Down in the draw, shadows swallowed footing, and the big deputy behind me carrying a heavy M14 stumbled and slipped and nearly toppled over. Unseen but heard, a California Air National Guard surveillance plane buzzed overhead. We halted in a meadow bright with moonlight; a game warden with a brushy mustache and a 12-gauge shotgun took cover by a Douglas fir. Another man, wearing a balaclava and carrying an M4 assault rifle painted with what appeared to be a cannabis leaf, crouched behind a scrub oak. An earpiece crackled. We crept back into the woods, and the trail grew steep. In the darkness, we felt our way forward like blind men in a new room.

A pot plant growing on public land

A BLM ranger inspecting a growers' camp

Members of the Full Court Press raid team, just after dawn

Sheriff Tom Allman

Short-hauling team members out of the woods

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As the sky turned violet, there were signs of other men: a can of salsa, a camping cup, the smell of shit. Farther on we saw four black hoses running from a tarp-lined pit into the woods like snakes from a pond—the growers’ water source. It was now full morning, and we stopped. “I’ve raided gardens where they were still drunk on Patrón at 9 a.m.,” the man in the balaclava whispered. “They didn’t hear us coming.” We moved down a hill, then back up. And here, finally, were the marijuana plants: hundreds of them, scattered over the south face of a hill, dazzling green in the morning light. They were no taller than a man’s knee, with buds the size of bottle caps. The man in the balaclava pointed to a path winding into the manzanita. “It’s their camp,” he hissed. Then he charged into the trees with his M4 raised, screaming, “Policía! Policía!”

Several hours earlier, I had set out in the dark with a dozen cops from the Mendocino County SWAT team and various other branches of law enforcement, on a mission to raid a large marijuana-growing operation concealed on public land near Northern California’s Mendocino National Forest. Tough, stout men, they were equipped like Navy SEALs—night-vision goggles, Kevlar vests, assault rifles—but more accustomed to busting down doors than running covert ops. As we moved forward, many chugged liked steam engines over the forest’s corrugated terrain. Sending lawmen out on nighttime wilderness raids to reclaim public lands was a recent escalation in the war on drugs—and not a particularly safe one, considering the armed and dangerous quarry.

According to Forest Service officials, White House drug reports, and articles published everywhere from right-wing blogs to , well-armed Mexican drug gangs were cultivating illegal pot farms on public land across California—many reputedly tied to bloody groups like the Zetas and the Sinaloa Cartel. According to many of these same sources, they had moved north in the wake of 9/11, when tighter security hampered cross-border drug smuggling. In fact, scant evidence exists to support the cartel theory, but there’s no doubt that Mendocino’s woods are full of Mexican growers. They’ve been operating in federally managed forests throughout California since at least the late 1990s, and though some money and men appear to flow back and forth across the border, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration believes public-land pot farms are run by small, independent Mexican drug gangs based in the U.S., often using illegal immigrants for labor.

These drug-trafficking organizations—DTOs, in DEA lingo—are responsible for much violence and environmental damage in the Golden State’s backcountry. Over the past decade or so, illegal growers in various parts of the state have taken Bureau of Land Management biologists hostage and fired on hikers and sheriff’s deputies. According to media reports, they’ve also fired on park rangers, game wardens, and kayakers. In 2010, more than 4.5 million marijuana plants were grown on federal land, the vast majority of them in California. The crop was worth approximately $11 billion on the street—the annual GDP of a midsize former Soviet satellite state.

In no place is the situation worse than around the , which is home to probably dozens of illegal pot farms at any given time. Long and narrow like a giant chile pepper, the “Mendo” contains almost a million undefended acres that abound with readily accessible water, south-facing slopes, and good roads and nearby highways for easy transport. In 2010, authorities found huge quantities of marijuana in the environs around Mendocino County—which encompasses a large swath of the forest, BLM land, Indian reservations, and towns like Willits, Ukiah, and Fort Bragg—than the DEA found in more than 35 other states combined: over half a million plants worth nearly $1.5 billion.

The potential for so much profit has made the backcountry contested territory, with growers menacing deer hunters and firing warning shots at ranchers. In 2006, Robert Corey Want and Ivan Tillotson, Jr., two members of a local Native American tribe, were shot to death by Mexican growers cultivating a pot farm on the tribe’s reservation. Two years later, in Lake County (which covers part of the Mendocino forest), a county supervisor named Rob Brown discovered two acres of hidden gardens—including one that had been booby-trapped with sharp punji sticks—scattered about his 300-acre property.

Many fearful locals have simply abandoned long-cherished trails and camping spots, and deadly firefights between growers and Mendocino cops have increased. In July 2010, a sheriff’s deputy shot and killed a 24-year-old grower named Angel Hernandez-Farias during a raid in the woods. Three weeks later, Mendocino deputies raided another remote garden and killed a grower wielding a rifle. Two more growers were killed during raids in nearby counties that summer, an unprecedented level of violence in what had once been a peaceable enclave of hippies, pear farmers, and mountain recluses.

In August 2010, long-latent civic fury spilled into the open at a county board of supervisors meeting that took place in Covelo, a tiny hardscrabble town bordering the Mendocino forest and itself notorious for producing prodigious amounts of pot. A fish-and-game commissioner named Paul Trouette, who’d just spent three days in the woods, reported seeing “carloads of Hispanic cartel-type vehicles flooding the roadways.” A store owner claimed the forest was under “armed foreign invasion.” Two ranchers and a teacher said growers had shot at them. Shaking with rage, another rancher demanded that supervisors declare a state of emergency and use the National Guard to clear the forest, a move without precedent in U.S. history.

“It’s an occupation,” said the rancher, Chris Brennan. “I’ve been shot at. They’re wiping out our deer. They’re poisoning the bears. We might as well change the name to Cartel National Forest.”

Facing a near revolt, Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman, a shrewd, gregarious man not immune to the warm glow of media attention, pledged to wage war in his own forest during the 2011 summer growing season. Not long after the Covelo meeting, Allman was knocking on politicians’ doors in Washington to secure money and material for the largest anti-pot operation in California history. Full Court Press, as he dubbed it, would harness the might of the nation’s massive drug-eradication apparatus: 300 police officers, soldiers, and agents from the DEA, the BLM, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Forest Service, six local sheriff’s offices, and more than a dozen other agencies; a squadron of Black Hawk helicopters and surveillance planes; satellite imagery and intelligence analysts; and a gauntlet of roving patrols to catch any growers foolish enough to try to flee the long arm of Mendocino’s sheriff.

“It’s high noon,” Allman told me when I met him at the start of operations, in July 2011. “We’re tired of losing our tourism dollars, tired of losing our hunters, tired of losing our natural resources, our water and wildlife. These people are shitting in our backyard. We’re going to kick ass.”

Sheriff Allman has a respectable paunch, a cop mustache, and eyes like blue sea glass. He’s been a lawman for 31 years and an elected official for six, conducting Mendocino’s police business from a desk cluttered with massifs of paper and a forearm-size artillery shell. A framed photograph of the cast of The Untouchables hangs on his office wall, signed by Kevin Costner. Allman, 51, is more like Sean Connery’s street-smart beat cop, however. He’s a tough, smart guy who’s been around: he served as a police trainer in Kosovo during the nineties, and unlike most police officers, he likes to quote Voltaire.

Also unlike most police officers, Allman doesn’t think all pot growing is bad. Among his more creative acts is a program he devised in 2009 to put the sheriff’s stamp of approval on the growing of certain kinds of marijuana on private land. The rationale for his plan dated back to 1996, when Californians passed Proposition 215, which allowed residents to cultivate and possess pot for medical use. The law lets each county set its own standards about how much is permissible, and Mendocino’s were liberal: 25 plants for anyone with a doctor’s recommendation and 99 for a medical cooperative. (Then as now, the feds still considered the drug illegal.) But Allman went further. In his plan, any grower with a doctor’s note was permitted to buy numbered zip ties from the sheriff’s office. The ties were affixed to the base of the plants, giving deputies an easy way to tell legitimate operations from otherwise. And in Mendocino, there was a lot of otherwise.

After Prop 215 passed, California’s medical-marijuana market morphed into a complex farrago of doctor-sanctioned growers, tillers who had a doctor’s note to grow but sold some of their product on the black market, and clandestine farmers operating wholly outside the law. In 2005, a local paper in Mendocino estimated that marijuana cultivation accounted for about two-thirds of the regional economy—some $1.5 billion a year. With the right wind, I could smell the skunky-sweet tang of the county’s most lucrative crop wafting over my hotel balcony in Ukiah, Mendocino’s county seat.

In Allman’s thinking, the zip ties imposed some order on the chaos: small growers operating in accordance with county law were brought into the open, which freed his department to focus on serious crime and larger, illegal operations. “Twenty-five plants and we don’t even land a helicopter,” Allman told me at his office in Ukiah. “I know Republicans—who would vote for Nixon if he were alive—who have 25 plants in their yard.”

It was a tricky position for a man with a badge. Allman was licensing some growers while launching a massive paramilitary assault on others, a contorted enforcement strategy probably adopted by no other lawman in the U.S. (In the fall of 2011, following a DEA raid on a prominent local cooperative and legal threats against the county from the U.S. attorney, Allman stopped selling zip ties to the 99-plant cooperatives.) For him, though, the line was clear: the real enemy was in the woods.

“This isn’t medical marijuana,” Allman told me. “This is public land. We have fifth-generation tourists telling us they won’t come here because the forests aren’t safe. I go shopping at night and see people with multiple grocery carts full of refried beans, tortillas, and rice. These are not locals. They came for one reason: to make their million dollars. Do they give it a second thought to leave their garbage or use pesticides to make their marijuana bigger? They don’t, because to them this is just a place to grow.”

Not long after talking with Allman, I met John Pinches, a rancher from nearby Laytonville and a Mendocino County supervisor. Pinches, 60, is bald, round like a snowman, and partial to belt buckles the size of salad plates. Politically conservative, he favors legalization but views the forest growers as a scourge. As a supervisor, he proposed a ban on the transporting of supplies like plastic irrigation tubing—critical for remote pot gardens—into the Mendocino forest. Manned checkpoints would enforce the ban and, in his reckoning, eliminate 90 percent of illegal growing. The idea had received a lukewarm reception by the Forest Service, Pinches told me. His view was that the agency didn’t want to invest the manpower.

“They’re sitting on their butts in their shiny green pickups, not out in the forest,” he said. “This is about your local citizenry—pot grower, metalworker, or bartender—taking back our national forest. We’ve had enough.”

Criticism of the Forest Service is common in this area. Most clandestine pot is grown on the agency’s land, but the service, undermanned and underfunded, is not equipped to adequately patrol its own territory or run backwoods enforcement operations. In 2009, agency officials ham-handedly warned visitors to “hike out quickly” if they encountered campers with tortillas and Tecate beer who were listening to Spanish-language music—because they might be armed marijuana growers.

Not surprisingly, Forest Service officials say they’re making a serious effort. “We’re doing everything we can to make sure we’re putting bodies toward the biggest issue—and the biggest issue here in California is marijuana,” Scott Harris, the special agent in charge of the Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest region, told me right before a cops-only Full Court Press meeting in Ukiah.

“If you go back four years, we probably had half the staff on the Mendocino that we have now,” said Lee Johnson, the forest’s district ranger. “We’re starting to become more concerned, and law enforcement was really beefed up to address the marijuana issue.”

Pinches wasn’t the only fed-up local. Several days later, in the cafĂ© of Ukiah’s Safeway, I met with Paul Trouette, the fish-and-game commissioner who had warned county supervisors of seeing “cartel-type activity” in the forest. Stocky and lank haired, Trouette ran a local juice-and-coffee bar and had recently formed a volunteer group to clean up old marijuana gardens in Mendocino’s backcountry.

A 50,000-plant pot farm—unheard-of a decade ago but common now—is an environmental bomb. Illegal forest growers raze acres of trees and siphon enormous volumes of water. They spray plants with toxic pesticides and lace the land with arsenic-based bait to kill off bud-munching animals. Restoring each site costs an average of $15,000, an expense borne by taxpayers.

