National Geographic Adventure has published the best work by today’s finest writers, and this tenth anniversary anthology assembles an elite corps of authors that includes Sebastian Junger, Peter Matthiessen, Philip Caputo, and two dozen others. These reporters have voyaged to the ends of the earth to bring back the decade’s most thrilling, eccentric, and extraordinary tales. But the pieces collected here do more than paint a portrait of the world’s most extreme and fascinating environments—they also explore important questions about adventure in the 21st century.

These stories rocket readers across the roof of the world on the new high-speed railway in Tibet, describe the tension between Indian farmers and the sacred elephants besieging their villages, and introduce them to a shaman whom some believe can cure the most serious depressions. We meet the great Afghan warlord Ahmed Shah Massoud—said to have been the finest guerrilla fighter since Ho Chi Minh—encounter a yeti with legendary mountaineer Reinhold Messner, and much more.

This is a wide-ranging collection for every road warrior and adventurer—armchair or otherwise—culled from the much acclaimed journal that in its first ten years has won millions of devoted readers and garnered more than a dozen prestigious prizes for excellence in journalism.