No matter how deep 20th-century pioneers crawl into the bush, no matter how many mountains and glaciers they insert between themselves and technology and Beanie Babies and the panjandrums of society, it seems civilization always reaches in after them. So it is in Atlin, British Columbia, a Shangri-la of cultural refugees hidden in the spill of Canada's far northwest and something of a petri dish in an ongoing experiment in picturesque isolation. Atlin is a literal last stop — the last stop for many of its residents, who desired to free themselves from the fluxion of the modern world. Problem is, the world has come calling, in the guise of an upstart mining company with designs on a cache of minerals sited even deeper in the wilderness than the town itself. And so they plan to cut a road through Atlin and into the virgin forest, a road that could forever change the town, its people, and the surrounding land.

Contributing editor Mark Levine arrived in Atlin expecting something like the insular eccentricities of TV's Northern Exposure. "But what was strange was how familiar the town seemed," he says. "It had all the neuroses that towns everywhere have, the same underlying tensions. I was surprised to discover that this basic drama, this moment of change that is defining towns all over the West, has made it up to the farthest reaches of civilization in exactly the same form. Many people moved to Atlin seeking to shed the effluence of American culture. But it chases people down."

Among other investigations, Levine took an aerial tour of the huge, roadless Eden that surrounds and defines Atlin, flying over one of North America's wildest landscapes. "You go mile after mile, and there's just nothing down there," says Levine, who next spring will begin teaching at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. "And that seems to me to be the nothing that people were looking for when they moved there — like the Wallace Stevens poem, 'the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.' I don't know how far you have to go now, how far you have to travel to reach this state of imagined purity. You probably have to go pretty far into the bush."

Born in Kobe, Japan, and raised in Los Angeles, Karl Taro Greenfeld (who profiles Olympic gold-medal mogul skier Jonny Moseley) is the author of Speed Tribes: Days and Nights with Japan's Next Generation, an acclaimed look at Japan's clubs-and-drugs subculture. A Knight-Bagehot Fellow at Columbia University, Greenfeld is writing a book on another music-soaked Asian subset — the expatriate rave circuit. "You get English deejays coming to places like Goa," he says. "It's a huge techno-trance, big-beat club scene."

Paul Theroux, whose two dozen books include the paddling memoir The Happy Isles of Oceania, began his travels in 1963. One of the first Peace Corps volunteers, he taught English in Malawi — it was then British Nyasaland — during its transition to independence. "Just before my tour was up, I was kicked out for covert political activity," says Theroux, who covers the Philippine island of Palawan. "The Corps stressed that we get involved with the people. I got so involved that I participated in a leftist plot to overthrow the government."

Rob Howard, who photographed Palawan in Theroux's wake, usually kayaks the less placid waters off Manhattan Island. "We put in at Canal Street," he says, "and paddle over to the Statue of Liberty." A frequent contributor to Outside, Howard's far-flung shoots have taken him to Madagascar, Zimbabwe, Mexico, and — somewhat closer to home — the Adirondacks.

Brad Wetzler (Field Notes), who last year followed the star-crossed expedition of polar explorer Lonnie Dupre for Outside, has moved on to less earthbound subjects: the Mir space station and space travel. A former Outside senior editor, Wetzler had a short — and grounded — career as a Chicago bluesman, playing guitar with contributing editor Daniel Coyle. "We played once at Buddy Guy's Legends," he says. "But I had no rhythm."

"I was obsessed with bird-watching as a kid," says Californian Wade Graham, who reports on the Colombian kidnapping of four American birders. Graham often writes about natural history, but he ultimately traded in his binoculars for a hang glider. "You end up having face-offs with birds of prey," he says. "They'll fly next to you and just laugh. They have no respect."

The author of Great Plains and Coyote V. Acme, frequent Outside contributor Ian Frazier ("Does the Mushroom Love Its Plucker?") is at work on a book about the Pine Ridge Oglala Sioux reservation, to be published next year by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. "Here's a tribe of 20,000 that you could fit into a college football stadium," says Frazier, "who have had a vastly disproportionate impact on how we see ourselves, how we see the West, and our whole idea of heroes. Crazy Horse, Red Cloud, Black Elk — all were Oglala Sioux."