It’s not like my family actually went through the exercise of picking a spirit tree for each of us, but if we had, my parents would have picked coastal redwoods. My dad grew up in Larkspur, California, on San Francisco Bay, in a house built beneath redwoods so big that he, his three brothers, and his sister couldn’t have linked arms around them. My mom met my dad in Arcata, on California’s northern coast, where they went to Humboldt State University. Poor and crafty, and anxious to prove that they could make their way in the world, both took a job with an old logger who sold restored redwood timber. My mom graded milled boards according to the clarity and straightness of the grain. My dad salvaged old-growth trees that other loggers had cut and then left behind because they were too hard to recover.

He once used a choker cable and an International flatbed to pull a log thicker than an Airstream out of a ravine. The log was so heavy that the truck’s front wheels rose off the ground, threatening to flip my dad and the whole operation ass over teakettle. When he tells the story, he pretends he’s a Looney Tunes character, driving along happy and ignorant until suddenly he realizes there’s no ground beneath him.

If my brother, Garrett, picked a tree now, it would be a sequoia.

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Twenty years ago, only the most dedicated snowboarders rode splitboards. They’d cut old fixed boards in half, glue on metal edges, fashion their own skins and bindings, climb up the mountain, then enjoy a clunky ride down. Today, the industry is flush with gear that makes skinning, sliding, and the transition between the two immeasurably easier and way more fun. The gap between in-bounds gear and the backcountry has never been slimmer thanks to this latest crop of innovations.

G-3 Pivot Backcountry Ski Poles ($154)

G-3’s Pivot covers the basics, with durable aluminum construction and a latch-initiated locking system. A small extension on the handle can lift the heel risers on your bindings. Each pole weighs 295 grams—less than most jackets. Each pole weighs in at 295 grams—less than most jackets—and is foldable to about 16 inches, so it fits snugly in backpacks. The small size extends four feet, and the large goes up to five.

Patagonia Stormstride Pants ($399)

The best pieces of equipment are the ones you never notice. Patagonia’s three-layer nylon Stormside pants clear that bar. At 476 grams, the Stormstride is lighter than most other pairs we tested. We also love the supple, ­50-percent recycled nylon and PU-reinforced ankle scuff guards. On cold, wet, and warm days alike, our testers said they forgot they were wearing pants at all. High praise indeed.­­­­­(women’s XS–XL / men’s XS–XL)

Arc’teryx ČѱđČÔ’s Procline Jacket ($499)

Layering is a backcountry ethos. Crucial to that is a good outer layer, like Arc’teryx’s men’s Procline jacket. The Procline’s ­­­wind-resistant fabric is stretchy, quiet, and clothlike, with a DWR coating that held up when snow turned to rain. A powder skirt and seven pockets round it out. (XS–XXL)

Jones Frontier Splitboard ($750)

Jeremy Jones makes aggressive boards to suit his big-m­ountain style of riding. Mortals, rejoice: the Frontier isn’t like that. With a blunt nose and slashy tail, it floated in deep powder during March laps in New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains. ­Serrated edges improved edge hold in hard conditions, and the poplar core gives the board energy and a damp feel.

Burton AK Dispatcher 25L Pack ($160)

All you need for most touring days is a hauler that can stash ­­­­extra ­layers, water, skins, and your avy kit. This bag is just that. Side zippers and a three-quarter zip back panel get you to your gear quickly. Nice details like the bomber ripstop Cordura-Kevlar outer, helmet bra, padded goggle pocket, splitboard carry straps on the back, and safety whistle on the chest strap round it out.

Nidecker Talon Boots ($480)

The Talon’s liner responds to your body heat and naturally molds to your shin over time, while a ­dual-Boa system reduces pressure points. An external carbon backstay boosts precision on the way down.

G-3 Split LT Glide Skins ($210)

The LT Glide’s camming plastic tail connectors clip over the back of any splitboard, while ­additional pivoting clips fix the skins to the board’s exterior edges.

Karakoram Grizzly Split ­Bindings ($400)

At 840 grams, the Grizzly is the heaviest of Karakoram’s split bindings, but it’s also among the most affordable. Utilizing the same aluminum baseplates and bomber lever-style attachment system as its high-end cousins, it offers such a secure connection that it makes splitboards ride like fixed boards.

Petzl Iko Core Headlamp ($90)

At 79 grams with a baffling 500 lumens, the Iso Core is hard to justify leaving behind when you head into the backcountry. This little lamp has a rechargeable built-in battery but also takes AAAs. It burns nine hours in the standard lighting mode, which is (hopefully) more than enough to get you out of the dark should things go south. The rigid plastic headband fits snugly over hats or helmets if you’re inspired to ride under a full moon.Ìę

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Since the early days of the pandemic, Jacob Glanville, a 40-year-old skateboarding immunologist with a silver tongue and a knack for self-promotion, has been proclaiming that he would develop the world’s best COVID-19 treatment. Few competitors believed him. Most just scoffed. But Glanville, then the chief executive officer of a tiny San Francisco company called Distributed Bio, has made significant progress, successfully creating an antibody that neutralizes the coronavirus in hamsters, an animal model for humans. He’s far behind the pharmaceutical giants Regeneron and Eli Lilly—both ofÌęwhich won of antibody-based treatments in November 2020—but his work is still important. WithÌęa total of $9 million invested so far, his discoveries have cost only a fraction of what the big firms have spent on their research. He says his treatment will work well and be more affordable—think $900 per dose instead of the $2,000 per that Regeneron charges. “I’ve got the best-in-class therapeutic,” Glanville told me recently, repeating a line he’s used often since April 2019.

Given the FDA’s approval of the first vaccine on December 11, 2020, you might be wondering why you should care about Glanville or his drug. It’s because won’t end the pandemic. That’s especially true in the U.S., where so many people see their freedom to get sick and pass it along as a basic right. The chilling truth is that, at this point, it’s effectively impossible to vaccinate enough people worldwide to vanquish COVID-19. And so, as withÌęthe flu, the deadly virus is likely to remain resident among us, destined to cause breakoutsÌęevery year. You should care about Glanville—along with the many other drug manufacturers still pushing their creations forward—because, odds are, the best COVID-19 treatments aren’t available yet. If Glanville is right, he could save many lives all over the planet.

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Weston °ÂŽÇłŸ±đČÔ’s Eclipse Splitboard ($899)

Climbing is easier with this surfy sub-s­even-pounder (for the 145- and 150-centimeter models). Its tapered shape and rockered tip also lend nimbleness in tight trees.

Flylow Smythe Bibs ($460)

Even high-performance bibs get hot on warm days. Not the slim five-pocket Smythes, which now boast a breathable, waterproof soft-shell material.Ìę

Burton Family Tree Hometown Hero X Splitboard ($1,500)

Burton’s lightest split was built for backcountry powder, with a wood core, directional camber, and entry rocker that kept it afloat and slashy in ­hip-deep snow.

POC Obex BC SPIN Helmet ($250)

This smart helmet features an inner gel-like membrane that provides extra protection against lateral forces. Also built in: Recco (a radar reflector) and an NFC chip that sends rescuers essential health and location info, which you upload to the chip via app, in case you become incapacitated.

Leki Guide Extreme V Poles ($250)

Leki employed carbon in the upper shaft and aluminum below for a pole that’s strong but light (nine ounces). Interior cables keep it taut when snapped into place.

Spark R&D Summit Skins ($190)

Spark R&D built the nylon Summits with dual-angle clips, which lasso the board with hooks both at the tip and the tail. The skins stay snug even on hot laps.

Strafe W’s Alpha Hooded Insulator Jacket ($269)

Polartec’s latest Alpha synthetic insulation lends this hoodie premium breathability. Its slim fit is just right for skinning in cool midwinter conditions. Bonus: an interior mesh sleeve keeps your phone warm.

Spark R&D Arc Pro Bindings ($540)

Reinforced carbon highbacks, heavy-duty plastic straps and ratchets, steel pivot pins—every choice in Spark’s design is a testament to durability and weight savings. Invest now, ride for many years.

Vans Hi-Country and Hell-Bound Boots ($330)

These flexible kicks feature a quick-drying liner from the North Face and removable tongue inserts for dialing in the fit.

Ledlenser MH5 Headlamp ($50)

Lights are ­mandatory for safety. The 400-lumen MH5 features two crisp white modes—low and high—and a red setting, without extraneous switches. It’s airy enough (3.3 ounces) to forget about until you need it.

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The night before Nouria Newman nearly drowned in India, in August 2018, she used her paddle to sweep animal dung out of an abandoned stone hut. The then 25-year-old French kayaker was alone at 13,467 feet in the Himalayas. “It’s gonna be the bedroom,” she announced, whisking the space with a mix of mild altitude sickness and bliss. That day she had put on the Tsarap River and kayaked mostly flatwater through mountains too high for trees to grow. Day two would bring elevated flows and mellow rapids—Class III, she’d been told.Ìę

“It’s beautiful. It’s beautiful. I’m so happy,” Newman said the next morning, announcing her state of mind into her GoPro as she paddled through a canyon whose walls were layered like stacked pancakes. Shortly after, she heard the unexpected roar of difficult whitewater ahead.Ìę

Paddling aloneÌęis as rare in kayaking as free-soloing is in climbing. It’s also gaining attention. Last year, in a descent many kayakers compared to Alex Honnold’s historic ropeless climb of Yosemite’s El Capitan, Spanish paddler Aniol Serrasolses Ìęduring the highest flows any kayaker had ever seen on the river. Before arriving in India, Newman was one of the world’s most accomplished paddlers, but she had never soloed anything significant. For her first attempt, she picked a 233-mile section of the Tsarap, Zanskar, and Indus—three connected rivers that help form what some call the Grand Canyon of Asia—because she’d heard it was well within her abilities, and because she wanted time to think.

Over the previous two years, Newman had graduated from a top school in France with a master’s degree in journalism, been let go from a job in that field, and been cut by the French national slalom team. Though she’d won an individual silver medal at the 2013 World Championships and team gold in 2014, team officials had tired of her pursuit of a career in whitewater, outside the narrow confines of slalom racing.Ìę

Throughout the two decades Newman had kayaked, she’d paddled in 46 countries and, in 2014, became one of only ten people , a formidable rapid on the Stikine that most boaters elect to portage around. She had run 80-foot waterfalls and claimed wins or top-ten finishes in nearly every noteworthy extreme whitewater competition in the world. “For the first time ever, the world’s best kayaker is a woman,” professional expedition paddler Ben Stookesberry, one of the sport’s elder statesmen, said.

Despite growing accolades, getting fired from the French team in December 2017 had left Newman feeling adrift. At the time, she was living in her mom’s apartment in the South of France and owned little more than she could pack into her perpetually damp gear bags. On a whim, she bought a ticket to India to compete in an event at the , on India’s southwest coast. She won the race, then began plotting her next move. When the police prevented her from paddling flooded rivers in India’s southeast, Newman flew north to attempt the Grand Canyon of Asia alone.

From the seat of her kayak that second morning on the Tsarap, the rapid she was approaching didn’t look like a mellow Class III. The river narrowed and slipped into a gorge, where Newman could see the tops of boulders. The rapid roared like big water, but it was too late to get out and scout. When she hit a wave forming upstream of a boulder, it broke and, like a reset typewriter, pushed Newman to the left. The view opened up. Just beneath her bow was a cauldron that sucked down through a funnel between two massive rocks. This was a siphon, where water can pull a paddler below the surface. Siphons kill kayakers.Ìę

Newman paddled hard to the right to cross back into the main current, but it wasn’t enough. Her boat met rock, and she became wedged between the boulder and the force of the current, directly above the siphon’s mouth. For four minutes she stayed there, still upright, but with the river surging over her shoulders. Finally, she pulled her spray skirt and flung her drybag, with all the supplies she’d need to survive, onto the rock island beside her. She then leaned forward to clip a tether to her kayak’s bow, hoping it would enable her to climb onto the island, pull the boat up behind her, and scout the remainder of the rapid.

She never made it out of the kayak. When she shifted her weight, the river poured into the open cockpit, and Newman, still in her boat, flushed into the siphon. Underwater she had time enough to think, You fucking idiot. Fortunately, there were no obstacles to trap her, and she was quickly flushed downstream. After another quarter-mile of big water, six minutes after she first got pinned, Newman reached the shore. By the time she’d returned upstream for her drybag and reran the rapid, 45 minutes had elapsed. On the riverbank, she broke into sobs. Then she switched on her GoPro, snapped her skirt onto her boat, and slid back into the current. “I’m cold. I’m scared,” she said between shaky breaths. “And it’s time to keep going.”Ìę

“Sorry I’m late,” Newman says. It’s the end of June, and one hour after our scheduled meetup. Newman, having lost track of time while running a classic Class V gorge on the slate-gray Raundalselva River outside Voss, Norway, is slogging up the trail at the take-out. She’s in a blue drysuit carrying her blue Jackson kayak over her shoulder. A dozen or so feral-looking paddlers—nearly all shirtless dudes—are basking and snacking in the sun. Newman drops her boat by the VW van she’s been living in for the past two weeks and says, “At least we didn’t have to go to the emergency room today.” They’d seen two accidents in the past two days: a friend following Newman’s lead paddled an inflatable unicorn off a 35-foot drop and nearly broke his coccyx, and another boater Newman was paddling with landed on her head at the bottom of a two-tiered, 60-foot waterfall and thought she’d dislocated her shoulder. “There were cameras there,” Newman says. “You should never step up your paddlingÌębecause there are cameras there.”Ìę

Newman has come to Voss with , a 32-year-old French-Irish filmmaker who, like Newman, retired from a successful slalom career to pursue extreme kayaking. They’re shooting a video series for Red Bull to highlight the world’s top paddlers: Newman, Serrasolses, Dane Jackson, and Ben Marr. The fjords surrounding Voss offer rivers and creeks with an absurdly high density of waterfalls and the type of unforgiving whitewater you’d expect to see in a Red Bull flick. The town’s other draw is the , a gathering and competition that attracts top athletes in climbing and kayaking, as well as BASE jumping, cliff diving, and other fringe sports. Between shoots of her running enormous rapids, Newman hopes to claim her throne in the downriver race at the European Championship, a whitewater eventÌęthat will take place three days from now on a nearby river.Ìę

Kayaking includes a variety of disciplines, and Newman is the rare athlete who excels at nearly all of them. She got her start in slalom racing, an Olympic event. In fiberglass boats that are as long, thin, and fragile as they are fast, paddlers race both upstream and down through a series of gates hung above the rapids. Freestyle competitions are held on standing waves or holes. In stubby plastic or carbon-fiber boats analogous to surfing’s shortboards, competitors utilize surges in the river to coax their kayaks into complex aerial maneuvers. Then there are extreme whitewater events like the one here in Voss. Boaters race heavy kayaks roughly the shape of bratwursts down waterfalls, boulder gardens, or high-volume rapids. Newman is the clear favorite.Ìę

