Brian Mockenhaupt told his story to producer Mike Kessler for an episode of The Daily Rally podcast. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I saw Kevin drop down, and then my feet gave out a little bit underneath me. Kevin had fallen into a crevasse, and I was beside him. And so at this moment, real concern started to rise up. Like, we’re in a bad situation. This is not good.

I live in Fort Wayne, Indiana. I’ve spent most of my adult life as a journalist. Much of that time was spent covering conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then writing about the military, the physical and psychological effects of war, and outdoors and adventure sports.

I was in the Army. I served as an infantryman with the 10th Mountain Division. I served two tours in Iraq shortly after the war started in 2003. And then in 2004 and 2005. We did a lot of mounted and dismounted patrolling, regularly received small arms fire, mortars, rockets. Roadside bombs were a pretty big threat. After I got out of the Army, I returned to journalism, and went several times to Iraq and Afghanistan to embed with Army, Air Force, and Marine units over there.

I was in Southern Afghanistan and I was embedded with some paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne, and we’re out on a foot patrol going down this dusty road. I had been walking with this soldier and we came to this crossroads. Part of the patrol went to the right, he went off to the right. I wasn’t sure which way to go. I chose to keep going straight. We continued on towards the village, and about five minutes later there was this massive explosion.

We could feel the concussion roll through our chests. I looked to the right and there was this big cloud of smoke and dirt rising up through the trees. The soldier that I had been with had walked over a patch of ground, and a massive bomb detonated under him.

He lost his legs, and then he ended up getting an infection. He died about a week later. I don’t know what would’ve happened if I had followed him. Maybe it would’ve blown up under me, and at the very least, I probably would’ve been hurt pretty badly.

Then, about a week later, I was with the same unit. We spent about 24 hours in this small compound in the farm fields in southern Afghanistan surrounded by the Taliban. And that was also kind of distressing. Those moments in Afghanistan certainly caused me to start reconsidering what I was doing and why I was doing it, but I still went back to Afghanistan a year after that. But that seed had been planted. Is this worth it? Why am I doing this?

I think in some ways what kept me going back to Iraq in Afghanistan was touching on something that I had experienced when I was in the military. That risk, that danger, that as awful as it is, sometimes there’s that part that’s enticing because the rest of the world falls away. In that moment, nothing else really matters other than what is happening or what might happen in the next few moments.

It’s an environment I knew from the military. It was being back as part of this group with this comradery, with this sort of feeling of being protected by the people around you. Being part of that team.

But each time I would go out and do that, there would be this question, like, Why am I doing this? I’m doing this voluntarily. And that’s where spending time in the outdoors started to replace for me some of the intensity and excitement of being in combat environments.

In 2011, I climbed a mountain in Nepal with several wounded Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, one of whom, this guy named Steve Baskis, had been blinded by a roadside bomb. A year after that, he and I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro together. We were with a group and I was guiding him up the mountain. Then, together with a couple other friends, we were going to climb Mount Elbrus in Russia. The highest mountain in Europe.

It was Steve and myself, Matt, Kevin, and Dan. Elbrus is considered to be a pretty straightforward mountain. We were climbing without a guide. And this was some foolishness, and some sort of naivete that we thought about a lot in later times.

So the five of us had set off at about midnight for the summit; we had been climbing for a few hours. Matt started to not feel well, and wanted to turn back. So Kevin, Steve, and I turned back with Matt. Dan was feeling pretty good.There were some other climbers who were around us on the mountain at the time. So we split up. Dan continued on; we were gonna descend down the slope and cross back over towards the camp.

The wind really started kicking up, and it turned into a whiteout. We were gonna make our way back to base camp. Sort of out of the peripheral vision to my left, I saw Kevin drop down. Then my feet gave out a little bit underneath me. Kevin had fallen into a crevasse, and I went in up to about mid-thigh. So fortunately for Kevin, he was short-roped to Steve; he stopped Kevin from falling in further. I backed out of the crevasse, and we didn’t realize until that point that there were crevasses all around us that were covered up by this fresh layer of snow.

There was a thunderstorm, a snow storm parked overhead and you could almost feel the electricity in the air. And I thought, Are we gonna get struck by lightning? What have I done? Why am I out here? How did this come to pass?

We got Kevin pulled back out of the crevasse, sort of collected our thoughts for a moment. And now it was the four of us making our way back, and the storm continued. Kevin was out on point and he would take a few steps and just stab his trekking pole around. If it came to a place where he stabbed through the snow, if it was a very big crevasse, we’d walk around it or he would step or jump across. I’d say it was about 18 hours after we had started, we made it back into the base camp.

It was hard for me to know change at that moment, and maybe to fully understand what waas happening. That time of the crossroads in Afghanistan, I was pretty shaken up by it, and I felt really lucky. And that time on Elbrus, the immediate thing that came from that was immense relief, but it took a lot longer for all of those things to stew and to meld for me to ultimately be able to make some sense of what those events, what those incidents, and all these other ones had meant in my life.

I started to realize that I had spent a lot of time looking elsewhere for some understanding of myself. And I’d chosen to believe that I could be defined by the experiences I had had, by the stories I wrote, by the places that I had been. It started to feel more and more like I was chasing something that was unattainable, that I wasn’t getting there. I was still aware of this question, this pretty uncomfortable question and curiosity about Who am I, what am I about?

As I’m journeying kind into and through myself, that led me then to this place of wanting to be able to share in other people’s journeys. Perhaps offer them a companion to walk with on the path for a while as they’re trying to navigate where their life is taking them, where they’re feeling stuck, where they’re struggling.

I went back to school in 2019 for a three-year program for clinical mental health counseling. I now see a mix of kids, a lot of adolescents, couples, families, and adults who are working through anxiety, depression, and trauma; just sort of human things we all struggle with.

I still love the outdoors, but I think I’m drawn less to the adventure and exploration, drawn less to the risk. Because in this season of my life, I’ve turned that focus inward to the adventure of exploring myself and helping others do the same.

Brian Mockenhaupt is a psychotherapist and yoga instructor in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He served two tours in Iraq with the U.S. Army, and has written for şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř, the Atlantic, Esquire, and Backpacker łľ˛ą˛µ˛ąłúľ±˛Ô±đ˛ő.Ěý

You can follow The Daily RallyĚý´Ç˛ÔĚý,Ěý,Ěý, or wherever you like to listen, and nominate someone to be featured on the show .

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It isn’t until the bus lurches to a halt at the entrance to Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, near Los Angeles, that the kids realize they’ve arrived. That’s how it is on a field trip. You pile in, buckle up, and try your best to use your quiet restaurant voice, even when traffic on the 101 is stop-and-go for an hour and you don’t have to be in class all day and the driver was nice enough to crank up the radio.

Just look at Jordyn or Athena or Harlowe. They’ve been singing along with Justin Bieber and Maroon 5 and Adele and everything KIIS FM has thrown at them since we pulled away from Mar Vista Elementary at 9 a.m. A few rows up, Justice, Seth, and Cameron have been talking, with unrestrained ten-year-old gusto, about whatever it is ten-year-olds talk about, while the rest of the fourth-graders have been grooving or clowning. But when the driver brakes and cuts the volume, a moment of near silence overtakes all 35 of them.

Oh. My. God. We’re here!

The kids on the left press their faces to the windows, peering out at the scrubby, oak-dotted hills and canyons, both of which are particularly green thanks to a recent gift from El Niño. Across the aisle, the other kids squirm for a better view, resisting the urge to undo their seat belts. That’s when ranger Mary Calvaresi climbs aboard, dark green cargo pants, wide-brimmed hat, and all.

“OK, everyone,” says Ranger Mary, who’s 32 and has no kids of her own, but speaks with the loving, patient authority necessary to address a busload of children. “If you can hear me, put your hands on your head.”

The kids—22 boys and 13 girls—do as they’re told, because Mary makes it fun.

“Put your hands on your shoulders… Hands on your ears… Hands on your heads.”

Now she’s got ’em. Even their teacher, Miss Treves, is impressed. And man, if these fourth-graders dig nature as much as they like this game, they’re going to love what comes next.

Today’s field trip to the Satwiwa region of the Santa Monica Mountains is part of a White House initiative called , a program that gives every fourth-grader in the country, and their families, free entry to all the national parks, monuments, waterways, and recreation areas in the U.S. for the 2015–16 school year—with the hope of extending the offer to fourth-graders in perpetuity. To spread awareness, the privately funded National Park Foundation is underwriting a field-trip campaign for resource strapped schools, shouldering the transportation costs required to host 130,000 kids.

The initiative is meant to address a confluence of 21st-century realities: 80 percent of U.S. families live in urban areas, where poverty, traffic, lack of regional transportation, hyper-scheduled childhoods, or some combination thereof makes it harder than ever for kids and families to get to wild spaces. Compounding the problem, kids today spend less time outdoors and more time glued to screens than they have since, well, the advent of screens. And they’re paying a mighty price—in high rates of clinical anxiety, depression, and ADHD, in low test scores and vitamin D deficiency, even in compromised distance vision. Call it what you like—the perils of modern life or nature-deficit disorder—but the science is abundant and unequivocal: children do better with a dose of the natural world in their lives.

That’s why the program targets fourth-graders. Nine- and ten-year-olds are more mature than third-graders, but not nearly as jaded, distracted by hormones, or downright bratty as fifth-grade tweens can be. 

Visitation statistics ­collected by the Park Service don’t ­account for children’s ages, so there is currently no data on the number of fourth-graders who have taken ­advantage of the Every Kid In a Park program. The three Los ­Angeles–area divisions of the NPS, where Ranger Mary helps coordinate the youth-education programs, have, since the start of the initiative last summer, introduced three new programs for fourth-graders and set a goal to get 10,000 of them to local public lands in the next year. The field trips take place all over the Santa Monica Mountains, but Rancho Sierra Vista/Satwiwa is a local gem. You might ­recognize the name from 2013, when the Springs Fire torched 24,238 acres of the Santa Monica Mountains between Highway 101 and the ­Pacific Coast Highway. This stretch, which sits just inside Ventura County, was one of the hardest hit. Thousands of sycamores, eucalyptus, and oaks were ­incinerated, their leaves turned to ash and their limbs blackened.

But three years later, on the day of the Mar Vista Elementary trip, the native and exotic grasses are a healthy light green. Poppies are beginning to sprout. Prickly pears and chollas are revealing their purples and yellows across a sloping mesa, giving way to the hillside oaks and willows that survived the burn and whose richer greens soften the visual impact of the charred flora. None of the kids even notice or ask about the funny-looking, fire-damaged trees in the distance.

“OK,” says Mary, holding up an acorn for 12 of the kids to see. “Who can tell me what an acorn is?” A dozen little arms shoot ­toward the sky. Me! me! me! This is the Coastal group, not to be mistaken for the similar-sized Inland or Island groups that are off with ­other rangers doing other activities. Coastal’s trip begins on the shaded stone patio of the park’s cultural center, near the picnic tables and a native plant garden.

“An acorn is a food that squirrels eat,” says Ava, with far more caution than she used when belting out hits on the bus.

“That’s right,” says Mary, adding that Native Americans—Chumash Indians, to be exact—also ate acorns.

“Who can guess how long ago the Chumash lived right here in this park?”

