Outside Podcast

In 2014, the federal government rounded up Cliven Bundy’s cattle over a matter of unpaid grazing fees. So the Bundy family gathered a posse and took them back at gunpoint. Two years later, they took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. The Bundys are making a habit of taking on the federal government and winning. For the past two years, reporter Leah Sottile has been following this story, trying to figure out what all this means for the future of public lands in the American West, and wondering what happens next?

Kellee Edwards had a dream of getting her own show on the Travel Channel. She also had a plan. As a black woman trying to break into the overwhelmingly white and male world of travel television, she figured she would have to be overqualified to get noticed. So she got certified as a scuba diver, learned to pilot her own aircraft, and traveled solo to remote corners of the planet. In just a few years, she went from working as a bank teller to hosting the Travel Channel show Mysterious Islands. Outside contributor Stephanie Joyce wanted to know: What’s that trip been like? This episode incorrectly states that Kellee Edwards pitched her show, Mysterious Islands, to the Travel Channel. In fact, the production company Departure Films pitched the project.

Distance runner Alexi Pappas is the rare dual-threat of Olympic athlete and movie star. In the 2016 film Tracktown, which she wrote, directed, and plays the lead character in, she set out to capture the running-obsessed culture of Eugene, Oregon—a place where recreational runners share the trails with pros, and local farms and butchers step up as beef and vegetable sponsors for hungry athletes. Outside contributor Stephanie Joyce talked to Pappas about how her life as an Olympic hopeful translated to the big screen, and why so many people connect with her as an artist and a runner.

One day in 2005 or 2006, a young wolf in Idaho headed west. He swam across the Snake River to Oregon, which was then outside the gray wolf’s range. After he established a territory, he became the most controversial canid in the state. Dubbed OR4 by Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, he was the alpha male of the first pack to live in Oregon in more than half a century. For years, biologist Russ Morgan tracked him, collared him, counted his pups, weighed him, photographed him, and protected him. Environmentalists rejoiced. Cattle ranchers called for his death. OR4 continued making bold raids on livestock and became known for his enduring competence as a hunter, father, and survivor. But nothing lasts forever.

Maverick’s, the monster surf break off the Northern California coast, has long been a proving ground for the world’s best big-wave surfers. But the contest held there most years has never included women, despite the fact that female surfers have been dropping in on giant swells for decades. In fact, the inaugural event at Maverick’s, held in 1999 and called Men Who Ride Mountains, took place several weeks after Sarah Gerhardt caught her first wave there. She wasn’t a professional surfer—she was a graduate student at the nearby University of California at Santa Cruz, where she had just started a Ph.D. in chemistry. Fast forward to today, and Gerhardt was one of six women invited to compete in a Maverick’s event. Outside contributor Stephanie Joyce caught up with the pioneering athlete to talk about her remarkable path.

After building Patagonia into an internationally renowned apparel brand, the company’s first CEO, Kris Tompkins, walked away from the job, following her heart to South America. She landed on a small farm in Chile, where she and her soon-to-be husband, The North Face founder Doug Tompkins, set to work conserving one of the last wild places on earth. But just as their dream of creating a network of parks stretching across Argentina and Chile was coming to fruition in 2015, she lost Doug in a kayaking accident. In response, Kris has doubled down on their vision while figuring out how to forge a new path forward, on her own.

It was the kind of disaster that wasn’t supposed to happen anymore. On February 11, 2017, the fishing vessel Destination disappeared in the Bering Sea on its way to the crab grounds. The boat went missing with an experienced crew, in unremarkable weather conditions, yet there was no mayday and rescue crews could find no life raft or survivors. For the past year, reporter Stephanie May Joyce has been following the investigation into what went wrong and how this mysterious tragedy has changed Alaskan fishing.

Apparently nobody told Bear Grylls that reality TV stars never have long careers. A dozen years after the cheeky Briton exploded onto American television, the king of survival entertainment is charging harder than ever, guiding A-listers into the wild for his NBC show Running Wild with Bear Grylls and launching innovative new series for Facebook and Netflix. He’s also building an adventure theme park in England and hosting a new survival race this spring outside Los Angeles that’s open to anyone. Outside executive editor Michael Roberts, who’s been covering Grylls for over a decade, tracked down the enduring icon on location in the Sierra Nevada to ask him: What’s your secret for survival? And why are you so convinced that going through tough times is good for all of us?

In her acclaimed 2012 memoir, Wild, Cheryl Strayed delivered a fresh take on outdoor writing—a redemption story set on the Pacific Crest Trail. The book spent seven weeks on the New York Times Best Seller List and reminded people everywhere that a grueling journey through the wilderness can help us overcome almost anything. At last year’s SXSW conference, Tim Ferriss sat down with Strayed for an episode of The Tim Ferriss Show to ask her about her creative process and philosophy. He has a way of getting remarkable people to explain their most effective habits and this conversation, on a stage in front of some 2,000 people, didn’t disappoint. We’ve been eager to share it with our audience since we heard it and this week we finally have our chance. You can also read a shortened text excerpt of the interview here

In 2009, Canadian researcher Geoff Hill asked park managers across North America what problems they needed solved. Every single one of them said human waste. Since then, Hill has been on a quest to figure out what to do about the fact that U.S. national parks get more than 300 million visitors each year, and at some point most of them have to take a dump. So far, every solution has failed. And so with every trip to the outhouse, we’re contaminating groundwater, spreading disease, and costing parks a fortune. Recently, however, Geoff found an elegant remedy. Correction: In this episode, we mistakenly say that Geoff Hill licensed a toilet from Ecosphere. The company’s name is Ecodomeo.

