During a recent lunch at Michael's restaurant, Men's Journal editor-in-chief Michael Caruso recalls a story about meeting a mapmaker in Kathmandu who was the main cartographer for Nepal, Tibet and northern Laos. Over drinks, Caruso asked the man if there were places that he didn't put on his maps.

"He said, 'Oh yeah, there's a lot of them,'" says the 43-year-old Caruso. "'The Tibetans have a name for them; they're called ba-yuls, which means 'power places' and I respect that and I don't put those in my maps.' I said, 'Really? Why don't you tell me about the last one you were at?' And he drew me a map on the back of a napkin. We ended up going off the Annapurnas trail for a month and we found this place."

Caruso's travel stories have a certain wistful J. Peterman-catalog quality about them, with scenes taking place in far-flung locales that have ancient artifacts but no modern plumbing—places far removed from the New York media maelstrom. He has a breathless romanticism about his own adventure travel, and enjoys recounting tales of his trips scuba diving among WW2 ship carcasses in Micronesia's Truk Lagoon and climbing the pyramids in Egypt.

But breathless travel tales come in handy when you edit a magazine that recently changed its tagline to "Live the Adventurous Life." It's not by accident that Men's Journal has morphed under Caruso's stewardship into a title much more focused on defining a mature version of guy-ness through climbing the world's highest mountains, heli-skiing, and diving with great white sharks. Responding to what he calls a "crisis in masculinity," Caruso and the MJ staff have created a venue for wealthy men who have graduated from the "laddie" demographic into established yuppies with a sense of yearning for "real" challenges.

"A lot of guys these days are in this post-metrosexual identity crisis," he says. "Guys don't really know how to be guys anymore. 'If I can't be sexist and I can't be drunk and I can't eat unhealthy food, then what does it mean to be a man these days?' Everything's disapproved of. You can't act out so much anymore. But I think adventure is one of the few ways you can act out still."

He calls adventure travel "one of the last great commodities out there," which he admits has a certain irony to it.

"You just don't want to go places where you feel like you're the one millionth visitor," he says. "You want to feel like you're first—not necessarily that you are first, but [you want to] feel like that." Even if they don't feel up to rafting in the wild whitewater of Fualeufu or riding on horseback through Mongoloia, Caruso says MJ readers get their kicks vicariously.

"We sometimes call it 'travel porn,'" Caruso says with a grin that suggests that there is something almost lascivious about mountain biking in the Moab desert.

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When the broad-shouldered, silver-haired editor took the helm at the Wenner title in November 2003, after a year-long trip around the globe, he was the publication's third EIC in a 15-month span. The previous chief, Bob Wallace, had been kicked upstairs to launch Wenner Books, and edit staffers admit that there wasn't even a clear idea of what a "Men's Journal story" was.

But in the past year and a half, the mag has seen a renaissance. The May issue, featuring the "100 Greatest Adventures on the Planet," has the most ad and edit pages in the mag's 13-year history.

"I show that issue to writers all the time now, and you can really see the light go on," says Tom Foster, one of Caruso's deputies. "They realize something cool is going on at MJ and they want to be a part of it."

Peter Frank, another deputy, attributes MJ's recent success to Caruso's focus on running a tighter ship.

"We've done a really terrific job reorganizing our deadlines and reducing some of the chaos at close, which improves everyone's life," says Frank. "Michael has encouraged us to focus tightly on our core subject of adventure, both editorially and in our photography and design. He has also really pushed the level of service in the magazine. In addition to having a strong service component to every story, we have also created a number of franchise packages—coolest jobs, hideouts, 'how to win at everything'—which supply great sell lines for the cover and have really boosted our newsstand."

But the transformation has not been without its growing pains. In the same second half of last year that saw such big gains, nine edit and art staffers left Men's Journal, vacating nearly a third of the desks in the department.

"I think we've had a normal amount of turnover in the past year," says Caruso, "especially considering the recent uptick in startups and general movement in the business. We always have talented people here and it's natural that other magazines try to hire from a place they perceive as doing well."

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Since graduating from Columbia with a B.A. two decades ago, Caruso has worked at a variety of magazines. Right out of college, he got a job as a messenger at the New Yorker, where he read the magazine's galleys and editorial comments in the margins as he delivered them from office to office. He describes that time as "the best graduate school I could hope for."

After working his way up the masthead at a bevy of titles, he finally graduated to become EIC of Los Angeles magazine in 1994. Since then he has spent time in the top spot at Details, Maximum Golf and now Men's Journal.

There have been low points for Caruso—most notably losing his job at Details despite circ being up and after he bragged to the Post that his numbers were so good that he was "going to get a big fat raise."

But with newsstand sales up 24 percent in the second half of '04, and ad pages climbing 20 percent during the same period, things are going well now.

Bob Roe, who worked under Caruso at Los Angeles and is now assistant managing editor at Sports Illustrated, says his former boss has a wide range of editorial strengths. "He's a whiz with a blue pencil (one of the best line editors I know)," says Roe. "[He] respects writers (very rare these days), is very good with the big picture stuff, handles the business stuff well, understands how to make a magazine look and read well and, most important, is always a stand-up guy in dealing with his staff and outsiders."

