MY FAMILY LIVES IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST, a region forged by fire. The course of our rivers, the yield of our soil, and the thrust of our mountains are all the products of past eruptions—prehistoric, ancient, and modern—from the volcanic peaks forming the Cascades. Living under the shadow of this phenomenon, we tend to take it for granted. So we toured among the range’s flagship massifs, considering them both close-up and from a clarifying distance. We started with Mount St. Helens in Washington State, traveled through the Columbia River Gorge to Mount Hood, and drove down to Mount Bachelor in central Oregon: 300 volcano-graced miles.

Assuage that red-hot wanderlust: Washington’s Mt. St. Helens

Illustration by Zohar Lazar

Day 1Portland, Oregon-Kelso, Washington
Ahead lies Mount St. Helens, the peak cloud-hidden from I-5. We pull off the freeway at Castle Rock, get our bearings at the National Volcanic Monument Visitor Center, and then work our way up Washington 504. My wife, Patricia, and I first drove this way when our son, Tom, was six, our daughter, Mary, was three, and the mountain was still a sere, cinder-black wasteland. Now Tom is 13, Mary is 10, and St. Helens has undergone a remarkable rebirth.

At the Coldwater Ridge Visitor Center, hillsides bloom with heather, and huckleberry bushes soften the lava shoals. We visit Johnston Ridge Observatory for a 16-minute film spotlighting the eruption. Afterward, curtains draw back to reveal a picture window and what ought to be a view into the crater, four miles away. Today, however, all we see is gray. Undaunted, we climb the Eruption Trail, which leads to the highest observation point along Johnston Ridge. At the top, we spend ten cold but exhilarating minutes identifying neighboring mountains that Tom and Mary, who’ve grown up in the Northwest, know by heart. Patricia and I, California transplants, still have to go by the map.

Doubling back on I-5, we stop in Kelso and economize at the Comfort Inn, knowing we’ll have plush accommodations later.

Day 2 Kelso-Stevenson
We leave I-5 in Woodland, where Washington 503 takes us east along the southern slope of St. Helens. A few miles from the crater, we stop at Ape Cave, a 3.25-mile lava tube tucked into the mountainside. We put on fleece, grab four flashlights, and proceed underground into the black heart of the volcano. We wind our way through the narrow cavern before emerging into the sweet, pure light of the High Cascades.

“Guess we can’t get any closer to a mountain than that,” Tom says with satisfaction as we climb into the car.

We overnight at Dolce Skamania Lodge, where Patricia and I soak in the hot tub, gazing into the Columbia Gorge, while the kids play in the pool. We have dinner on the patio—the sun warming our faces, local microbrews in our glasses, the kids goofing on the lawn as the salmon grills.

Day 3Stevenson-Timberline Lodge, Oregon
The day begins with a jog west on Washington 14 to Beacon Rock, the second-highest freestanding rock in the world. The 848-foot-high plug of volcanic basalt was noted with awe in the journals of Lewis and Clark. In 1918, a gentleman from Philadelphia, Henry J. Biddle, finished a 4,500-foot trail with sections of cast-iron railing up its sheer cliffs. We climb it, dizzy and laughing at its 53 switchbacks.

We cross into Oregon on the Bridge of the Gods—a name without hyperbole. I-84 takes us east to Hood River to savor muffins at Bette’s Place and to the port where we watch windsurfers whip in the pellucid late afternoon. We follow the clear light up the valley to the pearly year-round snowfields of Mount Hood and Timberline Lodge, where FDR slept and Stanley Kubrick filmed some outdoor scenes in The Shining.
Day 4Timberline Lodge-Bend
The kids want to try summer skiing on the Mount Hood glaciers but settle for building a snowman beside the parking lot. Then it’s into the car and southeast on U.S. 26, crossing the watershed dividing the rainforest from the high desert. Douglas fir gives way to ponderosa pine. The air turns hot, and toothy peaks—Mount Jefferson, Three Sisters, and Mount Bachelor—loom on the otherwise open horizon. We shoot south on U.S. 97 along the tumbling Deschutes River, filled with blue-ribbon trout. At Smith Rock State Park, which draws rock climbers the way Hood River attracts windsurfers, we stop for a picnic lunch and then hike the canyon with its rock walls made of compressed volcanic ash.

By 6 p.m. we’re watching the ducks on Mirror Pond (it reflects Mount Bachelor) in downtown Bend. After dinner at the redoubtable Deschutes Brewery, with its friendly atmosphere, hearty fare like barbecue ribs, and splendid Black Butte Porter ale, we retire to the River House Resort, where you can fish behind your room and listen to the gurgling Deschutes all night.

Day 5Bend
We’re up early for a raft trip over the Big Eddy rapids. The popular family excursion includes a stretch of the Deschutes River five miles southwest of Bend, flowing through black lava fields in the Lava Lands National Monument. A third of a mile of continuous Class III rapids crowns the trip. Building the suspense, and modeling responsible rivercraft, our guide has us beach in a wide eddy and walk up the bank to scout our route through the rocks. Mary and Tom are enthralled; their mother is nervous.

We crash through the rapids, gasping at snowmelt flooding over the bow and paddling ecstatically. When we reach the calm water at the end, Mary leaps in for a swim and is quickly joined by Tom. After a moment, Patricia and I are in the river too.

Late afternoon brings a jaunt west on the Cascade Lakes Highway to the Mount Bachelor ski resort. We ride the lift to the 9,065-foot summit for a staggering view of peaks soaring above lava-gouged lakes. We can take in the entire length of Oregon from Mount Shasta in northern California to Mount Hood, which shadows Portland, our hometown. From this mountaintop, home seems close enough to touch.

DAY ONE (Portland, OR-Kelso, WA)
MILEAGE: 180.
DRIVE TIME: 3.5 hours.
DIRECTIONS: I-5 north from Portland; east on Washington 504 at Castle Rock; I-5 south to Kelso.
STOPS: Mount St. Helens Visitor Center (360-274-2100) for volcano history; Hoffstadt Bluffs Visitor Center (360-274-7750) for lunch; Coldwater Ridge Visitor Center (360-274-2131) to get close to the crater.
STAY AT: Kelso Comfort Inn ($75; 800-228-5150).

DAY TWO (Kelso-Stevenson)
MILEAGE: 120.
DRIVE TIME: 2 hours.
DIRECTIONS: I-5 south to Woodland; Washington 503 to Washington 14 west.
STOPS: Get oriented at the visitor center in Woodland and stock up on fuel, water, and picnic items.
STAY AT: Dolce Skamania Lodge (800-221-7117; ): oversize double rooms with a living area start at $199.
DAY THREE (Stevenson-Timberline Lodge, OR)
MILEAGE: 50.
DRIVE TIME: 1.5 hours.
DIRECTIONS: Washington 14 east to Beacon Rock; then back to Bridge of the Gods; I-84 east to Hood River; U.S. 35 south.
STOPS: Beacon Rock State Park (509-427-8265). Try the eggs Benedict at Bette’s Place (541-386-1880) in Hood River for an inexpensive breakfast or the three-meat barge burger for lunch.
STAY AT: Timberline Lodge (800-547-1406; ): doubles, $170-$225 per night.

DAYS FOUR AND FIVE (Timberline Lodge-Bend)
MILEAGE: 170.
DRIVE TIME: 4 hours.
DIRECTIONS: U.S. 26 east to U.S. 97 south (at Madras).
STOPS: Follow signs off U.S. 97 in Terrebone to Smith Rock State Park (800-551-6949; ). Dinner at the Deschutes Brewery (541-382-9242). Raft Big Eddy with Sun Country Tours (800-770-2161). Mount Bachelor ski resort (800-829-2442, ).
STAY AT: Riverhouse Resort (800-547-3928; ); ask for a river-view room ($105-$152).

The post The Volcano Tour appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

OREGON

As I helped my kids pack for a road trip from our home in Portland to the twin southern-Oregon wonders of Crater Lake National Park and Oregon Caves National Monument, an item in the paper caught my eye. The day before, a reliable witness had reported seeing Sasquatch during his family’s visit to the Oregon Caves. “I know what a bear looks like,” I read, quoting the man for 12-year-old Tom and nine-year-old Mary, “and that was no bear.” The kids looked up thoughtfully.


“Is there only one Bigfoot?” Mary asked. “Or do they have families?”


“Mary, there isn’t any Bigfoot,” Tom said, with a big brother’s air of authority. “Sasquatch is only a myth.”


“…I smelled a pungent, overpowering odor…,” I read.


“Give me that newspaper,” my wife, Patricia, said with a glare.