After changing outside Heurteau’s van, Newman peels the lid off a can of tuna and slurps the liquid off the top. She’d recently told me she was “trying to get out of the dirtbag cycle this year,” but clearly she hasn’t achieved her goal. Not that anybody really makes a stable living from kayaking these days. Two decades ago, when companies like Subaru and Nike fueled the sport’s short-lived boom, top kayakers could make six figures. But by the mid-2000s, the industry had contracted and the money dried up. Now it’s ruled by a handful of small but hearty brands that kick down gear and whatever cash they can afford, usually not more than a few thousand dollars, to the dedicated athletes who rep their products.Ìę

Barring independent wealth, the only reliable way to paddle full-time is to attract a mainstream sponsor. For Newman, that’s Red Bull. Since 2013, she’s been sponsored by the energy-drink company, which now pays her around $13,000 a year. She makes another $8,600 or so from industry sponsors—Jackson, Kokotat, Sweet Protection—and scrapes together a bit more income from guiding and the occasional speaking gig. (In July, she delivered a motivational talk on risk to outdoor retailers in Munich for about $330. “Really good money!” she called it.) Despite the tight budget, Newman manages to paddle more days out of the year—upwards of 250—than almost anyone else in the sport. In 2018 alone, she kayaked in 16 countries. In the two months leading up to our meeting in Norway, Newman ran rivers in France, Slovenia, Austria, Germany, Italy, and Iran. During that last stop, Ìęat the behest of the International Canoe Federation. It’s an enviable travel schedule, but lately, scrimping by has made Newman wonder how long she can keep it up.Ìę

That’s one reason that, instead of Norway, Newman would prefer to be in the United States right now, competing in the Ìęin Colorado and then the Ìęin Idaho—two of the sport’s biggest races. With wins there, thanks to prize money and performance bonuses in her Red Bull contract, she would nearly double her annual income. She was the heavy favorite at both events, until the State Department rejected her visa request. The official rationale was that Newman didn’t have enough money in her bank account to prove she could support herself. True enough. But Newman suspects the real reason was that , and a recent stamp from the Islamic Republic of Iran looked suspicious. Newman spent a good portion of what she usually makes in a year to hire a lawyer to reapply for a visa. Near the end of the process, she wrote to friends and associates in the States asking them to support her application.Ìę

“I feel incredibly lucky to get to do what I love most and what I do best,” she wrote. “But it turns out Mr. Immigration Officer is right about something. Whitewater kayaking isn’t a proper job.”

Newman grew up an only child in , a small village near a ski resort in the French Alps. Her father, an English expatriate, worked in tourism. Her mother, who was born in Paris, held various jobs, which included renting skis and packaging chocolate. In a small town full of skiers and hunters, Newman was an outsider. “The other kids would bring marmot pelts to school,” Newman remembers. “I wanted a marmot pelt to bring to show-and-tell.” She brought a venomous asp shoved into a bottle of liquor instead.Ìę

Every summer, the Newman family traveled abroad, visiting Costa Rica, Thailand, or Cuba for extended periods, usually with no fixed itinerary. The one time she joined an organized tour, with her grandfather, Newman grew bored, like they’d forfeited adventure. “I still struggle with structure and authority,” she says. She recalls skidding her bike through a neighbor’s freshly graveled driveway for the sheer thrill of defying them.Ìę

Newman started paddling around age four, not long after seeing a plastic kayak for the first time. “I thought it was a huge Playmobil toy,” she says. “The coolest, biggest plastic toy.” When she asked her parents if she could try kayaking, they said yes, but not until she’d learned to swim. So Newman took swimming lessons. In the U.S., most paddlers are taught to kayak by family or peers. In France, the pathway is more formalized. Paddlers pay to join a local slalom club that gives them access to gear, coaching, and a competitive circuit.

Newman won her first race when she was eight. At ten, when the World Championships were held on her local course, she made necklaces with little kayaks on them. She and a friend sold several hundred to spectators, earning Newman enough to buy a playboat to use when she wasn’t slalom training. She also skied, mountain-biked, and climbed, but the river meant something more. “Taking away kayaking was the only thing that worked when my parents threatened me with discipline,” she says.Ìę

In 2006, at age 14, Newman entered the French Championships, competing against adults. The event was held 30 minutes from home, in nearby Bourg-Saint-Maurice, on a glacial river—steep, frigid, and intemperate—with a course that Heurteau calls the world’s hardest. Newman took fifth in the women’s division.

When she was 18, Newman earned one of three spots on France’s senior slalom team. She had just moved south to start her master’s degree in journalism at , an esteemed school near one of the team’s training centers. A few years later, Newman remembers her coach telling her, “You’re fast. If you pull down a good run, you can be a world champ.” Newman had never considered that possibility, though she was already a disciplined athlete. She structured entire practices around fundamentals, spending hours and hours on forward strokes alone. On weekends or rest days, she’d trade her carbon race boat for a plastic freestyle or downriver kayak and chase whitewater for fun. She guesses she paddled 20 percent more than her teammates. The effort paid off. In 2013, she won silver at the World Championships in Prague. The win felt good, but slalom wasn’t enough to sate Newman’s fierce appetite for paddling.

Few slalom boaters can run whitewater at Newman’s level. The athletes who prioritize the raw speed and performance required for slalom don’t typically have the stomach for the danger, unpredictability, and adventure of whitewater. But while pursuing Class V rapids away from racing, Newman started to build a community of fellow big-water diehards. The year before she moved to Toulouse, Newman met Louise Jull, a Kiwi slalom racer who also excelled in whitewater. They soon formed the core of a loosely knit, all-women international kayaking crew that would grow to seven members. Newman, Jull, and the others competed against one another in slalom or extreme races, then logged notable descents in places like Norway and Chile. Newman was thrilled to have theÌęcamaraderie. “Lou was easy,” she says. “Like I wouldn’t see her for months, and then we’d pick up exactly where we’d left off.”Ìę

Still, Newman was struggling with her dual pursuits. “How do you match the hemispheres of slalom and kayaking? How do you fit all that in while trying to go to school?” she says. While training for the slalom World Championships in Maryland in 2014, Newman awoke early one day for a practice session. She found a sign hanging outside the entrance to the now dry concrete riverbed: The river is closed.Ìę

In a gesture of defiance against the rigidity of competition life, she impulsively bought a ticket to British Columbia. A day later, Newman showed up on the banks of the Stikine, where she became the first woman to kayak Site Zed. Feats such as these made her a minor celebrity in kayaking, and for a while she seemed to be thriving despite her divergent passions. She and her team claimed gold at the World Championships a couple of weeks later. Nonetheless, the French Canoe and Kayak Federation, which manages the national team, saw something in Newman they didn’t like. Her focus was drifting.Ìę

More than any other factor, what drove Newman to trade her slalom career for the endless pursuit of whitewater was a string of devastating tragedies, starting in the fall of 2014, that forced her to recalibrate her priorities. That November, Newman was recovering from surgery on her left rotator cuff when she had a bad reaction to a routine dose of morphine, leaving her unconscious for three days. When she awoke, she learned that a friend of hers, Peruvian paddler , had died in a kayaking accident.Ìę

Six more of Newman’s friends would die within the next 12 months, including Jull. In the spring of 2015, Jull was training in New Zealand when . The grab loop on her spray skirt caught on a log and she drowned.Ìę

When she received the news about Jull, Newman was still regaining her strength from surgery and reeling from grief. She says she considered quitting kayaking altogether, mourning the fact that she’d missed out on so much time with friends and family. Eventually, she visited a psychologist, who she remembers telling her to let go of her regrets and focus on the things she could change. Newman realized that she was no longer compelled by the singular pursuit of competition. “It changed my life drastically, because I always thought that getting medals was something really important,” she says. “But then I got a medal and it didn’t change a thing.” Around that time, when she found an old note Jull had written her, she was struck by one particular line—“Always remember the most important thing: fun.” She had it tattooed on her forearm (though she left out the word fun, keeping the most important thing to herself).Ìę

In May of 2015, Newman made a trip to the U.S. to paddle and to compete in extreme kayaking races. Still recovering from surgery, she won the women’s competition at the GoPro Mountain Games in Vail, Colorado, and finished an astonishing eighth overall (including men and women) in the North Fork Championship. Those were significant performances that came with financial perks, but even better were the opportunities they presented to travel. She linked up with some American extreme kayakers and maximized her three-month visa camping and paddling the West’s best whitewater.Ìę

Newman views those experiences, along with her time in therapy, as “the beginning of the end” of her slalom career. Rather than “doing loops on artificial courses like a goldfish,” she thought maybe she should pursue whitewater full-time. In 2016, Newman graduated with her master’s degree, and the following year the French Kayaking Federation made the decision for her.Ìę

“They fired me,” Newman says. The elite training program dictates that if an athlete fails to produce results, they can be cut from the team, and after her surgery, Newman’s results had been inconsistent. But it was more than that. “You quit slalom three years ago,” Olympic silver medalist VĂĄvra Hradilek told her. Newman knew he was right; her real passion had become whitewater. Still, the dismissal left her feeling like she’d failed at the thing she’d dedicated her life to. So she responded the way she always had in hard times: she went kayaking, this time alone, on a river high in India’s Himalayas.Ìę

After the near drowning in India, Newman had more than 200 miles of whitewater to paddle. She slowed down. She scouted rapids. A few times, fear and disorientation turned to tears. What the hell am I doing here? In the end, after seven days, Newman had paddled some 20 Class IV and V rapids, a breed of whitewater that’s like riding a fire hose through a minefield.Ìę

“It was like one of those tribal rituals where a child becomes an adult,” Heurteau says. “When she came off the river, something had triggered in her. She’d decided on a new path, and that path was to push harder than ever.”

Newman’s most ambitious goal now is to team up with Ben Stookesberry to complete China’s Tsangpo, a Himalayan river that some paddlers have called the sport’s equivalent of Mount Everest. In 2002, Scott Lindgren and a team of seven whitewater legends made a historic descent down the Tsangpo, though some controversy lingers over their accomplishment, because the team left the lower section of the river unrun. Newman and Stookesberry hope to one day make a complete descent. Money is as much an obstacle as the river itself. Including permits and transportation, the expedition will cost somewhere in the range of seven figures. Stookesberry thinks that if any kayaker can raise that sort of money in the sport, it’s Newman. The reasons, he says, have as much to do with her skills as a communicator as with her gifts as a paddler.Ìę

Three days before the European Championship in Norway, Newman and Heurteau are collecting more footage for their Red Bull film. Newman is standing at the edge of an ice-blue creek outside Voss that’s rushing over the lip of Nosebreaker, . The current makes an S-shaped turn, bouncing left, then right, then left again, before falling some three stories into the pool below. If you approach on the outside of the S, your boat will be shoved into the right wall: broken nose. If you’re too far inside, the river will shove you left and send you flat into an eddy, with similar results.Ìę

Having considered Nosebreaker for a few minutes, Newman appears unfazed. She describes it as “straightforward.” As Heurteau’s drone hums over the drop, Newman lowers herself into her kayak, splashes her face, and enters the rapid just left of a small V-shaped wave that marks the start of the first half-circle in the S turn. When she hits the main curler about 15 feet downstream, she leans hard into it, and the water shoves her much farther right than she’d anticipated—nearly against the wall. Newman disappears over the lip and lands with an empty boof.Ìę

Newman walks back to the top of the drop to run it again. This time she makes a subtle change. She enters the rapid at the same place but angles her boat a few degrees left, then leans into the first lateral with less force. The current carries her into the strongest flow in the center of the river. After a full stroke that lifts her bow, Newman arcs out beyond the waterfall and lands in the pool below with a series of silky skips. Her hair would still be dry if she hadn’t missed her first line.

What strikes me is how quickly she makes decisions. Heurteau compares a kayaker’s ability to read a river to a musician interpreting sheet music; the art comes down to how one executes within the understood structure. “Nouria has great water awareness,” he says. “It’s not that she’s going to stick her line every time, but she knows exactly what she will do if she doesn’t.”Ìę

Perhaps because of her journalism background, Newman has the uncommon ability to translate some of this knowledge for a general audience. In Tibet in early August, she diagrammed an entire half-mile rapid in her journal and posted it on Instagram. She broke the big-water Class V into some 25 steps and annotated the lines: “Keep left on the crushing wave,” “Stay balanced, aware of where you are,” “Boof for Jesus.” Though hard to read (Newman writes in chicken scratch), these dissections help dispel the persistent myth that kayaking is an extreme sport ruled by knuckleheaded adrenaline seekers who don’t think before they huck. There’s real planning behind her dangerous feats. “I’m not a stuntwoman,” she says. “I wouldn’t run these things unless I was sure I’d be OK.”

Newman has more than , a healthy number for a kayaker, though not extraordinary. (, another Red Bull paddler, has 139,000.) But Newman’s feed offers something distinct from the bro-brah image of risk-taking promulgated by most pro kayakers, who typically post huck shots from photogenic drops like Ìęor famed rivers like the Stikine and not much else. By contrast, Newman, who now posts nearly every day (because “the data demands it”), features a mix of lifestyle shots, envy-inducing travel images, a few photos of terrifying rapids, and portraits of friends. Each photo includes a short but well-considered caption. “Nouria is the latest addition to a long line of exceptional female kayakers,” says Mariann Saether, a professional paddler from Norway. What separates her from the rest, she says, is social media.

Within the small community of elite paddlers, Newman comes across as one of the adults in the room—sometimes the acerbic one. Stookesberry says her honesty isn’t universally popular among kayakers. In 2018, she wrote an op-ed in Kayak Session magazine that gently clowned Rush Sturges, one of the sport’s biggest names, over his conversion to veganism. “We shouldn’t be too judgmental towards one another. We are all in between swims, vegan or not,” she wrote. Her point was that all choices are justifiable but self-righteousness never is. One night while we were walking back from a party in Voss, Newman was incredulous about a top paddler’s recent career change to life coach. “He meant extortionist,” she laughed.Ìę

Still, it’s hard to imagine an athlete with a similar collection of talents struggling to make a career in almost any other sport. No wonder, then, that Newman is irritated that she hasn’t been able to turn her passion into a sustainable career. “Why do I get half as much as the boys when I paddle expeditions and win races?” Newman asks. “I have to be a fucking asshole to advocate for myself.”

Saether, who is in her late thirties and has been sponsored for twenty years, agrees that Newman deserves to earn more, but she doesn’t think gender bias is the issue. There’s just not much money to go around, she says. Newman doesn’t disagree, but she thinks women have to fight harder for their slice of a shrinking pie. She once threatened to walk away from a deal with Sweet Protection helmets if they didn’t compensate her. (They now give her about $1,665 a year.) She says that Jackson Kayaks pays some of its male athletes more than her. When I reached out to then president Eric Jackson, he conceded that a few top men make more than Newman but said she’s paid the average for their male paddlers. “We would love to do more, but we have been making cuts at JK. Nouria’s compensation isn’t a male/female thing. Her team manager, Emily [Jackson, Eric’s daughter], wouldn’t tolerate it.”

