"M exico's last true wilderness" is how Philip True once described the rugged fastness of the Sierra Madre Occidental, where the Huichol Indians have their ancestral home. To the adventurous Mexico City–based American newspaperman—as to many of us who care about the subjects covered by this magazine—the phrase, with its promise of an unspoiled pocket of natural landscape, had an irresistible allure. True was a proficient outdoorsman who loved solitary rambles in the wild, and over the years he had become fascinated by the remarkably intact Huichol culture. Last December he set out with notebook and camera to explore the realm of these Indians, whose peyote ceremonies and centuries-old animist beliefs have lured other modern seekers. "There's a beautiful story here," he wrote his editors back in Texas.

Fifteen days later, True's body was found in a shallow grave, raising serious questions about how and why this journey of seemingly noble intentions ended in an unhinged act of violence.

Two young, male Huichol suspects had been jailed by the time Outside correspondent Paul Kvinta made his own exploratory journey to retrace True's trek (page 56). "The Huichol way of life may seem idyllic, but encroachment by the modern world has made the Indians extraordinarily tense," Kvinta says. "New roads brought evangelical missionaries, and then drug traffickers, and finally a military crackdown." Kvinta found that while Philip True understood that the Huichols' world was changing, he may not have realized just how fast, and how disastrously he might become implicated in those changes. Did True's naive enthusiasm lead him to ignore some of the more unsettling ironies that attend expeditions to "uncover" indigenous peoples? He went to witness for himself the clash between modern life and ancient ways—apparently without realizing that, as one colleague later said, "He was the clash."

Former Washington Post correspondent Peter Maass used to think of himself as a man singularly unimpressed by the play of g-forces ("I always found roller coasters boring," he says), but that was before he found himself corkscrewing over the Arizona desert in the cockpit of a Sukhoi-29 for this month's report on the hyperadrenalized sport of "aerobatics" ("I Am Elena. You Will Fly Me Now." page 88). Maass, who once studied in St. Petersburg, found this odd pursuit dominated by Russian pilots, Russian planes, and a darkly Russian sense of fatalism. His book about covering the Bosnian conflict, Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War, was published in 1996 by Knopf. After spending hours rigging his radio-triggered camera to withstand the trials of an aerobatics plane, New York–based photographer F. Scott Schafer was raring to go—until his pilot ticked off a few caveats. "He told me to get sick inside my shirt," says Schafer, "or it would smear up the windshield and he wouldn't be able to see." Ordinarily, Schafer's subjects are terrestrial celebrities, including, appropriately, Aerosmith. National Book Award–winning novelist Ellen Gilchrist doesn't mind flying, so long as it's the earthbound variety. "There's no word dark enough for how I feel about air travel in the late twentieth century," says Gilchrist. "But I love getting behind the wheel." Her account of motoring through her native Mississippi Delta is part of our summer-ready compendium of essays on the joys of the open road (page 69). Gilchrist's latest novel, Flights of Angels, was published last fall by Little, Brown.

In 1984, writer and actor David Rakoff lived in a run-down row house in London, directly across from the offices of burgeoning tycoon Richard Branson. End of story—until we asked Rakoff, a Toronto native presently based in Manhattan, to ponder the Virgin founder's future now that he's been trumped in the around-the-world balloon race ("The Few. The Brave. The Capitalists." page100). "Personally, I don't care about records," says Rakoff, a regular on public radio's This American Life. "But I guess I could start caring if I had a discretionary fund of a few billion pounds." Rakoff's piece is illustrated by fellow Canadian expatriate Barry Blitt, a frequent New Yorker cover contributor and cartoonist whose animated work has appeared on Saturday Night Live. Contributing editor David Roberts understands the compulsive lengths to which a climber will go to conquer Mount McKinley, having once led a new route up its daunting Wickersham Wall. This month, Roberts brings his experience to bear on what is surely mountaineering's most durable controversy: Was Frederick Cook, in 1906, the first man to summit McKinley, or was he simply an audacious fraud (page 94)? "The debate is heating up again," says Roberts, "partly because Cook seems like an underdog now—and climbers love underdogs." TOP: CHARLES GULLUNG; BOTTOM: F. SCOTT SCHAFER