For many, music is the ultimate motivator. Our favorite songs get us off the couch and onto the crag or the trail. Athletes know music is a performance enhancer, and the science backs them up: Two years ago, at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, showed that subjects who listened to custom playlists were consistently able to generate more power during a 30-second interval than those who did not listen to music.

Neuroscientists have also long known that specific songs can actually cause chemical reactions in our brain that alter how we feel. Scientists at McGill University, in Montreal, who have spent nearly four decades studying music and the brain, that showed, in short, when we hear pleasurable music—specifically, recognizable pitches and patterns—our brain releases dopamine, the happiness neurotransmitter that responds to natural reward stimuli like exercise, food, and sex. And last year, Stefan Koelsch, a professor of music psychology at Freie University, in Berlin, and his colleagues expanded on previous studies suggesting that positive moods encouraged by music can maintain healthy physiological responses to stress. , published in the journal Nature Research, found that the release of cortisol among subjects listening to music heightened their abilities to react and overcome stressful situations.

“Music isn’t strictly necessary for survival,” says Robert Zatorre, the 2013 study’s lead author and professor of neuroscience at McGill. “If you don’t get any music, you won’t die.” But Zatorre says this burgeoning field of research showing that music can naturally and profoundly alter the brain’s chemical makeup poses a massive question: Can doctors design playlists to serve as an adjunct or even an alternative medical treatment?

In 2013, this question spurred��biologist Ketki Karanam, former head of product design at Nokia Marko Ahtisaari, and graduate Yadid Ayzenberg to lay the groundwork for the , a Boston-based company whose main goal is to develop music as precision medicine. For the past two years, Sync has been spearheading various studies that look at the connection between music and the mind. The company has collaborated with advisers from Berklee College of Music, MIT Media Lab, and Spotify to gather data on the therapeutic effects of music on large-scale populations. The ultimate goal is to help doctors treat patients suffering from pain and fatigue, among other ailments, via music instead of—or perhaps in conjunction with—drugs.

“Music can modulate neural systems like the dopamine response, autonomic nervous system, and others that are related to stress, movement, learning, and memory,” says Daphne Zohar, the CEO of parent biopharma company who joined the Sync team in 2015 and helped launch the project. “But we want to take this into the realm of clinical science.”

Recently, Sync has been collaborating with science advisers like Zatorre and musicians including six-time Grammy-winner Peter Gabriel, American singer-songwriter St. Vincent, and British classical pianist Jon Hopkins to embark on the first-ever large-scale study measuring how the structural properties of music—including beat, key, and timbre—affect our brain activity, heart rate, and sleep patterns. While Sync and its research are still in their infancy, project members envision themselves working toward discovering clinical applications to sharpen focus and treat anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress, and even Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, while providing pain management alternatives in light of the opioid-abuse epidemic in the United States, all by using music. Last December, crowd in California that she wondered about the day when medical professionals would tell patients, “Take two of these songs and call me in the morning.”

And what songs would a patient be taking? It depends, says Karanam: “In order to have the best effects on your mind and body, we’ll need to personalize music to fit [a potential patient’s] needs and tastes.” Whether that’s tango, rap, or heavy metal, a combination of conscious and subconscious factors—like personal taste, mood, the music that one grew up with—can influence how someone reacts to a song. One can even have positive, unexpected reactions to a song that they wouldn’t typically choose for their playlist, as a recent monthlong pseudo-experiment at Sync revealed. “We have a colleague who said they didn’t like Justin Bieber,” says Karanam. “But while he was listening to him, we looked at his monitor and his wrist device using electronominal activity, which measures the autonomic nervous system and tells us when you’re scared or excited. His heart rate picked up—he was emotionally engaged!”

