On perhaps my 100th day climbing at Turkey Rocks, a popular crag outside Colorado Springs, Colorado, I was gazing absentmindedly toward��Pikes Peak when the moment was sliced in half by a scream. My friend Noah was top-roping a 5.7 hand crack when something went wrong:��when he got to the anchor, he leaned back and fell 60 feet, bouncing��once on a ledge on his way to the ground. This was the first pitch he had ever climbed outside. An older climber cradled Noah’s bloodied face in his hands as my friend clung to consciousness. In that moment, I was not confident he would survive.��

Another climber and I scrambled to the top of the formation to get cell service��and were able to call in the Teller County Search and Rescue. With too many people crowded around Noah already, we went to find the cause of the accident. It turns out,��a new climber had built a gear anchor by putting a circular sling around the top of a small, sloping boulder. Six people had climbed the route on top rope before the fall. As each one lowered, the sling��slipped upward, eventually passing over the top of the rock. When Noah leaned back, there was nothing to catch him. On the ground, we found the anchor sling still attached to the rope, a single small cam dangling from it.

Climbing has a reputation as��a dangerous sport—and rightfully so. Last year 204 accidents resulting in 210 injuries and 22 deaths were reported to��Accidents in North American Climbing (ANAC), a long-running annual publication that documents��mountaineering and climbing. By��comparison, avalanche death among skiers averages around�� in the United States. The journal’s��numbers are a conservative estimate, as not all accidents are reported. And as more people embrace the sport, introduced by��the rapid growth of climbing gyms, many climbers are worried that accidents will increase.��

While your local crag may seem safe compared with��alpine peaks or 3,000-foot faces at Yosemite, accidents like the one I witnessed at Turkey Rocks—which involved inexperienced climbers and a relatively easy route—are just as common. ANAC has been keeping track of climbing��incidents since 1948, and its��data shows that accidents happen to beginner and advanced climbers at roughly the same rate.��According to��Dougald MacDonald, who has been editing ANAC��since 2015, you’re as likely to get hurt climbing a 5.7 in the Shawangunks as an alpine route in the Tetons.��

Noah’s fall was not the first accident I’d witnessed at that crag. Just a year prior, a miscommunication between a climber (also on top rope) and a belayer lead to a near death. The climber was planning on lowering, but the belayer thought he was going to rappel, so she took him off belay, and when he weighted the rope to descend, he free-fell instead. The belayer grabbed the rope with her bare hands and stopped him from hitting the ground, maybe 40 feet to the left of where Noah fell a year later.��

Part of the problem is a matter of perceived risk: hundreds of feet up a cliff in the Tetons, it’s easy to be aware of the danger. But risk can be less obvious closer to home. MacDonald explains that a familiar setting can lead to a lack of vigilance. “It’s easy to get casual and complacent about this stuff,” he says. You’re likely going to be more afraid halfway up an alpine face than a local sport climb, but a miscommunication on the latter could still result in broken bones—or worse. Falling from 70 feet and 1,000 often have the same result.��

Routine roped falls, where a climber is still secured but hits the rock a bit too fast or at the wrong angle, are the most common cause of injury in climbing; MacDonald says next on the list are��probably lowering and rappelling errors, when��a climber descends off the end of their rope into empty space or miscommunication leads to a fatal fall. Noah’s accident was the result of anchor failure, which MacDonald describes as extremely rare.��There was also little he could have done to prevent it, other than climb with more experienced partners. As a new climber, he trusted others to set up secure systems. He just happened to be the person on the rope when those systems failed.

The woman who built the anchor was fairly new to climbing��but had taken classes on building gear anchors. She built her anchor in the same place as the party before her, placing a sling around a sloping boulder and running a top rope through locking carabiners. The�� is three pieces of gear per anchor, which would mean backing the sling up twice so that the three pieces of gear could simultaneously bear a climber’s weight, but her anchor had only one backup: a small cam placed under the same boulder. It was not designed to withstand��the abrupt force of the failing anchor. When the sling failed, Noah fell hard on the cam, which popped out under the force of the fall.

While we waited for help, we tried to keep him��comfortable: we braced his neck, layered our spare jackets over him, and reassured him that he would make it out all right. The crag is just a 20-minute hike from a dirt road, but it took four hours to evacuate him. After search and rescue arrived, we rolled Noah onto a backboard and spent more than an hour carrying him across the disjointed talus. After a ride in a truck and a helicopter, he arrived at the hospital with a broken pelvis and a badly broken nose. He was lucky.��

Most climbing deaths and injuries are preventable.��Good communication, safety checks, and careful protection—everything from placing gear in easy terrain to making a plan with your climbing partner—can keep climbers of all skill levels out of trouble. Accidents like Noah’s can happen to anyone, anywhere. Even climbers with decades of experience can hurt themselves in the places they feel most comfortable. The more experience I gain climbing, the more rigorously I��check my knot—and my anchor—whether just a few miles from home or somewhere new.

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As people are being priced out of our favorite cities��and as urban areas are investing more in green spaces, we asked ���ϳԹ��� contributors to name the places they’re heading to for that perfect mix of city life and just-around-the-corner adventure. Here are their picks for the oft-overlooked, still sweet, outdoor-focused destinations��to keep on your radar.

Atlanta, Georgia��

This unexpected adventure hot spot has been long in the making

At first glance, you may think that the South’s biggest city (population 463,878) has nothing but rush-hour traffic and career-focused up-and-comers. But look closer and you’ll find world-class access to the outdoors. From the 20-plus miles of technical trail running at to in-town paddling and fishing at , Atlanta is only getting better as it goes through an open-space renaissance headlined by the , a 33-mile multi-use path that, when completed, will form a car-free circle connecting neighborhoods around the city. It’s one of the largest green-space initiatives in the country. There are currently five completed sections of the Beltline (check out the for its vibrant graffiti), but for real adventure, head to the interim trails, gravel and dirt paths that cut through the future Beltline corridor, offering easy off-road biking and running within city limits.��

The Georgia capital also recently scored its first purpose-built singletrack. , located between downtown and the airport, has nearly five new miles of International Mountain Bicycling Association–designated trails cut for flow, with a dozen more miles in the works. Meanwhile, the North Face is working with the Trust for Public Land to build public climbing boulders in , a new 16-acre green space in an underserved neighborhood on the west side of town. Next up? The city is putting $26 million into the construction of , a 280-acre woodland surrounding a former granite quarry that will be the Atlanta’s��largest open space. Plans��include��a cliff-lined lake. —Graham Averill

Colorado Springs, Colorado

The on-the-rise��alternative to Denver

Denver’s transformation into an outdoor hub with all the amenities of city living has attracted an influx of young well-to-do types, which has led to the now familiar reality: a housing shortage and skyrocketing rents. Those looking for Front Range real estate without the hefty price tag should consider moving 70 miles south, to Colorado Springs, the state’s second-biggest city and best-kept adventure secret. At 14,115 feet, dominates the skyline and features��19.5 rowdy miles of downhill biking in the summer and backcountry turns in the winter. The local ups are as exciting as the downs, including the legendary , where defunct cable-car tracks are now used by hikers in search of a vicious workout—2,000 feet of elevation gain in less than a mile—and an incredible view.��

Climbers head to the , where 1,300 acres of towering sandstone formations and trad routes make it hard to believe you’re only 15 minutes from downtown. For less altitude, hometown favorite offers 25 miles of biking and hiking trails that snake around ponderosa pines and blooming prickly pear cacti. And��although historically Colorado Springs hasn’t had the cool factor that defines the likes of Denver and Boulder, that’s also starting to change, thanks to an inflow of ��who are drawn to��the more than 230 businesses in the arts. The city also has its fair share of hip hangouts: check out , a former elementary school that has found new life as a bustling food hall and brewery; , a late-night New American restaurant; and the speakeasy-style cocktail bar . —Cheney Gardner�� ����

Duluth, Minnesota��

This adventure hub is now restoring the Saint��Louis Corridor

Minnesota’s major port city is beloved for its forested parks, trout streams, easy access to Lake Superior, and more than 100 miles of hiking, mountain-biking, and running trails. But what most people don’t know is that the northern city of 86,000 is also where the 192-mile-long Saint��Louis River flows into Lake Superior. For more than a century, the river’s last 39 miles, including its 12,000-acre freshwater estuary, were��trashed by industrial and municipal waste. In 1976, it was finally listed by the EPA as an Area of Concern, but since a restoration initiative launched in 2014, it’s making a comeback.��

The nonprofit has been working with federal, state, and local agencies on the , with a goal of restoring 50 percent of lost habitat in order to delist the river as an Area of Concern��by 2025,��though��in less than a decade, impressive progress has already been made. The river is once again a fishery for muskie, walleye, and smallmouth bass, while��bird species like bald eagle, kingfisher, and black tern are making a return, attracting fishermen and birders. The Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, one of six bands of Ojibwe that make up the tribe, can harvest wild rice once again. And for kayakers and canoers, the river is one signature away from receiving a National Water Trail designation. But for now, sweaty hikers and mountain bikers can swim at the easy-access beach at . —Stephanie Pearson��

Olympia, Washington

It has everything its Pacific Northwest neighbors have—but without the crowds

Forming a geographic midpoint between Washington’s Pacific coast and the mighty Cascade Range, Olympia is situated at the gateway to just about any outdoor adventure you can cook up. The state’s capital is certainly not its biggest or most popular city, but it��has experienced a second coming of sorts, backed by outdoor-minded families who are burned out and priced out of Seattle.

Located 60 miles to the south, Olympia sits at the southern end of Puget Sound, where the intricate waterways and affordable marinas attract a strong boating, sailing, and fishing community. Right in town, there’s , a 314-acre recreation area on Budd Inlet, and , which allocates areas for different activities, from bird-watching to hunting. Beyond that, is only an hour east of downtown, and Olympians (that’ll never get old) can be on a lift at in less than 90 minutes. In the same amount of time, surfers can score waves in the oceanside hamlet of Westport, while the nearby Olympic Range features a lifetime of hiking and mountain-biking trails.��

After decades stuck in cultural Twilight Zone, Olympia has embraced a growing arts community, driven by artists from Arbutus Folk School and Evergreen College and locals trying to gain a foothold outside Seattle’s crowded��scene. Add to that good schools and clean drinking water, and Olympia is quickly emerging��as the next big thing for young and adventurous��families in the Pacific Northwest. —Kade Krichko��

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There’s a little-known addendum to Newton’s law of gravity: what goes up, must come down and eat a lot of calories. And , the six-time world-champion trail��runner, does exactly that when he gets off the mountain.