We set out on a sunny July morning, driving east on U.S. 26 beside the flank of Mount Hood along the Chain of Fire, the magnificent row of volcanic peaks that runs the length of Oregon. The landscape opened; the loamy aroma of fir gave way to the sharp perfume of sage and manzanita. We stopped for a picnic on the banks of the trout-rich upper Deschutes River that borders the Connecticut-size Warm Springs Indian Reservation. The dry heat penetrated our rain-soaked Willamette Valley bones.


After lunch, we continued south on U.S. 97, resisting the temptation to stop at the excellent High Desert Museum near Bend, which we’d explored on previous road trips. Two hours later, we stood on the northwestern rim of Crater Lake, and the fidgety discomfort of the car trip’s last hour evaporated. Mary and Tom gazed out at the vast crystal waters.


“You mean the top of the mountain just blew off?” Mary asked.


“The volcanic explosion was 42 times more powerful than the Mount St. Helens eruption,” Tom informed her.


Mary considered for a moment. “Lucky thing,” she said.


For the next few days that blue eye beamed at us; the lake formed an oceanic presence that somehow seemed larger than the ocean. We gloried in the view from our room at the rambling, recently restored Crater Lake Lodge. Apart from the lodge, which often books up a year in advance, the park didn’t feel at all crowded. Seems that most visitors settle for driving in, taking a few snapshots, and then drilling back to Interstate 5.


We wanted to explore the park in greater depth. We drove between surreally huge leftover snowdrifts—banked 12 feet high on either side of Rim Drive—to a spectacular overlook hanging above the Phantom Ship, a basalt formation that, in profile, bears a striking resemblance to the cloud-ship in Peter Pan. At park headquarters, three miles from the rim, we scrambled over the boulder- and trillium-festooned Castle Crest Wildflower Trail.


The next morning we rose early to take the boat tour leaving from Cleetwood Cove. The steep, mile-long Cleetwood Trail is the only route between the crater rim and the water. Seen from the lake surface, the caldera’s basalt and lava walls shimmered, and the water changed color with each shifting wind and drifting cloud. Wizard Island, a volcanic plug that, in an eon or so, could grow into another fire-spewing peak, jutted up like Merlin’s cap. Normally you can disembark at the island to fish, picnic, and hike, but high winds prevented our boat from docking that morning. Tom, who’d packed his rod and reel, was briefly disappointed. The captain redlined the return route to the cove, and sheets of ice-cold lake water spumed over the bow, leaving us all shivering but ecstatic.


Exiting the park, we drove 150 miles southwest to the coastal mountains and Oregon Caves National Monument. The serpentine marble caverns are a striking complement to the caldera. After absorbing so much dazzling light at the lake, our eyes welcomed the caves’ ghostly darkness.


We checked into the comfortable and slightly eccentric Oregon Caves Lodge, which features a surprisingly good restaurant (with a real stream trickling through it) and, even more surprising, a retro soda fountain serving national-class milkshakes. None of the 22 rooms has a TV. Up in these silent, remote hills, a TV would be as out of place as a Wal-Mart. In the morning we followed our tour guide into the phantasmagorical depths, wearing hard hats for protection and heavy coats (don’t forget yours) against the prevailing 40-degree chill. The two-hour tour—a guaranteed kid-pleaser—took us slithering and scrambling over winding, spectrally lit paths and into giant rooms furnished with stalactites and stalagmites. Parents always forget which formation points up and which points down. Kids always seem to remember.


We emerged from underground into warm, clear sunshine. There were two ways back to the lodge, a quick ten-minute downhill stroll, and a steeper, more scenic route. The kids readily assented to the high road. Normally, Tom or I walk point in our family hikes. But that day, Mary insisted on taking the lead. When we stopped for water, I asked her why.


“So I can be the first one to see Sasquatch,” she replied. She thought for a moment and then added, “I guess I won’t mind if Tom smells him first.”


ROAD MAP

CRATER LAKE LODGE, built in 1915, was extensively restored six years ago and is open from mid-May through mid-October. Double-room rates range from $115-$160; loft rooms, which have two queen beds, cost $225 for four people. Reservations should be made at least six to eight months in advance of a summer arrival; call 541-830-8700. Crater Lake National Park information: 541-594-2211; www.nps.gov/crla.


BOAT TOURS of Crater Lake depart from Cleetwood Cove, a ten-mile drive from the lodge, several times daily from late June through mid-September, weather permitting, and last about two hours. For more information, check with Crater Lake Lodge.


OREGON CAVES NATIONAL MONUMENT is located 20 miles east of Cave Junction, Oregon. From I-5 at Grants Pass, head southwest on U.S.199 to Oregon 46. For information, call 541-592-2100; www.nps.gov/orca. For reservations at Oregon Caves Lodge ($95 for one or two people, $15 each additional person, kids 6 and under stay free), call 541-592-3400.

VIRGINIA: The Caves of the Shenandoah Valley

Our four-year-old daughter Hayley started talking about caves not long after she started talking. She’d study pictures, ask questions, and create her own virtual cave experience beneath the comforter. Her fascination rekindled my own childhood interest in spelunking, and I promised to show her the real thing.


The Shenandoah Valley of western Virginia is pocked with caves and campgrounds, so that’s where we headed. Bounded by the Blue Ridge and Appalachian Mountains, Interstate 81 runs up the valley, paralleling the Shenandoah River. These are scenic foothills, largely rural, with much of the land under preservation. The defining characteristic is “karst topography,” which is a fancy term for cave country. Caves are produced when underground springs dissolve limestone bedrock over millions of years, leaving behind subterranean chasms. Eight commercial caves line a 150-mile stretch along I-81 between Salem and Front Royal, Virginia.
First we test the waters with a weekend trip to Luray Caverns, the most famous cave in the East. Hayley adores the experience, especially listening to melodies played on the “stalacpipe,” a natural underground marimba. Next we try Endless Caverns, which is rawer and less tourist-inundated. She is captivated by such spectacles as Diamond Lake and Fairyland, but is a little overwhelmed by the strangeness of the environment. When the guide asks if there are any questions, Hayley raises her hand. “Do you know the way out of here?”


On our next foray, we decide to take on four caves in a weekend. Our great Virginia cave crawl begins with the Caverns at Natural Bridge, where the main lure is the 215-foot rock bridge that Thomas Jefferson proclaimed “the most sublime of Nature’s Works.” But we’re here for the caverns, the deepest commercial cave on the East Coast (347 feet), which is still being carved by moving water and is home to bats, salamanders, millipedes, crickets, and a strange species of beetle.


On the way in, Hayley registers uncertainty (“I wanna go back, I don’t like caves”) but does a 180 upon our exit (“I love caves,” she exults). In between, she ogles eight-million-year-old flowstone, peers into depthless solution holes, and happily receives a “cave kiss”: a drip of water from overhead. But she whimpers when we’re plunged into “total cave darkness,” that moment on every cave tour when the lights are extinguished. It is a blackness so profound that if you were to stay there for two weeks you’d be temporarily blinded when reintroduced to light.


En route to Shenandoah Caverns, we take a blue highway instead of the interstate, and Hayley gazes out at the Virginia countryside: fields of hay in circular bales, farm ponds, rolling hills and distant mountains, and lots of spotted cows.


Shenandoah Caverns is another big hit. Not only does it feature stunning geology—glistening cataracts of flowstone, sparkling curtains of crystalline calcite, and formations that suggest fried bacon and Darth Vader—but Hayley is given a lucky penny by the guide and told that as long as she holds fast to it, nothing will scare her. From this moment on, she is the very picture of bravery. At a mirror-smooth pool called the Wishing Well, Hayley is given another penny, which she tosses in. “I wished for a cow,” she confides. Near the end of the tour, she makes her customary inquiry—”Do you know the way out of here?”—and then adds, “Just teasing!”


Crystal Caverns, our next stop, is the smallest Virginia show cave and the least flashy in terms of lighting and effects. It’s appealing because it’s so intimate and natural. To Hayley’s delight we are each given a flashlight. In pre-Colonial times the cave was used by Native Americans who quarried arrowheads from a vein of hard, black limestone in a chamber they regarded as sacred. Rumors abound of auras and spirits, and PBS has been out to investigate. “If you believe the psychics, there is some hot stuff going on in here,” says the guide.


As we traipse through, our guide points out likenesses suggested by the daunting formations: a giant’s coffin, a reposing alligator, the dome of the U.S. Capitol (“It looks like vanilla ice cream!” shouts Hayley). Crystal Caverns is renowned for its honeycombed crystalline rimstone and diamondlike calcite crystals. Certain passages are tight and the cave is raw, but Hayley is elated. “I like it more here than all the caves,” she announces, waving her flashlight. “I want to go here every day.”


