I. Four Dead

Around 10:30 A.M. on October 7, 2023, Elena Cebanova’s phone rang at her home in Affi, Italy. When the slim, blond mother of two picked up, she learned that her younger sister, 33-year-old Anna Gutu, had been caught in an avalanche in Tibet and was missing.

Elena didn’t know much about mountaineering. Her sister had dived headlong into the sport less than two years earlier. She did know that this was an important climb for Anna. If she summited the mountain, she might achieve her dream of becoming the first American woman to climb all 14 of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks.

Elena was sure that Anna was OK. Whenever the family worried about her climbing, Anna always told them that she was guided by professionals. Now these people would find her, Elena thought.

An hour and a half later, her phone rang again. The caller spoke English, and Elena, who spoke only Italian and Russian, couldn’t follow what he was saying. Her partner opened Google Translate. Using the app, they learned that Anna was dead.

Two hours later, around 8 A.M. Eastern time, a phone rang in a leafy Massachusetts neighborhood. Seventy-five-year-old Susan Rzucidlo picked up. Susan, her cousin said, I’m not sure how to tell you this, but someone called saying that Gina died in an avalanche. I don’t know if it’s a prank.

This can’t be true, Susan thought. She would have gotten a call from the expedition’s organizers. She couldn’t remember the name of the mountain that her second-eldest daughter was climbing, but she knew that it was in China, because the permitting process had been agonizingly convoluted, and Gina had waited anxiously for weeks, hoping to beat another woman to the top. So Susan googled something like “most recent avalanche China.” And then she saw her daughter’s name.

The accidents made international news: Two American women and two Sherpas had perished in a pair of avalanches on Shishapangma, an 8,027-meter peak in Tibet. The climbers, it was reported, had been racing each other to become the first American woman to scale all 14 of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks, a feat widely popularized by 40-year-old Nepali mountaineer Nirmal “Nims” Purja, who in 2019 proved that the mountains—all of them located in the Himalaya and Karakoram Ranges of South Asia—could be climbed in just months. Purja himself had been on the mountain that day; Anna Gutu was a client of his climbing company, Elite Exped, and had been led by one of its Sherpas, 27-year-old Mingmar Sherpa. Gina Rzucidlo, 45, had been led by a 35-year-old Sherpa named Tenjen “Lama” Sherpa, who earlier that year guided Norway’s Kristin Harila, a former professional skier, in a successful attempt to beat Purja’s record. (They trounced it, climbing all the peaks in 92 days.) Both Mingmar and Tenjen died roped to their clients.

Climbers spoke to reporters about what they considered a dangerous trend of record chasing on 8,000-meter peaks, inspired by Purja and Harila and fueled by social media. (Gutu had a sizable Instagram following.) Several of those on the mountain that day were also pursuing their 14th peak; Purja had been trying to reach a new goal of summiting all of them without supplemental oxygen. Members of the climbing community pointed to recent snowfall that likely worsened the risk of avalanches, and criticized what they said was a failure of leadership on the mountain. But one expedition leader, Mingma Gyalje Sherpa of Imagine Nepal, known as Mingma G, said that the race was to blame. “Everything was going smoothly,” he told a reporter for , “but the competition between the two ladies ruined everything.”

Questions remained. Several years ago, one might have been lucky to climb a handful of those peaks in a lifetime. Now two women had ticked off 13 in rapid succession, converging upon the same final mountain on the same day. Who were Gina Rzucidlo and Anna Gutu? How did they end up racing to the roof of the world? And why did they, and their guides, die?

The post Death on Shishapangma appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

Originally, I had a vision. It involved getting into a car with strangers.

The idea struck me a few weeks before I left for Colorado, where I was going to report on the state’s notorious Interstate 70 traffic. Each winter, I-70 makes headlines and stymies skiers attempting to drive from Denver and the urban Front Range to the dozen or so resorts that lie west along the scenic and beleaguered 144-mile mountain corridor. The highway has even inspired its own Instagram account, , which features scenes of Corvettes squirming in the snow, semis jackknifed across the road, and the cherry-red ass ends of countless vehicles, all filmed by frustrated travelers.

I’ve been mired on I-70 myself, having lived on the Front Range until last year, when I moved back to my home state of California, to the mountains around Lake Tahoe. On my upcoming trip, I hoped to answer some of the questions I’d pondered as a Coloradan: What causes I-70 traffic? Could it ever be fixed? And what did traffic on I-70—and other infamous recreational arteries like Utah’s Little Cottonwood Canyon to Alta and Snowbird ski resorts or the Montauk Highway to Long Island’s beaches—reveal about our relationship with nature?

At the moment, though, I was specifically puzzling over who, exactly, wandered innocently into the I-70 gridlock each weekend. Everyone I knew in Colorado seemed to understand that you could mostly avoid traffic if you left the Front Range early in the morning and the resorts early afternoon. We set grim alarms that began with the numbers five, four, or even three to go skiing. Who were all these snoozers caught in the 8 A.M. swell each week? And wouldn’t it be great, I mulled, if I could somehow get into one of their cars for this story?

That’s when a synapse in my brain either fired or short-circuited. Maybe I could.

The initial plan was rough: I would trawl the popular Dinosaur Park-n-Ride lots outside Denver and talk my way into a vehicle with a group of these hapless pilgrims. We would wade into traffic together, brothers and sisters in arms, and I would bear witness to their arduous journey. Hard lessons would be learned, but good times would still be had, in the Rocky Mountain spirit of adventure.

I briefed my fiancé. He politely lauded my out-of-the-box thinking, but expressed valid concerns, including the offhand chance that I got murdered, or a more likely scenario in which I failed to convince anyone to let some rando into their car. He suggested I arrange a ride in advance.

I took to the keyboard with optimism. “Hi all!” I posted on three Denver-area skiing Facebook groups. “I’m looking for a fun group to hitch a ride with on Saturday January 6. … Looking for folks who were already planning to leave the Front Range at 7 A.M. or later.” I left my phone number, converting a few digits to text (“seven2zero…”) to foil the spam bots, and waited for the invitations to roll in.

The response was swift and derisive.