“A hundred years ago?” says a boy sitting cross-legged, who’s hidden by the show of hands.

“Great guess,” says Mary. “But wayyyyy more than that.”

“Since the dinosaurs?” asks a girl.

“Not quite that old,” says Mary.

Their arms are still up, wiggling like garden eels.

“One million years?”

Nope.

“Nine thousand years?”

Getting warmer.

When Cameron finally guesses 13,000 years, Mary calls for a round of applause. The four chaperone moms, whose eyes are locked on their iPhones, look up, clap a few times, then return to Facebook.

Mary throws the kids a true-or-false question: “The homes the Chumash lived in were called tepees.”

“That is so false,” says Mason.

“Another round of applause, please!” says Mary. “The Chumash lived in aps, which is pronounced ops. Let’s go see one!”

While the field trips are intended to expose kids to the unbridled possibilities of the great wide open, you can’t just turn a class of fourth-graders loose in the wilderness for two hours and tell them to meet back at the bus when time is up. Yet while it might appear as though the Coastal group is being micromanaged, herded from one place to the next, on closer inspection you see that they’re given the leeway to let their eyes and ears and minds wander.

“Some of these kids have never been in the outdoors,” says Mary, who joined the Park Service in 2009, after earning her BA in envi­ronmental science and resource management from California State Uni­versity, Channel Islands. “So if a kid is see­ing a ­red-tailed hawk or is fixated on a bee ­landing on a flower while I’m talking, it’s not a sign of disrespect. That indicates to me that something big is happening, so I give them the space.”

That much is clear as we stand under the dome-shaped ap. The group is rapt as Mary talks about the many uses of yucca. She calls it the grocery store plant, owing to its versatility. The thin fibers are woven with grasses into rope that holds the structure together. She passes around a switch, stopping at Tommy to note that his rope necklace once looked more like the plant in her hand. When Tommy smiles, his eyes simultaneously squint and sparkle.

Then Mary drops a trick question. “Can anyone guess what the Chumash used to make the doorway to the ap?”

The kids lob their guesses. Yucca? Oak branches? Cactus?

“Nope,” Mary says. “They used the ribs of a whale!”

The kids scan the arid-looking landscape, considering how a cetacean might make it all the way here. Mary tells them that the ocean is just on the other side of the Santa Monica Mountains. After explaining that the Chumash hung animal skins from the whale-rib arches to make doors, she asks, “What would happen if you slept in the ap without a door?”

“You could get robbed,” a girl says. “Or you could get taken.”

It’s a disheartening answer but not a surprising one. Mary hosts field trips twice a week from October to May, and her students run the demographic gamut. While many have never been to a national park, others, like roughly 60 percent of the kids at Mar Vista Elementary(according to a show of hands), have had some exposure. Tucked between highly gentrified Venice and Culver City, Mar Vista is a leafy, working-class neighborhood. Back when busing still existed, the school held Title I (read: low income) status, but these days parents move across town to live near it. Nevertheless, this is L.A., so the girl’s street smarts are a matter of course.

Ranger Mary praises her practical guess. “The real reason,” she says, with what feels like an extra dose of good cheer, “is to keep out rain and rodents like squirrels or mice.”

By around 12:30, the Coastals move on to the trip’s big adventure—a half-mile out-and-back hike from the ap to a water tank that’s about 100 vertical feet up toward 2,838-foot Boney Peak. A trail runner could make it there in five minutes, but Mary draws it out with a series of ecology lessons.

“Can you feel the sun on your face?” she asks a minute or two in. The kids had just been instructed to turn themselves into plants, spreading far enough apart so they can stretch out their arms, their faces absorbing heat from the burning yellow star in the sky.

Affirmative. “Great. Now turn around and tell me if it feels the same.” The kids pivot. No, they concur. Looking this way feels different.

Mary explains that the relationship between local plant life and the sun are different, too. The south- and west-facing flora, which get the majority of the light, are mostly chaparral. The oak trees and toyons and green brush that get less sun are called coastal sage scrub. They mostly face north.

At another stop, she points out a ­prickly pear. Marlo speaks up. “Can you eat a prickly pear?” Her voice is almost muted by a steady breeze that has blown the smog out of the Conejo Valley basin, providing a clear view all the way to the Santa Susana Mountains.

“You can eat one,” says Ranger Mary. “But you have to take the spines off first.”

Someone giggles.

Up the trail, the group gets to sample some of the area’s moisture-absorbent chia seeds, which the Chumash would suck on during long hikes to avoid carrying heavy loads of water. Mary asks what the seeds taste like.

“Tastes like tea,” says Athena.

“Taste like blood,” says Rose, who is diabetic and has to prick her finger daily for blood-sugar readings.

“They’re bland,” says one of the boys.

After everyone weighs in, Marlo pipes up. “I make chia pudding at home.

Finally, arriving at the water tank, the group takes a knee and listens as Ranger Mary outlines the importance of nature. She talks about oxygen and natural resources and safe habitats for animals to live, even though the wildlife today is lying conspicuously low.

“Does everyone think nature should exist even if we can’t always get to it?” she asks.

Her question is met with a collective, mumbly, “Yes.”

“Does anyone disagree?”

Nope.

Mary says they’d better get back if they want to have lunch before the bus leaves. But this time the hike is going to be different. “When we reach the shaded woodlands,” she says, “we’re not going to talk at all. We’re just going to walk in silence, so the only thing we hear is our footprints.”

Keeping the noise level down isn’t nearly as challenging as it was on the bus. Within seconds everything is remarkably calm. The kids gaze in all directions—at a smear of clouds overhead, at the rock band of Boney Peak over their left shoulders, at the oak-shrouded hills that lead to the Pacific, and at the windswept grasses that line the trail. A moment later they’ve spread out a bit, the way grown-up hikers do when they’re tired of talking. It’s anyone’s guess how many of these kids will take to this kind of recreation, let alone go on to become rangers or environmentalists. But there’s no doubt that, at this moment, every one of them is perfectly content, taking it all in, as if by nature.

Tomorrow, back in class at Mar Vista Elementary, the students will write their Field-Trip Reflections. Marlo, the chia gourmand, will note that her seeds tasted “like watermelon, lemon, and lavender.” Gordon will happily report that, while “we didn’t see much animals, there were a lot of plants” and a “really fast caterpillar and some hummingbirds.” Samy will explain that “the following fact may not be about the Chumash, [but] it’s sure interesting that in California, one way people divide Native people into tribes is by the language they speak.”

Everyone will say they loved the hike, and many will recall the crafts portion of the day, when they gathered at the picnic tables and made necklaces out of abalone shells. Emi will sum it up pretty well: “All the activities were so awesome and fun, especially the jewelry making. I had so much fun and I hope to come back soon.”

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You know the drill. You log on to Face­book to see what’s happening, and look­ing at all the awesome things every­­body is doing leaves you feeling inadequate, lonely, or, most insulting, like a failure. Considering the number of , we really should know better. The problem, as Benjamin Johnson, an assistant professor at VU University in Amsterdam who studies the psychological effects of social ­media, told me, is that “looking upward” at happy people too often backfires. “We like to look at how others are doing to improve our moods,” he said, “but then we think about ourselves and get depressed.”

I was pretty sure this was happening to me, but I had no idea to what degree my relatively normal Facebook usage (a dozen check-ins a week, with half as many low-impact postings) might be altering my mood. Would changing what I chose to share make me happier? I devised a simple experiment: for two weeks, I’d update my status as often and as honestly as possible and see how it made me feel.

This kind of public candor is much more difficult than it sounds, ­especially for a social-media self-­editor like me. Early on, I’ll admit, my posts were pretty timid—canine celebrity puns, a funny ironic picture of my ­anti-foodie frozen burrito, an uploaded Runtastic map of a quick-and-dirty mountain-bike ride—but people liked them, and I felt good. Great, even; call me schmaltzy, but when an old neighbor who had crashed his motocross bike into the deep end of an empty swimming pool gave me a thumbs-up on a post with a funny picture of Albert Einstein and a self-deprecating remark about my own hair, it took me straight to happy town.

I eventually worked up the courage to share truly personal information. At the peak of my boldness, I posted a long excerpt from a series of psychiatric exams I’d taken as a boy. This included some sad, heavy stuff that I still grapple with and normally talk about only with three other people. Examples: “Michael seems unable to live up to the expectations he places upon himself,” “has low self-esteem,” and “appears withdrawn and anxious.”

Hitting the post button felt good. I expected silence or a kind word from a few of my touchy-feely friends. ­Instead I got comments from people who knew me then and barely know me now, ranging from “funny and touching” to “brilliant” to “what a loser.” (Fortunately, my self-esteem is now high enough to handle a range of feedback.) I was happy because I was proud of myself. I revealed something meaningful and sensitive, critics be damned.

One grumpy afternoon, I confessed that “Facebook only serves to increase or decrease my self-esteem, based on how I’m feeling each day. Yet I rarely have the sense to stay away on down days. Is this how alcoholics feel?”

My honesty was validated by a veritable popcorn machine of likes and hang-in-theres, including a nice note from my mom, who rarely uses social media. Again, it felt good. As I let down my guard and revealed a more honest picture of my interior self, people generally responded in kind. A few friends began to love my posts so much that they e-mailed and texted just to cheer me on. (Another thought my account had been hacked.) When I announced that I was done with my experiment, an old skiing-, mountain-biking, and green-chile-stew-eating pal sent a message saying he hoped I wouldn’t revert to my low-key and infrequent updates. “I’m going to give you a bit of truthiness,” he wrote. “I liked your frenetic posts. You know why? I miss you.”

See more of şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř‘s happiness-boosting quest:

Strategies for a Healthier, Happier Life
5 Ways to Gain Control Over Your Technology
What Dogs Can Teach Us About Being Content
The Science of Happiness, Illustrated

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THE BIANNUAL GATHERING of the gear tribes is typically a magnanimous affair. Held each winter and summer in Salt Lake City's 675,000-square-foot Salt Palace convention center, the trade shows (OR for short) draw some 20,000 industry types—an assortment of hyperfit gear wonks who pal around, show off their wares, and tout their stuff to resellers and the press. At OR, VPs wear sandals and sales guys balance on slacklines; even ambitious young marketers rarely speak ill of the competition.

Sweat Science

Sweat Science: It’s all about the middle layer. Gore-Tex fuses its waterproof-breathable membrane to a separate protective layer. eVent and NeoShell incorporate protective materials directly into the membrane. —Madison Kahn

Gore washing machines

Washing machines in Gore’s testing lab

Gore's manufacturing facility

Gore’s manufacturing facility

Gore's rain room

Gore’s rain room

Bootie testing

Bootie testing

That's why the banner at last summer's show was so striking. Ten feet tall and 30 feet wide, it was the first thing people saw when they walked through the convention-center doors. Next to an image of a professional climber who’d been Photoshopped to look like someone from a “Faces of Meth” poster—vacant stare, yellow pallor—was the explanation, spelled out in massive, no-nonsense type: “Endured Constant Overheating and Freezing for 12 Years.” And below, the payoff: “Liberated by NeoShell.” While the message would probably seem cryptic to industry outsiders, everyone here knew exactly what it meant: is better than .

