On a cold, breezy morning in March 2017, I found myself shivering in a half-empty parking lot outside the entrance to the century-old Schmidt brewery in Saint听Paul, Minnesota. The brick-walled landmark appeared abandoned. Beer hasn鈥檛 flowed through its industrial arteries since 2002, when brewing ceased permanently. Its whitewashed grain silos were yellowed and rust-stained; the chimney stack that once billowed fragrant, hops-scented steam had been capped.

But a rebirth was underway here, one that has nothing to do with cheap lager. It was happening inside an empty 85,000-square-foot warehouse once used for storing kegs. That鈥檚 where I stood waiting for Fred Haberman, the then 51-year-old听cofounder of , who pulled up in a black Porsche Cayenne E-Hybrid.

鈥淚t鈥檚 sooo easy to recharge,鈥� he proclaimed, leaping out to praise its electric-hybrid engine. 鈥淚 can plug it into a regular outlet. In. My. House.鈥� Haberman adores anything that smacks of sustainability. If it鈥檚 good for the climate, the environment, or the planet, well then by God sign him up.

Haberman runs a successful marketing agency that bears his name, which has worked with foodie clients like Annie鈥檚 Homegrown, Earthbound Farm, and Organic Valley, along with听Prana, Volvo, and LeafLine Labs, a medical-cannabis outfit that manufacturers pharmaceutical-grade THC and CBD extracts. He launched Urban Organics in 2011 with three friends and a plan, among other things, to create the world鈥檚 largest organic aquaponics farm. Aquaponics combines hydroponics鈥攇rowing plants without soil in a water-based mineral solution鈥攚ith aquaculture, otherwise known as fish farming. Poop-laden wastewater from the fish is pumped into the plant beds, where roots suck up the nutrients and help purify the sullied water before it鈥檚 recirculated back to the aquaculture tanks.

An early form of aquaponics was developed by the Toltecs, who created artificial islands (called chinampas)听to grow crops on lakes. More recently, maker types have been getting into it, cobbling together smallish home setups. But the Urban Organics operation is massive. This became obvious when Haberman stopped talking about his SUV and prodded me through the front door of the Schmidt building and into the听warehouse.

It was humid inside and smelled peaty, like a temperate rain forest but with four million pea-sized suns鈥攇lowing LEDs affixed to power strips above thriving beds of arugula, kale, Swiss chard, and more. In a space roughly the size of a Costco, there were more than 300,000 individual plants. Today听there are some four million sprouting from grow racks stacked five stories high. Fish were in there, too鈥攕ome 100,000 rainbow trout and 100,000 arctic char doing laps inside eight open tanks, each seven feet deep. One million gallons of water was flowing through this Urban Organics farm鈥攆rom fish to plants and back again. Because it鈥檚 a closed-loop system, virtually no water is wasted except for a tiny amount (about 2 percent) lost to evaporation.

The yields can be tremendous: when I visited, 16,000 pounds of greens were being harvested every week. Output like that is a locavore鈥檚 dream, especially in Minnesota, where regional produce is scarce during the protracted, frigid winter. Restaurants, corner groceries, supermarkets, and a major hospital鈥攁ll located in the Twin Cities鈥攃ouldn鈥檛 get enough of the stuff.

The implications of a system like this are enormous. In the modern economy, most fresh produce is trucked vast distances, typically from California and Mexico in diesel-fueled refrigerated semitrailers. Seafood travels even farther, coming from places like Vietnam and Indonesia. The distribution costs associated with shipping food can add 25 percent to the final shelf price.

The Urban Organics model reduces this expense, while subsequently slashing the carbon footprint of farming. 鈥淎lmost all our customers do pickup,鈥� Haberman told me. 鈥淲e only own a few trucks.鈥� His products are also immune to droughts,听floods, and other global-warming weirdness.

Haberman鈥檚 hope, he said, was to erect similar facilities elsewhere 鈥渢o decentralize the food system and eradicate hunger. And to prove that you can take a distressed physical asset like a brewery and make it part of turning a neighborhood around.鈥� It all sounds very heroic and visionary until we start talking about how to profit from this grand endeavor. 鈥淲e鈥檙e still proving the model,鈥� Haberman concedes. 鈥淏ut if it does what it looks like on paper, you鈥檙e going to see a lot more of these farms.鈥�

Perhaps. But it鈥檚 worth noting that Urban Organics still isn鈥檛 profitable. Nearly two years after my visit鈥攂y which time Haberman had left the company to launch yet another startup, , which sells gourmet organic sauces and spreads鈥擨 checked in with Urban Organics general manager Dave Haider, who told me that the company isn鈥檛 currently in the black. He blames this partly on an aquaculture snafu: Initially听he started fish farming with 100,000 Atlantic salmon. But the attempt to farm salmon indoors was wildly ambitious and had never been done successfully in commercial aquaculture. The fry contracted a disease and the effort was scuttled.

鈥淲e had to dispose of all of them,鈥� Haider informed me, noting that salmon鈥攅ven farmed-raised鈥攕till prefer an outdoor venue. Since the company听switched to trout and char, Haider said, things have been going swimmingly. Once they鈥檙e full grown, he expects to reap about 7,000 pounds of fish each week, cycling in new fry to replace the harvested adults. Anticipating an uptick in sales, Haider has more than doubled his staff since my visit, from 15 to 40 employees.

While Haider wouldn鈥檛 reveal the company鈥檚 current or projected revenue, he exuded confidence. 鈥淎s we are one of the first aquaponics farms to operate at this scale, we are constantly learning and adjusting our model,鈥� he said. 鈥淲hile there have been setbacks, such as the switch from salmon to trout and char, overall we are on track with our profitability goals.鈥�

When I first met Haberman in early 2017, all he wanted to talk about was pond hockey. 鈥淚t鈥檚 my religion,鈥� he said of the game he plays with his buddies several times a week on Minnesota鈥檚听frozen lakes. In 2006, he founded the . 鈥淲e soon had 20,000 people showing up with over 1,000 teams,鈥� he told me over dinner at the Birchwood Caf茅 in Minneapolis, where we shared a plate of fried tilapia and a kale and arugula salad鈥攁ll Urban Organics fare, grown just eight miles away.

Haberman sold the championships in 2010 to a group of fellow players, at which point his partner at his marketing firm urged him to take a break from getting into any new businesses for at least a year. Haberman heeded the advice, sort of, and began researching food deserts. These are low-income areas devoid of groceries or farmer鈥檚 markets, where residents have inadequate access to fresh food鈥攁 plight that affects almost 24 million Americans.

Meanwhile, Haider, a former stonemason who once made backyard ponds and waterfalls, and who had been responsible for prepping the ice for Haberman鈥檚 hockey events, became intrigued by aquaponics after his wife, Kristen, alerted him to a local TV news segment about Will Allen, a former professional basketball player during the seventies. A longtime pioneer in outdoor urban agriculture, Allen, the son of a sharecropper, was by then delving into aquaponics. The story inspired Haider, who thought that听aquaponics would make a fun hobby. He cobbled together a crude setup in his basement to grow tomatoes and lettuce, nourished by the fecal droppings of two tilapia in an adjacent tank.

鈥淎nyhoo,鈥� continued Haberman, forgoing dessert for a pint of pale ale, 鈥淚 get wind of Dave and Kristen looking into aquaponics and I go, 鈥極h my God, I鈥檓 interested in this as well!鈥� And they say, 鈥楲et鈥檚 partner up.鈥欌�� Kristen had already left an HR听job at the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. Then the Haiders鈥檚 friend and neighbor Chris Ames signed on, becoming their finance and real estate guy. None of the founders had any experience with large-scale aquaponics farming, but as Haberman put it, 鈥淲e had this naivete that we could give it a varsity try and will it to succeed.鈥�

So in 2011, the partners purchased their first keg warehouse, in the vacant . Haider hired the听first employee, Anthony Johannes, and together they constructed the entire facility in just over a year, making countless supply trips to Home Depot. The Hamm鈥檚 space was Urban Organics鈥� pilot farm. (It鈥檚 about a tenth of the size of the Schmidt operation, built four years later.) 鈥淏reweries are great for aquaponics, as they need a source of water, which we have in the form of well houses on site,鈥� Haider explained. 鈥淭hey also have strong foundations built to handle large volumes of liquid.鈥�

When it came time to stock the Hamm鈥檚 fish farm, Haider and Johannes found a deal on tilapia at a hatchery located in Apopka, Florida, some 1,500 miles away. They flew there from Minnesota, rented a U-Haul, outfitted it with three 500-gallon tanks, and made the 36-hour trek back to the Hamm鈥檚 facility with 600 baby tilapia sloshing around in the back. 鈥淚 came in at six in the morning and Kristen says, 鈥榊ou smell like a dead fish,鈥欌�� Haider said. 鈥淚 had been riding in that truck for a day and a half.鈥�

When I visited the Hamm鈥檚 operation in 2017, it was producing 150 pounds of fish per week and 1,000 pounds of produce per month. Two employees were perched on stepladders with paring knives, carefully shearing听leaves of arugula and red kale. The salad mix was packaged in five-ounce clamshell containers and sold for $3.99 at local supermarkets. Haider offered me a piece of fresh-cut arugula. It tasted almost effervescent, with a peppery kick. 鈥淭his industry needs a success story,鈥� he said, 鈥淎nd it hasn鈥檛 had one yet on this scale.鈥�

Pentair is a $7.2 billion public corporation with its main U.S. main offices based in Minneapolis. (The global headquarters is in London.) It makes water treatment systems for residential and commercial applications, including food production and swimming pools.听Randy Hogan was Pentair鈥檚 CEO from 2001 until his retirement last year. When I听spoke to him in April 2017, he told me he鈥檇 heard about people jury-rigging his company鈥檚 products for home aquaponics systems. And he鈥檇 watched a few modest-size听aquaponics operations try and fail to create commercially viable farms. 鈥淔red Haberman said, 鈥業 know these folks Dave and Kristen who have this idea and they want to move out of their basement,鈥欌�� Hogan said. 鈥淭hey were the classic hobbyists.鈥�

Pentair had already ventured beyond its established pump and filter trade into rainwater recycling; the system it installed at Target Field, the ballpark for the Minnesota Twins, was the first and largest at a sports stadium at the time. With Urban Organics, Pentair was prepared to take aquaponics more seriously.

Last summer, not long after Hogan left its helm, Pentair purchased Urban Organics听outright for an undisclosed sum. To most, that may seem like a speculative investment. But while Hogan was still at the company, he argued otherwise, believing that it was the opportune moment for aquaponics. 鈥淲e don鈥檛 waste water, we use electricity efficiently, we use nutrients efficiently, and we don鈥檛 have to transport the product very far,鈥� he said at the time. 鈥淲e will see this being replicated in other cities.鈥� In the meantime, he characterized Urban Organics as a working R&D lab.

Aquaponics startups had approached Hogan before, though none intrigued him as much as the Schmidt brewery concept, chiefly because it was so large. 鈥淭he Hamm鈥檚 production level was not where we could have a large impact in the community,鈥� he said. 鈥淪chmidt鈥檚 is ten times larger, almost like corporate farming, and we were really intrigued with scaling up.鈥� Pentair put up virtually all the money and equipment鈥攁bout $15 million in capital investment鈥攖o build the Schmidt farm. This included a sophisticated indoor fish hatchery with eight 500-gallon tanks for hatching trout and char eggs.

Haider showed me a few other things that Pentair鈥檚 backing helped pay for. One is a robotic-looking contraption that automatically injects plant seeds into little tufts of shredded coconut husk used for germinating greens. Another is a specially designed fish pump for sucking up live trout and char when they鈥檙e ready to be transferred from the nursery to the 鈥済row out鈥� tanks. There鈥檚 also a clever pest-control system: every month, about 40,000 parasitic insects鈥攚asps, ladybugs, and mites鈥攁re released into the facility, where they set forth devouring anything that might want to nibble on the precious edible greens.

During my visit, Haider walked me over a span of elevated metal grates that sit four feet above a raging indoor river. What looked like Class IV rapids was actually a state-of-the-art filtration system. It鈥檚 outfitted with various mechanical, biological, UV, and ozone sterilization technologies to convert ammonia from fish poop into stuff that plants like to eat, such as nitrates and phosphates. The only byproduct is a black sludge that Urban Organics stuffs into plastic sacks and hopes to sell as organic fertilizer. 鈥淚t would make us the first zero-waste indoor farm,鈥� Haider pointed out.

During my tour, Haberman was uncharacteristically silent. He was content playing the wizard behind the curtain, quietly waiting for my reaction as he walked me through what legitimately is an impressive operation. Occasionally, though, Haberman chimed in with declarations like, 鈥淚 have a dream that we would have half-million-square-foot facilities like this in locations around the world.鈥� But Haberman was getting ahead of himself.

Aquaponics farming on the scale that Urban Organics is attempting is still almost unheard of. In fact, when Kristen requested organic certification from the U.S. Department of Agriculture through a local agency, the forms she received had little relevance to aquaponics, with most questions directed at conventional farming. As a result, she helped the agency develop an aquaponics-specific application.

