Pro snowboarder Kimmy Fasani seems to have only one speed: fast. I learn this at her tiny green clapboard cabin on Lake Mary, just 15 minutes up the road from her primary home in Mammoth Lakes, California. Soon after we arrive aboard a little e-powered dinghy, I turn around to gaze over the lake and its forested shores. Kimmy, meanwhile, has somehow already stripped down and pulled on a bikini, and is now leaping off a 20-foot cliff that fronts the frigid alpine water. For a moment, her body is silhouetted against the deep blue summer sky, and then she disappears beneath the glassy surface with a big splash followed by ripples of concentric waves. She surfaces with a whoop and a grin.

“It’s a tradition,” Kimmy says as she clambers back up the rocks. As long as the lake isn’t iced over, she and her husband, artist and pro skier Chris Benchetler, jump in at least once whenever they’re here. Kimmy towels off, changes into shorts and a long-sleeve shirt, and before long is bounding into the thickets on the south side of the lake, following an overgrown trail. Along with her good friend Cara Williamson, a brand-marketing executive who flew in from Denver for a few days, I run panting behind her, ducking under branches, crawling over logs, and tiptoeing through moats of muck. This is prime bear habitat, she tells me as she wrestles a branch. “They’re usually standing on the dock, sniffing, checking things out,” she says with a laugh.

Soon we come to a better-trod trail, which switchbacks through shady conifer forests and past sparkling views of the lake to the top of Mammoth Crest. This trail is Kimmy’s sanity. Now that she’s a mother of two boys, Koa and Zeppelin, aged six and three, she comes here to move around and drink in the mountain air and remember who she is amid all the motion and mundanity of motherhood.

As she breezes upslope, past ambling couples and vacationing families, I let her do most of the talking. Kimmy has been a professional athlete for 25 years, earning a reputation as a pioneer in women’s snowboarding. Now she’s finishing what may be her most challenging project yet. Six years ago, she and Chris invited their friend Tyler Hamlet, a Bellingham, Washington, cinematographer, to film what was supposed to be a lighthearted family documentary, a project that would soon evolve into something much different.

It started in 2017, when Kimmy was pregnant with Koa. With the bright-eyed optimism of people on the brink of parenthood, Kimmy and Chris planned to simply take him along whenever they traveled. They asked Tyler, who had worked with Chris on film projects in the past, if he would capture their joys and mishaps as Koa entered the world. “I wanted to try to create a road map for other athletes who wanted to start a family,” Kimmy told me as she huffed up the slope toward Mammoth Crest. “I wanted to help them realize that this is possible.”

After Koa arrived, in 2018, Tyler accompanied the couple to New Zealand, where they filmed a short for GoPro (one of Chris’s sponsors) and started capturing the challenges and hilarity of two pro athletes juggling life, work, and fun with an infant in tow. They surfed, skied, climbed, biked, and drove along the winding seaside roads of the South Island. It was a dream gig, and as veteran athletes Kimmy and Chris were accustomed to being in front of a camera.

But the balancing act turned out to be harder than any of them expected. Between New Zealand and the family’s next big trip, to Japan, things shifted. Koa was now ten months old, and Kimmy was officially stepping back into work after maternity leave by appearing in a video for her sponsor Burton.

“Tyler started realizing, ‘Oh, I better start filming more than the happy moments,’ ” Kimmy says. “This life has so much more dimension, and maybe we have a message that can help. But at the time, we didn’t know what it was.”

Over the coming years, the couple encountered more challenging plot twists than they could have foreseen: the unexpected ripple effects of childhood trauma, a career-hampering injury, an acute medical crisis for Koa, and, for Kimmy, an aggressive-breast-cancer diagnosis at 37, just months after her second child was born.

For years, Kimmy and Chris kept the documentary secret, not quite sure where it would lead. Tyler did other work for his clients, like Dakine and ESPN, but when he was with Kimmy and Chris, he kept the cameras rolling more than he otherwise would. He filmed them in the mountains, in formal interview settings, and during casual moments. The project became something much more real than any of them expected.

On the slopes above Lake Mary, Kimmy moves quickly up into the mountains, each footfall fast and confident, while Cara and I trail behind her. She tells me she has only just started to share the details of the film with people outside her immediate circle. “It’s scary talking about our private life, because there’s always room for criticism,” she says. “There’s so much unknown as to how the movie will be received. I wanted it to be an honest, raw, vulnerable piece that tackles big topics.” At once edgy and hopeful, Kimmy is finally ready to launch it into the world. She’s willing to be seen in a new way.

The post Kimmy Fasani Has Always Been Fearless. Motherhood—and Breast Cancer —Taught Her to Be Vulnerable. appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Four years ago, during a Zoom work meeting, a colleague who lives in London told me she’d decided to quit flying on airplanes. She simply couldn’t stomach the cost to the climate. Due to her decision, she said calmly, she would probably never visit the U.S. again. My heart skipped a beat.

Her choice seemed so extreme. She shared it with me casually in the context of conversation, without a trace of judgment or moralizing. Still, I felt shocked and inexplicably a little defensive—but also intrigued. At the time, I traveled by air as often as ten times a year for my work as a journalist and to see family members strewn about the country. I couldn’t imagine my life without flying.

But my colleague’s comment lodged in my mind as a beautiful and challenging seed. Over the next few years, it cracked through the concrete of what had been, until then, a completely unexamined belief in my inviolable entitlement to flying. When the pandemic arrived, grounding travelers and shrinking international air travel by 60 percent in 2020, I began to see that significantly reducing air travel—or even giving it up altogether—was absolutely possible.

Rare individuals have chosen not to fly for ethical reasons for decades, but in the years leading up to the pandemic, the smattering of outliers coalesced into a movement. It took root most quickly and deeply in Sweden, which in 2017 became the first country in the world to establish a legally binding carbon-neutrality target—a year before Greta Thunberg began protesting in front of its parliament. In Swedish, the movement became known as flygskam, which translates to “flight shame,” a term commonly attributed to Swedish singer Staffan Lingberg, who gave up flying in 2017.

The number of people pledging to stop flying grew so much that Swedish air travel declined 5 percent between 2018 and 2019, and the movement strengthened in other parts of Europe as well. In the U.S., the flight-free movement, in the form of groups like Flight Free USA and No Fly Climate Sci, has been slower to spread but is growing. This year, Flight Free USA, for example, is on track to see the largest number of pledges to stop or minimize flying at 436. By comparison, tens of thousands have pledged in Europe over the past four years.

On a collective level, the reasons for minimizing commercial aviation are obvious. In 2018, the industry accounted for of global emissions and has single-handedly contributed to about of observed human-caused climate change to date. If it were a country, it would be the sixth largest polluter in the world. Currently, no aviation technology or mitigation technique exists that could minimize emissions to the extent needed to avert catastrophic warming. (Small and short-distance electric planes are in development; FAA-approved commercial models could be available as early as 2026.)

At the same time, a relatively small group of people, including me, are living large on the backs of the masses. One found that only about 11 percent of the world’s population flew in 2018. And a startling of the world’s population causes 50 percent of the emissions from commercial aviation. While emissions depending on the distance traveled, the efficiency of your ground-transportation method, and the number of people in your vehicle, flying is almost always the most carbon-intensive mode of transportation mile for mile. Simply traveling less and traveling shorter distances are surefire ways to minimize emissions.

But individually, giving up flying can be hard. Surrounded by millions of others who aren’t adjusting their own behaviors, do my choices matter? Is it worth what seems like a huge personal sacrifice, when I am just one lonely person taking a stand?

Not long after my colleague’s comment, I broached the topic with a close loved one who has solar panels on his house and drives an electric car. I thought we could have a substantive discussion, but his response was simple: “I’m not going to stop flying,” he said testily. End of conversation.

This shutdown, as well as my own reluctance, made me even more curious. What did we really think we were losing? On a subconscious level, do those of us who fly believe we have the right to pollute more than others, simply by virtue of being accustomed to it? And able to afford it? I was also moved by my colleague’s matter-of-fact attitude. Although her choice seemed radical to me at the time, she didn’t seem perturbed. She wasn’t standing atop some mountain of haughty saviorism. She even seemed quietly peaceful about it. I wondered about what seemed to be an unseen reward, some hidden gain, about not flying that I couldn’t understand from the paradigm in which I dwelled.

“At first, I didn’t want to be confined like that,” Liz says. Yet as she took in the news of the escalating effects of climate change, an almost debilitating climate-despair grew, and her wanderlust began to feel too big, somehow out of balance with the world as she understood it. She wasn’t quite sure how it would go to fly so little. Alternative transportation isn’t as simple in the U.S., where long-distance ground infrastructure lags behind that of Europe. Last year, when Liz came to visit me and other friends in Colorado, she rode the train from her home in Virginia. It took 53 hours. (A comparable trip in Europe, from Madrid to Berlin, would take half the time.)

Recently, I’ve begun talking with others who have renounced flying or drastically minimized their air travel. For each person, the choice sprung from a visceral experience that they couldn’t ignore. Eric Holthaus, a meteorologist and author of The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What’s Possible in the Age of Warming, was boarding a plane at the San Francisco airport in 2013 when, reflecting on the latest dire Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, he had a panic attack. He vowed to make that flight his last.

Daniel Fahey, a Lonely Planet travel writer based in England, saw a graph representing carbon emissions over the past 10,000 years, with an almost vertical line illustrating emissions in the past century, and felt queasy. His last flight was in 2018. Kim Cobb, a climate scientist and director of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, was filled with grief when a coral reef she’d studied for 18 years almost entirely died off during a monthslong marine-warming event in 2016. Flying home over the Pacific from Korea the next year, staring down at the vast ocean, she thought, Really, Kim? “I just remember this pit in my stomach, realizing that I don’t know how many more times I can do this,” she says of her international flight.

Kim started walking her kids to school every day, biking to and from work in Atlanta and, later, in Providence, Rhode Island, and, between 2017 and 2019, she reduced her plane travel from 150,000 miles per year to zero, transforming her life in the process. Still, sometimes life presents challenges: she chose to fly once, last September, to her brother’s wedding in Denver because a train trip would have necessitated taking her kids out of their new school for a week.

In 2021, I experienced my own climate gut punch. șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű offered me an opportunity to travel to the Arctic for the winter solstice, a bucket-list trip I’d dreamed about for nearly a decade that was finally materializing. But to travel so far (7,000 miles round-trip), with so many resulting carbon emissions, and to a place especially sensitive to the ravages of global warming, felt irresponsible and tone-deaf. Yet it was hard to deny a longing that felt much deeper than simply wanting an escape or an adventure. I thought hard about it and ultimately decided to go.

Lodging in an off-grid retreat center 63 miles north of the Arctic Circle in the Brooks Range of Alaska, I watched northern lights tango across the sky, cross-country-skied as polar dawn melted into polar dusk, and immersed myself in the crystalline stillness of a place that slumbers without any direct sunlight for more than a month. Those mountains, tundras, and boreal forests continue to haunt my dreams, and memories of the land’s beauty and fragility inspire my work.

But during my time there, the temperature shot upward more than 60 degrees over the course of about 24 hours, from minus 35 to a preposterous 28 degrees, an Arctic-winter heat wave that echoed broader temperature shifts and catastrophic changes debilitating the region. The cognitive dissonance of loving a place so much while also contributing directly to its demise was almost physically painful.

Flying home, a subtle tension suffused my body, as if I could feel the misalignment between my choices and my hope and concern for the world. I wanted to forget about it, ignore it, or rationalize my way out. I bought to mitigate my travel for that entire year, but it felt like a cheap apology. (According to one to the European Commission, the vast majority of offset programs don’t reduce emissions.) I wasn’t sure my relationship with flying would ever be the same.

