Jökulsårlón Lagoon, Iceland.

The air is cold but the water is colder, its surface gridlocked with icebergs. Slabs and hunks and blocks of ice the size of ships, houses, buses—they’re everywhere, crowded into the glacial lagoon. The icebergs are dazzling white and pale gray and a light milky blue, and striped with volcanic ash; the water is the color of dull metal. Low clouds press down. Seabirds shriek. On the far side of the lagoon, a glacier called Vatnajökull hunkers like the beast that it is: a 3,100-square-mile ice cap that sprawls over southeast Iceland, dwarfing other European glaciers. For anyone unaware that it is ill-advised to jump in for a dip, a big red sign spells out the hazards: “NoÌęSwimming—Freezing Water. YouÌęOnlyÌęSurviveÌęFewÌęMinutes.” And if that isn’t enough of a deterrent: “DangerousÌęCurrents. RollingÌęIcebergsÌęFormÌęWaves.”

“Oooh, look at all those fears!” Wim Hof says, reading the sign in mock terror. He is 61 years old and scruffily bearded, with a growly, booming voice that’s easily heard at a distance. Hof is Dutch, his accent full of rolling r’s and long vowels. There’s nothing slick about his appearance. He’s wearing surf shorts, rubber sandals, and a tropical-print T-shirt under a thin raincoat that flaps in the wind. It’s not much in the way of clothing; by comparison, I’m swaddled in so many layers I can barely move my arms. It’s about 40 degrees Fahrenheit outside, with plenty of windchill. Farther down the beach, little clots of tourists who’ve braved the sour weather look like they’re huddled together for survival.

Hof, meanwhile, is in his element. His exploits in, on, and under ice are so renowned that his nickname is the Iceman. Maybe you’ve seen photos of him standing encased in ice for nearly two hours or running up Mount Everest wearing only shorts. (He made it to 24,278 feet but had to turn back before reaching the summit due to a foot injury.) Or summiting Kilimanjaro in 31 hours—again, nearly naked—a climb that typically takes a week to allow for altitude acclimatization. Each of these activities seems like it could kill a person, but Hof’s only close call over the years happened on his first attempt, in 2000, to swim 50 meters below the solid cap ice on a lake in Finland. His corneas froze, impairing his vision, and he couldn’t find the exit hole. (He was rescued by a safety diver.)

Hof strips down to his trunks with gusto and starts heading toward the lagoon. He’s here to film promotional videos for his company, called , and his crew—three athletic men named Peter Schagen, Thor Gudnason, and Tahir Burhan—are laden with camera gear. Hof turns to me. “I’m writing a new book, you know,” he says in a low voice, as though confiding a secret. “Its title is FUCK FEAR!” (Hof does, in fact, have a new book out, but its title is .) Then he lets out a guffaw and strides across the black lava beach.

At the water’s edge, Hof stops for a moment. “You gotta swim today,” he tells me. “Yeah—it will be good! We’ll go wild! We will sing in front of everybody! And we are gonna cut the crap and the bullshit and we are gonna live!” Hof tends to make intense eye contact, as though he can see right through a person’s arsenal of half-baked fears and excuses, and he’s doing it now, sizing me up. I’m saved by Burhan, who walks up with two guitar cases. He and Hof take out their guitars and start strumming. “Do you remember how to play
 like a child
 wooahh
 that’s where I want to go, back in the flow,” Hof croons as the wind slaps at us.

Schagen signals that he’s ready with the drone, and Hof puts down the guitar. The tourists have sidled closer, drawn perhaps by the music but more likely by the improbable sight of bare flesh. The lagoon is only a few degrees above freezing; plunging into water that temperature feels like simultaneously being shocked, jabbed with needles, and squeezed in a vice. It’s a sensation that most of us try to avoid. But if you can stand cold immersion—and survive it—beyond the pain there’s exhilaration.

“Most people just think, Who is that crazy man?” Hof says. “But we’ve got to get back to the cold. Somebody has to show this.” He flings out his arms as if embracing the world at large, takes a deep breath, exhales, and walks into the lagoon.

There’s no flinching, no gasping. He submerges slowly, then strokes toward an anvil-shaped iceberg about 200 yards offshore. A seal pops its head up and glares at Hof, then makes a beeline for him, moving fast enough to leave a wake. This doesn’t look like it’s going to be a friendly encounter.

Hof, treading water, spots his companion. “Hi, Johnny!” he yells as the seal approaches. The two stare at each other for a while, and then Hof, perhaps recognizing the futility of a territorial standoff with a seal, turns and paddles back to shore. He’s been in the water for 30 minutes; when he gets out, his skin is an alarming shade of red. “Easy does it,” he says, grinning. “We’ve got all day.” He wipes himself with a towel, showing no signs of shivering. “I feel great!”

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It was a Sunday in Tonga, so the kingdom’s business had come to a halt. Stores were shuttered, traffic was quiet, even the airport was closed. King Tupou VI strolled out of his oceanfront palace and down the main street of Nukualofa, capital city of the island of Tongatapu, to attend church along with the rest of his South Pacific nation. Men wore their best sarongs; women wore taovalas—coconut-fiber aprons—over long dresses. The scene was all very ordinary except for one thing, and it was visible from the palace’s front lawn: a moored at the pier, bristling with heavy cranes, stacked with high-tech equipment, and carrying a mysterious $30 million cargo.

“Welcome to the good ship Pressure Drop,” said Rob McCallum, who stood on deck in khaki shorts, river shoes, and a polo shirt emblazoned with the emblem of the , a black shield bearing the Latin phrase In Profundo: Cognitio (“In the Deep: Knowledge”). A former New Zealand national park ranger who grew up in Papua New Guinea, 54-year-old McCallum is a legendary expedition leader. , some of which happen to be underwater, like the wreck of the Titanic. Five Deeps, however, was something even more extreme: a global mission to dive a manned submersible to the deepest point in the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic, and Southern Oceans. This had never been done before—which is exactly why McCallum’s client, Texas businessman Victor Vescovo, had set out to do it.

If you were to draw a Venn diagram of people who want to dive seven miles underwater, people with the skills to test-pilot a deep submersible, people with the means to fund the most technologically advanced ocean expedition in history, and people willing to devote several years of their life to such an expedition—you wouldn’t find many names in the middle. But Vescovo qualifies on every count.Ìę

His rĂ©sumĂ© is unusual. As a student, Vescovo earned degrees from Stanford (political science and economics), MIT (defense and arms-control studies), and Harvard (MBA). At 53, and sits on the boards of ten companies. He is the 12th American to have completed , standing atop all of the Seven Summits and skiing to the North and South Poles. (On Mount Everest, he survived what he calls a “minor avalanche” in the Khumbu Icefall.) He’s made millions reinventing industrial processes; he pilots his own Embraer Phenom jet and Eurocopter 120 helicopter. He’s conversant in seven languages. His proficiency in Arabic came in handy during his 20 years as a U.S. Navy Reserve intelligence officer with top-secret clearance, especially right after 9/11. For relaxation, Vescovo studies military history, inhales science fiction, flies rescue dogs to new homes in his jet, and retreats to a workshop in his Dallas garage, where he makes fountain pens and tends to his collection of cars. He is not someone who approaches life in half measures.Ìę

According to Vescovo, the roots of his go-big-or-go-home philosophy can be traced back to age three, when he snuck into the family sedan, released the emergency brake, and rolled the car down the driveway into a tree. The resulting crash cracked his skull in three places, shattered his jaw, broke his hand and some ribs, and provided an early whiff of mortality. “I realized that every day is precious, and you may not get another one—best make full use of them,” Vescovo says.

Yet even by Vescovo’s standards, the goals he’d set for the Five Deeps were outlandish, ranking somewhere between launching into low orbit (easier) and decamping to Mars (harder). have walked on the lunar surface, but only to our planet’s deepest spot, known as the Challenger Deep. There are reasons for this. For one, it lies at the bottom of , a 1,500-mile-long, 43-mile-wide gash in the western Pacific seabed, near Guam. To reach it, you need to dive 11,000 meters: that’s 1.3 miles deeper than Mount Everest is high, in obsidian darkness, under pressures of 16,000 pounds per square inch.

Our knowledge about the ocean has long been concentrated in its uppermost waters, the top . If you see marine life and you can name it, odds are it swims in these shallows. But the epipelagic occupies only 5 percent of the ocean’s volume. It’s merely a ceiling: the real action takes place below. Traveling downward, you pass through the twilight zone (from 200 to 1,000 meters), the midnight zone (from 1,000 to 4,000 meters), the abyssal zone (4,000 to 6,000 meters), and then finally the , named after Hades, the mythical kingdom of the dead. These waters begin at 6,000 meters and pitch down into —the vast majority of which are located in the Pacific—like the inverted summits of towering peaks. The hadal zone is the earth’s most forbidding frontier. This realm is so hard to access that it has generally seemed prudent to send robots rather than people. But hard doesn’t mean impossible.

In 1960, the U.S. Navy sent Lieutenant Don Walsh and Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard to the Challenger Deep , a sort of underwater zeppelin loaded with iron pellets and 34,000 gallons of gasoline. Five hours after its submergence, the Trieste landed on the trench floor with a thud, stirring up clouds of silt that ruined the visibility. It was ironic to arrive at such an exotic destination and then fail to see it. But in their time near the bottom, Walsh and Piccard did glimpse something long and flat swimming away—a hint that Hades wasn’t a total wasteland.

The next half-century went by in the Mariana Trench without human visitation. Then, in March 2012, filmmaker James Cameron took the plunge in the Deepsea Challenger—a torpedo-shaped, lime-green vessel designed to carry only a pilot—becoming the first person to dive solo to the Challenger Deep. “In the space of one day, I’ve gone to another planet and come back,” . (Unfortunately, that was the last trip his submersible has made. He had donated it to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and it was damaged during transport. It’s been in drydock ever since.)

To complete the Five Deeps, a submersible would need to be strong enough to withstand implosion in the hadal zone, but nimble enough to handle in rugged terrain; big enough to carry a pilot and a scientist, and reliable enough to trust with their lives, but light enough to be launched from a ship. Every wire and bolt and circuit board and battery on it would need to be fail-safe in corrosive salt water, under gargantuan pressures, and they would need to stay that way over time. This is such a tall order—and a proposition so expensive it makes Phenom jets look cheap—that no such vehicle existed. Until Vescovo commissioned one.

I hauled my duffel bag up the gangway and shook McCallum’s hand. The tropical sun blazed in a cloudless sky, glancing off a white hangar that stretched across the ship’s stern deck. Beneath this container, I knew, the most futuristic submersible ever built hunkered quietly, awaiting its next mission. Vescovo had named it Limiting Factor after an artificial intelligence in an Iain M. Banks science-fiction novel, and when I joined the ship, it had already made a run of successful dives. The Atlantic’s Puerto Rico Trench? Check. The Java Trench in the Indian Ocean? Done. The South Sandwich Trench in the Southern Ocean? Dicey but completed. And three weeks earlier, in May 2019, Vescovo had become the fourth person ever to touch down in the Pacific’s Challenger Deep, at 10,925 meters. The Five Deeps team had gone on to make four more dives in the Mariana Trench, for a total of five jaunts to the bottom of the earth within ten days. On one of those dives, the Limiting Factor became the first vessel to be certified by the , for “unlimited trips to full ocean depth.” On another, the expedition’s chief scientist, , of England’s Newcastle University, to personally visit the ecosystem he studied.

Now the expedition was headed out on its next Pacific quest: the first manned descent to the second-­deepest spot on earth. Known as the Horizon Deep, this patch of Hades is part of the Tonga Trench. In 2013, a at 10,850 meters, less than 100 meters shy of the Challenger Deep’s record depth. But the world’s ocean trenches are tumultuous places. They’re formed by colliding tectonic plates, one plate driving another downward into the earth’s mantle. This process is called subduction, and it wreaks geological havoc. Some of its effects include rattling earthquakes, volcanic paroxysms, and submarine landslides, resulting in mega-tsunamis like the 2004 nightmare in Indonesia, which originated in the Java Trench, and the 2011 horror show in Japan. Such upheavals can change the seafloor topography as huge volumes of rock shift around. And the Tonga Trench is the liveliest subduction zone of all. Part of its at the unsettling rate of nine inches per year, causing swarms of earthquakes. On the off chance that some new, yawning chasm might be found, Vescovo wanted to take a closer look. “It’s well within the margin of error,” McCallum said, raising an eyebrow. He explained that we’d be leaving for the trench the following afternoon, timing our departure to skirt a major storm. “It’s going to be a little sporty.”

Later, after traveling with him, I would become familiar with McCallum’s signature facial expression: a kind of half smile, half smirk, both bemused and concerned, happy but always scanning ahead for trouble. By the time I arrived in Tonga, McCallum had spent two years planning, worrying, juggling, hiring, and scheduling, in addition to cajoling bureaucrats around the globe for the expedition’s necessary permits. “At the moment I’m dealing with 57 government entities,” he told me.

That was the easy part.

The Tonga Trench lies 178 miles southeast of Nukualofa, a passage that would take 18 hours. Four days were planned at the dive site, making it a weeklong round trip for 43 passengers and crew. While it was in port, the Pressure Drop buzzed with preparation. Vescovo had bought the ship—a Stalwart-class ocean-surveillance vessel designed for spying on Russian submarines during the Cold War—and outfitted it for the expedition. Its facilities included multiple offices, wet and dry science labs, a machine shop, a gym, a movie lounge, an infirmary, and satellite internet access that enabled Vescovo to conduct business from the middle of nowhere.

Patrick Lahey and I stood in the hangar next to , the submersible that he and his team had built after years of doodling on napkins, dreaming of the day when someone would come along with a large checkbook and a burning desire to dive below 6,000 meters. Lahey, 56, is a ­battle-tested guy with a lively sense of irreverence and a fast engine running between his ears. He’s the president of Florida-based and, like McCallum, a familiar figure in the world of ocean exploration. If you’ve ever seen a sub that looks like something George Jetson would drive—an aquatic spaceship in which passengers sit under a clear acrylic dome—you’ve seen Triton’s handiwork. : it’s the Apple of submersible design.

