Patagonia

The companion book to Jeff Johnson's film about retracing the 1968 journey of Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tompkins to Patagonia. Part surf trip, part climbing expedition, part environmental reckoning. Johnson sails, hitchhikes, and climbs his way to the edge of the world — and finds it being sold off piece by piece.

Steve House's memoir of becoming one of the best alpine climbers of his generation. The ascent of Nanga Parbat's Rupal Face — alpine style, in a single push — is the centerpiece. House writes about the physical and psychological cost of climbing at the highest level.

Through photography, interviews, crew stories, and a foreword by Desmond Tutu, the hardcover Mālama Honua shares the travels of a double-hulled canoe named Hōkūle’a. Built in the 1970s, this sailing canoe was created to revive the art and science of ancient Polynesian wayfinding techniques: understanding the distinct patterns of ocean swells, reading the stars for clues, predicting the weather from animal behavior and wind. No GPS, National Weather Service, or Apple products allowed. Because as one of the book’s modern day navigators says, “If you can read the ocean…you will never be lost.” The book begins in 2014 and covers a multi-year boat journey to communities in New Zealand, Australia, Africa, and South and North America, steered onward by captain Nainoa Thompson, the first native Hawaiian since the 14th century to sail without modern instruments from Hawaii to Tahiti. Visually luscious, educationally inspiring, and totally badass—how many times have you relied upon your smartphone today?—this book is a treasure of hard-won knowledge and experience.

A solo kayak journey up Alaska's Inside Passage at age 60-something. No support boat, no satellite phone, no concessions to age. Pure competence and joy.

Cultural historian Mark Kurlansky, author of the bestselling books such as Cod, Salt, and Milk, turns his signature deep-dive lens to another focus, that of salmon, which until quite recently roamed abundantly wild throughout the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Textbook in size yet lyrically reverent, Salmon is a four-hundred page ode to a fish “beautiful in its many phases; thrilling in its athleticism; poetic in its heroic and tragic life story.” With stunning images both modern and historical—such as a massive, sixty-four pound Atlantic salmon caught on a rod in the British Isles or a Tlakuit fisherman using a dip net on the Columbia in 1910—and even a few recipes for beer bread and chowder, Kurlansky covers seemingly every angle of river dams, fisheries, aquaculture, and piscine ecology. From Japan’s markets to Alaska’s Bristol Bay, Salmon reveals the long, fabled journey of a fish whose survival is intertwined with our own.

Stripped-down fly fishing — tenkara rods, simple flies, no reels. The fishing equivalent of the climbing philosophy that built Patagonia: less gear, more attention.

Chouinard on risk — in climbing, in business, in life. Short essays drawn from decades of doing things the hard way. The philosophy behind Patagonia, distilled to its essentials.

Seven years sailing solo around the Pacific on a 40-foot boat, surfing remote breaks, and learning to live without a plan. A young woman's voyage that became a way of life. One of the best adventure memoirs of the last decade.

Having been a marina live-aboard for over three years, I know how many would-be sailors dream of bluewater voyages. But with trip logistics and obligations in the way, even the most dialed boaters rarely leave port. Against the odds, with a combination of good fortune, bartending shifts, and more than a year of hard boat prep, Liz Clark cast off from Santa Barbara in her early 20s and she’s been sailing and surfing the world ever since. Over a decade and 20,000 nautical miles later, Captain Clark brings us Swell, a memoir named after her beloved 1966 Cal-40. It’s a life seemingly so charmed it scarcely seems real, but Clark shares both sunshine and grime, from remote tropical islands and a surf sisterhood to broken-down engines and relationships both damaging and generous. With enchanting illustrations and photos, Swell offers an open-hearted exploration of how to stay aloft from one safe anchorage to the next, navigating the unknown terrain in between.

Growing up rough in the Canadian Rockies, becoming one of the best alpinists in the world. Blanchard's memoir is unflinching about the cost — the broken relationships, the dead friends, the moments when climbing asks for everything.

The business philosophy behind Patagonia — environmental responsibility as a corporate practice, not a marketing strategy. A companion to Let My People Go Surfing, more focused on the supply chain.

The complete history of Cerro Torre — the most disputed summit claim in mountaineering. Did Maestri reach the top in 1959? Cordes investigates the evidence, the personalities, and the obsession that has consumed climbers for sixty years.

Beamish built a boat and sailed it down the Baja California coast, surfing the points along the way. Handmade craft, handmade journey. The slowest possible way to cover the distance.

Few wildlife biologists can tell stories like Douglas Chadwick, a National Geographic contributor since 1977 who’s spent his life in the field with elusive and misunderstood animals—snow leopards in the Himalaya, wolverines and grizzly bears in North America. In this strange-but-true account he takes us into a mountainous corner of Mongolian desert, one of the world’s most difficult, remote landscapes, where only four to six inches of rain fall a year, most of the ground is stone, and temperatures range from 122 Fahrenheit to minus 40. How can anything live here? First confirmed by scientists as recently as the 1940s, the Gobi bear is the rarest of bears—a relative of grizzlies, shaggy-haired and shy yet playful, a tenacious champion of adaptation. With chapters like “Indiana Jones and the Gobi Death Worm” plus more than 150 images by photographer Joe Riis, it’s an exploration of survival and a reminder our world still holds mystery.

What The Joy of Cooking is to home cooks, Waves and Beaches has been to sea lovers for nearly sixty years. The comprehensive tome is part fundamental instructional and part voluminous love letter to the alchemy of where land meets the sea. Willard Bascom, an engineer, adventurer, photographer, scientist, and cinematographer who pioneered a number of ocean technologies, including being one of the first to suggest neoprene as a wetsuit material, wrote the book in 1963. When Bascom died in a car accident in 2000, oceanographer Kim McCoy, Bascom’s friend and protégé, inherited the beloved manuscript. This third edition reflects both authors and their seventy years of experience on shorelines on all seven continents, as well as an update devoted to the history and effects of climate change. Four hundred pages stuffed with physics illustrations, encyclopedic text, and gorgeous photography makes for essential reading that belongs on the bookshelves of all coastal explorers.