Women Explorers

Harriet Chalmers Adams earned public acclaim in the early twentieth century by traveling, at great peril, through some of the most treacherous parts of the globe. She recorded her three-year, 40,000 mile journey through South America. Her adventures, in words and photographs, were published in National Geographic Magazine and other trade publications. She also presented on the lecture circuit. When war broke out in 1914, she was the first woman correspondent to be granted permission to the front lines in France.After World War I, Harriet helped launch the Society of Woman Geographers. Her ...

As a child growing up in the wild beauty of the Ozarks, Barbara often spent her days exploring outside and daydreaming of faraway places in order to escape a life of poverty. She longed to trade her homemade clothes and outdoor toilet for spectacular adventures around the world. That chance came in the form of a wild-eyed, long-haired Viking-like young man named Peter. After an exciting courtship and a wedding on a dime, the young couple departed on foot from New Orleans on July 5, 1976, heading toward the Pacific Coast.

Beryl Markham, the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west, describes her childhood on a farm in Kenya, her apprenticeship as a horse trainer, and her later career as a pioneer aviator who piloted passengers and supplies in a small plane to remote corners of Africa.

They crossed oceans, deserts, and the limits of belief. From shipwreck to sanctuary, from marble dust to mountain snow, these women pursued truth until it transformed them. Their journeys became the world’s imagination. Discover the Women Who Turned Exploration into Revelation From the stage to the Himalayas, from the convent to the desert, Women of the World traces a century of travelers, scholars, mystics, and visionaries who transformed experience into conscience. In this final volume of The Women of the Nineteenth Century trilogy, Richard Fleischman follows fifteen extraordinary ...

Five hundred years before Columbus, a Viking woman named Gudrid sailed off the edge of the known world. She landed in the New World and lived there for three years, giving birth to a baby before sailing home. Or so the Icelandic sagas say. Even after archaeologists found a Viking longhouse in...

On June 1, 1937, famous pilot Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, took off in their small plane. Earhart’s goal was to make a record-breaking flight around the world. On the last part of the flight, they approached Howland Island to refuel. Before they could land, radio communication from Earhart stopped, and the plane disappeared. Search efforts turned up few clues. What happened to Earhart and Noonan? Explore the theories and learn why their disappearance has become one of history’s greatest mysteries.

In 1934, the painter Christiane Ritter leaves her comfortable life in Austria and travels to the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen, to spend a year there with her husband. She thinks it will be a relaxing trip, a chance to "read thick books in the remote quiet and, not least, sleep to my heart's content," but when Christiane arrives she is shocked to realize that they are to live in a tiny ramshackle hut on the shores of a lonely fjord, hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement, battling the elements every day, just to survive.

This audiobook tells the story of Amelia Earhart, the daring female aviator who disappeared while attempting to become the first woman to fly a plane around the world.

In September 1921, four young men and Ada Blackjack, a diminutive 25-year-old Eskimo woman, ventured deep into the Arctic in a secret attempt to colonize desolate Wrangel Island for Great Britain. Two years later, Ada Blackjack emerged as the sole survivor of this ambitious polar expedition. This young, unskilled woman - who had headed to the Arctic in search of money and a husband - conquered the seemingly unconquerable north and survived all alone after her male companions had perished.

Full Tilt is the inspiring true story of Dervla Murphy's 1963 journey from Ireland to India on an Armstrong Cadet bicycle, and the trials, landscapes, and cultures she encountered along the way. The route takes her through the valleys and snowy mountain passes of Europe and India to the scorching deserts of Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the metal of her bicycle, Rozinante (named after Don Quixote's steed), becomes too hot to touch.

The astonishing first-person account of Mississippi pioneer woman struggling to survive, protect her family, and make a home in the early American South. Near the end of her life, Mary Mann Hamilton (1866 - c.1936) began recording her experiences in the backwoods of the Mississippi Delta. The...

Imagine giving up everything you own and walking across the country... for 28 years? Meet Peace Pilgrim, who crossed the U.S. on foot seven times with only the clothes on her back to spread her message of peace. From 1953 to 1981, she lived off the land and the kindness of those she met. Whenever trouble came her way - whether blizzards or black eyes - her sole response was love.

Growing up in the Canadian Rockies, the mountains have always been home for Jenny Tough. Travelling the world, she's always discovered commonalities with mountains—and mountain people. Her major project is to run solo and unsupported across a mountain range on every continent where indigenous mountain people live isolated from the outside, urban world. Running solo and unsupported comes with obvious logistical as well as physical challenges, but running is also a common language.

A memoir of heartbreak, thousand-mile races, the endless Alaskan wilderness and many, many dogs from one of only a handful of women to have completed both the Yukon Quest and the Iditarod. In 2009, after a crippling divorce that left her heartbroken and directionless, Kristin decided to accept...

In 2006, Kit DesLauriers made history by becoming the first person to climb - and then ski - from the summit of each continent's highest mountain, the famed Seven Summits. Centered on this quest, Higher Love represents a hero's journey, rich with personal insights, life-threatening consequences, and a thrilling crescendo. Spanning seven continents in just two years, this deeply personal memoir recounts Kit's initially secret journey that would change her life forever.

The Girl Explorers is the inspirational and untold story of the founding of the Society of Women Geographers - an organization of adventurous female world explorers - and how key members served as early advocates for human rights and paved the way for today's women scientists by scaling mountains, exploring the high seas, flying across the Atlantic, and recording the world through film, sculpture, and literature.

Aspen’s and Justin’s paths serendipitously aligned on the Pacific Crest Trail when both were walking from Mexico to Canada, separately and alone - both using thru-hiking in hopes of escaping their pasts. Both sought to redefine themselves beneath the stars. By the time they made it to the snowy Cascade Range of British Columbia - the trail’s end - Aspen and Justin were in love.

Jackie was an ordinary American woman whose life changed after a blind date with rugged Antarctic explorer Finn Ronne. After marrying, they began planning the 1946-1948 Ronne Antarctic Research Expedition. Her participation was not welcomed by the expedition team of red-blooded males eager to prove themselves in the frozen, hostile environment of Antarctica.

An acclaimed bow hunter who defies the stereotype that hunting is a man’s game, Eva Shockey is at the forefront of a new wave of women and girls who are passionate about outdoor sports. Eva Shockey grew up expecting to be a dancer like her glamorous mother. But something about spending...

Tracey Curtis-Taylor has created headlines around the world with three epic flights in a 1942 Boeing Stearman biplane. Paying homage to two historic female aviators, she flew from Cape Town to Goodwood in 2013, from London to Australia in 2015 and, two years later, completed a transcontinental flight across the USA, after surviving a plane crash during the expedition. But her daring exploits came at a huge personal cost. Tracey tells, in breathtaking detail, the remarkable story of how she overcame extreme adversity to complete her three epic journeys.