I first heard about the disappearance of the Titan submersible, and the Titan’s passengers, on the morning of Monday, June 19, the day after reports emerged that something had gone wrong. Because it was a holiday in the U.S., I wasnā€™t as online as Iā€™d normally be, but the editor of Bloomberg Businessweek texted me a link to a New York Times story. He thought of me immediately because Iā€™d profiled , the CEO of OceanGate, for his magazine back in 2017, when Rush was going full steam with plans to build a submersible and take tourists 12,500 feet down to view the Titanic, but that subā€”the one we now know as the Titanā€”was still just a prototype.

My next stop was email, and there among the unread messages was a note from Rob McCallum, one of the most experienced deep-sea explorers on the planet. ā€œHi Josh,ā€ he wrote. ā€œThe word is that the OceanGate sub Titan has gone missing at the Titanic site. I still remember our long ago conversation about this very dayā€¦ā€ And that was it.

The ellipses arenā€™t there to signal that Iā€™m truncating McCallumsā€™s message. He didnā€™t write more, because he didnā€™t have to, because I knew what he meant: that he already felt sure the Titan had imploded underwater. As we could find out later, James Cameron, the film director and submersibles innovator, had quickly decided the same thing. It would be days before the rest of the world reached the same conclusion, and Iā€™ve spent a lot of time lately wondering why it took so long.

When I ran into McCallum again two years later, his worry had only grown. This time we were both onboard the Pressure Drop, the support ship for Vescovoā€™s expedition. He was about to attempt to reach his first ā€œdeepā€ā€”the deepest point in the Atlantic Oceanā€”in an extremely robust, extremely expensive submersible, custom-built for the purpose by Triton submarines at a reported cost of $35 million. That vessel, the Limiting Factor, was the opposite of Rushā€™s Titan, an experimental prototype assembled by Rush and his team in a small marina in Everett, Washington, and constructed around a pressure hull made of carbon fiber, a material that was completely untested in such ocean depths.

The Limiting Factorā€™s hull was made of titanium, proven in the deep seas, but the most significant difference between it and the Titan was that the LF was ā€œclassedā€ā€”as in Triton had sent the entire hull to Russia, into the only pressure chamber on earth big enough to accommodate it, to make sure it could hold up to pressures at 36,000 feet down. Every wire, every circuit, every piece of hardware on the LF went through the same process, at great expense. (McCallum estimates that classification was probably 25 percent of the total cost.) The Titan, on the other hand, was not classed. Rush swore by his own tests and experts. When pushed, as we heard many times, he liked to say that regulations only stifle innovation. The tiny submersible industry, Rush said back in 2019, was ā€œobscenely safe because they have all these regulations. But it also hasnā€™t innovated or grownā€”because they have all these regulations.ā€ A blog post on OceanGateā€™s website referred to classification as ā€œanathema to innovation.ā€

And this was what worried McCallum, as we revisited the topic on Vescovoā€™s ship, off Puerto Rico in 2019. He was extremely concerned that if Stockton kept at it and took tourists to the Titanic, something catastrophic could happen. That the subā€™s hull would fail and implode.

Unofficial Confirmation of theĢżTitan‘s Collapse

Looking at his email that first morning after the Titan disappeared, I quickly fired back a reply, asking what he knew. ā€œIt happened exactly as predicted,ā€ he wrote. ā€œAn implosion at 3500m.ā€ Did he have confirmation? Because thatā€™s not what the international news was reporting. Yes, he wrote back. ā€œIt was detected acoustically ā€¦ but that needs to come through the formal channels.ā€

I am not a deep-sea expert. Iā€™ve just written about the subject a lot, because my centered on the attempted salvage of a submarine from a depth of 16,500 feetā€”a wreck that was heard and then located, usingā€¦ top-secret acoustic sensors. (In that case, sensors owned by the Air Force and deployed in the Pacific.) Researching the book led to a fascination with the ocean bottom, which led me to the guys who plumb around down there today, like McCallum. It really is a small world, which is how a guy like McCallum is connected to Rush, Vescovo, and Cameron, not to mention the guys who ran trips to the Titanic back in the 1990s. He knows what heā€™s talking about, and I knew that if he was saying the Titan had imploded, it almost certainly had. I was so confident, in fact, that I told my wife (a writer for People) thatā€”on a day when every other news organization was running with a ā€œCan we find them?ā€ narrativeā€”she should tell her editors to prepare a story about the °Õ¾±³Ł²¹²Ōā€™s implosion. I even gave her quotes. That was on Tuesday. But I told her to wait for official confirmation from the Coast Guard or Navy.

She waited, and waited, and waited. As did the rest of usā€”America, and the world, because that confirmation didnā€™t come. Not on Monday, or Tuesday, or Wednesday, or even into Thursday morning, by which time the °Õ¾±³Ł²¹²Ōā€™s oxygen would almost certainly have run out, if by some miracle the sub was stranded out there and not blown to pieces. To my great surprise, the narrative that emerged, and continued over the week, was about an urgent mission to locate the Titan and rescue its occupantsā€”about the world marshaling resources and coming together in pursuit of this heroic goal. Reporters from NBC, the BBC, Sky News, Fox, NewsNation, and the German network Welt all flew to the front lines in St. Johnā€™s, Newfoundland, to wait for updates. CNN sent Anderson Cooper.

Itā€™s a narrative we all love: humans rallying to a common cause. Remember that soccer team stuck in the Thai cave? But this was different, and it felt like a charade, like total bullshit. Because if I knew the sub was gone, plenty of other people did, too. So where was that coverage?

James Cameron confirmed as much after the °Õ¾±³Ł²¹²Ōā€™s implosion was finally announced, when he told Anderson Cooper that heā€™d known since Monday, too. For Cameron, it started with a hunch. Implosion was the only explanation that fit the facts he knewā€”a sudden loss of communication and tracking, all at the same time. And when he shared that theory with friends in the submersibles community, he was told about the detection of a ā€œloud noise consistent with an implosion event.ā€ By the Navy. But the Navy was also apparently telling people close to the situation that the results were ā€œnot definitiveā€ā€”which is to say that, as much as it sounded like something had imploded, right around the time the Titan vanished, there was no way to be 100 percent sure until someone had visual confirmation of the wreckage. And the only way to do that was to get a deep-diving remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to the site. No one knew how long that would take.

For three days, I told people the sub was lost while growing increasingly confused about what the hell was going on. Was this an intentional charade, and if so, to what end? Or was that original intelā€”from the most dependable of sourcesā€”somehow wrong?

The noises did apparently create some hopeā€”and panicā€”on the Polar Prince, the °Õ¾±³Ł²¹²Ōā€™s support ship. McCallum later told me that this particular twist ā€œreally did their heads in,ā€ because there was no way for the crew to zero in on the soundsā€™ precise location. The mood onboard Wednesday, he said, was ā€œfrantic,ā€ and heā€™d been forced to consider something that had previously seemed impossibleā€”that the Titan, somehow, was stuck in the water somewhere between the seafloor and surface.

This, to any deep-sea explorer, is basically an impossible idea. The crafts themselves are negatively buoyant. Theyā€™re either sinking or theyā€™re rising. To be stuck in the middle? That was mind-bending. McCallum and his friends around the world stretched for explanations. Perhaps thereā€™d been a partial flooding on the sub, or perhaps the crew had been unable to drop all of its ballast. The most plausible guess to explain how the Titan could be lost somewhere out there, he said, would be that the sub was somehow slowed during its ascent. In this scenario, it could have been pulled by currents far outside the search areaā€”an outcome ā€œtoo ghastly to contemplate,ā€ McCallum said, because in that hypothetical, the sub could reach the surface and not be found in the vast search area that was involved.

Meaning that the passengers inside could possibly see the outside but not reach it, because the °Õ¾±³Ł²¹²Ōā€™s design didnā€™t allow passengers to open the hatch. They would suffocate while staring out the porthole at the air they desperately needed. Think about that for a minute.

Hearing that the mood was frantic on the Polar Prince fixed my sense that maybe OceanGate was responsible for the disconnect between perception and realityā€”that there was some incentive for the company to keep hope alive, for PR or insurance purposes. According to McCallum, the crew on the mission had never given up hope.

It wasnā€™t until I stumbled into some back-and-forth between Navy guys on Twitter that I really understood what was happening, though. Because of my book, I follow submariners, Special Operators, and naval historians, and a few of them had been pulled into arguments about possible conspiracies. People had all kinds of ideas about why the whole search could be a lie, ranging from ā€œthe Navy was afraid to reveal the secret acoustic sensorsā€ to ā€œthe Biden administration wants to drown out the latest Hunter Biden scandal.ā€

What moved me was this idea, stated by a few of these guys: sure, the acoustic anomaly could be an implosion, and probably it was, but until that could be visually confirmed by an ROV locating the wreckage, you have to assume thereā€™s some chance of an alternate outcome. Because imagine this scenario: they call off the searchā€”or never start itā€”declare the sub imploded and lives lost, and then a few days later the Titan is found wedged under the the Titanic wreckage, or worse, bobbing on the surface somewhere just outside the search zone, containing five humans whoā€™d all suffocated. Even if the chance of that being the case was 0.001 percent, you have to search.

And what about the major TV news organizations? They had all leaped to the search narrative. At least one put a countdown clock on the screen anticipating when the °Õ¾±³Ł²¹²Ōā€™s oxygen would run out. ā€œWe didnā€™t know,ā€ a breaking-news producer at one of the leading networks told me. ā€œI mean, any smart person could deduce that it probably wasnā€™t going to end well.ā€ But at her network, anyway, there was no prevailing sense that the Titan had been destroyed early on. And if someone did know this, the opinion wasnā€™t widely shared. There was, she admits, plenty of incentive to buy in to the faint hope of a happy ending. Viewers loved it. Ratings are monitored on a minute-to-minute basis, and when a story gets traction, a network will stick with it. ā€œIt was a feeding frenzy, and ratings were high,ā€ she says. ā€œNews organizations are a business,ā€ and the longer the search dragged on, the more people devoured it. ā€œThatā€™s the sad reality of corporate media in America.ā€

The finding confirmed what McCallum had originally surmised, based on the information he received Sunday night, half a day after the Titan vanished. The same thing heā€™d told me on Monday morning. ā€œIā€™m a professional expedition leader,ā€ he said by phone, from a location off Papua New Guinea. ā€œI strongly believe in logic and in Occamā€™s razorā€”that the simplest explanation is the one. We had the report that it had imploded. We had the report of the loss of comms, loss of tracking. We had the report of them dropping weights and bolting for the surface.ā€

The tapping sound had thrown everybody off, and it couldnā€™t simply be dismissed. ā€œBut it was always just that they imploded at 3,500 meters [about 11,500 feet],ā€ he said. ā€œThatā€™s why they were found where they are, which is exactly where they were supposed to be. They wouldā€™ve been on a glide path to land on the seabed, a few hundred meters in front of the bow. And then you approach the bow and thatā€™s the wow moment. Thatā€™s the money shot.ā€ The experience people pay $250,000 to have.

ā€œStockton thought he was going to be the Elon Musk of the ocean,ā€ Victor Vescovo told me. ā€œAnd he ignored not just a warning here and there, but the industry as a whole was saying, ā€˜Dude, you need to stop doing this.ā€™ People keep asking me, ā€˜Why didnā€™t people stop him?ā€™ Because thereā€™s no international police force on the high seas. You can do whatever you want.ā€

Vescovo and McCallum and Cameron have all expressed concern about what this catastrophe might do to the entire industry. Not so much for themā€”because they work on private expeditions and build their vessels to extreme levels of safety. But smaller commercial operations that take tourists out to even shallow depths could suffer.

Operations like the one run in the Bahamas by Karl Stanley. Stanley was out on an early test of the Titan, with Rush, in April 2019 and got freaked out by some sounds he was hearing in the hull. He told reporters that he couldnā€™t stop thinking about those sounds and went so far as to try and dissuade Rush from going forward with his Titanic trips. Hereā€™s what he wrote to Rush, in an email obtained by The New York Times: ā€œA useful thought exercise here would be to imagine the removal of the variables of the investors, the eager mission scientists, your team hungry for success, the press releases already announcing this summer’s dive schedule.ā€ In other words: Please donā€™t rush and cut corners because of external pressures. You have to get this right.

Itā€™s basically what McCallum had been trying to tell Rush for years. He remembers one lunch, three or four years ago, when Rush explained why he didnā€™t need to get the Titan certifiedā€”that his system of strain gauges that provided real-time monitoring of the carbon-fiber hull was all the safety he needed. ā€œI was incredulous,ā€ McCallum says. ā€œI said, ā€˜Dude, you are standing way too close to the edge.ā€™ā€

Vescovo said, ā€œI think it is very important for people to note that for the last 50 years, there has never been a loss of life or even a serious personal injury in any deep-diving submersible operation until now. And this is the only submersible that flouted those conventions and [Rush] said, ā€˜We donā€™t need to certify this submarine. It takes too long. Itā€™s too expensive and itā€™s not necessary.ā€™ And so in many respects, this was a bit of a rogue operation, and hopefully this incident will curtail that so that we go back to having a well-developed submersible like mine, [or] others that are very, very safe, because we do need humans to explore the ocean.ā€

The post The False Hope That the °Õ¾±³Ł²¹²Ōā€™s Passengers Might Have Been Saved appeared first on ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų Online.

When I went to Fairbanks to visit Lance Mackey last winter, I knew I was meeting one of dog-sled racingā€™s greatest champions on the downslide of his success. Even so, the relentlessly optimistic Mackey was feeling good about his chances at a comeback.

It didnā€™t happen, and since then Mackey has endured more than his share of setbacks. Zorro, the beloved long-time anchor of his kennel, died in June. Last week came news that Mackey himself was back in the hospital, a place he knows all too well. Radiation from the cancer treatments that saved Mackeyā€™s life back in 2001 had caused most of his teeth to fall out and severely weakened his jawbone, but now he had to undergo surgery to remove the last two teeth he had. He was also two-thirds of the way through a series of 30 hyperbaric-oxygen treatments that could strengthen his jawbone enough to support artificial teeth.

