A few months ago, my pit bull wandered into my neighbor’s garage looking for affection. When I went to get her, I spotted a vintage mountain bike hanging by its rear wheel on the wall. It was a rigid neon green Diamondback ��with an early-nineties��paint-splatter overlay.

“That’s a really cool bike,” I told my neighbor while she rubbed the dog’s belly.

“You want it?” she said.

We haggled over the price. She wanted $5. I gave her $20. If I harbored long-term goals of one day becoming a competitive downhill mountain biker, hitting Red Bull–certified runs, or even just the trail in Philadelphia’s Wissahickon Park near my house, I had just entered the world of adventure sports for a bargain.

The 2018 Outdoor Industry Association��(OIA)�� found that people who make more money spend more time outside—32��percent of outdoor-sports participants make $100,000 or more per year. Not surprising. The cost of gear, the travel involved to get to destinations, and other factors��pose serious barriers to entry to would-be bikers, climbers, and skiers. But you don’t necessarily have to spend thousands of dollars to try these active endeavors. Before you go all in to equip yourself, pump the brakes and listen to these experts who have made it their lives’��work to get more people outside.��

Find��an Entry Point

No one’s ever going to sell me a Diamondback Mission 2C Carbon, which retails for a��, for $20. Heck, some bikes are that. My new neon green ride would be something Samantha Searles, research director at the OIA, would call an entry-point purchase.��

“Obviously, biking can be expensive,” Searles says.��“But the other part of it is, how often are you going to have buy a bike? You make that first investment, and you can either upgrade or not. You can start with something you found on Craigslist or go to a store that’s having an end-of-the-year demo sale and buy a discounted bike that way.”

Each sport has different entry points on the economic ladder. Sometimes the best way to get started is by using someone else’s stuff. Ski resorts, indoor climbing gyms, and bike shops want you to get hooked, so most places will rent you the gear you need, which can still be somewhat expensive but is cheaper than buying it all. It’s��an ideal way to figure out whether the sport is right for you.��

If there’s a store that sells adventure gear, chances are it��can help you find local swaps, too—basically��Craigslist-in-the-flesh shopping events with mountains of good used gear. Each February, Robin Culver hosts��, dubbed the “East Coast’s largest indoor bicycle swap,” at the Carroll County Agricultural Center in Westminster, Maryland. It costs $5 to get in, and��Culver says that both private owners and bike shops participate��to unload inventory.��“Everything moves quickly, and everything is cheaper than what you’d find at a bicycle shop for the most part,” she says. “The deals are incredible.” In Washington State, the��Tacoma Ski Swap in the nation, with a portion of the proceeds going to the University of Puget Sound’s ski team. There are swap-meet groups on Facebook, too, if you’re willing to pay for shipping.��

Knowing what you need to get started, and which individual pieces of equipment��require a larger investment, will also help you stretch your dollars.��For example, according to Greg Whitehouse, owner of in Berkeley, once you’ve decided to become a skier, you should buy the best boots possible, then save money by picking up a set of skis on Craigslist. Cheap, ill-fitting boots will end your day early and kill your enthusiasm, he says. Bargain skis, on the other hand, will never hurt your feet.��

If you’re just getting into climbing, find a more experieneced partner or join a group of people who already have a stash of expensive equipment, like ropes and protection, advises��Phil Ratterman, owner of in Overland Park, Kansas. From there, the��minimum package��you’ll need��for going out on a climb would be shoes, a harness, and a helmet—a complete��beginner’s kit that will cost about $200. You can also check with��gear stores��to see if they rent any of that equipment.��

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One barrier to entry for a snow hobby, historically, was the high cost of single-day lift��tickets. However, most resorts today have packages that include a lift ticket, rental gear, and a��lesson, all for about the price of a single ticket.��Whitehouse says that ski resorts have a core group of repeat customers, the hardcore enthusiasts for whom powder is a lifestyle, but they know that far more people go skiing once and never come back. “They’ve decided that lessons are super important for that. You can’t have fun until you learn how to do it a little bit. They’re thinking, We’ll give you a smoking deal, but we need you take a lesson,” he says.��

Multiresort��international passes��are another breakthrough of��recent decades. The 2019–20 is $1,049 and gives you access to 39 global destinations��with no blackout dates. The $949 allows for unlimited skiing at resorts in numerous western states, along with Rusutu, a with 16 expert and advanced runs. Smaller hills across the country are offering deals, too. Ikon offers a pass to Ontario’s for $299 a season. Mount Pleasant of Edinboro, in northwestern Pennsylvania, offers a season pass for $300.

