Steve

“Our first trip was to the Canadian Arctic, where we were supposed to witness the migration of the Porcupine caribou herd, the largest and most magnificent movement of mammals in North America, and document their crossing of a remote river called the Firth, which Pete assured our editors at National Geographic Adventure “shouldn’t be too big of a deal,” given the size of the herd (roughly 123,000 animals, flanked by wolves, grizzly bears, and other predators). Unfortunately, we planned so poorly that we failed to locate a single caribou, returning home with little to show, aside from a lone photo capturing a set of antlers lying forlornly on the tundra—which, one of the magazine’s fact-checkers indignantly informed me, had actually belonged to a moose.”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“The mosaic is so rich and varied that a hiker who descends from the highest point on the North Rim to the lowest point inside the canyon will pass through a spectrum of life equivalent to moving from the cool boreal forests of subarctic Canada to the sunstruck deserts of Mexico that lie just above the Tropic of Cancer—thereby compressing a distribution of plants and animals that typically stretch over more than two thousand horizontal miles into a single vertical mile.”
― Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

“The laurel shall wave and form a bright wreath for the brows of the brave.”
― Lee Child, Exit Strategy

“One way to sum up the new scholarship is to say that it has begun, at last, to fill in one of the biggest blanks in history: the Western Hemisphere before 1492. It was, in the current view, a thriving, stunning diverse place, a tumult of languages, trade, and culture, a regiin where tens of millions of people loved and hated and worshipped as people do everywhere. Much of this world vanished after Columbus, swept away by disease and subjugation. So thorough was the erasure that within a few generations neither conqueror nor conquered knew that this world had existed. Now, though, it is returning to view. It seems incumbent on us to take a look.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus