West Virginia has the highest average elevation of any state east of the Mississippi. That’s not due to��the mountains—its��tallest peak is still lower than Denver—but the��hills that roll out like endless moguls.

More than a century��ago,��towns rose up in the valleys, built from coal fortunes. In the late 1800s, the city of Bramwell used to��. Its��bank was once so flush with cash that its janitor would . Nearby, the city of Bluefield was built next to the world’s richest coal deposit, which became��a mini metropolis and��earned��it the nickname Little New York.

But things have changed. Most of those towns��are��empty and crumbling now. In Bluefield, the population has dropped by half, to , and a quarter of its residents live in poverty. In Bramwell, a few rehabbed mansions share the streets with a largely barren business district and derelict homes that stand as a reminder of what was. In the 1980s, , a number that has since��, despite��.

But for the first time in a generation,��after many have accepted��the fact that coal money isn’t going to come back, optimism has returned to��these valley towns. Even with the nation’s��economy imploding from the pandemic, some West Virginians finally see a way they could turn things around: ATV tourism.

It’s possible thanks��to more than 700 miles of doubletrack trails cut through those endless hills. In the past 20 years, motorcycle and riders have arrived in increasing numbers, and last year the state sold more than��56,000 permits for��the ,��a professionally managed network��amid��beautiful old-growth forests. This enterprise��helped fuel a West Virginia tourism industry that has experienced��a��. Today��—more than the coal industry employed a generation ago.

It’s perhaps��a bit ironic that the Hatfield-McCoy Trails got their start in large part��from��a man��who had no interest in using them.

In 1989, John English didn’t ride ATVs, even though��he was director of state government affairs for the national . He met up for lunch one day with Leff Moore, now deceased, who was executive director of the West Virginia Recreational Vehicle Association. Moore started talking about the former coal-mine roads. English, now 75, recalled, “A little light came on, and we both started thinking, Gee, how could we maybe take advantage of that?”

, especially in the southern part of the state, where . The two men��realized that if��they could convince the companies of those trails’��tourism potential, they could conceivably develop a network unlike any other in the world.

The companies had sliced��trails through��virgin hemlock��forests more than a century ago to get workers to the mines, often using school buses with jacked-up suspensions and off-road tires.��Dave Preston, 63, still recalls bouncing along on gravel roads on his way to work. He’s a third-generation coal miner from Matewan, the West Virginian town memorialized in by the same name that documented bloody conflicts between miners and the companies that mistreated them. In 1974, at just 18, Preston went to work in the mines.

“Well, you’re from coal country. It was in your blood. It’s dangerous work. It’s hard work. But it paid good,” Preston said. “The money in the mine was so good, you had school teachers quitting to go work in them.”

Miners would make upward��of six figures a year, Preston remembered. But he was laid off in 1983, with the local coal mines nearly exhausted, and he picked up��a job at an auto-rebuild shop. “It wasn’t a real good time,”��he said.��“Nobody likes being unemployed. I kept a job, but it was like a quarter of the money.”

In his downtime, Preston and other former��miners began taking��their ATVs out to explore the��trails they used to ride to work. The affinity for the machines, he said,��is something West Virginians have in their blood. You’ll often see people shuttling their kids to school or pulling up to a McDonald’s drive-through on one.

But the problem with the former coal roads becoming recreational trails, English realized back in 1989, was that none of them connected. Mostly, they ended at the mines and offered��few scenic destinations.

So in the 1990s, English and the other trail founders set out to change things. They convinced the state legislature to allocate $1.5 million to create an authority that would��oversee trail maintenance, sell permits, and take on liability in case anybody got injured. Then they brought in a team from the Bureau of Land Management to suss out how to connect everything into what would become a thousand��contiguous miles of trails��and draw up the first maps of the network.

Named after��the families who once attracted international attention for a blood feud that started over a stolen hog, the Hatfield-McCoy Trails opened in 2000. Nobody had any idea what to expect next, said Jeffrey T. Lusk, executive director of the . “We were so concerned,” Lusk said. “We were thinking, Oh my goodness, when we turn this on, is anybody going to come use them?”

That first year, the state sold 5,000 permits (which cost $26.50 for residents and��$50 for out-of-state visitors), far more than anyone��expected. “In those first few months, we knew we had something. We had something people wanted to do,” Lusk said.

It wouldn’t take long for��interest in the trails to turn into a business opportunity for a state that needed it badly.

Cameron Ellis grew up on top of a cleared hillside near the town of Gilbert, West Virginia. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had all mined coal in the hill. It dried up��before Ellis came along. As a little kid, he knew the family’s land only for what it had once been.

Ellis, 29, was in elementary school when the trails opened, and his family was among the first to see the potential. They added ten primitive campsites to their property in 2002. With no facilities, the campers showered��at the town’s community center.

Those first guests were all one demographic: young men traveling in groups. That changed, however, after��a shift in the ATV industry that became a big reason for the success of the Hatfield-McCoy Trails. In the early 2000s, ATVs were��essentially four-wheel motorcycles, with controls on the handlebars and��an open cab. Then the industry switched to a vehicle known as a side-by-side;��largely enclosed, it has��a car-like steering wheel��and pedals.��The demographic of the people arriving to the Ellis’s campground soon included families, with dad and mom and the kids all piling into four-seat machines.

The family’s now features��20 primitive tent sites, 43 full-hookup campsites, 11 mountaintop cabins with��kitchens and baths, ATV��rentals, and a barbecue restaurant. It has welcomed��guests from every state in the nation and numerous��foreign countries.

“It was nothing but primitive when we first started,” Ellis said,��“and we’ve built up to everything we’ve had now. Even just ten��years ago, you wouldn’t have thought it would grow into something so large. It’s a lifeline into southern West Virginia now.”

Today the trails are��the number-one draw in Mercer County, said��Jamie Null, executive director of the local tourism board. Her organization, , even bought its own ATV��three years ago, outfitting��it in green and white and��emblazoning it��with the county’s name across the door. Null grew up in Princeton, West Virginia, in a family that wasn’t very outdoorsy. But now she takes journalists and politicians on trips across the county in her Polaris General four-seater (and she��bought one for her own family). She sees a lot of optimism in the ATV-rental businesses and in hotels��like outside Bluefield, which promotes itself as “designed to meet the needs of ATV riders.”

“As far as me having a crystal ball and saying this could save a town, who can do that?” Null says. “But we have to look at the bigger picture and look at how we can revitalize our towns.”

In the past five years, the trail system has added two new sections,��increasing��Hatfield-McCoy from 550 to 730 miles and��connecting more towns that might benefit from that��same kind of economic growth, said Lusk. Last year��the trails saw a 12 percent uptick, with 56,258 permits sold, mostly to visitors from out of state.

Like all tourism-focused industries nowadays, Lusk is undoubtedly concerned with how COVID-19 will affect things, especially considering a good deal of his business happens in early spring. On March 21, , but that didn’t last long; two months later, the state reopened them, and since then, riders have returned in numbers surpassing 2019 figures. During the closure, the state initiated��the , and Lusk says that, so far, no trail-related businesses have been forced to close.

The biggest challenge currently��is a lack of supporting infrastructure. If the trails are to grow, the state needs more hotels,��restaurants,��and shops to cater to riders. “These towns have the opportunity to reinvent themselves,” Lusk��said.

The trails have undoubtedly changed things for Dave Preston, the former coal miner. In 1991, he went back to work underground and continued in the mines until 2013, when they laid him off again. It was then that he heard about a job as an ATV guide. He grew up in a family that “knew how to eat off the land,” and taking tourists out into the woods now is something that makes him proud, able to show off the countryside where he was raised. “It’s my cup of tea,” he said. “I grew up in the outdoors.”

While some might look down on��motor-powered ATV recreation on public lands, Preston explains that the vehicles��are the only way to access terrain that few would otherwise see. The trails are officially multi-use, but they are far too muddy in the winter and spring and too dusty in the summer��for other modes of transportation. Even fat-tire bikes would get bogged down in the ruts or struggle on the inclines, and all of it would be laborious for hikers or horses.

On a trip into the woods of Mercer County earlier this year, Preston bombed through mud pits and maneuvered knobby wheels through ruts running with mud. His machine seemed unstoppable, and it easily forged��up steep��inclines, charged over exposed rocks, and blasted down hillsides.

He took a couple zooms through a mud pit for photos. Then he made a precipitous��descent, followed the trail on a 90-degree turn, and stopped next to a near vertical hillside. Tucked between the roots of trees, he pointed out a cave the size of a kitchen window. A century ago, miners had drilled there to reach a small cut of coal. Preston picked up a chunk of black rock they left behind;��a streak of soot remained on his fingers after he tossed it back.

On the way out, the trail passed by a graveyard miles from anything, just perched atop a bald nob. Preston explained that his ancestors used to bury their dead out here in unofficial graves found along these trails, markers to a civilization that’s moved on.

The post How ATVs Are Reviving a Forgotten Region of Appalachia appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

On November 25, 2019, Chris Carney and his two-man��crew,��Pete Brown��and Jun “Sumi” Sumiyama, set off from Japan on their way to Hawaii in a 42-foot sailboat, the Coco-Haz III.��They had four weeks to cross the world’s largest ocean. The boat’s owner, a retired Japanese dentist, needed the trip done in a hurry—he’d lose a boat slip he’d rented if it��didn’t arrive in time. Carney didn’t think they��would make it on schedule, even if everything went right. But things went far worse than he imagined when two catastrophes left them stranded in the middle of the sea.

Here is Carney’s story, as told to ���ϳԹ���.

It was morning when it happened. I got��my raingear on and went��up on the deck to��make some changes to our course. I stuck my head up, and I couldn’t believe it—the mast was gone.

One of the shrouds that connected it to the ship just broke, I guess from metal fatigue. I’ve been sailing most of my life, and not only has this never happened on any boat I’ve been on, but I don’t know anybody else who’s had this happen to them, the mast just snapping like that.

It was December 19, and we were about a thousand miles from Oahu, Hawaii. We had lots of fuel, so we thought we could just motor in. The next day, a storm hit us. The seas were at 10 to 13 feet, nothing too dangerous. But as soon as night fell, there was one wave that went by, and we all looked at each other thinking, Whoa, that was a big one.

The next wave��didn’t just roll us, it picked us up and threw us. We landed upside down in the sea.

It was incredibly violent. What they show on TV, when the camera goes up and down and things are falling? It doesn’t do it justice. Stuff was flying everywhere. The battery came blasting out of the engine compartment and shot through the cabin like a rocket. We got thrown around pretty good, and we were all bruised and cut. Sumi hit his head. We didn’t know how bad it was until later.

The three of us were standing on the ceiling, and the water was coming in fast. At first it was��shin-deep, and then it came up to our knees. In no time��it was at��our thighs. The hatch was up in the front, underwater. I kept picturing what that would be like, opening that hatch and coming out on the surface during a storm. We would be in the middle of the ocean with nothing.

I was sure that this was��where we were going to die, right here in this storm, in this water. I was thinking, God, this boat’s got to right itself. Sailboats are designed to flip back over if they roll, but you never know what’s going to happen��at sea.

Finally, it did roll. But even though the boat was upright, we were waist-deep in water, with the storm sending in more every time a wave broke over us. The engine was flooded. Most of our fuel went into the ocean. We lost our navigation, all our electronics, nearly all of our fresh water—everything. We were dead in the water and adrift.

We did our best to bail. The waves were slamming into us, and��the hull started to crack. If we had a breach, the boat was going to sink in about 30 seconds.

The storm didn’t break, and it was miserable. We were cold, and everything was wet. No dry clothes, no dry beds. We went on starvation rations, like five almonds per day. By rationing what little water and food we had left, we thought we could make it maybe 40 or 50 days. I had never seriously faced my mortality before. Everyone knows they’re��going to die. But they don’t think that they are going die in 50 days.

The storm finally broke after 36 hours. We estimated that we had about 700 miles to go, so we rigged up a makeshift sail from the boat’s Bimini top, kind of like a convertible top for a car. With that, we could make one or two knots, but if the current is one or two knots against you, you’re not going anywhere.

At that point, our biggest issue was morale. Each of us was entertaining our worst fears. Sumi kind of withdrew. He had a severe concussion, and he was sleeping 18 hours a day. He became very silent.��Pete, who’s��from Tennessee, kept coming up with these songs on the banjo. They were pretty morose. He was singing about how he’d never see his family again��and how the sea was going to get him.

I gave us about a 10 percent chance. Pete was giving us much less. We had a compass��but no maps and only a moderate indication of where we might be.��Dead reckoning is a sketchy way to navigate;��it’s just guessing the direction you’re going and how fast you’re traveling, but that’s what we did. The wind rarely shifts in that part of the ocean, so we used little ribbons tied around the boat to see where it was coming from. At night��we relied on the feel of the wind on our cheeks. We thought we were at about 24 degrees north latitude when the rogue wave hit, so I figured that if we got down to 21 degrees, we might end up in the shipping lanes.

During the days, our time was occupied by tinkering with things. One guy would be driving, one guy who had been on watch the night before would be napping, and the other would be tinkering. Nothing we did could get that engine working. The satellite phone was wet, so we put it in rice at first and then dried it��in the sun. To no avail. It never did get working.

Out of the 15 or so flashlights we had on board, only one was fully waterproof, so it was the only one that survived. At night��you could use the moon and the stars to navigate. But occasionally��you’d have to look at the compass. So that flashlight was key.

