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Forget the obvious. Adventure is the domain of the bold working in any discipline. They break molds, conventions and new ground. They might even break the law to make a statement, or a difference.

Holding up his own scarred hand with a grin, Rob Erekson recalls a gash in Joshua Eddy’s arm that needed 15 stitches.

“Everybody’s going to fall, and you’re gonna bleed,” Erekson says of running the desert trails of Southern Nevada, with the punishing heat, “vicious” terrain and occasional homicidal cactus.

“You go to Oregon or Northern California and it’s beautiful dirt, pillowy and buttery,” Eddy says. “Out here, things attack your ass.”

That’s part of the allure for runners who find peace, empowerment and sweaty good times in testing themselves against the landscape, show-cased in annual races put on by Desert Dash.

Erekson has been an owner of the 17-year-old company since 2013. He remembers when its flag-ship event, Blood, Sweat & Beers, drew maybe 80 lo-cals to Bootleg Canyon. Now it’s bringing 700 from all over the West for 5Ks up to full marathons.

That distance diversity will remain, but Erekson says new partners Stephen Massey, Aaron Hastings and Eddy are fueling the plan to expand the com-pany’s ultra category, from 31 miles up to 100.

“We’ve been able to bring a lot of people in who were 5K runners or less and were really nervous about trail running,” says Hastings, whose first race with Desert Dash was 6.2 miles. Now he’s tackling five times that distance, and sharing his story with newbies showing up to the group’s weekly run. In just over two years, more than 2,000 people have joined the Facebook page, and Eddy says it’s the first time the trail community has formally jelled.

Desert Dash is keen to keep it growing so more people can experience the singular satisfaction of dispatching a race like Bootleg Beatdown, coming up June 17. Massey, who runs 100-milers, calls the 3.1-mile course “extremely difficult.”

“It’s a 1,000-foot climb in three-quarters of a mile. It’s brutal, insanely technical. It’s hot,” Erekson says.

When you prove yourself on something that feels epic, Massey says, “you get a new perspective.”

Release. Control. Training for life’s painful slogs. And the simple joy of getting caked with dirt among the converted. — Erin Ryan

P U S H I N GL I M I T S

T H E

ROB EREKSON, STEPHEN MASSEY, JOSHUA EDDY AND AARON HASTINGSOrganization: Desert DashMission: Spreading the gospel of trail running

JON ESTRADA/SPECIAL TO THE SUNDAY

L A S V E G A N S B R E A K I N G B A R R I E R SI N S C I E N C E , A R T , F I T N E S S ,

A I D W O R K A N D F O O D

Rob Erekson

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Brett Ottolenghi doesn’t carry whole ham legs through casinos anymore. His quest to purify the American diet has expanded from

restaurant plates to the political arena and Florida’s lionfish-infested waters alike.

Not content to be a purveyor of artisanal, sustain-able foods, he has become a producer and tenacious advocate who still finds time for related adventures (like wading into Japanese creeks to pick wasabi to grate on sharkskin for visitors of his Las Vegas shop).

His pursuits have taken him to Spain for saffron, to Tunisia for olives and to the Colorado hinterlands to riff with a farmer hell-bent on using bison to turn deserts back into meadows. Along with some beauti-ful food, Ottolenghi has found widespread “cheating” — adulteration of product in pursuit of profit.

“You find that even the most mundane ingredient, like mozzarella cheese, turns out to be one of the big-gest scams there is,” he says.

Rather than retreat into his own little curated world, he’s traveling the country for a book about exceptional food pioneers. He’s talking with the U.S. Department of Agriculture about pathways to a mobile slaugh-

terhouse that could “transform the possibilities of farming” in Nevada. In industry circles, he’s making cases for eating invasive fish and feeding farmed species with protein-rich black soldier flies. He still attends Nevada Dairy Commission meetings to move the needle on legalizing raw milk. And he launched his Vegas Food Expo in March, featuring 135 innovative companies, with a goal of 250 for next year.

Top of mind is Artisanal Farms, a 40-acre pistachio grove about an hour northwest of Las Vegas housing what may be the world’s happiest chickens. They roost in the trees and eat natural feed grown onsite that contains no corn or soybeans. About 1,000 heritage hens are laying organic blue and brown eggs you can buy at Ottolenghi’s shop, PublicUs and Glazier’s Food Marketplace, and the farm will soon add 4,000 birds toward the break-even goal of 20,000.

“There’s this myth that only conventional agriculture can feed the world. ... One reason for doing this egg farm at scale is to dispel that idea,” Ottolenghi says. “I’m trying to push food forward on many fronts. All of my projects support the central core of just facilitating a better food system.” — Erin Ryan

In unstable regions throughout the world, areas can be deemed too

dangerous for aid workers. They are pulled out by their organiza-tions — or forced out by militant governments — leaving victims of war, genocide or famine with-out much-needed relief.

That’s when Robert Hoey gets interested.

He built his Las Vegas-based nonprofit, Shadows of Hope, on a willingness to go where others can’t, or won’t, and do whatever is needed. Volunteers, ranging from doctors and social work-ers to former special forces, have completed missions in more than a dozen countries, including Syria and Iraq. They’ve set up clinics on battle lines, snuck into forbidden areas for intel and shot back when combatants shot at them.

