They call it The River of No Return, and whatever the old-timers who gave it that nickname meant by it, for Tims it meant that after his first float down the Middle Fork, there was no going back to his workaday life. Within two years he sold his business, bought a commercial rafting operation, and moved his family to Idaho.

“I knew from our first run that I'd never get tired of it,” he says, and suddenly we're harking back to the August morning when he and I and five other friends dipped our nervous paddles into the current at the Boundary Creek put-in.

The water's relatively low, but it feels like we're pushing out into the throat of a beast that is going to have us for lunch somewhere along the way. None of us has much whitewater experience, and we have no guide–just maps that mark the rapids and the campsites, supplies for ten days, and the wonderful buzz that gets on you as you point your boat downstream into the deepest wilderness in the Lower 48, on the longest undammed river system, with no idea what's around the next bend. Probably wild tides, we imagine. Deep holes and thrashing waves that might well dump and drown us and then flush us 100 miles to the confluence of the Middle Fork and the Main Salmon, where rangers will haul our broken bodies ashore and stack us like cordwood at the take-out.

Instead we find ourselves on a rattly little flow, barely deep enough to float us through the pretty streambed rock gardens, past thick forest that spills to the water's edge down steep mountain slopes that hunker over us. The challenge of navigating the low water gradually sharpens our river eyes and ears, and the deep peace of the place evaporates our dreams of peril. We spend our second night in almost embarrassing high-country luxury at Sunflower Flat, wallowing in naturally terraced hot springs that overflow down the bank, one to another, until they plunge as warm waterfall into the cold stream.

We've seen only a couple of other rafts on the river, and indeed for the entire ten days we will spot only the occasional party floating by. Amazingly, 10,000 people run the Middle Fork each summer without ever robbing it of its solitude. Groups set off by permit–seven per day, no more than 30 people per flotilla–toward assigned campsites that are isolated from one another and governed by rules that require you to leave them looking as if the last people to camp there traded tobacco with Lewis and Clark. In fact, the Middle Fork was among the first American rivers to be designated Wild and Scenic, and in midsummer you get the best of both descriptions, in a combination unrivaled by any stretch of froth in the nation. The rapids are exciting but still doable for families. The weather's warm. The water's clear. And the pace is just slow enough to let you dry off between splashings, lie back, and melt into the mountains.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that 2.3 million surrounding acres were designated as wilderness a decade and a half ago, making the river's environs off-limits to any development that would tame the wild loneliness of the place. But then there's never been much human smudge in this landscape–a few mines along the river, a few ranches, a couple of pictographs left by the small bands of Indians, called Sheepeaters, who hunted here. Crossing these massive granite mountains has always been a forbidding enterprise. Lewis and Clark had to go north for 150 miles to skirt this barrier of high peaks, severe canyons, and thrashing rivers. And 200 years later, if you want to get east-to-west across Idaho, you still have to go the way they went, around the daunting geology that saved this territory from road-building long enough for it to be saved again by enlightened environmental policy.

Thirty miles into our trip, we scud out of the alpine shadows into open, grassy hillscape scattered with huge ponderosa pines. The river widens and flattens into a counterpoint of pooling calms that gather and then roil into rapids that grow longer and spunkier. By day four we've been through a dozen whitewater patches–good wet fun without terror–and are gearing up for what may be our first boat-eater, Tappen Falls.

We scout it with the kind of reverence you bring to anything that has the word falls in its name: a four-foot drop at this water level, not as fearsome as we'd expected, but enough for us to station a couple of guys with ropes at the bottom. As it is, we ride both the drop and the powerful outflow in a high-whooping style that makes every last novice of us feel like we've broken our first wild horse and are now ready to get on a big ugly bull.

By August, though, all the Class IV wild water on the Middle Fork has long since emptied into the sea. To ride the river while it's really raging, you have to be here in early June, under funky spring skies and on the full tide of the snowmelt. Then, Tims assures me, you can run the entire hundred miles, through huge standing waves, deep holes, and roller-coaster chutes, in a shade under 12 hours.

At our leisurely late-summer pace, by contrast, day six brings us only halfway. So far we've seen enough eagles, otters, ducks, deer, and elk to make it seem that they've been hired to entertain the customers. And by about mile 60, as the canyon walls turn sheer and the ridges grow ragged, mountain sheep begin striking poses above us with the confidence that nobody without hooves is going to bother them. (Later I will see a young goat take what should be a death plunge: 30 feet of free fall onto an almost sheer rock face, where he'll somehow get his legs under him for a sliding, headlong run to a small ledge, on which he will bounce, shake himself off, and look up at his herd as if to say, “Found a shortcut.”)

The trail along the bank ends as the river squeezes through a narrowing slash called Impassable Canyon for the last 30 miles. The ride gets faster and wetter as the rapids ricochet off the walls, drop hard between massive boulders, and follow one after another with little breathing room between. The campsites huddle in the shadow of the gorge, which from mountain peak to water's edge is deeper than the Grand Canyon.

On our tenth day, we take out at Cache Bar, about four miles downriver from the confluence of the Middle and Main Forks of the Salmon. If we had the time and the permit, we could continue on another 120 miles, west to Riggins. But we've already had about all the perfect river peace and mountain beauty we can stand.

Craig Vetter, a contributing editor of şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř, is the author of Striking It Rich (William Morrow).