At one point, Haberman compared aquaponics to the work of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. 鈥淵ou knew something powerful was going to come from their work,鈥� he said. 鈥淚 feel the same way about aquaponics. In ten听to twenty听years, you鈥檙e going to see these operations everywhere.鈥�

While Haberman has moved on from Urban Organics, when I spoke with him again in January 2019, he remained emphatic that aquaponics is a key component of听the future of food. That vision might seem improbable to the tractor and-plow folks still muscling crops from sprawling 500-acre farms, vulnerable to the whims of weather and听the price of diesel. But like any revolution, perspective is often generational. 鈥淲e have a nine-year-old daughter,鈥� says Kristen. 鈥淲hen she was younger, if you asked her to draw a farm, she drew a brick building with fish and plants inside.鈥�

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On July 27, the media team at the University of Southampton, in the UK, announced results from a new study concerning a molecule researchers had dubbed Compound 14. When fed to obese mice, it triggered a startling metabolic reaction: In just seven days the rodents shed five percent of their body weight. Even more miraculous, the otherwise healthy mice thinned down while continuing to gorge on a high-fat, high-carb diet鈥攖he rodent-equivalent of ice cream and pizza鈥攁nd all without doing a single bout of exercise.听

, published in the Journal of Chemistry & Biology, called Compound 14 an 鈥渆xercise mimetic,鈥� a phrase Ali Tavossoli now laments. 鈥淲e never actually said this is exercise in a pill,鈥� says Tavossoli, a professor of chemical biology at the University of Southampton and the study鈥檚 principal scientist. In fact, the experiment was intended to explore potential therapies for metabolic disorders, diabetes, obesity, and muscular dystrophy, a disease that makes normal exercise impossible because it damages muscle tissue.听

But merely suggesting that a substance could simulate exercise was enough to spark hysteria. 鈥淚t all snowballed,鈥� Tavossoli says. 鈥淚 lost count of all the people I spoke to.鈥� The Washington Post called. So did ABC News and Esquire. Then Shape magazine, which followed up with an online article, preposterously headlined 鈥淎n Exercise Pill May Soon Exist for Gym-Haters.鈥澨�

Let鈥檚 be clear: There is no such thing as a workout pill, now or ever. Compound 14 and similar molecules, including AICAR and GW1516 (see Faster, Higher, Squeakier,听国产吃瓜黑料, February 2011), dupe cells into thinking they鈥檝e run out of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), their primary fuel. With ATP depleted, cells demand glucose, which is derived from burning fat. A secondary benefit鈥攁nd what makes these compounds so attractive for treating diabetes鈥攊s boosting glucose tolerance. 鈥淏ut this is only what happens in mice,鈥� Tavossoli points out. 鈥淲e have no idea what this does in humans.鈥澨�

But more importantly, these compounds are not even remotely equivalent to doing actual physical activity, 鈥渢he benefits of which are huge for just about everything,鈥� says Ron Evans, a biology professor at the Salk Institute who pioneered AICAR and GW1516 research. Exercise can prevent heart disease, stroke, cancer, and arthritis. It will make you buff, reduce stress, bolster your immune system, boost brainpower, strengthen bones, lower cholesterol, improve sleep, and supercharge your sex life. A pill that can do all this? Pipe dream. Now go to the gym.听

The post This Is How Much a Fitness Pill Would Actually Help You appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

It鈥檚 shortly after five on the evening of August 1, 2014, and the winds on Mount Robson are calm, the sky is sapphire, and the sun is blazing, pushing temperatures to a near record 83 degrees. Robson鈥攁t 12,972 feet the highest peak in the Canadian Rockies鈥攊s so far north that darkness won鈥檛 fall here for several hours.

Suddenly, a red streak flits past the summit. Next, an orange blip loops into view. They鈥檙e paragliders, two of them, waltzing with the mountain, which looks like a Giza pyramid clad in ice. For nearly an hour, and soar like lazy raptors.

Climbers descending Robson鈥檚 south face stop to watch, dumbfounded. From above they can hear howls of joy. 鈥淲ill was screaming the whole time,鈥� McClurg, 43, tells me a few days later, while we鈥檙e camped in a neighboring mountain range.

鈥淚 never thought it was possible,鈥� says Gadd, 48, a renowned paraglider who has set several distance-flying records in the sport. He鈥檚 also an accomplished ice climber, having won almost every major competition there is. Gadd lives in Canmore, Alberta, and knows Robson well. That鈥檚 because in 2002鈥攐n his fifth attempt鈥攈e completed the first one-day ascent of the peak. 鈥淚 failed to summit Robson four times,鈥� he says. 鈥淏ut flying paragliders over it? It had never been done or even seriously considered.鈥�

Clouds usually shroud Robson鈥檚 glaciated flanks, while high winds often scream across its summit. 鈥淭here are only about ten clear days a year up there,鈥� Gadd says, adding that the area is just too remote, and the weather too volatile, for unpowered flight. This is the case throughout much of the Canadian Rockies, where almost nobody does long-distance paragliding. Roads and trails are scarce, making it virtually impossible to reach points high enough to launch from. As for landing, you鈥檒l likely end up trapped in some far-flung, timber-choked valley. 鈥淵ou simply can鈥檛 walk out,鈥� Gadd says. 鈥淚 know these mountains, and if you don鈥檛 fly out, you鈥檒l die back there.鈥�

Despite the dangers, Gadd and McClurg set out last summer to paraglide down the spine of the Canadian Rockies, from McBride, British Columbia, south to the U.S. border in Montana, a distance of 385 miles. They christened their adventure the , a nod to the , a paragliding adventure race held every two years in Europe.

Gadd has competed in that event, but what the two are attempting in the Canadian Rockies is riskier. 鈥淭he Alps are extremely accessible,鈥� says veteran paraglider Bill Belcourt, vice president of the and director of research and development for Black Diamond Equipment. 鈥淭here are no downsides to flying there. People live everywhere. Roads are everywhere. In Canada, you have much, much higher objective hazards鈥攖here are critters that can eat you鈥攕o you don鈥檛 want to screw up.鈥�

McClurg offers another perspective. 鈥淲e are breaking the number-one rule you learn when you start paragliding, which is never fly over somewhere that you don鈥檛 have a place to land,鈥� he says. 鈥淗ere, we鈥檙e going hours without a place to land.鈥�

McClurg lives in Sun Valley, Idaho, where he moved in 2012, fed up with life at sea after 13 years running yacht charters. (He has sailed around the world twice.) He鈥檚 also a former ski racer and an elite kayaker who has made Class V first descents in Central America. In 2003, McClurg took up paragliding and later embraced a style of the sport known as vol biv, from vol bivouac, a French phrase that roughly translates to 鈥渇light and sleep.鈥� Pilots use specially designed packs they can wear in-flight, carrying tents, sleeping bags, clothing, food, stoves, and handheld avionics. During the day they soar; by night they sleep, wherever they happen to land.

In 2012, McClurg set off on his first vol biv expedition鈥�18 days and 500 miles鈥攗p the spine of the Sierra Nevada, from Southern California to the Oregon border. Along with two other pilots, he completed 13 flights, parts of which had never been done with a paraglider before. While not nearly as remote or technically difficult as the Canadian Rockies鈥攖he terrain offered plenty of landing sites, and the pilots had vehicle support along most of the route鈥攊t was an impressive accomplishment for a newbie.听

McClurg went for it again in 2013, hoping to fly from Hurricane Ridge, in southwest Utah, to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, a distance of some 500 miles. 鈥淏ut the weather killed us,鈥� says McClurg. In the end, they eked out just 60 miles before calling it off. Shortly before the expedition, in July, while training near his home in Sun Valley, McClurg set the world record for the longest single foot-launched paragliding flight鈥攕even hours and 240 miles, from Bald Mountain, Idaho, to just outside Helena, Montana.

A paraglider uses what鈥檚 called a wing, which is fashioned from high-tech fabrics. It鈥檚 shaped like a parabola, but with a flattened vertex (the top of the arc). Wings range in size, with the largest spanning about 30 feet. A paraglider gets lift the same way planes do: from pressure differences between air traveling over the top and bottom surfaces of the wing.

Today, most paragliders do what they鈥檝e always done: hitch a ride up a mountain to launch, soar for a few hours, and then glide to a predetermined landing spot. Flying long distances with a wing is a somewhat recent phenomenon, particularly when it鈥檚 done for consecutive days or weeks at a time.

Russell Ogden, a test pilot for Ozone, a paraglider manufacturer whose innovations have revolutionized wings, told me, 鈥淧aragliding is a niche sport, and vol biv is a niche of that niche.鈥� But vol biv, he says, 鈥渉as become massive in the past ten years,鈥� thanks to advances in performance. Many give credit for these advances to a French paraglider and naval architect named Luc Armant, who went to work for Ozone in 2008, joining its R&D team.

A typical wing is made of reinforced ripstop nylon and polyester, into which baffled chambers called cells have been sewn. To launch, a pilot slips into a harness and then runs forward while tugging on suspension lines to hoist the wing aloft. When air enters vents along the wing鈥檚 leading edge, the cells puff up like a windsock in a stiff breeze and give the paraglider its shape.听

Three sets of suspension lines used to be standard. All those lines provided stability but also generated a significant amount of drag. Armant created a wing with just two line sets. To compensate for the loss of stability, he incorporated spaghetti-thin plastic fibers鈥攍iterally, weed-whacker line鈥攊nto the baffled cells. Doing so dramatically cut drag, thereby increasing efficiency in the air, and it wasn鈥檛 long before most other manufacturers started producing their own versions of the two-line wing. Nick Greece, an accomplished paraglider and editor of Hang Gliding and Paragliding magazine, says Armant鈥檚 design was a game changer. 鈥淧reviously, we were doing 100-mile flights,鈥� he says. 鈥淣ow we were easily doing 160-mile flights, and then a 200-mile flight came next.鈥�

Electronics are helping, too, especially bread-crumb trackers, made by companies like DeLorme and Spot. These handheld devices transmit position, speed, and altitude at regular intervals鈥攖ypically every ten minutes鈥攖o GPS satellites, which relay the data to the Internet, where a paraglider鈥檚 route is viewable to anyone online. With trackers, pilots can instantly see where they鈥檝e been and where they鈥檙e going while airborne.

More than anything, though, vol biv is happening because Gadd and McClurg, along with a small cadre of like-minded pilots, are rewriting the rules of the sport.

鈥淭his trip will change the worldview of anyone paying attention to bivvy flying,鈥� Bill Belcourt says. 鈥淎ll of a sudden, what you thought was daunting might seem not that bad. It changes your perspective. It鈥檚 like climbing with Alex Lowe. He had a way of making everything look a lot flatter.鈥�

Gadd and McClurg planned the X-Rockies expedition over e-mail and by telephone. Practically strangers, they didn鈥檛 meet face-to-face until just before their first day out, hiking together for an hour up one of the few trails decent enough to get them to their planned launch site at 6,788 feet. They were hauling 60-pound packs stuffed with supplies, their wings carefully folded inside.

When it was go time, at around 1 p.m., they unfurled their wings. They launched from a narrow alpine meadow perched barely above tree line, 鈥渨ith enough rocks and angle to make it technical,鈥� Gadd recalls. The margin for error was zero. By 5 p.m., they were soaring around Mount Robson. During that historic flight, Gadd told himself, If we can fly over Robson, we can fly over anything.

They got two more days of good weather鈥攃lear skies, light winds鈥攂efore conditions swiftly deteriorated. Nearby wildfires spewed thick smoke, reducing visibility. Gusty winds and frequent thunderstorms forced them to detour into increasingly isolated terrain. By the end of day four they were separated. Gadd stayed above tree line and landed in a high meadow. McClurg struggled to reach him but couldn鈥檛 gain altitude. With nowhere to set down safely, he crashed into the shoulder of Karluk Peak, slamming face-first into a rock.

I set out to catch up with them a few days later. On August 5, I fly into Calgary and rent an SUV at the airport. Over the next two days, I drive more than 350 miles with Jody MacDonald, who is on hand to photograph the expedition. She鈥檚 married to McClurg, and she was already a paraglider when they met in 2003. In fact, she gave him his first lesson.听

We head northwest, toward British Columbia. Gadd and McClurg are carrying an arsenal of technology, including satellite phones, VHF radios, and the bread-crumb trackers. I can obtain their tracker data with my iPhone. I can also type text messages into a website that relays them to their trackers. But none of this helps us get anywhere near them. They are simply too deep in the backcountry鈥攁t least 20 miles from the nearest road.

About 30 hours after we leave Calgary, near Revelstoke, B.C., I get a satellite text from McClurg: 鈥淏ring fresh underwear.鈥� In the midst of circumnavigating peaks, crossing crevasse-riddled glaciers, and vaulting chasmal valleys, McClurg apparently needs a change of skivvies. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not unusual for him to shit his pants,鈥� MacDonald informs me. She鈥檚 laughing, but she鈥檚 also serious.

