The Year of Giving Adventurously

Citizen philanthropy is on the rise—and so are the nonprofits. Here are the 30 organizations and innovators truly making a difference, delivering health care in rural Asia, distributing bikes in Africa, and championing preservation in your backyard. Plus: Carbon-eating superplants, why the solar-powered car is MIA, and more.

THE ORGANIZATIONS
Shelterbox
American Himalayan Foundation
Oceana
Kiva
1% for the Planet
Big City Mountaineers
African Wildlife Foundation
American Forests
World Bicycle Relief
Water For People
Climate Counts
Ioby
American Trails
The Marine Mammal Center
Afghan Child Education and Care Organization
Foundation Rwanda
Environmental Defense Fund
Trekking for Kids
American Rivers
Health in Harmony
Pathfinder International
Rainforest Alliance
Technoserve
Vital Voices Global Partnership
World Wildlife Fund
THE INNOVATORS
David Belt
Amy Purdy
Jon Rose

Dan Morrison
HOW TO GIVE RESPONSIBLY
How We Picked Them
Do Diligence

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Shelterbox

Cornwall, England

BY THE NUMBERS: More than one million natural-­disaster victims supplied since 2001
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Tom Henderson, 61, a former Royal Navy search-and-rescue diver and offshore-drilling consultant
WHAT IT DOES: Henderson established in 2000 to offer practical tools to disaster victims so they can help themselves, an approach designed to foster self-reliance and self-esteem. Each $1,000 kit, which comes in a durable box that doubles as a storage container or crib, contains a family tent (­torture-tested to withstand high winds, heavy rain, and ­extreme temperatures), blankets, a multifuel stove, a cookset, a water filtration ­system, tools, and an activity pack for kids. Teams of volunteers deploy to disaster sites—often within 24 hours—hand-deliver boxes, and teach families how to use them. ShelterBox spent more than $19 million on programs last year; since 2001, it has distributed 110,000 boxes in 150 disaster zones, including the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, ­Hurricane Katrina, and the Haiti earthquake.
EXTRA CREDIT: Individual donations—which go straight to paying for box contents—can be followed with tracking numbers.
LOOKING AHEAD: Shelter­Box recently revamped its Shelter­Box Academy, which trains hundreds of volunteers every year to operate in harsh, remote locales. It’s now offering more courses for the public, including university classes, corporate team training, and first-aid programs, which raise funds for volunteer education.

American Himalayan Foundation

San Francisco

BY THE NUMBERS: 300,000 Nepalis, Tibetans, and Sherpas served by 140 education, health care, and human-welfare ­programs this year alone
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Erica Stone, 60, a University of California at Berkeley MBA and former documentary-film production manager who has trekked extensively in Nepal
WHAT IT DOES: The (AHF) was established 30 years ago when financier Richard Blum and a group of climbers and trekkers recognized threats to Himalayan culture from ­unstable governments and a lack of basic ­services. AHF supports local partners with the funding, ­technical ­assistance, and strategy advice they need. In 2010, the organization provided $3.3 million to these partners for projects in ­education, health care, and cultural preservation in ­Nepal, Tibet, and Tibetan refugee settlements in India. ­Projects range from establishing a hospital for disabled children in Kathmandu to training locals in the Nepali region of Mustang to preserve 15th-century Buddhist temples. One notable ­current issue: an education-based prevention program ­fighting human traffickers, who lure as many as 20,000 rural ­Nepali girls into prostitution or ­oppressive ­domestic-servant jobs each year. Board member Jon Krakauer has donated 100 percent of the proceeds from his 2011 e-book “Three Cups of ­Deceit”—an ­investigation into the practices of ­Central Asia ­Institute founder Greg ­Mortenson—to the ­foundation’s anti-trafficking ­program, which sponsors the girls’ schooling and has assisted more than 10,000 girls over the past 15 years.
EXTRA CREDIT: AHF is creative and committed; spending on programs is consistently high at more than 80 percent.
LOOKING AHEAD: One of AHF’s newest projects is the Tibetan Enterprise Fund, which offers grants and small loans to Tibetan refugees who have viable small-business and farming ideas.
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Oceana

Washington, D.C.

BY THE NUMBERS: Since 2001, ’s research and political outreach have helped persuade governments to increase protections for 1.2 million square miles of ocean
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Andrew Sharpless, 56, a Harvard Law and London School of Economics grad who’s held top jobs at RealNetworks, New York City’s ­Museum of Television and Radio, and Discovery.com
WHAT IT DOES: In 1999, several foundations—including the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund—commissioned a study on ocean advocacy and realized that only a tiny fraction of money spent by environmental nonprofits was aimed at ocean protection. Two years later, Oceana was born with a practical mandate: to conduct studies and research, inform lawmakers, and protect degraded oceans through concrete policy. The approach has gotten results. Chile banned shark finning, announced the creation of the world’s fourth-largest no-take marine reserve, and reformed salmon-industry practices to protect wild fish populations. The U.S. also banned shark finning in its coastal ­waters, and Morocco and Turkey outlawed drift nets, already prohibited by the European Union and the United Nations.
EXTRA CREDIT: Oceana can point to dozens of policy victories on four continents in the past ten years. And it’s one of only a few charities to receive a four-star rating from Charity Navigator three years in a row.
LOOKING AHEAD: Oceana has devised a practical road map to wean the U.S. from Gulf of Mexico oil through measures like switching oil-heated homes to electric power and electrifying 10 percent of cars by 2020—a plan that received a grant from the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy last year.
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Kiva

San Francisco

BY THE NUMBERS: Since 2005, more than 628,000 ­citizen lenders have provided $248 million in microloans to small entrepreneurs in developing countries
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Matt Flannery, 34, a former software engineer at TiVo
WHAT IT DOES: In 2004, Flannery was working as a programmer when he took a trip to East Africa to make a documentary about entrepreneurs and saw how much difference small investments can make. In 2005, he launched , which connects citizen philanthropists directly to borrowers in developing countries. In a typical transaction, a potential lender peruses Kiva’s online listings of hopeful borrowers, chosen with help from partner organizations in the field. The lender picks one and makes a loan of $25 or more through PayPal. The borrower—a Tajik peddler hoping to buy rice, say, or a Kenyan farmer buying animal feed—makes the purchase and then repays the loan, which is available for the donor’s withdrawal or future loans. Within six months of Kiva’s founding, all seven of the original borrowers, including a goat herder, a fishmonger, and a restaurant owner, had repaid their loans. Now borrowers hail from 60 countries, and their businesses encompass everything from a Bulgarian bicycle-repair shop to an Internet café in Benin.
EXTRA CREDIT: Philanthropy experts say it often takes an ­individual’s story to move ­donors to give. Flannery and Kiva harness that impulse, ­taking affordable, crowdsourced lending to new levels around the world.
LOOKING AHEAD: In June, Kiva, now working with an $11 million budget, announced its first U.S. microfinance ­programs, in Detroit and New Orleans.
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1% for the Planet

Waitsfield, Vermont

BY THE NUMBERS: In 2010, 1,450 companies donated $22 million to environmental organizations through 1%.
WHO’S IN CHARGE: Terry Kellogg, 39, a Yale-trained MBA who was the first director of environmental stewardship at Timberland.
WHAT IT DOES: In 2001, ­Patagonia founder Yvon ­Choui­nard and Craig Matthews, the owner of Blue Ribbon Flies, hatched a simple plan to encour­age ­businesses to give back to the environment. A business pledges to donate 1 percent of sales to vetted ­environmental groups—­including several on this list—and agrees to be ­audited annually. In exchange, it can display the 1% logo, designed to encourage consumers to support companies that are giving back. Since then, the organization has raised close to $100 million for more than 2,500 groups, from American Forests to the Shawangunk Conservancy. The money has ­powered high-impact projects like the Seed Alliance, which is using money from Clif Bar to establish a seed bank to conserve genetic crop diversity. Now signs on an average of one new member every day—from small wineries to large manufacturers in 45 countries—and is on track to become the largest network of environmental funders on the planet.
EXTRA CREDIT: For decades, Chouinard has put his money where his good intentions are.
LOOKING AHEAD: 1% recently enlisted 14 people—­including musician Jack Johnson and ­şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř’s own Christopher Keyes—to help spread the word.
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Big City Mountaineers

Denver

BY THE NUMBERS: More than 15,000 urban teenagers have taken part in sponsored outdoor trips since 1989.
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Executive director Lisa Mattis, 41, former director of individual giving and director of the scholarship program for Outward Bound
WHAT IT DOES: (BCM) gives underprivileged city kids a chance to experience wilderness adventure. Roughly 83 percent of urban teens who participate in BCM’s trips live below the poverty line, 62 percent have never been outside their home counties, and the vast majority have never seen a starry sky. Drawing on an annual budget of $1.5 million, this 22-year-old nonprofit takes young city dwellers from Denver, Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon, on seven-day hiking or canoeing trips in settings like the Boundary Waters and Yosemite National Park. Along the way, volunteer leaders guide teens through a series of challenges that culminate in summiting a peak or completing a long river portage. BCM has devised innovative fundraising techniques, including , in which participants challenge themselves in the same way BCM kids might—by tackling a guided climb of a difficult peak and raising funds through sponsorships. This year, North Face–sponsored athlete Cedar Wright signed on, choosing a self-guided climb on a remote Malaysian island. He hopes to raise $10,000.
EXTRA CREDIT: BCM offers diverse ways to get involved and is one of the largest wilderness programs for urban kids.
LOOKING AHEAD: The group has added single-day and overnight programs to augment its seven-day courses. These offer gateway programs for kids intimidated by longer outings.
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African Wildlife Foundation

Nairobi, Kenya

BY THE NUMBERS: Currently backing 31 conservation-oriented projects that generate more than $2 million annually for African communities; spent $19 million on programs in 2010
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Patrick Bergin, 47, a former Peace Corps volunteer in Tanzania and project officer for the foundation in Tanzania’s national parks
WHAT IT DOES: Launched in 1961, the (AWF) is one of a growing number of NGOs pushing a more inclusive ­approach to conservation based on a simple philosophy: local people should be factored into the equation. AWF starts by sending field researchers to identify species and landscapes at risk, then employs a host of education, advocacy, and development plans to give local people sound reasons to care for their land and wildlife. One method is what the AWF calls conservation enterprises—sustainable businesses like wildlife tourism and eco-sensitive agriculture. In 2008, AWF partnered with Rwandan communities to build the swanky, locally owned Sabyinyo Silverback Lodge near Volcanoes National Park. It now attracts well-heeled tourists who come to see rare mountain gorillas, generating a flow of dollars that supports locals with infrastructure and development projects. AWF also brokered a deal between Starbucks and small coffee growers in Kenya. In exchange for adhering to strict ethical guidelines for both labor and cultivation, Starbucks offers farmers lucrative contracts.
EXTRA CREDIT: AWF earned a top rating from the American Institute of Philanthropy. Thanks to its success, its people-centered programs have been emulated widely, particularly in the past decade.
LOOKING AHEAD: The group recently launched a website () that catalogs community-owned safari lodges that conscientious travelers can visit.
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American Forests

Washington, D.C.

BY THE NUMBERS: Nearly 40 million trees planted in the past 21 years
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Scott Steen, 47, former executive ­director of the American Ceramic Society, an organization for cera­mic engineers and scientists
WHAT IT DOES: Forests are the planet’s most effective carbon sinks, so their health has never been more important. Which is why newly appointed CEO Steen is revamping this old-guard conservation organization—founded in 1875 to establish and protect state and national forests—into a force to battle climate change, boost river and habitat quality, and improve recreation areas. With nearly a third of the staff replaced and a new science advisory board ­installed, the group is now largely focused on reforestation projects in ­response to urban need and devastation from wildfires, insect infestations, agricultural clearing, and ­pollution. This year, introduced 54 new ­projects, ranging from a 27,000-tree planting effort near Oregon’s Klamath River—to prevent erosion into tribal fisheries owned by the Yurok, Karuk, and Hoopa people—to a project in Cameroon that involves planting 50,000 trees.
EXTRA CREDIT: In the face of climate change and clean-water shortages, forest health has never been more important. American Forests has earned a top rating from the American Institute of Philanthropy.
LOOKING AHEAD: Whitebark pines are known as a keystone species with an outsize ability to enhance ecosystem diversity; they’re also nearly extinct in some parts of the Rockies. American Forests is working with the Forest Service and a team of researchers to identify and breed disease-resistant trees.

World Bicycle Relief

Chicago

BY THE NUMBERS: More than 88,000 bikes distributed and sold in developing nations since 2005
WHO'S IN CHARGE: F. K. Day, 51, executive vice president of SRAM Corporation, the largest bicycle-component manufacturer in the U.S.
WHAT IT DOES: Shortly after the 2004 tsunami hit, Day traveled to Sri Lanka, saw the apocalyptic devastation firsthand, and realized there was a simple, brilliant invention that could speed reconstruction and improve lives: bicycles. Bikes are at least four times as fast as walking and can carry up to five times as much cargo as a person. They improve access to health care and education and facilitate commerce. To put more of them in service, Day created a virtually indestructible, easily fixable bike that costs about $134 to produce. By 2006, (WBR) was born and, in partnership with the NGO World Vision, had distributed more than 24,000 free bikes to Sri Lankans. Since then the organization has built assembly plants in Kenya, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, trained locals to construct bikes, and taught some 700 local mechan­ics how to maintain them. Now it partners with reputable NGOs already in the field to identify populations in need and create contracts with individuals who promote using the free bikes for productive purposes like getting to school. In 2010, they spent $2.5 million on bikes, plants, and programs.
EXTRA CREDIT: WBR tracks the effects of its programs through third-party studies. Day was picked as one of the top 25 philanthropists by Barron’s and the Global Philanthropy Group last year.
LOOKING AHEAD: The bikes are so sturdy that volunteers at organizations like the World Health Organization and Catholic Relief Services in Africa requested to buy them. Two years ago, World Bicycle Relief initiated a program to sell bikes to organizations; proceeds benefit WBR charitable ­programs. In 2012, WBR will open a fourth ­assembly plant, in South Africa.
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Water for People

Denver

BY THE NUMBERS: The group helped more than 188,000 people gain access to clean water in 2010.
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Ned ­Breslin, 46, formerly a Mozam­bique country representative for WaterAid, health and hygiene education manager for Mvula Trust, and development director for Operation Hunger
WHAT IT DOES: It’s estimated that 884 million people lack ­access to a reliable supply of clean drinking water. Each of ’s projects, carried out in countries from India to Peru, is based on the organization’s four guiding principles: everyone in an aided community gets access to water and sanitation; representatives from local government, NGOs, and the local business community all must sign on to the plan; commitments must span at least ten years; and solutions, such as wells, storage tanks, gravity-fed piping systems, and latrines, are designed to last and grow as populations expand. In an ongoing project in Malawi, 48 new water kiosks were constructed. A local entrepreneur returns regularly to purchase the compost. His family earns enough to pay off the loan and save money, and the businessman sells the compost to farmers for a profit. To support the programs, which cost nearly $10 million per year, the organization has devised innovative fundraising initiatives. The ­latest: mountaineer Jake Norton is climbing each continent’s three highest summits to raise $2.1 million in donations.
EXTRA CREDIT: For seven years in a row, the project has earned a four-star rating from Charity Navigator.
LOOKING AHEAD: Water for People just released a beta version of FLOW (field-level operations watch), a new monitoring system in which field workers use a cell-phone app to update the WFP website with the status of clean-water access in remote areas. Donors and staffers can chart progress on an online map updated in real time, sending money and volunteers to places that need it most.
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Climate Counts

Manchester, New Hampshire

BY THE NUMBERS: 150 major companies, from Disney to General Electric, are rated annually on their climate practices
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Mike Bellamente, 35, who led a team from the U.S. Economic Development Administration to study how communities were affected by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill
WHAT IT DOES: Launched in 2007 and operated by a small team of sustainability experts and more than a dozen independent researchers, uses a scorecard for corporations, rating them on 22 criteria in four areas: carbon footprint, efforts to reduce impact, support for climate-friendly legislation, and public transparency. With a $350,000 annual budget, the group now looks at companies in 16 high-visibility industries, including airlines, hotels, electronics, food products, and toys. The goal is to encourage consumers to vote with their dollars—­ratings are available through the website, a pocket guide, and a mobile app—and to spur executives to reduce their companies’ carbon output. Many firms have embraced the ratings concept; some have even hired corporate sustainability directors as a result.
EXTRA CREDIT: The group leverages a tiny staff’s efforts into positive changes on a large scale. Renowned sustainability journalist and consultant Joel Makower as well as Gary ­Hirshberg, founder of Stonyfield Farm, a corporate sustainability leader, sit on the board.
LOOKING AHEAD: In 2010, Climate Counts began offering audits, verification ratings, and workshops for smaller, unrated companies that elect to be scrutinized. The group is expanding its ratings with a new scorecard on water use.
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IOBY

New York City

BY THE NUMBERS: (In Our Back Yards) has raised more than $130,000 for 100 neighborhood environmental projects in New York since 2009.
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Erin Barnes, 31, a former community organizer for the Save Our Wild Salmon Coalition
WHAT IT DOES: In 2007, Barnes, Cassie Flynn, and Brandon Whitney—all recent grads of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies master’s program—moved to New York City and noticed a curious trend in the environmental movement. Movies like An Inconvenient Truth had galvanized people to take action, but the problems seemed so large and distant that the energy was channeled mainly into green consumerism. Using a digital platform from , the three launched a pilot website that posts environmental projects in the city that could use money and volunteers. Soon, locals in all five boroughs were posting projects like urban farm startups in empty lots, beach cleanups, and beautification days for city parks. With help from IOBY, a group called Velo City raised some $3,000 to support an urban-education program called Bikesploration.
EXTRA CREDIT: IOBY is a young startup but readily supplies financial reports. It’s backed by more than a dozen foundations, including the Kresge Foundation and the Jack Johnson Ohana Foundation.
LOOKING AHEAD: After the successful NYC pilot—this year IOBY expects to raise ­another $100,000 for neighborhood environmental projects there—plans are afoot to expand to up to three more U.S. cities in the next two years, using $250,000 in seed money from foundations.

