Vanishing Act Download PDF

Disappear into Yellowstone’s secret northern fringe, store where you’ll find a rejuvenated landscape and total solitude (except for the bison and grizzlies).

Last night I pitched my tent at 8,500 feet atop the Buffalo Plateau, in a mile-wide meadow laced with spring-fed brooks. From the campsite, overlooking the remote northeast corner of Yellowstone National Park, I have the option of descending back to the base of the plateau and making a horseshoe end-run around its north side. But a ranger in the backcountry office had told me about an off-trail shortcut through a lodgepole burn that would save four miles. Of course, like most cross-country bushwhacks, it was debatable if the “shortcut” would actually save time. I knew it would require acrobatic scrambling over and under fallen timber. But who can pass up the allure of such a little-used route? Continue reading →

Globetrotter Download PDF

Leo Le Bon, the Godfather of trekking.

In this interview the founder of adventure travel dishes on his favorite wild places, oddest encounters, and the world’s next great trekking destinations. In 1967, Leo Le Bon led a group of Northern California clients on the first commercial trek in Nepal, and it was wildly successful. So the Belgium-born travel agent created a company offering even more exotic journeys, and in so doing jumpstarted a new kind of tourism: adventure travel. Le Bon pioneered treks in Tibet and China, the Andes and Greenland, and introduced walking safaris in Kenya—firsts for all of these countries. Mountain Travel Sobek, the company he co-founded (and retired from in 1990), still guides trekkers to the unexplored fringe: 160 trips to 72 countries are planned for 2009. We caught up with Le Bon, now 72, just before he left for Everest Base Camp last October, with his wife and a cadre of friends, to celebrate the anniversary of his inaugural journey there 40 years ago.

How did your first trek to Nepal get off the ground?
I put an ad in the Sierra Club Bulletin for a trek in Nepal—and got 100 replies in two weeks! Ultimately, 30 people signed up for what was the very first commercial trek in Nepal. It cost $400 per trekker, or $2,620 in 2008 dollars.

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The Red Zone Download PDF

As conservationists and energy developers fight over Wyoming’s Red Desert, one thing is certain: There’s no time like the present to hike through its unreal geography.

I crest a shallow canyon rim in southern Wyoming’s Red Desert and spook a family of six pronghorn antelope. They sprint into the sun, leaping in rhythmic bounds over desert scrub. It’s our third day of hiking; we’re seemingly lost, and several miles from our next water cache. But the antelope are so astoundingly fast and graceful that I can’t help watching them, happily letting the gravity of our situation fade for a few seconds.

Having evolved alongside the cheetah, their mortal enemy, pronghorn have supersize hearts and lungs, and can sustain speeds of 60 miles per hour for several minutes. But their flight on this May afternoon has little to do with survival: Wyoming’s pronghorn have no predators, save hunters; their behavior is triggered by bits of remnant DNA leftover from a time when cheetahs, now extinct in North America, prowled these rangelands 13,000 years ago. Continue reading →