2019 SKIS &

Editors’ Review: SNOWBOARDS

LIVE B RAVELY
SPECIAL ISSUE

Terror
in the
wild
10 shocking stories
of Madness, mystery, MY FATHER’S
True Crime, SOS—
and Survival FROM THE
MIDDLE OF
THE SEA

The Storm, KIDNAPPED

the mountain, ON THE
and every APPALACHIAN
parent’s TRAIL
worst
nightmare THE SIX-YEAR-
OLD WHO GOT
LOST IN
THE WOODS

A RESCUE HELICOPTER ON MOUNT HOOD, 1986

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Outside Magazine
11.18
50
62
special
issue
T E R R O R in the Wild
50 Mayday
“Being kidnapped by pirates,”
the e-mail read. Then: “Mes-
sage me as soon as u can. I’m
really shaken.” The notes were
from ALI CARR TROXELL’s
father, who was halfway
across the Pacific on the first
leg of his solo attempt to sail
around the world. Was he
really under attack? Or was
isolation playing tricks on
his mind? The clock was tick-
ing, and there was no easy
way to find out.
2
Contents
62 The House
of Mourning
In May 1986, twenty students
and chaperones from the
Oregon Episcopal School
set out on an expedition to
summit Mount Hood. In a few
days, nine of them would be
dead, victims of a springtime
blizzard that came through
like a hurricane. PAULS
TOUTONGHI revisits a trag-
edy that remains one of the
worst climbing disasters in
North American history.
80
74
74 The Upside
of Danger
Cody Sheehy was only six
when he wandered off during
a family picnic and got lost in
the woods. What was it inside
the boy that allowed him to
walk alone for 18 hours and
as many miles—falling into a
creek, dodging coyotes, and
moving through darkness on
instinct alone—until he found
help? BY EMMA MARRIS
PLUS: Six more frightening true stories of survival.
C LO C K W I S E F R O M TO P L E F T: C O U R T E SY O F R O D N E Y D U N W O R T H ; T H E T I M E S O F G A I N E SV I L L E , G E O R I G A ; M I C H A E L H A N S O N ; J O E L DAV I S / T H E O R E G O N I A N . C OV E R : S T E V E N N E H L / T H E O R E G O N I A N .
80 The Stranger
in the Shelter
In the spring of 1974, two
idealistic young friends set
out to hike from Georgia
to Maine. On their second
night out, they made it to a
place called Low Gap—but
someone was already there.
EARL SWIFT reconstructs
the terrible untold story
of the first murder on the
Appalachian Trail.
 Timberland, and Flyroam are trademarks of TBL Licensing LLC. All other trademarks or logos are the property of their respective owners. ©
TBL Licensing. All rights reserved.

THE NEW 1978 FLYROAM™ HIKER

Available at Timberland and Macy’s
RAISED IN THE CITY.
BORN IN THE WOODS.
Outside Magazine Contents
11.18

Portrait of a
Marquesan man
from Jimmy Dispatches
Nelson’s Homage
to Humanity
14 BIG IDEA
Hikers, Meet Hunters:
In today’s political
climate of red versus
blue and rural versus
urban, it’s never been
more important for
the outdoor-recreation
community to unite
with the hook and
bullet crowd.
BY STEVEN RINELLA

Portfolio: Jimmy
Nelson’s iconic portraits
of indigenous people
celebrate our common
humanity.

28 TRAVEL
Australia and New
Zealand: The 12
greatest adventures
Down Under and
beyond, from trekking
wild Tasmania to diving
with psychedelic sea
slugs off the Kiwi coast.
Base Camp: A luxe new
backcountry chalet just
ten miles from Denali.

42 STYLE
Watch: A high-flying
timekeeper that will last
for generations.

44 GEAR
Skis: Whether you
charge on frontside
hardpack or scout for
sidecountry fresh, our
annual roundup has the
best sticks for you.
Snowboards: This
season’s rides push the
limits with their ability
to carve and surf.
Ski Essentials: Bamboo
poles, a soft wool
onesie, and everything
else you need to stay
© JIMMY NELSON PICTURES BV

warm and go fast.

Gear Protection:
Racking up all the best
ways to carry and store
your winter cargo.

6 BETWEEN
THE LINES
96 PARTING
SHOT

4
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Utah is Winter’s Favorite Town
at VisitParkCity.com.
Between the Lines Fear Factor
11.18

Feedback

to investigate true crimes, Kindred Spirit

natural disasters, and wil- For “The Monk’s Tale” (August), writer Bill
derness nightmares. Donahue explored the life of his late uncle, a
Our magazine’s mission Benedictine monk who left the church for a
is to inspire active partici- quiet life in a Pyrenees village. One reader
pation in the world outside, felt a kinship with William Joseph Donahue.
so why put the spotlight on
such grim material? For one I think we’re all a of variable quality
thing, dark stories reso- bit unconventional and quantity. Water
nate. Whether “Into Thin like Uncle Bill. I’ve supply diversifica-
The Dark Side Air” and the magazine story that became The served as a state- tion is critical for
A six-year-old boy goes missing in the woods Perfect Storm from the 1990s, or more recent prison chaplain, a this region. Misin-
of northeast Oregon and must travel miles narratives on rattlesnake bites and the sink- hostage negotiator, formation is as dan-
through the rugged backcountry to find his ing of a fishing vessel, which ran this summer, and an EMT. Many gerous as running
way home. A young couple from South Caro- disaster stories are often the most widely read of us experience out of water.
lina encounters a murderous stranger on the pieces we publish. That’s not because we all intimacy with our David Clark,
Appalachian Trail. A group of teenagers on a have morbid fascinations or we aim to exploit Creator by being former Utah
school-sponsored climb takes shelter in a tiny the tragedy of others. Rather, when people outdoors with His House speaker
snow cave as a relentless storm traps them in are confronted with the worst that nature creation. Santa Clara, Utah
a whiteout high on Oregon’s Mount Hood. unleashes, incredible things can happen— Father Bob Povish
And a California retiree, pursuing his lifelong even in the wake of tragedy. The stories we’re Boyertown, Lost in the
dream of sailing solo around the world, begins sharing this month are dark, but they contain Pennsylvania Amazon
to go mad in a remote part of the Pacific Ocean. universal truths that elevate them beyond I was pumped that
This month’s issue of Outside will drop mere rubbernecking. “As a little kid, I had this Can’t Hold you shed light on
you into some truly terrifying narratives, opportunity to be tested and learn that there Water Amazon harm-
ones that are as beautifully told as they are really aren’t any barriers,” says Cody Sheehy, Mark Sundeen fails ing independent

C LO C K W I S E F R O M TO P L E F T: G R AYS O N S C H A F F E R ; B R I A N C R O N I N ; M A R T H A C A R R
haunting. Indeed, they are exactly the kinds now 32 years removed from his boyhood epic to consider facts business owners
of stories we were looking to tell when we in the Oregon woods (page 74). “I think a lot on southern Utah’s (“Amazon Is the
began planning this special issue earlier this of people figure that out. They just might not water supply and Future of Gear!
year. The idea was to explore the dark side figure it out at six.” demand and the Amazon Is the End
of the outdoors, giving writers wide latitude —CHRISTOPHER KEYES ( @KEYESER) economic benefits of Gear!”) until I
of the Lake Powell saw an Outside
Pipeline (“The Online article tout-
Green Green Grass ing Amazon deals.
of Home”). The in- You’ve illustrated
complete reporting the problem: the
Lost at Sea misleads readers to temptation to find
In “Mayday” (page 50), former Outside believe the project the best deal no
staffer Ali Carr Troxell explores a mystery is not necessary. It matter who suffers.
that has tormented her family since the is. Most of south- Stuart Harris
spring of 2017: her father, Richard Carr, ern Utah relies on a Los Alamitos,
disappeared in the Pacific Ocean during single water source California
a solo attempt to sail around the world.
Carr Troxell says she sometimes felt her
dad’s presence while working on this The Woodshed
difficult story. At one point she opened In August, “The Monk’s Tale” incorrectly
a fortune cookie to find a message that labeled a photo as showing a work of Thu-
read: You’re not afraid of storms, for cydides. It was Plato’s Philebus. And the
you’re learning to sail your ship. “As I story “Amazon Is the Future of Gear! Ama-
made my way through the process of zon Is the End of Gear!” misspelled Nate
writing this story,” she says, “I thought Alder’s name. Outside regrets the errors.
my dad was there rooting for me.”

6 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE
 Even after
34,000 years...
They still
share a love
of meat

Gray Wolf
Species: Canis lupus

Feed your dog more of the

chicken, duck or salmon Domestic Dog
Subspecies: Canis lupus familiaris
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Feed them like family.® Fun Fact:
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Available at your favorite pet specialty store. and wolves separated from a common ancestor
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Between the Lines Fear Factor
11.18

“By then it was

too late. The
storm, howling
in from the
Paciic, had
arrived.”
—PAULS TOUTONGHI, PAGE 62

Near and
> Gear to Our
Hearts
Go With Us Outside Online
Wake up in the is launching an
treetops at Hapuku expanded Holiday
Lodge and Tree- Gift Guide in
houses, on a trip to November, with all
New Zealand’s South the gear your loved
Island with Outside ones need to start
GO. Hiking, surfing, the new year. Sus-
and whale-watching pect they already
will be right outside have what they
your door. Trips start need? Not if they
at $420; learn more score a 22 or above
at outsidego.com. on this quiz.

1. Their hiking
about three books of Sheehy’s path. boots are
that have helped Then she asked covered in:
shape his views on Werner Hoeger, an a. Spiderwebs (-2)

C LO C K W I S E F R O M B OT TO M R I G H T: M I C H A E L H A N S O N ; H A P U KU LO D G E A N D T R E E H O U S E S ( 4 )
conservation. emeritus professor b. Duct tape (+5)
of kinesiology at
A SAND COUNTY Boise State Univer- 2. They keep bikes:
ALMANAC sity, to compare their a. Somewhere in
by Aldo Leopold numbers. the basement (-5)
“I never thought b. On the roof of
about the sacrifices their car (+4)
FOR A SIX-YEAR-OLD:
and effort it took

The Meat-
to create wild spaces
until my brother
turned me on to this
42,000 3. An S shape
brings to mind:
a. The letter (-4)
STEPS / 14 MILES
Eater’s great book.” b. Their ski
Reading List pole (+7)
FOR AN ADULT:
In this month’s Big BROWN DOG
Idea column (page
14), Steven Rinella—
an Outside contrib-
by Jim Harrison
“I learned it was OK
to be pissed about Walking got lost at age six
34,300 4. Their most re-
cent snowshoes:
a. Are tennis
STEPS / 14 MILES
uting editor and host ecological destruc- in Some- and trekked between rackets (+6)
of the Netflix show tion—and to express one Else’s 14 and 20 miles b. Are the latest
MeatEater—tells us that outrage.” (Smaller) home (“The Upside FOR A SIX-YEAR-OLD: from MSR (-1)
why environmen- Shoes of Danger,” page 74).
talists need to get
along with hunt-
ARCTIC DREAMS
by Barry Lopez
While on their hon-
eymoon earlier this
“I was tired, and I’m
37,” Hanson says. “I
60,000 5. They camp
beneath the stars
ers and anglers. “Early in my life, year, photographer can’t imagine what STEPS / 20 MILES because:
We asked Rinella, Lopez’s unease with Michael Hanson and it’d be like for a first- a. They’re locked
whose new release hunting would’ve his wife, Dani Fried- grader.” To find out, FOR AN ADULT: out of the
The MeatEater Fish made me put this rich, hiked 17 miles writer Emma Marris house (-2)
and Game Cook-
book comes out in
down. But he taught
me to engage with a
in Oregon’s Wallowa
Valley, the same area
brought her six-year-
old son, Nico, along
49,000 b. Their tent has
holes in it (+4)
November, to talk different viewpoint.” where Cody Sheehy while retracing part STEPS / 20 MILES

8 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE
 NATURE IS
WAITING FOR YOU. THE GREENLAND WINTER PARKA

Put simply, we love nature. Big and vast to walk, explore a nearby park, remember what it
get lost in, quiet and intimate to rejuvenate feels like to breathe fresh air and hear the wind
you, open and accessible for all generations to in the trees. Nature is waiting for you. What
explore. are you waiting for?

Escape the rush for a moment and go for a Designed in Sweden. Worn around the world.

fjallraven.us
 Discover the
world’s coolest
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experiences
PHOTOGRAPH BY JIMMY NELSON | SEGERA’S NAY PALAD BIRD NEST

S A FA R I + LU X U R Y A D V E N T U R E
 Between the Lines Fear Factor
11.18

Get an Assist
>
“You’ll need help
from your spouse What We’re
and your friends with Watching
training and crewing. Klaus Obermeyer
Don’t forget to ex- has earned the right
press appreciation.” to give life advice.
Seven decades ago,
Bring the Family he founded outer-
“It’s tough to explain wear company Sport
the high you get Obermeyer, and he’s
while being involved going strong at 98,
F R O M L E F T: C O U R T E SY O F K AT I E A R N O L D ; O B E R M E Y E R

in an ultra. Share the skiing hard and still

experience. Include working at its Aspen,
your family as much Colorado, office. Hear
as possible so they his words of wisdom
can feel it with you.” on Outside TV’s Out-
look on November 11
And She Would Run 100 More Always Be Training at 8 P.M. Eastern.
Contributing editor Katie Arnold, Outside On- “I didn’t have a train-
line’s Raising Rippers columnist and a mother ing plan. With kids,
of two, tackled her first 100-mile ultramarathon there’s a lot of mov- Blood in the Wild
this summer, winning the women’s division of ing parts. Any time I In September 2015, Virginia-based writer Earl Swift published a memo-
the Leadville Trail 100 Run in Colorado. Arnold, was on my feet was rable Outside feature about a double homicide that happened on the
46, laid down the seventh-fastest women’s practice: walking the Appalachian Trail in 1990, the same year he was doing a through-hike of
time in the storied race’s history. “It’s just kids to school, biking the legendary route (“Up on Cove Mountain”). While researching that
proof that you can be both a parent and a seri- around town, running story, Swift learned about a 1974 killing that’s believed to be the first
ous runner,” she says. “It’s a total juggle, but after dinner. Don’t murder committed on the AT. In “The Stranger in the Shelter” (page 80),
it’s so possible. And it makes both things bet- stress about a super- he reconstructs this forgotten crime with the help of its sole survivor,
ter.” Here are her tips for going the distance. rigid schedule.” and is sharing her story publicly for the first time.

FIGHT YOUR COUGH

IN 12-HOUR SHIFTS.

The liquid-strength
of Robitussin ⇒ghts
your cough all-day
or all-night.

IT’S NEVER
JUST A COUGH
TM

Use ass di
ddirected.
irec
rected
rec ted.. © 2017 P⇒zer, IInc.
ted nc.
 Follow us on
Twitter &
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12 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE
YOUR LOVE OF THE OUTDOORS
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AND SATELLITE COMMUNICATOR
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Dispatches Big Idea
11.18
for those of us who love the
This Land Is IT’S TEMPTING
outdoors to think of ourselves as belonging to
Our Land one of two groups. There’s my own crew of
sportsmen and women, known as the hook
OUTDOOR INDUSTRY:
and bullet crowd; and then there’s the outdoor
IT’S TIME TO EMBRACE recreationists or “nonconsumptive users,” a
HUNTERS AND ANGLERS term for hikers, climbers, kayakers, birders,
AS POLITICAL ALLIES IN mountain bikers, and others who might enjoy
CONSERVATION BATTLES being around wild creatures without ever eat-
BY STEVEN RINELLA ing one for dinner.
From cold shoulders at the trailhead to
outright hostility, the tension between these
groups can be traced back to at least 1903,
when the preservationist John Muir asked
President Theodore Roosevelt, a dedicated
hunter, when he was going to get beyond “the
boyishness of killing things”—a glib question
to put to a man whose hands-on relation-
ship with nature later inspired him to protect
about 230 million acres of American land.
Even today, while I spend as much time and
effort advocating on behalf of wildlife habitat
as I do hunting in it, some people who spot me
with my rifle are never going to imagine any-
thing but a callous hick who inflicts suffering
on animals while littering backcountry roads
14 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE
with beer cans. Of course, the stereotypes
run both ways. While a professional nature
photographer may advocate for conservation
through their work, a hunter may view them
as profiting from wildlife without financially
contributing to federal and state conserva-
tion programs, the latter of which are funded
primarily through the purchase of hunting
and fishing licenses and the collection of ex-
cise taxes levied against guns, ammo, archery
equipment, and fishing supplies. In 2017, these
fees added up to over $2.7 billion.
Such divisions are especially seductive in
today’s fractured political climate of red ver-
sus blue and rural versus urban, where we’re all
busy wounding our enemies rather than col-
lecting friends. But there’s never been a more
N I C K M E E K / G A L L E R Y S TO C K
important time for hunters and anglers and
the outdoor-recreation community to come
together for conservation. By doing so, we can
shift our focus to common foes who would
like to undo the legacies of both Roosevelt and
Muir by privatizing our public lands, strip-
ping away our access to public waterways, and
opening up our remaining bastions of pristine
wilderness to industrial development. >

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P: Matt Power A: Monique Mitchell
 PROTECT YOUR PASSION.
JOIN THE MOVEMENT.

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Dispatches Big Idea
11.18
This call might sound like kumbaya bull-
shit unless you consider a couple of well-
known case studies that demonstrate the
power of unity. The first happened in early
2017, when Utah congressman Jason Chaf-
fetz introduced H.R. 621, the Disposal of Ex-
cess Federal Lands Act. The bill would have
required the federal government to sell off
millions of acres of public land in ten western
states. The hook and bullet crowd and out-
door recreationists were both apoplectic that
someone would want to reduce the acreage
of federally protected lands where we’re free
to hunt, fish, climb, bike, and hike. Protest-
ers coalesced under #keepitpublic, and the
movement grew to a ferocious rallying cry on
social media. Within days, Chaffetz posted
on Instagram that he was withdrawing the
bill. Normally a suit and tie kind of fella, the
congressman appeared in his photo decked
out in a camo hat and jacket and cradling a
hunting dog.
Case study number two: In April 2017,
President Trump ordered interior secretary
Ryan Zinke to review 27 national monuments
created or expanded after 1996, with an eye
toward reducing their size or repealing their
status. The move sparked a firestorm of out-
rage from many of the same organizations
that protested H.R. 621. Yes, Trump axed a
combined two million acres from Bears Ears
and Grand Staircase–Escalante National
Monuments in Utah. But there was a hidden
upside to the outcry that is rarely mentioned:
a partial win for conservationists.
Remember, President Trump had ordered
Secretary Zinke to review 27 national monu-
ments, not two. Some of those were certainly
red herrings, but others were at risk. “There
were definitely other monuments they in-
tended to reduce, including Organ Moun-
tains–Desert Peaks,” says New Mexico senator
Martin Heinrich. But insiders say that Zinke
was surprised by the breadth and intensity of
the pushback and acted accordingly. “I don’t
want to make light of the reductions that did
occur,” says Whit Fosburgh, president and
CEO of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation
Partnership, a nonprofit group for sportsmen
and women. “But it certainly would’ve been a
lot worse if sportsmen and the outdoor com-
munity hadn’t raised their voices the way that
they did.”
What’s it going to take to see more and
bigger wins? First, we need to make sure that
our disagreements don’t bleed over into areas
where we’re aligned. You and I might not
see eye to eye on removing Endangered Spe-
cies Act protection from grizzly bears in the
Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (I support it)
or revamping existing law to allow mountain
18 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE
bikes into federally designated wilderness
(I’m against it). But we should view those
disagreements as luxuries that come from
having a wealth of wildlife and pristine land-
scapes for people to experience. If we lose the
more important fight around defending those
ecosystems in the first place, the arguments
become moot.
Second, the holier-than-thou attitudes
and territoriality need to end. Over the past
80 years, hunters and anglers have funded
billions of dollars’ worth of vital conservation
work, and many of us have cultural ties to the
land that go back generations. That hardly
means we have a greater claim to wildlands or
wildlife than anyone else. If you’re in a situa-
tion where a hiker spooked your deer, you’ve
got it all wrong: the hiker spooked our deer.
Likewise, nonhunters need to recognize the
validity of regulated hunting and fishing, even
if some of those practices might seem person-
ally off-putting. Sure, hunters remove lim-
ited numbers of animals from the landscape
for personal use. But with proper manage-
ment practices and good habitat, those ani-
mals are back again the next year. If you strip
away someone’s connection to the landscape,
you risk losing their support as well.
Third, we need to start talking more. Some
dialogue is already taking place. In April, Pa-
tagonia founder Yvon Chouinard got up in
front of a gathering of Backcountry Hunt-
ers and Anglers members in Boise, Idaho, to
celebrate public lands and told a couple of
stories about hunting doves and eating veni-
son. In July, Chouinard and Land Tawney,
the president and CEO of BHA, cowrote an
op-ed in the Denver Post calling for align-
ment among hunters and anglers and outdoor
recreationists. Likewise, Fosburgh has moved
the needle on conservation issues by working
with unlikely allies, including the Audubon
Society and the Environmental Defense Fund.
Regrettably, these interactions make some
people uneasy. BHA caught flack from some
of my fellow hunters, who were angry at the
group for giving voice to people who might
not be 100 percent aligned with their views.
Politicians get nervous about these alli-
ances, too. They’re comfortable pissing off 49
percent of their constituency, but they can’t
afford to piss off 51 percent. And they espe-
cially can’t afford to ignore the money. Hunt-
ers and anglers spend over $63 billion annually
in pursuit of their passions. Wildlife watchers
contribute some $30 billion. Skiers, snow-
boarders, and other snow-sports enthusi-
asts throw down $73 billion. Trail-sports
folks shell out more than $200 billion. The
total spending of outdoor enthusiasts is ap-
proaching a formidable $900 billion. Collec-
Some people who
spot me with my rile
are never going to
imagine anything but
a callous hick who
inlicts suffering on
animals while littering
backcountry roads
with beer cans.
tively, our economic footprint should be able
to kick down the doors of the partisan safe
havens where politicians go to do bad things.
And there are plenty of bad things brew-
ing. In June, Utah senator Mike Lee vowed to
dismantle the public-lands system that we
know today. He described it as existing for
an “upper-crust elite,” which is surprising
given the 331 million visits to national parks
last year and the 72 percent of hunters who
pursue game on public lands in the West.
There are plenty of politicians on both sides
of the aisle who respect the sanctity of our
protected landscapes, and they need to be re-
warded with campaign support and votes as
we head to the polls this November.
Likewise, we need to be forceful in our in-
sistence that the Land and Water Conserva-
tion Fund be permanently reauthorized with
dedicated funding. This piece of legislation
from 1964 diverts money from oil and gas
leases on offshore federal property into a fund
that’s used for recreational access to public
lands and waters across the nation. It’s also
one of our most important tools for conserv-
ing fish and wildlife. The fund was thrown a
temporary lifeline in 2015, with an expiration
date of September 30, 2018. But as of press
time, a few powerful legislators were con-
tinuing to stall reauthorization.
The list goes on. With issues ranging from
the ill-advised Pebble Mine near Alaska’s
Bristol Bay to sage grouse recovery in the
American West to Everglades restoration on
the Florida peninsula, there’s plenty of room
for sportsmen and women and outdoor rec-
reationists to sing as a chorus rather than as
lone voices crying out from the wilderness. O
Contributing editor Steven Rinella is the
host of MeatEater, available on Netflix.
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To chase down new horizons
To experience mile after mile of escape
To pursue what you love

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Dispatches Exposure
11.18
Portfolio by Jimmy Nelson

20 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE
 The Miao people,
China 2005

Humans
Being
A DUTCH PHOTOGRAPHER
HAS SPENT A
DECADE CAPTURING
INDIGENOUS IDENTITY
As a young boy, Jimmy Nelson lived
with his father, a geologist and
explorer, in developing countries
around the world. Now 51, he
speaks of those years as the most
uncultivated of his life—a time
when he hung from trees and ran
naked with his friends. But when
he turned seven, he was sent
to a Catholic boarding school in
England, where he studied for the
next ten years. For a free-ranging
kid, the difference between those
two worlds was jarring, and Nelson
describes his work photographing
tribal communities as a search for
that lost wild self. His first book,
Before They Pass Away (2013),
sparked global conversation: the
tribal-rights organization Survival
International was a loud critic,
arguing that it presented an
exoticized depiction of indigenous
groups. Nelson’s new book, Hom-
age to Humanity, shot on six conti-
nents in the years since, responds
to that criticism with a digital app
showing his behind-the-scenes
work on the 600 photos. “People
are not used to seeing these tribes
in such a glorified way,” Nelson
says. “These pictures are not fake.
They’re just another truth—a digni-
fied, respectful, invested truth.”
—EMILY REED
Dispatches Exposure
11.18

Nelson stays with a community up to three weeks before photographing

its members. “I spend days and weeks explaining what I’m going to do,
and that I’m not here to steal your picture,” he says, and tells them: “I’m
here to make an iconographic picture, an artistic picture, an inspirational
picture of you in all your glory and strength and power.”

The Nagula
subgroup
of the
Ni-Vanuatu
people,
Vanuatu 2017

22 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE
 M I R R O R L E S S
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Dispatches Exposure
11.18

A Wodaabe man,
Chad 2016

A Kazakh man,
Mongolia 2017

A Miao child,
China 2016
The Kaluli people,
Papua New
Guinea 2017

24 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE
 “We’ve stopped
connecting with one an-
other as human beings,”
says Nelson. “We’ve
stopped looking, we’ve
stopped touching, we’ve
stopped empathizing,
we’ve stopped feel-
ing, and we’ve stopped
daring to be fragile. Not
only have we stopped
communicating with one
another, we’ve stopped
communicating with the
planet we live on.”