“That’s literally the worst traffic weekend of the year. Hard pass!”
“Anyone leaving at that time of day, on that particular weekend is clearly a sadistic psychopath and should not be trusted to drive you anywhere.”
“This is literally the first man [note: I’m a woman] that is actively trying to get stuck on i70.”

And the most humiliating:

“You can write your number out this ������’t bumble or match.com.”

For the next several days I cringed at the sight of new Facebook notifications. I questioned my entire plan. Colorado was having an unusually dry season, and for the week preceding my trip, the snowfall forecast looked like a line of binary code: 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1 inches. What if it didn’t snow? What if ski conditions were so bad I didn’t even see traffic?

By Thursday, things were looking up. OpenSnow forecasters were baiting skiers with “soft/powder conditions” for Saturday morning. The mountains were calling, and everyone in Denver would go. I packed my skis and flew to Colorado to get stuck in traffic.

The post Colorado’s I-70 Has America’s Most Notorious Ski Traffic. Is There a Solution? appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

Araminta “Minty” Ross was born into slavery in 1822 on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. As a girl, she dreaded doing domestic work that kept her indoors under the hawkish eye and often abusive hand of a mistress. As a teenager, she was hired out to do the kind of grueling agricultural labor usually assigned to men, and she later worked alongside her father, a lumberman, learning how to forage and to follow waterways. Eventually, she used the survival skills and physical endurance she’d developed not only to escape north to her own freedom, but also to lead more than a dozen successful missions to liberate over 70 enslaved people. Ross navigated for those groups under cover of night and in freezing winter conditions. She hid people in swamps, showed them which plants could be eaten safely, and deployed her knowledge of the woods to evade slave hunters. For this she would one day be described as “the ultimate outdoorswoman” by a park ranger. Most of us know her by the name she adopted in her twenties: Harriet Tubman.

This fresh look at the Tubman narrative is one of many stories from the new book , by Tiya Miles. In Wild Girls, Miles, an author and a professor of American history at Harvard University, reexamines the lives of female trailblazers to reveal how playing and working outside as girls prepared them to subvert the status quo as adults. A childhood full of climbing trees and challenging boys to footraces in Victorian-era New England, for example, inspired Louisa May Alcott to create the feisty, independent Jo March in Little Women. Annual migrations between summer and winter settlements in the Rocky Mountains equipped a 16-year-old Shoshone girl named Sacagawea, who was kidnapped and sold or exchanged to a French trader to be one of his “wives,” to serve as Lewis and Clark’s most valuable guide. Before she founded the United Farm Workers Association with Cesar Chavez in 1962, Dorothy Huerta learned “to be strong,” she said, from hikes through the Sierra Nevada with her Girl Scout troop.

In Wild Girls, Miles focuses on women of the 19th century, when, she writes, indoor spaces represented both literal and psychic confinement. White women were relegated to the domestic sphere at a time when performing physical work or playing sports was considered unfeminine. Enslaved Black women working in the house endured the surveillance of the women who controlled them and sexual predation by the men, even as the outdoors connoted both the toil of forced labor and the beauty of nature. Native girls sequestered in boarding schools had their culture and identity systematically assailed. Indoor spaces were heavily regimented along gender lines, Miles argues, while the outdoors was where girls could be freer from restrictive social norms and supervision. Her thesis: time in nature expanded their minds, readying them for revolutionary thought.

Miles herself was profoundly shaped by time outdoors in her youth. Growing up in Cincinnati in the 1970s, shuttling between divorced parents’ homes, she spent hours exploring abandoned buildings and empty lots in the urban neighborhood around her mother’s house, discovering relics like old shoes and furniture, and imagining what they might tell her about the past. She visited state parks with her father and stepmother, and at Kentucky’s Natural Bridge State Resort Park, Miles saw a landscape so awe-inspiring that she wrote about it for a Bible class assignment requiring her to describe an experience with God.

Miles’s most treasured memories outdoors were of times spent with her maternal grandmother on the porch of her Craftsman bungalow or in the garden she lovingly tended. Her grandmother told her stories about her childhood in rural Mississippi, where her family had been sharecroppers. The stories were always rooted in the environment: how green and lush and sustaining the country, how backbreaking the labor in the cotton fields. Miles’s grandmother also described the day when armed white men rode onto the family farm on horseback and forced her father to sign away almost all of their land and possessions. “There was this memory of an idealized Southern nature accompanied by a terrorized Southern nature,” Miles told me when we spoke in the fall. “At the same time,” she continued, citing her grandmother’s ability to save over decades to buy that Craftsman, “there was a present-day experience of the pleasure and pride of having one’s own little bit of the outdoors, one’s own little garden.” The idea that Black people have a complicated yet nonetheless deep and sustaining relationship with the outdoors is a theme Miles has explored in her writing again and again.

“The way we think about nature and the environment in this country is fairly limited,” says Carolyn Finney, author of the book Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors. “We either see nature as a supermarket of resources or a place for outdoor recreation.” Tubman doesn’t fit into either category in that narrow view; nor do the relationships that many people of color have with the outdoors. For example, Finney points out, “Labor has never been seriously considered as a way to have a really strong relationship with nature.” This narrow mindset has led to the erasure of Black people and other people of color from the conversation about environmentalism, she says. The stories in Wild Girls, then, also quietly expand the idea of what it means to be an outdoors person. Miles wants readers to know that, as she writes, “People imagined to exist outside only as exploited laborers or romanticized symbols have in fact lived large and impactful lives outdoors.”

Soon after the revelation about Tubman, Miles, who began her research in African American and Native American women’s histories, became increasingly interested in environmental action. Also in 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, disproportionately affecting Black residents, and Miles saw that the effects of climate change were likely to hit poor communities and people of color hardest. In her work, she began to collect notes on how enslaved people related to nature. In 2011, she founded a nonprofit, ECO Girls, which provided environmental cultural experiences in southeast Michigan. These efforts culminated more than a decade later in Wild Girls.

Miles, an artful explainer who often began her responses to my questions by summarizing the points to be covered, told me that there were two reasons she felt compelled to share stories like Tubman’s. “I think it’s important for all of us to understand the complexity and multidimensionality of Black experience,” she said. “Black people and other marginalized groups have been too often reduced to stereotypical elements and not considered or respected or understood in the wholeness of their beings.”

