This week's adventure round-up is a reminder that big trips don't have an age limit — or a script. The standout story: Dale "Greybeard" Sanders, who only started extreme endurance challenges at 80 and is now 91. He has paddled the Mississippi source-to-sea twice, raced the Missouri River, and this year took back the record as the oldest person to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail. Not everyone his age is chasing records, though — 77-year-old Wendy Eden keeps exploring Canada's wilderness solo, simply adjusting her methods as the years pass.

Hitchhiking is quietly making a comeback in Australia. Writer Aston Brown hitched from Sydney to Perth and argues the appeal is surrendering control and meeting people you'd never otherwise cross paths with. The practice collapsed after serial killer Ivan Milat targeted hitchhikers decades ago, but online communities are introducing it to a new generation. Brown is honest about the risks — and that his experience as a man doesn't reflect what women travelling alone face. Highlights included three days and 1,900km riding with a 79-year-old widower, and a birdwatching invite from the head of Australia's national science agency.

Less uplifting but gripping: 72-year-old Mary Beth Granbery survived six nights in the California wilderness after falling 30m down an embankment on the Cabin Creek Trail near Mount Shasta. Her camper van at the trailhead triggered the search, and rescuers found her a day later — injured, dehydrated and hypothermic, but conscious.

For wildlife lovers, Geena Truman and her husband drove 2,500km across Madagascar in a rented 4x4, hunting for lemurs along the RN7 from Antananarivo through rainforest, rice paddies, canyons and desert. Golden bamboo lemurs, ring-tails and Verreaux's sifakas all showed up. Off the highway, tracks got rough enough that they hired a local guide — a pisteur — to handle river crossings and mud.

There's road-trip nostalgia too: six young climbers in a blue Ford van in 1976, driving west to Wyoming's Tetons, surviving loose rock, a near-fatal slide down the Skillet Couloir and two violent thunderstorms, all anchored by the affordable Grand Teton Climbers' Ranch, which still operates today.

In Scotland, Renate Powell finished her second round of all 282 Munros — in barefoot shoes. She switched to minimalist footwear in her forties after a skiing injury wrecked her knee, building up from 100m walks over more than a year. Fourteen years on, she's still long-distance walking and never needed the knee replacement once suggested.

Finally, a salute to Sir Ranulph Fiennes, now 82 and living with Parkinson's: the 60,000km Transglobe circumnavigation crossing both Poles, an unsupported Antarctic ski crossing, and the famous fretsaw amputation of his own frostbitten fingertips. And a cautionary tale from British Columbia, where two climbers were plucked off Edge Peak's White Dyke — the third rescue this year for one of them, prompting veterans to urge honest route assessment and knowing your partner's limits before you set out.