TransRockies Runners Trade Intense Elevations for Incredible Views

On Tuesday, 70 two-person teams took off into the Colorado Rockies for the six-day, 112-mile GORE-TEX TransRockies Run. Runners from 11 countries will journey from Buena Vista to Beaver Creek, through the heart of the White River and San Isabel National Forests. The course includes a mix of single-track and forest road with nearly 25,000 feet of elevation gain, reaching altitudes of over 12,500 feet. The runners—including elite ultraunners such as Anita Ortiz and Erik Skaggs and Olympic trialist Max King—will eat and live together in a unique tent village as they make their way through the spectacular scenery.

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Field FAQs with Holly Morris Hiking Your Way to a Better Relationship

Holly Morris is a TV host (Treks in a Wild World, Globe Trekker), and the author of Adventure Divas. Post your travel questions here and they could get answered in the magazine.

Illustration by Tim Marrs

Q: My husband and I are avid climbers—only he sprints, and I meander. Minor bickering aside, this is fine for day trips, but we’re headed up Kilimanjaro soon, and I’m worried about our teamwork. Advice?

A. Dasher vs. Dawdler: a classic backcountry matchup. Trying to change each other will only lead to couples therapy, so I’ll spare you (and your insurance company) the expense by dispensing a trite but true adage: Walk a mile in each other’s crampons. In short, empathize and compromise—or quit climbing in tandem.

Dashers often miss that rare moustached green tinkerbird or vivid lichen hiding in plain sight. And Dawdlers—including myself—risk finding themselves huddled in a snow cave at sundown, a thousand feet shy of the summit. “You have to realize that time is limited and that, for safety’s sake, you need to be as efficient as possible,” says top American alpinist and 25-year Mount Rainier guide Ed Viesturs. “Meandering is fine while hiking, but in the mountains speed is safety.” Without guides like Viesturs rushing us across treacherous glaciers before the sun makes them slick or up slab routes to avoid rockfall dislodged by climbers above, we’d never get through unscathed, much less experience magnificent peaks. Then again, my dash up a big mountain in the Himalaya to view the five sacred peaks of Kanchenjunga was rewarded with cold, wet fog on the summit that, Murphy’s Law, cleared on our descent. Sprint and meander, then, as the situation requires. Just remember that on Kilimanjaro, as in life, the important thing is the journey—and a healthy relationship.

Headliners: Adventure in 60 Seconds

A roundup of the latest adventure news, by Mindy Zacharjasz

Polar road trip, check! Two young Brits docked in Sydney after a 26,000 miles sled, sail, and cycle from the geomagnetic North Pole to the magnetic South Pole. The 395-day journey was chock full of drama--a fall through the ice, king-sized storms, and a capsized boat--all shared via video on their very nifty website.

Six lost climbers, rescued from New Zealand’s Mount Cook, also had an Australian homecoming. Finally, some good news after the K2 disaster.

Italy is home for the TransRockies challenge winners, Marzio Deho and Johnny Cattaneo, who biked 600 kilometers and 12,000 vertical meters, beating out the next duo by an impressive 25 minutes.

Cracking hot rocks may be the new energy solution--at least now that it’s got a $10.25 million pick-me-up courtesy of Google. The technology, Enhanced Geothermal Systems, can tap into potential all over the US, while traditional geothermal requires naturally occurring pockets or hot air or water. And Connecticut has come up with its own alternative energy coupon: Free solar panel installation.

But who need alternative energy when you have really, really fast legs? Yep, Usain Bolt runs just about as fast (23 mph) as that snazzy electric car. Even if he doesn’t stand a chance against newer models or the 200 mph English bio-ethanol racer debuting this week, it seems he can still give fuel a literal run for the money.

The Adventure Life with Steve Casimiro Dam Breaks, Floods Near Grand Canyon

Text and photos by West Coast Editor Steve Casimiro

Havasupai Canyon, location of the stunning waterfall on the cover of the June/July issue of ADVENTURE, flash-flooded yesterday after heavy rains swept across northern Arizona and a small earthen dam burst upstream from the village of Supai. No injuries were reported, but nearly 300 visitors got heli-evacuated from the narrow tributary of the Grand Canyon.

