All episodes
Author: Chris Watson
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The Ultimate 7: wild expeditions from Death Valley to Denali, with Oli France
At minus thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, fourteen thousand feet up Denali, Oli France woke to find his water bottles frozen solid. He had cycled three thousand five hundred miles from Death Valley to get here — the longest, coldest commute to a mountain he had ever made.
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Living off-grid and surviving 75 days alone in Canada’s wilderness.
The first thing Karie Lee Knoke built when she got to Labrador was a fire. Not for warmth — for the sound. After three weeks alone in the boreal forest, the quiet had begun to do something to her. She needed a noise she had made.
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Amazonian tribe life and the Primal Survivor journey, with Hazen Audel
At nineteen, Hazen Audel rode a battered bus into Ecuador’s rainforest with seventy-eight dollars, a tent, and no plan beyond finding the creatures he’d only seen in books. Then a rainbow boa slithered aboard — and his life split open.
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The undercover investigator who lived inside wildlife crime.
Timothy Santel spent three decades inside the illegal wildlife trade — not as a trafficker, but as the agent who brought them down. Operation Snowplow. Operation Crash. Fifty prosecutions across continents. This is what it costs to be a voice for animals that cannot speak.
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Wild Siberian adventures (amid a 9-5 job).
The ice beneath Ash Routen’s boots was three metres thick, but it didn’t feel solid. Lake Baikal groans. It booms. In February, the world’s deepest lake — frozen and vast — becomes something alive, and the mind plays tricks. Ash walked it anyway.
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Into the wilds of the Okavango Delta, with Olly Pemberton
Olly Pemberton was three feet from a bull hippo when its jaws snapped open. In the heart of the Okavango Delta, filming wildlife means breathing the same air as the animal trying to kill you. That proximity — thatrawness — is what he’s spent a career chasing.
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A 1,200-mile journey along the Cherokee Trail of Tears, with Ian Finch
Royal Marine turned expedition photographer Ian Finch spent 1,200 miles retracing the Cherokee Trail of Tears on foot. Four thousand people died on that route in 1838. Some nights, he camped where they fell.
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Graham Zimmerman. First ascents and searching for balance amongst mountains.
At 7,041 metres on Link Sar in Pakistan’s Karakoram, Graham Zimmerman stood on a summit thirty-eight years in the making. Not his years — the mountain’s. Link Sar had turned back every team since 1979. What he learnt up there wasn’t about conquering. It was about returning.
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The swimming elephant took two years to photograph.
Jonathan Kingston’s first National Geographic assignment began with a broken camera and a maxed-out credit card. Twenty years later, he’s still chasing the image he hasn’t made yet — the one that holds more stories than a single frame should be able to carry.
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Mountain biking down Kilimanjaro and across the Karakoram, with Gerhard Czerner
Gerhard Czerner carried a mountain bike to the base of K2, taught his porters to ride on the Baltoro Glacier, and rode down Kilimanjaro’s scree in 2016. These are not summary facts. They are the opening lines of a longer conversation about what happens when you stop separating the climb from the descent.
