Outside Podcast

Professional outdoor athletes can seem invincible—like no matter what crazy thing they do next, they’ll come out the other side alive (and probably smiling). But if you actually ask these athletes about their relationship with risk, they’ll likely be quick to tell you about the moment they realized that no matter how good they are at their sport, sometimes bad things happen. For the latest episode...

When we venture into the wilderness, we accept that there are certain dangers, like bears and snakes and crazy weather. Truth be told, a bit of risk is what attracts many people to the backcountry (even if normal urban life is much riskier). But there are times when the usual natural threats are replaced by something far more menacing: an aggressive human. In this gripping story from our friends a...

Among people who spend a lot of time in the wilderness, there’s a notion that the trail is our teacher. And if you talk to serious outdoor adventurers, you quickly realize just how powerful trail lessons can be. Take the case of professional endurance athlete Rebecca Rusch, who was schooled over the last several winters while riding a bike across the Alaska Range as a racer in the 350-mile Iditaro...

There are few places on earth where humans aren’t at the top of the food chain, but the Arctic sea ice is one of them. Photographer Kiliii Yuyan saw this firsthand while documenting the Inupiat people’s spring whale hunt. A hungry polar bear began stalking the party, forcing the hunters to defend themselves. The dramatic experience was a harsh lesson in the realities of survival in a truly wild pl...

American road racing has struggled in the past decade. Following the downfall of Lance Armstrong, road racing became almost synonymous with doping, sponsors walked away, and fans became disenchanted. But new energy is emerging again in the longtime American discipline of crit racing, or criterium, which has riders hammering out laps on courses through city streets. It’s fast, rowdy, and full of cr...

For survivors of harrowing events, the most challenging part of the saga often comes after they’ve lived through what seemed like an impossible scenario. Such was the case of Joe Stone, who was a high-flying athlete addicted to the thrills of sports like skydiving and BASE jumping before a brutal accident left him paralyzed from the chest down and with limited fine motor skills in his hands. And s...

If you’re a climber, the risk of falling is always there—it's an essential fact about the sport. And for a lot of climbers, this is actually part of the appeal. That was definitely how Brendan Leonard saw it. Today Leonard is best known as a trail runner and the creator of Semi-Rad, where he publishes essays and illustrations about life as a nonprofessional athlete. But back in his twenties, climb...

It’s the ultimate mountain-town caricature: the shaggy semi-athlete who lives in a van (or truck or crowded apartment), works a number of crappy jobs (pizza delivery, barback, liftie), and skis 100 days every winter. This is the ski bum: a hero to some, a loser to others, and an enigma to everyone—until now. In this episode, bona fide ski bum Paddy “Paddy O” O’Connell presents irrefutable evidence...

People are drawn to the mountains for all kinds of reasons—the desire to challenge themselves physically or emotionally, a hunger for risk or perhaps solitude, the need for a sense of accomplishment. But for some, the appeal is both deeper and far more complicated. So it is with Sequoia Schmidt, whose father and brother died on K2, the world’s second-tallest and most dangerous peak. That tragedy u...

In 2001, when Caroline Gleich was 15 years old, her half-brother Martin died in an avalanche while skiing in the Utah backcountry. That tragedy didn’t prevent Gleich from becoming a professional skier—quite the opposite—but it has led her to develop a unique approach to managing risk. The truth is, avalanches are largely predictable: they only occur on certain slopes and under certain conditions....

It was a glorious powder day in the Sierra Nevada when three friends set off into the backcountry at dawn. They had tons of experience and all the essential emergency gear, so they were unfazed by the fact that the local avalanche center had listed the danger that day as considerable. As the trio saw it, if you wanted to enjoy good skiing conditions in the backcountry, you had to accept some risk....

When a groups of friends in their twenties set out to climb Mount Rainier, they felt like they were ready for anything. But on the upper slopes of the peak, trouble found them. A storm moved in, and members of the party began to suffer from altitude sickness and dehydration. As climbers began turning around, two decided to push on: an aggressive military athlete who was on a quest for the summit a...

