Erik Hedegaard Archives - ��ϳԹ�� Online

Learning to Surf Without Feeling

sperkins-pom — Tue, 13 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The only thing I’ve ever wanted to do as a surfer is walk to the nose of my board, hang ten, cruise along like that, every little piggy happily dangling off the tip, me just minding my own business, not a care in the world, before cross-stepping back to the tail and kicking out, mission accomplished, all eyes on the beach on me, a couple of hoots received from my fellow surfers on the paddle back out, and then I do it all again. Is that too much to ask?

And yet, time and time again, I am denied. Whenever I try to move forward, my feet either refuse to lift, or tangle up with one another, or suddenly propel me backward off the board, windmilling into the drink. It’s the damnedest thing.

In fact, I am one of the biggest klutzes the surf breaks around my Wakefield, Rhode Island, home base have ever seen. It’s embarrassing. Taking off on a wave, I’ve heard snickers. Once, this hot-stuff longboarder named Carl paddled up to me and said, “You shouldn’t be out here, man. You can’t even surf.” And sometimes, during my bleakest moments, I have to agree. But I don’t plan on giving up anytime soon. You’ve got your ridiculous, far-fetched, half-baked dreams that won’t go away, I’ve got mine. I want to nose ride.

Which is what has brought me to Costa Rica, to the dusty, stray-dog surf town of Tamarindo, where I am nervously slurping down some predawn coffee poolside at the lovely Vista Villas hotel, looking over the railing at a few nice waves peeling in the distance and wondering just what I’ve gotten myself into. My traveling companion is a sandy-haired, 48-year-old surfer named Robert Weaver, from Santa Cruz, California, but everyone calls him Wingnut. For the most part, we have nothing in common. He starred in , the highly successful 1994 sequel to 1966’s Endless Summer, the greatest surf movie of all time, and is considered one of the best longboarders and nose riders of the modern era. Also, he’s always cheerful, always peppy, always entertaining, and always optimistic—one of his favorite sayings is “In my world, the glass is half full all the time”—while I’m more Danish and really have no idea what he’s talking about. He’s got muscles, I’ve got skin and bones. He’s well tanned, I’m deeply pale. You get the idea.

Yet for all our differences, we do share one thing. Both of us have a serious autoimmune disease. In Wingnut’s case, it’s (MS), which was first diagnosed in 1997, went into remission five years later, and hasn’t come back since. Mine is something called (CIDP), and it’s been having a field day with me for at least the past ten years, turning my immune cells against me and destroying the protective covering—the myelin sheath—that surrounds the nerve fibers in my legs and feet. As a result, many of those nerves are now dead, leaving me with calf muscles that are atrophied and as thin as cornstalks, toes that won’t wiggle, and feet that are so insensible they sometimes flop around of their own accord. I have scars on my knees from the times I’ve fallen.��

All toes on the nose.

As it happens, CIDP is a fairly rare disease, afflicting at most 8.9 people per 100,000—MS is 30 per 100,000—and in my case is idiopathic, with no known cause and no way to stop its progression. It’s almost never fatal, but there’s a 30 percent chance a wheelchair is in my future and an almost zero percent chance I’ll be surfing ten years from now. At the moment, the worst thing is how it has messed with my balance. The remaining millions of nerves in my feet are incredibly slow to tell my brain how to get my body to react to the world around it. Hence all my clumsiness, and why I can no longer ride regular surfboards—they’re far too tippy for me—and have happily taken to SUP boards, which are wider, thicker, and much more stable. Even so, it took me two years to learn how to stand on one of them, and it’s been impossible for me to get to the nose. That’s why I got in touch with Wingnut, to see what he could do with me while there’s still time.

“OK, man.” he says. “Ready? Let’s go!”

I nod my head, but I don’t want to go anywhere, not really. I’d rather stay here and listen to Wingnut talk about his life as a professional surfer for hire, $2,500 a day, taking wealthy clients (hedge-fund operators, movie stars, famous athletes) to places like Ollie’s Point, a more remote Costa Rica break, where, if he’s in the water, you’d better understand that he rules the roost.

We could talk about my disease. I've got a lot to say, about spinal taps, interminable plasma infusions, and weird KGB-type Russian nurses who seem to delight in zapping my muscles with electrodes, to see how dead those nerves really are becoming.

“This one time, there’s a kid I don’t know—he’s the best surfer out there, next to me—taking all the waves,” he says. “I paddle up to him and ask him to back off, let my guys have some. He’s like, ‘Hey, I want to get as many waves as I can.’ And I go, ‘Alright, let me rephrase that. Either you back off, or I will ride every wave you’re on, in front of you, behind you, I will take you out on every single wave, all day long. It’ll be fun. It’ll be something new for me to do, to ruin your day.’ See, I understand that need, that hunger, but you’ve got to be benevolent with your power as a dominant predator in the water. You’ve got to be responsible, or else I’ll fucking teach you some responsibility.”

I’d like to hear more of these stories featuring Wingnut as good-guy alpha enforcer. Or else we could talk about my disease. I’ve got a lot to say, about spinal taps, interminable plasma infusions, and weird KGB-type Russian nurses who seem to delight in zapping my muscles with electrodes, to see how dead those nerves really are becoming. But Wingnut doesn’t give me the chance. Instead, he bounces down the stairs to our room, slathers on sunscreen, grabs a towel, and is on the way to the beach, with me huffing and puffing behind. I’d run to catch up, but I can’t run anymore, either. Soon enough, though, we’re in the water, and shortly thereafter, I’m showing him just what I’m made of. It isn’t pretty.

