It’s 5am and I’m awakened by frost shavings that drift onto my face, cascading down from the tent wall as a strong Arctic wind pushes against it. The air temperature hovers around -30F, but, burrowed within two sleeping bags, I stay warm for the moment, thinking through the day ahead and the challenges of the uphill route that faces my team as we move toward the high point of the pass through which we’re traveling. We are halfway into a ten-day pulking expedition through Auyuittuq National P

There are times on this trip when I question my abilities. Am I really capable of doing this? What are we even doing here? Why am I doing this? What is the value of this? These thoughts generally make a pronounced appearance when we are somewhere that feels like the middle of nowhere. As we lay in our tent this morning, still warm in our sleeping bag, surrounded by mountains, miles from the nearest village, rain began to spatter on our tent and I suddenly felt overwhelmed with hopelessness. T

Perched cross legged high up on a Benghazi rooftop sipping sweet Arabica coffee the sound of Kalashnikov fire cuts through the evening call to prayer and we hear the bullets zinging upwards into the night sky. Our Libyan host doesn’t flinch but after a pause his friend insists that ‘we go inside because you can be killed by a falling bullet and we will be in trouble because no one will believe the story’. He is calm and collected but we soon realise that he isn’t joking and move inside. I res

Apple Pie Ingredients

We arrived in Sweden and made our way along the E10 to the granite archipelago of Lofoten off the northern coast Norway. Car packed to the max with three weeks worth of food, climbing kit and a huge amount optimism. We continued on through driving rain and gale force winds. The thought of putting up brand new tents in these conditions was beginning to become slightly less than appealing. So we decided to get a local forecast, possibly a good thing that we did, as

Traveling on funds raised by selling tea at the summit of a local hill behind our university, my friend Remi and I had escaped the exam hall for another year. Flying from Scotland, we had set out from the class room for summer holiday with a goal. Our aim, to cross Iceland from its southern most corner to its northern most tip on foot. Planning, packing and preparing had taken over our final semester with far more energy than I had spent actually studying. We had watched with baited breath a

The volcano was covered in ashes with a similar texture to sand, pumice stone and big rocks. The pumice stone on the upper section felt as if large, lightweight stones were floating on sand. It was tough to ride, especially on scree slopes, where the stones were so light that they sunk beneath the weight of a bike, dragging the front wheel down into the sand below… In 2003 it begun as an idea, but it quickly became a strong feeling – the kind that burns inside your inner core with passion and

Jason: It was a friend of mine from university, Steve Smith, and he had the idea. Parts of the journey had been done before; people had ridden bikes across continents, and a few people at this point – 1992 – had rowed across oceans. But no one had connected a continuous journey to circumnavigate the world by just using human power, no motors or sails. Neither of us were adventurers at the time; he was an environmental scientist and I actually had a window clean

After seven months working in Cuenca, Ecuador, it was time to hit the road. I was about to embark on a cycling trip across the Andes – something I had dreamed of for a long time. Anyone who’s ever attempted to cycle in Ecuador would agree that the landscape is comparable to a giant rollercoaster – especially the Sierra, the Andean region. Until I found my rhythm, the first days of the trip were fairly arduous. Riding uphill for half the day and riding downhill the other half. With the passin

Travel writing is all about dreaming. It is about imagining you are someone, or somewhere else. You’ve got to allow your mind wander away from where you are to where you might be, and forget yourself and embrace who you might be. I’m sitting at my desk and typing this as the bright light of the morning sun shines outside. I’m indoors and dreaming out. As my fingertips unconsciously tattoo the keys of my computer my mind goes walkabout, slowly loosing itself, floating beyond the computer scr

The start horn blew and there was a star burst as sixteen competitors exploded from the podium; I ran looking at the map but it wasn’t until our first waypoint, on a bright orange Landrover, I realised it was at the bottom of the Empire State Building in New York, it began to sink in, I was on an urban orienteering course in New York. I had just set off on the race of a lifetime. The start line: Broadway, the beginning of the Landrover G4 Challenge, ahead lay twenty eight day of a global adv

There is a strong temptation in Alaska to fly into remote areas to experience raw wilderness. But it is more rewarding to access that same wilderness without the flight- finding the nearest road or commercial airport and connecting the dots. Part of my motivation is to save money, but mostly I want to see more of the landscape- especially the transition to and from massive peaks. This traverse was planned as 390 km, turned into 600 km, and took 30 days, self-supported. The team was Joshua For

I had never heard of the Kaveri River until I decided to walk across India. I could only squeeze a 6-week trip into my calendar so I cast my eye southwards down India’s triangular shape until I reached a latitude I reckoned I could get across in the time available. And that is how I spotted the holiest of southern India’s rivers. This was starting to sound like an adventure: I would walk from the mouth of the Kaveri on the east shore of India to its source in the mountains, and then drop down

On a July evening in 1741 the Russian sailing vessel St. Paul spotted birds and floating trees, a sure sign they had reached the unmapped coast of North America. The ship’s Captain, Alexei Chirikov, had become separated weeks earlier from Captain Commander Vitus Bering and his vessel the St. Peter. Eager to make a name for himself, Chirikov sent a launch ashore to claim the land for Russia. It never returned. Nor did the second one. Left with no other landing craft and limited water, the St P

The Haute Route Pyrenees is a high level 900km coast to coast trail on the waistline between France and Spain. It begins as it ends – in humid, sleepy seaside resorts, but between these two points the only constant is change. Hugging the border ridge as closely as possible, our route moves through the lush heart of the Basque country along tracks used by Hannibal and Roland, past icy lakes and through valleys of wild flowers, salamanders, snakes and frogs, carpenter bees and jersey moths.

The Mexicans call it the Holy Spirit – sitting on the beach, my eyes fixed a few miles offshore on a group of humpbacks jumping, their tails and flukes slapping the water, much like a baby would do in a bath, I start to understand the sacred spirit of this location. Cliffs made of thick layers of black lava and volcanic ash surround a series of protected bays with crystal blue water and sandy beaches. Its waters are rich with nutrients and host year round pelagic species – gray whales, humpba

I didn’t want to be static at checkpoints. I had this feeling that I would only get the best photographs on this race if I actually stuck with the competing teams, capturing their weeklong purgatory alongside them right here in the remote harshness of Terra del Fuego, the backdrop of one of the world’s most extreme endurance events. Capturing the true experience of the Patagonia Expedition Race was never going to be easy. I was one of only four photographers cove

Ama Dablam, to me, is quite simply the world’s most beautiful mountain. Every face and every ridge is steep, high and laced with beautiful ice sculptures and impenetrable rock bands. Arriving into base camp fully acclimatized, having been in the Khumbu for nearly 30 days, I decided I needed a few days of rest to recover, refuel and prepare for the climb ahead. I had a plan and it was going to require a lot of energy. I’ll be honest with you, I was intimidated by the mountain, by the unknown

“We’ll have to cycle through at least one swamp” announced Tim, suddenly self-satisfied. The three of us frowned whilst we mulled over the prospect of the impending challenge. We had only scraps of information about the remote Patagonian border crossing between Chile and Argentina, most was rumour and hearsay gleaned from other cyclists who had braved the passage before us and whom we all suspected had toyed with the truth by weaving exaggerated tales of hardship. But in amongst the hyperbole

Crux, in mountaineering, has a specific meaning but in reality it is simply a term of art which has evolved whilst still mirroring its original definition. Two of the final three days, for us, would be crux days – the most difficult. Each had challenges and decisive points towards which we had been working over the months of preparation and the eight days of trekking that preceded our leaving the Dix Hut in the early hours of 30th September 2011. In bed, I stare for much of the night at the c