There are times, more than I鈥檇 care to admit, an hour and a half into a trainer ride in my freezing garage, staring at my bike avatar move through virtual landscapes of Zwift, when my gear is growing moss and the walls are closing in the way do at Disney鈥檚 Haunted Mansion ride, that I suddenly feel the urge to shed the cloying comforts of home and go for some long trek through a foreign landscape.

If only, I鈥檝e often thought, I had an 国产吃瓜黑料 Buddy鈥攕omeone who would always be there, nodding along as I detailed my latest hazily conceptualized scheme: I just read about the most remote pub in the UK. They鈥檒l buy you a beer if you hike in. It takes a few days. You up for it? To complicate things, my mind never seems to drift to the local, the achievable (say, a day-hike in the Poconos) for which I might actually drum up a companion. I generate quixotic ideas that call for veritable Sancho Panzas.

The trusty companion of trail and tent is an idea鈥攁lmost a romantic longing鈥攖hat haunts the world of outdoor exploits. You think of famous climbing partnerships like Conrad Anker and Jimmy Chin, or Tommy Caldwell and Alex Honnold. If you鈥檙e me, you think of writers like William Finnegan, in his surfing memoir Barbarian Days, cavorting around the globe with his buddy Bryan Di Salvatore. Finnegan once evinced the bromance aspect of the whole thing. 鈥淵ou go to extreme lengths, and you do it together, so these friendships really get tested,鈥� he told Alta Journal. 鈥淵ou want that great wave, but it鈥檚 much greater if your friend sees you get that great wave. It鈥檚 a dense sort of homoerotic world you live in.鈥� The same, of course, can be true of female adventure friendships.

I鈥檓 not alone in my hunger for shared adventure. You see it on the partner boards at shops like Denver鈥檚 Wilderness Exchange, where people put up cards listing their preferred pursuit and available dates (鈥淎lways,鈥� being my favorite). You see it in endless online queries from people new to a town who don鈥檛 have anyone to join them in the outdoors. The URL will take you to a site, based in Alaska, looking to pair people up. 鈥淲hat a great idea!鈥� one commenter wrote. 鈥淛ust what Alaska needs … So many things to do, but not always easy to find the people to go with.鈥�

Indeed.

As it turns out, I actually do have an ideal adventure buddy in mind: my friend Wayne Chambliss. Wayne鈥攃urrently doing post-graduate work in London on geography, part of which involves him being 鈥渋nhumed,鈥� or buried underground鈥攊s pretty much up for anything, no matter how grueling, how ill-advised, how quasi-legal. He鈥檚 got an outdoor CV that is impressively outlandish.

All this raises a question: What, in fact, makes for a good adventure buddy?

There was the time near Utqiagvik, Alaska, that he had to outsprint a polar bear鈥攖his just after he鈥檇 taken bolt cutters to his wedding ring, chucking half of it, in some Tolkienesque rite, onto the frozen Beaufort Sea. Or the time, for lack of planning, he was forced to do a fifty-one-mile single-push circumambulation of Oregon鈥檚 Three Sisters volcanic peaks. He鈥檚 been submerged in a homemade submarine, along with its maker, off the coast of Honduras; he鈥檚 been airlifted into the wilds of Canada for a kayaking trip, without much knowing how to kayak. He鈥檚 crossed the Grand Canyon from rim to rim to rim, walked through Chernobyl鈥檚 zone of exclusion, and traversed Death Valley on foot (twice). Wayne is also a ferocious magpie of information, an endless spinner of theories and weaver of connections, a writer of feverish, private dispatches. Once, when I was asked him for any off-the-cuff thoughts for a potential story on treasure, he responded immediately:

鈥淗ey, Tom. An interesting question. I鈥檒l give it some thought. In the meantime, are you considering botanical rarities like ghost orchids or Pennantia baylisiana, or last surviving speakers of languages, or the gold that Rumi帽ahui ordered hidden in the Llanganates Mountains, or the Nazi gold hidden in Lower Silesia, or the one viable REE mine in the U.S. (now owned by a Chinese concern), or how antimatter (of which less than twenty nanograms have been produced thus far, I believe) costs ~$62.5 trillion per gram, or the lone copy of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin (which would be a great opportunity to interview the Wu-Tang Clan, and maybe Bill Murray), the disassembly of the Codex Leicester鈥︹��

I will cut it off there. But it went on. And it was the first of three emails. Suffice it to say, we could spend weeks on an outing without running out of things to talk about. There is just one problem in all of this: Wayne and I have never actually done any adventures together. Our failure to connect can be explained away by that tangled alchemy of time pressure, work commitments, having a family, and the general financial state of the creative precariat. Call it real life.

