After stuffing my appendages into a neoprene wetsuit tight enough to defeat Houdini, I cinch up my mask, bite down on my snorkel, and belly flop into the icy current of Vancouver Island’s Campbell River. I’m here with 11 other customers who have each shelled out $47 for the chance to float facedown through rapids and bounce off rocks among hundreds of bronze-sided, migrating coho headed the other way. The schools part and then close behind us in the murk, hardly noticing our frogman flotilla. Forget swimming with sharks—here, on the only fish-watching adventure tour of its kind in North America, I’ve become one with the salmon.

Snorkeling among the Campbell’s salmon runs first started in the 1950s when Canadian nature writer Roderick Haig-Brown wrote Measure of the Year, which described his own experience swimming with the fish. But in the past two years, guided trips have proven especially popular. “By my second year, business jumped 300 percent,” says Catherine Temple of Paradise Sound ���ϳԹ��� Tours, which started the salmon excursions in 1997. “Last year it went up another 300 percent. And this year it will be even bigger.”

From July through October, Temple runs two trips a day, packing her clients into a van and whisking them three miles upriver, providing mini-seminars on marine biology along the way. At different times of the year, the Campbell hosts all five species of Pacific salmon: chinook, coho, chum, sockeye, pink—and even the odd Atlantic salmon escaped from a nearby fish farm. Chinooks can get as big as 60 pounds, which up close can be “kind of scary,” says Temple, since many of her clients are seeing these fish in situ for the first time. “A lot of people are surprised to find out there’s more than one species,” she says. “Most of them have only ever seen a salmon on their plate.”

July will be rush hour on the Campbell, as the river swells with some 165,000 pinks. But this kind of tourism is harmless to the fish, maintains Dave Ewart, a manager for Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans. “As long as we don’t have hundreds of people floating down the river every day, we’ll be fine,” he says. As for the clients, despite low water temperatures, brisk currents, and occasionally dangerous rapids, little has gone wrong—except for a 1999 mishap when a startled fish smacked a guide in the face. “Yeah,” says Temple, winding up for the inevitable fish joke. “He got socked in the eye by a sockeye.”

Once a Sanyo refrigeration engineer with a dream, Otsuka, 53, coinvented faux snow in 1987, believing it could revolutionize the ski industry. He couldn’t sell the fake flakes to his employer, so he got the Japanese government to back him. Today he’s president of the Snova Corporation, an empire of indoor snowboarding stadia, where for $53 (including equipment rental) per 90-minute session, visitors can shred polymers on a swath of mock-Nagano.

At the unveiling of Snova Yokohama last fall, Otsuka’s eighth such facility in Japan, baggy-clothed riders carved down the 108-foot-wide slope as techno music pumped through the air. “Unlike traditional artificial snow,” the proud inventor shouted, “Snova snow won’t melt or ice up.” Otsuka’s designer powder also costs half as much to maintain, feels surprisingly like the real thing, and keeps boarders dry when they fall. “The Japanese are so enamored of their technology that if man can make better snow than God can, so much the better,” says Ski Japan! author T. R. Reid.

Despite Japan’s saturated ski market (many of the nation’s approximately 600 resorts were built in the last decade), business is booming for Snova. The firm’s indoor slope in Kobe, which opened in 1997, attracts about 500 visitors a day and has already recouped its $8.5 million construction cost. By the end of the year, Snova plans to open its first snowboard arena in Singapore.

Opportunities might also beckon in the packaged food industry. “It’s a coated resin molecule that has no taste and no harmful effects on the body or the environment,” Otsuka says of his product, which has the texture of microscopic roe. “It’s similar to the material used in diapers and sanitary napkins, but with the right flavoring, I could market it as imitation caviar!” With that, the Snovaboarding evangelist shoves off to practice his fakey backside 360-indy.

“There will be fires,” says Tom Westby, a timber and fire coordinator with Superior National Forest’s Gunflint Ranger District. “It’s just a matter of how big.” If that sounds ominous, it’s meant to. Up in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, rangers like Westby aren’t just predicting a long, hot summer; they’re getting positively biblical. The prophecy? An inferno will sweep through a 200-square-mile area, creating downdrafts of up to 40 mph, scattering burning refuse for miles, and sending smoke billowing 50,000 feet into the atmosphere.

That scenario sounds like hyperbolic doomsaying, but according to a November 1999 U.S. Forest Service report called “Fuels Risk Assessment of Blowdown in the BWCA and Adjacent Lands,” it’s not. The rate of fuel loading—that is, the accumulation of dry, dead wood on the forest floor—quadrupled from a typical five to 20 tons per acre to 60 to 80 tons last July, after a gale-force wind ripped through a 30-mile-long-by-eight-mile-wide swath of the conservation area, turning an estimated 25 million trees into tinder.

So why hasn’t this gargantuan pile of firewood been cleaned up? Call it the Catch-22 clause of the Wilderness Act. In its aim to keep vast tracts of America’s woodlands pristine, the Wilderness Act forbids controlled burns and heavy machinery within designated wilderness areas. Firefighters have to apply for a special federal permit if they want to circumvent the rules—and in this case, the requisite studies and public hearings could drag on until the fall of 2001. But even if rangers somehow manage to jump-start the process, the response from environmental purists will likely be loud. “With the Forest Service’s rationale, they should just cut down the whole Superior National Forest because it might burn,” says Ray Fenner, executive director of the Minnesota-based Superior Wilderness Action Network.

Locals who rely on the tourist economy and proprietors of resorts lining the 63-mile Gunflint Trail road, the area hardest hit by last year’s storm, add yet another level of controversy. Wary that increased media attention will turn away many of the 200,000 canoeists and outdoorsmen who visit the area each year, they’re pressuring the Forest Service not to overplay the risk. “This isn’t an atomic bomb that will spread over ten to 20 miles in a couple of seconds,” insists Dick Smith, owner of Gunflint Pines Resort and Campgrounds.

The conflicting agendas place the Forest Service in “a very hard place,” says Superior National Forest spokeswoman Kris Reichenbach. Unfortunately, the stopgap solutions—setting up evacuation routes, discussing fire bans, and distributing reams of fire-prevention literature to visitors—are likely to be ineffectual in a place one expert judges to be the most flammable area of its size in the United States. Perhaps Tom Westby best sums up the situation: “If we have a dry spring, we’re going to be in a world of hurt.”

Frank Molteno wants to take you hunting. You’ll slink around the South African bush until you are face-to-flank with 5,000 pounds of white rhinoceros; then you’ll shoulder a .32-caliber Palmer gun and squeeze the trigger. But instead of a bullet and a bloody kill, a straw-size tranquilizer dart will puncture the beast’s behind, resulting in nothing more than a long nap and a nasty hangover.

“Nothing like sticking a rhino in the butt from about 20 feet,” gushes satisfied Molteno client Steve Camp. Darting safaris, like the one Camp and his wife took last year, are the latest rage out on the veld. For the past two years, professional hunters like Molteno, head of Darting Safaris, a South African nonprofit, have charged clients $5,000 to $10,000 (about half the cost of a shoot-to-kill safari) to dart big-five game on private reserves in Botswana, Kenya, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. Paying clients bring the animals down, and wildlife managers use the nap time to collect genetic samples or affix radio collars. This year, there will be several dozen shoot-and-release expeditions throughout Africa, and supporters of the continent’s newest conservation practice are quick to brag that not only do the fees support nonprofits, but, as Molteno points out, “The hunt is a peripheral component of management procedures.”

Those heading to Africa this month for the cool fall season, when darting is the least taxing to the animals, can choose from a plethora of safaris. Elephant hunters will be grinning like bwana wanna-bes while a vet with the Zimbabwe-based nonprofit group Save the Elephants fits snoozing pachyderms with GPS collars. And the aforementioned Darting Safaris specializes in collecting DNA samples from various species as a safeguard against population depletion.

Though this marriage of hunting and management appears to be a hit, not all tours, alas, are ecologically motivated. South African vets and above-board outfitters worry that profiteering reserve managers are allowing animals to be darted more than once a season, for sport. “My colleagues advise that yes, there are a few fly-by-nights,” confirms Michelle Booysan, vice-president of Pretoria-based dart-safari outfitter Deepgreen.

Traditional hunters scoff, but dart hunting is no peashooter game. Given that the projectile will descend one foot for every 25 yards traveled, it’s easy to miss. “When you stalk an animal and put a round in him with a rifle, you’re impeding his ability to defend himself at the same moment you’re making him aware of you,” says Molteno. “With a dart gun, it’s somewhat more anxious.”

