For more than a week now, an American hiker has been lost in northern Mexico’s deep Sierra Madre canyons, in the town of Urique, Chihuahua, where the Caballo Blanco Ultra is held each March. Police first thought that Patrick Braxton-Andrew, a 34-year-old Spanish teacher in North Carolina, went missing while alone on a hike. But as investigators in both countries learn more, they’re realizing the case might not be so simple.
Braxton-Andrew had flown to Chihuahua city on October 24. He planned to take the El Chepe train over the Sierra mountains to the coastal town of Los Mochis, Sinaloa, then meet his brother in the country’s capital for a Day of the Dead celebration. The train covers some of the most gorgeous high-elevation pine mountains on either side of the border, passing through 86 tunnels and over 37 bridges. At the train route’s zenith, it pauses at Divisadero, a small town that overlooks the Copper Canyon, which in parts is nearly twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. The Tarahumara natives—the famous long-distance runners of Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run—sell handmade wares in stalls outside the train stop. Mexican visitors are everywhere snapping photos. For a place as remote as the Sierra mountains, it can feel a bit touristy.
Braxton-Andrew, above all, loved hidden places. He’d traveled through much of Southeast Asia and Central America searching them out. “That’s what he lives for,” his father, Gary, told Outside. So in the interest of exploring he rode a bus three hours down serpentine switchbacks to Urique, where he’d read online about a national park with deserted trails.
In Urique, Braxton-Andrew’s family said he met a group of fellow travelers, the only other foreigners in town besides himself. They explored the Copper Canyon National Park and the river together, but as the weekend came to an end, they went their separate ways. On October 28, the last anyone heard from Braxton-Andrew, he mentioned to his family one last hike.
Most U.S. and Mexican press accounts say he never returned, but his family now believes otherwise.
More than 100 police officers, a canine unit, and drones, have scoured the river at the bottom of the canyon, as well as nearby rancherias, including Guadalupe Coronado, El Naranjo, Chiltepin, and El Guayabo. Locals, including Tarahumara villages, have also helped in the search. But Andrew-Braxton’s brother, Kerry, told Outside that his brother had talked to friends and coworkers from a local internet cafe that afternoon. In one message, he seemed to describe the final hike, which would mean Andrew-Braxton had finished his trek that morning and returned to Urique.
There is also what he left in his hotel room: practically everything. He left his jackets and the nice camera he took everywhere worth Instagraming, both of which Kerry said he’d have taken on a longer walk. All that was missing from his pack were the clothes he’d been wearing, some money, and maybe a book. “He was most likely either going to dinner, or if he had a book, maybe there was somewhere around town he wanted to see where he might have gone to sit and read,” Kerry says. Police have also started looking less around the park, and asking more questions in town.
Urique lays at one of the Copper Canyon’s deepest points, and while its remoteness draws the occasional adventurer like Braxton-Andrew, these same remote qualities also make it ideal for outlaws. The region is known locally as the Golden Triangle, because it’s where Mexican cartels grow most of the drugs they traffic to the U.S. In 2015, warring gangs cut short the Caballo Blanco Ultra. A mob of armed, flack-jacketed men stormed a local police station and left with two officers in the back of their truck. The race’s organizers evacuated all foreign runners after gunshots and grenades were heard.
And the same week that Braxton-Andrew went missing the heads of six men believed to be in a local cartel were found outside a gas station in the town of Creel, where the El Chepe train passes through on its way to Divisadero.
The Sierra register some of the highest murder rates in Mexico. But Randy Gingrich, who runs a non-profit called Tierra Nativa that gives aid to Tarahumara in the region, says he could not recall the last time an American was harmed in the mountains of Chihuahua. That’s because even in a place as lawless as the Sierra there have always been certain rules. Cartels killing other cartels, or even targeting local Tarahumara who refuse to grow drugs, or give up their land, is common. A weekly occurrence even. But if the drug gangs did something to a tourist, it could mean the area is growing increasingly paranoid, which might bring greater violence to the region. “Now,” Gingrich says, “I am very concerned.”
Police say the locals are also obeying another unwritten rule of the Sierra: staying silent about any details. But Andrew-Braxton’s family is hopeful somebody knows what happened to him and will come forward. The family has talked with the foreign tourists he met up with in Urique, but are still trying to get in touch with a young man from the group who stayed behind. He was camping in the area, and he might have even moved on to Central America, where he said he’d be traveling next. “The bottom line is we want Patrick back,” his father, Gary, says. “That’s the most important thing to us. And we’re here for the long run.”
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As of this writing, the ongoing Camp Fire in northern California was responsible for taking at least 42 lives and destroying more than 6,400 homes. Both numbers are expected to rise as the fire continues and as first responders sift through the wreckage. As extreme wildfires like this one become the new normal across the American West, I thought it’d be important to put the devastation they create in perspective.
The Camp Fire was likely started by downed power lines sometime on Thursday morning. Near-zero-humidity conditions had left brush bone dry, meaning embers burst into flames almost immediately. Powerful winds coming down from the Great Basin whipped those embers forward in what survivors have described as a firestorm. By the time those flames reached the town of Paradise later that day, the fire was advancing at a rate of 80 acres per minute. Reports indicate virtually the entire town was destroyed. As of Tuesday, the fire measured 200 square miles and was only 30 percent contained.
While this is the deadliest fire in California history, it still falls behind other massive conflagrations when it comes to size and fatalities. The Peshtigo Fire, which burned 280,000 acres of Wisconsin in 1871, killed at least 1,500 people. According to the Wisconsin Historical Society, the area had been suffering such a significant drought that its residents had grown used to the smell of smoke and the presence of ash in the air. So the town of Peshtigo didn’t take any extra precautions when they went to bed on the night of October 8. Late that night, “all hell rode into town on the back of a wind,” stated one survivor. In the ensuing panic, many people remained in their homes, all but two of which burned down.
Neither fire approaches the size of the Great Fire of 1910. There, hurricane-force winds met drought conditions, burning three million acres in the northern Rocky Mountains. A sparsely populated area, only 78 people were killed, many of them firefighters. It’s this fire that led to the U.S. Forest Service’s policy of fire suppression, which is often cited as worsening today’s wildfire conditions.
The Camp Fire supplants last year’s Tubbs Fire as the most destructive in the state's history. Tubbs is infamous for also burning through an urban area, destroying 2,800 homes in the city of Santa Rosa. It took 22 lives.
While no costs have yet been tabulated for the ongoing disaster, the Tubbs fire may help us gain an understanding of how much the Camp Fire is going to cost. Its damage was estimated at $1.2 billion, while firefighting costs were $100 million.
To me, what’s remarkable about the Camp Fire isn’t just the sheer amount of destruction. It’s the timing. In addition to Camp, there are two other terrible fires ravaging California, and all of this is happening just months after the devastating Carr Fire destroyed parts of nearby Redding. In fact, seven of the 20 most destructive fires in California history have come in the last year alone. The Camp Fire isn’t an outlier—it’s just the latest indication that, out West, we have to get used to living with wildfire year-round.
A year ago today, I wrote a piece analyzing the impact climate change is going to have on wildfires and the people who have to live with them. That led me to research suggesting that an estimated 5.1 million homes in California alone are at risk from wildfire—120 times more than the number of homes in the state that are at risk of sea-level rise.
My conclusion then was the same as it is now: climate change is going to massively worsen fire conditions in the American West and we will have to find new ways to live in that much more fire-prone landscape. Until we do, we’re not watching small, fast-moving individual disasters—we’re looking at one very big one.
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My father’s e-mail didn’t make much sense, but he seemed to be saying that pirates had boarded his boat. “Being kidnappedby filmcompany Deep south blackcult took over steering,” it read. “Ship disabled.”
He sent this to my mother, Martha Carr, at 4:30 a.m. Pacific time on May 28, 2017, a Sunday. She was at home in Los Angeles, asleep, and she wouldn’t see the message—and a couple more like it—until 8:30 a.m. For several hours, my dad, 71-year-old Richard Carr, must have thought they weren’t getting through.
Dad was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, on his way from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to the Marquesas Islands, 26 days into a single-handed, 2,780-mile crossing that was to be the first major leg of a lifelong dream: sailing around the world. It was 3:30 A.M. where he was, near the equator, an hour behind Pacific time. He was 1,160 nautical miles from the Marquesas, 1,975 from Hawaii, and 1,553 from Mexico—about as far away from land, and help, as you can get.
His boat was a 36-foot Union Cutter called Celebration, built in 1985. It had a white hull, faded teak decks, brass portholes turning turquoise, and forest green sail covers that always reminded me of summer camp. Climbing into the cabin was like disappearing into a hobbit hole—a dark, welcoming space with oak cabinets and big cushions.
Just six hours before Dad sent the pirate alert, late in the evening on May 27, he had used his satellite text messager and tracking device to wish Mom a happy 39th wedding anniversary. He also wanted to ease her concerns that his boat was pointed the wrong way, something she’d noticed on a map that indicated his position based on the messages he sent.
“Hey Hon. I’m fine,” he wrote. “I have enough food, etc. The watermaker is still working. Pulling over & parking in a storm (heave to) is a good skill to have & practice.” He signed off with a smiley face.
The smile was gone now. Ten minutes after his 4:30 message, he e-mailed one of his younger brothers, John Carr, an aerospace engineer in Orange County. “Being kidnapped by pirates,” he wrote. “Talk to martha.” John was asleep, too, and didn’t see it.
About two hours later, Dad followed up with this message to John: “Apparently, I’ve been spared.” A few minutes after that, at 6:54, he messaged Mom: “Hugewind pirates left. I’m fine. Talklater.” He said he’d sent out an SOS and an alert from his EPIRB, an emergency device that transmits a satellite signal to rescuers when a boat is in distress. He asked her to call and cancel them.
At 7:54, shortly after sunrise where Dad was, he wrote Mom: “Message me as soon as u can. I’m really shaken.” Then he tried John again: “Very scarey. Thought I would not see day.” For Dad, sunrise meant nearly 13 hours of sitting in humid 80-degree weather in the doldrums—an area near the equator with fickle conditions that leave sailors becalmed one minute, huddled in squalls the next, and then scrambling to catch a big gust of wind.
Around eight in L.A., Mom went outside to do some gardening before it got too hot. She still wasn’t aware of the e-mail Dad had sent. “Richard usually messaged me in the afternoon, and I would write back,” she told me later. “So I didn’t check my e-mail when I got up.”
At 8:30, the phone rang. It was John calling to discuss the strange e-mail he’d received. She ran upstairs to her laptop. It was then, roughly an hour after Dad sent his final message of the morning, that he finally heard back from the family. Mom’s first message to him said: “Omg-what do u need? Are u ok?”
She phoned my brother, Tim, who lives in Culver City, about 45 minutes from her house, with his wife, Jen, and their two young boys. Tim messaged Dad, asking if he was all right and giving him instructions for canceling an SOS. Then he drove to Mom’s. Once there he called me in Woodstock, New York, where I live with my husband, Ian, and our two small daughters.
Before leaving, Dad had given Mom a list of emergency contacts. She called a California branch of the Coast Guard and was advised to try Honolulu instead, because that part of the Pacific is their territory. A woman answered. After listening to the details about Dad, she checked for an EPIRB alert from him. When she came back, she said, “There’s been no signal.”
What was going on? There were various possibilities, and none of them seemed good. We scrambled to find answers, knowing there might not be much time.
Richard Carr grew up in the 1940s and ’50s near the Erie Canal just outside Buffalo, New York. As was typical in that area at that time, he was one of seven kids in a hardworking family with stern parents, all of them crammed into a three-bedroom house.
