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El Capitan, as seen here from the floor of Yosemite Valley, was once considered almost unclimbable. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Xavier de Jauréguiberry.

Until 1958, no person in known history had climbed the face of what may be the world’s most famous cliff, Yosemite’s El Capitan.

In the 54 years since climbing greats Warren Harding, George Whitmore and Wayne Merry made the first ascent, “El Cap” has been scaled thousands of times. Many individuals have climbed the 3,000-foot wall by numerous routes, and today dozens of climbers may be on the face of the cliff at any given time, nearly every month of the year. Scraps of dropped camping debris litter the valley floor, including bags of human waste, though “poop tubes” are now required of multi-day climbers. Today, just going up is hardly even an achievement in the climbing community, and so climbers bent on setting records or gaining praise must attempt such stunts as solo climbing and speed climbing. It’s been the same story for many of the great walls around the world: Once unclimbed, they are now mostly old news. Pitons scar many of them from base to top, and chalk smudges indicate clearly where a thousand climbers before have anchored their fingertips. For each successive person who goes up—each taking advantage of advances in knowledge, technology and gear—the challenge of the climb loses another trace of its old glory.

But Yvon Chouinard remembers the early years of the sport. He was among the pioneers of modern rock climbing and has climbed El Cap six times, two of which were first ascents of unmarked routes. Chouinard, who lives in Ventura County, began climbing as a kid in the 1950s, when he and several friends began making their first trips to Yosemite. At the time, campsites in the national park were always plentiful—though climbing gear was not.

“We were stealing hemp ropes from the telephone company,” he recalled with a laugh as he spoke to me by phone recently. “We had to learn on our own. There were no schools back then.”

Common practice of the era was to pound bolts into the rock; climbers secured their ropes—and their lives—to these bolts in case of a fall. But Chouinard was among the first people to consider the adverse effects this was having. So he designed his own form of removable pitons and began selling them to others in the small but growing circle of climbers. Eventually he invented gear that could be wedged into cracks, then removed again, leaving the rock unmarked. Later still, Chouinard began making clothing suited for the rigors of scaling cliffs, and in 1972 he founded a little company called Patagonia. It would grow into one of the best-known names in outdoor apparel.

In the 1950s, Chouinard says, there were fewer than 300 climbers in America. Most routes, whether climbed previously or not, were still un-scarred by either chalk or metal, and Chouinard grew high on the challenge and the danger of ascending routes while feeling the rock with his free hand, reaching, sometimes straining, looking for that next hold.

Yvon Chouinard, American climbing pioneer and founder of Patagonia, works a route on the West Face of Sentinel Rock in Yosemite in the 1960s. Photo by Tom Frost.

Today, hundreds of thousands of climbers scale walls around the world. I asked Chouinard if this—the growing popularity of climbing—is good for the world, good for people and maybe even good for the rock.

“It would be good because it’s getting people outdoors and into natural places,” he said—except that, inevitably, the Earth’s great walls have suffered. “Today, you go up a route that people climbed in the 1920s using hemp ropes and pitons, and there’ll be a bolt every 15 feet—and next to a crack. It’s really unfortunate.”

Modern climbing has become commercialized, too, and increasingly competitive. Sponsorships and financial motivation to break records or just gain glory may push climbers beyond their own limits. “And that,” Chouinard said, “can kill you.”

Long ago, Chouinard and his contemporaries committed themselves to an unofficial set of climbing ethics, which foremost mandate that a cliff be left as nature made it; for the next climber, so went the idea, there should be no evidence of a prior climber’s passage. “If you’re going up a route that’s been climbed without gear a thousand times and you’re putting bolts into the rock, you’re ruining the whole experience for the next person,” Chouinard explained. He cites what he calls the “manifest destiny idea, especially in Europe,” about “conquering the mountain and making it easier for the next person.” By such a process, Chouinard says, the magic is all but lost as cabins and cable cars are built on its slopes.

"Clean climbing," with wedges that can be removed after use, leaves no scars on cliffs like this one in Sweden - but faint chalk marks still lead the way. Photo courtesy of Evan Riley.

