Outside Podcast

Science can’t fully explain why and how tornadoes form. But on May 31, 2013, all the factors we do understand pointed towards off-the-charts risk in central Oklahoma. Hundreds of amateur storm chasers, professional meteorologists, and thrill-seekers flocked to the area expecting an incredible storm. What actually touched down blew them all away. 

Back when men still believed the “weaker sex” were inferior climbers, Arlene Blum led a women’s ascent of Annapurna, the world’s tenth-highest peak. The 1978 climb put the first women—and first Americans, period—on the summit, but the death of two climbers sparked a controversy. Outside contributing editor Florence Williams talks with Blum and Alpinist editor in chief Katie Ives about why the expedition continues to inspire climbers and stir debate. 

In the 1990s, Beth Rodden was a climbing prodigy, celebrated for her athletic gifts and unwavering discipline. Then, while on an expedition in Central Asia in 2000, she and her small team of friends were kidnapped. That terrifying ordeal—and their daring escape—changed her life in ways she has only recently begun to understand. In a revealing conversation with Outside contributing editor Florence Williams, Rodden opens up about the price of perfectionism, blowing up her marriage to climbing superstar Tommy Caldwell, and moving forward as an athlete and new mother.

Once Joe Stone learned how to use his paralyzed body, he immediately set an audacious goal: he would race in an Ironman triathlon—despite the fact that no quadriplegic athlete had ever attempted the event. And after that? Well, Joe decided he could go much, much bigger.

Joe Stone doesn’t do anything halfway. Back when he was a skater, he went big. When he partied, he went hard. When he took up skydiving and speed-flying, he flew almost every day. Then one day he crashed and became a C7 quadriplegic. What do you do when you’re addicted to adrenaline but confined to a wheelchair? A lot of stuff that no one else has ever done before.

On the morning of May 25, 2006,  Myles Osborne was poised to become one of the last climbers of the season to summit Mount Everest. The weather was perfect, and it seemed nothing would stop his team. Then a flapping of orange fabric caught his eye. He believed it to be a tent—until the fabric spoke: “I imagine you’re surprised to see me here.” The speaker was Lincoln Hall, who'd been reported dead the night before. He was gloveless, frostbitten, and hallucinating—but alive. Osborne's expedition was faced with a dilemma: would they stay and help Hall, giving up the summit and endangering their own lives? Or finish this once-in-a-lifetime journey that had been years in the making? We explore the choice they made and look into the fascinating science around how we make decisions in high-risk environments—and live with them afterward.

What’s the cure for our modern malaise of stress, distraction, and screen addiction? Nature, of course. But while many people advocate the benefits of getting outside, we are only just beginning to understand what really happens to us when we venture out the door. For her new book, The Nature Fix, Outside contributing editor Florence Williams expands on a 2012 feature she wrote about Japanese forest bathing, delving deep into the fascinating science behind the restorative power of wild places. Outside editor Christopher Keyes talks with Williams about the research being done around the world to investigate how spending more time in nature can make us healthier, happier, and even more creative.

In the summer of 1970, Ed Welch and Bruce Frey put in a canoe at the headwaters of the Amazon and shoved off into the current. Their only plan was to travel downstream until it wasn’t fun anymore. They had a rifle, they had a machete, they had a vague idea of how to survive in the jungle. Then a jaguar chased both of them up a tree.

Denmark's rugged Faroe Islands are known for sheep, rowboats, and a brutal tradition called “The Grind” in which Faroese men butcher hundreds of pilot whales by hand, on the beach, in full view of locals and tourists. Reporter Joel Carnegie traveled to the islands last summer to try to understand the cultural forces that sustain the bloody practice. What's the point if the whales are no longer needed for income or food (and the meat may contain toxic levels of mercury)? And what happens when an anti-whaling environmental group shows up telling them to stop—or else?

Writer Mark Sundeen spent the last three years chronicling the lives of three couples who have dropped out of mainstream society, trading cars, technology, and electricity for freedom and hard work on the new American frontier. The result is his latest book, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America, a fascinating, timely, and deeply personal examination of what it means to be a non-conformist in the modern age. Editor Chris Keyes talks with the frequent Outside contributor, who wrote a feature for the January/February 2017 issue on the tiny-house movement and has been described as the "our poet laureate of alternative lifestyles."

