When we launched the concept of Operation Denali, summiting the mountain was intended to be the culmination of our journey of recovery. Instead, it has opened doors everywhere and reached an audience far greater than we ever expected. The recognition given by National Geographic Adventure and those of you who love the spirit of adventure have had a hand in that. The combined effect of this broad community of interest and support has spread the word and brought inspiration and motivation to many of our Wounded Warriors, which was the main goal of the climb. For that you have my thanks!
For me, it’s about being part of a team that is the Adventurers of the Year. A whole group of people made a huge effort toward this project—people from University of California, San Diego, local Mongolians, the Mongolian Academy of Science. This project has made me realize that anything in the world is possible, as long as you have the support of your friends. That makes all the difference in the world. And that’s taken to a larger scale now that the readers of National Geographic Adventure have offered their support. They definitely nominated everyone who has been involved, not just me.
Turning my education in engineering into one of the greatest adventures of my life has been a huge journey. The idea to search for the tomb of Genghis Khan occurred to me while backpacking with friends in Mongolia. I came back dreaming of doing something outrageous, something that everyone thought was impossible. But to continue to work on it. To have your friends believe in it. To have your family believe in it. And to have your colleagues believe in it. It really makes me believe anyone can do anything.
Our long-term goal is to set up some protection mechanism to preserve the cultural heritage of Mongolia, which has had a huge impact on the rest of the world. The Mongols basically created a lot of what we know of as our modern history. Genghis Khan was one man with a dream. He was the rejected son of a nomadic family who was left to die in the woods. He rose to power, uniting all his people, and then turned outward and basically built an empire larger than Napoleon and Alexander the Great combined. And that story really hasn’t been told completely. It’s been looked at from different perspectives, but the greatness of his achievements, in a lot of ways, is underestimated. That is a major goal of this project: To share the true history of the foundation of our own cultural past. It will be a long process, but we are hoping, with the support of the public and people of Mongolia, we can to help preserve their cultural heritage.
Last November we introduced you to the 2009 Adventurers of the Year, recognized for their extraordinary achievements in exploration, conservation, actions sports, and humanitarian work.
Their accomplishments ranged from the longest BASE jump ever to educating 10,000 women and girls in war-torn Afghanistan to rocketing 350 miles above the Earth to save a telescope. Then, for our first ever Readers’ Choice Adventurer of the Year Award, we asked you to vote for the person you felt best embodied the spirit of adventure. (See the entire Best of Adventure feature here.)
Today,
with nearly 20,000 votes cast, we are thrilled to announce a tie. Both
winners are equally impressive, but in entirely different ways.
Explorer-engineer Albert Yu-Min Lin organized a high-risk
expedition into Mongolia’s “Forbidden Zone” to search for the lost
tomb of Genghis Khan using state-of-the-art mapping technology. Wounded Iraq
war veteran Marc Hoffmeister led a team of soldiers,
many missing limbs, up the dangerous West Buttress route on Denali.
When we delivered the news to each winner, both assured us of one
thing: They could not have done it alone—and their adventures continue.
We have been huge fans of snowboarder Gretchen Bleiler for a while now—so much so that we made her one of our Adventurers of the Year in 2008 for her decision to take a year to snowboard in the backcountry (watch a video of her in action). During yesterday's Olympic halfpipe competition, Bleiler nailed her signature trick, the Cripler 720, but then crashed. While expected to add another medal to the Silver she won in Torino, Bleiler finished in 11th place. But she took it in stride: "It's crazy, the Olympics. It's two runs of finals. And you work so hard for it," said Bleiler, who won silver in the halfpipe at the 2006 Winter Games. "But sometimes it just isn't your turn." (Read more in this Denver Post article.)
Last summer, Bleiler stopped by our office to talk about her new Oakley ski and snowboarding apparel line, her upcoming wedding in Costa Rica, and her hopes for the Games. Read the interview here.
American alpine skier Ted Ligety will compete this week, weather permitting, in Vancouver. See the schedule. See our Beyond the Olympics feature for training tips, ski trips, gear, and more.