Still, voluntarily not flying while friends take holidays in far-flung places feels like nothing but a gaping and pointless loss. And while it takes a certain amount of privilege to be able to fly, it could potentially take an even greater degree of privilege to travel and not fly, given the time and expense involved. Those who have chosen to fly less or not at all say there are trade-offs.

My friend Liz declined an offer to go on a camping trip with a group of her favorite people because it would have necessitated a flight, and she has opted to do a professional training program online instead of in person. For a time, meteorologist Eric Holthaus took long train trips for work, which put a strain on his family life, and he declined his dream job at the Weather Channel because it would have required too much travel. Climate scientist Kim Cobb recognizes that if she hadn’t already been well established in her career, there would have been profound opportunity costs.

There is also an emotional risk to being an outlier. Liz has found that her choice has sometimes made people so uncomfortable that they’ve ridiculed her or immediately dismissed the idea. Many of Holthaus’s friends have responded with disbelief. “It’s amazing how much travel is baked into middle-class, upper-middle-class culture,” he says. “It’s an identity, and I wasn’t really expecting it to be that hard to break. But with that has come a chance to examine all of that privilege of having traveled and being cultured as a status symbol. It’s not really that uncommon to not fly. It’s just in our bubble that it feels unthinkable.”

Holthaus also, however, delights in the benefits of slow travel, in which people travel more slowly and conscientiously rather than and quickly and superficially. He realized he had both more money and more time to spend outside on his vacations, and they felt more special and intentional. Daniel Fahey, the travel writer who once thought nothing of jetting from London to Beijing for a weekend, has found the challenge and novelty of traveling plane-free invigorating. “When you’re traveling slow, you’re not numb to everything else,” he says. “You’re more alive to stuff. If I fly across the country and watch a movie for an hour and a half, I’ve been disengaged from my environment.” There’s also an intrinsic value to feeling aligned with your conscience, he says.

Liz spoke of the ineffable rewards of minimizing flying, how traveling more slowly felt less wrenching on her body and less transactional. Cobb feels more connected to her community and family—and she’s in better shape because she makes time to bike to work now.

I recently learned of a Buddhist teaching that speaks to this debate: a wise person always trades a lesser happiness for a greater happiness. I wondered if flying less could be the greater happiness because it’s simply a more harmonious and peaceful way of being in the world. “It’s a satisfaction with doing less, with having less, with living in deeper harmony,” Liz explained. “I do feel like I’m respecting the earth more with these choices.”

Tourism can be a great force for destruction but also a force for tremendous social good, for travelers and hosts. I certainly wouldn’t advise people to stop traveling. I am grateful for innumerable wonderful travel experiences that have entertained, delighted, and expanded my understanding of this planet and its inhabitants, human and otherwise, and deepened my empathy.

But there have also been ways that I have traveled, largely in haste and frequently aboard a plane, that have encouraged a sort of objectification of those places, as if they were products or trophies. When I plop in from out of the sky, my comprehension of a new land and its people is often decontextualized from the living fabric of the earth and my place in it. Could I have even more meaningful and adventurous travel experiences, with greater positive impacts for the places I visited, if I approached travel in a different way? Like opting for longer and more sporadic overland journeys instead of shorter trips with long-haul flights?

Last fall, my husband and I had a couple of flexible weeks and were considering a trip together, possibly to Central America. I looked into flights to Costa Rica and Belize. We could have afforded to go, but something felt empty about it, jet-setting off to a remote beach or rainforest. It felt too easy and on some level unrealistic. We decided not to go abroad and instead each took shorter trips closer to home.

I drove south a few hours from my home in Colorado, to a remote area of New Mexico. A storm arrived and blanketed the desert with snow, and I hiked through the silent sage and junipers as the sun reemerged. An owl swooped out of the dark in front of my car one evening, and an elk herd passed right before me. On my way home, cresting the Continental Divide at dawn, I passed through a forest of ponderosas perfectly encapsulated in a million faceted crystals of frost—in all of my travels to many dozens of countries, it was among the most beautiful things I have ever seen.

But I also recognized an internal shift. Instead of feeling a sense of harried entitlement that can sometimes come with the busyness of long-haul trips, and the way I have shoehorned them into my very full life, I felt a sense of humility and a deeper appreciation of what the earth was offering me through no apparent merit of my own. Internally, it was undoubtedly trading a lesser happiness for a greater happiness.

I’d like to say that I’m vowing to quit flying entirely, but because our closest family members live 15 hours away by car, that may not be realistic. My husband and I already have two obligations that necessitate flying this year. However, it is feasible to reduce our flying to one flight trip per year, and I intend to do that in 2024. It will take some imagination, ingenuity, time, and planning ahead. I recognize that the privileges of having traveled the world previously and having a flexible job and some disposable income make this choice easier than it may be for some. But there are others making this choice, and it occurred to me that minimizing flying, in and of itself, is an adventure. It’s not about living within some rigid ideal but probing the forward edge of social change.

In the relationship between individual, cultural, and systemic change, you never know exactly how your part will affect the whole. But when I started to think in a real way about limiting my flying, I noticed that my paralysis and resignation around climate change loosened. I began to feel a sense of energy and agency, even hope, however small. People everywhere, in every time, have to step into a future way of being that they can’t currently imagine. Why not me? Why not you?

Kate Siber is a correspondent for șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű magazine and the author of two children’s books. Her work has also appeared in Men’s Journal, The New York Times Magazine, and various National Geographic publications. Her next trip—by electric car—will be to Canyonlands National Park in Utah.

The post Should I Stop Flying? It’s a Difficult Decision to Make. appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

About eight years ago, I stepped through the unlocked door of a 1915 cabin-turned-chapel in Wiseman, Alaska, an Arctic settlement of about a dozen people roughly seven hours north of Fairbanks. In the dim light, the pastor’s log was open on the makeshift pulpit for anyone to read, and I quickly lost myself in pages of lilting cursive.

It was September, the Arctic tundra glowed with electric reds and rusts, and every day the snow line crept down the stone pyramids of the Brooks Range. The pastor, who had lived in Wiseman for decades, described the inexorable march of darkness as a force both terrifying and beautiful. She spoke of chopping wood, preserving berries, and squeezing the joy out of every moment of daylight before a winter in which, for more than a month, the sun never rises above the horizon.

The notion of such sustained darkness in a remote corner of the planet unnerved me. Residents of the Arctic tell stories of people losing their minds in the black of polar night. But I also felt strangely curious—and drawn to return one day.

For years, I tried to manufacture a good excuse to travel to the great north in the depths of winter, but it never worked out. It’s not exactly easy to get to at any time of year and services like hotels and transport are few. (During my previous trip, I had been on my way to report on polar bears farther north.) But last summer, a friend forwarded me an email about a tiny off-grid six-person retreat center that had just opened outside of Wiseman. The owners were hosting a week-long trip that included yoga and exploring the Arctic wild with skis, snowshoes, and dogsleds, and the dates fell right on the winter solstice.

I couldn’t resist signing up for the retreat, but I had hesitations. I’m not exactly a cold-resistant creature: I’ve suffered from hypothermia multiple times and frostbite that turned my feet white and wooden. I’m generally dressed in a sweater and jeans when my friends are wearing shorts and flip flops. Even at much more temperate latitudes, seasonal affective disorder runs in my family. I also contemplated the wisdom of traveling during a pandemic, and the carbon emissions of flying long distances. If rationality won, I wouldn’t have gone. And yet, some powerful urge that I can’t quite explain compelled me to commit. Perhaps it was the pull of long-gestating curiosity or some gut-level instinct, but that’s how I found myself on a plane to Fairbanks on one of the darkest, coldest days of December.

When I arrived in the central Alaskan city, it was early afternoon, the sun already grazed the horizon, and the temperature was 37 degrees below zero. In cold that deep, snow stays fluffy, and everything sparkles as if scrubbed. Even the air itself seems pristine. Soon after arriving, I tugged my snowpants over my jeans, donned both my down jacket and an insulated parka, and pulled on my warmest hat for a short walk. The cold blew through it all in seconds. My eyelashes froze and my nose hairs crinkled. The liquid on my eyeballs felt like it was turning to slush. Even the slightest breeze lacerated my cheeks, and my mind felt tight with a barely concealed panic. I grew up in Boston, and I was still shocked by the cold’s staggering punch. I had never felt anything like it, and the next day I’d be traveling seven hours north by car.

The area around Wiseman, Alaska, has been traveled for thousands of years by groups including the Gwich’in, Koyukon, and Inupiat. It’s a spare and beautiful land of shocking extremes—not exactly a practical spot to build a retreat center, even a small one. Mollie and Sean Busby, the founders of , know this intimately. The couple—a 36-year-old yoga instructor and a 38-year-old pro snowboarder—have spent the last few years negotiating the rigors and hazards of the Arctic and developing friendships in the community, a necessity in a place where people are few and the margins of survival have sharp edges. Their property lies beyond the reach of roads, on a limestone bench on a mountainside a one-mile hike or snowmachine ride from the end of the road in Wiseman. In the winter, they fetch water from a chipped-out hole in the Koyukuk River and heat their cabins and two communal domes with wood-burning and Swedish oil stoves, sometimes both at the same time. Nine sled dogs live in trim dog houses in the middle of their compound and yip and howl with glee when humans approach. Sometimes the wolf packs that haunt the area howl back. About an hour north, the continent’s forests peter out into tundra that stretches straight to the Arctic Sea.

Mercifully, the temperature actually rose as Mollie drove four of us north on the Dalton Highway in a Suburban loaded to the ceiling with supplies, groceries and dog food. The winds screamed across the road, obscuring it with skeins of shifting snow, but Mollie, a hardy down-to-earth Wisconsinite, seemed unfazed. “It’s worse in summer,” she said casually, fiddling with the radio dial. “Cars catch air off the frost heaves.”

As we wound farther north, the sky brightened without even a trace of hurry, and the boreal forests appeared in foggy grayscale. The three other participants, a wilderness therapist from Vermont, an emotional-intelligence educator from Massachusetts and a biological anthropologist from Texas, all of us women in our thirties and forties, simmered into a reverent silence. There aren’t a lot of signs of human beings between Fairbanks and Wiseman except two lonely truck stops and glimpses of the Alaska Pipeline, for which the road was originally constructed. But natural wonders abound, from a solitary moose or caribou ambling the highway to eerie tracts of snow ghosts, stunted black spruce trees encased in rime ice that appear figure-like, as if monks in prayer.

A week before we arrived, the Busbys dug themselves out of nearly four feet of snow, the area’s deepest 24-hour snowfall in half a century. It took days for them to create enough friction to heat the bottomless fluff so that it would pack down into trails. After arriving at the end of the road (in the dark, of course) we pulled on our cold-weather gear and headlamps and hiked to Arctic Hive’s encampment. When we arrived, string lights hung between the trees, illuminating everything in a surreal, romantic glow. Footpaths formed miniature slot canyons made of snow. The dogs’ joyful howls rung through the forest. Perhaps it was the muffle of snowy darkness or the cold or the sheer remove from daily life, but it felt like we had passed through a gate into a different plane.

Between November 30 and January 9, the residents of Wiseman, Alaska, do not see the sun. They lose about 12 to 15 minutes of light each day until the solstice and then gain it back just as quickly. The future always looks scarier from the confines of imagination, and polar night was not so unnerving once I was in it. It was actually brighter than I anticipated—locals like to say that on the winter solstice, there are still five hours when it’s light enough that you can’t see the stars.

