Big Wall Beverly Johnson Changed the Calculus of Yosemite Climbing

In 1969, Beverly Johnson left school in the last semester of her geology studies for a more hands-on education in California granite, culminating...

Climber John Bachar Blew the Doors Clean Off the ’70s Yosemite Climbing Scene

In the early 1970s the major Yosemite climbing proving ground was an area called the Nabisco Wall, a series of vertical cracks that would have be...

Justin Schmidt, 'King of Sting,' Was Like a Sommelier of Insect Sting Pain

Shackleton suffered tremendous adversity and pain and overcame the fear of starvation, freezing, and death. But did he ever willingly subject him...

Mary Barr Fought Expectations as First Female Forest Service Air Boss

When Mary Barr was pregnant with her first child, she knew she wanted a woman obstetrician to deliver her baby. But she lived in rural, isolated n...

Hannes Keller Showed the World Humans Could Reach the Ocean’s Black Depths

  Ever turn a cup upside down in the bath or a pool and dunk it below the surface? The cup bobs there, buoyed by a pocket of air trapped in the b...

Abigail Becker Might the Baddest Badass You’ve Never Heard Of

In 1854, Abigail Becker married a widower and moved to a small, rugged trapper’s cabin on Long Point, Lake Erie, in very remote Ontario, Canada, ...

Joseph Kittinger, the Man Who Dove to Earth

First, the indescribable view. Earth, many miles below, twinkling blue, whorls of white and grey clouds. Home is down there somewhere, familiar f...

Buzz Holmstrom, First to Solo Row the Grand Canyon

  In November 1937, Haldane “Buzz” Holmstrom sat in the sand below Lava Cliff, the last substantial rapid in Grand Canyon. He’d come nearly 1,000...

Roald Amundsen Had to Make Do With Being First to South Pole

Roald Amundsen There's no evidence of this, but surely there must have been a saying among the great polar explorers of the nineteenth and early ...

Solo Paddler Audrey Sutherland Did the Most Important Things

The first time Audrey Sutherland explored the rugged northeast coast of Moloka’i, she swam the 20-mile stretch. Forty-one years old, divorced, a ...

How ‘Steel Grandpa’ Gustaf Håkansson Pirated Sweden’s Toughest Bike Race

Matthew Henson, Peary's Aide, Was 100% Polar Explorer Badass

As steam and rail shrunk the globe at the turn of the twentieth century, the race was on to claim the last great prizes of exploration—and of the...