Elephant Ivory Project: Explorers Begin Jungle Motorcycle Trek to Collect Elephant Dung—and Confront Enraged Poacher

By Trip Jennings and Kyle Dickman; Photographs courtesy Kyle Dickman, Skip Brown, and Terese Hart

We just arrived this morning and I already want to leave Kisangani, a city of 700,000 in the center of Congo’s jungle. A cholera outbreak started in the city last week and left 27 dead—200 more cases have been reported. Andy and I are with Terese and John Hart, conservationists who have been working in the DRC for 30 years. They’ve agreed to help us plan our mission. But the question of where to start sampling elephant dung isn’t simple. The region Dr. Wasser wants us to sample most, the proposed Lomami National Park in the 25,000 square mile jungle known as TL2, has become even more dangerous.

The Harts, who have been a driving force behind the creation of Lomani National Park, had just received a letter from the one of their TL2-based supporters. It warned them of a man who is calling himself Moses and planting burning crosses—death threats—in the front yards of people who support the creation of Lomami National Park. President Kabila is expected to approve the park this year. That declaration could crack down on poachers operating in the region, which is why Moses opposes any additional protections to TL2.

"There’s so much conflict in the country that we don't know how many elephants are left in some of DRC’s biggest protected areas," says Dr. Samuel Wasser, the director of the Center for Conservation Biology. “One thing we do know is African elephant numbers are dropping, and a lot of ivory is coming from the Congo.” Samples from TL2 will help Wasser locate and stop poachers operating around the country.

So we’re going in. The expedition is far and away the most complicated of my life. I’ve never needed a military escort.


Officials burning a poacher's camp

Everest 2011: Flight of the Climbers - Dave Hahn Guides a Father-Daughter Duo on Everest Attempt

Bill and Sara McGahan and Jeff Martin walking out of Lukla to begin the ten-day trek to Everest Base Camp

Photographs and text by Dave Hahn, a guide for RMI Expeditions and First Ascent. In May 2010 Hahn reached the summit of Mount Everest for the 12th time, the most of any a non-Sherpa climber. This time, he is leading a Bill McGahan and his 16-year-old daughter, Sara, on a bid for the summit. Follow the team's Everest expedition in dispatches here. 
 
Dispatch 1: Kathmandu

My little team began to combine in Kathmandu yesterday afternoon. Jeff Martin, my boss at RMI Expeditions, met my flight into hot and dusty K-Du at around one o'clock. Jeff has already been over here for nearly a week, chasing down logistical details and getting all the arrangements made. My climbers, Bill and his 16-yea-old daughter Sara McGahan, beat me into town by about an hour, having flown East out of Atlanta, while I circled West from Taos. Long, long flights no matter how you slice it ... a passel of time zones and bad airplane food. I had time for a quick shower back at the hotel before Jeff and I taxied our way over to the Ministry of Tourism. I scribbled my name a half-dozen times and shook a bunch of official hands ... swallowed the obligatory cup of sweet tea and, voile!! We walked out with an all-important Everest climbing permit.

We retreated to the hotel to join Bill and Sara for dinner. Despite the fun reunion, we got yawning and fading fast ... hopelessly jet-lagged we stumbled off to our rooms. Linden Mallory is already up in Everest's Khumbu icefalls--we'll get together with him about a week into our trek. Mark Tucker will join us at about the same time to complete the team. But for now it is just the four of us, which made today pretty easy when it came to a final gear check and and packing session.

We enjoyed an interview and conversation with Bili Bierling who is helping the legendary Elizabeth Hawley with the monumental task of keeping track of climber statistics in the Nepal Himalaya. Then we each made a few forays out into the streets to track down odds and ends—our version of sightseeing at this busy point in the expedition. We need to be ready to fly good and early tomorrow morning, up from 4,000 feet in Kathmandu to 9,200 feet in Lukla before the air gets cloudy and turbulent. My alarm is set for 4:15 a.m. and my bags are packed once again... with luck we'll be walking in mountains by mid-morning.


