Outdoor Recreation Audiobooks | Sports & Recreation

Wild Wisdom: Primal Skills to Survive in Nature

Survive anything nature throws your way with these survival tips and wilderness philosophy from renowned outdoorsman and now beloved TikTok star Donny Dust. Donny Dust is a US Marine Corps veteran who now owns and operates Colorado's premier survival and wilderness self-reliance school. He's amassed two decades worth of primitive living skills everywhere from the jungles of Asia to the mountains of North America. He's appeared on reality TV series like History Channel's Alone and hosted USA Channel's Mud, Sweat & Beards. Now, Donny brings all he's learned to Wild Wisdom. He teaches you how to be more observant to help avoid danger, problem-solve, prioritize finding shelter, and to be flexible and creative when you need the right supplies for a task. He also focuses on essential gear, sheltering, building fire, staying hydrated, food, foraging, and trapping. Beautiful and instructive illustrations throughout make this is must-carry for anyone venturing into nature. Millions of people now follow Donny Dust on TikTok to watch him craft objects from nothing but what he finds in the wilderness. Even the tools he uses to do the crafting are made from scratch, whether it's a saw, chisel, hammer, or cordage. He's made bows, arrows, axes, rope, sandals, backpacks, bowls, swords, and of course, fire—lots of fire—but Wild Wisdom offers so much more. Written by one of the country's foremost experts, it's a book for almost anyone, whether you're a longtime outdoorsperson hoping to hone your skills and deepen your appreciation and understanding of the wilderness, or a newcomer looking to take your first adventures in nature.

Donny Dust (Author), TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within

A renowned climber and National Geographic photographer shares his incredible adventures-and the early trauma that drove him to seek such heights-in a vivid memoir that spans the summit of Everest to the darkest corners of the soul. "In order to escape madness, I will live madly. I will risk my life in order to save it." Growing up in the mountains of Utah, Cory Richards was constantly surrounded by the outdoors. His father, a high school teacher and ski patroller, spent years teaching Cory and his brother how to ski, climb, mountaineer, and survive in the wild. Despite a seemingly idyllic childhood, the Richards home was fraught with violence, grief, and mental illness. After being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and dropping out of high school, Cory subsumed himself in the worlds of photography and climbing, seeking out the farthest reaches of the world to escape the darkness. Suddenly though, in the midst of a wildly successful career in adventure photography, a catastrophic avalanche changed everything, forcing Cory to confront the trauma of his past, evaluate his own mental health and learn to rewrite his own story. The Color of Everything is a thrilling tale of risk and adventure, written by a man who has done it all: he's stood at the top of the world, climbed imposing mountain faces alone in the dark and become the only American to summit an 8,000-meter peak in winter. But it is also the story of a tumultuous life--a stirring, lyrical memoir that captures the profound musings of a brilliant and unquiet mind grappling with the meaning of success, the cost of fame, addiction, and whether it is possible to outrun your demons. With exquisite prose and disarming candor, accompanied by stunning photos from his career, Richards excavates the psychological roots and effects of trauma and shares what it took for him to climb out.

Cory Richards (Author), TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Bothy: In Search of Simple Shelter

A stirring book for anyone who longs to run away to the woods sometimes. You will find a bothy in the mountains or the wilderness, remote huts you can’t reserve, usually without electricity or other mod-cons, running water or a marker on the map. In this beautiful journey, Kat Hill travels between fifteen bothies – across Scotland, England and Wales – revealing the beauty of these wild shelters, their history, the stories of the people who frequent them and the core of why we all crave escaping into the remote. Weaving in her own story of heartbreak and new purpose, her historian’s perspective and brilliant, fresh consideration of the environment and what we owe to it, this is a glorious book of adventure and peace, wilderness and refuge.

Kat Hill (Author), TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Believer: A Year in the Fly-Fishing Life

