Brad Rassler Archives - ��ԹϺ�� Online

Winging It with the New Backcountry Barnstormers

jversteegh — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 14:07:21 +0000

Part One: The Convincer in Chief

Northern Nevada and the Lost Sierra, Summer 2022

In early August of 2022, 69 days before the 12th annual High Sierra Fly-In—an event known as American aviation’s Burning Man—Trent Palmer hoisted himself into the cockpit of his red, white, and blue bush plane, the Freedom Fox, and fired up the engine for another cruise into the valleys north of Lake Tahoe. Palmer, wearing flip-flops, shorts, and a Trent Palmer limited-edition trucker hat (“Fly Low, Don’t Die,” $40), is not your typical bush pilot, hauling mountaineers and machinery. Thanks to a prodigious YouTube following, he’s one of the most prominent of a new breed of lower 48 adventurers who are landing their fat-tire planes on and in mountaintops, ridgetops, river canyons, mountain meadows, dry lake beds, and grass and dirt airstrips, mainly in the American West, and mostly on land managed by the federal government.

Here was Palmer, 34, his handsome face smooth of whiskers but strong of jaw, moving through his preflight checklist, which included ditching his flip-flops in favor of bare feet, both of which were hovering over the rudder pedals. He jiggled the center control stick, rising up from the floor between his legs, which he used to tame the Freedom Fox’s direction and pitch. He said “Clear” and pushed the starter button, and the propeller coughed and revved, eventually producing a throaty thrum. The plane’s wings and fuselage were the color of Old Glory; several dozen stars spanned the cockpit’s exterior. An observer would be forgiven for mistaking Palmer’s craft for an Air National Guard stunt plane.

Palmer tweaked the throttle and steered toward the runway. He spoke into his headset: “Stead traffic, Freedom Fox, taking runway two-six at alpha two. It’ll be a westbound departure.”

I sat to Palmer’s right, a motion-sickness bracelet on my left wrist, anti-nausea gum in my mouth, and a gallon-size ziplock at my feet. The copilot’s control stick started bobbing around between my legs in sync with Palmer’s. The Freedom Fox, an immaculately maintained, high-wing, single-engine tail-wheel plane with burly 29-inch bush tires, monster shocks, extended wings, and a 140-horsepower fuel-injected turbocharged engine, climbed from Reno-Stead Regional Airport at 1,500 feet a minute. The stamped alkaline flats of the Great Basin gave way to the dense pine forests of California’s Lost Sierra, a huge swath of mountainous backcountry about an hour north of Reno. On the horizon, the jagged crest of the Sierra Buttes came into view. Palmer, who was piping a Shakey Graves tune through the headsets, exuded competence, bonhomie, and (in the confines, I couldn’t help but notice) a pleasant, soapy smell.

He had agreed to take me along as he executed a series of “short takeoffs and landings”—STOL, for short—which epitomize bush flying, whether the assignment is depositing researchers onto a remote airstrip in Alaska’s Brooks Range, competing in STOL competitions, or landing “off-airport”—on ungroomed terrain, nowhere near a runway—as we were about to do next to California’s Stampede Reservoir.

Palmer seemed happy to be flying without cameras and a YouTube agenda. “How are you feeling?” he asked, this polite ambassador and evangelist of his winged pastime, this member of a band of nine bush-pilot buckaroos called the , social media influencers all, using their platforms to spread the bush-flying gospel to the uninitiated.

In one 2018 video, Palmer and two other young pilots fly to a northern Nevada mountaintop and set up base camp. One pilot paraglides off the summit. In a voiceover keyed to uplifting synths and soaring drone shots, Palmer says, “More often than not, we work away all the golden years of our lives, years we’ll never get back, all in an attempt to enjoy the remaining few.”

“I say it doesn’t have to be that way,” he continues. “What I’m saying is to stop waiting, stop dreaming, and start living. Life is too short to eat dessert last.”

“You know the drill,” he concludes. “Like this video if you do, subscribe if you haven’t, [and] come be my wingman.” Then he whispers “Peace,” flashes the V, and slaps his hand over the lens.

The result? Followers. Half a million of them. Palmer grosses about $150,000 a year from various income streams, including YouTube.

He gestured at the twitching control stick. “You might get punched in the nuts when I’m landing,” he said, “but don’t worry about it.”

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Antisemitic Statements by a Climbing Pioneer Prompt the American Alpine Club to Rename a Prestigious Honor

jversteegh — Thu, 05 May 2022 22:19:30 +0000

On the morning of May 4, I learned that the American Alpine Club (AAC) is planning to change the name of the Robert and Miriam Underhill Award, a prestigious annual prize that honors the memories of two outstanding alpinists, a husband-and-wife team who made a mark in the first half of the 20th century. For the past 39 years, the club has given the Underhill Award to an American climber who has “demonstrated the highest level of skill in the mountaineering arts and who, through the application of this skill, courage, and perseverance, has achieved outstanding success in the various fields of mountaineering endeavor.” The award’s 46 recipients include some of American climbing’s most famous names: Lynn Hill, Royal Robbins, Catherine M. Freer, Yvon Chouinard, Jeff Lowe, Alex Honnold, Conrad Anker, Jim Donini, Kitty Calhoun, and Peter Croft.

I never met the Underhills—he died in 1983, she in 1977—but I’d read about them, and I learned a few years ago that Robert, a revered figure in the history of California climbing, was an antisemite. In letters written to friends at the Sierra Club��and the AAC in 1939 and 1946,��respectively, he referred to Jews as “kikes,” “mutts,” and “lowgrade.” He implied that Jewish people didn’t belong on rock faces at all and said they lacked the character and physical traits to be successful in challenging mountain environments.

Robert Underhill’s distaste for Jews has been documented in two books by the climbing historian Maurice Isserman: , a sweeping 2010 history of Himalayan mountaineering, cowritten with Stewart Weaver, and , an epic 2017 account of climbing in the United States. Isserman’s books were well-known among climbers, but to my knowledge the AAC had never publicly addressed Underhill’s attitudes about Jews. Plenty of organizations have interrogated their problematic pasts in recent years. Shouldn’t the AAC?

I’ve been a club member for 21 years. I’m Jewish, and I’ve been the victim of antisemitism. Though I’d intended to write about Isserman’s research, I hadn’t gotten around to doing it. Then, on April 22 of this year, I scrolled through my email and found an AAC newsletter announcing the new winner of the Underhill Award—Joe Terravecchia—and I decided it was time to bring up Robert’s old statements. Later that day, I emailed the AAC. Citing Isserman’s research, I asked if they knew about the letters and whether they thought the organization should respond to their contents. Jamie Logan, the AAC’s interim CEO, emailed within the hour to thank me for reaching out. “As a recipient of the Underhill award my immediate reaction is that we should rename the award,” she wrote.

For 12 days, I didn’t hear anything else, and I wondered whether I was getting blown off.��I also wondered whether I’d unwittingly blurred my role: Was I making the inquiry as a club member or as a journalist? I decided to write once more to ask��if the silence was the same as no comment. But then, early on the morning of May 4, Logan emailed me. “Hi Brad, we have decided to rename the award. We are also doing some research into Miriam’s views before we finalize what to do.” On May 5, the AAC removed the Robert and Miriam Underhill Awardees page from its website.

Underhill, photographed in the Sierra Nevada in 1931��(�ʳ�ǳٴ�: /Wikimedia Commons)

In a subsequent email, AAC vice president Pete Ward offered more detail. “We view the AAC as the stewards of the most accurate possible history of climbing,” he wrote, adding that a process of renaming will involve creating a committee tasked with taking a deep look at the club’s past and future. “Our goal is to do this in a way that ensures we’re awarding meaningful contributions rather than simply being generic and performative. Whatever the new name is should at once honor the better parts of our history while also being precise in what we’re trying to celebrate with that award.”

