Outside Podcast

Outside Podcast

Outside’s longstanding literary storytelling tradition comes to life in audio with features that will both entertain and inform listeners. We launched in March 2016 with our first series, Science of Survival, and have since expanded our show and now offer a range of story formats, including reports from our correspondents in the field and interviews with the biggest figures in sports, adventure, and the outdoors.

Episodes

January 7, 2026 54 mins
The Olympics is a ridiculous mixture of hit-you-straight-in-the-feels origin stories and Greek god-level athletic prowess. Even in the endless parade of epic performances it inevitably serves up, Jessie Diggins’ will likely stand out. The most decorated American crosscountry skier of all time, Jessie was one of the most thrilling moments in Olympic history when she and teammate Kikkan Randall won the US’s first-ever crosscountry sk...
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The comeback is central to the mythology of sports, and when one plays out on the already mythic stage of the Olympics, athletes in relatively obscure sports can become legends. That’s the context in which halfpipe skier Nick Goepper finds himself as the U.S. Ski Team prepares to name its Olympians next week. An unlikely ski phenom from Indiana, who first drew attention in the park of his 400-vertical foot local hill, Nick is a thr...
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Adventuring outside is great for the beauty, the sense of awe, the fitness, but really…we’re all in it for the snacks. And no one chases down the munchies quite like skiers. Maybe you’ve seen a snowy wiggler pull a bratwurst out of a jacket pocket while on a chairlift. Maybe you yourself have devoured a towering plate of loaded tatter tots at apres. There’s just something about scarfing oodles of vittles during and after skiing tha...
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Roman Dial is engaged in a five-decade exploration of Alaska by raft, mountain bike, and foot … but not trail. Over the course of locally legendary adventures like his 800-mile traverse of the Brooks Range and the 628 miles he once hiked with a single backpack’s worth of food and gear, Dial was forced to invent new means of transport, like the pack raft and a form of bushwack mountain biking called “hell biking.” His commitment to ...
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Even those of us who seek freedom and adventure in the wilderness are hardwired to keep themselves safe. It’s why we, as a species, outlasted the dodo and reached the top of the food chain. But there is a subset of outdoor athletes who seem to have found the genetic safety switch in their mitochondria and turned it off—folks like ski alpinist Christina Lustenberger. Lusti, as her superhuman friends call her, has racked up more firs...
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When the mountains grab ahold of your heart, they have a way of directing your life, even becoming a keystone of your identity. But what happens when you associate your time adventuring outside with the lowest points in your life? Can you retire from the outdoors? That’s exactly what  photographer and mountaineer Cory Richards did. You may have heard Cory’s story: after nearly two decades of first ascents and award winning photos a...
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Something funky this way comes. All over the world, deep inside dark forests, hunters tip toe in secret for a wildly expensive delicacy: truffles. The aromatic fungi grows underground, tethered to tree roots, and is exceptionally difficult to find—which is why specially trained dogs are needed to sniff them out, and they’re worth their weight in gold. As it turns out, the truffle business is not too dissimilar from the illegal-drug...
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If you’ve ever been bucked off your mogul line, stuffed a front bike tire, caught a toe on a rock, or collapsed the leg of a camp chair, you know that to go outside is to have an intense relationship with balance. But recovering physical balance is a lot easier than emotional balance. Just ask climber and balance Jedi Kai Lightner. Kai has been a climbing savant since he scaled a 50-foot flagpole at 6-years-old. He then went on to ...
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Have you ever wondered why you feel a pull to go for that grueling trail run or long bike ride or demanding backcountry ski? We have an innate need for adventure, but why? According to paleoanthropologist and evolutionary biologist Ella Al-Shamahi, it’s in our DNA. Ella’s years of Paleolithic study focuses on the first humans and how they behaved—everything from community building to tool evolution to the world’s first sea crossing...
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They say it’s not the fall that gets ya, it’s the landing. Fear of falling, or smacking one’s face onto the cold hard earth, is an innate human emotion. Even for athletes who’ve spent a lifetime climbing mountains, traversing sheer cliffs, balancing on knife-edge ridgelines, this fear never disappears. And that’s why folks who paraglide, speedfly, and skydive are both fascinating and confounding. What do they know that the rest of ...
