The Pursuit Zone

Ryan Wichelns is the founding editor of Trails Magazine.   It is the only independent, quality-over-quantity, and print-only magazine for backpackers and those who love to sleep in the dirt. He is also an outdoor-adventure and environmental freelance writer and journalist. His work has appeared in Backpacker Magazine, Outside Online, Gear Junkie, and more.   Ryan first appeared in episode 12 and a...

  At the age of 22 she had a spinal injury that ended her dreams of becoming an athlete.  Through a lot of pain, disappointment and treatment she slowly got better.  Two years later she wanted to prove to herself that she could still achieve big goals so she set out to cycle the Iron Curtain Trail also known as Eurovelo 13 .  The route took her from Norway on the Barents Sea through 19 countries e...

In 2015, with his friend Tarran , he completed a kayaking adventure along the Amazon River, traveling from the headwaters of the Rio Mantaro, high in the Peruvian Andes, to the Atlantic Ocean in Brazil.   It was 400 miles of trekking followed by 3,600 miles of kayaking for 4.5 months.  You can learn more about Olie and his adventures at oliehuntersmart.com .  Olie Hunter Smart, welcome back to the...

The first part of his 40,000-kilometer cycling journey took him from England to Tbilisi Georgia.  After a winter break in England earning money, he reunited with his bike and continued through central Asia along the Pamir highway and into the Whakan Valley.  He was denied a visa to China so he chose to cycle India from south to north.  His adventure continued into Nepal, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam...

  In the summer of 2019, Anna Welch traveled from New Zealand to San Francisco to begin cycling across the United States. She was inspired by the Kate Harris book Lands of Lost Borders – A Journey on the Silk Road . She wanted to see a cross-section of American culture and geography in a way that tested her mental and physical limits. She followed the Western Express and Trans Am routes, using map...

  In 2018 they began a long cycling adventure, heading east from their home country the Netherlands. Some of the places they have cycled include Turkey, Iran, Oman, and Japan. They've experienced the extremes of the high mountain passes through central Asia and the heat and humidity of SE Asia. Along the way they captured these moments with their cameras and created some of the best cycling videos...

  He lives a life of adventure as a travel writer and broadcast journalist, reporting from over 100 countries in the past decade.  Back in 2016 he sailed and cycled from China to London in 133 days.  The main legs of this journey were a 28-day yacht race across the North Pacific then cycling across the USA in 49 days before getting back into the race on a different crew and sailing 11 days across...

Christine Ka'aloa runs the YouTube channel GrrrlTraveler .  It's a channel that takes you inside her solo travel adventures around the world.  Before YouTube, she lived in New York City for over 8 years, working in tv and video production including working with MTV.  When the economy slowed in 2009, she decided to take a gap year to travel abroad.  She spent time living in South Korea teaching Eng...

Photo credit: Susanna Oreskovic In the late 1920s, the husband-and-wife duo Don and Phyllis Munday believed there was an undiscovered peak in the Coast Range about 200 miles north of Vancouver which was an uncharted part of the province.  They called it Mystery Mountain and set out to find it.  They achieved their goal in 1928, reaching the lower summit of Mystery Mountain which became known as Mo...

Her travels have taken her all over the world.  Her first big adventure was traveling solo through parts of East and West Africa using public transportation.  She is also into cycle-touring and spent 2.5 months in SE Asia, 5 weeks in Patagonia, and most recently was back in Africa cycling from Luxor Egypt to Khartoum Sudan.  In 2019 she competed in the first Bike Nonstop US race from Portland Oreg...

  Her adventure began in Ushuaia Argentina in late January 2013. Nearly 7 months later she cycled into Santiago Chile after 4,600 km accomplishing her goal of unicycling through Patagonia. But the goal was more than just a cycling challenge. It was a way to meet people from different cultures and a way to discover herself at the same time. In 2016, she received the Kris Holm Evolution of Balance a...

At the end of 2016 he left his job to begin 2 months of planning for a walk across India from Turtuk in the north to Kanyakumari in the south. The walk would begin in 2017. The year marking 70 years of Indian independence. The goal of the expedition was to learn about how Independence and Partition affected the people that lived through it as well as to demonstrate that with careful planning and d...

