Back in 2014, pro climber Alex Honnold gave us a tour of the 2002 Ford Econoline E150 he used as his mobile base camp. That van served him...
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Back in 2014, pro climber Alex Honnold gave us a tour of the 2002 Ford Econoline E150 he used as his mobile base camp. That van served him well—he put 190,000 miles on it over nine years—but Honnold recently upgraded to a 2016 Dodge Ram ProMaster, which is roomier and more comfortable. Photographer Max Whittaker got to peek inside the new digs late last month while Honnold was climbing in Yosemite.
I’m strapped into the rear seat of a 2019 Subaru Forester Touring, an all-wheel-drive SUV, anxiously awaiting the start of the 2019 Oregon Trail Rally recce day.
Recce, otherwise known as reconnaissance, is a pre-rally driving activity that allows teams to run each stage’s course to scout the roads and write their own pace notes, an integral part of rallying; it’s created to help drivers understand changes in the road and surrounding areas, so when the three-day rally begins, they’re intimately familiar with the route. It’s also the perfect way to find out what the Forester is capable of off pavement.
I’m riding with Michelle Miller, a seasoned codriver, Oregon Trail Rally competitor, and one of DirtFish Rally School’s driving instructors, and her husband, Chris Miller, who’s behind the wheel. Michelle will manage the GoPros, Monit rally computer, and pace notes. While many Subarus are actually used for rally racing (namely WRXs and older Imprezas, for their speed and precise handling), Foresters, which are slower and taller, are great recce rigs. They’re nimble, responsive, and sure-footed at the lower speeds required to create sound pace notes. Our Forester is equipped with a 182-horsepower, 2.5-liter, four-cylinder boxer engine mated to a continuously variable transmission (CVT), which shifts seamlessly through a continuous range of effective gear ratios.
After two passes through three stages, Michelle notes that the Forester is a very well-balanced and comfortable ride. Over the course of the day and a few dozen on- and off-road miles, she’s able to write neatly over rough terrain and not get carsick. Our speed varies from crawling over washed-out, rocky areas to spirited driving through long tarmac sweeps.
Michelle described the Forester as “very roomy and open,” with an engine that has “good and consistent power delivery, along with very good brakes.” She thought it rode well over rough gravel and rutted roads. “It was super comfortable,” she says. Chris added that the Forester felt solid and quiet, especially given the gravel and dirt-filled miles traversed. “The power delivery is also impressive—it felt torquey all the way up,” he says. “It’s linear and smooth, which made it easy to drive off pavement.”
The Forester’s active AWD system can vary power distribution to the wheels to suit whatever terrain you’re tackling. This system adjusts speed to each wheel individually to keep you on track. This helps prevent sliding around a corner when you’re headed up a snowy mountain pass or slipping on asphalt when it’s rainy, and it aids in recovery if you start to lose control. I spent over four hours piloting the Forester over dirt and gravel and on highways. It felt planted when attacking tight, hard-packed dirt corners, and it eased over bumps and washed-out areas—the vehicle’s capabilities really go far beyond rally prep.
The fifth-generation model was completely redesigned for 2019, with a stiffer platform, quieter and larger interior cabin, and improved safety. The new Subaru Global Platform uses hot-pressed, ultrahigh tensile steel in key areas of the structure. This design offers significant increases in safety, stability, rigidity, ride comfort, and noise reduction, all of which we experienced while running recce. Subaru’s choice to use this type of steel also means less metal framework and more space, resulting in greater visibility, wider openings for the rear doors and gate, as well as more passenger and cargo space.
In addition, the Forester Touring offers tons of active and passive safety technology. EyeSight driver-assist technology uses two cameras to spot and alert you to hazards, such as pedestrians, or when you stray from your lane. It also features the DriverFocus distraction-mitigation system, a monitoring process that uses infrared sensors and facial recognition to pinpoint driver distraction and warn you when you’re not paying attention. And along with the tech upgrades, it sports seven airbags (two frontal ones, two side-pelvis and torso airbags, two side-curtain airbags, and one at the driver’s knees).
The Forester is great for one person and their gear or small families with their stuff, so you’ll have no trouble driving your mountain bikes to the trailhead or kayaks to the sea. If you still need more space, check out the Subaru Outback or Subaru’s new Ascent—a three-row SUV with seating for up to eight people. These models have Subaru’s famous AWD, new steel platform, and many of the same safety features. Ultimately, for those looking to tackle dirt, sand, snow, and highways with one adventuremobile, the Forester is a solid pick for solo explorers and families alike.
On October 1, the Pacific Crest Trail Association (PCTA) announced a new permitting system that will affect all of the trail’s prospective thru-hikers starting in the 2020 season. Stricter regulations have been added to both north- and southbound hikes to more evenly distrubute crowds in both directions. The changes are intended to combat the significant increase in long-distance trail use over the past five years.
Perhaps the most surprising change for the incoming class of PCT hikers is the addition of a required southbound hiking permit. Previously, only northbound hikers needed one, but now, so will those who wish to hike 500 or more continuous miles starting anywhere from Canadian border through Stehekin, Washington. Every day, 15 permits will be available for thru-hikers for start dates between June 15 and July 31. After that, an additional 15 long-distance permits will be available for horseback riders and section hikers heading south between August 1 and September 15. The lottery for these permits will open at 10:30 A.M. PST on January 14, 2020.
Southbound travelers aren’t the only ones affected by the PCT’s new rules. A minor tweak to the northbound permitting season has also been made: in addition to the 50-hikers-per-day quota that was first implemented in 2013, all thru-hikers starting at or near the Mexican border between March 1 and May 31 will need a designated permit.
At 10:30 A.M. PST on October 29, the lottery will open for the first 35 daily permits to head north in March. There’s also a more last-minute-rush lottery for hikers who don’t nab a permit this October: the remaining 15 permits per day will be issued alongside the southbound permits on the morning of January 14.
The PCTA also implemented stricter rules in central Oregon for upcoming seasons. In the Mount Jefferson, Mount Washington, and Three Sisters Wilderness areas, long-distance thru-hikers will be required to camp inside the PCT corridor (a half-mile on either side of the trail) and will be prohibited from camping in the Obsidian, North and South Matthieu Lakes, Coyote and Shale Lakes, and Jefferson Park areas. These rules will go into effect in 2020 or 2021.
But hands down, the biggest change to hit the PCT next year will be the requirement that all hikers travel the 250-plus miles between California’s Kennedy Meadows South and Sonora Pass in one continuous trip. In other words, hikers can no longer skip the Sierra Nevada due to high snow or bad weather, fly north to hike in Oregon or Washington, and then zip back down south to finish the Sierra in late summer, when conditions are more favorable.
“The John Muir Trail is incredibly popular during the peak hiking season with day hikers, weekend backpackers, section hikers, JMT hikers, and PCT long-distance hikers,” says Mark Larabee, associate director of communications for the PCTA. Those who choose to flip-flop segments to avoid the snow put undue pressure on this already-impacted ecosystem, which affects the sustainability of the PCT itself. The PCTA now expects that thru-hikers will proceed in a more continuous motion through the Sierra, protecting this iconic mountain range for future adventurers.
Of course, trekkers will still be allowed to exit the Sierra and travel to nearby towns for a quick resupply in Lone Pine, California, or a much needed zero day in Mammoth Lakes, for example, but any gap of more than seven days on a hiker’s itinerary will effectively void their permit. “If people want to skip a section of the southern Sierra and return when conditions are more favorable, they’re welcome to do it, but they will need a local-agency permit,” says Larabee.
The U.S. Forest Service has instituted this change to prevent overcrowding in one of the most popular wilderness areas in the country. In 2014, 2,655 long-distance hiking permits were issued by the PCTA. That number has since skyrocketed to 7,313 permits issued in 2018, and the southern Sierra is one of the hardest hit places in terms of foot traffic.