Even so, the Limiting Factor was a challenge of a different magnitude. It is to shallower-diving submersibles what the Space Shuttle is to a Cessna. I looked up at the sub: at 12 feet tall and 12.5 tons, it loomed over us. To me it looked like a giant padded envelope, white and square, with tapered edges. Most of its bulk consists of a highly specialized syntactic foam—made of tiny ceramic spheres suspended in polymer resin—the only material able to provide buoyancy while remaining uncrushable. “This is a perfect titanium sphere,” Lahey said, pointing to the pressure hull near the bottom of the sub, the five-foot-­diameter cockpit where Vescovo and sometimes a passenger sit in padded leather seats. (It’s Vescovo’s custom to do the first descent alone in every new location, but after that he often brings another team member along on his dives.) The titanium is three and a half inches thick. In the deepest ocean trenches, the metal orb would be subjected to pressures equal to 292 fueled and fully loaded 747 jumbo jets stacked on top of it. The sphere’s three acrylic view ports gave it the appearance of a chubby alien’s face.Ìę

Ìę“I first met Victor four years ago,” Lahey recalled. “He said, ‘Would you build me a sub that will take me to the bottom of the ocean?’ A sub that would carry him—he didn’t care if it had view ports. I said, ‘I’m not doing that. I’ll build you a sub that takes two people, with view ports. It needs a hydraulic arm so it’s a legitimate tool for science. And it has to be certified, not a one-hit wonder, but a sub that can do thousands of dives to hadal depths and will change our relationship to the deep ocean.’” He smiled. “After all, it’s not just about getting down there. It’s about what you can do when you get down there.”

Over the past year, the Five Deeps team had been doing a lot: Horizon Deep would be the Limiting Factor’s 26th dive. All that remained to complete the expedition were this depth check of the Tonga Trench and the Molloy Deep in the Arctic Ocean (and a few dives on the Titanic by Vescovo and Lahey en route to the Arctic, because why not?). It was all going smoothly now, but for Lahey and his crew it had been a wild ride, with plenty of white-knuckle moments. There was the dive in the Southern Ocean when Vescovo’s communications systems failed and the weather closed in as he surfaced in the gloom among icebergs. On the next launch attempt the seas were pitching, and as the sub was lowered into the water, it swung like a wrecking ball into the stern of the ship. Then there was the dive in Challenger Deep when the Limiting Factor ran out of battery power on the bottom. And it was nobody’s idea of a good time when the sub’s $350,000 hydraulic arm fell off on a dive, sank into the Puerto Rico Trench, and had to be replaced. Through all this, Lahey remained undaunted. Thirty-eight years spent working as a commercial diver, submersible pilot, and submarine manufacturer had taught him that the ocean makes its own rules. “I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy,” he said. “You have to be optimistic or crazy or a little bit of both to do this, because I know there are easier ways to make a living.”

Vescovo arrived on board the next morning, coming into McCallum’s office with a gust of energy so intense that I wondered if it might knock the skull and crossbones flag off the wall. He is a slender, athletic man, six feet tall, with ice-blue eyes, blond hair that he wears in a ponytail, and a close-cropped silvery beard. Even now, in his fifties, he has the high-voltage stoke of a grommet. “So let’s see, I’m at the bottom of the deep, and I’m in my own submarine,” he said, laughing, when I asked him how things were going. “I can do whatever I want. I’m looking around, I’m seeing sea creatures—oh yeah, I’m having a blast!”

Vescovo’s enthusiasm is infectious, but there’s nothing giddy about it. His kid-like curiosity coexists with a mind that knows how to construct an aerospace factory and decipher raw intelligence on Al Qaeda. Lahey had described him to me as “a bit of a Vulcan,” equipped with fierce logic, but also “a friggin’ unicorn.” Both of these things are true.

At that particular moment, he was excited about the possibility of diving on the wreck of a . He’d been trawling online for new places to take the Limiting Factor. “­K-278,” Vescovo announced. “It’s between the Molloy Deep and Tromsö, Norway. No Westerner’s ever gone down and photographed it. I’d have to bring a Geiger counter.”

Lahey, standing nearby, stared at him over the top of his reading glasses. “Diving next to a nuclear sub—what could possibly go wrong?”

“Oh, come on!” Vescovo urged. “It’d be awesome!” He turned to me. “When I started my Navy career, I was an intel guy. That was part of my job, hunting these things.”

Vescovo wandered into the dry lab, a mission-control area where the ocean-mapping team, the Triton engineers and technicians, and the scientists worked. LCD screens lined the walls, displaying high-resolution bathymetric maps of the Tonga Trench. The maps had been made with the expedition’s state-of-the-art sonar system, welded to the ship’s hull, on the trip from Guam to Tonga.

The trench was radically steep, with sheer walls of jagged rock. A ridge reared up in the center. “It will be the most dramatic deep we’ve seen so far,” Vescovo said, looking pleased. On the maps, the Horizon Deep appeared as a yellow dot, with its measurements confirmed: the Challenger Deep still reigned as the deepest trench. If Vescovo was disappointed by the news, he didn’t show it. The chance to make record-setting dives alone may have been his grail—he knew that Five Deeps could be perceived as “one man’s ego trip”—but along the way he’d become intrigued by the expedition’s scientific goals: to find out as much as possible about what was going on down there and then share that information. An impressive team of scientists had become involved; it included Jamieson, one of the top experts in hadal biology; geologist , an authority on subduction zones; and , from the British Geological Survey. The Tonga Trench is a wonderland of rock formation, earth processes, fluid circulation—a glimpse back into planetary deep time—and Vescovo planned to take Stewart on his second dive, to survey a thousand-meter wall near the bottom. “It would be nice to age that section of the crust,” Stewart noted. “Nobody’s actually done a transect of one of these walls. At all.”Ìę

On each dive, Vescovo invited eminent ocean explorers of past decades to join the ship. Captain Don Walsh, now 88, had come along to the Mariana Trench. was here for the Tonga leg. MacInnis’s medical specialty is the physiology and psychology of extreme diving, how the human body copes (or not) with exposure to depth. He’s led ten expeditions under Arctic ice and was an adviser to James Cameron. The French submersible pilot and former naval commander served as Five Deeps’ technical consultant; he’d been in charge of the Nautile, France’s 6,000-meter sub.

As a rule, deep-ocean research is difficult and expensive, and the field is badly underfunded. In 2018, NASA’s . That same year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for ocean exploration and research. Every last crater on the moon has been named, but less than 18 percent of the ocean has been mapped with any kind of sharp detail. Precise depth measurements are especially hard to come by. The only way to measure ocean depth is with sound waves, which travel at varying speeds depending on water temperature, density, and salinity. Pinpointing depth over thousands of meters is a highly technical affair, and in most places in the ocean no one has even tried.Ìę

Before Vescovo could dive to the deepest spots in the Indian and the Southern Ocean, for instance, first he had to find them. He’d sprung for the ever made, and hired , a talented young ocean mapping scientist, to run it. (Ultimately, the Five Deeps maps will be donated to the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans, a UN body .) Triton had also built —untethered platforms the size of Smart cars and laden with scientific instruments, navigational equipment, cameras, animal traps, and bait—engineered to the same specifications as the sub. The landers took samples from the water column and enabled Jamieson to collect specimens everywhere the ship went, an unprecedented trove.

The first night at sea was bouncy, as predicted. “These are some pretty big swells,” Vescovo noted at breakfast the next morning, holding his plate to keep it from sliding across the table. “Well, the storm that’s generating them is a monster,” Lahey replied. “It’s covering half of New Zealand.” McCallum, a Kiwi, flashed his trademark smirk. “We call it winter.” I finished my toast and stood up, bracing myself between two tables. I was headed to the science lab to meet up with Jamieson and look at some deep-ocean creatures. “You’re gonna like Al,” Lahey said, grinning. “He’s a proper fucking dour Scotsman, miserable as the day is long. But he’s got a great sense of humor.”

Jamieson was in his office, a nook just big enough for a desk and two chairs. He was drinking coffee from his thermal mug, also known as the Goblet of Hades. No one had logged more time studying the trenches than Jamieson. He’s in his forties, tall, with a mop of dark hair and a tendency to glower even when cracking a joke. His uniform was a black T-shirt, baggy cargo shorts, and black steel-toed boots. I wanted to know more about what he’d found in the trenches, what the landers had brought up in their traps: critters were slurped into canisters and lured into wire-mesh boxes. “A lot of the usual suspects,” he said, and then brightened. “Oh, the Java Trench was quite good. I don’t know if you saw the video with the big sort of transparent thing with the dog head and the tentacles?” He pulled up a clip on his computer.

, at 6,000 meters. The background was ink black; the lander’s lights illuminated the foreground. Two metal bars reached into the darkness, holding a dead mackerel above a seafloor covered in soft brown sediment. A small fish hovered hopefully next to a white crinoid, a sea lily that resembled a wonky flower. “That’s a new species of snailfish,” Jamieson pointed out. “But look—” A ghostly figure appeared in the frame, sailing toward the bait. It really did look like a gelatinous basset hound head trailing a long tentacle. Inside the head there was a lot going on. It glimmered in pale shades of lilac, with twinkles of white and gold. “That’s so far scored highest on the weird-shit-o-meter,” Jamieson said, adding that it was a stalked ascidian, or sea squirt—albeit a species nobody had ever laid eyes on before.

The highlight reel continued, a parade of beings visiting the landers at various depths and locations. “Dumbo octopus at 6,000 meters—who would’ve thought?” Jamieson said of the deepest-ever sighting to that point. Dumbos are rare, primitive animals that propel themselves with the help of two flappy fins perched on their heads like cartoon elephant ears. (They’re also adorable.) A larger head jutted in from the side, round with small eyes, attached to a thick, snaky body. Jamieson identified it as a cusk eel. It wasn’t interested in the bait, he added, but in the other animals that had come for the bait. Cusk eels like to eat amphipods, white prawn-like crustaceans that populate the trenches in large numbers. Some amphipods are tiny, but others, known as super­giants, can grow up to 13 inches long. They’re ace predators: in one time-lapse sequence, we watched a cloud of amphipods devour a mackerel with such gusto that only the skeleton remained.

Earlier in his career, Jamieson had discovered the world’s deepest-dwelling fish, a snailfish species that could swim down to 8,200 meters. (.) “And there it is,” he said, pointing to the screen. Snailfish are popsicle-size, with semitransparent jelly bodies and fluttery fins, and they’re found in every Pacific trench. Despite their delicate appearance, they’ve got some gnarly capabilities. “They have two mouths,” Jamieson explained. With the first, they suck in amphipods. “But if you put an amphipod in your mouth, the first thing it’s gonna do is eat its way out of your head.” To solve that problem, the snailfish’s second, internal mouth consists of two grinding plates.

By this point in the expedition, Jamieson had made 63 lander deployments, filmed ten terabytes of video, and filled a freezer with animals that would all be donating their DNA to science. The genetic material collected on the expedition would be studied for years to come. “We’re looking at the population of the trench from the shallow end all the way to the deep end,” he said, gesturing to the screen. “And as you can see, there’s all kinds of things going on. The idea of the deep as this barren, lifeless place is just horseshit.”

On the morning of Vescovo’s first dive, the wind was blowing 20 knots and the ocean was choppy with swells coming from two directions and the sunrise had been a strange dark scarlet, but everything was a go for the launch. “Conditions are more challenging than we’d like,” Lahey admitted. “But they’re not the worst that we’ve had.” On the dive plan, McCallum had listed the day’s hazards: “Extreme depth. Tropical sun. Night recovery.” And then, at the bottom, highlighted in red: “Complacency.” “We’re coming off the massive high of Challenger Deep,” he warned. “This is the time karma will kick us if we’re not careful.”

I positioned myself on deck, out of the way of heavy machinery, and watched the Triton crew perform the industrial ballet required to launch the Limiting Factor. The process is undeniably dangerous, fraught with enough perils that it had once caused the deck operations manager, Kelvin Magee—a good-natured Canadian so strong and capable he’d been nicknamed the Kelvinator—to collapse from a stress-induced migraine. Winches whined as the hangar rolled back, and the sub was moved along tracks and then out of its cradle, pinning it against a bumper at the stern of the ship. Tim Macdonald, a 30-year-old mechanical engineer from Australia, climbed atop the sub, wearing a wetsuit, a safety vest, a helmet, and neoprene booties. He is the “swimmer,” a risky job that involves grappling with the sub’s hooks, lines, and straps during launch and recovery, and securing the craft so Vescovo can enter and exit. “I’m the most expendable,” he’d said jokingly. “That’s why they put me in.”

Now the Limiting Factor was suspended over the water, and Vescovo disappeared into the hatch. Slowly, the sub was lowered and moved away from the ship. Macdonald, still riding it like a bronco, unhooked the lines. It helped that he was a surfer: from my vantage point, I could see a big set rolling in. When he was finished, he leaped into the ocean and was picked up by McCallum in a Zodiac. The submersible was free to descend. I watched as it rocked in the waves, a white speck in the vast blue Pacific. Then it was gone.

I found Lahey in the dry lab, huddled over a laptop alongside Triton’s principal electrical design engineer, Tom Blades, a soft-spoken Brit in his thirties. The two would stay glued to this spot for the next ten hours, monitoring the sub’s movements using software Blades developed. “He’s doing roughly two knots,” Lahey said, “about a meter per second.” Every 15 minutes, Vescovo would transmit his depth and heading via acoustic modem, his voice coming in faintly but audibly with a burst of squeegee static.

Life on the ship was quiet while the dive was underway. People who’d been up all night preparing for the launch went off to their cabins to sleep. I felt restless and found it impossible to do anything but stare at the screens that charted Vescovo’s progress. It’s an odd thing to go about your day knowing that someone is miles below you in a world that nobody has ever seen. A small part of me was nervous for him. Every safety precaution had been taken, but the hadal zone is never 100 percent jeopardy-free. The worst-case scenario is known as catastrophic failure, which means that nothing—not the sub, not its passenger—comes back in solid form. Entanglement is another hazard, although that’s more of a concern around shipwrecks and cables. A cockpit fire or slow leak wouldn’t be good for Vescovo, either. Yet the odds of any of these scenarios happening were minuscule, and the larger part of me would’ve happily sold my lesser internal organs to trade places with him.