University of California molecular biologist Daniel Morse worked for five years to crack one of nature’s enigmas. “An abalone can withstand assaults from a hungry sea otter pounding on its shell with a rock,” he says. “Such tremendous strength made us realize that nature has already solved many of our engineering problems.”

Then, in December 1999, the pieces fell into place. He and his team at UC Santa Barbara’s Marine Biotechnology Center figured out how an abalone molecule called lustrin increases the shell’s strength by a factor of 3,000.

His findings have outdoor-equipment manufacturersdreaming of fail-safe climbing ropes, unbendable ski poles, and rip-proof tents and clothing. “For kayaks and paddles, this stuff would most definitely be of interest,” says Steve Scarborough, vice-president of design at Dagger Canoe and Kayak. “If the synthetic actually measures up in terms of stiffness, tensile strength, and weight, it could make an awesome boat. The Olympic committee will probably outlaw it right away.”

To understand the strength of a lustrin molecule, visualize a microscopic bight of thick rope bound by a thin rope. Pull hard enough on the ends of the thick rope and eventually the thinner strand breaks—but the larger one stays intact. Each lustrin fiber incorporates thousands of such sacrificial bonds, and because just one bond breaks at a time, only a tremendously intense, sustained force can rip all of the molecules apart and shatter the mollusk’s shell. In safety equipment like helmets, says Galen Stucky, a UCSB professor who helped Morse lead the research, this new breed of material could offer incomparable protection.

Though researchers have isolated lustrin and deciphered its molecular structure, lustrin-based outdoor products aren’t expected for at least three to five years, according to Stucky. In the meantime, eager R&D geeks will have to fantasize about ersatz-abalone equipment. “I’d love to announce that we’re coming out with new, armored mountain-biking pants—’Soon to be on your shelves! Weighing 13 ounces and offering bullet-resistance!'” says Patagonia’s environmental assessment director Eric Wilmanns. “But we aren’t quite there yet.”

Do you like it rough? Easy? Hard? Soft? However you choose to hit the trail, you’ll find a soul mate among the woodsy habitués who dispense their wisdom in the following pages—from the long-distance trekker and the devotee of amphibious excursions to the headstrong guy who enjoys getting lost and the gung-ho guru of fast-packing. Not to mention the backcountry hedonist with the luxury jones. So pick your style, bushwhacker—and let’s get it on.

Go Long, Go Deep
The Floating World
Get Real Gone
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Are We Not Men?
It Ain’t Heavy, It’s My Salmon on Toast Points

But soon enough your brain starts to run out of gas—opinions, ideas, plans start to float away. Maybe once upon a time life was so simple that this process only took a few hours: wander in fields, write sonnet, come home, take bath. But now a day trip does more for your muscles than your mind. It’s hard to leave it all behind when it all is used to tagging along with you wherever you go.

When you do really get away, though, strangeness can happen. I remember hiking for a week by myself, easy trail- walking in the Adirondacks where I live. One rainy morning, I woke up, my mind still, didn’t bother to get dressed, and just began to wander down the trail. It was as if I gave off no vibrations at all. An owl stayed perched on a branch as I walked two feet beneath him; a deer stayed on the trail, shifting her weight to let me pass; a mother merganser paraded her young inches from where I lay naked on a rock. Late in the day I saw people coming my way_—a party of four, perfectly pleasant-looking backpackers chattering their way down the trail. I’d already yanked my clothes on, but I crouched behind a fallen hemlock and hid till they were gone; I didn’t want the spell to break.

Take as much food as you can carry, but no cell phone. And no book that isn’t illustrated with pictures of the local birds or wildflowers. You can chew information all the rest of your days—the idea here is to get a little bored. Does that prospect unnerve you? It shouldn’t; it’s not like going on an airplane without a book. There’s plenty of stuff out there to read, written in what John Muir called “the great alphabet of nature.” But you have to slow down enough to see it.

One trick is to bushwhack whenever possible (and ethical). You can keep your eyes fixed as firmly on a muddy trail as you can on a four-lane highway, and if you do, your mind will drift just as quickly. When you’re off the trail, finding your way, you’re always looking. The contours of the land, the game trails, the drainages—they catch your attention, fill your head.

Sometimes, if everything’s going well, even movement starts to seem unnecessary. I remember a week I spent on the top of a mountain near my home, when I hiked no more than two or three miles from camp on any given day. I’d just head out along some ridge until I found a patch of sunshine and then sit down, or until I found a patch of berries and then fill my baseball cap. Here are the things I noticed: Night takes a long time to fall—hours, from the sun low in the sky through the pink glow to the darkening blue to the first star. Also, a mountaintop has a sufficient number of rocks and trees, needing neither more nor less to be complete. One day I lay on my stomach on a little promontory and watched a black bear pick berries on the same slope I’d browsed the day before. He moved at about the same leisurely and unconcerned pace. Like me, he had the luxury of a predatorless existence, at least until hunting season. His only work was to fill himself with calories before winter; mine was to fill myself with silence before I returned home.

If you’re lucky, nothing dramatic will happen. The days will fade into one another. That way, you’ll know it wasn’t fording the raging river, or facing down the grizzly, or surviving the thunderstorm that left you a little changed. It was just the quiet, the chance to use senses other than the info-eye or the info-ear. Which leads, of course, to the main danger of going long and deep. You might not be able to find your way back to quite the spot where you began.

PHILOSOPHY OF CAMPING 101: “People too often hike to a beautiful natural area, pitch their tent, crawl inside, zip the door, and shut out the world. This is camping? I prefer what I like to call ‘stealth camping’—wander a mile or two beyond the crowded campground, establish a low-profile campsite, and sleep under a tarp. If a deer wanders past, you see it. You stay connected to nature.”
—RAY JARDINE, AUTHOR OF BEYOND BACKPACKING

Bill McKibben’s book on cross-country ski racing, Long Distance: Notes on a Year of Living Strenuously, is due out this fall from Simon & Schuster.

An hour later, my peaceful reverie was shattered when Carl stretched his 6-foot-3 frame out of the tent and broke into booming fits of laughter, waking the entire camp. “Why, Stephanie,” he bellowed, “is that a nightgown you’re wearing?” As a matter of fact, it was—my favorite full-length, flowered flannel nightie. The other kids could tease me till I cried, but as far as I was concerned, frilly sleeping apparel was fair game on a canoe trip.

Actually, even the kitchen sink is fair game if it fits in the boat and can be schlepped across a portage. I’ve seen folks lug sirloin-packed coolers and Samsonite-size tackle boxes through the wilderness. But no longer needing my security nightgown, I now stuff my Duluth Pack with only the bare necessities: an extra pair of shoes, two pair of wool socks, a stocking cap, a Hacky Sack, polypropylene long underwear, two T-shirts, a paperback novel, a pair of nylon shorts, a swimsuit, Carhartt work pants, rain gear, a sleeping bag, a headlamp, a first-aid kit, a bee-sting allergy kit, a Bible, and at least one roll of toilet paper.

But to reduce the joys of canoe-camping to the material goods you can stash between the gunwales is to discount the mesmerizing rhythm of a paddle dipping into glassy waters, the shivery call of a loon as it surfaces across the lake, and the glorious self-sufficiency of catching and eating your own walleye. Even the most terrifying episodes bring about a certain thank-God-I-didn’t-kick-the-bucket kind of happiness, like the time in the middle of Lake Agnes when every curly hair on my head stood on end, rising in staticky salute to an incoming thunderstorm.

What really elevates canoe-camping and other forms of amphibious exploration (kayak touring is no less wondrous) to the higher echelons of wilderness experience is this: It takes a partner to help muscle the craft and carry the load. I’ve guided canoe trips in Minnesota and Ontario, and my paddling partners have included Beastie, a frazzle-haired Outward Bound junkie who combed his beard with a dinner fork; Kelayna, a sassy 12-year-old who couldn’t swim a stroke but could bake a Dutch-oven chocolate cake to rival Betty Crocker’s; and Maren, a 95-pound wisp who I once saw portage a canoefor eight miles. No matter what our differences were in the real world, we still managed to create our own peaceable kingdom, a self-propelling yin to each other’s yang.

On some days, however, when the weather turns hypothermic or super-size mosquitoes zoom in for the kill, the dark side of even the most symbiotic paddling partnership can reveal itself. Such was the case when Kelayna the cake-baker decided she was homesick, tired, and dying of malaria. Her proposal: to tough it out alone at the campsite while I paddled the four days, 16 lakes, and 15 portages to call for a rescue party at the nearest phone. With bodily force and strategic cajoling—namely, the false promise of a 7-Eleven Big Gulp just a few portages away—I managed to coax her back into the boat.

