling in government assistance programs, learning how to use e-mail. They help them write rĂ©sumĂ©s and coach them in interview skills. (Don’t dwell on the crime or prison time; acknowledge the mistakes and talk about the positive things you’ve done since then.) A whiteboard lists businesses where clients have found work in the past—like local restaurants and hotels—to save them time and frustration. In the warehouse, clients can pick up clothes for job interviews or furniture and household items when they move into their own apartments.

Such services might seem like an obvious way to help people get back on their feet, but they aren’t yet the norm. “Most of these reentry programs operate on a shoestring,” Jacobs says. “They’re underfunded and underdeveloped, and they don’t reach the majority of people.” Groups like Sponsors that provide several integrated services—particularly housing—under one roof are exceedingly rare, she says.

Even in Lane County, Oregon, where Sponsors is located, most men and women released from prison don’t get the suite of transition options that Sponsors offers. Last fall, when I met with Donovan Dumire, Lane County’s head of probation and parole, he had 1,944 high- and medium-risk offenders under his watch. The 700 low-risk offenders, who have advantages like family support, positive social networks, and decent jobs, are treated with a more hands-off approach—keeping them on too tight a leash has been shown to increase their chances of returning to criminal behavior. Sponsors, founded 43 years ago by Catholic nuns and community activists, is the only reentry provider for Lane County and can house, at best, 500 people a year.

Many former inmates do end up back in prison. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which tracked 400,000 prisoners released in 2005, some 68 percent were rearrested or violated the terms of their parole within three years, and 77 percent did so within five years. If nothing else, this is hugely expensive. Between federal, state, and local jails, we spend about $80 billion a year housing prisoners. (The annual cost of keeping a single person incarcerated can run anywhere from $30,000 to more than $90,000.) Add in court fees and legal services, and the yearly total explodes to $260 billion.

Over the past 20 years, crime rates that tripled between the 1960s and 1980s fell by nearly half, but incarceration rates that ballooned in the 1990s stayed relatively steady, in part due to get-tough measures like mandatory minimums for drug offenses and three-strikes laws that impose long sentences for third convictions. As prison populations remained high, rehabilitation programs were slashed as money was channeled to more immediate needs like new facilities and additional staff. Though the national conversation has gradually shifted from warehousing prisoners to better preparing them to return to society, funding hasn’t caught up to ideology.

The federal government and many states are trying to shrink their prison populations, but for each inmate released, daunting challenges await, even with the support of robust programs like Sponsors. “And just to be real about this, we’re in Eugene, Oregon,” Solomon told me. “We’re not in Oakland or Detroit or other communities ravaged by economic disparity and hopelessness. We’re not sending people back to gang-infested neighborhoods.”

Most reentry programs, where they do exist, focus on housing, employment, and substance-abuse counseling. A roof, a job, and clean pee. That’s a good start, but it doesn’t make a life. Former inmates can have those things and still be miserable, and therefore more likely to fail. To succeed they need some enjoyment in their lives, hobbies, and supportive friends—all of which fall into another tier of criminogenic risk factors when estimating the likelihood of reoffense. Indeed, set against many states’ inability to help the formerly incarcerated with the basics, a hiking trip can seem frivolous.

“If you’re not happy, if you don’t have something to live for, you’ll go back to where you started,” Jackson told me. “Play and laughter is often a missing piece.”

One-on-one mentorship programs are becoming more common. Sponsors pairs the recently released with community members who will spend several hours with them each month on healthy activities, anything from hiking to dinner out to church services. Many former inmates, like Mike, also serve as mentors, friendly guides who have walked the same path.

Jen Jackson holds a bachelor’s degree in environmental humanities, with a focus on people’s connection to the natural world, and a master’s degree in adventure-based experiential education. She has mentored through Big Brothers Big Sisters, worked with at-risk youth in wilderness-therapy programs, and taught high school environmental science, art, and physical education using the outdoors for hands-on learning. She later began working for , the city of Eugene’s recreation program, which leads activities like kayaking, mountain biking, sailing, and snowshoeing. She came to Sponsors in 2010 and quickly started the outdoors program. “It was a no-brainer,” she says. “This was a culmination of all my life experiences and interests.”

Over the past six years, Jackson has run about 50 outdoors trips with Sponsors clients, taking them hiking, rafting, and crabbing on the coast. She is 34 and petite, with a small nose hoop and light brown hair that falls to her jaw. She lives in the forested hills outside Eugene, with a large garden, goats, and some chickens—a bucolic escape from hectic days. Sponsors clients don’t have that remove. On a sailing trip, one of the men in the mentoring program jumped into the water without a life preserver and ignored Jackson’s entreaties to get back in the boat. He couldn’t help himself, he told her later. He hadn’t been submerged in water for 25 years, and the sensation, the joy of the moment, overwhelmed him.

Jackson’s vision for outdoor therapy hasn’t always been well received by those who help fund Sponsors. After one excursion with clients, she sent a picture to a donor agency and received a curt reply: We’re not paying for them to have fun. That’s shortsighted. Sponsors clients in the mentorship program are 80 percent less likely than other former inmates in Lane County to reoffend.

For Tony, who is now 46, just wading through the aisles of options for socks and underwear at Walmart was enough to overwhelm him, never mind the fruitless job searches and the anxiety of explaining his past to complete strangers. At times he would sit at the bus stop and weep from frustration, unsure how to navigate the world into which he’d reemerged.

The brighter moments, few and cherished, carried him through the early months. Not long after his release, he went snowshoeing with Jackson in the Cascades, his first time back in the deep outdoors, and watched a hawk soar overhead in a cloudless sky. He counts that day as one of his best ever and a much needed counter to the relentless pressures of life post-prison. “The time really begins when you come back out to society, when you have to deal with the roadblocks and hurdles,” Tony said. “People have no clue how hard it is to get your life back.”

Ex-cons are not unlike soldiers returning from war. Now back among people who don’t understand where they’ve been, or how they’ve been changed by the experience, they are expected to resume or establish a role as functioning members of society. Yet they’ve been shaped by their time away, in a world ruled by alien norms, where at times they embraced behaviors at odds with civil society.

“My first night in prison was the scariest of my life,” Eric told me. His cellmate wouldn’t let him enter until he had inspected Eric’s paperwork, which shows a prisoner’s crime and sentence. Fortunately for Eric, he had “good paper,” which basically meant that he wasn’t a sex offender. (They don’t fare well in prison—they are often ostracized, assaulted, and extorted for money or snacks from the commissary.)

“He put me on the top bunk, and I had to ask permission to come down and use the bathroom,” Eric said. “People are yelling at each other, cussing. It didn’t quiet down until 10 p.m.” He kept to himself for several days and watched the other prisoners, the gang members in particular, the way they rolled their shoulders when they moved, a strut, a show of confidence and authority. He walked around the recreation yard, practicing his swagger.

“It’s a crash course, and the learning curve is almost vertical,” another Sponsors client told me. “It’s a very, very violent society.”

Some new inmates won’t leave their cells for days because they are too scared to enter the free-for-all of the open areas before they understand something of the power dynamics. Young prisoners in particular face huge pressures to join a gang, with promises of protection, friendship, and status. The chow hall is an easy place to spot the newbies,
who often stand with their backs to the wall, tray in hand, waiting for a table to open. Not one with an unoccupied seat, but a whole table, so they can be sure that they’re not sitting with the wrong people—gang members or, far worse, the sex offenders, who often form their own band of outcasts. Tony once accidentally sat down with a gang member, but the veteran inmate recognized that Tony had made a mistake, not a statement, and let it slide. He quickly learned that respect rules life in prison, where the seemingly innocuous can be interpreted as a deliberate affront, a test. “You step on someone’s shoe,” Tony said, “you best turn around and give your apologies.”

He spent the first two years of his sentence at the Snake River Correctional Institution, near the Idaho state line, where many other Sponsors clients had cycled through as well. The largest of Oregon’s 14 prisons, it’s one of the more violent, known among inmates as a “gladiator school.”

I visited Snake River on a cold fall morning. Located an hour northwest of Boise, it sits amid rolling hills, a complex of beige buildings ringed by high fences topped with razor wire that sparkles in the sun. Captain Thomas Jost and corrections officer Michael Lea met me at the front office and led me through a series of locked doors into the housing areas. Lea has worked here nearly 19 years, and Jost for 16. “There are guys that I’ve known for that long—we came here at the same time,” Jost said. “We kind of grew up together.” About 8 percent of Snake River’s 3,000 prisoners are serving life without parole; they’ll be in prison long after Jost and Lea retire. But the rest—like the clients at Sponsors—will eventually get out, which means that how they act here, how they’re treated, and whether they’re able to improve themselves matters a great deal.

We walked down the wide, high-ceilinged, brightly lit corridors that connect the housing units, each of which holds 80 inmates, with one officer overseeing them. The halls were empty, the inmates locked in their cells for one of six daily counts. They live in long, rectangular bays, where a common area separates two wings of ten small two-man cells. The inmates are always on display through two large windows, one in the door and another beside it. We peeked into a cell, where an inmate lay on the top bunk watching a ten-inch TV, its case made of clear plastic so that nothing could be hidden inside. A man of perhaps 50 sat on the bottom bunk, his left eye badly blackened and swollen to a thin slit.

“What happened to you?” Jost asked.

“I fell down.”

“Uh-huh,” said Jost.

Had an officer seen that fight, the assailant would likely be headed to segregation, or what we think of as solitary confinement. (Snake River calls it “special housing.”)

Inmates who violate prison rules, assault other inmates or officers, have persistent behavior problems, or can’t be in general population for their own or others’ safety live alone in roughly eight-by-twelve-foot cells. Stays range from a week to six months, but prisoners can be in segregation longer if they rack up too many infractions or are deemed a danger to others.

Just outside one of the segregation units, Jost and Lea showed me a chair-like device that scans the body for metal. Lea told me of an inmate who slid a whole paper clip into his heel through the thick callous.

“They have nothing but time,” he said.

“You’re hypervigilant in here,” Jost said.

Inmates in segregation wear orange jumpsuits instead of the denim pants and shirts worn in general population, and their hands are restrained anytime they’re escorted outside their cells. But that is rare—they spend 23 hours a day alone on lockdown.

Tony spent a week in Snake River segregation for fighting his roommate, and he told me that what he remembers most is the strange synergy of isolation and noise: alone in your head, with sounds bouncing off concrete as inmates yell at guards and to each other, some calling out chess moves between cells for games tracked on homemade paper boards. As Jost, Lea, and I passed through the main hall, where water from an overflowing toilet had puddled, an inmate shouted to us: “You guys are walking through shit water, just so you know.”

We climbed the stairs to a control room, where an officer kept watch. From this perch, they can see into cells on both floors, like looking at animals on display in a pet store. The lights are always on in the main room, which means the cells are never dark. In one, a man sat on the toilet, unspooling a length of toilet paper. In the next, a shirtless inmate did side planks. Televisions aren’t allowed in segregation, but a few were reading or calling between their cells. The rest slept or stared at the ceiling.

“Isolation is not good over time,” Jost said. “If you were stuck in that cell 23 hours a day, eventually you’d crack. We’ve seen guys come in normal and they just break down.” Snake River can house as many as 456 prisoners in segregation; nationwide, by one estimate, 80,000 prisoners are in solitary confinement at any given time. Inmates held alone, with limited human interaction, can suffer mental-health problems ranging from anxiety and insomnia to paranoia and depression. They’re more violent, and they kill themselves more often than other prisoners. For those who already have mental-health problems, as many do, time in solitary makes it all worse.

In good weather, inmates in Snake River’s general population have twice-daily yard time, for up to six hours total. They can play soccer, baseball, or basketball, run on the track, lift weights, throw horseshoes—rubber ones—or just lie in the turf. There’s fresh air but not much nature.

Those in solitary have barely any contact with the outdoors. For their daily 45 minutes outside their cells (not counting the 15 minutes they get to shower), inmates have
access to a recreation yard—a cement-floored space about 15 feet by 30 feet, with high cement walls. If they look up they can see the sky through a mesh grate, a narrow glimpse of the world beyond the prison. The lucky might see a bird fly over.

But the housing unit that Jost and Lea showed me had an indoor recreation room, too, and here, in a 15-by-12-foot space with high walls, I saw something remarkable and entirely out of place: on the far wall, in brilliant color, palm trees swayed in a tropical breeze, and water lapped at the sand. The sounds of gently breaking and retreating waves filled the room.

A projector mounted out of reach on the opposite wall displayed the six-by-nine-foot scene. A library of 38 clips included scenes of waves pounding rocks on the California coastline, a tranquil sunset, time-lapse images of clouds building and breaking, sweeping mountain vistas, and forests with birds singing. Ambient sounds accompanied some of the videos. Others were paired with classical music.

This was the Blue Room, a first-of-its-kind effort to connect the most isolated prisoners with the natural world. And its presence in a penitentiary says much about both the power of nature to soothe the human mind and an ongoing shift within the corrections system, from punishment to rehabilitation.

, the inventor of the Blue Room, is an ecologist who, in 1980, started studying the Costa Rican rainforest by using rock-climbing equipment to ascend high into the canopy. The importance and inherent benefits of trees seemed obvious to her, but she realized that many didn’t share her connection to the natural world, so she embarked on a public education campaign. She gave sermons at churches and synagogues about trees and spirituality, worked with rappers to reach inner-city kids, and took lawmakers on climbing trips into the treetops. A decade ago, she started a science-education project in a Washington state prison, where she taught minimum-security inmates to grow moss and raise endangered butterflies and frogs.

The prisoners in Nadkarni’s project had the highest level of privileges among the inmates, including opportunities to interact with the natural world. With good behavior, inmates in some prisons can earn spots on work crews to landscape local parks, pick up trash along highways, or maintain walking trails. Several states have farm programs, with inmates raising livestock, running dairies, and growing vegetables for use in the prison or to donate to nearby communities. Inmates on wildfire crews enjoy perhaps the greatest immersion in nature. (Of course, the impetus is cheap labor, not improving participants’ mental well-being.) Both Tony and Brian had worked on outdoor crews—cutting lawns, raking leaves. “The worst part of the day,” Tony told me, “was having to go back.”

Nadkarni wondered: What of the prisoners most removed from the natural world? While scientists had long studied the mental-health effects of solitary confinement, no one looked at the effects of nature on those most distant from it. Prison offered the perfect laboratory. “If we had tried to do an experiment—let’s keep men away from nature for seven years, then reintroduce nature and see what happens to them—it would have been impossible,” Nadkarni told me. “It would have been unethical.”

Research on nature’s role in other institutional settings suggested to Nadkarni that prisoners would experience the same benefits. For instance, patients who could see trees outside their windows at a Pennsylvania hospital recovered faster from gallbladder surgery than patients whose windows looked out on a brick wall. They needed fewer painkillers, had fewer complications, and complained to nurses less frequently. Nature imagery on hospital walls eases patient stress, herb and flower gardens in dementia wards can calm residents and reduce violent outbursts, and public housing developments that incorporate trees and natural spaces have lower crime rates and promote stronger social bonds among neighbors than those that don’t. “When you surround people with nature, you can get a change in behavior,” Nadkarni, 61, said. “People respond positively—physiologically, psychologically, emotionally.”

In 2008, she approached a Washington prison about a nature-imagery program for inmates in solitary confinement, but corrections officers there said it would coddle prisoners. Two years later, a Snake River corrections officer watched Nadkarni’s TED Talk and called her. This time she didn’t pitch the nature imagery as stress reduction for prisoners; rather, she said that the program could make officers safer by improving inmates’ behavior.

Lea, who worked in the intensive management unit at the time, built the projection system in 2013. “I was just tired of listening to them gripe the whole day,” he said. “If I can get them to shut up for an hour, that’s golden.” The Blue Room, named for the color the walls were painted, succeeded in quieting the inmates, but it did a lot more than that. They received fewer disciplinary infractions than inmates in other segregation units, and prison staff said they required fewer cell extractions, in which teams of corrections officers physicallyÌęremove unruly inmates.

Patricia Hasbach, an eco-psychologist on Nadkarni’s team, interviewed six inmates about their Blue Room experience and found that the imagery helped them with self-regulation, the ability to resist their worst impulses—a skill that’s degraded by time in solitary. They often recalled the experience hours later to calm themselves. Many said they thought the videos helped them sleep. Inmates can use the room every other day for up to 45 minutes. They can sit on a cushion, but many exercise, walk around as the videos play, or stand a few feet from the projection, the natural world filling their view. Most of the inmates she interviewed—like many prisoners in the U.S. today—hadn’t spent much time in nature before they were incarcerated, so the Blue Room didn’t help them recall pleasant memories. Instead it was the imagery itself, and the emotions it conjured, that calmed them.

The project has also given corrections officers a tool to head off potentially unruly behavior in inmates. Hasbach heard this during interviews with staff, and Jost and Lea told me the same. If they see an inmate who seems agitated or has become unusually quiet, they might ask if he wants time in the Blue Room.

“They can’t go down the street to be alone,” Jost said, and Lea picked up his thought: “But they can go in that room and be in a forest.”

A prisoner in the cell nearest to the Blue Room had been eavesdropping. “They can talk all the bullshit they want about that room,” he shouted. “You can’t be locked in a cell for over a year and not start losing your mind.” The inmate was a regular in the Blue Room. “That guy would be the first one to freak out if we took this out,” Lea said.

Twenty-four of the prisoners currently in segregation will be paroled within months, with very little time in general population as a transition. “How do you think they’re going to react if they’ve been stuck in a cell 23 hours a day?” Jost said. “What are we trying to push back to the street?”

Many states have reduced the use of solitary confinement in recent years, and last year the federal government banned solitary for juvenile offenders in federal prison and prohibited its use for minor infractions. Advocacy groups say this doesn’t go far enough. They want solitary abolished altogether, which has brought Nadkarni criticism—and some nasty e-mails—for her Blue Room work. By making solitary more palatable, some have told her, she’s helping maintain an inhumane practice. “I do understand where they’re coming from, but we’re not going to abolish prisons,” she told me. “All I can do is provide as many prisoners as I can with the healing power of nature as a way to mitigate some of the negative things that go on in prisons today and to make them more productive, better people when they come out.”

Snake River hopes to add Blue Rooms to its other segregation and general-population units. A controlled study with a larger sample size is now under way, but preliminary results generated interest from facilities in Alaska, South Carolina, Rhode Island, and even the Washington prison that originally turned down Nadkarni’s proposal. Prisons in Wisconsin and Nebraska just opened their own versions of the Blue Room. Last year a sheriff from Utah embraced the idea when he discussed it with Nadkarni. “We keep getting more and more punitive, taking away their privileges, subtracting what they’re able to do,” sheÌęremembered him saying. “It’s not working.”

When Jackson and her Sponsors clients first arrived along the McKenzie for their fishing trip, they gathered under a riverside pavilion, out of the spitting rain, and their guide for the day, Jonathan Blanco, explained the seams and pools where trout could be found. He mounted a few vises to the picnic tables and guided the group through the fine and frustrating work of fly tying.

“I’m going to give it a whirl, but I don’t see this being my talent,” Tony said as he spiraled thread around what would become a woolly bugger. Tony is thoughtful and earnest, with a ruddy face and close-cropped, graying hair. His tongue poked from the corner of his mouth as he concentrated. “What happens if the thread breaks?” he asked.

“You just wrap right over it,” Blanco said.

Blanco, who is 35 and quick to smile, started tying flies at age eight and was doing so professionally at 15. He built his first fly rod at 18 and now has his own rod-building business, a side gig to his 14-year career at the Oregon Department of Corrections.

Prisoners and corrections officers are both shaped by the struggle for control and respect. Blanco had seen himself as an enforcer, tasked with reminding inmates that they had done wrong and had forfeited their rights to freedom. “I made life a living hell for some guys,” he said. “I’m five-foot-six, and I weighed 130 pounds when I started. I had to be aggressive.” He was a taser and firearms instructor, and spent more than three years with prison SWAT teams, called in to break up fights and subdue unruly inmates. “I’ve had things turn ugly,” he told me. “The only way to get through that was to dehumanize the individuals we were working with.”

Blanco worked on death row at Oregon State Penitentiary for two years, then met an advocate for inmates whose own father, a corrections officer, had been murdered by a prisoner. How could he work with inmates when one had taken so much from him? Blanco asked. By helping prisoners, the man told him, he was keeping others safe, maybe preventing another murder.

In 2012, Blanco transferred to the prison’s hobby shop and helped inmates establish their own online handicraft businesses, selling jewelry, leather goods, and artwork. He now runs the prison arts programs statewide, though he’s still learning to dial back who he’d become as a corrections officer. “What helped was nature,” he said. “Going outside, that’s my outlet.” He fishes or hikes most weekends—and on the occasional mental-health weekday—and hoped these men would find the same relief. “Some of them give up quickly,” even committing new crimes just to return to a world they understand, he told me. “Going out into the woods may give them enough solitude to take a deep breath.”

He led the group onto the grass and gave a quick lesson in casting, the wrist fixed and the forearm gliding like a metronome from 11 o’clock to two and back again. They fished the river for several hours. Brian, working a hole by a downed snag, caught a single rainbow trout. The other six came from Mike, who opted to spin-cast with worms.

They gathered again in the late afternoon under the pavilion to cook their catch. The rain had stopped and the clouds had thinned, with a hopeful patch of blue in the western sky. As they nibbled on the trout, Jackson asked them to discuss the pressures they faced and what might ease them.

“How do you find time day to day to step back?” she asked.

“I’ll just walk around the block, look at the trees, the colors,” Tony said. “A five, ten-minute walk and I’m able to regroup.”

Jackson nodded and smiled. Just as a 45-minute session in the Blue Room can’t counteract all the effects of prison, a trip into the outdoors every month or two doesn’t erase the daily stressors. That’s the shortcoming of such programs: the impacts are lessened if exposure isn’t maintained or revisited, even in small doses. “We’re working with the most marginalized people, and there are a lot of barriers to recreation,” Jackson said as we drove back into town. “There’s transportation, there’s time, there’s money. But what is nature and what is recreation? It’s not that nature and the outdoors is this other place you go—it’s right here. It’s what’s right outside the window, or on the walk between your two or three jobs.”