It really is kind of a minor miracle that anyone can nose ride at all. You’re standing there, perched on the end of your board, nothing in front of you but the water rushing by. It makes no sense. By all rights, the board should lever up and smack you in the back of the head, leaving a knot to remind you of your hubris. But if you’re any good, it doesn’t. The board stays locked in, held in place by the counterbalancing force of the wave breaking on its tail. “It’s a very strange thing, when you think about it,” says Matt Warshaw, the former editor and author of the History of Surfing. “When you see someone set up and hang ten for a long time, even as a nonsurfer, you just sort of stop and your jaw drops, like, how is that even happening? I’ve heard it described as the closest feeling to flight you can get. It’s bizarre and wonderful, and a bit freaky.”

And I want it. Back home in Rhode Island, I’ve sometimes wanted it so badly that, when the surf goes flat, I’ll turn off my phone, lower my shades, tell my girlfriend to go away, lock the doors, put my dog in the basement, bring my dog back up, cuddle with her in bed, and spend the next four hours glued to surf videos on YouTube, hoping that some of what I see rubs off on me. I typically start with videos from the early 1960s, roughly around the time that hanging ten, arguably first accomplished in the fifties by the late Dale Velzy, established itself as the most wonderful way to ride a wave. Big names of the era include early Malibu, California, fixture Mickey Dora, also known as Da Cat for his lightness of step on a surfboard, and David Nuuhiwa, who in old footage glides to the front, arms by his side, shoulders down, then lifts his left arm straight up into the air and leans way, way back into a soul arch that is cool-daddy-casual beautiful. Then there are the best of today—Joel Tudor, Alex Knost, C.J. Nelson, Mikey DeTemple, and, of course, Wingnut. I love watching them all.

After that, I’ll take a break and go work on my balance skills, warming up with a vintage Bongo Board that I’ve actually gotten good at; progressing to a wobbly electrified version of the Bongo Board called the uSurf, which doesn’t so much aim to improve your balance as to throw you against the wall; transitioning to a contemplative glance at my Wingnut-endorsed , a type of advanced balance board that I’m too scared to try; and ending with me soaking my head in a fifth of vodka. Later, I’ll cruise the Internet in search of another “perfect” nose-riding fin or another “perfect” nose-riding SUP and fall asleep while rereading for the umpteenth time Tom Wegener’s seminal treatise on the physics of nose riding, in which he postulates his “suction + tension = hang ten” theory of why a board can stick to a wave and allow it to be ridden from the beak.

The next morning, I’ll wake up and head straight to one of my local rock-reef breaks, to get in a dawn-patrol surf session and wash off all the mortifying fatuity of the previous day. I know as well as anyone that what legendary Malibu longboarder Mickey Munoz says is true: “You can sit on the beach, and you can watch the waves, and you can watch people ride them, and you can visualize what you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it, but when you finally get in the water, all bets are off.”

Actually, it's been going unexpectedly well with Wingnut so far. On day one, after some initial flailing, I proved to him that I could catch a wave and ride down the line. “You can surf,” he says. “You can do a bottom turn. Fantastic foundation. Marvelous!”

On day two, I did something I’ve never been able to do before: take one step forward on my board without falling off. In fact, it looked as if I’d been taking that one step forever. Why here and not in Rhode Island, I don’t know. I just did it, right after Wingnut told me to do it, as in, “Do it!”

The author, right, with Wingnut.

Now it’s day three, another sunny morning in Tamarindo, at the break right in front of , which has become our drinking hole away from Vista Villas and is where Wingnut’s longtime buddy Robert August, one of the stars of the first Endless Summer, is the surfboard shaper in residence and quite the 68-year-old ladies’ man. It’s early enough that Wingnut and I have the waves mostly to ourselves. He’s riding his slender, tippy Wingnut-model Boardworks SUP; I’m riding a superwide, superstable Starboard Whopper, ten feet by thirty-four inches, on loan from Marco Salazar, a former dentist who fell for SUP after retiring from his practice and moved to Tamarindo to start . It’s just the ticket for my special needs. Even I have a hard time falling off this beast, and I can almost keep up with Wingnut as he paddles into position to wait for the next wave.

“When we’re out here, hover around the mother ship and you will be in the zone,” he says, watching a small dark line roll toward us. “There’s virtually no wind. The current’s mellow. OK, so here we go. Start paddling. Turn around. It’s all you! It’s all you!”

I pivot the Whopper, begin paddling like hell, catch the wave, execute an OK top turn, and start cross-stepping to the nose, to hang ten toes over and bring me all the joy in the world. Only, my feet stop moving after that first step. I look down and tell them to lift. They refuse. Stupid feet. I hate my feet, especially the right one, which is the more reluctant of the two and has told its toady brother to stay still, too.

“Come on!” I can hear Wingnut yelling. “Walk! Let’s go! Good step! Good step! Move it! Do it! One more! Again! Again!”

I’d love to, but no way. I kick out and paddle back. “My feet,” I say.

“Fuck your feet,” he says. “If you can take one step, you can take three.”

