Sometimes great things happen in threes, as we discovered when the American Society of Magazine Editors gathered this April in New York to present publishing's Oscars, the National Magazine Awards. Since Outside was fortunate enough to win back-to-back awards for General Excellence (the rough equivalent of Best Picture) in 1996 and 1997, we were, as Scorsese says, honored simply to be nominated again this year. And as no magazine in the NMAs' 32-year history had ever won three consecutive General Excellence awards, we were well prepared to distribute congratulations to one of our fellow finalists — the New Yorker, GQ, Spin, and House & Garden. Such was the plan, at least. But to our surprise and delight, Outside again garnered the top honor in the enormously competitive category of magazines with 400,000 to one million readers. (This latest Ellie, as sculptor Alexander Calder's "Elephant" stabile is known, is our fifth in as many years, and in addition to these recent NMA victories, Outside has been a finalist for a record 16 straight years.) "Having won this category the last two years," the judges noted, "Outside had a lot to live up to. But its vitality and originality are boundless. Even in its 20th anniversary year, Outside insists on blazing new trails."

Humbly, we suggest that ASME's words apply more aptly to our readers, who each month insist on blazing new trails of their own. Intelligent, active, and involved, they challenge the magazine to be as curious and engaged by the world as are they. Thus our goal for the past two decades has remained remarkably unchanged: to present the world outside in all its lively, inspiring, and infuriating detail — and to do so through the efforts of resourceful, talented, and passionate photographers, illustrators, and writers. (Such as contributing editor Daniel Coyle, whose profile of Exxon Valdez captain Joseph Hazelwood was an NMA finalist for feature writing this year.)

So what's in store for Outside at 21? Well, even though the magazine will soon be considered a legal adult, we frankly feel more like a kid on holiday — restless, a little irascible, and raring to go. We hope you'll come along as we continue to explore anything and everything that looks interesting out there. And oh, we're buying.

As a former senior editor of this magazine, Hampton Sides has eyeballed up close all manner of increasingly extreme athleticism. "I'm curious about the kind of synthetic suffering people seem to be searching for more and more," he says — a curiosity slaked by his frontline witnessing of Morocco's excruciating Saharan slog, the Marathon des Sables. Sides is also the inquisitive mind behind Outside's column The Wild File.

With Sides in the Sahara was London-based photographer Dan Burn-Forti, who was pleased simply to be an observer. "We called it Club Kwai," he says. "I would never do anything like that unless my car broke down." Burn-Forti emerged unscathed from his desert exile and promptly hightailed it to Italy's putatively safer climes — where he succumbed to food poisoning while photographing a convention of automobile designers.

Before his attempt last summer to re-create Leif Eriksson's eleventh-century voyage to Newfoundland, writer W. Hodding Carter's nautical r‰sum‰ was littered with disasters. Among them: ramming a barge on the Mississippi with his Sunfish and shredding a canoe in West Virginia's New River. "Actually," Carter avers, "that canoe thing was my wife's fault." Carter is the author of Westward Whoa, a tale of traveling Lewis and Clark's trail by boat, horse, and rental car. The story of his experience as a Viking manqu‰ begins.

"My favorite thing is island hopping, just paddling from one island to another," says Paul Theroux, who for this month's guide to summer reveling details navigating the waters near his Cape Cod home. Theroux is the author of such celebrated books as The Great Railway Bazaar and The Mosquito Coast; his newest is Sir Vidia's Shadow, a memoir of his 30-year-long rapport with the writer V. S. Naipaul, to be published by Houghton Mifflin this fall. "It's about friendship," Theroux explains, "beginning, middle, and end."

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder (The Soul of a New Machine, House) is completing a book about the western Massachusetts town of Northampton. "It's about growing up in a place, loving a place, and having to leave it," he says. Kidder, however, has no plans to give up his favorite salty stretch of Maine peninsula, the topic of his piece. "It's austere by many people's standards," says Kidder. "But I can clear my head there."

Although he's logged time in the rainforest and undersea for Outside, Tad Friend covers more familiar ground back home. "I write a lot about pop culture," says Friend, who chronicles the impact of this year's Amazon fires on Brazil's Indians. "Yet my most fervent hope for the Yanomami is that they never discover it."