It’s not just sponsors that Newman has to battle. In June, a few weeks before the European Championship, Newman was planning to enter Ìęrace. At the time, the competition had two events, a marathon course and a sprint final, but there was no women’s division in the sprint and therefore half the available prize money. The reason for the disparity, according to the race directors, was that in prior years no women had elected to compete in the more challenging sprint event—but they weren’t barred from entering it.

Newman showed up to the King and Queen of the Alps planning to compete in both marathon and sprint, but when she received her official registration form, it stated that only the top 20 male finishers in the marathon would be allowed to compete in the sprint final. She discussed her concerns with the directors, who proposed a solution: they would ask the other women if they wanted the chance to race in the final, and if none did, Nouria could compete with the men. In the end, three other women wanted to compete, and the company sponsoring the event ponied up 300 more euros in prize money for a women’s category—the same amount as the men. Newman won the race.

“I wish girls had more ego to stand up and show the world how good they actually are,” Newman says. “Kayaking is a reflection of society.”Ìę

A few days after I watched Newman run Nosebreaker, we’re sitting in the living room of a small apartment she’s sharing with six other kayakers who are here for the races in Voss. It’s around 10 P.M. the night before the European Championship, and Newman’s phone buzzes. It’s a text from a transgender woman she recently kayaked with: Can Newman help her lobby the race directors to let her compete in the women’s division at future events? For twenty minutes, Newman struggles with what to do. At the root of the trouble, she explains, is the question of what gender means—why it even matters. In the end, she decides to ignore the text, concluding that she doesn’t know enough about the topic to be an advocate. “I really feel for her,” she says. “But at the same time, I’ve competed enough to know that if you want to be accepted, if you want to be a part of something, maybe competition is not what will make you feel better.”

It’s now the final heat of the European Championship, and Newman is waiting in a pool beneath a 20-foot waterfall on Norway’s Myrkdalselvi River. She already has a several-second lead over the four women she’s competing against. Prepping for her second run, Newman pantomimes each move on the course like a downhill skier outside the starting gate. A left stroke off the right side of drop one. Down the V forming just left of the rock island. Vertical strokes through the flats. And center-left off the second drop, a 20-foot waterfall.Ìę

There are about 100 kayakers and spectators positioned on the banks of the Myrkdalselvi. Techno music pumps from a speaker, and when competitors near a bridge doubling as a viewing platform, the crowd roars and shifts from the upstream side to the downstream side.Ìę

As extreme racecourses go, this isn’t an impressive one. The river level is so low that racers scrape bottom at one part of the run. But if it isn’t particularly dangerous, racing the MyrkdalselviÌętoday is technical. Along the half-mile course, the river drops over six distinct ledges that vary in size from a three-foot, river-wide hole to a twenty-foot waterfall that shoots kayakers into the pool below like they’ve been fired from a T-shirt gun.

The emcee announces that Newman has taken the course. “We don’t even have to watch to know who wins this. She’s too fast,” says a young, shirtless spectator with dreadlocks and bare feet. Newman’s first lap, not her best, would have qualified her for the men’s final. But when her boat skips into view after the first drop, something’s off. She’s too far right to catch the fast water flowing on the left side. From then on, the mistakes pile up. She gets stuck on a rock in the flat stretch and is too far left when she launches from theÌę20-foot drop, causing her to land in slack water and lose time pulling herself out of an eddy. “Huh,” the guy with dreads says. “Things are getting interesting.” At the finish line, Newman collapses in exhaustion.Ìę

Despite what she called her ugliest race ever, she finished less than a second behind the eventual winner.Ìę

Newman is gracious in defeat. “And the one that showed anything can happen today, Beth Morgan!” says the emcee as they take the podium. Newman showers Morgan with champagne, but afterward she sounds devastated. “I can’t believe it, I fucked up,” she says. “I started thinking about what went wrong, trying to compensate. I think it’s time to take a step back and relax.”

And so she does. For a whole hour and a half, Newman doesn’t kayak—doesn’t even really consider it. Then a friend asks if she wants to run something mellow close by. Oh, why not, Newman thinks. It’ll be good for me.Ìę

Before the year ends, she’ll deliver the talk to outdoor retailers in Munich, teach clinics for kids at the Freestyle World Championships in Spain, notch three significant high-water descents in three weeks in Tibet and Nepal, swing through Paris to pick up a credit card to replace the one she’s worn out, then jet to Quebec for two weeks for a first descent, and finally to Indonesia for three weeks of exploratory paddling. She’s still mulling over that full-time job. But by now, she’s learned to count on something better coming along first.

The post World’s Best Kayaker Seeks Full-Time Employment appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Costa Cheeca Sunglasses ($259)

Turns out polarized glass is nice when the water’s frozen, too. Costas excel in the mountains, with an athletic fit that helps them stay put.

Rab Microlight Summit Jacket ($325)

With hydrophobic goose down, a longer cut to keep the coat from creeping up above your pack’s waist belt, and a helmet-compatible hood, the Microlight Summit sounds overbuilt. But weighing in at just a pound, it’s anything but.

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Burton Flight Attendant X Splitboard ($1,500)

The Flight Attendant X rode so well that one tester brought it along on a trip to Utah’s powder-filled resorts. It’s wider at the tip than at the tail, it floats over deep snow, and camber underfoot lends it pop. But what we liked best was the board’s tight, surfy responsiveness. A real joy in trees.

K2 Aspect Boots ($460)

With grabby Vibram outsoles and stiff construction, the Aspect can take crampons and kick steps into ice—important attributes in a backcountry boot. Other features we appreciated: the warm Intuition liners and the Boa system that links to cables on the shell, which made tweaking the fit easy even in gloves.

Black Diamond Ascension Splitboard STS Skins ($175)

BD’s patented tail clips ensure a snug fit, and the nylon bases offer exceptional glide and traction. The Ascensions are worth the time and trouble it takes to trim them to fit.

Patagonia Powder Bowl Pants ($299)

Gore-Tex keeps them dry, mesh lining at the vents prevents snow from intruding, and articu­lated knees boost mobility. The Powder Bowl works as well off the lift as it does on the skin track.

Ìę

Karakoram Prime Connect-W Bindings ($399)

The women’s Prime retains the machined aluminum and easy transition from climb to ride mode of all Karakoram bindings. Get the dedicated splitboard plates ($149) to mount them for backcountry use.

Jones Talon Pro Poles ($150)

These collapsible sticks are made with two lengths of carbon to save weight and one length of aircraft-grade aluminum for durability.

The post The Best Splitboarding Gear of 2020 appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

It might one day be to the world’s great fortune that Jacob Glanville, a young immunologist trying to make a name for himself in the field of universal vaccines, went online and found Tim Friede, a mechanic who into his bloodstream for going on two decades. It may also prove to be yet another stroke of terrible luck for Friede.

But let’s start at the beginning. It was March 2017. Glanville, who left a to launch a startup called , had just developed a novel method for accelerating the creation of new drugs by extracting patients’ antibodies, the blood proteins vertebrates use to counteract the threat of viruses, bacteria, and toxins. He thought he’d apply the technique to cancer research. So one day, while sitting with a meditative view at San Francisco’s Japanese Tea Garden, he took to Google in search of a melanoma survivor. Chasing a thought, he typed in “repeat venom survivor” instead and found Friede.

Friede, who has spent 19 years promoting his quest to help researchers create a universal antivenom, takes up an inordinate amount of space on the internet. Glanville soon stumbled upon a newspaper story that described , the one he says proves his immunity to two of the deadliest snakes in existence. In the video, Friede holds the head of a Papua New Guinea taipan, one of the world’s most potently venomous snakes, against his forearm. Blood is already dripping from fang marks on his right arm, left there moments earlier by a ten-foot-long black mamba. Now the taipan bites. An attack from either snake can stop a person’s heart in a couple of hours. Other symptoms, including drooping eyelids and paralysis of the tongue, develop in seconds. But Friede calmly puts the snake back in its cage and says to the camera, “I love it. I love it. I love it.”

Glanville watched this with the appropriate mix of discomfort and grim fascination. “Jesus fuck, this is my guy,” he said. Friede’s immune system, it seemed, was able to neutralize dozens of different toxins. Glanville wondered whether he could use his new antibody-­extraction method on Friede to create a universal antivenom.

Friede was driving home from his factory job building military trucks in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, when he received the first call. He remembers Glanville complimenting him on his knowledge of the immune system and explaining his interest in creating an antivenom. Soon after, they made a handshake agreement. Friede would supply his antibodies, and Glanville his science, and should they bring an antivenom to market, they’d split the profits down the middle. It was a long shot, but one that could eventually net each of them millions.

It’s now early December 2018, and Friede and Glanville are meeting in person for the first time, at Distributed Bio’s new offices in South San Francisco, in a nondescript building so close to the city’s birthplace of biotechnology sign, you could hit it with a genetically modified peach. Along with four other young immunologists and Friede’s girlfriend, Gretchen Greeley, they are drinking single-malt Scotch in an office down the hall from the lab where Glanville’s team has been studying Friede’s blood. Glanville, 38, is six-foot-two, with round glasses and a round face framed by dark, curly hair. He’s wearing designer jeans and nice leather boots.

Friede, 51, is around the same height as Glanville. He has a full head of closely shaved graying hair, wispy sideburns that drip into a goatee, and a face so thin it looks blown onto his cheekbones. He’s wearing faded jeans from Goodwill and steel-toed Keens. His voice is gravelly from cigarettes, and feeling insecure in the presence of so many Ph.D.’s, he plays the part of the dumb country boy. “That was the most terrifying few hours of my life,” he says, describing what was a fairly routine flight to San Francisco. Then he proclaims, “Today is the best day of my life.” When Glanville pulls him into a fatherly side hug, Friede seems to swell.

Glanville has ostensibly flown Friede to San Francisco to plan the next steps of their multiyear antivenom project. But really they’ve gathered here to meet me. Putting a new drug on the market can cost tens of millions of dollars, and Glanville knows that press can lead to funding. Having once survived a harrowing rattlesnake bite myself, I was curious whether, by some cosmic confluence of the ongoing technological revolution in immunology, Glanville’s skill set, and Friede’s unfathomable tolerance for pain, a mechanic from Wisconsin really was on the verge of becoming the dark angel of antivenom that for years he’d been saying he was.

A week earlier, I was buying Friede dinner in his new hometown of Green Bay and trying to figure out what triggered this obsession of his in the first place. A veteran of interviews, he took me to “the steakhouse where the Packers eat” and ordered a $50 rib eye. With an IPA in hand, Friede told me about his recent move from Oshkosh, where he’d lived for two years. “I was bagging up my mamba, a big ten-foot black,” he said, adding that he hadn’t injected that particular snake’s venom in several months. “And pop, right in the ring finger. Blood everywhere. I mean everywhere. Total accident.” This was the 100th time he’d been bitten by a mamba. “So, true story,” he said, “I walk into the kitchen and tell Gret, ‘Give me 15,’ because normally after 15 you’re pretty good to go.”

“What’s 15?” I asked.

“Minutes. If you’re not immune in 15, you’re out—dead. So I pass out. I thought, Son of a bitch, either I’m going down or fucking shock is getting me,” he said. But he had no hives. He could breathe. Five minutes later, he was back on his feet and then, wham, down again. “I hit my head on the damn sink. Made it through that one. That was two months ago,” Friede said, and then the waitress arrived with our salads.

The son of schoolteachers he never met, Friede was adopted when he was three months old and raised by a police-officer dad and a stay-at-home mom in the Milwaukee suburbs. An intense kid, he grew up hunting snakes and fantasizing about joining the Special Forces. Shortly after graduating from high school, he broke his ankle in a car accident when he flipped his VW bug. At 19, after he fractured the ankle a second time, in Army boot camp, he gave up on the military and took a job as a high-rise window washer in Milwaukee.

Still somewhat aimless at 30, he enrolled in a class on how to milk spiders and scorpions, hoping to land a career extracting venom for medical research. A few arachnid bites later, he got a pet copperhead, and it’s been all snakes ever since. That’s also around the time he first heard about self-­immunization. The ancient practice involves escalating exposure to any harmful substance—toxin, bacteria, virus—that the human body produces antibodies against. It sounded smart, becoming immune to his deadly menag­erie. So in 2000, Friede began shooting himself with snake venom in small doses, at one point using some syringes acquired from his best friend’s wife, a vet tech named Karen.

He suffered his first snakebite the day after 9/11. A few days before, Karen had died in a head-on collision that would also render her two young kids comatose for six months. Devastated and depressed, Friede got good and drunk and tried to milk his Egyptian cobra. The snake twisted and sank its fangs into his left middle finger. Having begun self-immunizing the year before, he’d already injected 0.26 milligrams of cobra venom diluted in saline—a dose large enough to ensure he could survive a cobra bite. Friede’s wife at the time snapped a picture of him in his living room. He looks fleshier and happy, with a smile on his face and his bloody hand pushed up against the nose of his dog, a pit bull mix, while his beaming six-year-old son hugs the animal. It’s one of two photos on his fridge. “That changed everything,” Friede said. “It was the first time I beat death.”

The second time came an hour later. The freshly cobra-bitten Friede, feeling cocky, went back to the cages where he kept his snakes and picked up a monocled cobra with his bare hands. “Naja kaouthia,” Friede recalled, using the snake’s scientific name, as he always does. The cobra perforated his right biceps. “I was scared as hell,” he said. Friede collapsed. Fully paralyzed, he could still hear when the medics arrived and discussed whether he was dead. They revived him with six vials of antivenom from the zoo, and Friede spent the next four days in a coma. “That one is hard to talk about—a fucking disaster,” he said. “I wish it never happened.” It’s also the story he uses to answer questions about his obsession. Afterward, he made it a goal to survive two venomous snakebites in a single night, this time without requiring antivenom.

To do so, Friede taught himself enough immunology to self-vaccinate more safely. When he is bitten or injects himself with snake toxins, his B cells, , secrete thousands of different antibodies in an effort to counteract each of the many distinct proteins that make up a particular venom. At first very few succeed. Like random keys inserted into locks, they simply don’t fit. But inevitably, a few do. It’s evolution taking place directly in the bloodstream. Every time Friede receives a snakebite, his B cells make only those antibodies that address the now present toxin while at the same time constantly tinkering to improve the designs. The more venom Friede injects, the more effective his antibodies become.

What’s challenging about his approach is that each species’ venom is a combination of 20 to 70 toxic proteins and enzymes that kill or maim in their own special way. To survive bites from multiple species, Friede needs antibodies capable of turning off the deadliest toxins in the venoms injected, be it rattlesnake or cobra. He also needs a legion of them in his bloodstream at all times, although when he first began self-immunizing, he wasn’t really certain how many. Friede ­decided that more was better, and the process he settled on required near constant exposure to venom. So he ordered a lot of snakes.

