Recommended Reading

Starting in Mexico’s fir forests, onward through Nebraska’s cornfields, into southeastern Canada, and looping past Boston and New York City, Sara Dykman rode her bike along a path millions upon millions have circuited before, although she was the first human to do so. In her adventure memoir Bicycling with Butterflies, she writes about tracing the ten-thousand-mile monarch migration route on a rig she built from secondhand parts. Her nine-month trek was filled with bike touring elements any long-distance cyclist will recognize: the generosity of strangers, the bliss of hot showers and ice cream, and a range of campsites from bunkhouses to culverts to soccer fields. Along the way, Dykman brings us into the perspective of the butterflies, and you’ll discover the intricacies of metamorphosis, milkweed varieties, and monarch habitat, as well as the customs of passionate butterfly advocates, or, as Dykman calls them, Crazy Monarch People. Read this book and be transported into the everyday magic of two-legged and six-legged creatures great and small.

Natalie Warren and Ann Raiho connected over a shared love of paddling as teenagers at a Minnesota outdoor camp. Later, as college graduation approached, Raiho suggested an expedition inspired by the 1935 book Canoeing with the Cree, a classic outdoors tale of two men who paddled from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay, wending two thousand miles through muddy rivers, whitewater rapids, windy lakes, polar bear country, and dozens of riverfront towns and Indigenous communities. Aiming to be the first women to undertake the route, they set off in a seventeen-foot Langford Prospector dubbed Kawena Kinomaeta, meaning “no worries” in Cree, and eventually adopted a tough scruff of a dog named Myhan as their third boat companion. Hudson Bay Bound shares all the exuberance, self-doubt, relationship spats, exhaustion, and basic truths of their three-month voyage: “When in doubt, don’t think too much, and walk around the block in your hiking boots.” Isn’t it time you planned a big adventure with your best friend?

Searching for a Northeast polar passage from Europe to China, sixteenth century Dutch navigator William Barents and his crew of sixteen made a few attempts to sail through the Arctic, going farther than any Europeans had before. Proving that the third time is not always the charm, in the winter of 1596 they became stranded, stuck hard in the sea ice off of Nova Zembla, two hundred miles north of Siberia. Barents and his men built a cabin from their boat’s salvaged lumber—ominously, their sole carpenter perished before construction had even begun—and hunkered down for a year of desperate survival, keeping the constant threats of polar bears, frostbite, hunger, and one another at bay. Journalist Andrea Pitzer ventured to the Arctic more than once to track this story, studying Barents’ ship log and other direct accounts from his crew. Icebound is an engrossing, bone-chilling history, an open porthole into the dreams and nightmares of the great Age of Exploration.

What The Joy of Cooking is to home chefs, Waves and Beaches has been to sea lovers for nearly sixty years. The comprehensive tome is part fundamental instructional and part voluminous love letter to the alchemy of where land meets the sea. Willard Bascom, an engineer, adventurer, photographer, cinematographer, and scientist who pioneered a number of ocean technologies, including being one of the first to suggest neoprene as a wetsuit material, wrote the book in 1963. When Bascom died in a car accident in 2000, oceanographer Kim McCoy, Bascom’s friend and protégé, inherited the beloved manuscript. This third edition reflects both authors and their seventy years of experience on shorelines on all seven continents, as well as an update devoted to the history and effects of climate change. Four hundred pages stuffed with physics illustrations, encyclopedic text, and gorgeous photography makes for essential reading that belongs on the bookshelves of all coastal explorers.