See Also:
Access and Resources: Running the River Wild and Scenic

The post A Float Through The Big Unblemished appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

25. Lance Armstrong

ROAD CYCLIST

Age: 29 Specs: 5-foot-11, 158 pounds

Homes: Plano, Texas; Nice, France

THE CASE: Try to forget the cancer. Forget his best-selling autobiography and his picture on the Wheaties box and his general cultural apotheosis. Even forget that he won a bronze medal in the Olympic time trial not five months after breaking his C7 vertebra on a training ride in a head-on collision with a vehicle—a show of toughness that carried his habitual heroism to the edge of absurdity. Focus instead on Armstrong's moment last July atop Mont Ventoux at the 2000 Tour de France. He's dragging Italian Marco Pantani, one of the sport's most storied climbers, up the final kilometers of a mountain ascent so torturous that organizers include it on the route only once every few years.Then Armstrong, in a stroke of psych-out noblesse-oblige genius, eases up and lets Pantani pass him for the day's victory; he's so sure of his overall lead that he need not trifle with a stage win. Humiliated, Pantani comes unglued and withdraws a few days later, and Armstrong pedals imperiously to his second Tour win. Overlooked in the incident was an astonishing fact: Armstrong's average heart rate during the hardest moments on Ventoux averaged 184. His normal training rate for such grades—188 to 192. “What this means,” says Armstrong's coach, Chris Carmichael, “is that he was well below his lactate threshold.
What that means is he wasn't even winded.

SECOND OPINION: A trio of former Tour winners bowed to Armstrong in a media scrum following his 2000 victory.
*Jan Ullrich (1997) after losing to Armstrong this go-round in one of the fastest time trials in Tour history: “I did not have the measure of Lance. It's hard that he was 25 seconds faster, but he showed again that he rightfully carries the yellow.”

*Eddy Merckx (1969–1972, 1974): “He's not only the best rider, but the most serious. He races all season, not just one month, like so many others.”
*Greg LeMond (1986, 1989, 1990), the only other American champ: “I haven't seen anybody dominate a race like that. Ever.”

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: October 2, 1996, the day he was diagnosed with testicular cancer.

WHAT'S NEXT: A Tour hat trick.

24. Francine Moreillon

FREESKIER

23. Giovani Soldini

SAILOR

Around-the-world single-handing is not so much a sport as it is “a complete career,” says the 34-year-old Italian. “You need to know a little bit of everything: The designing of the boat, the reading of the weather, the fixing of the generator…”

And let's not forget the throwing of the hammer. In February 1999, midway through the epic Around Alone race, Soldini sailed 200 miles back into the heart of a merciless Southern Ocean storm to rescue competitor Isabelle Autissier, whose yacht had capsized. When he got there, Autissier, sheltering inside her upturned hull, couldn't hear his shouts over the shrieking wind. Soldini reached into his toolbox, pulled out the heaviest thing he could find, and flung it across the water at the Frenchwoman's hull. A few minutes later Autissier opened her escape hatch, tossed out her life raft, and made her way over to his boat.

Such resourcefulness is the product of Soldini's youth, spent working in boatyards and on the foredecks of other people's yachts after dropping out of school in Milan at 16. By his midtwenties he was chafing for his own command. “If you work on a cruising boat, the owner is always wanting to stop, to take a swim or something,” he says. “The boat never goes.” With a tiny budget but a fierce desire to race in the 1994 BOC Challenge (since renamed the Around Alone), Soldini enlisted a dozen patients in a drug-rehab clinic to work for free on the construction of an ultralight sloop. With it, he won two legs of the race, battling the more experienced Australian David Adams right to the wire in the regatta's 50-foot Class II. Four years later, with backing from Fila, he built a 60-foot boat and, after rescuing Autissier, easily won the elite division of the race. He was the first non-Frenchman to do so.

Soldini is known to his peers for his bold tactics—he often sails away from the fleet on speculative “fliers”—as well as his ambitious race schedule, which includes both single-handed and fully crewed events. The latter have not always been kind to him. In early 1998, he and four friends attempted to set a transatlantic record on Fila and capsized in rough seas 400 miles short of the English Channel. Despite a sturdy safety harness, Soldini's codesigner and best friend, Andrea Romanelli, was washed overboard, never to be seen again. “It was terrible, my worst experience ever,” Soldini says. “When you are alone, you have only yourself to worry about. When you are five people sailing, you have to think about much more.”

22. Andrew McLean

SKI MOUNTAINEER

21. Shannon Carroll

STEEPCREEKER

Age: 22 Specs: 5-foot-10, 152 pounds

Home: Nevada City, California

THE CASE: Born buff and brassy, Carroll began paddling at 11, ran her first Class V at 15, and then raised the stakes even higher. Since then she's claimed the women's world-record waterfall descent (a 78-foot prayer off the McKenzie River's Sahalie Falls near Eugene, Oregon), won the women's world championship of surf kayaking, and put her churning aquatic luge maneuvers on display in Twitch 2000, a video of stupefying kayaking footage.But her first love is steepcreeking—running precipitous torrents that plunge as much as 500 feet per mile and are choked with logs and tenacious holes. It's just the type of paddling she grew up on in Thurmond, West Virginia. “I was lucky to get an early start paddling,” she says, “and there are still frontiers to push.”

SECOND OPINION: “Shannon's very aggressive on the water,” says fellow competitor Jamie Simon. “Yet afterwards everyone loves to be around her. The only thing I enjoy more than paddling with her is listening to her sing.”

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: Getting pinned on West Virginia's Upper Gauley with her bow wedged deep into a colander of rocks for 20 minutes. Just before going under, rescuers pulled her out by the stern.

WHAT'S NEXT: Trying to qualify for the U.S. rodeo kayaking team next season.

20. Bjorn Daehlie

NORDIC SKIER

Age: 33 Specs: 6 feet, 172 pounds
Home: Nannestad, Norway

THE CASE: In the oxygen-deprived nightmare that is nordic skiing, it helps to be a freak of nature. Thanks to an off-the-charts VO2 max of 96, a resting heart rate of 45, anda hypermotivated training ethic, Daehlie has captured 12 Olympic medals—more than any other winter Olympian. Perhaps he's best known, however, for his histrionic come-from-behind finishes. After kicking past Swede Niklas Jonsson in the 50k freestyle in the 1998 Nagano Games, he collapsed at the tape and didn't stand for two hours. Melodramatic showmanship say some, but hey, what do you expect from a guy wearing pastel tights?

SECOND OPINION: “He's the complete package,” says U.S. cross-country ski team member Justin Wadsworth. “He's got the genetic gift, the work ethic, and he can suffer better than anyone he races against.”