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The Adventure Life with Steve Casimiro Gear Review: Tissot T-Touch Expert Watch

Text by West Coast Editor Steve Casimiro

Photograph by Joshua Scott

Reviewed: Tissot T-Touch Expert, $1,095

For a while it seemed as though anyone with an adventurous streak was doomed to an eternity of wrist-top robots—watches that looked more like PDAs than the sleek timepieces so coveted in the corporate world. But thankfully that trend has started to reverse. One of my favorite ringleaders is Tissot, whose watches employ a clever touch-screen system to bypass the usual barrage of buttons. Take the company’s latest creation, the T-Touch Expert. On the surface, it looks like any other bit of boardroom bling: crystal face, titanium bracelet, minimal flair. Start tapping around, though, and you’ll pull up a virtual farmer’s almanac. That’s because the face is radially sliced into six invisible sections (picture a pizza), plus one in the center, with hidden, heat-sensitive electrodes in each. Say you want to check the weather. Push the “T” button to activate touch mode, then press the face where noon should be, and bingo, up comes the forecasted atmospheric pressure. Disoriented? Tap the bottom of the face and the minute hand will swing to true north. Display time could be longer—after 15 to 30 seconds the Expert reverts to its timekeeping duties—but it’s enough for a good look. Other features include altimeter, thermometer, and chronograph. And, oh yeah, one last perk: zero envy for the suit-and-tie club.

With Stone Age Graveyard Discovery in "Green Sahara," the Age of Exploration Continues

Paul Sereno knows his way around dirt: the National Geographic explorer-in-residence has unearthed dinosaurs on five continents over the past 20 years. Today, National Geographic announced his latest discovery.

While looking for dinosaur bones in Sahara in northern Niger, Sereno's team stumbled across a Stone Age graveyard dating back to a time when the desert was green (read the news story from National Geographic News and the feature story in the September issue of Natinal Geographic). The findings include at least 200 human burials from two distinct time periods, as well as bones belonging to fish, hippos, and crocodiles that once inhabited a long-vanished lake. If Sereno's previous in-country finds—such as the 500-toothed plant-eating Nigersaurus and the "SuperCoc" Sarcosuchus—weren't enough, this one is a great reminder to us all that the Age of Exploration is far from over.

Below, we've included an excerpt from our premiere issue to gain a bit of insight into Sereno's thoughts on adventure and why exploration is still relevant today.

From National Geographic ADVENTURE, Spring 1999, "Explorers For the Millenium," Text by Paul Scott

There’s an idea alive in the land that the Age of Exploration is over: Just glance at the globe! All the blank spots have been mapped! Take a bow, Exploration—and get off the stage. To which we say: Hogwash. Yes—the world has been topo’d off, by all manner of surveyors and satellites. And as the youngest progeny of the National Geographic Society, which has supported groundbreaking, map-filling exploration since 1888, we’re thrilled at all the success our efforts (among others) have wrought.

But here’s the thing: The NGS has a much broader definition of “exploration” than the simplistic “finding new places,” and so do we—and that’s where the been-there/done-that millennial ennui peddlers are indulging in Magoo-like myopia.

Explorers at the millennium just need to be more creative. They need to redefine the nature of exploration itself, casting it, for instance, not as a straightforward search for unknown landscape, but as an emergency investigation of the disappearing species and cultures that live upon it. As a dig for the bones of undiscovered dinosaurs below it. As a slightly quixotic quest for the precise height of the world’s tallest mountains. As a treacherous slog through deep, unmapped, toxic-fume-filled caverns. As an inventory of the world at the bottom of the ocean.

To prove our point, we’ve chosen to spotlight seven explorers who have had the creative vision and the audacious curiosity to be unstymied by the notion that it’s all been done. And because of the human inclination to worship at the altar of First, these explorers, who tend to pursue subtler objectives, understand the need to cultivate their own celebrity, to build a buzz, just to avoid becoming trees falling in the silent (denuded) forest. We applaud them for that. And we’re happy to help.

Paul Sereno: Dinosaur-bone digger; University of Chicago paleontologist; theorist on the evolution of dinosaurs

“Adventure for me means seeking to reveal the unknown and experiencing the trials and tribulations of getting to remote areas and coming."

Sereno won a National Geographic Society grant in 1984 that helped fund an eight-month, round-the-world journey to photograph and study previously unseen dinosaur fossils, arranging them in an evolutionary family tree. In 1988 and 1991, he undertook digs in Argentina to learn how dinosaurs came to dominate. In Niger he unearthed a previously unknown species, which he named Afrovenator. Sereno is single-minded in his pursuit of discovery. He once moved six tons of 100-million-year-old bones across the Sahara despite armed guards, death threats to foreigners, and political instability. “You go into town,” he says, “and you say, ‘Look, we have to move something heavy.’ You don’t isolate yourself. That, and you learn French.”

Read about six more explorers >>

Plus: Enter to win a trip to this year's Adventurer of the Year Awards at the National Geograhic Headquarters. Enter now >>

Deep Survival with Laurence Gonzales How Hypersensitivity Can Save Your Life

Text by Contributing Editor Laurence Gonzales, author of the books Everyday Survival and Deep Survival

Illustration by Arthur E. Giron

When Peggy Orenstein, a best-selling author, was told that she had breast cancer, she remarked with odd detachment how curious it was that the colors all drained out of her world. She noticed “how the colors in my home office . . . went flat. Isn’t that odd, I thought, looking down at my newly alien torso. My red shirt has turned gray. My red shirt has turned gray, and I might die.”

