Thayer Walker, Journalist
ME. BY MYSELF. FOR A LONG TIME. (VERY LONG.) Outside, July 2007
I called them slime nuggets, though I should have been more gracious as they were one of the few things keeping me alive. I discovered the mollusks on my second day stranded on a desert island called Pargo, in Panama’s Gulf of Chiriqui. I carried little more than a knife, a dive mask, and the clothes on my back and hadn’t yet taken down a mastodon, so I embraced the variety they offered my coconut-and-termite diet.
KAYAKING MEXICO’S RIO ALSESECA
Men’s Journal, June 2007
Searching for a drowned horseman is never the most encouraging way to begin a three-week kayaking expedition, but the team didn’t have much of a choice. As the paddlers put on to the Class V Xico River on their first day exploring the waters of Veracruz, Mexico officials stopped them to explain that eight days prior a man and his steed had fallen upstream and plummeted over a 90-foot waterfall. The horse survived, the man didn’t and the only way the kayakers could start the trip was if they agreed to look for the body.
KILLER ABS
Outside, April 2006
Usually a rescue entails clipping a deputy--known as a “meatball” or “screaming teabag”--to the belly of the helicopter, dragging him through the air at 60 miles per hour, and plopping him into heaving 15-foot seas to pull out a struggling diver. “Most of the time,” said pilot Paul Bradley, “the divers are either too far out past the break to get back in, or they’re already dead.
Thayer Walker, Journalist
To prepare himself for the giant drops--and massive wipeouts--McNamara follows an agonizing fitness routine that includes everything from jogging underwater while weighted down by rocks to pedaling a unicycle on a trampoline. His ultimate ambition is to ride a 100-footer, surfing’s holy grail. I had a more modest goal: to catch the wave of my life.
RIDE LIKE A GIANT
Outside, February 2008
Garrett McNamara at Teahupoo.
photo courtesy of: Garrett McNamara
CRASH COURSE
Men’s Fitness, April 2008
Pro Kayaker Jesse Coombs enjoys life on Idaho’s Class V North Fork of Payette River.
The inescapable truth of Class V kayaking had become unmistakably clear: At the most fundamental level it isn’t defined by challenging rapids or dangerous features, but rather by the simple fact that one error--one momentary lapse in concentration or small misjudgment--can be fatal.
OFF THE DEEP END
Outside, June 2008
Karl Stanley’s homemade submarine has sprung a leak. It’s a discovery both fortuitous and disconcerting. Fortuitous because I notice it as we bob on the surface of the placid Caribbean Sea, just a few hundred feet off the Honduran Island of Roatán. Disconcerting because it’s 8:30 p.m. and we’re about to spend the night 1,600 feet down searching for the six-gill shark, an enigmatic 15-foot, 1,300 pound predator that patrols these depths.
A Flapjack Devilfish floating at 2,400 ft. Photo: Thayer Walker
A LONG WAY FOR A SHORT FILM
Outside, July 08
The painful paradox of shooting in rarefied air hit me like 1,000 pounds of feathers. The first rule of climbing Kilimanjaro: Don’t rush. The first rule of adventure filmmaking: Sometimes you have to rush.
Filmmaker Joshua Levine on the slopes of Kilimanjaro. Photo: Michael Brown
A Farallon local. Photo: Adam Brown
OFF LIMITS
Surfer’s Journal, August 08
No one really knows how many white sharks patrol the water during the peak season of September through November but in October 2006, the scientific group Tagging of Pacific Predators (TOPP) photographed more than 40 different white sharks around Southeast Farallon. The following year TOPP detected 14 distinct acoustically-tagged individuals in a single day at the island. It’s impossible to calculate the odds of a surfer getting hit out there, but they certainly aren’t favorable. “I do not encourage people to try to surf here,” says Farallon biologist Adam Brown.
THE UNBREAKABLE TIMMY TURNER
Men’s Journal, September 08
After more than a decade working over operating tables, few cases surprise Dr. Richard Kim. The neurosurgeon has removed brain tumors the size of softballs and once had to bury his knee into a patient’s forehead to leverage a six-inch knife out of his skull. He has operated on infants with cranial fractures (“The skull looked like a cracked ping-pong ball,” he says) and a multi-platinum rapper with gunshots wounds (“He was very angry.”) Kim has cut into so many skulls that the familiar process offers all the novelty of opening a can of tomatoes. So on December 17, 2005, when Timmy Turner was wheeled into the operating room of Newport Beach’s Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian, Kim wasn’t anticipating anything he hadn’t seen before. Then he opened Turner’s head.
Timmy Turner’s skull. Photo: Jeff Harris