One night��Pete fumbled for the flashlight and knocked it into��the ocean. It was floating in the water, and we were heading away from it. Pete jumped in and swam. He was getting pretty far away from the boat. When he found it, he put it in his mouth, but the light was facing him, blinding him. He couldn’t see to swim back. I tried to wake up Sumi so I could go in and help, but he was in a trance, still concussed. I was screaming to Pete:��“Swim to my voice!” I was thinking I’d have to turn the boat around and go back for him. But he swam hard and made it. His tooth was chipped from biting down on that flashlight.

Two days later, we finally had some luck. The wind magically started coming from behind us, and we made headway. Each day��I would wake up and think, This a beautiful day to get rescued.

By day nine, we were feeling pretty good, and we were all inside trying to figure out how much drinking water was left. I started thinking we had spent too much time inside, and I popped my head up, and there was a freaking ship—right there, just a half-mile away.��We sent up rockets and smoke bombs��and stood on the deck screaming and waving. But it didn’t see us��and just passed by.

Pete was supposed to have been��up on deck at that moment. He felt pretty bad after that. He’s normally not a potty mouth, but he started swearing, saying, “This is a fucking shitshow.” It was the first ship we’d seen in three weeks, and it just went right by us.

But at least we knew that we were in a shipping lane. That gave us some hope.

Sumi started to feel better. His hand and head were both numb, and he was still concussed. But he was sleeping less and more upbeat. He was driving the next day when we saw a second ship.

It was a container ship called Nobility. It was a long way off. So��we ripped the mirrors from the bathroom and used them to reflect the sun to signal the ship. For the longest time, it didn’t see us. We thought it might just pass us by, like the last one. Luckily, it eventually changed course, slowed way down, and blew its horn.

This was December��29. The Coast Guard had been searching since��the 24th and was��going to cancel the search on the 30th. The Nobility was headed to Korea. It took the Coast Guard about four hours to find the Kalamazoo, a Good Samaritan vessel that could bring us to Hawaii instead. It came up alongside us. They threw ropes down and tied us up.

I was reluctant to leave. I had never abandoned a boat in the middle of the ocean. You know how they say captains should go down with the ship? There’s an element of shame attached to not completing your voyage.

If I thought there was a 10 percent chance that we could find Hawaii, I probably would have said, “Let’s just take some water and we’ll be on our way.” Pete felt the same. He said, “Our mission is a failure.” But if we died out there, then our mission would have definitely been��a failure.

We climbed on the Kalamazoo at sunset. The first thing they gave us was some steak and potatoes, which was their Sunday meal. As we ate, we laughed about our twist of fate. Just a day before, we were pretty sure we were not going to make it.

If someone finds themselves in the same spot I was in, I would say to use your noggin. Make your best guess. Say, “This is our plan, and let’s stick to it.” That’s��what we did. After ten days, we were only eight miles off our guess of where we were.

While we were lost, I thought about how much I love my family. I’ve got a two-year-old son and a girlfriend in the Philippines. Thankfully, he will never have to say, “I never knew my father. He died when I was two, lost at sea.” Now I’ve got a chance to watch him grow up. I cherish the time that I have to spend with them. Maybe I took them for granted before? I don’t know.

My girlfriend has said she wasn’t worried. She said, “You promised me you’d come back.” Isn’t that what everybody says?

The post How a Shipwrecked Crew Survived 10 Days Lost at Sea appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

A big man who usually has an unhurried gait, Stacey Moore picked up his pace to a near jog. It was, after all, what could��be one of the most important nights of his life.��

Wearing a blue-and-white-striped dress shirt and black slacks, Moore led me through a maze of hallways connecting Pennsylvania’s Valley Forge Casino Resort with a Radisson Hotel.

“This is big,” Moore said. He was generally a bit of a quiet talker, maybe on the shy side, with an affable smile that made��it seem like he was always on the verge of a punch line. “Tonight is really big for me.”��

Moore is��commissioner of the (ACL), a four-year-old operation that has helped turn a tailgate game into an organized sport. It was early August, and the league was hosting a nationally televised broadcast, featuring players from three countries,��as part of its six-day .

Live television has its obvious obstacles, but perhaps the biggest one for Moore were the thousand players in the basement of the casino,��tossing beanbags into holes and��getting piss drunk. Moore told��me��it’s not uncommon to have to yank his players away from the bar for a round.��

But that’s not even the worst of it. “One guy, we started our broadcast, and he’s nowhere to be found,” Moore said. “Turns out he was in the can. He’s supposed to be on live TV, and he’s taking a dump.”

Moore shook his head at the idea of that happening again.��

The league had its first exposure��on ESPN in July 2016, albeit on the network’s online-only ESPN3. Its big break came a year later, with the first-ever nationally televised cornhole tournament on ESPN2. This year, the conclusion of the international World Cup tournament, one event that’s part of the world championships, was shown live on ESPN8: The Ocho, which, to catch you up, was initially a parody created in the movie . The Ocho became such a cultural phenomenon that the network decided to turn ESPN2 into the Ocho once a year in August. Its��slogan?��“Bringing you the finest in seldom-seen sports from around the globe since 1999. If it’s almost a sport, we’ve got it here.”

The idea that cornhole is categorized as “almost a sport” doesn’t seem to help the league’s credibility. It also doesn’t help that the World Cup tournament was broadcast after cherry-pit spitting, acrobatic pizza trials, and slippery stairs, in which leotard-wearing contestants try to, well, you’ve already figured it out.

The World Cup is just one of several titles on the line at the overall tournament. : the All Forces Championship for veterans; doubles play broken down into seniors, women’s, and mixed competition; something called the Devour Man of the Year. When asked whether��there’s one that stands above the rest, organizers kept insisting they’re all somehow equally important.��

Inside an auditorium underneath the Radisson, Moore surveyed the scene.��He let out a deep breath. The sobriety of his players aside, things were looking close to ready.

The pressure of a live broadcast wasn’t the only thing on the line. Moore created the World Cup portion of the event hoping that cornhole would earn more respect and��attention in other countries. He’ll need both if he’s to meet his goal of .

