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Out in the desert,

I became a better athlete than I ever was before.

It was not uncommon for me to run 250 miles a week.

Two hundred and fifty miles a week

is a thousand miles a month.

Twelve months,

that's 12,000 miles right there.

When I started to lose my eyesight,

I kept pushing and pushing.

And after a couple of years,

I've honed myself to run across Death Valley.

My purpose was to start at Badwater

and go roughly 150 miles to the summit of Mount Whitney.

It had never been done before.

My very dear friend,

David, and I started training together.

But one of the things David didn't do

was the heat training.

Going down to Death Valley the first time in 1974,

we started at four o'clock in the morning.

Dave came down with heat stroke after about 18 miles.

If you get heat stroke, the clock is ticking.

At Furnace Creek, we put David in the bathtub.

I put over 100 pounds of ice on him.

And there were people there,

and they said they'd take care of him.

So then I took off and started running.

The only thing I could think of

was that my good friend was dying.

His temperature, core temperature, was over 104.

So I stopped.

It took him over a year, over a year before he recovered.

That's how close he was to dying.

And that's the reason why I didn't make it the first time.

The second time I went down there,

I showed Death Valley absolutely no respect whatsoever.

I figured I'm gonna go back and kill it.

I ran a mile in under six minutes

in that attempt.

I was charging instead of taking it easy.

And after 40, 50 miles,

I learned real fast who was the boss.

You don't charge Death Valley.

You treat Death Valley the same way you do

when you're making a meringue.

If you go too fast, the whole thing will collapse.

It's not so hard physically.

What's really hard is mentally, to slow down.

It had never been done before.

It wasn't important how fast I did it.

Bristlecone pines live in a pretty high altitude

near Death Valley.

The bristlecone pines survive where other things wouldn't

because they are slowing down

to a painstakingly slow growth rate.

The bristlecone pines are so beautiful

because you really can see their struggle

is sort of inherent in their forms.

So it's almost like

you can watch their movement over time

and understand that they really want to live.

There's a...

There's a sense of doing whatever it takes to survive

in a pretty harsh environment.

It actually wasn't until the '60s

that people knew that they were that old.

A grad student had lost his coring bit

in the middle of a tree, and the Forest Service said,

"Well, just go ahead and cut it down.

There's plenty of them."

And it turned out he cut down

what ended up being the oldest known tree

in the world, at the time, that was the Prometheus tree.

The oldest bristlecone pines are over 5,000 years old.

The oldest unitary organisms on the planet.

It's really interesting to think

about what was going on in history at that time,

the invention of the wheel...

and cuneiform, the first written language.

So it really actually demarcates the beginning of human history.

I had been working on a lot of landscape work

that was about the relationship between humanity and nature.

And I got an invitation to visit some friends in Japan.

I took the advice

that several people had given to me,

which was, if you're interested in nature,

you should go visit the 7,000-year-old tree.

And it's on this remote island called Yakushima.

I just bought a new camera.

It was a medium format film camera,

and I photographed it.

But I had no idea when I started

that it would be a ten-year endeavor

photographing the oldest living things.

Looking for things

that were continuously living for 2,000 years and longer.

Two thousand, being, you know, why is it 2018 right now,

like, isn't it, you know, 4,500,002,018?

Like really trying to create this framework

for understanding human timekeeping.

So, initially, I thought,

"Oh, I'll find somebody who's going to partner with me,

an evolutionary biologist."

They said, "Well, look at what you're doing.

It's really broad.

This is not something that one scientist

would ever claim expertise at."

That was the first moment when I realized

I would have to be the expert.

It was thrilling to learn

that there were so many organisms

that have been alive for 2,000 years or longer.

I had no idea.

The honey mushroom

is a 2,400-year-old humongous fungus

that lives almost entirely underground

that is actually the largest organism

in the world.

Its unique footprint, if you will,

is that it will kill trees in this circular pattern,

and so that's known as Armillaria Death Rings.

And it's quite clever

because it doesn't kill the trees

until after they've reached reproductive age.

So thereby, it's ensuring

that it will continue to have a food supply.

There's an 80,000-year-old clonal colony

of aspen trees in Utah.

It's known as Pando, and this is fascinating

because what looks like a forest is essentially one tree.

Like 106 acres in size.

And what I mean by that

is that it's this giant interconnected root system,

and each tree is actually a stem coming up from that system.

This whole system communicates with all parts of itself.

So, you know, if one section needs water,

an area that has more water

can send it through the root system

to the place that needs it

or likewise nutrients or warning signs.

I was surprised to learn that there were any animals

that were over 2,000 years old,

and it turns out there's several.