In emergencies, under extreme stress, it is common for sensory perceptions to change. How we perceive the world—and what good those perceptions do us—are partly a matter of our emotional state. A few years ago I talked to a woman named Jana who had been on vacation in Mexico with her husband, sister, and brother-in-law. One night they all went skinny-dipping in the bay behind the resort. A bit tipsy, they splashed and cavorted and laughed. Then an eight-foot crocodile surfaced behind Jana, and her senses immediately went into a new and unfamiliar mode.

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Haruki Murakami on Running—Better for the Nylon-Shorts Set Than Tweed Brigade

Review by Andrew Burmon

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Knopf), by Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami’s sentences have always ticked forward with the confident beat of footfalls. Even his most surreal daydreams unfurl with pace and deliberation.

In his latest book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, a collection of essays on his decades-long career as an amateur marathoner and triathlete, Murakami briefly explores the connection between his runner’s discipline and his writerly reserve. “Writing novels, to me, is basically a kind of manual labor,” he writes in an essay entitled “Most of What I Know About Writing Fiction I Learned From Running Every Day.” The rhythm behind Murakami’s sentences, he reveals, is the echo of his shoes hitting pavement.

But What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is a surprising book. It is not, as would be reasonably expected, an accomplished writer’s victory lap. On the contrary, the book is a slow and thorough tribute to the joy of exhaustion. The reader comes to know Murakami’s knees better than Murakami himself, which is to say that the book is geared more toward the nylon-shorts set than toward the tweed brigade.
       
The problem created by Murakami’s decision to write a book about himself as a runner rather than himself as a writer is that he is a much more accomplished writer than he is a runner.

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Olympics 2008: Why Pentathletes Are the Most Beautiful

Text by Kelly Ruane

With the Olympics starting up today (watch the opening ceremonies tonight at 7:30 p.m. EST on NBC), no doubt most of us are eagerly awaiting the primetime crowd pleasers—gymnastics, swimming, running, beach volleyball. But this year, it's possible to follow any number of more obscure sports, as well, on NBCOlympics.com. The newly launched site allows users to stream events on their computers, including many that don't score much of the limelight, like the modern pentathlon. And if there's one event that Olympics fans likely haven't heard of but should, this is it.

The pentathlon is a rigorous daylong event deemed a “true Olympic sport” by the International Olympic Committee. First introduced to the games in 1912, it hails from the archaic period of Ancient Greece, when muscle-bound warriors would compete in five events—running, jumping, spear throwing, discus, and wrestling. Baron Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the International Olympic Committee, once said the Pentathlon “tested a man’s moral qualities as much as his physical resources and skills, producing thereby the ideal complete athlete.”

Back in 708 B.C. when the event was introduced to the Ancient Games in Olympia (and around the same time the Chinese were inventing gunpowder), the champion of the pentathlon was declared victor ludorum, Latin for “winner of the games.” The event was considered the climax of the games, and Aristotle claimed that “a body capable of enduring all efforts, either of the racecourse or of bodily strength . . . this is why the athletes in the Pentathlon are most beautiful.”

In today’s games, the event includes shooting, fencing, swimming, horseback riding, and running. To see who will compete for the U.S. go to pentathlon.teamusa.org and watch the event on August 21 and 22.

To keep track of who’s in the lead check out the easy-to-read medal count at http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/beijing/medals.

More Olympics News:
Yahoo.com: China strides onto Olympic stage

Reuters: Heat and the Great Wall await cyclists

Yahoo: Air pollution shrouds Beijing on eve of Olympics

Yahoo: Morgan Hamm out of Olympics with ankle injury

Sports Illustrated: Chinese Islamic extremist group posts video threatening Games

NBColympics.com: The Opening Ceremony: How it works

The Adventure Life with Steve CasimiroSpecial Report: The Greatest Gear Show on Earth

Text and photos by West Coast Editor Steve Casimiro

SALT LAKE CITY: The outdoor industry has descended on this lovely little desert town for the gearfest/trade show known as Outdoor Retailer Summer Market and that means it’s impossible to get a table at the Red Iguana, one of the best Mexican restaurants north of the Rio Grande. The show hasn’t
even started yet and so I thought I could sneak in a lunchtime plate of mole negro at the lizard, but no—25 people were waiting outside in the Utah sun for a table. That’s the bad news, I guess. The good news is that with 17,000 attendees and more than a thousand exhibitors, there’s more Gore-Tex, Vibram, and Cordura here than you could wear in a lifetime—it’s a gear geek’s dream.

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