By hiking 2,181 miles in 46 days -- an average of 47 miles per day -- she became the first female to ever set that mark. But this is not a book about records or numbers; this is a book about endurance and faith, and most of all love. The most amazing part of this story is not found at the finish, but is discovered through the many challenges, lessons and relationships that present themselves along the trail. This is Jennifer's story, in her own words, about how she started this journey with a love for hiking and more significantly a love for her husband Brew. Together, they were able to overcome rugged mountains and raging rivers, sleet storms and 100 degree heat, shin-splints and illnesses. They made new friends and tested old friendships; they shared together laughter, and tears -- a lot of tears. But, through it all, they fell more in love with one another and with the wilderness. By completing this extraordinary amateur feat, Jennifer rose above the culture of multi-million dollar sports contracts that is marked by shortcuts and steroids. This is the story of a real person doing something remarkable. Jennifer Pharr Davis is a modern role-model for women -- and men. She is an authentic hero.

    Here, far from crowds that haunt Blenheim Palace, Stonehenge, Stratford-upon-Avon, or Haworth, I find the England of my dreams--quiet, pastoral, and sometimes endearingly eccentric...."Join Susan Allen Toth as she takes you along on her fascinating journeys to London, to enchanting gardens, to a fairy-tale castle on the Cornish coast with a history-laden past--and to sights both hidden and known. With a novelist's eye for detail and an intrepid traveler's love of adventure, Ms. Toth reveals the secrets of impeccable preparation, while leaving plenty of room for surprising discoveries. And ever practical, she offers her experience on how to keep a travel journal, how to be your own travel agent, how much time to allow for your visits, as well as the pleasures of bed-and-breakfasts, supermarket souvenirs, and hidden gardens in the city of London. Lively, trenchant, personal, and above all, entertaining, England As You Like It puts the armchair and real-life traveler under the wing of a seasoned and multitalented tour guide."A delightfully written book full of anecdotes and tips, lived and learned by the author. Toth's personable style makes readers feel as though they are actually traveling with her through the charming corners and coves of Great Britain."--The Toronto Sun

    Port--launched a secondhand 18-foot canvas canoe into the Minnesota River at Fort Snelling for an ambitious summer-long journey from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay. Without benefit of radio, motor, or good maps, the teenagers made their way over 2,250 miles of rivers, lakes, and difficult portages. Nearly four months later, after shooting hundreds of sets of rapids and surviving exceedingly bad conditions and even worse advice, the ragged, hungry adventurers arrived in York Factory on Hudson Bay--with winter freeze-up on their heels. First published in 1935, Canoeing with the Cree is Sevareid's classic account of this youthful odyssey. The newspaper stories that Sevareid wrote on this trip launched his distinguished journalism career, which included more than a decade as a television correspondent and commentator on the CBS Evening News. Now with a new foreword by Arctic explorer, Ann Bancroft.

    One midsummer week over sixty years later, Olivia Laing walked Woolf's river from source to sea. The result is a passionate investigation into how history resides in a landscape - and how ghosts never quite leave the places they love. Along the way, Laing explores the roles rivers play in human lives, tracing their intricate flow through literature and mythology alike. To the River excavates all sorts of stories from the Ouse's marshy banks, from the brutal Barons' War of the thirteenth century to the 'Dinosaur Hunters', the nineteenth-century amateur naturalists who first cracked the fossil code. Central among these ghosts is, of course, Virginia Woolf herself: her life, her writing and her watery death. Woolf is the most constant companion on Laing's journey, and To the River can be read in part as a biography of this extraordinary English writer, refracted back through the river she loved. But other writers float through these pages too - among them Iris Murdoch, Shakespeare, Homer and Kenneth Grahame, author of the riverside classic The Wind in the Willows. The result is a wonderfully discursive read - which interweaves biography, history, nature writing and memoir, driven by Laing's deep understanding of science and cultural history. It's a beautiful, lyrical work that marks the arrival of a major new writer.