For the climbing curious, gyms have been lowering the barrier to the sport for decades, and most cities have at least one such gym. Apex charges $12 for a day pass, and��for another $4,��you can rent��shoes and a chalk bag. It also offers introductory classes and private instruction to help people get started.��

Another advantage to joining a climbing gym is having a community of like-minded enthusiasts all around:��people to belay you and tell you to use your feet more. It’s also a great place to develop��a group to go with when you’re ready to start climbing outdoors, which, once you get the gear in place, is the cheapest way to climb.��

The same goes for guided mountain-bike��tours. Amy Regan, founder of Arizona Mountain Biking, organizes group rides and also recommends Meetup and Facebook groups as ways to connect with local enthusiasts.��Her organization offers��a free riding-skills class once a year as well as more in-depth riding clinics for $75.��

Secure��Affordable Outdoor Digs

Figuring out where to stay near the trails and mountains on a budget is how dirtbag��culture was born, and accommodations are one area where adventure-sports enthusiasts can save a lot of money. Think of Alex Honnold, who still lives��out of his van when he climbs,��or the revolutionaries who made Yosemite’s Camp 4 a mini Haight-Ashbury decades ago. The sport came first—comfort off the walls wasn’t a top priority.

If you don’t want to sleep in a car eating Doritos, or even camp for weeks on end, Whitehouse says clubs are a way to get close to the mountains for less money in both winter and summer. His��local , for example, owns a four-bedroom lodge in Tahoe City, California. You can join for $115 per year, along with a small fee each night you book (from $9) and a commitment to put in a week’s worth of work on the property.��

Many resort towns have hostels, like in Aspen, Colorado, or����in Killington, Vermont. Both offer hostel and dorm-like accommodations. Single beds can range from $40 to $45 a night. In the summer, when ski resorts transition into mountain-biking destinations, there are even more options. I’ve stayed in campgrounds in both Mammoth Lakes, California, and for less than $30 a night, and when I was there, nearly every car was carrying bicycles.��

Join��the Industry

Obviously, not everyone is��able to do this, but once you’ve committed and decided that an adventure sport��will be more than a hobby for you, getting a job in the industry can help make it a lifelong thing, a slow and steady progression to better gear and gnarlier rides. That’s what Bryan Fox did. He grew up racing BMX bikes in Washington.��Eventually, he moved to California and bought his first mountain bike, an��ubiquitous , but cracked��the frame on a jump. He upgraded to a 1993 Specialized Rockhopper Comp. He rode a bit with a cycling group called SCAAB (Stockton Cyclists Are Always Bleeding) and raced in a few events. After that, he got a job at in Stockon and upgraded to another Specialized with an employee-purchase program there. When he moved to Chico, California, Fox worked at , founded in 1918. Now��he works in radio and rides a , a bike that retails��for just under $1,000. At��46, Fox still likes to ride Downieville, in Sierra County.��

Whether you work in the industry or not, finding your entry point��is still the first step to��getting into adventure sports. Over the years, Fox tuned up a lot of bikes bought at Walmart, and he says there’s mostly nothing wrong with that. “We’d encourage people to go ahead and buy it, but bring it here to the shop and let us do a $50 tune-up on it��so that the gears shift, and the brakes work, and that kind of stuff,” he says.��

“A lot of times we turned those kinds of people into new customers, and we realized that instead of chasing those kids out of the store with their department-store bikes, we should encourage them,” Fox��says. “We were of the school of ‘Hey man, it doesn’t matter how fancy the bike is, as long as you’re out there.’”

