As a massive storm swept through central Alberta in early July, a couple stood on their porch watching bolts of lightning play across the cloudy skies. A particularly massive lightning strike hit nearby. A moment later, they saw a ball of light hovering near the impact site.

In an interview with Global News Canada, Ed Pardy described seeing "a ball of fire… about 20 feet above the ground, and it kind of stayed there in a big round ball."

Ed and his wife, Melinda, said the orb consisted of bluish light, maybe two meters across. Amazed, they began filming. The couple captured 23 seconds of the light hovering on the horizon, before it vanished with a popping sound.

After viewing the video, that the couple sent to several Canadian news networks, many people believe the phenomenon is "ball lightning."

Elusive and mysterious

Ball lightning is a rare and little-understood atmospheric phenomenon. Accounts vary, but the generally agreed-upon description is of a ball of light, anywhere from a few centimeters to a few meters across. Ball lightning coincides with thunderstorms and hovers for a minute or so before disappearing.

Accounts of ball lightning are uncommon, but stories have been around for centuries. The earliest account commonly cited is from a massive storm that swept over England in 1638. Three hundred people were attending church when, according to eyewitness accounts, a ball of fire over two meters across burst through the church window, bashed around, tore open the roof, and killed four church-goers, filling the building with smoke and the smell of sulfur. Witnesses concluded it was the devil, an understandable conclusion at the time.

This isn't the only story of "globular lightning" entering a building. In 1852, the French Academy of Sciences took sworn statements that a ball of light, roughly the size of a human head, burst from the fireplace of a startled tailor, having traveled down the chimney.

In 1753, ball lightning killed a Russian scientist researching electricity, according to contemporary reports. Georg Richmann was holding one end of a string, the other end of which he had attached to a kite. Ball lightning appeared, traveled down the string, and killed Richmann instantly.

Despite scattered reports continuing over the years, scientific understanding lagged behind.

Many theories, limited evidence

So, what exactly is ball lightning? Science isn't quite sure yet. Many reports can likely be attributed to other things. A 2010 study from researchers at Austria's University of Innsbruck found that the magnetic fields generated by lightning storms could cause visual hallucinations. Specifically, they can cause "magnetophosphenes," which appear as flashing lights. This could account for cases of ball lightning.

But unless magnetophosphenes are contagious and spread over video, what the Pardy's saw was real.

Researchers have put forward dozens of theories to explain ball lightning. One of the more credible theories came from a group of Chinese researchers who happened to record ball lightning in 2014. In only a few seconds, the ball went from purple, to orange, to white, to red and then sputtered out. The changing colors indicated its makeup, and the scientists detected small amounts of silicon, iron, and calcium.

They proposed that ball lightning forms when a lightning bolt hits soil, vaporizing the elements within, and creating light and color effects. Experiments in 2007 using vaporized silicon support this theory. Scientists from the Federal University of Pernambuco were able to produce small glowing orbs by delivering electric shocks to silicon wafers.

Another theory is that ball lightning is detached Saint Elmo's fire (a faint light on the extremities of pointed objects during stormy weather, such as around the masts of ships). There's also the "Electrochemical Model," positing that ball lightning is air plasma held in a ball by layers of chemical ions.

Science has yet to settle which, if any, of these theories is correct. But the video filmed by the Pardy's is probably the best video of ball lightning captured so far, and lightning phenomena researchers will likely pore over the 23 seconds of footage for new information.

A pair of Portland, Oregon men who set out on Christmas Eve to look for the legendary Sasquatch have been found deceased after days of searching.

The two men, whose names have not been made public, were 59 and 37. Searchers found their bodies in Gifford Pinchot National Forest, a densely wooded and mountainous 500,000-hectare wilderness.

The Skamania County Sheriff's Office believes that they died of exposure. The weather was frequently stormy and below freezing, and the men had been ill-prepared to face those conditions for long.

Christmas search

Stormy weather also delayed the search effort. According to the Sheriff's office, the volunteers had to contend with “freezing temperatures, snow, high water levels, heavy rain, and heavily wooded terrain."

The men were reported missing around 1 am on Christmas morning when they failed to return on the 24th, as expected. Traffic camera footage identified their vehicle, which had been abandoned in a rural, wooded area. From there, a search began.

The three-day search involved dogs, drones, a borrowed Coast Guard helicopter, and over 60 volunteers. Several local government organizations also helped. In the end, the men were found too late.

The Skamania sasquatch

The family members who reported the men missing told authorities that they had been looking for the “sasquatch.”