The boys in the family were often out all day, until dinner, and Richard was no different. He taught kids to swim and fish for the local Boys’ Club and built a canoe with his older brother to explore the canal’s feeder creeks. He and his best friends played Lost Boys along parts of the Niagara River, when he wasn’t diving in it with members of the scuba club he started.“He was an optimist,” my uncle John recalls. “He always had the outlook that there was something to do and it was always good.”
In 1963, Richard was offered a full scholarship to study marine biology at the University of Miami, but his father refused to divulge the family’s income on the required forms, so the aid fell through. Ready for some distance from his hometown, he caught a free ride to L.A., where he took classes at a community college to make himself eligible for residency tuition at California universities. To save money, he worked at a Laundromat and sometimes lived off ketchup packets mixed with water. (“Tomato soup,” he joked.) He was shy, but he had a sunny, magnetic smile.
Mom saw him for the first time in 1969, at Oakwood, her private high school in L.A. Born Martha Gold, she was a popular tenth-grader, with long red hair, parents who worked in the film industry, and a horse that she jumped in competition. Dad was interviewing to teach seventh-grade science. By that time, he’d earned a degree in anthropology from UCLA and was interested in psychology. They didn’t start a relationship until 1975, when Mom was at UCLA as a psych major. They met in a professional group, and though Mom declined his invitations for a while, she finally gave in and agreed to go out with him.
“I was an anxious person and didn’t have a lot of relationship experience,” she says. “He helped me work through my resistance and wasn’t put off by my weaknesses, so that showed me a lot about his devotion.”
They married in 1978; by the next year, Mom was pregnant with Tim. Dad, who had learned to sail in California, sold a boat he owned—a 31-foot Mariner ketch called Cortez—and bought an old Spanish-style house in the San Fernando Valley, where Tim and I grew up and where Mom still lives. My parents were busy raising us and tending to clients in their therapy practices, but sailing was always on Dad’s mind. He often tried to convince Mom that the family should sail around the world together, but she wanted her kids to have a normal upbringing.
My parents shared an office suite in Hollywood, across from the famous Capitol Records building. As a kid, I’d sometimes sit in the waiting room while one of them finished a session. I’d sort my Mom’s tea collection and watch gem-toned fish flit about in Dad’s saltwater tank. Over the years, in addition to his practice, he became deeply interested in research. He explored the neurology of babies in the womb and wrote a book about the neuroscience of art therapy.
Though Dad was devoted to his work, our coffee table was never without an issue of Cruising World. On some weekends during my childhood, we sailed a rented boat to Catalina Island, a half-day’s trip from L.A. We often camped and skied, and also traveled to Hawaii, snorkeling and listening to Dad tick off the names of the fish we’d seen.
More recently, as he prepared to depart on his circumnavigation, I thought about taking sailing lessons and joining him somewhere tropical. Father-daughter time felt sacred by then, because we hadn’t lived in the same state for almost ten years. The occasions we spent together—a ski trip to Mammoth, a daylong sail off Los Angeles Harbor—established our dynamic. We dipped comfortably into troughs of silence crested by deep conversations about life.
Dad’s quest to sail the world got serious on March 16, 2010, when he made the final payment on a boat he found in the San Francisco Bay Area called Celebration. It had a crack in the bulkhead, a rusted mast step, and a hull full of blisters. He planned to devote the next few years to readying it.
The boat had been known as Pelican, until the previous owner changed it. According to legend, renaming a boat enrages the sea gods if you neglect to do various ritualistic things, like burn the old ship’s log. I have no idea if the prior owner adhered to that tradition, but we do know that he made it only as far as San Diego on his own around-the-world attempt. There he suffered a stroke and was sidelined. Seven years after purchasing the boat, my dad bought a carved pelican figurine at a stop in La Paz, Mexico, and mounted it in the cabin as a talisman.
During the summer of 2010, once Celebration was fit to use, it was temporarily docked in Oxnard, 60 miles northwest of L.A., and my parents spent weekends sailing to the Channel Islands. Mom enjoyed the trips but had no interest in big ocean crossings. Instead of joining Dad on his circumnavigation, which would play out in stages over several years, she planned to meet him in various ports around the world.
That fall, Celebration found its new long-term home in busy, industrial Los Angeles Harbor, at a small, homey marina called Lighthouse Yacht Landing. It was tucked into the terminus of a maze of massive cranes playing Tetris with container ships.
Dad spent weekends fastidiously working on Celebration, but eight hours a day was a lot for him. “He wasn’t a carpenter or a mason or a plumber,” says Thor Faber, a boat repairman who sold Dad equipment to prepare for long sails. “It’s taxing for somebody who is 40 or 50, but for someone who is 60-plus it’s a big adventure.”
Still, Dad couldn’t stay away, and the more time he spent on the boat, the more obsessed he became with getting everything done. When his professional work got in the way, he grew frustrated and cranky. Marty Richards, Dad’s liveaboard neighbor, says he could never suggest a fix for something without inviting a lengthy back-and-forth.
“Your dad was a stubborn guy,” he told me. “Kind of a self-taught guy, and I think he pretty much lived his whole life that way, right? He wouldn’t take anything on faith unless he could understand it intuitively. He just wouldn’t believe it.”
Dad hoped to depart in late 2015, but an El Niño weather forecast loomed for that winter. Plus, the boat wasn’t seaworthy yet. The delays felt monumental to him. It was as if sticking to the schedule was the primary goal, and he couldn’t see that being patient would allow him to practice and prepare. I think he also sensed that, at this stage of his life, getting ready for such a trip might require more time than he had left.
Mom became anxious as the departure date got closer. Their lives had been intertwined for decades, and he was about to leave on a voyage that could go on for years. The repairs—which came to nearly half the cost of the boat—caused frequent arguments. But she had to accept that he wasn’t going to give up his dream, so they moved forward, at times clumsily, toward his ultimate adventure.
The start of 2016 brought a major new expense: Celebration’s decks were rotting and had to be replaced. After that repair was completed, in Marina del Rey, Dad motored down the coast toward L.A. Harbor. En route, the engine started smoking, and it blew a head gasket, requiring a partial rebuild. Crucial time to test gear and practice single-handing was slipping away.
Finally, Dad refused to delay any longer. He forced himself to get going by signing up for the Baja Ha-Ha, a two-week cruising rally with 130 other boats that ran from San Diego to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, at the end of October. He would go with his marina mate Marty Richards.
Dad and Richards made their way to San Diego, and the whole family gathered there to say goodbye. Mom kept her nerves under control by orchestrating dinner. Dad’s anxiety peaked as he tried to clear years of collected junk from Celebration—piles of pencils, rulers, and other dead weight.
I was nervous, given Dad’s track record with mishaps like the overheated engine, which required a Coast Guard tow. But I also understood the exhilaration he felt on the water. Over the years, as part of my career, I’ve snowboarded backcountry terrain and climbed in the dark with thousands of feet of exposure. I was proud that Dad was going for it. I knew there was a chance that he wouldn’t come back, but I’d rather he try—risk and all—than live with regret.
One night in San Diego, after the kids were asleep, Tim and Ian went to the hotel bar. A sailor there started talking about pirates along the African coast, an area that Dad would eventually find himself in as he sailed around the world.
“That really alarmed us and made us question if Richard knew what he was doing,” Ian remembers. “We were crying into our scotch. We knew he was going no matter what.”
“I remember feeling impressed at how brave he was and proud of him for going, but I was also terrified,” Tim says. “I gave him a hug on the boat and told him I was afraid he wouldn’t come back.”
When it was time to pull away from port, Mom ran off briefly to put something in the car. When she got back, Celebration was gone. “That was when I really started to worry,” she says. “How could he forget to say goodbye?” She called his mobile. After fueling up, he turned around, docked, and said a proper farewell before rejoining the rally.
Problems ensued as Dad and Richards made their way south. Among other things, they had to fix a leaky bilge pump, which had caused an alarming amount of steam to pour from the engine compartment. New noises kept Dad awake on the first night. “He was so sleep deprived he was slurring,” Mom recalls of their phone conversation the next day. “His thoughts were all over the place.”
And his eyes were playing tricks on him. At one point in the night, he thought he saw a forest of trees rising from the water, illuminated by phosphorescence. “Despite knowing they couldn’t be real,” he wrote later on his blog, “I had to wait … and watch the branches dissolve into fragmentary illusions.” Hallucinations worried us, but we also knew that they’re not uncommon among sailors on overnighters.
Even so, Dad had some hard things to face. “The real journey, which had been more challenging than my conjured fears before we started, left me needing to reflect and redefine my trip,” he wrote. “Questions tormented me... When Marty’s gone, who will I talk things through with? How will I hold up sailing day and night on long runs? Am I really ready to single-hand this trip? A reality that had been an idea just a few days before was unfolding according to its own design as the life I’d agreed to.”
Cabo Corrientes, rocky and pointed like an arrowhead, is the last piece of land jutting into the Pacific at the base of Mexico’s horseshoe-shaped Banderas Bay. Head east and you’ll hit Puerto Vallarta, the bass-thumping spring-break destination. Head west and you’ll hear nothing but wind and the slap of the ocean against your hull.
I can picture Dad clearing that spot on the morning of May 3, 2017, his hands loosely gripping the boat’s metal wheel and his blue eyes surveying the horizon. He would have uttered an “mmph” to mark the moment before he went back to winching and charting and setting angles. “My sea journey has really begun,” he texted as he moved out. “Only ocean to the Marquesas. Lite winds. Breakfast time.”
The huge expanse ahead would be his first ocean crossing, and it would also be the hardest leg of his planned route, judging by the likely weather patterns and duration—an estimated 27 days. When I asked what scared him most about the trip, he said it was sleep deprivation, an inevitable issue for single-handed sailors, who often are so busy that they can rest only in chunks.
Dad had spent the month and a half before departure in La Cruz de Huanacaxtle, prepping to join the Pacific Puddle Jump, a migration of boats that cross from the Americas to French Polynesia, mostly during March and April, when the winds are strong and storms are rare. But April came to a close, and he still had repairs to make. Fortunately, the weather window remained favorable for a few extra weeks, and there were at least a half-dozen boats crossing at the same time. On May 2, the birthday of his first grandchild, Brendan, he set sail.
Celebration, a slow but sturdy boat, was equipped with solar panels, a wind generator, a watermaker (or desalinator), a four-man life raft, a self-steering device, a flare gun, a $1,300 survival suit designed for dangerous Alaskan fishing conditions, and provisions for three months, among other items.
“It’s an easy boat to handle,” says Mike Danielson of PV Sailing, a Puerto Vallarta–based marine service center that helped Dad rig. “If you’re in a gale, that boat can heave to and weather it out.”
Heaving to—a maneuver used to slow a boat’s progress and basically park it—is a skill Dad would practice often on this trip, especially when he was in the Intertropical Convergence Zone, where the north- and southeast trade winds meet near the equator. This region is infamous for chaotic weather that alternates between rain squalls, shifting winds, thunderstorms, and dead calm. The patterns become more frenetic as summer approaches. “It’s feast or famine out there,” says Danielson. “Getting across the convergence zone at that time is a lot of work.”
I was due to have my second baby a week before Dad’s estimated arrival in the Marquesas on May 29. Both of us would be facing difficult challenges thousands of miles apart—me in labor, him single-handing—and that made me feel close to him. Our family had preliminary plans to meet in New Zealand for Christmas.
On May 3, as Dad sailed west and Cabo Corrientes slipped below the horizon, my water broke—three weeks early. Later that day, I delivered my second daughter, Wyatt.
“Congrats on new daughter,” Dad wrote the next morning. “Delivered with your special drama, flair and courage to do all U can.” As he headed into the empty Pacific—wishing he’d been present for Wyatt’s birth—seven birds kept him company, perching on the bowsprit, falling, scrambling, honking, and perching again.
