Travel + Leisure

The pleasures of Inis Meáin are simple: a walk along the coast to the thunder of Atlantic swells; a tableau of fissured limestone that glimmers in the mist; the best potatoes you’ll ever taste. At the stone-walled Inis Meáin Restaurant & Suites (353-86/826-6026; inismeain.com; suites from $350; dinner for two $125), owners Marie-Thérèse and Ruairí de Blacam have equipped the five suites with bicycles and fishing rods; oversize beds come with alpaca throws, and 30-foot-wide windows look out onto Galway Bay and Connemara. The real allure is the 30-seat glass-walled restaurant, known for its deceptively basic fish dishes and homegrown vegetables. For dessert, try the seaweed pudding in wild-berry sauce at An Dún B&B (353-87/680-6251; inismeainaccommodation.com; doubles from $98; dinner for two $50; dessert for two $15).

San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, Nov. 4, 2012

Nontraditional designs rarely have found footing in the mountains, where vacationers have preferred that their getaways resemble forest cabins or rambling lodges. Although a blast of flat-roof and glass construction appeared at Lake Tahoe before the 1960 Olympics, the builders soon found that the roofs leaked or collapsed under snow. In time, “Old Tahoe” architecture triumphed, loyal to the gable dormers and sloping earthbound rooflines popular in the Alps and Scandinavia. The style prevailed until now.

Contemporary designs are gaining ground in several Tahoe locales, from Incline Village to Alpine Meadows, from Tahoe Donner to Tahoe City, but they are most abundant in Martis Camp, the new gated community near Truckee. Forty to 50 percent of the more than 100 homes under construction or finished at Martis Camp speak the visual language of the early 20th century International Style: flat or low-sloping roofs, short or no overhanging eaves, open floor plans, and long spans of steel. Exterior ornament has disappeared, and plate-glass walls reveal wide vistas. Lightweight, steel-supported roofs seem more related to sky than earth.

Inside, ambience is achieved through the infiltration of light and the arrangements of space and materials, rather than with the applied ornament of wainscoting and trim.

“In our area there has been a preconception that peaked roofs and multiple layers of details were requirements of mountain architecture,” says architect Clare Walton of Walton Architecture and Engineering in Tahoe City. “Recently we have seen success in utilizing clean lines, especially in the roofscapes.”

But the boxy design doesn’t tempt everyone. A few Tahoe architects contend that for all of its spare beauty, modernism means trouble. “The overhangs of traditional architecture are important, not only for the snow and rain but also for the sun exposure and heat efficiency,” says architect Sherry Guzzi of Sherry Guzzi Architect in Tahoe City. A great house will work well with the environment and also respond to the needs of the occupants, she says.

Contractor Bruce Olson concurs. Most of his luxury homes have blended the pitch-roofed Old Tahoe vernacular with the muscular traditions of architecture in Norway and Sweden, although he also has built modernist-style homes.

“A traditional Tahoe home will incorporate wood, stone and warmer colors,” Olson says. “Some of the more contemporary homes are letting the outside in with glass, but there’s not a lot of wood. Let’s say you’ve been outside all day in the elements, and you come home and your home is all white and spotless clean. To me, that feels cold.”

A home needs to reflect a sense of place, as well, they say. “The (modernist) house could be in Malibu, Spain … anywhere,” Olson says. “It doesn’t define Tahoe. With true Old Tahoe architecture, you’ll have a hard time saying what year it was built. It’s timeless. It has always been more of a romantic style capturing the real feel of the Earth.”

While the modern forms may seem rigid and nonorganic to some observers, to proponents, they encourage an interaction with nature. There is notably “a blurring of the line between interior and exterior through the extension of materials that will run continuously from inside to out,” says Martis Camp Architecture Review Coordinator Vangela Wightman. “A stone tile terrace becomes the stone floor inside; cedar soffit material will extend into an entry and beyond.”

If built right, the new structures blend with their surroundings while meeting needs for both climate protection and cozy shelter, architects say.

“What some may call modern, we think of as organic, a freedom of form assembled with natural materials that contribute to the built place,” says architect Greg Faulkner of Faulkner Architects in Berkeley and Truckee. “How things are made and assembled is important in the work. There’s expediency, honesty and clarity in the structure.”