Similar advertisements for NeoShell, a new waterproof-breathable material made by , the Massachusetts-based fabric manufacturer best known for popularizing synthetic fleece, were suspended throughout the Salt Palace and plastered on billboards around town. They’ve subsequently appeared on websites and in magazines, including this one. NeoShell, which debuted last fall in top-of-the-line jackets from the likes of , , and , is the company’s first-ever waterproof-breathable product. “We did tons of research,” Nate Simmons, Polartec’s marketing director, told me at the company’s booth. “We wouldn’t have come into this space unless we were confident we could compete.”

While NeoShell was Gore-Tex’s most conspicuous new challenger at OR, it wasn’t the only one. At the elaborate booth, staffers were just as determined to upstage Gore-Tex by touting the breathability of their own new proprietary fabric, , which the company launched last year with a marketing video vowing to “take down Gore-Tex.” Woody Blackford, Columbia’s VP of global innovation, was dressed in a white lab coat for theatrical effect. He guided me to a display that looked like something out of a well-funded high school science fair, with two hot plates sitting side by side. Blackford squeezed a drop of water onto each plate, then placed a cutout from a jacket that features OmniDry, among other exclusive technologies, onto one and a swatch of a generic jacket with an ePTFE membrane, the main ingredient in Gore-Tex, onto the other. He then placed a shallow glass cup atop each swatch. Within minutes, the cup on the OmniDry sample had fogged up. The one atop the generic swatch, meanwhile, remained mostly clear. (Several minutes later it was cloudy, too.) The reason the OmniDry cup fogged up so much faster, Blackford explained, is that the fabric is better at passing moisture vapor. In other words, it’s more breathable. “If you’re going to be out sweating,” he asked, “which one would you want to wear—the one that stays wet or the one that gets dry?”

A few years ago, this kind of brazen, taste-test marketing against Gore-Tex would have been unheard of. Over the past three decades, has become one of the most powerful and recognizable brands in the world, transforming its proprietary membrane into a household name, as synonymous with waterproof-breathable as Coke is with soda. That transformation has been very good for the outdoor industry. Some of the largest companies on the OR floor were literally built through their affiliation with the Gore-Tex brand. According to some estimates, Gore now commands more than 70 percent of a waterproof-breathable outerwear market that didn’t even exist before its membrane was developed, a market that now, by some estimates, tops a billion dollars. 

Gore-Tex might be a cash cow for gear manufacturers, but you wouldn’t have heard a lot of gratitude by surveying last summer’s OR crowd. I asked dozens of industry veterans and designers about the unprecedented marketing attacks from Columbia and Polartec, and the first thing I noticed was the fear. Hardly anyone was willing to speak about Gore-Tex on the record. When I asked one manufacturer why people were being so coy, he told me, “Everybody hates Gore, everybody needs Gore, so everybody’s afraid of Gore. They can make or break you.” He was referring to an open secret among industry insiders: that Gore’s licensees are afraid to work with non-Gore technologies, lest the market leader terminate their contracts. 

Whispers about Gore’s heavy-handed tactics have been circulating for years, but allegations have recently gotten serious enough that both federal and international regulatory agencies are involved. In the fall of 2010, Columbia and its Italian subsidiary, , a small company that specializes in waterproof-breathable technology, . While the complaint is confidential, the grievances are said to be straightforward. “In order to maintain market dominance,” Peter Bragdon, Columbia’s lead counsel, recently told me, “W.L. Gore and Associates engages in unfair business practices, intimidating footwear and glove licensees into loyalty and violating antitrust laws by excluding the competition.” In other words, Gore is being accused of systematically preventing manufacturers from gaining access to competing products.

At almost exactly the same time, a “non-public” complaint against Gore was put forth to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. While the complainant’s name (or names) is confidential under federal law, and no one has publicly taken credit, the grievance was convincing enough for , a fairly uncommon response. “While antitrust complaints are filed at a rate of several hundred per year, only around 10 percent become full-scale investigations,” a former FTC lawyer, who requested anonymity, told me. “The government is picky.” In the meantime, outerwear heavyweights are waging a battle on terms unfamiliar to this crowd, and the otherwise collegial outdoor industry may never be the same again.

SEVENTEEN OF GORE’S 60 worldwide facilities are scattered between Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Wilmington, Delaware, a distinctly American, almost contourless triangle of former farmland that’s gracelessly yielding to modern industry and metastasizing strip malls. This is Turnpike Country. Factory Land. The last place you’d expect to find captains of the outdoor industry. That is, until you step into the company’s Capabilities Center in Barksdale, Delaware. Nestled tastefully beside a woodsy ribbon of blacktop, the center is essentially a curated display of Gore’s contributions to the gear world and beyond. My guides were Cynthia Amon, an amiable spokeswoman with unflappable company loyalty, and engineer Tim Smith, a fit 32-year-old with a knack for decoding complicated science.

“Like many great innovations, Gore-Tex wasn’t so much invented as it was discovered,” Smith explained, pointing to the first of many displays. It was 1969, and a man named Bob Gore was in his Newark, Delaware, basement experimenting with a piece of polytetrofluoroethylene, or PTFE, a fluorocarbon solid that’s impervious to water and UV rays—and best known by its popular trade name, Teflon. Bob worked for his father, Bill, a former DuPont engineer whose 11-year-old company, W. L. Gore and Associates, had been making PTFE housing for cables and wires used by the burgeoning airline and telecom industries.

Down in his basement, the younger Gore wanted to know what would happen if he gave PTFE a powerful yank, rather than apply the slow-stretching process required to make Teflon. Expanded PTFE (ePTFE), he learned, could be manipulated into a virtually weightless film, like a trashcan liner but exponentially thinner. This synthetic skin, or membrane, contained billions of microscopic pores that turned out to be auspiciously sized: water droplets couldn’t fit through, but moisture vapor—the steam that comes off your body when you sweat—could. In other words, Bob Gore discovered that ePTFE was waterproof and breathable.

In 1976, one of the first jackets with a Gore-Tex membrane debuted in the Early Winters catalog, which touted the garment as “possibly the most versatile piece of clothing you’ll ever wear.” This wasn’t bombastic marketing-speak. “Before Gore-Tex came along, recreating outdoors was not always especially comfortable,” Michael Hodgson, the former president of the trade-news website , which publishes the OR Daily newspaper, told me. “The advent of Gore-Tex brought us to a place where we stay drier, and thus warmer, for longer periods of time. This, of course, made wet-weather activities a lot more enticing, which in turn made people more apt to get outside.”

The outdoor industry and consumers were quick to embrace the new technology. By the late eighties, thanks in part to Gore’s well-funded and savvy marketing efforts, Gore-Tex had become a household name and a mandatory part of every outdoorsman’s gear closet. Gore required its licensees to use the term “Gore-Tex” somewhere in the name of the product (or on the actual item) and encouraged them to affix its now famous diamond-shaped black hangtag to the garment on the rack, a suggestion that licensees were happy to follow. “In the eighties, using Gore-Tex didn’t just help businesses,” a former designer with one of the big outerwear companies told me, on condition of anonymity. “It took our businesses to another level. When you’re selling thousands of units at $450 each, you’re very aware of the value of the Gore-Tex brand.”

Gore thrived beyond the outdoor market, too. As Amon pointed out, “Gore products are everywhere. Even inside of us!” She walked me through the company’s mini museum, a collection of exhibits replete with an astronaut suit and medical displays, noting that Gore-made PTFE or ePTFE is found in million-dollar ropes for oil rigs, guitar strings, dental floss, hernia patches, fake arteries, aneurism stents, and hundreds of other products. It’s no wonder that W. L. Gore and Associates is a $3 billion operation as of 2012. (Gore, a privately held company, declined to disclose how much of its revenue comes from its fabrics division.)

Gore supplies only one critical ingredient in the manufacturing of waterproof-breathable outdoor gear, but it guarantees every product that uses the Gore-Tex membrane. For that reason, it holds licensees to stringent and exacting agreements. Any company that puts the material in its wares is required to use Gore-certified factories and machinery, the latter of which is typically patented,Ěýfabricated, and leased to the factories by Gore itself. The fabric maker is also intimately involved in every step of the design and production processes, a policy that has grated on some brand managers and designers over the years. “You had to buy and use Gore-made seam tape that was exactly 24 millimeters wide,” John Cooley, who for much of the nineties served as Marmot’s VP of sales and marketing, recently recalled. “You had to have zipper flaps that were a certain width. They were highly controlling.”

In a way, working with Gore is like opening a franchise. You don’t just erect the golden arches and throw a few burgers on the grill—you go to Hamburger U, follow the manual, and work within an established infrastructure. Because Gore was founded and is still run by engineers, its testing process is famously scientific. The Maryland quality-control facility, which I also toured, is equipped with a rain room, a climate chamber, and more machines than can be counted over the course of an afternoon visit. “We’re proud of the role we play from inception to finished product,” Amon told me at the end of my seven-hour, two-state, three-facility tour. “We don’t just sell the best waterproof-breathable membrane. We sell a service so that our customers—and their customers—come back. We have to be sure that Gore-Tex lives up to its promise.”

While jumping through all of Gore’s hoops is an expensive and time-consuming process, most of the industry’s top brands told me that a first-rate product comes out the other end. “To us, it’s beneficial to work with someone who’s as dedicated to performance and quality as we are,” Carl Moriarty, the lead designer at , one of the most innovative and respected brands in the business, told me. While Marmot’s Cooley admitted that working with Gore could be frustrating, he too empathized with its philosophy. “Because of Gore’s rigid control over licensees and design, the performance bar was raised,” he said. “Anyone making a Gore-Tex jacket had to make it correctly. As a result, the whole breed improved, and the consumer ultimately benefited.”

Of course, no one had to buy or use Gore-Tex. By the time Gore’s primary ePTFE patent expired, in 1997, there were dozens of lower-priced, non-ePTFE alternatives, made by companies such as Japan’s and China’s Formosa Mills. Gear makers could now offer a host of jackets with their own house-brand fabrics, like North Face’s , Patagonia’s , and Marmot’s . The key was how they were marketed. As long as Gore’s licensees didn’t promote them as superior to Gore-Tex, the company was willing to tolerate their existence. The performance hierarchy had been established: Gore at the top, everyone else below.

Then, in 1999, a small company called BHA Group began peddling an ePTFE membrane, similar to Gore-Tex, called . Used for years in industrial smokestack filters, the membrane, tweaked to work in garments, was purportedly more breathable than Gore’s. Companies that had grown weary of Gore’s micromanaging now had a viable ePTFE alternative. “eVent was every bit as good as Gore-Tex,” claimed a marketing specialist who works with a number of brands and requested anonymity. But getting a piece of the waterproof-breathable market wasn’t that simple. “Gore literally built the industry,” said the marketer. “It’s hard to come in after two and a half decades and compete with such a well-established and respected brand.” 

Since the arrival of eVent, Gore has successfully maintained its coveted market position, but its continued dominance wasn’t what fueled the current hostility, say insiders. It was the measures the company allegedly took to remain there.

WHILE THE LEGAL battles against Gore are concerned solely with its business practices, the ongoing campaign for hearts and minds in the marketplace is all about fabric performance. In case it’s not already clear, the debate over who makes the best waterproof-breathable technology is about letting moisture out, not keeping it at bay. Barring leakage resulting from excessive wear and tear or saturation—a.k.a. wetting out—any self-respecting brand will turn back rain. The fight concerns the dark, extremely niche art of breathability.