A Kazakh
woman,
Mongolia
2017

OUTSIDE MAGAZINE 25
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Dispatches Australia and New Zealand
11.18

Pumphouse Point,
Tasmania

The Real Deep South

A N E X PAT T R AV E L W R I T E R W H O S P E N T T H E
PA S T F I V E Y E A R S E X P L O R I N G A U S T R A L I A
AND NEW ZEALAND REVEALS HER 12
F AV O R I T E D O W N U N D E R A D V E N T U R E S
BY SERENA RENNER

28 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE P H OTO G R A P H B Y Adam Gibson


a b
f e
C LO C K W I S E F R O M TO P L E F T: C H R I S B R AY; A DA M G I B S O N ; H AY L E Y A N D E R S E N ; A DA M G I B S O N ; A L E X KY D D ; L A U R Y N I S H A K
1 2
ARNHEM LAND,
NORTHERN TERRITORY
INDIGENOUS CULTURE, ART, BEACHES
The best thing about traveling in Australia’s
far north is connecting with the Aboriginal
people who have roamed these canyons and
coasts for some 65,000 years. Nowhere is
their culture more alive than in Arnhem Land,
a 37,500-square-mile preserve with rusty red
coastlines, rugged escarpments, and croc-
filled oxbow lakes. You can camp on the Co-
bourg Peninsula with a permit, but it’s easier to
leave the planning to professionals. On Intrepid
Travel’s seven-day trek through the region,
you’ll camp and stay in lodges, eat bush foods
like mud crabs and tart billy goat plums, and
listen to Aboriginal guides tell Dreamtime sto-
ries about everything from creation myths to
morality. After spending the last two nights in
an oceanfront cabin on Bremer Island, a haven
for sea turtle hatchlings, you’ll head back to
the mainland to explore the Buku Art Centre,
home to the region’s most prized Aboriginal art.
DETOUR: South of Darwin, the territory’s capi-
tal, paddle the gorges of Nitmiluk National Park
and take a dip in the plunge pools of Edith Falls.
NINGALOO REEF,
WESTERN AUSTRALIA
SURFING, SNORKELING, DIVING
This reef compares favorably to its more
famous sister on the east coast: it’s home to
pumping surf breaks, migrating whale sharks,
and healthier coral. Pack a spare can of gas for
the 770-mile drive north from Perth and hold
tight as you overtake road trains—semitrucks
up to six trailers long that look straight out of
Mad Max. When you reach the southern end of
the reef, 78 miles north of Carnarvon, relax in a
palm-frond surf shack on the sand at Red Bluff
(from $22), and watch for breaching whales
between sets on the legendary left-hand point
break. Visit between March and July and Coral
Bay Eco Tours will take you snorkeling amid
docile whale sharks. On your way back to Perth,
stop by the Lobster Shack in Cervantes to
taste the Thompson family’s renowned west-
ern rock lobster, grilled on the half shell.
DETOUR: Book a four- or seven-day stay at
Swell, a new eco-lodge on Christmas Island
in the Indian Ocean, and you’ll get a free
outing to snorkel the reefs (from $1,983 for
four nights, all-inclusive).
a. Swell Eco Lodge, Western Australia
b, d. Pumphouse Point, Tasmania
c, f. Arnhem Land
e. Ningaloo Reef
c
d
3
NORTHWEST TASMANIA
TREKKING, PHOTOGRAPHY, WILDLIFE
Tasmania is in the midst of a cultural boom,
thanks to innovative chefs, craft distillers,
and a world-class modern art museum called
MONA. But head to its northwest and you’ll
find the Tarkine, one of the largest, oldest, and
least disturbed temperate rainforests in the
world. Though home to such rare and endan-
gered species as the orange bellied parrot and
Tasmanian devil, most of the forest lacks pro-
tection from logging and mining. Discover why
it’s worth saving during a four-day excursion
at Tarkine Trails’ Tiger Ridge, a camp offering
daily walks or photography workshops under
giant stringybark gum trees. Hikers should tack
on a jaunt along the 40-mile Overland Track
in nearby Cradle Mountain–Lake St. Clair Na-
tional Park. End the trek with a stay at Pump-
house Point, a renovated 1940s hydroelectric
plant that appears to float on the inky waters
of the country’s deepest lake (from $213).
DETOUR: Take on the new Great Tasmanian
Traverse and spend 37 days in the bush,
including eight days rafting the Franklin River,
one of the world’s greatest whitewater trips.
OUTSIDE MAGAZINE 29
 a, d. Halcyon House, New South Wales

Dispatches Australia and New Zealand b. Bubbletent Australia, New South Wales
c. The Gold Coast
e. Wollemi National Park
11.18 f. The Ghan

a b c

C LO C K W I S E F R O M TO P L E F T: K A R A R O S E N LU N D ; M AY U M I I WA S A K I ; V I S U A L C O L L E C T I V E / S H U T T E R S TO C K ; K A R A R O S E N LU N D ; H I K E A N D S E E K / DA N J E E ; G R E AT S O U T H E R N R A I L
f e d

4 5
THE RED CENTER,
NORTHERN TERRITORY
SKYDIVING, OVERLANDING, ART INSTALLATIONS
Uluru, the sacred monolith formerly known as
Ayers Rock, pulls massive crowds to the coun-
try’s geographic center, but it’s still worth your
time to go there. Take the scenic route from
Alice Springs along red-dirt roads, stopping at
Kings Creek Station to swim in a shipping
container turned pool before bedding down
in a glamping tent at the base of the George
Gill Range (from $945, all-inclusive; campsites
and safari tents available from $18). When you
finally reach Uluru, admire it from the air on
a sunrise skydive booked through Ayers Rock
Resort. At sundown, watch it fade from pink to
purple as you enjoy lamb topped with native
sea parsley at the resort’s Field of Light exhibi-
tion, a mesmerizing art installation of 50,000
glowing glass stalks.
DETOUR: Book a cabin on the Ghan for the
world’s longest north-to-south rail journey, bi-
secting Australia from Darwin to Adelaide. It’s a
four-day trip, but you can halve it by departing
from Alice Springs (from $767, all-inclusive).
WOLLEMI NATIONAL PARK,
NEW SOUTH WALES
GLOWWORMS, VILLAS, HOT TUBS
An hour and a half west of Sydney, you’ll find
the Greater Blue Mountains, a 2.6-million-
acre Unesco World Heritage site known for
its sandstone plateaus, undulating forests,
waterfall-spilling cliffs, and mysterious blue
haze that’s thought to be caused by droplets
of eucalyptus oil. Get off the beaten path
by setting out for the fern-filled canyons of
Wollemi National Park. The villas at neighbor-
ing Emirates One and Only Wolgan Valley are
splurge worthy, with private plunge pools,
guided hikes, and binoculars for spotting resi-
dent kangaroos and wombats (from $1,955,
all-inclusive). If you’d rather point your field
glasses skyward, Bubbletent Australia’s three
transparent domes, set 3,600 feet up the rim
of nearby Capertree Valley, are perfect for
stargazing or simply soaking in the wood-fired
outdoor hot tubs (from $492 for two nights).
DETOUR: The Jenolan Caves in the southern
Blue Mountains are the world’s oldest known
caverns. Access is easy with daily guided tours.
6
GOLD COAST, QUEENSLAND
SURF SCHOOLS, SWIMMING HOLES, BREWERIES
This surfer’s paradise, an hour’s drive from
Brisbane, has a reputation for being a little too
much like Las Vegas. To escape the glitz, head
to the more soulful southern end of the Goldie,
near Burleigh Heads. Surf Services Australia
offers lessons from five-time Australian na-
tional champion Mark Richardson, who will put
you on a gently peeling right-hander known as
Currumbin Alley. Later, take a walk past secret
swimming holes along the Ocean View Track
in Burleigh Head National Park before grab-
bing a draft of award-winning extra pale ale at
nearby Balter Brewing Company, which was
cofounded by local pro surfers. Stay at the Hal-
cyon House, a Mediterranean-style boutique
hotel right off the sand in Cabarita Beach, a
mellow surf town 20 minutes south of the Gold
Coast in New South Wales (from $436).
DETOUR: A two-hour flight from Brisbane will
get you to Lord Howe, a volcanic island blessed
with misty cloud forests, empty kite-surfing
breaks, great scuba diving, and the Seven
Peaks Walk, Australia’s newest Great Walk.

30 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE
 Love is now
bigger than ever.
Presenting the all-new 3-row 2019 Subaru Ascent.™

With a spacious interior, up to 5,000 pounds of towing capacity*, and flexible seating
for up to 8, it’s the perfect SUV for those who like to bring the family when heading out
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Subaru Ascent and Ascent Premium models with standard equipment. 2019 Subaru Ascent Touring shown is rated at 26 mpg highway. Actual mileage may vary. **MSRP excludes destination
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Dispatches Australia and New Zealand a–b. Flinders Ranges
c. Cabn, the Adelaide Hills
11.18 d. Camel Treks Australia

a b

d c

C LO C K W I S E F R O M TO P L E F T: H AY L E Y B A I L L I E ; S O U T H A U S T R A L I A N TO U R I S M C O M M I S S I O N ; N E W S T Y L E M E D I A ; J E S S I C A C L A R K

7
FLINDERS RANGES, SOUTH AUSTRALIA
CAMPING, CAMELS, PUB LIFE
South Australia is known more for shorelines and Shiraz than untamed outback, but the state’s mauve and ocher interior features some
of the most enigmatic landscape in the country. Begin your adventure at Wilpena Pound, a massive crater-like amphitheater 270 miles
north of Adelaide, which is ringed by serrated mountain peaks that were once taller than the Himalayas. Be sure to hike the 4.3-mile
Wangara Lookout Trail for panoramic views of the inner basin before heading back to Wilpena Pound Resort, where you’ll find a range of
accommodations, including campsites (from $18). Then take to the sky on Wrightsair’s flightseeing tour of the Pound, the spiny Flinders
mountains, and Lake Eyre, a salt lake that fills with water and shines pink after a deluge. Lunch is at William Creek Hotel, a 131-year-old
Aussie pub and the lake’s closest settlement. For another truly Australian experience, keep an eye out for emus and yellow-footed rock
wallabies from atop a camel during one of Camel Treks Australia’s multi-day expeditions out of Beltana Station (from $1,060).
DETOUR: Inspired by similar retreats in the U.S., tiny-house getaway Cabn recently opened Jude, a diminutive Scandinavian-style home
surrounded by the forests, farms, and wineries just outside the state’s capital city in the Adelaide Hills (from $138). The glassed-in
hideaway is tough to leave, but nearby Mount Lofty might lure you out for a morning run or rock climb.

32 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE
 ENGINEERED BY HUNTERS
BUILT FOR A LIFETIME

As the World’s Foremost Outfitter ®, we engineer, build and use everything we create. It gets put to the test in the most brutal conditions imaginable.
This year’s lineup of optics went through rigorous field testing and countless refinements before we allowed it to bear the Cabela’s name. It’s the gear
we use on our personal hunts. It’s the gear we rely on for success. See cabelas.com/optics for more information.

IT’S IN OUR BLOOD. IT’S IN OUR NATURE®.

HIGH-DEFINITION VALUE TROPHY-SPOTTING FEATURES PREMIUM LOW-LIGHT VISIBILITY

available at
 a. Gibbston Valley Winery, South Island

Dispatches Australia and New Zealand b, f. Poor Knights Islands

c. The Pioneer Mountain Bike Stage Race
d. Onsen Hot Pools, Queenstown
11.18 e. Aoraki–Mount Cook, South Island

a b c

f e d

8 9
POOR KNIGHTS ISLANDS,
NORTH ISLAND
PADDLEBOARDING, SCUBA DIVING, SNORKELING
Most people think all the fun happens on New
Zealand’s South Island. They’re wrong. The wa-
ters off Poor Knights Islands, a small volcanic
archipelago off the primeval Tutukaka Coast,
were ranked as one of the top ten dive sites
in the world by Jacques Cousteau. Moray eels
hide in seaweed-covered crevices, psyche-
delic sea slugs rest on fan corals, and snapper,
kingfish, and trevally school in the hundreds
around a labyrinth of underwater tunnels,
arches, and coral gardens. Dive Tutukaka offers
private charters to some 100 sites, including
Northern Arch, where stingrays mate and hide
from orcas. Decompress on the mainland at
the 6,000-acre Lodge at Kauri Cliffs, which
offers a hilltop infinity pool, fishing guides,
horseback riding, and helicopter tours of the
craggy coastlines (from $547).
DETOUR: In the Bay of Islands, north of the
Tutukaka Coast, parasail between isles and fill
up on oysters and seafood chowder at the Duke
of Marlborough Hotel in the village of Russell.
MACKENZIE BASIN,
SOUTH ISLAND
STARS, VISTAS, SCENIC RETREATS
The peaks in this region served as Edmund
Hillary’s training ground for Mount Everest.
While you explore 12,218-foot Aoraki–Mount
Cook, starting from Lake Pukaki or the Mueller
Hut, you might notice something that hasn’t
changed since the Kiwi explorer trekked the
area—incredible stargazing. On a clear night,
you’ll see why the region was christened
the first and largest Gold Tier reserve by the
International Dark-Sky Association. Several
companies run night-sky tours, but be sure
to check out the planetarium and stargazing
events at the Sir Edmund Hillary Alpine Center
and the local wine at the Pukaki Wine Cellar
and Observatory. Then soak in a cedar tub
before drifting off under exotic constellations
in your glass-roofed bedroom at SkyScape,
a guesthouse on a working sheep farm deep
inside the reserve (from $383).
DETOUR: If you’re looking for stars in the coun-
try’s north, Great Barrier Island is the world’s
only isle designated a Dark Sky Sanctuary.
C LO C K W I S E F R O M TO P L E F T: G I B B S TO N VA L L E Y W I N E R Y; S I M O N E M AT U C C I ; T I M B A R D S L E Y- S M I T H ; O N S E N ; C H R I S D I E B O L D ; D I V E ! T U T U K A K A
10
QUEENSTOWN,
SOUTH ISLAND
MOUNTAIN BIKING, WINE, ECO-LODGES
Queenstown, New Zealand’s adventure capital,
has taken off as a cycling destination. Every
November, the city hosts the Pioneer Mountain
Bike Stage Race, where two-person teams
ride 263 miles through the Southern Alps.
If that’s not your style, rent a hardtail from
Gibbston Valley Winery and cap off a nine-mile
round-trip ride along the Kawarau River with
a complimentary wine and cheese lunch. The
winery also rents full-suspension rigs for shred-
ding the 25 miles of trails at neighboring Rab-
bit Ridge Bike Resort. When you’re cycled out,
recuperate in heated spring water at Onsen
Hot Pools, a spa just north of Queenstown that
overlooks the rapids-filled Shotover River.
Then check in to Camp Glenorchy, a solar-
powered lodge that opened earlier this year on
the shores of Lake Wakatipu (from $161).
DETOUR: Riding the Roxburgh Gorge Trail in
the Central Otago region, you’ll wind past
sheep farms, Gold Rush towns, and the Clutha
Mata-au, the South Island’s longest river.

34 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE
Dispatches Australia and New Zealand
11.18
a b
e d
11
TAUPO VOLCANIC ZONE,
NORTH ISLAND
VOLCANOES, HOT SPRINGS, SUMMIT VIEWS
Extending from Mount Ruapehu to White
Island, off the northeastern coast, this active
volcanic region steams and seethes with
dozens of geothermal features, ranging from
the waterfall-and-hot-spring-fed Kerosene
Creek to the thermal pools of the Wairakei Ter-
races spa. It’s also pocked with calderas and
punctuated by snowcapped peaks, the most
well-known being Mount Tongariro, home to
the stunning 12-mile Tongariro Alpine Cross-
ing. The route can be crowded, so head out in
the early morning under shooting stars—or
go in winter, when crampons and an ice ax are
required—and you should have the trail all to
yourself. If you need a guide, Stewart Barclay,
founder of Adrift Tongariro, has completed the
crossing more than 2,000 times. He’ll happily
rise at 12:30 A.M. to lead your expedition be-
fore the rest of the mountain even wakes up.
DETOUR: Want to really escape the masses?
Barclay also leads climbs of 9,177-foot Mount
Ruapehu, the tallest peak on the North Island.
36 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE
a, e. Taupo Volcanic Zone
b–c. Abel Tasman National Park, South Island
d. Old Ghost Road, South Island
c
C LO C K W I S E F R O M TO P L E F T: M A U R I T I U S I M AG E S / O F F S E T; W I L S O N S A B E L TA S M A N ( 2 ) ; M AT T H AG E / H A G E P H OTO ; C A M I L L A R U T H E R F O R D
12
PAPAROA NATIONAL PARK, SOUTH ISLAND
MOUNTAIN BIKING, HIKING, KAYAKING
The west coast of New Zealand’s South Island draws travelers in search of glaciers, rainforests,
whitebait (tiny delicious fish that are fried whole or frittered), and pounamu—jade stones that are
an important part of Maori culture. Once the 34-mile Paparoa hut-to-hut track is finished in early
2019, it will be a hiker’s and biker’s paradise, too. The trail winds through beech trees and nikau
palms that provide habitat for roroa, the iconic terrestrial bird better known as the great spotted
kiwi. For another epic bikepacking journey, head to the 53-mile Old Ghost Road: this former mining
track, which runs along the Mokihinui River and through the Lyell Range, is defined by steep climbs,
exposed drop-offs, and long descents. The route is home to five huts that come with gas stoves,
fireplaces, toilets, and bunk beds ($91).
DETOUR: In the South Island’s northwest corner, Wilsons Abel Tasman offers guided kayaking
trips along the Abel Tasman Coast Track, where you’ll stop for day hikes and sleep on the beach
(from $1,060 for three days). Recuperate at the Mussel Inn café in the town of Onekaka in
Golden Bay over pan-fried tarakihi fish, green-lipped mussels, and a house-brewed Captain
Cooker—a malt beer infused with manuka tree cuttings that was inspired by the first ale
ever brewed in New Zealand, by none other than Captain Cook.
Dispatches Base Camp
11.18

True North
THIS BACKCOUNTRY LODGE IN THE HEART OF
DENALI NATIONAL PARK MAY BE PERCHED
ON A RAZOR’S EDGE, BUT ITS REAL THRILL IS
ACCESS TO ENDLESS ADVENTURE

38 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE P H OTO G R A P H B Y Chris Burkard

 SHELDON
CHALET

Access: From Anchor-

age, drive two hours
north to the small village
of Talkeetna or book a
three-hour journey on
the Alaska Railroad.
Then board the wait-
ing helicopter for a
45-minute flight to the
chalet. From $2,300,
all-inclusive.

Weather: Denali Na-

tional Park’s weather
is extremely variable,
so bring winter clothes
C LO C K W I S E F R O M TO P L E F T: C H R I S B U R K A R D ; L U K E M AT T S O N / S TO C K SY; C H R I S B U R K A R D ; J E F F S C H U LT Z

even in the warmest

months. The chalet will
provide a comprehen-
sive list of necessary
gear once you book your
stay. You can ski all
year on the glacier, but
the best snow condi-
tions are from February
to April. The heli-hiking
and fishing season is
May through July.

Side Trip: In winter,

bookend your trip with
steep-and-deep skiing
at Alyeska Resort in
Girdwood, 40 miles
SURROUNDED BY sweeping views of Ruth Glacier eyes at the faux-fur throws in the five guest rooms south of Anchorage. The
and the jagged Alaska Range, the Sheldon Chalet wel- or the helipad that doubles as a wine-tasting deck, aerial tram to the top
comed its first guests in February, but its debut has but he would have loved the world-class adventure of Mount Alyeska deliv-
been nearly half a century in the making. In the 1970s, offerings. In the winter, ski-tour the mile-thick Ruth ers stunning views of the
trailblazing bush pilot Don Sheldon and his wife, Ro- Glacier, rappel into crevasses, or explore neighboring glacier-filled Chugach
berta, had lofty dreams of bringing adventure tourism Mountain House, a rugged hut built by Don in 1966 Mountains.
to their almost five-acre homestead in the shadow of as a refuge for climbers. In the summer, heli-fish for
North America’s tallest mountain. Four decades later, king salmon along the Chulitna River or hike to his- Required Reading:
their children discovered Don’s blueprints for a hex- toric homesteads. When you need a rest day, the staff Wager with the Wind:
agonal structure and reimagined the building with a can arrange a helicopter trip to remote hot springs or The Don Sheldon Story,
level of luxury that early Alaskan pioneers could never a flightseeing tour of the park. Many guests come by James Greiner,
have fathomed. specifically for the otherworldly glow of the aurora explores the bush pilot’s
Guests arrive by helicopter from Talkeetna and are borealis, which can be seen from mid-September life, from mountain res-
welcomed with champagne, oysters, king crab legs, through late April. No matter the season, spend your cue missions to the
and knockout views of Denali’s 20,310-foot summit, evenings on the chalet’s observation deck as meteors cancer that claimed him
ten miles to the northwest. Don might have rolled his light up the sky. —JEN MURPHY in 1975, at age 53.

OUTSIDE MAGAZINE 39
Not all paddling out looks the same. Sometimes
you need boots. With 200 grams of insulation,
®
salt-resistant leather and a Vibram Arctic
Grip™ outsole, the Tremblant will get you there.
Longboarding on Lake Superior in the heart of
the winter isn’t for the uncommitted. But Surfer Dan
is having the time of his life in the Upper Peninsula
of Michigan – and he’s happy to share his spots
with you. To see a profile of this local legend,
visit Merrell.com/outdoorlife.
Dispatches Style
11.18

Time Traveler
A GLOBE-TROTTING
COMPANION FOR THE AGES
BY JASON HEATON

THERE IS A mythical creature in

horological circles known as the
One Watch: a single timepiece you
could own, forsaking all others,
and wear 24/7 for the rest of your
life and then pass down to an heir.
Now, Tudor has actually made
that unicorn: the Black Bay GMT.
Based on the brand’s popular
Black Bay dive model, this new
version is eminently capable, with
a 660-foot depth rating, a self-
winding mechanical movement
that’s shock and magnetic-field
resistant, and an understated
nylon band. The GMT’s show-
stopper is its ability to simul-
taneously track two time zones,
courtesy of a fourth hand and
matte blue and red bezel—nods
to a watch that Rolex, Tudor’s
parent company, made for Pan
Am pilots in the 1950s. And
with a price point well below a
Rolex, it’s an investment you can
justify making. $3,575

42 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE P H OTO G R A P H B Y Hannah McCaughey

Dispatches
11.18
Carve It Your Way
THE BEST RESORT PLANKS FOR
HOWEVER YOU LIKE TO GET DOWN
BY MARC PERUZZI
A. BEST WOMEN’S ALL-
MOUNTAIN FRONTSIDE
Head Wild Joy $750
Head embraced the light-
done-right style to produce
a ski that’s feathery but not
skittish. The company utilized
high-tech materials like
Koroyd and graphene, a metal
made from a single layer of
carbon atoms that’s ultralight
and 200 times stronger than
steel. When those ounce
savers are built in with a
traditional vertical wood core
and sidewall construction,
you end up with a ski that’s
weighted more proportionally
for most women yet still holds
an edge at speed. Our testers
were consistently blown
away. “It’s light but substan-
tial,” said one. “The Wild Joy
offers great on-trail carving,
but there’s enough girth for
some off-piste exploring.”
139/90/118
B. BEST ALL-MOUNTAIN
Rossignol Experience
94 Ti $800
Say hello to perhaps the most
versatile all-mountain ski ever
made. The Experience 94 Ti
is wide enough (94 millime-
ters at the waist) for most
powder days, and the tapered
tip and tail make it easy to
turn off-trail. The central
rail—a vertical strip of Titanal
that runs nearly the length
of the ski—both steadies
the Experience on edge and
boosts stability by limiting
counter flexing. The effect is
enhanced by new vibration
dampeners in the tip. “Loaded
with energy,” said a tester.
“It begs to be pushed hard
on-trail or off, but responds to
slow speed changes of direc-
tion.” 132/94/122
C. BEST ULTRAPREMIUM
Kästle MX99 $1,399
Kästle’s new MX99 doesn’t
feature the world’s most
radical shape or the latest
superfibers, but it was a star
of our test because of the
unmatched build quality. Of
course, a silver fir and beech
core augmented with two
44 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE
Skis
sheets of Titanal and one
layer of carbon—all laid out by
hand—doesn’t come cheap.
But the return on that invest-
ment is clear: this Kästle is
more durable and skis better.
“Nimble yet stable,” said a
tester. “The edge-to-edge
transitions are fast enough
that even at nearly 100 mil-
limeters underfoot, you can
have fun on groomers all day.”
135/99/120
D. BEST WOMEN’S
ALL-MOUNTAIN
Atomic Vantage 97 C W $600
With the new Vantage 97 C W,
Atomic again sought to make
a powerful ski that weighs
less but doesn’t chatter. To
do it, the brand devised a new
design—a poplar core sand-
wiched in carbon mesh—that
reinforces the ski without
weighing it down. On the hill,
that translates to a silky ride
with exceptional edge hold,
so you don’t need to muscle
the Vantage into cooperating.
“It’s lightweight, which saves
energy,” said a tester, “but
it’s also crisp and solid, with
limitless stability.” We’d ski
the 97 daily in the Mountain
West. 128.5/97/117.5
E
E. BEST POWDER
Fischer Ranger 102 FR $699
Rangers are known for their
lightweight and surfy feel,
perfect for backcountry turns.
This new model is all that,
but features a hardier and
damper vertical-sidewall-
sandwich construction that
D
adds power without sacrific-
ing playfulness. At 102 milli- A
meters underfoot, the Ranger
FR is plenty fat for all but
the deepest storm days. “It’s
predictable at high speeds,” B
said one of our testers at
Snowbird, Utah. “And just
because you can throw it
C
sideways to scrub speed
doesn’t mean you can’t rail
turns on icy snow, too.”
We’d ski it about 80 percent
of the time off-trail in soft
snow, but it’ll also make
short work of chalky resort
steeps. 136/102/126
P H OTO G R A P H S B Y Inga Hendrickson
 Snowboards
A. BEST WOMEN’S
DIRECTIONAL
Gnu Klassy $470
The compact, all-
mountain Klassy was
designed by pro Kaitlyn
Farrington, and testers
were quick to call it one
A of the best carvers of
the year. It combines a
wide waist and stubby
directional shape with
rocker between the
feet for hoverboard-like
buoyancy, while camber
2019:
A Shape
Odyssey
FOUR DECKS
THAT POINT TO
THE SPORT’S
FUTURE
BY DREW ZIEFF
C alike dug the snappy,
D up speed for a few more
B miles per hour.
OUTSIDE MAGAZINE
toward the tip and tail
offers ample grip in
turns. All that lends
it plenty of versatil-
ity: the Klassy handles
choppy moguls and lays
trenches in corduroy
with aplomb.
B. BEST SHORTIE
Lib Tech T. Rice
Orca $600
This potbellied powder
board, with a cutout
tail and plenty of float,
is designed for surfing
steeps. But we appreci-
ated the Orca’s ability to
rip turns on groomers,
too: it’s astonishingly
nimble edge to edge in
spite of its wide shape,
and serrated rails offer
“professional masseuse-
like grip,” according
to one of our freeride
testers.
C. BEST BIG GUN
K2 Overboard $480
K2’s fat-nosed, pin-
tailed Goliath is primed
for charging hard. The
165-centimeter length
has a relatively puny
effective edge—the area
of the board that comes
into contact with the
snow when turning. Still,
the carbon-reinforced
Overboard subsequently
surprised testers with
its ability to hammer
powerful carves on hard-
pack and draw tight,
graceful lines when
needed. “Weird, in the
right way,” said a tester
of this smooth operator.
D. BEST
DIRECTIONAL TWIN
Nitro Team $500
With serious pop
potential and depend-
able edge hold, Nitro’s
Team is a solid direc-
tional-twin shape that
proved fun wherever
we took it. All-mountain
riders and park rats
reactive, semistiff wood
core, as well as the high-
density base, which al-
lows you to quickly pick
45
Dispatches Ski Essentials
11.18 PHQ·V

D
B

Burton AK Hover jacket $630

The Hover, with three-layer
Gore-Tex Pro, has all the bells
and whistles you’d expect from
a high-end technical shell—
superb waterproofing and
breathability, fully taped
seams—in a longer, baggier cut.

Full F

Coverage
STAY WARM AND basically Lange’s race D. Black Diamond Razor F. Patagonia Capilene H. Dakine Reverb
COMFORTABLE—AND boot with a grippier sole Carbon Pro ski poles $140 Midweight bottoms $59 hoodie $175
HAVE MORE FUN and a more comfortable, These are backcountry- Prone to cold legs on the Wear it under a shell and
BY JOHN CLARY heat-moldable liner. The oriented poles, but we also chair? This midweight this puffy midlayer, with
DAVIES AND KRISTA snug heel pocket locks you use them on resort slopes. polyester fabric will keep 100 grams of PrimaLoft in-
CRABTREE in for smooth, powerful With aluminum upper you warm, but it’s feath- sulation in its body and 80
flex. Heads up: the LV pieces and carbon-fiber ery, too, with a brushed grams in the sleeves, will
A. Fits Medium Ski stands for low volume— lower shafts, the Razors grid pattern that raises keep you toasty. Bonus: it
OTC socks $26 this version has a narrow weigh in at just ten ounces it off the skin to improve packs up into a neck pillow
These hit the sweet spot: 97-millimeter last. per stick, and wrist straps breathability when you get for your flight home.
thick merino wool pre- release reliably under high cooking on the downhill.
vents bruised shins and C. Hestra Henrik Leather tension so you don’t get I. FlyLow Magnum 2.1
adds warmth, and thin Pro Model gloves $185 hung up in tree branches. G. Giro Contact pants $325
nylon-polyester helps vent Hestra is known for its goggles $250 Consummate resortwear,
moisture from the calves. best-in-class leather E. Giro Range MIPS These are our new go-to. these pants are con-
Toe cups and reinforced gloves and mittens. The helmet $250 The Contact offers subtle structed from a water-
heels keep everything in Pro Model features the Don’t look like a fathead. style, a wide field of vision, proof polyester-spandex
place, so the socks don’t brand’s famously soft and The minimalist Range is 27 different shades of blend that moves excep-
bunch up in your boots. supple cowhide matched low profile and still has the Zeiss lenses to choose tionally well. A built-in
with synthetic Thermolite requisite safety tech, plus from, and a magnetic lens belt, inner and outer thigh
B. Lange RX 130 LV insulation, which keeps a slick magnetic buckle, swap that’s as straight- vents, and well-placed
boots $850 your paws toasty without meaning you can always forward and effective as pockets round out the
The truly stiff RX 130 is adding too much bulk. leave your gloves on. they come. Magnum’s elegant design.