The next morning, I toured the grounds at Sponsors and saw its nearby nature, a moment of peace within easy reach, where clients can sit by the meandering flower garden or help work the five large raised beds, which in summer are crowded with beets and squash, corn and tomatoes, strawberries and blueberries. The importance that Sponsors places on time spent outdoors can be seen in the bright and sprawling mural painted across a wall behind the garden. Sketched by a local artist and painted by the clients, it depicts the prisoner’s journey from the bleak setting of incarceration to a vibrant landscape where he’s embraced and supported. In the middle of the mural, surrounded by sunlight, the man kneels and drinks from a mountain stream.

In a renovated garage beside the mural, I found Wayne, who runs Sponsors’ fledgling bike shop. With his wallet chain, tatted forearms, and thick brown goatee, he still looked much like the hard-drinking, hard-swinging biker he’d been before prison.

About half of Sponsors’ clients can’t drive. Some lost their license for drunk driving or nonpayment of child support; others can’t afford a car and insurance. “When you get out, you don’t have any freedom,” Wayne said as he unwound a coil of brake cable. With bicycles they can ride to interviews and appointments or just cruise along the riverside paths for some exercise and relaxation.

Every few months, the Eugene police department donates a couple dozen confiscated and abandoned bikes. Some just need a tune-up; others Wayne cannibalizes for a growing inventory of spare parts. That morning he had loaned out three bikes.
Another, a Trek mountain bike halfway through a rebuild, hung in a Park floor stand. He’d just received several light kits for anyone who needed to ride at night. A few stop in each day with flat tires, squirrelly derailleurs, squeaky brakes. He wants the shop to become a gathering spot, where clients can learn to work on their own bikes.

Wayne had racked up three drunk-driving arrests and lost his license but kept driving, which earned him two years in prison. There he cleaned himself up, started going to church and Alcoholics Anonymous; getting right, he calls it. Since his release last March, cycling had become a core element of his life, for both logistics and enjoyment. His girlfriend offers him rides in her car, but he usually declines, preferring the independence of his bike, clear skies or rain. He rides an electric bike around town and bought a Specialized Crave Comp 29er for trail and downhill riding. He had also made new friends at local bike shops and on the trails. “You lose your friends when you go to prison, and you have to stay away from them when you get out, if you want to stay out of prison,” he said. “The majority of the people you hung out with have the same problem you did. You feel really lonely.”

Later that afternoon, I drove with Tony into the hills south of Eugene for a hike up Spencer Butte, and he spoke of loneliness, too. He told me about the first night in his own apartment after his 90 days at Sponsors, after the friends who helped him move had left, when the quiet and solitude had overwhelmed him. “The fear set in,” he said. “The fear of being alone. You don’t know how to manage on your own anymore.”

He would like to counsel troubled youth someday, to help them avoid the bad choices he didn’t. “Nip it in the bud,” he said. He still has his own struggles. He wasn’t getting enough house-painting work, Sponsors staff suspected he’d started drinking again, and he’d been arrested a few months earlier for misdemeanor assault and spent several days in jail. For much of the summer, he slept in a tent by the river in a Eugene park, returning there each night after work. He presented this time to me as an extended camping trip, but when I mentioned it to Jackson, she offered a different perspective: The camping was partly by necessity. He was between housing during that period, but whether by circumstance or choice, he spoke of the experience with what sounded like genuine pleasure and appreciation.

Last summer, Tony also bought a used blue kayak, and he often loaded it into his pickup truck and drove to a series of ponds north of town, where he had canoed with his stepfather as a boy. On one kayaking trip, three small ducks jumped on his bow. “It gives you a tender moment,” he said. “I carry that with me.”

We set off down the trail, a late-day sun pushing bars of golden light through the fall foliage. Tony stepped lightly over rocks and tree roots in paint-spattered leather boots. In these woods he was merely a hiker, and the many people we passed, the dog walkers and college kids and trail runners, offered friendly nods and greetings, bonded, for a moment, by a shared enjoyment of nature. We rounded a corner on the trail and Tony glimpsed the summit, a short climb away. He sucked a breath and sighed. “I see that,” he said, “and everything just leaves my head.”

Former inmates are identified by first name only; sponsors clients written about in the past have lost jobs after coworkers and others read about their criminal backgrounds.

Brian Mockenhaupt is an șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű contributing editor. ​

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OUR ALREADY BAD DAY took a terrible turn when Kevin fell into the crevasse. Lucky for him, he was tethered to a blind man. Steve felt the sharp tug and immediately dropped to his butt and dug his crampons into the ice. This gave Kevin enough time to kick his toe into the opposite wall of the crevasse and stop, armpits-deep, his free leg dangling over the darkness. I had fallen in beside him but used my trekking pole to span the gap and went in only up to my thighs. The fourth member of our party, Matt, was unroped and 20 yards away. I backed out and scooted across the snow on my belly, and together Steve and I pulled Kevin, gently, from the fissure.

But we were still lost in a blizzard and trapped in a crevasse field on the slopes of 18,510-foot Mount Elbrus, the highest mountain in Europe. A thunderstorm was parked overhead, and lightning flashed around us. I might die out here, I thought. I’m going to be on the news. Four climbers lost and presumed dead on Elbrus. I’m actually going to be that guy.

I had felt that sort of extended dread just once before, in southern Afghanistan in 2010, in a farmer’s compound surrounded by, and under fire from, the Taliban. But back then other people had known we needed help. Reinforcements were en route to hammer the enemy with machine-gun and rocket fire. Out in the crevasse field, no one knew we were in trouble. This was bad. But confrontations with mortality can have merit; they certainly spur reflection on the risks you take and whether they’re worthwhile.

I had just turned 38, nearing the end of a decade that began with war and led me, unexpectedly, to the outdoors. I spent my 30th birthday on a highway in southern Iraq, driving a humvee north from Kuwait for a 12-month deployment as an infantryman in western Baghdad. The risk was so extreme, so over the top compared with everything else I had known in my life, that there was little I could do but rely on my training, try to keep myself and my friends safe, and hope for the best. The more I was around danger, the less dangerous it seemed. Random gunshots or an explosion two streets away weren’t much to worry about. And it was exciting.

After leaving the Army at 32, I made several reporting trips to Iraq and Afghanistan, because there were important stories to be told. But also, if I’m being honest with myself, I returned to war zones because of the thrill of the unknown, when the day could turn upside down at any moment. On foot patrols through the mountains along the Pakistan border, or through bomb-infested farmland in southern Afghanistan, the air hummed with tension. I’m not reckless, but I came to crave unpredictable moments, even though it sometimes felt like risk for the sake of risk, which I knew had the potential to kill me. Being in war zones fostered a strange, fatalistic rationalization: things would work out OK because they had thus far, and if things didn’t work out, that was somehow OK, too, because the event would likely be so catastrophically bad that I wouldn’t be alive to worry about the outcome.

Writing about the military and veterans led me to Nepal in 2010, where I climbed 20,075-foot Lobuche with 11 wounded Iraq and Afghanistan vets. There I found the camaraderie of shared experience and what seemed like a safer version of the excitement I had known in the military. The next summer, I climbed Kilimanjaro with one of those veterans, Steve Baskis, who was blinded by a bomb in Baghdad. A year later, Steve and I planned a trip to Elbrus with several other friends, including Kevin Noe and Matt Murray. By then, outdoor adventure had become a core part of my life, serving as a transition from the heady recklessness of war.

Being in the mountains offered another reminder that the world is raw and unpredictable, even if the danger often seemed more like perception than reality. Before the trip to Russia, I read that Mount Elbrus is a straightforward climb, one of the easy Seven Summits—like Kilimanjaro with more snow on top. We had been told that the route was well marked with small flags, so a guide wasn’t necessary.

Then the day turned upside down. Hours before entering the crevasse field at 10 a.m., we turned back shy of the summit when Matt became sick and couldn’t continue. It was still dark, but the arrival of daylight brought no clarity. A pounding wind pelted us with ice and snow and cut visibility to 20 feet. The storm cleared briefly as we worked down the mountain to the edge of what seemed to be a snowfield. We couldn’t see all the fissures, covered as they were by a fresh layer of ice and snow. Because Steve is blind, he was roped to Kevin, but Matt and I were unroped as we traversed what seemed like the easy grade of the lower mountain. It took Kevin’s fall for us to realize that we’d veered into a crevasse field that now stretched between us and base camp.

Bad decisions led us here, but we made some good decisions, too. We had turned back from the summit push as a group, and after roping up we listed our options and took what we determined by consensus to be the best course. We worked together and slowly made our way through the crevasse field, with Kevin as point man, stabbing a pole through thin ice searching for snow bridges. Sixteen hours after setting off for the summit, we shuffled back into base camp.

Later, I pondered the choices that led to those hours in the crevasse field and what could have been. I realize now that this had not been just another dicey moment, the same as a near miss in Iraq or Afghanistan. Elbrus represented a passing over from the at times uncontrollable danger and uncertainty of my early thirties, when, despite extraordinary preparation, so much had to be left to chance.

I still don’t like knowing exactly how my days will play out. I will always crave risk and unpredictable elements in my life, things the outdoor world certainly offers. But unlike a war zone, I can mitigate most of the danger by making good decisions. It’s rare when there is nothing I can do. The responsibility is on me.ÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌęÌę Ìę

Contributing editor Brian Mockenhaupt wrote about sports psychologist Michael Gervais in January.

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Six feet two inches of lithe muscle and golden skin, Kerri Walsh folds her lanky frame into a black leather chair at the (DISC) in Marina del Rey, California, and tucks her knees to her chest. She towers on beach-volleyball courts, but in a baggy sweatshirt and pink flip-flops she seems more guarded than dominating. It’s May 2012, and the London Olympics loom. Alongside teammate Misty May-Treanor, Walsh has already won two gold medals, and she wants another. But after a frustrating week of practice games against international competition on Manhattan Beach, she needs a mental tune-up.

Michael Gervais.

Andy Walshe, director of Redbull’s high-performance program.

“I’m holding on too tight,” she says, “and when I make a mistake, I’m pissed.”

Kicked back in a matching chair a few feet away, index finger on his cheek, psychologist Michael Gervais listens with a trained intensity born of years spent discerning deeper meanings and motivations. “Bring to life a time on the sand when you were in a great space,” he says. “A moment that’s amazing.”

Walsh is quiet for several seconds, then shrugs. She says she can’t think of a perfect moment.

“Did I say perfect?”

“No,” she says, “but ideal.”

Gervais’ eyebrows rise. “Do those words mean the same thing to you?”

Walsh nods.

“They do? Hmm….”

Walsh knows this is about to get uncomfortable. Gervais will take her off the court and dig into her dilemma of trying to be a good wife and mother and win another gold. Right now she’s struggling—when she’s with her family she’s thinking about volleyball, and when she’s on the court she’s feeling guilty about not being with her husband and two kids. Walsh and May-Treanor opened the 2012 season with a lackluster few tournaments, and they’re running out of time to prepare for London. Gervais will force Walsh to peel back some scabs, and she will cry. But she knows she’ll play better for it.

Walsh and dozens of other athletes who work with Gervais call him their secret weapon. His clients include snowboarders, swimmers, basketball players, golfers, and the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks. As a member of Red Bull’s high-performance team, he has taught the energy-drink maker’s athletes how to calm their minds for competition. He has guided them through grueling, weeklong mental boot camps involving meditation, yoga, and sensory deprivation to sharpen their minds. And in 2010 he helped save the now famous , Red Bull’s NASA-style mission to carry Austrian BASE jumper Felix Baumgartner 24 miles above the earth for the highest-ever free fall. That summer, after garnering worldwide media attention in the run-up to the planned September launch (including an August 2010 cover story in șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű), the project was suddenly in jeopardy. The reason: Baumgartner was afraid of his space suit.

That fact will surprise anyone who first encountered Baumgartner after his successful jump last October, when he triumphantly greeted the press looking the part of the fearless stuntman—all command and control. But back in 2010, during training exercises, Baumgartner suddenly found the tight confines of his Stratos suit and helmet terrifying. Simply looking at them triggered surges of anxiety and hyperventilation. The more he tried to suppress the anxiety, the worse it got—so bad that it seemed Stratos would be shelved permanently. Hoping to get the project moving again, Red Bull called in Gervais. The two weeks of intense sessions with Baumgartner that eventually got Stratos back on track—more on those in a minute—offer a unique glimpse into Gervais’ methods.

The best way to think of Gervais is as a race-car mechanic who tweaks high-performance machines. Most psychologists repair the faulty ignitions and thrashed suspensions that keep us from being roadworthy, so we can get around OK and not be a danger to others. This is a sickness model, trying to make those toward the left side of the bell curve more like everyone in the average-Joe middle. But Gervais works at the other end of the curve, in that thin zone of specialness, making the very best better by helping them understand their own minds.

Sit next to Gervais on an airplane and he’ll tell you he sells time-shares. It’s a clever conversation ender, because as soon as he reveals that he’s a sports psychologist they’re asking how they can get their six-year-old more excited about soccer.

His clients don’t need motivation. They’re disciplined, regimented, and driven, accustomed to both pain and deprivation, and they often have high-stakes incentives for self-improvement: a gold medal, a lucrative sponsorship, an extra million dollars in their contracts. “Most of us want to grow, but few want to do the hard work to change,” he says. “The greatest have a vision, and they commit to follow it. They have great capacity to experience what’s uncomfortable, because they know that’s the way to self-mastery.”

But Gervais’ athletes aren’t immune to the hang-ups that stymie the rest of us. They worry about failure or try to please everyone. They argue with their spouses and stress over money, even if the checks have a couple more zeros. But their physical and mental landscapes are less cluttered, or at least better mapped, with fewer unknowns. They’ve spent years honing their bodies. They already work with nutritionists and strength coaches and understand better than most of us how subtle changes in sleep, diet, or exercise manifests in performance. And for Gervais, their chosen sports provide ideal feedback, with clear metrics for progress. Did performance improve? A stopwatch or scorekeeper offers enticing clarity compared with the sometimes vague and imprecise self-reporting of feelings and emotional states that most psychologists have to work with.

Gervais, now 40, first learned about the power of the mind during surf tournaments as a teenager in Redondo Beach. In the lineup at local amateur events, sometimes alongside much more experienced surfers, performance anxiety would overwhelm him. “I was competing against men way out of my league. My girlfriend would show up, my parents, and I couldn’t even feel my surfboard,” he says. “One of these men paddled by and said, ‘Gervais, why don’t you stop thinking about everything that could go wrong and just enjoy it?’ I flipped it around and pictured myself enjoying it.”

He didn’t know it then, but he’d just used visualization, one of the five core mental skills he now teaches clients. The others: self-talk, arousal control, goal setting, and pre-performance routines. Many top athletes already do some version of these on their own, even if they haven’t put the name to it. “A lot of what I do is getting people to develop a sense of insight into how they work best and then the conviction to commit to that way,” he says, “even when it’s difficult or goes against what most people are doing.”

After earning his master’s in sports and exercise psychology in 1998, Gervais began working as a consultant with high school and college athletes and the now defunct Long Beach Ice Dogs hockey team. He discovered his specialty was in one-on-one problem solving, helping high performers overcome what he says is a universal challenge for top athletes: “Being able to fully trust themselves and trust their skills in progressively higher stakes, and being able to harness the activity of their mind so they can be more present.” He earned his Ph.D. in 2004 and was soon working with top professionals.

Sports psychology had come a long way since its origins more than a century ago in the U. S. In the early days, the focus was almost exclusively on research, with groundbreaking experiments that tested the reaction speeds of football linemen and found that cyclists clocked faster times when competing against others than riding alone. The therapeutic model, however, took much longer to make inroads. In 1938, Coleman Griffith, considered the father of sports psychology in this country, was hired by Chicago Cubs owner Philip Wrigley after his team crumbled late in the season and lost the pennant to the New York Giants. The manager, Charlie Grimm, wanted none of it and discouraged the players from cooperating.

With that sort of skepticism, top athletes working with “headshrinkers” was slow to take hold. Much of the resistance, says Seahawks coach Pete Carroll, came from the organization, not the athletes. “For a coach to let someone from the outside come to talk to your team, that means you don’t have the answers yourself,” he says. “The athletes have always been willing. They’ll take whatever advantage they can get.”

Carroll, who studied sports psychology in graduate school and was head coach at the for a decade, had been approached by many sports psychologists over the years to help his players, but he always declined. He met Gervais in 2011, and he liked his approach. “He’s the best I’ve ever been around,” says Carroll, “and I’ve been looking for these guys for years.”

Today, nearly every professional sport incorporates mental training. The U.S. Olympic Committee now has five full-time sports psychologists, and many more athletes meet with independent specialists like Gervais. As the field has gone mainstream, an athlete meeting with a psychologist has lost much of its stigma. In 2010, Los Angeles Laker Ron Artest even thanked his psychiatrist on live television after the Lakers clinched the NBA title. Many of the athletes in this piece declined to be mentioned by name—not because they’re afraid of being seen as weak but because they don’t want to reveal a competitive advantage.

Surprisingly, Gervais’ sessions sound a lot like traditional counseling, with questions about background and athletes’ relationships with their parents. “I have a lot of conversations about their sport,” he says, “but most are about them as a person.” This follows a pattern: start with a problem on the field, find its root cause in the athlete’s life, and develop an array of tools to address it. Often the issues are subtle. An athlete might feel he’s plateaued and can’t reach the next level, no matter how hard he’s trained, or his personal relationships suffer because of his devotion to the sport. But sometimes his clients’ problems are more acute, like a figure skater who can’t stick a landing or a basketball player who loses his cool after missing a few shots.

Or a daredevil who’s afraid to wear his space suit.

DURING A 27-YEAR career in adventure sports, Felix Baumgartner has flown across the English Channel with a carbon-fiber wing on his back, jumped off some of the world’s highest buildings, and leaped into a 600-foot cave in Croatia. He’s had plenty of dicey moments in situations that would paralyze most of us. It’s no wonder, then, that when Baumgartner found himself nearly hyperventilating in the space suit, he and the project’s managers were baffled. According to Baumgartner, he’d never experienced this kind of anxiety before. “I thought it would get better, but it became worse,” he says. “Everyone put their trust in me. It was embarrassing.”

Initially, the Stratos team chalked up the symptoms to a lack of cardiovascular fitness. Yet even after a weeks-long training regimen in the summer of 2010, the labored breathing continued. Baumgartner tried to fight the feelings of panic, and early on he was able to wear the suit for up to an hour during exercises at the Stratos facilities in the desert outside Lancaster, California. But soon he could barely stand a few minutes. As the mission foundered in the fall of 2010, a Stratos team member popped into the Santa Monica office of Andy Walshe, the director of Red Bull’s high-performance program, looking for a stationary bike Baumgartner could use to train. That chance encounter saved the project.

In 2007, Red Bull had hired Walshe, an expert in the science of human movement, to build a training program for its stable of sponsored athletes, now numbering 500 in 160 sports, mostly action and adventure: cliff diving, wingsuiting, rally-car racing, snowboarding. He had created a similar program for the U.S. Olympic Ski and Snowboard Association, leading to several gold medals in 2006 in Turin, Italy. At Red Bull, Walshe started from scratch, encountering many athletes, like Baumgartner, who didn’t grow up in sports with established development pipelines. “We didn’t even have coaches for a lot of our athletes, and it struck me how damn good they all were,” Walshe says. “They taught themselves and figured out how to deliver at the highest levels, how to manage themselves under pressure, how to be fit enough to do what they want to do.” Walshe assembled a crew of coaches, doctors, nutritionists, and trainers to fine-tune the Red Bull athletes’ bodies, and he brought on Gervais to hone their minds.

By then, Gervais had established himself as one of the best sports psychologists in the business, working with professionals in all the major team sports, as well as with big-wave surfers and ultimate fighters. He already had offices in Marina del Rey and Manhattan Beach (which he still maintains), but he was intrigued by the Red Bull opportunity. He and Walshe bonded over a shared fascination with how people become masters in their field. To understand this at a neural level, they’re even working with Los Angeles tech company to compile a database of elite performers’ brain patterns using quantitative electroencephalographs, or QEEGs, which measure electrical currents generated in various regions of the brain. They’re particularly interested in athletes who explore the edge of what’s possible, often doing things that no one has done before. Mapmakers, they call them. Walshe compares them to early explorers like Ferdinand Magellan, who attempted to circumnavigate the globe in the face of mass skepticism. “Ninety-nine point nine percent of people said, ‘You can’t do this.’ And he said, ‘You know what? I think you’re wrong.’ And then he went and did it,” Walshe says.

Baumgartner, who was planning to leap out of a capsule into space, not knowing what would happen when he broke the sound barrier, fit this mold. Only now anxiety had grounded him. After hearing about the panic attacks, Walshe persuaded Baumgartner to speak with Gervais in the fall of 2010. Together they quickly identified the deeper problem. The Stratos project involved more than a dozen people, and for the most part, Baumgartner’s previous stunt work hadn’t required him to rely so extensively on such a large team. The suit came to represent Baumgartner’s perceived lack of control. Once the helmet was on and the visor closed, he couldn’t even breathe on his own.

“In my whole life I’d never asked for help,” Baumgartner recalled last fall when I reached him by phone. “I’d always had an answer for everything. Of course, I’d had nervous moments, but I was always able to deal with the anxiety.” By the time he met with Gervais, he said, “I knew I couldn’t help myself.”

TO BETTER UNDERSTAND WHAT Baumgartner was experiencing, Gervais decided to go to the Stratos headquarters and try on the equipment himself. Just getting into the 100-pound suit and backpack parachute took 15 minutes, with someone else dressing him. The helmet fit tightly around his cheeks, exacerbating the sense of confinement. And with the visor closed, the outside world fell away. Gervais remembers listening to his own breathing, loud inside the helmet, as though he was scuba diving. Then he entered the tiny capsule where Baumgartner would have to sit for several hours during the final jump mission. Gervais sweated and labored to make what he felt should have been easy movements. Finally, he stood on the tiny platform and imagined what Baumgartner would be seeing, the earth spread out below him.

