In 2014, the federal government rounded up Cliven Bundy’s cattle over a matter of unpaid grazing fees. So the Bundy family gathered a posse and took them back at gunpoint. Two years later, they took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. The Bundys are making a habit of taking on the federal government and winning. For the past two years, reporter Leah Sottile has been following this story, trying to figure out what all this means for the future of public lands in the American West, and wond...
May 15, 2018•45 min
Kellee Edwards had a dream of getting her own show on the Travel Channel. She also had a plan. As a black woman trying to break into the overwhelmingly white and male world of travel television, she figured she would have to be overqualified to get noticed. So she got certified as a scuba diver, learned to pilot her own aircraft, and traveled solo to remote corners of the planet. In just a few years, she went from working as a bank teller to hosting the Travel Channel show Mysterious Islands. Ou...
May 08, 2018•24 min•Ep. 67
Distance runner Alexi Pappas is the rare dual-threat of Olympic athlete and movie star. In the 2016 film Tracktown, which she wrote, directed, and plays the lead character in, she set out to capture the running-obsessed culture of Eugene, Oregon—a place where recreational runners share the trails with pros, and local farms and butchers step up as beef and vegetable sponsors for hungry athletes. Outside contributor Stephanie Joyce talked to Pappas about how her life as an Olympic hopeful translat...
May 01, 2018•23 min•Ep. 66
One day in 2005 or 2006, a young wolf in Idaho headed west. He swam across the Snake River to Oregon, which was then outside the gray wolf’s range. After he established a territory, he became the most controversial canid in the state. Dubbed OR4 by Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, he was the alpha male of the first pack to live in Oregon in more than half a century. For years, biologist Russ Morgan tracked him, collared him, counted his pups, weighed him, photographed him, and protected h...
Apr 24, 2018•44 min•Ep. 65
Maverick’s, the monster surf break off the Northern California coast, has long been a proving ground for the world’s best big-wave surfers. But the contest held there most years has never included women, despite the fact that female surfers have been dropping in on giant swells for decades. In fact, the inaugural event at Maverick’s, held in 1999 and called Men Who Ride Mountains, took place several weeks after Sarah Gerhardt caught her first wave there. She wasn’t a professional surfer—she was ...
Apr 17, 2018•31 min
After building Patagonia into an internationally renowned apparel brand, the company’s first CEO, Kris Tompkins, walked away from the job, following her heart to South America. She landed on a small farm in Chile, where she and her soon-to-be husband, The North Face founder Doug Tompkins, set to work conserving one of the last wild places on earth. But just as their dream of creating a network of parks stretching across Argentina and Chile was coming to fruition in 2015, she lost Doug in a kayak...
Apr 10, 2018•22 min•Ep. 63
It was the kind of disaster that wasn’t supposed to happen anymore. On February 11, 2017, the fishing vessel Destination disappeared in the Bering Sea on its way to the crab grounds. The boat went missing with an experienced crew, in unremarkable weather conditions, yet there was no mayday and rescue crews could find no life raft or survivors. For the past year, reporter Stephanie May Joyce has been following the investigation into what went wrong and how this mysterious tragedy has changed Alas...
Apr 03, 2018•41 min
Apparently nobody told Bear Grylls that reality TV stars never have long careers. A dozen years after the cheeky Briton exploded onto American television, the king of survival entertainment is charging harder than ever, guiding A-listers into the wild for his NBC show Running Wild with Bear Grylls and launching innovative new series for Facebook and Netflix. He’s also building an adventure theme park in England and hosting a new survival race this spring outside Los Angeles that’s open to anyone...
Mar 20, 2018•31 min
In her acclaimed 2012 memoir, Wild, Cheryl Strayed delivered a fresh take on outdoor writing—a redemption story set on the Pacific Crest Trail. The book spent seven weeks on the New York Times Best Seller List and reminded people everywhere that a grueling journey through the wilderness can help us overcome almost anything. At last year’s SXSW conference, Tim Ferriss sat down with Strayed for an episode of The Tim Ferriss Show to ask her about her creative process and philosophy. He has a way of...
Mar 06, 2018•1 hr 37 min
In 2009, Canadian researcher Geoff Hill asked park managers across North America what problems they needed solved. Every single one of them said human waste. Since then, Hill has been on a quest to figure out what to do about the fact that U.S. national parks get more than 300 million visitors each year, and at some point most of them have to take a dump. So far, every solution has failed. And so with every trip to the outhouse, we’re contaminating groundwater, spreading disease, and costing par...
