Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
"Outdoor sports adventurers and rock stars have two things in common," Rick Ridgeway observes in The Do Boys: 52 Stories of Adventure. "If they live past 40, many of their friends have not. And if they do reach that milestone, they have probably had as many experiences as most people twice that age."
Rick condenses his long lifetime of adventures, from Everest and K2 to Borneo to Antarctica, into stories that bring his experiences in earth's last wild places back to sea level where all of can reflect on lessons learned. "The most valuable stories," Rick writes, "are outside the small spheres of our own lives, and paying attention to them can guide us into wider worlds."
Synopsis
A life worth living is lived at the edges where it is wild Early in his memoir, adventurer, mountaineer, writer, filmmaker, and environmentalist Rick Ridgeway faces an existential "fork in the road." "I was twenty-five years old, and somewhere in my reading I had run across a quote from Saint Thomas Aquinas: trust the authority of your instincts," he writes, his gut telling him to choose adventure over convention.
What follows is a candid account of the many decision points in his life, from high school, when he pivoted away from family, to the events that led him to become part of The Do Boys, a "group of guys who go around having adventures." "We don't just talk about doing stuff," Rick remembers Yvon Chouinard saying. "We do it." The members of the posse expanded and contracted over the years, as did the activities they pursued, but always at the core were Yvon Chouinard, environmentalist and founder of Patagonia, and Doug Tompkins, environmentalist and founder of The North Face, and Rick.
This story of Rick's life crosses continents, from North America to Asia, across South America and Africa, embracing adventures - climbing, surfing, kayaking, trekking - all along the way. It also chronicles Rick's growing love of the natural world, as well as his awareness of human proclivity to exploit it. "We all strive to protect what we love and protecting the beauty of wild nature from our species' aptitude to disfigure it would become a central focus for ...The Do Boys." It would also become the spine of this book, the thread that weaves through the friendships, the loves and the losses of a life lived "doing stuff" in the wildest and most remote corners of our planet.
A master storyteller, this long-awaited memoir is the book end to Ridgeway's impressive list of publications, including Seven Summits (Grand Central Publishing, 1988), The Shadow of Kilmanjaro (Holt, 1999), and The Big Open (National Geographic, 2005).
Synopsis
A life worth living is lived at the edges where it is wild At the beginning of his memoir Life Lived Wild, Adventures at the Edge of the Map, Rick Ridgeway tells us that if you add up all his many expeditions, he's spent over five years of his life sleeping in tents: "And most of that in small tents pitched in the world's most remote regions." It's not a boast so much as an explanation. Whether at elevation or raising a family back at sea level, those years taught him, he writes, "to distinguish matters of consequence from matters of inconsequence." He leaves it to his readers, though, to do the final sort of which is which.
Some of his travels made, and remain, news: the first American ascent of K2; the first direct coast-to-coast traverse of Borneo; the first crossing on foot of a 300-mile corner of Tibet so remote no outsider had ever seen it. Big as these trips were, Rick keeps an eye out for the quiet surprises, like the butterflies he encounters at 23,000 feet on K2 or the furtive silhouettes of wild-eared pheasants in Tibet.
What really comes through best in Life Lived Wild, though, are his fellow travelers. There's Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, and Doug Tompkins, best known for cofounding The North Face but better remembered for his conservation throughout South America. Some companions don't make the return journey. Rick treats them all with candor and straightforward tenderness. And through their commitments to protecting the wild places they shared, he discovers his own.
A master storyteller, this long-awaited memoir is the book end to Ridgeway's impressive list of publications, including Seven Summits (Grand Central Publishing, 1988), The Shadow of Kilmanjaro (Holt, 1999), and The Big Open (National Geographic, 2005).