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Does dawn patrol have you throwing on whatever’s at hand on your way to the office? Give yourself more time in the water with a  from Quiksilver Japan.

True Wetsuits look like normal business attire: ties, shirts, jackets, and pants. The color options are equally tame, with a navy or black single-breasted jacket, and, for more formal occasions, a . But the jackets and pants’ construction from two-millimeter-thick neoprene, just like a traditional wetsuit, traps body heat in the water. The dress shirt is made from a water-repellent fabric. Even the design is geared toward surf-performance, including flat-sewn pockets so you don’t fill up on a wipeout. 

Though Quiksilver Japan is taking orders on the True Wetsuits, it's not planning on shipping until mid-summer. Until then, you’ll just have to get out of the ocean a little earlier. 

$2,511,

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Samuel L. Jackson walked up to a rack of ski-shaped plywood slats, selected one, kissed it, and tossed it into a fire burning in Telluride’s Elks Park. A cheer erupted from the 100-odd ski bums, baffled tourists, and other A-list actors in town for Valentine’s Day weekend. A local actor dressed as Ullr, the Norse god of skiing, snow, and archery, rallied the crowd in what locals refer to commonly as a ski burn—a pagan sacrifice of skis meant to reverse Southern Colorado’s snow drought.

Locals participate for fun but Mayor Stu Fraser insists that it always works—and this time, it had to. Director Quentin Tarantino was in town to film , a post-Civil War western starring Jackson and centered on travelers trapped by a blizzard. But the snow gods weren’t delivering. So Tarantino personally requested the burn.

Budgeted at $44 million, Hateful Eight is the biggest film to shoot in Colorado since 1969’s True Grit. Depending on the cast and crew’s experience, Colorado stands to gain—or lose—the interest of the rest of the film industry, and the big local spending that comes with it.

Three days earlier, Hateful Eight producer Shannon McIntosh found herself researching Native American snow dance rituals. Telluride’s snow season started with a three-day dump in November but has been abnormally light since, with the exception of  (after the season’s ) in December. The film’s cast and crew had been staying busy filming indoor scenes, but the movie’s pivotal scene needed powder. McIntosh wasn’t about to sit on her hands and hope for another storm. 

“Our supervising art director told me one day how, in Vail two years ago, some Native Americans went and did a snow dance ritual that brought snow a few days later,” said McIntosh, who has worked with Tarantino since Pulp Fiction. “I said that’s a really great idea.”

Telluride, a quiet resort town of 2,300 nestled in the San Juans, has hosted burns a few times each ski season since the 1980s, when poor snowpack pushed a group of animated women called the Epoxy Sisters to take matters into their own hands. The ceremony lives on three decades later, but with organizers less inclined toward both disposal of real skis and the accidental epoxy huffing that comes with burning resin-covered gear.

Tarantino heard about the tradition from a local and put in a request with Telluride Town Manager Greg Clifton. Within 72 hours, the town and the film’s crew organized both the ski burn that weekend and a dance with the Ute Indians at filming location Schmid Ranch the following Tuesday. The entire town government got on board for the burn: Clifton personally sawed and shaped the “skis.”

Not everyone is convinced of the mystical powers of the ski burn. Donald Zuckerman, director of Colorado Office of Film, Television & Media, is a man of numbers and science. He’d never heard of a ski burn before this one. Even without one, he said, the forecast on the weekend of February 21 and 22 had called for snow. “The weather predictions show we’re going to have a huge snowstorm on this part of the state,” he said a few days after the burn. 

Numbers also show, Zuckerman adds, that Hateful Eight—still months away from wrapping production—has already made a huge impact on Colorado’s economy. According to the state’s Office of Economic Development, articles mentioning both the film and Colorado since filming was announced in November have generated about 1.4 billion page views. The exposure is significant—it would have cost the state $12.6 million to place ads in those articles, Zuckerman says.

“It’s huge for Colorado,” Zuckerman said. “Quentin Tarantino is an icon. There’s a tendency among producers and directors to figure, well, if somebody else went somewhere and they’re happy, then they should consider it as well. We haven’t had much stuff filmed here in a long time. [But take] our competitor neighbor states that have had film programs for a long time—people have seen almost everything they have to offer on film more than once. For us, we’ve got a lot of virgin territory.”

It’s more than the mountains that brought Tarantino here, though. In 2012, Zuckerman started an incentive initiative offering a 20 percent rebate to filmmakers on money they spend within the state, with a $5 million annual budget. “[The initiative] took a little while to take off, but once it did, we got a lot of calls and inquiries,” Zuckerman says. “We’re still getting a lot of them, although the word is out that we are pretty much out of money for this year.” Tarantino pledged to spend at least $25 million in the state, so Colorado set aside $3.5 million from this year’s budget and $1.5 million from next year’s to compensate him. 

