Mr. Abercrombie dived with Jacques Cousteau, which he said was "like swimming with a fish." While suffering from typhoid in the Himalayas, he amputated the frozen toes of a pilgrim as gangrene set in. He slipped off his yak in Afghanistan and narrowly escaped plunging into a 1,000-foot chasm. In Venezuela, he was knocked off the top of a mountain-climbing cable car and bore the scar to the end of his life.

In 1965, while traveling through Saudi Arabia's "Empty Quarter," his sport-utility vehicle broke down, forcing him to repair the radiator hose with items from his first-aid kit and patch another leak with a poultice of camel dung and barley paste.

"If you wanted to tell stories, he could tell them into the night. I used to kid that every story he had ended in a near-death experience," said Marlin Fitzwater, Ronald Reagan's and George H.W. Bush's presidential press secretary and Mr. Abercrombie's neighbor for the past decade in Shady Side, Md. "He didn't brag, which was a big part of his charm. He was a man's man and an intellectual to boot."

The tale that everyone tells is his filing of what is regarded as the single biggest expense account item at a magazine once known for its outsize budgets.

Details of the story vary, but Mr. Abercrombie, bound for an assignment in Alaska in the mid-1960s, learned to fly, bought a Cessna 180 and took off for the northwest. Once in Alaska, he discovered he needed pontoons for the aircraft, so he bought those, shot his photos and flew home, mooring alongside his property. He called the office and told it that the plane he expensed could be picked up there.

"It was the latter that set off alarm bells in the accounting department, which might have been willing to let the plane pass, but not one with floats," said former executive editor Bob Poole.

To be fair, Mr. Abercrombie sold the plane, so the magazine recouped most of the cost. And in those free-spending days, Mr. Abercrombie estimated that he bought and sold a dozen Land Rovers in the magazine's name in many remote lands where no car rental agencies operated.

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