Tristan Gooley

Gooley was born in 1973; his father is Sir Michael Gooley, the founder of Trailfinders, who was knighted in 2021 for services to business and charity.^[6]

Gooley has a BA in history and politics (1996) from Newcastle University.^[7][8] He climbed Mount Kilimanjaro while in his teens,^[2] and, aged 19, he spent three days lost on the slopes of Gunung Rinjani, an active volcano in Indonesia.^[9]

Gooley has walked with the Dayak in Borneo,^[10] and in 2009 studied and practiced natural navigation methods with the Tuareg in the Libyan Sahara.^[11] In 2012 he led a short-handed small boat voyage, from the Orkney Islands into the Arctic Circle, to test Viking methods and determine whether nature can help a navigator estimate their distance from land.^[12] He has walked from Glasgow to London and parachuted off a building in Australia. After years of extreme journeys, aged 36 he turned towards smaller journeys and studying nature.^[13]

In 2008, he became the second person, after Steve Fossett (1944-2007), to have both sailed solo and flown solo across the Atlantic; as of 2023^[update], he is the only living person to have done so.^[14][15]

Gooley specialises in interpreting nature's signs,^[16] and has been referred to as the "Sherlock Holmes of Nature".^[17][18]

He has identified a type of path, which has been recognised by the Royal Institute of Navigation. The "smile path" is a (smile-shaped) curve, formed when walkers avoid an obstacle or, during Covid, seek to preserve safe distance from other people.^[19][20]

Gooley has written for the New York Times, the Sunday Times, the Wall Street Journal and the BBC.^[21] He is the author of books^[22] which have been translated into 19 languages,^[23] and have been referenced by artists including David Hockney.^[24]

Gooley is a fellow of the Royal Institute of Navigation and of the Royal Geographical Society.^[14]

In 2020 was awarded the Harold Spencer-Jones Gold Medal by the Royal Institute of Navigation in recognition of an outstanding contribution to navigation.^[25]

Gooley is married to Sophie and they have two sons. They live in Eartham, West Sussex.^[3]

Gooley is vice-chairman of Trailfinders, the travel agency founded in 1970 by his father.^[21]