Between The Lines
By Cory Johnson, Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

In an age when we've planted the earth's great mountain peaks with flags, crisscrossed the frigid Poles, and ricocheted down the mightiest rivers, it often seems that there are few pure adventures left. Still, we're not without imagination. In fact, ever since that day two centuries ago when a couple of Frenchmen sent a bedazed duck, sheep, and rooster floating over Versailles in a hot-air balloon, there have been those with dreams of riding a magic sail 25,000 miles round the world.

Enter the balloon men, an elite club of twentieth-century Phileas Foggs bound by a faith that they can fly their notoriously unpredictable contraptions against the whims of wind, weather, terrain, and scud-missile-happy governments on a jet stream over the oceans and continents of the globe. At its heart, really, the attempt to fly around the world is not so much a race as it is a stab at immortality.

This month contributing editor Daniel Coyle visits with the leading balloonists as they conspire and jockey against one another. From Steve Fossett, who takes off from a dark South Dakota field on a shoestring and a prayer, to Richard Branson, the flamboyant chairman of Virgin, who seduces Morocco and the media horde with his Yeagaresque ‹lan while awaiting liftoff, Coyle finds a wildly disparate cross section of billionaires, pilots, entrepreneurs, and even a television reporter, each with his own endearing tics, hard-driving desires, and fears in the face of a near-impossible flight, the kind that has already claimed dozens of lives.

"Like presidential candidates and stock-car racers," writes Coyle, whose "Balloonatics" begins on page 50, "adventure balloonists tend toward the optimistic. This is not a matter of predilection so much as necessity. Even if everything goes right--which almost never happens--it's a game that some pilots compare to three-dimensional chess."

Somewhere beneath the clouds, where the rest of us live, there have always been those mythical rivers, mountains, and coastlines to which we quest for our own versions of adventure, our own rites of passage. This month, in "The Classics," which begins on page 59, five of our favorite writers take us out into America. Whether it's Tim Cahill sea-kayaking Alaska's Glacier Bay or Chip Brown climbing the Grand Teton, Craig Vetter rafting Idaho's Salmon River or John Skow sailing the coast of Maine, we'd like to think of it as a postcard of life as it's meant to be lived in the best of seasons. Like Philip Weiss, who canoes Minnesota's Boundary Waters, may you, too, find in these sacred places the wild beaver within.

Meanwhile, writer Jack Hitt visits one of this country's grimmer outposts--so you don't have to. In Barrow, Alaska, with temperatures blustering to minus 90 degrees, Hitt offers an intimate portrait of a rough place somehow prospering in an Arctic deep-freeze. "If I Can Take It There, I Can Take It Anywhere," which begins on page 84, is made all the more starkly resonant by the photographic work of Norman Mauskopf and is accompanied by a roundup of other honored American hellholes with chutzpah in Jack Barth's "Route 666," which can be found on page 89.

Elsewhere in this issue, John Tayman visits Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, where thousands of aquatic rodents known as nutrias are digging holes in the levees and drainage canals that keep the state from flooding. Tayman's elemental human-versus-the-rest-of-nature story, "Stalking Tall," begins on page 98. And last, on page 94, New York Times sportswriter Jere Longman offers a human-versus-human drama in "They're Back...," a sneak preview of the pressures and pitfalls facing four of America's preeminent athletes as they hope to clear the last big hurdle on the road to Atlanta, this month's Olympic track and field trials.

One final bit of good news: We're pleased to announce that Outside was recently named a finalist for a National Magazine Award for general excellence among magazines with 400,000 to a million readers--making it the only magazine to have received NMA nominations 14 years in a row. Enormous credit goes to our writers and photographers, of course, but most of all to you, our readers, who keep us thirsting for new challenges and adventures. We'll see you in the jet stream.