Robert Baker clicks his flame-orange Tecnica boots into his bindings on the summit of Rendezvous Mountain, the high point of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort. Folks are just waking up in the valley below, but at 53, with bristling gray eyebrows, perma-rosied cheeks and a mariner’s beard, Baker wastes no time.

I watch Baker drop into Rendezvous Bowl, his skis cutting clean arcs through the wind-scoured snow. He moves with the ease of someone who’s skied this line for more than three decades—light on his edges, unbothered by the chop. A cloud of powder trails behind him, then settles as he stops below, looking back upslope for me.

Baker has skied like this for decades, a local who built his life around the mountain. Until five years ago, he was running a plum and grape farm in Fresno so he could spend his winters here. Only in the last few years has he started tracking vertical feet, out of curiosity. By the end of last season, he logged 5.8 million feet—a full million more than the next closest skier at Jackson Hole. If this winter is anything like the last, he’ll take more than 1,100 tram laps, spending the equivalent of a week of his life just riding back up the mountain. Unlike the younger skiers chasing single-day records, Baker’s approach is about sheer accumulation—stacking vertical, day after day, all season long. The Jackson Hole app will track nearly every foot. In classic ski bum-ese, Baker, called “Buddha” by the locals—says he doesn’t obsess over stats.

“You get what you get,” he says. “I just go skiing.”

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It’s a bluebird day at Val Thorens in France, the highest ski resort in Europe, and there’s still an hour and a half till the lifts close. But unlike your diehard last-chair Rockies skier, we’ve abandoned our skis. We’ve traded the lift lines for the queues at La Folie Douce, a famous outdoor bar above a steep blue run.

To my left, a group of skiers in Hogwarts regalia bops along to house music. Artificial fog engulfs the group on the table in front of me, where a flannel-clad man is dancing in front of the crowd. He and his friends are doing lewd things with a six-liter bottle of rosé—550 euros—and taking turns drinking straight out of it. A woman sways in black sequined pants. In the right lighting, she could be mistaken for a disco ball.

“Champagne
 shower. Champagne
 SHOWER,” the DJ starts to chant from a balcony overlooking the wooden deck, slowly building speed and volume. He waves for the crowd to join in.

“Champagne
 shower,” we chant back. “Champagne
 shower. Champagne
 SHOWER. CHAMPAGNE—” and then we get what we want: three bottles are popped and fizz rains from the balcony. We scream and duck, but there’s nowhere to hide from the spray. We’re packed in tighter than ski bums jockeying for the first tram of the morning.

We’re above treeline, surrounded by views of sharp, snow-covered peaks, yet the Alps are forgotten. The mountains aren’t the point—they’re the vehicle.

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I. Two Sides of a Single-Edged Blade

Franklin Park, Illinois, December 25, 2021

The sword was suspended in the basement rafters with a message from 1945 still secured to its fittings. My grandfather and I were sitting one floor above it at his kitchen table when an email arrived. It was 9:17 A.M. on Christmas Day in 2021, the Chicago weather too mild, the ground too much of a defeated brown, and the gathering too small to suggest that anything festive was about to happen. A notification lit up my phone with the subject line “Merry Christmas and a letter from Umeki-san.”

The timing was convenient. I was visiting for the holidays, staying at my mother’s childhood home in Franklin Park, ten miles west of Chicago. My parents were there, too. My grandfather, Joseph Kasser, who goes by Ben or Benny, built the home in 1957 for a family of four that eventually dwindled to one. My mom, Kathy, was the first to go, leaving for college in 1971; my grandma Alice died in 2008; my uncle Bob died in 2010. They left Benny alone on Louis Street with a lifetime of modest possessions. Among them was a Japanese sword he’d found on an Okinawa beach in the final days of World War II.

It was six months after I first asked Benny if he’d be interested in finding the sword’s owner. I don’t remember what I said to start the conversation. I do remember that I was nervous asking a man who doesn’t own much to part ways with a keepsake he’d found during perhaps the most consequential time of his life as an antiaircraft gunner in the U.S. Army. He didn’t hesitate. He said, “Sure.”