Perhaps by the grace of my own temporariness, the darkness felt benevolent. Over the course of a week, long slow dawns bled into long luxuriant dusks. Storm clouds lingered for days, swaddling the land in a moody dimness that made the forests and tundra appear soft-focus like a dream. Clock time began to feel less relevant without the familiar reference points of day. In my blond-wood cabin, with the Swedish oil stove murmuring, I slept like a teenager, waking only briefly and folding myself back into the embrace of night.

But the land and conditions also continually reminded us of their wildness and indifference. I marveled at how quickly my feet traced the edge of dangerous numbness; there isn’t much room for miscalculation. One day, in the precious hours of gloaming, we hiked up a nearby river canyon on snowshoes, sinking into knee-deep powder, tromping over minty blue glacial ice and clambering up frozen waterfalls. At times, flowing water thundered under the ice, spooking us all. The wind raged down the canyon’s hallways, stacked with a million delicate layers of limestone, only to relent into stillness around a bend. Later, we discovered that a local subsistence hunter had just trapped an enormous wolverine not far from where we turned around.

The area’s waterways have mercurial rhythms and sometimes river water escapes and flows over the ice, creating a layer of overflow topped by newly formed panes. “OK, I’m just going to commit,” Sean said one day as we stood in our snowshoes, feeling unnerved as we contemplated the loose floating shards. (Luckily, we only sank in about six inches.)

The intensity of the cold itself makes for unique considerations. Touching anything metal, even a zipper, feels like it burns, and frozen supplies and equipment can easily shatter. “One time we had the vacuum outside,” Mollie says. “I felt like I just looked at it and all of the sudden one of the hoses broke.” Simply to run a mile to their truck, the Busbys carry an emergency beacon if they’re alone. And living in polar night, residents of the Arctic have to be especially attentive to the risks of cabin fever. Some locals take copious doses of vitamin D. “And no matter what the temperature is,” Sean says, “you have to get outside everyday.”

It’s hard to imagine anyone would move to or stay in such an extreme place without some heartfelt need or purpose. Sean has always found solace in the mountains but even more so after his older brother died suddenly from a brown recluse spider bite when Sean was 16. After snowboard expeditions to all seven continents, for whatever reason, he and Mollie felt most deeply drawn to the high north. Looking at maps, they found Wiseman at an appealing latitude with the gift of skiable mountains. Sean also has several autoimmune disorders, including a photosensitive form of lupus that, in Montana, where the couple previously lived, discouraged him from going outside when the sun was shining. In the Arctic, even in summer, the UV light is low. “This is my happy place,” he told me. “To see people’s reaction to the environment up here is just the best feeling. You see that they get what you get. Something clicks. Something becomes tangible. I would say that a lot of our focus has been trying to create something tangible that people can then bring home with them to be better advocates of our natural spaces.”

Being off-grid, Arctic Hive is not fancy—I didn’t take a shower for a week and sat upon the iciest outhouse seat of my life. But in contrast to the merciless conditions, the snug indoor spaces felt decadent. Being physically comfortable allowed me to absorb the singular beauty of the place in ways I may not have otherwise. And luckily, the schedule was casual. We went dogsledding in the twilight beneath gigantic peaks and cross-country skied through forests so silent that when I stopped, all I could hear was the sound of my own heartbeat. With harnesses, we hooked up the sled dogs and went skijoring through the crystalline black, dodging willows and ducking under spruce boughs. We crossed fresh lynx tracks twice. In the mornings, Mollie led us in long, leisurely sessions of yoga in the cozy dome with both stoves firing. șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű the window panes, the silhouettes of the trees emerged from the navy cover of night slowly, almost imperceptibly, over hours.

Mollie told me one evening that people often ask her and Sean what they miss about life in a more moderate clime, and she chuckles at the assumption of lack. “This was a choice,” she says. “I don’t miss anything.”

On the winter solstice, the Alaskan Arctic is a place of potent liminality. It felt like the edge of the world. I gravitated to being alone, dawdling on our hikes back to the Hive, soaking in the strange rhythms of light and dark and gazing up at the sky’s ever-shifting morphology of blues. In the middle of the night, I watched as the moon traveled unfamiliar trajectories across the sky, and in the sumptuous warmth of the yoga dome one evening, after everyone else had left, in the gleam of a dozen flickering candles, I sat and listened to the wind for hours. More than I can ever remember, I felt a simple but unmistakable sense of belonging that I am rarely still enough to discern. Since I returned, when the walls of daily life feel like they’re closing in, remembering that sense of connection to this vast, wild planet has been a salve, a source of perspective, and a motivator.

Naturally, I wasn’t blind to the way a place this remote is affected by the environmental crises we all face, crises that often weigh on my mind and inform many, if not most, of the decisions I make. In some ways, the effects of climate change are even more extreme in the Arctic. While I was there, the temperature shot up to an almost unheard-of 28 degrees and then boomeranged 65 degrees back down in 24 hours. One local, Jack Reakoff, who has lived here since the seventies, told us stories of bizarre weather events that caused mass die-offs of moose and dall sheep in the last few years. I felt the grief of these unignorable truths. But it also felt like mourning or despairing were incomplete ways of relating to a place this spectacular.

One night, I wandered out of my cabin, wrapped in a sleeping bag I had brought just in case, and watched slack-jawed as the northern lights whirled across the dome overhead like a luminous river. After many days, the formidable peaks of the Brooks Range finally disrobed from their mantle of clouds and shone resplendent in the moonlight. Standing all alone in the snow, I felt like I had landed in a forgotten kingdom. It occurred to me that none of us can ever truly live up to the gift of simply existing on a planet of such outrageous magnificence. Maybe the celebration is every bit as necessary as the grief.

The post I Spent the Winter Solstice in One of the Darkest Places on Earth appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

I have hiked and run the trail that leads up Animas Mountain, just a few blocks from my home in Durango, Colorado, many hundreds of times. But one afternoon this past winter, ambling under clear, slanting sunlight, it felt different. The switchbacks were caked with week-old ice and mud. The colors of the sage and juniper were muted, and the air had the lazy bite of winterÌęin the foothills of the Rockies. The outing couldn’t have been more mundane. I know the contours of every tree, shrub, rock, and cactus. And yet I felt a sense of euphoria just to be there. The trail wasn’t different, but I was. This is one of the strange blessings that has emerged after undergoing a draconian treatment for breast cancer last year. It takes very little to open me up to the beauty of the world.

Now that I am fully through surgery, chemo, radiation, and 12 months of targeted drug therapy, and have a clean bill of health—at least for the moment—people ask me what I have learned. I see the expectancy written tautly in the muscles of their faces. Sometimes I even feel their impatience. I can’t produce a pithy sound bite, because the processes of genuine healing don’t lend themselves to easy summary. They sprawl over years and decades, leaping and stalling. Going through treatment was a leapÌęin healing of the sort that only begins with the body, and it started more than 15 years ago.

To say that I was tightly wound as a fledgling adult would be an understatement. Shortly after moving to Santa Fe to work for this magazine, one of my superiors shared that I was so intense about doing a good job that it unnerved him. I was straightjacketed by a sort of maniacal perfectionism that, in hindsight, my upbringing and intensive education veritably required. Some part of me wanted to be free of that, but I didn’t know how. There can be a certain safety in familiar suffering.

It was no mistake that I landed in Santa Fe. The process of loosening up began in its uncluttered deserts, under giant western skies. Even the air, unburdened by humidity, felt more spacious out there in comparison to the big eastern cities where I grew up. I learned to climb on the empty cliffs outside town and ride a road bike for the first time. After work my boyfriend and I would set off on excursions, from simple after-work bouldering to scaling alpine peaks after sunset for views of the city lights. Mostly, we moved fast or hard, or both, but sometimes I paused long enough to notice more about my surroundings. I especially loved the orchestral stillness of the desert before dawn, as if everything was waiting to begin the song.

The ability to be outside regularly was a privilege and a blessing that I cherished. It was key to the slow, healthy unwinding of my nervous system. But at the same time, perhaps subconsciously internalizing cultural standards around productivity and egotism, I prioritized activities that involved speed, strength, and skill over those that centered on slowness, attunement, and contemplation. I valued running over meandering and long backcountry ski days over mellow cross-country ski tours, as if everything needed to be big and noteworthy. Since high school, I had been trained to put even my extracurricular activities on some kind of internal résumé.

I noticed that the outdoor culture around me also seemed to encourage this perspective, or at least not dispute it. It was a patriarchal view that embraced challenge over nourishment and doing over being—on getting somewhere and becoming someone over sensing, receiving, and communing. Even perusing the pages of this magazine as part of my job, I noticed there were generally a lot of men doing bold, dangerous things. That’s great. I like men. And adventures. But it was an imbalance that I internalized, not only in terms of the activities I chose but also the trappings of the so-called outdoor lifestyle.

I remember my boyfriend, who was a gear reviewer, passing along trendy outdoor clothes to me. (Perhaps he wasn’t enamored with my frumpy sweats and cotton T-shirts.) I was happy to have free technical wear, but I was also unconsciously adopting a certain belief system that held that anyone outside had to look a certain way. That external pressure seemed to dovetail seamlessly with myÌęinternal expectations, so I couldn’t always tell one from the other.

Over the years, haphazardly, and despite myself, I have gravitated very slowly into a less rigid and more intuitive way of being. Part of this is the blessing of getting older. I’m now 40. Naturally, my body is slowing a bit and my need for constant positive self-reinforcement is lower. But it wasn’t until I was forced not only to slow down but actually stop that I realized the residual internal grip of these slow-dying habits: I got cancer.

Even though my tumor was small, the type of cancer was aggressive and had already spread, which meant I needed industrial-strength chemotherapy. After an infusion, I sometimes didn’t leave the house for days. It was as if a land mine had detonated within my body. I would lie on the couch, actually trying not to be present because I was so uncomfortable, my stomach scoured and raw, my mind slow and viscous, my vision blurred as if I were seeing through agitated water. Of course I wasn’t skiing or hiking; sometimes it was all I could do to simply go outside and look at the trees. I felt unmoored and adrift. Cut off from the perpetual motion that on some level oriented me to who I think I am, I felt like I had misplaced my identity.

One winter afternoon while on the sofa, I stared up at a slice of overcast sky through a skylight, listening to the squawks of a small flock of geese overhead. They happened to flap right across the rectangle of bright haze above me. That momentary glimpse felt like a gift, a reminder that the world I had left behind, which seemed so distant, was not as far away as I thought.

I began paying more attention to the nature right around me, to the ducks and herons in my neighborhood and the unhurried transformation of plants over weeks and months. I tuned in to the humble beauty of things I hadn’t really noticed before—the textures of rocks, the way shallow water shifts into shards of color with the slightest movement. I took full-body joy in seeing a deer precariously tiptoe through the river early one morning.

As terrible as the experience of treatment was, the relative simplicity of life opened up insight into its former complexity in new ways. I began to see more clearly and profoundly what is lost when I always move at speed or with some predetermined purpose—and when I only relate to the natural world in one way, through movement. It now seems absurd—the earth is the totality of who and what we are; it’s what we are made of, where we come from, and where we will go. To limit our understanding of and relationship to it in any way is tragic.

And yet I realized that even still, in the recent past, I sometimes conceived of my time outdoors—as cherished as it was—as checking the “exercise and well-being” box off a mental to-do list en route to something else. There was almost a subtle spirit of acquisition, a self-oriented neediness and haste that I hadn’t been aware of but had precluded the deepest sense of presence. I wonder if, on some level, looking at nature only through the lens of my own needs created a mindset that was subtly extractive.