Amen to that. My Diamondback sat beside my��dining-room table for weeks, mostly because I didn’t have a Presta attachment for my air pump. But I’ve since taken care of that and gotten out on the road.����

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If you think strictly in terms of global warming, the list of must-see, critically��endangered natural settings is relatively straightforward. It’s also very long. A number of places have been dubbed the “ground zero of climate change” by the media, including Florida, Alaska, and the earth’s poles. Any spot along a coastline, on the banks of tidal rivers, or on lonely Pacific atolls is in danger of changing drastically due to rising sea levels. Destinations known for winter sports, deep glaciers, and snowcapped summits will, at the very least, be much warmer in the future.

Where to go and what to see is, like most trips, dependent on your budget and also how much of the getting there you can handle. To help you plan and make decisions about where to head, we’ve gathered up some grim facts and spoken to a few people who’ve seen these bucket-list-worthy places change in their lifetimes.

But before you go anywhere, know that traveling to these places is also furthering the problem by putting more carbon into the atmosphere. People live in these locations��and��love them deeply, but��yes, make a living from them, too. Tread lightly. Merely gawking at an imperiled place isn’t much different than slowing down to look at wreckage on a highway. Ultimately, whether you can or��can’t get to one of these destinations, or the many others threatened by climate change, donating money to and advocating for the��organizations trying to stem the tide will��help.��

Everglades National Park, Florida

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says global sea levels are rising at a rate of about��. And with warmer ocean temperatures generating stronger coastal storms, more water is surging inland. Athan Manuel, director of the Sierra Club’s Lands Protection Program, says Everglades National Park is at the top of��the list when he thinks about vulnerable places. The 1.5-million-acre expanse of fresh water and saw grass prairies could basically “melt into the ocean,” he says.��One recent study by Florida International University warned that it could happen .��

“I used to live in South Florida, and the Florida Keys and the Everglades are both changing so dramatically,” Manuel��says.

Airports in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and Fort Myers make the Everglades and Big Cypress National Preserve, just north of it, one of the easiest destinations to get to on this list. In the spirit of Florida, tourists can lather themselves in sunscreen, sit in��, and whip around the marshes for $28 or take simpler, muckier excursions on foot with Clyde Butcher, a longtime Everglades photographer who looks like Santa in expedition khakis and a cowboy hat. Butcher’s motto is “,” and for $125 he’ll take two people on a two-hour tour where old tennis shoes��are a must.

Kayaking and canoeing the Everglades are��ideal ways to experience the landscape if you’ve got time, but the��vastness can be daunting for beginners. One waterway there is appropriately called the Nightmare.�� is available through the National Park Service, and guided tours abound. The most unique way to camp in the Everglades is on a chikee, an elevated wooden platform over the water��where people can tie up their boat and pitch a tent above the alligators. Like an Appalachian Trail shelter, you might be sharing a chikee with fellow campers. Some even come designed with��a portable toilet.

Glacier National Park, Montana��

Glacier National Park has already lost a vast majority of its namesake. A 2017��USGS��report titled ��found that of the 150 present in the park in 1850,��only 26 still fit that��definition.��It also noted ��suggesting that the glaciers of��Blackfoot–Jackson Glacier Basin,��the largest concentration��within the park, would disappear between 2030 and 2080.��

The park has experienced an increase of a million visitors over the last six years. Harvey Lemelin, a professor at Lakehead��University in Ontario, Canada, who literally wrote the book on the subject,��, says Glacier’s uptick in tourism coincides not coincidentally with the dire��climate outlook. “Everybody’s seen the pictures of the retreating glaciers in Glacier National Park,” Lemelin says. “It is out there.”

But he says the government agencies that run and regulate national parks all over the globe, along with many tour operators, wring their hands over the ethics of last-chance tourism.��When asked if the disappearing glaciers were driving tourism, Glacier National Park spokeswoman Lauren Alley told me, “There are��probably a lot of factors at play.”

“You know, we don’t have a scientific study that says X number of visitors came for this reason and X came for this reason. Certainly, people are coming to see glaciers,” she says.

Like many national parks in the American West, Alley says visitors should expect��crowds and parking lots at capacity by 8 A.M. Finding a place to stay can be difficult as well. If you’ve ever tried to book a room in national-park lodges or hotels, you know that gauntlet well. Glacier accepts reservations up to 13 months in advance. There are also��13��, many first-come, first-served, and ample backcountry camping. Another transportation option is Amtrak, which stops at East Glacier Park Village and��has�� that start at $849.

