THE LAST RIVER | Todd Balf

Todd Balf, a contributing editor to Men's Journal and Fast Company magazines has reported on, written about, and sometimes participated in expeditionary adventures for 15 years. Upon leaving an altogether decent desk job as a senior editor at Outside magazine in the late 1980's, an inspired Balf ushered in a freelance career by dragging his wife, Patricia, on a three-month, 20,000-mile road trip through the wilds of Central America. His first freelance assignment took him to the Class IV Kennebec River in Maine, where he trained with a class of aspiring raft guides and lost a quadrant of his front tooth in a first and nearly last attempt at whitewater mastery. Though Balf has produced numerous magazine profiles and general-interest reporting pieces, the whitewater humbling led to a string of first-person outdoor exploits, ranging from the serious (climbing Grand Teton and working a site on a Georges Banks dragger) to the semi-serious (sea kayaking in Baja and jungle exploration in Panama's Darien) to the absurd (extreme cold water swimming off the coast of Maine and snowshoe racing on behalf of Uncle Sam in an obscure biannual grudgefest with Canada).

Balf grew up in Rockport, Massachusetts, a tiny fishing village that juts out into the North Atlantic and was sometimes fondly (and sometimes not so fondly) referred to as "the end of the world'' by his parents, both native New Yorkers. Like most adolescent Rockporters, he spent summers sprinting into and out of the ice-cold 50 degree water, prowling the local shorelines with mask and snorkel for lobsters, and cliff jumping in the pristine freshwater granite quarries at the island's wooded center. Though he occasionally wishes otherwise, he never did quite screw up the courage to jump off the knife-edge, 30-foot-high Everestian pinnacle at Steel Derrick.

At the University of New Hampshire Balf studied journalism, taking up reporting internships at the Gloucester Daily Times and the Boston Globe where he wrote about fish catches and car wrecks, respectively. After college, he landed a job in Esquire's fact-checking department, a stroke of amazing good fortune given that he misspelled the chief of research's name in his application. In a rare, highly anticipated opportunity to "stretch" a bit, he got tabbed to personally interview Vernon Jordan, only to have to explain to the then head of the Urban League why Esquire's forthcoming "best and brightest" issue featured only a single African American—a basketball player.

Balf returned to Boston as an editor for Ultrasport magazine, then left for Chicago where he edited features for Outside and began to acquire a vocabulary that included the words crampon, peloton, and gnarly. Though Balf worked with such writers as Jon Krakauer and Sebastian Junger (briefly), he may be best remembered for a period of time when he mountain-biked 40 miles a day—20 miles at morning and night to get to work and home, 20 more at midday to walk the couple's apartment-shredding puppy.

Balf now lives in Beverly, Massachusetts, working out of a rehabbed backyard barn that lists perilously toward the ocean and is a source of concern for many of his abutting neighbors. He, his wife, and two young children occupy themselves with several pets (including the now deaf and elderly house-shredding dog) and a perpetually underperforming vegetable garden.