Story by Peter Stark | Outside Magazine, 2001| Photo: Shutterstock
As Freezing Persons Recollect the Snow–First Chill–Then Stupor–Then the Letting Go… The cold hard facts of freezing to death
When your Jeep spins lazily off the mountain road and slams backward into a snowbank, you don’t worry immediately about the cold. Your first thought is that you’ve just dented your bumper. Your second is that you’ve failed to bring a shovel. Your third is that you’ll be late for dinner. Friends are expecting you at their cabin around eight for a moonlight ski, a late dinner, a sauna. Nothing can keep you from that.
Story by Peter Stark and Amy Ragsdale | Everand, 2022
George Washington, the indigenous tribes, and the decisions that shaped America’s future.
It was still pitch-dark at 4 a.m. on November 4, 1791, when General Arthur St. Clair ordered his men to turn out from the tents they’d erected on top of a low, wooded bluff in what the U.S. had designated as the Northwest Territory. They had “laid on arms” all night—slept with muskets close at hand—due to the threat of attack.
Story by Peter Stark | Outside Magazine, 2012 | Photo: Shutterstock
The author packed up his house and family and moved to northeastern Brazil for a year. Fantasy or struggle? It’s complicated.
I was out for a Sunday-afternoon run along the big river, lost in tropical reveries. My family and I had just begun a year abroad in the old Portuguese-era town of Penedo, in northeastern Brazil, with hopes of shedding the overscheduled regimen of contemporary American life and sinking into the region’s slow pace. The graceful, sweeping Rio São Francisco was part of what had drawn us here, and two weeks in, Penedo, population 30,000 or so, had held true to its laid-back promise. That, however, was all about to change.
Story by Peter Stark | Outside Magazine, 2022 | Photo: Jen Judge
Heatstroke kills thousands of people every year. This is what it feels like—and how to know when you’re in danger.
End of the dirt road. You brake to a stop, swing your leg over the scooter, and kick the stand into place. The effort makes your head throb. The scooter wobbles. Your sunglasses slide down the mixture of sweat and sunscreen on your nose. You adjust them, look up tentatively at the fiery orb in the deep blue sky, and flinch. You chide yourself for staying out so late the night before, for not getting an earlier start this morning. The sun already feels too hot. But this is your only chance to surf Emerald Cove. It’s gonna be OK….
Story by Peter Stark | Outside Magazine, 2005 | Photo: Shutterstock
What does a naive environmentalist discover when he buys his own forest? He’s got to log it to save it.
It was never my intention to own a forest. I blame it on my mother-in-law. Sixteen years ago, my wife, Amy, and I, at her mother’s urging, searched for a small house to buy instead of dumping more money into the extortionate rents in our Montana university town. Paging through a Missoula real estate shopper one day, my eye involuntarily skipped over the 1930s bungalows on Cherry Street and was seized by a small ad billed ‘Rattlesnake Wilderness Land.’
Story by Peter Stark | Outside Magazine, 2003 | Photo: Shutterstock
A small band of marginally prepared adventurers attempts the 400-mile first descent of Mozambique’s mighty Lugenda.
Day 1, The Put-in
The bridge’s fractured pilings had been cleared of land mines since the civil war. Or so the locals, who’d materialized from out of the bush, told us. There were about a hundred of them, wearing ragged T-shirts and leaning over the railing near our Land Rover. Below us, the Lugenda River of northern Mozambique—only 60 feet wide here, near its source in the swamps of Lake Amaramba—wound placidly between grassy banks and patches of forest.
Story by Peter Stark | Outside Magazine, 2003 | Photo: Shutterstock
The author’s father traveled the world, shipped out on the last commercial sailing voyage around Cape Horn, and handed down a legacy of adventure. But his risk-taking spirit had a dark side—and its shadow fell across a final winter rendezvous in Aspen.
At 9:45 a.m. last January 25, my father slipped out of the Aspen hotel suite he was sharing with my mother, went to the concierge desk, and asked for one of the hotel's complimentary vans to give him a lift to Castle Creek, at the edge of town. He told the driver he wanted to take photographs from the footbridge, some 70 feet above the gorge. The driver didn't know my father wasn't carrying a camera.
Story by Peter Stark | Outside Magazine, 2003 | Photo: Shutterstock
This is what happens to your body when you get tangled up in the business end of a box jellyfish—the most venomous creature on earth.
When a hunter finds your body several years later the bones of your fingers will still be wrapped around the phone’s weathered plastic casing.