Travel Survival

"I never set out to hike 10,000 miles. It just sort of happened over the course of a decade." And so goes Lawton Grinter's compelling collection of short stories that have been over ten years and 10,000 trail miles in the making. I Hike brings the reader trailside with blissful moments on the highest mountain ridges to the mental lows of mosquito hell and into some peculiar situations that even seasoned hikers may find unbelievable.

The unforgettable true story of larger-than-life whitewater raft guides Clancy Reece and Jon Barker, two men who share a love of wild rivers and an unbending will to live life on their terms, no matter the cost. Clancy's motto, "Anything worth doing is worth overdoing," leads them into a decade of beautiful - and beautifully strange - river adventures.

Narrated in his own voice, in this third book about his travels aboard the 28-foot sailboat Atom, James Baldwin creates an ode to the sea and to those who venture upon her in small voyaging sailboats. The Next Distant Sea continues the memoir of his second adventurous circumnavigation as begun in his earlier book Bound for Distant Seas.

Told with sincerity, humor, and wit, Trespassing Across America is both a fascinating account of one man's remarkable journey along the Keystone XL pipeline and a meditation on climate change, the beauty of the natural world, and the extremes to which we can push ourselves - both physically and mentally.

On the afternoon of July 13, 1977, having become the first climbers to reach the summit of the Ogre, Doug Scott and Chris Bonington began their long descent. In the minutes that followed, any feeling of success from their achievement would be overwhelmed by the start of a desperate fight for survival. And things would only get worse.

A father and his son, a country apart. Time swirls and strange is a new normal. Believe it all. Trust none of it. Buck is driving for his life. Garth, too. Nowhere is safe as the dangers mount. Must get moving. Unless staying is better. Does anyone know the best choice? Make it up as you go because no one has gone through this before. The world becomes more and more hostile, but Buck and Garth aren't going to take it lying down.

A father and his son. Two-thousand-five-hundred miles apart. A blue ribbon crosses the sky. The world starts to unravel. No one knows what is happening, but everyone is trying to find out. Buck is running his big rig from the west coast. Garth is trapped in New York City with his high school friend. With Marine training and an 18-wheeler, Buck heads east. With no training and no communication with his father, Garth fights just to escape New York City.

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.

Why do we travel, what are we looking for, and will we recognize it if we find it? With the author’s 50th birthday looming, there seemed a need for something significant to happen. Not seeing an expiry date on his birth certificate made it hard to gauge when to have a mid-life crisis, but he’d almost definitely left it too late.

In 1743, a ship carrying 14 Russian sailors was headed for whaling grounds near Norway when a violent storm blew it far off course, where the ship froze into the ice. Some of the sailors remembered that other sailors had erected a hut on a nearby island and spent the winter there. Four sailors volunteered to go ashore to look for the hut in hopes of finding supplies or using it as a refuge should the 14 sailors be forced to spend the winter before the summer thaw could free their ship.

Mawson's Will is the dramatic story of what Sir Edmund Hillary calls "the most outstanding solo journey ever recorded in Antarctic history." For weeks in Antarctica, Douglas Mawson faced some of the most daunting conditions ever known to man: blistering wind, snow, and cold; loss of his companion, his dogs and supplies, the skin on his hands and the soles of his feet; thirst, starvation, disease, snowblindness - and he survived.

To anyone interested in small-boat cruising and voyaging, the names Lin and Larry Pardey need no introduction. As world-girdling sailors who roamed the planet on a pair of small, engineless boats that they built themselves, the Pardeys established their hard-earned reputations by eloquently (and sometimes controversially) telling their stories through a series of best-selling books and manuals, and countless seminars and boat shows.

Imagine a young doctor, trained in the latest medical knowledge and state-of-the-art equipment, suddenly transported back to one of the world’s most isolated and unforgiving environments - Nome, Alaska. That’s what happen to Dr. Sims. His plans to become a pediatric surgeon were drastically changed when, on the eve of being drafted into the army to serve as a MASH surgeon in Vietnam, he was offered a commission in the US Public Health for assignment in Anchorage, Alaska, where he was scheduled to act as chief of pediatrics at the Alaska Native Medical Center.

Peter Pond, a fur trader, explorer, and amateur mapmaker, spent his life ranging much farther than Milford, Connecticut, where he was born and died (1740-1807). He traded around the Great Lakes, on the Mississippi and the Minnesota Rivers, in the Canadian Northwest, and was a partner in Montreal’s North West Company. Knowing 18th-century North America on a scale that few others did, Pond drew some of the earliest maps of western Canada. David Chapin presents Pond’s life as part of a generation of traders who came of age between the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution.

A tale of adventures, as Lin and Larry Pardey continue their voyaging on board their self-built 24'4" cutter. They cross the exotic sea that spawned Homer's tales of Ulysses' Odyssey, then sail through the strife torn Red Sea and across the typhoon tossed waters of the Bay of Bengal.

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.

After Kim and her husband, Brian, decide to quit their jobs to travel around the world, they're given a yellow envelope containing a check and instructions to give the money away. There are only three rules for the envelope: don't overthink it, share your experiences, and don't feel pressured to give it all away. Through Ecuador, Peru, Nepal, and beyond, Kim and Brian face obstacles, including major challenges to their relationship.

David Livingstone was a Scottish missionary and one of the greatest European explorers who ever lived. He fought all his life against slavery, and is remembered as a national hero for opening up the interior of the so-called "Dark Continent"; his expeditions had a tremendous influence on the colonization of Africa and the relation between Europeans and Africans. The son of a Christian missionary himself, Livingstone felt a spiritual calling to reach people in the interior of Africa in order to find new commercial routes and thus free the Africans from the plague of slavery.

This is an incredible story of adventure, human ingenuity, persistence, and resilience that shows firsthand what it is to adventure as a woman in the most dangerous of circumstance, what it is to be truly alone in the wild, and why someone would challenge themselves with an expedition others would call crazy. For Marquis, her story is about freedom, being alive and wild by nature.

On June 11, 1898, Jeremiah Lynch decided that it was time for him to try his hand at mining the land of the Klondike as he set out on a steamship from San Francisco bound for the northwest. Lynch’s remarkable account of three years spent in the Klondike provide a vivid depiction of what life was like during the famous gold rush. Through the course of his years in the Yukon he meets some remarkable characters, some who have struck a rich vein and are enjoying the joys of success and others who are struggling to make ends meet in the bitter conditions that they now live in.