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

Best New Trips in the World: Tracking Wildlife in Slovakia

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 Slovakia. The world's far corners are now well within reach.

SLOVAKIA: Tracking a Wild Pack

Thirteen years ago, British biologist Robin Rigg ventured into Slovakia’s Carpathian Mountains to study wolves, and he never left. During the course of his research, he has published multiple studies on the canids, founded the Slovakia Wolf Census Program, and, on several occasions, crept to within 15 feet of his carnivorous subjects. Now Rigg is looking to the Carpathians’ Tatra Range, whose 8,000-foot-plus peaks are host to what is becoming a serious hunting problem. “Hunters tend to greatly exaggerate the numbers of wolves and lynx,” says Rigg, “which leads to unjustified persecution.” His plan is to take stock of the wildlife with the help of Biosphere Expeditions, which will send travelers to Rigg’s outpost for the first time this winter.

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Meet the Adventurers of the Year: The Cove Filmmaker Louie Psihoyos

Last week 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.

Behind Enemy Lines

If there is an oceanic equivalent to Fort Knox, it would be the cove outside the town of Taiji on Japan’s Honshu Island. For years, 24-hour patrols, razor wire fences, and a near-vertical landscape all conspired to keep a dark secret: Each fall, Japanese fishermen gathered there to corral and slaughter hundreds of dolphins for meat. No foreign activist had ever witnessed the carnage up close. Which is precisely why Louie Psihoyos showed up.

In 2005, Psihoyos, a former National Geographic photographer and budding filmmaker, decided to infiltrate the melee. To aid his mission, he assembled one of the most unique film crews in history. Continue reading this story >>

New Trip: Private Safari Tracking Gorillas and Rhinos in Rwanda and Kenya

As of today, Baobab Expeditions (see our rating of the company) is offering an 11-day private gorilla and rhino safari in Rwanda and Kenya, led by the most impressive of experts: Dr. Clare Richardson, president of the venerable Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International. An authority on gorilla research, she'll take you mountain gorilla tracking and score you rare access to Karisoke Research Center, the only gorilla research center in the world.

Elephants or Sharks? Pick Which Young Explorer Gets NG Funding

We don't normally advocate for armchair adventures over the real thing, but when the National Geographic Channel's Expedition Week starts up November 15th, we highly recommend a snagging a front row seat. You'll be searching for Amazon headshrinkers and tagging great white sharks...from the comforts of your living room. And, for the first time, you can help pick which conservation-focused expedition National Geographic will sponsor next.

The Contenders: Filmmaker Trip Jennings and Photographer Ben Horton.

TV Alert: NG Oceanographer Sylvia Earle Tonight on the Colbert Report

Watch Stephen Colbert joust with oceanographer Sylvia Earle tonight on Comedy Central (11:30 p.m. EST). In her 62 years studying sea life, the National Geographic Explorer in Residence has spent 6,500 hours exploring life underwater. She’s the only untethered diver ever to have dropped 1,250 feet to the ocean floor (though the bulky hardsuit looked more like a killer robot than a deep sea diver).

For years, “Her Deepness,” has been the world’s leading advocate for ocean conservation. Besides teaming up with Google to launch Google Ocean, the only complete, interactive map of the planet underwater, this year she’s launched a campaign to create a global network of marine reserves to allow sea life to recover after a century of over-fishing.—By Daniel Grushkin

National Geographic ADVENTURE: When did you realize that the ocean was being badly depleted by human activity?
Sylvia Earle: It has gradually dawned on me. The attitude of infinite resources in the sea was widespread. When I started out as a scientist years ago I just wanted to study my plants and the fish and the ecosystem because they’re beautiful, and that was my passion. In hindsight, the clues were all over. Even the decline of all the big fish was obvious by the mid 1950s.

Age of Citizen Science - Four Websites Where You Can Lend a Hand

Crowdsourcing. Group thinking. Call it what you will, but in the past ten years, average Joes tasked with online assignments (from bird counting to cloud identification and more) have contributed reams of data to the scientific body. Just one thing: Few scientists ever took it seriously. That’s changed. Sites are better, questions keener, and citizens are becoming viable foot soldiers in legitimate scientific studies. “We have over 30 ornithology papers published in peer-reviewed journals that use volunteer-collected data,” says Rick Bonney of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Citizen Science Program. Here are four ways you can lend a hand.

CamelBak Gives Water Bottles to Bottle-Banning Australian Town

CamelBak Australia is donating 2,000 of its Better Bottles to Bundanoon, a tiny tourist town 90 miles southwest of Sydney, Australia, that voted in July to ban the sale of bottled water. The difference with the CamelBak bottles, of course, is that they won’t be pitched into the rubbish at the end of the day. Rather, they’ll be refilled again and again by some of the 2,500 residents at indoor taps, drinking fountains, and three spanking new filtered-water filling stations around town.

The movement against the sale of “single-use” bottled water began when a Sydney-based beverage company, Norlex, proposed pumping water from a local aquifer to bottle for sale. The prospect of buying back their own water—marked up as much as 250 times—in the midst of a seven-year drought struck some Bundanoon townspeople as ridiculous. In July, a meeting was called and more than 350 citizens voted to take it a step farther and outlaw the sale of bottled water.

Year of the Gorilla: Using Ecotourism to Beat the Bushmeat Trade

With bushmeat trade on the rise and gorillas the decline, there's never been a better time to make the trek to Africa to check out these wild yet humanlike beasts for yourself. Let's face it, in a few more years, you may not have the chance.

An undercover investigation conducted by Endangered Species International recently revealed that four percent of the gorilla population in Kouilou, a region of the Republic of Congo, is being poached each month, as reported by the BBC. If nothing changes, within a year, 50 percent of the some 200 gorillas in the area may be wiped out—shipped down the Kouilou River to Pointe Noire and sold at $6 per handful of meat. 

Nat Geo In The Field: Mike Fay - Tracking Down Every Last Redwood

After 333 days and 2,000 miles, wilderness savant Mike Fay found every last redwood. Now he wants to save them.

Text by Cliff Ransom; Photograph by Michael Nichols

“I thought I’d be able to just Google it,” says biologist Mike Fay of locating the country’s southernmost redwood tree. Instead Fay and his hiking partner, activist Lindsey Holm, found themselves on the southern border of Los Padres National Forest in California, clawing their way up a steep-sided canyon.

“It’s thicker than hell. Impenetrable chaparral and poison oak like crazy,” Fay says. “After half an hour I get up to the top of this drainage where I see [what I think is] the southernmost redwood. Then I look around. Sure as hell, there’s another tree in a drainage farther south. So I’m like, damn, I’ve got to do this all over again. And I do. Then I see another tree even farther south. And it’s going on like this all frickin’ day.”

“You know where I found the southernmost redwood in the continental United States? Fifteen feet from California Route 1. I could have driven there.”

Continue reading this story >>

Watch "Climbing Redwood Giants" on September 29 at 10 p.m. on the National Geographic Channel. Learn more at nationalgeographic.com/redwoods.