New materials withstand the effects of a climate that heaps snow on the roofs in winter and sends air temperatures soaring in summer. Triple-glazed glass limits interior heat loss and damage from ultraviolet rays. Concrete-slab floors contain tubes circulating water for warmth. Structural Insulated Panels, or SIPs, form durable roofs, according to engineer Andrew Ryan.

Another shift: The contemporary homes are trending smaller – 3,000 to 4,000 square feet instead of the recent giants besting 20,000 square feet.

“They are working retreats,” Faulkner says. “The house is a tool for recharging fast-paced lives.”

They are vacation homes for a new generation.

“You have a younger clientele coming up here now,” says architect Joel Sherman, of JLS Design in Reno and Truckee, who’s been designing nontraditional homes at Tahoe since 1993. “Whereas 20 years ago you had an old Bay Area sensibility – people who wanted nostalgia and had visions for a cabin.”

Faulkner argues that, in fact, while the details may not mimic historical ornament, they can stir memories. The homes can resonate with historical references differently.

“I think we have histories that we use for reference when experiencing a place,” Faulkner says. He cited as an example a Lahontan house he recently designed, a sprawling Jenga web of glass, reclaimed redwood and stone acquired on site. The massive stacked timbers evoke a redwood grove. Glass walls fitting around existing granite boulders provide visual passages to outside terrain.

“If the place is a built landscape with layers of detail at varied sizes, it can more fully engage the senses; it can be memorable,” Faulkner says.

Architects like Faulkner who appreciate the principles of International Style, Bauhaus and American Mid-Century Modern are excited by the shift in sensibilities.

The Martis Camp design review committee members seemed to have freedom of expression in mind when they wrote codes that encourage diversity. “The ‘Martis Camp Architecture Handbook’ was very deliberately written to be non-prescriptive, and to encourage and support high-quality mountain architecture and well-composed design, regardless of stylistic approach,” Wightman said.

With homeowners also now embracing glass and steel, the sky’s the limit. Or is it?

Sierra Magazine, July/August 2011

MY GUIDE IS PETER CURTIN, brewmaster, founder of the Burren Tolkien Society, and owner of the Roadside Tavern in the nearby village of Lisdoonvarna. He is helping me with my mission to visit the various habitats of the Burren, a 220-square-mile rolling limestone massif on Ireland’s west coast. Today we’re going to the top of bare-bones Turlough Hill, where we’ll search for traces of the people who lived here 4,000 years ago.

Under a pale mist, we navigate yawning rock fractures, fields of scree, and stone walls that have stood without mortar for 1,000 years. The Burren is one of Europe’s largest karst, or continuous limestone, regions. The limestone, which formed undersea 320 million years ago, is laced with fissures through which rainwater seeps, to collect in vast tunnel systems. Ferns, mosses, and wildflowers dwell in the cracks. In places, the limestone has eroded to a calcium-rich soil that nourishes meadows bursting with tiny flowers and thick grasses and more than 700 other plant species. Hundreds of generations of farmers have grazed livestock on the meadows. The Irish government now recognizes local farmers as “Keepers of the Burren” and pays them to preserve the habitat.

Atop Turlough Hill we easily locate the ruins: the remains of a cluster of hut sites inside a large circular barricade of stone. Around us, the slinky mist is replaced by a silvery light mirrored in stone. Fields explode in brilliant green, gray hills roll to a bone-white shoreline, and the Atlantic spreads out in a blue sheet.

Curtin believes that the Burren inspired places in J. R. R. Tolkien’s fictitious Middle-earth. In The Fellowship of the Ring, Gandalf says, “The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it. . . . White shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.” That conjures up the Burren, and Ireland itself, well enough for me.

By Laura Read

San Francisco Chronicle Magazine

It’s a school with no computers, no televisions, no cell phones, no light switches, no amenities. If you want food or water, you’re pretty much on your own. The classroom is the great outdoors – and the course is survival.

In today’s tough economic times, when people are contemplating living with less, survival classes are attracting plenty of students who believe the primitive world offers an embarrassment of natural riches that not only can make the difference between life and death but also can expand personal growth.

“Five years ago, I founded Adventure Out. It was just me with a few friends helping to give surf lessons and survival workshops,” says Cliff Hodges of Santa Cruz. “The company grew to 20 employees, and now we run programs all over the state. Now every class fills up with a pretty long waiting list.”