Across the board, the new, expanded permits aren’t intended to persecute already overwhelmed hikers but rather help protect the sensitive wilderness areas surrounding the PCT. According to figures on the PCTA website, last year the trail had 160 southbound hikers beginning their trek on July 1, while only 13 people signed up to start hiking on June 29. When 160 people traverse a delicate, alpine landscape en masse, it can have a serious negative impact on the campsites and waterways those same thru-hikers will come to depend on. Larabee sees the new regulations as necessary to ensure that human impacts on the landscape do not become irreversible. “Reducing crowding by distributing people more evenly over time will protect the fragile environments the trail passes through and will enhance the user experience for all,” he says.
This is part of #OutsideFlannelWeek, a celebration of the fabric we all know and love.
The story of flannel begins with sheep. History tells us that some of the earliest flannel-like clothes come from Wales. As I imagine it: one day, a Welsh shepherd, fed up with coming home each night to a scratchy woolen undershirt, had a vision for a new kind of material that would fend off the North Atlantic mist and not leave him itching that one tricky spot between his shoulder blades. The result of that vision was flannel, a soft, hardy fabric first made of wool. (In fact, flannel is a type of weave, rather than a specific pattern.) Here, we’re going to take a look at some of its greatest hits.
In the Museum of English Rural Life’s digital archives, flannel appears in everything from petticoats to blankets to children’s smocks. While the oldest items are made of wool, flannel can also be made from fibers like cotton and even pine. The thread used to weave flannel is tightly spun and water resistant, and often brushed on one side, resulting in a fabric that’s durable and softens with age.
In the U.S., flannel has gone through a series of incarnations. Some of the earliest documented flannel garments were a kind of two-part long underwear known as emancipation suits, patented in the decades after the Civil War as a replacement for whalebone corsets. Those reportedly morphed into union suits, the full-body long underwear (with bum flap) worn by Yosemite Sam or your uncle in Wisconsin. Union suits became the standard base layer for those working in lumber or on railroads, while flannel jackets were used as heavy, water-resistant outerwear.
Flannel spiked in popularity during the folk-revival movement of the seventies, then achieved iconic fame with the rise of grunge in the nineties. As Clara Berg, a textile specialist and curator at Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry, told me, Seattle’s grunge scene embraced flannel and tattered jeans as anti-fashion. The clothes were functional and cheap—in a 1992 photo from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a man shows off a plaid jacket that he coyly says had been “left behind,” a remnant of the region’s lumber workers. The look appealed to those who didn’t feel represented by the glitz of hair metal. When Nirvana’s Nevermind exploded to the top of the Billboard charts in 1992, ratty thrift-store flannels came along for the ride. (It was around this time, Berg thinks, that plaid and flannel fused into synonyms, as the grunge scene didn’t distinguish between different plaid shirts—after all, they got them out of dumpsters and secondhand stores.)
With the popularity came a backlash. When Marc Jacobs, then a designer at Perry Ellis, released a grunge-inspired collection in 1993 (strips of flannel and long tartan skirts abounded), he was panned by both pearl clutchers in the fashion world and professional musicians who chafed as their anarchist sensibility was co-opted and commercialized.
But flannel’s popularity didn’t die down: think Jerry Seinfeld’s early-decade baggy highwater jeans and loose flannel shirts, the angsty teens and vampires in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Even the anti-grunge crusader played by Alicia Silverstone in 1995’s Clueless wears a tartan blazer and miniskirt. And last year, Marc Jacobs revived his grunge looks for Gen Z.
The current flannel trend, which has its roots in the post-millenium lumbersexual look, doesn’t follow directly from the heady, dumpster-diving days of grunge—it’s more like seventies Americana remixed by the gentrification set—but Berg says there are similarly admirable qualities. Brands like Filson, a Seattle-based company founded during the Alaskan Gold Rush, she notes, have experienced a revival by placing a premium on durability and function. That’s flannel at its best, I think. Stylish? Sure, sometimes. But a really good flannel will last long enough to be passed down to the next generation of hipsters.
In May 2019, yoga teacher and physical therapist Amanda Eller was lost for 17 days in the dense inland forests of Maui after a three-mile hike turned into a harrowing ordeal. She set out on foot without a cell phone, food, or water, as she only planned to be out for a short jaunt. After venturing off the trail, she wasn’t able to find her way back. She suffered from severe sunburn, leg injuries, and the loss of her shoes but survived by eating berries, drinking stream water, and sleeping among leaves. After more than two weeks, a rescue helicopter spotted her atop a waterfall. What should you do if you find yourself, like Eller, lost in the woods, with no trail in sight? We called up a few experts for their advice.
Obviously, most people don’t plan on getting lost. But there are a few steps you can take before heading out on an adventure that may help you in case you lose your way.
“Before a trip, it’s best to let someone responsible know—or leave a note about—where you are going, who you are going with, and when you plan to get back,” says Devin Hiemstra, a longtime volunteer with Northern California’s Tahoe Nordic Search and Rescue. “It helps us search the right area at the right time. On long trips, I even include how much equipment I have and how long I can be out in case things go bad.” Hiemstra added that securing a wilderness permit (when applicable) or leaving your route and trip duration in a trail register or your vehicle can also help.
Knowing how to use a map and compass could be critical if your phone or GPS device runs out of charge, and it’s best to learn before you hit the trail. “The most important thing to know about your compass is that it’s not magic. A compass can’t tell you which way to go if you don’t know which way you want to go. It can’t locate you if you get lost. But it can help,” says Clare Durand, president of Orienteering USA, the governing body for the sport in this country. “You can use the combination of map and compass to make sure the trail is going in the right direction. If there’s not a trail, you might be able to see from reading the contour lines that you’re going up a hill onto a ridge that’s running north to south, and you can get on that hill.”
For a crash course in navigation, check your local REI for map- and compass-reading workshops, or sign up for weekend-long navigation-skills classes in the southern Utah desert with Get in the Wild ($295). If you can’t make it in person, Backpacker magazine hosts a seven-part online course on backcountry navigation ($149) that teaches you how to orient a map, use a compass, plan a route, and respond if you get lost.
You don’t always need to tote an arsenal of GPS devices and emergency-survival tools every time you go into the woods. But if you’re heading into an area you don’t know, or you’re planning a longer-distance adventure, you may want to pack for just-in-case situations, like losing your way.
For starters, bring your cell phone and carry enough water and food to last longer than you think you’ll be out there. You may want to pack extra layers—we like the Mountain Hardwear Ghost Whisperer/2 Down Hoody ($325), since it’s warm and packs down small—and a strong headlamp, like the rechargeable Petzl Actik Core ($70).
A GPS device like the Garmin inReach Explorer+ ($450) can be a lifesaver. It includes preloaded topo maps, a built-in digital compass, and global satellite messaging for sending out SOS messages, even in zones without cell service.
Even if you have a GPS device, the batteries could die or you could lose the gadget, which is why you should learn how to navigate the old-fashioned way. “Find a compass with a clear baseplate, so you can see through it,” says Durand. “That makes it easy to hold it onto the map, and you don’t need any fancy sighting instruments.” Suunto’s A10 SH Compass ($25) has a standard design that’s easy to use—pair it with a paper map like those usually available at your local outdoor store. The USGS has maps of the United States available online, and sites like AllTrails allow you to print or save topographic maps to your phone.
A well-stocked first aid kit is always a smart idea. “Flares and signal mirrors are good if someone is looking and in a position to see it,” says Hiemstra. “A mirror is small and easy to carry, and a flare can be a great way to start a fire for warmth.” Coghlan’s Sight-Grid Signal Mirror ($13) is wallet size and can be seen up to 25 miles away, and West Marine’s White Handheld Solas Flare ($40) is designed for boaters, but it works for lost hikers, too. An emergency whistle, like JetScream’s floating model ($8), can also help rescuers locate you or let those nearby know you’re in distress.
If all else fails and you’re really lost, stop and settle yourself. “Don’t panic. Breathe. Take a snack or water break,” says Kenja Griffin, a California-based Outward Bound instructor of 20 years. “Use your map to figure out your handrails—what features are around you. Maybe you’ll see that the trail should be here on the map, say, on the north side of this ridge, and you should be going there.”