In Yosemite, where the cliffs remain mostly as they always were, simply the crowds of people clamoring to get their hands on some rock may have diminished the experience. The park service estimates that climbers log between 25,000 and 50,000 “climber-days” per year. Chouinard rarely visits the park anymore simply because of the difficulty in reserving a campsite. He feels the cables that lead up the back side of Half Dome should be removed, leaving this granite cathedral to the skilled and the impassioned—or no one at all.

Today, the popularity of rock climbing has spurred the proliferation of urban climbing gyms. But whether these facilities of synthetic rock, shredded rubber floors and fluorescent lighting are the modern climber’s answer to the urge to go up is questionable. Chouinard thinks that gyms simply don’t replicate the real spirit of rock climbing. “Climbing without risk isn’t climbing,” he says. “And in gyms, there’s no risk. You aren’t leading, and you’re not using your head. You’re just following the chalk marks to the top.”

So if gyms don’t cut it, and if even Yosemite—the Mecca of great walls and sacred rock—has lost its excitement, where on Earth can a modern climber go to find what Chouinard, Harding, Tom Frost and other Golden Age rock legends enjoyed five decades ago? Chouinard says that Sub-Sahara Africa, the Himalayas and Antarctica each offer pristine climbing opportunities. In the United States, he says, Alaska still offers untouched cliffs. And that’s all the hints we’ll give, and we’ll leave the thrills of discovery to you. And remember: If you follow the chalk marks, you’ll get to the top—but are you really climbing?

The author facing off with the edge of the world, where the gray and blustery waters of the Southern Ocean meet the rocks of Curio Bay, in the Catlins. Photo by Geoff Green.

Some residents of Christchurch may feel the world has forgotten them in their tremulous days of earthquake-related stress and recovery. But another part of New Zealand has hardly been discovered: the green hills, thick forests and southernmost Kiwi coastline of the Catlins. To even see this place on a globe, one must lift it upward to expose the underbelly of the planet, and a northerner like me who ventures down here may get the prickly, precarious feeling that, should he trip or falter too near the shore, he might fall off the bottom of the Earth.

A main claim to fame of the Catlins is the area’s high latitude. Slope Point is the southernmost spot of land on the South Island, at 46 degrees, 40 minutes south. Oh, come on, now. Don’t raise your eyebrows and whistle like that. Seattle, for example, boasts a latitude of 47 degrees, and Glasgow goes just under 56 degrees. Yet I’ll grant that the Catlins are farther south than Tasmania, than Cape Town and than most cities in South America. This is, indeed, among the southernmost settled areas on the planet.

As I zeroed in, the world grew quiet. Sheep became more populous and people scarcer, and the abandoned dairy houses and community halls I passed, all locked up and grown over with weeds, looked like prime ghost habitat. My 3G internet connection petered out and died at about 46 degrees, 20 minutes south, and I was left frightfully alone in a world where even climbers at the top of Everest can send text messages to their mothers. I entered the region’s large town, Gore, and though it is heralded as the “brown trout capital of the world,” Gore had evidently seen better days. Almost no one was out and about. On its main drag, many businesses appeared shuttered, and defunct relics of infrastructure along the train tracks told of a livelier economic era that had withered.

In the village of Waimahaka, in spite of an auto garage, a school and a “community centre,” I saw not a soul, though—like an old cliché borrowed from a film—a radio happened to be playing that saddest song of the homeless drifter, “Lodi,” by Creedence Clearwater Revival. Several miles later, I caught a scent of the sea on a cool breeze. The hills, as green as the sky was gray, reminded me of coastal Scotland. So did the names printed on mailboxes, like Holmes, Heaps and Airlie, Buckingham, McPherson and Alcock. Sheep by the thousands grazed in the fields along the roads, but I saw nobody tending them. Over a hill came my first glance of the Southern Ocean—that brutal unbroken circumglobal ring of churning waters that had been generating icy headwinds for days. I hit the coast at Fortrose, a salty village of shacks decorated with clam and abalone shells. I immediately dug up several dozen cockles from the sandy bay and packed them away for dinner, and along the highway I bought all my vegetables from honesty boxes—and not until I entered the campground in Curio Bay that night did I speak to someone, a man named Geoff from Yorkshire on his way to Dunedin to seek out several long-lost cousins who emigrated to New Zealand in the 1950s and, subsequently, might as well have vanished into thin air.