So far, Trouette and his 15 volunteers had reclaimed two remote sites in the Mendocino forest, bagging up nearly half a ton of garbage, gardening gear, and camping equipment and airlifting it out with a helicopter. But Trouette’s group differs from most conservation outfits in one important respect: they carry assault rifles. Several volunteers are ex-cops, and there’s a hazmat expert and a booby-trap specialist on the team. Trouette said local authorities support his efforts. I asked what would happen if they encountered a well-armed gang of growers.

“We don’t want to give the impression that we’re some vigilante group,” he said. “We recon trash sites.” But, Trouette acknowledged, “we’ve had standoffs. We’re not looking for that, but we’re not backing down. This is our land. We want to be able to take our families out and recreate on it. We want our fish to be there. We want our deer to be there. We are not taking this any longer. If you’re in this country illegally, wonderful, enjoy it. But if you’re committing felonies and intimidating us, be sure that you will be engaged one way or the other.”

Several groups like his are operating in Mendocino’s forest, Trouette said, and they are “taking care of the situation.” Then he scanned the Safeway suspiciously. “Every illegal alien here is probably connected somewhere,” he said. Most of the shoppers appeared to be husky mothers towing small shoals of children. An elderly woman sat at the table next to us with her grandchild. “It’s sketchy,” Trouette said. “I could be gunned down right on the roadside.”

To accompany a Full Court Press team on a night raid, I rode with a sheriff’s deputy to the Golden Ram, a sprawling hunting ranch bordering the Mendocino forest. It was well after midnight when we pulled into an open field jammed with police cruisers. An encampment of military tents, Porta Potties, and a truck-size generator was set up at the field’s far edge. In the headlights of a sheriff’s SUV, a dozen cops in camo and Kevlar filled CamelBaks and chambered rounds into M4s. Several others studied maps of the site, which had been pinpointed using aerial flyovers and satellite imagery. Most were from the Mendocino SWAT team—meaty, mustachioed, well armed—but a BLM ranger with a floppy jungle hat would act as the group’s navigator. Off to one side stood the man in the balaclava.

“You guys know about that pink shit they’re putting in the water, right?” a SWAT cop asked. “You’re dead within a half hour.”

“What’s the pink stuff?” I asked.

“Deadly,” he replied. “It’s coming out of Mexico. If you see a lot of dead animals, stay away.”

“Las manos arriba,” another cop said. “That’s all I got to remember.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Show me your hands.”

Soon we set out in a five-truck convoy, kicking up clouds of dust so thick that the vehicle in front was invisible except for the dim wink of brake lights. I rode with Mike Davis, a sergeant with the sheriff’s office, and a 92-pound police dog named Dutch. The dog’s exploits were legendary. Dutch had once been stabbed in the throat with a sharp stick while subduing a marijuana grower.

“The guys we deal with are the lowest rung on the ladder,” he explained as we bumped along. “They come out here in early spring and they’re guerrilla growing. Their boss’ll show up once a week in a minivan—nice new cowboy hat and chrome-toed boots—and there’ll be a designated time and place. He’ll pull over and throw things out while his guys jump out of the brush and grab the tortillas and eggs. These guys are really athletic. They’ll have a several-mile circuit of mini-grows and multiple camps within that circuit.

“What we’ve done since I’ve been a cop is buzz them with a helicopter and give them time to bug out,” Davis continued. “Then you drop in and whack-and-stack the plants. The public is telling us, ‘We want our public lands back.’ Well, going after these guys is dangerous. You bump into someone at close range in the manzanita and they swing around with an AK-47—you don’t have much time to figure out if he’s not going to shoot you because you’re a police officer.”

The convoy soon pulled off the road. The men piled out, checked rifles, and flicked on night-vision goggles. The plan was to follow a trail over several miles of rugged, descending terrain to reach two marijuana gardens on BLM land bordering the Mendocino forest. After reconning the site, the raid team would move in before sunrise and arrest the growers. If all went well, no one would get shot. When it was over, the raid team would be short-hauled out of the woods in pairs, an extraction technique that involves dangling from a cable beneath a helicopter.

One issue remained: despite the advance intelligence work, no one knew how many growers there were—or how well armed they might be. “If something happens, become the ground,” whispered Bob Farrell, the game warden with the shotgun.

The men moved slowly down the trail. The forest was strangely perfumed, like an incense-heavy chapel, and in the moonlight I could make out the silhouettes of tall pines and Douglas firs. The National Guard plane flew high overhead, tracking our movement. Scrabbling down a steep ravine, the deputy behind me slipped on a slick knuckle of rock. Then I felt his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t give us away,” he whispered, pointing at the orange light on my audio recorder.

Two hours later, the sky above the trees had turned the color of milk. The trunks of manzanitas, ruffled like prom dresses, were visible. When we finally found the camp, I braced myself for gunfire, but none came. It quickly became obvious that the growers had disappeared into the forest.

Soon, walking around the deserted camp, I saw that the inhabitants had lashed cheap sleeping bags to tree trunks to make raised beds. Food wrappers, cigarette packs, and cooking pans littered the ground. Wet tortillas and eggs rotted in a mesh pouch tied to a tree. Balaclava Man pulled back a blanket from one of the beds and a plump brown rat scurried out, dropped to the ground, and ran into the underbrush. Another lay nearby, its head crushed in a metal trap.

Everything here had been hauled in by men, a grim march over miles of rugged terrain that culminated in a six-month gig on a squalid patch of ground, there to water weeds. The occupants, judging the camp unworthy of defense, would be back, either here or somewhere else: clandestine growers often returned to the same sites time after time.

The BLM ranger jotted something in his notebook and kicked over a fertilizer bucket. Then we walked down the trail to meet the helicopter. “They got spooked,” a cop said as we waited on a nearby hillside. The men were sprawled in the dirt, their gear in messy piles. A SWAT member grumbled about overtime. Another complained about his back.

Nearly all the pot plants had been left standing, though members of a whack-and-stack team—mostly seasonal hires—were said to be short-hauling in later. Before long I could hear the beat of the helicopter’s rotors. It came in low and hovered overhead, blowing the manzanitas flat and ferrying out the men and Dutch, now muzzled and looking displeased. When my turn came, I hooked into the steel cable and held on tight as the forest dropped beneath my boots.

Soon after the raid, I drove to the county airport in Ukiah to ride along on a Full Court Press pot-spotting run. As I pulled in, a Black Hawk helicopter scythed off toward dun-colored hills, and a military-green Kiowa was warming up on the tarmac. The pilot, Josh McMinn, a young ginger-haired chief warrant officer with the California National Guard, had flown two combat tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. He and his copilot, Captain Pete Faeth, were accomplished spotters, though McMinn had the more expert eye. As we took off and zipped over Ukiah, he pointed out pot gardens below.

“There’s a 215 grow,” he shouted, using shorthand for medical marijuana. Twenty plants sat nestled in a clearing of brush and scrub oak, tall as Christmas trees and lined up in fussy rows. Farther on, McMinn pointed out some stoner’s personal patch, nestled behind a ranch house, then a cluster tucked among a vineyard’s trellises. Minutes later we circled over a timber company’s property. An entire hillside had been shorn of trees, leaving bare and scorched-looking earth pocked with about 20 plants resembling scabrous hair implants. From high up, Mendocino seemed overrun.

McMinn thought he’d spotted a clandestine garden during a previous mission, and we headed north to find it. The helicopter’s shadow slid over the forest as wind whipped through the doorless Kiowa. Faeth murmured approvingly at a ridgeline trail. During a recent operation, he had stowed his mountain bike in the back of a Chinook to slip off and bang down some singletrack.

“Little bit of G here,” said McKinn, putting the helicopter into a hard turn parallel to the ground. Then he gestured below. At first I saw nothing. Then, like rock outcrops in fog, the plants materialized, verdant blossoms among the forest’s muted colors. It was a professional grow, hundreds of plants expertly hidden amid the trees. More were probably concealed in the surrounding brush.

McMinn kept the Kiowa high, to avoid scaring the growers, and logged the site’s coordinates. Soon, Allman’s raid teams would likely swoop in, adding this garden to Full Court Press’ staggering final tally for summer 2011: 632,058 plants removed from 56 grow sites (significantly more than in the 2010 season), along with 57,000 pounds of trash, 40 miles of irrigation hose, and 38 pistols, assault rifles, and other weapons. Authorities would also arrest 159 growers, nearly all of whom were in the U.S. illegally, and charge them with various marijuana, firearms, and immigration violations.

Once the operation concluded in early August, however, there was a good chance the drug gangs would return to Mendocino’s forest. Or simply move to the next county before getting chased back—what Allman called the ping-pong effect. Mexican DTOs now dominated a segment of the marijuana business previously inhabited by longhairs and other small-timers, bringing capitalist zeal to a seemingly saturation-proof market. They employed scouts, drivers, luncheros (lunchmen) to ferry food and supplies, and armies of trimmers to harvest the crop. They established elaborate base camps, grow sites, and drop-off points for resupply—then spent months dodging police raids and flyovers. Like an entrenched cancer, they thwarted eradication: posting armed guards, planting earlier to avoid police raids. They even tricked plants to flower twice in one season, a bit of horticultural sleight of hand whose precise mechanics mystified law enforcement.

“These guys are growing in places we never anticipated—9,000 feet. It doesn’t even have to be on a south-facing slope,” said Laura Mark, a Forest Service special agent with years of experience investigating pot farms. “They broke the mold. They are also changing their tactics. When we started, they would run like rabbits. The trend now is, not only are they shooting back, they’re posting lookouts and setting up booby traps, some of them to detonate remotely. They’re being told, ‘Guard this at all costs.’ ”

The larger point is this: cultivating marijuana in a place like the Mendocino makes excellent economic sense. Even a mediocre grower can coax a pound of smokeable bud from one plant. At a wholesale rate of about $2,500 per pound, a relatively modest garden with 10,000 plants can gross roughly $25 million. Before night raids, the government deployed helicopters, planes, and heavily armed drug agents. The Forest Service recently dropped $100,000 on two SkySeer UAV drones to detect illegal pot farms. NASA’s built high-tech software that uses GIS data like water location to predict future grow sites. The military has even been brought to bear in numerous states—drug operations being the one exception to the federal Posse Comitatus Act, which bans the military from law enforcement—all to persuade growers to consider less lucrative options. Yet, over the past decade, the amount of marijuana seized on the state’s public lands surged ever higher.

“We have forests, mountains, access to water, Home Depot. It’s just set up for it,” said Brent Wood, a special agent supervisor with California’s Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement (now called the Bureau of Investigation). “Why would you risk transporting high-grade marijuana across the border when all you have to do is grow it, bring it down to the Central Valley, and hand it off to your distribution network? It makes sense. They’re businessmen.”

These businessmen were also expanding eastward. In June 2008, the Forest Service discovered a megafarm with almost 360,000 plants in Tennessee’s , the largest bust ever carried out on federal land. In 2010, authorities arrested 12 Hispanic growers and eradicated a garden containing 50,000 plants in a Wisconsin forest. An internal Forest Service memo reported that same year that Mexican drug gangs were aggressively expanding operations in both Wisconsin and Michigan, and that the agency’s law-enforcement personnel were “dangerously unprepared” for the coming explosive growth.

On a Forest Service map charting this trend over the past decade, it looks like a strong eastward wind had blown millions of marijuana seeds from California across the country. That wind, if you trace its source, would be the almost 17 million pot smokers in America.

On my last dayÌęin California, I went to Fresno to meet the enemy. Though much had been made about the pot growers’ ties to Mexican cartels, neither Sheriff Allman nor Special Agent Wood, who had 15 years’ experience working backcountry pot cases, thought any such connection existed. In Ukiah, Allman had shown me autopsy photos of Angel Hernandez-Farias, the grower killed by his deputy during a raid. Farias’s pale and lifeless body lay on a table, his head turned awkwardly to one side. He had been arrested once before, a felony charge of transporting marijuana. But he also had a young son and worked at a vineyard.