We arrived at this part of his story almost three hours after we’d sat down to dinner. The steakhouse had closed, but after we finished our meal, Friede spotted a friend, the restaurant’s baker, a cheery, pink-haired woman who loved snakes. We joined her and the rest of the waitstaff at the bar, where Friede, who is charming and funny, had them all riveted—especially when he began explaining the work he’d lined up for his antibodies tomorrow night.

“So, when I get bit by a water cobra, the most venomous snake in Africa, it’s going to be bam—lock and key, lock and key, millions of times,” Friede said. Then he pivoted, explaining why his immunity wasn’t just a dubious party trick but could save millions of lives. “What they did in San Francisco,” he said, “is cloned all my good antibodies to mamba, rattlesnake, everything.” And that, he continued, is what would become the foundation for a universal antivenom. (As it often does, his enthusiasm for the project had him getting a bit ahead of the science.)

“Oh, you’re a hero,” the restaurant’s manager said, buying Friede a beer and a shot of whiskey in appreciation.

“Oh no, no, no,” Friede said. “I’m not. I’m just an idiot who gets bit by snakes.”

Before Glanville had even heard of Friede, he was working on cures for HIV, cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease. But his real passion is the flu. As with venom toxins, the influenza virus is constantly evolving, yet with each transformation, .

“Evolution is ding, ding, ding, ding—all the time,” Glanville says. “Whether that mutation survives depends on whether it’s advantageous. The part of the protein that functions the same way across all species, that’s the part that’s conserved, because it’s already working.” In other words, a virus doesn’t fix what isn’t broken. This was the scientific epiphany that struck immunology a decade earlier, and it now drives all of Glanville’s work. If an antibody could be created to target that conserved portion, almost every strain of the virus could be neutralized—a universal vaccine.

Glanville grew up in Guatemala in the late eighties and early nineties, amid the country’s 36-year civil war. He’s the son of American expats, his father an “agricultural importer” (a winking euphemism) and his mother an artist whose father helped develop the engines that sent the first U.S. rockets into space. To avoid stray bullets, Glanville and his younger brother, Keith, slept on the floor of the hotel their parents owned, and to get to school they rode a boat across Lake Atitlán. Glanville was also brilliant, cooking up nitroglycerin in the family bathtub when he was nine and finishing high school math by the time he was 11. As an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley, Glanville studied computational bioengineering, a new field that used math and supercomputers to solve complex biological riddles. The immune system fascinated him. “So I figured out how to hack it,” he says.

Around 2008, computational bioengineering was in its promising infancy, and Pfizer hired Glanville a year out of college. Ever since human antibodies , scientists have considered them immunological silver bullets—cells with the elusive power to theoretically cure any disease. Isolating and engineering them became perhaps the greatest quest in medicine. Over the past two decades, scientists compiled that can be genomically sequenced, allowing researchers to read the DNA of each one. Once that’s known, any antibody can be grown in bacteria and modified to target a specific antigen.

Glanville’s major contribution at Pfizer (and the reason he was promoted to principal scientist in just four years) was writing 45,000 lines of code to optimize the process of matching antibodies to antigens. Searches that once took a team of scientists ten years to complete, Glanville says, can now be done in a week by a master’s student working alone. His software taught the computer to find thousands of matching antibodies from the tens of billions in a library. None of those matches would be perfect, but by swapping various features they share, one or a few of them could be made into something close. Glanville had developed a way to dramatically cull the number of potential candidates and then engineer the most promising ones. He transformed the search for antibody drugs from a needle in a hundred hay stacks to a needle in just one.

In 2012, at 31, Glanville took his code and left his prestigious job at Pfizer. He then founded Distributed Bio while also becoming the first Ph.D. candidate in computational immunology at Stanford University. Five years later, Glanville completed his doctorate, and business at Distributed Bio was booming. He now licenses his software and antibody library and each of nine other pharmaceutical giants for around $500,000 a year and typically receives 2 percent of the profit from any drugs developed using them. With those earnings, Distributed Bio has added a fleet of new hardware to help in the discovery, isolation, refinement, and cloning of antibodies, making his firm, which employs 20 researchers, a leader in the field.

Glanville’s baby was his flu-vaccine work, and important insights he gained during that quest would also apply to snakebites. As with the toxins in venom, influenza strains are incredibly diverse. We get flu shots every year because the virus mutates somewhere between 10 and 20 percent from one season to the next, rendering our defenses useless. To succeed with a flu vaccine, however, Glanville just needed to engineer antibodies that sniffed out the virus’ weak spot, that one place that doesn’t evolve even as everything around it does.

Along with his research co-lead, microbiologist Sarah Ives, Glanville bought 15 live flu viruses that were representative of the strains that had infected humans between 1938 and 2015, then locked them in cold storage. Collectively, influenza killed tens of millions of people during that span of time. Glanville wrote a computer program to identify any binding sites that were shared across all 15 viruses. And he found a region full of them, buried deep in its molecular folds. Then Glanville engineered a vaccine that would teach the immune system to produce antibodies to target that area. Back in Guatemala, at a pig farm he and his brother built on their parents’ property to save money on research trials, his team immunized 100 pigs (a common animal model for humans) with the designer vaccine. Then they exposed the pigs’ serum, the component in blood that contains antibodies, to influenza strains that the animals’ had never seen, those that went epidemic in humans between 2005 and 2015. The serum fought off the viruses. “The smart money is that this is the universal flu vaccine,” says Glanville. Indeed, the invited Dis­tributed Bio to submit a grant proposal, and the company plans to go into preclinical testing at veterinary research facilities in Iowa this fall.

Given that potential breakthrough, it’s perhaps not surprising that Glanville is so confident he can succeed with snakebites, too. “With our tech,” he told me, “because of what Tim has done—as crazy as that shit is—this is an easy problem for us to solve.”

Glanville had only an inkling of how crazy it really was. Starting in 2000, when Friede set his mind to immunizing himself from nearly all snakes, he turned his basement into a venom lab. He insulated the walls to keep tropical reptiles warm in Wisconsin’s winters and used spent syringes to hang a world map and a letter from a self-­immunizer he admired beside a Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar. Every few months, new species arrived at the Milwaukee airport, where Friede would pick up the wooden crates stamped Venomous SNAKEs.

When he got home, Friede would listen to Tool and open the crates with a screwdriver. On snake hooks or in Friede’s bare hands, out came the writhing contents. Water cobras. Taipans. Mambas. He put them in cages he stacked against a wall. Friede’s rarer venom donors were wild-caught—legally or illegally, he doesn’t know—and often stressed or sick. Some died a few months after they came in. Friede loves animals, but whether his snakes survived long-term didn’t ultimately affect his work. Once he milked their venom he could dehydrate it into a lifetime supply.

He also began taking what he calls “Darwinian notes.” On December 12, 2001, he wrote, “Since dying was no fun, took off ’til December.” That day he injected himself with the venom from the same cobra that nearly killed him, and he spiked his blood every few weeks from then on. He rated pain on a numerical scale, with entries ranging from 1 to 1,000. A common symptom was “3×3 swelling”; rarer was “swelling from knee to ass,” “hives over whole body,” and “anaphylactic shock” (though he suffered the last of these 12 times). Within a year of starting, he was letting live snakes bite him to demonstrate his immunity. Over time he could distinguish how much venom they’d injected simply by his body’s reaction. He grew to like water cobras, because their neurotoxic venom blocked his nerve cells, making a bite less painful and “very easy to beat.” He hated Cape cobras and rattlesnakes, whose necrotic venom dissolved his muscles.

Along the way, Friede developed a sort of stuntman-next-door persona by . Some were macho, like the one where as he films a black mamba double-nipping a sober Friede. But in most of the clips, Friede how self-­immunization really works. He was just your average enthusiastic guy in a Slayer T-shirt, admiring nature’s deadliest snakes by letting them bite him. He recorded tagged him by surprise and to help “a girl with a school project.”

Whether he put his videos on Facebook or YouTube, haters inevitably flocked to the comments. Snake enthusiasts, leading toxicologists, and online trolls attacked his efforts as useless witchcraft and labeled Friede either a fake who’d removed the snakes’ venom glands or an idiot. Friede says he even got death threats. “What was I doing? I wasn’t hurting anybody,” he says.

Before long the media discovered him, too. National Geographic filmed Friede for a TV segment in 2002. The History Channel Stan Lee’s Superhumans, and the Science Channel and a number of YouTube shows. He was also in several magazines and became a regular guest on podcasts and radio. All that attention offered something he craved: affirmation. “I was a rock star,” he says. “Hell yeah, it was fun.” At one point, Friede got a lawyer and an agent to capitalize on the opportunities but has since dropped both, because “it’s never been about the money.”

What it has been about, Friede insists, is saving lives. As early as 2003, he believed that scientists could turn his blood into a universal antivenom, so he began to reach out. Friede e-mailed Nobel Prize–winning experts on the immune system, an Arizona State University professor who developed a technique for genetic immunization, and Stanley Plotkin, the author of , which Friede used to inform his own immunization.

The scientists got back to him with cursory congratulations, but he found few who were genuinely interested in what he was doing. He got a better reception among a more amateur crowd—the burgeoning online self-immunization community. Norman Benoit, the closest thing the practice has to a historian, “has almost single-handedly taken the concept of self-immunizing to where it is today.” That place seems to be in 2013. It now has 3,000 members around the world and an image gallery that could be sent as hate mail to a squeamish enemy. On it, Friede generally advises caution to newcomers while supporting—though not providing advice on—their DIY immunity efforts.

Friede wasn’t exactly cautious himself. Over time his experimentation grew bolder, if not downright reckless. “You’ve got to make mistakes to get better, that’s part of it,” he says. On November 29, 2015, he filmed the black mamba and taipan double bite that led him to Glanville. The video now has 11.5 million views on YouTube. Friede described the event in his notes: “One of the worst double bites I’ve ever had. Swelling was 10″ x 10″. Took four days to heal.” A week later, he repeated the experiment with the same two snakes and had a similar experience. “Could not walk. Body was on fire. Fell down many times. Death was near. Learned a lot.” Friede has now survived bites from two species of rattlesnake, two species of taipan, four types of cobra, all three species of green mamba, and the black mamba.

As might be imagined, Friede’s obsession has taken a toll on his personal life. His ex-wife has said that Friede’s self-immunizing ruined their marriage. Friede doesn’t argue the point. Though he still considers his ex-wife a close friend, he says with remorse that for long periods he hasn’t had a good relationship with his sons, who are now 11 and 22. “I mean, I was working to save the world. I traded my life for all those people that snakes kill every year,” he says. After a strained 20 years, he and his wife split in 2010. Friede moved out and transferred his snake lab to a property in nearby Fond du Lac, where he slept in a tent. “I figured out how death works, then beat it,” he says. “That’s the only thing I’ve ever been good at.”

By the spring of 2017, divorced and estranged from his kids, Friede felt that he’d had enough. “I was done,” he says. “I was tired of the bites, tired of the pain, tired of not getting anywhere.” So even while he kept posting on Facebook, he planned to wind down his self-immunizing.

Then Glanville called. In as much time as it took him to explain his intentions, Friede’s dream was revived. Glanville reaching out was “everything,” Friede says. “E±č-±đ°ùČâ-łÙłóŸ±ČÔČ”.”

Around the time Glanville and Friede connected, their cause got a publicity boost. In June 2017, after intensive lobbying by physicians, the World Health Organization as a an upgraded classification with the heft to shake loose vital funding. Every year, between 80,000 and 130,000 people and claim 400,000 limbs through amputation.

Dozens of teams around the world first developed in the late 1890s by Albert Calmette, a French immunologist who also developed a vaccine for tuberculosis. Calmette made an antivenom to cobras by doing to rabbits what Friede has done to himself. Since then sheep and horses have become the antibody donors of choice, largely because of their abundant blood supplies. Otherwise, . Serums can expire in less than two years and are expensive ( and sometimes more), and the antibodies they produce work only against select types of venom. While that last flaw is acceptable in places like the United States, which is home to only four appreciably different venomous snakes, it isn’t in a country like India, which has 60.

As Glanville soon learned, none of the researchers working on a snakebite cure expected to engineer a truly universal antivenom. Doing so would require an antibody to turn off every toxin in every known snake venom, a financial improbability for a drug that Glanville forecasts will earn just $30 million a year. Yet, as Glanville also discovered, advances in genomic sequencing have revealed that across all 700 species of venomous snakes, the most destructive proteins belong to just 13 different families. “Not all toxins are equally bad. We just need to cure the nastiest ones to save lives,” Glanville says.

, Glanville hopes to target the protein-binding sites shared among each of those 13 families. If he can find antibodies to lock onto those vulnerable sites, a so-called broad-spectrum antivenom wouldn’t need to contain several thousand distinct antibodies. An effective number, he says, could be closer to 30.

Of the half-dozen toxicologists and antivenom experts I spoke to, not one had heard of Glanville. He hasn’t published any scientific papers on venom, though more than 30 in other areas. The most heralded work in the field is being conducted by Andreas Laustsen, a young researcher in Denmark who has dubbed himself Snakebite Jesus. Last summer, using some of the same tools as Glanville’s lab, Laustsen engineered human antibodies that when injected into mice , among the most potent ingredients in black mamba venom. But his work underscores just how difficult the challenge is. Because of the sheer complexity of venom, his antibodies were effective only when injected directly into the mice’s brains.

Glanville believes Friede is the solution. His theory is that Friede has done with his syringes and snakes what Glanville had done in the lab for flu: created antibodies to sniff out the shared sites of extremely diverse proteins. “The immune system is as lazy as the rest of us,” Glanville says. “Why make a bunch of different antibodies if you can just make one that does many jobs?”

Laustsen, who is supportive of any researcher working on antivenom, is nonetheless skeptical that Friede’s antibodies are anything special. Before beginning his experimentation on dendrotoxin, he worked with a self-immunizer from London. Laustsen found that his patient’s immunity was barely above background—not worth the effort or expense to extract antibodies, and certainly not worth the headache. Danish media had taken Laustsen to task for using a self-immunizer to develop a potentially profitable drug. “The promotion of such work carries the risk that others will start doing something crazy to get the interest of scientists. It might be a little slower to do it in the lab, but at least nobody gets hurt,” Laustsen says.

Medicine’s history of human experimentation is dark enough already. But Glanville doesn’t believe he’s made Friede into a human lab rat. Friede, he says, is the rare case where scientific curiosity drove someone to voluntarily do extreme things to their own body.