Gervais and Walshe decided that he needed to shift Baumgartner’s perception of the suit from something that was triggering anxiety to something vital for the mission’s survival. Instead of dealing with the space suit in a physical way, Gervais spent early sessions describing it to Baumgartner. He told him to picture the suit, imagine himself touching it, putting his feet in the suit, then his arms. “On a scale of one to 10, relaxed to panicked, where’s your mental state?” Gervais asked. Four. They didn’t move further until Baumgartner had relaxed, using breathing exercise and self-talk.

Once Baumgartner could discuss the suit without panic, Gervais showed it to him. This is classic fear extinction through exposure: present a patient with a small dose of discomfort, and once he’s comfortable with that, up the exposure. “We made a commitment to see this through,” Gervais told the visually anxious stuntman, “so we’ll sit and look at the suit all night if we have to.”

Baumgartner’s anxiety level dropped—confirmed by the heart-rate monitor he wore during the sessions—and they moved on to touching the suit and, finally, wearing it. First a foot, then the legs, the arms, the helmet, everything closing in on him now.

During one early session while wearing the suit, with just Gervais and Walshe in the room, Baumgartner had worked himself into a panic within a few minutes. Gervais and Walshe traded worried glances. Maybe this wouldn’t work. But allowing him to take off the suit at the moment of extreme anxiety would just reinforce the fear. Gervais had another approach for Baumgartner—taking his mind somewhere else. Our brains can quickly shift between thoughts, but we can’t think about two different things at once. As the anxiety rose, Gervais had Baumgartner spell words backward or do simple math calculations, just enough mental effort to take his mind off the suit.

“We’re not leaving,” Gervais told him. “You’ll have to fall asleep in this thing.”

Those small, progressive steps had led to a turning point. “Guys, I’ve got it,” Baumgartner told Gervais and the others a few days after his last panic attack. “I’m fine.” Gervais stayed on as the Stratos psychologist, sitting in the mission-control room during the test jumps and the final record-breaking leap last October, but Baumgartner never had another problem wearing the suit.

SOMEDAY, GERVAIS WILL HAVE an office right on the beach, and he’ll plop two chairs in the sand and chat with his clients as they watch the sunlight shimmer on the waves. Which is more than just aesthetics: the light twinkling on the water keys the left brain, he says; the vastness of the ocean keys the right.

But for now, he’s on the move all day between his offices, squeezing in appointments on the phone while I ride shotgun in his BMW sport-utility vehicle. In the back, his surfboard shares space with his son’s car seat. Most mornings he’ll surf or paddleboard before work, or do an hour of yoga, but today is all business. He calls a surfer to congratulate him on a recent championship and dissects a golfer’s hang-up of obsessing over the tee shot. (“This isn’t going to stop until you make a commitment to stop it,” Gervais tells him.) He orders an ace pitcher with a 100-mile-per-hour fastball to approach 18 strangers before their next meeting and tell them something he finds beautiful about them, to push him outside his comfort zone. And to a young water-polo player hoping to eventually make the Olympic team, he offers blunt advice: “Being the best in the world isn’t easy. And if you knew what I know, you probably wouldn’t want to do it.”

Gervais gave Walsh a similar warning before he started working with her three years ago, when she was already the best in the world. “He asked me repeatedly, ‘Are you sure you want to do this? Because you’re going to be different. Do you want to go into the dark side of you as much as the light?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I need to be a different, better person.’ Now I’m way more present and way more focused than I’ve ever been.”

Walsh, who eventually learned to make peace with her dual role as mom and world-class athlete, won her third gold medal in August—and she was hardly the only of Gervais’ athletes to benefit from his services last summer. His clients brought home five gold medals from London.

After a phone call with the Seahawks’ Carroll and before his weekly meeting with a race-car driver, Gervais pulls his vehicle to the curb outside the DISC Sports and Spine Center in Marina del Rey, where he’s a partner. His cell phone on speaker, he settles into his seat for a quick meditation session. On the other end of the line is one of the world’s fastest swimmers, sitting on a couch in his L.A. apartment.

“Give your body permission to be present with this process,” Gervais says. “Deep breath in…. Out…. Pause at the bottom. There’s nowhere to go and nowhere to be, so allow yourself to be here right now.” Gervais has worked with the swimmer for several months on managing outside stressors that distract him in the pool. This is the first meditation session, which he knows can seem too soft for many athletes, too far removed from athletics. But it’s not about athletics anyway. That’s just the proving ground for how well they’re living. “Where does the amazing and beautiful take place? In the present moment,” he told me earlier. “If I can teach people how to be quiet in their minds, I’m going to increase their experiences of the beautiful and the amazing.”

Now his voice is low and smooth, and it’s nearly putting me to sleep. “Notice the effects of gravity right now on your body,” he says. “Let gravity pull your feet down into the floor, into the earth’s core. Let your hamstrings melt away, and all the little muscles around your knees.”

As traffic zips by, Gervais talks the swimmer through his body, through the organs, into his mind. “Connect to that place in you that water cannot wet, that the wind cannot blow, and that fire cannot burn,” he says. “Without judgment, observe the activity of your mind by guiding your mind to one thing at a time. This is what it means to be present. Now allow every cell in your body to be open.”

The silence stretches for a long moment.

“Are you still there?” Gervais asks.

The voice on the other end sounds dreamy and tranquil but tinged with surprise.

“That was amazing.” ÌęÌęÌę

Contributing editor Brian Mockenhaupt wrote about the world’s largest search-and-rescue exercise in August.

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AS THE MORNING SUN creeps over a distant ridge, Charles Ray, America’s ambassador to Valsura, picks his way down a rocky hillside and into a dry creek bed to wait for his rescuers. He has chosen the wrong shoes for a desert excursion—black leather oxfords—but this makes sense. He didn’t plan on being out here, stranded amid the saguaro cactuses and tumbleweeds.

Aid worker

Tending to a participant playing an injured U.S. aid worker

Brett Hartnett

Brett Hartnett, founder of Angel Thunder

Solider

Delivering a survivor to safety

Landing

Landing in Arizona’s Apache National Forest

Charles Ray

Charles Ray. U.S. “ambassador” to Valsura, after the crash

Tent city

Tent city at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base

Pararescuemen

Pararescuemen aboard a Chinook

The nation of Valsura, ravaged by an earthquake and flooding, has requested humanitarian aid from the United States, which puts Ray, as the chief of mission, in charge of the relief effort. For an aerial tour of the disaster area, he brought along the press—me. But our two helicopters flew into a sandstorm and drifted onto the border of Sotostan, Valsura’s reclusive neighbor and longtime adversary. Considering these targets of opportunity, the Sotostan military shot down both helicopters. I’m uninjured, as is our copilot. Ray has internal bleeding. Everyone else on the two aircraft—pilots and crew members—is dead. The U.S. embassy reports the ambassador overdue, and the Air Force launches a rescue effort.

We hear them now. Rotors thump on the horizon, and we see two gray HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopters flying toward us, low over the desert. Ray stretches out in the dirt, a hand clutching his injured abdomen. One helicopter breaks off and circles several hundred feet overhead, the two door gunners scanning for threats. The other lands 100 feet away, covering us in a brown wave of dust and bits of scrub brush.

Two pararescuemen, Technical Sergeant Arthur Kakis and Staff Sergeant Tyler Boyer, hop from the helicopter and move toward us, rifles raised. They are among the hardest, most skilled products of the U.S. military: paramedics who can free-fall, scuba-dive, rock-climb, and fight their way to anyone stranded on a battlefield, an ocean, a mountainside, or a nasty backwater anywhere around the world.

“Mr. Ambassador,” Kakis says, “can you walk?”

Ray groans and winces when Kakis touches his belly, which is colored purple and black. Kakis and Boyer roll him onto a collapsible stretcher. “You’re going to help carry him,” Kakis tells me.

Bodies bent against the rotor wash, we load Ray into the helicopter, an aerial ambulance with a ventilator, a heart-rate monitor, a defibrillator, and two .50-caliber machine guns poking out the sides. After a 10-minute flight, we bank hard and land. Kakis whips open the sliding door, and I see an HC-130P rescue plane on a dirt airstrip. We transfer Ray into the plane’s empty bay, and a critical-care team straps down the stretcher and slips an oxygen mask over his face. The pilot guns the engines and we roar into the air, landing at a fenced-off, guarded cluster of beige tents that looks just like a forward operating base in Iraq or Afghanistan.

In an air-conditioned tent, doctors examine us, then a reintegration team takes us through the same process used to debrief freed prisoners of war, crash survivors, and rescued hostages. An intel officer quizzes us for details of the attack. A survival specialist asks how we responded during and after the crash. Finally, a psychologist wants to know how we’re coping.

“I don’t have time for talking about my feelings,” says Ray. “Citizens are missing. The president is on the phone.” He steps outside, where America’s newest overseas crisis is heating up fast.

“THIS IS LIKE PUTTING ON an elaborate theatrical production,” says Brett Hartnett, the 51-year-old retired combat rescue helicopter pilot who founded , the world’s largest search-and-rescue exercise. And the stage is enormous, a 40,000-square-mile swath of central and southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico that morphed last October into the fictional countries of Valsura, Sotostan, and Diyeme. For two weeks, a coalition of more than 1,700 pilots, commandos, rescue specialists, and law-enforcement agents from nine countries ran more than 350 simulated missions, honing the kinds of skills that can save your ass in some impossibly bad situations. If your climbing expedition in Pakistan or your kayaking trip in the Congo turns sour and you’re rolled up by bandits and held for ransom? Some of these guys may come looking for you.

The Air Force started training rescue specialists during World War II, with the primary mission of retrieving its own downed fliers. Recently, the mission has broadened considerably. The military can quickly deploy just about anywhere on earth, which has the side benefit of building goodwill. Rescuing and ferrying relief supplies to tsunami survivors in Southeast Asia shows a softer side of American might—something of a counterbalance to images of troops kicking down doors or of rubble from aerial drone strikes. And while few pilots are captured or stranded behind enemy lines these days, plenty of others are. Aid workers held in Pakistan. Tourists kidnapped in Yemen. Ship crews ransomed by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean. Washington has an obligation, by presidential directive, to help Americans taken captive or stranded in hostile countries while working for the U.S. government. In practice, this usually extends to any American in trouble.

The responsibility hasn’t always translated into quick and effective response—even when disasters take place on American soil. Think Katrina. After military, federal, state, and local agencies finally mobilized and descended on the flooded New Orleans area, no one knew who was in charge, exacerbating an already dire situation. “It was a mess,” says Hartnett, who helped plan Air Force rescues after the storm. “There was no command-and-control system. You almost have to force agencies to work with each other.”

Complications only increase when rescue scenarios take place abroad. If the U.S. government evacuates any personnel because of political unrest or natural disaster, it must offer evacuation to every U.S. citizen in that country, which can cause an operation to balloon in size. And if the probability of violence rises, the diplomatic stakes ratchet far higher. Should the crisis be handled through diplomacy or force? Can the local government stage a rescue or finagle the hostages’ release?

“If you haven’t thought about it beforehand, when the crisis happens you’re at absolute zero,” says Ray, 67, who in real life is the U.S. ambassador to Zimbabwe and was a Green Beret in Vietnam. “It’s like buying fire insurance after your house burns down.”

The annual Angel Thunder, organized and paid for by the U.S. Air Force and first held in 2006, in the wake of Katrina, is designed to hardwire America’s crisis response. Prior to Angel Thunder, combat search and rescue had mostly been folded into other military training exercises, which meant it was often treated as an after-thought. Here it’s the sole focus, and it’s Hartnett’s job to bring the whole event to life. Like many of the organizers, he can draw from an impressive amount of real-world experience. In 2003, Hartnett evacuated U.S. citizens from Liberia; he has pulled injured hunters out of the Alaskan wilderness; and he commanded an Air Force rescue detachment in Afghanistan, where he also flew close to a hundred medevac missions.

Still, re-creating those situations in a training scenario is tricky. Search-and-rescue missions are reactive, with just hours or less to plan and new information constantly flooding in. Angel Thunder must be tightly choreographed for safety—helicopters, jet fighters, refueling tankers, and civilian planes all share the same airspace—yet it must feel seat-of-the-pants believable to its most experienced participants. By the time it commences, Hartnett and his team of a half-dozen organizers have spent months working out Angel Thunder’s logistics, locating the best areas to conduct missions, coordinating with local law enforcement, and writing the elaborate script, based on actual events, that makes it all seem real.

By contrast, nearly all of the participants arrive at in Tucson knowing almost nothing about what will unfold. Drawn mostly from U.S. military units, this year’s Angel Thunder cast members also include Swedish K-9 teams, French pilots, Canadian medics, Colombian special forces, and U.S. Drug Enforcement and Border Patrol agents—a diverse crew that resembles a true-to-life coalition. As they’re deploying to Valsura, they’re told only that they will be conducting humanitarian operations but to be ready for any contingency. For two weeks, they’ll run round-the-clock missions and catch naps in some of the base’s two dozen tan Quonset-hut-shaped tents. If they forget to bring a critical piece of equipment or are unfamiliar with the skill sets of the other agencies in their coalition, too bad. Learning how to troubleshoot on the fly is the whole point.

“You know it’s going to be a pickup game,” says Air Force colonel Jason Hanover, commander of the 563rd Rescue Group in Tucson—and commander of the fictional task force deployed to Valsura—“but you hope it will be a team of guys you’ve played with before and you’re not just standing on the playground looking at each other.”

On day one, October 9, several hundred pilots, commandos, and medics crowd into an auditorium at Davis-Monthan, and Colonel Hanover steps onto the stage. “As of right now, we’re deployed to Valsura,” he says. His team then receives an exhausting intel dump: A tropical storm has caused massive flooding across central Valsura, and an 8.9-magnitude earthquake has destroyed thousands of homes. The death toll is 500 and climbing fast. Hundreds are missing, including some of the 10,000 Americans living and working in Valsura. Sotostan has activated army units along the Valsuran border, supposedly for humanitarian relief. But Valsura and Sotostan fought a vicious war in the 1980s and have since had ongoing border disputes, so the troop movements may signal an imminent attack. To the south, the main threat is the Valsuran Liberation Group, linked to insurgents and drug runners in Diyeme, Valsura’s eastern neighbor. They may use the crisis to foment trouble.

And with that, the game is on.

ANGEL THUNDER BEGINS to sputter in a matter of hours. Before rescue crews can be sent to search for flood and earthquake survivors, communication glitches derail the coalition. The primary and backup systems falter. Too little bandwidth and too much demand gridlocks the Rescue Operations Center—a tent packed with computers, phones, and radios—and mission planners can’t talk to some of their aircrews because of mismatched frequency encryption. Soon, however, the bugs are fixed, the network is running smoothly, and airplane and helicopter crews are finally dispatched to scour the remote and ravaged corners of Valsura.

Hartnett says none of these hiccups are planned, just like the inevitable problems during real-world missions, and he’s pleased with the coalition’s stumble and recovery. “Things going wrong is actually good. It forces you to find solutions,” he says. “If nothing had gone wrong, they wouldn’t have learned as much.”

We’re standing in a tent, off-limits to Angel Thunder participants, at the edge of the fenced-off compound. Phones ring, radios chirp, and several video screens show a steady stream of email and instant messages. Hartnett introduces me to some of his team, the 18 Air Force personnel and civilian contractors that form the Joint Exercise Control Group, known simply as the white cell. These are the puppet masters. Throughout Angel Thunder, they push a constant stream of information to the ROC through instant messages, email, and phone calls. It’s up to the participants to winnow the extraneous from the pertinent. The president declaring further support for the Valsuran government doesn’t matter. An 8.0 aftershock or aerial photos of missile batteries on the Sotostan border do. To gather details and plan missions, the coalition can contact other U.S. and Valsuran agencies, played by the white cell. The calls ring to a table with 14 phones, each representing a different group—from the U.S. embassy in Valsura and higher command in Washington, D.C., to the Valsuran government and the local hospital.

The Valsuran Air Force phone rings, and I listen as white-cell member Yonel Dorelis, a retired combat rescue pilot, answers. The coalition wants permission to fly through restricted airspace. “What rank are you?” he asks the caller, a lieutenant colonel.

“I only talk to colonels and above,” Dorelis says and hangs up the phone.

Answers like this force participants to clear the sort of obstacles they would face in a real crisis, but they can also be used to slow the tempo, keeping the exercise on schedule, or to work around scenarios the white cell hadn’t foreseen. Maybe the rescue crews want to do an unplanned, last-minute night jump. Rather than break the realism and tell them Angel Thunder’s organizers haven’t done the background logistics for that, a member of the white cell might say that the Valsuran prime minister’s wife’s rose gardens are in the area and they can’t risk jumpers landing in them—just the sort of ridiculousness planners have dealt with in real-world missions.

“That’s how we steer them in the right direction to do our bidding,” says Major Chris Escajeda, another combat rescue pilot working for the white cell.

A few minutes later, Major Andy Smith, just beginning his 12-hour shift running the white cell, calls the ROC to initiate the next training scenario. “This is Major Smith at the defense attaché’s office. We got a call from ,” he says, referring to the United States Agency for International Development. “We have 10 missing folks out there, and we’re wondering if you can do some aerial search?”

JUST BEFORE DAWN on October 11, I join 70 Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps candidates from local universities who are being scattered to a half-dozen remote sites across central and southern Arizona. They’re playing American aid workers injured and stranded by the earthquake and flooding. I’ll be a journalist who had been with them covering relief efforts. We’re flown by helicopter into the mountains of the Tonto and Apache-Sitgreaves national forests, toward the New Mexico state line, and dropped off in a meadow just before sunrise. We’re each assigned injuries. Mine is minor: a busted ankle. I climb up a wooded hillside and prop myself against a tree charred in wildfires several months earlier and wait for rescue.

A half-hour later, an HC-130P passes high overhead, and five pararescue jumpers leap out and float into the meadow under olive drab parachute canopies. The PJ who finds me splints my ankle and, for the pain, gives me a bubblegum Dum-Dum, simulating the fentanyl lollipop he’d actually be carrying. I follow him to a casualty collection point, at the meadow’s edge, where we load into a massive twin-rotor Chinook helicopter flown by the Singapore Air Force.

Kakis, the PJ I’ll see again when he rescues me and the ambassador after the helicopter shoot-down, squats beside me and works on Alex Travers, a cadet playing a survivor with a collapsed lung and blood filling his chest cavity. Kakis prepares a chest tube and stops just short of slicing a hole between Travers’ ribs. But he does give him a real IV. The helicopter shakes and bounces so much that I have trouble writing legibly in my notebook, but Kakis slips a needle into Travers’ arm, perfect on the first try. Meanwhile, at seven other sites across Arizona, more PJ teams are picking up survivors and ferrying them to our mutual destination, the University of Arizona Medical Center in Tucson. The hospital has posted signs for its more than 400 real patients reassuring them that the moaning people with blood-soaked uniforms are just pretending.

The next morning, day five, the coalition has far bigger problems when the U.S. embassy calls, via the white cell, to report Ambassador Ray’s helicopter overdue. The discovery that he has been shot down initiates the war-games portion of Angel Thunder. For the next five days, fighter jets will bomb missile batteries and troop formations in Sotostan, dropping real ordnance on an Air Force bombing range southwest of Phoenix. Planes are shot down and rescues launched. For one, the PJs use their high-angle skills to snatch a dummy pilot hanging by parachute from a cliff face. For another, a team of commandos searching for a downed pilot walks into a fake minefield, triggering an additional rescue mission.

Through it all, the ROC is in constant activity, day and night, with a steady hum of radio transmissions and phone calls as task force members launch missions, listen to them unfold, or catch quick naps back in their tents. As a soldier and then a journalist, I’ve spent many hours in real operations centers across Iraq and Afghanistan, and the tone here matches them exactly.

Finally, by October 17, the coalition has destroyed most of Sotostan’s air defenses along the border. The president announces an end to the bombing campaign, just in time for the chaos to spread into Diyeme to the east. Insurgents harboring there are causing too many problems in Valsura, which cues my next acting role.

WERE THIS NOT an exercise, I’d be the world’s unluckiest journalist: trapped by an earthquake and flooding, shot down while touring the disaster areas, and now, to end my trip to Valsura, kidnapped by drug-running insurgents and hustled across the border to a mountain hideout in Diyeme.

With my fellow hostages, Air Force staff sergeants Robert Little and Joseph Wheeler, who play the aid workers with whom I’ve been traveling, I’m led through a mud-brick village similar to dozens of villages I’ve walked through before as an embedded reporter with Marine units in Afghanistan. Our captors are preparing an ambush for the team coming to rescue us, and the cluster of buildings gives the defenders a strong advantage, with myriad doorways, windows, and rooftops from which to shoot and then hide. Made of pressed-earth bricks like those used in many parts of the Middle East, the village has 120 rooms linked by narrow alleyways and surrounded by a mile of mud walls—part of the sprawling in a desolate corner of southwestern New Mexico. In 2004, the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, which specializes in explosives research and testing, purchased the defunct company town of Playas and transformed it into a counterterrorism playground.

Our captors are played by soldiers from the 158th Infantry Regiment of the Arizona National Guard. They wear mismatched bits of military uniforms and civilian and Afghan clothing. Several have checkered kaffiyeh scarves wrapped around their heads. Other villagers, like the young woman walking toward us in an alleyway, are students from the University of New Mexico, paid for a few days of role-playing. She flashes a smile and pulls up her outer robe, revealing a suicide vest.

We’re led into a low-ceilinged, windowless room, its floors and walls decorated with Middle Eastern rugs and tapestries. The insurgents flex-cuff our wrists and bind our ankles with duct tape. We’ve already been given our injuries. Using wax putty, makeup, and fake blood, an airman has put a gruesome gunshot wound on my right forearm, a long gash on Wheeler’s head, and lacerations and deep bruises on Little’s shoulders, as though he’s been tortured. We look the part, save for our helmets and face masks, worn to protect us from the , which fly at 600 feet per second, twice as fast as paintball pellets, and can easily puncture an eye. Our captors leave us in the room. They roll shut the metal gate to our small compound, and I hear them shove fresh magazines into their rifles.

