It's a common-enough tale, getting lost in the jungle. Surely Birut‰ Galdikas heard versions of it, prior to her arrival in Indonesian Borneo nearly three decades ago: the movie adventure stories with their predatory natives and stalking beasts, or maybe the more sober accounts from scientific explorations gone awry — an epopee of the rotting green forest, with chapters yet unwritten.

What remains unclear is whether Galdikas recognizes that her particular story has in fact become the latest chapter in that troubling genre. As writer Linda Spalding discovered in her three-year study of the renowned primatologist, it's a tale that begins amid blinding purpose and somehow ends in a skein of deception and ineffectiveness, with Galdikas abandoning her scientific rigor for a zealous sentimentality that surely would have troubled her original sponsor, paleontologist Louis B. Leakey, the man who set primatologists Dian Fossey, Jane Goodall, and Galdikas on their paths to fame.

Of the trio, Galdikas remains the most mysterious — a quality she shares with the solitary orangutans she's spent decades studying and obsessing over, transforming them along the way into furry arboreal talismans for her singular set of beliefs. The known Galdikas chronicle — gleaned from television appearances and magazines and her own memoir, Reflections of Eden — essentially halts in 1985, and little is known about her professional activities in the 13 years since. It was with the goal of filling in those years that Spalding set out in search of the 54-year-old Galdikas. The result, "The Jungle Took Her," is one of the saddest, strangest, and most ironic sagas of modern conservation. "She was sucked in so far," says Spalding, "that she let the science go. I came to see her as the archetype of that mythical figure who suddenly appears on the horizon, slips into the culture, and tries to reform it. They seldom succeed."

Spalding is the author of the novels Daughters of Captain Cook and The Paper Wife, and the editor of Brick, A Literary Journal. In the fall, Ecco Press will publish The Follow, her book on Birut‰ Galdikas. She lives in Toronto with the novelist Michael Ondaatje.

Barry Lopez, a longtime friend of this magazine, is the author of ten books, including Arctic Dreams — a body of work for which he has received many literary honors, among them the National Book Award and the Pushcart Prize. "The Whaleboat" will be collected, along with other essays, in About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory, to be published by Alfred A. Knopf this June.

Among Ian Frazier's ("A Lovely Sort of Lower Purpose,") many essays for Outside is a notable piece on the joy of eating insects, an endeavor that netted the author of Coyote v. Acme some ink from the Missoula Independent. "They identified me as 'our local bug-eating, award-winning author,'" he says. "Which is sort of giving with one hand and taking away with the other."

Daniel Duane's living room overlooks San Francisco's Ocean Beach: "I used to wake up, plot the best moment for surfing, then work around that. Now I plan my writing time first, then work in the surfing." Duane's Caught Inside:A Surfer's Year on the California Coast was published last year. His story about the decade's biggest swell begins.

Contributing editor Tad Friend ("Please Don't Oil the Animatronic Warthog,") has journeyed from Spain to the South Pacific for this magazine, plumping an already-thick travel log that includes visits to all seven continents and 49 of the 50 states. The odd one out? "Amazingly, I've never been to Maine," says Friend. "Although the Maine Tourism Authority has been wooing me mightily of late."

Baltimore native and longtime Outside contributor Chris Hartlove heads to Disney's Animal Kingdom this month, documenting everything from faux lion kills to rampant dinosaurs — and continuing a theme of offbeat work for the magazine, which includes photographing pieces on Civil War re-creations and a serial map thief.

"I've been to more writing workshops than anyone alive," admits Robert Antoni, a professor of Caribbean literature at the University of Miami. Time wisely spent, given that his first novel, Devina Trace, won the prestigious Commonwealth Prize. Though raised in the Bahamas, Antoni makes annual pilgrimages to Trinidad, where his family has lived for more than 200 years. "Another Day Under the Black Volcano," about life on Montserrat, is Antoni's first article for Outside.

The husband-wife photographic team of Lisa Preston and Nils Schlebusch lucked into the ideal post-eruption mood-setter during their inaugural shoot for Outside: a total solar eclipse, which for almost four minutes threw the ash-covered island of Montserrat into eerie darkness.