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January 24, 2010 by admin

Mother Jones | January/February 2010

The Mustang Redemption: Dangerous felons are being trained to tame wild horses. But can the horses tame the men? Download PDF

George Reynolds is a 53-year-old felon. Sentenced in July 2008 for third-degree sexual assault against a minor, he’ll spend up to twelve years in prison, with a chance for parole in four. Standing just shy of six feet tall, Reynolds has blunt shoulders, powerful arms, a shock of brown hair, icy blue eyes, and a bushy Hulk Hogan mustache that frames his chin and creates a permanent frown. He’s an imposing figure, a guy you’d never want to cross. But at the moment, Reynolds looks terrified and minuscule next to his adversary, a 900-pound mustang that is very pissed off. This is the Wyoming State Honor Farm, where convicts train, or “gentle,” wild horses that have been rounded up from the high plains as part of a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) program to control mustang populations on federal lands. The Honor Farm admits good-behavior inmates from higher security penitentiaries. Reynolds transferred here in October 2008 to join a group of 25 prisoners who domesticate the horses so they can be offered for adoption. Continue reading →

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October 31, 2009 by admin

Ski | October 2009

Allison Gannett Download PDF

Saving Our Snow

Alison Gannett, a 43-year-old world champion extreme freeskier who lives in Crested Butte, Colo., was supposed to meet me at her place this morning. But last night, a fast-moving storm dropped nine inches of fluff. Gannett calls at 9, panting. “Let’s meet at the North Face T-bar at 11:30.” I get there five minutes late, and wait awhile before I realize that she has already split. North Face accesses Crested Butte’s double-black-diamond and extreme backcountry terrain, where Gannett has been doing laps since first chair. My cell phone rings again. “I’m headed to Third Bowl,” she says. “See you in an hour.” After taking a few runs myself, I arrive back at the lift just as Gannett comes tearing through and—without slowing down—plops herself onto the next T-bar just as it rounds the bull wheel. I scoot on beside her. “I’ve lived here 20 years and just skied two new lines I’ve never done before,” she announces. “Both of them scared the hell out of me.”

Gannett cannot sit still. She swings her skis, fiddles with her goggles and fires off text messages from her iPhone. During the two days we’ll spend riding the lifts together, she never removes the pole straps from her wrists, like she might leap off should the lift stop for more than 30 seconds. It wouldn’t be her first time hucking a 50-footer. Though retired from competitive freeskiing (“I stopped after knee surgery No. 7”), Gannett leads ski-mountaineering expeditions. In 2001 she was among the first group to ski the northwest face of Hanuman Tibba, a 19,500-foot Himalayan peak. In Crested Butte, she teaches avalanche safety clinics and runs a steeps camp for women. Continue reading →

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October 24, 2009 by admin

Backpacker | October 2009

Vanishing Act Download PDF

Disappear into Yellowstone’s secret northern fringe, store where you’ll find a rejuvenated landscape and total solitude (except for the bison and grizzlies).

Last night I pitched my tent at 8,500 feet atop the Buffalo Plateau, in a mile-wide meadow laced with spring-fed brooks. From the campsite, overlooking the remote northeast corner of Yellowstone National Park, I have the option of descending back to the base of the plateau and making a horseshoe end-run around its north side. But a ranger in the backcountry office had told me about an off-trail shortcut through a lodgepole burn that would save four miles. Of course, like most cross-country bushwhacks, it was debatable if the “shortcut” would actually save time. I knew it would require acrobatic scrambling over and under fallen timber. But who can pass up the allure of such a little-used route? Continue reading →

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August 23, 2009 by admin

Kiteboarding | August 2009

A Cuban Odyssey Download PDF

Six kiters embark on a 1,300-mile trip across the Caribbean’s best-kept secret to explore what could be the largest untapped flat-water playground on Earth.

