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.
Lasseter’s Reef: Will It Ever Be Found? Since its purported discovery more than 120 years ago, Lasseter’s Reef, a fabled gold-rich outback quartz vein, has eluded both fortune-hunters and researchers. Harold Lasseter was said to have found the fabled reef somewhere west of the MacDonnell Ranges in Central Australia in 1897. Since then, it has become a thing of legend.
Woman Trips Running From Charging Bison, Plays Dead & Misses Getting Run Over At Yellowstone National Park: You couldn’t make it up. A unnamed woman was recently touring Yellowstone National Park and found herself running for her life when she got too close to a charging bison. She tripped, fell flat on her face, and then played dead. Luckily for her, the charging bison pumped the brakes right before running her clean over.
A Thriller from the Death Zone: Writer Amy McCulloch was a young adventurer looking to challenge herself when she set her sights on Manaslu. On a guided expedition, she encountered the expected risks of high-altitude mountaineering, as well as a darker threat she’d never imagined. Members of her own team harassed and propositioned her in an environment where she was vulnerable. She returned home with a tale of resilience — and an idea for a new novel.
Managing risk in the Alpine
The Northwest Face of K6 West. Photo: Ian Welsted
One Pro’s Advice for Managing Risk in the Alpine: Ian Welsted, a Piolet d’Or recipient, alpinist, and mountain guide based in the Canadian Rockies, shares the lessons he’s learned from a lifetime of pushing it hard in the mountains.
It Took Just One Run for Toni Matt to Earn His Badass Legacy: Imagine going 150kph on a pair of skis. Unless you’re currently racing at the World Cup level, you have not gone that fast. Now imagine skiing at 150kph on a pair of straight, wooden boards, right before World War II. And that is one reason why Toni Matt was a badass.
Little Things That Kill You: When you’re outdoors, you tend to worry about grizzly bears, sharks, and mountain lions. But the real dangers are the parasites and microbes you can’t even see. Steven Rinella has been felled by the worst of them, and he offers an essential guide to prioritizing your panic.
Searching for Meteorites
Polar Light: This is an excerpt, slightly edited for the magazine Harpers, from the opening pages of a chapter on Antarctica, in the late Barry’s Lopez’s book, Horizon. It’s about a small group of people camped in the interior of the continent and searching for meteorites. It takes place during a stretch of rough weather that kept the party confined to their tents for days at a time.
