Don’t know about you, but I’m getting a lot of reading done these days. I just finished To Kill a Mockingbird, which I still can’t believe I made it through school without reading. On my nightstand are The Overstory by Richard Powers and Edge of the Map by Johanna Garton. Coventry by Rachel Cusk calls to me to finish it with a reminder of how lucid close observation can be. There’s a Stephen King open on my Kindle app…which one? Ah, yes, The Institute. Oh, and Joni just finished a loaner copy of Michelle Obama’s Becoming and I get it next.
Sometimes, though, you want to lose yourself in a classic adventure tale, where a human sets a goal and then launches on a quest to accomplish that goal. Can they climb this? Can they paddle this faster than anyone? Can they survive a plane crash in the Sahara? These five are some of my faves (four in photo because Emerald Mile is out on loan). I’ve read them all more than once, and each time I discover new delights within.
The Emerald Mile
In 1983, the Colorado River was in flood. The winter had seen the biggest El Niño on record, and the mountains of the Southwest were fat with snow. Late May, the temperature shot into the 80s and the snowpack melted almost all at once. Engineers at Glen Canyon Dam released massive amounts of water downstream, and into this maelstrom paddled river guide Kenton Grua and two of his friends, piloting the wooden dory that gives Kevin Fedarko’s book its name.
Grua was obsessed with the Grand Canyon—he was the first person to hike the length of it—and he had a purist’s connection to wooden boats, which had been used on the Colorado since John Wesley Powell’s first descent in the 1800s, and in particular to the Emerald Mile, which Grua patched and repaired after a horrific encounter with a rock nearly destroyed the boat. Grua had long wanted to beat the canyon speed record of 48 hours, and with the high water that May, and ignoring the admonishments of authorities to stay off the river, he thought he could.
Fedarko’s masterful narrative is a page-turner, even when you know the outcome (I’ve read it three times). He sets the story in motion and then slides from one current to another with the nuance stroke of an oar. There’s the strangely compelling study of hydrodynamics and dam construction, the romance and lore of wooden boats, and the deep passion of one man so unconcerned with fame that it was years before his canyon thru-hike was well-known beyond the flickering light of Colorado River campfires. The Emerald Mile as layered as the canyon walls themselves and as fast-moving as a river in flood. Put it on your list.
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Psychovertical
Andy Kirkpatrick is a brilliant thinker and bold alpinist who happens to be severely dyslexic. In school years, this left him adrift with his struggles, and not until he found climbing and art did life start to come into registration for him. His first alpine climbs were way beyond his abilities or experience, but he somehow survived. Compelled to share what he found in the mountains, and how he continued when partners blanched, he wrestled for two years to his first effort into words. Two years. That’s more time than many people spend writing books, let alone one story, but Kirkpatrick is nothing if not dogged. From the U.K., he faxed it off to Climbing magazine, where it was accepted by legendary editor Michael Kennedy, and from that day on Andy was a writer.
This winner of the 2008 Boardman-Tasker prize is half memoir, half account of his 12-day solo climb of El Cap’s Reticent Wall in Yosemite. The chapters alternate between glimpses of his past (gritty childhood, hardscrabble adolescence) and time on the wall, which is refreshingly candid and human. Example: “What was I doing? This was insane. I’d wasted most of the day just hauling my bag up one pitch. How on earth would I ever make it to the top? … Soloing is all about self-confidence, and right then I had zero.”
In the early chapters, as the neophyte alpinist takes risk after risk, I found myself biting my knuckle, saying No, Andy, no… He strings long runouts with zero chance of protection, commits to pitches where there’s no turning back, gets hit by sloughs and has his boot shorn from his foot. Yet somehow he survives, and this hard man with a soft heart returns to spin his yarns with brutal honesty and unflinching introspection, at his most poignant when he struggles with the conflicting pulls of his climbing obsession and his commitment to family.
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Wind, Sand and Stars
You know Antoine de Saint-Exupery as the author of The Little Prince and perhaps as the wordsmith who wrote, “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” He was also a pioneering aviator who carried mail across the Mediterranean from Europe to Africa and flew mail routes in South America. Wind, Sand and Stars is the tidy, taut tale of those early years of commercial aviation—the 1920s and 1930s—when airplanes seemed little more than wind-up toys and crashes and strandings were frequent. Yet, in Saint-Exupery’s words, the experience of being a human in places where no human belongs is timeless. Consider this passage, from being caught in a storm over Chile:
“There I was safe out of the clouds; but I was still blinded by the thick whirling snow and I had to hang on to my lake if I wasn’t to crash into one of the sides of the funnel. So down I went, and I flew round and round the lake, about a hundred and fifty feet above it, until I ran out of fuel. After two hours of this, I set the ship down on the snow—and over on the nose she went.