I walked to the beach just after sunrise, and there on the rocks, standing tall and handsome and all suited up, were my first wild penguins. Called hoiho in the Maori language, the yellow-eyed penguin is said to be the rarest in the world. I came to within about 30 feet from the oblivious birds, which, like so many creatures here, evolved without predators and without fear. The federal government has even imposed a legal approach limit of 10 meters to protect the naïve birds, for one could probably walk up to one and carry it away.

At Curio Bay, visitors are reminded to leave at least 10 meters between themselves and the penguins that come ashore here, which pay no regard to the humans who may approach them.

At midday I collected a limit of 50 mussels and cooked half on the beach near the Cathedral Caves, saving the rest for dinner. I had been sleeping for free whenever possible but that evening paid $14 for a campsite in Pounawea. In a heavy drizzle at dawn, I pedaled 35 kilometers to Balclutha, where I stayed at the country cottage of two friends who live in the outskirts. One of them, Chris Muggeridge, is a transplanted chef from the North Island and, with business partner Daniel Hauser, recently opened a tapas restaurant called Hause Made on Balclutha’s main drag at 55 Clyde Street. Locals, Muggeridge says, have been cautious but inquisitive about these flavorful things called “tapas” and while Christmastime brought some business, many guests “were asking where the steaks were,” Muggeridge says. For this is beef and mutton country, and small plates of spicy, aromatic Mediterranean-influenced food is an exotic novelty here—way, way down here at 46-plus degrees south. Muggeridge and Hauser even believe their restaurant might be the southernmost tapas joint on Earth.

I rode my bike to Kaka Point one afternoon to collect mussels at low tide, and in a deeper pool, as I looked for abalone, I saw the tail of a large fish nestled in a crevice. A moment later, lying on my belly, I had it pinned and spent about 60 seconds with both arms in the water, my head half submerged, skirmishing with the struggling animal to get a grip in its mouth. Finally, I emerged with a thrashing fish nearly two feet long with a head like a toad’s and vacant eyes as black as a Patagonian toothfish‘s. I flipped through my New Zealand ocean regulations booklet; the fish, near as I could deem, was a legal catch, so I dispatched it. On my way home, I stopped at Hause Made so Muggeridge could have a look. “It’s what we call ‘rock cod’,” he said—though we failed later that night through Internet searches to pinpoint the creature’s Latin name, which is what really counts in the murky seafood world of “cod,” “sea bass,” “snapper,” and so much other generic nomenclature.

Adventures will continue as surely as my wheels roll, but, sadly, I must start north for Christchurch, for I am at that point in my journey where the days left can be counted on two hands. How I cursed those blustery Antarctic southerlies for days as I came south—but those same gales may soon be my dearest friend as I ascend northward, over the face of the Earth, climbing the parallels like rungs of a ladder, into the latitudes of people, dependable Internet access and a selection of tapas bars.

The author pulled this fish from the tidepools at Kaka Point with just his hands. What, exactly, is it?

Felicity Aston looks back on her journey across Antarctica. Photo courtesy of Aston.

When we last checked in with British adventurer Felicity Aston, she was just embarking on a solo skiing trek across Antarctica. On Jan. 22, she completed her journey. Aston was delayed by weather early in the trek, which she carried out on skis. By the time she reached the South Pole in late December, on a miserable day of whiteout weather, she was three weeks behind schedule. “I didn’t think there was any chance I was going to be able top do the last 600 miles in the time I had left,” she told me via Skype from Punta Arenas, Chile. Aston’s main worry was that she would miss the last airplane out, which departed from the coastal Union Glacier on Jan. 26. “But the researchers at the Pole said not to worry, that it was all downhill and that I’d have the wind at my back and that there was plenty of time,” Aston recalls.

