For the Record

By Todd Balf and Paul Kvinta

Holy Roller Coasters
"Ask yourself, how far is heaven from hell?" muses Daxx Edder. If the 58-year-old developer has his way, the answer will be a mere 77 miles. As the visionary behind Holy Land Theme Park, a proposed amusement complex an hour northeast of Las Vegas in the tumbleweed town of Mesquite, Nevada, Edder has big plans: In addition to erecting a 33-story statue of Jesus, he hopes to bring all 66 books of the Bible to life using holographics, virtual reality, and — for the parting of the Red Sea — hydrologic special effects. Construction could take ten years, but as Edder reckons, "We could get the Christ statue up and knock out Genesis in a year and a half, and be open for business." It's a plan to which the people of Mesquite — home to a handful of casinos — seem strangely receptive. "I think it would fit into our community," says city manager Bill Da Vee. "In 1996, we ran off a pornographic bookstore, if that shows you our moral fiber."

Come Again?
To baffled locals, the strange part wasn't simply the fact that Eddy Matzger was attempting to skate up Mount Kilimanjaro — after all, the 19,340-foot East African peak is regularly besieged by all manner of oddball stunt artists. Rather, it was more his avowed rationale. "No one understood that I was just going up for the view," explains the four-time national in-line champion from Berkeley, California. "They didn't realize that skates are my shoes." Alas, unlike the terrain on his 1995 glide along the Great Wall of China, Kilimanjaro turned out not to be prime skating ground. "Only a tiny fraction was actually skateable," acknowledges Matzger, 30, who spent four days inching his way to the summit through mud and waist-deep snow, "but the skates did grip really well, almost like crampons." The descent, meanwhile, proved more hospitable, if a little less safe. "The Swahili language doesn't have a word for in-line skates," Matzger says of the reception his downhill run provoked. "But I kind of like what the porters came up with: flying shoes."

A First — and Likely a Last
For paddlers expecting the worst — namely, a 20-mile stretch of Class VI rapids known for turning logs into toothpicks — last January's trans-Borneo whitewater expedition turned out to be a picnic. At least in retrospect. During their 22-day, 600-mile trip, American kayakers John Weld, Andy Bridge, Mark Moore, and Nelson Oldham enjoyed relatively tame Class IV and V water and no hull-shattering collisions. Of course, that's not to say that schlepping 11-foot-long kayaks over a 4,000-foot-high mountain pass and negotiating two previously un-run rivers doesn't have its moments. Take the wildlife, for example: bloodthirsty leeches, wild boar, and fruit bats with two-foot wingspans. Not to mention the stealthier fauna. "I don't know what caused them," says veteran river guide Weld, 29, of the sudden outbreak of hives he experienced. "But considering that just about everything that stings you in Borneo can kill you, I feel lucky." Good point. But what about the ungodly 20-mile uphill portage, in which the team and local porters were forced to hack out a trail through the snarled, viney interior? "When the porters left us, they made us swear we wouldn't tell our friends about them," concedes Bridge, 34, a former national wildwater champion. "They said they'd never do this for anybody again."

A Homespun Art

Sad as it may be, catastrophe is the norm in Mike Hufstetler's chosen medium. "One time," sighs perhaps the world's lone spiderweb artist, describing the mishap that destroyed several of his gossamer labors of love, "a moth got into my garage and flew through my webs." Nonetheless, the 47-year-old Hufstetler perseveres, regularly combing the woods near his suburban Atlanta home for freshly spun webs, which he "captures" with adhesive foam-core boards (after shooing away the resident arachnid). Back in his garage, he spends 20 hours coating the web with a top-secret hardening substance made from common household products, spray-painting it, and mounting it on colored glass. It's a technique that, while finely honed, is far from fail-safe. "Three of every ten webs break during the artistic process," notes Hufstetler, who beat the odds recently by selling a 16-by-18-inch web for $1,000. "You wouldn't believe the damage a little static electricity can do."

Hang Ten, Appalachia

Should a three-mile-wide asteroid plunge into the Atlantic, tidal waves would churn clear to the Appalachian foothills, submerging the eastern seaboard within two hours. Or so projects astrophysicist Jack Hills, whose computer model at Los Alamos National Laboratory has just determined that the odds of its happening this year are ten million to one. A long shot, indeed — but enough to inspire (with a little prompting) some mountain folk to envision life as oceanfront property owners.
Ann Coleman, chairwoman, McDowell County Chamber of Commerce, Marion, North Carolina: "With Appalachian State University just 30 minutes away, we'd be the next big place for spring break!"
Dan Campbell, city manager, Galax, Virginia:
"Sure, we'd have beachfront property, but all our galax leaves would be destroyed. We'd have to change our name!"
Pete Mann, mayor, Wilkesboro, North Carolina: "We raise a lot of poultry in this area, but that would have to stop. The land would be much too valuable for chickens!"

Jack Grimm, 1925-1998

Of this century's many noted adventurers, few were more intrepid or more colorful than Jack Grimm, a west Texas oil baron who launched globe-trotting expeditions in search of nearly every modern enigma, from Bigfoot to the Loch Ness monster to Noah's Ark. Though his missions seldom turned up more than fuzzy photos or dubious shards of wood, Grimm — who died in January of cancer at age 72 — nonetheless amassed plenty of notoriety. In the early 1970s, his expeditions to Turkey's Mount Ararat, the reputed home of the Ark, nearly triggered an international incident when the Soviet Union accused Grimm of spying from the 16,946-foot peak. In 1983, his undersea searches of the North Atlantic yielded a blurry snapshot of a propeller he insisted was once part of the then-missing Titanic — a claim that became the subject of much contention when Robert Ballard discovered the ship two years later. "Jack deserves some credit when it comes to the Titanic," says longtime friend Bill Whitaker. "Who knows if he found anything, but he did narrow the search for Johnny-come-latelies like Ballard." Illustration by Gus D'Angelo