Also known as Bigfoot, the sasquatch is a mythical bipedal ape thought to live in the forests of North America, particularly the Pacific Northwest. A group that collects sightings of the creature has recorded over 700 encounters in Washington State, far more than in any other U.S. state or Canadian province. Within Washington, Skamania County has the most reports.

The county is aware of its status as the world sasquatch capital. A 1969 law forbids hunting or harming the sasquatch within Skamania County. The $1,000 fine is likely intended more to protect hairy hunters from mistaken-identity shootings. However, the local government encourages Bigfoot-related tourism. Guides and sample itineraries are even available for Sasquatch seekers.

But as this story proves, the region is still a dangerous place for the unprepared, and not because of a mythical beastie. These two fatalities were not the first in the county this year. Several other hikers and hunters have gone missing and also died.

Since record-keeping began 130 years ago, Mount Fuji has always acquired its distinctive cap of snow by now. Typically, it settles on the peak's upper slopes by early October. This year for the first time, the mountain has remained bare. 

Sitting southwest of Tokyo, 3,776m Mount Fuji is an active volcano and Japan’s highest peak. Covered in snow for much of the year, it opens for climbing in July. Millions of tourists flock to the UNESCO site each year in hopes of hiking to the summit and seeing the sunrise from its famous slopes. 

The average date for the first snowfall on its summit is October 2. In 2023, it fell on October 5. This is now the longest wait for snow since records began in 1894. Since then, the latest date for a snowcap has been October 26 in 1955 and 2016.

The reason for the lack of snow is no mystery. This year, Japan had its hottest summer on record. Through June, July, and August temperatures were 1.76 degrees Celsius higher than the average temperature for that time of year. Between June and September, a record 252 people died from heat stroke in Tokyo. Since summer, the warmer-than-normal temperatures have continued because of the subtropical jet stream hitting Japan. 

30˚C in October

Although you can't pin a single snowless season on climate change, over the last few decades, autumn temperatures in the country have gradually increased. This year, 74 cities recorded temperatures of over 30˚C during the first week of October.

The Japan Weather Association predicts that snow will finally blanket the peak by November 7. The Kofu Meteorological Office will announce the first snowcap of the season as soon as it is visible from their observation point 40km away. They have been announcing the first snow on the peak since records began. 

The Sphinx snow patch on Braeriach in the Scottish Highlands has melted for the fourth year in a row. This is the only 11th time the famous snow patch has melted since the 1700s. 

Braeriach is the third-highest mountain in the Cairngorms. The Sphinx sits within a coire -- a glacial hollow from the last Ice Age. Because of this and its presence for hundreds of years, many consider it a remnant of the last Ice Age.

Over the previous 20 years, Iain Cameron -- Scotland’s foremost snow patch expert -- has been monitoring the patch. He says it is a “barometer for climate change.”

This is the first time the patch has melted for the fourth year in a row in over 200 years. The Scottish Mountaineering Club recorded the first full melt in 1933. Over the next seven decades, it disappeared only occasionally. Since 2003, it has vanished eight times.

A sad day today. The Sphinx will melt in the early hours of tomorrow morning, meaning that’s the fourth consecutive year it has done so.

This patch was once considered permanent. It has now melted completely since the 1700s in the following years:

1933
1959
1996
2003
2006
2017… pic.twitter.com/yV5T9yulA4

— Iain Cameron (@theiaincameron) October 3, 2024

Cameron blames the scarcity of western-facing storms from the Atlantic. "There’s not as much snow falling in winter," he explains. "Precipitation is mostly rain.”

He visited the ice patch last Thursday. It measured a mere 0.5 meters wide and was gone by the following morning. In snowier decades, the patch was up to 50 meters in diameter.

"I feel both saddened and alarmed," he says. "I'm so used to seeing them year after year that it's hard to see them vanish so often. It’s like visiting an elderly relative."

In his 2021 book, The Vanishing Ice, Cameron explores elusive snow patches around the UK. He believes they might soon be a thing of the past.

In a trend that is unlikely to abate any time soon, people engrossed in their mobile phones risked their lives for content. A viral video from China shows tourists caught out by surging waters on the Qiantang River.

The Qiantang River flows through the Chinese province of Zhejiang on the eastern coast, just below Shanghai. The video of tourists on the river's edge, posted on X, is allegedly from a couple of days ago. Though we can't confirm the video's authenticity, it appears to show a huge tidal bore rushing up the river and then engulfing a group of around 20 people filming or photographing the incoming wave. The water sweeps some people away and it isn't immediately apparent if everyone is accounted for as the water recedes.

