The story of any journey cannot be properly told through the golden-hour highlights alone. The true story of any journey includes drudgery and dirt under the fingernails, and that requires telling too. In our case this came in the form of time squandered on blow-ups and pack-downs on rivers not paddled. There was road walking too – bloody hours of it. We swallowed Ibrubofen with every meal, gaffer-taped our heels, woke up dehydrated with slugs on our faces and smeared to a paste inside our

‘It’s cool I can still walk,’ a bright-eyed and beaming Gavin McClurg said as he strolled up to me just two days after finishing the Red Bull X-Alps 2015 in a very impressive 8th place. Seeing him like this you would struggle to comprehend what he, alongside 31 other athletes and their teams, had just endured and achieved. The Red Bull X-Alps is known as the toughest adventure race in the world, and for good reason. Athletes and their supporters race from Salzburg to Monaco, a straight-line

The air is very still here, and the outlines of the islands change with every passing flicker of heat. It’s as if the sky is sucking the land upward, all that simmering casting a dreamlike aura over the entire landscape – a thick and beautiful hallucination if ever there was one. I’ve been paddling and hiking the Baja peninsula for eight days now and yet my mind still has trouble grasping the reality of what it must have been like living in this arid – yet paradisal – place eons ago. Traces

It’s getting worse, I thought to myself. What had started as a dark blemish on the otherwise clear horizon was now on top of us, pelting us with rain. But the deluge wasn’t the cause of my concern – it was the fog. The deteriorating weather crushed our visibility, and I could no longer make out the black sand ahead of me. The driving wind, persistent rain and raging Pacific surf made a cocktail of deafening tones. ‘It’s only getting worse,’ I shouted over the noise to Christine. She stood at

Jamie: What first got you into long distance trail running? Jez: I first got the running whilst bug training for the London Marathon in 2002, but it was taking part in a long distance charity walk soon afterwards that really sowed the seed for trail running. I met guys who were running these off-road events of 50 or even 100 miles in quite remarkable times, and this introduced me to the somewhat underground world of ultra distance trail running. Of course that’s not really the case these

Perhaps we all ask ourselves similar questions at different stages of our lives. Have I taken the right paths? Does my work bring me joy? Am I able to support myself doing what I love? A decade ago I made the most important decision of my life. I gave up a career in international politics to become an explorer, and now I spend my time running trails, riding tracks and diving the seas while learning about new cultures and discovering new places. I seek to understand how ecosystems work at hi

I wake up, toss restlessly for five minutes before getting out of my sleeping bag, then put some water on the boil for a coffee. A couple of clicks of my camera and a gurgle from the pan. Sunrise captured and coffee ready. Porridge. Pack up. Pedal. Routine. My spirit cries out against it, yet it’s crept up upon me by stealth. Five months into my cycle ride around the world and I have subconsciously slipped into a routine. My friends back home are fresh from university and entering the world

You step off the back of the boat into a realm of blue. There is little shock – the water’s warm at the surface. Back on land, people are rising and rolling out of bed. You are dropping deeper, losing air, losing buoyancy, sinking out of the white light and through the layer of tropic blue, down, down, down. Beyond twenty meters, then thirty, where violet fades to midnight. At this depth, there is no red; colours dull, greens and browns just above, and the smaller, wildly painted fish are al

Losing Amanda, my beautiful wife and best friend, to breast cancer was something nobody saw coming. We were seen as a couple so lucky to love one another so much. Spending as much time together as we possibly could – stolen days, long weekends out camping and exploring or brief opportunist snowboarding trips – all was perfect. We spent seven of Amanda’s final 16 months travelling around South-East Asia, and then on to India before a planned visit to Nepal, but cancer had other ideas. Back p

Hidden in the Sierra Nevada National Park on Colombia’s north coast, the Lost City of Teyuna, known as the Ciudad Perdida, was off limits to visitors for years. But now, after Colombia’s dark period of paramilitary and drug-fuelled violence has come to an end, the pre-Colombian ruins are once more open and safe to visit. The indigenous inhabitants of the Sierra Nevada still hold these ruins sacred and carry out rituals there, but the site was not revealed to the outside world until tomb raid