The other reason, she said, is to reveal to Black women and other women of color that their history is rooted in the outdoors; that they, too, have inherited a deep connection to nature. In doing so, she hopes to activate them to meet the environmental challenges ahead. “I want Black women to feel equipped to know that we stand on this earth, we live with this earth, we are part of this earth,” she says. “It’s our duty to try to protect the home that we depend on, as well as the many other creatures we share it with.”

The pandemic in particular exposed unequal access to green spaces, especially for poor communities and people of color. Studies found, for example, that Black and Asian teens were less likely than their white counterparts to visit parks during the early months of the pandemic, and were more likely to feel emotionally distressed. Areas that were predominantly non-white had both less green space and higher rates of COVID-19.

When I asked Miles for some practical ways to make it easier for everyone to get outside, she suggested that people start by ensuring that everyone feels welcome in their own communities. “Visual signifiers” can help, she said, like a sign in her neighborhood that reads WITCHES AGAINST WHITE SUPREMACY, which, she tells me, made her chuckle. “I thought, This is a street I want to walk on.” Miles also suggested that people contribute not only to organizations that work toward conservation, but also to those that improve access for underrepresented groups.

Miles’s forthcoming projects include a book entirely about Tubman, and her first foray into climate fiction. She and her husband, also a Harvard professor, spend their summers in Montana, where he’s from. Their home base in Bozeman is the launching pad for most of their hikes and visits to national parks. But in Cambridge, too, Miles tries to get outside as much as possible, even if it just means taking her laptop outdoors. For her, time in nature is still key to maintaining gratitude and optimism, even while her work immerses her day after day in our country’s fraught racial history and our planet’s warming future. “Even though it’s a very destabilizing time,” she says, “it’s also a time when possibly, maybe, the things we all do can matter more because the stakes are so high. I think we all can have a heightened sense of purpose right now. That sense of purpose really does energize me.”

The post Tiya Miles Uncovers the Hidden History of Women in the Outdoors appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

Let me tell you a tale of a mythical beast who wanders the wintry peaks. He is your average American resort skier, and he does strange and marvelous things. According to legend, he will sit in traffic for three hours on a Saturday morning to make a drive that would otherwise take less than half the time. He will wander haplessly to a ticket counter and pay $200 for a lift ticket. He will wait in lift lines so long, the locals whisper, that you can see them from space. He will do all this for the privilege of sliding around for a few hours on a chewed-up slope days after the last storm. He will call it “skiing pow.” This behavior is nonsensical, you say. This man must be a myth.

On a sunny, bluebird Saturday in January, in a gondola going the wrong direction at Northstar ski resort outside Lake Tahoe, California, I find myself face-to-face with this fantastical beast. His name is Calvin, and he comes from Florida.

The creature, alas, is wounded. He shows me his forearms, where two hematomas are rising like bread loaves. “I got beat up a little,” he tells me. That’s why he’s riding the lift down.

I’m taking the gondola down too, but not because I’m hurt. I’m two hours into a daylong mission to ride a chairlift from first chair to last, 9 A.M. to 4 P.M., and interview everyone I encounter. That’s roughly 30 seven-minute interviews on the ride up, plus anyone I meet on the ride down. My editor wants me to take the lift both ways, I think because he hopes to torture me for comedic effect. He mentioned, a little too gleefully, that I should bring a warm jacket in case I’m on the chair for eight hours in a blizzard.

Sorry, guy: the day is instead warm and brilliantly clear, and the only lift a local resort will allow me to lap is Northstar’s Tahoe Zephyr Express, a “chondola” that carries both chairs and gondolas. I ride the chair up and the gondola down, and the latter is how I meet skiers and riders who the mountain is spitting out, like Calvin. (According to chairlift cultural norms, I’m going first-name only.) As with all the conversations I’ve had today, I ask him various unscripted questions, but they all circle around the same theme: why do you ski?

Or really, why do you still ski? Because it’s getting harder and harder to do. The average weekend warrior encounters increasingly insurmountable obstacles on their journey to the mountain: traffic ; lift ticket prices are extortionary; climate change has . Even if our hero could move closer to the slopes, Airbnb and remote work have decimated ski-town housing. “The regular Joe or Jill can’t afford to fall in love with the sport anymore,” Seth Masia, president of the International Skiing History Association, tells me. “If you fall in love, it could be like a bad marriage.”

I know this feeling. When I became enamored with snowboarding 17 years ago, the romance began like a dream. There were ski cabins leased with friends in Tahoe, a winter in New Zealand, a hundred-day season in Aspen. But after I moved to Colorado’s urban Front Range in 2012, the relationship began to sour. Weekend ski traffic got worse. Lodging got more expensive. I shifted time to the backcountry—by then I’d switched to skiing—but a lot of it was still off the notoriously congested I-70. So I sat in the gridlock. I skipped more powder days. And I wondered, at times, if my love affair had become toxic.

But Calvin, 27, is still in the honeymoon phase. He’s just happy to be on the mountain, which he describes as “next-level.” Calvin’s first foray into snowboarding was in Tennessee, and he started on the bunny hill with a bunch of little kids. Now he can kind of make turns, except when he can’t, and the board squirts straight down the hill. This, he says, is terrifying.

Calvin is here in Tahoe on a work trip, and he was determined to go snowboarding today. “I was like, whatever the cost,” he says, “I’m paying it.”

What did he pay?

He furrows his brow. “I rented the gear. It was maybe $130, and then for the day ticket it was like $200. So not too bad. You usually expect to spend like 500 bucks to go snowboarding.”

Do you? This expectation alarms me. This year I paid $870 for my season pass, and that felt like a big expense. But much news has been made of outrageous lift ticket prices; recently, a resort broke the $300 barrier. Price gouging—let’s call it what it is—for day passes is, of course, a strategy for selling season passes. And season passes are a climate-change-resistant strategy for collecting cash upfront, regardless of snowfall. But over a third of skier visits still come from folks like Calvin, who shell out for lift tickets at the window. And in some regions, like the Rockies, those folks have gone from paying an average of $98 for a day of skiing in 2013, to $197 in 2022, according to the National Ski Areas Association (NSAA).