That’s right.��Moore wants a game that’s typically played with one hand holding a beer—and possibly named for an indecent part of the human body—in the Olympics.��

There’s no clear explanation of how the game got its start. The origin story I heard many times at the world championships—that a 15th-century German cabinetmaker named Matthias Kuepermann invented the game after witnessing kids throwing rocks in a hole—is likely a myth, said Gerald��Gems, professor emeritus at North Central College near��Chicago. But his research did find that Chicagoans were playing the game as far back as the 1970s.��

Moore, who hails from Charlotte, North Carolina, got into cornhole after creating . He noticed��that people took cornhole far more seriously than beer pong or other games, so he started the American Cornhole League in 2015, which, as it turns out, wasn’t even the first��cornhole league. Frank Geers��first played the game in the Cincinnati Bengals’ parking lot in the late 1990s. At the time, he worked for a business doing specialty marketing, figuring out how to get brand logos placed in unconventional places. “What I saw, when I saw cornhole, was a billboard waiting to happen,” Geers recalled. For a few years, he worked trying to sell companies on the idea of putting their logos on cornhole boards, before having an even bigger epiphany: he would create the world’s first professional cornhole league. In 2005, Geers incorporated the American Cornhole Organization. “We got laughed at for five to seven years when we started saying this could be a sport,” Geers said. There are��now at least three pro cornhole leagues in the United States, with tournaments and branded products and claims to be the game’s official governing body. Moore’s ACL, however, remains the only one to be broadcast on national TV.

Among the things pro cornhole leagues have done for the sport is create standardized rules. Players get a point for landing on the board and three points for dropping a bag into the hole. Each team tosses four bags, alternating turns, and then the low score is subtracted from the high score; if one team sinks two bags and the other sinks just one, the first team gets three points. They typically play to 21 points, but it can sometimes take a half-hour or more to reach that number.

The pros even have a few tricks you likely haven’t seen. The first player to throw often tries to land the bag in front of the hole, blocking the other team from being able to slide their bags in. Sometimes they’ll even stack them up, a little beanbag wall. That forces the other team to attempt an airmail, or a toss with a high arc that ideally drops the beanbag right in the hole. For those of us who know the game mostly from football tailgates, the accuracy of the pros is shocking. Trey Ryder, the league’s expert commentator, said the pros land about 80 percent of their shots.��

On the afternoon before the big international championship, was in the bowels of the Valley Forge Casino, worried. Henderson is one of the game’s best-known players, the Derek Jeter of cornhole and the captain of Mid-East team, which was about to start play in an untelevised tournament��featuring��cornhole’s��elite​​​​,��the first major contest of the ACL World Championships.����

The first problem he had to overcome were��the league-provided jerseys. They came in an assortment of sizes. Nobody on his 16-person team wanted the XXL, and too many of them wanted the larges. Henderson eventually sorted the shirt issue. But more important, the team was missing one of its star players, a 40-year-old woman named Stacia Pugh, who wasn’t answering texts.

Luckily, Henderson, 28, is used to dealing with logistical issues. In his day job, he runs a warehouse in Athens, Ohio,��for a company that delivers convenience-store items to college students. He started playing cornhole when he was 16, traveling to compete in tournaments near his home. He got slaughtered at first,��so he’d practice hours a day��until he started winning. Sometimes he’d walk away with $500 for a first-place finish.

Nowadays��he practices 20 hours a week and dreams about quitting the warehouse job to become a full-time cornhole player. He said that��people ask him all the time how much he makes.��The league��claims that some have made up to $60,000. “There’s no way,” Henderson said. “There’s no way that’s possible.” Last year, a good year for Henderson, he made about $20,000 in winnings, but he said that most, if not all, of that money went to travel expenses to get��to events.��

Pugh, the missing member of Henderson’s team, is among the few who have become full-time pros. She got into the game ten��years ago when she started playing her dad, who would trash-talk while constantly besting her. She responded by buying her own boards and bags and practicing until she consistently beat him. In November 2018, Pugh quit her job as a real estate developer in Cleveland. As of August, she’d won more than $10,000 playing cornhole and in sponsorships, and she hoped to double that by year’s end.

The ACL estimates that��fewer��than 250��players are considered pros—those who have made money at a tournament. Women make up about 15 percent of that number, according to the league, and the best of them stand to make more money than the men. That’s because they can play in both women-only ACL contests and also in main events open to anyone.��

Pugh shrugged off questions when she showed up about 15 minutes after play was supposed to begin. Henderson switched from frantically running around the casino basement to getting ready for the game.��

Henderson and Pugh and the rest of their team took their spots among a mass of cornhole boards lined up in the cavernous, windowless space. The boards are made from a thin plank of pine or birch, and the landing bags created a cacophony, like a hundred off-beat snare drums.

I wandered behind the rows of courts, trying to understand it all. Unlike the broadcasts, which are chopped down to just the finals and juiced up with music and announcers, the beginning of bracket play is difficult for a spectator. The players get text messages from the organizers announcing when and where they’re playing, meaning it’s not possible for me to know what’s coming up next. The score is kept with golf tees stuck into wooden podiums, with numbers so small that it’s nearly impossible for a spectator to keep track. Also, the results are kept by scorekeepers who don’t announce them. At the end of one tournament, I watched as players simply stopped in the middle of games, knowing that one team had achieved enough points to claim the trophy; I’m still not sure how. ��

A replay is only accessible on the ACL website or for subscribers of the ESPN app, and even then, only the parts of the tournament that get broadcast are available.

Perhaps more challenging for the league’s hopes of making cornhole an Olympic sport, watched by millions, is the fact that tournaments are exceedingly long. The world championships in August lasted up to��14 hours a day over six days. The all-star-style tournament I watched lasted five hours—far longer than my cornhole attention span.��

When I mentioned this to Moore’s staff, they said that the night’s World Cup would be better, thanks to a simpler scoring method. It would be, they promised, a true spectator sport.

Earlier this year, cornhole had a bit of a moment. Following a Fourth of July tournament in Connecticut, ESPN posted on its Twitter feed that showed��Daymon Dennis making what might just be the Immaculate Reception of cornhole. Thrown high and arching, Dennis’s airmail shot��knocked��his opponent’s bag off the board before dropping into the hole, good for three points. In all the hours I watched cornhole at the championship, I didn’t see a shot like this��repeated. By last count, the clip had��been viewed 25 million times, according to Dennis.

Dennis said��he gets recognized while traveling now, and he can’t go anywhere in his hometown of Brownsville, Kentucky, without someone at least giving him a knowing look. Not that it has amounted to��much. “If��anybody’s going to be broke and famous,” his wife told him,��“it’s you.”��

I previously associated cornhole with frat parties and hipster bars in Asheville, North Carolina, where I first played the game maybe a decade ago, but those two crowds are a minority among the pros. Many players��at the tournament come from the Midwest and the South, with day jobs as contractors or��electricians—people who work with their hands. They’re often people with disposable income, in part because they have to pay their way to tournaments. It’s a welcoming group, with few displaying the kind of cold competitiveness I’ve seen at��mountain-biking or paddleboarding races.