I nod, even though I know it’s not true. The farther up the board you go, the more unstable it becomes, the better your balance has to be, the more micro adjustments you need to make. It’s not anything you have time to think about. Your body has to sense what’s necessary and take care of it. Mine won’t do that, and that’s all there is to it.

“And once you get up there, don’t kick out, stay on the wave,” Wingnut continues, “because that’s when you start getting an idea of how much lift you have. See, it’s such a mental thing. It’s all about getting to ‘Yes, you can,’ because, well, you fucking can!”

I’m still halfheartedly bobbing my head when Wingnut says, “There’s another little set coming.”

I look where he’s looking and don’t see anything. But then, just like he said, almost like magic, there the set is, right in front of me—except that the first wave is a little too close and has jacked up a little too steep.

“You’re on it!” he says.

“I’m not!” I say.

“Yes, you are, Eeyore. Go!”

Strangely enough, he’s correct, I am on it. And this time, I take a bigger step to the nose, actually get off the SUP’s traction pad and onto the bare paint on the front third of the board. Wingnut’s shouting, “Go! Nice! Go! Take another step!” But the moment I do, my feet get confused and I bail out over the side, come up sputtering, blinking furiously, one contact lens lost. I flop onto my board and paddle back out, scowling at my ineptitude and irritated that Wingnut called me Eeyore. But I’m also thinking about something he told me earlier. “Smiling in the surf is good,” he said. “I mean, my whole thing is, unless you’re in serious stuff, why aren’t you smiling? Every time you go, there’s something out there to put a smile on your face, otherwise you shouldn’t go, right?”

So before I get back to him, I plaster this great big grisly rictus of a phony-baloney smile all over my face. The last thing I want is to get sent to my room. But Wingnut doesn’t look at me. He’s too busy scanning the horizon for what may come next. He’s always doing this. Even if he’s talking to you, he’s looking past you for the next good ride.

Then he starts paddling for a wave. It’s a slightly larger one that looks like it’s going to close out and slam him into the sand. I’d kind of enjoy seeing that. But, of course, it doesn’t. Wingnut just flies along, taking his time cross-stepping to the nose, in three easy-as-you-please steps. He hangs five for a few seconds, steps back down the board, lets it drop to the bottom of the wave, then rockets it down the line, where he banks off the top into a truly tremendous swooping-gull cutback, smacks the dropping curl, comes around again, slides along beneath the foam ball, starts to walk even before he’s back into the green, continues walking, little graceful birdlike steps, until he’s fully up front again, back arched so that his rear foot is more heavily weighted than his front. It’s just so pretty. It’s enough to make me weep.

In the evenings, after surfing, we usually head to Robert August’s sweet little hacienda for a veggie-heavy dinner, to a bingo night for the local gringo community, to some rich guy’s what-a-view pad, to a barbecue cookout, or to a charity auction, with Wingnut making new friends as he goes and greeting old ones with handshakes and hugs. His energy is relentless. It’s hard to see how he could possibly have MS skulking around his mitochondria.

One night, he tells me what it was like in 1997, when it first appeared, and how it affected his surfing. “I could stand up and get my trim,” he says, “but then I’d have to get down and take a knee. If the waves were kind of bumpy, I’d go to stand up and fall right over.” It took two years for that initial episode to fade and another three years before the doctors pronounced the disease in remission, a happy turn of events that Wingnut attributes to clean living and lots of vitamin D directly from the sun.

“Yes, it can and will return,” he says, “but my lifetime surfing goals are all done. I got to surf in Indonesia, got to surf Fiji, got to surf South Africa, surfed with Gerry Lopez and Mickey Dora. So if I never surfed again, it would be horrible, but I could deal with it. But when I was diagnosed, my son Cameron had just been born. He was three months old, and the thought that I’d never get to share a wave with him—that was the hard part and the thing that scared me the most.” He stops, wipes at his eyes, and says, “I still get choked up about it,” then starts smiling that great Wingnut smile and says, “But now, yeah, that little fucker drops in on me all the time.”

“Hey,” he almost shouts.��“We're here to catch waves. I like this one. Come on, princess, this one is all you! It's a corker. It's a bobby-dazzler!”

As to my own surfing, it started in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, when I was 16, rode a shortboard, thought I was a ripper, decided to give up the sport after moving to Manhattan at 22, and returned to it with a new passion for longboarding, which is how most older guys ride, after I relocated to Rhode Island ten years ago—or right around the time that CIDP really began to mess with my feet, heart, and head. I’d first noticed it eight years before that, when I was 40 years old and my toes starting feeling all fuzzy. The numbness didn’t upset my mobility, so I didn’t think much about it, until I made the move to the Ocean State and hit the Matunuck beaches. Whenever I tried to stand on my board, I was overcome with dizziness and fell.

Two years later, a neurologist finally gave me the CIDP diagnosis. By that time, both feet were fully engaged and nerve death had begun to creep from the extremities up into my legs, atrophying muscle as it went. One thing I learned is that, while the disease can’t be cured, it can be fought. You can go after it with high doses of steroids, which sometimes work but is a method my doctors won’t let me try, since the side effects (crumbling hips, vicious mood swings, massive weight gain, and chronic girlfriend-irritating hiccups) are so dire. Or you can bombard the system with a plasma-protein replacement called intravenous immunoglobulin. IVIG works in about 80 percent of cases, allowing the nerve structure to regroup enough to create new muscle. That being the case, I’ve spent days on end hooked up to an intravenous drip at Rhode Island’s South County Hospital, only to find out that I’m a member of the fairly exclusive 20 percent club for whom IVIG does nothing at all. This also makes me wonder why cross stepping and nose riding continue to be my main surfing interest, since they’re vastly more difficult for a person with CIDP to accomplish. Must be I’m either stupid or stupidly perverse. Or both.

