Best New Trips in the World: Biking, Kayaking and Rafting in the Bitterroot Mountains of Idaho and Montana

For our annual Adventure Travel issue, we scoured the globe to find the 25 Best New Trips in the World for 2010, complete with a Best Trips photo gallery. Today, we present Idaho and Montana. The world's far corners are now well within reach.

IDAHO + MONTANA: Bitterroot Bonanza

As the co-owner of ROW Adventures, Peter Grubb has spent the better part of the past three decades scouting trips around the world. But until recently, he had all but ignored his own backyard, the Bitterroot Mountains straddling the Montana-Idaho border. He wasn’t the only one—very few outfitters lead trips here. And yet, the 10,000-foot peaks’ boulder fields and U-shaped valleys are loaded with lakes, hot springs, wildlife (lynx, bald eagles, wolves), and a rich history (Native Americans, fur traders, and Lewis and Clark all came through here). On ROW’s new Bitterroots Multisport trip, you’ll cycle the 50-mile Trail of the Coeur d’Alenes along the old Milwaukee Railroad line, kayak an alpine lake, raft the Clark Fork River’s Class III rapids, and bike over train trestles spanning deep canyons on the Hiawatha Trail.

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Plastiki Update with Expedition Coordinator Matthew Grey: Plastic-Bottle Boat Nearly Ready For Testing

About seven years ago, NG explorer and Adventure Ecology founder David de Rothschild had an ambitious idea: to build a boat out of plastic bottles and sail from San Francisco to Sydney, stopping at the Pacific Garbage Patch and other ecologically challenged zones along the way for an incredible, interactive adventure. Constructing this Kon-Tiki-inspired vessel presented innumerable challenges. But now, after corralling some 12,000 reclaimed soda bottles, developing new plastic technology, and recruiting a team of experts to execute his vision, the Plastiki is about to make a splash, literally. Finally. Here expedition coordinator Matthew Grey, they guy calling the shots behind the scenes, gives us an update.
 —Text by Mary Anne Potts; Photograph courtesy of Luca Bambini

Let’s see…preparing for a 12,000-nautical-mile ocean voyage aboard an experimental plastic-bottle boat. Have you ever done anything remotely similar to this?
Funny enough, I have. I have never built a boat before, but I have done similar types of intense projects that require a lot of on-the-hoof creativity and problem solving. That’s pretty much what I’ve always done.

Sounds like your last job was more than your average 9 to 5 gig.
My job before this was working for a company called Mabey & Johnson. They specialize in supplying and building bridges after disasters and in places of conflict. I was sent to all kinds of weird places—Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon—and to build bridges. We worked in places where you have to scrape for resources and people. It was an interesting time.

Virgin America Flies Miles Above the Rest With Low Prices, Wi-Fi, In-flight Options

Text by Ryan Bradley

Virgin America is as good as domestic air travel can get right now.

The first thing you notice is the mood lighting. It looks like a lounge: purple and red and kind of cheesy. But whatever—it's different from other airplanes. And that's the point. Richard Branson's Virgin empire is based around this idea that experiences can be swinging, sexy, fun. Even air travel. Even in the U.S. Even in this post 9/11, TSA-controlled, take-off-your-shoes-and-get-

bumped-from-your-flight-without-explanation-or-apology world. So it's a pretty low bar that Virgin America is leaping over, but they do it with a panache befitting the Branson brand.

Meet the Adventurers of the Year: Road Trippers Steven Shoppman + Stephen Bouey

 

The Long Road Home: Road Trippers Steven Shoppman + Stephen Bouey

It was at the edge of the Caspian Sea, between Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, that Steven Shoppman and Stephen Bouey’s drive around the world almost came to an end.

The two friends from Denver had been on the road for 14 months and 30,000 miles, and now, thanks to an intractable border guard, it looked like the wheels might just come off.

“What are you doing here?” the guard demanded. They were circumnavigating the globe by road, they explained, and they were doing it as never before: Through Web posts and word of mouth, Shoppman and Bouey had been recruiting a rotating cast of locals to join in their travels. Read the story and view images >>

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Two weeks ago we announced the 2009 Adventurers of the Year, selected for their extraordinary achievements in exploration, conservation, action sports, and humanitarian work. Now, for the first time ever, you can vote for the Readers' Choice Adventurer of the Year. To help you get to know them, we are going to highlight a different adventurer daily. You can only vote once, so make sure to check out each adventurers' profile, video, and photo gallery, before firing up our voting machine.

Best New Trips in the World: Bike and Camp in Colorado's Hovenweep National Monument

For our annual Adventure Travel issue, we scoured the globe to find the 25 Best New Trips in the World for 2010, complete with a Best Trips photo gallery. Today, we present Colorado. The world's far corners are now well within reach.

COLORADO: Alone With the Ancients

More than six million tourists flocked to the Four Corners region in 2008, making a beeline for the sandstone rock formations and ancestral Puebloan dwellings at places like Arches National Park and Mesa Verde. Hovenweep National Monument, meanwhile, saw just 25,411 visitors. “Hovenweep’s one of the more remote areas left in the country,” says Western Spirit Cycling president Ashley Korenblat. This spring Korenblat’s Moab-based outfit will lead the first commercial biking trip to the monument, which lies some 70 miles east of Cortez, Colorado, at the end of a circuitous country road. Once a major center for the ancestral Puebloans, Hovenweep’s sprawling collection of ruins doubles as a giant outdoor classroom for Native American history buffs. The trip is a kid-friendly affair, with interactive workshops along with double- and singletrack cruising.