The very term breathable is a bit of a misnomer. While there are waterproof-breathable running and biking jackets, they don’t breathe that well. (Unless it’s really wet or really cold, you’re better off wearing some sort of water-resistant soft shell for aerobic pursuits.) The most obvious sign that breathability is relative is that many jackets have mesh-backed pockets or, more commonly, pit zips to let moisture vapor escape.

Still, the amount these fabrics do breathe is what keeps high-end fabric makers obsessively tinkering and tweaking. Parsing the difference requires a quick construction lesson. Gore-Tex, like the majority of other waterproof-breathable fabrics, uses a so-called three-layer technology. On the outside is the face fabric, the material you see when admiring a garment on the rack. This is layer number one, which is also treated with a durable water-repellent (DWR) finish, a first line of defense whose molecules bond to the jacket’s fibers and therefore don’t inhibit breathability. Layer two, which you can’t see, is the ePTFE membrane with a separate, slathered-on protective coating, made of polyurethane and other ingredients, that protects the ePTFE against contaminants, such as sweat, body oil, and sunscreen residue, that can compromise breathability. And, finally, there’s usually a third inner layer, the softer lining you feel against your skin.

eVent is slightly different. You still have a DWR-treated face and an ePTFE membrane, but rather than use a separate, polyurethane-based coating to protect the membrane, eVent infuses it with polyacrylate, among other ingredients, which allegedly makes it more breathable but, according to some fabric experts, less durable than Gore-Tex.

NeoShell, not unlike the many house-brand fabrics currently found in lower-priced jackets by manufacturers big and small, ditches the ePTFE membrane altogether, instead using a polyurethane membrane. Yet, as with eVent, NeoShell’s protective ingredients are infused into the membrane, not glued over it as a separate layer, the way it typically is in Gore-Tex.

Further complicating things is the issue of convection, or what’s now known as air permeability. Not to be confused with breathability, air permeability refers to whether a fabric allows a cold breeze to come in from the outside or the hot air that builds up inside the jacket during exertion—not just the vapor from sweat—to escape, cooling you down. In theory, virtually all waterproof-breathable hard shells are windproof—meaning they’re not air permeable and that hot air thus has no way of escaping. But ask Columbia or NeoShell or eVent and they’ll tell you that those little poofs of air billowing around beneath your jacket can miraculously escape through their membranes. You need not open pit zips or unzip your jacket, they insist; the fabric does it for you. Gore disputes this claim. “Gore’s belief,” said the company’s Tim Smith, “is that something cannot be windproof and meaningfully air permeable at the same time.”

Perhaps no one has dedicated more time to testing the performance of these fabrics than Alan Dixon, the cofounder of . Dixon has spent hundreds of hours analyzing the claims of waterproof-breathable garments; he even wrote an article, entitled  research for which involved hiking the same trail, at the same time, at the same pace, for weeks. His conclusion? Even though he’s been known to have an eVent bias, he acknowledged that “it’s splitting hairs. Yes, there are some differences in the membranes themselves. But to the average person, they’re often slight. It’s a matter of degrees.”

In the lab, there are plenty of ways to measure those degrees. There are “cup tests,” “inverted cup tests,” “sweaty hot plates,” “sweaty mannequins,” and half a dozen other contraptions that each company has devised to measure the rate of “moisture vapor transfer” and “resistance to evaporative transfer” and “dynamic moisture permeation,” using formulas, numbers, and jargon fit for an MIT lecture hall. Unfortunately, there’s no global standard, and none of these tests are universally conducted or regulated by an independent party. Gore, eVent, Polartec, Columbia, you name it—they’re all essentially cherry-picking their own data and then stamping an A+ on their ads and catalogs. Furthermore, scientifically measuring performance in the field is nearly impossible. There are dozens of variables, from how many and what types of layers you’re wearing to the thickness of a garment’s face fabric to relative humidity and wind speed.

Even if you could objectively determine which membrane is more breathable, it’s only one piece of the waterproof-breathable puzzle. “The membrane is just the starting point,” said Moriarty of ´ˇ°ůł¦â€™t±đ°ů˛âłć, one of the few companies to use Gore-Tex fabric exclusively in its waterproof-breathable jackets. “These fabrics work through a synergy of many elements—membrane, face fabric, backing fabric, and durable-water-repellent finish, to name a few. Once you have these elements correct, then you can begin to work on how to build that fabric into a product.” Phillip Gibson, supervisory physical scientist at in Massachusetts, echoes Moriarty’s assessment. “Garment design is as important as the material itself,” he told me. “There is no single, magical membrane. It’s how you apply it that counts.” For example, whereas BackpackingLight’s Dixon thinks eVent breathes better in a wider range of conditions, Gibson told me that, because Gore strikes a reliable balance of materials and construction, “soldiers seem to like Gore-Tex best.” Military officials won’t disclose a breakdown of the waterproof-breathable technologies they use, and Gore won’t say how much money it hauls in from supplying Uncle Sam. But, says Gore representative Amon, “we do a huge amount of business with them.”

IN 2004, GENERAL ELECTRIC, one of the country’s largest and most profitable conglomerates, , the small company that brought eVent to market. For the first time, it looked as if someone had the money and muscle to rearrange the waterproof-breathable hierarchy. But it didn’t happen. According to dozens of industry veterans I spoke with, Gore responded to eVent—and the threat of other technologies—with an iron fist.

According to multiple sources, in 2002, shortly after introducing a product with eVent, the footwear maker had its license terminated by Gore. (Vasque declined to comment for this story.) Then, in 2003, according to OR Daily, venerable gear maker and Gore licensee debuted a new line of outerwear featuring eVent, only to promptly pull the garments and revert back to using Gore-Tex. (Lowe Alpine later closed up shop entirely.) Insiders say there are dozens of similar stories about Gore giving its licensees an us-or-them ultimatum, but no one would offer any on the record. When I asked Gore about these specific allegations, a government-relations associate, Michael Ratchford, told me that he’s “not going to discuss relationships with individual brands.” 

The most vocal Gore critic is probably Matteo Morlacchi, the 46-year-old co-founder of OutDry, which in the early 2000s devised a new way to bond a polyurethane membrane to fabrics. Typically, the membrane in Gore-Tex gloves and boots is a separate layer, sandwiched between the liner and the outer layer; OutDry’s technology adheres it directly to the fabric, which, among other benefits, prevents moisture from saturating the exterior of the glove or boot. “In 2004, we made successful tests and developments with the three top mountaineering boot makers in Italy—, , and ,” he told me at his OR booth last year. “All of them were ready to adopt OutDry for their 2005 collections but were stopped by Gore.” That same year, according to Morlacchi, Gore even pressured Garmont to remove its OutDry-equipped boot from the display at Europe’s big trade show. (All three boot makers declined to comment for this story.)

Morlacchi told me that, more recently, something similar happened with . In 2008, the company began using OutDry in its gloves, at which point Gore pulled its license for all accessories. (Mountain Hardwear is also owned by Columbia, which stands behind Morlacchi’s allegation.) In another instance, in 2009, said Morlacchi, a consumer used an industry discount to buy 43 pairs of OutDry-equipped gloves; a short while later, disparaging reviews of the same model of gloves—citing the recent purchase of 43 pairs—appeared on the and websites under the pseudonym “chilikook.” After some sleuthing, Mountain Hardwear discovered that an order of exactly that number of pairs of gloves had been made by a Gore employee and shipped to a Gore business address.

Ratchford initially told me that he hadn’t heard of the chilikook incident, but he later confirmed in an e-mail that it was true. As for the pulling of the licenses, he maintained that the EU complaint is “without merit.” While that may be the case, the EU nevertheless decided to launch a formal investigation last summer.

Even the retail giant REI, which in 2008 began using eVent in a few house-branded garments, claims it hasn’t been immune to Gore’s alleged strong-arming. “Shortly after we introduced our eVent line” in jackets and pants, Libby Catalinich, REI’s director of corporate communications, told last year, “Gore terminated our footwear license” and “essentially eliminated our REI-branded footwear.”

For this reason, many believe that REI, perhaps with help from eVent’s parent company, GE, filed the confidential complaint with the FTC. Catalinich wouldn’t confirm or deny whether REI was involved but said the company would cooperate with the FTC if asked. Columbia and eVent declined to comment on the matter; Polartec’s Nate Simmons told me that he doesn’t know who filed the complaint.

In the meantime, last spring the FTC subpoenaed Gore for every sliver of documentation dating back to 2001 that related to its waterproof-breathable-fabrics business. Gore attempted to fight the subpoena— is public and searchable on the FTC’s website—saying that complying would cost millions of dollars and man-hours. The FTC wouldn’t budge. Gore’s Ratchford told me that the FTC complaint, like the one in Europe, is baseless and that time will prove him right. “We have and will continue to cooperate with the FTC,” he said, “and we’ll keep providing innovative technology and products with confidence in the integrity of our business practices.”

UNTIL THE EU AND FTC release their findings—which might not happen for several months or, more likely, years—it’s impossible to tell whether Gore has really been abusing its market dominance or is simply the victim of other manufacturers’ envy. While there’s an overwhelming, if not maddening, amount of information about membranes and face fabrics and construction to sift through, there’s practically none about either complaint against W. L. Gore and Associates. As with many cases, the current FTC investigation is so sensitive that the agency is forbidden to even acknowledge it. 

It’s possible that, once the FTC concludes its investigation, the case will be dismissed and the allegations of exclusionary practice—in this case locking up the market and stifling competition in violation of FTC codes—will be proved baseless. If Gore isn’t exonerated, according to the former FTC lawyer, then chances are Gore will “enter into a consent decree, which basically says �Thou shalt not sin again.’ ” If this happens, they agree to change their behavior or face stiff penalties. Of potentially greater damage, a consent decree unseals the FTC case files, which could then be used as ammunition against Gore by any number of entities interested in suing the behemoth.

While the antitrust matter gets sorted out, Columbia, eVent, and NeoShell are still using their technology—and fighting words—to capture market share from the company that forever changed the way we recreate outdoors. For NeoShell, it appears to be working; North Face and Marmot now sell both Gore-Tex and NeoShell jackets, and by next fall some two dozen brands will be selling NeoShell garments. eVent hasn’t been quite as successful. Though the fabric can now be found in more than 60 brands, GE isn’t happy with the membrane’s position in the market. A few years ago, the conglomerate decided to change its business model and also sell its membrane as an unbranded fabric—meaning that, unlike with Gore-Tex, gear makers can simply buy eVent fabric and call it what they want. “We’re happy to accommodate whatever suits a customer’s business needs,” Glenn Crowther, GE’s global-product-line leader and a former Gore employee, told me at the OR show, firing a familiar-sounding shot across Gore’s bow. “Who are we to put rules on how garments and footwear should be made and say �You can’t use our technology unless you put our name on it’? We don’t need the credit.” One company that has taken them up on the arrangement is Mountain Hardwear, whose fabric contains GE technology that’s also used to produce eVent.