Minutes later, an explosion thunders in the warren of streets outside, and the villagers scream. The insurgents have hit our would-be rescuers with an improvised explosive device as they entered the village. “Game on!” a soldier yells, followed by the tic-tic-tic-tic of M-4 rifles firing rounds.

Shouts carry through the village, the ground shakes with another deep boom from a simulated insurgent bomb, and an A-10 attack jet screams overhead, a hundred feet above the rooftops. The rescue team lobs a real teargas grenade (an accident, it is later revealed), and we hear the insurgents, somewhere in the village, curse, spit, and dry-heave. I try to sketch a mental image of what is unfolding outside, but the voices and noises blend into a chaotic din, giving me the smallest hint of the sensory deprivation and utter impotence a hostage must feel.

The rescue team fights through the town, killing and capturing insurgents and checking each compound and room, searching for us. Again we hear hacking, swearing, and gagging. More teargas. “Get down! Do it now!” an agent shouts. “Show me your hands!” Never mind that a Diyeme insurgent wouldn’t understand him shouting in English—a pointed rifle barrel conveys a rather universal message. Thirty minutes after the gunfight started, the agents toss a grenade simulator into our courtyard. I can feel the boom in my chest.

“Bravo team, move!” an agent says. We hear the team storm into the courtyard, and we start shouting.

“Help!” I yell. “Help! We’re in here!”

The agents throw open the door and rush inside, rifles pointed at us. We raise our cuffed hands. “Don’t shoot!” Little says. “Don’t shoot!”

They free our wrists and ankles and check our names against the information they were given. A rescuer loops a tourniquet around my right biceps and treats Little and Wheeler. They herd us through the courtyard and into an alleyway, where they have commandeered a beat-up white minivan. The driver guns the engine, and we race around the back side of the village and cram into an armored vehicle. We speed away from the village and bounce along a dust-choked road to Playas, where an agent tosses a green smoke grenade into a neighborhood intersection to mark the landing zone for a rescue helicopter, which settles onto the street, its rotor wash pelting us with a wave of sand and gravel. Little, Wheeler, and I cram into the back, already crowded with four PJs. We rise over the houses of Playas, the old bowling alley, the baseball field, and the bank, and into the desert.

A few weeks from now, in November, Somali gunmen will kidnap Jessica Buchanan, an American working for a Danish aid group, and will hold her and a colleague at a remote camp for three months. They’ll be in January by airborne U.S. special-operations forces, some of whom are participating in Angel Thunder. Maybe these same men squeezed around me, dozing, in a tangle of legs, rifles, and backpacks.

I stare out the window, lulled by the whine of the engine, and I imagine the overwhelming relief I might feel had these men just pulled me from the battlefield or a cliff face, a capsized boat or an insurgent hideout. Lucky for me, my doomed assignment is finished. I may see these men again someday, but I’d rather not.

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TWO DAYS FROM NOW and 10,000 feet above theÌęSouthern California desert, Rex Pemberton will don a wingsuit, leap from a plane, and race toward the earth trailingÌęorange smoke from canisters strapped to his ankles whileÌęMelissa Pemberton, one of the world’s best aerobatics pilots, paints a white smoky corkscrew around her husband—two minutes of barnstormingÌęshowmanship for thousands of gaping spectators spread out below them.

Pemberton air-show

Melissa pilots the plane while Rex uses a wingsuit to jump to the ground during an air-show.

Melissa Pemberton

Melissa in her Zivko cockpit.

Rex Pemberton

Front-yard slacklining

But first, a moment of marital tension. A screw has worked itself loose, a tiny screw, stainless steel, five millimeters long, one of four securing a sheet of aircraft aluminum across the front left side of the engine. Rex notices the hole, a flaw in his wife’s exquisite plane, as they push it out of the hangar at Pine Mountain Lake Airport, a few hundred yards from their home in the hills outside . He taps his finger against the loose corner, and he worries. Engine vibrations have started a hairline crack in the metal. Melissa says she’ll have her mechanics replace the screw at an airport that’s a 15-minute flight away. But he retrieves a screwdriver and tiny screw from the hangar while she watches him, slightly exasperated.Ìę

In their garage, Rex often works on his powered paraglider, with its 30-horsepower engine that propels him over these valleys, forests, and mountain lakes at 40 miles per hour. But the $350,000 plane, a sparkling metallic blue Zivko Edge 540, with black flames edged in pink, has much smaller tolerances. “Rex, this isn’t your paraglider,” she says, her soft voice calm but her words coming faster now, betraying her annoyance. “I need you to listen to me when we’re talking about my plane.”

But he’s not really listening. He knows that if the piece breaks on her brief flight, there’s a chance she won’t be able to adjust the prop and may not be able to land. And he knows the odds. In his five years with Melissa, she has lost four close friends and sixÌęacquaintances. This season has been a particularly bad one on the air-show circuit. Five performers have died from crashes already, some of them in front of huge crowds, the worst when a modified P-51 Mustang , killing the pilot and eight spectators and injuring 69. Aerobatics are unforgiving. The forces exerted on Melissa’s plane can bend even the thick bolts that hold the engine in place, and aÌęmoment of disorientation, a major gust of wind, or a slight overcorrection at the controls can be fatal.Ìę

Rex can’t change any of that, but here at least he has the illusion of control. “Just let me see,” heÌęinsists, and spins the screw into the engine. “See? It’s the same screw. The exact same screw.”

Melissa relents and climbs into her plane. The prop turns, stutters, andÌęcatches, and the engine settles into a deep, throaty rumble. She revs the throttle and roars down the runway, and Rex watches his wife climb into the morning sky.

EVERY MARRIAGE HAS ITS unspoken rules, an understanding of needs andÌędesires, and the Pembertons’ is no different, though the stakes are slightly higher.

“I would never tell her to stop because of any fear that she’ll have an accident,” says Rex, 28. “We need to keep each other in check and make sure we’re doing these risky things in the safest way possible but not tell the other to stop, because those are our core values.”Ìę

Melissa, 27, agrees. Her husband has made more than 1,300 skydives and 300 BASE jumps. At age 21, he became the , and he recently set his sights on Pakistan’s K2, an objective that had Melissa concerned, though for reasons that had little to do with the technical route to the summit. “It’s one thing to worry about a mountain, but I don’t want him to get kidnapped or blown up,” she says. Still, these are concerns, not ultimatums. “I would never tell him outright, ‘No,’ ” she says. “If he wants to do something, that’s up to him.” Because that’s where they found each other—riding the edge of excess—and why they fell in love in the first place.

In April 2007, Pittsburgh native Melissa Andrzejewski traveled to Australia to train for aerobatics. Customs authorities held her plane for six months because the wooden shipping crate wasn’t certified pest-free. So at 23, a pilot without a plane, she decided to spend her downtime skydiving, rock climbing, and BASE jumping. One afternoon she walked into Rex’s house in Sydney with a friend of his, a fellow climber and jumper who needed mountaineering equipment. Rex had plenty; he’d just , at age 24.Ìę

The next week, Melissa and Rex spent a day BASE jumping with friends in the , and as they chatted on the hourlong hikes to and from theÌęexits, between leaps off craggy cliffs and surging adrenaline, Rex had a revelatory thought: This petite, blond-haired stunt pilot, with this smile and these hazel eyes, might be the only woman in the world who could do everything he loved, at his level, and a few things he couldn’t. That night they had a beer at the pub and then dinner with his parents, and deep into the small hours of the morning they had a first kiss. “I didn’t have much question that she was going to be the love of my life,” he says.Ìę

Their hunger for adventure may be genetic. They both came from families that pushed sports and exploration and instilled a sense of wonder for the outdoors. Melissa rock-climbed as a toddler and learned to scuba dive in the family pool at age five, then dredged for gold in rivers on vacations to Northern California. Rex started as a rock climber, too—at six, with his brother, Max, two years older. In a Sydney suburb, they built catapults to pelt the neighbors’ house with fruit and barreled down streets on scrap-metal luges, but mostly they climbed, which eventually led to alpine peaks in New Zealand.Ìę

In high school in Pittsburgh, Melissa played basketball and soccer, ran cross-country and track. But competition bouldering was her favorite, and she picked in Prescott, Arizona—a place Time magazine once called “the Harvard of the sky”—because the nearby climbing would be good. She first experienced aerobatics with her grandmother, who flew as a hobby and taught herself simple loops and rolls, and the summer before college she earned her pilot’s license, with her grandfather as her instructor. Melissa started taking aerobatics lessons early in college; by 22 she’d become the youngest woman on the competition team. From there she began flying air shows, rolling, flipping, and carving through a sport dominated by older men.Ìę

While his brother joined the Australian armed forces, Rex kept climbing. He raised $100,000 for his Everest bid in 2005, and another $100,000 to finish the Seven Summits. After the climbs, he started giving corporate training workshops, using his videos and stories from Everest and other expeditions to teach team building, goal setting, leadership, and risk management to companies like Google and Hewlett-Packard.Ìę

THE CAREER HAD DRAWN Melissa to Rex, long and lean and in control of his life. He wasn’t just crashing on friends’ couches and working only enough to fund the next adventure. He’d used his experiences to build aÌęcareer. “Our lifestyles are so out there, it’s hard to imagine finding someone else who would be OK with that and understand it, and he was already doing it,” she says.Ìę

For the next five months, they jumped and climbed across Australia, scuba-dived on its reefs, and leaped off Malaysian skyscrapers. In September 2007, at Colorado’s Royal Gorge, where they spent three days among a tribe of fellow BASE jumpers hucking themselves from a 956-foot-high bridge, he told her he loved her. He told her right after he realized the downside of finding your perfect match—right after he first felt the fear that hasn’t left him since.

Their helmet cameras documented the moment, the last of their 5 jumps: Melissa goes first, with a whoop and two backflips. She free-falls for three seconds and at about 500 feet pulls her chute, which opens cockeyed. Her lines cross and send her into a spin, back toward the rock face. She struggles to untwist the lines, and the video bounces between flashes of rock face, sky, and red-and-white parachute canopy. Rex, still above, sees that she’s in trouble.

“Fuck!” Melissa yells. She kicks herself away from the wall and keeps falling. She slams into the cliff again, tries to kick away with her left leg, and snaps her tibia and fibula. Finally, she plunges toward the rocks below until her chute catches on a small outcropping. Pieces of rock torn loose by her parachute cascade in a shower around her. She hangs 200 feet off the ground, and Rex thinks he’s just watched her die.

“Ohhhh fuck! Fuck!” he yells, then shouts for the high-angle rescue climbers on standby above.

“Is she moving?” His voice is now a pained moan. “Is she moving?”

“She’s moving, Rex,” a friend says. “She’s OK.”

“I think I broke my leg,” Melissa yells. “I’m passing out.”

“Don’t pass out,” Rex shouts. “Are you bleeding?”

“No,” she says. “I’m going to pass out.”

“Did I tell you that I love you?” he yells.

Melissa laughs. “I love you, too,” she says.

Five months later, in Antarctica, where Melissa joined Rex for a two-week corporate training gig aboard a Russian icebreaker, he proposed. He hid clues around the ship referencing their ten months together—like their day kitesurfing off the Sydney coast and kissing in the water under the sail—which led her to an avalanche beacon that led her ashore, where he was waiting with a ring and a bottle of champagne.Ìę

THE PEMBERTONS ARE ON THE ROAD seven months a year, between the spring-to-fall air shows, trips to Australia, corporate training events, and side adventures. When they’re home, Rex spends a couple of days a week in the Bay Area meeting with clients, so their Pine Mountain Lake A-frame, set among oaks and conifers, is something of a refuge.Ìę

They live a few hundred feet from the airport, where houses and hangars ring the runway, and nearly all of their neighbors are pilots—mostly retirees, plus a few business executives fromÌęSilicon Valley. The Pembertons are the curiosities, that sweet crazy couple, Melissa flying loops over the airport and Rex buzzing the treetops in his powered paraglider or walking slacklines in the front yard.

Their toys and work gear crowd the shelves in the basement: tents and skis, ropes,Ìęharnesses, diving tanks and a surfboard, 11 parachutes, and thousand-square-foot American and Canadian flags that they sometimes unfurl during skydiving routines at air shows. The garage holds the overflow: mountain and road bikes, the powered paraglider, a sailboard, a Yamaha R6 street bike, and two typical mountain-town vehicles—a Subaru Outback and a metallic blue Toyota Tacoma, picked by Melissa because the color matches her plane.Ìę

On the evening I visit, before Rex lights the grill for steaks and corn, he steps onto a 63-foot slackline stretched between two oak trees in the front yard. He steadies himself on the inch-wide tape and walks end to end. Next year he wants to try walking a 60-foot line stretched between two rock spires in Yosemite, 2,000 feet above the valley floor—another little adventure.Ìę

Meanwhile, in the kitchen, Melissa checks on her inaugural batch of kombucha, the fermented health drink made from mushroom-shaped bacteria cultures. She puts the four large jars back in the cupboard, pleased with the progress. The culture originally came from a batch brewed by a friend who recently died in a bicycle wreck, so the drink is a tribute of sorts.

Tonight Melissa has economics homework to do—she left college after her junior year to fly full-time and is now finishing her aeronautical-sciences degree from Embry-Riddle—and Netflix has delivered the seasonÌęfinale of Dexter. But first, the laundry has piled up. She lugs a basket of clothes to the basement, while in the living room, its walls adorned with Botswanan andÌęKenyan tapestries, Mexican wood carvings, and Buddhist prayer flags, Rex and I sit on the couch flipping through . Parachute doesn’t open. Lost in the mountains. Caught in an avalanche. No problem. Listening to Rex and Melissa, I realize that they read this book not as voyeurs but as connoisseurs, more to critique the advice than learn from it. Even knife wounds and an emergency tracheotomy aren’t surprising to them—Melissa just finished a course to become a wilderness emergency medical technician.

But a few entries catch their interest as Rex calls out topics to Melissa, who is still downstairs pulling clothes from the dryer. “How do you get inside from the roof of a moving train?” she asks, with a curiosity that suggests the knowledge may someday be useful.

“Crawling on all fours may be the best option,” Rex says. “Move your body with the rhythm of the train. Find the ladder at the end of the car and climb down.”

I read, with skepticism, the advice on flying a plane with an incapacitatedÌępilot. Before we settle into our steaks and corn and the Dexter episode—a moment that seems out of place in the Pemberton house for its very normalcy—I ask Melissa if I could land without killing everyone, and she barely considers. “Sure,” she says, and shrugs her shoulders.Ìę

That’s how they talk. When they describe their plans for 2012, it comes across as routine. Mundane. Air shows in the U.S., Central America, and Europe. A return to Ghana, where Melissa has been training young women to fly supplies into remote areas through a group called Medicine on the Move, and Rex will finish a documentary about the program. He’ll earn his pilot’s license—he wants to fly aerobatics, too—and maybe climb all 13 of California’s 14,000-foot peaks in 13 days. In March, they’ll head to South America. He’ll surf the miles-long Amazon tidal bore, and together they’ll jump off Venezuela’s 3,211-foot . Of course they will. What else would they do?

IF YOU ASK THE PEMBERTONS how they deal with all the risk, they’ll tell you their lives are really not so dangerous. “We all go through the binge-drinking phase in our sports, going hard and going big,” Melissa says. “We’re human—we like to push sports and take things to the next level—but you have to be able to step back, to be self-aware.”Ìę

The Royal Gorge jump taught them that—to not flirt with the limits of their abilities or equipment. “Hopefully that will help us live for a long time in the sports we do,” Rex says. He tells me that many of theirÌęactivities look more perilous than they are. The danger, he says, comes when actual risk outweighs perceived risk and an athlete doesn’t recognize the subtle shift. “They don’t know when to stop, and they push until they die,” he says. They pack their chutes too fast, or jump in areas that don’t allow a way out should anything go wrong, or keep pushing up a mountain slope after the weather fouls.

Rex and Melissa have walked away from jumps and backed off from maneuvers when they felt their training or gear wasn’t adequate or the conditions were wrong. In this sense, they say, their marriage is a safety valve. “We help each other in not getting to that point of complacency, because you’ve gotÌęanother person with you that you love and care about,” says Melissa, “and now you’re making a decision not just for you but for the other person.”

For Rex, the closest he’s come to saying no and breaking that unspoken rule has been Melissa’s proximity flying, the term BASE jumpers use to describe flying close to a cliff face using a wingsuit. In 2007, a few months before the Royal Gorge jump, Melissa spent two weeks jumping off 3,000-foot cliffs on BaffinÌęIsland in the Canadian Arctic—hairy jumps, screaming through canyons at more than 100 miles per hour. In , Melissa shuffles to a cliff edge, sucks a few nervous breaths, and leaps. Her free fall slows as air gathers under her wingsuit, then she races for the canyon mouth a half-mile away. Fifteen seconds into her flight, she aims for a steep ridge on the left side and clears it by less than ten feet, just as she’d planned. From leap to landing, the whole sequence takes justÌęunder a minute, and she howls, giddy, as she touches down. “That was the best jump of my life,” she tells me. “Then came the worst.”Ìę

A few hours later, Melissa made the same leap, followed by an American friend. (She requested that he not be identified.)ÌęMelissa shot through the canyon, again narrowly clearing the rock face at the mouth. She floated onto the snowfield and turned to watch her friend’s descent, but he hadn’t followed her out of the canyon. He’d free-fallen too far and started flying too late, and he hit the cliff face. They spent the next day waiting for the local police to come and retrieve his body. Even as she describes this, Melissa doesn’t see her own flight as reckless. Her preparation had been meticulous, she tells me. She’d jumped near the canyon mouth several times in previous days, learning the terrain and air currents until she knew she could make the flight. “You know your body, you know how you fly, you know the cliff,” she says. “I’ve never put myself in a situation where I felt I wasn’t in control.”Ìę

IN THE HALLWAY OUTSIDE Rex and Melissa’s upstairs bedroom, there are two wooden shelves on the wall. Mixed in with air-show programs and coins given to Melissa by military pilots is the foot-long titanium rod from her broken tibia, a piece of the rock outcropping that caught her chute at Royal Gorge, and another from a jump in Australia in which she slammed into the cliff face and broke a vertebra, all reminders of close calls. The top shelf serves as a shrine to her friends. “It’s only for the people closest to me. Otherwise I’d have a whole room,” she says.

Nick Nilmeyer, with whom Melissa had started aerobatics, , her first close friend to die in a plane. Chandy Clanton, her best friend on the air-show and aerobatics competition circuits, a mother of two boys who had flown through her second trimester in both pregnancies, in an Edge 540 while practicing for a Missouri air show in 2009. And in 2011 she lost her friend Amanda Franklin, a wing walker who performed with her husband, Kyle, who piloted the biplane. During Kyle and Amanda’s act at aÌęTexas air show last spring, the engine faltered. Amanda crawled off the wing and into the biplane’s second cockpit before the crash landing, but once on the ground the plane caught fire and she couldn’t get out.ÌęAmanda , and Kyle returned to flying air shows.

“It definitely hit Rex hard that that was his wife,” Melissa says. “I really saw a difference in him this season, having that extra level of concern.”

Which may explain the extra time Rex spent packing his parachute in the living room two days before the air show, meticulous and precise, as he inspected each line then folded the canopy into its small canvas case. And it surely explains the screw. “That is the fear speaking,” he told me.

Melissa is practical, and when a friend or colleague dies she mourns, often calling her father as soon as she hears about a death, and then deconstructs the event and searchesÌęaccident reports. She’ll double-check gauges and spend more time on her preflight inspection—perhaps an illusion of control, since careful pilots still die, but a necessary ritual for muting doubt. If a pilot crashes during a specific maneuver, she will climb to a safe height in her own plane and practice the same trick, making it go as wrong as possible and seeing how long it takes her to recover. She does this until maneuvers feel hardwired into her brain, then spends time alone before air shows, away from the crowds and the noise, running through her routine and pushing away outside worries.

Rex often films Melissa’s practices and performances, and he’s learned not to focus too closely on the tight view from theÌęcamera’s LCD screen. “I’d watch the plane diving down,” he says, “and think, Oh God, oh God, pull up, pull up, pull up.”Ìę

ON AIR-SHOW DAY in Thermal, California, just outside Palm Springs, thousands crane their heads back, video cameras fixed on a cloudless stretch of sky, and watch two planes, specks twinkling against the blue. Rex flies from the first plane in his wingsuit, a tiny white dot trailing a streak of smoke. Melissa slides her plane in behind him and wraps a white spiral around Rex’s wispy arrow of orange. Murmurs and gasps rise through the crowd. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the announcer says, “this is what you refer to as true love and harmony.”

Rex makes a sweeping 180-degree turn to keep himself in view of the spectators, and Melissa follows. She cranes her neck, always watching Rex, as she fights the G’s of the continuous two-minute turn. He kicks his feet at 2,300 feet, his signal that he’s about to pull his chute. Then he spins toward the ground in wide circles, yanks the toggles to slow the chute, and touches down with a little trot.Ìę

The crowd cheers, and Rex walks down the fence line, signing autographs. Above him, Melissa spirals from the sky, her plane spinning so fast it seems out of control, the same sort of maneuver that killed Chandy. She pulls from the dive and tears over the runway at more than 200 miles per hour, 20 feet off the ground and upside down. She flips over, banks hard, and climbs straight up until the plane slows and stops at 1,500 feet. The plane hangs in the air several seconds as though balanced on its tail, then it tips sideways and tumbles.Ìę

Her engine screams, and Melissa flies aÌęgiant loop, doing aileron rolls the whole time, the G forces pressing her into the seat as though a cow were sitting on her lap. At the beginning of the season the G forces exhaust her, with blood squeezing in and out of her organs, and she’ll feel hung over afterward, until she’s built up her tolerance through hours of flying. She pulls a 10-G turn and then blasts back down the runway, fishtailing the plane’s rear end side to side.

She lands, flashes a thumbs-up, and climbs from the cockpit. Several people want pictures with the plane; a few young women ask how they can learn to fly, and Melissa seems to gain energy with each conversation. A man introduces his daughters, 10 and 11, who are taking flight lessons. “They saw you fly a year ago and they haven’t stopped talking about it. So they want to be pilots now,” he tellsÌęMelissa. “Their legs are just long enough to reach the control panels.” She hugs the girls, lifts each into the cockpit, and tells them about aerobatics. “You are absolutely the inspiration for those girls,” their father says.

