Meet the Adventurers of the Year: Explorer Ed Stafford

Each day we will feature one of the 2010 Adventures of the Year here on our blog. Get to know them all in our photo gallery, then vote for your favorite for the People's Choice award—every day. You can even vote for a new favorite each day, if you can't pick just one. Photograph by Keith Ducatel

The Explorer

By walking the Amazon from source to sea, Ed Stafford completed one of the last epic, undone adventures.

A river greater in length and volume than any in the world, and no one had hiked along its entirety. A jungle the size of a continent, and no one had managed to cross all of it on foot. When Ed Stafford found out (after some Googling) that the Amazon had never been walked, he decided he was the one to do it. And he did. Stafford trekked more than 4,000 miles through the Amazon—surviving hostile locals, venomous snakes, and huge distances without food resupplies—for nearly two and a half years (860 days). The latter part of the expedition was with a Peruvian forestry worker, Gadiel "Cho" Sanchez Rivera, who accompanied Stafford from his home town in Peru all the way the Atlantic Ocean, arriving on August 9, 2010. It was the first time Cho had ever seen the ocean. It was the first time anyone had walked the entire length of the Amazon River. —By Ryan Bradley

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