Mackey has health insurance, but it apparently doesnā€™t cover oral surgery. He recently told a reporter for the Alaska Dispatch that for this and subsequent treatments. Musher Kirsten Ballard , and fans of Mackey have already contributed more than a third of the total. ā€œWhy am I doing it?ā€ Ballard said to the Dispatch. ā€œBecause Lance wonā€™t ask and because I care.ā€

Read more about Lance Mackey and his quest to keep on mushing.

The post Mackeyā€™s Hard Times Continue appeared first on ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų Online.

It takes a sharp blade to cut a frozen beaver into easily digestible strips. If the Hobart Corporation, maker of fine commercial kitchen appliances, ever shoots a TV ad for its band saws, it should definitely feature the one Lance Mackey uses in his dog yard. Half-buried in icy, urine-stained snow, it is tasked daily with slicing up whole skinned beavers, along with halal-certified lamb chunks, 50-pound blocks of ground chicken and beef, and big king salmonā€”all of it frozen as solid as the rolling countryside near Fairbanks, Alaska, where any wintertime temperature above minus 20 degrees, Mackey told me, is tropical.

Beaver isn't the kind of meat you can buy over the counter, but Mackey's mom has a good connection, a trapper down around Anchorage. Which is fortunate, since beaver, a pungent dark meat loaded with oil, is a musher's secret weapon. One of the great challenges of the sport is shoveling enough calories into your dogs, incredible endurance athletes that need to consume between 10,000 and 14,000 calories a day when they're running. Some stop eating for various reasons, and that's when you dish up the beaver. “Even a stubborn dog can't resist it,” Mackey said.

As he sawed away, the 43-year-old Mackey certainly looked like a guy who'd spent thousands of hours standing upright on a sled pointed into blasts of Arctic wind. He is thin and resolute, like a chew toy made of jerky. He has a windburned face with ice blue eyes that are often bloodshot, half-moon creases on either side of his mouth, and a brown goatee that's surprisingly trim and tame. The right side of his face and neck are sunken, the result of numerous cancer surgeries that scooped out most of the tissue between skin and bone. Mackey usually wears a baseball capā€”even when he's mushing, when he tucks it under a fur-trimmed hoodā€”and he keeps his long, infrequently washed hair in a ponytail that stretches down to his spiky shoulder blades.

Because of the frigid winters in the hills north of Fairbanks, where Lance Mackey's sits on five scruffy acres, the massive quantities of bulk meat stacked around the saw require no special storage. Which is also good, since Mackey will have to cut up nearly 6,000 pounds just to provision the two big races he was planning to enter when I visited him in January of 2013: the Yukon Quest and the . These brutal, 1,000-mile slogs happen only a month apart, in early February and early March, and it used to be that few mushers would dare to tackle both in a single season. Winning them in the same year was considered impossibleā€”until Mackey did it in 2007. And then did it again in 2008.

Had he done nothing else, Lance Mackey would be a legend for that accomplishment, but he ended up winning both races four times and taking the Iditarod an unprecedented four years in a row, from 2007 to 2010. “I would say he is the all-time great,” says 2009 champ Sebastian Schnuelle, who recently quit racing due to the challenges of competing in an all-consuming but low-paying sport.

Operating a kennel with 80-some dogs is exhausting work, and much of the food prep and poop disposal in recent winters has been left to a pair of young handlers whom Mackey often referred to as his “sons.” Cain Carter, 21, is actually the son of Mackey's ex-wife, Tonya, a longtime mainstay at the kennel who was expelled during an ugly split in 2011. Braxton Peterson, 26, is the ex-boyfriend of one of Carter's two older sisters. He moved in with the Mackey family back when they lived on the Kenai Peninsula and then came along in 2006 when they relocated to the property outside Fairbanks. At one time, all six humans, plus seven house dogs, were crammed into a two-room cabin with no running water or electricity. When I visited Comeback Kennel, Carter and Peterson were the only other people still around full-time.

The boys are sled racers themselves (both have completed one Iditarod), as well as pot-smoking buddies, self-professed ladies' men, and amateur rappers who record hip-hop songs (mostly about dogs) under the name the Musherz. Each has a nearly shaved head and a profusion of tattoos, several of which were obtained the previous summer while working on a tugboat off the coast of San Diego. Mackey sent the two of them south to earn money to fund their racing, but they blew any money they made. Thus, neither would be racing in the winter of 2013, and Mackey wasn't too thrilled about it.

But then Mackey didn't seem thrilled about much of anything by the time I got to Alaska. He was just three years removed from his fourth Iditarod win, and yet he was struggling. Dog food costs him more than $30,000 a year, and that's after generous contributions from his feed sponsor, Red Paw, plus bulk discounts and a network of friends and family who help provide some of his more expensive meats. “This is top-quality lamb,” Mackey said, kicking a box stamped HALAL. “I'm not feeding the boys lamb, I promise you.”

Though he makes money from racing, sponsorship, and mushing instruction, Mackey's ledger was solidly in the red, in keeping with dog racing's ongoing financial woes. Across the sport, purses have been going down, mainly because of recessionary impacts on sponsorship. The winner of the 2013 Yukon Quest would get only $19,000, and the $50,400 winner's check at the Iditarod, the sport's Super Bowl, wasn't much better. “It's a fucking joke,” Mackey said. “Don't get me started. I've won as many races as anyone, and I'm broke-ass.”

Preparing for and traveling to a race is a five-digit proposition. The only way to win the Iditarod is to show up with a team of dogs hardened by a season of competition, who have endured endless pain and crappy weather and technical problems and emerged with the knowledge that bad times are ephemeral. To do that means entering races with small purses, races that cost money even if you win. “Spending $100 to win $20 gets old in a hurry,” Mackey said. Going into 2013, his pride and ego didn't require that he win, but if he couldn't at least be competitive, he was certain to shed both fans and sponsors.

As he prepared for the season's two biggest events, Mackey was at a breaking point. Racing dogs is his one true love, but the grind was becoming intolerable. “This is who I am. This is what I do,” he said. “I know there'll be down days and years. But financially you can only handle so many of those before you're forced out.”

Mackey likes to say that he was “born into the sport of sled dogs,” which is very nearly true. His mother placed fourth in the Women's North American Championships in 1970, when she was seven months pregnant with him. His father, Dick, cofounded the Iditarod and won the race in 1978 by a single second, still the closest margin ever. Five years later, Lance's older brother, Rick, also won. For both Mackeys, it happened on their sixth try, and they both wore the same bib number Lance would later use: 13.

Lance was a promising junior musher known for a near psychic connection to his dogs, but he went astray as a teenager. As he recounted in , he left the sport, worked briefly above the Arctic Circle at his father's oil-camp truck stop, and then spent a decade as a fisherman, working and drinking and abusing drugs. He was drifting further away from a decent life when, in 1997, he reconnected with Tonya, an old high school friend whose substance-abuse problems were at least as bad as his.

Tonya had three small children in tow, but Mackey married her inside of a few months and embraced the entire crew. For a short time, the two wayward souls indulged each other's bad habits. Then, in 1998, they decided to clean up together, picking Lance's birthdayā€”June 2ā€”as the end of one era and the start of another. He was 27.

They moved to the Kenai Peninsula, south of Anchorage, and lived in a shack on a beach owned by a friend. They were so poor that Tonya cut her daughters' hair short because the family couldn't afford shampoo. But Lance, Tonya once wrote, “was like an erupting volcanoā€”the energy of his personality had to go somewhere.” Over time he made enough money fishing to buy a piece of land and build a small cabin, and there he reconnected with sled dogs.

Mackey entered sprint races and slowly began to build his own kennel, using, he says, “dogs that nobody else wanted,” plus a single very accomplished bitch, “a trotting dynamo” named Rosie that he bought for $100. He bred Rosie to a star dog from a friend's kennel, and when it came time to split the litter, he picked first and chose Zorro, “a little furball” mutt who would become the genetic foundation of Mackey's kennel, the linchpin of some of his greatest teams, and one of the most famous dogs ever to run across Alaska.

By 2001, Mackey felt accomplished enough to enter the Iditarod, but he was also troubled by chronic pain in his jaw and neck. He was sure it was just a bad tooth, and when a dentist agreed, Mackey went ahead with the race, only to have the pain become excruciating on the trail. After finishing 36th, Mackey was referred to a specialist, who told him he had cancerā€”squamous-cell carcinoma, which can be caused by excessive sun exposure or tobacco useā€”in his jaw and neck.

In short order, a surgeon removed a fistful of tissue from Mackey's face and neck, as well as his interior carotid artery, his salivary glands, and most of a large muscle that supported his right arm, causing it to go partially limp. Radiation treatments weakened him more. He lost ten teeth, and because neck tissue is full of connecting nerves, he suffered damage to his hands and feet that caused chronic pain and a susceptibility to cold, which poses a problem in his line of work.

The massive extraction left only a thin layer of skin covering one of the main arteries to Mackey's brain. Just being around dogs could be perilous, he was told. “If you were standing in the ER with a team of physicians, and a dog jumped up and scratched your neck,” one doctor said, “we would not be able to save you.” What's more, without salivary glands, Mackey would have to carry water at all times just so he could swallow.

And yet, only six months after surgery, Mackey made plans to enter the 2002 Iditarod. He shouldn't have been anywhere near the race, but he endured 440 excruciating miles before bowing out, mainly because the Ensure he carried to pour into his feeding tube kept freezing, making it almost impossible for him to eat.

Mackey was too broke to run the Iditarod the following year, so he focused on strengthening himself and his team. He stretched out his distances and ran a full circuit of races, and in 2004, he finished 26th in the Iditarod. But his real focus was on 2005, when he planned to make his first attempt at the Yukon Quest, a rugged, mountainous race from Fairbanks to Whitehorse, Yukon, that follows the route of the Klondike Gold Rush and is even more grueling than the Iditarod. It paid offā€”he won.

Few mushers had ever run the Quest and the Iditarod in the same year; conventional wisdom held that it was just too hard on dog teams, let alone humans. But Mackey noticed a funny thing about his dogsā€”the more he ran them, the stronger they seemed to become. The year of his first Quest victory, he finished seventh in the Iditarod. Mushing fans were astonished.

Mackey repeated as champion of the Quest in 2006 and won his third straight in 2007. And thenā€”in his sixth attempt, just like his father and brotherā€”he won the Iditarod, becoming the first person to win both races in the same year. “I couldn't do any wrong with them,” he later recalled about his team. “I could feed them parts of cigarettes and they'd stand up, thank me, and go again. I'd sleep in at checkpoints. Everything you could possibly do wrong, I did.”

Mackey had to overcome serious problems during that raceā€”at one point, one of his sled skis snapped off, and he had to repair it using an old rotting ski that he found behind a shed. But somehow he finished with a two-hour lead.

The next year the team was just as powerful, and Mackey pulled off his historic two-peat. As Frank Gerjevic, a member of the Idita-rod Hall of Fame selection committee, said when inducting Mackey in 2009: “He could start breeding cats tomorrow and still belong in the Hall of Fame. Iditarod and Quest in one year? Twice? Mold broken. Bar raised.”

Heading into 2011, Mackey had a chance to join Rick Swenson, the so-called King of the Iditarod, by becoming the only other five-time winner in the race's history. He finished 16th and came in for surprisingly strong criticism in Alaska.

“Suddenly, the dominant, once-feared musher had become something of an also-ran,” said a writer for the , even though 16th is hardly a terrible result. Things got worse from there. Mackey's top lead dog at the time, Maple, went into heat just before the 2012 Iditarod, and the males on his team wore themselves out trying to get to her. The dogs wouldn't eat, became dehydrated, and could barely jog. At one point, Braxton Petersonā€”racing for the first time and hoping only to finishā€”passed him.

Mackey fell so far back that he was in contention for the Red Lantern, a joke award given to the last-place finisher. But he scratched and clawed and finished 22nd, never complaining about his hard luck. To the surprise of many, he even showed up at the post-race banquet. “What are you going to do?” he said. “Cry in your beer?”

Arranging to meet Mackey in person was an endurance event in its own right. He has no manager, so you have to reach him by telephone, which doesn't work too well, since he rarely answers and his outgoing message usually says: “I'm on a run, call me back.”

I tried to connect with him for two months, racking up a calls-to-callbacks ratio of around twenty to one. I was finally able to persuade him to circle a couple of days on his calendar, and I booked a flight to Fairbanks on short notice. After 11 hours in a plane, I drove on a dirt road through heavy snow the next morning to Comeback Kennel, where I expected to find Lance. Instead, I was greeted at the door by Peterson.

“Lance is out on a run,” he told me. “He left last night. I have no idea when he'll be back.” He shrugged and asked if I wanted to come inside anyway. I sat at the kitchen table as he and Carter got the day going with bong hits and eggs, then excused themselves to go clean dog pens.

If Mackey was around, he might have joined in on the wake and bake. It's old news in Alaska that the renewed push for drug-testing enforcement prior to the 2010 Iditarod was the result of complaints from fellow mushers about Mackey's not-even-kind-of-secret pot use on the trail, which he did mainly to ease his pain. (He was also accused of blowing pot smoke in dogs' ears to make them hungry.) In particular, Mackey and the boys blame their neighbor Ken Anderson, also a musher, for complaining about it, and Anderson had become such a hated personage around Comeback Kennel that Mackey wouldn't even utter his name, insisting that he be called “my dipshit neighbor.” He is a favorite target in rap songs by the Musherz.

When I finally met Mackey in person, the next day, it was back at the Fairbanks Airport, where he'd gone after his training run to pick up Cindy Abbott, a teacher from San Diego who had hired him to teach her how to race.

Three winters ago, Mackey agreed to mentor Newton Marshall, a 30-year-old from Jamaica who aspired to become the country's first dogsled racer. Mackey managed to get the novice into sufficient shape to finish the Iditarod, using dogs he provided. In the summer of 2012, Abbott contacted Mackey seeking similar help.