When she was little, she dreamed of becoming a writer. But by her early forties, after dozens of jobs from teaching to real estate to selling insurance, she wondered why she had lost sight of that dream. So, in 2011 she set out from Belgrade Serbia on an old 8-speed mountain bike with a budget of 5 euros per day to begin cycling around the world. Along the way she overcame many hardships. But she...

She left her job as a graphic designer and traveled to New Zealand to start her first bicycle tour.  But when it was over, she knew she wanted more.  A few years later in 2015 she cycled away from her home in Sweden with the plan to ride back to New Zealand.  The journey took her through Europe, Turkey, and Iran before ending with an injured foot on the Pamir highway in Tajikistan.  Back in Sweden...

Karma is from Sweden and Scott from New Zealand.  They have a passion for long-distance hiking and exploring the world.  Not wanting to be owned by their stuff, they sold everything but the packs on their backs and in 2019 began a multi-year trek from North Cape at the top of Norway toward Bluff at the bottom of New Zealand.  So far, their journey has taken them through 8 countries.  They traveled...

Enjoy this bonus episode in celebration of reaching 200 episodes. 24 previous guests sent in recordings of what they are doing now.

Back in 2006 while snowboarding in the French Alps, he met some backpackers and became fascinated with their lifestyle and tales of travel and adventure.  Soon after, he quit his job and spent a year working and traveling Australia.  A few years later, while backpacking and volunteering in Central America, he decided to retire the backpack and begin traveling in other ways.  First, he built a bike...

At age 15 he emigrated with his parents from Romania to Montreal Canada.  He studied software engineering at University, but after graduation he decided to take another path in life.  He left on a 9-month adventure to cycle the Americas from the top of Alaska to the bottom of South America, a 34,000 km journey that ultimately lasted more than 3 years.  For this he was awarded the European Adventur...

In August 2019, he began a 780 km trek across Madagascar.  Joined by three team members, the goal was to walk east to west along Madagascar's longest river, the Mangoky.  The journey was 29 days through jungles and across mountain ranges while avoiding crocodiles and the threat of armed bandits.  Part of the adventure is to raise funds and awareness for the loss of wildlife and wild lands across A...

He is on a mission to use human power to reach the peaks of the seven summits.  After cycling to Nepal and summiting Mt. Everest in 2016, he set out on a new adventure to reach the top of Carstensz Pyramid , the highest peak of Mount Carstensz in the Popua Province of Indonesia.  He began on bicycle from Nepal, crossing India, Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia and ending 9,000 km later in East Java Indo...

They saved their money and quit their jobs to begin traveling the world with the goal of reaching all seven continents.  Their fourth continent, Antarctica, is an expensive place to get to so they applied for jobs at McMurdo station , a US Antarctic research base with a summer population of about 1,200 people.  You can learn more about their 5 months at McMurdo and their other travels at their web...

His passion is undertaking expeditions through the mountains, thousands of kilometers long, on foot and usually alone.  These journeys provide an opportunity to look within and ponder life's most profound questions.  For more than 2 decades he has walked over 20,000 km through mountain ranges in Europe and Asia.  In 2004 he did a first ever solo thru-hike of the Carpathian Mountains and in 2014 he...

The North Sea Cycle Route extends along the coastline of eight countries bordering the North Sea.  It's about 6,000 km long and is also known as EuroVelo 12 .  It's a diverse route covering land below sea level in the Netherlands to cliffs over 1,000 meters high in Norway.  Laura Kennington completed this journey over 70 days in the summer of 2018.  She has also recently authored a book titled Kai...

In February 2018, architects Guylee Simmonds and David Schnabel bought a marine survival lifeboat and spent a year converting it for a four-month, 5000 km voyage to the Arctic.  Along with a dog named Shackleton, they traveled from the UK to Tromsø, the largest city in the Arctic, situated far north in the Norwegian Fjords.  The aim of the expedition was to design a self-sufficient boat capable of...

Over the past decade she has done many adventures which have taken her to the Arctic, the Haute route, Bolivian high peaks, Denali, and Iceland to name a few.  Her first time in the Amazon jungle was a short trip to Guyana in 2014.  She went back in 2020 with the mission to cross the Kanuku mountain range.  With a small group of Amerindian tribe members, the team completed the crossing after a few...