Outside

“The dividing line—civilization there, wilderness here—was so apparent from up high. You wouldn’t be able to mark it clearly on a map, but Garrett and Burgin were over the edge, lost on the wild side. And now they were found—in four minutes.”

“Their tagline is ‘delivering technology to assess and promote nature exposure,’ and their initial vision was an app that would keep track of how much time you spend in natural environments.”

“He has a story he wants to share, about what life looks like afterward. It does not offer Five Easy Steps to Bury Your Pain. He knows how deeply loss can cleave a person. But he also learned that we need other people to help pull us clear of the wreckage.”

“When Sunny was euthanized in my backyard two days earlier, I knew that adjusting to life without her would be hard. What happened instead was more like a tsunami of grief that swept me out to sea. Now that I’m pushing 60, I thought I was fully experienced in coping with the death of loved ones. But the sadness from losing Sunny was far greater than what I had previously endured after the passing of my parents, grandparents, and other dogs. I was surprised and somewhat terrified that I had the capacity to cry so much.”

“Although bicycle accidents and dog bites result in far more human injuries and deaths in Alaska than bear attacks do, the image of an aggressive bear dwells among our greatest wildlife fears and fascinations.”

“I think Kanoa is rightly looking at this moment”—when he will represent Japan in the Olympics, the most-watched sporting event on earth—“and thinking, This is when I can be, honest to goodness, for a few days, the biggest athlete on earth.””

“The lasting effect Buckskin Gulch had on me isn’t pain or surgery. No, walking up the Paria River Canyon next to Glen and Dan and David and Bill and Matthew and Ed and Ben, the indelible impressions of the experience are the light, the dark, the sun, the moon, the reds, the browns, the cold, the warmth, the wet, the dry, the oxygen, the effort, the monotony, the catharsis, the purity, and the epiphany.”

“My dad gave me his hearty laugh and his boyish eyes, but he could also be stoic, gruff, and comically reserved with his emotions. He’d ask how my car was running, and I understood that he loved me. Watching the Tour together, I cherished that, though my dad had never competed, he understood the sport, and through it, he seemed to understand me.”

“Elías was drawn to crystal hunting as an antidote to conventional alpinism, which in his view had become all about speed. ‘With alpinism today, the goal is to spend as little time as possible in the mountains,’ he told me later. ‘As a cristallier, you spend real time in the mountains. Days, days, days. That changes everything. It changes your relationship with the geography.'”

“Cross-country skiing past a trail post carved with the words “Locals Only” doesn’t feel good. Neither does being evicted mid-pandemic because someone with more money wants to move in. Both beg a very American question that’s long been asked at the intersection of rural and urban, between the haves and have-nots.”