Like Mackey, Abbott is lean and wiry. She's also suffering from a diseaseā€”in her case, Wegener's granulomatosis, a rare, incurable, and potentially life-threatening condition that attacks the vascular system. She wanted to prove to herself, in the most extreme way possible, that life could go on despite her condition. She climbed Mount Everest in 2010 at age 51; a year later, she called Mackey to say she wanted to try the Iditarod.

“I started the conversation with 'I climbed Mount Everest last year,'ā€‰” Abbott told me as we all sat together at a Mexican restaurant in Fairbanks. “So he knew that I had some exposure to storms and freezing.” That turned out to be only partial preparation, though. “I didn't think I'd say anything is harder than climbing Everest,” Abbott said, “but this is a lot harder.”

Mackey was busy devouring tortilla chips and salsa. Given his surgeries and skinny frame, I'd assumed he didn't eat much, but in fact he ate like a sled dog, gobbling down a combo platter with an extra beef taco thrown in, then chasing it down with fried ice cream. “I eat constantly,” he said.

Mackey has many idiosyncrasies as a racer. One is that he seems to require almost no sleep. This was central to the strategy he developed with his dog teamsā€”he preferred to run them longer, at slower speeds, than his competitors. The technique resulted in less fatigue, which allowed for briefer rest stops. Mackey stuffs his dogs with the best food he can buy and lets them run slowly while it digests. He calls this “waddling.” Within an hour or two, they're fueled up and flying.

The past two seasons, however, Mackey's teams hadn't been flying. By his math, he now needed to finish in the top three of the big races to stay viable; anything less and he would lose money on the race. Mackey had lost three major sponsors in the previous two years, worth a total of $40,000. “So that had to be made up out of my pocket, out of my race earnings last year, which were $25,000,” he said. “You can do the math.”

Even at the height of his powers, Mackey said, he'd never managed to climb out of the red. “Unfortunately, when I started doing well, I paid some guy named Uncle Sam for about 15 years of taxes that I had never done.” He didn't have insurance when the cancer hit, and he estimates that he's spent more than $700,000 on operations. The only profit he's made in recent years comes from speaking engagements and dog sales, and that money mostly goes into improving his rambling house and dog facilities.

I stated the obvious: it sounded like his finances were perilous.

“I'm going to put it as blunt as I can,” he replied. “If I don't do well this year, I'm done. That's where I'm at. I'm on the verge of bankruptcy.”

A musherā€”even a great oneā€”is only as good as his dogs, and for Mackey, two have risen above the rest. One is Larry, Mackey's longtime team captain and the only dog in history to win the Golden Harness Award as best lead dog at both the Yukon Quest and the Iditarod. Larry, who like all sled dogs is a mix of hardy breeds, is so beloved in the dog-racing world that he has his own fan club. And Lance adores him, but out of the hundreds of dogs he's bred and raised, his favorite seems to be Zorro.

Zorro, from that first litter on the Kenai, was named for the mask-like gray rings that circle his eyes. At 72 pounds, he's big for a sled dog (40 to 60 pounds is more like it), and when Lance decided to develop a team around Zorro, Lance's brother thought he was nuts. But Zorro loved to race, had an insatiable appetite, and never lost any weight, not even on the trail.

Though Zorro rarely led a team, he was a tireless worker who could be counted on for extra horsepower, especially when things got tough. On the 3,000-foot ascent of a peak called Eagle Summit during the 2008 Yukon Quest, it was Zorro who carried the day. When he leaned into his harness and drove the team into the howling winds buffeting the summit, Mackey later recalled, “you could feel the extra gear.”

That race was one of the most difficult of Mackey's career, and he decided that Zorro, then eight, deserved a break. So he left him off the 2008 Iditarod roster with an eye toward bringing him back for a special race, just two weeks later, that would cap what Mackey hoped would be his greatest season. was holding the that year, an occasional event that would have a purse of $100,000. The 2008 running also marked the centennial of a 408-mile race held from 1908 to 1917 on the gold trails of the Seward Peninsula.

At the Sweepstakes, Mackey's team of 13 was capable but not outstanding. He was chugging along in third, trying to figure out what was wrong, when a surprise gust of wind blew his sled into a drift, upturning the basket and spilling dogs into deep snow. The damage to the sled and the team was minimal, but one dog came out of the wreckage with a limp. Unfortunately, it was Zorro.

Mackey had no choice but to carry Zorro with him in the sled basket, even though that meant another 70 pounds his team had to pull. That night they were positioned comfortably on the side of the trail when catastrophe struck: a drunk snowmobiler veered off course and plowed into the sled at 70 miles per hour. “It was like a truck hitting a Pinto,” Mackey told a reporter the next day. At the last second he jumped out of the way, but Zorro was inside when the collision happened. At first his injuries didn't look that severe, but the dog steadily declined: he was lethargic, and his long, lolling tongue seemed stuck outside of his mouth. Mackey arranged to fly him to a vet in Seattle, accompanied by Braxton Peterson, while Mackey stayed behind to deal with legal issues concerning the drunk driver.

By the time Mackey reached Seattle, Zorro's near-death experience had become big news in Alaska and beyond. Unsolicited letters and packages began to arrive at Mackey's home from around the worldā€”ten dollars here, twenty there, plus dog snacks, blankets, and notes of love and encouragement. When Mackey walked into the clinic, he saw Zorro lying in a kennel, connected to IVs, sound asleep. Mackey sat on the floor by the box and said, softly: “Zorro, old buddy, how you doing?” Zorro didn't open his eyes, but he must have known who was speaking. His tail began to thump the box's wall.

When the vets first saw Zorro, they weren't sure he would ever walk again, but Mackey started a rehab process at Comeback Kennel. Six times a day, he and one of the boys would slip a sling under Zorro's midsection and hoist him onto his legs. At first he would collapse immediately, but within a week he was taking tentative steps. Once Zorro worked up to 15 steps, Mackey knew he would walk again.

“His recovery reminded me of my own,” he wrote in his autobiography. “And I recognized that Zorro was stronger mentally than physically.”

Zorro's racing career was over, which was OK, since he was aging into retirement anyway. And as long as Zorro could walk, he could mate. “I told people, and I still believe it, that I could bring Zorro to a cat and come out with great dogs,” Mackey told me. “His genes are that strong.”

It's impossible to say exactly how a musher can go from dominant to average as quickly as it happened to Mackey, but he's not alone. There's a pattern among multiple winners of the Iditarod and the Yukon Quest, in which a musher dominates for a few years and then drops off precipitously. It happened to Susan Butcher, Martin Buser, and Jeff King. Mackey was only the latest in line.

The best explanation is that it's mostly about the dogs. The core of the team that carried Mackey to greatness has by now mostly retired to a life of leisure around the yard. Larry spends his days in one of the few heated buildings on the property, a small shed where Mackey lets his dogs relax after winter runs. Once bullet shaped and erect, Zorro now struggles to make his rear legs move. His back slopes, giving him the slouchy carriage of an old wolf, and tufts of tangled white undercoat burst out from his once rich black fur.

Mackey says he would do anything for Zorro, and he means it. He recalls a night a year or so back when he still had dogs living on a hill up above his house. Two bitches were in heat simultaneously, and Mackey was awakened by a yelping commotion: Zorro was trying to mate them. Mackey hopped out of bed and rushed to provide assistance to a dog who, despite being increasingly frail, was still the carrier of important genes.

“I went out there in my underpants and stood there holding him up until he finished,” Mackey said. “I am not at all embarrassed to say that I jerked his pecker to help him complete the deed.”

As Mackey walked me around the yard one frigid afternoon, he nodded his head at the sprawling collection of dogs, doghouses, and dog stuff. “Every house here is his,” he said of Zorro. “If he wants my bed, I sleep on the couch. If you're on the couch and he wants your seat, I'll tell you to get on the floor.”

Of course, Mackey knew that the future was all about other dogs. If he was going to rebuild his reputation, he had to rebuild his kennel, and that's exactly what he'd been doing for the previous two years, as bad luck, aging animals, and personal issues conspired to impede his racing. Over the fall and winter, he'd been working through his best new candidates, trying to identify which dogs were fast, durable, of sound mind, and willing to eat when he needed them to eat. This is not a simple matter, and there are many factors that go into a great sled dog, none more important than loyalty and trust.

“Time to go see my babies,” Mackey said, spreading love and pats from house to house as he walked among the 18 dogs that made up the kennel's current A-team. Notably absent was Maple, a proven lead dog: she was still nursing puppies from a litter born the previous month. But Mackey would still have Rev, a seasoned leader recognizable by his one and a half ears.

Mackey had 76 homemade doghouses in the yard, and he was in the process of winnowing his inventory down from a high of 120. His policy these days: if a dog doesn't show potential to make his team, or isn't a special veteran who's earned a cushy retirement, it goes up for sale. “I don't have time and money to keep them,” Mackey said.

Happy dogs hopped and yipped as he doled out chunks of frozen salmon. “I have a feeling we'll redeem ourselves,” he said, leaning in so that one of the excited animals could give him a kiss on the face. “Everything has to fall into place, and I'll need a little luck on my side. But the team will be capable.”

Alas, things did not go well at the Yukon Quest. Mackey started poorly, with a promising team that seemed sluggish. He entered the first checkpoint hot on the heels of the leader, Allen Moore, but had fallen to sixth by the time he hit the second stop, in the town of Carmacks. Temperatures were unseasonably warm, his dogs wouldn't eat, and Mackey made the tough decision to start cutting animals from his team, because individual dog health is always more important to him than results. He left four dogs in Carmacks, another at Pelly Crossing, and two more at Scroggle Creek. At the midway point in Dawson Cityā€”more than a full day off the lead and with only seven of his original 14 dogs still strong enough to runā€”he did something he hadn't done since the 2002 Iditarod: he withdrew.

It wasn't even a difficult decision. Still, Mackey was stunned, and embarrassed, and unsure of what would come next. The race was as disappointing as any in his career. In the immediate aftermath, he said he briefly considered walking away from the rest of the season.

“It was a body blow,” he said, “the kidney punch from hell.” What made the failure so hard to accept was that, for the first time since 2010, he was both prepared and confident in his dogs. “I had a good season, good weather, a positive attitude.” His dog team wasn't just big and powerful, it was “probably the best dog team the Quest has ever seen, and they fall apart after 50 miles.”

Everyone who follows the sport talks about Mackey's positive attitude, how well he takes bad luck. But the way he felt in Dawson City was crushing. “I'm not the kind of guy who gives up easily and quits on things, but that was one situation where I felt like I could fuck off and go away. Leave the kennel to the boys and go away somewhere where no one knows me.”

Test results soon revealed that an imbalance of iron from the dogs' supplements had shut down their appetites. Knowing what happened, Mackey said, didn't make it any easier to accept the loss, but it did give him “some peace of mind.”

When Mackey got home, he turned immediately to Iditarod preparations. His primary race team was in shambles, and he had only a few weeks to try and break in new dogs, including at least two that would be racing for the first time. “Right to the big leagues for them,” he said with a chuckle. He had no choice but to temper his expectations. The chances of finishing first with so many unknowns were slim. “It's always a possibility,” he said. “But I'll have my hands full.”

And wouldn't you know it, at the midway point of the 2013 race, who should be the first to arrive at Iditarodā€”the ghost town that marks the halfway point and gives the race its nameā€”but Lance Mackey. He beat his closest chaser, Sonny Lindner, by 91 minutes and had dropped only one dog, Stiffy, because the pup seemed dehydrated. It was an encouraging start.

But Mackey warned everyone that this wasn't the same caliber of team he'd had in his heyday. Soon enough, Mackey began to lose pace, falling to 13th by Unalakleet, a few days away from the finish. By then three more dogs were through. He also lost one of his last remaining teeth: it fell out while he was eating fudge on the trail. A dentist gave him penicillin to ward off infection, plus Tylenol to dull the pain caused by the exposed root, and he was on his way to Nome with a pocket full of pills.

The race turned out to be thrilling, with Mitch Seavey holding off several close pursuers on a soupy trail in unseasonably warm weather to become the oldest winner in history. Mackey wasn't a factor in the end, but he had improved compared with the previous two years, finishing 19th, 13 hours off the lead.

No musher can overcome average or inexperienced dogs, and it's the natural cycle of things that great teams come and go. Whether a particular racer can endure and win again after losing depends on that person's ability to rebuild. Jeff King did it. Rick Swenson's five wins happened over a 14-year span. And Mitch Seavey's only previous win came way back in 2004. “They were willing to rebuild a couple times,” says Sebastian Schnuelle, who provided on-course commentary during the race. “Time will tell if Lance can do that.”

Mackey, he told me, has two strengths that point to an ability to rise again if he wants to. The first is “his phenomenal connection to dogsā€”a spiritual bond. He got more out of dog teams than the rest of us could.” The second is his “immense positivity and drive. Obviously, with cancer, he's had problems few have had and come out on the positive side. And one thing I always noticed: the mental downs that a lot of us experienceā€”the little things on the trail that hurt usā€”don't affect him as much.”

Mackey stayed in Nome for the Iditarod banquet, then flew home to Fairbanks and was once again difficult to reach. I had assumed he was just enjoying the end of a trying race season. But then, in the final days of March, Braxton Peterson wrote a Facebook post that caught my attention. It read: “MCBK Falls. A New Beginning Rises.”

I sent Peterson a note, and he replied that he and Cain Carter had split from the kennel, but he didn't elaborate. A week later, I finally reached Mackey.

He was predictably harried. The boys, he said, were “gone for good.” When I asked why, he replied, “Well, two young boys is about all I really need to say.” He sighed. There was fatigue in his voice, and a mix of sadness and anger. “Some of the things they did aren't acceptable. I had my fair share of bullshit when I was young, so I can relate. The bottom line is, I can't have it around here. Bad for business. Bad for reputation. Bad for the dogs.”

Mackey had lined up some handlers to help socialize a big group of puppies and juveniles while Mackey and his girlfriend, a cellist, went on a speaking tour. I reminded him of what he'd told me during my visit, that if he didn't win one of the two races, or at least place high, he was going to quit. “I assume you've changed your mind,” I said. His reply floored me.