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: Getting outsprinted on his home turf by Italian Silvio Fauner in front of 100,000 stunned spectators while racing the anchor leg of the men's 4x10k relay at the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics.

WHAT'S NEXT: Barring catastrophe, Daehlie will compete in his fourth winter Olympics, in Salt Lake City. Should he win more medals, he may propel his record well out of reach.

19. John Howard

ADVENTURE RACER

18. Karleen Jeffery


FREERIDE SNOWBOARDER

They don't call her Gnarleen for nothing. Karleen Jeffery spent five years hiding out in Chamonix, storming down rules-free steeps with the world's most hell-bent snowboarders, but now she's back. Even while she was away, she managed to sneak in a competition here and there: The 27-year-old Canadian is a two-time World Extreme Champion, a six-time winner of the Mount Baker Banked Slalom, a four-time winner of the Rip Curl World Heli Challenge, and a three-time winner of the Canadian Nationals (twice for half-pipe, once for giant slalom). She's a North American Boardercross champion, a North American Big Air champion, and twice a Swedish Queen of the Hill. And did we mention that she's a redhead?

The 5-foot-2 femme fatale from Kelowna, British Columbia, got her start as a ski racer. Her father was a Canadian national ski team jumper, and her grandfather pioneered a 165-mile ski route from Jasper to Banff. Then one day back in 1990, a couple of guys dared her to learn snowboarding in time for the national championships six weeks later. She did, and she won. She was 16. (“Speed events were always my favorite,” says Jeffery, who now lives in Mammoth Lakes, California.)

Although she used to compete in the half-pipe, the Burton rider has turned her full attention to freeriding, where she outruns avalanches and cracking cornices. “Half-pipe just wasn't that challenging anymore,” she says. After a grueling climb up a peak, she might jump into a chute and carve through it at 50 mph, launch into a big-air inversion over a boulder, and spend the next few thousand feet spinning and slaloming down the face. “My sister can be pretty intimidating,” says older brother Scott, who stuck with skiing. “She rides really hard. She just charges.”

Both in competition and while starring in industry films—her latest is with XX Productions (that's a chromosome reference, dude) —Jeffery walks a fine line between safety and insanity. “It's me versus the mountain, just trying to anticipate what the mountain can do to me and how I can outwit Mother Nature,” she says. “I always have an escape plan if things go awry, some rock I can duck under.” It doesn't always work: Five years ago in the Alps she landed badly on a jump, breaking her pelvis and fracturing a vertebra.

Next year, aside from competing again in April's world extreme championship in Valdez, Jeffery and her fiancĂ©, BASE jumper Dave Barlia, plan to film each other's exploits around the world with her new 16mm camera. So, what does Barlia call her? “Well,” she says, “when I'm in a bad mood he calls me Snarleen.”

17. Göran Kropp

ADVENTURER

16. Louise Hose

GEOLOGIST/CAVER

Four thousand feet below the surface of the earth, in a cold, dank hole that exists on no map, the chances of rescue for a stranded caver are close to zilch. Louise Hose doesn't care. “You take the risks you can handle,” says the 48-year-old karst geologist, who once witnessed a partner die when he got trapped and drowned in an underground stream. “You don't allow yourself to break a femur.” Her matter-of-fact tone leaves little doubt why her colleagues, working alongside her years ago in a Mexican cave, nicknamed her “Macha.”

In 22 years of studying cave-forming rock, Hose has explored more than 230 underground holes, 80 of them virgin passages, and published her findings in periodicals with catchy titles like Chemical Geology: Special Geomicrobiology Issue. “Some go deeper, and some do more dangerous work or more science,” says Dave Luckins, a former president of the National Speleological Society who spent ten years on the NSS's board with her, “but few combine these elements and do it with her level of skill.”

Hose, a former national-level competitive cyclist, ventured into her first cave in 1970 as a freshman at California State University at Los Angeles. “I grew up in Los Angeles surrounded by people, so I really liked the isolation,” she says. To feed her jones for subterranean nooks, she earned a doctorate in geology from Louisiana State University. She's currently digging into the bizarre ecology of Mexico's Cueva de Villa Luz, where a recently discovered microbial colonies live off hydrogen sulfide and fart out sulfuric acid. In addition to stinking to high heaven, the atmosphere is poisonous, so Hose wears a gas mask as she works.

In a field known for its swashbuckling one-upmanship, Hose often arrives first at a site, where she rappels down hundreds of feet of rope with a 70-pound pack and then shimmies through insanely skinny passageways. Her body has been so badly bruised that a doctor once asked her if she was a victim of domestic violence. Nope, she told him, I'm a caver.

15. Laird Hamilton

WATERMAN

14. Doug Swingley

DOGSLED RACER

Age: 47 Specs: 5-foot-11, 160 pounds
Home: Lincoln, Montana

THE CASE: Owner, manager, friend, racer, and trainer of the fastest dogs alive, Swingley wears down opponents by charging from the gun; where most mushers cautiously modulate speed throughout a race with a foot brake, Swingley just lets 'em rip, convincing his dogs that long hills are a treat. The former mink rancher, who still trains his dogs in Montana, didn't start racing until he was 36, but he quickly made up for lost time. In his third Iditarod, in 1995, Swingley posted the first sub-ten-day time, thus becoming the first non-Alaskan to win the grueling 1,100-mile marathon. After finishing second in '96 and '97, he reclaimed the crown in 1999 and smoked the pack again in 2000, breaking his '95 record by nearly two hours.

SECOND OPINION: “Every year Doug's won the Iditarod, he's usually stayed one checkpoint ahead of the other mushers,” says 1989 winner Joe Runyan. “He pushes it a little bit every year.”

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: Beginning the 1999 Iditarod by breaking two ribs. “We took a 90-degree corner, and as I went down with the sled my chest was driven into a battery pack,” says Swingley. How'd he manage a victory? “A lot of Aleve.”

WHAT'S NEXT: Come this March, he'll aim the dogs straight for Nome, Alaska, the Iditarod's finish line, and a possible fourth victory.