At first the trip was a dream. Every few days, Dad would let us know how great the conditions were. “Lovely light air sailing,” he wrote. It filled me with relief and joy to know that, after years of hammering and tinkering that had left Dad’s hands greasy and raw, the boat was finally living up to its stout reputation. He was really doing it.
Eventually, the seas got bigger and rougher. Dad’s self-steering wind vane—which allowed him to leave the helm to cook or clean or sleep—was overwhelmed by winds and swells, and he had to stay on deck and help steer. Exhaustion set in, and the less than ideal wind direction he was trying to harness required vigilance.
By the time he was ten days in, averaging a slow, steady 80 to 90 nautical miles per day, he was getting to know himself in isolation. He told Mom that he was having a lot of internal dialogue, which for him was a normal way to deal with demanding situations.
As the days went on, the frequency of Dad’s messages slowed, as did his forward progress: he was making only 77 miles a day now, and his overall trip time was recalibrated to five weeks. Because of rough seas, he was having trouble eating without spilling. Worse, his watermaker had stopped functioning shortly after he left Banderas Bay. Mom relayed repair notes from Thor Faber; after two weeks, during which he probably drank from the backup supply, Dad got it working again.
In his third week out, on May 20, he wrote that “gear & wind & wave” had knocked two pairs of glasses off his face, leaving him with a single damaged but wearable pair. “A bit scarey couple of days,” he said. “Adveture & learn or die trying ;}};.” He followed with this cryptic note: “Horizontal winds that turn ranbows sideways pose question of how does one sail in that? Very carfully!”
For days the weather flopped between foul and calm. On May 26, two days before Dad sent his first message about pirates, he made a sharp turn south toward Hiva Oa—the second-largest island in the Marquesas—but storms blew him back 20 nautical miles.
“No joy!” he wrote. He told Mom that he was reevaluating everything. “It’s the whole plan,” he said. “Boat and I r not really going.” His next message read: “Damn t.” The weather router had just told him it would take 24 to 48 hours for the winds to become more favorable.
In the doldrums, time slows down. Explorer Jason Lewis, who has sailed in that part of the Pacific, described it like this in Jonathan Franklin’s book 438 Days, an account of the saga of Mexican fisherman Salvador Alvarenga, who survived being lost at sea in the Pacific for well over a year: “The lightning comes down to the water. You’ll see these thunderstorms developing, and they’ll be very dark and foreboding. You watch them for hours, rolling toward you. … Every day out there feels like a week … and every week feels like a month, a month felt like a year.”
In the same book, explorer Ivan Macfadyen says: “If you start to imagine saber-toothed tigers in the corner of the room, then suddenly they’re all over you. The fear factor is overpowering.”
Dad was never a complainer, but he was worried about the calm conditions. “This not a little thing,” he texted. “It’s over a week of lite adverse winds.” His fuel tank was nearly full—he could have motored most of the way to Hiva Oa—and he seemed to be forgetting that the weather wouldn’t always be like this.
“Big challenges going on,” he wrote on the 26th. “I need some new ways of approaching them. Strangest thing just happened. Too odd & Long for InReach. Involved scam moviemaking.”
Mom, alarmed, responded within minutes: “Scam moviemaking? Are you in contact with others? Food and water holding out?” She told him she wanted to hear more about the challenges he faced. He didn’t respond.
On the afternoon of May 27, around 1:15, he wrote: “Rain—Intense at times, moments horizontal. my decks are relatively clear, not sails. Happy Anniversary 39 years of bliss. Re movie scam. Maybe my Beautiful Mind ala My Sailing Mind. Take this as possible book idea. As real dilemma. After2 days sleep dep, Banderas Bay, Shortwave radio playng unknown to me made me think I was in trouble. Then thought to check it. Had a laugh.”
Mom wrote back: “Happy Anniversary Lover! I wondered if hallucination re Movie Scam but thought maybe u r listening to something bizarre over shortwave…SLEEP!”
Then she got the message that made it clear his boat was facing the wrong way. “I was in rolling seas, storm cells encroaching & gusts to 28Knts, so I heaved to,” he wrote. “Parked. Big storm Moving north.… Adverse til next Friday. Can u believe it. Obstacles at almost every step. The communication difficulties o”
The text ended there.
On the morning of May 28, once Mom had read the “deep south blackcult” pirate messages, the family started reaching out every ten minutes: “Are you okay?” “On phone with coast guard.” “Trying to find you.” “PLEASE ANSWER.”
We got nothing.
The Coast Guard tried to raise Dad by text, but he didn’t reply. Tim wrote: “Please respond to John Mom or Ali ASAP.… Want to know you’re safe and unhurt. Maybe you’re sleeping?”
Four hours of silence passed before Dad emerged at around 12 p.m. his time. “It’s part of being put in my pjace Southern style,” he wrote. “More later.”
But nothing followed that provided any clarity. Instead, roughly an hour later, he wrote: “I’m fine now. One of those nearby fishing boats was in empjoy of a southerq boss. Who, unbeknost to me, wanted to put me in my place. Long story.”
Why was he being so murky? Had he been kidnapped by pirates and someone else was sending these messages? Was he trying to communicate in code? Mom asked for his radio frequency so she could relay it to the Coast Guard in Honolulu. “You need to reply … NOW. What you are saying makes no sense. Anything stolen?” The Coast Guard messaged boats in the area via satellite, asking them to keep a look out for Celebration.
An hour went by before Dad said he’d try the Coast Guard over the SSB, a long-range radio favored by open-ocean sailors. He apologized for not responding, then said: “Nothing stolen No one hurt, No info on boat. Was inside deciding best action.”
We were relieved but confused. Would pirates allow him to stay inside to review his options while they were aboard?
At 2:55 p.m. Dad’s time on the 28th, after he reported that the radio channels were occupied, Mom sent him the Coast Guard’s e-mail address and wrote, “I have been hysterical today. Tim with me all day. What did the fisherman do exactly? Also, what language?”
At 3 p.m., the Coast Guard texted him again. He sent his coordinates—N 6 35.9712’ W 127 17.7952’—and then messaged them: “This is vessel. Celebration WDJ4510 needing to confirm cancellation of epirb 2DCC7B512CFFBFF this morning 5/28/17 around 6:30AM. Cannot reachUSCG on SSB.”
Tim let Dad know that no emergency signal had been sent or received, adding that we were glad he was OK but this was scary for everyone. He signed off: “Love you!!! Be safe.”
We were still baffled. Dad’s abrupt shift—from giving us vague information about pirates to providing lucid housekeeping details to the Coast Guard—made no sense. Why couldn’t he be clear about what had happened to him?
An hour later, he wrote Mom: “Still may be in trouble if myinfo gotinto public record.” She responded that nothing had been made public. At 5:08, he told the Coast Guard: “I’m sea beigwatched.”
“We don’t understand your message,” they replied. “Are you in distress? Did anyone come aboard your vessel? What is deep south black cult?”
Tim’s wife, Jen, wanted to confirm that someone else wasn’t pretending to be him. “Tell me something only you would know about me. What do I do for a living?” she wrote.
“Physical sports therapy,” he said. Correct.
Mom pressed for details about the pirates, with minutes passing between responses. “We spoke about Phyllis’ disability She’s retarded or speech disabled,” he wrote, referring to someone we’d never heard of. “She thought Iwas afriendwho should stay. I refused.”
“Who spoke with you about Phyllis?” Mom asked. “Was she related to one of the fishermen? I have no context. This sounds bizarre. Did they board your boat? Threaten you?”
“I luv u always,” he said. “Marni ashes buried at sea Al’s too.”
That was a gut punch. Marni and Al were Mom’s mother and stepfather. They’d both died in the two-year period before Dad sailed. One of his goals was to spread their ashes in the ocean.
“When I saw that message, I thought, Uh-oh. He’s going to do something,” Mom said later. “It was like he was taking care of business.”
A year earlier, Dad was sitting bedside with my mom’s mother as she lay dying of cancer, her body withering into a feather. “I don’t know how to die,” she whispered.
“You don’t have to. Your body knows what to do,” he said into her ear. “You can choose to go anywhere else in your mind. Think of a childhood memory, think of something that you love.” She thought of a camping trip with her sisters. A few hours later she was gone.
Now it was Mom’s turn to talk to him. “Thank you sweetheart,” she wrote at 6:06 p.m. “I am feeling alarmed you aren’t responding to my other questions. It’s safe to send message. Do u want to go to Hawaii instead?”
Three minutes later he responded:
“Killers. Watch yourback sorry…”
A few minutes after that:
“Hawaiisoundsqood barbeque at sea.… Sorry about insuance.”
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” Mom wrote. “You are scaring me. What is happening? Sounds like you are going to hurt yourself! Do you need help? Say yes or no.”
“Thesepeople r killers it’s nott beautiful mind,” he said.
All that day, Dad had moved, slow but steady, on his southwesterly route toward Hiva Oa. But now the map, which updated his position with each message, showed him heading due west. He was drifting off course.
At 6:59, he wrote: “Hekilled hisdaughter well not himhis aid. Poison crack. She’s dying These r old south. People will say I sucided. Better thanwhat he intends,I’ll wait. Miss u.”
“Is your ship disabled?” Mom wrote. “Company?”
“No not in significantway. Listen talk speakers with remote personne.”
“Listening on radio? Who is talking to you?”
“Listeningtome&hisdaughtr talk& re-porting back.”
My sister-in-law broke in, saying she was worried. “So am i notlookingto die,” he wrote. “Don’t want to be killed or enslaved.”
At this point, the Coast Guard requested that he type a simple Y or N to this question: “Is your life in danger?”
“I believe so,” Dad responded. A few minutes later, he wrote to our family: “Goodby.”
“You come home! NO!!!” Mom begged. Ten minutes later, he said, “I’D loveto-buthearboats&Needtoact fast.”
Over the next hour, his responses slowed. At 8:48, Tim wrote: “Satellite shows nearest boat is many many miles away. This isn’t just a lack of sleep right?” At 9:08, with no new message from Dad, Tim begged: “Hit SOS please.”
Family members kept messaging late into the night, but no one heard from Dad after 8:30 his time. The final e-mail from him read: “Not able stop Patjustgot news she’s toberescued&instijtutionalized byher- boy friend.”
All this was happening in the late afternoon and evening where Dad was. In New York State, I was four hours ahead. The last I’d heard, from the message relayed by Tim and Mom (“I’m fine now”), he seemed OK. By the time the situation started deteriorating, I was asleep for the night with our new baby. Mom didn’t know which messages were getting to me, and she didn’t call because she knew it was late on the East Coast.
At 2:30 a.m. my time on the 29th, I woke up to feed the baby and decided to check my phone—something I usually don’t do, but I felt an overwhelming need to message Dad, to let him know I was sending love.
The next morning, I found this e-mail from Mom. “I know you will be getting up before us and will see some scary e-mails from dad last night,” she wrote. “Coast guard says there are no boats near him. He sent us a few more e-mails after the one that says goodbye. But we don’t know what this means yet. We will loop you in as soon as we are up. Just hope he didn’t do something stupid out of paranoia. We messaged him to go to sleep. Hope he read.”
I called Mom and Tim and asked them to forward the messages. What I read looked schizophrenic. I studied them over and over; the fear in his words was tangible.
The Coast Guard hadn’t been able to find any instances of piracy in the area where Dad was. Later research, using records from the International Maritime Organization, showed that of the 204 reports of piracy and armed robbery worldwide in 2017, only three occurred in the region where Dad was sailing. All involved large container-style ships and had happened in Peruvian and Ecuadorean ports.
By the end of the day on May 29, we hadn’t heard from Dad for 24 hours. During a conference call with the Honolulu Coast Guard, I asked about the possibility that he had run into hostile fishermen in the early-morning hours of the 28th.
“Maybe he crossed their nets and they had to come on board to detangle his boat in the middle of the night,” I said. “That would be terrifying—it would be dark, he hadn’t seen people in weeks, and most likely they spoke another language and were angry.”
