Death on K2: Fredrik Ericsson Dies in First K2 Ski Descent Attempt

By Tetsuhiko Endo

What started out as a week of great hope in the Karakoram has instead ended in tragedy with the Death of Swedish alpinist and skier Fredrik Ericsson on K2 on Friday. Ericsson and his partner, American Trey Cook, were hoping to become the first men to climb K2 and descend on skis.

After a previous summit bid that included Ericsson, Cook, Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner, Kinga Baranowska, and Fabrizio Zangrilli was repelled by bad weather last week, it looked as if K2 would go unclimbed for another year. However, a rare stretch of unseasonably warm weather allowed one last hail mary attempt this week. But even the sun didn’t offer complete safety. All week, climbers dodged bowling ball-size rocks displaced by snow melt that careened down the mountain. By the time the climbers reached Camp 4, they were sleeping with their helmets on.

Spain: Pamplona's Running of the Bulls - An Eye-Witness Account

By Tetsuhiko Endo

To a man of spirit, cowardice and disaster coming together are far more bitter than death striking him unperceived at a time when he is full of courage and animated by the general hope.

--Pericles, Funeral Oration to the Athenian People during the Peloponnesian War

It’s six a.m. in Pamplona, the sky is turning from navy to pale blue with the approaching dawn, and the streets are already packed. In reality, many of the people who line the cobbled lanes of the old town have not been to bed yet. They’ve spent all night in the bars, clubs, and culinary societies of this ancient Roman city celebrating one of the patron saints of the region of Navarra, San Fermín.

Every year, roughly a million people flock to Iruña, as Pamplona is called in the native Basque language, for the festival of San Fermín, or Sanfermines. They join the native Navarros in an epic bacchanal that has taken place annually since 1591. The party kicked off yesterday at noon with the echoing explosion of a rocket and will continue, almost uninterrupted, for eight days and nights.

Almost.

Adventure in 60 Seconds: Last Week in Exploration

By Tetsuhiko Endo

Since the popularization of whitewater rafting and kayaking, the North Fork of the Payette has become one of North America's premier stretches of whitewater with 15 miles of continuous Class V rapids, including the infamous series of drops known as "Jacob's Ladder." Record rainfall in the region has swelled the river to unprecedented levels over the last two weeks and some of the world's best kayakers have taken the plunge into never before paddled conditions. Check out this video clip of the mayhem at Canoe and Kayak magazine.

Adventure in 60 Seconds: Last Week in Exploration

By Tetsuhiko Endo

The villagers of a small mountain town in Peru, called Licapa, are hoping that they can save their home and reverse the loss of Andean glaciers, reports the BBC. The plan is to simply whitewash large sections of rocky peaks that used to contain important, water-giving glaciers that sustained the water needs of mountain towns all over the Andes before global warming made them disappear. In theory, the white will reflect solar energy instead of absorbing it thereby cooling the area in question and creating a cold microclimate that will be conducive to glacier growth. The plan is the brain child of the 55-year-old Peruvian inventor, Eduardo Gold, and despite having detractors, has received a $200,000 grant from the World Bank.

Adventure in 60 Seconds: This Week in Exploration

Text by Tetsuhiko Endo
 
Here at Adventure, we have the tendency to focus our climbing expedition coverage on the largest and most dangerous mountains. In doing so, it is easy to forget that, besides Everest and K2, there are 13 other 8,000-meter peaks that can often be just as challenging to climb.

The Polish team of Artur Hajzer and Robert Szymczack kicked off the summer Pakistan climbing season this week with the summit of just such a mountain, Nanga Parbat. At 8,126 meters, the ninth highest peak in the world, whose name translates to the "Naked Mountain" in Hindi/Urdu has one of the richest climbing histories of all the 8,000ers. 

Adventure in 60 Seconds: Last Week in Exploration

By Tetsuhiko Endo

It's been a slow season in the Karakoram, reports Explorersweb.com. With only 25 climbing permits sold  for the entire region, we are going skip the usual climbing news this week, and look to other backdrops for our adventure fix.

