Portraits of Adventure

Some­times you can find adven­ture on your own doorstep. Although not exactly the Himalayas, the Bre­con Bea­cons in South Wales pro­vided teach­ing assis­tant and ama­teur pho­tog­ra­pher Ron Tear with his own Everest

Aus­trian ‘Fear­less Felix’ Baum­gart­ner holds the record for the world’s high­est BASE jump – off the Petronas Tow­ers in Kuala Lumpur – and, far more dan­ger­ously, the world’s low­est BASE jump, from Brazil’s iconic Christ the Redeemer statue, pic­tured here

The image cap­tured by pho­tog­ra­pher Eric Nathan shows an abseiler (the yel­low speck on the left) descend­ing only the bot­tom quar­ter of Lesotho’s Malet­sun­yane Falls. At four times the height of Nia­gara, it is home to one of the longest abseils in the world – a ter­ri­fy­ing 192m drop

There are a few more pho­tographs after the jump…

Climber Todd Skin­ner sleeps on a nar­row ledge near the sum­mit of 420-metre spire Kaga Pamari in Tim­buktu, Mali, Africa. The team dubbed the climb ‘the Har­mat­tan rodeo’ because of the thrash­ing winds that shook them as they ascended

The Xhosa peo­ple of South Africa are prob­a­bly best known for their most famous son, Nel­son Man­dela, but many Xhosa live far from the mod­ern world, deep in the Transkei region on the country’s East­ern Cape. This pic­ture cap­tures the most impor­tant adven­ture in these boys’ lives – their ini­ti­a­tion into man­hood, which involves five weeks of isolation

Por­traits of Adven­ture at the Guardian.co.uk