My husband, Dave, and I just spent a whole year in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness to raise awareness about the threats of proposed sulfide-ore copper mining within its watershed. For those of you who are unfamiliar, the BWCAW is a 1.1 million acre federally designated Wilderness Area in northern Minnesota. That’s Wilderness with a capital “W.” The region is a maze of lakes, rivers, wetlands and roadless forests—a paddler’s paradise.

​It is also the most popular Wilderness Area in the country, receiving about a quarter of a million visitors annually. We teamed up with the Campaign to Save the Boundary Waters to keep the beloved BWCAW on peoples’ minds for an entire year, sharing the experience through photos, blog posts, articles and social media. We were thrilled to have the chance to collect water samples for Adventure Scientist’s Global Microplastics Initiative along the way—adding samples from wilderness lakes along the Minnesota, Ontario border to their database. We also gathered water quality data for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.

It was our second day out and we had over six miles of open water traverse ahead of us. We clawed our way directly into oncoming waves, wind, and a flood current as the elements battled to restrain us.  Waves washed over our 21’ tandem sea kayak as it crept across the Gulf of Mexico, making no more than two miles per hour of slow and challenging forward progress.

We were paddling from Jewel Key to Pavilion Key in the 10,000 islands area of the Everglades National Park, Florida. This was our first wilderness adventure in the third-largest national park in the lower 48 states.

It’s not one of those things your mother warns you about. But Mike Libecki’s mom probably never thought she’d have to say “Be careful paddleboarding with polar bears, honey.”

As part of Mike Libecki’s trip to Greenland last summer to climb two first ascents, he paddleboarded 80 miles through sea ice, around glaciers, and next to some of the largest carnivores on the planet.

By: Pascale Marceau of Vertical Nepal

Exploration, adventure, pioneering, remoteness – all words that describe this fall’s Vertical Nepal expedition. The team had an objective to complete the first ever ascent of Langju Himal (20,885ft), a mountain situated in the Tsum Valley, deep in the heart of the Himalayas.  Although snow conditions, extremely technical terrain, and respiratory colds forced us to turn around just a day from the summit, Vertical Nepal remains a great success.  The team was excited to see the results of the sampling they did in collaboration with Adventure Scientists.

​By Kristian Beadle of Green Coconut Run Expedition

In the pitch black of a lightening storm off the coast of El Salvador, we steered under instruments alone. Suddenly a bright light shone from the port side of our sailboat. “Look out, it’s a panga!” cried Sabrina through the din of 30-knot winds shaking the rigging. In the disorienting chaos, with sails flapping wildly, our sailboat stalled into the wind, and I swung the wheel to starboard to avoid a collision with the small El Salvadorian fishing boat. 

It was four months into the Green Coconut Run, a cooperative sailing voyage on the 42-foot trimaran Aldebaran. Most people who own large cruising sailboats - capable of sailing across the ocean - are wealthy retirees. We circumvented this financial barrier by creating a sailing cooperative with over 50 participants, each joining for a week or longer. In order to crowd-source the voyage, everyone chipped in money or labor, depending on how much time they were coming aboard.