Not long after I graduated from college in the mid-1990s, I got a job as a cashier at Midwest Mountaineering, a popular outdoors store in Minneapolis. The best thing about it (apart from the employee discount) was getting to read Outside magazine when business got slow.
In those days Outside's pages were filled with writers I loved: Jon Krakauer, Tim Cahill, David Quammen. Around that same time, the magazine came out with its first anthology: "Out of the Noösphere." It was filled with classic stories from the previous two decades. I read my copy until it fell apart.
Since then, Outside has come out with a few other collections, all filled with great stories. This year it published another: "Out There: The Wildest Stories from Outside Magazine," an assortment of "misadventures." These include everything from working the "groover" (toilet boat) on a Grand Canyon raft, to canoeing the Mississippi River in a 57-foot flood, to an immersion in the strange world of competitive water sliding.
Most of the stories in "Out There" date from the 2000s, which got me thinking about how writing on the outdoors has changed over the years. After all, the genre is one of our great traditions, dating back to the likes of Henry David Thoreau, Theodore Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway and others. Yet for much of the 20th century, the writing was dominated by muscular prose, sarcastically described by Cahill, Outside's co-founder, as " 'Man's Adventure,' 'Adventures for Men' and 'Man's Testicles.' " In a recent interview, he said the goal in founding the magazine was simply to write, "stories about the outdoors that were literate. That's all."
They were that and more. Since its founding in 1978, the magazine broke new ground, mixing nature writing, personal essays, science writing, political reporting and just plain great stories. But today, in the age of selfies, social media and 7 billion people, I wondered how that original mission has evolved. So I called editor Chris Keyes to get his take.
"One thing that's different," Keyes said, "is that we're living in an era where all the firsts have essentially already happened. And in the last 10 years there's been a real shift from doing something first to doing it the fastest. There's a lot less emphasis on just getting out there and experiencing it, and more on, 'How fast can I do this?' "
Keyes said this reflects a larger change in how we experience the outdoors. Few people now have time for a two-week backpacking trip. But that also means that the bar is higher for a good story: Adventure alone is not enough.
"Almost half the people I meet who I tell I work at Outside say, 'Oh, I just took a trip, and I think it'd make a great story,' " Keyes said. "Everybody thinks their adventure is unique and that they can tell it. But writing is hard, and it takes experience and a lot of time to make your own travel experience compelling to the rest of us."