The Coast Guard didn’t rule it out.
Another question loomed: Had anything at all happened to him? Dad said he’d sent EPIRB and SOS signals, but he hadn’t. And what had he meant by “barbeque at sea”? The message “sorry about insuance” showed up immediately after that. Was he telling Mom that she wouldn’t be able to collect insurance money because there would be no body to recover?
This was so far from how I envisioned Dad leaving this world. I yearned to know what his face looked like, what his heart felt like in those rawest of moments. His words didn’t tell us. As darkness fell around me on the 29th, my mind looped the same haunting questions: Dad, where are you? What did you do?
At noon on May 28 in California, as Mom and Tim were waiting for a sign of life from Dad, the Coast Guard had asked about his mental-health history. Mom told them that he’d never had any problems. But judging by his reaction to sleep deprivation during the Baja Ha-Ha, she said, he may have been delusional from exhaustion.
The Coast Guard began scouring for resources—boats, planes, anything—to get eyes on him. The nearest boats were 200 nautical miles away, more than a day’s journey. A cargo plane could have reached him, but he was so far out that the crew would have only ten minutes to search before they’d need to turn back.
At 11 p.m., a staffer at DeLorme, the maker of Dad’s texting and tracking device, confirmed that it had stopped accepting messages at the exact moment he’d sent his final one. The device had either been turned off, malfunctioned, or been destroyed.
At 1 p.m. on Monday the 29th, the Coast Guard reached the U.S. fishing vessel -American Enterprise, which was 140 nautical miles southeast of Dad’s last known location. The skipper agreed to head to that position immediately.
To construct a search grid, the Coast Guard uses a program called the Search and Rescue Optimal Planning System. It gathers information such as a boat’s size and -location, plots 5,000 corresponding points on a map, and creates simulations of likely drift patterns. The Coast Guard usually sends a boat or plane to cover these drift points -immediately. If it can, it drops a self-locating data-marker buoy, which uses the current to validate the system’s predictions. In Dad’s case, he was too far away for either of those options.
Through all this, my family tried to figure out what else we could do. Mom e-mailed the Tahitian authorities. I called the most experienced sailor I knew. He suggested I try to contact fishing and commercial vessels in the area. Uncle John scoured real-time ship traffic online. Mom asked if there were any satellites taking pictures that might show us the boat or, worse, its debris. (There weren’t.) Tim e-mailed the IMB Piracy Reporting Center. But everything we were doing had already been tried by the Coast Guard.
On the evening of Tuesday, May 30, American Enterprise, along with its onboard helicopter, began a grid search southwest of Dad’s last known location. By the evening of May 31, three days since we’d heard from him, they had searched an area the size of Connecticut, with no sign of either the Celebration or any debris.
Meanwhile, a 688-foot Panamanian boat joined the search 240 nautical miles to the southeast—an area where the Coast Guard hypothesized that Dad might be. No sightings were reported.
By June 2, we were becoming desperate. We knew that Dad, even if he was still alive, probably couldn’t survive much longer. On June 4, a week since we’d heard from him, two more boats searched but saw nothing.
A day later, there was a glimmer of hope: the Coast Guard’s satellite data showed what looked like a sailboat headed south, which aligned with initial hypotheses about the boat’s course. Its length and color matched Celebration. The Coast Guard speculated that the boat was harnessing the trade winds south and would make a hard right at Hiva Oa’s latitude.
Unfortunately, by the time satellite data hits the Coast Guard’s desk, it’s 24 hours old, making a moving target nearly impossible to find, especially among scattered clouds and whitecaps.
American Enterprise, which was now the closest ship to the unidentified boat, sent up its helicopter again. The crew saw nothing.
On the 6th, the Coast Guard queried Tahitian hospitals to see if Dad had been brought in. Negative.
On June 8, Dad’s 72nd birthday, the Coast Guard again spotted an unidentified boat along the southern course—about 30 degrees off a Marquesas route. It was getting closer to Hiva Oa, traveling at four knots. Assuming it might be the same boat as before, the Coast Guard used the new data to create a third potential position.
Finally, on June 13, two weeks after my dad’s last communication, the unidentified boat was close enough that the Coast Guard deployed a plane from Hawaii.
After staging in Tahiti for a day, the C-130 Hercules would fly out, loaded with a communicator, a life raft, and other droppable supplies. The eight-hour round-trip flight would leave only two hours to search at the site, but at least it was something. The Tahiti coast guard’s Falcon surveillance plane would also search.
On the 15th, the planes took off from Tahiti. They scoured the boat’s path. Three vessels were spotted, and one remained unidentified, because it had no electronic signature. However, it didn’t match the description of Celebration, and radio contact confirmed that it had two people aboard.
Subsequent searches found nothing, and on June 21 the Hercules was sent back to Hawaii. On June 22, the Coast Guard suspended the search. All told, it had covered 59,598 square miles over 24 days.
In the 17 months since Dad vanished, no trace of his boat has been found. I doubt it ever will be—although one drift-analysis expert suggested that, if Celebration is still floating, it could hit New Guinea in two years. But I believe that the boat—or what’s left of it—is at the bottom of the Pacific, with Dad’s last coordinates serving as his only headstone.
I’ve spent hours trying to imagine what happened in the end. I’ve pictured Dad in an altered state: eyes glazed over, stoically moving about the boat as he completed necessary tasks, like dealing properly with my grandparents’ ashes. Or maybe he was sobbing—heartbroken to know he would never see his family again. Then he either set the teak deck on fire or cut an intake hose, filling the boat with water and sinking it.
If he did any of these things, it was because sleep deprivation had driven him mad, making him believe that suicide was the only way to escape the pirates he’d conjured, the only way to prevent them from killing him.
He didn’t have a gun on board, as far as we know, so he would have died either by fire or in the sea. Did he stay on deck as flames rose around him? Tim doubts it. He thinks Dad started a blaze, dove off the side, and swam straight down. I picture mottled moonlight reflecting on his pale skin as he descends into darkness.
The idea that sleep deprivation made Dad take drastic action may sound fantastical, but there are countless precedents. It’s known that exhaustion, fatigue, and isolation at sea can create extreme levels of delusion. Experienced sailors told me stories of mates who were rendered incapacitated just a few hundred miles offshore, with no obvious cause.
One of the most famous sailing mysteries is the case of Donald Crowhurst, a Briton who single-handed in the 1968 Golden Globe around-the-world race and never came home. He set sail on October 31—the same date Dad set off from San Diego—and was out for 243 days before he succumbed to mental collapse, writing a 25,000-word manifesto on the subject of the cosmic mind and why he had to leave this world. His boat—and log—were found floating in the Atlantic Ocean.
John Leach, a professor with the Extreme Environmental Medicine and Science Group at the University of Portsmouth, England—and an avid sailor and former military psychologist who specializes in prisoners, hostages, and others who’ve experienced isolation—described the perils of survival in the book 438 Days: “It’s okay living inside your own head, provided it doesn’t slip into psychosis.”
When I speak to Leach about my dad’s case, he describes to me how a mind can become unmoored. “Psychosis in simple terms is a breakdown in reality,” he told me. “When you are in isolation, and sleep deprived and water deprived, which I suspect he would’ve been, you take in the information around you and interpret it to fit the model in your head. If he thinks he’s being chased, he’ll hear waves and the wind as engines.”
The cluster effect of sleep deprivation, dehydration, fatigue, duress, and perceptual and sensory deprivation could have resulted in cognitive disorganization that was reflected in his language, Leach explains. In other words, Dad’s signals may have been misfiring, skewing his perceptions. And the timing didn’t help.
“There is something around about the three-week period in isolation that I’ve recorded too many times to dismiss,” Leach says. “Even people without psychiatric problems get a sudden crash psychologically, and for the first time they start thinking about suicide.”
My mother, sure that Dad was suicidal, had tried to reply to him in ways that would bring him off the ledge.
“Your dad used to tell me that the brain is the only organ in the body that doesn’t tell you when it’s malfunctioning,” she says. “I was afraid to say to him that’s what I thought was happening—that it was a hallucination—but I couldn’t figure out how to do it. I didn’t want him to feel abandoned and stop talking. Hearing each other through a sat phone would have helped, but he didn’t have one.”
When I ask if she has regrets, she laments not being more involved. “I felt so angry about him wanting to do this and spending so much money and he was going to leave me. I had to say, This is just his,” she says. “I didn’t want to go but I didn’t want to be alone, either. And he would’ve resented me if I had said, ‘You are not going.’ ”
Distancing herself mentally from the boat, the trip, and the departure date was a coping mechanism—the less she had to do with it, the less fearful she was. But she still wanted to be a brave, supportive wife, so she helped by packing and provisioning the boat in San Diego. Now she wonders if that was enough: “If I had educated myself about what he would face out there, I might have been more persuasive about him not going alone.”
Then Mom tells me something I didn’t know. “He always felt like we got the life I wanted, not the life he wanted, filled with adventure—diving and sailing,” she says. “He didn’t care about living in a nice house. He cared more about living in other places and exploring.”
“When he talked about buying the boat, I tried to offer him alternatives to make life more exciting,” Mom says. “But he couldn’t be swayed.”
Eventually, they were too far along to turn back. “It felt like the boat was in charge of him,” she says. “I know it wasn’t personal but still, the fact that he went off on this trip felt like I wasn’t enough. Ultimately, the boat won.”
Dad loved us—that’s why he compromised on how he wanted to live. His obsession with the boat and the trip suddenly made sense to me. He wanted to reclaim his life.
In the end, my family can go around and around on what happened and why. We’ll never really know. We can feel guilt, regret, and anger. But we’ll always return to this: maybe Dad wasn’t experienced enough to chase his goal, but he had to try or he’d die wondering, resenting his own life. It’s hard to say that anyone should die this way. But the question remains: If you have a lifelong dream, and time is running out, what would you do?
I’m standing in a single-wide trailer that serves as the office of the Nuevo Vallarta marina. It’s the checkout point for boats departing Mexico in the Nayarit region, 30 minutes north of Puerto Vallarta by car, and the last place Dad docked before setting out to sea.
Under fluorescent lights, I see “Richard Irwin Carr” scribbled across a photocopy of his departure papers and recognize his compact, jaunty handwriting. I know it intimately from birthday cards and school notes and phone messages on our brick-colored kitchen counter.
On May 2, 2017, in the early evening, Dad filled out the line labeled Voyage Plan: “Sail to South Pacific and around world.” It reads like a fantasy, like a little boy trying to catch smoke with his fingers.
I can picture his face, flushed from a combination of pride and embarrassment as he handed the papers back to the clerk. Then he would have stuffed his hands into his jeans pockets.
Ian and I walk down to the spot where he had his boat—A-23, the only unmarked stall in the marina and the one most often used for short-term, transient vessels. I touch the cleat where his rope was last unfurled. I’m sure that the sounds around us are no different than they were on the day he left: children playing at a nearby preschool, a boat being sanded, birds chirping, and the occasional large yacht motoring past the marina to sea.
Being here makes it hard to imagine the drama of Dad’s last hours. I think back to the text he sent for Mother’s Day, nearly two weeks into his crossing. I told him I’d thought of him during Wyatt’s birth, and he said: “Think of me often. I’m an interesting person who loves you as a person as well as my daughter. And I find that gratifying!”
A few days later, Ian and I charter a sailboat from the dock in La Cruz where Dad parked for a month and a half before he headed to Nuevo Vallarta. Palm trees and bougainvillea stand out against the white stucco of the thatch-roofed buildings surrounding the marina. The Sunday craft fair is a fiesta of coconut popsicles, fish tacos, and fresh juices.
