Book review—The Wave

Ocean adventure

Sea monsters exist—and not just the scaly, toothy kind. There’s another terror lurking in the sea, one more dangerous than any gilled creature—the freak wave. As the Japanese are all too painfully aware, giant waves can topple entire cities and snuff out thousands of lives in mere seconds. Whether they are caused by undersea earthquakes [...]

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Dangerous animal of the month—assassin caterpillar

Animal encounters

It may not stalk and kill people on purpose, but in its caterpillar stage, the giant silkworth moth (lonomia oblique) has caused hundreds of human deaths in South America. Commonly known as the “assassin caterpillar,” its back is covered with hundreds of tiny, detachable venomous spines. When someone accidentally brushes against this otherworldly-looking creature (which [...]

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Teen sailor Laura Dekker arrives in Bora Bora

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Dutch 15-year-old Laura Dekker has safely arrived in Bora Bora, in the South Pacific islands, after mostly smooth sailing from Panama. This puts Dekker at about the halfway point across the Pacific Ocean. Dekker sailed her boat, Guppy, to the Galapagos Islands along the way, where she surfed for the first time and snorkeled with [...]

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It’s summer movie time!

Video

Summer is when Hollywood rolls out a seemingly endless wave of movies. For film lovers, this would be exciting if not for the fact that most of these movies are schlock. But when you’re lucky enough to see one of those magical summer films that manage to be thrilling, mesmerizing, funny, sad, and suspenseful all [...]

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Wendy Booker shatters stereotypes about explorers

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To look at Outside magazine, you’d think we were still stuck in the “golden age” of exploration, a world inhabited almost exclusively by ultra-fit young men. But that’s no longer the case. Women are climbing Everest, rowing solo across oceans, dogsledding to the North and South poles—whatever the guys are doing, women are doing it [...]

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Dangerous animal of the month—Hispianolan solenodon

Animal encounters

Perhaps it doesn’t have the star quality of a hulking predator like a bear or a tiger, but the large, shrew-like Hispianolan solenodon has something else: the ability to inject venom into its prey through its teeth. The odd-looking solenodon, which is found only in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, shambles through the forest at [...]

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Siblings retrace Northwest Passage journey

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Sister-brother duo Sarah and Eric McNair-Landry are about three-quarters of the way through their kite-skiing reenactment of Roald Amundson’s 1906 journey across Canada’s Northwest Passage. Having grown up with Arctic guides for parents, they’ve already logged some serious expeditions, including kite-buggying across the Gobi Desert and kite-skiing across Greenland. Their current adventure—which covers more than [...]

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Interview with an ultrarunner

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Ultrarunning isn’t just for elite athletes. A case in point is 42-year-old Northern California mom Gail Merz. She ran her first marathon at age 40, and recently completed a 100-kilometer (60 mile) race. Read on to find out how—and why—she became an ultrarunner. Armchair Adventurista: When and why did you begin ultrarunning? Gail Merz: I [...]

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Book review—Born to Run

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Ultrarunning may seem like an extreme sport, yet writer Christopher McDougall would have you believe that it is in fact what we were all born to do—a basic skill that all humans possess, but we’ve simply forgotten. McDougall himself is an ultrarunner, albeit an unlikely one. Tired of endless running injuries and intrigued by stories [...]

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Where in the world are Sarah and Roz?

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Sarah Outen’s round-the-world journey is now solidly underway, with Outen averaging about 150 km (95 miles) per day astride her bike “Hercules” as she wends her way through eastern Europe. Even a bout of food poisoning in the Czech Republic couldn’t dampen Outen’s enthusiastic outlook for long. Her blog describes bucolic scenes of horse-and-cart farming [...]

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