“I don’t think if we gave anyone up here truth serum, they’d say, ‘I’m with the Juárez Cartel,’ ” Allman said. “These are small-time Hispanics brought to America and promised, ‘If you produce a good crop of marijuana, your family will be well compensated.’ ”

Still, much about how these gangs operate remained mysterious. Hoping to get a clearer picture, I arranged to meet a former member of a drug ring called the Magaña family. At their height in 2000, the Magañas—a network of relatives, in-laws, and associates primarily based in Fresno—operated the largest marijuana-growing operation on public land in California: an army of 100 mostly undocumented workers, stash houses with AK-47’s in the windows, and some 20 gardens in national forests from Los Padres to Mendocino. They were also involved in meth production.

The investigation to take down the Magañas, headed by Wood, spanned three years and was the first major case against a criminal organization cultivating marijuana on federal land—backcountry pot’s patient zero. It involved recorded phone calls, undercover drug buys, anonymous informants, and aerial surveillance. “Task forces were formed because of that case,” Wood said.

Inside the California Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement’s featureless one-story building in Fresno, I followed Isaias Rivera, a special agent with a shaved head and an elaborate arm tattoo, into an empty conference room. Rivera would help translate—a diversion from his usual duties, which recently had included posing as a hit man to snare a prison guard wishing to have his girlfriend killed. Soon a man in his late sixties walked into the room. He wore a white Stetson, cowboy boots, and a blue-striped western shirt stretched over an ample gut. He spoke softly. When I asked what he preferred to be called in print, he thought for a moment and said, “JesĂșs.”

Like many illegal growers in California, JesĂșs was from MichoacĂĄn, a state in southwestern Mexico legendary for marijuana cultivation. Initially, JesĂșs said, he came to America to make a better life for himself, first working at a vineyard and then ferrying laborers to job sites in a small fleet of station wagons. By 1999, Juan and Jose Luis Magaña, brothers and illegal aliens who ran the family’s drug business, were cultivating pot on public lands across California. The Magañas offered JesĂșs a job as a lunchero, using his station wagons to ferry food to backcountry drop points. For this he earned about $300 a week. JesĂșs said he also supplied workers to tend two gardens but refused to work in the forest himself. That first year, JesĂșs estimated, the Magañas operated some 50 gardens with about 5,000 plants each. That would put the family’s gross revenue for the season at somewhere around $350 million.

“MłÜłŠłóŽÇ,” JesĂșs replied when I asked if he had reservations about entering the drug business. “I knew it was wrong and constantly fought with myself about it. I was broke and didn’t have any money. I told myself if I did pretty good, I would quit in a year.”

Instead of quitting, however, he began transporting pot from drop-off points in the mountains to stash houses around the Central Valley. “I start bringing down the weed and, man, that’s $30,000 I’m making right here,” JesĂșs said. “This is easy money.” But the Magañas cheated him, JesĂșs claimed, paying only $15,000. Now hoping to rise in the family’s ranks, he had also begun managing two gardens, one of which was in the Mendo. But after the Magañas sold the pot from JesĂșs’s gardens that year, they offered only $27,000, far below market value. I asked JesĂșs whether by this point he’d begun to consider himself a criminal.

“Never in my life did I feel that way,” he replied. “I told myself this was the last time. When they came up with the $27,000, I told myself never again. I was going to get a job like the old days.”

Wood’s team was moving in by then. They had orchestrated undercover drug buys and received crucial information from anonymous sources, including how the family transported drug money to Mexico in the hidden compartment of a car. In August 2000, drug agents raided a Magaña garden in the Sierra National Forest and killed a grower. In September, they took out two more gardens. A month later, Wood’s team moved in and arrested 30 people connected with the Magañas’ operation. They came for JesĂșs at 7 a.m. on a Saturday, arresting him at his house with $350,000 in cash and 38 pounds of meth.

JesĂșs spent two years in prison but eventually cooperated with the federal government. Today he’s retired and has four children in the U.S., several others in Mexico, and enough grandchildren that he had difficulty counting them all. JesĂșs claimed to have left the drug business—mostly.

“I have quite the sun,” JesĂșs said of his backyard. “So I went to get a permit. They gave me six plants!”

“It’s still illegal with the feds,” Special Agent Rivera said.

“It’s still illegal with the feds,” JesĂșs agreed, smiling.

The room was quiet for a moment. I asked JesĂșs whether he thought it would be possible to stop people like the Magañas from growing marijuana on public lands. He paused for several seconds to consider the question.

“To tell you the truth, I see it as impossible,” he replied. Then he thought for a few seconds. “Gente con hambre, todo el tiempo,” he said. Translated, this meant there would always be hungry people looking for food. More figuratively, Rivera explained, what JesĂșs meant was that growing marijuana in the woods involved so little risk and such great reward that only a fool would walk away.

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ON OCTOBER 14, 2011, the board of directors of the , the 107-year-old adventurers’ fraternity, gathered at an upscale establishment in St. Louis called the Racquet Club. One of the meeting’s purposes was to select the winner of the annual Explorers Medal, the club’s highest honor, which in the past had gone to legendary figures like Roald Amundsen and Sir Edmund Hillary. Before voting, the board’s 16 members would be given a list of finalists compiled by the Flag and Honors committee, an appointed group that bestows most of the awards and includes explorers like Don Walsh, who in 1960 teamed with Jacques Piccard to make the first and only submersible descent 35,789 down to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

Lorie Karnath

Lorie Karnath

Board member Josh Bernstein

Board member Josh Bernstein

Honorary president and Karnath rival Don Walsh

Honorary president and Karnath rival Don Walsh

By the time the board convened, one member already knew the names of the finalists: president Lorie Karnath, a 52-year-old German businesswoman who took the club’s helm in 2009. As president, Karnath sits on both the board and the Flag and Honors committee. The night before the meeting, she’d spoken with Flag and Honors vice president Constance Difede, asking for the finalists’ names. It was an unusual request—committee members vote in secret, and in the past only the VP had seen the list of finalists. But no rule was being broken, so Difede shared the names.

What followed was a shock: Karnath proposed that the board move into a closed session and, together with another director, accused the Flag and Honors committee of bias. She was followed by Fred McLaren, a 79-year-old club member and former Navy submarine commander who had mapped parts of the Siberian coast in 1970 and has long coveted the Explorers Medal.

McLaren argued his case with rĂ©sumĂ© in hand and, according to some officials, made it clear that he had knowledge about the committee’s deliberations—even going so far as to reference Walsh’s confidential reservations about McLaren’s bona fides. (The committee had recommended that the medal go to Philip Currie, a leading Canadian paleontologist.) McLaren also accused Walsh, who is the club’s honorary president—a title conferred on him in 2008 as a sort of lifetime achievement award—of using favoritism to bestow a lesser honor on a friend, a charge the board didn’t pursue.

“The Flag and Honors committee is like the Supreme Court,” says David Concannon, a scuba diver and former committee member. “It’s the group that makes sure the club remains true to its principles. If you’re going to give someone an award today, they better be up to the same standards as Robert Peary was a century ago. Fred showed up with his rĂ©sumĂ©, and with knowledge of the internal communications regarding his nomination, and proceeded to blast the committee.”

It was no secret that Karnath and McLaren were close. He often advised her about club business, and she occasionally referred to him as “my guardian angel.” Several board and committee members, including Concannon, suspected that Karnath had leaked committee e-mails to him, a charge that both McLaren and Karnath deny. According to the president, “I didn’t lobby for him at all. I played no part in him getting his medal. He wasn’t nominated by me.”

Still, whatever McLaren did, it worked. In a majority vote, the board eventually decided to award two Explorers Medals: one to Currie and another to McLaren. Both are scheduled to be handed out March 17 at the club’s annual dinner, a big-ticket event at the Waldorf Astoria hotel that coincides with the club’s annual presidential election. Asked about the unusual decision to award a joint medal—it’s happened just seven times before—Karnath says, “Our problem is not that we’re awarding a medal to someone who doesn’t deserve it. Our problem is we don’t have enough medals for people who deserve them.”Ìę

For some, the episode was a breaking point. A number of club officials had been upset with Karnath for a while, stewing over what they call a capricious management style that has alienated members and sponsors alike. Karnath’s critics—including Walsh, Concannon, and board member Josh Bernstein, a former host of shows on History and the Discovery Channel—decided that she’d gone too far, threatening the integrity of the institution. According to officials, Karnath later asked Difede to reveal how each member of the Flag and Honors committee had voted—a charge Karnath denies.

On December 3, 10 of 12 committee members—everyone but Karnath and her husband, Robert Roethenmund, a Berlin real estate developer—threatened to quit in protest if the president didn’t address their concerns. Karnath promptly accepted their resignations, the start of a months-long feud that would grow to include , competing allegations of tyranny and jealousy, and a power struggle that could culminate at this year’s election.Ìę

“We were essentially fired for standing up,” says Concannon, who has left the club entirely. “What she did to the Flag and Honors committee was disgraceful. She’s rewarding her political cronies with medals.

“The bottom line,” he says, “is that the Explorers Club brand has been cheapened.”

THIS ISN’T THE FIRST power struggle at the Explorers Club. Founded in Manhattan in 1904, the club served as a hub for gentleman adventurers during the golden age of modern exploration. The first president, Adolphus W. Greely, led the 1881 Lady Franklin Bay Expedition to the Arctic, which ended in a new farthest-north record as well as multiple deaths by starvation among Greely’s support team. According to club lore, the second and third presidents, rival Arctic explorers Frederick Cook and Robert Peary, sometimes got into fights at board meetings.

Back then, the club was the pinnacle of the American adventure scene, and it had global influence. Peary, Amundsen, Hillary, Ernest Shackleton, and Charles Lindbergh were all members. The iconic red, white, and blue Explorers Club flag accompanied several important expeditions well into the middle of the 20th century—with Thor Heyerdahl in 1947 on his Kon-Tiki expedition and into space in 1970 with the Apollo 13 astronauts.Ìę

In the 1970s, with virtually all the world’s firsts bagged and tagged, the club began to slip from prominence. It had a calcified image, partly because it didn’t admit women until 1981. These days, its $175,000 expedition budget pales in comparison with companies like the North Face and organizations like the National Geographic Society. Top adventurers like alpinist Conrad Anker and kayaker Scott Lindgren have let their Explorers Club memberships lapse. Even now, however, the iconic flag has cachet: carrying the red-and-blue on your first ascent in the Himalayas can translate into backing from corporate sponsors like Eddie Bauer.Ìę

Now the nearly 3,000-member Explorers Club has 19 chapters in the U.S. and six more around the world, from Poland to China. Slightly more than half the club’s $1.5 million annual budget comes from membership dues. Not just anyone can get in—you have to be nominated by a current member—but you don’t have to be Edmund Hillary to join up, either. Many on the rolls are wealthy travelers. All elected and appointed positions, including the president, are voluntary. The average age is 65, giving real meaning to the phrase old boys’ club.

Karnath, it should be noted, is not the first president to butt heads with the club’s healthy egos. In 2002, Richard Wiese, a former model and TV host, was elected president—at 42, the youngest in club history—partly to freshen up the place. Among other changes, Wiese revamped the club’s financial structure to attract corporate sponsors. Wiese declined to comment for this story, but in 2006 he told șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű that it had been “an absolute dogfight to take some of these people kicking and screaming into the 21st century.”

When Karnath was elected, in 2009, she became only the second female president in club history, and part of her mandate was to proceed with modernization. Defending her tenure, Karnath points to a refurbished Manhattan headquarters, a new website, and a 20 percent increase in membership since 2008. Most significantly, though, she says she’s raised buckets of money from corporate sponsors, stabilizing a financially tenuous organization in the midst of a recession.

“I’m thrilled with this president,” says Jeff Blumenfeld, the club’s director of communications and editor of . “Years ago there’d be pots and pans out to catch rainwater in the building. This president came in and worked exceptionally hard to raise money to renovate it.”

The child of globe-trotting parents, Karnath joined the club in 1989 and was elected to the board in 2006. Her adventure bona fides were modest compared with, say, Walsh’s: a plane-hopping expedition to the North Pole, a trip to establish a white-stork sanctuary in Germany, a survey of flora and fauna in Borneo. What she had instead was extensive experience as an investment banker at firms like Credit Suisse. The fact that she was only 48 when she was elected also helped. The board has reelected her both years since she became president—and no one has even bothered to run against her.

