2008 archives

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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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July 31, 2008 by admin

MEN’S JOURNAL | JULY 2008

Into the Great Wide Open Download PDF

For a first taste of Alaska, it’s hard to beat a week of exploring in Wrangell-St. Elias. Bigger then Switzerland, it’s America’s largest and emptiest national park.

There are only three rules you have to remember when whitewater rafting in Alaska,” says my 26-year-old river guide Gaia Marrs. “First rule: Don’t fall out of the boat. Second rule: Don’t fall out of the boat. Third rule: Don’t fall out of the boat.” It’s July, and I’m lying supine in the sand on a riverbank in Alaska’s Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. My head is wedged between granite boulders, my legs are pinned together like disposable chopsticks, and my arms are splayed perpendicular to my torso. Marrs is standing over me, and I can see myself in her sunglasses. I look like a fallen scarecrow. In the event you end up in the water, the position you’re in now is how you’d want to go downriver,” she continues. “Feet first, on your back, so your butt hits the rocks before your head. Oh, and if you try to swim, use the backstroke. Anything else and you’ll probably drown.” Continue reading →

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July 29, 2008 by admin

KITEBOARDING | JULY 2008

Living La Vida Roques Download PDF

Do you dream of escaping your cubical for a kiting Shangri-La where sessions never stop? Meet Elias Percales and Lieselotte Vieweg—they fled conventional jobs for Los Roques to live every kiter’s fantasy.

Elias Pernales unfurls a map on his living room floor. “This is where we’ll launch our kites for the downwinder,” he says, pointing to a landless splotch of blue. I crouch next to him for closer scrutiny. We’re looking at a map of Los Roques, a Caribbean atoll that’s part of Venezuela. I arrived here four days ago. “There’s nothing there but open sea,” I inform him. “How do you expect us to rig?”

“The map is wrong,” Pernales scoffs. “Don’t worry. We’ll find an island. Everything will be fine.” Continue reading →

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July 2, 2008 by admin

Men’s Journal | July 2008

Six-Pack Abs, Made to Order Download PDF

Men tired of working their asses off in the gym and not seeing results are now turning to a radical new surgery to get the perfect stomach.

It’s 12 o’clock on Friday in Denver, Colorado, and Stephen Riebold, a 38-year-old engineer, has just stood up from his chair at Panera Bread Café and lifted his shirt to reveal to me (and the other 80 people eating here) the most ripped six-pack abs I’ve ever seen on a human being, Batman included. His obliques appear ready to burst through his skin. His serratus are those of Adonis. His abdominis are rippling quicksilver.

It’s all the more astounding considering Riebold is not racing in the Tour de France or competing in the Ironman this fall. In fact, he’s not a pro athlete at all; he’s barely a jock, and other than his stomach, he isn’t even that slim (his face and arms are a little pudgy). His miraculous midsection is the result of a novel procedure called high-definition liposculpture. It’s a more advanced cousin to conventional lipo, which uses a metal tube to suck up fat like a Shop-Vac. For Riebold’s procedure, however, which he had done five months ago, Denver plastic surgeon John Millard had stuck a VASER (Vibration Amplification of Sound Energy at Resonance)—a sleek stainless-steel probe the length of a chopstick—into his gut and did what lipo cannot: He sculpted Riebold’s existing body fat so that it molded to his abdominal muscles like shrink-wrap. Continue reading →

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April 10, 2008 by admin

Mother Jones | March/April 2008

Mulch Madness Download PDF

Cypress forests are the state’s best defense against hurricanes. So why are loggers clear-cutting the last trees?

Dean Wilson slams forward the throttle on his 18-foot aluminum bateau—a flat-bottom skiff that he welded together himself—and catapults us downriver. It’s April and I’m in the Atchafalaya Basin, the nation’s largest swamp—1.4 million acres (roughly 10 times the size of Chicago) wedged between the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico in southern Louisiana.

