Maggie Shipstead

I Hiked Arctic Sweden to Work Through Grief. Then My Ankle Gave Out.

Off Duty, WSJ, April 2024

I was 150 miles into a planned 270-mile hike through northern Sweden when the pain set in. Other aches and twinges—hip, knee, back—had already come and mostly gone but were never severe enough to make me consider quitting. This pain, a stabbing in my left ankle, said, You must stop. But my mom had died exactly two months before, and that pain said, You must keep going.

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What Survives in the Atacama Desert

T Magazine, The New York Times, May 2023

When I returned my rental car at the airport in Calama, I’d driven 1,499 miles through the Atacama Desert, drawing a zigzag through Chile’s far north. The driest place on earth — vying with parts of Antarctica — the Atacama covers an area of 40,000 to 49,000 square miles, depending on how inclusive your definition is, and stretches along 700 to 1,000 miles of Pacific coastline. It’s a place defined by absence, or at least extreme sparseness. Of water, of life. Whatever is determined enough to exist there — people, plants, animals, even microbes — must be hardy, resilient and well adapted. From the road, I’d seen life hanging on. I’d ventured into the desert and also seen what dryness preserves (bones, ruins) and what it exposes (mineral riches, the stars).

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Finding Awareness in Alaska

Outside, December 2021

Sitting on the lakeshore as Kathryn started her bear safety talk, I felt anxious, alienated from my stated purpose. When I pitched this story, I’d been curious whether being in an all-female group would make the backcountry less daunting to me. Now everything seemed daunting. My pack, last carried on a solo trek in Iceland in 2019, felt dauntingly heavy. The van from Anchorage, after we Wild Women exhausted basic small talk, had seemed dauntingly quiet. The vast, inhospitable landscape around us—well, it’s only reasonable to be daunted by Alaska.

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Tracking An Elusive Cat in the Indian Himalayas

Condé Nast Traveler, October 2020

What are we to make of elusiveness in an animal? If a creature is difficult for humans to see in the wild, is that nature's way of hanging a “Do not disturb” sign? When the animal lives in a fragile ecosystem imperiled by human activity, what are the ethics of going there, even when tourism might drive conservation? As I looked out over the Himalayas on my flight into the city of Leh, in India's far northern region of Ladakh, I found myself picking at these questions. I was on my way to join a trip—an expedition, in the preferred nomenclature of adventure travel—that had as its goal the sighting of an animal whose elusiveness has become its epithet. There is the brave lion, the sly fox, and the elusive snow leopard.

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Another Voyage for Madmen (And, This Time, One Woman)

Outside, July 2018

On July 1, 17 skippers in 17 boats left the French port town of Les Sables d’Olonne and sailed west into the Bay of Biscay. Their destination? Les Sables d’Olonne, but from the other direction, a journey of about nine months and 30,000 miles. The boats are unremarkable. The sailors are a mixed bag: hotshot pro racers, ambitious yachties, ultracompetent old salts, young upstarts, dedicated adventurers, a hopeless dreamer or two—16 men and one woman representing 12 countries, all with a common intention. They’re racing around the world without stopping, without benefit of modern technology, and alone.

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In Kyushu, Japan, a New Food Movement That’s Driven by Craft and Care

Condé Nast Traveler, July 2023

One February afternoon, I pulled on rubber boots and followed the writer and photographer Prairie Stuart-Wolff into a weed-choked gully not far from her rural home in northern Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan's four main islands. “The inoshishi got here first,” Prairie said, using the Japanese word for wild boar. She pointed to an area of uprooted soil. Our porcine friends were after grubs, but we were hunting for fukinoto, or butterbur, a bitter leafy perennial and early harbinger of seasonal change. Clambering around a thickety slope, we picked our fill of vibrantly green fukinoto buds; the best would be set aside for tempura, while the others would be blanched and chopped into miso paste to make a relish. “Fukinoto is considered the first taste of spring,” Prairie said. “There might still be snow on the ground, and the wind may still be blowing, but the earth is waking up. When I moved here, it was the first thing I ever foraged. I feel in a way that fukinoto is a symbol of my life in Japan.”