Now a confirmed cavehound, Hayley enters Skyline Caverns—her fourth of the weekend—as if it were a McDonald’s Playland. She charges around the labyrinthine curves and passageways and even welcomes total cave darkness without shrieking. She also takes a shine to the 16-year-old tour guide, literally running circles around him in the Cathedral Room.


Lacy calcite formations called anthodites are unique to Skyline Caverns. They hang from the ceiling like suspended snowflakes. Streams flow through, one of them home to a sightless cave beetle. With its high-ceilinged chambers and narrow passages, the cave resembles an underground Grand Canyon. Hayley trots through the catacombs like a kid riding a broomstick pony, completely comfortable with the notion that she is 260 feet underground.


A spelunker is born.


ROAD MAP

Along the I-81 corridor in western Virginia, you can realistically tour two caves a day with kids in tow. Each tour lasts roughly 60–90 minutes. Here’s an itinerary for a three-day, two-night trek that hits every cave and campground that we did. It moves from south to north, from Natural Bridge to Front Royal, a distance of 125 miles.


DAY ONE starts with a tour of the Caverns at Natural Bridge (Exit 175; 800-533-1410; www.naturalbridgeva.com). Then drive 90 miles north to Luray Caverns (Exit 264; 540-743-6551; www.luraycaverns.com). Spend the night on a mountain in nearby Shenandoah National Park (for information, call the park office at 540-999-3500) at Matthew’s Arm or Big Meadows campground; both are located off the scenic Skyline Drive, which is just ten miles eastof Luray via U.S. 211.


ON THE SECOND DAY, take in Endless Caverns (Exit 257; 540-896-2283; www.endlesscavern.com) and then proceed to Shenandoah Caverns (Exit 269; 540-477-3115; www.shenandoahcaverns.com). Camp that night on the banks of the Shenandoah River at Shenandoah River State Park (540-622-6840; www.dcr.state.va.us/parks/andygues.htm), accessible from I-81 by exiting onto I-66 (Exit 300) and then taking U.S. 340 (Exit 6) south to Bentonville.


AFTER BREAKING CAMP ON THE THIRD DAY, head five miles north on U.S. 340 to Skyline Caverns (Exit 13; 540-635-4545; www.skylinecaverns.com). Then finish off your spelunking expedition at Crystal Caverns (Exit 298; 540-465-5884).

UTAH: The Canyons of Zion and Escalante

Our small station wagon fills up quickly as we prepare for our first car-camping expedition in the American West. Even when it’s full we can’t stop loading—coolers, baseball gloves, a second tent, extra plastic bowls for bowl racing. We’re not used to such license. For our family, gear discipline is usually enforced by the cargo limitations of backpacks or sea kayaks. But now the highway beckons to our stuff. Wedging water bottles and hiking guidebooks into the front seat, I glance into the kid zone in back, which is brimming with Legos, ‘N Sync CDs, and hardbound Harry Potters. Maybe the reason we can’t stop loading is we’re heading from California to a new landscape: the canyonlands of southern Utah. If there prove to be no stores in the region, we’ll be ready. No Mormon wagon train was ever so well prepared.


The trip starts happily enough, at least in the front seat. My wife laughs hysterically every time she turns and sees me gazing out at the farm fields with what I take to be a faint Bruce Willis smirk. I have shaved off my beard for the first time in our 16 years together. But discouraging words are heard from the back, where sleeping bags and cooking pots keep avalanching onto the heads of Emily (nine) and Ethan (five). In Reno, abandoning the bearded father’s spartan ways, I buy a storage bin and mount it on the roof. Miraculously, I still can’t see out the back.
We are another day crossing Nevada, rising and falling along a highway whose sagebrush loneliness is diminished only by too frequent signs proclaiming it “The Loneliest Highway in America.” We turn south into Utah and soon approach the immense range of the Colorado Plateau, split like a ripe mango by canyons of red and yellow rock. It’s mid-March. We’re gambling that spring will arrive in the canyons by the time In this part of the world, you can actually drive deep into the backcountry. But we begin our trip in the well-marked splendor of Zion National Park, where a single busy campground is open for the early season. There is a fair hubbub in red-rock Yosemite—college students camping on their break. Though we see no animals on our midday hikes, we keep our senses sharp by counting Old Navy logos.


The sunny spring days are not too hot for hiking. The kids surprise us, chugging up two miles of (paved!) switchbacks to the top of a sheer precipice called Scout Lookout. This is mountains-with-handrails country, but as parents we’re willing to overlook the breach of Edward Abbey ethics. From the lookout, the trail continues a half-mile across exposed sandstone slabs to a promontory known as Angel’s Landing. Worried we’re pushing too far, we lead our kids slowly onto the face, clutching a heavy chain bolted to the rock and pausing occasionally to let the college students clamber past. As I gaze into the valley 1,300 feet below, Ethan tugs at my shirt and asks, in a tone that seems only mildly curious, “Is this the end of my life?” We turn back.


From Zion we drive east into the mountains on Utah 12, through gray skies and a dusting of snow. In the town of Escalante we turn south on Hole-in-the-Rock Road, a 58-mile pioneer route that once led Mormons across the Colorado River and now dead-ends at Lake Powell. We have entered the Grand Staircase- Escalante National Monument, created by President Clinton in 1996 to acclaim from environmentalists and outcries from Utah Republicans. The gravel road follows a high bench parallel to the Escalante River, a wild tributary of the Colorado. It is eerie to gaze across miles of redrock-and-juniper country, with its Alaska-size remoteness, and see little hint of the trapdoor landscape of canyons falling away to the east.


In contrast to busy Zion, here we rarely encounter another car. We congratulate ourselves on beating the crowds. “That’s because it’s snowing, Dad,” observes Emily. True enough, an occasional snow squall sweeps the horizon. “Operation Desert Storm,” we dub our spring vacation, and pretty much abandon plans for an overnight backpacking trip.


No matter. For families like us, there are countless “primitive” car-camping sites and turnoffs to reach side canyons of the Escalante. We choose several, relying on guidebooks and maps from the BLM office in town. At night we tent alone, read aloud by lantern, and listen to coyotes under a big black sky.


One cool gray afternoon we hike into Spooky and Peek-a-boo Canyons, slots of whimsically sculpted sandstone so narrow we have to turn sideways to squeeze through. The canyons are giddy gymnasiums that have us scrambling over chockstones, wedging past small pools of water, and even squeezing up chimneys 20 feet to climb out on the rock above.


On another day, the kids and I hike partway down Harris Wash, a regular Hopalong Cassidy movie set complete with a handful of grazing cattle. We follow a wide sandy bottom through cottonwoods into a zone of desert-varnished caves, hidden pools, and rock climbs with exploding sandstone handholds. Ethan finds a heart-shaped rock to bring back to his mother. Backing out of a box canyon, I step into a dry creekbed and feel my boot sink. “Quicksand!” I yell, dramatically leaping free to impress the kids. Rounding some trees, we discover something that makes my showing off redundant: a dead cow buried to its shoulders in a quicksand wallow. “Is there such a thing as slow sand?” Ethan wants to know. The next morning, when a local rancher rides up to our camp to ask what we’d seen down the canyon, I feign casualness as I describe our find, while Ethan hides behind my leg and gazes up wide-eyed at the cowboy on horseback.


We return to a highway campground for our last night. Above Calf Creek Recreation Area, a five-and-a-half-mile round-trip hike leads through a high-walled canyon with Anasazi pictographs and ruins. The trail dead-ends at Lower Calf Creek Falls, a refrigerated grotto where a 130-foot cataract makes a too-hot afternoon cold enough for sweaters. On the way back, we find a riffling stretch of Calf Creek just right to launch our plastic eating dishes in a bowl race, an essential family tradition. Then we throw them back on the pile of gear that’s soon to be headed home.


ROAD MAP

ZION NATIONAL PARK can see rainy days in March, but sunshine is common in spring and not as unrelenting as in summer. Watchman Campground (150 summer sites, $14) has 45 sites open all year; South Campground ($14, or $16 with electricity) is open April through October. Call 800-365-2267 for camping reservations. Visitors must now take a free shuttle bus to gain access to the main canyon. More information is available from the park office (435-772-3256) or at www.nps.gov/zion.


