Explorers House

Holly FitzGerald and her husband, Fitz - married less than two years - set out on a yearlong honeymoon adventure of a lifetime, backpacking around the world. Five months into the trip, their plane crash-lands in Peru at a penal colony walled in by jungle, and their blissfully romantic journey turns into a terrifying nonstop labyrinth of escape and survival.

The definitive biography of Everett Ruess, the artist, writer, and eloquent celebrator of the wilderness whose bold solo explorations of the American West and mysterious disappearance in the Utah desert at age twenty have earned him a large and devoted cult following.

Susan Casey is our premiere chronicler of the aquatic world. For The Underworld she traversed the globe, joining scientists and explorers on dives to the deepest places on the planet, interviewing the marine geologists, marine biologists, and oceanographers who are searching for knowledge in this vast unseen realm. She takes us on a fascinating journey through the history of deep-sea exploration, from the myths and legends of the ancient world to storied shipwrecks we can now reach on the bottom.

In The Ice at the End of the World, Jon Gertner explains how Greenland has evolved from one of earth’s last frontiers to its largest scientific laboratory. The history of Greenland’s ice begins with the explorers who arrived here at the turn of the 20th century. Their original goal was to conquer Greenland’s seemingly infinite interior. Yet their efforts eventually gave way to scientists who built lonely encampments out on the ice and began drilling - one mile, two miles down.Their aim was to pull up ice cores that could reveal the deepest mysteries of earth’s past.

Henry Worsley spent his life idolizing Ernest Shackleton, the 19th-century polar explorer who tried to become the first person to reach the South Pole and later sought to cross Antarctica on foot. Worsley felt an overpowering connection to those expeditions. In 2008, Worsley set out across Antarctica with two other descendants of Shackleton's crew, battling the freezing, desolate landscape and life-threatening physical exhaustion. He soon felt compelled to go back. In 2015, Worsley bid farewell to his family and embarked on his most perilous quest: to walk across Antarctica alone.

For decades, Dick Conant paddled the rivers of America, covering the Mississippi, Yellowstone, Ohio, Hudson, as well as innumerable smaller tributaries. These solo excursions were epic feats of planning, perseverance, and physical courage. At the same time, Conant collected people wherever he went, creating a vast network of friends and acquaintances who would forever remember this brilliant and charming man even after a single meeting.

Nando Parrado was unconscious for three days before he woke to discover that the plane carrying his rugby team to Chile had crashed deep in the Andes, killing many of his teammates, his mother, and his sister. Stranded with the few remaining survivors on a lifeless glacier and thinking constantly of his father’s grief, Parrado resolved that he could not simply wait to die. So Parrado, an ordinary young man with no particular disposition for leadership or heroism, led an expedition up the treacherous slopes of a snowcapped mountain and across forty-five miles of frozen wilderness.

In a memoir remarkable for its quiet confidence and acute natural observation, the author of Paddling Hawaii and Paddling My Own Canoe begins with her decision, at age 60, to undertake a solo, summer-long voyage along the southeast coast of Alaska in an inflatable kayak. Paddling North is a compilation of Sutherland's first two (of more than 20) such annual trips and her day-by-day travels through the Inside Passage from Ketchikan to Skagway. In 22 years, she encountered more than 30 bears, four wolves, and hundreds of whales.

Blind Descent explores both the brightest and darkest aspects of the timeless human urge to discover - to be first. It is also a thrilling epic about a pursuit that makes even extreme mountaineering and ocean exploration pale by comparison.

For listeners who dream of travel, yearn to get back out on the road, or want to enrich a journey they’re currently on, The Vagabond’s Way explores and celebrates the life-altering essence of travel all year long. Each day of the year features a meditation on an aspect of the journey, anchored by words of wisdom from a variety of thinkers—from Stoic philosopher Seneca and poet Maya Angelou to Trappist monk Thomas Merton and Grover from Sesame Street.

It is the last decade of the 19th century. The Wild West has been tamed and its fierce, independent and often violent larger-than-life figures – gun-toting wanderers, trappers, prospectors, Indian fighters, cowboys, and lawmen –are now victims of their own success. They are heroes who’ve outlived their usefulness.

The siren song of Cerro Gordo, a desolate ghost town perched high above Death Valley, has seduced thousands since the 1800s, but few fell harder for it than Brent Underwood, who moved there in March of 2020, only to be immediately snowed in and trapped for weeks. It had once been the largest silver mine in California. Over $500 million worth of ore was pulled from the miles of tunnels below the town. Butch Cassidy, Mark Twain, and other infamous characters of the American West were rumored to have stayed there. Newspapers reported a murder a week. But that was over 150 years ago.

In a collection of gripping stories of adventure, Doug Peacock, loner, iconoclast, environmentalist, and contemporary of Edward Abbey, reflects on a life lived in the wild, asking the question many ask in their twilight years: “Was It Worth It?”

With heart-pounding descriptions of avalanches and treacherous ascents, Barry Blanchard chronicles his transformation from a poor Native American/white kid from the wrong side of the tracks to one of the most respected alpinists in the world. At 13 he learned to rappel when he joined the 1292 Lord Strathcone's Horse Army Cadets. Soon kicked out for insubordination, he was already hooked on climbing and saw alpinism as a way to make his single mother proud and end his family's cycle of poverty.

When Forrest Fenn was given a fatal cancer diagnosis, he came up with a bold plan: He would hide a chest full of jewels and gold in the wilderness, and publish a poem that would serve as a map leading to the treasure's secret location. But he didn't die, and after hiding the treasure in 2010, Fenn instead presided over a decade-long gold rush that saw many thousands of treasure hunters scrambling across the Rocky Mountains in pursuit of his fortune.

Devastated by the unexpected end of her decades-long marriage, renowned spiritual teacher and intuitive guide Sonia Choquette undertook an equally unexpected move and relocated to Paris, the scene of many happy memories from her life as a student and young mother. Arriving in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, she found a Paris as traumatized by this unforeseen event as she had been by her divorce.

The flight of Apollo 11 made Aldrin one of the most famous persons on our planet, yet few people know the rest of this true American hero's story. In Magnificent Desolation, Aldrin not only gives us a harrowing first-person account of the lunar landing that came within seconds of failure and the ultimate insider's view of life as one of the superstars of America's space program, he also opens up with remarkable candor about his more personal trials - and eventual triumphs - back on Earth.

Recalling some of the most memorable escapades ever conducted in the Canadian Arctic with bush planes, Flying to Extremes takes place in the late ’60s and early ’70s from a base at Yellowknife, in the heart of the Northwest Territories. Beyond recounting so many near-mishaps, this book is also about colorful people: the trappers, prospectors, miners, adventurers and gold-ingot thieves who constituted the fauna at the main bar in Yellowknife in those days.

Marathon Man is an uplifting story of an extraordinary achievement - all the more inspiring given that the author was an inexperienced long-distance runner and only 20 when embarking on his mission to run 35 marathons in 35 consecutive days.

At once an incredible adventure narrative and a penetrating biographical portrait, The River of Doubt is the true story of Theodore Roosevelt's harrowing exploration of one of the most dangerous rivers on earth.