The Man Who Saw Too Much
Fellow Aspen first responders were momentarily shocked by Ferrara’s news. PTSD was supposed to happen to soldiers, a malady incurred on jittery battlefields far from home, not in a Xanadu dedicated to strenuous good fun. But Ferrara had long suspected he had PTSD and wasn’t surprised. “Of course he got PTSD,” says Pitkin County sheriff’s deputy Alex Burchetta. “Mike always did it big. He climbed the biggest mountains. And when he was on duty, he seemed to get the biggest calls. Injury, trauma, death—for 30 years, that pager was on 24/7, and he couldn’t get a reprieve. You’d have to be naive to think that he’d be impervious to it.”
Paleo Fitness: The Workout that Time Forgot
“We live like zoo animals!” It’s an idea Erwan Le Corre borrowed from the British zoologist Desmond Morris, author of the 1967 classic “The Naked Ape,” and it’s central to his worldview: that we are essentially wild creatures ill-suited to desk jobs and processed foods. “We have become divorced from nature, trapped in colorless boxes,” Le Corre says. “We have lost our adaptability, and it’s threatening our health and longevity.”
Twin Freaks
Twin brothers Mike and Steve Marolt have combined genetic gifts and actuarial efficiency to become two of the most accomplished high-altitude skiers alive. “A number of renowned ski mountaineers told me, without wanting their names to be used, that they resented the attention the Marolts had received for their exploits—or, more to the point, the attention the Marolts had sought out. The criticism is that the Marolts ski (and climb) unremarkable, unstylish lines (‘tourist routes,’ as one put it), that they care less about summits than about altimeter readings, and that, above all, they make more of their feats than those feats merit. The fact that they’ve skied so often above 7,000 meters elicits a collective ‘So what?’ from the sport’s elites, who favor first descents and technical derring-do. One of them told me, ‘All it proves is that they have more time and money to waste on trying to get one boring run.'”
If It’s Tuesday, It Must Be the Taliban: Tourism in Afghanistan
Tactically, our vacation had begun to feel similar to a military raid—rush in and rush out—and it was both exhilarating and unsatisfying. You were trying to be a tourist in a place that didn’t allow for it. You could strike up a conversation with a shopkeeper, but he might be a Taliban informant. You could wander down some beckoning side street, but you might not be seen again. It was the central paradox of a Hann trip: we were in Afghanistan, but the country still felt just out of reach.
The Cold Hard Facts of Freezing to Death
You’ve now crossed the boundary into profound hypothermia. By the time your core temperature has fallen to 88 degrees, your body has abandoned the urge to warm itself by shivering. Your blood is thickening like crankcase oil in a cold engine. Your oxygen consumption, a measure of your metabolic rate, has fallen by more than a quarter. Your kidneys, however, work overtime to process the fluid overload that occurred when the blood vessels in your extremities constricted and squeezed fluids toward your center. You feel a powerful urge to urinate, the only thing you feel at all.
Grand Theft Cattle
John Suther’s investigations have involved a never-ending litany of 21st-century weirdness: thugs stealing dairy calves at knifepoint; a guy hauling stolen and hog-tied calves in the back of a Volkswagen Jetta; organized criminal operations laundering drug money through trade in stolen livestock; illegal immigrants running barbaric underground rodeo circuits; and, in one of the largest cattle scams in American history, a missing $865,000 from one of the highest-paid actors on TV.
Into Thin Air
Everest deals with trespassers harshly: the dead vanish beneath the snows. While the living struggle to explain what happened. And why. A survivor of the mountain’s worst disaster examines the business of Mount Everest and the steep price of ambition.
Death of an Innocent: Excerpt from ‘Into the Wild’
How Christopher McCandless lost his way in the wilds. “James Gallien had driven five miles out of Fairbanks when he spotted the hitchhiker standing in the snow beside the road, thumb raised high, shivering in the gray Alaskan dawn. A rifle protruded from the young man’s pack, but he looked friendly enough; a hitchhiker with a Remington semiautomatic isn’t the sort of thing that gives motorists pause in the 49th state. Gallien steered his four-by-four onto the shoulder and told him to climb in. The hitchhiker introduced himself as Alex. ‘Alex?’ Gallien responded, fishing for a last name. ‘Just Alex,’ the young man replied, pointedly rejecting the bait. He explained that he wanted a ride as far as the edge of Denali National Park, where he intended to walk deep into the bush and ‘live off the land for a few months.'”
Big Fish: Jeff Novitzky vs. Lance Armstrong
There’s a determined man chasing Lance Armstrong, and he has a harpoon: Jeff Novitzky, a brilliant and relentless federal agent who’s out to prove that bike racing’s greatest champion cheated and lied.