BUT HOW TO PARSE tales that aren't unmistakable cotton candy? In general, the longer the piece, the more trustworthy the report. Quite simply, the big stories go to the best writers, and there are few if any dirty secrets. Veteran Outside correspondents like Patrick Symmes, Kevin Fedarko, and Bob Shacochis cut loose with a plane ticket and shoestring budget for a story they care passionately about. They mosey into the capitals of repressive regimes and slog up war-torn glaciers, returning with accounts that are almost always surprising and entertaining … and are then fact-checked under an electron microscope. Junior editors, eager newbies who'd like nothing more than to earn a promotion by exposing a fraud, rack up hefty long-distance bills double-checking the name of every flower and street corner, re-interviewing every shaman, and finding independent lepidopterists who might contradict the author's local butterfly buff. They rarely uncover anything substantial. As a former fact-checker, I never found cracks in the foundation, and I doubt that today's sleuths do either. If the author claims to have hopped on one foot on top of K2, you can trust that at least one Balti porter witnessed the high-altitude hokeypokey.

Not surprisingly, short, inspirational pieces ("service," in magazine-speak) are more fraught. While most benefit from years of experience in the field or exhaustive reporting, some of these charts of top getaways, snippets about five new national parks, graphics on the hardest climbing routes, "best of" lists, and other flirts and aperitifs don't always paint a full picture. An editor at a prominent newspaper once barked to a freelance-writer friend of mine, "Find me the next Tuscany!" After a couple of calls and a few hours of Googling around, he apparently did.

As reader Jeff Jordan discovered, Outside is not immune to the proverbial "phone job." After reading in the May 2008 issue about a brewpub in Portland, Oregon, with a cyclocross course behind it, he excitedly drove more than 300 miles to check it out. The only problem? There wasn't one. The course was "planned"—a detail that the editor cut and the fact-checker failed to catch.

(Cue sound of air hissing out of tire.)

Other times, a small piece can be so devastatingly honest that it's literally devastating. A perfect example happened in 1996, when a writer by the name of Jeff Spurrier all but declared a sandbar north of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, the next hot spot, highlighting its incredible left- and right-hand breaks and cheap bungalows. "The La Michoacán fruit-drink stand is where the local public phone is located," he wrote, "and is still the town's unofficial meeting place." A dozen years before it became a holy pilgrimage destination for surf-camp grads, Outside saw that Sayulita was great.

Was great. Now that Beverly Hills Chihuahua has been filmed there, I think it's fair to say it's no longer a hidden gem. [Editor's note: We still think it's great. And, for the record, San Pancho is the next Sayulita.] Remember, even the best news comes with an expiration date.