46 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE
A. Grass Sticks F. Arc’teryx Sentinel
D
ZRPHQ·V
Original Custom LT jacket $649
ski poles $89 This attractive shell
Choose your grip is an investment
color, strap, basket, in staying dry, with
and length when Gore-Tex Pro fabric,
ordering these poles watertight zips, a
made of sustain- helmet-compatible
able bamboo. Unlike hood, and a layering-
aluminum, it flexes friendly cut.
and springs back into C
shape, so they won’t G. Norrona E
snap during a spill. Lofoten Gore-Tex
Pro pants $749
B. Strafe Alpha Norrona has oper-
Direct Insulator ated in Norway’s
midlayer $249 chilly climes for four
This midlayer is generations, and it
tailor-made for the shows. The smartly
Rockies conditions crafted Lofoten fea-
near Strafe’s Aspen tures a zip-off bib so
headquarters. The you can adjust your
face fabric is plenty coverage to the snow
breathable, and depth. We also love
Polartec Alpha Direct the loose freeride fit.
insulation kept
testers’ cores toasty H. Lange RX 110 W B
but not overheated. boots $750
Candy Crush colors With a mix of rigid
add a nice pop. plastic where you
need more respon-
C. Smartwool Me- siveness and soft
rino 250 One-Piece plastic where
base layer $225 comfort is key, the
You’ll be the warmest RX 110 W beats
skier on the hill in this other boots in both
supremely soft wool performance and fit.
onesie. The drop tail The upright shape
zips open in a flash leads to less leg
for quick trips to the fatigue, and an asym-
bathroom. metric tongue wraps
the shin snugly.
D. Smith Vantage
MIPS helmet $260 I. Smith Skyline
F
A thin layer of Koroyd goggles $170
(tiny honeycomb- Bob Smith sold the
shaped cylinders of first thermal-sealed
rigid foam) under goggles in the park-
the Vantage’s sleek ing lots of ski resorts
shell absorbs energy in the sixties. The
in a crash while also Skyline has the same
reducing weight. The incredible heat reten-
Boa Fit System al- tion but with modern
lows for fine-tuning, updates: a rimless
and thick lining adds design, ultrawide
comfort. view, and contrast-
enhancing Chroma-
G
E. Seirus HeatTouch Pop lenses.
Hellfire mitts $425
A
If you’re plagued J. Wigwam Snow
by perpetually cold Altitude Pro
H
fingers, heated mitts socks $22
are the cure. The Wigwam’s first socks
Hellfire gauntlets were ribbed and
have three settings, made of unrefined I
and slim recharge- wool. A century later,
able lithium-ion the Snow Altitude
batteries hide in the Pros are much less J
cuffs. Leather and itchy, thanks to a
soft-shell exteriors stretchy merino-
cover waterproof- nylon combo and
breathable inserts. seamless toes.

OUTSIDE MAGAZINE 47
Dispatches
11.18
A B
F C
E D
Rack
and Roll
KEEP YOUR WINTER
ARSENAL SAFE
AT HOME AND ON
THE ROAD
BY JAKOB SCHILLER
A. StoreYourBoard
Timber Ski and Snow
wall rack $60
Skis propped against a
garage wall take up space
and inevitably clatter to
the ground. Keep yours
organized with this simple-
but-pretty red oak rack,
which bolts to the wall and
48 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE
Gear Protection
holds up to eight pairs of
skis (or four snowboards)
on horizontal arms.
B. Küat NV 2.0 bike rack
with Phat Bike kit
$649 and $10
Get your whip to the trail
with this hitch-mount
rack. It fits rubber up to
4.8 inches wide and flips
down with the push of a
foot pedal for easy load-
ing. We love the integrated
bike stand that pops out
of the rack.
C. Rhino-Rack Ski and
Snowboard carrier $149
This slim rack fits up to
four pairs of skis or two
snowboards laid bottom
to bottom, is compatible
with almost every roof bar four). Nifty attachment straps onto all of Dakine’s
out there, and features claws click to tell you roller suitcases for easy
large release buttons that when they’re sufficiently transport.
allow you to open and tight on your roof bars.
close it easily, even with F. Alu-Cab Explorer
gloved hands. E. Dakine Boundary ski Canopy camper
roller bag $210 shell $3,299
D. Thule Force XT In addition to room for The all-aluminum Explorer
cargo box $500 and up two pairs of skis, this comes with built-in rails
Here’s one for the family padded roller bag has for mounting roof racks,
that skis together. Load two removable interior can handle 300 pounds of
the Force XT with four pouches—one lined with equipment, and will take a
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 Mayday

Carr sailing
in the Bahamas
in 1981

50 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 11.18
 11.18
T E R R O R in the Wild

BY ALI CARR TROXELL

C O U R T E SY O F T H E C A R R FA M I LY
my father’s e-mail
didn’t make much sense, but he seemed to
be saying that pirates had boarded his boat.
“Being kidnappedby filmcompany Deep
south blackcult took over steering,” it read.
“Ship disabled.”
He sent this to my mother, Martha Carr,
at 4:30 A.M. Pacific time on May 28, 2017,
a Sunday. She was at home in Los Ange-
les, asleep, and she wouldn’t see the mes-
sage—and a couple more like it—until 8:30
A.M. For several hours, my dad, 71-year-
old Richard Carr, must have thought they
weren’t getting through.
Dad was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean,
on his way from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to
the Marquesas Islands, 26 days into a single-
handed, 2,780-mile crossing that was to be
the first major leg of a lifelong dream: sail-
ing around the world. It was 3:30 A.M. where
he was, near the equator, an hour behind
Pacific time. He was 1,160 nautical miles
from the Marquesas, 1,975 from Hawaii, and
1,553 from Mexico—about as far away from
land, and help, as you can get.
His boat was a 36-foot Union Cutter called
Celebration, built in 1985. It had a white hull,
faded teak decks, brass portholes turning
turquoise, and forest green sail covers that al-
ways reminded me of summer camp. Climb-
ing into the cabin was like disappearing into
a hobbit hole—a dark, welcoming space with
oak cabinets and big cushions.
Just six hours before Dad sent the pirate
alert, late in the evening on May 27, he had
used his satellite text messager and tracking
device to wish Mom a happy 39th wedding
anniversary. He also wanted to ease her con-
cerns that his boat was pointed the wrong
way, something she’d noticed on a map that
indicated his position based on the messages
he sent.
“Hey Hon. I’m fine,” he wrote. “I have
enough food, etc. The watermaker is still
working. Pulling over & parking in a storm
(heave to) is a good skill to have & practice.”
He signed off with a smiley face.
The smile was gone now. Ten minutes after
his 4:30 message, he e-mailed one of his
52 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 11.18
younger brothers, John Carr, an aerospace
afternoon, and I would write back,” she told
engineer in Orange County. “Being kid-
me later. “So I didn’t check my e-mail when
napped by pirates,” he wrote. “Talk to mar-
I got up.”
tha.” John was asleep, too, and didn’t see it.
At 8:30, the phone rang. It was John call-
About two hours later, Dad followed up
ing to discuss the strange e-mail he’d re-
with this message to John: “Apparently, I’ve
ceived. She ran upstairs to her laptop. It was
been spared.” A few minutes after that, at
then, roughly an hour after Dad sent his final
6:54, he messaged Mom: “Hugewind pirates
message of the morning, that he finally heard
left. I’m fine. Talklater.” He said he’d sent
back from the family. Mom’s first message to
out an SOS and an alert from his EPIRB, an
him said: “Omg-what do u need? Are u ok?”
emergency device that transmits a satellite
She phoned my brother, Tim, who lives
signal to rescuers when a boat is in distress.
in Culver City, about 45 minutes from her
He asked her to call and cancel them.
house, with his wife, Jen, and their two
At 7:54, shortly after sunrise where Dad
young boys. Tim messaged Dad, asking if he
was, he wrote Mom: “Message me as soon as
was all right and giving him instructions for
u can. I’m really shaken.” Then he tried John
canceling an SOS. Then he drove to Mom’s.
Once there he called me in Wood-
stock, New York, where I live with
my husband, Ian, and our two
I WAS NERVOUS, BUT I small daughters.
ALSO UNDERSTOOD THE Before leaving, Dad had given
EXHILARATION DAD FELT Mom a list of emergency contacts.
She called a California branch of
ON THE WATER, AND I the Coast Guard and was advised
WAS PROUD HE WAS GOING to try Honolulu instead, because
FOR IT. I KNEW THERE that part of the Pacific is their ter-
WAS A CHANCE THAT HE ritory. A woman answered. After
listening to the details about Dad,
WOULDN’T COME BACK, she checked for an EPIRB alert
BUT I’D RATHER HE from him. When she came back,
TRY—RISK AND ALL—THAN she said, “There’s been no signal.”
What was going on? There were
LIVE WITH REGRET. various possibilities, and none of
them seemed good. We scrambled
to find answers, knowing there
might not be much time.
again: “Very scarey. Thought I would not see RICHARD CARR grew up in the 1940s and
day.” For Dad, sunrise meant nearly 13 hours ’50s near the Erie Canal just outside Buf-
of sitting in humid 80-degree weather in the falo, New York. As was typical in that area
doldrums—an area near the equator with at that time, he was one of seven kids in a
fickle conditions that leave sailors becalmed hardworking family with stern parents, all of
one minute, huddled in squalls the next, and them crammed into a three-bedroom house.
then scrambling to catch a big gust of wind. The boys in the family were often out all
Around eight in L.A., Mom went outside day, until dinner, and Richard was no differ-
to do some gardening before it got too hot. ent. He taught kids to swim and fish for the
She still wasn’t aware of the e-mail Dad had local Boys’ Club and built a canoe with his
sent. “Richard usually messaged me in the older brother to explore the canal’s feeder
 CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT:
Carr (far left) with boyhood
friends in New York, early
1950s; Carr and Martha in
1975; sailing in the Bahamas
in 1981; with the author
in Santa Fe; with Tim and
grandson Brendan; with
Martha in 2016; Cortez,
one of Carr’s sailboats;
Martha and Tim, 1981
C LO C KW I S E F R O M TO P L E F T: C O U R T E SY O F R O D N E Y D U N W O R T H ; C O U R T E SY O F T H E C A R R FA M I LY ( 7 )

creeks. He and his best friends played Lost
Boys along parts of the Niagara River, when
he wasn’t diving in it with members of the
scuba club he started.“He was an optimist,”
my uncle John recalls. “He always had the
outlook that there was something to do and
it was always good.”
In 1963, Richard was offered a full schol-
arship to study marine biology at the Uni-
versity of Miami, but his father refused to
divulge the family’s income on the required
forms, so the aid fell through. Ready for some
distance from his hometown, he caught a
free ride to L.A., where he took classes at a
community college to make himself eligible
for residency tuition at California universi-
ties. To save money, he worked at a Laun-
dromat and sometimes lived off ketchup
packets mixed with water. (“Tomato soup,”
he joked.) He was shy, but he had a sunny,
magnetic smile.
Mom saw him for the first time in 1969,
at Oakwood, her private high school in
L.A. Born Martha Gold, she was a popular
tenth-grader, with long red hair, parents
who worked in the film industry, and a horse
that she jumped in competition. Dad was in-
terviewing to teach seventh-grade science.
By that time, he’d earned a degree in an-
thropology from UCLA and was interested
in psychology. They didn’t start a relation-
ship until 1975, when Mom was at UCLA as
a psych major. They met in a professional
group, and though Mom declined his invi-
tations for a while, she finally gave in and
agreed to go out with him.
“I was an anxious person and didn’t have
a lot of relationship experience,” she says.
“He helped me work through my resistance
and wasn’t put off by my weaknesses, so that
showed me a lot about his devotion.”
They married in 1978; by the next year,

11.18 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 53
Mom was pregnant with Tim. Dad, who
had learned to sail in California, sold a boat
he owned—a 31-foot Mariner ketch called
Cortez—and bought an old Spanish-style
house in the San Fernando Valley, where Tim
and I grew up and where Mom still lives. My
parents were busy raising us and tending to
clients in their therapy practices, but sailing
was always on Dad’s mind. He often tried to
convince Mom that the family should sail
around the world together, but she wanted
her kids to have a normal upbringing.
My parents shared an office suite in Holly-
wood, across from the famous Capitol Rec-
ords building. As a kid, I’d sometimes sit in
the waiting room while one of them finished
a session. I’d sort my Mom’s tea collection
and watch gem-toned fish flit about in Dad’s
saltwater tank. Over the years, in addition
to his practice, he became deeply interested
in research. He explored the neurology of
babies in the womb and wrote a book about
the neuroscience of art therapy.
Though Dad was devoted to his work, our
coffee table was never without an issue of
Cruising World. On some weekends dur-
ing my childhood, we sailed a rented boat to
Catalina Island, a half-day’s trip from L.A.
We often camped and skied, and also trav-
eled to Hawaii, snorkeling and listening to
Dad tick off the names of the fish we’d seen.
More recently, as he prepared to depart on
his circumnavigation, I thought about taking
sailing lessons and joining him somewhere
tropical. Father-daughter time felt sacred
by then, because we hadn’t lived in the same
state for almost ten years. The occasions
we spent together—a ski trip to Mammoth,
a daylong sail off Los Angeles Harbor—
established our dynamic. We dipped com-
fortably into troughs of silence crested by
deep conversations about life.
DAD’S QUEST TO sail the world got seri-
ous on March 16, 2010, when he made the
final payment on a boat he found in the San
Francisco Bay Area called Celebration. It had
a crack in the bulkhead, a rusted mast step,
and a hull full of blisters. He planned to de-
vote the next few years to readying it.
The boat had been known as Pelican, until
the previous owner changed it. According to
legend, renaming a boat enrages the sea gods
if you neglect to do various ritualistic things,
like burn the old ship’s log. I have no idea if
the prior owner adhered to that tradition,
but we do know that he made it only as far
as San Diego on his own around-the-world
attempt. There he suffered a stroke and was
sidelined. Seven years after purchasing the
boat, my dad bought a carved pelican figu-
rine at a stop in La Paz, Mexico, and mounted
it in the cabin as a talisman.
54 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 11.18
During the summer of 2010, once Celebra- winter. Plus, the boat wasn’t seaworthy yet.
tion was fit to use, it was temporarily docked The delays felt monumental to him. It was as
in Oxnard, 60 miles northwest of L.A., and if sticking to the schedule was the primary
my parents spent weekends sailing to the goal, and he couldn’t see that being patient
Channel Islands. Mom enjoyed the trips would allow him to practice and prepare. I
but had no interest in big ocean crossings. think he also sensed that, at this stage of his
Instead of joining Dad on his circumnavi- life, getting ready for such a trip might re-
gation, which would play out in stages over quire more time than he had left.
several years, she planned to meet him in Mom became anxious as the departure
various ports around the world. date got closer. Their lives had been inter-
That fall, Celebration found its new long- twined for decades, and he was about to
term home in busy, industrial Los Angeles leave on a voyage that could go on for years.
Harbor, at a small, homey marina called The repairs—which came to nearly half the
Lighthouse Yacht Landing. It was tucked cost of the boat—caused frequent argu-
into the terminus of a maze of massive ments. But she had to accept that he wasn’t
cranes playing Tetris with container ships. going to give up his dream, so they moved
Dad spent weekends fastidiously work- forward, at times clumsily, toward his ulti-
ing on Celebration, but eight hours a day mate adventure.
was a lot for him. “He wasn’t a carpenter or
a mason or a plumber,” says Thor Faber, a THE START OF 2016 brought a major new
boat repairman who sold Dad equipment to expense: Celebration’s decks were rotting
and had to be replaced. After that
repair was completed, in Ma-
rina del Rey, Dad motored down
AT FIRST THE TRIP the coast toward L.A. Harbor. En
route, the engine started smok-
WAS A DREAM. “LOVELY ing, and it blew a head gasket, re-
LIGHT AIR SAILING,” quiring a partial rebuild. Crucial
DAD WROTE. IT FILLED time to test gear and practice sin-
gle-handing was slipping away.
ME WITH RELIEF Finally, Dad refused to delay
AND JOY TO KNOW any longer. He forced himself to
THAT, AFTER YEARS get going by signing up for the
OF HAMMERING AND Baja Ha-Ha, a two-week cruis-
ing rally with 130 other boats
TINKERING, THE BOAT that ran from San Diego to Cabo
WAS FINALLY LIVING San Lucas, Mexico, at the end of
UP TO ITS STOUT October. He would go with his
marina mate Marty Richards.
REPUTATION. Dad and Richards made their
way to San Diego, and the whole
family gathered there to say good-
bye. Mom kept her nerves under
control by orchestrating dinner.
prepare for long sails. “It’s taxing for some- Dad’s anxiety peaked as he tried to clear years
body who is 40 or 50, but for someone who of collected junk from Celebration—piles of
is 60-plus it’s a big adventure.” pencils, rulers, and other dead weight.
Still, Dad couldn’t stay away, and the I was nervous, given Dad’s track record
more time he spent on the boat, the more with mishaps like the overheated engine,
obsessed he became with getting everything which required a Coast Guard tow. But I
done. When his professional work got in the also understood the exhilaration he felt
way, he grew frustrated and cranky. Marty on the water. Over the years, as part of my
Richards, Dad’s liveaboard neighbor, says career, I’ve snowboarded backcountry ter-
he could never suggest a fix for something rain and climbed in the dark with thousands
without inviting a lengthy back-and-forth. of feet of exposure. I was proud that Dad was
“Your dad was a stubborn guy,” he told going for it. I knew there was a chance that he
me. “Kind of a self-taught guy, and I think wouldn’t come back, but I’d rather he try—
he pretty much lived his whole life that way, risk and all—than live with regret.
right? He wouldn’t take anything on faith One night in San Diego, after the kids
unless he could understand it intuitively. He were asleep, Tim and Ian went to the hotel
just wouldn’t believe it.” bar. A sailor there started talking about
Dad hoped to depart in late 2015, but an pirates along the African coast, an area that
El Niño weather forecast loomed for that Dad would eventually find himself in as

he sailed around the world.
“That really alarmed us and made us ques-
tion if Richard knew what he was doing,” Ian
remembers. “We were crying into our scotch.
We knew he was going no matter what.”
“I remember feeling impressed at how
brave he was and proud of him for going, but
I was also terrified,” Tim says. “I gave him a
hug on the boat and told him I was afraid he
wouldn’t come back.”
When it was time to pull away from port,
Mom ran off briefly to put something in the
car. When she got back, Celebration was
gone. “That was when I really started to
worry,” she says. “How could he forget to say
goodbye?” She called his mobile. After fuel-
ing up, he turned around, docked, and said
a proper farewell before rejoining the rally.
Problems ensued as Dad and Richards
made their way south. Among other things,
they had to fix a leaky bilge pump, which had
caused an alarming amount of steam to pour
from the engine compartment. New noises
kept Dad awake on the first night. “He was so
sleep deprived he was slurring,” Mom recalls
of their phone conversation the next day.
“His thoughts were all over the place.”
And his eyes were playing tricks on him.
At one point in the night, he thought he saw
a forest of trees rising from the water, il-
luminated by phosphorescence. “Despite
knowing they couldn’t be real,” he wrote
later on his blog, “I had to wait … and watch
MAP BY PETRA ZEILER
the branches dissolve into fragmentary il-
lusions.” Hallucinations worried us, but
we also knew that they’re not uncommon
among sailors on overnighters.
Even so, Dad had some hard things to face.
“The real journey, which had been more
challenging than my conjured fears before
we started, left me needing to reflect and
redefine my trip,” he wrote. “Questions tor-
mented me.… When Marty’s gone, who will
I talk things through with? How will I hold
up sailing day and night on long runs? Am I
really ready to single-hand this trip? A reality
that had been an idea just a few days before
was unfolding according to its own design as
the life I’d agreed to.”
CABO CORRIENTES, rocky and pointed like
an arrowhead, is the last piece of land jut-
ting into the Pacific at the base of Mexico’s
horseshoe-shaped Banderas Bay. Head east
and you’ll hit Puerto Vallarta, the bass-
thumping spring-break destination. Head
west and you’ll hear nothing but wind and
the slap of the ocean against your hull.
I can picture Dad clearing that spot on the
morning of May 3, 2017, his hands loosely
gripping the boat’s metal wheel and his blue
eyes surveying the horizon. He would have
uttered an “mmph” to mark the moment be-
fore he went back to winching and charting
and setting angles. “My sea journey has really
begun,” he texted as he moved out. “Only
ocean to the Marquesas.
Lite winds. Breakfast
time.”
The huge expanse
ahead would be his first
ocean crossing, and it
would also be the hardest
leg of his planned route,
judging by the likely
weather patterns and du-
ration—an estimated 27
days. When I asked what
scared him most about
the trip, he said it was
sleep deprivation, an in-
evitable issue for single-
handed sailors, who often
are so busy that they can
rest only in chunks.
Dad had spent the
month and a half before
departure in La Cruz
de Huanacaxtle, prep-
ping to join the Pacific
Puddle Jump, a migration
of boats that cross from
the Americas to French
Polynesia, mostly during
March and April, when
the winds are strong and
storms are rare. But April came to a close,
and he still had repairs to make. Fortunately,
the weather window remained favorable for
a few extra weeks, and there were at least a
half-dozen boats crossing at the same time.
On May 2, the birthday of his first grandchild,
Brendan, he set sail.
Celebration, a slow but sturdy boat, was
equipped with solar panels, a wind generator,
a watermaker (or desalinator), a four-man
life raft, a self-steering device, a flare gun, a
$1,300 survival suit designed for dangerous
Alaskan fishing conditions, and provisions
for three months, among other items.
“It’s an easy boat to handle,” says Mike
Danielson of PV Sailing, a Puerto Vallarta–
based marine service center that helped Dad
rig. “If you’re in a gale, that boat can heave to
and weather it out.”
Heaving to—a maneuver used to slow a
boat’s progress and basically park it—is a
skill Dad would practice often on this trip,
especially when he was in the Intertropical
Convergence Zone, where the north- and
southeast trade winds meet near the equator.
This region is infamous for chaotic weather
that alternates between rain squalls, shifting
winds, thunderstorms, and dead calm. The
patterns become more frenetic as summer
approaches. “It’s feast or famine out there,”
says Danielson. “Getting across the conver-
gence zone at that time is a lot of work.”
I was due to have my second baby a week
11.18 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 55

before Dad’s estimated arrival in the Mar-
quesas on May 29. Both of us would be fac-
ing difficult challenges thousands of miles
apart—me in labor, him single-handing—
and that made me feel close to him. Our
family had preliminary plans to meet in New
Zealand for Christmas.
On May 3, as Dad sailed west and Cabo
Corrientes slipped below the horizon, my
water broke—three weeks early. Later that
day, I delivered my second daughter, Wyatt.
“Congrats on new daughter,” Dad wrote
the next morning. “Delivered with your
special drama, flair and courage to do all U
can.” As he headed into the empty Pacific—
wishing he’d been present for Wyatt’s birth—
seven birds kept him company, perching on
the bowsprit, falling, scrambling, honking,
and perching again.
At first the trip was a dream. Every few
days, Dad would let us know how great the
conditions were. “Lovely light air sailing,” he
wrote. It filled me with relief and joy to know
that, after years of hammering and tinkering
that had left Dad’s hands greasy and raw, the
boat was finally living up to its stout reputa-
tion. He was really doing it.
Eventually, the seas got bigger and
rougher. Dad’s self-steering wind vane—
which allowed him to leave the helm to cook
Celebration
one sail in that? Very carfully!”
under sail in
2016; left, For days the weather flopped be-
Carr in San tween foul and calm. On May 26, two
Diego, before days before Dad sent his first mes-
setting off sage about pirates, he made a sharp
for Mexico
turn south toward Hiva Oa—the
and the South
Pacific second-largest island in the Marque-
sas—but storms blew him back 20
nautical miles.
“No joy!” he wrote. He told Mom
that he was reevaluating everything.
“It’s the whole plan,” he said. “Boat
and I r not really going.” His next
message read: “Damn t.” The weather
router had just told him it would take
24 to 48 hours for the winds to be-
come more favorable.
In the doldrums, time slows down.
Explorer Jason Lewis, who has sailed
in that part of the Pacific, described
it like this in Jonathan Franklin’s
book 438 Days, an account of the
saga of Mexican fisherman Salvador
AT THIS POINT, Alvarenga, who survived being lost
THE COAST GUARD at sea in the Pacific for well over a
REQUESTED THAT HE year: “The lightning comes down
to the water. You’ll see these thun-
TYPE A SIMPLE Y OR derstorms developing, and they’ll
N TO THIS QUESTION: be very dark and foreboding. You
“IS YOUR LIFE IN watch them for hours, rolling toward
you. … Every day out there feels like
DANGER?” “I BELIEVE a week … and every week feels like a
SO,” DAD RESPONDED. month, a month felt like a year.”
A FEW MINUTES LATER, In the same book, explorer Ivan
HE WROTE TO OUR Macfadyen says: “If you start to
imagine saber-toothed tigers in the
FAMILY: “GOODBY.” corner of the room, then suddenly
“YOU COME HOME! they’re all over you. The fear factor
NO!!!” MOM BEGGED. is overpowering.”
Dad was never a complainer, but
he was worried about the calm con-
ditions. “This not a little thing,” he
texted. “It’s over a week of lite ad-
AS THE DAYS went on, the frequency of verse winds.” His fuel tank was nearly full—
Dad’s messages slowed, as did his forward he could have motored most of the way to
progress: he was making only 77 miles a Hiva Oa—and he seemed to be forgetting that
day now, and his overall trip time was re- the weather wouldn’t always be like this.
calibrated to five weeks. Because of rough “Big challenges going on,” he wrote on the
seas, he was having trouble eating without 26th. “I need some new ways of approach-
spilling. Worse, his watermaker had stopped ing them. Strangest thing just happened. Too
functioning shortly after he left Banderas odd & Long for InReach. Involved scam mov-
Bay. Mom relayed repair notes from Thor iemaking.”
F R O M L E F T: T I M C A R R ; D E E N A M I T C H E L L

or clean or sleep—was overwhelmed by
winds and swells, and he had to stay on deck
and help steer. Exhaustion set in, and the
less than ideal wind direction he was trying
to harness required vigilance.
By the time he was ten days in, averaging a
slow, steady 80 to 90 nautical miles per day,
he was getting to know himself in isolation.
He told Mom that he was having a lot of in-
ternal dialogue, which for him was a normal
way to deal with demanding situations.
Faber; after two weeks, during which he
probably drank from the backup supply, Dad
got it working again.
In his third week out, on May 20, he wrote
that “gear & wind & wave” had knocked two
pairs of glasses off his face, leaving him with
a single damaged but wearable pair. “A bit
scarey couple of days,” he said. “Adveture
& learn or die trying ;}};.” He followed with
this cryptic note: “Horizontal winds that turn
ranbows sideways pose question of how does
Mom, alarmed, responded within minutes:
“Scam moviemaking? Are you in contact
with others? Food and water holding out?”
She told him she wanted to hear more about
the challenges he faced. He didn’t respond.
On the afternoon of May 27, around 1:15,
he wrote: “Rain—Intense at times, moments
horizontal. my decks are relatively clear, not
sails. Happy Anniversary 39 years of bliss. Re
movie scam. Maybe my Beautiful Mind ala
My Sailing Mind. Take this as possible book

56 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 11.18
idea. As real dilemma. After2 days sleep dep,
Banderas Bay, Shortwave radio playng un-
known to me made me think I was in trouble.
Then thought to check it. Had a laugh.”
Mom wrote back: “Happy Anniversary
Lover! I wondered if hallucination re Movie
Scam but thought maybe u r listening to
something bizarre over shortwave…SLEEP!”
Then she got the message that made it
clear his boat was facing the wrong way. “I
was in rolling seas, storm cells encroaching
& gusts to 28Knts, so I heaved to,” he wrote.
“Parked. Big storm Moving north.… Adverse
til next Friday. Can u believe it. Obstacles at
almost every step. The communication dif-
ficulties o”
been hysterical today. Tim with me all day.
What did the fisherman do exactly? Also,
what language?”
At 3 P.M., the Coast Guard texted him
again. He sent his coordinates—N 6 35.9712’
W 127 17.7952’—and then messaged them:
“This is vessel. Celebration WDJ4510 need-
ing to confirm cancellation of epirb 2DC-
C7B512CFFBFF this morning 5/28/17 around
6:30AM. Cannot reachUSCG on SSB.”
Tim let Dad know that no emergency
signal had been sent or received, adding that
we were glad he was OK but this was scary
for everyone. He signed off: “Love you!!!
Be safe.”
We were still baffled. Dad’s abrupt shift—
from giving us vague information about
pirates to providing lucid housekeeping
11.18
T E R R O R in the Wild

SOS
The text ended there.

