Contributors

"I'm that crazy person always trying to pet people's dogs on the street," confesses Jo Ann Beard, who managed to control herself during her encounter with Yellowstone's wolves. "Being close to wolves was fascinating for me — and miserable for them." Beard is the author of The Boys of My Youth, an essay collection whose title belies its subject. "There were no boys in my youth," she says.

Veteran road-tripper Sara Corbett has braved worse than her dusty pilgrimage across the Australian outback. Back in 1991, she and a soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend hit the highway in a beat-up Toyota bound for Alaska. "The car survived the trip," says Corbett. "The relationship didn't. On the way back we drove nonstop from Denali to Michigan." Now a Maine resident, Corbett writes frequently for Outside; her 1997 book, Venus to the Hoop, describes a year on the road with the U.S. women's Olympic basketball team.

The last time native Ohioan Susan Orlean visited Hawaii, she was about the age of the surfer girls she profiles. "I had just read Moby Dick, and I was obsessed with whales," says Orlean, "and I lied and told all my friends I'd seen a whole school of whales five million feet long." A staff writer for The New Yorker and frequent contributor to Outside, Orlean is the author of The Orchid Thief, due out in January from Random House.

"If there is such a thing in this universe, I was the diametric opposite of a cheerleader," says Manhattanite Marshall Sella, who visits the world of the dauntingly fit and perky. "I was the glumleader." A longtime contributor to Outside, New York, and the New York Times Magazine, Sella certainly didn't spread any sunshine at this year's National Cheerleading Championships in Daytona Beach, Florida. "I had the flu and threw up on the beach in public view of 3,000 people," he recalls. "Someone asked who I worked with, and I looked up, pale and shivering, and said, 'Men's Health.'"