Feb 20, 2018•32 min
If you’ve ever beaten yourself up after eating an entire pint of ice cream, know this: it’s really not your fault. According to obesity researcher and neurobiologist Stephen Guyenet, author of The Hungry Brain and founder of the wellness and science blog Whole Health Source, millions of years of evolution have hardwired us to seek out sugary, fatty, and salty foods. All those calories kept us alive back when we were hunter-gathers. Today they just make us fat. Outside editor Christopher Keyes si...
Feb 06, 2018•34 min
On the 833-mile border between Finland and Russia, a band of elite Finnish soldiers are preparing to defend the country if Russia decides it wants to again redraw the map of Europe. With tensions still high after the Kremlin’s invasion of Crimea and Ukraine, writer David Wolman went to Finland to find out what this tiny band of Finns can possibly do if the Russian war machine heads their way. Quite a lot, it turns out.
Jan 23, 2018•22 min
To write her three bestselling books on the ocean, Susan Casey went deep with great white sharks in California, big-wave surfing icon Laird Hamilton in Hawaii, and wild dolphins around the world. Her willingness to literally immerse herself in the topic of the ocean—she’s a former competitive swimmer—has allowed her to craft captivating stories that chronicle our relationship with the sea. And yet she’s a relative newcomer to the life aquatic. In the mid-nineties, she was Outside’s creative dire...
Jan 09, 2018•35 min
Falls are the leading cause of death in the backcountry. Nothing else comes close. And while many are freak accidents that amount to nothing more than bad luck, some are more nuanced and interesting—and personal. If you found yourself stuck at the bottom of a canyon with a broken leg, what would you do? And why? In this episode, we go inside the thought process of a real-life survivor—one who happens to host a podcast about survival.
Dec 19, 2017•46 min
Andy Petranek and Michael Stanwyck know fitness. Petranek was a former adventure racer and RedBull Athlete before founding one of the first CrossFit gyms. Soon after, Stanwyck walked in looking for a new type of workout and quickly became CrossFit LA’s manager. But while their classes made gym members stronger, the pair longed to have a more holistic impact on their clients. In 2011, they created the Whole Life Challenge, a six-week program that focuses on seven lifestyle changes that optimize w...
Dec 12, 2017•42 min
Bee venom is similar to a rattlesnake’s. It rapidly disperses in your tissue, and when you’re stung, the pain you feel is a combination of proteins and peptides attacking your cell membranes. Each sting contains enough venom to incapacitate a small mouse, but bees won’t really hurt you unless you’re allergic. Or at least, that’s what you thought until you disturbed a hive of Africanized bees, which have been known to chase attackers for more than ten hours.
Dec 05, 2017•32 min
There are several thousand species of mushroom, but only a handful that will kill you. And the toxins found in poisonous mushrooms are some of the deadliest natural poisons on earth. Just seven milligrams—one quarter of a grain of rice—is enough to kill an adult. When you picked some mushrooms off the forest floor, you planned to make a nice risotto. But now you’re in the hospital, fighting for your life.
Nov 28, 2017•28 min
What if you could opt out of society and go live in a completely self-contained glass bubble in the desert? You and your team would be cut off from the rest of society. For two years, you’d have to grow every morsel of food that you wanted to eat and fix anything and everything that went wrong. That was the plan for the team of scientists that entered Biosphere 2 in the mid-nineties. You may remember that they didn’t make it, but why was it the people on the outside who broke the glass and ended...
Nov 21, 2017•27 min
What happens to people who are swept out to sea? Some survive for months and even years, alone in lifeboats eating whatever they can catch and drinking rainwater. In this episode we ask you, the listener, to imagine a surfing session gone very wrong when a strong offshore wind blows you out into the ocean. You’re alone on your board, at the mercy of the weather. No one knows you’re out here and you have no way of calling for help. Do you have what it takes to endure until a rescue arrives? And t...
Nov 14, 2017•31 min
As we get ready to roll out new Science of Survival episodes beginning November 14, we wanted to replay the one that started it all. This thrilling re-creation of the classic Outside feature by Peter Stark leads the listener through a series of plausible mishaps on a bitterly cold night: a car accident on a lonely road, a broken ski binding that foils a backcountry escape, a disorienting tumble in the snow, and a slow descent into delirious hypothermia before (spoiler alert!) a dramatic rescue. ...