Griffin suggests walking a big circle around your immediate area. “Be aware of your surroundings. Be present,” Griffin says. “If you’re walking on trails, pay attention to where the trail goes. It can be easy to get off course if you’re walking on granite and the trail disappears. Look for clues of impact by other people, like footprints or trail markers.”
If these attempts fail, calling 911 is the best way to initiate a search and rescue. “Most SAR teams are run through the county sheriff, and calling 911 is the most efficient way to start the process, plus their location services are really helpful,” says Hiemstra. “People can have mixed results with cell-phone pings, but if they can drop a pin on a map and send that in a text, it’s usually really accurate.”
After calling or sending a pin, stay aware of your phone’s battery power, and do your best to conserve it. Keep your phone in a warm, interior pocket if it’s getting cold, and turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, which can sap energy faster.
“Whenever someone is lost and calls for help, the best thing to do is to stay where you are,” says Hiemstra. “We always think we can trace our footprints or get to a better spot, but often we end up getting ourselves more lost or to a worse spot to be found.” He recommends staying put, keeping warm and dry, and making yourself as visible as possible. If there’s a nearby obviously visible spot, like an open meadow, you can go there to be more visible to a helicopter.
In most places, winter is when bikes are stowed away until spring. Not in Minnesota. “People from around the country would make fun of me,” says Hansi Johnson, a former regional director at the International Mountain Biking Association. “They’d say, ‘Yeah, mountain biking in Minnesota is great four months of the year.’ I’d tell them, ‘You’re missing the point.’”
The point is that many Minnesotan cyclists actually crave winter. There’s a surreal magic to those moonlit, subzero winter nights when you can bundle up and set out into the snow like a two-wheeled Jack London. Counter to what cyclists in more forgiving climates might believe, it’s possible and—yes—even fun to ride in Minnesota year-round.
Minneapolis maintains 128 miles of all-season bike trails and lanes, and Saint Paul has 88, which makes the Twin Cities one of the biggest year-round urban cycling hubs in the world. To stay sane in the shoulder seasons, when mud makes mountain biking impossible, cyclists hit dirt roads on their gravel bikes. In summer there are hundreds of miles of singletrack and paved rail-to-trail routes across the state. Riding all year may require a full set of bikes but, as Johnson says, “In Minnesota you can’t be a one-trick pony.”
At this latitude, winter is cold enough that snow and ice stay on the ground all season, which makes for excellent fat biking. While the official season is December through March, snow consistently falls October through April. Minneapolis’s Theodore Wirth Park has more than six miles of designated fat-bike trails, and even makes snow on its lighted five-mile cross-country ski loop that opens for riding Friday through Sunday evenings. Fat bikes for sale and rent as well as hot cocoa are available at the Trailhead, a new chalet with lockers, showers, and a fitness center. From January 30 to February 2, the park is the epicenter of the City of Lakes Loppet Festival, a celebration of everything winter that includes four fat tire events, including sprint races and an urban tour.
Two hours north of Minneapolis, Cuyuna Lakes is a former iron-ore mining quarry turned mountain-bike park, with 25 miles of trail spread over 800 acres, all groomed for fat biking in winter. Ratings range from green to double black diamond, and wind past snow-covered mining lakes. In February, it hosts the 45Nrth Whiteout, with 10-, 20-, and 30-kilometer races on snowy singletrack.
Then there’s next-level winter riding: the Arrowhead 135, a frostbitten ultra that starts near the Canadian border. It’s scheduled for late January when the temperature can drop to negative 60 degrees. The race traverses south for 135 miles through remote wilderness, where wolf packs have been known to circle, before ending near Tower, Minnesota. “You’re in the middle of nowhere and are on your own for hours,” says Pat Greehan, who finished the race last year in 22 hours 6 minutes, right before the temperature plummeted to minus 40. “Between miles 90 and 110, there are 41 hills, most of which are not rideable when you’re pushing 50 pounds of gear in snow.” What more evidence do you need that Minnesotans like to suffer?
When the trails turn to slush, cyclists use their GPS to link dirt roads into gravel routes, from the rolling bluffs of Mississippi River country in the southeast corner of the state to the wooded Forest Service roads farther north. Most are training for races like May’s Le Grand du Nord, northern Minnesota’s premier self-supported spring gravel event that offers 20-, 54-, and 110-mile rides. Starting on the shore of Lake Superior in the quaint harbor town of Grand Marais, the 110-mile ride climbs 5,500 feet on gravel roads through the Sawtooth Mountains near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. The ride ends with a beer or three at Voyageur Brewing Company.
After the trails dry out in May, Duluth, the hilly, hipster-filled industrial city of 86,000 that sits on the western tip of Lake Superior, turns into a mountain-biking mecca. Over the past decade, Duluth, in conjunction with local non-profit Cyclists of Gitchee Gummee Shores, has invested millions of dollars into building more than 100 miles of singletrack that stretch from the Chambers Grove Park along the Saint Louis River in the west to the flowing waterfalls of Lester Park in the east. The 85-mile Duluth Traverse hugs the city’s coastline and has jaw-dropping views of the lake. Spiraling off it are separate loops that offer expert-only trails, from the 3,500-foot downhill insanity of Calculated Risk, at Spirit Mountain in the south, to the steep bedrock roll downs of DM, in Piedmont farther north. The outfitters Duluth Experience host a three-hour tour of the Duluth Traverse ($79; hardtail rental included) and Day Tripper of Duluth offers two-to-three-hour private lessons from a guide certified by the Professional Mountain Bike Instructors Association ($75).
Less extensive but equally exciting is the expanding network of trails in the 460-acre Tioga Recreation Area near Grand Rapids, a wooded playground overlooking Pokegama Lake and the Mississippi River, three hours north from Minneapolis. There are currently 22 miles of completed trail, offering variety in difficulty and style, from rocky, technical cross-country routes to jumpy downhills for advanced riders. Ardent Bikes in Grand Rapids rents hardtails and full-suspension bikes, starting at $45 for two hours.
To cycle through a flaming array of fall colors and get a serious hill workout, head south with a road or gravel bike to the Root River and Harmony-Preston Valley Trails, a 60-mile, Y-shaped, rail-to-trail network in the southeast corner of the state between Houston and Fountain. The route undulates through river-bluff country, historic small towns, and traditional Amish communities of southern Minnesota, a vast change from the dense pine forests of the north. Book a night (and a massage) at the funkily renovated Stone Mill Hotel and Suites (from $90), then set out on the town for a play at the renowned Commonweal Theatre Company.
This is part of #OutsideFlannelWeek, a celebration of the fabric we all know and love.
In the Gingras household, right around the time we replace Halloween decorations with turkeys and cornucopias, the biggest seasonal transition of all occurs: the beds are stripped and remade with flannel sheets.
I grew up with New Englander parents thinking that everyone did this every fall, only to learn last year from my naive coworkers that no, Flannel Savings Time is not a marking of cooler weather and shorter days for other families. I remain baffled that so many people haven’t caught on to this simple hygge hack, so allow me to enlighten you.
Flannel sheets are as critical to fall and winter as hot apple cider and a good pair of waterproof boots. At the end of a long day of work and exercising in the bitter cold, you slide into your flannel nest and feel like you’re wrapped in the world’s coziest hug. They are the OG anxiety bedding (move over, weighted blankets), keeping the gloom of winter at bay and my toes warm no matter how hard the wind howls outside my window. Doesn’t that sound better than shivering while your boring regular sheets warm up to your body temperature, only to roll over and hit a cold spot once more?
“Alright,” you say, “I’m ready to embrace the hygge-est of home goods.” Congratulations on this monumental step in your self-care routine! I recommend this fuzzy brushed-cotton set from L.L.Bean. It’s not too warm in case you sleep hot, but it’ll still elevate the comfort factor of your bed significantly.
