In 1995, Stephen Kirkpatrick joined a five-man expedition into the remote jungles of the Peruvian Amazon. Kirkpatrick's assignment was to document an area of the rainforest that had never before been photographed, nor by most accounts, ever explored by white men.Within hours of their departure, an inaccurate map and a series of bad decisions leave the group hopelessly lost in the depths of the Amazon jungle. What began as a career-making photo expedition quickly turned into a despe...

When the fishing vessel La Conte sinks suddenly at night in one-hundred-mile-per-hour winds and record ninety-foot seas during a savage storm in January 1998, her five crewmen are left to drift without a life raft in the freezing Alaskan waters and survive as best they can.One hundred fifty miles away, in Sitka, Alaska, an H-60 Jayhawk helicopter lifts off from America's most remote Coast Guard base in the hopes of tracking down an anonymous Mayday signal. A fisherman's worst nightm...

This true story began in August 1929. A group of eight prospectors, led by C.D.H. MacAlpine of the Dominion Explorers, flew into the Arctic in search of mineral wealth. Grossly underequipped, the expedition ran out of fuel and was stranded above the Arctic Circle. Within days, Western Canada Airways sent a rescue team headed by Captain Andy Cruickshank, in what was to become the most extensive aviation search in Canadian history.The searchers encountered trouble: turbulent weather,...

This expansive book chronicles the true story of twelve American sailors who were shipwrecked off the coast of Africa in 1815, captured by desert nomads, sold into slavery, and subjected to a hellish two-month journey through the perilous heart of the Sahara.The western Sahara is a baking hot and desolate place, home only to nomads and their camels, and to locusts, snails and thorny scrub—and its barren and ever-changing coastline has baffled sailors for centuries....

"A memoir as wild, engaging, stubborn, and authentic as that distant valley where [Cobb's] family staked out the last plot in America." —John Balzar, author of Yukon AloneIn 1973, Norma Cobb, her husband Lester and their five children—the oldest of whom was nine years old and the youngest, twins, barely one—pulled up stakes in the lower 48 and headed north to Alaska to follow a pioneer dream of claiming land under the Homestead Act. The only land available ...

Two members of a team who descended into the Huautla cave complex in Mexico describe their perilous and deadly trek into one of the world's deepest caves.The Huautla in Mexico is the deepest cave in the Western Hemisphere, possibly the world. Shafts reach skyscraper-depths, caverns are stadium-sized, and sudden floods can drown divers in an instant.With a two-decade obsession, William Stone and his 44-member team entered the sinkhole at Sotano de San August...

In the midst of the Blizzard of 1978, the tanker Global Hope floundered on the shoals in Salem Sound off the Massachusetts coast. The Coast Guard heard the Mayday calls and immediately dispatched a patrol boat. Within an hour, the Coast Guard boat was in as much trouble as the tanker, having lost its radar, depth finder, and engine power in horrendous seas. Pilot boat Captain Frank Quirk was monitoring the Coast Guard's efforts by radio, and when he heard that the patrol boat was ...

In the wilderness, one false step can make the difference between a delightful respite and a brush with death.On a beautiful summer afternoon in 1998, Dan Stephens, a 22-year-old canoeist, was leading a trip deep into Ontario's Quetico Provincial Park. He stepped into a gap among cedar trees to look for the next portage—and did not return. More than four hours later, Dan awakened with a lump on his head from a fall and stumbled deeper into the woods, confused.Three years la...

**#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Wager comes a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction “with all the pace and excitement of a movie thriller”(The New York Times) that unravels the greatest exploration mystery of the twentieth century—the story of the legendary British explorer who ventured into the Amazon jungle in search of a fabled civilization and never returned."[Grann is] one of the preeminen...

Would you send your teenager into the Alaska wilderness to work for people you never met? On June 9, 1973, 16-year-old Michael Travis put an advertisement in the Fairbanks Daily News Miner looking for work. What he got was more than he bargained for. Michael accepted an offer to help an older couple build a lodge at Melozi Hot Springs—a remote camp north of the Yukon River. The couple is shocked when they see a boy step out of the bush plane, instead of a capable man they sorely needed. Mi...

“I told God that if he would let us survive this night, I would make it mean something worthwhile. And then, somehow, I felt calmer than I have ever felt. Unreasonably so. Irrationally so. I looked over the scene of our wrecked life and I smiled–a crazy smile for sure–and I looked through the dark at the mad beauty of it.”–Jean SilverwoodAn exhilarating true-life adventure of one family’s extraordinary sea voyage of self-discovery and survival, trag...

By the same author as the bestselling Total Loss this is a new collection of terrifying and compelling accounts of yachts lost at sea. The seven deadly causes of loss continue to take their toll and Paul Gelder has compiled first-hand accounts of shipwreck and sinking caused by Collision Gear Failure Stress of Weather Faulty Navigation Fire Crew Failure and Exhaustion. The moving emotionally charged descriptions of shipwrecked sailors abandoning their yachts at sea will have you on the edg...