George Lowe dies at 89; climber was on Everest expedition with Hillary

FILE - In this Aug. 8, 1953 file photo, Sir Edmund Hillary, left, and his fellow New Zealander George Lowe, are welcomed home to New Zealand following their arrival by air at Auckland. George Lowe, the last surviving climber from the team that made the first successful ascent of Mount Everest, died Wednesday, March 20, 2013. He was 89. (AP Photo, File)

George Lowe dies at 89; climber was on Everest expedition with Hillary

Lowe, a New Zealander like Sir Edmund Hillary, was the last surviving climber from the 1953 expedition.

After Sir Edmund Hillary's historic ascent of Mt. Everest, everyone knew Hillary's name. Far fewer knew about his indispensable partner, George Lowe.

Hillary and his friend Lowe were the only two New Zealanders on the 1953 expedition to the top of the world's highest peak. If they could have had their way, they would have trekked to the summit together, but a number of circumstances, including the politics of giving two non-Brits on a British-led team the prime roles, conspired to leave Lowe among the unsung.

Lowe, the last surviving climber from the team that made the first successful ascent of Mount Everest, died after an illness Wednesday in Ripley, England, his wife, Mary Lowe, told the Associated Press. He was 89.

Hillary and Lowe were almost cut off the team by expedition leader John Hunt. But Hunt reinstated them at the urging of the English climbers, who recognized that the New Zealanders' alpine skills were formidable.

Both Hillary and Lowe led the way through the icefall. But it was Lowe, who wielded an ice ax with legendary skill, who cut the route up the daunting glacial wall known as the Lhotse Face. And it was Lowe who helped cut the steps to the final camp 1,000 feet below the mountain's summit on May 28, 1953.

The next day, Hillary and Tenzing Norgay of Nepal reached the 29,035-foot peak.

When Hillary returned to camp, he met Lowe, walking toward him with soup and emergency oxygen. "Well, George," Hillary recalled saying, "we knocked the bastard off."

Lowe and Hillary "climbed together through life, really," said travel writer Jan Morris, who was part of the Everest expedition as a journalist.

"And when it came to the point near the summit, George had to play a subsidiary role. He climbed very high, he climbed to top camp and said goodbye to Hillary, then helped him come down. He played a very important role."

Hillary often referred to Lowe in his autobiographies as a pillar of strength. "Calm and competent, he rode through the storm like a great ocean liner," Hillary wrote. "With his strong hand on the rope, I knew I couldn't fall far."

Almost 4,000 people have now successfully climbed Everest, according to the Nepal Mountaineering Assn., but that 1953 expedition remains one of the iconic moments of 20th-century adventure.

Morris said she was now the only survivor of the 1953 group.

She said Lowe was "a gentleman in the old sense — very kind, very forceful, thoughtful and also a true adventurer, an unusual combination."

Hillary, who died in 2008, inevitably got much of the media attention — and a knighthood fromQueen Elizabeth II. Mary Lowe said her husband "didn't mind a bit."

"He had a wonderful life," she said. "He did a lot of things, but he was a very modest man.... He never sought the limelight. Ed Hillary didn't seek the limelight either — but he had it thrust upon him."

Born in Hastings, New Zealand, in 1924 and a teacher by training, Lowe began climbing in the country's Southern Alps and met Hillary, another ambitious young climber with whom he forged a lifelong bond.

In 1951, Lowe was part of a New Zealand expedition to the Himalayas, and in 1953 he and Hillary joined the British Everest expedition led by Hunt.

Kari Herbert of Polarworld, which is due to publish Lowe's book "Letters From Everest" later this year, said Lowe's efforts were crucial to the expedition's success.

"He was one of the lead climbers, forging the route up Everest's Lhotse Face without oxygen and later cutting steps for his partners up the summit ridge," she said.

Lowe directed a film of the expedition, "The Conquest of Everest," which received an Academy Award nomination in 1954 for best documentary feature.

He also made "Antarctic Crossing" after participating in the 1955-58 Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, the first successful overland crossing of the continent. It, too, was Oscar-nominated.

Lowe later made expeditions to Greenland, Greece and Ethiopia, taught school in Britain and Chile, lectured on his expeditions and became Her Majesty's Inspector of Schools for England.