Not long after Glanville connected with Friede, on a muggy July morning in 2017, a woman in a little blue car showed up at Friede’s house in Osh­kosh, drew 20 milliliters of his blood, and shipped it to Distributed Bio in South San Francisco. Then Friede grabbed a syringe and a vial of taipan venom from the fridge and shot it into his thigh. For the next 19 days, he injected escalating doses of western diamondback, black mamba, and taipan venom, following his normal immunization schedule. On the 28th day of the experiment, the woman in the blue car returned, retrieved more blood, and again shipped it to Distributed Bio.

The two samples gave Glanville and his team before and after snapshots of Friede’s immune system. By comparing them, Glanville could tell if Friede’s antibodies were actually evolving to better neutralize the toxins—and if they were, how well they were doing that job. Determining that would take Glanville and his team more than a year.

Glanville was aware that Friede was injecting himself throughout the four weeks between blood draws. I asked him if he was concerned that his subject might be taking too many risks during a period when he was technically participating in a Distributed Bio study. Glanville was adamant that he’d never asked Tim to inject venom and that their research was strictly passive. “Our conclusion was that Tim was continuing his routine practice of boosting that he’d be performing whether or not we had run the study,” he wrote to me in a long e-mail explaining the rigorous biomedical-ethics considerations he thought through in advance of the study. “We just took blood samples during his process. We asked him what his schedule was but did not influence it. Thus our study never exposed Tim to any new risk.”

Glanville also pointed out that he’s taken steps to ensure that Friede doesn’t become antivenom’s , the never compensated source of one of the most significant cell lines in medical research. From the outset, Glanville said he’d make certain that Friede would have a significant stake in any future profit from his cells, and he made that legal in April 2019 when they signed an official contract.

Although he and Friede are partners there’s a vast disparity between what they each have riding on the research’s success. For Glanville, the work on a broad-spectrum antivenom is something of a side project that, even if it yields a marketable product, won’t generate anything close to the profit his work on influenza, cancer, and HIV might someday generate.

Friede, meanwhile, has gone all in. Within weeks of Glanville’s first blood draw, Friede found reason to quit the $50,000-a-year truck-assembly job he’d held for eight years. “There are things I know on paper that are pretty sweet,” he told me. “Vaccine wise. Money wise.” He said he thought his partner had already invested “probably in the millions” and that Glanville was “banking on stuff he knows is going to work. Otherwise he wouldn’t do it.” (Glanville estimates his costs so far at closer to $30,000, compared with $300,000 he’s put into influenza.) The bulk of Friede’s income between November 2017 and October 2018, when he took a job delivering pizzas, was $6,680 that Distributed Bio paid him for “research funding.” After Glanville discovered Friede was broke, he offered to host him at his family’s farm in Guatemala, but Friede owed so much money in child support that the U.S. government wouldn’t issue him a passport.

“Obviously, it hasn’t worked yet,” Friede says, betraying a hint of remorse before washing it away with his familiar optimism. “Will it? Yes, it fucking will.”

When Friede and I first talked, I had my own ethical dilemma to work through. A couple of months before meeting him in Green Bay, we discussed him being bitten by a snake for this story, something he said he was happy to do. But as we got closer to the interview date, I began to have second thoughts. What if something happened? So, the morning after we’d closed out the bar at the steakhouse, where I’d heard him boast about his big plans for a water cobra bite with me as a witness, I asked Friede not to go through with it. There was plenty for me to watch on YouTube, I explained. Friede seemed to understand and agreed.

That attitude changes over the course of our second day together. We’ve just finished a late-afternoon lunch at a diner near his home, accompanied by Friede’s girlfriend of four years, Gretchen Greeley. An animal lover with a sharp intellect, Greeley works as a cook and has become something of a stabilizing force for Friede. He calls her “the most fun part of my life.”

Last fall they went through a rough patch. After a year in Oshkosh, the couple moved to Green Bay, where Greeley grew up and Friede’s ex-wife lives with their two sons. They were unable to find a rental willing to take their pit bull, however, so Friede and Greeley lived at a Motel 6 for a month with their two dogs and a polydactyl cat named Wednesday Absinthe Adams. A couple of weeks ago, they moved into the 400-square-foot attic apartment where we’ve been watching YouTube videos of the “most brutal” snakebites of Friede’s career.

And we’re drinking. A pile of empty Steel Reserve tallboys and white-wine minis crowd the garbage can. An industrial-metal band that Greeley and Friede like plays on an antique-looking radio. By the kitchen sink, in a black crate that Greeley pulled out almost two hours ago, are a pair of water cobras. Wednesday Absinthe Adams and another cat are wrestling on top of the crate, and I can sense Friede, now splayed out on the couch, plotting his move.

He takes another nip of whiskey and then stretches out his arms. At some point tonight he put on my down jacket, which is much too small for him, and he’s now making noise about keeping it in exchange for showing me what I’d asked him not to show me.

“You didn’t come all the way out here to see nothing,” he says.

I’ve had a few drinks myself, and curiosity is getting the better of me. “I do want that coat back,” I say. Greeley silently fetches the crate and places it at Friede’s feet.

“Fear is kind of a fucking weird thing,” he says. He removes the lid, and two water cobra heads levitate above the rim to investigate, each banded black and gold. “NajaÌęČčČÔČԳܱôČčłÙČč,” Friede says, pausing for effect. “The most venomous snake in Africa.”

Friede thrusts his hands into the crate and comes up holding the two snakes, each about six feet long. One cobra then slides with remarkable speed and very little aggression up the baffles of Friede’s jacket—my jacket—toward his neck. He grabs it and moves his hands beneath its belly like he’s pouring sand from one hand into the next.

“It’s almost like we know each other,” he says. “See how gentle I am with these animals?” And he is, until he starts tapping one snake’s head against his wrist. “You’re not going to bite are you?” he whispers.

For the next ten minutes he pokes, prods, pats, and pets, all to elicit a bite. If he’s afraid, you’d never know it. A week ago, to prepare for this interview, he injected a lethal dose of water cobra venom. It had been 11 months since his last booster shot, and he administered it an hour before he and Greeley were supposed to be at her parents’ for Thanksgiving dinner.

“Fuck you for that, by the way,” Greeley says, reminding Friede that no antivenom exists for water cobras. She says that when she saw what he’d done that night, she cried and nearly passed out.

“Come on, hon,” Friede responds. “I just wanted to know what would happen.”

With the recent booster, Friede is confident that he can survive a bite from each of these cobras, but they don’t seem interested. “Come on, bite me. Bite me,” he says. Their jaws stay shut.

“Get me a cup,” he tells Greeley, moving to plan B. She heads to the kitchen and rummages through the empty cabinets. The scales, glass vials, and insulin syringes he usually uses when shooting venom are still locked in storage, so Greeley makes do. She grabs a plastic bag and winds it tightly around a NyQuil measuring cup. Then she gets the dirty needle Friede requested. “It’s more hardcore,” Greeley explains, passing it over the cobras to Friede.

Friede pushes a snake’s head against the bag. Fangs puncture plastic, clear venom gleeks into the cup. He repeats the procedure with the other snake, then places the cobras back in the crate. His routine thrown off by Greeley’s improvised venom receptacle, he spends the next three minutes wrestling the tightly wound bag off the NyQuil cap. “It’s not a fucking bomb, honey,” Friede admonishes, his showmanship overwhelmed by childlike frustration. Venom finally flows into the syringe. “Oh yeah, that’s enough to kill me,” he says.

The needle goes in just behind the round bone on the inside of Friede’s left wrist. And that’s about it. Twenty minutes pass without incident. Three cigarettes go into Friede. His pit bull curls up with him on the couch, and he starts chatting about how water cobra venom is simple to beat. “It’s really easy for him,” Greeley says, pleased with the results.

I’m suddenly overcome by that special fatigue that follows an adrenaline overdose, feeling as though the three of us have just survived something profound. Reluctantly, Friede returns my coat. Then I lower myself down the attic stairs and head into snow that has just started to fall.

In the parts of the day when Ray Newland, the 27-year-old scientist who Glanville appointed to the antivenom project, wasn’t panning Distributed Bio’s antibody libraries for clients, he worked with Friede’s blood. First he segregated ten million antibodies sequenced from it, an elevated amount for a normal adult and a possible indication that Friede really had done something special to his immune system. Newland arranged these into a searchable library and then began analyzing it for venom-specific antibodies.

One morning in April 2018, about a year into the project, Glanville and Newland pulled on biohazard suits, fitted themselves with rebreathers, and mixed saline into seven different types of dehydrated venoms that Newland had ordered online from a lab in France. Some were venoms Friede had immunized himself against and some were not. The varied sample would tell Glanville if Friede’s antibodies were working against any of the venoms present, and also if they were working to neutralize a venom his immune system had never seen before. The latter scenario would suggest the type of broad-spectrum reactivity necessary to build a new class of antivenom.

Ten million is an enormous number, so to cull the herd, Newland magnetized each of the seven venoms, then mixed them with Friede’s antibodies in a test tube. After ten minutes, he stuck a magnet against the side of the tube to pull out the venom toxins along with any antibodies that were sticking to them. Over the course of the next two weeks, Newland repeated this process three times, using DNA sequencing to count and clone some 1,200 of Friede’s anti­bodies that had stuck to the venom. To further clarify which of these were actually targeting toxins, he then dipped them all into a cocktail of venom and other chemicals. If the antibodies formed a true bond to the toxins, that area of the plate would turn blue. Newland’s first plate did so. So did his next 12. Newland let out a scream, prompting a Distributed Bio tech to shoot footage on her phone that captured Glanville and Newland in lab coats dancing something like the Macarena.

Within a week, Newland weeded out 282 binding antibodies and had hits on all seven venoms, including ones Friede hadn’t immunized against. “Tim’s blood is the best chance the world has at a broadly reactive antivenom,” Newland says. “We are light-years ahead of the competition.” Instead of a single antibody that worked against one toxin but not the whole venom, they had 282 that worked, in the lab, against many toxins in whole venoms—and millions more to look through for an even better fit.

This was the breakthrough Friede had been seeking for almost 20 years. You could imagine him printing Glanville’s results, chewing the pages up into wads, and blowing spitballs into the faces of his naysayers. How good were his antibodies? In a $500,000 screener called the Carterra LSA that tests how strongly an antibody binds—a good indicator of whether it’s neutralizing its target—Newland found one that hit a toxin in black mamba venom with, he says, “about three times higher affinity than any drug on the market.” It was a tighter bond than any Glanville had seen or been able to manufacture.

In December, Newland hosted a meeting with a consultant Glanville had hired to help Distributed Bio secure funding for more research. The company had a proposal in with the National Institutes of Health for $400,000, which included a full-time salary of $80,000 a year for Friede. It promised to do what had never been done before in antivenom research: use whole antibodies, first isolated from a human donor, to shut down black mamba and western diamondback venom in live mice. The venom of those two species contain proteins from most of the 13 deadliest toxin families that Glanville decided would need to be neutralized by a broad-­spectrum antivenom. The antibodies would be ­Friede’s—fully human and unlikely to induce serum sickness, a problem with most existing antivenoms. And they could be dehydrated into a thermostable powder, so they wouldn’t need to be refrigerated. Glanville’s team was pitching the idea that the product could be carried by American soldiers anywhere they traveled and stocked in the rural clinics where it’s needed most.

Still, Distributed Bio’s scientists knew that landing a grant would be just the start. Drug development has notoriously low odds of success, and despite the recent surge in antivenom research spurred by the World Health Organization’s reclassification of snakebites, drug companies aren’t exactly clamoring for a new antivenom. In fact, the current single-species products on the market have earned so little revenue that Sanofi Pasteur, the industry giant, , leaving those snakebitten in large swaths of Africa to seek cures from traditional healers.

And there was that other issue hovering in the background: the murky ethics of exploiting Friede’s self-mutilation, a factor that could scare away potential investors. It’s a point Glanville still struggles with. “If the cure really is in Tim,” he asks, “why should 130,000 people have to die every year from snakebites?”

The day after Friede first met Glanville in South San Francisco, he shows up at Distributed Bio’s offices around 2 P.M. looking rougher around the edges than usual. Following dinner and sangria at a tapas joint the night before, Glanville took Friede and me to his favorite kava bar, where we sucked down several coconut shells of mildly stimulating mud. Glanville went home, but Friede kept the party going. On the Uber ride back to his hotel, he had the driver stop at a liquor store. Now, suffering a brutal hangover, he spends the afternoon with °żłÜłÙČőŸ±»ć±đ’s photographer having his picture taken with Glanville. (“Not my favorite thing,” Friede says.)

Later that evening, he and Greeley sit on the sidewalk in front of Distributed Bio’s offices. They’re taking a break from the company’s holiday party to smoke a cigarette. Rush hour is ramping up, and the sun is setting. Friede’s mood, full of optimism the night before, seems to have deflated all at once. Just before they’d come to San Francisco, he’d been fired from his pizza-delivery job because he’d failed to pay a ticket for a seatbelt violation. Worse was the situation with their two dogs. They’d kenneled them before they came to California, and now they’re worried they can’t afford to get them out.

“I’m just glad you got to see the ass part of this whole thing and the rock-star part,” Friede tells me. “I wish I had my job, my house, my kids, my life, but guess what? I don’t. And if it took that to get this done, maybe it was all worth it.”

He presses his cigarette into the sidewalk and goes back inside to a Christmas party full of scientists and millionaires. Glanville, wearing an ironic holiday sweater, is chatting with an immunologist who is working to cure cancer. Friede orders a vodka cocktail from the bar and steps off to one side of the room with Greeley. It’s the last time I see them.

When he got back to Wisconsin, Friede sold his self-immunization kit and snake cages so he could afford to get the rest of his stuff out of storage. One day in January, he announced on Facebook that he was quitting self-immunizing. Hundreds of people liked the post or wrote encouraging comments. An era had ended. After an estimated 200 snakebites and 700 lethal injections, self-immunizing’s brightest star had retired.

Friede, now doing maintenance work at the steakhouse where we ate and still waiting for Glanville’s grant to go through, no longer has to punish his own body to save the snakebitten. With his antibodies in the hands of reliable scientists, he could do no more. When I reached him by phone in the spring, he told me he was making an effort to spend time with his kids. He would continue to do interviews for snake-themed websites, but only to promote the antivenom project and talk about how he’d move beyond self-­immunizing. Life was starting anew, and it felt good.

But then, on March 13, he backslid when Greeley suffered a non-venomous bite from a python they were pet-sitting for a friend. “Wasn’t going to post this. But had to,” he wrote on Facebook. “My GF gets nailed by a ball python. I laughed. Then I get hit by a water cobra twice.” Old habits die hard.

Contributing editor Kyle Dickman wrote about surviving a rattlesnake bike in the June 2018 issue.

The post The Human Antivenom Project appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Sometime before 7 A.M.Ìęon November 8, Kit Bailey, an assistant chief with the , got a call about a new wildfire that sounded ominous. , an old Northern California gold-mining town notched into the windy and wooded Feather River Canyon.

