Walter B. Cheadle’s diary tells his incredible story of travelling with Lord Milton, as they journeyed along the uncharted Yellowhead route in 1862–63. A miraculously successful expedition, the men traversed the continent, making their way from Quebec, through Saskatchewan, Alberta, up the Athabasca River, risking their lives opening the trails through the Canadian Rockies, and eventually arriving in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1863. Cheadle’s candid and gritty but also humorous account...

#1 New York Times Bestseller: The true story behind Netflix's Society of the Snow —A rugby team resorts to the unthinkable after a plane crash in the Andes.Spirits were high when the Fairchild F-227 took off from Mendoza, Argentina, and headed for Santiago, Chile. On board were forty-five people, including an amateur rugby team from Uruguay and their friends and family. The ski...

New York Times Bestseller: A Pulitzer Prize–winning author retraces the voyages of Captain James Cook: "Alternately hilarious, poignant, and insightful." — Seattle TimesCaptain James Cook's three epic journeys in the eighteenth century were the last great voyages of discovery. His ships sailed 150,000 miles, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, from Tasmania to Oregon, from Easter Island to Siberia. When Cook set off for the Pacific in 1768, a third o...

Michael Palin's terrific account of his journey through 18 countries bordering the Pacific Ocean, published by Phoenix for the first time.For almost a year, Michael Palin travelled through 18 countries on the perimeter of the world's largest ocean, in a spectacular journey of contrasts, drama and beauty.From head-hunters in Borneo to a meal of maggots in Mexico, his route takes him to some of the most politically volatile and physically demanding places on ...

His two companions dead, food and supplies vanished in a crevasse, Douglas Mawson was still one hundred miles from camp.On January 17, 1913, alone and near starvation, Douglas Mawson, leader of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, was hauling a sledge to get back to base camp. The dogs were gone. Now Mawson himself plunged through a snow bridge, dangling over an abyss by the sledge harness. A line of poetry gave him the will to haul himself back to the surface.Mawson was ...

Maria Coffey's Where the Mountain Casts Its Shadow is a powerful, affecting and important book that exposes the far reaching personal costs of extreme adventure.Without risk, say mountaineers, there would be none of the self-knowledge that comes from pushing life to its extremes. For them, perhaps, it is worth the cost. But when tragedy strikes, what happens to the people left behind? Why would anyone choose to invest in a future with a high-altitude risk-...

Patagonia is a strange and terrifying place, a vast tract of land shared by Argentina and Chile where the violent weather spawned over the southern Pacific charges through the Andes with gale-force winds, roaring clouds, and stinging snow. Squarely athwart the latitudes known to sailors as the roaring forties and furious fifties, Patagonia is a land trapped between angry torrents of sea and sky, a place that has fascinated explorers and writers for centuries. Magellan dis...

The amazing story of one man’s obsession with an enigmatic and deadly reptile.Raymond Ditmars (18761942), the first curator of reptiles at New York’s famous Bronx Zoo, brought cold-blooded animals to public attention as never before. Through wildly successful books and movies, he inspired a generation of zoologists with his fascination for snakes, insects, and other misunderstood creatures.Ditmars was among the most celebrated naturalists in America. His r...

Christian Beamish, a former editor at The Surfer’s Journal, envisioned a low-tech, self-reliant exploration for surf along the coast of North America, using primarily clothes and instruments available to his ancestors, and the 18-foot boat he would build by hand in his garage. How the vision met reality and how the two came to shape each other places Voyage of the Cormorant in the great American tradition of tales of life at sea, and what it has to teach us.

This is the story of a man who achieved what thousands only dream of. He shed the pressures of urban life as an international journalist and exchanged it for solitude, self-sufficiency and new purpose. He emigrated to Canada, found a plot of rock, trees and cliffs in a remote part of the British Columbian coastline, and moved in with typewriter, tent and the barest necessities to build his dream cabin. How he eventually built his log cabin, learned to live off the sea, adjusted to and work...

this is a factual recount about an adventurous young man that bored with life in main stream Britain decided to do what so many others before him did. He left Britain to travel the world and in doing so had many memorable and exciting experiences.This was in the sixties which was not so long ago, but the world then was very different. A world that seemed smaller than the world of today, where life was doubtless harder, but perhaps more caring, more generous and very much more person...

The Feasts of Memory is a book that inspires all those who left their homeland behind as well as those in search of new realms. Elias Kulukundis traces the course of a family’s emigration from Kasos island to Syros, the formerly commercial capital of Greece, and then from Syros to London and New York. He is equally at home describing expatriates around a dinner table in exile or delving into the motivating passions of the Aegean islands, some of them, in the words of The New Yorker Magazin...