Into Thin Air

Then, three years after Goodall’s book was printed, a series of incidents occurred that horrified her. The tribe of chimps Goodall had been watching became quite large. Food was harder to find. Quarrels broke out. To relieve the pressure, the unit finally split into two separate tribes. One band stayed in the old home territory. The other left to c

“Everyone knows about Machu Picchu and, less so of course, places like Espiritu Pampa and Choquequirao. That’s because Bingham wrote about those things in his books. But he went to dozens of places, some that almost no one else has gone to since. He was dealing with corruption, thievery, people of dubious character—and he was under a lot of pressur

I got it into my head to climb a mountain called the Devils Thumb. An intrusion of diorite sculpted by ancient glaciers into a peak of immense and spectacular proportions, the Thumb is especially imposing from the north: Its great north wall, which had never been climbed, rises sheer and clean for six thousand feet from the glacier at its base, twi

‘The distance between hell and heaven is short in these parts,’ Børge Ousland said on our way to the North Pole.