The closest we got was when I randomly discovered we were both in Quito, Ecuador, at the same time. I was working on a magazine piece about a spate of new luxury high-rises built by big-name architects. He was , the active volcano that shimmers distantly over the city. Flopping on my bed at night after another lavish, wine-heavy dinner, I felt a bit trapped, like Martin Sheen鈥檚 character in Apocalypse Now, stewing in Saigon: 鈥淓very minute I stay in this room, I get weaker.鈥� Wayne was out there in the bush, getting stronger.

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In the summer of 2023, climbers Tommy Caldwell and Alex Honnold tackled an adventure of monumental size: they biked, hiked, and sailed 2,600 miles from Colorado to Alaska, and then ascended a massive granite monolith deep in Tongass National Forest called the Devil’s Thumb. The duo made history: they became the first climbers to ascend the 9,000-foot formation’s five jagged peaks鈥攁 challenge known as the Diablo Traverse鈥攊n a single day.

The adventure is the focal point of聽National Geographic’s聽latest feature-length documentary, titled聽The Devil’s Climb,聽which debuted in October. Caldwell, who conceived of the adventure, spoke with 国产吃瓜黑料 about some of the most pivotal moments that were left out of the film.

鈥淲e spent four days doing like a quarter mile an hour bushwhacking through the Alaskan wilderness,鈥� Caldwell said. 鈥淚t was the hardest part of the whole trip, all the way from Colorado, but none of it鈥檚 in the film.鈥�

Most climbers attempting to scale the Devil’s Thumb get there via helicopter. But for the film, Caldwell and Honnold spent 38 days biking 2,320 miles from his home in Estes Park, Colorado, to the tiny town of Prince Rupert, British Columbia, where the roadway ends. Then, the duo sailed for ten days up the Alaskan Panhandle, before trekking 20 more miles to reach the peak.

The hike to the peak should have been relatively straightforward, following a historical route up a glacier. But the glacier had melted into a lake of slush and icebergs when the duo reached it. So instead, Caldwell, Honnold, and the eight-person National Geographic film crew had to chart a new route in the adjacent valley鈥攁n old-growth temperate rainforest.

Caldwell recalls being 鈥渟oaked to the bone鈥� by the dense, wet understory, fighting his way through ten-foot tall Devil鈥檚 Club, a shrub covered top-to-bottom in noxious thorns, for 鈥渉ours and hours.鈥� One of the crew developed trench foot. Another almost fell to their death while the group was hiking after dark along a steep, forested hillside above Class V rapids.

鈥淭hey lost their footing and just disappeared through the forest below us,鈥� Caldwell said. 鈥淲e thought they fell into the rapids. Luckily, they stuck it right at the lip of the cliff.鈥�

Caldwell and Honnold鈥檚 longest, most sustained effort of the entire journey occurred during that trek. They put in 15-20 hour hiking days because it was impossible to move quickly through the vegetation. 鈥淭he bush is so thick,鈥� Caldwell says, 鈥渢here were periods were we didn鈥檛 even touch the ground, where were just kind of like hovering.鈥�

He hit rock bottom, mentally, during the trek, and credits the filming crew with renewing his focus. 鈥淲e鈥檙e bushwhacking in the rainforest, completely wet, kind of lost, just miserable, and suddenly one of the guys who loves to sing starts beatboxing,鈥� Caldwell said. 鈥淭he whole crew joins in and starts rapping, making up this song.鈥�

The spontaneous injection of levity was exactly what Caldwell needed. 鈥淭he film was very focused on Alex and I,鈥� he said, 鈥渂ut there were so many other people who were a big part of it for me.鈥�

One of those people is Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard. Caldwell and Honnold spent a couple days at Chounaird鈥檚 house during the early portion of their expedition, while biking through Jackson, Wyoming. Caldwell originally dreamed up of the Devil鈥檚 Thumb climb as a way to shine a spotlight on the Tongass National Forest. Specifically the need to protect it from logging and other development鈥攁 cause also championed by Chouinard, who Caldwell said is 鈥渆ssentially my boss鈥� these days.