He was a founder of the Sir Edmund Hillary Himalayan Trust U.K., a charity set up to support the mountain residents of Nepal.

In addition to his wife, Mary, whom he married in 1980, Lowe is survived by three sons from his first marriage to John Hunt's daughter Susan: Gavin, Bruce and Matthew.

Lowe often said in interviews that he was happy to have played a supporting role in one of the greatest adventures of the 20th century.

"I'm absolutely delighted I didn't have the life that Ed's had," he told the New Zealand Herald in 2008. "Ed was the right one. I would have been a bugger. I wouldn't have had the diplomacy."

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-george-lowe-20130322,0,6335220.story

Bezos expedition retrieves Apollo rocket engines from ocean floor

The F-1 rocket engine is still a modern wonder — one and a half million pounds of thrust, 32 million horsepower, and burning 6,000 pounds of rocket grade kerosene and liquid oxygen every second. On July 16, 1969, the world watched as five particular F-1 engines fired in concert, beginning the historic Apollo 11 mission. Those five F-1s burned for just a few minutes, and then plunged back to Earth into the Atlantic Ocean, just as NASA planned. A few days later, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon.



A recovery team funded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has plucked two rocket engines from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean that were used to send astronauts to the moon more than 40 years ago, he wrote on the project's website on Wednesday.

Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon, last year announced plans to search the sea floor for rocket motors shed during Saturn 5 launches to the moon during the 1969-1972 Apollo program.

Bezos Expeditions found and retrieved two Saturn 5 first-stage engines from three miles beneath the Atlantic Ocean.

"We've seen an underwater wonderland - an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines that tells the story of a fiery and violent end, one that serves testament to the Apollo program," Bezos wrote.

"Each piece we bring on deck conjures for me the thousands of engineers who worked together back then to do what for all time had been thought surely impossible," he added.

NASA sent seven missions to the moon, six of which successfully carried astronauts to the lunar surface. Bezos said because the serial numbers on the retrieved engines are missing or partially missing, identifying which mission they were used for will be difficult.

"We might see more during restoration. The objects themselves are gorgeous," he added.

"This is a historic find and I congratulate the team for its determination and perseverance in the recovery of these important artifacts of our first efforts to send humans beyond Earth orbit," NASA administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement.

The engines, which remain the property of the U.S. government, will be restored and put on public display.

The recovery ship, called Seabed Worker, is due to dock at Port Canaveral, Fla., on Thursday after three weeks at sea.

Bezos also is founder and chief executive of a small privately owned startup space company called Blue Origin, based in Kent, Wash., which is working on developing low-cost, reusable suborbital and orbital spaceships to carry people and experiments.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/21/us-space-apollo-idUSBRE92K00420130321

Travis’ Travels: Swallowed up in the rugged beauty of Smith Rock State Park

A view of Oregon from the Smith Rock State Park

Once I’d had my fill of the Oregon coast, it was time to head inland and visit the Smith Rock State Park, an otherworldly landscape near Bend sharpened by the indolent Crooked River, golden flatlands that stretch to the distance, and sheer crags that jut into a deep blue sky. The land is almost like something out of a J.R.R. Tolkien story, which is fitting, for as I write this post it is the great novelist’s birthday. The land also happens to be a mecca for climbers, and luckily, I was able to get a taste of the sport by tagging along with local climbers Jesper Hilts and Garrett Handke. The following is a gallery of what I found.

The entrance to Smith Rock at sunset

Hilts was cracking jokes all day, and here he is climbing one of the thousands of routes that climbers from all over the world come to enjoy

We headed down a trail along the river to find our next climbing spot. Hilts, in yellow, gave me, in brown, a tour of some of the lesser-known and more difficult climbs in the park.

Hilts climbs, left, with the Crooked River in the distance below; at right Hilts tackles a route called “Kill the Hate,” which is rated 5.13a (hint: it’s insanely difficult), and Handke is below him, belaying.

Behind the scenes of how I captured Hilts with the Crooked River in the background using a GoPro Hero3 on a pole.