Later that day, I talked to several Underhill recipients, who didn’t know about Robert’s antisemitism and were pleased with the AAC’s decision. “I had no idea he had that past,” said Lynn Hill, who won in 1984. “I believe that climbing is a sport that is inclusive and welcomes all races, all genders, and people who love climbing and love the earth and love nature and love humanity. And that is not humanity.”

“It’s flabbergasting,” said Peter Croft, who was honored in 1989. “This is black and white, not shades of gray. Changing the name is an awesome thing to do.”

“I mean, the whole point of naming awards is to basically put somebody on a pedestal,” said Alex Honnold, who won in 2018. “And if you find that they’re not worthy of the pedestal, then find somebody else.” Honnold even had an idea for a new name: “Call it the Peter Croft Award,” he said. “He’s the world’s nicest man. The Croft Award for Excellence in Climbing.”

In the origin story of modern Yosemite climbing, few people loom as large as Robert L.H. Underhill, a professor of philosophy at Harvard who was the editor of the Appalachian Mountain Club’s journal and who, by the early 1930s, had put up notable ascents in the U.S. and Europe. In 1931, he traveled west to teach European rope techniques to a handful of the Sierra Club’s best climbers.

“Now it is necessary to understand that the rope, in its final meaning, is the symbol which transforms an individualistic into a higher social enterprise,” he wrote in an essay published in the Sierra Club Bulletin—an essay that followed the completion of a legendary Sierra climbing season. With Norman Clyde, Jules Eichorn, and Glen Dawson, Underhill made the first ascent of Mount Whitney’s east-face route that year.

“The time is summer 1931, the place [is] Garnet Lake in the Sierra Nevada,” writes historian Joseph E. Taylor III in , a 2010 history of Yosemite climbing. “Francis Farquhar has brought fellow Harvard man and celebrated mountaineer Robert Underhill to teach European techniques to the Sierra Club. Underhill treads the holy Range of Light like a mountaineering Moses, and the followers of John Muir listen reverently.”

In letters written to friends at the Sierra Club and the AAC in 1939 and 1946, respectively, Underhill referred to Jews as “kikes,” “mutts,” and “lowgrade.” He implied that Jewish people didn’t belong on rock faces at all.

Before she married Underhill in 1932, Miriam O’Brien had also established herself as a top-shelf climber and writer. Her essay “Manless Alpine Climbing,” published in the August 1934 issue of National Geographic, summarized her distinguished career as a pioneering alpinist—she was one of the best of her generation, of either gender. Together, Robert and Miriam, accompanied by two guides, had made the first traverse of the Alps’ Aiguilles du Diable in 1928.

Robert, an academic, a world traveler fluent in German, and a Quaker who was described by a classmate as “a quiet and unassuming person [who] never advertised his exploits,” was unusually expressive when it came to the subject of inborn human qualities. “Likening climbers to military comrades and ascribing leadership to the ‘virtue’ of ‘natural capacity’ and ‘inborn talent and natural instinct,’” Taylor writes, “Underhill echoed Victorian beliefs about the innate nature of masculine, physical superiority.”

Unfortunately, Robert also believed that the inborn qualities of Jews were lacking. In 1939, Sierra Club board member Dick Leonard wrote to him to ask about a climbing fatality that had happened near West Point, New York. The death occurred during an outing sponsored by the Appalachian Mountain Club, the country’s oldest outdoor-recreation nonprofit and Underhill’s organizational home. He replied by disparaging the fallen climber, who happened to be Jewish, and lamenting Jews’ membership in the New York chapter of the AMC. Isserman cites the letter in Continental Divide:

The A.M.C. has a New York Chapter, but the members are so afraid of getting stuck with kikes and others that they deliberately suppress any publicity it might have and make it almost impossible for new people to join! One can’t be sure some special Jewish psychology didn’t enter into this accident, at least fundamentally. It isn’t so usual for Jews to go in for mountaineering, and when they do I can conceive that they are conscious of invading what they may look upon as the other man’s sport, and consequently that they feel unduly impelled to make themselves felt by undertaking the spectacular.

When Isserman was researching Fallen Giants at the AAC archives in Golden, Colorado, he came across a letter dated June 24, 1946. Underhill was addressing Henry S. Hall, a former climbing partner and a fellow Harvard alum. He wrote:

Have you the pleasure of a personal acquaintance with Mr. James Ramsey Ullman? Neither have I but Miriam and I have just spent a night at the Lakes of the Clouds hut where he was present with his two boys. Unless I miss my guess, he is a lowgrade New York Jew—at any rate his boys are beautifully Jewish and he is incontestably lowgrade. . . . The New York chapter of the AMC would never let such a mutt through their censors; can the A.A.C. be less choosey?

The existence of Underhill’s antisemitic letters was no secret. In fact, Fallen Giants and Continental Divide merited coverage in the American Alpine Journal, the latter reviewed in 2017 by Peter Beal, who wrote: “Particularly interesting is a discussion of anti-Semitism and other forms of discrimination from very well-known figures in climbing, such as Robert Underhill.”

In the print edition of her 2007 memoir��Breaking Trail, the mountaineer Arlene Blum mentions Underhill’s letter to Hall—without using either man’s name but making clear that it involved AAC business.

And yet, before now, the AAC’s board had not publicly discussed Underhill’s antisemitic predilections or considered the effect of his words on the organization. When I asked Pete Ward about the club’s institutional memory, he replied: “While I’m not willing to speculate on what has come before, I can say that the AAC staff and board are committed to a continual process of examining and shining light on all parts of our history. Including, and especially, the parts of that history that must evolve. We are accountable to our community and to ourselves to be open, accurate��and transparent in that evolution.”

Historian and author Maurice Isserman (Photo: /)

As for Miriam Underhill, Isserman told me he didn’t find any evidence that she shared her husband’s prejudices. Ward said that his team’s initial impressions are the same.

The dates of Robert Underhill’s letters are important. By 1939, Adolf Hitler’s persecution of German Jews was well underway. In July 1944, The New York Times reported that approximately 1.75 million Jews had perished at the hands of the Nazis, a figure that, tragically, turned out to be low. By 1945, Allied troops had started liberating a network of concentration and death camps. And in 1946, Underhill, presumably writing from the comfort of his New Hampshire home, saw fit to complain to his friend Henry Hall about the American Alpine Club’s Jewish problem.

I don’t wish to suggest that American Jews suffered from the same level of systemic othering, marginalization, and violence that some minority groups have in this country. At the same time, American Jews were barred from admission to certain clubs, subjected to quotas at institutions of higher learning, and redlined from neighborhoods. And yes, there were also victims of violence, including Leo Frank, who was infamously lynched in Atlanta in 1915.

When Underhill referred to Ullman as a mutt, he was invoking an age-old antisemitic trope, which had recently been employed by the Third Reich: Jews as a race apart, impure, an entire people requiring eradication. When Underhill complained to Leonard about the inclusion of Jews in the climbing ranks, he was reinforcing not only a classist system but also suggesting that by seeking admission to climbing clubs, Jews were overreaching.

Historically, a Jewish athlete’s successes served to puncture the negative cultural stereotypes that have portrayed Jews as weak, cowardly, and venal: images promulgated by the antisemitic propaganda of Nazi Germany and seen in the recent rise of both in the U.S. and abroad. “Sports [has provided] for distinctive ethnic identity and solidarity, [and] Jewish athletes during the inter-war years were viewed by fellow Jews as symbols of anti-racism resistance,” writes sociologist Richard Giulianotti in Sport: A Critical Sociology.

By limiting their membership to the ranks of the AAC, by demeaning a dead Jew who was supposedly killed by exceeding his abilities, Underhill was using his considerable influence to keep Jews down.

Simply put, a Jew—or a member of any marginalized people—who excels in an endeavor creates opportunities for those who follow. By limiting their membership to the ranks of the AAC, by demeaning a dead Jew who was supposedly killed by exceeding his abilities, Underhill was using his considerable influence to keep Jews down.

“There’s no way to interpret Underhill’s comments except as anti-Semitic,” Isserman told me in an email, adding that his tone reflected “his assumption that in revealing his own anti-Semitism he would not discredit himself in the eyes of those with whom he was corresponding.”