It was one of those inspired “sure”s that really mean “absolutely,” a posture-correcting “sure,” an energy-intoned “sure,” not “I suppose” or “if you want.” A momentous syllable that set something off. It was apparently something he had considered.

Now, on Christmas Day, I didn’t know if the email that had arrived contained good news about our quest. I read it silently while sitting at the kitchen table, where I had heard one side of the story for more than three decades.

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On a brisk weekday in October 2023, three sewing machines hummed while experimental indie pop played quietly inside a warehouse near the airport in Missoula, Montana. Three sewers had their heads down, assembling eggplant-colored jumpsuits, as Mallory Ottariano, the 34-year-old founder of the women’s outdoor clothing brand , squinted into a dizzying spreadsheet. The Youniverse—what Ottariano, a queen of puns, calls the factory she opened just eight months earlier—smelled like the sugary candle that had been burning that morning, and soon it would be fragrant with garlic.

“What kind of pizza do you guys like? Or not like?” Ottariano shouted from the lofted office that a handy friend helped her build. Staring at numbers was making her hungry.

“No olives!” one of the sewers shouted between stitches.

“Any meat?” Ottariano asked.

“I like pepperoni,” said another.

You couldn’t tell from the employees’ nonchalance, but Youer was in the middle of its latest supply-chain crisis. Actually, two. First, it couldn’t find a specific purple thread in all of the U.S. to sew together 300 pairs of leggings, 30 of which had already sold to customers eagerly awaiting their arrival. Any other color would look weird, and dyeing was too expensive. Second, inventory slated to be ready in a month for a Black Friday drop wasn’t even underway at a contract factory in Los Angeles, California. Unless Ottariano found a fix fast, Youer’s customers would be disappointed, if not angry.

Since Ottariano started out back in 2012 with a $100 sewing machine from eBay, her brand has amassed a fanatical following among active women. Signature garments like the best-selling ($179) and stretchy ($94) sell out quickly. The vibrant prints are hand-designed and cheekily named by Ottariano, like a floral pattern called OK Bloomer.

Prodded about her stress levels, Ottariano shrugged as if to say, What’s new? After all she’s been through—including contemplating bankruptcy following losses in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to unreliable factories in 2020—not many setbacks phase her anymore.

“I’ve proven to myself that we can figure it out,” she says. “It’s not really fun, but I think that’s just the reality of business. If I want to stay in this industry, that’s going to happen all the damn time.”

It’s especially the reality for small outdoor businesses like Youer that have chosen to manufacture domestically despite countless challenges such as higher costs, fewer resources, more regulation, and now potential new tariffs proposed by President Donald Trump on U.S. imports from China, Canada, and Mexico.

These obstacles pose such a threat to small businesses that doubt lingers: Is having more control, greater transparency, and better ethics by manufacturing in the U.S. worth it? And do American consumers care enough about those things to keep the few American-made gear brands alive?

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In the summer of 1991, Mical Garcia was 19 years old, taking classes at a cosmetology school in the farm town of Manteca, California, when she got an alarming call from her stepdad in Las Vegas. Her mother had run off. He came home from work to find her possessions gone, and a note explaining that she’d been leading a double life and did not want to be contacted.

Mical, who helps people pronounce her name by saying “like ‘me call you,’” was surprised but not overly concerned at the time. Her mother, Linda Sue Anderson, was carefree and a bit wild. “We’d play that song ‘Delta Dawn’ really loud, sing at the top of our lungs even though we didn’t have great voices, and dance,” Mical told me recently. Her mom once took her to see the Vegas crooner Engelbert Humperdinck in concert. Linda was beautiful, always had her long blond hair done, her nails and makeup just so. “She was never a Betty Crocker stay-at-home mom.”

The flip side was mood swings, which Mical, who is now a nurse, thinks could have been diagnosed as bipolar disorder. Linda would lock herself in her room, leaving Mical to babysit her sister, Dulcenea, and her brother, Ethan, who everyone called Petey. “I was in first or second grade, and I was cooking for them. My dad was traveling. She wouldn’t open the door.” Other times Linda, who worked as a travel agent, would disappear for days.

