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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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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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 →

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November 21, 2010 by admin

Newsweek | November 2010

Can This Cure Cancer? Download PDF

Why scientists are heading underwater to search for a new generation of cures.”

When Hendrik Luesch invited me to Florida to go snorkeling, I didn’t expect to be wading through brackish muck in the Indian River Lagoon, a 156-mile-long estuary. I’m traveling aboard a 21-foot fishing boat with Luesch, a 40-year-old associate professor of medicinal chemistry at the University of Florida in Gainesville. The visibility sucks, like swimming through a vat of kombucha. Luesch drags his fingers through the water, gathering a wad of flotsam. He raises the specimen into the sunlight to get a better look at the slime, known as cyanobacteria.

Cyanobacteria live in every ocean and on every continent in both salt and fresh water. One species causes a rash known as swimmer’s itch; another blooms in lakes and reservoirs, expelling a neurotoxin that can be fatal to humans. “They produce this huge diversity of compounds that have never been identified,” says Luesch, who’s been studying them since 1997. Luesch has investigated cyanobacteria from around the world—Hawaii, Florida, Guam, Palau—and last year he made a startling discovery: a family of cyanobacteria called Symploca emits a toxin that attacks tumors. Luesch sprinkled Symploca extract on cultures of colon, bone, and breast-cancer cells, and they withered within hours, as though they’d been doused with Roundup; he did the same with healthy cells, and they survived virtually unscathed. Luesch christened the new compound “largazole” (the first batch came from algae near Key Largo), and has recently completed animal testing: in mice, largazole slowed the growth of cancerous colorectal tumors. He hopes to have an FDA-approved treatment on the market in about 10 years—the typical timeline to develop a new drug. Continue reading →

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October 23, 2010 by admin

OnEarth | Fall 2010

Cold Comfort Download PDF

After suffering through another summer of record-breaking heat, it’s time to rethink our century-old love affair with air-conditioning.

Before modern cooling machines enveloped civilization in frigid air, humans living in hot climes used all sorts of techniques to stay reasonably comfy. Egyptians fashioned homes with mud and stone. Domed mosques and temples in the Middle East and India funneled hot air upward. Dwelling in subterranean chambers kept denizens of Cappadocia in Turkey and Petra in Jordan from breaking a sweat. Some cultures draped water-soaked fabric over open windows; others topped their roofs with thatch or earth to diffuse heat. Roman emperors had their plebeians haul snow from distant mountaintops and pile it along palace walls. More recently, residents of America’s Deep South kept their homes airy with vaulted ceilings, spacious front rooms, wraparound porches, and picture windows.

Then, in the early twentieth century, a tenacious young engineer named Willis Carrier introduced us to the miracle of indoor climate control. Today, the company that Carrier founded earns $11.4 billion in annual sales, but its products, having revolutionized the way Americans live, remain the least efficient appliances in a typical household. They devour 16 percent of an average household’s annual energy tab, producing the equivalent of 2,290 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions. “We’ve always taken air-conditioning for granted,” Gordon Holness, president of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), told me recently. “We’ve got into these lazy patterns because energy has been readily available and cheap. Now we’re realizing there isn’t an endless supply.” Continue reading →

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August 23, 2010 by admin

Air & Space | August/September 2010

Cold Case Download PDF

A new team sets out to solve old disappearances.

On Thursday, October 26, 1944, 12-year-old Frank Jacobs did what he always did when school got out: He walked a half-mile to the Manhattan Beach pier, where he liked to fish for halibut. Jacobs settled in a spot on the pier’s north side, which gave him a view of aircraft departing from Mines Field (now Los Angeles International Airport), about three and a half miles south. He loved catching a glimpse of an American fighter.

Airplanes departing Mines usually head west, over the bay. And that autumn afternoon was no different: Jacobs noticed the roar of a single-engine airplane climbing over the water. Though the boy built balsawood models of aircraft used in World War II, he could not identify this airplane. But he suspected it was a P-51 Mustang. Continue reading →

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June 24, 2010 by admin

Air & Space, June/July 2010

The Last Gunslinger Download PDF

The F-15C is the only dedicated dogfighter left in the U.S. military fleet. Why isn’t the Air Force replacing it?

While driving through downtown Mountain Home, Idaho, on a gray February morning, I notice something troubling: Mountain Home has no mountains. Later I learn why. In the 1880s, the town was relocated. Its original site was an Overton trail stagecoach stop called Rattlesnake Station. A post office, a farmhouse, and a few clapboard structures were nestled in the foothills of the Sawtooth Range, where snowy peaks soar above 10,000 feet. The outpost served a gunslinging clientele of trappers, miners, and explorers, and, true to the romance of the American west, survival there required a will and an ability to fight. But in 1883, the Oregon Short Line railroad laid tracks seven miles southeast, on the Snake River Plateau. A more comfortable life beckoned, so the town moved. And that’s when Mountain Home lost its soul.

Its rebirth began in August 1943, when the U.S. Army Air Forces built an airfield on the outskirts of town to train B-24 Liberator crews. Soon the base expanded, until it encompassed 134,000 acres. In 1991, the F-15 Eagles arrived. Built by McDonnell Douglas (now Boeing), the F-15 made its first flight on July 27, 1972, and the C model remains the only fighter in the U.S. arsenal designed exclusively for air-to-air combat. Its pilots have restored to Mountain Home the sensibility of the gunslinger, whose singular pursuit leaves no safety net: It’s kill or be killed. Continue reading →

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April 17, 2010 by admin

OnEarth | Spring 2010

Renewable Energy Catches On In Red America Download PDF

Kern County, California, went Republican by 18 points in the last election. Now it’s captivated by wind and solar power. Here’s why.

On a crisp, cloudless morning in November 2002, Susan Hansen stood atop California’s Cache Peak clutching a satchel containing the ashes of her husband, Homer. Susan, now 75, had reached the summit on a rock-strewn trail, climbing for an hour through scrub oak, bull pine, and juniper. The 6,676-foot-high Cache Peak, which protrudes from the Tehachapi Range about 40 miles east of Bakersfield, is situated almost wholly within the Hansen ranch.

Susan’s in-laws are also buried on the mountain. In 1946 they purchased the property—more than 50 square miles—from the Southern Pacific Railroad. “The first one up was my father-in-law,” Susan tells me when I visit her in December. “It took 12 people to carry his casket to the top, and we had to dynamite a hole in the rock for the grave.” After that fiasco, the family decided cremation would be easier. Once her in-laws had passed away, the Hansens divided up the property and sold their shares, except for Susan and Homer, who kept an 11,000-acre plot. There they started a cow-calf operation that at its peak had 1,000 head of cattle. Continue reading →

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