Wolf howls, bird songs, crickets, frogs—soundscapes contain clues to not only what's going on around us but also who we are. Not just as individuals, but as human beings. Or at least, that's what Bernie Krause says. Krause is a soundscape artist who's spent decades collecting the sounds of the natural world and contemplating their meaning. In this piece, producer Tim Hinman from the podcast Sound Matters talks to Krause about how soundscapes work, what they can tell us about our world, and why audio ecology should be an integral part of how we think about conservation.

“If you're not at the table, you're on the menu,” says Sally Jewell. Hopeful, thoughtful, slightly ticked-off, and surprisingly emotional, the outgoing Secretary of the Interior talks with Outside editor Chris Keyes about the presidential election and what it means for the future of public lands. Can environmental protections be dismantled? Will they? Are we going to see an increase in Malheur Wildlife Refuge-style occupations? America's chief steward reflects on leaving her post and what we can expect from the next administration.

Dan  Futrell and Isaac Stonerand are back from searching through the wreckage of Eastern Airlines Flight 980 on a remote mountain in Bolivia, and their findings have prompted a whole new set of questions. Will anyone look at the material they brought back to the U.S.? Who hired climber Bernardo Guarachi to get to the crash site back in 1985? And why did he never speak to anyone about his ascent? Have the details of the crash remained a mystery because of international cover up or just bad weather and bad luck? In this episode, we delve more into the seemingly unsolvable mystery of a 1985 airplane collision and the two men trying to solve it.

Since colliding with a Bolivian mountain in 1985, Eastern Airlines Flight 980 has been frozen inside a glacier perched on the edge of a 3,000-foot drop. With wreckage now melting out of the ice at the base of the cliff, Dan Futrell and Isaac Stoner travel to the debris field at 16,000 feet, battling altitude sickness and a roller coaster of emotions as they search for 980’s missing flight recorder.

Since colliding into a Bolivian mountain in 1985, Eastern Airlines Flight 980 has been frozen inside a glacier perched on the edge of a 3,000-foot drop. With wreckage now melting out of ice at the base of the cliff, Dan Futrell and Isaac Stoner travel to the debris field at 16,000 feet, battling altitude sickness and a roller coaster of emotions in search for 980’s missing flight recorder.

John Muir rhapsodizing about Yosemite is one thing, but Outside contributing editor Ian Frazier has had it with people calling their favorite outdoor spots “cathedrals,” “shrines,” and “sacred spaces.” When he made his case in an issue of Outside, it struck a major nerve with readers. Frazier explains his argument, reacts to reader letters, and reads the story that ignited a firestorm.

Scientists are compiling huge amounts of data on the impact of global warming, but the story of that data often gets lost. Enter NikSawe, a researcher at Stanford who is transforming big data into music. Two parts science, one art, data sonification turns the numbers we tend to ignore into a very human story, and could potentially help scientists identify new trends and correlations that are easier to hear than to see.

For two decades, Conrad Anker has been at the forefront of climbing, evolving into America’s best all-around alpinist. With skills on rock, ice, and big peaks, he's now something of an elder statesmen and mentor to a new generation of elite athletes. Though perhaps best known for finding the body of legendary British mountaineer George Mallory on Mount Everest in 1999, he is celebrated among climbers for scaling a variety of difficult and dangerous routes on technical peaks around the world. Outside editor Chris Keyes talks to Anker about his long journey from dirtbag to rock star, the critical importance of choosing the right climbing partners, and why some consider bottled oxygen a performance-enhancing drug.

Author Mark Johnson argues that performance enhancing drugs are hardly a recent phenomenon. In his new book, Spitting in the Soup, he traces doping all the way back to the 1904 Olympic marathon in St. Louis and shows how doping and sport have been fundamentally intertwined for more than a century. The only thing new, says Johnson, is our increasingly moralistic view of the practice and the demonization of athletes who get caught. Chris Keyes talks to Johnson about the surprising history of doping, America's double standards when it comes to performance enhancement, the trouble with media sensationalism, and the coming era of gene doping that will change sports forever.