The family moved around a lot. When their parents divorced, they were living near Lake Tahoe. Their father won full custody and took the family to Manteca. Linda remarried and settled in Nevada. Her new husband was a pit boss at Caesars Palace with a degree from Stanford University. “He worshipped the ground she walked on,” Mical said. “I never heard they were having problems.”

So when Linda ran off, the Garcia children figured she’d come back eventually—just like she always had.

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Whump! My face plant is sudden, a cartwheel of flying ski poles and curse words into powder. The sting of snow on bare skin jolts my eyes open, and I hear a chorus of woo! erupt lower on the slope.

“Yeah, Fred!” a voice bellows. “You were a little too far forward—remember to keep your weight back.”

I brush myself off and schuss down the powdery hillside to my two companions, wondering how my 38 years of skiing experience seemingly evaporated in an instant. But I have little time to nurse my bruised pride—my new friends are already making their way up the slope for another run. I struggle to keep pace as we trudge toward the summit of this wooded hillside in Genesee, an upscale neighborhood in Denver’s western suburbs. I look to an adjacent hilltop and see the familiar elliptical sides of the Sculptured House, the mansion built by architect Charles Deaton featured in the 1973 film ł§±ô±đ±đ±è±đ°ù.Ìę

The guy in front of me, Wade Wilson, is a wiry real estate agent from nearby Golden. In front of him is Alex Kaufman, also from Golden, who dishes out rapid-fire advice as we climb. Keep your weight over your arches, not the balls of your feet. You don’t edge the turns like on a normal ski, you just kind of waggle your knees. Don’t worry if you hit a rock, just let the skis do their job.

“You’ll get the hang of it, I promise,” Kaufman says. “Everyone sucks their first time.” Kaufman, 45, is a father of two, a youth soccer coach, and the chief operating officer of Kaufman Asset Management, a company that invests in affordable housing. But I’m here because Kaufman is also a budding social media celebrity in the U.S. skiing world, where fans know him as the Weird Foothill Guy.

The Weird Foothill Guy only boasts about 11,000 followers across his channels, but his audience includes ski-industry heads of state, outdoor journalists, and even a few official resort accounts. I started following him in 2023 and quickly became obsessed with his online musings. Like many snow-sports aficionados, he regularly posts about the shoddy state of American skiing: massive lift lines, $48 cheeseburgers, and miles-long traffic jams on Interstate 70, the main artery connecting Denver with the resorts. “Economic vitality!” he once tweeted next to a video of a January traffic jam that stranded some motorists for ten hours on the freeway.

But most Weird Foothill Guy content promotes Kaufman’s highly unorthodox style of backcountry skiing—one that seems to defy logic. He skis up and down slopes that are just a few miles from downtown Denver—hillsides with so little snowpack (and so many rocks and stumps) that your daredevil nephew wouldn’t sled down them, let alone tackle them on skis. Yet Kaufman navigates this terrain three or four days a week during the winter, often on his lunch break or before work. He floods social media with photos from these micro-adventures, alongside captions that express his radical view on the sport. Basically: Resort skiing sucks and I’ve discovered an amazing alternative. 

Kaufman’s brand of skiing—which he calls Simple Skiing—relies on a bizarre plastic ski called the Marquette Backcountry, which looks like a cross between a child’s toy and a float pontoon. He did not invent these strange skis, but he has become their strongest evangelist. He keeps a small fleet of them in his garage, and lends them out to anyone who wants to try them, including me. Descending on them presents an ample learning curve, as I have just discovered. Ascending is similarly challenging. You don’t use climbing skins. The skis have fish-scale-like divots on the bottoms that grip the snow, similar to the ones on some cross-country skis.

Wilson and Kaufman speed ahead. Kaufman is wearing a pair of basketball shorts over tights and a flannel shirt. An orange handkerchief flutters from his back pocket. “I have the bandana in case hunters spot me,” he says. “I never wear ski pants—you get too hot.”

I soon learn this lesson, as my core temperature spikes under my preferred backcountry outfit. Snowmelt from my crash drips down my back and soaks my long underwear, and I wonder: Is this really better than a day at the resort?