13. Scott Lindgren

EXPEDITION KAYAKER

Age: 28 Specs: 5-foot-11, 155 pounds
Home: Auburn, California

THE CASE: There's a handful of paddlers who can run the big-river first descents that Lindgren relishes, and there's a handful of filmmakers who can capture the shots he does, but no one else can do both time after time and still manage to come back alive. The Rocklin, California, native, who began paddling at 19, has marshaled countless remote river expeditions—Nepal's Thule Bheri and Tibet's upper Karnali, to name a couple—in which he navigates raging gorges studded with Class V-plus drops in a heavily laden kayak, wearing an awkward head camera. His company, Scott Lindgren Productions, is known for making videos (Flood 2: The Last Drop, Thirst) and films that defy belief, even among grizzled whitewater paddlers. “When I discovered kayaking, it was a release I hadn't found in other sports,” says Lindgren. “It was never about being a high-profile athlete; it is strictly about going out and finding the deepest, hardest rivers.”

SECOND OPINION: “There are a lot of good extreme paddlers, but Scott can predict water flows like no one else I know,” says fellow first-descenter Clay Wright. “When you go on an expedition with Scott, you know it will be dialed.”

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: “Trying to get me to talk about my most harrowing moment,” sniffs Lindgren, “is like trying to take spinach away from Popeye.”

WHAT'S NEXT: A three-week voyage on the White Nile in Uganda and the wrap of Liquid Cubed, a film about his surf kayaking exploits in Indonesia.

12. Anne-Caroline Chausson

MOUNTAIN-BIKE RACER

11. Johan Reinhard

ARCHAEOLOGIST/EXPLORER

Someone once asked Johan Reinhard how many close calls he'd survived. When he finished tallying them, the total came to 34. “I haven't been broken up too badly,” says the 57-year-old Illinois native, “but I've been nearly killed almost every way you can think of.” To thrive as the world's foremost high-altitude archaeologist, it helps to be both lucky and wise. When an avalanche wipes the slope you just exited—that's luck. When a Nepalese tribe of hunters orders you, upon pain of death, to stop shadowing them, and you beat feet—that's wisdom.

For two decades Reinhard, who holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Vienna, has scoured remote Andean mountaintops seeking clues left behind by ancient South American civilizations. His discoveries have blown minds in the science world: In 1995 he recovered the famous 500-year-old Incan “ice maiden,” the most well preserved body from pre-Columbian times. Last year he and his team battled 70-mph winds and snow to unearth three more mummies on the summit of Argentina's 22,000-foot Mount Llullaillaco. “The DNA samples we sent to George Mason University were as intact as a living person's,” says Reinhard.

The archaeologist, who's been climbing mountains since college, has bagged more than 100 South American peaks over 17,000 feet, making him one of the world's most prolific Andean climbers—a record he didn't consciously seek. “What keeps me going up is that [those high mountains] have the world's best-preserved mummies,” he says, “and they're soon going to be destroyed.” Earlier this year Reinhard scrambled up to a burial site on an Argentinean peak to find that thieves had gotten there first. With dynamite. “All we found were remains of blown-up textiles and bones,” he says.

Now funded as a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, Reinhard retreats to his home near Franklin, West Virginia, to sift through his findings when he isn't in the field. “I've had to give up a lot for this life,” he says. “But I've always had the freedom to go out and explore.”

10. Josune Bereziartu

ROCK CLIMBER

9. Børge Ousland

POLAR EXPLORER

Age: 38 Specs: 6-foot-2, 187 pounds

Home: Oslo, Norway

THE CASE: A former deep-sea diver in the icy North Atlantic waters off Norway, Ousland has redefined what it means to be a masochistic loner. In 1994 he became the first man to travel solo, and without assistance or resupply, to the North Pole. A year later he skied solo to the South Pole, and in 1996 he became the first to cross Antarctica alone and unassisted—a trip that took 64 days. While those before him have relied on resupply caches and airdrops, Ousland lugs his provisions behind him on a sledge, trekking across perilously thin ice in whiteout conditions that can reach minus 55 degrees Celsius. He has an almost pathological attention to detail and an uncanny knack for discerning safe ice from sketchy ice. Fine, but how's he stay warm and sane? A diet loaded with olive oil and butter, and a Walkman blaring Jimi Hendrix.

SECOND OPINION: “Ousland is Roald Amundsen incarnate,” says polar sage Will Steger, invoking the turn-of-the-century Norwegian explorer who made the world's first trek to the South Pole. “He is strong, well prepared, cautious, and he understands ice better than anybody.”

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: On a 1993 ski expedition from Franz Josef Land to Spitsbergen, in the Arctic Ocean, he awoke to shotgunlike sounds—ice cracking—and found himself and his teammate bobbing on a raft of ice. The men spent two days adrift at sea, their ice-island eroding at the edges, before rescuers plucked them to safety.

WHAT'S NEXT: In January Ousland will attempt what's considered the last great feat in polar exploration: the first unsupported traverse of the Arctic, from Russia to Canada via the North Pole.

8. Eric Jackson

WHITEWATER PADDLER

7. Tomaz Humar

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Age: 31 Specs: 5-foot-10, 157 pounds
Home: Kamnik, Slovenia

THE CASE: To get a sense of the audacity of Tomaz Humar's November 1999 solo ascent of the 4,000-foot wall of ice and rotten rock on the south face of Nepal's Dhaulagiri, consider this: Upon returning home, he found that climbing's greatest living legend, Reinhold Messner, had flown in and was waiting to congratulate him. An epic in 1997 on the west face of Nuptse, Everest's 25,921-foot neighbor, and a 1996 first ascent of the northwest face of Nepal's Ama Dablam also rank as two of the boldest climbs of the 1990s. A fiercely self-reliant mountaineer who typically goes solo, Humar prides himself on his mental strength: “When I start a climb, I become some kind of animal,” he says. “I turn off everything—hunger, pain, freezing—in order to survive.”