Chances are you won’t be held captive with strangers on your next paddling venture, but even relationships with siblings, spouses, parents, and friends take on a new light after a few days on the water. You discover, for example, that your brother, once a head-banger, now has an affinity for Yo-Yo Ma. Or that your mother once was a Girl Scout archery champion. Or that your husband can spend hours on end picking blueberries. Such insights are often as fleeting as wispy clouds, disappearing the moment you strap the boat on the roof rack and head back to civilization. The memories that linger, though, are of the soul-searching debates—and jokes—over the Big Questions, like, does God really exist? Or, more important, who lit the firecracker under Dad’s sleeping pad back in ’76?

It wasn’t me. I was out fishing in my flannel nightie.

“Outdoor Research makes women’s clothing with a pee system and the zipper opens wide enough so that you can do more than that. Title Nine Sports makes a zip-open bra, for easy access. A Lush oil-filled massage bar for him. And get a tent that gives you a better morning glow than green. You don’t want your partner to wake up and think they just slept with the Loch Ness monster.”
—LUANN COLOMBO, AUTHOR OF HOW TO HAVE SEX IN THE WOODS

Stephanie Gregory writes The Wild File for ���ϳԹ���.

My first reaction is to envy the exciting perils of these men in T-shirts. Then I read something in the furrowed brows of the TV anchors: the chilling truth that newsworthy outdoorsfolk rarely make it back to check their Nielsens.

OK, you can die out there. Usually, though, misplacing yourself is neither so public nor so tragic. I, for one, get lost on a regular basis. Yet I always manage to find my way out before friends and family can agree which of my organs to donate and which to keep for themselves. Being prepared for getting lost is a skill like any other. The trick is to keep a cool head. The rational mind knows that fat reserves can keep you alive in the wild for weeks. Even better, the rational mind can think your butt back to safety.

The most obvious strategy is to turn back the way you came. My brother tells a story of being lost with his wife in Southern California’s Los Padres National Forest. Relying on an outdated guidebook, they set off on a Saturday morning to spend the weekend hiking a long loop—not knowing that the Forest Service stopped maintaining the trail in the late eighties. They struggled for a day and a half through a maddening overgrowth of chaparral, manzanita, and poison oak before totally losing the trail in a place jovially known as the Devil’s Potrero, or “pasture.” They turned back late Sunday, but not in time to avoid an unplanned night in the woods. On Monday, when my sister-in-law didn’t show up for work, concerned coworkers asked the Highway Patrol to check accident records for any sign of the missing couple. Their humiliating retreat didn’t end until late that night, when they hitched a ride with a random band of beekeepers dressed, as my brother said, “all in white, like angels.”

How painful is it to retrace your path when you planned a loop? Well, five years after this misadventure, my brother still rants at length about Forest Service budget cuts and their effect on trail maintenance. He forgets to mention that, while they were lost in the Los Padres, he and his wife conceived their first child.

For most of us, getting lost is little more than an inconvenience. The 21st century, however, has declared a holy war on inconvenience. With cell phones and GPS receivers, we can keep ourselves present and accounted for at all times. What a bunch of weenies we are. If you do get lost, take the opportunity to tap into the better human qualities, i.e. our powers of deduction and animalistic instinct for self-preservation. Bring water, food, and an extra layer of clothes. Don’t just look for landmarks and terrain features, take their measure, too. If a pretty, snowy mountain slope is tilted steeply and bereft of trees, it’s an avalanche zone. Hiking amongst big, dead trees on a windy day is wilderness Jenga. So think, dammit, think.

A few years ago I took a solo tour of the Tatoosh Range in Rainier National Park. I ambled aimlessly, and tangled myself in thick underbrush on the wrong side of a ridge. The skies wept and my fingers grew numb. It seemed I had two choices: to brainstorm my way out or to fashion a nice deathbed pillow from D.B. Cooper’s wormy skull. I figured that parallel valleys all drained to the same place, so I tramped downstream along a creek until it emptied into a river adjacent to an unfamiliar trail. My sense of direction urged me to go right, and eventually I made a grotesque circle back to my original trailhead.

If you have the good sense to get lost in the daytime, use the sun. Even overcast skies glow a little brighter in one direction. Consider it east or west, depending on the time of day. Factor in the time of year, also—that brighter shade of pale in the sky will trend southward around the winter solstice and northward in June and July. The sun is the only star I trust. Some say you can navigate by the south-pointing triangle of Deneb, Vega, and Altair, but it’s hard enough to find one star, let alone three.

The way I see it, getting lost provides unexpected relief from the sometimes tedious “eat-recreate-eat-sleep” routine of a camping trip. Veer off-trail and you might stumble upon a bulbous porcini, a 500-year-old Incan mummy, or the Treasure of the Sierra Madre. You camp in order to reconnect with the wild, right? So go ahead and ramble. Remember, the beaten path, by its very nature, is beat.

“Your circadian rhythm becomes skewed, personal hygiene is a challenge, and after a week anybody will start to miss the sun and wide open spaces.”
—PAT KAMBESIS, CAVE PHOTOGRAPHER, CODISCOVERER OF THE CHANDELIER BALLROOM IN NEW MEXICO’S LECHUGUILLA CAVE

���ϳԹ��� correspondent Rob Story profiled the ski-filmmeisters of Teton Gravity Research in the November 1999 issue.

One snowy morning last spring, Graham let me tag along on a hike to one of the explorer’s campsites, a spot near Carson Pass he’d recently discovered. As walks in the woods go, it was both geographically and intellectually rigorous, with Graham delivering a lecture on the technological advances that have eased the burdens of land navigation. To emphasize his point, he explained that Frémont’s duties as leader of a U.S. government–sponsored survey expedition included having to call a halt at midday and get up at odd hours of the night, weather permitting, to futz with a bunch of sextants, chronometers, thermometers, telescopes, astronomical tables, and complex mathematical formulae, and thus determine the latitude, longitude, and altitude of his exploring party.

Fast-forward a century and a half. As we snowshoed up a spur ridge covered in aspens and lodgepole pines, Graham suddenly stopped, reached into his parka pocket, and extracted his cell phone–size Magellan 315 Global Positioning System receiver.

“What if Frémont had had this?” he barked. Well, maybe his men wouldn’t have had to eat their boots. Alas, this was not the answer Graham was looking for.

“He wouldn’t have had to get up in the middle of the night, waiting to fix one of the Jovan moons,” he said. “At any moment of the day or night he would’ve known where he was.”

Then he punched a button. In seconds, our position materialized on the tiny screen: Latitude 38š 41′ 56″ N; Longitude 119š 57′ 35″ W; Altitude 7,776 feet. So much for Jovan moons.

IT KNOWS WHERE YOU LIVE

The GPS relies on a constellation of 24 orbiting satellites that the United States Department of Defense began launching in 1978 to meet its own navigational needs, and to keep tabs on military movements during the Cold War. Using atomic clocks accurate to within one second every 70,000 years, each satellite continuously broadcasts the time and its position. A GPS receiver, pulling in signals from three or more satellites simultaneously, then measures how long it takes them to arrive, calculates the distance to each orbiting body, and, using simple geometry, produces a fix on your position.

First made available to the public in the 1980s, GPS technology nowadays is exploited by everybody from bush pilots to mountaineers to your Uncle Milt the bass fisherman. Instead of having to lug around a load of obscure, weighty, and hard-to-figure-out navigational equipment (would you know where to buy a sextant these days?), now you can push a button or two on your GPS receiver and, just like that, you’re on the map. Most models can store at least 200 “waypoints,” readings on locations you either want to go to or have been to already. If you haven’t been there, keystroke the coordinates and your GPS will help you find the spot; if you’re already there, just press a button to bookmark the position. By entering a series of waypoints, you can create a route and store the whole thing for later use.

In his hunt for Frémont’s trail, Graham typically studies a topographical map to suss out the coordinates of a particular Sierra locale he wants to visit, and then keys them in to his GPS. Using the same map, he finds a road that takes him within striking distance, parks, and switches on his GPS to take a reading on his location. At this point the instrument can tell him exactly how far his target is and in what direction. Now it’s just a matter of using a compass to hike to the site. That’s right—a compass. As the amateur cartographer is quick to point out, while GPS would have greatly reduced Frémont’s logistical burdens, it would not have solved the mess he got himself into. “Since Frémont didn’t have a decent map of the Sierra to use GPS by, the system would have told him where he was, but not where he had to go—or anything about terrain,” Graham says. “The Sierra still would have been terra incognita for him.”

JUST DON’T FORGET THE MAP

When it comes to terra incognita, Graham knows what he’s talking about. Because merely pinpointing your position won’t get you anywhere, you need to own traditional orienteering skills along with that fancy GPS. To fully exploit the data it provides, you should know how to use a topographical map, a compass, and a plotting scale—a rulerlike tool calibrated to the same scale and coordinate system as your map.