But Calvin has no complaints. The views here are “unreal,” he says.

Is it worth it?

“Oh yeah. A hundred percent.”

The post I Spent 7 Straight Hours on a Chairlift. Here’s What I Learned About Why We Still Ski. appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

Tommy Pozzi started washing dishes at a diner for seven bucks an hour when he was 13 or 14. Like most teenagers, he didn’t know what he wanted to do when he grew up. But both his parents worked the assembly line at the Buick factory in Flint, Michigan, and they told him and his younger sister not to do what they did. Don’t waste your life punching the clock at a job you hate, they said. Do something you’re passionate about.

Tommy was passionate about the mountains. He’d never seen the big ones out west, but as a young rock climber he read mountaineering books, and in the winter he opened the windows of his bedroom and did push-ups in the frigid air—“cold training,” he called it. After high school he went to the University of Utah, in Salt Lake City, so he could ski and climb, but as a junior he ran out of tuition money. Over the next several years he worked various jobs in the oil and gas industry, which was good pay but a hard lifestyle that involved spending weeks on a rig. By the time he was 30, he had a serious girlfriend, and he could see a future in which the job made him a miserable husband and father. So he quit.

He had friends who were ski patrollers at Park City Mountain Resort, about 30 miles from his home in Salt Lake. In 2015, he started as a rookie patroller there, where he learned new skills constantly: how to make a ski slope safe from avalanches by throwing explosives onto it, how to transport an injured skier down a mountain in a toboggan. He loved the job, but the pay was dismal. His hourly wage increased from $10.25 an hour to $16 his third year, then stagnated. Money got particularly tight after he and his wife had their daughter in 2019. He sometimes had to carpool to work because he couldn’t afford the gas to get there.

Things became even more stressful during the pandemic. In January 2020, the union Tommy had joined—Park City Professional Ski Patrol Association, which represented the 180 or so patrollers and safety personnel on Park City Mountain—had begun negotiating a new contract with the ski area’s multibillion-dollar parent corporation, Vail Resorts, which at the time owned 37 properties worldwide, including Whistler Blackcomb and Vail Mountain. Tommy had hoped the union could bargain for a couple bucks’ an hour raise, which would help him cover his bills. But the negotiations didn’t start until August 2020, and then they dragged on through the following 2020–21 ski season, without resolution. Meanwhile, real estate prices soared in resort towns like Park City, as well as outdoorsy metro areas like Salt Lake City.

In the fall of 2021, Tommy’s son was born, and he began his seventh season as a patroller. That December, the union approached its 46th meeting and 16th month of negotiations with Vail amid a roiling national conversation about labor, as workers from ��������Dz���’s and Amazon staged strikes and unionization drives. Vail was taking a pummeling in the news due to long lift lines and terrain closures, both attributed to workforce shortages. The union’s talks attracted public support and media attention. When I met Tommy over Zoom a few weeks before Christmas, he told me about the nine-to-twelve-hour days that left his feet and back aching, the commute through Parleys Canyon that became “life or death” in the snow, and the dangers of his job. With regard to hand-throwing explosives, for example, “You can only throw it so far, and some people,” he said, joking, “are not that good at throwing.”

Despite his wry sense of humor, it was clear that Tommy was frustrated by the protracted talks between the union and Vail, which wanted to start first-year patrollers at what was then the company-wide minimum wage of $15 an hour, instead of the $16.70 the union was asking for. (According to shareholder reports, Vail appeared to be financially healthy, earning profit margins in its mountain operations, before depreciation and amortization, of 29.2 percent in 2020 and 32.6 percent in 2021.) At the time, as a seventh-year patroller who oversaw a team of four or five, Tommy made just $17.83 an hour, well below the $20.88 MIT then deemed a living wage to support a family of four in Salt Lake County. A two-week paycheck, after taxes, ranged from $850 to $1,300. His wife made a modest salary at a local nonprofit, and after their $1,200 mortgage, $1,800 a month for two kids in day care, groceries, diapers, a car payment, gas, and other bills, “it’s very much a paycheck-to-paycheck existence,” he told me.

Tommy pointed to the irony that his employee ski pass gave him access to any Vail resort, but he couldn’t afford a ski vacation: not the gas to get there, the hotel to stay in, or the ski lessons for his kids. “But all the people who can afford all that stuff, we’re there to help those guys and make sure that the mountain is open so that they can spend money there,” he said. Noting a recent $118 million acquisition by Vail of three resorts in Pennsylvania, he said, “It’s like, what about the people who make all this possible? It just feels like they think we’re expendable and we have no value.”

The second week of January 2022, the union voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike ahead of the resort’s lucrative Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend. A few days later, after a 15-hour meeting that ran into the early morning, the union and Vail arrived at a new contract, which was put to the patrollers for a vote. Tommy deliberated until the final hour before voting yes.

The post How to Throw Bombs, Save Lives, and Raise a Family in Paradise on $22 an Hour appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

Last fall, I came up with what seemed at the time like a good idea: I convinced my friend Melanie that she and I should enter a backcountry ski mountaineering race. The Grand Traverse is a 40-mile slog from Crested Butte to Aspen, Colorado, and it required us to race as a team. Neither of us had ever done a ski race, but we’d always been compatible partners on mountain bikes, so I figured we’d be well-matched on the skin track, too.

I was wrong. On our first long training day together, Mel dropped me repeatedly. As she disappeared out of sight on our last climb, I began a downwards spiral: How much would I hold us back on race day? Why had I come up with this stupid idea? Why wasn’t she waiting? When I finally caught up, Mel asked, “Are you bonking?” I opened my mouth to respond and—oh, no—tears began rolling down my cheeks.

I was awash in saline and shame. Crying was a behavior I associated with beginnerdom, noob status, something I did most often in the years I was learning to mountain bike. But—dammit, now Mel’s brow was furrowed with motherly concern—I couldn’t stop the waterworks. “I think you need to eat something,” she offered.

She was right: sugar improved my mood, and at the bottom of the final descent we joked about my meltdown. In the days that followed, though, I became more curious than embarrassed. I wasn’t actually crying out of pain or discomfort, so what emotions were I reacting to? And was there anything positive to be derived from the tears—or were they just a liability in an outdoor setting?