Text by Christian Camerota; Photo courtesy of Shred Optics
The lives of an entrepreneur and a ski racer seem diametrically opposed. That is, until you meet Ted Ligety. Ligety is not normal, of course. Far from it. How else do you explain a compulsion to fearlessly hurtle yourself down a 45-degree-angled, skating-rink slick mountain of ice at 70+mph? But that’s what Ligety has chosen as his career, at least for the time being. And he’s not shy about professing his love for the perks of his job.
“Sometimes you feel like there’s other stuff you’d wanna do,” Ligety admits when asked if he ever feels like he’s missed out on anything. “But at the same time, like, being a ski racer is a pretty kick ass job, you know?” He laughs freely at the thought. “You get to go all over the world and you get to ski…I mean, I wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t love it as much as I do…my college friends are talking about fun college stories and I’m like, ‘Okay, well, I’m off in Europe right now winning races.’”
In the ’70s and ’80s, Rick Ridgeway was on a tear: He became one of the first Americans to summit K2, joined the second U.S. expedition to conquer Everest, and dragged a 250-pound handcart across a Tibetan plateau. But perhaps his most outlandish idea was to climb Mount Kilimanjaro . . . and keep walking all the way to the Indian Ocean. In 1997 he did just that, publishing an account of his journey, The Shadow of Kilimanjaro. Since Ridgeway’s feat—which included the first west-east crossing of 11,000-square-mile Tsavo West and East National Parks—Tropical Ice Limited has been retracing portions of his 300-mile route. Now owner Iain Allan, who served as Ridgeway’s original guide, will organize the first full trek from mountain to sea.
If Betty Ford treated wanderlust, actor Ewan McGregor would be the first admitted. The 38-year-old gets his travel fix by working on multiple movies (coming up: Amelia—opens this Friday, Oct 23—and The Men Who Stare at Goats), then taking off for extended motorcycle tours across Africa and around the globe. For our annual travel issue, we asked the actor to share his hard-won wisdom. All of it, by the way, applicable to non-movie stars. —Ryan Bradley; photograph by Ron Gaunt/Getty Images
Go Far Out I’d never considered traveling to out-of-the-way spots before I visited Churchill, Canada, to make a documentary about polar bears. Then I was hooked.
If you've been watching Ken Burns's The National Parks: America's Best Idea series this week on PBS, you've probably already started dreaming of your next escape. The first episode, which aired on Sunday night, captured the grandeur of Yosemite and Yellowstone enough to make anyone want to find their inner John Muir and head out West.
Just makes sure you do it right and far from the crowds with these unexpected adventure trips. Then get more game plan ideas from Editor at Large Robert Earle Howells'snational parks feature story and photo gallery. Or read an essay by Ken Burns about his love for the national parks.
Imagine a chance to travel all over the world with your best bud and share a million dollars—if you can handle the obstacles that true adventure travel throws at you. Well that’s The Amazing Race, which pits teams of two against each other as they race around the globe for the pot of gold at the finish line. With the premiere of season 15 at 8 pm EST on CBS, we wondered, what does it mean to win the race? ADVENTURE caught up with season three winner Zach Behr in New York. Behr, now a supervising producer on MTV’s Made, explains what you do when you win half a million dollars, the importance of experiencing local color, and the simple pleasure of eating Vietnamese chicken satay from a street cart.
So you won The Amazing Race and split a million dollars with your partner, Florinka Pesenti, a friend from your days at Vassar College. What'd you do with the money?
I took a chunk of it with my then girlfriend, now wife, and went to Costa Rica for ten days and traveled around.
Though a recent expedition failed to find legendary polar explorer Roald Amundsen's lost plane, another relic of Amundsen's life recently re-surfaced—a letter Amundsen wrote soon after he became the first man ever to reach the South Pole in 1912. A Tasmanian yacht club discovered Amundsen's letter of acceptance to an honorary membership to the Derwent Sailing Squadron behind a filing cabinet, where it had been lost for years.
"Allow me to convey my very best thanks for the honour you have done me in electing me as an honorary member of the Derwent Sailing Squadron," Amundsen wrote in the letter. He was offered the membership while he stayed in Hobart, where local's discovered his identity after he telegraphed the news of the success of his Antarctic expedition to King Haakon of Norway.
The historic letter has been donated to the Tasmania Maritime Museum.
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