The award’s name needed changing, as did the narrative informing it.

who is a 75-year-old trans woman, knows something of courageous and transformative change. She won the Underhill Award in 2020 after transitioning in 2017. She took the lead on the decision to change the award’s name, and she’s facilitating a process to assess the sweep of the club’s history.

“It’s my feeling that any organization 100 years or more old should look into its past,” Jamie told me, “because it’s likely there will be problematic characters and incidents that don’t mesh with the present.”

Congratulations to Logan and Ward for starting organizational change. It’s a new board for a new time.

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“I Write for Katie”: How Katie Ives Climbs Mountains at ‘Alpinist’

jversteegh — Fri, 01 Oct 2021 09:45:57 +0000

Katie Ives still laughs about the bungled adjective that saved her life.

She was high in the Tetons more than a decade ago, at the crux of an ice-plastered climb. Night was falling. Her hands were wooden from the cold, and a fall spelled death. In that dire moment, Ives did not pray for safe deliverance. She did not consider the grief of family and friends when they heard the news. She did not mourn the loss of a dream career.

“What went through my head were the proofs sitting on my desk at home,” says the editor in chief of Alpinist magazine. “And the fact that one of my writers wrote something she hadn’t meant to write. And if I die, people are going to think my writer doesn’t know the difference between nauseous and nauseated.”

Limbs invigorated by this peril, Ives made the move, rushed to Alpinist’s office in Jackson, Wyoming, corrected the error, and saved the writer—her writer—from unthinkable embarrassment.

“It’s a funny story,” Ives says. “But it says more about who I was then rather than who I am now.” She objects when I point out that the mistake was extraordinarily forgettable and the correction overly perfectionistic.

“I don’t want to perpetuate the myth that I’m a perfectionist,” she tells me. “Say that I care about craft.”

Ives’s care for craft runs deep. As Tami Knight, her friend and a frequent Alpinist contributor, puts it: “Katie has been Katie since Katie started being Katie.”

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Leaving the Grace of This World

jversteegh — Thu, 10 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide or self-harm, call the toll-free from anywhere in the United States at 1-800-273-8255, or text HOME to the Crisis Text Line at 741741.

COVID-19, wildfire smoke and hurricanes, the chaotic state of the body politic, and all the troubles in the world have me seeking shelter lately. I’ve been thinking about my Michigan uncle, and how he lived large and died too young. I’d like to tell you about him. Maybe there’s something to be learned in his story: a way not to live, and a way not to die, and how to make better choices after we’re sprung loose to resume whatever it is we call normalcy in the dawning of the post-pandemic era.

When I turned 13, on the occasion of my bar mitzvah, my Uncle Richard gave me a set of barbells and a subscription to Penthouse. He taught me how to fish for trout in Michigan rivers before I entered my teens��and liked to give me philosophical tips on ways to live. “You know,” he was fond of saying, “you can never be too good-looking, too tanned, or make too much money.”

He was 31 when his second marriage failed; he swore off the institution and got a vasectomy. He would often tell my mother that my younger brother and sister and I were the children he’d never have.

He was handsome, with a square face and a straight Greek nose and a strong chin. My stepfather called him Richard the Kid, because he was always on the make and never showed signs of settling down. When my grandmother used to chide him that “there’s more to life than having fun,” he’d say she was wrong. “All there is to life is having fun, Mom.”

For most of his 58 years, he lived within ten miles of his birthplace in Pontiac’s Seneca Hills. He passed the Michigan bar exam in 1970 and then entered the Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office. He went by Dick Levine, and he discovered a gift for arguing jury trials. “I’m so good, I convicted an innocent man,” he told one of his ex-wives, who asked me not to use her name.

In 1973, he switched sides and hung a shingle: “Richard Jerome Levine, Criminal Defense Attorney.” He defended a wide range of people, from drunk drivers to drug dealers to men charged with date rape. He spurned plea bargains and backroom deals. He became famous in the county court for a streak of acquittals that some say reached into the seventies. He was renowned as the organizer of the Big Ten party, an annual holiday bash he threw with nine other attorneys at Santia Hall, a banquet space in nearby Keego Harbor. He always sang “Blue Christmas” with his buddy Patrick.

And then, suddenly, on Halloween night in 2002, he threw a party for himself at the Oakland County Boat Club. A poster said “BYE BYE RICHIE.” His friend Irene Santia, the owner of Santia Hall, catered the event.��There were cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, a celebration of his plans for a new life in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Someone asked him when he would come back.

“Never,” he said.

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Jennifer Ridgeway Has Passed Away at 69

jversteegh — Fri, 20 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Jennifer Ridgeway, Patagonia’s first director of advertising and the company’s founding director of photography, died Tuesday in her Ojai, California, home after a yearlong fight with pancreatic cancer. She was 69. She is survived by her husband, Rick, 70; her two daughters,��Carissa Tudor, 36, and Cameron Tambakis, 34; a son, Connor, 31; and four grandchildren.

Company employees credit Ridgeway with creating the aesthetic that would become emblematic of the Patagonia brand: her catalog images relied not on paid models��but on photographs of “real people doing real things,” as Patagonia��founder��Yvon Chouinard put it. The Patagonia catalog under Ridgeway’s direction��emphasized the documentary image and underplayed the product. The��photos told stories, inspired, and did what they were intended to do: sell��clothing. But perhaps more than that, Ridgeway, through her selections, described a counternarrative to consumer culture that still managed to boost sales.��“She had an eye for authenticity,” says Vincent Stanley, a member of Patagonia’s management team for five decades and��currently the company’s director of philosophy, “a real eye for beauty, and a direct, wry sense of humor.”

Jennifer Dawn Fleming was born on December 30, 1949, in Jackson, Oklahoma, to J. Carl Fleming and Claudine Sneed, both schoolteachers. The family, which included her two brothers, lived for a time in Texas before settling in Portland, Oregon. Jennifer attended the��University of Mississippi��and graduated with an MA in psychology from the University of Oregon. In “Capture a Patagoniac,” an autobiographical essay she wrote for an early Patagonia catalog, she described working as a model from age 12 through college and then moving to New York City��for a job with Calvin Klein, where she organized��trunk shows for the company’s high-end accounts, such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus.

Traveling in Thailand for business in 1981, she missed a connecting flight in Delhi, India, and “inspired by the Cat Stevens song,” she wrote, opted to detour to��Kathmandu, Nepal. As she told it, she booked into the upscale Hotel Yak and��Yeti and was soon being schmoozed in the bar by a climber slash writer with a contract from National Geographic who was suddenly inviting her to join him on a three-week walkabout in��Sagarmatha National Park, which is home to Mount Everest.

“I’ve got wads of rupees in my expense account, and I’ll hire you an army of Sherpas. We’ll sip Rémy Martin in Namche Bazaar and dine on yak steak on the Khumbu��Glacier,”��the climber said.

She demurred, saying,��“But the farthest I’ve ever walked … is from a cab on Fifth Avenue into the front entrance of Bergdorf Goodman.”��

The climber, Rick Ridgeway, asked��her to visit when her business travels brought her to Southern California. Three months later, they did. The diminutive Ridgeway met her at the airport with his two equally diminutive cronies: a very soused Yvon Chouinard and the Japanese mountaineer Naoe Sakashita. “Great,” she later wrote, as she realized that the cost of her silk gown, pearls, and five-inch heels exceeded the cost of Chouinard’s 1969 Datsun, “I’m being hosted by three drunk dwarves.” The beach cottage just south of the Santa Barbara community of Montecito��that Ridgeway��had promised to put them up in turned out to be a shack in Ventura, but in the winter of 1982, the two were married. Jennifer was mustered into Patagonia, hired by Kris Tompkins, then the��general manager, and assigned to marketing. “Those first few months, I was in charge of advertising, art, and PR,” Jennifer recalled. “They even had me writing catalog copy. As soon as I could spell polypropylene, I began scheduling ad campaigns for long underwear … working with the media, running the pro-purchase program, managing catalog production, and creating a photography department.” That year��the company produced its second lifestyle-based catalog.

