Alone at his home in Montrose, Colorado, on a June afternoon in 2020, Travis Lorentz sat down to watch the nearly 40-minute video of his son’s death. Travis knew the video was going to break his heart. But he also hoped it would help answer some crucial questions.Ěý

“I have to know that I have found everything that I can find and that I have seen everything that I can see,” Travis said. “Because it’s not gonna matter to anybody more than it does to us.”

Three months earlier, a National Park Service ranger named Robert John Mitchell had killed 25-year-old Gage Lorentz while he was driving through Carlsbad Caverns National Park, in southeastern New Mexico. Gage was unarmed, and the authorities had provided no clear answers to his family’s questions about how he ended up dead during a traffic stop. Instead, Travis was relying on Mitchell’s Axon body camera, which had been attached to his chest.Ěý

The video opened in silence, the result of a camera setting that preserved the footage from 30 seconds prior to when Mitchell actively started to record, but without sound. In the upper right corner of the screen was a time stamp: 5:07 P.M., March 21, 2020.Ěý

Gage was already in the frame, standing in a gravel turnaround near a picnic area, about ten feet in front of the ranger. He was wearing a light camo jacket; his brown hair, short on the sides and floppy on top, blew in the wind. In the background were two pickup trucks, one white and one silver. Travis thought his son looked upset, which would make sense, since Ranger Mitchell would later tell investigators that he had detained Gage for speeding down a dirt road leading to the turnaround, knocking over a park sign in the process.

When the sound finally came on, Mitchell was asking Gage to move toward a nearby log fence, which he did. Mitchell then told him to spread his feet, which were out of the frame. As Gage complied, he looked at the ranger and gave a little shake, bopping his head to Pitbull and Kesha’s “Timber,” which blasted from the white truck’s speakers. When Mitchell didn’t respond, Gage followed up by saying, “Come on, that was pretty good timing!”

Mitchell, 53, would later tell investigators that Gage “wasn’t behaving like most people would behave when they’re dealing with the police,” and that from the start of the encounter, he had suspected Gage was “using something.” But the medical examiner found no drugs or alcohol in his system. To Travis,Ěýit just looked like his son was trying to defuse the situation by making light of it.Ěý

Mitchell told Gage to turn around. Gage shook his head, and the ranger started backing up while drawing his Taser. In response, Gage told him, defiantly, to “get real with it, other one.” It was an odd response, and Mitchell would later point to it as justification for the shooting, saying that Gage had “a fixation” on his gun. But a different interpretation of the moment might be that Gage had simply mounted an ill-advised challenge to Mitchell’s authority.

Either way, Gage stayed put, standing by the fence and shaking his head. Suddenly, without any kind of warning, Mitchell raised his arms and fired the Taser. At the same moment, the video cut out. When it resumed, the time stamp showed that 25 seconds had passed. It’s not clear why there is missing footage; the manufacturer blamed equipment failure, but Gage’s family is seeking access to the camera’s metadata for analysis by their own experts.Ěý

Gage was no longer in the frame when the video returned. The first few seconds showed Mitchell on the ground, clutching his Sig Sauer .45 with both hands, and Gage’s hand right next to the gun. Then Gage’s hand disappeared from the frame, and within moments the deafeningly loud sound of a gunshot overwhelmed the camera’s microphone. When viewed in slow motion, the video showed Gage’s shadow next to Mitchell, followed by Mitchell pivoting and firing a shot into Gage’s thigh. The next frames showed Mitchell grabbing Gage by the jacket and firing a second shot into his chest from point-blank range, possibly while Mitchell had him pinned to the ground.Ěý

That was as far as Travis made it.

“It took me several weeks to get as far as I did,” he said. “And it destroyed my chances of sleep for months and months and months.”

The post The Park Service Has a Ranger Problem appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

The night before Paradise burned, Kathryn and Doug Houston had been up late dealing with a malfunctioning fire alarm. So Kathryn was feeling tired as she headed out to the barn to feed the chickens and her old horse, Gus, at around 7 A.M. It was a cold and windy morning, November 8, 2018, and she was hoping for rain; it was late in the year for it to be so dry. She barely made it out the door when she spotted a plume of black smoke off in the distance, snaking up out of a canyon to the northeast—the first wisps of what would become the deadliest wildfire in the U.S. in a century. Kathryn immediately turned around and headed back inside.

“In November, we weren’t thinking we were going to get a big fire,” she told me. “I just thought, This is not right.”

The Houstons’Ěýhome satĚýon a dead-end country road two miles south of , a small town in the heavily forested foothills of the Sierra Nevada. The two-story white house, with its gabled roof and covered porches, reminded Kathryn of the farmhouses she had grown up around in Kansas, but the propertyĚýwas very California as well, with an in-ground swimming pool and a massive solar array. Perched on a ridgeline between two steeply sloping canyons, it offered views all the way out to the rich agricultural lands of the Sacramento Valley, roughly a thousand feet below.

Doug was inside, working out in their home gym, as he usually did in the mornings before commuting to his job as chancellor of the , about an hour andĚý15 minutes away in Yuba City. He was scheduled to be at a trustee’s meeting that day, but as soon as Kathryn relayed the news about the smoke, he emailed his office to let them know he might not make it in.

The Houstons, both in their early sixties, were not the kind of people to panic in the face of an emergency. Kathryn, a veterinarian, had been raised on a farmĚýand took pride in her planning abilities. Doug, who served as an Army combat engineer earlier in life, still approached most situations with an eye for tactical advantage; his colleagues liked to tease him about his habit of referring to everything as a mission. He turned on his phone’s police-scanner app and heard emergency officials discussing whether they might need to issue an evacuation order for Paradise. The couple immediately started getting ready. They knew that fires could move quickly in their area, and they didn’t want to be caught off guard.

Doug went outside to take down the shade sails suspendedĚýover the patio, while Kathryn gathered up all their important documents in case they needed to leave, then went through the house videoing their belongings to support an insurance claim if their home burned down. Before long, the Butte County sheriff started for the northern parts of Paradise, and by the time a burning piece of Tyvek floated into the Houstons’Ěýyard around 10 A.M., it was clear the fire was moving rapidly in their direction.

SoonĚýDoug heard a fire crew over the scanner calling for a bulldozer to push abandoned cars out of the roadway.

“At that point, it hit me that they weren’t able to get people out—and they weren’t going to be able to get the fire crews in,” Doug said.

There were only a handful of roads in and out of Paradise, and they had become as virtually all of the town’s roughly 27,000 residents tried to escape. Doug knew they had a decision to make: leave immediately and hope they wouldn’t get caught in traffic, or commit to staying and defending their property.