Until you’re ready to change out your sheets in spring, I promise the next few months will be full of snuggly nights and mornings of hitting the snooze button for just five more minutes of bliss. Go ahead, you’ve earned that shelter from the cold world outside. Welcome to your best fall ever.
For the first 20 miles of the ride up the Col du Galibier—the storied Alpine climb that debuted in the Tour de France back in 1911, when all but three riders were forced to dismount and walk their chunky pre-carbon-fiber velocipedes to the 8,000-foot summit—I was actually enjoying myself, more or less. The other cyclists on my weeklong tour had decided to bag it and hop in the support van halfway up the climb, as the temperature began to plummet and a cold rain swept down from the surrounding peaks. So had Massimo, our cheerfully inscrutable, Dante-quoting bike guide, who preferred the warmer climes of his native Sardinia. I was alone with the mountain, savoring the subtle gradations of my rising distress.
With a couple miles to go, though, the novelty started to wear off. The rain turned to sleet, and as I switchbacked through canyon-like passageways formed by monstrous ten-foot snowbanks, my hands, in their sodden gloves, became too numb to operate my gears—more of a theoretical problem than an actual one, since I was too spent to get out of my lowest gear anyway. As I neared the summit, the grade seemed to keep getting steeper, the headwind stronger, and my insistence on finishing the climb under my own power more foolish.
Instead of the ghosts of Coppi and Merckx and other bygone stars who’d triumphed here, I found myself chasing the flowing locks of Fabian Cancellara, the flamboyant Swiss rider who was famously (some would say outrageously) accused of hiding a tiny electric motor in his bike in 2010. As a novice cyclist embarking on an ambitious itinerary called Epic Climbs of the Western Alps, I had seriously considered requesting one of the e-bikes offered by my tour company, just to make sure I wouldn’t hold my more experienced trip mates back. Now I contemplated Fabian’s choice: If I had a Go button on my bike, would I press it?
As I turned yet another corner, with less than half a mile to go, the easterly headwind became a virtual wall. I had to get out of my saddle and lean into a wobbly, slow-motion sprint just to avoid slowing to a complete halt and toppling over sideways. By the time I turned away from the wind a few hundred yards later, my heart rate and breathing were fully maxed out and my legs were jelly. I knew I couldn’t face the gale again. Then I saw that, instead of another hairpin, the road ahead snaked up the rest of the way to the summit without turning back into the wind. I pedaled onward, with a mix of pride and relief—pride that I’d made it, relief that my bike hadn’t, after all, been equipped with a motor that would have tempted me to take an electric shortcut.
A few minutes later, I was thawing in a cozy bistro on the far side of the summit, sipping hot chocolate, with a plush hotel-style bathrobe draped over my shivering shoulders. That’s when an uncomfortable thought struck me: Why should I disparage the boost provided by an electric motor when, that very morning, with precisely the same goal, I’d sat patiently in a hotel lounge while a neuropsychologist trickled electric current through a web of electrodes gelled to my scalp?
Really it was just a matter of time. Back in 2013, when Brazilian scientists first showed that a relatively simple protocol of transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) to the brain seemed to enhance endurance, you could already map out the events that would follow: the flood of copycat studies, the launch of a Silicon Valley startup peddling the technique to early adopters, the murky reports of professional athletes and teams like the Golden State Warriors and the U.S. ski squad experimenting with it, the rising ethical concerns about fairness and safety, and, finally, the press release that showed up in my inbox in January of this year—the field’s “Holy shit, they’re using Crispr on human embryos!” moment.
The pitch was from NeuroFire Cycling, a spin-off of Bahrain Merida Pro Cycling Team’s official sports-medicine clinic, the RIBA Rehabilitation Institute (IRR), based in Turin, Italy. It had enlisted a bike-touring company called Tourissimo, also based in Turin, to run the logistics for a bespoke trip, giving well-heeled amateurs the opportunity to spend a week riding famous Grand Tour passes while eating gourmet meals and receiving “advanced neurostim protocols used by the world’s top riders” for a cool $7,000 plus airfare. Before tackling the Colle delle Finestre, in the Piedmontese Alps of northern Italy, you’d get your prefrontal cortex stimulated to “enhance performance, mood, and the propensity to enter flow states.” After the Col d’Izoard, across the border in France’s Hautes-Alpes region, you’d hit your upper motor cortex “to enhance the central nervous system’s role in natural recovery processes.”
It read like an elaborate piece of satire. But it’s not: the technology is, on at least some level, real, and after six years of speculation and hype, someone was bound to start promoting it to the recreational market. It occurred to me that a tour for weekend warriors run by scientists also working with a top UCI cycling team would offer a unique opportunity to delve into some of the lingering questions about tDCS. Not just the obvious ones—does it work? is it safe?—but also trickier ones about fairness, technological innovation, and the deeper meaning of sport for those of us whose wins and losses are personal and unremunerated. So in early June, I buckled into a red-eye to Turin for a week of hard climbs, fine wines, and credulity-stretching neuroelectrophysiology.
The idea that a jolt to your brain might enhance your physical powers isn’t quite as futuristic as it sounds. A history of tDCS published in Psychological Medicine in 2016 traces the technique’s lineage back to Roman times, when an imperial physician named Scribonius Largus prescribed a live torpedo fish to the scalp to relieve headaches. Similar ideas crop up in cultures around the world, but the modern incarnation of tDCS began in the late 1990s and took off a decade or so later. The basic idea is simple: your brain is like a vast interconnected circuit, with neurons that communicate with each other via electric discharges. Applying a very weak current of a few milliamperes tweaks the excitability of the affected neurons, such that they become a little more (or, if you run the current in the opposite direction, less) likely to fire in response to whatever you do in the subsequent hour or two. Exactly what that means depends on which parts of the brain you hook up, but the general upshot is that different brain regions are able to communicate with each other more easily—which, if you believe the hype, can have effects ranging from changing your mood to making you a better sniper. All it takes, as a vibrant and somewhat scary online DIY subculture attests, is a nine-volt battery and a couple of electrodes.
Of course, wiring up your brain still carries some pretty weighty cultural associations. When Massimo, the Tourissimo cycling guide, picked me up at the airport, I found that he was as bemused by the whole thing as I was. As we dodged and weaved through Turin’s Saturday-morning traffic, he outlined the plan: he would take me back to the hotel for lunch and a brief rest, then I’d get fitted for a bike, then he would take me to the IRR clinic for my first—as he described it, air quotes and all—“treatment.” I’d be joined by two other cycling journalists from Britain for NeuroFire’s maiden tour, he said, since no paying customers had actually signed up. Still, “we have another testimonial,” he added cheerfully. “It’s from Jack Nicholson.”
At the clinic, a sleek complex with ultramodern furniture, rows of sophisticated rehab equipment, and the high-wattage brightness of a toothpaste commercial, we met a half dozen members of the tour’s medical and support staff. The plan for the week, they explained, had two main parts. For our first three days of cycling, we would receive 20 minutes of brain stimulation immediately before riding, with the electrodes positioned on our scalp in a configuration designed to enhance our performance, perhaps by kicking us into a flow state for the first hour or two of the ride. For the last two days, as the cumulative fatigue of tens of thousands of feet of climbing mounted, we would switch to 20 minutes of stimulation immediately after riding, this time with an electrode configuration chosen to enhance the recuperative powers of the massage we would receive simultaneously as our synapses sizzled.
But first we needed some baseline testing to figure out where the electrodes should be placed on each of us. A neuropsychologist from the IRR named Elisabetta Geda ushered me down a corridor, past rows of glossy pamphlets and posters displaying before-and-after tummy pics from exotic treatments like “full-body contouring by cryoadypolisis,” to a quiet room where she pulled a neoprene cap studded with electrodes over my scalp. As I visualized cycling up a mountain road, she used electroencephalography (EEG) to monitor the communication between different regions of my brain. “The brain signals are like an orchestra,” she explained. “Every section has a rhythm, and we record these rhythms with EEG. Then we can personalize your electrode montage, because each person may need a different treatment.”