The crowd thins, the sun drops toward a jagged ridgeline, and a few pilots take off in the old warbirds, headed home. The next morning, Melissa and Rex will wake before dawn and scramble up a rocky mountain spine overlooking Palm Springs to watch the sun rise. Melissa’s left knee will ache, from the Royal Gorge jump. So will Rex’s, from a years-ago fall near the end of a 100-kilometer trail race just before he climbed Everest. They’ll push higher, climbing boulders to small peaks along the ridge, caught up in a little adventure.Ìę

But here, on these emptying acres of concrete, a long-awaited moment of calm, and a slow exhale.

“We survived another season,” Rex says, and high-fives Melissa. “We’re still alive.”

The post As Long As They Both Shall Live appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

TWO YEARS LATER AND STILL HE IMAGINED HIS BLINDNESS AS A TERRIBLE DREAM. He’d wake up and see again. The mountains. A wife whose face he knew only by touch. The sunrise. Everything. His last vision of this world was a dusty, darkened street in northern Baghdad while at the wheel of an enormous armored vehicle. The bomb was simple but lethal: a metal tube stuffed with explosives and capped with a concave copper disk. Powered by the blast, the disk transformed into a jet of molten copper that bored through the thick front passenger door. Shrapnel sliced through his friend Sergeant Victor Cota, then into him. Metal punched through his right temple, ruptured his eyes, gouged holes in his left thigh and right biceps, and mangled his left forearm. Face crushed and body scorched, he was covered in so much of Cota’s blood that fellow soldiers thought he was dead, until he stirred from unconsciousness and wiped his face. Cota died in the truck, and Private First Class Steve Baskis woke up a week later in Walter Reed Army Medical Center to more pain than he’d ever felt and a doctor telling him he’d never see again. Yet he carried an optimism many couldn’t understand. “I just love living, more than anything,” he’d often say.

Eric Weihenmayer, Lobuche

Weihenmayer, in front, approaching the summit

Chad Jukes, Lobuche

Veteran Jukes

Veterans— Climb Group Photo

The entire team, including soldiers, guides, climbing Sherpas, trekkers, and porters, with the Lobuche summit in the background.

Before the deployment, his father made him promise that he wouldn’t give up on life if he came home broken. So he learned to navigate a darkened world, ran in the Chicago Marathon and finished a half Ironman triathlon. He married a specialist in blindness rehabilitation and trained for the Paralympic cycling team. Baskis knew many wounded who’d become mired in desolation and anger. That wasn’t him. He pushed and suffered and didn’t quit. But now, as he gulped thin air and tripped and stumbled over rocks, the frustration swelled, and he wondered whether the final 2,000-foot ascent might break him. “I’m not going to make it if it’s like this all day,” he said. “I don’t know if I have enough in the tank.”

Beneath Baskis, several more climbers whose bodies had been battered by war were scattered on rope teams along the rock slabs. They’d had legs taken by explosions and crashes, brains rattled by bombs, and spirits hammered by loss and fear and the disorienting journey home from the battlefield. Those moments, the worst of their lives, had brought them here: working up the side of 20,075-foot Lobuche in Nepal’s Himalayas, hours before dawn. For some it was their first trip to a foreign country not at war. They climbed alongside their expedition teammates—ten mountaineers who had scaled Everest in 2001, including Erik Weihenmayer, still the only blind person to summit that peak. Weihenmayer and his friends, many of whom had since become professional mountain guides, wanted to commemorate the climb. Leading ten injured veterans up Lobuche, in Everest’s shadow, seemed an appropriate parallel. “An expedition has the ability to renew you, to renew your soul,” Weihenmayer had told the veterans several days earlier in Kathmandu. “I’ve been on dozens and dozens of expeditions, and I’ve died and been reborn on every one.”

The two groups had far more in common than each had first imagined. Usually, the language of war translates crassly to athletics. A playing field is not a battle­field; athletes are not warriors. But mountaineering approximates many elements of soldiering—a team trained to operate in extreme conditions straining toward a coveted piece of ground as the world falls away, until life is reduced to a small pocket of space and time. Death lurks in both as well, from an avalanche or a buried bomb, a misplaced step or a mortar barrage. I had served two tours in Iraq as an infantryman, and as we prepared for the summit push the night before at our 17,000-foot-high camp, the mood was electric, nervous, and giddy; it reminded me precisely of the energy before a mission, the mix of joking and seriousness, rechecking gear and rehearsing plans. I could have been back in Baghdad.

At least bombs weren’t a concern; just breathing was hard enough. “I can’t believe how much energy it takes to talk,” a marine named Dan Sidles told me as we pawed up the slabs. There was little conversation anyway; most of us retreated inward, searched for purchase on the rocks, and tried to find a rhythm to our steps and breaths.

But near the front of the column, the slabs steepened and Baskis’s optimism dimmed. He tapped and scraped his trekking poles against the rocks, probing for solid ground and for voids where he might step into nothing. His atrophied left hand, with its shredded nerves and blood vessels, ached in the cold. After the slabs, we would have another 1,500 vertical feet of snow and ice before he reached the summit—a summit Baskis would be able to stand on but not see.

He smashed his knee into a boulder and pain rocketed through his leg. “I don’t want to go on,” he said. “I want to turn around.”

“This is no longer about you,” said Jeff Evans, a few feet below him. Evans was the leader, the owner of Mountain­Vision Expeditions and a part-time physician’s assistant from Boulder with 20 years of experience at high altitude. He recognized Baskis’s problems as mental, not signs of altitude sickness or potentially fatal cerebral edema. Baskis needed a push. “You’re doing this for all the men and women who have been injured,” he continued. “You need to man up and do this.”

The teammate in front of Baskis jangled the bell and Baskis followed. Behind him a string of headlamps bobbed and the soldiers scaled the giant slabs, their worlds reduced to individual bubbles of light, somewhere between the battlefield and home.

WE’D STARTED the expedition a week and a half earlier, with a flight from Kathmandu to Lukla, at the mouth of the Khumbu Valley. It was the middle of October, high season for trekkers headed to Everest Base Camp, five miles northeast of our objective. The guides had chosen Lobuche as a middle ground of challenge and accessibility, a demanding summit they felt most of the group could reach. After nine days of trekking, taking our time to acclimatize, we’d camp at 17,000 feet, then climb the final 3,000 vertical feet to the summit in one long push. The route included a few intensely steep sections, but except for two hanging seracs below the summit, there was limited danger. This expedition had more unique challenges. Of the 11 veterans on the trip, three had lost a leg, one was blind, at least seven had sustained traumatic brain injuries, and several were suffering from varying degrees of post-traumatic stress. The guides could only guess how these problems might manifest themselves when we got on the mountain.

We began our trek by following the Dudh Kosi, the Milk River—the famous torrent that drains Everest. A mile outside Lukla, we paused on a promontory, and Cody Miranda, a former Marine Corps staff sergeant, pulled in a long breath and blew it out slow. His face showed deep relief, as though he’d just burst to the surface after being held underwater. Our brief stay in Kathmandu had worn him down. “I couldn’t take another day in that city,” he said. “I just can’t handle it.”

As soon as he’d boarded the plane in California, he’d considered getting off, and that stress ratcheted higher in Kathmandu, where pedestrians share the narrow streets with motorbikes that weave between clusters of tourists and cars that race by with only inches to spare. For Miranda, the anxiety worsened by the hour. His chest tightened, his head throbbed, and his eyes grew tired from flitting across the faces, doorways, and rooftops, scanning for threats. “When you’ve been to a place where anything can happen, you never let go of that,” he said. “They say don’t be hypervigilant. Well, hypervigilance keeps me alive. Do I really want to lose that?”

Miranda is 38, blond-haired and block-jawed, a barrel of muscle, but speaks softly and wears a slight smile, half entertained, half wary. He served 18 years in the Marine Corps, much of that with Force Recon, a special-operations unit. He was hit by two explosions in the early days of the Iraq war—the first an underwater mine, while clearing the port of Umm Qasr, the second a rocket-propelled grenade that rattled his brain and wrecked his short-term memory. He spent more than a year in a San Diego naval hospital. One of his few constants over the past several years has been his best friend, Katherine Ragazzino, also on the climb, a fellow marine and patient at the hospital, where they were both treated for brain injuries and post-traumatic stress. Rizzo, as she is known to everyone, was a little ways behind us on the trail. She calms him, he said, and helps him see the world around him as less threatening. “Inner peace. That’s really what I need,” Miranda said. “I don’t have any. Ever.”

Miranda had been groomed for some of the military’s most difficult and dangerous tasks, and he was outfitted with a lethal skill set at great expense of time and money. The military has always excelled at building and maintaining its fighting force, but it’s the unbuilding of soldiers that’s tricky. Helping them reintegrate to the world they left behind can be harder than healing their physical injuries. I had been luckier than Miranda and many of the other Lobuche veterans. I returned from Iraq physically whole, and the dreams, frightening and surreal, which can last a lifetime for some, faded after several months. I didn’t know the pain and frustration of learning to walk on a new leg or stumbling through blackness that stretches forever. But I knew about coming home and not being home. I knew that I was most comfortable around those who had been under fire, and I wondered if it was me who’d changed or everyone else. I knew that war could twist and warp what was once accepted as truth and make you a stranger to friends, a stranger sometimes even to yourself.

For soldiers who bring home mental traumas, and those who feel alien in the world they return to, the Veterans Administration provides individual and group therapy sessions and readjustment counseling, and medication for more severe cases. But as the wars have stretched on, as more soldiers have come home with post-traumatic stress and ever more have taken their own lives, the government has looked beyond traditional treatment methods. For the same reason millions of us take weekend camping trips, using mountains and rivers as stepping stones on the path back home has gained popularity in recent years: the wilderness gives respite. Both the VA and private groups have launched scores of outdoor programs for combat vets to snowboard, rock-climb, mountain-bike, surf, fly-fish, and canoe. —The Exceptional Athlete Matters—which organized the Lobuche climb, has sponsored several veterans’ events, among them a 3,700-mile coast-to-coast bike ride last summer that included two of the members of our expedition, Chad Jukes and Nicolette Maroulis. Weihenmayer first worked with World T.E.A.M. Sports in 1997, when he cycled the length of Vietnam with his father, Ed, who flew fighter jets for the Marine Corps, and several other Vietnam veterans.

“It’s giving vets a chance to reconnect with themselves without any outside noise, any outside chatter,” said Lobuche guide Luis Benitez, who climbed Everest with Weihenmayer and then summited that mountain five more times guiding clients. Benitez has worked for 19 years with Outward Bound, which first took veterans on wilderness expeditions after the Vietnam War. “It’s giving them a chance to unplug from a process that tells them they’re broken, that they need fixing, that they’re not capable of much,” he said, “and it gives them the space to be capable, in pretty incredible settings.”

Some of the programs, Outward Bound included, incorporate formalized introspection, adding a defined emotional journey to the physical one, the sort of group sharing sessions Benitez had been leading for years. As they planned the expedition, the team agreed that it should be more than just another summit push. “I want everyone to come away from this feeling like they have had some therapy and feeling like they have been rehabilitated,” Evans told me. This was delicate. While many of the guides had spent years working in emotionally charged situations, helping clients through moments of crisis at high altitude, none of them were trained as therapists. “If you’re going to start opening doors in terms of therapy and trying to help people heal, you need to be very, very careful,” Benitez said. “If you’re not equipped to deal with what you find on the other side, you can do more harm than good.”

Benitez, who was charged with leading these discussions, started slow. The first night of the trek, he asked for an end-of-day accounting, some highs and lows from the previous hours, maybe an unexpected conversation along the trail or a sore stump that made hiking difficult. But by the fourth day, he wanted to go deeper. We gathered outside the Khumbu guesthouse, high on the hillside above the warren of cafés and shops of Namche Bazaar, a picturesque setting for a therapy session. Who, Benitez asked, had helped them or hindered them in their recoveries?

“I tear down a lot of things around me,” Miranda said. “I’m my own worst enemy, and I have been for quite some time. As they say in those AA meetings, go back to the people you’ve hurt and try to make amends with them. I feel like I have to do that, and my list is so long.” He turned toward Rizzo, who sat on the other side of the circle. “I’m sorry for some of the things I’ve done, Katherine. I don’t mean them, and you know I’d give my left arm and leg for you.”

Rizzo sobbed. “When you get this type of injury,” she said, “you hurt others and you don’t mean to.”

“For some reason, she keeps trying to help me,” Miranda said. “I hope I can pay it back someday.”

Like Miranda and Rizzo, several of the veterans had been in therapy for a few years, for both physical and mental wounds. Most could mark their progress—running on a new prosthetic leg, less-intense headaches, fewer nightmares. Others couldn’t. “There’s been three times I’ve gotten close to just shooting myself,” Ashley Crandall, 27, told the group. She wiped a strand of long brown hair from her face and stared at the ground. “The last two months, I’ve been getting closer and closer to that point.” She served eight years in the Army and the National Guard as a helicopter mechanic, including two deployments in the Middle East. For the past two years she’d been a patient at Walter Reed, where she underwent a battery of treatments, from cognitive therapy to drug cocktails. Nothing had worked, and she had started believing that her post-traumatic stress was permanent.

“I work with a lot of amputees, and I see the whole spectrum: ‘My life is great’ to ‘I want to kill myself,'” Chad Butrick told her. Stocky and red-bearded, with an intense gaze, Butrick lost his right leg below the knee in a 2005 vehicle accident after leaving the Army and now works for Boulder-based Paradox Sports, which helps people with disabilities rock- and ice-climb, kayak, and mountain-bike. “One of my favorite quotes is from Henry Ford: ‘If you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right.’ It’s less of a destination than a decision,” he said. “The only thing that stands in your way is you.”

“I disagree,” Crandall said. “I’ve made the decision to be happy. I’ve made the decision to move on with my life. I’ve made plans, and it doesn’t work. You have to have someone else pull you out of that.”

“You can’t wait for someone all the time,” Baskis said. “Your support network is very important, but a lot of it’s yourself, too.”

“It’s the self-realization, the finding peace with yourself, that’s hard,” Rizzo said.

AFTER SEVERAL DAYS of trekking, the veterans were holding up well. The ampu­tees hadn’t reported any serious issues with stumps or prostheses. Many of those with post-traumatic stress, like Miranda, said the mountains calmed them. And Baskis, while frustrated moving over rocky terrain, was in his usual good spirits. He navigated much the way Weihenmayer does, using trekking poles for guidance and support, with a teammate walking just ahead jangling a bell and another following behind, calling out major obstacles and drop-offs.

Still, the guides knew altitude could exacerbate any simmering problems. While the veterans relaxed at the teahouse and wandered the narrow streets of Namche Bazaar during a rest day, the guides gathered in a bakery around a long table and plotted the summit push. “There are going to be a lot of issues,” Evans said. He’d gotten a glimpse a day earlier, crossing a ravine high above the river. “Rizzo had problems walking down the steps after the bridge. Pure anxiety attack.”

Maybe they needed to further refine expectations, Benitez suggested, so the veterans understood it would be OK to turn around before the summit. They knew this would be tricky. Climbers don’t climb mountains halfway. While some are more summit-obsessed than others, most withstand the deprivation, stress, and fatigue of long expeditions because they want to stand on top. For those in the military, trained to accomplish a mission, take a piece of ground, even when the costs are high, this sort of single-mindedness can be even more deeply ingrained.

The issue had first come up during a three-day shakedown trip in August in the Colorado Rockies, where we practiced rope skills and self-arrests with our ice axes on St. Mary’s Glacier and trekked to James Peak. At 13,300 feet, it was the highest most of us had ever been. We sat in a loose circle at our camp on the edge of an alpine lake, eating bagel sandwiches, a break from climbing and rappelling on the glacier. The expedition’s amputees—Matt Nyman, Jukes, and Butrick—had spent several years mountaineering. But the rest of the veterans, myself included, had never worn crampons.

Evans, our expedition leader, preached the need to find a slow, steady rhythm during the Lobuche climb. Exert yourself too hard one day, he said, and your body might not recover. “You’re not the typical people. That’s why we want to hang out with you,” Evans said. “But sometimes you can be stubborn. Don’t let the military mindset of pushing through, sucking it up, dominate.”

“We’ve done that so many times,” Rizzo said. “When you’re hurt, you don’t tell anyone.”

“Don’t try to hide things that you think aren’t important,” guide Charley Mace said. “I’ve seen clients try to hide things. They wanted the mountain so bad, and they were willing to risk themselves.”

Now, with just a few days of trekking remaining before our summit bid, the guides needed a consensus on the veterans’ abilities and the likelihood of getting everyone to the top of Lobuche. “We do not want to have a meltdown in the middle of that ridge, because then we’ll have some serious shit,” Sherman Bull said. At 74, he was the most senior member of the expedition. In 2001, he’d become the oldest person at the time to summit Everest. He works as a surgeon in Stamford, Connecticut, and he often viewed our expedition through the prism of caregiving. He was wary of problems that the guides, untrained in therapy, might not be able to handle. “There are some very fragile people up here,” he said, “and they may freak out.”

Mountain guides can walk knife-edges, mile-long drops on both sides, with the sure-footedness of goats. After years of repeated exposure, they become habituated, gradually overcoming natural fears. Someone new to the mountains can be incapacitated by the apparent danger, just as a soldier who spends his time on a protected base can suffer legitimate post-traumatic stress from a rocket that lands a football field away. He feels mortal danger. Reactions differ, and this unknown was what gave the guides the most anxiety as we prepared to leave Namche Bazaar.

“There needs to be a doorway to disengage,” Benitez said.

Evans shook his head. Once the summit push was under way, that would be too late. “On a fixed line, on the side of a hill,” he said, “we can’t have someone disengage.”

WE MOVED A FEW MILES UP the valley each day, and while the distances felt short, our bodies worked hard adjusting to thinner air. I spent most of my days hiking alongside Dan Sidles, a former marine who survived two tours in Iraq. Of the veterans on the climb, Sidles, now 29, had experienced some of the heaviest combat. “Fighting is all I know,” he told me. “That’s it.”

In the Marine Corps he’d found a family he could rely on, and he fit the image perfectly—an all-state football player from middle-of-nowhere Iowa, huge chest and arms that strain stitching on a shirt. While in the Corps, he covered his upper body with tattoos, a canvas of destruction and loss. BROTHERHOOD stretches across his stomach. An angel and a devil perch on his shoulders. On his lower back, a marine kneels in mourning beneath FALLEN BROTHERS NEVER FORGOTTEN. But his first tattoo as a marine, LAUGH NOW, CRY LATER, inked across his chest, seemed prophetic.

We hiked together for hours, sometimes in silence but often in deep conversation. On the trail after breakfast one morning, Sidles told me he’d dreamt the night before that he was holding a guy by his feet and snapping him like a dusty rug. “He must have done something to piss me off,” Sidles said. “I haven’t had a dream like that in two years.”

“Why now?” I asked.

“Probably because I’ve been dredging all this stuff up,” he said. “Everyone here wants to hear about it. Back in the civilian world, no one wants to hear that shit.” The few times he did talk about it, when people asked, their reactions told him he’d made a mistake.

His reentry was typical. Because such a small fraction of citizens serve in the military, there is a general deference to those who do, perhaps tinged with guilt that during these years of war, life went on much the same for most Americans. Society doesn’t know how to deal with people who have suffered and killed on its behalf. So people put yellow SUPPORT OUR TROOPS bumper stickers on their cars, shake soldiers’ hands in airports, and tell them they can’t imagine what it was like over there, because, really, they can’t. But the effects of being at once celebrated as heroes, pitied, and dismissed can be devastating, particularly for psychologically wounded vets like Sidles. As I listened to his story, I wondered whether climbing a mountain might be an ideal salve, an extended trip between the intensity of combat and the mundane realities of home, a chance to decompress before behaviors had become too deeply entrenched, compounded by years of secondary and tertiary effects of the trauma—lost jobs, broken marriages, drug and alcohol addictions, estranged relationships.

After Sidles’s first deployment, for the invasion of Iraq, he was depressed, but everyone was. He and his friends drank and stewed, and when they returned to Iraq a year later, their moods improved. “We were there to kill the bad guys, so when we did it, we were happy. I was happy. I loved it,” he said.

During his second tour, which included weeks of street-to-street fighting during the first battle of Fallujah, Sidles was hit with two IEDs. The first time, no one in the truck was hurt. The second bomb, bigger and closer, ripped into them. Sidles couldn’t feel the left side of his face. Blood spattered onto his body armor. When he could hear again, the only sound was his friend in the backseat, now missing his left arm. “It was the worst scream you’ll ever hear. Horror. It was crazy. Insane.” But when a medic took Sidles’s vital signs a short time later, they were normal.

On his next patrol, his truck parked atop a bomb that didn’t explode. “What do you do? You shake it off. You can’t dwell on that stuff. You just can’t.” But the mind stores trauma like messages piling up on an answering machine. And no matter how habituated the psyche becomes to the craziness and fear of combat, some experiences defy its ability to file them away. Cracks appear in that storage vault.

For Sidles the moment came on a rooftop in Fallujah, where he had just hunkered down with his three-man machine-gun team. Gunfire erupted from buildings on three sides. Bullets snapped overhead, and rocket-propelled grenades screamed past, barely missing the rooftop. The only way down was a ladder, exposed to the insurgents’ fire. Bullets riddled the building and sprayed pieces of cement. Sidles sent his men down the ladder while he raked the surrounding buildings with machine-gun fire. Then he was alone on the roof. Images swept through his mind, the best moments, mostly laughing with friends, his 22 years replayed in seconds. “Every choice I had made in life led me to that rooftop, and it was all over,” he told me as we sat on a stone wall outside the monastery at Tengboche, one of the holiest sites in the Khumbu Valley. The morning fog had lifted, and we waited for the monks to start the puja, a cere­mony blessing our expedition. “I was going to be killed by another human being, and there was nothing I could do about it,” he said. “I don’t think you’re ever the same after that. A piece of you is taken.”