While its clinical applications are still years away, Sync has been conducting preliminary lab research and launched a few large-scale projects marrying digital music services with wearable body monitors to collect self-reported data from listeners. For example, Sync recently began tracking listeners’ moods, blood pressure, and sleeping habits via wearable devices like Fitbit to identify patterns in the connections between music, emotions, and cognitive performance. To this end, Sync has already analyzed more than 10 million publicly available playlists tagged with health-related terms, such as “relaxation,” and earlier this year launched , a smartphone app that offers algorithmically generated music meant to relax a user before sleeping. The company also created the , a first-of-its-kind app that delivers daily playlists through Slack’s real-time messaging system, and is testing the effectiveness of specifically engineered music for people trying to relax or work. Founders and investors plan to incorporate biometric feedback loops into these programs to gather self-reported heart rate and heart rate variabilities to best understand how physiology correlates to music.

“For the first time, we are trying to understand the emotional state of listeners as they listen to music,” says Tristan Johan, a principal scientist at Spotify and co-founder of the , a research company that aggregates, analyzes, and shares musical data from the web. Johan joined Sync as a musical adviser to help the engineer and science crew analyze musical information and system designs. “The data, when measured by sensors and under normal listening conditions (at home, at work, etc), is not biased, and we can capture orders of magnitude more of it than in a lab,” says Johan. “The hope is to find the music that is best for you in any given situation or condition, in particular where music can have an positive effect on your health.”

Project members plan to use the data gathered in these preliminary projects ultimately to better understand how effective music can be—and hopefully will be—for medical treatment. Karanam says the company hopes to publish its first research findings one or two years from now. And so Karanam’s question remains: Could we one day harness the personalized therapeutic effects of music?

“We could use music to enhance a lot of people’s lives,” says Zatorre. “Imagine if we could help depressed people get 10 percent better without any drugs? These would have huge societal impacts. Even a small improvement is meaningful.”

The post ‘Take Two Songs and Call Me in the Morning’: How Music Might Be Your Next Prescription Drug appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

Alex Honnold Has a Soft Spot for Pulling��on Plastic

“I started climbing at 11, when my parents brought me to Granite Arch, near our home in Sacramento. I’d never heard of rock climbing before. My dad would take me there—we’d bring our lunches and make an adventure out of it. I wore headphones with a Walkman on the wall, listening to Megadeth and Creed. When I climb indoors these days, I get the most out of the ratty old gyms. The resin holds from the mid-nineties, mini finger buckets, Nicros, Metolius. It takes you back. I hear Creed at the gym now and I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, I’m 14 again.’ isn’t as adventurous as climbing a mountain, but you have to take it for what it is—and it is awesome. Climbing a good route is climbing a good route, whether on plastic or rock. Just do what you find inspiring.”

New Heights

Last year was a��good one for climbing gyms, with 27 opening across the U.S. (A projected 18 more are ­expected in 2017.) “We’ve moved out of the Wild West of early-2000s gym development and��into a wider world of possibilities,” says Mike Helt, editor in chief of . Wher­ever you happen to live, chances are��an indoor wall isn’t far.

Pacific Coast

2000: 20 gyms
2016: 89

Rocky Mountains

2000: 15 gyms
2016: 70

Midwest

2000: 27 gyms
2016: 61

South

2000: 32 gyms
2016: 95

Northeast

2000: 29 gyms
2016: 84

State with the Most Gyms

Surprise! California with 61.

City with the Most Gyms

Actual surprise: NYC with six.

The Country’s Largest Gym

in Glendale Heights, Illinois, has a whopping 45,000 square��feet of space.

The Country’s Smallest Gym

in Waynesville, Ohio, covers about 550 square feet and has a maximum wall height of��12 feet.

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We spoke to a couple professional climbers about how they treat their various rock-related ailments. Take heed from these self care experts.��

�ʰ��Dz�����:��Sore forearms��and calves

���DZ��ܳپ��Dz�:��Tennessee boulder­ing legend Jimmy Webb uses a foam roller, like ($40), to warm up his muscles before and prevent tendonitis after.

Problem:��Chewed-up hands

Solution:��At the end of a hard day, three-time U.S. sport-climbing champ Sasha DiGiulian sands down the calluses on her palms and��moisturizes with�� ($18). In the��event of a flapper—a dangling dermal patch caused by a fall from a rough hold—snip the skin, moisturize the spot, cover it with a , and then wrap the whole thing in ath­letic tape.

