Journalist Will Hunt, who made the crossing with a group of urban explorers, recounts being menaced by rainwater and rats — and meeting fellow subterranean wanderers along the way.
exploration
Posted inEditor's Pick
Determined to Hitch a Ride on the Greatest Rig in America
An excerpt of The Stowaway: A Young Man’s Extraordinary Adventure to Antarctica, about Billy Gawronski, a 17-year-old who was hell-bent on stowing away to Antarctica on Richard Evelyn Byrd’s 1928 expedition.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Here Be Dragons: Finding the Blank Spaces in a Well-Mapped World
Maps are how we orient ourselves, and how we donate a place’s value — and by extension, the value of that place’s inhabitance. What does that means for the place still left un-mapped?
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
A Year and a Day in a Mars Simulator: Reflections at the Halfway Mark
Sheyna Gifford, mission physician for NASA’s sMars simulation, reflects on her year-and-a-day “off-planet,” six months in.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The People Who Get Woken Up at 2am When Bob Ballard Finds Something on the Ocean Floor
73-year-old ocean explorer Bob Ballard discovered the wreck of the Titanic 30 years ago, and he hasn’t stopped exploring the ocean floor since. In a recent piece for Popular Mechanics, Ryan D’Agostino profiled Ballard and the research aboard his ship Nautilus (a 211-foot former East German research vessel that carries seventeen crew and thirty-one scientists and operations specialists). But what […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Travel, Foreignness, and the Spaces in Between: A Pico Iyer Reading List
Seven reads by Pico Iyer on travel and finding one’s place in the world.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
A Journey to Antarctica
I don’t think I was the only one who had trouble holding it together. We had come all this way and cashed in so much good fortune for the outside chance that we might see those eight Emperor penguins pick their way across the ice. And we did. In a world that can seem purpose-built […]