Besides being a professional climber, Caldwell also works for Patagonia as a Global Sports Activist. 鈥淎 big part of my job is trying to figure out places that have a conservation need and a climbing component,鈥� he said.

Chouinard was part of the reason Caldwell decided to expand the Diablo Traverse into an epic adventure, to do it human-powered, and to do with his best friend Honnold. Caldwell had recently read A Wild Idea, a biography by author Jonathan Franklin about the late businessman and conservationist Doug Tompkins, and was inspired by the conservation work (and expeditions) Tompkins and Chouinard had done together in Patagonia.

Caldwell calls his and Honnold鈥檚 time with Chouinard the 鈥渕ost endearing鈥� part of their journey. Biking to Chouinard鈥檚 home, Caldwell quickly realized how many of the original houses in Jackson had been scraped to build mansions. Not Chouinard鈥檚. It is the same as it was 50 years ago when it was purchased. Pedaling up the driveway, Caldwell noticed a beater Subaru, 鈥渢he shittiest car I鈥檝e ever seen in my life,鈥� with a bumper sticker proclaiming “Every billionaire is a policy failure.”

Chouinard stepped out of the modest home to greet Caldwell and Honnold. 鈥淗e鈥檚 wearing this stained white t-shirt and these jeans that he probably got when he’s a teenager that he’s cobbled back together with hand-stitched patches,鈥� Caldwell said. 鈥淎nd we were like, Oh my god, he really lives it.鈥�

Caldwell had hoped that the conservation angle would have been a larger part of the documentary film. Particularly the time he and Honnold spent with an Indigenous leader and activist named Marina Anderson on Prince of Wales Island, while they were sailing in the Tongass National Forest archipelago. Caldwell first met Anderson at a climate conference in Miami, and was excited to learn about her home region鈥檚 ecology and biodiversity.

While the cameras were rolling, Anderson taught the climbers about the importance of temperate rainforests (Tongass National Forest is the world鈥檚 largest at nearly 17 million acres) and took them salmon fishing. Those scenes were ultimately cut. 鈥淚t was a little bit of a hard pill to swallow, honestly,鈥� Caldwell said. 鈥淲e were ultimately making this story to save the forest.鈥�

Want more of 国产吃瓜黑料鈥檚 in-depth coverage of adventure stories like this one? .

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Jessie Diggins鈥� life revolves around snow. She is, after all, the most decorated Nordic skier in U.S. history. But recently, it鈥檚 not the snow itself that鈥檚 top of mind for her; it鈥檚 the lack of it. Losing winter as we know it鈥攁long with the other environmental ravages of climate change and a warming globe鈥攈as become one of her biggest sources of worry and motivation.

鈥淚 want my grandkids someday to have the opportunity to learn cross-country skiing,鈥� Diggins told OBJ. 鈥淢aybe they like it, and maybe they don鈥檛. But at least I want them to get the chance to experience winter the way we knew it growing up.鈥�

Earlier this year, that wish brought the three-time Olympic medal winner to Capitol Hill聽to lobby for a wonky-sounding bill that could help : the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which finally became law on August 16.

She鈥檚 not the only pro athlete getting involved in politics. Environmental concerns聽also brought Tommy Caldwell, one of the planet鈥檚 best rock climbers, and Colorado senator John Hickenlooper together for a climb last fall, so that Caldwell could bend the senator鈥檚 ear about his climate concerns. Mountaineer Conrad Anker has paid repeated visits to the offices of Montana senators Jon Tester and Steve Daines for the same reason. And pioneering climber Phil Henderson, the leader of the first all-Black American team to summit Everest, is out pounding the pavement, encouraging his community to , when he鈥檚 not making sports history.