He came home alive but drank and fought and lost count of nights spent in jail. He skirted other arrests because many cops go easy on wounded vets. In 2008, Sidles was arrested for drunk driving, and while in jail for two weeks he thought about Iraq, and his behavior after the war, and decided he was blaming the world for the way his life had turned out. “It was devastating,” he told me. “I had thought I was the man’s man. What I thought about myself wasn’t true at all.”

He tried counseling, but the therapist hadn’t been in combat, and that, Sidles said, “is like me giving mothering advice to a mother.” Instead, he watched documentaries and read books on post-traumatic stress, and he saw his own life in those stories. He moved to Phoenix, worked as a fitness instructor, drew disability pay, and spent the rest of his time alone. “Fighting in the war shaped who I am. I don’t want to be that,” he said. “But if I’m not that, then who the fuck am I?”

Finally, in the spring of 2010, he called his case manager at the Veterans Administration and told her nothing was fun anymore. She asked him if he’d like to climb a Hima­layan mountain.

By the time we’d reached base camp, with our dozen brightly colored tents clustered around the long mess tent on a 16,000-foot grassy plateau, Sidles had found much of what he’d been missing: camaraderie, shared history, and the thrill of the unknown. “Here, you have to keep your wits about you or you could die. And it’s hard for me to pay attention to things if there isn’t anything scary,” he said. “When you get out of combat, you’re kind of lost because you don’t have that threat.”

This is a common feeling among combat vets, and some military units have tried to soothe that need by establishing formalized programs like platoon rock-climbing, bungee-jumping, and rafting trips—better to get a thrill in a controlled environment than by rocketing down the highway on a motorcycle at 140 miles per hour, as many do. In one more day we’d begin the climb, and Sidles was looking forward to the high stakes of the mission. “Your mind almost needs that. That challenge. That adrenaline,” he said. “I hope I can get that back, if that makes sense. To a lot of people, it doesn’t.”

MIDNIGHT, SUMMIT DAY, and the team took its first casualty. For the past 24 hours, Rizzo had been dogged by headaches, diarrhea, and nausea, during the rest day at base camp and as we hiked the 1,000 feet to our high camp. She felt no better when she woke up, and she worried, above all else, that she would be a liability for the group. Rizzo stepped from her tent wearing a down jacket and fleece hat. Miranda, her best friend, was already dressed for the climb—boots, gaiters, climbing harness, headlamp. She stood close to him, and they spoke in hushed voices. He shook his head. “If you’re not going,” he told her, “then I’m not going either.”

They stepped into the mess tent, where soldiers and guides of the first of the two climbing groups sat eating oatmeal. “While my mind says I can do it, my body is in a lot of pain,” she told them, then turned to Miranda. “I know you want to stay behind,” she said, tears pooling in her eyes, “but I have my sponsor’s flag, and I’d like you to take it up there for me.” Miranda slid his arm around her back. “I can’t do that to you,” he said. “This is my summit. It’s not about a flag for me. It’s not about a mountaintop. I’ve left a lot of people behind, and I’m not going to leave you behind, too.”

The tent fell quiet. “I’m so proud of you both,” Benitez said, his voice tight. “I can’t even begin to tell you.”

“We’ll get that flag up there,” Evans said.

“It’s the tightness we had in the military that we miss in the outside world,” Miranda said. “This is a reflection of that, and it’s a good thing to hold on to. It’s about the guy next to you, in this case my best friend.” Rizzo leaned her head on Miranda’s shoulder. Weihenmayer sat next to Rizzo, and a tear slid down his cheek.

Around 1 a.m., the first climbing group filed out of the tent and into the darkness. They skirted the lake and scrambled through the streambed and onto the rock slabs. Headlamps twinkled like a string of Christmas lights, and the jangle of bells carried through the still air. Ten minutes into the climb, the expedition lost another soldier. Ashley Crandall, struck with a panic attack, stumbling and hyperventilating, couldn’t go on. Benitez walked back down the hill with her, and she climbed into a tent with Miranda and Rizzo as the second group filed out of camp and onto the rocks.

We sidestepped and duck-walked across the slabs and stared at the narrow wedges of light that guided our progress. We’d prepared for cold weather, but the air was warm, barely at freezing, and we were soon stripping layers. After several slow hours in darkness, without any perspective of our surroundings, we stood on a rock outcropping in the pale blue light before sunrise and saw heavy gray clouds on the southern horizon. A gauzy veil of falling snow covered Ama Dablam, a spectacular mountain eight miles to the southeast.

The sun crept up behind Everest, and hours passed in the same monotonous rhythm—step, breath, step, breath, step—punctuated by the crunch of ice axes stabbing into snow and crampons kicking steps. Leg muscles twitched from fatigue. The front of our column snaked up the snow toward a 300-foot runnel, at times steeper than 60 degrees, the last major obstacle before the summit. Charley Mace took over leading Baskis. “Deep breaths,” he said. “Deep breaths.” Baskis’s legs were strong from bicycling, but he was tired. He clutched the ascender with his good hand and leaned back, essentially pulling himself forward by doing one-armed pull-ups. “You’re not using your legs,” Mace said.

Throughout the trip, Weihenmayer and the guides had peppered Baskis with suggestions on crossing tricky terrain. Though they spoke from deep experience—as one of the world’s most accomplished blind athletes and those who had been guiding him for years—Baskis had grown frustrated with the continuous recommendations. “I can’t go on,” he said. “I should have trained harder.”

“Stop complaining,” Mace said. “Push on.”

Baskis leaned forward and took a step, using his legs more. They trudged up. A few steps. Pause. A few steps. Pause. Mace described regular markers so Baskis could visualize the progress. Three hundred feet. Two hundred. One hundred. “We’re almost there,” Mace said.

Finally, Weihenmayer called down from the summit, just a few feet above them. “Who’s that huffing and puffing?” Baskis sucked down deep breaths. He kicked his feet into the slope again, and the ground leveled. “You’re on top,” Mace said. Weihenmayer hugged Baskis, and Baskis wept. He could hear the summit. Voices no longer bounced off snow and rock but instead carried on the wind into openness in all directions. In his mind, he saw around him a ring of shark’s teeth, an endless wave of jagged mountains smeared with snow, and he saw Everest, looming in the east.

By 10 a.m. we were all on the summit. Many cried and hugged. I was too exhausted to have much sense of accomplishment. I stared blankly at Everest, eight miles east and nearly 9,000 feet higher, in awe that so many around me had been there. We took pictures with the American flag and sponsors’ flags, and Mace pulled out a tie-dyed flag with a huge peace sign that had accompanied him to summits for 20 years.

And that was it: months of planning and training reduced to a half-hour sitting in the snow. We clipped into belay devices and started down.

SIDLES AND I had just returned to high camp when Evans radioed down from the slabs and told a guide to clear out the mess tent, warm up bags of IV fluids, and ready the Gamow bag, a portable hyperbaric chamber, for amputee Matt Nyman. His brain was swelling, and if the cerebral edema wasn’t reversed soon, he could die.

Evans had spent the past two hours focused on Sherman Bull, who was so exhausted on the summit that the other guides worried he wouldn’t be able to descend under his own power. Bull was feeling better, and they had just rappelled down the dihedral, the steepest part of the rock slabs, when Mace walked up with Nyman, tethered to him by a short rope. Just after the transition back onto the rocks, Nyman had told Mace he felt nauseous. Now he was stumbling and speaking incoherently. His headache, he said, was an eight out of ten, a level of pain Mace and Evans took seriously. They’d both heard the story of Nyman’s injury. “This guy knows how to suffer,” Mace told me later.

On a July night in 2005 in Iraq, Nyman and three other commandos sat with legs dangling off the edge of a helicopter that raced low over darkened Baghdad homes. He had spent nine years with elite Army units that focused on killing and capturing high-value targets. When the bird touched down, Nyman planned to hop onto the rooftop, but as they descended, the downward blast of air from the rotors sucked a sleeping mat off the roof and into the blades. The helicopter went into an uncontrollable spin and slammed down. The rotors spun like giant meat slicers, and as Nyman fell backward they lopped off his right leg at the ankle and crushed his left foot. Launched by the helicopter’s momentum, he crashed into a concrete wall. Had the spinning tail rotor not broken apart against that wall, Nyman would have been thrown through the blades. Instead, he lay dazed but conscious, with a collapsed lung and a broken left femur. Within a few seconds, he had begun twisting a tourniquet around his right shin to stop the spray of blood. As more soldiers arrived and loaded him onto a stretcher, Nyman remained conscious and held his rifle. He didn’t pass out until he was on the medevac, sure that he and his comrades were safe. Evans figured the same was true now: walking down under his own power gave Nyman his best chance for survival. “If he walks, he’s completely a robotic warrior,” Evans said. “That dude will never stop.”

An hour later, Nyman staggered into camp, leaning heavily on the walking crutches, his face pale and his eyes drawn and unfocused. “He’s improving,” Evans said, “but he’s still very sick.” In the mess tent, Nyman sat on a sleeping bag and tried to pull in deep breaths as Evans worked a stethoscope across his back. “You have wheezes,” Evans said, “but you don’t have fluids, and that’s a good thing.” Evans stuck Nyman’s forearm with a needle to start IV fluids, and Nyman hassled him for missing the vein the first time, causing blood to stain his jacket. “Hangover helper,” Evans said, and Nyman offered a weak smile and nodded. “My buddies and I used to give them to each other on Friday nights so we could keep drinking,” he said.

Evans slipped a monitor onto Nyman’s finger. His oxygen saturation was still a dangerously low 63 percent. Genetics play a big part in a climber’s ability to acclimatize, and while Nyman had been a phenomenally strong and driven soldier, altitude proved harder to master. He’d been evacuated off Mount McKinley two years ago with cerebral edema before a successful summit in 2010. He ate two cups of ramen noodles—a very good sign—and Evans zipped him into the Gamow bag, a nylon tube seven feet long and two feet wide. Nyman lay on his back in the sleeping bag and peered through a tiny plastic window as Evans inflated the bag with a foot pump. As pressure built, he breathed denser air, the equivalent of being at 10,000 feet to our 17,000. Guides and veterans rotated through the tent in half-hour shifts all night, working the foot pump. By morning his headache had faded, his color had returned, and he’d climbed out of the tube. He’d once been buried in a coffin as part of a rescue exercise. A night in the Gamow bag, he said, was far worse.

THE EXPEDITION ENDED drunkenly, as expeditions often do. After three days trekking, we arrived in Khumjung, hometown of Kami Tenzing, our head Sherpa. A cold drizzle fell outside, and we gathered in the dark warmth of a teahouse. Kami and another Sherpa slipped out and returned several minutes later with a case of beer, a bottle of whiskey, and a scuffed plastic jug filled with chhaang, a milky white brew made from fermented rice. Kami passed out coffee mugs, then wandered through the group with a huge silver teakettle, topping them off before they were halfway drained. The alcohol worked through our bodies, and the din of chatter and laughter rose.

In a few days, we would peer through airplane windows at ribbons of yak trails along alpine ridges that would widen into roads bearing the first cars we’d seen in two weeks, and the mountains would deflate into hills and then flatlands, then melt into the chaos of Kathmandu, with its exhaust and dust and tourists dodging motorbikes. And then we would be home, and Nepal would grow soft at the edges, a memory, crowded by lives on hold and now resumed. “The difficult part is coming home,” Weihenmayer had told the veterans. “It’s just the same old world. You’ve had this amazing experience that’s changed your life, and you’re having trouble relating to people.” Indeed, many of the veterans, like Sidles, were still trying to break through barriers the war had created. Again they would find themselves alone, without their comrades and frustrated by a world that doesn’t understand them.

But that was still to come. The objective had been met, and what would soon be did not yet matter. The world narrowed to this dark room, the air toasted by dried clumps of yak dung shoveled into the stove. Baskis sat in a chair in the middle of the room, surrounded by a chaotic swirl of conversations, shouts, clanging glasses, and laughter. The day before, at the last group session, he had given us a glimpse into his world. “It’s this deep, dark, black abyss I stare into. It’s never ending,” he said. He paused, started speaking again, and his voice caught. His breath came in ragged waves. “I wish I could see everything that’s around me. I wish I could see the sunset and the sunrise. It would drive me up the mountain even harder,” he said. “I was able to see, and I’m so glad I could see for so long. It doesn’t matter how much pain and suffering, blood and sweat—I’ll push as hard as I can.”

Now Evans, who’d served as the DJ through the night, stepped behind Baskis’s chair, iPod speaker in hand. He danced to “Mountain Song,” by Jane’s Addiction, and thrust the speaker toward Baskis’s left ear, then his right, back and forth. “Stop! Stop!” Baskis yelled, and he laughed and swatted at Evans.

Nicolette Maroulis assumed Kami’s role but skipped the cups. Instead, she roamed the room and poured streams of chhaang from kettle to upturned mouths. More whiskey bottles appeared and traveled hand to hand, then Chad Butrick pulled off his leg and filled it with chhaang. He balanced on one foot and handed his leg to Kami, who drank deep from the carbon-fiber goblet, a hiking shoe still attached, then passed it through the room. The leg filled and drained and filled again, and when the chhaang ran out, the leg sloshed with whiskey, and the night faded into a soft, smoky haze, somewhere between the mountain and the battlefield, but closer to home.

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Action Speaks Louder Than Nerds

The Cove

Louie Psihoyos

With his Oscar-winning documentary, The Cove, director Louie Psihoyos showed us that the best way to inspire film audiences to take on a cause is to keep them on the edge of their seats.

BEFORE HE WON the Oscar, Louie Psihoyos stood up the Academy. On March 4, three nights before the Oscars, Psihoyos, founder of the nonprofit Oceanic Preservation Society and director of the dolphin-slaughter exposé The Cove, was scheduled to appear at the Los Angeles mayor's mansion with all the other nominees. But something came up.

While the Hollywood royalty clinked glasses at the mansion, Psihoyos sat in a truck in the parking lot of a Santa Monica sushi restaurant, wearing a microphone and a wire. He had heard that the restaurant, the Hump, served illegal whale meat. With him was his right-hand man, Charles Hambleton, assistant director of The Cove and OPS's official “director of clandestine operations.” In another truck were agents from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The group listened in as two women wearing wires ordered, then slipped their would-be supper—endangered sei whale—into plastic bags for DNA testing.

Three nights later, The Cove won the Oscar for best documentary, making Psihoyos, a first-time filmmaker, something like a rookie hitting a game-winning home run in the World Series. (Backstage, George Clooney complimented Psihoyos, noting the obvious: The Cove is better than Ocean's 11, because it's real.) The following day, Fish and Wildlife busted the Hump, earning Psihoyos a front-page story in The New York Times. Oprah called. A few weeks later, the morning after filming a segment on her show, Psihoyos flew to Seoul, South Korea, where Hambleton had found another whale-serving restaurant to bust.

It was a hectic month, but Psihoyos, 53, has become accustomed to such juggling. In the past two years, he's spent fewer than 80 days at the Boulder, Colorado, home he shares with his wife, Viki, a former dancer with the New York City Ballet, dividing the rest of his time between film festivals, speaking engagements, and shooting for his next project, a 3-D look at extinction in the oceans. After a decade in which the documentary has evolved from PBS special to de rigueur format for everyone from NYU grad students to Martin Scorsese, Psihoyos has suddenly become the “It” boy of true-life filmmaking. And while solid fact-finding journalism gave The Cove heft, what sets it apart is an electrifying jolt of blockbuster-type action and tension: The Bourne Identity meets Nova.

“It's absolutely thrilling to watch, it enrages you, and it calls people to action,” says David Courier, senior programmer for the Sundance Film Festival, where The Cove premiered in January 2009, winning the audience award for best documentary. “The lesson for filmmakers is that if you want to call attention to a cause and if you can do it in a way that satisfies the desires of everyday moviegoers, that's a really smart way to go.”

In a post–Inconvenient Truth world, it's hardly news that investigative filmmaking can sway public opinion. But by ditching the established documentary formula (interviews + narration + piecemeal clips) used by everyone from Al Gore to Stacy Peralta to Michael Moore and instead gripping viewers with a fast-paced and viscerally horrifying tale, Psihoyos has upended notions of how nonfiction films can convey serious messages.

The funny thing is, Psihoyos never intended to make a thriller. His vision for The Cove had been a heady film about overfishing and mercury poisoning, with the dolphin slaughter standing in as a metaphor for human abuse of the oceans. The fact that OPS spent months in Taiji, Japan, hiding out in camo, using thermal cameras to film fishermen slaughtering hundreds of dolphins, was incidental. He planned to include the footage as DVD bonus material. That changed only after he hired two documentary veterans, editor Geoffrey Richman and writer Mark Monroe, to help craft his 1,000 hours of raw film.

“When I saw what Louie considered the B roll, I said, 'You're going to have a hell of a DVD extra,'” says Monroe. “It took a couple of glasses of wine to convince Louie. I said, 'This needs to go in the film. You're talking about putting black ski masks on! That's fun!'”

But while the special-ops tactics may come across as a game, filmmaking to Psihoyos is deadly serious work. Like Paul Watson and Sylvia Earle, he's evangelical about the fate of the oceans. When we meet at OPS's headquarters, a solar-powered office in his backyard, Psihoyos tells me that OPS is “in the save-the-world business.” A large, imposing man, he speaks from the gut, like a trained actor, and frequently rubs at his eyes. His OPS colleagues say that while shooting they've woken up at 4 A.M. to find Psihoyos online, doing research. “I have this jihad,” he explains.

The jihad is new. Psihoyos's first life was photography. Raised in landlocked Dubuque, Iowa, he studied photojournalism at the University of Missouri, where he won the prestigious College Photographer of the Year award. National Geographic hired him as a staff photographer at age 23, and Psihoyos soon became known for his willingness to travel quickly and often; for an ability to translate abstract ideas (he shot stories on sleep and trash); and for his obsession with the perfect shot. In 1998, he rented out the Orlando Magic's arena to shoot Michael Jordan for what would become one of the bestselling covers in the history of Fortune magazine.

Also that year, he met Jim Clark, the billionaire founder of Netscape. Clark started inviting Psihoyos, a longtime diving aficionado, on dive trips all over the world. In 2002, the two were in the GalĂĄpagos when they saw an illegal longline fishing boat. Clark said, “Somebody should do something about this.” Psihoyos responded, “How about us?” Clark wrote him a big check, and OPS was born.

Psihoyos first heard about Taiji's dolphin slaughter in 2005, from Ric O'Barry, the Flipper trainer turned activist who stars in The Cove. Part of the film's magic stems from the fact that there was not much of a plan. OPS simply showed up in Japan with a lot of fancy equipment, including a dolphin-shaped blimp outfitted with cameras. (“We liked to joke that we were all professionals,” Psihoyos says, “just not at this.”) But the same qualities that make Psihoyos a terrific photojournalist—artistic eye, monastic work ethic, affinity for risk—drive the story. You would not find Al Gore or Michael Moore pulling on XXL camo, risking jail time alongside a team of novices.

If the ultimate measure of an investigative documentary is what it does to spur tangible change, the jury is still out on The Cove: as you read this, fishermen are killing dolphins in Taiji. But if the measure is creating a groundswell of public outrage, then The Cove has few peers. This past September 2, the day after the dolphin hunt started, Ric O'Barry delivered 1.7 million petitions in protest from 150-plus countries to the U.S. Embassy in Japan.

“It's had a big impact,” says Doe Mayer, co-head of the Documentary Production program at the University of Southern California's film school. “My students have been very motivated by this. They've spoken about the possibility of activism based on a documentary.”

Psihoyos hopes to have an even greater effect with The Singing Planet, which will be completed in 2013 and focus on the major cause of the marine extinction crisis: the burning of fossil fuels. The idea is to take a nuanced look at issues like acidification and the depletion of plankton. Which might sound a little, well, quiet—if not for the filmmaker. After all, Psihoyos has busted two whale-serving restaurants on hidden cameras, and he's spent the past six months shooting from Abu Dhabi to the Gulf of Mexico, where he hung out of helicopters, filming oil-slicked dolphins.

“I do love the Ocean's 11 aspect of the last film,” Psihoyos told me, “and I think we can really bump that up a notch. Our whole life is about picking fights.”

It’s Time for Maps to Stand Up

IT’S LITERALLY a matter of life and death: soldiers navigating mountain passes and urban alleyways need the fastest and safest route from A to B. Satellite-photo maps, the standard tool for decades, often have a serious drawback: no contour lines, and thus no depth. What looks like a curb could be a 20-foot wall; a seemingly shallow ditch might be impassable—and trap them in a kill zone.

Enter the holographic map. Austin-based Zebra Imaging has developed flexible plastic sheets that morph into three-dimensional holograms when exposed to a halogen or LED flashlight beam, with peaks and buildings literally rising off the page. And unlike paper printouts and GPS units, the holographic maps—of which the military now has 8,000 in Afghanistan and Iraq—can be stomped on, soaked, and stuffed. “They don’t get old, they don’t break, and you don’t have to worry about the battery dying,” says Michelle Kalphat, of the Army’s research-and-development command.

Zebra starts with three-dimensional images pulled from satellites, then records thousands of perspectives of the same image onto photosensitive film. Each view is printed with lasers as a series of squiggles that reflect light in a specific direction, intensity, and color. Viewed together, layered one atop another, they give the illusion of height and depth. Printed on 3-by-2.5-foot panels, the sheets can be tiled together into 10-by-9-foot maps and etched with latitude and longitude lines and compass directions. Zebra has also begun work on maps for disaster-response teams that can show how different areas will be affected by rising floodwaters, depending on the angle from which the map is viewed.

We know what you’re thinking: so when do I get to tote my 3-D map into the backcountry? It’ll be a while. The maps start at $1,500 and take three hours to print on Zebra’s room-size machine.

Old Surfboards Don’t Have To Die—They Can Multiply

MODERN SURFBOARDS may look beautiful, but they’re inherently filthy—almost every material in them is toxic. Efforts to use green alternatives—think soy- and sugar-based cores—have fallen short because they don’t surf like normal boards.