Geda and her colleagues at the rehabilitation clinic have been using tDCS for several years on patients with conditions like chronic pain, addiction, fatigue related to multiple sclerosis, and cognitive deficits after traumatic brain injury. They use it in combination with existing treatments, priming the appropriate neurons to fire more readily in order to amplify the benefits of those therapies. So in 2017, when the IRR signed on as the official sports-medicine provider for the new Bahrain Merida cycling team, Geda began to consider the technique’s athletic potential. She and her collaborators ran a study replicating the 2013 Brazilian results, then floated the idea to Bahrain Merida.
The initial response was lukewarm. “At the beginning, we were a little bit afraid,” Luca Pollastri, one of the cycling team’s medical doctors told me. “We took some time to understand what’s going on, what’s legitimate, what’s the World Anti-Doping Agency’s position, and so on.” Instead of using it to directly enhance performance, Pollastri asked Geda if she could devise a protocol that would help athletes relax and recover after racing, which is a major challenge in Grand Tours, when riders are going to the well day after day for weeks. Geda suggested stimulating the brain during massage, effectively amplifying the massage’s effects on the central nervous system—an unorthodox approach that no one else had tried.
Among the first riders to try it was Domenico Pozzovivo, an Italian climbing specialist known in the peloton as the Doctor for his cerebral approach—not Bahrain Merida’s star, but someone happy to experiment with new ideas and capable of giving detailed feedback about them. In the 2018 Giro d’Italia, Pozzovivo started using tDCS to boost his recovery a few stages into the race. Night after night, he faithfully donned the electrodes for a massage, and after 17 stages, he found himself in third position in the general classification: on track, at age 35, for his first-ever Grand Tour podium. But the complicated logistics of a grueling mountaintop finish in the resort town of Prato Nevoso meant that he missed his session after the 18th stage, and, for the first time in the race, he slept poorly. The next day, he lost eight minutes to the leader and slipped back to sixth overall, before rallying in the final two stages to finish fifth. To the staff at Bahrain Merida, and to Pozzovivo himself, neither his career-best overall performance nor the timing of his one bad day seemed like a coincidence.
By this time, Pollastri and his colleagues were ready to consider using the technique as a prerace booster. With Gabriele Gallo, a sports scientist at the University of Milan, they brought ten cyclists from Bahrain Merida’s continental team to the lab for a double-blind series of simulated 15-kilometer time trials with real and sham tDCS. For a roughly 20-minute effort, the riders averaged 16 seconds faster with tDCS, right on the margins of a statistically significant improvement. It was suggestive enough that they decided to use it at the opening stage of the 2019 Tour de Romandie, where Slovenian rider Jan Tratnik took the win for Bahrain Merida.
On the morning after our EEG tests, we met Geda in a conference room in the imposingly ornate Grand Hotel Sitea for our first treatment before a test ride up the Colle della Maddalena, one of the hills across the Po River from downtown Turin. When I apologized for encroaching on her Sunday, Geda waved me off: she’d sent her two toddlers to their grandmother’s for the weekend so she could focus on the tour. “This is like a holiday for me,” she laughed. Pulling up a 3-D model of the human brain on her computer, she outlined the results of the previous day’s EEG tests.
Trevor Ward, one of the British journalists, apparently had “a great connection” between his prefrontal and motor cortices—between perception and action, in effect. This is characteristic of elite athletes, Geda explained, so he would receive the same six-electrode tDCS stimulation that the pros got, focusing on the prefrontal cortex (PFC) itself. That’s the region of the brain that integrates information from everywhere else and decides whether and when you can push harder. “Our theory is that the PFC is less active during exercise because other regions are overloaded,” Gallo explained. “So if we stimulate this area, the athlete should have better regulation of pacing.”
The other Brit, John Whitney, and I were not so accomplished, so we’d get a remedial eight-electrode stimulation to help nurture the crucial prefrontal-motor connection in addition to stimulating the PFC. Geda slid the neoprene cap onto my head, and I felt a mild prickling in my scalp as one milliampere of current began to flow. A minute or so later, the sensation faded to nothing, and for the rest of the 20 minutes, I simply sat back and relaxed.
After a short ride through the cobbled maze of Turin’s pedestrian core (and the requisite stop for espresso), we crossed the Po and started climbing. As we pedaled up the incline, I felt a little buzzed and a little jet-lagged, and my bike felt about half as heavy as usual—which it was, since I’d trained for the trip on an aging mountain bike and was now riding a $6,000 carbon-frame Bianchi. Joining us for the ride was Vittoria Bussi, the reigning world-record holder for the one-hour time trial, and I fell in beside her to get her take on the technology.
Bussi, it turned out, had just returned from a time trial in Slovenia, where she’d been accompanied by Geda to try prerace tDCS. Bussi hadn’t detected any difference in performance or power output, but her heart rate had been lower than usual—a somewhat ambiguous result that she’d also noticed in a previous experiment with the technique. A compulsive tinkerer, with a Ph.D. in math from the University of Oxford, Bussi saw tDCS as just another element of the continual process of experimentation, quantification, and optimization that cycling permits. “I’m curious,” she said. “I like trying to figure out the best possible approach to a problem.” Overall, the race in Slovenia had been a success, with a third-place finish that boded well for her goal of qualifying for the 2020 Olympics. She figured she’d keep using brain stimulation, at least for a while.
As for me—well, I never expected to feel any magical gains from brain stimulation. (Don’t tell my editor.) My pace up the Colle della Maddalena, or any other hill, would be determined by how hard it felt. If the effort that felt sustainable happened to get me to the top a percent or two faster than normal, how would I possibly detect such a subtle difference? At best, the cumulative effects of each day’s brain stimulation would leave me a little fresher as the week (and its 37,000 feet of climbing) proceeded—better able to enjoy the evening feasts, less likely to end up in the sag wagon. But for any given ride, the only useful way to judge something like this is with well-designed research, preferably double-blind and peer-reviewed. Trust the data, not your easily deluded intuition.
Even the data, however, is far from definitive on tDCS. The U.S. National Library of Medicine lists more than 5,000 tDCS studies, the vast majority from the past decade. The technique improves working memory (or maybe it doesn’t), it helps patients with Parkinson’s disease walk better (or maybe it doesn’t), it helps fight depression (or maybe it doesn’t), and on and on for a seemingly limitless variety of conditions. There’s a ton of hype and a corresponding amount of backlash. One researcher described the field as “a sea of bullshit and bad science.”
The sports applications of tDCS face a similarly muddled situation. A review published in Frontiers in Physiology in 2017 identified 12 studies of brain stimulation and exercise performance, eight of which found a performance boost. Conversely, two meta-analyses of 22 and 24 studies published in Brain Stimulation in 2019 concluded that the evidence in favor of an athletic boost is somewhere between slim and nonexistent. Part of the problem is that different studies use different protocols, electrode montages, and exercise tests. Some stimulate the motor cortex, hoping to facilitate a stronger output signal from brain to muscle. That’s the approach that consumer-tech startup Halo Neuroscience uses for its $400 brain-stimulating headphones. Other studies stimulate the regions responsible for evaluating inputs to the brain, hoping to dull the sensation of effort. Geda and Pollastri, by focusing on the prefrontal cortex, take yet another approach.
To skeptics, peering at this hodgepodge of conflicting evidence and concluding that brain stimulation will make you faster sounds a lot like wishful thinking. In July, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Calgary named James Wrightson posted a preprint (a finished paper that is posted publicly for comment prior to being submitted for peer review) of his latest study, which found no effect of tDCS to the motor cortex on leg endurance. A crucial detail: Wrightson’s study protocol had been preregistered, meaning that he decided in advance how his data would be analyzed, and he committed to sharing the results regardless of whether or not they confirmed his hypothesis. How many of the small, positive reports of tDCS’s athletic effects, he wondered, might be explained by massaged data or counterbalanced by negative studies that no one bothered to publish?