Hilts

As we were leaving the park, we looked back and saw someone highlining across two of the tallest towers in the park. I told Hilts I had to try to get up to the highliner to take some shots, so he told me how to get to the top and wished me luck.

When I got to the highliner, he was being buffeted by fiercely cold winds, which got up to 40 miles per hour. At that point, Robbie wisely called it a day.

Self-portrait of me gazing at a place I will not soon forget.

See you on the road!

Utah’s nature-made subway ride

Tickets for Zion Park's subway are hard to come by, but well worth it

While Zion National Park has no train, it does have a subway, and the lottery to visit this subway has just opened up for the year. This cylindrical slot canyon is so popular only 80 permits are issued per day, and a lottery reservation system is enacted between March and November to handle peak demand. Getting to this curvy canyon is no small task. The 9.5-mile round trip hike is strenuous and requires technical skill. But if popularity and beautiful images are anything to go by, the journey is well worth it. Take a ride on nature’s subway below.

While the subway itself is only a quarter of a mile long, getting there is a somewhat difficult 9.5-mile hike round trip. Image by Stephanie

Only 80 permits are issued per day and they can be difficult to get during peak times in spring and summer. Image by Terra Trekking

If you want to bring your friends you’ll have to be selective; groups of more than 12 are not allowed.
Image by Terra Trekking

Getting to the subway does require some route-finding and rappelling, so it’s not for the inexperienced. Image by Terra Trekking

Algae thrive in the low light deep in the subway tunnel, causing the vibrant greens seen in these pools. Image by Mike Henderson

The subway is located between two peaks named North and South Guardian Angels.
Image by CCharmon

As swimming is required in some areas, going in the warmer months is advised.
Image by WikiCommons

Heavy snow melts and spring runoff can flood and shut down the subway, so make sure you check the train schedule before heading out. Image by Jeremiah Roth

Kayaker completes 4,000-mile, nine-month journey

Daniel Alvarez paddles 20 miles per day from Minnesota to the Florida Keys

The plan was to kayak 4,000 miles from the northernmost tip of the lower 48 states in Minnesota to the southernmost point in Key West, Florida, a plan that Outside Magazine called bold, inspired, and slightly reckless.

Daniel Alvarez, 31, from Tallahassee, Florida, has proven himself worthy as a long-distance hiker, having completed the 2,174-mile Appalachian Trail, the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail, and the 3,000-mile Continental Divide Trail.

Now he has proven himself as a long-distance kayaker.

Alvarez completed the nine-month kayak journey on Saturday, paddling into Key West to a cheering crowd.

“When I got to the end [Saturday], there were a ton of people on the beach and they were all cheering me on,” Alvarez wrote in an email to the Duluth News Tribune. He had paddled through Duluth in September. “I felt pretty silly because they thought I’d done it alone, when really I would never have made it close without a hundred different people along the way who helped.”

Not only did he receive help from people along the way, Alvarez got financial help for his trip from Outside Magazine. He won Outside’s inaugural Adventure Grant and $10,000, finding this out a week into the journey.

Traveling in a donated, bright yellow, 17-foot Necky kayak—“I wanted to give the huge barges on the Mississippi the best chance of seeing me,” he told Outside—Alvarez paddled about 20 miles a day from Northwest Angle in Minnesota, through the Boundary Waters and Lake Superior, down the Mississippi, and across the Gulf of Mexico.

 

Along the way, Alvarez blogged about his trip and posted photos at Predictably Lost. It should be noted that he made the trip in part to support the protection of the waterways along his route. His website details the organizations he supports.

Many people along the way told Alvarez they wished they could do what he was doing, to which he told them, “If you make it a priority, you can. If you don’t make it a priority, there are a thousand excuses not to do it. Eventually, you just have to get in the boat and start paddling.”

Now that the former corporate lawyer has stopped paddling, what is on the horizon?

“I just have no idea what I’m going to do next,” Alvarez told the Duluth News Tribune. “It’s a good thing and terrifying feeling, but I’m sure I will figure it out soon.”

Geobeats offers a nice YouTube video about Alvarez’s journey, but take note, that isn’t him paddling into Key West at the beginning:

Photos courtesy of Daniel Alvarez. 