Remarks like Crowther’s were common last summer, but if you had visited with the Gore-Tex team on OR’s trade-show floor, the extent and bitterness of the turf war wouldn’t have been remotely apparent. At Gore’s small but bustling booth, it was business as usual. Rather than snarky ad campaigns aimed at its rivals, there were a dozen oversize posters emblazoned with endorsements by a roster of athletes and executives. (“Gore-Tex is the gold standard for comfort and protection in the world’s most challenging environments,” read a quote from North Face president Steve Rendle.) The rest of Gore’s booth seemed to speak for itself, too, lined as it was with jackets and gloves and shoes from all the major players. Gore-Tex’s representative didn’t even give me the hard sell. “Let me know if you need anything,” she said from across the booth, gesturing toward the spiffy new gear. “Whatever company you love, it's probably on this wall.”

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I've lost my pants, been pantsed, and wet my pants, but I haven't, in recent memory, been so torn about ditching a pair of pants. They were gray Carhartts, and they were my yardwork pants, my campfire pants, my ski-trip pants. Even though they were cotton, they were my peak-bagging pants. But for every Home Depot run and road trip they made, they had their shortcomings. It started with the crotch—they gave my privates no privacy. The waist was belly-button height—I was constantly pulling them down to my hips, which caused the fly to bunch up into an embarrassing horizontal pup tent. Don't misunderstand me; I really liked them. They were functional. They had a side pocket that held a cell phone, and a hammer loop I actually used. They didn't just fit into the mountain-guy paradigm; they were the paradigm—the Toyota Tacoma of pants. Still, sadly, they didn't fit me. Or perhaps I didn't fit them. So, during a move last summer, they went to the Goodwill bin. I'm sure they'll make some different-size mountain guy happy.

1. Gramicci Field Pant ($68, )

2. Eddie Bauer Flannel Lined Cargo Pants ($69; )

3. Lee Jeans Heritage Straight Fit Jean ($44; )

4. Burton Midfit Denim Jean ($64; )

5. Dockers K1 Khaki ($165; )

6. Patagonia Men's Cord Pants ($85; )

7. Mountain Khakis Original Pant ($73; )

8. Stetson 1520 Standard Straight Leg ($60; )

The post A Farewell to Pants appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

The thought echoes in my head like a command from a bureaucrat’s megaphone: It is the duty of the honorable bicyclist to maintain a safe speed and proper distance from comrades while riding in group formation. There are 11 of us, descending an unnamed pass in the northwestern corner of Vietnam at 20 miles per hour. The diesel-dank city of Lai Chau is a few miles back; the valley village of Pa Tan is about 30 miles ahead. It’s day four of our trip, and by now, after several days of dodging tiny minivans and flatulent motorbikes and Chinese dump trucks, we’ve learned that bikes are at the bottom of the vehicular food chain.

So why haven’t we heeded our guide’s warning and slowed down? Before I can convey this thought to the group, Kim, a 39-year-old Bay Area software marketer riding just ahead of me, realizes she’s going too fast, jams on her front brake in a state of pre-hairpin panic, crosses up her mountain bike’s front wheel, launches over the handlebars, and face-plants. Hard.

I dismount, yell “Rider down!” and rush over to help. Kim’s fair complexion has turned green. Her eyes are closed, lids fluttering, and she’s moaning like Beavis coming down from a sugar high. Luckily, she manages to walk away with only a few cuts and bruises. The next day, she’ll feel good enough to ride.

We’re in Vietnam with Roadmonkey şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Philanthropy, a startup travel outfitter owned and operated by Paul von Zielbauer, who lives in Brooklyn and, until recently, was a full-time reporter for The New York Times. Roadmonkey’s mission can be summed up like so: Lead a group of paying clients on a killer outdoor trip that also involves several days of Peace Corps–style do-gooderism. This is Roadmonkey’s inaugural outing, a nine-day, van-supported 300-mile bicycle tour, followed by four days building a playground at an orphanage where the majority of the children have HIV.

I’ll come right out and say it: I had misgivings about this trip. I’d looked into pay-to-volunteer vacations in the past, not just as a client but for a possible career move. “Voluntourism,” as it’s often called, sounded like a meaningful way to travel and, perhaps, a half-decent way to make a living, at least compared with the one I’ve eked out as a freelance writer. But I wasn’t quite convinced. Volunteer vacations seemed like an excuse for Westerners to catch an adrenaline rush, safely slum it in some beautiful but poverty-stricken corner of the world, and then preen with false humility over syrah and tapenade back home. What could I accomplish that a low-wage Vietnamese laborer couldn’t, besides letting others know that I’m an up-with-people kind of guy?

For starters, I could raise money through my own social networks, as each of my fellow tripmates was expected to do. That money would go to one of the Vietnamese orphanage’s primary backers, the New Jersey–based nonprofit Worldwide Orphans Foundation (WWO). One e-mail blast, one Facebook posting, and four days later, I’d raised about $800, much of it from people I hadn’t spoken to in a decade. Then I caught a flight to Hanoi to see for myself if Roadmonkey’s brand of voluntourism was a noble niche within the travel business or a form of philanthro-washing that would leave me feeling unfulfilled.

MAN, THESE KIDS are cute—especially this one little dude, Lanh. (Because Lanh is a minor under government care, I’ve changed his name.) I first meet him in the kids’ sleeping quarters at the orphanage, near the city of Ba Vi, about an hour west of Hanoi. The orphanage, essentially a courtyard with several rooms on its perimeter, was once the health center of the adjacent Ba Vi prison, a low-security facility for drug offenders and prostitutes about 100 yards away. Lanh has been at Ba Vi for about two years. Like all but a few of the 60 HIV-positive kids here, he appears surprisingly healthy. Because he is.

“With the right treatment, there’s no reason children born with HIV can’t live a full life,” says Linh Do, the 34-year-old Vietnamese American who runs WWO’s operations in the country. As she explains, institutions like the orphanage are essential to providing rural health care in Vietnam. Of the country’s 63 provinces, only a handful are fully equipped to handle pediatric HIV, and the few communities that can aren’t always tolerant of the disease. In some cases, she says, “we get kids who come from good, loving families in villages that are too far from good treatment. Ba Vi is their only choice.”

December 31, 2008. 2:32 P.M.

Chance Dannen, a banker at the Wells Fargo branch in Aspen, Colorado, looked down from his desk chair and stared at the bomb by his feet. It didn't appear to be the work of an actual terrorist. It was just a large plastic storage bin, really, its sides and lid sloppily covered with holiday paper, as if wrapped by a clumsy child. But there it was, staring back.

Twenty seconds earlier, an elderly man had strolled in wearing jeans and a parka, a black knit hat, and huge black glasses. He put the package on the floor and handed Dannen a small, empty pizza box with a typewritten note on top. The man was out the door by the time Dannen got through the first sentence, which read, YOU HAD BETTER BE ONE VERY COOL INDIVIDUAL AND NOT START A PANIC OR MANY IN ASPEN WILL PAY A HORRIBLE PRICE IN BLOOD.

Dannen tiptoed around the package and took the letter to his manager. PUT $60,000 IN USED $100S IN THE WHITE BOX, it continued. DO NOT MOVE OR COVER THE VERY BIG FIRECRACKER IN THE CONTAINER. UNIQUE CHEMICALS AND ELECTRONICS. ANY DYES, TRACKERS, OR OTHER BULLSHIT WILL CAUSE DISASTER TO ALL.

The note made cryptic references to “rag-head martyrs,” along with Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and their “monkey,” George W. Bush. Wait 20 minutes, it said, and then take the cash-stuffed box outside for pickup. If all went according to plan and the “firecracker” went undisturbed, the device would deactivate in two hours. But there better not be any tricks. The letter stated that Aspen's three other banks were getting held up, too, with help from accomplices, and that another package was hidden in a “high end watering hole” for “added insurance.”

Nobody on the street noticed the suspect when he left Wells Fargo. Authorities theorize that he retreated to an alley half a block away, behind the Elks Lodge, where he picked up one of three more gift-wrapped bombs that he'd stashed next to a dumpster. He carried it a few yards to Vectra Bank, at the corner of East Hyman Avenue and South Hunter Street, delivered it with a note, and left, passing the bank's security camera at 2:36 P.M. He probably got to the corner of Hunter and Hopkins, looked down the block toward Wells Fargo, and, seeing the cops and the evacuees gathering outside, aborted his mission. Then he blended in with the crowd, whose New Year's Eve was about to be ruined.

Before long, Aspen police were swarming in and CBs were crackling all over northern Colorado. Every Crown Vic in the region was hurtling toward the Roaring Fork Valley: cops from Vail, FBI agents from Glenwood Springs, the Grand Junction bomb squad—190 responders in all. At 5:34 P.M., the Aspen Police Department (APD) issued a reverse 911 call to all the landline phones within two blocks of the crime scene; less than an hour later, they issued a second call, this time covering 16 square blocks. Buses got rerouted. Traffic backed up. Residents and tourists, waiters and cooks, managers and merchants—everyone had to clear the area immediately. As for all those New Year's Eve parties and dinner reservations and free-spending downtown shoppers? No sale. Aspen finance director Don Taylor puts the loss to local merchants at nearly $2 million.

It was a dark moment, and it was far from over: The suspect was unknown and on the loose, and nobody could guess who he was. A few weeks after the events of that night, Chris Womack, 46, lead investigator for the Aspen police, told me that the bank's video wasn't any help. “We reviewed the image from Vectra's surveillance camera and released it to the public,” he said, “but no one could ID the suspect. We didn't even know if it was someone local or an out-of-towner.”

By the time the 911 calls went out, cops and sheriff's deputies were gathering three blocks from Wells Fargo and Vectra, in the basement of the Pitkin County Courthouse, where city and county law enforcement share office space. They interviewed bank employees and racked their brains. If it was someone local, who? Among the many criminals, cranks, and jokers who'd passed through the Roaring Fork Valley over the years, who would choose Aspen's biggest night to threaten the town's 25,000 residents and visitors?

Nobody came up with a candidate, but a few hours later the answer would become head-smackingly obvious.

His first name might as well have been “Fuckin'.” As in: Who's that guy with the woman on his arm, a wad of cash in his hand, and a grin twice as wide as the Hotel Jerome bar? It's Fuckin' Jim Blanning! Did you hear about the guy who dropped his drawers at La Cantina and waved a dildo at the county commissioner? Ha! Fuckin' Blanning.

“People said that a lot over the years,” Blanning's old friend Jackie Parker told me when I arrived in Aspen two weeks after the town's bizarre, headline-making New Year's Eve. “He'd be up to something, and every time we'd all just be like Fuckin' Blanning.' He had a way of surprising you, but at the same time, you expected it.”

Even if he'd tried to lie low, Blanning—who was 72 on the night of the crime—had always been hard to miss. He was six feet tall and broad-shouldered, with a slow, confident stride. In his heyday, he was all bright blue eyes, thick brown hair, and a mellow-scratchy baritone.