Everest appears behind Bill McGahan and his daughter 16-year-old daugher Sara

Australia Adventure Guide: The Gold Coast's Surfing, Hiking, and Creeping "Fellas"

A longboarder in Queensland along Australia's Gold Coast; Photograph by Ben Moon/Aurora Photos. See more Australia photos

By Tetsuhiko Endo

When Australia appears in the news, chances are you are seeing Queensland. Cyclones, crocodiles, floods, and an encyclopedic list of venomous creatures make it an easy place to deride. But a place with this many hazards is also a place that remains fundamentally untamed and the rewards it holds for the savvy adventure traveler are second to none.

I’ve come to the Gold Coast, the Southeast corner of Queensland, to try to pack as much excitement into one week as I can, and have not been disappointed. I begin my stay at the Swell Resort in Burleigh Heads —a complex of holiday apartments that come with all the comforts of hotel rooms (towels linens, soap), but also include full kitchens, living areas, and central air conditioners that can conquer even the balmiest sub-tropical days.

From this base, I spend a few days surfing from Burleigh’s eponymous headland, the cradle of modern Australian professional surfing, to Snapper Rocks, one of the world’s most prized high performance waves, to Byron Bay, the hippy enclave that thumbs its nose at any hint of commercialism. Though not as teeming with venomous beasties as the coast farther north, certain winds and currents will sweep pseudo jelly-fish called Blue Bottles into the waters of the Gold Coast. Their stings aren’t dangerous, but they are painful enough that I complain to a fellow surfer.

“Awe, they’re not that bad, mate.” He responds. “Just make sure you avoid the Purple People Eaters. Those fellas really hurt.”

World Water Day: How Long Can You Last Without Water?

National Geographic Explorer David de Rothschild pictured aboard the Plastiki, a boat made of post-consumer plastic bottles which embarked on a voyage from San Francisco to Sydney one year ago yesterday. The expedition made de Rothschild one of our 2010 Adventurers of the Year.

Op-ed by David de Rothschild; Photograph courtesy of Adventure Ecology 

If you type the phrase "how long can you last without" into Google, given the thousands of preemptive suggestions to fire back to complete the phrase, it might surprise you that "water" is the first word to bubble up and claim top spot. Scan the first few pages of the 159,000,000 search results and you’re presented with a collection of near identical survival websites focused on tips needed to keep your personal water tank from dipping dipping into the red.

But amid all the reams of cut-and-paste references, one particular tip caught my eye. It was a sentence that could easily win the award for most obvious statement of 2011: "The best method to survive without water is not to be placed in that situation in the first place."

Elephant Ivory Project: Young Explorers in DRC Continue Quest to Stop Elephant Poachers

By Kyle Dickman and Trip Jennings; Photographs by Andy Maser

It's been a fortunate few days. We arrived in Kinshasa on Monday exhausted from 36 hours of transit and found the Congo just as hot as we left it two years ago. On Tuesday morning, we met with Dr. Teresa Hart, a 30-year veteran of conservation in the DRC. Teresa first came to the country as a Peace Corp volunteer in 1974. She’s now in her tenth year studying bonobos, an ape found only in the DRC, in a 25,000-square mile block of forest known as TL2. The region's an elephant sanctuary on paper but animals are disappearing there faster than ever.

The Future of Exploration: An Interview With Explorers Club President Lorie Karnath

In just a few days, an expected 1,000 explorers from around the world will arrive in New York City to attend Saturday's Explorers Club Annual Dinner, the Academy Awards of exploration. Now in her third term as president of the club, Lorie Karnath (pictured) took a break from preparations to discuss exploration with a purpose, the importance of challenging conventional thought, and how technology is changing the game … oh, and the end of the world.—Mary Anne Potts

Adventure: First, Japan. The news just continues to worsen. What role do explorers play in these kinds of world events?
Lorie Karnath: Field research and data collection being done by explorers and scientists may aid in better understanding why and where earthquakes occur, and why they are often followed by tsunamis. The work being done in the field today will hopefully help to better prepare and prevent such disasters as the ones we have just witnessed in Japan.

