It began as every surfer’s dream: an empty point break, a rising swell, and a good friend to share the rides. But what happens when you’re out there and the waves just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger? So it went for William Finnegan at a break off the Portuguese island of Madeira. This happened decades ago, back when surfers had to more or less guess at the conditions they’d encounter on any given day. In this episode, Finnegan, whose surfing memoir Barbarian Days won the Pulitzer Prize, shares one of his most harrowing experiences in the water. He and another longtime surfer were stuck out past the impact zone in a remote section of seas as night descended. Exhausted and frightened, they were forced to decide how to go about saving themselves.   ​​​​​​​

This episode of the Outside Podcast is brought to you by Sonos, maker of the Sonos Move, a portable smart speaker that delivers detailed sound and rich base in every kind of room and outdoors. Learn more and order yours at Sonos.com

Serious surfers train themselves to be ready for difficult moments: a brutal wipeout, being held down underwater by waves, losing a board and being forced swim a mile to shore. Then there are the kinds of experiences that nobody is really prepared for, like getting pushed out to sea by winds or currents and set adrift where nobody can see you. To get through that scenario alive, you need extraordinary fortitude. In this episode, we revisit one of the most surprising tales we’ve ever told on the Outside Podcast. We imagined what it might take to survive being alone for days on a surfboard in the open water—and then found someone who endured exactly that.

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As it turns out, being a grown-up novice offers all kinds of surprising benefits. Just ask journalist Tom Vanderbilt, who spent a year attempting to pick up a variety of challenging skills, from surfing to singing to drawing. Ultimately, he didn’t become amazing at any of these things, but his humble quest taught him something far more valuable: that despite your age or how busy you think you are, introducing yourself to a new skill is one of the most life-enhancing things you can do. Vanderbilt chronicled his efforts and hard-won wisdom in his latest book, Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning. For this episode, Outside magazine’s editor, Christopher Keyes, gets Vanderbilt to explain what really happens to us when we dare to be a beginner again.

This episode of the Outside Podcast is brought to you by L.L. Bean, a company that wants to help you experience the power of being outside this winter. Visit llbean.com to find inspiration and how-to advice for active outdoor fun this season, plus ready-for-anything outerwear to keep you cozy. L.L. Bean, Be an Outsider.

Serious athletes are used to digging deep. But there’s pushing yourself, and then there’s what climber Emily Harrington did on November 4, when she became the first woman, and the fourth person ever, to free-climb the Golden Gate route up Yosemite’s El Capitan in a single day. It was an insanely challenging endeavor: a 3,200-foot ascent up the sheer granite wall using only her hands and feet. For Harrington, it was the culmination of a long effort that included a fall on El Cap in 2019, which sent her to the hospital strapped to a backboard. In November, she was just a few hundred feet from the top when she took another bad fall, this time smashing her head. With blood pouring down her face, she had to decide whether she could keep going. In this episode, Harrington talks to Outside contributor Stephanie Joyce about why she’s still terrified at the beginning of every Yosemite season and how falling is what actually allowed her to get to the top.

This episode of the Outside Podcast is brought to you by Vermont, a state that is open for the very best in winter adventures so long as you take some extra steps before traveling. Learn more about how to plan the getaway you need this season at VermontVacation.com.

Ask a professional adventurer to share the most important lesson they’ve learned from their time in the wild, and you’re bound to get a good story. Which is exactly why we posed this question to Steven Rinella, host of the Netflix series MeatEater, and Krystle Wright, an adventure photographer based in Australia. For Rinella, a dangerous decision on a trip to Alaska’s Arctic made him see how being steadfastly committed to a goal is a kind of recklessness. On a footloose pilgrimage to the American Southwest, Wright realized that sometimes the best approach to a creative project is to just wing it and hope everything works out. In this episode, the two talk about seminal experiences that helped shape their careers and lives, and that offer the rest of us invaluable guidance for our own trips.

This episode of the Outside Podcast is brought to you by Bose, maker of the new Bose Frames Tempo, high-performance sports sunglasses that deliver high quality audio. It’s the sound you expect from Bose with everything you need from sport sunglasses. Learn more about how they can elevate your running and cycling at bose.com.