These days I feel free to be outside in different ways—ways I would have once considered sleepy. Recently, a friend and I sat in an expansive meadow, sandwiched between two cliffs, and played around with watercolors for hours. (I’m terrible, but who cares.) Sometimes I just stop, stand still, and watch birds, which I once would have judged as laughably boring. (It becomes more interesting when you have the patience to not move around so much.) On occasion I sit down in a thicket, close my eyes, and listen.

But this long unlearning isn’t only about slowing down or eschewing technical apparel. I love racing up mountains, taking backpacking trips, and skiing deep into the wilderness. We humans need some element of challenge. And I undoubtedly appreciate a well-made piece of gear. (I have collected an embarrassing amount of it.) This process is rather about having the balance of mind to be able to choose how to relate to the outdoors in any given moment and not be so beholden to internal or external pressures. Ultimately, that freedom supports a deeper, more real, sustainable and nourishing relationship with the natural world, as well as oneself. Maybe they’re not so separate, actually.

Recently, I met my mom in Sedona, Arizona, for a week. While she was resting one day, I decided to quickly steal up into a canyon. I didn’t think I would be gone for long, so I tossed on my sneakers and headed out in jeans and a T-shirt. I was so entranced by the steep canyon walls, red spires, rocky knobs, and vibrant spring greenery that I kept going. The pandemic was beginning to ease, and I felt a sense of buoyancy that was maybe just in the air.

On the way back, feeling ebullient, I started to trot. I just felt like it. It didn’t seem to matter that I didn’t have a sports bra on. Every few hundred yards I’d break into a sprint and careen through the ponderosas and the terra-cotta monoliths looming overhead. There was something so simple and freeing about it. I wasn’t trying to get anywhere. Achieving a certain pace or mileage couldn’t have been further from my mind. It was just the pure, senseless joy of a human body moving through space.

As my perfectionism continues to transform and express itself more subtly, something else seems to be happening naturally. It’s a reclamation of my own humanity on a level beyond words and culture, a reorientation toward reverence. Cancer, in all its misery, obliterated my expectations for myself and for what the world owes me. In the wake of those entitlements, it seems the only appropriate response to being in nature—in whatever way I am able—is wonder.

The post How Cancer Helped Transform My Relationship to the Outdoors appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Even as far as deserts go, the Bisti Badlands in northern New Mexico are inhospitable. I have rarely seen so much as a lizard among the stone hoodoos and petrified logs. That’s why I was astonished one wintry dayÌęto see a long-eared jackrabbit tear out from a gravelly wash, its lithe body moving so fast it almost floated above the landscape. Two dogs bolted in maniacal pursuit.

The dogs belonged to my friends, who screeched at them to stop, but the canines were already too intoxicated with instinct to register any commands. They chased the hare for hundreds of yards, eventually around a corner and out of sight. It took a while for them to return, but they did not come back with a dead rabbit. My friends laughed, as if agreeing that all’s well that ends well—dogs will be dogs! We kept walking. But I felt sad.

I adore my friends, and I love their dogs—they’re hilarious and cute and fun—but I also care for the jackrabbit. What would become of it? The margins of survival in this desiccated land must be as thin as knives. Even though the animal survived the chase, I wondered if the expense of energy meant the difference between life and death anyway.

You may have noticed that there are a lot of dogs out and about these days. In my town, Durango, Colorado, dogs are a big part of outdoor culture, and their population has always been high. But now canines appear to be positively everywhere: jostlingÌęon the bike path, zooming about the trails, trotting near (or not so near) their owners down the street.

Since the pandemic began, breeders, shelters, and rescues have seen unprecedented demand for puppy adoptions. According to the American Pet Products Association, 12.6 million households brought homeÌęa pet between March and December. , a nonprofit that tracked data from someÌę1,200 shelters and rescue organizations across the country, recorded a 9Ìępercent rise in the dog adoption rate between 2019 and 2020. The joy and companionship that pets bring to people’s lives areÌęunequivocally good, especially in such challenging years. At the same time, there is another concurrent and concerning phenomenon brewing: an epidemic of problematic dog behavior.

“I see a lot of dogs not being well socialized,” says Cheryl Albrecht, a trainer and the owner of here in Durango. “The biggest thing is, they don’t know how to be alone, and they’re afraid of new things. People aren’t traveling, they aren’t taking their dogs downtown or to the store.” Albrecht has noticed that many dogs aren’t accustomed to being in populated public places, and there has been a surge in the number of dogs on public lands.

The American Pet Products Association that only about 6Ìępercent of dog owners take their dog to obedience training. They are a beloved part of our lifestyle, but when untrained, they terrorize wildlife, chase bikers, irk passersby, and cause trouble on trails. As the dog population grows, what is our responsibility as their guardians—to other people, wildlife, public lands, and the dogs themselves?

I was once an oblivious dog owner myself and, admittedly, probably more egregious than most. I inherited Skyler, an 85-pound white wolf-shepherd mix, when I started dating my husband, Andrew, 14 years ago. We took her backcountry skiing and paddleboarded up the river while she ran along the bank. It wasn’t long before I started taking her on runs and hikes on my own. I adored her. She was uncannily smart and empathetic, with a mesmerizing wild streak. On a regular basis, she’d jump Andrew’s six-foot fence and take herself on long walks in the middle of the night. SometimesÌęwhen backpacking, we’d yip in jest, and she’d throw her head back and join in with a heart-rattling howl. I felt that sound in the marrow of my bones. It made me realize viscerally the thin line between predator and pet.

With big teeth and pointy ears, Skyler probably appeared scarier than most dogs. It bothered me that she would run after wildlife, stand smack in the middle of the trail when someone was trying to run or bike by, and occasionally nip at puppies. She was better trained when Andrew was around. I’m sure I could have had more control over her if I’d put in anyÌęeffort, but it somehow didn’t seem that important. Plus, most of the dogs I was surrounded by were not particularly well trained, so her misbehavior didn’t seem out of the realm of social acceptance. In my busyness, I didn’t give it much thought.

Now I realize my obliviousness had ripple effects. Skyler was mostly under voice control, but not entirely. That lack of obedienceÌęstressed out other owners and their pooches, and it proved vexing and occasionally fatal to wildlife. I was also not taking into account that some people have very different cultural relationships with dogs. Many people are afraid of dogs because of past experiences, or they simply don’t love them as much as I do. I should have been more considerate and taken more responsibility.

One of the allures of living in a mountain town or other recreation community is the possibility of taking your dog everywhere, and the freedom of letting themÌęroam off-leash. But if everyone were as oblivious as I was—Skyler died nearly five years ago—and dog ownership keeps rising, things would become unworkable quickly. With so many new puppies around, now is the time to change dog culture. I propose that we collectively deem it socially unacceptable to let dogs chase wildlife, rush up to strangers, jump on people, and bark at passersby. It’s actually not bad dog behavior. It’s negligent human behavior.

“I always call it trail etiquette,” says Eva Perrigo, a certified trainer, behavior counselor, and owner of in Jackson, Wyoming. “There’s trail etiquette among humans, and we need to have trail etiquette with dogs as well. And where I live, there’s not a lot of it! I’m always of the belief that if you don’t have a recall that is 99 percent solid in all situations, your dog shouldn’t be off-leash.” Perrigo recommends a long line for dogs who aren’t under complete voice command. “Wildlife takes precedence—this is their land,” she says. “It’s also a safety thing for dogs. If they run into a moose and her baby, it could kill them.” Simply the scent of a dog, even if it’s long gone, affects the of animals from mule deer to bobcats.

A few weeks ago, I was walking on my town’s bike path with a friend, Vanna, and her two dogs, both on-leash. She held her young black LabÌęand I held her sprightly pitbull mix, who pranced along like a little diva. Dogs were everywhere, and we did our best to navigate them skillfully. Then a man approached us with his small Lab mix off-leash. The ownerÌęstopped, stood still, and muttered an almost imperceptible command. The dog stopped and sat down peacefully. We passed within a couple feet, and the dog stayed perfectly still, only his eyeballs moving, tracking us calmly. The man gave another command and they kept walking. Vanna and I looked at each other and burst out laughing. Neither of us had ever seen a dog that well trained. It was like watching a magic trick. But what if that were closer to the norm?

Naturally, not everyone is going to have the time or desire to train their dog to such a precise degree. And perhaps it’s not necessary for those who are content to keep their pets on a leash. But there are great boons to putting a little effort into training, for the dog and for you. “If you have a dog who is well trained, he has that much more freedom because you can trust him in more situations,” says Perrigo. You’re less stressed about what trouble he might get into, and “he’s going to get more opportunity to play with his buddies.” Training your dog can actually strengthen the bond between you—provided you don’t use excessively punitive means—and make it more fun and sustainable to even have a dog. Albrecht, for example, trains dogs to bike, ski, and camp with their owners. They learn to keep pace, stay out of the way of wheels and metal edges, and respond to directional commands on the fly.

If I adopt a dog again, which I probably will, I will do it differently. First, I would reflect on what breed and temperament would fit my lifestyle before committing. Some dogs are easier than others. Skyler was a beautiful soul, but she required more care and attention than, say, a happy-go-lucky golden retriever. “If you don’t want a project dog, don’t get one,” advises Albrecht. “It’s like having a baby, a four-legged one.” I would recognize that having a dog isn’t only about going on hikes together and cuddling on the couch. It takes time and energy to develop the bond and make sure the dog is a good citizen in the greater context of my community. It’s not just about me. And I would take the time to train the dogÌęwith basic commands—if not with a professional, then on my own. It’s stressful dealing with a petÌęwho doesn’t listen. Conversely, it’s incredibly fun and rewarding to be able to take your dog everywhere and do anything with themÌętagging along.

One day this winter, I watched Albrecht set off from her house in the hills outside Durango with a dozen dogs of various sizes and breeds, all off-leash. Twice weekly, she takes a group of hounds she has trained on a five-hour excursion that she calls . She schussed through the ponderosa pines as the dogs zipped nearby, not jumping in her way and not running up the backs of her skis. When she gave the command, every single one of them came right away. They all sat when asked. When she released them, they trotted along, gleefully sniffing, exploring, and playing. Everyone seemed to be having a fantastic time, including Albrecht.

You don’t need an advanced degree to train your dog. With a moderate level of effort and know-how, you can have a canine that is more fun to be around for everyone, including you. Here are six tips to help get you there.

Understand Your Dog

First, observe and listen. Dogs have physical, social, and mental needs, and they communicate with their behaviors and body language. Pay attention and you’ll start to understand what your dog is feeling and why they areÌęmaking certain choices. Sometimes simply taking care of unmet needs, such as vigorous exercise, can help with behavior challenges. The website Ìęis a great resource for deciphering dog body language. Also, dogs change as they age. Watch for shifting patterns and preferences. “We need to realize that dogs are their own individuals,” says Heather Ross, a certified behavior consultant, dog trainer, and owner of , in Felton, California. “That’s what so great about dogs—they have a lot to teach us.”

Socialize Your Dog

The golden socialization period for puppies lasts between 3Ìęand 15Ìęweeks of age. During that time, their minds are like sponges. They are learning how to interact with the world, what is safe, and what is scary. Use this time to introduce them to lots of new things and give them positive associations. “Socialization is all about preventing animals from developing fear,” says Perrigo. “After 15 weeks, socialization can still happen, it’s just slower.” At any time, you can give your dog a positive association with a new experience (like a skateboarder rushing by, for example) by giving them things they like, such as yummy food, petting, or happy talk.

Master the Basics

For anyone who plans to take their dogs on trails and outdoors, Perrigo recommends mastering a minimum of three basic commands with your dog: come, leave it, and stay. Albrecht and Ross also suggest teaching them how to not pull while on a leash. “You don’t want them to prevent other people’s enjoyment, and you don’t want them to pick up stuff that might be dangerous,” says Ross. Training involves slow progression, repetition, and consistency. Start with low-intensity situations. For example, if you are training your dog to stay, start inside your house where theyÌęwon’t be tempted to go very far, then move to more distracting situations: from the backyard to the front yard to a park and finally to trails, beaches, or other open space.

