CLIMBING MOUNTAINS is an act I happen to love, but it is only one narrow version of adventure. There are thousands. In fact, there's one for every human with the passion to push personal boundaries.

Recognizing this, W. L. Gore & Associates, the manufacturer of Gore-Tex, began awarding grants in 1990 to "small, unencumbered teams of friends with daring and imaginative goals," teams that would attempt their projects "in a self-propelled, environmentally sound, cost-effective way." The Shipton/Tilman Grants, as the program is known, have supported a wide array of exploration—caving in Thailand, crossing the Gobi by foot, sea-kayaking around Tierra del Fuego, kite-skiing across the Yukon. Our plan to climb Nyambo Konka earned a grant as well, in part for its imaginative simplicity: one rope, two guys, three weeks, four ice tools, and an unclimbed peak in an unexplored amphitheater.

Eric Shipton and H. W. Tilman were two British mountaineers a half-century ahead of their time. From the 1930s into the 1960s, they explored mountains in Africa and Asia with an elegant, prescient style. While most expeditions of that era were enormous, nationalistic undertakings, Shipton and Tilman usually chose to move quick and light, low-cost and low-impact. Together they were the first to traverse the West Ridge of Mount Kenya, the first to break through the Rishi Gorge into Nepal's Nanda Devi Sanctuary, and the first to explore and survey the northern approaches to K2 and its subsidiary glaciers.

The duo epitomized the best of what adventure can be—exploratory, gallant, in search of higher truths—which, frankly, made them historical anomalies. Although it hasn't been a linear progression, exploration has evolved profoundly over the past half-millennium. In his encyclopedic Great Adventures and Explorations (1947), Vilhjalmur Stefansson, twice president of the Explorers Club of New York and a legendary polar explorer in his own right, bluntly characterizes the "self-confessed greed for riches, lust for conquest, and bigotry in religion" that motivated many early explorers. Prior to the 1700s, expeditions were generally military forces with the dual purposes of imperialism and religious conversion. The Enlightenment, with its emphasis on knowledge, ethics, and aesthetics, profoundly changed the adventure landscape. By the 19th century, science—not merely gold, slaves, or converts—had become integral to most exploration. German geographer Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) and British naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–82) were luminary examples.

At the turn of the 20th century, only the farthest corners of the earth were left unexplored. American naval officer Robert Peary reached the North Pole in 1909; Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen made the South Pole in 1911. Shipton climbed the first 7,000-meter peak, Kamet, in the Indian Himalayas, in 1931. A four-man American team made the first ascent of 24,790-foot Minya Konka, the highest peak in the Daxue Shan Range, a year later. Frenchman Maurice Herzog nabbed the first 8,000-meter peak, Annapurna, in 1950; Hillary and Norgay summited Everest in 1953.

In the past two generations, all 14 of the world's 8,000-meter peaks have been climbed. The Amazon, the Nile, the Niger, the Upper Tsangpo—all have been run. Everest has been skied, Angel Falls BASE-jumped, the sky itself surfed. So what's left?

Nothing, according to some fin de siècle defeatists. You've likely heard the lament: Africa has the Internet, the Silk Road is a highway, the Inca Trail a tourist trap—time to play Dragon Quest VIII.

Columnist John Tierney, in a 1998 New York Times Magazine critique titled "Going Where a Lot of Other Dudes with Really Great Equipment Have Gone Before," promoted this sort of fashionable jadedness by coining the word explornography: "the vicarious thrill of exploring when there is nothing left to explore." According to Tierney, the "Age of Exploration has been succeeded by the Age of Explornography." Even Italian alpinist Reinhold Messner, who should know better, declared last year in London's Guardian, "Mountaineering is over. Alpinism is dead. Maybe its spirit is still alive a little in Britain and America, but it will soon die out."

They're both wrong.

It's self-evident that the age of grand geographical exploration—with the enormous exceptions of deep space, deep earth, and the deep sea—is over, but as I see it, the age of adventure has only just begun.