Red Bull Media House is paying the costs of a big-budget, six-person film crew, which is trailing Gadd and McClurg in a helicopter for part of the expedition, dropping supplies while they鈥檙e at it. The crew鈥檚 boss, Elizabeth Leilani of Reel Water Productions, manages to reach me during a brief period when my cell phone has coverage. 鈥淐ome to Mica Creek,鈥� she tells us. 鈥淭he heli is there, and we can bump you up to the guys.鈥�

I scour a topo map and locate Mica Creek at the northern frontier of B.C.鈥檚 Monashee Mountains. Six hours later I鈥檓 in the heli, its blades thumping east. We head toward a cluster of glaciated peaks鈥攃ollectively known as the Continental Range鈥攕cattered across a 25,000-square-mile wilderness that straddles the crest of the Canadian Rockies.

A thunderstorm is barreling toward us, spitting rain and sleet at our windscreen. The pilot, who had been chatting us up over the headsets, goes silent. He wrestles the heli through buffeting crosswinds and then points the nose toward a knife-edge ridge. Looking down I can see a meadow, perhaps an acre in size, wedged into a rocky nook. Two tents are visible: one is lime green, the other gold. The heli lands with a plunk. By now the storm is on top of us, a black fury of clouds and howling winds.

Clutching my backpack, I leap out. The pilot guns the throttle and roars off. McClurg emerges from the green tent, a little wobbly, and gives me a hug. He was asleep, snoozing on his bunched-up wing, and my arrival startled him. There鈥檚 a dime-size scab on his upper lip and bloodstains on his wing. I鈥檝e known McClurg since 2005, and every time I see him he looks like he just got back from a two-week beach vacation鈥攄eeply tanned, his tousled brown hair veined with sun-bleached highlights.听

By the time sunset arrives, the skies have cleared to reveal a buckled and contorted macrocosm of rock and ice extending to all horizons. We boil ramen, and I ask McClurg to recap his crash. 鈥淲hen Will and I got separated, I got into a bad hole and couldn鈥檛 climb out,鈥� he says. With daylight dwindling, he knew he had to get down. But where? He had already covered 20 miles and hadn鈥檛 spotted a single clearing. A controlled crash into a mountainside was the only option.

鈥淚t was a really scary, terrifying place to be.鈥� And that鈥檚 how I hit my face,鈥� he says. 鈥淚t could have gone so much worse. I got really lucky.鈥� He shook off the crash and scrambled to a ledge beneath 10,167-foot Karluk Peak to pitch camp. In the morning, desperate to find Gadd, he launched but quickly discovered that he didn鈥檛 have enough lift to get over the next ridge. So he circled back and landed where he started. He tried again and finally achieved a successful flight. As McClurg would later record in his journal: 鈥淚 was completely frazzled 鈥� dehydrated and low blood sugar, scared, knew I shouldn鈥檛 be flying.鈥�

McClurg headed south and found Gadd camped where we are now. Gadd spotted McClurg approaching and got on the radio to warn him away from landing. 鈥淚t鈥檚 too on!鈥� he yelled. 鈥淭he conditions are just too strong!鈥�

In mountains like this, whenever the sun is out, the ground heats up, radiating warm air, which rises into cylindrical columns called thermals. Fly into one and you get good lift, like stepping into an elevator heading toward the stratosphere. When a wing isn鈥檛 inside a thermal, it descends. How fast it goes down is determined by its glide ratio, a measure of elevation loss to distance traveled. For paragliders, the ratio is typically 11 to 1, which means that if no other forces are acting on the wing, such as thermals or headwinds, it will fall 100 feet for every 1,100 feet of forward progress. If you鈥檙e paragliding off a local hill and intend to land low, descending is not a concern, but it is in these mountains.

鈥淗ere, you do one glide for ten minutes and you end up on the dirt,鈥� Gadd says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 like a samurai sword fight. There is no retreat.鈥�

Thermals are usually indicated by the presence of cumulus clouds, which are created when moisture condenses as it hits the cool air at higher altitudes.

The clouds materialize above dominant topographic features, specifically ridges and summits, often aligning themselves like cotton balls in a conga line.

鈥淲e call those cloud streets,鈥� McClurg says. Stay on a cloud street and you can leapfrog from thermal to thermal. But thermals don鈥檛 always form where you want to go. Or they can become too strong, making high-alpine landings about as easy as swimming up a waterfall.

McClurg heeded Gadd鈥檚 advice and aimed for a nearby drainage. As he approached, his wing partially deflated, which is called a collapse. Seconds before plummeting into a stand of 50-foot-tall subalpine firs, he skidded into a narrow glade, only a short hike away from Gadd. 鈥淚 was ecstatic to be back together again,鈥� McClurg says.

Our camp, at 6,800 feet, is situated directly beneath the west wall of Mount Dainard, a 500-million-year-old marble-and-limestone slab that amplifies the thunder when squalls rip through. For three days the weather is spasmodic, alternating between rain, hail, lightning, wind, and sun. Gadd and McClurg hole up in their tents, usually napping.听

At first, McClurg was ready for a break, but after two days he can鈥檛 sit still. If the sun is visible for more than 15 minutes, he鈥檚 up, pacing, talking to himself. He holds out his arms, palms forward. 鈥淔eel that? Feel that?鈥� There鈥檚 a faint breeze blowing upslope, and he鈥檚 sure this indicates developing thermals. Gadd emerges from his tent just as McClurg announces, 鈥淒ude, this is looking better.鈥�

Gadd says, 鈥淚 look at this as less worse.鈥�

Gadd has auburn hair and a creamy complexion that seems incongruous with a guy who鈥檚 outdoors every waking minute. He started paragliding in 1992, when the sport was young and embraced mainly by climbers using wings as a quick way to get themselves off a peak. Ten years later he smashed the distance world record, by means of what鈥檚 known as a tow-launch flight, in which pilots are hoisted aloft with a winch and cable rig attached to the bed of a pickup truck. His flight鈥攆rom Zapata, Texas, near the Mexican border, to Ozona鈥攃overed 263 miles and lasted 10 hours and 38 minutes, a mark that wasn鈥檛 beaten for a decade. 鈥淏ut equally important to me are the many firsts I鈥檝e done,鈥� he says. This includes a paragliding flight over Independence Pass in Colorado, as well as several new routes over the U.S. and Canadian Rockies.

Long before Gadd started paragliding, he was steeped in alpinism. His parents, who raised him in Calgary and Jasper, started taking him to the mountains when he was a toddler. Gadd is five foot eleven and lanky, with long, sinewy arms鈥攊deal tools for a world-champion ice climber.听

鈥淲illie was on 5.6鈥檚 and 5.7鈥檚 by the time he was five,鈥� his father, Ben Gadd, told me. 鈥淗e is very connected with real-world adventures. He also just likes to show off. Since he鈥檚 been really little, it鈥檚 鈥榃atch me do this, watch me do that.鈥� He鈥檚 not the sort of guy who wants to climb all the 8,000-meter peaks. He wants to go to one and have a video running, because he鈥檚 a performer as much as an athlete.鈥澨�

Like many alpinists who鈥檝e seen friends die or get injured while climbing and paragliding, Gadd has become adept at mitigating risk. In camp he entertains us with his favorite almost-got-killed tales. There鈥檚 the time he was paragliding in Mexico and his wing spiraled so violently that G-forces caused him to black out momentarily. Or when he was paragliding near Boulder, Colorado, and hit a powerful wave of air that whisked him up to 18,000 feet in only minutes, the lack of oxygen temporarily blinding him. These mishaps have left Gadd with a pragmatist鈥檚 instinct.

鈥淲illie describes it as the power of negative thinking,鈥� says his father. It鈥檚 a response, explains Gadd, 鈥渢o being surrounded by too many fucking pathological optimists. If you always think positive thoughts, you might have super high confidence, but you鈥檙e going to get bit.鈥�

McClurg conceived听of the X-Rockies expedition long before Gadd got involved. 鈥淎t first, Will wouldn鈥檛 even consider it,鈥� McClurg says, mainly because the original plan required too much hiking. Gadd eventually signed on, but only after McClurg agreed to make some changes to the route and strategy, which included more flying and much less tromping. 鈥淚鈥檓 a pilot, not a backpacker,鈥� Gadd says.

McClurg, who is five-eight and ripped like a mountain gorilla, grew up in South Lake Tahoe, California, where his parents divorced when he was six. His father, Jack, took their boat; his mother, Jan, got the tent trailer.

鈥淲e made two or three trips every summer in that trailer,鈥� Jan told me. 鈥淥ur big one was always to Yosemite.鈥� A single mom, she couldn鈥檛 stray from camp because she was caring for McClurg鈥檚 sister, who is five years younger. 鈥淪o I had to just let him go and trust that he鈥檇 be OK,鈥� she says.

McClurg would often disappear from dawn until dusk to explore the park. Half Dome was his favorite place, and he first hiked it, with a buddy, when he was nine. 鈥淚 decided a long time ago I can鈥檛 lose sleep and worry about him,鈥� Jan says. When I ask McClurg about this, he agrees that he had plenty of freedom. 鈥淲hen I was 11, my mom would go on business trips for a week, and I was the babysitter for my sister. These days she鈥檇 be put in jail for doing that. But it taught me very early on what I was capable of, allowing me to believe that anything is possible. Now I tend to be overconfident, especially with flying.鈥�

During the expedition, Belcourt and a few fellow pilots have been keeping tabs on its progress, and they鈥檝e been relishing the idea of these starkly different personalities being together, in a sport where it can be distracting and even dangerous for two pilots to fly in close proximity. 鈥淲e鈥檙e all wondering how Will is dealing with Gavin, joking about it,鈥� Belcourt says. 鈥淭his crazy optimist with Will.鈥�

鈥淵ou鈥檙e trying to realize your own potential in a place where no one sees and no one cares,鈥� Belcourt has said of paragliders鈥� penchant for solitude.

鈥淭here is a purity in that.鈥� And yet there are situations鈥攁 longitudinal traverse of the Canadian Rockies, for instance鈥攚here solo flying would be suicide.

鈥淭he biggest technical problem with paragliding is seeing the sky and understanding how it works,鈥� Gadd explains. And unlike a typical flight, where pilots soar to wherever the thermals are working best, Gadd and McClurg want to adhere to a predetermined route that will lead to the U.S. border. This means that every second in the air requires a relentless search for clues that will help them navigate south.

鈥淲ith two people, you have twice as much information about what鈥檚 going on in the atmosphere,鈥� Gadd says. 鈥淲e can sample a lot more air and up our odds.鈥澨�

On our third night trapped in camp, Gadd fishes a bottle of cheap whiskey from his pack, takes a swig, and passes it to me. 鈥淲hat we鈥檙e flying through is without a doubt the deepest, most dangerous, and most sketchy terrain anyone has ever flown on a paraglider, so it just helps having someone out there with you,鈥� he says. 鈥淭here is a lot of stress involved flying in these gnarly conditions,鈥� adds McClurg, who says that partnering up has given him 鈥渁 psychological boost. It鈥檚 like, Well, if he鈥檚 up here, I must not be totally crazy! And you know he鈥檚 thinking the same thing.鈥�

It's the fourth day at our high camp, and the pilots are piling on layers鈥攎erino-wool long underwear, down jackets, gloves鈥攖o stay warm in the frigid air at higher altitudes. 鈥淒uring the expedition, 13,000 feet has been normal for us,鈥� says McClurg, who drops his pants to install the final piece of gear鈥攁 strap-on catheter, so he can urinate in-flight.

