Outside Podcast

Jason Motlagh and his crew were the first journalists in years to successfully cross the Darién Gap, a lawless, roadless jungle on the border of Colombia and Panama. Teeming with deadly snakes, drug traffickers, and antigovernment guerrillas, it has become a pathway for migrants whose desperation to reach the U.S. sends them on a perilous journey. He talks to Chris Keyes about the risks and logistics of the assignment, his motivations as a reporter, and the emotional toll of working in conflict zones.

Robert Young Pelton has made a career of tracking down warlords and interviewing people in the most dangerous places in the world. He's been kidnapped in Colombia, survived an assassination attempt in Uganda, and joined the hunt for Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Outside editor Chris Keyes wanted to know how spending that much time on the edge has affected him in the long term. But the answer's not what you'd think.

It could be one of the most incredible, yet perplexing, survival stories of all time: In 1991, a man named Michael Proudfoot was supposedly SCUBA diving on a shipwreck off the coast of Baja, Mexico, when his regulator—or mouthpiece—broke. He was alone, deep underwater inside a sunken ship, with only minutes to survive before he would run out of air. The string of bizarre events that take place next seem unreal.

When you’re stuck underwater in a submarine, the number of ways you can die is long and varied—crushing, burning, asphyxiation, exploding, the list goes on and on. Escaping alive requires maintaining calm and making all the right choices. Which makes it all the more surprising that one of the first known submarine survival stories—which includes a 19th century Prussian carpenter and a military crew—involves the first-known undersea fistfight.

For centuries, the Devil’s Highway—a waterless pathway through desert in southern Arizona—was one of the deadliest places in North America, killing thousands of Spanish conquistadors, gold prospectors, and migrants. Construction of a circumnavigating railroad allowed fatalities to taper at the end of the 19th century, but in the early 2000s, the route again became lethal. As immigration crackdown increased along other sections of the U.S.–Mexico border, illegal immigrants resorted to using the desert for entry, unaware that it would kill them. One infamous modern tragedy along the Devil’s Highway took place in spring 2001, when a large group, led by an experienced guide, set out from the Mexican border town of Senoyta. The disturbing outcome—and many others like it—helped researchers develop the Death Index, a new model for predicting dehydration fatalities.

Thirst is an unpredictable threat. In its early stages, it’s much like mild hunger. For centuries, hydration was as much superstition as science. But historical events at Devil’s Highway—a notoriously deadly path in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona—are proof of dehydration’s deadly risk. It was 1905 when Pablo Valencia, a gold prospector in his 40s, came stumbling into a geology camp, desperate for water. Valencia had spent the past six days wandering a 110-degree desert, where water sources can be separated by 100 miles, alone. He shouldn’t have been alive, but he was. Geologist William John McGee helped nurse Valencia back to health, bearing witness to the excruciating reality of what happens to the body while dying of thirst. In this episode, we dive into the history of a desert that claimed thousands of lives, as well as the ways this particular tale has forever altered modern understanding of the limits of dehydration.

One of the most famous accidents in wingsuit history.

Most of the time, when lightning makes the news, it’s because of an outlandish happening, seemingly too strange to be true. Like the park ranger who was struck seven times. Or the survivor who also won the lottery (the chances of which are about one in 2.6 trillion). Or the guy who claimed lightning strike gave him sudden musical talent. This is not one of those stories. This is about Phil Broscovak—who was struck by lightning while on a climbing trip with family in 2005—and the reality of life post-strike. In this intriguing episode, we investigate lightning strike recovery and the confounding, bizarre science that only hints at what Phil and other survivors endure. “You become a bag of shattered glass, really,” he says.

This thrilling re-creation of the classic hypothermia feature by Peter Stark brings the listener through a series of plausible mishaps on a bitterly cold night: a car accident on a lonely road, a broken ski binding that foils a backcountry escape, a disorienting tumble in the snow, and a slow descent into delirious hypothermia before (spoiler alert!) a dramatic rescue. "I started thinking about how one little mistake leads to another and another in an accumulation of mistakes that leads to an untenable situation," says Stark. "Frozen Alive" is a fascinating, accurate description of our physiological response to extreme cold, deepening listeners’ respect for how the human body metamorphoses when cooled.

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