Nov 07, 2017•29 min
Peak performance has always been about getting as close to your genetic potential as possible. The limits of your training, nutrition, and recovery are dictated by your DNA. But what if they weren’t? What if you could change the genetic code you were born with? As sequencing DNA gets cheaper and faster, and gene-editing tools get more precise and easy to use, we’re progressing toward a world where we might all have perfect DNA for our chosen sport—and be able to change it whenever we want. But g...
Oct 31, 2017•29 min
If you want to understand sleep deprivation, you want to talk to a member of the Navy SEALs, who go nearly a week without rest during training. And there’s probably no better Navy SEAL to talk to than Kirk Parsley, the physician who started noticing all sorts of problems with his fellow elite soldiers. They weren’t recovering from workouts, they had trouble concentrating, and they were emotionally unstable. The culprit: they weren’t getting enough zzz’s. After a decade studying the benefits of s...
Oct 24, 2017•34 min
Several decades ago, radio producer Scott Carrier and his brother Dave tried to chase down an antelope on foot. That might sound crazy, but Dave was an evolutionary biologist and had just come up with a radical idea: during the heat of the day, humans can outrun most any creature, even one of the world’s fastest animals. His theory was that humans had evolved as endurance predators, able to hunt without weapons. So the brothers gave it a shot, and Scott produced a story about the efforts that ab...
Oct 17, 2017•47 min
For most athletes, achieving peak performance means training hard, eating right, and maybe some stretching. But when you get to the elite level, where everyone’s doing that, it’s the mental game that makes winners and losers. How hard can you push your body? How much pain can you tolerate? How can you avoid getting psyched out before a big event? If you’re a top-tier professional athlete trying to train your brain, you’re likely going to turn to Michael Gervais, a renowned expert in high-perform...
Oct 10, 2017•35 min
Kevin Fedarko is a celebrated and well-heeled journalist, accustomed to dropping in on an exotic place and extracting a story, often in less than a week. But in 2004, he left his job at Outside and went looking for something deeper and more meaningful: a story forged over months and years. He ended up at the bottom of the Grand Canyon at the helm of a boat full of poop called the Jackass.
Oct 03, 2017•58 min
More than two decades after he radically transformed big-wave surfing, Laird Hamilton is still a dominant force in the sport. As detailed in the new documentary Take Every Wave, Hamilton is again pushing the edge with his new obsession, hydrofoil surfing. His wife, Gabby Reece, is a former professional volleyball player, model, author, and currently the host of the NBC reality show Strong. At their home in Malibu, Hamilton and Reece have created an elite training boot camp where they torture the...
Sep 26, 2017•33 min
Killer frogs! Forest-destroying moths! Bird-eating mongooses! These may sound like biblical plagues, but they’re the result of bad human decisions. All too often, after an invasive species shows up in an ecosystem and wreaks havoc, our response is to import another species that will eat the first one. Then, of course, the predator turns out to be even worse for the environment. Except now, maybe, we’ve figured out how to do biocontrol right. And as it turns out, some of those infamous mistakes w...
Sep 20, 2017•34 min
Jack Johnson is known as the world’s mellowest pop star. A surfer raised on the north shore of Hawaii, his acoustic strumming has been the default soundtrack to good-times beach living for more than 15 years. But these days, something’s up with Jack Johnson. He’s decided that in the current political and social climate, quietly supporting environmental non-profits and greening the music industry isn't enough. He’s ready to speak up, beginning with his new album, All the Light Above It Too. Execu...
Sep 06, 2017•22 min
Rebecca Rusch is called the "Queen of Pain" for a reason. She's a three-time world champion in the 24-Hour Mountain Bike race, the 2011 National XC single-speed champion, and she's won the Leadville 100 mountain bike race four times. But a couple years ago, Rusch decided to take on an entirely new kind of pain. It would involve an epic ride along the Ho Chi Minh trail to find the crash site where her father, a U.S. Air Force pilot, was shot down when she was just three years old. Her emotional j...
Aug 23, 2017•24 min
In 2012, Vanessa Garrison co-founded GirlTrek, an organization with a simple goal: get women walking for 30 minutes a day. Now 110,000 walkers strong, GirlTrek is a national force. The story of GirlTrek is about health, justice, power, and survival. But mostly it’s the story of trying to change your community, and the world, through something as simple as going for a walk. To understand how GirlTrek was started, how it blew up, and where it’s going next, Outside contributing editor Florence Will...
Aug 09, 2017•23 min