Find an Online Program

You can train many dogs on your own if you have the time and interest, and online resources abound. The Great Courses, for example, offers a online course. There is good free content on YouTube—including on or feeds—but you have to sift through a lot of chaff. If you use YouTube videos, make sure the trainers you subscribe to are using philosophies you agree with and that the dog in the video resembles your dog in temperament. Consistency is also key. “We’re always training our dogs, 24/7,” says Albrecht. “Whatever you’re allowing your dog to do in daily life, you’re reinforcing. Think about what you’re doing all day long with them,” not just in the 20 minutes you’re practicing sit commands.

Hire a Trainer

If your dog is aggressive toward other dogs or humans, or if you don’t have the time or interest to train your dog yourself, you will need to hire a trainer. While there are professional certifications, such as the , dog training is an unregulated industry. Do your homework. Theory has evolved considerablyÌęeven in the past ten years, so make sure your trainer is keeping abreast of current science and that their philosophy jives with your own. For example, trainers often have differing policies on the use of e-collars, which administer small shocks or vibrations to deter unwanted behavior. The most important part is that they will work with you on your own goals for your pooch. “Being a dog trainer isn’t just about being with dogs, it’s about being with people and teaching people,” says Ross. “Someone could be a great trainer, but they might not be a good fit for your personality.”

Prepare Your Dog for Post-Pandemic Life Now

When the pandemic ends, life will change a lot for dogs, possibly abruptly. Separation anxiety will likely be a huge issue for many pets, and trainers are concerned that shelters could see an influx as pet owners realize they aren’t equipped to care for their sensitive companions. So start accustoming your dog to future changes in lifestyle. If you think you will one day take your dog to coffee shops, breweries, or other public spaces, introduce them to similar areas now so they won’t be shocked by all the activity. If you plan to leave your pet alone for many hours at some point, let them get used to being alone for longer periods now. And consider setting up a relationship with a local soon—they may get inundated when pandemic restrictions lift.

The post I Was a Bad Dog Owner. Don’t Be Like Me. appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

About ten years ago, at the end of a 19-day raft trip through the Grand Canyon, I grabbed the bag I had stashed in the shuttle van and pulled on my jeans. They felt a little tight, but I didn’t think much of it at the time. I had spent the previous few weeks in swimsuits and board shorts, hiking and swimming, sipping beer by campfires and staring slack-jawed at cliffs and canyons. I figured my jeans simply felt unfamiliar.

But a few days later, standing on a scale in the chlorine-scented locker room of the municipal recreation center, I tapped the little weights back and forth to discover that I had gained a considerable amount of weight. I was amazed—and elated. I didn’t necessarily need to gain weight, or lose it. What was significant was that I had barely noticed. In that moment, I realized that after more than a decade, I had made a full recoveryÌęfrom anorexia nervosa, which had once caused me an unthinkable amount of suffering. I thought I would never be free of it.

The illness started more than a decade before, subtly at first. I was a junior in high school, struggling with depression after a difficult move to a new city. I felt isolated and disconnected from my peers, myself, and the natural world, which had always been a source of solace for me. I started to get curious about what it would be like to skip a meal or two. In hindsight, like many who suffer from eating disorders, it was a misguided and desperate grapple for control at a time when the great themes of my lifeÌęwere in chaos. But soon, what seemed like just a weird idea gained momentum. In that distorted state, it felt good to deprive myself, as if it were some ascetic form of self-mastery. Just like that, I started the steady slide into a vortex of self-denial, compulsiveness, and perfectionism while withering into a wisp of my former self, both physically and emotionally.

My well-meaningÌęif perplexedÌęparents attempted to secure care for me through standard methods. They delivered me to a psychiatrist, who listened stony-faced, pronounced me depressed, and prescribed a drug. (With teenage defiance, I never took it and vowed never to go again.) They brought me to a pediatrician who specialized in eating disorders. She weighed me, sized me up, and offered weight goals and diet plans. (I pretended I didn’t have a problem, and she pretended not to see through me.) At that time, I wasn’t ready to recover. I wasn’t even ready to admit something was wrong.

It’s common for those suffering from eating disorders to wait a while, sometimes years, to get help, and treatments vary greatly. If the case is life-threatening, sufferers are hospitalized. Others spend time in multiweek residential treatment centers or intensive outpatient programs. For less severe cases, patients ideally consult with a dietitian, therapist, and psychiatrist to develop a tailored treatment plan. But because eating disorders—which include anorexiaÌęand bulimia, as well as lesser-known conditions like binge eating disorder and , a debilitating obsession with “healthful” eating—are shadowed with stigma, they are often suffered in secret.

Unfortunately, some people never seek treatment. These afflictions are known as , and they have of all mental conditions. But eating disorders on the whole are surprisingly common. An estimatedÌęÌęwill suffer from one in their lifetimes. Worldwide, the alongside increasing urbanization and industrialization, particularly and .

Perhaps out of stubbornness, ignorance,Ìęor fear of the stigma, I took a divergent path. Four years later, as a junior in college, after a morning swirling in yet another eddy of food-obsessed thoughts, I finally reached a breaking point. How much brain space had I ceded to my diet? I realized that I would genuinely rather be fat and happy than thin and miserable. I just didn’t know how to get better, and, perhaps foolishly, it didn’t occur to me to seek help. My route to healing would involve a therapy that gets surprisinglyÌęlittle play in the medical establishment: nature.

After college, I moved to Italy for work and instinctively let go of all semblance of control.ÌęNothing was off limits—thick, steaming mugs of Italian hot chocolate;Ìęcrispy, delectable pizzas;Ìęcheesy panini. I bought new clothes and then more new clothes. I gained weight very quickly, and waves of anxiety and panic washed over me for months. The experts I consultedÌęfor this storyÌętold me that many people with eating disorders go through phases similar to this, releasing their rigid behaviors only to swing drastically to the other side of the spectrum. For me, it was profoundly uncomfortable. Day and night, I felt like I was wearing a hot, itchy fat suit. As excruciating as it was, tossing myself into the fire of weight gain seemed to burn away the most entrenched mental patterns.

I still, however, needed to learn how to eat and live in a balanced way, and I had no idea how to do that. Some of the hallmark behaviors of eating disorders include skipping meals, cycles of binging and depriving, and restricting food groups, so after I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico,Ìęto work for this magazine,ÌęI promised myself that I would eat three square meals a day, no matter what. In hindsight, it would have been advisable to secure professional help. Instead, I gravitated outside.

At the local ski area, I learned how to bounce through giant mounds of powder. At dawn, my colleagues and I hiked up white slopes in the gathering light and blazed down before work. As the weather warmed, I huffed to the top of local peaks for views of the sunset over the empty desert beyond town and learned to haul myself up sport climbs at local crags. I had run and skied and biked before, but I had never lived in a place where the natural world threaded so seamlessly into the fabric of my everyday life. In these wild places, I began to make the long, slow shift from imposing a steely will over my body to actually inhabiting it.

But the Type A perfectionism that spurred my anorexia didn’t fade easily. At first, I brought those compulsive and self-recriminating habits to my time outside. In many ways, I still treated myself like an objectÌęor a perpetual self-improvement project. At the end of a day climbing, for instance, I wouldn’t feel content unless I pushed myself as hard as possible—an arbitrary bar that necessitated a certain attitude of self-punishment.

“For most people, as they treat their eating disorder, there’s a tendency to feel like they need an outlet for those controlling, rigid behaviors,” says , a registered dietitian who often works with athletes and the host of the . “Especially with athletes, exercise can become the new coping mechanism.”

Kara Bazzi, a therapist and founder of , a treatment center in Seattle, says it can be particularly tricky when the compulsive behavior is wrapped up with a genuine, healthy passion for a sport or activity. “Most people can say, well, I love my activities and I have a high appetite for movement,” Bazzi says. “But then where does it cross the line to be problematic? That’s a very gray, intricate thing to parse out.”

Endurance sports, individual sports, and elite athleticism are risk factors for eating disorders, and it’s not rare for athletes, including outdoor and adventure sportsÌęathletes, to struggle with eating. Bazzi, a former Division I runner, says athletic culture commonly normalizes disordered behaviors.

To the extent that it encouraged me to fully inhabit my body, being active was helpful. But I realized over time that there’s a difference between being an athlete outside and just being outside. A key piece of reclaiming my health and well-being was letting go of the need to be good, or fast, or even notably skilled at anything. It took many years for me to slow down and fully understand that healing came less from the exercise itself and more from the feeling of groundedness that comesÌęfrom being immersed in nature. Sometimes that meant simply sitting down and listening to the frogs, the wind through cottonwood trees, or even just the sound of silence.

It may seem obvious that spending a lot of time outside would support recovery from an eating disorder. Institutionally, however, the so-called nature prescription gets surprisingly little attention when it comes to anorexia, bulimia, and related conditions. A mountain of research has uncovered other health benefits of spending time in the natural world, fromÌę to reduced levels of , and . But when I reached out to Nature and Health, a researchÌęcenterÌęat theÌęUniversity of Washington devoted to exploring the effect of nature on human well-being, the researchers didn’t know of a single study—existing or in the works—examining the role nature plays in eating disorder recovery. (There is , however, suggesting a correlation between positive body image and exposure to nature.) A search on the Children andÌęNature Network’s library, which includes hundreds of studies on nature and health, didn’t yield a single article on the topic.

Some eating disorder treatment centers offer nature walks and beach outings, but few appear to make time spent in nature a central aspect of their programs, perhaps because health insurance companies focus on reimbursing standard methods of care. At the same time, therapists and social workers at some wilderness therapy programs for troubled youth, such as Aspiro șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű and Evoke Therapy Programs, have found that their trips can help people with mild eating disorders and body image challenges by allowing freedom from social media, mirrors, and pervasive cultural and familial pressures to look a certain way.

For years, , a therapist and author of , has taken her clients on silent walks in nature. “With an eating disorder, you’re constantly not in the moment—you regret this or that, or you’re worried about what you’re going to eat in the future,” she says. “Being able to be outside changes what we focus on. Nature brings us back to a core essence that is not the chattering ego mind.”

Especially in the early years of recovery, I was at my best when I was in the wilderness for days or even weeks at a time—the dirtier the better. In the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of northern New Mexico, I lolled in alpine meadows strewn with wildflowers. Hiking at 12,000 feet, I got caught in a magnificent, terrifying thunderstorm and huddled in a crevice while it tired itself out over my head. On occasion, I sat still enough for birds and chipmunks to forget I was there and flit right in front of my face.

In the wilderness, with its elemental beauty and challenge, I could forget myself for a while. It was as if the more time I spent outside moving, exploring, and disconnecting from my responsibilities and ambitions, the more my attention loosened its tight orbit around myself. Nature is a mirror for who we really are. Being immersed in it calmed my nervous system and helped me cultivate a healthy sense of my own smallness in the context of things, but it also helped me connect to a deeper and wilder aspect of my own humanity that I had always tried to efface or control. It was as if experiencing the ceaseless changing and rhythmic cycles of the natural world helped me realize the changeable nature of my own body. I started to think of it more as an inscrutable collection of processes and a map of sensation to be felt and known, rather than a product to be controlled.