By 1986, as the company grew, Ridgeway happily ceded some of those roles to specialists, but she kept the job that gave her the most pleasure: photo director, with the help of a couple of longtime��employees, including��Karen Bednorz (now the company’s historical photo archivist) and Jane Sievert (who would go on to assume Ridgeway’s role), managing a��cadre��of athlete-photographers—hundreds of them—most of whom were friends or friends of friends. Some were given clothing to put on their climbing, paddling, and fishing partners. They worked unapologetically on spec��or didn’t work at all. Tens of thousands of photos rolled in the door every year, filed, as Bednorz recalls, within six boxes on a big cart the team rolled up from a vault every morning and locked up every night.

Most of them understood that, as Ridgeway wrote in 1986, “The goal of the photos is to sweep people away, to inspire them—to let them visualize what it’s like to be ‘out there,’ not stuck sitting at a desk or in front of a TV. The message is to get off your bum and get out there and do stuff.”��

And as more and more of them got off their bums and did stuff, so did the photographers, who learned quickly that to gain entry into the book, their images required a certain kind of brutal honesty and an unscripted je ne sais quoi.��

They gleaned images now considered iconic, like the one of the mom tossing her bundled newborn across a small canyon to the waiting arms of the dad. But by employing a system that had both freelancers and any photographically inclined customer submitting photos willy-nilly, they knowingly amplified their workload. “I’m never going to work as hard for anyone for the rest of my life,” says Sievert, who has referred to her friend as “part spiritual mother and part Zen master.” Ridgeway hired Sievert for her climbing background—the better to understand a real climbing shot from a simulacrum of one—and not for her photography chops, because she had none. “I was so green, and Jennifer was so generous,” Sievert says. In the early years, Sievert remembers��Ridgeway encouraging��her to spend time outdoors, climbing and skiing, not only to cultivate relationships with photographers, but to hone her own athletic talents, because “you can’t do it if you’re not in it.” Bednorz recalls how Ridgeway helped her sort out her personal life. “I had a couple of relationships under my belt,” says Bednorz. “She taught me that a healthy one was possible.”

With time, Ridgeway tended to her own family and other projects, often working unseen and unheralded in the background (there are few photos of Ridgeway herself), with the same attention to detail and single-minded focus that she used to vet photo submissions. In 1985, with Malinda Chouinard, Ridgeway cofounded Patagonia’s on-site day-care center��(a concept the two had begun rolling out two years prior),��eventually��enrolling��all three of her children as proof of concept (her��four grandchildren currently attend), and then in 2016, again with Malinda Chouinard, she wrote to inspire other companies to do the same. In 2011,��Sievert and Ridgeway coauthored��, a book that the Banff Centre��honored��with its Best Book–Mountain Image��award.

Ridgeway’s gift, says Stanley, was cultivating��a portfolio of photographs in every catalog that allowed people to see themselves in the activity. “And it changed the way the industry viewed sports,” he says. Even more than the depictions of extreme athletes engaged in activities that many might be unable to relate to, Stanley says that Ridgeway sought to steep its customers in the wild landscapes those photos celebrated.

Ever the apprentice, Sievert sees herself as the protector of Ridgeway’s vision and her ken for finding the ultimate, authentic image. “You can’t script life,” Sievert says, inferring that a Patagonia photograph isn’t scripted either. And for that matter, neither is death.

In a 2009 piece for National Geographic Traveler, “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,” Rick Ridgeway writes��of a trip to Patagonia—his first with with Jennifer and their three children. One scene takes place at Moreno Glacier��in Los Glaciares National Park.

“From the parking lot, we descend through a forest of stunted beech trees to a series of viewing platforms that bring us eye to eye with a wall of ice 200 feet high and three miles long. Jennifer stands transfixed, then looks at me and forms her mouth into a silent ‘wow!’ as though saying anything aloud would be as disrespectful in this natural shrine as it would be in a man-made cathedral. But noise is something all visitors to Moreno Glacier hope to hear: The huge blocks of ice occasionally break with a gunfire crack followed by a giant splash into the lake.

“‘I’m going to will one into breaking off,’ Jennifer says with a kind of New Age determinism counter to her usual cause-and-effect way of looking at the world. I keep my camera ready while she faces the glacier. An hour passes, then two. The sun sets and the air cools.

“‘I guess it doesn’t want to break now. Maybe it’s better this way,’ Jennifer says. ‘Now we have more reason to return.’”

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Your Favorite Dirtbags Are Motivational Speakers

jversteegh — Mon, 28 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

“The joke is, ‘Hey, I’ve climbed Everest,��now I’m a motivational speaker,’” Conrad Anker told me after I observed that there’s been a noticeable uptick in climbers—many of them former dirtbags and non-Everest types—delivering positivity platitudes and business bromides to Fortune 100 companies. Anker, a 56-year-old��alpinist of some renown who recently retired from his three-decade reign as captain of the North Face athlete team, concurred. Compared to mugging for their sponsors’ ads or clicking through a PowerPoint deck at a local climbing gym, a big-time speaking gig is great work if you can get it. Today, thanks to the mainstreaming of extreme sports, a relatively��known athlete can fetch upward��of $10,000 an hour.

��ԹϺ�� types have always braved the dais to satisfy their sponsors, raise funds pre-adventure, and pay debts post-trip—or��simply relate their stories to fellow pilgrims, gratis. While the spiel has morphed along with cultural norms, the metamessages of motivation themselves have changed little. They consist mainly of man’s mastery over nature, man’s mastery over self,��and man’s mastery over mechanical objects.

Straightaway you can see how these expedition accounts and the metaphors therein might prove useful to the corporate crowd. In fact, captains of industry routinely deploy the catchphrases of ascent—“to the summit,”��“climb higher,”��“reach the peak,”��etc.—and pen books along those lines with titles like ��or ��and , the latter with chapters contributed mostly by mountaineers and one by Royal Robbins:��“Success Through Failure in the School of Hard Rocks.” And then there’s the Everest genre, consisting of lessons learned on the naked slopes of that much-flogged mountain, including a Harvard Business School case study deconstructing the 1996 tragedy.

All of which is to say that even now, in a venue near you, an extreme athlete struts and frets below a proscenium arch, wearing one of those wispy headset affairs, filling��with story��the murky lacuna between aspiration and realization.

In truth, adventure types compose a nanoparticle of the estimated 53,000 public speakers in this country, but they’re surprisingly ubiquitous. Basically, you’ve got the hardcores and the entertainers. The hardcores, whose names you probably know, are hired for who they are (or were) and what they’ve done (or did). (In short,��everyone’s in the game, but the athletes getting real work include Tommy Caldwell, Jimmy Chin, Alex Honnold, and Ed Viesturs.) The entertainers, who��you’ve never heard of, are hired for their ability to absolutely kill onstage. Generally speaking, the entertainers don’t win Piolet d’Or awards, and the hardcores don’t kill. (By “kill,” I mean the ability to both own a stage and deliver exquisitely timed maxims diaphragmatically to thunderous applause.) Many of the entertainers, and increasingly the hardcores, are represented by the country’s top speakers bureaus, like Keppler and WSB.

The most successful of the entertainers by far is 52-year-old Alison Levine. While her adventure bona fides are not exactly visionary—she’s climbed the Seven Summits and skied to both poles—they’re plenty good enough if you can slay onstage, which Levine does (). “I just like to tell people, don’t worry about being the best and the fastest and the strongest,” she tells me. “Just be the most relentless.” And that she is. Levine averages over 100 gigs a year. She earns $32,000 per appearance, out of which she pays travel expenses and a 30��percent agency fee to Keppler. Levine says she has been Keppler’s most requested speaker eight years running. By her math, she has delivered the same stand-up routine over 800 times to mainly business audiences. She says, “I want them to walk out of the room and say, There’s nowhere else I would have rather been than listening to Alison Levine.” Apparently, they do.