Everybody knew Blanning. Hell, he'd been an Aspenite since the 1940s, when he was just five years old. If you'd ever caught the first gondola of the day, you probably saw the grown-up Jim grinning and gripping, saying things like “Glory morning!” If you'd ever had a nightcap at Little Annie's, then surely you heard him telling stories or marveling at life's little surprises. “Jim was always open to what the universe had to offer,” says 37-year Aspen resident Joni Bruce, 62, his fourth wife. “His favorite saying was Fate is the hunter.' “

This was Jim Blanning from the days of Old Aspen, mind you, the wash-down-a-Quaalude-with-a-pull-tab-Coors-and-turn-up-the-Eagles Aspen of the seventies and eighties. Back then, Blanning didn't just show up for the party; he was the party. “I remember walking into the town's first disco back in '75,” recalls Pitkin County sheriff Bob Braudis, a towering 64-year-old who was Blanning's friend for more than 30 years and whose native Boston accent has survived fourâ€�decades in the Rockies, “and there's Blanning, dancing away in his cowboy boots and Wranglers. He could have fun with a bar full of miners or the prince of Thailand's nephew.”

“Jim was the last of the wild men,” says Bruce. “He was a tremendous character with a huge presence. He was a partyer, a prankster, totally gregarious and good to his friends.” Blanning was the kind of dude who would hold court at the Pub or the Jerome, buy rounds, excuse himself to go tow a friend's truck out on Highway 82, and still make it back for last call. “He was one of my most generous friends,” says Jim Wingers, 64, who met Blanning in the early sixties. “One winter, when I was laid up with a broken leg and couldn't work, he came by and gave me four grand, no questions asked.”

When Blanning had money, it usually was the result of a complicated real-estate transaction involving one or more mining claims. Pitkin County's backcountry was loaded with old claims—10- to 20-acre parcels established during the silver boom of the early 1870s—most of which were abandoned during a market crash two decades later. But where prospectors had found failure, Blanning saw dollar signs—he was one of the first to grasp how easily old mining claims could be flipped into lucrative real-estate opportunities. By the mid-sixties, he'd already bought several, which could go for as little as $300 back then.

Blanning wasn't the only person to buy and sell claims, but hisdevotion to the trade was legendary. The potential was limitless, he'd insist, beaming with optimism at buyers or investors. There were untapped veins of silver! You could build cabins and subdivisions on those old parcels and have your own little slice of paradise! The cash came in sporadic chunks—$3,000 here, $25,000 there—but, Wingers says, “Blanning always had a place to hang his hat.” Usually it was a trailer on one of his properties, recalled fondly by an old bedmate as “the stabbin' cabin.”

The only thing that rivaled Blanning's passion for mining was his appetite for women. “Right when I moved to town, I told a girlfriend that I'd met this guy, Jim Blanning,” Bruce recalls. “And she just laughs and says, Oh, Jim's the first guy you date when you move to Aspen.' When it came to women, he was the town greeter.”

By the mid-seventies, when Bruce married Blanning, he was 40, three times divorced, and an estranged father of two. Wife number one had taken the kids—a boy and a girl—and hit the road early. Wives two and three had come and gone so fast that no one remembers their names. Bruce, who wore a gold “4” medallion while married to Blanning, filed for divorce after eight months, partly over concerns that her husband's hound-dogging might be pathological.

“After his final marriage, Jim went through women like they were nothing,” says his younger brother Bill Blanning, now 71 and living in Denver. “Aspen was bad for Jim in that regard. These women would show up on vacation, and Jim's handsome and strong, a real mountain man. He'd tour them around town, take them up in the backcountry. Women just loved it.”For all his party-boy charm, Blanning was also prone to erratic behavior. He'd buy dinner for the gang one night and borrow for it the next, pleading poverty. According to consistent and oft-told legend, he initiated countless police chases around town, usually involving alcohol and a snowmobile. In 1986, on the night of his 50th birthday, Blanning got busted for a DUI while tearing through Aspen in an old Jeep—on the sidewalk.

Many old-time Aspenites recount these stunts with a sort of quaint fondness. But Bill Blanning is less sanguine. “Jim did what he pleased, when he pleased, no matter what it meant to other people,” he says, offering as an example a party in the sixties that took an unpleasant turn when Blanning spiked the punch and locked everybody in the house. “Maybe he was what you call bipolar. You never knew what you were gonna get with Jim. When things were looking up, he was your best friend. He was gonna make millions and take you around the world. But he'd get some wild thing in his head. He could turn on you just like that and become a monster. And the next week the monster would be gone, and he'd be sorry and respectful.”

Not everyone got Blanning's respect, especially the police. From the sixties through the mid-eighties, Blanning's name landed on 73 incident reports with the APD—traffic violations, failure to appear, petty theft, assault with a deadly weapon. That Blanning never spent more than a night or two in jail back then is a miracle, though Braudis chalks it up to his charm and intelligence.

“He usually knew how far he could push things,” Braudis says. “He knew what to say and when to say it for maximum benefit.” But Blanning's get-out-of-jail-free card didn't last forever; he did serious time starting in the late nineties. As Braudis would ultimately figure out, his crime back then—a racketeering conviction that put him in a federal prison from 1996 to 2002—was the key to what he did on New Year's Eve 2008.

5:30 P.M.

About an hour after sundown, when Grand Junction's bomb squad arrived in Aspen, authorities found two more packages in the alley behind the Elks Lodge, sitting on a black plastic sled. The contents were unknown, so the three-man crew sent in a robot to assess their weight and determine whether they contained liquids. Even now, bomb-squad member Matt Carson won't say exactly how the devices worked—he's worried about copycat bombers—but he emphasizes that the threat was real. “We gathered enough information to know that it wasn't a hoax,” he says.

That night, Carson and his partners opted to use a “remote opening tool,” essentially a high-pressure water cannon that obliterates and extinguishes any bomb parts or flames in its path. By 7:30 they were almost ready to make short work of the devices in the alley.

Meanwhile, everyone in Aspen had accepted that the night wasofficially a bust. The big fireworks show was postponed. People with dinner reservations retreated to overcrowded establishments outside the danger zone. Down-valley residents with up-valley plans stayed in Woody Creek and Carbondale and Basalt. Mexican and Salvadoran dishwashers hopped on the bus back to Glenwood Springs. A man at a bus stop panicked and passed out, causing a minor scene.

Out at Aspen High School, volunteers set up a refugee camp for about 2,000 hotel and condo dwellers with nowhere to go. Aspen mayor Mick Ireland prepared to ride his bike to the school to perform ambassadorial duties with the tourists, to assure them that everything would be back to normal soon. But just before he left, police hurried him off to an undisclosed location, citing a new threat.

This fact emerged at around 7:45, when the managing editor at The Aspen Times, Rick Carroll, found a handwritten note by the paper's front door, on Main Street. “For the first 2 years in prison I woke up every [day] wishing I was dead,” it read. “Now it comes to pass. I was and am a good man.” The note named two people: Sheriff Braudis and Mayor Ireland. “May Bob help to understand it all,” it read. “May Mike Irland rot in hell.”

Carroll rushed the note, which had a Denver address written on it, over to the courthouse. When Braudis saw it, his eyes went straight to the signature at the bottom. He immediately recognized Jim Blanning's scrawl. He'd seen it many times, on incident reports and on letters that Blanning sent him from prison. And as far as he knew, Blanning had been living in Denver since he got out on parole in 2002.

“Anyone who knew Blanning came to expect some pretty bizarre behavior,” he explained. “I knew him to be manic, and also to be depressed, but never violently so.” Nevertheless, when Braudis read the letter, he had a premonition: “I knew we'd find his body by morning.”

APD radioed the bomb squad to announce that they'd identified a suspect and that he had a history of arrests and disputes with Aspen officials. When the bomb squad neutralized the packages in the alley, the contents dispersed like shrapnel. The detritus consisted of cell-phone parts, mousetraps, and bladders of gasoline items that, in Braudis's opinion, were pieces of a viable device.

“A cell phone receives a call and vibrates, setting off a mousetrap,” he explains, theorizing about Blanning's bombs. “The mousetrap snaps down on a well-placed strike—a match or a road flare—igniting a spark or a flame. Flame meet vapors from five-gallon plastic bladder of gasoline. Boom.”

“If your father was alive,” Bill Blanning recalls his mother saying to little Jim, “he'd have straightened you right out.” But James Blanning Sr., an officer in the Army's 26th Cavalry, had died as a sick and starved POW in Japanese custody when Jim Jr. was five, Bill was four, and Dick, the last child, was two. (Dick declined to be interviewed for this article.) The Blannings were from Des Moines, Iowa, but they'd bounced from base to base and were living in the Philippines when James Sr. died. Sistie Blanning took the kids to Colorado Springs, where her parents were living. She and the boys traveled to Aspen regularly to learn how to ski. They settled there permanently in 1945.

Few Aspenites are left from those days, but former Aspen Times editor and longtime columnist Mary Eshbaugh Hayes, 80, remembers Sistie as “a bohemian, an artist.” With help from a generouslocal baroness, Sistie bought and ran the Garrett House, a rooming establishment on West Hopkins Avenue, where Jim and hisbrothers grew up.

As the oldest of three boys, Jim was the ringleader. “He was strong and powerful,” Bill recalls. “He pretty well got his way.He pounded my brother and me when we were little. We wereconstantly terrorized by him.”

According to Bill, if Jim wanted a toy, he'd take it. If he needed money, he'd pawn something, never mind that it usually wasn't his to sell. “He took anything he wanted, anytime he wanted,” Bill says. “He didn't have a whole lot of conscience about using other people's things. He'd say, Oh, I traded you for it—I can't remember what I traded, but now it's mine.' “

In the mountains, Jim became fascinated with mines. He'd seen the old mining maps and photos in the Hotel Jerome, where the family lived for their first few months. But the real thing blew his mind. There were tunnels and shafts under thousands of county acres a giant honeycomb playground where he could explore and, according to Bill, experiment with old tools and explosives left behind by prospectors after the Panic of 1893.

After graduating from Aspen High in 1954 and then bashing gates with the Aspen Ski Club and doing a stint as a ski instructor, Blanning headed to the University of Colorado at Boulder. College being college, and Blanning being Blanning, he once floated a stick of dynamite down a small runoff channel that passed underneath a sorority house. “I don't think he got caught for that one,” Bill says. Not long after, during a school parade, Blanning and some friends flipped the master switch controlling the power. “One of the other guys snitched,” Bill says, “and Jim got expelled.”

In '56, Blanning joined the Air Force, where, according to Bill, the regimented military life kept his wilder instincts in check. After serving three years, he returned to Aspen in 1959 and began odd-jobbing shuttling tourists into town, working at ranches, driving a delivery truck. In '61, he left town to help cut trails at a newColorado resort called Breckenridge. There, he got to know Dieter Bibbig, a young German who'd recently moved to Aspen.

“We were on the same crew, and I was telling someone how I wanted a gun for elk season,” Bibbig says. “Blanning walks up to me and says, Hey, Dieter, I've got a rifle I can sell you.' It was a .30-30 Winchester. I gave him $40 for it.” It was the only good deal he would ever get from Blanning.

8:00 P.M.

In the basement of the courthouse, authorities started calling Blanning's friends, asking about his whereabouts and whether they thought he really intended to hurt anyone. Soon, Blanning's pal Jay Parker and two Aspen police officers took a trip up to Smuggler Mine, northeast of town. Parker, a co-owner of the defunct mine, had spent plenty of time palling around with Blanning in its tunnels and shafts. Back in 1994, their good friend Stefan Albouy, a mining buff and claim developer, had committed suicide at Smuggler, and Parker was worried that Blanning might follow his friend's example. But Blanning wasn't there.

