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In the age of Prii, An Inconvenient Truth, and reams of 100% recycled printer paper, environmentalism is as much a fixture in American society as football season. That issues like climate change and sustainable fuel are topics of conversation among government officials and citizens alike is taken for granted. Environmental…
Sarah Palin checks fishing nets for holes, Photo by Gilles Mingasson An early review of Sarah Palin’s Alaska —Abe Streep Toward the end of a long montage introducing Sarah Palin’s Alaska, the Mark Burnett-produced, eight-episode series that premieres on TLC Sunday at 9 P.M. Eastern (7…
From Eastern Rises, winner Best Film on Mountain Sport, 2010 Banff Film Festival. Courtesy of The Banff Center The Banff Mountain Film Festival wrapped up yesterday, with Jason Burlage’s Mi Chacra taking home the grand…
A wild journey into the world of giant waves—and the crazed surfers who seek them out.
Reed Timmer, star of the Discovery Channel's Storm Chasers, turned chasing tornadoes into a career.
Bestselling author Sebastian Junger on his new book War, documentary Restrepo, and Afghanistan’s recent election. –Stayton Bonner The Perfect Storm began as an October 1994 ϳԹ story. How did you go from freelance war reporting…
Bestselling author Mary Roach on laboratory sex, space condoms, andFelix Baumgartner’s record-breaking attempt to jump from 23 miles above sealevel.–Stayton Bonner What’s the deal with people jumping from really highplaces?As a BASE-jumper, Felix’s day job…
The good folks over at Made Possible conducted a series of interviews with ϳԹ September cover subject Sebastian Junger. In the…
A new master of natural-history writing emerges with the story of a killer tiger in wildest Russia.
Graham Bowley rehashes August 2008's tragic events on Pakistan's K2.
ϳԹ films so horrendously awful, they’re brilliant. 10The River Wild (1994) The plot is washed out, and villains Kevin Bacon and a pre-comedic John C. Reilly are mediocre at best. But when the bad guys force a buffed-out…
(Viking, $27, August) In The Black Nile, Dan Morrison and his hometown buddy,Schon, set out to trace the Nile from the Great Lakes region of Uganda to its…
Greg Grandin's Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City, a Pulitzer-Prize finalist, is a 20th-century tale of industrial ambition, mismanagement, and failure. The head of the whole thing…
Twenty-one years ago Bernd Heinrich, a cold-hardened University of Vermont biology professor, burst upon the literary scene with Ravens in Winter, which did for corvids what Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf did…
MountainFilm in Telluride, a 32-year-old festival, is a little meeting of big minds in a beautiful place. Granted, I'm not being particularly objective. ϳԹ sponsors the festival and a group of editors from the magazine and producers from our new television channel spoke on a panel Sunday.
Micah True, a.k.a. Caballo Blanco, was a special guest at the Jemez Mountain Trail Runs this past weekend in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The star of Christopher McDougall's…
In the late '90s, God's Army, a Burmese anti-government guerrilla group, was headline news. The front-page draw wasn't that they were violent revolutionaries but that they were a group of child soldiers. After reading Mac McClelland's…
Hampton Sides appeared last night on The Colbert Report to talk about his new book, Hellhound on…
An American imprisoned for the murder of his ex-girlfriend in a Nicaraguan surf town finally clears the air—sort of.
After realizing the gaping hole between my convictions about climate change and my own carbon footprint, I embarked on a yearlong experiment in 2008 torediscover the heart of where I live, by the shores of Puget Sound. I traded in my car and jet travel…
Our planet is still the sweet spot for human existence, but it won't be for long, Bill McKibben warns. We've polluted it drastically. More than 22 years ago, the writer foretold The End of Nature.
For the past few years, my ϳԹ colleague Alex Heard–whose office is right next door to mine–has been working nights and weekends on a nonfiction book called The Eyes of Willie McGee, which is about a courtroom drama in Mississippi that took…
Prayer flags , worn by the wind, strung between trees just outside of Patagonia, Arizona (© Jay Graham / drr.net) Over the coming months, ϳԹ will be posting interviews with adventurers, environmentalists, filmmakers, and others conducted by Mountainfilm. Many of the icons appearing at this…
How did you become a travel writer?I don’t look at travel writing asbeing much different from any other kind of writing. I’ve done a little bit ofeverything, some political stories and more character-driven stuff. I tend toapproach travel writing pretty much…
In her new book Eco-Sex, author Stefanie Iris Weiss documents the “eco-sexual” revolution, according to reuters.com.As opposed to offering one's partner carbon-unfriendly roses, (think ofthose shipping miles involved,) Weiss suggests hand-cranked sex toys,eco-friendly…
ϳԹ contributor Carl Hoffman has a new book just out, The Lunatic Express, that recounts the unbelievable (but true!) adventures he experienced while traveling around the world on the most miserable and dangerous conveyances he could find.
