National Geographic BlogWild

The Wildest Dream got its Canadian debut screening Saturday night at the Banff Mountain Film festival. The new National Geographic feature film combines fascinating archival video footage of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine on Mount Everest in 1924, love letters between Mallory and his wife Ruth, and a bold attempt to recreate Mallory and Irvine's bid for the summit by modern-day climbers Conrad Anker and Leo Houlding.

National Geographic's Expeditions Council has come out in force for the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festivals, conducting workshops to help filmmakers and authors pitch ideas to National Geographic Television, National Geographic Books, and our magazines.

National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Mike Fay's Redwood Transect is featured on the cover of this month's magazine. The buzz here is all about the redwoods, Mike's amazing walk and the huge, cool, special foldout image of a redwood tree in the middle of the magazine.

Greetings from Costa Rica, faithful BlogWild followers. For the next three weeks, I’m headed to sea.

National Geographic Fellow Enric Sala, National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Sylvia Earle, and a team of leading marine scientists from Central America and across the globe have gathered here. Destination: Cocos Island—Isla del Coco, ringed by some of the most shark-rich waters anywhere—and the submerged and all-but-unexplored summits of Las Gemelas (“The Twin Sisters”) seamounts.

Rachel Graham, a friend with National Geographic Books, wrote to let me know they'd made a video to promote Tornado Hunter: Getting Inside the Most Violent Storms on Earth. The book chronicles some of the monster funnels National Geographic grantee Tim Samaras has seen up close, and his harrowing adventures deploying cameras in their paths. You may have seen Tim's work featured in National Geographic magazine.

When last I wrote about the 2009 National Geographic Student Expedition to Iceland, we were clambering up the margin of the world's third-largest glacier. Our next stop: Ingólfshöfthi, where Ingólfur Arnarson—the Viking who founded Reykjavik—wintered over in the year 874 (give or take a few) before heading west to settle what would become Iceland's capital city.

Days of camping without power and Internet access interrupted the story of my trans-Icelandic journey with Nat Geo Student Expeditions. Now I'm back on the grid, and the saga continues...

We get our first real taste of ice on Iceland's southern coast at Solheimajökull. (The last part of the name is pronounced yokel, as in "local yokel," and means "glacier" in Icelandic.)

Greenland is famously buried beneath an enormous glacier, so largely white, while Iceland is largely green. That said, there's still plenty of ice on Iceland—for the moment, at least. Vatnajökull, the world's third-largest glacier, covers much of Iceland's southeast quarter. Smaller (but plenty impressive) glaciers dot the rest of the island.

Biologist, conservationist, and National Geographic Emerging Explorer Zeb Hogan heads to Thailand and lands a giant freshwater stingray, possibly the largest ever caught. See the fish and follow the adventure tonight on the National Geographic Channel.

Hello once more from Iceland. I'm newly arrived here with Nat Geo Student Expeditions, sharing highlights of our trek. Welcome! I met up with the students I'd be traveling with for the next ten days in Reykjavik late last week, fired up and ready to roll.

Late-night twilight greetings from Iceland! I'm here with Nat Geo Student Expeditions and a group of (I asked what adjective to use to describe them, and they chose) extraordinary teens. We've come to photograph this island, to study the wild geology that put it here just south of the Arctic Circle. We're documenting the effects of climate change—the melting away of glaciers that have covered Iceland for millennia and that gave it its very name.

Last time I posted, I promised stories from my trip to Guyana in July 2007. I was on a quest for some of the country's exotic (and toxic!) frogs with collaborator Bruce Means, Executive Director of the Coastal Plains Institute and an adjunct professor at Florida State University.

Tropical rainforest covers more than 80 percent—80 percent—of the English-speaking country of Guyana, bordered by Venezuela, Brazil, Suriname, and South America's northern coast.

What's it like to be a million oar strokes from your destination, tossed alone in a tiny boat? Ask Roz Savage, the one-time management consultant turned full-time rower, environmental advocate, and inspirational speaker. Roz departs Hawaii today bound for Tuvalu on the second leg of her trans-Pacific journey.

She's already knocked off the Atlantic, a 103-day, 2,935-mile (4,723-kilometer) ordeal in 2005. Storms broke all of her oars and claimed her stove, stereo, and cockpit navigation instruments. Her satellite phone failed with nearly four weeks left on the journey. Undaunted, Roz rowed on.

Mountaineer Peter Whittaker—nephew of Jim Whittaker, the first American to summit Everest—has reached Camp 4 on the peak's South Col with teammate Ed Viesturs, veteran of numerous high mountain ascents and the first individual to summit all 14 of the world's 8,000-meter (26,247-foot) peaks without bottled oxygen. Watch daily video dispatches, read the full chronicle of the expedition, and follow its progress on National Geographic Adventure Magazine's Return to Everest website.