Gray has lived in Colorado Springs, Colorado, home of the Olympic Training Center and the nearby Manitou Springs Incline (where he holds the fastest known time), since 2014. It’s a perfect fit for him. He grew up��a self-proclaimed military brat, and several military bases and the U.S. Air Force Academy are located here, which he says makes it feel like home. Plus, there are plenty of nearby peaks to bag and, thanks to��, it’s suddenly rife with breweries, artisanal bakeries, and places to get exceptional doughnuts.

He’s very much here for all of that—and some pizza and maybe a burrito, too. “I can eat a lot of pizza,” he says, adding that he’s put away two large ones��in a��sitting after a particularly hard workout. Which is why we trust Gray’s food recommendations for Colorado Springs. While some athletes will point you toward��a stash of stale energy bars when you ask what��they like to eat, Gray isn’t shy about his love for calorie-saturated fare.

Even better,��he loves to cook and has eaten his way around the world both as a military brat and a professional athlete. “I feel like people who are picky don’t get the best experience,” he says about noshing��on the road. His philosophy is simple: in Norway you have to try the lutefisk, and if you’re in Scotland, you’re missing out if you don’t sample the haggis.

There’s no lutefisk or haggis��on this list. But Gray did give us a bunch of great options for breakfast, lunch, and dinner in Colorado Springs. Consider your next trip planned.

Start Your Day with Some Sweat

There's a lot to do outside here. Gray’s pick is��, the pathway up to Pike’s Peak. You can do as much or as little of the out-and-back as you like, but��the trail is about 10.5 miles each way, and the last miles��of the ascent��are very rugged. Gray describes it as “not that bad,” but keep in mind��the source and plan accordingly. (It is not recommended that mortals attempt the whole thing in one day, FYI.)

Next Stop: Burritos

Gray likes hitting Barr Trail because it’s close to . “It’s kind of a dive, but they have amazing breakfast burritos,” he says. His go-to��filling��is the pollo asado. He loads up his roll of goodness with hot sauce, salsa, and hot peppers. “I love hot stuff.��They probably hate it when I come, because I clean out their pepper bar.”

Coffee—If You Need It

Gray isn’t a coffee drinker, so he didn’t have a recommendation. His go-to is the chai his Kenyan teammates sometimes bring to workouts. Since you may not have that option, our recommendation is��. The café is next to a site where it��does all its��own roasting, using beans from small, sustainable farms.

This Is Olympic City USA

When Gray has guests, touring the 35-acre�� is always on his list of things to do. You can walk through the Hall of Fame rotunda, see the weight-lifting and aquatic centers, and basically bask in the glow of America’s Olympians. The tour��runs every hour on the hour.����

Win the Eating Olympics

As we alluded to before, Gray has quite an appetite. His two lunch spots? First:��, a local chain where the patties are made from Colorado beef, then topped with all kinds of gluttonous things. Gray’s order is the Luther, a cardiologist’s worst nightmare, with bacon, cheddar, an egg, and a patty stacked between two glazed donuts.

“If I’ve had a total bonkfest, I head to��,” a Chicago-style��joint. Gray feels that Chicago-style pizza is the best pizza. While��we won’t��confirm or deny that statement, we will admit that cheese, sauce, and bread in any combo is good in our book. Gray says he’ll eat literally anything his friends order on his pizza, though he has a particular fondness for the Hawaiian.

Doughnuts on Pikes Peak

If you’re not in a food coma, there’s a doughnut��shop at the summit of Pike’s Peak. Because they’re being made��at 14,000 feet, these doughnuts��have a slightly different, coarser��texture than a typical doughnut. “It’s not the best doughnut, but when I’m running, if I’m doing Pikes Peak, I always carry money with me, because it’s hard to smell them and not get one,” he says. And: they’re famous. You basically have to try them.

Hit the Old Colorado City Farmers’ Market

If you’re in town on a summer weekend, strolling the booths is a fun way to pass a morning. Gray says that if you’re especially lucky, you may hit the market during green-chile season. “Everyone thinks of New Mexico as being the place for green chiles, but they’re a big deal here, too,” he says. Watch vendors roasting them and selling them by the bushel, then look out for someone hawking enchiladas topped with green-chile sauce or stuffed roasted chiles.

Head Toward��Dinner

If you can handle any more food at this point, Gray suggests��. He spent a significant part of his childhood living in Germany, and this restaurant holds up to his memories of what a proper German restaurant should be. He��always orders ��ä�����������Ծ��ٳ����. “It’s a pork cutlet with rich mushroom sauce, served with spätzle, which is like a fresh noodle,” he explains.

End Your Day

Gray prefers to sip whiskey at home at the end of a long day, but since he can’t invite all of our readers over, we’re sending you out to a couple of Colorado Springs’ best watering holes. The first is the��, a distillery with a very hip bar attached to it. Its��spirit options are expansive, and the cocktails are worth the splurge, at $10 each. Beer lovers should pop��over to��, a recently opened brewery and taproom. The space, which was founded by a couple of long-distance runners and outdoors lovers, is friendly to pups and runners, so it’s perfect for the ���ϳԹ��� crew.��

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Around 10 A.M. on Friday, September 15, 2017, Ginger Chase-Watkins called the in Colorado Springs looking for her husband, Tim Watkins. She hadn’t heard from him in more than 24 hours.

A bike mechanic and lifelong outdoorsman, Watkins��was known to spend nights in the wild, something he had done since he was a boy in Palmer Lake, Colorado, the town where he and Ginger grew up and still lived. But lately he’d been sleeping in his car, often parked at a local trailhead, to escape the turmoil in his personal life.

When Ginger had arrived��home from work the previous night at 8:30, she’d seen Watkins’s car in the driveway but noticed that his custom-built Tessier mountain bike was missing. His absence struck her as odd, but she was exhausted from a string of 12-hour workdays as a medical-imaging technician. Knowing that Watkins��had terrible night vision, she texted him asking his whereabouts—Was he visiting his parents, who lived nearby? Having a beer at O’Malley’s Pub?—then fell asleep. When she woke up the next morning, he still had not come home. She texted again and then left for work at 6 A.M.

Watkins, 60, had not been in a healthy state of mind recently. He had been struggling with memory loss for at least a year—a result of hitting his head too many times as a kid, he said—and financial problems had put his marriage in limbo. Ginger had supported them for months before he found work,��but a few days before he disappeared, she asked him to leave the house. It was less a separation than an attempted reset, she said months later when we spoke at her home. “I just felt like I wasn’t getting any help, and I needed a minute to myself,” she said. Tears ran down her cheeks. “I have such hurt about that.”

In the months before his disappearance, Watkins��had battled depression and even considered suicide. Still, now that he was employed at Old Town, Ginger knew he would never skip work. “I thought, This is not like Tim,” she said. “He’s out there, he’s hurt, we need to find him.”

Watkins knew how to handle himself on a bike. He basically created the mountain-biking scene in Palmer Lake and Monument, sister towns half an hour north of Colorado Springs in El Paso County. He and Ginger lived three blocks from , home to a vast network of singletrack, much of it off the map—unless you had the map that Watkins��made himself, which served as a fat-tire bible for new arrivals.

Ginger reported Watkins��missing after she called Old Town, and��she posted information about his disappearance on social media the next morning. A local search party formed; around 2 P.M.��on Saturday,��a volunteer found a cycling shoe on the side of Mount��Herman Road, three feet from an upright beer can and not far from the popular . Ginger confirmed that it was her husband’s shoe—a size 42 Pearl Izumi. Years ago��his feet had been disfigured in an accident, and he almost never took a step without his shoes on. She figured he couldn’t be far.

More than��2,700 people live in Palmer Lake, but when Watkins��was growing up, the population was closer to 1,000. He was a daredevil, tearing down Balanced Rock Road on two wheels and using his shoes for brakes. In his twenties he grew into a powerful mountain biker, if not a graceful one. He bounced around Colorado, ski-patrolling at Loveland and riding singletrack in Crested Butte, where his brother David��settled. “He was always chasing incredible dreams,” David says.

Eventually��he landed back in his hometown, got married, and had two children—Arielle, now 27 and a mother herself, and Isaac, 25. His first marriage ended in 1993, and in 2000, he��opened Monument’s only bike shop with his second wife. He undercharged and overdelivered, supporting the scene in his spare time. It’s likely that no one built more local trails than Watkins��did.

“He was this amazing angel up there, and everybody knew him,” says two-time Olympian Alison Dunlap, a longtime friend and riding partner. “But he was a quiet leader. He didn’t brag. He had his bike shop, and he just loved to ride.”

Dunlap met Watkins, who was 12 years older than her, in 1987, when she moved to Colorado Springs to attend college. They became close friends and frequent riding partners during her rise in the sport. Watkins��often led her on rides around Mount��Herman Road, where trails like Bobsled and Stoopid and Mule snake through the forest. His��local favorite, however, was always Limbaugh Canyon—a stunning creekside singletrack that he helped build, lined by wildflowers and aspen groves.

By 2014, Watkins��had been divorced twice—the��second happened about a decade after the first—and was losing hope of finding a partner when he and Ginger started dating, nearly 40 years after they’d been childhood friends. He liked to think he could save people, and she needed love and support: she’d lost her sister to diabetes, her father to esophageal cancer, her son to suicide, and her brother to lung cancer, the last two deaths��happening just a few months apart in 2010. “After my son took his life,��I lived in this house with the shades drawn and tried to be invisible,” Ginger said. “And somehow Tim knew that I needed help. I worked nights, and I’d wake up and he’s out shoveling my driveway. I was mortified, like, somebody found me out. But he just knew that I was hurting.”

One day Watkins��asked Ginger, a recreational mountain biker, to go for a ride. She was intimidated, but he was patient, and they bonded over the sport. A month later, they fell in love during a trip to Crested Butte. Ginger says Watkins��brought her back to life, and friends say she did the same for him. “I just wanted to bring the world to him and bring him to the world,” she��says.

They married in September 2015 at the annual Vinotok fall harvest festival in Crested Butte. They lived there for a year, including three months in a tent, before returning to Palmer Lake in September 2016. That’s when Watkins��started to struggle. He’d suffered through depressive episodes before, often feeling like a screwup because he never made much money. This time was no different. When he couldn’t find work back home, Ginger’s sole-provider role wore her down and created tension.

Compounding things, Watkins’s��memory problems worsened. He was forgetting people’s names and where he was going. He repeated himself in conversation, which added to his despair. Two weeks before he disappeared, he thanked Isaac for spending the day with him. “If it wouldn’t have been for hanging out with you today,”��Watkins told him, “I don’t know that I wouldn’t have taken my own life.”