The weekend after the ski burn, in late February, the Norse god Ullr recognized the pleas by providing a  over two days. Was it the burn or the subsequent dance that worked, or did the town just get lucky? It doesn’t matter, McIntosh said. “We put it out there, and now we’ve got our snow.”

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Movement is self-expression, so it’s only fitting to wear something as loud and bold as you are while crushing a workout at the gym or sprinting the last mile of a marathon. Enter , a new fitness brand producing performance pants for and women with a kick.

The brainchild of Los Angeles-based designer and yogi Chriztina Marie, Eagle Rock Werkshop’s line of yoga tights are pieces of art. While most fitness companies stick to single color schemes, simple geometric patterns, or small ornamental designs, Marie screens full-scale sketches, renderings, and photographs over her leggings. Often nature-themed, the New Zealand version (pictured far left), was created from an iPhone photo she took while exploring the country. 

But this art is made to be used—the tights are performance wear first, bringing real-world utility to a workout. Chlorine- and UV-resistant, quick to dry, and made of a stretchy-but-tough flatlock Lycra knit tight enough to resist piling, adventurers can confidently wear them from the mat to the track to the ocean. Compression technology supports you through running, yoga, surfing, biking, and even CrossFit.

Eagle Rock Werkshop is a boutique company—the pants are made in small batches through a closely-knit supply chain. Thirty-one prints are available now, with many more outdoor-inspired prints in the works (Marie just started designing a series inspired by the desert landscapes of Sedona, Arizona). Check out the company’s for sneak-peeks at new designs.

$88,

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A new app designed to forecast geyser events in Yellowstone National Park will help ensure that visitors get what they came for.

The app, called NPS Yellowstone Geysers, was this week. It sends real-time eruption predictions for six Yellowstone geysers, including Old Faithful, to visitors’ smartphones and tablets. People unable to witness the eruptions in person can watch the app’s live stream, synced to webcams throughout the park.

Project lead Brett Oppegaard, an assistant professor of communication at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, says NPS Yellowstone Geysers is a jumping-off point for a more digitally immersive park experience. Oppegaard, who developed the for NPS five years ago, has already put together new teams of academics and NPS employees to make more park features digitally accessible.

“We have plans to make many more apps, for a variety of devices and platforms, to explore our bigger research question: Can mobile technologies do better [to inform] than other information technologies at the park, such as brochures and wayside signs?” Oppegaard told ���ϳԹ���.

The park has spotty cellphone reception, which is necessary for watching the live streams and accessing predictions and Yellowstone’s social media feed. The rangers, however, don’t seem worried. “As of last week, Old Faithful, Grant, and Lake all have 4G coverage from Verizon,” park representatives .

The predictions, of course, aren’t perfect. , the app offers a suggested 20-minute window in which to catch each Old Faithful eruption. For Grand Geyser, the window extends to 90 minutes before and after the prediction.

NPS Yellowstone Geyser is available free for Android via the and for iPhone via the .

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A new solar-powered, glow-in-the-dark bike path in the Netherlands aims to make bike commuting safer—and more beautiful. 

By day, the half-mile path looks like any other paved bike route. But at night, 50,000 stones coated in a phosphorescent paint and solar-powered LEDs light cyclists’ way. Even cooler: Daan Roosegaarde, the designer of the solar bike path, found inspiration from Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, laying the rocks and lights so they imitated the swirls of the famous Dutch painting.

The glowing route—which opened November 13 to honor the 125th anniversary of Van Gogh’s death—is the second iteration of Roosegaarde’s , whose mission is to build smart, interactive highways. The project launched earlier this month with the Glowing Lines roadway that uses three lines of glow-in-the-dark paint to outline the sides of the road.

Roosegaarde hopes the Van Gogh-Roosegaarde bike path leads to more solar-powered roadways designed to store clean energy and keep commuters safe. One of his goals is to develop reactive paints that glow in temperatures below freezing, alerting drivers to potentially icy conditions. The other: to create closed, clean-energy systems that are as beautiful as they are energy-efficient.

“It’s a new total system that is self-sufficient and practical, and just incredibly poetic,” Roosegaarde later .

The Van Gogh route isn’t the only solar-powered bike path in the country. Earlier this month, started laying solar panels into a bike path outside of Amsterdam. The power they generate will go back to the national grid.

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The grueling  is returning to California’s Death Valley National Park in July 2015 after a year in exile, race organizer ���ϳԹ���CORPS announced in a press release. The 135-mile race will be held July 28 to 30 along its traditional route between the town of Badwater and the portal of Mount Whitney.