Expedition journeys into world's deepest hydrothermal vents

http://science.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/21/17048309-expedition-journeys-into-worlds-deepest-hydrothermal-vents?lite

By Douglas MainLiveScience

Researchers are exploring the deepest known set of hydrothermal vents in the world, at a site in the Caribbean nearly 5 kilometers (3 miles) beneath the ocean surface.

They've discovered a new vent there that is deeper than any previously known, said Andrew Thaler, a researcher on the expedition. The group explores the area using a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) named Isis, which just completed its first dive Wednesday, Thaler said.  

The site, known as the Beebe Hydrothermal Vent Field, lays in the Cayman Trough, a deep section of the Caribbean south of Cuba. It lies about twice as deep as most known hydrothermal vents. Hydrothermal vents are fissures in the seafloor where geologically heated water spews forth.

The researchers, led by Britain's National Oceanography Center and the University of Southampton, discovered the Beebe field in 2010, but have yet to detail all of its treasure trove of life and geochemical oddities.

Their previous studies have already revealed several species new to science, and this go-around will likely do the same. "From a biological perspective, we won't know if we've made a major discovery until we've had a chance to process samples back at the lab, but there's no doubt that a few new species will be described from this cruise," Thaler said.

NERC/NOC

Anemones and blind shrimp are bountiful near the vents.

The scientists set sail on the RS James Cooke on Feb. 6 and will be at sea until early March. They are blogging about the expedition at a site called Into the Cayman Abyss and tweeting using the hashtag#DeepestVents.

The vents are crawling with blind shrimp, fields of anemones, tube worms and other bizarre life forms, said Thaler, who studies these creatures as a researcher at Duke University. Isis has already returned with samples of seawater and wildlife scooped or vacuumed from the ocean floor, he said.

The vents, some of the hottest ever discovered, are also interesting from a geological perspective. Here, high temperatures and pressure cause venting fluid to become supercritical, meaning it behaves like a gas and a liquid. These fluids are very reactive, dissolving minerals deep in the Earth's crust and transporting them to the seafloor, according to the expedition's website.

The Beebe field also contains a series of older mounds from former vents, which could help researchers understand how these important formations are created.

One researcher placed half of a pig carcass within the Cayman Trough near the hydrothermal vents to see what scavengers it might attract, Thaler said.

Reach Douglas Main at dmain@techmedianetwork.com. Follow him on Twitter @Douglas_Main. Follow OurAmazingPlanet on Twitter @OAPlanet. We're also on Facebook and Google+.

• Extreme Life on Earth: 8 Bizarre Creatures
• Images: Strange Life at Antarctic Seafloor
• In Photos: Spooky Deep-Sea Creatures

Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Spare a Dime For the World’s Greatest Living Explorer?

What’s the greatest living Arctic explorer to do when his funding disappears?

The world’s greatest living explorer crumpled between the washing machine and the refrigerator, sweat dripping from his nose onto the kitchen floor. At that moment, Pen Hadow didn’t look like a polar hero. And as he recently announced his retirement, one wondered why he was still putting himself through such a punishing training regimen. “Old habits die hard,” he gasped between pants. I think it was more complicated. After all, when the body stops traveling, the spirit takes over the trek.

'Everything I did combined the spirits of adventure and science to get the important message out.' (Courtesy of Martin Hartley)

Fifty-year-old Hadow has more sea-ice time than anyone on the planet. Ten years ago he became the first person to trek solo, and without resupply, from the Canadian coast to the North Pole, an achievement likened to the first ascent of Everest without oxygen. The amiable Hadow has also led a score of expeditions to both polar regions, guiding parties of clients under the aegis of his own adventure travel company, and in addition, he has undertaken three multimillion-dollar scientific surveys of the Arctic Ocean sponsored by insurance giant Catlin.

Having spent seven months in the Antarctic myself, and almost as long in the Arctic, I know the conditions explorers face: pressure ridges 10 feet high, temperatures in the minus 60s Fahrenheit, disintegrating sea ice, and winds that don’t just knock you down, they send you flying. No amount of satellite phones, high-frequency radios, tracking beacons, or emergency transmitters will enable a support plane to reach you in an hour if you get peritonitis or carbon-monoxide poisoning, and a polar bear or thin ice could finish off a hero in a second. Imagine one of Hadow’s open-water swims between floes, when he towed his sledge like a boat—a tasty snack for a thousand-pound bear.