It sounds like something out of a James Bond film: a robotic exoskeleton that helps you ski better. But the real thing exists. A San Francisco–based startup called Roam has developed a breakthrough device that pairs clever mechanics with artificial intelligence to give your lower body a boost when you need it most. For able-bodied skiers, it’s a performance-enhancement tool that will let you ignor...

It began as every surfer’s dream: an empty point break, a rising swell, and a good friend to share the rides. But what happens when you’re out there and the waves just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger? So it went for William Finnegan at a break off the Portuguese island of Madeira. This happened decades ago, back when surfers had to more or less guess at the conditions they’d encounter on...

Serious surfers train themselves to be ready for difficult moments: a brutal wipeout, being held down underwater by waves, losing a board and being forced swim a mile to shore. Then there are the kinds of experiences that nobody is really prepared for, like getting pushed out to sea by winds or currents and set adrift where nobody can see you. To get through that scenario alive, you need extraordi...

As it turns out, being a grown-up novice offers all kinds of surprising benefits. Just ask journalist Tom Vanderbilt, who spent a year attempting to pick up a variety of challenging skills, from surfing to singing to drawing. Ultimately, he didn’t become amazing at any of these things, but his humble quest taught him something far more valuable: that despite your age or how busy you think you are,...

Serious athletes are used to digging deep. But there’s pushing yourself, and then there’s what climber Emily Harrington did on November 4, when she became the first woman, and the fourth person ever, to free-climb the Golden Gate route up Yosemite’s El Capitan in a single day. It was an insanely challenging endeavor: a 3,200-foot ascent up the sheer granite wall using only her hands and feet. For...

Ask a professional adventurer to share the most important lesson they’ve learned from their time in the wild, and you’re bound to get a good story. Which is exactly why we posed this question to Steven Rinella, host of the Netflix series MeatEater, and Krystle Wright, an adventure photographer based in Australia. For Rinella, a dangerous decision on a trip to Alaska’s Arctic made him see how being...

With the latest version of its Watch and the imminent launch of its online training platform Fitness+, Apple is positioning itself as a leader in the health and wellness space. For CEO Tim Cook, this effort has been many years in the making. A fitness obsessive, Cook works out daily, passionately believes that exercise is key to our quality of life, and he sees extraordinary opportunity in the abi...

When we embark on a big adventure outdoors, the truth is that we rarely know what we’re getting into. Usually, the reasons we give for taking a trip are rarely what make it so memorable. You might go into the mountains with dreams of perfect powder turns but come away marveling about something you saw in the sky. These novel experiences and surprises are why so many of us keep going back. In this...

Jeb Corliss is one of the original madmen of BASE jumping. For more than two decades, he flung himself from the top of massive waterfalls, bridges, and skyscrapers, and managed to miraculously survive multiple crash landings in a sport that rarely gives second chances. But now he’s 44, and no longer chasing the edge of risk. Instead, Corliss has embarked on a journey into the depths of his own tro...

In the past couple of years, South Carolina–based writer Latria Graham has published a pair of essays in Outside magazine about the challenges that Black people face in the outdoors. Both stories generated a great deal of attention to this matter and also spurred a number of readers to write to her to ask questions, as well as share their own personal experiences. For Graham, one category of lette...

It wasn’t all that long ago that protecting the environment was an issue considered to be above partisanship. In 1970, it was Richard Nixon who announced the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency and signed the Clean Air Act into law. So how did the environment become one of the most divisive issues in American politics? The answer is a fight over trees. In the 1990s, a fierce confronta...

For many years, Jeremy Jones had a simple job: he was the king of freeride snowboarding, traveling the planet to carve lines down jagged peaks for action films. But then he began to notice changes in the mountains he was visiting: less snow, shrinking glaciers, and other signs that matched what scientists were saying about the growing menace of climate change. After struggling for a way to respond...

To become an elite climber, you need to get very good at defying gravity. This requires developing extraordinary control of your body while also maximizing your strength to weight ratio. To do that, you train constantly and also pay attention to your diet. At the upper echelons of the sport, where every move counts, there’s pressure on athletes to do all they can to make themselves stronger, while...