“When I dragged myself clear of her I stood up. The wind knocked me down. I stood up again. Over I went a second time. So I crawled under the cockpit and dug me out a shelter in the snow. I pulled a lot of mail sacks round me, and there I lay for two days and two nights.”
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Paddling North
In 1962, single mothers of four generally didn’t wade into the Pacific Ocean and swim into the unknown with no hope of turning back, but Audrey Sutherland wasn’t like most single mothers. From the time she was a little girl in Southern California until she passed away at age 94, Sutherland lived emphatically by the mantra she expressed at every turn: go simple, go solo, go now. And so she jumped in the waters off Molokai, towed a raft with supplies, camped on empty beaches at night, and swam the north coast by herself.
At age 59, this school counselor determined to paddle the colder waters of Alaska. She ordered a nine-foot inflatable kayak and heaps of maps and for the next 20 summers she traveled north to kayak from island to island. These trips form the backbone of Paddling North, Sutherland’s ode to self-sufficiency, stitched together with recipes and tips and nuggets of advice. Sutherland was a tough woman, and her prose is often as direct as a cold wave across the bow, but her personal imperatives hang in the air like challenges”: “I didn’t need to get ‘away.’ I needed to get ‘to.’ To simplicity. I wanted to be lean and hard and sunbrowned and kind. Instead, I felt fat and soft and white and mean.”
At just 160-some pages, Paddling North can be consumed in one long sitting, but that would be the equivalent of motoring the Northwest Passage. Better to take the leisurely pace of a blow-up kayak, subject to the push and pull of Sutherland’s tidal adventures, as lingering and memorable as a sunset in the far north, seen from a deserted beach on an uninhabited island.
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Lands of Lost Borders
Some books you read for the story, some books you read for the writing, and some books you read to witness in amazement a talent truly blessed. Such a talent is Kate Harris, whose story of a Silk Road bicycling journey we featured in AJ quarterly (if I could have excepted the entire book, I would have). Harris packs a universe into every paragraph of Lands of Lost Borders and weaves prose-poetry in nearly every line. Consider the opening of the book:
“The end of the world was always just out of reach. Cracked asphalt deepened to night beyond the reach of our headlamps, the thin beams swallowed by blackness that receded before us now matter how fast we biked. Light was a kind of pavement thrown down in front of our wheels, and the road went on and on. If I ever reach the end, I remember thinking, I’ll fly off the end of the world. I pedaled harder.”
At the outset of her ride, launching from Istanbul, she and longtime friend Mel Yule first miss their ferry stop across the Bosporus, then at their first turn, one goes right and one goes left. Rather than being inauspicious, it’s a profoundly symbolic reminder that it isn’t so much which way you go, but that you do go, and you pay attention to what you find along the way. Audrey Sutherland would have been proud.
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Every once in a while I read a book so good, I immediately go out and try to buy all of that authors books. Kate Harris’s book Land of Lost Borders is one of those books. I was a bit disappointed that it was her first, and that there was nothing more for me to read, but excited to see what she comes out with next.
What I loved about the book is that it reminded me of some of my own, lesser, adventures. She is great at capturing the awe, and boredom, and pain, and uncertainty that are the reality of travel.
I agree, such a wonderful book even for non bikers.
I have not read very many adventure books but I am interested so thanks for the list. I read Kon Tiki for the first time last year and it was amazing. I was humbled by the story of those men sailing 4000 miles across the Pacific in a raft built to centuries old specifications.
I read Kon Tiki the first time when I was a teenager, and it filled me with a sense of curiosity and wonder at the world that I haven’t been able to shake since. Thor Heyerdahl will always be one of my greatest heroes.
As a small Specialty Outdoor Retailer struggling to survive the pandemic, I haven’t had much time lately for non-essential reading. But I’ve kept Paddling North by my bedside, reading a few pages every night. I know a little bit about the part of the world she was paddling, my wife and I having spent some time with my brother and sister-in-law at their place on Stuart Island, overlooking the eastern channel of the Inside Passage.