“No,” he said. “In fact, I sold my main team when I got done. I'm taking a couple years and regrouping. See some new things, get my interest and enthusiasm back. And make some money. I'm broke as shit.”

I mentioned something he'd said during the race, that his team was raw but capable of winning in 2014. “Oh, that team could win,” he said. “They have a real bright future. But I can't afford to feed, train, and race them adequately.” So he sold 20 of the best dogs to Sonny Lindner, keeping only his five old-guard leadersā€”Rev, Amp, Munch, Mare, and Mapleā€”plus the 55 puppies. If he should decide to race again, he said, “I'll have a helluva team in a couple years.”

This was exactly how he'd started back in 2002, with puppies he bred personally. “That's what I'm doing again,” he said. “I'm hitting reset. I cleaned houseā€”handlers, ex-wife, the old dogs. It's a complete start-over.”

When I pressed for more details about his Iditarod experience, he was reluctant to get into it. “I had some highs and very low lows,” he said. “To put it bluntly, last year sucked ass, and this was no different.”

In the end, it was as simple as Mackey had framed it back in January: he was busted.

His tone sagged. Mackey didn't seem embarrassed to tell me this, but the reality of it was hurting him. “When I loaded those 20 dogs in Sonny's truck, that was the hardest day of my life,” he said. “I've been through some bullshit, but that was the hardest thing I've ever done. Those were my babies.”

Mackey said he was certain he could have won the Iditarod with that team, possibly as soon as next year, but that personally he wouldn't be able to get them ready. “Sonny has money, he won't skimp on food. I can watch them in action.” He said that Lindner's would be “the team to beat” next year. He pointed out that all of the best teams running today were “winning with dogs or breedings from my kennel. That's pretty satisfying.”

Mackey revealed that, honestly, he hadn't even wanted to run the 2013 Iditarod. “It was just another bad year for me,” he said. “I had more lows the past three years than highs. I needed to step back, take a breather, and get my love back for the sport.

“I'll just get back to what I know,” he said. “That's having fun. I didn't start this to win Iditarod. I started to have fun with dogs.”ĢżĢżĢżĢżĢżĢżĢżĢżĢżĢżĢżĢżĢż

is the author of and a longtime contributor to ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų.

The post Lance Mackey: The World’s Toughest Athlete appeared first on ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų Online.

From choosing the right breed to buying the right gear, here's what you need to know.Ģż

ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų Training 101

1. When you're packing into a campsite, your dog should carry its own food and water. If you're in a leave-no-trace area, it should also pack out its own waste.
2. Which reminds us: pick up your dog's poop anytime it's visible from the trail.
3. Dogs generally overheat much faster than humans. If you're hungry or thirsty, chances are your dog is, too.
4. You aren't the only one who can get injured. If you're headed into the backcountry, pack a pet first-aid kit.
5. If the terrain you're trekking through is rough and jagged, check periodically for cuts and scrapes on paws. Spray-on remedies, like Pet Care's Liquid Bandage ($7), work well in a pinch.
6. If your dog comes when it's called within two commands, doesn't chase wildlife, and never jumps on or runs directly at other people, it can be off-leash. Otherwise, keep it tethered.
7. It's never too late to train your dog.

Pick the Right Breed

Australian Shepherd

• Type: Cattle dog
• Personality: Exuberant, bold, brave
• Pros: Aussies are independent thinkers with no real chase instinct (they work herds by staring them down, not nipping). That makes them good companions for dynamic, fast-paced activities.
• Cons: High-energy; heavy shedders; thick coats prone to burs and matted fur (but also resistant to brush, thorns, and water)
• Best Suited To: Hiking, running, skiing, kayaking, and especially mountain biking
• Similar Dogs: Border collie, blue heeler

British Labrador Retriever

• Type: Sporting dog
• Personality: Friendly, loyal, affectionate
• Pros: America's most popular dog is trainable, loving, and social. British labs are generally smaller and leaner than their American cousins and are thus better adapted to endurance sports.
• Cons: Can put on weight if they don't get enough exercise; not the fastest dogs around, but will run until they drop; hip dysplasia
• Best Suited To: Most sports, particularly boating: they're excellent swimmers
• Similar Dogs: Chesapeake Bay retriever, golden retrieverĢż

Siberian Husky

• Type: Sled dog
• Personality: Smart, stubborn, occasionally aloof
• Pros: Strong, tough, and durable, Huskies are bred to pull sleds over long distances. Given the right conditions, they'll work forever. You'll have a hard time finding a better dog in the snow.
• Cons: Prey drivenā€”will chase virtually any animal that crosses their path; can be destructive if left alone; prefer cooler weather; tend to bark a lot
• Best Suited To: Skiing, snowboarding, snowshoeing, hiking, and mountaineering
• Similar Dogs: Alaskan malamute, Samoyed, chow chow

English Setter

• Type: Hunting dog
• Personality: Affectionate, happy, almost goofy
• Pros: Athletic and motivated, with a deeply ingrained hunting instinct, setters are gentle and tolerantā€”and they're great with kids.
• Cons: Birding instinct is so hard-wired that it can be difficult to work around when training; affectionate nature can make them sensitive; fairly heavy droolers
• Best Suited To: Running, hiking, boating, and hunting
• Similar Dogs: Irish setter, springer spaniel, German shorthaired pointer

Poodle

• Type: Water dog
• Personality: Friendly, playful, obstinate at times
• Pros: Extremely smart, poodles are also solid swimmers, are comfortable around guns, shed minimally, and are hypoallergenic. The largest sizeā€”standardā€”is the best bet for rugged outdoor pursuits.
• Cons: Energetic and prone to boredom if you don't keep them entertained; can be mischievous
• Best Suited To: Hunting, fishing, and boating
• Similar Dogs: Portuguese water dog, Irish water spaniel

*Mutts are also a good option. Breed characteristics will still be apparent, however. Choose a mix that fits your lifestyle.

There Are No Unteachable Dogs

First know this: dogs don't sit, stay, or heel because they think it's the right thing to do. They do it because those habits have been ingrained through training. Here are the basic principles: command, behavior, mark, reward. Every time your pup sits, say “good” and give it a treat, either a small piece of food (liver treats or popcorn are good) or a pat on the head. By saying “good,” you're marking the behavior: your dog will quickly realize that “good” means food or attention. Eventually, it will realize that every time it sits, it gets a “good” and then a treat. At that point, add in “sit.” Before long it will all come together: “ā€‰'Sit' (the command) means I should sit (the behavior), because that means I'm going to get a treat (the reward).” It's a simple formula, but it's also the most fundamental one. From there you can move on to “here,” “heel,” “leave it,” “down,” “beer me,” and all the other crucial commands.

Prevent the Most Common Injuries

Ski edges (11%): Avoid slicing your dog by bringing it only when you cross-country or skate-ski. (Most nordic skis don't have edges.)

Poisonous plants (11%): Dogs that forage aren't getting a proper diet. Feed your dog grain-free dog food (no corn or gluten). It's more expensive but healthier.

Cars (18%): Use rewards to train Fido to do two thingsā€”to come when called and to heel on command, especially at trailheads and intersections. If your dog is at heel and you stop, it should stop, too.

Exercise injury (29%): To avoid ACL tears and other mishaps, feed puppies food with a protein-to-fat ratio of about two to one, for bone and joint development, and keep hikes longer than two miles to a minimum.

Dogfights (19%): Get your puppy used to unfamiliar dogs. Talk to and shake hands with another dog's owner, demonstrating that the two of you are in charge, then tell your dog, “Go say hello.”

Follow These Sport-Specific Tips for Worry-Free Play

Mountain Biking:ĢżYour dog should be a running breed (pointer, heeler, husky) and in good shape. Otherwise joint damage and arthritis could be in its future. Train your dog to follow two feet behind your rear wheel. And if you're riding hard or bombing steep descents, leave it at home.

Trail Running:ĢżThe key is good recallā€”your dog's ability to come back to your side on command. Train your dog to recall at a turn in the trail, so it doesn't encounter something before you do. If it gets excited when you come upon other runners or dogs, train it with the command “leave it.”

Whitewater Rafting:ĢżStick to mellower stretches of water (generally, nothing over Class III), get your dog a flotation device, and designate a spot for it to sit. Create a target in the boat (a life jacket or a dog bed) and repeatedly lead your dog to it, rewarding it when it stays. Familiarize your dog with currents by playing ball in the eddy line. For more tips and trip ideas, check out .

Backcountry Skiing:ĢżSkis have razor-sharp edges that can cut pups' tendons. Your dog should be able to heel at least two feet behind you on the way downā€”or wait at the top of the hill until you've descended before following. And get dog booties: snow can cause your dog's pads to abrade to the point of bleeding. Get your dog used to wearing them by putting them on at feeding time for a few weeks before heading out. Our testers' favorites: Bark'n Boots Grip Trex ($70).

The post Dogs Are the Ultimate Outdoor Companions appeared first on ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų Online.

IN THE SECOND WEEK of February, a three-minute teaser for a film called The Art of Flight was posted online. Shot by the Jackson, Wyoming, production house Brain Farm and starring Travis Rice, widely regarded as the worldā€™s best snowboarder, the clip blew upā€”in part due to the formidable Ā­marketing tentacles of Red Bull, the filmā€™s primary backer. Within a week, it had been viewed 1.5 million times, Ā­approximately 1.3 million more times than the trailer for any other snowboarding film in existence. ā€œJustin Timberlake texted me,ā€ Curt Morgan, the movieā€™s 29-year-old director, told me shortly after the clip went viral. ā€œ50 Cent posted it.ā€

Phantom HD

Travis Rice, captured by the Phantom HD.

Cinema Ranger

Brain Farm's Cinema Ranger

Cineflex on a Chairlift

The Cineflex mounted on a chairlift at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort.

Brain Farm

Brain Farm founder Curt Morgan (center) with, from left, Clark Fyans, Travis Rice, Mark Landvik, and Chad Jackson.

Gabe Langlois

Cameraman Gabe Langlois.

Scotty Lago

Pro snowboarder Scotty Lago.

Travis Rice

Pro snowboarder Travis Rice.

Pat Moore

Pat Moore goes big in the Snake River Mountains.

Ģż

Hold that thought: 50 Cent posted a link to a trailer for a snowboarding film?

Certainly Flight, which premieres September 7 at New York Cityā€™s Beacon Theater, was reaching a much broader audience than any snowboarding film had before, but it was also wowing action-sports luminaries. ā€œMind-blowing,ā€ said Ā­Annie Fast, editor in chief of Transworld Snowboarding. ā€œInsanely beautiful and well crafted,ā€ said Brian Wimmer, director and founder of the X-Dance Action Sports Film Festival.

While the ridersā€™ feats are Ā­astonishing, itā€™s the trailerā€™s cinematography that is the real star of the show. Thanks to a deep-pocketed investor and a tight relationship with Red Bull, which is picking up the filmā€™s entire, undisclosed (but certainly multimillion-dollar) tab, Morgan was able to deploy the same arsenal of high-tech toys used by crews on celebrated docs like Planet Earth and Life, Ā­including a Cineflexā€”a remote-controlled gyro-stabilized Ā­camera that utilizes software developed for the military. One of many beautiful shots in the trailer is of professional snowboarder Mark Landvik launching from a massive kicker and hand-planting off a pine tree that appears to be the height of a small skyscraper. If the sequence had been shot like every other action-sports filmā€”that is, by a single cameraman, maybe two, perhaps from a helicopter, using standard-issue high-definition camerasā€”it would have been extraordinarily cool. But Ā­because Morgan was able to set up a 12-foot jib for one of his newest gizmos, the super-slo-mo Phantom HD Gold (which is capable of turning one second into 60), itā€™s extraordinarily cool and also serenely graceful.

What isnā€™t apparent, of course, is all of the painstaking preparation that went into capturing the sequence. To set up the shot, which was filmed 20 miles from the nearest trailhead in the Snake River Mountains Ā­outside Jackson, Wyoming, it took six guys on sleds three days to break trail for the camera crew, then another full day to shuttle in the 800 pounds of equipment, including 200 pounds of free weights used as ballast for the Phantomā€™s jib arm. Once everything was in place, a team of 10 to 12 guysā€”Ā­including Rice, Ā­Landvik, and Olympic halfpipe bronze medalist Scotty Lagoā€”spent four more days moving an estimated 80 tons of snow to build the 20-foot kicker Landvik and company would launch off.

ā€œIn the commercial world,ā€ Morgan told me a few days after I watched his crew methodiĀ­cally build the ramp, ā€œthat one jump would cost a half-million dollars.ā€ For Morgan, it was just another day on location for Flight (which as of early July was still in postproduction). Over the past two years, when not directing commercials for blue-chip clients like Visa and shooting scenes for Hollywood films like Jackass 3D, Morgan and crew have been following Rice, Landvik, and a revolving cast of snowboardingā€™s cool kids around the planet.

Already, theyā€™d spent a month and a half in Chile and a month in Alaskaā€™s Tordrillo Mountains, plus stints in Canada and Jackson, with tentative plans to hit British Columbia, Romania, Greece, Austria, and, if they still had the cash, Greenland. Snowmobiles had been crashed, 15 top-of-the-line AStar B3 helicopters rented, and both fireworks and firearms deployed. (Morgan often carries a .50-caliber pistol with him on location.)

Youā€™ll be able to see it all, though not necessarily in the theater. A condition of Red Bullā€™s investment was that Brain Farm produce an accompanying TV show, an eight-episode making-of documentary series. (At press time, Brain Farmā€™s agents were still in negotiations with networks; the yet unnamed series is expected to debut in early 2012.)

All signs point to Flight becoming the biggest action-sports movie of all time, bypassing its groundbreaking precursor, Thatā€™s It, Thatā€™s All, the 2008 film that established Brain Farm as one of the best in the business.
Ģż
ITā€™S WORTH NOTING that raising the bar in the action-sports genre wasnā€™t terribly difficult. Ski Ā­movies tend to all look alike, in large part because there just isnā€™t much money to be made from them. Snow-porn Ā­filmmakers generally scrape by, squeezing money from increasingly cash-strapped endemic sponsors and negotiating reduced rates from resorts and heli- or cat-ski operations in exchange for exposure. Following the business model established by Ā­Warren Miller, the down payment for the next film comes from the previous oneā€™s DVD sales and tour revenue. ā€œMost ski filmmakers are geniuses at doing a lot with a little bit of budget,ā€ says Jack Shaw, a journalist and ski guide whoā€™s written about the history of the genre.