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How I Beat a Curse (and COVID) in French Polynesia

Travel + Leisure, August 2022

“This trip is cursed," I said to the woman from the Aranui 5, a Polynesian hybrid cargo-cruise ship, when she called to confirm that, yes, I had COVID, and no, I would not be sailing for the Marquesas Islands the next day. I would be staying where I was: quarantined in a hotel room in Papeete, the capital of French Polynesia.

She laughed. ”When I feel that way, I send out good energy, and I say, 'Hey! Curse! Go away!'“

The next evening, I watched from my balcony as the Aranui 5 glided out of the harbor and into the sunset.

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Taking a Leap in Antarctica

The New York Times, January 1, 2021

“You won’t like his body,” my mother said when I told her I was going on a five-week-long first date to an ice-covered continent with someone nearly her age. “It won’t be what you’re used to.” Ominously, she added, “You won’t like his toenails.”

When I left, it was winter in Los Angeles, and when I arrived, it was summer in Invercargill, a port city at the bottom of New Zealand’s South Island. He was in the tiny terminal, looking nervous, wearing a polo shirt with his company’s logo embroidered on the breast and clutching three red roses in cellophane.

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The Wild Interiors, Cerulean Blues, and Winding Rivers of Fiji

Condé Nast Traveler, November 2022

Bula means “hello,” but it also means life. And indeed Fiji is a place that drums on your senses, reminds you that you are alive. It's lush and colorful, busy. No one will let you arrive at or leave a place without singing a song of welcome or farewell. The roadsides are full of grazing horses and children in school uniforms walking or hitchhiking, the boys in dapper narrow skirts called sulus, the girls in sleeveless shirtdresses in mint green or coral. Snack bars try to outdo one another with clever names: Road Krill, Cannibal Country, Cuppabula. People sell fruit, yaqona root, and strings of fish from simple stands. Outfitters offer cage-free shark dives and advertise snorkeling and scuba excursions with laminated photos of reefs bustling with fish. Water, always water.

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A visit to a remote arctic lodge run by a family of polar explorers

Condé Nast Traveler, April 2019

After our third attempt to land, I started to wonder about plan B. Thirteen of us were in the Twin Otter: eight guests, three guides, a pilot, and a copilot. The cloud ceiling kept inching lower, and a strong crosswind held the gravel airstrip’s wind sock out like a rigid, forbidding arm. We were returning to Arctic Watch, a remote lodge in Canada’s outermost far north, after a trip to Beechey Island, a place one of the guides had called, with genuine enthusiasm, “next-level bleak.”

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Hunting for Lionfish with Chef José Andrés in the Bahamas

Departures, January 2019

One afternoon in the Bahamas, storm clouds patrolled the horizon and a breeze stirred the turquoise water into a chop. I bobbed at the surface in scuba gear, peering down through my mask, watching as an unusual predator glided along the reef, yellow-finned and wielding a spear. It was chef José Andrés, and he was out for lionfish.

Extravagantly striped and frilled with venomous spines, lionfish are familiar denizens of saltwater aquariums that have become an invasive plague on Caribbean reefs and across the Eastern seaboard. No one knows exactly how the fish, native to the Indo-Pacific, first came to these waters—the leading theory is that some were carelessly released by aquarists beginning in the 1980s—but once established, they began growing and reproducing and gobbling down other species at a fantastic rate, drastically unbalancing sensitive coral ecosystems. “In their stomach,” Andrés said, “you’re gonna find baby lobsters, baby crabs, little octopuses. They eat everything. They are my type of people.”

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Bringing an Equestrian Past to the Okavango Delta

Condé Nast Traveler, March 2020

“Be able to gallop out of trouble.”

This riding skill, required by Okavango Horse Safaris to join their horseback tours through Botswana's Okavango Delta, gave me pause. I'd spent thousands of hours in the saddle since childhood, but mostly inside fenced arenas, never encountering any trouble that might warrant a galloping escape. In this context, trouble meant a confrontation with big game.