ON THE MORNING of May 28, once Mom

had read the “deep south blackcult” pirate
messages, the family started reaching out
every ten minutes: “Are you okay?” “On
phone with coast guard.” “Trying to find
you.” “PLEASE ANSWER.”
We got nothing.
The Coast Guard tried to raise Dad by text,
but he didn’t reply. Tim wrote: “Please re-
spond to John Mom or Ali ASAP.… Want to
know you’re safe and unhurt. Maybe you’re
sleeping?”
Four hours of silence passed before Dad
emerged at around 12 P.M. his time. “It’s part
of being put in my pjace Southern style,” he
wrote. “More later.”
But nothing followed that provided any
clarity. Instead, roughly an hour later, he
wrote: “I’m fine now. One of those nearby
fishing boats was in empjoy of a southerq
boss. Who, unbeknost to me, wanted to put
me in my place. Long story.”
Why was he being so murky? Had he been
kidnapped by pirates and someone else was
sending these messages? Was he trying to
communicate in code? Mom asked for his
radio frequency so she could relay it to the
Coast Guard in Honolulu. “You need to reply
… NOW. What you are saying makes no
sense. Anything stolen?” The Coast Guard
messaged boats in the area via satellite, ask-
ing them to keep a look out for Celebration.
An hour went by before Dad said he’d try
the Coast Guard over the SSB, a long-range
radio favored by open-ocean sailors. He
apologized for not responding, then said:
“Nothing stolen No one hurt, No info on
boat. Was inside deciding best action.”
We were relieved but confused. Would
pirates allow him to stay inside to review his
options while they were aboard?
At 2:55 P.M. Dad’s time on the 28th,
after he reported that the radio channels
were occupied, Mom sent him the Coast
Guard’s e-mail address and wrote, “I have
CRASHING DOWN
Charlie Finlayson was on the ultimate climbing
adventure with his dad, David, when a loose boulder
forced him to make a daunting rescue
AS TOLD TO WILL COCKRELL
DAVID FINLAYSON: I’d been taking Charlie into the backcountry since he was a
baby. In 2015, when he was 13, we planned a trip to climb these granite towers about
13 miles into Frank Church–River of No Return Wilderness, in Idaho. A week in, we
were about 1,000 feet up a tower. There was loose rock, so I anchored Charlie off
to a tree to belay me while I did some route finding. That’s when I heard the crack.
CHARLIE FINLAYSON: I didn’t see the boulder hit him, but I saw the rock flake he
was standing on come off the wall.
DAVID: My left arm was above my head, and the boulder snapped it, crushed my
helmet, and broke my back and my left leg. I ended up 40 feet below Charlie.
CHARLIE: I couldn’t see him, because there was this bush in the way, so I didn’t
know if he was alive. He was silent for like five minutes. I kept shouting, asking if
he could hear me.
DAVID: I woke up and heard Charlie yelling. I told him I was OK but bleeding and
needed the first aid kit. He lowered it down, then rappelled to me and lowered me
another 20 feet to a ledge, where he helped me get bandaged. We were so far up
the wall, I thought I might bleed out before we got down. But I just couldn’t say,
“Hey, I might not make it.” I told him that if I passed out, he should tie me off to
the wall and go. It took us until nightfall to reach the bottom.
CHARLIE: There was one point where I knew he was delirious, because he said,
“OK, you can scramble from here, it looks pretty flat.” We were still 100 feet up.
DAVID: Charlie went to our camp in the dark to get sleeping bags, water, and food.
We stayed up all night talking. He’d doze off, then pop up to make sure I was awake.
At first light, he got me moving very slowly back to camp. Many times I said, “Char-
lie, I can’t go any farther.” He’d say, “Let me help you make it another inch.” At
camp, I told him he had to go get help.
CHARLIE: I said, “No, I’m not going out by myself.”
DAVID: That was emotional. I wasn’t too worried about him getting lost, but
there might not be anybody at the trailhead. The next morning he was ready. He
said, “I guess I better get going.” He gave me a big hug and left.
CHARLIE: About three miles from camp, I ran into a couple of hikers, who told me
there was a big group behind them. I asked them to check on my dad, and I kept
going. At first I didn’t see anyone else, so I blew my whistle. This guy ran up to me
and then went to get a ranger. That’s when I knew that my dad was going to make it.
DAVID: I had my final round of surgeries in December. I’m still recovering, but we
did an all-day climb a couple of weeks ago.

11.18 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 57
details to the Coast Guard—made no sense.
Why couldn’t he be clear about what had
happened to him?
An hour later, he wrote Mom: “Still may
be in trouble if myinfo gotinto public record.”
She responded that nothing had been made
public. At 5:08, he told the Coast Guard:
“I’m sea beigwatched.”
“We don’t understand your message,”
they replied. “Are you in distress? Did any-
one come aboard your vessel? What is deep
south black cult?”
Tim’s wife, Jen, wanted to confirm that
someone else wasn’t pretending to be
him. “Tell me something only you would
know about me. What do I do for a living?”
she wrote.
“Physical sports therapy,” he said. Correct.
Mom pressed for details about the pirates,
with minutes passing between responses.
“We spoke about Phyllis’ disability She’s
retarded or speech disabled,” he wrote,
referring to someone we’d never heard of.
“She thought Iwas afriendwho should stay.
I refused.”
“Who spoke with you about Phyllis?”
Mom asked. “Was she related to one of
the fishermen? I have no context. This
sounds bizarre. Did they board your boat?
Threaten you?”
“I luv u always,” he said. “Marni ashes
buried at sea Al’s too.”
That was a gut punch. Marni and Al were
Mom’s mother and stepfather. They’d both
died in the two-year period before Dad
sailed. One of his goals was to spread their
ashes in the ocean.
“When I saw that message, I thought,
Uh-oh. He’s going to do something,” Mom
said later. “It was like he was taking care of
business.”
A YEAR EARLIER, Dad was sitting bedside
with my mom’s mother as she lay dying of
cancer, her body withering into a feather. “I
don’t know how to die,” she whispered.
“You don’t have to. Your body knows what
to do,” he said into her ear. “You can choose
to go anywhere else in your mind. Think of a
childhood memory, think of something that
you love.” She thought of a camping trip with
her sisters. A few hours later she was gone.
Now it was Mom’s turn to talk to him.
“Thank you sweetheart,” she wrote at 6:06
P.M. “I am feeling alarmed you aren’t re-
sponding to my other questions. It’s safe
to send message. Do u want to go to Hawaii
instead?”
Three minutes later he responded:
“Killers. Watch yourback sorry…”
A few minutes after that:
“Hawaiisoundsqood barbeque at sea.…
Sorry about insuance.”
58 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 11.18
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” Mom wrote.
“You are scaring me. What is happening?
Sounds like you are going to hurt yourself!
Do you need help? Say yes or no.”
“Thesepeople r killers it’s nott beautiful
mind,” he said.
All that day, Dad had moved, slow but
steady, on his southwesterly route toward
Hiva Oa. But now the map, which updated
his position with each message, showed him
heading due west. He was drifting off course.
At 6:59, he wrote: “Hekilled hisdaughter
well not himhis aid. Poison crack. She’s dying
These r old south. People will say I sucided.
Better thanwhat he intends,I’ll wait. Miss u.”
“Is your ship disabled?” Mom wrote.
“Company?”
“No not in significantway. Listen talk
speakers with remote personne.”
“Listening on radio? Who is talking to
you?”
“Listeningtome&hisdaughtr talk& re-
porting back.”
My sister-in-law broke in, saying she
was worried. “So am i notlookingto die,” he
wrote. “Don’t want to be killed or enslaved.”
At this point, the Coast Guard requested
that he type a simple Y or N to this question:
“Is your life in danger?”
“I believe so,” Dad responded. A few min-
utes later, he wrote to our family: “Goodby.”
“You come home! NO!!!” Mom begged.
Ten minutes later, he said, “I’D loveto-
buthearboats&Needtoact fast.”
Over the next hour, his responses slowed.
At 8:48, Tim wrote: “Satellite shows near-
est boat is many many miles away. This isn’t
just a lack of sleep right?” At 9:08, with no
new message from Dad, Tim begged: “Hit
SOS please.”
Family members kept messaging late into
the night, but no one heard from Dad after
8:30 his time. The final e-mail from him
read: “Not able stop Patjustgot news she’s
toberescued&instijtutionalized byher-
boy friend.”
ALL THIS WAS happening in the late after-
noon and evening where Dad was. In New
York State, I was four hours ahead. The last
I’d heard, from the message relayed by Tim
and Mom (“I’m fine now”), he seemed OK.
By the time the situation started deteriorat-
ing, I was asleep for the night with our new
baby. Mom didn’t know which messages were
getting to me, and she didn’t call because she
knew it was late on the East Coast.
At 2:30 A.M. my time on the 29th, I woke
up to feed the baby and decided to check my
phone—something I usually don’t do, but I
felt an overwhelming need to message Dad,
to let him know I was sending love.
The next morning, I found this e-mail
from Mom. “I know you will be getting up
before us and will see some scary e-mails
from dad last night,” she wrote. “Coast guard
says there are no boats near him. He sent us
a few more e-mails after the one that says
goodbye. But we don’t know what this means
yet. We will loop you in as soon as we are up.
Just hope he didn’t do something stupid out
of paranoia. We messaged him to go to sleep.
Hope he read.”
I called Mom and Tim and asked them to
forward the messages. What I read looked
schizophrenic. I studied them over and over;
the fear in his words was tangible.
The Coast Guard hadn’t been able to find
any instances of piracy in the area where
Dad was. Later research, using records from
the International Maritime Organization,
showed that of the 204 reports of piracy and
armed robbery worldwide in 2017, only three
occurred in the region where Dad was sail-
ing. All involved large container-style ships
and had happened in Peruvian and Ecuador-
ean ports.
By the end of the day on May 29, we hadn’t
heard from Dad for 24 hours. During a con-
ference call with the Honolulu Coast Guard,
I asked about the possibility that he had run
into hostile fishermen in the early-morning
hours of the 28th.
“Maybe he crossed their nets and they had
to come on board to detangle his boat in the
middle of the night,” I said. “That would be
terrifying—it would be dark, he hadn’t seen
people in weeks, and most likely they spoke
another language and were angry.”
The Coast Guard didn’t rule it out.
Another question loomed: Had anything
at all happened to him? Dad said he’d sent
EPIRB and SOS signals, but he hadn’t. And
what had he meant by “barbeque at sea”?
The message “sorry about insuance” showed
up immediately after that. Was he telling
Mom that she wouldn’t be able to collect
insurance money because there would be no
body to recover?
This was so far from how I envisioned
Dad leaving this world. I yearned to know
what his face looked like, what his heart felt
like in those rawest of moments. His words
didn’t tell us. As darkness fell around me on
the 29th, my mind looped the same haunt-
ing questions: Dad, where are you? What did
you do?
AT NOON ON May 28 in California, as Mom
and Tim were waiting for a sign of life from
Dad, the Coast Guard had asked about his
mental-health history. Mom told them that
he’d never had any problems. But judging
by his reaction to sleep deprivation during
the Baja Ha-Ha, she said, he may have been
delusional from exhaustion.
 The Coast Guard began scouring for re-
sources—boats, planes, anything—to get
eyes on him. The nearest boats were 200
nautical miles away, more than a day’s jour-
ney. A cargo plane could have reached him,
but he was so far out that the crew would
have only ten minutes to search before
they’d need to turn back.
At 11 P.M., a staffer at DeLorme, the maker
of Dad’s texting and tracking device, con-
firmed that it had stopped accepting mes-
sages at the exact moment he’d sent his final
one. The device had either been turned off,
malfunctioned, or been destroyed.
At 1 P.M. on Monday the 29th, the Coast
Guard reached the U.S. fishing vessel
American Enterprise, which was 140 nau-
tical miles southeast of Dad’s last known
location. The skipper agreed to head to that
position immediately.
To construct a search grid, the Coast
Guard uses a program called the Search and
Rescue Optimal Planning System. It gath-
ers information such as a boat’s size and
location, plots 5,000 corresponding points
on a map, and creates simulations of likely
drift patterns. The Coast Guard usually
sends a boat or plane to cover these drift
points immediately. If it can, it drops a self-
locating data-marker buoy, which uses the
current to validate the system’s predictions.
In Dad’s case, he was too far away for either
of those options.
Through all this, my family tried to figure
out what else we could do. Mom e-mailed
the Tahitian authorities. I called the most
experienced sailor I knew. He suggested I try
to contact fishing and commercial vessels in
the area. Uncle John scoured real-time ship
traffic online. Mom asked if there were any
satellites taking pictures that might show us
the boat or, worse, its debris. (There weren’t.)
Tim e-mailed the IMB Piracy Reporting
Center. But everything we were doing had
already been tried by the Coast Guard.
On the evening of Tuesday, May 30,
American Enterprise, along with its onboard
helicopter, began a grid search southwest of
Dad’s last known location. By the evening
of May 31, three days since we’d heard from
him, they had searched an area the size of
Connecticut, with no sign of either the Cel-
ebration or any debris.
Meanwhile, a 688-foot Panamanian boat
joined the search 240 nautical miles to the
southeast—an area where the Coast Guard
hypothesized that Dad might be. No sight-
ings were reported.
By June 2, we were becoming desperate.
We knew that Dad, even if he was still alive,
probably couldn’t survive much longer. On
June 4, a week since we’d heard from him,
two more boats searched but saw nothing.
A day later, there was a glimmer of hope: On the 15th, the planes took off from Tahiti.
the Coast Guard’s satellite data showed what They scoured the boat’s path. Three vessels
looked like a sailboat headed south, which were spotted, and one remained unidenti-
aligned with initial hypotheses about the fied, because it had no electronic signature.
boat’s course. Its length and color matched However, it didn’t match the description of
Celebration. The Coast Guard speculated Celebration, and radio contact confirmed
that the boat was harnessing the trade winds that it had two people aboard.
south and would make a hard right at Hiva Subsequent searches found nothing, and
Oa’s latitude. on June 21 the Hercules was sent back to Ha-
Unfortunately, by the time satellite data waii. On June 22, the Coast Guard suspended
hits the Coast Guard’s desk, it’s 24 hours old, the search. All told, it had covered 59,598
making a moving target nearly impossible square miles over 24 days.
to find, especially among scattered clouds
and whitecaps. IN THE 17 MONTHS since Dad vanished, no
American Enterprise, which was now the trace of his boat has been found. I doubt it
closest ship to the unidentified boat, sent up ever will be—although one drift-analysis
its helicopter again. The crew saw nothing. expert suggested that, if Celebration is still
On the 6th, the Coast Guard queried floating, it could hit New Guinea in two
Tahitian hospitals to see if Dad had been years. But I believe that the boat—or what’s
brought in. Negative. left of it—is at the bottom of the Pacific, with
Dad’s last coordinates serving as
his only headstone.
I’ve spent hours trying to imag-
I’VE PICTURED DAD ine what happened in the end. I’ve
IN AN ALTERED STATE: pictured Dad in an altered state:
eyes glazed over, stoically moving
EYES GLAZED OVER, about the boat as he completed
STOICALLY MOVING necessary tasks, like dealing
ABOUT THE BOAT AS properly with my grandparents’
ashes. Or maybe he was sobbing—
HE COMPLETED heartbroken to know he would
NECESSARY TASKS. never see his family again. Then he
OR MAYBE HE WAS either set the teak deck on fire or
cut an intake hose, filling the boat
SOBBING—HEARTBROKEN with water and sinking it.
TO KNOW HE WOULD If he did any of these things,
NEVER SEE HIS it was because sleep deprivation
FAMILY AGAIN. had driven him mad, making him
believe that suicide was the only
way to escape the pirates he’d
conjured, the only way to prevent
them from killing him.
He didn’t have a gun on board,
On June 8, Dad’s 72nd birthday, the Coast as far as we know, so he would have died
Guard again spotted an unidentified boat either by fire or in the sea. Did he stay on deck
along the southern course—about 30 de- as flames rose around him? Tim doubts it. He
grees off a Marquesas route. It was getting thinks Dad started a blaze, dove off the side,
closer to Hiva Oa, traveling at four knots. and swam straight down. I picture mottled
Assuming it might be the same boat as be- moonlight reflecting on his pale skin as he
fore, the Coast Guard used the new data to descends into darkness.
create a third potential position. The idea that sleep deprivation made
Finally, on June 13, two weeks after my Dad take drastic action may sound fantasti-
dad’s last communication, the unidentified cal, but there are countless precedents. It’s
boat was close enough that the Coast Guard known that exhaustion, fatigue, and iso-
deployed a plane from Hawaii. lation at sea can create extreme levels of de-
After staging in Tahiti for a day, the C-130 lusion. Experienced sailors told me stories
Hercules would fly out, loaded with a com- of mates who were rendered incapacitated
municator, a life raft, and other droppable just a few hundred miles offshore, with no
supplies. The eight-hour round-trip flight obvious cause.
would leave only two hours to search at the One of the most famous sailing myster-
site, but at least it was something. The Tahiti ies is the case of Donald Crowhurst, a Briton
coast guard’s Falcon surveillance plane would who single-handed in the 1968 Golden
also search. Globe around-the-world race and never
11.18 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 59
came home. He set sail on October 31—the
same date Dad set off from San Diego—and
was out for 243 days before he succumbed
to mental collapse, writing a 25,000-word
manifesto on the subject of the cosmic mind
and why he had to leave this world. His
boat—and log—were found floating in the
Atlantic Ocean.
John Leach, a professor with the Extreme
Environmental Medicine and Science Group
at the University of Portsmouth, England—
and an avid sailor and former military psy-
chologist who specializes in prisoners,
hostages, and others who’ve experienced
isolation—described the perils of survival
in the book 438 Days: “It’s okay living inside
your own head, provided it doesn’t slip into
psychosis.”
When I speak to Leach about my dad’s
case, he describes to me how a mind can be-
come unmoored. “Psychosis in simple terms
is a breakdown in reality,” he told me. “When
you are in isolation, and sleep deprived and
water deprived, which I suspect he would’ve
been, you take in the information around you
and interpret it to fit the model in your head.
If he thinks he’s being chased, he’ll hear
waves and the wind as engines.”
The cluster effect of sleep deprivation,
dehydration, fatigue, duress, and percep-
tual and sensory deprivation could have
resulted in cognitive disorganization that
was reflected in his language, Leach explains.
In other words, Dad’s signals may have been
misfiring, skewing his perceptions. And the
timing didn’t help.
“There is something around about the
three-week period in isolation that I’ve re-
corded too many times to dismiss,” Leach
says. “Even people without psychiatric
problems get a sudden crash psychologi-
cally, and for the first time they start think-
ing about suicide.”
My mother, sure that Dad was suicidal,
had tried to reply to him in ways that would
bring him off the ledge.
“Your dad used to tell me that the brain is
the only organ in the body that doesn’t tell
you when it’s malfunctioning,” she says. “I
was afraid to say to him that’s what I thought
was happening—that it was a hallucination—
but I couldn’t figure out how to do it. I didn’t
want him to feel abandoned and stop talk-
ing. Hearing each other through a sat phone
would have helped, but he didn’t have one.”
When I ask if she has regrets, she laments
not being more involved. “I felt so angry
about him wanting to do this and spending
so much money and he was going to leave
me. I had to say, This is just his,” she says.
“I didn’t want to go but I didn’t want to be
alone, either. And he would’ve resented me
if I had said, ‘You are not going.’ ”
60 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 11.18
Distancing herself mentally from the boat, I’M STANDING in a single-wide trailer that
the trip, and the departure date was a coping serves as the office of the Nuevo Vallarta
mechanism—the less she had to do with it, marina. It’s the checkout point for boats
the less fearful she was. But she still wanted departing Mexico in the Nayarit region, 30
to be a brave, supportive wife, so she helped minutes north of Puerto Vallarta by car, and
by packing and provisioning the boat in San the last place Dad docked before setting out
Diego. Now she wonders if that was enough: to sea.
“If I had educated myself about what he Under fluorescent lights, I see “Richard
would face out there, I might have been more Irwin Carr” scribbled across a photocopy
persuasive about him not going alone.” of his departure papers and recognize his
Then Mom tells me something I didn’t compact, jaunty handwriting. I know it inti-
know. “He always felt like we got the life I mately from birthday cards and school notes
wanted, not the life he wanted, filled with and phone messages on our brick-colored
adventure—diving and sailing,” she says. kitchen counter.
“He didn’t care about living in a nice house. On May 2, 2017, in the early evening, Dad
He cared more about living in other places filled out the line labeled Voyage Plan: “Sail
and exploring.” to South Pacific and around world.” It reads
“When he talked about buying the boat, like a fantasy, like a little boy trying to catch
I tried to offer him alternatives to make life smoke with his fingers.
more exciting,” Mom says. “But he couldn’t I can picture his face, flushed from a com-
be swayed.” bination of pride and embarrassment as
he handed the papers back to
the clerk. Then he would have
stuffed his hands into his jeans
“HE ALWAYS FELT LIKE pockets.
WE GOT THE LIFE I Ian and I walk down to the
spot where he had his boat—
WANTED, NOT THE LIFE A-23, the only unmarked stall
HE WANTED, FILLED in the marina and the one most
WITH ADVENTURE—DIVING often used for short-term, tran-
sient vessels. I touch the cleat
AND SAILING,” MOM SAYS. where his rope was last un-
“THE FACT THAT HE furled. I’m sure that the sounds
WENT OFF ON THIS TRIP around us are no different than
they were on the day he left:
FELT LIKE I WASN’T children playing at a nearby
ENOUGH. ULTIMATELY, preschool, a boat being sanded,
THE BOAT WON.” birds chirping, and the occa-
sional large yacht motoring past
the marina to sea.
Being here makes it hard to
imagine the drama of Dad’s
Eventually, they were too far along to turn last hours. I think back to the text he sent
back. “It felt like the boat was in charge of for Mother’s Day, nearly two weeks into his
him,” she says. “I know it wasn’t personal crossing. I told him I’d thought of him dur-
but still, the fact that he went off on this ing Wyatt’s birth, and he said: “Think of me
trip felt like I wasn’t enough. Ultimately, the often. I’m an interesting person who loves
boat won.” you as a person as well as my daughter. And
Dad loved us—that’s why he compromised I find that gratifying!”
on how he wanted to live. His obsession with A few days later, Ian and I charter a sail-
the boat and the trip suddenly made sense to boat from the dock in La Cruz where Dad
me. He wanted to reclaim his life. parked for a month and a half before he
In the end, my family can go around and headed to Nuevo Vallarta. Palm trees and
around on what happened and why. We’ll bougainvillea stand out against the white
never really know. We can feel guilt, regret, stucco of the thatch-roofed buildings sur-
and anger. But we’ll always return to this: rounding the marina. The Sunday craft fair
maybe Dad wasn’t experienced enough to is a fiesta of coconut popsicles, fish tacos,
chase his goal, but he had to try or he’d die and fresh juices.
wondering, resenting his own life. It’s hard The deckhand is a young, thin Mexican
to say that anyone should die this way. But man in his twenties named Eddie. He looks
the question remains: If you have a lifelong like many of the skater boys I went to high
dream, and time is running out, what would school with in L.A., wearing Vans and a chain
you do? wallet. He puts on Def Leppard and Weezer
as we sail into Banderas Bay. His English is ex-
cellent. I explain why I’m in town, and when I
mention Celebration he grows quiet.
“I remember your dad,” he says. “Short,
with gray hair.” Eddie had helped him rig
his sails. Then he says, “I offered to go with
him.” Eddie had been looking for work as a
paid deckhand.
Dad had hoped to find mates to sail with
during parts of his circumnavigation—he
once wrote on his blog that the experi-
ence would feel incomplete without shar-
ing it—but he was anxious about the laws
in the South Pacific. He told my mom that
he didn’t want to be financially responsible
for his crew, potentially made up of strang-
ers, and any medical needs they might have
once they hit the ocean. Being beholden felt
too risky to him.
As we sail out toward Cabo Corrientes,
I take in the horizon, cupping my hands at
my eyes like blinders. I want to imagine what
it’s like to see only the edge for days on end.
I shake my head at the knowledge that Dad
turned down Eddie’s offer. He would prob-
ably still be alive.
BACK HOME, people ask if going to Mexico
was hard. Maybe I was in denial or just numb,
but it wasn’t. Being there made me feel close
to Dad. The hardest part was leaving, like I
wouldn’t feel his presence again unless I re-
turned for a visit.
The other hardest part is that he’ll never
know Wyatt. She’s a risk-taker. My first
daughter would sit quietly on the bed or
changing table, while my second wants to
swan-dive off it. I can see her natural in-
clination to push things out of the way and
investigate everything around her.
A writer I know who has interviewed some
of the most daring athletes in the world—
people who have both flourished and per-
ished in their edge-of-peril pursuits—told
me that, at some point, if we feel the itch in
our soul to explore, we have to go. Some will
consider Dad’s behavior reckless, arguing
that he was underprepared (I can’t argue)
and irresponsible (maybe, though he waited
until his children were grown before setting
off). But to assert that he was wrong to go,
my writer friend said, is “to deny a potent
ingredient that made him who he was—the
joy in him, perhaps.” I agree. Maybe I’m like
Dad and I would have gone, too.
At the memorial we held five months after
he vanished, a family friend talked about the
grudge she felt when he first explained his
plan to sail around the world.
“How dare he do what he feels like doing,”
she said with a chuckle. She told me that she
realized her anger was a manifestation of
envy and admiration. She respected his dog-
gedness and willingness to do what most are horizon. He had a burning thing inside that
too frightened to. inspired him to look over the edge. And for a
Patients from his practice—some who had few days at least, he sailed with abandon, the
seen him for more than 30 years—introduced wind at his back.
themselves and told stories about times Like any adventurer, Dad didn’t know
when their lives would’ve gone south if Dad how it would end. He had to sail away to find
hadn’t been there. I was meeting them for out. O
the first time, but they felt like relatives.
Their gratitude for him, and for his unre- ALI CARR TROXELL ( @ALICARR
lenting determination, matched what I felt. TROXELL), A FORMER EDITOR AT
Just like his granddaughter, Dad kept OUTSIDE, IS THE MANAGING EDITOR
pushing things out of his way to get to the OF THE MAGAZINE GEAR PATROL.
11.18
T E R R O R in the Wild
SOS
WAY OFF-PISTE
Kelsey Malin and a friend were chasing powder at
Colorado’s Monarch Mountain resort when a wrong turn
sent them into the wild for 52 frigid hours
AS TOLD TO WILL COCKRELL
I’m a ski instructor, but not a backcountry skier. This was my first time at Mon-
arch. I was with a friend, and we spotted some powder at the edge of a run. At
no point did we duck a rope. We skied for a long time before we realized that we
were lost. I checked my phone, which had just enough battery life to show us how
far we’d strayed. That was around 3 P.M. Instead of backtracking, we headed in
the direction we thought would take us to the highway.
Just before dark I built a lean-to. It was a cold night. I had stepped in a creek,
and my foot was wet. At one point, I went out to pee and fell over. I got up and
started yelling, “We’ve got to move—if we stay here we’ll die!” I was crying. My
friend calmed me down. He said that if we went wandering in the dark, we really
would die. He was right.
In the morning, we retraced our tracks. We spent the day sidestepping and
tripping through snow up to our thighs, encouraging each other not to give up.
At dusk we reached a road and decided to follow it, each in a different direc-
tion. If either of us came upon some reason not to keep going, we’d turn around.
We’d either meet up again or know that the other person was farther down the
road. After a while I saw a sign: CURVES AHEAD NEXT 19 MILES . I threw my skis
in frustration. I have a vivid memory of falling into a snowbank and feeling like I
was wrapped in a warm blanket. I just wanted to sleep. But I thought about how
it would affect my family and friends if I gave up. That pushed me to keep going,
even though it meant turning back.
My friend had turned back, too, after he came upon a giant snowbank in the
road. That night we made a snow cave. We were delirious. I had dreams of going
to a 7-Eleven for taquitos and beer. I pissed myself. In the morning, I couldn’t
take another step. My friend offered to scout and come back to make sure I was
alive. He headed straight up the mountain until he collapsed. A backcountry skier
had to jump over his body to avoid hitting him. Then my friend popped up and
explained that we were lost and had been out for two nights. The skier sent him
back to me with peppermint tea and granola bars and went to get help.
My friend returned, shouting, “I have snacks! I have tea!” I can’t describe the
relief. When ski patrol reached us, my internal body temperature was near 80
degrees. I went into shock on the helicopter. Somehow the doctors saved my
foot, except for a small piece of my big toe.
11.18 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 61
 the
house of
mourning

A rescue helicopter on Mount Hood

in May 1986; opposite, the Oregon
Episcopal School bell tower

62 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 11.18
R AC H E L L AC O U R N I E S E N . O P P O S I T E PAG E : J AC K S M I T H /A P.