By noon the thermals are cranking. Gadd and McClurg roll out their wings and launch. In only nine minutes, they climb 1,900 feet. I can barely see them, but I can hear their variometers. The device helps pilots find the so-called core of a thermal by repeatedly emitting audible chirps that scale higher during ascents (when they鈥檙e in the core) and lower during descents (when they鈥檝e moved outside it). Four hours and 42 minutes later, they鈥檝e landed in a meadow at 7,200 feet, having traveled 68 miles鈥攖heir second-longest one-day gain on the expedition. (The longest: 94 miles.) In his journal, McClurg writes, 鈥淏est flight of my life. Most committing, beautiful, crazy, fun, wild, exceptional aviation experience I鈥檝e ever had. Totally insane. Will reckons we went 50 miles with no landing options. Will and I feel at this point the rest of the expedition is just gravy, we鈥檝e survived the hardest part.鈥�

A short while later a cold front rolls in, grounding Gadd and McClurg for eight days. 鈥淭he goal of the U.S. border became this imagined line that Will and I started to think was pointless,鈥� says McClurg. They鈥檙e pinned down and despondent near the town of Invermere, 120 miles from Montana. Gadd asks himself, Is this it? We鈥檙e done? We鈥檙e never going to get it going again? Later he tells me, 鈥淚 looked at the distance remaining and figured it鈥檚 not going to happen in the amount of summer we have left. The flying season ends in mid-August, when early fall starts.鈥澨�

But finally they get a break鈥攖wo days of sun, which reaps them another 100 miles鈥攂efore persistent rain settles in. 鈥淲e were flying in the most turbulent, whacked-out conditions ever,鈥� Gadd recalls. 鈥淚 run paragliding competitions, and we cancel them when conditions are too strong. If we were flying in a competition, I would have canceled most of our flying days.鈥�

It's nearly two weeks later, on September 4, before they鈥檙e airborne again. Rested and resupplied, they launch late in the afternoon and barely cover 15 miles in two hours. They land in a snow-dusted meadow just below the summit of Mount Broadwood (7,299 feet) to pitch camp. And then McClurg realizes that he left his tent behind. 鈥淏y about 9:30 p.m., I was encased in a pretty nice ream of ice,鈥� he says later.听

In the morning, clear skies prevail. But the late-summer sun is weak and can鈥檛 fuel reliable thermals. Plus, Gadd is sick鈥攁 nasty head cold. They launch anyway, with the U.S. border a mere 20 miles ahead, but they have trouble gaining altitude. After 90 minutes, they wrestle their wings up 300 feet, just enough height to get themselves across a wide glacial valley. 鈥淲e would have been on the ground if we didn鈥檛 get to the next thermal,鈥� McClurg says. 鈥淚 felt like it was do or die.鈥澨�

It鈥檚 a few minutes past 5 p.m. when Gadd and McClurg discern a succession of peaks, aligned north to south, known as Inverted Ridge. It appears to be a straight shot to the border. At 6:45, with less than an hour of daylight remaining, Gadd notices a 50-foot-wide clear-cut running east to west. He checks his GPS. 鈥淗oly shit! We鈥檙e over the border,鈥� he shouts to McClurg over the radio. Both pilots are screaming and hollering and doing air high-fives.听

By sheer chance, their final flight ended near a logging road that led them out of the wilderness. All told, their north-south linear distance totaled 497 miles. Add in detours and backtracks, and they easily covered twice that. During the monthlong expedition they completed 15 flights, which averaged about 32 miles each. 鈥淏ut numbers don鈥檛 tell the story,鈥� insists Gadd. 鈥淧aragliding is a sport that is least defined by its numbers. It鈥檚 freedom that defines it. It鈥檚 the freest sport I do in my life鈥攁nd the expression of that is what Gavin and I did.鈥� He goes on: 鈥淭he route we flew had never been flown in a paraglider鈥攁nd may never be flown again. The blank areas on the map used to scare me. Now I鈥檓 like, 鈥楲et鈥檚 go there!鈥� 鈥�

Michael Behar () wrote about snow-prediction expert Joel Gratz in July 2013.

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Last month, on Valentine’s Day, Trader Joe’s held the grand opening for its first store in Boulder, Colorado, where I live. In fact, there were previously no stores anywhere in Colorado, and residents had long been begging the grocer to locate here via online petitions and Facebook fan pages. In early 2012, inklings emerged that TJ’s was eyeing potential Colorado sites, including my town. The rumors headlined Boulder’s Daily Camera, which would report on the $11-billion chain in some 70-plus articles over the next two years.

When opening day arrived, . A jam band hammered on steel drums, while fist-pumping employees clad in Aloha shirts handed out plastic leis to swooning customers. To marshal traffic, police were on hand. So were Jim and Lisa Lucas, who ducked work to publicly profess their love to Trader Joe’s in its parking lot. Elated, too, were Joe and Jennifer Boyte. The couple had been making pilgrimages to the nearest Trader Joe’s, in Santa Fe, New Mexico鈥攁n 840-mile round-trip drive for items like Two Buck Chuck and dark-chocolate-and-sea-salt-covered butterscotch caramels.

Once our store opened, a trek to TJ’s quickly became a right-of-passage in Boulder. “Have you been yet?” demanded my foodie friends, incessantly. Suddenly, Trader Joe’s was bigger than legal weed. Resistance was futile. But I was wary. Our cookie-cutter supermarket, King Soopers, owned by the Kroger conglomerate, already carried enough organic food to feed a battalion. Our 40,000-square-foot Whole Foods is mobbed daily, like Mecca during the hajj. From what I had online about its offerings, I wondered how Trader Joe’s expected to survive selling mostly over-processed garbage to throngs of kale-huggers.

Trader Joe’s isn’t hawking health food exclusively. Even so, its marketing certainly exudes an aura of clean livin’ goodness. Plus, its website claims that its privately branded products鈥攖hose with the TJ’s label鈥攃ontain and no They also tout vegan, kosher, gluten-free, low-sodium, and fat-free alternatives. Tantalizing! Upon arriving at the Boulder store, I grabbed a shopping cart, thinking I could fill it with actual food.

“You don’t want to buy that,” warned Melanie Warner, who I had asked to tag along. “But it’s just dried peaches?” I pleaded before glancing at the second ingredient: sulfur dioxide. Warner wrote , which The Huffington Post named one of the best food books of 2013. I trust Warner because not only can she pronounce “tert-butylhydroquinone,” she also knows that it’s a added to many fast foods, , and .

According to the FDA, is not natural (though it is a common preservative, and also used by vintners in wine). We made a beeline to the customer service counter, where a “crew member” named Kerrie was happy to assist. How does sulfur dioxide reconcile with your “no artificial preservatives” policy, I asked? This kind of inquiry is hardly uncommon around our health-obsessed town. She was stumped and telephoned corporate. The answer: “It’s 100-percent natural,” insisted Kerrie. “Like the sulfur dioxide you get from volcanoes.” So, like the crude oil you find underground? Warner said later, “Poor Kerrie. She’s got her job cut out for her in Boulder.”

Indeed, Kerrie tells me she’s been with Trader Joe’s for eight years at locations in Vancouver in Washington State, Portland, Oregon, and Rochester, Minnesota. “We’re getting more questions from customers in Boulder than at any other store I’ve worked at. People are more conscious, and they’re also skeptical because we’re the new kids on the block. But we knew this was going to happen here.”

I give Kerrie huge props for engaging us with patience and a smile. She wasn’t defensive but appeared genuinely concerned that her company wasn’t living up to its pledge. Scripted? Perhaps. Nonetheless, when I gave her a long list of Trader Joe’s private label products that contained questionable preservatives鈥攕odium phosphate (Pulled Beef Brisket), trisodium citrate (Bacon Cheddar Cheese), sodium lauryl sulfate (Bibimbap Bowl), sodium phosphate (Pork Roast Florentine)鈥擪errie promised to investigate.

Three hours later, she called me at home. “I looked into sodium lauryl sulfate,” she said. “It’s used to control acidity. We’ve received a lot of concerns about it, so we’re in the process of reevaluating it. And I’m still researching the rest of your list.”

Kerrie rocked. But neither she nor Warner could help me fill my cart. “They’re creating whole new categories of crap,” declared Warner, palming a jar of , made with “crushed biscuits,” something called “raising agent,” four different types of sugar, and margarine (people still use that?).

I spent nearly 90 minutes scouring the aisles with Warner, using our iPhones to Google the ingredients of dozens of products. Natural or artificial, the place is a preservative shit-show. The entire freezer section might as well be the poster-child for What’s Wrong With the American Diet because boxed meals with 20-plus ingredients and scads of sodium aren’t healthy鈥攚ith or without the bonus mystery additives.

And if you’re worried about GMOs, you’re going to have to take TJ’s word that they’re absent because company executives their outside vendors or . As for meat, a handful of shrink-wrapped steaks touted “all natural,” while a logo emblazoned packages of turkey cold cuts. My inquiry to an employee restocking the deli aisle got a polite and honest reply: “If it doesn’t say organic, you can pretty much assume it’s raised conventionally with antibiotics and hormones.” Yikes.

We ventured to Trader Joe’s at 11 a.m. on a blustery and frigid Tuesday morning in early March when we figured the place would be deserted. But the Cult of Trader Joe’s is strong in these parts. It was packed with salivating Boulderites, who, like me, probably assumed there was something healthy to be found inside. At checkout, the clerk gave my forlorn cart the once-over. “Did you find everything you need?” Need? Well, no. But it wasn’t a total loss: I scored some organic chicken breasts, a few cans of low-sodium organic black beans, and four tins of wild-caught sardines.

Now before you get all huffy and post vitriolic missives in the comments thread of this piece, know that I’m writing this in the context of Boulder, where even 7-Eleven stocks organic milk. This is not about Trader Joe’s operating in urban , places like Atlanta or Memphis. And it doesn’t concern Trader Joe’s in Northern California, where a friend who lives in Marin County informed me his only alternative, Safeway, is a Soviet throwback. In these cities鈥攁ssuming the abundance of cheap, prepackaged fare doesn’t sucker you in鈥擳rader Joe’s is a godsend.

Trader Joe’s old-schoolers whose dietary choices I respect advised this: Don’t go for grocery shopping. Treat it like a flea market鈥攁 place to hunt for the few prized gems hidden amid mostly worthless junk. With any nascent retail endeavor in finicky Boulder, there is a learning curve. Though Trader Joe’s appears to be a willing student, I won’t be making another trip anytime soon. And yet with employees like Kerrie compiling customer wish lists and addressing complaints from sticklers like me, I’ll never say never.

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How do you create a crapocalypse?

Here鈥檚 how: Between September 10th and 15th, heavy rains engulfed Boulder, Colorado, where I live, dumping 16.4 inches on the People鈥檚 Republic. On September 12, the city set an all-time 24-hour rainfall record, at 9.08 inches. Boulder is situated in a semi-arid region that averages about 20 inches of rain annually, and yet we managed to tally up 80 percent of our yearly total in just five days. An udometer (a fancy term for rain gauge) near my home in South Boulder measured 21.13 inches鈥攐ur entire year in less than a work-week!

Much of that water funneled into the numerous narrow canyons that flank the town鈥檚 west side, eventually blasting into the city, sweeping away people, cars, homes, supermarkets, roads, bridges, trees, and livestock. The floods also to spew, in some cases with geyser-like virility, from sinks, bathtubs, showers, and toilets.

On Sunday evening, as the deluge was finally waning, local ABC affiliate 7-News weatherdude Mike Nelson appeared downright baffled about where all the water was going to end up. I鈥檒l tell you where some of it went, Mike. It went into the sewers, which maxed out quickly. When a closed fluid system that relies on gravity gets overloaded, it becomes pressurized. Suddenly, the poo needed an exit, and anyone with plumbing became its escape route.

Renee Williams and her husband, Brian Nelson, and their two kids, Jake and Stella, made and because they were among the dozens whose homes were choked with crap. I first met Williams, who lives two blocks from me, while I was shooting video of the floodwaters raging past her front lawn. The next morning she called pleading for help鈥攖hey had a full-blown sewage eruption underway. Her whole family is now staying in our guest room while Servpro demolishes their home, 鈥渓ike it never even happened.鈥�

You could say. Thanks to the floods, dozens of the native black-tailed prairie dogs that populate Boulder鈥檚 parks and grasslands have been flushed out of their burrows and have been seen wandering aimlessly. Dazed and confused, they are taking to the roadways, where they get flattened, immediately. Insects鈥攂ees, mosquitos, spiders, flies, moths, crickets鈥攈ave become inexplicably agoraphobic. Open a door or window for a moment and they鈥檒l gang-rush to get inside. Did you know Boulder had native crayfish? I didn鈥檛 until a friend posted a video on Facebook capturing legions of them doing a sidestep scamper along the South Boulder Creek trail, where I run once a week. Birds are gorging on the exposed crayfish, which, like the prairie dogs, seem hell-bent on committing mass suicide.

But , as some are claiming? Not so much. First, the millennial categorization refers that atmospheric conditions could have aligned in a way to produce a storm of such magnitude. Those conditions included a supersaturated atmosphere鈥攖he most water vapor ever measured in September here鈥攆ed by residual moisture from weakening tropical storms in the Gulf of Mexico and Pacific Ocean. Another critical component: easterly, or 鈥渦pslope鈥� winds, which slammed all that moisture against the Rocky Mountains, where it had nowhere to go but up. Because colder, denser air at high altitudes cannot hold as much water as warm air lower down, the vapor condensed into rain.

Finally, 鈥攖he linchpin. The Jet Stream carries weather from west to east across Colorado like a runaway freight train. That means fronts normally last eight, maybe 12 hours, and don鈥檛 impact large geographical areas. Lately, however, the Jet Stream has been crawling rather than sprinting across the Northern Hemisphere. Many climatologists attribute this to a warming and melting Arctic. have shown that when the Arctic heats up and dries out, the Jet Stream gets “wavier,” which primes the atmosphere for producing 鈥渂locking highs.鈥� And that鈥檚 the prevailing theory behind the Boulder Floods: A massive blocking high prevented waterlogged air from hustling east. Instead it got pinned between the Great Plains and the Front Range鈥攄irectly over Boulder鈥攚here it was wrung out like a wet sponge in a bench vice.