I could only imagine what it would be like to roam around Hades, the feeling of primeval solitude, alone in the ocean’s eternal night. That was Vescovo’s favorite part: he loved to dive solo. Understandably, there had been grumbling about going to such rarefied—and scientifically significant—places with an empty seat beside him. It didn’t make sense from an operations standpoint: it’s tricky for the pilot to simultaneously navigate and work the hydraulic arm. But Vescovo was firm about his choice. “It’s a materially different experience to be completely on your own in these remote, somewhat dangerous places,” he’d said. “It’s a more private experience. And there’s no greater feeling of freedom.” Vescovo would socialize as much as he needed to—on the ship he was always friendly and accessible—but his real soul food was independence. “I don’t think it’s a surprise to anyone that I’ve never been married,” he said.

Just before one o’clock, after a four-hour descent, Vescovo touched down in the Horizon Deep. “Life support good,” he relayed, his voice warbling in and out on the modem. “At bottom. Repeat. At bottom.” “Roger, L.F.,” Lahey responded. “Understand, depth one-zero-eight-one-seven meters. Life support good. On the bottom. Congratulations.” A cheer went up; everyone’s shoulders relaxed. But we also knew that the dive was far from over. Anything could happen. And 15 minutes later, it did.

After he landed on the seafloor, Vescovo had set out across the trench to pick up rock samples and deposit them in one of the landers. But he noticed that the sub’s batteries were draining fast. He shut down some systems and tried to figure out why he was losing power, but nothing was obviously wrong. Continuing on, he arrived at a slope where slivers of rock poked through the sediment. When he tried to run the manipulator arm, it gave him a voltage failure: not enough juice. By that point, he’d spent two of his three hours of bottom time. He decided to head back up.

Later it was discovered that water had breached an electrical junction box outside the hull, causing what Lahey described as “a sustained high-current event.” In other words, an electrical fire, though there couldn’t be actual flames at that depth. The box itself was scorched and melted and looked like it had been through a war. Lahey and Blades examined it for a long time. “It’s a difficult one,” Blades said, frowning. “There’s so much damage that we can’t see what the original cause was. There’s a seal that could’ve leaked slightly, but that seal’s long gone now. We just need to rebuild it.”

“Tom’s unflappable,” Lahey said. “Unlike me.”

Blades smiled drily. “I’m screaming inside.”

The submersible is designed so that failures are isolated, with triple redundancies and backup safety systems—Vescovo was never in imminent danger. But the repairs would take 48 hours, which meant there was no time for a second dive. If we waited out here, the storm would be upon us; 30-foot seas were forecast. The weather window had closed.

When the ship returned to Nukualofa, we had a sunset barbecue on the top deck that turned into a raucous party lasting late into the night. The celebration was due: over the past six weeks, the team had executed six dives below 10,000 meters, with everyone brought back safely. It was a feat that had never been accomplished—or even attempted—before.

I’d spent the days since the dive pestering Vescovo for details of what he’d seen in the deep, what thoughts had gone through his head, even what he’d eaten in the sub (a tuna sandwich, chips, and a Diet Coke). When I asked him how it felt down there, he described it as totally peaceful. “Once you go down below 500 meters, it’s a very different world,” he said. “It is quiet. It’s very dark, very calm. You could have a raging hurricane above you and you wouldn’t know it. In that respect, it’s almost an embrace.” He told me that each trench had its own personality: The Puerto Rico Trench was wide and flat at the bottom, thick with sediment and rafts of sargassum seaweed, and not especially lively at a glance. The Southern Ocean offered more scenery. The trench was rockier; he’d flown over the remnants of a volcanic eruption. The Mariana Trench emanated a strong mystique. He’d passed through an area of undulating dunes and fissures in the seafloor tinged yellow by sulfur deposits. In the Challenger Deep, he was met by a swimming sea cucumber. The Java Trench was enthralling: its steep walls were carpeted in ochre, cobalt, and orange bacterial mats, and there was evidence of underwater landslides. But Tonga? Vescovo wasn’t a fan. “This is the eeriest, most hostile place I’ve seen so far.”

He’d landed in a heavily sedimented basin that was “completely and utterly flat.” No visible life stirred, though Jamieson would later point out the burrows of many reclusive creatures captured by video cameras. “It felt the most alien,” Vescovo said. “It was really cold, and I could just see the battery power being eaten away. It wasn’t welcoming. It didn’t want me there.”

He showed me some video that he’d shot on his phone, through the view ports. I found it hypnotic and dreamlike, beautiful in its own spooky way. The visibility was crystalline, and the bottom looked weirdly smooth, as though covered in a soft skin. It was actually a beige-gold sediment so fine that when it was disturbed by the thrusters, it billowed like smoke in the water. The sub’s lights cast rich twilight colors, azure and indigo ebbing to black. The Horizon Deep appeared to me like a cryptic story in an ancient language, a chapter of earth’s autobiography written on the seafloor.

Now, on the deck of the ship, after the miles at sea, the all-nighters spent working, the months away from family and friends, the tense business of submersible operations, the endless planning—it was time for the Five Deeps team to set all that down and cut loose for an evening. Jamieson was jamming on guitar with first mate Fraser Retson. In the background, I heard blenders whirring.

McCallum, circulating in a Hawaiian shirt, was pouring frozen margaritas. Lahey looked relaxed, laughing with his six-man Triton crew at a picnic table. The night was warm and humid, and the air smelled of rain and flowers. After a while people began singing. Vescovo got up and belted out “Desperado,” his ponytail slipping from its elastic. Then he added a verse of his own:

I’ve got the Five Deeps blues
Sitting on a bridge in Tonga
My battery’s on fire at 10,000 meters
And I’m just trying to get home

He finished to loud applause; someone handed him a margarita. Vescovo leaned back against the ship’s railing. Five Deeps was on the home stretch of its journey, but some interesting experiences still lay ahead. Eleven weeks from now, the Molloy Deep dive in the Arctic would go off seamlessly, and the team would celebrate by cruising through fjords for two days, watching polar bears cavorting and walruses lolling against a backdrop of snow-capped peaks. From there, the Pressure Drop sailed on to Edinburgh, then down to London, where Vescovo received a standing ovation after a presentation at the Royal Geographical Society.

But his victory lap was interrupted by a dash of controversy. James Cameron, who’d supported the expedition wholeheartedly, offering advice and exchanging e-mail with Vescovo along the way, spoke up from New Zealand, where he was working on three Avatar sequels. to the expedition’s newly announced claim that Vescovo had made the “deepest submarine dive in history” in the Challenger Deep, going 17 meters deeper than Cameron had. “For me, the science work is the most important part,” Cameron told me. “But I don’t think he went deeper. I don’t think you can go deeper.” The Challenger Deep is just not that bumpy, he said. “I think Victor and I went to the same place, which is a completely dead-ass flat plain.” Any variations in depth measurements, he added, fell within the typical margins of error.

Vescovo conceded nothing. “We assaulted the Mariana Trench with a level of technology—the sonar, three landers, multiple submarine dives—that we have very high confidence in our data,” he pointed out to the audience at the Royal Geographical Society. “His depth data probably are more accurate,” Cameron agreed, and then laughed. “My response to that is: Cool. That means I went deeper than I thought I did.”Ìę

“Look, I have enormous respect for the guy,” Vescovo would tell me later, sounding frustrated. “But it’s tough for me to just ignore my own data and make a scientific statement that, ‘Yeah, it’s completely flat.’ I’ve got all my instruments saying that’s not the situation, and I think it’s just as possible that we did find a deeper place. And you know, I don’t know what to tell him.”Ìę

In any case, all these dives were good news for the ocean, and none of this was any kind of finale. It was more like the end of the beginning. Vescovo had already announced his next expedition with the Limiting Factor. He wanted to go back to the Challenger Deep—he’d extended an invitation to Cameron to join him—and then off to explore more trenches along the Pacific Ring of Fire, a 25,000-mile belt of seismic mayhem full of deep-sea volcanoes. “That’s what’s so great about ocean exploration,” he told me in Nukualofa, taking a sip of his drink. “There’s still so much that’s unknown.” Plus, he added, “I’ve gotten hooked on it.” Behind him the lights from King Tupou’s palace shone. Vescovo looked out at the water and smiled. “We’ve had some fun. Isn’t that the point?” O

Susan Casey (), formerly an șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű creative director and editor in chief at O, the Oprah Magazine, is the author of three books: , , and .

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Words matter, and they especially matter when you’re writing about Bethany Hamilton. The world knows the story of how a marauding tiger shark changed the course of Hamilton’s life in 2003, taking her left arm while she was surfing on Kauai’s north shore. She was 13 years old, a wildly talented grommette with her eye on a professional surfing career. Descriptions of that encounter invariably use words like victim and tragedy, but in the aftermath, Hamilton has served notice that neither label applies.

Even as the media referred to her as “shark-bite girl” and tried to categorize her as a disabled athlete, Hamilton, now 28, has never thought of herself in those terms. “At that time in my life, being so young and resilient, and a charger at whatever came my way, the loss of my arm felt like a speed bump,” she says. “A little hurdle to go over.”

That doesn’t mean the experience was easy. The next time you’re tempted to indulge in a spell of whining, consider the following: Hamilton lost 60 percent of the blood in her body that day. Less than a month later, stitches barely out, she was back in the ocean relearning how to surf. (She kicks her legs to counterbalance paddling with one arm, and her father rigged a handle on her board so she can duck-dive.) Two months after that, she returned to competition. She won a national championship in 2005, and turned pro in 2007.

Over the past five years, Hamilton got married; finished third on the television show with her husband, Adam Dirks, a youth minister she met in 2012; won a women’s pro event at Oahu’s Pipeline, an ­infamous wave that has killed at least 11 people; and got barreled at Teahupoo, a Tahitian break even more treacherous than Pipeline. In 2014, she flew to Bali to practice her aerial surfing skills at Padang Padang—a fast snapper of a wave where she fell many times, occasionally coming up bloodied—and ultimately landed a frontside air-reverse 360, which she calls “the gnarliest thing I’ve ever done.” Not for long, perhaps: Hamilton and Dirks’s first son, ­Tobias, arrived in June 2015. Their second, Wesley, followed in March 2018.

Hamilton’s run of accomplishments is chronicled in the new documentary , out this fall. Between footage of her triumphs, the film includes smaller moments from everyday life: breastfeeding Tobias after competition heats, surfing breaks near her home in Kauai, pumping iron while eight months pregnant with Wesley.

The film also reveals what really sets Hamilton apart: her titanium core. She cross-trains up to five hours a day, a mix of surfing, swimming, HIIT gym workouts, trampoline sessions, Pilates, beach sprinting, and underwater running while carrying a heavy rock. Maybe this tenacity comes from her devout Christian faith, or maybe it’s learned and hard-won, but the documentary makes clear that Hamilton is a driven competitor, unafraid of pain, no stranger to setting and achieving the most outlandish goals.

It would be unreasonable not to allow her some lingering fears. She’s respectful of sharks but not enamored of them. If Hamilton has any obstacle it’s frustration, the disappointment when she falls short of her own zenith.

In 2016, seven months after giving birth to Tobias, Hamilton spotted a big swell on the weather maps and island-hopped over to Maui in pursuit of one of the world’s most formidable waves: . She was towed into and rode a 40-footer. Then she decided to raise the degree of difficulty by actually paddling into a giant wave. Her first few attempts resulted in memorable wipeouts, but she returned to the lineup and got one of the day’s best rides. Hamilton laughs as she describes it: “Probably one of the scariest sessions of my entire life, and it was soooo fun at the same time—like this weird, crazy, fun sort of thing.”

Tobias hadn’t even reached his first birthday when he and his parents landed in Fiji, where Hamilton had been chosen as the wildcard entry at the World Surfing League’s elite Fiji Pro event. Few of the sports cognoscenti expected her to place. , Hamilton defeated six-time world champion Stephanie Gilmore and the top competitor on the women’s pro tour, Tyler Wright. “This really isn’t supposed to be happening,” Sports Illustrated .

After Hamilton’s Fiji performance, surf icon Kelly Slater declared himself “ridiculously impressed.” Meanwhile, big-wave legend Laird Hamilton (no relation) says: “She’s a surfer at the core, and her desire and love for the sport has allowed her to do some stuff that even surfers who have all their limbs can’t do.”

Even with two toddlers, Hamilton is not slowing down. “I want to push my aerial surfing,” she says. “That’s the area that feels compelling and exciting to me.” She and Dirks recently published a children’s book, . Next she’s launching a lifestyle app for young women, with fitness, nutrition, and other advice tucked in among tenets of her Christian beliefs. America’s industrial food system, she says, has wreaked havoc on our well-being: “We need to recognize what we’re doing to ourselves, and the earth, with food.”

Bethany Hamilton, nutritionist? Local-food activist? Children’s-book author? App developer?

“It’s almost like I need a challenge,” Hamilton says, giggling at the understatement. With that she hits on one of the reasons people are so moved by her story. We all need a challenge now and then, but those among us who face the most daunting ones with grace and grit we call heroic. In the Bethany Hamilton lexicon, that’s a word that fits perfectly.

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What I noticed, in the moments before I saw the shark, was the silence. It was a deep silence, full of myth and primordial fear. That’s the one thing that everyone who’s encountered a great white agrees on: Before you see it, you feel its presence. A single animal emits a vibe that raises the hairs on the back of your neck, long before it shows itself. And though I didn’t know it at that moment, there were at least five great whites circling me.

I sat in a small boat—a 17-foot Boston Whaler—with two scientists who were determined to crack the great white’s secrets. Their work was noble and occasionally terrifying; white sharks are among the ocean’s most mysterious and misunderstood creatures. Certainly, they’re the only ones that come equipped with their own scary theme music.