BY
PAULS TOUTONGHI
11.18
T E R R O R in the Wild

“the heart of the
wise is in the
house of mourning.”
—Ecclesiastes 7:4
It’s the second Wednesday of May in 2018,
and more than 1,000 students, alumni,
parents, and faculty affiliated with Oregon
Episcopal School—a small private academy
on a beautiful hilly campus in southwest
Portland—have gathered at the base of a bell
tower. Today is the 32nd annual Mount Hood
Climb Service Day, and Melissa Robinson,
the middle school chaplain, is offering a
benediction.
“Holy God, we pray for those we love but
see no longer,” she says. “May they inspire
each of us to enter today with a generous
heart, ready to serve and eager to love.”
After Robinson concludes, the Reverend
Corbet Clark reads off nine names. Patrick
McGinness. Tasha Amy. Marion Horwell.
Susan McClave. Richard Haeder. Erik Sand-
vik. Tom Goman. Erin O’Leary. Alison Lit-
zenberger. He pauses after each. A bell tolls.
About an hour before midnight on Sun-
day, May 11, 1986—Mother’s Day—15 stu-
dents gathered on this campus to gear up for
an outdoor expedition. Within 12 hours, by
midmorning the following day, they hoped to
be standing on the summit of Mount Hood—
11,249 feet above sea level—at the geographic
center of the Cascades volcanic arc.
Back then, Oregon Episcopal ran a pro-
gram called Basecamp—an educational
experience modeled on the principles of
Outward Bound and a requirement for all
tenth-graders, who were scheduled to make
the Hood ascent in four separate groups.
The idea was to help students grow by put-
ting them in a challenging environment that
required problem-solving and teamwork. As
Kurt Hahn, Outward Bound’s founder, once
put it, “The experience of helping a fellow
man in danger, or even of training in a real-
istic manner to be ready to give this help,
tends to change the balance of power in a
youth’s inner life.”
64 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 11.18
And so in the months leading up to the
spring of 1986, instructors had taught stu-
dents the technical aspects of snow climb-
ing: how to step-kick an ascent, how to
plunge-step a descent, how to execute a sit-
ting glissade, how to self-arrest during a fall,
how to perform basic first aid in the field.
Like many other students before them,
this group gathered up carabiners, seat har-
nesses, and Prusik slings. They grabbed
crampons, a field stove, a sleeping bag, a
large nylon tarp, and two first aid kits. Later,
at Timberline Lodge, a rambling structure
that serves a large ski area just west of the
route they would take, they were issued ice
axes and helmets. The team also carried
compasses, a set of long wands that would
be used to mark their path on the way up and
down, and a sturdy shovel designed for dig-
ging through balky, ice-crusted snow.
Now, one by one, they climbed aboard a
yellow school bus, carried their heavy gear
down its narrow aisle, took their seats, and
looked forward to the adventure ahead.
AS THE BUS rumbled off on the 90-minute
trip to Mount Hood, the trip’s leader—
Thomas Goman, the school’s 42-year-old
chaplain and an Episcopal priest—settled in
up front. Also on board was Marion Horwell,
the dean of residents and student affairs, a
capable woman who had never climbed
a mountain before but had come along to
support her school. Only one parent was
going: Sharon Spray, who accompanied her
daughter, Hilary. The last two members of
the party would join them at Timberline:
Dee Zduniak, an Outward Bound instructor
who was taking part in preparation to help
lead the climb later that year, and Ralph
Summers, a professional guide who, at 30,
looked like somebody’s older brother.
Fifteen boys and girls, one mother, one
priest, one administrator, two guides. Twenty
people in all, nine of whom would die over the
next four days. One of the girls who would
perish, Tasha Amy, had limited vision in her
only functioning eye but was determined to
be on the expedition all the same. “She would
have been just downright insulted if anyone
had suggested she not climb the mountain,”
one of her teachers later said.
For a few weeks that spring, the horrific
story of this expedition was splashed all
over the news, with coverage on local and
network television, in papers ranging from
the Oregonian to The New York Times to the
Sydney Morning Herald, and in magazines
such as Newsweek and People. But the news
cycle moved on, and most of the reporting
in the immediate aftermath couldn’t an-
swer questions that would take time to sort
out. What exactly went wrong up there, and
why? And what might it all come to mean, as
the survivors aged and had families of their
own, and the school community tried in any
way possible to recover? How does a school
make amends and open up a conversation
about healing, grieving, death, forgiveness,
growth, and change?
Thirty-two years after the tragedy, we
have information that wasn’t available back
then: interviews with survivors and rescuers
and parents, facts that emerged during a civil
lawsuit, and the conclusions of two investi-
gations—one commissioned by the school
in 1986, which was overseen by climbing
legend Jed Williamson, and one done by the
American Alpine Club in 1987. As a result,
these questions can now be more thoroughly
analyzed, if not definitively answered.
The Oregon Episcopal School Mount
Hood climb remains, to this day, the second-
deadliest alpine accident in North American
history, behind a 1981 avalanche on Mount
Rainier that killed 11. Seven of the nine Hood
victims were teenagers, students at a well-
intentioned school who followed the lead of
adults they trusted.
Both of my children attend Oregon Epis-
copal. Eight-year-old twins, they were
on hand for Service Day in 2016, 2017, and
2018. For this reason and many others, I’ve
long been haunted by the story of the climb’s
lost students, kids so much like my own, so
fragile and young.
ON THAT NIGHT in May, Goman’s group
left Timberline at around 3 A.M. and were
met with temperatures that were comfort-
ably above freezing. They were at 6,000 feet,
close to the tree line, and there was calf-
deep snow on the ground. As they got going
on what would have been roughly a six-mile
round trip, they moved quietly through a
hushed kind of darkness broken by the muf-

Rescue workers
transport an
unidentified
climber
fled sound of their footsteps.
The ice-capped landscape of Mount Hood
can be almost otherworldly in its beauty. Fu-
maroles—volcanic steam vents—are located
all along the side of the mountain; when ac-
tive, they send silvery plumes of mist into the
air, giving moonlit nights a luminescent glow.
Most climbers follow a route up the south
side, departing from the parking lot at Tim-
berline Lodge, a WPA-built structure that
was used to depict the haunted mountain
hotel in The Shining. The first section of the
5,249-foot ascent skirts the eastern edge of
the Timberline ski area. A well-known lift,
the Palmer chair, parallels the climb’s path
all the way up to 8,500 feet, where the route
continues on to the top, taking climbers past
well-known features like Crater Rock, the
Hogsback—a huge mound of ice and snow
at 10,500 feet—and two rock towers near the
summit called the Pearly Gates.
The apparent simplicity of this line, cou-
pled with the mountain’s majestic beauty,
has made Mount Hood both alluring and
dangerous. In the past century, more than
120 people have died on it, a total in the fa-
tality range of North American peaks like
Denali and Mount Washington.
There are several clear risks: avalanches,
R I L E Y C ATO N /A P
falls, crevasses, weather that can turn nasty
in minutes. Because of the dangers, it’s
important to have a good leader on every
expedition, someone who can make the
pragmatic decision to change plans when
FIFTEEN BOYS AND
GIRLS, ONE MOTHER,
ONE PRIEST, ONE
ADMINISTRATOR,
TWO GUIDES. TWENTY
PEOPLE IN ALL,
NINE OF WHOM WOULD
DIE OVER THE NEXT
FOUR DAYS.
necessary. During many Oregon Episcopal
climbs before the May 1986 attempt, that
person had been Tom Goman.
Goman was affectionately known to stu-
dents as “Ferder” Tom, from the abbrevia-
tions of “father” and “doctor.” (He was both
a priest and a Ph.D.)
“The kids adored him,” recalls Jim
Thompson, who in 1986 was assistant to
the bishop for the Episcopal Diocese of Or-
egon. “His popularity was astounding. And,
of course, he had the reputation of being the
brain on campus.”
Born in Corvallis, Goman had a divin-
ity degree from Harvard and a doctorate
from Claremont. He was already a seasoned
mountaineer when, in 1978, he took a job at
Oregon Episcopal, where he taught phi-
losophy, ethics, and math. His scholarly
work covered a range of topics, including
the nature of human sacrifice in Hindu
scriptures. Throughout his work, Goman
was preoccupied with the twin ideas of
responsibility and sacrifice; many kinds
of sacrifice, he once wrote, produce “the
mystic purification of our Self.”
Joel Schalit, a student who would go
on to become a writer and editor, was a
19-year-old senior in 1986 and a mem-
ber of Goman’s advanced climbing team,
a group that did extra training to help
shepherd less experienced climbers. He
was close with Goman and had stayed
overnight a few times with Goman and
his wife at their home.
“Tom was a father to me,” Schalit has
written on a blog he used to maintain.
“But as I got to know him better, I began
to sense that he was seriously troubled.”
Leading up to the Hood climb, Sch-
alit observed a streak of recklessness in
his character. He has written about the
story of one particular expedition under
Goman’s leadership, which happened
on a rocky outcropping above Oregon’s
Sandy River. “Once we reached
the summit, our instructions
were to anchor a rappelling line
by tying it to a tree,” he wrote.
“Then we were supposed to
practice belaying one another
from atop the precipice.”
The students were nervous
and hesitant to proceed. To
show that the maneuver was in
fact possible, Goman proceeded
to demonstrate. As Schalit de-
scribed it, he “took off his hel-
met, screamed out, ‘On belay?,’
and took a swan dive off the cliff.
… As I looked out over the ledge,
Tom’s body banged sharply
against the jagged walls. … This
routine was repeated eight more times, and
by the end of it Tom was covered in blood. ...
We were all extremely shaken.”
THE FORECAST for Mount Hood on the af-
ternoon of May 12 was grim. News organi-
zations and weather services had predicted
a multi-day storm, with vicious winds and
heavy marine moisture surging in. Goman
assessed the conditions and decided the
climb could be completed safely anyway,
before the worst of the weather hit.
Matt Zaffino, now the chief meteorolo-
gist for KGW, Portland’s NBC affiliate, was
a young weatherman in 1986, based in
Medford, Oregon. He says any Mount Hood
veteran should have known that a big storm
11.18 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 65
can turn the peak into a death zone without
warning. “When a storm like this hits, it hits
fast,” he says. “You’re not just dealing with
something that’s heading from point A to
point B. Things are actually developing over
your mountain.”
As dawn approached, the conditions and
visibility were still fairly mild. But a few
people began to have second thoughts about
pushing on.
The first to head down were Hilary and
Sharon Spray. Hilary, who’s now a musician,
had a stomach ache and didn’t feel fit enough
to complete the climb, though she was urged
to keep going. “I was the first person to turn
back,” she says. “I did experience pressure
from the leaders to continue. Tom Goman
pressured the kids. We all assumed he knew
what was best. I knew that what was best for
me was to turn around and leave.”
During media coverage of the climb’s
tenth anniversary, Sharon talked about a
moment she never forgot: the sight of the
other climbers walking away, heading up-
ward, the sounds of their movement grow-
ing fainter with each passing step.
At Silcox Hut, a warming station at 7,000
feet, two more students wavered. Lorca
Smetana, suffering from cramps, told Goman
she was in pain and asked him if he needed
her to stay. He didn’t. From Silcox, the route
down is easy to follow, even in foul weather.
Smetana returned to the lodge with another
climber, Courtney Boatsman.
Two more climbers turned back after that.
At around 11:30 A.M., Dee Zduniak, suffer-
ing from mild snow blindness, decided she
needed to head down, too. She left, by her-
self, and retraced the path to the base, whit-
tling the group to 13.
On Sunday, May 18, three days after the
group was finally found, Ralph Summers—
the guide and a survivor—wrote a statement
for the Clackamas County sheriff. In his ac-
count, which is one of the only first-person
written records of the climb from some-
one who was there, Summers said that bad
weather descended suddenly, in the two-
hour period after Zduniak’s departure.
Goman thought the group could still
summit and get down, however, so they
pushed and pushed. As the weather wors-
ened, Summers began to question whether
they should turn around. They didn’t.
Finally, at roughly 2 P.M., with everyone
above 11,000 feet and winds blowing hard,
Summers was able to convince Goman to
change his mind. Summers had gone ahead
alone, 30 or 40 feet, and seen that the condi-
tions were simply too precarious.
“When the distance between us increased
to the limit of visibility, I decided to go back
to the group,” Summers wrote. “I told Tom
66 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 11.18
that I thought we should get out of there. ... gave the container to an athletic 15-year-
I told him to go to the front of the group and old named Giles Thompson. Summers took
make sure they stayed in our tracks.” McGinness’s temperature, and then McGin-
But by then it was too late. The storm, ness drank 12 precious ounces of hot, sugary
howling in from the Pacific, had arrived. carbohydrates.
The rewarming process helped, but it ate
EVEN IN THE deteriorating weather, there up time. Roughly an hour passed before the
was a direct path down the mountain—in group got going again, led now by Summers
theory, at least. and McClave, who stepped into a leadership
But nothing that day was normal or lin- role when leadership was most urgently
ear. The first complicating factor emerged needed. According to Summers’s statement,
when 15-year-old Patrick McGinness—the Goman overcorrected the course to avoid a
youngest climber—started struggling in the canyon, setting a compass to a heading that
cold. A sweet, respectful boy with a dimpled was 20 degrees off course and passing it to
smile and a lean runner’s body, McGinness her near the front of the line.
lacked insulating fat. Around 3:30 P.M., his It’s also possible that Goman was having
speech slurred. He staggered and toppled cognitive problems by this point. “We can
over, wanting only to go to sleep. only speculate,” said the American Alpine
At this point, the group had descended Club’s accident report, “that there was the
several hundred feet and were clustered strong possibility that fatigue and the cold
just below the Hogsback. On a clear day, the were affecting him adversely at a much ear-
climbers would have been easy to see from lier state than others in the group had be-
come aware.”
Whatever the reason, the
climbers were moving almost
“THE WINDS AT THE directly sideways, across the
TOP OF THE PALMER face of the mountain, instead of
down. As they proceeded, Sum-
CHAIR LIFT WERE 103 mers noticed a crack in the snow
MILES PER HOUR,” and grew worried: he thought
SAYS MARK KELSEY, they might be crossing an area
called White River Glacier.
A MOUNT HOOD SEARCH Under any circumstances,
AND RESCUE VETERAN. crossing a glacier is danger-
WINDS OF 103 QUALIFY ous, because its crevasses are
not always visible. In a blizzard,
AS A CATEGORY 2 blowing snow undergoes a pro-
HURRICANE. cess called mechanical harden-
ing, meaning it can accumu-
late in caps—or bridges—over
empty space. These bridges can
collapse when you step on them.
Timberline Lodge—black dots on Hood’s Summers’s post-climb statement de-
bright surface. But visibility was now be- scribes what he did next. (The emphasis
tween 20 and 30 feet. is his.) “I reminded the group to FOLLOW
Conditions like this can induce vertigo. MY FOOTSTEPS,” he wrote, “and DO NOT
It’s impossible to differentiate ground from STEP ON THE CRACK.”
sky, and when you take a step, you don’t By this point, visibility was less than ten
know where your foot will land. feet, and winds were getting stronger. After
Given all that, what happened next was leading the group past the crack, Summers
nothing less than heroic, illustrating the best moved ahead. Before long, he felt his foot go
of the Basecamp ideals. The students hud- over an edge abruptly. Then he saw another
dled around McGinness, placing him in the crevasse, which looked to be 30 feet deep. It
group’s only sleeping bag. Susan McClave, a was around 7 P.M.
senior and an experienced climber, took off “Considering the late hour,” Summers
her jacket and boots and crawled inside to wrote, “and the fact that we had one stu-
warm him up. This action cost her just a few dent that could not walk unassisted, and
fractions of a degree of body heat, but they not knowing our exact location, and finding
were fractions she’d never recover. ourselves on a glacier with at least one large
While this was going on, Summers fum- crevasse, I considered it was our best option
bled with the controls of his field stove, to dig in. ... I started digging a snow cave.”
igniting the burner and boiling water, into They weren’t on the glacier but were near
which he dissolved two lemon drops. He its edge, at an altitude of 8,200 feet.
 IN THE EARLY HOURS of Tuesday, May 13,
Mark Kelsey’s phone rang: there was trouble
on Mount Hood, involving student climbers
who were due back and hadn’t been seen.
Within a few hours, he headed out to join
other members of a group called Portland
Mountain Rescue (PMR). They showed up at
the base of Mount Hood, in the middle of the
storm, carrying their gear in a blue and white
Suburban that practically dragged its muf-
fler on the pavement as it moved along. The
PMR team reached Timberline at 5:21 A.M. In
records of the search operation kept by the
Clackamas County sheriff’s office, Kelsey is
listed as the second member of what became
Rescue Team 1.
A tall, athletic man with a shaved head,
Kelsey, now 68, has a tattoo on his left
forearm: inky black numbers and letters—
N45°22’25”, W121°41’45” —that are the lon-
gitude and latitude coordinates for the sum-
mit of Mount Hood, a place he describes as
“pretty much my temple.”
CRAIG TUTTLE/GETTY
Kelsey spent 17 years as a PMR volunteer.
He estimates that he’s summited Hood at
least 460 times, and he says the weather on
May 13, 1986, remains the worst he’s ever
seen while on a search. “In my whole climb-
ing career, I never got frostbite except for
MAP BY PETRA ZEILER
that day,” he says. “The first day of the res-
cue, the winds at the top of the Palmer chair
lift were 103 miles per hour.”
Winds of 103 qualify as a Category 2 hur-
ricane. It was immediately clear that the res-
cuers, just by stepping outside in the mael-
strom, would be risking their lives.
“You can’t even stand up in 100-mile-
per-hour winds,” says Matt Zaffino, the KGW
meteorologist and a climber who has sum-
mited Mount Hood twice. “If you do move,
you can’t even see where you’re going. With
blowing snow, you have zero visibility. Those
are really, really dangerous conditions.”
The rescuers, both men and women, came
out anyway: the sheriff’s log records a wave
of arrivals. First was PMR, at 5:21. At 8:53
came the ground crew from the 304th recov-
ery squadron, a unit of Air Force pararescu-
ers. Throughout the morning other teams
arrived, with some people bringing Tucker
Sno-Cats—big, bulky all-terrain vehicles
that weighed more than two tons each. The
sheriff’s office established a staging area and
sent searchers out into the weather.
They found nothing. They had no idea,
after all, where to look, since the whiteout
meant helicopters couldn’t fly. Searching
through the worst of the storm—covering
a vast, snow-blown area—the volunteers
struggled to see or hear anything. The wind
howled. Snow piled up. Visibility, for parts
of the day, was less than an arm’s length.
David McClure, the base operations chief for
PMR, told a reporter at the time that “the se-
verity of this storm was certainly one of the
worst this mountain has ever encountered.”
“People don’t understand the brutality of
it,” says Tom Hallman Jr., a Pulitzer Prize–
winning journalist for the Oregonian who
was among the first people to arrive at Tim-
berline that day. “I remember one guy stag-
gering into the staging area looking like the
abominable snowman.”
During the initial day of searching, the
winds were strong enough that they flipped
over a Sno-Cat; after it was put back up-
right, a window popped out. And still the
volunteers went out.
DURING A STORM emergency, a snow cave
can be a lifesaving shelter. After an exhaust-
ing day, Ralph Summers managed to dig
one—with Goman’s assistance—in about
an hour. When it was finished, the cave had
floor space measuring roughly six feet by
eight feet and was four feet high inside.
The students and adults got on their
11.18 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 67
hands and knees and crawled into the com-
pact space two at a time, passing through
a three-foot entrance that would have run
slightly uphill. They wedged their bod-
ies through. Legs crossed over legs, arms
jammed into the snow.
It quickly became clear that the cave was
too small. It was big enough for six, but they
were trying to fit in 13. It was claustropho-
bic inside, and the walls soon began to thaw
from body heat. Snowmelt accumulated in
a slushy trough on the cave floor; anybody
in the middle ended up in a shallow pool of
ice water. Terrified, the students struggled to
breathe. “Everyone was panicking about air,”
one of the survivors later said.
The students set up a rotation—they
would take turns sitting outside in the gale-
force winds. Goman, already shaking with
cold, spent part of that first night outside
the cave, fully exposed. “I remember him
screaming,” Thompson told Hallman in
1996, in a tenth anniversary story for the
Oregonian. “I remember that sound.”
As was true for the others, Thompson’s
position inside the cave probably changed
over the next three days, but he would end
up near the entrance. Together with other
students, he struggled to keep the cave
mouth open. At some point during the night,
the wind outside the cave entrance sucked
away both the shovel and the sleeping bag.
Without the shovel, the students had to try
to keep the entrance clear with an ice ax and
by moving in and out of the cave.
By first light on Tuesday morning, the sit-
uation had become untenable. As Hallman
recounted in 1996, Summers asked Goman
to count to ten and he was unable to. So Sum-
mers decided he had to leave, to try and get
down and find rescuers. “The only chance to
keep alive and to get help for the group was
to strike out and keep walking,” he said in his
statement.
Summers asked if anyone wanted to go
68 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 11.18
Search and rescue
gear; left, guide
Ralph Summers
with him. Molly Schula, one of the advanced
climbers, volunteered. They got started and
vanished into the whiteout.
As they descended, glissading down a
steep slope, Schula saw the shovel—a criti-
cal piece of equipment for keeping the en-
trance open—lying on the snow. But if they’d
turned around and taken it back up the hill,
they might very well have died. Instead they
trudged forward, step by step, still going
in the wrong direction. A few hours later,
by 9:50 A.M., they’d made it to the lodge of
Mount Hood Meadows, a ski resort roughly
two miles east of Timberline. They’d veered
badly off course, but they’d somehow lucked
into a different facility and were saved.
THE 11 REMAINING climbers continued to
lose ground, and the storm didn’t ease.
Inside, they waited, vacillating between
hope and despair. The air was cold and
damp. It must have been painful to breathe.
And the cave opening was getting smaller as
new snow kept coming in. “Simply stated,”
the American Alpine Club’s report said,
“events for the next two days ... involved a
prolonged and valiant attempt on the part of
the students to maintain the cave.”
The historical record—which includes
dozens of news articles from 1986 and the
years following—doesn’t provide a com-
pletely detailed picture of what transpired
inside the cave during the worst hours, and
perhaps that’s for the best. In a real sense,
this was a sanctified space, and it should be
respected as the place where four children
and two adults died.
At one point—most likely on Tuesday
night, the group’s second in the elements—
Alison Litzenberger gathered her courage
and went outside. The blizzard was still rag-
ing. The cave’s entrance was nearly sealed
shut. But she was small; someone her size
could still fit through it, clearing an air pas-
sage if the group was lucky. She moved into
the maelstrom.
Both Erin O’Leary and Erik Sandvik fol-
lowed her. Thompson has said that he re-
members Sandvik trying to get back inside
and trying to help him do so. But Sandvik
couldn’t get more than a single boot back
through the entrance.
F R O M L E F T: M I C H A E L H I N S DA L E /A P ; DA L E S WA N S O N / O R E G O N I A N
Four feet of snow had accumulated in 24
hours, and at this point the mouth of the
cave was effectively sealed. Three students
were outside; eight people were in—buried
now, deep under the snow.
THE WEATHER cleared on early Wednesday
morning. Around 2 A.M., Mark Kelsey’s team
rode in a Sno-Cat from Mount Hood Mead-
ows up the side of the mountain. “They set
us right on the nose of the glacier,” he says.
Exposed to the elements, whipped by
the last gusts of the storm, Kelsey’s group
sheltered in place for hours. After sunrise,
at 5:45, they noticed two black dots on the
flank of an area called White River Canyon.
They went over to investigate. What
Kelsey saw next has never left him: two bod-
ies, apparently lifeless, lying on the snow.
“They were in the fetal position, one right
above the other, the two at the bottom of the
hill,” he says. “Not in a position like they’d
fallen, but in a position where they’d curled
to stay warm.” It was Alison Litzenberger
and Erin O’Leary. Their body temperatures
were in the forties.
Around this time, not far away, a differ-
ent set of rescuers spotted a third body, that
of Erik Sandvik. After trying fruitlessly to
get back in through the opening of the cave,
Sandvik had simply fallen on the snow. He
was located almost directly on top of the rest
of his friends.
Kelsey was his team’s navigator, respon-
sible for the radio. So he called for a helicop-
ter to come and collect the victims. He also
looked at the positioning of the bodies and
saw a clear fall line between them.
“We started probing up toward the third
individual,” he says. They began moving
steadily toward the location of the cave. “We
were about 150 feet away, I think, with the
avalanche probes.”
BACK AT THE operations base, a helicopter
from the 304th recovery squadron took off
and headed up to where the students had
been found. Though all three were probably
dead already, for a lengthy period of time
both law enforcement officials and members
of the media had the mistaken impression
that they might be alive.
Kelsey believes this happened because
the helicopter radioed to base personnel
that they should prepare warm oxygen—a
standard treatment for hypothermia vic-
tims—generating a horrific false hope that
circulated among the parents. But whether
the misunderstanding really occurred for
this reason is unclear.
The confusion was certainly real, though.
In the sheriff’s radio log, a deputy named
Dave Kennell records the initial mistake.
“0554,” Kennell wrote. “Found Survivors.”
Later, an officer named Gene Hanners de-
scribed this period in the sheriff’s official
search and rescue report.
“At 6:00 A.M., the command post was
notified by the 304th Parajumpers that
they had found three ‘survivors,’ ” he wrote.
He told a deputy “to inform the parents of
the lost climbers that they had found three
survivors, however their condition was not
known at the time.”
Hanners was unable to get an update on
the climbers for close to three agonizing
hours—when he finally met a 304th helicop-
ter in a parking lot. “A PJ ran to us and told us
that they had two ‘deltas’ for us,” he stated in
the report. “His crew unloaded two bodies
and placed them on the ground in front of us.
I informed the PJ that I thought the climb- velopments. The weather finally cleared,
ers were alive and he reported that all three
but the damage was done. All sign of the
were dead.” The two deputies removed the climbers had been erased. “It was like the
gear from the cargo bed of a Toyota pickup mountain had been wiped with a trowel,” a
and drove the bodies away. rescuer told me.
Back on the mountain, Kelsey’s team was One person, a master sergeant named
pulled off its line. The search was redirected
Richard Harder, firmly believed that it was
after Summers went up in a helicopter to still possible to find the climbers, and he had
pinpoint the location of the cave, but reports
a hunch about where they were. Harder was
differ on where he thought it was. Kelsey a member of the 304th, which—together
thinks he and his team must have been very with a private company, Hillsboro Helicop-
close to the cave when they were moved, and ters—flew 58 sorties that week, ferrying gear
that they may have been only a few feet away.
and rescuers up and down the mountain at
“It was a perfect storm of mistakes,” he says.
altitudes as high as 9,200 feet. A tall, hand-
Even 32 years later, Kelsey is overcome some service veteran, Harder had earned
with emotion when he describes returning the nickname Bagger because his first 24
to the base at the end of that day’s search.missions with the 304th had, unfortunately,
“Listen, I’m going to tell you something… ended without any live rescues.
and I’m going to try and do this.” He pauses. According to a United Press International
“Because I still remember getting off that story published at the time, Bagger “was sure
helicopter. And all of the parents start mov-
the search team was too high on the moun-
ing in toward us. Just these faces of hope. Of
tain and was wasting valuable time.” With
desperation… ‘Give us something, please.’ David McClure on board, he jumped into
And to have to not say anything... That was the Huey and, at 8,200 feet, leaned through
tough. Because those people wanted...” his side hatch and threw out a flare to mark
where he thought the cave was.
He radioed that this was where
he believed the search should
FOUR FEET OF SNOW concentrate.
HAD ACCUMULATED IN That met with resistance.
“1033. The Bagger put smoke
24 HOURS. THE MOUTH down in area of probable search.
OF THE CAVE WAS Field OL feels that they’ve cov-
EFFECTIVELY SEALED. ered marked area thoroughly,”
the radio log notes.
THREE STUDENTS WERE Later that afternoon, Bag-
OUTSIDE; EIGHT ger finally organized a group of
PEOPLE WERE IN— searchers—among them Sum-
mers—and set up what was
BURIED NOW, DEEP called a fine probe line. Start-
UNDER THE SNOW. ing at 8,500 feet, working about
three feet apart, the rescuers
moved slowly down the slope,
pushing ten-foot avalanche
poles into the snow. It was a
His voice trails away, and he shakes his last, desperate measure, and it worked. At
head. “You just wanted to tell them, hold 5:38 P.M.—just 22 minutes before the sched-
them, do something. But we weren’t allowed uled end of that day’s search—a 304th ser-
to. There was a procedure for that.” geant named Charlie Ek hit something solid.
Frantically, everyone started digging.
BY THE END OF the mission, volunteers Pierre Bustanoby of the Seattle Mountain
would log 5,874 hours on the mountain. Rescue Council describes the moment when
They’d come from alpine rescue groups the cave was located. “One of the PJs stuck
all over Oregon and Washington—Corval- his head down, smelled the void, and said it
lis Mountain Rescue, the Hood River Crag had a bad smell. This immediately told us we
Rats, Alpine Ambulance, the Mazamas, Se- were on target, and moments later we heard
attle Mountain Rescue. There were numer- moaning coming from the main cave.”
ous firemen and law-enforcement officers, From inside the tiny space, lying just be-
and volunteers from the Forest Service, the neath Giles Thompson in the entrance, a
Mount Hood Snowmobile Club, the Ameri- student named Brinton Clark was visible.
can Red Cross, and German Shepherd Search She was semiconscious and moaning. Ad-
Dogs of Washington State. missions data at a hospital in Portland re-
Wednesday passed with no further de- corded her core temperature at 74.12.
11.18 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 69