Wingnut is great, though. It’s hard not to think he’s great. He’s just so full of joy. At the same time, it gets to be a little much, how everything in his life always turns out for the best, how bitchin’ everything is, the way he’s always whistling, the way everyone brightens in his presence, the way he calls all the Costa Rican guys guapo—Spanish for “handsome”—making them laugh, him with his snappy shorts, his neatly pressed shirts, his easygoing flip-flops. Plus, everything’s usually all about him, which he easily owns up to. “Yes, I am megalomaniacal,” he says, “and I like the sound of my own voice. But a good, healthy ego can get you through a lot. Remember—the glass is half full.” I guess some people are just born that way, and sometimes, I suppose, it’d be nice.

Right now we're out at a tiny-wave break called Suizo—Wingnut, me, and Robert August’s very cool, athletically built assistant Kristen, nicknamed Waimea. Wingy is calling out waves for me, Waimea is hooting up a storm, and I’m getting closer to the nose. After one ride, Wingnut steams up and says, “You did so many things right on that wave. When you got to the paint, you kept your weight more on the outside rail, which keeps you better balanced. You had a really good vertical stance, with your hips square. You were real stable. You just got real relaxed and stood tall. And that’s the perfect thing to do. It’s like what Laird Hamilton’s dad, Bill, used to say: ‘Stand tall, do nothing at all.’ ”

I’m bobbing my head, smiling for real this time. But my toes are always still about a foot shy of finding themselves directly on the nose. Wingnut has tried telling me that being anywhere on the front third of the board is considered nose riding, which is how some people look at it. But I know better. As Matt Warshaw says, “Nobody gives a shit if you’re on the front third of the board. That’s not what people are thinking about when they think nose riding. Nose riding is hanging ten or hanging five, something way, way up there.”

But here’s the thing that has me scratching my head. During all our time together, Wingnut hasn’t ever actually instructed me in the ways of nose riding, the nuts-and-bolts -mechanics of it. He hasn’t directly addressed how much to bend my knees or when to start walking. He’s acted more like a surfing-lifestyle tour guide and an enthusiastic supporter of my hopes, and at that he’s been terrific. And so much about him is contagious. When he starts wearing his beach towel backward around his neck, I do the same. He likes to drink a single beer with his breakfast; I’ve at least thought about doing that, too. But why I’m getting closer to the nose I can’t exactly figure out.

The author, getting close to the nose.

Two days later, our last day before leaving for home, again at Suizo, I’m wondering where the time went and looking down at my feet, the source of all my issues. More than anything, I want to experience that great aha, epiphanic, life-altering moment that leads to all my nose-riding dreams coming true, with me hanging ten or at least five. But there’s only an hour of sunlight left, and it doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen.

I look over at Wingnut. He’s blabbing away at some goo-goo-eyed surfer girl, saying, “I’m so hot right now. I’m like Hansel. I’m so hot right now,” and preening in his amusing, self-mocking way. But then he’s paddling in my direction. “You see that one?” I look around absently. “Hey,” he almost shouts. “We’re not here to fuck around. We’re here to catch waves. I like this one. Come on, princess, this one is all you! It’s a corker. It’s a bobby-dazzler!”

I start laughing and paddling and drop down the face of the wave, come around, stall, then walk. Behind me, Wingnut is yelling, “That’s it! That’s it! All the way up! All the way up! Don’t look down. Look where you want to go! Make it happen, motherfucker! It’s the last day!”

I glance at my feet, praying that what I see are ten toes over. Nothing doing. I’m still at least a foot short. Maybe even two.

Back in Rhode Island, the first thing I do is order a new SUP, a very handsome nose rider made by L41, out of Santa Cruz. It’ll have a wide, square tail, lots of tail rocker, a flat midsection, fancy step rails—and Wingnut has already proclaimed it bitchin.’ It’ll be here in a month or two. I can’t wait. And then I’ve got my eye on a board called the Hammer, made by a guy named Wardog, which is known to be a great all-rounder and probably perfect for me if all my further attempts at nose riding only lead me to pound the L41 into fiberglass smithereens on the local rocks.

Meanwhile, I’ve been pondering some things Wingnut told me after our final session. “I really like what you’ve done, but you’ve got a mental roadblock,” he said. “Nothing is stopping you but you. And, again, fuck your feet. They’re not an excuse I’m going to buy. You’ve got to have the right mental attitude, because you can talk yourself into success, or you can talk your way into failure, right?”

Yes, right, and I’ve heard this stuff before, and, yeah, I know, the choice is mine. But I’ve also come to believe that sometimes the choice isn’t yours. I mean this in a good way. Whatever nose-riding progress I made in Costa Rica, I made largely because, when you hang around Wingnut, what you get is Wingnut all the time, Wingnut without end, Wingnut smiling every second of every goddamn day, Wingnut constantly whispering in your ear, “I have faith in you.” At some point, whether you know it or not, whether you even want to or not, you can’t help but start to think that maybe, sometimes, the glass really is half full. His faith becomes your faith. That’s probably what got me so close to the nose in Tamarindo. And, if anything, that’s what’ll one day get me all the way up there. As long as he’s still with me, I know it can be done.

