What drives me is exploration with a purpose, more the classic Royal Geographical Society genre.

I love all of the Earth.

You can only inspire when you give people a new way of looking at the world in which they live.

Almost a quarter of our planet is a single mountain range and we didn't enter it until after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin went to the moon. So we went to the moon, played golf up there, before we went to the largest feature on our own planet.

I learned how to order my thoughts, and most important, learned how to develop a plan. I discovered the power of a plan. If you can plan it out, and it seems logical to you, you can do it. And that was the secret to success.

My family came in 1635 from England and settled in Williamsburg. Shortly after, they split up; half went to New England and half stayed in Virginia. I'm a Virginian Ballard.

You don't go to Gettysburg with a shovel, you don't take belt buckles off the Arizona.