Last summer, I began studying the north coast of Cuba with Google Earth, and what I saw was electrifying. An aquatic labyrinth of mangrove cays and sapphire lagoons emerged 80 miles from Havana in the Archipiélago de Sabana and ended in the east near Baracoa, where, on Oct. 27, 1492, Christopher Columbus ?rst spotted the island from the deck of his carrack. Satellite imagery revealed a wide coral shelf paralleling the shore. Between the reef and the mainland is an enormous inland sound sprinkled with hundreds of tiny cays. From almost every cay extends snow-white sandbars that enclose aquamarine pools. All told, Cuba’s northern coastal waters harbor a 6,500-square-mile slick—large enough to encompass the ?ats at South Padre Island some 25 times over.

For a wind check, I called Scott Stripling, a fellow kiter based in Puerto Rico who is a meteorologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Stripling has contacts at Cuba’s Instituto de Meteorología (Institute of Meteorology), renowned for its forecasting prowess. (Fidel Castro pumps gobs of cash into the national sciences.) Stripling managed to obtain climate records from his colleagues in Havana. The data was intoxicating: In an e-mail, Stripling said the north coast gets slammed with consistent 20-knot winds from November through April. Continue reading →

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April 24, 2009 by admin

OnEarth | Spring 2009

Selling the Sun Download PDF

A Man, A Plan, and the Dawn of America’s Solar Future

“I am a capitalist,” announces Jigar Shah, the 34-year-old founder of SunEdison. We have just sat down for dinner at a bustling noodle joint in Washington, D.C. Upon hearing Shah, who is wearing pressed khakis and a crisp blue oxford shirt, the couple at the next table nearly choke on their pad thai. A brash entrepreneur banging the capitalist drum isn’t going to win many friends here, especially now. It’s December, and a few blocks away congressional leaders are debating whether to give foundering automakers billions of dollars in bailout money. Ineptitude has ruined Detroit, greed has soiled Wall Street, and Democrats on Capitol Hill are counting the days until their guy steps into the White House.

But Shah can’t help himself. An iconoclast among greens, he’s a devoted environmentalist who champions market economics and believes American business acumen can conquer climate change. Shah has spent the past six years leveraging his convictions to build North America’s largest and most successful provider of solar energy. Continue reading →

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March 23, 2009 by admin

Backpacker | March 2009

Globetrotter Download PDF

Leo Le Bon, the Godfather of trekking.

In this interview the founder of adventure travel dishes on his favorite wild places, oddest encounters, and the world’s next great trekking destinations. In 1967, Leo Le Bon led a group of Northern California clients on the first commercial trek in Nepal, and it was wildly successful. So the Belgium-born travel agent created a company offering even more exotic journeys, and in so doing jumpstarted a new kind of tourism: adventure travel. Le Bon pioneered treks in Tibet and China, the Andes and Greenland, and introduced walking safaris in Kenya—firsts for all of these countries. Mountain Travel Sobek, the company he co-founded (and retired from in 1990), still guides trekkers to the unexplored fringe: 160 trips to 72 countries are planned for 2009. We caught up with Le Bon, now 72, just before he left for Everest Base Camp last October, with his wife and a cadre of friends, to celebrate the anniversary of his inaugural journey there 40 years ago.

How did your first trek to Nepal get off the ground?
I put an ad in the Sierra Club Bulletin for a trek in Nepal—and got 100 replies in two weeks! Ultimately, 30 people signed up for what was the very first commercial trek in Nepal. It cost $400 per trekker, or $2,620 in 2008 dollars.

Continue reading →

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March 19, 2009 by admin

Best Life | March 2009

The New Science of Hair Growth Download PDF

Robot follicular surgeons, invisible micrografts, in vitro hair cloning … scientists have a wider array of weapons than ever before in the war on baldness. Many believe we’re finally on the verge of banishing it forever.

Brandishing a syringe the size of a caulking gun, hair-transplant surgeon James Harris, MD, injects local anesthetic into the scalp of a male patient, a married financial analyst in his early forties who has asked not to be identified. We’ll call him Scott. For five hours, I’ve been watching Dr. Harris perform a hair transplant called surgically advanced follicular extraction, or SAFE. A follicular unit is a miniature, self-contained hair factory embedded in the skin. Each square centimeter of human scalp contains 80 to 120 follicular units, and each of those has one to four hairs.