GRAND STAIRCASE- ESCALANTE NATIONAL MONUMENT covers almost 2 million acres in southern Utah. For information on hikes and campgrounds, both developed and primitive, call the Visitor’s Center at 435-826-5499 or log on to www.ut.blm.gov/monument. The town of Escalante, along Utah 12 between Bryce Canyon and Capitol Reef National Parks, has a few small grocery stores and motels. A great source of information and gear in town is Escalante Outfitters (435-826-4266), which also provides after-hiking pizza at its Esca-latte Cafe.


OF THE SEVERAL CANYON-HIKING GUIDEBOOKS available, we especially liked Utah Hiking, by Buck Tilton (Foghorn Press, 1999), which describes hiking through Spooky Canyon as “crawling through the belly of a sandstone snake.”

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25. Lance Armstrong

ROAD CYCLIST

Age: 29 Specs: 5-foot-11, 158 pounds

Homes: Plano, Texas; Nice, France

THE CASE: Try to forget the cancer. Forget his best-selling autobiography and his picture on the Wheaties box and his general cultural apotheosis. Even forget that he won a bronze medal in the Olympic time trial not five months after breaking his C7 vertebra on a training ride in a head-on collision with a vehicle—a show of toughness that carried his habitual heroism to the edge of absurdity. Focus instead on Armstrong's moment last July atop Mont Ventoux at the 2000 Tour de France. He's dragging Italian Marco Pantani, one of the sport's most storied climbers, up the final kilometers of a mountain ascent so torturous that organizers include it on the route only once every few years.Then Armstrong, in a stroke of psych-out noblesse-oblige genius, eases up and lets Pantani pass him for the day's victory; he's so sure of his overall lead that he need not trifle with a stage win. Humiliated, Pantani comes unglued and withdraws a few days later, and Armstrong pedals imperiously to his second Tour win. Overlooked in the incident was an astonishing fact: Armstrong's average heart rate during the hardest moments on Ventoux averaged 184. His normal training rate for such grades—188 to 192. “What this means,” says Armstrong's coach, Chris Carmichael, “is that he was well below his lactate threshold.
What that means is he wasn't even winded.

SECOND OPINION: A trio of former Tour winners bowed to Armstrong in a media scrum following his 2000 victory.
*Jan Ullrich (1997) after losing to Armstrong this go-round in one of the fastest time trials in Tour history: “I did not have the measure of Lance. It's hard that he was 25 seconds faster, but he showed again that he rightfully carries the yellow.”

*Eddy Merckx (1969–1972, 1974): “He's not only the best rider, but the most serious. He races all season, not just one month, like so many others.”
*Greg LeMond (1986, 1989, 1990), the only other American champ: “I haven't seen anybody dominate a race like that. Ever.”

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: October 2, 1996, the day he was diagnosed with testicular cancer.

WHAT'S NEXT: A Tour hat trick.

24. Francine Moreillon

FREESKIER

23. Giovani Soldini

SAILOR

Around-the-world single-handing is not so much a sport as it is “a complete career,” says the 34-year-old Italian. “You need to know a little bit of everything: The designing of the boat, the reading of the weather, the fixing of the generator…”

And let's not forget the throwing of the hammer. In February 1999, midway through the epic Around Alone race, Soldini sailed 200 miles back into the heart of a merciless Southern Ocean storm to rescue competitor Isabelle Autissier, whose yacht had capsized. When he got there, Autissier, sheltering inside her upturned hull, couldn't hear his shouts over the shrieking wind. Soldini reached into his toolbox, pulled out the heaviest thing he could find, and flung it across the water at the Frenchwoman's hull. A few minutes later Autissier opened her escape hatch, tossed out her life raft, and made her way over to his boat.

Such resourcefulness is the product of Soldini's youth, spent working in boatyards and on the foredecks of other people's yachts after dropping out of school in Milan at 16. By his midtwenties he was chafing for his own command. “If you work on a cruising boat, the owner is always wanting to stop, to take a swim or something,” he says. “The boat never goes.” With a tiny budget but a fierce desire to race in the 1994 BOC Challenge (since renamed the Around Alone), Soldini enlisted a dozen patients in a drug-rehab clinic to work for free on the construction of an ultralight sloop. With it, he won two legs of the race, battling the more experienced Australian David Adams right to the wire in the regatta's 50-foot Class II. Four years later, with backing from Fila, he built a 60-foot boat and, after rescuing Autissier, easily won the elite division of the race. He was the first non-Frenchman to do so.

Soldini is known to his peers for his bold tactics—he often sails away from the fleet on speculative “fliers”—as well as his ambitious race schedule, which includes both single-handed and fully crewed events. The latter have not always been kind to him. In early 1998, he and four friends attempted to set a transatlantic record on Fila and capsized in rough seas 400 miles short of the English Channel. Despite a sturdy safety harness, Soldini's codesigner and best friend, Andrea Romanelli, was washed overboard, never to be seen again. “It was terrible, my worst experience ever,” Soldini says. “When you are alone, you have only yourself to worry about. When you are five people sailing, you have to think about much more.”

22. Andrew McLean

SKI MOUNTAINEER

21. Shannon Carroll

STEEPCREEKER

Age: 22 Specs: 5-foot-10, 152 pounds

Home: Nevada City, California

THE CASE: Born buff and brassy, Carroll began paddling at 11, ran her first Class V at 15, and then raised the stakes even higher. Since then she's claimed the women's world-record waterfall descent (a 78-foot prayer off the McKenzie River's Sahalie Falls near Eugene, Oregon), won the women's world championship of surf kayaking, and put her churning aquatic luge maneuvers on display in Twitch 2000, a video of stupefying kayaking footage.But her first love is steepcreeking—running precipitous torrents that plunge as much as 500 feet per mile and are choked with logs and tenacious holes. It's just the type of paddling she grew up on in Thurmond, West Virginia. “I was lucky to get an early start paddling,” she says, “and there are still frontiers to push.”

SECOND OPINION: “Shannon's very aggressive on the water,” says fellow competitor Jamie Simon. “Yet afterwards everyone loves to be around her. The only thing I enjoy more than paddling with her is listening to her sing.”

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: Getting pinned on West Virginia's Upper Gauley with her bow wedged deep into a colander of rocks for 20 minutes. Just before going under, rescuers pulled her out by the stern.

WHAT'S NEXT: Trying to qualify for the U.S. rodeo kayaking team next season.

20. Bjorn Daehlie

NORDIC SKIER

Age: 33 Specs: 6 feet, 172 pounds
Home: Nannestad, Norway

THE CASE: In the oxygen-deprived nightmare that is nordic skiing, it helps to be a freak of nature. Thanks to an off-the-charts VO2 max of 96, a resting heart rate of 45, anda hypermotivated training ethic, Daehlie has captured 12 Olympic medals—more than any other winter Olympian. Perhaps he's best known, however, for his histrionic come-from-behind finishes. After kicking past Swede Niklas Jonsson in the 50k freestyle in the 1998 Nagano Games, he collapsed at the tape and didn't stand for two hours. Melodramatic showmanship say some, but hey, what do you expect from a guy wearing pastel tights?

SECOND OPINION: “He's the complete package,” says U.S. cross-country ski team member Justin Wadsworth. “He's got the genetic gift, the work ethic, and he can suffer better than anyone he races against.”

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: Getting outsprinted on his home turf by Italian Silvio Fauner in front of 100,000 stunned spectators while racing the anchor leg of the men's 4x10k relay at the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics.

WHAT'S NEXT: Barring catastrophe, Daehlie will compete in his fourth winter Olympics, in Salt Lake City. Should he win more medals, he may propel his record well out of reach.

19. John Howard

ADVENTURE RACER

18. Karleen Jeffery


FREERIDE SNOWBOARDER

They don't call her Gnarleen for nothing. Karleen Jeffery spent five years hiding out in Chamonix, storming down rules-free steeps with the world's most hell-bent snowboarders, but now she's back. Even while she was away, she managed to sneak in a competition here and there: The 27-year-old Canadian is a two-time World Extreme Champion, a six-time winner of the Mount Baker Banked Slalom, a four-time winner of the Rip Curl World Heli Challenge, and a three-time winner of the Canadian Nationals (twice for half-pipe, once for giant slalom). She's a North American Boardercross champion, a North American Big Air champion, and twice a Swedish Queen of the Hill. And did we mention that she's a redhead?

The 5-foot-2 femme fatale from Kelowna, British Columbia, got her start as a ski racer. Her father was a Canadian national ski team jumper, and her grandfather pioneered a 165-mile ski route from Jasper to Banff. Then one day back in 1990, a couple of guys dared her to learn snowboarding in time for the national championships six weeks later. She did, and she won. She was 16. (“Speed events were always my favorite,” says Jeffery, who now lives in Mammoth Lakes, California.)