If you’ve ever beaten yourself up after eating an entire pint of ice cream, know this: it’s really not your fault. According to obesity researcher and neurobiologist Stephen Guyenet, author of The Hungry Brain and founder of the wellness and science blog Whole Health Source, millions of years of evolution have hardwired us to seek out sugary, fatty, and salty foods. All those calories kept us alive back when we were hunter-gathers. Today they just make us fat. Outside editor Christopher Keyes sits down with Guyenet to discuss why we feel so powerless in the face of decadent desserts, how different systems in our brain compete for dominance, and what we can do to combat all this temptation.

On the 833-mile border between Finland and Russia, a band of elite Finnish soldiers are preparing to defend the country if Russia decides it wants to again redraw the map of Europe. With tensions still high after the Kremlin’s invasion of Crimea and Ukraine, writer David Wolman went to Finland to find out what this tiny band of Finns can possibly do if the Russian war machine heads their way. Quite a lot, it turns out.

To write her three bestselling books on the ocean, Susan Casey went deep with great white sharks in California, big-wave surfing icon Laird Hamilton in Hawaii, and wild dolphins around the world. Her willingness to literally immerse herself in the topic of the ocean—she’s a former competitive swimmer—has allowed her to craft captivating stories that chronicle our relationship with the sea. And yet she’s a relative newcomer to the life aquatic. In the mid-nineties, she was Outside’s creative director, helping guide the publication to an unprecedented three consecutive National Magazine Awards. She was later the editor in chief of O, the Oprah Magazine. It seems that every time she tries something new she becomes one of the best at it. Outside editor Chris Keyes sat down with her to ask: How does she do it? And why is she so concerned about the future of the sea?

Falls are the leading cause of death in the backcountry. Nothing else comes close. And while many are freak accidents that amount to nothing more than bad luck, some are more nuanced and interesting—and personal. If you found yourself stuck at the bottom of a canyon with a broken leg, what would you do? And why? In this episode, we go inside the thought process of a real-life survivor—one who happens to host a podcast about survival.

Andy Petranek and Michael Stanwyck know fitness. Petranek was a former adventure racer and RedBull Athlete before founding one of the first CrossFit gyms. Soon after, Stanwyck walked in looking for a new type of workout and quickly became CrossFit LA’s manager. But while their classes made gym members stronger, the pair longed to have a more holistic impact on their clients. In 2011, they created the Whole Life Challenge, a six-week program that focuses on seven lifestyle changes that optimize well-being. The Challenge, which turns healthy living into a game, now attracts more than 50,000 participants a year. Last week, Petranek and Stanwyck sat down with Outside editor Chris Keyes to discuss the problem with diets, the keys to changing habits, the power of crowds, and how small lifestyle changes add up to make a big difference.

Bee venom is similar to a rattlesnake’s. It rapidly disperses in your tissue, and when you’re stung, the pain you feel is a combination of proteins and peptides attacking your cell membranes. Each sting contains enough venom to incapacitate a small mouse, but bees won’t really hurt you unless you’re allergic. Or at least, that’s what you thought until you disturbed a hive of Africanized bees, which have been known to chase attackers for more than ten hours.

There are several thousand species of mushroom, but only a handful that will kill you. And the toxins found in poisonous mushrooms are some of the deadliest natural poisons on earth. Just seven milligrams—one quarter of a grain of rice—is enough to kill an adult. When you picked some mushrooms off the forest floor, you planned to make a nice risotto. But now you’re in the hospital, fighting for your life.

What if you could opt out of society and go live in a completely self-contained glass bubble in the desert? You and your team would be cut off from the rest of society. For two years, you’d have to grow every morsel of food that you wanted to eat and fix anything and everything that went wrong. That was the plan for the team of scientists that entered Biosphere 2 in the mid-nineties. You may remember that they didn’t make it, but why was it the people on the outside who broke the glass and ended the experiment? Our friends at the podcast Terrestrial, from KUOW in Seattle, tell the story of what went wrong.

What happens to people who are swept out to sea? Some survive for months and even years, alone in lifeboats eating whatever they can catch and drinking rainwater. In this episode we ask you, the listener, to imagine a surfing session gone very wrong when a strong offshore wind blows you out into the ocean. You’re alone on your board, at the mercy of the weather. No one knows you’re out here and you have no way of calling for help. Do you have what it takes to endure until a rescue arrives? And then we tell you the true story of someone who did.

As we get ready to roll out new Science of Survival episodes beginning November 14, we wanted to replay the one that started it all. This thrilling re-creation of the classic Outside feature by Peter Stark leads the listener through a series of plausible mishaps on a bitterly cold night: a car accident on a lonely road, a broken ski binding that foils a backcountry escape, a disorienting tumble in the snow, and a slow descent into delirious hypothermia before (spoiler alert!) a dramatic rescue. Be prepared for a vivid and fascinating exploration of our physiological response to extreme cold that will forever change how you think about venturing into frozen landscapes.