I find my answer at the summit. Wilson and Kaufman have waited for me, and as I reach the top, I look down from our perch. Below us is I-70, packed with cars; a serpentine line of red brake lights stretching to the horizon. The traffic is barely inching along, and the nearest resort is still 45 miles up the road. I shift my gaze to the snowy slope below my skis. We’re completely alone, shredding untracked powder just 25 minutes from downtown Denver.

“We’ll be home eating breakfast before they’re in the parking lot,” Kaufman says. “C’mon, let’s hit another run.”

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The camp chairs are set up. A cracked clipboard rests under my arm. I’m stuffed into my mom jeans. It’s showtime.

June gloom blankets Encinal Canyon in a lush mist. I could be in Narnia instead of Malibu, but I barely notice. My body stands in front of a marooned Airstream, waiting. But my mind is back home, wondering if my 14-month-old is napping as I review the research on my clipboard. Tonight I’ll camp in this patch of Eden with Shailene Woodley, the 33-year-old actor and environmentalist known for her lead roles in The Fault in Our Stars, the Divergent trilogy, and the series Big Little Lies, instead of sleeping at home with my daughter. It’s the first time I’ve been away from her overnight.

“There she is,” a member of our six-woman crew says. An electric sedan with a mint green surfboard on top crunches to a stop. A luminous creature in a pastel silk shirt emerges and wraps me in a hug. My mind freezes. My clipboard is blank on basic human greetings.

“I had to stop at REI and get a new sleeping pad,” Woodley says, rolling her eyes. “I left my old one with my ex.” The actress is no stranger to camping, and remarkably at home in the outdoors. From a young age, she’s felt a kinship with and responsibility toward the natural world. Her lifelong commitment to environmental work started when, as a freshman at Simi Valley High School, she rallied her fellow students to petition for a recycling program. Since then she’s become an outspoken advocate for the climate, working with various nonprofits and NGOs and participating in the Standing Rock protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline.

We sit under an ancient oak tree in collapsible chairs. If Woodley has a phone, I don’t see it. When I ask about it she says, “I guess I’m addicted to real interaction.” She glimpses mine and coos at the wallpaper photo of my baby. When I tell her I met the love of my life at 39 she says, “You give me hope!”

Woodley radiates something I can’t place. Youth and beauty? Sure. But that’s everywhere in Hollywood. Later, when I play back the recording of our conversation, I hear how rushed I sound, so determined to ask all the questions, to get somewhere. But she’s in no hurry. She’s right here.

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You’re about to read one of the șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűÌę°ä±ôČčČőČőŸ±łŠČő, a series highlighting the best stories we’ve ever published, along with author interviews, where-are-they-now updates, and other exclusive bonus materials. Read Lisa Chase’s interview with David Quammen about this feature here.

He never founded a philosophic school, like Plato and Pythagoras did. He didn’t want followers. He simply wrote his one book and deposited the scroll in a certain sacred building, the temple of Artemis, where the general public couldn’t get ahold of it. The book itself was eventually lost, and all that survives of it today are about a hundred fragments, which have come down secondhand in the works of other ancient writers. So his ideas are known only by hearsay. He seems to have said a lot of interesting things, some of them cryptic, some of them downright ornery, but this river comment is the one for which Heraclitus is widely remembered. The full translation is: “You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing on.” To most people it comes across as a nice resonant metaphor, a bit of philosophic poetry. To me it is that and more.

Once, for a stretch of years, I lived in a very small town on the bank of a famous Montana river. It was famous mainly for its trout, this river, and for its clear water and abundance of chemical nutrients, and for the seasonal blizzards of emerging insects that made it one of the most rewarding pieces of habitat in North America, arguably in the world, if you happened to be a trout or fly-fisherman. I happened to be a fly-fisherman.

One species of insect in particular—one “hatch,” to use the slightly misleading term that fishermen apply to these impressive entomological events, when a few billion members of some mayfly or stone fly or caddis fly species all emerge simultaneously into adulthood and take flight over a river—gave this river an unmatched renown. The species was Pteronarcys californica, a monstrous but benign stone fly that grew more than two inches long and carried a pinkish-orange underbelly for which it had gotten the common name salmonfly. These insects, during their three years of development as aquatic larvae, could survive only in a river that was cold, pure, fast-flowing, rich in dissolved oxygen, and covered across its flat bottom with boulders the size of bowling balls, among which the larvae would live and graze. The famous river offered all those conditions extravagantly, and so P. californica flourished there like it did nowhere else. Trout flourished in turn.

