“Hi,” Barbara Garrett said, phone to her ear. “I’m with a partner, and we’re up in the mountains and have no way down.”

“OK,” the 911 operator said.

“I don’t know.ĚýWe thought we were on a trail, but we’re way up high and—I don’t know. We’ve been climbing and climbing and climbing, and I can’t even find a trail to go down.”

“OK. Do you know what trail you’re on?”

“Well…” Then she began to explain.

Garrett was 74. At 2 P.M. on April 3, 2020, she and her hiking partner, 63-year-old David Burgin, had left a parking lot at the city limits of Ogden, Utah, and hiked several miles on the Indian Trail into the Wasatch Mountains. During the return hike in the evening, Garrett started getting nervous. She thought they’d been heading the right way, but they were still going up, and were now on an unfamiliar slope where the trail was banded by cliffs. It didn’t make sense.

“I don’t think we’re on the trail anymore,” she told Burgin. He said, “Well, it might not be the trail, but it’s a trail, and it’s headed toward town.” The slope kept ramping up; to keep their footing, they had to tug on roots and rocks, with Burgin telling Garrett, “Come on. You can do it.” Finally, they came to a narrow ledge that ran above a cliff tall enough to injure her if she fell off. For the first time in the four years she’d been hiking with Burgin, Garrett was scared.

They’d met while hiking, back in 2017. He’d taken her picture at sunset, on top of the Ogden Canyon Overlook Trail, and they’d chatted all the way down like a couple of high schoolers. After saying goodbye, Garrett started walking toward her Dodge Caravan but then turned around, walked back over, and gave Burgin a hug under the stars. It was such a great day.

This was the worst day. They’d crossed the ledge, scrambled up more steep terrain, and were now stuck on a flat perch. The sun dropped behind the ridgeline. The temperature was in the forties, and it would soon be dark. They were at 6,000 feet.

“OK, all right,” the dispatcher said. “So I’m trying to see where the map is pinging you. It’s not a very good reading.”

“Oh, I’m kind of hiding behind a rock. You mean you can find my cell phone?”

“Yeah. It’s telling me that you’re possibly by Ogden Canyon, but it’s very far. Give me one second, OK?”

Garrett heard typing. Then the dispatcher connected her to a sheriff’s deputy who didn’t seem to understand her fear or fatigue, because he said, “While you got a little bit of daylight, just start working your way down, and I’ll come up and then try to find you.”

“Well…” Garrett sighed.

“Let me get your phone number.”

“Oh, my gosh.” Garrett knew they were in danger. What she didn’t know was that an uncommon kind of rescuer would soon be hitting the mountains to search for them.

The post Why Drones Are the Future of Outdoor Search and Rescue appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

Leroy Bull was a boy who felt things other children did not. He sensed that there was something right on the edge of his reality, in rural Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, where he grew up in the 1940s and ’50s. Sometimes it sent him messages, although at the time he did not know them as such. What he knew was that in school his eye was drawn out the window and into the woods, where his world hushed.

He quickly learned not to tell the other kids that sometimes, in these moments, he thought he glimpsed the future. Once, when he was older, he called his high school sweetheart and urged her to stay home from school. She hung up, ignored his advice, and broke her ankle that afternoon in gym. As a child, kids called Bull crazy. Was he? He didn’t know. He was surer of himself when he was alone.

There was an old strip mine up the road from his home, and he liked to walk there. The floor of the mine was unnaturally flat and its walls steeply sloped, but he would pick his way down a few times a week, enter that vast space, and feel small. There, he was most aware of the hush. It was like the bottom of a deep breath. It was as if he had grown wings and flown out of this world. Going down was always like returning.

People are most aware of the other side when they’re young, before they grow up and come to distrust what they can’t measure, he says now. Yet some adults retain the feeling, and they may pass along what they’ve learned to those who are open. Bull’s grandfather lived on a farm on the edge of Watertown, New York. He felt something, too.

Bull spent his summers on that farm in upstate New York punching cows, as he puts it, six days out of seven. One spring, on Easter Sunday, when Bull was 12 and he and his brother and the cousins were all up in the front yard, his grandfather disappeared into the woods. When he emerged, he was clutching half a dozen branches he’d cut from the willows. They were shaped like wishbones.

He handed the branches around and showed the kids how to hold them—palms skyward, points facing forward like the needle on a compass. Then he lined the children up before what he said was an underground vein of water that fed a black pitcher pump, and the old-timer told them to walk.

Well, the kids walked, and when they walked over the ground said to have water beneath it, a few of their rods, as it happened, dipped.

Bull’s was the first. His brother’s didn’t budge.

Afterward, their grandfather pulled Bull aside and said, “If you can learn to use that in your lifetime, do it, because it will probably help you.”