Of the hardcores, there’s the surging Alex Honnold, 33, who, post��Free Solo, is the most famous climber in the world since Hillary and Norgay stood atop Mount Everest. Actually, he’s far more famous, since the latter two were bereft of Instagram accounts. Honnold has been talk-show fodder since 2011, the year 60 Minutes featured him soloing around in Yosemite Valley. With a foil to introduce him and ply him with questions, Honnold, who by now has given thousands of interviews, does just fine. No, better than that—Honnold, who evinces part cyborg and part naïf, kills in interviews. Last spring, however, he�� explaining how he prepared for the El Capitan��Freerider ascent. He looked positively C-3POish as he attempted to coordinate his��much celebrated arms and hands to emphasize various talking points. All told, he looked far more gripped onstage than he did on the rock. Still, Jonathan Retseck, Honnold’s agent and the cofounder of , an agency that caters to adventure athletes, told me that speaking ops��are piling up for Honnold. Retseck expects the climber will��soon command up to $50,000 per appearance.

All of which is to say that even now, in a venue near you, an extreme athlete struts and frets below a proscenium arch, wearing one of those wispy headset affairs, filling��with story��the murky lacuna between aspiration and realization.

Most adventure athletes of sufficient notoriety (and some with none) advertise speaking services on their websites alongside documentary shorts, a steady stream of social-media ejecta, and hot links to their memoirs. Public speaking? It’s not viewed so much as a nice to have but a need��to have to thrive in today’s adventure ecosystem. Five-figure public-speaking fees are signifiers of the professionalization of adventure sports.

The hardcores are entitled to make a living—and a good one. Still, it discomfits when extreme athletes become cogs in the machine.��Blame it all on the malign confluence of Manifest Destiny, the metastasis of social media, positive psychology, and the rah-rah sales culture of hypercompetitive capitalism, with its fixation on shareholder wealth. Rather than collude with their sponsors and corporate America, I think, why not pull a on them?

Hilaree Nelson did that recently, sort of. In January 2018, the extreme skier and��climber��found herself of top-drawer scientists and sustainability specialists, which included Al Gore, who flanked her on the right. The occasion: the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, whose attendees consist of the richest and most powerful men on the globe (women comprised only 21 percent of all attendees). The panel was discussing climate change. Nelson told me that she felt out of her depth. But she didn’t hold back.

“If there is hope to be correlated with the Trump administration,” she said, “—and this is hopefully not naive on my part—but it is the amount of people in the United States who have found a voice and who are working locally and through their states, through school education… I mean, it is phenomenal…through big businesses, everyone is taking it upon themselves to make it happen…. I can’t even believe I’m saying this—but I think that’s a good thing to come from the Trump administration.”

She smiled, stared down at her hands, which she’d been steepling and lacing together throughout the talk, and looked at the panel moderator.

“But I’m saying it. I just did.”

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In Search of a Dying Tree, and a Change for Our Climate

mlaplante — Sun, 02 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

There’s been much talk among scientists of late about��. What’s needed to convey scientific findings to the public, they say, is a device to isolate the signal from the noise: a good old-fashioned plotline.

Enter ecologist Lauren E. Oakes and ��($27, Basic Books), a debut effort in which she storifies the five years of research that earned her a doctorate in 2015 from Stanford University’s Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources. Part memoir and part adventure yarn,��with pen and ink illustrations by Kate Cahill, Oakes’s book is an attempt to put a human face on hard science.

She transports the reader from Stanford’s gladed campus to southeast Alaska’s temperate rainforest, where she braves brown bears, rough seas, and thickets of devil’s club to survey 50 stands of Callitropsis nootkatensis.��Otherwise known as the Alaskan yellow-cedar, the species has been slowly succumbing to climate change in the lower latitudes of the Alexander Archipelago. Archetypal characters guide��her—call it the fellowship of the growth ring—consisting of��wise elders, eccentric helpers, and even an old man of the forest,��the Yoda-like Greg Streveler, who counsels��her to pay heed to that which cannot be measured. She comes away from the yellow-cedar��killing fields with a fundamentally altered view about what it means to be a scientist in the Anthropocene: “I didn’t want to become an ecologist to monitor a living species to extinction, write it up for a journal, and move on to the next study,” she writes.

So she didn’t.

Call it the human-plant interface, the canary in the book’s title. As goes the yellow-cedar, so go we.

Taking Streveler’s advice, Oakes observes the built and natural landscapes of southeast Alaska for six years to determine how both human and plant communities will cope with the cedar’s departure. First she uses environmental science to quantify��the yellow-cedar’s dieback and succession (cataloging metrics like tree height and canopy density). Next��she employs��social science (interviews, mainly) in the frontcountry to gauge the local citizens’ reactions to the tree’s decline. Call it the human-plant interface, the canary in the book’s title. As goes the yellow-cedar, so go we.

In one pivotal scene, essentially a hack into the book’s thesis, Oakes interviews the late Teri Rofkar, a Tlingit weaver, who says it plain: while the earth will persevere, climate change will go hard on humanity until we find some way to cooperate—and soon.

(Basic Books)

That conversation takes place years after Oakes��had surveyed 40 low-elevation stands of dead and dying yellow-cedars on the outer coast of Chichagof Island and other places��farther north in , where the trees still flourish. The yellow-cedar, Oakes explains, has survived southeast Alaska’s harsh winters for millennia, thanks to snow blanketing its roots and the annual release of a kind of antifreeze throughout its vasculature—a process called dehardening. But early-season thaws effectively drain the antifreeze, and rain falls in the lower elevations where snow once did. When cold snaps follow, the trees freeze to death.

Yet for Oakes, the yellow-cedar is an emblem of survival. She describes how the trees “migrate,” their seedlings finding tenacious purchase in widely scattered ecological pockets that seem promising for survival, an adaptive predilection scientists can’t quite explain. Humans similarly adapt, observes Oakes, especially when they work together toward a common cause. “We see what goes on and adapt for thousands of years,” Ernestine Hanlon-Abel, a Chilkat weaver from Hoonah, tells Oakes. In the 1700s, the Glacier Bay Tlingit people fled the advance of the Little Ice Age by relocating south, to Chichagof Island, and settled the village of Hoonah.

Change and loss: Oakes isn’t exempt. She quotes her field journal: “We are constantly working to stay warm, to access our sites, paddling, hiking, scrambling, hanging bear bags, hollering, measuring… Middle of the night, waking to hunger pangs.” She shuttles between wilderness and modernity with the accompanying angst.��Her boyfriend dumps her��by sat phone.��“What do you mean ‘you can’t do this thing,’” Oakes asks. “This thing,” replies the boyfriend. “Like us.” At that moment, a brown bear emerges from the bush. “I��gotta go,” says Oakes. “Hey bear. Heyyyyy bear.” She stands her ground, avoids eye contact, and survives the encounter.��

Then one evening, back in Palo Alto, she learns that her father has died. In shock, she runs into a rainy night in her socks, toward a cliff fronting the Pacific Ocean. A faceless man carrying a sleeping bag emerges from the shadows of a Monterey pine, which is��distantly related to the yellow-cedar. He stops, and they silently regard one another, but her gaze moves to the tree.��“I traced the shadow of the trunk back to the tree and looked up toward its branches. They fanned out in layers with their flat tops reaching for the sea,” she writes. But when��the man takes��a step forward, she thinks,��What am I doing? Go home.��She does��and reaches a “white picket fence, a familiar fence that bordered a yard a couple blocks from home.”��This is a rich scene, an exploration of the shear zone between the frontier and civilization, wilderness and society: despite our yearning for the former, we’ve disrupted and abused it—both the land and its Indigenous settlers. Now we’re impelled to return to the latter, which is where, perhaps, the hard work of reconciliation and the way forward begins.

The yellow-cedar’s prognosis? Overall, not good.