And then there’s the small matter of UTM. All GPS receivers provide traditional latitude-longitude readings but, increasingly, many also utilize the newer Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) coordinate system. Universal Transverse whaaaa, you ask? Good question. Lines of longitude and latitude superimposed on the earth’s spherical surface result in inconstant distance factors, meaning a degree of longitude at the equator is about 69 miles long, whereas it’s about 49 miles long at Minneapolis, on the 45th parallel. By “flattening” the earth’s nonpolar regions into a rectangle and dividing them into 60 zones, UTM reduces those inconsistencies.

Both systems work, it’s just a matter of personal preference. In Graham’s case, he sticks with traditional latitude-longitude readings. “Most of the time, I’m working with 19th-century maps and Frémont’s journals, which don’t use UTM,” he says. For the rest of you modern-day frontiersmen out there, now may be the time to get acquainted with both systems, lest you find yourself using your shiny new GPS device as a projectile to fend off vultures.

If most of this sounds like a techno-geek soliloquy left out of the latest Star Trek flick, here are a couple of pre-Computer Age caveats. First, although GPS receivers feature tiny video screens that display preprogrammed map grids with various zoom options, those images don’t compare in detail and scope with traditional paper topo maps—so definitely use both. Second, while GPS offers bankable latitude and longitude coordinates, its altitude readings are often unreliable (see “Going Up?”, a review of altimeters, page 130).

Ultimately, Graham is pretty sure he would have found the Frémont campsite using the old maps-and-legends method, but GPS made success a speedy certainty. “Without GPS,” he says, “even after getting close to the site, it would have been hours of wandering here and there.” Which is fine if you’re basking in nature’s splendors, but not so good if your men are starting to gaze longingly at your footwear.

Tom Chaffin teaches U.S. history at Emory University and is currently working on a biography of John C. Frémont.

We’d been in such a hurry to get off work, get out of town and get into the mountains that it was only when we finally decided to whip up some breakfast that we discovered things were missing. I’d apparently left my stuff sack of extra clothes in the car—gone were my long pants, fleece vest, extra socks, and my baseball cap. Mike dumped his pack and did inventory. Somehow he had forgotten his cup, the extra bottles of stove fuel, his windpants, and worst of all, one of the food bags.

“Guess we’ll just go without,” said Mike, grinning goofily.

And we did, hiking the Medicine Bow Range from Elk Mountain in Wyoming to the Rawahs in Colorado. I wore what little I had, put on my windbreaker when it got cold, and wrapped my sleeping bag around my shoulders in the evening. We saved fuel and rationed the food; Mike used the pot as his cup. None of this caused hardship. On the contrary, our packs were lighter and thus so were our hearts.

On the next trip, loading up in the parking lot, Mike grabbed my sack of spare clothes and threw it back into the car. “Cut it!”

“Then you gotta cut everything you forgot last time.”

“Already did,” he said.

Not to be outdone, I pulled the stove bag out of his pack and tossed it back into the car.

“Excellent, man, excellent,” crooned Mike.

We did that trip eating breakfast and lunch cold and building the tiniest of campfires to cook dinner. It was a spartan trek. Unburdened by dead weight, we moved quickly and smoothly through the mountains, covering more country more easily than we had ever done before.

Mike and I decided to call our game “the big cut.” Pushing further, we added variations. On any adventure, before leaving the parking lot (or the airport), each of us was empowered to remove one item from the other guy’s pack. Our trips became ultralean and efficient. For every pound of gear we cut from our packs we were rewarded with an extra mile on the trail. More for less. More of the wilderness in exchange for less equipment. Instead of sweating underneath monstrous loads, moving as slowly and ponderously as beasts of burden, we cruised the trail like coyotes, heads up, alert, eyes on the horizon.

Here’s the real trick to traveling light: Scrutinize every piece of gear. Why take a three-pound, multi-zippered, multi-pocketed, expedition jacket when an eight-ounce windbreaker is sufficient? Why take a heavy full-length air mattress when, with the right campsite selection, an eight-ounce foam pad is enough? Why carry a ten-pound tent “tested on Everest” when, if the point is to be outside, a four-pound tent is terrific? Why take a bulky sweater when a featherweight down vest is adequate? Why carry extra food when you’ll never eat it? Why carry extra water when you can move from stream to stream and purify what you need? And now that you’re carrying half the weight, why use a seven-pound backpack when a three-pound pack is fine?

Why? Because it goes against everything we’ve learned to crave. Ours is a maximalist culture—the bigger the better. Minimalism is discouraged, even denigrated—but take a minute and think about the last time you were on the trail. A fat, plush Cadillac may be fine for the highway, a big-screen TV just the thing for home theater thrills, but carrying a heavy backpack is backbreaking work. It crushes the body, flattens the spirit, and makes about as much sense as carrying a picnic table when you would be just as happy sitting on the grass.

In the end, the decision to go light and fast is an existential one. To enter the wilderness is to dispossess ourselves of the burden of possessions, to slip smooth and clean as Houdini from the thousand invisible chains of stuff. Once inside, we become, however briefly, part of the wild—lithe, lighthearted and free, loping across the landscape.

So next time you’re getting ready to head out, identify every single thing you doubt you’ll really need. Then forget it.

“The more our camping style depends on the paraphernalia of the world we are leaving behind, the more we dwell in contradictions.”
—IAN BAKER, BUDDHIST SCHOLAR AND EXPEDITION LEADER

“It’s really seductive to take along complicated-looking gear, but when it comes down to it, I think you’re better off without that battery-operated egg beater.

Mark Jenkins is The Hard Way columnist for ���ϳԹ���.

Latimer works with peevish focus, but then suddenly she’s ready, shouldering an enormous external frame pack. A smile slices her cheeky apricot-colored face and she dances onto the trail. “I love it!” she yells. “God, I love it!” What she loves, among other things, is weight on her back. “I’m the reincarnation of a mule,” she says.

She also adores leading pilgrims into the Sierras with a load of grande luxe comestibles. Latimer occupies a singular position in the outdoors: For 22 years she has pushed back the limits of backcountry deliciousness through her Berkeley-based guiding company , which specializes in all-women trips. But she doesn’t mind taking me and another Y-chromosomer on this outing, a recapitulation of her standard Whitney hike. We’re taking a roundabout, scenery-maximized backside approach to the top of the mountain. We’ll cover about 42 miles, with one goof-around day at a particularly gorgeous campsite. Whitney’s role, as Latimer explains it, is to provide incentive as well as aesthetics. “I think it’s good to have a goal,” she says. But the goal’s goal is sybaritic delight. And I’m getting hungry.

OK, I am un-wowed by the thai tom yum soup on our first night in the backcountry. The problem is not the soup but psychic displacement. I don’t know where I am yet and compare Latimer’s tom yum to restaurant fare. But then, after a few day’s hiking, Latimer flips me and everybody else to the 33rd level of gustatory bliss with her salmon on toast points.

It doesn’t hurt that the campsite is as good as the hors d’oeuvres. We’re in a 9,600-foot valley in a copse of pines between a trout stream and a glistening meadow. The group stands around the maestra, who kneels in pine duff, browning slices of bread in a banged-up frying pan over an itty-bitty camp stove. She cuts the toast into dainty triangles, smears on the salmon and offers them around. The first bite is oral Fantasia. The smoked fish swims to heaven while Holsteins sing the cream-cheese chorus and herbs and minced green onion go off like fireworks. The toast—pain grille, really—makes the whole business too too. The contradiction between here-and-now and what we’re eating opens a toothsome rent in reality. Latimer seems to be having even more fun than we are. “I like the element of surprise, of turning people on,” she says. “Cooks are egoists. They love the praise they get.”

Latimer’s ego can dine hugely on us, who praise her nonstop. Most of our meals are straight out of her 1991 book, Wilderness Cuisine, which is a woods-foodie standard. She doesn’t mind sharing unpublished recipes, which seem too simple to be such knockouts. The salmon spread, for instance, is just cream cheese stirred up with a piece of vacuum-packed fish and a bit of dill and onion. Anybody could do it, except, of course, most of us wouldn’t bother, much less follow it with a romaine salad perfectly dressed with rice-wine vinegar (Latimer tosses ours in a plastic grocery sack patched with duct tape), and then pesto over angel hair and fresh-baked brownies.