Isaac made his father promise he would never kill himself. ��“I shouldn’t have even said that,” Watkins��replied.

The day before Watkins��disappeared, he and Isaac got together to split a six-pack and watch a movie. Ginger had asked Watkins��to leave a few days earlier, and he was worried about their future as a couple. After the movie, he loaned Isaac $20, a sum that likely ate up much of his savings. Then he called Ginger and asked to come home. “Of course, you big goofy redhead,” she told him. “Get your butt home. I’ll be there in a half hour.”

Watkins called Isaac to let him know he had a place to stay—and to thank him, once more, for being there when he needed someone. “I appreciate how good a young man you are,” he said in a voice mail. “I’m grateful for a good son.”

The following morning—Thursday, September 14—Ginger got up for work at 5:30. Watkins��rarely rose that early, but he did that day. It was Ginger’s 52nd birthday. He hugged her and asked if she wanted to go out to dinner. She said she’d rather save it for their weekend trip to Vinotok—a getaway they both hoped would get their relationship back on track.

Watkins spoke to a friend around 11 A.M., which is how it was determined that��he left his house for a mountain-bike ride around 10:30 or 10:45. Ginger got home that night to find his bike gone, then went to work again the next morning. It was only after she called Old Town that she started to panic.

The decided not to initiate a search right away��because there were no extenuating circumstances, such as Watkins��being on medication or a reason to suspect foul play. After Ginger posted news about his disappearance on Saturday morning, locals started combing the trails west of town—as Isaac had been doing since the previous day��when Ginger told him his father hadn’t come home. Isaac didn’t think his dad had gone back on his promise about suicide, but he also didn’t rule it out.

“I made sure that search and rescue knew the background—that he could be somewhere away from the trail, trying not to be found,” Isaac says. “So we were looking in some obscure places that were special to him.”

By noon on Saturday, the civilian search party numbered 60. Some thought Watkins��had crashed and couldn’t move. Others wondered whether��a mountain lion had attacked him. (Watkins��once had��a mountain lion leap over his head when he stopped to pee during a ride.)

Three hours after Watkins’s��shoe turned up on Mount��Herman Road, a searcher found his bike resting on its side next to a spruce tree, as if Watkins��had laid it down and gone for a hike. The bike was fewer than 50 feet uphill from Forest Service Trail 715, a.k.a. Limbaugh Canyon, but completely hidden from view. The front tire was flat, and the gearing��suggested that Watkins��was going downhill when his ride ended. The bike was roughly a quarter mile north of where��Limbaugh Canyon Trail breaks off Mount��Herman Road.

Spurred by the discovery of Watkins’s shoe, the launched an official search that afternoon, involving both humans and dogs. It continued Sunday morning, aided by 120 friends of Watkins’s��and concerned locals who spread out off-trail. One of the civilians discovered��Watkins’s cell-phone case, grocery card, and various other wallet contents scattered along Mount��Herman Road, half a mile west of where his shoe was found. That��was past the Limbaugh Trailhead, heading away from Palmer Lake, which struck people as odd. Then, just after noon, as Ginger and Isaac hiked��above the trail, their radio crackled.

“We need help down by where Watkins’s bike was found,” someone said.

“What kind of help?”

“We need the coroner.”

Ginger and Isaac sprinted down the mountain. Ginger wailed as she tried to get to Watkins��before someone tackled her. She got up and was tackled again.

According to sources familiar with the investigation, Watkins had been shot in three places and buried beneath��logs and branches in a shallow depression��40 yards west of the Limbaugh Canyon Trail. Bullets had grazed his ear and injured his hand; the likely fatal shot, from a .22 caliber, entered near his ribs and never exited. Closer examination of his front tire later revealed that it��had also been shot. Watkins��is the first mountain biker known to have been murdered during a ride.

There was still a banana in his pack, suggesting he was killed early in his outing, before he��stopped to eat it. Whoever shot him had taken his hydration pack, jacket, helmet, phone, shoes, and socks.

No one knew why he’d been shot—whether it was intentional or an accident that the killer tried to cover up. Watkins��had no known enemies. He was not confrontational. But it was hard to ignore the attempt at hiding the body. As Ginger says, “It’s one thing to accidentally shoot somebody. It’s a whole other thing to bury them.”

The El Paso County��Sheriff’s Office won’t comment on its investigation into Watkins’s death, and any records about the case (which is still open) are not publicly available. Various theories have emerged about what happened. The first of them—murder—gained traction eight days after Watkins��was found, when police in Woodland Park, a town 20 miles west of Monument on Mount��Herman Road, arrested a then 31-year-old transient named Daniel Nations on unrelated weapons charges. After that��the El Paso Sheriff’s Office charged Nations with felony menacing for an incident that took place in late August. According to the arrest affidavit, Nations accosted and threatened a passing dirt biker with a hatchet at his campsite on Mount��Herman Road��after placing logs in the road that��forced the rider to stop. Woodland Park officers searched Nations’s car and found a hatchet and a .22-caliber rifle, , the same caliber bullet that killed Watkins. Nations’s��wife and two young children were with him��at the time of his arrest.

Additionally, detective Jason Darbyshire of the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office told ���ϳԹ��� that Nations had acted aggressively��during a road-rage incident in Monument around the same time. Nations “got out of his vehicle, confronted another driver, and ended up kicking and breaking their windshield,” Darbyshire said, adding that the incident “escalated very quickly.” A judge’s gag order prevented that case report from being released.

At the time of his arrest, Nations was a registered sex offender who was convicted of indecent exposure in South Carolina in 2007 and domestic battery in Indiana in 2016. Circumstantial evidence led Colorado officials to question him about Watkins’s murder—he’d been spotted driving back and forth on Mount��Herman Road during the search and glaring at volunteers, according to multiple searchers. Although investigators questioned Nations about Watkins, they never named him as a suspect. Three months after his arrest, prosecutors cut a deal with Nations that allowed him to plead guilty to the felony menacing charge and receive no jail time.

Detectives told Watkins’s family that they had no evidence to link Nations to the murder scene: ballistics tests were inconclusive, meaning the bullet inside Watkins was too deformed to match its striations to the murder weapon, and DNA tests were also inconclusive, though it’s unclear whether Nations submitted DNA.

Nations was extradited back to Indiana in February to face charges in three counties for, among other offenses, failure to register as a sex offender and possession of marijuana. He pleaded guilty and served��time in multiple jails. He agreed to an interview with ���ϳԹ��� twice during his time behind bars, but each time he was transferred or released before law enforcement made him available. In early July, he returned to the Colorado Springs area to see his children. Subsequent attempts to contact him were unsuccessful, though he did give a tearful interview to the in August��in which he called the Watkins allegations “preposterous” and said, “I’m not what they made me out to be.”

Katelyn Nations, who filed for divorce after her husband’s��arrest in Colorado, did not respond to multiple interview requests. She told the Gazette that she bought their .22-caliber rifle a week before Watkins was killed. She said Nations had access to it, but that it was primarily for protection from other transients and thieves.

Another possibility is that someone shot Watkins accidentally, then hid him to conceal the crime. If that happened, the culprit could have been one of the many sport shooters who have frequented Mount��Herman Road for decades—even after the practice was banned there by the U.S. Forest Service in 2014. The conflicts between trail users and shooters is fueled, some say, by the zone’s close proximity to Interstate 25 and lenient management by the Forest Service. The situation was serious enough that multiple locals told me they’d long worried that a mountain biker would get shot in the area. “I always said it’s going to take a death for the Forest Service to try to rein in the shooting,” said Brad Baker, who often rode with Watkins and assisted in the search.

To get a sense of how a shooting accident might happen there, I��started by driving up Mount��Herman Road from Monument. Its��intersection with Red Rocks Drive is a spot where mountain bikers often park before riding farther up the dirt road and connecting with a trail. Signs declaring NO SHOOTING��are posted every mile near town, then higher on the road at a handful of pull-offs that mark departure points for various trails. ��

Watkins usually pedaled up Mount��Herman Road to a place called Shooter’s Alley, a popular sport-shooting hangout on top of a rocky bench that overlooks Limbaugh Canyon. A short singletrack starts there and quickly connects to Forest Service Trail 715 at a four-way intersection, where it contours the hillside before diving down into Limbaugh. Watkins’s body was found just downhill from that intersection.

Shooter’s Alley is one of three heavily damaged shooting sites near the crime scene. Despite the 2014 ban, you can still find stuffed animals in tatters and shredded paper targets. Across a quarter-acre swath down the hill from Shooter’s Alley, dozens of trees, some up��two feet in diameter, are either pockmarked by bullets or sheared near the base, weakened by so many shots that the wind blew them over.

In addition to the local regulation prohibiting��the use of firearms here, there’s a , regardless of which agency manages it. “The regulations say things like��no shooting in an occupied site, you have to have a backstop, you can’t shoot a tree,” says Dave Condit, deputy supervisor for Pike and San Isabel National Forest, whose 2.75 million acres includes Mount��Herman Road. “You also can’t leave trash lying around.”

Which means that pretty much everything that was happening on Mount��Herman Road, in plain sight of anyone who passed, was illegal. Several locals told me that they had seen people shooting down the middle of the road. Jim Latchaw, who estimates he’s ridden Limbaugh Canyon close to 2,000 times, once saw someone peppering the singletrack while he was riding it. “I could see where the bullets were hitting, right on the trail,” Latchaw says. “I was shouting for them not to shoot, but they shot anyway.”

To understand why this practice continued for decades, with virtually no law-enforcement patrols—locals who rode or hiked the trails along Mount��Herman Road multiple times per week estimated that they saw an official presence just a handful of times each year—it’s important to remember where it was taking place. El Paso County is one of Colorado’s most conservative areas. , , and a socially conservative Christian advocacy group, all call El Paso home, as do hundreds of thousands of gun owners.

As mountain biking grew around Mount��Herman, so did the close calls. Six locals told me they have heard bullets whiz past their heads while riding, close enough to feel the displacement of air. Isaac Watkins��recalls camping in Limbaugh Canyon as a teenager when a bullet suddenly exploded the rocks a few feet away from where he was sitting. “I thought I was being targeted deliberately,” he says.

Watkins hated having to deal with shooters, but he never provoked them. “I witnessed him with a shooter multiple times, he was very friendly,” says a longtime friend and riding partner of Watkins��who asked to remain anonymous due to fear of retribution from sport shooters. “He rode up and said, ‘Hey guys, I’m not against shooting or anything, but I just want to let you know there’s a trail right down below, where your bullets are going.’ Usually they’d say, ‘Oh,��OK, I didn’t realize there’s a trail down there. We’ll make sure we’re shooting into a backstop.’ ”

Interactions weren’t always so cordial, though. Trucks on Mount��Herman Road were known to pass cyclists extra close and accelerate as they passed, showering the riders with dirt and rocks. “You knew it was intentional,” says Alison Dunlap. “I would never have ridden that road alone.”