American Trails

Redding, California

BY THE NUMBERS: The world’s largest advocacy group for planning, building, and managing trails and greenways
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Pam Gluck, 54, former state trails ­coordinator for Arizona, ­recreation director for Pinetop-Lakeside, Arizona, and ­cross-country ski guide
WHAT IT DOES: Chances are, if you walked any new trails in the U.S. in the past 20 years, (AT) played a part in establishing them. The 20,000-member outfit is the only national organization dedicated to building, expanding, and safeguarding trail systems for all users, from hikers, ­bikers, runners, and equestrians to dirt-bike and ATV riders. Oper­ating on an annual budget of $295,000, AT provides hundreds of member organizations with guidelines on how to plan trail systems, write grant proposals, negotiate rights of way, and manage urban and backcountry trails. (For example, the Sacramento River National Recreation Trail in California and the Arkansas River Trail in Little Rock were recently built with help from AT.) It secures funding for trail building and maintenance by knocking on doors on Capitol Hill and at numerous federal agencies, including the Forest Service, the National Park Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Land Management. AT contracts with these agencies to run training sessions for trail crews and sponsors an annual national symposium for trail builders and advocates.
EXTRA CREDIT: A host of ­government agencies, including the Forest Service and the ­National Park Service, endorse AT, which supports some 22,000 members and 500 grassroots trails organizations.
LOOKING AHEAD: Two years ago, manufacturer GameTime, research firm PlayCore, the Natural Learning Initiative, and American Trails launched Pathways for Play, a program designed to keep kids outside and to help fight childhood obesity. The pilot project, PlayTrails, debuted in an urban park in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 2010 with six play areas on a half-mile trail. PlayTrails have since debuted in Missouri and North Carolina, and more than a dozen communities nationwide plan to build them.

The Marine Mammal Center

Sausalito, California

BY THE NUMBERS: 30,000 people schooled in marine-science programs each year; approximately 17,000 marine mammals rescued since its inception
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Executive director Jeffrey R. Boehm, 50, formerly the senior vice president of animal health and conservation science for the Great Lakes Conservation Awareness initiative at the John G. Shedd Aquarium in Chicago and a onetime veterinarian at the Los Angeles Zoo
WHAT IT DOES: In 1975, when the (MMC) was founded, this seaside rescue-and-rehab outfit was little more than a first-aid clinic housed in a collection of kiddie pools. Now it’s the largest operation of its kind in the United States, rescuing hundreds of sea mammals each year (from dolphins to newborn seal pups) that are malnourished or have been stranded, beached, shot, struck by boats, bitten by sharks, or tangled in fishing nets. After receiving veterinary care, the creatures are returned to the wild or—if they’re unlikely to survive release—transferred to aquariums or zoos. During the mammals’ captivity, kids from preschool to college age are allowed to come in for a look, and MMC offers educational programs that inspire many of them to consider careers in marine biology. Meanwhile, the group’s 16-­person veterinary-science unit has collaborated with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and numerous universities on research topics like the effects of toxic-algae poisoning, a natural occurrence ­exacerbated by agricultural runoff and warming seas.
EXTRA CREDIT: MMC transforms a simple mission into a force for conservation through education and science. It earned top marks from the American Institute of Philanthropy.
LOOKING AHEAD: Marine mammals are bellwethers of environmental changes, not least because they’re at the top of the food chain. MMC’s ongoing research—for example, on the potential link between PCBs and startlingly high rates of reproductive cancer among seals and sea lions—could help shed light on how those changes affect our health.
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Afghan Child Education and Care Organization

Kabul, Afghanistan

BY THE NUMBERS: More than 11 orphanages established in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 2003
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Andeisha Farid, 28, a former war refugee from Afghanistan. Before launching AFCECO, Farid worked as a program manager for CharityHelp International’s child-sponsorship program.
WHAT IT DOES: estimates that Afghanistan is home to roughly one million war orphans, many of whom are forced into child labor or a life of begging. Farid, who was educated by Afghan women in a Pakistan refugee camp during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, envisioned a new kind of orphanage, one that would operate with the blessing of home villages by keeping the kids connected to their heritage. After she started her first safe house for 20 kids in Islamabad in 2003, she teamed with CharityHelp International’s child-sponsorship program, which allowed her to expand. Now AFCECO’s three-story orphanages—built in places like Kabul and Islamabad—are oases of learning, where children take classes and participate in soccer, photography, drama, and martial arts. The orphanages harbor more than 600 children, some of whom get a chance to study abroad.
EXTRA CREDIT: Farid’s locally effective approach is also globally inspiring—as an example of the dividends that can accrue from a single salvaged life.
LOOKING AHEAD: AFCECO is raising money for a medical clinic in Kabul that would offer care to both orphans and orphanage employees, many of whom are war widows.
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Foundation Rwanda

New York City

Jean-Paul

Jean-Paul assembling a Kona Africa bike

Assembling bikes

Foundation Rwanda mothers assembling Kona Africa bikes to give to other Foundation Rwanda families in need

BY THE NUMBERS: More than 830 children of rape survivors have been educated through sponsorships since 2008.
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Jules Shell, 34, a documentary filmmaker and former creative ­director at the Andrea and Charles Bronf­man Philanthropies
WHAT IT DOES: In 2006, while on assignment in Rwanda, Newsweek photo­journalist Jonathan Torgovnik met Margaret, a woman who had not only survived the 1994 Rwandan genocide and weathered multiple rapes but also contracted HIV, given birth to a child, and been marginalized by her community. ­Torgovnik later returned to ­produce a book of photographs and, with Shell, a film about the estimated 20,000 Rwandan children conceived through sexual assaults. They established Foundation Rwanda to pay for the ­children’s education and provide medical services and job training for their ­mothers. These days, the ­foundation spends about $283,000 ­annually on programs. Other initiatives include an oral-health project that offers checkups and dental products, and the Ladies of Abasangiye, a cooperative that trains women in business, ­English-language, and craft skills. (Upscale retailer Anthropologie recently began importing its handbags.)
EXTRA CREDIT: A triple play of tactics—smart use of media, solid tools, and sound business practices—boosts a marginalized but extremely deserving class of recipients.
LOOKING AHEAD: Foundation Rwanda has announced plans to launch BirthdayBike.org, a program that raises money to buy a bike and a year’s schooling for Rwandan schoolkids.
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Environmental Defense Fund

New York City

BY THE NUMBERS: Four million acres of private land are now protected under the group’s Safe Harbor program, which helps landowners preserve endangered-species habitat on their property.
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Fred Krupp, 57, former head of the Connecticut Fund for the ­Environment
WHAT IT DOES: In the 1960s, widespread use of the pesticide DDT threatened the survival of countless American bird species, and a small group came up with a solution that, back then, was strikingly novel: sue the government. The result was a landmark court case that led to statewide and nationwide bans of DDT and, in 1967, to the establishment of the (EDF). The nonprofit continues to pursue unusual tactics, hiring not only scientists and lawyers but also economists and political strategists to devise market-based solutions to broad environmental issues, including climate, oceans, ecosystems, and human health. In the nineties, EDF pioneered corporate partnerships, and their consulting resulted in major corporate changes, such as reducing McDonald’s waste stream by 30 percent and introducing hybrid trucks to FedEx’s fleet. Last year, EDF spent more than $83.5 million on programs like Climate Corps, a summer fellowship that trains MBA students to consult with large businesses on energy efficiency.
EXTRA CREDIT: EDF’s willingness to work with corporate giants like McDonald’s and Wal-Mart has earned them a reputation for cooperative results.
LOOKING AHEAD: EDF is growing a campaign to pass clean-air legislation at the state and municipal levels, since Congress appears stuck. The organization is also working to quantify the economic benefits afforded by natural systems—for example, runoff filtration by wetlands—so decision makers can consider the positive impact in dollars.
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Trekking for Kids

Washington, D.C.

BY THE NUMBERS: Nearly $400,000 raised for ten orphanages in developing countries since 2005
WHO'S IN CHARGE: José Montero, 40, president of the Montero Group, a D.C.–based consulting firm
WHAT IT DOES: When siblings José and Ana Maria Montero decided to hike the Inca Trail in 2005, they wanted to give something back to the Peruvian community. Their father, Pepe, who’d lost his parents during the Spanish Civil War, suggested raising money for orphanages, and (TFK) was born. Now the small group—which ­operates mostly with volunteers and an annual budget of about $32,000—­organizes walka­thon-style treks, bringing money and volunteer labor to remote areas. Each trekker raises a minimum of $1,000 for the chosen orphanage and pays his or her own travel expenses. For two days before the trek, the group completes a project they’ve raised money for, such as building a new dormitory or renovating kitchens. After as many as eight days on the trail, trekkers return and take the orphans on a field trip, like ­zip-lining, hiking, or visiting a children’s museum. So far, volunteers have gone to Peru, Nepal, Ecuador, Morocco, ­Guatemala, Tanzania, and Thailand, raising as much as $60,000 for each orphanage.
EXTRA CREDIT: Combines adventure with purpose-driven travel, and every dollar raised for a project goes to the project
LOOKING AHEAD: Upcoming expeditions include ­Patagonia and Romania next summer. TFK aims to expand corporate sponsorships to cover ­administrative expenses and increase the number of trips it offers, with programs geared toward college students, families, and corporate team building.
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American Rivers

Washington, D.C.

BY THE NUMBERS: 200 dams dismantled since 1998
WHO'S IN CHARGE: CEO and president Bob Irvin, 52, a veteran attorney and environmentalist who most recently served as senior vice president for conservation programs at Defenders of Wildlife
WHAT IT DOES: Rivers are valuable for more than just hydropower: they provide clean drinking water, recreational ­opportunities, and healthy fisheries. For years, (AR) has pushed these and other arguments in an effort to heal North American waterways, and the group has been at the forefront of two big recent anti-dam victories, both in Washington State. This fall, the 210-foot Glines Canyon Dam became the tallest ever removed, restoring more than 70 miles of salmon and steelhead habitat on the Elwha River. The dismantling of the 125-foot Condit Dam has restored 33 miles of steelhead habitat on the White Salmon River, a renowned whitewater run visited by 25,000 boaters annually. The nonprofit group also lobbies for Wild and Scenic designations—which preserve rivers as free-flowing—releases an annual most-endangered list to spotlight rivers in peril, and works with municipalities to push measures to prevent polluted urban runoff from reaching watersheds.
EXTRA CREDIT: AR has earned honors from multiple watchdog groups for its efforts to improve river health.
LOOKING AHEAD: American Rivers helped orchestrate the removal of two major dams on Maine’s Penobscot River. When completed next summer, the effort will restore 1,000 miles of Atlantic salmon runs and ­canoeing and fishing access. The organization, which spent $8.5 million in 2010, has also helped plan more than 100 dam removals over the next five years.
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Health in Harmony

Portland, Oregon

BY THE NUMBERS: 14,000 patients treated in ’s Indonesia clinic since 2007
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Kinari Webb, 39, a graduate of the Yale School of Medicine
WHAT IT DOES: Gunung Palung National Park, a 222,000-acre swath of rainforest in West Kalimantan, Indonesia, harbors one of the last major wild populations of orangutans and other rare species such as gibbons, crested fireback pheasants, and clouded leopards. It’s also the watershed for 60,000 people who live in poverty on its margins, often engaging in illegal logging. When Webb first visited as an undergrad studying orangutans, she realized that the high cost of medical care for subsistence farmers was what drove them to log the forest for cash. She returned in 2005 to start Health in Harmony and its Indonesian counterpart, Alam Sehat ­Lestari—both of which are driven by the philosophy that better health care for locals could improve the health of the forest. She opened a small medical center in the remote town of Sukadana, a mobile clinic, and an ambulance ­service, and started several projects to help locals develop sustainable alternative livelihoods as farmers and herders. Though no one is refused care, the clinic offers discounts to communities that agree to stop illegal logging.
EXTRA CREDIT: Health in Harmony is supported by a host of foundations and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Great Apes Conservation Fund; members of the board include professors and doctors from Yale, Dartmouth, and Johns Hopkins.
LOOKING AHEAD: Health in Harmony plans to build a $1.2 million hospital in Sukadana, which will provide surgical care for people who now must travel 12 hours or more to get it.
Ěý

Pathfinder International

Watertown, Massachusetts

BY THE NUMBERS: More than 3.75 million people received HIV and AIDS services through Pathfinder-supported projects in 2010
WHO'S IN CHARGE: In February, Purnima Mane will take over as president, replacing longtime leader Daniel E. Pellegrom. Mane is currently the assistant secretary general of the United Nations.
WHAT IT DOES: Overpopulation can lead to poverty and conflict and can overtax water supplies, arable land, and other resources. was founded in 1957 to expand access to basic health and reproductive services so individuals in developing ­nations can plan families and build sustainable communities. With $90 million to spend each year, the organization reaches people in more than 25 countries with a range of local programs. In the past two years, these have included establishing a solar-powered blood bank in Nigeria, distributing delivery kits with medication for rural births in Bangladesh, and training Red Cross staffers to prevent postpartum hemorrhages in refugee settings in Tanzania. Through a project in Bihar, India, Pathfinder helped educate more than 650,000 youth in 700 villages about contraceptives. The program resulted in an average 2.6-year increase in the age of marriage and a 1.5-year increase in the age of mothers at first birth.
EXTRA CREDIT: Pathfinder spends 88 percent of its budget on programs.
LOOKING AHEAD: Recently, the group partnered with the Nature Conservancy and the Frankfurt Zoological Society on a plan to establish sustainable fisheries, healthy forests, and health care in a remote, wildlife-rich area of western Tanzania, where populations are outpacing natural resources.
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Rainforest Alliance

New York City

BY THE NUMBERS: More than 167 million acres of forests worldwide are now rated as sustainable under Rainforest Alliance’s certification system
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Tensie Whelan, 51, a former journalist and consultant who has worked with the National Audubon Society and the League of Conservation Voters
WHAT IT DOES: Established during the rainforest crisis of the 1980s, 25-year-old aims to preserve the biodiversity of forests worldwide by creating conservation-friendly livelihoods for locals. Its programs center on sustainability-certification labels for forestry, tourism, and agricultural businesses, which can just as easily be forces for conservation as for devastation. Certification guidelines and training programs help farmers, foresters, lodges, and tour guides build sustainable businesses. The labels are also designed to encourage consumers to purchase conscientiously. (Companies like Newman’s Own Organics, Naked Juice, and Whole Foods buy Rainforest ­Alliance–certified ­coffee, cocoa, bananas, and tea.) The organization offers a free grade-school curriculum—downloaded and viewed online eight million times since 2003—to teach kids about the animals and people living in the rainforest.
EXTRA CREDIT: The demand for sustainable goods has never been higher, and Rainforest ­Alliance–certified products sell to companies with major impact, like Dole and Wal-Mart.
LOOKING AHEAD: In 2007, Rainforest Alliance launched a climate-change program, which helps farmers reforest unused lands, and recently raised its standards for sustainable beef production.
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Technoserve

Washington, D.C.

BY THE NUMBERS: Since 2010, an estimated 40,300 people employed in 30 countries with the help of ’s programs
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Bruce McNamer, a 49-year-old Stanford MBA, formerly an investment banker at Morgan Stanley, a management consultant at McKinsey, and a Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay
WHAT IT DOES: While working in a hospital in Ghana in the 1960s, Technoserve founder Ed Bullard realized that local farms and businesses languished not because of a shortage of moti­vation or ability, but because of a lack of resources, both educational and financial. He started Technoserve in 1968 to connect entrepreneurs in developing countries with capital and educational resources. The organization started primarily with small farmers, but now, with a $58.3 million annual budget, it works to strengthen entire industries, such as coffee and cocoa. Some 1,000 staffers, mostly natives with successful business experience, train entrepreneurs in skills from writing business plans to apply­ing fertilizer; connect them to finance organizations and corporations that can purchase their goods; hold business-plan competitions; and lobby to improve regulations. The results can be tangible for beneficiaries like Nicaragua’s Jorge Salazar Cooperative of farmers, which, with Technoserve’s help, started planting high-value crops like rare criollo cocoa and built a plant for processing malanga, a local tuber. The co-op then reinvested its profits to build a pharmacy and support local schools and police.
EXTRA CREDIT: Technoserve enlists volunteer consultants from companies like McKinsey and L’Oréal. It’s top-rated by the American Institute of Philanthropy.
LOOKING AHEAD: Techno­serve recently received a grant from the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund to help develop Haiti’s business sector along with initiatives like the Haiti Hope Project, a partnership with Coca-Cola to help mango farmers find new markets and financial backing.
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Vital Voices Global Partnership

Washington, D.C.

BY THE NUMBERS: 10,000 emerging women leaders trained in 127 countries since 1997
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Alyse Nelson, 37, former deputy ­director of the Vital Voices Global Democracy Initiative at the U.S. Department of State
WHAT IT DOES: This NGO sprang from an acclaimed U.S. State Department program, ­Vital Voices Democracy Initiative, established in 1997 by Hillary Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Working with the UN, EU, World Bank, and international governments, the program organized conferences for hundreds of emerging women leaders. In 2000, (VVGP) was established to continue the mission by combating human trafficking, supporting women entrepreneurs, and advancing women in politics and public leadership. The goal is for each woman touched by VVGP’s ­programs to pay it forward. In 2008, Ghanaian Brigitte ­Dzogbenuku, general manager of a fitness center in Accra, spent five weeks in the U.S. taking skills seminars and shadowing Donna Orender, president of the WNBA. After returning to Ghana, she founded Hoop Sistas, a girls’ basketball program that offers career development and women’s health workshops.
EXTRA CREDIT: Big reach with steady ­results; consistently receives four-star ­ratings from Charity Navigator
LOOKING AHEAD: In 2012, VVGP will expand programs in North Africa and the Middle East.
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World Wildlife Fund

Washington, D.C.

BY THE NUMBERS: More than $1 billion invested in roughly 12,000 projects in 100 countries since 1985
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Carter Roberts, 51, a Harvard MBA who spent 15 years leading domestic, international, and science programs at the Nature Conservancy
WHAT IT DOES: The (WWF) was founded in 1961 with a deceptively simple mission: to conserve species. It soon realized that in order to do that, it needed to preserve the land and oceans those species live in—and that triage was in order. Over the years, the organization has homed in on 19 hot spots of biodiversity experiencing grave threats, such as the Amazon, the eastern Himalayas, and the Arctic. Now operating out of 100 offices worldwide, WWF employs a strategy heavy on fieldwork and scientific studies, which staffers use both to develop solutions at the village level and to affect policies and consumer behavior. One solution WWF pioneered: sustainable-business certifications that encourage better business practices and informed purchasing among consumers.
EXTRA CREDIT: WWF’s name recognition and budget allow it to implement projects and initiatives that cross political borders and incorporate dozens of complicated partnerships, a difficult feat for smaller groups.
LOOKING AHEAD: Through its Market Transformation Initiative, WWF is working with about 100 multinational corporations—50 partnerships are already established—that provide staples like soy, beef, and sugar. The idea is to help companies institute sustainable practices on all levels, from harvesting to packaging. Critics decry WWF for sleeping with the enemy—the organization takes consulting fees—but its success is undeniable. In the past four years, with WWF’s help, Coca-Cola has improved water efficiency by 13 percent and reduced carbon emissions by 6 percent.

David Belt

Bright idea: New-school urban playgrounds

In July 2009, in a blighted junkyard along the borough’s Gowanus Canal, a tree grew in Brooklyn—actually, a tree, a bocce court, lounge chairs, and three swimming pools made from converted dumpsters. For the next two months, this lo-fi country club hosted barbecues, birthdays, and mixers, offering locals a taste of leisure life inside the hardscrabble city.

