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.

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Meet the Adventurers of the Year: Biogeochemist Katey Walter Anthony

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. For the next two weeks, we are going to highlight a different adventurer daily, starting today with Katey Walter Anthony. You can only vote once, so make sure to check out each adventurers' profile, video, and photo gallery, before firing up our voting machine.

Arctic Sage
By the third day of drifting in the storm-tossed Arctic Ocean, with no engine and no real prospects of rescue, a question came to Katey Walter Anthony: “What’s a data point really worth?”

Others might have had other things on their minds, but to Walter Anthony, data is everything. As a biogeochemist with the University of Alaska Fairbanks and a National Geographic Emerging Explorer, she studies methane. The greenhouse gas is 25 times more potent than CO₂ and is being rapidly released into the atmosphere from thawing permafrost. But this source of methane is not factored into most climate change models, something that does not sit well with Walter Anthony. Continue reading this story >>

Special Report: Maldives - The Future of a Sinking Island Nation

On the eve of his election, Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed made the mother of all campaign promises. Once in office, the 42-year-old pledged to set aside revenue from the country’s sizable tourism industry to buy land in India, Sri Lanka, and Australia. If the oceans around his low-lying island nation continued to rise as predicted—by two feet in the next 90 years—he would simply move the entire population. “It’s an insurance policy for the worst possible outcome,” he explained to the press. Soon after, Nasheed again made headlines, this time with his plan to make the Maldives the first carbon-neutral country in the world—in ten years. “I don’t think we have any choice but to make this our priority,” he told me in February. “The Maldives is the front line in the climate battle.”—Text by Jon Bowermaster; Photograph by Fiona Stewart

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.

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.

Climate Ride Kicks Off Saturday - Cyclist Pedal 300 Miles From NYC to DC

This Saturday (September 26) the second annual Brita Climate Ride will roll away from lower Manhattan en route to our nation’s capitol. The five-day, 300-mile cycling tour will help raise money and awareness for climate change education through organizations such as Focus the Nation and Clean Air – Cool Planet. It will also raise hope for a future powered by renewable energy and a green economy.

Last year I pedaled the inaugural Climate Ride from NYC to D.C. for the first charity ride of its kind. The brainchild of two former Backroads biking guides, the event ran smoother than a well tuned S-Works. And it did not disappoint, either as a fully-supported bike tour through beautiful countryside or an inspiring message for change.

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.

Go Green: David Byrne’s Favorite Biking Cities

Former Talking Heads front man David Byrne has traveled all over North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia—and that’s just in the past six months. His preferred mode of transport: a Montague folding bike with full-size wheels and good suspension (he once got sore wrists from riding on cobblestones—bad news for a guitar player). Byrne’s newly released Bicycle Diaries (Viking, $26) chronicles these urban rides. Here are the eight best (in his opinion).—Ryan Bradley

The  Byrne  Bikeability  Chart

CLASSIC: URBAN CENTERS DOING IT RIGHT

New York

“I’ve been riding a bicycle as my principal means of transportation in New York since the early 1980s. I feel energized and liberated as the air and street life whiz by. There’s a great route along the Staten Island boardwalk that lines the beaches (the Greenway Bike Path). There are no cars, and the beaches are surprisingly clean.” 

San Francisco

“The local cycling organization has issued a wonderful map that shows, by deepness of the red shading, the steepness of the streets in a particular area... A deep red street is a major hill to be avoided unless you’re a masochist.”

Our Favorite Adventurers on Twitter - Updated 9/2

Who better to follow in 140 characters or less than our favorite explorers? We've put together a roster of tweeters, from eco-activist David de Rothschild to alpinist Ed Viesturs, to keep an eye on the ever-changing world of adventure. 

This list is by no means final, so keep checking back to see who's been added. And, as always, tell us who we left out in the comment section below. We're particularly interested in adding gear manufacturers, conservation groups, and outfitters that are tweeting, so if you're out there, let us know.

Of course, you can also follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/ngadventure

See the full list after the jump.

Melting Glaciers Move Border Between Switzerland and Italy

On Wednesday, the Swiss government approved the altering of its border up to 500 feet into some areas of Italy due to melting glaciers in the high Alps. Swiss topographers determined the watershed that had determined the border in 1942 had moved, and Italian topographers agreed. This means Switzerland now owns the last stop of the renowned Furggsattel Sesselbahn ski station near Matterhorn peak. Atlases will not be corrected. Read the AP story here.  –Alyson Sheppard