Bull would not realize for some time that what he had done that Easter Sunday was to channel the other side—the spirit world, as he calls it—which always felt strongest when he was close to Mother Nature, when the din of his world hushed and the messages from the other side rose in him like goose bumps. He would not learn until his twenties that he could call upon the hush to find things—water, minerals, utility lines—on a map; he would be in his forties before he learned to summon from the silence images of missing people or lost pets or misplaced wedding rings; and not until he was a half-century old would he realize, with shock, that on rare days he could project visions onto the landscape to guide him in his search, like the time a golden grid of shimmering lines snapped above the grass and led him to a well site. Bull’s calling, he would learn, was in finding things the old way, with his intuition as a guide and a forked stick as a pointer, like dowsers have for centuries. All his powers would come in time. It was on that Easter Sunday, when Bull was just a boy, that he took the first step: he learned to find water.

The post Into the Mystical and Inexplicable World of Dowsing appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

When I say the skiing was icy, I don’t mean your standard East Coast edge-skittering hardpack. I mean ice. Ice ice. Frozen water. Inches of it. Peppered in little bumps, like the bumps that stood on my forearms when later I told peopleĚýwhat happenedĚýlast springĚýon the summit of the tallest mountain in Vermont. I watched two friends ski down first. They looked like toy ships on uncertain seas—heaving starboard, falling portside, too much in the bow, sinking in the stern—but they didn’t capsize. When I jump-turned down into the slope, though, my skis blew right out from under me on one of those damn bumps. I started sliding fast and I couldn’t get my skis to bite, so I summoned all my animal instincts to keep them below me, where they scuffed the bumpy ice and regulated my descent to the little tree downhillĚýand the big cliff beyond.

But I hit the tree and stopped.Ěý

That dayĚýI had on powder skisĚýby East Coast standards, that were 98 millimeters underfoot. For two decades now, the American skier has beenĚýirrationally gripped with powder fever. Shane McConkey (may he rest in peace) was the harbinger. He reversed the historic trend of manufacturing skis with more sidecut and camber when he for the first true powder skis, the , on a bar napkinĚýin 1996. In 2001, he tried outĚýthe first prototype in New Zealand onĚýwet, heavy snow. The rest of the pros on the tripĚýwere flailing, but he was flying, and his performanceĚýblew the industry away.

McConkey’s skis were shaped in precisely the opposite dimensions of every other ski at the time:Ěýthey had fat waists, a reversed sidecut, and zero camber. Skis with this geometry, McConkey proved, rip in powder, and that’s why you see iterations of these obese boards today beneathĚýthe feet of so many skiers, even when the snow is firm. “They’re trying to manifest their season,” saysĚýMike Rogge, an editor at Mountain GazetteĚýmagazine and aĚýformerĚýeditor at Powder.

Powder skis, he says,Ěýare a specialized tool, just like skinny skis. But people are drawn to powder skis even on days when they’d be better equipped on their thinner-waisted sisters,Ěýin part because ski magazines and their Instagram feeds feature pros in powder on powder skis. Everyone, it seems, is an optimist. And the market reflectsĚýthis. Last season, sales of skis with widths between 101 and 110 millimeters underfoot grew 10 percent, faster than any other category, according to data provided by the NPD Group.

Now, I’m not saying go hawk your fatties. What I am saying, though, is go tromp on over to that mirror there, look deeply within, and ask yourself, “Honestly, am I best served on most days by powder skis?”Ěý

Ponder it.Ěý

“I don’t think it’s one or the other,” says Rogge. “You can never really have too many skis,Ěýand that,Ěýto me, is part of being a skier.ĚýYou want to build the quiver that makes your season the most fun.”Ěý

For weeks after my slide, the only lesson I could muster was that a full slope of ice made for bad skiing, not that my skis were too wide for the conditions. But I have since moved back out west, to southwestern Colorado, where the distances between places are great and thoseĚýdistancesĚýcan be harrowing. Traveling on skis through suchĚýlonely spaces has shifted my perspective. I understand now that when the slope is steep and firm, skiing can be dangerousĚýif you’re unprepared. My friends were preparedĚýon the day I slid; they were on skinny skis with sharp edges, skis with leverage andĚýbite, skis, it seems to me now, that are less a toy for pleasure and more a tool for safe passage. I’ve since looked into the mirror, and I know my answer: I am not best servedĚýevery dayĚýon powder skis.

So lastĚýfall I bought a pair of skinny skis.