Meanwhile, a police background check had turned up a green 1997 Jeep Cherokee registered to one of Blanning's LLCs. The landlord at his Denver property said the Cherokee had a spare tire on the roof. Word went out over the radio.

Leads came in and fizzled. At 10:18, someone reported having seen Blanning at the Steak Pit earlier in the day. Another saw an elderly man shaking a police barricade near Wells Fargo. A man who'd been at Ace Hardware that afternoon said he'd seen a man buying black plastic sleds, just like the one Blanning had used to tow his packages. But it wasn't Blanning; it was a guy who runs the horse-drawn-carriage business on Ute Avenue. He'd shown up at the stables that morning to find that his horse-manure sled had been stolen. Police assume that Blanning swiped it to haul his bombs.

Around 11:00, cops headed out to Midnight Mine, a road that passes several of Blanning's former claims. Every law-enforcement officer available cruised Aspen, looking for a Cherokee with a tire on the roof. Blanning could easily have fled town, but some speculate that he stuck around to watch the hubbub. Jay Parker thinks Blanning “probably drove to a spot with a good view of town so he could look out over the whole scene and see the mess he made.”

There is, however, another possible scenario—that Blanning was driving around looking for Mayor Ireland. The police took this possibility seriously. Ireland was brought to an “undisclosed location,” where he would wait out the night's events with police protection. He was as surprised as anybody to hear that he was a target= of Blanning's rage. “I'd been negatively referenced by constituents before,” he said later, “but this was unusual. I don't know why he had all this animosity toward me.”

The answer to that starts with Blanning's up-and-down track record as a businessman. His first notable venture was a bar called the Molly Gibson, which he opened in the winter of '63 in a Hyman Street space now occupied by a Quiksilver store. Business was brisk, but Blanning was a lousy bookkeeper and the place folded in less than a year. He got over it. By that time, he'd also embarked on his life's work as a buyer and seller of mining claims.

For the next three decades, Blanning sank all his time and money into this work. Sometimes he'd look at a claim map, decide which parcel or parcels he wanted, track down the heirs of the original name on the deed, and buy them out for a few hundred dollars. The land was remote and lacked infrastructure, so most owners were happy to dump it. This method was labor-intensive, but it was cheap and legal.

Blanning had other methods, however, that were less straightforward. One involved close scrutiny of the 1872 Mining Act, which requires counties to advertise mining-claim sales and auction the parcels off at a specified time every year. If Blanning could find proof that no such advertising or auctioning had taken place for a specific deed, well, too bad for Pitkin County—Blanning would lay claim to it.

Usually, though, Blanning searched for claims that were the property of old corporations—prospecting businesses that had packed up and left decades before. There were hundreds of them. Blanning would discover one, establish a new corporation with the same name as the defunct one, and become the rightful owner. “Jim referred to this as resuscitating' a corporation,” says Chip McCrory, 54, a former Pitkin County assistant district attorney. “But Blanning wasn't resuscitating anything. He'd adopt an old corporation's name just to take ownership. Then he'd turn around and sell it as a piece of real estate, regardless of its intended use.”

Conservationists view the 1872 Mining Act much like gun-control advocates look at the Second Amendment—as an antiquated piece of legislation created in a context that no longer exists. “The Mining Act is outdated and obsolete in many ways,” says Ireland. “Land pirates” like Blanning, he says, “were trying to parlay that obsolete law to their advantage and buy up mining claims for subdivision. No one could have foreseen this in 1872.”

Even so, Blanning did his share of legitimate business, selling cheap land in the seventies and eighties to ski bums and service workers. Several houses on Ute Avenue—at the base of Aspen Mountain ski area—sit on former Blanning claims, as do a few homes in the Castle Creek area and an 8,000-square-footer on top of Red Mountain. “I think the price on that claim was $5,000,” says Jim Wingers. “It's worth a lot more now.”

According to everyone who knew him, Blanning was relentless about taking possession of every square inch of a parcel. “He had some claims that were being encroached upon by Ruthie's Restaurant,” Wingers says, referring to the popular eatery at Aspen Mountain. “Jim put up a rope and made the skiers go through a six-foot-wide area so he could count the number of people passing through his property. This drove D.R.C. Brown, the resort's owner, up a wall. Jim settled for two lifetime ski passes and some cash.”

Mick Ireland moved to Aspen in 1979 to be a ski bum but switched tracks in '85 and enrolled at the University of Colorado Law School, in Boulder. He first heard about Blanning in the summer of '86, while on break. Blanning, by way of his land research, was convinced that the town was in danger. “We'd had a big winter followed by a wet spring,” Ireland explains, sitting at a conference table inside city hall. “Blan­ning claimed that a seismograph showed the mountain was cracking and was wet enough to slide and bury the town near Wagner Park.” Blanning was wrong, but he meant well. He was convincing enough that officials briefly evacuated the area.

Out of law school and back in Aspen,Ireland took a job as a reporter for The Aspen Times in the summer of '88. He'd heard about a group that was buying up mining claims with the intention of selling the land for development, and he began reporting the story. To Ireland, people like Blanning were using claims “for reasons other than their intended purpose.” A few years later, Ireland was appointed county commissioner. One of the first projects he was involved with was a land swap involving 125 acres near Mount Sopris, which sat atop more than 50 mining claims northwest of town. The rub: Blanning's name was on some of the deeds. Blanning signed on to a lawsuit against the U.S. Forest Service and won. But the case went federal, and the judge ruled against Blanning, saying that his ownership of the claims was based on duplicitously acquired deeds.

That battle, in part, inspired a legislative move by the county to rein in residential development on old mining claims. After several months of debate, the measure passed, placing strict limitations on rural building. By this time, of course, Aspen was a world-famous destination resort. Workers were being priced out of town and forced down-valley to Basalt and Carbondale and even Glenwood Springs, 40 miles away. Blanning, whose entire livelihood was tied up in mining claims and who wasn't known for squirreling away cash, found himself left out of the game.He had to make a statement. One evening in 1994, he threw a hardbound copy of the U.S. Constitution through a courthousewindow. While preparing for the stunt,he'd called up Sheriff Braudis's girlfriend, Dede Brinkman, a filmmaker, and askedher to document the crime. “It's a two-camera shoot,” he told her.

Later that summer, he climbed the stairs to the roof of the Pitkin County Courthouse, tied a rope to the cupola, wrapped the other end around his neck, and stood at the edge of the building, threatening to jump. Braudis, along with several other law-enforcement officers and friends of Blanning, took turns trying to talk him off the ledge. “He's screaming all kinds of stuff,” Braudis recalls. ” Bob, they ruined my life, these fuckin' elected officials. They're all wrong and I'm right. I can't live like this, man.' ” When Blanning finally came down, he melted into the arms of the police chief and wept.

While psychiatric treatment, or at least a break, was probably in order, Blanning opted to stay in the land business. It would be his biggest mistake. In 1995, he learned that Dieter Bibbig, the German to whom he'd sold the rifle back in '61, kept his Aspen home not in his name but rather under the protection of a limited-liability company. Owning property under an LLC is a common way to protect assets in the event of a lawsuit. But just as a driver has to re-register a car, an LLC owner must renew the corporation every few years. Bibbig had let his LLC lapse. As far as Blanning was concerned, the property was up for grabs, just like the abandoned mining claims he'd scored over the years. He “resuscitated” Bibbig's LLC under his own name and then took out a $350,000 loan, using Bibbig's house a Victorian on Park Avenue as collateral. He defaulted on the loan, then sold Bibbig's house out from under him.

“It was not a real-estate transaction,” says Chip McCrory, the former assistant D.A. “It was a criminal act. He didn't resuscitate Bibbig's LLC. He stole it.” Bibbig had to spend nearly a quarter million on lawyer fees to get his house back. The incident prompted McCrory to investigate Blanning further. “The paper trail seemed endless,” he says. “We found three or four mining-claim sales where Blanning was adopting these old corporations' names, passing property through a series of shell corporations . . . and trying to sell them. The county believed that he'd done business in violation of racketeering laws, so we charged him accordingly.” That meant using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO), a federal law created to maximize punishment for organized-crime figures. Forced to choose between prison and a plea deal with financial demands he couldn't fulfill, Blanning opted to go to trial. The jury found him guilty, and the judge gave him 16 years in prison.

Blanning had a few weeks of freedom after the sentencing, which he used to make a final statement. One Friday evening he walked into La Cantina, where county officials regularly met for after-meeting drinks. He approached their table, took off his clothes, and folded them neatly on a nearby chair. “All he had on was a Speedo, with this giant purple thing sticking out of it,” recalls Ireland. “It was a huge purple dildo. He just stood there with his hands on his hips, staring at us.”

The incident earned Blanning an indecent-exposure charge and got him branded a sex offender before he was shipped off to the federal pen in Cañon City, Colorado. “It was a totally draconian sentencing,” Braudis says. “The Bibbig case should have been a civil case, not a federal RICO case. And the pervert thing, that was just excessive. Blanning got way more than he deserved. At that point, I knew his life was over.”

In 2002, at age 66, Blanning was released and given an “intensive supervised parole.” He'd done six years. After a year in a halfway house in Denver, he rented an apartment in the city's Sloan Lake neighborhood. Every few months, his brother Bill would stop by to check in and occasionally leave money. Their meetings were brief, and Blanning did most of the talking—about mining claims or the nightclub he frequented on weekends, where he'd dance with the ladies and nurse a Coke to save money. Whenever Bill left, he'd say, “I'm glad to see you're doing all right and getting by, Jim.” And each time, Blanning would respond, “Well, if worse comes to worst, there's always Plan B.”

11:45 P.M.

Dieter Bibbig got the call just before midnight: Jim Blanning was behind the bomb scare and on the loose. He hung up, went into another room to get his rifle—the rifle Blanning had sold him 47 years earlier—and waited. But Blanning never showed; he was busy preparing his final message, a suicide note, handwritten and four pages long, addressed to Sherriff Braudis. He wrote, in part:

I came loaded for bear, as you will see. I was going to do just as the bomb note [stated]. Could have done some serious damage. Oh well. Too tired—to the bone . . . My body is shot and the ongoing black depression has [made] mush of my mind lately . . . Many people know I had a wonderful life until Mick Ireland and JE [Jodi Edwards,another county attorney] got me. God knows I would love to have cut Ireland's and Chip McCrory's balls off before skinning them. I wandered around for hours this afternoon. God knows I have a long history—Aspen School, Air Force Nuclear Weapons—Ski Patrol and Instructor . . . more deeds/property, etc. than mostanyone. Not sure where you will find me. Should be interesting to hear everyone tell stories about me.

Sometime in the early-morning hours, Blanning pulled into a small parking area next to the North Star Nature Preserve, about two miles south of town, towardIndependence Pass. He turned off the engine, stepped out of the vehicle, put a .38 revolver under his chin, and fired. The bullet pinballed inside his skull, never emerging. Police found him at 4:27, face up in the snow, legs outstretched, eyes open.

