Outdoor Travel

For the '70s child, summer holidays didn't mean the joy of CentreParcs or the sophistication of a Tuscan villa. They meant being crammed into a car with Grandma and heading to the coast. With just a tent for a home and a bucket for the necessities, we would set off on new adventures each year stoically resolving to enjoy ourselves. For Emma Kennedy, and her mum and dad, disaster always came along for the ride no matter where they went.

In 2010, Jonathon Stalls and his blue-heeler husky mix began their 242-day walk across the United States, depending upon each other and the kindness of strangers along the way. In this collection of essays, Stalls explores walking as waking up: how a cross-country journey through the family farms of West Virginia, the deep freedom of Nevada’s High desert, and everywhere in between unlocked connections to his deepest aches and dreams—and opened new avenues for renewal, connection, and change.

In this coming-of-middle-age memoir, Kim Heacox, writing in the tradition of Abbey, McPhee, and Thoreau, discovers an Alaska reborn from beneath a massive glacier, where flowers emerge from boulders, moose swim fjords, and bears cross crevasses with Homeric resolve. In such a place Heacox finds that people are reborn too, and their lives begin anew with incredible journeys, epiphanies, and successes. All in an America free of crass commercialism and overdevelopment.

On 30 January, 1981 Joe Tasker and Ade Burgess stood at 24,000 feet on the west ridge of Mount Everest. Below them were their companions, some exhausted, some crippled by illness, all virtually incapacitated. Further progress seemed impossible. Everest the Cruel Way is Joe Tasker's story of an attempt to climb the highest mountain on earth - an attempt which pushed a group of Britain's finest mountaineers to their limits. The goal had been to climb Mount Everest at its hardest: via the infamous west ridge, without supplementary oxygen and in winter.

Join cruising legends Lin and Larry Pardey as from England they proceed into the Baltic, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Germany. During their voyage they dealt with armed guards on the Polish waterfront who watched while the people greeted them with flowers and fruit. They weathered a fierce mast-under broach in a Baltic gale. And experienced great friendships found in harbors large and small.

Blind Descent explores both the brightest and darkest aspects of the timeless human urge to discover - to be first. It is also a thrilling epic about a pursuit that makes even extreme mountaineering and ocean exploration pale by comparison.

Bob Shepton is an ordained minister in the Church of England in his 70s, but spends most of his time sailing into the Arctic and making first ascents of inaccessible mountains. No tea parties for this vicar. Opening with the disastrous fire that destroyed his yacht whilst he was ice-bound in Greenland, the book travels back to his childhood growing up on his family's rubber plantation in Malaysia, moving back to England after his father was shot by the Japanese during the war, boarding school, the Royal Marines, and the church.

Rising from the depths of the North Pacific lies a fabled island, now submerged just 15 feet below the surface of the ocean. Rumors and warnings about Cortes Bank abound, but among big wave surfers, this legendary rock is famous for one simple (and massive) reason: this is the home of the biggest rideable wave on the face of the earth.

The ultimate endurance athlete, Marshall Ulrich has run more than 100 foot races averaging over 100 miles each, completed 12 expedition-length adventure races, and ascended the seven summits - including Mount Everest. Yet, his run from California to New York - the equivalent of running two marathons and a 10k every day for nearly two months straight - proved to be his most challenging effort yet. In Running on Empty, he shares the gritty backstory of his run and the excruciating punishments he endured on the road.

In the fall of 1978, Ray Ordorica packed everything he thought he would need into his Toyota LandCruiser and drove north to Alaska. He came to a land he had never seen, to find something he wasn't even sure existed: a wilderness cabin he could use for a year or more to live, think, relax, read, and write. Ordorica found his cabin, fixed it up, and, although it was just an un-insulated 12- by 16-foot one-room log structure, he spent three winters in it in relative comfort.

Two Years Before the Mast, written by Richard Henry Dana, provides a vivid account of "the life of a common sailor at sea". Dana sails from Boston, around Cape Horn, stopping in several ports along the California coast including San Diego, San Pedro, Santa Barbara, and San Francisco. On the return trip around Cape Horn in the middle of the Antarctic winter Dana describes terrifying storms and incredible beauty, giving vivid descriptions of icebergs and the scurvy that afflicts members of the crew.

"Epic" is a mountaineering term that evokes a sense of treacherous disaster. The climb that went wrong: fighting blinding snowstorms and horrific avalanches; days spent tentbound running low on food, water, and oxygen; surviving broken bones and shattered spirits. This program offers a collection of the most memorable accounts of legend-making expeditions to the world's most famous peaks, often in the worst possible conditions.

Put the career on hold, pull the children out of school, sell the house, and buy a boat in Greece to sail the Mediterranean? Why not? And so begins Heyward and Charlotte’s one-year businessman’s sabbatical. But with the winter months approaching and the Gulf War under way, this dream cruise will soon present them with a whole new set of obstacles.

Fanny Bullock Workman was a complicated and restless woman who defied the rigid Victorian morals she found as restrictive as a corset. With her frizzy, brown hair tucked under a topee, Workman was a force on the mountain and off. Instrumental in breaking the British stranglehold on Himalayan mountain climbing, this American woman climbed more peaks than any of her peers, became the first woman to map the far reaches of the Himalayas, the first woman to lecture at the Sorbonne, and the second to address the Royal Geographic Society of London.

There must be easier ways to heal and grow than walking 500 miles across Spain. But it’s hard to imagine one filled with more adventure, laughter, and excitement. The author sets off armed with idealistic expectations and a backpack. But then things quickly get real on the Camino, and she soon learns a thing or two about humility, vulnerability, and letting go.

In the great depths surrounding the Lofoten islands in Norway lives the infamous Greenland shark. At 26 feet in length and weighing more than a ton, it is truly a beast to behold. But the shark is not just known for its size alone: Its meat contains a toxin that, when consumed, has been known to make people drunk and hallucinatory.

Bluewater Walkabout: Into Africa is a memoir about an adventure in the wild bush of Africa and a family sailing journey. But when her sons bring along two friends who upset the family balance, rogue waves and great white sharks threaten the family's safety. Tina begins to deal with a mysterious health problem, and the perils of life at sea become very real.

I was diagnosed with high blood pressure, borderline diabetes, obesity, and being overweight. I lived a busy life, and I didn't have a lot of money. Taking the time to follow a strict diet and exercise routine or paying out a lot of money for a gym membership or personal training was out of the question. That was 12 years ago. Fast forward to the present, I now am an experienced long-distance hiker. I have traveled and hiked in over 17 countries. I no longer have diabetes or high blood pressure.

"You'll never make it!" With encouragement like that, author Mickey Thomas, in a fit of youthful testosterone, and with meticulous inattention to detail, decided to embark on a once-in-a lifetime 3,400-mile bicycle trek from Montana to Alaska. While riding through knee problems, illness, homesickness, infatuation, bad weather, and meeting a host of quirky and hilarious characters, Mickey, and his group rides over some of the roughest roads and most desolate scenery in North America. Along the way, he discovers an inner strength as well as a new physical stamina he never had.

The Last Great Mountain tells the story of the first ascent of Kangchenjunga the third highest but reputedly the hardest mountain in the world. It was an astonishing achievement for a British team led by Everest veteran Charles Evans. Drawing on interviews, diaries and unpublished accounts, Mick Conefrey begins his story in 1905 with the disastrous first attempt on the mountain by a team led by Aleister Crowley, explores the three dramatic German expeditions of the the late 1920s and brings it all to a climax 50 years later with the first ascent by Joe Brown and George Band.