Today, when he's not in Los Angeles, Mr. Nitze, 41, lives three hours away on an entirely different type of frontier: on the outer edge of civilization north from Palm Springs, off a 1-mile-long dirt road in the remote, rocky high desert of Southern California.

WSJ: The Do-It-Yourself Desert Retreat

On Thursday, NASA released a sweeping color panorama of the planet's surface, showing the rocky, reddish desert surrounding it and the mountain it will explore in the coming months.

CNN: SHARE THIS

There's the Gulf Coast, Texas Hill Country, the Great Plains, Sonoran Desert, Rocky Mountains, Blue Ridge Parkway, Great Lakes, and so on.

FORBES: Great Drives: Cross Country Road Trip

For the next 120 days, we cycled an average of 100km a day through the deep sands of the Nubian Desert in Sudan, the rocky mountains of Ethiopia and the torrential rains of Tanzania.

BBC: How we quit our jobs to travel: The showbiz couple

Those two vehicles were only found by chance, when an army unit conducting desert exercises happened upon them parked in a rocky wasteland.

ECONOMIST: A blow for the forces of evil | The