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Our Y2K New Year's Resolution? To bring you the dawning millennium's best information about daring exploration, far-flung expeditioning, and soul-stirring sports vacations. (Admittedly, there's a slightly selfish motive behind our generosity—we're making our own plans to go!) In this issue, we get a head start on
accomplishing this resolution with "Wish You Were Here," beginning on page 70, a comprehensive compendium of great adventure-travel destinations and ideas. In the process of scouting out these trips, we noticed a curious thing: Sometime during the past year, while many of us
were preoccupied with impeachment hearings and IPOs, adventure travel—that richly effective prescription for treating modern ills—crossed the line from marginal to mainstream.
According to a recent survey conducted by the Travel Industry Association of America, 50 percent of Americans went hiking, mountain-biking, or otherwise gallivanting in their spare time in the last five years. The newly hard-core masses are shipping out for climbing trips to the Karakoram and fast-water float trips down remote Chilean rivers; outfitters
have been fanning out to ever-more-exotic locales, pouring money into marketing campaigns, and designing shorter, activity-crammed excursions to accommodate the time-strapped.
The choices are simply too numerous and varied to resist. This month,Outside offers the latest, most reliable advice on selecting from more than a hundred of the most enticing guided trips in the world. Look for surprises like downhill skiing the mountains of Iran; wish-fulfillment epics like trekking through the rainforests
of Gabon in search of mountain gorillas; and mind-altering challenges like spelunking limestone labyrinths in Chiapas, Mexico. "For me, traveling isn't so much about finding adventure as about being immersed in a very exciting kind of education," says Kate Wheeler, a Boston-based novelist and Outside contributor who wrote the
essay that kicks off "Wish You Were Here." Having spent much of her life crisscrossing Asia and South America, Wheeler (whose new novel, When Mountains Walked, will be published in February) has learned a lesson worth repeating: "The most important element is fascination."
Ever since Montana writer Bill Vaughn transformed his junk-clogged backyard swamp into a pristine pond, he has been consumed by a private obsession: ice skating. "My neighbors don't exactly share my hobby," admits Vaughn, who spent three years hauling old tires, farm equipment, and tangled barbed wire from his boggy slough near Missoula and now
lovingly tends to its winter glaze with a snowplow mounted on a lawn tractor. "They're more into shooting and burning things." His essay, "Skating Home Backward," begins on page 52.
Switzerland-born, Manhattan-based artist Philippe Lardy felt liberated when he illustrated Vaughn's skating story. His work usually accompanies the kind of topical journalism that appears on the pages of the New York Times, Newsweek, and The Village Voice. In contrast, says Lardy, Vaughn's personal memoir allowed the art to "take on a logic all its own."
Longtime Outside correspondent Elizabeth Royte has had a busy two years: First she spent six months marooned on an island research station in the Panama Canal for her forthcoming book on tropical science, due from Houghton-Mifflin in the fall. Then she got married, had a baby, and wrote her book. Royte eulogizes
the accomplishments of revered wilderness educator Paul Petzoldt ("Leaving a Trace," page 28), who died in October at age 91..
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Where will Bruce McCall be at the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2000? Languishing with his family on the sleepy Caribbean isle of Nevis, unperturbed by Y2K hysteria. "I haven't paid much attention to it," admits the New York writer-illustrator, who brought himself up to speed with an Armageddon-themed sketchbook for Outside's special millennial Prognosticator (page 65). "I wouldn't think it so funny if I thought doomsday was actually upon us."
Wild File reporter Jim Collins is himself a wild guy (page 31). The lifelong New Hampshire resident lived alone in an island cabin for four years without plumbing or electricity while commuting to work at Yankee magazine by canoe and
ice skates. Now married and the father of an 18-month-old girl, Collins recently settled into a converted summer camp. "We still rely on composting toilets and vegetable gardens," he says. "But life is certainly more comfortable."
"I'm paranoid about getting sick," confesses Tish Hamilton. "But when it happens, I usually train through it." An entertainment editor at the New York Daily News who's prepping for her second ultramarathon, Hamilton investigated when—and how much—to exercise when you're ill. "Take a 10K Run and Call Me in the Morning" begins on page 89.
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