Articles | Michael Behar | Writer & Editor

Standard

October 25, 2011 by admin

Air & Space | October/November 2011

Lost in America Download PDF

Airplanes that go missing are often untraceable. Why is effective tracking technology being ignored?

The morning of December 9, 2009, began cool and clear. In Dorrigo, an Australian town about 300 miles north of Sydney, the pilot of a Bell 206L-1 LongRanger helicopter took off on his second flight of the day. The 29-year-old (officials did not release his name) was under contract with the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service to aid crews fighting bushfires. Also aboard was Aaron Harber, a 41-year-old park ranger being ferried to Cathedral Rock National Park, where he would help battle a blaze.

At 11:20 a.m., a few minutes after takeoff, the pilot flew into a thick fog. He immediately lost all visual reference points. For a split second he glimpsed a ridgeline and a cluster of trees, then nothing. He knew he was perilously close to the ground—perhaps just 20 feet above it—but had no idea what direction he was traveling in. “This is not good,” he told Harber. “I’m going to try to land.” When the pilot yanked the cyclic to flare the chopper and slow its speed, there was a loud bang, and the LongRanger went into a flat spin. The main rotor snapped and sliced through the cockpit canopy just as the aircraft slammed into the ground. In the impact, Harber’s seatbelt shoulder harness was severed. Continue reading →

Standard

September 1, 2011 by admin

Kiteboarding | September 2011

Surf’s Up, Finally Download PDF

The world’s first kite competition exclusively for wave-riders debuts.

It wasn’t long ago—perhaps 10 years—when the idea of surfing a wave with a kite was ludicrous. Kites pulled like deranged cruise missiles. Depower was laughable. Getting onto a wave was easy; staying on it was another story. The early generations of kites would stall at low speeds. To keep them aloft, riders needed gobs of speed, which made it impossible to stay on the face of a wave unless the surf was insanely huge (the bigger the swell, the faster it travels). The physics to execute classic moves—bottom turns, off-the-lip carves, and getting barreled—simply didn’t compute. Those who claimed to kite waves were really just outrunning them. Meanwhile, surfers scoffed at the lameness of it all.

But as kiting moved from infancy into adolescence, the desire to catch waves fueled innovation. First came bow kites, in 2005, with hybrid-and delta-shaped sails to follow. The advances led to kites that hovered patiently while a rider dawdled in the surf. Today, kiters are not only shredding the world’s legendary breaks, but doing things paddle-and-wait surfers can only dream of: cherry-picking the sweetest waves in a set—or riding them all—on ordinary surfboards, even strapless. Continue reading →

Standard

July 24, 2011 by admin

Kiteboarding | July 2011

I, Kiter Download PDF

Riders convene in the British Virgin Islands for the second annual BVI Kite Jam. Amidst steady wind, world-class waves and boundless flat water, jammers rediscover the kindred bonds that give our sport its soul.

Horseshoe reef, the fourth largest on Earth, meanders for 18 miles around Anegada, an atoll perched at the northern frontier of the British Virgin Islands. The reef encloses an electric blue lagoon fringed with frothy ribbons of surf. its thriving coral heads have trashed hundreds of laden vessels, spilling their cargoes onto Anegada’s pearly beaches. Scavenging these shipwrecks provided islanders with their primary income source for several centuries. now tourism fuels Anegada’s economy. The atoll has long been a far-flung hideout for sailors, who believe the island exudes a quiet energy that lulls visitors into a rhapsodic bliss. Perhaps that is why on a very windy day at Anegada’s cow Wreck Beach there are at least 50 kiteboarders in varying states of repose, loafing in the sand. “It was really weird to see,” Charlie Smith says. “There was a lot of chatting going on and not much kiteboarding.” Continue reading →

Standard

April 24, 2011 by admin

Outside | April 2011

Just Waive Goodbye Download PDF

With so many novice adventurers filing suit when something goes wrong, outfitters are shielding themselves behind increasingly dense liability forms. What does the mumbo jumbo really mean? We asked a crack team of lawyers.