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Meet the Adventurers of the Year: Astronaut John Grunsfeld

Voice from Outer Space: Astronaut John Grunsfeld

Around NASA, he’s known as “the Hubble Repairman.” And last May, on his third visit to the orbiting space telescope, John Grunsfeld pulled off the repair to end all repairs. Working at zero gravity some 350 miles above the surface of the Earth, the astronaut restored sight to a half-blind Hubble—called the greatest scientific instrument ever invented—and ensured that it will continue to send back the stunning images and mind-boggling data that have transformed our understanding of the universe.

Having just turned 51, Grunsfeld has spent his career championing manned space exploration. At a time when astronaut-led programs are being called into question, ADVENTURE tracked down Grunsfeld at the Johnson Space Center in Houston to learn about his May mission and why going manned matters. Read the story and view images >>

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Two weeks ago we announced the 2009 Adventurers of the Year, selected for their extraordinary achievements in exploration, conservation, action sports, and humanitarian work. Now, for the first time ever, you can vote for the Readers' Choice Adventurer of the Year. To help you get to know them, we are going to highlight a different adventurer daily. You can only vote once, so make sure to check out each adventurers' profile, video, and photo gallery, before firing up our voting machine.

Best New Trips in the World: Hiking California's Sierra High Route

For our annual Adventure Travel issue, we scoured the globe to find the 25 Best New Trips in the World for 2010, complete with a Best Trips photo gallery. Today, we present California. The world's far corners are now well within reach.

CALIFORNIA: Thru-Hike the Sierra

“What makes the Sierra High Route so unique,” says Ian Elman, owner of Southern Yosemite Mountain Guides, “is that it’s not a trail, it’s a concept.” That concept—invented in the 1970s by a guy named Steve Roper, who wrote The Sierra High Route: Traversing Timberline Country—is to trace the highest points across the Sierra while staying above tree line and away from other hikers. The thing is, it’s exceedingly difficult to execute this concept on your own: Only a handful of people complete it each year. Lucky for you, Andrew Skurka will lead the inaugural Sierra High Route outfitted crossing for Southern Yosemite Mountain Guides in 2010. The trekker extraordinaire (and our 2008 Adventurer of the Year) completed the hike in just eight days last year. Starting in Kings Canyon National Park, you’ll hoof it 195 miles north, passing through the John Muir Wilderness, the Ansel Adams Wilderness, and Yosemite National Park.

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Best New Trips in the World: Sea Kayak, Snorkel, and Swim with Whales in Tonga

For our annual Adventure Travel issue, we scoured the globe to find the 25 Best New Trips in the World for 2010, complete with a Best Trips photo gallery. Today, we present Tonga. The world's far corners are now well within reach.

TONGA: Whale World

Each June, some 450 humpback whales arrive in the shallow waters off Tonga’s Ha’apai Islands to mate and calf, transforming the archipelago into an oversize nursery until September. The Ha’apai are one of the only places in the world where you can snorkel with the 50-foot-long mammals—and starting next year, Wilderness Travel will be the only tour operator to bring clients here to do it. “They’re really curious and let you get very close,” says the outfitter’s Barbara Banks. Just don’t expect a Sea World encounter. “It’s done with the absolute strictest guidelines about behavior around the whales,” adds Banks. “There is no contact.”

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Gear Crush: Nikon's Coolpix Projector Camera

With all due respect to Facebook, the most rewarding way to share trip photos is the old-school method: in person. And Nikon’s Coolpix S1000pj lets you do just that. Easily. The world’s first camera with a built-in projector, it turns any white backdrop into an impromptu slide show. Projections are clear up to 3 x 4 feet—surprisingly good for a pocket-size device. The camera itself isn’t bad either, with 12.1MP and Nikon’s Best Shot Selector, which takes up to ten frames per click and keeps the sharpest ($430; nikonusa.com). —Catharine Livingston

Best New Trips in the World: Shadowing Rick Ridgeway's Journey Through Tanzania and Kenya, From Kilimanjaro to the Indian Ocean

For our annual Adventure Travel issue, we scoured the globe to find the 25 Best New Trips in the World for 2010, complete with a Best Trips photo gallery. Today, we present Tanzania and Kenya. The world's far corners are now well within reach.

TANZANIA + KENYA: Beyond Kili

In the ’70s and ’80s, Rick Ridgeway was on a tear: He became one of the first Americans to summit K2, joined the second U.S. expedition to conquer Everest, and dragged a 250-pound handcart across a Tibetan plateau. But perhaps his most outlandish idea was to climb Mount Kilimanjaro . . . and keep walking all the way to the Indian Ocean. In 1997 he did just that, publishing an account of his journey, The Shadow of Kilimanjaro. Since Ridgeway’s feat—which included the first west-east crossing of 11,000-square-mile Tsavo West and East National Parks—Tropical Ice Limited has been retracing portions of his 300-mile route. Now owner Iain Allan, who served as Ridgeway’s original guide, will organize the first full trek from mountain to sea.

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