Joel Gratz, a Boulder meteorologist I wrote about for 国产吃瓜黑料 in July, put it this way, 鈥淭he atmosphere was in outlier mode, like a rogue wave in the ocean. It feels insane to us because we鈥檝e never seen anything like it, and it鈥檚 a very tiny statistical probability that it can happen, but it does happen.鈥�

Hydrologists see things differently than meteorologists. John Pitlick, a geologist and hydrologist at the University of Colorado who has spent decades investigating Front Range floods, painstakingly plotted the average flow rates of numerous streams, creeks, and rivers around Boulder, with data going back nearly a half-century. He compared those rates with historic floods over the same timespan.

Recently, Professor Pitlick held an impromptu one-hour PowerPoint lecture to share his findings with a group of scientists, students, and journalists who鈥檇 packed into a small classroom at the University of Colorado鈥檚 Leeds School of Business. I was there, too. His conclusion? Expect a similarly sized flood to return to Boulder in 20 to 50 years鈥攖hough it may take the form of a more intense event, over a smaller area. It鈥檚 notable that rainfall rates of the recent flood weren鈥檛 record-setting. During the famed 1976 Big Thompson Flood, rain fell at up to eight inches per hour. Peaks last week in Boulder only hit a maximum one-inch per hour (though it persisted much longer than the four-hour rain that triggered the Thompson event). The takeaway is that Mother Nature didn鈥檛 come anywhere close to demonstrating her full, unbridled fury.

But she will, believes Pitlick, and we won鈥檛 have to wait as nearly long as we thought to witness it. Assuming Pitlick鈥檚 historic flood figures are accurate (he asked the audience to fact-check him and nobody spoke up), and this truly was a mere 20- or 30-year storm, then the impact鈥�18,000 homes damaged and nearly 2,000 destroyed; eight people dead鈥攚ill be paltry compared to the Big One that is still out there, en route. Anyone who lives in the will be toast, regardless of how the City of Boulder decides to beef up mitigation.

Several scientists who study climate change, extreme weather, and floods took part in a at the University of Colorado’s Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Sciences this week. The consensus was that it was too early to determine the so-called “return frequency” of this event鈥攎ore research is needed鈥攂ut they felt that the “hundred-year” likelihood was exceedingly generous.

If nothing else, Boulder should probably revamp its sewer network very soon because next time, whenever that is, it may well be far worse than just a few soiled neighborhoods. And a city submerged in shit is going to be unimaginably more challenging to clean up than one bathed in rainwater. Upgrades will cost millions of dollars. But, hey, the city could easily pay for them with all the revenues it鈥檒l reap from the proposed slapped on now-legal recreational pot sales鈥攖hough only if locals refrain from handing out , like they did on Pearl Street recently, for 鈥渟tressed out residents who lost their stash in the flood.鈥� Then again, that may make the next crapocalypse easier to deal with, too. 听

听

Contributions can be made at , and through the . In addition, Castelli is releasing the special edition and will contribute 100 percent of proceeds to help flooded communities.

The post Postcard from Pooville: The Boulder Floods appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

Joel Gratz is making me nervous. It鈥檚 midmorning on a snowy Colorado day in March, and we鈥檙e riding the Sun Up triple chair in Vail鈥檚 Back Bowls. Gratz has scooched his butt to the very edge of the seat, and now he鈥檚 thrashing his right arm to and fro, determined to capture a few flakes with his mittened fist. Whenever Gratz talks about the weather 鈥� snow especially 鈥� the 31-year-old meteorologist can forget where he is, speaking in a nonstop stream. 鈥淚 usually just tune it out,鈥� says his girlfriend, Lauren Alweis, who is skiing with us.

Gratz has a little fun on the job.

Gratz powing down in Vail.

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鈥淭hese flakes are pretty sweet!鈥� Gratz shouts. 鈥淎nd look at the way they鈥檙e falling 鈥� from northwest to southeast. That鈥檚 good! But the moisture layer is thin.鈥�

Gratz, a lifelong skier who lives in Boulder, loves nailing a forecast, and today he did just that, having predicted that Vail would get nearly a foot of new snow. To prove it to the tens of thousands of people who follow his powder forecasts鈥攑osted daily on his website, 鈥攈e whips out his iPhone and snaps pictures of freshly covered glades that he鈥檒l upload later. Gratz also has a ruler affixed to a ski pole; ten minutes earlier, he jammed it into the snowpack and photographed that, too. 鈥淎 week ago I said today would be a very good day,鈥� he says. 鈥淚t turned out that it was. That鈥檚 pretty cool from a weather standpoint.鈥�

Gratz is what weather buffs like me call a microscale forecaster, which means he focuses on a particular kind of weather event (in his case, snowfall) for an audience that is particularly interested (skiers and snowboarders). He got started five years ago, frustrated by his inability to find the tailored forecasts he craved. 鈥淚 was livid whenever I missed a powder day,鈥� he tells me. 鈥淣obody could forecast them, so I started doing it myself.鈥�

What eventually became OpenSnow started with an e-mail to 38 friends, sent on December 17, 2007, which said: 鈥淵ou鈥檙e on this list because you know there鈥檚 nothing better than the feeling of skiing in deep, untracked powder!鈥� Gratz鈥檚 first advisory predicted dumps at various Colorado resorts, including Vail, Aspen, and Steamboat. 鈥淔riday could be a great day to play hooky,鈥� he wrote. A buddy pinged back, 鈥淵ou are a great man! People will sing songs about you.鈥�

Today, OpenSnow, which went live in 2010, attracts a million unique visitors a year, including 1,600 members who pay up to $45 annually to receive customized powder alerts by e-mail and time-lapse video feeds from the slopes at 24 Colorado resorts. OpenSnow has also expanded to cover Lake Tahoe, New England, Utah, and portions of the mid-Atlantic. Each region gets its own forecaster, handpicked by Gratz for both weather knowledge and powder addiction.

OpenSnow is one of several newfangled websites offering such fine-tuned information, on everything from surf conditions to wind speeds for kiteboarders to the likelihood that thunderstorms will drench your mountain-bike ride. These sites exist because they meet a demand that government weather agencies aren鈥檛 filling.

鈥淕overnment forecasts don鈥檛 focus on the recreational side of weather鈥攖he fun side,鈥� Gratz points out. The sole mission of the (NWS) is to protect lives and property. For this reason, its winter forecasts often cover hundreds of square miles and are intended mainly to scare drivers off the roads during snowstorms. OpenSnow targets people who want to put themselves in the crosshairs of a blizzard.

Prior to one snowstorm last March, Gratz projected different snow totals for Copper Mountain and Vail, even though the two resorts are only 12 miles apart. The NWS, part of the (NOAA), would never bother with such a distinction. After the front rolled through, Copper had amassed only two inches, while Vail got nine 鈥� a difference Gratz saw coming. A spread like that is momentous to a skier or boarder.

鈥淚t鈥檚 fun to forecast in Colorado, but holy shit, is it hard,鈥� Gratz says. It helps, he says, that 鈥淚鈥檝e got a little bit of OCD in me. But without wanting that powder day myself, I would never have the motivation to do all this work.鈥�

ONLY RECENTLY has weather forecasting become a high-tech business. Back in the 1950s, the NWS refused to issue tornado warnings because the science was notoriously inaccurate. Mike Smith, a senior vice president for , a Pennsylvania company that produces made-to-order forecasts for some 175,000 industry and government clients, recalls that even in 1971, when he got his first job at a TV station in Oklahoma City, they still relied on radars that used World War II technology. 鈥淚t was considered taboo for meteorologists to issue tornado warnings more than a day out,鈥� he says.

Nowadays, thanks to an explosion in satellite data gathering and supercomputer power, it鈥檚 possible to forecast more than two weeks in advance. We can also zoom in on areas of a few square miles and make up-to-the-minute spot forecasts. Smith鈥檚 team is beta testing a new system called SkyGuard Mobile, an app that continually monitors your location using the GPS in your smartphone and then alerts you when something nasty is coming. 鈥淚f you鈥檙e a trucker, it can warn you if you鈥檙e about to drive into an unexpected ice storm,鈥� Smith says. The app would be indispensable to a mountaineer, he says, or a 鈥渇isherman out in a boat as a thunderstorm approaches.鈥�

Generally, meteorologists base their forecasts on three major models. Two of them, the and the , are produced in the United States by the NWS. The third, the , is run by an intergovernmental agency in Britain. There鈥檚 ongoing debate among weather nerds about which is best and why, but most agree that the Europeans are kicking our butt, chiefly because they鈥檝e invested more in computers.

To feed these models, data is gathered from dozens of sources. There are remote-sensing satellites that can detect minute atmospheric changes 鈥� even 鈥渟eeing鈥� through clouds to measure subtle temperature shifts on the ground. There are also pulse Doppler radars, which visualize storms in four dimensions (spatially and chronologically). Weather balloons and backyard hobbyists all contribute to the data trove, while the Internet and wireless networks facilitate a grand information exchange.

What鈥檚 more, thanks to NOAA and a handful of other taxpayer-funded agencies, virtually everything is available for free, online, with just a few mouse clicks. 鈥淭here鈥檚 a huge potential business for people who want to predict recreational weather,鈥� Smith says.

And that鈥檚 exactly what Gratz is doing, working full-time as CEO and overseeing a growing operation that started turning a profit during its second season, with nearly 10 percent of its 18,000 registered users signing up for paid extras in the first two months they were offered. In a recent public message to OpenSnow readers, Gratz confided, 鈥淚 pay about $200 a year for two websites that provide data, but 98 percent of the data I use to make forecasts is freely available 鈥� and OpenSnow wouldn鈥檛 exist without it.鈥�

ON VALENTINE鈥橲 DAY, a week before I skied with Gratz, we met for lunch at a trendy bistro in downtown Boulder called the Kitchen Next Door. The previous month had been dismal for Colorado snow, but that day it was dumping. Our waiter immediately recognized Gratz 鈥� he鈥檚 been featured in the Denver Post and on local TV 鈥� and wanted to know when to expect the next powder day.

鈥淵ou should take Thursday off,鈥� Gratz told him.

鈥淕otta work,鈥� the waiter groaned.

鈥淪witch with someone,鈥� Gratz said, sounding quite serious. 鈥淪omething big is going to happen. Trust me.鈥� Gratz then launched into a discussion of weather-model behavior that went on until the waiter鈥檚 eyes glazed over, as did mine. Gratz didn鈥檛 notice: he was already busy checking an iPhone app that displayed animated radar images of the day鈥檚 blizzard. 鈥淟ook at this incoming band of snow!鈥� he said, shoving the screen in my face. 鈥淭he wind direction!鈥� Eventually, he snapped out of it and started telling me how he got into all this.

Gratz was an only child raised in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and he loved snow as far back as he can remember. He started skiing at four, and when he was ten he began tracking and charting the weather as a hobby. 鈥淚n high school, I鈥檇 check radar on the Internet in the library to see if it was going to snow enough for us to get out of school,鈥� he told me. 鈥淲henever there was snow, I wanted to know how long it would last, was it heavy or light. I was obsessive.鈥�

Gratz went to Penn State 鈥� graduating in 2003 with a bachelor鈥檚 in meteorology 鈥� and then got a summer internship at the NBC TV affiliate in Philadelphia. 鈥淚 worked with Glenn 鈥楬urricane鈥� Schwartz,鈥� he said. 鈥淚 did all the background stuff for the forecasts. But when the cameras shut down, I never knew if anyone was listening or making decisions based on what we just did.鈥�

He nixed the idea of pursuing a career as an on-air weatherman, in part because he didn鈥檛 want to end up with a starter job in 鈥渂umblefuck nowhere.鈥� During his junior year at Penn State, he got involved in an on-the-ground research project with scientists at the University of Oklahoma who were investigating thunderstorm formation. 鈥淭hat was my first chance to actually see the weather developing,鈥� he said. 鈥淲e drove all over the plains with radar trucks. But I ruled out research, because you鈥檇 get all this data and then have to spend years trying to get grants to write code that would forecast the weather.鈥�

Gratz moved to Colorado in 2003 to work under Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He earned a master鈥檚 and tacked on an MBA. In 2006, just out of grad school, he was hired by Boulder-based ICAT, a provider of catastrophic property insurance, to do risk-modeling analysis.

It was a high-paying job, but he hated cubicle life. He would leave work and immediately head home to geek out on local weather at his computer. 鈥淓very night, I would look at some stuff, make notes, and after a storm moved through I would check the snow amounts,鈥� he said. 鈥淚 was looking at the weather for hours a day.鈥�

He got better at identifying potential snow-makers, which he would deconstruct in weekend forecasts that he e-mailed to friends. His list grew to 500 and included professional big-mountain skier and Aspen resident Chris Davenport, who met Gratz at an event in Boulder and asked to be added. 鈥淥nce he saw it, he realized it was legit and passed it on,鈥� Gratz told me.