These issues aren’t unique to tDCS research, of course. In fact, they apply to pretty much any sexy and “science-backed” performance aid these days. Wrightson is a passionate advocate of more rigorous methodology in sports science, which lags behind other fields, like neuroscience, in insisting on things like preregistration and large sample sizes that reduce the likelihood of spurious results. His own study, with 22 subjects, isn’t enough to prove that tDCS doesn’t work, he emphasized when I emailed to ask about his research. Many more studies, with far bigger sample sizes, are needed before we can draw any firm conclusions. Until then, his advice to athletes is to skip tDCS—and any other shiny new performance booster—until better evidence is available. “But athletes are always going to be athletes (and coaches, coaches),” he wrote, “so we’ll probably still see Halo devices everywhere at Tokyo 2020 anyway.”
From a scientific perspective—the Sisyphean pursuit of knowledge through the eternal evaluation and reevaluation of evidence, let’s say—Wrightson is undeniably correct. We don’t know shit about tDCS, scientifically speaking. But his comment about athletes being athletes, with the implication that anyone who tries an unproven technique like tDCS is a benighted dunce, struck me as unfair. Athletes are not trying to advance human knowledge or settle epistemological questions; they’re trying to win. If you have a technology with minimal cost, no known health risks, and there’s a plausible but unproven chance that it has real performance-boosting effects, isn’t it entirely rational to give it a try? Even ignoring placebo effects—another discussion entirely—there’s a small possibility of life-altering benefits for an elite athlete near the top of their sport, weighed against negligible downsides.
Wrightson, when I put this to him, didn’t buy it. In fact, he felt that even discussing preliminary research in fields like tDCS outside the hallowed halls of academia was highly irresponsible. Writing about tDCS in the “lay press,” as I had done on several occasions (and am doing right now, for that matter), was particularly egregious. “I think you were wrong to publish those articles so early,” he insisted. “It’s a hill I’m willing to die on.”
The first real hill of our tour, on Monday morning, was the Colle delle Finestre—the hero-making climb where, in last year’s Giro, Chris Froome made his winning 50-mile breakaway and where, after a restless night, Pozzovivo’s podium dreams died. We started our day in the Alpine town of Susa, lounging on folding chairs in a public park in the shadow of an imposing 2,000-year-old Roman arch as Geda gelled up the electrodes. But just before she cranked on the current, the ominous clouds above us unleashed a few warning drops. We barely had time to scramble back into the van, where I put in my 20 minutes of stimulation amid the drumbeat of torrential rain on the roof.
An hour later, the rain finally subsided, and we pedaled off, with Massimo setting the pace. We soon settled into a rhythm that would come to feel routine in the days to come, climbing steadily for 10 or 15 or 20 miles at a time, up average grades of 7 or 8 or 9 percent. There was almost no traffic, since other roads and tunnels now provide faster and more direct routes across the mountain passes. We saw nobody other than the occasional shepherd or blueberry picker, though we passed farmhouses and mountain refuges and ancient churches and monuments to cyclists of yore. It’s not like climbing the short, sharp hills that I encounter around my home in Toronto, where you can rely on momentum and a leg-burning sprint to get you to the crest. Instead you have to find a sustainable rhythm, so that the climb becomes not a frantic struggle but a meditative grind.
Just under five miles from the top of Colle delle Finestre, the asphalt ended. The rest of the road was gravel, wet and slippery thanks to the rain that was once again falling. I focused on following Massimo’s rear wheel, weaving between rocks and cutting across stream-washed gullies in the road. I felt surprisingly strong and was almost disappointed when we finally reached the stone monument to cycling star (and thrice-caught doper) Danilo di Luca at the summit. I’d have sworn the brain stimulation had worked, except that the rain-delayed start meant the performance-boosting window—about 90 minutes, Geda had told us—had closed long before we even hit the gravel.
The logistical challenges of combining brain stimulation with cycling, we now realized, weren’t trivial. Geda had brought enough equipment from the clinic to zap two of us at once, but when you added in the time needed to clean electrodes between users and so on, it took about an hour for the three of us. A fully booked tour with eight cyclists would have been even more chaotic, even with extra staff and equipment. Bahrain Merida encountered similar challenges: it had sprung for ten sophisticated clinical-grade tDCS machines, each costing thousands of dollars, but it didn’t have enough trained medical staff to administer the treatment to everyone at once; instead, it only used one or two machines at a time.
Even though we’d come for the explicit purpose of trying out the brain stimulation, Trevor, John, and I couldn’t help grumbling a bit over the next few days. When the morning sun was shining and the mountains beckoned, it felt wrong to spend precious blue-skied hours fiddling with electrodes or to delay our dinner after a long day in the saddle. There were moments, as I waited patiently on van seats and in lobbies and hotel rooms across Piedmont and Savoy, when I began to question the basic premise of the trip. Sometimes I worried that the technology didn’t really work. Other times I worried that it did.
I’m all for e-bikes in the appropriate context. But it’s also obvious that it would be both unfair and meaningless to win a race using a motor, like winning a marathon by wearing roller skates. Even if the only person you’re competing with is yourself, you wouldn’t celebrate a new best time on your favorite training route (or, God forbid, a Strava KOM) if it was battery powered. Despite the Olympic motto, we intuitively understand that simply going faster (or higher or stronger) without any restrictions is not the fundamental goal of sport. Instead, there’s something else that’s harder to articulate—what the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) vaguely and unhelpfully refers to as “the spirit of sport.”
For nearly four decades, Thomas Murray, president emeritus of the Hastings Center bioethics research institute, has been trying to pin that elusive spirit down. A research grant from the National Science Foundation in 1979 started him down the path of trying to understand why athletes do or don’t choose to dope, which in turn led to the question of what sport is really about. His conclusion, laid out in academic papers and a 2018 book called Good Sport: Why Our Games Matter and How Doping Undermines Them, is that the highest goal of athletic competition is “the virtuous perfection of natural talents.” “Virtuous is a loaded word,” he acknowledged when I phoned to get his thoughts on brain stimulation. “Absolutely it is. But it’s the right word.”
In some situations, virtue is easy to discern. Training, nutrition, and coaching are all widely sanctioned methods of honing your abilities. Taking a crowbar to your main rival’s kneecap is not. But the distinction is often more nuanced. “There’s a golf ball that flies straighter, but sport bans it,” he points out. “They also bar certain clubs that make it easier to hit accurate shots out of the rough.” The point isn’t that all technology is bad; it’s that slicing into the rough should have a penalty. So the key question, whether you’re talking about drugs or technology, isn’t: Does it make you better? It’s: Does it change the things athletes have to do, and the qualities they have to possess, to win?
As the athletic implications of tDCS have become apparent, academics have started grappling with the ethical questions, variously arguing that it should be allowed, or that it should be banned, or even that athletes should be tested and handicapped to ensure that everyone gets exactly the same net benefit from it. The argument that caught my attention, from a 2013 paper on “neurodoping” by British neuroscientist and psychologist Nick Davis, was that brain stimulation “mediates a person’s ability but does not enhance it in the strictest sense.” You don’t get extra energy or stronger muscles from tDCS; you just find it a little easier to access the energy and strength that’s already present within you. Why would we ban something that simply helps us dig a little deeper?
To me, though, that internal struggle to push a little closer to your limits is an essential part of endurance sport—in a sense, it’s the fundamental, defining characteristic. Change that and you change what it takes to win. After all, if you could just push a button to extract every ounce of power from your quads, what mystery would remain? Why would anyone watch—or participate?
I expected Murray, a long-standing defender of anti-doping orthodoxy, to share my qualms. But when I tried to pin him down about tDCS, he hedged. “The mere fact that something is a biomedical technology and enhances performance is not enough to disqualify it,” he said. “It’s only when it disrupts the connections between natural talents and their perfection.” That’s a judgment that may differ from sport to sport: a barefoot ultrarunner might have a different take on the appropriate role of technology in their sport compared to a gear-happy triathlete. WADA itself, according to spokesman James Fitzgerald, is aware of the controversy and has discussed it with experts in the field but hasn’t yet seen “compelling evidence” that it breaks the rules.