The project, called Dumpster Pools, was the work of David Belt, a 44-year-old real estate developer who grew restless a few years ago and decided to chart a new course. To that end, he began turning what he calls “junk spaces”—abandoned big-box stores, run-down urban lots—into inspired community rec centers and art projects. In May 2010, Belt and his ­colleagues at —a rotating crew of like-minded friends and designers—took on the “boring act of recycling,” as Belt puts it, by building a 20-by-30-foot clear box, with high walls made of steel and bulletproof glass, on a private Brooklyn lot. Locals were invited to smash bottles against the glass, which was wired to trigger nightclub-style flashing lights. The shards were all recycled.

Both projects were funded entirely by donations and built mostly by volunteers. In 2012, Belt is expanding, with new projects in Philadelphia (where he refurbished 27,000 square feet of an old warehouse and church as a rec-and-learning center) and Detroit (an industrial-wasteland skate park). The coolest of Macro Sea’s future visions: a series of five-story artificial ice cliffs for urban mountaineering, which Belt hopes to bring to Manhattan high-rises someday. The challenge is finding ice coils large enough to keep the walls solid for weeks at a time, but Belt doesn’t seem worried. “We’re not afraid of scale,” he laughs.

Amy Purdy

Bright idea: Disabled adventurers go big

Purdy is one of the country’s most effective advocates for disabled outdoor athletes, and she came to her work the hard way: by losing both legs below the knees when she was 19. In the summer of 1999, bacterial meningitis sent her body into septic shock and set off a cascading series of ­organ failures that nearly killed her. A week before, she’d been a rising young snowboard competitor; suddenly, it looked like her career was over.

“I was lying in my hospital bed, watching the X Games on TV,” Purdy says, “and I remember thinking that if I could see just one person competing with a prosthetic leg, everything would be OK.” There weren’t any, but working with a prosthetics expert, Purdy created a leg with an articulated ankle joint that allowed her to bend her knees on a board. Within a year and a half, she was competing again. Since then she’s won three gold medals in adaptive events, most recently at the New Zealand Para-Snowboard World Cup.

In 2005, Purdy and her boyfriend, Daniel Gale, founded (AAS) to give other disabled athletes a path into extreme activities—from motocross to snowboarding to skateboarding. In addition to taking wounded veterans onto the slopes and halfpipe, AAS has created a competitive circuit for disabled riders and hopes to bring boardercross to the Paralympics by 2018. “When I lost my legs, there were no ­opportunities to move forward in snowboarding,” she says. Now, thanks in part to Purdy, there are 81 adaptive snowboarders competing around the world.

Jon Rose

Bright idea: DIY disaster relief

In September 2009, California surfer Jon Rose was sailing toward the island of Sumatra, carrying ten water filters that he planned to deliver to a rural community while enjoying a surf trip in Indonesia. Rose was looking to move on from his career as a Quiksilver-sponsored surfing pro. Inspired by his father’s nonprofit, RainCatcher, which teaches African villagers how to filter rainwater, he hit upon the idea of recruiting surfers to deliver water filters in their travels through developing countries. He thought it would be a pet project. Then, on his first mission, an earthquake hit nearby, devastating the city of Padang. “It was like divine intervention,” Rose says. “Like, �OK, this is your life. This is what you’re doing.’ ”

Rose’s organization, , has since provided some 2.5 million people access to safe water, delivering more than 75,000 simple portable filters, which can be used with local water supplies and whatever buckets are at hand, cutting out the need to dig wells or use purification chemicals. The group is one part viral campaign—looking for volunteers to buy and distribute filters abroad—and one part action squad, running relief and improvement programs in Haiti, Brazil, Pakistan, Indonesia, Kenya, Uganda, India, and Liberia. It’s a style that Rose refers to as “black ops” or “guerrilla humanitarianism,” which he defines as working “under the radar and around the red tape.” That means a lean budget and a skeleton staff that coordinates with locals on the ground and moves into and out of target areas quickly.

Those years he spent far off the beaten path prepared him for his new job, Rose says. “It’s sort of the same way I felt about surfing as a kid,” he says. “But it’s greater.”

David Milarch

Organization: Archangel Ancient Tree Archive
Bright idea: New old growth

David Milarch discovered his calling as a tree evangelist during a near-death experience from renal failure 19 years ago. “When I came to, there was a ten-page outline that I don’t remember writing,” says the cofounder of this Michigan-based environmental group. His mission, dictated (he sincerely believes) by the Archangel Michael: to clean up the planet’s air and water and reverse the effects of climate change by cloning the world’s biggest, oldest trees.

Once a hard-living biker, Milarch developed a passionate spiritual connection to old-growth trees—especially redwoods and giant sequoias. Both species can live for millennia, pumping out oxygen and sequestering tons of atmospheric carbon. Milarch, along with his son Jared and project coordinator Meryl Marsh, started taking cuttings from the tops of the most titanic redwoods and sequoias they could find, as well as sprouts from huge stumps. Working in a Monterey, California, greenhouse and using various propagation techniques, project consultant Bill Werner has coaxed bits of the plant tissue to root and grow into field-ready transplants. also maintains living libraries of more than 40 cloned species, from an ancient Monterey cypress to thousand-year-old Irish oaks.

Some scientists have questioned whether genetic material alone is responsible for the trees’ size and longevity, arguing that favorable growing conditions could just as likely explain it, but Milarch sides with his science adviser, the eminent redwood geneticist William J. Libby. Next year, Milarch hopes to start planting redwood saplings in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, and he’s looking for investors to underwrite other planting projects in the U.S. and abroad. “We want to rebuild the world’s first old-growth redwood forest,” he says. “They’re the most iconic trees on earth.”

Dan Morrison

Organization: Citizen Effect
Bright idea: Donations with destinations

Dan Morrison understands the power of face time. While traveling through India in 2006, he met a woman who said her earthquake-ravaged community needed a well but didn’t have the $5,000 required to build it. Back home in Washington, D.C., he sent out a card pledging $2,500 and asking acquaintances to join him. Within days, $500 checks started ­arriving—from a friend, a former roommate, and Morrison’s high school English teacher, among others. A lightbulb went off. “I realized that with fundraising, it’s critical to have a specific project people can wrap their minds around,” says Morrison. “That the request was coming from someone they knew made it that much more effective.”

In December 2008, Morrison created 1Well, a nonprofit that helped people make investments in high-need areas around the world. Soon after, he quit his job as a consultant on Middle East policy to focus on 1Well full-time. In 2009, spurred by a $300,000 grant from Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, and his wife, Wendy, the group morphed into , an online fundraising platform that connects citizen philanthropists with vetted, small-scale projects around the world. Budding do-gooders visit the website and choose a country, a fundraising goal, and a focus area (food security, education). In 2011, the group raised close to $500,000, funding 339 projects to date.

The twist comes in picking a fundraising approach—like the cross-country bike ride that Boulder, Colorado’s Glenn Olsen did to raise money to build indoor toilets in Bandwhad, India. “When you do what you love in the name of a good cause, it’s more fun for everyone,” says Morrison, who believes that many people who might skip a specific objective (eliminating dysentery in South Asia?) will be lured in by an individual putting forth so much effort to help.

How We Picked Them

To compile our list of top philanthropies, we polled everyone from fellow journalists to independent experts who keep track of nonprofits all over the world, and we used Facebook and Twitter to broadcast our interest. We also brought in Kate Siber, a tireless Colorado-based writer who spent weeks beating the bushes for capable nonprofits that are doing work that is both worthwhile and innovative. Siber relied on ratings from organizations like Charity Navigator and Charitywatch, but she also looked to other credibility factors, including partnerships with government agencies and NGOs, transparency (does the organization clearly spell out its mission and the results it’s achieved?), ­efficiency (how much is spent on programs instead of overhead?), and scope. Your favorites aren’t on the list? Tell us all about them at fixtheworld@outsidemag.com. It’s a big planet out there. No doubt we’ll be doing this again.

Do Diligence

How to size up charities on your own

There are 1.6 million nonprofits in the U.S., but only a small number are rated by groups like Charity Navigator () and the National Center for Charitable Statistics (). Interested in one that hasn’t been vetted by either? Do your homework using their methods.
Check financial health. Efficient charities spend at least 75 percent of their annual budget directly on programs, according to Charity Navigator. An organization should be able to provide recent 990 forms—an annual report to the IRS, required of most nonprofits, describing their mission and finances—online or upon request.
Assess executive compensation. You don’t want to spend too much on somebody else’s salary. Be aware that average executive pay for the largest 5,500 organizations is $150,000, but highly effective organizations may spend more for a seasoned CEO.
Consider reputation. Grants from well-known groups, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, or contracts with government agencies lend organizations credibility, since they require detailed vetting. Do a search of the organization on Google News for any red flags.
Request the organization’s policy on donor relationships. Most will agree not to sell your contact information to other groups or will offer you the opportunity to opt out.
Investigate results. Established charities should be able to demonstrate the need for their services, report their activities, measure their results, and communicate all of it clearly. If the group is small and local, observe projects in your area.

The post Citizen Philanthropy appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

MIKE FAY IS WEARING a headlamp to cut through the gloom of his bush cabin in Southeast Alaska’s Tongass National forest. It’s about 5 P.M. on a November afternoon, nearly dark outside and well below freezing. Fay, the famously tough conservation biologist best known for his Megatransect expedition of 1999 and 2000, during which he bushwhacked 2,500 miles across the Congo Basin with a band of Pygmy trackers and porters, is moving in for the winter. We’ve just arrived from the gritty fishing-and-cruise-ship port of Ketchikan with a boatload of supplies, ­after a pounding four-hour voyage along rumpled coastline, hydroplaning across yard-high whitecaps most of the way. The powerboat that brought us will return for me in six days’ time, and once I’m gone Fay will face four months of absolute solitude: icebound until spring in this narrow and darkly forested river valley at the western edge of the Coast Mountains, with no companionship, no ­music, no movies, no light reading, no ­alcohol or drugs (except caffeine), and no communication with the outside world.

Fay pausing on his 2,500-mile Megatransect

Fay pausing on his 2,500-mile Megatransect

Fay on the granite dome where he had his transformative moment during the Megatransect.

Fay on the granite dome where he had his transformative moment during the Megatransect.

A self-portrait from his winter of solitude

A self-portrait from his winter of solitude

Fay at his remote bush cabin

Fay at his remote bush cabin

Fay piloting his Craigslist-bought aluminum skiff in Southeast Alaska

Fay piloting his Craigslist-bought aluminum skiff in Southeast Alaska

I’ve come along to find out why, exactly, he plans to do this. Or, more to the point, why, after having invested 30 years of his life in studying and safeguarding the great rain­forests of Central Africa, J. Michael Fay—distinguished field ecologist for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic ­Society, and one of the boldest adventurers of our time—has apparently decided he’d like to live in Alaska as a mountain man.

His short answer: “I’m traveling paths not knowing where they’ll meet. I’m confused about the direction of global conservation.”

The long answer would unfold over the course of my visit but even then would leave me wondering whether Fay was just ­taking one of his hiatuses from Africa—or was ter­minally fed up with the entrenched corruption, bureaucratic inertia, and lack of ­action that has undercut his work there in the decade-plus since he completed the Megatransect. The grueling 15-month ecological survey sparked one of the most ambitious conservation initiatives on the continent: to create a network of national parks in Gabon and remake the country as a shining model of ecotourism and green development—the Costa Rica of Central Africa. But that vision has been slow to materialize, and Fay has been worn down by the effort.

In July 2010, while serving as technical ­direc­tor for the parks, Fay became gravely ill. “I had chills, a headache, diarrhea, a temperature of 103, and no appetite,” he says. “My piss was brown and my liver ached.” He suspected malaria, but drugs didn’t help. At the end of the month, he traveled to Southeast Alaska, a vast and mostly roadless region of islands, fjords, glaciers, temperate rainforest, and coastal mountains where Fay has purchased two pieces of property in recent years. In his three decades of African fieldwork, he had survived a horrific elephant goring, skirmishes with ivory poachers, forced landings of small planes he was piloting, plus many bouts of malaria and various parasites, which he usually cured by self-medicating. His hope this time was that the right combination of elixirs, along with a change of climate and hard work on a cabin he was building near Ketchikan, would bring him around. Still ­unable to eat after two weeks, on the verge of collapse, he dragged himself to the hospital, where emergency-room doctors ordered him to be evacuated by air to Seattle. At the University of Washington Medical Center, he was quarantined for fear that he might be hosting an emerging tropical disease.

Lying in the isolation ward, with doctors peering at him through biohazard suits, he was in a precarious state physically and mentally. And while he would eventually shake ­whatever had felled him—on his own in Alaska, as he’d planned—the nagging ambivalence about his future in Africa remained, along with fundamental doubts about conservation’s ability to prevent humans from gobbling up the planet. In his mind, global conservation was becoming all theory and no action.

“I’m not jaded or burned out,” he insisted when I called him in Ketchikan last October. “But what does a conservationist do? What’s our job? Our strategy?”

The fitful process of establishing the ­Gabon parks had him ready to reinvest his ener­gies in what he considers to be “the greatest wilderness in North America.” Besides the months he planned to spend alone in the Tongass, he was contemplating a massive walk through Alaska and Canada.

I proposed joining Fay at his remote bush cabin for a week to talk further, just before he went into hibernation. Although he was ­under extreme pressure to finish preparations for winter, he agreed on the condition that I not divulge the cabin’s location. “I don’t want anyone to know where I am,” he said.

FAY’S LIFE HAS BEEN defined by a quest for the ultimate primal wilderness. He found it once, in Africa, about two-thirds of the way through the Megatransect, while travers­ing a forest block in northern Gabon he called the Minkébé Archipelago. The date is precisely fixed in his mind: June 26, 2000. That evening, he left his team in camp and scrambled to the top of an isolated granite dome, or insel­berg, with a 360-degree view of the surrounding landscape. He reached the summit just as the setting sun cast shafts of golden light into the steaming rainforest. “I felt complete bliss,” he wrote in his online journal, “like I was alone on a virgin planet.”

The moment was transformative. “Something happened to me on top of that lump of granite last night,” he wrote. “I have been to the mountaintop.”

The Megatransect had its own ­powerful impact on the conservation community, due to the boldness of the endeavor and the acts of government preservation it inspired. When I first met Fay in Gabon in 1998, he took me and National Geographic photographer Michael “Nick” Nichols for a flight in his green-and-white Cessna, traveling in reverse over his intended route, which would begin the following year near his research station in the Republic of Congo and end on a beach in southwestern Gabon. His goal was “to quantify a stroll”—to collect data on biological diversity and identify critically important forest blocks along the way. I was stuffed in the airless back of the small plane among our duffel bags, trying not to vomit, catching sporadic glimpses of what appeared to be a Lost World without end.

The National Geographic Society had agreed to bankroll the lion’s share of the project, but Fay wanted Nichols, writer ­David Quammen, and video­grapher Phil Allen to join his entourage for only several weeks at a time, at the start and finish and twice in the middle, at resupply points. Otherwise, he wanted no distractions. He would be “going deep,” as he puts it, in order to open doors of perception that swing wide for him only after weeks of uninterrupted immersion.

In the end, Fay walked the roughly 2,500 miles in 456 days. He emerged from the forest a celebrity—“the world’s greatest living explorer,” as National Public Radio correspondent Alex Chadwick would later call him. Some 20 months later, in August 2002, Gabon’s president, Omar Bongo Ondimba, decreed that 13 areas Fay and his WCS colleagues had identified as critically important habitats—some 11,300 square miles in all, or more than 10 percent of Gabon’s land mass—would be set aside as national parks. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell followed that same week with an American ­commitment of $53 million for the Congo Basin Forest Partner­ship, an alliance of governments, conservation groups, and industries.

With a burst of enthusiasm, Fay took charge of conservation action for Operation Loango, an alliance between a Dutch ecotourism company and WCS to develop an economic base for a new coastal park. He plunged into training a staff of guides and rangers, who were to guard against game poaching and ­illegal commercial fishing inside the three-mile offshore protected zone. He recruited teams to clean up a 56-mile stretch of beach, ultimately collecting some 100,000 flip-flops, 90,000 plastic bottles, blobs of oil, castaway refrigerators, fuel drums, a kilo of cocaine, and other flotsam. A 10,000-square-foot main lodge was built, and Fay helped establish tent camps for viewing game and monitoring poachers.

Still, the new green Gabon wallowed in cor­ruption. President Bongo had ruled the country since 1967 and amassed a vast fortune by treating Gabon’s natural resources, particularly its oil reserves, as part of his private estate. Meanwhile, at the Loango park, Asian-owned fishing trawlers would hang offshore in supposedly protected waters at the mouths of rivers, scooping up “concentrations of fish as thick as bouillabaisse,” according to Fay. He’d relay GPS coordinates of the violators to government officials, to little avail. Inside the park, Fay had to rely on local communities to fight poaching because his rangers lacked authority—they were not officially part of the forest department.

Fay, who says, “When I’m not walking, I’m not happy,” can be impatient to a fault, but he had endured African park building before. In the 1980s and 1990s, he played key roles in successful campaigns to carve out two huge ­national parks in Congo and the Central African Repub­lic, an effort that required months of grinding paperwork and lobbying. This time, however, he was feeling itchy and stymied. His “appetite for action” was not being satisfied.

“I hit a brick wall in 2004,” he says. “The government and local NGOs weren’t acting on any of the things I wanted to do. I don’t accept complacency, and I can’t be stuck in my life. It drives me crazy.”

So he left for most of the next five years.

That June, he launched the Megaflyover, a seven-month aerial survey of the continent to find places where he could “make things happen instead of spinning my wheels in Gabon.” He and two other pilots flew a pair of vintage Cessnas 60,000 wandering air miles between South Africa and Morocco. By the time they touched down in Casablanca on Christmas Day, Fay had archived more than 116,000 digital photos documenting the “human footprint” on the landscape.

His next big project, launched in 2007, was a redwoods version of the Megatransect: a 2,050-mile, 333-day trudge from Big Sur to southern Oregon, the entire extent of the coastal species’s range. The goal was to “revolutionize forestry” by showing how you can have both productive harvests and a healthy ecosystem. I met up with Fay and his research assistant, Lindsey Holm, a sprightly 24-year-old former tree sitter, toward the end. Grimy and exhausted, and carrying 50-pound water­proof packs, they’d spent the preceding four hours struggling to progress just a mile, clambering over downed redwoods that littered the forest like colossal pick-up sticks.

The two struck me as a well-matched team, but there were times, Holm says, when Fay would fall into moods. “He’d brood and brood for days,” she later told me. “Then he snaps out of it.”

When the walk was over, Fay considered continuing north alone, but the prospect of trekking through the clear-cut forests of Ore­gon and Washington caused him to abandon the idea. Instead, he flew to Southeast Alaska, where he’d spent a summer after high school. “When I came back up here, I thought it was going to be messed up,” he says. “But the ecosystem was intact—no fences, trespassing signs, or roads. I couldn’t believe it. I’ve discovered a First World existence with the abundance of nature that you’d expect to find in the Amazon or Gabon. I’m in heaven.”