When the clouds of P. californica took flight, and mated in air, and then began dropping back onto the water, the fish fed upon them voraciously, recklessly. Wary old brown trout the size of a person’s thigh, granddaddy animals that would never otherwise condescend to feed by daylight upon floating insects, came up off the bottom for this banquet. Each gulp of P. californica was a nutritional windfall. The trout filled their bellies and their mouths and still continued gorging. Consequently, the so-called salmonfly so-called hatch on this river, occurring annually during two weeks in June, triggered by small changes in water temperature, became a wild and garish national festival in the fly-fishing year. Stockbrokers in New York, corporate lawyers in San Francisco, federal judges and star-quality surgeons and foundation presidents—the sort of folk who own antique bamboo fly rods and field jackets of Irish tweed—planned their vacations around this event. They packed their gear and then waited for the telephone signal from a guide in a shop on Main Street of the little town where I lived.

The signal would say: It’s started. Or, in more detail: Yeah, the hatch is on. Passed through town yesterday. Bugs everywhere. By now the head end of it must be halfway to Varney Bridge. Get here as soon as you can. They got here. Cab drivers and schoolteachers came too. People who couldn’t afford to hire a guide and be chauffeured comfortably in a Mackenzie boat, or who didn’t want to, arrived with dinghies and johnboats lashed to the roofs of old yellow buses. And if the weather held, and you got yourself to the right stretch of river at the right time, it could indeed be very damn good fishing.

But that wasn’t why I lived in the town. Truth be known, when P. californica filled the sky and a flotilla of boats filled the river, I usually headed in the opposite direction. I didn’t care for the crowds. It was almost as bad as the Fourth of July rodeo, when the town suddenly became clogged with college kids from a nearby city, and Main Street was ankle deep in beer cans on the morning of the fifth, and I would find people I didn’t know sleeping it off in my front yard, under the scraggly elm. The salmonfly hatch was like that, only with stockbrokers and flying hooks. Besides, there were other places and other ways to catch fish. I would take my rod and my waders and disappear to a small spring creek that ran through a stock ranch on the bottomland east of the river.

It was private property. There was no room for guided boats on this little creek, and there was no room for tweed. Instead of tweed there were sheep—usually about thirty head, bleating in halfhearted annoyance but shuffling out of my way as I hiked from the barn out to the water. There was an old swayback horse named Buck, a buckskin; also a younger one, a hot white-stockinged mare that had once been a queen of the barrel-racing circuit and hadn’t forgotten her previous station in life. There was a graveyard of rusty car bodies, a string of them, DeSotos and Fords from the Truman years, dumped into the spring creek along one bend to hold the bank in place and save the sheep pasture from turning into an island. Locally this sort of thing is referred to as the “Detroit riprap” mode of soil conservation; after a while, the derelict cars come to seem a harmonious part of the scenery. There was also an old two-story ranch house of stucco with yellow trim. Inside lived a man and a woman, married then.

Now we have come to the reason I did live in that town. Actually there wasn’t one reason but three: the spring creek, the man, and the woman. At the time, for a stretch of years, those were three of the closest friends I’d ever had.

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It’s a pleasantly warm afternoon in Azerbaijan, a former soviet republic sandwiched between Russia and Iran, and the tank crewmen of the Qubadli regional Border Detachment are hosting a party. For hours they’ve been working to raise a wedding-style tent and set a dozen tables with cartons of fruit nectar, bowls of nuts, and plates of pale pink meats. The Azerbaijanis have been fighting off and on for more than 30 years with Armenia, another ex-Soviet state a grenade toss to the west, but tonight the war can wait.

Around 5 P.M., 14 shiny Nissan Pathfinders, Toyota Land Cruisers, and Mitsubishi Pajeros come racing into the encampment behind a military-police escort vehicle—a boxy Russian-built Lada—with lights flashing and engine whining. The SUVs file into a gravel parking area that was scratched out of the scrubland. Dozens of the detachment’s T-72 tanks and infantry fighting vehicles sit silently nearby like insects ready to sting.