The author of the instant fishing classic The Optimist wades into deeper waters and shares new wisdom, humor, and experience in seven extraordinary fly-fishing expeditions that mark one year in his journey through the middle part of life when worldly demands increase even as fishing continues to beckon—and must be pursued. In David Coggins's previous book, The Optimist, he tackles the techniques of fly fishing and meditates on its virtues, recounting his triumphs and frustrations. Now, in The Believer, he deftly mixes travel, local cultures, further fishing challenges (some knee-buckling in their disappointment), and details his own experience as life and love crowd his time to fish. Self-consciously—and self-deprecatingly—Coggins embarks on seven far-flung fishing voyages, away from screens and social media, not answering his phone, reveling in humanity's undying yearning for a quest, for the rituals and rites of passage that mark transition. For David, these journeys not only showcase his skill as an angler—including to Norway, Scotland, Spain, Cuba, and Argentina, as well as road trips to Wyoming, Tennessee, and the Catskills—they also signal the end of his fly-fishing youth. But that doesn't mean that David will sell all his rods and hang up his hat; rather, that his relationship with his fly-fishing obsession will evolve. And he's okay with that—mostly, especially if he can catch an elusive salmon or a ferociously strong tarpon or the mysterious and almost invisible bonefish. The Believer is a humble, humorous call for the journey that is part of the destination, where the search for greater self-awareness leads to patience, observation, and endurance. And, since this is fly fishing, after all—there's always the possibility of abject failure and leaping, glorious reward. Wry, entertaining, thoughtful, and relatable, The Believer will hook both anglers and non-anglers alike.

David Coggins (Author), Scott Brick, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Out of Mind

In 2015, climber and documentary maker Joe French was filming in the Himalaya when tragedy struck and he found himself caught in an earthquake that killed nearly 9,000 people. Miraculously, he survived – but this wasn't the first accident from which he was lucky enough to escape. On a previous expedition to the Himalayas, Joe's team of Sherpas had been wiped out by an avalanche. Back in Scotland, his wife Julie was fighting her own battle against cancer and, on his return, Joe found himself at home caring for their two young girls. Suffering from a form of PTSD, Joe attempted to find peace again, using his love of the outdoors to ground himself in nature. Running barefoot through the forests and glens around his house in Scotland, he discovered the means to stop going out of his mind.

Joe French (Author), TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America

In the decades directly following the Holocaust, American Jewish leaders anxiously debated how to preserve and produce what they considered authentic Jewish culture, fearful that growing affluence and suburbanization threatened the future of Jewish life. Many communal educators and rabbis contended that without educational interventions, Judaism as they understood it would disappear altogether. They pinned their hopes on residential summer camps for Jewish youth: institutions that sprang up across the United States in the postwar decades as places for children and teenagers to socialize, recreate, and experience Jewish culture. Adults' fears, hopes, and dreams about the Jewish future inflected every element of camp life, from the languages they taught to what was encouraged romantically and permitted sexually. But adult plans did not constitute everything that occurred at camp: children and teenagers also shaped these sleepaway camps to mirror their own desires and interests and decided whether to accept or resist the ideas and ideologies their camp leaders promoted. Focusing on the lived experience of campers and camp counselors, The Jews of Summer demonstrates how a cultural crisis birthed a rite of passage that remains a significant influence in American Jewish life.

Sandra Fox (Author), Sharon Freedman (Narrator)

Audiobook

Ruin: A Novel of Flyfishing in Bankruptcy

Frank is another dreamer whose life is suddenly burned to the ground. More a disillusioned literature PhD than an experienced financier, he had naively agreed to join his wife's inheritance with his own personal guarantee of a college friend's private equity partnership debt. The business implosion and subsequent bankruptcy took all their assets. Francy, an orphaned European heiress, now finds herself homeless, still married to pleasant, witty Frank-who had failed to protect them from disaster. The couple flees Manhattan to live at a desolate non-working Hudson Valley farm. Frank starts an artisanal brewery with a charismatic new eccentric friend. And, central to the heart of the story, he takes up fly fishing. Frank's perceptions on the water are fresh and acute, sometimes colored by his memory of the words of famous writers, now painfully ironic in his life's new context. And throughout, there is Francy's story. Now in exile, she re-approaches painting with new and darkly complex emotional energy. Her work's enigmatic intensity attracts a wealthy neighbor who offers Francy a show in his Manhattan gallery and that attracts a great deal of trouble indeed.

Leigh Seippel (Author), Andrew J. Andersen (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Half Bird

Brought to you by Penguin. Discover the incredible story of one woman's solo journey across the Bay of Biscay, into the Mediterranean, and the unexpected joy of solitude, self-discovery and resilience 'We have no idea how much resilience there is inside us until we have to draw on it. We learn that we grow through adversity only as we go through it. That we crave happiness like plants leaning toward the light' When Susan quit her job in London and set sail off the south coast of England on her beloved sailboat, Isean, she was unaware this spontaneous departure would lead to a three-year journey spanning several countries across the continent. With only the very basics on board, resourcefulness becomes an unexpected source of joy and contentment. The highs and lows of living in such an extreme way awakens a newfound appreciation for the beauty of her surroundings, for being safe - for just being alive. For all the physical and navigational challenges of her journey, the other side of her story reveals a more important change - an inner journey - that took place along the way. This wasn't merely a challenge, a mid-life adventure or gap-year career break; it was much gentler than that, but much greater too. She was seeking nothing less than an entirely different life, having left the land far behind to call the wild, unbiddable sea home. ©2024 Susan Smillie (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Susan Smillie (Author), Susan Smilie, Susan Smillie, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Everest: The West Ridge