Although she used to compete in the half-pipe, the Burton rider has turned her full attention to freeriding, where she outruns avalanches and cracking cornices. “Half-pipe just wasn't that challenging anymore,” she says. After a grueling climb up a peak, she might jump into a chute and carve through it at 50 mph, launch into a big-air inversion over a boulder, and spend the next few thousand feet spinning and slaloming down the face. “My sister can be pretty intimidating,” says older brother Scott, who stuck with skiing. “She rides really hard. She just charges.”

Both in competition and while starring in industry films—her latest is with XX Productions (that's a chromosome reference, dude) —Jeffery walks a fine line between safety and insanity. “It's me versus the mountain, just trying to anticipate what the mountain can do to me and how I can outwit Mother Nature,” she says. “I always have an escape plan if things go awry, some rock I can duck under.” It doesn't always work: Five years ago in the Alps she landed badly on a jump, breaking her pelvis and fracturing a vertebra.

Next year, aside from competing again in April's world extreme championship in Valdez, Jeffery and her fiancé, BASE jumper Dave Barlia, plan to film each other's exploits around the world with her new 16mm camera. So, what does Barlia call her? “Well,” she says, “when I'm in a bad mood he calls me Snarleen.”

17. Göran Kropp

ADVENTURER

16. Louise Hose

GEOLOGIST/CAVER

Four thousand feet below the surface of the earth, in a cold, dank hole that exists on no map, the chances of rescue for a stranded caver are close to zilch. Louise Hose doesn't care. “You take the risks you can handle,” says the 48-year-old karst geologist, who once witnessed a partner die when he got trapped and drowned in an underground stream. “You don't allow yourself to break a femur.” Her matter-of-fact tone leaves little doubt why her colleagues, working alongside her years ago in a Mexican cave, nicknamed her “Macha.”

In 22 years of studying cave-forming rock, Hose has explored more than 230 underground holes, 80 of them virgin passages, and published her findings in periodicals with catchy titles like Chemical Geology: Special Geomicrobiology Issue. “Some go deeper, and some do more dangerous work or more science,” says Dave Luckins, a former president of the National Speleological Society who spent ten years on the NSS's board with her, “but few combine these elements and do it with her level of skill.”

Hose, a former national-level competitive cyclist, ventured into her first cave in 1970 as a freshman at California State University at Los Angeles. “I grew up in Los Angeles surrounded by people, so I really liked the isolation,” she says. To feed her jones for subterranean nooks, she earned a doctorate in geology from Louisiana State University. She's currently digging into the bizarre ecology of Mexico's Cueva de Villa Luz, where a recently discovered microbial colonies live off hydrogen sulfide and fart out sulfuric acid. In addition to stinking to high heaven, the atmosphere is poisonous, so Hose wears a gas mask as she works.

In a field known for its swashbuckling one-upmanship, Hose often arrives first at a site, where she rappels down hundreds of feet of rope with a 70-pound pack and then shimmies through insanely skinny passageways. Her body has been so badly bruised that a doctor once asked her if she was a victim of domestic violence. Nope, she told him, I'm a caver.

15. Laird Hamilton

WATERMAN

14. Doug Swingley

DOGSLED RACER

Age: 47 Specs: 5-foot-11, 160 pounds
Home: Lincoln, Montana

THE CASE: Owner, manager, friend, racer, and trainer of the fastest dogs alive, Swingley wears down opponents by charging from the gun; where most mushers cautiously modulate speed throughout a race with a foot brake, Swingley just lets 'em rip, convincing his dogs that long hills are a treat. The former mink rancher, who still trains his dogs in Montana, didn't start racing until he was 36, but he quickly made up for lost time. In his third Iditarod, in 1995, Swingley posted the first sub-ten-day time, thus becoming the first non-Alaskan to win the grueling 1,100-mile marathon. After finishing second in '96 and '97, he reclaimed the crown in 1999 and smoked the pack again in 2000, breaking his '95 record by nearly two hours.

SECOND OPINION: “Every year Doug's won the Iditarod, he's usually stayed one checkpoint ahead of the other mushers,” says 1989 winner Joe Runyan. “He pushes it a little bit every year.”

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: Beginning the 1999 Iditarod by breaking two ribs. “We took a 90-degree corner, and as I went down with the sled my chest was driven into a battery pack,” says Swingley. How'd he manage a victory? “A lot of Aleve.”

WHAT'S NEXT: Come this March, he'll aim the dogs straight for Nome, Alaska, the Iditarod's finish line, and a possible fourth victory.

13. Scott Lindgren

EXPEDITION KAYAKER

Age: 28 Specs: 5-foot-11, 155 pounds
Home: Auburn, California

THE CASE: There's a handful of paddlers who can run the big-river first descents that Lindgren relishes, and there's a handful of filmmakers who can capture the shots he does, but no one else can do both time after time and still manage to come back alive. The Rocklin, California, native, who began paddling at 19, has marshaled countless remote river expeditions—Nepal's Thule Bheri and Tibet's upper Karnali, to name a couple—in which he navigates raging gorges studded with Class V-plus drops in a heavily laden kayak, wearing an awkward head camera. His company, Scott Lindgren Productions, is known for making videos (Flood 2: The Last Drop, Thirst) and films that defy belief, even among grizzled whitewater paddlers. “When I discovered kayaking, it was a release I hadn't found in other sports,” says Lindgren. “It was never about being a high-profile athlete; it is strictly about going out and finding the deepest, hardest rivers.”

SECOND OPINION: “There are a lot of good extreme paddlers, but Scott can predict water flows like no one else I know,” says fellow first-descenter Clay Wright. “When you go on an expedition with Scott, you know it will be dialed.”

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: “Trying to get me to talk about my most harrowing moment,” sniffs Lindgren, “is like trying to take spinach away from Popeye.”

WHAT'S NEXT: A three-week voyage on the White Nile in Uganda and the wrap of Liquid Cubed, a film about his surf kayaking exploits in Indonesia.

12. Anne-Caroline Chausson

MOUNTAIN-BIKE RACER

11. Johan Reinhard

ARCHAEOLOGIST/EXPLORER

Someone once asked Johan Reinhard how many close calls he'd survived. When he finished tallying them, the total came to 34. “I haven't been broken up too badly,” says the 57-year-old Illinois native, “but I've been nearly killed almost every way you can think of.” To thrive as the world's foremost high-altitude archaeologist, it helps to be both lucky and wise. When an avalanche wipes the slope you just exited—that's luck. When a Nepalese tribe of hunters orders you, upon pain of death, to stop shadowing them, and you beat feet—that's wisdom.

For two decades Reinhard, who holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Vienna, has scoured remote Andean mountaintops seeking clues left behind by ancient South American civilizations. His discoveries have blown minds in the science world: In 1995 he recovered the famous 500-year-old Incan “ice maiden,” the most well preserved body from pre-Columbian times. Last year he and his team battled 70-mph winds and snow to unearth three more mummies on the summit of Argentina's 22,000-foot Mount Llullaillaco. “The DNA samples we sent to George Mason University were as intact as a living person's,” says Reinhard.

The archaeologist, who's been climbing mountains since college, has bagged more than 100 South American peaks over 17,000 feet, making him one of the world's most prolific Andean climbers—a record he didn't consciously seek. “What keeps me going up is that [those high mountains] have the world's best-preserved mummies,” he says, “and they're soon going to be destroyed.” Earlier this year Reinhard scrambled up to a burial site on an Argentinean peak to find that thieves had gotten there first. With dynamite. “All we found were remains of blown-up textiles and bones,” he says.

Now funded as a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, Reinhard retreats to his home near Franklin, West Virginia, to sift through his findings when he isn't in the field. “I've had to give up a lot for this life,” he says. “But I've always had the freedom to go out and explore.”

10. Josune Bereziartu

ROCK CLIMBER

9. Børge Ousland

POLAR EXPLORER

Age: 38 Specs: 6-foot-2, 187 pounds

Home: Oslo, Norway

THE CASE: A former deep-sea diver in the icy North Atlantic waters off Norway, Ousland has redefined what it means to be a masochistic loner. In 1994 he became the first man to travel solo, and without assistance or resupply, to the North Pole. A year later he skied solo to the South Pole, and in 1996 he became the first to cross Antarctica alone and unassisted—a trip that took 64 days. While those before him have relied on resupply caches and airdrops, Ousland lugs his provisions behind him on a sledge, trekking across perilously thin ice in whiteout conditions that can reach minus 55 degrees Celsius. He has an almost pathological attention to detail and an uncanny knack for discerning safe ice from sketchy ice. Fine, but how's he stay warm and sane? A diet loaded with olive oil and butter, and a Walkman blaring Jimi Hendrix.

