By Scott Stoll
Published: August 24, 2020
Updated: 2 years ago

Adventures before the era of blogs

If you can imagine, it was only a few decades ago when sharing an adventure was a painstaking process. Often the adventures were long-completed before the celebratory phone call was made and the newspaper article was published. Prior to newspapers, adventures were recorded by hand and took years, and sometimes lifetimes, before they saw publication. Lewis and Clark’s journals lay dormant for over a century.

When Scott’s first adventure-travel website, theArgonauts.com, came online in 1999, our vision was to give adventurers a forum to share their adventures in real-time — as they were happening! We wanted people to be able to share their hopes and dreams and pass along the boon of their adventures, like new discoveries, new ideas and lessons learned. We were an online adventure magazine before the concept of a webzine, blog or guest post existed, and long before mobile phones and social media were invented, which has now made it easy to share content with a few clicks, with beautiful photos from automated, high-tech cameras.

We could see the Internet was going to revolutionize global communication, but the infrastructure and technology still weren’t in place. In fact, the only way many adventurers had to share their inspirational story was to email us and have us post their story online. Many people wanted us to automate these features, which would have essentially been one of the first social media platforms. TheArgonauts.com was ahead of its time and unfortunately, we could never find the estimated $50-100,000 to create the features that companies like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and WordPress now make so free and easy for everyone.

Below are a collection of stories that are from before the digital era of cell phones and social media. We’re really proud to have been on the cutting edge. We cared about every story. That being said, hundreds of poor-quality blogs were deleted. Many of them were just random updates, like a picture or a sentence. They were more like a Tweet or Facebook post, but without more context, they aren’t very interesting anymore.

We are proud of what we have accomplished, and we hope these stories live on. Thanks for being part of the adventure.

Feature Adventurers

We featured stories about people doing amazing things. We called the Argonauts, but you can call the adventurers, explorers or travelers, but definitely not vacationers. These are well-crafted, magazine-quality stories (our website use to be called a webzine) that talk a lot about what motivates people and the human spirit.

Alastair Humphreys with the setting sun perfectly behind his silhouette.

Travelogues

Before social media existed or mobile devices became commonplace, The Argonauts gave dozens of people a chance to share their story as it was happening. Here are some of our favorite adventures.

Columns

To the stars the earth as seen from the moon

Photo Pictorials

About the photographs

In the beginning, our website showcased hundreds of Feature Photos by travelers on the road with no ability to share their pictures with the world. However, now with the advent of social media, travelers can easily share their own photos without us. So, we don’t post single pics or blurbs anymore; but, we still have an audience that loves an inspirational story with lots of photographs. So please share your guest post.

Update 2020: We found a lot of the original high-res photographs. See the side-by-side difference.