PATRICK M C GINNESS’S core temperature
was measured at 54 degrees. The other
climbers’ temperatures were as low as 37.4.
Clark and Thompson both survived, and one
can only guess as to why.
Asked by Oregonian reporters why
Thompson came through, a cardiac sur-
geon, Duane Bietz, said, “He had pretty good
equipment on—a good pair of rubber pants,
a good pair of wool pants.”
Helicopters rushed the victims into the
city. At nearly every Portland-area medical
institution—Emmanuel, Providence, Good
Samaritan, St. Vincent, and Oregon Health
and Sciences University—doctors did every-
thing they could, with little success.
“You have to understand what a heroic ef-
fort this was,” says one physiologist. “These
medical procedures demand massive re-
sources. A single hospital rarely has the
capacity to treat more than a few of these
patients.”
During the first moments of Thompson’s
treatment at Providence, he went into car-
diac arrest. The surgeons opened his chest
and massaged his heart by hand, triggering
the resumption of its usual rhythm.
That May, June, and July, doctors fought
valiantly to keep Thompson alive, but they
couldn’t save his legs. During this period,
Giles’s older brother, Ross—a senior at Or-
egon Episcopal—sat once in the little hospi-
tal room and at other times in the stairwell
of the ICU and practiced scales on a classical
guitar. His music would become, in an ex-
plicit sense, a form of healing.
“It’s all about vibration,” Ross says today.
“I use a lot of minor keys. It’s great for the
brain.” He offered the music as a kind of gift;
it floated out toward his brother and the
phalanx of doctors who’d installed them-
selves in his room.
70 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 11.18
Richard
and Judith
Haeder and
attorney
Paul Luvera
(at left) in
court in 1990
PARENT RICHARD
HAEDER SR. EMERGED
AS THE SCHOOL’S
MOST VOCAL CRITIC.
HE CALLED THE
EXPEDITION A “DEATH
MARCH” AND BASECAMP
A “DISASTROUS
KILLING PROGRAM.”
IN THE WAKE of the disaster, predictably,
inquiries and offers came flooding in from
writers, publishers, and Hollywood. Some
individuals—and even the school itself—
cooperated with the basic needs of journal-
ists working on deadline, but they shut the
door on tabloids and movie deals.
“To profit from the pain of grieving fami-
lies, the sadness of a school, and even the
relief of other families is abhorrent,” said a
statement issued by the Oregon Episcopal
School. Mariann Koop, the school’s spokes-
woman at the time, elaborated. “It’s repul-
sive. Our answer to all of them is no, period.”
One project briefly got traction, then
stalled. Portland Mountain Rescue began
working with Charles Fries, a veteran televi-
sion producer who was known for a TV series
called The Amazing Spider-Man. Months
after news of a potential movie deal broke, in
September 1986, some of the families who’d
lost loved ones composed a written pact.
“Acceptance of fees, royalties or other pay-
ments by either families, the school or any
other organization is inappropriate,” it said.
This was a nonbinding, self-policed prohi-
bition. But the idea behind it—that telling
your story might be destructive—lingered
for many years.
There’s never been a movie about what
happened. The only book that emerged
was The Mountain Never Cries, a mem-
oir written by Giles Thompson’s mother,
Ann Holaday, in which she lamented the
hunger for recrimination that seemed to
preoccupy some people in the tragedy’s
aftermath.
“Even at that critical time, all they
wanted to hear was the emotional side
and whom did I blame,” she wrote of the
TV and newspaper reporters who covered
the search. “They wanted me to point
fingers—at whomever, at whatever. The
school, the system, anything.”
A MORE important question re-
mained: what to do about what
had happened.
At graduation ceremonies in
June 1986, Oregon Episcopal ad-
ministrators chose to honor all
the climb’s participants, includ-
ing Susan McClave. She was cited
for her leadership on the moun-
tain, and she collected four post-
humous awards, including the
Alumni Award, an accolade given
to the senior who most exempli-
fied “academic accomplishment,
demonstrated leadership, and
loyalty.” Her ashes would later be
interred on campus.
The school then commissioned
an official inquest, convening a panel of
climbing and hypothermia experts, includ-
ing a well-known Oregon doctor named
Cameron Bangs. The report, which was
published in July 1986 in the Oregonian,
assigned blame primarily to Goman, who
failed to turn back in bad weather, striving
beyond the point of common sense to get the
students to the top. Parents reacted with a
mix of anger, criticism, and understanding.
Susan McClave’s father, Donald, was no-
tably reserved. “Hopefully we can get on
with our lives,” he told the Associated Press.
Later in the article, he added: “We will never
know, any of us, for sure why [Goman]
M A R V B O N DA R O W I C Z / O R E G O N I A N ( 2 )
climbed as long as he did. But he was a fine
man who never would have endangered his
own life, let alone anyone else’s.”
Families of the seven students who died
were offered settlements by the school’s in-
surer. The McGinness family took a different
path, filing a wrongful-death lawsuit in Sep-
tember 1986. Fifteen months later, on De-
cember 7, 1987, Cecil Drinkward, the chair-
man of the Oregon Episcopal School board,
filed an affidavit in Multnomah County
Circuit Court, begging for the lawsuit to be
postponed.
“This is now our Senior Class,” he wrote of
the students who had been tenth-graders in
1986. “To hold what I am sure will be a well-
publicized trial in the last three months of
their senior year will require those students
to relive the trauma again at a time when
they should be allowed to have the normal
teenage experiences which come with high
school graduation.”
The judge ultimately scheduled the trial’s
opening statements for late June in 1988,
just after graduation. Forty-eight hours be-
fore the first court date, the opposing parties
were able to negotiate a settlement.
One family persisted, however. In a two-
year period after the climb, Richard Haeder
Sr. had emerged as the school’s most vocal
critic. He called the expedition a “death
march” and Basecamp a “disastrous kill-
ing program.” He and his wife, Judith, de-
manded $2.76 million in damages, claim-
ing negligence on the part of the school and
guide Ralph Summers.
During one deposition, Judith Haeder had
a tense exchange with an attorney named
Mark Wagner, a Vietnam veteran who was
representing the school. He asked about her
and her husband’s motivations for bringing
the lawsuit and whether she was being over-
protective of her kids.
“I don’t think I’m overprotective, but I
think I’m more cautious,” she said. “I think
I’m—have you ever lost a son?”
“I’ve never sued anybody for $3 million.
That’s not the question.”
“Well, anyway, if you had, you would
know—”
“Well, I’ve lost more people than you
would ever know in Vietnam.”
“That’s not the same.”
The jury found Summers not liable and
found Oregon Episcopal negligent, awarding
the Haeders a smaller amount—$500,000—
than they had sought.
After the trial, Summers moved away
from Portland. He rarely spoke to the media.
He earned a master’s degree in social work,
and spent over two decades as a mental-
health manager for the State of Oregon.
Today he lives in White Salmon, Washing-
ton, a small town of 2,500 located on a bluff
overlooking the Columbia River. It’s a place
known regionally for its breathtaking view of
Mount Hood.
Master Sergeant Richard Harder died of
a heart attack in 1996, at 44. His grave, at
Willamette National Cemetery, in Portland,
displays his name and rank, the two wars in
which he served, and then—on either side of
the Air Force crest—the words OUR HERO.
THE BAGGER.
11.18
T E R R O R in the Wild
SOS
ADRIFT
One weekend, Matthew Bryce headed to his favorite
Scottish beach to surf. The conditions were perfect.
Until they were deadly.
AS TOLD TO PETER FRICK-WRIGHT
When I first fell in love with surfing, I spent quite a while in France, working as a
lifeguard in Biarritz. When I came back to Scotland, I would always go up to this
beach in Westport. One morning, I headed there with just a short funboard and
paddled out. There were six- or seven-foot swells. Conditions were great. I was the
only person in the water, but that is perfectly normal for this beach. It’s one of the
most isolated parts of Scotland.
I’d only caught about three waves before everything went wrong. I paddled out
behind the break to rest. I’d really worn myself out climbing at an indoor gym two
days before, and now my arm was cramping. I sat there for a couple of minutes
catching my breath, but the wind began carrying me out. When I started trying to
head back in, a cramp in my right shoulder made my paddling shockingly bad. So
the wind just took over. By that time, there were a few people on the beach, and I
tried signaling for help, but they were too far away. The wind became relentless.
Instead of trying to paddle in, I decided to aim for the jut of land to the south, but
the wind was still pushing me away from shore.
After several hours, the current switched and began carrying me north, so I tried
to hit a different piece of land. But I was maybe three miles from shore at this
point. By late afternoon, I ended up so far out, I no longer had any reference point
to tell which way I was moving. Night fell and I was exhausted. I decided to count
30 seconds paddling, then stop and count 30, then paddle again. I was basically
heading toward Ireland.
It was the middle of the night, I was freezing cold, and I was passing out. I was
thinking I was going to die. I was paddling as often as possible to generate heat,
but the board was so small, and I could only keep about half my body above water.
The wind really started whipping up waves, which were going over me, causing me
to cough and sputter. My feet were numb, my muscles were cramping.
At some points, I wanted to just pass out and slip into the water. I started saying
goodbye to everyone in my head. Goodbye, I love you, I’m sorry.
When the sun began to rise, I immediately thought about how I was supposed to
be at work that day, and figured they might contact my parents to find out where I
was. I found out later that that’s when the search started. By about noon, I actually
saw a helicopter searching in squares—but it stopped a couple of squares away
from me and flew away. I decided to try and stay in that area, but it never returned.
I was horribly, horribly dehydrated and a little bit delirious. The day was ending. I
thought I’d done well to carry on this long, but I was done. I was ready to die. Then
another helicopter came from the direction of the sunset. I could see the copilot
looking. Even when they were getting ready to drop down and recover me, I still
wasn’t convinced it was really happening. Once the line was in the water, the res-
cuer came up to me and said, “Well done.”
11.18 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 71

Climbers Molly
Schula and
Giles Thompson
AS THE YEARS went by, survivors and fami-
lies of the deceased found different ways
to interpret and understand the disaster on
Mount Hood.
Like other teenagers involved in or touched
by the tragedy, Brinton Clark built her life
around trying to heal others. After graduat-
ing from Oregon Episcopal, she went to Stan-
ford, then spent two years in Ghana with the
Peace Corps. She returned to attend medical
school in San Francisco. In 2005, she became
an internist and teaching doctor in Portland.
(Clark declined to speak on the record
about the events of 1986, as did officials
from Oregon Episcopal School.)
Lorca Smetana, who left the climb before
the storm hit, became a human-resilience
counselor and teaches at Montana State Uni-
versity. “It’s been my work ever since Mount
Hood to somehow claim joy along with the
pain,” she says. “Returning always to com-
passion, to resilience, arriving at peace by
repairing, adapting, doing the work. And I
will be remembered now more for joy and
compassion than for tragedy.”
Starting in 1988, Christine McClave, Su-
san’s mother, trained to be a volunteer facili-
tator at a small nonprofit called the Dougy
Center for Grieving Children and Families.
At the time of her arrival, the center was
housed in a tiny rented house on the campus
of Warner Pacific University.
“She was a pillar of our community,” says
Donna Schuurman, the center’s former CEO
and executive director. “She did it all.” Last
spring, the day before the center honored
her three decades of work, McClave suffered
an aneurysm that later took her life.
Over the past three decades, places like
the Dougy Center have been trying to trans-
72 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 11.18
“IT WAS DIFFICULT
TO GO BACK,” ROSS
THOMPSON SAYS OF
RETURNING TO OREGON
EPISCOPAL FOR
SERVICE DAY. “I
HAD SO MUCH ANGER,
SO MUCH RAGE.
BUT, GOING BACK,
I EXPRESSED MY
ANGER.”
form the way grief is treated, to break our
culture’s deep social prohibitions about
discussing death. “Society has this idea that
grief goes away or eventually you recover,”
Schuurman says. “But grief doesn’t go away.
Period. It changes your life forever, and you
have to accommodate to a new reality.”
Mar Goman—Tom’s widow—agrees. “At
the time, I couldn’t imagine how I would
ever survive. I never thought my life would
be good again. But I now see grief as a trans-
formative part of living.”
Goman believes she was able to heal from
the events of 1986, ultimately, because of the
love of her current partner, Virginia. “My
sexuality caused a schism with the church,”
she says. “But I feel like I have been loved,
unconditionally, twice in my life. Once, by
Tom, for 18 years. And now a second time,
for 30 years, by a woman. Both of these loves
are an immense gift. But one came out of a
great and tragic loss.”
This echoes what Amy Hor-
well—the daughter of former
dean Marion Horwell—believes.
In 1986, she was just 12, and
her mom was raising her alone.
There could be no larger disrup-
tion, no more significant trauma,
than a loss like this.
“I very much believe that
trauma is not something to
‘get over’ but needs integrat-
ing into one’s sense of self and
worldview,” Horwell told me in
an e-mail she sent from South-
end-on-Sea, England, where
she works as a psychotherapist
specializing in trauma.
Horwell moved to England
to live with her father after her
mother’s death. Reflecting on
her own path since then, she was
unequivocal. “I think my expe-
rience of traumatic loss hugely
influenced and informed my
professional development, my
choice of career, my identity as a
psychologist and psychothera-
pist,” she writes. “Of course, the
loss of my mother was not an
event that occurred in isolation,
and it had significant repercus-
sions in terms of subsequent
losses.”
She continued, “It made me
realize just how much loss his-
torically has been a part of my
life and how much it has defined
my identity—and I wanted to do
something with that.”
IT’S LATER in the morning on
Mount Hood Climb Service Day, and kids
in first through fifth grade from the Lower
School have gathered in the chapel. Phillip
Craig, the school’s chaplain, stands in front
of the altar.
Service Day is about listening, remem- F R O M L E F T: J AC K S M I T H /A P ; R A N DY W O O D/ O R E G O N I A N
bering, and doing. In an hour, my son and
daughter will depart for the Oregon Food
Bank. Each second-grader, on this morning,
will prepare 41 pounds of food for distribu-
tion in the Portland area.
First, however, the students listen to Craig
explain the meaning of their day of service.
He stands near the front row, holding a wire-
less microphone in one hand.
“We do take a chance ... every single year
before Mount Hood Climb Service Day, to
remember the story of the Mount Hood
climb,” he says softly. “When we’re finished
with the story, we’re going to ring a bell. And
I’d like to invite you, for just a minute, to sit
in silence, and to think about what we might
learn from this story that we hear, each and
every year. And after that we’ll sing a song.”
“A story can be like a candle, shining in the
dark,” he continues. “It can light up a path
in front of us, so we know where to go. It can
help us search out the truth. It can light up
the faces of all those around us. And it can
remind us that we are never alone. Today,
we are going to hear a story that is part of
our OES family story. Some of you may have
heard it before, some might be hearing it for
the very first time, but it is a story we hear
each year. And it happened over 30 years
ago. And it is true.”
Earlier that day there was another service,
held in a small chapel that’s tucked behind
the main altar of the church. Giles Thomp-
son was there. He arrived just as the mass
began and sat beside his brother in the last
of the four rows. The service was short and
simple, a remembrance of the victims.
As we knelt for communion, I noticed the
ease with which Thompson, who has worked
for years as a theater technician in Seattle,
lowered himself to the padded railing. His
prosthetic legs, a bright and intricate met-
alwork, were visible beneath the hem of his
cargo shorts.
Afterward, he was mobbed by eighth-
graders. They stood around him in a tight
cluster, wanting to talk to him, wanting to
hear his account of the climb and the things
he’d endured. Later, he would speak to those
same students—with his brother—telling
them what the tragedy meant at the time and
what it means today.
“It’s raw,” Ross Thompson told me later.
“It was difficult to go back. I had so much
anger, so much rage. But, going back, I ex-
pressed my anger. Father Craig was deeply
helpful. He was able to listen to us.”
OVER THE PAST 32 years, there has never
been another Oregon Episcopal–sponsored
student expedition to climb Mount Hood.
Before its inquest, the school suspended the
Basecamp program.
As the years passed, one student from
the school—Patrick Lamb—remained par-
ticularly haunted by the climb. In the spring
of 1986, Lamb was a sophomore at Oregon
Episcopal; he’d trained all year with the
climbing group. Two days before the trip, he
sprained his ankle playing soccer and wasn’t
able to go.
In 1999, Lamb returned to Mount Hood.
He took a string of Tibetan prayer flags and
a short invocation written on a laminated
piece of paper, and he left both items at the
summit. “Leaving a prayer for eternal heal-
ing and acceptance of what we cannot un-
derstand,” the text read, “for all those im-
pacted by the OES climb of Mt. Hood May of
1986.” Lamb is aware that his loss—though I think it stays right in front of you until you
deep—was not commensurate with the loss deal with it. I mean, if you don’t face it—
of a child or a sibling or a parent or a spouse. don’t look right at it—well, then you’ll never
But his grief was enormous. be at peace.” O
“I’ve cried limitless tears,” he says. “And
I think it’s really interesting that I’m able PAULS TOUTONGHI HAS WRITTEN FOR
to talk about it now. You know, you’d think THE NEW YORKER, GRANTA, AND OTHER
that just because you get older it’s going to PUBLICATIONS. HE TEACHES AT LEWIS
dim, or that you could get over it. I disagree. AND CLARK COLLEGE IN PORTLAND.
11.18
T E R R O R in the Wild
SOS
A HIGH CASE OF THE BENDS
George Watson was on an exploratory scuba dive in a
remote lake in the Peruvian Andes when everything that
could go wrong suddenly did
AS TOLD TO WILL COCKRELL
Our team was diving in Lake Sibinacocha, in Peru, which is at about 16,000 feet. We
wanted to collect data on the effects of diving at altitude and also look for Incan
artifacts. I’d been a rock climber and a diver most of my life, and I thought of the
trip like a first ascent.
My dive partner on the third day was Geoff Belter. We were heading down to
around 200 feet, with four tanks each and battery-powered scooters. At about
165 feet, my scooter died, which was a serious enough failure that the dive was
essentially over and Geoff would have to tow me up. At about 110 feet, my first tank
ran out of gas, so I switched to the other and it immediately ran out. That was a sur-
prise. We weren’t supposed to get close to blowing through that much gas. We’re
still not sure what happened with the tanks, and in any case it’s clear our judge-
ment was compromised for some reason—most likely we got too cold. Geoff tried
to give me a hose so I could share his air, but I realized that his tank was empty, too.
We immediately went up to 80 feet, where it was safe to switch to our remaining
tanks, problem solved. I signed to Geoff to send a signal bag to the surface, where
another diver, Umberto, was standing by in a kayak. But we were really unstable in
a water column, suddenly oscillating up and down and away from each other. The
last I remember seeing Geoff, he was holding the bag in his hand in a peculiar way
that I’ll never forget. Then he was gone. His body was never found.
I got pulled all the way back down to 110 feet. I hit a button on my drysuit to use
air from my new tank to help me get back to a shallower depth. But I lost control
and shot to the surface. I yelled to Umberto, who picked me up in the boat, put me
on oxygen, and paddled me frantically to shore. Bubbles were forming in my body,
and I was expecting to have a massive stroke. I was hypothermic and shivering vio-
lently, so the team put me in a winter sleeping bag. After an hour, I could feel my toes.
A helicopter evacuation wasn’t an option, so they put me on a horse, but after 30
minutes I lost control of my abdominals and fell off. They carried me in an inflatable
boat over a 17,000-foot pass, then drove me to a decompression chamber in Cusco.
Back in the States, after rehab, I did my first dive in 2015. Last year, we all went back
to Lake Sibinacocha and recovered an ancient artifact from the bottom. There’s now
a memorial to Geoff in Florida’s Jackson Blue Springs Cave.
11.18 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 73
 the
upside
of
danger

PHOTOGRAPHS BY
MICHAEL HANSON

74 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 11.18
The author’s
six-year-old son,
Nico, walking the
Oregon woods where
Sheehy got lost at
the same age
cody sheehy
is standing in a grassy meadow in
northeast Oregon, surrounded by dark
pines, spruce, and juniper trees. Cody,
39 years old and six foot two, grew up in
a ranching family here in remote, rugged
Wallowa County. When he was six years
old—a mere 40 pounds and three and a
half feet tall—he got lost in these woods
while playing with his older sister dur-
ing a springtime family picnic. Within a
few hours, a search party began looking
for him, crisscrossing the Blue Moun-
tains on horseback all night as rain fell
and temperatures hovered just above
freezing. They never found him.
Instead, Cody, who is now a Tucson-
based documentary filmmaker and
sailor, found himself. Over 18 hours, he
walked an estimated 14 to 20 miles out
of the mountains and into the sparsely
populated Wallowa Valley. During that
journey he fell into a river, climbed a
tree to escape two terrifying coyotes,
and hid from a passing car because—as
he recalls it—his reptile brain had taken
over. He was cold and exhausted, and
he developed acute tendonitis in his
ankles that put him on crutches for a
week. But he saved himself.
The story was national news in
1986, appearing in newspapers around
the country, and made the Paul Har-
vey show, a folksy radio program with
millions of listeners. People sent Cody
letters of congratulation, money, and
Bibles. Some letters were simply ad-
dressed to the Lost Boy of Wallowa.
His grandfather, a cowboy poet, wrote
a ballad about him.
11.18
T E R R O R in the Wild
BY EMMA MARRIS
When I came across old newspaper
clippings about Cody’s experience, I
was stunned that he had walked him-
self to safety. My empathy and curi-
osity went into overdrive when I real-
ized that he’d gone missing at age six,
the age my son, Nico, is now. I tracked
Cody down to see if he could answer
an ultimately unanswerable question:
Did that dark, long, bone-breaking
walk make him the person he is today
or merely reveal the inner strength he’d
had all along?
Cody and I retraced his journey
through the woods this summer. We
first drove the route with Everett Rob-
erts, who was a member of the search
party. Then Cody and I walked a key sec-
tion with Nico. Although Cody hadn’t
been back through those particular
meadows and forest roads since that night in
1986, he remembered the area in vivid detail
and anticipated the location of forks in the
road, creeks, and other landmarks.
“When I fell in, I felt really cold,” he says
with faraway eyes as we stand at Howard
Creek. “After that my feet started to hurt.”
At a white house sitting all alone in the
woods, which he recalls as highly spooky,
he’s surprised at how pleasant it looks and
how close to the road it is. “I remember the
driveway as way longer,” he says. He looks
for a tree nearby that he climbed to escape
the coyotes. In the dust of the road he draws
a picture of it, one branch sticking out to the
side, low down.
Cody believes that he was changed by get-
ting lost. “Over the course of your life, you
push through a lot of physical barriers,” he
says. “As you grow older, your first coach
helps you break through barriers, and maybe
in the military you learn to push through
barriers or maybe in your first hard job. As a
little kid, I had this opportunity to be tested
and learn that there really aren’t any bar-
riers. I think a lot of people figure that out.
They just might not figure it out at six.”
EVEN AS A CHILD, Cody was a good walker.
The Sheehys were cattle ranchers, and he
spent a lot of time outdoors. He had hiked in
the Wallowa Mountains with his family. He’d
even hiked in Inner Mongolia, where his fa-
ther, Dennis, worked for the International
Fund for Agricultural Development, advis-
ing local governments on how to manage
their land to avoid overgrazing and soil ero-
sion. Dennis is a Marine Corps Vietnam vet
who, while bleeding from a gunshot wound,
crawled through a rice paddy and dense jun-
gle to rejoin his comrades, earning a Purple
Heart. In Oregon, Dennis wore a cowboy hat
and boots and was known as All-Day Dens
for his superhuman ability to work. “My dad
is the toughest person ever,” Cody says. “He
never quits. If I ever encounter something
where I am just about to quit, I always think
76 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 11.18
Sheehy looking out
on Oregon’s Wallowa
Valley; left, Sheehy
with searcher Everett
Roberts (center) and
his mother, Marcie
of my dad. He is tough to live up to.”
Cody was the kind of kid who played out
of sight of adults, who caught crayfish and
climbed trees and had to wait for the rare
occasion when his family rented a TV and
a VCR to have any screen time. (When they
did, they always watched Star Wars.) He was
also confident. So when he realized he was
lost, he decided to follow a forest road and
find his own way home.
I call search and rescue researcher Rob-
ert Koester, who wrote the book Lost Person
Behavior. “I imagine that exploring self-
confidence is what leads you to say, Here is a
road. I am going to follow the road, and it is
going to take me somewhere,” he says. Koes-
ter explains that the distance Cody covered
at such a young age makes his story unusual.
He should know. He maintains a database of
about 150,000 cases of people who got lost.
“Right off the bat, he’s a statistical outlier,”
he says.
“He was uniquely qualified to do what he
did,” says Roberts, a Marine Corps veteran
who at the time of the search was operat-
ing a forklift at a local Wallowa County mill.
Roberts also believes there may have been an
unseen hand with the boy’s survival. “His
dad, Dennis, survived Vietnam. Maybe it’s
just fate.”
Dennis was pleased to hear about Cody’s
gumption when he got a letter detailing the
story. He was in Inner Mongolia at the time,
so the frantic searching and worrying was left
to Cody’s mother, Marcie. But Marcie never
blamed herself for being a bad mom—which,
let’s face it, would be the first accusation to
pop up in online comments if this story hap-
pened today. She never felt guilty for letting
Cody and his sister play on the other side of
the meadow from where she and a friend sat
around the fire. “It’s just normal,” she says
now. “Kids go off and play.”
“In my entire childhood, I never felt it
was anyone else’s fault,” Cody says. “I felt
responsible.”
I wonder if part of the reason that Cody
walked so far was that he saw getting lost as
his mistake and therefore saw finding him-
self as his responsibility. “I do remember I
was focused on doing something, taking ac-
tion,” Cody says.
Apart from the psychological matter of
feeling like it was their job to get found,
would a modern six-year-old be physi-
cally and psychologically able to do what
Cody did? “It is always dangerous to make
sweeping statements,” Koester says. “There
are probably six-year-olds who still spend
all their time running around and playing
outside and looking for crayfish in the creek.
The child who just sits in front of a screen
isn’t going to do as well.”
Cody got lost during the kind of game that
fewer and fewer kids engage in these days:
explorers. He and his nine-year-old sister,
Carrie, picked a tree and walked off in a dif-
ferent direction, then returned and shared
any interesting finds. The whole point of
the game was to be briefly and excitingly
alone in the woods. But Cody didn’t come
back. As the search wore on, his sister be-
came annoyed with him for getting lost and
disrupting the family’s plans for the evening.
She’s a rancher now, with kids of her own. I
ask her if she was scared for her brother that
day back in 1986. “No,” she says, matter-
of-factly. “Kids don’t get scared.” But as a
mother, the incident has haunted her, espe-
cially when each of her own kids approached
age six.
HERE’S HOW CODY got lost: Heading back to
the base tree, he crossed a clearing, plunged
through the trees, and expected to see the
fire that marked their picnic spot. Instead he
saw an unfamiliar meadow. He backtracked
to the first clearing, then continued in the
opposite direction. Again he found an un-
familiar meadow. No fire, no family. He cir-
cled awhile longer, leaving small footprints
pointed every which way.
Patches of snow still lingered in the low
spots of the land, and dried stalks of yarrow
and teasel stood out beneath a white sky. It
was 2:30 P.M. He was wearing sweatpants,
gloves, discount sneakers, and a puffy coat
with a hood. This was the moment that Cody
made up his mind, the moment that sepa-
rates his story from so many others. Stand-
ing in an unfamiliar meadow, surrounded
by silent ponderosa pines, thoroughly lost,
Cody saw a dirt road and figured it had to
lead somewhere. He decided to pick a direc-
tion and follow the road until he got there. By
late afternoon, when the search for him got
started, he was already miles away.
“In retrospect, I liked having something
to focus on rather than just being panicked
and scared and vulnerable,” Cody says. “It’s
a lot scarier to be sitting in the woods in the
dark, lost, than it is to be in the woods at
night but walking home.”
“Some kids will sit down and stay in one
place,” says Koester. “If you are in the open
woods and there is no landmark to follow,
then the majority of six-year-old kids are
going to circle.” So it wasn’t surprising that
the search party concentrated its efforts
around Deerings Meadow, where Cody was
last seen. But lost people also latch on to lin-
ear features, like a road, Koester says.
Standing in the same meadow today,
Cody says, “I should have sat down.” then hauled himself out of the water, scram-
He’s right. Search and rescue experts say bled up the bank, found the road, and kept
that in most situations, it makes sense to walking. It was around this time, he recalls,
stay in one place if you’re lost, especially if that he realized he wasn’t going to get dinner
you’re a kid. Chances are good that you’re and that his situation was serious.
close to where your searchers will start look- Cody was worried about getting in trouble
ing, and chances are also good that people for getting lost. The sooner he got back to his
will start looking immediately. The National family, the less trouble he would be in. So he
Association for Search and Rescue teaches ran, then walked, ran, then walked, then ran,
kids to “hug a tree.” The program was es- like that.
tablished after a nine-year-old boy died of
hypothermia while lost on Palomar Moun- AT SOME POINT, Cody’s thinking changed,
tain in California in 1981. he says. He developed tunnel vision. He
Although he didn’t know to stay put, Cody heard a buzzing in his ears. “Any noise, any
was lucky that the path he chose led down. sound, I hid,” he says. He hid from engine
He lived on the floor of Wallowa Valley, with noise, maybe more than once, potentially
its clear Wallowa River and green landscape evading his would-be rescuers. He just had
of cattle and hay, homeland of Chief Jo- to keep going. He figured that if he could
seph’s band of Nez Perce, almost completely walk to his house, down in the valley, and
encircled by forested mountains, like a se- sneak into his bed before the sun rose, he
could roll out of bed in time for breakfast
cret valley in a fairy tale or legend. If he had
and everything would magically
be OK. “I had a singular mission,”
he says.
Would a modern Later, as his stomach began to
gnaw at him, he revised his plan,
six-year-old be adding a stop at his grandfather
physically and Tom’s place. He imagined that
psychologically able the old cowboy would be awake
to do what Cody did? and reading in his chair. He would
give Cody grapes. And then Cody
“The child who just would walk the five or so addi-
sits in front of a tional miles to his own home and
screen isn’t going slip into bed.
At 7:52, the sun set completely,
to do as well,” and the stars began to appear.
search and rescue Cody kept walking. He wanted to
researcher Robert be an astronaut when he grew up,
so he watched the sky, distracting
Koester says. himself from the pain in his feet by
looking for Halley’s Comet, which
was visiting the solar system that
year. From Wallowa County on
April 27, the comet would have
gotten lost in the steeper Eagle Cap Wilder- been just under the horizon.
ness, across the valley, down might have By now there were dozens of people out
been easier to find. Here in a rolling section searching for him, some in trucks, at least
of the Blue Mountains, though, undulating half a dozen on horseback, including the
meadows and knolls spread out in every di- local Catholic priest, Father Ray Hopp.
rection. He could only hope that the forest Marcie was driving forest roads with Tom,
road was taking him out, not farther in. crying and praying. With temperatures so
By twilight, some six to nine miles from low, searchers worried about Cody becom-
where he started, Cody came to a fork in ing hypothermic. But they underestimated
the road. He chose the right-hand fork and how far he could travel in the time he’d been
walked down it awhile, then had second lost. Their circle was too small.
thoughts. But his small, increasingly sore Cody kept moving. He walked another
feet refused to backtrack all the way, so he six and a half miles from the creek, up a
decided to ford Howard Creek to reach the steep hillside and through dark stands of firs
left-hand road. But at the bottom of a steep and pines. He came to an abandoned white
gully he slipped. house, which looked eerie in the starlight.
“I remember thinking I was going to fall (Now it has been fixed up as someone’s
in and thinking I didn’t care. And I fell in,” country place and does not look spooky.)
Cody says. He soaked his legs and an arm, There was no moon yet.
11.18 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 77