If the book’s central plot device is Oakes’s maturation as a scientist, then the plot suffers as she shifts her inquiry from the wild fringe of the Pacific to the homes that border it. We miss scenes of the near hypothermic Oakes and her ragtag team battling the elements in the name of science: here her dialogue with academics and tribal elders, although intimate and vulnerable, seems to have been lifted straight from the interview transcripts. Action turns to reflection as Oakes recapitulates the themes with which we’ve already become familiar, such as��loss, regeneration, connection to landscape, cooperation, adaptation, and hope.��Oakes seems to be using the book less as a cudgel than a rhetorical vehicle to answer her own questions about the fate of species—ours and the yellow-cedar’s.

With good reason. It’s been three decades since NASA scientist James Hansen concluded,��in testimony before Congress, that the changing climate was human caused. And for too long, Oakes reminds us, we’ve viewed nature as a resource well, something to be hewn, mined, and domesticated. That mindset doesn’t work anymore. As recent reports by the ��and the�� make clear, the dangers of the runaway climate couldn’t be more present or clear.��

The yellow-cedar’s prognosis? Overall, not good. Oakes is a bit more bullish about Homo sapiens, although there’s no deus ex machina in her��plotline; we’ll need our own dose of dehardening to find the will to work together. Meanwhile, we can take inspiration from the��surviving pockets of yellow-cedar and adapt to the changes as best as we humans can.

In 2016, ��ԹϺ�� wrote about Oakes’s Stanford colleague Nik Sawe, who transformed her yellow-cedar data into music. The topic was the subject of an ��ԹϺ�� podcast.

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13 Lessons to Make You Really, Truly Happy. Maybe.

mlaplante — Mon, 27 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Last autumn, I enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley’s massive open online course to see if I might goose my felicity quotient through an understanding of the edicts dispensed almost daily by the USA’s happiness industrial complex. The course is free. It’s Berkeley. And its instructors, Emiliana Simon-Thomas and Dacher Keltner, have been teaching the material for years. (Keltner created UC Berkeley’s in 2001; the online program debuted in 2014. Other online happiness courses, as far I can tell, are derivative.)

The ten-week course kicks off with a robust introduction to the science of positive psychology, followed by seven weekly modules, parsed into themes: social connection, compassion and kindness, cooperation and reconciliation, mindfulness, mental habits of happiness, gratitude, and new frontiers of happiness research (like Keltner’s pioneering work in the phenomenon called awe—more on that in a bit). A midterm and final exam make up the remaining weeks.

My plan was to see the course through, no matter what. To guard against bailing, I shelled out an advance payment of $49 for a proof-of-completion certificate. If nothing else, I’d send the thing to my sister-in-law, , who’s been at me for years to do something about my preternatural angst. Later, I would learn that of the roughly 500,000 enrollees, only 8,000 have received certificates—a completion rate of less than 2 percent.

The reason for so many lookie-loos? The workload, probably. All told, I plowed through more than 50 hours of material—reading, videos, experiential exercises, quizzes, and exams—while squelching my uneasiness about the squishiness of social science and the field of positive psychology with its reliance on self-reporting. I would later learn that while happiness researchers are employing new studies grounded in the physical sciences, many are simply , and worse: Some have even been censured recently for their readers.

As the course progressed, I’d come to view the science as commonsensical—simplistic even. To wit: Being a member of a supportive community confers positive vibes; quieting the mind alleviates stress; exercise tickles happiness hormones. Add to that the happiness insights passed down by the world’s great thinkers over two millennia—Confucius, the Buddha, Aristotle, and, uh, , among others—and I would find myself wondering with each completed week: Why the science? Aren’t these practices time-honored enough by now for us to understand that they more or less work as advertised? (Apparently not. The United States’ ranking continues to drop in the annual , where we currently sit in 18th place.)

Am I any happier after having taken the course? Not really. But if consuming the science failed to dampen my neuroticism, at least I walked away with a better understanding of the literature—both the research and the profusion of popular titles spilling off the self-help bookshelves. My conclusion? If I didn’t know any better—and I doubt the positive psychology community would admit this—I would guess that happiness science cops many lessons from Buddhism. After all, it was arguably the Dalai Lama himself who launched the positivity craze with his 1998 book, The Art of Happiness. “[T]he very motion of our life is toward happiness,” he wrote in the book’s opening paragraph.

“It's almost embarrassing how, at the end of the day, we end up noticing this idea that the middle path is most productive,” Simon-Thomas told me when I called her a few weeks after completing the course. “For some people, the biggest struggle from the course is self-compassion, really looking at themselves and taking the time to understand where their barriers and challenges to happiness lie, and making choices that align with happiness instead of suffering.”

If hewing to the middle way was the big aha I took from Simon-Thomas, Keltner, and all the rest, here are 13 smaller truths that helped point me and other happiness seekers in that direction.

#1. If You’re Happy, Then You Probably Know It (So Clap Your Hands)

You cannot measure happiness without defining it, yet on the murkiness index, happiness is right up there with “sustainability” and “wellness.” To some, happiness is the opposite of worry: enjoying good health, being free of troubles. To others, it’s living a meaningful life and giving to others, which is much closer in practice to the Aristotelian definition of happiness as . Sonja Lyubomirsky, a professor of positive psychology at UC Riverside and the author of The How of Happiness, characterizes it as “the experience of joy, contentment, or positive well-being, combined with a sense that one’s life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile.” (Positive psychologists use the terms “subjective well-being” and “happiness” interchangeably.) The Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman identifies four levels of happiness: subjective, genetic, emotional, and sensate (like the feeling of a cool breeze on warm skin).

The bottom line: Researchers determine if someone’s happy by asking them if they’re happy. Don’t take my word for it:

#2. The Great Bulk of Happiness Science Doesn’t Measure Happiness

Happiness science is really no more than a fetching label for an amalgam of psychological, biological, and social studies, all of which measure a kind of emotional health. Research methods include observation, surveys, biomarkers, and measurement devices like fMRI to study such phenomena as relationships, self-compassion, concentration, affective state, and personality. Some of these findings appear to be at least once removed from a direct, evidential tie to happiness. I could be off here, but if researchers presuppose physical health is an important component of well-being, why do so many healthy folks feel perfectly wretched and go on to live long lives? In general, the happiness taxonomy seems as much art as science.

#3. Intimacy Harks Back to Infancy

Attachment theory, first developed in 1969, suggests that the quality of the attention we received from our primary caregivers can affect the intimacy and sustainability of our adult social connections—which are a major determinant of well-being, and even life expectancy. Infants who received consistent nurturing from their caregivers tend to enjoy stronger, more trusting relationships. Those with avoidant tendencies, which may result from neglectful caregiving, frequently find themselves on the outs with their romantic partners, which can set up a vicious cycle of relationship failure. But studies suggest that, with effort, .

Want to test for intimacy red flags in your relationships? Grab a partner and .

#4. Your Money’s No Good Here

At least one landmark study reports that those who come into loads of money are no happier than folks who don’t. That said, if you’re destitute, money helps, but only up to a point: Kahneman postulates that point to be about $75,000 per year. According to the literature, we become habituated to sudden changes in our lives—like winning the lottery—a phenomenon called hedonic adaptation.

The good news: If an unexpected windfall won’t make you happy forever, then tragedy won’t permanently sink you either.

#5. Happiness Is as Slippery as a Greased Boar

By now we should know that buying won’t get us to the promised land. Thing is, most of us are really good at about the future, which means what will actually make us happy. Thus, we miss out on opportunities that could provide a meaningful boost (spending time with friends or family, say) and invest in stuff that looks sexy on the surface but won’t ultimately budge our happiness needles for good.

Recommended exercise: from Berkeley.