THE TIME HAS COME. You’ve saved up for the adventure of a lifetime, and departure is imminent. But before you can raft the Grand Canyon, heli-ski Alaska’s Chugach Range, or climb Kilimanjaro, you need to get by a pesky gatekeeper: the liability-release waiver. If you’re like most clients, you’ll sign without reading a word. But you should know what you’re getting into. “It’s just like signing a mortgage,” says Tracey Knutson, an Anchorage-based attorney who represents outfitters from Alaska to Antarctica. “This is a binding contract.” More to the point, it’s a binding contract that leaves you powerless. Refuse to sign the waiver and you’ll be sent packing with a refund. If you sign, then get hurt and file suit ? Good luck—judge s toss out about 90 percent of recreation-based lawsuits.

This wasn’t always the case. “I recall many large outfits not using waivers in the early seventies,” says Reb Gregg, a Houston-based attorney who lectures about recreational liability. So how did things get so contentious? To find out, we constructed an abridged sample waiver using language from the contracts of a few leading outfitters, then dug up the lawsuits that prompted the bombproof legalese. The result is a look at 50 years of ski accidents, shark attacks, rafting mishaps, and negligent guides. Read on—then sign at your own risk. Continue reading →

Standard

April 10, 2011 by admin

Rosebud | Spring 2011

Sky-High Shortcut Download PDF

Heli-Hiking the Bugaboos.

“Let’s begin by learning how to breathe,” declares Lyle Grisedale, a lanky 66-year-old alpine guide and lifelong mountain bum.

I’m standing on an 8,000-foot-high rocky ridge with Grisedale and a group of a dozen hikers in British Columbia’s Bugaboo Range. It would normally take at least two days trudging uphill through wooded slopes and across snowfields to reach this perch. Our journey took six minutes aboard a Bell 212 helicopter. The brawny twin-engine beast delivered our entire posse from the Bugaboo Lodge, an upscale retreat operated by Canadian Mountain Holidays (CMH) that is tucked in a lush valley 3,100 feet below the peak. Grisedale works for CMH, an adventure outfitter founded 50 years ago by an Austrian immigrant who pioneered the use of helicopters for ski touring and backcountry hiking. Continue reading →

Standard

April 9, 2011 by admin

Mother Jones, March/April 2011

Alien vs. Predator: Biocontrol Edition Download PDF

Can an imported weevil KO an invasive weed that’s choking out our parks and pastures? Or do we enlist bugs at our own peril?”

We’ve been driving south from Missoula, Montana, for nearly an hour on a torrid August afternoon when Noah Poritz veers his tomato-red pickup truck onto the shoulder of a gravel road and slams on the brakes. The tires slide to an abrupt stop, churning up a cloud of hot dust. Poritz leaps out and surveys the stark landscape. “This is the site,” he declares, making a long, slow sweep across the horizon with his hand. We’re in the heart of the Bitterroot Valley, a 100-mile-long patchwork of dairy farms and cattle ranches, flanked by massive granite peaks. “It is perfect weevil weather today,” says Poritz. “They can’t handle the heat of the soil. When the temperature rises, they climb the plants. When it gets hot is when we scoop them up.” Continue reading →

Standard

February 23, 2011 by admin

Outside | February 2011

Faster. Higher. Squeakier. Download PDF

In 2007, molecular biologist Ron Evans flipped a genetic switch on test mice and turned them into super-athletes. Headlines ensued, as did nervous references to human applications and ‘exercise in a pill.’ Evans is still toiling away in the lab, and guess what? The day is coming.