A friend once dubbed what happened to me a “sports cry,” and in the years I’ve been using the term since, I’ve found no need to explain it: even the most accomplished athletes have shed tears in the field. Pro climber , the first woman to free-climb El Capitan’s Golden Gate route in under 24 hours, calls it her “default” reaction when she’s frustrated or scared. Pro skier tells me he’s “definitely” done it, for “multiple reasons.”

My initial theory about sports cries was that they were a result of fatigue and glycogen depletion. While researchers haven’t studied those variables directly, Ad Vingerhoets, psychology professor and author of Why Only Humans Weep: Unraveling the Mystery of Tears, tells me they do know that sleep deprivation lowers the threshold for crying, meaning it takes less to make us boohoo. But while being physically tired may make us more likely to cry, most tears are triggered by emotions—and the emotions underlying our mid-adventure meltdowns are often the same ones that trigger them in day-to-day life.

While children most often cry in response to physical pain or discomfort, Vingerhoets explains, adults rarely do. The most common emotions that cause tears throughout our lifespan, he says, are feelings of powerlessness and frustration, followed by loss and separation from loved ones. Both sets of feelings were present that day on the mountain with Mel: I felt powerless and frustrated that I was moving so slowly, but I also felt the primal panic of being left behind.

Townsend also identified similar feelings during one of his more memorable sports cries, which happened during a shoot, when he miscalculated his takeoff on an 80-foot cliff jump and blew his knee. Afterwards, as he was being evacuated alone in the helicopter, he contemplated the severity of his injury as well as the fact that he was flying away from his friends, and started “bawling.” “You feel like an island in those moments,” he says. “Like you fucked up and put yourself in this position… and now you’re alone.”

Crying might be one of the more vulnerable things we do, writes Amy Blume-Marcovici: “It is a time when our body reveals our inner world to those outside of us, whether we want it to or not.”

While Townsend tends to cry only during what he calls “outlier” moments, it’s more workaday for Harrington. “It’s just one of those things that happens to me when I have strong emotions,” she says. For her, crying feels helpful, like a catharsis.

Actually, some research says that crying ������’t inherently therapeutic or cathartic. In , performed by Vingerhoets and some colleagues, just 50 percent of people reported feeling better after crying, while 40 percent reported feeling no different and 10 percent felt worse. The major factor that determines whether people report feeling better or worse after they cry is how others react—crying in a supportive environment can make people feel better; an unsupportive response makes them feel worse.

For Harrington, who started climbing at age ten, the male-dominated culture of climbing didn’t feel like one that was receptive to her tears. When she was younger, she says, she often felt embarrassed and ashamed about breaking down on the wall. “I used to feel like it was this distinctively female trait,” she says. “I just felt like everyone thought I was weak.” The tears didn’t have the cathartic effect they do now; they only added to the frustration of the moment, and afterwards, she would spend the rest of the day feeling bad about the outburst. But as she matured, she realized that the way she handled her emotions wasn’t wrong or bad; it was something that worked for her. That self-acceptance transformed the tears from a “hurdle,” as she puts it, to a “tool.” Now, she says, “crying is sort of my process.”

Women do cry more often than men, though researchers aren’t exactly sure why. It could be hormones—lower testosterone is generally related to a lower threshold for crying—but it could be social factors, too. Vingerhoets theorizes that women may feel helpless or powerless more quickly in conflict situations, for example; and they may also expose themselves to what he calls “emotional stimuli” more often.

Of course, there are practical reasons that crying or any other major outburst ������’t always helpful in outdoor sports—strong emotions can impede decision-making and become a safety issue. Townsend says there have been times he’s wanted to cry on ski mountaineering missions but didn’t, in order to get out of a dangerous situation safely. Harrington keeps it productive by allowing herself to feel the emotions, cry, and then move on. To her, it’s similar to any strong display of emotion, like shouting after you fall—the feeling is the same even if the expression is different. “I think it’s OK as long as you don’t carry it with you throughout the day,” she says. “As soon as you touch the ground it should be over.”

Despite its potential drawbacks, there are other reasons crying might have value in outdoor culture—it can help us connect more deeply with others. Researchers think emotional crying is a behavior we evolved to help us create social coherence, by signaling that we need help or care. , Vingerhoets and other researchers compared normal criers with people who never cry, and found that the normal criers were more empathetic, and reported feeling more connected to and supported by others.

For Townsend, tears have facilitated bonding experiences on at least two separate occasions. On one trip, a friend had an anxiety attack and started crying; eliciting Townsend to put his hand on his back and sit next to him for about 20 minutes. Afterwards, the friend told him that was the best response he could have provided. Tears have helped him share positive emotions too: In 2019, while en route to skiing the Messner Couloir on Denali, Townsend caught a view back to base camp at 19,000 feet. Overwhelmed by the beauty, he started crying. His companions were also swept up in the experience, and eventually the group was laughing tearfully together, “in a really joyful fun way, not in a making fun of you way,” he recalls. Both experiences, he says, felt deeply meaningful.

Because it’s so rarely in our control, crying might be one of the more vulnerable things we do, writes Amy Blume-Marcovici, in the book, When Therapists Cry: Reflections on Therapists’ Tears in Therapy: “It is a time when our body reveals our inner world to those outside of us, whether we want it to or not.” That’s probably because crying is the outcome of a sudden physiological shift in our bodies, when our sympathetic system—the one responsible for our fight or flight response—cedes control to our parasympathetic system, which powers our rest or digest response. While going into rest-or-digest mode on a mountain might seem counterproductive, in the magazine , psychologist Jay Efran suggests that rather than thinking of tears as a breakdown, “we optimistically consider it a potential breakthrough. By backing away from an overwhelming issue, the system can husband its resources and regroup for a fresh assault.” Either way, he notes that we often don’t cry at the height of a crisis but rather when we think it’s safe to finally relax. That sense of safety can come from a caring gesture or the presence of a trusted figure—like a friend who’s willing to sit with us when we’re having a panic attack, or gently suggest that we eat some calories.

