Adventure travel doesn't get much better than hiking with world-famous climbers and meeting innovative conservationists in one of the world's most beautiful settings. Outside Magazine's writers agreed, as the popular adventure publication selected Wilderness Travel's Climbing and Conservation in Patagonia Special Event November 26-29, 2018 as one of its 25 Best Trips for 2018. The trips were published in the April 2018 issue.
This isn't the first time Outside magazine has given Wilderness Travel top props. The publication named the company the Best Outfitter in the World in 2015, and this is the seventh time one of their trips has been selected as Best of the Year by the prestigious magazine.
Outside Contributing Editor and Writer Stephanie Pearson highlighted the Patagonia symposium's opportunity to meet renowned climbers, including Conrad Anker and Alex Honnold, and conservationists Kris Tompkins and Rick Ridgeway, and hear directly from them about their lives and accomplishments.
Attendees of the unique four-day event will step into the heart of the conservation story in Patagonia, a beautiful but fragile region. Limited to just 72 guests, the symposium will feature presentations, film screenings and an incredible opportunity to interact with these visionaries during daily hiking excursions in Patagonia's Los Glaciares National Park, a World Heritage Site with expansive glaciers and rock spires.
Anker, who discovered the frozen body of lost Everest hiker George Mallory in 1999 and who has summited Everest three times, and Honnold, who completed an unprecedented free solo climb of El Capitan in Yosemite in 2017, have just returned from a phenomenal climbing expedition to Antarctica with several first ascents. Watch this video of their Antarctic expedition.
Conservationist Kris Tompkins made history recently by signing decrees with the Chilean president to formally create Pumalín National Park and Patagonia National Park Chile. One million acres, the largest donation of land from a private entity to a nation, has been combined with a donation from Chile to create a Great Route of National Parks in Chile. A total of more than 10 million acres of new national parklands now belong to the Chilean people, and the two recent parks alone are more than three times the size of Yosemite and Yellowstone combined.
After the symposium's completion, guests will continue on one of five specially-designed hiking and natural history trips that will take them deeper into this remarkable landscape. Pearson selected the 13-day Whales to Jaguars as her top pick, describing it as orca-watching off Argentina's Peninsula Valdés, a chance to see the recovering jaguar population in the Iberá wetlands, and a finish at the 275 towering cascades of Iguazú Falls.
For more information or to book one of the limited spots at the symposium, visit WildernessTravel.com or call 1-800-368-2794