Brian Mullin, a board member with , which builds and maintains trails in the area, says his group tried to convince the Forest Service that shooting along Mount��Herman Road was unsafe. The organization��invited people in power to come see for themselves, including county commissioners, Forest Service staff, a TV news team, even a representative from the NRA. “It took five years of intense pressure and lobbying” to convince the Forest Service that a shooting ban was necessary, Mullin says.

The Forest Service typically assigns just one law-enforcement officer to each ranger district. The agency always has the option to take immediate action and enact changes to its rules, but Condit says he tries to avoid closures as a management solution. (A Forest Service spokesperson declined ���ܳٲ������’s request to interview the district’s law-enforcement officer; the spokesperson also declined to comment on the county’s investigation into Watkins’s death.)

When the Forest Service finally banned shooting on Mount Herman Road, Frank Landis, then the agency’s outdoor-recreation planner, justified the decision by citing “18 months of consistent close calls.” The drama didn’t end with the ban, though. Soon after it was imposed, state senator Michael Merrifield, a longtime friend of Watkins and a frequent Limbaugh Canyon visitor, pedaled past a father squeezing off rounds with his two sons in front of a NO SHOOTING��sign.

“You’re not supposed to be shooting here,” Merrifield said.

The father turned and glared. “Maybe I’ll make you the target,” he said. Merrifield kept going.

Sport shooting—and the spent piles of shells, ratty couches, and bullet-riddled televisions that Watkins and other locals begrudgingly helped dispose of—was a problem throughout the forest, including on Gold Camp and Rampart Range roads outside Colorado Springs. In 2015, a 60-year-old grandfather named Glenn Martin was killed by an errant bullet while camping with his family, roughly 20 miles from where Watkins was shot. Martin’s killer has never been found.

Merrifield, who recalls an incident in 2011 or 2012 in which a bullet barely missed his head while he was riding in Limbaugh Canyon, decided a few years ago to stop going to Mount��Herman Road. “In my opinion, the sheriff’s office and the Forest Service didn’t put enough manpower into it,” he says. “You didn’t have to hike to find people breaking the law—it was obvious. You could drive along and people would be shooting right by the side of the road. I don’t think law enforcement was doing nearly what they should have to enforce the law.”

When asked whether he initiated a conversation to change the protocol, Merrifield said he did not. “It just never came to my mind until after Tim got killed,” he says. “And I was so angry and frustrated. I haven’t had the opportunity to say anything, and I don’t know what good it would do.”

Many locals have stopped riding Limbaugh Canyon. Others have armed themselves. “I still go up there every day, but I brought a little pistol with me for a while,” says Latchaw, who is 73 and fought in Vietnam. “It’s just a five-shot .38, real small. I hate to carry it.”

Some hope Watkins’s death leads to a civilian ranger team—or at the least, tighter Forest Service enforcement. “We’ve got to change how we’re policing this area,” says Rob Meeker, 39, who grew up in Monument and helped organize the civilian search. “I think that would be one of the best ways to honor Watkins—make Mount��Herman Road a place where people feel safe to ride again. Right now��I’d go ride it, because I have my .40 on my hip, but a lot of the biking community is scared to ride some of the best trails in the state. And that’s bullshit.”

“We’re not against shooting,” says the friend of Watkins��who asked not to be named. “We’re against—well, literally, there is a Forest Service–system trail right where the bullets land.”

In early January, I met��four of Watkins’s friends to retrace the route he likely took the day he died. We rode up to Shooter’s Alley, where bullet-riddled trees looked like beavers had gnawed them down to stumps. The first time I visited, two weeks earlier, I’d seen a handmade sign taped to a tree, apparently challenging Watkins’s killer to a gunfight.��

Leave a date and time and location. Let’s finish this up.

You will not win, this is not your mountain, this is our mountain,

THIS IS TIM’S MOUNTAIN.

The sign was gone when we rode through the four-way intersection and descended into the canyon. I could see why Watkins loved this ride. You feel like you’re totally removed from the world, when in fact you’re just off an interstate.

What happened to Watkins remains a mystery. Everyone has theories, but the questions linger. Was he��ambushed and robbed by a transient? Targeted as a mountain biker? Accidentally hit by a sport shooter, then killed to cover up the mistake? Was he pedaling when he was shot? Was his body moved?

Several people have wondered if the killer removed Watkins’s shoes because he or she was unfamiliar with cycling cleats and couldn’t get them off the pedals. If that level of tampering was involved, how did no one else see anything on such a popular trail? A pair of mountain bikers who rode into Limbaugh from Mount��Herman Road that day, roughly 30 minutes before Watkins would have passed through, said they noticed nothing unusual.

“I was trying to rationalize all the rational motives, but I get the feeling this was maybe just an irrational act,” Isaac says. “I don’t really see anybody benefiting in the long run.”

Watkins’s family and friends yearn for closure, but the case took another twist on September 2. Kevin Rudnicki, a 20-year-old Palmer Lake native, went hiking on Mount��Herman and never returned. A weeks-long search failed to find him. Just before he��left, his mother reminded him to be careful because of what had happened to Watkins. He was last seen on the same trail where Watkins was killed: Limbaugh Canyon.

Ginger participated in the search for Rudnicki, which brought back hard memories from a year ago. The day after searchers found Watkins’s body, she and Arielle joined Meeker and Meeker’s father and hiked to the site. As a group, they carried two shotguns, two handguns, and a rifle that Meeker’s dad used to cover them from a distant ridge. Ginger crawled into the shallow hole where Watkins had been buried, an image that still terrifies her.

“I have these nightmares of him being aware of what was going on,” she says. “I mean, he was out there for three days. Did he die right away? The death certificate said it was within seconds, but I don’t know.”

She was sitting in her living room, petting one of her Ibizan hounds. A framed photo of Watkins��hung above a framed photo of her son, Josh, who died seven years earlier. “It’s more than I know how to deal with,” she says.

One of Watkins’s friends named a trail after him along Mount��Herman Road and put up a sign. People hug the sign as a way to connect. Ginger rides there, too, though she’s not ready to ride Limbaugh again.

“It’s a minute-to-minute, day-to-day process,” she says. “I still can’t wrap my head around how you go for a mountain-bike ride and are murdered.”

The post Murder on a Mountain Bike appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

Give us a cabin with a wood-burning fireplace, a cozy chair to read a book, some good coffee, and maybe an evening nip of whiskey, and we’re happy. Give us hiking and biking trails, backcountry ski runs, old-growth forests, or loaner canoes and kayaks—plus��no cell service��or internet, so we can truly get away—and we may never leave. ��

The Sky and Timber Loft Cabin

Cheshire, Oregon

Jason Williams, a bike mechanic,��and his partner, Shasta Brewer, a freelance designer, spent three years restoring their��log home on a five-acre property just 15 minutes outside Eugene, Oregon. Then they��tackled their ��guesthouse cabin, up the hill, which is where you’ll stay. It��has a high-beam ceiling of exposed logs, a record player, and a stovetop espresso maker, plus thoughtful extras like birding books, binoculars, and board games. There’s no Wi-Fi and limited cell coverage. Instead, guests explore forest trails before lounging around the outdoor fire pit or the living room’s cast-iron wood stove.��$108

Fariss Farms

Allisonia, Virginia

In the Blue Ridge Mountains, you’ll find ��and , a 990-acre property and vineyard that’s part of the state’s booming wine scene. Choose from three cabins, one of which dates back to 1882 and each of which were recently renovated with newly timbered and reclaimed logs. A trail leads from your front porch to a swimming hole on Little Reed Island Creek, or bring a canoe to paddle New River and a bike to cycle the 57-mile New River Trail, which follows an abandoned railroad.��From $155

Starfire Cabin

Sandpoint, Idaho

George and Kristina Orton spent three years milling trees from their own property to build the 800-square-foot . It sleeps up to four in a bedroom and an upper loft, and comes stocked with firewood. Kayaking on Lake Pend Oreille,��skiing at Schweitzer Mountain, and exploring��the waterfront town of Sandpoint��are all options a short drive��away, but the feels remote, with limited cell-phone service, no Wi-Fi, and stargazing through a skylight. Kristina occasionally shows up with homemade pies and cookies. $150��

Sherman Log House

Ludlow, Vermont

Located five miles from Okemo Mountain Resort, the��, from vacation rental company , has walls of shiplap��planks, hardwood floors, and three bedrooms with enough room for up to ten��people. You’ll play board games in front of a wood-burning fireplace and enjoy views of the snow-covered Green Mountains from the large��jetted bathtub. When you’re not skiing at Okemo, which is on the Epic Pass as of this winter, head to the nearby Crowley Cheese Factory for a tasting tour, or spend some time in the charming village of Ludlow (population 811), 30��miles away. $143

The Hunt Hill Log Cabins

Sarona, Wisconsin

The rents out that overlook 600 acres of old-growth forest, bogs, and four glacial lakes in a protected nature reserve. The cabins are rustic, but you’ll have access to 13 miles of trails and a canoe to spot ospreys and otters from the water. Built in 1917, the Frances Andrews Cabin sleeps up to six and sports views of Big Devil��and Upper and Lower Twin Lakes. The Log Cabin, constructed in 1930, has a stone fireplace��and a loft and bedroom that sleep up to four. It’s��open all year.��$120

The Lodge on Little St. Simons Island

Little St. Simons Island, Georgia��

This����is only accessible by boat, has��seven miles of secluded coastline, and accommodates a maximum��of just 32 guests. ��in the lodge or one of the five hunting-camp-inspired bungalows��and your stay includes boat transfers, meals, and guided outings with local naturalists.��Fall and winter bring��cooler temperatures and fewer��bugs��and people, making it an ideal time to visit. If that still sounds too crowded, you can rent out the entire island.��From $575, all-inclusive�� �� ����

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Name: Deanna Curtis
Job: Director of falconry at the Broadmoor Resort
Home Base: Colorado Springs, Colorado
Age: 52
Education: Graduated from Estacada High School in Oregon

For Deanna Curtis’s two sons and their Cub Scout buddies, it was an extra-special pack meeting, featuring a birds of prey demonstration put on by an organization called HawkQuest. But for Curtis, then a stay-at-home mom, seeing those majestic creatures in action almost 20 years ago was a life-changing moment that inspired her to pursue a career in the ancient sport of falconry.