Despite the rough start to our training, on race day Mel and I proved to be a good pair. The race began at midnight, and for six hours we schussed together as a unit through the inky darkness. But as the sun began to rise, we found ourselves pushing as hard as we could to make it to Star Pass, the high point of the race, by the crucial 7 A.M. cutoff. At the top, just before the brief descent to the pass, I spotted a course marshal checking off racers. After a frantic transition, we skied around a small contour and the marshal reappeared. Now she was holding two ski poles over her head in the shape of an X.

A painful lump formed in my throat. We’d missed the cutoff by minutes. The tears welled up, and I didn’t bother holding them back this time. I let myself have a good cry on the ridge, at 12,330 feet.

But as the tears flowed and dampened my goggles, I felt less bereft. The race had always been a big, ambitious goal. We had tried our best and pushed ourselves farther than we’d ever gone on skis. That was something to be proud of.

“For me, tears represent that discomfort of pushing my limits constantly,” Harrington says. “They’re the result of me always taking on big challenges, putting myself out there, being open to failure.” We should fail more often, she thinks: these are the times we grow.

After a few minutes, I pulled myself together. A storm was coming in and it was time to get off the mountain. By the time we began skiing back down the way we came, my eyes were dry, and I felt a surprising sense of peace.

The post I’ll Cry if I Want To (and You Can, Too) appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.
—Genesis 3:25

It’s weird to start a story about yourself with someone else’s memory. But I don’t have memories like this of my own. I never ran on a beach naked. I never played naked in the dirt. I don’t think there’s a single naked photo of me as a kid.

It’s not like I think I’ve been deprived. My fully clothed childhood was happy and fine. But I do think it’s probably why, as an adult, I don’t have the kinds of wild tales that Dan and my friends have; stories of skiing butt naked in the backcountry and mountain biking nude under the full moon. If we come upon an alpine lake midhike, I’m the person who gets in wearing my underwear, or worse, who doesn’t swim at all because I don’t want to pack wet clothes out. Once, on a hut trip, some friends stripped down to their avalanche beacons (safety first) and skied off the roof. I cheered and took photos from the sideline. In these moments, my modesty felt like an impediment. I admired my friends who were less inhibited, so comfortable in their own skin.

I did try loosening up. Years ago, some pals and I went on a backpacking trip to Conundrum Hot Springs, outside Aspen, Colorado. Like most backcountry springs, these were clothing optional, and the second morning at camp, I rallied everyone to get in naked.

At least I thought I did. I made it to the pool first, undressed, and got in. Then everyone else arrived.

And no one else got naked.

It was like a bad dream. Only instead of standing in front of a classroom, I was sitting in an alpine pool as clear as glass. I tried to fold my limbs strategically, and my friends and I looked around and made awkward conversation. At one point an older man arrived and, fully clothed, squatted poolside like a gargoyle, just watching. It was agonizing. I wouldn’t disrobe again in public for years.

But that was a long time ago. I’m in my late thirties and harder to embarrass now. So recently, as Dan was telling me about the time he modeled nude for an article in his college newspaper, I blurted out, “What if I became one of those naked people?” I was tired of listening to everyone else’s stories.

“Oh God,” Dan muttered. But he quickly got on board. A lifetime of prudishness would not be undone overnight, so we agreed I should design a training plan of sorts, progressing from a beginner-level warm-up (bathe in a nude hot spring?) to some intermediate challenge (wander around unclad at a clothing-optional resort?) and eventually to a graduation exercise (a naked ski or bike ride?). I would become one of those people I had always admired.

I would become someone who does naked stuff outside.

The post One Woman’s Wholesome Mission to Get Naked ���ϳԹ��� appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

Before I became a journalist, one of the best jobs I had was waiting tables at a barbecue restaurant atop a little bump on Snowmass Mountain called Sam’s Knob. My daily commute involved riding a high-speed chairlift, and I was guaranteed an hour and 15 minutes of snowboarding every morning before my shift. Tips were good, so I could afford to work four days a week, thus netting myself another three days to snowboard. Sam’s was where I learned that fresh snow made a sound when you were surfing through it: shhhh, softer than a whisper.

The way I felt about that job was the polar opposite of how I’d felt about the job I left not long before it, the one I worked right out of college, as a financial analyst for corporate clients in San Francisco. Particularly during the first couple of years, I worked late nights and often weekends. The office was on the 20th floor of a skyscraper on California Street, and I can still remember how the city glittered at night through the glass walls, rows and rows of glowing windows framing offices like mine, many of which were still occupied by young professionals like me, all of us eating takeout at our desks.

These two jobs may not appear to have much in common, but they were fundamentally similar in that they were, to me, J-O-B jobs. I mean that I did not find either of them inherently fulfilling; neither dishing brisket nor building Excel models made my soul sing. But in both instances I was compensated adequately, worked in a safe and comfortable environment, and had coworkers and supervisors that I enjoyed. The difference, then, was not the job itself but the life I was able to have outside it—that is to say, in the case of my finance job, no life at all, and in the case of the serving gig, one in which I spent most of my time doing something I loved.

The latter scenario is the holy grail of work-life balance. But many of us don’t have lives like that. According to a , more than 40 percent of Americans work over 45 hours a week. Yet, despite those long hours, roughly a third agree or strongly agree that in their current job, there’s “too much work to do it well.” All this got worse during the pandemic, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, saw their calendar stack up with more meetings, their inbox swell with more email, and their workday lengthen by 48.5 minutes. No wonder nearly 60 percent of Americans feel “some level of burnout,” according to a Business Insider.

But burnout ������’t just a result of being overworked. It’s also rooted in our cultural belief that work ������’t just a means to a paycheck but a path to purpose, meaning, and character, says Jonathan Malesic, author of . Malesic, a former theology professor who grew disillusioned with what was once a dream career in academia, says that the underlying cause of burnout is a mismatch between this lofty view of work and the more mundane reality that it’s sometimes unpleasant, meaningless, and even character destroying. This gap, Malesic writes, “leads us to exhaustion, cynicism, and despair.”

The solution, he says, is to reprioritize life above work. For many this will mean working less, “because drowning in email” is “not the purpose of a human life.” Instead, we should build a meaningful existence—one worth walking away from our desk for—and decide how work fits into that.