In December 2008, Fay purchased two and a half acres of forest overlooking Moser Bay, 20 minutes north by boat from Ketch­ikan. The following summer, Fay began building a cabin there to serve as his primary residence and also started negotiating the purchase of the bush cabin deep in the Tongass—“as far away as I could get from the bulk of human­ity”—that he envisioned as a wilderness refuge and base camp for ­future megatreks.

“YOU’D BETTER put on every­thing you’ve got,” Fay said when he walked into my room at the Gilmore Hotel in downtown Ketch­ikan at 6:30 a.m. He’d spent the night in his van in the Safeway parking lot. It was a cold, dry, windy morning, and Fay’s wild, static-charged graying hair and wire-rimmed spectacles gave him a sort of mad-scientist look: Einstein turned sourdough.

At 56, Fay is five feet nine inches tall and has the compact, sinewy build of a rock climber. In one iconic photo taken during the Megatransect, he is shirt­less and barefoot, hunched on the crest of that rain-slicked inselberg. Having dwindled to 121 pounds, he looks like a stringy gargoyle. When I met him in the redwoods, I thought he looked gaunt at 132 pounds, but he described himself as “buff” and said he’d never been in better health. (“Skinny is good for the body.”) In Alaska, I expected him to appear ravaged after his battle with whatever parasite (or multiple parasites) he’d picked up in Gabon, but he looked more robust than ever, having packed on some 30 pounds of muscle.

After four days in the Seattle hospital, with no diag­nosis forth­coming, Fay had ­demanded his release—and immediately caught a cab to REI to buy a GPS, tents, and sporks, among other items. “I got there and said, �Holy shit, I’m not better,’ ” Fay says. He went to Sea-Tac airport, intending to fly to Ketchi­kan and tough it out. At his ­departure gate, lying flat on his back in the waiting lounge, he dialed Nichols, who is an old friend and a close collaborator on the Megatransect and other projects.

“I’m dying, man,” Fay rasped into his BlackBerry.

“He sounded scared,” says Nichols. “You’re talking about a person who doesn’t show emotion.” They agreed that Fay should come to Nichols’s home, near Charlottesville, Virginia. “When he got here, he was about three-quarters of the way to dying. He curled up like a dog in the corner, and we left him alone.”

A week later, Fay felt strong enough to fly to Ketchikan, and there, among the medications he treated himself with, was one for schistosomiasis, also known as snail fever. Caused by blood flukes whose intermediate host is freshwater snails, it can cause symptoms similar to Fay’s. Severe cases can be fatal.

After regaining his health, Fay pushed himself, working long days to finish detailing the Moser Bay cabin and ready his Tongass refuge for his coming winter. In the three weeks before my arrival, he’d been on a coast-to-coast outfitting binge, driving a used van he’d bought in Washington, D.C., and prowling Craigslist for supplies on the journey west. He picked up a Kevlar-hulled canoe, a 14-foot aluminum skiff and trailer, outboard motors, generators, tools, chainsaws, hunting rifles and ammo, fishing gear, bulk food, and a pair of renovated 400-pound clawfoot bathtubs—one for each cabin. The van also held all of his expedition journals, which he’d been storing at the Geographic’s Washington headquarters over the years, and portable hard drives containing untold terabytes of his digital photos, written dispatches, and biological notes. When he rolled onto an Alaska-bound ferry in Bellingham, Washington, with the bathtubs riding on top of the trailered skiff, he says, “It looked like the Beverly Hillbillies.”

Ketchikan lies at the southern end of the Alexander Archipelago, a mosaic of more than a thousand islands fringing the drama­tic western slope of the Coast Range. It’s wet, steep, glaciated country, densely ­forested with hemlock, spruce, and Alaska yellow ­cedar. The Tongass National Forest sprawls for 17 million acres, with about a third of that acreage protected in 19 wilderness areas. Drenched by an average of 13.5 feet of precip­i­tation a year, the rainforest forms a vast ecosystem that spills across the border into British Columbia.

It was dry on the morning we met, but windy and bitterly cold. Fay drove us to the Knudson Cove Marina, where we loaded up the workboat, crowded into its heated cabin, and ­motored into the heaving Tongass Narrows with Knudson’s burly owner, Mike Troina, at the helm. We made a brief pit stop at Fay’s Moser Bay cabin so he could pick up some tools. The nearly fini­shed 20-by-30-foot refuge, built of prime, locally milled yellow cedar, is the first permanent address Fay has had since he moved to Africa shortly after graduating from college in 1978. In the past ten years, he figures he has slept outside 90 percent of the time, and in a bed maybe only 50 nights. After the Megatransect, when he returned to Washington, D.C., to begin building a database about the project, he rented a “cool” apartment near the Geographic’s offices. Two days after moving in, Fay felt so claustrophobic that he broke the lease and moved to Rock Creek Park to camp. He lived there, on and off, for a year.

In 2007, before embarking on the redwoods trek, he bought a fixer-upper house on 20 acres in California’s Humboldt County, with his then-girlfriend, Jane Sievert, the Patagonia company’s photo director. The two had been maintaining a long-distance relationship for seven years and were planning to make a go of domesticity. But Sievert—with a great job in sunny Ventura, California, and her daughter from a previous marriage still in school there—got cold feet.

“He was going to domesticate himself for her,” says Nichols. “But Jane wasn’t ready for it. It’s the only time he let himself be vulnerable. He may never recover from that.”

A few weeks before I arrived in Ketchikan, Fay was writing yet another shopping list in one of his notebooks (“50 lb. flour, 20 lb. ­butter…”) and slipped in a note to himself: “No more dates,” he wrote, before equivocating. “Unless they’re up here.”

Fay has maintained passionate relationships with several girlfriends, and he was once married, to biologist Andrea Turkalo, while the two worked in Africa in the eighties and early nineties. But over the years, he has concluded that he would rather live alone than with a woman—especially now that he has reached his mid-fifties. “Your sexual drive diminishes, and that hormonal confusion goes away,” he says. “I feel like I’ve been liberated. To people who take Viagra, I say, Are you nuts?”

On the other hand, women with field skills like Lindsey Holm are more welcome on his expeditions than men: “They eat less, they’re courteous, and they’re easier to handle in difficult situations. Men want to make decisions. Women won’t push you into a dumb-assed situation.”

“Sex for me is like a chore,” Fay says frankly. “I’m over it. But companionship? Definitely.”

WHEN WE TURNED INTO the braided estuary that leads up to Fay’s bush cabin, the shallow water dead ahead was glazed with an inch of ice, and only a narrow channel remained open. Troina nosed through as far as he dared, but with his hull scraping bottom, he was obliged to drop us off in the shallows.

Fay, unfazed, led the way ashore, icy ­water lapping at our boot tops as we shuttled armloads of cargo to the nearest beach. From there, the cabin was a quarter-mile upstream, and we made repeated round-trips in Fay’s canoe, filling it with supplies, dragging it across frozen stretches, and paddling where we could. After about three hours of grunt work, we managed to get everything inside.

Fay fired up two pressure lanterns and lit the woodstove, and ten minutes later the indoor temperature had climbed past 30 degrees. Constructed of peeled, honey-colored cedar logs, the cabin has an open 20-by-30-foot floor plan, with a kitchenette, a master bedroom at the rear of the main level, a large sleeping loft upstairs, and plenty of windows and verandas all around. Fay began unpacking about $500 worth of groceries: sensible, long-lasting provisions such as yams, acorn squashes, and bricks of cheese, but also indulgences like premium coffee and an enormous jug of Hershey’s chocolate-flavored syrup. He’d already squirreled away more food in the back bedroom—enough for two years, Fay figured. I made it more like five.

“The objective is to live up here for the winter and not to suffer and eat gorp every meal,” Fay said. “And I am extremely well prepared. Call me crazy or call me prepared.”

Both seemed accurate. His inventory included a dozen sleeping bags, four identical backpacks, six tents, ten headlamps, and a lifetime supply of neoprene boots. His wardrobe was heavy on technical outerwear and featured layer after layer of insulated jackets, pullovers, and merino-wool underwear. A gun rack in the living room held seven hunting rifles and shotguns. He had 15 fishing rods, an ice-fishing awl, and a plenteous supply of fur and feathers to tie his own flies. In making what he calls his “great transition from Africa to North America,” he’d whistled through $600,000, almost his entire life savings, on his two cabins, building supplies, boats, food, clothing, and other endless redundancies. (With most of his living ­expenses covered at field camps during his career, plus some inheritance from his parents, Fay had slowly built his nest egg; his WCS salary has averaged about $50,000 a year since 1991, and he receives a modest stipend from the National Geographic Society.)

“This is a much colder and wetter environment than I’m used to,” Fay told me as he busied himself in the kitchenette cooking dinner. “I can learn how to camp here, figure out how to walk on a glacier, and know which vegetation is easier to walk in, all within three miles of here.”

The cabin is also strategically located within megatrekking range of “one of the hottest, fastest-moving giga-resource zones on the planet.” Across the Barrier Range, in British Columbia’s Golden Triangle, lay billions of dollars in gold and copper deposits—and rivers that serve as salmon spawning grounds for Southeast Alaska’s Inside Passage. Farther afield, in Alberta, energy companies tapping the Athabasca oil sands—estimated to be the world’s second-largest reserve—are planning a pipeline to pump the dense tar oil 730 miles west to proposed loading docks in a B.C. fjord. A spill could be catastrophic.

For Fay, developing a strategy to defend his new home begins with exploration. “I don’t have a plan yet except to educate myself—to walk, look, listen, and talk to people,” he said. “I’m new here, and I don’t know anything about this place. I want to live here, make friends, learn about the environment, and piece together the intricacies of the ecosystem.”

Eventually he’ll range into Canada, although when or how far, he’s uncertain. He might walk 800 miles to Alberta. He may go all the way to Hudson Bay.

“Coming up here is not about me checking out,” Fay said. “It’s about thinking how to reach the goal of conserving the planet, of achieving some balance. I have a skill set that I can bring to this place.”

WHEN FAY WAS 14 and living in suburban New Jersey, a friend’s mother asked what he wanted to be doing in 30 years. “I’m going to be walking around in the woods,” he replied. He was obsessed with fly-fishing, and earned money by selling mackerel he’d caught at the Jersey Shore to neighbors for 25 cents each, hawking his catch door to door from a wheelbarrow.

Fay had spent his earliest years in Southern California. His parents owned a home in Pasadena’s Hastings Ranch subdivision, with its two-car garages, water-guzzling lawns, and eye-stinging smog. To escape the haze, he and his pals would ride their Sting-Ray bikes up into the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, behind his house. For pocket money, he caught snakes, tarantulas, newts, and blue-bellied lizards and sold them to a pet store, and at Christmas he roamed his neighborhood peddling foraged mistletoe. “My will to be outside came from being in those hills,” he says.

Fay’s father, an insurance executive, was transferred east when Fay was 12, and by the time he started high school he’d read all of Thoreau. During his senior year, Fay announced that he wanted to solo the John Muir Trail for his final project. His parents vetoed the idea but got him a waiter’s job at a Tucson dude ranch, and Fay studied the flora and fauna of a nearby national monument. The summer after graduating, he went to Alaska to guide two quirky British birding ladies who were family friends. For an astute young naturalist, Fay says, Alaska “was like Arizona times ten.”

At the University of Arizona, Fay majored in botany and was something of a loner. “I didn’t have any girlfriends, didn’t drink or smoke pot,” he says. “I just studied.” He graduated with honors in 1978 and signed up for the now-defunct Smithsonian Peace Corps Environmental Program, which sent students abroad to help develop conservation projects and national parks. At 21, he found himself dispatched to Tunisia for two years to document the plants and animals in a national park around Lake Ichkeul. He hung out with Bedouins and learned to speak Arabic. “They were trying to convert me to Islam,” Fay recalls. “I’d show them the wonders of nature and tell them, �This is my Allah.’ ”

Fay so loved the life that in 1980 he signed up for another tour, this time in the Central African Republic. In the meantime, he’d hooked up with a pretty 26-year-old American volunteer, Andrea Turkalo, and married her. She taught biology, and he became the botanist for an elephant project in Manovo-Gounda St. Floris National Park. “They gave me a Suzuki dirt bike and told me to go out into this vast African wilderness and collect every plant I could find,” Fay says. “It was a dream job.”

Exploring widely, Fay came across elephant herds numbering in the thousands but also piles of their rotting carcasses, their faces hacked off and their tusks missing. Most disturbing was that the elephants’ hamstrings had been severed and their trunks slit from tip to top. This was the work of the janjaweed, Sudanese outlaws and ivory poachers who years later would terrorize neighboring Darfur. They hunted on horseback using spears to cripple their prey and sabers to finish them off. The carnage transformed Fay from a scientist into a militant activist. “We started carrying guns and made feeble attempts to stem the bloody tide,” he wrote in an article about those times, “but it was hopeless.”

In the late 1980s, Fay worked with the World Wildlife Fund to create the Central African Republic’s first forest park and then, in 1991, moved across the border to the Congo to help the WCS create and manage an adjoining park called Nouablé-Ndoki. Turkalo stayed behind to oversee what’s become the longest-running study of forest elephants ever undertaken. While she was quietly observing the animals from a tree platform, he was tracking gorillas and conducting raids on ivory-poaching camps, torching them to ashes. They were living within 100 miles of each other, but their marriage didn’t survive their commitments to their work.

Fay has many near-death tales from his years in Africa, including his well-publicized goring by a female elephant while he was leading a beach walk in Gabon on New Year’s Eve 2002. He suffered 13 stab wounds—one for each of the country’s new national parks—and had to be airlifted to a hospital in the capital to undergo surgery.

Less known are incidents brought on by his own bravado, like his missions into the Congo’s capital, Brazzaville, in 1997, during the bloody civil war. On the last of several trips, he hitched a flight with a Lebanese friend, hoping to retrieve more than $50,000 in cash and $400,000 in unreimbursed receipts from the Nouablé-Ndoki project office safe.

At the chaotic airport, Fay hired a gang of rebels and raced into town in their stolen car, his guards hanging out of the windows brandishing AK-47’s and Uzis. He managed to get the money and data from the office and make it back to the airport, though without a clue as to how he was going to get out. After searching around, he found the keys to a Cessna 172 at the aero club, but the plane’s navigational system and radio had been stripped, and its battery seemed dead. He gave the ignition one last try, and the prop kicked over once, twice … before the engine rumbled to life. With rebels closing in, he took off as tracer rounds streaked the night sky and followed the black swath of the Congo River to an airstrip at Pointe Noire, on the Atlantic coast.

“I was having a fucking great time,” Fay says. “That was more fun than I’ve ever had in my life.”

FAY WAS POUNDING nails on his Moser Bay cabin in December 2009 when Gabon’s new president, Ali Bongo Ondimba—son of Omar Bongo, who died that June at age 73—called Fay’s cell phone. “Come to Gabon
as soon as you can,” said Bongo. “We will make it happen.”

Believing he had a mandate to “kick butt,” Fay accepted the position of technical director of the parks. “My job was to open cans of worms and expose the contents,” Fay says, “to get things on the straight and narrow.”

One of the first things he did was fire six of the park’s 13 wardens. “They were power-hungry, corrupt, horrible people who were completely undisciplined,” he says. “There were plenty of people of higher quality to replace them. Better to polish a rough rock than a turd.”

Next he focused on Sinopec, a huge Chinese oil-exploration company that was operating inside a once sacrosanct presidential reserve called Wonga Wongue. “No one knew much about it,” says Fay. “So we took a helicopter down and found that they were burying waste oil and drilling mud, and dumping raw sewage from camps that were all-Chinese into rivers that flowed past villages. They treated the Gabonese like rats.” Fay urged Bongo to step in and call the president of Sinopec. “He had an opportunity to say, �It’ll cost you more, but you can become a model for the greenest oil company in Gabon instead of the blackest,’ ” Fay says. “That never happened.”

Inside Minkébé National Park, an open-pit gold mine had doubled in size, to 6,000 people, since Fay had first seen it during the Megatransect. Around the park, logging companies had ravaged the forest, and the elephant population was rapidly declining due to habitat loss and poaching. “I felt like a gerbil on a treadmill,” Fay says. “I thought, Man, I only have about ten years left to do conservation work.

“I gave it seven months, and it wasn’t happening,” he continues. Before departing for Ketchikan last year, racked with fever, he met with his WCS colleagues and Gabon’s director general of the environment. “I said, �Call me when you’re really ready.’ ”

OUR FIRST MORNING at the Tongass cabin was windless and clear, and a brittle 19 degrees. Sometime during the night, a surge of incoming tide had buckled the river’s ice sheet, lifting it several feet and fracturing it into thousands of fragments. At sunup, the ice floe was being sucked down the middle of the river on a strong outgoing current, as if someone had pulled a drain plug.

Fay’s cabin was built by the previous owners in 2003 but sits on an 87-acre homestead established in the late 1930s. Although its crop fields have lain fallow for decades, two original log cabins are still being used seasonally as a hunting-and-fishing getaway. Next to those weathered buildings, Fay’s cabin, with its solar panels and thermal windows, looks a little out of place, but it still has a rustic outhouse. It came partly furnished, with twin beds in the loft, a dinette set, and a leather recliner couch in the living room.

Fay considered this first day of his winter hibernation a “holiday” and decided we’d spend the morning reconnoitering upstream. We set out across meadows glittering with frost and traversed sloughs of frozen muskeg that would become boot-sucking, mosquito-infested swamps come summer. Bear trails led us through willow thickets, past beaver dams, and around icy ponds simmering with methane gas.

We’d been walking for about a half-hour when Fay paused in a clearing to savor the moment. “I’m out here talking to myself all day when I’m alone,” he said. “Sometimes I just yell out, �I love this place!’ ”

Hiking on trails or in open forest, Fay has the limber, ground-eating gait of an African wild dog, but when the going gets thick he can turn into a bull elephant, charging headlong into obstacles, castigating himself as he goes. Holm, his research assistant, says that in steep redwood ravines she could keep track of him because he’d be cussing at the top of his lungs. On our walk, as he bashed through a riverside thicket, a twig flicked his glasses into the drink. “Goddammit, Fay!” he shouted. He fished them out of the water and kept pushing ahead.

After an hour, he decided to turn back. We left the river and found a bear trail that quickly brought us back to the beaver ponds. Inching out onto the transparent ice, testing his weight, Fay looked down just as a large beaver rocketed beneath his boot soles.

“Beaver!” he cried out, his face lighting up. “That was amazing,” he said. “It made my day.”

ROUGHLY HALFWAY through the Megatransect, in May 2000, Fay wrote a revealing entry in his journal: “Thank god I never had children—way too much of a burden. Solo is the way to go—depend on yourself only.”

At that point, he and the team were holed up in a desolate village on the Congo-Gabon border, and Fay confessed to being “frazzled.” The Congolese Pygmies had no entry visas for Gabon. Fay had been nursing one man who was on the verge of dying of highly contagious hepatitis. The other porters were making incisions on the poor man’s back to bleed out the evil spirits and smearing blood over his body with heated medicinal leaves. Fay went ballistic when he caught them ignoring strict orders not to share the infected porter’s fufu, his manioc porridge. “I am sick and tired of being a parent to 13 children,” Fay wrote in his journal.