As athlete activism , some fans are for folks like Diggins, Caldwell, Anker, and Henderson to stay in their lanes and quiet down. Whatever the haters may say, their efforts are working. The four athletes, working with nonprofit , were among the many voices that helped move the IRA over the finish line. The law tackles health care costs, tax codes, and pollution in historically marginalized communities, and also contains the largest climate investment聽in U.S. history.

鈥淭his puts us on a path for energy security in the 21st century,鈥� said Mario Molina, POW鈥檚 executive director. 鈥淚t will also help us reach our commitment under the Paris Agreement聽of 40 percent greenhouse-gas emissions reduction from 2005 levels by 2030.鈥�

But the fight isn鈥檛 over.

A little over a week after President Biden signed the bill into law, 国产吃瓜黑料 Business Journal sat down with these four athletes, along with Molina of POW, to ask what the legislation means to them, their careers, and the broader outdoor community鈥攁nd what still needs to be done to ensure a safe future for our planet. The below conversation has been edited for聽clarity.

Of all the ways you could spend your time, why advocate for climate-change legislation and the Inflation Reduction Act?聽

Jessie Diggins: It doesn鈥檛 matter if you鈥檙e a huge fan of fresh powder or you鈥檙e聽into fly fishing or trail running, we鈥檙e聽all invested in some way in being outdoors, breathing clean air, enjoying the amazing environment, and protecting our crazy-cool outdoor playgrounds.

Tommy Caldwell: I don鈥檛 like politics, and I don鈥檛 really like the idea of lobbying. But I do understand that policy is our quickest way to make a change. At the very least, I want to slow down climate change so we can extend the health and wellbeing of our children and our children鈥檚 children. This is really about future generations.

And will this law actually protect our planet, in your view? Or at least help?

Mario Molina: Under a business-as-usual scenario, where we don’t do anything at all, we are on a trajectory to reach warming of 3.5 to 4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. Everything that we鈥檙e experiencing now鈥攖he heatwave that we just had, the increase in hurricanes, floods, reduced snowpack, the unreliability of winter, droughts and fires out West鈥攊s the consequence of about 1.2 degrees.

Say you鈥檙e mountain biking down a 40-degree slope and you see a cement wall in front of you. When is it too late to hit the brakes? Do you want to hit that at 50 miles per hour? Or do you want to hit it at 25 miles per hour? We are going to continue to see the impact [of climate change], but there is a scenario in which those impacts are manageable, and we were able to protect some semblance of seasonality.

What has that 1.2-degree warming, and the resulting climate changes, looked like for you on trails and mountains over the course of your careers?

JD: A couple of years back, we started our World Cup season with the pre-camp in Finland in Rovaniemi, which is right on the edge of the Arctic Circle. Even there, the trails had completely melted out, they were full of rocks and dirt and puddles, and it was down to a very thin layer of man-made snow. We would jog home after skiing these small loops on this dirty snow, and there would be little flowers and green moss and plants blooming on the side of the trail鈥攊n November! In the Arctic Circle! For me, that was just really shocking. It brings it home that nowhere is safe.

Phil Henderson: The biggest example I can give is from Mount Kenya in 2000, where I spent a lot of time, and where there are permanent ice fields. The route to one of the higher peaks is easy [Editor鈥檚 note: easy for you, Phil]. I went back in 2010, and that ice was gone, those permanent ice fields were pretty much gone.

Similar story: I went to Kilimanjaro in 2000, and then back in 2018, and again what you see is shrinking glaciers, ice that鈥檚聽not there anymore. So I鈥檝e聽seen it with my eyes in places that most people will never see. But others see it in their cities, in the urban areas: winter coming later, the snowpack being far more shallow, no runoff in the rivers.

Tommy Caldwell: I started noticing the glacier changes in the mountains鈥攖hat鈥檚聽really obvious. As glaciers melt out, the mountains are thawing and starting to fall down in certain places. Beyond that, the two places where I spend most of my time, Colorado and Yosemite,聽are drastically changed because of forest fires. Once, the summertime was an incredible climbing season; now a lot of the time we鈥檙e聽stuck inside because of the air quality.