Though Scott is sitting upright, his scalp is a gruesome battlefield. Rivulets of blood seep from thousands of BB-size puncture wounds. A trash can is brimming with blood-soaked gauze. But Scott feels nothing. He’s watching CNBC’s financial roundup on a wall-mounted TV while thumbing through e-mails on his BlackBerry, oblivious to the mayhem topside. Continue reading →

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November 13, 2008 by admin

Outside | October/November 2008

Chasing the Bull Download PDF

Sailing a fully stocked 57-foot catamaran, kitesurfer and entrepreneur Gavin McClurg sets out to find and tame the big a strapping winds in Panama’s Bocas Del Toro.

I’m not a sailor, but I’m pretty sure that attempting to thread a 57-foot sailing yacht through a shoulder-deep, mangrove-choked estuary isn’t prudent seamanship. We entered this maze of islets 20 minutes ago on Discovery, a Lagoon 570 catamaran, motoring on twin diesels, and so far we haven’t run aground. But I keep glimpsing stacks of billowy black coral inches below the surface of the crystalline flatwater. Captaining the ship is 36-year-old Gavin McClurg, a slight-framed boatman who has spent the past decade ocean-hopping. He purchased Discovery in Italy on December 22, 2006, and less than 12 hours later sailed her 5,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean. “No tools, no bedding, no spares, no nothing,” he says. When we set sail earlier in the day from a sleepy marina in Panama to commence a weeklong expedition through the Bocas del Toro archipelago, McClurg had only a crude itinerary and just one goal: to find good wind. McClurg, along with his two dozen passengers, hopes to become the first to kitesurf in these remote islands. At the moment, however, McClurg is darting from his vantage point on the starboard stern to Discovery’s saloon, where he checks a map on his laptop. His girlfriend and first mate, Jody MacDonald, 33, is standing on the boom, watching for hazards from her 14-foot perch.

“Reeeeeeeeeeeef!” she screams. MacDonald unwinds by BASE jumping, so her panic is alarming. “What does the chart say?” Continue reading →

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September 30, 2008 by admin

Wired | September 2008

A Star is Born Download PDF

Digital video was supposed to replace film. But the picture looks flat and fake, and Hollywood was slow to switch. That’s changing. The Red One, an ultrahigh-res digital camera, is ready of its close-up.

A crowd has gathered front of the Las Vegas Convention Center, where a security guard is about to unlock the main entrance. It’s less than a minute before 9 am, the official opening of the 2008 National Association of Broadcasters Show—typically a sleepy sales and marketing event known more for schmoozing than buzz. But as the glass doors open on this April morning, a hundred people race toward a large crimson tent in the center of the hall.

The tent is home to Red Digital Cinema and its revolutionary motion picture camera, the Red One. Standing nearby is the man who developed it—a handsome guy with a neatly trimmed goatee and a pair of sunglasses perched atop his clean-shaven head. He clutches a can of Diet Coke in his left hand, an unlit Montecristo jutting from between his fingers. Continue reading →

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September 24, 2008 by admin

Backpacker | September 2008

The Red Zone Download PDF

As conservationists and energy developers fight over Wyoming’s Red Desert, one thing is certain: There’s no time like the present to hike through its unreal geography.

I crest a shallow canyon rim in southern Wyoming’s Red Desert and spook a family of six pronghorn antelope. They sprint into the sun, leaping in rhythmic bounds over desert scrub. It’s our third day of hiking; we’re seemingly lost, and several miles from our next water cache. But the antelope are so astoundingly fast and graceful that I can’t help watching them, happily letting the gravity of our situation fade for a few seconds.

Having evolved alongside the cheetah, their mortal enemy, pronghorn have supersize hearts and lungs, and can sustain speeds of 60 miles per hour for several minutes. But their flight on this May afternoon has little to do with survival: Wyoming’s pronghorn have no predators, save hunters; their behavior is triggered by bits of remnant DNA leftover from a time when cheetahs, now extinct in North America, prowled these rangelands 13,000 years ago. Continue reading →

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