Relatively small budgets, usually in the midā€“six figures for feature-length documentaries made by outfits like Teton Gravity Research and Mack Dawg Productions, naturally limit production values. There have been attempts to break the mold, notably 2005ā€™s First Descent, paid for by Mountain Dew, and 2007ā€™s Steep, an extreme-skiing documenĀ­tary that received a wide theatrical release. Both tanked. The former was boring and repetĀ­Ā­itive and was panned by the filmā€™s core audience and mainstream viewers alike; the Ā­latter was good but ultimately not entertaining enough to reel in the general public.

Flight is a different animal entirely. From Brain Farmā€™s inception in 2008, the Ā­company has played the game by its own rules. Rice and Morgan have been friends since they were both 17-year-olds riding for Rossignol. While Riceā€™s star in the sport ascended, Morgan abandoned it after breaking his back three times in one year. Heā€™d always loved photoĀ­graphy and film, though, and Ā­after Ā­attending some workshops at Maine Media College, he began shooting footage for the Kass brothers, Matt and Danny, the New Jerseyā€“reared bad boys of snowboarding who would go on to found Grenade Gloves. A few years spent making low-budget films burned Morgan out, and in 2002 he moved back to his hometown of Albany, New York, where he spent a year unloading trucks and playing in a metal band. Until his old friend Riceā€”by now pulling in big sponsorship dollars, most notably from Red Bull and Quiksilverā€”Ā­intervened. ā€œTravis called me and said, ā€˜We need to start making movies. I can pay you now. Iā€™ve got money,ā€™ā€‰ā€ Morgan says.

Morgan moved into Riceā€™s house in Jackson, and they began work on their first movie, 2006ā€™s The Community Project. The following year, Morgan and Rice were traveling in New Zealand when they met a film crew that was shooting from helicopters using a revolutionary new camera-stabilization system. The footage blew their minds. A few months later, the two headed back to New Zealand, rented the crewā€™s equipment, and started filming Thatā€™s It, Thatā€™s All.

TITAā€™s stunning visuals, especially those zoom-out-for-miles shots much of the world first saw in Planet Earth, started Ā­attracting notice from non-action-sports clients, but it was an introduction to Joe Sorge, a wealthy biotech entrepreneur with a home in Jackson, that allowed Morgan to build Brain Farm into the Willy Wonka production house it is today. In 2009, over dinner in Los Angeles, Morgan told Sorge about his fantasy of buying an arsenal of cutting-edge production equipment, including his own Cineflex. Sorge agreed to bankroll an incredible lineup of gearā€”including the Phantom, the Cineflex, and an array of other HD and 35mm film cameras (see ā€œThe Toy Chestā€)ā€”in exchange for a portion of the company.

ā€œWe have a lot of money in hardware,ā€ Morgan says. How much? ā€œIā€™m not sure I want to put a figure on it.ā€ He thinks about it for a minute: ā€œYou can say millions.ā€

Brain Farm now has eight full-time employees and a slick headquarters in a modern loftlike building just outside Jackson. Over the past 18 months, in addition to their projects with Visa and for Jackass 3D, Brain Farm worked on an episode of Expedition Wild, a series on the National Ā­Geographic Channel; filmed commercials for Subaru, NBC/Universal, and Quiksilver; and, most recently, shot a two-minute 3-D spot for Red Bull starring the deaf motocross Ā­rider Ashley Fiolek, which aired in theaters ahead of Thor and Pirates of the Ā­Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.

ONE EVENING WHILE I was in Jackson, Morgan suggested we go for a ride in what he calls the Cinema Truck, a Ford F-250 pickĀ­up modified to serve as a rolling platform for the Cineflex. The rig looks menacingā€”blacked out from top to tire and outfitted with what appears to be a large surveillance Ā­device on the roof.

In a sense, thatā€™s what the Cineflex is: a five-axis, extremely-long-distance high-definition camera system developed by the defense industry for spying. Its use is still controlled by International Traffic in Arms Regulations, which required that Brain Farm register it with the State Department.

As Brain Farm producer Chad Jackson steers the truck out onto the road, the camera feed shows up in hi-def on a large screen built into the dash. Morgan twiddles a knob on a remote-control console and the camera spins around to focus on a Subaru trailing us. He zooms in, in, in, until I can just about see the nose hairs of the woman driving. Spinning the camera 180 degrees, he points out a speck in my vision thousands of yards away that turns out to be a bush, and behind it is a mule deer, as crisp as if it were standing on the hood. Itā€™s unbelievable.

ā€œI consider this an endless dolly,ā€ Morgan says. He estimates that he uses the Cineflex in approximately 60 percent of Brain Farmā€™s shots, and though it was initially built to be affixed to helicopters, Morgan has designed custom mounts for a snowmobile, an ATV, a snowcat, and, most recently, a chairlift.

The plan had been for me to tag along as Brain Farm experimented with the new chairĀ­lift mount, shooting Rice and Landvik in-bounds at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, but there wasnā€™t enough new snow. Instead, Morgan and his crew opted to dig in at one of their favorite filming locations in the Snake River Mountains.

For the dayā€™s first major shot, the group selected a gap between some trees at the top of a small canyon. Morgan set up by himself, with the Phantom, to one side. First to go was Landvik, who soared out of the woods and over the edge. He tapped a tree in the air, stomped the landing, and rode down to meet the rest of the crew, which included one guy shooting with a traditional long-lens 35mm camera and another using a VariCam to collect footage for the TV show.

ā€œThat was sick,ā€ Morgan rasped over the radio when Landvik slid to a stop below. ā€œMaybe you can double-tap this time?ā€

Landvik laughed. ā€œHeā€™s so unrealistic,ā€ he said, his speech slurred by a fat lip and 13 stitches heā€™d gotten in a recent crash.

One criticism youā€™ll sometimes hear of Morganā€”who wants every frame to be epicā€”is that he pushes riders too hard, goading them into tricks they might not otherwise attempt.

This turned out not to be an issue for Lago. His jump, which began with a higher, angled Ā­approach, was absolutely huge, and he, too, tapped the treeā€”only he didnā€™t mean to. The glancing blow spun him off-axis, and he found himself 30 feet in the air falling backward, his arms spinning wildly as he tried in vain to stay upright. He crashed in an enormous puff of white. When he Ā­arrived at the bottom, snow was packed into every crevice of his helmet.

ā€œThatā€™s gonna look epic on the Phantom,ā€ Landvik said. ā€œYour arms will spin like 50 times.ā€

ā€œI wanna yell the worst word right now,ā€ Lago said, chucking his helmet. ā€œLetā€™s go build a big fucking jump.ā€

I SKIPPED THE NEXT DAYā€™S shoot, but later that evening I visited Morgan at Brain Farmā€™s editing suite to see how it had gone. ā€œIt got gnarly out there,ā€ he said as he queued up a clip heā€™d been working on. Already heā€™d laid a moody audio track under the action. (Morgan is also helping produce Flightā€™s soundtrack, and heā€™d recently spent a week collaborating with the French musician Anthony Gonzalez, who records under the name M83.) Ā­Slowlyā€”very, very slowlyā€”Scotty Lagoā€™s image Ā­appeared in the frame, and he executed an Ā­impressive-looking trick I didnā€™t recognize.

ā€œThese are some of the biggest airs ever,ā€ Morgan said, noting that what Lago had done was a switch double rodeo 1080. But that wasnā€™t the gnarly part. Upon impact, Lago kneed himself in the faceā€”hard. ā€œScotty broke his jaw, and now itā€™s wired shut,ā€ Morgan said. ā€œWe spent most of the night at the hospital.ā€ And of course: ā€œWe got it all on film.ā€

While Morgan was initially daunted by Flightā€™s TV component, heā€™s grown to enjoy the medium. Making ambitious films is unbelievably complicatedā€”and stressfulā€”but he found that shooting for TV required almost no thought at all. Everything thatā€™s bad for the big screenā€”injuries, fights, logistical snafusā€”is great for the small.

ā€œNow I almost love TV more than film,ā€ he said, adding that with film ā€œit can take a week to get one shot. Thatā€™s stupid. And all the stuff around that is whatā€™s actually interĀ­esting to everyone else.ā€ That said, Brain Farm is still devoting most of its promotional Ā­effort to the film. After Flightā€™s world premiere this September in New York, it will tour the U.S., playing in a mix of bigger cities and ski towns before heading to Canada, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.

Exploiting every possible source of reveĀ­nue, Brain Farm will make the film available simulĀ­taneously through the iTunes Store and as a DVD and Blu-ray set; it will also release a limited-edition coffee-table book, The Art of Light, featuring stills and shots by the rotating cast of set photographers. And this past May, Morgan and Gonzalezā€”under the name the Three Corners of the Earthā€”made a set of songs available on iTunes from their recording sessions, including the one used in the trailer.

In the end, though, Morgan is worried less about the box office than about the filmā€™s critical reception. While he declined to discuss Brain Farmā€™s financials with me, I got the distinct impression that their commercial and Hollywood work now brings in the majority of their revenue, and that Morgan views TITA and Flight as gigantic calling cards heā€™s using to build his companyā€™s Ā­celebrity. If thereā€™s been one major criticism of TITA, itā€™s that, for all its dazzling visuals, itā€™s still just snow porn. There isnā€™t much story.
ā€œOne of the toughest things is to please the coreā€”someone who lives and breathes itā€”while doing something that speaks to the layman,ā€ says Rice.

When I reached Morgan on the phone a few weeks later, he was still tinkering with how much ā€œcharacter component,ā€ as he referred to it, there would be in Flightā€™s final cut. He knows that every wide-angle shot of an epic jump he edits out will alienate the park rats, while every additional minute of character and story will make it more interesting to mainstream viewers.

In the meantime, Wyoming had been getting pummeled with snow. So much, in fact, that Brain Farm ended up delaying its departure for RevelĀ­stoke, and after that Alaska, to finish the Jackson chapter of the film. Theyā€™d scratched Romania, Greece, and Austria from the plan, and Greenland was looking unlikely. While Morgan told me he could probably Ā­assemble the movie then if he had to, he still wasnā€™t sure about the filmā€™s length. When Iā€™d visited him in Jackson, he was leaning toward a feature. Now he wasnā€™t so certain.

Not that any of these issues were keeping him up at night. In part thatā€™s because heā€™s so busy. He was just back from shooting the 3-D Red Bull commercial, as well as a series of ads for the Marines. Or it might be Ā­because heā€™s already begun chewing over his next big projectsā€”including, perhaps, a surf film, a snowboarding movie ā€œbased around Antarctica,ā€ and something shot entirely in 3-D. Or it might simply be that Brain Farm is now successful enough that he doesnā€™t have to do everything himself. ā€œI used to have 40 jobs,ā€ Morgan says. Now he can Ā­orchestrate a shoot and not actually have to be there: ā€œItā€™s dumping out, itā€™s freezing, and Iā€™m eating a hamburger at a deli.ā€

The post Brain Farm’s The Art of Flight appeared first on ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų Online.

Viva South America!
Where the adventure comes in one size: grande

THAT'S NICE, your little Alaska. One-fifth the size of Brazil, but maybe you like modest. The ocean off Hawaii is pretty; too bad the biomass is all in the GalĆ”pagos. Nevada has a lot going for itā€”but not the 11 languages of similar-sized Ecuador.

You don't really want middling and monochrome, do you? No. You'd prefer large. (“Dude, IguaƧĆŗ is almost three Niagaras!”) If you're going to have penguins, why not 500,000 on one beach? (It's called Punta Tombo, Argentina.) You'd like a surfing coast with twice the waves and half the boards? (Southern Ecuador to northern Chile. Not to mention Brazil and Uruguay.)

Yup, for a real adventure, you need an expanse of earth. Something bigger than your dreams. A place where the phrase No es posible still translates as “Oh yeah? Watch this.” Call me when you reach the real Americaā€”the one they call South.

You couldn't build this place in SimEarth: ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų Travel Edition. South America is an immense continent, yet it has the coherence and culture of an island. It is ends-of-the-earth remote, but you can get there in an old VW bus. The cultures are exotic, but they're not incomprehensibly alien. Same for the languages: even five words badly pronounced will get you treated like a hero.

And there's always more of it: scores of islands from Chile to Colombia, a dozen countries, hundreds of indigenous nations, and uncountable dirt roads going to places unknown, at least to you. It is cleaner and greener than North America, at least outside the cities. You don't know what visibility is until you've watched ripples on Lake Titicaca through ten miles of thin air. Speak to me of whitewater when you can pronounce FutaleufĆŗ.

I've hitched the plains of Patagonia, horsed it over the Continental Divide in Chile, and floated remote corners of the Amazon. I drove a motorcycle from Buenos Aires to Lima once and even back again. I also drove a few nails into the cabin I started near the trout rivers of Esquel, Argentina. I've had a lost city in the clouds (Kuelap, Peru) all to myself. In the GalƔpagos, I learned that you stop being scared sometime around the 100th shark. Even Hugo ChƔvez can't keep me out. (Los Roques or bust!) And after 20 years of grazing, I'm still hungry: the 12,000-foot Altiplano, a plateau of northern Argentina, is on my list, along with the wildlife in Brazil's Mato Grosso. Cartagena, Colombia, sounds fun. I've still never made it to Tierra del Fuego. I dream about studying capoeira on the beach in ItacarƩ, Brazil, where the dancing martial art was born.

Fortunately, the place keeps getting bigger. Much of South America is only now opening up; paradoxically, as better economies and new infrastructure have arisen, the supply of places to be discovered has surpassed the demand. There are more turnoffs, more trailheads, more lost corners. There's unpeopled wilderness (Suriname, anyone?) and booty-shaking masses (see: MaracanĆ£ Stadium, Rio). And, yes, in South America they can bring the comfy. You don't have to suffer.