That’s why Joey Santley decided that instead of re-creating the surfboard, he’d just reuse it. A San Clemente, California–based surfer whose father was a board manufacturer, Santley founded the ReSurf Foundation in 2006 along with several friends with the idea of recycling the waste created in board-making. They started with the dust that piles up when shapers carve polyurethane-foam “blanks” into surfboard cores. Initially, they worked on using the dust in concrete and asphalt mixes, then decided to try to recycle it into new blanks.

That’s the simple idea behind Santley’s new company, Green Foam, which produces blanks made of 40 percent recycled polyurethane. They perform just like standard blanks and are being ridden by top pro surfers, including Rob Machado, who has a signature Green Foam board with celebrated manufacturer Channel Islands. Santley expects to sell some 3,000 blanks this year and 12,000 in 2011, thanks to a licensing deal with industry goliath US Blanks.

Of course, partially recycled boards hardly solve surfing’s waste problem. But by infecting the mainstream board-production process, Green Foam is having a real impact. “It’s a great success,” says Frank Scura, executive director of the Action Sports Environmental Coalition, “and they’re going to stimulate more change.”

That’s what Santley is after. “This is a step,” he says, noting that he’s researching recycled neoprene. “We’ll keep pushing forward.”

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Loves a Crowd

KELLY SLATER was about to lose. So he decided to go all in and … tweet.

No, he wasn’t trying to sweet-talk a judge at a surfing event. Slater was rallying his fans to help him make the cut for a video contest hosted by , a new Web site that calls itself a “platform for creating a surf movie.” Aspiring filmmakers team up with a surfer to submit clips, Innersection members vote for favorites, and at the end of the year, 20 winners have their clips edited together by surf-film kingpin Taylor Steele. The top-rated clip overall also earns a $100,000 prize.

Crowdsourcing has officially arrived in the world of adventure. Freedom to Roam, a Denver-based nonprofit working to protect animal migration corridors, has signed on some 1,500 “citizen naturalists” to post animal observations on its new Witness for Wildlife Web site. Similarly, San Francisco transportation officials called on bicycle commuters to help map new bike lanes with a smart-phone app called CycleTracks, which records your route as you pedal. Even serious scientists are getting comfortable with outsourcing to the masses: one archaeological expedition in Mongolia asked desktop-bound explorers to scour satellite photos for the lost tomb of Genghis Khan.

Still, while emerging technologies may have us turning to the crowd for answers, sometimes we still prefer to follow the leader. Just ask Slater. In the waning hours of the Innersection.tv contest, his tweet garnered him the ratings to vault into the finals.

The Answer is Flow

MOUNTAIN-BIKE trails are often a disappointment—either over-the-handlebars steep and littered with hazards, or flat, easy, and boring. That’s because most of them weren’t designed for bikes; they were cobbled together from existing hiking paths, fire roads, and ski runs.

Thankfully, that’s changing fast. “There’s a big shift toward building trails that the average rider can enjoy,” says Dave Kelly, co-owner of Gravity Logic, a Whistler, B.C.-based trail-design firm. “The idea is to create fast, flowing terrain.” The key word here is flow, which has become the industry-wide term for trails that cruise like a fat-tire roller coaster over the terrain. “Flow-inspired trails are purpose-built to let gravity carry a biker down a succession of berms, rollers, and other features,” explains Mark Eller, communications director of the International Mountain Bicycling Association (IMBA). “This is trail engineering to make riding more fun.”

The concept of flow isn’t new—Kelly built early iterations at Whistler Blackcomb in the late nineties—but the full-on embrace of the philosophy is. IMBA currently has flow projects in the works on public and private lands, from mountain resorts to national forests to municipal bike parks, where cities are eagerly building “pump tracks,” loops you can ride without pedaling. “The question is, Where are they not building flow trails?” says Joey Klein, an IMBA trail specialist who worked on two of the country’s newest flow networks: Paradise Royale, in Northern California, and Rush and Maple Hollow, in Draper, Utah. Internationally, flow trails are being developed in Australia, the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Italy, to name a few locales.

And while hardcore riders may dismiss what is essentially mountain biking’s answer to the blue run, they’ll be drowned out by the cheers. “No single trail will make everyone happy,” offers Nat Lopes, co-owner of Hilride, a private trail-design firm, “but trails with flow will capture the biggest segment of users.”

Africa Has Nothing on the Southwest

IN RECENT YEARS, adventure travel outfitters have been scrambling to devise trips that meet our rapidly evolving tastes for fresh experiences. We want adrenaline (Class V whitewater!) but comfort (French wine). We want to be eco-sensitive (carbon offsets, biodiesel transport) and culturally sensitive (native guides, voluntourism) and, post-recession, we want affordability (more domestic itineraries). Now comes along an elegantly simple mashup of all these trends: the American safari.

EcoNewMexico (), based in Santa Fe, has begun developing a network of locally owned and managed tent camps and eco-lodges that will be run much like the classic African outposts. Native American guides will lead some of the tours of ancient ruins as well as horseback outings to spot New Mexico’s version of the Big Five: mountain lions, bears, bison, gray wolves, and bighorn sheep. Other activities will include volunteer work with animals set to be reintroduced to the wild, fly-fishing for trout, and mountain biking.

For EcoNewMexico co-founders Chip and Sandy Cunningham, who for 20 years have run trips in Africa with their company Uncharted Outposts, importing the safari concept has been a long-simmering vision. “We’d come back from Africa and ask, Why don’t we do this here?” explains Sandy. The company got off the ground earlier this year and started offering its first tented trips this past August, with Silver City–based Great West Trail leading groups through the Gila and Aldo Leopold wildernesses.

“In the Southwest, we have these incredible places and animals that need preserving and guides who can bring it all to life,” says Sandy. “But so few people really know about it.”

First Ascents Can Be Easy

AT ITS CORE, climbing is a sport of one-upmanship, especially at the elite level. You get into the record books by climbing higher, faster, lighter, or otherwise better. So why, then, did Canadian Sonnie Trotter and climbing partner Ben Moon spend almost a week this past July pioneering the easiest route up the 1,300-foot granite face of British Columbia’s Squamish Chief?

“I knew nobody else was going to do it—it just takes so much work,” Trotter explains. It was “one of those deals when you say, ‘Someday, someone should clean this up. People would love it.’ That someone was us.”

Trotter, 31, is arguably the world’s best trad climber—i.e., he places his own temporary protection—having made hundreds of first ascents around the globe. Recently, he’s committed himself to mostly “equipping new routes” rather than repeating the breakthrough climbs of his peers. Putting up a new route is exactly what he and Moon, a 35-year-old Oregon-based climber-photographer, set out to do on the Chief, where the easiest line was hidden by debris and plants. The pair labored siege style in their harnesses for five days, using shovels, hoes, and rakes to remove moss, muck, and rocks from a dike and series of ledges to set the 12-pitch 5.9-route they dubbed the Squamish Buttress North Face Variation. Previously, the easiest route up the Chief contained a brutal 50-foot section of 5.10c finger crack that, as Moon puts it, “bottlenecked all the climbing parties and wasn’t fun for anyone.”

The North Face has already seen hundreds of ascents. Meanwhile, Trotter went back to the Chief in September to set another line, this time a 5.13c. “I put up two routes this summer,” says Trotter. “The easiest and the hardest.”

Two Wheels Are Better Than Four

DOESN’T LOOK like much of a city, huh? Bingo. Bicycle City (), a 160-acre community now in the works in the rolling hills outside Columbia, South Carolina, has dreams of growing up to be … a village. As a prototype for a planned network of car-free burgs, the first pedal-powered, mixed-use hamlet in the nation will start small and stay that way. Initially, a handful of LEED-certified homes will anchor a lakeside parcel of forest and meadow, with an option on at least 628 additional acres—and plans for business spaces, a school, and, naturally, more trails, as well as a high-speed road-bike course. Planners envision America’s answer to towns like Zermatt, Switzerland. “Bicycle City is holistic,” says co-founder Joe Mellett. “We’ll address climate change, childhood obesity, and alternative energy—and hope to have a great diversity of people and ideas.”

But what will daily life there be like? Residents will park their cars at the edge of the village and use public carts or bike trailers to haul home any goods purchased outside of town. Prefer to ride? Nearby are the huge new state farmers’ market (4.5 miles), a greenway running along the Congaree River (7 miles), and downtown Columbia (12 miles). A multi-use market center will feature a cafĂ© and offer bike rentals and repairs. For green thumbs and foodies, at least two community plots will be set aside for organic gardening. A central park will feature a modern playground at one end and an entertainment gazebo at the other, and the property’s surrounding forest and fields will feature some five miles of singletrack, with more planned.

Pumped?

But They Do Make ‘Em Like They Used To

External frame backpack

External frame backpack

RETRO. VINTAGE. Old-school. However you label it, we’re all suckers for nostalgia—a fact that gets Paul McCartney a gig at the Super Bowl and has Urban Outfitters constantly restocking its inventory of buffalo-check shirts. Even in the performance-first outdoor industry, consumer hunger for that classic look has been strong enough to spur such recent developments as soft-shell track jackets and the return of red-laced waffle stompers. And yet nobody would have ever predicted this: the revival of 1960s-era external-frame backpacks.

When Greg Lowe first introduced snug-fitting internal-frame packs, in 1967, back- packers bought in big-time. Here was a pack that hugged us close on twisting ascents or when we went backcountry-skiing or climbing. Lowe’s imitators went on to add all manner of features, and except for guys who kept their beards through the Reagan years, we banished our externals to the basement. There was just one problem: externals do a superior job of carrying and distributing heavy loads when you’re simply hiking mellow trails. This is why companies like Kelty and JanSport never stopped making them, and externals have always had a small but loyal following.

Now, triggered by a rediscovered love of backpacking among recession-battered Americans, at least half a dozen brands are planning new external-frame models for 2011. But while the new packs’ designs pay homage to hiking’s heyday, they benefit from four decades of engineering innovation. “The design is old-school, the performance is full-on 21st-century,” says Kelty spokesman Scott Kaier of the brand’s three models, which feature lightweight, water-resistant fabrics. Likewise, JanSport’s reissue of its classic burnt-orange D2 has upgrades in foam, fabric, and webbing—not that anyone can tell by looking at it.

“We purposefully hid all the new technology,” says Eric Rothenhaus, JanSport’s director of design and development. “You can feel it, but you can’t see it.”

A Photo is Worth 5,000 Acres

WHEN IT COMES to conservation campaigns, scientific evidence does little to sway public opinion. That’s where the International League of Conservation Photographers comes in. Produce a photo of a polar bear cub frolicking in front of an oil derrick and the issue becomes tangible.

It works like this: The ILCP selects a threatened area and dispatches a Rapid Assessment Visual Expedition (RAVE) team assembled from its 100-plus member photographers, who include Pulitzer Prize winner Jack Dykinga and World Press Photo Award winner Daniel BeltrĂĄ. They feed their images to a carefully cultivated network of media outlets, which appreciate being handed a story on a platter. To have maximum impact, the ILCP will distribute photos just prior to public-comment periods.

Using photos to highlight endangered landscapes is an old strategy, but there’s never been this kind of organized, calculated effort to distribute images with such specific intent. Since its founding, in 2005, by photographer Cristina Goettsch Mittermeier, the ILCP has helped save 5,000 acres in Mexico and enforce a primate-hunting ban in Equatorial Guinea, among other successes. In 2010, the ILCP’s annual budget grew to $1.7 million and the group launched four RAVEs, twice as many as any previous year. It also celebrated one of its biggest wins yet, a ban on fossil-fuel exploration in British Columbia’s Flathead River Valley, spurred, in part, by a 2009 RAVE. The backdrop for B.C. premier Gordon Campbell’s announcement of the ban? A photo of the river shot by ILCP photographer Garth Lenz.

“They say a picture is worth a thousand words,” offers Sierra Club B.C. spokesperson Sarah Cox. “In the case of the Flathead, it was worth about 10,000.”

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Damien Kuhn planted a boot in the loose rock, shrugged his shoulders under the awkward weight, and steadied himself on the ever-steeper slope, halfway up a mountainside in the Hindu Kush. Just ahead, soldiers snaked single-file toward the ridgeline. More men followed behind him, sweaty faces glistening in the midafternoon sun. He turned and looked back, down into the valley, where a hawk rode the currents and a ribbon of brown water slid between the mountain seams. Farther on, a few miles to the east, the earth rose sharply into the high peaks of Pakistan, still heavy with snow. The view was stunning, yes. But after all those months, circumstances had muted his appreciation for such moments. “You can't really enjoy hiking,” he said, “when someone's trying to kill you.”

Observation Post Hatchet lay several hundred feet below on a narrow, rocky shelf, a couple of acres of mountainside at the farthest, most desolate reaches of America's war in Afghanistan. The 24 men of Recon Platoon, 6th Squadron, 4th Cavalry Regiment, 3rd Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, lived in plywood huts surrounded by earthen barriers and coils of concertina wire, led by Kuhn, 23 years old, a first lieutenant two years out of West Point with a boyish face that seldom needed a razor. Together with an Afghan army platoon, they spent their days scanning the valleys and ridges of Kunar province for an elusive foe. They had come up the mountain that late April afternoon searching for enemy firing positions and infiltration routes and the bodies of the men they may have killed several days earlier.

The attack had started in the day's last light, as the sun tucked behind the ridgeline. A dozen Taliban fighters crept around the back side of the mountain. They hid behind giant rocks and fired at the American and Afghan soldiers. Machine-gun rounds zipped into the camp, slicing holes in sandbags. Hatchet had launched a fast defense, ripping into the hillside with automatic weapons. A mortar team lobbed rounds at the attackers, and jets dropped three 2,000-pound bombs, which fell on the ridgeline far above, along a likely escape route. Shock waves rolled through the camp, and shrapnel spun through the air overhead.

Maybe the attack was a response to the taunting. That winter, Kuhn had marched a patrol six hours through knee-deep snow to a nearby summit and nailed a wooden sign to a tree. In Pashto it read, “Attention Al Qaeda and Taliban. This mountain is claimed by the 2nd Kandek and 6/4 Cav. If you have the courage to fight, OP Hatchet is this way.” The Afghan army lieutenant shimmied up the tree and hung a small Afghan flag.

The Taliban intended to overrun Hatchet and seize the weapons and ammunition, but they underestimated the size of the force: 24 Americans and 30 Afghans. A local farmer later told the Afghan platoon that the Taliban had thought the Americans had left the mountain. And they'd planned on a larger assault force. More fighters were still walking up the mountain when the attack started. They too had trouble moving through the terrain, stymied by steep grades, loose rocks, and long climbs. As 6/4's commander, Lieutenant Colonel James Markert, had told me, “you underestimate the ability of these mountains to break you into pieces and grind you into dust.” After months of leading and sometimes losing men in this terrain where small units often operate far from resupply and reinforcements, deep in enemy-controlled areas he'd distilled a simple lesson: “Be patient and be careful, because you can get your ass handed to you pretty quickly.”

The U.S. military once had a specialized unit for this type of fighting, drawn from a mix of woodsmen, Ivy League skiers, world-famous alpinists, and Olympic athletes. During World War II, the 10th Mountain Division trained for two years in the Colorado Rockies, learning to ski and climb, assault ridgelines, and build snow shelters. They used fixed ropes to scale rock faces and rigged pulley systems to hoist machine guns, mortars, and ammunition up mountainsides and evacuate casualties. In 1945, the division joined the war in Italy, where they scaled the Apennine Range at night, overran the Germans' ridgeline defenses, and helped revive the stalled Allied advance.

After the war, the military didn't see a need for this kind of fighting and deactivated the division in 1958. Reactivated in 1985, it became just another infantry unit, alpine specialists in name only. I served with the 10th Mountain Division a few years ago, and we didn't train a day on mountain warfare. We focused instead on desert and urban combat, which is what we saw in Iraq.

I had flown up to Hatchet to see what these modern alpine soldiers were up against. I had been in the mountains before but always on backpacking trips, leisurely treks on ridgetop trails. And I'd been on hundreds of combat patrols during my two tours as an infantryman in Iraq, but those were on flat ground, walking through farm fields and neighborhoods. I could scan rooftops for snipers and trash piles for hidden bombs without worrying that a misstep might send me over a cliff. In Afghanistan, the first few minutes of the patrol told me it was a very different kind of warfare. I struggled up the hillside, sliding on the gravel with each step. Though we were only at 5,000 feet, my lungs demanded air while my body armor constricted my chest. I was more focused on finding handholds and footholds than scanning ridgelines for someone planning to shoot me.

I carried about 30 pounds, far less than the others. With body armor, helmet, weapon, ammunition, grenades, water, and medical supplies, each U.S. soldier humped at least 50 pounds. Some loads were double that. And the patrol, out for just a few hours, traveled relatively light. Kuhn knew the enemy could easily outmaneuver his men. He paused between steps and sucked in a breath. “If we don't kill them when they're shooting at us, we're not going to catch up to them,” he said. “We can walk around all day and hope, but if they don't want to fight us here, they'll just wait until we get home to shoot at us.”

For young leaders like Kuhn, responsible for 50-plus men, mountain topography makes every decision more complicated. How will wounded men get off the mountain? (A medevac helicopter could take an hour or more to arrive and might not have anywhere to land.) What's the right balance between traveling light and carrying enough firepower to repel an ambush? And what route to take? Choose the easiest path and soldiers will move faster, sure of foot. But since it's one of few trails, the enemy will know just where the patrol is headed. Take a new route, crossing more extreme terrain, and the chance of injury rises. “Do you pattern yourself and take that risk?” Kuhn wondered. “Or do you risk someone falling off the mountain?”

He'd taken a new route that day, much steeper than the established path. Halfway up, with the men winded and still far from the ridgeline, Kuhn recalculated the risk. We'd take our chances on the trail.

The war in Afghanistan is often called an “economy-of-force effort,” meaning you'd like more of everything, but you do the best with what you have and place limited resources where they can have the most dramatic effect. For the past several years, more troops have been needed everywhere as the military made do in the shadow of Iraq. Thirty thousand reinforcements have arrived since early 2009, which has swelled U.S. troop levels to more than 60,000 and the overall NATO force to more than 90,000. General Stanley McChrystal, the new U.S. commander in Afghanistan, has called for still more troops, without which he says the war could be lost.

McChrystal, who has shifted America's focus from killing insurgents to protecting civilians, also wants to withdraw from some sparsely populated areas and bulk up forces around the cities. Commanders hope the influx and redistribution will give them the forces needed to implement a classic counterinsurgency strategy: Clear areas of enemy fighters, then hold that land and protect the populace while building up the local economy, government, and security forces. The Obama administration plans to more than double the Afghan army and police, to 400,000, an expansion that will take several years. In the meantime, foreign soldiers fill in the gaps, which are many and wide.

The new troops have funneled mostly into southern Afghanistan, the Taliban and poppy-growing heartland, and the provinces around the capital, Kabul. But some have also landed in the mountains of the east, where fighters flow across the porous border and shelter in remote valleys. There, the war grinds on, eight years in. “Right now, we're containing the enemy,” Colonel John Spiszer told me last spring from his office in Jalalabad, 90 miles east of Kabul. “We're keeping him occupied.” Spiszer had just returned from a memorial service at an outpost in the Korengal Valley, a particularly violent pocket of Kunar province, where one of his soldiers had been killed in a Taliban ambush. Commanding the 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 1st Infantry Division, which includes the 450 soldiers of the 6/4 Cavalry, Spiszer had about 5,000 troops spread across four provinces. But the jewel was Nangarhar, with its broad river valleys, fertile land, and good roads. The province has most of the region's population, and violence has been relatively low. In the “clear, hold, build” strategy of counterinsurgency, Nangarhar had progressed to the latter two. Spiszer's other provinces lagged further behind, especially Kunar and Nuristan, where soldiers often can't reach the people they're supposed to keep safe, while their mountain outposts serve as beacons for insurgents.

In October 2009, a massive Taliban attack on one of the Nuristan outposts would bring these vulnerabilities into sharper relief, just as the Obama administration debated whether to ramp up or scale back the war. The fight, which involved 300 insurgents, took place in one of the very areas from which McChrystal planned to withdraw. Eight U.S. soldiers, several Afghan police, and more than 100 attackers were killed.

“The question is,” Spiszer said in the spring, “if I wasn't up there, would they still be fighting? I don't know.” Some insurgents, locals who just don't like having American troops in their backyard, would certainly quit fighting. But many others are mainline Taliban crossing the mountain passes from Pakistan and using the remote areas as sanctuaries to train and stage operations. Without the distraction of the outposts, Spiszer figured, the violence would migrate south into the population centers and put at risk hard-won gains. The war won't be won in the mountains, but failure here could keep the Americans, NATO, and the Afghan government from turning the tide elsewhere. So for soldiers like Kuhn, the war is little changed. They try to secure the roads and stymie the transit of arms and fighters. They train Afghan security forces and work with local governments to build roads, schools, and power plants. And they play this simple and unenviable role: giving the insurgents someone to shoot at.

To see these targets up close, I leapfrogged from Bagram Airfield to Jalalabad to Forward Operating Base Bostick, in the Kunar River Valley, and then, when the thunderstorms had blown through, flew into Hatchet. I shared the helicopter with a load of care packages, the first mail Recon platoon had received in a month. The military depends heavily on helicopters for moving troops and materiel into the most rugged areas of Afghanistan. When the weather turns or helicopters are needed elsewhere, outposts can go weeks without resupply. The boxes were welcome, but the helicopter didn't bring any cooking oil, a huge disappointment to the soldiers, who now had chicken fingers and French fries a favorite but no way to cook them.

After so long in the field, few meals still tasted good. Kuhn and his men had been told they'd be at Hatchet for a couple of months, which stretched into a year. For the first three months, they lived in earthen caves and spent their waking hours either on guard duty or building defenses. They filled thousands of sandbags, strung coils of wire, and hacked down trees to clear their weapons' fields of fire. They ate prepackaged field rations and had little communication with the outside world. Life improved this past fall, when engineers brought a lumberyard's worth of wood slung from the bellies of helicopters and built guard towers, sleeping quarters, an aid station, and a recreation room. Through a satellite link, the soldiers could call home and surf the Internet, and around Christmas the Army gave them an Xbox, with which they stabbed, blew up, and shot each other playing Call of Duty 4.