In Antarctica, there's the volcano sponge,

some of which are thought to be up to 15,000 years old.

The one that I got to photograph, however,

I had to learn to scuba dive for that, around 60 feet deep.

It actually took my breath away

seeing this just enormous creature.

It almost looked like some lost meteorite

at the bottom of the sea.

What are the things that connect these organisms

that seem so different?

I came to understand that fast and furious

is not the way to live and grow.

Map lichens in Greenland

grow one centimeter every 100 years.

The continents are actually drifting away from each other

faster than these lichens are growing.

A number of the oldest living things

thrive in a pretty harsh environment.

Not in spite of this harsh environment they live in,

but because of it.

And the Atacama Desert is really one of my favorites.

It has seen almost no rainfall in all of recorded history.

I drove from the coast

to farther and farther up this, you know, tremendous elevation,

and it just gets drier and drier and more desolate,

and truly, you could be on another planet.

I was there in search of the llareta plants.

They look like moss over rocks, but they're actually shrubs.

So they're made up of thousands

of these really tightly compressed branches,

and they're so dense you could actually sit or stand

on top of them.

But, at that altitude, you're likely

to fall over from dizziness, so I don't recommend it.

And who knows what else exists?

We've really only scratched the surface

of understanding what's on our own planet,

let alone looking out to the rest of the universe.

We are all living in a base camp here

in the middle of the desert.

The driest desert of the world.

This is the weather that astronomers like.

So we see back in time

where no visible light is emitted.

Imagine light that began traveling

and coming towards us

from eight billion light years away.

Through empty space, this light travels

unimpeded by anything, untouched,

and then it hits Earth,

and there's this very thin layer of Earth's atmosphere,

which can completely destroy that light.

This layer is the reason why we can't look further

and further into the universe,

further and further back in time.

One of the ways in which we can do that on earth

is to go up to the Atacama Desert

in the Chilean Andes,

where you're above most of the dense layers

of Earth's atmosphere.

And, to me, it's really amazing that these ancient lands

have been chosen as the site

to look nearly to the beginning of time

when the first stars were being born.

The VLT is made of four telescopes,

the largest mirrors ever made

from a monolithic piece of glass.

And the surface had to be so precise.

Imagine grinding a city like Paris down,

so that the only bumps left are about a millimeter high.

That's the kind of precision

that they needed for the kind of astronomy

that we need to do now.

These telescopes have become so sensitive,

and the kind of things that we are studying

have become so faint

that astronomers are essentially

in search of very, very special land

that is completely radio-quiet.

Which means no interference

from television towers, mobile phones,

transmission from airplanes, radios, urban centers.

And that's what set me on journeys

to these very extreme locations all over the Earth.

These amazing places, which in themselves are poetic

where there was extreme physics being done.

And also, to share this sense that I have

of what physics can do to us as human beings,

not in terms of the knowledge,

just simply in terms of how it makes us feel.

And I wanted a way of exploring that feeling.

A certain comprehension of an infinity.

How immense everything is.

That we are part of it

and probably a very tiny dot in this vast scheme of things.

The Hanle Observatory lies

in one of the remotest regions of India.

One of the remotest regions in the Indian Himalayas.

There are almost no people there.

It's quite an impressive, remote, cold, beautiful place.

When I was standing on top of Mount Saraswati,

which is the hill on which the telescope has been built,

looking across the valley floor, perched really precariously

at the other end of the valley

was this 400-year-old Buddhist monastery.

The thing that became clear there,

looking at the monastery from the telescope,

was that both monks and cosmologists need silence.

It's because of this silence

that we are able to look deeper into the cosmos,

and further back in time.

We need to preserve these places on Earth

because if we don't, then we'll end up on a planet

that is so noisy...

from television towers, mobile phones,

or light pollution, which is a kind of noise,

that we will be stranded in this cosmos

without an ability to look outwards

to understand our very beginnings

and maybe understand where we are headed.

We live in a very busy world

that doesn't foster silence.

My childhood backyard was an ancient coral reef

many, many millennia back.

It's like a cathedral.

A place of great beauty and silence.

It's easier to capture the evidence

of some of the old passages of time here...

through the fossilized crustaceans of the mountains,

through the pictographs that remain on those rocks,

highly polished ancient mammoth rubbings,

known trails from early settlers.

So there's this beautiful echo of what's passed through

and I like to think about the people that came

way before my own passing through

that their echoes are still here as well.

I've been a founding member of Paul's Out of Eden Walk.

He conceived of the idea

while he was walking across this landscape.

I got this idea on this ranch in West Texas

where I was doing a little help

with the local vaqueros, the local cowboys.

