Living their Dreams

High adventure and the thrill of discovery is all in a day’s work for these modern-day explorers

Jason Schoonover might well be carrot river, Saskatchewan’s most intrepid citizen. A 13th-generation descendant of his Dutch ancestors who settled in New York in 1652, Schoonover is an explorer, adventurer, danger-seeker, non-fiction and fiction writer, and Canadian standard-bearer for the fabled and exclusive Explorers Club. The Club was founded in 1904 by the survivors of Frederick A. Cook’s 1894 Arctic expedition and today promotes exploration in the service of science.

Whether Cook really did discover the North Pole is still debated. But what’s uncontestable is the dream that ties together the achievements of 120 of the world’s most successful explorers, all of whom are featured in Schoonover’s latest book, excerpted here, Adventurous Dreams, Adventurous Lives (Rocky Mountain Books, 2007).

As Wade Davis, explorer-in-residence with the National Geographic Society, says in the book’s opening pages: “Perhaps the most wonderful thing about this…marvelous anthology is the fact…that every great adventure begins with a dream, and that every life well lived grows out of a simple promise of hope.”

Schoonover is more direct: “Dreams are powerful things: they can launch probes to the far wall of the universe and, at their worst, they can kill.” The dreams of the explorers featured in Schoonover’s book, however, do the best possible thing: inspire. So here on the pages of Outpost is a brief taste of what moved five of the 120 explorers featured in the book to hold on very tight to their dreams.

— Bob Ramsay

Photo by Su Hattori

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 27th, 2010 at 1:39 pm and is filed under Field Notes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site. Add to del.icio.us.