Outside September 2014

While waiting in the lineup for the start of the 2014 Fiji Women’s Pro competition near the island of Tavarua last May, Walsh watched surfing icon Laird Hamilton paddle into a wave on a SUP. “Because of the fisheye lens I was using, it looks like I’m some distance away, but it was maybe two feet,” says the photographer, who lives in New South Wales, Australia. “I got the shot without running into him, and we both made it out of the barrel.” THE TOOLS: GoPro Hero3+ Black Edition, 2.8mm fisheye lens, ISO 400, 1/4,000 second Jeremiah Watt Last June, while traveling through Zion National Park in Utah, Watt captured Cincinnati’s Ben Ritchey making his way up a ladder-like series of depressions in the 140-foot sandstone face of Kolob Canyon.…

A Simple Act The summer between my sophomore and junior years in college, I took a job on a student work crew building and repairing trails in the Frank Church–River of No Return Wilderness in Idaho, one of the largest roadless areas in the continental U.S. To get to the site, we had to fly 53 miles in a Cessna and land on a patchy runway at the Indian Creek guard station. Then we hiked a few miles to a pristine floodplain along the banks of the Middle Fork of the Salmon River and set up camp. I remember nearly every detail of the 55 days that followed. Getting up at 5:45 for breakfast. The mountain lion I saw lapping water across the river while I fished for cutthroat. The…

Still Rockin’ I WAS STANDING at Glacier Point, one of Yosemite National Park’s most iconic vistas, at 5 A.M. during this summer’s peak tourist season. The campgrounds were full. In a few hours, shuttles would be circling in a slow parade. But here at sunrise, a crime was about to unfold, and I had received a tip that I should come witness it. After a few minutes, a man emerged from the woods behind me. He wore a wingsuit, a parachute pack, and a mask. The man walked to the edge of a cliff and onto an overhanging rock. He paused and said, “Three, two, one—see ya.” Then he leaned toward the chasm. This year marks Yosemite’s 150th anniversary, an event commemorated by no fewer than 200 Park Service–sanctioned programs…

REBELS WITH A CAUSE JOHN SA LAT HÉ A Swiss blacksmith, Salathé first visited Yosemite on doctor’s orders in the early 1940s. (Salathé believed his wife was poisoning him.) He pioneered several iconic routes in the valley and invented the modern climbing piton. In his later years, he joined a religious cult and roamed the mountains, surviving on wild plants. WA RREN HARDING The original bad boy of Camp 4, Harding lived hard—drinking, carousing, and otherwise fulfilling his motto, Semper Farcisimus! He completed some of Yosemite’s boldest firsts, beating his rival, the purist Royal Robbins, up the face of El Capitan in 1958. BEVERLY JOHNSON Big Wall Bev arrived at Camp 4 in the late sixties. In 1973, she participated in the first all-female ascent of El Cap, then completed…

ON SEPTEMBER 13, in Beijing, drivers will take their positions at the premier event of the world’s newest motor-sports league, the FIA Formula E Series. TV viewers—as many as 100 million, by some estimates—are bound to focus on what’s missing: the decibels. Though the new e-cars look almost identical to their IndyCar siblings, they sound more like hushed jet engines. In a testament to how far electric cars have come, the muted roar may be the most significant difference. The engines under the hoods were developed by British racing outfit McLaren, and their batteries have enough juice to power the e-cars for roughly half the one-hour race time, at which point drivers switch vehicles during a pitstop. Fully charged, the cars can reach top speeds of 150 miles per hour.…

IN THE 1970S and 1980s, Texaco extracted more than a billion barrels of oil from the Ecuadorean rainforest but spilled an estimated 400,000. In 1993, locals filed a class action against the company. That case is ongoing—it’s a legal version of the Amazon, serpentine and vast, with the company still fighting an Ecuadoran judge’s record-setting $19 billion verdict—and is the subject of Paul M. Barrett’s serious but uneven book Law of the Jungle: The $19 Billion Legal Battle Over Oil in the Rain Forest and the Lawyer Who’d Stop at Nothing to Win It (Crown, $26). Barrett, a senior writer at Bloomberg Businessweek and author of the bestselling book Glock, focuses on the activist lawyer, Steven Donziger, who turned the case into a no-holds-barred crusade against Chevron, which acquired Texaco…