Unusual in the testosterone-fueled exploration community, Hadow is not just a stuntman out to prove he can beat all that. He believes passionately that the explorer’s role is to enable and communicate science. “Everything I did,” he says now, reflecting on a long career, “combined the spirits of adventure and science to get the important message out that the Arctic Ocean environment is changing at a speed and scale likely to have dramatic effects throughout the Northern Hemisphere.”

Hadow was born in the Scottish highlands, where his father was a pig farmer. He was raised, by Robert Falcon Scott’s son’s former nanny, in the British tradition of toughening children up in the open air and dispatching them to boarding school at the age of 7. “The one constant in my life,” Hadow has said, “was the distant echoing in my head of Nanny Wigley’s tales of the great explorers.” The hair is graying around the temples these days, but Hadow has kept his boyish good looks. Perhaps regrettably, he looks an awful lot like Tony Blair. He lives in one half of a former school in the twee market town of Tavistock in Devon in southern England. A globe five feet in circumference occupies a corner of the high-ceilinged sitting room, and a Times Atlas lies open on a special stand in another. In an office off the sitting room, piles of graphs and charts overflow onto a rowing machine, a battered mini boxed set of Winnie the Pooh books, and framed photographs of Hadow’s ex-wife. They have two children: a son, 14, and a daughter, 10. Imagine telling the other kids at school that Daddy’s an explorer.

In a break in the kitchen training session, I cruelly mention that Hadow would be an old man now in the exploration game. “I don’t accept that,” he says between glugs of water. “Endurance-event athletes tend to be older. Even more so in the polar environment, where skills can only be acquired by experience. The only issue with age is recovery time.” So why has he retired? “The economic climate forced it on me.” It turns out that he had been planning, as a swan song, the first unsupported solo crossing of the north polar ice cap: a thousand-mile, three-month ski hike from Russia to Canada via the North Pole. Core costs exceeded $1.3 million. Like every explorer since Columbus, Hadow has spent an awful lot of time wooing sponsors. But last year, for the first time, his sponsorship collapsed three months before the offing.

Hadow became the first solo explorer to reach the North Pole unsupported in 2003. (Courtesy of Martin Hartley)

Is he the last of his species? Is there a future for old-style exploration? Hadow launched into a set of squats. When he finished, he leaned against the sink before contemplating his reply. “At the macro level,” he says thoughtfully, “by which I mean finding out where things are—exploration has no future. But at a micro level there is masses to achieve. Establishing the range of the fritillary butterfly, for example, can yield vital data on a changing climate. I think there is a significant role for future explorers to support science in the more hazardous technical challenges. They can help chart markers of change. A chapter has closed in a spatial sense, but another has opened.

“In pursuit of sponsorship I’ve lately made a comprehensive sweep through corporate boardrooms, and I strongly believe that although the economic climate is not right, the social climate really is, and in five to 10 years we’ll see a burgeoning of environmental sponsorship through which the business community will demonstrate a commitment to the natural world. Companies big and small will take up the baton from the green charities. It needs to be a properly organized societal effort, and only business has the reach to roll this out on a massive scale. Not-for-profits don’t have the reach or the cash to tackle big stuff, and increasingly, I believe, they will act in an advisory capacity.”Other polar explorers have gathered science data in the course of dragging sledges, making records, and losing half their body weight. As you read this, Sir Ranulph Fiennes is leading a winter trek 2,500 miles across Antarctica: the team will be calibrating ice measurements on the ground, taking core samples to establish rates of water flow from the ice sheet, and searching for extreme- environment cryo-bacteria. But all too often these kind of expeditions end up looking like stunts. Hadow exudes authenticity.