“I remember actually assessing at that point. The horse pasture is safe—it’s mineral dirt. We’ve got the pool. The pumps are both running. The generators are running,” Doug said.Ěý“OK, we’re not going anywhere. We’re staying right here. We’re going to stay and defend.”

The post The Future of Wildfire Fighting Is on All of Us appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

Kellee Edwards rode inĚýa small plane for the first time in 2012. Now, only six years later, she flies planes to remote locations on her own Travel Channel show, . Edwards is theĚýfirst black woman to host a regular season show on the network. She broke into the overwhelmingly white and male world of travel television with over-the-top credentials, like pilot certification, scuba diving certification, and soon, a motorcycle license.

şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř contributor Stephanie Joyce asked her about her journey from YouTube to cable TV, her intense travel philosophy, and her only half-joking interest in being “the most interesting woman in the world.”

Kellee Edwards’s Story is a Trip

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OUTSIDE: How didĚýyour first flight in a small plane go?
KELLEE EDWARDS: It's very much stripped of the comforts of the airplanes that most people are used to flying on. The G-forces when turning the plane had my stomach so topsy-turvy I felt like I was gonna throw up. And then the turbulence. I'm feeling sick. The plane is shaking. I hope this guy knows what he's doing. He looks pretty young. And then the plane smoothed out, the air got smooth, I looked out, and it was just beautiful. Then the pilot said, “Kellee, I'm gonna let you take the controls.” When I felt that power in these two hands, turning the plane slowly—the fact that that plane was moving on my accord, oh my gosh. That was the best power trip that I had ever felt in my life. I forgot how I felt a minute prior.

When we landed, I was like, “So how do these classes work, and when are we available to start, and can you tell me how I get rid of the sickness?”

What’s the pilot community like?
I remember the first time I went to a meeting at Santa Monica Airport, I walked into that room and they stopped talking and said, “Are you lost? Are you looking for something?” I said “No, I'm here for the pilot meeting.” As soon as that meeting ended, I swear, half the room came up to me: “So what are you doing here? What are you flying? How long have been flying?” It was an overwhelming, supportive, curious moment that I will never forget. They said, “Let me know if there's anything I can do to help. If you ever want to fly my airplane, let me know.”ĚýYou know why? Because they want to see more people like me. The older white guys are tired of seeing each other too, you know? So they want to encourage a new generation of pilots, and they really get excited at the thought of more of them looking like me.

So yeah, with that said, they hand over their keys and say “Have at it, have fun! Bring it back safely! You got insurance, right?”

You’re also a scuba diver.
It’s still freaky to me at times, to be honest with you. I jumped into the ocean for the first time on a snorkel trip in the Cayman Islands. I lost my breath when I got in the water because it was so deep. I went down for like 30 seconds longer than I wanted to be, and I came back up like, “This ocean is huge and this is scary and do I get back on the boat?” No, stay in the water. Okay. Get comfortable. Put your face in the water, look at something and I look down and I saw three scuba divers, and they looked so comfortable and they were like leisurely and they were not panicking like the girl who was 30 feet above them.

When I came home I was really bothered by the fact that I was freaked out by jumping in the water. I was like, “How can I get over that phobia? I should learn to become a scuba diver.” Learning to scuba dive—it's pretty serious. I had some difficulty with it. But I became an advanced open water diver, so I went from a person who freaked out from snorkeling to a person who does night diving and deep diving.

How have things changed making the jump from YouTube to the Travel Channel?
It's very interesting what's happening, having the platform that I have in my community right now. Because I went from being the weird girl that, you know, “Only white people do that” or “You're acting like a white girl,” to “You're so cool,” or “I've never seen anyone who looks like me doing the things that you do.” So I went from being the underdog and the weirdo to the representation that others needed to see to know that they can do it too. I really love the support that I'm getting from my community now.

What’s next?
I’m getting my motorcycle license in a few weeks, and no one knows because everyone always says “Don't do that, that's dangerous.” Well if I listened to all those people I would not be a pilot, I would not be an advanced scuba diver, I would have not traveled the world solo. It won't be a sport bike, even though I love and I have a need for speed. It will be a cruiser like a Triumph or a Harley. I'm adding that to the repertoire because I have air and sea covered, and I just really want to cover land on the road, so that's going to be the motorcycle. I got it all mapped out.

Your life reminds me of those Dos Equis commercials… “the most interesting man in the world.”
I mean, I can kill a Dos Equis commercial, okay? I would love to be the most interesting woman in the world. I will land an airplane. I will ride a motorcycle to the ocean. I willĚýscuba dive in the freaking ocean. I'll come up and I'll climb up on a ship. That's not a bad legacy to leave.

Listen to our conversation with Kellee Edwards on the şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Podcast.

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For most elite athletes, training to be the best at their sport is enough. Then there’s Greek-American runner Alexi Pappas, who made a feature-length film while preparing to compete in the 2016 Summer Olympics. Called , it was released a little over two months before she lined up at the start of the 10,000 meters in Rio and tells the story of a hyper-focused runner who is sidelined by an injury while preparing for the Olympic trials. Pappas wrote and directed the movie with her fiancé, Jeremy Teicher, and played the lead character, Plumb Marigold. Most recently, she produced a series of fictional-ish short films as an artist-in-residence at the Pyeongchang winter games.

On a recent episode of the şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Podcast, correspondent Stephanie May Joyce spoke with Pappas about her many interests, her athletic drive, and her support systems. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Alexi Pappas Dreams Like a Crazy and Runs Like One, Too

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OUTSIDE: Your dad introduced you to running and brought you to the 1996 Olympics, in Atlanta. Do you remember much of that?
ALEXI PAPPAS: I remember crowds, and I remember being in awe of Olympians, and feeling like that is a really worthy goal. And I watched a man run the marathon who would later become my college coach, Mark Coogan. It's so cool to know now I was there as a six-year-old watching someone who one day give you the confidence to get there yourself.

To go to the place where the best athletes were gathering expanded my ceiling for what existed in the world. I love window shopping for that sake—I like seeing what exists. And the Olympics are just the pinnacle of athletic achievement. Once you see it in real life, you're like, “This is a thing I can touch.”

You ran cross-country at Dartmouth. Did you imagine you’d be a professional athlete back then?
I knew that I had a competitive—not even just an itch, but I knew inside of me was a mind of a champion. I just was not physically there yet, and that was tough because I was the worst on the team and the worst in the league and not good enough for the travel squad. My dad just was like, “Keep showing up every day,” and I was like, “Okay.” That's kind of how he's always been, and not in a bad way, in a really good way.