The dust settles and about 30 civilians from more than 20 countries step from the cars, stretch their legs, and look around in wonder. Some are doctors. Some are vagabonds. All of them are here to see one of the world’s most contentious enclaves.

The detachment base sits on the fringes of Nagorno-Karabakh, a 2,700-square-mile patch of the Lesser Caucasus Mountains nestled inside Azerbaijan but historically home to a lot of ethnic Armenians, too. The two have been at each other’s throats for generations over this region, with thousands of lives lost. In the past four years, Azerbaijan has reclaimed the besieged area, and more than 100,000 Armenians fled back to Armenia. While the conflict appears to be over for now, there are remnants of the war everywhere: step off the road and a land mine might do you in.

A muscular, jovial colonel with thin, graying hair and slate-colored eyes comes forward in his battle dress. The tank crews stand at attention in navy blue boiler suits. His name is Murad, but that’s all he can say. A patch on his chest reads O (I) RH+, which is his blood type.

“Welcome! Welcome!” the colonel says to the guests. “We’re so honored you are here.”

The leader of the visiting guests, Charles Veley, a 58-year-old from Marin County, California, steps forward from a white Mitsubishi that I’ve been riding in, too. “Thank you for having us,” Veley replies. “I hear you have a surprise.”

“Yes, yes,” the colonel says. “I hope you enjoy.”

What’s no surprise is that Veley, who has a boyish grin and a neutral, even way of speaking, is here. That’s because he is, according to a system he created, America’s most traveled person, a wanderer who has visited more of the planet than almost any known human in history. Fewer than ten people have seen more of the globe than he has.

To quantify that, there are lists. The most straightforward one comes from the United Nations, which affirms that there are 195 countries in existence, including places like Palestine and the Holy See. Federal Express says that it delivers to more than 220 countries and territories. The list that Veley compiled, and that thousands of other extreme travelers recognize, tops out at more than 1,500 distinct places that are currently possible for one to visit. It includes countries, regions, enclaves, atolls, both poles, and at least one small, sheer-cliffed islet in the middle of the ocean. Russia isn’t just “Russia,” but 86 discrete stops. The United Kingdom has 30 stops, including islands like Herm and Sark. To see the United States, you must travel to 79 places that stretch from the Florida Keys to the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea.

“Charles isn’t an adventure seeker but a knowledge seeker,” his friend Kolja Spöri, the German founder of the Extreme Traveler International Congress, a yearly gathering of the world’s most obsessive travelers that’s been held in such places as Baghdad, Equatorial Guinea, and Siberia, told me. “He’s the spiritual father of all country collectors,” he added in a blog post.

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On the morning of Monday, May 6, the air on the Cumbrian Coast was 58 degrees Fahrenheit and very damp.  The tide was neither in nor out, and the surface of the Irish Sea looked like a restless version of the paved parking lot where my wife and I stood. Before descending to the beach, I loosened my shoelaces, jogged a few experimental steps, and tightened the laces again. Emma was stretching her quads and fiddling with the nozzle of her water bladder. We had giddy prerace feelings, though this was not a race, or even a run, and we’d come to England because we wanted to slow down.

Above the beach, a muddy path crept up a green sheep pasture to the top of St. Bees Head, a 300-foot sandstone sea cliff teeming with birds and mist. We knew from maps and books and online research that the Coast to Coast Walk, which we were there to do, traversed the mesa-like head for four and a half miles before veering eastward for another 188.

“How are they feeling?” Emma asked, nodding grimly in the direction of my feet.

“I’m hoping they’re just nervous,” I replied.

A fishing boat was humming alone in the sea fret. Beach pebbles clacked with fright, delight, or some other rocky emotion as they were tumbled by the waves. Because it’s a Coast to Coast tradition, we spent a few minutes on the shore picking among these oblate stones until one felt right—mine a mostly solid matte black, Emma’s black with green veins. Then we slid the rocks into our packs, dipped our feet in the sea, and clicked our Garmin watches on.

“I’ll race ya,” Emma said.

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