Bailey, a 57-year-old German-Irish man with gray hair and a handlebar mustache, knew the area well. During a 39-year career that included stints as a hotshot, smoke jumper, and a chief officer on a Type 1 team, he’d fought many “stubborn fucking fires” in the canyon. Tucked into the Sierra Nevada foothills, the place had always provided ideal habitat for blazes, which could stay fueled for months by the grasses and pines clinging to the gorge’s steep walls.

—named for a tributary of the Feather River—didn’t stay confined for long. A northwest wind blowing at 40 miles an hour pushed flames into a grassy swale on the canyon’s north slopes. Within minutes, 700 feet of hillside turned to ash. Soon the fire vaulted into a stand of ponderosa pines on the plateau north of the Feather. Smoke and heat tugged burning needles off branches. Then the wind snatched them up, and a blizzard of flaming matches was suddenly cartwheeling thousands of feet into the air. The needles landed a mile or more ahead of the main blaze, and new hot spots bloomed. The fire leapfrogged north and west, burning an area the size of Central Park every eight minutes.

Concow, one of dozens of unincorporated communities in the Sierra foothills, sits on a lake that was just four miles downwind of Pulga, and houses there were burning by 7:35 A.M. Awakened by flames in their driveways, some families jumped into the lake to survive. They spent hours on a small island, shivering through hypothermia in the reflection of burning homes. Many of the community’s 700 people were severely burnedÌęand at least eight died, including 48-year-old Jesus Fernandez. Smoke killed him outside his house, likely while he tried to catch his dog.

Meanwhile, the fire sprinted on.

“Go hard,” Bailey’s chief told him when he called for an update. Bailey drove north, his speedometer quivering into the nineties. His main concern was that the fire would do exactly what it was already doing: dash across the plateau where Concow sat, hurdle the westÌębranch of the Feather, and land in the pinesÌęon the next plateau to the north. This area was home to Paradise, a town of almost 27,000 retirees and families. It contained 20 churches and an equal number of mobile home parks, a Kmart, a KFC, a hospital, and nine schools that served 3,500 kids—many of whom were just now climbing aboard school buses for the day.

In the months before the Camp Fire broke out, Northern California was experiencing similar conditions that led to the terrible , where wind-driven blazes destroyed 8,920Ìęhomes and killed 44 people.

Dry grass was a culprit in both disasters. On a research farm about 30 miles south of Paradise, scientists from the have, since 1978, measured how much grass or fine fuels grow every year—a critical factor in how quickly a fire spreads during dry months. Both 2017 and 2018 saw banner crops of grass, but with important differences in how they germinated and were nourished by rain.

Last year’s grass boom happened because of the wettest winter the Sacramento area had seen in 122 years. The 2018 crop emerged thanks to one damp month. Coming on the heels of a winter that provided far-below-average snowpack, March and April were warm and relatively wet—peak growing season. The grasses rioted; last spring, the U.C. Davis team harvested a bit more than 5,500 pounds of grassÌęper acre, almost twice the normal amount.

Then conditions worsened drastically. The last measurable rain was on May 25, and July was the warmest on record. The spring’s green grass turned brown and crispy. According to Brent Wachter, a Northern California forecaster who specializes in fire-related weather monitoring, the Sierra foothills became “a tall mat of woven fire starters.”

Even before the Camp Fire, wildfires had caused historic damage. By November 7, they’d burned an astonishing 1.3 million acres in Northern California alone—about 15 percent of the total land burned nationwide in 2018. That figure included a record-setting blaze that , along with , 90 minutes north of Paradise, , and created a little-known meteorological phenomenon known as . Those occur when the hot air lifting off flames creates a vortex when it’s hit by the prevailing breeze.

Then came the fierce dry winds. By late October, the high-pressure system that scorched California throughout the summer had drifted out over the Pacific—a seasonal trend that usually signals relief. But in the first days of November, that air slid east and south over Oregon before tucking in behind California’s Sierra Nevada on November 7. Next it shifted west. Around midnight, this huge balloon of warm, dry air bent over the crest of the Sierra and deflated, sending winds howling down the long western slope of the mountains and toward the Sacramento Valley.

The exact cause of the Camp Fire remains under investigation, but defective power lines may have provided the spark. Not long after 6 A.M. on November 8, a Cal Fire crew stationed at nearby Jarbo Gap drove into the Feather River Canyon after a fire was reported near a malfunctioning line—a common cause of wildfires, especially in extreme winds. Less than 15 minutes later, at 6:33, the crew’s captain, Matt McKenzie, was standing on a small dam on the Feather, looking north at a glowing spot on a ridge he couldn’t reach. There was no road access. The fire was already burning ten acres.

“This has got potential for a major incident,” McKenzie told a dispatcher. He called for as many additional firefighters as could be found. But even if air tankers, engines, and hotshot crews had all been pre-positioned just moments away, it wouldn’t have mattered. Not in those conditions.

Gary Glotfelty, a wiryÌę75-year-old retired firefighter who lived on Paradise’s northeast tip, was just finishing his coffee on November 8 when his phone rang. It was the caregiver for his disabled 42-year-old son, Cody, who lived in a group home in the middle of town. They were now evacuating to the KFC, the caregiver said, a predetermined safety zone.

This worried Glotfelty. He left his wife, Rhoda, at home and rushed to pick up their son. But this wouldn’t be the usual four-minute trip. By 8:30 A.M., just two hours after the fire started, every side street in Paradise was packed with cars funneling onto the three roads that exited town to the west. The first major traffic jam was reported around 9 A.M. on Clark Road.

Most people had heard of the fire through texts or calls. Some heard about it from the police, who were driving through town, using loudspeakers to tell residents to “Get out now!” Others got the word from neighbors going door to door, after they’d seen flames from their breakfast table, or when the walls of their mobile homes became too hot to touch.

Glotfelty turned left, edging his Ford 150 truck into traffic that was slowly inching forward. Then he saw fire behind the Christian Missionary Alliance Church, near Paradise’s town center. After 50 years in the field, Glotfelty had seen more destructive fire than almost anybody on the planet. Now he was a sitting duck in a traffic jam, stuck between the 200-foot flames of the main blaze—ripping toward town from the West Branch of the Feather River—and a spot fire in the middle of town.Ìę

The Camp Fire entered Paradise’s eastern edge at around 8 A.M. and kept riding the wind to the northwest. Swarming embers landed on pine needles piled on lawn furniture or in gutters of the trailers in Pine Grove Mobile Home Park, near where Glotfelty had first seen flames. Those embers glowed to life and, soon, one trailer in a park of 76 was burning. The radiant heat bubbled the siding on the mobile homes next door, and those caught fire, too. Within two minutes, entire rooms were engulfed. Winds gusting into the fifties blasted overhead, flinging embers from new fires downwind toward buildings and trees. It didn’t seem to matter how well-prepared a home was for fire. The Gross family lived on an immaculately cleared compound in homes built of stucco and concrete. The embers poured through the vents. They fled with their houses burning behind them.

As Glotfelty sat in his truck, the skies went black. Headlights blinked on. People started honking, pounding their steering wheels, but where could they go?

The Camp Fire catastrophe was 150 years in the making, and the reasons behind it are both complex and simple. The West is hotter and drier than it was a century ago. There’s more fuel to feed the flames, and more people living in places that are more prone to burn than at any point in American history.

Back before California gained statehood, , creating, at Paradise’s elevation, a forest of widely spaced pines that shaded native grass. California’s Native American inhabitants intentionally started most of those burns to manage undergrowth. When the tribes were conquered around the time of the 1849 California Gold Rush, so were most of the flames.

Lightning, of course, still started some fires, as it always had. Usually accompanied by rain from thunderstorms, lightning sparked smoldering fires that were relatively easy to deal with when the state of California first organized a wildland firefighting force in the 1940s. Meanwhile, that “Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires.” Over time, the annual acreage burned shrank to a fraction of the historic norms. But the forest didn’t stop growing. Without regular fires, places in the foothills near Paradise have grown dense with as many as 400 pines per acreÌęwhere a century ago only 40 pines per acre would have stood.

While the forests thickened, California boomed. The slapdash villages that 49ers built atop ridges to support the Gold Rush have long since been transformed into towns like Paradise. Engineers turned mining trails into highways. They plugged the state’s wild rivers with 1,500 dams and connected turbines to the great coastal cities, using 210,000 miles of power lines strung from the mountainsÌęover pine forests, grasslands, and chaparral. This year, all that fuel was dried by and .

Until recently, California’s public utilities were often held liable for the damages caused by their equipment, scattered through all that fuel. , after the 2017 fires in Sonoma, those damages could total $15 billion for , the utility that provides power to all of Northern California.

The burden was so great that lawmakers and PG&E stockholders began to fear bankruptcy. But on September 21, 2018, the state government propped up the utility with . This was a case ofÌęlawmakers trying to make the best of aÌęgrim situation. Northern California couldn’t let its sole utility provider fail. Nor could it allow PG&E to keep increasing rates just to rebuild the cities that utility lines had caused to burn. So SB-901Ìęsaid that wouldn’t have to shoulder the financial burden of repairing the cities ravaged by fires started by power lines. At least not alone. Instead, after power lines cause a disaster, the state would conduct a stress test to see how much of the damages the company could pay and still remain solvent. The amount left would be rolled into state bonds and sold on the open market. Lawmakers also added the stipulation that PG&E do a better job preparing for wildfires, including some things the utility was already doing.

In the past few years, the company has hired its own private firefighting forces to tamp out the flames its lines start, as other utilities in California have done. It also dedicated to forecasting wind and heat events. When such weather phenomena appeared, PG&E could power down before the winds peaked.

That didn’t happen before the Camp Fire, though.

Kit Bailey felt like a salmon swimming upstream. Still in the flats in the northern Sacramento Valley, he hit a thousand cars pouring bumper-to-bumper in both lanes down Clark Road. The fire column ahead was massive, eerily black, and bent parallel to the ground as it billowed smoke over the valley in volumes that would damage the state’s air quality for weeks. Bailey could see the fire rearing up. He leaned on the horn, then he ramped his truck onto the sloping shoulder to bypass traffic. By now, it was clear that recon was no longer his primary mission. He was driving to Paradise to save lives.

By the time Bailey made it to Paradise, at 9 A.M., the town was midnight-dark from smoke. On Pearson Street, one of the three streets that cross the town, a man wearing a black leather jacket, black jeans, and long hair flagged him down. He’d pulled his RV into a side street because his battery had died. He said his wife was sick inside.

Bailey grabbed a flashlight from behind his seat and jumped out, embers and debris whipping through the smoke, in winds of 48 miles per hour. He attached jumper cables. The RV’s engine turned over, coughed, and never fired.

“You’re out of gas,” Bailey yelled to the driver. The man had a gas can. “Find some,” Bailey said, pushing the can into his hands. “Siphon, steal, do whatever you need to do, but get gas. I’ll be back to check on you in an hour. I’ve got to get other people.”

The people of Paradise took fire safety more seriously than many in the Sierra foothills. Since recordkeeping started in 1911, wildfires have burned almost half of Butte County, which contains the city. Some years were worse than others. In 2008, on Paradise’s northern edge. The town evacuated and learned something scary in the process: with only four roads leading into and out of Paradise from the south, it took three hours for people to flee, and every evacuation road caught fire.

After 2008’s near miss, the two local , chapters of a statewide group formed after , redoubled their efforts to make Paradise safer. They started programs to help residents upgrade their vents so that embers were less likely to drop through them and burn homes. They raised money to thin the forest on the town’s perimeter, mailed reminders citywide telling people to pack before a fire struck, and conducted evacuation drills. Everybody knew that the roads woefully underserved a town of 26,000. But with a tax base tied to a median home value of $205,500—cheap compared with the state’s $443,400 median—upgrading evacuation routes wasn’t realistic. Paradise’s residents would have to do what they could.

One improvement was a new evacuation system. In an attempt to limit the number of cars on roads, evacuation orders were staggered geographically. But the phone-based system could only contact people who had shared their numbers with fire departments. Fewer than 8,000 people had done so, and on November 8, when the city issued its first evacuation orders shortly before 8 A.M., only a fraction of those people got the notices, because officials only called the eastern quarter of town.

It took more than an hour for Gary Glotfelty to reach his son at the KFC. Cody was standing beside his caregiver in the smoky dark. Their greeting was brief. “Cody, get in the truck, We’re getting out of here,” he said. By then, Glotfelty couldn’t go back up Clark Road because of traffic going south. So he looped back on side streets. West on Billie to Oakway. North on Oakway to Wagstaff. East on Wagstaff to Clark—still jammed. On Wagstaff, houses were ablaze. His wife was still at home, much closer to the main fire than they were. Walking was faster than driving. He parked his truck at the Cypress Meadows nursing home on Clark. Cody used to be a track star in the Special Olympics, so they ran. On the shoulder of stop-and-go traffic on Clark, dragging behind a suitcase that his son’s caregiver had packed for the evacuation, a 75-year-old man and his disabled boy ran home with fire closing in on both sides.

By this time, just after 9:30 A.M., most of Paradise’s electrical and communications infrastructure had blinked out: lights, land lines, internet, cell service. By evening, firefighters would completely drain the city’s water supply. The wind knocked down trees and power lines, which fell across side streets and main roads. Cars, idling for hours, ran out of gas and blocked or slowed traffic.

The town’s hospital, which sits on the canyon rim above the westÌębranch of the Feather, was especially vulnerable. Engine crews had prioritized protecting it. While they hosed down the hospital, nurses evacuated patients into ambulances. One ambulance caught fire as it fled. The patient inside survived only because passengers were pulled from the flames by an off-shift doctor. He wheeled the patient into a garage that firefighters had turned into a makeshift clinic. But the nurses couldn’t get everybody out of the hospital. The critical patients had to remain behind, and nurses volunteered to stay with them. One wing of the hospital caught fire and collapsed. By a miracle of great effort and good luck, firefighting stopped the blaze before it spread to the main building.

Paradise would burn for more than 24 hours. People took refuge in the parking lots at churches andÌęKmart, in a football field, in antique stores, and in school buses packed with terrified and disoriented children. Some people died in flames, having never left their homes. Others died in the streets from inhaling smoke and the poisonous gases venting off houses and businesses. Others died when their cars caught fire. In the traffic jams, which vehicles burned and which didn’t was pure happenstance.

Bailey kept driving. He picked up a Latino man who was barefoot, who was holding his pants up because he didn’t have a belt, and moving along using a walker. “Get in!” Bailey yelled, then he whipped the truck through debris and past engulfed mobile home parks toward the Ace Hardware on Clark and Pearson, which had become an impromptu drop point. Firefighters had used their engines to form a blockade around the parking lot and were hosing down flames closing in from all directions. Along with other first responders, Bailey was scooping people up wherever he found them and dropping them at the Ace, where police could shuttle them out of the city.