He went through three sets of elevated press-ups with his feet on a chair. Why quite so much exercise if the next trip is off? “I’m a great believer in mind-body balance, and I want to carry my skills into the next phase,” he says, referring to the coaching company he has just established, aimed at both corporations and individuals. Much talk ensued on the importance of developing whole-body strength rather than sticking on slabs of muscle; on four-week cycles of progressively higher intensity, followed by a deload week; and on lactic thresholds and stored glycogen. I sat at the kitchen table with my notebook open, feeling fat.

Most explorers regard the polar regions as territory to be beaten into submission. Either that, or a battleground on which to prove how near dead they can get while acquiring a frozen beard. Not Hadow. There is something of the feminine about his take on the natural world—something that’s not about conquering. The Arctic Ocean and the Antarctic must be the most male places in the world—don’t I know it—yet Hadow reckons women thrive on the ice. He has guided many female groups, including the first all-women trek to the South Pole.

His Arctic Survey in 2009 took thousands of measurements assessing climate change. (Martin Hartley/Catlin Arctic Survey via ZUMA)

“In my experience,” he told me between burpees, “in the polar regions women do better. Men live on their own private islands in a sea of uncertainty, doubt, and anxiety and play a very conservative psychological game. As a result, they tend to underperform, whereas women intuitively work collaboratively.” He has a woman’s poetic memory, too. Fourteen years ago, he briefly met one of my children. When we spoke of the boy, he said, “Oh yes, the one with eyes the color of a blackbird’s egg.”

Who owns the Arctic Ocean? Nobody. But given our increasingly ravenous global appetite for hydrocarbons, and the decreasing sea ice that makes it easier to extract the stuff, ownership has risen to the top of the geopolitical agenda. The five Arctic littoral nations (Denmark, the United States, Canada, Russia, and Norway) are racing to “prove” that their continental shelves extend north for hundreds of miles, thereby allowing them to claim swathes of the Arctic as sovereign territory. Russia even sent a politician down in a submarine under the pole to plant a red banner in the seabed. Non-Arctic countries too are jostling for a place at the table. WikiLeaks revealed U.S. concern over Chinese interest in the Arctic. Cui Hongjian of the China Institute of International Studies recently made a startling comparison. “Countries closer to the Arctic,” he said, “may tend to wish the Arctic is private or that they have priority to develop it. But China insists that it is a public area, just like the moon.”

Hadow has seen for himself how a warming climate is changing the polar regions, and so have I. Once I traveled on a Russian icebreaker across the Arctic Ocean from Murmansk to east Greenland. Standing next to the captain on the bridge, day after day I watched him crossing out huge patches of ice from last year’s chart. In addition to the widely reported record melt in 2012, Arctic monitoring stations measured heat-trapping carbon dioxide exceeding 400 parts per million for the first time ever. By general consensus, 350 ppm is the highest safe level we need to maintain in order to avoid profound climate change.

The volume of summer ice on the Arctic Ocean is poorly understood. “We can see the area of the ice from satellites,” Hadow explains, “but we can’t see its thickness. Thirty to 40 percent of the total volume of Arctic Ocean ice is held in pressure ridges. On my aborted expedition I was going to take five different measurements of every ridge I crossed.”

“How many ridges would there have been on your route?” I ask.“About 7,500.”
“So you were going to take 37,500 measurements with a cutting-edge kit?”
“No, with a clipboard, a pencil, and a pile of forms.”

This is vintage Hadow. Unlike most explorers, he doesn’t talk about gear much. His passion is ice craft: understanding how the polar environment works and how he can work with it. And anyway, not many kits work at minus 60 degrees. At the South Pole, I saw grown men cry at the failure of some multimillion-dollar piece of equipment that had worked in the lab.

How serious, I ask, is the Big Melt? Having finished his training session, Hadow was about to take a shower, but at this question he became tremendously animated, standing at the sink in his socks and waving his arms around like a windmill. “There couldn’t possibly be anything more serious!” This man cares about the Arctic Ocean very much, and his personal relationship with the landscape he knows so well is deeply touching. His major concern is the damage that would be caused by hydrocarbon extraction. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that 30 percent of the world’s undiscovered gas and 13 percent of its undiscovered oil lie underneath the Arctic Ocean, not to mention a periodic table of minerals. “It means that the role of the explorer has never been more important. The natural world is showing signs of stress in response to human activity, yet urbanization, increasingly, has cut us off from the natural world. The better we understand how it works, the better we can manage it.”