Problem:��Cracked feet

���DZ��ܳپ��Dz�:�� showers sporadically, so his skin stays dry and tough for free solo­ing. But that can lead to split soles.��If you mainly climb indoors, apply�� ($6) daily.

Problem:��Ripe-smelling shoes

���DZ��ܳپ��Dz�:��Pro climber and BASE jumper Steph ­Davis uses ($12.50 for two) to suck moisture out of her shoes and fight off bacteria.

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In June, a 23-year-old Portland man walked away from a boardwalk and slipped and fell into the boiling, acidic spring in the Norris Geyser Basin in Yellowstone and never emerged. In July, a 35-year-old Florida woman fell to her death from a Grand Canyon trail when posting a photo from Ooh Aah Point. In August, a 64-year-old Atlanta woman died after she was hit by a car while looking at a snake on a Great Smoky road.

These are just a few��of over 1,000 deaths excluding known suicides that occurred over the past decade in the most deadly national parks in the country. The number one overall cause of death is drowning, followed by motor vehicle crashes and slips or falls, according to Jeffrey Olson, public affairs officer at the National Park Service in Washington, D.C.

Since the Parks Service doesn’t offer updated aggregated records on the official number of fatalities, we pulled records from January 2006 to September 2016 on where, how, and why park visitors are dying. Here’s what we found.

Lake Mead National Recreation Area

Established: 1964
Size: 1.5 million acres
Visitors: 7.2 million annually
Deaths: 254

Set in the Nevada desert, Lake Mead’s high temperatures are brutal and the rugged terrain claims an average 25 casualties each year. But the real danger is the 290-square-mile lake itself. As of September, a total of 15 people died in the park this year; four of them drowned. The park also has the highest number of homicides of any Park Service unit over the past decade at six.

Yosemite National Park

Established: 1890
Size: 747,956 acres
Visitors: 5 million annually
Deaths: 150

Yosemite’s granite walls and alpine ridges have long attracted outdoor enthusiasts of every breed, and the common causes of death��bear that out: people there most often die from falls or natural causes, such as cardiac arrest and heart attacks, while hiking or climbing.

A hiking website dedicated to the park shows more than 20 people have died on Half Dome alone due to falls, lightning strikes, and heart attacks, and that number rises to more than 60 when adding deaths on linked trail systems. This year, the park had 15 deaths from natural causes, drownings, and climbing-related accidents.

Grand Canyon National Park

Established: 1919
Size: 1.2 million acres
Visitors: 5.5 million annually
Deaths: 130

The crown jewel of the Park Service, the Grand Canyon possesses an ancient geology difficult to traverse and the drastic swings in climate, from sub-zero to triple-digit temperatures, punish unprepared visitors. Eight people died in the park this year, most due to cardiac arrests and falls off hiking points. The park has the second highest number of suicides over the past decade, at 19.

Yellowstone National Park

Established: 1872
Size: 2.2 million acres
Visitors: 5.969 million annually
Deaths: 93

The 13 deaths in Yellowstone this year included the highly-publicized demise of a man who fell into a hot spring in Norris Geyser Basin. At least 22 people are known to have died in the park’s scorching thermal springs. The latest death was that of a 13-year-old boy, who suffered terrible burns when he fell into a nearby hot pool in the Norris Geyser Basin.

Golden Gate National Recreation Area

Established: 1972
Size: 82,000 acres
Visitors: 15.6 million annually
Deaths: 85

Rip currents and sneaker waves are some of the risks tourists face when swimming in the beaches within Golden Gate. The U.S. Park Police and law enforcement rangers, which serve the park alongside the San Francisco Fire Department, recommend against venturing into the surf here. Despite its name, the Gold Gate Bridge is not part of the park; it is managed by a bridge district and so the rising number of youth suicides here are not reflect in park data. But the land on either side of the bridge is within the park and law enforcement caution people visiting the urban metro area of 7 million from standing on edges of unstable cliffs and driving fast on the many narrow and windy roads.

