By 1929, Amelia Earhart was famous for her groundbreaking flight across the Atlantic, with pilot Bill Stultz and mechanic Slim Gordon. Now, she seemed to be living the perfect life: she was a rich and famous celebrity and could fly whenever she liked. But all that attention made her uncomfortable. After all, Amelia wasn’t the pilot of her transatlantic flight. So she decided to make herself into the aviator she always wanted to be. Only another death-defying adventure would prove to Amelia – and to the world – that she finally had earned her wings.

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In April 1928, a social worker named Amelia Earhart received a phone call that would alter the course of her life. She was offered the chance to become the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. Charles Lindbergh had completed his famous solo flight the year before, but many others had died trying. Amelia would be joined by only a pilot and a mechanic, for a long flight that was sure to be fraught with danger. But it was an adventure she couldn’t turn down, an undertaking that changed the future of aviation.

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Bear. Running. Toward me. Writer and wildlife biologist Caroline Van Hemert encountered only one dangerous bear on her four-thousand-mile trip from Washington to Alaska. She survived to write about it in The Sun is A Compass: My 4,000-Mile Journey into the Alaskan Wilds. Caroline joins host Mike Corey to talk about her own experiences with bears, and what drew her to the story of snowboarder Bart Pieciul’s violent bear encounter, which she wrote about for Outside Magazine.

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After Bart Pieciul is mauled by a bear in the Alaska wilderness, his friends have to use all of their outdoor knowledge to keep him alive. The three men are stranded in the mountains for hours, waiting for a Coast Guard helicopter to airlift Bart to the nearest hospital. As the temperature drops, they’re desperate to prevent their friend from succumbing to blood loss and hypothermia. And they have no idea if the bear that attacked him will return.

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The residents of Haines, Alaska are used to living alongside bears. The region surrounding their small town has one of the densest bear populations in the world. But as climate change curtails the bears’ natural food sources, encounters between bears and humans are becoming more common, putting everyone on edge. 

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When outdoor writer Pete Takeda first heard the story of a covert CIA operation in the Himalayas, he couldn’t believe it. So he decided to investigate. His curiosity led him on an adventure to the Himalayas in search of answers. Today, Pete joins host Cassie De Pecol to share how he ascended some of the planet’s most challenging peaks to research his book, An Eye At The Top of the World: The Terrifying Legacy of the Cold War’s Most Daring C.I.A. Operation.

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Two years have passed since the team of Indian and American elite climbers lost a nuclear-powered spying device in the Himalayas. Now, as China continues to test its nuclear weapons, the climbing team is given one last chance to complete their mission. This time they have to bring a new spying device up a different mountain. But as they summit the 22,000 foot peak called Nanda Kot, they’ll face avalanches, severe weather, and a shocking last-minute setback.

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Winter storms arrived early on the Himalayan peak Nanda Devi, forcing the team of American and Indian climbers to retreat down the mountain and abandon the nuclear-powered spying device. Now in the spring of 1966, the team has to go back up to retrieve it. But they are unprepared for what they will discover when they get there.

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In 1965, with Cold War tensions escalating, the CIA and India’s Intelligence Bureau joined forces to spy on China’s budding nuclear program. Satellites and spy planes at the time were unreliable, so the agencies hatched an unusual plan: place a nuclear-powered spying device atop Nanda Devi, the tallest mountain located entirely within India. The world’s best climbers from both America and India must scale the treacherous peak while carrying the dangerous device up to over 23,000 feet.

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Searching for lost cities in the Amazon sounds like something out of a Hollywood script – unless you’re University of Florida anthropologist Mike Heckenberger. He’s been visiting the Amazon for three decades, working with local tribes and uncovering a network of ancient cities in the jungle. On this episode, Mike joins host Cassie De Pecol to discuss what it’s like to explore the region today, more than a century since Roosevelt’s expedition, and what we can learn from the indigenous people of the Amazon about preserving it.

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