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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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January 24, 2010 by admin

Mother Jones | January/February 2010

The Mustang Redemption: Dangerous felons are being trained to tame wild horses. But can the horses tame the men? Download PDF

George Reynolds is a 53-year-old felon. Sentenced in July 2008 for third-degree sexual assault against a minor, he’ll spend up to twelve years in prison, with a chance for parole in four. Standing just shy of six feet tall, Reynolds has blunt shoulders, powerful arms, a shock of brown hair, icy blue eyes, and a bushy Hulk Hogan mustache that frames his chin and creates a permanent frown. He’s an imposing figure, a guy you’d never want to cross. But at the moment, Reynolds looks terrified and minuscule next to his adversary, a 900-pound mustang that is very pissed off. This is the Wyoming State Honor Farm, where convicts train, or “gentle,” wild horses that have been rounded up from the high plains as part of a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) program to control mustang populations on federal lands. The Honor Farm admits good-behavior inmates from higher security penitentiaries. Reynolds transferred here in October 2008 to join a group of 25 prisoners who domesticate the horses so they can be offered for adoption. Continue reading →

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October 31, 2009 by admin

Ski | October 2009

Allison Gannett Download PDF

Saving Our Snow

Alison Gannett, a 43-year-old world champion extreme freeskier who lives in Crested Butte, Colo., was supposed to meet me at her place this morning. But last night, a fast-moving storm dropped nine inches of fluff. Gannett calls at 9, panting. “Let’s meet at the North Face T-bar at 11:30.” I get there five minutes late, and wait awhile before I realize that she has already split. North Face accesses Crested Butte’s double-black-diamond and extreme backcountry terrain, where Gannett has been doing laps since first chair. My cell phone rings again. “I’m headed to Third Bowl,” she says. “See you in an hour.” After taking a few runs myself, I arrive back at the lift just as Gannett comes tearing through and—without slowing down—plops herself onto the next T-bar just as it rounds the bull wheel. I scoot on beside her. “I’ve lived here 20 years and just skied two new lines I’ve never done before,” she announces. “Both of them scared the hell out of me.”

Gannett cannot sit still. She swings her skis, fiddles with her goggles and fires off text messages from her iPhone. During the two days we’ll spend riding the lifts together, she never removes the pole straps from her wrists, like she might leap off should the lift stop for more than 30 seconds. It wouldn’t be her first time hucking a 50-footer. Though retired from competitive freeskiing (“I stopped after knee surgery No. 7”), Gannett leads ski-mountaineering expeditions. In 2001 she was among the first group to ski the northwest face of Hanuman Tibba, a 19,500-foot Himalayan peak. In Crested Butte, she teaches avalanche safety clinics and runs a steeps camp for women. Continue reading →

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October 24, 2009 by admin

Backpacker | October 2009

Vanishing Act Download PDF

Disappear into Yellowstone’s secret northern fringe, store where you’ll find a rejuvenated landscape and total solitude (except for the bison and grizzlies).

Last night I pitched my tent at 8,500 feet atop the Buffalo Plateau, in a mile-wide meadow laced with spring-fed brooks. From the campsite, overlooking the remote northeast corner of Yellowstone National Park, I have the option of descending back to the base of the plateau and making a horseshoe end-run around its north side. But a ranger in the backcountry office had told me about an off-trail shortcut through a lodgepole burn that would save four miles. Of course, like most cross-country bushwhacks, it was debatable if the “shortcut” would actually save time. I knew it would require acrobatic scrambling over and under fallen timber. But who can pass up the allure of such a little-used route? Continue reading →

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August 23, 2009 by admin

Kiteboarding | August 2009

A Cuban Odyssey Download PDF

Six kiters embark on a 1,300-mile trip across the Caribbean’s best-kept secret to explore what could be the largest untapped flat-water playground on Earth.

Last summer, I began studying the north coast of Cuba with Google Earth, and what I saw was electrifying. An aquatic labyrinth of mangrove cays and sapphire lagoons emerged 80 miles from Havana in the Archipiélago de Sabana and ended in the east near Baracoa, where, on Oct. 27, 1492, Christopher Columbus ?rst spotted the island from the deck of his carrack. Satellite imagery revealed a wide coral shelf paralleling the shore. Between the reef and the mainland is an enormous inland sound sprinkled with hundreds of tiny cays. From almost every cay extends snow-white sandbars that enclose aquamarine pools. All told, Cuba’s northern coastal waters harbor a 6,500-square-mile slick—large enough to encompass the ?ats at South Padre Island some 25 times over.