I'd stumbled upon the concept of horseback safaris while researching a trek in Patagonia that introduced me to the joy of crossing rugged terrain on horseback. A handful of outfitters run trips in wildlife-dense areas of eastern and Southern Africa, but because of the necessary riding experience, the activity is relatively niche. Though the idea made me nervous, I couldn't get it out of my head. I wanted the chance to venture into a world ruled by animals while astride an animal—to be a part of the landscape, away from all the engine noise and clicking camera shutters. I'd seen photos of riders alongside giraffes loping through the shallow floodwaters of the Okavango, and, basically, I needed to do that.

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A Cruise to the Bottom of the World With My Mother

Departures, January 2020

Morning in Antarctica. Gray clouds, black water, blue icebergs, black rock, white snow. Off Cuverville Island, a dollop of volcanic rock grandly back-dropped by the Antarctic Peninsula’s cascading glaciers and serrated peaks, the ocean was lively. Outboard-powered Zodiac boats buzzed passengers in bright orange parkas to shore from the cruise ship Seabourn Quest. The dorsal fins of two resting humpback whales stood out against a nearby ice cliff, and, here and there, patches of disturbance on the water’s surface sprouted dozens of swiveling penguin heads. Sometimes the birds dove to feed; sometimes they zoomed toward land, breaching the surface with porpoising leaps to evade lurking leopard seals. Hundreds of these penguins, members of the gentoo species, dotted the island’s slopes, my shipmates’ orange parkas moving among them.

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Why I Keep Going Back to Michigan’s Leelenau Peninsula

Condé Nast Traveler, July 2021

Even now, thirty-odd years after they were lost, my family still talks about the rings. West Point, class of 1943. First the original and then a replacement slipped off my grandfather’s hand while he swam in Lake Michigan’s Grand Traverse Bay, a 32-mile-long incursion that separates the Leelanau Peninsula, the pinkie finger of Michigan’s mitten, from the mainland. Poppy might have learned his lesson after the first one, but absentmindedness is strong in our gene pool. I suppose it’s possible some stranger has found one by now, but they’re both probably still on the bottom, not far from the house, kept company by the ashes of a family dog and the billions of invasive zebra mussels that have carpeted the lake floor in recent decades, outcompeting native species and making the water clear but devoid of life. The Grand Traverse Bay is hundreds of feet deep in places. When you swim, you can see your toes—beyond, only blackness.

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Turns Out, Overwater Bungalows are Heaven

Travel + Leisure, October 2019

I was waiting at the airport in Papeete, on the island of Tahiti, for a man with whom I’d gone on only one date, four months previously, in France. He wasn’t French but Australian, divorced, and nearly three decades my senior, and he’d been delayed a day because his plane was struck by lightning leaving Sydney, which we’d decided was a good omen for this vacation, which was to be six days in one of those dreamy bungalows you see all over Instagram: thatched-roof and standing on stilts in seas as preposterously, luminously blue as blue Gatorade.

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Thoughts on Going It Alone

Condé Nast Traveler, August 2019

The thing is, you can just go. You don’t need permission. You don’t need to ask anyone what they want to do, or eat, or see. The only schedule and budget that matter are yours. The only moods that need to be indulged, negotiated, bolstered? Yours.

Sometimes it’s a difficult question: what do I want? We’re used to obligations and compromises, to accommodating others. But ask yourself. If the answer is I don’t know, that’s not a problem--it’s an opportunity.

Driving alone in New Zealand, I passed a sign for glider rides. I don’t know. Might be scary. I drove on for ten minutes, turned around. Then I was in the tiny cockpit of a sleek, engineless plane, a pilot behind me, no sound but the wind, nothing between us and the sky but a plexiglass canopy. We circled over a braided river, its banks purple with lupines. The pilot’s voice came tinny through my headset: Want to take the stick? I took it, felt the balance of wings on air.

Sometimes I miss the comfort of having someone familiar to talk to, the relief of not being responsible for everything. I feel more conspicuous alone: spotlit on an empty stage, vulnerable without context as part of a couple or friendship or family. In Bali, an airport porter pulled me around a corner, demanded a tip. Bleary and flustered, I gave him a bill. Another, he said. The pink one. Later I realized I’d given him fifty dollars, but there was no one to blame but myself.

I’ve stood alone on a hilltop under a total solar eclipse. I’ve stood beside a frozen lake under the aurora borealis. I’ve floated in the South Pacific above a humpback whale while its song reverberated in my ribs. There are people I love who I wish had experienced these things, too, but if I’d waited for them, I wouldn’t have done any of it. 