While it would be easy to question the athleticism required of cornhole, it is surprising to watch how much the players throw—hundreds if not thousands of times a day at the championship. “People usually think I’m joking when I say this, but players do get sore,” said��Ryder, the color commentator.����

Even if cornhole does require a certain level of athleticism, it doesn’t demand sobriety. Henderson, while competing in two big tournaments a day, drank cans of Busch Light wrapped in a koozie. On , it lists her favorite drink while competing: Barefoot cabernet sauvignon. When asked about it, she said at least one glass is necessary before play begins. “It just helps with the nerves,” she said.��

Moore said��that casual approach to the game keeps things fun��and is��something he’s not willing to change. Even if it meant that��later that night��he might be pulling his players away from the bar.

Minutes before the ESPN broadcast began, Moore stood in the center of a landing that overlooked��the lighted area where the games were to be played. He snaked his way between speakers and cables and tables holding monitors and soundboards. Ryder was nearby under bright lights. Moore bounced from one foot to the other. “Yeah, I’m nervous,” he said. “Do I look nervous?”

I took a seat at one end of the auditorium. The place filled to standing room only. Aside from a few family and friends, the crowd of maybe 200 was mostly players competing in the other events. “Make some noise!” the DJ urged them regularly, and they obliged. Many held signs that read��“for hims 4 bagger,” a reference to a player sinking all four beanbags, provided by an ACL sponsor, Hims, which sells discount erectile-dysfunction drugs.

The World Cup had begun the day before, with 25 international players representing three countries—Australia, Canada, and the U.S. Every time cornhole gets a national broadcast, Moore said, he sees an uptick in interest. At this point, Moore said,��his work is an investment into what pro cornhole could become. “I’m definitely not making a lot of money,” Moore said. “People say I’m the Roger Goodell of cornhole, but all of our league, all of the prize money, all of our expenses, all of what I’m making from it, doesn’t equal NFL commissioner Roger Goodell’s salary.” (Goodell's next contract will reportedly pay him�� a year.)

As attention for cornhole increases, so will the prize money, Moore said. The 2019 ACL World Championship made $249,000 in payouts, divided among about a hundred players, according to the league, thanks in part to money that amateur players pay to enter tournaments. The World Cup promised a payout of $25,000 split between the two teams in the finals.

As the World Cup broadcast got started, Henderson and his partner, , edged out a victory against the other top-ranked U.S. team. Next, a Canadian team beat a contingent from Australia, pitting the Canadians against Henderson and Hissner in the finals.

While it had been my intention to track the final and provide a riveting dispatch, I must confess: I had little idea of what was happening. Even with a front-row seat, it was often impossible to see where bags landed. The referee, standing at a podium to the side of the arena, had to confirm the point totals with the players. The only commentator broadcast in the arena came from��the DJ, whose main job, it seemed, was to hype the crowd for wide-angle shots. That left spectators unsure of what was going on, with reactions to even the final shots happening��a few seconds after the conclusion of the matches.

From what I could tell, Henderson and Hissner won nearly every round in the finals, slaughtering the Canadians by nine points. It was just after 9 P.M. when it ended, and Hissner, now a world champion, had��been playing while holding��a thermos of beer since at least 2 P.M. (although I never saw him refill it).��

Henderson, as everyone expected, walked away from the entire event among the top players, bringing home $8,000 in prize money.

The ACL claimed that more than 200,000 viewers saw the championship event on the Ocho, which league officials said��beat out Major League Soccer and Major League Baseball games broadcast at the same times. The broadcast’s viewership, according to also league officials, was 80 percent��men, and��at least 40 percent of the audience was��in the 25-to-34 age bracket.��

The next day I caught Moore during some downtime in the casino’s basement. He looked exhausted. “It’s going,” he said��with a laugh, when I asked how things were looking. His problem at that moment was trying to figure out why ESPN had broadcast the rest of the world-championship event on its online-only ESPN3. “We get good ratings, people are into it, I just don’t get it,” he said.��

We talked briefly about the Olympics. He knows he needs to increase the number of international teams if he’s going to make a legitimate attempt at claiming that cornhole is played widely enough to justify a bid. He’s pinning��his hopes on American soldiers, who he’s heard often pull out cornhole boards at bases in Germany and the Middle East. Perhaps the locals will catch on and spread it organically.

I mentioned my problems following the play, especially the lack of a commentator explaining the score, and I admitted��sheepishly that it was impossible to keep a cornhole attention span for tournaments that last hours. “Yeah,” he said��with genuine interest, “we know that’s something we need to work on if we’re going to start getting spectators.”

The next night, the broadcast shifted to crew play, meaning four-person teams. The finals lasted almost two hours, and I excused myself before the last game. While a good��shot was initially a spectacle, its entertainment value had worn off.

Before heading to the��airport the following day, I took a walk in downtown Philadelphia and found��a pair of cornhole boards set up in John F. Kennedy Plaza. “Cornhole!” a kid yelled, sprinting toward them, and he and his brother started tossing bags. But they quickly lost��interest in the game and��threw the bags��at each other instead. Their mother eventually intervened, giving me the chance to play.��

It was my first time in years. Attempting to mimic the throwing motion used by most pros—arm dipped behind my back to set up an underhand throw, wrist flicked��at the last second, bag arcing gently—I landed two bags on the board and sank another, a good round. I looked around the crowded park, but nobody was watching.��

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Everyone told Tom Kennedy to expect flooded trails when he hiked through in the spring of 2015. But as he sloshed��through miles of waist-deep swamp water that hid��alligators and aggressive snakes, the trail quickly got the better of him.

Right from the start, at the Oasis Visitor Center, in the middle of Florida’s southern tip, the trail disappeared into a sawgrass swamp, the wispy green stalks climbing above Kennedy’s head. He waded in and soon found himself struggling for every step through muck that was as thick as drying concrete��and��threatening��to pull off his boots. With��little dry land available, he made camp in a hammock.

This was Kennedy’s second-ever long-distance hike. He had done the first one, a��journey up the��Appalachian Trail, way back in 1980. After getting laid off from his job selling mattresses in 2014 and well into his sixties, he decided to tackle another of the nation’s designated scenic trails. He picked the 1,300-mile Florida National Scenic Trail because, with a top elevation of just 300 feet,��it sounded relatively easy.

On day three, after 30 miles of mostly sodden trails, Kennedy finally made it through to the other side of the million-acre Big Cypress swamp. He was��so thoroughly dehydrated that he could barely speak.

As Kennedy emerged, a character that seemed straight out of fiction stood in front of him. The man looked like Don Quixote, his mustache jutting out like steer horns on the front of a Cadillac. He introduced himself as Nimblewill Nomad, a legend among long-distance hikers who set out in 1998 to finish the Florida Trail and didn’t stop��walking until he got to Quebec. Since then, the Nomad, whose real name is M.J. “Sunny” Eberhart, finished tens of thousands of trail miles. “Now, this is a man who had his toenails surgically removed so they wouldn’t fall off,” Kennedy says.

