Recommended Reading

From Borneo to the Brooks Range, Roman Dial is a pioneering legend of deep adventure—endurance racing, mountaineering, forest canopy climbing, packrafting (he wrote the book on the last). Lauded as a National Geographic Explorer, Dial has said he finds freedom in wilderness without permits, tents without floors, and travel without trails. The Adventurer’s Son is a memoir of those pursuits and of how he and his wife, Peggy, raised their two children to love the outdoors—until tragedy struck when their twenty-seven-year-old son disappeared on a backcountry trek in a Costa Rican jungle. The Dials endured a two-year mystery of dead-ends, drug smugglers, despair, and second-guessing. Should they have dropped their lifetime of expeditions for “team sports, Chuck E. Cheeses, the local cineplex?” In this riveting account of a family’s search for answers, Dial shares a thought-provoking investigation of what it means to embrace life’s wild uncertainties.

Combining travel and sports writing with cultural history, Why We Swim is a bracing collection of stories from the world’s untamed waters and community pools, and writer Bonnie Tsui, a near-daily swimmer whose parents met poolside, is the perfect guide to the life aquatic. From the free-diving superpowers of Southeast Asia’s sea nomads to the habits of Olympian world record-holders, she ponders how humans have evolved for land yet been drawn for millennia to water: Neolithic cave paintings featuring swimmers date back ten thousand years. If you’re part selkie—a half-seal, half-human character of North Atlantic folklore—then Tsui might inspire you to try diving two hundred feet down in the ocean, or, if extreme cold is more your thing, joining the International Ice Swimming Association. Even if you’re like me, recovering from a childhood of failed pool lessons, here is the push to cannonball, once and for all, into the deep end.

Anthropologist, ethnobotanist, and award-winning author of twenty books, including One River, The Wayfinders, and Into the Silence, Wade Davis has a soul of many passions. One of his strongest is for Colombia, the land and people that stole his heart as a teenager in 1968, before cocaine and civil war transformed one of the earth’s most ecologically and geographically diverse regions into a nightmare of bloody terror. After decades of strife, the country now is healing, creating national parks, restoring indigenous rights, and opening to travel. Charting the wonders of this renewal, Davis turned to Colombia’s lifeline, the thousand-mile Magdalena River. With four maps and vivid photography, his new book journeys to snowcapped peaks, the Amazon rainforest, impossibly green wetlands, and coastal sands—where “magical realism is simply journalism.” Best shelved between Gabriel García Márquez and Norman Maclean, Magdalena is a magnetic chronicle of the sacredness of water as the source of all things.

Wrench, machete, spork, an evening dress—it’s tough to whittle down what you truly need for a night outside. Have you ever wondered how Amelia Earhart or Reinhold Messner loaded their bags? Now you can examine the must-haves of some of the world’s greatest adventurers with Expeditions Unpacked, a hardcover visual tour of gear lists from twenty-five major journeys by foot, car, bicycle, kayak, kiteski, hybrid balloon, and more. Appreciate the comfort of Vivobarefoot shoes on Laura Bingham’s first descent of the Essequibo River, admire the resourcefully stuffed single satchel of Nellie Bly for her global circumnavigation, and consider the breathability failure of Robert Falcon Scott’s gabardine jackets in Antarctica. Author Ed Stafford, who holds a Guinness world record as the first person to walk the Amazon River, reveals the ebb and flow of expedition technology and human whimsy, from wolfskin mittens to Gore-Tex to the occasional, just-gotta-have-it accordion.