After you graduated, how did you support yourself while paying off student loan debts and chasing your Olympic ambitions?
There's that sense of like, I'm betting on myself, and my body, and my potential. I was always making sure that I was being financially responsible. I made sure I could support this dream. I had local food sponsors for a while. I had a beef sponsor with the local butcher shop, fish sponsor with the local fish shop, a veggie sponsor with this farm, a coffee sponsor, a bread sponsor. Did I name them all?

That sounds very Eugene.
Yeah, it's very Eugene. Eugene is such a wonderful place to be because they supported my dream in that way. And I realized I don't need a sunglasses sponsorship at this point—I can't eat sunglasses. You know what it was? I really knew my goal. My goal was to train for the Olympics, and I wrote down, with thought, what I needed to get there. And it wasn't too much money. It was food, shoes, coaching, teammates, and good trails. Eugene provided all of that.

In Tracktown, Plumb’s dad is obviously proud of her running accomplishments, but she also accuses him of living his life through hers. Is there an element of that to your relationship with your dad in real life?
I think it's a bigger deal for Plumb because she has been so laser-focused. However, they are both the proudest, most supportive dads. I think as a teenager we have to somehow figure out how to not mistake our parents’ pride for pressure, and to know that they'd probably be proud of us if we were pursuing something else. My dad just wanted me to stay busy—I think that was the most important thing to him.

When did you first become interested in theater and performance?
Always. Always, always, always. I think running is a performance, so I'm always performing. When I was little, I did a lot of theater, and I've always loved it. I think my mom liked to do those sorts of things too. It was a gift to be alongside Rachel [Dratch] and Andy [Buckley] and everybody else in Tracktown. Those are certainly people I admire and look up to. Just like when you're running next to someone you admire you are elevated by them—as long as you feel like they want you to be there. I felt that you can grow from being around people who are at the top of their game. I just think it's very inefficient to not be extremely brave and push on yourself in these opportunity moments.

What was it like to run for the Greek national team in Rio?
Oh man, Rio was awesome. I was peaking physically, so I was ready to run well. I felt like my body was in line with my mind, which is so special. It was so fun to be among the best and feel like I truly belonged there. My coach prepared me by saying, “You know what, you're probably going to get lapped.” I think everyone but three people got lapped in that race because it was a world record-breaking 10K. But he said, “You can also run out of your mind—a personal best, a national record, even if you get lapped.”

So it didn't so much feel like me against her against her against her. It was like, all of us charged, and it was really beautiful.

Listen to our conversation with Alexi Pappas on the şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Podcast.

The post Alexi Pappas Lives a Life of Performances appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

It was close to midnight on February 9, 2017, when the Destination left its Alaskan harbor for the last time. The lights of Unalaska, the regional fishing hub, slowly faded into blackness as the vessel made its way out into the Bering Sea and cut a path north toward the Pribilof Islands, a tiny archipelago in middle of the vast emptiness between Alaska and Russia. The crew planned to drop off extra bait on Saint Paul, the northern island, before heading out to the crab grounds.

It was a trip everyone aboard had made dozens of times. The Destination’s captain, Jeff Hathaway, had been a crab fisherman for 40 years and probably spent as much time in the area between Unalaska and the Pribilofs as his own backyard. He usually drove most of the way, with the other five crew members taking shifts on wheel watch at night.

The wind was starting to pick up from the northeast as a cold front pushed down from the Arctic. Saint Paul sits 275 miles northwest of Unalaska—a day’s trip for a boat traveling at a steady clip. As the Destination headed that way, it was riding in the trough, broadside to the wind and waves, taking all the spray and weather on its starboard side. That, along with a full load of crab pots on its back deck, would have exaggerated the boat’s side-to-side roll. By the time dawn broke, the Destination’s course had taken it almost 100 miles from land. It was cold enough that nearby boats reported accumulating a thick layer of ice from freezing spray.

At 1:30 p.m. on February 10, the vessel’s automated tracking system showed the Destination turning to the northeast, pointing its bow into the waves, and slowing down. Jogging, as it’s called, is a way to make a boat more stable. It’s common when the crew is out on deck or when there’s a problem, like loose chains on the pot stack. In winter, crabbers will sometimes jog as the crew breaks ice off the boat to keep it from getting top-heavy. But clearing any significant quantity of ice takes hours, and the Destination was back on its way in just 20 minutes.

The vessel kept a steady course until 10:10 p.m., when it slowed down and jogged for a second time. For 30 minutes, the Destination faced into the wind at a slow crawl until, as before, it continued on its way toward the islands. It was strange for the boat to jog twice in such quick succession, but if something was wrong, the crew didn’t radio anyone about it.

Around 5 a.m. on February 11, the vessel reached the southern tip of Saint George Island, the southernmost of the Pribilofs. It would have been impossible to see the island in the dark, but the wind and seas would have calmed in its lee. In rough weather, boats often shelter behind the island, but the Destination didn’t stop. An hour later, it was back in the open ocean, maintaining its northwesterly course toward the processing plant on Saint Paul. The boat was on track to arrive around 8 a.m.

The Destination had just barely cleared the island when it slowed down and turned to the northeast, once again jogging into the waves. For two minutes, the vessel continued traveling in a straight line at three knots. Then, at 6:12, the bow abruptly swung hard to starboard, pointing the boat almost due east. Even though it was moving slowly by then, the sudden change in direction would likely have caused it to pitch to one side. That jolt would have been the first sign for most of the crew that something was seriously wrong—at that hour, almost everyone would still be sleeping below deck.

For the next two minutes, the Destination continued to spin, tracing a 270-degree arc, until the bow was facing due west—out toward the empty sea.

If anyone was in the wheelhouse at that moment, it would have been abundantly clear that disaster was imminent. Boats aren’t meant to spin like that. But there was no mayday.

Then, at 6:14 a.m., the Destination’s tracking system stopped transmitting.

The Bering Sea has a well-deserved reputation as a dangerous place. One author called it “where the sea breaks its back”—a nod to the massive storms that regularly churn across the region, bringing hurricane-force winds and multistory waves. It’s also the most productive fishing grounds in the United States, with boats hauling in more than $1 billion worth of seafood every year. The most famous of those harvests is crab, which has been dramatized in the reality television series Deadliest Catch.