With the latest version of its Watch and the imminent launch of its online training platform Fitness+, Apple is positioning itself as a leader in the health and wellness space. For CEO Tim Cook, this effort has been many years in the making. A fitness obsessive, Cook works out daily, passionately believes that exercise is key to our quality of life, and he sees extraordinary opportunity in the ability to democratize health science by enabling millions of his customers to anonymously share their data with researchers. But Cook is also an outdoors nerd who says that his time in nature and offline is “like a palate cleanser for the mind.” In this extended conversation with Outside Podcast host Michael Roberts, Cook talks about both the incredible promise of technology to enhance our well-being and Apple’s duty to help us use our devices more wisely.

When we embark on a big adventure outdoors, the truth is that we rarely know what we’re getting into. Usually, the reasons we give for taking a trip are rarely what make it so memorable. You might go into the mountains with dreams of perfect powder turns but come away marveling about something you saw in the sky. These novel experiences and surprises are why so many of us keep going back. In this episode, we share a pair of stories about people finding unexpected delight in the wilderness—having remarkable days that they didn’t really plan for and that changed them in ways they never imagined. Because after the year we’ve all had, it feels good to hear about better times and be reminded of the kinds of decisions that lead to the most enlightening moments.

This episode of the Outside Podcast is brought to you by Sonos, maker of the Sonos Move, a portable smart speaker that delivers detailed sound and rich base in every kind of room and outdoors. Learn more about why it makes the perfect gift this holiday season at Sonos.com

Jeb Corliss is one of the original madmen of BASE jumping. For more than two decades, he flung himself from the top of massive waterfalls, bridges, and skyscrapers, and managed to miraculously survive multiple crash landings in a sport that rarely gives second chances. But now he’s 44, and no longer chasing the edge of risk. Instead, Corliss has embarked on a journey into the depths of his own troubled mind. And he’s reached a surprising conclusion: BASE jumping, one of the most deadly sports on earth, may have been the thing that kept him alive. Outside contributor Daniel Duane traveled to Southern California to talk to Corliss about his latest high-wire act.

This episode of the Outside Podcast is brought to you by Bose, maker of the new Bose Frames Tempo, high-performance sports sunglasses that deliver high quality audio. It’s the sound you expect from Bose with everything you need from sport sunglasses. Learn more about how they can elevate your running and cycling at bose.com.

In the past couple of years, South Carolina–based writer Latria Graham has published a pair of essays in Outside magazine about the challenges that Black people face in the outdoors. Both stories generated a great deal of attention to this matter and also spurred a number of readers to write to her to ask questions, as well as share their own personal experiences. For Graham, one category of letters proved to be a heavy burden: those from people of color asking her advice on where they could be safe and welcome in outdoor spaces. Unsure of how to respond, she said nothing for a long time. But after many months of reckoning with the national movement for racial justice in America, she was ready to give her answer.

This episode of the Outside Podcast is brought to you by L.L. Bean, your source for ready-for-anything outerwear this winter. Outside podcast listeners get $10 off online purchases of $75 or more between November 11 and December 6, 2020. Go to llbean.com and enter the promo code OUTSIDE at checkout.

It wasn’t all that long ago that protecting the environment was an issue considered to be above partisanship. In 1970, it was Richard Nixon who announced the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency and signed the Clean Air Act into law. So how did the environment become one of the most divisive issues in American politics? The answer is a fight over trees. In the 1990s, a fierce confrontation in the Pacific Northwest pitted loggers against activists and scientists trying to defend ancient forests. As it escalated into a national debate, it created new battle lines that would define decades of conflicts over everything from fracking to climate change. In this first episode of the new podcast series Timber Wars, journalist Aaron Scott of Oregon Public Broadcasting explains how it all got started—and why we’re still having the same fight in 2020.  

This episode of the Outside Podcast is brought to you by Bose, maker of the new Bose Frames Tempo, high-performance sports sunglasses that deliver high quality audio. It’s the sound you expect from Bose with everything you need from sport sunglasses. Learn more about how they can elevate your running and cycling at bose.com.