There is, however, one final caveat, Murray acknowledged before hanging up: “Once an effective technology gets adopted in a sport, it becomes tyrannical. You have to use it.” If the pros start brain-zapping, don’t kid yourself that it won’t trickle down to college, high school, and even the weekend warriors.
The queen stage of our tour, with almost 9,000 feet of climbing over two historic passes, started in the crenellated French mountain town of Briançon. In the breakfast room of our hotel, I chatted with Umberto, the tour guide who (to his mild chagrin) had been assigned to drive the support van instead of cycle with us. He comes from a prominent Piedmontese mountaineering family and had trained and worked as a mountain guide before switching to cycling. His affection for the Alpine landscape around us was reverent, almost poetic, and I got the sense that he sees the world much as Reinhold Messner does: where you end up is less important than how you get there. “When I was a kid growing up in the mountains,” he told me when I delicately probed his views on our tech-assisted adventure, “sport was about you. Your quest. But our society pushes everything to extremes.”
Those words echoed in my head as we rolled out under the radiant blue sky to tackle first the 7,400-foot Col d’Izoard and then the 9,000-foot Colle dell’Agnello, which Hannibal and his elephants supposedly crossed en route to Rome more than 2,000 years ago. A few miles from the summit of Agnello, I got confused about my gears. Tailing Massimo, as I had all week, suddenly seemed too slow to stay upright, so with a muttered apology, I moved past him and essentially launched an attack. By the time I realized that I’d accidentally been in my third gear rather than my lowest one, I was too sheepish to admit my mistake, so I decided to simply carry on to the summit and let it all hang out. As on Galibier, I was soon living from switchback to switchback, stretching the elastic thinner and thinner, and not at all sure that it wouldn’t snap before I reached the top.
An hour later, after a long, wobbly descent along endless switchbacks, past startled ibexes licking salt from the recently deiced roads, I coasted into the rustic town of Sampeyre, truly a spent force. There waiting for me in the hotel were Geda and a physical therapist from the IRR. Before I knew it, I was lying facedown on a massage table, having my deltoids kneaded as Geda hooked my brain up to the old familiar juice. It was an extremely pleasant way to end an epic day. I’d made it to the top of Agnello successfully—success being defined by the nebulous but utterly unfakeable sense that I’d pushed as hard as I was capable of and then a little bit more. Now the high-voltage massage would supercharge my recovery and, according to Pozzovivo, deepen my slumbers. “I have to say that, for me, the quality of sleep improved,” he claimed in a post-Giro interview last year.
For the record, the idea that tDCS massage should aid recovery is “highly speculative,” according to Samuele Marcora, a University of Kent expert on the brain’s role in fatigue, who has studied tDCS and cycling. That’s probably being diplomatic. Even Geda acknowledged that the recovery protocol is mostly based on clinical experience rather than research. The pre-ride protocol is more plausible and well supported, Marcora told me. But even then, he added, “caffeine and a session with a good sport psychologist are likely to be much more useful.”
I knew and agreed with all this. Really, I did. But as the week wore on, I’d slowly realized that my ostensible reasons for going on the trip—investigating whether tDCS actually works, reflecting on the role technology should play in sport—were to some extent convenient covers for a more personal obsession. As much as I consider myself a skeptic and Luddite who runs and bikes with nothing but a grimy vintage Timex Ironman, I’ve been drawn in repeatedly by a fascination with brain stimulation. (Much to the annoyance, it turns out, of people like James Wrightson.) I’ve flown to Los Angeles for a zany Red Bull experiment with it, tried Halo Neuroscience’s headphones, written a whole book chapter about it, and now biked across the Alps on a bespoke brain stim tour.
As someone who has spent decades trying to figure out what the edge really feels like, the truth is that I’m as fascinated as I am horrified by the prospect of inching a little closer. If you pin me down, I’d say WADA should at least ban the technique in competition, even if, like stimulants and cannabis, it remains permitted in training. But I absolutely want to know with greater certainty whether it truly boosts endurance. Because if it does, that tells us something profound about the nature of our limits—that they’re in our neurons, not our muscle fibers. Maybe that’s what keeps drawing me back to the topic: the desire to find out if the edge I’ve been skirting all this time is just an illusion.
These are the riddles I was pondering when I finally flicked off my bedside lamp after my Herculean effort on Agnello and the subsequent massage. And for the first time since the trip began, I lay awake in the dark for nearly two hours, tossing and turning while my mind continued to race. Maybe it was because of the brain stimulation, or maybe it was despite it. Maybe it was the long day in the saddle, or the ill-advised third helping of gnocchi in butter, or the imponderable depth of the questions I was wrestling with. I’ll never know for sure—unless, as my history suggests is likely, I wire myself up again sometime.
Over four days and three nights in mid-September, Pearl Johnson, age 9, climbed the Triple Direct route on El Capitan, earning her the title as the youngest person to ascend the 3,000-foot formation. Pearl climbed with her mother, Janet, and a family friend, Nick Sullens, of Yosemite Search and Rescue. Pearl’s dad, Philip, a law enforcement ranger in the park, met them at the top.
“Someone asked me if I was nervous, and I said ‘No,’” Janet said after. “I knew I was comfortable up there. I’ve climbed a lot with Pearl. I knew what she was capable of.”
Pearl, however, was nervous, according to Sullens. “A lot of time was spent overcoming her fear,” Sullens said. “I was impressed with her wanting to keep going. If it were me at nine, I would have wanted to be out of there. Sometimes she would say, ‘I want this to be over, this is really scary.’ I would offer to bail and be down in two hours, and she would say she wanted to be there. She had a desire to pursue the goal. She wanted to climb that mountain.”
Little girls have been having a banner year in Yosemite this season. In June, 10-year-old Selah Schneiter climbed the Nose on El Capitan with her father Mike and his friend Mark Regier, making her the then-youngest person in the world to climb the granite monolith. The story went viral, and Selah appeared on ESPN, The Today Show and ABC News.
Pearl also wanted to climb The Nose, but it was crowded, so they switched to the less-popular but equally long Triple Direct route, which parallels the Nose before joining it for the upper third of the climb. Unlike Selah, Pearl did not lead or clean any of the pitches on the route. She used ascenders to climb the static rope that the team used to haul their equipment.
Janet and Philip, both longtime Yosemite locals, have decades of climbing experience under their belts. And so Pearl’s earliest memories are of climbing, which she picked up when she learned to walk. Her biggest climbs before El Cap include Cathedral Peak in Tuolumne Meadows at age 6, the 15-pitch Royal Arches route at age 7, and Snake Dike on Half Dome at age 8.
Pearl has seen Free Solo, and knows Alex Honnold, who stayed next door to the Johnsons during filming.
“One of my favorite parts of Free Solo was when Alex encountered the guys in the pink bunny suits,” Pearl said. “I climbed it in tights covered with cats and donuts.”
Pearl summited El Cap on September 16, in the midst of a hailstorm and plummeting temperatures. “I ran to the big juniper tree for cover while Nick and my mom were hauling up the bags one at a time,” she said. “The top was scary. We were in a cloud, and my fingers were purple.”
The hail turned to rain, soaking the team. But Pearl’s dad was building a fire. She knew that soon she would be comfortable again—the worry would pass, just as it had on the wall.
When Cody Townsend set out to ski British Columbia’s 8,927-foot Joffre Peak—part of the Fifty, his project to descend the iconic lines collected in the 2010 book Fifty Classic Ski Descents in North America—he thought he might miss the window of skiability. It was late February of this year, and the unusually thin snowpack and low visibility turned him around on his first attempt. But three days later, Townsend succeeded, sidestepping and jump-turning down the line, despite crummy snow (“Holy shit, this skiing is gonna suuuuck,” he tells his cameraman) and an emergency helicopter rescue for a skier on a neighboring couloir (“Dude, dude, somebody just fell down Central”).