In the 1990s, Bering Sea crab fishing lived up to that name. Fishermen raced each other in cocaine-fueled competitive derbies, staying awake for days on end and loading as many pots and as much crab as possible onto their boats. The results were catastrophic. During the decade, 12 boats sank and 73 crab fishermen died. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an agency not known for exaggeration, called the fatality rate “astronomical.” Even so, young men arrived in droves for fishing jobs, inspired by the extraordinary high pay—one could make $100,000 in a season. The Bering Sea was the the last outpost of the Wild West. Unalaska, which had been a small, mostly Native fishing village with a few hundred permanent residents, became a boomtown. There were almost nightly brawls at the , a bar that Playboy once ranked as the second most dangerous in America.

Then, in 2005, the same year Deadliest Catch started airing, everything changed. Fisheries managers started divvying up the catch, and each boat was given a share of the crab harvest—a quota—which it could fish at its leisure. That, combined with new safety regulations, transformed the industry. The derbies that inspired the show ended. Between 2006 and 2016, not one boat sank and just a single crab fisherman died on the job.

So when the Destination went missing, it didn’t take long for the news to spread across the fishing fleet. The reaction was almost unanimous disbelief. Hathaway and his crew were veterans of the Bering Sea. Many of them had been at it for decades. Then there were the circumstances of the boat’s disappearance—in unremarkable weather, close to land, and with no mayday. It didn’t make sense. “If I could line up the fleet of 70 boats, that boat, with that guy running it—it would be pretty high on my list of boats that wouldn’t have a problem,” says Mike Mathisen, captain of the F/V Karin Lynn, another Bering Sea crabber.

Less than an hour after the Destination stopped transmitting, Coast Guard rescue aircraft were preparing to launch for the vessel’s last known location. But the vast distances of the Bering Sea meant that it would be hours before they arrived.

Exactly one week before the Destination disappeared, the boat pulled into its home port of , after 27 days fishing for cod. It was rare for the Destination to visit town during the season, but the six-man crew was exhausted and it was Super Bowl weekend. They’d have four days on land before setting off again for the upcoming snow crab harvest.

The Destination tied up to the dock at the east wall of the harbor. At 110 feet long, the blue-and-white vessel dwarfed most of its neighbors. In earlier decades, Sand Point—a town of 1,000 that feels considerably smaller, with few paved roads, one restaurant (Chinese), and no stoplights—had been home to a fleet of large Bering Sea fishing vessels. But industry consolidation sent most of them 3,000 miles south to Seattle. It was a point of pride for the local community that the Destination still called Sand Point home, and everyone knew the crew, even though most of the six lived elsewhere in Alaska or in the lower 48.

Thirty-six-year-old deckhand Darrik Seibold, who’d spent about seven seasons on the Destination, was the closest to a full-time resident. A former high school football player nicknamed Superman because he was, in the words of a friend, “one strong son of a gun,” Seibold moved to Sand Point in 2009. He’d struck up a relationship with a local woman, Amber Karlsen (nee Gundersen), and in 2014, they had a son, Eli. Seibold had been a nomad for most of his life, often picking up and leaving with little more than his sketchbooks and journals, but Eli grounded him. The relationship with Karlsen had recently hit a rocky patch, according to his family and friends, but Seibold still spent most of his time in Sand Point with Eli. He liked to take his son four-wheeling in the tundra near town and hiking on the island’s big, sandy volcanic beaches. There wouldn’t be time for those things on this quick stopover, though: There was lots of work to be done on the boat.

The first order of business was to rerig the Destination’s 200 pots—seven-by-seven-foot rectangular cages of steel and webbing—for crab season. The crew worked on the dock, looking out over the brown rolling hills and white-sand beaches of Unga Island, part of the Shumagin archipelago, at the far eastern end of the Aleutian Island chain. During winter, it’s common for the wind to whip through the passage between the islands at almost hurricane force, but it had been a relatively mild year, and the weather stayed calm as the crew worked its way through the stack of pots. Since 2005, most boats had cut down on the number of pots they carried, to save weight, but Hathaway liked his 200-pot configuration. It had been his go-to for years.

Seibold worked a little more slowly than usual—he had tweaked his hip the previous month, the latest of a long string of fishing injuries. Just after Eli was born, Seibold caught his hand between a dock piling and the steel hull of a small boat, crushing his thumb and index finger. It took surgery and metal pins to fix it, but he was back fishing as soon as he could make a fist.

As a kid, Seibold had bounced back and forth between his mother’s home in southeast Alaska and his father’s home in Washington. In Alaska, he spent time on his grandfather’s charter boat, catching halibut and salmon. After high school, he tried various jobs but eventually fell into fishing full-time—the camaraderie and athleticism were like the football teams he had played on. It was also good money: When the fishing was going well, Seibold could make $30,000 in a few weeks. He hoped to make at least that during the upcoming crab season. Even so, Seibold had started talking about leaving the industry.

“He would go to the Bering Sea and be gone three months at a time,” Karlsen says. “It was too long for him when Eli was growing up. Eli was his life.”

Seibold wanted to find a job that would allow him to come home to his son at night—maybe carpentry or construction. He was going to start looking as soon as the season ended.

Fully loaded, the Destination left port on the morning of February 8, then headed west down the Aleutian chain toward Unalaska. The weather had stayed relatively nice, and the boat chugged along at eight knots.

In Unalaska, the crew needed to pick up more bait—the squid, cod, and herring fishermen use to attract crab. The Destination’s bait freezer was already full, but word was that the fishing had been slow out on the grounds and boats were burning through their reserves. The Destination’s owner, a fisherman turned entrepreneur named David Wilson, told the crew to stock up before heading out. Stopping in Unalaska would add a day to the trip and extra weight to the already heavy boat, but without bait, there would be no crab.

Before arriving in port, Hathaway called the Coast Guard. Since 1999, crabbers have been required to give the agency 24 hours notice before leaving for the fishing grounds. The rule is supposed to give the Coast Guard a chance to inspect crabbers for overloading before they leave port, but the inspections aren’t mandatory. The Coast Guard petty officer who answered the phone offered to send someone over, but Hathaway declined. He told them he’d been through an inspection before the crab season in October, although the Coast Guard has no record of that.

As the Destination switched docks in the Unalaska harbor, it passed the F/V April Lane’, headed the other way. The five-high stack of crab pots on the Destination’s back deck made Rick Fehst, captain of the April Lane’, do a double take. “They are not leaving [Unalaska] with that stack on,” he thought. Fehst had seen the weather forecast, which called for heavy freezing spray with temperatures dipping into the teens. Bad weather is a fact of life in the Bering Sea, but the spray poses particular challenges for crab boats carrying pots. The pot stack provides a large surface area for the water to turn to ice; enough accumulation can make a boat top-heavy and prone to roll over.