The video, with a warning that the content could be distressing, can be viewed below.

WARNING - disturbing (And I post this as a warning).

Another video of people taking dangerous selfies. This is Qiantang River in China a couple of days ago....pic.twitter.com/0P5JhX2FTH

— Volcaholic (@volcaholic1) September 8, 2024

The surge could be because of typhoon Yagi, a superstorm that has left a trail of destruction in its wake across the Philippines, south-eastern China, and north Vietnam. Asia's largest storm of the year, Yagi has killed at least 141 people in Vietnam.

Unnecessary risks?

This is not the first phone-related death we've covered this summer. In mid-August, Czech gymnast Natalie Stichova fell to her death in Germany while trying to get in position for an Instagram photo with the famous Neuschwanstein Castle.

This year, the Atlantic hurricane season has been far calmer than usual, and it is all because of sand. Fine grains from the Sahara have been so abundant in the air that they have affected the formation of hurricanes.

The Sahara Air Layer consists of sand and dust particles from North Africa that the winds throw up into the atmosphere. From there, it drifts west. This happens every year in June and July, when around 180 million tons of Saharan dust enters the atmosphere.

This July, there was an abnormally large amount of it. It has impacted visibility and air quality in major European cities, including Rome, Athens, and Paris.

"While it is not unusual for Saharan dust plumes to reach Europe, there has been an increase in the intensity and frequency of such episodes in recent years, which could be potentially attributed to changes in atmospheric circulation patterns," Mark Parrington of Europe's Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service said in a statement.

Dry, dusty air stops hurricanes from forming

The dust and sand make the air up high warmer and incredibly dry. This layer of warm air sits over a lower layer of cool air and keeps the tall clouds that lead to hurricanes from forming. Instead, the clouds spread outwards.

“Hurricanes are not likely to form when you’ve got a lot of this dry air from the desert in it,” said Chris Fogarty from the Canadian Hurricane Centre.

Earlier this year, experts thought we would have an active hurricane season since ocean temperatures are at an all-time high. The surface temperature of the oceans is a key factor in hurricane formation. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicted that we could have up to 25 named storms, including 13 hurricanes. So far, there have been just three named storms -- Alberto, Beryl, and Chris.

Of these, only Beryl was a hurricane. Occurring on July 2, it was the earliest category 5 Atlantic hurricane ever recorded. Wind speeds of up to 240kph devastated parts of the Caribbean.

But since early July, the Atlantic basin has calmed significantly. The high levels of airborne sand have counteracted the warm ocean temperatures. However, scientists warn that this will not last. Hurricanes may yet strike this season.

A father and daughter perished from the heat while hiking in Canyonlands National Park late last week, according to the National Park Service (NPS).

The San Juan County Sheriff's Office identified the victims as Albino Herrera Espinoza and his daughter Beatriz Herrera.

"San Juan County Dispatch received a 911 text from a person at the Island in the Sky district of Canyonlands National Park. The 23-year-old woman and her 52-year-old father, both from Green Bay, Wisconsin, had been hiking on the Syncline Trail, gotten lost, and run out of water," reads a statement from the NPS.

NPS rangers and Bureau of Land Management Moab District rescue personnel scrambled in response to the text message. However, by the time officials located Espinoza and Herrera, the pair were dead.

Park officials reported that the air temperature when the two texted for help was over 38°C.

A massive heat dome has been hovering over North America for the last several weeks, smashing heat records across several western American states. The weather pattern is expected to continue.

Since summer began, at least 30 confirmed heat-related deaths have occurred in the Western United States.

Some forecasts suggest that the weather window that opened on Everest last weekend would last a long time. Other models predicted increasing winds. The winds won out.

Nearly 50 climbers endured rising winds yesterday near the summit, forcing them to turn back in dangerous conditions. They now have to wait until the next window. With only short spells of good weather, the risk on Everest then becomes overcrowding.

Those who did summit on Sunday and Monday reported excellent conditions, with glorious sunshine on the top of the world. But the wind changed Monday afternoon. By Tuesday, it had reached 70 to 100 kph, surprising climbers heading for the summit.

Eduard Kubatov of Kyrgyzstan, who intends to climb Lhotse without oxygen, described how two teammates had to return around at the Balcony (8,380m) in 70 kph winds.

"I am proud of them," Kubatov wrote. "They went on even when they could no longer see each other in the darkness." Ultimately, both they and a large Chinese team retreated.

Frostbite and helicopters

At least, Kubatov's partners made all the way safely down to Base Camp on foot.  Another team, led by Vladimir Kotlyar, planned to use a helicopter to descend from Camp 2 back to Base Camp, according to Kubatov. Read the post in Russian and a video in the Kyrgyz language here.