The event’s future was threatened at the end of 2013, when the park suspended endurance event permits while it completed a safety review. The self-billed “world’s toughest foot race” features a course that climbs more than 17,000 feet in searing heat. A field of up to 100 racers must attempt to reach the finish within 48 hours, forcing them to run through the night. Responding to the suspension, ���ϳԹ���CORPS race director Chris Kostman modified the 2014 race route to avoid Death Valley. This past August, the park imposed permanent restrictions on organized races, citing safety concerns. The specifics of the new regulations seemed to force Badwater out of the park forever.

But now Kostman and Death Valley officials have agreed on increased safety measures mandated by the park’s safety review (), allowing the race to return to its traditional route on a slightly shifted timetable.

“This wasn’t a reversal [of a ban],” says Death Valley National Park spokesperson Cheryl Chipman. “We finished a safety review and have new conditions. And apparently the race organizer decided that he wanted to have it in Death Valley, and he’s willing to comply with the new conditions.”

“The dust has settled, [and] both ���ϳԹ���CORPS and the National Park Service are cooperating,” Kostman told ���ϳԹ���. “We just have to follow all their new rules and regulations, such as scheduling on or immediately before the full moon and starting the runners after sunset, along with a variety of smaller operational issues regarding the start line, road signage, and such. Plus a lot more paperwork and oversight.”

Chipman says the race will start at night to keep it in compliance with national guidelines for heat safety, which has a 110-degree upper limit for endurance sports.

“By starting at night, below 110 degrees, we’re taking away the factor of radiant heat,” Chipman says. “The runners are at higher elevation by the time it rolls around and gets hot again. Or they’ve reached the point where they leave the park, where we don’t have jurisdiction.”

Badwater organizers will release details on the new regulations in early January, but “most of the impact of the new rules will be on us, the organizers, with more bureaucracy and additional expenses,” Kostman wrote in the press release.

Meanwhile, Kostman let ���ϳԹ��� in on some of the new athlete-specific rules: “No more than one support vehicle, instead of two. No more than four crew members, instead of six. Bib numbers on pacers, too. Less back-and-forth of the crew across the road to support their runners. Limitations as to where crews can stop during the second major climb of the route. More reflective high-visibility gear at night and during the day. Things of that nature.”

 will open January 19 and close February 2.

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The U.S. Forest Service is threatening to close the area around South Lake Tahoe’s Taylor Creek if a dangerous pattern of visitor “bear selfies” doesn’t abate.

Each fall, bears congregate at the water outside Taylor Creek Visitors Center to intercept the kokanee salmon run. This year, photo-snapping visitors have congregated around the bears. The USFS  to keep a safe distance after the problem escalated to unsafe levels last week. that at one point, about 30 people were taking pictures with bears, including one cub that came within two feet of tourists.

“It is presenting a safety issue. We are afraid someone is going to get attacked,” Lisa Herron, spokesperson for the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit, told the . While bear attacks are rare, Herron has already heard of one bear charging a group that got too close. If the bears don’t injure the tourists, cars might—people have stopped along California State Route 89 to run across the highway for better vantage points. 

In addition to putting themselves at risk, tourists are damaging the park and endangering the bears. People who wander off trails to get closer to the animals trample protected plants and disturb creek beds. In its reminder, the USFS added that provoked bears might have to be put down.

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Yelp  that users can book domestic hotel rooms and winery tours directly through its website and plans to add more services in coming months.

While select chains like La Quinta have been using pop-out ads within Yelp, this is the company’s first move to centralize bookings. On the back end, , the flight and hotel booking startup founded by Reddit’s Steve Huffman, will handle hotel reservations, and CellarPass will handle winery tour bookings.

The partnerships will give Yelp users a greater inventory from which to book, and they’ll even get special mobile rates. The move also enables Yelp to earn booking fees while avoiding the hassle of handling relationships with hundreds of companies.

, the fact that mobile users can book diverse services through one Yelp profile and enter credit card information only once facilitates an easier and much more efficient user experience.

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A Canadian man survived both a grizzly bear mauling and gunshot Sunday morning in the Elk Valley, 40 miles from the Montana border.

that Wilf Lloyd, a 56-year-old taxidermist from Cranbrook, British Columbia, had been hunting elk with son-in-law Skeet Podrasky when the pair stumbled upon the bear just south of Fernie, B.C. Lloyd suffered leg injuries during the mauling and additional injuries at the hands of Podrasky, who accidentally shot Lloyd before fatally shooting the bear. 

As , Lloyd was airlifted in critical condition to Calgary’s Foothills Hospital. He is still recovering and awaiting decision about a leg amputation, .

“This is a somewhat remote area, and there’s no history with this bear,” conservation officer Sergeant Cam Schley of Cranbrook . Grizzly attacks are rare to begin with in North America, though that black bear attacks are on the rise because humans are moving into black bear habitats, while mountain droughts force bears into urban areas.

Despite being regular hunters in Calgary’s backwoods, it is unknown whether Lloyd or Podrasky were carrying bear spray at the time of the incident.

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