There’s just one obvious catch: historically, work-life balance has largely been out of our hands. “Most people don’t have much of a choice about whether, or how much, to work, given the state of wage and benefit levels in the nation and the lack of government-provided social safety nets,” notes , a Harvard law professor and a faculty codirector of Harvard’s Labor and Worklife Program. “The power generally resides with the employer.”

But Sachs also says that we’re now witnessing important developments in the labor market. Starting last spring, in what’s being called the Great Resignation, millions of workers quit their jobs. Corporations from to have recently seen major worker strikes over wages and other issues. And over the past two years, employees at Facebook, Google, and Net­flix staged walkouts and demanded an emphasis on social responsibility from executives. These displays of collective power, Sachs says, can have “real effects.”

In other words, we may be having a moment—one in which, for the first time in decades, we have some ability to redefine what work-life balance means. So let’s start by asking the right questions: What is a meaningful life? And how does work fit into that?

The post It’s Easy to Find Work-Life Balance. Just Find the Meaning of Life. appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

Like any good amateur athlete, I spent a long stretch of my life taking myself too seriously. My sport was mountain-bike racing, and what I lacked in physical gifts I made up for in the gift of free time. Basically, my competitive edge was that I didn’t have kids. I could ride my bike six or seven days a week. I could splurge an entire weekend on a race. I could do gym work and intervals and hard group rides all to get fitter and faster. So I did.

But two summers ago, my priorities were suddenly realigned when a man driving a van struck and nearly killed my then partner while he was riding his road bike. Sitting bedside with a loved one in the ICU has the effect of changing your perspective. Suddenly all that time spent trying to become a better amateur bike racer seemed meaningless. In the months that followed, I supported my partner and rode my bike when I could, which was sporadically. As I watched friends pull away from me on climbs, it struck me how difficult it had been to build all that fitness and how easy it had been to lose. In the future, I told myself, I would put my time toward things that were less fragile. Things that endured.

I’d ridden with a lot of people in the previous decade. The riders I always admired most were never the fastest to the top or the first to the bottom. Rather, they were the ones who handled their bikes like they were dancing: a little tail whip over that bucket-handle root, a floaty hop over that dip in the trail. When I was a snowboarder, we called this steez, a portmanteau that describes an elusive blend of style and ease, and on both snow and dirt I loved to follow athletes who had it. In mountain biking, some of these riders were total sleepers, middle-aged guys with a beer belly who’d show up for the group ride and suffer up the climb. But then they’d transform on the descent, still as light and quick on their feet as foxes. The body remembers.

In my second life as a mountain biker, I decided, I would no longer pursue the fleeting qualities of speed and strength. Instead—using the parlance of the youths who are now elder millennials—I would seek only to be steezy. With a straight face, I told friends that fitness comes and goes, but style is forever.

I started learning little tricks, like how to pull the rear brake at high speeds to skid my back tire in sandy corners. I practiced bunny hopping over small obstacles. I spent nearly two months exclusively riding jump trails. Almost no one saw any of it, which was fine. I was a grown woman learning the same tricks as my friends’ preteen sons. But when I succeeded, joy coursed through my veins. Style was a paradox, in that it looked cool but wasn’t about showing off. Moving with style just felt good.

“I can clearly see somebody skiing with style,” legendary freestyler tells me when I call him one afternoon. “It sticks out like a sore thumb.” Most recognizable by his one-foot mohawk and his role in classic ski films like , Plake built a nontraditional career in front of the camera instead of on the racecourse, demonstrating equal prowess and skiing freaky-steep big mountains. He is both icon and iconoclast, one of the most expressive athletes in one of the most stylish sports. But he says skiing ������’t the creative endeavor it used to be. “I think we’ve lost a lot of style,” he says. “Everybody looks like robots.”

Plake, now 57, attributes our homogeneity to a few factors, including our modern-day powder mania—“Nobody wants to ski moguls or groomers anymore”—and our stiflingly too-cool attitude: “If you do daffies or spread eagles or some ballet trick, it’s like, he-he ha-ha, that’s funny old school. What makes it any less of a style move than some rail trick?” Finally, there’s the gear: “Everyone’s skiing these big wide skis. You don’t really have to plant your poles or move up or down. You kind of sit there and lean and bank.” Back in the day, he recalls, he and his friends would occasionally ski on superlong 225-centimeter skis, just for the challenge.

“Is difficulty some element of style too, then?” I ask.

“I think so, yeah,” he says. “Funny little style tricks take time to learn.” In other words, style has to be earned. That’s really what we appreciate when we see a beautiful skier coming down the mountain under the lift line, right? The fluidity and ease that belie years of practice. Even in the Instagram era, you can’t fake style.

But with enough work, Plake says, anyone can learn to be stylish. And it’s worth pursuing as the ultimate form of self-expression. “You’re trying to say something,” he tells me. “Skiing is a great opportunity to say something. Sport in general is a great opportunity to say something.”

I found myself wondering whether every sport offers the opportunity to express style. For example, do runners—poor bastards—experience the same unfettered joy I felt floating off a tabletop jump?

Um, yes, says ultrarunner . It’s just more subtle, and it’s more about economy of motion. “There is definitely a sense of joy and play in trying to turn your brain off and move through challenging, technical terrain with a sense of style and efficiency,” he says. Road cycling has a version of this, too, embodied by the French term souplesse, which describes a rider’s smooth, beautiful, and high-cadence pedal stroke.

Still, the concept of style is probably more important in some sports than others. “To generalize, if you ask 20 rock climbers, ‘What’s your goal?’ they’d say, ‘Get better’—as in climb a higher number,” says International Federation of Mountain Guides–certified , who leads both rock and snow expeditions out of his home base in Chamonix, France. “If you ask that question to any skier, most would say, ‘Improve my style.’ There’s no greater compliment to be paid as a skier than ‘You looked good doing that.’ People will say, ‘You looked good climbing that,’ but if you don’t get to the top, who cares?”

Maybe it’s worth thinking about not just what we do but how we do it. Maybe prioritizing style could even make us happier people.

