Sports Travel

In 1930, two novice paddlers - Eric Sevareid and Walter C. Port - launched a secondhand 18-foot canvas canoe from the Minnesota River at Fort Snelling for an ambitious summer-long journey from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay. Without benefit of radio, motor or good maps, the teenagers made their way over 2,250 miles of rivers, lakes, and difficult portages.

Back in 1981, publisher Ed Danner took a chance, hiring Nancy Besonen, a rookie reporter from Chicago's South Side, for his weekly newspaper, the L'Anse Sentinel. Her humor column, "Off the Hook," was ostensibly all about fishing, but she quickly cut loose, writing about anything relevant to life, especially in the Michigan's Upper Peninsula, as long as it made her readers smile.

The Tsangpo Gorge in southeastern Tibet has lured explorers and adventurers since its discovery. Sacred to the Buddhists, the inspiration for Shangri La, the Gorge is as steeped in legend and mystery as any spot on earth. As a river-running challenge, the remote Tsangpo is relentlessly unforgiving, more difficult than any stretch of river ever attempted. Its mysteries have withstood a century's worth of determined efforts to explore its length. The finest expedition paddlers on earth have tried.

Growing up a 90-pound weakling tormented by bullies in the schoolyards of Kansas, young Matthew Polly dreamed of one day journeying to the Shaolin Temple in China to become the toughest fighter in the world, like Caine in his favorite 1970s TV series, Kung Fu. While in college, Matthew decided the time had come to pursue this quixotic dream before it was too late. Much to the dismay of his parents, he dropped out of Princeton to spend two years training with the legendary sect of monks who invented kung fu and Zen Buddhism.

Mount Everest is situated in the Himalayan Mountains, on the border between Nepal and Tibet. It is the tallest mountain in the world, standing roughly 29,029 feet above sea level. Every year, Everest gets taller by about half an inch. This is due to movements in the Earth's crust and two tectonic plates, deep beneath the Earth's surface, pushing together.

Year after year, climbers return to the world's most difficult mountains. At these places, even the most cautious climber is vulnerable to mistakes, bad weather, and bad luck, which often leads to death. This collection offers harrowing accounts of extreme mountaineering and its potentially fatal consequences.

At 23, Andrew Forsthoefel headed out the back door of his home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, with a backpack, an audio recorder, his copies of Whitman and Rilke, and a sign that read "Walking to Listen". He had just graduated from Middlebury College and was ready to begin his adult life, but he didn't know how. So he decided to take a cross-country quest for guidance, one where everyone he met would be his guide. In the year that followed, he faced an Appalachian winter and a Mojave summer. He met beasts inside: fear, loneliness, doubt.

One man’s challenge to compete in a yacht race around the world, as much against the natural elements as his fellow competitors... The 2018 Golden Globe Race marked the 50th anniversary of the Sunday-Times-sponsored solo circumnavigation and proved to be every bit of a boat and mind-breaking event as the first.

Nobody wakes up in the morning and decides to shut down their senses and stumble through each day in an oblivious bubble, and yet some people end up having much richer experiences than others. In this guidebook, natural navigator Tristan Gooley strives to reawaken our senses to help us understand and deepen our personal experience of nature. His message is to connect - however we can and to whatever draws us in.

This is a book about ten women over the past three hundred years who have found walking essential to their sense of themselves, as people and as writers. Wanderers traces their footsteps, from eighteenth-century parson's daughter Elizabeth Carter—who desired nothing more than to be taken for a vagabond in the wilds of southern England—to modern walker-writers such as Nan Shepherd and Cheryl Strayed.

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.

In 2008 Sean Conway set off on a 1,000 mile bike ride that would shape the next 10 years of his life, as he became obsessed with the idea of becoming a real ultra cyclist. This is his story, how he tried and failed many times to break a cycling world record, and the story about his final world record attempt, cycling 4,000 miles across Europe. Sean nearly gave up on his dream after tragically losing two of his ultra cycling friends, but decided to continue in their honor with his quest to chase big miles on two wheels.

Joe Tasker lies, struck down by illness, in a damp, bug-infested room in the Himalaya, wondering if he will be well enough to climb Dunagiri, his first venture to the "big" mountains. One of Britain’s foremost mountaineers and a pioneer of lightweight climbing, he is about to attempt one of the first true "Alpine-style" climbs in the Greater Ranges. The Dunagiri attempt forms part of Tasker’s striking tale of adventure in the savage arena of the mountains.

This audiobook has been a labor of love that spans many years. The love is for Michigan's Upper Peninsula (UP), its places, and people. I've spent many years exploring the wilderness of the UP, and one thing has become apparent. No matter what part you find yourself in, fascinating sights are around every corner. There are parks, wilderness areas, and museums. There are ghost towns and places named after legends. There are trails to be walked and waterways to be paddled. In the UP, life is meant to be lived to the fullest.

Banff is one of the most renowned tourist destinations in Canada and the most popular in the Canadian Rockies. It is the oldest national park in Canada, the second in North America (following Yellowstone in Wyoming) and the third oldest park in the world (following Royal in Australia). It encompasses 6,641 square kilometres (2,564 square miles) including the Lake Louise area and part of the Icefields Parkway.

With an itinerary covering 41 countries, spanning all seven continents, and armed with a backpack, binoculars, and a series of one-way tickets, he sets out on the greatest adventure in the birding world. Along the way he meets a colorful cast of fellow birders—and discovers a world of blood-sucking leeches, chronic sleep deprivation, floods, war zones, ecologic devastation, and conservation triumphs.

Kayak adventurer Jim Payne can’t stop running away from home. After solo trips on American and English waterways, recounted in One Inch above the Water (2008) and Discovering England (2012), Payne shares four more harrowing and humorous adventures in Worlds to Discover: Facing angry bulls and breached dams on the Connecticut River.

Sandy Stott, the "Accidents" editor at the journal of the Appalachian Mountain Club, delivers both a history and a celebration of the search and rescue workers who save countless lives in the White Mountains - along with a plea for us not to take their steadfastness and bravery for granted. Filled with tales of astonishing courage and sobering tragedy, Critical Hours will appeal to outdoor enthusiasts and armchair adventurers alike.

In No Shortage of Good Days John Gierach takes listeners from the Smokies in Tennessee to his home waters in Colorado, from the Canadian Maritimes to Mexico - saltwater or fresh, it's all fishing and all irresistible. As always he writes perceptively about a wide range of subjects: the charm of familiar waters, the etiquette of working with new fishing guides, night fishing when the trout and the mosquitoes are both biting, and fishing snobbery, a pitfall he seems to have largely avoided.

Eye of the Albatross takes us soaring to locales where whales, sea turtles, penguins, and shearwaters flourish in their own quotidian rhythms. Carl Safina’s guide and inspiration is an albatross he calls Amelia, whose life and far-flung flights he describes in fascinating detail. Interwoven with recollections of whalers and famous explorers, Eye of the Albatross probes the unmistakable environmental impact of the encounters between man and marine life.