The Nomad eyed him up and down. Kennedy looked like Chevy Chase after getting lost in the desert in Vacation. It was downright comical—until you got to his feet. He had stripped off his boots and muddy socks, and his feet were black and covered in blisters. A section of his right heel looked as if it had been scooped out by a melon baller. “In all my years on the trails,” the Nomad told Kennedy, “I’ve never seen feet that bad.”

Like the state it occupies, the�� maintains a reputation for its surprising difficulty and eccentricities—the hiking version of the oddball “”��made famous on Twitter and in late-night monologues. For those who have hiked it, running into find-them-nowhere-else characters and nearly impossible obstacles is part of the charm.

The entire path is about the same distance as a walk from Canada to Mexico. While a few thousand people register every year to hike the length of the Appalachian Trail and other well-known routes, this one averages about 30. “The Florida Trail is like the ugly stepchild,” Kennedy says. “It gets the least amount of attention, yet it is the toughest trail out there.”

That’s thanks in part to the swamp water. Most hikers begin in the south, in Big Cypress, the no-man’s-land between Naples and Miami, so they’ll��finish the hottest section first. Flooding often devours large swaths of the trail in the 150 miles between Lake Okeechobee and Ocala National Forest in central Florida. Then��hikers will almost certainly have to wade through more��water again before reaching the northern terminus in , south of Tallahassee.

The muck soaks backpacks and drowns campsites, leaving hikers little choice but to continue in wet shoes and socks. Bears, panthers, countless alligators, and aggressive water moccasins share the same swamp water��that floods the trail.

Jane Hamilton,��a trail angel��who helps hikers along the way and volunteers to maintain a stretch of the trail northeast of Gainesville, acknowledges the rampant rumors about another creature hikers��might face once they get up to the Panhandle. It’s a legend she says was created by one of the trail volunteers years ago, a little “joke about the sasquatch.” Most people call it the Skunk Ape, and believers say the creature uses the Florida Trail as a hunting path. There’s even a tourist trap called the Skunk Ape Research Headquarters��near the trail’s southern end.

Hunters populate the woods, pursuing deer from late summer through much of winter and wild boar all year. Although regulars say there have never been hunting-related accidents, bringing a blaze orange vest isn’t a bad idea.

Then��there are the unfinished sections that send hikers onto roads and highways through Orlando’s��suburbia. That route, cutting through the center of the state, got its rough design after a Miami real estate agent��named Jim Kern took his family on a 40-mile hike of the Appalachian Trail in North Carolina in 1966. He returned to Florida and set out to create��a Sunshine State version. In his mid-eighties now, Kern is still fighting to complete the final sections, about 300 miles, which he guesses will cost another $200 million.

Even in its incomplete state, the Florida Trail is one of just 11 federally designated national scenic trails, and while few walk its full length, the trail��attracts more than 350,000 people each��year��who bite off sections.����for day hikers include the quartz-white sands in Gulf Islands National Seashore and the forests of skinny pines that jut up like toothpicks in Ocala National Forest.

Thru-hikers are a rare sight, so much so that locals often mistake��them as homeless, says Alex Stigliano, program director at the , a nonprofit that maintains the trail and has 4,000 members. He was recently explaining thru-hiking��to a sheriff in��a rural Florida county, and the man interrupted Stigliano to ask, “Hold on a second. You’re telling me people don’t have jobs and just go hiking for a couple months?”

Sandra Friend first walked the length of the Florida Trail��back in 1999, after hearing about it from Eberhart a year earlier at an Appalachian Trail gathering. After finishing the Florida Trail, she found herself captivated by it and began publishing a well-used guidebook in 2002. Friend met her husband, John, on the trail in 2011, and they teamed up in 2015 to create the that has��become popular among hikers.

Large sections remain unused except for the handful of people making��the full-length trek, Friend��says, so the Florida Trail has developed a reputation for eccentrics. “There are oddball people attracted to long-distance hiking. It’s a vortex for it,” she says. “I’ve met some bizarre people along the way. But they’re harmless—just different.”

In 2014, when Stigliano first moved from Maine to Tallahassee, he asked his boss if he should buy a gun before setting off on the Florida Trail. “He said, ‘Oh, god,��no.��Actually, please don’t do that,’” Stigliano recalls. “When you hike the trail, you don’t see a lot of other people, and when you do, it’s like, ‘Oh, cool, hey.’”

Janie Hamilton is another trail angel who maintains a section northeast of Gainesville. She often agrees to shuttle hikers who want to skip portions of feet-punishing paved roads. Sometimes those drives mean hours getting to know complete strangers who just wandered out of the woods. “You meet the neatest people,” Hamilton says.

It’s common for those who have spent time on the Florida Trail to walk away with stories you wouldn’t expect to happen elsewhere. Those hiking��the trail recently��might have met Kyle “The Mayor” Rohrig, who completed 1,100 miles with his blind Shiba Inu, Katana, riding on his shoulders. You might have also found herbalist Heather Housekeeper, who collects edibles like yellow dandelion flowers to cook in crepes.

However, the trail’s reputation for eccentrics, Eberhart says, is not something that should frighten away first-timers. “You might see these people on the trail who will make you want to walk across the street to avoid them, but once you get to know them, they will become your new best friend,” Eberhart��says.

Since retiring from his job as an eye doctor in Titusville, Florida, in 1993, Eberhart,��the Nimblewill Nomad, says he slowly reinvented himself.��He once had an office where he showed up and left at the same time every day and looked the part of a physician. After retirement, he let his sugar-white hair grow to his shoulders and��his beard fall to his chest.��He replaced��his schedule with mostly unplanned travel, tacking on new trails to the ends of other hikes just because he felt like walking some more.��Eberhart admits one reason he always finds friends among Florida Trail hikers is that he’s found a place where he fits in. “I’m one of them,” he says. “Maybe that makes it easier for me.”

The trail certainly has a reputation for interesting characters, but there’s another reason Andy Niekamp would be wary about recommending it. An accomplished long-distance hiker from Dayton, Ohio, Niekamp set off on the Florida Trail on December��16. He had already completed a half-dozen major hikes, including the Appalachian Trail four times. He also runs , a company that leads people on backpacking trips. But��the Florida Trail is simply too harsh, too unforgiving for anyone but the most serious of backpackers. “Well, I would probably not take clients down to do that,” Niekamp says.

During Niekamp’s journey, controlled burns reduced entire sections of the trail to black ash, obliterating markings and leaving him to find his way using GPS. His shoes never really dried out during��the entire length, and coarse muck between his toes meant he was always in danger of abrasions and the infections swamp water might carry. In the swamps, he used a walking stick in an attempt to shoo away alligators and water moccasins. Niekamp��finished on February��26, 2019—a journey of more than two months.

James Rieker and Ryan Edwards Crowder, two twentysomethings who set out to hike the entire Florida trail in December 2017,��lost the trail markers while wading in waist-deep water not long after starting their hike.��They went four days without food and water until they could finally get a cellphone signal. Deputies hoisted them out of Big Cypress by helicopter.