The deckhand is a young, thin Mexican man in his twenties named Eddie. He looks like many of the skater boys I went to high school with in L.A., wearing Vans and a chain wallet. He puts on Def Leppard and Weezer as we sail into Banderas Bay. His English is excellent. I explain why I’m in town, and when I mention Celebration he grows quiet.
“I remember your dad,” he says. “Short, with gray hair.” Eddie had helped him rig his sails. Then he says, “I offered to go with him.” Eddie had been looking for work as a paid deckhand.
Dad had hoped to find mates to sail with during parts of his circumnavigation—he once wrote on his blog that the experience would feel incomplete without sharing it—but he was anxious about the laws in the South Pacific. He told my mom that he didn’t want to be financially responsible for his crew, potentially made up of strangers, and any medical needs they might have once they hit the ocean. Being beholden felt too risky to him.
As we sail out toward Cabo Corrientes, I take in the horizon, cupping my hands at my eyes like blinders. I want to imagine what it’s like to see only the edge for days on end. I shake my head at the knowledge that Dad turned down Eddie’s offer. He would probably still be alive.
Back home, people ask if going to Mexico was hard. Maybe I was in denial or just numb, but it wasn’t. Being there made me feel close to Dad. The hardest part was leaving, like I wouldn’t feel his presence again unless I returned for a visit.
The other hardest part is that he’ll never know Wyatt. She’s a risk-taker. My first daughter would sit quietly on the bed or changing table, while my second wants to swan-dive off it. I can see her natural inclination to push things out of the way and investigate everything around her.
A writer I know who has interviewed some of the most daring athletes in the world—people who have both flourished and perished in their edge-of-peril pursuits—told me that, at some point, if we feel the itch in our soul to explore, we have to go. Some will consider Dad’s behavior reckless, arguing that he was underprepared (I can’t argue) and irresponsible (maybe, though he waited until his children were grown before setting off). But to assert that he was wrong to go, my writer friend said, is “to deny a potent ingredient that made him who he was—the joy in him, perhaps.” I agree. Maybe I’m like Dad and I would have gone, too.
At the memorial we held five months after he vanished, a family friend talked about the grudge she felt when he first explained his plan to sail around the world.
“How dare he do what he feels like doing,” she said with a chuckle. She told me that she realized her anger was a manifestation of envy and admiration. She respected his doggedness and willingness to do what most are too frightened to.
Patients from his practice—some who had seen him for more than 30 years—-introduced themselves and told stories about times when their lives would’ve gone south if Dad hadn’t been there. I was meeting them for the first time, but they felt like relatives. Their gratitude for him, and for his unrelenting determination, matched what I felt.
Just like his granddaughter, Dad kept pushing things out of his way to get to the horizon. He had a burning thing inside that inspired him to look over the edge. And for a few days at least, he sailed with abandon, the wind at his back.
Like any adventurer, Dad didn’t know how it would end. He had to sail away to find out.
Ali Carr Troxell (@Alicarrtroxell), a former editor at Outside, is the managing editor of the magazine Gear Patrol.
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Clayton Woodruff, vice president of Progressive Trail Design (PTD) in Bentonville, Arkansas, misses digging in the dirt. When he joined the mountain-bike trail-building company in 2010, just a few years after his brother, Nathan, founded it in 2007, he’d spend up to six months a year either in the seat of a miniature bulldozer, literally cutting new singletrack out of the raw earth, or following behind the machine, shovel in hand, to smooth it out. It was just him, his brother, and a few close friends back then. Today the company has about 30 employees, and Woodruff spends most of his work hours behind a desk, not heavy machinery.
“I was just telling someone that I’ve gone soft these days because, I’m like, Oh man, I need air-conditioning,” he says. “But there is a lot less job stress when you know all you have to do is build stuff.”
And no wonder. On a typical day for Woodruff, there’s planning to be done, designs to be drawn, employees to manage, subcontractors to be hired, and an unbelievable amount of red tape to cut through. While a ground crew can knock out about a mile of new trail in a couple of hours if the conditions are right, it can take years to get the necessary erosion-control plans, environmental-impact reports, and other paperwork approved before a single shovelful of dirt can be moved.
Compared to that, actually building a trail is fairly simple. He and the other designers will look at a topographic map and start laying out possible routes based on the contours of the land and the scenic overlooks and features they want riders to enjoy. Once a route has been determined, they’ll walk it and mark it with brightly colored survey flags, adding switchbacks and doglegs along the way to ensure the slope of the trail doesn’t exceed an erosion-friendly 10 percent grade. Then, using a combination of experience and intuition for what makes a trail fun, the crew member manning the mini bulldozer simply starts cutting a track from flag to flag.
“That’s where skill comes in,” Woodruff says. “We compete against landscape construction companies for projects, but you almost have to be a rider to be able to go into the woods and visualize what that trail’s going to look like. If you take that knowledge out of it, you’re just digging in the dirt.”
From there, the rest of the crew follows on foot, wielding hand tools to spice up the route and make sure it rides the way they want. That can mean ten- to twelve-hour days on the ground for weeks at a time.
Gaining that level of expertise, both at the office and in the woods, was a long journey for a company that began almost by accident. But looking back now, it seems a little like fate. If you’re not a mountain biker, you probably know Bentonville as the home of Walmart’s headquarters. If you are a mountain biker, you know that the sleepy Ozark town, population 35,301, is becoming one of America’s singletrack meccas (which you can read about here, here, and here). But that wasn’t always the case. When Clayton and Nathan were growing up in these hills, most of the mountain biking they could find was either on old dirt-bike tracks or trails built illegally in the woods.
Then in the mid-2000s, Nathan, who was working toward a career in education, helped build a few routes at a nearby state park, and when Bentonville started thinking about creating some new, downhill-style bike trails, his name sort of popped up for the job. From there he founded PTD and took on any project he could find, often subcontracting for larger organizations like the International Mountain Bicycling Association’s trail-building division and sleeping in dingy RVs in parking lots to save money while working gigs. As the company grew, so did Bentonville and America’s demand for quality singletrack, and PTD has since built trails everywhere from Bend, Oregon, to Baja California Sur, Mexico.
One key to this success could be the brothers’ approach to their industry. That is, while they are very much your stereotypical mountain-biking bros who love drinking beer and shredding on their bikes, they’re all business when it comes to their work.
“Mountain biking has this culture around it that’s not taken seriously,” Woodruff says. “If I was giving advice to someone looking to do what we do, it’d be to send in a professional e-mail and résumé. If somebody just sends ‘What’s up bro? All this seems chill,’ I’m not inclined to hire that guy.”
Today 20 of PTD’s 30 employees work full-time year-round. It’s their professionalism and institutional knowledge that lets them juggle the seven to ten projects they take on each year.
But no matter where their next project is or what kind of trail they’re building, the best part of the job continues to be the same. No, it’s not getting paid to ride (though Woodruff admits that’s pretty great, too)—it’s riding their new trail with friends or clients for the first time.
“It’s just high fives all around,” he says.
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Last May, exactly one week after Garmin announced the InReach Mini, Spot released its first new device in five years. It’s also the company’s first device with two-way satellite messaging.
The Spot X retails for $250, weighs 6.7 ounces, and features a 2.7-inch dot matrix screen and physical QWERTY keyboard. It looks like an orange BlackBerry with an oversized antenna.
I used the Spot X this summer while guiding trips in the Colorado Rockies and High Sierra.
Review: Spot X
To break into the two-way messaging market, the Spot X needed to be somehow better than the category-leading InReach units. In some respects, it is.- The Spot X is simpler, designed to be fully functional as a standalone device.
- Each unit has a dedicated U.S. mobile phone number, so it’s easier to send messages to it from cellphones or other two-way satellite messengers.
- It has twice the battery life of the InReach SE+ and Explorer+ (in ten-minute tracking mode).
- Both the device and comparable service plans are less expensive.
But currently, the Spot X still falls short:
- The keyboard and control pad lack touch sensitivity and responsiveness.
- It’s twice as heavy as the InReach Mini.
- It lacks smartphone connectivity, which could allow users to share contacts, sync wireless settings, and use the phone’s keyboard and touchscreen.
- There are minimal navigation features and no weather reporting function.
- The online portal needs to be aesthetically refreshed and more user friendly.
- If your budget does not include an extra $50 to buy the Mini.
- If you don’t have a smartphone or don’t carry one into the backcountry, in which case, you can send messages more efficiently with the Spot X.
Key Product Specs
- 6.7 ounces (verified)
- 2.7-inch dot matrix display
- Integrated physical QWERTY keyboard
- Optional illumination of the display and keyboard
- Nonreplaceable lithium battery, chargeable via USB
- Resistant to impact, dust, and water
- $250 MSRP
The Damn Keyboard
The Spot X has a major flaw: its physical keyboard. Even if the Spot X were perfect in every other way, the keyboard makes me not want to use it.In fairness, the “virtual keyboard” on the InReach units is annoyingly tedious. But at least there’s a workaround: using the Earthmate app on my smartphone.
The Spot X keyboard has three problems:
- The keys are small and flat-topped, so it’s difficult to feel individual keys or press a single key without also pressing adjacent keys.
- The three lowermost keys—alt, space, and uppercase—require pressing with excessive force.
- The select button isn’t tall enough. It should be higher than the surrounding directional keys so it’s easier to press.
If you can get beyond the keyboard, here’s the rest of what you need to know.
What Does the Spot X Do?
The Spot X has four capabilities.1. Messaging
The Spot X can send and receive text messages and short emails. This makes it fundamentally different than other Spot devices like the Gen3, which can only send messages. Messages can be predefined, custom, or posted to social media (Facebook, Twitter, or both).Each Spot X has a personal U.S. mobile number, which makes sending messages to the device much easier. The process of sending messages to an InReach device is less straightforward.
2. Tracking
The Spot X can broadcast its location at intervals of 2.5, five, ten, 30, and 60 minutes. The basic service plans do not include the 2.5- and/or five-minute intervals.3. Emergency
If life or limb are in danger, the Spot X can send an SOS message directly to the GEOS International Emergency Response Coordination Center, which will notify the appropriate emergency responders.4. Navigation
The Spot X has a digital compass and allows you to create waypoints. (You can create waypoints more efficiently in the online portal, but still only one at a time.) It does not support maps—neither a simple grid map nor image-based maps (such as USGS 7.5-minute tiles or proprietary data).Its navigation capabilities are comparable to a standalone inReach Mini, but the Mini pairs with the Earthmate app, which gives your smartphone similar (or even greater) functionality to a conventional handheld GPS unit.
What Doesn’t the Spot X Do?
Compared to existing two-way messaging devices, what features are lacking in the Spot X?1. Phone Connectivity
The Spot X is a standalone unit and cannot be paired with a phone. If it could connect to your phone, you could share your contacts with the Spot X instead of having to enter them in the online portal before your trip. You could use your phone’s touchscreen to navigate the Spot X’s user interface and to type messages (preferable to the crappy keyboard on the Spot X). You could also update settings like your check-in recipients list and predefined messages without requiring a hard-wire computer sync with the Spot X Device Updater.2. Weather
Before I leave for a trip, I always check the backcountry weather forecast. But on longer trips, receiving an updated forecast can be extremely helpful. Unlike the InReach, the Spot X cannot pull down a forecast for current or user-specified locations.Cost of Ownership
The long-term cost of a Spot X includes the initial purchase price plus your chosen service plan.Initial Purchase
The Spot X retails for $250, which is $50 to $100 less than competing units.Service Plan
You’ll need a service plan to operate the Spot X. Currently, three tiers are available in either annual or month-to-month subscriptions.- Basic: $12 per month if you pay for a year up-front; $15 per month for a month-to-month subscription
- Advanced: $20/$30
- Unlimited: $30/$40
All plans provide unlimited check-in and SOS messages but vary in the number of included custom messages and frequency of the shortest tracking intervals.