Caruso says that he feels a special satisfaction in editing Men's Journal, because he thinks of himself as the magazine's target reader. A city-dweller with a baby daughter and a workaday life, he nonetheless feels the same postmodern angst as his readers to "get out there," and find "authentic experiences."

"This magazine has always been for guys who have a kind of unquenchable curiosity about the world, and Michael definitely has that," says Foster. "Just yesterday he was giving me tips for a vacation I'm planning this fall—he's one of those guys who's already been where you're going, and knows all the best out-of-the-way spots to check out when you get there, and maybe a good local to call for advice."

Caruso says the key to his time at MJ has been that he never has thought of it as "just a job." "I'm looking for my next adventure, he says. "And that's my approach with the writers and editors. It's all 'tell me about this place; why would I want to go? What's the payoff? And would I really be able to go there?'"

He has tried to make the magazine more service-oriented, emphasizing photographs that show actual places and giving people more information about how to actually do all the things the magazine describes. He also says he has tried to push top-notch writers to challenge themselves with extreme adventures.

"A lot of times a writer has something they've wanted a chance to do for years," says Caruso, "and we just tell them to do it. Sometimes it's just something that we hear about. We recently sent a writer to the bone-jarring Dakar rally on the most dangerous year. Our writer came back with a great piece, but he was shaken. He's a pretty hardy guy, but he's said several times since 'I can't believe you guys sent me on that death tour.' There were eight people who died during the race, so, you know, it's pretty authentic." He also just sent a writer to Oman, and mentioned Bulgaria, Kurdistan and Afghanistan as up-and-coming "capitals of adventure," where he was looking to send writers for upcoming pieces.

But for all Caruso's focus on the "authentic," he has drawn some criticism for manufactured cover photos that super-impose celebrity photos on other backgrounds. Editor David Zinczenko, from the competing Men's Health, charges as well that MJ has never really been "authentic," copying in turns several successful models from other magazines.

"Men's Journal started out as a magazine that was chasing Outside," says Zinczenko. "Then it redirected to become an Esquire clone. Then it went after Men's Health. Then it went after the lad magazines. And now it's trying to be BestLife. The only thing authentic about Men's Journal is the slightly rank smell of desperation."

Zinczenko also says that a close look at MJ's vaunted increased circulation would reveal "an awful lot of smoke and mirrors," pointing to a recent ABC pink sheet that found 47.2 percent of the title's circ is sold through multi-mag deals and agencies for next to nothing, and then added that MH readers compared favorably to MJ's.

"When it comes to quality and strength in numbers, our readers can steal their readers' girlfriends every time," snipes Zinczenko.

Dismissing Zinczenko's comments as jealousy, Caruso notes that most of the phases his counterpart refers to were before his tenure.

"Since I've been here, our editorial has been consistent and on-message," he says. "As for the response to our editorial, I'll let our newsstand and ad page percentages speak for themselves. They compare favorably to the competition—including Men's Health."

Caruso blasts his competitor for being too focused on masculine insecurities, and chalks up its popularity to a growing "culture of complaint" where modern men are too coddled, and mags like Men's Health respond to the nagging media messages that constantly ask "Why aren't you more sexy? Why aren't you more attractive? Why don't you smell better? What's wrong with you?"

"It's all about aches and pains, and moans and pharmaceuticals; everything to just lull you into a false state of comfort," says Caruso. "I think there's something a little odd about that. At Men's Journal we're a little more about, 'Hey, look, some stuff's going to hurt; that's ok if it hurts. You're alive; suck it up and move on. You could be enjoying yourself. You still can kayak and climb the pyramids.'"

The mag's publisher, Carlos Demadrid, says MJ readers aren't interested in being told what's wrong with their lives. "Our guys are more accomplished and affluent than readers of other men's titles," says Demadrid, steering the conversation with phrases likely to be oft-repeated to advertisers. "They're the guys who are less interested in how something looks, and more interested in 'quality.' The guy that goes to hip, cool restaurants because he wants to be seen is not our reader. The guy who goes to the same restaurant and the food is good and tells a bunch of friends, that's our reader. It's all about quality and performance. Our guys wouldn't be happy with us if we recommend something that looks pretty but breaks down after six months."

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Leaving Michael's, Caruso notices boss Jann Wenner sitting at a nearby table with California governess Maria Shriver and few others. He waves while walking by, but refrains from stopping by to schmooze. Wenner gives a wide grin, but quickly resumes his conversation.

Caruso says he has a good relationship with his boss, who he calls "a real smart guy", and that while Wenner sometimes will give editorial direction ("particularly about skiing stories; the guy skis something like 70 days out of the year"), he mostly leaves the reins to the edit staff. He handles the topic delicately and inserts the obligatory plug for his employer.

"It's a very good time to be at Wenner," he says. "All three of our titles, Us Weekly, Rolling Stone and Men's Journal are doing really well. It's going to be a great Christmas party this year."

It may be a good party, but Christmas is still eight months away, and a lot can happen in eight months if you're an editor in the revolving door of magazine publishing.

David S. Hirschman is mediabistro.com's news editor.