“I’ve raised the money,” Karnath says. “I’ve increased the membership numbers. I’ve done all this in a very short amount of time. This whole story is really about transition. We’re transitioning into the 21st century. Some people adapt to change faster than others.”

She framed the Flag and Honors episode as a temporary flap, saying that all committee members had been invited back to their posts—but also noting that a little turnover might be good for the place. “Some of those people will be staying on that committee,” she says, “and some will be leaving.”

According to her supporters, she’s a strong leader who gets things done and ruffles a few feathers along the way. “We do have a couple of people who have trouble having a female boss,” says McLaren. “Particularly one that’s attractive, articulate, and capable. None of this would be a problem if some of these men would spend two weeks in a boot camp and learn something called respect.”

THE ST. LOUIS FIASCO was only the beginning. On December 20, someone that the club had censured and fined , who allegedly had accepted high-priced sponsor tickets from Rolex and Eddie Bauer to two galas, including the club’s 2011 annual dinner. (Members paid $375 to attend the March dinner; a seat at the Eddie Bauer table, where Bernstein sat, ran more than $1,000. Bernstein paid $375, and his wife, Lily Snyder, paid nothing.) The story described a feud between Bernstein and Karnath for control of the club. Ken Kamler, a board member and microsurgeon who aided victims during the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, was quoted as saying, “Josh is a real explorer, and Lorie Karnath is not, and she is threatened.”

Some club sponsors were furious to see their names in a tabloid: the day after the Post story ran, the CEO of one sponsor wrote a scathing letter to Karnath and the club’s leadership. Another sponsor wrote an e-mail supporting Bernstein, who has been prominently involved in the club since his TV career lost steam in 2008. He and Karnath have repeatedly clashed over his desire to use the club’s headquarters for photo and television shoots; the previous president, Dan Bennett, let Bernstein film in the building without paying the club’s usage fee, and Bernstein chafed when Karnath demanded that he file proper paperwork. While Bernstein denies eyeing Karnath’s job—he told me he’s not running for president this year—he did respond to the charge that he accepted improper gifts.Ìę

“I was acting in the best interests of the club,” Bernstein says. “I was invited by the sponsors of the club. It was never raised as a potential conflict until Lorie made it one.”

Asked about Bernstein, Karnath said, “I welcome a voice of dissent. Not everyone has to agree with me. But if you are a contributor to the club, then criticism goes a lot farther.”

Karnath’s lawyer, Benjamin Hulsey, the club’s legal co-chairman, was less guarded in his response. “I think Josh Bernstein wants to be president, and he thinks instead of working hard and doing what you usually do, he’ll shortcut it by denigrating the existing president,” he says. “Ken Kamler just can’t deal with a strong, smart, pretty woman. I think that’s exactly what’s going on here.”

The fallout from the Post story was severe. Bernstein and three other board members—Kamler, Difede, and Jim Clash, a writer for Forbes—united in opposition to the president. Another camp rallied around Karnath. An e-mail war that had been brewing for weeks intensified. The head of a Florida chapter, a Karnath booster named Jim Thompson, called her critics “perps” and “cur dogs.”

On a cold afternoon in early January, I met with a high-level Explorers Club official at a restaurant in Manhattan. This person, who asked not to be named, was worried that his cell phone was bugged. During our conversation, he kept glancing anxiously at an older woman several tables away, fearing that she could be a Karnath spy.

“I’ve never seen anything like the way it is now,” the official said. “If you ask a simple question, you’re immediately thrown before the ethics committee or slammed down. What happened with Josh was a monkey trial.”

The official made charges of micro-management and vindictiveness that I heard repeated by six current and former club members. Others, who didn’t comment, have also had spats with Karnath in the past. In 2010, Kristin Larson, a board member who worked on legal matters—and who wouldn’t comment for this story—claimed Karnath repeatedly stymied her attempts to obtain financial information. “She treated my inquiries as hostile acts,” Larson wrote in a letter to the board. She resigned soon after—according to Karnath, due to an unrelated matter. Angela Schuster, editor of the club’s flagship publication, the quarterly , says that Karnath has even started decreeing the theme of each issue. (The latest: microscopes.) Karnath maintains that she’s merely helping offset the journal’s overhead by making it more palatable to advertisers.

These are hardly impeachable offenses. More serious charges include a lack of transparency and questionable judgment. In 2010, according to one club official, the king of Morocco donated to the club 12 all-expenses-paid tickets to a religious festival in his country, with the tickets to be auctioned off at a benefit. But, the official says, the tickets were never auctioned; instead, half of them went to club members, and Karnath kept a few for herself, her husband, and friends. Karnath denies this, saying that the tickets were never officially donated and that she attended the festival as a guest of the Moroccan tourism bureau.

According to some members, Karnath has been guarded about the club’s finances, and there are whispers that she may have inflated her accomplishments. Bernstein is dubious about Karnath’s claim to have boosted club membership. In January, he told me that Karnath had not been removing members who weren’t paying dues or who had passed away. The rolls, in other words, were stocked with deadbeats and the dead.

Karnath disputes this and says she’s led the effort to cleanse the rolls while increasing the number of actual, paying members. Blumenfeld backs her up. “Lorie launched a campaign to call each member, and as a result, 290 inactive members were eliminated,” he pointed out in an e-mail. He also noted that member dues have increased under Karnath’s tenure, from $776,112 in 2009 to $819,435 in 2011.

Then there are the fundraising claims. “By our calculations, the president has raised perhaps $562,000,” says Bernstein. “Karnath says it was $1 million to $1.2 million. Our repeated requests to be given a detailed breakdown of this amount have so far been ignored.”Ìę

The club is a tax-exempt nonprofit with publicly available records. According to filings, the organization’s income has varied widely in recent years, from more than $2 million in 2007 to just over $1 million in 2008—and $1.8 million in 2009, Karnath’s first year as president. But the records don’t show where every dollar goes. One concern voiced by Karnath’s critics involves a $300,000 donation made in 2008 by a now deceased club member. The money was pledged under Karnath’s predecessor, Dan Bennett, and after Karnath took office it was transferred to a building-renovation fund. Karnath’s critics complain that the president has since taken credit for raising all of the money in that fund. Her defense: while the $300,000 was promised under Bennett, it arrived during her tenure, and she merely allocated it to a pressing cause. The club’s treasurer, Mark Kassner, backs her, saying the board approved the transfer of the donation. “Any suggestion of impropriety,” Kassner says, “is part of an unsubstantiated smear campaign.”

SO WHICH IS IT? Is Karnath a vindictive dictator or the target of a petty witch hunt by a hopelessly dated rebel alliance? One thing’s certain: this isn’t the first time her management style has caused a stir. In 2004, Karnath was hired to shore up the finances of the Dahlem Conference, a prestigious scientific gathering in Berlin launched during the cold war. Sponsored by the Free University of Berlin, the Dahlem Conference was held several times a year and featured top scientists discussing heady topics, like the “Genetic and Cultural Evolution of Cooperation.” As the new century dawned, though, the organization found itself on shaky financial ground, and it brought in several German entrepreneurs and businesspeople, including Karnath, to secure funding. Within a year, the organization had imploded.

According to Randolf Menzel, a neurobiologist and former chairman of Dahlem’s 12-member scientific advisory board, the university appointed Karnath to the board without its consent. The committee, which included a Nobel laureate and two Guggenheim fellows, was outraged by the intrusion, especially when Karnath proposed her own idea for a workshop. Program director Julia Lupp, who declined to comment, objected that Karnath was out of bounds. Soon after, the university removed Lupp from the board, and rumors began to swirl that Karnath was involved with her ouster.Ìę

“Karnath saw Julia as an impediment to whatever her plans were,” says Norbert Baer, a research professor at New York University who also served on Dahlem’s board. Karnath denies having anything to do with Lupp’s departure, and Wedigo de Vivanco, the Free University’s dean of international affairs, supports her claim, calling Karnath’s role in the incident “coincidence” and saying that Lupp was removed as part of a larger upheaval. In any case, Lupp’s firing provoked fury: 10 of the 12 scientific committee’s members threatened to resign, and the university was inundated with letters of protest from scientists around the world. Following an investigation, Lupp was cleared of wrongdoing and reappointed. Karnath left the university after the conference was restructured. Asked about Dahlem, Karnath said, “The university wanted it to change. That’s what I do. I go in and make change and move things forward.”

In person, Karnath doesn’t come off as mendacious. She was friendly when we met at club headquarters in January, a time when the infighting had reached absurd levels. Clash and Kamler—two of Bernstein’s cohorts on the board of directors—were under review by the ethics committee for speaking to the Post. I’d become something of a sounding board for the fight, my inbox filled with vitriolic e-mail from both sides. At one point I received an envelope containing internal club documents, with a return address bearing the name John Drake—the secret agent in the 1960’s British spy show Danger Man. I got the feeling that the anti-Karnath crowd was attempting to air its grievances—and possibly force the president’s ouster—through the media.

Karnath seemed oblivious to the maelstrom as she led me past a stuffed polar bear and up to her office. She spoke about her accomplishments for 45 minutes. When I asked about the Bernstein and Flag and Honors spats, she dismissed her critics as a band of malcontents. “It’s a small group of people with an agenda. The vast majority of the club, we want to continue our work and be productive,” she said. “If this story ends up being negative,” she continued, eyes welling with tears, “then all the work I’ve done is damaged.”

During our interview, a board member and underwater photographer named breezed into the office in a fur coat and handed me a printout. “That should about cover it,” she said, and left. The paper contained a rundown of Karnath’s best qualities. “Every once in a while if we’re lucky in life,” it read, “it seems the planets and stars align in the universe to produce a most advantageous and auspicious time when things just come together. With Lorie Karnath as our president and all her hard work, I think this is one of those moments for TEC.”

Needless to say, not everyone feels that way. Soon after my visit, on January 27, a top-level meeting was held at club headquarters. Karnath was in attendance; so were Constance Difede, the Flag and Honors vice president, and most members of the board. The idea was to clear the air. But things went south when Difede took the floor. She had been a staunch Karnath supporter prior to the St. Louis incident, and though she’d been reinstated to her post, she was still bitter.

“You have destroyed so many people in this club,” she declared. “I would not trust you to hold my belay rope.” She proposed that Karnath be immediately removed as president. For her part, Karnath later told me, “The intent of the session was to look for proactive ways to move forward. Unfortunately, Constance was not able to follow the intent of the program.” And what’s the program? “It’s about change,” she said.Ìę

THE NEXT ELECTION is March 18, the day after the annual dinner. While Karnath hasn’t confirmed that she’s running, she’s done little to dissuade the notion. “I’ve invested a huge amount of my personal self into this, and I want to make sure that’s protected,” she told me. “I don’t want to see anyone tear it apart.”

To enter the election, members must submit their names and qualifications to the club’s nominations committee, which passes a short list on to the board of directors for a final vote. There’s some concern about the impartiality of this process, though. Soon after the medals blowup in St. Louis, Karnath appointed a new chair of the nominations committee: Fred McLaren.

“I believe it’s a quid pro quo,” says Concannon. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he gets the Explorers Medal with the strong help of the president and then he’s nominated to be head of the nominating committee.” Multiple members have threatened to boycott the dinner, which promises to be more eventful than last year’s, a Maya-apocalypse-themed affair that featured fog machines, dancers in faux loincloths, and a live panther that appeared to have been drugged.

If Karnath does run—members can announce their candidacy up until the day of the board meeting—it’s unclear who would oppose her. Multiple sources told me that Don Walsh might enter the race to take down his foe, pointing to a letter he sent to club leadership in December, in which he hinted at the possibility and seemed to take the high road about the organization’s troubles. “Information about several of these problems has now gone beyond the boundaries of our membership,” he wrote. “This is really unfortunate, and we will not be able to stop it. The best remedy is to clean up the mess.” But even Walsh wasn’t above a bit of backroom plotting, as evidenced by a later e-mail to another Flag and Honors member, leaked to me by a Karnath supporter. In it, Walsh, who declined to comment for this story, admitted that his threat to run had constituted “a Machiavellian maneuver.” His real goal, he wrote, was “to buy time so Lorie’s ‘reappointment’ is not a slam dunk.”