Like Alfred Hitchcock, who mapped out every camera shot on storyboards ahead of time, Latimer mentally rehearses each of her evening meals. “I have only a limited number of pots and stuff,” she says. “I start planning my dinner out in my head. Exactly, step by step, what I’m going to do.” Latimer has devised a battery of shortcuts and weight-saving gadgetry. She travels sans water filter, killing microbes with tincture of iodine (ten drops per liter of water) then killing off the medicine flavor with powdered ascorbic acid. The Latimer-signature backpackers’ cupboard/dish drainer consists of a 3 by 4-foot piece of nylon window screen folded in half and pinned to a line strung horizontally between two trees. Dishes dry quickly in it, and they’re easy to keep track of. She also carries a smaller piece of screen which multitasks as a colander, salad spinner, and scouring pad.

During our layover day, Latimer cranks the backwoods-comfort meter up to ten. She leads her group to a nearby waterfall, where she proffers chevre and sun-dried tomatoes. The high point, from her end, is finding wild watercress to garnish the plate just so. “I’m having fun now!” she enthuses. But she also finds time to loll with her back against a tree. Just sitting in the sun, Latimer fosters an illusion that follows her through the trip: Somewhere, just out of sight, she has her own secret resort hotel, because she looks too good to be camping. She sports the same synthetic fuzz and techno-cloth as the rest of us, but she wears it with more flair and a few extras—scarf, silver earrings, lipstick. Grooming, she says, is part of the disciplined attention to one’s own needs that can mean survival. “Where are you going to draw the line, if you let yourself go?” she demands. “Are you going to let yourself get cold? Is it going to be no lipstick? I mean, where’s the line?”

I can’t imagine what the guy-equivalent of lipstick might be, but I’m with her—it’s treacherous to cross the slob line. And I can’t help but notice how the survival/fashion gear flatters her. Latimer is good to sit next to; brown-eyed, with an arsenal of smiles and a low, precise voice with an accentless twang. If a puma had her own radio show, she’d sound like Latimer. Rrrrrow. At 55, she doesn’t play tricks with artificial youth. She’s just an all-American babe with crow’s-feet and decades of windburn. She’s also a fifth-generation daughter of the Sierra foothills, raised in Placerville, California, a couple of hundred miles northwest of where we sit. Childhood backpacking trips with her father taught Latimer that camping is eating. “We had biscuits and eggs and salad with Thousand Island dressing. And bacon. And trout, golden trout,” she rhapsodizes. Her food is a contemporized throwback. It’s also a protest against what she calls “Sierra Club nerds” who make camping into something anal-compulsive and meager. Ultralight fetishism particularly gets on her nerves. Says Latimer, sounding as if she’d like to biff it out with a nerd right now, “There are plenty of hard-core people who carry heavy packs.”

Latimer confides something about mount whitney: it might be the tallest peak in the Lower 48, but it’s not the apogee of our trip. “The goal is the garbage-bag bath,” she says. There’s no way to know if she’s right during the bath itself, because it happens three days before we summit. But the post-trip view bears her out. Whitney is this great big, you know, mountain. There’s nothing all that surprising up there—at least not on the scale of a packable solar-heated spa.

Latimer’s recipe:

Spread a ground cloth 300 feet from a water source where the sun can shine unobstructed for at least four hours. Set out two extra-large black garbage bags and fill with six gallons of water apiece. (Tie the bags loosely shut while filling to prevent spills.) Close the bags and leave the sun to do its work. When the bags are warm, it’s bath time. Use one bag to wash, the other to rinse.

The water in my bag is more tepid than hot, but things start to get miraculous when I sit in it, pull the plastic up to chest level, and remember backcountry baths past. Where are the goose bumps, the screaming from ice-water shock? How come I don’t want to run to the sleeping bag and go into fetal position? The bath is so not-horrible that there’s time to sink into it, to splash and look around at the meadow, the trees on the far side, the mountains over the trees. In five minutes the garbage bag is kicking the ass of every outdoor spa in the West. Here, in a sack of Sierra bathwater, is the entire Camping-with-Carole-Latimer experience: It could be miserable, except she’s figured out a way to make it more like a week at Canyon Ranch.

Speaking of which, isn’t this sushi night? ����

“People don’t realize how much dead space there is in a pack. You learn to stuff the pots with food and squirrel away the cheese.”
—MARK HARVEY, AUTHOR OF THE NATIONAL OUTDOOR LEADERSHIP SCHOOL WILDERNESS GUIDE

“I did start to consume a bit of Mountain Dew towards the end. Other than that, I guess I’m naturally full of energy. Fourteen hours a day was not that hard.”

���ϳԹ��� correspondent Mike Steere profiled GoLite, an ultralight camping-gear startup, in the December 1999 issue.

There’s no excuse like the year 2000 for upping the adventure stakes and draining the old twentieth-century bank account. At least that’s the message outfitters are sending, judging by the outlandish itineraries—and price tags—being offered up of late. And though you may have missed your chance to shell out $36,000 for Odyssey 2000 (a 20,000-mile, 45-country, 366-day bicycle trip taking off on January 1, 2000), there are still plenty of lavish ways to commemorate the end of an age.

• Ah, the Concorde. Fast, sleek, sexy in that seventies kind of way—and arguably worth every penny of the $55,000 Abercrombie and Kent is charging for its retro-chic “Supersonic Safari.” For three weeks passengers will be whooshed at 1,000 miles per hour through the African skies, deplaning to take in the lions and ibex in the Serengeti and to bob under the spray of Victoria Falls. Cocktail hours and flowing champagne raise the glamour quotient, and fellow passengers will all be, according to Abercrombie and Kent, “discerning travelers.” The tour departs February 11. Call 800-323-7308 for details.
• When the Russian economy shriveled, so did the rubles funding its national oceanography program. Undaunted, ingenious scientists hit on another means of subsidizing their subaquatic research: wealthy Western tourists. As the highlight of an $18,950 voyage through the Azores, outfitter Zegraham DeepSea Voyages (in association with the Russian Academy of Sciences) is taking undersea adventurers 7,875 feet below the surface of the Atlantic in a $25 million research submersible-cum-pleasure-pod. (Just like Mir, but underwater!) You’ll marvel at spewing hydrothermal vents, eyeless shrimp, and lethargic albino fish. “You may be able to see a five-foot-long tube worm, but it’s not a guarantee,” says Zegraham’s Chris Ostendorf of the nine-hour dive. Tube worms or no, everybody gets to keep a souvenir video—all in the name of science. Zegraham is running only two of these 13-day Azores tours, leaving September 16 and 23. Call 888-772-2366 for details.
• For the well-heeled goth, Creative ���ϳԹ��� Club is offering the “Land of the Walking Dead” tour. A relatively modest $5,000 includes travel to an undisclosed village in Indonesia’s remote South Sulawesi (undisclosed to “protect the village from tourists,” according to CAC owner Charlie Gibbs) to join an annual festival in which wrinkled, embalmed corpses of long-interred ancestors are dug up and carried back to the village for a cleaning, a blessing, and a fresh wrap. Activities include the bloody machete slaughter of water buffalo and pigs, followed by a race: The strongest and most agile village men sprint back to the burial grounds, carrying the dead. “In the end it’s really about making friends,” says Gibbs. The two-week tour, which also includes a little sunbathing in Bali, leaves in August. Call 714-545-5888 for details.

Beyond livestock-packed buses and vanishing money belts lies a whole other set of daunting travel woes, like errant tornadoes, insurgent guerrilla armies, and drugproof diseases. These more serious hazards are not necessarily reasons to deny your hankering for adventure. But do check out what’s going on where you’re going (e.g., this is not the year to visit Chechnya) and educate yourself on State Department travel warnings (202-647-5225; ) before heading into uncertain territory. Below, a selective roster of adventure-travel destinations where you might get more than you bargained for.

DISEASE OUTBREAKS/ HEALTH THREATS

Solomon Islands: An island traveler’s biggest worry used to be UV-cooked skin—a blessing compared with the mutating strains of drug-resistant malaria being freighted around the South Pacific by mosquitoes. The World Health Organization lists 101 countries affected by malaria, but the Solomons (along with Vietnam, Papua New Guinea, and Myanmar) are considered “high risk.” So be sure to choke down oral mefloquine with your mai-tai, add topical deet when you slather on suncreen, and spend your nights under bug-proof nets.

Malaysia: First came England’s mad cows, then Hong Kong’s tainted chickens. Now it’s the pig’s turn to wreak a little havoc. More than 100 Malaysians have died from a previously unknown disease, the Nipah virus, which is thought to be transmitted through the consumption of pork. Take a pass on bacon when you’re visiting.

Kenya: With the rainy season comes Rift Valley Fever, a virus transmitted by the Aedes mosquito and in the meat of infected animals. Until a vaccine is available, use insect repellent religiously, and subscribe to vegetarianism for the length of your trip.