In the mid to late '90s,

the genetic revolution was just taking off in a big way

and scientists were able to start extracting

very useful information about ancient migrations,

which you could, you know, you can trace through our DNA.

I thought, "What if I retrace the route

of the first human beings who walked out of Africa...

to recreate the first primordial walk

that we made across the world?"

The first discovery of the world by the first Homo sapiens,

the first exploration of the Earth

back in the Stone Age.

I drew out the map of the intended global trail

about 20,000 plus miles on foot

from Ethiopia to the tip of South America,

Tierra del Fuego,

which scientists tell us is the last virgin beach

that our ancestors reached about 7,000 years ago.

- Okay. Go ahead. - All right.

I've been a foreign correspondent

for the past 15 years.

Foreign correspondents normally cover stories

as they happen.

They fly to story A and they fly to story B.

What this project hopes to do

is connect the spaces in between.

And the argument there is that there are hidden links

between major stories of our day that never get covered

because we simply don't slow down enough to see them.

Paul's walk comes at a time when journalism

is pressed on all sides by short attention span

because of the immediacy

of the Digital Age and the internet.

We're still carrying around a Pleistocene brain

that absorbs information and processes the world

at the pace of walking, at three miles an hour.

Do you remember what Linda's reaction was?

Uh-huh.

Over a cup of coffee,

maybe not even looking up from a newspaper or a book

and just saying, "Uh-huh,

so you're gonna walk around the world?

All right. That sounds good."

Again, she knows me.

When I was 14, I walked across the Sierra Nevadas alone.

Later, across Papua New Guinea and through Alaska,

just living off a rifle.

He had walked from the border of Arizona to Mexico City,

retracing the footsteps of an early Victorian explorer,

took a packed mule,

and that took something like nine months.

So then, it was not too big of a leap

to jump into a dugout canoe,

a pirogue, to float down the Congo River for weeks,

to tell the story of the Congo Civil War.

Or to walk away

from a broken down Russian Jeep in Afghanistan

and walk and ride horses

over the Hindu Kush through hip-deep snow,

to get to the front lines of the Afghan War.

I think whether we realize it or not,

we're all on some form of pilgrimage,

and that includes commuting to work,

you know, these micro migrations,

even those are a form of pilgrimage.

Um...

And it's our task maybe to find the meaning under them.

Being fearless is important for anyone

who is trying to do something of the unknown.

So I started to extend my training,

acclimating my body to temperatures.

For example, I rode

a stationary bicycle in the sauna.

The air temperature was 165 for 10 hours.

I made sure that my skin did not touch the bike

because it would've been like a soldering iron,

I would have scourged myself.

I didn't know I had this capacity.

I did not know.

Ten hours is a long time,

but it's not two, it's not three days.

I wanted to know how much I can take.

All the pain that I inflicted to find out about myself,

each step pushing the boundaries further and further.

It took me 4 years and 15,000 miles.

And then I started thinking, you know,

"Maybe I can run Death Valley."

I headed North across the Panamint Desert.

The temperature was climbing and climbing,

and I lost visual contact with the surrounding mountains.

I have glaucoma. I can only see so much.

I knew where the sun was supposed to be.

Following the sun, I repositioned myself.

Focused on it, I almost became hypnotized to it.

I had to pay attention to my footing.

I was by myself, my life depended on it.

Before setting out in December of 2012,

I went down to the finish line to meet the last native speaker

of her indigenous language in that part of the world.

So I spent a day with her at her cabin

next to the Beagle Channel in Chile.

This is just across the channel from Argentina,

listening to her talk,

and she would walk around and say, you know,

a canoe is this,

and a rock is this, and the river is this.

Recording this language

is a form of gathering a precious stone

at this point in time

where language is about to wink out,

to carry with me across the world.

To remind myself partly why I'm doing this

because this project is rooted in the bedrock of history.

And, in that sense, it's also an act of remembering.

And I just wanted to remember her

as I walk towards her.

I don't know if she'll still be there

I don't know. When I get there, she was quite old.

I had first photographed

the 3,500-year-old bald cypress tree

just outside of Orlando in 2007, I believe.

A few years ago,

some kids snuck in to do drugs inside the tree,

and they actually set it on fire from the inside out,

and then posted about it on Facebook

and got caught, thankfully,

but it was actually on fire for over a week

before anyone knew.

It was impossible to save.

There it was, smoldering and dead.

It really changed my perspective

about everything that I was doing.

It was a very painful reminder that just because something

is incredibly old, does not mean that it's immortal.

In South Africa, a researcher I was speaking with

introduced me to something

that are collectively known as the underground forests.