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Bell Boy

sperkins-pom — Fri, 01 Nov 2002 00:00:00 +0000

Leave it to a former Russian military trainer to develop a complete workout using a most rudimentary piece of equipment. The device in question is called a kettlebell, and it’s nothing more than a melon-size cast-iron ball with a handle. The trainer making the most of it is Pavel Tsatsouline, who once spent his days beefing up the Soviet special operations forces. Since arriving in the United States 11 years ago, Pavel’s renounced his commie ways, settled in leafy Santa Monica, California, and turned into quite the capitalist running dog. He markets his own abdominal machine (the Pavelizer), pens exercise books (Power to the People!), and even sells Red Army fitness tips to his onetime sworn enemies, the U.S. Marines. Tsatsouline’s genius, however, rests with the minimalist kettlebell. Using a single girya (they come in six sizes, ranging from nine to 88 pounds), he devises workouts that include lifts, presses, and squats; abdominal exercises; and cardio drills. Done right, he says, his regimen will efficiently work all of your major muscles and, well, “leave you coughing up hair balls.” Russkie overstatement? Maybe, but to find out for yourself, grab a 10- to 30-pound dumbbell—or visit to order the real thing—and try the following three times a week.

Pavel Tsatsouline: Russia’s fitness antidote to Richard Simmons

A. (5 sets of 1 rep per arm)
(1) Lying on your back, perform a one-arm press. (2) Roll onto your side, propping yourself up with your arm. (3) Stand up, keeping the dumbbell overhead. (4) Reverse the steps and lie back down. Repeat with the other hand.

B. (1 set to muscle failure)
(1) Lean over with your back straight, grip the dumbbell with both hands, and swing it under your legs. (2) Snap your hips forward and project the weight to shoulder height.

C. (5 sets of 3 to 5 reps)
(1) With both hands behind you, squat down, grip the dumbbell, and return to a standing position. (2) Set the dumbbell down and repeat.

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Trigger Twigg

sperkins-pom — Fri, 01 Jan 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Do You Have to Be a Little Unhinged to Climb This? Nope. But It Can’t Hurt.

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“It’s no secret that the Alaskan frontier is something of a magnet for people intent on dropping out, holing up, or just generally disappearing. But even by the insular standards of the 49th state, Trigger Twigg is no easy man to track down. Besides lacking a telephone, this former bear hunter, erstwhile barroom bouncer, and self-confessed winter-climbing junkie has no job, no car, and no regular routine (although he can sometimes be found doing his laundry at Talkeetna’s Fairview Inn, which has been catering to climbers for the past 75 years and takes considerable pride in the fact that Warren Harding died soon after having had dinner there). Short of actually flying into Talkeetna and planting your boots on the Fairview’s foot rail, the only way to reach Twigg is to call KTNA Radio and politely ask whoever answers to please broadcast a “Denali Echo” for Twigg, 48. “Hopefully somebody’ll tell him, and he’ll call you back,” explains the person manning the phones. “But with Trigger there are no guarantees.”

Thanks to a fire last summer that swept through the wall tent that he and his girlfriend were sharing in the hills just outside Talkeetna, Twigg also has no house — though he is currently building a cabin next to the birch privy that survived the conflagration. In the process of gutting the home, the blaze also destroyed most of Twigg’s ropes and ice axes, and the rest of his mountaineering gear. Nevertheless, sometime this month Twigg will make a bid to complete the first winter ascent of the tallest exposed mountain face in the world — a sheet of ice and rock running 14,000 feet up the north side of Mount McKinley. Known as the Wickersham Wall, the avalanche-prone face has been scaled on rare occasions during McKinley’s brief summer climbing season. The notion of a winter assault, however, is so audacious that the National Park Service’s Web site characterizes it as “bordering on the ridiculous because of its unfathomable risks.”

Chief among those hazards is some of the worst weather of any major mountain system on earth. Temperatures that often hammer the mercury to 40 below zero can plummet another 100 degrees in windchill when 50-mile-an-hour gales roar in from the Bering Sea, flogging McKinley’s exposed flanks and immobilizing climbers for up to three weeks at a time. Adding to the sense of siege are hanging glaciers, rockfalls, and the rather disconcerting fact that the north-facing Wickersham gets absolutely no direct sunlight in January. Indeed, much of Twigg’s ascent will be undertaken in the dark. “Just the approach is really dangerous. He’ll be climbing through a wall of darkness,” notes J.D. Swed, the mountain’s South District Ranger, who has participated in more than 100 McKinley rescues in the last seven years. Adds Rick Thoman, lead forecaster at the National Weather Service in Fairbanks and apparently something of an authority on understatement: “The Wickersham Wall is not a nice place to be in winter.”

