The cliff face loomed above my head, pegs sticking straight out from the rock. I clipped into the steel cable with both carabiners, took a deep breath, and grabbed the first peg of the Klettersteig Via Ferrata in Kandersteg, Switzerland. Then I felt the first stirrings of stark terror. It made no sense; the fear …
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Epic journeys often start with buses on rocky backcountry roads, chartered planes to remote peaks, lost luggage, new languages and that first step to the edge of the world. Julieta Gismondi (Jules) and Lou Anne Harris started their epic journey from the middle of New York City by loading up their Stand Up Paddleboards at Pier …
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At Misadventures, we’ve checked in again to see how women are represented in the outdoor and adventure-industry publication world. In two past reports (Winter 2015 and Summer 2014), we documented how many outdoor and adventure lifestyle magazines and websites, rather than being gender-neutral, strongly skew toward a male audience. How did we measure this? In an admittedly imprecise way, …
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When my husband and I told our new friend Pati, the daughter of the former president of Bolivia, that we were going to El Alto to see the Cholitas Luchadoras, she suggested I keep our five month old daughter strapped to my body at all times. “Children have been kidnapped from daycare centers and returned …
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Fall came to Novosibirsk the last day of August. The week before had included a minus 1 evening, but that was a summer aberration. The last day of August was the real start of fall. That day the air became especially clear, and the light changed to that special tilting light of spring and fall. …
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I have long been a fan of award winning international journalist Kitty Pilgrim. Now, I am a fan of Kitty Pilgrim, adventure novelist, speaker, and role model. Her first novel, The Explorers Code, got me hooked on the characters and their life of intrigue. I imagined myself as one of them, living the very James Bond …
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Misadventures is teaming up with Women’s Wilderness out in Boulder, Colorado to spread the word about their event, Summit Sisters. Summit Sisters is a sweet gathering June 3rd-5th that will bring together women climbing enthusiasts of all levels, including pros who will be leading workshops throughout the weekend! Tickets are going fast, but don’t worry. …
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“Living Big” may be Mary Cecchini’s mantra, but it’s more than a state of mind—it’s an international destination. Though she’d been saying the phrase since childhood, it really took hold in 2011 when Mary’s mother became ill after suffering a brain aneurism. “I saw right in front of me how fragile life is. People always …
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Keeper of the Mountains: The Elizabeth Hawley Story By Bernadette McDonald; Foreword by Sir Edmund Hillary I must have heard about Elizabeth Hawley first while researching Nepal. I love books about climbing. While this isn’t exactly a “climbing” book per se, Keeper of the Mountains is the biography of a woman who chronicled the history of climbing …
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There is Sarah, the energetic blonde storyteller, a recent transplant from Florida. There is Leslie, the soft spoken and sweet Madison grad. There is Laura, the Bay Area native with a bubbly exterior, but an introverted interior. And there is me, the married dreamer from Minnesota. Together we make up a group of four women …
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I’ve been traveling alone in Thailand for a little over two weeks now. I came here to escape a nagging sense of idleness that I felt back home in Asheville, NC. This journey was supposed to be a life-changing trip for a long-term partner of mine and me, but morphed into an exploration of my …
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Mount Rinjani was a sketch in charcoal. Acres of burned-out grassland, the northeastern flank of the mountain eaten up, turned under. At the trail’s edge, scorched alang-alang grass trembled, the husks fragile and ashy and blowing away. A bleak scene for a honeymoon. But that didn’t matter. We were here for adventure, however it might …
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