When conversation turns to tales of intrepid outdoorsmen — hardy, hardened, battling souls who stood toe-to-toe with the great back of beyond — no one ever mentions John Keats. And correctly so.

Still, Keats was a canny explorer of the human interior, and it was he who penned the line, "O moments as big as years." Which brings us, at last, to the point: If you're lucky, you've collected at least one such outsize moment, some breakthrough, I-just-didn't-realize instant when your relationship with the natural world pivots, expands, and is forever after transformed. Indeed, these revelatory flashes are a large part of why people chase adventure, and why our outdoor careers are so consuming. And yet few things are more difficult than trying to convey something of the essence of those riveting, ineffable, unpredictable epiphanies. It's like trying to keep cold, clear lake water from slipping through your fingers.

So the questions remain: What, exactly, happens in a peak moment? And do they come unbidden, or can something be done — some activity undertaken, some mesmeric place visited — to make these intensifications of the here and now come about? We put these queries to six of the most renowned writers working today, and uncovered supporting evidence from folks such as George Orwell, Annie Dillard, and Thomas F. Hornbein. The result, "Give Us a Moment," is an affecting assembly of splendid culminations, of subtle joys, of brushes with ecstasy and mortality and more.

Contributing to the package are David Guterson, the Bainbridge Island, Washington-based author of the best-selling Snow Falling on Cedars and the upcoming novel East of the Mountains; longtime contributor Andrea Barrett, who won the National Book Award for her story collection, Ship Fever, and whose new novel, The Voyage of the Narwhal, is in bookstores now; Bryan Di Salvatore, whose work appears frequently in this magazine, and who is the author of the forthcoming A Clever Base-Ballist, a nonfiction book about our venerable national pastime; essayist and travel writer Pico Iyer, author of Video Night in Kathmandu; Bernd Heinrich, a professor of biology at the University of Vermont whose numerous natural-history books include Ravens in Winter and The Trees in My Forest; and finally, acclaimed novelist and essayist David James Duncan, whose books include The River Why and The Brothers K.

Also this month, newsstand browsers will note an expansion of Outside's publishing territory with the arrival of the premier issue of Women Outside. It's a magazine that speaks more directly to a growing number of Outside readers, but it's guided by the same force that drives its older brother: an active, authoritative, ever-curious interest in the world that begins beyond the pavement. As Women Outside's editors suggest in the inaugural issue, just think of it as Outside with an estrogen chaser.

Edward Hoagland's 15 books include the essay collections The Courage of Turtles and Balancing Acts. A frequent contributor to Outside, he travels this month to the fauna-rich landscape of India's Arunachal Pradesh ("Everest to the Left of Me, Unrest to the Right"), temporarily leaving behind the fauna-rich surroundings of his northern Vermont cabin. "I saw six different moose crossing my front lawn this June alone," says Hoagland.

As a longtime contributor to Outside, Paul Kvinta has tackled many subjects, from polar trekking to building catapults to, this month, the odd life of world-record breath-hold diver Francisco "Pipin" Ferreras. Of late, Kvinta has also been playing the role of a "homespun storyteller" on National Public Radio's weekend All Things Considered. "I talk a lot about my eccentric Cajun family," he says. "I've had an uncle who was a cockfighter and two who were priests and a grandmother who once had a church in her house."

Like Sir Wilfred Thesiger, the legendary British explorer he profiles, Washington, D.C.-based writer Dennis Drabelle has found his own corner of the map to roam. "Whenever I get the chance," says Drabelle, who in the '70s worked for the Interior Department as an environmental lawyer, "I go backpacking in the Canadian Rockies." (It's a locale he first discovered as an Explorer Scout in 1962.) Winner of the National Book Critics Circle's 1996 award for excellence in reviewing, Drabelle is now at work on a novel.

Kemmerer, Wyoming, writer Jon Billman, who writes this month's Field Notes column on his state's diamond fever, put himself through college fighting wildfires in the Black Hills. "They used to say that one day on the fire line was like smoking five cartons of cigarettes," he recalls. "And I thought, Maybe I should stick with something like writing and live a little longer." Billman's first book of short stories, When We Were Wolves, will be published next August by Random House.