Apryle Craig is reminiscing about her do-it-yourself kayak trip through the Pacific Northwest’s Inside Passage. The 111-day journey started in Washington’s Gig Harbor before traveling more than 1,200 miles to Alaska.

The age of real adventure is over. All of the exploring has been done, all of the discoveries made. What a load of baloney. Sure, these days it’s harder—though not impossible—to get yourself eaten by cannibals or kidnapped by pirates. But that’s not my thing. I’m drawn to traveling wild places under my own power, which I’ve done from Tibet to Peru. So where have I had the biggest epic of my life? Easy: Switzerland. Never mind that a century and a half ago, intrepid Brits used Swiss peaks to launch the golden age of mountaineering. Trekking? The Alps are ground zero. You’d be forgiven for thinking Switzerland is the last place to go looking for new adventure. But you’d be wrong.

Everyone needs goals. Hence this life list. In the United States, a good case could be made that one of them should be to take more time off. Americans have notoriously few paid vacation days: 12, compared to 21 for Canadians, 23 for the Brits, and 39 for the French. What’s more, you may be hard pressed to find people who actually use all their vacation days. According to a 2010 study by Expedia, the travel company, Americans earned an average of 15 vacation days (paid and unpaid), but only used 12 of them.

In 2008, Alan Carpenter decided to try his first long distance hike. He picked the manageable John Muir trail, a 218-mile walk through the Sierra Nevada mountains, as he says.

Waters talks about this season’s challenge with the familiarity and perspective of a pro walking off the links at the Masters. He’s not priming a fairway shot or reading the green, but his view shares the absorption of technical details and evaluation of risk often seen with toptier performers in their field.

Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc. HOT 0.87% today announced it will open its first dual-branded ski resort complex in Changbaishan, China later this year. The Westin Changbaishan and Sheraton Changbaishan Resort will open in August 2012, adjacent to the slopes of Changbai Mountains, one of China’s leading ski areas. The highly anticipated resort complex will lengthen Starwood’s lead as the largest international luxury and upper upscale hotel operator in China.

At the beginning of April, John Frieh from Portland, Oregon, and Doug Shepherd from Los Alamos, New Mexico, completed a huge new ice line on the northeast face of Mt. Dickey in the Ruth Gorge of the Alaska Range. The two climbed the ca. 5,000-foot face in two long days, and then descended during the middle of their second night out.

The Aspen Skiing Co., the mayor, a pair of county commissioners and many residents in town are pressuring the Aspen Chamber Resort Association to quit paying dues and divorce itself from the U.S. Chamber, which has aggressively lobbied against climate legislation over the years. The 680-member local chamber wrote a letter to the national group in 2010 delineating its political differences, but the debate this ski season — the driest one here since 1976-1977 — has become far more heated.

Micah True was a man to be run after. When Christopher McDougall chased him down to write Born to Run, he followed an elusive trail of clues through desert canyons. Time and again he heard that True, the man called Caballo Blanco, the White Horse, had just been there.

Thirty-four-year-old Willow Koerber Rockwell (Trek World Racing) may have just returned to World Cup racing after taking last season off to focus on her pregnancy (Raven Starr Rockwell was born on Dec. 31), but that doesn’t mean she isn’t ready to rock this season. In fact, she’s especially motivated, with a potential spot on the U.S. Olympic Team within her grasp.