Southern Indiana Trails

From high on the side of Mount Everest, Bishnu Gurung could hear the steady drone of helicopters landing in Base Camp, nearly 6,000 vertical feet below. The 52-year-old guide couldn’t tell if the flights were rescuing sick climbers or possibly shuttling in more people from COVID hot spots like Kathmandu. Either way, it wasn’t good.   He looked down and could see his client ratcheting painstakingly up the Lhotse Face. Bishnu edged his crampons against the slope as he moved slowly into Camp III and dropped his load of supplies. After 30 years of working on Everest, the mountain had become almost like a second home. Although he couldn’t see Base Camp, he had heard rumors from other guides and climbers that the coronavirus was raging across the nylon metropolis.  His client was a Nepali climber named Gobinda Prasad Devkota. Bishnu was impressed with the speed and dexterity he’d shown on this initial acclimatization trip, despite having lost the use of on...

Even the laziest cooks can do better than store-bought pickles. With just a little prep work, you can make your own, adding flavor and crunch to salads, sandwiches, and more, while netting health benefits from the produce and the juice. Another bonus: you probably have most of the ingredients already. Pickle brine, typically made with salt, sugar, and vinegar, brims with electrolytes that can help combat dehydration and cramping , explains Maddie Alm, a registered dietician, runner, and owner of Fueling Forward , a sports nutrition business in Boulder, Colorado. (Alm says you can take a few sips as soon as you feel a cramp coming on , or combine it with some water in place of a sports drink.) And while certain methods of cooking reduce or eliminate water-soluble vitamins in veggies, cold-pickling leaves those intact. Try your hand at pickling with this quick recipe adapted from the blog of Jennifer Segal, author of the cookbook Once Upon a Chef . You can substitute other vegetables ...

After years of family trauma, Kayla Lockhart was desperate for relief from the panic that plagued her. At her lowest moment, she picked up a fly-fishing rod and headed out to a stream—and for the first time in her life, she was able to quiet all the alarm bells in her head. For the final episode in our spring Wild Files series, we tell the story of Lockhart’s brave journey from a painful childhood to the healing waters that she now wants to share with everyone.  This episode of the Outside Podcast is brought to you by the all-new 2021 Ford Bronco Sport, a 4x4 SUV with seven available G.O.A.T. modes that enable it to go over any type of terrain. Learn more at ford.com/bronco . by Outside Editors via Outside Magazine: All

What I wear on the bike has a strong influence on how my ride feels that day. And I’m not the only one with this sentiment: there’s a reason the hashtags #SockDoping or #NewKitDay exist. Slipping on my favorite aero jersey makes me feel sleek and fast. Skipping the chamois guarantees a chill cruise to the coffee shop. One of my favorite items to ride in, though, is a humble T-shirt. Riding in a tee is freeing: goodbye suck-it-in Lycra, hello breeze on my back. Wearing non-cycling clothing on the bike sets the tone for a ride that equally colors outside the lines, like dragging my road bike up four miles of rocky singletrack (a poor choice in retrospect) or taking it on the metro to the edge of town to ride to an alpine lake (a great choice). This wasn’t my idea. Riders have long worn T-shirts on bikes. But up until recently, it wasn’t accepted or even practical for serious cyclists. ( Velominati rules  and all that.) Besides, where d...

You know that feeling of clarity you get after a good run or ride? The feeling that your synapses are firing, your mind is a laser, and if someone flashed a series of random cues on a computer screen you’d be able to hit the right button in a fraction of a second? No? Well, trust me. There’s a bunch of evidence that short bouts of moderate exercise improve performance in cognitive tasks immediately afterwards. It’s not necessarily the kind of thing you can feel , but it’s a highly repeatable finding. But there are also a lot of unanswered questions about this phenomenon, as a recent study in the Journal of Sports Sciences makes clear. How much exercise is enough to trigger this effect? How much is too much? Does it matter how fit you are? Or what type of cognitive task you’re doing? A group of researchers at the University of Sydney and Griffith University in Australia, led by Danielle McCartney, tries to fill in some of these gaps. The study involved 21 trained cyclists and triath...

Mylo Fowler  grew up on the Navajo reservation, raised by its red dirt and wild horses. This film,   directed by Chris Burkard and presented by Sony , begins when a spiritual elder upends Mylo’s entire vision of the future, telling him, ‘‘The greatest impact you will have on your life and for others is when you move off the reservation.’’ Fowler enters the unknown to discover his rightful place in the world. by Outside Editors via Outside Magazine: All

Hannah Whetzel couldn’t sit down. When she did, pain radiated everywhere. So the then junior at the University of Arizona stood. She stood during the four-hour bus ride to Flagstaff for the team’s first cross-country meet of the 2017 season. She stood at breakfast. And she stood any time she wasn’t driving or in class.  The problem started in her hamstring while at preseason running camp. She notified her coaches during the first week of school, but she says they didn’t seem too concerned. At times Whetzel broke down crying due to the intense pain—sometimes in front of her coaches, sometimes alone in her car. But she kept running and racing. Oddly, it didn’t hurt when she ran hard workouts. It was as if her body’s circuitry misfired, holding off the searing sensation until the endorphins faded. Since she was a non-scholarship member of the team, she felt like she had no wiggle room to disappoint her coaches. Finally, in February 2018, Whetzel got an MRI, which revealed a par...