Dressed in full camo and knee-high rubber boots, Wilson, 45, skims through a bayou only a couple of feet deep, and nearly pitches me overboard when he swerves left to avoid a hapless butterfly that’s fluttered into our path. A minute later he yells “Duck!” then cranks the wheel. We slide to the right, doing a NASCAR-style drift turn into a smaller canal. Sharp reeds and spiky underbrush scrape the hull; it sounds like a thousand swamp trolls clawing at our boat. Fearing decapitation, I wedge my head between my knees as overhanging branches graze my back. Continue reading →

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March 24, 2008 by admin

Men’s Journal, March 2008

Sudden Death Download PDF

When active and healthy Michael Behar is awakened one night with palpitations, he learns of a potentially fatal condition that causes athletes’ hearts to fail without warning.

I’m still loopy from the anesthesia when a blurry silhouette stoops over my hospital bed and announces, “You’re gonna live.” It’s my cardiologist, Nelson Trujillo. Thirty minutes earlier, while I snoozed blithely, Trujillo shoved a hollow plastic catheter through the skin above my right groin and into my femoral artery. He snaked the flexible tube north about two feet, through my aorta, until he entered my right coronary artery. Into the catheter he squirted a “radiocontrast agent” that tinted my blood with a reflective dye. As a technician steadied a hefty rectangular imaging device called a fluoroscope over my torso, Trujillo watched an adjacent monitor that displayed the dyed blood circulating through my beating heart.

The procedure, an angiogram, is typically a last step for cardiologists trying to figure out if your heart is in serious trouble. For the most part it’s administered to old guys with beer guts who complain of chest pains, or used on post–heart attack victims to survey the carnage. “The angio lets us see what happened and what’s left,” Trujillo said. I’m neither old nor obese, and I can definitively confirm that at 39, my heart, thus far, has not attacked me. Still, my doctor had urged me to “get poked,” as he put it, because of what brought me to his office in the first place. Continue reading →

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March 9, 2008 by admin

Air & Space | February/March 2008

Anatomy of a Search Download PDF

Why the U.S. Civil Air Patrol couldn’t find Steve Fossett.

“You are looking for something that doesn’t belong: burned foliage, glinting metal, scorch marks on the ground,” explains Cynthia Ryan, who is sitting next to me in our Cessna 182, making notes about our flight on a yellow legal pad.

It is a crisp and cloudless September morning, and I am serving as a “scanner” on this Civil Air Patrol flight. The job is painful: With my face smushed against the rear starboard window, I squint through the blinding morning sun to scrutinize a jumble of craggy peaks, badlands, arroyos, and withering scrub. Ryan points out Mount Grant, an 11,500-foot-high monolith at 10 o’clock, just as the pilot rolls us sideways to avoid hitting it. “That’s one son-of-a-gun to search because it’s so rugged,” she says. Continue reading →

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January 23, 2008 by admin

AARP MAGAZINE | JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2008

Flowin’ in the Wind Download PDF

In North Carolina and across the country, older adventurers are going crazy for kiteboarding: a fun and waaay-fast watersport.

I’m kiteboarding with Mary Hammond-Tooke across Pamlico Sound, a 300-square-mile estuary of waist-deep water ringed by North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Mary, a 63-year-old former midwife, is attached to a behemoth blue-and-white parabolic kite, dwarfing her with its 25-foot wingspan. Her technique is careful and deliberate: one errant maneuver and the kite could slingshot her airborne or plow her into the water. But Mary fearlessly dips her steering-control bar and the 100-foot kite lines snap taut, sending the nylon sail into a power dive that catapults her downwind. She leans back and throws her weight into her hips, edging her board and carving a deep upwind tack that ejects a foamy white rooster tail. Now she’s slicing through the balmy water with ballerina precision at close to 30 miles per hour—startlingly fast for a relative beginner who has been kiteboarding for only about a year.

“I love the speed, the thrill of moving with the wind,” says Mary, lean and limber, with the body of a long-distance runner. “It makes me feel alive.” After 20 minutes of riding, as we zoom across the sound, I finally get close enough to see her irrepressible grin—the adrenaline surge is working its magic. The kiteboarding rush is instant and intense, a giddy high that lubricates muscles and masks fatigue. I’ve kited five-hour sessions and hardly felt tired (though there’s a morning-after effect strangely akin to a hangover). Continue reading →

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