John Summerton is an award-winning graphic designer who decided to combine his fascination for adventure and exploration with his love of good design, typography, and photography. In 2011, he launched Sidetracked as an online journal. In 2014, it moved into print. Today, thirty volumes deep and published three times a year, it is widely regarded as the finest adventure magazine in the world — the one that Gear Patrol, WildBounds, and the outdoor publishing community at large keep returning to as the benchmark for what the genre can achieve.
The formula is deceptively simple: each issue delivers a limited collection of personal stories from the world's wildest places, told by the people who were there. But the execution is anything but simple. The photography is immersive and extraordinary — shot by contributors like Martin Hartley, one of the only professional photographers to have crossed the Arctic Ocean on foot, and printed in full colour on FSC-approved uncoated paper. The writing, overseen by editor Alex Roddie, goes beyond the usual adventure-magazine formula of "went here, did this" to consider what happens before and after a wild undertaking — the doubt, the preparation, the return, the way an expedition changes the person who undertakes it. The result is 144 pages of content that makes adventure feel aspirational and relatable in equal measure.
Beyond the magazine, Summerton built the Sidetracked Creators Tour — a UK-wide series of evenings pairing adventure films, photography, and craft beer in unique taproom venues. The editorial roster reads like a who's who of contemporary outdoor culture: Jenny Tough on bicycling at 5,000 metres in Ladakh, Ian Finch documenting Indigenous biologists conserving dwindling moose populations, Hamish Frost attempting untouched summits in Nepal. Each story is chosen not for its extremity but for its emotional truth — the conviction that there is a powerful link between challenge and connection, and that by testing ourselves we forge a sense of purpose that the easy path cannot provide.
Explore Sidetracked at <a href="https://www.sidetracked.com/" target="\_blank">sidetracked.com