That area is very prone to fire, and what these trees did

was basically migrate

the bulk of their structures underground.

And that way, when the fires inevitably come through,

it just singes the top of the leaves off,

which they can easily reproduce.

And so I visited 1 that was around 13,000 years old,

that's been around since mastodons

and saber tooth tigers when humans started farming.

However, a few years later,

I was informed that it had been destroyed

when they decided to change the traffic patterns

outside of the garden and paved right over it.

It hit another note of the chord

of what it means to be looking at time.

The whole point of the project, really,

was to create a relationship

with timescales that are far removed

from our normal human experience,

and by doing so, to create a relationship

with that time that's personal.

When you see something that's alive, that's alive now,

that you can have an interaction with

and has experienced 80,000 years of the world's history

leading up to this moment that you meet it,

and then on the other end of the spectrum,

you have the click of the shutter of a camera,

so a 60th of a second.

And then, somewhere in between those two,

we somehow then all come together

to share this moment.

And, to me, that's a way

to start looking at time with a different perspective.

Even though we are part of this giant continuum,

it's actually a reminder to look at the small moments

that make up the fabric of the time

that we all spend here.

One of the places where some

of the oldest Homo sapiens fossils have been found

is the Rift Valley of Ethiopia.

Bones about 156,000 years old.

So I chose that as my starting line

back in January of 2013,

and walked away from that boneyard,

up the Rift Valley of Africa.

The Afar Region where Paul started

requires every bit of forethought

and planning to survive.

I'm grateful that I was able to join Paul

seeing him take the first few steps.

As we continue to know

each other, our paths have, um...

They converge and diverge.

He has been trying to understand the world

and who we are through the soles of his feet.

The antidote to instant news and abbreviated viewpoint.

In my case, my path has to move

through a level of abstraction to pursue those questions.

For a period of time, we knew each other

in the template of a traditional marriage.

Though our practices are vastly different,

what we share is appreciation

for slowing down and seeing the invisible.

But I suppose one of the more harrowing moments for me

uh, was when Paul was abducted along the Sudan-Chad border

in 2006, and he went missing.

There's always the element of risk

because Paul does not shy away from challenging stories.

So you wonder, "Are you going to see this person again

as they walk off into the Afar desert?"

We were moving in opposite directions now.

I saw horrible things

about how we treat each other as human beings

in my career as a war reporter.

But walking has given me hope

about our generally messed up species.

Walking creates bonds, you get to know people.

You talk about your life with each other.

It's a bridge to that person's mind and heart,

to their cosmos.

On this journey, though, across continents,

I hoped that things were gonna be okay.

It was a physically demanding starting line to the journey.

Temperatures were extreme.

The very first days of the journey

were defined by this harsh reality

of walking through a drying landscape

where pastoral groups were fighting each other

over shrinking pasture lands and drying water holes.

So it became the war story almost immediately.

And they were, in fact, killing each other.

So we have actually walked through the Rift Valley

along a very strange snaking route

that if you took like a satellite picture

would seem nonsensical because there was no barrier,

but they were following

these invisible edges of conflict zones

that most people couldn't see that were invisible to the eye,

but were as real as any trench works,

you know, on front lines of any war.

And I remember we had to kind of do

a silent camp one night without fire,

so as not to be spotted to get through a danger zone

before anybody noticed us.

Climate change,

it's a very difficult thing to convey to people

because it appears to be moving so slowly.

It's an incremental calamity.

But when you're walking, you have no choice,

but to experience it through your own body

in ways that reading about it never will,

or looking at equations never will,

or hearing politicians lie about it never will.

And sure enough, after crossing the Djibouti border,

we stumbled across men, women, and children who didn't make it.

A couple days ago, we found the bodies

of seven migrants in the desert.

They died of thirst,

trying to reach Saudi Arabia.

And they were just one ridge line away

from reaching the Red Sea,

their watery finish line to get out of the desert.

It's made my own journey seem... frivolous.

So I'll just ask the question again.

Okay.

Abdi Nasir, it took you one week to walk here.

What did you... Is the journey worth the danger?

Is the journey worth going to Saudi Arabia

when people are dying?

I was stuck in the port of Djibouti for six weeks,

because I couldn't convince a commercial cargo ship

to take on a passenger,

with the risk of being attacked by Somali Pirates.

There's been a lot of murder out at sea.

Piracy is like a lottery

for poor people that are starving,

and they're ready to risk their lives, you know.

- They're desperate. - Yeah.

Maybe I'll see you in Saudi Arabia.

I should come to Ali

because I've been trying for a month to get a boat,

and I can't find a boat, so, Ali, I might need your help.

I wasn't getting a visa to walk through Eritrea.

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