After that things ballooned. Gratz started blogging in late 2008, quit his job, and launched OpenSnow (originally called Colorado Powder Forecast) on a shoestring in 2010. He was joined by meteorologist Andrew Murray, who came from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, where he鈥檇 been designing and coding weather-themed websites. Gratz also recruited Bryan Allegretto, who was writing a popular blog featuring powdercasts for the Lake Tahoe area.

鈥淚 had no kids, no wife, and a mortgage half covered by a roommate, so I decided to do it, even though I had no business plan and no clue what I was going to do the rest of the year,鈥� Gratz said. But making money and building a company were never his principal goals. 鈥淚 wanted to feel useful, really useful,鈥� he said.

POWDER FIENDS aren鈥檛 the only ones seeking out鈥攁nd paying for鈥攎icroscale technology. At his home in Redmond, Washington, Michael Fagin, founder of a forecasting operation called Washington Online Weather, is able to monitor conditions on Mount Everest鈥攃omparing six different models鈥攁nd advise climbing teams who hire him for the service. 鈥淚 e-mail detailed forecasts directly to the Base Camp manager,鈥� says Fagin. He鈥檒l also speak to climbers by satellite phone if a fast-moving front could put lives at risk.

AccuWeather and WeatherFlow (which tracks wind speeds for kiteboarders, windsurfers, and sailors) refine their services with proprietary models designed to run on off-the-shelf computers. Both companies collect data from several thousand networked weather stations that dispatch regular reports to their central servers. From this data, meteorologists can run simulations in-house and then compare the outcomes to the conventional models.

Gratz has something similar in mind for OpenSnow. He鈥檚 developing a model to compute the impact of wind direction and topography on snow totals at various winter resorts in Colorado. 鈥淚t should be able to tell us that, when Vail gets a northwest flow, they鈥檒l get twice the amount of snow that other models forecast,鈥� he says.

Gratz plans to test-drive his homegrown model in the fall, when forecast season -begins. At the first sign of snow, he鈥檒l make it part of a daily ritual that has gone unchanged since OpenSnow went live in 2010. Every morning before dawn, working in bed in his underwear, Gratz will check the latest global models, view infrared feeds from satellites, examine Doppler images, and peek at the resort and highway webcams. He鈥檒l note variations in barometric pressure and ripples in the jet stream. Sometimes he鈥檒l call or text ski patrollers he knows: firsthand eyes on the hill. The effort can take as much as three hours, at which point he鈥檒l post his prognosis to OpenSnow, usually by nine. On snow days he often files updates.

The process will get faster for Gratz as emerging technologies mature. One such innovation is the , in development at NOAA鈥檚 Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder. Alexander MacDonald, who directs the lab, is compiling data from at least 30 sources, some never before used to build weather models. 鈥淲e pioneered having commercial aircraft send us temperatures and wind speeds every hour,鈥� says MacDonald.

Unlike conventional models, which encompass large regions of the country and take hours and even days to generate, the High Resolution Rapid Refresh model is fast and focused. It carves the U.S. into parcels measuring nine square kilometers. Click on a parcel and you get a 鈥渘owcast鈥� for what鈥檚 going to occur every 15 minutes forward, out to 24 hours.

Not every inch of the U.S. is modeled (yet), but MacDonald was able to walk me through the process of determining air temperature six feet above the ground, at a precise location near Chicago O鈥橦are International Airport, 12 hours into the future. Eventually, with added computing power, he intends to shrink the parcel size鈥攐r 鈥渞esolution鈥濃�攖o one kilometer. 鈥淏y January 2015, all you鈥檒l have to do is download an app to your phone,鈥� MacDonald says. 鈥淚t will always know where you are and what the weather鈥檚 going to be like at your location for the next 12 or 18 hours.鈥�

鈥淣owcasting is likely the future,鈥� Gratz agrees. 鈥淩ight now I鈥檇 classify it as pretty good much of the time, but not great all of the time. When something fails occasionally, it鈥檚 hard to trust it.鈥� So for the moment, Gratz is sticking to the tools that have worked for him鈥攁nd made him something of a celebrity. While we鈥檙e at Vail, admirers intercept him in the lift line. 鈥淭hank you, Joel!鈥� a woman gushes, confessing that she鈥檇 called in sick to the office because of his forecast. 鈥淚 love you,鈥� another declares.

OF COURSE, GRATZ sometimes fails, a fact he discusses frankly on a part of his site called Keep Me Honest. For several consecutive days in early April, he assured his readers that a monster powder maker was brewing. 鈥淣early all resorts will see about 5-10 inches from the storm, with about 10-18 inches for areas east of the [Continental] Divide,鈥� he wrote just 48 hours before the impending storm. He added: 鈥淭he best days to ski deep snow will be Tuesday 鈥� it could be very good.鈥�

On Tuesday, April 9 鈥� the day of reckoning 鈥� the system fell apart, and only a couple of areas saw flakes. That afternoon, Gratz posted a mea culpa to OpenSnow: 鈥淭his storm has certainly turned into a pain in the you know what.鈥� Then he provided an exhaustively detailed postmortem, complete with animated satellite imagery, on what went wrong.

鈥淚n retrospect, I鈥檓 not sure I would have done anything differently,鈥� Gratz told me later. 鈥淐olorado is one of the more difficult places to forecast, because it鈥檚 got big topography, chaotic topography. You have all these mountain ranges going every direction with no rhyme or reason.鈥�

Occasionally, Gratz gets surly comments from readers. When a storm didn鈥檛 materialize in February, an OpenSnow user lashed out in the site鈥檚 comments section: 鈥淭wo days before the storm, he was calling for significant accumulations over the next two days. That didn鈥檛 happen. He was wrong about the overall snowfall in the high country over the last five days by a LONGSHOT.鈥� But in the same thread, many defended Gratz. 鈥淪ince discovering Joel, I鈥檝e found he鈥檚 spot on or in the range 95 percent of the time,鈥� one user wrote. 鈥淚f chasing pow was the equivalent of the Range Game on The Price Is Right, I鈥檇 want Joel sitting in the audience telling me what to do.鈥�

Gratz offers this: 鈥淚 may not be perfect all the time, but my audience realizes that they are better off overall because of what I do for them.鈥� Some clearly more than others. Shortly before Christmas, an admirer, presumably female, submitted a private message to OpenSnow. 鈥淭here鈥檚 nothing better than reading your forecast for pow every morning while I鈥檓 laying in bed,鈥� she wrote. 鈥淵ou look pretty cute in your picture. Are you single?鈥�

When I ask if anything still stumps him, Gratz doesn鈥檛 hesitate. 鈥淪teamboat Springs,鈥� he says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 the last unexplained thing for me in Colorado. I call it the Steamboat Surprise. Every year they鈥檒l get a foot or two overnight when they should have got a few inches and nobody else gets anything close. It has frustrated me for the better part of eight years, and you can鈥檛 explain it due to orographics.鈥�

I sense a dissertation coming, so I interrupt. 鈥淚 know a tree run that rarely gets skied,鈥� I say. 鈥淚t鈥檒l be untouched.鈥� Suddenly, the other Gratz reappears. 鈥淚鈥檓 game,鈥� he says. 鈥淪how me the way.鈥�

Michael Behar (@michaelbehar) wrote about gene-based endurance research in February 2011.

The post Joel Gratz Knows More About Snow Than Anyone appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

OpenSnow
Tracks snowstorms for skiers and boarders.
Cost: Basic membership is free. Pro accounts, $20 or $45 a year, get you add-ons like access to meteorologists and powder alerts for resorts you pick.

Chance of Weather
Select an activity鈥攆rom biking to barbecuing鈥攁nd plug in a zip code for hourly forecasts, along with rankings that grade the potential enjoyment of your chosen pursuit based on conditions.
Cost: Free.

WindAlert
Gives kiteboarders, sailors, and windsurfers minute-by-minute wind reports and hourly forecasts at more than 50,000 locations worldwide.
Cost: Free to view forecasts. Pro memberships 鈥� $3 to $10 monthly 鈥� feature real-time wind observations, daily meteorologist briefings, and unlimited e-mail or SMS alerts.

Washington Online Weather
Offers high-altitude mountain forecasts for the Himalayas, the Alps, Denali, the Caucasus, the Karakoram, and the Andes. Reports are customized to match intended climbing routes.
Cost: From $45. Price varies depending on location and quantity of forecasts.

SkyGuard Mobile
Select conditions鈥攖ornadoes, lightning, flash flooding, heavy snow, hail, high wind鈥攁nd get notified if severe weather is in the vicinity. Ignore an alert for more than two minutes and a meteorologist texts you to ensure you鈥檙e safe.
Cost: Up to $20 a month per device.

Stealth Travel Club
Get e-mailed when it鈥檚 about to go off at one of numerous world-class surf breaks. Book and pay to join a prearranged 鈥渟urfari鈥� and within 48 hours you鈥檒l be charging bombers.
Cost: Free for forecasts; trip costs vary depending on destination.

The post Precision Forecasting: Where to Find It appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

THE TIME HAS COME. You've saved up for the adventure of a lifetime, and departure is imminent. But before you can raft the Grand Canyon, heli-ski Alaska's Chugach Range, or climb Kilimanjaro, you need to get by a pesky gatekeeper: the liability-release waiver. If you're like most clients, you'll sign without reading a word. But you should know what you're getting into. “It's just like signing a mortgage,” says Tracey Knutson, an Anchorage-based attorney who represents outfitters from Alaska to Antarctica. “This is a binding contract.” More to the point, it's a binding contract that leaves you powerless. Refuse to sign the waiver and you'll be sent packing with a refund. If you sign, then get hurt and file suit? Good luck鈥攋udges toss out about 90 percent of recreation-based lawsuits.

This wasn't always the case. “I recall many large outfits not using waivers in the early seventies,” says Reb Gregg, a Houston-based attorney who lectures about recreational liability. So how did things get so contentious? To find out, we constructed an abridged sample waiver using language from the contracts of a few leading outfitters, then dug up the lawsuits that prompted the bombproof legalese. The result is a look at 50 years of ski accidents, shark attacks, rafting mishaps, and negligent guides. Read on鈥攖hen sign at your own risk.

The post Just Waive Goodbye appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

BACK IN THE EARLY 1960s, when the architect Louis Kahn designed the airy layout of the Salk Institute鈥攁 collection of stark concrete towers aligned like teetering dominoes on a Pacific Ocean bluff in La Jolla, California鈥攈e oriented the buildings so that robust sea breezes would waft through the upper floors. But as I descend four flights of stairs to enter a sprawling subterranean lab, the sweet ocean air turns sour. Researchers at Salk are conducting cutting-edge experiments in genetics, biology, neuroscience, and human physiology. At the core of this futuristic work are 6,000 old-fashioned, defecating rodents, stacked in shoebox-size plastic cages, creating an odor far too potent for Kahn's ingenious ventilation scheme to handle.

Despite the funk, the facility is meticulous. Wearing powder-blue scrubs, a surgical mask, a bouffant cap, and cloth shoe covers, I enter through a sterile clean room closed off between double doors. A whitewashed hallway adjoins various smaller labs, where mice are being injected with performance-enhancing compounds and forced to sprint on tiny treadmills. Others have had bits of their DNA reprogrammed to make them better runners. There are paunchy mice gorging on high-fat diets and svelte mice getting low-cal meals. Hunched over a metal table, a technician sorts through a squirming posse, plucking out prime studs for breeding and banishing aggressive males to solitary confinement. Mice are sacrificed and their muscles examined. Blood is sampled, hearts are inspected, kidneys and livers prodded.

This busy little world is the multi-million-dollar endeavor of Ron Evans, a 61-year-old molecular and developmental biologist who's trying to crack the code of human endurance. With help from a team of 35 scientists, Evans has an ambitious goal: to develop the first-ever performance-enhancing drug that can radically boost physical endurance in humans.

The “exercise in a pill” project began during the summer of 2007, when Evans made a stunning announcement. While investigating obesity, he stumbled upon a genetic switch that unexpectedly turned his lab rodents into super-athletes. In August 2008, Evans published the findings in Cell, a prestigious scientific journal, claiming that in some cases his augmented mice could run 90 percent farther than ordinary critters. By comparison, it's considered extraordinary when a human athlete's performance jumps by only 3 percent. Evans's breakthrough would be like transforming a dawdling weekend jogger into an Ironman contender overnight. And, as Evans assures me, “This wouldn't require you to actually exercise muscle to gain a benefit.”

In the now famous Cell paper, Evans and his co-authors鈥攁 collaborative multinational team based at research institutes in California, Massachusetts, and South Korea鈥攃onfidently announced that they had found a way “to enhance training adaptation or even to increase endurance without exercise.” Physiologists who'd spent their careers deconstructing the sophisticated mechanics of exercise and its numerous benefits were skeptical, dismissing the notion of pill-popping your daily workout as ludicrous.

But that didn't stop every major media outlet鈥攊ncluding the big four networks, cable news channels, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal鈥攆rom declaring the breakthrough a “couch potato's dream.” Nova scienceNow, a PBS program, interviewed Evans, who said that “the benefit of exercise alone and the benefit of the drug [are] almost exact” and predicted that athletes would be the earliest adopters.