Finally, he conceded that his men were spent. He sent them home with pay and hired replacements. The Pygmies left without saying goodbye.

Farther along, while waiting for a helicopter resupply that would also deliver Nichols, Quammen, and Allen, Fay seemed eager for company. He wrote in his field notes that he “couldn’t wait” to show Nichols the inselbergs. Yet when the chopper landed and Quammen gave Fay a gift of three pounds of French-roast coffee, Fay didn’t bother to say thanks. Nichols recalls that Fay seemed happy to see him “for a few minutes.”

“I could feel that [we] were encroaching on his concentration,” Nichols wrote in an account of the reunion. “He had become a tree, one with the forest. This is what he needed to do to accomplish his goal.”

“You could see that the team was going down,” Nichols told me. “They were on the verge of mutiny. Mike had called them everything but monkeys.”

Fay’s scalding tirades became so routine that Quammen used shorthand for them in his notes: “Riot Act.” The hottest outburst came only days from the finish, at a blackwater sump separating the team from their destination beach. Fay ordered the men to stay put while he swam off to find a way across. He was gone for more than an hour. Had he drowned? the others wondered. Had a crocodile pulled him under?
Finally, with dark settling over the forest, the team decided to move. A porter began whacking a tree with his machete, thinking he’d create a catwalk across the swamp. Just then Fay appeared, and he exploded.

In his telling, Fay said that the tree’s milky sap was so toxic that one droplet in the eye could cause blindness. And furthermore, whose idiotic idea was it to fell the tree? According to Quammen’s National Geographic story, he launched into a blistering harangue, railing about the crew’s “fecklessness, incompetence, childishness, stupidity and insubordination.” Nichols and Quammen were appalled.

“I could have killed the motherfucker,” Nichols says. “We thought we’d been left there. The Pygmies cut down a tree, but I didn’t know what they were doing. We waited as long as we thought we could and then—it was getting dark—said, �We gotta get out of here.’ Mike swam back to chaos.

“He is single-minded,” Nichols continues. “And because his mission is so important, nothing else matters. It’s not part of the ­arrangement to get any appreciation. I love Mike to pieces but hate him for that.”

Fay claims the tirades were calculated performances—merely tactical posturing—because one severe injury could have endangered everyone. Ultimately, his prime responsibilities were “the finish line, with no dead,” he says.

Now, more than ten years on, Fay seems as driven as ever to wander into wild spaces so that he can protect them, but also less tolerant of anything that might slow him down. “I’m a nomad who loves making things happen and loves to be in nature,” he says. “The good thing about being a nomad is that you follow your own nose and don’t take orders from anyone.”

“Mike is an impatient person,” says James Deutsch, who directs WCS’s Africa programs and is Fay’s de facto boss. “He looks for opportunities where his fearlessness and vision and laser focus can make the greatest contribution. His power depends on having the freedom to speak his conscience and the ability to choose what he’s working on to get the maximum conservation impact.”

Fay has an opportunity to make an impact in Alaska, but to truly do so may mean turning his back on Gabon. “It’s sobering to hear him wrestle with this life-altering question of whether or not to give up on Africa and surrender to the forces of evil after 30 years of blood, sweat, and tears,” says wildlife bio­logist Richard Ruggiero, who has worked closely with Fay since they were in the Central African Republic in the early eighties and now directs the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Africa programs. “It’s not like he snapped. It’s death by a thousand cuts—every time you see another dead elephant or deal with another corrupt official. Mike has a view of the world with the purest expression of wilderness of anyone I’ve met. His drive to preserve it both motivates him and breaks his heart and spirit. If we lose him to Alaska, it’ll be Alaska’s gain and Africa’s loss.”
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ON WHAT WOULD TURN OUT to be my final two nights at Fay’s cabin, the temperature sank to 12 degrees. The river froze solid, and I grew increasingly anxious that the boat wouldn’t be able to make it back to pick me up—that we’d have to figure out some way to communicate to a passing plane that I needed a helicopter. But my worries were misplaced. From a watertight Pelican case, Fay nonchalantly pulled out a satellite phone. The next day, he called Troina at Knudson Cove and told him to return for me two days ahead of schedule. “I’ll take another 20 pounds of beef and some bread and milk, too,” Fay said before the connection failed.

We passed the time cutting and stacking firewood, except for one morning when we set out after breakfast to climb the woods behind his cabin, hoping to reach a ridgeline with a clear view. “Welcome to the redwoods transect times 333 days,” Fay said as he loped up the steeply forested slope, vaulting deadfall.

I fell behind, lost sight of him, and ended up blundering around in a patch of devil’s club on a 45-degree pitch, lacerating my sweaty, exposed forearms. “You need to go Zen, man,” Fay said. We never made the ridge.

Later that evening, he read me excerpts from Thoreau’s essay “Walking,” which he’d loaded onto a portable hard drive.

“Thoreau wrote about �the genius of sauntering,’ of developing a talent for walking, of being persistent in walking, and completely disconnecting from the world,” Fay said by way of introduction. “He wrote, �He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all.’ He had the right idea, but he never reached nirvana, that heightened sense of awareness, which isn’t spiritual but physical and mental. It takes months to get there, but once you’re there, it’s a steady state. Four months in Alaska is enough to achieve that.”

On the final morning, we stepped outside into stillness and lightly falling snow. Fay carried an empty backpack, the sat phone, and a .45-caliber pistol, to signal Troina if he happened to miss us at the designated pickup spot. We crossed the frozen river gingerly, sliding the canoe between us in case the ice gave way. As we hiked the half-mile downstream to the open waters of the bay, it began snowing hard.

Troina arrived at noon, right on schedule. He idled up to the cutbank, Fay took his supplies, and I hopped on board.

“See ya,” Fay said as we backed away. I was about to lose sight of him through the swirling snow when he waved once, shouldered his backpack, and turned to saunter away.

LIKE THOREAU, FAY didn’t quite reach nirvana. He came out on March 7, eleven days short of four months, and went straight to Gabon. Before holing up for the winter, he’d agreed to join Ruggiero and the WCS people there for high-level strategy meetings on how to kick-start a “quantum leap” of progress that would finally bring about the green Gabon originally envisioned—and on Fay’s role in the effort. He also wanted to be on hand to take delivery of a new surveillance plane donated by a wealthy WCS trustee.

Over the winter in the Tongass, Fay had not gone entirely without company. During a thaw, neighbors had boated up from Ketchikan to spend a few nights at their cabins, and they’d invited Fay to stop over for a meal. His own cabin, on the other hand, had remained inviolate. His only visitors were a group of martens that became his constant companions on walkabouts. “OK, boys,” he’d greet them every morning. “Where are we going to walk today?”

“I wasn’t lonely,” Fay said. “Quite the opposite. I was dreading coming out. It was killing me, knowing that spring was just about to unfold. Life was coming back to this desolate place. My chest was feeling this anguish: �Goddammit, I have to leave.’ I was bummed.”

In early June, he e-mailed me an upbeat progress report from Gabon: “Been kicking good butt in Africa.” He’d flown the new plane down to the Wonga Wongue reserve, where Sinopec is still operating, and captured aerial photos of 30 poached elephants, which persuaded president Ali Bongo to order a crack military unit into action. Soldiers descended on the reserve and arrested the poaching kingpin.
“Lo and behold, the poaching stopped,” Fay told me by phone several weeks later, after he’d returned to Ketchikan. “I said, �Alright, let’s see if we can take out the gold camp in Minkébé.” Seventy-two hours ­after the presidential guard ordered the camp cleared, the exodus was complete, without a shot being fired. Ruggiero called it “the largest and most meaningful large-scale operation in defense of a protected area in the history of the Congo Basin.”

Fay then turned his attention to offshore fishing. He flew the coastline and radioed illegal trawlers’ GPS coordinates to the Gabonese navy, which seized the boats. Their Chinese captains were jailed, and courts imposed more than $700,000 in fines. “All right!” Fay said to Ruggiero. “We’re actually able to do things.”

Still, he wasn’t convinced that the recent steps were enough. “We’re still only 5 percent of where we need to go,” he told me. “I’ll give Gabon one or two more shots and see if we can make it. But on a personal level, I’m more committed to the North American rainforest. It’s new and fresh and challenging for me.

“I’ve been trying to live two lives, here and in Gabon,” he went on. “People consider me an Africa guy. That’s where they think I should be. But if I’m just going to be a troubleshooter for the parks, well, that’s not why I went there.”

In August, Fay invited Holm to come up from California for a ten-day trek to a 5,000-foot peak behind his bush cabin. “Bushwhacking was crazy,” he told me several days after they got back. “On the way up, you couldn’t see your feet through the blueberry leaves. And on the mountain, the nighttime temperature fell below freezing. During the day, it was 45 degrees, windy and raining.”

He was feeling more hopeful about the progress he’d made in Gabon, now calling the closure of the mining camps and busting of the illegal trawlers a “turning point.” Even so, he knew it was time to commit to Alaska. “This is where my heart is,” he said. He’d informed WCS and National Geographic of his decision and received their blessings. Not only that, but thanks to another donation by a WCS trustee, it’s likely Fay will have a new Cessna 180 floatplane.

He plans to winter again in the Tongass. But this time, after experiencing the return of spring, he thinks he might retreat into the forest as people begin showing up in the valley.

“I could easily go feral,” he says. “I could go all the way. I can be completely in my own world.”

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of Mongolia.

Ulaan Taiga

Hamid Sardar-Afkhami

Sardar in the frontier hamlet of Ulaan Uul

The Darhad Depression

The Darhad Depression, with the Khoridol Saridag Range in the background.

Anyone roaming around in Mongolia’s vast and forbidden Ulaan Taiga can reasonably be assumed to be either a smuggler, a livestock rustler, or a bandit, and probably well armed.

The lawless wilderness, whose name loosely translates as “Red Forest,” sprawls along the northwestern frontier with Russian Tuva. Although it was once freely traversed by migratory Tsaatan reindeer herders, who foraged and hunted and grazed their animals there (and dabbled in a little horse rustling and smuggling themselves), Mongolian authorities booted everyone about 30 years ago and declared the region off-limits except by special permit. Criminal gangs in Tuva couldn’t have cared less, and their cross-border raids have persisted. Today the Tsaatan’s ancestral homeland—as much a physical realm as a parallel spirit world known to shamans as “the Dark Heavens”—is a perilous no-man’s-land where shootouts between mounted rangers and Tuvan desperadoes occur regularly, particularly along a notorious trail that intersects the border at a sacred mountain called Uma Tolgoi. This was to be our expedition’s objective.

We would be a large team of 23 people and 38 horses under the leadership of Hamid Sardar-Afkhami,Ěýa rakish 44-year-old Iranian-American scholar and documentary filmmaker who divides his time between Mongolia and Paris. Cosmopolitan and well-connected, Sardar grew up in privileged circumstances in the Shah’s Iran and, after his family fled the 1979 Iranian revolution, in France and the Unites States, attending prep school at Choate Rosemary Hall, in Connecticut. But in the extremes of Mongolia’s outback he’s as tough as boot leather. He could be a model for Indiana Jones, right down to his beat-up Stetson fedora. He has a Ph.D. from Harvard in Sanskrit and Tibetan studies and has been a practicing Buddhist for nearly 25 years, pursuing a rigorous tantric discipline called Dzogchen.

Sardar’s explorations have taken him to the far corners of Tibet and Mongolia to investigate occult mysteries of Central Asia’s supernatural landscapes. These demanding odysseys have been carried out in the spirit of religious pilgrimages, or what Sardar calls “Buddhist adventures,” the idea being to embrace danger and fear as a path to self-awareness. During the 1990s, for example, he and author Ian Baker made repeated forays into Tibet’s three-mile-deep Tsangpo Gorge to explore a hidden land called Pemako. They never found its fabled innermost sanctuary, but in 1998, after thrashing around the leech-ridden jungle for weeks, they did locate a thundering waterfall that had been rumored to exist for more than a century. The discovery made headlines around the world (EXPLORERS FIND ELUSIVE SHANGRI-LA IN WORLD’S DEEPEST KNOWN GORGE), but to Sardar the hoopla missed the point of a pilgrimage, which is all about an inward journey.

I first met Sardar in Nepal in 1999, and I later traveled with him in Tibet. We stayed in touch only sporadically afterwards, and not much at all after he moved to Mongolia’s capital, Ulaan Bator, in 2000 to start a cultural-immersion program for American college students. He remained something of a mysterious character to me even as he discovered his calling as a filmmaker and ethnographic photographer. His first three films earned top honors at the Banff Mountain Film Festival, and his large-scale platinum prints command upwards of $5,000 in Paris art galleries. Inspired by the work of Edward Curtis, who photographed the great tribes of the American West, Sardar is on a mission to make a visual record of Mongolia’s nomadic people before they vanish into the 21st century. Outfitting groups like ours and operating an exclusive tented camp is just a “summer hobby,” he says, but also a “skillful means” to achieve his ends.

We would be among the first Western adventurers to explore the Ulaan Taiga since Mongolia drew back the Iron Curtain in the late 1980s. The expedition he proposed was a challenging two-week pack trip, starting at his isolated camp west of Lake Hovsgol, in a valley where the grasslands rise up to meet the taiga (alpine forests). From there we would ride to a Tsaatan encampment of tepees and hook up with a shaman and several hunters, then head offĚýinto a shadowy world inhabited by bear, elk, moose, and wolves… and the ghosts of Tsaatan ancestors. Only the shaman would know the way, and he’d have to divine our route to avoid hazards.

Our goal—geographically speaking, anyway—would be to traverse the Ulaan Taiga’s high country, a sponge cake of peat bogs, lakes, and streams enveloped by forested mountains. This is the watershed for five major rivers, as well as the portal to the Dark Heavens, which Sardar describes as “a twilight world of lights, sounds, and voices.”

After a week of riding we would establish a base at the foot of Uma Tolgoi, which represents the earth mother in Tsaatan cosmology. There our shaman would enter a trance state to seek the counsel of spirits and ask them to guarantee our safety. As a finale, we’d celebrate back at Sardar’s camp with cigars, cognac, hot baths, and massages before heading home, cleansed of our neuroses and possessing clear vision.

“The ingredients are gathering to make this either one of the greatest or strangest expeditions to a sacred mountain,” Sardar e-mailed me in the run-up to the trip, “especially since we will have no real guide except for a little shaman who bears an uncanny resemblance to a jovial Gollum.” Our day-to-day plans were likely to “change completely,” he warned.

But to my mind there was one certainty: Venturing into the Ulaan Taiga would complete a journey I’d started 20 years earlier, when şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř dispatched me to a newly emerging Mongolia to explore the last best frontier in adventure travel. The highlight of that trip was supposed to have been a horse-supported trek into the taiga west of Lake Hovsgol, but the state-run Zhuulchin National Tourist Organization had bungled logistics so badly that the trek was reduced to a day hike. This time, I was joining what Sardar called “the most difficult and treacherous expedition in Mongolia.”

SARDAR SCHEDULED OUR TRIP for the end of July, allowing us to dodge the frenzy for internal flights during the Naadam festival in Ulaan Bator, which celebrates Mongolia’s Three Games of Men: horse racing, wrestling, and archery. We’d also be out of the high country well before it turns into a giant deep freezer.

Mongolia had changed a lot in the 20 years since my last visit. Ulaan Bator, a drab, Soviet-style city in 1989, had since acquired the trappings of a capitalist metropolis: flashing neon billboards, traffic jams, a glut of restaurants, and a thundering nightclub called River Sounds. After Mongolia’s Communist government collapsed, in 1990, the economy stalled, unemployment and poverty soared, and the new leaders went hat in hand to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank looking for a bailout. Still, the tourism sector has been a consistent growth area and now accounts for roughly 10 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (although copper and gold mining in the Gobi Desert is poised to far outstrip that). Whereas Zhuulchin apparatchiks processed about 10,000 tourists in 1989, today some 530 inde­pendent tour operators compete for the business of nearly half a million visitors.

Indeed, Mongolia is becoming the Patagonia of Central Asia. You can spend six grand for a week’s fly-fishing on the Uur River or $4,500 to play polo at a deluxe camp near the ancient capital city of Karakorum. There has also been a proliferation of $15-a-night guesthouses in Ulaan Bator, where your bunkmate is apt to be an Australian backpacker crowing about the deals he scored in Naran Tuul’s black market.

Sardar’s niche is the high end. Yet because my budget was skimpy, he agreed to cut me a half-price buddy deal: $2,000 for two weeks. In return, he teased, I might have to play “tent bitch.”

During my layover in U.B., I hooked up with two other arriving members of the expedition, Gil and Troy Gillenwater. Land investors from Scottsdale, Arizona, the brothers, 56 and 49, respectively, were old pilgrimage pals of Sardar’s. I’d met them in the mid-nineties, and we’d often talked about getting together for an adventure but had never settled on one until now.

Sardar’s camp is situated at the gateway to the Ulaan Taiga, where the Khug River spills out of the mountains into the Darhad Depression, a grassy basin that once may have harbored a massive glacial lake. We took an early-morning flight into the provincial airport at Moron, where we met Sardar’s driver in a Land Cruiser to begin the eight-hour drive, stopping at nightfall in the frontier town of Ulaan Uul.

We found Sardar the next day lounging on damask-covered pillows in his watchman’s yurt—ger in Mongolian—at the head of the camp’s access road. He’d ridden out to meet us with several wranglers and three mounts. Tanned and glowing with good health, Sardar was dressed like a country squire out for a day of riding, in a worn cashmere sweater over jeans, beat-up rubber boots, vintage Ray-Ban aviators, and his slouchy, caramel-colored fedora. He grew up riding at his grandfather’s estate on the Caspian Sea, on horses provided by the local Kalmyk herders. They told him thrilling tales about their Mongol ancestors, a tribe of warrior nomads who’d migrated to the Caspian steppes in the 17th century. When he moved to Mongolia, Sardar chose the name Wind Horse for his camp as an homage to Mongolia’s coat of arms, which depicts a wind horse.

We mounted up and took off at a trot, crossing the Khug then following it upstream, toward a luxuriantly green valley hemmed in by darkly forested uplands. Tributary creeks rushed out of side canyons to join the main stem, which appeared to pour out of a distant notch in the peaks. It was late July, but already the moors above timberline were sporting fresh snow.

Soon the camp came into sight. A dozen white gers, looking like rounds of Brie cheese, were scattered down the face of a grassy hillside. At the highest point, six yellow banners mounted on spear-like flagpoles rustled in the breeze. Horses grazed amid the wildflowers, but the valley was otherwise deserted.

Two “horse boys” ran down to take our reins while Sardar led us to the kitchen ger. His cook was busily preparing a dinner of pumpkin soup, pasta with pesto, grated beet salad, and freshly caught sautĂ©ed grayling.