Glen Canyon National Recreation Area

Established: 1972
Size: 1.25 million acres
Visitors: 3.2 million annually
Deaths: 82

Lake Powell, a reservoir on the Colorado River in Glen Canyon, is home to outdoor activities such as boating and water-skiing, but park officials are quick to point out that at least 150 people not wearing life jackets have drowned here in the past decades. Such was the case in August, when a heroic, 35-year-old Colorado woman drowned while rescuing her 2-year-old son who fell out of their houseboat and into the lake. The mother followed him into the water and held the boy above water until her brother reached them in a runabout boat. She was not wearing a life jacket and was unresponsive when pulled out from the water. At that time, her death was the sixth drowning in the lake.

Glen Canyon, which stretches the Utah and Arizona desert, endures temperatures ranging from highs of 110 degrees and lows of 0 degrees. In late August, a 72-year-old Utah hiker was rescued by helicopter after six days of wandering the barren land. He had become disoriented, while hiking toward Powell Lake and was found sunburn and dehydrated.

Denali National Park and Preserve

Established: 1917
Size: 6 million acres
Visitors: 587,412 annually
Deaths: 62

In 1967, a snow storm roared across Mount McKinley and killed seven of 12 students attempting to summit Denali, the highest peak in North America. Nearly five decades later, Alaska’s most-visited park had four deaths this year, including that of a 45-year-old Czech mountaineer who fell 1,500 feet, while skiing the Messner Couloir and a 66-year-old Japanese climber who succumbed to a fatal cerebral edema, while climbing the summit and descending the 20,310-foot peak’s West Buttress route.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park

Established: 1934
Size: 521,621
Visitors: 11.3 million annually
Deaths: 60

Great Smoky draws more visitors than any other Park Service unit, boasting 800 miles of hiking trails and unmatched forests in its Appalachian setting. Of the tens of thousands of visitors this year, seven people died: four were killed in motor vehicle accidents, two drowned, and one woman perished after falling eight feet off a rock wall.

Grand Teton National Park

Established: 1929
Size: 309,993 acres
Visitors: 3.3 million annually
Deaths: 59

The striking Teton Range is one of the nation’s deadliest due to its steep forests and foothills. The park had four deaths this year, including the loss of a 42-year-old mountain guide who died falling off the Grand Teton��when he unclipped his tether from an anchor while reaching for a rappel device.

Natchez Trace Parkway

Established: 1988
Size: 444 miles
Visitors: 5.9 million annually
Deaths: 56

Once traveled by Native Americans and settlers, this parkway, which the Park Service maintains and considers a park, offers motorists and bicyclists the scenic views and monuments of the Appalachian foothills and bluffs on the lower Mississippi River. But the ride through Eden can be dangerous. Seven people died on the road this year from motor vehicle crashes. In fact, only two of the 56 deaths recorded over the past decade were not related to non-motor vehicle, motorcycle, or bicycle incidents. Natchez leads the park system with the highest number of suicides over the past decade, at 25.

The post The 10 Most Deadly National Parks appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

In Virginia, where the is crossed by more black bears and wild boars than humans, where the trail runs through hardwood forest, dark rhododendron thickets, and mountain laurel tunnels, long-distance hiker Jennifer Pharr Davis soaked��her feet in a cold creek before traveling beside , aka God’s Thumbprint. “Out of the 14 states that the Appalachian Trail travels through, as a hiker, Virginia is my favorite,” says Pharr Davis, who held the speed record on��the trail six years ago.

But the remote stretch of trail that Pharr Davis loves could soon change irreparably. Pennsylvania oil and gas company is attempting to build a 300-mile, 42-inch-wide natural gas pipeline—the largest ever proposed for the 2,190-mile trail. It would run from shale reserves in the Appalachian Basin southbound through the Appalachian Mountains in West Virginia and Virginia and then east into connecting pipelines in North Carolina.

For West Virginia and Virginia governors Jim Justice and Terry McAuliffe, the $3.5-billion proposal represents a cheaper energy alternative to coal, plus jobs for their constituents. But for the thousands of people who hike and thru-hike the AT each year, including Pharr Davis and Ron Tipton, executive director of the , the pipeline means .