#6. Happiness Isn’t a Feeling, It’s a Practice

Lots of scientists subscribe to set point theory—the idea that our internal genetic happiness levels are more or less predetermined. And you’ve probably heard that genetics is responsible for 50 percent of our happiness, with circumstance taking up 10 percent and individual initiative the remaining 40 percent. Although , who derived these pie slices, cautions that they’re not exactly Newtonian, that’s still a whole lot of genetics to overcome if you don’t have a predilection for joy or optimism. This means you’d be well-served by thinking of happiness as a lifelong practice, much like mastering the forward paddle stroke.

At the same time, there’s no such thing as single path to happiness, so scientists like Keltner and Simon-Thomas advise using a design-thinking approach to arrive at your best fit. “Think of it instead as a personal science experiment, or the ultimate word map; you don’t have to figure everything out,” Simon-Thomas says. “It’s like you’ve got all the ingredients in the kitchen and a couple of recipes, and you can try them and see which one tastes bad and which one makes you feel good.”

#7. Gratitude Is the Killer Happy App, but Don’t Overdo It

Acknowledging what you have—even if it seems like you have very little—was the technique that most impressed me: simple, fast, , and, no, I didn’t morph into a complacent bliss monkey by counting my blessings. At least , co-authored by Lyubomirsky, suggests that habitually counting your blessings boosts positive affect, something that’s easily done by keeping a . While the task is simple—at the end of the day, record all the good things that happened to you—researchers recommend only three “doses” a week. Why? Simon Thomas told me there’s no perfect answer to the conundrum of why less is more when it comes to gratitude but recommended adopting a varied regimen of what works best for any individual. “For most of the so-called happiness practices,” Simon-Thomas said, “there’s always the possibility of diminishing return with forced or obligatory over-repetition, like, ‘Uh, let’s see, I am grateful for Post-it notes…for being lots of colors.’ Either it gets shallow or it makes us feel overextended. Think of it like exercise—if a person exerts themselves continuously in the same kind of motion, they risk getting hurt.”

#8. Go Ahead, Embrace Your Angst

Simon-Thomas and Keltner made clear that the goal of the course isn’t to teach you to surf a wave of bliss that never breaks. It’s futile to happify your way through life’s vicissitudes, which are an inescapable part of the human experience. “Angst and melancholy are fundamental human emotions that have a particular functional purpose in our evolutionary trajectory,” Simon-Thomas says.

#9. Don’t Go It Alone

Humans, irrational primates that we are, are often a pain in the ass, but we need one another. As Simon-Thomas and Keltner put it, we’re ultrasocial and wired to connect. In fact, there’s an evolutionary basis for collectivism: As a species, we’ve always gathered around a campfire, either literal or virtual. And apparently, although it seems counterintuitive, at least one researcher has found us to be a . Besides, it’s fun to trigger each other’s neuropeptide called oxytocin, our endogenous “love drug,” evoked when we cooperate, attach, affiliate, and, yeah, make whoopee.

#10. On Being Here Now

Perhaps no single wellness intervention has been the focus of as much scientific scrutiny as mindfulness, which has become a kind of panacea for all that ails the psyche,��and for good reason: focusing on the present moment has been used to quiet humans’ capricious minds for thousands of years (recall my��observation between Buddhism and happiness practices).��Scientists claim mindfulness buoys well-being, strengthens attention, reduces stress, diminishes depression, and, hell, even slows aging. Different forms of —body awareness, compassion, and meta-cognitive— different aspects of well-being.

Yet these findings come with a caveat: despite the many studies validating the efficacy of a mindfulness, several meta-analyses have found little evidence that such practices influenced positive emotions. In some cases,��it would seem that��mindfulness hype has

#11. Get Gobsmacked by Nature, Laugh, Play, and Go with the Flow

Evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson coined the term “biophilia” for humanity’s instinct to merge with other forms of life. Keltner has used the natural world in his research on the , which he defines as “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast and greater than the self that exceeds current knowledge structures.” Think hugging a giant sequoia, skiing under the northern lights, or wandering through wilderness.

Keltner’s emerging work in happiness identifies and play as integral to well-being. Cobbled together, I thought of two good friends tackling a big backcountry climbing objective—or .

#12. Happiness Has Nothing to Do with Meaningfulness, According to Some

While most well-being scientists of a purposeful life one subverted that notion. “Happiness was linked to being a taker rather than a giver,” the research team wrote, “whereas meaningfulness went with being a giver rather than a taker. Higher levels of worry, stress, and anxiety were linked to higher meaningfulness but lower happiness.”

The paper made some key happiness researchers, including Lyubomirsky, not very happy. (More about that debate .) “When I think about the importance of separating happiness and meaningfulness,” Simon-Thomas told me, “that’s where I hit a wall. If you’re truly living a happy life in this overarching way, a piece of that is that it’s meaningful to you.”

#13. Compassion Is Baked into Our Nervous System

More than 20 years ago, University of Chicago’s Steve Porges introduced the polyvagal theory, which placed the vagus nerve at the center of human compassion. The love nerve, if you will. The vagus (Latin for “wandering”) is the longest nerve of the body’s autonomic nervous system, taking root at the top of the spinal cord and meandering down to the gut. The vagus nerve affects speech, how we direct our gaze, breathing, heart rate, digestion, and—of special interest to happiness researchers—our immune systems, inflammation responses, and the firing of oxytocin. In one experiment conducted in Keltner’s Berkeley lab, college students watched videos of people in distress. The students with particularly strong vagal tone demonstrated greater empathy, sympathy, and compassion than those who lacked it. So, how to strengthen your vagal profile? Exercise and mindfulness, for starters. Completing some could help, too.

I found this “you’ve evolved to be kind” notion the most disarming factoid of the hundreds served up over the ten weeks. When I caught up with Simon-Thomas, I fessed up: I’ve always assumed that humans harbor ulterior motives for our kindly acts. “This is another common debate about altruism,” she told me. “Like, oh well, if you actually enjoy being nice to others, then you’re never truly altruistic. I find that to be a false dichotomy. Instead, it just means that, at a fundamental level, we’re wired to be altruistic over our basic design as a species.”

Her answer made me kind of happy.

Convinced? The next Berkeley Science of Happiness MOOC starts��Sep 3, 2018.

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It’s Not Just High Temps Messing with Snow—It’s Dust

jversteegh — Wed, 07 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

If irony is the hygiene of the mind, then it’s also the scourge of Tom Painter’s sinuses. Painter, 52, allergic to both dust and soot, is laid low by migraines when he inhales either one. But here’s the ironic bit: Painter is the world’s authority on light-absorbing particles like dust and soot—schmutz, in Painter’s parlance—and how they are corroding mountain snowpacks everywhere. Schmutzy snow, Painter says, lowers snow’s reflectivity, or albedo (rhymes with libido). While high-albedo snow reflects upwards of 90 percent of earthbound solar energy back into the atmosphere, dusty low-albedo snow causes snowpacks to melt nearly two months early.

Schmutz’s deleterious effect on snow is widespread and is increasing at an alarming rate—so much so that Painter and his NASA colleagues believe that climate change has likely been given too much credit for the diminution of mountain snowpacks and particulate matter too little. To wit: In 2013, Painter published showing how black carbon particulate from the industrial revolution’s smokestacks snuffed out Europe’s Little Ice Age. His most recent work shows that high-dust years lead to a rise in melt independent of temperature.

If you’re a skier or a water drinker, schmutz matters—especially if you live west of the Great Plains. The American West’s water delivery system assumes water melts from mountains come spring and trickles into reservoirs during spring and early summer, where it’s then stored for use throughout the year. Precipitation, much of which comes from snow, is the source of 75 percent of that water. Premature runoff means shallower ski runs, sure, but also less freshwater for table and crops.

Eolian dust, or windblown silt, such as the grains of sand transported from the world’s great deserts, has always found its way into mountain snow. But Painter is seeing a greater prevalence of dust stirred up by humans. The steady creep of desertification—the stripping of plants, nutrients, microbes, and crust from the earth’s surface—stems from overgrazing, over-farming, clear-cutting, land development, recreational off-road vehicle use, and even hiking off-trail. One estimate puts the global rate of desertification at about 30 million acres of arable land a year, or a football field every second, and the United States isn’t immune to its ravages.