POLITICAL INSTABILITY

Myanmar: When the draconian Burmese government declared 1996 “Visit Myanmar Year,” it managed to woo some 200,000 foreigners to ogle its golden pagodas. But repression and paranoia are hard habits to break. Last September, a 28-year-old British woman was sentenced to seven years of hard labor for singing revolutionary songs in public (she served just over a month, thanks to British diplomatic efforts), and some human-rights groups urge tourists to take their dollars elsewhere. If you go, stay off your pro-democracy soapbox or be prepared for trouble.

NATURAL DISASTERS

Ecuador: When Guagua Pichincha blew its top in October, blizzards of ash coated Quito. Since then, the 15,092-foot volcano has continued to rumble at random, belching cinders over the city and dusting nearby trekking routes. The exhalations are expected to continue for several years, as are the power outages and the particle-choked fallout, which occasionally disrupt flights to the Galápagos. Also keep an eye on Tungurahua, near the town of Baños—at press time, an eruption was imminent.

LAND MINES

Cambodia: With one land mine for every two of its 11 million people, Cambodia is a world leader in mine-infestation. A national effort is in the works to uncover and destroy mines in the most populated areas, but it could take decades to complete. Locating the devices, however, isn’t a problem: They currently litter many roads, rice paddies, and forests. “If you visit, don’t even walk off the road to pee,” warns Susan B. Walker, government relations liaison for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.

TERRORISM/ANTI-U.S. THREATS

Uganda: Ever since a group of Hutu rebels slaughtered eight unsuspecting tourists on a gorilla-tracking expedition in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest last March, Uganda has struggled to coax foreigners back into the woods. The latest strategy: a government-sponsored entourage of soldiers, armed rangers, and machete-wielding trackers that will accompany tourists on their excursions. (The Ugandan president himself travels with less protection.) Still, in-park overnights are considered unwise as rebels continue to bunk in the jungle.

CRIME/RANDOM VIOLENCE

El Salvador: The bloody 12-year civil war ended in 1992, but during peacetime this country has developed one of the world’s highest crime rates. The war left many combatants jobless and armed, and hence robberies and carjackings of foreigners in former military zones are frequently reported. Travel after dark is strongly discouraged by the U.S. State Department. Still, surfers flock to the famous point break at La Libertad, where consistent five-foot swells run 300 yards to shore. Most hotels padlock their gates at sundown, but come morning, surf’s up again.

True adventure involves a certain measure of unpredictability. Who better to educate us on handling encounters with the outlandish than Gõran Kropp, the Energizer Bunny expeditioner and self-proclaimed “Crazy Swede” who in 1996 rode his bicycle 8,580 miles from his homeland to Mount Everest, summited without oxygen, and then cycled back home. We recently tracked down the 32-year-old phenom in a remote corner of Scandinavia (where he is training for the next two endurance feats on his world agenda, a solo ski traverse from Russia to the North Pole and a 7,400-mile sailing and skiing expedition to the South Pole) to solicit his advice on adventure travel. Heed his wisdom at your own risk.

That bicycling-to-Everest stunt was pretty impressive. Do you recommend such an intense experience for all adventure-seekers?

No. That was just my personal protest against all these huge expeditions and all this high-altitude Sherpa stuff. If you need this kind of help, maybe it’s good to try a shorter mountain.

Which takes priority when you plan a trip: the activity itself, or the cultural experience?

The culture and religion are important, but that stuff is a bonus. Still, I want to see as much as I can—you only have one life to live. If you have two lives, it’s a bonus.

Having passed through countless countries, any advice for breaking the language barrier?

Use English. It works, no problem. If not, you can also do a lot with gestures—like when you need the toilet.

What’s your philosophy on expedition training?

On an expedition, you often don’t eat for two or three days, but you still have to perform. I try to have the same circumstances while I’m training as I would up on Everest, or wherever. Hard physical training without proper food or energy in my body.

What about equipment? Do travelers need the most high-tech stuff?

It’s better to go back to basics. I had fancy lightweight wheels on my bike, and on the Asian roads they became shaped like—what do you call it—an olive. I had to take a bus 180 miles to Tehran to fix them.

How should travelers cope with stress on the road?

Just remember you’re on vacation and you’re supposed to have a nice time. It’s OK to call home and tell your mother to send your favorite biscuits.

How long does it normally take for a person to go a bit loony out there?

It’s not the amount of time; it’s your troubles. Once I was in the countryside of Pakistan enjoying my lunch, and a huge crowd popped out from houses to look at the Western guy with his bicycle. They were standing right in my lunch! One of them took my map, so I took it back. Another one pulled me up by my underwear, and it got to pieces. Then he tried to hit me with his fist, and I got furious and hit him hard in the head. It was like a Tyson match. I thought I would be dead, but everybody ran away.

Having been through that, did you learn any lessons about avoiding unpleasant social situations?

Now, every time I have a lunch break, I make sure to take the first guy I see and hit him hard in the head. [Laughs.] Just kidding.

Above the lifts, Bridger’s infamous ridge, called The Ridge—hey, people are plainspoken out here—adds 400 skiable acres of steep rock-wall chutes (among them the dauntingly named Deviated Septum) and alluvial snowfields. (Avalanche transceivers and a buddy are required.) Warren Miller’s early extreme skiing stars grew up here. But for all its muscle, the place is incredibly low-key. Bridger is a nonprofit run by a committee of dues-paying locals determined to fight off corporate takeovers, preserve the base area from condo-mania, and keep skiing affordable. Right on. Every year on the second Friday in January—the anniversary of Bridger’s grand opening in 1954—you can ski for ten bucks. If you decide to stay a few days, check out the Powderhound Package: four nights’ lodging plus four days’ skiing for an extremely thrifty $150.

Don’t get the wrong idea, though; there’s nothing wrong with pampering yourself. Just do it Montana-style, taking a few leisurely days to explore some outstanding, (slightly) flatter terrain. Get in the car and head east on I-90, and then pick up U.S. 89 south at Livingston. After 45 miles of the state’s most dramatic mountain scenery, turn out of Paradise Valley into Tom Miner Basin and up to the classy, yet rustic, B-Bar Guest Ranch. On the northern edge of Yellowstone in the western part of the Absaroka Range, the B-Bar offers spectacular gladed steeps as well as 25 miles of trails groomed by—get this—Suffolk Punch draft horses. If you’re really bushed, you can skijor behind the horses; it’s like waterskiing, only colder. And in keeping with the backwoodsy feel of the place, the lodge is small (it sleeps 34), and the food is homegrown and chemical-free.

OK, enough of all this plush stuff. It’s tele time. Retrace your steps to Bozeman and head west on I-90 to Three Forks. From there, go north on U.S. 287 to Helena and work your way out 24 miles northwest of town on Green Meadow Road to Marysville and a down-home hill called Great Divide. The four lifts at Great Divide creep, and you’ll be looking at the same view all day—the rounded hills of the Big Belt Mountains. Get over it! You’ve landed in telemark turn–honing heaven: After a nice snow, the peripheral terrain between runs like Big Open and Hi-Voltage lovingly mimics the backcountry, with varying steeps, deep untracked snow, and mature trees. Plus there’s a bit of kick and glide at the top and bottom just to keep you honest. On weekdays, lift tickets cost $5 an hour, $24 for the day, and the place is postapocalyptically empty. You’d think the local free-heelers would be all over it, but there’s no one here. Ha! Don’t tell them.

While you’re in the neighborhood, check out the unassuming Alice Creek Ranch, a quick, 46-mile drive on Montana 279 over Flesher Pass and west to Lincoln. Here, on the edge of the Scapegoat Wilderness, $8 will buy you a day pass to 25 miles of skate-groomed trails, and you can rent a modest cabin that sleeps up to six. For an extra fee, the owners will snow-cat you to nearby untracked slopes for tele or alpine skiing through the rolling, Douglas-fir dotted landscape.

Your next stop is the town of Anaconda, famous for several things: an old smelter smokestack taller than the Washington Monument, a very strange black-sand golf course designed by Jack Nicklaus, and the beautiful, snow-drenched Pintler Mountains. To get to the peaks, jump on U.S. 12 west out of Helena, pick up I-90 south, and then take Montana 1 to the Discovery Basin Ski Area. A few years ago, this operation doubled its size by bringing lift service to its steep, north-facing backside. The back bowls and chutes stay blessedly ungroomed all year. By March, the bumps are big as half-ton Fords. The gentle front side is ideal for perfecting your fakeys and 360s. Then you can hit the half-pipe. You’ll see guys wearing Carhartts and you’ll ride vintage lifts, one cranked up so fast that it’s like watching laundry fall off a clothesline. But no problem: The lift ops will learn your name and pick up the pieces.