Spot vs. Garmin Subscription Costs
Service plans for Spot X and InReach devices do not match up perfectly, but overall Spot charges less for service. For example:- For $15 per month, Spot includes 20 custom messages; Garmin’s plan includes ten.
- For $30 per month, Spot includes 100 custom messages; Garmin charges $35 for 40.
- Spot charges 25 cents per message over the limit; Garmin charges $1.
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Update: All of Malibu went under an evacuation order on Friday afternoon. Five people are reported dead in the Camp Fire, which reports indicate has completely destroyed the town of Paradise, California.
“By the end of the day, I expect to be standing on the beach, shooting a fire burning to the Pacific Ocean,” Stuart Palley, a wildfire photographer who has spent the past five years shooting wildfires in California, told me over the phone Friday morning. He called me as he was driving south on the Pacific Coast Highway, headed from Oxnard to Malibu.
He expects to encounter extremely dangerous conditions in Malibu, as the Santa Ana winds blowing out to sea hit on-shore winds from the ocean. “The swirling winds create unpredictable conditions and that’s when people die,” Palley says.
There are two fires currently burning around Malibu: the Hill and Woolsey fires. As of this morning, the Hill Fire had burned 7,000 acres and the Woolsey Fire 10,000. Togeher, they’ve jumped the 101 freeway, burning into the Santa Monica Mountains and forcing the evacuation of 75,000 homes. Meanwhile, an as-yet-unnamed fire in Griffith Park started Friday morning; it has already burned 30 acres and is forcing the evacuation of animals at the zoo. Then there's the Camp Fire in northern California that burned 1,000 structures overnight and has grown to 70,000 acres. CNN says that in total, the fires caused 150,000 Californians to be evacuated from their homes last night.
All of the above fires are developing so rapidly that there's very little reliable details about them online. (I encourage readers to consult CalFire, the radio, and first responders for the most up-to-date information.)
Tens of thousands of people are under mandatory evacuation orders and Palley says that the fires in the Santa Monica Mountains, above Malibu, have developed so fast that many of the roads there have become impassable even to firefighters. Residents are under instructions to shelter in place.
“So far there have not been any civilian casualties,” says Palley. “But that could change very fast.” He described “apocalyptic” conditions to me as he drove towards Malibu.
Fuel loads across California’s brush-covered hills are extremely high, humidity is extremely low, and there's no rain in the forecast. Over 20 million people in the state are currently under red-flag fire warnings. “These are the worst wildland-urban interface fire conditions I’ve ever seen,” says Palley.
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Could saving our nation’s natural heritage be the issue that unites a divided country? It looks that way, at least in New Mexico’s 2nd Congressional District, where a pro-public-lands Democrat achieved a narrow upset over a pro-Trump, anti-monument Republican.
Xochitl Torres Small, a 33-year-old attorney and first-time Congressional candidate, just won her bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in a massive region that’s 99.6 percent rural and about 60 times the size of Rhode Island. She’ll be the first woman ever and only the third Democrat in the last half century to represent the district. (Her win also makes New Mexico the only state in the West with an entirely Democratic U.S. House and Senate.)
To be fair, Torres Small mostly campaigned on key issues such as immigration, health care, and education. But she's also been consistently vocal about protecting the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument, a 776-square-mile preserve made up of wild, rugged mountains that's located in her district. Designated by President Barack Obama in 2014, the monument is popular with locals, but was nevertheless the target of efforts by President Donald Trump and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to shrink several national monuments last year.
“The community invested over a decade to carefully study, document, and negotiate protection of these Wild West lands,” Torres Small wrote in an open letter to Zinke in June. “The result is a stunning national monument that receives overwhelming local support and attracts national and international acclaim, and the accompanying tourism dollars that come with that. Please, don't interfere with our hard-earned source of local pride. Let us keep our Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument.”
Her Republican opponent, Yvette Herrell, served as a state chairperson for the Koch-backed American Legislative Exchange Council, a nonprofit that has aggressively sought to privatize public lands.
Torres Small is just one success story in a broader wave of candidates who have embraced protecting our public lands as part of their campaign platforms. With the nascent success of conservation as a national issue that can turn out voters and swing campaigns, I hope to see more politicians from both parties jumping on the public lands bandwagon in 2020 and beyond.
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Since 1961, when Royal Robbins, Tom Frost, and Chuck Pratt made the first ascent, the Salathè Wall on Yosemite's El Capitan has stood as one of the pinnacles of big wall climbing. The first ascent crew split the climb into two trips: they climbed the first 900 feet in three and a half days, then came down on fixed lines. Several days later, they went back up the fixed lines and took another six days to finish the climb.
In 1997, Japanese climber Yuji Hirayama tried to onsight the route—which means they attempted to climb it on his first try without any falls or prior knowledge of the line. Hirayama fell at the Teflon Corner, pitch number 24 of 35. If that pitch sounds familiar, it’s because the Salathè Wall shares approximately 87 percent of Freerider’s terrain, the route Alex Honnold famously free soloed in 2017 after years of practice. The two routes diverge at pitch number 29, the Headwall, with Freerider taking a slightly easier line.
Onsighting a route takes a particular set of skills. Primarily a climber has to be incredibly good at reading difficult sequences of moves. But they’ve also got to be strong enough to hold on while they figure things out, or to downclimb to a rest when they’re a little unsure how to proceed. A single fall and the onsight doesn't count.
Enter Adam Ondra, by far the best climber in the world. The 25-year-old Czech has onsighted routes as hard as 5.14d (the Salathe Wall is 5.13b), but had never onsighted anything as massive as the 3,000-foot Salathè Wall.
Last weekend, he gave it a go. Starting at a minute past midnight, Ondra and his partner, Nico Favresse, made it up over 2,500 feet to the Headwall (the route’s crux) where Ondra fell twice.
“Some dreams came true yesterday, but the ultimate—the onsight—is not fulfilled,” Ondra wrote on Instagram. “And the nature of onsight is that it will never be fulfilled any more. It is only one try, lots of pressure in case of such a legendary route like Salathè in Yosemite on El Capitan.”
With Ondra’s one chance gone, this monumental achievement remains to be accomplished.
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On Tuesday, voters affirmed their commitment to public land and conservation in an era of multifaceted attacks on wilderness, wildlife, national monuments, critical habitat, and clean air and water.
From Montana to Minnesota, to states as far from the West as Connecticut and Georgia, voters turned out in decisive numbers to support pro-public-land candidates and to oppose the pro-industry favoritism of President Trump and interior secretary Ryan Zinke. Equally noteworthy, several races wound up with Republicans and Democrats toeing the same line of public-lands support—lending credibility to the idea that conservation issues offer a rare space for politicians and voters from both parties to meet in the middle. “You look at the big picture and candidates in swing states realized that pro-public-lands stances are a beneficial place to go,” says Aaron Weiss of the Denver-based nonprofit Center for Western Priorities. “It’s one of the last big issues that really speaks to folks in both parties.”
“Overall, the observance is that conservation issues were on the ballot across the country,” says Jenny Rowland of the Center for American Progress, “and we’re seeing that voters are rejecting the Zinke- and Trump-branded attacks on parks, the oceans, and national monuments.” All told, the Center for American Progress reports that public lands and environmental issues played decisive roles in at least 14 races.
“My hope was that public lands would become a top-tier issue and not something we only care about after we have a roof on our head and pay for health care,” says Land Tawney, president of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, based in Missoula, Montana. “That was my hope, but I didn’t think it would play this well in places like Minnesota.” Tawney says he was particularly encouraged to see Erik Paulsen, a Republican from Hennepin County, Minnesota, which includes parts of the Minneapolis suburbs, launch his campaign with a video of himself paddling a canoe in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCA). In the ad, Paulsen pledges to protect the Boundary Waters from a proposed copper-nickel mining project, which Trump and Zinke have sought to facilitate, and which conservationists and environmentalists claim poses an existential threat to one of the most unique freshwater ecosystems in North America. “When President Trump tried to take away important environmental protections for the Boundary Waters, I said no way,” Paulsen says in the ad while standing on the reedy shores of a Minnesota lake. “I’ll stand up to my party or President Trump to protect Minnesota.”
Paulsen lost to Democrat Dean Phillips, who also opposes mining near the Boundary Waters, but for Tawney, the fact that both candidates stepped up for the BWCA is noteworthy. In Tawney’s home state of Montana, a nail-biter of a race between Republican state auditor Matt Rosendale and incumbent Democratic senator Jon Tester, the legitimacy of each of the candidates’ claims to support public lands and conservation was under heavy scrutiny. Rosendale had difficulty escaping the long shadow of his formerly enthusiastic support for the sale and transfer of public land, which he expressed with unflinching conviction back in 2014 when he ran against Zinke in the Republican congressional primary. He sought to recant that position throughout 2018. Tester, who has long been considered a champion of public lands and conservation, helped craft the Rocky Mountain Front Heritage Act, which passed in 2014 and expanded the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area by 67,000 acres. This year he worked across the aisle to get his Montana Republican colleagues senator Steve Daines and congressman Greg Gianforte to support a bill to withdraw 30,000 acres of U.S. Forest Service land near Yellowstone National Park from the mineral leasing program.
Rosendale lost despite Trump visiting Montana four times in recent months, often on what seemed like a personal mission to derail Tester. “Jon Tester successfully turned public lands and public-lands access into a third rail for Republicans,” Weiss says, explaining how a wave of land-transfer bills failed at the level of state legislatures across the West back in 2015, including in Montana, at the height of the land-transfer movement. Tester seized on that moment to cement enduring support for public lands. “The more extreme folks in the state are not making it to the federal level,” says Weiss. “They have to run to the middle on public lands and support for public access.”
Nevada senator Dean Heller, the incumbent Republican who applauded Zinke’s controversial review of national monuments last year and has proposed legislation to eliminate wilderness study areas, lost to Democrat Jacky Rosen, who stuck up for monuments and made public lands a central part of her campaign. In New Mexico, senator Martin Heinrich, a Democrat who has also defended national monuments and last year helped to open access to the Sabinoso Wilderness Area, easily defeated his Republican opponent, Mark Rich, who has called for Bureau of Land Management land to be transferred to the states and then privatized.
Ballot initiatives also spoke to the muscle of a pro-public-lands and public-waters constituency. In Connecticut, an initiative to make it harder to sell state lands passed by 84.5 percent. After a scandal last year involving Zinke’s decision to exempt Florida from the Interior Department’s nationwide offshore drilling expansion, following a request from governor Rick Scott (whose Senate race against incumbent Bill Nelson, a Democrat, may be headed for a recount), Floridians voted to ban offshore drilling. Georgians voted by a four-to-one margin to divert 80 percent of sales-tax revenue from sporting-goods stores into a state-run conservation fund. (Of course, the news wasn’t all good.)
With an empowered public-lands caucus in the House and an imminent changeover of chairmanships on vital committees like the House Natural Resources Committee, conservationists and environmentalists are hopeful that popular bipartisan legislation, like a bill to reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund, will finally become law. Since 2015, the House Natural Resources Committee has been chaired by land-transfer proponent Rob Bishop of Utah, a Republican who has also sought to undermine the Endangered Species Act and wilderness protections. Ranking member Raul Grijalva, a Democrat from Arizona, will likely chair the committee starting next year. Beyond the LWCF, public-lands advocates are hoping Congress will move forward with pending legislation to fund wildlife protection and habitat enhancement, parks maintenance, and conservation components of the farm bill.
Grijalva is pledging to use the committee’s investigate powers to investigate Zinke and other appointees who he calls “ethically challenged.” “They're going to be held accountable, and if they don’t want to participate in that accountability, then we have other legal recourses to make them do that,” Grijalva says. “And I think we are expected to do that and we need to do that.”