Over the years, a funny thing has happened. As I open more to the mystery of this human body, I also open more and more to the extravagant miracle of the natural world itself. Things I had only been peripherally aware of in the throes of my former preoccupations have become more apparent and vibrant—the lush sounds of a forest, the delicate scent of sage after rain. It’s as if the heavy lens of self has thinned a bit to reveal a clearer picture of the world.

Recovery takes diverse forms and means different things to different people. For me, the process was like erosion. It took many years for the compulsive thoughts, difficult emotions, and inflexible behaviors to wear away completely. But now they are gone. Like others who consider themselves fully recovered, I know where my boundaries lie: I don’t ever do cleanses, and I don’t have a scale in my home. I also know that regular contact with the outdoors is crucial for me to maintain a balanced mind, and I make sure to get my feet on dirt every day and to not take my time outside too seriously. In Durango, Colorado, where I now live, while my friends are out running 20 miles through the mountains or winning 24-hour mountain bike races, I’m wandering around in the wilderness inspecting flowers, picking mushrooms, and staring at the sky.

Not long ago, I went camping one weekend with a friend. We took a hike on an obscure, overgrown trail that led pretty much nowhere—just the sort of long, delightful, pointless rambling I like these days. It had rained a lot, and the wildflowers had grown gigantic and unruly, sprawling over the trail and stretching neck-high in some places. Winding through aspen groves and meadows, I started to relax after a long week, and the landscape appeared like a mosaic of light. The forest was at once completely ordinary and utterly awe-inspiring. Perhaps the ability to feel at home in my body, to experience it from the inside out instead of manipulating it from the outside in, has come with the capacity to feel more at home in the world. It’s hard to imagine a deeper sign of well-being than this: not needing anything to be different, especially yourself.

If you are struggling with eating and body image in any way, you do not have to suffer alone. Consider reaching out to the , which is available via text, phone, or chat.

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Three decades ago, when author was learning to backpack on the California coast, he had a feeling that nature was something that had happened in the past. There were no more otters or humpback whales in the water offshore, no peregrine falcons or eagles soaring overhead. Elk no longer roamed the forests and condors were virtually extinct.Ìę

Recently, Kaufmann, 47, a naturalist and self-described data-driven artist, has experienced a recurring dream that contrasts starkly with that oldÌęreality. In the dream, he’s not sure if he’s old or young, in the future or in the past. He’s walking by the Sacramento River, which is flooded 35 miles across and so full of salmon it glitters in the sun. As he walks upstream alongside the fish, he sees wildflowers crowding the hillsides, insects livening the air, and birds congregating in such numbers they darken the sky. It’s a vision of abundance and possibility, and the dream ends when he reaches the headwaters, the nexus of the life cycle of the fishery. Ìę Ìę

Kaufmann shares this dream in the beginning of his sprawling opus of a new book, , which was published in September. The genre-bending work blends science writing, hand-lettered prose poetry, and Kaufmann’s plein-air watercolors, and is intended to be a means to deepen environmental literacy. It’s also an invitation to travel—in perspective—from Kaufmann’s understanding of nature as a childÌęto the vision of promise embedded in his adulthood dream.Ìę

“I think we are longing, as humans, for a better story,” says Kaufmann. “And my whole job is to start with a better story about just how beautiful this moment is
 It’s a moment of transformation and a moment of emergency.”Ìę

The most enticing non-fiction books allow the reader an opportunity to inhabit the worldview of the author. During this year of near-Biblical catastrophe, from the coronavirus pandemic to California’s first recorded —a million-acre wildfire—Kaufmann’s hopeful, inclusive outlook is so appealing it almost feels like a guilty pleasure. He claims a sort of “stubborn optimism.” For every point of despair, he has a point of hope. He is fond of saying that “people protect what they love, and people love what they know,” and so it follows that we must start with the facts and with a better story in which to organize them.Ìę

The Forests of California features hand-painted maps, diagrams, and vignettes of flora and fauna, but it is not a field guide or a textbook. Kaufmann is more concerned with the relationships between things and how systems work than exhaustively answering questions of what, where, and when (but the book does include those details as well). For example, we learn about ponderosa pine and the species it takes up as neighbors and the function palm oases play in the context of the desert. Kaufmann is also forthright that he infuses the book with his own cognitive bias toward celebrating beauty. “I’m not going to leave you alone with the information like a good textbook should,” he says. “This is a story from a guy who’s given his whole life to this thing that he loves most in the universe, which is the natural world of California.”Ìę

If you decide to read this book, take your time. It is densely packed with art that invites lingering and details gleaned from scientific papers that areÌędistilled to pithy and informative tidbits. (Did you know that the Sierra Nevada has the continent’s highest level of mammal endemism? Or that in a tablespoon of forest soil, there are more microbiotic creatures than human beings alive right now?)Ìę

Even as a non-Californian, I found the presentation of text and art engrossing. It felt natural to extrapolate Kaufman’s way of understanding forest interrelationships to broaden my understanding of my own landscape in southwest Colorado—and my relationship to it. His enthusiasm seepsÌęthrough even the most fact-heavy sections of the book, which made it a joy to read, especially during this time of cataclysmic change.Ìę

Kaufmann has published two similar books in the last few years, Ìęand . This most recent book on forests is the first in a series of so-called field atlases covering a variety of the state’s natural resources. The Coasts of California and The Deserts of California will be published in spring and fall 2021, and another volume, The State of Fire: Understanding Why, Where and How California Burns, will follow in 2022.Ìę

To keep up with his production schedule, Kaufmann borders on obsessive, waking at 4:30 A.M. to work. A former tattoo artist and the son of a psychologist and an astrophysicist, he is prone to long philosophical soliloquies. With a greying John Muir-like beard and a penchant for linen jackets, pocketed vests,Ìęand felt hats, he looks like he could have stepped out of the 19th century. (He often sleeps under a wool blanket while backpacking.)Ìę

This year has been an especially challenging one for California, between the pandemic, civil unrest in response to long-standing racial injustice, and wildfires, but Kaufmann is happy that Forests came out now. While his books have been well received, he occasionally encounters readers who see his optimism as naive. He responds that cynicism, even in these challenging times, is an abdication of one’s social responsibilities.Ìę

“It’s a luxury and an indulgence, a privilege,” he says. “There’s no choice but to be optimistic. But that being said, there is this really important edge to walk on, which is that a lot of people, when they hear optimism, they think idealism. They’re thinking I’m not actually facing the facts—when in fact optimism is, by my working definition, the process of engaging the facts with eyes wide open.”Ìę

The basis for effective action, he says, is cultivating a genuine love for place and an understanding of one’s own part in the interconnected whole of the environment, as well as being informed, which is where his elixir of data-driven art,Ìęcartography, and mystical poetry come in.Ìę

He believes that despite the stressors on the state’s natural resources,Ìęthere is a path to leave the 21st century with nature in better shape than it was at the turn of the 20th century. In his previous book tours and, now, online events, he is heartened by meeting people who are motivated, if daunted, to meet the environmental challenges California faces. They come up to him after talks with wide eyes and white knuckles.Ìę

“They’re almost pleading, ‘Obi, what can I do for this thing, this feeling I have that nature is going away, or that we’ve completely screwed things up already?’” he says. “I always answer that kind of question with a question back, like ‘Well, when was the last time you went camping?’”Ìę

Oftentimes, it’s been a while. So he asks those readers with the anxious faces to please put everything down and go connect with the natural world, not just as an escape but as fuel for action and political will. Go roam in the woods and valleys and mountains, he tells them. Take your boots off and dunk your feet in the rivers. Feel the breeze. “Whatever happens next,” he says, “we’re going to need you grounded, we’re going to need you connected, we’re going to need you unpanicked.ÌęBecause we’ve got a long trail ahead of us and we’re going to need everybody—and I mean everybody.”Ìę

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In 19th-century Europe, women rarely traveled far, especially not alone, so Ida Pfeiffer had to come up with a good excuse. TheÌęViennese housewifeÌętold her friends and family that she was going to visit a friend in Constantinople, but she really planned to go all the way to what is now Israel. Later, when questioned about her audacious journey, she said that her trip was a religious pilgrimage. The real reason, however, was that she wanted to explore the world like a man could—bravely, independently, following her curiosity.
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At the time, travel in these regions was perilous, especially for a solitary woman. Pfeiffer, 45 years old, with neither status nor wealth, felt there was a high chance she would not return. In 1842, she got her will in order and set off down the Danube on a steamer. Over the course of about nine months, she passed through the Black Sea to the Holy Land, downÌęto Egypt, and finally to Italy before arriving back home. Along the way, she sailed through river rapids, rode long hours on horseback through the desert, and braved mobs who stared at and manhandled her because she was such an extraordinary sight.
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It would have been seen as immodest for a lady to pursue writing about her adventures, but a savvy publisher persuaded Pfeiffer to let him print her observations and reflections—anonymously at first, then under her own name. The book, , became the first of a string of bestsellers and launched her travel career, which spanned 16 years, 150,000 miles by sea,Ìęand 20,000 miles on land, including two trips around the world. No known woman had ever traveled alone so far and lived to write about it.Ìę
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“That’s what made her so famous,” says , a historian of science at the National University of Singapore and the author of , which was released this month. “Everywhere she went, people were just astonished that she was traveling by herself. She’s such an improbable hero—she’s not wealthy, she’s not beautiful, she’s not educated—and yet she does all of these amazing things.”

Pfeiffer was born in 1797 in Vienna, and she endured an unusual upbringing that prepared her well for her later pursuits. Her father was a well-to-do merchant but ran an austere household, toughening up his seven children with meager diets and few comforts. But he also allowed young Ida to wear boys’ clothing and romp around with her five brothers. (She also had a sister who was born later.) “I was not shy,” she wrote decades later of her childhood, “but wild as a boy, and bolder and more forward than my elder brothers.”Ìę

When she was almost nine, Pfeiffer’s father died, and her mother began imposing the strictures of girlhood that Pfeiffer detested, like wearing dresses and playing the piano. She read travelogues and, when she realized she was barred from joining the military because of her gender, set her sights on travel and science. When Pfeiffer was in her early twenties, she was married off against her wishes to an affluent widower and gave birth toÌętwo sons. For a couple of decades, Pfeiffer raised her children and, when her husband couldn’t find work, lived in poverty. She taught drawing and music lessons to keep the family afloat. After her sons had homes of their own, she started daydreaming again about seeing the world.
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At the time, there were some popular women travel authors, such as Isabella Frances Romer and Lady Hester Stanhope, who journeyed with their husbands or male escorts. Pfeiffer’s husband was too old to travel (and she may not have wanted him to come), and she was not wealthy enough to travel in style like the authors she had read. But with a small inheritance from her mother, who died in 1831, she set off anyway.Ìę
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On her second expedition, in 1845, she headed north to see Scandinavia and Iceland, traipsing between hot springs and geysers and climbing up an active volcano. She taught herself to speak English and Danish, take daguerreotypes, and collect and preserve animal, mineral, and plant specimens. Upon her return to Austria, she sold the specimens to museums and wrote another book, financing her biggest undertaking yet: aÌętrip around the world.
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In 1846, she took off on a sailing ship (sailboats were cheaper than steamers) across the Atlantic to Brazil. Over more than two years, she plunged into the rainforests of South America, weathered the turbulent waters of Cape Horn, hopscotched across South Pacific Islands, made fast friends with the queen of Tahiti, accompanied a tiger hunt in India, and visited a harem in Iran. While Pfeiffer was attacked several times and barred from entering certain places that were reserved for men, she was mostly treated kindly. Some historians say she may have even enjoyed more safety traveling as a woman, simply because she was such a curiosity.Ìę
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By this time, Pfeiffer was famous. News of her uncommon exploits splashed across newspapers around the world. Later in her travel career, hotels and ships offered her free rooms and passages because of her celebrity. She was described as petite, plain, and slightly stooped, but one who movedÌęwith deliberation. Although she was staid and reserved, she also had prodigious energy, going to places fewÌęEuropeans had ever seen.Ìę

