Your adventure went too far
Bicycling.com—an entertaining and informative web site—has an article about Al Newman, a hard-driving, semi-retired, 73-year-old entrepreneur who just rode his bike around Antarctica and thereby completed his quest to cycle on all seven continents. Reaction one: Whoa. Atta boy. Reaction two: I wish the article had been a little less evasive about how long he...
The Great American Rail Trail: a glass 52 percent full
Do you like maps and bike trails and visions of grandeur? Of course you do, and this is your website: the Great American Rail Trail is taking shape. For anyone with the time and ambition to ride across this continent, a smooth, safe and continuous bike trail would be an unalloyed godsend. No more risk...
Record-breaking round-the-world voyage for 70-year-old
In an extreme case of a nice elderly lady wandering away from home, 70-year-old Jeanne Socrates has become the oldest woman to sail around the world, solo, without stopping. The grandmother from Ealing, west London, completed her circumnavigation last week, when she docked her 38-foot yacht Nereida back in Victoria, B.C., after 259 days...
Travel notes: Do not try to leap over volcanic steam cracks
This ought to be an unnecessary warning, along with “Don’t pet the bison.” But it remains true that what is obvious to you and me might not be clear to someone else. In this case, a 15-year-old visiting Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Said teen thought it would make an excellent story if he were to...
Love, fractally
Simon Beck is back at his winter home at Les Arcs, the French ski resort, stomping more extraordinary designs into the snowy landscape. Beck, a self-employed map-maker from the south of England, laboriously paces out his complicated artworks, spending about 10 hours on each. Then he takes a photograph or two…and waits for his masterpiece...
Denali wins again
Let’s focus on the success here: climbing solo, AARP-eligible adventurer Lonnie Dupre reached 17,200 feet on Denali, in January. Not to belabor this, but he carried all his food and fuel, alone, to 17,200 feet, in January. He was planning to reach the 20,320-foot summit today but, as his website reports, “extremely...
Lonnie Dupre is back on Denali
Lonnie Dupre, the AARP-eligible adventurer who has focused on solo-climbing Denali in January, is currently taking his third run at the mountain.Two years ago, he made it to 17,200 feet–“just hours from the summit”–before bad weather intervened. Last year, even nastier weather pinned him down at a lower altitude. This time, he’s making the ascent...
Hell’s troika stops Nyad
Endurance swimmer Diana Nyad dove into Cuban waters on Saturday with plans to walk up a Key West beach on Wednesday, her sixty-third birthday. Sadly, after covering about half the distance over 60 hours, she has climbed out of the water. This was Nyad’s fourth attempt. Last September, she covered 82 miles (in around 40...
Duff scuttles plan to row to Iceland
Chris Duff has called it off. The 54-year-old adventurer and author had hoped to be the first person in modern times to row solo from Scotland to Iceland. He’d made it halfway, landing in the Faroe Islands after five days of paddling in late May. Now, after six frustrating weeks of waiting for good conditions...
Fire and rain
Mother Nature has been kicking up her heels over the past few weeks. In the sense that she’s been leveling leg punches to the head of mankind. She’s also been working on what looks like a preview of the end of days, using two strikingly opposed mechanisms. Colorado has been on fire. The nightmare burn...
AARP-eligible sea kayaker at midpoint on Scotland-Iceland row
Fifty-four-year-old sea kayaker Chris Duff has finished the first leg of a demanding, 450-mile voyage from Scotland to Iceland. He left the Scottish island of Lewis last Wednesday, rowed 40-50 miles a day and arrived Sunday in the Faroe Islands. This makes him one of the few travelers since St. Brendan to find the Faroe...
104-year-old sets paragliding record
It’s been a good few weeks for achievements by people who are so old that—typically—each new breath would be considered something of a triumph . Fauja Singh finished the London Marathon in late April; he is 101. A week or so earlier, Peggy McAlpine reclaimed the record for the oldest person to take part in a...