“I can put up with just about anything as long as I eat well and have a hot bath,” Sardar said. The bathhouse—he calls it a “spa”—was up the hill in a carpeted ger equipped with a pair of kidney-shaped fiberglass soaking tubs. A massage? Sardar introduced us to a visiting bariachi, or bone-setter, a substantial woman with an iron grip. For the full purge, he recommended drinking a cleansing concoction of mare’s milk before she worked us over. The combination would unclog our “subtle anatomy,” improve our circulation, and detoxify our livers, skin, and colons.

Sardar’s wife, Nara, and nine-month-old boy, Rohan, had come out from Ulaan Bator to spend a week in the countryside before our expedition left. During his bachelorhood, Sardar had become a seasoned ladies’ man (he joked that he learned Mongolian from “six months of intensive pillow talk”), but he fell for Nara after the two met in an Ulaan Bator Internet cafĂ© in 2007. She was 24; he was 41. A former television reporter, she’s a radiant beauty whose full name, Narangel, translates as “Sunlight.” They married the following spring, and Rohan arrived that fall.

Sitting in the kitchen ger over tea, Sardar cradled Rohan in his lap and sang a Tuvan lullaby. The name Rohan comes from The Lord of the Rings, in which the land of Rohan appears as a lushly pastured realm of Middle-earth guarded by fierce horsemen. In Mongolia, it seemed, Sardar had found just such a place to enact his own fantasies.

WHEN SARDAR WAS an undergraduate at Tufts, near Boston, studying history, he had a series of vivid dreams about a pristine landscape dominated by a perfectly shaped pyramidal mountain. A Tibetan warrior riding a white horse galloped up, gestured at the mountain, and commanded, “Go!” The prophetic nature of the visions didn’t become clear until after he moved to Kathmandu in 1987 for a semester-abroad program and met the academic director, Ian Baker. The two grew to be fast friends, and Baker suggested that his own guru, a revered Tibetan yogi named Chatral Sangye Dorje Rinpoche, might consent to interpret the dreams.

Sardar traveled upcountry to meet the rinpoche at his monastery. “When I came into his room,” Sardar recalls, “we both instantly recognized each other. It was he who had been in my dream. He roared with laughter and invited me to sit with him.”

Chatral Rinpoche agreed to be Sardar’s teacher and proposed that he go to the Neysarpa Valley, in the Himalayas, to meditate. Sardar spent a month trying to quiet his chattering mind. At first he went through a deep depression, but it suddenly gave way to bliss. “Chopping wood or carrying water—it was all bliss,” Sardar says.

The rinpoche gave Sardar a Buddhist name, Lekdrup Dorje, meaning “Effortless Thunderbolt.” By the end of the semester, Sardar was conflicted. Should he forsake Western civilization altogether or go back to school? “It’s OK,” the rinpoche said. “You can be a secret Buddhist.”

At Harvard, Sardar studied filmmaking while also pursing his doctoral work in Tibetan studies. On breaks, he and Baker would disappear into the Tsangpo Gorge and surrender themselves to whatever happened. It was a paradoxical paradise—spectacular landscape but with leeches, unceasing rain, and hideously steep slopes—and it had a transformative power.

“The point of an existential pilgrimage is not to overcome the contradictions but use them as a kind of creative tension,” Sardar says. “The forest becomes a mirror of our own inner paradoxes if we approach it in the right frame of mind.”

He moved back to Kathmandu in 1999 to direct the School for International Training (SIT), the semester-abroad program that he’d attended as an undergrad. In 2000, he accepted SIT’s offer to establish a Mongolia program. He moved to Ulaan Bator and began a series of “amazing journeys” into the hinterlands, ostensibly to meet potential host families for his students. What he found was “a vision” for his first film.

He took a sabbatical to make The Reindeer People, which follows a Tsaatan family on their seasonal migrations. When it earned a jury prize for Best Film on Mountain Culture at the Banff Mountain Film Festival in 2004, the sabbatical became permanent. His next film, Balapan, Wings of the Altai, about a 14-year-old Kazakh who aspires to be an eagle master, won similar praise at both Banff and Telluride Mountainfilm in 2006, and Tracking the White Reindeer took the Banff award again two years later. The films were successful partly due to his vision as a filmmaker, says Sardar, but mostly due to the “subject matter, and the unique transporting nature of these nomadic cultures.”

Sardar had a $300,000 budget for White Reindeer and teamed up with French cinematographer Laurent Chalet, the director of photography on March of the Penguins. The film follows a Tsaatan teenager who longs to marry a beautiful girl. To prove his worth, he must recapture a valuable stud reindeer that has escaped into the frozen taiga. The crew shot in winter and routinely saw temperatures drop to minus 30 degrees. It took 12 days to find the Tsaatan, who were moving their camps.

The French stayed three weeks before they had to return to Paris. Left alone with the Tsaatan and their animals, Sardar improvised the script as a love story. “Everything you see is real,” says Chalet, “but Hamid made the situations in which the Tsaatans played their roles naturally.”

At one point, a hot-air balloon Sardar was using to shoot aerials caught fire. “The pilot cried out, ‘Fire!'” Sardar recalls. “I told him, ‘Look, you deal with it. I’m filming.'” The basket crashed to earth and was dragged along the frozen ground. Sardar and the pilot were scraped up but not badly injured. “The footage was great,” he says. In the end the film was a hit, described by The New Yorker‘s film blog as “stunning in its simplicity and entirely otherworldly in its visuals.”

Balapan and White Reindeer are similar stories in that both feature young boys facing rites of passage. I suggested to Sardar that perhaps the characters are his alter egos. Perhaps so, he said, recalling his childhood on the Caspian, where he hiked with his father in alpine forests populated by bears and leopards. His father always hunted with a guide named Nader Gholi Khan, or “Bear Catcher.” Once, when Sardar was walking ahead of the two of them, a bear came charging out of the forest straight at him. He heard a pinging sound over his head: his father’s rifle shot. The bear fell dead and skidded to a stop at Sardar’s feet.

“I have lost a connection to the wild,” he said. “We all have. People hunger for a spiritual connection to the landscape and to animals. It’s a primal state that I’m trying to recapture. We’ve become virtual men living in a virtual world. We can only become whole again by reconnecting to the wild. This is what people who come on my expeditions get.”

SARDAR’S ORIGINAL ITINERARY had us departing his camp on the fourth morning, and I’d thought our team would include only one other paying member: Adrian Ruthenberg, director of the Asian Development Bank’s Mongolia operations. Sardar had described him in e-mails as “a Navy SEAL type” who would bring his wines and fly rods. That was true enough, but Sardar hadn’t mentioned the rest of the guy’s entourage.

Ruthenberg—cigar-smoking, built like a tank, and outfitted to the nines—arrived in his own Land Cruiser. He’d brought his ten-year-old son, Georg, and a pile of friends from Germany. There was Thomas Lutz, an economist and water-systems consultant, and his son, Ben, a solemn, bookish boy of 12. Wolfgang VandrĂ©, tall and mild-mannered, sells books for a living. Rachel Agmase, a sunny half-Ethiopian, half-German girl of 16, had persuaded her parents (friends of Ruthenberg) to let her come along. In a second Land Cruiser was Martin Marschke, who directs Mongolia operations for the German development-aid agency GTZ.

Our team also included Alona Kagan, a buxom, spiritual fifty-something art dealer from Paris who’d been ensconced in camp when we arrived. She’d met Sardar at a gallery show of his photos, and he’d invited her to come along, thinking that she would add a “grace note.” She had never slept outdoors and referred to the expedition as “a camping trip.” From time to time, she would go off alone and chant resonant mantras to balance her chakras.

By the fifth day in camp, the Gillenwater brothers and I were getting antsy, but Sardar had his own agenda. He’s never one to play the eager tour guide; he’s more a gatherer of friends and people he finds interesting, glamorous, or politically advantageous. He maintains a small seasonal office staff in Ulaan Bator, using a travel agency to book hotel and flight reservations. If Sardar receives inquiries from anyone who seems high-maintenance, he might not respond.

In any case, he’d double-booked part of our visit, inviting Peter Morrow, the American CEO of Mongolia’s biggest commercial bank, and his retinue to the camp for a two-day pow-wow about the future of the Tsaatan people. Another policymaker, Rogier van den Brink, the World Bank’s lead economist for Mongolia, had brought his wife, Natasha, and their two children for a holiday in the taiga. The American ambassador had passed, but even so, the dining ger was packed with 30 people one night.

Half a dozen Tsaatan tribal leaders arrived on reindeer one afternoon to join the forum. We gathered around a coffee table in the shade of a towering larch tree—the Tsaatans, economists and bankers, and a linguist friend of Sardar’s from Ulaan Bator, who translated for the Tsaatans. The conversation centered on the Tsaatans’ meager standard of living and their uncertain future.

With fewer than 400 Tsaatan still living a traditional lifestyle, Sardar thinks the culture is probably doomed. But the taiga must be sacrosanct, he insists. Besides the threat of exploitation by international mining consortiums, there is the more immediate concern of wildcat gold miners he referred to as “ninjas.” They come up the Khug Valley in twos and threes wearing green plastic mining pans on their backs, resembling Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Sardar thought there could be 4,000 of them in the region—the “desperate members of society,” he called them: failed herders, criminals. I wanted to see one of their camps, but Sardar refused. “It’s a dark and violent place,” he said. “There are karaoke gers, prostitutes, everyone drunk, smashing their vodka bottles, shitting all over the place.” According to Sardar, the ninjas and their camp followers poach wildlife with impunity, depriving the Tsaatan of game, and graze their horses on pastures vital to families who’ve lived in the Khug Valley for generations.

Sardar wants to see the whole of northwestern Mongolia turned into a conservation area. “Let the big mining companies have the Gobi, but keep them away from the north,” he said. “If these rivers and lakes are polluted, the whole country is fucked.”

There was some cocktail-hour kidding about Sardar becoming a Mongolian Walter E. Kurtz, the rogue colonel from Apocalypse Now—a messianic demigod, dug in far upriver with his minions, defending his empire.

But later that evening, in the dim candlelight of the dining ger, I glanced over at Sardar, reclining on a bearskin with Rohan in his lap. At that moment, the whole Kurtz scenario seemed utterly implausible.

FOLLOWING THE TSAATAN summit, Sardar learned that our shaman-guide had gone on a colossal vodka bender and would be a no-show. Without telling us, he’d decided to scrap our ride to the Tsaatan encampment altogether. To save time, we would drive to the trailhead while the wranglers and horses took a roundabout overland route. He grew increasingly preoccupied and prowled around in a pair of baggy drawstring pants and a white tunic, hands clasped behind his back.

On the sixth day, we loaded the cars and took off—only to have Sardar’s Land Cruiser break down. He sent the Germans and Kagan ahead, while Sardar, the Gillenwaters, and I spent another night in Ulaan Uul. When at last we regrouped at the trailhead and mounted up, Gil burst out, “Well, it took us eight days, but look at this valley! I can’t believe I’m riding in Mongolia.”

We set out from a log-built corral at a border-patrol outpost, protected by three tough-looking patrolmen with AK-47’s slung across their backs. Riding single file, we stretched out into a convoy a quarter-mile long: 11 clients, two cooks, six wranglers, three guards, 15 loaded packhorses and spare mounts, and Sardar.

It was a crisp, sunny morning when we began, but as we neared a mountain pass, a massive black cloud leaped over the ridge to the south. The wind rose and a cold rain began pelting down. Sardar dismounted to put on his rain jacket, and the rest of us followed suit. In the commotion of gusting wind and flapping Gore-Tex, Wolfgang VandrĂ©’s horse spooked as he was remounting. Teetering in the saddle, rucksack askew, wide-eyed with terror, Wolfgang blurted, “Brrrrrrrr [German for Whoa!].” Then he hit the ground hard.

No one moved. Vandré grimaced in pain, holding his lower back. But he was OK, just bruised and badly shaken, and with a dis­located pinkie, which the guard corporal snapped back into place and splinted with two twigs.

“I cannot emphasize enough the importance of not spooking the horses,” Sardar said gravely. “Do not let your jackets flap.”

Right at that moment, the rain turned to hail. “Hold your horses,” Sardar yelled above the gusting wind and hissing of hailstones. “Hold on to them!”

Pea-size at first, the pellets grew larger. They pounded down furiously, leaping off the ground like popcorn. “Last month,” Sardar hollered, “there was hail the size of tennis balls near my camp. It killed nine camels.”

I turned my horse rump-first to the storm. Behind me, little Ben Lutz squatted down under his poncho, gripping his reins and screaming hysterically.

Then it was over; the storm ended as abruptly as it had started. A wrangler returned with VandrĂ©’s horse. About 20 minutes later, we crested the pass, then settled into a campsite beside Targhan Nuur, a small lake that teemed with voracious, one-cast lenok, a Siberian equivalent of brown trout. Ruthenberg and his son caught a dozen fat ones on wet flies, while Sardar—off by himself for four hours—bagged six more on lures. The guards came up with another ten, a gift from a squad of border patrolmen who were coming off their shift.

“Brown trout en papillote with wild-onion-and-piñon stuffing!” Sardar announced with delight when our husband-and-wife cooking team, Odgoo and Chimgee, served dinner by the bonfire. There was plenty for the wranglers and guards, who stayed in a satellite camp with their own fire but no tents. They slept wrapped in their heavy, ankle-length woolen tunics and covered themselves with tarps or slickers.

I had a six-person dome tent all to myself, and a folding cot. When the rain started up again, I shivered inside the thin, damp, flannel-lined sleeping bag that Sardar had provided. It was a big storm, and it seemed to be stuck right on top of us.

WE RODE ALL the next day in a cold drizzle, heading west toward Tuva across boggy, treeless alpine tundra. A faint trail led us through swamps of sucking mire and up into wild gardens of blue and golden poppies growing among the lichens. The horses struggled and bucked to free themselves from bogs, whereas reindeer, with their wide, splayed hooves, would have danced across the muck. During the frigid taiga winters, their spongy footpads tighten, allowing them to dig down through snow and ice to get at the lichens, their main diet.

My backside was barking after six hours in the saddle, but we kept pushing on, looking for a campsite. Sardar sent three wranglers on a scouting mission. Following their intuition, they went straight to the highest spot around and found an old Tsaatan campsite. Whoever had been there last had cleared out in a hurry. They’d left tepee poles and footlong carved tent pegs, and a tin cookstove that had long since rusted out. Soon we had a crackling fire going and everyone pressed near, our clothes and boots steaming in the heat.

“This camp was last used probably in the late seventies or early eighties,” Sardar said over a bowl of hot soup. “Some of the Tsaatans had turned to banditry by then. They stole horses and sold them across the border in Tuva to their cousins. The leader of their gang was named Gombo, a master shaman who caused bad weather to cover their tracks. Another member, Gostya, was known as ‘the bandit shaman.’ He spent time in jail. One time, after he sold some rustled horses, he bought a Russian motorcycle that he dismantled and packed across the border in pieces. The cops saw him roaring around the streets of Ulaan Uul and said, ‘What’s up with this?’ That was the start of the campaign to rid the taiga of Tsaatans.”

But this was not the oldest campsite we found. Several days later, while Sardar was again fishing by himself, he came across a secluded glen visible only from the river. Beneath a smoke-smudged overhanging rock he uncovered an arsenal of what appeared to be Neolithic hunting weapons—weathered bows and arrows, a dagger-shaped carved antler, a bloodstained cobblestone. Holding the granite sphere in the palm of my hand, I envisioned a hunter using it to crush the bones of a recent kill in order to suck out the marrow, the way our wranglers sucked on roasted sheep bones. Overcome by temptation, I took the rock as a souvenir and brought it back to camp for show-and-tell.

“In shamanic belief, you’ll be cursed if you take rocks from a river,” Sardar deadpanned. “The nagas will follow you,” he said, referring to serpent spirits associated with water.

“You don’t want to fuck with the nagas,” Troy Gillenwater said, drawing back and shaking his head when I offered the stone to him. “But that’s a really cool rock. You could put it on a shelf at home.”

“Yes, take it!” Sardar said. “To hell with the superstitions of these local people.”

They were having fun with me, but still, I replaced the stone and asked the ancestral hunters for forgiveness and protection. Two days later, when we reached Uma Togloi, the sacred mountain, I received their answer.

THE MOUNTAIN WAS shaped more like a bread loaf than the gleaming pyramid in Sardar’s visionary dream. We set up camp in an idyllic meadow beneath its brow, about a mile east of the Delger Moron River, which defines the Tuvan border. We were saddle sore and running low on food, so Sardar declared a rest day. He and Ruthenberg would catch our dinner while the rest of us amused ourselves however bloody well we could.

The Delger Moron is famous for its taimen, a gigantic salmonid that can grow to more than six feet and weigh upwards of 200 pounds. Known as “river wolves,” they hunt in packs and are voracious predators, consuming ducks, rodents, and even each other. Taimen are a threatened species, and they’re protected in Mongolia by catch-and-release regulations, but not in Tuva. Sardar had hooked one upriver and released it, but he now had a bad case of taimen fever. The cure was across the border.

I asked to tag along, but Sardar wouldn’t have it. “This is a war zone,” he said. “It’s a shoot-on-sight border.” Trigger-happy guards on the Tuvan side take potshots at the Mongols. The Mongol guards target anyone they suspect of being a bandit. Sardar wanted to travel fast, and I would slow him down.

It was a fine, clear day, so I threw in with the Gillenwaters, who were taking one of their regular long day hikes. They proposed climbing a ridge closer to the river, where we’d have a panoramic view of the valley and the fluted gray peaks in Tuva.

About a half-mile from camp, at an empty border-patrol log cabin, we waded across a creek and began bushwhacking through tall brush, heading for the base of the ridge. Someone yelled at us.

“Hoi!” he called.

“Who the hell is that?” Troy said. “I can’t see anyone.”

We picked up our pace and made for a stand of larch trees.

“Hoi, hoi!” The summons was more insistent.

“Get behind the trees,” Gil whispered. “There’s somebody out there.”

I spotted a figure crouched down in the brush. It was hard to tell, but he appeared to be directing someone behind him to flank us.

“He’s got a gun,” Gil said.

“Bandits!” all three of us blurted simultaneously.

We were in a bad spot. Troy proposed that we run for it—straight up the 30-degree slope at our backs. Bad idea, I said. We’d be fully exposed on the hillside and make easy targets. We were pinned down, without an escape route. “This is not good,” said Gil.

The armed man we could see motioned again to his hidden partners. One of them stood up and sprinted through the brush, heading to our left flank. They were closing in. Suddenly the flanker broke into a clearing. “Fatigues,” I said. “He’s wearing military fatigues.” In a flash, I realized they were border patrolmen and stepped out from behind my tree, holding my arms wide.

“Amerik!” I shouted.

The Gillenwaters thought I’d lost it.

The crouched ranger was 50 yards away. He didn’t move. I walked into the open and waved at him to come forward.