The scientists had found the perfect place to conduct their research: Southeast Farallon Island, a remote outpost 30 miles due west of the Golden Gate Bridge, where each autumn a large population of great white sharks gather to hunt elephant seals. Technically, the island exists within the 415 area code, but its jagged rocks, dark water, and plain spookiness evoke another planet. I’d made my way out there after seeing a documentary about the place that haunted me. In the three years since I’d glimpsed them on film, the Farallon great whites topped my list of marine obsessions.

Dangling off the stern like a lure, a six-foot surfboard bobbed on the light swell. Typically, to get a great white’s attention, more substantial bait is required. But not here. The sharks are so numerous, so hungry, that the mere suggestion of a seal draws them in.

It was drawing them in now.

“Shark approaching,” the first scientist said in a low voice. He’d seen the big boil made by a great white’s tail fin as it swims just below the surface. Then, suddenly, I saw it, too. A strong wake, a swirl of disturbance, then the dorsal fin rising like a periscope, headed directly for us. The shark swam alongside the Whaler, then dove beneath us and bumped the back of the boat. I was struck by its massive girth, the many scars and scrapes and divots on its body, and its color: Viewed from above, these white sharks were jet black. Only their undersides were white. Three more sharks approached, also midsize males, investigating the boat. One raised his head from the water and bit a corner of the outboard motor almost delicately. The Whaler rocked. Then, at once, the males vanished, and in swam a huge female. She was 18 feet long and seven feet wide, a sublime predator shaped by 400 million years of evolution. I felt a very old part of my brain snap to attention—the amygdala, a bean-shaped bundle of neurons that processes fear. But I wasn’t scared—I was awed.

It was only later, when the awe subsided and I began to think about what could have gone wrong, what bad things might have happened when surrounded by a small herd of great white sharks, that fear settled back in. Later, when life became ordinary again. Later, when the scientists laughingly revealed to me their boat’s nickname: the Dinner Plate.

Susan Casey is the bestselling author of , , and two other books.

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Failure to pack the proper emergency supplies is a fast way to turn adventure into misadventure, and like most people who wander far from Walgreens’ range, I’ve built my first-aid kit through bitter trial and error. But I’ve got it down now, and here’s the best addition I’ve made to my ready-for-anything list: vodka.

A flask of 80-proof is wildly useful, wherever you are. Vodka is literally—not just psychologically—good medicine. It’s a disinfectant, an antimicrobial, and an anesthetic, so it can clean a cut, prevent infection, and de-stress the patient all at once. Dab it on poison ivy to stop the itching. Pour it on a jellyfish sting to quell the pain—no need to ask someone to pee on you. Vodka cleans dirty surfaces and can sterilize a needle or a safety pin. A dropper of it will clear up an ear infection. In a pinch, vodka works as a fire starter. It’s a hand sanitizer! It’s a dessert topping! Well, maybe not. But it does nicely as an aperitif.Ìę

Or a nightcap. Setting aside the obvious benefits of a personal stash on, say, an overnight bus ride through Hunan province, if you have jet lag, a vodka hot toddy will help you sleep. To soothe a sore throat, gargle your medicinal vodka with warm water. A splash of vodka on your forehead will lower a fever; on your foot it can help heal a blister. Do your running shoes stink? A light sprinkle on the insoles will freshen them up. Does someone in your travel party stink? Rub vodka under your nose. If you’ve eaten something unfortunate, you could do worse than tossing back a shot or two, in an attempt to kill the bacterial invaders. Look, I’m not a doctor. There may be zero medical evidence this works. But take it from , the 19th-century explorer who specialized in Africa’s most inhospitable corners. He claimed that the reason he survived the parasitic illnesses that killed all his explorer friends was that, every day he was out in the field, he drank like a fish.

Speaking of fish, you can use your adventure vodka to humanely kill them, by pouring it over their gills. No nasty, messy gaffing required. And when you’re sitting around the campfire, eating grilled trout and enjoying a riverside martini, you can spritz some vodka into the air to keep mosquitoes and blackflies away. Vodka repels insects: they really prefer tequila.

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To get to the sharks at the you must walk through a set of jaws that serve as a doorway, then wind down a low-lit gullet of a corridor, past a floor-to-ceiling lava lamp of jellyfish. At the end of the passage,Ìęcasting a cool blue gloom, is a 750,000-­gallon tank filled with hundreds of large, toothy fish—sleek reef sharks, alien hammerheads, purposeful tigers, burly ahi and trevallies, silvery milkfish—and broad-tailed stingrays sweeping around all of them like kites.Ìę

Among the crowds, there was pointing and shrieking and exclamations of wonder, toddlers clutching plush sea turtle dolls, teenagers trying and failing to look bored, and an overexcited guide barking into a micro­phone about how someone he knew “had all his fingers ripped off” by a giant trevally. As he delivered this cautionary tale, an elegant, muscular pair of legs appearedÌęin the tank window behind his head.Ìę

for your iPhone to listen to more longform titles.

And Kimi Werner dropped into the water.

She wore a black bathing suit, a black mask, a weight belt, and freediving fins, andÌęshe looked like a Bond girl, albeit one who would do her own stunts, and 007’s as well. Werner, 37, is a spearfishing champion who holds world records. She regularly divesÌębelow 150 feet on a single breath—which she can hold for almost five minutes—while hunting mammoth wahoos, snappers the size of Smart cars, and other ocean denizens known for their ability to fight.Ìę

Werner has freedived under Arctic ice and stalked dogtooth tuna off Zanzibar and sailed across the Drake Passage in a small boat. She has spearfished in all five of the planet’s oceans and off each of its ­seven continents. The job description she has written for herself is enviable. “Free­-diving Underwater Huntress,” bio reads. “Lover of nature and food and our connection to both. Exploring this world and within as authentically as I can.” Yet to call her a professional adventurer or ocean athlete would be too limiting. She is also an acclaimed artist, a trained chef, an inspirational speaker, and an environmental activist sponsored by Patagonia, Yeti, Maui Jim, and a host of other companies. Werner has starred in Discovery Channel’s , about extreme fishing, and on National Geographic, in which she samples off-the-grid lifestyles. Recently, she was featured in surfer and filmmaker Keith Malloy’s new movie, .Ìę

Werner is highly successful, though her rĂ©sumĂ© breaks every rule. She has never, will never, do time in an office. On the few occasions she’s had steady employment, she felt bored and trapped and she quit in short ­order, without a safety net. Often, she’s turned down lucrative opportunities because they didn’t feel right. “I’ve never had a five-year plan,” she says. “Or even a one-year plan.”Ìę

While the crowd looked on, Werner dove to the tank floor and lay down on the sand, her long ponytail rippling in the current. She appeared as relaxed as someone lounging on a beach chair, even as a hammerhead ­orbited, inches from her face. This was a publicity appearance: Werner was here to support the center’s conservation efforts, and if the point was to grab peoples’ attention, it was working. “Is this a mermaid?” asked a boy in a bucket hat. “Say hi to Kimi!” a chirpy girl in an aquarium uniform instructed. “This is a very difficult physical feat, everybody!” shouted the guide. “She’s holding her breath the entire time she’s down there! This is something you have to train yourself for!”

I had come here to meet Werner, and to see her in her element, because I admire the way she navigates water with a level of assurance that most people never attain on land. Like Werner, I prefer liquids to solids, and as a longtime competitive swimmer I’ve spent countless hours submerged. Aquatic savants are always compelling to me—the more obsessive the better. To be at homeÌęunderwater is to be an oddity in a world where a tiny fraction of the population can swim 500 yards; aquatic professionals are an even smaller subset. Yet the ability to spend our days in an environment of our own choosing—in Werner’s case, salt water—is the perfect mix of sanity and luxury, andÌęobviously something we should try more often. From childhood onward, there is no shortage of rules, both self- and culturally imposed, about what we’re “supposed” to be doing. And they usually boil down to this: what everyone else is doing.Ìę

It’s easy to find yourself living someone else’s life; I knew this firsthand. I have sat in many meetings with men in suits and pretended to care about spreadsheets. I have listened to business jargon—talk of monetizing, optimizing, incentivizing—until I thought I might projectile-vomit. EvenÌębefore I could fully articulate it I sought a different type of power, one that had more to do with freedom. My dream was to live in a town where I could swim in the ocean ­every day and write books with my cats draped across my desk in a room where I could open the windows and work in natural light and never have to wear closed-toe shoes again.

It sounds simple, but it took me 30 years to get there. Society is seductive; it’s good at telling us what we can’t do, can’t have, can’t be. Werner intrigued me because, quite clearly, she wasn’t listening. She was thriving on her own terms, doing what she loved. She was paid well for living well, rewarded for not selling herself out. To my mind, this was success. And this made her an inspiration for anyone yearning to slip society’s leash and light out for adventure. In other words, all of us.

“She’s one of those people who’ve just got it, you know?” says Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia. “She’s the most legit person I’ve met,” says waterman Mark Healey, Werner’s dive partner. “I have ­never seen the light in her grow dim,” says legendary talent manager Shep Gordon, a close friend. Everything I’d heard about Werner led me to believe that she had cracked a ­major code: how to have a fulfilling, exciting, self-­determined life, at large in nature, unmarred by bullshit or compromise.Ìę

Somehow, brilliantly, she had managed to stay wild.

About an hourÌęlater, Werner came out of the tank and I met her on the back deck of the aquarium, where she was rinsing off under a hose. “That totally gave me my fix,” she said, smiling. She is a strong woman of medium height, with wide-set brown eyes, high cheekbones, and dark hair that falls to the middle of her back. Her shoulders have been sculpted by decades of water time.

A group of aquarium brass were gathered around her, looking starstruck. One man lurched forward with a plastic fish and asked Werner to autograph it for his daughter.Ìę

“What’d you think of the tiger shark?” another guy asked.Ìę

Werner grinned. “So cute.”

“Where was your last adventure?” someone else wanted to know.

“Panama. You’d hit the cold thermocline and there were just yellowfin tuna everywhere. It was incredible.”

Another diver stepped up and handed Werner a baggie of shark teeth, sifted from the tank’s sandy bottom. Sharks are cartilaginous fish—they have no bones—which means their teeth get dislodged often. Handily, they have several rows of spares, arrayed one behind the other. Sharks have a bad reputation, largely undeserved, and I knew that Werner had an unusually close relationship with them. In her line of work, marauding sharks are as common as morning traffic on a commute. “Matching their behavior is the best thing to do,” she says. “If they come in and they’re super mellow, then I can be mellow, but if they’re coming in hot and ­sporadic, then I need to hold my ground and set the energy.” The most important thing is not to behave like prey. “At first when sharks approached me I would cower, and I’d get kind of bullied. But then one time, I was working so hard to get this fish, and as I was pulling it in I saw this shark coming up to eat it, and I was just like, ‘No! Not today, buddy. You go get your own dinner. This one’s mine.’ As soon as I did that, the shark just took off. It taught me a lot.”

This is a hell of a way to get groceries, but Werner doesn’t see it like that. For her, the real risk is in becoming a “zombie who doesn’t ever think about where their food comes from,” helpless in the absence of a Safeway. “Our world is so based on efficiency and convenience,” she says. “I think something in your life is really missing if you decide to just shut off your brain and consume.” About 80 percent of everything Werner eats, or cooks for others, comes from hunting, growing, foraging, or trading.Ìę

“I hate it when they say ‘man and the ecosystem,’ ” Werner says. “Because we’re part of the ecosystem.” And, she adds, “we’re not necessarily at the top of the food chain.”ÌęAt no time was this more apparent than on October 1, 2012, when Werner met a creature that does occupy that spot.Ìę

The scene was dreamlike; it looked like CGI footage Disney might have whippedÌęup for some twisted Little Mermaid sequel. On screen, Werner was gliding along with a 17-foot great white shark, her left hand latched on to its dorsal fin. Like millions who have watched video of the encounter, I found it surreal: Who rides a great white shark?

Talking about the experience now, Werner stresses that there was nothing planned or stunt-like about the meeting. She had been invited on a cage-diving trip to Mexico’s Guadalupe Island—a rocky outpost 150 miles offshore from Baja, known for its resident great whites—when a friend suggested a freedive one afternoon. I have been to Guadalupe and seen what lives in those waters, and I would note that at no point did it ­occur to me that it would be good fun to swim around outside the cage. Werner did want to do that, however, and the captain had given his permission. The day had been sharkless, and the cage divers had quit, tired of staring into the empty blue. But when Werner jumped in and cleared her mask, she saw immediately that she was not alone.Ìę

“This big shark was three feet away and coming right at me,” she recalls. “And in that moment I was like, ‘OK, that’s my hand. I gotta play it.’ Werner swam toward the shark, which turned away, moving with a languid rhythm. Watching the shark’s body language, Werner could tell that it was just curious, and not in hunting mode. The two circled each other: “It turned into this beautiful dance we were doing.” At one point, the shark swam directly below Werner, who had dived 30 feet down, to the point of negative buoyancy. “I realized I had two choices. I’m either going to land on this shark, or I can do a flip kick and go back up to the surface.” She chose the first option. Make it smooth! she told herself, reaching out for the shark’s immense back. “I touched her, let her know I was there. I felt this massive, massive ­animal, and yet her energy was so calm. SheÌęreally slowed down, and we just went with it. And we actually did it several times.”

Both Werner and another diver had captured the scene on their GoPros, and in the aftermath she rejected offers from ­energy-drink companies and reality-TV producers, all wanting to use the footage for their own cranked-up purposes. “I felt like a huge dummy, for sure, saying no to all this stuff,” she said, “but I just didn’t want to put it out there in that way.” In the end, Werner and her boyfriend, filmmaker Justin Turkowski, created the five-minute clip I’d seen, which tucks the shark encounter into a larger conservation message. It is a quiet, modest piece, the opposite of sharksploitation. When I mentioned this to Werner, she nodded. “After it happened, I went mute for about two months. It was a sacred experience, and I wanted to protect that.”