In fact, there’s a scientific explanation for why my little steez quests feel so good. “Working on style will inadvertently produce a tremendous amount of flow,” says Steven Kotler, head of the and bestselling author of books like . You know flow: it’s the mental state that underpins peak performance and is characterized by complete immersion, effortless concentration, and a sense of timelessness. Flow is triggered by a number of preconditions, Kotler says, several of which occur when we’re trying to be more stylish.

The most important is the challenge-to-skills balance. In order to enter a flow state, you have to be challenged just beyond your skill level. Kotler, who surfs, mountain bikes, and skis, says that working on style elicits the sweet spot “because you’re just trying to get a little more graceful, a little smoother, a little more creative than last time.”

I tell Kotler that in my twenties, when I was deep into snowboarding, I used to say that chasing flow is the secret to life. But this was before I understood the science behind it. I only knew that sometimes when I was surfing between trees, my mind went quiet and it felt like I had tapped into something profound. Now I know there are powerful neurobiological reasons for this.

“The five to six neurochemicals released during flow are the five most potent feel-good drugs the brain can produce,” says Kotler. “It’s one of the most overarching conclusions in psychology. You want more meaning, purpose, overall life satisfaction, happiness, and well-being in your life? You need more flow in your life.”

When Glen Plake was younger, he got in a fair amount of trouble and even served a few months of jail time. Not everyone was amused by his antics. In a , Steve Casimiro wrote: “Dismissed by many in the sport as washed-up or irrelevant, Plake should have disappeared years ago.” His detractors, as Casimiro put it, thought of him as “a braying bad boy long on hype and short on substance.”

Today, however, Plake is not only relevant but revered, known less as a bad boy and more as a fun-loving ambassador for the sport. He and his wife, Kimberly, make cross-country road trips to ski with fans and staff . He became a Professional Ski Instructors of America Level 3 instructor, finally joining the establishment to encourage more people to take up the winter pastime.

“That guy loves skiing,” says Uhlmann, the Chamonix guide. He pals around with Plake, who spends his winters there. “He really, really loves skiing.” This has proven to be the binding ingredient in Glen Plake’s staying power.

Maybe this is the final element of style: it comes from a place of love.

I realized this on an unseasonably warm, cloudless Sunday in November, as I set out on the longest mountain-bike ride I’d attempted in months. On my last lap up the mountain, the sky was turning pink and everything in my body ached. But I still expended what remaining energy I had to swish my rear wheel up and over sandy little hips on the final descent. I remembered something Steven Kotler said about why flow feels so good.

“You ever fallen in love?” he asked.

I laughed. “Yeah.”

“Feels good, right?”

“M��-�󳾳�.”

“That’s norepinephrine and dopamine,” he said. “That’s two of the five feel-good chemicals that show up in flow. So take romantic love and a bunch of pleasure drugs on top of it. Now you understand why flow is so addictive and it feels like the meaning of life and blah blah blah.”

Another sandy rainbow beckoned. I scrubbed it with my rear wheel. Flow would elude me today, but hey, love felt pretty good, too. And whatever this was I was doing, however it looked from the outside, love is where it came from.

The post Approaching Outdoor Sports with Steez and Flow appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

Once upon a time, there was a magical town named Crested Butte. It was nestled in a valley in southwest Colorado among beautiful, towering peaks and shivering aspen groves. The mountains made the town difficult to get to—it lay, quite literally, at the end of a two-lane road. There were a couple of dirt roads in, too, but after the late-fall snowstorms, they became impassable. And so the mountains protected the town.

For a long time things were good. In the winter, there was powder to ski; in the summer, there were trails to ride. Most important, there were not so many visitors, at least compared to other mountain towns. Crested Butte was far from the constant roar and snaking brake lights of I-70, Denver’s thoroughfare to the mountains; and some might also say the family who owned the ski resort did a pretty crappy job of marketing it. But the residents liked it this way. Their town had not sold its soul for tourist dollars and high-speed lifts like Aspen or Vail. They still had their T-bars, their funky culture, their cruiser bikes parked unlocked on the streets.

But things began to change. Crested Butte was discovered, in the same way that other magical towns were being discovered. More people began to visit, and those people told their friends and posted glowy photos on Instagram. More people bought second homes there, driving up the price of real estate. Then came the Airbnbs and the VRBOs, which allowed second-home owners to earn a lot more money renting to tourists than to the people who actually lived and worked there. The locals found it harder and harder to afford a place to rent or buy in town. They began to leave, moving 35 minutes downvalley to Gunnison or disappearing from the area altogether. By 2017, some wondered if Airbnb was going to kill this, and other, magical towns.

Then came the pandemic. Maybe this part of the story you know. Unchained from their desks, the hordes of newly remote white-collar workers descended upon all the magical mountain towns, and in just one year, the median list price for a home in Crested Butte jumped 40 percent, to $895,000. Rents soared, too—20 to 40 percent in Colorado ski towns like Crested Butte, according to one . Meanwhile, both for-sale and rental inventory plummeted. Now it was nearly impossible for locals to find housing.

And one day in the summer of 2021, the town simply stopped working. Restaurants began to shut down for parts of the day or entire days of the week. “Help Wanted” signs appeared up and down the main street of Elk Avenue. It didn’t matter that the sidewalks teemed with tourists freed from COVID lockdowns and ready to spend. Lines grew. People waited an hour and a half, two hours for food. What’s happening? visitors grumped.

The newspapers reported on the problem: it was so hard to find affordable housing in town that there weren’t enough people left to work in town. It wasn’t just Crested Butte, either. The headlines popped up all summer long:

In July, NPR shone its spotlight on Crested Butte:  Indeed, by that point the valley’s tourism association was running ads in the local paper informing visitors about the housing shortage and asking them to be patient with slower than usual service. The window of the iconic Wooden Nickel steakhouse displayed an “Employee Crisis Limited Menu” notice. The sign went on to explain that, on top of having “barely enough employees to run the restaurant,” some cooks had just quit. “We’re sorry we’re unable to provide the menu you expected,” it told would-be diners. “Thank you for joining us on this challenging evening.” Across the street, at the Brick Oven Pizzeria, someone had affixed a sticker on the wall of the men’s bathroom that read, simply, “SAVE CB.”

The magical town, it seemed, was in serious trouble.

The post How to Save a Ski Town appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.