Fehst called his crew up to the wheelhouse for a teaching moment as the Destination passed. If he were running that boat, Fehst explained, he would ditch the top layer or two of pots. Better yet, he told his crew, he would stay in port until it warmed up. One of Fehst’s crew members shot a video of the Destination on his phone. Then everyone went back to work. Fehst didn’t hail the Destination on the radio or reach out to the Coast Guard. “It’s not my business to call a captain out,” he said. “It’s not our culture to do something like that. We all just figure if you’ve gone to the wheelhouse, you know what you’re doing [and] you’re going to make the right choices.”

He didn’t know Hathaway well, but he knew that he was an experienced mariner. Hathaway started fishing in the Bering Sea in the 1970s, after dropping out of high school, and had been captain of the Destination since 1993. Within the fleet, he was known as a perfectionist for his color-coordinated buoys and perfectly aligned crab pots. Aboard the Destination, Hathaway had a reputation for his quirks, including his habit of wearing pajamas while on the boat—usually plaid, but sometimes a pair featuring the blue and red fish of Dr. Seuss fame.

Hathaway was well aware of how dangerous the Bering Sea could be; he had almost lost his wife, Sue, to it. The couple met on a fishing boat in 1979, when she was a cook and he was an engineer. They married in 1984. The year before, Sue was aboard the 98-foot Arctic Dreamer as it headed into port, fully loaded with crab, when a wave hit the vessel and it capsized. The six crew members barely had time to put on their survival suits and issue a mayday before the boat sank, leaving the fishermen swimming for their life raft. Sue went back to Alaska for one more season before giving up on fishing for good. She and Hathaway lived in Port Orchard, Washington, where they raised their daughter, Hannah Cassara.ĚýĚý

Hathaway kept fishing, taking over as captain of the Destination in 1993. AsĚýCassara grew up, she wrote letters and postcards to her dad during his three- and four-month absences. During his infrequent visits to port, Hathaway would call home on scratchy connections and tell Cassara how peaceful it was to throw off the lines and head out to sea. In recent years, since the advent of satellite phones, he made a point to call home every night. There were times over the years when Hathaway tried to quit fishing and find work closer to his home in Washington. But none of those efforts—including a failed oyster business, ostrich farming, and a gig patching asphalt—ever stuck. “His passion was definitely fishing,” Cassara says. “It was what he knew best.”

From Unalaska, Hathaway called Wilson, the Destination’s owner, to let him know they would be leaving for Saint Paul that night. During the call, Hathaway mentioned that the stuffing box—the watertight seal around the propeller shaft—was leaking, but that they had tightened down the bolts and it seemed like the problem was fixed. Leaky valves and clogged filters are common problems for any commercial fishing vessel, but the Destination had also been plagued by some bigger mechanical issues in recent years. Infrequently but unpredictably, the rudder would stick hard to one side, causing the boat to suddenly veer in one direction until the engine could be restarted. It was enough of a concern that Wilson had the whole steering system flushed when the Destination was in Seattle for repairs in 2016. They needed to make a small repair to the exhaust system, and then they would be on their way.

With the boat tied up at the dock, Hathaway went to pick up spare parts for the exhaust system. While he was gone, Seibold’s brother, Dylan Hatfield, stopped by. Eight years Seibold’s junior, Hatfield was also a crab fisherman and had worked on the Destination until 2014. The two were recognizably related but had radically different personalities: Seibold was reserved, while Hatfield was a self-described social butterfly. He bounced around the boat, chatting with his former crewmates. The atmosphere was normal, Hatfield said later. The men were “laughing and telling stories and having a good time.”

The group included Larry O’Grady; at 55, he was the most senior deckhand. He’d been fishing almost as long as Hathaway and liked to regale the crew with stories about the glory days. The boat’s engineer, Charles “Glenn” Jones, 46, was another veteran, having fished on and off for decades. He was recently married and had three little kids. The other deckhands were Ray Vincler, a 32-year-old local raised in the tiny village of Akutan, just one island over from Unalaska, and Kai Hamik—the youngest, at 29—a square-jawed former college baseball player from Arizona.

In contrast to the high-drama interpersonal clashes often portrayed on Deadliest Catch, the Destination’s crew mostly got along. They liked to play pranks on one another and kept up a running joke about O’Grady allegedly perming his hair. In captioned “NOT DEADLIEST CATCH,” Hamik spliced together footage of the crew pulling pots with video of Jones showing off his dance moves on deck. The crew respected Hathaway. “Jeff was dad,” Hatfield said. “That was what we called him on the boat.”

During Hatfield’s tenure, Hathaway would sometimes gather the crew in the galley to show old videotapes from boats he’d worked on in the 1970s. He would point at the video periodically and say, “That guy’s dead, that guy’s dead, that guy’s dead.” At the time, it seemed to Hatfield that knowing fishermen who had died was a rite of passage.

Bill Prout was in the wheelhouse of his crab boat, the F/V Silver Spray, getting ready to leave Saint Paul harbor, when he heard the Coast Guard’s first callout for the Destination over the radio. It was around 6:30 a.m. on February 11, and the broadcast noted that the Destination’s emergency position-indicating radio beacon () had been activated near Saint George.

At first, Prout didn’t think much of it. He had been in the wheelhouse and hadn’t heard a distress call from the vessel. Also, he knew the Destination by reputation, and it wasn’t the kind of boat likely to have problems. EPIRBs are designed to activate on contact with the water, communicating to the Coast Guard that a vessel is in trouble even when a boat is out of radio range. In practice, however, EPIRBs are often set off by far less dramatic circumstances—someone chipping ice off the boat or hitting the wrong button. Prout figured the Destination’s crew had knocked the EPIRB accidentally. He didn’t change course. The Silver Spray was 23 miles from the Destination—at least two hours away.

It wasn’t until 6:54 a.m. that the Coast Guard called Prout directly to ask if he could hail the Destination.

“Destination, Destination, Destination, this is Silver Spray, receive us on Channel 16.” There was no answer. Prout tried again and again. After the third time, he started worry. He plotted a new course toward the Destination.

Along the way, he turned the Silver Spray’s floodlights on and off, hoping to see the flash of a strobe or the shadow of a hull. But other than the reflection of his own lights in the water, everything was dark. Prout arrived at the Destination’s last known position around 9:15 a.m., three hours after the EPIRB alert.

