Outside Podcast

Joe Stone doesn’t do anything halfway. Back when he was a skater, he went big. When he partied, he went hard. When he took up skydiving and speed-flying, he flew almost every day. Then one day he crashed and became a C7 quadriplegic. What do you do when you’re addicted to adrenaline but confined to a wheelchair? A lot of stuff that no one else has ever done before.

On the morning of May 25, 2006,  Myles Osborne was poised to become one of the last climbers of the season to summit Mount Everest. The weather was perfect, and it seemed nothing would stop his team. Then a flapping of orange fabric caught his eye. He believed it to be a tent—until the fabric spoke: “I imagine you’re surprised to see me here.” The speaker was Lincoln Hall, who'd been reported dead the night before. He was gloveless, frostbitten, and hallucinating—but alive. Osborne's expedition was faced with a dilemma: would they stay and help Hall, giving up the summit and endangering their own lives? Or finish this once-in-a-lifetime journey that had been years in the making? We explore the choice they made and look into the fascinating science around how we make decisions in high-risk environments—and live with them afterward.

What’s the cure for our modern malaise of stress, distraction, and screen addiction? Nature, of course. But while many people advocate the benefits of getting outside, we are only just beginning to understand what really happens to us when we venture out the door. For her new book, The Nature Fix, Outside contributing editor Florence Williams expands on a 2012 feature she wrote about Japanese forest bathing, delving deep into the fascinating science behind the restorative power of wild places. Outside editor Christopher Keyes talks with Williams about the research being done around the world to investigate how spending more time in nature can make us healthier, happier, and even more creative.

In the summer of 1970, Ed Welch and Bruce Frey put in a canoe at the headwaters of the Amazon and shoved off into the current. Their only plan was to travel downstream until it wasn’t fun anymore. They had a rifle, they had a machete, they had a vague idea of how to survive in the jungle. Then a jaguar chased both of them up a tree.

Denmark's rugged Faroe Islands are known for sheep, rowboats, and a brutal tradition called “The Grind” in which Faroese men butcher hundreds of pilot whales by hand, on the beach, in full view of locals and tourists. Reporter Joel Carnegie traveled to the islands last summer to try to understand the cultural forces that sustain the bloody practice. What's the point if the whales are no longer needed for income or food (and the meat may contain toxic levels of mercury)? And what happens when an anti-whaling environmental group shows up telling them to stop—or else?

Writer Mark Sundeen spent the last three years chronicling the lives of three couples who have dropped out of mainstream society, trading cars, technology, and electricity for freedom and hard work on the new American frontier. The result is his latest book, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America, a fascinating, timely, and deeply personal examination of what it means to be a non-conformist in the modern age. Editor Chris Keyes talks with the frequent Outside contributor, who wrote a feature for the January/February 2017 issue on the tiny-house movement and has been described as the "our poet laureate of alternative lifestyles."

Wolf howls, bird songs, crickets, frogs—soundscapes contain clues to not only what's going on around us but also who we are. Not just as individuals, but as human beings. Or at least, that's what Bernie Krause says. Krause is a soundscape artist who's spent decades collecting the sounds of the natural world and contemplating their meaning. In this piece, producer Tim Hinman from the podcast Sound Matters talks to Krause about how soundscapes work, what they can tell us about our world, and why audio ecology should be an integral part of how we think about conservation.

“If you're not at the table, you're on the menu,” says Sally Jewell. Hopeful, thoughtful, slightly ticked-off, and surprisingly emotional, the outgoing Secretary of the Interior talks with Outside editor Chris Keyes about the presidential election and what it means for the future of public lands. Can environmental protections be dismantled? Will they? Are we going to see an increase in Malheur Wildlife Refuge-style occupations? America's chief steward reflects on leaving her post and what we can expect from the next administration.

Dan  Futrell and Isaac Stonerand are back from searching through the wreckage of Eastern Airlines Flight 980 on a remote mountain in Bolivia, and their findings have prompted a whole new set of questions. Will anyone look at the material they brought back to the U.S.? Who hired climber Bernardo Guarachi to get to the crash site back in 1985? And why did he never speak to anyone about his ascent? Have the details of the crash remained a mystery because of international cover up or just bad weather and bad luck? In this episode, we delve more into the seemingly unsolvable mystery of a 1985 airplane collision and the two men trying to solve it.

Since colliding with a Bolivian mountain in 1985, Eastern Airlines Flight 980 has been frozen inside a glacier perched on the edge of a 3,000-foot drop. With wreckage now melting out of the ice at the base of the cliff, Dan Futrell and Isaac Stoner travel to the debris field at 16,000 feet, battling altitude sickness and a roller coaster of emotions as they search for 980’s missing flight recorder.