“At that point I had no idea that falconry even existed,” Curtis says. But she immersed herself into her newfound passion, learning about different species of birds of prey, their history with humans (which, according to some experts, may go as far back as 10,000 B.C.), and the exacting care involved (measuring their weights pre- and post-flight, for example, right down to the gram). Soon after the Cub Scout meeting, Curtis attended her first falconry meet, where falconers gather to share information on training techniques, go on hunts, and, Curtis says with a laugh, “come back and tell tall tales.” She was hooked. “The light bulb moment happened: Holy smokes, I can have my own birds. I can hunt with them.”

About two years later, Curtis joined the staff of HawkQuest and eventually became licensed as a master falconer, a designation that comes after seven years of apprenticeship, training, and passing a 100-question exam. She also founded her own nonprofit, , which cares for birds that have been wounded or injured and are unable to survive in the wild. She currently owns five birds. “As a falconer, you can take birds from the wild, but they cannot be an adult,” Curtis explains. “They must be a young juvenile bird, and we know this from the way their plumage looks. You can also purchase them from breeders.” (Curtis notes that falconry is a zero-impact sport, meaning falconers have no impact on wild raptor populations, as noted in several studies, and can even help them survive when they otherwise would not.)

Curtis joined the in December 2017 as director of falconry and, along with a co-worker, oversees eight birds of prey, including Harris’s hawks, a Eurasian eagle owl, and Saker falcons, and leads falconry demonstrations for the resort guests. There’s also a class for those with some falconry experience. Curtis hopes to offer hunting outings soon as well.

On What She Loves About Her Job: “Being able to work with wild animals. To think you can have this wild animal, trap it one day, and be hunting with it in two to three weeks, working with you as a team member—it’s kind of a romantic thought.”

On Why It’s Legal for Licensed Falconers to Take Birds from the Wild: “It’s something I try to go over in all of my classes. People at first are like, ‘What? Why would you want to do that?’ But falconry is a zero-impact sport, and 70 to 80 percent of birds in the wild will die their first year, mainly due to starvation, but also things like being hit by a car, electrocution, being shot by people. But the main thing is starvation. They grow so quickly, then Mom and Dad kick them out, then winter comes and the prey population decreases, which makes it much harder for them to survive. So we take them, train them to hunt with us, and then you can release them at a later date, when the bird has a better chance at survival. You don’t have to release them, but I’d say a big percentage of falconers catch new birds every year and release them every spring.”

On What She Would Be Doing If She Wasn’t Involved in Falconry: “Working with wildlife in a different type of setting. But education is really important to me, so there’s not much else I could do and be able to get this kind of fulfillment. Perhaps falconry-based bird abatement, where you use raptors to keep pest species like starlings and gulls away from airports, vineyards, and resorts. Dassi is one of our Saker falcons who was used at JFK, keeping the airways clear of birds that could bring down airplanes. You hear a lot about the bird strikes at airports, and a lot of airports are using falconers now to help keep the runways clear.”

On an Ordinary Day: “I’m typically at work by 9 or 10 a.m. Then I make sure the birds are at [proper] weight for flying—not too heavy, not too thin. I also get all the food prepped for our classes. I will take Chase [one of the Broadmoor’s Saker falcons] and put him outside and weather him for a bit, which basically means getting him some vitamin D in the natural light and getting him used to the weather conditions prior to flying. Then I will load up the birds into their cages and into my car. Then we’re off to do the class. We’ll do a class or two, maybe three, then I clean the chambers thoroughly. Then I go home.”

On Her Least Favorite Part of the Job: “One of the food sources we have for the birds is day-old rooster chicks. Nobody wants the roosters, so they get offed on their first day. So it’s kind of a nice way to not let them go to waste. It’s pretty easy food prep, since you don’t have to cut up rabbit or quail. You can just pull off a leg, which is a small enough tidbit that the bird will want to continually fly. You have to keep them very closely weight managed for flying, so if I was to feed the bird the entire chick, the bird would say, ‘Well, I don’t need to fly to you anymore. I’m full.’ But there are drawbacks, too. Because they’re only a day old, the chicks still have that yolk sac inside them, and they can burst. Recently, when I was flying Chase, I was lure-flying him, and I was a little klutzy and the egg yolk exploded on me. With Rosco, the Harris’s hawk, sometimes I’ll fly him to the fist [industry terminology for the bird landing on the falconer’s outstretched, gloved fist] for a day-old chick, and I’ve had the yolk sac explode in my face as he’s eating it. That’s a bad day at the office for me. You just hope the guests can handle it.”

On Being a Woman in Male-Dominated Field: “For every woman, it’s probably a little different. I read on falconry forums how some women feel like they’re not taken seriously by men. I’ve not ever felt that at all. I always feel like I’ve been welcome. I don’t feel like I’ve been treated any differently than anyone else. I don’t walk around going, ‘I’m a female falconer.’ I’m a falconer. If you want to be good at something, you’re going to be good at whether you’re male or female, black or white.”

On More Women Getting into Falconry: “We’re in an age where we’re realizing it’s good for our kids to see we’re not just moms. You’re seeing a growth in women in not just falconry, but in hunting and all sorts of other outdoor sports. We’re not being told that we can’t do it anymore.”

On That Iconic Glove and Other Gear: “The glove is made out of leather. You can have them custom fit, or you can buy a generic glove. I get mine from a place called , and I will trace my hand, and they will make a glove based on that. I go through mine in a couple of years. Jesses are the leather straps that are put on the birds’ ankles so you can hold them without them flying off. You can also use bells so you can hear them as they fly.

As far as the hood [for the bird], people are always curious about that. You need to have a hood to keep them calm and focused. The hoods came about in the beginning of time, and there are several different types. There’s a , made around the time of Genghis Khan, and you have , invented by the Dutch, and many others. You have some that are very ornately decorated and some that are that are just very plain. If you train the birds properly, they don’t mind it. If you can relate it to a dog, if you pull out your leash, your dog gets excited because they know they are going for walk. So if everything is associated with positiveness—the hood comes off and the bird gets a reward—the bird accepts it very nicely, and you start that at a very young age.”

On How Technology Is Changing Falconry: “—which is the use of a transmitter that the bird wears and a receiver that the falconer uses to track it—is the newest invention with falconry. Now we have GPS telemetry, which can track how fast your bird flew, how high it flew, how far it few, the temperatures it flew in. You can tell if he had a good day, or you can see he really wasn’t trying, was he?”

On the Most Fulfilling Part of Her Job: “When I get to see people smiling from ear to ear after experiencing a connection with these birds, that tells me it might make a difference in the future of that species. That’s how you make change—you make a connection with something. It happens in every single class. There has never been a grumpy person when they’re holding Chase.”

The post The Stay-at-Home Mom Turned Falconer appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

If anybody ever sets up a blogger Hall of Fame, Irvin Muchnick and Tim Joyce should be picked for the first class. Over the past three years, Muchnick, 60, and Joyce, 48, have teamed up on Muchnick’s website, , to produce an important investigation into the ongoing problem of sexual abuse committed by coaches in the sport of swimming.

Between them they’ve written hundreds of posts on this alarming subject, covering everything from individual coaches who have abused athletes to the top leadership at swimming’s governing body, Colorado Springs–based . A favorite target has been the group’s executive director, 64-year-old Chuck Wielgus, a man who they believe should have been fired long ago for not doing enough to protect young athletes. For both journalists, the work has been alternately rewarding, difficult, lonely, and frustrating, as they’ve had to confront both direct intimidation and what they see as blindness among mainstream media outlets about the scope of this scandal.

Muchnick, who lives in Berkeley, California, is a longtime sportswriter whose other main focus in recent years has been brain injuries, the subject of his forthcoming book . His interest in swimming began when he found out that the coach of a Berkeley swim team—one that his oldest daughter had competed for—had raped one of his athletes. Joyce, who lives in New York City, came to the topic from a different path. In 2011, when Joyce was a columnist for Real Clear Sports, he about the Penn State sex-abuse crisis, which led an anonymous victim of sexual abuse by a swim coach to contact him, suggesting that he take a close look at USA Swimming. He’s been working the beat ever since.

In a conversation with ���ϳԹ��� editorial director , Muchnick and Joyce talked about their experiences covering one of the darkest stories in American sports.

OUTSIDE: Tim, you found out fast that covering this story can have consequences. Tell us about it.
JOYCE: In the summer of 2012, I started writing articles about USA Swimming for the website of WBAL, a major Baltimore broadcasting company that owns a television station and two radio stations. I was interviewed about a dozen times for WBAL-AM. But then I started —which is Michael Phelps’s home club. In a bizarre Orwellian act, the station removed all the articles and interviews I’d done from its website, even though it had fact-checked the piece I wrote about the NBAC. I couldn’t find a media site that was interested in this at all, so in 2012 I decided to partner with Irv on his relentless and vigilant pursuit of the story.

Irv, tell us about the coach of your daughter’s old team. What happened there?
MUCHNICK: My eldest daughter was an excellent—not elite or Olympic-class—club swimmer. Watching her become the jock of our family was a magical time in my life. I loved getting up with her at 5 A.M. on a Saturday in Berkeley to drive to a meet anywhere from Santa Rosa to San Jose.

Around 2008, our team, which was coached by a man named Jesse Stovall, collapsed organizationally, and we went elsewhere. There was also the mysterious departure of the team’s star swimmer, who stomped off after an on-deck argument. A year later, I learned through an e-mail network that Stovall had been arrested on a fugitive warrant from Florida, where he had “chaperoned” the swimmer, a 16-year-old girl, to a national meet and twice raped her. Stovall pleaded down the charges on the eve of his trial, got probation, and was later banned by USA Swimming.

With little support from other parents, I became the main source for a cover story about Stovall in my local alternative weekly, the East Bay Express. I thought that was the end of it, but a couple of weeks after that, in the spring of 2010, 20/20 aired its investigation of the sexual-abuse culture of swimming, focusing largely on Andy King and Brian Hindson. I realized that I had stumbled onto my local precinct’s rendition of a national problem.

Two years later, in the spring of 2012, I started talking with attorneys Robert Allard in San Jose and Jonathan Little in Indianapolis, just to follow up. I learned what any journalist worth his salt could see: that the , initiated by USA Swimming after 20/20, was all PR bullshit. Abuse continued, but there was now a “director of Safe Sport”—which, really, was just a staff point person who gave the same old message to victims: that they had to go to the police and expose themselves to National Board of Review hearings before anything could happen. The person who holds this job, Susan Woessner, serves as a good face for generalized educational efforts, such as attendance at anti-abuse academic conferences, but USA Swimming still makes all the familiar excuses for inaction: this case happened a long time ago; that case involved someone who is not a member anymore, so we have no jurisdiction; and so on.

