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Andes Mountains, Ecuador
I lived in Ecuador for many years in order to research this story. I kept a visa, which allowed me to stay in the country, by getting a job teaching at the American School in Quito. I was studying monkeys in the rain forest of eastern Ecuador when I heard the story of this great Inca treasure worth five billion dollars in today's money. This story, more than any other, was the reason I chose to become a writer. -
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Peter Lourie's Travels
This timeline traces the author and adventurer Peter Lourie's travels since 1979. The dates provided are rough estimates of when he visited each place not when the book about the visit was published. The descriptions are his own from his web site http://peterlourie.com which we encourage you to visit as well. Reading about Peter Lourie may make you long for an adventure too- enjoy! -
Amazon River, Brazil
For three months I wandered the state of Rondonia in the heart of Brazil's Amazon jungle. I took boats, jeeps, planes, and traveled all around. I saw the old forest being cut down and burned. Among other delicacies, we ate piranha, monkey, armadillo, macaw, and alligator. -
Hudson River, NY
I was the only person ever to canoe the entire Hudson River from its source at Lake Tear of the Clouds on the edge of Mount Marcy to the sea. I made this three-week journey in June through the whitewater at the beginning of the river in the Adirondacks and all the way down past power dams, locks, and then into the big tides of the lower river, ending up in the wild New York Harbor. -
Hudson River, NY
This is the adult version of the children's book about canoeing the Hudson. I met such interesting people along the way, and learned so much history that I decided I needed to write a longer version than just 48 pages. So this book (300 pages) is the "real" story of the trip, and it describes in greater detail than "Hudson River" the feelings I felt and the facts I learned on that spectacular 315-mile canoe trek. -
Yukon Territory
My paddling partner, Ernie La Prairie and I wanted to see the gold rush trail of 1897. So we paddled from Whitehorse to Dawson in the Yukon Territory, 460 miles with a 7-mile-an-hour current! What wild territory it seemed, even today, this arctic wilderness, full of moose, grizzlies, and wolves that howled in the moonlight. We paddled 52 miles a day. One day we paddled into the night until we hit a sandbar, making it an 82-mile marathon. -
Everglades, Florida
For this book I made many trips into the River of Grass to spend time with Buffalo Tiger, a wonderful old man who had grown up in the Everglades without ever speaking to a white kid until he was 14. I spent hour after hour interviewing him. Buffalo had been the chief of the Micossukee Tribe for 35 years, and even today at 82 he still runs his own airboat service on the Tamiami Trail just west of Miami. -
Missouri River, Nebraska to Montana
This book comes from a trip I made up the Missouri, 1700 miles by boat, in 1995 when I traveled with travel writer William Least Heat Moon, from Omaha, Nebraska, up to Three Forks, Montana. We fought a current that sometimes ran 12 miles per hour and met many wonderful people who taught us about the river that had been the path of Lewis and Clark from 1804-1806. -
Hudson River, NY
Peter Lourie's only book of fiction! Tales of pirates' treasure are real to Killian and his friend Alex, who set off on a hunt for gold doubloons buried by Captain Kidd, the notorious pirate who stashed his loot in the Hudson Highlands. Spurred on by Killian's recurring dream of the ghostly pirate pointing the way to the gold, the boys desperately try to keep one step ahead of Cruger, a crazed treasure-hunter whose cave they discover on haunted Bannerman's Island. -
Erie Canal, NY
I spent three weeks paddling the Erie Canal in a solo boat with a double-bladed paddle. The last week of the journey I paddled north to my home up near Lake Champlain. I kept a 1000-page journal for this trip. What I loved about the Erie were all the tug captains and canal people who told me stories along the way. That canal, in its various versions, has been in continuous operation since 1825. -
Rio Grande, Rocky Mtns. to Gulf of Mexico
When I traveled down this third-longest river in the United States--1,885 miles long--I decided to mostly drive it so I could see the whole thing in less than a month. But I rafted various sections, too. I was amazed how this scrawny river can travel all that distance through deserts to the Gulf of Mexico, all the way from the Rocky Mountains! What history along the way, too. The Spanish conquistadors came north along the river; cowboys like Billy the Kidd traveled along its banks. -
Llanganati Mountains, Ecuador
After 16 years, I returned to Ecuador and to the little village of Triunfo, where many years before I had hired three guides to take up into the Llanganati Mountains in search for the great Inca treasure. Meeting my guides again made me want to go back to look for gold. But I thought I'd wait until my son got a little older. Then we might go together. -
Sacagawea's Trail, North Dakota to Pacific Ocean
In the summer of 1999, I took my family on the Lewis and Clark Trail from North Dakota to Oregon, and we canoed and kayaked sections of the same rivers traveled by Sacagawea, the Shoshone Indian woman who had helped Lewis and Clark across the western part of the United States nearly two hundred years ago. This trip was our best family trip ever, and we talked to the various tribes along the way, and panned for gold, and went to a Native American powwow. -