SECOND OPINION: “Ousland is Roald Amundsen incarnate,” says polar sage Will Steger, invoking the turn-of-the-century Norwegian explorer who made the world's first trek to the South Pole. “He is strong, well prepared, cautious, and he understands ice better than anybody.”

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: On a 1993 ski expedition from Franz Josef Land to Spitsbergen, in the Arctic Ocean, he awoke to shotgunlike sounds—ice cracking—and found himself and his teammate bobbing on a raft of ice. The men spent two days adrift at sea, their ice-island eroding at the edges, before rescuers plucked them to safety.

WHAT'S NEXT: In January Ousland will attempt what's considered the last great feat in polar exploration: the first unsupported traverse of the Arctic, from Russia to Canada via the North Pole.

8. Eric Jackson

WHITEWATER PADDLER

7. Tomaz Humar

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Age: 31 Specs: 5-foot-10, 157 pounds
Home: Kamnik, Slovenia

THE CASE: To get a sense of the audacity of Tomaz Humar's November 1999 solo ascent of the 4,000-foot wall of ice and rotten rock on the south face of Nepal's Dhaulagiri, consider this: Upon returning home, he found that climbing's greatest living legend, Reinhold Messner, had flown in and was waiting to congratulate him. An epic in 1997 on the west face of Nuptse, Everest's 25,921-foot neighbor, and a 1996 first ascent of the northwest face of Nepal's Ama Dablam also rank as two of the boldest climbs of the 1990s. A fiercely self-reliant mountaineer who typically goes solo, Humar prides himself on his mental strength: “When I start a climb, I become some kind of animal,” he says. “I turn off everything—hunger, pain, freezing—in order to survive.”

SECOND OPINION: “Humar is willing to take on dangerous climbs with the understanding that if he moves fast enough, he'll get through without getting killed,” says Christian Beckwith, editor of the American Alpine Journal.

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: “Saying good-bye to my children before each expedition.”

WHAT'S NEXT: “I'm cooking it in my head right now,” he says. “When it is the right time, the mountain will tell me so.”

6. Lori Bowden

TRIATHLETE

Age: 33 Specs: 5-foot-6, 115 pounds

Home: Victoria, British Columbia

THE CASE: When the Canadian swapped her bike for her running shoes to start the final leg of her Hawaii Ironman professional debut in 1996, she was in 30th place. “When I finished eighth,” she says, “I knew I'd eventually have a shot at winning it.” Indeed. Owing to her running prowess, these days Bowden routinely gobbles up seemingly unbeatable competitors' leads. Take her first Hawaii Ironman win, in 1999: Entering the run three minutes down, Bowden recorded the event's first sub-three-hour marathon by a woman, winning by seven minutes. In 2000 she sealed her arrival with two major triathlon victories, in Australia and Canada. Now just imagine how good she'll be when she improves her shabby swimming ability. (In her Hawaii win she finished the swim in an abysmal 89th place.)

SECOND OPINION: Karen Smyers, who finished second in Hawaii in 1999, says: “The biggest thing she's got going for her is that she really has no idea how good she is.”

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: Nearly drowning in the pounding surf during the swim leg at a sprint triathlon in Chile last January.

WHAT'S NEXT: Erasing the 4 minutes and 45 seconds standing between her Ironman best and Paula Newby-Fraser's world-record time (8:50:23), set in 1994.

5. Kevin Pritchard

WINDSURFER

4. Layne Beachley

SURFER

Age: 28 Specs: 5-foot-5, 121 pounds
Home: Dee Why Beach, Australia

THE CASE: Already considered the planet's premier female big-wave rider, this powerful, exuberant Australian is also the first woman to get into the high-testosterone sport of tow-in surfing. But her performance in contest surfing is another story. For years Beachley battled chronic fatigue syndrome, depression, and Lisa Andersen—the fluid Floridian surfer who piled up four straight world titles. In 1998, thanks in part to the support of mentor-boyfriend Ken Bradshaw, a 48-year-old big-wave legend from Sunset Beach on the North Shore of Oahu, Beachley located the “competitive beast” within, and has won two world titles since. With one contest remaining on this year's circuit, she's all but assured of a third.

SECOND OPINION: “She rides waves that most guys would want to be nowhere near,” says Bill Sharp, publisher of California's SurfNews. “Things that are 18 to 20 feet on the Hawaiian scale, which means a 35- to 40-foot face.

“MOST HARROWING MOMENT: Last winter, filming for the Australian edition of 60 Minutes, Beachley got Bradshaw to tow her into Backyards, a giant, unruly break offshore of Sunset Beach. “I was way too deep when I let go of the rope,” she says. “An entire section of the wave closed out—18 feet of white water—and before Ken could get to me, three more waves broke on top of me. I was just sitting there underwater, singing to myself.” The refrain? “Rag doll, rag doll.”

WHAT'S NEXT: Getting towed into Jaws, the steep, hollow monster wave off Maui pioneered by Laird Hamilton and Buzzy Kerbox.

3. Jeremy Jones

BIG-MOUNTAIN SNOWBOARDER

Age: 25 Specs: 5-foot-7, 145 pounds

Home: Truckee, California

THE CASE: Jones rips the seemingly convex pitches of Alaska's intimidating Chugach Mountains, pointing his board straight down the fall line of slopes where you drop 20 feet with each turn. He rails open faces at 60 mph and then shoots off 50-foot cliffs. Apparently fearless, Jones first earned his reputation as snowboarding's primo big-mountain freerider from stunts in the 1997 snowboard flickTB6, but he's equally famous for riding the Chugach's fluted spines—steep, wind-carved ribs of snow that protrude from the guts of the mountain. On such terrain, you don't outrun your slough, you ride in it, cascading down waterfalls of snow. In the premiere this fall of the ski film Further, Jones's gonzo descent cemented his status as a snowboarder of Homeric proportions. In the words of innumerable viewers, Jones isn't just the best, “He's sick.”

SECOND OPINION: “Jones attacks terrain,” says veteran snowboarder and writer Jeff Galbraith. “He does lines you don't see anyone else do, without straining.”

MOST HARROWING MOMENT: Walking from helicopter landing zones along knife-edge ridgelines, where his soft-soled boots offer little grip and the board he's holding easily catches homicidal wind gusts.

WHAT'S NEXT: A helicopter tour deeper into Alaska's imposing ranges with his two filmmaker brothers, of Teton Gravity Research, who'll capture Jeremy's first descents using long lenses from distant (read: safe) vantages.

2. Tommy Caldwell

ROCK CLIMBER

The Immovable Object Meets the Unstoppable Force

Step by step, year after year, summit after summit, never altering, Ed Viesturs has planted his flag across the top of the world. And everybody loves him. What's the deal with this guy?

The Immovable Object Meets the Unstoppable Force

Step by step, year after year, summit after summit, never altering, Ed Viesturs has planted his flag across the top of the world. And everybody loves him. What's the deal with this guy?

The Immovable Object Meets the Unstoppable Force

Step by step, year after year, summit after summit, never altering, Ed Viesturs has planted his flag across the top of the world. And everybody loves him. What's the deal with this guy?

The Immovable Object Meets the Unstoppable Force

Step by step, year after year, summit after summit, never altering, Ed Viesturs has planted his flag across the top of the world. And everybody loves him. What's the deal with this guy?

