Outside Magazine April 2002

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The Big Idea
The Outside Innovators

Gerard Fusil & Mark Burnett
Endurance Junkies
The masochistic phenomenon called "adventure racing" began in 1989, when French journalist Gerard Fusil launched the Raid Gauloises, an off-road, multiday slog combining several outdoor sports in exotic landscapes. Six years later a British Raid veteran named Mark Burnett snatched Fusil's brainchild and tarted it up for American TV viewers, who know the event as the Eco-Challenge. Now, some 300 adventure races exist. Fusil, 54, heads up the comparatively obscure Elf Authentic Adventure, a 16-day ordeal that lures 100 athletes each year. The 41-year-old Burnett, on the other hand, has gone platinum with his adventure-inspired reality shows, including Survivor and his newest, Combat Missions, in which contestants grind out military exercises for prize money.

Cold is cool: Paul and Susan Schurke making the most of winter in Ely, Minnesota.

Paul & Susan Schurke
Mushers for the Masses
In the early eighties, when Paul Schurke first dreamed of making a living by running dogsled tours in northern Minnesota, the prospects had to look tundra-bleak. Adventure travel was an upstart industry jockeying for mainstream appeal, and the smart bet was offering low-risk, faux-rugged trips to exotic locales: canned safaris, dude-ranch cattle drives, Italian bicycling tours. But mushing through the North Woods? "Most Americans viewed winter as an exercise in survival rather than an opportunity to explore the beauty of the outdoor world," recalls Schurke, now 46. "I wanted to change that." It was a tough business proposition. How do you market a sport, a season, and a region with dubious commercial appeal?

Schurke's answer: through an intense devotion to place and an obsession with detail. After returning from a 1986 sled-and-ski expedition to the North Pole with Will Steger, Schurke purchased nine purebred Eskimo dogs from an Inuit breeder, renovated a sod-roofed log cabin outside Ely, Minnesota, and opened the Wintergreen Dogsled Lodge, one of the first commercial mushing outfits in the United States. His wife, Susan, cranked up her sewing machine and started custom-designing Inuit-style anoraks for Paul's clients. "In the beginning we lived on beans and rice," recalls Schurke. "But making money was never the goal. All I know about my business is that my bookkeeper calls me when I'm overdrawn."

Word of mouth spread, and by the midnineties Wintergreen had nearly doubled in size, with Susan's Wintergreen Designs maturing alongside it into a $1.5 million garment company. These days, Wintergreen's staff of ten humans and 64 dogs introduces some 400 clients a year to the North Woods. "People often tell me Wintergreen changed their entire approach to winter," says Schurke. "To me, that's why we're here." —Mark Jenkins

Richard Bangs
Globetrotter for Hire
Back in the early 1970s, when Richard Bangs was a 22-year-old Grand Canyon raft guide with $500 to his name, he had an itch to get on rivers no one had run before. Wouldn't it be nice, he thought, if he could take along people who would help foot the bills? Bangs lured a small group of brave souls to accompany him on a first descent of Ethiopia's Awash River, and thus the concept of commercial, expedition-style travel was born. Eventually his company, called Sobek (the Egyptian crocodile god), grew to offer every variety of guided adventure before merging with archrival Mountain Travel in 1991. Today Mountain Travel Sobek is a $21-million-a-year dream-fulfillment clearinghouse, offering 124 trips on all seven continents.

Jordy Margid
Telly Transformer
A plastic telemark boot? Sacrilege! But in 1988 Jordy Margid, a product manager at Black Diamond, waved off the purists and ushered in the future when he joined with Italian bootmaker Scarpa to codesign the Terminator. At $400, the T1 cost less than a high-end leather boot, but it performed better, lasted longer, and was every bit as comfy. Its flexible toe permitted the traditional t-turn, but the hard shell gave telly skiers alpine-like control, reigniting interest in the sport. Sales have increased 1,500 percent since the boot's debut, and the product line has grown to include a race boot (T-Race), a scaled-down all-mountain boot (T2), and a touring model (T3). Did plasticizing cost telemark skiing its soul? Nah—it added more. "Now there isn't any kind of skiing you can't do on a telly boot," says Margid, 39, who's currently designing a high-performance, releasable telemark binding.

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