Books like The ice balloon by Alec Wilkinson

A biography profiling the life of explorer Zebulon Pike, describing his adventures and treks of the land west of the Mississippi River, known as the American West. Includes source notes and timeline.

Called the "Great Pathfinder", Daniel Boone is most famous for opening up the West to settlers through Kentucky. A symbol of America's pioneering spirit Boone was a skilled outdoorsman and an avid reader although he never attended school. Sydelle Kramer skillfully recounts Boone's many adventures such as the day he rescued his own daughter from kidnappers.

Henry Worsley, a decorated British special forces officer and Shackleton admirer, embarked on a perilous solo trek across Antarctica in 2015, driven by a lifelong obsession with polar exploration.

From Sea to Shining Sea traces the Clark family of Virginia through the American Revolution and the Lewis & Clark Expedition, depicting their courage, hardships, and influence on America’s western expansion.

An epic historical adventure awaits. Christopher Columbus's 1492 voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in search of a trading route to China, and his unexpected landfall in the Americas, is a watershed event in world history. Yet Columbus made three more voyages within the span of only a decade, each designed to demonstrate that he could sail to China within a matter of weeks and convert those he found there to Christianity. These later voyages were even more adventurous, violent, and ambiguous, but they revealed Columbus's uncanny sense of the sea, his mingled brilliance and delusion, and his superb navigational skills. In all these exploits he almost never lost a sailor. By their conclusion, however, Columbus was broken in body and spirit. If the first voyage illustrates the rewards of exploration, the latter voyages illustrate the tragic costs -- political, moral, and economic. In rich detail Laurence Bergreen re-creates each of these adventures as well as the historical background of Columbus's celebrated, controversial career. - Publisher.

Nicholas Thomas chronicles the life and global journeys of Britain's celebrated explorer and cartographer, James Cook, exploring his navigation, discoveries, and encounters with Indigenous peoples of the Pacific.

In graphic novel format, tells the dramatic story of Lewis and Clark’s exploration of the unmapped American West.

A harrowing first‑hand chronicle of 1914 when Russian navigator Valerian Albanov and thirteen crewers abandoned the icebound Saint Anna to trek across the Kara Sea in search of safety, surviving blizzards, starvation and mutiny.