When dawn finally came, the first thing Prout spotted was a pair of buoys. Then he smelled the diesel and spotted the fuel slick. “That’s when we really started looking for a life raft,” he said. The Destination, he knew, was gone.

More than four hours had passed since the initial distress signal. In 32-degree water, someone wearing street clothes can’t survive longer than a few minutes. Even in a fully sealed immersion suit, which boats are required to carry, most estimates of survival time are between four and six hours.

Soon, the Coast Guard aircraft arrived. The helicopter was carrying not only a rescue team, but also a cameraman from Deadliest Catch. He filmed as the helicopter crew directed Prout to the still-transmitting EPIRB. It floated alone on the surface of the water.

Hannah Cassara had just come in from feeding the horses at her Washington home when her mother called. It was 8:30 a.m., and this was already Sue Hathaway’s second call of the morning. Cassara’s heart sank at the ring. Her uncle was in the hospital with complications from surgery, and the earlier phone call had been to let Cassara know he was in critical condition. For her mom to call back so soon, Cassara knew the news must be bad. “I thought my uncle had died,” she said.

When she picked up, Cassara heard Sue crying on the other end of the line.

“Hannah, they found the EPIRB on the boat,” Sue said.

For a moment, she couldn’t process what her mother was saying. Hathaway had missed his usual evening call the night before, and Cassara had been hoping to hear from him in the morning so they could talk about her uncle. It had never even occurred to her to worry about her dad.

“He must be in a life raft,” Cassara thought. “They do their drills. They know the safety stuff. The safety stuff is so important to Dad.”

Panicked, she and her husband packed up their car to head 100 miles north to her parents’ house. As they drove, Cassara kept expecting the Coast Guard to call and tell her they had found the life raft. She was waiting to hear her dad’s voice coming over the line from far away, just as it always had.

It wasn’t until several hours later that Hatfield, Seibold’s brother, heard the news. His morning flight out of Unalaska had been canceled, and he was back on his boat, taking a nap, with his phone off. Hatfield woke up to his captain knocking on the door. Rubbing away the fog of sleep, Hatfield asked him what was happening, and his captain broke the news that the Destination’s EPIRB had gone off.

“I knew right then they were gone,” Hatfield told me.

The question that remained: Why had the boat sunk? There was no obvious explanation for its sudden and fatal disappearance.

The Coast Guard searched the area of the Destination’s last transmission for days, hoping for a miracle, or at least a body. When the Silver Spray retrieved the EPIRB, the crew found that it had been taped to a coil of rope, a highly unusual setup for an emergency beacon. “Someone rigged it!” a crew member shouted as they hauled the EPIRB aboard. But after searching more than 6,000 square miles, the Coast Guard failed to locate a life raft or anyone in a survival suit. “It’s a different type of grieving,” Hatfield told me last fall. “There’s no closure, no body, no grave. They’re just gone, dust in the wind.”

Understanding why the boat had sunk would take longer. In April, the Coast Guard discreetly coordinated a search for the wreck using sonar but didn’t find anything in the vicinity of the Destination’s last transmission. On a second attempt in July, with an expanded search area, they . The Destination was resting on its port side in 250 feet of water, more than two miles from where it last transmitted. Grainy sonar images, taken from the surface, showed the boat was upright and intact, although it appeared to be missing the back half of its pot stack.

The Coast Guard sent an underwater vehicle to take photos of the wreck, but the current was too strong and kept pushing it off course. One of the only clear images it managed to capture was of a small section of the stern of the vessel. Beaming through the murky waters were big, white letters: DES.

In August, the Coast Guard convened a to determine what happened, in hopes of preventing similar accidents. Investigators called on 44 people to testify over ten days.

There’s a recurring theme in most disasters, especially those at sea: It’s never a single thing that dooms a vessel. Rather, a series of small decisions and circumstances together add up to a catastrophe. Those factors often start piling up long before the actual accident.

A few serious issues came to light during the testimony. First, there were the 200 crab pots that the crew loaded in Sand Point. According to the Destination’s stability book—a manual for how to properly load a vessel—200 pots was well within its operating limits. But the manual hadn’t been updated since 1993. The naval architect who wrote it estimated each pot’s weight at 700 pounds. That may have been accurate at the time, but it wasn’t in 2017. When the Coast Guard pulled up one of the pots from the wreck site, they found it weighed closer to 850 pounds. With the extra weight of the pots, plus the additional bait, the Destination was already tens of thousands of pounds heavier than accounted for in its stability book—and that didn’t include the weight of ice accumulation from the freezing spray.

When a boat has too much weight up high, it starts to lose stability. When that happens, the boat’s roll becomes more pronounced and the steering can become sluggish. The less stable the boat, the less it takes to knock it over—a big wave, a sharp turn, a sudden change in speed. Former crew members testified that it was unusual for the boat to have jogged twice on its way to the islands. If the Destination was already having problems, icing would have exacerbated those issues.

Finally, the Destination’s life raft was stored behind the wheelhouse in a cradle with an automatic release. Like the EPIRB, the life raft should have automatically deployed on contact with the water, but rescuers never found it. Did it deploy and sink? Or did it never deploy at all?

The Coast Guard is expected to release the findings of its investigation sometime this year; that may provide some more definitive answers. But there are still likely to be outstanding questions—like why there was no mayday.

The day of Seibold’s memorial in Sand Point was cold and rainy, but dozens of people came out anyway. It was April 16, Seibold’s birthday—he would have been turning 37. Instead, the community gathered on the beach to bid him farewell. Karlsen had built a small boat and attached a Superman cape to the mast. Eli added a basket of Easter eggs that he wanted to send to his father. He knew that his dad’s boat had sunk, but he hadn’t quite yet grasped what that meant and kept asking Karlsen to go find Seibold.

As Karlsen stood on the beach, she thought about how Seibold must have felt once he realized he would never see Eli again. “He just wanted so bad to spend his life with Eli,” she said. “Eli was just his pride and joy.”

She thought about what she would tell her son about his dad, once he was old enough to understand, and wondered if Eli would someday want to follow in Seibold’s footsteps and go to sea. Karlsen knew that when it came down to it, she probably wouldn’t have much say in that decision. “When he gets older, [Eli is] going to want to know about all of this, and his dad,” she said. “He’ll make that decision himself.”

Hatfield, Seibold’s brother, spent the summer after the accident fishing salmon in the more protected waters of southeast Alaska. But when fall came and king crab season neared, Hatfield found himself staring down an empty suitcase as he tried to talk himself into going back to the Bering Sea. “I couldn’t even get myself to pack,” he said. He had been having nightmares for months about what might have happened in those last few minutes on the boat. He imagined how it must have felt as his brother was pulled down into the depths. Even so, Hatfield didn’t want the dreams to end.