He stood up. He was indeed a Mongolian ranger, and he had his AK-47 pointed straight at me. He was built like a rottweiler, with a thick neck and ropy forearms, and he wore a mean look. He motioned for me to approach him, keeping his rifle trained on me.

The three of us walked forward with our hands in the open. The flanker had moved into place but stayed ten yards behind us, with his rifle aimed at our backs. I gestured toward our camp, pointed to their shoulder insignia, and held up three fingers—a feeble attempt to sign that we were with three patrolmen. But it helped. The men lowered their muzzles.

“What… is… your… name?” the flanker asked in halting English. You could feel the tension evaporate.

As they marched us back the way we came, a third ranger appeared on horseback. He was the ranking sergeant. In camp, Alona Kagan spoke to him in Russian, explaining that our permits were with “our commander” and that he would return from fishing in the evening. They said they’d wait.

Sardar’s right-hand wrangler, Dawa, rode out to find him. When the two came into camp about an hour later, the rangers saluted Sardar and he saluted back. But after studying our permit, the sergeant announced that he would have to contact his superiors by radio. In the meantime, we were not to leave.

Chatting the rangers up about how they’d stalked us, Sardar burst out laughing. “They thought you guys were Russians sneaking across the border,” he said. “They’d been sent here to investigate reports about horse thieves operating in the area, and they thought you were the ones. This guy here”—he pointed at the sergeant—”was hiding in the brush with a sniper scope trained on you. He says he’s shot five bandits in four years.”

The patrolmen left us to spend the night at their cabin. That night around the campfire, we finished off the last ounces from a bottle of vodka that Ruthenberg had packed.

“How about that Mike?” Gil said as we passed the cup around. “He walked right out and spread his arms open. It was like he was saying, ‘Come on, motherfucker. You want a piece of me?'”

But that was the only logical option once I’d seen the flanker’s uniform, I said.

“Well, you can put that interpretation on it if you want,” Gil said. “As far as I’m concerned, Mike McRae saved my life today.”

THE RANGERS’ COLONEL rode into camp two days later. He and his aide wore polished combat boots and pressed uniforms. Our permit was invalid for what he called Sector 26. (I later learned that anywhere within two kilometers of the border is strictly off-limits.) Nor had he been alerted to our expedition. But we were stupid foreigners and seemed like nice people, so he would levy a nominal fine—5,000 tugriks apiece, or about $4. For $100, we’d be free to go and most welcome to return anytime. They’d show us all the best taimen holes in a canyon downstream, provided we released our catches.

We decamped and followed the outlaw trail east. On the outskirts of the special protected area, we came across the first ger we’d seen since starting. The family had a modest flock of sheep and some yaks, and they were just the kind of herders that the bandits prey on. In one incident, the outlaws burst into a ger at midnight and opened fire. They killed the parents, shot up the oldest boy, and made off with 68 head of cattle and two horses, vanishing into the night.

Here, though, the family reported no trouble. The wife invited us in for tea and biscuits with fresh yak butter and sold us a sheep for 50,000 tugriks ($40). While Odgoo and Chimgee cooked the prime cuts for dinner, the wranglers and guards amused themselves by wrestling bare-chested in a creekbed next to our camp, and the family’s young son and daughter drove their animals down to the stream for an evening drink.

“This is the quintessential Mongolian experience,” Sardar said with a Nikon pressed to his eye.

Possibly, but for me the defining moment of the expedition came the following day. We trotted for eight hours, through rain, sleet, hail, and finally snow. Sardar sent two horsemen ahead to find our drivers, who were to meet us at a prearranged spot that afternoon. The scouts were still gone when the light began to fade.

We reached the next ger, in a forested canyon, at nightfall. “We’ll stay here tonight,” Sardar announced. He greeted the family and explained our predicament, but it went without saying that they would welcome us. Come in, sit, have tea, they said. It was like having 21 strangers show up at the door of your one-room flat and invite themselves to spend the night.

Inside, we stripped off our sodden packs and clothes and hung them to dry from the lattice frame and roof poles. Not knowing any better, I reached up to hang my rucksack from the tonno, the circular crown above the stove, and Sardar freaked out. “Mike, what are you doing? That’s a sacred part of the ger. Only the husband can touch it.”

Floor space was at a premium, but Sardar’s men brought him a campstool and draped a reindeer skin over it. He chilled out and had a cup of tea. The family would have gladly fed us, but dinner was on us: mutton and wild onion samosas, which Chimgee and the lady of the ger deep-fried in a wok. While they were cooking, the neighbors dropped by to have a look. We were now a crowd of 25, and I worried that we were exceeding the occupancy rate for a standard ger, if not wearing out our welcome.

“No, no,” Sardar said, acting as lord of the banquet on his throne. “This is good. This is our life in Mongolia.”

ONE MORNING at the Wind Horse breakfast table, I had asked Sardar why he’d moved to Mongolia. He went on for 20 minutes.

“What we all love about Mongolia is the spirit of the frontier,” he said. “I can gallop for a month here without seeing a fence. I’m here trying to protect my freedom.

“Mongolia isn’t some fantasy; it’s about the art of living that we’ve forgotten. I go back to Paris and find everyone numb. They’ve lost their heroic aspect. We’re all living in hell, which we try to perfume with iPhones, vacations, the next fast car. Either you choose the path of liberation, seeking enlightenment, or of samsara, seeking happiness, which always depends on having something: the promotion, the job, the second home, the child.”

He paused to look around for something on the table, frowned, and walked to the ger’s door. “Where’s the yogurt?” he bellowed down to the girls in the kitchen ger. “Where’s the butter? The milk? The jam?”

End of teaching.

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PASQUALE SCATURRO LEADS TWO LIVES. A big, rough-edged, passionate guy with a salty mouth and a Sicilian surname, Scaturro is an exploration geophysicist who travels the world prospecting for oil reserves. This is Scaturro's soldier-of-fortune persona, a role that has taken him to such dicey locales as the Ogaden, the lawless wasteland between Ethiopia and Somalia, and the former Soviet republic of Georgia, which he calls “the kidnapping capital of the world.” The work can be dangerous-he needed military protection on both those jobs-and he's well compensated for it. He recently earned his pilot's license and has his eye on a Cessna 206. His house in suburban Denver is paid off. He owns a 35,000-acre ranch in Namibia and keeps a Land Rover there, tricked out for safaris. He's in peak physical condition, is happily married, and has three grown children from a previous marriage, five grandchildren, and a wide circle of friends and contacts around the globe. Life is good.

Travel Ethiopia

Scaturro cleans up on the banks of the Omo

Travel Ethiopia

Scaturro and crew on the Lower Omo

Travel Ethiopia

A Bodi man in a dugout canoe

Travel Ethiopia

Members of the Gofa tribe with spears for sale

Travel Ethiopia

Women from the Mursi tribe

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Scaturro and Petros consulting the map

Travel Ethiopia

On the Omo's upper section

Rare moment of Scaturro

Scaturro in a rare moment of downtime

Ethiopia Map

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But it's also short, as he likes to observe, and at 54, having reached a point at which others might be tempted to ease up, Scaturro has an internal doomsday clock that's racing like there's no tomorrow.

“He has this time thing going,” says his wife, Kim. “It's not like a midlife crisis, but he knows his body is going to give out at some point.” Before that happens, his apparent goal is to cram in as many experiences as possible-in the mold of his 19th-century heroes, Nile explorers Samuel Baker and Richard Francis Burton.

Scaturro's hobby, which seems to be morphing into a full-time second career, is organizing and leading extreme expeditions, as in extremely long, challenging, remote, logistically complicated, or never before accomplished-sometimes all of the above. He calls his business Exploration Specialists International, which covers just about everything he does, for both fun and profit. Working 25 percent of his time as a geophysicist allows him to spend the other 75 percent indulging his wanderlust. He's been to Everest three times and summited on his second attempt, in 1998. In 2001, he led a large team to the mountain with the principal objective of putting the first blind climber, Erik Weihenmayer, on the summit. Scaturro was forced to turn back at 27,500 feet, due to a relapse of malaria that he had picked up in Africa, but Weihenmayer made it to the top and safely back down-along with 19 teammates, including 64-year-old Sherman Bull, who at the time was the oldest climber to have scaled Everest.

Three years later, in 2004, Scaturro became an adventure celebrity himself when the Imax film-production companies MacGillivray Freeman and Orbita Max recruited him to lead an expedition with the audacious goal of navigating the Blue Nile from its source in the Ethiopian highlands to the Mediterranean Sea, an unprecedented journey of roughly 3,500 miles. Bandits had murdered a number of people on previous expeditions, and ferocious rapids in the river's upper gorges had claimed others. But it was the length of the trip (114 days), particularly the desert passages across Sudan and Egypt, that presented the most daunting challenge. Producer Greg MacGillivray was sure monotony itself would defeat Scaturro and the expedition's cameraman, Gordon Brown.

“My fear was that any mere mortal would turn back out of sheer boredom,” says MacGillivray. “But Pasquale never lost steam. He kept moving. He said he would do it, for me, for Gordon. I don't know any other person besides him who could have pulled it off.” MacGillivray places Scaturro into an elite adventure league with super-alpinist Ed Viesturs and oceanographer Robert Ballard, who found the wreck of the Titanic. “Pasquale is one of those people who take on challenges that are almost unachievable and then push beyond that,” MacGillivray says. “If it were easy, they wouldn't be interested.”

Scaturro's starring role in Mystery of the Nile propelled him into a glamorous, hectic orbit. MacGillivray made him director of mountain operations for The Alps, a 2007 Imax documentary about climber John Harlin's attempt to scale the Eiger's north face, the hazardous rock wall that claimed his father's life. Back home, Scaturro was in demand as a speaker. One week he popped up in Boston lecturing executives on corporate team-building, the next he was in Albuquerque introducing the Nile movie's local premiere.

Serious money came knocking when an investment group asked if he was interested in looking for oil in Nigeria, Libya, and Kurdistan. “Kurdistan?” he snorted. “Don't you mean northern Iraq? In other words, you want me to work in the three most fucked-up places on the planet for two years?” Thanks, he said, but he had better things to do.

Namely, running Ethiopia's Omo River with his Colorado rafting buddies. As he conceived the expedition, the team would be lim­ited to eight people and two rafts. They would spend about two weeks on the river, a run he'd done twice before, in 1994 and 2001. But in typical Scaturro fashion, he proposed parking the rafts on the Lower Omo and trekking 60 miles across the Boma Plateau into southern Sudan-a region he calls “perhaps the last wilderness area in Africa.” Afterwards, they'd keep boating to the Omo's terminus, in Kenya's Lake Turkana. The journey would span roughly 600 miles.

“Last time I was on the Omo,” Scaturro wrote in an e-mail to me, “I decided that I wouldn't return unless it was to explore the area to the west of the river. This is that trip.”

Southern Sudan? An area awash in automatic weapons, where a protracted civil war had only recently ended?

Not to worry, Scaturro said: He had arranged for a military escort. “We'll be met at the border by a colonel in the SPLA. Dude, you should come.”

“OK, EVERYBODY, LISTEN UP!” Scaturro barked in a booming, gravelly voice. He was standing by the bow of his gray Avon Pro raft, dressed in a clean khaki field shirt, shorts, and flip-flops, about to deliver his morning pep talk. It was around 10 a.m. on the eighth day of the trip, in late 2006, and we were about to shove off from the previous night's camp, a narrow, terraced beach that crowded into the Omo's tangled riverine forest. Across the water, a troop of nervous baboons clambered on a cliff face festooned with tropical greenery. We were coming down out of the mountains here, some 160 river miles below our put-in, and Scaturro was worried about falling behind schedule. For the past three days, he'd been dogging the Ethiopian staff to shake a leg in the morning and get the coffee on the campfire. Without a caffeine buzz, he insisted, we would never get under way earlier.

“Tomorrow, coffee will be ready at six o'clock,” he said, shooting a glance at our late-rising logistics manager, Petros Sisay, who'd rolled out that morning a full half-hour after Scaturro. “When you hear that coffee is ready, I want you all to pack your personal gear and clear your tents. We need to be on the river by eight o'clock.”

Considering the size of our group-19 of us, including five Ethiopian staff-a departure that early was going to be a stretch. With six more people and two more boats than Scaturro initially had planned, we weren't what you'd call fast-and-light. Our camps looked like deluxe Colorado River bivouacs, and the front storage bin of our booze barge, a classic old 18-foot Avon Spirit, was filled to the brim with clanking bottles, mostly local beer but also wine, whiskey, and a deadly off-brand ouzo. After a delirious party one night upriver, there had been so many empties strewn around the fire pit that Scaturro had declared a moratorium on happy hour.

To be fair, our late departure wasn't entirely Petros's fault. But by then the pudgy, garrulous cultural anthropologist and tour guide had become everybody's favorite whipping boy. He'd sold himself to Scaturro on the strength of his academic credentials and purported expertise on the Omo Valley's tribes-the Bodi, Bumi, and Mursi, among others. That remained to be seen, since we hadn't come to any villages yet. But as a manager he'd already proven undependable. He'd arrived at the Bele Bridge, our first resupply spot, two days upriver, with plenty of food and cold beer but without the mounting hardware for an outboard motor that we'd need to power through the Lower Omo's sluggish meanders.

“We ain't going nowhere on the lower river without those pipes, Petros!” Scaturro had exploded. “How many times did I tell you, 'On penalty of death, don't forget those parts'? Jesus Christ! I said it 20 times and should have said it 21.”

“I delegated this responsibility,” Petros explained lamely. Scaturro stomped off, placed a satellite call to our outfitter, Red Jackal tours, and arranged to have the parts driven overnight to the next road access, about 20 miles downriver.

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As a leader, Scaturro can be overbearing and foulmouthed, salting his orders with run-on profanities that would make a Soprano blush. In his view, an expedition team has one decider-in-chief-him-and when he bellows an order, you'd better jump. But he knows he's not infallible.

“My definition of a great team is one that continues to function when the leader goes down, like I did on Everest,” he says. “The leader's role is to pick a team, train them, and then make himself irrelevant.”

Despite his outbursts, he seems to thrive on fixing snafus and coaxing the best out of people. Between oil and gas gigs and what he calls his “high-profile” expeditions, he loves nothing more than bringing together comrades and casual acquaintances on a do-it-yourself adventure, for which everyone shares the cost. He's a pied piper to an ever-changing entourage of climbers, rafters, trekkers, and ordinary travelers who would follow him just about anywhere.

“He's a great team leader,” says Mike Prosser, a bearish, gray-bearded river-equipment manufacturer who ran the upper Blue Nile with Scaturro and jumped at the invitation to row the Omo. “He can be demanding and he'll get in your face, but five minutes later he'll put his arm around you and it's over.”

Twenty-five years ago, Scaturro considered guiding as a career but decided against taking passengers down the same rivers or up the same slopes again and again, like a glorified tour-bus operator. Instead, he sees his role as a catalyst, coach, and master of ceremonies. When we'd all met up in Addis Ababa a couple of weeks earlier, he'd assigned key tasks like rigging rafts to the boatmen and crew, while everyone else eagerly pitched in. On shopping excursions, he led the way into Addis's sprawling open-air market, the Mercato, ordering large quantities of provisions, dickering, and clearly relishing the role of tour leader and consummate Africa hand. At noisy team dinners, Scaturro was lord of the banquet to his adoring subjects, spinning stories about his trips on the Omo (“mud two feet deep in camp”) and the Ogaden (“the asshole pulled the pin and held the grenade on our hood”). It probably wouldn't have mattered if they were in Addis or Anchorage, as long as they were with the man they knew as “PV,” short for Pasquale Vincent.

“I've never met anyone with his energy and drive,” says Steve Jones, one of our lead boatmen. Jones had logged nearly 90 trips down the Colorado as a commercial guide in the 1980s and later went to Chile with Scaturro to raft the BĂ­o-BĂ­o. “These expeditions are not fun a hundred percent of the time,” he says. “The trips get long, people can get sick and irritable. Pasquale seems to have a larger appetite for these tough expeditions than anyone I know.”

Our third raft was piloted by another of Scaturro's old friends, Kurt Hoppe, an ultrafit oil-exploration consultant who'd rowed part of the Blue Nile with him. For assistant boatmen, he'd tapped two young guys, Zach Gill and Zach Baird- “Big Zach and Pro Zach”-who were like sons to him. The rest of us looked like package tourists-a lawyer and her computer-scientist husband, a veterinarian, a software salesman, a marketing exec, and a business-school professor.

On the Nile expedition, Scaturro's Ethiopian staff had secretly called him chakwala, which in Amharic means something like “impatient and pushy.” But two had agreed to be rehired: Yalew Mteku, his agile little factotum; and Baye Gebreselassie, our security guard, a laconic soldier who looks like Denzel Washington. Scaturro had also recruited Robel Petros, a seasoned crewman, and Tesomen Gesla, our cook.

After five days, we rolled out of Addis in an air-conditioned Mercedes coach followed by a cargo truck stuffed with rolled-up boats and gear, heading for the Great Rift Valley and the put-in bridge.

“God, I'm tired,” Scaturro said. “I can't wait to get on the river.”

BELOW THE PUT-IN, we entered a lost world inhabited only by insects, birds, and other wildlife. Tsetse flies and mosquitoes render the upper reaches of the Omo Valley inhospitable to humans and livestock. The people were a thousand feet above us on the Ethiopian Plateau, Scaturro said, where there were scores of grass-hut villages. The river was brown, wide, and choppy, clipping along at five miles an hour in a channel lined by gleaming black boulders that looked like colossal lumps of coal. Colobus monkeys with striking black-and-white coats leaped through the treetops, while hippos lolled in the shallows.

When he heard about the Omo in 1976, three years after Sobek Expeditions had made the first descent, Scaturro was 23, married, and holding down jobs as a general contractor and night cook while studying geology at Northern Arizona University, in Flagstaff. On a trip to the Grand Canyon, Gary Mercado, a classmate who'd been a Colorado River guide, described his recent adventures in Ethiopia as a Sobek boatman. One of these, on the Baro River, had been a catastrophe. Rounding the first bend below the put-in, the team's rafts had plunged over a waterfall and flipped, drowning a client.

Scaturro was more envious of the adventure than horrified by the tragedy. “I thought, My God, that's the greatest story I ever heard. I was so fucking jealous.”

After graduating in 1980, Scaturro moved to Denver and went to work for Amoco as a geophysicist. After four years, he struck out on his own, taking lucrative consulting jobs that left him with enough freedom and money to take off on adventures. During an ascent of Argentina's 22,834-foot Aconcagua, he found himself at Camp 1, two miles ahead of his teammates. To kill time, he made tea and organized the camp himself.

“I decided most mountaineers didn't know shit about logistics and organizing expeditions,” he says, “so I started doing it myself.” He guided friends on Aconcagua twice more before trying the Himalayas, the Karakoram, and high-altitude peaks in Russia and Alaska, including Mount McKinley. He led private rafting expeditions as well, running some of the same rivers Sobek had pioneered.