Things didn’t turn out as well at the end of the hike for Nick Horton and Logan Buehler, who work together at a Fort Lauderdale company that helps addicts find a rehab clinic. Horton says they were unprepared when they set off on July 23, 2018,��for a 15-mile hike on a stretch north of Alligator Alley, the highway that bisects the southern tip of the state. They brought nearly a gallon of water each but quickly ran out. When they found the trail flooded after about eight miles, they decided to continue, but dragging their feet through the muck took hours longer than they predicted.

It wasn’t that Horton was an inexperienced hiker. Growing up in Arkansas, he and his��parents went into the woods nearly every weekend. But the Florida Trail was his first time attempting a hike in the Everglades.

Ten miles in, Horton and Buehler came to Camp Noble, where they noticed just one lone tent. The sun had begun to set. It took Horton’s eyes a moment to adjust to the dim light within the tent. Inside was an emaciated figure, so skinny he looked like a caveman. He was dead, still sitting cross-legged, eyes wide open and staring straight ahead.

The Collier County Sheriff’s Office is still trying to identify the man in the tent. The best anyone can determine is that he went by the trail names Denim and Mostly Harmless. It was days before Horton stopped seeing the man’s image when he closed his eyes, and now he’s just glad it wasn’t him. “We knew we bit off more than we could chew,” Horton says.

Difficulties of the trail aside, Niekamp admits that the country’s only subtropical trail surprised him with its beauty. In the south Florida swamps, he waded between prehistoric-looking strands of cypress trees that rise like ancient stone statues. On pathways of sugar sand north of Lake Okeechobee, he marveled at live oaks with limbs that could cover a city block and��Spanish moss drooping like a graying beard. In the Panhandle, he passed between spindly longleaf pines with needles falling like snow in a breeze. The Florida Trail is��also the only national scenic trail with beach views, as it passes��along Panhandle sand as fine as sifted flour.

Kennedy says he’s debating hiking it again��despite the strange encounters and miles of difficult swamps. “It’s like any trail,” he says.��“You love it when you’re done with it.”

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Janet Kowal had a personal connection to the (RAGBRAI). Even though she’s now living outside Chicago, working for the Village of Burr Ridge town hall, Kowal has Iowa in her blood. The 2013 route would take her through her hometown of Des Moines and skirt the University of Iowa, where she graduated in 1987. Kowal bought a new-to-her 2007 Giant OCR C1 road bike for the event and, to be cautious, took it to her local bike shop for a full-service tune-up.

Not long into the ride, however, Kowal’s bike shattered beneath her. For no apparent reason—she’d neither hit an obstacle nor encountered a pothole—the front fork snapped in half as if it had exploded from within. Kowal was sent crashing into the pavement, helmet first. She fractured her spine and clavicle, suffered a concussion, and tore ligaments in her left thumb.

After missing weeks of work and racking up medical bills for surgeries on her hand, Kowal sued in 2013. She went after the shop that sold her the bike, the one that serviced it, and then Giant itself. The lawsuit, filed in Cook County, Illinois, claims that a manufacturing defect in the fork’s carbon fiber caused it to fail.

Taiwan-based Giant quickly tried to bow out. The company argued in court filings that there’s an entirely independent Giant in the United States in charge of distribution to authorized retailers. While Giant of Taiwan made the bike, it can’t be held liable, the company claimed, because it doesn’t do business in Illinois, and the U.S.-based Giant shares no negligence either because it didn’t make the bike.

The company’s argument wasn’t new. It has been made in hundreds of similar lawsuits involving foreign-made bikes. In many of them, the logic has been enough to sway judges to throw out lawsuits or convince bike owners to settle. But the judge in Kowal’s case said the lawsuit could go forward against both Giant of Taiwan and its U.S.-based cousin. Giant appealed; in September, the Illinois Appellate Court agreed to let the lawsuit continue—the first time an appellate court has weighed in on such a case.

“This is an area of law that has been in flux in recent years,” says Ken Hoffman, Kowal’s Chicago-based attorney. “The bike manufacturers are like nesting dolls. They set up layers and layers of companies to try to protect themselves, but finally they are being held liable.”

There’s already a cottage industry of people who specialize in lawsuits resulting from bike accidents, including a growing cadre of attorneys and forensic experts who specialize in carbon fiber. Now that use of the material, once reserved for high-end bikes, has become widespread in the bike industry, reports of accidents and mysterious failures are on the rise. Kowal’s case signals that bike manufacturers—even overseas brands—may now be held accountable. The result could be a dramatic spike in the number of lawsuits brought against makers of carbon-fiber bike parts.

“There’s an old saying in bike manufacturing: It can be lightweight, durable, or cheap—pick two. A lot of these carbon-fiber components are lightweight and cheap, but they are not durable.” says Luke Elrath, an engineer who once designed kids’ bikes for Trek and now works as a bicycle-accident expert for Robson Forensic in Philadelphia. Soon after joining the firm in 2012, Elrath began noticing an uptick in calls from lawyers looking for his analysis of carbon-fiber bicycle components that had failed under their clients. After researching how the carbon components in these cases were made, Elrath now believes many of the accidents occurred because of faulty design and construction.

Elrath is one of several experts in carbon-fiber bike accidents. Their names are circulated among members of Bike Law, a network of independent lawyers and firms that use a website and listserv to share stories on carbon-fiber failures. Attorney James B. Reed is a New York state representative of Bike Law and has handled two lawsuits where clients suffered catastrophic injuries when carbon-fiber components failed below them. He has heard about numerous others from people on the Bike Law listserv.

Reed and other experts in carbon fiber agree that any material can fail. Wrecks happen from faulty aluminum, steel, and even rock-hard titanium. The difference with carbon fiber is that it can be difficult to detect signs of damage that might signal imminent failure. Cracks and dents in other materials are typically easy to see, but fissures in carbon fiber often hide beneath the paint. What’s worse is that when carbon fiber fails, it fails spectacularly. While other materials might simply buckle or bend, carbon fiber can shatter into pieces, sending riders flying into the road or trail. And this kind of catastrophic destruction can happen to any part of a bike made with the material.

“I’ve seen accidents from a whole range of carbon-fiber components—handlebars, forks, seatposts, entire frames,” Reed says. “As a lawyer, the question is, ‘What’s the cause of the failure?’”

That’s a question Philip W. Coats, an attorney in San Diego, set out to answer when he represented a client whose front fork shattered. Coats obtained documents from the Chinese manufacturer (a settlement agreement forbids him from naming the company). Using a Mandarin translator, he found that the factory had no standards on how carbon fiber is produced. No rules restricted how thick it should be or how much impact it needed to absorb in a collision, Coats said.