She plowed through jungles at an indomitable speed, tiring out her guides, and once asked the crew of a sailboat to tie her to a mast, like Odysseus, so she could fully experience the fury of a storm without being swept away, according to Van Wyhe. She also didn’t take any nonsense—when one donkey driver tried to cheat her in Alexandria, Egypt, for example, she pulled out her horsewhipÌęand gave him a couple of good smacks.Ìę
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While Pfeiffer insists on her own simplicity and humility in her books—perhaps an attempt to adhere to gender norms—she was also keenly observant, unsparingly judgmental, and wry. “Much was spoken, and little understood,” she wrote about dining with a family in Jaffa (which she refers to as Joppa), Israel, and navigating a language barrier. “The same thing is said often to be the case in learned societies; so it was not of much consequence.”Ìę
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In her own lifetime, Pfeiffer’s books were translated into seven languages. The kingÌęof Prussia awarded her a gold medal in the arts and sciences. Explorer and the geographer extolled her accomplishments, helping her to become the first woman recognized asÌęan honorary member in the geographical societies of Berlin and Paris. TodayÌęthousands of Pfeiffer’s specimens remain in European museums and institutions, and several species are named after her.
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On several occasions, Pfeiffer considered retiring, but her curiosity and restless spirit compelled her abroad. On her last trip, to Madagascar and Mauritius, she was caught up in a coup, expelled, and fell ill, perhaps with malaria. She never fully recoveredÌęand died in Austria on October 27, 1858. She was 63.
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After her death, Pfeiffer’s books remained popular through the 1880s but then fell out of print. Inspired by her example as well as others, more women started traveling alone, and the late 19th and early 20th centuries spawned a cohort of famous and adventurous solo women travel authors, including and .ÌęOne can only imagine Pfeiffer’s astonishment.Ìę

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More doctors are encouraging their patients to take a dose of nature for their health. But for many, it isn’t so easy to follow that advice. To bridge the gap between receiving a nature prescription and filling it, a grassroots movement of nonprofit organizations is starting to develop urban nature programs.

One of the best such examples is the (AMC), one of the oldest outdoor clubs in the country, which launched in 2013. This Boston-area initiative works with physicians and other health care providers to help families get outside without leaving their neighborhoods. Programs are held in city parks and include hikes and activities like scavenger hunts, kite flying, and making bracelets from natural materials. Last yearÌę2,200 people participated.

I spoke with Outdoors Rx directorÌęÌęand her colleague and program manager, Emily Grilli, about the challenges and opportunities of bringing the nature-prescription movement to the under-resourced neighborhoods of Boston.

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű: What are some of the barriers the families you serve face in trying to get a dose of nature?
Burres: We found that just the physical prescription from a doctor wasn’t enough of a catalyst to get people outside. We have a lot of working families, so there are constraints in terms of time and resources. Sometimes people have a perception that parks are unsafe. Sometimes they don’t even know where their parks are. This may sound weird depending on your own relationship with nature, but people don’t always understand that a park near them might be public. A great example is in Boston. It has huge wrought-iron gates around it, and the first thing you read when you get there is all the things you’re not allowed to do.

With those barriers and the AMC not being well-known in these neighborhoods, how do you get people interested in attending an Outdoors Rx event?
Burres: We’ve expanded beyond just working with pediatricians to work with a lot of community health workers, nutritionists, and different community providers whoÌęhave more time with their patients than primary-care physicians. They’re often able to have longer conversations about why it’s so important to get outside. Where we can, we go to our partner locations to meet families, so they get to see who we are and make sure they are comfortable with us and know that their kid is going to have fun. We also work with a lot of other community-based organizations. These are folks who live in the neighborhoods that we work in. We can provide a resource to them that they don’t have, which is outdoor programming. And they offer a connection to their constituents.

There are lots of new studies about how time spent in nature improves aspects of our health, from blood pressure to stress resilience. Do you adjust the design of your programs based on new research?
Grilli: We have changed language in marketing materials, and we’ve incorporated more mindfulness activities into our programs, but the programs don’t shift when the research shifts. Typically, families don’t ask, “Oh, what was the health benefit I just gained from being outside?”ÌęBut they go away feeling better and more connected with their kids and neighbors in a place where they can continue to return.

Burres: Our primary focus is to help families build healthy habits. When designing programs, we ask: What are the things that make people feel more connected to nature and to each other, and what are the things that help them keep coming back outside? There is science around that, in terms of the role of wonder and aweÌęand joy and discovery. Those are the things we think about bringing into our programs. When you’re in a huge park that’s forested, the nature can really speak for itself, and kids are naturally curious. But when we work in places like Chelsea and Revere, there’s a lot less green space, unfortunately. That requires more creativity and a deeper reliance on our curriculum in order to keep it fresh and engaging.

The AMC has historically been a very white organization, while Outdoors Rx works primarily in neighborhoods of color. How are you sensitive to those power dynamics?
Grilli:ÌęThe AMC has a code of conduct that explicitly states that we are open to all. Race is a huge dynamic in everything, including getting outdoors and who has had the privilege to be outside in the past and who has the tools to do it in the future. We are doing our best to try to break down those barriers and make sure everyone feels welcome. There are some really great green spaces in the region where you’d need to get into the car or bus to have a traditional nature experience, but the equity piece is we’re executing the programs in the zip codes where these families live. We’re saying, “There’s nature all around you, even in Washington Street in Dorchester.”

We also have bilingual program coordinators that offer programs in English and Spanish. We have some of our tools, whether it’s a scavenger hunt or bird-identification card, in both English and Spanish. We also partner with and to celebrate that heritage and that history and be mindful of who is coming outside with us.

Burres: One of the things that I’m really aware of is that this [project] could come off as overbearing and the whole “white savior” showing up—we would never want to conduct ourselves in that way. We know we are outsiders in the community and strive to approach everything with a community [lens] and to listen. I think one of the coolest things we have to offer is that nature is free. It’s open 24/7/365, and it’s one of these things that’s accessible for all of us. I just want to shout it from the rooftops. Being a parent is superhard. If you have constrained resources, it’s a whole lot harder. We want to make it as easy as possible for folksÌęby doing things locally, so it’s easy to get to, it’s free, and it’s really fun.

How do you know if Outdoors Rx is succeeding?
Grilli: We’ve talked a lot about our retention. We’d rather see 20 families tenÌętimesÌęthan 200 families all at once. Creating a lifestyle change is really hard work, and that’s how you build that healthy habit. We can say we’ve seen the Lopez family 15 times in 2018 and 17 times in 2017. Our retention and testimonies about behavior change have helped us define our success.

Burres: Here’s one example. After a program in Callahan State Park, this woman who brought her three boys shared that she lived near that park for 20 years of her life and has always been afraid to go in it. She said she doesn’t consider herself knowledgeable about the outdoors and wasn’t sure how to figure out the trails and how to get them back out. But by coming out with us, having that introduction, and understanding how things connect within that park, she felt more confident and said that she intends to come back all the time. We don’t expect that you’re going to spend five years of your life with us. Your kids are going to grow, they’re going to change. But if we introduce you to local parks and give you the skills to find the local trailhead, if that keeps you going outside, then we’ve succeeded.

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The cardboard box arrived on my doorstep emblazoned with great promises. “Transformation starts from within (this box),” it proclaimed. “With every delivery, you’re a step closer to your best self.” Inside the insulated packaging, the key to my salvation came in the form of attractively labeled plastic tubs containing meals to last me three days, several sachets of detox tea, vials of mystical-sounding beauty and detox concentrates, and a prim card summarizing the menu.Ìę

I had signed up to try an online service called , which offers organic, dairy-free, gluten-free, refined-sugar-free, non-GMO, “life-transforming, plant-rich super meals delivered to your door,” according to its website—for a mere $210 for three days ofÌębreakfast, lunch, and dinner, or $420 for five days, mailed toÌęmy delivery location in Colorado. (Price varies by region but generally starts at $239 for three days.) While I relish rolling my eyes at slick marketing—and high prices—I also wanted to like this idea. Sakara promises to have you eating fresh, healthy food with zero effort. But how good could food out of a cardboard box really taste?Ìę

Sakara is one of a new crop of heat-and-eat meal-delivery services that are increasingly populating the internet. These offerings stand in contrast toÌęBlue Apron–style meal kits, which cannonballed into the food-service scene in 2012 but whose growth is . These new companies generally send single-serving frozen or refrigerated meals that require no cooking, and some food-industry experts say they could take over the online meal-delivery market, a space that could balloon to $10 billion by 2020, according to the market and consumer-data company Statista.Ìę

“The meal kits are absolutely dying,” says Brittain Ladd, a global-strategy and supply-chain consultant for the food industry. “People are not interested in this type of a way to cook—to have to go through this much process. Consumers are looking for something easier, and that’s why the ready-to-eat meals are the only ones that really have a bright future.”Ìę

After I received the box from Sakara, I tossed the Sakara BurgerÌę(made from carrots, beets, black beans, oats, nuts, and seeds) into the toaster, dressed up the salad greens, smeared the burger with cashew-chili crĂšme, and dug in. The meal was surprisingly good for health food. It was fresh, tasty, creative—like what I imagine Gwyneth Paltrow eats. Was I wooed by the promise of a new, luminous me? I needed someone else’s opinion, so I asked my husband to test it out. “That just came out of that box?” he asked, taking a second forkful.Ìę“Damn.”ÌęÌę

The internet has no shortage of gimmicky services that promise to transform you into a better, shinier, healthier version of yourself while making your life easier and your wallet slimmer. What makes these meals different from the tired TV dinners you find in the frozen wasteland of the supermarket?ÌęI wanted to find out. Over the course of about three months, I triedÌęa dozen services—not because I hate cooking (I really like it) but because I love to eat. These companies promise tasty, nutritious (and the ever vague “chef-prepared”) meals with what seems like too-good-to-be-true ease. It’s aÌęlife hack that, if it worked, seemed like it could come in handy,Ìęeven for an avid cook. Ìę

The services come in a dizzying array of options. There are prepared-meal optionsÌęfor specific dietary restrictions, such as , , , or , as well as for certain goals like , , or . Some get even more specific. , for instance, offers meals just for babies, toddlers, and kids, and offers bulk fillings specifically for enchiladas and lasagnas. Some even offer special diets for brides ()Ìęand anti-inflammation detox courses (). Other services deliver only regionally, but I only tested those that currently ship nationally and offer complete meals.Ìę

When the boxes started arriving, I had to grapple with my aversion to prepackaged food. I quickly learned that the fare often turned out better—especially the texture—when I heated it in a pan or the oven as opposed to the microwave, and it felt more nourishing if I plated it rather than eating it straight out of the tray.Ìę

Over the course of my test, I tried meals from vegan service ’s savory croquettes with sweet potatoes to ’s bison-beef sliders, ’s paleo butternut-squash lasagna, and ’s blackened salmon with Creole tomato-okra stew. With the exception of two services, the meals were better than I expected. (I found that Fresh n’ Lean had dry meats and slimy pasta, and some meals even had a faint plasticky flavor. Splendid Spoon hadÌęmixed results, with some good soups and smoothies and some that were tasteless or chalky.) I even tried out a fewÌęmicrowave TV dinners from the grocery store by comparison. The ingredients from the mail-order variety generally seemedÌęhigher quality, and “chef-prepared” meals are typically more inventive than the standard meat-and-gravy supermarket stuff.Ìę

