Travel Survival

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.

"It’s a preposterous plan. Still, if you do get up it, it’ll be the hardest thing that’s been done in the Himalayas." Thus spoke Chris Bonington when Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker presented him with their plan to tackle the unscaled West Wall of Changabang - the Shining Mountain - in 1976. Bonington’s was one of the more positive responses; most felt the climb impossibly hard, especially for a two-man, lightweight expedition.

Rich with humor and natural history, this memoir describes 25 summers of back-to-the-earth adventure as author William L. Sullivan and his wife Janell build a log cabin by hand along a roadless river deep in the wilds of Oregon's Coast Range. Along the way they confront beaver in the refrigerator, raise a family, and puzzle out a murder mystery that had haunted their homestead site. Cabin Fever takes listeners to a warm world of kerosene lamplight, wood stoves, and ghost stories that may be true.

On 8 August 1914, five days after the outbreak of World War One, the Endurance, a wooden-hulled, coal-fired icebreaker, set sail for the South Pole, in a bid to complete the first-ever trans-Antarctic expedition, which would cross the continent from the Weddell Sea to Scott's base at Cape Evans, via the Pole. However, despite the best planning, the ship succumbs to the ice floes of the Weddell Sea, and is subjected to months of uncontrollable drifting before its crew makes a scramble for Elephant Island, where they battle constant cold and starvation.

How does a middle-aged wife, mother, and FBI agent pursue her dream of hiking 2,200 miles from Springer Mountain, Georgia, to Mount Katahdin, Maine? Sticks Harsha balances her trekking ambitions against the responsibilities of daily life by hiking the Appalachian Trail in sections, one piece at a time. Across a thirteen-year odyssey, Sticks discovers the best of America: the stunning beauty and diversity of nature, the quaintness of small towns, the quirkiness of fellow hikers, and, above all, the generosity of strangers.

Cade has managed to survive the duel with the Hydra Alpha - barely. But the Games are far from over. By order of their cruel and mysterious overlord, Abaddon, Cade and his friends are sent off to war against the Greys, a humanoid race who have far surpassed humans in technology on their home planet. This attempt to move up the leaderboard, however, leads Cade to a game-changing revelation: The Pantheon - the millennia-old alien masterminds behind the Games - have a weakness.

This is the remarkable ship's log/diary of Captain William Bligh, which describes in vivid detail what happened to him and his 18-person crew after the famous "Mutiny" on the "Bounty." In a boat only 23 feet long, Captain Bligh and his men voyaged for 4,000 miles to eventual safety. This book is a partial excerpt from Bligh's work, Voyage to the South Sea, which was commissioned by the English Majesty.

Just why exactly hadn't anyone attempted to motorcycle from India to Burma before, and how hard could it actually be? Against his better judgment, woefully unprepared, and desperately trying to impress his new aristocratic girlfriend, Andrew Benfield decides to find out.

In 1973, the Wilcox family sets off to sail around the world aboard the 40-foot sailboat, Vela. Thirteen months later, they are shipwrecked on a coral reef, with surf tearing a huge hole into the side of their boat. With years invested in saving money, preparing the boat, and learning to navigate by the stars, parents Chuck and Dawn refuse to give up. Can they overcome the emotional, physical, and financial challenges to transform from castaways into circumnavigators?

Buck and Garth try to retain their humanity as they fight for their lives. How many others can they help? Should they even try? No one knows what's going on except a handful of people and even they aren't sure what happened, but most importantly, how do they stop it? The survivors are rushing to Colorado in an epic race. Time is working against them in more ways than one.

In 1915, Sir Ernest Shackleton's attempt to traverse the Antarctic was cut short when his ship, Endurance, became trapped in ice. The disaster left Shackleton and his men alone at the frozen South Pole, fighting for their lives. Their survival and escape is the most famous adventure in history.

Why do we travel, what are we looking for, and will we recognize it if we find it? With the author’s 50th birthday looming, there seemed a need for something significant to happen. Not seeing an expiry date on his birth certificate made it hard to gauge when to have a mid-life crisis, but he’d almost definitely left it too late.

Journeys to Impossible Places continues the story Simon started in his phenomenal Sunday Times best seller Step by Step, which traced the first decades of his life from depressed and unemployed teenager through to his early TV programmes. Now Simon takes us on the epic and thrilling adventures that followed, in beautiful, tricky and downright dangerous corners of the world, as he travelled through the Tropics, to remote paradise islands, jungles dripping with heat and life and on nerve-wracking secret missions.

Bound for Distant Seas begins sailing author James Baldwin's epic tale of his second circumnavigation. His story is seasoned by his adventures during his first circumnavigation in 1984-86 as told in Across Islands and Oceans. Alone with little money aboard Atom, his now-engineless 28-foot sailboat, James embarks on his odyssey without the comforts and equipment most sailors consider essential.

Michael Palin is off again, this time to the seemingly desolate Sahara Desert. There's no easy way across, as he and his team discover on their most challenging expedition yet.

By the 6th Millennium, humans have spread across a large portion of the galaxy. They have colonized many habitable planets, looking for resources and more room for the expanding population. Zephro is one of those colonies. It is a jungle planet on the edge of the galaxy, with the large outpost city of Jalopolis as the only bastion of civilization. John, Chie, and some of their friends have just graduated and accepted an invitation to attend Jalopolis University on the planet of Zephro. Shortly after their arrival, a series of unfortunate events occur, transforming them from innocent high ...

'Another excellent volume, breaking down a single posting into a multitude of interesting individual stories.' Ron Powell joined the C-130 Hercules fleet as a pilot just as the Falklands War started. So his early months on the aircraft, affectionately known to its crews as Fat Albert, are dominated by frequent visits to Ascension Island in the South Atlantic. But this third volume of Shropshire Blue also chronicles flights across much of the rest of the world, from Las Vegas to New Zealand and northern Canada to the Falklands. Highlights include flights into Hong Kong, East Berlin, Beirut, ...

The Last Great Mountain tells the story of the first ascent of Kangchenjunga the third highest but reputedly the hardest mountain in the world. It was an astonishing achievement for a British team led by Everest veteran Charles Evans. Drawing on interviews, diaries and unpublished accounts, Mick Conefrey begins his story in 1905 with the disastrous first attempt on the mountain by a team led by Aleister Crowley, explores the three dramatic German expeditions of the the late 1920s and brings it all to a climax 50 years later with the first ascent by Joe Brown and George Band.

The North Pole, originally published in 1910, makes available Robert E. Peary's own account of his expedition in the Arctic. It provides hotly contested evidence that remains an indispensable key in deciding who deserved the coveted title "Discoverer of the North Pole". It is also a gripping adventure story that is impossible to put down.

Told with sincerity, humor, and wit, Trespassing Across America is both a fascinating account of one man's remarkable journey along the Keystone XL pipeline and a meditation on climate change, the beauty of the natural world, and the extremes to which we can push ourselves - both physically and mentally.