Expeditions

Environmental activist George Wolfe has always believed the best way to know a river is to kayak it. So when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently designated the entire Los Angeles River a "traditional navigable waterway," he organized an expedition. Toting a waterproof first-aid kit and a sack of binoculars, Wolfe led seven people clad in T-shirts, shorts, sun hats and life vests to a lush, eight-mile stretch of river bottom near Griffith Park known as the Glendale Narrows.

On an overcast Saturday morning, Christopher Nyerges — the head of Eagle Rock's School of Self-Reliance — gingerly skirts a feral clump of bright green weeds. "Always watch where you're stepping 'cause you might be stepping on our lunch," he says to the 17 students following him. Resembling troops in an outdoorsy New Age army, the group wanders through Pasadena's Hahamongna Watershed Park, scouring the dirt hills, shallow valleys and parched riverbeds of the land for edible plants as part of a wild food outing that Nyerges regularly teaches.

It's taken a while, but you think you've finally gotten a grasp on the issues related to where most of your food comes from. You've successfully parsed the gray areas among local, seasonal, organic, sustainable, no-spray and conventional. You know your carbon footprint from your food miles, and you shop at a farmers market when you're not getting deliveries from your CSA. Congratulations. Now what do you do about fish? Yeah, that's what I thought. Me too. As confusing as the arguments about produce might be, they've got nothing on seafood.

In January, President Obama pledged not to forsake or forget Haiti during what promised to be a long and painful recovery from the worst earthquake to hit the island nation in 200 years. To that end, the administration immediately sent military assistance and millions of dollars in emergency aid. But it has yet to take another crucial step: expediting the immigration to the United States of the 55,000 Haitians who already have been approved for visas by the Department of Homeland Security.

I could see a river of flame below me, a glowing red lava tube that sliced across the jagged black landscape of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. The seething, molten rock was so close I could feel the heat and smell the sulfur. Nearby, a stand of eucalyptus trees erupted in flames as lava touched it. I was whirling above Kilauea — one of the most active volcanoes in the world — in a helicopter that had no door. In the seat in front of me sat a pilot and a Times photographer, who leaned precariously out of the cabin of the chopper to shoot pictures.

It's 40 degrees below zero on Russia's Lake Baikal and the cold is debilitating. Ray Zahab and Kevin Vallely are traveling 26 miles every day, sleeping four to five hours a night, battling snowstorms and consuming freeze-dried meals of spaghetti and chicken tikka. Though the duo, who started out with 110-pound sleds, are attempting to cross the length of the frozen lake in 10 days, this isn't another extreme sports feat. Instead, it's an attempt to educate and inspire more than 8,000 students in 37 schools across the country and Canada, as the explorers communicate via satellite from halfway across the world.

One campaign takes the high road, which will lead a team of celebs, do-gooders and hypoxia enthusiasts to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro, in Tanzania, to raise awareness of the global clean-water crisis. The other takes the low road, descending to the lowest point on Earth, the Mariana Trench, near Guam, and then sinks even lower in a cheesy attempt to sell cars. Yet both promotional efforts suggest a trend in what might be called expedition marketing. This is the era of Discovery Channel-style, extreme adventure entertainment -- Bear Grylls living off spiders in the Kalahari, Matt Watson jumping from a helicopter onto a sailfish, great races hither and yon. And causes and companies seem to be ever more willing to go to the ends of the Earth to get attention back home.

Three Americans arrested by Iranian authorities last summer during what their families describe as a hiking expedition along the Iran-Iraq border now face espionage charges, a leading Iranian judiciary official said today. Abbas Jafari-Dolatabadi, the powerful Tehran public prosecutor, told the country's official Islamic Republic News Agency that the investigation of the three individuals is ongoing and that a judgment will be announced "in the not too distant future." Shane Bauer, 27, Sarah Shourd, 31, and Joshua Fattal, 27, were arrested by Iranian authorities July 31 during what their friends and families describe as a hiking trip in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, which borders Iran.