He's Climbing A Mountain. Where is She?

It's not often that Hull, a small British city, makes international headlines, but last week, it was at the center of a media storm as one of its residents staged his glorious homecoming: After 28 years and 31,000 miles, Karl Bushby came back from walking around the world.

Bushby, who was just 29 when he set off in 1998, now holds records for the longest unbroken journey on foot; for being the first person to have walked continuously across the world; for being one of the first people to cross the Bering Strait between the U.S. and Russia on foot in modern times; and for swimming the Caspian Sea between Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. 

His return was such a landmark moment because of the two rules he set for himself. First, that he wasn't allowed to use motorized transport; second, he couldn’t return home until the journey was complete. That meant he hadn't seen his mother for the full 28 years (she welcomed him back with classic Hullensian understatement: "Where have you been?"). Not incidentally, he had also missed getting to know his son, Adam, who was eight years old when he left. 

Bushby has expressed regrets about missing out on Adam's childhood: "There's a guilt there," he told a reporter. "That cross gets heavier the more the years go by…The way I squared the circle with Adam was by thinking that by doing this maybe I'll have more meaning in his life, more value doing what I'm doing." In the same interview he described his choice as "purely selfish."

Bushby is hardly an outlier among explorers, as he has pointed out: "If you look at the lives of people like [the explorers] Shackleton and Cook and the others, they were horrible husbands and fathers." He's right. When you see stories of a man discovering new lands or breaking dangerous records, it's more than likely that his wife (or, in Bushby’s case, his ex-wife), is left single-handedly running the household while her husband swashbuckles his way into the record books. These achievements, in other words, would be impossible without a woman doing quiet, unpaid, often solitary labor in the background. 

Let's start with Bushby’s ex, Angela Tivnen. The two were already separated when Bushby made a bet with a friend that he could walk around the world; their short marriage had ended in 1995, three years before Bushby set out. So no, the pair weren’t still together, but there was still a child. In a 2026 interview with the Daily Mail, Tivnen did not explicitly criticize him, although she did say she "could have done with more support. Tivnen was not consulted. "I was hurt," she said. 

Her grace in the face of what feels like a fundamentally selfish act is impressive. "I can’t blame Karl for wanting to follow his dreams and do what he wants to do," she said. "We've only got one life."

I'm glad Tivnen spoke up, because information about the wives of other famous explorers is hard to come by. In 2022, the author Katherine MacInnes, herself the wife of a mountaineer who climbed Everest, wrote "Snow Widows," the story of Captain Robert Falcon Scott's doomed attempt to reach the South Pole, from the perspective of the team’s wives and mothers. MacInnes said it took a decade to write, partly because finding her source material was so difficult. While the men's diaries and letters were in easy-to-access archives, no-one had thought to do the same for contemporaneous material written by their wives. 

Kathleen Scott, Captain Scott's wife, was an artist and a sculptor, but almost everything written about her is in the context of her husband’s accomplishments. Even an entry on The Royal Society of Sculptors' website fails to mention much of her art other than statues she made of Scott himself. Her body of work actually included several public artworks and other pieces  showcased at the Royal Academy. The entry also fails to mention that she was an anti-suffrage campaigner who had been accused of having at least one affair. At least she wasn't boring. 

In 1910, Kathleen accompanied her husband on his expedition as far as New Zealand, and was again en route to meet him two few years later when she was told of her husband's death. Robert had left when their son, Peter, was nine months old. Now Peter was going on three.

Then there is Emily Shackleton — the wife of the Antarctic explorer, Ernest Shackleton — another relatively mysterious figure. We do know that she married Ernest at the age of 36, had three children, and supported her family while Ernest set off on three expeditions. He died on the third, leaving Emily the modern equivalent of $2 million of debt. 

Lucky for us, the women behind modern adventurers are more comfortable sharing their views. In 2017, Marina Fogle, the wife of the British adventurer and TV presenter Ben Fogle, wrote that there were times when her husband's career choice felt "selfish."

"Ben has never made a parents’ evening, and the children know it will only be me watching their school play," she wrote. But, "his joy and excitement of his experiences are infectious. He may miss parents’ evening, but he’ll take an assembly, regaling 200 kids with his adventures as his children’s hearts burst with pride."

There's a double standard at play here, of course. Ben Fogle doesn't have to worry about childcare conflicts like the Japanese mountaineer Junko Tabei, who led the first all-women team up Everest. And it's unlikely that he'd be subjected to posthumous criticism if he died, as was the adventurer Alison Hargreaves, who perished on K2 in 1995 leaving behind two children. Hargreaves wrote in her diary: "It eats away at me — wanting the children and wanting K2. I feel like I'm being pulled in two." The year before her death, as she became the first woman to reach the summit of Everest solo and without oxygen, she had devoted that moment to her children. "To Tom and Kate," she said. "I am on the highest point in the world and I love you dearly."

The difference in these cases is notable. When Bushby started out on his adventure, he didn't ask Tivnen – he told her, making the assumption that she would take care of their son. Japan’s Tabei, by her telling, had no such luxury. Mountaineering "was considered unrealistic, unproductive and most of all, detrimental to our families,” she wrote in her memoir.

Great Men usually have the luxury of knowing that real life will carry on while they are on their adventures, achieving Great Things. Great Women? Not so much. After all, someone has to steer the ship at home. Perhaps the Greatest Men of all are those who stay at the helm, alongside their partners.