But back to Tim. In the summer of 2012, I invited him to work with me. Two heads are better than one, and this story is too big for any single freelance reporter.

When I talk to people about this problem—whether I bring up your stories for Concussion Inc. or Rachel Sturtz’s for ���ϳԹ���—I consistently get two responses. “Why haven’t I heard about this already?” Followed by: “How much of this kind of abuse goes on?” Because it doesn’t only happen in swimming, as you guys and Sturtz have made clear in your reporting.
MUCHNICK: The short answer to your second question is that it happens a hell of a lot more than most people think, but it’s not measurable. I’m not big on quantifying this stuff, because that takes us into the realm of “experts,” and I can’t stand the way the expert class takes up all the oxygen in these discussions. If you do some simple math—there are 341,000 year-round youth-club swimmers and 17,000 coaches—look at the reported cases and the unjust outcomes, factor in the institutional cover-up and human-denial quotient, and extrapolate even conservatively, I think it’s clear that the problem in swimming, and probably in many other Olympic sports, makes Penn State look like a tea party. It’s much closer in scale to the global problem of sexual predators in the Catholic Church.

JOYCE: The answer to your question about awareness is twofold. There’s an acute sense of what I call abuse fatigue—after the Catholic Church, Penn State, and scandals, for example—and, unfortunately, no matter how shocking and repulsive the stories are that we hear from victims in swimming, a numbing effect takes place. I also think the swimming scandal has not generated consistent headlines because swimming is a sport you usually hear about only once every four years, during the Summer Olympics. And it lacks a media-ready narrative—unlike Penn State, which featured a famous coach, who prided himself on ethics, and an easy-to-despise villain.

In addition—and this is a disturbing and difficult thing to talk about—Penn State and the church scandals involved man-on-boy abuse. There’s something about man-on-girl abuse that, in our society, is somehow seen as acceptable, or at least expected on some level.

A lot of the coverage of sexual abuse in swimming, for obvious reasons, plays out through breaking news about notorious individual abusers like Andy King, Richard Curl, and Brian Hindson. What are some cases that you’ve done a lot of reporting on?
MUCHNICK: Two of the biggest stories we’ve worked on together involve Greg Winslow and Alex Pussieldi.

In February of 2013, Tim and I were simultaneously tipped that an Arizona State University police report was about to recommend prosecution of Winslow—a former club coach on a campus-based team there who by then was the head swimming coach at the University of Utah—for allegedly molesting a teenage swimmer, Whitney Lopus. In 2008, Lopus had followed Winslow to Utah for a year. Then she returned to Arizona and descended into substance abuse and a suicide attempt before accusing him of molesting her on numerous occasions, most notably in his office on campus, starting when she was 15.

When we relayed this information to the University of Utah, Winslow was suspended and soon fired. Our first-day story on this development was, I believe, the only time that major news organizations, such as the Associated Press and The New York Times, ever .

[quote]I think it’s clear that the problem in swimming, and probably in many other Olympic sports, makes Penn State look like a tea party.[/quote]

As a national narrative, the Winslow story mostly focused on Utah’s cover-up of complaints about his alcohol abuse and physically and emotionally cruel behavior. The Phoenix NBC affiliate on the Lopus case, the ultimate decision by the prosecutor not to press charges, and the family’s settlement in a civil lawsuit against Winslow, Arizona Swimming (the regional affiliate of USA Swimming), Sun Devil Aquatics (the club at ASU), Mike Chasson (the owner of the club), and Jill Chasson (his wife and, at the time, chair of swimming’s National Board of Review).

Tell us about Pussieldi.
MUCHNICK: In January of this year, Tim and I were poring over thousands of pages of discovery in civil lawsuits by swimming-abuse victims, and we came across the most heavily redacted set of pages we’d ever seen. One night, during a phone conference, Tim said we had to try and figure out the identity of a coach who was referred to only by his initials: “A.P.”

Once we figured out the name, became the for a while. A Brazilian native, he coached in Fort Lauderdale for ten years after being credibly accused of having maintained a secret videotaping system inside his home. Pussieldi, who has never been charged with a crime, is now back in Brazil, where he’s a prominent television commentator on swimming.

In Sturtz’s story, she writes about the intimidating tactics that attorney Jonathan Little faced when he went to court against USA Swimming. Have you encountered anything like that?
JOYCE: The bullying tactics are both obvious and subtle. The obvious includes PR representatives for USA Swimming contacting media outlets where I wrote about the story, in an attempt to discredit my reporting. During the WBAL fiasco, Jamie Olsen, the former communications person for USA Swimming, e-mailed the news director, stating that my work was full of “inflammatory and blatantly false information,” though she never did say which part was false.

The threat of lawsuits looms very large over nearly every mainstream media outlet. Time and again, Irv and I have pitched swimming stories to big news organizations. And while they express interest at first, and even ask for drafts of a long article, they balk at the last minute—due, we believe, to corporate pressure or fear of legal reprisal.

MUCHNICK: My favorite anecdote comes from the 2012 Olympic Trials in Omaha. I had bought my own ticket, because USA Swimming refused to give me media credentials. A Washington, D.C., area coach named Noah Rucker had just been brought up on criminal sexual-abuse charges, stemming from acts he had allegedly engaged in several years earlier with a high school swimmer he was coaching, and USA Swimming had scheduled a hearing to consider his status. Inside the CenturyLink Center in Omaha, I walked up to USA Swimming’s PR person at the poolside, introduced myself, and asked, “What is the update on the Noah Rucker hearing?” I was told, “We’re here for a competition, not to talk about that. If you don’t leave this area, I’ll call security and have you ejected.”

Where is Rucker now?
MUCHNICK: In 2013, he was jailed in Virginia for six months, for contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and then he was banned by USA Swimming. I don’t know his current whereabouts. His former boss, Rick Curl, is now in a Maryland prison for the serial molestation of a teenage swimmer he coached, Kelley Davies.

You guys make it abundantly clear on the website that you think Chuck Wielgus should go. Why is he so high on your list?
MUCHNICK: As I’ve written, Wielgus has —regarding what he knew and when he knew it—that simply does not appear to be credible. In 2010, during a deposition in the civil lawsuit against Indiana coach Brian Hindson—who had secretly videotaped young female athletes inside locker rooms—Wielgus said that the issue of Peeping Tom videos made by coaches was “not even on the radar” at USA Swimming prior to 2008.

But back in 2005, the FBI had alerted USA Swimming and its aquatic centers about Pennsylvania coach , who was on the FBI’s Most Wanted list and featured in the TV program America’s Most Wanted. Trites was fleeing charges of having done the exact same thing Hindson would later be accused of: videotaping female swimmers as they changed in a locker room. And in the Pussieldi case, we came across extensive 2004 allegations—found in reports generated by a USA Swimming investigator and by Fort Lauderdale police—that Pussieldi had peeped at young male swimmers through a hidden camera.

[quote]America’s millions of sports parents own a piece of this problem, too. If they wake up to the dark side of youth athletic programs—instead of simply hoping that the worst doesn’t happen to their own kids—then there’s an opportunity for an overdue overhaul.[/quote]

JOYCE: Another example relates to former USA Swimming National Coach , who now is on USA Swimming’s list of banned coaches. In January of 2006, after allegations of sexual abuse were brought against Uchiyama, involving a girl from California, he quietly left USA Swimming, under the terms of an agreement, signed by Wielgus, stating that USA Swimming would not conduct any further investigation into his actions.

Then, shortly after being banned, Uchiyama—incredibly—was hired by the Country Club of Colorado, just down the road from USA Swimming headquarters in Colorado Springs, where he became the aquatics director. On his job application, Uchiyama received a glowing reference from Pat Hogan, an executive at USA Swimming, who declared that Uchiyama was a “great people person.”

In the ensuing years, USA Swimming held several board meetings at the Country Club of Colorado. It’s an insult to anyone of intelligence to suggest that all the higher-ups at USA Swimming, especially Wielgus, didn’t know that Uchiyama was once again around minors on a swim deck after being banned.

As you’re both aware, California congressman George Miller has to investigate the sexual-abuse culture in youth sports, and officials are taking a hard look at USA Swimming. Some congressional investigations end up being important, some don’t amount to much. What are your hopes for this one?
JOYCE: The Republican majority in the House has shown zero interest in moving this issue forward. As has been reported previously, Miller has requested that Representative Jon Kline—who chairs the House Committee on Education and the Workforce—hold hearings on the matter, and Kline hasn’t budged.

Miller, who is retiring, has a long and distinguished history as an activist, progressive legislator who has protected children’s interests, and there’s no question that his absence will be felt with this issue. We’ve already seen publicly stated interest and support of Miller’s efforts from House members in districts where abusive swim coaches have worked, including California congressman Mike Honda and Oregon congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici. Congressional members from such districts and states are natural fits to pick up where Miller leaves off.

Greater pressure should also be exerted in the Senate, especially on women senators—for example, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, who has shown great leadership about issues of sexual abuse in the military—to call for hearings. I see the Senate as more of a hope, however slim, because the House, being so overwhelmingly Republican, likely won’t accomplish much.

That sounds fairly bleak.
JOYCE: Yes, but I believe that if the FBI deeply investigates USA Swimming—as Miller has formally asked them to do—and if the GAO report is hard-hitting, there may be enough momentum to force this issue into a wider public realm. There has to be consistent pressure, relating to the fact that the United States Olympic Committee was formed by an act of Congress, and it is imperative that any oversight of the USOC and its governing bodies, such as USA Swimming, remain with Congress. But the USOC has a very high-profile lobbying presence, and that will surely be an impediment to progress on the Hill.

MUCHNICK: Anyone who thinks USA Swimming corruption is going to get cleaned up just because a couple of independent journalists have latched onto it, and ���ϳԹ��� and Rachel Sturtz have exposed the organization’s insurance operations and Safe Sport hype, needs a reality check. As for what Congressman Miller’s intentions are, you would have to ask him. He has been holding his cards very close.

The Republican sweep in the midterm elections was not good news for quick action. But bear in mind that, for my money, the Democrats, from President Obama on down, haven’t shown any real will to rein in the excesses of our sports system, either.

The political paradigm I prefer is not partisan. Instead, the model is the effort that shaped up starting in 2013 to stop sexual assaults in our newly gender-integrated military. That has been an initiative driven by a new class of women legislators in both parties. I believe the new Congress will have at least 102 women: 83 in the House, 20 in the Senate. Liberal or conservative, carnivore or vegan, they as a group will be far likelier than the membership at large to have confronted the issue of abuse, and to be determined to do something constructive about it.