“It’s kind of nice to see everyone’s face,” he explained.

The day he was supposed to leave for the crab season came and went, Hatfield’s suitcase still empty.

“My heart’s just not in it anymore,” he said.

Stephanie May Joyce produced the podcast “F/V Destination, Do You Copy?” for şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř. is an illustrator based in New York.

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Sarah Gerhardt is not a professional surfer, but among big-wave ridersĚýshe needs no introduction. In 1999,ĚýGerhardtĚýwas the first woman to drop in at Mavericks, the monster break off the Northern California coast.ĚýJust a few weeks later, Quicksilver held the inaugural surf contest there,Ěýcalling itĚý“Men Who Ride Mountains.”ĚýIn fact, no woman was invitedĚýuntil 2016,Ěýwhen the contest was forced to add a women's heatĚýin order to receive a permit from the California Coastal Commission.

Being aĚýpioneer in a male-dominated sport is never easy, butĚýĚýGerhardtĚýhad a particularly challenging road. Growing up in San Luis Obispo, California, she and her sister cared for their mother, who suffered from severe muscular dystrophy, while their father was at sea for months at a time as a merchant marine. The family often struggled financially and she was bullied in school. But Gerhardt’s dad gave her a surfboard and wetsuit for her 13th birthday and she found refuge in the ocean.ĚýOn a trip to Hawaii in college, she fell in with a crew of surfers that included big-wave icon Ken Bradshaw, andĚýquickly found herself tackling bigger and bigger waves.Ěý

Now a chemistry professor at Cabrillo College, Gerhardt continues to ride huge swells.ĚýOn a recent episode of theĚýşÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Podcast, sheĚýspoke with correspondent Stephanie May JoyceĚýabout her mentors, her hecklers, and what it’s like to ride mountains. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.

The Woman Who Rides Mountains

Listen to our podcast interview with Sarah Gerhardt

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OUTSIDE: Were you immediately hooked on surfing as a teenager?
SARAH GERHARDT:ĚýI had a love-hate relationship with surfing. The equipment I was riding was terrible, so it was very difficult for me to learn and I was on my own and just kind of thrashing around in some pretty brutal conditions. Sometimes I would get really frustrated and just, “I never want to surf again,” and then I'd be back at the beach and be like, “I'm gonna try it again.” So I wasn't hooked immediately on surfing, but I was definitely immediately hooked on the ocean. I loved the way it smells on a big day. It's actually a little ozone smell, it smells kind of sweet.

Surfing was a way to be part of that experience, so I kept at it. And then eventually when I did figure out how to stand up on a wave and go down the line, the feeling was just like flying on water, and I just kept wanting that feeling over and over again.

What drew you to big-wave surfing?
There’s the social component. I did have a lot of negative energy from men. I got a lot of heckling, like “You’re a chick, you can't surf.” When I went out on to bigger and bigger waves, all those men who were naysayers were on the beach kicking dirt, and I could leave them behind.

I could leave everything on the beach. I could leave how crazy life was, I could leave poverty, I could leave illness, all my worries. Being out and in bigger surf requires so much attention and so much focus. It really kind of distills life down to its experiential essence and just for those brief moments in time—maybe an hour, or maybe ten seconds on a wave—it was just the kind of thing that kind of liberated me, so that I could go back to the beach and face life.

You surfed Mavericks for the first time in February 1999. What was it like?
I’d really gotten slapped around trying to paddle out.ĚýI'd seen how terrifying it is. So I had open expectations of whatever's going to happen is going to happen.ĚýI was just kind of fooling around, like, “Hey, is this where I sit? Is this where I go?” Colin Brown, who's become a lifelong friend of ours, was saying, “Actually, this is the perfect spot, and here comes a wave, and you're going to catch it.” So I spun around and caught a wave right then and I was completely blown away, it was such an incredible experience. I kicked out and said, “I want more of that.” So that's what I did—I went and got more.

The next swell that broke was in March, and my husband and I paddled out together. It was kind of big and stormy, and it wasn't crowded. There was a photographer on a cliff that I didn't notice, which is good, because I actually don't like being in front of a camera. I was able to go out and free surf, and I got some more waves that day. It was a really amazing experience.

I had a message on my phone when I got home from that session, from Surfer magazine, wanting to do an interview. I was like, “How the heck do they even know I got a wave?”

What is like to suddenly be a surfing celebrity?
I wasn't prepared for the attention. I didn't want it and didn't really know how to handle it. At the time, there was an online forum called Agroville, and a lot of people had pseudonyms, and so they could hide behind anonymity. A lot of people started ripping me apart. They were saying said I was stupid and I couldn't surf and and I was going to get worked and would I ever come back.ĚýI read those commentsĚýand I never read it again.

I did get positive feedback, too. A lot of people were really excited to see that a woman had surfed Mavericks. The interesting thing is even that was difficult to deal withĚýbecause I've never thought of myself as amazing. I'm just a normal human beingĚýand I've spent a lot of time with my face just in the dirt, thoughĚýI've picked myself back up and kept going.Ěý

Did you ever consider becoming a pro surfer?
I thought about it at the end of high school andĚýbeginning of college, but there were very few opportunities for professional female surfers then. There were some women who were making a living on the tour, but mostly it wasn't really an option.

I got to surf with the top women in the world when I was in Hawaii. A lot of them were incredible surfersĚýbut they didn't have any sponsors because they didn't look the part. They weren't a size twoĚýwith long blond hair and big boobs. I don't look like that, either, so there was no way I was going to get a sponsor. I saw the struggle, and it was just sad. And I had other had other aspirations anyway.

You were included as an alternate for an all-maleĚýMavericks competition in the early 2000s. How did you feel about that?
I was last on the list—there wasĚýno way I was going to get in the contest.ĚýBut it was definitely a nod and recognition that I'd been out there, and I appreciated that honor. Interestingly enough, I didn't feel like I was worthy of it. I didn't feel like I could stand up in the same waves that men could and in the way that they were charging, so it felt a little awkward.

Do you feel differently now?
I think even after being out there for 20 years, it's still a man’s place. When there are 50 people in the water, and maybe there are only one or two women in the water, it doesn't feel like I belong there. I have a lot of really great friends that I just love and respect, and I'm excited to watch them surf. So on one hand I feel like this is my tribe, but on the other hand, I'm still an outsider and I think that it's probably awkward for the guys when they're all having fun, and they're carrying on with their banter, and, “Oh, here comes a woman. Okay, everybody tighten up, and start acting nicer.” I don't know that I'll ever experience a time when it's not like that.