Twigg, however, is no stranger to discomfort. During a boyhood spent hunting raccoons, squirrels, and wild mushrooms in Cumberland, Maryland, he learned to climb by strapping on a mask, a snorkel, and golf shoes and scaling local waterfalls. Twice during a stint as a bouncer at a Santa Barbara bar, he jetted off to Siberia with a handmade bow and a set of flint-tipped arrows to bag grizzly bears. In 1994, he moved to Alaska and flung himself into mountaineering, notching one ascent of McKinley plus two winter climbs of previously uncharted peaks in the Yetna Range. Somewhere along the way, he managed to acquire the tattoo of a green dragon that runs across his face and a business card that reads, in part, “alligator circumcision by appointment only.”

For his Wickersham bid, Twigg has developed an unusual training regimen. Instead of hewing to a state-of-the-art cardiovascular program in a climate-controlled gym, he is pursuing less structured activities that seem mainly to concentrate on raw pain. He spends several hours each week hauling 10-foot logs up mountainsides “to practice suffering in the cold.” He undertakes nighttime ascents of frozen waterfalls scouted out by his bush-pilot friends, rubberizes the muscles in his wrists with a shot-filled gravity ball, and each day performs several sets of chin-ups with his new set of ice axes from the limbs of trees near his unfinished cabin. “You gotta be a harsh motherfucker, you know what I mean?” he says. “I make myself harsh every day.”

Unfortunately, this demeanor seems to dovetail with a dangerous trend bemoaned by many hard-core Alaska alpinists: the perception that McKinley can be climbed by anyone who is physically fit and laced with sufficient levels of testosterone. In recent years, this misconception has helped to transform the tallest peak in North America from a lonely wilderness outpost into a mecca for all manner of mountaineers — veteran, novice, and the woefully out-to-lunch. Since the mid-1980s, McKinley’s roster of climbers has more than doubled. The near-record number who made the attempt last summer (1,100) included a 12-year-old boy from Korea who became the youngest person in history to reach the summit. More notably, perhaps, three others perished, including a volunteer ranger participating in one of that season’s two dozen rescue missions. “It’s way too crowded,” declares Brad Washburn, 88, who in 1951 became the first to ascend the mountain by way of the West Buttress. “You need a damn traffic light up there.”

While such reservations are surely appropriate, climbers who know Twigg firsthand seem convinced that, braggadocio aside, his prowess is genuine. Perhaps the strongest testament to his skills is the fact that Artur Testov, the Russian climber who pulled off an astonishing winter ascent of McKinley via the West Buttress last January, has agreed to partner up with Twigg on the Wickersham. Another supporter is Rick Ridgeway, who participated in the first American assault on K2 in 1978. “When I first talked to Trigger back in 1992, I was definitely skeptical,” admits Ridgeway. “But I saw him on the mountain that year, and he’s great. Based on his history and credibility, I’d say he’s got a good shot at it.”

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Polar Chic

There’s nothing hotter than cold women — or so some publishers say

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During the eight months she spent in the frozen wilds of Two Rivers, Alaska, with her husband, their three-year-old daughter, and 33 dogs, Ann Cook weathered some trying ordeals. She spent a minus-60-degree night huddled in a pile of hay with her huskies. She employed a snow shovel to fend off an animal she thought was a renegade moose (it turned out to be a horse), stitched 12 fleece doggie jackets on a broken sewing machine, and endured a litany of other woes stemming from her decision to move from New England in 1991 to race sled dogs across the tundra. All of which are chronicled in chilling detail in her recently released book, Running North, a memoir that the publisher, Algonquin Books, has elected to promote through an inventive if somewhat strained device: Next month, Algonquin is sending her off on a dogsled tour across northern New Hampshire.

If all goes according to plan, Cook’s husky-enhanced publicity stunt will (a) sell lots of books and (b) catapult the 43-year-old debut author into the front ranks of the publishing world’s literary genre du jour: Women Who Write About Snow. The latest spin-off of the endlessly hyped and immensely profitable Men Who Write About Disasters category, the trend includes such recent works as Sara Wheeler’s Antarctic travelogue Terra Incognita; Caroline Alexander’s The Endurance, an account of Ernest Shackleton’s 1914-1917 polar expedition; Jenny Diski’s memoir Skating to Antarctica; and Andrea Barrett’s adventure novel The Voyage of the Narwhal.

Unfortunately, aside from snowy settings and the fact that they are penned by women, few of these books actually have much in common. That, however, hasn’t stopped publishing-industry insiders from announcing that a dramatic shift in the zeitgeist has taken place. Nor has it discouraged media pundits from making breathless inquiries into what this all means. (“Why,” demanded a recent issue of Entertainment Weekly, “are so many chicks going polar?”) All of which has generated the kind of overheated hype that has left some of the principal players feeling a little confused. “I didn’t realize I was part of a new trend, because I didn’t know there was a new trend,” declares Diski. “Women have been off adventuring since the 19th century. It would be a bit sad to say that, on the brink of the millennium, we’re just now picking up our petticoats and venturing out of the house.”

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Putting the “Loo” in Lewis and Clark

An archaeologist’s search for a long-lost privy

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��Ever since Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage hit the best-seller lists in 1996, Americans have been reveling in a Lewis and Clark love fest that has achieved a variety of expressions, from plying part of the famed captains’ route aboard a 70-passenger cruise ship to schlepping dugouts over the few rapids that have survived the hydroelectric dams. This month near the Oregon coast, however, an archaeologist at the University of Washington hopes to resurrect a Corps of Discovery chapter that, some might argue, ought to stay buried. “The great thing about this,” says professor Julie Stein, “is that guides will be able to point to the very spot where Lewis and Clark answered the call of nature.”