    What we learned about ourselves and about each other. And the sorry tale of how I came to walk a mile in my underpants… In February 2016 I asked Alex, my youngest son, if he wanted to come for a walk with me. Why? Because I wanted a physical challenge before I was too old for a physical challenge – and I wanted some father/son time before Alex went to university and things were never quite the same again. But I wasn’t a walker: I was a writer: someone who spent his days slumped over a desk. The furthest I’d walked was four miles with the dog on a sunny day. So I had to get fit, I had to find out if I could walk 90 miles in 5 days – and I had to come face to face with the ghosts that had haunted me for ten years. “I absolutely love it. Such an easy read and very humorous.” ‘Father, Son and the Pennine Way’ takes you from the February afternoon when I asked Alex to come for a walk with me, to the day we sent off from Malham in North Yorkshire, to the moment we strode up the final hill into Dufton, just outside Carlisle. …But it’s not a book about walking. This is a book about a father/son relationship told through a walk. If you want a traditional guidebook, don’t buy the book. But if you want to be entertained, inspired, amused and taken on a wonderful journey through the Yorkshire Dales, then you’ll love this book. “A brilliant story. Really well put together and very funny.”

    The farm was high up a mountain, nearly impassable in winter. The neighbors were surly, or perhaps just unused to foreigners. But the setting was breathtaking, and soon it changed Jenny's and Robert's lives.What began as the somewhat conventional dream of a young, ambitious couple from London looking for a weekend home quickly became a different vision. Horatio's mother, romantic and tenacious, found it impossible to leave the fierce and beautiful land. She abandoned her job, her social world, and eventually her marriage to raise her two sons in the company of a herd of sheep, a few dogs, and the badgers, foxes, and mice who had prior claim to her new world. While other boys were going to films and listening to rock music, Horatio was weaning ewes and watching weather and surviving the furor of irascible neighbors. His childhood was marked by wonder and joy, and it is that wonderment that he bestows upon the reader as he recounts the story of the ancient, sometimes brutal, way of life on a hill farm. This wise book is a moving tribute to his mother, both beautiful and brave.

    Culled from the mud-spattered pages of her journal, this is her unvarnished account of her adventures and research.

    His first tunnel trips inspired a lifelong fascination with exploring underground worlds, from the derelict subway stations and sewers of New York City to sacred caves, catacombs, tombs, bunkers, and ancient underground cities in more than twenty countries around the world. Underground is both a personal exploration of Hunt’s obsession and a panoramic study of how we are all connected to the underground, how caves and other dark hollows have frightened and enchanted us through the ages.In a narrative spanning continents and epochs, Hunt follows a cast of subterraneaphiles who have dedicated themselves to investigating underground worlds. He tracks the origins of life with a team of NASA microbiologists a mile beneath the Black Hills, camps out for three days with urban explorers in the catacombs and sewers of Paris, descends with an Aboriginal family into a 35,000-year-old mine in the Australian outback, and glimpses a sacred sculpture molded by Paleolithic artists in the depths of a cave in the Pyrenees.Each adventure is woven with findings in mythology and anthropology, natural history and neuroscience, literature and philosophy. In elegant and graceful prose, Hunt cures us of our “surface chauvinism,” opening our eyes to the planet’s hidden dimension. He reveals how the subterranean landscape gave shape to our most basic beliefs and guided how we think about ourselves as humans. At bottom, Underground is a meditation on the allure of darkness, the power of mystery, and our eternal desire to connect with what we cannot see.

