Outside February 2013

DONALD MIRALLE To capture 2,000 triathletes swimming across Kailua Bay at October’s Ironman World Championship in Kona, Hawaii, Miralle needed to get above the action. “It’s the only way to show the madness of that mass start,” says the San Diego photographer. After shooting this photo from a helicopter at 7 A.M., he spent the next ten hours on a motorcycle, following the athletes through all three stages of the 140-mile race. “I competed in a few triathlons years ago but nothing like this. It’s incredibly inspiring what these people can do.” THE TOOLS: Nikon D4, 70–200mm f/2.8 lens, ISO 400, f/2.8, 1/1,600 second KARI MEDIG Medig shot Revelstoke, British Columbia, skiers Audray Ayotte and Gurpreet Chandna skinning up 13,000-foot Rohtang Pass on the last day of a three-week backcountry…

Slow-Cooked Adventure I barely remember this, but apparently more than five years ago we green-lighted an assignment for contributing editor Nick Heil to profile a 51-year-old adventurer named Erden Eruc. It was 2007, and Eruc, a Turkishborn engineer, had recently announced his absurdly ambitious plan to embark on a solo human-powered circumnavigation of the earth, including rows across the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans—all part of an effort to honor his hero and mentor, Swedish adventurer Göran Kropp. Assignment in hand, Heil began trying to coordinate a place to meet up with Eruc during the journey, but the logistics proved impossible. The story was shifted to the back burner, where it stayed, barely simmering, for another four years, a span during which Heil had time to write a fantastic book…

Software engineer ERDEN ERUC spent five years walking, biking, and rowing the globe (“Around the World in 1,026 Days,” page 62). Only one object made it through every leg of the 37,000-mile journey: a quarter-size basalt rock. “A friend of mine, Göran Kropp, fell and died while I was belaying him up a climb. A week later, I returned to where he had fallen and picked up a little stone covered in his dried blood. That rock came with me—in my chest pocket, in a pouch on my handlebars, in my raft—around the world. The blood has long since worn off. Someday I will plant it atop Everest.”…

LOVE AND TERROR In our December issue we published “Honey Stinger,” the story of eco-activist Eric McDavid, who planned a bomb attack with the help of an alluring FBI informant and was sentenced to prison for 20 years. Was McDavid set up? Readers responded fiercely to the story. Outside readers should take an interest in all types of eco-activism. I don’t condone terrorism, but I dislike entrapment even more. In the case of McDavid, that’s what it is. JIM KELLER ONLINE While there is certainly no problem, legally or morally, with peaceful protest or dissent, acts of terrorism—ecological or otherwise—are illegal and despicable. Why do eco-activists like McDavid think they can trump others’ rights? If someone is so morally shallow and suggestible that all it takes is a word of…

“One clear, sterile autumn morning—September 2006, to be exact—a hand not entirely my own but that nonetheless belonged to me smashed a beer bottle against a rock wall I once climbed in Rifle Mountain Park. It hunted a shard of glass. The hand, once rough with climber callus and ropy with veins, had withered sickbed soft and pallid. Now it had designs—a theatrical slashing at the wrists—on its paranoid and bloated host.” —From Death Grip: A Climber’s Escape from Benzo Madness (MacMillan, $25), Matt Samet’s new memoir about his addiction to climbing and prescription drugs, which began as an Outside story (“Beauty in the Breakdown,” June 2010)…

A suggestion to make the magazine better: Can you include updates on past stories? What happened to the soldier who walked into the wilderness (“Why Noah Went to the Woods,” by Mark Sundeen, May 2012)? Has he been found or heard from again?1 Or the story about the women who have disappeared in Canada on the lonely highway (“The Vanishing,” by Bob Friel, July 2012)?2 And how about that young man who stole the airplanes and boats (“Game Over,” by Bob Friel, March 2012)? Is he still in prison?3 MIKE SLY SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS Happy to help, Mike: 1. Last August, Noah Pippin’s remains were found in Montana’s Bob Marshall Wilderness, 18 miles from where he was last seen nearly two years earlier. The coroner’s report has yet to be…