Stein, 46, is hunting for evidence of a 19th-century privy that could offer a crucial clue to the location of Fort Clatsop, the long-vanished encampment where Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and their men sat out the cold and rainy winter of 1805-1806. Last September she spent a week collecting more than 70 soil samples, which are now being analyzed for traces of mercury. That’s because whenever the men complained of stomach aches or showed symptoms of syphilis, Lewis administered a dose of Dr. Rush’s Bilious Pills — powerful purgatives that sent the men racing for the outhouse. The evidence they deposited (the pills contained an insoluble form of mercury) could enable Stein to pinpoint the privy itself and, by extension, the elusive fort: Army regulations dictated that latrines be dug exactly 90 paces away.

While awaiting lab-test results, which should be available this month, L&C devotees can scarcely contain themselves. “For the enthusiast,” declares John L. Allen, a University of Connecticut geographer, “the real Fort Clatsop is like the fingerbone of a saint.”

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But There’s a Nice 5.11 Up That New Taco Bell

Yosemite’s latest expansion has America’s most hallowed base camp under siege

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“It’s probably the only campsite in America known worldwide because of its history, and if the Park Service goes through with its plans, many of the reasons to go there will be erased,” declares Tom Frost, 62, who completed the second ascent of El Capitan’s Nose route in 1960. The camp to which Frost is referring is a four-acre patch of dirt in the Yosemite Valley just east of the base of El Cap. Known simply as Camp 4, it is revered by rock jocks from the Shawangunks to Trango Tower as the place where, during a halcyon interval in the 1950s and 1960s, modern big-wall climbing was born.

It was here that Frost, together with Royal Robbins, Yvon Chouinard, Warren Harding, TM Herbert, Chuck Pratt, and others, fashioned the tools and techniques that took them up the Valley’s granite monoliths. It is here that successive generations of wall rats have made pilgrimages to test their mettle and learn from the masters. And it is here, within 500 feet of the cradle of contemporary climbing, that the National Park Service now wants to build a parking lot, 12 cottages, a registration building, an Indian cultural center, and four three-story dormitories containing 340 beds.

While similar forms of expansion have overtaken parts of the park in recent years, Camp 4 has remained somewhat aloof from the sort of concession-industry ravages that makes Yosemite Valley synonymous with overdevelopment. Until a few years ago, rangers rarely even visited the unruly cantonment, where picnic tables were typically adorned with neat rows of hardware and the ground between was strewn with beer bottles, haul bags, and radios blaring the Allman Brothers. When climbers who called this place home weren’t cutting their teeth on routes like Crack of Despair, Lunatic Fringe, and The Meat Grinder, they were crashing church picnics, mooning the tourist bus, and attempting to inveigle young women into their unwashed sleeping bags (or, in the case of one intrepid Don Juan, into a secondhand tent appointed with purple sheets purloined from a Nevada brothel).

All of which may help to explain why the Park Service’s plan has provoked a level of protest more typically associated with the desecration of an ancient Indian burial ground. “If they put up more buildings,” asserts photographer Galen Rowell, who has about 30 Yosemite first ascents to his name, “they’re just plain stupid.” In their defense, park officials point out that construction will take place adjacent to the campground and will not touch a single tent site. Most of the new structures, however, would be highly visible from Camp 4 — and thereby corrupt the mythic essence and legendary funk of what Frost calls, with risible but endearing grandiloquence, “an ever-evolving colony of minds and spirits.”

Since last January, Frost and 26 other prominent climbers have been spearheading a crusade to stop the plan. In November, just as this magazine went to press, they won a temporary victory when their threat of a lawsuit induced the Park Service to withdraw its current plan and begin crafting an alternative, details of which could be announced as early as this month. Unfortunately, insiders fear that the new plan will simply modify the existing one and that it is only a matter of time before the project goes forward. That, however, has done nothing to dampen the determination to protect a living testament to the spirit of the people who invented modern big-wall climbing. Plus, adds Chouinard, “it’s the only place left where climbers can really dirtbag it.”

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Just Like Moses, Except for the Red Sea Bit

Four Coloradans wander the desert, leading their people to adventure-racing’s promised land

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“They’re dirty animals, and they make weird noises,” declares adventure-racing veteran Billy Mattison. That may be an unfair indictment of a noble beast, especially considering the fact that Mattison, 41, and his three fellow adventure racers from Colorado failed to apply themselves to the finer points of dromedary science before embarking on the camel-derby segment of last October’s Eco-Challenge in Morocco. (Their entire preparation consisted of watching Lawrence of Arabia on video just before boarding a plane for Marrakech.)

Perhaps sensing this disdain, the animals responded by biting and bucking throughout the initial nine-mile slog along the sand dunes of North Africa’s Atlantic coast. Upon completing this phase of the competition, Mattison and his Team Vail colleagues — Michael Kloser, 38, who manages an outdoor-recreation center; Andreas Boesel, 48, who runs a restaurant; and mountain-biking instructor Sara Ballantyne, 38 — found themselves consigned to the middle of the pack, ranking a dismal 28th out of 57 teams.

