National Geographic ADVENTURE

Jellyfish Invasions! Rip Tides! Shark Attacks! Six Beach Dangers (and How to Avoid Them)

Text by Christopher Percy Collier and Devon O’Neil

Illustration by Kate Miller

The lures of the beach are hard to resist come summer. But this season a raft of perils (Shark attacks! Riptides! Jellyfish invasions!) seems poised to storm the coast and shift the action from surfing and sea kayaking to chicken fights and Marco Polo at the community pool. Last year, in fact, saw more than 25,000 beach closings or swimming advisories—a 28 percent increase from 2006, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. What’s more alarming is that an estimated seven million people get sick every year after visiting the nation’s 3,500 beaches. But that’s no reason to forsake the sand. Here, what the experts say is lurking out there--and what you can do to maximize your time in the sun.

Continue reading this story>>

The Adventure Life with Steve CasimiroSurf and Ye Shall Be Asked: The Curiously Interrogative World of Gabe Sullivan

Text by West Coast Editor Steve Casimiro. Photographs by Sierra Sullivan, Tom Servais (top, bottom)

Flipping through Surfer Magazine goes something like this: blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, shocking lime green, blue, blue, blue.

There in each issue, jumping out from Surfer’s sea of epic waves and countless board short ads, is a rusty but glowing, chartreuse 1972 VW camper van, the icon and motorized doppleganger of Curious Gabe, Gabe Sullivan, who, every month, poses to ten complete strangers the kind of existential questions you’d expect to be asked in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly or in a dorm room at 1 a.m. Questions like, Does surfing improve with age? Would you rather be an East- or West-Coast surfer? And, a real brain scrambler, What’s worse—being a hoser or a poser?

Continue reading this story and see more photos>>

Banff's Radical Reels Reigns on YouTube

With its 2008 incarnation now touring theaters around the globe, the Banff Mountain Film Festival is generating a web buzz as well.

Users on our favorite guilty pleasure video sharing site, YouTube, voted last year's trailer promoting the festival's Radical Reels category one of the best sports videos. With almost 26,000 views, 2007 Radical Reels video is a dramatic montage of outdoor action sports featuring athletes in some of the most extreme conditions imaginable--underground ice cave climbing and downhill mountain unicycling to name a few. But there's substance, too: The trailer also shows snippets from some of the festival’s longer, more thought-provoking films to counterbalance the archetypical footage of daredevils' antics that we love to watch.

Still undiscovered by the YouTube audience (for now, at least), the 2008 Radicals Reels trailer (which we embedded above) is definitely worth a watch. This year's films can be viewed in their entirety during the Radical Reels tour, hitting 13 states and four Canadian provinces this year.

--Lucas Pollock