It was not a good week to be a sailor. A few weeks ago, we reported on the launch of the "Bounty Boat" -- a group of men lead by Captain Dan McIntyre who are trying to recreate the journey of William Bligh, the poor guy who was mutinied against in the famous story of Fletcher Christian. Apparently McIntyre takes recreating very seriously. He is copying Bligh's journey down to the rations that Bligh and his men ate. In the last week alone the men have suffered a knockdown and a decrease in their rations, which, according to their blog, they heartily disliked to begin with. Check out all the grousing, complaining, arguing, and occasionally mutinous thought on their blog.

Adventure in 60 Seconds: This Week in Exploration

Text by Tetsuhiko Endo

At the NG Adventure Blog, our reporting often focuses on adventurers of leisure--people who test themselves against Mother Nature in dogged adherence to the George Mallory school of philosophy: "Because it's there." Risk and reward for these modern thrill-seekers is high, but measured on a mostly personal scale. However, there is another class of adventurer for whom the stakes are often higher, the odds longer, and the prestige much less. These are the vocational adventurers, people who tempt fate every time they punch the clock.

Among this intrepid, yet under appreciated crew are crab fishermen, war correspondents, emergency aid workers, and most pertinently, the people who are currently trying to fix what could turn out to be the worst ecological disaster of our time, the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. A few days ago, BP engineers lowered a cap onto the underwater oil leak that is designed to divert the flow of some of the crude to tankers sitting on the surface, roughly a mile overhead, reports the BBC.

Adventure in 60 Seconds: This Week in Exploration

By Tetsuhiko Endo

And just like that, it's over. The circus has left the Himalaya and the only evidence that an army of international climbers spent all spring scrambling up and down its forbidding peaks are a few optimistic stragglers and the perennial accumulation of garbage on Mount Everest. As is usually the case, most of the season came down to a weather window that lasted a few precious days and saw 447 people reach the highest point in the world, according to everestnews.com. The summitting started with a trickle last Saturday morning and turned into a torrent, which didn't let up until Wednesday. Explorersweb trained in unflinching eye on four wild days of route congestion, speed climbing attempts, frostbite, disabled climbers, successful rescues, failed rescues, oxygen tank theft, and summit after summit after summit. Of 447 inspiring stories that came out of this past week, two rise above the rest:

Adventure in 60 Seconds: This Week in Exploration

"Come hither! come hither! my little daughtèr,
And do not tremble so;
For I can weather the roughest gale
That ever wind did blow."

Those words were written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1842, and although they were inspired by a storm off the East Coast of the United States in 1839, they sum up perfectly the situation in the Himalaya for the last two weeks. Climbers are hunkered in high camps on Makalu, Dhaulagiri, Everest, and a host of other mountains waiting for the wind to ease. Three Chinese climbers who chose to brave the gales lost their lives on Dhauligiri, while their companions were saved by the brave efforts of Fishtail Air and Air Zermatt. As this goes live, explorersweb reports that the winds are scheduled to drop on the 21st, opening the window to a tidal wave of summits, especially on Everest. But it won't necessarily be smooth sailing next week. The seasonal monsoons, which bring an end to the Everest climbing season every year, look to be making an early appearance, perhaps as soon as the 27th. If this is the case, summitting is going to come down to the buzzer.—By Tetsuhiko Endo

No More "Youngest" World Records in Sailing -- Is There Such a Thing "Too Young" in Adventure?

It is expected that Australian Jessica Watson, 16, will complete her successful solo, non-stop, unsupported  circumnavigation of the globe on Saturday. Over the past year, we have seen a dizzying number of teens attempt to bump each other out of the record for youngest solo, non-stop, unsupported circumnavigation. And though Watson will technically be the youngest person to pull off this feat, some suggest that her route was not long enough to make if officially qualify. Regardless, the title of "youngest" in sailing has become moot: The World Sailing Speed Record Council and other record-keeping organizations stopped recognizing "youngest" pursuits recently because they've become so controversial.