“I feel pretty lucky
to be the mom of a kid
who survived,” says
Marcie, seen here at
the family home in
Wallowa Valley.
It was here he saw the two coyotes. Cody
stopped to watch them. They walked toward
him, and Cody sprinted away, fearing that
they were following him. These days there
are wolves in Wallowa County, but in the
eighties coyotes were the top dogs and com-
mon. Usually, they give people a wide berth,
but they have been known to attack children.
Terrified, Cody climbed into a tree, prob-
ably a juniper, and wedged himself between
the trunk and a sturdy branch. There in the
dark, pressed up against the pitchy gin smell
of the bark, he dozed. At 12:41 A.M. on Mon-
day, April 28, 1986, the moon rose. It was
just three days past full, so it cast a bright sil-
very light over the pines, the junipers, and a
few wizened apple trees from an old orchard.
“It was really cold in that tree,” Cody re-
members. “It got so cold I couldn’t sleep. I
couldn’t stay in the tree, so I decided to keep
walking.” He had traveled 12 to 15 miles by
now. His feet hurt. The forest opened up
beyond the house, and Cody walked through
a series of grassy meadows, pale and silent.
“I remember continual disappointment
that it was farther each time I came to a new
meadow,” Cody says. “I spent a lot of time
looking at my feet.”
The sun rose at 5:41, and around that
time, Cody came to the edge of the plateau
he’d been walking on, at about 3,700 feet of
elevation. Looking into the valley, almost
78 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 11.18
1,000 feet down and two more miles by road,
he saw houses, roads, pastures, and distant
livestock. But it wasn’t a part of Wallowa he
recognized. His feet were in agony. I’ve got
to get down there, he remembers thinking.
CODY IS HELPING my son, Nico, dismount
from a pine tree he has climbed. We are walk-
ing the part of his journey between the creek
and the white house. Looking at Nico’s tiny
frame, his spaghetti legs, his little feet, it’s as
if Cody were alarmed for his childhood self.
I tell Nico he can ask Cody any question he
wants. “OK,” says Nico. “What is the largest
land mammal?” Later he asks Cody some-
thing a bit more germane. “When you were
lost, did you climb up a tree to see where you
were?” Cody looks up, trying to remember.
“I don’t know why I wouldn’t have. Maybe
I did.”
Nico tries to be tough, but after a few
miles he starts casually asking how much
longer we have to go. In the dust of the road,
we find coyote tracks.
While we walk, Cody catches us up on
his life since 1986. Maybe because he found
himself, the experience made him bolder,
not more wary, he says. “I’ve never consid-
ered myself a very brave person, but I have
always climbed trees to the very top.”
His mother agrees. “He is a risk-taker,”
Marcie says. In middle school, he climbed to
the top of a high-voltage transmission tower
near his house because it was tall, scary, and
had a ladder, and he wanted to feel the elec-
tricity buzzing in his body.
Cody eventually left Wallowa to attend col-
lege at Oregon State and then Portland State.
To pay for it, he spent summers building trails
in the Eagle Cap Wilderness, about 14 miles
as the crow flies from where he’d been lost.
He and his coworkers would ride into the hills
on horseback, carrying their tools on pack
mules. They’d work all day and sleep in the
mountains for ten days at a stretch.
Cody comes from a military family, but
he decided that wasn’t for him. During
college he bought a beat-up sailboat on
a whim, a 27-footer moored in a Portland
marina on the Columbia River. After living
on it for a while, he figured he’d give skip-
pering a try. He got advice from his neigh-
boring boat owners, taught himself the
basics, then decided to sail south. He was
mostly alone, staying awake for 24 hours,
glued to the tiller. After nearly getting run
over by a container ship in San Francisco
Bay, he headed toward Monterey, where he
ran out of money.
In 2008, Cody scored a broken-down 54-
foot sailboat for spare change from a Bay
Area techie who was selling off his pleasure
craft during the financial crash. He sailed
that boat all the way to Nicaragua with his
wife—a Finnish geographical information
scientist named Jatta, who he married in
2011—and their two dogs, spending months
free and mobile.
Cody bailed out of a career in engineering
when film called to him. As with sailing, he
learned in his own way, through experimen-
tation and mentorship rather than formal
training. Today, Cody works as a producer
for the University of Arizona and runs two
companies. One, Rhumbline Media, makes
documentary films; the other, Filmstacker,
is working on an app that allows groups of
creators to combine short clips into finished
movies. Cody puts in long hours every week
on these endeavors, and he misses the thrill
of the sailing life. “It’s like you’re Han Solo
and you have your own little spaceship,” he
says. “You can get to the most rugged, remote
wilderness, 100 miles from the closest vil-
lage, or have an island all to yourself.”
He’s worried about getting too comfort-
able, settling into a routine, though he still
sails off the coast of Mexico for a month
every year. Before, when he and Jatta were on
the water for months at a time, he felt “to-
tally alive,” he says. “I am trying to get back
to that feeling. I think I still can. I don’t think
I’ve screwed it up yet.”
Cody’s persistence hasn’t changed since
he was six. Even after walking down that
steep mountain road and reaching town, he
planned to keep going on his own and walk
all the way home. Eventually, a teenager
waiting for the bus talked him into accept-
ing help by promising him cookies. They
knocked on the door of an older lady, who
called the sheriff. A lawman picked Cody up.
When he got home, his sister Carrie tried to
take off his shoes, and he screamed in pain.
As soon as his legs and feet healed, he was
back out playing in the woods.
CODY AND HIS WIFE are thinking of having
some kids of their own, even though Cody
admits to still feeling like a big kid himself. “I
think I would be a good dad,” he says. “I as-
pire to be a parent who lets my kid run around
a ton. I would love if my kid had all the crazy
experiences I had growing up and survived
them. But it’s pretty scary to think about.”
As dusk settles in, Cody, Nico, and I set up
camp on top of a hill at the edge of the plateau
where Cody would have seen the lights of the
valley glimmering in the dawn. Nico finds
some elk teeth and then falls asleep in our tent
while Cody and I have a beer. Nighthawks
begin diving so steeply that air roars through
their primary feathers, filling the night with
sound. Like he has since he was six, Cody
skips a tent and sleeps under the stars.
When Cody bought his current boat, it
was named Endymion, after a handsome
shepherd from Greek mythology who was
loved by the goddess of the moon. Perhaps
wanting to cast aside associations with live-
stock and herding that smacked of Wallowa,
Cody changed the name. But he says it’s bad
luck to rechristen a boat “unless it has been
so significantly altered that Poseidon can-
not recognize it,” and he found out that there
was likely a coin stamped ENDYMION under
the mast. So he changed the name back.
Maybe the experience of getting lost is like
a coin under Cody’s mast, something that
creates a continuous identity between his
childhood self and his adult self. Either way,
it taught him a lesson he’s never forgotten.
It’s a lesson about “persistence and what it
can unlock,” he says. “I am the kind of person
that will fight to the very end.”
The next morning, it’s time to pack up
our tent and head home. Nico looks dubi-
ously at the expanse of cheatgrass ahead of
us. He spent a lot of the previous day picking
the poky seeds out of his socks. Cody swoops
him up, adding 40 pounds to the weight of
his pack, and carries Nico down the hill. O
EMMA MARRIS ( @EMMA_MARRIS)
WROTE ABOUT A WOLF NAMED
OR-4 FOR OUTSIDE ONLINE IN
OCTOBER 2017. SHE IS THE AUTHOR
OF RAMBUNCTIOUS GARDEN.
11.18
T E R R O R in the Wild
SOS
SINK OR SWIM
David McMahon and Sydnie Uemoto, young pilots
for Mokulele Airlines, were just trying to log some
hours flying between Oahu and the Big Island.
Then the engines went out.
AS TOLD TO WILL COCKRELL
Sydnie and I had never met, but that’s normal when you’re putting in hours. When
we took off, all signs were normal. After we climbed to 2,000 feet, the plane started
to rumble a bit, but it wasn’t enough of a concern to turn back. After about an hour
in the air—at the widest part of the channel between Maui and Kona—the right
engine went out. Sydnie got on the radio to tell air traffic control that we may need
assistance. Then the left engine went. We declared emergency right away. We were
basically gliding.
We weren’t that high—I think about 3,000 feet—which doesn’t give you much
time. I remember looking out at the ocean as we were descending—it just got
bigger and bigger and bigger. I don’t know how we didn’t die on impact. We were
probably approaching at 70, 80 miles per hour, and the plane only had lap belts, no
shoulder straps. Sydnie said that she landed it like a regular plane on the ground.
She did an amazing job.
As we were getting our bearings, the water was already halfway up the dash-
board and gushing in the door. We exited onto the wing and next thing you know,
the plane is gone. But I wasn’t really panicking yet, because I was thinking, We just
survived a plane crash, and the Coast Guard knows where we went down.
We crashed at about 3:15 P.M. and saw the first rescue aircraft about an hour and
a half later. There were a few planes circling, and then a couple of helicopters. But
the water was really rough—six-foot whitecaps—so they couldn’t see us. One plane
flew right over us. After the sixth or seventh pass, I started to lose hope. Then the
air cartridge on my life vest fell off and it deflated.
We realized we had to do this on our own. The good thing about the Big Island is
that it’s got two large volcanoes, both nearly 14,000 feet. So even though we were
about 25 miles away when we landed, we could see land. By the time we decided
to swim it was dark, but we could see lights on the island. We just switched gears
and agreed to keep each other positive.
After swimming for a while, I was getting to a point where I couldn’t even keep my
head above water. This was my lowest moment. Then Sydnie noticed something on
my vest—I hadn’t pulled the toggle to inflate one side. I was like, Holy shit, I’m back!
Then Sydnie swam into a massive jellyfish. She screamed in pain and rolled onto
her back, her eyes closed. She was breathing heavily, and she wasn’t responding. She
slowly came back, and then she just switched on. She said,“We gotta get outta here.”
At first light, we got the sense of how far we’d swum. It was amazing. We even
began talking about the first meal we were going to eat after we made it to shore.
That’s when we saw the shark, about ten feet below us, probably six or seven feet
long. It made a big slow circle around us, like you see in movies. It stuck around for
about 30 minutes and then disappeared.
Eventually, we saw a Coast Guard helicopter, but it flew past. Then I heard one
behind us and, without even looking, I knew it was coming for us. Once the guy got
down to us, he said, “Man, we are so happy to see you.”
The crazy thing is, we were probably five miles from shore. We would have arrived
around sunset, but we definitely would have made it on our own.
11.18 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 79
 Ralph Fox
in 1992

the
strang-
er
in the
shelter

80 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 11.18
P R E V I O U S PAG E : C O U R T E SY O F L A P E E R C O U N T Y P R E S S

BY
EARL SWIFT
11.18
T E R R O R in the Wild

it begins with
the girl.
A typical girl of the mid-seventies American
South, in most respects. In love with her dog,
her friends, and summer days wasted in ad-
venture yarns and mysteries. In Jethro Tull
records and card games and movie dates. In
canoeing the pond out back of her family’s
house in Sumter, South Carolina.
Sharper than average: Margaret McFad-
din Harritt could dive so deep into books
that the world around her disappeared, and
she could apply the same focus to any task at
hand. She finished high school in three years
and turned 17 just days before arriving at the
University of South Carolina.
She looked even younger than she was.
But she was also a headstrong kid. Dar-
ing. Hungry for the new and exotic. South
Carolina wasn’t much for counterculture in
the fall of 1973, but she found a pocket of it
a few blocks from USC in Columbia’s Five
Points district. Hippie boutiques. Hole-in-
the-wall restaurants. The Joyful Alterna-
tive, which sold incense, New Age books,
and roach clips. A new outdoor shop called
the Backpacker.
Margaret found a job in Five Points, wait-
ing tables at a popular restaurant, Capri’s
Italian. Which is what she was doing one
night in March 1974 when in walked tall,
long-haired Joel Polson.
He was slender, fit, and wore shorts year-
round. His mustache and goatee signaled
that he was older than Margaret—by nine
years, she’d come to find out. But otherwise
he seemed an unspoiled child of nature, a
guileless friend to all.
And from that first night, Joel talked non-
stop about a great adventure he had in the
works. He planned to hike the Appalachian
Trail, all 2,200 miles of it. It would take
months. And hey, he told her, you should
come with me.
Margaret laughed off the idea. She’d just
met him. Besides, she was no athlete—she
hadn’t intentionally exercised a day in her
life—and slogging up mountains didn’t
82 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 11.18
sound like fun. But Joel kept coming back,
still talking up the trip. She ran into him at
the Joyful Alternative, where he talked about
it more. Before long, two thoughts began to
crystallize.
One, she liked this Joel. Not in a roman-
tic way; he was more buddy material than
boyfriend. But she found that he was deeply
interested in the world around him. He was
relentlessly upbeat. Not least, he was gen-
erous: he wanted to pursue big, life-shaping
experiences that he was eager to share.
And two, she would not be returning to
USC in the fall. She felt out of place there,
uninspired by her classes. She wasn’t sure
what she would do.
Perhaps a long walk was just the way to
work that out.
MARGARET OWED much to her DNA. She
was fun-loving like her physician father,
a hard-playing freethinker who friends
called Wild Bill. And she was willful like her
mother, whose childhood polio had not kept
her from college and a career as a clinical pa-
thologist, raising four children, and juggling
a crowded social calendar.
Like both of her parents, she was intellec-
tually curious. She devoured books on East-
ern religions. And in their pages she detected
threads that resonated with her—that time is
vast and human life short. Death would come
for her, as it did everyone. Fearing it didn’t
make much sense. Fear in general didn’t.
The sum of all this: Margaret said yes. “I
can remember sitting in her front yard and
her telling me about the trip,” says Mary Jac
Brennan, Margaret’s closest friend since first
grade. “I’m sure I knew about the trail, but
I’d never known anyone who did that kind
of stuff.”
In 1974, few did. The previous year, just 93
people completed a through-hike of the en-
tire trail, and the feat did not yet inspire the
public’s imagination. Margaret knew almost
nothing about the AT. Still, in early May, she
found herself 38 miles from its southern
terminus at Springer Mountain, Georgia,
beginning their first full day of hiking.
They’d started their journey the evening
before, at a road crossing at Tesnatee Gap,
but got such a late start that they were able
to cover only a couple of miles, in darkness.
Now Margaret got a first good look at her
surroundings. In spring, the southern Ap-
palachian forests are flooded with light (ma-
ples, oaks, and tulip trees are just beginning
to bud) and wildflowers—buttercups and
purple trilliums, toothworts and mayapples,
the neat white radials of great chickweed. In
every direction mountains form blue-gray
ramparts against the sky.
It was stunning. But the view carried a
price: the trail climbed steadily, unmerci-
fully, and burdened by their overloaded ex-
ternal-frame packs, the unseasoned hikers
felt every foot. It wasn’t long before Marga-
ret had a blister forming on her heel. They
paused to tape moleskin over it. About a mile
on, they broke for lunch. They encountered
a party of foresters armed with chainsaws,
on the hunt for blowdowns, and stopped to
chat. They rested once more a little farther
on, and again after that.
Late in the afternoon, they were relieved
to reach a long descent. At the bottom, a sign
pointed the way down a 190-yard side trail
to the Low Gap shelter. They’d covered just
six miles but agreed: the day ended here.
Then as now, the shelter was a lean-to
perched high on concrete pilings in a glade
hemmed by a curving brook. There, under
the hut’s gabled roof, they found another
hiker already settled on the bare plank floor.
They must have made quite the first
impression. Margaret had her hair in pig-
tails, looked barely into her teens, and was
dwarfed by her enormous red JanSport pack.
Joel wore a pith helmet, the headgear favored
by olden-day jungle explorers, equal parts
swashbuckling and absurd.
By comparison, the stranger was nonde-
script. He was a little older than Joel, by the
looks of him, and much smaller—five inches
shorter and slight of build. He had a wispy
mustache and horn-rimmed glasses. What
remained of his receding blond hair was
combed straight back and fell over his collar.
As she shook off her pack, Margaret asked
his name. Ralph, he replied.
WERE THERE clues that something awful
was about to happen?
No. None that Margaret detected, anyway.
Ralph appeared harmless, though certainly
down on his luck, with the dark, desiccated
skin of a heavy smoker who’d gone awhile
without a shower. In the shelter beside him
was a meager pile of gear: blanket, leather
 CLOCKWISE:
Joel Polson in
1971; Margaret
Harritt in the
mid-’70s; the
Appalachian Trail
in White County,
Georgia; the
Low Gap shelter
today; the Back-
packer store
in 1973; White
C LO C KW I S E F R O M TO P L E F T: C O U R T E SY O F J O H N N Y P O L S O N ; J AC Q U I E H AY M O N D ; E A R L S W I F T ( 2 ) ; C O U R T E SY O F T H E B AC K PAC K E R ; C O U R T E SY O F W H I T E C O U N T Y S H E R I F F ’ S O F F I C E

County sheriff
Frank Baker

jacket, canvas rucksack.
After a few minutes of conversation, Mar-
garet crossed the clearing to wash up in the
stream. Joel sidled up close. He didn’t know
that he trusted this Ralph character, he told
her, keeping his voice low. Surprising talk,
coming from him.
Ralph didn’t look like a hiker, Joel ex-
plained—he was wearing suede crepe-soled
desert boots, and didn’t have any proper gear.
He glanced back over his shoulder toward the
shelter. They’d left their packs right next to
the guy, he whispered. For all they knew, he
could be stealing their stuff right now.
They hurried back to the shelter. Ralph
hadn’t moved. Their gear was untouched.
He watched as, a little chastened, they
strung up a clothesline and hung their socks
and T-shirts. They started a fire and cooked
dinner, offering him some. He demurred.
As they ate, Ralph left the shelter and
wandered into the trees, returning with an
armful of wood for the fire. He made another
trip for more. Went back a third time.
Well, maybe he’s all right, Joel commented
to Margaret while Ralph was gone. He’s prob-
ably OK. Still, he told her, they should leave
first thing in the morning. He’d wake her, and
they’d get hiking straight away. They’d have
breakfast when they were a mile or two up
the trail to the north.
Margaret crawled into her sleeping bag
not long after. Darkness had yet to fall. As
she drifted off, the men built the fire into a
fierce blaze. Neither said much.
She woke to Joel urging her to get mov-
ing. Margaret sat up in her bag. Morning
had come, and he was already loaded up; his
big green pack leaned against a tree outside,
cinched tight. She watched as he walked to
the stream, splashed water on his face, and
doubled back toward the fire ring. At the
same time, Ralph threw off his blanket and
stepped out of the shelter.
She was lacing a boot when there came
a loud, sharp noise, a blast, and when she
looked up, Joel had dropped into an awkward
crouch. His head rested on the fire ring. He
was motionless.
Before Margaret had time to process the
scene, Ralph was leaping into the shelter to
stand over her. In his hand was an enormous
revolver.
Wait, what? “Roll over,” Ralph said. “Be

11.18 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 83
quiet.” He tied her hands behind her back
with twine. What had just happened? He
ordered her to her feet, then guided her up
the narrow path that led to the privy and into
the trackless woods beyond. “Is Joel dead?”
she dared to ask.
“No,” Ralph told her, “he’s just hurt.” He
said it quickly.
“Could you pull him away from the fire
ring so he doesn’t get burned?”
Yes, Ralph said, he’d do that. He stopped
her beside a slim hardwood, ordered her to
sit on the ground, pulled her legs around the
tree, and tied her feet together. He blind-
folded her. “Do I have to gag you?” he asked.
“No,” Margaret replied. “What are you
going to do with me?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
He walked off. Margaret sat on the for-
est floor, surrounded by the sounds of trees
and birds, frantic. This couldn’t be real. She
willed herself to calm down, to imagine
that it was all a story, a fiction. She hoped
Joel wasn’t badly hurt. Ten minutes passed,
maybe fifteen.
Footsteps. Ralph removed her blindfold,
untied her, and led her back to the shelter.
Joel was nowhere to be seen. She asked Ralph
where he was.
“I got rid of him,” he said.
JOEL EUGENE POLSON: April 26, 1948 to
May 9, 1974. Remembered today, when he is
remembered at all, for his unfortunate place
in history—the first documented murder on
the Appalachian Trail.
In the decades since, seven other hikers
have died in acts of violence on the footpath.
Most of those crimes have attracted national
attention, if for no other reason than the AT’s
status as one of the safest places around.
A few southern newspapers wrote of his
murder in the days after. But the story soon
faded, and today Joel Polson’s life and death
are usually dispensed with in a sentence or
two. Who he was, and how he passed the 26
years before that May morning, are such a
blank that many mentions of him in print
and online misspell his name Polsom.
This much is known: He was from Harts-
ville, South Carolina, a paper-mill town 60
miles northeast of Columbia. The youngest
of three children born to John E. and Bonnie
Tedder Polson, a mill worker turned jeweler
and a farm-raised homemaker.
Joel was intrepid as a kid, into scouting,
playing soldier. Then, when he was 13 or
14, he suffered a mysterious accident. “Joel
climbed up a tree onto the roof of the ga-
rage, and he apparently fell down,” says his
brother, Johnny. Their parents, who’d been
out for the day, returned to find Joel dirty
and discombobulated. “We never got a clear
84 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 11.18
story of what happened, because Joel didn’t in her pocket. She handed it over.
remember,” Johnny says. “He was thrown off Pack up, Ralph told her. He led her back
into the woods—deeper this time, 200 yards
by some sort of mental thing from that fall.”
Whatever his condition, by the time he from the shelter. She asked whether he was
was able to return to school, he was two going to kill her. “You really don’t have any
years older than his classmates. Even so, hereason to,” she told him. “I didn’t do any-
seemed “childlike, kind of naive,” a friend,thing to you.”
Kenneth Krueger Jr., remembers. “Not of the “Well,” Ralph said, “neither did Joel.”
world. He didn’t see people as threatening.” He had her again sit facing a tree and once
He was also shy and nerdish, clumsy in more positioned her legs around the trunk,
binding her feet together. He tied her hands
his interactions. Photos from his high school
yearbooks depict a bespectacled straight behind her back. He covered her backpack
arrow with a mission-control haircut and with leaves and wedged his own rucksack
a fondness for cardigans and chinos. “He behind her as a backrest. I’ll leave you here,
didn’t have that many friends,” his brother he told her. I’ll leave a note in the shelter say-
says. “And of course, talking to girls, he ing where you are.
didn’t have any skills there.” Ralph had brought Joel’s pith helmet
Still, Joel was difficult to overlook at along, and now he turned it upside down,
Hartsville High. He got into photography, filled it with water, and placed it beside her.
and he and his camera became fixtures at He dropped a bag of granola in her lap. He
every campus event. Classmates nicknamed had her demonstrate that she could reach
him Flash. both with her mouth. It could be that some-
That primed him for further involvement. body will come in an hour, he said. Then
again, it might be tomorrow.
By his senior year, he’d been active not only
on the newspaper and yearbook staffs, but This time he dispensed with the blindfold.
in student government, a slew of clubs, and Instead, he balanced Joel’s watch on a log so
the junior and senior class plays. He was that she could read its face, then stalked off
through the trees.
Margaret watched the sweep
of the second hand. It seemed
MARGARET WAS LACING A preternaturally slow. Minutes
BOOT WHEN THERE CAME crawled by. She strained her
A LOUD, SHARP NOISE, ears, dreading the sound of
footsteps, certain that if Ralph
A BLAST, AND WHEN returned it would be to kill her.
SHE LOOKED UP, JOEL After fifteen minutes, here
HAD DROPPED INTO AN he came. Being dead didn’t
AWKWARD CROUCH. HIS frighten her. Getting that way,
she realized, did. She found her-
HEAD RESTED ON THE self thinking, with eerie calm:
FIRE RING. HE WAS OK God. Here I come.
MOTIONLESS. Ralph surprised her. I can’t
leave you here, he announced.
What if it’s days before anyone
shows up? You’d die, and I don’t
want that.
I didn’t want to kill Joel, he
president of the Photography Club, was a DJ said. I just wanted his gear. I had to do it be-
on the school radio station, and worked the cause he was such a big guy. But, he said, he
counter in the student store. had never “whacked a chick before.”
Flipping through the yearbook, you’d So you have a choice, Ralph told her. You
think that awkward Joel Polson was among can stay here if you want. Or you can hike out
the most popular kids in school. of the mountains with me. When we get to
the next highway, I’ll let you go home.
AT THE SHELTER, Margaret was numb with Margaret did not dwell on her options.
shock. Joel was probably dead. It made no She did not want to sit tied up in the woods.
sense. The men had not said a word to each She wanted to get away from the shelter and
other that morning. out of Georgia, and yes, she’d be walking
Ralph ordered her to eat and drink while with Joel’s killer, but that was secondary to
he went through Joel’s pack. He asked getting out of there.
whether Joel had any money. Traveler’s “Untie me,” she told him.
checks, she managed. Where? She pointed A few minutes later, they were packed up
out where Joel stashed them. She had change and headed back to the AT, Margaret in the
 lead, Ralph and his gun a pace behind. At that Ralph might shove her over the preci- FIVE YEARS OUT of Hartsville High, Joel
the junction, they could have turned south, pice or shoot her in the back and kick her bore scant resemblance to the clean-cut kid
backtracking to a road less than five miles down the mountainside. She was certain in his old yearbook photos. He looked like a
away. Instead, Ralph ordered her north. he’d do it. It made sense that he would. hippie out of central casting—beard, granny
Listen up, he said as they walked. I’m She steadied her nerves by talking. She glasses, hair spilling past his shoulders and
going to let you go. But if we run into any- said it seemed like he was running from held in place with a headband.
one before we reach civilization, and you something and asked what it was. He’d been But appearances aside, he was out of step
say anything—or do anything to signal that in and out of the pen, he replied. The FBI was with the Woodstock generation. He lived
there’s something wrong—you’ll all die. And probably looking for him. with his parents. He remained a quiet misfit.
I’ll kill you first. He was preoccupied. He was wearing Though he was good-looking—“beautiful,”
Joel’s heavy pack, which was sized for a man Myra Polson says—no one recalls him hav-
AFTER HIGH SCHOOL, Joel continued to with a longer torso. The straps carved into ing a girlfriend. “He was just a friend to ev-
hone his skill behind a lens. He landed pic- his shoulders, and he couldn’t get the hipbelt erybody,” says a college buddy, Marguerite
tures in the local papers and won first place to ride comfortably. It was he, not Margaret, Ewing. “He was happy to be by himself, and
at the 1970 Darlington Arts Fes- he was really happy to make other
tival. “If he had lived, he would people happy.”
have been an outstanding pho- He continued to dive deep
tographer,” his friend and dis- into hobbies: He took a liking
tant cousin Myra Polson says. “I to bluegrass tunes and built his
mean, he would have been going own washtub bass, carrying the
to National Geographic.” unwieldy instrument wherever
Joel hiked frequently into a he went. He bought a fiddle, too.
local arboretum to photograph Family and friends never heard
flowers and the blackwater him play it, but it ranked high
swamp at its heart. Perhaps the among his possessions.
beauty he found there kindled In time, Joel moved to Colum-
his interest in the natural world, bia and was hired on as a night
because during a stint at Harts- watchman at the Joyful Alterna-
ville’s Coker College, he im- tive. The post included a cot in the
mersed himself in “trying to save back, which is where he was living
the planet,” Krueger says. when he first walked into Capri’s
He took up cycling, too, and and met Margaret.
invested in a lightweight road By then he’d read everything
bike he took on marathon rides he could find about the Appala-
across the coastal plain. Around Polson in 1970, about the time chian Trail and was a regular at
1970, he pedaled from Hartsville he rode from Hartsville, South the Backpacker, where he made an
to Kent, Ohio, and a couple of Carolina, to Kent, Ohio impression on the owners, broth-
years later, says his brother, he ers Lewis and Malcolm Jones.
set out to ride across the country. “Joel Polson was one of the most
Joel’s trip ended in Texas. “He gentle persons I’ve met through
got hemorrhoids,” Johnny Polson says. “He who needed to stop every few minutes. the years,” Lewis says. “A true gentle person,
came back on a Greyhound with his bike.” They were resting not far into the hike quiet and trustworthy.”
Inevitably, his interest in the outdoors when two men with chainsaws came into He was also broke—he didn’t earn nearly
and arcane gear fused into a new passion: view, one of them the same forester she and enough to cover the cost of gear. All he had
Joel started talking about hiking the Appa- Joel had spoken with the day before. Marga- to offer was that fiddle. “He said that if I
lachian Trail. ret panicked. This was no chance for rescue. would let him get some equipment and sign
Just the opposite: if the forester saw that she a note, he would leave the violin with me,
YOU SET THE PACE, Ralph said. If you need was hiking with a different man, she was and when he got back from his adventure
to rest, stop. Anything you need, we’ll do it. sure Ralph would start shooting. he’d pay us back.”
His kindness chilled Margaret. She be- And in fact, the guy did notice. “Oh yeah,” “He outfitted himself with a tent, sleep-
lieved none of it. She was the only person he said. “We saw y’all yesterday.” She held ing bag, all the equipment he’d need,” Lewis
who could link him to a murder. Surely he her breath. says. “And he went on his way.”
planned to kill her. He said no more about it. They couldn’t
But for now she was still alive, and she dawdle, he said. Their ride was picking them THE OLD ROADBED ended, and Margaret
C O U R T E SY O F J O H N N Y P O L S O N