Dropping in on Werner’s world now, it might seem as though everything magically fell into place, that she found her calling early and was instantly successful and has led such a charmed and golden existence that even great white sharks turn sweet in her presence. This would be wrong.Ìę

Kimi and her sister, Christy, were raised in Maui’s jungly backcountry, schooled in the survival arts by their “Japanese hippie” mother, June, and a down-to-earth, adventure-loving father, Chris. “We were really poor,” Werner says. “Basically, we lived in a shack.” As a toddler, Werner’s chores included collecting eggs from chickens that lived under the house and riding a pig down a dirt road to pick up the mail. On “harvest days” she watched her parents dispatch turkeys and rabbits with an ax. It was not a childhood for whiners, the squeamish, or the easily frightened.

At age five, Werner began to accompany her father while he spearfished along theÌęisland’s feisty north shore. “He would put me on his back and climb down the sea cliffs,” she recalls. “We’d have to time the waves to jump in and get past the surge.” She would cling to a kickboard while her father dove: “I remember being scared of how deep it was, but I would watch for his bubbles, and as long as I could see them I was fine.”Ìę

Werner soon got bored with floating on the surface and began to take plunges herself, learning to identify fish and observing the action below. Though she was too young for a spear, the idea of being self-sufficient—of relying on your own skill and wits to get food—was captivating. The ocean became familiar, even in its extremes. While other girls played with princess dolls, Werner was cave-diving for lobsters. Other kids scraped their knees; she got a man-of-war wrapped around her throat. “It was the most excruciating pain,” she says. “It looked like someone had whipped me.”

Even after her father started a construction business, and the shack was replaced by a suburban home, and the hunting and gathering tutorials gave way to a typical high school adolescence, Werner carried those early, hazy ocean memories with her. When she moved to Oahu toÌępursue a culinary degree at a community college, the memories came along too, tucked into the top drawer of her subconscious.

Post-college life started off at a trudge. She worked a restaurant job in Honolulu, took art classes, paddled outrigger canoes, and it all felt sort of dull. Something was missing. At age 24, Werner remembered what that was.Ìę

She was at a barbecue when two guysÌęarrived with a stringer of freshly speared fish. “It just triggered something,” she says. There was something enduringly haunting—in a good way—about that simpler, rougher time in her life, when her family worked to feed themselves and nature defined every day. Werner approached the men. “I told them I used to dive when I was five and maybeÌęthey could take me with them sometime?” Thinking back on it now, she laughs. “I’m sure I sounded like a liability or a psycho.”Ìę

When the phone didn’t ring, Werner bought a three-pronged spear and went out on her own: “And I was as scared as I’ve ever been. Just totally spooked.” She calmed herself by imagining that her father was in the water with her. “I came out with six fish. It took me all day to get them, and I was elated,”Ìęshe says. “There was this crazy buzz going through me. I was like, ‘This is it! I’m back!’ It was a reunion with my five-year-old soul. It felt like falling in love. Where all of a sudden it didn’t matter if I hated my job—it didn’t matter because I was in love.”Ìę

It wasn't long before Werner’s talent and stoke attracted the right mentors, elite Hawaiian spearfishermen Kalei Fernandez and Wayde Hayashi. They taught her how to dive past 100 feet, and about the importance of safety. In the lightless depths, as a rule, things get dangerous quickly. One looming threat is shallow-water blackout, a sudden loss of consciousness upon surfacing, triggered by extended breath holding. It is a terrifyingly easy way to die, and experience is no guarantee against it.Ìę

Despite the perils, Werner loved the deeps. She loved the way the pressure squeezed her body; to her it felt like a hug. She learned to slow her heart rate, and discovered that she had an unusual ability to equalize her ears and sinuses at will, without using her hands. The best part was the peacefulness, the ­silence, the need to be fully present. There was a profound conversation going on down there, it just didn’t involve words.

In 2008, after only three years of coaching, Werner won the national spearfishing championships. The event was held in the frigid Atlantic off Newport, Rhode Island, in water so murky she had trouble finding the bottom. “I could barely see my fins,” she says. “That just freaked me out.”Ìę

But in the competition itself, everything went right. Almost immediately, 20 feet down in the green-black haze, Werner met a behemoth, a 33-pound striped bass that would turn out to be the second-largest fish caught in the competition, even among men. The striper battled hard, lashing her with its tail. “It was a wrestling match between me and this fish,” she says. It was an improbable win for a rookie who had never dived outside Hawaii, and who’d raised money for the trip by selling T-shirts. Spearfishing is a global community of ocean thrill seekers—and now it had a new star.

Sponsorships followed, international travel, awards, accolades, press. But it felt wrong to take more fish than she was going to eat—or to descend on a location to win a trophy, and barely get a whiff of the place or its culture—and Werner quit almost as abruptly as she’d begun. “I didn’t like what competition was doing to me,” she says. “I was a little aggro. My vibe was just different. Before I knew it, I wasn’t coming out of the water feeling happy.”Ìę

Her decision to quit was unpopular. Nobody could understand why she would give up the glory and the sponsorship money.Ìę“I was called a waste of talent, a disappointment,” she says. “I lost friends, dive partners. I really thought I was going to lose everything.”Ìę

Werner cashed in her savings and flew to Palau, the remote island nation in the western Pacific famous for its diving and its radical approach to conservation. Struggling with rising sea levels, ocean pollution, habitat loss, and overfishing, the Palauans had adopted a green tax, ended industrial fishing, made 80 percent of their waters into a marine reserve, and developed strict environmental policies, enforced on a community level by tribal chiefs. “People understood that they couldn’t take certain fish, or they would have to answer to the tribe,” Werner says. “I remember thinking, Hmmm, we don’t have tribes. I don’t know how to apply that. Then I realized that I do have a tribe: people I know who feel the same way I do.”

The trip helped Werner get clear about what she really wanted: travel, tribe, ocean, fish, nature—but not for any mercenary purposes. Reef health and water quality were declining. Plastic pollution was a scourge. Fish populations were dwindling. Corals were dying. “The ocean looked very different than it did when I was a little kid,” Werner says. “And that really got me thinking about how I could give back.”

Which is excellent, of course, but adding environmentalist to your crazy quilt of avocations still doesn’t pay the rent. As always, people had plenty of advice: Get a real job or you’re headed for failure. You’re not getting any younger, you know. No one can make a living this way. Werner recalls the stricken face of one woman who’d asked about her career plans: “It was such a look of concern and confusion. And I just started laughing, because I didn’t know what else to do.”

The naysayers were wrong. As Werner embraced her ideals and quirks and desires, she got better sponsors, new opportunities to work in film and television, a warmerÌę
reception for her artwork, more chances to explore—and a much bigger tribe. Far from falling apart, in a surprising and fluid way, her life was coming together.

Werner and Turkowski live at the end of a narrow lane on Oahu’s north shore, in a vintage fifties bungalow ringed by a cathe­dral of trees, plants, and flowers. On the afternoon I stopped by, there were wetsuits hanging from a clothesline, freediving fins lying on the lawn, weight belts spread out to dry atop coolers. A sheathed knife poked out of a drybag; a beach cruiser leaned against the stairs. The walls were decorated with seashells, antlers, and a gallery of Werner’s vibrant paintings of marine life.Ìę

Werner was packing and unpacking, sorting gear, caught in a 48-hour turnaround between trips to Europe and Korea. She was also making lunch, pulling kale from the garden, avocados from trees. Earlier, she’d gone diving and caught the fish we’d be eating: papio, aholehole, and kole. The fish lay on ice, their scales glinting in the sunlight. Werner slid them onto a dish and headed across the lawn to clean and fillet them. She was barefoot, wearing a slip of a sundress and carrying a big-ass knife.Ìę

“When I’m home I cook three times a day for my own therapy,” she said, kneeling to scale the fish. Turkowski, a tall, outdoorsy guy in his thirties, ambled up, took a few photos—Werner has 150,000 followers on social media—and handed her a beer. (The two met in 2012 on a shoot.) The neighbor’s dog loped over hopefully. He was likely to be disappointed. Werner wastes nothing, and takes care to remove every last scrap of meat, even the weird parts like collars and cheeks.

Werner grilled the fish in a cast-iron pan, on a propane stove next to the porch, then tossed it in a salad from the garden. We sat at the outside table, joined by Nigel, a personable gecko. Werner had tamed him using dabs of honey, and now, being smart enough to recognize a good thing, he perched on the table, blissfully licking a chunk of mango.

I took a bite of my fish and leaned back in amazement. The papio was grilled simply, with salt and pepper, but no five-star restaurant could hope to compare. Beyond its freshness there was an extra essence—the flavor of wildness itself.

The next morning I met Werner at Shark’s Cove, a rocky inlet down the road from her house. Clouds elbowed the sun but couldn’t quite stop it from beaming. We were going for a swim along the coast—a mellow one I’d thought, possibly naively.Ìę

“Do you want to go in through a sea cave?” Werner asked.

“Ułó
â¶Ä

There are few things I don’t like to do in the ocean, but swimming through underwater caves is one of them. Claustrophobia, darkness, being pinned by a current: it’s everyÌęprimal fear rolled into one neat package.ÌęNo, I didn’t want to. But I had a feeling that I was about to.

Werner led me across a stretch of spiky lava rock to a jagged crack just wide enough for a body to fit through. Inside the crack the ocean surged, hissing spray through a blowhole. Werner estimated that it would take about 30 seconds to make it through the passage. While I was considering this, a crab the size of a hubcap scuttled by and dropped into the crack.Ìę

Werner slipped into the water and, between waves, disappeared under the rock. I followed, nervously adjusting my mask. But then something wonderful happened: below the surface, the crack opened up into a luminous blue tunnel. Sunlight filtered through the water at the exit, which, as Werner promised, was well within sight. There was room to swim through without getting jammed between rocks or scraped against coral. The cave wasn’t terrifying—it was fun.

But my knee-jerk fear was a reminder that our worst enemy lives between our two ears. It’s important to transcend the mind’s shrieking, a skill that Werner has mastered. Adrenaline is fine; panic is not. Especially underwater. “It’s about relaxing into whatever discomfort is there,” she says. “Doing anything slowly and smoothly when you are excited or scared or running out of air—that’s the hard part. But you have to be able to switch that panic into relaxation.” To attain this state, Werner advises something that’s not always easy: trusting yourself. “Get down into your gut and let something deeper than the thought process guide you.”Ìę

We set out for Waimea Bay, about a mile away. The visibility was clear, and 30 feet down I could see a jigsaw of rocks on a white-sand bottom. Fish darted into little hideouts only they knew about; sea turtles glided by. I caught a glimpse of an omilu, or bluefin trevally, hanging out in the shadows, looking nervous as Werner swam by.

She kicked her long fins and arrowed, headfirst, to the bottom. There was something down there that had caught her eye, some detail she’d noticed: an unusual cleft in the rock, a fish behaving strangely. I watched as she took off her snorkel and probed the seafloor with it. Then suddenly she was back at the surface, holding a squirming ­octopus. Its body was brown and mottled and filmy, its eyes were alien moons. The octopus stretched its tentacles up her arm, down her back, across her shoulder, and into the corner of her mouth. She peeled it off gently and it jetted away in a puff of indignant black ink, happy to be rid of us.Ìę

We swam on. Werner spent most of her time underwater, taking drops and winding through lava tubes, staying down for what seemed like unreasonable amounts of time. There was a seamless quality to her movements, as though she was in sync with the water itself, just another creature on the reef.Ìę

As we approached the mouth of Waimea Bay, Werner dove and then resurfaced ­quickly. “Look behind you!” she said. I ducked underwater and saw a pod of dolphins coming straight for us. They were spinners, a petite, athletic species, and there were dozens of them. The animals eyed us curiously as they passed. A few hung back to examine us further, circling at close range, and letting us accompany them as they moved slowly offshore.Ìę

Nothing is quite as delightful as playing with wild dolphins, and Werner and I were giddy, pretty much high, when we hit the beach. We made our way across the sand and headed for the car, climbing an embankment of lava rock to get to the spot where we’d parked. Werner, walking ahead, stopped and looked back at Waimea. The bay is always sublime, but now the sun had lit up the ­water, so it appeared to be glowing. “Look at those colors,” she said. “You couldn’t even make that up.” We stood for a while, just staring. The ocean shone aquamarine, turquoise, emerald, lapis, sapphire—a spectrum of otherworldly blues. And at that moment if you had told us that we were the two luckiest women in the world, I think we would have agreed with you.

Susan Casey (), formerly an șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű creative director and editor-in-chief of O, the Oprah Magazine, is the author of three books: , , and . She lives on Maui. Katherine Streeter () is anÌę°żłÜłÙČőŸ±»ć±đÌęcontributing artist.

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Eleven-time world surf champion Kelly Slater has always been one of the good guys. Creative, astute, and generous, the improbably humble master of a sport not known for its understatement, he even managed to make appearing on Baywatch seem cool. He teaches autistic kids to surf. He plays guitar with Eddie Vedder. One time, he saved a mother and toddler from being swept away by a rogue wave. And he’s an activist. Climate change, fair trade, turtle conservation: name an environmental issue, Slater has stood up for it. The tagline for his clothing company, , is #ItsNotOk. “We need to shift our awareness,” he is quoted, on its website. “It’s not ok to destroy our ocean.” So it was startling last week when on Reunion Island, a tiny French territory in the Indian Ocean.Ìę

žé±đłÜČÔŸ±ŽÇČÔ’s . Over the past six years, there have been 20 shark attacks in its surrounding waters, which happen to contain some of the world’s most alluring breaks. Eight of the attacks were fatal. The most recent victim, bodyboarder , 26, died on February 21. Naussance, like the others, was bitten by a bull shark. “Honestly, I won’t be popular for saying this, but there needs to be a serious cull on Reunion, and it should happen everyday [sic],” Slater wrote afterward on Instagram. “There is a clear imbalance happening in the ocean there.”

That last sentence is certainly true. But not for the reasons Slater and infuriated locals believe; and far from improving things, their prescription—kill the sharks, open the island’s marine preserve to commercial fishing—would make the situation worse. žé±đłÜČÔŸ±ŽÇČÔ’s real problem is not a crazy glut of marauding bull sharks, but an utterly tweaked marine ecosystem, sluiced with run-off pollution and garbage, overfished to the point of collapse. The solution is to fix it, not ruin it further.