If approved, construction could last 18 months or more, says Andrew Downs, regional director of the ATC. Development would introduce a 150-foot-wide permanent right-of-way across thousands of private properties as well as through , says Downs. It would also mean boring beneath parts of the AT: hikers would see the pipeline route��for at least 80 miles.

“The pipeline would be more than just an eyesore and environmental risk,” Pharr Davis wrote in email. “There is something woven into our individual fiber and our identity as a country that relates to undisturbed mountains meeting the horizon. When you cut through that with a pipeline you limit our ability to explore our thoughts, our land, and our potential.”

Last September, the����released a 781-page draft environmental impact , announcing it might cross federal lands run by the Forest Service and the Army Corps of Engineers. The��statement concluded that the project would have “some adverse environmental impacts,” though it said they could be reduced via mitigation measures such as building structures to reduce downstream��sedimentation��and purchasing credits from approved wetland mitigation banks to “compensate” for conversions of wetlands.

The developers, for their part, say that they have already made adequate adjustments to the pipeline's route. EQT Corporation spokeswoman Natalie Cox says Mountain Valley Pipeline “adopted 11 route alternative segments and 572 minor route adjustments, the majority of which were based on various landowner requests, avoidance of sensitive and cultural and historic resources, or engineering considerations.”

But government agencies in West Virginia and Virginia, along with the Department of Interior, National Park Service, and Bureau of Land Management, informed the FERC that the statement lacks analysis of whether the pipeline is even needed. They also say it fails to study economic impacts on landowners and the visual impact to iconic viewpoints such as�� and . On January 26, the FERC submitted a delaying release of a final environmental statement on the project, citing inconsistencies in the company’s data on impacts to historic districts and wildlife and compensation for property owners with water rights along the pipeline route.

Today, the Appalachian Trail is crossed by 58 pipelines, most of them buried underground and carrying gas and water. But soon there could be many more. Over the past four years, expanded gas extraction in West Virginia and Pennsylvania has increased the number of proposed pipelines to cross the AT. The Mountain Valley Pipeline project is only one of as many as 10 more proposed to be built along some portion of the AT, including . The companies behind these projects say the pipelines will create thousands of jobs, bring tax revenue to local governments, and support future energy needs for the areas.

Opponents contend that neither project is needed for the states' energy futures. A����from Key-Log Economics, a research group analyzing costs of forest, water, and pipeline projects, found the industry-sponsored studies promising financial gains “use inappropriate methods and unrealistic assumptions that result in over-inflated estimates of the potential benefits of the [Mountain Valley Pipeline].” In July 2016, Ernest��Kastning, a former geology professor at Radford University, ��to the��FERC��showing��the pipeline would pass through��karst-heavy��terrains, creating building hazards due to “land instability, weak soils, and potential seismicity.” Opposed landowners say there are risks of leaks, explosions, and damage to drinking water, and protest the proposed use of eminent domain.

Environmental groups based in West Virginia and Virginia say they recognize the region's need for energy and jobs, but argue the pipelines could be built using established transit and trade routes near the trail��rather than through the mountains. Energy companies have worked with the ATC and stakeholder groups to avoid disturbing the trail by rerouting pipelines or rerouting the actual trail.��In 2014, , Texas technology and chemical company Celanese Corporation and trail advocates��agreed to move the trail to a “more scenic location on permanently protected lands” on the border of West Virginia and Virginia—an area the Mountain Valley Pipeline would pass through. “That was partnership,” says Downs. “But the Mountain Valley Pipeline is different. They haven’t talked to us. They aren’t working with us at all. They haven’t done adequate analysis on visual impacts and we weren’t involved in the citing process so the outcome is hugely more impactful than it has to be.”

What’s more concerning to pipeline opponents is that the Mountain Valley Pipeline, if it were to be approved, could have ramifications for protections of ten other National Scenic Trails across the country, including the Pacific Crest Trail. Approval would require amending the Jefferson National Forest Plan, according to Mike Dawson, director of trail operations for the . Forest plans guide all management of national forests and sometimes take years to develop. Dawson and others say that amending such a plan retroactively could set a precedent of changing plans across the country anytime a new development is proposed.