During one of his laps around town, Bailey found a young Asian woman who spoke broken English. She was outside the fire’s edge on Clark Road, hiking into Paradise in nice jeans, open-toed shoes, and a short-sleeve blouse.

“What are you doing? Everything OK?” Bailey asked. She was crying and kept saying, “My parents, my parents.” She got in. Bailey took her a mile closer to Paradise, where her parents lived on the edge of town. They drove through wind-driven fire, big and aggressive. They passed a lifted white pickup truck that had driven through an iron gate and rear-ended a Prius.

When they pulled up to the gate of her parents’ house, her mother, who looked 80, was in smoke beneath an oak tree, raking smoldering grass by her fence. The daughter got out. The mother and daughter hugged and cried. Then the mother yelled at her daughter to get the hell out of there. The mother stayed behind with her Rottweiler, two cows, and a rake, while Bailey took the daughter back to her car. When he drove into Paradise to collect others, a power line fell across the road and broke his windshield. He jumped out, cut it with bolt cutters, and drove on.

Eventually, he made it back to the RV where he’d met the man in a black leather jacket that morning. He had no way of knowing if he and his sick wife had escaped, but the RV hadn’t moved. It was now ash and melted metal.

When Glotfelty and his son made it to their house, they could see 30-to-40-foot flames curling up behind the structure to the northeast. Glotfelty’s neighbor had already laid out the fire hoses that Glotfelty kept in a shed since 2008, when that year’s fire had nearly destroyed the place. His wife rushed out the door. Glotfelty looked left. Fifty-foot flames were now standing up in four acres of blackberry bushes near the house. Fire was burning the mobile homes visible out their back door, and it was burning oaks visible out their front door. “Get him out of here!” Glotfelty said to his wife about their son. He was staying. The last thing she saw in the rearview mirror was Glotfelty igniting his drip torch and laying a strip of fire—a final stand—around their home.

Late in the night of November 8, the winds began to die and the Camp Fire slowed in the grass and flats outside of Chico. By then, 55,000 acres had burned in a pattern that looked like a windsock. The blaze had spread 17 miles from its ignition point outside Pulga. Paradise was the biggest of the communities that burned. Concow, Centerville, Magalia, Irish Town, and Hell Town were also devastated and mostly gone.

The toll from that day is staggering. Cal Fire initially estimated that 2,000 structures had been lost and that nobody died. Since then, the numbers have climbed daily. It’s now at . Cadaver dogs, which are the best means for finding cremated bodies, have had to sniff through every burned structure or vehicle. So far, , many of those in or next to cars on evacuation routes, but most in their homes. With people still missing and hospitalized, the death toll will continue to climb.

for many of the more than 50,000 people displaced by the Camp Fire. Refugees spent their Thanksgiving eating meals of donated food, then retired to tents pitched on blacktop.

On a cold morning three days after Paradise was lost, Bailey and his staff gathered in an operational trailer parked at the incident command post at Chico’s fairgrounds. Some 3,000 firefighters were already on the job. Bailey looked exhausted. He’d spent his past year living like a deployed soldier. He fought the North Bay fires in October 2017 that killed 44. He’d also fought , which burned 1,063 buildings and a then record 280,000 acres; the Carr Fire in August in Redding, which razed 1,604 buildings, killed three firefighters, and sent eight townspeople to their graves; and at least seven more “monster megafires” in between. Now there was the Camp, deadlier and more destructive than all of those combined.

The Camp Fire is the blaze that experts have been warning about for a generation. When search and rescue teams finish collecting the dead, the closest comparison will be to fires like . But for students of fire like Bailey, the Camp Fire isn’t a relic; it’s the present and the future. Each of the . More than half of those burned since 2015.

At the same time the Camp Fire leveled Paradise, another urban-interface firestorm—as Bailey has started to call this new breed of blaze—ripped through Malibu. . That morning, about these fires being wholly preventable through better forest management. Yet once the Camp Fire was burning, no management could have prevented disaster. Paradise is ash because a mat of grass, dried out by climate change—167-plus days with no rain—caught fire during a sustained 40-mile-an-hour wind.

President Trump was right that forest management is part of the fix. As is rewriting building codes so that all new construction is fire wise, tightening and diversifying regulations on greenhouse emissions, and modernizing the insurance industry so that homeowners are incentivized to harden their houses against fires. Lighting more prescribed fires to decrease the intensity of the burns that do go rogue will also help. But even a vigorous combination of these measures would only slow the damage caused by megafires, not stop it. Like coastal cities facing rising seas, the reality is that 39 million people now live in a tinderbox that’s only getting more flammable.

Bailey, like many firefighters, thinks the best way to limit the damage is to limit ignitions, particularly during peak winds. That means fixing the power-line problem, which will be a long and expensive challenge. After the disaster on November 8, PG&E faced insolvency. If its lines are found to be the source of the Camp Fire, as they were in last year’s Tubbs Fire that burned Santa Rosa, the utility could be staring at an additional $15 billion in liability—bringing the total up to $30 billion in just two years. The company’s insurers would pay only 10 percent of that. On November 7, PG&E’s stock was steady at $50 a share. A week after the Camp Fire, .

Then, on November 15, by declaring that it would be using the authority provided by Senate Bill 901 to pass any potential costs to taxpayers. If PG&E’s power lines caused the Camp Fire, its customers will pay to fix or clean up Paradise. Many firefighters view this as a criminal bailout. But what choice did California have? PG&E is the state’s largest utility. If it failed, the Bay Area, the stateÌęcapital, and five million homes could go dark.

In the trailer, Bailey and three more chiefs from California’s Office of Emergency Operations began to list other towns they considered just as vulnerable as Paradise, including Wrightwood, Idyllwild, Devore, Placerville, Nevada City, Santa Cruz, Scott’s Valley, and San Luis Obispo. “They’re everywhere, and not just in California,” Bailey said, before taking a moment to look at his boots.

That afternoon, he drove back to Paradise to check on Glotfelty. When Bailey pulled up to the house, a PG&E utility truck was moving a power pole that had fallen and blocked the driveway. Smoke was puffing up from what had been blackberries, and a California quail shuffled beneath a burnt oak and bobbed its head.

Glotfelty’s house and that of his neighbors survived. They were the few standing buildings in a city that looked like Dresden after it was bombed in World War II. Glotfelty’s backfire-and-nozzle work had protected the houses, and he’d survived the firestorm in the safety of the burned fuel it had created. “We saved the insurance company $700,000 in houses,” Glotfelty told Bailey, but he was already regretting his heroics. Services wouldn’t return to Paradise for years, and they may never come back. Yet he now owned a home here that he couldn’t sell, andÌęwithout money from insurance, he couldn’t afford to buy another somewhere else. “I’m too old to start over again,” Glotfelty said.

After three days in Paradise without a phone, he’d just learned that his wife and son made it out alive. Cal Fire had caught and corralled them and 140 others in a parking lot on the corner of Skyway and Clark. For the rest of the day, they huddled in the smoke, shivering in winds up to 40 miles an hour. Cody, an Eagle Scout, had handed out the clothes his caregiver had packed in his evacuation bag so that people had something to hold over their faces.

Glotfelty was now off to Orville to see his son and wife. Before he left, he pulled from his pocket a silver dollar he’d saved from his days pumping gas in Reno in the sixties. A small gift, he said, pushing it into Bailey’s palm. “To remind you of this event,” Glotfelty said and he headed out of Paradise.

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Around 4:00 p.m. on June 30, 2013, a 30-year-old hotshot named Christopher MacKenzie pulls a camera from his pocket and shoots a short video. Downhill from him are ten firefighters, all members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots. In the background, the Yarnell Hill Fire sweeps toward the 650-person town of Yarnell, Arizona. On the radio in the background is the voice of the crew’s superintendent, Eric Marsh. He’s somewhere nearby and hints at playing witness to coming disaster. “I was just saying I knew this was coming,” he says. “When I called and asked you what your comfort level was, I could just feel it—you know, too bad.”

“I copy,” says Jesse Steed, the crew’s second in command. “And it’s almost made it to that road we walked in on.”

In that moment, the fire was exploding with a fury most of the several hundred firefighters battling the blaze remembered only as “unprecedented.” One called it “pandemonium.” MacKenzie and his crew were watching this unfold from the safest place on the fire: in the already burned brush high on the same ridge where lightning had started the blaze two days earlier. Less than 50 minutes later, MacKenzie, Steed, Marsh, who had rejoined the crew, and 16 other hotshots were dead in a canyon a mile and a half away, burned to death a short walk from the safety of a ranch on the edge of Yarnell.

The death of 19 Granite Mountain Hotshots, which I wrote about for this magazine and, later, , marked the worst wildland fire disaster in almost 100 years. In the hours after, the Arizona State Forestry Division commissioned a report to find out what happened. Why had the men left the safety of the ridge? For three months, a team of 18 interagency investigators combed over any shred of evidence they could find. They interviewed every firefighter of consequence working the blaze. They took Granite Mountain’s sole surviving member, Brendan “Donut” McDonough, back to the knoll where he last saw his crew. They scoured dispatch records, weather and fuel data, photos, social media posts from firefighters on the blaze, and accounts from civilians. MacKenzie’s partially melted camera was found, having survived a fire that burned hotter than 2,000 degrees. All of the information the investigators collected went into a 116-page record of the tragedy that they hoped could be studied to avoid similar incidents. Yet the investigation felt incomplete. After MacKenzie’s video, the record went spotty for the critical window between when the hotshots left the safety of the ridge and when they reappeared in the canyon minutes before their deaths. Nobody can say for certain why they left.

“All of a sudden, all this other chaos happened. The clarity, the certainty,” says Brad Mayhew, tossing his hands up like he’s throwing confetti. He served as the lead investigator on the report commissioned by the state forestry division immediately after the fatalities. This fall, he agreed to meet me in Yarnell and walk the hotshots’ final steps. It was late afternoon and 100 degrees on September 11. We sat where MacKenzie had shot the video, looking out at the long valley. In the years after the fire, the valley has regrown green but is not yet shaggy. Surrounding us were pyramids of small rocks stacked atop bigger boulders. Mayhew, who is 38, with a salted black beard and a voice that’s deep like that of James Earl Jones, pulled up MacKenzie’s video on his phone to confirm our location. It immediately became clear that somebody had piled the rocks to mark where the ten hotshots had sat or stood in MacKenzie’s final video. “It’s somber,” he mustered.

For most of an hour, we sat among those stones, eating nuts while talking with a big view of the landscape where the tragic fire burned. All the unknowns surrounding Granite Mountain’s deaths bred distrust and blame, and all that emotion soon translated into lawsuits from the some the hotshots’ families. Collectively, they sued the state for wrongful death, settling for $670,000, which was divided among the aggrieved. The fire community clammed up after the lawsuits. “Just talking about Yarnell became radioactive,” Mayhew says. A warm wind was pulling up from the desert and blowing across our backs. “How can this profession make progress if people aren’t comfortable talking about it publicly?”

Most fire fatalities have forced significant safety and cultural changes to wildland firefighting. In an age when fires are getting more dangerous and the need to fight them more pressing, what, if anything, has changed after Yarnell?

In January 2014, 11 veteran firefighters from the nation’s biggest fire agencies—the vanguard of fire, as they were described to me—met in Yarnell. They hiked along the route the hotshots had likely taken from the ridge into the canyon where the 19 died seven months earlier. They arrived at a startling conclusion. “We could see ourselves making the same decision they’d made,” said Travis Dotson, a member of the , a federally funded organization that helps firefighters improve their performance. Around the time of the field trip, Dotson and others formed an underground group called Honor the Fallen. Included in its couple dozen members were some of the highest-ranking firefighters from the various agencies in the wildland fire business: the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and the Park Service. Their goal was to make sure Yarnell Hill, the most publicized event in wildland firefighting history, forced some much-needed changes to the job’s outdated culture. Three years later, they tried to spark “an age of enlightenment” in wildland fire. As Dotson distilled the shift in mindset, “Before Yarnell, it was about getting better at fighting fire. After, it’s been about getting better at accepting death.”

Some context is needed here. Since 1910, more than 1,100 wildland firefighters have died on the line. “There has never been a fire season that we’ve escaped with no deaths, and many years reach well into the double digits,” says Dotson, who used to be a smokejumper. “Making it through a fire season without a death is a statistical impossibility.” Historically, fire agencies responded to fatalities with investigations that sought to understand what happened. Since 1990, when a blaze killed six firefighters on an inmate crew, those investigations seemed intent on proving that dead firefighters broke rules—sometimes in ways that were criminal. This fervor peaked in 2001 in Washington state, when a fire killed four and the incident commander was charged with involuntary manslaughter. Traditionally, the agencies used the investigators’ conclusions to develop new learning tools, scientific labs, and, mostly, rules. Fatality fires spawned the “18 Watch-Out Situations,” the “Ten Standard Firefighting Orders,” and the ever-growing 118-page Incident Response Pocket Guide that most firefighters keep in their pockets today. Need a reminder on unexploded ordnance safety? That’s on page 27. A refresher on the alignments of patterns for dangerous fire behavior? Page 73. Best practices for a media interview? 111. It’s an astonishing document that matches problems to solutions, but it’s also something like the pamphlet a scout leader might hand a Boy Scout before dropping them into the Alaskan bush. Over time, the relationship between tragedy and rulemaking sewed into the culture the belief that firefighters die only when they break rules.

From the outset, the members of Honor the Fallen understood that Yarnell was unlikely to result in any official change. For one thing, Mayhew’s investigation was of a new wave that borrowed from the military’s tradition: They tried to understand what the firefighters knew in the moment rather than seeking fault in behavior. Instead of chasing “the instant gratification of new rules,” as Mayhew put it, they put the onus of making change on the fire agencies at large. But the approach seemed to fall flat. Granite Mountain was the rare unit operated by a municipality, and the big wildland firefighting agencies did all they could to publicly distance themselves from a tragedy that wasn’t their own. “We treated this whole thing different because Granite Mountain had a different color blood,” Dotson says.

Yarnell did prompt a modest update to the fire shelter, the flimsy aluminum heat shields the hotshots had died under, and the development of a new phone app that helps firefighters get weather updates in real time. But as Honor the Fallen predicted, it led to no significant policy changes.

Then 2015 happened. That year, more acres burned than at any point in recorded history, and the Forest Service lost seven firefighters. That agency is one of many in today’s ballooning wildland fire business, but as the oldest and largest, it sets the industry’s culture. The chief at the time, Tom Tidwell, responded as tradition dictated. “He said, ‘I don’t want another fire season like 2015,’” says John Phipps, director of the Forest Service’s . Tidwell had called him at home in Colorado late one November night and said, “I’m directing you and the leadership team of the Forest Service to come up with a way that we don’t have that kind of a season ever again.” He gave Phipps’s team six months to come up with a way to stop firefighters from dying on the line. “We have 10,000 firefighters,” Phipps remembers thinking. “Well, gee, what can we do in five to six months, get it deployed, and have it make a difference so that everybody goes home in 2016?”