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The Taliban charged us only $1 to get through the first roadblock. At the second, we paid two.

Afghanistan

Tabor—s Trip

Damon Tabor

The author on the road outside Band-e Amir

Geoff Hann

Hann, our fearless leader

Afghanistan

Officers guarding a security checkpoint

It was highway robbery, but that seemed unimportant. We were traveling in an unarmored Toyota minibus with bald tires and a faded red allah sticker on the back window. The men at the roadblocks had guns, so we gladly would've paid more.

But by the time we reached the next roadblock, the mood on the bus had soured. Everyone was edgy about the possibility of getting kidnapped. We were worn out from several days of hard travel on roads that were little more than cratered, ditch-ridden goat tracks. We were tired of lamb kabob.

At the third roadblock, a pink nylon rope was strung between two wooden posts. We stopped, and a sneering man in his forties with deeply lined brown skin slowly walked up to the vehicle. A younger man with a Kalashnikov sat under a tree by the road while a group of turbaned men stood a short distance away, one holding an automatic rifle and another a cell phone. The man spoke to our driver in Dari, and the driver, young and normally brash, replied quietly. The man turned and looked at us. His eyes were bright and cold and he made our driver nervous. Then he stepped back, untied the pink rope, and let it drop to the ground.

We continued up the road and entered a dusty, ramshackle village called Chisht-e Sharif. A U.S. military helicopter buzzed overhead. Pickup trucks loaded with Afghan National Army soldiers—wearing black masks and carrying weapons—sped down the road, heading in the direction we'd come from.

“You couldn't come to Afghanistan without seeing some Taliban, right?” asked our guide, a seventy-something Englishman named Geoff Hann. He had a ruddy complexion and thick eyebrows, and with a beard and skullcap he could pass for an Afghan. Hann had been leading tours through the country intermittently for more than 30 years, but now even he looked shaken.

I was on “vacation,” part of a small tour group whose members had paid Hann, the owner of a UK-based company called Hinterland Travel, $3,700 for the pleasure of traveling in a war zone. His job was to make sure that the people who'd signed up stayed alive while moving through one of the most hazardous countries on earth. Hann operates in safer places, too, but he has a reputation as a specialist who can shepherd adventurous tourists through countries like Iraq and Afghanistan—places that other guides won't touch, no matter how much cash you slap down.

It was August 2010, and it would have been hard to think of a less desirable getaway spot than this Texas-size Central Asian nation. U.S. and NATO forces were engaged in a major offensive to crush a Taliban insurgency entrenched in Afghani­stan's south and east but also blooming in the once peaceful north and west. The month before had been the most deadly for American troops since the Taliban's ouster in 2001 by the U.S. military and its Afghan allies, after several years of brutal fundamentalist rule. Suicide bombings were frequent, armed bandits stalked the country's roads, and kidnapping was now a commercial enterprise. The central government—shakily presided over from Kabul by U.S.-backed president Hamid Karzai—exerted little control outside major cities, and safety anywhere was tenuous at best. The U.S. State Department warned its citizens against traveling to Afghanistan, while the Lonely Planet guide to the country strenuously undersold its attractions. “Hundreds of what are now called 'illegally armed groups' operate freely,” it read. “Kidnapping remains a threat.
Criminal groups have been known to sell hostages to the highest bidder, usually the insurgents.” Increasingly, NGO workers, journalists, and a trickle of tourists—the only foreigners in the country aside from the military—were confined to cities and usually traveled in armored SUVs with armed guards.

The sundry security threats mocked the best-laid travel plans, so Hann's itineraries were strings of guesswork that he referred to as “theories.” Ours had initially called for flying into Peshawar, Pakistan, then driving over the Khyber Pass to Jalalabad, Afghan­i­stan, but NATO forces were using the Khyber to move resupply convoys, which made it irresistible to insurgents and impassable for us. Thus, prior to our group's arrival, Hann had notified all his clients that they would fly from Dubai into Kabul instead. The plan after that was to hire minibuses to carry us several hundred miles across central Afghanistan from Kabul to Herat, a city near the Iranian border, then dogleg up to Mazar-e Sharif, in the north, and finally return to Kabul, all without armor or armed security.

The journey would avoid the country's most deadly regions—the southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand—but no part of Afghanistan was truly safe. In Kabul, there were kidnappers and suicide bombs. On the road, there were bandits, Taliban, jihadis, land mines, and improvised explosive devices (IEDs). In the northwest, there was the worst road in Afghanistan and a notoriously lawless town, Bala Murghab, teeming with insurgents. In the northeast, once considered generally secure, the Taliban had recently overrun a government checkpoint north of Kabul and beheaded six policemen. Even livestock was dangerous; in December 2009, the Taliban attacked British troops using a “donkey bomb.”

Hann sells his Afghanistan tours as a chance to see the country's rugged outback while sleeping on dirty teahouse floors and tackling the country's roads in minibuses that buck like mechanical bulls. It's also an opportunity to gamble your life on his instincts and experience in order to be a tourist in a place that barely has any. There are no backpackers or bus-tour day-trippers in Afghanistan, and proximity to danger is the real essence of a Hann trip. His tour is a chance to court your own demise—a short walk on the Hindu Kush's dark side. If you were lucky, you would feel more alive at the end. If you weren't? It was best not to think about that.

FOR HANN, THE ROAD to this career started in 1970, when he drove a Volkswagen camper from Britain to Bombay, chasing after an errant wife living on an ashram—an impromptu cannonball run with an intact marriage as the prize. The wife came back—though Hann later left her and courted a woman he met on one of his tours—and the trip gave him a glimpse of a more exciting way of life. A native of Surrey who dropped out of school at 17, Hann had served in the Royal Air Force in the mid-1950s and then worked for several uneventful years as an electroplater at his father's company.

The wife-fetching mission aroused an appetite for untamed travel, and the timing was right. In the sixties and early seventies, Afghanistan, then a constitutional monarchy, was getting besieged by repurposed double-deckers and flagrantly painted VW Kombis ferrying unkempt Westerners from London to India and Nepal—the so-called Hippie Trail. In 1971, Hann started Hann Overland and guided “a handful of weirdos” in a 12-seat Land Rover from London to Bombay. Along the way, the group dodged bandits, got robbed in Turkey, and drove through the wilds of Afghanistan. “By the end of the trip,” he told me, “we were all a bit rattled, but it was exciting.”

Hann's company, which was primarily running Iraq tours, went under after the first Gulf war grounded flights to Baghdad. He launched Hinterland after the war ended in 1991, focusing mostly on Afghanistan and Iraq. But Hann has also led trips through a marquee list of danger zones, including Kashmir, Burma, and Pakistan. He's been jailed in India, interrogated by various security services, and smacked in the head with a rifle butt. He carries a commando knife and keeps a pistol stashed with a Pakistani rug dealer he calls “Mr. Ralph.” During a now-legendary trip through Iraq following the 2003 U.S. invasion, Hann's group watched as a mob beat a man to death in Mosul; later, they were only a block away when a car bomb detonated outside the Turkish embassy in Baghdad. In 2007, Hann stumbled into a gun battle between two warring clans in Afghani­stan, then negotiated an on-the-fly ceasefire and led his group, Moses-like, through the parted factions. Remarkably, none of his clients has been kidnapped or killed over the past 40 years, but Hann believes they'd better sign up with eyes wide open.

“People come on a trip like this of their own free will,” he says. “If something happens to them, I'm very sorry—I do my best to make sure it doesn't. But if it does, then that's what happened. Anyone who says they didn't know is an idiot. It's on television every day.” Though fiery and occasionally volatile, Hann is generally cautious, but he can become distracted, and he allows his clients to wander freely and alone in cities—something most Western companies and NGOs working in war zones would consider insanely risky. Obviously, Hann's tours attract adventurous travelers, but they're not adrenaline freaks or war junkies. Most are past middle age, unmarried, fairly mild-mannered, and childless. They carry passports sporting ink from countries like Syria, Pakistan, and Sudan—places that Westerners usually prefer to see as flickering images on a screen. Some are ticking off items on a bucket list, but many seem driven by a desire to see all the world's splendors and have simply been everywhere else. Afghanistan, to them, is the next logical frontier. The fact that it's dangerous is part of the appeal.

Not surprisingly, Hann has a few critics. One veteran Western traveler with extensive experience in Afghani­stan—who asked not to be named—told me that what Hann does is irresponsible.

“There are a couple of companies in Kabul that I would trust to take people in Afghan­istan,” he said. “They are local, have established security procedures, work as fixers for journos, businesses, and NGOs, and they're completely plugged in. Hinterland is not.
Just because Hann has gotten away with it so far doesn't make these tours safe.”

Hann knows he takes risks, of course, but he argues that the security situation is more nuanced than government travel bulletins and jumpy journalists would have you believe. He thinks it's possible to move through Afghanistan with the right combination of information and prudence, hopping to islands of safety like rocks in a river. On every trip, he's attempting to disprove the world's conventional wisdom about where humans should and shouldn't go. “I'm trying to do the impossible, which is to give people the freedom to move about in restricted areas,” he says with conviction. “It's not easy. At the end of the day, they get the rough with the smooth.”

“WE'VE ALREADY BEEN HERE too long,” Hann had declared two days after we flew into Kabul and checked into the Spinzar Hotel, which had lazy guards with gleaming new Kalashnikovs at a checkpoint out front. He had rules about being a tourist, which made being a tourist difficult: You didn't stay anywhere long and you told no one where you were going. You avoided military trucks and UN vehicles, which was hard because they were everywhere.

On the morning of our third day, we packed into a white minibus to head north to Bamiyan, the site of some famous Buddhist ruins. There were reports of Taliban activity on the road ahead, but no one in the group seemed anxious. Sue Hynard, an executive assistant from London in her late fifties, had once been on a tour in Pakistan's Swat Valley when fighting broke out between the military and insurgents, and her attitude was pretty typical of the group.

“Tourists go on package tours to places like Torremolinos,” she said, referring to the overdeveloped British-resort kennel in southern Spain. “We're travelers.”

The others apparently felt the same way. Peter Haug, a 58-year-old professor of supply-chain management from Bellingham, Washington, had gotten lost in Bhutan's wilderness and been rescued by army troops. Cameron Rose, a tall, pale retired math teacher at England's Eton school, had made a midnight run with a sugar smuggler going from Lebanon into Syria. Kent Rausner, a 44-year-old Danish hotelier living in Thailand, had had a knife pulled on him in Dakar. The oldest person in our group was a tiny, 75-year-old Indian woman named Bithi Das, who walked with a cane and exuded Yoda-like tranquillity. She was going to Libya and Uzbekistan after this, and seemed to have a philosophical take about risk.

“I will die,” she told me at one point. “We all will die. It's OK.”

Spumes of dust were blowing into the air as we inched through Kabul's apocalyptic streets, and military convoys stopped traffic for blocks. Sue, Bithi, and Valerie Godsalve, a dyspeptic pathologist who'd flown in late from Saskatoon, Canada, were wearing veils. Peter, Cameron, Kent, and I wore shalwar kameez, the long tunic and baggy pants that U.S. soldiers call “man jammies.” Afghans still stared when they saw us; they weren't used to seeing kuffar, or “nonbelievers,” in unarmored minibuses.

An hour north of the city, the sky turned the color of pressed tin and rain began falling in thick drops that turned the road to mud. Abbas pulled up behind a long line of cars stopped in front of a torrent of water surging down from the mountains and across the road. It looked impassable, but an enterprising local had driven an orange backhoe into the washout and was using the bucket to carve out an improvised road—and charged 100 afghanis, or about $2, to let cars across.