We’re told memories are best when they’re shared, but I’m saying sometimes it’s okay to gobble down the world like the most delicious midnight snack, all for you. I’m saying our memories are only ever really our own, anyway. I’m saying: take a trip.

Read the editors’ recommendations for solo trips here

By Rail Through the Ottoman Empire

Travel + Leisure, November 2019

Sometimes the train’s throwback elegance made me feel like a visitor from another era; sometimes the scenery gave me a sense of traveling through another time. Once, somewhere in Romania, beside a highway humming with boxy Cold War-era Trabants and the latest German luxury cars, I glimpsed a man driving a horse cart down a dirt lane. One person’s now is another’s then.

For four days, the train carried me and my 17 fellow passengers through four countries, across a thousand miles. And here’s what blew my mind: every inch of railroad we clacked across in Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary fell inside the boundaries of what was once the Ottoman Empire.

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Visiting a Luxury Guest Ranch in the Last Days Before Covid-19

Condé Nast Traveler, October 2020

Looking back at my visit, just weeks before the pandemic began to shut down America, I can see that as much as I relished it I also took it for granted. Of course I could eat dinner with friends beside a snapping fire—why wouldn't I be able to? Of course I could get a massage or chat with a bartender. Of course I could move freely between the natural world and the luxurious accommodations, seamlessly assisted by other humans. But it turns out that these things are not actually givens but gifts. To pass through the world at speed, to receive gestures of hospitality, and to savor moments of solidarity—what privileges those are!

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Departures, October 2019

Between the riprap granite of the rail embankment and the lacy wash of the waves lies the beach, varying in width, studded in places with lifeguard towers, empty some days except perhaps for a lone jogger, other days packed with umbrellas and towels and teeming with human bodies. It’s the edge of California but also its center. It’s the place you might go when you have a feeling that seems too big for your body: maybe love, maybe grief. It’s a boundary with a view onto the boundless.

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Following Elena Ferrante to a chaotic city and a serene island

Travel + Leisure, April 2019

Within hours of arriving on the island of Ischia, I’d been propositioned by a man on a Vespa, survived a minor vehicular accident, and eaten a meal so delicious I wanted to kiss my fingertips and say, “Perfetto!” Here in the Campania region of southern Italy, life is all about contrasts. There’s the famously hectic metropolis of Naples, where I’d begun my trip; there are the ruined ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, which sit under Mount Vesuvius, the volcano that destroyed them; there are the upscale destinations of Sorrento, Capri, and the Amalfi Coast. And then there’s Ischia.

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A winter journey by train (and helicopter) to see the northern lights and visit a spectacular new lodge

Travel + Leisure, January 2019

For cold climate dwellers, a winter trip offers the chance to trade wool layers, snow shovels, and shin-deep gutter slush for palm trees and sunscreen. But I live in Los Angeles, where palms are everywhere and rogue 90 degree days in January make me long to scrape ice off a windshield or at least wear a sweater. Enough of this temperate sunshine, I decided. Alaska or bust, right into its frosty, rugged heart.

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All It Took Was One Tweet

Salon, December 2015

As I moseyed up and down Tom Bradley International Terminal, I was mulling over whether, perhaps, the people who say not to drink alcohol before or during flights may not have fully considered the fact that I might really want to. Three flights were leaving for Auckland within two hours—sweet, in a way, to think of our little flock of planes playing follow-the-leader over the ocean—and as I passed the gate for the one before mine, my eye snagged on a slight, unadorned young woman in a black sweater. I slowed. Did I know her? No. Or—yes. It was Taylor Swift.

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Nom-noming in the Carribbean with José Andrés

Travel + Leisure, October 2018

As we left the Atlantis Bahamas resort and turned toward Nassau, a siren whooped and lights flashed. Chef José Andrés turned around to peer out, but the cop sped past. “I bet he’s going to McKenzie’s,” Andrés said. He shook his fist. “You better not get there before me!” We were on our way to his favorite lunch venue, McKenzie’s Fresh Conch, in Potter’s Cay, a strip of shacks hawking cold beer and the national specialty: conch.