In 1963, Jim Whittaker became the first American to summit Everest via the South Col route. Roughly two weeks after Whittaker's achievement, Tom Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld, fellow American mountaineers on the same expedition, became the first climbers ever to summit the world's highest peak via the dangerous and forbidding West Ridge-a route on which only a handful of climbers have since succeeded. This special fiftieth anniversary edition reintroduces the adventure in a larger format by members of the expedition, including leader Norman G. Dyhrenfurth and team doctor Jim Lester. In addition to a new foreword by Jon Krakauer, this volume also features a new preface by Hornbein along with a series of prefaces he wrote for earlier editions, including the original from 1965.

Thomas Hornbein (Author), Tom Beyer (Narrator)

Audiobook

Wanderers: A History of Women Walking

This is a book about ten women over the past three hundred years who have found walking essential to their sense of themselves, as people and as writers. Wanderers traces their footsteps, from eighteenth-century parson's daughter Elizabeth Carter-who desired nothing more than to be taken for a vagabond in the wilds of southern England-to modern walker-writers such as Nan Shepherd and Cheryl Strayed. For each, walking was integral, whether it was rambling for miles across the Highlands, like Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt, or pacing novels into being, as Virginia Woolf did around Bloomsbury. Offering a beguiling view of the history of walking, Wanderers guides us through the different ways of seeing-of being-articulated by these ten pathfinding women.

Kerri Andrews (Author), Lauren Baldwin (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Everest Politics Show: Sorrow and strife on the world’s highest mountain

In April 2014 Mark Horrell went on a mountaineering expedition to Nepal, hoping to climb Lhotse, the fourth-highest mountain in the world, which shares a base camp and climbing route with Mount Everest. He dreamed of following in the footsteps of Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary, by climbing through the infamous ice maze of the Khumbu Icefall, and he yearned to sleep in the grand amphitheatre of Everest Base Camp, surrounded by towering peaks. He was also intrigued by the media publicity surrounding commercial expeditions to Everest. He wanted to discover for himself whether it had become the circus that everybody described. But when a devastating avalanche swept across the Khumbu Icefall, he got more than he bargained for. Suddenly he found himself witnessing the greatest natural disaster Everest had ever seen. And that was just the start. Everest Sherpas came out in protest, issuing a list of demands to the Government of Nepal. What happened next left his team confused, bewildered and fearing for their safety.

Mark Horrell (Author), Mark Horrell (Narrator)

Audiobook

The 12-3-30 Workout Explained

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice. The 12-3-30 Workout Explained is an illuminating and comprehensive exploration of the fitness phenomenon that has captured the attention of millions worldwide. Originating from a simple yet effective routine introduced by Lauren Giraldo, this workout comprises walking on a treadmill at a 12% incline, 3 mph speed, for 30 minutes, and has been heralded for its accessibility and transformative effects on health and fitness. Structured to cater to both beginners and seasoned fitness enthusiasts, the guide breaks down the workout's components, offering a scientific examination of its benefits, including improved cardiovascular health, muscle tone, and weight loss. It also addresses common challenges and provides practical solutions for integrating the workout into a balanced lifestyle, emphasizing the importance of nutrition, hydration, and recovery. The book is enriched with detailed chapters on preparing for the 12-3-30 workout, including mental preparation, selecting the right gear, and setting up an optimal workout space. It goes further to provide tailored workout plans that accommodate different fitness levels, ensuring that readers can modify the routine to match their personal health and fitness goals. Beyond the workout itself, The 12-3-30 Workout Explained offers a holistic view of fitness and well-being. It encourages readers to set long-term health goals, incorporate variety into their exercise routines, and maintain motivation through community support and personal reflection. The guide is not just about a workout; it's about adopting a sustainable approach to health that values consistency, self-care, and personal growth.

Mick Southerland (Author), Digital Voice Mike G (Narrator)

Audiobook

Outdoor Recreation Audiobooks in Sports & Recreation