The sleeping-giant constituency in all this is America’s millions of sports parents. They own a piece of this problem, too. If they wake up to the dark side of youth athletic programs—instead of simply hoping that the worst doesn’t happen to their own kids—then there’s an opportunity for an overdue overhaul of the .

If not, we face at least four more years of what I call “Safe Sport reboot.” What the USOC is now saying is that swimming has done a great job—which isn’t true—but that the Safe Sport task for all the national sports governing bodies must be taken over by a new and privately funded “independent” agency. The model is the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. Tim and I feel that this agency will serve as an ineffective “sex police,” with an agenda that is still friendlier to the NGBs than to young athletes. This is like rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic, and it’s no substitute for real federal oversight.

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Want to breathe with unconstrained lungs, cruise over hills as if they were pesky speed bumps, and shave down your PR? Then you’ll need to in thin mountain air. Although there’s no conclusive sweet spot for optimal elevation training, that athletes live between 7,000 and 8,000 feet above sea level. Sparse oxygen at such altitude forces your body to increase its number of red blood cells, thus increasing the amount of oxygen delivered to muscles during exercise and improving performance.

Want to train at altitude? Head for the red.

High

Over 5,000 feet

Lately, some of the best runners in the country have been traveling abroad for their stints at altitude. said he trained for a month at around 6,000 feet in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, leading up to the 2014 indoor track national championships. , Sara, flew to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to run at 7,000 feet in preparation for this year’s Boston Marathon.�� (elevation 7,900), for the same race.

But there are plenty of high altitude destinations stateside. Flatlanders ought to be cautious when traveling any of these places—and not just because of the lack of oxygen. Visitors often become residents.�� moved to Boulder, Colorado, in 1970 to prepare for the 1972 Munich Olympics, and Boulderites still see him on area trails.

Here are ten of our favorite places to run at altitude, from high to higher:

Bozeman, Montana

Elevation: 4,816 feet
��is one of the few elite runners who trains in this southwest Montana college town, which boasts 67 miles of trails in its Main Street to Mountains trail system. Kimball’s favorite run is the��Bangtail Divide trail, but if you’re looking for more options, check out the local running club, .��Beginning in late April, hook up with the group for its weekly around town and in the surrounding hills. The adventurous ought to traverse the Bridger Ridge: 20 miles of singletrack that weaves over��boulders and talus fields before��reaching Sacagawea peak at just more than 9,600 feet.

Such a strenuous run requires a thick, juicy steak. Luckily, there are nearly three Montana cows for every Montanan. Although not in Bozeman, is a half hour drive away in Manhattan, Montana, and serves some of the finest steaks in the West.

Albuquerque, New Mexico

Elevation: 4,954 feet
New Mexico is not widely known for its lofty peaks, but Albuquerque is the best kept secret above 4,000 feet. , a professional running group based in Seattle, has sought high-altitude training and refuge from the dreary Pacific Northwest weather in ABQ every winter for the past two years.

The less intense�� offer training runs and races throughout the year. Roadies can wave to the polar bears at each May, and trail runners can climb to the top of 10,678-foot Sandia Peak each August during the infamous nine-mile .

For those who subscribe to the sleep high, train low philosophy, the Duke City is ideal. The sprawling city reaches 6,500 feet in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains and dips down to 4,500 feet near the city center, which is also where you’ll find the����.The paved, multi-use path parallels Rio Grande River for 16 miles—perfect for marathoners in search of a flat, semi-shady route for their long runs.

According to Beasts coach Danny Mackey, is his runners’ favorite eatery. The New Mexican restaurant opened in the early 1960s and is said to serve the best red chili in town.

Boulder, Colorado

Elevation: 5,272 feet
In Boulder, runners can get their Rocky Mountain highs without being sequestered in the wilderness like a monk. After all, the town is home to , the largest 10K in the country with more than 50,000 runners crossing the finish line each May.

If you prefer dirt, hit the trails (likely within distance of your front door), or drive a half hour to��, which starts above 8,000 feet. This 20-mile roller coaster of pain and anguish is considered a proving ground by those who have read about it in ,��Chris Lear’s inside look at the University of Colorado’s 1998 cross-country team.

In the evening, hang out on downtown Boulder’s��. The bars and street performers on the pedestrian mall’s red bricks keep the after-dark scene thriving. , a greasy-spoon diner adorned with autographs from Olympians and national champions, is a popular breakfast destination for those recovering from a long run—or a hangover.

Mount Laguna, California

Elevation: 5,987 feet
One hour east of San Diego in the Cleveland National Forest, Laguna Mountain enjoys cooler temps than one would expect from Southern California. Loaded with trails—the Big Laguna, Noble Canyon, Indian Creek, Pine Mountain, and Pacific Crest, to name a few—the area offers miles of rolling singletrack through classic California chaparrel, streamside meadows, and forests overlooking the��Anza-Borrego Desert.

Distance runners should check out the (which will hopefully happen in 2014; organizers cancelled the 2013 race due wildfires). Ultrarunners should consider the , which—like the marathon—takes you to the top of the mountain and then some (last year’s finishers took between 17 and 31 hours to finish the race).

The rustic houses visitors right in the national forest. Many of the 17 cabins are also pet-friendly—perfect for trail runners who travel with their pooches. Campsites are also available throughout the national forest.

Colorado Springs, Colorado

Elevation: 6,322 feet
Mention training in��Colorado Springs��and most people think of the��Olympic Training Center. The flagship facility of the U.S. Olympic Committee boasts two Olympic size swimming pools, six gymnasiums, and the largest indoor shooting facilities in the Western Hemisphere, but these amenities don’t always appeal to runners.

Runners will enjoy easy access to����and/or the 260 miles of multisport trails available within a ten-mile radius.��Fifteen minutes away at the base of 14,117-foot Pikes Peak is a trail where running close to 16 minutes per mile would make you world famous. Called the Manitou Incline, the trail shoots up 2,000 feet in about 5,200 feet. Dominant high-altitude����leads long runs up the trail every Sunday with the��.

The 13.32-mile��, held each August, also offers runners a chance to test their climbing en route from 6,300-foot Manitou Springs to the top of the mountain. If you really want to destroy your legs, opt for the 26.2-mile Pikes Peak Marathon.

Santa Fe, New Mexico

Elevation: 6,818 feet
Although some American distance runners travel to train in Iten, the high-altitude running epicenter of Kenya, some Kenyan-born runners live at around 7,000 feet in foothills of Santa Fe, about an hour outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Seven Kenyan born athletes with top-ten marathon finishes are on the roster, such Andrew Musuva, a Grandma’s Marathon Champion, and Jonathan Ndambuki, a 2:10 marathoner.

A spider-web of interconnected singletrack, known as the , loops through the rolling piñon and juniper-covered foothills of the City Different for more than 20 miles. The 17-mile Railtrail is a flatter option, which turns to dirt three miles from town and offers mountain views in every direction. The , the local (non-Kenyan) running club, offer weekend runs in both locations, as well as in-town circuits on Thursday nights and a variety of races throughout the year.

A serious desert runner is best refueld at . Order the��protein-rich buffalo burger: a patty from local Bosque farms on a brioche bun with garlic mayo and hand-cut fries.

Flagstaff, Arizona

Elevation: 6,834 feet
One of the coolest high-altitude destinations, this high and dry city suffers none of the squelching heat that has caused Arizona to pass on an extra hour of sunshine during Daylight Savings Time. For most of the year, a blur resembling can be seen zooming over evergreen shaded dirt roads. also spent two months here in preparation for the 2014 Boston Marathon, focusing on base building and high mileage along Lake Mary Road.

The ambitious and the foolhardy ought to explore the trails around Arizona Snowbowl Ski Resort. The annual seven-mile in July hands out prizes for the overall winners, the fastest first mile, and for the first runner to eat a burger at mile six and still cross the finish line.

Locals say , a convenience store complete with a beer, wine, and espresso bar,��is the best spot for a post-run beverage.

Mancos, Colorado

Elevation: 7,027 feet
Tucked away in the southwest corner of Colorado with a population of fewer than 1,400, Mancos offers something seldom found in Boulder or Colorado Springs: solitude. “You won’t see anyone on the trails except our athletes, which is remarkable that still exists in Colorado,” said Ben Hahn, founder of ��running club. Stay at the club’s 8,000-foot-high altitude training center where residents are served organic meals cooked with ingredients grown, picked, or slaughtered within 100 miles.

“Being out here—running through the trails, through the woods, seeing some animal life—it’s a lot different than home, where I see a lot of cars and have to worry about traffic,” says marathoner Ryan McGuire. “I can just get lost in my runs out here and focus on my training.”

Despite being off the beaten path, the nearby San Juan Mountains have plenty of places to run, including nearby . Or, buy some inner tubes from the town’s gas station and float the lazy Dolores River.

Park City, Utah

Elevation: 7,034 feet
Park City is world-famous for its three ski resorts��(,��, and the��), but the mountain town also has more than 350 miles of scenic, well-maintained mountain tracks close to town and in the surrounding Wasatch Range. Although some trails have double-black diamond ratings, a beginner-friendly place to start exploring is , 694 acres of contiguous open space that boasts more than 30 miles of high-desert trails. For company, seek out ,��who assemble weekly for runs ten miles and longer. To hammer out a faster tempo run, there’s : a dirt highway that starts up Emigration Canyon and never dips below 6,000 feet. The scenery would take your breath away if the elevation didn’t take it first.

Mammoth Lakes, California

Elevation: 7,880 feet
Five hours north of Los Angeles, this resort town is a mecca for skiers and snowboarders riding down the mountains and runners shuffling up them. Since 2001, the has been churning out record holders, such as four-time Olympic marathon trials qualifier and the current U.S. 50K record . His favorite loop? A winding odyssey of Mammoth starting at Shady Rest Park and ending with a dip in the cool creek at .

Olympic marathoner Deena Kastor, who earned bronze at the 2004 Athens Games, also lives and trains in Mammoth. “The altitude has surely had a positive effect on my training,” , “but the benefits have also come on a psychological level as well. Being at altitude means simplicity, athleticism, focus, ��camaraderie and being lured down another trail I’ve never happened to see before. The grandness of the scenery has offered me the grand goals I keep chasing.”