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The strange story of the world’s first solo round-the-world sailing race

Lapham’s Quarterly, Summer 2013

On December 24, 1968, astronaut Bill Anders, lunar module pilot on the Apollo 8 mission—his first and only space flight—took a photograph. In it, the distant blue earth, half in shadow, rises above the gray curve of the moon’s surface. Anders and the other crew members, Frank Borman and Jim Lovell, were the first humans to orbit the moon. They were also the first to travel far away enough from our planet that they could look back and see it whole, a blue sphere against a void. When the first photographs appeared in newspapers the following day, the public was startled and moved. This was a snapshot of all of us, riding through a dark universe on a planet that is small and alone, vulnerable and finite.

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Reflections on a favorite passage from literature

From The Atlantic’s By Heart Series, April 2014

If there are such things as universal truths about how we experience life, “time passes” is one of them. (I’d suggest its harsher relative “everybody dies” as another.) Time is the medium in which we live, the thing that separates each heartbeat from the last, the axis against which the distance between birth and death is measured. Time is also a necessary conductor for literature. Reading, the basic act of moving eyes over words and allowing sense to penetrate the mind, takes time, even if during the best and most transcendent reading experiences the forward tick of time ceases to register.

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Grief for a favorite species

New York Times, November 2017

Lately I’ve been haunted by a photo. In it, a mother elephant and her baby are running across a road in West Bengal, India. The mother has her head down and ears forward, heading for safety in the trees. A ball of fire clings to her right foot; her tail appears singed. The baby’s hind legs are engulfed in flames. In the background, a crowd of men is running away, some pausing to gape and jeer over their shoulders. They are the reason for the fire. They have thrown firecrackers and balls of flaming tar at the animals. The image, taken by Biplab Hazra and chosen by the Indian conservation group Sanctuary Asia as this year’s winner of its annual wildlife photography contest, is titled “Hell Is Here.”

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The Ambassador of a New Age of Ballet

Condé Nast Traveler, February 2015

David Hallberg's day begins at the barre. This austere wooden railing is where he gets right with his body, casts off the fogginess of sleep, the soreness of yesterday, sweeps his limbs in and out, up and down in time with the piano, puts his muscles and tendons and ligaments through their paces, reminds them of their responsibilities. The barre might be in New York, where Hallberg has been a principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre since 2005, or in Moscow, where in 2011 he became the first American ever to be named a premier danseur at the Bolshoi Ballet, or it might be in another city altogether—the location doesn’t really matter. In a life defined by movement, the barre is a constant. The barre is bedrock.

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On Being a Bad Surfer in the Lap of Nicaraguan Luxury

Rhapsody, October 2017

The evening we arrived in Nicaragua, my friend Rebecca and I strolled down the beach to scope out the surfers. At the far end of a long scimitar of sand called Playa Manzanillo, a high promontory of pale sedimentary rock jutted out into the Pacific, golden in the setting sun and capped with a lush toupee of jungle, whittling a consistent curl of whitewater off the incoming green swells. As we watched, a lone surfer paddled into a wave, popped to his feet, and carved a lazy serpentine line along the glassy barrel. “That’s not us,” I said to Rebecca.

Much closer to shore, wading in the white foam, two little boys in swim shirts belly-flopped onto longboards and rode in until they beached, giggling, on the sand. I pointed. “That’s us.”

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Where Ancient Rock Carvings Find Refuge in a Missile Range

California Sunday Magazine, October 2015

I am in the back seat of a stranger’s 4x4, crossing a missile test range in the Mojave Desert. We are heading to a canyon full of ancient rock carvings that sits more than 40 miles inside Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, once known as the Secret City. These petroglyphs were made by unknown people for unknown reasons over uncertain millennia. Archaeologists disagree, but the semiconsensus is that most are between one and three thousand years old.

The landscape is flat and sandy, the bed of a long-lost glacial lake. Here and there we pass white domes that house instruments used for testing rockets and bombs. Roads head off to nowhere. The desert might seem barren and exposed, but its inhospitable vastness offers obscurity, sanctuary. In the distance: the tail fins of several airplanes, including a Southwest Airlines passenger jet. A sign: WEAPONS SURVIVABILITY LAB.