SECOND OPINION: “Humar is willing to take on dangerous climbs with the understanding that if he moves fast enough, he'll get through without getting killed,” says Christian Beckwith, editor of the American Alpine Journal.

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: “Saying good-bye to my children before each expedition.”

WHAT'S NEXT: “I'm cooking it in my head right now,” he says. “When it is the right time, the mountain will tell me so.”

6. Lori Bowden

TRIATHLETE

Age: 33 Specs: 5-foot-6, 115 pounds

Home: Victoria, British Columbia

THE CASE: When the Canadian swapped her bike for her running shoes to start the final leg of her Hawaii Ironman professional debut in 1996, she was in 30th place. “When I finished eighth,” she says, “I knew I'd eventually have a shot at winning it.” Indeed. Owing to her running prowess, these days Bowden routinely gobbles up seemingly unbeatable competitors' leads. Take her first Hawaii Ironman win, in 1999: Entering the run three minutes down, Bowden recorded the event's first sub-three-hour marathon by a woman, winning by seven minutes. In 2000 she sealed her arrival with two major triathlon victories, in Australia and Canada. Now just imagine how good she'll be when she improves her shabby swimming ability. (In her Hawaii win she finished the swim in an abysmal 89th place.)

SECOND OPINION: Karen Smyers, who finished second in Hawaii in 1999, says: “The biggest thing she's got going for her is that she really has no idea how good she is.”

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: Nearly drowning in the pounding surf during the swim leg at a sprint triathlon in Chile last January.

WHAT'S NEXT: Erasing the 4 minutes and 45 seconds standing between her Ironman best and Paula Newby-Fraser's world-record time (8:50:23), set in 1994.

5. Kevin Pritchard

WINDSURFER

4. Layne Beachley

SURFER

Age: 28 Specs: 5-foot-5, 121 pounds
Home: Dee Why Beach, Australia

THE CASE: Already considered the planet's premier female big-wave rider, this powerful, exuberant Australian is also the first woman to get into the high-testosterone sport of tow-in surfing. But her performance in contest surfing is another story. For years Beachley battled chronic fatigue syndrome, depression, and Lisa Andersen—the fluid Floridian surfer who piled up four straight world titles. In 1998, thanks in part to the support of mentor-boyfriend Ken Bradshaw, a 48-year-old big-wave legend from Sunset Beach on the North Shore of Oahu, Beachley located the “competitive beast” within, and has won two world titles since. With one contest remaining on this year's circuit, she's all but assured of a third.

SECOND OPINION: “She rides waves that most guys would want to be nowhere near,” says Bill Sharp, publisher of California's SurfNews. “Things that are 18 to 20 feet on the Hawaiian scale, which means a 35- to 40-foot face.

“MOST HARROWING MOMENT: Last winter, filming for the Australian edition of 60 Minutes, Beachley got Bradshaw to tow her into Backyards, a giant, unruly break offshore of Sunset Beach. “I was way too deep when I let go of the rope,” she says. “An entire section of the wave closed out—18 feet of white water—and before Ken could get to me, three more waves broke on top of me. I was just sitting there underwater, singing to myself.” The refrain? “Rag doll, rag doll.”

WHAT'S NEXT: Getting towed into Jaws, the steep, hollow monster wave off Maui pioneered by Laird Hamilton and Buzzy Kerbox.

3. Jeremy Jones

BIG-MOUNTAIN SNOWBOARDER

Age: 25 Specs: 5-foot-7, 145 pounds

Home: Truckee, California

THE CASE: Jones rips the seemingly convex pitches of Alaska's intimidating Chugach Mountains, pointing his board straight down the fall line of slopes where you drop 20 feet with each turn. He rails open faces at 60 mph and then shoots off 50-foot cliffs. Apparently fearless, Jones first earned his reputation as snowboarding's primo big-mountain freerider from stunts in the 1997 snowboard flickTB6, but he's equally famous for riding the Chugach's fluted spines—steep, wind-carved ribs of snow that protrude from the guts of the mountain. On such terrain, you don't outrun your slough, you ride in it, cascading down waterfalls of snow. In the premiere this fall of the ski film Further, Jones's gonzo descent cemented his status as a snowboarder of Homeric proportions. In the words of innumerable viewers, Jones isn't just the best, “He's sick.”

SECOND OPINION: “Jones attacks terrain,” says veteran snowboarder and writer Jeff Galbraith. “He does lines you don't see anyone else do, without straining.”

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: Walking from helicopter landing zones along knife-edge ridgelines, where his soft-soled boots offer little grip and the board he's holding easily catches homicidal wind gusts.

WHAT'S NEXT: A helicopter tour deeper into Alaska's imposing ranges with his two filmmaker brothers, of Teton Gravity Research, who'll capture Jeremy's first descents using long lenses from distant (read: safe) vantages.

2. Tommy Caldwell

ROCK CLIMBER

The Immovable Object Meets the Unstoppable Force

Step by step, year after year, summit after summit, never altering, Ed Viesturs has planted his flag across the top of the world. And everybody loves him. What's the deal with this guy?

The Immovable Object Meets the Unstoppable Force

Step by step, year after year, summit after summit, never altering, Ed Viesturs has planted his flag across the top of the world. And everybody loves him. What's the deal with this guy?

The Immovable Object Meets the Unstoppable Force

Step by step, year after year, summit after summit, never altering, Ed Viesturs has planted his flag across the top of the world. And everybody loves him. What's the deal with this guy?

The Immovable Object Meets the Unstoppable Force

Step by step, year after year, summit after summit, never altering, Ed Viesturs has planted his flag across the top of the world. And everybody loves him. What's the deal with this guy?