Had they remained there throughout the rest of the seven-day, 300-mile race, whose eight events had competitors pounding up the Barbary coast, through the Atlas Mountains, and across sections of the Sahara — they would have adhered to a venerable Eco-Challenge tradition. In the four-year history of the race, no Americans have ever taken the title. And though a U.S.-based team did win the rival Raid Gauloises, which concluded a week earlier in Ecuador, most of that team actually hails from Australia and New Zealand. “It’s taken a while to spring this sport in the United States,” sighs Mattison. “People look at me and shake their heads, like I’m a freak or something.”

This year’s Eco-Challenge, however, proved to be something of a turning point. Once free of the cantankerous camels, Team Vail flung itself with such alacrity into the other phases of the competition — kayaking the Atlantic coast, racing Arabian stallions, and traversing the Altas range on foot — that as it entered the final 110-mile mountain-bike haul down to Marrakech, there was only one team in front of it. “We were pretty much brain-dead at that point,” admits Mattison.

Nevertheless, his squad of fat-tire fanatics fended off Team Australia and Team Spain, whisking across the finish line with a winning time of six days, 22 hours, and 16 minutes — and forcing adventure-racing aficionados to concede that the Americans had finally proven themselves. “They raced smart and didn’t make any mistakes,” says Chris Haggerty, an instructor at San Francisco’s Presidio ��ϳԹ�� Racing Academy who was part of Team Navigator, which placed 17th. “Americans are new to this sport for the most part, so that’s pretty amazing.” Mattison, however, says he’s competed in his last dromedary race: “I couldn’t care less if I never see another camel again.”

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For the Record

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By Jake Brooks, Kimberly Lisagor, and Andrew Tilin (with Alex Salkever)

Ground Zero
For nearly 40 years, the Aral Sea has topped the list of the most beleaguered bodies of water on the planet. Straddling the border of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, what was once the world’s fourth-largest lake has shrunk to less than half of its original size, sucked dry by decades of intensive Soviet-style irrigation. What remains — parched salt flats and beached trawlers — is only slightly less dismaying than what has disappeared altogether: 80 percent of the area’s birds and mammals, a once-vibrant fishing economy, and the health of entire communities now stricken with cancer and typhoid. There are, however, two small grace notes. Last September, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) pointed out that the Aral will stop shrinking and stabilize, albeit at less than 20 percent of its original size, by 2015. And early this year, contractors will break ground on part of an $86 million project designed to restore the region’s wetlands and improve its drinking water. It’s a mildly heartening turning point after a half-century of degradation. “Up to now, it’s been compared to a bad nuclear accident,” laments Tom Price of the OSCE. “Something along the lines of Chernobyl.”

A Race Too … Pointless?
OK, it’s official: The adventure world’s fixation on impressive but absurd accomplishments has now achieved the apotheosis of extremism. Last October, Himalayan potato farmer Kazi Sherpa shattered the Mount Everest “speed-ascent record” by pulling off the grueling slog from the 17,600-foot base camp to the 29,028-foot summit in a brisk 20 hours and 24 minutes. But despite besting the existing record by nearly two hours, the 33-year-old climber is far from thrilled. “I wanted to do it much faster,” he grumbles, explaining that heavy winds delayed him at the 26,000-foot South Col. Which is why Kazi Sherpa plans a second sprint up the mountain sometime in the next two years, with the intention of topping out in 18 hours or less — a mark that he hopes will stand as unassailable, and one that more sober minds deem pretty irrelevant. “It’s certainly a virtuoso display of high-altitude climbing,” concedes American alpinist David Breashears. “But there aren’t many people lining up to see how much faster it can be done.”

Yes, I Do Speak Snow Goose
“Fortunately, they couldn’t swim as fast as I could paddle,” says veteran adventurer Jon Waterman, referring to the two hungry grizzlies he encountered last summer during stage two of his attempt to complete a solo traverse of the Northwest Passage — a 1,023-mile journey along the Arctic Coast in which he spent weeks on end without seeing another human. (“It’s pretty twisted in that respect,” he concedes.) But evidently not twisted enough to dissuade the 42-year-old Colorado writer from embarking on the third and final leg of his expedition this month: a 1,100-mile trek from Umingmaktok to Repulse Bay via sea kayak and touring skis. If Waterman pulls it off, he’ll become the first American ever to complete the feat — although he admits to being far more anxious about surviving the profound loneliness than about setting records. “You begin talking to birds and seals,” he says. “Which, when you’re out there all alone, starts to seem perfectly normal.”

We Accept Your Apology. The Turtles, Alas, Do Not.
When 222 baby hawksbill turtles poked their heads out of the sand at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park last September, they were intent on doing what chelonian hatchlings do best: bumbling down the beach and into the sea to join their brethren, only a few thousand of whom survive (a statistic that ranks the hawksbill as one of the world’s most endangered marine species). Sadly, a number of them never got that far. Seven weeks earlier, a group of earnest volunteers had covered the fragile eggs with wire mesh to shield them from predators — and then failed to remove the protective cage before the hatch, which began a day earlier than anticipated. By the following afternoon, 37 of the newborns had been toasted to death by the Hawaiian sun — a potentially debilitating blunder for Volcanoes’s underfunded turtle-protection program. “We all have our screwups,” sighs Tim Tunison, the park’s resource management chief, who has launched a search for turtle-friendly fencing. “But this is the most lamentable one to date.”

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