Near the end at Union Glacier

But no such luck—at least not at first—and for several days after departing from 90 degrees south, Aston faced a brutally discouraging headwind. Then, good fortune came her way abruptly as the wind turned tail and nudged her forward. Moreover, she was nearly two miles above sea level (it’s a thick layer of ice down at the Pole) and it was, truly, all downhill to the coast. In fact, Aston more than compensated for early weather delays, and when she caught sight of the coastal mountains on January 21, she broke down in tears of victory four days ahead of schedule. The peaks stood out on the horizon as dark and steely cold blobs layered in wisps of icy cloud, but they shined with unusual brilliance—for they marked the end.

“They were like a neon sign flashing at me saying, ‘You have finished!’” Aston explained.

Aston in the tent at Hilleberg

That moment was the highlight of the trip, she told me, but there were other standout moments—including spells of abject misery on the ice. These occasions were rooted in the stress and fear of being so separated from the world, for there is no feeling of vulnerability on the Earth, Aston told me, as being alone in Antarctica, where other travelers have died. She was particularly afraid of frostbite. “I was always moving my fingers and toes and touching my face to make sure things weren’t freezing,” she said.

One especially meaningful moment came when she arrived at 90 south. Though none of the researchers present could see her approaching through the wild and snowy blizzard of that day, Aston was greeted onsite by one woman who handed the weather-worn traveler a fresh nectarine and an apple—nearly unimaginably satisfying treats at the very bottom of the world, where prior travelers in dire straits have resorted to eating penguins. Another glowing instant for Aston was the sight of the sun after a particularly gloomy spell of bad weather. She described that golden break in the sky as “a minor miracle.”

Now that she’s crossed the Earth’s most inhospitable continent on her own, what’s next for Aston? She isn’t yet sure, though she suspects it may not be in anyplace frozen. “I think it will be a while before I put on skis again,” she said, adding that she also doubts she will go solo on her next outing.

And did Aston find what she has been looking for in her long and rigorous tramps over the globe? Again, she isn’t sure. For each of her numerous adventures, Aston told me, has been a test of personal limits—and even after a self-powered trip across Antarctica, she is yet to find those limits. “Perhaps what I’m really looking for is failure,” she said, “because until you fail, you don’t know what your limits are.”

In Nepal, the Lambrecht family of Sebastopol, California is loving life and local transport.

When avid travelers Paul and Denise Lambrecht were expecting their first child, it never occurred to them that their lifestyle of spontaneity would have to end. In fact, it didn’t, and in many ways their most rewarding adventures were about to begin. Just three months after their daughter Ruby was born in 2001, Paul and Denise, each 30 and living in rural Sonoma County, California, turned to each other, shrugged and said, “let’s leave the country.”

So says Paul, who, with Denise, worked seasonally at the time as a teacher with a wilderness living course in Colorado. The Lambrechts rented out their home to generate some income and took flight. They landed in Portugal without plans, with no reservations and with an infant on their backs. They traveled by bus and train, visited beaches and mountains, found cheap lodging each night and generally immersed themselves in the nation’s family-based, food-loving, wine-soaked culture. Paul recalls the joy of taking Ruby into village bars and, while ordering espresso and wine, seeing Ruby swept up by strange arms and passed around by the admiring locals. “It was something you wouldn’t ever do in most places in America,” he says. The family rented a house for a time in Ericeira and eventually migrated eastward and northward. They explored the Pyrenees, settling into a small mountain community called Panticosa for several weeks, and finally moved on to France, which they toured north to south. The trip lasted through the summer.

The Lambrechts had more children—Ruby, 10, Ani, 7, and Noah, 3—and their mobility has not diminished.

“It never felt hard to travel with kids,” Paul says. “It just felt like what we would do. We were travelers. It was in our blood, and the idea that we would ever stop traveling just because we had kids never sat well with us.”

So they kept moving, and almost every summer for a decade the Lambrechts have voyaged abroad. Three years ago, the family spent six months journeying through Asia. They trekked in Nepal and went as far east as Laos and the shores of Thailand.