We arrived so late that the only place to sleep was the police barracks. In the morning, I followed the group across a dry, dusty field to see the now destroyed Bamiyan Buddhas. These were once a premier attraction, but in 2001 the Taliban used anti-aircraft guns and dynamite to reduce both statues—carved into a tall sandstone cliff as early as the third century and standing 120 and 175 feet tall—into a fenced-off pile of dusty rubble. The cliff was honeycombed with grottoes inhabited 1,500 years ago by hermetic Buddhist monks, though many were now littered with bone shards and animal feces. I walked up a twisting staircase cut into the sandstone cliff and, at the top, looked out at nothing. To visit Bamiyan's Buddhas was to contemplate a void—appropriate, since the taller statue had represented sunyata, or emptiness.

A day later, we set out west across the spine of the Hindu Kush toward Band-e Amir, a glittering string of topaz-colored lakes set high amid cliff-studded mountains. Backhoes and yellow bulldozers were scraping the road, part of a USAID project attempting to smooth Afghanistan's expanses for exports other than opium. It was early afternoon when we reached the first lake, where cars filled a dirt parking lot. In 2009, the Afghan government had declared this area the country's first national park. Hotels and restaurants were planned. Locals were dissuaded from using hand grenades to fish. During the dedication, Karl Eikenberry, a former Army lieutenant general and the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, had ridden a swan paddleboat—one of the site's main attractions—around one of the lakes, grinning like a schoolboy.

Now, women in burkas watched from shore while their husbands paddled around. Families ate picnics on blankets and boys jumped into the cold water in their underwear. Peter, Sue, and I climbed into a red boat with flaking paint, quickly trailed by a small swan-boat flotilla of curious Af­ghans. Two boys in a yellow boat approached first, one smiling widely and showing teeth like a tumbledown fencerow.

Another boat approached, filled with three men in their thirties wearing light-colored tunics. From a distance, they'd been pointing and laughing at the infidels in the swan boat. “Excuse me, where are you from?” shouted one, giggling with his friends. Another pulled out a digital camera and began taking pictures of us.

“America and England,” Peter said, smiling. I'd nicknamed him Operation American Caress, because he waved at every scowling Afghan on the road, though often as not they just stared. “What is your job?” Abdullah, the older boy, asked.

“We are tourists,” I said. He looked surprised.

“In Band-e Amir, security is very good,” one of the men said proudly.

“Is there anything like this in America?” Abdullah asked.

“America is Los Angeles and California and Mexico and Chicago!” one of the older men yelled giddily.

“You are very friendly and kind men!” one of the older men yelled, and then they paddled away, laughing like children.

WE DROVE ALL THE NEXT DAY, crossed the 11,000-foot Shahtu Pass, and then stopped for the night at a teahouse with an ill-tempered donkey in the back. Cameron unrolled an air mattress as large as an airplane's evacuation slide. Valerie surreptitiously tortured her hair into a helmet of pink rollers. Bithi snored in the corner, a surprisingly baritone rumble. Later, Hann, who had been outside talking on a sat phone, walked into the room. “There's been a really bad killing,” he said, announcing that the Taliban had shot and killed ten members of a medical team, including six Americans, near the northeast border with Tajikistan.

It was possible sometimes to forget that the sawtooth mountains and apple orchards flashing past the minibus windows were in Afghanistan at all, but the perils now seemed very real again. No one slept well.

We woke up at dawn and drove west, now somewhere in the middle of the country. Soviet personnel carriers, stripped to their frames, rusted in the scraggly grass; yellow-eyed herding dogs loped after the minibus. We stopped for lunch in a teahouse with posters of grim-faced legislative candidates tacked to the wall, and Hann asked the owner, a delicate-featured man named Jarwald, about the road ahead.

“In Bala Murghab, is the Taliban there or is it just badmash?” he asked, using a word for bandits.

“They aren't here in this province,” Jarwald said. “The other provinces—the Taliban are there. Around Chaghcharan, the security is very good. After that, it may be some problems for you.”

“Are they your sons?” Bithi asked, indicating a group of Afghan men sitting impassively against a wall, listening to our conversation.

“No, they are my friends,” Jarwald said, chuckling. “He is older than me.” Jarwald was one of the Hazara Shia, a group ill-treated by the fundamentalist Pashtun Taliban, who consider them heretical Muslims. President Karzai, also a Pashtun, seemed to ignore them. Jarwald said he would support Karzai going forward if, and only if, he paved the road.

“You can't build a road unless there's security and unless there's money,” Hann said.

“Sometimes one before the other.”

Jarwald conferred with his friends for a moment. “They want to fight after that because the government haven't any attention for us,” he said. “They want to enjoy the Taliban.” By which he meant join them.

“What's your duty here?” Jarwald asked Hann.

“I bring tourists to Afghanistan,” he said.

The Afghan men said something to Jarwald and they all laughed. “They are saying we can arrest you, so the government make our roads,” Jarwald said.

We laughed nervously. The bill arrived and Hann bickered with the waiter about it, which seemed imprudent. Men like Jarwald were Hann's main source of information about security conditions. Though Hann's Web site claims otherwise, he had performed no real intelligence gathering—checking Afghan news sites or e-mailing local sources—before arriving in-country. Instead, he chatted with waiters and taxi drivers once he was on the ground, forging ahead or retreating depending on what they told him. But since most Afghans don't speak English and Hann speaks almost no Dari or Pashto, this process often involved a questionably effective game of charades.

We drove along a winding dirt road until late in the day, then pulled into Chaghcharan, a dusty traders' settlement on a wind-swept plateau. Hann disliked the town intensely and said it was filled with hustlers. At dusk, after languishing in a cramped room for several hours, I asked Bithi if she wanted to take a walk. She hadn't moved much since Kabul and wasn't eating or drinking enough. We went down a narrow alley and onto a wide, half-paved road. Mud-brick buildings lined the street, and the town's small shops were mostly shuttered. A group of young men stood on the street corner, staring as we walked past. I didn't like the way they watched us, but Bithi seemed unafraid.

“I took a trip to Kashmir,” she said, holding my arm as we shuffled along. “A pilgrimage Indians take to a mountain called Amarnath. This is where Shiva shared the secret of creation with his wife, Parvati, but two white doves overheard and so now they are reborn again and again.”

She kept talking as we passed several men working on the road. It had grown dark; wind whipped grit through the air. I suggested we go back to the teahouse. We crossed the street and walked by a dark-skinned man with a red turban and bloodshot eyes. I said “Salaam,” but he only glared. Up ahead, the young men were still at the corner. Three dirty boys with stained tunics followed behind us, one clutching a plastic pistol. Bithi was quiet for a moment, and I asked if she was afraid of dying. She had had heart surgery six months before, knee surgery before that, and took 20 pills every day. Her body had become a kind of cage, and she was ready to be done with it.

“If God told me I would die tomorrow, I would be happy,” she said.

THE NEXT AFTERNOON we passed through the Taliban roadblocks. The last one rattled Hann and the driver and everybody else. Valerie soon began emitting breathy yelps whenever we went over bumps. Cameron had grown thin-skinned. Earlier in the day, at the Minaret of Jam, a 213-foot tower covered in elaborate script next to the Hari River, he had unloaded on the driver for swiping an empty plastic water bottle. “You can't just take people's things!” he screamed. “This belongs to me!” It was a low point in Westerner-Afghan relations, and it seemed like a bad omen.

A few hours later, we were drinking greasy green tea in a town several miles past the Taliban roadblocks, and the group was mutinous. Hann wanted to stay on the road another night, but the group wanted instead to press on to Herat, a major city close to the border with Iran. It was a long day's drive, but there were beds, non-lamb meals, and, presumably, fewer Taliban. Hann got in the minibus, muttering darkly.

The hills soon flattened out, and we drove into the sun-blasted western half of Afghanistan. Nomads' black domed tents lined the road. A current of air like an opened oven door—Afghans call it the Wind of 120 Days—buffeted the minibus. Cameron, Sue, and Peter had struck up a lively, semigeriatric conversation about ailments, but I suggested that our first Taliban encounter warranted further comment.

“I've not particularly enjoyed the road or the roadblocks,” Sue said. “The rest of it's been lovely. I think if my parents were alive, I probably wouldn't have come.”

“I've never taken into account anything to do with dependents, because it's never been an issue,” Cameron added. “Even when Mother was alive. I leave my will on the study table, but I do that when I go to the Antarctic. I really need to get it done professionally now.”

We reached Herat at dusk. It was a cosmopolitan city with roadside shops selling red velvet dresses and knockoff cell phones. In the morning, we walked through the Musalla Complex, a 15th-century compound of minarets, mosques, and madrassas that had been devastated over time by British dynamite, Soviet artillery, and earthquakes. A remaining minaret was held upright by steel block and tackle airlifted from Kabul and installed by a UNESCO crew that included the same Italian who'd stabilized the Leaning Tower of Pisa a few years ago. Hann, who had a weakness for Afghan carpets, added another to the already extensive collection he'd amassed since Kabul. We visited Gazar Gah, a Sufi shrine where men prayed on red rugs beneath a green ilex tree. Males passed on one side of the tree, females on the other. The Afghans snickered at Peter for walking the wrong way. We were infidels in a Muslim holy place and I stuffed 100 afghanis into a donation box.

Later, Hann arrived at dinner preoccupied. The plan had been to drive north the next day from Herat to Mazar-e Sharif via a town called Maimana. Maimana was considered safe, but south of it was Bala Murghab, riddled with insurgents and bandits. Last year, the military had turned Hann's group back. The local police had also made Lonely Planet writer Paul Clammer sleep in their compound after the Taliban attacked an NGO office in town the day before he arrived.

“They were very kind, made us tea and gave us beds outside,” Clammer had told me. “At midnight, we were awoken by the sound of much automatic gunfire, and the sky lit up with tracers.”

Now, Hann said at the table, we had to decide if we wanted to drive through this. He'd been trying to hire a driver all afternoon, but he'd been rebuffed everywhere. “I said they had no testicles,” he said. “I personally think it's safe enough to go, but they were telling me it's too dangerous. Bala Murghab is nasty. It's full of crooks, bandits, smugglers, and Taliban. I'm disappointed.”

Hann laid out two options. He had a driver willing to take us to a town south of Bala Murghab, but once there we'd have to hire another driver to get to Maimana. We might get lucky. We might also get killed. The iffiest stretch of road was about 40 miles long, an island of danger—what Afghans sometimes called a yagistan, or lawless place—in an already choppy sea. We could probably make it, but the decision to go would be a deeply existential one. Or, Hann said, we could catch a short flight to Kabul and then another to Mazar-e Sharif—lifted above Afghanistan's perils by a credit card.

“I quite like the sound of that,” Sue said. “Everybody seems to be saying it's not a good idea.”

“It's silly to say at my age, but I say go with the flow of the country you're experiencing,” Cameron said. He looked as relaxed and happy as I'd seen him on the trip. “Fine by me,” Peter said, turning his attention back to a pretty Spanish woman who'd joined us for dinner.

“I would sneak up there and do it,” Hann said, “but if the locals say the risk is too great, then it's really irresponsible for us to go. There's risks, and there's risks.”

WE TOOK THE FLIGHT. In Mazar-e Sharif, which felt like the frontier town that it was, we quickly located a seedy expat café serving green $4 cans of Tuborg beer, likely trucked in illegally from Uzbekistan. A large TV blared CNN. A worn-looking blonde, a Western man with a shaved head, and a Maori security contractor with an oily perm and tattooed forearms were drinking at another table. They blew plumes of smoke and talked about an aid project. Our group had been reduced by two: Kent had flown back to Thailand from Kabul to run his two hotels. Valerie's camera was stolen in Herat and she'd flown back to Saskatoon without a word to anyone.

Hann hired two taxis the next morning and we drove to Haji Piyada, a stucco mosque that is the oldest in Afghanistan and now sits covered by what looks like an enormous protective carport. The building's caretaker, a bent-legged man with a long scar across his jaw, squatted in the dirt. Two Afghan policemen sat under a rough-looking shack by a stream. A field of marijuana plants grew nearby. We walked quietly through the mosque, and I asked Bithi what she thought of the journey.

“There is rise and fall of terrorists all the time,” she said. “It's a kind of adventure to see one of the Taliban.”

“What would you say if you met one?” I asked.

“As-Salamu Alaykum,” she said, smiling a little wickedly. It's an Islamic greeting that means “Peace be upon you.”