The Great Barrier Reef, Australia

As the world’s largest coral reef, the Great Barrier Reef��often appears as the poster child for nature on the brink. It’s roughly half the size��, and according to National Geographic, half of it��has been “.” But that means there’s still a vibrant coral reef out there to visit, only now just a quarter the size of the Lone Star State.��

Getting there, obviously, isn’t the easiest the trip, and it’s��certainly more expensive than heading to reefs off the Florida Keys. It could require sacrificing other vacations or planning for years down the road.

The city of Cairns��is considered the gateway to the Great Barrier Reef and is home to the nearest airport, which has connections from Brisbane and Sydney. You can sleep in luxury resorts along the Coral Sea, but there are a lot of options on a coastline that runs north for 500 miles. Tourism Tropical North Queensland compiled a list of�� on the Great Barrier Reef, and each one, replete with palm trees and aquamarine waters, could easily be your most liked Instagram post of the year. The nonprofit Great Barrier Reef Foundation recommends visiting “.” That means choosing kayak, diving, or cruise outfitters deemed to be ��by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority.��

Majuli Island, India

The world’s largest river island, Majuli, sits amid the snaking tendrils of the Brahmaputra River in the northeastern state of Assam. In 1979, one resident, Jadav Payeng, single-handedly planted an entire forest there��to help stem erosion that’s been steadily shrinking the island (and��perhaps to��balance the cosmic ledger of misdeeds done by mankind). Today, Majuli’s Molai Forest��is home to Bengal tigers and rhinoceroses.

“There are no monsters in nature except for humans,” Payeng says in Forest Man,��the�� about his efforts. “Humans consume everything until there is nothing left.”

Visiting Majuli, a pilgrimage site for Hindus, will require some homework when leaving from the U.S. The nearest major airport is in Dhaka, 475 miles to the south, in Bangladesh, though��there’s a much smaller airport��much closer, in Jorhat, India. From there, it’s a slew of bus or train rides and a ferry from the mainland. If you can get there, you can sleep at��, which has both bamboo and concrete huts starting at��.

Kilimanjaro, Tanzania

In his 2006 documentary��, Al Gore said that “within the decade there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro,” referring to the iconic, snowcapped peak, the tallest��in Africa. Many have pointed out that snow remains on Kilimanjaro today, part of the danger in putting any one endangered place on a precise timeline.

Protus Mayunga, who grew up in Tanzania, first climbed the mountain when he was 17. Now 43, he says he’s climbed it��hundreds of times since, and after returning from a recent trip, he compared the pictures he’d taken there decades ago and saw a stark difference, not in snow cover��but rather its��glaciers.

“They are definitely shrinking. I think by 2020, some glaciers will still be standing, but yeah, it’s definitely a big difference for sure,” Mayunga says. “I was there in August, and there was tons of snow—starting at 16,000 feet and going to the summit, everything was covered. But when the season changes, everything usually melts.”

Mayunga travels from his home in New York’s Catskills several times a year to lead groups on climbing expeditions in Tanzania with his . Prices to summit can range from $1,200 to $6,000 per person, Mayunga says, depending on your outfitter and the route.

The North and South Poles

The Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, according the National Snow and Ice Data Center, “contain more than 99 percent of the freshwater ice on earth,” and each, if global warming continues unabated, would likely be the main source of rising sea levels.

Veteran adventurer and climber Guy Cotter, owner of��, a travel company that runs expeditions to far-flung places, says ice on the North Pole is undoubtedly thinning. “In a few years, it may be that it will be impossible to ski to the North Pole because it will be open ocean,” Cotter says.

, based in southern Greenland, runs two-week kayaking and ice-hiking trips starting at $2,450 and ice-cap expeditions into “unexplored” territories for just under $4,000.

say that Antarctica has seen an increase in both water and air temperature in recent decades, causing the growth of plant life and the dispersal of its ubiquitous penguin colonies. While the South Pole may not change as quickly as the North Pole in our lifetime, it’s worth a visit if you can afford it. ���ϳԹ��� Consultants runs ski trips there that can last for two months. A shorter, 16-day ski expedition to the South Pole costs $64,000, and most of that pays for the flights on and off the ice.

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