Outside Online's Amy Marr

Outside Online (www.outsidemag.com). Launched in 1995, Outside Online has been an increasingly sophisticated digital companion to the tactile product you're now holding. It combines what's best about the magazine—National Magazine Award—winning reporting, reviews, and information you can use—with what's best about the Web: cool graphics, breaking news, a smart index, event coverage, and archived articles from back issues. We've rearranged the content by subject matter, so you can pick and choose among 200,000 (count 'em) pages. Also new are community forums, download-and-print topo maps, a continually updated sporting-events calendar, and the inimitably buff Mr. Fit, ready to answer all of your health and fitness questions.

"We're giving you a huge vault of information," says Amy Marr, executive director of Outside Online, who along with editorial director Sarah Friedman and their production team devoted months of hard work to enriching the site. "We also offer the magazine, of course, including Outside's annual Travel Guides and Buyer's Guide," continues Marr. "Think of it as having access to all of your favorite issues of Outside all the time. In addition to the great writing and gear and fitness advice, we're creating seamless ways to connect you to everything you might possibly want to do outside."

You can begin your own leap from our print publication to its reinvigorated online counterpart by enjoying the full-to-bursting Holiday Gift Guide in this issue (page 139) and then surfing over to Outside Online's version of the same—complete with links to all the manufacturers and hundreds of other ways to dig deeper into the commerce and adventure of the world outside. Happy browsing to all!

"GoLite is a business in approximately the same sense that street luge is transportation," says correspondent Mike Steere of the startup gear company he profiles this month ("Wonk on the Wild Side," page 58). The Los Angeles—based business reporter began his career 18 years ago reporting on the outdoor industry, so he knows a thing or two about gear. "GoLite is good stuff," he says. "It kept me warm on Mount Whitney when I was busting ice at night." Despite a history of receiving much bad advice, frequent contributor Ian Frazier can't help giving dubious tips to other outdoorsmen ("Trust Me. In These Parts, Hot Dogs Actually Repel Bears," page 116). "I like to think I'm laconic, but in fact I'm so incredibly chatty it's embarrassing," confides Frazier, whose latest book, On the Rez, will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in January. "It doesn't have that video game feel yet," says New York—based writer Mark Lasswell of the smorgasbord of virtual adventure served up on the Quokka.com Web site ("Quokka Kicks," page 100). "The technology is still so slow that it feels like you're browsing at a buffet where everything's placed about ten feet apart." Lasswell also writes for Rolling Stone.

"Even if I have the gear, sometimes I find that it's easier to go without," says Michael Kessler, a former Outside editor, who assembled this year's Holiday Gift Guide (page 139). On a backpacking trip in Denali National Park last summer, Kessler ferried his load by crossing and recrossing the 36-degree waters of the Teklanika River in the buff. "It was easier than figuring out how to keep all of my stuff dry," he claims. For Los Angeles—based portrait photographer Catherine Ledner, not all shoots go as well as her portraits of the key players in Mike Steere's gear-industry analysis. "It's a problem when I'm shooting girls in bikinis on the beach and it's 50 degrees out," she says. "Preventing them from looking blue isn't easy." Ledner's work has appeared in Fast Company, GQ, and InStyle. Would you rather encounter a gang of hungry sharks or a picturesque elk? Former Outside travel editor Susan Enfield met scores of polite whitetip sharks in Micronesia earlier this year ("The Palau Factor," page 120). Then, a few months after her trip, a bull elk in British Columbia came on like Jaws. "He broke the windshield, and pierced the hood with his hooves," Enfield recalls.

Clockwise from top: Brown Cannon; Dave Cox; Dave Cox; Brown Cannon; Andrew Geiger