We decided to go to the area called Colossus Wall, a 50-metre- high sheer face, an unusually steep wall for slate. It’s south-facing and it’s exposed to the weather, meaning that although it gets the sun when it’s out, the Welsh rain that falls all year round is usually seeping out of the wall somewhere, making the already slippery slate even trickier. Spillett was raring to go and wanted to do a route called Ride the Wild Surf, which is an E4 – testing but nothing drastic. I decided I’d

I coerced my hand out of my pogie with great care, as if I were disentangling a gnarled vine from a tree limb. I almost chuckled as I did so – not because it was particularly funny, but because the effort required for that one simple action, an action that was as natural to me as walking, was completely out of proportion to the task. I was spent. After wresting my hands free, I fumbled for the GoPro strapped to the deck of my kayak and waged the daily war to detach it from its mount. The ca

Yukon’s Wind River shimmered like liquid silver, delicate ribbons stretching out down the valley as we flew above. The majesty of the mountains, proudly displaying their geological heritage in reds, yellows, greens and blues was humbling. Just as my heart found poetic wings to soar, a sudden drop in altitude clipped them, and caused a skip of beat. The tiny plane, our canoe lashed beneath, banked sharply to the right; the lake came rushing up to meet us as we landed. I released my father fr

Working with one of the world’s top female climbers, Hazel Findlay, and her father Steve, Cut Media have produced an inspirational portrait around their unique ‘live for today’ approach to life. The film was shot in both Norway and Steve’s home in Australia and inspired by the Sky1 series You, Me & The Apocalypse. ‘To me an adventure is, an activity or a project with, no known outcome, and you put yourself in a position where you have to use your arts, skills a

Ben and his teammate, Tarka L’Herpiniere, trekked 1,795 miles across the inhospitable landscape of Antarctica, a journey to the South Pole and back, and in doing so set the world record for the longest ever polar journey on foot. The journey, which took a total of 105 days, pushed the limits of physical and mental fortitude and reset the bar for polar expeditions of the future. Having followed the expedition avidly for the duration of the journey via its regular blog updates, I was keen to

We’d just finished snorkelling through the glacial waters of the Silfra Rift as part of a Land Rover adventure weekend in Iceland. Next on the list was ice climbing but, due to the insane weather conditions that we’d been experiencing, this wasn’t looking hopeful. As the sun tried it’s best to fight through the clouds we nurse a cup of coffee and I ask him about living a life involving extremes in conditions and altitude. John: So how did your love of mountaineering come about? Kenton: We

I’m short. I’m hairy, I have no sense of style and I look nothing like a runner. The phrase ‘muffin-top’ accurately describes both my physique and my sense of style. But I do have one thing going for me: opportunity. I’ve had the opportunity to run the length of Argentina. I’ve had the opportunity to run from Walvis Bay to P.E. and recently, I had the opportunity to run across Canada. Over 15,000km’s of trail and ne’er a step repeated. Every runner’s fantasy. There are several reasons why I

I watch sand flow across the pavement like flood waters. I hear it, abrasive in the wind, now coming from the south southwest, each gust a thousand tiny tacks on my exposed neck. Driven into my mouth, its taste is clean and not particularly unpleasant, but for the grit. I spit to my right, but the glob is driven back by the wind and plastered to my jaw. Forced to keep my lips clamped, there is a complete lack of smell. Out here, where the Peruvian desert runs into the Pacific, it smells as

Sitting in the waiting room at the Argentine Customs post of San Sebastian, my dream shattered on the floor in front of me. It had turned into some kind of living nightmare I couldn’t escape from. Tormented by the wind for days with only occasional respite, exhausted and demoralised, drowning in self-pity, I did the only sensible thing I could do at that time. I ate. It was around midday. I had already dug deeper than I thought, just to get here. The room was heated. There was a sink with r

When bad weather forced Matthew Gibbons off his planned route whilst trekking in Albania, he found himself stumbling into Europe’s biggest cannabis farm. He tells Sidetracked the story. Trekking towards the peak of Albania’s Sopoti mountain, we watched a dark cloud shroud the radio mast we had been aiming for all morning. It submerged the entire summit of the 1500m peak and, with it, our route. We found ourselves faced with a choice: continue our journey along a ridgeline, or bypass the sum