Whit Fosburgh, CEO of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, based in Washington, D.C., says he’s excited to work with a House that would focus on important bipartisan conservation legislation. “We’re not going to see all these extreme anti-public-land, anti-wildlife bills coming out of the House,” Fosburgh says, referring to unviable legislation that has come out of the Natural Resources Committee under Bishop’s leadership, including bills to sell millions of acres of public land, eliminate the land-management agencies’ law-enforcement arms, and allow bicycles and other wheeled vehicles into wilderness areas. “Now we will not have to spend half our time playing defense.”
Fosburgh is hopeful that the new House membership will work to divert more funds to the Conservation Reserve Program in the ongoing farm-bill negotiations. CRP, managed by the Department of Agriculture, pays farmers to take land out of production and set it aside as wildlife habitat. He said that low commodities prices for crops like soybeans may help garner support for CRP from Republicans in the Midwest who are seeking relief for their constituents.
One of the most significant public-lands moments in the election cycle actually happened last spring, when lieutenant governor Brad Little defeated congressman Raul Labrador in Idaho’s Republican gubernatorial primary. Labrador, a Tea Party member who is considered to be far right of center on public-lands issues, wrote an op-ed in 2016 claiming that the Bundys’ armed takeover of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge was “civil disobedience.” In the same op-ed, Labrador argued for pilot projects that would test local control of land management on national forest lands. Idahoans rejected Labrador. So when Democrat Paulette Jordan and Little faced off on Tuesday, voters had a choice between two politicians who were both appealing to the middle on public lands.
“It feels like we’ve managed to shift the ground on this stuff, so that if public land is a wedge issue, it’s a wedge within the Republican Party and not within the broader electorate,” says Weiss. “And we see that as victory.”
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There’s a strong argument to be made that street riding—basically the wintertime equivalent of urban skateboarding—is the most creative expression of the sport. And no one rides as hard, or is as inventive, as Jess Kimura, one of the newest members to The North Face's snow team. While she’s been injured so many times she’s earned the nickname Danger Pony, Kimura has also been rewarded for her ingenuity and fearlessness with countless awards. She’s also typically the only woman featured in the sport’s gritty street films.
That gender gap is one of the reasons Kimura recently added “filmmaker” to her résumé. Instead of sitting on her ass (her words) for the past two seasons while recovering from surgeries, Kimura decided to pick up the camera. The resulting film, The Uninvited, which debuts this October, is the first-ever all-women’s street riding film. “I wanted to create a path to sponsorship for these women,” says Kimura. The film is as raw and honest as she is, and all the more impressive considering that she financed the entire project out of her own pocket.
Street riding taught Kimura to be methodical. Although she’s fearless, she didn’t learn to street ride by hopping on handrails above unforgiving urban staircases. “I started by drawing a line in the snow and trying to ride straight down it,” she says. Later, to mimic a rail, she’d bury a PVC pipe in the snow so only an inch stuck out. She built her skills in increments, while also building resilience. “I learned that failure was part of the process,” Kimura says. “That’s what adventure teaches you—how to find and push your limits. It can make life so much more productive.
While urban exploration is at the core of street riding, Kimura hails from the small town of Vernon, British Columbia, and now lives in Whistler. To street ride, she travels to metropolitan areas rich with hills and snow. Once there, she and her crew scout locations, imagine possibilities, and then wait for a storm so they can ride handrails, stadium steps, and parking garage walls. Then it’s game on as they shovel snow into ramps, landing hills, and transitions, often at night, when the streets are deserted. “It’s kind of like parkour but on your snowboard,” says Kimura. “Except on a snowboard you might ride a rail and then drop off a two-story building. It feels more real and more impressive because you make the terrain—not some resort. I’ve had an imagination like a disease since I was a child, and street riding satisfies that part of my brain.”
Kimura loves urban snowboarding because it demands style of creativity, but also because the adventure of street riding is accessible to the masses—and taking an inventive approach to exploring urban areas. “Growing up, I could afford nothing,” she says. “With street riding, all you need is a snowboard and a shovel. You don’t need a season pass, or an address in a fancy resort town.” As evidence of that geographic diversity, The Uninvited was filmed in Salt Lake City, Utah; Sapporo, Japan; and Helsinki, Finland, among other cities. The undisputed epicenter of street riding, though, is Quebec City, for more than the terrain and the climate: “People in Quebec don’t call the cops on you for street riding,” says Kimura. “Maybe it’s because it snows so much there that people are happy to see you digging out the stairways.”
Filmmaking is just the latest adventure Kimura is taking on; her next chance to learn. “After surgery, I gave myself one week to mope. Then I got off my ass. Figuring out how to make this film is the mental equivalent of taking all the physical risks of street riding. But it’s more meaningful because I’m creating an opportunity for the women coming up behind me.”
The North Face believes in celebrating the spirit of exploration that lives within us all. From the mountain to the city, they believe that all explorers share a mindset of curiosity paired with the courage to try something new. This 4-part series also includes a climbing prodigy from New York City and an explorer with creative passions just as varied as his climbing ones. | Hero photo credit: Aaron Blatt
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For starters, Ashima Shiraishi is first and foremost an urban climber. By that we don’t mean she scales buildings. Rather that she’s also a cosmopolitan young woman who just happens to be arguably the best rock athlete in the world, having climbed two V15s (a grade no other woman has attained). The New York City native discovered the sport when she was six, playing with her father near the city’s infamous Rat Rock boulder in Central Park. She later honed her craft training at the famed gym, Brooklyn Boulders. Fast-forward to today and the 17-year-old phenom, one of the youngest and most accomplished The North Face athletes, is the International Federation of Sport Climbing’s three-time defending World Youth Champion in both bouldering and lead climbing.
Her next big goal? Standing atop the podium the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, where climbing will be a medal sport for the first time. To prepare for the games, she and her family recently relocated to Tokyo. Not surprisingly, the transition to the world’s largest city has been disruptive—she’s having a tough time navigating the train system and is struggling to adjust to all the distracting lights. But it’s also proven inspiring, once she got over the cultural differences. “Tokyo lacks the diversity of New York,” says Shiraishi. “If you’re doing something odd, people stare at you. It can be intimidating.” But adapting to a new city has forced her to try new things. “Adventure to me is letting yourself be uncomfortable,” she says. “I’m starting to enjoy the process. It’s making me grow. It’s freeing.”
For Shiraishi, challenging herself means more than climbing new walls or tackling harder bouldering problems. “I’m an introvert, so just talking to a stranger each day can be an adventure I set myself on. Everyday you make these choices.” Forcing herself to face that which makes her uneasy is a theme with Shiraishi. Just look at her introduction to the sport in New York’s Central Park. “I went to climb the Rat Rock boulder every day after school until I got it,” she says. “Keep stacking up those small adventures, and that’s a life.”
Which is to say, even in the Lost in Translation–style estrangement of Japan, there’s a place for you, if you just adjust your outlook on sport, life, and culture. “There are 500 climbing gyms in Japan,” says Shiraishi. “In climbing gyms, there is always a community that I feel comfortable in, everywhere in the world. And at every single gym, there are freaky strong climbers. Being surrounded by people like that is really motivating.”
Even Shiraishi’s favorite hobby is urban-centric. She loves to forage through second-hand stores for treasures, what she calls “thrifting.” This might be hereditary: her parents met at fashion school, and her mom later created all the costumes for her dad’s dance troupe. “As a baby, I was fashionable,” says Shiraishi. “My parents always said, ‘Wear something you feel confident in’ instead of thinking about whatever is the current hype. If you’re confident, you’ll look cool. My best Tokyo find was a tracksuit sweater from the eighties. It’s nice and warm—a little puffy. I’m in love with it. I wore it at every single competition this year. It cost me eight dollars.”
Armed with her kitschy tracksuit, a mind open to new experiences, and a physicality ideally suited to vertical rock, we’re only expecting to see that superpower confidence grow. Even if she never climbs buildings.
The North Face believes in celebrating the spirit of exploration that lives within us all. From the mountain to the city, they believe that all explorers share a mindset of curiosity paired with the courage to try something new. This 4-part series also includes a snowboarder mentoring the next generation of female street riders and a climber with creative passions just as varied as his climbing ones. | Hero photo credit: Eddie Lee
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Born and raised in Detroit, alpinist Sam Elias has summited Everest and podiumed in ice-climbing events, and he climbs everything from big walls to super-punchy sport climbs. Translation: the 36-year-old knows his way around rock and ice. (He’s also pretty good on snow, too, having gone to college on a ski racing scholarship.) But Elias’ creative passions are just as varied as his climbing ones: he’s designed everything from his own tattoos to the Beyond the Wall line of clothing for The North Face. Always looking for new ways to connect with people, Elias draws as much inspiration from the urban spaces of his adopted hometown of Salt Lake City as he does from the mountains. “I love those extreme contrasts,” says Elias. “I just get so alive.”
Elias is especially proud of his Detroit roots, returning frequently to visit his parents and reconnect with the working class city. “I’ve always called myself a blue-collar climber,” he says. “I like to work. I can get lost for hours in hard, physical labor. I get that from my father, who emigrated from Syria, but also from the culture of Detroit.” Elias has other urban sensibilities, too, like his love of the electronica DJ shows he attends in Salt Lake City, and his growing array of tattoos, which he collaborates in designing. “Tattoos feel like a new interface for me with the urban environment,” he says.
When he travels, Elias revels in exploring new cities even though he never much liked walking around in them until recently. But his thirst to get a feel for the authentic culture of a place trumps that dislike. Today, he plots walking tours on his phone to visit museums, parks, or the city’s high point, as he did this fall in Halifax, Nova Scotia. “I fell in love with climbing because of the lifestyle and the culture,” says Elias. “I want to connect to that wherever I go now. The cuisine, the clothing of a place—I’m fascinated by the minutiae. It gives texture to life.”
The biggest cities, like New York, offer a particular pleasure for Elias, who loves to be immersed in a crowd of people going about their business. “It’s comforting because nobody cares what you’re wearing, or what you do for work, or about your sexuality. There’s just too many people for them to get hung up about things, and that allows me to be more comfortable in my own skin.”
Exploration, says Elias, is more than just physical journey. “Climbing for me has always been a way to turn exploration inward—the exploration of self. If you carry the attitude of exploration and curiosity, urban experiences can be just as much a mirror to the self.”
The North Face believes in celebrating the spirit of exploration that lives within us all. From the mountain to the city, they believe that all explorers share a mindset of curiosity paired with the courage to try something new. This 4-part series also includes a climbing prodigy from New York City and a snowboarder mentoring the next generation of female street riders. | Hero photo credit: Jason Nelson.
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Fresh out of Massachusetts, the 20-year-old me was wicked dumb. Hey, science tells me that my brain wasn’t fully developed at that age—and as soon as it was fully developed, science tells me that it began to decay. You really can’t win. Anyway, thrilled to be in the mountains of New Hampshire and Colorado, I threw myself into the outdoor world with no training, few mentors, and a damn-the-torpedoes worldview that predictably ended up with many torpedoes coming my way. My youth is a lost cause at this point, but maybe you can glean a few tips from my hard-earned lessons.