Townsend didn’t know how small his skiing window on Joffre had been. In May, a massive landslide, caused by melting permafrost, ripped off the entire face he had skied. “As it stands now,” he says, “I have the last descent on Joffre, because half the mountain fell off. We watched two of the three lines off that peak disappear forever.”
The Fifty started out as a personal challenge. In January, the 36-year-old California native launched the project, which he anticipated would take place over three winters. He started a video series, with an episode about each of the peaks. He didn’t realize how much the quest to tick off lines was going to be a race against receding glaciers and a potential eulogy for the ski routes themselves. He didn’t think he was signing up to record last descents.
Last winter, Townsend ticked off 20 of the lines and released 16 episodes. The biggest surprise, he says in the second season of the Fifty video series—which launched this month—has been how quickly the snow is changing. Melting glaciers, landslides caused by warming, and variable snowpacks forced him to change his routes. “This book, which is supposed to be this permanent book and stand a test of time,” he says, “instead feels really temporary. It’s a strange and really, really sad thing.”
Conveying what’s happening in the high country has always been a part of mountain athletes’ jobs. As long as skiers and climbers have been sponsored, they’ve been responsible for returning with trip reports from the roof of the world. Now they’re also on the front lines of change—they have the skills and ability to get into fragile places where even glaciologists rely only on lidar and satellite technology and aerial photos. The IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate, which came out in September, painted a dire picture of the future of high-mountain ice. Small-scale glaciers are predicted to lose 80 percent of their current ice mass by 2100. Moving at a glacial pace isn’t an adage that works anymore.
So much of the discussion around climate change happens in the theoretical space of models and what-ifs. Overlaying that science with story, with the eyewitness narrative of a dude just trying to shralp, gives a more complete picture without being preachy or wonky.
When Townsend looks at climbing a peak like Joffre, he does a dissection of the mountain, studying weather conditions, glacial creep, and snow status before he goes. He’ll scour Google Earth, dig through old trip reports, and poll local skiers for details and yearly photos. But he’s found that those historical records don’t line up with the present.
Take Mount Baker, Washington. Preparing to ski the Watson Traverse in May, Townsend and videographer Bjarne Salen had looked at a friend’s five-year-old photos and picked a seemingly mellow line. But when they arrived, they found that the glacier was broken up and riddled with crevasses. “Bjarne and I skied on a rope the whole way down, because there were giant crevasses and seracs peeling off,” he told me. “It was the scariest 25-degree slope I’ve ever skied in my life. I came away from that being like, At this pace, this line is going to be unskiable in ten years, tops.”
In the overwhelming quickening of global climate impacts, it can feel like nothing moves the needle on change, in the outdoor world least of all. As Ethan Linck pointed out in what has become a seminal essay, “Your Stoke Won’t Save Us,” published in High Country News in May 2018, it’s not enough to rip big lines. “Stoke,” Linck wrote, “seems like a shaky bet for effecting the dramatic change necessary to halt accelerating ecological collapse.”
The thing that does feel valuable, I think, is connecting the dots between the field of science and being out in the field itself. Because of climate change, there’s a fundamental shift happening in how we can access places and how we’re going to do so in the future. A last descent is both a hard stop and a story about the impermanence of the places that stoke us up the most.
Saving for a trip is often made to sound easy: skip a latte every week, and before you know it, you’re halfway to Patagonia. But anyone who’s tried to squirrel away more than a few bucks here and there knows it takes a lot more discipline to accumulate significant reserves.
That’s bad news for those of us (read: everyone) who don’t have time to toil away at Excel spreadsheets, or who get anxiety from just looking at our bank accounts. Luckily there are tools that do the hard work for you. For the past few years, I’ve used a combination of savings, investment, and budgeting apps to put aside thousands of dollars to pay off my student loans, quit my job to write freelance full time, and fund a life of adventure.
My obsession started when I stumbled upon the Qapital app in late 2016, after emptying all but a few hundred bucks from my bank account to pay off a student loan. The timing couldn’t have been worse: I’d recently booked a trip to Cuba, where you need cash for everything—I couldn’t put expenses on a credit card and pay it off with the next paycheck. Qapital, which transfers money into a separate account based on parameters you set, held me accountable toward spending less than usual on everyday treats, so I’d have money for on-the-ground purchases. In conjunction with freelancing on the side of my full-time editorial job, closely monitoring my savings goals, and cutting back on splurges, the app helped me put aside more than $10,000 in less than a year.
From then on, I was hooked. I now have a set of apps that helps me cut down on frivolous purchases, earn cash back on necessities, and track my spending.
Qapital is the easiest set-it-and-forget-it savings app I use. It transfers money into an external account based on rules you create yourself, which can be as simple as “round up to the nearest $1” every time you swipe a credit card or as elaborate as putting aside $5 toward a donation to charity whenever you splurge on Starbucks. To make the stakes even higher, sync it up with the app IFTTT (If This, Then That), which uses real-life cause and effect scenarios to deposit a set amount to your Qapital account every time a specific action occurs. I use IFTTT to put aside $1 every time President Trump tweets, which has funded more than one taco-infused adventure to Mexico City. It’s $3 per month for Qapital’s basic savings model (additional features, like investment and checking account services, cost up to $12), and IFTTT is free.
If you have a cell phone, internet, or cable bill, odds are you’re overpaying for it due to fine-print exceptions like reimbursements for periodic lapses in service. Trim’s bots renegotiate your bills and monitor your internet provider for outages you might not have been aware of, then request refunds on your behalf. The bots log into your accounts and contact customer-service reps posing as you to lower monthly fees and request discounts and refunds. I regularly save about $5 to $20 per month using Trim on my Comcast internet bill alone, even with the app’s 25 percent commission. Trim will also identify all of your recurring monthly subscriptions, so you can see how $5 here and $15 there adds up over a month or year. You can ask the app to cancel some of these services on your behalf, saving you time, cutting down on your excess spending, and helping you funnel that money directly into savings for travel.
This app trolls your inbox for flight information and automatically requests refunds or mileage points when you experience a significant delay or cancellation. It will also check for compensation from the previous year’s flights upon sign up, so you can get cash back even before booking another trip. This is especially useful if you’ve taken a flight from the European Union recently. EU regulations mandate that airlines pay customers up to around $660 for delays and cancellations. On a work trip earlier this year, I got stuck in Stockholm for an extra day because of a late flight. Within a couple weeks, Delta sent me a check for $675, which I immediately dropped into my savings. Service takes 30 percent of what they save you, but it's well worth it.
Most of us earn cash back or miles on credit cards for everyday purchases. Drop works similarly, giving users points for every dollar spent at certain stores (such as Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods) on top of the normal rewards that you receive from your credit-card company. It’s basically free money that can be redeemed for gift cards, like $100 at American Airlines or $25 at Whole Foods. Points add up slowly if you only accumulate them from daily spending, so browse Drop’s special offers for bonus points on purchases like online shopping, trials with Hulu or Barkbox, and promos for a wine subscription. You save more money by not spending it, of course, but if you’re going to shop anyway, it’s worth checking for deals before making a big purchase. In a little over a year, I’ve accumulated about $235 in Drop points.
Small purchases during a trip add up fast—especially if you fall into the exchange-rate trap, where everything seems cheap compared with prices back home. That’s why I use Trail Wallet, which records every dollar you spend for a trip, from the moment you book the first flight or Airbnb to the car ride home from the airport. It allows you to log transactions in any currency and converts them to U.S. dollars, offers day-to-day real-time spending reports, and calculates your daily average as you go. Set a daily or overall budget, appoint caps for standard categories like food and lodging, or pick one of your own choosing (I spend too much on coffee). The free version allows for 25 transactions per trip, but I recommend paying the $5 fee for full access. This app helped me stay $200 under budget on a recent trip to Japan by putting my small buys into perspective. Skipping a souvenir here and there allowed me guilt-free splurges on more expensive meals and higher-quality gifts toward the end of my trip.