David Crerar, a Vancouverite, has spent decades exploring the city’s North Shore Mountains—partly as a long-distance trail and adventure runner. As Crerar became better acquainted with that section of backcountry, he found that there was little known about its mountains beyond the more popular hikes and peaks closest to the city. As a result, he […]
Category: Exploration
Adventure-writer and explorer Robert Twigger has more than a few idiosyncratic pastimes known to his readers: searching for exotic creatures, floating down rivers in inflatable rafts and making perfect omelettes. But if he had to choose one activity that ranks above all others, it would be walking. Non-stop walking. Across great, interminable, distances. He identifies […]
As a few readers may know, I’ve been working diligently for years on a non-fiction book about the Sasquatch phenomenon. The travel memoir entitled, In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond: In Search of the Sasquatch, chronicles my wanderings through the British Columbia coastal communities of the Great Bear Rainforest, to hear about eyewitness encounters with […]
In 1951, British explorer Eric Shipton and his climbing team came across a set of mysterious snow tracks on Menlung Glacier, along the Nepal-Tibet border near Mount Everest. Shipton’s Sherpa colleague, Shen Tensing, told him that the tracks, which resembled a human footprint with a very large toe, belonged to a “Yeti” – a hair-covered […]
In 2015 I attended a talk at a North Vancouver library entitled “The First Crossing of the Star Mountains of Papua New Guinea.” A geologist, David Cook, gave the lecture describing an obscure journey half a century earlier, in 1965, in which himself, five other Australians and 13 local porters made the crossing of the […]
Last spring I spent a week with a group of mountaineers at a remote glacier camp in Yukon’s St. Elias Range near the base of Mount Logan, Canada’s highest peak. Sometimes referred to as “Canada’s Himalayas”, the St. Elias Mountains (the highest in North America) sit within the largest glaciated region outside of Greenland and the […]
Brent Liddle, a wilderness guide from Haines Junction, Yukon has spent over three decades exploring one of the most remote corners of North America. Between 1975 and 2002 he served as an interpretive guide at Kluane National Park: a 22,000 square kilometer wilderness area in the Yukon straddling the southernmost limit of the Arctic. Kluane […]
For decades a small indie bookstore has been operating, virtually in secret, beneath the corporate hustle of Toronto’s downtown core. “Open Air Books and Maps” is a quirky and clandestine establishment located in a basement-level nook at the corner of Adelaide and Toronto streets. Since 1976, this cramped and largely unannounced subterranean haunt has been […]
Muhammed “al-Sharif” al-Idrisi (c. 1100-1165) was a major Muslim scholar, geographer and mapmaker of the medieval Islamic period. He was born in the town of Ceuta, in Morocco, and was descended from a line of nobleman who traced their lineage to the Prophet Mohammed. Al-Idrisi took an interest in foreign lands and travel early in […]