Tim Ferriss is many things. A bestselling author. A kickboxing champion. A horseback archer. The first American in history to hold a Guinness World Record in tango. He has built an enormous following by doing just about everything—and, more importantly, figuring out how to do it all better than most experts and then sharing what he’s learned with the rest of us. He calls himself a human guinea pig. Outside editor Chris Keyes talks to Ferriss about the origins and evolution of his uniquely aggressive approach to experimentation and his self-improvement. 

Read Tim Ferriss's latest book, filled with expert advice on happiness, meaning, and secrets to success.

Jason Motlagh and his crew were the first journalists in years to successfully cross the Darién Gap, a lawless, roadless jungle on the border of Colombia and Panama. Teeming with deadly snakes, drug traffickers, and antigovernment guerrillas, it has become a pathway for migrants whose desperation to reach the U.S. sends them on a perilous journey. He talks to Chris Keyes about the risks and logistics of the assignment, his motivations as a reporter, and the emotional toll of working in conflict zones.

Robert Young Pelton has made a career of tracking down warlords and interviewing people in the most dangerous places in the world. He's been kidnapped in Colombia, survived an assassination attempt in Uganda, and joined the hunt for Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Outside editor Chris Keyes wanted to know how spending that much time on the edge has affected him in the long term. But the answer's not what you'd think.

It could be one of the most incredible, yet perplexing, survival stories of all time: In 1991, a man named Michael Proudfoot was supposedly SCUBA diving on a shipwreck off the coast of Baja, Mexico, when his regulator—or mouthpiece—broke. He was alone, deep underwater inside a sunken ship, with only minutes to survive before he would run out of air. The string of bizarre events that take place next seem unreal.

When you’re stuck underwater in a submarine, the number of ways you can die is long and varied—crushing, burning, asphyxiation, exploding, the list goes on and on. Escaping alive requires maintaining calm and making all the right choices. Which makes it all the more surprising that one of the first known submarine survival stories—which includes a 19th century Prussian carpenter and a military crew—involves the first-known undersea fistfight.

For centuries, the Devil’s Highway—a waterless pathway through desert in southern Arizona—was one of the deadliest places in North America, killing thousands of Spanish conquistadors, gold prospectors, and migrants. Construction of a circumnavigating railroad allowed fatalities to taper at the end of the 19th century, but in the early 2000s, the route again became lethal. As immigration crackdown increased along other sections of the U.S.–Mexico border, illegal immigrants resorted to using the desert for entry, unaware that it would kill them. One infamous modern tragedy along the Devil’s Highway took place in spring 2001, when a large group, led by an experienced guide, set out from the Mexican border town of Senoyta. The disturbing outcome—and many others like it—helped researchers develop the Death Index, a new model for predicting dehydration fatalities.

Thirst is an unpredictable threat. In its early stages, it’s much like mild hunger. For centuries, hydration was as much superstition as science. But historical events at Devil’s Highway—a notoriously deadly path in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona—are proof of dehydration’s deadly risk. It was 1905 when Pablo Valencia, a gold prospector in his 40s, came stumbling into a geology camp, desperate for water. Valencia had spent the past six days wandering a 110-degree desert, where water sources can be separated by 100 miles, alone. He shouldn’t have been alive, but he was. Geologist William John McGee helped nurse Valencia back to health, bearing witness to the excruciating reality of what happens to the body while dying of thirst. In this episode, we dive into the history of a desert that claimed thousands of lives, as well as the ways this particular tale has forever altered modern understanding of the limits of dehydration.

One of the most famous accidents in wingsuit history.

Most of the time, when lightning makes the news, it’s because of an outlandish happening, seemingly too strange to be true. Like the park ranger who was struck seven times. Or the survivor who also won the lottery (the chances of which are about one in 2.6 trillion). Or the guy who claimed lightning strike gave him sudden musical talent. This is not one of those stories. This is about Phil Broscovak—who was struck by lightning while on a climbing trip with family in 2005—and the reality of life post-strike. In this intriguing episode, we investigate lightning strike recovery and the confounding, bizarre science that only hints at what Phil and other survivors endure. “You become a bag of shattered glass, really,” he says.

This thrilling re-creation of the classic hypothermia feature by Peter Stark brings 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. "I started thinking about how one little mistake leads to another and another in an accumulation of mistakes that leads to an untenable situation," says Stark. "Frozen Alive" is a fascinating, accurate description of our physiological response to extreme cold, deepening listeners’ respect for how the human body metamorphoses when cooled.

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