Ultimate Adventure Bucket List 2012

Twenty of the world's top athletes and explorers share their wildest dream trips—a dazzling list of never attempted feats daunting to even these world-class competitors. For the rest of us, consider their must-do adventures—and start planning. 

Dream Trip: Ski South Georgia Island

,On his legendary quest to rescue the sailors of the Endurance, Sir Ernest Shackleton undertook one of the hairiest small-boat crossings ever recorded—800 nautical miles across the insane-making conditions of the Southern Ocean. Then he topped it off with an arguably more insane trek across rugged snow-buried South Georgia Island. Since then, the unsettled island hasn’t changed much at all, which is why it remains one of the last great unknown adventure destinations. 

“My current dream trip would be to hire a sailboat with five or six of my friends, skiers, photographers, and filmmakers and document a trip to South Georgia Island,” says Chris Davenport. “The goal would be to try and re-create the amazing traverse of Sir Ernest Shackleton.” Along the way, they’d cross glaciers and snowfields, spot penguins and fur seals, and ski descents on peaks that top 9,600 feet. “This would be a monthlong trip to one of the world’s most beautiful and remote islands,” says Davenport.

Dream Trip: Climb 8,000-Meter Peaks in the Himalaya

Ueli Steck is fixated on a goal that is perhaps more difficult than a summit: testing his personal limits. This is not so simple when it comes to the Swiss Machine, whose limits are preposterously extreme. It has led him to set his sights on scaling 8,000-meter summits—at top speeds. 

“You know, 8,000 meters, they’re the highest peaks,” says Steck. “It’s the thinnest air and it’s the biggest challenge.” Steck, naturally, doesn’t want to walk up them—“I’m a bad hiker,” he says. Steck is aiming for the mountains’ bold, highly technical routes, such as the south face of 26,545-foot Annapurna. He already stood on the top of Cho Oyu (with mountaineer Don Bowie) and Shishapangma (in 10.5 hours) in 2011. Perhaps Everest isn’t so far-fetched.

Dream Trip: Kayak the Entire Yarlung Tsangpo, Tibet

Some might argue that the last frontier of human exploration lies not in mountains or jungles but in the tumultuous uncharted rivers that run through them. And one of the mightiest, hairiest, most remote prizes still left to kayak in full is undoubtedly the Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibet.

“It’s a massive river,” says expedition paddler Ben Stookesberry. “It essentially drains half of the Tibetan Plateau. It's headwaters lie in Western Tibet near Mount Kailas, which, to Tibetan and Hindu cultures, is the center of the universe." It flows due east past Mount Everest before dropping 9,000 feet through the Tsangpo Gorge to India.

Sky-high permit fees, the river’s remoteness, and the sheer terror of its unknown Class V+ whitewater has kept this river sacred and relatively unexplored. The entire river, which has views of Everest and runs through a 16,000-foot gorge—the deepest on Earth—has yet to be kayaked top to bottom in one expedition. Doug Gordon died trying in 1998 shortly into the trip. In 2002, a team led by Scott Lindgren successfully completed the first descent of the Upper Tsangpo Gorge, one of the last prizes in big water kayaking, but opted to leave the Lower Gorge for another time. Just kayaking and negotiating the Upper Gorge took them 30 days. “It’s the Everest of rivers,” says Stookesberry. “But unlike Everest, it has never been completely accomplished.

Dream Trip: Ice Climb Baffin Island and Greenland

”It all started with a rumor. From friends who have flown over Greenland and Canada’s Baffin Island to scout for minerals and tourism, Will Gadd heard about the possibility of ice-climbing gold: huge granite fjords spackled with frozen waterfalls. “I think there is likely more ice in the Baffin Island-Greenland sweep than anyone suspects,” says Gadd. “But it's really, really hard to get there.”
Gadd plans to wait for conditions to ripen during the winter of 2011—12 before he heads up on a private expedition to investigate. He expects to find a host of 2,000- to 3,000-foot waterfalls in places so far north that they don’t see the sun for as much as two months out of the year—perfect conditions for intrepid ice climbers. “It’s like Yosemite Valley but a lot more of it,” says Gadd. “And no, I can’t give you the GPS coordinates.”

