Do Boys: Adventures at the Edge of the Map

A life worth living is lived at the edges where it is wild

Early in his memoir, adventurer, mountaineer, writer, filmmaker, and environmentalist Rick Ridgeway faces an existential "fork in the road." "I was twenty-five years old, and somewhere in my reading I had run across a quote from Saint Thomas Aquinas: trust the authority of your instincts," he writes, his gut telling him to choose adventure over convention.

What follows is a candid account of the many decision points in his life, from high school, when he pivoted away from family, to the events that led him to become part of The Do Boys, a "group of guys who go around having adventures." "We don't just talk about doing stuff," Rick remembers Yvon Chouinard saying. "We do it." The members of the posse expanded and contracted over the years, as did the activities they pursued, but always at the core were Yvon Chouinard, environmentalist and founder of Patagonia, and Doug Tompkins, environmentalist and founder of The North Face, and Rick.

This story of Rick's life crosses continents, from North America to Asia, across South America and Africa, embracing adventures - climbing, surfing, kayaking, trekking - all along the way. It also chronicles Rick's growing love of the natural world, as well as his awareness of human proclivity to exploit it. "We all strive to protect what we love and protecting the beauty of wild nature from our species' aptitude to disfigure it would become a central focus for ...The Do Boys." It would also become the spine of this book, the thread that weaves through the friendships, the loves and the losses of a life lived "doing stuff" in the wildest and most remote corners of our planet.

A master storyteller, this long-awaited memoir is the book end to Ridgeway's impressive list of publications, including Seven Summits (Grand Central Publishing, 1988), The Shadow of Kilmanjaro (Holt, 1999), and The Big Open (National Geographic, 2005).