Amending the forest plan would also impact areas protecting wilderness, old growth forest, and roadless areas. There are other ways to deal with rerouting the Mountain Valley Pipeline project without having to modify the management plans, as has previously happened with numerous energy transmission projects, wrote Dawson to the FERC.

The ATC and Dawson warn that approving the Mountain Valley Pipeline project indeed necessitates amendments and that reality weighs heavy on the minds of park enthusiasts across the country. “If you can come and throw a monkey wrench in the situation and set aside the commitments then the system is really broken,” says Dawson, who spent over 20 years leading the ATC’s office in southwest and central Virginia from 1980 to 2001.��“Just about anything you can think of to develop someone will try to do that even on public lands, but also on private land that’s adjacent to the trail,” says Dawson. “We're worried because if the Forest Service does this, there's no reasons for other national forests to give protections, because they're not worth the paper they're written on.”

The post Will Pipelines Destroy Our Thru-Hikes? appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

Scaling a 270-foot-tall construction crane in downtown Washington, D.C., while hauling a 65-pound nylon banner isn’t an easy feat. But on Wednesday morning, that’s exactly what seven activists affiliated with Greenpeace��did to protest President Trump’s signature on executive orders supporting the revival of the Keystone and Dakota Access pipeline projects.

Once positioned on the crane’s long arm—called a jib—the climbers unfurled a 35-foot-by-70-foot banner reading “Resist.” “We wanted to be visible from the White House,” says Travis Nichols, a spokesperson for Greenpeace USA. “I don’t know if Trump has seen it, but it would have been hard for him to ignore.”

To understand just how the climbers—one of whom is 62 years old—ascended the steel crane and hung the banner, ���ϳԹ��� talked with Basil Tsimoyianis, a training coordinator and rope tech at Greenpeace USA who hosts activist workshops on proper climbing gear and techniques. He emphasized what any climber knows: that without the right gear, the expedition is doomed.

Metolius Haul Bags

When the seven activists approached the crane in the early morning to avoid security, they carried rope, food, and first-aid supplies inside Metolius Haul Bags.��

Once at the crane, the activists free-climbed (meaning they used ropes and lanyards��to protect against a fall) a series of inverted ladders, known as “back scratchers,” starting at the crane’s base. Karen Topakian, board chair of Greenpeace Inc.,��and Zachary Riddle, a support care manager at the environmental organization, used dynamic, nylon lanyards and steel-locked chains to set themselves on one of the ladder rungs about 100 feet off the ground to remain within earshot of law enforcement and construction crews.

Avao Bod Croll Fast Harness

The five other Greenpeace connected activists, Josh Ingram, Zeph Fishlyn, Pearl Robinson, Zakaria Kronemer, and Nancy Pili Hernandez, all wore Petzl Vertex Helmets and Avao Fast Crawl Harnesses as they climbed, taking turns carrying the banner, which was stuffed into a 100-liter Metolius Big Wall Haul Bag.

PMI Global Pro Low Stretch 10.5mm rope

As Ingram climbed, he carried two, 100-foot-long PMI Global Pro ropes to later be strung across the jib and used as safety lines, along with a 300-foot rope for the possible need to rappel to the ground.

UHF Radio

Once the banner was ready to unfurl, Ingram gave the OK over an Icon Radio, signaling Fishlyn, Robinson, and Kronemer to follow him onto the jib to designated marks.

Petzl Rig

Fishlyn, Robinson, and Kronemer attached themselves to the horizontal safety lines using dynamic lanyards.��After reaching their position on the jib they used a��Petzl RIG rappel device and Camp Goblin fall arrest device on their main working and backup lines for descent. Once secured onto this new system they��detached from their safety lines and fully suspended themselves off the boom.