“Lots of Fun”: The Viesturs ResumĂ©

“Only when guiding,” says Ed Viesturs of his philosophy on using supplemental oxygen, “but never when attempting to climb a mountain for the first time.” A testament to titanic lung capacity, Viesturs has etched a record on 8,000-meter peaks surpassed by no other American. Here are the highlights, along with Grateful Ed's vivid recollections:

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IT WAS TWILIGHT IN YOSEMITE after a day of light rain. Headlights flickered in the dark of the valley floor below as Dan Osman took out his cell phone and called his friends Jim Fritsch and Frank Gambalie. “It’s all set,” he said. “Why aren’t you here? You guys have to do this.” Big storm, they told him. The roads out of Squaw Valley had been closed because of the snow. They wanted to be there, had planned to make the five-hour drive south to watch their friend take the longest, most dangerous plunge he’d ever attempted. Both of them were experienced jumpers. Gambalie was also a high-diving parachutist who’d made hundreds of leaps from bridges, buildings, cliffs, antennae—any lofty place with a landing zone; Fritsch, meanwhile, owned a bungee-jumping operation. But the fall Osman was about to make was beyond BASE or bungee. Dano, as they called him, was about to pitch himself off a rock pillar called Leaning Tower and plunge 1,100 feet tethered only to a climbing rope rigged to stop his fall just 150 feet above the boulder field at the base of the cliff.

Terje Haakonsen

Bobby Julich & Kevin Livingston

Alberto Tomba

Hermann Maier
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Gambalie and Fritsch had taken these prejump calls before, had listened to Osman’s countdown and then to the whistle of the wind as they marked the interval, had imagined the rush of the ground coming up as both of them had experienced many times themselves jumping on Osman’s rigs. Osman himself had used his unique system of ropes, pulleys, and anchors more than a thousand times, and had developed a careful series of safety checks to assure that he and his equipment were ready. This time, however, in the chill of a late-November evening, he seemed hurried. He interrupted the countdown twice. Then, from an angle on the pillar he hadn’t tried before, he leapt. The heavy whisper of the wind through the phone lasted ten, 11, 12 seconds, past what Fritsch and Gambalie knew to be the limit of the rope. The phone went dead.

No problem, thought Gambalie. He imagined the phone cutting out from the impact of the rope coming taut as Dano ran out of slack, bounced, and swung in a wide, jubilant arc at the bottom of the fall. Gambalie called back and was put into Osman’s voice mail. “That was totally rad,” he said. “We’re on our way. Give me a call and let me know how it went.”

At 35 years old, Dan Osman had long since become a famous name in the world of extreme—many would say senseless—risk environment. For close to a decade his bizarre specialty was jumps like the one at Leaning Tower: single-rope plunges from bridges or cliffs that Osman would make for videos and commercials and, more often, just for the sheer hell of it. Though I’d never met him, I’d read about him, seen some magazine pictures—the long dark hair, the gymnast’s body hurtling through the sky like a rag doll. Having taken more than a few unwitting falls on climbing ropes myself, I thought Osman’s deliberate leaps into the void were reckless, nuts, a no-net circus act ultimately bound for catastrophe. My opinion was seconded by this magazine, which in January 1996 published a short but highly critical piece about Osman titled “Really Quite Stupid.”

Osman began his career, not surprisingly, as a climber. His home turf was Cave Rock, the vaulted outside face of a tunnel near Lake Tahoe’s south shore, where he spent years attempting difficult routes that spat him off the wall again and again. After high school he took off for a couple of years in Yosemite and fell comfortably into the lost-boy culture of drifters who live on the rocks during the day, sleep in the dirt at night, scrounge for food and showers, work only enough to earn whatever money it takes to keep them at their sport, and spend long periods away from telephones and mailboxes, outside the catch of ordinary responsibilities. In the mideighties he returned to Tahoe and continued his Peter Pan drift: He climbed and worked construction intermittently; he and his girlfriend had a child and then separated. His friends joked about “Dano Time” when he arrived a few hours or a few days late for appointments. His mother’s childhood nickname for him, “Danny I Forgot,” hung on in the form of unpaid speeding tickets, unregistered vehicles, broken steps to his small cluttered apartment that went unrepaired though he was an accomplished carpenter.

“It disappointed me that he didn’t take care of those things,” says his father, Les Osman, a Japanese-American man who was once a SWAT team cop. “And I finally told him I wouldn’t bail him out when his unpaid tickets landed him in jail. But he never had a lot of money; he was grossly underpaid for the risks he took. He usually earned just enough to take care of his daughter, Emma, and to pay his bills, including his hospital bills. Things like traffic tickets just came last.”</br…[>

BAILING OSMAN OUT OF HIS JAMS often fell to his friends, many of them rock rats like himself, others more attuned to the day-to-day realities of adult life but nonetheless charmed by Osman’s perpetual good nature.

“Whatever rough edges there were got smoothed out by a genuine fondness for the guy,” said Roger Rogalski, a climber and orthopedic surgeon who became Osman’s doctor, as we sat in his south Tahoe office. “He had his demons, sure, but I can’t say a single bad thing about him.”

By the late eighties Osman had made a name for himself as an accomplished rock and ice climber and as a no-ropes free soloist. Rogalski, who treated him mostly for small injuries—broken ribs and ankles—often suspended his payment, and Osman responded by gifting him with jackets and shoes that he had begun to receive from a handful of climbing sponsors. But Osman’s interest in the sport was flagging. In 1989, working with a top rope to put up a 5.13 climb at Cave Rock that he called Phantom Lord, he fell 50 times trying to place a single bolt above a particularly torturous move. In the process he discovered that he was more exhilarated by the falling than the climbing.

“I’m not sure why,” Rogalski said. “Maybe when a couple of the hot French guys came along and did Slayer on sight—a 5.14 route that took Dan a year to put up. Sometime after that he sort of drifted away from serious climbing and got very into the jumping. Most of us thought it was crazy, putting your life in the trust of a rope, but he was a passionate guy, and when his passion for climbing cooled he had to replace it with something. And it wasn’t going to be backgammon.”

Osman took small jumps at first, the length of ordinary climbing falls that could be caught by traditional belays and anchors. Then, as the falls got longer and longer, as he grew confident of the equipment, he began designing complex systems to anchor the lines in a way that would spread the load at impact and allow him to plunge from heights that no one had ever dared to try on climbing ropes. In Yosemite and elsewhere, he gathered groups of climbers to take turns at his new “sport,” sometimes called “body hurling” or, as one oxymoron had it, “controlled free-falling.”