Paul hopes his kids are absorbing the important lessons of global travel. “I want them to see themselves as part of a world population and maybe even understand someday how American culture drives a material need that is way out of balance with the rest of the world.” Paul believes that he, Denise and the children have developed an appreciation of a life uncluttered by things. He thinks that material possessions like the toys that amass in heaps in many parents’ homes can be more cumbersome than the children themselves.

Eric Eggers of Portland, Oregon tows his 10-month-old son Sebastian through the woods on a ski outing.

Of course, taking the kids on globetrotting forays isn’t possible for all families. But in Portland, Oregon, Barb Myers and Eric Eggers still get outside, often into some fantastic scenery, with their 10-month-old son in tow. This winter, they have been cross-country skiing regularly while towing young Sebastian behind them in a Chariot child-carrier, a versatile contraption that may be fitted with wheels or skis as the terrain and season deem necessary. “It’s pretty sweet,” Myers says. Though she and Eggers don’t move as far or as fast as they once did, Sebastian weighs 23 pounds and may be to thank for improving levels of physical fitness in his parents.

(Then again, the resistance training that Sebastian provides is nothing compared to that of the almost-200-pound sled that Felicity Aston is currently dragging to the South Pole. She recently tweeted that she has been breaking down in tears almost every day, though a more recent tweet buoyantly told of her crossing the 88th southern parallel, putting her 138 miles from the polar research station.)

In the world of parenthood, the most tyrannical dictator may be nap time, which can govern the functioning of an entire household and essentially put its occupants under house arrest. But Myers and Eggers never accepted such shackles; they often just strap Sebastian into the Chariot when he grows drowsy, and as they ski into the woods, the kid conks out. It works perfectly.

“He naps and we ski,” Myers says.

Meanwhile, what do the kids take away from experiences afield and abroad? Sebastian, who has slept through many a scenic view and dreamy snowscape in his cozy Chariot, may be too young to remember the joys of cross-country skiing in Oregon, but at some level, Myers and Eggers hope, he’s absorbing the experiences.

“The hope is that by being exposed to the outdoors, he’ll someday take a shine to all this,” she says.

That’s what Michael Berg and Laura Cary believe, too. Also of Portland, they have an 18-month-old son named Calder who, from the time he was three months old, has been accompanying his parents on hikes, skiing excursions (with the ever-handy Chariot trailer) and car-camping trips into the primitive woods of the National Forest.

The Berg-Cary family enjoys the gleaming wonderland of Mount Hood.

“He’s like a sponge at 18 months,” Berg says, “and he’s absorbing all of this.” Cary notes that her own parents took a two-month summer tour through the Alaskan bush when she was just eight months old. It’s not an adventure she remembers, but she thinks the trip left a positive print deep within her psyche. “Starting kids in the outdoors early is important because everything they see gets ingrained and impressed into their being,” she says.

Cary read an influential book recently called Last Child in the Woods. “It tells about how so many kids are deficient in outdoor experience and activity,” she says.

And it doesn’t have to be that way. By all accounts, traveling and adventuring with children is rewarding and thrilling, with the odd misadventure arriving with uproarious tantrums and atomic-scale meltdowns—which, of course, will happen wherever a family happens to be. As Michael observes, “our baby, now toddler, will probably have moments of frustration and crying no matter where we are. Being out in the forest just makes it more enjoyable for all of us.”

Felicity Aston, shown here in Iceland, is currently attempting cross Antarctica alone. Image courtesy of Kaspersky Lab.

Two nights ago, with her tent staked down and dinnertime approaching, Felicity Aston received an unnerving surprise: Of her three cigarette lighters, not one would produce a flame.

Fortunately, the adventurer—now attempting to ski alone across Antarctica and still 180 miles from the South Pole—brought along plenty of matches, and she needs them. Without a working cook stove, Aston’s peanuts, chocolate and even her freeze-dried meals would provide sustenance, but she would have no water, which must be melted from ice. And so she’s rationing her matches—which she has counted down to the last.