Christopher McDougall believes we're all runners at heart. You'll likely convert to his philosophy when you read his book Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen. It's an excellent tale about…
The case for barefoot running seems to have gone mainstream in the past week. Last Thursday, Daniel E. Lieberman, a prominent biological anthropologist at Harvard (he researches how humans, and especially athletes, have evolved), published a study in Nature showing that runners with heavily padded shoes tend…
Lewis diving into the seas off Antarctica (Photo by Terje Eggum) There's no better time to call out Lewis Gordon Pugh than during COP15. Pugh dons nothing more than a cap, goggles, and a Speedo to call…
A map of Oz. The land-and-water-based route FDR took—from Washington, D.C. toCalifornia and then down the Pacific coast and through the Panama Canal—on his 1935 presidential vacation. Europe as it might look had the Nazis won. These are just a few of the images London-based journalist Frank Jacobshas collected…
In 2003, the Library of Congress paid $10 million for a 500-year-old German map. Why the hefty price tag? The document is the only remaining copy of the 1507 Waldseemüller map, which contains the earliest known reference to the New World as America. Upon hearing of the sale, Toby Lester,…
Photo: Anne Mustoe from her website By Mary Catherine O'Connor For some people, the only kinds of bike rides to go on are the epic kind. Such was the opinion, it seems, of Anne Mustoe,…
In our November issue we ranked the 10 best adventure biographies of all time. We were inspired to write the list after reading an incredibly solid bio of…
The idea of Paddle to Seattle may sound a bit contrived, two dudes build their own kayaks and then paddle the 1200-mile North American Inside Passage from Alaska to Seattle. But from the moment this documentary starts, it's clear that it will not watch as slow as…
Douglas Brinkley's biography of Teddy Roosevelt proves we still have a lot to learn from the conservation giant.
Two new plane-crash memoirs hope to soar into the survival-narrative canon.
Greg Mortenson’s 1993 climbing partner on K2 defends the founder of the Central Asia Institute, maintaining that both 60 Minutes and Jon Krakauer presented distorted portraits of the person he knows.
Ben Sherwood talks about the secrets and science that can save your life.
Can a cult fly-fishing novel about a young man coming of age in the wild blow up on the big screen? It's happened once before
How could he? As host of the ribald series ‘No Reservations’, Bourdain is the ultimate adventure traveler, eating (and drinking) his way across the planet, courageously swallowing whatever the locals do. This has 1. Caused him to acquire a very funky flavor and 2. Seriously altered his mind.
Fifteen of the world's best athletes, explorers, and writers pick their favorite adventure books of the past 35 years.
'Tis the season for giving the gift of...GEAR! Whether those on your list hike, ski, climb, paddle, or just like to see the world, there's no end to the cool stuff that you can give them. But where to start shopping? Right here, of course. The all-knowing Gear Guy has sifted through endless mounds of swag to come up with his list of sure-fire gifts to land you
Telluride-based ϳԹ correspondent Rob Story is the author of ϳԹ ϳԹ Travel: Mountain Biking. When he isn’t looking for new singletrack or hitting the mountain-Story averages 50 days on the slopes per winter-he’s writing for magazines. An editor-at-large at Bike, Story has also written for Powder and Skiing. He received…
Jon Krakauer survives Everest; Sebastian Junger gets lost in the desert, Hampton Sides has a chat with Lance Armstrong; Ian Frazier profiles the world's wiliest mushroom hunter; Mark Jenkins does it The Hard Way; Tim Cahill travels with bandits; Bruce Barcott tracks a Native American artifacts smuggler, Kevin Fedarko spends…
Our biggest library of essentials, with classic tales of adventure, poetry, and how-to bibles
A River Running West: The Life and Times of John Wesley Powell, by Donald Worster (Oxford, $35). On May 24, 1869, a one-armed Civil War veteran named John Wesley Powell put in to the Green River, in what’s now Wyoming, with a crew of nine roustabouts,…
Occupy your off-season with the successes, failures, and bemusements of fellow adventurers. Plus: author picks and ten underappreciated books.
For three hours, a team of scientists collected samples from deep inside the crater of a seemingly peaceful volcano. Suddenly, an apocalyptic eruption shot white-hot rocks into the darkening sky. Nine people were killed high on the Colombian mountain that day, and volcanologist Stanley Williams barely escaped with his life. In an exclusive preview from the cont
A Whale Hunt, by Robert Sullivan; Noodling for Flatheads, by Burkhard Bilger; Full Creel, by Nick Lyons; and To the Elephant Graveyard, by Tarquin Hall
Ripped from tomorrow's headlines, the ecobiography of Tyrone Tierwater—failed monkeywrencher, ex-husband, ex-con, ex-zookeeper of the last Patagonian fox, and still-grieving father of the tree-dwelling Sierra, 21st-century martyr to the redwoods.
The Adventurist: My Life in Dangerous Places, by Robert Young Pelton; The Snakebite Survivors' Club: Travels Among Serpents, by Jeremy Seal; Teewinot: A Year in the Grand Tetons, by Jack Turner; and The Water in Between, by Kevin Patterson.
Tibet's Secret Mountain, by Chris Bonington and Charles Clarke; A Newer World: Kit Carson, John C. Frémont, and the Claiming of the American West, by David Roberts; Savage Shore, by Edward Marriott; and The Change in the Weather, by William K. Stevens.
Books to upgrade your coffee table, featuring photography by NASA's Apollo astronauts, mountaineering legend Vittorio Sella, Glen Canyon chronicler Tad Nichols, and wildlife portraitist James Balog, along with Patagonia moments, Jane Goodall's chimps, and the world's most disgusting foods.
The Longest Silence, by Thomas McGuane; River Horse, by William Least Heat-Moon; The Voyage, by Philp Caputo; and more.
Alaskan eccentric Trigger Twigg attempts the first winter ascent of the world's tallest face
In the dusty realm of big-league map collecting, one man cut a darker figure than his milquetoasty colleagues. Armed with an X-Acto knife and an arsenal of fake identities, he systematically ransacked the nation's libraries, hoping in his own peculiar way to dominate the globe.