What do you mean by that? Mountains are actually falling down?

TC: Ice is melting out of the cracks. I first started to notice it in Patagonia. Mountains melted and moved, and that created ,聽but also just completely sporadic rockfall, whole sides of the mountain.

Conrad Anker: The original ascent route of The Ogre [in Pakistan鈥檚 Karakoram Range] is completely melted out. It鈥檚聽not climbable from a safety parameter. Think of it like this. If you鈥檝e聽ever scraped ice off in your driveway on a cold day, it鈥檚聽completely stuck there. You chip so hard, you end up breaking the concrete. If you鈥檙e聽an ice climber, you want those conditions. But then on a warm day, when there鈥檚聽a bed of water underneath it鈥攚hich is what happened this year in the Marmolada Glacier Collapse [in the Dolomites]鈥攖hat鈥檚 when things move.

So while this bill likely won鈥檛 stop some of those changes, it sounds like it could help them from getting worse. Where does it fall short?聽

MM: We would have loved not to see oil leases included in the bill. The International Energy Agency has said pretty emphatically that in order to reach the 1.5-degree Paris target, there can鈥檛聽be any new fossil fuel development.

Now, having said that, rarely in politics do you get something done that doesn鈥檛聽get criticism from both sides. If you鈥檙e聽getting criticism from both sides, you鈥檝e聽probably struck somewhere in the middle of the best you could get.

What are some of the tangible, immediate benefits of the climate portions of the bill?

CA: Near-term, if we have more solar panels and wind towers, those two industries hire from the climbing community.聽They put advertisements in the magazines that talk to those people; they actively recruit within them. So there鈥檚聽going to be more climbers working on towers and using their skills. We鈥檙e聽going to create jobs. Here in Montana, we鈥檙e a coal state but have a tremendous amount of wind and solar potential. The law will put people to work.

TC: I moved into a new house a few years ago and I鈥檝e聽been debating putting solar on鈥擨鈥檒l admit, it does seem a little bit expensive. This [the bill’s Residential Clean Energy Credit, which allows homeowners to subtract 30 percent of solar costs from their federal taxes through 2032] just moves the needle to a place that makes it a no-brainer. If that can happen for me, on my house, it can happen for other people.

What鈥檚 next then? Where do we go from here?

MM: The work that鈥檚 left won’t be done in our lifetime. That鈥檚聽something we have to recognize. But this is a massive quantum leap. Number one is clean-energy permitting and number two is interconnection and transmission [of that energy]. We have to make permitting far more effective, far more efficient. After that, the focus is grid upgrades.

What can we do as people who love the outdoors?

JD: . And not just every four years. Vote this fall [in the midterms]. We鈥檝e聽seen history made in the margins of elections, in the smallest numbers you can imagine. That can actually make a big swing and change the course of what will happen and what laws are able to be passed.

PH: Look at your daily life, and minimize as much energy use as you possibly can. If you can use solar, switch to solar. If you can drive an electric car, drive an electric car. If you can ride a bike, ride a bike. If you can walk, walk. We just have to really change our way of thinking and living on a day-to-day basis.

Even with everything you鈥檝e seen鈥攕ki trails melting, mountains crumbling鈥攄o you feel hopeful?

TC: It鈥檚聽amazing how my mood can go from feeling pretty discouraged to feeling very hopeful just based on this one bill. Once this version of the bill finally passed, I did find myself filled with hope.

JD: We need to remember that we鈥檙e聽not at the end of the race yet鈥攁nd this is a very, very long race. But I think it鈥檚聽important to celebrate where we are right now, and then to keep looking forward, using our voices, and not taking for granted how amazing the outdoors are. Every time I get out to ski, I have to remind myself how incredible that opportunity is, and that we have to fight to protect it. It鈥檚聽when we start taking things for granted that we鈥檙e most at risk of losing them.

Editor’s note: Protect Our Winters is an 国产吃瓜黑料. . POW is focused on sparking the civic engagement that fuels big climate policy wins like the Inflation Reduction Act.

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