“When I finally did it, my brain just balked,” says Gambalie, 28. “This wasn’t like skydiving, where the ground is never really in perspective, or even like bungee, where you start decelerating long before you get to the bottom. On Dano’s system you got so close to the ground before the rope caught, it really scared me. The rush was just phenomenal, because there was no comfort margin like there is in BASE jumping, no margin for error.”

If anyone needed proof of the zero tolerance for mistakes in Osman-style rope jumps, it came in 1994 at a Utah bridge. Bobby Tarver, a 25-year-old climber, rigged a new set of ropes for a 250-foot jump. Climbing ropes are designed to stretch when fallen on, and Osman always prestretched new ones with a series of short falls to determine their maximum lengths, something that Tarver failed to do, though it was part of the detailed written instructions that Osman had given him. Tarver’s jump stretched the unused rope far enough to slam him into the canyon wall, killing him instantly. His death was chalked up to pilot error, and Osman continued to encourage his friends to try jumping.

“He wanted me to do it, but I wouldn’t,” said climber Ron Kauk. “I was intimidated by it—it’s super scary. It’s against my nature to let go of the rock.”

ON A BRIGHT WINTER DAY NEAR YOSEMITE’S CAMP FOUR, Kauk was scrambling like a spider up the side of a big boulder. We were just out of sight across the valley from the overhanging granite wall of Leaning Tower, which rose 1,300 feet behind the thundering rush of Bridalveil Falls.

Kauk, 41, is a longtime valley local and one of its best climbers, and he and I had known each other since my years as a beginning climber on rocks not far from the trees we were under. I’d never gone much past novice climbs, but when I talked about the special fear I always felt when I was rappelling or otherwise depending entirely on a piece of equipment rather than on my hands and feet, Kauk nodded.

“Dano knew what he was doing, knew more about ropes and rigging than anybody,” he said, “but I didn’t like the idea that others who didn’t know as much might try it. It’s how I felt when John Bachar started free soloing back in the mideighties. I thought it was taking climbing in a direction I didn’t want to see it go.”

Dean Potter, a 26-year-old climber and Camp Four search-and-rescue team member, was working on a nearby boulder. Potter had helped put up the Leaning Tower rig and had jumped with Osman from a valley landmark called The Rostrum. “I did that one jump and I didn’t like it,” he said. “My climbing has always been about control, so throwing myself off the rocks like that—thinking maybe I live, maybe I die—pretty much freaked me out. But Dano was a master at this stuff. He had these elaborate drawings, and while we were working on Leaning Tower, he’d get up all excited in the morning, saying he hadn’t slept all night thinking about the rig.”

Yosemite authorities, not surprisingly, cast a jaundiced eye on Osman’s activities. They had outlawed BASE jumping in the park years earlier, and though what Osman was doing was not illegal, the rangers clearly worried about adding him to their already long list of potential search-and-rescue victims. They were particularly irked by the fact that many of Osman’s jumps were filmed for commercials and adventure videos and photographed for print ads. To them, Osman’s work for the cameras was an open invitation to every adrenaline-addled kid with a climbing rope.

Soon I would get my first look at one of the videos that had made Osman’s jumps famous. It was called Masters of Stone 4, and I couldn’t help but be amused by the warning that opened the film. “If you want a long and happy life,” it read, “don’t attempt the radical activities depicted in this program.”

That’s exactly the kind of caveat that makes dangerous games irresistible to some people, including me. I’ve taken long falls out of airplanes and on bungee cords, I’ve ice-climbed, ski-jumped, and even gone hand-over-hand onto the wing of a biplane, as if for me, neither a long nor a short life could ever be happy without taking a few gratuitous chances. But most of the risky things I’ve done, I’ve done only once, and though they’ve all scared the hell out of me, none of them has put me or the equipment near the breaking point. But watching Dan Osman cartwheeling off high sandstone cliffs and then riding a bicycle and then a skateboard over the brink, I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was trapped in a reach for limits he was most likely to find only in a death fall. It doesn’t matter how well designed and executed a system is, things can go wrong, things that might or might not have anything to do with your abilities. Osman, to my eyes, was flying without a parachute in a plane that had “experimental” stenciled on the tail.

Sadly enough, watching someone in danger has an undeniable magnetism to it, and if the many TV shows and commercials built around such thrill scenes are any evidence, our appetite for seeing other people do things that might kill or cripple them is insatiable. And though it’s often called sick, I’ve always considered it just a vivid way of thinking about death, a no-risk look down the dark hole that all of us eventually fall into. But to keep us tuned in, the athletes who star in these video moments have to push further toward the deadly edge every time out. Osman, at age 35, was caught in the hard choice between the nerve it takes to keep going higher, faster, closer to the invisible line between life and death and the very different kind of courage it takes to step back from the game, from the adulation, and figure out what you’re going to do with the rest of your life.

Osman arrived in Yosemite late last October determined to make a record-breaking jump. With the help of several friends, he rigged anchors and lines to the Leaning Tower rocks. The rig consisted of a 1,200-foot Tyrolean traverse, a thick line strung like a tightrope, between the tower and a smaller outcrop called Fifi Buttress. The jump line was fastened near the tower side of the traverse so that he would fall away from the rocks. Osman made his first leap on 600 feet of rope, and over the course of a week the jumps got longer—750, 800, 850, 900 feet.

ON OCTOBER 26, just as Osman was preparing for another jump, he got a cell phone call from his 12-year-old daughter, Emma, who lives in Gardnerville with her mother. She was crying, worried about him, she said, and he responded without hesitation. He told his friends he had to leave, got in his truck, and headed off to be with her. Osman was by all accounts dedicated to Emma and concerned that his high jinks put her in a precarious spot that she had not chosen. He talked about his anxieties in Andrew Todhunter’s book about him, the breathlessly titled Fall of the Phantom Lord, published in 1998 before the Leaning Tower jump. “By dying,” Osman said, “I would be letting everybody down—my family, my friends … My daughter will manage, she’ll be okay … but I’d be robbing her.”