Wear the Goggles
I actually got this warning from a ripping 50-year-old Copper Mountain ski instructor during my first (and only) year instructing. “The sun at altitude will give you cataracts,” she told me on day one. “Keep your goggles on until you go inside.” I’ve heeded that advice while resort skiing, but in the backcountry, I switched to sunglasses for the uptrack on account of overheating and fogging. Not a great idea. A ski photographer friend whose job requires standing in the sun while wearing low-profile RX sunnies just got out of cataract surgery last week. Be more selective about the shades you wear. I started touring in the original POC Do about eight years ago because it offers almost as much coverage as glacier glasses. The updated Do Flow Clarity comes close.Ditch the Chemicals
Back in the day, we would douche our apparel in Scotchgard, a toxic waterproofer made by 3M full of known carcinogens. Great. Most of the waterproof-breathable gear we buy is still coated with the same perfluorocarbons (PFCs) found in the old Scotchgard spray cans. Until the industry is forced to clean up its act, you can limit your exposure and help the planet by washing and treating your ski pants in Nikwax-brand cleansers and waterproofers, which contain no toxic chemicals.Your Core Runs from Hips to Shoulders
My back was thrashed in my late twenties and early thirties. At the time, I had no idea what core training really meant, so I would supplement stupid weightlifting exercises (never use a weight machine) with old-school sit-ups. My abs were strong, but my lower back was as weak as a kitten’s, creating an imbalance that led to a bad compression while mogul skiing. That injury, in turn, led to a bulging disk, which led to chronic inflammation and pain. Now in winter, I skate ski and reinforce my lower back with foundation training, further bolster my core with exercises similar to the ones performed by the greatest XC mountain bike racer in history, and weight train in a more subdued way (like Olympic gold medalist Jessie Diggins).Beware the Wax
It’s cool to tune your own skis, but the high-end fluorocarbon waxes Nordic and alpine racers covet also pose grave health risks. Two studies in Norway and Sweden have found that those fluorocarbons, a likely carcinogen, stacked up in the blood of wax technicians. The fix? Stop buying the spendy fluorocarbon waxes unless you’re on the World Cup, and opt for a friendlier alternative, like Purl Wax (if you’re a dedicated hot waxer) or DPS’s new Phantom 2.0 non-wax that lasts the life of the ski (if you’re a freeskier or ski tourer). Also, don a quality respirator and wear the safety glasses. My pal who works for Rossignol can’t see much out of one eye after a piece of metal he was machining sent shrapnel into it.Stand Up Straight
About 15 years ago, I was ripping around Snowbird with a great skier. We came past a rocky outcropping into a steep chute and encountered a woman gripped by the exposure. Standing sideways to the fall line, she was leaning back into the hill as if there was some safety to be found there. My friend told her to stand up straight. She did. And in doing so, her edges made better contact with the steep terrain. Now balanced over her feet, she was able to swing the skis around into that next mountaineering-style ski turn. Unless you’re actively self-arresting, you do fundamentally the same thing when you’re traversing a slope on crampons or riding a bike near the edge of a precipice. To lean into the earth is human nature. To stand up in the void is more of an avian act. That type of transcendence takes courage. It’s also a skill that you can practice.Watch What You Eat
It sounds like a Jenny Craig tweet. It’s not. I started paying attention ten years ago when a doctor buddy I ski and bike with convinced me that I should eat like my Mediterranean ancestors. The arguments he made in his research-driven book were convincing enough from a long-term health perspective. Who wants Alzheimer’s and heart disease? But I’m a short-term-goal person, so I still wasn’t eating right most the time. It wasn’t until I read some advice for cyclists from (of all people) “nutritionist to the stars” Philip Goglia that I stumbled on a diet that worked for me as a recreational athlete. While Goglia pointed out that athletes really can’t eat too many vegetables (the basis of the Med diet), he also said that athletes shouldn’t eat inflammatory dairy, gluten, mold, or yeast-based products. Merging the approaches, I ended up with a table rich in fresh green leafy vegetables, plant-based fats, lean proteins, and whole (unprocessed) carbohydrates. I now feel as though I’m better fueled for hard efforts on the bike, and I recover better. And since I cut Goglia’s four, I’ve had neither seasonal allergies nor a single asthmatic episode (I’ve been asthmatic since childhood). Maybe that will work for you, maybe it won’t. But, hey, I’m not a doctor—and this is a letter to me.Protect the Knees
Cyclists know that cold air and exposed knees can lead to tendon damage. The maxim? Below 65 degrees, wear knee warmers; below 55 degrees, wear leg warmers; below 35 degrees, wear your thickest insulated bibs. (Or, if you’re a mountain biker, these more casual pants.) It was pro big-mountain skier Chris Davenport, though, who turned me on to knee pads for skiers. I started wearing them when I was bootpacking up couloirs in spring or scrambling up rock in the backcountry, but I grew accustomed to the crash protection and added warmth they offered inbounds as well. Now I ski with Black Diamond’s knee pads all winter long.Don’t Submit in Advance
Explore all the ways you can to avoid the knife. Before undergoing surgery for a heart arrhythmia called supraventricular tachycardia, I told my cardiac electrophysiologist that I was a heavy caffeine user. He scoffed at the connection. It was only after the failed procedure (and $15,000) that I stumbled upon a study that said researchers have triggered tachycardia in rats with caffeine. I quit caffeine and haven’t had an episode since. My shoulder used to dislocate all the time when I was young, but the right exercise (skate skiing again) and learning how to crash healed it. Ditto with my aforementioned back that a surgeon wanted to cut into when I was in my twenties. We have amazing health care in this country, but don’t just blindly submit to the system. See a physical therapist first.Get Forward
This is different advice than stand up straight. When you’re skiing or mountain biking steep terrain, don’t shift your weight back. Before fat skis and slacker long-travel forks, we used to have to do exactly that (just a touch) in powder and on steep singletrack, and those are tough habits to break. On skis, stay centered and let the ski float you as you drive turns from your core. For a reference, check out Sam Cohen’s upper-body position in this edit that just dropped. Zero wasted energy. On a mountain bike, use the dropper post to pull yourself down and forward to weight the front tire, balance your weight in the suspension, and actively pilot the bike instead of using it as a sled. I’m still learning that last bit.Go the !@#$ to Sleep
Tom Brady espouses that sleep is as vital to performance as skills, nutrition, and cross-training. He’s correct, but you don’t need his fancy recovery pajamas. Sleep was always an afterthought when I was younger. I slept poorly, which means I performed poorly and recovered poorly. Now I think about sleep, which means I think about stress. This past summer, cycling great George Hincapie told fellow doper Lance Armstrong on their podcast that he tried to compartmentalize stress—addressing what he could during the day and putting the rest in a box before bed. I’ve found that pretty helpful. I now give myself nine hours in bed with the hopes of hitting eight hours of sleep—which is probably my magic number, according to this compilation story from the New York Times.Gear Matters: A Tale of Entropy
I knew the lightweight Schwalbe tires weren’t a match for the rocky Breck Epic course, but unable to find the burlier tires I wanted in town, I figured I’d wing it. What happens next is a cautionary tale. As expected, I tear a sidewall on a bombing descent. No problem. I got this, I think. I’m quick with tire repairs. So I slap a boot on the tear, but in my hurry to inflate, I snap the valve stem off the tube. No problem. I have a second tube in my saddlebag. As I extract that tube, though, the stitching on the saddlebag rips. As I prepare to rejoin the race, I now have a spent tube and a worthless saddlebag in my hands, so I shove them into my overcrowded jersey pockets, telling myself I’ll clean up my act at the next aid station. Except I never make it. As I get up to speed on a smooth descent, the tube works its way from my jersey and into my spokes. What follows is the most sudden and violent bike crash I’ve ever experienced. I end up staggering to the road with a shattered clavicle for an ambulance ride to the ER. The conclusion: Gear matters. As a guide on Mount Rainier once told our group of Outside editors, “Get your shit dialed.”]]>
Photo Gallery: A Tribute to Indigenous Cultures Around the World
Earlier this month, Colorado’s Wolf Creek, with a reported 22-inch base, became the first U.S. ski area to open this winter. When can we expect real snow accumulation in other parts of the country?
First, you should know that meteorologists are particular about how they measure snow. For the snow to be considered “measurable,” you need at least 0.1 inch of accumulation. That tiny threshold is what most of us would call a dusting. A “trace” of snow means the flakes melted as soon as they hit the ground; it’s not measurable.
Sleet is measured and reported as if it were snow. Sleet, or ice pellets, forms when a snowflake falls through a shallow layer of warm air above the surface and refreezes before it reaches the ground. Sleet accumulates like snow, and even though it’s icier and more dangerous than a fluffy pile of powder, it’s counted as such in the record books.
The above map shows the average first date of measurable snowfall around the United States. (Some cities have multiple weather stations, so I used the one that has the longest reporting record, most of which go back at least 70 years. I used National Airport for the average first measurable snowfall date in Washington, D.C.; Central Park for New York City; and O’Hare Airport for Chicago.)
Some cities reliably record snow every year on those dates, while others go many years without seeing so much as a single flake. Snow is (shockingly!) rare in places like Austin, Texas, and Mobile, Alabama, but they see small winter storms every couple years, and it’s possible to estimate an average first snowfall date from those events.
The pattern of first measurable snows across the country are fairly predictable. It starts snowing before Halloween near the Rocky Mountains, while it typically doesn’t start snowing in the South until after January 1—if at all. Higher elevations can start seeing feet of snow as early as the beginning of October, with measurable snows reaching population centers like Helena, Montana, and Denver, Colorado, by the middle of the month. Canada begins exporting cold air in earnest by the end of October, increasing the chances for snow across much of the northern Plains and Upper Midwest.
Lake-effect snow is the big story once November rolls around. Lake-effect snow is caused by convection, the same process that creates thunderstorms. Warm air immediately above the relatively warm waters of the Great Lakes can quickly rise through bitterly cold air in the atmosphere above. The resulting bands of snow can dump many feet of snow in one day, sometimes in narrow swaths just a few miles wide. Buffalo, New York, sees several major lake-effect snow events every year. One of the city’s suburbs saw 63 inches of snow in 48 hours back in November 2014, while communities a few miles up the road saw barely enough to shovel away.
By the end of November, a large portion of the United States has reached the date it typically sees its first measurable snowfall. The Northeast and Mid-Atlantic typically see their first by the beginning of December, as clippers become commonplace. (A clipper is a small, fast-moving weather system that comes from the northwest and can drop a quick coating of snow before the skies clear out.)
We usually start seeing significant winter storms by the middle of December. Powerful low-pressure systems moving across the central United States can cause paralyzing blizzards on the Plains. Strong storms that develop near the East Coast, known as nor’easters, are the source of most major snowstorms in the eastern states. In addition to possibly dropping feet of snow on major cities from North Carolina to Maine, nor’easters can produce winds as intense as a hurricane, and the strongest ones can even develop a hurricane-like eye. These powerful storms are usually responsible for accumulating snows in the southern United States, where cities like Greensboro, North Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia, typically don’t see their first coatings until after the new year. It’s tougher for snow to fall as you get closer to the Gulf Coast, but every once and a while all the ingredients can come together to allow a winter storm to reach the beaches of the Gulf.
The average date a city sees its first measurable snow is just that—an average. Averages change with time and can vary depending on the period of data in question. For this post, I used a station’s entire period of record, which stretches more than 100 years in New York’s Central Park and just 59 years at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. If you change those periods to just 30 years, which is the standard period of time to figure, some interesting trends emerge.
The average first date of measurable snow is gradually getting later in the year in some eastern U.S. cities. Philadelphia, for instance, has seen its first snow slip by two weeks over the past 60 years. The average first snowfall date in Philly was December 6 for the period between 1957 and 1987, but the date gradually moved back to December 20 by the 30-year period between 1987 and 2017.
Some of these changes are attributable to long-term weather patterns, but climate change could also play a role. Climate data shows that many cities (including Philadelphia) have seen their first freeze later in the fall and their last freeze earlier in the spring. The area covered by snow during winter in North America has also been on the decline since the 1970s. This trend of later first snowfall events in the eastern United States could be a part of this overall warming trend.
Despite this year’s unusually warm fall for a large part of the United States, much of the central part of the country saw its first measurable snow a lot earlier than usual. Measurable snow fell as far south as Texas this year as a result of a robust storm that coincided with a burst of cold air flowing south from Canada. Seasonal snowfall maps will start filling in as we head into November and cold air rules the day.
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Photo Gallery: Where Your Wool Comes From
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