When we’re not outdoors, we get our adventure fix by exploring social media and the web. Sometimes we’re a little too plugged in and browsing adventure reads can turn from minutes to hours. To nourish your own adventure fix, here are some of the best adventure links we’ve discovered this week.
Heart of Sharkness: It was a show of unprecedented aggression in a surfers’ paradise: 10 shark attacks in the past two years, three of them fatal. Now the surfers are biting back, calling for a posse to hunt and kill the offending animals. Bucky McMahon paddles straight into the insanely unsafe waters of Réunion Island, a little slice of France off the coast of Africa, and reports on a raging turf war between man and beast.
You’re Either an Explorer, or You’re Not. Which One Are You? What is it about exploration that prompts people to take gigantic risks? Why do some of us embrace the unknown –- even when death is at stake –- while others only dream? Why are we sitting in our office chairs instead of making our first attempts at the South Pole?
The Sadist of Tennessee
Barkley Marathons race director, Lazarus Lake. Photo: Alexis Berg
Good Luck Morons: Lazarus Lake and His Impossible Race: Thirty years ago, an East Tennessee guy with the unlikely name of Lazarus started the most demanding footrace in the world. The Barkley Marathons were already famous among extreme athletes when a 2014 documentary film caught the wider world’s attention. The story of the race is great. The story of the man behind it is even better. That is, if Lazarus Lake really exists.
Taking a Fall: The 200kph, 10,000m, 3-Minutes-To-Impact Survival Guide: You’re 10km up, alone and falling without a parachute. Though the odds are long, a small number of people have found themselves in similar situations — and lived to tell the tale.
High on Everest. Photo: Anja Blacha
Death on Everest: The Boom In Climbing Tourism is Dangerous and Unsustainable: The last days of Everest’s spring window for 2019 witnessed the deaths of 11 climbers. Images of hundreds of mountaineers queuing to reach the summit and reports of climbers stepping over dead bodies dismayed people around the world. Many wondered how human beings had got it so wrong.
‘Life’s Like Mountaineering – Never Look Down’: The Wisdom of Sir Edmund Hillary: If standing on top of the world’s highest mountain isn’t enough to give you good perspective, we don’t know what is. Ed Hillary had worldly wisdom by the bucketload.
The World According to Messner
Reinhold Messner: The Man Who Left His Life On the Mountain: Haunted by the brother he lost in the Himalaya and abandoned by “fascist” former climbing partners, Reinhold Messner nevertheless remains the face of mountaineering’s bitter history. In this archive piece from 2016, GQ speaks to the boundary-breaking adventurer about Nazi benefactors, the Everest “kindergarten” and how three nights at the edge of death gave him a perspective he’d never had before.
A Fascination With Disaster: The storied and disaster-ridden history of arctic exploration isn’t over for many scholars around the globe. Adriana Craciun, a Boston University professor of English is still asking questions, and delving into various Arctic mysteries and catalogs of artifacts.