On the other side of the Sapphire Mountains, west of Anaconda, is Lost Trail Powder Mountain, considered the premier powder sink in the state. (To get there, take I-90 going east and follow it to I-15 south. Pick up Montana 43 and head west to the Idaho border.) Straddling the state line at 7,000-plus feet, the slopes here funnel in the flakes—300 inches a year—from steroidal storm systems in both the Pacific Northwest and central Rockies. Even better, the tiny operation—three double-chairs and a rope tow—is closed three days a week, which means the stuff just sits there, waiting for you. “We haven’t done a lot of long-range marketing,” declares Bill Grasser, who’s owned the place for 30 years. “We like it like this.”

It’s nestled in the Bitterroot Mountains, so the views are underwhelming, but the trees and chutes will either keep you grinning or grimacing all day. If Lost Trail feels like it’s in the middle of nowhere, that’s because it is—even Lewis and Clark couldn’t figure out the terrain, hence the name. None of the nearest towns—Hamilton, Darby, and, across the state line, Salmon—boasts a population bigger than the Broadway IRT subway on Sunday morning. You might even get lonely. Full-day tickets are only $19.

It’s finally time to head back to Bozeman, but just before you get there, one more detour. Pick up U.S. 191 south and follow it to Big Sky Resort. I know, I know, we said this was a guide to mom-and-pops. So we lied. You’re in western Montana; you can’t leave without skiing Big Sky! It’s big, it’s bountiful, it has steeps off Lone Mountain that will make you cry. Lift tickets are a pricey $52, but consider this your one chance to splurge. If you really feel like indulging, stay at the luxe Lone Mountain Ranch for some serious cross-country skiing and gourmet-food eating—elk medallions and chocolate bread-pudding cake—on your days off. The ranch’s 40 miles of skate- and classic-groomed trails skirt a subdivision now and then, but guides and instructors can lead you up and down the nearby wilderness slopes of the spectacular Spanish Peaks or into Yellowstone, where, if you’re lucky, you’ll cap off your few-frills Montana ski adventure by spotting a moose. Just be sure your dog is up to the challenge.

���ϳԹ��� correspondent Florence Williams lives in Helena. She profiled Eustace Conway in September.

Traveling Montana’s backroads in winter requires well-honed Emersonian self-reliance skills. Invariably, your cell phone quits just before an elk forces your SUV into a snowbank. So unless the idea of cannibalizing your ski buds appeals to you, buy a shovel and throw it in the trunk with a sleeping bag and a stash of Clif Bars.

Getting There: Fly directly to Bozeman’s Gallatin Field so you’ll be fresh to battle Bridger’s Ridge Hippies for powder turns in the morning. Delta (800-221-1212) routes flights from Salt Lake City, Northwest (800-225-2525) from Minneapolis–St. Paul, and Horizon (800-547-9308) from Seattle. Dial the Airfield Manager (406-388-8321) for a list of local car rental agencies, most of which offer everything from Subarus to Suburbans. Ski racks go for around $6 extra per day.

Lodging: To take advantage of Bridger’s $150 Powderhound Package, call the hill at 800-223-9609. At the B-Bar Ranch (left), two nights’ lodging, meals, and skiing will run you $400 per person, double occupancy. For reservations, call 406-848-7523. If one day at Great Divide isn’t enough (it won’t be), the Helena Chamber of Commerce (406-442-4120) can provide a listing of local hotels. But take heed: A cabin for six at nearby Alice Creek Ranch (406-362-4810) will set you back only $75. By this point, your body will be screaming for a Montana Whirlpool—otherwise known as hot springs. The Fairmont Hot Springs Resort lets you soak twice, sleep twice, and ski twice at Discovery for $130 per person (800-332-3272). Ski two days at Lost Trail and spend two nights at the Camp Creek Inn Bed and Breakfast (406-821-3508) for $84 per person. Two days’ skiing and two nights’ lodging at Big Sky (800-548-4486) runs $169 per person, double occupancy, in early January. A weeklong cabin-stay at Lone Mountain Ranch (800-514-4644) costs $2,600 for two, $1,665 if you’re solo, and includes meals and skiing; one-day ski passes cost $12.

The locals who ski the Gunflint Trail System in northern Minnesota face an unusual predicament. “By April we get tired of immaculate, groomed trails,” says cross-country ski lodge owner Scott Beattie, “so we have to go crust-cruising in the Boundary Waters instead.” Fortunately, those of us who live farther afield can ski the Gunflint’s 126-mile spiderweb of cross-country runs without suffering any such ennui. Credit an average of 111 inches of chalk–like snowfall a year and temperatures low enough to keep it on the ground from late December through the end of March. Add state-of-the-art grooming machines that carve skating and classical tracks of all skill levels and grind even the chunkiest of crud to perfection. The result: some of the smoothest and most beautiful tracked nordic skiing this side of Telemark, Norway.

Anchored by seven North Woods–chic lodges, the Gunflint system begins at Pincushion Bed & Breakfast, three miles north of Grand Marais off Cook County Road 12. Though isolated from the larger Gunflint network, parts of this southern, 15-mile circuit are worth a quickie ski, especially the 4.8-mile Pincushion Mountain Loop. Huff your way to the summit and take in a 360-degree ridgeline view of Lake Superior to the south, the rugged Sawtooth Mountains to the west, Superior National Forest to the north, and on a clear day, Isle Royale National Park to the east.

Twenty-four miles farther north is Bearskin Lodge, a secluded settlement of cozy log cabins and trailside tepees (above left), and the gateway to the 36-mile Central Gunflint system. Any reasonably fit skier could stay for a week to explore this bounty, but obsessive-compulsives will be happy to know they’ve reached only the tip of the snowy iceberg: A three-mile ski brings you to the 17-mile Banadad Trail, the longest groomed wilderness ski route in the United States and the link to the vast, 58-mile Upper Gunflint network. That’s 111 miles of connected trails that roll through pine- and birch-studded forests, around frozen mountain lakes, and across more than a few new snowfields created by a deadly thunderstorm that downed an estimated 12 million trees last July.

Cross-country skiing may be the region’s winter sport of choice, aside from hockey and gorging on lutefisk, but there’s no shortage of other hibernal pastimes—snowshoeing, dogsledding, ice-fishing, and sleigh riding, among others. Obligingly, the Gunflint Trail Association’s “Guest of All” program allows visitors to stay overnight in one lodge while partaking of activities at the other resorts along the way. But regardless of how you choose to break a sweat during the day, the true test of North Woods valor comes with the evening sauna: He who rolls in the snow longest wins.

SNOW HOW:

For a list of resorts and prices, call 800-338-6932. Boundary Country Trekking (800-322-8327) offers lodge-to-lodge, yurt-to-yurt, and lodge-to-yurt outings: You ski, they provide the skins. Three-night trips start at $382 per person. To ski Banadad and Pincushion you’ll need a Minnesota ski pass, $10 for the year, available at the Pincushion Lodge or Backcountry Trekking; for the privately run Central and Upper Gunflint Trails, day passes are sold at area lodges for $10.

In the heart of British Columbia’s 330,000-acre Glacier National Park, midway between the towns of Revelstoke and Golden, on a road that twists among the granite spires of the Selkirk Mountains, lies Gunsite, a parking area with a large avalanche gun—the only hint at what lies beyond. Here you’ll want to pull over. Now you’re poised for an in-depth exploration of Rogers Pass, quite possibly the finest patch of backwoods downhill skiing in North America. What determines backcountry greatness? Four factors, all of which Rogers has in spades.

1. The White Stuff: More than 360 inches of blissfully dry fluff settles down here each winter. My first taste of the rarefied crystals came several winters ago when I dropped into a run called Lookout Notch and was instantly swallowed by a billowing cloud, the flakes glinting like mica in the sunlight, my tracks deep as gopher furrows. The conditions were so fine that my partners, whose snow vocabulary would daunt an Inuit, declared it one step beyond powder—a talc-like exquisiteness called pooder. Poo, for short.
2. (Relatively) Easy Access: At Rogers, you gain your first foot of vertical when you step out of the car. From Gunsite, you’re within striking distance of runs like Dome Glacier and the wondrous Seven Steps of Paradise. Three miles down the road at the Glacier Park Information Center lies the trailhead to Ursus Minor Basin, Balu Pass, and Grizzly Shoulder, each offering nearly 3,000 vertical feet of continuous slopes that can be tackled in an energetic half day. Just make sure you bring your chains so you can get out when you’re done.
3. Serious Terrain: The three vast valleys of Rogers Pass—the Asulkan, the Illecillewaet, and the Connaught—are graced with everything from wooded glades to smooth bowls and immense steeps. And the runs are seemingly bottomless. Out here, the notion of crossing someone else’s tracks borders on heresy.
4. First-Rate Shackability: Intrepid souls can set up camp if they like, but most will want to leave the dirigible-size backpacks at home. Rogers Pass features four cabins run by the Alpine Club of Canada that can handle 12 to 24 skiers and come equipped with wood-burning stoves, firewood, propane cooking stoves, and lanterns. The Asulkan cabin ($12.50 per person per night) is ideally situated at the base of the Seven Steps run—about a four-hour trip south from the Gunsite parking lot—and has large picture windows. Attention, car campers: Wheeler Hut, which sleeps 24 ($15 per person), has a full kitchen and is an easy 20-minute ski from the parking lot; I’ve seen people skinning up to it with a case of Molson under each arm.