Wilderness survival schools have been around since the 1960s, but interest began swelling during the Y2K scare. These days, people have access to plenty of survival material. They’re watching survival television shows. They’re reading survival books, such as “Survive! Essential Skills and Tactics to Get You Out of Anywhere – Alive” by Les Stroud, host of the Discovery Channel show “Survivorman.” They’re checking out survival schools online and through word of mouth.

What neophytes are quickly discovering is that survival schools are not just for Rambo anymore; they’re for Bambi, too.

Most good schools teach that wilderness survival is not only about making a fire, capturing food and building a shelter, though those skills are important. It also requires an intimacy with natural systems. Students learn how things work in the environment around them, and how they themselves fit into that environment.

“We’ll track the animals, but we’ll also relate them to the ecological context,” says Josh Lane, the creative mentoring specialist at the Shikari Tracking Guild in Santa Cruz. “There are so many mysteries at play on the landscape. If we see coyote tracks, we ask, ‘What is it about the landscape that causes them to move in that way?’ It seems to make a real tangible difference for people who are looking for that connection and wanting to feel it. They get immersed into nature, and they see quickly how alive that connection can be in their lives.”

Sensitivity trumps toughness

The paradox is that the most powerful ingredient of toughness is not muscle power, but sensitivity. “Wilderness training always builds character,” says Jon Young, Shikari’s founder. “You have to face your fears. Learning to pay attention to the birds and animals around you brings you right to your edge. If you’re used to a temperature of 68 degrees Fahrenheit, then a constant temperature of 62 degrees is going to feel intense, uncomfortable.

“And there’s the edge. Your sense of touch, the humidity, the cold wind will take you outside your comfort zone. You slow down, pay attention with your eyes and your ears. You have to be a participant with much more consciousness. Being in touch with nature directly on a consistent basis is going to build the character needed for survival.”

The lessons taught in survival schools can give students the kind of shakeup that might save their lives in any situation, not just the kind of trouble that occurs alone in the wilderness.

“We live in a fishbowl culture,” said Laurence Gonzales, survival columnist for National Geographic Adventure. “Every morning we get a reward: The coffee goes on, and there’s the croissant; it’s lunchtime, and there’s the sandwich. We get rewarded no matter the stupid things we do. That’s great, until things go wrong.” If all you do is watch “Dancing With the Stars,” he says, you’re not taking advantage of human intelligence. “It’s not what’s in your pack that makes the difference in survival; it’s what’s in your heart.”

“Survivorman’s” Les Stroud agrees. Since college, he’s taken numerous survival courses, even lived a primitive lifestyle for a year in a remote part of Canada. “Most of what you need to survive is mental,” he says. “When it’s 3 a.m. and that cold chill is rippling down the spine, it takes more than a fire to get you through the night.”

Wilderness survival schools vary wildly. Some teach what to do when things go wrong, and how to use available equipment to stay alive. Some teach only primitive techniques culled from indigenous cultures. Some incorporate natural history lessons and mental awareness skills. Some go further to forge self-discovery or build interpersonal skills, recognizing that people facing hardships are not always alone.

The schools generally help students shed what they know about 21st century living and plunge them into the unknown, where they must match themselves with nature.

starting a fire took days

“They drop you into the middle of the wilderness with nothing,” says Gonzales, who took two survival courses while researching his book “Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why.”

“The first thing we did was make fire. We broke a couple of rocks against each other and got an edge that was sharp enough so that we could strip bark off a tree branch.” Gonzales then worked the bark into fibers and made a cord. With another branch and the cord, he constructed a bow drill, which he spun against a wood board with a notch in it until the friction produced a hot ember. “You put the ember into some dry material and blow on it, and you get fire,” he says. Simple as the procedure sounds, it wasn’t easy – it took him two days.

While the course taught Gonzales to build a shelter, navigate without map and compass and other useful skills, the most important lessons, he says, came from the practice itself. “Survival is not so much about technique; it’s about the opening of your mind to possibilities.”

Most of the American schools draw from indigenous approaches to primitive living. In Colorado, for example, the Boulder Outdoor Survival School presents seven-, 14- and 28-day survival skills and field courses in southern Utah based on lifestyles of the Pueblo culture. The school got some buzz several years ago when its instructors were consulted for the 2000 movie “Castaway.”

