Outside

“Maybe not in our hearts, but certainly in our brains. Plus, they can make you love the indoors far too much—which is why there’s now a full-fledged, woodsy rehab center for joystick addicts who need a soothing pathway back to a normal life.”

“Staff members of Marie Stopes International navigate wild bulls, treacherous singletrack, and rushing rivers to make long-term birth control accessible to some of the hardest-to-access places in Nepal.”

In April, celebrated alpinists alpinists David Lama, Jess Roskelley, and Hansjörg Auer died in an avalanche on Mount Howse — a terrible and unpredictable but known risk of the sport. How do participants in a sport where death is a semi-regular occurrence  cope?

“Whether I realized it or not, I’d thought of vanlife as a sort of test for my interest in adventure, the outdoors, freedom…Here’s what living out of a van was: a massive stretch of raw adventure and also an earthquake, destabilizing my life, showing me I didn’t really know all that much about risk, privilege, happiness, failure, and my own mental state. When it was all over, I got to see what had crumbled—and what hadn’t. That was vanlife’s gift to me.”

Grossly inefficient and often just gross, beef looks increasingly antiquated as alternative meats keep improving.

What happens when a small tourist hub is suddenly made strange by violence?

“[W]hile strangers on the internet accused Valérie of being irresponsible for bringing her baby into bear country, every parent in Whitehorse knows that a bear could wander across their driveway or through their yard someday. Our whole lives are lived in bear country.”

“The end was coming for Roany, a strong and beautiful horse who’d been at the center of Pam Houston’s life for 25 years. What she wanted for him was simple: a peaceful exit, lifted by the touch of human hands.”

Recklessness, or natural evolution of an age-old impulse? “Th[e] impulse to fashion our image publicly has only increased in the digital age—which means it’s that much harder to get noticed.”

“In July, a group of Afghan women set out to climb 24,580-foot Mount Noshaq, their country’s highest mountain. No Afghan woman had ever reached the summit, and many challenges stood in their way, from hostile Afghan men who think that women shouldn’t exercise, to the terrorist attack in a district near the peak two days before the climb began.”