One of the policemen approached Bithi and spoke to her in Hindi. He was young-looking and wore a jaunty white scarf with his green uniform.

“He says the Taliban's attitude is to kill no matter who it is,” she translated. “They want to have the pride that they have killed someone. They are very near, 10 to 15 kilometers.” As we were leaving, she handed the proprietor 100 afghanis, which Hann protested was too much.

The next morning, Hann hired a rickety minibus to take us west to Andkhoy, a town near the border with Turkmenistan. Our driver was an Uzbek named Abdullah, and he drank black tea and smoked cheap cigarettes during the holy month, which made me trust him. Hann had never been to Andkhoy before, but he'd heard they had good carpets. From there we would drive to a village called Daulatabad, then return to Mazar-e Sharif through the Dasht-e Leili desert. This was the last, and potentially worst, leg of the trip. A one-eyed taxi driver had warned Hann that Daulatabad was teeming with Taliban.

On the outskirts of Mazar, a graveyard of T-62 Russian tanks and Katyusha rocket launchers sat by the road. Goats lounged in the shade of a gas pipeline. Off to the right, a road led to Qala-e Jangi, a sprawling 19th-century military fortress and the site of a seven-day prison uprising led by the Taliban in November 2001. Earlier, Peter and I had taken a side trip there, tried unsuccessfully to bribe the guard to let us in, and were then passed off to Jeff and Stan, two cops from Texas who were helping train Afghan police at a nearby military base. “Maaannn,” Stan had said, looking concerned when I told him we were tourists.

“Y'all be careful. It's like the fucking Wild West out there,” Jeff said, scribbling our names on the back of a business card in case something happened.

At midday, we drove into Daulatabad, a small village with tree-lined streets crowded with donkey carts and kaleidoscopically painted, three-wheeled rickshaws. Abdullah parked on a side street. The plan was to quickly explore the town, then return to the bus. I followed Hann, Sue, Peter, and Cameron into a market of crowded stalls selling tools, shoes, and scraps of cloth. A young boy led a camel caravan through the street. Another boy laughed at my shalwar kameez and called me farangi, or “foreigner.” I trailed Hann down an alley and into a courtyard filled with wood. Afghan men, squatting in the dirt, turned and stared.

“I think we better go back,” Hann said, after walking quickly through the courtyard. Back at the minibus, a crowd had gathered around the vehicle and Abdullah was discussing our route through the desert with several men. “Too dangerous, not safe, Taliban,” one of them said.

Hann had climbed into the passenger seat and turned around to look at us. “Who's up for going through the desert?” he asked. “He says that it's not a problem for him but could be a problem for us.”

“I think it's up to the driver,” Sue said.

“We go back to Andkhoy then,” Peter said.

“I was trying to find rare carpets just to have a look, but nobody seems to know where they are,” Hann muttered. He looked unhappy to be retreating again.

Tactically, our vacation had begun to feel similar to a military raid—rush in and rush out—and it was both exhilarating and unsatisfying. You were trying to be a tourist in a place that didn't allow for it. You could strike up a conversation with a shopkeeper, but he might be a Taliban informant. You could wander down some beckoning side street, but you might not be seen again. It was the central paradox of a Hann trip: we were in Afghanistan, but the country still felt just out of reach.

ON MY LAST DAY in Afghanistan, I ate runny eggs and stale naan with weak tea for breakfast at Kabul's Spinzar Hotel. Hann and I were setting out for Ghazni, a notoriously dangerous town on a notoriously dangerous road between Kabul and Kandahar. In July 2007, the Taliban had kidnapped 23 South Korean volunteers on this road, two of whom were later executed. The month before we arrived, two U.S. Navy sailors had been found dead after a mysterious, unsanctioned drive in the area.

Hann's itinerary had called for an optional half-day trip to Ghazni at the tour's end, but he canceled it because the security risk was too high. I wanted to see more of the country—and perhaps indulge some darker urge, too—and he had agreed to take me, provided I absolved him of responsibility. It was a potential suicide run with no point, but we found a taxi driver willing to do it for 4,000 afghanis, or about $90. If we were killed, sensible people would say we'd gotten what we deserved. When I asked Hann to assess the danger level, he said, “Fairly high.”

We wove through Kabul's backstreets and alleys and passed two dogs fucking, which I took as a good sign. Then we drove by a humble-jumble of rocks in the middle of the road, a grave, which I took as a bad sign. I sat low in the taxi's backseat, wearing a shalwar kameez and a checkered scarf over my head. Hann sat up front, wearing a white skullcap, black vest, and several weeks' worth of beard. At the edge of the city, we were flagged off the road at a police checkpoint.

“We're tourists,” I told the officer, showing him Hann's camera, which was small and pink and looked like a teenage girl's.

“You should not be on this road. It is too dangerous,” the officer said. He said something to the driver, and I thought he would make us turn back, but we were let through.

We picked up the Kabul-Kandahar highway, a long, straight two-lane road that ran southwest through flat, sandy plains and low foothills. I could feel the city's protective grip, thin as it was, slipping away. A man in a black vest and turban stood under a billboard watching the traffic. A military helicopter flew overhead. The driver looked nervous and began driving too slow. He pointed behind us and said, “Kabul, Kabul.” Hann ignored him and stabbed his finger in the direction ahead and said, “Ghazni, Ghazni.” Then the driver pulled over to the side of the road and stopped.

“This is not good, mate,” Hann said, looking around anxiously.

The driver popped the hood, got out, and fiddled with the engine. The sun was almost directly overhead now, the car sweltering. A minute ticked by, and another. Cars raced by. An Afghan police compound stood off the road several hundred yards ahead. I wondered if they would mistake us for insurgents and start shooting. I was furious at the driver for stopping here, for risking our lives.

He got back in the taxi and turned the key, but the engine quit. He turned it again, we lurched forward, and the engine quit again. He said something unintelligible except for the word “Taliban.” He was faking engine trouble, I suspected. We were making him a target and he wanted to be rid of us.

“Bullshit,” Hann yelled. “He's a fucking prick. He's not getting paid, either. We're only 50 K from Ghazni. He shouldn't have taken us if that's how he felt.”

It was reckless to sit on the road, and I suggested we go back. Hann relented. The taxi's engine caught after a few tries and we swung around in the road and retreated toward Kabul. Then the driver abruptly slowed again. I looked up and saw a cloud of white smoke next to the road a few hundred yards ahead—what looked like an IED or land-mine explosion, though there'd been no sound. The cars around us slowed to a crawl and we drove down the highway in a loose, hesitant convoy. Our driver chewed on the collar of his shalwar kameez.

Near the smoke, a dead goat lay in the road with its insides strewn across the asphalt. A minute later, three SUVs, filled with turbaned men carrying Kalashnikovs and an RPG, suddenly turned around ahead of us and went speeding past. A small unit of Afghan police was standing in the road ahead with AK-47's at the ready. They had a pickup-mounted .50-caliber machine gun pointed in our direction. Their faces looked anxious, and they seemed prepared to fight. We were slipping toward something chaotic and lethal. I did not want to die in an Afghan taxi on this road. We were no longer tourists.

We sped through the roadblock and, after a few miles, the driver seemed to relax. The car's engine improved, and soon we approached the crumbling perimeter mud wall and shack-covered hills that marked the city's edges. White kites made of plastic bags flew in the air. A red archway over the road read WELCOME.

Hann was quiet and looked out the window. At a roundabout, a seemingly endless military convoy of American Humvees and heavily armored MRAPs rumbled past, the battered minibuses and sedans snarled around it in a tightening knot. My head hurt and my stomach burned. I wanted to get off the road, to board a wobbly 707 and leave Afghanistan behind. We got out of the taxi near the Spinzar, and Hann paid the driver 1,000 Afghanis. The driver protested, waving the bills indignantly in the air, and I thought Hann was going to punch him. I slipped him a few hundred more, but it still didn't seem like nearly enough.

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Anderson Cooper

Eyewitness
[42, NEW YORK CITY]
You were in Port-au-Prince less than 24 hours after the quake. With a tragedy of this scale, where do you start?
You just turn the camera on and open your eyes. No matter what direction you move, you keep the camera rolling. It's all happening in real time and goes on for days like that. Each morning you go out and think, OK, I'm going to look for a rescue, or, I'm going to go to a cemetery, but invariably you never get there, because so much comes across your path.

Do you sleep?
The first couple of days, you really don't. You shoot all day, and spend the nighttime editing and writing. But frankly, you don't think about that stuff, because it's so overwhelming.

Watching your reports, it seemed like anger might have become the dominant emotion among Haitians.
I think first there's the shock and horror of it all, and then you see how things play out. It doesn't get better, and the local government is completely not meeting the needs of its citizens, so there are a lot of things that anger people. Those are the people we talk to all day long. It's not so much what I think about it; it's more what I'm hearing from people. Why are people dying stupid deaths? A child doesn't need to die from an infection from a broken leg.

Is part of your role to broadcast that rage?
It's not so much that I'm broadcasting rage. I'm there to bear witness to what's happening. There's really nothing sadder than a child dying and no one knowing the suffering and pain of the loved ones left behind. And I think there's value in documenting that and giving voice to it.

There's been criticism directed at you and some of your CNN colleagues for overstepping your roles as objective journalists and getting involved in the story. At one point, you jumped into a crowd of looters to pull out an injured boy.
To be in places before relief workers are there: That presents some unique challenges. You suddenly find yourself in a situation where, say, you're a doctor—what do you do? There are some journalism purists who say that you do nothing, that you just go watch and report, and I certainly understand that. But in the case of the little boy [in Haiti] who got hit in the head with a cement block, no one was helping him. He couldn't get up. He'd try to get up and collapse. Blood was pouring from his head…It was a split-second decision to take him out of the situation. I think anyone would have done the same thing if they had the opportunity.

What kinds of stories make you want leave the studio and jump on a plane?
I tend to be drawn to stories that aren't on people's radar. When I was a kid, I used to look at old maps with unexplored regions. I find it interesting that with all the technology we have today, there are still places that don't make headlines. The situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo is one I've traveled to report on a lot. There are six million people who have died in the Congo in the past ten years. It's the deadliest conflict since World War II, but very few people know much about it. It's truly horrific.

We ran a piece recently by Nicholas D. Kristof, arguing for the need to find hopeful stories within a tragedy to get people's attention. Is that something you try to do?
I believe in telling the reality of what's happening. And some nights there isn't much to be hopeful for. But even the first day after the quake in Haiti, before the rescue crews got there, [we filmed] people rescue a little girl. That was a positive thing.

What effect do the things you witness have on you personally? Is it traumatic?
There was a time when I first started, when I made a fake press pass and borrowed a camera and headed into wars, and for three years that was the only kind of story I was interested in doing. It definitely takes a toll. You have to be very conscious of its effects and try to take a break when you need to.

There's also the inherent danger you're dealing with for prolonged periods.
I'm far more acutely aware of my surroundings than my friends who have regular jobs. I'm acutely aware of who's around and what the possibilities are. It changes the way you see your surroundings. But I don't seek out dangerous situations. I'm pretty much a chicken. Truly, I don't believe [my team has] taken any risks.

What about when you were younger?
My first three years, I can't believe some of the things I did. The idea of going to Somalia alone, not having a place to stay or security. I was 23 or 24. There was fighting between different clans in the city. I literally landed on the airstrip and had no idea about the town. A truckload of gunmen approached me, and I ended up hiring them as my gunmen, and we went around to the burial grounds where all these bodies were being dumped, and there were all these empty pits. I was thinking, They could just shoot me and put me in a pit and no one would ever know.

Were you just naive?
I don't think I was naive; I just didn't allow fear to stop me from going to a place. I don't believe you should be ruled by fear in anything in your life. I don't like anything that scares me, and I prefer to face it head-on and get over it. Anyone who says they're not scared is a fool or a liar or both. I just don't want that fear in my stomach to be part of my life, so I work to eliminate it.

Some of the athletes we talk to seem to crave the adrenaline that goes with fear.
I think it's a little different. I have no interest in jumping out of an airplane, or any of the things people do for thrills to push their limits and all that. To me, that seems foolish, and there's no point. If people are suffering in a place, to me, it's not a question of whether I'm going to go or not, it's a question of how fast can I get there?