Closer to home, in Santa Cruz, Adventure Out offers a one-day survival clinic as well as weekend and weeklong workshops in flint-knapping, bow-making, hide-tanning, tracking and other skills. A new program this year teaches about sea-foraging and edible plants during a backpack trip into remote parts of the Lost Coast. Shikari Tracking Guild presents a Saturday series in nature awareness and animal tracking as well as a weeklong course in bird language and a nine-month nature and survival skills program called Native Eyes.

part of society too

Sometimes, individuals arrive at a wilderness training school and discover that it’s not so hard for them to handle the wilderness alone; what’s difficult is getting along when they return to society.

“We want people to realize that they are part of nature, and nature is their home – that they can trust nature, but they also can trust each other,” says John Chilkotowsky, program director of Wilderness Awareness School, an outdoor school teaching survival, natural history and other courses in Duvall, Wash. “It’s the opposite of what we call the ‘sociopathic naturalist’ syndrome, in which people think nature is good and people are bad.

“In our courses, students are learning difficult skills. When we put them out for wilderness tests, time and time again they discover that the way they survive and flourish is through their ability to function well in a community.”

Many schools claim that students leave with a much greater understanding of themselves. “We’re not a therapy camp,” Chilkotowsky says. “But this experience is completely transformative. Part of that is that you have a bunch of people around you who are jazzed up about the natural world: They celebrate that nature is fully alive, the flowers are blooming, the birds are singing. That is an immense contrast to our usual experience of some folks who are habitually depressed, expecting nothing to bloom or sing in their day. There’s something elemental in nature that invites you to be who you truly are.”

A person can’t survive a grueling challenge without clarity and connection, according to Stroud. A panicked person will never coax that ember to flame. “Maintain the will to live,” Stroud says. “What’s the first thing you do out there in any situation? You have to refrain from panic. Once you’ve been able to do that, the rest becomes the technical application of your knowledge and skills.”

nurturing will to live

A lost person can become calm simply by taking the first steps taught by most survival courses and in most books: “You assess your own situation,” Stroud says. First, by determining which aspects of the situation are working in favor of survival, and which are working against it. Are you injured? Is nightfall approaching? Then, assess the external environment and the tools and options for survival existing in your surroundings – tree limbs, grass, loose dirt, fire-starting tools, etc.

The most important tool for survival is an internal one, Stroud stresses. If you can manage your mind, by keeping calm and nurturing your will to live, the odds of survival increase dramatically. “The will to live is in most of us – sometimes it’s hidden away,” Stroud says. “None of us wants to die.” —

By Laura Read

MIT’s Technology Review Magazine

In the bare-bones warehouse space of CrossFit West Santa Cruz, rock and rap music thrums over the clamor of some very fit people lifting big weights. Cliff Hodges, the 30-year-old MIT grad who co-owns the new gym, starts his day here around 8 a.m. But a few hours later in the parking lot outside, he’ll meet up with customers seeking a different kind of experience from the workout junkies inside. Dressed for the outdoors, these folks are more interested in reconnecting with nature in the nearby forest. After loading into a company van, they’ll wind upward into the Santa Cruz Mountains above the Pacific Ocean, park, and enter a stand of redwoods and oak on foot. There, the hum of traffic disappears; the aromas of evergreen boughs and dry grass fill the air.

Having grown up two miles away, Hodges understands these woods the way most people know their hometowns: this bush or tree shelters this type of bird or rodent; that animal uses the main trails, while others tread a fainter path. Rounding a corner, he kneels by the hoof prints of a deer, observing that the animal darted off the trail here onto a barely noticeable path that vanishes into the trees. He grins. “In class we’ll spend a lot of time staring at the ground,” he says. “It’s what we call dirt time.”

When he left MIT in 2004, Hodges thought he might spend much of the rest of his life working inside shiny-clean rooms as an electrical engineer, confining his dirt time to weekends and evenings. Equipped with bachelor’s and master of engineering degrees in electrical engineering and computer science, he joined a company that developed flash memory for computers. But within three months, he decided the job wasn’t for him. He missed the outdoors and realized that a college hobby–teaching wilderness survival–was something he wanted to do full time. By the end of the year, he’d left the engineering world and launched an outdoor school and guide service he called Adventure Out. “I was working on the business end and attempting to secure funding for about a month before I quit the job so I could hit the ground running,” he says. The company was offering programs by the spring of 2005.

The leap from electrical engineering to launching a business didn’t seem like much of a stretch to Hodges. “My business sense comes from the analytical education that I received as a student of engineering,” he says. “MIT produces the best problem solvers in the world. Applying those scientific and methodical approaches to small business is easy in comparison to something as complex as device physics.”