So, vicariously with Audrey I suffered the cold and wet, the headwinds, reef and bear scares and all the delights of days and nights in incredible places, lovely solitude and chance meetings with kind strangers. Oh, and don’t forget the wonderful meals she created out of foragings blended with provisions, together with wine picked up in outposts along the way.
I finished a couple nights ago, sad to reach journey’s end and especially to learn that she had died a few years ago at 94, and I would never be able to carry out my plan to get in touch and tell her how she has lifted me up.
So many wonderful books I’ve added to my reading list. I would add “A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca” to this list. It’s one of the countless books I read years ago and yet still recall vividly.
Thanks for the list! I feel the need to give a pitch for Endurance by Alfred Lansing. Even though you know how the story ends, it is a fantastic book. Sir Ernest Shackleton, still leading by example 100 yrs later, can show us a thing or two about how to hunker down, stay positive, and entertain ourselves for months. Our homes aren’t isolated ships frozen in ice floes… but kinda?
A little/ less known writer is William Willis. His Epic Voyage of the Seven Little Sisters deserves a place on any self-respecting adventure bookshelf. Old school ocean rafter in the Thor Heyerdahl mold, but with added escapes from tropical prison islands and fighting off aggressive lepers. T. R. Pearson’s Seaworthy is a good biography of him also.
Wind, Sand and Stars has been a beloved companion for 30 years. But Bruce Chatwin was the person who first transfixed me at a cathartic personal level with his stories in In Patagonia. I must have been around 16 or 17, but immediately started expanding my horizons and longing for exploration and discovering the world at large. Between Chatwin and the biography of Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, the classic solo British explorer, I was hooked, and went spiraling off into a life of wilderness adventure travel, guiding, and exploring the remote corners of the world whenever I could. I silently thank them and pay homage to all of the wonderful adventure travel writers, old and new, as I look back and reflect on the endless amazing adventures and personal growth and perspective that adventure travel affords! I would credit travel and adventure for fully half of my life-long education, and value it beyond price! Thanks so much for sharing more good reads with us! Adventure Journal is also an astonishing and wonderful creation and opens such a variety of windows into all sort of amazing experiences…so thank you, thank you, thank you!
This situation has really provided the opportunity to plow through some books.
What do you think of Overstory?
Just Finished: Our Towns by James and Deborah Fallows
Currently: Billionaire Wilderness by Justin Farrell
Up Next: The Road by Cormac McCarthy (timing feels right)
Favorite Adventure Book: Down the Great Unknown by Edward Dolnick
^ can’t believe the ride those men sent it on
I thought it was brilliant, it a little overwrought at times.
“The Road” is very dark; please post your thoughts about when you finish it.
I enjoyed it. It was an easy book to read in a time sense, but tough mentally. It is dark and emotional. Big no thank you on an apocalypse.
This book also introduced me to Cormac McCarthy’s other works, which I have enjoyed even more.
DLehm, what do you think of Billionaire Wilderness so far? I was so excited when I read a summary, and was left wanting halfway through and ended up returning it to the library unfinished.
Ha, I exact had same experience.
Hahaha that makes me feel so much better coming from you Justin. It was just too academic for me. If I wanted to read academic papers, I would. I borrowed the book to get a creatively woven story that highlighted both sides of a complex issue and ended up with so many citations and no context, I may as well have been on Google Scholar!
Hey all. So I did read it and found it fine. I wouldn’t really say it was ground breaking – it was more a form of confirmation bias for me. I know that area well and believe certain things about the super elites – so nothing really shocking. I guess some of the statistics were a little staggering, but other than that it didn’t tell me much that was new. Though I will say it was interesting learning about how the rich use conservation as a tool to increase their wealth. Land issues are very complex and there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of a solution.
I remember thinking the parts going into the subjects’ desire to be seen as a local were humorous, as well as some of the other anecdotes clearly portraying these people’s unawareness.
Funny you mentioned the academic part – I had the same thought. Said to myself “Princeton Press makes sense.” Felt like a thesis paper made into a book.
Lastly, I envy your ability to put a book down unfinished. I cannot do that and I have trudged through many a lame book because of it.
I assume it was the author’s PhD dissertation turned into a book. I went to grad school for US History and recognize the structure of those works pretty clearly. It’s a problem, in my opinion, with the intrusion of social science into the humanities. Billionaire Wilderness would be told better as a human story, free from adhering to a scaffolding that mimics hard sciences. It’s an important story that would be read more widely if it was written as something fun to read, not chunks of text backing up graphs. I was first person to check it out at my library, and I can see why.