Drought equals dust. In 2015, farmers in California’s Central Valley abandoned crops due to diminishing groundwater stores caused by a four-year drought and an anemic snowpack in the Sierra Nevada. Ground that should have been green was brown and vulnerable to wind transport atop the scanty Sierra snow. In the mid- to late-2000s, a series of extreme dust storms began to boil up from the Colorado Plateau and coated the southern Rockies in a patina of rouge. “It’s literally snowing dirt,” says Mike Kaplan, president and CEO of Aspen Skiing Co. “It’s almost like out an apocalyptic movie. You go from glorious majestic white mountains to these dirty-looking mountains, and a whole winter’s worth of snowpack changes overnight.”

Soot is essentially black carbon, and that side of the equation is a bit more straightforward. Soot is produced by the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels from, say, diesel engines, industrial emissions, and burning biomass, like wildfires, which are on the rise because of climate change.

Despite their potential for harm, dust and soot weren’t acknowledged as a scourge of snowpacks until a little more than a decade ago, when Painter and extreme skier turned scientist Chris Landry ventured into southwest Colorado’s Senator Beck Basin to calculate the effects of dust on the timing of winter runoff. Their findings? “Not only does dust bring peak runoff several weeks earlier at the Colorado River’s Lee’s Ferry,” Painter says, “but it also has decreased the annual flow by about 5 percent each year.” Painter figures that 5 percent is enough to satisfy the water requirements of Las Vegas for 18 months.

The scientist in Painter knows better than to opine on data he hasn’t yet collected, but key clues point to grim news, even on the globe’s highest snowfields.

Painter and Landry looked at two key metrics: snow albedo’s effect on the timing of the snowpack’s runoff, and the volume of pure water lurking in entire sub-basins. Snow scientists call that latter measurement the snow water equivalent (SWE). To the Department of Agriculture, SWE means “the depth of water that would theoretically result if you melted the entire snowpack instantaneously.” Join SWE and snow albedo in one algorithm, and you get a dream come true for municipal water managers, who can now determine how much and when the snowmelt will hit their reservoirs. “Water managers don’t have to commit to billion-dollar decisions with really, really fuzzy information,” says Painter. “They now know how much SWE there is in every sub-basin.”

If the Senator Beck Basin calculations laid the groundwork for everything Painter does now at NASA, his method of data acquisition (by hand, in the field) and mode of travel (by ski) did not. He collects his metrics at 20,000 feet from the belly of a Beechcraft King Air twin-turboprop. Onboard lidar measures SWE, and a spectrometer measures snow albedo. Officially, it’s called the (ASO). Unofficially, it’s Painter’s brainchild, and it has disrupted the business of measuring the volume and timing of mountain meltwater. Every western water manager wants a piece of it: Oregon, Colorado, and Wyoming. “It’s crazy,” Painter told a group of water scientists two years ago at the University of Nevada, Reno. “The phone is ringing all the time.”

I don’t ring Painter’s phone; I text it. We meet in the austere concrete-and-glass surround of Mammoth’s Black Velvet coffeehouse to talk snow and water and feedback loops. “We’re finally starting, as a community, to understand this,” he says, referring to the way schmutz and temperature are wrecking the global snowpack. “There were a few of us that really had this first glimpse into it. But the broader community is starting to understand that, yeah, this is actually really, really powerful in a lot of places that we hadn’t realized it was powerful.”

That realization is evolving, says Painter, simply because no one’s had the technology to efficiently measure snow albedo on a global scale. Scientists still can’t tell us, for example, precisely how much water we’re losing to light-absorbing particles in the American West. “There’s much to understand in the West and across the rest of the globe,” Painter says.

But that could change in about ten years, when Painter hopes to hitch radar and a spectrometer to a satellite. The scientist in him knows better than to opine on data he hasn’t yet collected, but key clues point to grim news, even on the globe’s highest snowfields. “The few ice cores extracted from the Himalaya, for example, show dust deposition dating back to the 1850s and climbing steadily ever since,” Painter says. Data rolling in from the Andes, the Alps, the Caucasus, Antarctica, the Cascades, and the Sierra show increased loads of both black carbon and dust dating back to the Industrial Revolution. “So I think we’ve kind of gotten past the surprise stage,” he says.

“The ski experience is beside the point,” Kaplan says. “This is about these mountain watersheds. They’ve got to maintain their integrity, or we’ve got much bigger problems to solve.”

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Climbing Legend Fred Beckey Dies

anavas — Tue, 31 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Fred Beckey, widely hailed as North America’s most prolific climber and mountaineer, died��Monday in the Seattle home of his friend and partner, Megan Bond. He was 94.

“We were planning another trip to the Himalaya for next spring. He had a lot more to do,” says Bond. “He had a good death and a great life.”

Reactions to his death, both among those who knew him and among the broader climbing community were swift and all of apiece:

Legendary.

“They'll never be another Fred Becky,” wrote climber and writer John Long on . “No words.”

When contacted in Seattle this evening, Bond, who is writing a biography of Beckey, said, “Our deep friendship spanned six countries, ten western states, hundreds of bivouacs, and travel over many tens of thousands of shared vertical feet and lateral miles. We spent over a decade together climbing, exploring mountains, wilderness terrains, remote regions, and engaged in shared intellectual and literary pursuits.”

Born in Dusseldorf, Germany, in 1923, Beckey was two��years��old when his parents, Kalus (a physician) and Marta Maria (an opera singer) emigrated to Seattle with him. Within 14 years, Beckey had become the enfant terrible of Cascades climbing. Described by climbing historian Andy Selters as “a one-man tornado,” Beckey, “a 16-year-old with almost disturbingly fearsome intensity,” climbed 35 peaks in his first year as a member of the , a Seattle-based climbing club. Within another three years the 19-year-old, climbing in tandem with his younger brother Helmy, made the second ascent of British Columbia’s , with Fred ingeniously using felt slippers over his tennis shoes to surmount a crux ice chimney. Waddington’s reputation at the time was fearsome. In a reminiscence of Beckey on Supertopo, climbing historian Chris Jones called Waddington a “forbidding, remote peak that had turned back the best climbers of the day. How many of us were even born, let alone climbing then! And he was just warming up.”

He had a passion for seeking the unknown that is probably unparalleled.

Warming up, indeed. It was Beckey’s keen intellect combined with an insatiable��appetite for ascent that propelled him up some of the country’s most remote—and��obvious—rock walls and mountain faces. The Beckey name, it seems, is strewn in the indices of every important guidebook in North America, including Steck and Roper’s , and Jones’s .��In 1954 alone, he climbed both the south ridge of 12,540-foot Mount Deborah and the west ridge of��14,573-foot��Mount Hunter, in Alaska,��both with Henry Meybohm and Heinrich Harrer, the latter of Eiger fame. He also��made the first ascent of the Northwest Buttress of Denali that year.��

“He had a passion for seeking the unknown that is probably unparalleled,” said past president of the , Jim McCarthy, speaking from Colorado. “The real thing about Fred is that he is a monument to future generations.”

Beckey, it seemed, left none of the continent’s ranges untouched,��either by hand or in print. After receiving an undergraduate degree in business administration from the University of Washington, Beckey cobbled together a life that had him climbing and writing about climbing. With a near-encyclopedic knowledge of the Northwest’s mountain geography, Beckey either authored or co-authored at least eight guidebook-cum-histories, including the three-volume , the definitive source for climbs in that range.

A past honorary member of the American Alpine Club, Beckey was also awarded, in 2015, the President’s Gold Medal—an award given to only four other climbers in the Club’s 115-year history. In 2013, Beckey won the Adidas Lifetime Achievement Award for his climbing accomplishments. Beckey, who has often been called the country’s ur-dirtbag—a climber who eschews riches to pursue climbing full-time—was made the subject of an ��of��that name.

“He devoted his life to advancing climbing and he succeeded,” says McCarthy. “He deserves to be venerated.”

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