“Lots of Fun”: The Viesturs Resumé

“Only when guiding,” says Ed Viesturs of his philosophy on using supplemental oxygen, “but never when attempting to climb a mountain for the first time.” A testament to titanic lung capacity, Viesturs has etched a record on 8,000-meter peaks surpassed by no other American. Here are the highlights, along with Grateful Ed's vivid recollections:

The post Superheroes appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

Morning creeps toward noon as Radkewich works the hill, running with light-limbed grace, just on the edge of oxygen deficiency. His seeming ease belies the hectic, edgy pulse of his closely calibrated days. In its early years, triathlon served as a stately form of aerobic meditation, a paean to the merits of going slow and long. The signature race, the Hawaii Ironman, was dominated by powerful but offhand former lifeguards such as Dave Scott and Mark Allen, who churned through the 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike, and 26.2-mile run like Zen masters, enclosed in bubbles of unremitting effort. All that’s changed. The Ironman, the emblematic endurance event of the 1980s, has lost popularity to shorter, high-pressure races that are won not by laid-back Californians, but by Australians and Europeans. The odds-on favorite for the Sydney gold is four-time world champion Simon Lessing, who was born in South Africa but races for Great Britain. For more than a decade, American men have languished far down in the triathlon pecking order. Not one of them has won the Olympic-distance world championship since Mark Allen did in 1989. But Radkewich, Kemper, and a few others, including Tony De Boom (a media darling whose brother, Tim, is also a pro triathlete), harbor a spark of hope. In elite, Olympic-distance races, mere seconds often separate the first- and 20th-place finishers. A race often goes to whoever’s hot—or lucky—on a given day. Radkewich, who led the American men in World Cup points last year, and Kemper, runner-up in the 1999 Pan Am Games, should be in the lead pack coming out of the water in Sydney Harbor, should hang near the front through the bike phase, and should make the transition into the 10k with plausible, if dark-horse, shots at a medal. That is, if they don’t crash and burn in the trials. If they hit every workout bang on the nail, performing each swim, bike ride, and run—and every weight-training, stretching, and sports-psychology session—at the exact prescribed pitch of intensity. Radkewich cranks his uphill repeat, turns, and pads downslope for his final two-minute gasper. Dapice passes, toiling uphill, following his own training sequence. “It’s not the work I mind,” Radkewich says of his ascetic profession. “It’s the constant grind of scrambling for dough. Not that I’m in such bad shape myself. I’ve got it a lot easier than Josh, for instance. “And hey,” he says with a grin, pointing to the passing rock spires. “I get to live in the Springs!” A few more strides and the grin fades. “The real reason I live here is that it’s cheap,” he admits. “Up in Boulder, I’d pay 650 bucks a month for my apartment. Here, I only pay $450.” With a glint of self-derision, he adds, “I can afford to go to the movies once in a while, instead of just renting videos.”

A half-dozen tourists huddle behind the plate-glass window overlooking the Olympic Training Center pool, hoping to catch a glimpse of Amy Van Dyken or some other swimming superstar. But today all they get are Radkewich, Kemper, and Dapice. Guys they’ve never heard of in a sport they’ve barely heard of. The one where they run and bike and swim forever. Masochistic freaks. But you never can tell. Come September, maybe one of them will win a gold medal and we’ll be telling everybody how we saw him back in February. Hunter Kemper, that’s the guy we saw swimming that day! The three men stroke down the long lanes, closely watched by Kevin McKenna, a coach for the U.S. Olympic swim team on loan to USA Triathlon. He’s been hired to make the top American triathletes more efficient swimmers. It’s a matter of mechanics, he explains. Arm-tilt angles. Triathletes have to lift their arms high through the chop of open water. The men finish a set of laps and McKenna calls them out of the pool to watch him demonstrate a stroke. Sleek and body-shaved, the triathletes rise glistening from the water. Radkewich and Dapice are compactly muscled, both around five-foot-nine and 150 pounds, with the bristling physiques of college wrestlers. Kemper, by contrast, stands six-three and weighs 160; his long limbs twitch with rawboned power. Somatotype isn’t all that separates the 24-year-old Kemper from his fellow triathletes. His outstanding ’99 season established him, just one year after turning pro, as the next great hope in American triathlon. He outsprinted veteran Australian star Greg Welch to win a major race in Oceanside, California, repeating the feat he’d performed on the same course at the end of the’ 98 season, when he outkicked Radkewich for the U.S. national championship. Kemper is the alpha guy both in substance—he is among the strongest runners in the sport—and in style. A self-described mama’s boy, he combines a puppyish playfulness with an obsessive work ethic and a hardheaded understanding of the business of triathlon. Before his rookie pro season, he negotiated an exclusive contract with RLX Polo Sport that made him the best-paid and best-known U.S. male Olympic-distance triathlete. (Tim De Boom is the Polo poster boy for Ironman-length events.) Though he’s the sport’s leading male American hope for a medal in Sydney in just his third season, Kemper won’t approach his peak until the 2004 Games, when many predict he’ll be a dominant international performer. Kemper’s rise has put a unique strain on his relationship with Radkewich, from whom he snatched not only the national championship but the U. S. Olympic Committee Triathlete of the Year title. It adds a further twist to their respective tales, which are uncannily similar. Both come from athletic, upper-middle-class families in the Orlando, Florida, area. Both thrived as competitive swimmers before turning to triathlon. In 1985, at age 14, Radkewich beat Lance Armstong to claim the IronKids National Championship. Kemper won in 1986 and the four years following. With their sons involved in the same sport and belonging to the same swim club, the Kemper and Radkewich families grew close. The parents took turns driving to practices and meets; Kemper even had a brief grade-school romance with Radkewich’s little sister. “Nick and Hunter always had a camaraderie,” says Hunter’s mother, Gretchen Kemper, “but their difference in age kept them from really being friends. We might be closer to Nick than Hunter is.” In college, Radkewich and Kemper put triathlon on hold. Radkewich attended Notre Dame and Kemper went to Wake Forest, both NCAA Division I schools with first-rate cross-country and track programs. Summers, they concentrated on triathlon, and both won amateur national championships. As soon as they graduated (with business degrees), both turned pro. Now they live in the same town and compete for the same difficult prize. Publicly, they staunchly downplay any rivalry, declaring themselves each other’s number-one fans. Privately, they defuse potential conflict by keeping their emotional and physical distance. They work with different personal coaches, have different training partners, and follow different training schedules. They don’t socialize together. Kemper spends time with players on the women’s Olympic volleyball team; Radkewich likes to hang with the OTC swimmers. But now, with the days dwindling until the trials and the OTC practicing economy of scale by having all the top triathletes work together with specialists such as McKenna, distance is harder to achieve. Last week Kemper and Radkewich were on location together in Australia, this afternoon they’re swimming in the same pool, and tomorrow they’ll be chugging through the same cycling workout. In such close quarters, it’s impossible for Radkewich to ignore his teammate’s presence or to forget that just a few short years ago he, not Kemper, was considered the next great U.S. triathlon hope. He was the one with the glow. “With all the excitement around Hunter’s emergence, people tend to underestimate Nick,” says six-time Hawaii Ironman winner Dave Scott. “I think Nick’s almost as good a runner as Hunter, and a stronger swimmer. In Olympic-distance races, swimming becomes incredibly important.” Shoulders hunched, chilled skin prickling, Radkewich and his teammates heed McKenna’s tutorial to varying degrees. Dapice and Kemper, still relatively new in the sport, pay dutiful attention; Radkewich, the hardened veteran, listens more skeptically. For him, McKenna’s well-meaning rap forms a small indignity. One more hoop to jump through. Why hire a “swim specialist” who doesn’t know squat about triathlon? Why not give the dough they’re paying this joker to a struggling triathlete? Radkewich has his own coach, Michelle Blessing, who knows the sport cold; why not pay her? Radkewich sulks circumspectly, hanging at the back of the group. He’s got to stay with the program if he wants to keep eating and swimming and lifting for free; if he wants to keep drawing his monthly better-than-nothing USA Triathlon stipend of $600, which will vanish completely if he screws up and fails to make the Olympic team. McKenna finishes his spiel and the guys knife back into the water. As they settle into their work I’m joined by Steve Locke, executive director of USA Triathlon, who’s unabashedly pleased to have me spend so much time with his star athletes. Thus far, most of the media attention has swirled around American women such as former Olympic swimmer Barb Lindquist, triathlon’s strongest medal contender, and Karen Smyers, who’s been training for the Olympics while fighting a well-publicized battle with thyroid cancer. “The major corporate sponsors are getting interested in our sport,” Locke says proudly. “Look at Visa. Most important, we’re starting to draw the talented young athletes.” He nods toward the pool. “Guys like Hunter.” Locke smiles contentedly, then catches himself, adding, “And Nick, of course.”

