Travel

With the great out-of-doors, as with cuisine, there’s no disputing matters of taste. One person’s caviar is another’s soggy dumpling. For myself, I’ve always preferred a good healthy slog through an ancient forest to the more easeful charms of a beach. So it was that, shortly after I arrived on Orcas Island, I began hiking along the Cold Spring Trail. …

Macau is fast becoming a city on the radar of people in all four corners of the world. It is full of history, culture and magical scenery, which can be explored properly on one of the city’s many hiking trails that are available to adventurous types. Although Macau is one of the most densely populated cities on the planet, with …

Rumbles and booms like a thunderstorm echo all night long in Tarr Inlet. It’s not a storm but our neighbor, the Margerie glacier, calving icebergs a mile away at the head of the inlet. Waves from the falling ice rock the boat, usually gently, but sometimes more vigorously, which I find a bit unnerving. The next morning, the glassy bay …

I had been thinking about Glacier Bay for a long time. I’d done my fair share of poking around on— and in— glaciers in the North Cascades, Canadian Rockies and Alaska. The sensuous forms and sculptural grace of icescapes had always captured my imagination. For me, glacial landscapes offered up a visceral sense of nature’s drama laid bare, the shifting …

In 1989, Robert Michael Pyle was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to investigate the legends of Sasquatch. The resulting book, Where Bigfoot Walks: Across the Dark Divide was published in 1995 and was greeted with international acclaim. In the decade that followed Pyle continued his explorations into the mythology and speculative realities surrounding the existence—or lack thereof—of Bigfoot. In a new …

St. Moritz undoubtedly ranks very high on any list of places that winter sports and hiking enthusiasts would like to visit one day and is certainly at the top of ski resorts in Switzerland. This famous alpine resort is the perfect combination of majestic scenery, a lush environment and a wide variety of winter hiking trails to choose from – …

This past spring I visited Whitehorse and a friend drove me to the Son of War Eagle Landfill a few miles outside of town. For local birders, this might as well have been Point Pelee, or even Brazil’s Pantanal. “Last year I saw two uncommon species for the Yukon here—a Brewer’s blackbird and an American pipit,” my friend told me. …

Bargains like this just don’t happen every year. Admission to Canadian National Parks is free during 2017 as part of the country’s 150th birthday celebration. Add to that a favorable exchange rate on the U.S. dollar, and a car-camping road trip north this summer looks like a steal. It’s time to start planning. British Columbia has five great national parks …

  It all started simply enough. Rand’s son Darby was graduating from Williams College in 1997, and his dad asked him what he wanted as a graduation present. The answer too was simple: “A trip.” Next question: where? In his Introduction to the second edition of Alaska Wilderness: Exploring the Central Brooks Range, George Marshall provided the answer. “The greatest …

I first encountered the inspired writing of Lawrence Millman some 25 years ago, when I happened upon a somewhat battered copy of his now-classic Last Places in a used book store. I was instantly smitten. The book, which chronicles Millman’s journey across the North Atlantic from Norway to Newfoundland following ancient Viking sea routes was a revelation. At the time, …