Prussic Hitches

Now suspended, Fishlyn, Robinson, and Kronemer rappelled about ten feet below the boom to unfurl the banner. Kronemer fed the banner out of its bag to the others. Fishlyn hauled the banner across using a Petzl Micro Traxion fixed to a prussic on their working line. Once in place the climbers rappeled down using their weight to open the banner. While the banner flew, the climbers began calling news outlets from their cell phones and Tweeting, hanging high above the nation’s capital city.��

The post What Gear Did the Greenpeace Protestors Use? appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

A weekend ski trip can turn into a full-blown nightmare if you want to bring your dog. In response to skier complaints about restrictions at hotels in their favorite resort capitals, a number of hospitality groups are making serious changes. “The logistics of a ski vacation can be difficult,” says Caitlin Martz, of ���ٲ���’s Waldorf Astoria Park City. “Hotels are going beyond just allowing pets to accompany their owners on their trip and are beginning to treat dogs as guests.” Here’s a rundown of some of the amenities.��

• In Beaver Creek, Colorado, the indulges��dogs with a Bachelor Pack, including bath treatments, toys, and treats available from room service.��
• In Vermont, guests at can avail themselves of grooming and dog-sitting services.��
• Starting this ­winter, dogs and owners can dine ­together during Yappy Hour at��the in Aspen, where the hotel’s pastry chef whips up gourmet dog biscuits. Fido requires more? Order him the grass-fed beef tenderloin with eggs and brown rice from the pet menu.
• ���ٲ���’s boasts a full-time director of pet ­relations (Sammy the mutt) and offers services like dog massages, administered by a certified canine masseuse, and pet-sitting��while you’re on��the slopes.��
• At the in Ketchum, Idaho, guests ­receive a logoed leash, a Frisbee,��and a backpack��for comfortably ­carrying a dog.��

The post You Can (and Should) Bring Your Dog on Your Next Ski Vacation appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

In 2015, writer Douglas Preston was on assignment for National Geographic in Honduras, navigating the deep jungle of La Mosquitia with a team using lidar, a . They were searching for the legendary Ciudad Blanca, or White City, where indigenous Hondurans were said to have fled from Spanish conquistadores in the 16th century. Preston’s new book, ($28; Grand Central Publishing), recounts the expedition, which included a team of scientists, researchers, filmmakers, and soldiers. After traveling through a lawless region filled with risks like jaguars and parasitic diseases, they found no evidence of the White City. Instead, what they found were the remains of what was likely a much larger, unique civilization near the edge of the Mayan empire.

We spoke with Preston about the trip and the unexpected ways it affected his life.

OUTSIDE: In your pursuit of Ciudad Blanca, you heard legends that anyone who dared enter the city would fall ill and die. Did those stories frighten you?
PRESTON: I’m not really a superstitious person, and I dismissed the legend that the city was cursed. However, after getting out of the area and becoming ill, it made me think maybe the stories were based in reality. The valley is a terrible hot zone of disease, and that fact may have been the source of the legend of the curse.

In the months after you returned home to Santa Fe, New Mexico, you fell ill from bug bites and were eventually diagnosed with leishmaniasis, one of the deadliest known parasitic diseases in the world. How is your health today?
It took a couple months for the disease to develop. The parasite is flesh eating. It’s truly disgusting. I wouldn’t recommend you Google images of this. The expedition team and I have received the best medical treatment in the world at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. We’re part of a research project there. The treatment is very difficult and very physically demanding.

Unfortunately, it appears the disease is coming back in me and a couple of others. It’s incurable. It creates a horrible, open ulcer on your skin. That healed up—there’s a big scar on me now—but there are these red nodules again, showing that the parasite is multiplying again. I am going back to the NIH, but I’m essentially in total denial. I feel fine. I feel absolutely physically fit.

Lidar “the greatest archaeological advance since carbon-14 dating.” But your expedition was the first to use the technology for pure exploration—“to look for something nobody could be sure even existed,” as you write.
It wouldn’t have been possible to navigate La Mosquitia without [lidar]. It allowed us to find pristine, untouched sites that hadn’t been looted at all. This is exceedingly rare in archaeology, especially in Central America. We found millions of dollars’ worth of gorgeous artifacts lying on the ground. They were lying where they were left 500 years ago. This ruin is so untouched. It’s like Pompeii. It’s frozen in time.