Rogers is so expansive that the superior snow will undoubtedly go much further than your provisions, so the trip usually takes on an organic rhythm: Ski back to Gunsite, drive to town for a resupply, head back in to the bowls. Repeat. Follow this simple plan and you, too, may discern the Tao of poo.��

SNOW HOW:

Rogers Pass, 200 miles east of Calgary, is skiable from December to April; March has the lightest snows and best weather. Warning: This is wild, unforgiving terrain. Skiers inexperienced in backcountry touring techniques should hire a guide. Canmore, Alberta–based Yamnuska Inc. (403-678-4164) leads trips for $200 per day for one person, plus $35 for each additional skier. To blaze your own trail, order the composite Rogers Pass map from Mountain Equipment Co-Op ($12.50; 403-269-2420). Avalanches are a constant danger, so probes, shovels, and transceivers are essential; for a recorded avalanche bulletin, call 250-837-6867. For cabin rentals, call the Alpine Club of Canada (403-678-3200).

So I tuck my nose in my collar and remind myself of the two perfectly sensible reasons for risking midair hypothermia on this particular day. First, I’m at Vermont’s Jay Peak, home of the best lift-served tree-skiing in the country. Second, it’s the first decent storm of the season on a mountain that gets an average of 332 inches of cold powder straight out of Alberta every year—more snow than many resorts in Colorado see. For those two reasons alone, I will shiver, I will bury my face in my gloves, I will endure. Three years of western skiing have made me a sissy; it’s time to toughen up.

Teeth chattering like maracas, I leap from the chair, straighten my semi-frozen torso, and swing my arms and legs to push some blood into the more numb extremities. Suddenly I see four ponytailed telemarkers skating uphill. Nobody skates uphill at a ski area unless they’re going somewhere special, so I file in behind them. Stealthily as Mohawk scouts, the free-heeled four dip under a rope and ski into the woods. What else can I do but follow?

This, after all, is woodland-skiing paradise. Sitting just seven miles from the Canadian border in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, Jay Peak is blessed with 20 pristine glades ranging from moderately difficult terrain (Beaver Pond Glade, Buck Woods) to sphincter-clenching steeps (Valhalla, Vertigo)—2,153 feet of heavily wooded vertical in all. A silviculturist might look up the mountainside and see ordinary northeastern hardwoods, but New England’s hard-core skiers and snowboarders know that the trees of Jay are like no others on earth: not so tight you can’t ski the fall line, not so loose you forget you’re in the timber. And thanks to a Herculean cleanup after 1998’s infamous ice storm, the forest floor is clean, clean, clean, which means you can go fast, fast, fast.

And I realize, perhaps a little too late, that that’s exactly what I’m doing now. While the storm rages on the trails, the snow falls softly among the trees, which enhance my depth perception and boost my confidence despite the whiteout conditions. The first few turns aren’t really turns at all, but sheer drops off a series of four-foot-high steps. By the fourth step I’m going much too fast, blurring past balsam firs, sugar maples, birches, and telemarkers.

It almost makes me want to return to the fetal position. Then I remember the advice a better skier once gave me: “Don’t look at the trees, look at the spaces between the trees. Ski to the exits.” Logic and experience tell me my exits will run out, but here on Jay they don’t. I float through the natural slalom course until my quads burn and a decidedly less Zen mantra enters my head: “Ski good or eat wood.” Not relishing the thought of tapping sap from a sugar maple with my teeth, I cut hard to stop, lean on my poles, and suck arctic air into my lungs between laughing fits. So what if I can’t feel my face on the next chairlift up? I’m going back into the woods for more.��

SNOW HOW:

Jay Peak Resort is completing a $3.6 million expansion project, including construction of the Northeast’s longest high-speed quad chairlift, that should be running by opening day in mid- to late November. To help fund it, prices will jump by five bucks to $49. However, Jay accepts Canadian currency at par for lift tickets, so convert your cash and save 30 percent. For details on lodging and tickets call the resort at 802-988-2611; for guided backcountry tours ($45 per person) call the Jay Peak Ski School at 802-988-2611, ext. 8298.

There are a lot of stomping grounds in St. Regis, but the least trampled and most rewarding may be the ten-mile section of the Nine Carries Canoe Route that starts at the Saranac Inn area—so-called because it was once the site of a large resort—four miles from Lake Clear Junction on Route 30, behind the state fish hatchery. Take the unplowed road (there’s only one) to Little Clear Pond and head north on the wind-packed snow of the western shore—better footing than the clear ice of the open lake—and pick up the carry path to St. Regis Pond. Walk on the softer, deeper snow of the rolling half-mile trail; it’ll be slower going, but you’ll get first crack at unsullied deer, otter, coyote, and ermine tracks. When you reach the lean-to on the headland to the west of the pond, you’ll get your first glimpse of 2,873-foot St. Regis Mountain, looming to the north. Plot your summit assault later; the task at hand is to tromp over St. Regis Pond, Ochre Pond, and Fish Pond and through the 150-foot old-growth-pine stands in between. Once you’re past the frozen water of Fish, march another three miles southeast over the state fire road and you’ll be back at the hatchery. Scramble the final two miles north on Route 30 and you will reach your cave-like lair—or at least the closest approximation, Hohmeyer’s Lake Clear Lodge.��

SNOW HOW:

Snag a copy of Adirondack Canoe Waters: North Flow, published by ADK, before you go. Blue Line Sport Shop (518-891-4680) in Saranac Lake, 15 minutes from the trailhead, rents Sherpa snowshoes for $10–$15 per day, depending on the model. Doubles at Hohmeyer’s (800-442-2356) cost $110–$125; lakeside suites with fireplace and hot tub go for $135–$250.

Pitcher and his resort were virtually going it alone at first. Snowboarding took nearly a decade to earn acceptance from most ski areas. (At this point the only antiboarding holdouts in the U.S. are Alta, Aspen Mountain, Mad River Glen, and Taos.) But Wolf Creek’s freakishly profuse 465-inch annual snowfall (the most of any Colorado resort) and steep backcountry terrain (1,604 feet of vertical drop) earned it high marks from snowboard pioneers who trekked to contests there back in the eighties. These days Kalei and top pros like Todd Richards and Kevin Jones can’t get enough of Wolf Creek and its consistently bountiful early-winter conditions. “I’d rather just stay here,” says Kalei, “and know I’m going to get it good.”

Good is most definitely an understatement for Wolf Creek’s enormous annual snow crop. It lies in a horseshoe-shaped cluster of mountains in the San Juan Range that serves as a dumping ground for moisture-rich clouds as they race out of Baja across the southwestern United States and smash into the Continental Divide. Wolf Creek encompasses just 1,500 acres, with 30 miles of trails, but the quality ride more than compensates for the mountain’s diminutive quantity: It’s riddled with gladed runs that break out into the deep landings of bowls and cliff drops. Knife Ridge, a patrolled, 500-acre backcountry area where radical behavior is encouraged rather than cited, will soon have lift access (pending Forest Service approval), adding considerably more expert acreage to Wolf Creek’s mix.

After eight hours of spinning heelside off basalt ledges, your knees will inform you it’s time to pack it in. Wolf Creek lacks overnight options, but The Spring Inn, a hotel and spa just 24 miles down the road in Pagosa Springs, provides healing waters. While the Bogner-suited crowd up north jostles for macchiatoes, you’ll be woozily ensconced in a hot tub, anticipating the next day’s glorious powder run and hoping to bump into Kingsbury, off fiddling with one of Kalei’s old freestyle boards on a far-off knoll where Mrs. Pitcher can’t find him.

SNOW HOW:

Wolf Creek (800-754-9653) is an hour’s drive from Durango, five hours from Denver. Lift tickets cost $37 for a full day, $27 for a half-day. Soak your mogul-throttled bones at The Spring Inn (doubles, $77; 800-225-0934).