In the wake of tragedy it’s understandable that emotions run hot, but , no matter how you look at it. Sharks have been here for 400 million years: they are older than trees on this planet. Somehow, they’ve managed to survive every mass extinction, with the possible exception of the one that’s unfurling right now, caused by us. Scientists estimate that , most . The notion of killing more of them because they interfere with our watersports is obscene. As apex predators,, particularly coral reefs. And if deep moral and environmental reasons aren’t enough, there’s also a pragmatic reason not to cull sharks: .Ìę

Between 1959 and 1976, Hawaii culled almost 5,000 sharks—and the number of attacks stayed the same. (In recent years, they have risen.) In 2014, after a run of three shark fatalities in three years, . Not a single white shark was captured, but the effort did kill 68 tiger sharks, a near-threatened species that hadn’t bitten anyone in Australia since 1929. Meanwhile, the nets and long-lines set out to ensnare sharks ended up killing everything else that swam by. The three-year program was terminated after 13 weeks.Ìę

Removing predators from an ecosystem always brings unintended consequences; it’s never a good idea. One reason bull sharks (a highly aggressive, non-native species) have moved into žé±đłÜČÔŸ±ŽÇČÔ’s waters, in fact, is because the reef sharks (a relatively mellow native species) that competed with them for food are gone, killed by fishermen. (It also doesn’t help that the fish the sharks are competing for are largely gone, too.) In 2011, when the French government hired a team of freedivers to investigate žé±đłÜČÔŸ±ŽÇČÔ’s waters, the team came back with unexpected news: they hadn’t encountered many sharks, but the few they could find were all in one area, near the Boucan Canot marina and Saint Gilles harbor, food and garbage and fish guts tossed from boats and washed off beaches. Virtually all of the attacks had occurred along this same stretch of coastline.Ìę

Bull sharks aren’t anyone’s favorite species—they’re wily, beady-eyed, hunchbacked sharks with an exceptionally strong bite (even for a shark), and they’re not choosy about what they attack. They’re fond of sewage, and like to lurk in the muddy, murky waters caused by rain runoff from žé±đłÜČÔŸ±ŽÇČÔ’s steep volcanic slopes and urban areas. But like them or not, we need them. After decades of post-Jaws vilification, the critical role of sharks in the ocean seems to be gaining awareness, even in fraught situations like Reunion. After Slater posted his comment, , ranging from, “Kind of blew it with that shark cull idea ya brah?” to “Maybe nobody has ever told you but it’s not YOUR ocean just because you get paid ridiculous amounts of money to surf in it,” to “Calling for a daily shark cull? You selfish, arrogant Vin Diesel looking motherfucker.”Ìę

So let’s take that cull off the table, and talk about what else can be done to help the good people of Reunion Island, who very reasonably want to be able to dip a toe in the ocean without having their foot ripped off. Shark tagging and monitoring, increased lookouts above and below the water, shark-repelling pylons on the seafloor, relocating certain sharks, cleaning up the garbage, mitigating runoff, allowing fish stocks to recover,Ìęavoiding surfing at dusk, or alone, or in the most dangerous areas, especially spotsÌęwithÌęmurky, muddy water—yes, sorry, even when the waves are firing—all of these things would help.ÌęNobody wants to tell a kid that he can’t go out on his boogeyboard because he might get bitten in half. But no one wants to see a sharkless, algae-slicked, trash-filled, dead ocean, either—including Kelly Slater, who a couple days after he’d made it, admitting: “I did not think my words through.”Ìę

Susan Casey is the best-selling author ofÌę.Ìę

The post Why Shark Culls Are a Terrible Idea appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Hurricane Madeline had just spun offÌęand Hurricane Lester was hard on its heelsÌęand the skies over Maui’s north shore were brooding and restless, with fierce clouds casting the ocean a surly shade of slate, but Kai Lenny thought the conditions would be “epic” for a downwind coast run on his stand-up ­hydrofoil board, so he drove to Maliko Gulch in his black Ford F-150 truck, towing a matched pair of jet skis behind him on a trailer. This convoy of stoke and gear rolled up the Hana Highway and hairpin-turned into the gulch, bouncing across washboard ruts and through giant mud puddles. At the edge of the launch ramp, Lenny backed up the truck and tipped the jet skis into the water. “Look, it’s already breaking up,” he said, scanning the horizon. “It’s windy though. There’ll be bumps out there for sure.”Ìę

Nothing about the day looked overly appealing. I stood ankle-deep in storm debris—leaves, sticks, mud, rocks—wrestled on a wetsuit, and zipped up my flotation vest. Standing beside me, Victor Lopez, one of Lenny’s mentors (and the brother of surf legend Gerry Lopez), did the same, and then we waded into the murky gulch and climbed aboard the skis. Rain fell crankily. Lenny, however, was buoyant and cheerful.Ìę

And why not? At 24, Lenny is already a seven-time stand-up-paddling world champion—three racing and four surfing with a paddle. He is one of the globe’s most ­accomplished watermen, a prodigy not only at paddling, but also at windsurfing, kitesurfing, and big-wave surfing—doing each of these three sports at such an elite level that, were he to give any one of them his singular attention, its world title would also be well within reach. In pursuit of his passions Lenny has surfed oceans, bays, rivers, lakes, wave parks, even swimming pools. Last April in a Paris stadium, he windsurfed off a ramp and landed a massive aerial flip, with 15,000 spectators cheering and disco lights flashing overhead. His repertoire also includes prone paddling, outrigger canoeing, freediving, skimboarding, bodysurfing, shortboard surfing—anything that involves water or waves, basically. One surf observer has quipped that Lenny could “ride a loaf of bread if you coated it with resin.” But chest puffing is not Lenny’s style. “I wouldn’t say I’m anywhere close to where I want to be,” he says. “I feel like the more you learn, the less you know.”

Certainly it doesn’t hurt Lenny’s aquatic DNA that he was born and raised on Maui; that his parents, Martin and Paula, moved to the island specifically to windsurf and then built their family life entirely around watersports; that he grew up with “uncles” like Laird Hamilton, Dave Kalama, , , and the . Before Lenny’s first week on earth was complete, his parents had already dipped him into the Pacific, a baptism of the highest, wildest order. At four he caught his first wave; by nine he had his first sponsor. This all seems quite fateful, even before you learn that kaiÌęis the Hawaiian word for “ocean.”Ìę

Now, two decades later, watching ­Lenny paddle is a lesson in elegance; I’ve seen sea­birds less graceful. At five-nine and 154 pounds, he is not a brawny guy. For his size he’s long-limbed, every muscle a functional tool. Lopez and I followed as Lenny set off on his 7'2″ canary yellow hydrofoil board in search of the best wind and waves. Soon he was up on the foil. “He’s going nine or ten knots,” Lopez said, nodding his approval.

A foil appears ungainly only when it’s not in motion. More than anything it resembles an airplane wing, connected to a board by a vertical strut. When it moves through the water, the physics kick in and the foil creates lift, allowing the rider to soar, frictionless, around two feet above the surface. Though foils have been around for years, they’ve mainly been used for tow surfing. Lenny changed that, working with an engineer on the design, adapting it for stand-up paddling and shortboard surfing. Being able to fly under your own power was, he claimed, “life changing.” ­Every wave in the ocean, even crummy waves, mushy waves, misshapen waves, was suddenly a joyride.Ìę

We made our way down the coast as ­Lenny zipped through the swells. At one point the sky darkened ominously behind us while the sun peeked out front and a full rainbow emerged, glowing with preposterous ­beauty. It arched over Lenny’s head, the ­dramatic light illuminating the Hurley logo on his boardshorts, the Tag Heuer watch on his wrist, the rich yellow of his Naish surfboard, the Red Bull logos glinting off the jet skis. Lenny’s skin shone like copper; his smile could be seen from outer space. It was an image that would make advertising executives fall to their knees in rapture, eyes rolled back in their heads.Ìę

Lopez grinned. “Kai has a whole different relationship to the ocean than most people,” he said. “And he’s the nicest kid out there! The only grief I can give him is that he eats too many burritos.”

On any afternoon when the trade winds are blowing, Hookipa Beach Park, on Maui’s north shore, is a riot of kites and sails, attitude and adrenaline. In the parking lot you’ll hear German, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, pidgin—a United Nations of surf. Local heavies patrol the place enforcingÌęDarwin’s rules of etiquette. Offshore the waves can be triple overhead. In short, it’s a tough place to make an impression. Especially if you’re ten years old.

Veteran pilot Don Shearer, whose yellow chopper is a familiar sight at every big swell, recalled the first time he saw Lenny at Hoo­kipa, back in 2003. Shearer had been flying a photography crew who were shooting the scene when a tiny figure streaked into the frame: “Here comes this little kid, and he does this full loop right in front of the helicopter on his windsurfer! I’m like, ‘Who the hell is that?’ ”

Robby Naish knew who it was. Naish, now 53, is a windsurfing icon, a 24-time world champ who won his first title at age 13. He also launched a board-sports company, fielding a team of talented riders. Around the same time Shearer noticed Lenny, ­Naish had ­received a letter, penned in a kid’s hand. “I will be the best team rider if you give me a chance,” it read. A rĂ©sumĂ© and list of references were attached. The letter was signed:Ìę“Your Freind [sic], Kai Waterman Lenny.”

“Thank you very much for your rĂ©sumé  and welcome to the team!” Naish wrote back, adding: “The number one rule is that school comes first!” He also advised Lenny to listen to his parents and to “stay modest. Nobody likes a ‘big head’ even if he’s the best in the world.”

Recalling Lenny’s letter now, Naish chuckles. “It was cute. I’ve known Kai since he was born. He had so much enthusiasm, it was pretty clear he was gonna go places eventually. Unless he spun out or became a drug addict, it was almost guaranteed. Fortunately, he’s got his head on straight.”Ìę

This is an understatement. As a young adult, Lenny has his act together in a way that’s rare in someone twice his age. Disciplined, organized, reliable, friendly, positive: all those adjectives apply. Lenny doesn’t drink alcohol—“I don’t like the taste,” he says—or, God forbid, smoke. He considers his time in the ocean to be a state of constant meditation. When forced to remain on land, he reads Joseph Campbell and teaches himself filmmaking. The most deviant thing he’s been known to do is roll his dog, Bubba, upside down and spin him around a few times. “He loves it,” Lenny says. (For the record that appears to be true.)Ìę

Most important, he is surrounded by Maui’s tight-knit watersports community and a family that couldn’t be more supportive. Martin Lenny, an ­affable man with a calming presence, juggles a real estate ­career with helping Kai guide his ­affairs. ­Paula ­Lenny is an athletic woman with tousled blond hair and kind eyes who recently retired as a physician. The two not only ­encouraged Kai and his younger brother, Ridge, in their oceanic adventures—they joined in.Ìę

To put it mildly, this is not always the soil in which young surfers grow: Rates of burnout and dropout and delinquency abound. Substance abuse lurks nearby. The surf world’s list of cautionary tales is long, but it is simply impossible to imagine Lenny, say, chugging a 40 while dazed on oxycodone. At no time in his life will he be getting his neck tattooed.Ìę

This is not to say, however, that Lenny is perfect. There was that incident in the cane fields, when his Polaris Rzr ATV ended up floating down an irrigation ditch and had to be sling-loaded out. Officially closed to the public, these fields hold forbidden allure for dirt bikers—or, in Lenny’s case, high-speed off-roaders who enjoy aerobatics. “If I was really in trouble and I had to make my great escape, nobody could catch me on that thing,” he says. “It goes 140 miles per hour!” And the burrito-gluttony charge is legitimate.

Lenny loves Taco Bell with a level of devotion that fast-food chains don’t often inspire. The relationship is not mercenary: there is no sponsorship here, just adoration. It takes multiple bean and cheese burritos to power an eight-hour day of training that may include surfing, paddling, foiling, kiting, windsurfing, a gym workout, and a Muay Thai boxing session thrown in for good measure.Ìę

“I have a hard time keeping weight on,” Lenny says. “There’s a burning furnace in my stomach.” Finding his body’s ideal fuel has not been an easy quest. On the water he dutifully ingested gels, which he hated, and found himself bonking and fading anyway. At home a dinner of fish and salad didn’t cut it. “I was always feeling so tired, because I wasn’t getting enough fat and calories,” Lenny says. “So this year I just said screw it, I’m gonna eat whatever I want. And I feel amazing. I finally realized that the people who were telling me what to eat were all, like, 50.”

If there’s a race that demands the full mea­sure of Lenny’s determination, it’s the Molokai 2 Oahu Paddleboard World Championships, a 32-mile, notoriously feisty channel crossing between the two islands. At that distance it’s a test of pain threshold as well as paddling skills. In 2015, Lenny finished second. The year before that resulted in fourth. This wouldn’t suffice. The M2O is a crown jewel in the extreme-sports kingdom; winning it was high on Lenny’s to-do list. He changed up his equipment, modified his training, debriefed with master waterman Dave Kalama, tweaked his race tactics, and stocked the escort boat with Taco Bell.Ìę

And trounced everyone at the 2016 race, .

“The best part was nobody thought I was going to win,” Lenny tells me one day as we’re sitting in the living room of his parents’ house in Spreckelsville, a stone’s throw from some of the Pacific’s best windsurfing breaks. “I just raced against myself,” Lenny says, describing a strategy of high-intensity intervals rather than a long, grinding slog. “I would go really hard for a while, then I would really relax.”