Back in the early 1960s, when the architect Louis Kahn designed the airy layout of the Salk Institute—a collection of stark concrete towers aligned like teetering dominoes on a Pacific Ocean bluff in La Jolla, California—he oriented the buildings so that robust sea breezes would waft through the upper floors. But as I descend four flights of stairs to enter a sprawling subterranean lab, the sweet ocean air turns sour. Researchers at Salk are conducting cutting-edge experiments in genetics, biology, neuroscience, and human physiology. At the core of this futuristic work are 6,000 old-fashioned, defecating rodents, stacked in shoebox-size plastic cages, creating an odor far too potent for Kahn’s ingenious ventilation scheme to handle.

Despite the funk, the facility is meticulous. Wearing powder-blue scrubs, a surgical mask, a bouffant cap, and cloth shoe covers, I enter through a sterile clean room closed off between double doors. A whitewashed hallway adjoins various smaller labs, where mice are being injected with performance-enhancing compounds and forced to sprint on tiny treadmills. Others have had bits of their DNA reprogrammed to make them better runners. There are paunchy mice gorging on high-fat diets and svelte mice getting low-cal meals. Hunched over a metal table, a technician sorts through a squirming posse, plucking out prime studs for breeding and banishing aggressive males to solitary confinement. Mice are sacrificed and their muscles examined. Blood is sampled, hearts are inspected, kidneys and livers prodded. Continue reading →

Standard

January 29, 2011 by admin

Afar | January/February 2011

Fresh from the Yucatán Download PDF

A mainstay of home cooking throughout Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula and a standard on nearly every restaurant menu in the region, sopa de lima combines zesty Old and New World flavors. The basic elements are savory chicken broth, fiery habanero chili, and a tart blast from the lima fruit. According to Chef José Vázquez, a native of the Yucatán, the soup is a quintessential example of cultural fusion—centuries before the term was coined to describe a culinary movement.

The Yucatán is wedged between the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, geographically isolated from the country’s interior. “Historically, it has had a much closer relationship with Europe than has the rest of Mexico,” notes Vázquez, who studied at the California Culinary Institute and returned home to become head chef at Hacienda Xcanatún in Mérida, the Yucatán state capital. And sopa de lima, more than any other staple of local cuisine, represents the collision of indigenous Mayan foods with European, Asian, and Middle Eastern fare. Continue reading →

Standard

January 18, 2011 by admin

Kiteboarding | January 2011

Board Silly Download PDF

It’s rare to find a pro surfer on a production board. Now kites are discovering the magic of a custom ride.

To witness Stephen Schank build me a custom-designed, handmade twin-tip kiteboard is like watching one of those articulated high-speed assembly line robots at a modern automotive Plant. Somewhere, embedded deep inside his brain, the neural equivalent to software code is dispatching parsed instructions to his body, which moves in sync to a silent beat. His actions are premeditated, precise and blindingly fast, conforming to a series of discrete steps he’s honed over eight years of shaping. It takes Schank, who is 37, less than 20 minutes to cut, bevel and sand my board’s core. It’s carved from a single piece of very expensive and ultralight closed-cell foam endowed with unique flex and dampening properties.

While Schank is quick, he is by no means hasty. When I visit his tiny shop, located inside an aluminum Quonset hut in Buxton, North Carolina, he spends two hours interrogating me about what I hope to get from a handbuilt board. He makes notes in a leather-bound black notebook, punches figures into a calculator and finally announces a size: 132 centimeters by 40.5 centimeters. I had wanted something slightly longer, but Schank, a former professional kiteboarder and windsurfer (he’s also competed in mountain biking, skiing, ice climbing and hang gliding, among other sports), has a vision and won’t budge. For my board, he selects every feasible feature—outline, tip flex, core materials, rail thickness—to accommodate my riding style. Schank orders fiberglass specially woven for him in different weights and weaves; for me, he chooses a combination to suit chop and surf, the conditions I kite in most often. He measures the width of my shoulders and hips to determine my optimal foot stance. He even tunes each fin individually (they’re lettered for accurate placement) and sets them slightly inward because I expressed a pet peeve about face spray. Continue reading →

PUBLICATIONS