I also developed strategies to maximize my orders. First of all, skip breakfast entrees if they involve eggs, which are pretty much never good reheated. It’s also best to avoid options that are meant to be served right after cooking, like risotto, which should be oozing with savory creaminess. (Across several services, it turned out dry and lifeless.) Fattier meats like beef and pork often taste better than lean meats when reheated, and fish is always better warmed in a pan. Also, don’t hesitate to doctor up your meal with sauces, seasonings, or an extra veggie or two. And if you’re on a budget, you might consider buying one box with a lot of meals and freezing them to save on shipping.Ìę

Coincidentally, as I tested out these services, I also started to go through a busy period at work. I’d come home starving and remember that I had ready-to-go trays sitting in the fridge, pop oneÌęin the oven, pan, or microwave and—voilĂ !—instant balanced meal. I even shamelessly served them to some houseguests (to good reviews). It was so easy, I almost felt guilty, as if I were cheating at life.Ìę

I was concerned about the carbon cost of mailing a heavy refrigerated box and all that single-use plastic. In some cases, however, I could return the box and recycle the packaging. (MamaSezz, for example, sends a return label.) One service, Kettlebell Kitchen, had biodegradable containers. But with only one tray as opposed to numerous ingredient containers that I buy when I grocery shop, I’m not sure whether these services produce more or less waste than some of my home-cooked meals.Ìę

Ready-to-eat food delivery seems like a good tool for when I’m busy orÌętoo tired to cook. Still, something about these services made me feel disconnected. Yes, they are healthy, balanced, exceptionally easy meals, but convenience can have unseen costs. I realized how much cooking grounds me. I not only missed the kitchen work, I missed going to myÌęlocal grocery stores, picking out produce, and actually talking to human beings.Ìę

It’s been more than a month since my last box arrived. Some of the services were so tasty that I thought I might sign up again,Ìębut I haven’t yet felt inclined. AndÌęI did notice that the founders of Sakara, Danielle Duboise and Whitney Tingle (who are known to say things like “food should make you feel sexy,”), just came out with a cookbook. Is it possible that they, too, actually prefer a real-life home-cooked meal? The inside lineÌęon some recipes seemed like a good middle ground—I save money, eat supermodel-approved food, and still get to chop and sautĂ©. As I write this, Ìęis winging its way in a cardboard box to my doorstep.Ìę

The Ultimate Guide to Meal-Delivery ServicesÌę

Ready-to-eat meal services aren’t one size fits all. Here’s how to find out which works best for your diet and lifestyle.Ìę

BistroMD

Best For: Weight loss.Ìę

Founded by a weight-loss physician, this service offers nutritionally balanced daily meal plans that include breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. And they have a glut ofÌęspecialty options: gluten-free, heart-healthy, diabetic friendly, and even menopause specific. I went with the good old-fashioned standard program.ÌęI found that lunch and dinner entrees, such as turkey breast with herbed brown gravy, and grilled salmon with lemon-Dijon dressing, were consistently good. This was my husband’s favorite service. Honestly, I found that the snacks were almostÌętoo healthy, and I wanted more sugar and salt.ÌęBistroMD also offers consultations with a dietitian and personal trainer as part of your membership.Ìę

Fine Print: Gluten-free, diabetic, heart-healthy, and menopause options.Ìę
Price: Ìęplus shipping.Ìę
Subscription Model: Weekly subscriptions.Ìę

Factor 75

Best For: Carb- and nutrition-conscious foodies.Ìę

Factor 75 touts its use of lean proteins, low-glycemic carbs, and healthy fats. The service offers keto, paleo, and dairy-free options, and members receive a free 20-minute nutrition coaching session with a dietitian. Meals include buffalo chicken breast with cauliflower mash, a burger with roasted radishes, and paleo butternut-squash lasagna. Because they tend to have a fair amount of fat, they felt particularly satisfying. One of the houseguests I servedÌęthis to liked it so much that he bought a subscription himself.

Fine Print: Gluten-free, non-GMO, soy-free, hormone- and antibiotic-free, grass-fed meats.Ìę
Price: Ìęplus shipping.Ìę
Subscription Model: ÀÌęla carte boxes or weekly subscriptions.Ìę

The Good Kitchen

Best For: Farm-to-table omnivores.Ìę

The Good Kitchen differentiates itself from other services by focusing on sustainably sourced, seasonal food, working closely with farmers, ranchers, and suppliers. Meals arrive fresh and include items like roasted chicken breast with spinach and fennel sautĂ©,Ìęand spaghetti squash with goat cheese and pesto. The offeringsÌęwere quite simple, and I felt like some of them could use a touch ofÌępizzazz in the form of a tomato or green beans or a topping of some kind (in the case of the spaghetti squash at least). But one cool bonus is you can order kid-specific meals.Ìę

Fine Print: Mostly organic, GMO-free produce; antibiotic- and hormone-free poultry and eggs; grass-fed, pastured meats; Seafood Watch–compliant fish;ÌęWhole30 approved.Ìę
Price: , with free shipping.Ìę
Subscription Model: Order Ă Ìęla carte boxes or receive deliveries weekly, every other week, or monthly.Ìę

Icon Meals

Best For: Value-conscious omnivores.

Originally founded to help bodybuilders and other athletes pack in nutrients and healthy calories, Icon Meals offers plain, healthy food at a good value. Ready-made meals include salmon and saffron rice with green beans, and chicken alfredo pizza. You can also create custom meals by choosing the type and amount of protein, carbs, and veggies. The vegetarian options were lackluster, and I found the fare a bit bland—but nothing that a little seasoning couldn’t fix. Salty-sweet snacks like the protein popcorn were addictive.

Price: Ìęplus shipping. In-store pickup at one of the company’s two retail shopsÌęor at participating retailers and gymsÌęis available in Texas.Ìę
Subscription Model: Order Ă Ìęla carte. No subscriptions.Ìę

Kettlebell Kitchen

Best For: Athletes.

Kettlebell Kitchen started by delivering heat-and-eat meals to athletes at gyms across the country in 2013. Two years ago, itÌęalso started shipping items by FedEx, differentiating its companyÌęfrom other services by tailoring itsÌęnutritional profiles to specific performance aims, like muscle building or endurance training. My husband and I really loved this service (it was one of my two favorites), because the menu items were simple but not boring—like a roasted beet and charred radicchio salad, and shepherd’s pie with cauliflower mash. The food also came in biodegradable trays.Ìę

Fine Print: Grass-fed beef;Ìęhormone- and antibiotic-free poultry.Ìę
Price: Ìęplus shipping
Subscription Model: Order Ă Ìęla carte boxes or weekly subscriptions.Ìę

MamaSezz

Best For: Veggie comfort-food lovers.

These vegan meals were the most like home-cooked fare—rich lasagna, and eggplant casserole, for example—and came in low-profile sealed Ziplock bags. Each meal was enough to feed two people, and the box came with a pamphlet on different ways to eat them, like serving the lasagna (which had an incredibly convincing cheese substitute) on a bed of spinach or making sloppy joes out of the chili. It sort of felt like receiving a care package from my grandma.ÌęMamaSezz also sends a return shipping label customers so the box can be reused.ÌęTheyÌęoften have specials that make the serviceÌęquite affordable.Ìę

Fine Print: Meat-free, organic, non-GMO, dairy-free, gluten-free, preservative-free food. Ìę
Price: , which feeds two people dinner for a week, plus shipping. (Free shipping on orders over $89 from the East Coast.) ÌęÌę
Subscription Model: Order Ă Ìęla carte boxes or receive deliveries every week or every second, third, or fourth week.Ìę

Pete’s Paleo

Best For: Paleo devotees.

Every week, the menu at Pete’s Paleo changes based on what’s available from farmers. Customers don’t choose mealsÌębut receive what’s on offer during that time. Menu items include dishes like Persian lamb with kabocha squash and kale, and rosemary-crusted pork tenderloin with greens and roasted purple potatoes. You can also order bone broth and thick-cut bacon as supplements or opt for a 21-day sugar detox. The food is delicious, but my husband found the portions a little small.Ìę

Fine Print: Gluten-free, dairy-free, soy-free, organic, and non-GMO produce;Ìęgrass-fed and pastured meats.Ìę
Price: . Free shipping on some orders. Ìę
Subscription Model: Weekly subscriptions.Ìę

Sakara

Best For: High-end health foodies. ÌęÌę

Sakara offers what I see as health-spa food—super healthy, fresh, delicious, and pricey. Few other services offer fresh salads, relying instead on cooked meals, and you’re paying for fancy ingredients like Himalayan pink salt. Sakara’s breakfast items include novelties like a pumpkin-pie parfait and a “superfood muffin,”Ìęwhich is made of bananas, apples, walnuts, and gluten-free oats. Entrees, such as the kimchi and buckwheat soba bowl, and the margherita flatbread, were consistently tasty. Customers can also add extra items, like daily probiotics and “beauty chocolates,” which are supposed to improve your skin. (Who knows how that works.) The drawback is the price.ÌęBut the food was top-notch, making this service one of my two favorites.Ìę

Fine Print: Organic, dairy-free, gluten-free, non-GMO, meat-free food.Ìę
Price: for three days of breakfast, lunch, and dinner.Ìę
Subscription Model: Weekly subscriptions. One-week trials are available for a cost of $20 more.Ìę

Splendid Spoon

Best for: Smoothie and soup aficionados.

Splendid Spoon offers three things: smoothies, soups, and something called “reset sippables.” I found some of the smoothies delicious (blackberry basil) and others a bit chalky (the AB and J, which translates to almond butter and strawberry puree). The soups wereÌęmixed, too;Ìęseveral were tasty, like the zucchini puttanesca, but others were too acidic or bland, or I just felt like I could have done it better myself. The thing that really turned me off from this one was the sippable soups, which I found nauseating. They come in a bottle so you can sip them, but I find nothing palatable about cold beets pureed with balsamic vinegar, dill, and chia seeds. It reminds me of the gnarly green-blender concoctions my health-food aunt tries to get me to eat. ÌęÌę

Fine Print: Vegan and gluten-free fare.Ìę
Price: per smoothie or soup, with free shipping.Ìę
Subscription Model: Weekly subscriptions.Ìę

Veestro

Best For: Vegan gourmands.Ìę

Unlike most other services, Veestro’s meals arrive frozen and are best thawed for a day in the fridge before reheating. (But you can also reheat them straight out of the box.) ItÌęcontends that frozen meals hold their nutrients better over time. Options include red curry with tofu, soba noodles in peanut sauce, and veggie empanadas. The savory croquettes were especially yummy. The portions were perfect for me, an athletic 120-pound woman with a fast metabolism, but they were a bit small for my husband. (They do offer a weight-loss option, so maybe that has something to do with it.)Ìę

Fine Print: Vegan and organic, with high-protein and gluten-free options.Ìę
Price: , with free shipping.Ìę
Subscription Model: Order Ă Ìęla carte boxes or receive deliveries on a weekly or biweekly basis.Ìę

The Vegan Garden

Best For: Vegans and juice lovers.Ìę

These home-style meals are ideal for people who eschew animal products but embrace meat substitutes. Options include tempeh chili, plant-powered pizza, and juices and smoothies in an array of colors and flavors. Items like the spaghetti and “meat” balls and the enchiladas were tasty and filling, while the “beef” and broccoli tasted a bit too sweet. The packaging—small plastic bags—was appealingly low profile in comparison to some of the other services.Ìę

Fine Print: Vegan.Ìę
Price: , which includes tenÌęentrees and tenÌęsmoothies, plus shipping. Ìę
Subscription Model: Order themed packages (like soups or fall specials) or a monthly subscription, which includes weekly deliveries.Ìę

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