Some conflicts smolder along indefinitely, generating heat and acrimony but never reaching the level of full-blown violence. The long-running battle over land development, especially in the West, is ordinarily such an issue. But when the discussion turns incendiary — literally, in the case of the $12 million arson fire aimed at derailing a controversial Vail, Colorado, ski expansion project — the terms of the debate are changed in an instant. The news that a group calling itself the Earth Liberation Front was taking credit for the crime, and that its target was Vail Associates, the successful, aggressive resort and real estate corporation, made it clear that someone wanted to turn a rhetorical skirmish into open warfare. With the torching of Two Elk Lodge, four ski lifts, and two other buildings, these arsonists committed the most costly act of eco-terrorism on record.

The ashes had barely grown cold when Robert S. Boynton, a Brooklyn-based journalist and contributing editor to the New Yorker, arrived to investigate. "I was drawn by the drama of the fire," Boynton says, "but in the end it was only a way in. It's really the prologue and the aftermath that are most compelling."

Digging into the tangled history of big money and hard feelings in Vail, Boynton soon discovered that "beneath this seemingly pristine, beautiful town are all these webs of connections. There's a tension between the surface and what's really going on economically. I heard a lot of talk about the idea of community, but then you start to think, 'This isn't a community. This is a ski resort.'"

Before the fire, most Vail residents opposed the expansion project, to be built on national forest land said to be one of the last remaining habitats of the endangered Canadian lynx. But even as the arson drew welcome attention to this opposition, it also effectively tarred all environmental activists with an "eco-terrorist" brush. This contradiction, along with the forensic mystery and the larger tale of a town sharply at odds, make for a decisively thought-provoking report.

Robert Antoni, who revisits the Bahamian cay that his grandfather once owned in "Blackbeard Doesn't Come Here Anymore," was going back in another sense: "My grandparents' stories form the beginnings of all my fiction," says the award-winning novelist (Divina Trace and Blessed Is the Fruit), who grew up in Trinidad and the Bahamas and teaches at the University of Miami. A hint of how wild those stories were comes via the working title for Antoni's next collection: My Grandmother's Erotic Folk Tales and Stories of Adventure with Occasional Orgies in Her Boardinghouse for American Soldiers During the War.

"I just did a cookbook with John Madden," says photographer Russell Kaye. "It's full of tailgate recipes, so we stood around in parking lots eating animal parts." This month Kaye left paved lots for paradise, cruising on the Disney Magic to Antoni's childhood cay. His last feature also involved high-seas imagineering: For the July 1998 issue, Kaye tailed Hodding Carter on his attempted reenactment of Leif Eriksson's journey to the New World.

"The future of the human race is a pretty overwhelming theme," says Mark Hertsgaard, who dauntlessly tackles the subject in Earth Odyssey: Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future, to be published this month by Broadway Books. In an excerpt ("The Nile at Mile One"), Hertsgaard recounts the East African leg of his five-year pilgrimage. Back in the States, the author of On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency splits his time between his creekside home outside Washington, D.C., and a Sierra Nevada cabin.

David Noland defines adventure one simple way: "At least once in your trip, you must say to yourself, 'What the [expletive deleted] am I doing here?'" It's an expression that the author of Travels Along the Edge and our 1999 Trip-Finder used recently in the Zimbabwean bush. Tracking a pair of lions, Noland heard an ear-shattering roar from behind: "I thought, 'My God, that lion has to be 40 feet long and weigh 1,000 tons.' It's a different ball game when you're down the food chain and on their turf."

Shane DuBow ("Do You Know What You Don't Know?") has published fiction in Ploughshares and the Chicago Review and has 10 years of experience leading backcountry trips everywhere from Wyoming to Alaska. For one former writing gig, an online column, DuBow frequently traversed the wilds of the Windy City. "I once canoed the Chicago River from Baha'i to Baja," he boasts. "That is, from the Baha'i Temple to the Baja Beach Club."

Over two peripatetic decades, Tim Cahill has made friends around the globe. "I write for a living, but I'm the world's worst letter-writer," laments Cahill. "I'm always feeling guilty. In fact, I feel guilty right now." In this month's Out There column, Cahill looks up Nyoman Wirata, a long-lost comrade in Bali. "Nyoman told me that he's never seen snow, so I'm heading outside my cabin this minute to take a picture for him of me standing in the Montana snow."