The Age of Exploration—at least geographic exploration—is pretty much over. The white spaces have been filled in, by footprints or by Google Earth. But there is still plenty of adventure out there, and every year National Geographic lets us vote on who has done the best job of firing up our hunger for something challenging and wild and scary.
The current nominees for Adventurer of the Year include Recreati URL friend Alaister Humphreys, a man with serious trekking chops (including hikes across Iceland and a 46,000-mile global bike ride) who has refocused his energies on microadventures that promise to get more folks out of the house and into the woods.
In a normal year, we’d probably be urging you to cast your vote for Humphreys. A lot of olds have neither the resources nor the health to go bushwhacking through the jungles of Kalimantan, but they could manage a stout stroll through the natural country that’s might be just a few miles past the terminus of the local bus line. (Or, for sheer madness, we’d maybe recommend the Nepalese pair that paraglided off the summit of Everest, biked to a river, then kayaked the Ganges to where it empties into the Indian Ocean.)
This year, though, we have to toss our support behind 66-year-old writer and Arctic explorer Jon Turk, who spent this summer making a 1,485-mile circumnavigation of Ellesmere Island—one of the least hospitable places on earth.
With companion Erik Boomer, he hiked, kayaked, skied, faced off against polar bears and wolves, and completed the journey in 104 days. Let us save you the math: that’s more than 14 miles a day, through howling arctic winds, across slushy snow, half-frozen bays, fractured ice ridges. (The trip blog makes chilling but excellent reading.)
This isn’t Turk’s first time out, as he explains: “Over the decades, I have kayaked across the North Pacific and around Cape Horn, mountain biked through the Gobi desert, made first climbing ascents of big walls on Baffin Island, and first ski descents in the Tien Shan Mountains in Kyrgyzia.” He also authored one of the first textbooks on environmental science.
In recent years, he’s been intrigued with the shamans of Siberia, where he’s made five trips. He credits an ancient shaman, Moolynaut, with the mending of his pelvis, which had been fractured in an earlier mountaineering accident. His experiences are recounted in his latest book, The Raven’s Gift. He’s also authored accounts of his northern kayak explorations and a kayak-trimaran expedition from Japan to Alaska.
Turk had planned the Ellesmere adventure as his last: “my retirement party, the most physically demanding expedition of my life.” He made it home, sure that he didn’t want to push his body that hard again. “But that was a month ago,” he told a reporter. “I just got an opportunity to do something in Tibet that’s really cool. So I’m doing it. Retirement from something this hard? Yes. Retirement from remote places? No.”
(Photograph of the Boomer-Turk Ellesmere Island expedition by Jon Turk via jonturk.net)