Thank you for the list (and your fine writing). I’ve read some of the pieces that you note but not Kate Harris’ book, which I will try.
For readers; other books that also may entice, entertain and edify:
Horizon, Barry Lopez; Seasons, Ellen Meloy; River of Lost Souls, Jon P. Thompson; Young Men and Fire, Norman Maclean (25th Ann. edition); Jim Harrison, Dead Man’s Float (poetry).
Lopez is a seasoned and iconic writer and still with us. Thompson, a writer/editor at High Country News did great research in his book. Meloy gone for a decade or more but having a quiver of great publications. Maclean passed on, but the Y men and F out in a 25th edition, is quite the story and read. Harrison with his crusty style featured books, novels, articles, poetry: Dead Man’s being his last.
Much of the political and Covid-19 landscape dark; and Casimiro’s suggestions, and other reads, offering a flash of light, insight and joy. (Thank you SC, for the above and for your endless stream of AJ pieces.)
Thanks for this list, I am currently reading Lost in the Jungle by Yossi Ghinsberg which I would also recommend and The Lost Men by Kelly Tyler Lewis.
Wonderful source of great reads!
Thanks for all the recommendations. I just finished, Highway of Diamonds: an international travel adventure by J. Jaye Gold. What an AMAZING book! I got hooked by the adventure story, loved the dynamic characters and came to really appreciate the subtle life lessons woven throughout.
Here is a link to the first three chapters of the book: https://a.co/1P4a3Ld
All the best to you,
Ian
I have just finished Kate Harris’ book Lands of Lost Borders. What a writer… what a wondrous explorer!
Thank you for the recommendations. I’m going to start with “Lands of Lost Borders” and work my way through the list. A book I’d like to add to the list is Alvah Simon’s “North to the Night,” about his remarkable sailing journey north of the Arctic Circle. I consider this book a must-read in the adventure book genre.
How did I miss this list when it was first published on AJ?!
Thanks for re-posting it!
My reading list just filled up!
I’ve been rereading David Quammen’s Wild thoughts from Wild Places – It’s a thoughtful and diverse collection of stories – highly recommended . I’m adding Kate Harris’ book to my Spring list.
These all look grand! The Emerald Mile is one of my favs. This list does need one addition:
In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette
by Hampton Sides
On July 8, 1879, Captain George Washington De Long and his team of thirty-two men set sail from San Francisco on the USS Jeanette. Heading deep into uncharted Arctic waters, they carried the aspirations of a young country burning to be the first nation to reach the North Pole.
Two years into the voyage, the Jeannette’s hull was breached by an impassable stretch of pack ice, forcing the crew to abandon ship amid torrents of rushing of water. Hours later, the ship had sunk below the surface, marooning the men a thousand miles north of Siberia, where they faced a terrifying march with minimal supplies across the endless ice pack.
Enduring everything from snow blindness and polar bears to ferocious storms and labyrinths of ice, the crew battled madness and starvation as they struggled desperately to survive. With thrilling twists and turns, In The Kingdom of Ice is a tale of heroism and determination in the most brutal place on Earth.
From the 2020 National Outdoor Book Awards; (2, semi-adventure reads). The Only Kayak, A Journey into the Heart of Alaska, Kim Heacox; The World Beneath Their Feet, Mountaineering Madness & The Deadly Race to Summit the Himalayas, Scott Ellsworth. Fedarko’s & Harris’ books I shared with multiple friends & Paddling North is one my partner enjoyed while we were in Maui 1.5 yrs. ago. Thanks for the update on the reads.
*typetypetypetypetypetypetypetypetypetypetype* (looks up blankly; robotic monotone voice) What are these “books” you speak of? *typetypetypetypetypetypetype…..*
I would add several wonderful reads by Mark Jenkins. Mark wrote a column in Outside for several yrs called The Hard Way. His book The Hard Way is a compilation of many of these short stories that are simply mind blowing. In addition – A Man’s Life, and Off The Map are two outstanding adventure books of Mark’s chronicling some very ambitious and previously unprecedented explorations.
Great list! I would def take these on my trip this summer. I have been plannig this trip since last spring. I even bought a new boat by Lund. I can share your article on my web directory about boating and travelling. Would you mind?