Dream Trip: Dive and Surf From Florida to the Bahamas

Kenny Broad sees the adventure beneath the surface—literally. The cave diver and cultural anthropologist has explored much of subterranean Florida and the Bahamas through its underworld of watery limestone caves and passageways. 

His dream trip is something he dubs the “Caves, Waves, and Babes Expedition,” a water sport odyssey across Florida and the Bahamas with his wife, Amy, and sons Lincoln, four, and Jasper, eight. From Cedar Key and Manatee Springs on the Gulf Coast of Florida, the epicenter of cave diving, the group would “dive our way underground and paddle rivers on surface until we come out in the Atlantic, then cross the Gulf Stream in my trawler, and make our way to the Bahamas,” says Broad. “From there, we’d cave dive all the way down the Caribbean, with breaks to surf when the waves are good.”

Dream Trip: BASE Jump Off Shipton Spire, Pakistan

The Karakorum Range might as well have a moat around it. A kingdom of the greatest concentration of high mountains on Earth, it holds such fearsome 8,000-meter peaks as K2, Gasherbrum I and II, and Broad Peak. And not only is the range remote and difficult to access, it sits on top of a hotbed of volatile borders between Tajikistan, China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and India, effectively sealing the mountains from the bulk of mountaineers—and leaving many faces unclimbed. 

Perhaps that is part of the allure to climber and BASE jumper Steph Davis, who summited Shipton Spire in 1998. “When we climbed that, it was the third ascent of the peak, and I really enjoyed being there,” she says. “Everything there is just really big, which is part of what makes that place really special. If we lived in a fantasy land and nothing’s an obstacle, it would be pretty cool to go back and jump Shipton.” 

By jump, she means toss herself off of it—with a parachute, of course. A 19,308-foot tooth with an inconceivably huge granite face, Shipton has attracted many climbers, but it has never—yet—been jumped.

Dream Trip: Snowboard the Himalaya

,More than 110 peaks rise to over 24,000 feet in the Himalaya, making it both the loftiest mountain range on Earth and an irresistible stomping grounds for elite adventurers. Gretchen Bleiler is no exception. The accomplished competition and backcountry snowboarder daydreams about a journey to the region for both its adventurous allure and its cultural and spiritual mystique.
She envisions "a trip to the Himalaya where we go on treks and snowboard, build jumps to learn tricks, practice yoga, and also adventure to find hidden monasteries in the middle of nowhere.” As for specifics, Bleiler is still hatching a plan. She could wander anywhere from the flanks of 20,200-foot Thorung Peak to the snowfields, glaciers, and pinnacles surrounding Everest. One thing is certain: Along the way, she’d undoubtedly encounter the captivating suggestions of Himalayan culture: stupas on remote hilltops, chants wafting from high monasteries, and ubiquitous prayer flags that carry missives to the heavens

Dream Trip: Traverse the High Arctic, Canada

.“The Inuit or Eskimo people call this area the land of hardship and starvation,” says Will Steger of Canada’s Arctic—in other words, an obvious vacation destination for the famed polar explorer. “For adventure’s sake, I’m stringing together an extremely challenging route, up valleys and rivers and crossing mountains, the whole thing,” says Steger of a 2,000-mile dream expedition that he will undertake during the winter of 2013—14. “A lot of the areas I’ve always wanted to go to and others I want to revisit, particularly some of the native cultures along the way.” 

Starting on the Arctic Ocean at the MacKenzie Delta in the Northwest Territories—one of the coldest places in the Northern Hemisphere in winter—Steger will cross thick forests, huge lakes, headwaters of grand rivers most of us have never heard of, open plains, and frozen mountain ranges all the way to South Indian Lake in northern Manitoba. He’ll travel territory he’s never seen but also stop in villages where he’s known three generations of Inuit. 

The ever present dangers of bitter cold, storms, and the unknown that would deter less trained individuals don’t phase Steger. In fact, that’s a large part of the appeal. “Go to any wild place, for as long as you can, even if it’s a week or two, and you’ll get a new perspective on your life,” he says.
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