There's a rueful old joke down South America way. God is making the world, and he gives South America too much. He starts with 4,000 miles of cloud-splitting Andes, adds the biggest rainforest in the world and then the largest river by volume. He sticks gold, silver, and oil everywhere. He fills up the oceans. Even the deserts are superlative. (Driest! Highest!) Finally, Saint Peter cries out, “God, slow down. You're giving them way too much!”

The punch lineā€””Don't worry,” God says, “wait till you see the poor people”ā€”is funny to self-deprecating South Americans. But the setup is what matters to us. Somebody made this other half of America too big, too good. Where else is adventure getting better all the time?

Explore the Amazon

Rio Aucayacu

Life on the Amazon's Aucayacu

One of the best ways to experience the Amazon’s incredible array of diversity is at Ecuador’s little-known Huaorani Ecolodge, a solar-powered oasis in the heart of the 1.7 million acres of Amazon owned by the Huaorani, the tribe at the center of Joe Kane’s 1995 book Savages. After a 40-minute flight from the small town of Shellā€”already the edge of civilizationā€”you’ll land in the village of Quehueri’ono (translation: Cannibal River, but don’t be alarmed). Your guide will pole you down the slow-moving Shiripuno in a dugout canoe to the lodge, a traditional palm-thatched dining room surrounded by five simple cabins. There, you’ll learn how to use a blowgun, perfect your machete swing, set traps for monkeys and peccaries, drink the banana-smoothie-like concoction called chucula, and meet the tribe’s visionary leader, Moi EnoĀ­menga. High points: spotting a jaguar on the riverbank while camping on a remote platform under the stars, then getting up before dawn to swim beneath a towering waterfall. Not many tourists have seen the Amazon this way. In fact, two branches of the Huaorani still live in virtual isolation downriverā€”and prefer it that way. Five days, $860 per person, double occupancy;

Fly-Fish Argentina

You could pay an American outfitter five grand to helicopter you to a remote river in Patagonia, point out a fat wild brown trout, and hold your hand while you cast. Or you could throw a decent six-weight fly rod, boots, and some leaders (2x to 5x) in a pack, book a flight to Bariloche, Argentina (Delta and Continental fly through Buenos Aires), and do it yourself. The trout here are bigā€”seven, eight, ten, twelve poundsā€”and the beauty of the place is the dizzying amount of options within a day’s reach. For easy access, the big Rio Limay flows out of the eastern shore of 250-square-mile Lago Nahuel Huapi (day floats with Bariloche-based Outfitters Patagonia, $370; ; bring Woolly Buggers with rubber legs). Want to cast dry flies to rising 16-to-24-inch fish in the vicinity of exactly no one? Book a three-day, 40-mile float on the pristine Rio Caleufu ($1,050 with Outfitters Patagonia). If you’d rather wade-fish without a guide, drive two hours north to the Rio Malleo with a hatful of Parachute Adams and Pheasant-Tail Nymphs. Or drive two hours south of Bariloche and float remote Fonck Lake, where you’ll catch as many 20-inch browns as you wish. (Just don’t go the day after it rainsā€”the road will resemble a milkshake.) If you don’t have access to a boat, make for Espejo Chico Lake, walk around the shoreline, strip Woolly Buggers along the steep ledges, and wait for your rod to do a very big double take.

Climb Bolivia

When talk turns to mountaineering in South America, one peak comes to mindā€”Argentina’s 22,834-foot Aconcagua. But that ignores the spectacular peaks of Bolivia. Mountaineers gravitate toward this country for the same reasons they head to Nepal: One, it’s got soul. And two, with its elevated Altiplano, deep blue skies, and big glaciers, Bolivia feels HimaĀ­layan in scope. Deplane in the 16th-century capital of La Paz and you’re already at nearly 12,000 feet. There, meet your group of Berg ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶųs International guides for a 16-day expedition. After five days of trekking and acclimatizing (and getting blessed by an Aymara witch doctor) on Isla del Sol, in Lake Titicacaā€”where you’ll see the same balsa-wood boats Thor Heyerdahl modeled Kon-Tiki afterā€”you’ll travel to base camp at the edge of a pristine mountain lake in western Bolivia’s Cordillera Real. Depending on weather conditions, avalanche hazard, and the group’s experience, the local guides will choose up to four climbs, from the steep summit ridge of 17,618-foot PequeƱo Alpamayo to the relatively straightforward ascent of Bolivia’s highest peak, 21,463-foot Sajama. If Sajama is a success, attempt 18,700-foot Cabeza de Condor, the Bolivian Matterhorn. Your reward? A soak in nearby hot springs. $3,200;

Bonefish in Venezuela

Los Roques, Venezuela

Snorkeling Los Roques, Venezuela

Welcome to the best place in the world to bonefish: the flats of Los Roques, an old-style Caribbean paradise 80 miles off the coast of Venezuela. Here’s why: only 1,500 people inhabit the 350-island chain, and the surrounding turquoise watersā€”packed with coral reefs, mangrove forests, and sea-grass bedsā€”are the protected Los Roques Archipelago National Park. Hurricanes rarely land here, and with year-round temperatures averaging 81 degrees, there’s never a bad time to cast. Did we mention that during high-tide season, between October and December, you’re likely to catch permit, tarpon, and bonefish all in the same day? When you’re not fishing, kick back deckside at the simple, sophisticated Pez Raton Lodge, a five-bedroom inn with a chef who cooks up a mean lobster. The lodge is just far enough from Gran Roque, the islands’ main village, that you can enjoy solitude or walk to the town square for the islanders’ endless stream of fiestas. For your first visit, go with an experienced fishing outfitter like Frontiers Travel, which, besides leading you to the best fish, can also help you navigate Hugo ChĆ”vez territory. After all, you’re in Venezuelaā€”it’s not dangerous, but traveling can be logistically tricky. Five-night, four-day trips, from $2,795 per person;

Raft Epic Whitewater

The Andes Mountains rise to heights exceeded only by the Himalayas. Here, 5,000-foot canyons seem to dot the countryside like footprints in a sandbox. At the bottom of nearly all of those canyons is a wild, primeval, tempestuous riverā€”a whitewater fanatic’s paradise. Peru, with its combination of native cultures and remote rivers feeding into the Amazon rainforest, is ground zero for exploratory raft trips, where you encounter wildlifeā€”parrots, giant river otters, condorsā€”that is much less surprised to see you than the indigenous locals are (you wave, they stare). Eventually the rafts round the bend and drop in on another set of Class IV rapids. It’s all very civilized, in a Gods Must Be Crazy sort of way. Global Descents offers multi-day trips on the (relatively) easily accessed but still remote Rio Apurimac, near Cusco ($3,500, including an Inca Trail trek; ). Earth River Expeditions has a new trip this year exploring the practically undiscovered Rio Yavero, where Peru’s highlands transform into Amazonian rainforest in a less-than-100-mile stretch ($3,300; ). South America’s most renowned whitewater classic, though, is Chile’s FutaleufĆŗ. The Fu, as it is known, has the unique trifecta of being impossibly clear, massively powerful, and refreshingly brisk. While plenty of companies lead trips on the Fu, only Earth River offers multi-day outings that involve wooden hot tubs, five-star meals, and a night spent above the forest floor in a handcrafted treehouse ($3,300; ).

Find Colombian Ruins

Think of ruins in South America and you think Machu Picchu. Think again. La Ciudad Perdida (the Lost City), in northern Colombia, is one of the most prominent archaeological sites on the continent. And while it’s true that Colombia has had its safety problemsā€”in 2003, eight trekkers were kidnapped at La Ciudad Perdida by the National Liberation Army and held for 101 daysā€”the U.S. State Department reports that security has markedly improved in the past decade. (Just be aware that certain parts of the country remain unsafe, like the border areas and eastern Colombia.) Book a guided tour of the Lost City with Turcol outfitters and you’ll rest easier. I met my guides in the faded coastal colonial town of Santa Marta and began the trek to La Ciudad Perdida, a not-for-the-faint-of-heart five-day, 30-mile journey into the jungled and steep Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. Our group was smallā€”just six of us, a guide, and a few porters. We slept in hammocks at night and trekked through farmland, swam under waterfalls, and crossed the Rio Buritaca nine times (no bridges) before we reached the gateway to the ruins: 1,200 jagged and moss-covered stone steps. We spent two nights at La Ciudad Perdida and were the only ones there. As I stood mud-soaked on the grassy terraces built in the late eighth century that once teemed with the city’s residents, I realized that if La Ciudad Perdida were anywhere but Colombia, it would have thousands of visitors per year. From $270 per person;

Sail The GalƔpagos

Believe the hype. Six hundred miles off the coast of Ecuador, the GalĆ”pagos Islands are like the Garden of Eden before the Fall. With its high concentration of endemic species and virtually zero predators, the wildlife on this archipelago is so at ease that a Nazca booby might waddle up to peck your camera lens. There’s plenty of controversy over the most PC way to see the islands. Hidden Places, owned by writer Maria Coffey and her husband, Dag Goering, has crafted an 11-day itinerary that’s as eco-conscious as they come, thanks to the couple’s local connections and commitment to environmental integrity. You begin in Ecuador’s colonial capital of Quito, where you’ll stay in a family-owned boutique hotel. Once in the islands, you’ll cruise on a locally owned 90-foot yacht that holds only 16 guests, has a state-of-the-art waste-management system, and uses biodegradable products. Your guide, Ernesto Vaca, has been working as a park naturalist since 1989. Along the cliffs of EspaƱola Island, he might point out a pair of waved albatrosses engaged in their mating ritual: clacking their beaks together like swords. You’ll also visit pirate sites, eat barbecue with one of the original GalĆ”pagos settler families, and watch tiny penguins zip past your snorkeling mask. Doubles from $4,850;

Beach-Hop Brazil

Bahia, Brazil

Beach life in Bahia, Brazil

Need to dig your toes in the sand? Take a couple of weeks and beach-hop in Bahia, a northeastern Brazilian state with 685 miles of pristine Atlantic coastline. This colorful region of wild, endless beaches brought the world the martial art of capoeira and the Afro-Brazilian samba. Get a feel for the culture in Salvador, the “happiness capital of Brazil,” a lively 16th-century city where you’ll find laid-back locals, pastel colonial Portuguese casas, and 31 miles of beaches (Busca Vida is a local favorite). Nearby Boipeba, a sleepy island with palm-lined white-sand shores and fishing villages founded by Jesuit priests in 1537, is the perfect place to do nothing but drink fresh coconut water in a beachside hammock at your inexpensive posada between swims. If you want more action, the bustling surf town of ItacarĆ© has a nonstop party atmosphere with plenty of caipirinhas, a drink made from potent cachaƧa, sugar, and lime. Gorge on freshly grilled dorado on spectacular Itacarezinho beach or surf any number of breaks with Easy Drop Surf Camp (). Feel like splurging? The small village of Trancoso is paradise on earth and a low-key vacation spot for the world’s fashionistas. Uxua Casa Hotel (one-bedrooms from $750 per night; ) has nine eclectic casas surrounding the town’s square, all within an easy walk of Trancoso’s eight beaches. Dine at Restaurante Da Silvana, which serves up the best authenĀ­tic Bahian dishes in town.

Ski The Andes

It’s every serious skier’s summer fantasy to make a pilgrimage to Chile, with its intense steeps, untracked powder, and abundant red wine. Book your trip now for the first three weeks in August, after the Chilean July holidays wrap up, leaving the ski areas empty. Start in Portilloā€”where each season the massive yellow Hotel Portillo hosts an eccentric cast of Brazilian heiresses and Austrian ski racersā€”and then head south toward the Lake District. Along the way you’ll find Nevados de ChillĆ”n, where you can ski off-piste powder past hissing, steaming blowholes on an active volcano and tap into the open bowls of Valle Nevado, El Colorado, and La Parva, where hidden gullies shelter powder long after storms. There, if you rent a car, you have the flexibility to do road laps (think DIY cat-skiing). Don’t forget the actual snowcat operation at wild, untamed Arpa, a low-key yin to Portillo’s luxe yang. For a great introduction to Andes skiing, check out professional skier Chris Davenport’s Ski with the Superstars week in Portillo, which features personalized coaching by some of the biggest names in freeskiing, including Mike Douglas, Olympian Wendy Fisher, and Davenport himself ($2,150; ). Admire your lines from the best ski-lunch spot on earthā€”the deck of TĆ­o Bob’s, an old stone shepherd’s hut perched on the edge of a rocky ridge surrounded by the jagged Andes.

Road-Trip Ruta 40

Imagine Route 66 before developmentā€”hell, before pavementā€”and you’ll begin to understand the iconic and oddly pristine nature of Argentina’s Ruta 40 (or La Cuarenta, as it’s locally known). In its entirety, Ruta 40 stretches from the Bolivian border all the way down to the continent’s little toe, in Cabo VĆ­rgenesā€”3,100-plus miles of gorgeous, unpredictable road-tripping that bounces past 18 rivers and 20 national parks, including the Moab-like Calchaqui Valley (home to the ancient ruins of Quilmes) and Talampaya, sometimes called Argentina’s Grand Canyon. Drive it all, or follow the 1,200-mile, weeklong slice I did with a couple of friends a few years back in a rented VW Gol we picked up in the colonial city of Salta. The road skirts the Andes for miles on end, so impromptu jags led us to hikes and trout-filled streams. Often there’ll be nothing for hours, and then the reward of a mirage proves real: the mystically lush valley town of Barreal or the petroglyphs at Talampaya National Park. Do not miss Posada San Eduardo, a charming, modest estate owned by a former Formula One driver in Barreal (Av. San MartĆ­n at Los Enamorados; no phone or website) and La Palmera restaurant, home to the best chivito (roast baby goat) on earth (Ruta 15 at Ruta 40, Villa Union, near Talampaya National Park, no phone or website). Near the finish line, allow for a couple of days in the fecund region around Mendoza, whereā€”I can happily reportā€”you’ll find wines delicious and cheap enough to bring any road trip to a sudden, gluttonous end.

The post Meet The Neighbors appeared first on ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų Online.

Watch a video of Landon Donovan's cover shoot.

Landon Donovan

Dockweiler Beach, Los Angeles, September 2010

Landon Donovan

“Landon grasps the entire concept of what goes into making a fit player,” says Ben Yauss, the Galaxy's strength-and-conditioning coach. “Thatā€šĆ„Ć“s what sets him apart.”

Landon Donovan

Landon Donovan

There is something in the air over Carson, California, and it's not the Goodyear Blimp, which docks at a local landing strip and for years was this Los Angeles bedroom community's hottest attraction. No, on this warm September night there's an energy emanating from the sold-out 27,000-seat Home Depot Center, where the L.A. Galaxy are set to host the New York Red Bulls in what Major League Soccer's PR machine has frothily billed as “the biggest game of the year.” Some might say, in fact, that it's the biggest regular-season game in league history.

For the first time in years, the league's two prime media markets have top teams, and tonight is only the second time that five so-called designated playersā€”basically, big names who aren't subject to the MLS salary capā€”have been scheduled to compete on the same field. The revivified Red Bulls franchise arrived with two new stars, Thierry Henry, the all-time top scorer for the French national team, and superstar Mexican midfielder Rafael Marquez, as well as their all-time leading scorer, Colombian Juan Pablo Angel. The Galaxy, for the first time since November 2009, will start the great David Beckham, back after tearing his Achilles tendon. But the evening's biggest attraction, by count of souvenir jerseys weaving through the crowd outside the stadium, is a sprightly American with a receding hairline: 28-year-old Galaxy captain Landon Donovan, wearer of the number 10, given to a team's most respected player.

In the stands, it feels like a soccer game in Europe. The Galaxy's two supporter sections chant and bounce and sing and pound on drums with a joyful insanity that spills over into adjoining seats. Because they're at this game! Because Becks is back! And because they have Donovanā€”and New York doesn't.

U.S. soccer fanatics have been enamored of Donovan since at least 2002, when the relatively unknown 20-year-old was the breakout star of the U.S. World Cup team, named by FIFA as the best young player in the tournament for helping the U.S. reach the quarterfinals for the first time since 1930. Ever since, Donovan has carried the national team and his MLS squads to such a degree that many consider him the best American ever to play the game. And this was before last year's World Cup, when, in the waning moments of a frustrating do-or-die game against Algeria, Donovan pounced on a rebound and drilled home the winning goal, joyously belly-flopping into the corner of the fieldā€”and into the hearts of the millions of Americans watching a World Cup match for the first time.

It wasn't the most beautiful goal you'll ever see, but the dramatic timing and the fact that it was scored by the team's most recognizable name made it one of the great moments in American sports history. Almost immediately, people began to refer to it as the Miracle on Grass, and a compilation video of people across the U.S. reacting in orgiastic glee became a viral sensation, garnering some three million views and counting on YouTube.

New Galaxy fans paying close attention tonight in Carson will notice something that serious soccer observers have long appreciated:ā€ˆthat Donovan can not only run forever but can also, at any moment, locate and make tangible that hoary sportscaster clichĆ©, the mystical “extra gear.” Late in a game, when other players have lost a step, Donovan is just as quick as he was in the first minute.

And so, if you replay the clip of Donovan's historic goal, you will see him sprinting more than half the field to catch up to the action, to be in the right place, fresh and sharp amid beleaguered Algerian defenders, more than 90 minutes after the first whistle. However unspectacular it may appear, it was the moment Donovan had been preparing for his entire careerā€”and, most likely, the moment that will forever define him.

Which raises the question: What does he do now?

LANDON DONOVAN is the leading scorer in the history of the U.S. men's national team, as well as the all-time assists leader. He's the leading scorer in the history of the L.A. Galaxy and, by season's end, was within a few dozen assists of being the all-time leader. He's the leading scorer in MLS playoff history and the 2009 league MVP, as well as a six-time recipient of the Honda Player of the Year award, given by sportswriters to the best player on the national team.

And yet, to many fans, he long represented unfulfilled promise. That's because the only true barometer of soccer greatness is success in Europe, where Donovan failed three times to succeed in the German Bundesliga, one of the world's best leagues.

The first time, he was young. He arrived at 17, was impatient and homesick and unable to crack the starting lineup at Bayer Leverkusen and sulked his way home not even two years later. He went back in 2005 but lasted only a few months. In 2009, he played with Bayern Munich, scoring in some exhibition games and then giving up again. Donovan says now that he didn't understand that it takes time to earn a coach's respect and find your role on a team. “I didn't have anyone telling me, ā€˜You're not going to play for ten games, but don't worry, this is part of your development.' I wasn't there to socialize. I wasn't there to train. I was there to play soccer. And when you're not, it becomes a bit of a question.”

But following the 2009 MLS season, Donovan tried once more, this time heading to the English Premier League, arguably the world's best, to play for Everton, a top team. His signing was barely news in the UK, but within a few weeks he was beloved. He played in 13 games, scored two goals, and was tremendous, earning the team's player of the month award in January. In his final match, fans serenaded him with raucous chants of “U-S-A!”

Rory Smith, a soccer writer for London's Telegraph newspaper, says that Donovan “stood out as one of the best players on the pitch. He showed against Chelsea, Manchester United, and Arsenal”ā€”three good teamsā€””that he is a player of the utmost quality. His flexibility was the most impressive trait he displayed, playing on both wings or as a striker, but his touch, his vision, his awareness, and his speed all stood out.”

Donovan is consistently among the top runners in any game as measured by distance covered. He's also one of the fastest. Peter Krustrup, a professor in the department of exercise and sport sciences at the University of Copenhagen, says that soccer players are among the world's greatest athletes because they run so often at high intensity, which he defines as more than 15 kilometers per hour. Among midfielders like Donovan, that number is more like 18. At the World Cup, Donovan was one of a relatively small number to be clocked (in bursts) at over 30, or almost 19 miles per hour.

Speed is a natural gift, but not every athlete knows how to harness it. Donovan is a fitness obsessive who's figured out how to optimize his body for performance. A professed admirer of Kenyan runners, who, he says, “never jog,” Donovan has for most of his career trained by constantly pushing himself at 80 to 90 percent of his maximum heart rate (a strategy now standard for soccer players around the world). He's also dialed his diet, following a lean fish-and-vegetable menu, then, after hearing that Michael Jordan ate steak before games, amping up his protein intake to boost his energy reserves.

All of which explains why, in the 91st minute of an intense match at the World Cup, it was no surprise at all to see Donovan sprinting to get in position to save his team, just when things seemed grim.

“The advantage doesn't come because you can run more than someone over 90 minutes,” Donovan says. “The advantage comes when, in the tenth minute, I'm sprinting back and making another guy chase me. By the end of the game, that guy's worn down, but I can still keep going at the same pace. That might mean the difference between a half-yard or a yard to make a play.”

“DO YOU MIND if I put my feet up?” Donovan asks me. We're seated on metal chairs in the bowels of the Home Depot Center a few days after the game against the Red Bulls, which the Galaxy lost 2ā€“0, even though Thierry Henry missed the game with a sprained knee. Donovan's teammates are showering off after a brutal practice, which concluded with 30 minutes of shuttle runs that left some of them on the ground, gasping for air. Their captain, meanwhile, was given the day off and instead did some light work in the weight room. Mr. Tireless is finally tired.

It's no wonder. Donovan has been in season, at peak intensity, for almost two full years thanks to his Galaxy schedule, the World Cup, and the stint with Everton. Over that period, he played in more than 100 gamesā€”a ridiculous total, especially for a midfielder.

Still, he's annoyed by the fatigue. “There have been weeks when I've not been hydrating properly, or not eating properly, or training too hard,” he says. “When I do that, I don't feel good. It has to be the exact formula.”

The formula isn't something he can clearly articulate; nor is it a plan you could write down and follow. “I just do what feels right,” he says.

“The big thing with Landon is that he has a good grasp of the entire concept of what goes into making a fit player,” says Ben Yauss, the Galaxy's strength-and-conditioning coach. “A lot of different components go into itā€”nutrition, how to recover, how to work in the gymā€”and when you add all that up, that's what sets him apart. He's got this regimen that works for him.”

These days, the most important element of that regimen is restā€”something he has to work at. “That's been an interesting learning experience for me this year,” he confesses. “I've always been activeā€”outdoors, on the beach, playingā€”and so to go home and have to sit on my couch and relax ā€¦ it's frustrating. Sometimes, you just have to really shut yourself down.”

That's certainly his M.O. when it comes to public appearances. He has long been fiercely protective of his private lifeā€”the status of his on-again, off-again marriage to actress Bianca Kajlich, of CBS's Rules of Engagement, remains a consistent mysteryā€”and he prefers to do interviews on the grounds of the Home Depot Center and only to talk soccer. Following The Goal, he did a quick media lapā€”Letterman, Jon Stewart, Regis & Kellyā€”but came across as awkward and uncomfortable. There was no Donovan Wheaties box, nor any new endorsements to supplement his standing deals with Nike and Gatorade. Donovan remains a reluctant self-marketer:ā€ˆhis Twitter feed (215,000 followers) is mostly photos of his pit bulls and banter with other pro soccer players.

For the past five years, Donovan has lived in Manhattan Beach, close enough to hear the waves breaking. He's a happy lifelong Southern Californian, and you wonder if one reason his latest stint in Europe was so successful was that he knew it was temporary. “It's one thing to go for three months, knowing you're coming home,” he tells me. “It's an entirely different thing to sign a three-year deal.”

Ultimately, Donovan's sense of worth seems based almost completely upon how he's perceived as a soccer player. Which is why he knows he won't be able to turn down another opportunity to prove himself again with Everton, or whoever comes calling, even though his body could use a good, long break. “You only get so many chances,” he says.

Same goes for the World Cup. He has at least one more in his future:ā€ˆ2014, in Brazil, where he will be 32 and expected to push the Americans well into the knockout rounds. Is it on his mind at all?

“I'm just trying to get through tomorrow,” he answers, then catches himself. “To play World Cup in Brazil would be awesome. That's 100 percent my goal right now.” Topping his 2010 performance will be tough, but at least Donovan has a strategy:ā€ˆlead the Galaxy on another playoff run. Make a dazzling cameo in Europe. Run longer and faster than everyone else. Be there when it counts.

In other words, don't change a damn thing.

The post Landon Donovan Isnā€™t Finished appeared first on ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų Online.

RICK MCINTYRE unhinges his convertible wool mitten and grips the plastic handle of an antenna that looks like it was snapped off an old TV. He lifts it high above his head, then out to the farthest reach of his arm, listening for the crude radiotelemetry receiver to beep. When it does, his focus tunnels toward the source of the signal.

On this cold early morning in March, the beep is weak, and yet it signifies something powerful to McIntyre, because it’s coming from a radio collar wrapped around the neck of a female wolf known as 690ā€”the last collared survivor of the legendary Druid Peak wolf pack of Yellowstone National Park. Formed out of the second group of gray wolves reintroduced in 1996 after a nearly 70-year absence from the park, the Druidsā€”named after a mountainā€”have starred in three major nature documentaries and countless amateur videos, since their territory, primarily the ten-mile-long Lamar Valley, so nicely overlaps with tourist habitat.

As a biological technician for the Yellowstone Wolf Project, McIntyre, 61, has observed the pack’s ebbs and flows since the beginning. In the first four years, he missed a few days; he wasn’t a year-round employee and was working winters at Big Bend National Park, in Texas. But since June 12, 2000, for more than 3,500 consecutive days, McIntyre has risen before sunrise, filled a thermos with coffee, packed some snacks and gear, and hopped into his canary-yellow Nissan Xterra for the 30-minute commute from his cabin into Yellowstone to observe the wolves.

By his own choosing, McIntyre is one of the lowest-ranking members of the Yellowstone Wolf Project, but he is certainly one of its most important. He has observed more hours of wolf behavior over the past decade than anyone in the program and has developed some profound theories about the predator’s character and instincts. He has also become the ruddy face of wolf science to Yellowstone tourists. As the park’s director of planning told me, “Rick is as known as the wolves.”

McIntyre has long obsessed over the Druids, which reached a peak of 37 wolves in 2001, making it the largest pack ever recorded anywhere. (The average size of Yellowstone’s 11 current packs is eight wolves.) But by the early months of 2010, researchers were seeing the Druids less and less often. When wolf 690’s last living sister, White Line, died a few days before I arrived in the park, 690, a black female afflicted with the skin disease mange, became the last known Druid. If she were to die, the era of the Druids would be over, an event McIntyre likened to “the fall of the Roman Empire.”

Doug Smith, a wildlife-biology Ph.D. and the head of the Yellowstone Wolf Project, had recently observed 690 from the air during a survey and described her as “wandering around aimlessly,” saying she “looked terrible.” He felt badā€”for the loss of the pack but more so for McIntyre, who he said followed the Druids “like a soap opera.”

“One reason that Rick is so attached to them,” said Smith, “and I mean this as a slight joke, is that they’re his family.”

GIVEN THE VITRIOLIC debate over the hunting of wolves since they were removed from the Endangered Species List in 2008, you might guess that the Druids were brought down in a spray of bullets. You’d be wrong.

Gray wolves were “delisted” in the Northern Rockies in 2008, and by 2009 Idaho and Montana had set up hunting seasons outside of Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks. (In Wyoming, the issue was tied up in courts.) With ranchers already allowed to kill wolves that harass cattle and sheep, conservationists claimed the predators would be driven back to the brink of extinction.

It hasn’t played out that way. That’s partly because states had to meet federal guidelines designed to maintain a sustainable population. But it’s mostly because the reintroduction program worked so well. According to Ed Bangs, the Northern Rocky Mountains Wolf Recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, wolf numbers have reached a point at which there’s no longer a need to worry about them. He estimates that there are at least 1,700 wolves in the West, connected and interbreeding with another 12,000 in the Canadian Rockies. Last year, hunters reported 206 wolf killsā€”the real number may have been much higherā€”yet the overall population actually increased 4 percent. Bangs insists it’s good policy to manage wolves like bears and mountain lions, both of which are hunted to control population growth. Part of the logic here is that hunters will kill the least shy animals, the ones most likely to range into human habitat. Over time, hunting will reinforce an innate distrust of people that will only help future populations.

