Roald Amundsen's Gjøa expedition of 1903–06 was the first to sail through the Northwest Passage, from Beechey Island and Gjoa Haven in Arctic Canada to Nome in Alaska. Today the little herring boat sits in the Fram Museum in Oslo.
The route follows the voyage stop by stop: the Franklin memorial at Beechey Island, two winters at King William Island, a long ski trip to the telegraph at Eagle, the arrival in Nome, Gjøa's decades in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, and her return to Norway.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was filmed around Austin in the summer of 1973, and its main sites can still be visited: Bagdad Cemetery in Leander, the Last Chance Gas Station in Bastrop, and the Quick Hill farmhouse, now Hooper's restaurant in Kingsland. This route follows the film from the grave-robbing opening to Sally's escape on a Round Rock road, then ends inside the house where Leatherface's family sat down to dinner.
Tobe Hooper shot the $140,000 film on 16mm over 13 days, using a real farmhouse, a working gas station and a country cemetery instead of sets. Temperatures reached 110°F during the shoot.
In the 1920s the Osage Nation drew oil wealth from beneath its Oklahoma land, and newspapers called the Osage the richest nation or social group on earth, man for man. Then they began to die — shot, poisoned, killed by a bomb in Fairfax — while local courts and guardians controlled the money.
This route follows the documented places of the Osage murders, from Mollie Kyle's Gray Horse and Pawhuska's Million Dollar Elm to the Fairfax bombing, a lawyer's body beside the railroad, and the trials at Guthrie and Oklahoma City. It ends at the Osage Nation Museum, which keeps the record in the tribe's own voice. Scorsese's 2023 film was shot in many of the same towns.
In the early 1900s a Russian army surveyor, Vladimir Arsenyev, mapped the wild Ussuri taiga with the help of Dersu Uzala, an indigenous hunter who read the forest better than any map. Arsenyev's memoir became a classic, and Akira Kurosawa turned it into an Oscar-winning film in 1975.
The route follows the story from Vladivostok to Lake Khanka and the Sikhote-Alin, then to Khabarovsk, Dersu's lost grave and the film's shooting base. Pins mark regions and towns, not exact campsites.