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What kinds of cities make families happy? That was our starting point. The answer, of course, is complicated. Our first assumption: kids like being around other kids. So we looked for cities where a high percentage of the population is under age 18. Next we looked at affordability, since every parent knows the financial challenges of raising offspring (some $241,000 for a child born in 2012, according to the United States Department of Agriculture). Then we considered health, removing any metropolitan areas that were above the national rate for adult obesity. Finally, we zeroed in on what we believe is the critical X-factor: access to large urban parks, trail networks, waterways, ski mountains, and other wild spaces. As it turns out, any city that scored high on all of the above inevitably supports a community of active families who value outdoor play above all else. And the winners are…

Population: 3.3 million (metro)

Median Home Price: $217,000


Best For: Lovers of parks and lakes

The Trust for Public Land ranks Minneapolis the number-one city in the country for parks. Indeed, 20 percent of the total land is in parks—some 6,700 acres—and 94 percent of city residents live within a ten-minute walk to a park. Minnehaha Park, overlooking the Mississippi River, contains family-friendly bike paths and forested riverside walking trails that snake along limestone bluffs. Despite brutal winters—average lows dip into the single digits—Minneapolis consistently ranks among the top biking cities in the U.S. thanks to its extensive bikeways (including 92 miles on city streets and 85 off-street paths) and progressive biking policies. The new five-and-a-half-mile Midtown Greenway, which is separated from car and pedestrian traffic and plowed in the winter, allows for rapid cross-town pedaling.

Then there are the lakes, some 750 of them, including the Chain of Lakes, which offers everything from swimming and sailing to logrolling and canoeing. Families ready for bigger water adventures can make the four-hour drive north to the 1.1-million-acre Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, one of the largest wilderness areas east of the Rockies.

Population: 1.8 million (metro)

Median Home Price: $217,000

Best For: Urban recreation

Largely thanks to Lance Armstrong, Austin has developed a reputation as a cyclist’s town—a label that’s endured even after the seven-time Tour de France champion’s fall from grace. Designated as a Silver-level Bicycle Friendly Community by the League of American Bicyclists since 2007, more than half of Austin’s streets have dedicated bicycle lanes. In fact, during the past three years, the city has actually reduced the number of motor vehicle lanes on roadways to install bike lanes (the master plan calls for 900 miles by 2020). The city is home to , Lance’s massive bike shop, and numerous cycling clubs, like Social Cycling Austin (“Putting butts on bikes since 2009”), which organizes weekly rides that range from hardcore workouts to “Caffeine Cruises.”

Lesser known is the fact that Austin is also a great all-around adventure-sports town. The Barton Creek Greenbelt stitches together seven miles of waterfront parks, providing hiking and (awesome) mountain-biking trails and, in the spring, kayaking spots and swimming holes. The loop trails bordering 416-acre Lady Bird Lake are ground zero for Austin’s vibrant road-running community, while the lake itself has become a hot spot for stand-up paddleboarding. Outfitter offers rentals, lessons, and even a party package for kids’ birthdays (cake, ice cream, and water guns included).

Population: 2.2 million (metro)

Median Home Price: $288,000

Best For: Living by bike

It starts with the biking, of course. Portland, which has been leading the country’s cycling lifestyle revolution, boasts 181 miles of bike lanes, some 80 miles of off-street bike paths, and the highest percentage of bike commuters of any large city in the U.S. (6 percent, compared to the average of 0.5 percent). There are some 5,000 public bike racks in town. Kids can join weekly “bike trains,” group rides along prearranged routes to public schools. Portland isn’t only about two-wheelin’, though. The Columbia and Willamette rivers run through town, providing flatwater kayaking and stand-up paddleboarding. There are more than 300 parks, including 5,172-acre Forest Park, a dream spot for urban hiking and trail running, with 70 miles of dirt and gravel routes. Mount Hood, an hour and a half’s drive to the east, offers skiing year-round and rafting and lift-accessed mountain biking in the summer. Eighty miles to the west is Oregon’s rugged and wild coastline.

Population: 1.1 million (metro)

Median Home Price: $241,000

Best For: Mountain sports

Among major U.S. cities, it’s impossible to beat Salt Lake’s access to mountain sports. Within 45 minutes are four of the best ski areas in the world: Alta, Snowbird, Solitude, and Brighton. Then there are the endless backcountry skiing lines in the nearby Wasatch Mountains. Mountain bikers have their pick of numerous singletrack trails in the canyons east of town, which also contain hundreds of rock-climbing routes. The Middle and Lower Provo rivers offer blue-ribbon trout fishing. Not surprisingly, Salt Lake is home to a thriving community of serious outdoor fanatics. (It’s also the venue for the biggest trade show in the outdoor-gear industry, Outdoor Retailer, every summer and winter.) All this and it’s a true urban center, with an NBA team, a busy international airport, and healthy job market (local employers include eBay and 3M).

Population: 4.6 million (metro)

Median Home Price: $375,000

Best For: Running fanatics

Blame it on the Boston Marathon, but this city of diehard pro-ball sports fans is also arguably the running capital of the United States. From post-college racing teams to women-only groups, more than a dozen running clubs call Boston home. You can count on a 5- or 10K almost any weekend, or just log miles on the 18-mile Charles River path.

Families can do much more than run in Boston, of course. More than 15 percent of city land is in parks. One of the largest, 527-acre Franklin Park, is a hub for pick-up soccer games, tennis, cycling, and, well, yes, running—since 1997, the Boston Middle School Cross Country Championships have been held here. In the Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area, a collection of 34 islands and peninsulas within striking distance of downtown, the offers seven- to 14-day summer adventures for teens that teach camping, kayaking, and sailing skills. Boston is also surprisingly easy to escape for a major city: the Berkshires, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the Green Mountains of Vermont, and the beaches of the Cape and North Shore are all within three hours.

Population: 678, 319 (metro)

Median Home Price: $213,000

Best For: Endurance sports

Why are both the United States Olympic Training Center and Carmichael Training Systems, an elite coaching operation, based in Colorado Springs? Maybe it’s the hundreds of miles of multi-use trails within a ten-mile radius of town. Maybe it’s 14,117-foot Pikes Peak right next door. Maybe it’s the weather (the Front Range sees some 250 days of sunshine a year). Whatever the answer, Colorado Springs is clearly a mecca for elite endurance athletes, and their energy helps define the character of the decidedly affordable city, which lies about 70 miles south of Denver. Families here have fast access to some of the top ski areas on the planet (the Summit County resorts start two hours away) as well as the many wilderness areas of the Rocky Mountains. In the spring and summer, head two hours west for rafting on the Class IV rapids of the Arkansas River.

Population: 590, 341 (metro)

Median Home Price: $158, 200

Best For: Cycling

One way to get the next generation amped up about cycling: show them how the best bikes in the world are made. Start with a factory tour at , half an hour northeast of town, in Waterloo; then head to the legendary factory, which produces exquisite steel-frame bikes at its factory 90 minutes east. Cycling is ingrained in the culture here and will certainly be part of its future. The city has plans to become the bike-commuting capital of the U.S. with Madison B-cycle, a 35-station urban bike-sharing program that features 350 three-speed cruisers. Prefer mountain biking? Take a trip to to Devil’s Lake State Park, 40 miles to the north.

Off the bike, the , backed by the University of Wisconsin, offers summertime courses in sailing, windsurfing, canoeing, and kayaking for kids ages 10 to 18 on Lake Mendota. Come winter, six city parks boast a combined 20 miles of signed and groomed cross-country ski trails. For beginners, gives free weekly lessons in January and February.

Population: 887,000 (metro)

Median Home Price: $190,000

Best For: Year-round adventure

New Mexico’s largest city doesn’t feel big at all. One reason is the 16-mile multi-use Paseo del Bosque Trail, which runs along the Rio Grande. Another is the U-Mound, a top-rated bouldering site on the eastern edge of town. And with as many clear days a year as Colorado’s Front Range but with a lower cost of living, Albuquerque is a particularly inviting place to raise an active family. Indeed, all kinds of fun can be had in and around the city, which is set just above 5,000 feet and offers easy access New Mexico’s many wilderness areas. Looming directly to the east are the Sandia Mountains, a range that tops out at over 10,000 feet and is great for hiking, trail running, mountain biking, and skiing (though not every winter; nearby Santa Fe has more reliable snow). Fantastic road biking routes head out (and up) in all directions. In the spring, kayakers and rafters flock to whitewater stretches of the Rio Grande and Rio Chama. Every fall, Albuquerque plays host to the annual Duke City Marathon, considered a world-class event. Finally, there are the city’s many urban parks—286 in all—and 113 miles of multi-use trails.

Population: 5.9 million (metro)

Median Home Price: $443,000

Best For: Weekend warriors

Surprise: D.C. provides more acres of greenspace per capita than any other U.S. city of its size. The most diverse playground of the bunch is Rock Creek Park, which has 40 miles of hiking trails, a 25-mile forested road-biking route, and, when the creek is high, Class III and IV whitewater for experienced kayakers. Though it’s very much a wonky town dominated by people working in politics, D.C. is loaded with recreational athletes—just ask former mayor Adrian Fenty, who finished 16th at the Washington, D.C., Triathlon in 2010. Favorite running routes include the four-mile lap around the National Mall for views of the Capitol, White House, Lincoln Memorial, and other historic sites (the annual Marine Corps Marathon is another great way to see these spots). Cyclists roll out on the C&O Canal towpath, which winds 185 miles up the Potomac, starting in Georgetown and ending in Cumberland, Maryland. Half an hour northwest from D.C., Virginia’s small Great Falls National Park offers top-roping climbing routes rated up to 5.12 in difficulty, with programs for kids ages eight to 16 from the instructors at . Or you can simply cruise around town on one of the 2,500 bikes that are part of Capital Bikeshare, which was the nation’s first program of its kind when it launched in 2008.

Population : 650,234 (metro)

Median Home Price: $188,000

Best For: Playing in the Rockies

Set in the Northern Rockies with more than 4,300 acres of open space, a whitewater park, and a ski area just outside of town, Boise is a place you move to for outdoor fun. The 25-mile-long Greenbelt, which follows the Boise River through the heart of the city, links riverside parks through a network of biking and walking paths. The Boise River Park, a longtime dream of local paddlers that opened in 2012, has two surfing waves close to Main Street. Flatwater paddlers can put in to the river about six miles north, at Barber Park, and float the kid-friendly stretch through town to Ann Morrison Park. In the winter, , just 16 miles away, offers 2,600 acres of alpine and cross-country skiing trails, as well as a strong ski and snowboard school. And the Ridge to Rivers trail system in the hills above Boise comprises 130 miles of trails, with singletrack mountain biking, spectacular hiking and running routes, and designated pedestrian-only trails.

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