Hodges approaches wilderness training a bit differently from many established survival schools. While they may require students to abandon their normal routines for months, he offers shorter workshops, making the outdoors more accessible and less intimidating to deskbound city dwellers. Introducing a broad audience to primitive ways is one of Hodges’s goals. “We need more people who understand that there is more to the world than cars and televisions,” he says. “In the wilderness, our bodies get into a different pace. The body moves in sync with the wilderness. It’s no longer about instant gratification; it’s about ebb and flow.”

In a five-hour introductory course, students learn how to build shelters, start fires, purify water, identify edible plants, and build animal traps. Advanced two- and three-day workshops cover tanning hides, tracking animals, and making arrowheads using a stone-against-stone technique called flint knapping. One-week courses in desert and winter survival give students a chance to delve deeper. Adventure Out also offers classes in surfing, mountain biking, backpacking, and rock climbing. Hodges’s gym, which he opened last spring, is a natural extension for him; CrossFit, a high-intensity strength and conditioning program pioneered in Santa Cruz, aims to prepare the body for unpredictable real-life situations. “We do functional fitness–sprinting, rowing, weight lifting, moving the body through three-dimensional space–so people are better fit for their outdoor activities and outdoor sports,” he says.

Adventure Out programs have been featured in print media such as Fortune Small Business, the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, and San Diego Magazine, as well as on regional TV stations. Hodges estimates that 10,000 students have passed through his classes in five years–and more than a few claim he’s changed their lives. “He’s an incredibly talented individual,” says George Cagle, a technical program manager at Microsoft who’s taken three Adventure Out classes. “He teaches you how to become involved in the environment, to realize that you’re part of the wilderness.”

To people who know Hodges well, the switch from high tech to primitive tech is no surprise. Back in college, “he was capturing squirrels in the middle of the city, and taking roadkill and turning it into hide,” says his MIT roommate, Kai McDonald ’03, SM ’05, now a managing principal at a Southern California investment company. “I remember going into the freezer one day and seeing a strange item wrapped in plastic. It was a deer brain, which he was using to tan animal hides.”

As an undergrad, Hodges learned the tanning technique (rubbing hides with brain matter to preserve and soften them) on weekends at a survival school in New Jersey. By his senior year, he was eager to teach the skills himself. He had his chance during IAP. “It was the coldest cold snap that Boston had seen in a decade,” he recalls, “and we had to import all of our materials to our class location, which was right in front of the dome. We built a debris shelter from sticks and leaves we gathered near Walden Pond. We also created fire by friction and practiced water collection. We purified the water by dropping in rocks we’d heated over an open fire.”

Even today, some of the technological advances that excite him most are those that occurred more than 10,000 years ago. Take the bow drill, for instance. “It uses human power to generate a greater force than humans can generate on their own,” Hodges says. “When you look at two sticks rubbing together, it’s not that exciting; but these inventions laid the foundations for civilization.” The drill is made by securing a natural fiber to the two ends of a simple bow, then wrapping the fiber around a spindle. Moving the bow back and forth to rotate the spindle rapidly against another piece of wood creates friction, which generates heat and ignites the wood. The resulting ember is then wrapped in dried grass and blown into flame. Hodges can ignite a flame in 30 to 45 seconds; beginners usually practice for days before producing an ember.

Hodges also employs traditional techniques to hunt deer, wild pigs, and other animals that he uses for food and hides. “For me there are huge elements of sacredness and history to using these skills,” he says. “The thrill and pride I take in harvesting my own food is immense, and wholly incomparable to anything else. It is cultural preservation–maintaining skills that are vanishing.” He spends about 100 hours making the tools needed for one hunt–the bow, arrows, and stone arrowheads. In November 2007 he captured his first black bear, a 450-pound record-breaker. California Fish and Game wardens told him it is the only bear on record caught using a stone point.

Though he has no plans to go after any more bears, Hodges has no regrets about the path he’s on. “People ask me, ‘How do you feel about tossing away your engineering degree?’ I don’t feel that I’ve done that at all,” he says. “MIT taught me the sky is the limit. Everyone there is trying to create something that’s going to have a positive effect in the world.

“There are a lot of people fighting for the environment by preserving open space or working on clean energy. My way is to connect people with the outdoors one individual at a time.”