The Last Great Hikes

The Last Great Hikes is a narrative journey across the world’s most storied footpaths, told with the immediacy of journals, letters, field notes, and eyewitness accounts. Oliver Greyson walks the listener from the medieval stones of the Camino de Santiago to the wind-carved dunes of Arabia’s Empty Quarter, from the green labyrinth of the Amazon to the thin air of the Himalayas. Along the Kokoda Track he follows soldiers and the Papuan stretcher bearers who carried them through mud and fever. In New Zealand’s Fiordland he traces the early guides who opened the Milford Track to wonder seekers. On South Georgia he relives Ernest Shackleton’s desperate crossing after months trapped by Antarctic ice.

Every chapter blends landscape and history. Pilgrims, explorers, porters, villagers, and rescuers speak through diaries and dispatches. Mountains, jungles, deserts, and fjords become stages where endurance, faith, science, and chance intersect. The result is a portrait of hiking as more than recreation. It is movement that binds generations and cultures through shared paths and hard-earned miles.

Written for a general audience, The Last Great Hikes offers armchair travel with documentary depth. It invites listeners to feel the grit of sand, the press of altitude, the hush of rainforest rain, and the steady rhythm of one foot meeting earth again and again.