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Not your grandma’s Hawaii

Travel + Leisure, November 2015

Around 8:30, a warm rain began to fall on Honolulu’s monthly night market, but no one seemed to mind. Not the crowds swarming the food vendors up and down Cooke Street, not the bikinied models strutting the runway for the local boutique Bamboo Sky, not the multitude of leashed, smiling dogs—and not me. I was fresh off the plane, sitting on a curb devouring a bowl of noodles and lemongrass tofu. The scene was pleasantly cacophonous, with grumbling generators, shouted food orders, and the competing beats of several DJs. Teenagers leaned against streetlamps and ate gourmet mac and cheese with chopsticks. Couples strolled while sipping lemonade from huge Mason jars adorned with stickers that said ALOHA.

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I’m not here to make friends

From the anthology A Paris All Your Own: Bestselling Women Writers on the City of Light, 2017

I sat motionless at my desk, breathing shallowly, my fingers resting on my laptop’s keyboard. He knocked again, waited, knocked a little louder, waited. Under the apartment door, his feet cast shadows on the dark green linoleum. I didn’t make a sound. Finally, he went on his way, footsteps receding. After a minute, the hall lights, which were on a timer, clicked out, and there was only darkness under the door.

The phone had rung a few times the previous day, and I hadn’t answered. I knew who was calling. It was the same man who had just knocked: not a stalker or a creep, actually, but the Swiss composer who lived across the hall, an affable, fortyish guy with a mop of dark curls. I’d met him in the elevator earlier in the week. According to Google, he composed operas—not just any operas: underwater operas. (In related news, it turns out there are underwater operas. The world is a marvelous place!)

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Taking the Queen Mary 2 From Southampton to New York for some reason

Paris Review Daily, 2012

In this day and age, the decision to cross the Atlantic on a ship instead of in a plane requires explanation. I did it—in April, aboard the Queen Mary 2—because I wanted to sit for a week and stare at three-thousand nautical miles of saltwater nothingness. I’d been away from the States for a long time. I spent a month in Bali, made a quick stop home for Christmas, then did three months in Paris and one in Edinburgh. My friends wanted to know if I was Eat Pray Love–ing. I didn’t quite have an answer. No job, no school, no relationship was pulling me to any one place, and if I was going to spend most of my time typing on my computer, I might as well see Bali or Paris when I looked up. “Maybe you go for a walk today,” suggested my landlady’s Balinese housekeeper as she watched me type. “Maybe you come back next year and bring friends.”

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On inheriting a love of ballet from my mother

O: The Oprah Magazine, May 2014

As a child, I liked to browse my mother's bookshelves in hopes of finding something I wasn't supposed to see. When I was 6, poking through her collection of ballet books, I came across a glossy hardback with the promising title Private View, but it contained mostly chaste black-and-white photos of dancers working in the studio or waiting offstage in the shadowy wings. One of the dancers did catch my eye, though. He had an intriguing, contradictory face: melancholy but impish, boyish but lined, sometimes playful, other times stern. Even when he smiled, he looked guarded, a little mysterious. I wanted to know who he was.

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After a harrowing bus journey, a simple breakfast felt like a celebratory feast

Condé Nast Traveler, February 2015

Hunger is widely acknowledged as the finest seasoning for food. Beside it on the spice rack of intangibles, though, I would place relief. After a taxing experience, a meal doesn’t have to be mac-and-cheese or sweet potato fries to be comfort food. Solace comes from the ritual of eating, the marking of comfort’s return.

In 2005, after college graduation, a friend and I bought round-the-world plane tickets. The trip’s centerpiece was a month in India, culminating with a Himalayan trek. We did Mumbai; we saw the Taj and the palaces of Jaipur; we stayed across the street from a crematorium in Delhi. Then we boarded a northbound bus to Leh, the jumping-off point for our trek.

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The coolest sport(s) no one follows

The New Republic, August 2016

The last time you had to deliver a message, what did you do? Type with your thumbs for ten seconds and press send? That’s what I did. But what if you had to sword-fight, swim, ride a horse, run, and shoot a pistol before handing over your emojis in person? You might find you’d rather keep your thoughts to yourself.

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