For a wind check, I called Scott Stripling, a fellow kiter based in Puerto Rico who is a meteorologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Stripling has contacts at Cuba’s Instituto de Meteorología (Institute of Meteorology), renowned for its forecasting prowess. (Fidel Castro pumps gobs of cash into the national sciences.) Stripling managed to obtain climate records from his colleagues in Havana. The data was intoxicating: In an e-mail, Stripling said the north coast gets slammed with consistent 20-knot winds from November through April. Continue reading →

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April 24, 2009 by admin

OnEarth | Spring 2009

Selling the Sun Download PDF

A Man, A Plan, and the Dawn of America’s Solar Future

“I am a capitalist,” announces Jigar Shah, the 34-year-old founder of SunEdison. We have just sat down for dinner at a bustling noodle joint in Washington, D.C. Upon hearing Shah, who is wearing pressed khakis and a crisp blue oxford shirt, the couple at the next table nearly choke on their pad thai. A brash entrepreneur banging the capitalist drum isn’t going to win many friends here, especially now. It’s December, and a few blocks away congressional leaders are debating whether to give foundering automakers billions of dollars in bailout money. Ineptitude has ruined Detroit, greed has soiled Wall Street, and Democrats on Capitol Hill are counting the days until their guy steps into the White House.

But Shah can’t help himself. An iconoclast among greens, he’s a devoted environmentalist who champions market economics and believes American business acumen can conquer climate change. Shah has spent the past six years leveraging his convictions to build North America’s largest and most successful provider of solar energy. Continue reading →

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March 23, 2009 by admin

Backpacker | March 2009

Globetrotter Download PDF

Leo Le Bon, the Godfather of trekking.

In this interview the founder of adventure travel dishes on his favorite wild places, oddest encounters, and the world’s next great trekking destinations. In 1967, Leo Le Bon led a group of Northern California clients on the first commercial trek in Nepal, and it was wildly successful. So the Belgium-born travel agent created a company offering even more exotic journeys, and in so doing jumpstarted a new kind of tourism: adventure travel. Le Bon pioneered treks in Tibet and China, the Andes and Greenland, and introduced walking safaris in Kenya—firsts for all of these countries. Mountain Travel Sobek, the company he co-founded (and retired from in 1990), still guides trekkers to the unexplored fringe: 160 trips to 72 countries are planned for 2009. We caught up with Le Bon, now 72, just before he left for Everest Base Camp last October, with his wife and a cadre of friends, to celebrate the anniversary of his inaugural journey there 40 years ago.

How did your first trek to Nepal get off the ground?
I put an ad in the Sierra Club Bulletin for a trek in Nepal—and got 100 replies in two weeks! Ultimately, 30 people signed up for what was the very first commercial trek in Nepal. It cost $400 per trekker, or $2,620 in 2008 dollars.

Continue reading →

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March 19, 2009 by admin

Best Life | March 2009

The New Science of Hair Growth Download PDF

Robot follicular surgeons, invisible micrografts, in vitro hair cloning … scientists have a wider array of weapons than ever before in the war on baldness. Many believe we’re finally on the verge of banishing it forever.

Brandishing a syringe the size of a caulking gun, hair-transplant surgeon James Harris, MD, injects local anesthetic into the scalp of a male patient, a married financial analyst in his early forties who has asked not to be identified. We’ll call him Scott. For five hours, I’ve been watching Dr. Harris perform a hair transplant called surgically advanced follicular extraction, or SAFE. A follicular unit is a miniature, self-contained hair factory embedded in the skin. Each square centimeter of human scalp contains 80 to 120 follicular units, and each of those has one to four hairs.

Though Scott is sitting upright, his scalp is a gruesome battlefield. Rivulets of blood seep from thousands of BB-size puncture wounds. A trash can is brimming with blood-soaked gauze. But Scott feels nothing. He’s watching CNBC’s financial roundup on a wall-mounted TV while thumbing through e-mails on his BlackBerry, oblivious to the mayhem topside. Continue reading →

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