Mississippi River, Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico
All my life I had wanted to travel America's mythic river. Finally I got the chance to paddle parts of it with my partner Ernie La Prairie. After he left me around Minneapolis, I traveled alone all the way down to the Gulf, arriving there in a hurricane. -
Palenque, Mexico
I spent a number of weeks following archaeologists around the ancient Maya city of Palenque in the jungles of Chiapas, Mexico. Never before had I seen so many ruins in the half-light of the jungle. And the howler monkeys roared at us like lions. There is more mystery here than I had ever thought existed on the planet. Whole Maya cities have yet to be discovered in the jungles of Guatemala. -
Chaco Canyon, New Mexico
In September 2000, I went to Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, to work on a book about the ancient Puebloan people who had lived in great houses here a thousand years ago. I was accompanied by Dr. Gwinn Vivian, an archaeologist who had grown up excavating these sites with his father, who was also a Chaco Canyon archaeologist. These ruins are still a mystery to scientists, but we do know that they were left by the ancestors of the Zuni, Hopi, and Rio Grand pueblos. -
Tierra del Fuego, Argentina
In January 2001, I flew to Punta Arenas, Chile, on the Strait of Magellan, and worked my way down through the main island of Tierra del Fuego to Ushuaia, Argentina, which lies on the Beagle Channel. I explored islands with penguins and sea lions, and I learned all about the history of this fascinating area. The flight from Santiago, Chile, to Punta Arenas took four hours! And when I got to Ushuaia, I was literally at the bottom of the world, only fifty miles or so from the dreaded Cape Horn. -
Teotihuacan, Mexico
In September 2002, I traveled to Mexico to the ancient ruins of Teotihuacan and into the Pyramid of the Moon to witness the first excavation ever done at the top of that great temple. Teotihuacan was a great city a thousand years before the Aztecs built their city of Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City. The Aztecs revered the ancient culture and modeled their own city and much of their culture on the former empire. -
Andros Island, Bahamas
My daughter and I went to the Bahamas to scuba dive. On Andros Island we dived with sharks and searched for buried treasure. One hundred miles long and forty-five miles wide, Andros, which is only fifteen miles from crowded Nassau, is untamed, wild, and mysterious. The island is pocked with "blue holes," giant round sink holes connected to deep ocean blue holes through a series of twisted caverns and tunnels deep under the sea. -
Arctic Circle, Alaska
For thousands of years, Iñupiaq Eskimos have hunted bowhead whales from the sea ice. Now this hunting platform is becoming thinner and more dangerous. The Iñupiaq Eskimos live in a warming land - the North Slope of Alaska. As global climate change continues to heat up the Arctic, the Iñupiaq culture faces an uncertain future. In Arctic Thaw, you will meet some of the scientists who study climate change as well as some of the Iñupiaq villagers. -
Barrow, Alaska
To learn more about global warming and how it might be affecting the Arctic and the people who live there, I made five trips to the North Slope of Alaska, often accompanied by Dr. Paul Shepson, a professor of Chemistry at Purdue University. Along the way I reconnected with my friend Craig George, son of children's book writer Jean Craighead George. To go out with him when his Inupiaq friends bring in the whales was an amazing experience. -
Cabeza de Vaca's trail from Texas to Mexico
In 1527, the conquistador Cabeza de Vaca set sail for the Spanish territory of “La Florida." His aim was to explore and colonize an unknown land that stretched from present-day Florida to Texas. The mission met with disaster. In an attempt to sail back to Cuba, de Vaca and his crew crashed near the shores of Galveston Island. From there de Vaca embarked on one of the greatest adventures in history. His quest to return home took him ten years as he made his way across Texas and into Mexico. -
Barrow, Alaska
This book will be available on 1/10/12! In it, it is springtime on the North Slope of Alaska and the U.S. Geological Survey team is gearing up for polar bear capturing. During a capture, information is collected on the sea ice. All this information goes into a large database made by the scientists of the Polar Bear Research Project. You'll find out what is this information telling scientists about polar bears and global warming. -
In a 5th Grade Classroom, NY!
After reviewing many dry research papers, NY fifth-grade teacher David Somoza began to experiment with an adventure writing model, based on the books written by Peter Lourie. Adventure writing integrates nonfiction and fiction and motivates students to write with imagination, curiosity, and a hunger to learn everything about their topic. -
Florida
In The Manatee Scientists, John Reynolds does an aerial count of manatees from the Florida sky; Lucy Keith spends a weekend rescuing manatees trapped in a dam in Senegal; and Fernando Rosas takes the author on an Amazonian boat trip, looking for a young manatee he released back into the wild.
