Resources

At ten miles, the Strait of Gibraltar is the shortest of the Oceans Seven swims, though with more than three hundred ships passing through each day, it’s one of the most challenging. The rest are the North Channel between Northern Ireland and Scotland, twenty-one miles; Cook Strait between New Zealand’s North and South islands, sixteen miles; Moloka’i Channel between Oahu and Moloka’i, twenty-seven miles; English Channel, twenty-one miles; Catalina Channel between Santa Catalina Island and Los Angeles, twenty miles; and Tsugaru Strait between Japan’s Honshu and Hokkaido islands, twelve miles. As of publication, nineteen swimmers had successfully completed all seven.

Photos: Antonio Bellido, antoniobellido.es, @antoniobellido__

While the twenty-six-hundred-year-old bald cypress in this story is indeed ancient, somewhere in California’s White Mountains there stands a bristlecone pine that’s five thousand years old. But even that tree is a mere pup compared to Pando, a stand of aspen trees (a grove