recognized that staying that way meant up miles to the south later that afternoon. now led Ralph over a narrower, more arduous
doing everything he said, buying one min- Ralph asked about the next road crossing path. It was studded with rocks and knuckled
ute at a time. to the north. with roots, and it rode the knobby spine of a
For nearly four miles out of Low Gap, the It’s a long way, the man replied. A good ridge high above the infant Chattahoochee
trail followed an old roadbed ruffed with hike. River. She spurred their conversation as they
ferns. On their left rose dark stone, bearded The men hurried off, unaware of their tackled a series of short but steep ascents. He
in moss and punctuated with small water- luck, leaving Margaret with a deepening told her he’d busted out of jail. She learned
falls. On their right the ground fell sharply dread that she and Ralph would spend the that he was born “up north” but had been
away. Margaret expected at any moment night in the woods. “out west,” up in the mountains. There he

11.18 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 85
could scratch by with just a pocketknife.
Not so in these southern Appalachians: here
he felt out of his element. He wanted to get
back west, which meant moving light and
fast—which meant stealing Joel’s gear.
The afternoon sun crossed the sky. The AT
traversed several slides of jumbled boulders,
and the hikers’ progress, never brisk, slowed
as they picked their way across. Just beyond,
they came to the Rocky Knob shelter, where
they rested before descending a steep, 150-
yard side trail to a spring.
After filling his canteen, Ralph pulled a
trail map from Joel’s pack and was surprised
to find that the next road crossing was less
than three miles away. Even they could cover
the distance by nightfall.
JOEL ASKED MANY to join his hike—friends,
acquaintances, and, as in Margaret’s case,
near strangers. All but Margaret dropped out
as the time to leave approached.
He arranged for his mother to mail-drop
supplies and, miffed that the only available
AT patch bore the legend MAINE TO GEOR-
GIA , carefully embroidered his own reading
GEORGIA TO MAINE . Margaret had never
met a man who could embroider. She was
impressed.
They refined their timetable: Joel would
attend a fiddling convention in North Caro-
lina and from there make his way to Springer
Mountain. In the three weeks before Mar-
garet’s last exam, he’d bang out the trail’s
76-mile Georgia section, then he’d tell her
where to meet him and she’d take a bus from
Columbia. They’d hike together from there.
One logistical hurdle remained. Know-
ing that her parents would never let her hike
alone with a man, Margaret concocted a lie:
she would be one of 15 college students Joel
would lead on the trip. She enlisted him as
11.18
T E R R O R in the Wild
coconspirator and introduced him to her
folks in mid-April 1974.
Her father, an avid hunter, was excited by
the adventure and evidently satisfied that
Joel was fit to lead it. He bought Margaret
the gear she’d need and snapped a Polaroid
of her wearing her oversize pack. She looked
tiny and impossibly young in the image—
slight, baby-faced, feigning hardy courage
with one foot propped up on a chair.
The night before Joel left, he and Margaret
stayed with her elder sister, Polly. Joel spread
his sleeping bag on the kitchen floor. Polly’s
young daughter had received baby chicks for
Easter, and the bright yellow birds “drove
him crazy all night,” Polly remembers. “He
was a lovely young man, and he made light of
the fact that he slept with the baby chicks.”
In the morning, he was off.
A week later, he was back. Once again he’d
developed hemorrhoids, and he’d made it
only to Tesnatee Gap. He killed time while
Margaret wrapped up her classes.
On Monday, May 6, the two left Columbia
by bus for Atlanta. The next day they took
another bus into the mountains and caught
a ride to the trailhead at Tesnatee.
CHANGE OF PLAN, Ralph announced. He

SOS would not let Margaret go when they reached

the road. He needed time to work out his

UNDER FIRE next move, and he wanted her with him.

They would hitch to the nearest town and
John Pascoe and his wife, Jan, had lived in their get a motel room, and he’d let her go in the
beautiful Napa home for 38 years when the Tubbs Fire morning.
It was good news and bad. The good:
arrived suddenly at their door in October 2017
Ralph might not kill her here and now. The
AS TOLD TO WILL COCKRELL bad: Ralph would kill her just the same. And
first she might have to actually hole up with
We always knew fire was a possibility. When it came that day, there was no warning. him in a motel.
We smelled smoke and that was disturbing, so we got on our phones and tried to They clambered out of the hollow, up a
find out what was going on. All five neighbors on the dead-end road where we lived series of short, steep climbs, and then down
had left. We decided to throw stuff into our cars and drive down to check our exit the rocky, hourlong descent into Unicoi Gap.
route—but by then the fire had reached the end of the driveway. We could see it on They heard passing cars long before they saw
the ridge coming toward us. I thought, This is not possible. Georgia Route 75 through the trees. Ralph
What actually saved our lives was a motorcycle trip we’d taken about six years repeated his warning: say anything and
earlier to Big Bear Lake, in Southern California. We’d stopped at a coffee shop and everyone dies.
the guy who ran it told us how a fire had come through and he and his buddy had A few minutes after they reached the
survived in a pool. After that, I always had that in the back of my mind as a last re- blacktop, a young woman pulled over and
sort. Jan called 911 as we were running and told the dispatcher we were going to the offered them a lift. Once in the car, Ralph
neighbor’s pool. Luckily, it was only five feet deep, so we didn’t have to tread water. told her they had traveler’s checks but had
When the fire hit, the tree went up behind the pool, it got so hot. We were under- lost their IDs. Did she know of a place that
water holding our breaths and then coming up and sucking air, and then going back would overlook that?
down. We did that for, I don’t know—it was timeless. There were ashes flying all over She might, the woman replied. Nine
and the neighbor’s house was burning, so we moved as far away from it as possible. miles south of Unicoi Gap, she stopped the
Once the trees, the houses, everything was consumed, I thought, We’re going to car outside a restaurant in the north Georgia
be OK. Jan’s phone had melted on the pool deck, so we had no way of connecting burg of Helen.
with the outside world. We decided to get out of the pool and see if our house had The name of the place—Wurst Haus—
survived. It hadn’t. We stayed there, keeping warm by a burning railroad tie. I think offered a clue to what set Helen apart. Facing
it was 48 degrees that night. We huddled around that little thing until dawn, then the decline of its logging industry, the town
walked three miles, barefoot, to the road at the bottom of our hill. We ran into a had reimagined itself as a tourist draw: a
sheriff, who took us to a friend’s home. When I got out to thank him, he saluted me. storybook Bavarian village, its every build-
ing revamped with towers, chalet rooflines,

86 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 11.18
 and alpine gingerbread.
It was into this discordant setting that
Margaret and Ralph now stepped. In the
restaurant, with Ralph holding his gun a foot
away, Margaret asked whether she could
cash a $20 traveler’s check. Of course, she
was told. Where in town could they stay?
Just up the road, came the reply.
The Chattahoochee Motel was an unas-
suming place, with six rooms facing the
road and its namesake river chattering fast
out back. Ralph did the talking this time.
He asked for a room, handed over $10, and
signed the register Mr. and Mrs. Joel Polson.
Margaret entered their room with a fast-
beating heart. She fully expected he would
rape her. Just as likely, this is where he’d kill
her. But once he’d closed the door behind
them, Ralph was interested only in whether
the TV carried word that Joel’s body had
been found.
Nothing appeared on the local news. At
a restaurant next door, they bought food
and beer and brought it back to the room.
They watched an Elvis Presley movie. Ralph
practiced Joel’s signature, so he could cash
his traveler’s checks. He told Margaret that
if she wanted to keep a memento of Joel, she
was welcome to go through his pack. She left
it as it was.
She asked to take a shower. It did not give
her the brief peace she’d sought: Ralph fol-
lowed her into the bathroom, ushering a
fraught moment. But he didn’t lay a hand
on her, didn’t so much as look at her—he
was there, it seemed, solely to keep her from
climbing through the window.
You know, Ralph told her, I could tell you
were scared when we were hiking. You kept
turning around, like you thought I was about
to shoot you. I almost gave you the gun just
to calm you down.
It’s too bad, he said, that we didn’t meet
under different circumstances.
If all this hadn’t happened, I could have
really liked you.
MARGARET DRIFTED off, exhaustion over-
powering her fear, as Ralph sat alert in a chair,
the gun beside him. Though it might seem
impossible, she slept through the night; it
was well past sunup when she opened her
eyes to find him still sitting there. They
packed and walked to the Wurst Haus to cash
more traveler’s checks, Margaret amazed by
every new step he allowed her to take. The
restaurant had no money in the till. At a gas
WILLIAM L. HARRITT
station up the street, Ralph forged Joel’s sig-
nature, and they walked out with $20.
They returned to the Wurst Haus for cof-
fee. He was still going to let her go, Ralph
said. But he couldn’t think of allowing her
to hitchhike home to South Carolina—there
was no telling what sort of person might pick
her up. So they’d find a bus station, and then
they’d go their separate ways. Ralph had a
map of Georgia and figured they could get
a bus in Cleveland, nine miles to the south.
They started through town, thumbs out. A
car pulled over.
At Cleveland’s Trailways station, Marga-
ret asked the man at the counter for a ticket
Harritt at home before
the hike, spring 1974
IT’S TOO BAD,
RALPH SAID, THAT
WE DIDN’T MEET
UNDER DIFFERENT
CIRCUMSTANCES. IF
ALL THIS HADN’T
HAPPENED, I COULD
HAVE REALLY LIKED
YOU.
to Columbia. Well, he said, from here you’d
have to go to Atlanta first. But Cornelia, a
town to the southeast, has a Greyhound sta-
tion. You can catch an eastbound bus there.
They hitched another ride. The Grey-
hound station occupied a downtown store-
front, and when Margaret and Ralph arrived
shortly before noon, they found the door
locked and a sign on the glass: GONE TO THE
DOCTOR. BE BACK AFTERNOON.
They walked to a nearby bank to cash
more traveler’s checks. After a quick lunch
at a restaurant around the corner, they re-
turned to the bus station, where the man-
ager appeared and unlocked the door. Mar-
garet bought a $10 ticket for Columbia.
Ralph stepped up to the counter. He was
still keeping Margaret at point-blank range,
so he couldn’t very well hide where he was
going: he paid $3 for a ticket to Atlanta.
His bus, due in first, was running late,
so Ralph talked. He’d probably been stupid
to let her live, he told her. He knew she’d
go to the police and that the cops would be
looking for a man with a big green pack. He
counted on having a few hours’ head start.
I promise you, he said, that if you call the
police as soon as I leave, and they’re waiting
when I get to Atlanta, innocent peo-
ple are going to die. I’ll start shoot-
ing, and I won’t care who gets hurt.
You should write a book about
this, he said. You could make some
money.
Then his bus arrived. His pack
was loaded into the cargo hold. He
climbed aboard. Margaret watched
the bus pull away.
She sat in the waiting room, awed
that she was alive, scared that he’d
be back, and wanting nothing but
to get home to her mother. She sat,
immobile, until her own bus arrived
a short time later.
It was dark when the Greyhound
reached Columbia. From a station
phone booth, Margaret called her
elder brother, who lived in the city,
but got no answer. She called her
parents in Sumter. No one picked up.
So she dialed the Columbia po-
lice. Someone’s been killed in Geor-
gia, she said, and I need to tell you
about it. Could you come get me?
THE LOW GAP shelter stands just
within White County, Georgia. At
11:15 that night, the sheriff’s office
got a call from a police captain in
South Carolina relating that a teen-
ager in hiking boots and pigtails had
just told him what he’d later de-
scribe as “a right weird story”—that
a homicide had occurred at Low Gap and that
a body could be found nearby.
Sheriff Frank Baker summoned backup
from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
In the wee hours of Saturday, May 11, GBI
special agent Stanley L. Thompson was
roused from his bed and dispatched to White
County. Well before dawn, Thompson joined
Baker at the crime scene. The sheriff had
already found Joel.
He lay covered with leaves and sticks,
across the stream from the shelter. His
clothes were in disarray, suggesting he’d
been dragged by his armpits. “The subject’s
head was in a plastic bag and the bag had
been tied around his head with a piece of
string,” Thompson wrote in his report. “This
was done apparently to keep the blood from
being strewn around the area.”
11.18 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 87
 An autopsy found that a .38-caliber bul-
let had entered Joel’s skull just behind his left
ear, ripped through his cerebellum, and come
to a stop beneath his scalp above and behind
his right ear.
That was a break for investigators. They
had the bullet.
Margaret described her ordeal in an
hours-long interview two days later. She
was as confused as her listeners about one
piece of the narrative. “It was just strange
that he knew the whole time that it would
be because of me that he would get caught
and all [but] was still letting me go,” she said.
“I don’t know what his motive was or
anything, but he was unbelievably kind to
me. He really was.”
While she gave her statement, Joel’s fam-
ily and friends gathered in Hartsville for his
funeral. Just after, his distraught mother had
to be hospitalized.
A WEEK AFTER the killing, on May 16, the
Atlanta Police Department received a tele-
phone tip: a woman said she’d met a man
matching the newspaper’s description of
the Appalachian Trail murder suspect. She
knew where he lived.
Agent Thompson and Sheriff Baker drove
to Atlanta, where police obtained a search
warrant for the man’s apartment. He wasn’t
home, but inside they found Joel’s backpack,
his clothes and camping gear, and a revolver
containing four live rounds and one empty
cartridge. Thompson waited inside for the
tenant to return. Late that afternoon he did.
“He was just meek as a lamb, from what I re-
member,” Thompson says. “He had no choice,
because I stuck a .357 right in his nose.”
Police identified him as Ralph Howard
Fox. He was 31, born and raised in Detroit.
Like Joel, he was the youngest of three chil-
dren in a solidly middle-class household.
The similarities ended there.
“He started early on getting into trouble,”
his sister, Corrinne, says. In his teens, Ralph
kidnapped a girl from a party he threw while
his parents were away, she recalls. At 17, he
was arrested for car theft, and again a year
after that for breaking and entering. In 1963,
when he was 20, he ran off to New Mexico
with a teenage girl and was arrested for
statutory rape and contributing to the de-
linquency of a minor. Her name was Ann.
He married her a few months later.
In March 1964, with his 16-year-old wife
expecting their son, Ralph forced a Detroit
high school junior into his car at gunpoint,
then drove her 13 miles to a wooded lover’s
lane in Troy, Michigan. An alert cop came
upon them as he was tying the girl’s hands
behind her back.
Ann divorced him. The state gave him 15
88 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 11.18
years, but he served only a fraction of that
before he escaped from the Michigan State
Prison in Jackson. Details of his breakout
are lost—Michigan prison officials say his
file was destroyed years ago—but in Octo-
ber 1969, he was recaptured in Miami and
returned to Jackson.
“He was never out of prison very long
before the next thing happened,” Corrinne
says. Indeed, she says, while out on parole he
broke into Ann’s apartment and lay in wait
for her. When she walked in, he opened fire
with a rifle. He missed.
Ralph eventually fled the state. He
bounced around New Orleans for a while,
Harritt today
“I wouldn’t
say I’ve done
anything all that
extraordinary, but
I have very much
taken it to heart
that I WAS SPARED
FOR SOMETHING,”
Margaret says.
then Fort Lauderdale, and later Atlanta. He
stepped onto the Appalachian Trail for the
first time five days before killing Joel.
Margaret picked him out of a lineup. He
admitted owning the gun, which he said
he’d bought on a Florida beach; it was later
matched to the bullet taken from Joel’s head.
He confessed to stealing Joel’s gear. He de-
scribed tying Margaret up, returning for her,
and their hike to Unicoi Gap. “I was just trying
all the time to keep her scared, you know,” he
told Thompson after his arrest, “so that she
wouldn’t run for help or anything like that.”
Ralph did not explicitly confess to mur-
der, however, or explain just what had hap-
pened that morning at Low Gap. When
Sheriff Baker asked him whether Joel was
“a friendly type of fellow,” Ralph replied: “I
didn’t talk to him much.”
Thompson: “Did you need the gear, the
camping equipment and all that—is that the
purpose?”
Ralph: “No.”
Thompson: “Did you get into an argu-
ment, some kind of argument, or anything?”
“No,” Ralph told him, “just something—
I’ll have to wait for a lawyer.”
He said no more. When he was indicted for
murder the following October, Ralph
pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to
life in Georgia State Prison.
RALPH FOX, a.k.a. Inmate D-21795,
spent most of the next 17 years
behind bars. But when his older
brother died, in July 1991, he was
granted a one-month reprieve to at-
tend the Michigan funeral. That fur-
lough morphed into parole, with his
supervision transferred to Michigan
authorities.
And so Ralph gained a tentative
freedom, and he moved in with
Corrinne in Lapeer County, Michi-
gan, about 50 miles north of Detroit.
He could have made a new start. He
could have demonstrated that his
behavior at Low Gap had been an
aberration and that the mercy he
showed to Margaret Harritt, while
unsettling in its own right, was truer
to his character. That in his middle
years he was a wiser and better man.
At first it seemed he might. He
came home deeply aged and de-
pleted by prison. He was quiet,
agreeable. “I thought he had totally
changed,” Corrinne says.
But after seven months of liberty,
he failed to appear at a meeting with
his parole officer and didn’t turn up
at home or his job. About a week
later, on March 5, 1992, police were
called to a muddy field in rural Lapeer, where
they recovered the nude body of 29-year-old
Diane Good of Detroit. She’d been strangled.
They also found evidence that a car had
recently been mired in the mud. Canvassing
local towing companies turned up a driver
who recalled pulling a blue-gray Mercury
Cougar from the field. Its owner had given
his name as Ralph Fox.
P O L LY H A R R E L L
Police issued a nationwide alert for man
and vehicle. Two days later, Ralph was ar-
rested in Skagit County, Washington, as he
tried to break into a parked car. A Lapeer
jury convicted him of murder that Novem-
ber. Ralph did not take the stand. His only
statement on the matter came at his January
1993 sentencing. “I’d just like for the record
to know,” he said, “that I did not have any-
thing to do with the murder of Diane Good.”
Circuit Judge Martin E. Clements wasn’t
having it. “Mr. Fox, you were convicted of
murder before in another state,” he said.
“You are now convicted of two murders in
your lifetime. I am satisfied that you pose a
substantial risk to a free society, and that you
should never be let out of prison.
“Ever,” he added. “For any reason.”
THUS IT WENT. Some years after Ralph was
again locked up, he was diagnosed with lung
cancer, and in June 2003 he was transferred
to the state prison hospital. He died there the
following month.
Corrinne has not been able to reconcile
the “very soft-spoken” brother she knew
with the killer he was. The summer after he
died, she and Ralph’s son took his cremated
remains to a swinging bridge over eastern
Michigan’s Rifle River and dumped them
into the water.
By that time, traces of Joel Polson were
becoming elusive. His parents were dead.
Friends and relatives had scattered, and his
simple, flat gravestone in the family plot
provided no information beyond the dates
of his birth and death. No marker bore his
name at Low Gap or anywhere else on the
AT. Of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of
photographs he took, few survived outside
of the yearbooks he worked on.
His fiddle endured, however. When the
Jones brothers back in Columbia heard that
Joel had been killed, they were “just devas-
tated,” Lewis says. “We went over to Joel’s
funeral, my brother and I.”
“I wanted to give them this violin,” he
says, but the Polsons said no—Joel had made
a deal with the store, which the family felt it
should honor. “They said they would like me
to keep it.”
And he did, for more than 40 years. “I had
it refurbished,” Lewis says. “And my grand-
daughter was interested in playing the vio-
lin, so I gave it to her.”
She “stuck with it very diligently for a
couple of years,” he says, then lost interest.
If she did not resume playing, Lewis planned
to get it back. “I’ll always have that violin.
It’ll be in the family,” Lewis said this spring.
“This is a special instrument.”
Lewis didn’t know at the time that his
granddaughter had quit playing for good and
that her family had stashed the fiddle in the
attic. That a leaky pipe had dripped water on
it until the seams burst and the wood turned
to mush. That it went out with the trash.
THREE PEOPLE met in the Georgia woods.
One died there, leaving scant trace of his
decent and well-meaning life. A second fol-
lowed nearly thirty years later, with little but
heartache to mark a squandered existence.
But this story ends, as it began, with Mar-
garet. She turned 62 not long ago. She is mar-
ried, with two children, three stepchildren,
and two grandkids, and lives in southern
Europe, where her husband was based when
they met. Their hilltop home, fringed with
palms, olives, and citrus trees, offers a sweep-
ing panorama of rolling grassland studded
with Bronze Age megaliths. She passes after-
noons tending to an ambitious herb garden.
Her thoughts rarely wander back to May
1974. When they do, she can revisit those
days with almost clinical detachment. “I’ll
explain to people that it almost feels like it
happened to somebody else,” she says. “But
that’s not exactly accurate. It’s very much a
part of me, but the whole thing is so surreal
that it almost feels like it’s a movie.”
More than forty years passed before she
decided to share her story—first with the
Appalachian Trail Conservancy, in 2015, and
now for this article. Time has brought her lit-
tle clarity about why it happened. Who steals
a backpack by walking up to its owner and,
without so much as a word, shooting him
in the head? Who lets the sole witness get
away? Why did Ralph handle her with such
fraternal care when he’d brutalized others?
Perhaps even more, she is amazed by her
own behavior. She had always assumed that
if confronted with violence, she’d “scream
and fight and get crazy and run away.”
“But a person does not know how you’re
going to react in that critical moment until
you’re in it,” she says. “I had this calm.
Adrenaline—who knows what it was? But I
was calm.”
“I am not a passive person. But I was pas-
sive then, and it probably saved my life.”
The arc of that life has been a rebuttal to
her two days with Ralph. Later in 1974, she
got her own place outside Sumter and found
work at an orchard, overseeing its production
of tree seeds. The job, solitary and outdoor,
appealed so much that in 1975 she enrolled
at Clemson University and took up forestry.
She did a lot of thinking. “I decided I’d
start being and doing what I was supposed
to,” she says. “I was a teenager hanging out,
smoking pot, and doing the things you do at
that age. Within a year or two of this experi-
ence, I had quit all drugs, all alcohol. I was
much more serious.”
“It was almost as if God took a big old
branch and whacked me across the head and
said, ‘Wake up. Don’t wait forty years. Don’t
wait five years. Wake up right now.’ ”
Any other person terrorized in the woods
might avoid them. Margaret went on to get
her doctorate, which required several years in
the tropical forests of Brazil. She joined the
U.S. Agency for International Development,
managing projects in Honduras, Nicaragua,
and Bolivia. She spent much of a decade in
jungles. She was twice posted to Pakistan and
worked in five former Soviet republics.
Once, years after he’d been locked up,
Ralph mailed Margaret’s parents a copy of
the Georgia State Prison newspaper he ed-
ited, and she worried that he knew their ad-
dress. Another time, a friend remarked that
killers in Georgia could expect to serve just
seven years, and she was again anxious that
he might be free to hurt her loved ones.
But those episodes aside, her hours with
Ralph, certain that she was about to die,
seemed to have inoculated her against fear.
Today, post-retirement, she continues
to visit the world’s hot zones as a contrac-
tor with her old agency. “She doesn’t mind
wearing bulletproof vests and being deliv-
ered by Marine helicopters,” her sister, Polly,
says. “It’s not as though she’s throwing her-
self in the face of danger, but at the same
time it doesn’t scare her.”
Margaret herself is matter-of-fact about
her life’s trajectory. “I wouldn’t say I’ve done
anything all that extraordinary, but I have
very much taken it to heart that I was spared
for something,” she says. “Maybe this ex-
perience helped me see that life is a fleeting
moment, so grab it and go.”
Most days, she is quick to point out, do not
require bravery. She wakes up surrounded by
beauty. She digs in her garden. She roams the
countryside around her home.
Hiking out there is calming, restorative. A
reboot. The light looks different in that part of
the world. Everything is suffused with gold.
And the grasslands are wide open. You can
see for miles.
Nothing is hidden. O
EARL SWIFT ( @EARLSWIFT1) IS THE
AUTHOR OF CHESAPEAKE REQUIEM:
A YEAR WITH THE WATERMEN OF
VANISHING TANGIER ISLAND. HE
WROTE ABOUT THE WRECK OF A
TANGIER FISHING BOAT IN JUNE.
Volume XLIII, Number 10. OUTSIDE (ISSN 0278-1433)
is published monthly, except for the January/February
double issue, by Mariah Media Network LLC, 400 Market
St., Santa Fe, NM 87501. Periodical postage paid at Santa
Fe, NM, and additional mailing offices. Canadian Goods
and Services Tax Registration No. R126291723. Canada
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11.18 O U T S I D E M A G A Z I N E 89
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11.18

Telluride, Colorado
P H OTO G R A P H B Y
Michael Kunde

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