For $450 a month, Radkewich gets the top-floor flat of a formerly grand Victorian residence near the old downtown area of Colorado Springs. It’s a prototypical jock’s bachelor pad, with clothes and gear strewn about the rooms amid piles of magazines and CDs. Today, the living room vibrates to a Metallica video. Kemper and Dapice have just arrived, stationary bikes in tow, for a long session with the Computrainer, a $1,500 software system that simulates the terrain and intensity of an outdoor cycling workout. “It’s quite a gadget,” Kemper explains, wiring a heart-rate monitor and wheel sensor to Radkewich’s computer. “We don’t have to worry about traffic or flat tires. We can count on getting our heart rates up. Hit a key and we can e-mail the results directly to our coaches.” Radkewich emerges from the bathroom, his two-week stubble replaced by a carefully sculpted goatee. A small tattoo of a scorpion atop a heart fashionably stains his bare left shoulder. As Kemper mounts his bike, Radkewich ejects Metallica and inserts the movie he has chosen for diversion during the long afternoon: Slap Shot, a 1977 Paul Newman film that tells the story of a minor-league hockey team. “It catches the reality of an athlete’s life better than just about any other sports movie,” Radkewich says with the authority of an inveterate film buff and, of course, a lifelong athlete. Radkewich came out of Notre Dame holding distinguished running credentials in addition to his amateur national championship. A luminous future as a pro seemed assured. But he entered the sport during the early nineties, just as American triathlon was spiraling downhill. By that time, most of the international triathlon community had abandoned Ironman-length races in favor of shorter contests that attracted more spectators and, more significant, television coverage. The abbreviated race format permitted drafting, the once illegal practice of accepting and giving wind-shielding aid during the bike leg. Americans resisted the change, especially the old guard led by such Californian warhorses as Scott Tinley and Mike Pigg. A split developed: Europe, Australia, and the rest of the world converted to a shorter, faster, more entertaining style of triathlon, while Americans stuck with the grueling (read “boring”), no-drafting Ironman-length events. Still, Radkewich was fortunate enough to pluck a modest bouquet of sponsorships, including Saucony shoes and Mrs. T’s Pierogies, which together with his parents’ support allowed him to launch a career. Long, dues-paying years ensued. Radkewich logged eighth- through 12th-place finishes with depressing regularity, solid performances landing him just out of reach of the prize money. He limped along until 1998, when his attenuated lifeline of stipends and sponsorships finally snapped. There were still two long years until the Olympics. Discouraged, Radkewich nearly quit the sport, but his coach convinced him to keep on plugging. He’d need to swallow his pride, however, and take a day job. He went to work selling suits at Dillard’s department store in Colorado Springs. Radkewich was good at it. He had a natural eye for fabric and color, for the drape of a jacket on a customer’s shoulders; he soon became the top salesman in the menswear department. Management loved him, except for the fact that he was always a few minutes late for work. “They thought I was lazy,” Radkewich recalls with a sour smile. “They didn’t realize that by the time I was supposed to start at the store I’d already been up for three hours training.” He finally broke through in late 1998, winning four races in a row and the U.S.O.C. Triathlete of the Year title. The prize money and renewed sponsorship contracts enabled him to make a decent, if continually uncertain, living from the sport. But Radkewich knows that another day job is only a few bad races away. “I’d be lying if I said triathlon was still a lot of fun for me,” he says. “Racing well remains a constant intellectual and physical challenge, but I’ve spent too many hard years for the sport to be a pure kick anymore.” He falls silent for a moment, his eyes straying back to the movie. “If I make the Olympics, I’ll have achieved everything I set out to do. If I make it to Sydney, I’ll take some time off afterward to reassess.”

Hunter Kemper spins on his stationary bike a few feet away, listening intently. For his whole life, he has stood just a little apart from Radkewich, watching and learning. In college, he wondered why Radkewich and other pro triathletes were so inconsistent, finishing in the top three one race and 58th the next. Much of the reason, he determined, was financial uncertainty, the stress of maintaining half a dozen corporate sponsorships that together barely paid a subsistence wage.

So in the spring of 1998, his senior year in college, Kemper shrewdly assembled a business plan. He prepared a résumé and a cover letter and sent them off via overnight delivery to 30 potential corporate sponsors. Not the standard shoe and bike and energy-bar companies, but the mighty powerhouses in the habit of doing nothing halfway—Nike, Nautica, Tommy Hilfiger. Polo Sport responded.

Kemper put on a suit and traveled to New York. The Polo marketing executives were impressed by his boy-next-door manner, his nerdy/sexy/preppy good looks, and his self-confidence. Kemper’s athletic talent was genuine, moreover, as was his sense of timing: Triathlon would be featured prominently during the 2000 Olympics, not long after Polo rolled out its new line of RLX performance sportswear. The executives recognized a perfect fit and signed Kemper to an exclusive sponsorship deal. (He declines to say what it’s worth.)

Kemper displays only the Polo logo during a race. No tacky, tricked-out plastering of logos across his bike, wetsuit, and singlet. He needn’t fuss with the competing, time-consuming demands of multiple sponsors. Most important, Polo pays him a stable salary that, while hardly up to major-sport standards, matches what a bright, aggressive, recent college grad might earn in the business world. Even before he dove into the water for his first professional triathlon two years ago, Kemper had achieved a level of comfort and security that Radkewich had never approached during five difficult years in the sport. It took Kemper just a few months to make good on Polo’s investment. After a slow start, he capped the 1998 season by winning the national championships and being named USA Triathlon’s Rookie of the Year. In May 1999, Kemper won a major race in Arizona and the next week locked horns with Greg Welch at the Oceanside triathlon.

“We came out of the bike nose to nose and set out running on a loop course,” Kemper recalls. “I knew I was capable of racing well, but facing Welch like that, just the two of us, was more than I bargained for. On the last loop we were stride to stride, hammering, and I was able to outkick him in the end. It was like…” Kemper straightens from his handlebars and jabs his fist into the dank, fetid air of the apartment. “It was indescribable, the greatest feeling in the world.” He shakes his head. “That was an amazing day.”

The room goes quiet, the men again settling into the whir of their searing simulated climb through the mountains.

“At the end of last season, Polo called me up and said they wanted to pay me more money and extend my contract to run past the Olympics,” Kemper goes on, pitching his voice below the video’s sound track. For a moment he focuses on his cycling. Then, very softly, he adds, “That kind of support is crucial. That made me feel good.”

Radkewich, meanwhile, seems to have lost himself in Slap Shot, which is approaching its climax. He pedals hard, eyes riveted on the screen, absorbed in the story of a fictional hockey team’s ten-hour bus rides through the boonies; of three teammates forced to share a shabby hotel room; of a season’s accrued losses graced by sporadic flashes of mastery. He doesn’t need to spell out the similarities between the characters’ lives and his own. Nor does he have to voice the central fact of his lifelong relationship with Hunter Kemper.

They are not quite friends, and as long as they pursue the same peculiar, unforgiving profession, they probably never will be. They differ in age, temperament, and fortune. They share boyhood memories, a passionate but repressed rivalry, and for the next half-hour, this sweat-rank living room. Like a lot of brothers, Radkewich and Kemper are stuck with each other. Ìý

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The point in Oregon where the mighty Columbia River meets the great Pacific Ocean bears the surprisingly unarresting name of Clatsop Spit. The spit doesn’t look like much—yawning acres of storm-blasted dunes facing far more dramatic Cape Disappointment on the Washington side of the river. From the observation deck of Fort Stevens State Park, your eye is drawn to the six-mile-long rock jetty, to smashing surf dotted by seals, and to mammoth container ships gliding gingerly over the treacherous Columbia Bar.

During my first few trips here, I didn’t linger at Clatsop Spit. But something kept calling me back. I wanted to walk out to the extreme tip of land where, in Raymond Carver’s phrase, water comes together with other water.
On a recent raw fall day I returned to complete the pilgrimage, following a faint trail in the lee of the jetty. Waves thundered and spurts of seawater kicked up over the boulders. As I waded across an icy ankle-deep estuary to reach the headlands, huge clouds piled in an operatic sky. Perfect Northwest weather, in other words, and I moved briskly toward the point. Or what seems to be the point: a navigational marker a mile off, from which I hoped to be able to resolve all conflicting elements—river and ocean, Washington and Oregon, sky and water, bridge and town.


When I reached the marker, however, it offered no such clarity. Nothing heralds the spot where river stops and ocean starts, where one state ends and another begins. The beach keeps curving. Undemarcated, the waters roil grayly together at Clatsop Spit.


To make your own peregrination, start at Fort Stevens State Park, takeoff point of the 46-mile Oregon Coast hiking trail, which shoots south past Haystack Rock and other marquee beach attractions. The park offers a range of camping options, from hike-in sites for $4.25 to five-person canvas yurts (with heat, electricity, and water) for $29; call 800-452-5687. Ten miles east on U.S. 101 in the fishing-cum-quaint-tourist town of Astoria, soak up local lore at the extensive Columbia River Maritime Museum (503-325-2323).

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Rock and Roil

Heeding the call of Oregon’s Clatsop Spit

Three Stallion Inn

Randolph, Vermont

Bulletins

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