According to John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace U.K., surface ice measurements “will be critical to our understanding of what’s really going on in the high Arctic. What ice information can reveal is that this is not just about the Arctic—these changes will affect us all.” Hadow has a messianic vision of the global importance of the explorer’s work. “The Discovery Channel/National Geographic view of the natural world has taken us down a dead end and wasted time, making us feel a sense of awe and wonder but not moving us forward usefully,” he says. “I don’t think the Arctic is beautiful, though it has its moments. I don’t buy into wilderness worship. It delays the relationship we need to have. When we understand well, we start to care, and then maybe we’ll act.”

Bravery is not just about besting ice floes. It’s also about accepting that something has ended and facing the next challenge with quiet dignity. It was hard not to feel sorry for Hadow when I saw what he was putting himself through on the training front with no expedition at the end of it. But he is so immensely likable, it was impossible to see him as a tragic figure. There was instead something quietly hieratic about this man who knows so much about something so very important. We should listen to his message. His recently founded life-coaching company has already netted several high-profile corporate clients, and he plans to develop his profile in that field, as well as engaging in a range of polar-spokesman activities.

Despite his derision for the fluffy polar bear wondrous nature view of the polar regions, Hadow talks of “a lifelong love of the Arctic” in romantic terms. In the shower he’s obviously tried to find the words to sum up his attitude. Shiny and polished, he emerges to recite what he’s come up with. It’s corny as hell, but totally convincing. “The Arctic Ocean is like a defenseless princess who needs chaperones—a new generation of explorers—to represent her interests abroad as she arrives on the global scene. Everyone is looking to see what they can get out of her—nobody else there is coming from her perspective. That’s the job of those coming up behind me. Before it’s too late.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2013/02/11/spare-a-dime-for-the-world-s-greatest-living-explorer.html

Hiking the Keystone XL Trail

EXPEDITION WATCH: HIKING THE KEYSTONE XL TRAIL

By Adventure Lab

There's no pipeline—or anything even resembling a trail or infrastructure—yet. And that's precisely why Ken Ilgunas decided to head out in September on a 1,700-mile hike tracing the planned route for the Keystone XL Pipeline—from Hardisty, Alberta, Canada, to Houston, Texas. He wanted to chronicle the opinions of the people who live along the proposed route.

Before he left, Ilgunas shared all of the logistics. He detailed his food supplies (6.5 pounds of mashed potato powder and 228 candy bars), his plan for staggering his supply pickups (sending individual boxes via Priority Mail to small town post offices), and shared his design of a homemade lightweight camp stove (tin foil and an empty Purina cat food can). He wrote a post about how he broke his pinky toe after tripping down the stairs in his friend's basement to add some pre-trip drama. He wrote another post about all of the gear he would take with him, 27 pounds of stuff that includes a can of bear spray he's had at the ready for plenty of non-bear-related incidents. He's been in defense mode a fair amount of the trip, something that becomes obvious after a quick survey of of his blog post titles: "It finally happens, I'm attacked by cows," "Finally get going, have an interesting bar experience outside the Alberta/Saskatchewan border," and "A posse of paranoid Montanans surround my tent."

Here's a bit more on his trek, in case you want to follow along.

WHAT: A 1,700-mile walk from Hardisty, Alberta, to Houston, Texas, along the planned route of the Keystone XL Pipeline. Ilgunas plans to interview and hang out with the locals as he goes. He has hiked from farm to town to farm, battled through shin splits, fended off attacks from moose and dogs, and weathered a three-day winter storm in a tent.

WHO: Ilgunas is a 29-year-old adventurer and writer who lived out of a van during his time at Duke, worked as a backcountry ranger in Alaska, and hitchhiked from Alaska to New York. (Just read thisshort series of posts called Vandwelling to get a taste for his sense of humor and degree of honesty.)

WHEN: In mid-September, Ilgunas hitchiked north to Canada from Denver, Colorado. On September 24,  he began to hike south from Hardisty, Alberta. He expects to arrive at the end of the pipeline in Houston, Texas, sometime in February. He is currently in Kansas, where cold streams and dogs off leash have inspired interesting conversations with his camera. (Warning: vulgar language in the video below, filmed in Kansas.)