    Bolingbroke-Kent proves a great travelling companion - compassionate, spirited and with a sharp eye for human oddity' Benedict Allen, author of Edge of Blue Heaven and  Into the Abyss  'A transformative journey that gripped me from the very first page' Alastair Humphreys, author of The Boy Who Biked the World and Microadventures'Remote, mountainous and forbidding, here shamans still fly through the night, hidden valleys conceal portals to other worlds, yetis leave footprints in the snow, spirits and demons abound, and the gods are appeased by the blood of sacrificed beasts'  A mountainous state clinging to the far north-eastern corner of India, Arunachal Pradesh - meaning 'land of the dawn-lit mountains' - has remained uniquely isolated.  Steeped in myth and mystery, not since pith-helmeted explorers went in search of the fabled 'Falls of the Brahmaputra' has an outsider dared to traverse it. Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent sets out to chronicle this forgotten corner of Asia. Travelling some 2,000 miles she encounters shamans, lamas, hunters, opium farmers, fantastic tribal festivals and little-known stories from the Second World War.  In the process, she discovers a world and a way of living that are on the cusp of changing forever. 'A beautifully written, exciting and revealing book that harks back to a golden age of travel writing' Lois Pryce, author of Revolutionary Ride

    And with the publication of The Valley of the Assassins in 1934, her legend was launched.Leaving behind a miserable family life, Freya set out, at the age of thirty-four, to explore remote and dangerous regions of the Middle East. She was captured in 1927 by the French military police after penetrating their cordon around the rebellious Druze. She explored the mountainous territory of the mysterious Assassins of Persia, became the first woman to explore Luristan in western Iran, and followed ancient frankincense routes to locate a lost city. Admired by British officialdom, her knowledge of Middle Eastern languages and culture aided the military and diplomatic corps, for whom she conceived an effective propaganda network during WWII.But Stark's indomitable spirit was forged by contradictions, her high-profile wanderings often masking deep insecurities. A child of privilege, she grew up in near poverty; she longed for love, but consistently focused on the wrong men. This is a brilliant and balanced biography—filled with sheikhs, diplomats, nomad warriors and chieftains, generals, would-be lovers, and luminaries. Author Jane Geniesse digs beneath the mythology to uncover a complex, quixotic, and controversial woman.

    But how many of us get to make a living at it, spending days observing nature from the canopies of stunning forests all around the world? As a wildlife cameraman for the BBC and National Geographic, James Aldred spends his working life high up in trees, poised to capture key moments in the lives of wild animals and birds. Aldred’s climbs take him to the most incredible and majestic trees in existence. In Borneo, home to the tallest tropical rain forest on the planet, just getting a rope up into the 250-foot-tall trees is a challenge. In Venezuela, even body armor isn’t guaranteed protection against the razor-sharp talons of a nesting Harpy Eagle. In Australia, the peace of being lulled to sleep in a hammock twenty-five stories above the ground— after a grueling day of climbing and filming—is broken by a midnight storm that threatens to topple the tree.   In this vivid account of memorable trees he has climbed (“Goliath,” “Apollo,” “Roaring Meg”), Aldred blends incredible stories of his adventures in the branches with a fascination for the majesty of trees to show us the joy of rising—literally—above the daily grind, up into the canopy of the forest.

    Wise, rhapsodic, exalted – Island Home is not just a brilliant, moving insight into the life and art of one of our finest writers, but a compelling investigation into the way our country shapes us.

    Douglas. It is an account of the way Douglas and other men found a richer life in the mountains and how they found something else besides.In such country Douglas has noted, "Men can find deep solitude and under conditions of grandeur that are startling, he can come to know both himself and God."The men of the story are such legendary characters as Roy Schaeffer and Jack Nelson, and the sheepherders, Indians, fisherman, and foresters who have learned to survive in the wilderness and enjoy it.

    Paddling North is a compilation of Sutherland’s first two (of over 20) such annual trips and her day-by-day travels through the Inside Passage from Ketchikan to Skagway. With illustrations and the author’s recipes.

    In the tradition of Eiger Dreams, In the Zone: Epic Survival Stories from the Mountaineering World, and Not Without Peril, comes a new book that examines the thrills and perils of outdoor adventure in the “East’s greatest wilderness,” the Adirondacks.