Two days later, as he arrived back in the Valley, he was confronted and taken into custody by park rangers. The arrest had nothing to do with his jumps; rather, he was charged with a loose-end collection of Danny-I-Forgot offenses that had multiplied and festered as the result of his chronic inattention to the nagging details of everyday life, including driving with a suspended license (a federal misdemeanor because he was in a national park), a state felony for having failed to register for probation, and a state misdemeanor for unpaid traffic tickets. He was held in the Yosemite jail for 14 days—its only prisoner for most of that time—while friends and family raised money and pledged collateral to post the $1,500 federal and $21,000 state bonds.

He was released to his sister and brother-in-law, who took him back to Reno, where he spent time with Emma and filmmaker-friend Eric Perlman, who had offered his house against bail and who now suggested to Osman that it was time for him to get his life in order.

“I told him, ‘You’ve gone far enough, pushed it probably farther than it should be pushed. Nobody’s going to touch this one for a long time. Take the rig down, show the judge you’re serious, that you’re playing by the rules here,'” says Perlman, who filmed Masters of Stone 4, among other Osman videos. “And he agreed absolutely. He said, ‘You know, you’re right. It’s what I should do. And my guardian angels need a break anyway. They’ve been working overtime for me.'”

Despite Osman’s acquiescence, Perlman sensed a dour restlessness in his friend. “He was depressed as hell after all that time alone in jail,” he says. “And when he got back to Yosemite and saw all the hard work and creativity it had taken to put up the rig…” Perlman’s voice trails off.

Osman called his friend Miles Daisher on Wednesday, November 18, and said he needed a ride to Yosemite so he could take the rig down; the rangers had threatened to confiscate it. The two of them left late on the 20th, arrived the next day, and climbed to the tower that night. But the following afternoon, instead of removing the rig, Osman made a 925-foot jump on ropes that had been hanging in intermittent rain and snow for more than a month.

“I asked him about that,” says Daisher, “because I’d heard that rope loses strength when it gets wet. He said it did lose a little but that these ropes were the kind they use on Everest, that they were designed to hold up in wet, freezing conditions, that they’d be fine. So he jumped, and it was a good one, no problem. Then I jumped, and it was great. We were having a blast.”

That night the two of them shopped for food at the village store and chatted with friends about the record jump Osman intended for the next day. There was no talk about dismantling the rig.

At 4:15 on the afternoon of the 23d, Daisher made a jump and lowered himself to the ground with rope carried in a waist pack. When he got back to the tower at about 5:30, he found Osman hurrying to reset the rig, trying to beat the encroaching darkness to make his grand jump.

“I had a bad feeling about it,” says Daisher. “He was jumping from a different angle than we usually did, which meant he had to jump over the retrieval line, which he wasn’t even going to be able to see, as dark as it was by then. And he’d added 75 feet to the rope, which was about three times more than he usually added from one jump to the next. So he was jumping on a thousand feet of line, which meant he was going to be only about 150 feet off the ground when he stopped. I was really skeptical. I kept saying, ‘I don’t think so, Dano, I don’t like this.'”

OSMAN ASSURED HIM THAT ALL WAS SET and then took out his phone and called Fritsch and Gambalie, snowed in at Squaw Valley. “This is it,” he told them, “I’m going big.” He put the phone in a case on his chest and began his countdown. Then he stopped. “You got the spot?” he asked Daisher, who was crouched on the rock, ready to throw a coiled length of the jump line once Osman went over the cliff. “Got it,” said Daisher. Osman began another countdown but stopped again and asked into the phone, “Did you guys say something?” No, they told him, go for it, and this time he finished the count and flew from the rock.

“I watched his headlamp disappearing into the dark,” says Daisher, “going and going, and in about ten seconds I saw the rope straighten, heard it start to whip—what Dano called flossing the sky—but it didn’t make the full whipping sound. Then I heard him yell—’Ahhhhhh’—and a crash like a tree had broken in half, and I thought, ‘Holy shit, he’s swung into one of them.’ I pictured him down there hanging from a limb, injured and bloody. I yelled to him, got on the radio. Nothing. Quiet. Then I started freaking.”

Daisher rappelled to the base as fast as he could and followed the beam of his headlamp through the rocks and trees until he finally saw the ragged rope end dangling from branches above him. Then he spotted Osman, lying peacefully on his side. He checked for a pulse and, when he found none, sprinted off through the boulder field to a parking lot pay phone where he made a panicked call to Fritsch. “Dano’s dead,” he said, crying. “He’s on the ground, I just saw him, he’s dead.”

Fritsch and Gambalie told him they’d be there as fast as they could, and Daisher called 911 to report the accident. A coroner arrived with rangers who started toward the scene but turned back because of the slippery going over rain-soaked boulders. A while later they phoned Dean Potter at search and rescue and asked him to find the body and camp next to it overnight to ward off bears and coyotes.

Three weeks later, the rig was still hanging between the tower and Fifi Buttress, as was a long section of the broken jump line. Park authorities were involved in an investigation that was taking longer than Osman’s friends thought it should, and in December a group of them retrieved the upper sections of the jump line and sent it to Black Diamond Equipment for analysis. The results, which they have since submitted to the Park Service, postulate a theory that seems to indicate not system failure but human error: In short, Osman had failed to realize that changing his jump angle would ultimately place an unbearable load on one of the knots that connected the ropes of his jump line. The rangers, who are still working on their report, have not yet confirmed the cause of the accident.

A memorial service was held on November 28 at Cave Rock. Osman’s ashes were scattered over Lake Tahoe while more than 200 of his friends stood in the cold, snowy wind to speak loving words, place flowers, and organize a benefit and a memorial fund for Emma. And to absorb the shock of a death that shouldn’t have shocked them at all.

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