For his first BĂ­o-BĂ­o trip, Scaturro borrowed Sobek oar boats, customized them with raft frames he designed himself, and ran the river Grand Canyon style. He helped produce an ESPN film about the BĂ­o-BĂ­o in 1991, to raise awareness of the dam projects that were about to ruin it. “If God created the perfect river,” he told me, “it was the BĂ­o-BĂ­o.”

I took that as a figure of speech, since the only other time I'd heard Scaturro use the word God on our expedition had been with damn. I never would have guessed he used to be a churchgoing man-a Baptist deacon, no less. But he and his first wife had been devout Christians, both raised in deeply religious families. (Growing up in Hollywood, Scaturro shared a bedroom with four brothers in a bungalow behind his father's Sunset Boulevard trattoria, Vince's Little Star Restaurant, which was right near Paramount Studios.) His marriage broke up after 17 years, in 1989. His wife's spiritualism had grown increasingly fervent, he says, to the point that it interfered with their relationship. He'd been donating heavily to the church but stopped when he suspected the elders were scamming him in a building project, quit the congregation, renounced organized religion, and split with his wife. “I feel like I had to go through that period,” he says.

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Relaxing in camp on the Omo one evening, Scaturro said, “When you take away the guilt trip of religion and knock down the walls, you have to ask yourself, 'What are my boundaries?' I get out here and I can see more clearly. It's like being on a straight stretch of river.”

Mostly, though, Scaturro kept focused on our progress. Every afternoon he would sit at a folding table to update his daily river log and annotate a computer-generated topo map of the river that he'd produced at home. The map was about 15 feet long and 18 inches wide. It showed the river corridor in fine detail but omitted one critical feature: a massive new hydroelectric plant being built about 45 miles below the put-in. It was only after reaching Addis that we'd heard rumors about it. The project is part of the government's scheme to harness every major river in Ethiopia.

On the night before we reached the plant, sitting around the campfire with wine in hand, Scaturro slipped into a reflective mood. “Are the Ethiopian people better off with the dams or not?” he asked. “I don't know.”

There was no equivocating the next morning when we rounded the first bend and saw what was happening. Roads that had been bulldozed down from above on both sides of the river were about to converge at the narrowest point in the canyon. The channel was being pinched off by tons of rock debris supporting the ends of a temporary bridge. In a week, the bridge would be finished, the river blocked. Along the right bank was an enormous poured-concrete turbine plant. A second generating plant and a nearly 800-foot-high dam would be located about a hundred miles downstream. By 2011, when both projects are scheduled to be online, the most spectacular part of the Omo Valley will be lost forever.

Scaturro scowled. “There aren't going to be any free-flowing rivers left in the world,” he grumbled. “All that will remain is cesspools. We may be the last generation to have these river adventures.” As we shot the rapids in the narrowing gap at the bridge site, he roared, “Yahoo, baby! The last run on the Omo!”

THE OMO'S MOST CHALLENGING RAPID, about 175 miles below the put-in, is called Tis Isat (“Smoke of Fire”) Falls South. When we pulled over to scout the drop, on day nine, we were a slightly different team. Tom Bateman, our sharp-witted management professor, had left after an old foot injury flared up. We'd picked up photographer Liz Gilbert and a sweet Greek tourist named Simoni Zafiropoulou. A tall, middle-aged blonde who favored flamboyant jewelry, she'd met us at our hotel in Addis and, to everyone's shock, popped up at the resupply bridge, carrying her clothing in garbage bags. She was desperate to join the team. What could Scaturro say?

Scaturro consulted a sketch of the rapid in his 2001 river log, taking careful note of a keeper hole that couldn't be seen from where we stood. He warned the other boatmen. Liz said she wanted photos of the other rafts in the rapid. No problem, Scaturro said. He would eddy out at the bottom of the run, after clearing the hole.

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Simoni, Liz, and I sat in the bow of Scaturro's boat, while Yalew lounged on a pile of drybags lashed to the stern. Scaturro told us to crouch in the bilge and hold tight to the grab lines. Straining at the oars, he ferried across the channel, pivoted downstream, and let the river do the rest. The boat bumped and crunched over rocky shoals, hung up briefly, then continued sweeping down through the left-trending curve. Scaturro was standing at the oars, making minor course corrections, when he glanced sideways to scope out the best way into the eddy. When he looked back, he screamed, “Hold on! Hold on!” He'd forgotten about the keeper hole.

I was on the raft's downstream side, which plunged into the hole first and slammed into a standing wave. A wall of water crashed over my back. The boat tilted at a steep angle as backwash drove the downstream tube underwater. A weird roaring sound filled the air. We were trapped and about to flip.

Instinctively, Scaturro dropped the oars and moved to the high side. “Get in the back of the boat!” he yelled. “Get in the back!” He grabbed Simoni and Liz by the scruffs of their life jackets and yanked them into the middle of the raft.

Suddenly weightless, the bow popped up and leaped over the backwash. We were all right.

Scaturro looked shaken. Our close call was a disturbing flashback to near misses that he'd vowed would never happen again. One had occurred about a month into the Nile expedition, in the river's ominous Black Gorge.

In Gordon Brown's retelling of that 2004 episode, he was scouting in his kayak and ran a long rapid with a 12-foot pour-over that couldn't be seen from upriver. Scaturro followed in his raft, but a mixup in signals sent him careering over the drop into a nasty hole. Scaturro threw himself on the raft's high side to prevent it from flipping. He washed out of the hole, but the raft following him, piloted by Chilean photographer Michel L'Huillier, a whitewater novice, dropped into the pit sideways and capsized, pitching everyone aboard into the river and nearly drowning the trip's cook.

The Imax movie shows L'Huillier's flip but not the subsequent shouting match between Brown and Scaturro. The two got into it as the rattled Ethiopian camp staff looked on. Scaturro said he didn't see Brown's signals; Brown thought Scaturro had ignored them. When Brown accused Scaturro of being reckless with people's lives, he touched a nerve. Two of Scaturro's teammates had perished on previous expeditions, both in 1993: climber Greg Gordon, who slipped to his death on Pumori, the 23,494-foot peak next to Everest; and Harriet Nicholson, the fiancée of one of his clients, who drowned on a rafting holiday on the Yukon's Alsek River. Nicholson's death was especially troubling, because she'd been riding in Scaturro's boat, which flipped in a deep hole that he saw too late. Years later, the deaths still haunt him.

Our near miss at Tis Isat happened for the same reason as the Alsek accident. “In both instances,” Scaturro says, “I was paying attention to other things rather than concentrating on the river, something I try never to do, but it does happen.”

Tis Isat hadn't quite finished with us. The moment we reached shore, we heard a piercing emergency whistle. Scaturro grabbed two throw bags of coiled rescue line and dashed upriver, hopping across the sharp, black boulders in his flip-flops. It was only a false alarm: one man briefly overboard.

“I need a rest,” Scaturro said afterwards. “I need lunch.”

Petros didn't take the hint.

“Petros, lunch!” Scaturro hollered. “I am still the goddamn expedition leader, and I want lunch.”

That night in camp, perhaps to make a point to Petros, he handed napkins to everyone after dessert. Five minutes later he was fast asleep, slumped in a chair by the campfire with his chin on his chest.

IN THE MILES BELOW the Tis Isat falls, the river's current stalled. To make time, we began motoring. The first tribal village we encountered was a Bodi settlement. Petros's command of their language was limited, but he gathered that a stick-fighting contest was about to take place, in which young suitors whack each other silly with poles that have phallus-shaped tips. The winner gets the girl.

Scaturro suggested we take photos from the boats and move on. We were on a tight schedule. At a Mursi village 30 miles downstream, Liz, the photographer, put her foot down. The women were wearing lip plates, and she wanted time to shoot them. Scaturro cut the throttle and steered toward shore. He told Petros to get off and negotiate a deal with the elders: one price, unlimited photos.

“Leave your daypack here so they don't know that it's your bank,” Scaturro told him.

Petros scrambled out of the boat, still carrying his rucksack. Two young men arrived by dugout. As lean as gazelles, they were naked but covered themselves with blankets. Their upper arms were dotted with scars, which were self-inflicted to show how many enemies they'd defeated in battle. One of them carried an assault rifle.

Petros gave us the high sign.

“OK, everybody, go ahead,” Scaturro said. We piled off with our cameras. The deal was 70 birr, about $9, for as many photos as we wanted. “Don't anybody pull out any money, or it's all over,” Scaturro shouted. “Petros will pay.”

After five minutes, a commotion developed. Petros was rummaging in his backpack for money while a gray-haired Mursi elder standing beside him peeled off crisp one-birr notes from a stack and handed them out to a knot of clamoring women. They were demanding two birr per photo.

“All right, back in the boats,” Scaturro screamed. “Now! Petros, get that fucking backpack on board.”

We hurried to the rafts. Zach Gill, our massively strong, six-foot-five assistant boatman, stayed ashore tending the bow line. “Shove off! Shove off!” Scaturro yelled. The women wouldn't have it. They surrounded Gill and held fast to the line, haranguing us.

Suddenly, there was the metallic ker-chank of a round being chambered. One of the angry young men pacing the banks was brandishing a loaded Kalashnikov.

Scaturro turned and calmly said to our security guard, “Baye.” Baye understood immediately; he moved to his drybag and started pulling out socks, shirts, and finally his 9mm service pistol, which he cocked and held barrel-down by his thigh.

Another gunman appeared. “John Ricci, get up here,” Scaturro barked. “If that guy loads a round, jump him.” An Ironman triathlete, Ricci was, at 235 pounds, the bulkiest man on the team. Even if the Mursi were bluffing, I couldn't believe Scaturro would take such a risk. Ricci stepped to the bow and folded his arms. The second gunman backed off.

But money was still an issue. “Petros, get some money up here, right now,” Scaturro yelled. Petros remained frozen in place.

We were at a tense standoff. At last, Robel pulled out his own wallet and palavered with the gunmen in Amharic. They settled for 12 birr, the equivalent of $1.50. We were free to leave.

FOUR DAYS LATER, I left the expedition, along with six others who had commitments at home. We found out by e-mail that the remaining team members had reached Lake Turkana, but there had been no trekking, no colonel, and no SPLA escort. Instead, they had waited three days at a riverside missionary station for a truck that Petros had insisted was coming, then had driven to a border outpost called Kibbish Wells. Petros had gotten sick and moaned that he was dying. Scaturro had slipped him a sleeping pill to shut him up.

After he got home, Scaturro e-mailed a final thank-you to everyone on the team. “I have never been with a commercial or private group in such difficult conditions and had such a wonderful time,” he wrote.

“I know the trip I want to take now,” Scaturro told me later. “I want to go back next year, take a dugout across the lower river, and start walking. It'll be a 400-kilometer walk. I'm convinced that if there are any authentic tribes left in Africa, we'll find them.”

But that would have to wait. Last July, Scaturro flew to Pakistan to join the Shared Summits Expedition on K2. In September, he led a team down Ethiopia's Tekeze, portaging around a dam that will choke off that river. He ended 2007 in the Middle East, working with a television crew producing a series on the Arab countries.

Meanwhile, his wish list is ever-expanding: Raft the Mekong from source to sea, walk the length of Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula, sail the South Pacific, drive from Cape Town to Lon­don. He and Weihenmayer are talking about putting up a new route on New Guinea's Carstensz Pyramid, one of the Seven Summits.

“I'm not afraid of dying,” Scaturro says. “I'm afraid of dying before I do everything I want to do. People always ask me, 'How do you do it, and how can I do it?' I tell them that we've been born into the greatest country on earth. All we have to do is to get rid of our fear and control the guilt-family guilt, church guilt, work guilt-and take advantage of the opportunity. When I hear, 'I can't go, my grass will die,' I say, 'Tear out the grass and let's go adventuring.'

“Because in the end, it's all about friends and memories, baby.”

Access + Resources
ETHIOPIA

GETTING THERE: Ethiopian Airlines flies direct from Washington, D.C., to Addis Ababa for about $1,600 round-trip (). WHEN TO GO: September through February, following the rainy season, when the countryside is full of wildflowers.

WHAT TO DO & WHERE TO STAY:
Great Rift Valley
RAFT THE OMO – Remote River Expeditions has plans to raft the upper canyon this October, from Gibe Farm to Bele Bridge, an 80-mile journey that will take you down one of the Omo s last raftable stretches ($2,100; ). DISCOVER ETHIOPIAN CULTURE – After you set up base camp at Murulle Omo Explorer s Lodge, on the Lower Omo, Ethiopian Rift Valley Safaris will take you to local villages of the Dorze and Hamar people (from $1,300 for ten days; ).

Simien National Park
HIKE THE SIMIEN MOUNTAINS – Join Mountain Travel Sobek on its 16-day Ethiopian trekking tour and hike inside Simien National Park, topping out on 15,158-foot Ras Dashen, Ethiopia s highest peak ($4,700; ). SIMIEN LODGE – Dubbed Africa s highest hotel (10,696 feet), this new lodge s thatch-roof tukuls are equipped with heated floors (doubles, $110; ).

Lake Tana
DESCEND THE NILE – Raft the wild stretch between Lake Tana and Blue Nile Falls on a seven-to-ten-day trip with Nile River Safaris this October ($1,700; ).

Lakes District
BISHANGARI LODGE – On the eastern shore of Lake Langano, this eco-resort s nine godjos (bungalows) are made with papyrus, wood, and grass, and are adorned with local craftwork. The lodge can organize everything from bird-watching to mountain biking, but seeing the sunset from the resort s Tree Bar, built around a 400-year-old fig tree, is equally appealing (doubles, $90; ).

Bale Mountains National Park
TRACK A WOLF – The Ethiopian wolf, one of the planet s most endangered species, persists in a small section of the Bale Mountains above 10,500 feet. Track the elusive canid with Naturetrek, which offers a 13-day safari from London for about $3,900 ().

GETTING AROUND: Ethiopian Airlines offers regular flights to more than a dozen cities throughout the country. Red Jackal Tour Operator, in Addis Ababa, rents Land Cruisers from $90 per day, with a driver ().

Ěý

The post The Decider appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

WHEN MY WIFE AND I DROPPED OUR PACKS at our first night’s camp, below the Grand Canyon’s South Rim, we were running on empty: water about gone, ditto our energy. We were on the New Hance Trail, a punishing, eight-mile unmaintained chute that plunges 4,600 feet to the Colorado River, about 20 miles east of the Bright Angel Trail. It’s one of the fastest and most scenic of the South Rim’s backcountry routes but also one of the toughest—the black-diamond express to the bottom.

Ginny and I had signed up for an eight-day guided trek into the canyon’s stupendous eastern wilderness, and both of us were already grateful that we weren’t going it alone. Because it’s impossible to carry enough water for a multiday trek (every gallon weighs 8.3 pounds), you have to know where to find it—and now, in late May, with afternoon temperatures edging above 90 degrees, many of the inner canyon’s hidden springs and seeps were rapidly vanishing. Hikers naive enough to try a rim-to-rim traverse during the 120-degree days of midsummer keep the Park Service’s search-and-rescue teams busy. In July and August, fatalities from heatstroke aren’t uncommon; a month after our trek, it would take the life of a 28-year-old British man.

We’re both experienced in the wilderness, but not in the Grand Canyon. David Hogan, on the other hand, has been hiking and guiding the canyon’s backcountry for nine years. A self-described “recovering New Yorker,” he’s easygoing, knowledgeable about the terrain and natural history, and a workhorse: He humped a 90-pound pack stuffed with food, fuel, cooking gear, water pump, first-aid kit, and sat phone while we carried about 35 pounds each. Our first camp was on an exposed, windswept terrace, about halfway to the Colorado. There wasn’t a drop of water around except for Hogan’s dwindling stash. He told us to relax while he trotted off in river sandals carrying two ten-liter bladders and a filter pump. The round-trip to a secret spring he knew took him two hours.

The next morning, I repeatedly fell behind while dawdling over some potsherd or fossil or rubbernecking at geological formations that make up what John Wesley Powell called “the most sublime spectacle on earth.” To the men on Powell’s expedition, and to other 19th-century explorers, the canyon’s soaring geological features suggested temples of mythological deities such as Vishnu, Jupiter, and Venus. As I looked out at the rows of pinnacles and pagoda-shaped buttes, it was clear why the canyon has long been venerated as sacred.

It’s said that every downward step in the canyon represents 60,000 years, so by the time we heard the roar of the Colorado, we had descended through about 1.8 billion years of geologic time. We joined the river at Hance Rapids, 76.8 river miles below the put-in at Lees Ferry. After a midday dip, we ate in a shady grove of tamarisk trees; until evening, we had the area pretty much to ourselves. Even though some 4.6 million people entered the park last year, it’s estimated that fewer than 100,000 backpackers ventured below the rim.

Trail maps I’d studied suggested that once we reached the river, we’d be at leisure: strolling on beaches, promenading up side canyons, sipping cocktails proffered by generous rafters. Yes, we enjoyed all this. But as we hiked eastward on the Escalante Trail toward the Tanner Trail, our exit route, Hogan led us over rockslides of black schist that spilled into the river’s turbulent, pea-green water. We clung to ledges the width of my boot. The footing was loose and scary, the drops long and precipitous. Plus I couldn’t seem to consume enough water to keep my urine “clear and copious.” To restore my wits, Hogan gave me packets of electrolyte-replacement crystals to mix with my water.

About two miles above Hance Rapids, we turned away from the river and headed into Seventy-Five-Mile Canyon. It would be two days before we rejoined the Colorado, and between us and fresh water lay a shadeless expanse called Furnace Flats. A group of four buddies we met had crossed it the day before. Having overestimated their hiking prowess, by nightfall they’d been forced to bivouac in a dry camp where their only liquid refreshment was 86 proof: liters of martinis and Scotch.

We, on the other hand, were guzzling slurpies the next afternoon. Hogan’s fellow guide Shayne Hall moseyed into camp at noon, after powering down the Tanner Trail with a packful of frozen drinks and fresh supplies. After one big gulp, I developed a piercing headache—surely the first case of brain freeze at that particular spot.

Hall left us the next morning and planned to be on the rim before nightfall. He could complete the 14-mile hike in little more than six hours, whereas we’d be doing it in three days. On the way out, he stopped at Tanner Rapids to set up a tent for us. That wasn’t necessary, of course, but it did lighten our load and reserve us a shaded campsite on a popular beach where rafters and overnight hikers usually snap up the prime spots. It was one more perk of having experience and foresight on our side.

The next day was blazing. I scooped out a seat beside the river and dipped into The Man Who Walked Through Time, Colin Fletcher’s 1967 classic about his end-to-end canyon trek. Late that afternoon, before departing for our final night’s camp, midway to the rim, we met four long-haul hikers from Chicago. One was on his 22nd canyon trek. Each journey, he told us, had been a “religious experience.”

I wouldn’t go that far about our trip. If I’d had any epiphany, it was in rediscovering, as Fletcher had, that the greatest reward of a hard walk in the wilderness is simply contentment. We were hooked on the canyon, and we’d picked up so many skills that we’d consider forgoing a guide next time. Then again, those slurpies were a godsend.

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