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The September Alaskan air was cool but not cold. Nevertheless, I didn’t begrudge the coat I brought with me. I was too excited by what lay ahead to feel anything but anticipation in any event.. The guide’s name was Deacon, and he checked the crampons on my boots twice before we stepped onto the Matanuska Glacier, which struck me as either excessive caution or an honest assessment of how I’d tied my own laces. The …

The water drops fast at the Soo Locks, faster than most passengers expect the first time they feel it. A deckhand on the lower deck ties off against the wall of the MacArthur Lock in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, and within about twenty minutes the ship settles twenty-one feet, the concrete walls rising around the hull like a bathtub draining in slow motion. Then the lower gates open, and Lake Superior, the largest freshwater lake …

The woman at the Glühwein stall took my five euros. She pulled a mug from a rack of a hundred identical mugs, filled it from a pot that had been simmering since noon, and slid it across the counter with a smile. She already knew I wasn’t bringing the mug back. Nobody does. That’s the whole point of the two-euro Pfand built into the price. You can return the mug at the end of the …

The engine goes quiet a little after six, and for a moment nobody in the vehicle says anything.  Thirty yards off are four female lions and a scatter of cubs. None are doing anything you would call dramatic. One lifts her head, considers the vehicle with an expression that isn’t quite boredom and isn’t quite contempt, and puts her head back down. Other than the antics of the cubs, that’s the whole encounter,  it’s the …

The zodiac engine cuts, and for a moment the only sound in the Gerlache Strait is water lapping against inflatable pontoons and the wet exhale of a crabeater seal hauled out twenty feet away, unbothered, barely opening one eye to register the eight strangers in red parkas now drifting past. Nobody on the boat says anything. The guide, a marine biologist who spent the morning’s briefing explaining pack ice formations with the patience of someone …

The rain started sideways somewhere around the second pint, which in Dingle seems to be less a weather event than a scheduling cue. Inside An Droichead Beag, a fiddle player and a woman with a bodhrán had been trading tunes for twenty minutes without announcing a single one, the way musicians do when they’ve played together long enough not to need a set list. A man at the bar, a fisherman by the look …

In the late 1960s and into the early 1970s, a group of University of California, Berkeley students calling themselves the Rolling Quads pressed the city to do something that sounds almost absurdly small now: cut ramps into the curbs along Telegraph Avenue, the four blocks between Bancroft Way and Dwight Way. Hale Zukas, one of the group’s members, designed the ramp himself and worked the city council until it agreed. Their most famous member, Ed …

Mount Etna has been erupting since roughly August 6, when a new vent opened in the Valle del Bove and began sending ash south and east in whatever direction the wind chose. By August 13, Euronews was calling it the seventh consecutive day of activity, a stretch of sustained eruption Sicily hadn’t seen since the 1970s. Catania’s airport, the busiest in Sicily, stayed closed for five straight days, arrivals and departures suspended until 2am on …

A ranger at the Washington Monument ticket booth is busy.  It’s early October, the sky over the Mall is doing that flat, high-pressure blue that only shows up a few weeks a year, and the line of people rearranging their afternoon around a fifteen-minute window is short enough that you can actually hear the conversation. In July, this same booth runs a different kind of crowd: bigger, slower, sweating through shirts by nine in the …

Proctor’s Ledge sits at the bottom of a residential street in Salem, a low stone outcrop behind a chain-link fence, wedged between a Walgreens parking lot and a row of houses with above-ground pools. There’s a granite memorial wall now, dedicated in 2017 after a team from the University of Virginia used tax records, deeds, and a 1692 diary entry to confirm what locals had long suspected: this patch of scrub land, not the wooded …

The Globe Museum in Vienna keeps its lights low, the better to protect four centuries of hand-painted spheres from fading, and on a Tuesday afternoon I had the entire second floor to myself. A 17th-century Coronelli globe sat under glass, the oceans still tinted the pale green cartographers used before anyone had actually measured the Pacific. I stood there for twenty minutes reading the little card about celestial versus terrestrial globe pairs, which is the …

The fog does the introducing in Sintra. You climb the switchbacks out of town in a tuk-tuk that smells faintly of diesel and eucalyptus, the driver working the horn at every blind corner, and for most of the ride there is nothing above you but gray. Then, without warning, a canary-yellow tower punches through the cloud like something surfacing for air, followed by a dome, and the effect is less “castle in the mist” than …

The ferry captain running the Isla Mujeres route makes the crossing roughly 14 times a day, and on each he continues to announce the dolphins, cutting through the wake with the kind of casual indifference only a wild animal that has seen fourteen ferries a day for years can manage. His passengers never fail to get a charge out of the water mammals. Twenty minutes after leaving the concrete high-rises of the Zona Hotelera behind, …

At Mountain Crossings, the outfitter built into the trail itself at Neel Gap, Georgia, there’s a rhododendron tree strung with boots. Thru-hikers who quit within the first thirty miles — and a startling number do, somewhere around fifteen to twenty percent by most counts kept at the shop — sometimes leave their footwear behind as a kind of offering, or a warning, depending on how you read it. I watched a man in his fifties …