They called it the Life First Initiative. It focused on “reducing the amount of unnecessary risk” to firefighters’ lives. Tidwell’s directive reinforced that the Forest Service “accepted no loss of life” and suggested 11 more rules. (A couple examples: “Under no circumstances will mop-up be allowed under snags or fire-weakened trees.” “Firefighters are prohibited from working alone without radio communications or easy access to emergency medical skills.”) It provided firefighters no tools to assess risk or determine how much of it was necessary.

Because of swift internal backlash, these rules fell short of implementation, but they set the initiative’s tone. From the moment Life First came out, Honor the Fallen considered it a relic. The initiative didn’t mention that over the past three decades, the Forest Service’s fire force had mushroomed from 6,000 employees in 1998—about a third of the agency’s workforce—into a seasonal army that now gobbled up half the agency’s $4 billion–plus annual budget and then spent hundreds of millions more in emergency funding. It didn’t mention that wildland firefighters’ primary job was no longer to save publicly owned trees for the timber industry to cut, but to place themselves between watersheds, infrastructure, cities, and often uncontrollable fires like Yarnell Hill. And most damning, it failed to acknowledge what the agency’s scientific arm openly states: that because of climate change, sick forests, and explosive population growth, every trend points to firefighters being asked to take bigger risks more often. The year after Life First’s release, 15 more firefighters died.

Honor the Fallen responded immediately after Life First’s release. “They attempted to deal with increased complexity with more rules, some of which just show a total disconnect from the reality of today’s wildland fire environment,” says Mark Smith, a consultant for , a company with a 20-year history of advising the Forest Service on leadership and culture. “If you accept that zero fatalities is unachievable, why would you establish it as an objective?” On behalf of Honor the Fallen, Smith penned an essay called “,” in which he slaughtered the sacred cow that we could fight fires without firefighters dying. It was time to move the profession out the 1970s and into the 21st century, he argued. In other words, it was time for management to ignore the politics and accept that fighting wildland fire is a dangerous profession.

According to Smith’s calculations, at the start of each season, every wildland firefighter has a one in 1,600 chance of ending up in a coffin by year’s end—and that doesn’t factor in serious injuries or near misses. With an average of 19 deaths a year, the job is roughly as dangerous as a soldier in training, a career where recruits sign a will when they walk into boot camp. (Because of Honor the Fallen’s work, some crews now ask their firefighters to do this.) The strange thing, Smith says, is that the Forest Service’s official policies still insist that more rules, or following existing rules better, would keep everybody alive.

Smith calls this paradigm a “lawyer’s dream,” where the agency has unintentionally created “a cover your ass” environment by requiring that its firefighters follow rules that simply cannot all be simultaneously followed. While these rules are well intentioned and do indeed save lives, he says they also impose a false sense of control in a wildly chaotic environment. My favorite line of Smith’s from “The Big Lie” is this: “There is nothing low risk about a 19-year-old hotshot driving an ATV loaded with fuel mix down a burning mountain at dusk after working a 12-hour day.”

Using formulas developed in the military, Smith, a former Army Ranger, calculated that the vast majority of firefighting operations exist in the medium- to high-risk zone. In other words, there’s a relatively high probability that a tree eventually crushes you, you step on a bee nest, grab the business end of a chainsaw, or get burned. Yet somehow, most firefighters Smith polled believe they work in a low-risk environment—something more like a factory floor. He says that in the special forces, if the Rangers found it too dangerous to take an objective, they came up with a new plan. That’s not always the case in wildland fire.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s one house or one community,” Phipps says. “It’s not part of our protocol to say, gee, we’ll risk less here because it’s only one house.” Put another way, under the current paradigm, the agency regularly risks the same number of firefighters’ lives to save an outhouse as they do the city of Denver.

When I asked Smith how a job as obviously dangerous as wildland firefighting came to be seen as safe, he reached back to 1910, when the Big Burn ripped a 3 million–acre hole into rich timber lands, killed approximately 76 firefighters, and kicked off the Forest Service’s 100-year transition from a land management agency to one of the world’s largest fire departments. He says that back then, the firefighters were militias of men rousted from bars or ranches, and the public wasn’t all that concerned when they died. But die they did, and in great numbers: 25 in California near Griffith Park in 1933; 15 near Cody, Wyoming, in 1937; 11 in the Cleveland National Forest in 1943. In some ways, not much has changed. “Until now, there’s been this insidious cultural legacy where the belief has been if we can just get these low-paid resources to follow the rules, nothing bad will happen,” Smith says.

The backbone of the fire service remains young men and women. Wildland firefighting is a seasonal job with a starting base pay of about $1,920 per month. An Army private makes slightly more than that, and their meals are paid for, plus all their lodging, retirement benefits, and 100 percent of their dental, medical, and vision insurance. Basic training for a soldier is three months. A rookie firefighter can battle blazes as intense as Yarnell if they can pass a week’s worth of online classes and heft a 45-pound pack over three miles in less than 45 minutes.

One reason young men and women might embrace the risk of firefighting is that the job promises big adventure. At least that was true for me when I was in my early twenties and fought fire. But it’s also true that slim budgets and great societal expectations drive risk onto naive kids. The entire Forest Service’s budget is a fingernail on the arm of the military’s—$4.7 billion versus $717 billion. Yet every time a fire starts in a town’s backyard, politicians and the public demand an immediate and forceful response. Smith’s worry is that if the Forest Service admitted the incredibly high chance of death their people are exposed to, their firefighters—or maybe their families—might demand fair compensation. And what land management agency can afford to pay that?

After writing “The Big Lie,” Smith followed up with another piece called “When Luck Runs Out.” In it, he argued that not measuring risk or reward is completely at odds with the military (including the Coast Guard), commercial diving, or almost any other high-risk industry where accidents are accepted as an inevitability. He developed a chart that explained how wildfire agencies might adopt the technique. At the bottom, recreation lands and roads justified a low level of risk. Domestic animals and critical watersheds justified a medium risk. Smith felt a high risk was acceptable if they were working to mitigate threats to regional employment centers and human life. And undertaking extreme risk was OK in only one case: “viable and saveable human life in imminent danger.” It’s widely assumed that describes Granite Mountain’s intent on Yarnell Hill.

This type of risk assessment isn’t yet being done on the fireline. “I see these changes taking ten years, maybe 15,” Smith says.

But there’s reason to be encouraged. Independent of Life First, the Forest Service’s research arm is developing new ways to assess risk. Think of it as the Moneyball of firefighting. The project is led by Dave Calkin, an economist and numbers geek who works for the Forest Service in Missoula, Montana. Calkin is controversial in the fire service. His previous work has shown that the best tactic to take with fires burning under extreme conditions, like that spun up a tornado of flames and killed six people last July, is to treat them like a hurricane and get the hell out of the way. Lately, Calkin’s been applying economics to weigh the potential of tragic outcomes against the values firefighters try to protect. Quantifying these variables, he says, is the future of wildland firefighting. To sum up his work, Calkin quotes another Forest Service rule about when to fight a wildfire: “The right place, the right time, the right reason. Up until now, the right reason has been left to firefighters to determine,” Calkin says. “That should be a decision made by leadership.”

Ideally, his work will help leadership decide when firefighters should be sent in and when they should wait. Models by Calkin and his team rely on layers of overlaid data. His maps show roads, ridges, rivers—all the typical things found on a map. But they also show vegetation types (forest, brush, the density of dead trees compared to live ones), the perimeters of historic wildfires, and any perceived value at risk—owls, watersheds, towns. His team inputs current and forecasted weather for any given fire. The computer then determines the characteristics of the places where historic fires have stopped and where they haven’t and translates that information into a sort of paint-by-numbers risk map: red where a fire’s most likely to be most dangerous, green where firefighters have the best chance of stopping it, and yellow where they don’t. His models use computers to scout fires and, by doing this, help remove emotion from risk assessment. So far, Calkin hasn’t run a simulation on the Yarnell Hill Fire—there’s no need to since the fire has already burned. But had they run the model on June 30, 2013, it almost certainly would have computed the risk as extreme and the likelihood of success at low to none.

“When we commit firefighters, we want to make sure that the value a firefighter is protecting is worth the investment of the risk they’re exposed to,” Calkin says. That’s not happening, yet. Currently, big agencies fight single fires for months on end, and the public seems content to fund the effort. But nobody is asking if it’s working. That’s because it’s hard to quantify the impact firefighters have on fires. How much bigger would California’s 460,000-acre , now the biggest fire in state history, be if $100 million hadn’t been spent trying to control it? Would more than 9,000 homes have burned in last year’s Sonoma and Napa Valley fires if 11,000 firefighters hadn’t tried to stop them? Would they have killed fewer than 42 people? Calkins says too often, regardless of how the fire’s behaving, the assumption is yes. And that means big agencies keep shuttling hordes of firefighters toward the flames without knowing if they can actually do anything to stop them.

Last summer, Calkin’s tool was first put to the test in Arizona’s Tonto National Forest, where the Forest Service let a wildfire burn outside the small town of Globe based on his model’s predictions. It provided recommendations on where they could catch it should they need to, thereby allowing the agency to actively manage the fire while not necessarily fighting it. In the end, it burned 9,000 acres of fire-adapted forest, restoring health to the woods while thinning out some of the excess vegetation that may have otherwise put Globe and the firefighters sent in to protect it at greater risk should a fire spark on some dry and windy day in the future. That project was a dust fleck on the lens of forested lands that need restoration, but it represents a completely different approach to risk mitigation: one that prioritizes maintenance and calculated risk over a reactionary policy of total suppression.

“We’re trying to change a proud tradition,” says Chris Dunn, Calkin’s colleague, who works at Oregon State University. “What we ultimately want to do is help firefighters become fire stewards.”

Back on the ridgetop, Mayhew plays the video MacKenzie shot here five years ago. There’s a moment where the video jumps that looks like an edit. “People seized on that and said we’d doctored the clip,” says Mayhew, shaking his head. “They discounted the entire investigation because they thought they’d caught us in a lie.” In fact, it was two separate but complete clips edited into one. Many firefighters don’t trust investigations. History gave them good reasons. “That’s because for a long time they went out and created reasons to blame workers,” Mayhew says. As an independent contractor, he has made investigating fireline accidents his career.

The team’s reaction to Mayhew’s investigation was particularly strong. He thinks that’s because their investigation did what few others have before. They acknowledged that firefighting is high risk and people sometimes die doing it. In the final report, they didn’t cast blame, which made it harder to learn from the deaths and angered many people.

Around the time that Mayhew’s investigation was released, in the fall of 2013, online discussion boards cropped up that attracted fire professionals and hobbyists. One blog still active today has tens of thousands of comments. Too many of them are overseasoned with vitriol or dedicated to conspiracy theories—somebody ordered the men to leave the ridge; a backfire sparked by a homeowner killed the crew; the hotshots were amateurs. These commenters often accuse Mayhew of being a conspirator in a government coverup. He calls the accusation patently false. But what bothers him is that some of those ideas have infected the fire culture, and he’s constantly having to correct dangerous misperceptions. “It’s comforting to think, ‘I never would have done that. I’m not like them,’” says Mayhew, who was a hotshot and still works as a firefighter. “They were just firefighters, and we’re just firefighters.”

Mayhew and I left the overlook and began hiking when the sun slipped below the Weaver Mountains and the peaks’ shadows stretched into the valley below. We followed the thin road that Granite Mountain took to their deaths. It was steep and rutted, and we both kicked rocks that tumbled downhill. We soon reached the point where the hotshots opted to drop off the ridge, through the canyon, and toward the ranch. We stood there for a moment. A turkey vulture rotated overhead. “Doesn’t it look like it’s right there?” Mayhew asked of the ranch we could see at the head of the canyon. “Like you could be there in five minutes?”

The uncertainty behind what drove those men, in view of that terrifying fire, to drop into a wickedly steep box canyon has generated the conspiracies that still haunt wildland firefighting today. In hindsight, it’s a hard decision to fathom. For his part, Mayhew tries to stay out of the swirling theories. He thinks the way to learn from Yarnell is to ask firefighters to put themselves in Granite Mountain’s boots and ask what could have lured them to make the same choice. On this point, he’s bullish. “They were trying to save lives,” Mayhew says. “They knew people were threatened down there. That must have weighed on them.”

Whatever it was that pulled them off that ridge, after years of making necessarily risky decisions on the fireline, Granite Mountain missed something on Yarnell Hill. And the numbers simply caught them. Mayhew grunted and set off down the hill, hiking toward 19 crosses five minutes from a ranch.

The post What We Learned from the Yarnell Hill Fire Deaths appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Because boot-packing takes too long

G3 Alpinist Plus Glide Skins ($184)

G3 tweaked the mohair-to-nylon ratio in its Alpinist skins to suit a variety of conditions and terrain. Our favorite: the 70 percent mohair, 30 percent nylon Glide. It’s downright zippy on low-angle tours.

Arc’teryx Beta SL Jacket ($299)

A quality shell is a must on any backcountry mission, even if it mostly lives in your pack. Arc’teryx’s Beta SL tips the scales at less than 11 ounces. And with its cinchable hood, slim fit, and two-layer Gore-Tex, we were more than happy to bust it out when necessary.

Salomon Pillow Talk Splitboard ($800)

Terrible name, killer deck. Salomon took its women’s all-mountain Pillow Talk, cut it in half, and gave it a new core. The flex is on the soft side, but the board handled well in mixed conditions.

Dakine Poacher R.A.S. 26 Pack ($210)

With a whistle on the sternum strap (smart), a hydration sleeve in the main pack (nifty), and a rear-entry zipper (essential), the Poacher is full featured. But what we liked most is compatibility with Mammut’s top-end R.A.S. airbag ($490).

Salomon Speedway Splitboard ($900)

“Super fun, super light, very maneuverable,” said one tester. With a wide nose that gives it great float in soft snow, the Speedway is ideal for beginner or intermediate splitboarders who focus on powder.

Black Diamond Dawn Patrol Ski Touring Pants ($199)

These touring pants are made of four-way-stretch soft-shell material. They give in all the right places, and they’re breathable while still providing insulation. The tailored fit is a plus: call us hipsters, but we don’t like tangling our crampons in our pant legs.

Burton Hitchhiker Bindings ($460)

The Hitchhiker is a collaboration between Spark, arguably the first name in split bindings, and Burton, arguably the first name in the fixed kind. The aluminum baseplates are light but durable, and the lever that releases the toe to switch to ride mode is glove-friendly.

Vans Verse Boots ($390)

With a customizable insulating liner and a waterproof zipper shroud, the Verse is luxe. Hardy inserts can be removed to soften the boots for the climb up and replaced to stiffen them for the ride down.

The post The Best Splitboarding Gear of 2019 appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.