Women Explorers

At age 47, a mother of two, Debbie Moderow was not your average musher in the Iditarod, but that's where she found herself when, less than 200 miles from the finish line, her dogs decided they didn't want to run anymore. After all her preparation, after all the careful management of her team, and after their running so well for over a week, the huskies balked. But the sting of not completing the race after coming so far was nothing compared to the disappointment Moderow felt in having lost touch with her dogs.

In The Gutsy Girl, author Caroline Paul emboldens girls to seek out lives of exhilaration. Once a young scaredy-cat herself, Caroline decided that fear got in the way of the life she wanted - of excitement, confidence, self-reliance, friendship, and fun. She has since flown planes, rafted big rivers, climbed tall mountains, and fought fires as one of the first female firefighters in San Francisco.

After months of following one-size-fits-all advice for a 57-year-old widow, Linda Crill is still miserable, until she makes a rebellious spur-of-the-moment decision: she trades her corporate suits for motorcycle leathers and commits herself to a 2,500-mile road trip down America’s Pacific Northwest coast on a Harley. The problem: she doesn’t know how to ride and has only 30 days to learn. Four short weeks later, Linda joins two men and a woman for a white-knuckled, exhilarating road trip along the west coast from Vancouver, Canada, to the wine country of Mendocino, California....

In 1958, while flying from one island to another, Audrey Sutherland sees the remote and roadless northeast side of Molokai, with its spectacular sea cliffs and waterfalls. Always an adventurer, she decides that she must find a way to explore this then inaccessible area. After much study, she determines that the best way for her to navigate these treacherous sea walls is to swim while towing an inflatable kayak. This is the story of fulfilling her dream, of planning then implementing, of launching and advancing, of retreating and reconnoitering, of challenge and success.

If you haven't seen a Discovery Channel gold-hunting show, you might picture a gold prospector as a relic of the Wild West: a TNT-toting bearded old man wildly swinging a pick on the hunt for nuggets, guided by old maps, superstition, legends and instinct. It's still predominantly a man's world, and still often fanatical, but these days the golden dream attracts people from all walks of life—and 25-year-old Tyler Mahoney (Australian star of the Discovery Channel's Gold Rush series) is leading the way.

An exemplary travelogue of danger and achievement by the Frenchwoman Madame Alexandra David-Neel of her 1923 expedition to Tibet, the fifth in her series of Asian travels and her personal recounting of her journey to Lhasa, Tibet's forbidden city. In order to penetrate Tibet and reach Lhasa, she used her fluency of Tibetan dialects and culture, disguised herself as a beggar with yak hair extensions and inked skin, and tackled some of the roughest terrain and climate in the world.

At the age of 19, Lara Prior-Palmer discovered a website devoted to "the world's longest, toughest horse race" - an annual competition of endurance and skill that involves dozens of riders racing a series of 25 wild ponies across 1,000 kilometers of Mongolian grassland. On a whim, she decided to enter the race. Riders often spend years preparing to compete in the Mongol Derby, and many fail to finish. Rough Magic captures the extraordinary story of one young woman who forged ahead, against all odds, to become the first female winner of this breathtaking race.

The image we have of Amelia Earhart today - a tousle-haired, androgynous flier clad in shirt, silk scarf, leather jacket, and goggles - is only one of her many personas, most of which have been lost to us through the years. Through years of research and interviews with many of the surviving people who knew Amelia, Susan Butler has recreated a remarkably vivid and multifaceted portrait of this enigmatic figure.

Experience Alexandra David-Neel's captivating and inspirational journey to become the first Western woman to reach the Tibetan holy city of Lhasa and be received by the Dalai Lama. Enduring backbreaking travel, threatening militaries, disease, and countless other dangers, David-Neel's journey is an epic demonstration of perseverance and courage.

Two stories about William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army; two stories about amazing women aviators; and two true-to-life adventures!

Reporter Diana Marcum is in crisis. A long-buried personal sadness is enfolding her - and her career is stalled - when she stumbles upon an unusual group of immigrants living in rural California. She follows them on their annual return to the remote Azores islands in the Atlantic Ocean, where bulls run down village streets, volcanoes are active, and the people celebrate festas to ease their saudade, a longing so deep that the Portuguese word for it can’t be fully translated.

In 1921, Inupait seamstress Ada Blackjack joined a a group of four white men who wanted to establish a trading post on Wrangel Island in the freezing Arctic Ocean. The explorers were stranded on the island when their return ship was forced to turn back due to ice. Facing harsh conditions and dwindling food supplies, the men died one by one, but Ada remained. Find out how she alone managed to survive the disastrous expedition.

Grief was gnawing at me, trapping my body in a cycle of pain with no offer of relief, making me restless and not letting me go. I desired liberosis, to care less about things. I desperately sought inner and outer liberation. I was having sleepless nights. My soul knew the solution, but my body was not listening until the moment came when I just longed to leave. I wished to free myself from this situation, wipe it from my being, and surround myself with the wilderness.

Near the end of her life, Mary Mann Hamilton (1866-c.1936) was encouraged to record her experiences as a female pioneer. The result is the only known firsthand account of a remarkable woman thrust into the center of taming the American South - surviving floods, tornadoes, and fires; facing bears, panthers, and snakes; managing a boardinghouse in Arkansas that was home to an eccentric group of settlers; and running a logging camp in Mississippi that blazed a trail for development in the Mississippi Delta.

This audiobook tells the story of Amelia Earhart, the daring female aviator who disappeared while attempting to become the first woman to fly a plane around the world.

In 1922, a 16-year-old Canadian girl, fed up with life in a French convent school, answered an ad for a travelling secretary. Tall, blonde, and swaggering with confidence, she might have passed for twenty. She also knew what she wanted: to become the first female to drive around the world. Her name was Aloha Wanderwell. By the age of 25, she had become a pilot, a film star, an ambassador for world peace, and the centerpiece of one of the biggest unsolved murder mysteries in California history. Her story defied belief, but it was true. Every bit of it. Except for her name.

In the early years of the 18th century, a band of French scientists set off on a daring, decade-long expedition to South America in a race to measure the precise shape of the earth. Like Lewis and Clark's exploration of the American West, their incredible mission revealed the mysteries of a little-known continent to a world hungry for discovery. Scaling 16,000-foot mountains in the Peruvian Andes, and braving jaguars, pumas, insects, and vampire bats in the jungle, the scientists barely completed their mission.

Amelia Earhart’s autobiographical book The Fun of It: Random Records of My Own Flying and of Women in Aviation covers Earhart’s life through May 20-21, 1932, “when Miss Earhart, alone in a Lockheed Vega monoplane with a single Wasp engine, negotiated 2,026 miles through storm and fog from Harbor Grace, Newfoundland, to a cow pasture on the outskirts of Londonderry, Ireland. The flight set a transatlantic record of 14 hours, 56 minutes...and stirred such public adulation that she confided, ‘I’ll be glad when the zoo part is over.’” (ANB)

Leslie White knew she wanted more out of life - She found it in an unlikely place. Devastated from the loss of both parents to cancer nine months apart, Leslie vowed to change her life. She bought the neighbor’s old motorhome, found a job as a traveling histologist, and hit the road. But she found she could not trust the one person she was still holding onto.

This book honors all the women who ride motorcycles and inspires others with rebel souls to do the same. Women Who Ride is a delightful compilation by, and for, women motorcycle riders, filled with true stories from both youngsters and those with a lifetime of riding experience.