WHY: "I wanted to walk just because I was in the mood for a long walk," he told the CBC. "And I wanted this to have some sort of purpose. To go on a journey is to be changed by the experiences you have and the people you meet and the places you see. And to go into a journey with some sort of rigid stance? You’re kind of closing yourself off from those opportunities."

SPONSORS: None.

FOLLOW ALONG: KenIlgunas.com

Lost campsite used by Scott's Antarctic expedition found after 100 years

A campsite used by members of Captain Scott's doomed Antarctic expedition has been found - a century after Scott and his team perished on the journey to the South Pole.

Yahoo! News - Scott's entire team perished on the return trip from the South Pole in 1912 (Image: SWNS)


A campsite used by members of Captain Scott's doomed Antarctic expedition has been found - a century after Scott and his team perished on the journey to the South Pole.

Scott and four companions reached the South Pole on January 17, 1912, only to discover they had been beaten there by another team led by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen.

On the 1500km journey way back to base on the coast of Antarctica the entire team died, including Captain Scott himself, Captain Laurence Oates, Edgar Evans, Henry Bowers and Edward Wilson in March 1912.

The survivors back at base camp set out to recover the bodies but could not return home as their ship would not arrive until January the following year.

While they waited, the base camp team continued work by scaling the continent’s second highest volcano, Mount Erebus, to complete a geological study.

The site, pictured in 1912, and as it is today (Image: SWNS)

Geologist Professor Frank Debenham had the idea of creating a polar research institute while on the trek.

Now a camp which the team made on the peak's upper slopes has been discovered by explorers, 100 years after it was last used.

The new expedition was led by Professor Clive Oppenheimer, who re-enacted the Scott expedition's ascent, using written accounts and pictures from the time.

Prof Oppenheimer, a volnacologist at the University of Cambridge, found rings of stones that Scott's team built around their tents to keep the pegs firmly in the ground.

But the rest of the camp had disappeared completely.

He said: "I was tremendously excited to discover the campsite. In my mind’s eye, I saw the four men fussing around their tent.

"Transposing again the historic photographs on the snowy stretch in front of me, I couldn’t help smiling and saying ‘hello boys’."

UK and New Zealand authorities are now working to get official protection for the site.

Philippa Foster Back, granddaughter of Prof Debenham and chair of The United Kingdom Antarctic Heritage Trust said the discovery was "wonderful".

She said: "It is a reminder of both the dangers and thrills of Antarctic science and a fitting tribute to the great legacies of exploration and discovery left to us by all the brave men of that party."

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/lost-campsite-used-by-scott-s-antarctic-expedition-found-after-100-years-164228871.html

Sir Ranulph expedition ship arrives in Canary Wharf

Sir Ranulph expedition ship arrives in Canary Wharf
By Rob Virtue on November 30, 2012 11:50 AM |


A ship aiming to be part of the first ever trans-Antarctic winter crossing has docked in Wood Wharf.

Led by explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes, the Coldest Journey expedition will see the specially adapted SA Agulhas travel nearly 2000 miles in almost complete darkness and in tempretures of minus 90 degrees celcius in a never before attempted challenge.

During its time in Canary wharf, the ship will be loaded with vital equipment and supplies for the journey.

The project team which includes Brian Newham, Ian Prickett, Spencer Smirl, Richmond Dykes and Dr Robert Lambert will carry out scientific experiments whilst on the ice and also raise money for Seeing Is Believing, an internationl charity focused on tackling avoidable blindness.

Sir Ranulph said: "Seeing is Believing is a cause very dear to me. Having experienced temporary snow blindness myself in the past, I've had a glimpse into what it would be like to lose my sight. It's absolutely frightening. I was moved by the challenge of eliminating avoidable blindness and I wanted to be a part of it.

"The Coldest Journey has the potential to make a real impact towards the goal of eliminating avoidable blindness around the world."

The journey will begin on 21 March 2013 at the winter equinox and could be 68-year-old Sir Ranulph's final expedition.