This year’s dinner theme is the Maya prophecy, which some interpret as predicting the end of the world in 2012. Though the world seems especially chaotic right now, why did you pick this theme?
It’s actually not so much about the Maya prophecy, but about prophecies in general, and how explorers throughout the centuries have not only had to deal with the challenges of exploration, but, on top of that, they have had to deal with going against accepted bodies of thought.

We all know about 2012, but what are some of the other prophecies?
Over and over explorers have had to challenge very erudite groups. For example, think about how long it took scientists to decide that the Earth was not the center of the universe. There were times when there was prophecy that the world was flat and that people were going to fall off the edge of it. And yet explorers still jumped in ships and discovered it was round. Explorers were told if they climbed the highest mountain they would be annihilated by radioactive rays … and on and on.

But each time, explorers were not only willing to go through the hardship that goes along with exploration, they were able to think outside the box and go against the status quo. So part of our role as explorers is not just discovery, but it’s also separating science from fiction.

Survival Guide: Signs of a Tsunami, a National Geographic Expert Weighs In

Photograph of Beverly Goodman by Howie Goodman

Editor's Note: In light of the devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan and possible future events along the Pacific Coasts, we're sharing some recently published tips from Adventure on how to survive a tsunami. Read more tips in our Survival Guide.

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How to Survive a Tsunami
By Damon Tabor, originally published in the August/September 2009 editon of Adventure

“One of the troubles with tsunamis is that they aren’t regular enough,” says geoarchaeologist and National Geographic Emerging Explorer Beverly Goodman. “You don’t want to scare everyone, but it’s not fantasy, either. Anytime you’ve got a combination of water and tectonics, there’s a potential. It has happened and will happen again.”

If you live near the coast, use Google Earth to determine your home’s sea level height and distance from shore. Map out an evacuation route if you live in a danger zone—generally less than 25 feet above sea level and within a mile of shore. Sign up to receive early alert text messages from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s tsunami warning center. Some waves, however, could reach coastal areas faster than the system can react. Keep a grab-and-run kit in a waterproof river guide’s pack, which could help you float.

If you see ocean water dramatically recede, immediately run for high ground (go by foot, since the earthquake that launched the wave could make roads impassable). Head for the nearest tall concrete building, ideally at least ten stories high. If you’re overtaken by waves, swim hard and keep your legs up. Submerged trees, telephone poles, and roofs can drag you underwater. “I just treated it like whitewater kayaking,” says Paul Landgraver, a Thailand-based scuba diving instructor who was carried more than a half mile in four minutes by the surge during the 2004 tsunami in Asia. “I looked for smooth water, avoiding obstacles by swimming left or right as best I could. I tried to float as much as I could on the surface.” As soon as you can, get out of the water. When tsunamis waves recede, they can pull objects miles out to sea.

The Expert: Beverly Goodman, Ph.D. ||| Geoarchaeologist, NG Emerging Explorer

The project: You’d expect 100-foot-tall waves to leave behind a clear path of destruction. You’d be wrong. To identify past events—and predict future ones—Goodman collects the smallest of clues: grains of sand.

“Traditionally, scientists searching for evidence of a past tsunami look for marine deposits on land. But after the chaos of a giant wave, people return home fairly quickly. They rebuild. They clean up. Evidence of the event is erased. So instead of looking on shore, we go underwater. Using an aluminum irrigation pipe connected to a pneumatic hammer, we take core samples from the seafloor. We then identify unusually large layers of deposits—indicating a single, violent event—and analyze the sand grain size to estimate wave height, the magnitude of the event, and when it happened. We feed that information into tsunami databases. Models are only as strong as the data you put into them. The more we know about past tsunamis, the better we can predict coastline risk.”