The flesh-and-blood enemy remained elusive. Nine months into their deployment, Hatchet had been attacked only a few times, and frustration brewed. The soldiers were highly trained scouts and snipers, able to kill a man from half a mile away or more, and many felt their skills could be better used. “You spend all that time training for the game,” Kuhn said, “you don't want to sit on the bench.” But that's the way of war in the mountains, hot and cold. Insurgents might hammer a camp for weeks, then leave it alone. And while many soldiers wish for combat, once they've seen it, some long for it to end. Several miles up the valley from Hatchet, two 6/4 outposts had been attacked relentlessly, sometimes twice a day, with RPG, machine-gun, and sniper fire. Those outposts are so low in the valley that when soldiers return fire, they shoot at 45-degree angles. They'd been mortared so many times that when they heard the thump of a launch up in the mountain, they knew they had 40 seconds until impact. I met a soldier who'd been blown out of his bunk one night by an RPG and had been in enough firefights to lose count. “I didn't know what an anxiety attack was before I came here,” he said. When he slept, he dreamed bad dreams. The pills prescribed by the Army doc helped, sometimes.

The black beating heart of that anxiety pounds in the ears in the small hours of the night, when soldiers stare at once familiar rocks and trees, turned trippy green in the fuzz of night vision, imagining annihilation, a wave of men rushing toward the camp in a crazed attack. Such dread is not unwarranted. The Taliban have refined this blunt and terrifying tactic, massing by the hundreds and assaulting remote outposts, using manpower to overcome technological deficits. The positions are sometimes defended by just a platoon, and while the Taliban had yet to completely overrun an outpost, they had come very close. In one 2008 attack southwest of Hatchet, attackers killed nine of the 45 American defenders and wounded 27, a casualty rate of 75 percent.

With small units surrounded in the mountains, far from reinforcements, firepower is the great equalizer, the reason defenders survive and a reassurance that keeps the men from losing their minds. The outposts bristle with heavy machine guns, automatic grenade launchers, and mortar tubes. The larger bases can lob 90-pound artillery shells from 20 miles away, and attack helicopters and jets often arrive within minutes. In more populated areas of Afghanistan, the military, wary of hitting civilians, restricts the types of weapons that can be used. But out in the mountains, the fights turn into free-for-alls. And some of those battles have become so desperate, the enemy so close, that soldiers have called in air strikes on their own positions.

Kuhn walked just ahead of me up the steep slope.

“Is there a danger of mines on this trail?” I asked.

“Don't know,” he said. “I haven't stepped on one yet.”

A soldier radioed down from ahead. Maruf Samy, the senior Afghan sergeant, thought he'd found a booby trap. Kuhn picked his way up the hill and met Samy next to a thin wire that stretched between two trees. Samy handed Kuhn a small green tube—not an explosive, as Samy surmised, but an American trip flare. Kuhn laughed. “There's nothing like having a guy walk up to you, say 'IED,' and put something in your hand.”

After handing over the suspected IED, or “improvised explosive device,” Samy climbed the mountain in easy strides, rejoining his soldiers, but the Americans slowed, then stopped. Specialist Thomas Hunter winced and kneaded his left thigh. “I'm cramping up,” he muttered. With his body armor, machine gun, and 700 rounds of ammunition, he carried more than 100 pounds. Even without falls, the mountains are hard on soldiers.

Specialist Benjamin Hart sat Hunter down and slid a needle into his arm. The IV bag of saline solution would rehydrate his muscles. Hart had given Kuhn and five others IVs before the patrol as a precaution. As the platoon medic, he played the den mother, always checking on the men. For everything from fevers to gunshot wounds, he was the only medical care for miles, a responsibility that weighed heavily on him, especially in the beginning, 19 years old and fresh from training.

“Everybody good?” he asked.

The answers came back, rapid-fire:

“My toe hurts.”

“My back hurts.”

“I have a rock in my shoe.”

Hart rolled his eyes and laughed. “I'm done with you guys,” he said.

We sat nearby on a rock outcropping, waiting for the bag to drain into Hunter, and gazed at the deep bowls of snow in Pakistan. A snowboarder's paradise, suggested Staff Sergeant Desmond McClellan, a squad leader from Wetumpka, Alabama.

Specialist Joshua Rivers scoffed. A Texas flatlander, he'd spent little time in the mountains, which was fine by him. “I swear to God, I don't want to see another mountain after this deployment,” he said. “I don't even want to see a hill.”

“I don't think the mountains would be so bad if we didn't have all this weight,” McClellan said.

“I don't think the mountains would be so bad if I wasn't here,” Rivers said.

While the military no longer has a dedicated alpine unit, it still teaches mountain warfare at a Marine Corps school near Bridgeport, California, and an Army school in Jericho, Vermont. Spiszer's brigade sent about 60 soldiers to Jericho before the summer 2008 deployment. Much of the course focused on managing heavy loads and moving safely across dangerous terrain. Students learned basic fixed-rope work and mountain first aid but also how to use and care for pack animals. The Marine Corps has taught a pack-animal course since the early eighties, when the CIA sent the mujahedeen thousands of mules to ferry supplies through the mountains in their fight against the Soviets.

Such a skill seems archaic in the age of helicopters, but many outposts in Afghanistan are still resupplied in part by donkey. Indeed, a few days spent there explains why Afghans have been such successful fighters over the centuries. Watch how the goat herder moves across the slopes, as surefooted as his animals, climbing the same passes since childhood. “We live in the mountains,” Khalis Safy, the Afghan platoon leader at Hatchet, had told me the day before the patrol up the mountain. “Our fight is in the mountains. Our homes are in the mountains. Our jobs are in the mountains. It's a habit for us.”

The Afghans had invited me for tea on their side of the camp, separated from the American quarters by the helicopter landing zone. We crowded into the small, dark room, quarters for nine men. Wood smoke hung in the air and shafts of sunlight streamed in through a small window. A junior soldier poured the chai, and Safy told us stories of his days fighting the Taliban under the famed mujahedeen commander Ahmed Shah Massoud. “We would have two or three guys, fighting maybe 100. Shoot and move. Shoot and move,” he said, essentially describing the way the Taliban fights today. “At that time, everyone respected us,” Safy said. “Now, when we're out in this area, we get hard looks from the people.”

Sergeant Samy pointed out two longstanding problems: The people are too poor, and the government is too corrupt. “If there were more jobs in these areas, they wouldn't fight,” he said. “Most of the Taliban just fight for money. For some poor people, if they're in the Afghan army, and the Taliban offers them more money, maybe they'd go to the Taliban.”

In a land long ruled by tribes, fostering allegiance to an institution like a national army is difficult. The quality of the soldiers is uneven, both at the lower ranks, with soldiers inadequately prepared and resourced for battle, and the higher ranks, with appointments sometimes based on cronyism. Kuhn told me he trusted and respected Safy and Samy, and met with them regularly to coordinate patrols, but most of his platoon at Hatchet had little interaction with the Afghans.

America's war in Afghanistan won't end until the insurgency is beaten or Afghan security forces can take over the fight, and much money has been spent making them a more competent, professional force. But Samy figured the fighting would continue, with or without the Americans, no matter the quality of the forces, because war had been woven into the fabric of life. “All of our history is fighting,” he said. The British. The Russians. The Taliban. “We'll see who's next.”

Back on the patrol, Hunter, full of fluids, picked up his machine gun. Everyone groaned and pushed to their feet. “I don't mind coming up, but thinking about going down just pisses me off. It's hard on my knees,” William Pinciotti, a thick-necked sniper, told McClellan. “I'm getting too old for this shit.”

“Too old?” McClellan said, his Alabama drawl pulling and stretching the words. “You're like 25.”

After another half-hour of climbing, a few slides on loose rock, and a near collision with 50 charging goats, we reached the mountain's spine. No one had bothered to shoot at the patrol, and the patrol had found no one to shoot. From the ridgeline above Hatchet, the sweat-soaked scouts studied the valley on the back side of their mountain, where a smattering of houses made up a small village. A newer white house clung to the mountainside several hundred feet up the opposite side of the valley. The platoon had started calling it the Taliban House after Afghan soldiers told them it was owned by insurgents. A plume of white smoke rose from the house's courtyard.

“Smoke signals,” Kuhn said.

“Who's Indian up here?” McClellan asked.

“I'm part Indian,” Rivers said.

“What's he saying?”

“One-five-five rounds, land here,” Rivers said, referring to the 155-millimeter howitzers at Forward Operating Base Bostick, ten miles down the valley. Before the platoon started its descent back to Hatchet, where the cook had dinner waiting, Rivers and McClellan plotted the coordinates of the house, should they ever have a reason to blow it up.

Intelligence reports said there were enemy fighters in that valley, maybe the men who'd attacked Hatchet the week before. It was just a couple of miles away, but getting there would require such an expenditure of resources that it was essentially off-limits to Kuhn's men. Likewise, the Taliban would like to attack Hatchet more often, but according to intel gathered from locals, it was simply too hard to cross the mountain with weapons that could do real damage and too hard to gain a decent vantage from which to attack. So the two sides had settled into a strange stalemate.

That scenario is common throughout the remote provinces, not just in Hatchet's little corner of the war. At dinner one night at FOB Bostick, after I'd caught a helicopter off the mountain a few days after the patrol, an intelligence officer told me he confronted those geographical obstacles daily as he plied locals for information. “People tell me all the time, 'I know where the bad guys are.' OK, show me. And they'll point somewhere way off in the mountains. Well, I can't go there.”

Though 6/4 Cavalry was responsible for an enormous swath of land, it controlled very little of it. An army doesn't need to own everything, just key pieces of terrain, but the mountains make it difficult. Captain Jay Bessey, 31, commander of 6/4's Charlie Troop, patrolled a ten-mile section of road the only main road in the region starting just below FOB Bostick and running along the Kunar River to the southern border of the Ghaziabad District. His influence stretched up the hillsides a bit, a corridor a mile or two wide in places, depending on the severity of the terrain. But only a third of the people lived near the road. The rest were in areas accessible only by small pickup truck or, more likely, by foot. “If two-thirds of the people are unaffected by us, that leaves them open to the other guys,” he said.

To influence these areas, Bessey needed proxies, and he took me to them: 20 men who could help end the war, stroking long beards and drinking purple Gatorade in the shade of a gazebo. Bessey had invited the men members of a local shura, like a town council to FOB Bostick to discuss development projects: roads, schools, clinics, and power plants. This was the softer side of counterinsurgency, and it could be frustrating for hard-charging officers like Bessey, trained to “close with and destroy the enemy,” in Army parlance. American soldiers can keep killing and arresting insurgents, but Afghanistan won't have lasting stability if local forces can't protect the people, if the government is mired in corruption.

The shura members had their own agenda, certainly, and some had Taliban in their families, which made their support all the more critical. Without local leaders' participation, efforts often failed. Running smoothly, development should have looked something like this: The shura requested a project from the district governor, who conducted an open bidding process, awarded a contract, then monitored the work to make sure it was done correctly. When local government recommended and oversaw projects, the work was more likely to be finished, the money less likely to be stolen, and the school, clinic, or power plant less likely to be blown up.

“If the people of Ghaziabad take ownership of the project, there will be fewer problems. They need to take care of it as they would their own house,” Captain Bill Evans told the men. In America, Evans, 43, works as a Los Angeles firefighter. But here, as head of an Army Reserves civil-affairs team, he oversaw development projects and coached officials on governance. His manner was both gregarious and blunt, backslaps and loud laughs. He worked to distinguish himself from the other soldiers as more diplomat than gunslinger. But he would not be a pushover. “If they lie to me, they're dead to me,” he told me privately. Evans liked the men of the shura, most of them at least, but needed them to understand that American largesse had limits.

Over the past year, the military had funded $1.3 million worth of development projects in Ghaziabad and surrounding areas and millions more in prior years. Many had not borne fruit. “Of the 11 micro-hydro projects, I've been told all of them have been started,” Bessey told the council. “However, I've seen no evidence of progress.” He was cutting off funding for all but five of the projects, those that he could inspect himself.

That problem could be alleviated by accomplishing something that's a cornerstone of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan: improving existing roads and building new ones into what are now off-limits areas. Local construction crews are widening and smoothing the main road and will eventually pave it, which will lengthen the reach of both the security forces and local government. The shura members were also eager for better roads into the nearby Helgal and Darin valleys.

“Is security going to be a problem in Darin like it is in Helgal?” Evans asked them.

The district governor shook his head, a determined no. “Things are good there,” he said.

Evans leaned toward me. “Things are not good there,” he said in a hushed voice. “This is the same thing they tell you every time. And 99 percent of the time there's a problem.”

In flatter parts of Afghanistan, a driver might avoid dangerous areas by taking a different route. But in these mountains, if you drive, you drive Route California. A few days earlier, gunmen had stopped two Afghan trucks carrying road-building equipment a few miles south of FOB Bostick, yanked out the drivers, and burned the trucks and cargo. This is low-hanging fruit for the insurgents: The road represents government legitimacy and the state's ability to provide for its citizens, and when work stops, the people lose faith that promises will be fulfilled.

To deter attacks, Bessey was building a checkpoint in a field between the river and the road. On a cloudy afternoon two days after the shura meeting, he and his boss, Lieutenant Colonel Markert, waded through the summer wheat and planned the defenses. From there they could more easily control movement through the area, but the position would be vulnerable to attack from across the road, where a hill rose several hundred feet. Markert raised his rifle to his eye and scanned the ridgeline through his scope. He watched a girl in a bright-red robe pick berries. “You have to strike a balance,” he said, “between owning the highest ground and being where you can influence the population.”

They would put a smaller observation position on the ridgeline, to guard against fighters moving in from a valley running perpendicular to the road. That had happened several months earlier, when insurgents lined the hillside and ambushed Markert and his men as they drove past. The attackers fired RPGs and machine guns at the convoy and within minutes had disabled eight of the 12 humvees. Rounds tore through the trucks, killing engines and flattening tires as drivers tried to push through the kill zone.

While driving back to camp, I worried less about an ambush than simply falling into the river. I rode in a “mine-resistant, ambush-protected” vehicle, or MRAP, a 15-ton truck designed to deflect IED blasts. The road was so narrow in spots, the trucks tires so close to the edge, that when I looked down I saw only water, 100 feet below. The river, swollen with snowmelt, crashed over rocks and swirled in dull-chocolate eddies. Through the other window I saw rock face.

The driver, Specialist Bryan Leigh, threaded our course, gingerly.

“I can't wait to get home and drive my car on pavement,” he said.

“You mean you don't like driving a big, boxy, top-heavy vehicle on unimproved roads along a sheer cliff?” Bessey asked.

“My only consolation,” Leigh said, “is having people with a fear of heights in the truck.”

The gunner, Private First Class Brian Jones, broke in over the intercom. “I don't have a fear of heights,” he said. “I have a fear of being spattered into unrecognizable red matter.”

They dissected our chances of surviving a plunge into the water. This hadn't happened in the area yet, which seemed amazing, given the weight of the trucks and the state of the road. The truck would stay intact, they figured, but bouncing equipment would break bodies. And if we did survive the fall, we'd be stuck in a metal box sinking to the bottom of a river. I stopped looking out the window.

The next day I drove north with Headquarters Troop, far up the valley to the Gowardesh Bridge, which had been controlled by the Taliban until two years before and was being guarded by the Afghan Border Police. This stretch of road had seen little serious fighting recently, only because the Americans hadn't been using it. In planning the previous patrol to the bridge, a month earlier, Captain Paul Roberts had briefed his Afghan army counterparts. That night, Kuhn's men at Hatchet saw four men down in the valley, digging in the road. An American patrol hadn't gone up that road in weeks, yet here was an IED team. Someone had talked. Kuhn's men watched the four diggers, and another four on the mountainside, until air strikes killed them.

Roberts assumed there would be enemy contact during this patrol, a hunch reinforced when 6/4 called with new intel: Insurgents had been watching our patrol and planned to attack us once we'd driven into the tighter sections. A few soldiers traded “Here we go again” glances. Being told you're about to be shot at elicits a predictable rawness of the nerves. But there was also anticipation, the game about to begin.

We left the two MRAPs behind, because the road would be barely wide enough and strong enough for the five armored humvees. The Afghans rode in unarmored pickup trucks. The valley narrowed in spots to a canyon. Water roared through rapids, a few feet from the trucks. We had no room to turn around or pass an immobilized vehicle.

“Good spot for an ambush,” said our driver, Staff Sergeant Jean-Francois Frenette. “Very tight fit, a lot of rock to hide behind.”

Captain Evans scanned the rock face across the river. The gunner, Sergeant James Romero lanky, earnest, and at that moment very, very nervous craned his neck back and looked straight up. The machine gun attached to the turret was useless here. Romero couldn't raise it beyond a 45-degree angle. He used his M4 rifle to cover the cliff.

Before the patrol, Romero had asked if I was comfortable operating the humvee's M240 machine gun, in case he went down. No problem, I said. I'd fired one many times. Still, he gave me a quick refresher, said it would make him feel better. As we drove through the valley, as Romero scanned the cliffs, I found that diligence a comfort.

“How's your view?” Evans called to Romero.

“Fuck this,” Romero said. “I hate this spot.”

The patrol moved in “bounding overwatch”: While the first section of vehicles advanced, the second section covered the cliffs. We inchwormed through the tricky stretches, and when we could be seen from above, the mountaintop OPs kept an eye on us. At the bridge, the border police said they'd been attacked the previous night, a common occurrence. But they were still holding the bridge, which kept the Taliban occupied harassing them and eliminated a key transit route for weapons and fighters. This saved the Americans from having to do it all themselves, which they couldn't, even if they wanted to. Roberts drank tea with the police commander and we left, back down the valley, with Romero freaked by the cliffs.

No one ambushed us, which surprised everyone. Maybe it would happen the next time, or the time after that, because the interests there were incompatible: The Americans wanted a secure road; the Taliban wanted unencumbered movement.

“We know it's coming,” Roberts said.

The attack did come, and it was devastating. Several days after our patrol, Roberts led a huge push into the area, Operation Bear Hunt, and expected a fight, yet his men didn't fire a shot. Maybe the enemy had known the Americans were coming in force and decided to lie low. Maybe they had their own plans. On the day Bear Hunt ended, the Taliban hit Bari Alai, a mountaintop OP several miles to the south. Unlike Hatchet, Bari Alai was occupied only by a 25-man Afghan army platoon, along with three American and four Latvian advisers. An estimated 100 insurgents had massed in the darkness and attacked at dawn. While machine-gun teams raked the outpost, more fighters climbed up the mountain, blew a hole through the wire, and rushed into the camp. A few soldiers would have been on guard, but many were probably sleeping when the attack started a nightmare realized.

The outpost had been established two months earlier, to cut off the Helgal and Darin valleys as safe havens for fighters and weapons from Pakistan, and it had come under fire regularly but always from a distance. The Americans and Latvians answered those volleys with symphonies of mortars, artillery, helicopter gunships, and jet fighters, pulverizing the mountainside with high explosives. But with attackers rushing the camp, then inside the wire, with stunned soldiers scurrying for weapons and body armor, the sophisticated tools of war were useless. This was a close-in fight, chaotic. Staff Sergeant William Vile fired at the attackers as he called for reinforcements and air support over the radio. Both arrived, too late. Vile, the other two Americans, two Latvians, and three Afghan soldiers were dead. Another Latvian was wounded, along with several Afghans. When reinforcements flew up to the outpost that morning, they found it destroyed and on fire, the survivors half buried in the rubble. For the first time during the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban had completely overrun a coalition outpost.

The attackers had gathered up 11 of the surviving Afghan soldiers and an interpreter and marched them into the Helgal Valley. Several days later, when the Americans pushed hundreds of troops into the valley, the Taliban released their prisoners, which seemed odd to the Americans and reinforced an unsettling suspicion: Some of the Afghan soldiers had been complicit in the attack or had given up almost immediately. Had it been an American unit at Bari Alai, they would have fought to the death, as they nearly have on several occasions in the mountains.

Before going up to Hatchet, I had shared a tent with several Latvian soldiers returning from leave, including a sergeant named Arnis who'd been stationed at Bari Alai. He slept on the bunk next to mine. The Latvians had partnered with soldiers from the Michigan National Guard to mentor the Afghan army. Before deploying, they'd trained together for months, climbing mountains in Slovakia, Austria, and the Republic of Georgia. They told me about the challenges of mountain warfare, the tradeoffs between safety and maneuverability, and all the rest. But the biggest problem they encountered was their Afghan counterparts. It wasn't just that they'd sometimes smoke marijuana at night or neglect to carry water on patrols and then ask the advisers for water during halts. The Latvians simply didn't trust them. Maybe a quarter are competent, motivated soldiers, they said, and then suggested that the rest would walk away from the camp if they weren't surrounded by miles of wilderness inhabited by people who would just as soon kill them as help them.

“Do you feel safe?” I asked Arnis as we sat on our cots, waiting for clear weather so the helicopters could ferry us into the mountain.

“No,” he said, “of course not.”

Arnis and I were lucky. He didn't return to Bari Alai but was shuffled to a different outpost. I had wanted to visit Bari Alai but ran out of time. On the day I returned home, I heard about the attack, in the barest of details: massive assault, eight dead, many wounded. But as more information trickled out, the story got worse and worse. Soldiers told me a near-by OP had been abandoned by Afghan soldiers the day before, then used by insurgents as a staging ground and firing position for the assault on Bari Alai. And many of the Claymore mines that ringed the outpost for perimeter defense hadn't been detonated during the fight, because the wires had been deactivated from inside the camp.

That sort of treachery, mercifully rare in Afghanistan, is an inescapable risk of building and mentoring local forces. Such are the wars we fight today in this slow slog of counterinsurgency, when winning strategies require uncomfortable levels of exposure and trust and lead to the occasional terrible day. So add that to the worries that fester for soldiers in the mountains, staring at the same rocks and trees and ridges and draws, month after month, wondering if this will be the day, in the soft blue light before dawn, with clumps of cloud drifting through camp and the crows already squawking, when the war will charge up the mountain and wash over them. O

Brian Mockenhaupt is a fellow at the .

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