Martin and Paula are at home today, too; the only Lenny not in evidence is Ridge, who is away at college. The house has a ­relaxed, happy vibe, with comfy sofas, wooden carvings of sea turtles, vintage surfboards hanging from the dining room ceiling.Ìę

In the run-up to the 2016 M2O, after a big-wave competition caused Lenny to miss one paddling event and illness kept him from another, a SUP blogger brayed across the Internet: The stand-up tour’s current world champion was not a contender. You would not be seeing him on the podium.Ìę

Paula nods. “Everyone was asking, ‘Is Kai going to retire from racing?’ ”

“People are funny,” Lenny says with a smirk. “When they don’t see you, they assume that you’re done. And I’m like, ‘You guys do realize I’m only 24, right?’ ”

Enjoying this pressure-free, underdog status might have been easier had a 60 Minutes Sports crew not been following Lenny, hoping to capture footage of a big showy victory. “It’s such a mental game, that race,” he says. “It hurts so bad. You’re pounding as hard as you can for four hours.” But the effort was worth it: “The only way to become world champion is to go to a point that somebody else isn’t willing to go.” The other day on the water, Lopez had weighed in: “I think that record’s going to stand for a long time. And when it’s broken, it’ll be him breaking it.”

El Niño winter is hard luck for many marine creatures, but one group thrives on it: big-wave surfers. And no big wave draws more of their attention than Peahi, otherwise known as Jaws. Located on Maui five miles east of Maliko Gulch and a half-mile offshore, Jaws is an irresistible fever dream for anyone whose idea of a good time involves surfing a wave as daunting as Mount Everest. Its faces can top 80 feet.Ìę

Lenny has been riding Jaws since he was 16, and he was fantasizing about it long before that. He began tow-surfing it under the tutelage of Kalama and Hamilton, the wave’s undisputed kings. “Kai’s been watching us ride Peahi since he was a baby,” Hamilton says. “For him, riding these giant waves is the norm: ‘Oh, that’s what you do.’ ” Despite a memorable wipeout the first time he was towed in, Lenny was instantly sold; now he’s there whenever the wave breaks in good conditions. Most years that’s three, four, maybe five times. Then the weather gods brought winter 2015–16: Lenny surfed Jaws 24 times. His performance on the biggest days earned him a spot on the World Surf League’s Big Wave Tour.Ìę

“I think a huge transformation came from being a part of my best big-wave season ever,” Lenny says. “From the start of it, my thought process was, ‘Well, I hope I don’t die. If I can make it to May, I’m gonna be so happy.’ ” Not that he was any less scared by the end, he stresses. Big-wave riders tend to think of Peahi as a ferocious female presence—Hamilton has called her “the Grand Empress”—who commands total respect. “I feel like she’s my other mother, in a way,” Lenny says. “And that’s spiritually speaking, because every time I go out, I do feel like I’m being taught a lesson.”Ìę

“He has that sense of how to survive up there,” Kalama notes. “And not every big-wave surfer does. A lot of them just have giant nuts and will go on anything—and all they’re really doing is taking off into obliv­ion. Kai’s extremely talented in maneuvering and positioning and judging how to make the wave. And yet, at the same time, he’s totally down to take a beating. Which is really impressive in my book.”

“I’ve always been really lucky with injuries,” Lenny says, allowing only that the worst one he’s gotten at Jaws—his right foot nearly sliced in half—was “irritating.” He’d fallen on a wave and taken some 30-footers on the head, and somewhere in the maelstrom his board’s fin filleted him between his toes. Lenny popped up, gasped for air, reached down, and felt two pieces of foot where there would normally be one. That bad situation would have been worse if not for Don ­Shearer’s improvisational medevac skills.Ìę

“Yeah, I pulled him out of the water,” Shearer says. “I saw the whole thing happen, and it didn’t look good.” To transport Lenny from the lineup to shore to a car to the hospital would have taken too long—­obvious from the scarlet froth in the whitewater. With Shearer hovering low and Lopez maneuvering the jet ski, Lenny grabbed the helicopter’s left skid and hauled himself into the backseat. Judging from the photos, this is not something you should try at home.

“By the time I got to the airport, he had bled all over the whole helicopter,” Shearer recalls. “The inside, the outside, the seats, the ceiling. And we had the doors off, you know—it’s a hurricane in the backseat. We’re going 120 knots, and you get side winds.”Ìę

After Lenny was safely in the ER, ­Shearer surveyed his chopper, which now looked like the site of an ax murder. “I called Kai and left a message: ‘If I didn’t love you so much, I would come over there and kick your ass! I’d make you come over here and clean up this shit! I have to wash the whole damned helicopter!’ ” Shearer laughs. “He owes me a wash job! Tell him I haven’t forgotten.”

Even at home, Lenny runs a tight ship. His apartment above his parents’ garage brings to mind a well-ordered yacht: zero clutter, all items tidily stowed. “I like to keep everything as clean as I can,” he explains, an admirable philosophy for anyone, especially anyone who happens to compete professionally in at least four different sports. And he is ­constantly travel­ing, schlepping equipment all over the planet and then back home to Maui. He would surely be forgiven a bit of chaos: a tangle of ­leashes, a pile of wetsuits on the floor. Yet when he shows me a room where about 60 of his hundreds of boards are stored, the rows are so neat it’s as though they’ve been filed in alphabetical order.Ìę

Today is a rest day, a concept Lenny does not love but is learning to tolerate. The Herculean work ethic that drives him ­physically, however, also holds sway over his interior life, so Lenny’s idea of taking a break includes designing new foil shapes on his computer, or watching technical videos of canoe paddling, or analyzing the data from his heart-rate monitor, or writing in his journal, or reading David Mamet on Directing Film, the book that’s lying on his desk. The one thing the day probably won’t include is actual, indolent rest. “If I’m not on the move—I’m all about adventure around the next corner, otherwise I get really bored,” Lenny emphasizes. “I need constant stimulation.”

Whatever Lenny is doing to engage himself, it’s working. And whatever success he’s already achieved, it’s clear he’s just getting started. Which goals are up next? I ask for specifics, and Lenny muses for a moment, then says he would have to break it down by sport. Even talking about waves revs him up, and the words tumble out in a rush. “For windsurfing, I want to be doing gravity-­defying moves in the air when I jump. I want to do double rotations and feel like I lose the sensation of time. And then kitesurfing, I’m really into doing maneuvers you couldn’t do on a surfboard, that need the assistance of the kite. Connecting the dots so it just looks unbelievable. Shortboard surfing, it’s about tricks, learning all the intricacies of tricks. Big-wave surfing is about performance. I want to ride really big waves, and I want to surf them like they’re small waves. That’s my goal. And then foiling, I want to figure out how to be a fighter pilot. Being as efficient as flying, but doing radical turns. Defying most people’s idea of physics. Doing stuff where they think, That’s not possible. I love that. That’s so cool. And then stand-up-paddle racing, I just want to be an absolute animal. Feel like there’s no other athlete who can push as hard as me or go as fast as I can. And the only way to do that is by training and stuff. What else is there? That kind of covers all the basics.”

The post Kai Lenny Walks on Water appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Playing the Field: Be On the Lookout

Sparks fly in the strangest places

Whenever I tell the story of how Sara and I fell for each other, it sounds like a lie. Sometimes I rein in the details—not because they’re false, but -because I know they appear to be. Like the part with the volcano. The part with the volcano always tips it from crazy to unbelievable.

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We’d been in the Amazon for a week, in northern Ecuador, dodging bullet ants, swimming with pink dolphins, fishing for piranhas. Friends, platonic, since childhood. On what was supposed to be the final day of our trip, we emerged from the jungle on the outskirts of Lago Agrio, a little oil town just south of the Colombian border, where we planned to drag our grimy backpacks onto a turboprop and fly to Quito. We already had two seats booked on a flight.

Walking the road toward town, we smel-led the burning tires before we saw them. There were several smoking piles and hundreds of protestors. As we got closer, a few of them started chanting that they should throw the gringos into the fire. Sara’s Spanish was rusty, and she asked me what they were saying. I told her I’d tell her later.

The airport was shut down, as were all major roads. Foreign oil companies had bled the area for decades, giving little in return, and the locals were fed up. Most of the nearby wells and pipelines had just been sabotaged, cutting into Ecuador’s oil output. We found a cheap hotel with a nervous desk clerk and an empty room and waited for the inevitable crackdown.

The military arrived. We watched the clashes from our window, saw Molotoved banks burn, inhaled lungfuls of tear gas. At some point we discovered what I imagine has always been true: when things fall apart, people fall together.

As chaos subsided, we tried to get out of town. We hitched a ride with a cop, then thought better of it when we saw a police car in flames. We called our embassies—she has Canadian citizenship—but they couldn’t do anything. Eventually we found a television news crew that was determined to get its footage back to Quito, and we asked if we could tag along. They said we could. The protestors let them through. They wanted their message out.

The last hurdle was a partially dismantled bridge. We stopped and hauled just enough of its scattered pieces of steel back into place. As our vehicle inched across, I looked up the riverbed and saw that we were on the flanks of a volcano—El Reventador—and that it was in the process of reven-tando, belching smoke and ash.

That was 11 years ago. The short-lived Lago Agrio uprising had only a modest effect on world oil prices, but it changed our worlds completely.

Our daughter just turned ten.

Luke Dittrich is the author of .

Getting Serious: Stay the Course

Relationships demand compromise. But always hold on to your dangerous habits.

When I started dating my wife, Katie, I ached for her from my knees to my throat. My desire to keep her close tempted me to cancel trips, tell my buddies to buzz off, and turn down jobs that I’d normally be thrilled to get.

A specific recollection has me climbing into the nosebleed section of a giant Sitka spruce that was leaning over my friend’s home in order to knock out the top with a chainsaw. I’d done this a bunch of times while working as an arborist during graduate school. I always loved the thrill of riding that bucking tree amid the rush of air created by the severed trunk racing toward a collision with the earth. But this time, as I inched my way up, I suffered a collection of worries about a climbing rope that suddenly seemed vulnerable and insufficient. One wrong move with my chainsaw or an errant placement of my climbing spurs and I might not live to touch Katie’s thigh again. The only sensible thing to do was rappel down and leave the tree to some sucker who was less in love.

But I kept climbing. I was driven by thoughts of many friends who had given up some vital part of themselves in the early stages of a relationship—solo climbs, annual fishing trips, plans to cross the continent on a bike—and their girlfriends grew to love them in the absence of such things. Later, when my friends tried to resume their old behaviors, they realized that they had inadvertently placed them out of reach. A buddy of mine describes this phenomenon as “the screwing you get for the screwing you got.”

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That’s not good for anyone—not for you, your girlfriend, or your relationship. When Katie and I were going through that love-drunk phase, I kept right on doing extended hunts in the mountains of Alaska and traveling to some of the remotest corners of the world for work. Instead of feeling threatened by these activities, she learned to take pride in my ability to navigate danger. “I want my guy to be capable,” she’d say, “and to remain dedicated to what he’s doing even in the face of big risks.”

Just don’t push it to the point of selfishness. Katie knows that I’m not carousing in bars at night. She knows that she can count on me in tough times. She knows that our family is my top priority. Because of all that, she’s OK with me turning up in the top of a big tree, attached to life only by a thin rope. When I come down, it’s like our first date all over again.

Contributing editor Steven Rinella is the author of .

Making the Commitment: No Risk, No Reward

The best way to show your willingness to go the distance? Follow them anywhere.

It’s only three miles, I told him. You can swim three miles. I’ve got some fins in your size, and the group stops every 500 yards. The water’s warm! Usually there isn’t much current. Right now the Southern Hemisphere is quiet, and the Northern Hemisphere hasn’t kicked in yet, so there won’t be any swell. We’ll see turtles! Fish. Manta rays. Across the coral reefs it’s a kaleidoscopic trip, and in the deep water
 well, you can still see the bottom. You’ll love it! You’ll be fine.

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He was game. He was from Manhattan by way of northern Italy, in Hawaii for the first time, and he had flown to the middle of the Pacific Ocean to visit me. We were a new couple, feeling our way through early turbulence and geographic complications, and more than anything, I wanted him to stay for a while. In matters of the heart, I’ve learned that it pays to address the heart directly, so I set out to share what I love most: Maui’s offshore waters.

Here’s what I didn’t share: that a thriving population of tiger and oceanic whitetip sharks love these waters as much as I do.

Two years earlier, in fact, while swimming the same course, three friends and I ran into a feeding 13-foot tiger. I’ve seen my share of large marine life, and this was for sure the crankiest. A tattered sea turtle with a chunk out of its shell lay below us as we treaded helplessly, watching the shark roll its eyes back, tuck in its pectoral fins, and prepare to attack. But something gave the animal pause, and after a few long, menacing minutes, it snatched up the sea turtle, gave the carcass a warning shake, and swam slowly away.

Since then there have been other shark encounters around here, several bites and two fatalities. I didn’t see the upside in mentioning this. We waded out from the beach, adjusted our goggles. I was nervous. This was a moment of reckoning.

Until now we’d gotten along easily in our fledgling relationship, but reality would eventually descend—and here was a dose of it. Could I love someone who didn’t handle himself well in the ocean? The short answer was no. But I also realized that it’s a pretty tall order to ask someone from New York City to plunge into 70-foot-deep salt water and stay there for two hours comfortably.

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My worries were wasted. He swam well; if anything, he’d understated his skill. The ocean was crystalline that day, everything glowing and luminous. But when we arrived at the turnaround point, a rocky cliff studded with sea caves, the water abruptly turned oily and murky. Looking down, I saw a severed ahi head lying on the seafloor and realized, with a jolt, that the fishermen on the rocks above had been chumming. A lot.

Before I could suggest that we get out of there, another swimmer yelled: “Shark!” We ducked our heads in time to see a ten-foot oceanic whitetip, sleek as a fighter jet, swim past us right below the surface. The shark’s mouth was open, teeth clearly visible, and it was heading out to sea as if spooked. “I think we’d better go,” I said. He agreed, and in that moment I saw that he hadn’t panicked, hadn’t freaked out, and that, if anything, he was awed by the whitetip—which, by the way, is one of the more aggressive models. We got engaged six months later. Now when he tells the story of his first open-water swim in Hawaii, there’s pride in his voice, and happiness. A man who loves the wildest fish in the sea? That’s what I call a keeper.

Susan Casey is the author of .