A ski is either a buoy or a blade. It floatsĚýor it cuts. None do both well. Powder skis, which must float, achieve buoyancy mainly by sheer surface area, but on corn or boilerplate or wind-whipped, sunbaked, supportable mank, a wide ski is a slow ski edge to edge. Your width underfoot also reduces leverageĚýlaterally, so a wide ski more easily blows out of turns. All that tends to make for a sluggish and imprecise ski, oneĚýthat spreads like a butter knife, not one that cuts like a cleaver.

Of course, you don’t wantĚýskis to cut in powder. Those skis don’t float. They sink, and sinking in deep snowĚýsucks. But you don’t sink on firm snow; in thoseĚýconditions, you want a ski that cuts and tracks when you tilt it, not one that squabbles. The two defining traits of a ski that rails areĚýmore curvature along itsĚýedges and less distance between them. More sidecut—which gives a ski that hourglass shape—allows a pair to penetrate deeper in itsĚýtracks and shortens the turn radius, heightening those sweet, sweet G’s. ByĚýcontrast, aĚýthinner-waisted skiĚýamplifies traction in a turn because it offersĚýmoreĚýleverage.

Skinny skisĚýalso snapĚýedge to edge. It’sĚýa different sensation than the feel-good, floaty vibes, brah, of bounding through powder like a dolphin rolling on dopamine. It’s more savage. You flick your ankles and instantly there you are, leaping into a new turn, loading onto a new set of edges, leaning in and hanging on and bracing with your quads and glutes and core against a force that wants to eject you, wantsĚýto break you. It’s not a dolphin you’re riding,Ěýit’s a bull.

But there are better authorities than me on carving. I only raced in high school. Take it fromĚýski racer Bode Miller, who has won six Olympic gold medals. Carving isĚý“one of the elements of skiing that is really, really fun. It’s primarily what I do,” he said, laughing, when I reached him by phone in Montana. And when it comes to carving, your ski choice makes “a huge, huge difference,” he said.ĚýWith a fat ski, “you can make a slide GS turn, a slide slalom turn, and it’s, you know, playful, fun.” But when you angle a thin-waisted pair of skis sharply into a turn and dip deeply enough to fight the six or seven or eight G’s pulling on you, “it’s really like a whole new sport.”

No skis excel more at carving than skinny skis, and it is Miller’s goal to “softly nudge” people to try them. After all,Ěýhe’s designing them (and other models)Ěýfor the manufacturer . There’s just so much more to skiing that you’re missing if you don’t give skis thinner than 100 millimeters underfoot a chance, he said.ĚýBut he acknowledges that it’s probably impossible to change the paradigm with so much market momentum behind fat-waisted skis, which is a shame. Many skiers haven’t ever truly carved. “I think it’s something that’s never, unfortunately, been shared,” he said.

My skinny skis are a pair of discounted Ěýmounted with ancient Ěýbindings. They are 176 centimeters long and, conspicuously, 82Ěýmillimeters underfoot. They’re the skinniest skis I’ve owned as an adult, rivaling even what I rode when I was a kid and my dad plopped me on the best deals he found at ski swaps. They’re unsubstantial, and the first few times I skied them, before snowĚýin southwestern Colorado had substantiallyĚýaccumulated, I was afraid, deep down, that skiers would think I was, too. They don’t scream fun. They whimper pragmatism, somethingĚýfew skiers really care about, it seems.

In late January, I finally tested my skinny skis in the conditions for which they’re designed: firm snow. That day, onĚýgroomers at Winter Park, much of the corduroy had been scraped clean by the afternoon. Bare patches shined with a white-blueĚýalmost-ice. I kicked in, rode to the top of Mary Jane, and the skinny skis kicked back.

They vaulted from edge to edge to edge, and I could feel that gyroscopic tug as I cut unbroken lines from turn to turn to turn, accelerating on the low-angle groomer as islands of trees zipped by faster and faster and faster. They hammered twin tracks into the hard snow as the slope steepened and opened below me.ĚýI felt like a locomotive storming down the valley, fast because I was confident, confident because I was secure. The skinny skis cut where my powder skis would slide. The cutting quaked in my thighs, which were flexed, and I felt powerful.

Then I lost an edge.Ěý

As I slidĚýsideways, still on my feet, I didn’t think about that spring slide last year on the summit of the tallest mountain in Vermont, because you don’t think in moments when you must act. I thought about it later, though. If, at Winter Park, I’d been on skis just 15 millimeters wider underfoot, with less edge-to-edge leverage, I could’ve continued sliding and, upon heaving my knees uphill in an effort to regain control, blown my edgesĚýout entirely, landing on my hip, catching a rogue edge, spinning upside down, losing skis, poles, and perhaps sailingĚýinto the trees. But I was on skinny skis that day, and when I pressed my knees into the slope, my edges caught, slamming me back into my track. I rocketed through my turn, grinning.

The post An Ode to Skinny Skis appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.