Adventure Archive

The perfect way to top off a morning of tank driving: fire off a collection of automatic weapons, including a Tommy gun, and M-16, and the .30 caliber machine gun shown here. I’ll describe the experience in an upcoming “I’ll Try Anything” column for Popular Mechanics.

Popular Mechanics called me up and said, “We want you to go drive a tank.” I said, “Okay.”

For me one of the most disturbing aspects of the Joplin tornado, which left at least 117 people dead when it struck southwestern Missouri on May 22, is that it was pursued by at least two teams of storm chasers, one of which was filming for a national TV show. Some might argue that storm chasers serve a valuable scientific purpose in gathering data that will allow the destructive forces of tornadoes to be better understood and predicted, so that lives will be saved in the future. And it’s true that after the Joplin tornado, as is often the case, storm chasers were among the first on hand to help the survivors, arriving well before EMTs and firemen. But for me it’s impossible to overlook the fact that for most who undertake it, storm chasing is strictly a recreational activity. The emotional reality is that storm chasers enjoying immersing themselves in a force of nature that takes lives. Indeed, their activities may actively contribute to the death toll.

It’s been 12 years since I went tornado-hunting myself. I was reporting a story about weather junkies for a now-defunct magazine. I spent a long day driving around Oklahoma with Cloud 9 Tours (which was one of the outfits on hand for this year’s Joplin twister), then got caught up in reporting the aftermath of that year’s deadly tornado, an F5 twister that tore through the town of Moore, Oklahoma. It was one death in particular that made me forever question the morality of storm chasing. I was never tempted to go again. Read the rest of this entry »

Just spent the morning doing something I’ve  been wanting to try for years: Fly a jetpack. JetLev, the unit’s manufacturer, just completed the first production model and let me be the first media to experience it first-hand. Instead of a rocket expelling hot gas, you’ve got twin nozzles shooting out high volumes of water at low pressure. You’re tethered to the surface by a 33-foot-long flexible hose. It’s a total hoot. Note that I’d only been flying this contraption for a few minutes when the video was taken. I got better — a little — after logging about 30 minutes total flying time; I was able to go higher and keep the thing under better control; the demo pilots can pull off some really impressive flying. I’ll be writing about the experience soon for Popular Mechanics.

I’m currently in northernmost Quebec, in the Inuit village of Puvirnituq. The seemingly endless expanse of snow and ice, the biting subzero temperatures and the howling wind, powerfully drive home the resourcefulness of the Inuit, who for over a thousand years thrived in this unforgiving landscape with only stone-age technology. But what powerful technology it was: fire, seal-skin anoraks, snow-carving knives for making igloos, and above all, dogs. Yesterday afternoon I went for a dog-sled ride with expert musher Jean-Marie Novalinga, whose team pulled us across a flat, wind-scoured landscape. Unlike dog teams in Alaska, those in this part of the Arctic are harnessed in a loose fan formation, as if one were being pulled by a feral pack of dogs. One there in the empty expanse, man and dog working together, the partnership feels like a very primal relationship indeed.

It is, at heart, both a practical relationship and a deeply emotional one. “You have to feel connection to your dogs,” Novalinga said. “It’s the only way to work together.”

Anyone who has ever lived with a dog knows what he means by connection. Humans and dogs have a way of intuiting one another’s emotions – of feeling like we know what the other is feeling — that is unique among all the species on earth. But how they can achieve it is something of a biological puzzle. After all, dogs and humans are not particularly closely related species. Our last common ancestor lived far back during the age of dinosaurs. Dogs are more closely related to whales than they are to us. We are more closely related to mice than to dogs. So why should we feel such a powerful and unique bond? Read the rest of this entry »

Fear shuts down thought. Under conditions of intense fear, the amygdala activates the locus ceruleus, which releases high levels of noradrenaline in the prefrontal cortex. This works to deactivate the whole of the lateral prefrontal cortex. In essence, the fear system pulls the plug on all our higher-level cognitive processes. The time to make a plan is not when you wake up inside a burning building.

Unfortunately, most of us have a hard time appreciating before the fact how non-negotiable this effect will be. That failure can result in tragic consequences – especially when it comes to one particular recreational activity that demands self-reliance in a potentially fatal environment. What is it? Read the rest of this entry »

The most exciting thing about travel for me is the delicious sense of disorientation, that Alice-in-Wonderland sense that even the smallest, most mundane details of life have been switched around. For me, getting lost in a strange place isn’t necessarily a bad thing at all. I like the sense of being totally cut off from the predictable world of my everyday life, immersed in the strangeness of the new. In the current issue of Travel + Leisure magazine, I have a short article talking about how traveling without navigational aids can boost your awareness of the world around you.

As it happens, a friend of mine, the travel writer Matt Gross, has been thinking along the same lines. Matt spent years traveling around the world writing the Frugal Traveler column for the New York Times. Now he’s started a new column called “Getting Lost,” in which he describes his attempts to deliberately disorient himself in places around the world that he has never visited before. Given our mutual interest in the topic, we decided to interview each other. My answers to Matt’s questions can be found over at his website, The Minor Glories.

Most of us try hard not to get lost. Where did you get the idea to deliberately throw yourself into the experience? Read the rest of this entry »

A mist hangs in the forested valley as dawn approaches. Somewhere a lone bird calls. I sit on my haunches, listening. There are wild pigs in this forest, somewhere. Daylight might draw them up through this thicket to the ridgeline behind me. My quarry is a razor-tusked beast that can weigh several hundred pounds and is famous for exacting violent revenge on hunters. I check my weapons—a wooden bow and a single stone-tipped arrow—and find myself wondering: Is this really a great idea?

So begins my latest “I’ll Try Anything” column in Popular Mechanics, about my time stone-age hunting with Santa Cruz wilderness expert Cliff Hodges. You can read the full story here.

The New York Times is running a story tomorrow that I wrote about hardcore vacation ranches out West, where guests take part in running real working cattle ranch. (It’s already available online, though.) Unfortunately, they had to cut out some of the more vivid scenes from the piece. “We’re a family newspaper,” my editor said. I didn’t think that what they took out was all that gruesome, but in my estimation it went a long way toward establishing just how hardcore these experiences are. This isn’t a Disney Channel version of cattle ranching; animals get castrated, have their ovaries pulled out, get tags punched into their ears, and all the rest.

At any rate, in the interest of full and complete reporting, I’m putting the full version online below, so those of a more hardy disposition can learn what these ranches are all about. Read the rest of this entry »