Though it may be years before doctors are writing prescriptions that turbocharge your training, serious people are aimed at that goal. Evans's group is a front-runner in the race, but there are others: independent teams around the world developing naturally derived and synthetically engineered compounds that in preliminary animal experiments鈥攁nd a few human tests鈥攈ave measurably increased overall fitness.

Obviously, there will be hurdles. One is convincing biotech firms to back the costly studies required to create a marketable drug. Another is the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which won't green-light a new treatment that exists solely to help people run farther. (Scientists would first have to show that the drug can cure a real disease.) Even so, Evans believes that we're heading toward an inevitable day in which a pill will supplement and, in many cases, entirely replace exercise.

I FIRST HEARD ABOUT EVANS on the NBC Nightly News, shortly after slogging through a 40-minute treadmill run at my gym. When a smirking Brian Williams flashed the onscreen headline exercise in a pill, my bullshit meter redlined. So I phoned Evans, who amiably assured me that his research was legit and invited me to visit his lab, where I could see his supermice firsthand.

Now, over the course of an introductory two-hour chat in his oak-paneled fifth-floor office, Evans, a SoCal native who's tan and slim and looks far younger than his age, does his best to simplify the science. When it comes to genetics and pharmacology鈥攕ubjects I've covered for more than a decade鈥擨'm usually a quick study. Not so today. Listening to Evans delve into the complexities of cellular nutrient transfer makes my brain hurt.

Evans is goateed and wears frameless specs, designer jeans, a crisp blue oxford shirt, and black retro sneakers. On the windows, across the glass, he's scribbled elaborate equations that almost completely obscure the ocean view. Academic honors in elegant frames crowd the walls, with overflow awards aligned neatly along baseboards. On a shelf are three bobbleheads鈥攐ne of Evans beside James Watson and Francis Crick, the legendary scientists who in 1962 shared a Nobel Prize with Maurice Wilkins for mapping the structure of DNA. There's a stainless-steel yo-yo on his desk and a half-empty bottle of Jose Cuervo on a coffee table. I ask about the tequila, but Evans, a wicked tennis player and avid swimmer, can't remember how it got there and would rather talk about Lance Armstrong's quads.

To be an endurance athlete like Armstrong, Evans explains, your leg muscles need lots of slow-twitch fibers. “Energy is stored in the chemical form of ATP, adenosine triphosphate,” he says. “The mitochondria, the powerhouses of the cells, break down sugar and fat to create ATP.” Every endurance athlete knows what comes next: when ATP stores run dry, you bonk, hit the wall鈥攌ablooey.

Exercise creates more slow-twitch fibers and fuels a process known as “mitochondrial biogenesis.” Put simply, train hard and your mitochondria multiply like microbes. More mitochondria equals more ATP and, whoosh, you're running sub-three-hour marathons. Among exercise physiologists, the consensus has always been that the only way to increase mitochondria was through intense, prolonged physical activity.

“Endurance is a matter of real-time generation of ATP, and it was thought that exercise was the only way to get the system to work better,” says Evans, who accepted this idea until 1998. That's when he began exploring the role of genes in obesity, homing in on a genetic switch called peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor delta, or PPAR-delta, a protein known to regulate metabolism and fat burning. When your body demands fuel, PPAR-delta can influence whether it chooses glucose (sugar) or lipids (fats).

At rest, PPAR-delta is dormant. But during exercise it awakens to sustain a metabolic chain reaction that produces muscle fibers with slow-twitch properties, which feed on body fat. Vigorous exercise isn't an option if you're morbidly obese, though. So Evans wondered: what if we exercised the gene and not the muscle? Activate PPAR-delta, his thinking went, and fat-eating slow-twitch fibers would materialize like blades of grass sprouting from a freshly watered lawn.

In his first experiment, Evans coded the PPAR-delta gene to activate only in fat cells, where he thought it would have the most impact on weight loss. “We reengineered PPAR-delta in mice to be permanently on, like a light switch,” he says. “What happened was a bit of a miracle. The animals slimmed down and were resistant to weight gain even on a high-fat diet.” Fat cells in the mice had become more oxidative, similar to what happens when you blow air over smoldering coals and they erupt into flames. The cells could, quite literally, vaporize excess blubber.

Impressive results, but Evans wasn't satisfied. By 2004 he'd figured out how to tweak the PPAR-delta gene to fire in muscle cells. If the muscle became oxidative, like in the fat-cell experiment, it would cultivate the growth of mitochondria-rich slow-twitch fibers, essential for endurance.

Recalling all this, Evans grins broadly, eager to reveal the outcome. “We got marathon mice鈥攁n entire strain of animals that had become long-distance runners without ever having had to run,” he says. “We proved that endurance could be genetically engineered through this particular switch. And the switch stayed on, and could be passed on as a genetic trait. You could have a whole lineage of long-distance-running mice.”

WHILE WE TALK, Evans sits cross-legged in a sage-colored lounge chair, fiddling with pencil-thin paper wands that resemble giant chopsticks. He makes them by rolling together discarded Post-its. “Humans and spotted hyenas are endurance predators. They wear their prey out,” he says, delving into a tangential discussion of fast-twitch muscle fibers in primates. I nudge him back on topic. “So we wanted to find a drug that could activate the PPAR-delta switch by injection or pill,” he says, “because genetic engineering is impractical.”

At this point Evans leaps from his chair and starts pacing in front of a large whiteboard. He grabs a red marker and draws a box. Inside, he writes “GW1516.” “This is a Glaxo compound,” he says, referring to the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, which, Evans learned, had created GW1516 more than a decade ago, later making it publicly available for biotech researchers. “They were developing it to trigger the PPAR-delta switch, because they had observed that in obese primates it tripled HDL levels, the good cholesterol.” Glaxo test subjects had been receiving GW1516 in intermittent doses鈥攅nough to increase HDL but not a lot else. GW1516 was available commercially, so Evans ordered up a batch and fed it to his mice every day for five weeks, a dose that far exceeded amounts given in any previous experiments. “The effect was huge!” he says.

It sure was. Couch-potato mice could eke out a lame two-thirds of a mile. The same was true for mice given GW1516 that didn't train. Mice that didn't get GW1516 but did ten-minute daily stints on a treadmill eventually hit 1.1 miles. But mice that had both鈥攖raining and GW1516鈥攅asily hit 2.3 miles.

In short, the drug had doubled the normal performance-enhancing effect of regular endurance training. Unlike mice with genetically altered PPAR-delta, GW1516 had no impact on sedentary animals. Exercise, it seemed, was an essential part of the equation, though Evans didn't know why.

He submitted the results to Cell in 2007. But the editors wanted more and initially refused to publish his paper. “We had ended the story with a drug working in the context of exercise, and the Cell reviewers said, 鈥楲ook, you can't leave us hanging, because if what you're saying is correct, then the real breakthrough would be to completely replace exercise.' They wanted us to take it to the next level, to find a drug that could enhance performance without any exercise. That was something nobody had done before, and we didn't think it was possible.”

Evans persisted, searching for another substance to flip the PPAR-delta switch. The winner was a chemical compound called AICAR (pronounced aye-car), which had been around since the 1980s and was being used in clinical trials for the treatment of ischemic reperfusion, a rare complication of coronary bypass surgery that occurs when blood flow restored to previously damaged arteries causes inflammation and damage to heart tissue.

“We knew AICAR could stimulate a more oxidative metabolism,” Evan says. “There were reports that it had been given to people, and activity in muscle had been measured. But these studies were all based on single injections. They weren't giving it once a day for 30 days. When we did that, the results were beautiful.”

Once again, here was an experimental compound readily available to scientists鈥攂ut one that nobody had thought to test in a high-dose way. Mice that hadn't done any exercise but were given AICAR could run 23 percent longer and 44 percent farther than sedentary mice that didn't get the drug.

Sure, it wasn't the doubling of endurance seen with GW1516. But the AICAR mice hadn't trained at all. They'd become remarkably fit by doing nothing.

ONCE WORD GOT OUT about AICAR and GW1516, Evans figured that human athletes would jump the gun and start ingesting the stuff. Before Evans published his Cell paper, he tipped off the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), the Montreal-headquartered outfit that sets drug-testing and enforcement policies adopted by every Olympic and many non-Olympic sports. WADA asked him to devise a test to detect the drugs in urine and blood and added both compounds to its list of banned substances. It didn't take long for the drug to make news: the French Anti-Doping Agency alleged that AICAR had been used by riders in the 2009 Tour de France, though it never came forward with specific allegations or named names.

Meanwhile, on supplements-oriented Web forums like RxMuscle.com, the buzz grew quickly. “I can't wait!” one poster declared. “Give me some of that GW1516!” Another wrote: “AICAR is already available on the grey market.” There's also an online clearinghouse, aicar.co.uk, which provides AICAR data and calls the compound “a new dawn in dieting and fitness 鈥� the revolutionary AICAR and GW1516 are the newest buddies of athletes.”

Other studies have shown that a healthy abundance of mitochondria can mitigate aging and make it easier to lose weight, factors that will likely extend AICAR and GW1516 use well beyond a handful of zealous endurance athletes. And as Evans points out, “These compounds are easy to make or obtain.” He shows me a Web site where a licensed research institute can buy GW1516 online; AICAR is also available from biotech suppliers. “Type 鈥榩urchase AICAR' into a search engine,” Evans suggests. I quickly find some, though it's not cheap: a thousand bucks for ten grams, about 20 times the street price of cocaine.

Though AICAR is easy to buy, that doesn't mean it's safe. “The big problem with AICAR is the side effects,” says Laurie Goodyear, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and senior investigator at the Joslin Diabetes Center. “Athletes would get a huge increase in lactic acid. There's also a molecular mutation in the heart that can lead to sudden death. Certainly there's a possibility that drugs could be developed to increase endurance. But I don't believe AICAR would improve performance in humans.” In 2008, Goodyear wrote an article for The New England Journal of Medicine that examined Evans's claims. Her parting advice: “Don't get too comfortable on that couch just yet.”

In addition, Evans's mice were couch potatoes that had never exercised. With a fitness baseline of zero, there's plenty of room to improve. “If you have a highly trained athlete that already has high levels of mitochondria,” Goodyear says, “it's possible they may get some benefit, but I don't think it would be really huge.”

Mark Davis, who directs the Exercise Biochemistry Laboratory at the University of South Carolina, believes that in elite athletes mitochondria hit a ceiling at some point, in part because “too many of them can actually be toxic to the cells.”

EVANS ISN'T DISSUADED, but he's also aware that the FDA won't approve any drug unless it has a specific disease application. So his team is focusing its resources and funding on identifying legitimate therapeutic uses for AICAR and GW1516. He's been talking with biotech firms about funding clinical trials that “target frailty, or people in wheelchairs who can't exercise, or who've gone through surgery and are bedridden.” There's also potential for treating diabetes, high cholesterol, obesity, metabolic disorders, and muscular dystrophy. Still, Evans isn't bashful about admitting where the real money will be made.

“If approved, this can be prescribed by doctors for anything you want,” he says. “And very few people in this country get the recommended minimum of 40 minutes a day of exercise. So when you ask me who would want a drug that confers some of the benefits of exercise without actually exercising, it would be the majority of the population.”

That's the kind of market pharmcos love鈥攁nd it's why Evans isn't the only one dreaming of riches. “We're doing the same thing with resveratrol as Evans did with AICAR,” says Johan Auwerx, a professor of energy metabolism at 脡cole Polytechnique F脡d脡rale de Lausanne, in Switzerland. “There is a healthy competition going on between us.” Resveratrol, in case you missed it being touted on Oprah, 60 Minutes, and Good Morning America, is a potent antioxidant found in the skins of red grapes. In mice given colossal doses鈥攖o match them, you'd have to chug something like 50,000 bottles of wine a day鈥攊t curbed aging, lowered blood sugar, slowed the spread of cancer, and spawned mitochondria.

“Our mice ran longer when we gave them resveratrol,” says Auwerx, who is now trying to identify other natural compounds more potent still, to be taken as an over-the-counter supplement.

Evans is one of only a few scientists targeting endurance through genes鈥攁nd that, he believes, gives him an edge. “A lot of people study the end result [of exercise] or study hormones,” he says. “But what controls everything is the genome. It's the heart of the entire system, and it's what I'm interested in changing.” First, though, he must test hordes of mice for every conceivable side effect, inject them with varying dosages of AICAR at different intervals to establish an optimal treatment program, and demonstrate that his compounds can do something other than just endow rodents (and ultimately humans) with superlative endurance. There's also that minor little discrepancy between rodent and human physiology: after all, the list of prototype miracle drugs that performed spectacularly in mice, and then failed catastrophically during human clinical trials, is long and sordid.