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Icon: Ivan Watson

Chaos Correspondent

[34, ISTANBUL]
Cooper isn't the only guy in a tight T-shirt reporting live from Haiti these days. CNN recently poached Ivan Watson from National Public Radio. Here's his take on the crisis in Haiti:”You don't have someone you can be angry at in Haiti. There's little more you can do than shake your fist at the sky. This is real 'wrath of God' stuff. Yesterday they gave me a mandatory day off. I wasn't allowed to work. You go at a sprint for five days, and then your body starts to deteriorate. I've never covered anything this big—the amount of human suffering, the loss. It was so overwhelming that I couldn't process it at first. But then it became clear that it was a duty to get some word out about this place. The only way I could deal with the bodies stacked up was to put on the journalistic lens. The scale of the damage was so huge that I couldn't pretend to pitch in. There was a girl who was in trouble, and I didn't drop everything to help. We reported on her and we were running from one place to another. I checked up on her later and didn't expect this little girl to die. If it had happened three days later, and I had been capable of understanding what the hell was going on, I would have tried to do everything to save this trapped girl but…didn't. It will haunt me forever.”

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Icon: Sonnie Trotter

Rock Star

Sonnie Trotter

[30, SQUAMISH, B.C.]
A lot of climbers drill permanent safety bolts into the rock every six or seven feet, but we're going back and doing trad routes the way they would've been done back in the seventies. We've nicknamed it “retro-trad.” Some outstanding climbs would've never been bolted if they weren't 5.14. Only now, climbing that hard on trad gear—stoppers, cams, and nuts that are placed into cracks and then removed—is relatively normal. So that's what we're doing. When I was 16, I saw footage of Peter Croft doing a climb like this in Yosemite. It was a 5.13 finger crack, and it had bolts on it. He ignored them. It just seemed to make sense to me. You can turn a lot of sport climbs into really dangerous trad climbs, but I'm looking for lines with big, bold features—the ones that scream out from across the valley. Maybe they have history. These I find worthy of the challenge. And, of course, they help me hone my skills for my own first ascents.

Trotter, who's climbed trad routes as hard as 5.14c, spent March establishing new routes on Mexico's 2,500-foot El Gigante.

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Icon: Lynsey Dyer

Huck Doll

[28, JACKSON HOLE]
The more skiing becomes a job, the less you get to ski for fun. I used to feel like I had to prove myself all the time. It was kind of like “Hold my beer. Watch this.” It's always good to stomp those giant airs, but the skiing part has become underappreciated. A lot of the time, just getting to the cliff is the burliest part of the line, the part that shows whether you're a legit skier. When you watch somebody ski fluidly from top to bottom, that's what makes you want to go do it. Most of the big lines I've skied so far have been around Jackson. But there's nothing like Alaska. I've put a lot of time in up there but still haven't gotten my dream opportunity. All the guys are champing to get up there. They have seniority and dictate what's going on—whether you get on a helicopter that's going to the best places. I just want to keep putting my time in, so when I get the call I'm ready. When women are given a chance, you'll be impressed.

Dyer, a former Junior Olympic gold medalist, left racing to ski the biggest cliffs and steepest faces for the cameras of Warren Miller and Teton Gravity Research. She's the co-founder of , which aims to increase female participation in sports.

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Icon: Reid Stowe

Marathon Mariner

Reid Stowe

[58, ADRIFT]
There are many reasons I decided to do this voyage, but they've changed a lot since I first conceived of it, in 1986, and left land in 2007. I've been at sail for more than a thousand days now—the longest sea voyage without resupply in history. But I still have months and months to go, so I can't celebrate. I'm trying not to look ahead, but right now it seems as if I don't have a home. This boat is the only home I have, and it's been beaten up in every way. At the beginning of the voyage, I was hit by a ship on autopilot, so I've sailed this whole time with a partially disabled boat. I capsized at one point, but I kept going. In a way, I succeeded through the power of love, because if you truly love what you're doing, you can succeed at whatever you do. I've learned a lot about myself by being separated from society for so long. I've learned that we as humans must explore. We must see and discover new things or we degenerate. My hope is that this voyage will inspire people to overcome their fears and follow their dreams—to explore. I kept going because I had to. What else could I do?

Stowe was on day 1,003 at sea when we reached him via sat phone. He'd been sailing back and forth between the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans. He plans on docking his 70-foot schooner, Anne, at New York City this June.

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Icon: Lewis Gordon Pugh

Sea Lion

[40, LONDON]
I started out wanting to swim in places where nobody had swum before: Antarctica, the Arctic, all the bloody-cold places. I wanted to be a pioneer, a descendent of Scott and Amundsen, except an explorer of the oceans. I think I was born to swim, but standing on the ice edge at the North Pole in just a Speedo and goggles, I was terrified. You dive in and the water's 28 degrees—colder than what killed the Titanic's passengers—and it's like a death zone. It feels like somebody punched you in the stomach. You cannot breathe. Your skin is on fire. But doing this also gives me an opportunity to shake the lapels of world leaders who aren't taking the environment seriously. In 2008, I swam north of Spitsbergen and was so shocked by how thin the sea ice had become I called Gordon Brown on my satellite phone. We had a long chat. Shortly after, he appointed a climate-change minister in Britain.

In May, Pugh will attempt a one-kilometer swim through the near-freezing waters of an unnamed lake, at about 18,000 feet at the foot of Everest.

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Icon: Maya Gabeira

Giant Rider

[23, OAHU]
The first time I saw a really big wave was at Waimea, at the Eddie Aikau invitational. I was 17 and had just moved to Hawaii from Brazil. I wanted to live on my own. I wanted to figure out who I was and what I really wanted in life. I knew that day that I wanted to surf those waves. After a year of sitting in the lineup with the boys, I caught my first big one—maybe 15 feet—and everything just felt right. I was so focused and in the moment. I loved it. Soon enough I was surfing big waves all over the world. I ended up at Teahupoo, in Tahiti. I was really nervous. I took two big wipeouts, either of which could have ended my career. But it didn't feel right to sit on my board and look stupid, to give up. So my partner, Carlos Burle, towed me out again, and I caught one. People criticized me for taking those risks, for getting in over my head. And, yes, in the beginning I did take a lot of risks, but in the beginning you have to take those risks. How else do you make it? How else do you realize your dreams?

Last August, Gabeira surfed a 45-footer at Dungeons, South Africa, the largest wave ever ridden by a woman—which makes her a shoo-in for her third consecutive Billabong XXL title.

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Icon: Cody Townsend

Water…Skier

[26, SANTA CRUZ]
A little over a year ago, Mike Douglas and I came up with the idea to ski on waves. We're both longtime surfers and professional skiers, so the idea came naturally. Very few people knew about the project when we arrived in Maui. We were sure we'd get blasted out of there as kooks if locals heard about some haoles trying to ski on waves, but everyone was supportive. The technology is pretty far behind. It's like skiing on hickory skis 50 years ago. We used alpine ski boots and super-fat wake skis. After one ride, a wave sucked me down and gave me the worst hold-down of my life. I was standing on a reef below the surface. Even with a life jacket on, I couldn't get up. My skis felt like 200-pound weights on each leg. But we also got up to 25-second rides on some big waves with 20-foot faces. It felt like skiing on top of a slow, wet avalanche. It'd be the easiest way ever to get barreled. On a surfboard, you often get spit out, but on skis you can stall out in the tube. By the end of the trip we knew exactly what equipment we'd have to design to make it better.

Townsend is a professional skier, surfer, and watersports innovator.

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Icon: Nikki Kimball

Endurance Predator

[38, BOZEMAN, MONTANA]
Fun? The race? Fun? Yeah, there were parts of it that were fun. One time, five of us were running along the singletrack and saw this wasp nest, and there was nothing we could do but run through it. (You can't go off-trail, because the jungle's too thick.) These hornets were as long as your little finger—huge. You just heard swearing in five different languages. It was hilarious in a warped kind of way. It's not always painful. I was 27 when I started entering trail races. I'm a slow runner, but I can run for a really long time. It's like hiking at a faster pace. You get to see so much more country, and race organizers are always holding these things in amazing places. It's very social for me. I never took the racing seriously until the press noticed that I had a six-year winning streak. I think each person has a finite number of world-class performances in them.

Starting in 1999, Kimball went seven consecutive years without losing an ultramarathon, including the U.S. national championships. She just returned from winning Brazil's 150-mile Jungle Marathon.

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Icon: Teresa MacPherson and Banks

Guiding Lights

Teresa MacPherson

Teresa MacPherson and Banks

[57 and 6, FAIRFAX, VIRGINIA]
I went to Port-au-Prince with the second wave of people from our task force with Banks, my 65-pound black Labrador, who is trained to find living people. The rubble went on for miles and miles. Helicopters were continually overhead. Rescue teams were everywhere. We used the dogs to discover people trapped in difficult-to-reach places. Banks crawled into voids, tunneling through an unstable environment where no human could go. He barked when he detected the scent of a living person. It could be seven days before an extrication was complete. The doctors said the victims were probably able to survive because they were used to subsisting on so little. The best canine story in Haiti was about a dog that ran out of its search area and began barking at a wall. They bored a hole in it and stared into the face of a three-year-old, dehydrated but alive. That was a 100 percent dog find. I often wondered if our training would be good enough for a disaster of this magnitude. Would the dogs just go, Are you kidding me? But Banks totally did his job. Our group made 16 rescues, a new record for us. Thankfully, we made a difference.

Virginia Task Force One canine search specialist Teresa MacPherson manages FEMA's disaster dog program. She and her Labs have worked in the aftermaths of the Oklahoma City bombing and hurricanes Ike and Katrina.

This article originally appeared as Parting Shot in șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű's April 2010 issue.

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Icon: Rolando Garibotti

Silent Master

[39, JACKSON HOLE]
Am I media shy? I don't make sponsorship money or apply for grants. I make a living as a guide, and that works well enough. I don't object to media after the fact, but I'm always surprised when people promote a climb before doing it, because it's difficult to deal with the pressure of those expectations. The Torre Traverse [Patagonia's Cerro Standhardt, Punta Herron, Torre Egger, and Cerro Torre] took me almost three years. I dedicated all of my time to it. The reason Colin Haley and I pulled it off is because we're very good at planning, not because we're particularly good climbers. We had barely enough food and were barely warm enough. We asked to withdraw the climb from the Piolet d'Or [mountaineering's highest award] in early 2009. That was the second time I'd done that. The first was for a new route on Cerro Torre, in 2005. I just thought the idea that somebody would win this Piolet d'Or was ridiculous. I'm down here with Haley, again. We have an idea, but I don't know if we'll pull it off this year, so I think I'll keep it to myself.

Garibotti has held the record for the Grand Traverse—climbing ten Teton peaks—since 2000, with a time of 6:49.

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Icon: Trip Jennings

River Lover

[27, PORTLAND, OREGON]
There's no road map that shows you how to make a living as a kayaker and filmmaker, but last December I knew I had done it when I paid my cell-phone bill on time. The idea behind my first film, Bigger Than Rodeo, was to blend environmental activism and cutting-edge whitewater. I drove around the country in a '96 Subaru Impreza and maxed out three credit cards while showing footage of a paddler running a 105-foot waterfall. It took three more films and two more credit cards to figure out a combination of adventure and activism that worked. You don't get an interesting job by filling out an application; you commit to your dream the same way you do a waterfall: pick your line and dive headfirst. I'm glad I did it. In the past two years, my filming expeditions to Papua New Guinea, China, the Congo, Bolivia, Canada, and Brazil have been paid for through a partnership with National Geographic and the International League of Conservation Photographers. In the next six months I'm scheduled to shoot one film about elephant poaching in the Congo and another about kayaking in Laos. I created my dream job. It all started because I spent a year living out of a moldy Subaru and poaching continental breakfasts at cheap motels.

In 2008, Jennings led a team down the rebel-infested lower Congo, the last of the world's great unrun rivers. His films for National Geographic TV use kayaks to access Class V rivers in the service of science.

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