Explorers Depart For DRC to Fight Elephant Poaching--One Vial of Scat at Time

By Kyle Dickman and Trip Jennings

Today, I'm packing. After two years in the works, we’re kicking off the Elephant Ivory Project in earnest on Sunday morning when Andy Maser and I fly to Kinshasha, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with a case of collection vials and the goal of saving a species. Here’s the back story.

A couple of years ago, I met Dr. Samuel Wasser, the director of the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington and an expert on African elephants, at a meeting for National Geographic Explorers in Seattle, Washington. Wasser has been working on a project for a decade that compares DNA sampled from seized elephant ivory to reference DNA sampled from wild elephant scat in Africa. (Just a reminder: the trade of elephant ivory has been banned internationally since 1989.) With this information, Wasser is able to determine where elephants with a DNA makeup similar to that found in the seized ivory live. Because individual elephants from the same population have many similar genes, and because poachers tend to repeatedly target specific populations, Wasser’s study is a valuable conservation tool. The information allows willing governments and NGOs to direct anti-poaching units to threatened herds, thus stopping the trade before the animals are killed.

Ten Top Women Adventurers For International Women's Day - Who's Your Favorite?

Photograph by Ignacio Delgado

To celebrate International Women's Day today, we decided to look back at ten women adventurers recently featured on National Geographic Adventure. Topping our list is Spanish mountaineer Edurne Pasaban (pictured), who won our People's Choice Adventurer of the Year vote this year. In 2010, she completed a nine-year quest to climb the world's 14 8,000-meter peaks. This March, she will return to Everest to climb it without supplemental oxygen. If she is successful, she will be the first women to climb the 8,000-meter peaks without supplemental oxygen. Good luck, Edurne!

Mountaineer Edurne Pasaban - The Spaniard climbed the world's 14 8,000 meter peaks and won our 2011 People's Choice Adventurer of the Year vote. See the photos and video >>

Circumnavigator Jessica Watson - This Australian solo sailed around the world at just 16 years old, though her wisdom exceeds her age. Read the interview >> 

Rower Roz Savage - Savage has solo rowed across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Now she's attempting the Indian. Read the interview >>

Skier, Eco-Advocate Alison Gannett - This world champion skier now spends a great deal of her time speaking on behalf of the world's melting snow. See her favorite ski spots >> 

Surfer Anastasia Ashley - It's not easy to make your way in the male-dominated world of big-wave surfing. Read the interview >>

Freeskier Jenn Berg - This audacious skier has been featured in the last five Warren Miller movies. Enough said. See her favorite ski spots >>

Snowboarder Gretchen Bleiler - First noted as one of our Adventurers of the Year for her love of backcountry snowboarding, the Olympic silver medalist recently went on a South Africa trip with Oakley to fit perscription glasses on people in need. Read more >>

Musher, Snowkiter Sarah McNair-Landry - This up-and-coming arctic explorer is one of the best mushers and snowkiters we have ever known. Her next expedition will take her kite skiing across the Northwest Passage. Read more >>

Climber Steph Davis - Featured in our Ultimate Adventure Bucket List for her groundbreaking climbs in Yosemite, Steph is constantly surprising us with adventures—including this wingsuit flying video >>

Explorers' Club President Lorie Karnath - Lorie just accepted a second term as the president of the prestigious, male-dominated Explorers' Club. We will have an interview up with her next week. Until then, read her thoughts on space exploration >>

Who is your favorite woman adventurer? Post your comments below!

Adventure Photography: Your Best Skiing and Snowboarding Photos

Today we published a new photo gallery of the best skiing and snowboarding images to be submitted to My Shot, National Geographic's user photography site. This collection of images, which spans the globe, is impressive, including one of our favorites taken by Dmitry Toikka. Not only was the photo taken in the spectacular Kamchatka region of Russia, known as the "Ring of Fire" for its high density of volcanoes (there are 68 active volcanoes), the snowboarder's awesome dog is trailing him down the slope. Looks like a great day to be riding around in volcano country. Enter the gallery >>