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In 1978, skier and kinetic artist John King, along with two pals, set out on a singular and epic adventure: a backcountry ski tour from Durango, Colorado to the Medicine Bow Range near Fort Collins. Over six weeks, the trio skied 490 miles, climbed 65,000 vertical feet. They finished gaunt and sun cooked, with boots held together by tape. Their route influenced the design of the Colorado Trail and the locations of the 10th Mountain...
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Chitchatting is a natural part of any adventure you do with a pal—what else are you gonna do around a campfire or sitting on the tailgate at a trailhead or going for a long walk in the woods? But most of us don’t set out on a journey for the sole purpose of talking with strangers. That’s exactly what writer and standup paddleboarder Dan Rubinstein did. Over 11 weeks, he paddled 1,200 miles from his home in Ottawa to New York City a...
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For most of us, mountain biking is a great way to get into the outdoors, get a workout, get an adrenaline rush, and hopefully avoid losing any skin or breaking a collarbone. For the mountain bikers of Red Bull’s annual Rampage contest, mountain biking is a means of defining the limits of human performance and fear tolerance. Every year, these men and women gather on a sprawling ridgeline near Zion National Park in Utah, and proceed...
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Ruggedness, dependability, and handiness define a lot of outdoor archetypes, from the ski patroller to the river guide to the park ranger. So why would you find all three in a famous actor? Maybe because the actor in question—Nick Offerman—is an avid outdoorsman in his own right. Surely you know Nick from one of his many memorable roles,  like Ron Swanson on Parks And Recreation and General Sidney in the latest Mission Impossible. ...
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Many outdoorsy folks will happily slog for hours toward outdoor fun, despite the fact that any number of adventure derailing smackdowns await us. Gear malfunctions, crummy weather, and bloodied limbs don’t stop us from heading into the unknown. No one puts this optimistic persistence to better use than lifelong surfer and CEO of the Surfrider Foundation, Chad Nelsen. Chad grew up in smog-choked Laguna Beach in the 1970s, when pipes...
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Wood chopping is objectively awful for all the obvious reasons: blisters, back aches, over-the-counter painkiller expenses. But that’s not what you remember months later, when the fruits of your labor warm you and your loved ones on a cold winter night. See, wood chopping is really an investment—both in terms of that crackling fire, but also your emotional well being.  That is something Nicole Coenen knows all about. The internet’s...
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Spend time outdoors, and you’ll eventually spend time in brutal, even scary weather. Dangerous winds, flash flood-inducing rain, and vision-erasing whiteouts are sometimes the cost of entry. By the same token, you’re as likely to remember the upsides to those experience—the belly laughter of relief, the rainbows after the rain, the waist deep powder—as the scary parts. Hank Schyma, aka Pecos Hank, built a career out of those upside...
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Extreme adaptability and versatility can be found throughout the animal kingdom, but may have found their peak expression in Alexi Pappas. As a runner, Pappas was a two-time All-American for Dartmouth who set a national record running for Greece at the 2016 Olympics. As a performer, she was a member of Dartmouth’s gut-busting Dog Day improv group before going on to write, direct, and star in several feature films, including Trackto...
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After Lawlor Coe lost his brother Hunter to tragedy, he did everything he could to avoid his pain. Then he laced up his joggers and began to run. At first, it was to elude his grief. But over time, as he began to log miles and miles, he found that the physical suffering he was enduring out on the trail helped him find his way to peace, and then back to joy. He was no longer running from his sorrow, from his anger, but toward a new ...
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The blissed out, swell chasing surfer with a single-minded focus on the next great ride is a pervasive outdoorsy archetype that’s completely at odds with the lived experience of many surfers. Take historian Kevin Dawon, a professor at UC Merced, for whom surfing serves as his connection to a rich tradition of African aquatic culture. Dawson is credited with resurfacing the first account of surfing in Africa, from 1640—more than 100...
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