Longform

CATCHING A BREAK

Uncommon Path

By Jen Murphy

Political unrest decimated Nicaragua’s burgeoning tourism business. On the brink of recovery, the country took another hit from the coronavirus pandemic. Will surfers be the ones who eventually bring it back?

For a while, it looked like Ernesto Martinez Hellmund’s life as a surf guide was over. Yet here he was on a hot summer day in August 2019 kicking out of a long, hollow, right-handed barrel at Playgrounds, a reef break reachable by boat from the small fishing village of El Astillero on Nicaragua’s Pacific coast. As he landed in a glistening shower of backspray, he turned just in time to watch one of his clients take off on a fast, steep, left-breaking wave. Cheers went up from the rest of the young, surf-obsessed Americans on the boat. Martinez, normally soft-spoken, let out a hoot of his own and then, spotting another set heaving in the distance, paddled quickly to get in position. The 34-year-old was living the dream—a dream he thought might never exist in Nicaragua again after political unrest tore through the country in 2018. And a dream he thought he had left behind when he fled the violence for the United States with his family, not knowing when he would return.

The Dirty Secret Hiding in Your Carbon Mountain Bike

Outside

By Sarah Max

Riding bikes may be green, but the manufacturing behind them can be far from it

Last January, Leo Kokkonen, founder of Finland-based Pole Bicycles, visited China in search of a frame manufacturer, the final step of a two-year-long project to design, test, and launch the company’s first carbon-fiber mountain bike.

Founded in 2013, Pole quickly made a name for itself among critics after its Evolink bikes—known for their long wheelbase—took top honors in the industry’s 2017 Design and Innovation Awards. The rollout of a carbon frame was supposed to be the next logical step to put Kokkonen’s startup on the international map in an industry where carbon is the new king.

By the time Kokkonen boarded his flight home to Finland, however, he’d made up his mind to pull the plug on the whole project.

How Colorado Ski Patrollers Are Grinding to Keep Their Slopes Safe—and Their Profession Viable

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By Jay Bouchard

To find out what it takes to don the red-and-white jacket, we send one writer to try out for ski patrol. What he found was long days, low wages, passionate professionals, and signs of change on the horizon.

That financial stress only compounds the job’s mental toll. “There used to be this misunderstanding that, as long as the powder was good, nothing we saw could actually hurt us,” says Laura McGladrey, a psychiatric nurse practitioner at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and a longtime patroller. “That was somewhat magical thinking.”

Troubled Waters

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By Krista Langlois

A hundred years ago this month, a handful of men tasked with divvying up the Colorado River gravely misjudged its character. Is it too late to fix their mistakes?

The compact’s goal was to jump-start “the expeditious agricultural and industrial development” of this arid country, and in that, it succeeded. On the river’s journey through seven states, two countries, and 30 federally recognized tribal communities, the river irrigates some of North America’s most productive farmland and helps electrify some of its biggest cities. Yet, like the Bible or the U.S. Constitution, the compact was written in a different era, and applying it to our modern lives can be challenging. Population growth has outpaced anything early planners anticipated, while climate change and aridification are shrinking snowpacks and depleting the soil of moisture. “For many years, we’ve been using more water than nature provides,” says Kevin Moran, associate vice president of regional affairs at the Environmental Defense Fund. “And now we’re coming to a moment of reckoning.”