“I have just enough to get me to the South Pole,” Aston told me during a phone chat on Wednesday, while her soup simmered on the pot and the wind wailed outside her tent. It was evening, almost bedtime—though time of day hardly matters in December at the very underside of the planet, where the sun circles the sky just above the horizon and leaves anyone without navigation tools as dizzy and directionless as the whirling wind.

Aston began her journey on November 25 at a latitude of 85 degrees south on the Ross Ice Shelf, and she aims to finish by late January. Completion would make her the first person to cross Antarctica alone and unassisted by anything but bodily power. A Norwegian adventurer named Børge Ousland crossed the continent in the summer of 1996 to 97, but he took advantage of the wind when it blew in his favor by letting out a parachute to drag him forward. Aston is using nothing but muscle power—and muscle she needs. At the outset, the 5-foot-11 Aston had with her about 200 pounds of gear, which she is dragging behind her on two sleds. Her baggage is a no-nonsense assembly of tent, stove, fuel and a carefully rationed two pounds of food per day of travel. The journeyer is also packing along a telephone for maintaining contact with more humanly latitudes. She reserves time slots almost daily to speak with people, often members of the media.

Aston is a veteran of travels in rough places, usually accompanied by others. As her website states, “Felicity has raced in the Canadian Arctic, led a team of women across the inland ice of Greenland, led a record-making International team to the South Pole, searched for meteorite craters in Quebec, skied along a frozen river in Siberia, traversed the winter ice of Lake Baikal, completed the infamous Marathon Des Sables across the Moroccan Sahara and spent three years living and working in the Antarctic.” Many of her journeys, she explained to me, have been self-administered tests of her own emotional and physical endurance limits. On this particular trek, Aston may have met her match: solitude.

“I’m learning that I’m not a natural soloist,” the 33-year-old Briton said, her voice responding to mine on the slight delay of satellite communication. “Being this alone is a new experience for me.”

Aston hasn’t seen a soul since she started, since souls don’t naturally occur in this land, but at the South Pole she expects to be received by the scientists occupying the location’s United States-run research station, home of the South Pole Telescope. Aston is covering about 15 nautical miles per day, she says, and expects to be at the South Pole a few days before Christmas. Then, her journey will continue as she walks on toward a remote outpost called the Union Glacier, served by a commercial aviation operator Antarctic Logistics and Expeditions. And while Aston may be in no-man’s land, where schedules, deadlines and responsibility seem to carry little relevance, she is, in fact, tightly bound by one crucial logistic.

“I can’t miss the last plane out,” she said, explaining that ALE’s Ilyushin IL76 aircraft, scheduled to come and go 17 times this year, makes its final departure from Union Glacier this summer on January 26. Aston is already behind schedule, after days of bad weather holed her up in her tent on the Ross Ice Shelf, then slowed her to a feeble crawl on the Leverett Glacier, the wind blasting her from all directions. She has more glacial ice to navigate and more perilous crevasses to dodge or hop before she hits the high polar plateau. From here, a straight shot south will land her at 90 degrees south—not to mention a frigid 9,301 feet above sea level. Aston is keeping on track with GPS and compass, minding the fact that the ever-drifting magnetic South Pole is currently centered over the Antarctic Ocean; she needs no reminding that she is pursuing the geographic South Pole.

The cozy inside of Aston's tent, with dinner cooking in the foreground. Image courtesy of Kaspersky Lab.

At the outset, Aston was eating about 4,000 calories daily. She is bumping up her measured intake to 4,500 calories to compensate for wear and tear on the body, which, instead of growing stronger under such grueling conditions, may actually grow weaker and increasingly exhausted, she explained. I asked what Aston thinks she’ll have for her first square meal back in civilization.

“I’m really missing warm, fresh, puffy bread,” she said.

No matter. Aston, one of the toughest people alive, will have her bread when it comes. Meanwhile, every move she makes is a step on thin ice.

“I feel very vulnerable out here,” said Aston, her voice beamed from Antarctica through space and down again into my own cell phone. “I’ve never been so far away from everything. When you’re this remote, there’s nobody watching out for you, and you have to take absolute responsibility for yourself. It’s a very scary feeling.”

Aston’s attempt to cross Antarctica alone can be followed at the expedition’s website.