Meet the Adventurers of the Year: Explorer Albert Yu-Min Lin

Conjuring Genghis Khan: Explorer Albert Yu-Min Lin

Picture the young explorer, standing in his StarCAVE, searching for the tomb of Genghis Khan. Picture the world around him, the wilderness stretching away in all directions. Picture him stooping to inspect some rocks near his feet, rocks that together form a suspiciously tidy rectangle, a rectangle that stands out for its orderliness amid the surrounding chaos of green lichen and gray talus. Picture him making a note to himself, then turning toward a faraway peak topped by an ancient shrine and launching himself toward it at several hundred miles an hour.

It’s an illusion, of course. The StarCAVE, this five-walled Cave Automated Virtual Environment, is a trickster, a dream-bringer. It squats in an earthquake-proof room in a laboratory at the University of California, San Diego, and allows its users to immerse themselves in huge three-dimensional projections of computer-generated molecules or architectural CAD blueprints or, as now, high-resolution satellite imagery of northern Mongolia. The explorer squats to examine pixels, not rocks, and when he flies away, he’s standing still. None of this is real.

Except for the explorer.

He’s as real as it gets. Read the story and watch the video >>

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Three weeks ago we announced the 2009 Adventurers of the Year, selected for their extraordinary achievements in exploration, conservation, action sports, and humanitarian work. Now, for the first time ever, you can vote for the Readers' Choice Adventurer of the Year. To help you get to know them, we are going to highlight a different adventurer daily. You can only vote once, so make sure to check out each adventurers' profile, video, and photo gallery, before firing up our voting machine.

Go Green: Eco-Voyagers Take on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

And the award for green cause of the year goes to . . . the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. After decades of anonymity, the floating trash pile located midway between California and Hawaii had a breakout 2009—luring news crews, a trio aboard a raft made of junk, a zero-impact rower, and some hipsters from Vice magazine. Oh, and it was featured on Oprah. But most of the coverage (even you, Oprah) failed to ask one rather important question: Now that we know it’s out there, what do we do about it?

Meet the Adventurers of the Year: Veteran Marc Hoffmeister

Operation Denali: Veteran Marc Hoffmeister

It was April 2007. Serving in the U.S. Army in Iraq, Hoffmeister, then 37 years old, was riding in an Army Humvee. The troops were on patrol outside Al Hillah when an IED tore their vehicle to shreds. “I knew I was badly hurt,” Hoffmeister says today. “I was staring through a large hole in my left arm. I couldn’t feel anything. I couldn’t hear.” Hoffmeister was evacuated to a hospital in Germany, then sent on a 29-hour “hell flight” home. Eight surgeries on his arm followed, and months of pain-racked convalescence. Then the depression set in. Though back in his hometown of Eagle River, Alaska, Hoffmeister felt completely at loose ends. “I was just on the couch, doing nothing,” he says.

Then in early 2008 his wife, Gayle, announced that she was going to climb Denali, with or without her husband. “I said, ‘Not without me, you aren’t!’” Hoffmeister recalls. In the weeks that followed, his sense of purpose returned. “I figured that if I’m sitting here dealing with this hardship, there must be others doing the same thing,” he says. “I wanted to find them and get over it together.” Read the story and watch the video >>

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Three weeks ago we announced the 2009 Adventurers of the Year, selected for their extraordinary achievements in exploration, conservation, action sports, and humanitarian work. Now, for the first time ever, you can vote for the Readers' Choice Adventurer of the Year. To help you get to know them, we are going to highlight a different adventurer daily. You can only vote once, so make sure to check out each adventurers' profile, video, and photo gallery, before firing up our voting machine.

Meet the Adventurers of the Year: Surfer Maya Gabeira

Wave of the Future: Surfer Maya 

Bobbing in the South Atlantic, her partner, Carlos Burle, 42, still half unconscious after losing a battle with one of the first waves of the day, Maya Gabeira considered turning back. From the seat of her Jet Ski, the 22-year-old Brazilian watched as South Africa’s Dungeons break swelled to 50 feet. Holding on behind her, Burle was badly shaken: “I almost died,” he said over and over.

Then the sun came out, and Gabeira spoke up: “Can you drive?”

Gabeira, the only sponsored female big-wave surfer in the world, began her career in earnest at the age of 17, when she left Brazil and set out alone for Hawaii. Read the story and watch the video >>

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Three weeks ago we announced the 2009 Adventurers of the Year, selected for their extraordinary achievements in exploration, conservation, action sports, and humanitarian work. Now, for the first time ever, you can vote for the Readers' Choice Adventurer of the Year. To help you get to know them, we are going to highlight a different adventurer daily. You can only vote once, so make sure to check out each adventurers' profile, video, and photo gallery, before firing up our voting machine.

Field Notes: Whitewater and Monster Fish on Brazil's "River of Doubt"

I’m in Cacoal, Brazil, with National Geographic explorers Zeb Hogan (left), the world's foremost megafish expert, and Trip Jennings (right), an accomplished kayaker and filmmaker. Located 130 miles east of the Bolivian border, the town is just a few hours' drive from the where we’ll launch the first-ever expedition to study the aquatic life in the Rio Roosevelt, once known as the River of Doubt, tomorrow morning. If we're lucky, we'll get to document some of the huge fish Teddy Roosevelt described during his 1914 exploration.

