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Cloud, sea and sun create a morning sky as spectacular as it is serene as Matt Rutherford enters another day on his solo voyage around the Americas. Photo by Matt Rutherford

After Columbus, Magellan and Drake; after Steller, Nansen and Amundsen; after the golden age of exploration fizzled into the era of idleness and suburbia; after the deepest jungles of New Guinea were finally mapped; and after the conquest of the solar system—still there remained one thing undone.

And now Matt Rutherford is doing it: He is on the homestretch of a nearly one-year journey that should make him the first person ever to circumnavigate the Americas on a single voyage. The 30-year-old sailor from Annapolis, Maryland is currently riding the wind northwest through the western Atlantic Ocean. The journey runs 25,000 miles from the edge of Arctic Canada to the tip of Patagonia and two oceans in between. He’s sailing alone, though that isn’t essential to the record.

“Nobody, period, has done this before,” Rutherford told me by satellite telephone on March 8. “Not on a 100-foot boat with a crew of 50, not on an aircraft carrier.”

Rutherford’s boat is the sort, as he says, that could be moored at a wharf and not attract a second glance. It’s a modest 27-foot Albin-Vega with a tendency for mechanical things to break and a ceiling so low that the 6-foot-tall Rutherford bumps his head any time he wakes up and forgets where he is. Rutherford, a sailor since 2004, has not set foot on land for almost 280 days, with an estimated 30 left. When we spoke, he was about 200 miles north of the mouth of the Amazon River and moving homeward, and certainly the most perilous parts of the journey are in the sack.

Indeed, right after setting out last June, he tackled the once almost mythical, now plain legendary Northwest Passage. Then he braved the nasty Bering Sea, and southward he went along the West Coast of Canada, the United States and Mexico. He entered the 30-to-35-degree latitude zone of famously windless weather, often called the “horse latitudes,” where many a sailing ship of the old days was stranded for sweltering, thirsty weeks. But Rutherford sailed through and into the sticky, balmy tropics. He paid little notice to the Panama Canal—the lazy sailor’s gateway to the Atlantic—for Rutherford was taking the scenic route. Ecuador, Peru and Chile sailed by before the American faced off with the tip of South America. As most sailors do when they find themselves in this neighborhood, Rutherford slipped through the Strait of Magellan, which brought him back again to the ocean he knows best, and the final leg of the trip began.

Rutherford has been fishing, he said. He trolls a lure behind him and, about two weeks ago, landed a mahi mahi worth a few good meals. He took a mid-sized yellowfin tuna off of New England early on and has lost a good many lures to strong strikes that broke his line. Those may have been sharks, swordfish or bluefin tuna. But the ideal catch, Rutherford explains, is a skipjack tuna, since they’re big enough for a feast but small enough to not to be wasted.

He is also eating freeze-dried foods provided by a sponsor, Shelf Reliance. The Utah company’s products are of high quality, Rutherford says, and he’s been preparing restaurant-quality soups and stews.

“All the great freeze-dried foods come out of Utah because of the Mormon ideology that you should have at least a year’s worth of freeze-dried food on your shelf,” Rutherford explained. “They make good freeze-dried food. You’ve gotta go to the Mormons if you want the good stuff.”

Rutherford has fought through just enough nasty weather to keep him on his toes, and he had a close call in the Bering Sea when an icy wave nearly flipped him over. Elsewhere, he has seen about 15 gales, he says, adding that he respects the ocean but doesn’t fear it.

“If the boat sinks and I drown, so be it,” he said. “That’s just how it is, but there’s no sense in being scared all the time.”

Somewhere in the Canadian Arctic last summer, Rutherford soaks up the chill, the fog and silence of the Northwest Passage. Photo by Matt Rutherford.

His vessel has had a few technical problems – not the least of which was when his water desalinator conked out off of Newfoundland. More recently, off Brazil, his engine petered out. Rutherford’s engine has served mostly as a generator for various appliances and lights, not for locomotion (he is, after all, a sailor). In each minor crisis, nearby vessels came to his assistance, tossing him the parts needed to make repairs.

Other vessels have been less helpful—like the one in early March that approached him in the middle of the night and began circling, coming closer and closer at each pass until, when the strange boat came to within 20 feet away, Rutherford fired a gun twice into the night sky. The boat departed in a hurry.

Asked whether any peers have criticized his voyage as haphazard or foolish, Rutherford said, “With these kinds of trips, it just depends on the outcome. If I had failed early on, then it could have been easily ridiculed, like, ‘Oh, you can’t do that trip on such a small budget or sailing alone, or on such a small boat.’ Basically, I either fail and everyone thinks I’m crazy, or I succeed and I’m a hero.”

Rutherford’s journey is a fundraising venture for Chesapeake Region Accessible Boating (CRAB), a nonprofit sailing program for people with disabilities, and donations can be made via his website. His progress can be followed through his blog. Rutherford is an experienced adventurer and a self-titled “gypsy,” and this journey will not likely be his last. He has already pedaled a bicycle around Southeast Asia and spent 2008 to 2010 on a 32-foot sailboat zigzagging between four continents in the Atlantic Ocean. Next up may be a return to the Arctic, where Rutherford hopes to film a documentary. But first: home, where he says he’s anticipating “a cold beer and a hot shower.”

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.”

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.