It’s an approach some in the hu-manitarian world see as reckless and inappropriate, but Hoey and his team believe if they don’t step in and do what they can, nobody will. Most volunteers are former military fueled by the frustration of witnessing injustices but being hamstrung by protocols.

Hoey admits to breaking laws to serve missions. The nonprofit’s website says it works with who-ever is helpful, “from authorities in the highest government office to lowly pirates and thieves.” He says he feels no regret about crossing lines, giving the example of smug-gling a journalist into a region with a media blackout.

“There is a gray area that we operate in. That’s OK. Nobody is clean,” he says. “The Army isn’t clean. The CIA isn’t clean. Shad-ows of Hope isn’t. ... But at least we’re not doing it for money or land. We’re just there because people need help.”

In July, volunteers plan to em-bark on a three-month mission to parts of Indonesia, Pakistan and India. The goal is to fact-find and offer aid to vulnerable groups in remote or restricted areas (in Indonesia’s West Papua, for instance, Hoey says people have reached out about genocide hap-pening inside a military zone).

Hoey believes this work is important enough to compromise his own health. He has lost an eye, three teeth and part of his left leg to injuries sustained overseas. In the back of his mind, he wonders if he might die for this. “But to see the stuff I’ve seen … I can’t not do anything.” — April Corbin

ROBERT HOEYOrganization: Shadows of HopeMission: Helping the vulnerable (by any means necessary)

BRETT OTTOLENGHIOrganization: Artisanal FoodsMission: Transforming the food system

JON ESTRADA/SPECIAL TO THE SUNDAY MIKAYLA WHITMORE/STAFF

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Las Vegas is a recurring canvas for the nomadic pair behind notorious art collective Indecline.

In 2012, hanged dummies appeared on billboards along Interstate 15, one reading “Dying for work,” the other “Hope you’re happy Wall St.” And during last year’s vit-riolic presidential campaign, one of the infamous “naked Trump” statues made appearances around town.

“Everybody was talking about that across the world,” T says of the viral multicity project.

Indecline’s network of “graffiti writers, filmmakers, photographers and full-time rebels and activists” has been ruffling feathers to make points since 2001, whether about police brutality, the failures of public bureaucracy or what members see as First World sins (read the fine print on their tanker-size can of Claim Your Destiny Beer just outside of North Las Vegas). Weathering controversy comes with this cause, and it fits the founders’ roots grow-ing up in the punk-rock scene.

“(George W.) Bush was in office, and we were starting to come into our own from the literature that we were reading and documentaries we were watching,” M says. “We were getting nice and angsty. … So it was really the beginning of put-ting animosity and angst into art.”

Projects have largely been illegal — trespassing and vandalism are frequent offenses — but M and T say the platform is worth it. Liken-ing their creative process to that of the makers of “South Park,” they say even the comical stuff embeds a call to action. A recent project in Oakland, for example, had them teaming with local artists to steal corporate billboards to build tents for area homeless.

“People can watch it and say, ‘We know that’s wrong,’ but at the end there’s a hook,” M says. “Creating a disruption and then at the end of it delivering a message that’s actually helpful and beneficial to people if they’re willing to understand that side of the argument.” — Mick Akers

“I tell them to never turn their backs; treat it like a wild animal,” Brian Hed-

lund says of training first-timers to hunt extremophiles in hot springs. The microscopic organisms thrive in water that can hit 250 degrees, and to demonstrate the risk, Hed-lund shows an old photo of what one second of exposure did to his ankle. The wounds look surgical, healthy skin surrounding patches of raw dermis the color of cherry Popsicle. “My career, tattooed,” Hedlund jokes.

For more than a decade, he has explored geothermal ecosystems across the West and in China and Armenia, his own field samples sharing lab space with others sent from Africa and the Philippines. His research team also is looking at microbe-rich water bubbling up in Death Valley that likely fell as snow during the last ice age.

Backed by millions in grants from private companies such as DuPont and public agencies including NASA and the National Science Foundation, Hedlund searches for microbial groups about which nothing is known — hence the “dark matter” term borrowed from astronomy.

Using gene sequencing as a forensic tool, his lab identifies and then tests them for particu-lar abilities, from eating sulfur to making DNA and RNA. They are notoriously difficult to isolate and grow, but Hedlund has a so-called black thumb.

“There are tons of extreme environments in Nevada, and most are very understudied,” says Hedlund, whose team and peers at the Desert Research Institute have put the state on the map for extremophile microbiology. He has a reputation for skilled han-dling of these invisible creatures, able to preserve desired macro-molecules to make groundbreak-ing studies possible.

He is among the authors on a 2013 publication in the pres-tigious journal Nature. Hedlund helped sequence uncultivated cells from bacteria and archaea to reveal relationships, ecosystem functions and unexpected meta-bolic features: “a step toward a better understanding of biologi-cal evolution on our planet,” the abstract said.

But asked about eureka mo-ments, Hedlund chuckles.

“I’m 99 percent ignorant,” he says, holding up two fingers about a centimeter apart. “I know this much.” — Erin Ryan

JON ESTRADA/SPECIAL TO THE SUNDAY MIKAYLA WHITMORE/STAFF

BRIAN HEDLUNDOrganization: UNLV School of Life SciencesMission: Exploring microbial dark matter

M AND TOrganization: IndeclineMission: Raising awareness through activist art