Christian Bodegren
The Mission Kayak through the world’s largest rainforest
The Crux Weeks of upstream travel
Extenuating Circumstances Crocodiles, biting insects, piranha
The Fine Print Bodegren worked as a roughneck on North Sea drilling rigs to fund his journey
Swedish explorer Christian Bodegren spent more than nine months paddling from Venezuela to Argentina via rivers great and small. The journey traversed the Amazon rainforest from north to south, including many of the continent’s legendary rivers: the Orinoco, the Rio Negro, the Madeira and of course the Amazon. He finished near Buenos Aires, where the Rio de la Plata meets the sea. The route included hundreds of miles of upstream travel, in addition to the regular litany of rainforest hassles-crocs, flesh-feeding insects and the dreaded Piranha, which Bodegren turned into sushi. (He posted the recipe on his blog. It begins, “Catch a big piranha but be careful of the teeth.”) Bodegren paddled
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Jon Turk and Erik Boomer
The Mission Ski and kayak 1,500 miles around Ellesmere Island in the Canadian High Arctic
The Crux 17 days trapped by shifting sea ice
Extenuating Circumstances Extreme weather, unpredictable ice, curious polar bears
The Fine Print Turk experienced kidney failure just hours after completing the historic circumnavigation
Jon Turk and Erik Boomer were an unlikely team to ski and sea kayak 1,500 miles around a remote arctic island. To start with, they barely knew each other. Turk was 65, a veteran arctic and sea kayak adventurer; Boomer was 26, a world-class whitewater paddler who had sat in a sea kayak just once before. And they started the trip a man down after the friend that introduced them, Paddler of the Year nominee Tyler Bradt, pulled out of the trip after breaking his back on a 100-foot waterfall. On the ice though, none of that seemed to matter. This seeming odd couple found common cause in their love of the outdoors, their cool-headed optimism, and gritty toughness. More Info In Their Own Words
Chris Tretwold, Jules Domine, and Maxi Kniewasser
The Mission Paddle the renowned, Class V Homathko River to access and ski Mt. Waddington, British Columbia’s highest peak
The Crux Finding safe river and snow conditions for boating, climbing, and skiing.
Extenuating Circumstances Fully loaded boats, spiking river levels, riverside avalanches and landslides
The Fine Print Ski gear was previously air-dropped in
The international team of American Chris Tretwold, Frenchman Jules Domine, and Canadian Maxi Kniewasser set off in early May from the Homathko source to access the remote ski-mountaineering prize of Mt. Waddington. On Day Two (of 17), avalanches blocked off the river in the committing upper canyons with no portage options, forcing the team to paddle the rapids underneath. Things didn’t get any easier, from the storm that grounded them at base camp, the crevasse Kniewasser fell into, and (after a successful summit) returning to a Homathko that had more than doubled in size. A landslide blocked the Tragedy Canyon rapids, “forming a raging landslide rapid with no end in sight,”
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Natalie Warren and Ann Raiho
The Mission To paddle 2,250 miles from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay
The Crux Paddling 335 miles up the Minnesota River
Extenuating Circumstances They adopted a stray puppy in Norway House that they named Myhan and joined them on the rest of their journey
The Fine Print They didn’t camp every night, because people along the river kept inviting them to stay in their homes
Ann Raiho and Natalie Warren had a simple graduation plan: grab their degrees from St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn., and, three days later, begin paddling the 2,250 miles from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay. They began battling up the Minnesota River, crossed windy Lake Winnipeg and eventually ran the rapids of the Hayes River. On August 25 they became the first women pair and only the fourth team in history to make the journey. The trip raised money for YMCA Camp Menogyn, where the two women met as teenagers and did their first paddling trip together. More Info Hudson Bay Bound
Paddlers Steve Fisher, Ben Marr, Tyler Bradt, and Rush Sturges
with Peter Meredith and Boston Ndoole in support
The Mission Paddle a continuous line through the word’s highest-volume whitewater rapids
The Crux At 1.5 million CFS, everything is a crux
Extenuating Circumstances Dangerous country, difficult bureaucracy, an untimely malaria outbreak
The Fine Print The team had helicopter support for scouting and rescue
The Congo River’s Inga Rapids are the highest-volume whitewater on Earth, with more than twice the gradient and 50 times the average flow of the Grand Canyon’s steepest section. For centuries, explorers had considered the rapids impassable. After years of careful study, Steve Fisher was convinced they could be run by the right team and with the proper support and preparation. The on-water team was Fisher and fellow big-water chargers Tyler Bradt, Rush Sturges and Ben Marr, with renowned African river explorer Peter Meredith and local fixer Boston Ndoole running safety and interference. Over four
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Season 1
Freya Hoffmeister
The Mission Paddle 5,000 miles around the southern tip of South America; first stage of a three-year, 15,000-mile continental circumnavigation
The Crux Cape Horn, where Hoffmeister was wind bound for five days
Extenuating Circumstances Wind, weather, distance, isolation
The Fine Print Freya describes five days being wind bound by 80-knot gusts as “no big deal.”
Say this about Freya Hoffmeister: She doesn’t think small. The paddler best known for circumnavigating Australia in 2009 has targeted her “second continent”—a solo circumnavigation of South America. The circuit will take three years, broken into three sections of approximately eight months and 5,000 miles each. Hoffmeister completed the first stage—nominated for Adventure of the Year—in May. As expected, the trip was an unrelenting slog punctuated by unexpected life-or-death trials. One of those came two days after Christmas, when, nearing the end of a 60-mile passage around Cape Horn,
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