Going Long: Lean On Me

Whatever the trail throws at you, you can handle it step by step

The first date that my wife, Lisa, and I went on was a bug safari in Central Park in the summer of 1992. Dressed in khakis and penny loafers, we wandered the woods and hillsides with magnifying glasses and entomology books in hand. Two weeks later, we pitched a tent for three nights in Adirondack Park. Soon afterward, we camped in New York’s High Peaks Wilderness Area and hiked 5,344-foot Mount Marcy.

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As our relationship grew, our outings got more ambitious. Later that year, we strapped a canoe on top of Lisa’s Saturn and drove from Boston to Everglades National Park to paddle the 99-mile Wilderness Waterway. We conceived our first children—twin girls—while backpacking in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and eloped in the summer of ’95, with Lisa gathering a bouquet of wildflowers and vegetables on the way to the courthouse in Lewisburg, West Virginia.

Some couples hike hand in hand. Not us. Lisa kicked my ass. She walked faster. She was never out of breath. And she always—and I mean always—prepared and packed better than I did. She was the quintessential adventure partner.

And then her body started falling apart. First to go was her shoulder. So we stopped doing triathlons together. A few years later, around 1998, she broke her right big toe. For some reason it never healed, and so while she could still hike glaciers in Greenland faster than me, each of us carrying a twin on our back, she was hurting every other step. Yet she soldiered on because it was our thing. We were the outdoors couple.

And then it got worse. By 2007, she started to experience excruciating pain in her hips on simple walks on our neighborhood nature trail. We didn’t know it, but she had a hered­itary condition, shared with her brother and two sisters, in which the tissues that held her joints together were simply no longer strong enough for the job. Between the four siblings, they’ve now had four hips, five shoulders, and three knees replaced.

Watching Lisa hobble around our house, first on a cane and then on a walker, I assumed our outdoor life together was over. But about two years back—and I remember the exact look, words, and location—she turned to me and said, “I miss being in the outdoors with you and the kids too much. I want to go on hikes with you until the day we die.”

We learned that her “good” hip had end-stage osteoarthritis, and her bad hip was far worse. Her doctor couldn’t believe the destruction—bone had been grinding on bone for quite a while. Last winter she got dual hip-replacement surgery. Then, in the spring, a reconstructed big toe. Her right second toe was so disfigured by arthritis that she chose to have it amputated.

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A few months into her recovery, it’s a relief just to be able to walk with her to the end of the driveway to get the paper. Or to arrive hand in hand, out of breath, at an outdoor wedding. We have a tough climb ahead, but as long as there’s a trail before us, we’re ­going to follow it, together.

Correspondent W. Hodding Carter is the author of and .

Ìę

My husband, Steve, and I have been living and skiing in northern New Mexico for 16 years. We’ve had epic powder season, when we skied Taos nearly every weekend and drought seasons when we had to settle for skinning up our local ski area and carving wide wale. Steve scored some great backcountry seasons, with hut trips to British Columbia. Then I had pregnant seasons (hiking Kachina Peak at 5 months along—maybe not the wisest idea?) and newborn seasons, when my ski days were curtailed by ravenous infants and, when I did venture farther afield, my pump was part of the package. I’ve expressed milk in ski area parking lots, cafeteria bathrooms, and SnoCats, but never—thank God—on a chairlift.

Now that our two daughters are emerging from babyhood and are learning to ski, we’re having kid seasons. We’re enormously lucky to have a decent resort just 25 minutes up the road, but it’s still a schlep to get girls and gear to the lifts, and on the best days, we only manage to sneak in few runs ourselves. So all winter we’ve been fantasizing about getting out of the area and into the backcountry, where—away from the vacationing crowds, the lure of hot chocolate in the lodge, the occasional parking lot tantrum—skiing as a family would be simpler, more relaxing. Or so we thought.

Ìę

Choosing the right spot was key. There are plenty of backcountry huts and yurts throughout the Rockies, but with a one-year-old and three-year-old, we had very specific criteria: We needed something within a few miles of a road, as our range would be limited by how far we could carry them and all our gear. The terrain had to be low-angle, with low or no risk of avalanche. Ideally, the hut would be big enough to accommodate another family. And we didn’t want to have to spend a ridiculous amount of time driving to get there. All told, our requirements were a little daunting, and I was starting to think we’d be better off waiting until the kids were older.

Then by chance I found it: a lone yurt at , deep in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, about an hour northeast of Taos. The yurt—a circular, wood-and-canvas shelter, in only its second season—is only a mile from the base area, accessible by groomed and rolling cross-country ski trails. EFXC’s website describes it as having woodstove for heat, a propane stove for cooking, all the necessary cooking gear, an outhouse, and bunks for six (BYO sleeping bags). It sounded ideal for us and another family, who also have two girls under four. I figured we’d put the babies in portable, backcountry cribs, and the rest of us would crash on the bunks. Best of all, EFXC rents ski pulks specifically designed for carrying kids, and we could pay an extra $25 to have our gear transported via snowmobile to the yurt and back. I checked the calendar: Not surprisingly, only a couple weekend nights were still available, so I booked one on the spot.

It had all the makings of a perfect starter yurt trip.

Last Saturday morning, we left Santa Fe at the tail end of a storm, with fog obscuring the mountains and three inches of wet snow on the ground, but by the time we reached the Rio Grande Gorge, the roads were dry and the skies were clearing. It was turning out to be a classic March day in New Mexico: snow one moment, sun the next, all the more beautiful for how moody and unpredictable it was. After a two-and-a-half hour drive, we arrived at Enchanted Forest around lunchtime and spent the better part of an hour unloading and repacking our sizeable pile of gear and food. As we’ve learned from summer river trips, it’s almost impossible to travel light in the backcountry with toddlers and babies—even more so in the winter, when they need lots of warm layers, bulky boots, and for our three year old Pippa, a last-minute pair of borrowed XC skis.

Mush! photo: Blair Beakley

We debated using the snowmobile—the purists (e.g., fathers) among us argued it would be just as easy to haul the kids and then come back for the gear—but eventually, practical minds prevailed, and Mike, the head ski patroller, backed the sled behind our car and we started piling it full of stuff. Good thing, because putting four wiggly toddlers into two small ski pulks—picture a bike trailer, only smaller and with two plastic grooves instead of wheels—turned out to be trickier than we thought. One-year-old Maisy was delighted to play in the pulk, but when we stuck her sister in beside her and zipped up the clear plastic cover, it turned into an instant mosh pit. Ditto for our friends Stewart and Blair, whose 11-month-old baby Grace began wailing loudly beside three-year-old Franny. Time for Plan B: our .

We’d strapped the little girls on our backs and the bigger girls in the pulks and were finally ready to shove off, when Geoff, EFXC’s owner, ambled out of the homey base lodge to assess our rigs. “Oh we don’t usually allow people to ski with kids on their backs,” he told us. The casual way he said this belied the bomb he dropped next. “It’s too dangerous. There have been eight fatalities in the last decade.” He paused meaningfully to let the horror set in. “I was a first responder on one of them.” I looked at Blair, who has been my partner on numerous ski outings with babies in tow, and I could tell she was thinking what I was thinking: All those times I’ve skied pregnant or with a baby strapped to my back—how could I be such terrible, careless mother?!

But Geoff wasn’t done yet. “Think about it: a baby’s head is like a watermelon,” he went on, “and if your skis slide out from under you, bam.” He made a slapping motion with one hand, and in one frenzied contortion, Blair shrugged the baby pack off her pack and put Grace into the safety of the pulk. Maisy was still protesting, so I decided to keep her on my back, at least for the long gradual climb to the yurt. After all, Mike had just told me my backcountry skis—wider than typical XC skis, with metal edges—were “a little overkill” for the groomed trails. “If you get nervous,” Steve said pragmatically, “you can put her in the sled.”

Setting off, Powderpuff Trail climbs gently from the lodge, and pretty soon Geoff’s message of doom was drowned out by Gracie’s desperate screeching. Behind me, I could feel Maisy’s head slump on my shoulder and all 23 pounds of her turn to dead weight. She was asleep. I could just make out Pippa’s bright eyes and huge grin through the fogged-up plastic cover of her pulk. With the help of the trail map, we navigated half a dozen junctions along EFXC’s more than 30k of trails. The website was reporting a 30-inch base, but in some sunny places, it skied more like five, with rocks and patches of grass peeking through along the edges. Still, it was undeniably gorgeous, and liberating, to be out there in the fresh air and stillness of the afternoon, pulling the girls under our own power, free from our mountain of stuff and life’s constant yammering distractions, at least for a little while.

The yurt, when we arrived after half an hour, sat in a picturesque clearing beside the trail; to the south, you could make out the high snowy ridge of Wheeler Peak, the highest in New Mexico. Even from some distance, I could tell it was going to be the smallest yurt I’d ever seen (never mind that it was the only yurt I’d ever seen, up close). Inside, our neatly stacked gear took up half the place; the rest consisted of two bunk beds, a tiny folding table, four chairs piled in the corner, a small wooden counter with a two-burner camping stove, a lantern dangling from the ceiling, a miniature wood stove, and a narrow shelf stacked with Sorry! and Yahtzee. It wasn’t immediately clear to me how we’d all fit inside, or where we would sleep, but we crammed in anyway, nervously admiring the view through the skylight and trying not to step on each other, especially baby Grace, who would more or less live on the floor all weekend.

We laid out lunch of hummus and wraps on the table and shooed the girls outside to take advantage of the daylight hours and build a snow cave. Then Blair and I ducked out to ski a lap around the south end of the trail system to an overlook called Piece de Resistance, with views south towards Wheeler Peak and Gold Hill, above Taos Ski Valley. Afterwards, we all went out for a walk, strapping Pippa into a pair of kiddy XC skis for the first time. I was expecting a spastic, wobbly-ankle debacle, but Pippa was surprisingly surefooted, herringboning up the steeper slopes and evening getting some glide.

Back at the yurt, Steve lit a fire, gave me explicit instructions to not let it go out, and skied off with Stewart into the late afternoon. Soon it would be dark, and suddenly the yurt felt very cold. It was hard to decide which was more urgent: get the kids into warm clothes or put dinner—vegetarian chili Blair made ahead—on the stove. We scrambled to do both at once, layering the girls up in wool leggings and fleece while trying to light the burners, cajoling them to eat chili and cornbread cross-legged on the floor, jamming too-long logs into the woodstove, and taming the crazy mess of gear spilling onto every inch of yurt. Yeah, we were backcountry nesting. By the time the guys came back, the yurt had a vague air of order about it, the kids were fed, and hot chili for the rest of us was simmering on the stove—a fleeting moment of calm before the storm. Literally.

Trying to put four kids to bed in a space roughly the size of a bathroom isn’t something I’d wish upon my worst enemy, and even though the adults among us were far too preoccupied trying to settle squalling girls to say anything aloud, I know we were all thinking the same thing, and not for the first time that day: How could this possibly be worth it? Nearly two hours of musical kids and bunks and countless false alarm trips to the malodorous outhouse later, the kids were more or less asleep. And since there was nothing much for us to do but sit and whisper in the dark—I was most certainly not going to catch up on my New Yorker reading as I’d imagined—we all retreated to our bunks in various stages of emotional and physical disrepair.

Trust me when I say that the most essential piece of gear on a family yurt trip is a pair of earplugs. They’ll take the edge off when your husband gets up repeatedly to shove wood in the stove and when the kid (yours) in the top bunk wails with a night terror (thankfully, Franny and Grace, model yurt citizens, slept through the hysteria). The only thing stranger than my inconsolable, half-asleep daughter thrashing on the top bunk was the flash of snow lightning that lit up the skylight and the clap of thunder that followed. Oh great, I thought, imagining our tiny canvas shelter being vaporized by the next strike, this is just what we need.

Next thing I knew, though, the faint light of dawn was streaking through the plastic windows and the children were beginning to chirp softly, like tree frogs in a Costa Rican dawn. All I could think was, thank God, we’d survived. șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, the rogue midnight storm had dropped at half a foot of fresh snow, and the ponderosas glittered in white. There was the answer to our question: Yes, in the blinding light of a backcountry powder day, this was most certainly all worth it.

After breakfast, we went out for a family ski and got first tracks on fluffy, just-groomed trails. The older girls stood in the back of the pulks, musher-style, and Pippa broke out the XC skis for a bit, their peals of laughter breaking the powdery quiet. No one was out yet, and as we glided along through the silent, shining forest, I was struck by how, despite the obvious hassles, sleeping out in the backcountry is the only true way I know to slow time. Away from the over-stimulation of everyday routines, life really is so much simpler. In a 16-foot yurt, your only job of consequence is to keep the kids from killing each other or freezing to death. That, and fly through the trees on fast skis with fresh air in your lungs and sun on your face and people you love all around. Really, is there anything more important?

Top Ten Tips for Surviving Your First Yurt Trip with Kids

1. If you can, stay at least two nights, preferably three. It takes the same amount of prep as one, and the first night you’ll be too busy working out the kinks to really relax. By the second, you’ll have your system down and can focus on checking out.

2. Don’t forget earplugs.

3. Suck up your pride and take snow mobile assist if there is one. Definitely.

4. Bring more warm layers than you think you need, especially socks. Even with woodstoves, yurts can be chilly.

5. Pack slippers for all.

6. Borrow, rent, or BYO ski pulk. Chariot makes ski kits that will turn your bike trailer into a kiddy pulk. Otherwise, check out ($475), the classic, made-in-Utah sled that we used at EFXC.

7. Snowshoes are a great alternative to XC skiing if you’re worried about carrying kids on your back.

8. Bring or rent equipment for the kids, even if they’ve never tried Nordic skiing. A backcountry base camp is the perfect low-pressure place to explore the feeling of gliding on edgeless skis. If they’re not into it, they can always play musher in the pulk or build snow caves.

9. Double check the size of the shelter before you book. Your gear will take up more floor space than you think, and a 16-foot diameter hut isn’t big enough for eight. A hut with a separate sleeping space will make for a more restful night for all.

10. Homemade banana bread from Alice Water’s Art of Simple Food is an instant tantrum tamer and easy no-cook breakfast when you want to feed the kids fast and get out for a ski.

Enchanted Forest Cross Country Ski Area, ; yurt rental, from $75 per night.

—Katie Arnold

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