IN THE BASEMENT LAB at the Salk Institute, my escort鈥攁 bespectacled postdoc with a boyish smile, named Vihang Narkar鈥攔aises another concern. Athletes rely on mental stamina as much as they do physical fortitude to push through pain, a phenomenon that could make it tricky to accurately assess the potency of AICAR or GW1516 in people. Our tendency to either persevere or succumb is inextricably tied to both brain and brawn. But according to Narkar, mice bonk for only one reason: their muscles are simply depleted of every last bit of ATP.

While chatting with Narkar, I sort of forget about the “wild” mice we've left on the treadmill, which he'd set up earlier to demonstrate a typical training session. Neither has been tainted with the magic jock-juice, and they appear identical鈥攋ust two ordinary plump and furry rodents with no discerning features that might hint at physical prowess. They've been plodding along for 20 minutes or so without much fuss.

Then Narkar ups the belt speed to 18 meters per minute (roughly two-thirds of a mile per hour) and the mice burst into a gallop. He pushes it higher, to 22 meters per minute, and the mouse closest to me takes the lead鈥攁 born athlete, for sure鈥攚hile the slower mouse languishes. Suddenly, the speedy mouse dashes right off the end of the belt, springs from the treadmill, plummets four feet onto the floor, and is headed in a blind sprint for the door when Narkar nabs it with a lightning-fast lunge-and-swipe combo that he's definitely performed more than once.

I insist that Narkar mistakenly grabbed an AICAR mouse for this demonstration. “Some wild mice are just inherently better runners,” he says. It's apropos that he recognizes its natural athleticism鈥攐ften the game-changing wild card integral to competitive sports鈥攕ince he's part of a team developing drugs that could give any beer-bellied schlub a fast-track ticket to the peloton.

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Bahamas
Fly-Fishing

“PUT THE FLY RIGHT ON HIS HEAD” is the common refrain of sight-fishing guides to their clients standing knee-deep in the crystalline Atlantic waters off Long Island, a four-mile sand strip 165 miles south of Nassau. In some cases, the head belongs to a six-pound bonefish; in others it’s a tailing, manhole-cover-size permit. And when the fly drops, more often than not the fish devours it. So goes pretty much every experience with the crew from Bonafide Bonefishing. With everything from flats casting off white-sand beaches to raiding a secret permit stronghold accessible by a 45-minute boat ride from Stella Maris Resort, the 80-mile-long isle makes it tough to say they weren’t biting. Be sure to request either Docky or Alvin Smith, longtime guides who are often booked six months to a year in advance.

PLAYTIME: Bonafide offers day trips from Stella Maris for bonefishing, permit fishing, and reef fishing. Rental rods and gear are available, but they suggest that you bring your own. From $450 a day for two;

ISLAND LIVING: Relax in the newly developed Stella Maris’s Love Beach Bungalows. Set on five acres, each of the three cottages offers two-bedroom, two-bath accommodations, all facing a swimming lagoon and beaches. An SUV is available for unencumbered on-island excursions. From $1,365;

Antigua

Sailing

Antigua

SAILING IN THE CARIBBEAN? It’s tough to narrow down to just one island, we know, but if there’s a single place that balances both the sport and its well-lubricated after-hours lifestyle, it’s 108-square-mile Antigua. The island has become the quintessential yachtie hot spot and, from late April to early May, hosts more than 1,500 sailors during Stanford Antigua Sailing Week, the Caribbean’s second-largest regatta. More than 200 boats race in eight different classes, with participants ranging from landlubbers on chartered sloops to America’s Cup winners crewing billion-dollar boats. And when the sails drop, the long pours begin. The island’s own Antigua Distillery churns out award-winning rums (pick up a bottle of the English Harbour five-year-old). In Falmouth Harbour, where many of Sailing Week’s festivities take place, work your way from the Last Lemming to the Mad Mongoose and then on to Skullduggery, where it’s required that you have at least one espresso martini before hitting up the bars in English Harbour.

PLAYTIME: A slew of private charter companies like Horizon Yacht Charters, whose founder, Andrew Thompson, often races in Sailing Week, operate out of Antigua (a full list is available at ). Qualified captains can take off on their own, or you can always hire a skipper.

ISLAND LIVING: If you don’t feel like sleeping where you sail, grab a room at the newly opened鈥攁nd swanky鈥擜ntigua Yacht Club Marina and Resort, in Falmouth Harbour. They’ll even dock your boat for a daily rate. Doubles from $277;

Bonaire

Diving

Bonaire

THE AQUATIC BOUNTY and 80-plus-foot visibility in the waters off this arid, mostly flat isle 50 miles north of Venezuela inspire a kind of reef madness among scuba divers. “Bonaire has some of the nicest diving in the world,” says Bruce Bowker, who came to the island in 1973 as its first full-time dive instructor. “It’s like jumping into an aquarium.” Just a flutter-kick away from the island’s leeward shore, you’ll find seahorses, soft corals swaying like hula girls, and swirls of sergeant majors and blue tang. Eighty-nine buoy-marked dive sites, all within the Bonaire National Marine Park, shelter almost 500 species of fish鈥攎ore than can be found anywhere else in the Caribbean.

PLAYTIME: Bari Reef, on the island’s western shore, is said to be the best fish-spotting location in the Caribbean. Hook up with Bonaire Dive & 国产吃瓜黑料’s Jerry Ligon, a naturalist who can help you on your way to identifying more than 100 different species of fish. From $40;

ISLAND LIVING: Opened in September 2007 on a hillside overlooking the sea, La Pura Vista is a five-room guesthouse with a mosaic-tiled pool. Doubles from $125;

Puerto Rico

Surfing

Puerto Rico

A MULTISPORT DRAW, Puerto Rico offers enough mountain biking, hiking, snorkeling, and diving to keep an energetic visitor occupied for months. But it’s the surfing鈥攃entered around the town of Rinc贸n, on the western shore鈥� that you’ll come back for. Tied with Huntington Beach, California, for hosting the most ISA surfing events, Puerto Rico reigns as the surf mecca of the Caribbean, with 310 miles of coastline. “All the other islands have open windows, but they’re small,” says Rip Curl team rider and Puerto Rico native Brian Toth. “PR has huge open windows for swells to come through.” The 2007 World Masters had surfers barreling off Rinc贸n’s point break, Maria’s, which produces waves up to 14 feet. Toth’s favorite break? Jobos, near the town of Isabela, 45 minutes from Rinc贸n, which pumps perfect rights most days.

PLAYTIME: Waves break consistently from October through April鈥攑ass up the standard foam board for a lesson on a classic fiberglass longboard with Playa Brava Surf Underground. Surf-school owner Tupi Cabrera takes pride in his island because it has the widest variety of waves and, in his words, “it’s freakin’ cool!” Ninety-minute lessons from $40;

ISLAND LIVING: Rinc贸n’s luxurious Horned Dorset Primavera Hotel has 22 private, plunge-pool-adorned villas on four hillside oceanfront acres. Doubles from $610;

British Virgin Islands

Sea Kayaking

British Virgin Islands

WITH ABOUT 35 ISLANDS situated miles apart, consistent trade winds, and strong currents, the BVIs inspire connect-the-dots sea kayaking. But one route stands out: a 14-mile open-water crossing from Virgin Gorda to Anegada, a flat, coral-limestone island that was once a pirate haven with blissful beaches, low-slung brush, and almost as many iguanas and flamingos as locals. Horse Shoe Reef envelops the land in thick and treacherous coral growth, meaning boats need to steer clear or join the 200 or so offshore shipwrecks. But the inner-reef waters are ultra-calm, and your kayak will allow you to snug along the shoreline and squeeze through the narrow inlets to salt ponds, where you’ll find some of the Caribbean’s most diverse and abundant wildlife. Look for brown boobies, pelicans, herons, egrets, and ospreys flitting among the piles of conch shells. Then kayak to the north shore, where you can snorkel for treasure or paddle south to fish the flats.

PLAYTIME: Arawak Expeditions offers custom trips to Anegada and throughout the islands, as well as multi-day camping trips.

ISLAND LIVING: Virgin Gorda’s Biras Creek Resort is a luxurious, eco-friendly resort with 33 suites. Last year’s face-lift added two new plunge pools, a brand-new fleet of kayaks, and a bicycle for every guest. Doubles, $615;

St. Bart’s

Lazing & Eating

St. Bart’s

FROM PASTRY TO PARADISE is how your day on St. Bart’s will most likely start. You just need to make a couple of decisions: almond, chocolate, or butter croissant, monsieur? And then: quiet with great sunning or happening with great barefoot dining? Located about 15 miles east of St. Martin, where the Antilles chain bends to the south, tiny St. Barth茅lemy (just eight square miles) is the Frenchiest of the French West Indies. The mostly European visitors鈥攕ome 230,000 a year鈥攃ome to eat, drink, and lounge. It’s leisure as extreme sport. And it’s easy to spend $150 on lunch鈥攂ut worth it. For the tuna tartare at La Plage (), on St. Jean Beach. For the tiger prawns at Le Bartolom茅o, at the Hotel Guanahani (). For anything on the menu at the St. Barth’s Isle de France ().

PLAYTIME: Digest in peace on a secluded beach, like Governeur or Saline. You can also windsurf at St. Jean, surf at Lorient, and scuba-dive in offshore reserves.

ISLAND LIVING: Do like those in the know and rent a private villa from an agency such as St. Barth Properties ().

Islas Los Roques

Snorkeling & Exploring

Islas Los Roques

EACH MORNING, while the sun warms the sea and the pelicans bomb sardines, the small harbor in Los Roques, Venezuela, slowly comes alive. Here, about 100 miles north of Caracas, sits arguably the largest concentration of beautiful beaches in the hemisphere鈥攕ome 42 islands of white sand, with turquoise lagoons and only one town among all of them. Gran Roque (pop. 1,600) has breezy inns, an espresso bar, and sandy streets plied only by flip-flops. But wander down to the harbor and you’ll find the fishermen. They’re the ones with literally a menu of deserted islands nearby, and for $15 or less they’ll take you and your snorkeling gear there. “Francisqui? Crasqui?” they say. “Which island you like today?” The decision isn’t easy. There’s premium snorkeling among hundreds of thousands of tiny silversides off Crasqui, a 30-minute boat ride away, and great diving in the coral pinnacles of La Guaza, which teems with jacks and grouper. But of all the islands and all the beaches and all the things to do鈥擣rancisqui for kiteboarding, Cayo de Agua for lagoons, and so on鈥擟ayo Muerto, just a 20-minute ride away, is particularly special. A sandbar 500 paces long surrounded by a sea so clear you could mistake it for air, “Death Key” is the classic deserted island of castaway fantasies.

PLAYTIME: If riding a fishing boat isn’t for you, Ecobuzos Dive 国产吃瓜黑料s runs boats out of Gran Roque to various destinations off Los Roques. $35;

ISLAND LIVING: Gran Roque’s newest inn, Posada Natura Viva, features a quiet courtyard and a predominantly Italian clientele and can help arrange everything from flights to renting snorkeling gear. $247;

St. Lucia

Mountain Biking

St. Lucia

FORGET THE BEACHES. The mountain biking on St. Lucia has visitors looking inland, where riders can rip past waterfalls and saman trees on dozens of singletrack trails and fire roads throughout the 238-square-mile island. The best riding is in the 400-acre Anse Mamin Plantation’s 12-mile network of jungle-lined track, dedicated solely to knobby tires. Suitable for a range of abilities, the trails wind through the old sugarcane fields and offer opportunities for freeriders to drop some of the plantation’s original stone walls and stairways. The biggest challenge? The two-mile Tinker Juarez Trail, designed by the endurance mountain biker and two-time Olympian. This climb to the top of a 900-foot peak has been completed only once sans hiking, by Tinker himself.

PLAYTIME: Bike St. Lucia provides Cannondale F800 mountain bikes for day use. $89 per day;

ISLAND LIVING: The new Jade Mountain Resort, which is connected to the Anse Mamin Plantation, features private “sanctuaries” that have infinity pools with views of the Piton Mountains. Doubles from $1,020;

Turks and Caicos Islands

Kiteboarding

Turks and Caicos Islands

UNTIL RECENTLY, IT WAS SCUBA DIVERS who salivated over the turquoise waters and Technicolor reefs. But recently, kiteboarders have discovered the Turks and Caicos鈥攁 166-square-mile archipelago in the eastern Caribbean鈥攁nd it’s fast becoming a hallowed destination for world-class riding. During the winter, cold fronts rolling across the lower 48 arm-wrestle with the prevailing trades blowing from the east. A deadlock ensues, and that puts the squeeze on, blasting the Turks and Caicos from January to May with buttery-smooth winds. Bathwater-warm seas let you leave the wetsuit at home, and its proximity to the North Atlantic ensures there’s always a swell if you have an appetite for big surf.

PLAYTIME: The Kitehouse is a full-service international kiteboarding outfitter run by pro Paul Menta. Full-day lessons from $300;

ISLAND LIVING: Menta loves houseguests. An upscale suite at his new villa runs from $150 a day, including gear.

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