It’s not that all carbon fiber is dangerous. When made well, carbon fiber can be tougher than steel and quite safe. But when made incorrectly, carbon-fiber components can easily break. The parts are built by layering fibrous carbon that’s bound together with resin. If the manufacturer skimps on the resin or simply applies it unevenly, gaps can form, making it susceptible to cracks. Those fissures can spread from an innocuous collision, like the impact of a bike lock or simply from landing hard coming off a curb. Over days or sometimes years, the fracture spreads until, in many cases, the material shatters. Time is often the crucial element.

Steven Sweat, a bicycle-accident attorney in Los Angeles, says he has worked on numerous carbon-fiber cases, more and more in recent years as the components age. “There are problems with manufacturing, but we’re also just testing the limits of how long carbon can last,” Sweat says.

What’s more, even if a carbon-fiber component is well made and has never suffered a routine ding or collision, accidents can occur due to poor maintenance. Unlike with other materials, if you overtighten carbon-fiber parts, they’re likely to shatter down the road. Often, owner’s manuals offer little guidance on how to maintain the material, leaving it to bike owners or mechanics to develop their own standards.

Roman F. Beck, a bicycle-accident forensic expert in San Diego, worries that the growing inventory of older secondhand bikes will become a ticking time bomb, especially now that the material has become pervasive in bike manufacturing. He cites even top-of-the-line mountain bike makers known for premium quality. “As good as [many] frames are, what happens when someone rides five or ten or 20 years from now?” Beck says. “Mountain bikes take a lot of punishment, but nobody knows how long these frames will last in that environment.”

And because no one tracks how often carbon-fiber bike components fail, Beck says there’s no way to determine how widespread the problem has become.

First used in aircraft dating back to the 1960s, carbon fiber made its way to bike parts in the 1970s, as manufacturers discovered its vast potential for cutting weight. French bike builder Look produced a carbon-fiber frame in 1986, and it gained widespread attention when Greg LeMond won the Tour de France with it. A few years later, however, the world’s first mass-produced carbon-fiber frame, the Trek 5000, suffered so many problems following its 1989 release that the company discontinued the model after a year.

But Trek didn’t give up. Learning from its errors, the company released a new carbon-fiber bike in 1992 using its “Optimum Compaction, Low Void” technology and has been using the material ever since. Other bike manufacturers soon figured out their own carbon-fiber processes; in the 1990s, they began selling parts and entire bikes made from the material, mostly at exorbitant costs and for use in professional racing.

By the mid-2000s, carbon fiber became widespread in the industry, not just in race bikes but in everything from commuters to mountain bikes. Components like front forks and handlebars built from the material can now be bought for under $100 and entire bikes for less than $2,000.

Since then, there have been several recalls related to the material. In 2009, for instance, Mavic recalled its R-SYS carbon-fiber wheel rims after reports that they were shattering. In 2010, the bicycle magazine VeloNews reported that several racers riding on Trek Madone 6-Series bikes after the failure of carbon-fiber steerer tubes, the part that connects the frame to the handlebars. In response, Trek said the problem came from installation and compatibility issues. The company didn’t recall the bike but worked with the Consumer Product Safety Commission on a consumer alert.

Matt Shriver, Trek’s Belgium-based technical director, says manufacturing can’t always be to blame for carbon-fiber accidents. In the eight years that he’s worked with Trek’s race team, Shriver says he hasn’t seen one failure in a carbon-fiber frame that could be blamed on the way it was built. In a in February involving a Trek Domane carbon-fiber frame that split in half, Shriver says Trek’s engineering department sent him a link to an article, asking if the cause could be a manufacturing defect. “I looked into it, and it turns out a guy fell on the frame during the crash,” Shriver says. “That’s the kind of impact that could cause any material to break.”

Like other manufacturers, Trek maintains that its carbon-fiber components and bikes are safe. The company’s warranty, however, extends only to the primary user. Shriver says that buyers looking into secondhand parts and frames should make sure they were serviced correctly. To examine the quality of used carbon-fiber bikes, some mechanics have begun conducting the “white glove test,” which involves wiping carbon-fiber parts with a cotton glove—if the glove snags along the way, it could signal that the carbon has been damaged. Others tap carbon-fiber frames with a coin, listening for a change in pitch that might signal a crack.

Yet even those approaches don’t ensure buyers that they’re getting a used bike without hidden damage. Elrath, the bike-accident expert, says the most effective way to inspect carbon fiber is to send it to one of a couple companies in the country that can conduct an ultrasonic scan—a checkup that often costs $350 and might lead to repairs that could run upwards of $1,000. Not the kind of fees, in other words, that most buyers in the market for a used bike are likely willing to pay.

It’s important to note that some of the experts on carbon fiber-related accidents I spoke with haven’t concluded that the material is patently unsafe. Instead, they say the consequences of shoddy manufacturing and wear and tear underscore the importance of buying from a reputable manufacturer and assuring the bike is inspected regularly by someone trained to maintain carbon components. Even after the lawsuits he’s seen, attorney James Reed, the New York Bike Law representative, still rides two carbon-fiber bikes, a Trek Madone road bike and a Giant mountain bike.

Andrew Juskaitis, Giant’s U.S.-based global product marketing manager, couldn’t talk about the specifics of the Kowal case but told me that when bikes and components fail due to manufacturing defects, the company stands by them and will offer replacements. Carbon-fiber components have sometimes failed, Juskaitis conceded, but he said that’s simply the reality of bike building. “Like any material, carbon fiber has a fatigue rate, just like steel or aluminum or titanium or anything,” he said. “No maintenance can keep a frame from fatiguing eventually.” In cases where Giant’s manufacturing is responsible, Juskaitis says the company will negotiate “to make things right.”

For Kowal, whose Giant front fork broke beneath her in the ride across Iowa, settlement negotiations are underway. If they can’t reach a settlement, the next step will be a “destructive test” of Kowal’s bike, which has been kept in storage. The exam, according to attorney Hoffman, will involve hiring a forensic expert to analyze the fork’s material to see if it was too thin or manufactured with defective gaps.

If Kowal’s lawsuit goes to trial and she wins against Giant of Taiwan, the victory won’t necessarily set a precedent for other cases, especially outside Illinois. But no matter how the case ends, the appeals court ruling in Kowal’s favor may embolden other attorneys to go after foreign bike manufacturers and the U.S.-based companies they set up to distribute, using the same arguments Kowal made in her case.

The question now is just how many others will be hurt by carbon-fiber bike components failing, Elrath says. An avid cyclist, he rides a carbon-fiber bike—but it’s one he built himself, adding additional material at high-stress junctions. He knows others were built with far lower standards.

“It’s completely reasonable for someone who wants a lightweight bike to look at carbon fiber, but they need to understand the risks,” Elrath says. “Absolutely this is getting ignored.”

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