Moments later, Grand Junction's bomb squad deployed the “remote opening tool” on the Wells Fargo package, which they'd safely moved to the sidewalk. When the blast of water hit it, a four-story fireball shot into the sky. “We'll never know whether the devices would have actually worked,” APD's Chris Womack later told me. “But I personally believe that Blanning intended to do damage.”

He certainly had the firepower. In addition to the .38, he wore a fishing vest that held eight semi-automatic-rifle magazines and three .38-caliber speed loaders. In his Cherokee, authorities found maps of Aspen with several addresses marked, among them the homes of Ireland and McCrory. There was also an AR-15 rifle and enough camping gear for a person to survive in the woods for weeks.

Whether Blanning intended to do any real harm will be the subject of debate on Aspen's barstools and chairlifts for years to come. Some will demonize him, or categorize him as a slightly more personable version of the Unabomber. Others will mythologize him as a man driven mad by the forces of government. Braudis comes down in the middle.

“Jim Blanning was not Don Quixote fighting windmills,” he says. “He's not a romantic figure. Some people ascribe his troubles to the closing of the door by government, but that's romanticizing Jim Blanning, and I'm not gonna do that. He was a friend. And he was one of many colorful characters I've met in Aspen. He had demons. He'd become critical, and critical people have to take things to the next level. Unfortunately he did that by fucking up New Year's Eve and then electing to kill himself.”

Shortly into the new year, Vail police announced that Blanning was a suspect in two robberies from 2005 and 2006, both at WestStar Bank, in Vail Village. Blanning had made purchases and deposits equal in value to five-figure amounts taken from the bank, and the suspect in surveillance footage wore a hat, glasses, and jacket identical to the outfit Blanning sported in Aspen on New Year's Eve. The Vail suspect wore white gloves and bronze face paint. Authorities found matching gloves and tubes of bronze makeup in Blanning's Denver apartment along with mining-claim maps, field guides, books, camping gear, and receipts dating back to the 1950s. Blanning had even saved the famous purple phallus from his visit to La Cantina.

At the time of the Vail robberies, Blanning didn't own a car. Police found no evidence of any car-rental transactions after his release from prison, and they have no leads as to a possible getaway driver. A friend of his in Denver told me that he thinks Blanning may have taken a bus an audacious and crafty move but not beyond the scope of his behavior. Detective sergeant Craig Bettis of the VPD believes that after the second robbery, Blanning may have simply walked out of WestStar, trekked up Vail Mountain, and camped out for a few days until the heat died down.

“He certainly was bold enough,” Bettis says. “But at this point, all we can do is guess.”

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RYAN HALL WAS LYING AWAKE last night when God spoke. “This time He was telling me, ‘Less is more’—scale back the caffeine, the supplements, even the intensity of my training.”

Ryan Hall

Ryan Hall in Mammoth Lakes, California, in July 2010

Ryan Hall

“Ryan's faith takes the edge off his ego.” says Terrence Mahon, Hall's coach.

The 28-year-old marathon star is explaining his spiritual pillow talk to his younger brother, Chad, as they run a stretch of singletrack at the base of the Snow Summit ski area, in Big Bear, California. Ryan already put in ten miles and did drills this morning. Now he’s on his afternoon run—25 to 30 minutes, at 7,000 feet of elevation, at a shake-the-legs-out pace of seven and a half minutes per mile. Chad, who’s keeping up, is an accomplished NCAA runner in his own right. I’m following on their mother’s townie bike. “There’s this temptation to do more,” he says, “as if hammering all the time is the way to improvement. As if winning is everything.”

It’s a peculiar credo for a man who had the distinction, three years ago, of being hailed as the most promising up-and-coming U.S. marathoner in a generation, after he set an American debut record of 2:08:24 at the 2007 London Marathon. It’s also a strange mantra when you consider the double play that Hall is hoping to pull off on October 10: to win the Chicago Marathon, becoming the first American-born man to take that race since 1982, and, while he’s at it, smash the American marathon record of 2:05:38, set by Morrocan-born Khalid Khannouchi in 2002.

In other words, Hall hopes to secure a position as the greatest American marathoner since Frank Shorter, Bill Rodgers, Alberto Salazar, and Greg Meyer dominated the scene back in the Mustache Days of the seventies and eighties—proving that the U.S. can still produce great long-distance champions. (Joining Hall, of course, is fellow American Meb Keflezighi, last year’s New York City Marathon winner, who immigrated from Eritria when he was ten.)

Yes, that sounds like “more” rather than “less.” But Ryan Hall is a running contradiction. Consider his form. While the sport’s leaders—mostly Kenyans and Ethiopians—move along with bowed lower backs and puffed-out chests, Hall, who’s an inch shy of six feet and weighs 135 pounds, runs bolt upright, as if his lumbar has no curve. And then there’s his long, relaxed stride: Hall is a loping wolfhound in a field of shuffling terriers. As Rodgers, winner of four New York City Marathons and four Boston Marathons, recently told me, “He runs kinda funny.”

Hall talks kinda funny, too, tossing around words like dude, gnarly, and trippy in a low-decibel Southern California drawl. What’s more, beneath the slow speech and the blond bro shag is a religious faith that’s every bit as powerful as his motor.

God is indeed Hall’s homeboy—”the God of the Bible, the God who created me, who gave me a gift to run,” Hall tells me as he bites into a reheated fish taco at his parents’ house in Big Bear. (He lives and trains in Mammoth Lakes, in the eastern Sierra.) But while God may have given Hall a gift, He has yet to deliver a career-defining win. Three years into his pro career, Hall’s results are remarkable but not in line with the early hype: seventh place in London in 2007 (2:08:24, the fastest debut marathon by an American), first in the Olympic Trials in New York City the same year (2:09:02, a course record), tenth at the Beijing Games in 2008, third at the hilly Boston Marathon in 2009, and fourth in New York the same year. And at 28, he’s in the prime of his career.

Still, the old guard believes. “He’s only been in seven marathons,” says Rodgers, “and his worst finish was tenth—at the Olympics! Most guys will have at least one slow race, but Ryan never seems to get tired. I think that makes him—along with Meb—a symbol of a new era of American distance running.”

Trouble is, Hall doesn’t seem to care. “I don’t race to beat other people,” he says. “I’ve got to be on that starting line and know I can handle finishing 100th.”

So why does he race?

“I owe it to Him and to myself and to others to cultivate the gift.”

The story of Hall’s “gift” is right out of a church-camp movie. A decent 14-year-old ball-sports player, eager to emulate his dad—Mickey Hall was drafted by the Baltimore Orioles but decided to teach instead—is riding the bus to a basketball game. While staring out at Big Bear Lake, he feels an urge to run around it, all 15 miles, never mind that he hasn’t run more than three in his life.

That Saturday, he laces up his shoes and, along with Dad, completes the loop. On the couch after the run, the boy’s calves scream, and God speaks louder. Ryan, He says, run for me. Run for yourself. Run so that others may be inspired. And so he ran—to high school track stardom, to a scholarship at Stanford, and to Beijing, stopping to marry miler Sara Bei in 2005 and set up the Hall Steps Foundation, a nonprofit that helps the poor.

“I’ve been out on 22- and 24-mile runs with Ryan, and we’ve talked a lot about faith,” says Keflezighi, Hall’s neighbor, training partner, and top rival, who also leans on religion for success. “He has a respect for the distance and a healthy perspective of God that works well for him.”

But can Hall and his “all will be revealed” approach kick ass in Chicago? Or would it behoove him to crank up some Slayer, trash a hotel room, and visualize victory rather than gracefully accepting defeat? Terrence Mahon, Hall’s coach at the Mammoth Track Club, insists his athlete is dialed just right: “Ryan’s faith takes the edge off his ego,” he says. “He knows he’s running for personal reasons.”

Rodgers agrees. “Some people thrive on a lot of pressure,” he told me. “I’ve seen guys swear at competitors or bad-mouth them in the media. I even did a bit of that myself. But Ryan thrives by keeping the pressure off. Because of that, I think he can win Chicago and beat the American record. He’s got it in him to beat the best guys from Kenya and Ethiopia, too.” Of course, what matters in Chicago is that Hall runs as he’s meant to. But even though the route is low, flat, and fast, there’s still the weather to contend with. “I could be in the best shape,” Hall says, “but if there’s a 30-mile-per-hour wind, it doesn’t matter—no one’s getting any records.”

In other words, don’t hold your breath, America. Hall may have the legs, the discipline, the maturity, and the spirit to make it happen, but, despite his goals, he knows better than to predict a victory like some Ali-esque smack talker. As he tells me before we part ways, “I leave room for a little bit of mystery. If you really want something, the way to get it is to let it go.”

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Ride

Step one: Land in Denver. Step two: Make like the Democratic National Convention gadflies and get out of town. The 60–mile drive from downtown Denver to Grand County takes an hour and change; once you roll over Berthoud Pass on Highway 40, you could stop to ride the 28 miles of free–ride trails at Winter Park ski resort, but you’d do better to head another ten minutes to the town of Fraser, near the Arapaho National Forest. Check in to a private cabin at the Wild Horse Inn (doubles, $245; ). The owner, John Cribari, is a former trainer for Trek, Cannondale, and Gary Fisher who knows all of the 600 marked trails in the area. For an epic, have Cribari send you from the Fraser Valley floor to the High Lonesome Trail (average elevation: 10,000 feet), where you can ride a 30–mile loop while gasping at the mountain views in every direction (rentals from $50 at Totally Wired Cyclery, in Fraser; 970–726–6923).

Hike

The Indian Peaks Wilderness is like a satellite office of the Alps that few know about: The 76,000–acre wilderness stretches north from the Grand County line all the way to Rocky Mountain National Park. For a warm–up, hike from Junco Lake Trailhead, seven miles north of Fraser, to Columbine Lake on a mellow, six–mile trek. If you want something a little more brawny, try the 20–mile, 2,000–vertical–foot out–and–back hike from the Monarch Lake trailhead (about 15 miles from the intersection of U.S. 34 and 40 in Granby) to the incisor–like peaks along Lone Eagle Cirque (maps available from Totally Wired Cyclery). From the tops of 12,000–foot Apache and Navajo peaks—or anywhere else in the range—you’ll feel like you can touch the planes heading to and from Denver.

Heckle

Back in town, catch fair weather—and fair-weather fans—at Coors Field. A miracle like the Rockies’ 2007 World Series run is unlikely this year, so you probably won’t see a game with playoff implications. But you will see next year’s hot pros–pects playing in the National League’s most spectacular natural setting; the peaks on the horizon may trump the on–field action. Walk up to the park just before the first pitch and grab sub-$10 seats in the centerfield bleachers with rowdy Coors–swillers (). Post–game, check in to the Curtis, about ten blocks from the stadium, a new hotel with a hip–for–Denver bar and pop–culture kitsch in the hallways—the ninth floor is an homage to big–hair bands (from $180; ). Next up: Platte Street, a quiet retail–and–restaurant ‘hood. Fill up on thin crust at Proto’s Pizzeria Napolatana (), then walk down the street to My Brother’s Bar, an unpretentious den that’s perfect for grousing about the home team (303–455–9991).

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Out of This World

Trips that will blow your mind and your budget

Be Careful Out There

A traveler’s advisory on the world’s most adventurous places

Heed the Swede

If he biked to Everest and back, he must know what he’s doing. Right?

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