How can archaeologists use lidar in the future?
Lidar has been used extensively in New Mexico and other places in the United States. The technology is very expensive, though. Once they get to lidaring the Amazon rainforest and the highlands and plains of Colombia, it’s going to be an absolute revelation. They’re going to discover pre-Columbian sites. They are going to understand just how widespread and sophisticated these civilizations were.

In the book, you write, “It was clear to everyone by this point that the White City was a conflation of stories and probably did not exist in its described form.” What exactly did you find in your search for the unknown?
We found that the legend is based on truth. We found important evidence of a very large city that was part of this interesting and mysterious culture that grew up on the Maya frontier but was not actually Maya itself. Throughout history, the incredible, spectacular civilization of the Maya has sucked all the oxygen of the surrounding cultures. This lost culture in Mosquitia became unknown. They don’t even have a formal name, and the archaeology done in this region has been very sparse. There are a lot of lost cities in the Mosquitia rainforests. There’s a lost civilization there.

Who were the people of La Mosquitia?
Here are a people who transformed this very hostile and very unfriendly rainforest environment almost into a Garden of Eden. They built grand plazas and open areas where people could socialize, with great ceremonial architecture. There were huge pathways between houses—houses on mounds so they wouldn’t get flooded. It was quite a wonderful environment. Once the civilization collapsed in the 1600s, everything went back to jungle. Now you walk through and there are trees 20 feet in diameter. You think it’s a virgin rainforest, but it isn’t. Five hundred years ago, it was very different.

After your was published on March 2, 2015, President Juan Orlando Hernandez ordered military personnel to guard the site against looters and promised to stop looters and illegal deforestation. Are those protective measures still in place?
I believe the president still has a small camp of Honduran soldiers protecting the site. This valley is so difficult to get into. The only way to get there is by helicopter, and you’re flying into restricted airspace where you risk getting shot down. Going overland would take weeks. Plus, I don’t know how looters would haul objects on the ground.

The president also took immediate action to halt and even roll back some of the illegal clear-cutting for cattle grazing. I do think that serious efforts have been undertaken. It’s really complicated. On the one side, you have really poor people trying to make a living. On the other side, you have rich families involved in the illegal land clearing as well.

What did this quest mean for you?
The thing that impressed me personally was to be in a place completely outside the 21st century, so remote that the jaguars and monkeys and other animals hadn’t seen people before. It made me feel really unimportant and superfluous. I had no business being there. I was no longer a homo sapien master. I was just an animal feeling very uncomfortable and one that was in a hostile environment—it didn’t give a shit about me. That’s a good experience every human should have at least once in their life. It knocked some of the ego out of me.

At the time of your trip, Honduras was experiencing political, economic, and cultural turmoil. Gangs and narco traffickers took over large areas of land, leading to the highest murder rate in the world. What did this discovery mean in that context?
I think it’s a long-term benefit on many levels. It’s not right to reduce a country to that level, which the international press has done. Honduras is a beautiful country with warm people, and there’s tremendous potential for tourism and growth. Now Conservation International and various organizations are coming in to try to protect the rainforest. Hernandez hopes it’s a huge economic benefit in terms of tourism. And, as some Hondurans said to me, they don’t have a clear national identity. This discovery shows their pre-Columbian past.

What does the Lost City tell us about current civilizations?
A civilization, in its height, thinks it’s invulnerable. It’s like a teenager who thinks he’s going to live forever. Because of that hubris, the civilization starts on a path that eventually leads to downfall. This has happened again and again.

Our American civilization feels invulnerable, and yet we are just like all the rest of them. I see many problems in our culture that occurred in the Mayan, Roman, and Greek cultures. Some fell more quickly than others. For Mayans, income inequality was a prime factor for the fall of that civilization. Tax avoidance was a prime factor in the fall of the Roman Empire, which essentially went bankrupt. These lessons are all out there. I think the Lost City has a lot of lessons for today, if only we would heed them.

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