“Did the Endangered Species Act do its job to restore wolves?” Bangs asks. “Big time. But is it the best tool to manage wolves once the population is recovered? No way.” To Bangs, the wolves are back, and “you couldn’t get rid of them now except with a massive government poisoning campaign.”

Meanwhile, in August, a federal judge decided that since Wyoming has yet to craft an acceptable management planā€”the state’s Fish and Game Department wants to allow unregulated killing in most areasā€”all Rockies wolves need to go back on the Endangered Species List. In response, some enraged state officials called for more aggressive means of population control, such as gassing pups in their dens.

For McIntyre, the ruling provides a reprieve from having his research subjects stuffed and mounted. (Hunters have shot at least three radio-collared wolves that wandered outside the park, including 527, the alpha female of the Cottonwood Creek pack, another tourist favorite.) Still, Yellowstone wolves are in dramatic decline. From a high of 174 wolves in 2003, the population is now thought to be less than 100. Why?

One of the biggest factors, says Smith, is the elk, which are more formidable now that the wolves have had 15 years to prey on the weak. Bangs adds that the decline was “absolutely predictableā€”we knew it would happen.” The place was “overrun with grandma elk.” Once those elk were culled, the herds got stronger, kills became more difficult, and it was harder for a wolf to survive. Some packs have resorted to hunting bison, at great peril.

The current population is probably “a longer-term sustainable number,” Smith admits. Data show that the average pack size is down, and with less game available, wolf-on-wolf violence has increased due to battles over hunting grounds. The number-one killer of adult Yellowstone wolves over the past year? Wolves.

Whether or not this is unusual, whether the end of the Druids and a shrinking Yellowstone wolf population are part of a natural cycle, to McIntyre these open-ended questions are the reason to keep watching, every day. “What we’re trying to do is to use the time that we spend in the field to really understand what normal behavior of wolves is like in the wild,” he says.

YELLOWSTONE’S WOLF population is the first to be observed day after day, without interruption. “All the time we are seeing new facets of wolf behavior,” McIntyre tells me one day at his cabin. “This is by far the best place in the world to watch it.”

As 690 and White Line lived out their days, they grew increasingly desperate. Shortly before my visit, they killed a coyote, and White Line ate it. “We’d never seen that before,” McIntyre says. (Wolves had been known to kill coyotes only because of competition.) A few days later, White Line was killed herself, likely by a mountain lion.

McIntyre agrees with Smith that the smaller, hardier elk population is a major cause of the decline of Yellowstone’s wolves, though he thinks that, in the case of the Druids, “the basic reason was a string of bad luck.” One precipitous event was the death of their alpha female, 569, in a 2009 battle with a rival pack. “That set off a chain of events,” he says, including the alpha male known as 480 “abdicating his position and leaving the pack.” The Druids, like many of the park’s wolves, also suffered a devastating bout of mange, especially the pups. None of the Druids’s 2009 offspring survived into the fall. “We’re thinking an experience like that really affects the cohesion of the pack,” he says.

Since he began his streak in 2000, McIntyre has been to a single town outside of Montana (Cody, Wyoming) and made only a few trips to malls, to see movies. From sunup to sundown, it’s all wolves, save for the occasional nap. He is either observing them, helping tourists locate them and understand what they’re doing, or preventing tourists from bothering them. When he gets home, he settles into a rolling chair at his desk and begins transcribing dictated field observations. To date, McIntyre has compiled more than 8,000 single-spaced pages of meticulous notes (e.g., “755 stands up, yawns, and lies back down”), many of them printed and bound in three-ring binders. “He was very proud a couple years ago,” says Smith. “He had hit more words than the Bible.”

A commonly cited positive of the wolf’s return to Yellowstone is that it enlivened the ecology of the park. One study found that woody plants like aspen and willow were dying off during the seven decades the predators were absent and the elk population boomed. When the wolves came back in 1995, the elk could no longer lazily chew away all the aspen and willow chutes. Plants and trees rebounded, songbird numbers grew, and beaver colonies boomed.

McIntyre’s relentless observations can support such ecological hypotheses. But more interesting, his incessant exposure to a recurring cast of wolves he can identify on sight allows him to make more creative speculations about wolf biology. One individual that left an indelible impression was Wolf 21, the longtime alpha male of the Druids. “He was a big, tough guy but also had a very gentle nature with his family,” McIntyre tells me one afternoon while staring into a spotting scope over the Yellowstone River. He speaks slowly and methodically and has the gentle air and wispy white hair and mustache of Captain Kangaroo. “Wolf 21’s idea of a fair fight was six against one, with him being the one. And he never lost.” But he had a heart. According to McIntyre, 21 would always spare the life of a defeated rival.

One spring, one of 21’s younger siblings was sick. “Maybe blind, maybe just developmentally disabled. It didn’t know how to feed itself,” McIntyre says. He warns me, “I get emotional telling this story,” then goes on to say that when 21 would deliver food to the brood, he made it a point to sit with this sick wolf. This is not a typical event in the wild, where the strong are favored.

McIntyre believes 21’s actions help explain why dogs tend to devote extra attention to a sick or depressed person. “We relate that behavior to dogs; we recognize that they’re good at that,” he says. “But what we don’t recognize is that it’s a behavior that seems to come from wild wolves.”

If you visit McIntyre’s cabin, you’ll findā€”in addition to shelves of wrestling videos and stacks of sixties British acid-rock CDsā€”a bronze statue of Wolf 21. There’s also a photo of one of 21’s nephews, 302, nicknamed Casanova for his promiscuous lifestyle. “He arrived from another pack in 2003 and immediately began to woo a number of 21’s daughters,” McIntyre says. When 21 chased him off, he’d run just far enough to ensure his own safety but not so far that the females couldn’t wander off to mate with him. On occasion, 21 needed to send a message and “would beat him up but not kill him.”

Wolf 21 died in 2004, at age nineā€”old for a wild wolf. “He wandered off and curled up under a tree, looking like he had just gone to sleep,” says McIntyre. The death affected McIntyre, he says, much as the death of a human friend would. Following 21’s death, Casanova finally made something of himself, helping lead the Druid pack for a period.

One of McIntyre’s more compelling theories is that domesticated dogs inherited their recently proven ability to detect cancer in humans from wolves. “Let’s say a young wolf participates in a hunt and the pack kills an elk,” he says. “As that wolf is feeding, it’s noticing that this elk smells a little funny. Maybe a year later that wolf is leading a hunt. He detects in the air that same scent on another elk and makes a special effort to test that one. Maybe the scent was cancer. In the mind of the wolf, the important thing was this elk that we killed so easily a year ago smelled the same as that elk over there …” he trails off.

“What’s fascinating to me,” he continues, “is that a skill that developed evolutionarily as a way to help wolves survive in the wildā€”their descendants, the modern dog, can use it to aid human beings.”

THE END OF THE DRUIDS isn’t the end of McIntyre’s work. “We have this ongoing series of stories to keep track of,” he says as he leads me on an afternoon hike in search of the Blacktail pack, one of the park’s largest. Not quite ready to let go of the Druids, he points out that the Blacktails were formed by 302 in his final year, “so you could say it’s an extension of Druid pack.”

To me, every boulder and dirt pile looks like a wolf, but it’s nearing sunset and we’ve yet to actually see one. Radio collars have teased us all day with beeps of varying intensity. Then McIntyre points to a line of dots moving across the landscape, perhaps three miles away: nine wolves, noses down, on a trail. He smiles: “The last day I know that no one saw a wolf in Yellowstone was February 8, 2001.”

As he often does, McIntyre goes into a detailed genealogy of the Blacktails, ticking off ages of the distant shapes. “When I was up in Denali”ā€”where McIntyre worked as a seasonal naturalist for 15 summers, starting in 1976ā€””you were excited just to see a wolf,” he says. “You didn’t know any of this stuff.”

Whereas many packs rise and fall in a few years, the Druids ruled the most fecund swath of Yellowstone for 13. By thriving for so long, the Druids spread their powerful genes throughout the Yellowstone ecosystem. The individuals that survive what may well be a natural downsizing of the population are stronger for it. Maybe, in a more ecologically stable Yellowstone, we’ll never again see such a reign.

The post Pack Man appeared first on ŗŚĮĻ³Ō¹ĻĶų Online.

LAIRD HAMILTON was telling a dick joke. It’s one he’s very fond of and that he would repeat several times over the ensuing days, but this first telling happened in the cabin of a Twin Otter plane as it bounced over the Alaska Range one day last March. Hamilton delivered the punch line, then laughed, loudly, and for longer than was warranted. But Hamilton is eager and manic and large in every way. As you might know from his surfing, there’s nothing subtle about him.

Sharing the cabin with us were Dave Kalama, Hamilton’s tow-in-surfing partner; Don King, a cinematographer for many of their movies; and Jeremy Jones, widely considered the best big-mountain snowboarder alive. There were also some more normal, if very wealthy, men: two Texans, two Swiss, an Austrian, a Frenchman, a guy from Boston, and an Anchorage local.

Shortly after Hamilton told his joke, the pilot landed the Otter with a thud on a frozen lake next to the Tordrillo Mountain Lodge, the most remote heli-ski lodge in North America.

“That was way too smooth!” Hamilton yelled. “Can we do it again?”

Then, of course, he laughed.

So what was I, a middle-class resident of Brooklyn, doing in deepest Alaska with three professional athletes and a pile of rich guys? Reporting on a sort of dry run for EpicQuest, a new travel company based on the notion that some people will pay almost anything to experience the planet’s greatest adventure playgrounds under the guidance of elite athletes. The idea was born at Tordrillo, the most exclusive outpost of the famed Chugach Powder Guides, which runs heli-skiing trips here from mid-February to April. One day in 2007, a D.C. lobbyist and regular CPG client named Craig Pattee asked Mike Overcast, one of the owners, why he wasn’t catering to deep-pocketed thrill seekers year-round. As Pattee saw it, CPG could easily lure these customers into other top-shelf experiences.

Overcast thought this was a grand idea and founded EpicQuest along with fellow owners Chris Owens and Dave Hamre, as well as Mark Baumgardner, the owner of Sun Valley Heli Ski Guides, and Pattee, who signed on as CEO. They added kayaking in Bhutan, heli-fishing on the slopes of Mount Kenya, and Indonesia surf trips on the famous yacht Indies Trader IV.

EpicQuest adventures, which began late last winter, will only rarely offer up superstar attendees like Hamilton, a frequent CPG client who’s been an unofficial consultant for EpicQuest. But ski guests are likely to encounter Olympic gold-medalist Tommy Moe and extreme-ski pro Jeremy Nobis (the duo co-own the Tordrillo Lodge), as well as star guides like Zach Crist, Chris Davenport, or Greg Harms, who was at the lodge for our week and who will run his own Epic-branded heli-trips in Chile during the Southern Hemisphere winters.

As you might have guessed, EpicQuest’s launch was in motion before the economy skied off a cliff. But both Owens and Pattee maintain a brave face. “Those people in the highest sectors of the wealth demographic are still spending. And they are very brand loyal,” Pattee told me on the phone before I left. “We have people who will only come on vacation with us.”

That left me with just one question: Is vacationing with elite athletes really such a good idea?

My fellow amateurs in Alaska certainly seemed excited at the prospect, if a touch nervous. Since ours wasn’t an official EpicĀ­Quest trip, the clients, who each paid $9,000 for the week, had no idea they’d be carving turns with the likes of Hamilton and Jones. Richard, a fifty-something Texan who’d come with his pal Phil, summed up his reaction this way: “My wife asked, Ā‘Should I be worried [about the risks]?’ And I said, ‘Nah.’ Then we wake up this morning and the first person I see is Laird Hamilton.”

DURING THE AFTERNOON’S SAFETY BRIEFING, Overcast filled us in on the risks of crevasses, rotor blades, and, of course, avalanches. HamilĀ­ton chimed in that he’d set one off last yearĀ—and was actually carried over a ridge on a runaway wave of snow.

Kurt, an Austrian who was there as a personal guide to the FrenchmanĀ—a pudgy, grumpy garlic mogul on the Atkins dietĀ—looked at Hamilton. “So why does the surfer from Hawaii ride snowboard?” he said.

“I surf the snow!” Hamilton answered.

ON A PERFECT spring day in Alaska, Jeff Corwin is casting a fly at a deep, clear pool fed by a short and powerful waterfall thundering so close that the mist envelops him. Overhead is a 200-foot granite cliff topped by Sitka spruce. Birds chatter, the wind blows, and every few minutes the sky shifts from slate gray to sunny, then back again.

Jeff Corwin

Corwin at Cambodia's Phnom Tamao Wildlife Rescue Centre with an endangered clouded leopard

We hiked 45 minutes upriver to this spot, on the infrequently visited interior of Baranof Island, after a boat dropped Corwin and a small group of fishermen on the shore of one of the island’s many fjords, just before dawn. For the second-straight year, the famous naturalist-slash-animal-show-host has come to his friend Duane Lambeth’s Dove Island Lodge in pursuit of spring steelhead. Which pretty much answers the age-old question, Where do nature-show hosts go on vacation?

“Maybe 15 people have fished this water,” Corwin says, practically beaming. This weeklong May trip is a rare break in a frenetic 2009 for Corwin. Between castsĀ—and wine-soaked dinners at the lodgeĀ—he’s juggling calls and messages from producers at NBC and the Food Network, as well as Rodale Press. He’s been traveling almost nonstop for six months and will be off again shortly, at work on a pair of projects that he hopes will elevate him from Jeff Corwin the Animal Planet guy to Jeff Corwin the TV star, achieving a more well-rounded notoriety than his late competitor, Steve “Crocodile Hunter” Irwin. It’s a trajectory he set for himself after getting a taste of serious mainstream attention with 2007’s Planet in Peril, the CNN documentary that he co-hosted with Anderson Cooper and Dr. Sanjay GuptaĀ—and that continued on without him after CNN went with all in-house talent for the sequel.