There just aren't that many women involved in big-wave right now. I don't know how long it's going to take for that to change, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to stop going out. It just might always feel a little awkward.

Are you disappointed that the organizers have scrapped the Mavericks contest both years sinceĚýthe all-women's heat was announced?Ěý
I have mixed feelings about the contest. I've never been interested in competing against other people. I'd rather just go free surf. My heart isn't set on on the event happening, but I'm really looking forward to womenĚýhaving their moment to shine at Mavericks.ĚýAnd I am definitely the oldest person on the list, so I also feel like I'm ready to pass that torch onto to the next generation.

Listen to our conversation with Sarah Gerhardt on the şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Podcast.

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On October 4, Joel Clement, a career employee at the Department of the Interior, . In the letter explaining why, he didn’t hold back, citing Secretary Ryan Zinke’s “resume of failure” and accusing him of wasting taxpayer money and betraying the American people.

Until June, Clement was in charge of the Office of Policy Analysis, where he worked primarily on the effects of climate change in Alaska. Then he was abruptly transferred to a position in the office that audits royalty payments from companies extracting oil and coal on public lands—an area well outside of his expertise. Clement concluded that the Trump Administration was trying to coerce him to leave the DOI, and , claiming that his reassignment was retaliation for his speaking out publicly about the danger of climate change.

şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř contributor Stephanie Joyce spoke with Clement a few days ago about his experience, how he sees the Trump Administration undermining the institutions of government, and what he wishes he’d said to Zinke. ĚýĚý

OUTSIDE: Describe the letter that outlined your reassignment.
CLEMENT: I got an email at 8 p.m.—I happened to check email because a friend said “Hey, I was just reassigned, you might want to check your email”—and the letter said something to the effect of, “We’re going to move you, and we’re going to move you to this auditing office because you have economists on your staff currently, so you must know about money and numbers and therefore we’re going to move you to an auditing office.”

It was just ridiculous. It was an attempt to make some excuse for sending me somewhere where they hoped that I would quit.

As far as I know, you’re one of the few high-ranking officials, or the only one, to file a complaint. How did your colleagues at the Interior treat you after you filed it?
Well, first of all, I think there may be others, they just haven’t been public. We don’t know yet. I’m hoping that there are others.

I took a week off after filing, and when I came back, I was nervous about going in that front door, because I didn’t have any idea how people would react. Boy, I was so encouraged and relieved. Everyone was very supportive.

I’m not going to mention any specific people because everyone is quite nervous, everyone is looking over their shoulder. I will say there were a lot of smiles and handshakes and low-key appreciation in public spaces, and a lot of people came by my office in private just to say thank you and I hope you’re doing alright and good luck.

If, as you allege, shifting personnel is a strategy to get people to quit, do you think it’s been effective at silencing the conversation about climate change within the department?
First of all, it’s unlawful. But yes, I think it put quite a chill in the Senior Executive Service, in particular. Everyone is keeping their heads down, people are not talking much about it.

Where do you see the DOI headed? What’s the outcome of all of this?
There will be more turmoil. Secretary Zinke has not demonstrated the kind of dedication to ethics that you’d hope to see, so there may be other problems for him. There are several investigations going on right now, including the ones that I’m involved with.

But the career staff are dedicated and they’re on the ball and they can get the job done regardless of the turmoil upstairs. You know, there are 70,000 people that work for the DOI and there are probably 65 political employees there right now. So, there’s only so much damage they can do to an agency with so much inertia.

That was something people talked about a lot in the aftermath of the election—that there’s a lot of inertia in the federal government and it’s hard to change things quickly. But a lot of things seem to have changed quickly, so do you really believe that?
Well, here’s why I haven’t revised my opinion: yes, there is this all-out assault and they’re trying to break down the agencies from within, particularly Scott Pruitt and Secretary Zinke, but they’re not very good at it, so they’re landing in court.

We’re seeing this over and over and we’ll continue to see it. The nullification of the Clean Power Plan is a good example. Three times the Supreme Court has decided that the EPA must regulate CO2 emissions. You can’t just stop doing it, or you’ll land in court.

They’re just sort of stalling tactics. The Administration is throwing kind of ham-fisted punches at rules and policies and laws and they’re not landing, for the most part. But you’re right, of course, that many things are changing and that’s frustrating to see.

So, in some senses, they’re not being very effective at getting things changed.
Yeah, they don’t really know what strings to pull to get it to happen. What they do know, what they’re experts in, is the kind of political language around what they are trying to do. But the actual implementation is not something that they’ve demonstrated any acumen at.

Other than reassignments.
Well, yeah, but that was just a statement as much as anything else. And it was a failure. It was widely panned as a clumsy half-effort to make their mark on the agency. There are still only a handful of people who have been Senate confirmed. They still are missing a lot of positions.

Their political strategy isn’t going to trickle down to the career folks that way. But we’ll see. Maybe they’re up to all kinds of crazy sneaky stuff and just not telling us about it.

But if the goal is to gum up the works, that’s not working well?
Right. They’re not succeeding at that, even though that is certainly the goal. What they are succeeding at is taking the scientistsĚýand experts out of the equationĚýby putting all the advisory committees on hold and so on. That's happening across the federal level.ĚýThey clearly don’t want to be challenged by people who know their subject matters.Ěý

You’ve said your reassignment sets a dangerous precedent. Why is that?
With every transition there are new priorities and people get all spun up about the changes that will happen. But if you think back to when we went from Clinton to Bush and then Bush to Obama, the priorities certainly changed in that period of time, but never has a Cabinet member come in with the deliberate intention to disable the agency that he’s leading. And that’s a really dangerous precedent. That’s a disregard for the rule of law and the will of the people and Congress. And in my view, it’s flying in the face of the Constitution. So I think it’s a bigger deal maybe than a lot of other people think, and I worry about it.

Even if someone comes in with that aim, can they really accomplish that?
I think ultimately the mission of the agency and the intent of Congress and the intent of the Constitution will win the day. But we’re going through a terrible period of churning and disappointment with the behavior of these public servants, who are clearly not serving the public.

If you actually had the opportunity to meet face to face with Zinke, what would you say to him?
I would ask him to resign, I would ask him to step down. I’ve thought about this a lot. If I got stuck in an elevator with him in the building before I left, that’s exactly what I would have said.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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