—Text by Kyle Dickman; Photograph by Adams Mills Elliott

Meet the Adventurers of the Year: Sky Flier Dean S. Potter

The Icarus Project: Sky Flier Dean S. Potter

On a sunny afternoon in mid-August, Dean Potter stepped onto a tongue of rock just below the summit of Switzerland’s Eiger and jumped off. At first he plunged toward a ledge 600 feet below, then air gathered in his wingsuit, his forward trajectory kicked in, and he began to fly.

Speeding three feet ahead for every one he dropped, Potter, 37, watched as ice slopes gave way to talus, then to fields, then cabins, then houses, restaurants, and eventually a town, which he veered away from to avoid the power lines. By the time he pulled his chute and drifted to earth, Potter had spent two minutes and 50 seconds in flight. It was the longest BASE jump ever, covering some 9,000 vertical feet and nearly four miles. Read the story and watch the video >>

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Three weeks ago we announced the 2009 Adventurers of the Year, selected for their extraordinary achievements in exploration, conservation, action sports, and humanitarian work. Now, for the first time ever, you can vote for the Readers' Choice Adventurer of the Year. To help you get to know them, we are going to highlight a different adventurer daily. You can only vote once, so make sure to check out each adventurers' profile, video, and photo gallery, before firing up our voting machine.

Best New Trips in the World: Biking, Kayaking and Rafting in the Bitterroot Mountains of Idaho and Montana

For our annual Adventure Travel issue, we scoured the globe to find the 25 Best New Trips in the World for 2010, complete with a Best Trips photo gallery. Today, we present Idaho and Montana. The world's far corners are now well within reach.

IDAHO + MONTANA: Bitterroot Bonanza

As the co-owner of ROW Adventures, Peter Grubb has spent the better part of the past three decades scouting trips around the world. But until recently, he had all but ignored his own backyard, the Bitterroot Mountains straddling the Montana-Idaho border. He wasn’t the only one—very few outfitters lead trips here. And yet, the 10,000-foot peaks’ boulder fields and U-shaped valleys are loaded with lakes, hot springs, wildlife (lynx, bald eagles, wolves), and a rich history (Native Americans, fur traders, and Lewis and Clark all came through here). On ROW’s new Bitterroots Multisport trip, you’ll cycle the 50-mile Trail of the Coeur d’Alenes along the old Milwaukee Railroad line, kayak an alpine lake, raft the Clark Fork River’s Class III rapids, and bike over train trestles spanning deep canyons on the Hiawatha Trail.

Click here to continue reading "Best New Trips in the World: Idaho + Montana"

Virgin America Flies Miles Above the Rest With Low Prices, Wi-Fi, In-flight Options

Text by Ryan Bradley

Virgin America is as good as domestic air travel can get right now.

The first thing you notice is the mood lighting. It looks like a lounge: purple and red and kind of cheesy. But whatever—it's different from other airplanes. And that's the point. Richard Branson's Virgin empire is based around this idea that experiences can be swinging, sexy, fun. Even air travel. Even in the U.S. Even in this post 9/11, TSA-controlled, take-off-your-shoes-and-get-

bumped-from-your-flight-without-explanation-or-apology world. So it's a pretty low bar that Virgin America is leaping over, but they do it with a panache befitting the Branson brand.

Meet the Adventurers of the Year: Road Trippers Steven Shoppman + Stephen Bouey

 

The Long Road Home: Road Trippers Steven Shoppman + Stephen Bouey

It was at the edge of the Caspian Sea, between Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, that Steven Shoppman and Stephen Bouey’s drive around the world almost came to an end.

The two friends from Denver had been on the road for 14 months and 30,000 miles, and now, thanks to an intractable border guard, it looked like the wheels might just come off.

“What are you doing here?” the guard demanded. They were circumnavigating the globe by road, they explained, and they were doing it as never before: Through Web posts and word of mouth, Shoppman and Bouey had been recruiting a rotating cast of locals to join in their travels. Read the story and view images >>

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Two weeks ago we announced the 2009 Adventurers of the Year, selected for their extraordinary achievements in exploration, conservation, action sports, and humanitarian work. Now, for the first time ever, you can vote for the Readers' Choice Adventurer of the Year. To help you get to know them, we are going to highlight a different adventurer daily. You can only vote once, so make sure to check out each adventurers' profile, video, and photo gallery, before firing up our voting machine.

Best New Trips in the World: Bike and Camp in Colorado's Hovenweep National Monument

For our annual Adventure Travel issue, we scoured the globe to find the 25 Best New Trips in the World for 2010, complete with a Best Trips photo gallery. Today, we present Colorado. The world's far corners are now well within reach.

COLORADO: Alone With the Ancients

More than six million tourists flocked to the Four Corners region in 2008, making a beeline for the sandstone rock formations and ancestral Puebloan dwellings at places like Arches National Park and Mesa Verde. Hovenweep National Monument, meanwhile, saw just 25,411 visitors. “Hovenweep’s one of the more remote areas left in the country,” says Western Spirit Cycling president Ashley Korenblat. This spring Korenblat’s Moab-based outfit will lead the first commercial biking trip to the monument, which lies some 70 miles east of Cortez, Colorado, at the end of a circuitous country road. Once a major center for the ancestral Puebloans, Hovenweep’s sprawling collection of ruins doubles as a giant outdoor classroom for Native American history buffs. The trip is a kid-friendly affair, with interactive workshops along with double- and singletrack cruising.

Click here to continue reading "Best New Trips in the World: Colorado"