Kotlyar is a Russian mountain guide and worked last year as manager/guide for the 7 Summits Club, the company owned by Alexander Abramov. This year, Kotylar is on Everest but it is unclear whether he is again guiding for Abramov or is an independent contractor.

View this post on Instagram

See this post on Instagram

Airlifts above Base Camp are forbidden on Everest, except for rescues. But even if one or two climbers needed rescue, it's unlikely the whole team did. Note that several Russians, including Abramov, used a helicopter to descend from Camp 2 to Base Camp after summiting last year, as recorded by The Himalayan Database.

Abramov himself posted a video showing the logjams at the Khumbu Icefall, the section that helicopter shortcuts from Camp 2 avoid.

View this post on Instagram

See this post on Instagram

The high wind has taken its toll on many climbers. The crew at the Everest ER clinic says they have heard that many suffered from frostbite. "We saw a couple of frostbites, but most of them got evacuated from higher camps directly to Kathmandu," a spokesperson at the Himalayan Rescue Association told ExplorersWeb.

In an update three days ago, the medical team reported that they have already seen 507 patients -- 80 foreigners and the rest Nepalese workers.

Teams ignoring forecasts?

But was the wind yesterday really a surprise? According to Piotr Krzyżowski of Poland, aiming for Lhotse without oxygen, the forecast showed increasing winds, yet the teams still went up.

"I don't quite understand the leaders who push climbers in such weather, as if there's some pressure to summit," he wrote.

As a no-O2 climber, Krzyzowski will be especially vulnerable to cold. So although he completed his acclimatization, he will wait for low winds, expected to come Monday and Tuesday.

He won't be alone. Many teams point to May 20 as their summit day, which may lead to crowds at the Icefall, the Lhotse Face, and the summit area. A number of no-O2 climbers are also heading up around that time, including Kubatov, Krzyzowski, James McManus, Moesses Fiamoncini, and Silvestro Franchini on Lhotse; and Hugo Ayaviri, Sirbaz Khan, Valery Babanov and Mingtemba Sherpa, Nordinne Nouar, and Karol  Adamski (with two sherpas) on Everest.

The Princess of Qatar, Asma Al Thani, has also returned for a second attempt to climb Everest without supplementary O2, with the full support of Nirmal Purja's team. Tunc Findik of Turkey has not fully recovered from some throat problems and has decided to use oxygen on his summit push.

Impatience

In Base Camp, impatience and anxiety have increased with the many delays. High-end outfitters such as Madison Mountaineering are ready to wait until the last week of May, to take advantage of fewer people and the usually stable pre-monsoon weather.

For other teams, however, each extra day adds to the cost of their expedition. In addition, those who had planned to summit this week will not have as much flexibility with their chosen summit day. Coordination between teams will be difficult.

To make things worse, the forecasts hint at better weather to come but are uncertain. "The forecasts are very conflicting, so we're going up anyway," Eduard Kubatov wrote today.

What will the weather be like?

"That is a problem with nearly every expedition: nine times out of ten, guides have to interpret the forecast," meteorologist Marc de Keyser of Everest4Expeditions told ExplorersWeb.

De Keyser works with several Himalayan expeditions in Nepal and Pakistan and also provides individual forecasts. Right now, he is offering predictions for Everest and Denali.

De Keyser told ExplorersWeb that several teams have set their sights on the weekend, despite unclear conditions. Winds may drop on Saturday, but not early enough in the day.

"May 19 looks pretty good, as the jet stream is moving further south," he says. "This will put the Himalaya on the northern/cold/cyclonic side of the jet stream, which brings huge convection clouds, heavy snow showers, and risk of thunderstorms. The top of those convection clouds could reach 8,000m. In this situation, it is possible to summit but it will be very tricky."

"I would bet on May 20 or 21 or even after that. Convection will be less and the top of clouds lower, while the wind will be light," de Keyser concluded.

Check the wind charts for Nepal below tomorrow and for Sunday, May 19:

The forty days and nights of rain during the Biblical flood does not compare to what happened in the late Triassic, over 234 million years ago. Earth was hot and humid, and the rain lasted two million years. An umbrella -- and not just one ark but a fleet of them -- would have been recommended.

The Triassic Period featured several major upheavals in the climate, landscape, and life on Earth. One of the least known is the Carnian Pluvial Event (CPE). Not surprisingly, the two million years of rain changed the planet forever. 

Before the Great Rain

What was Earth like before this endlessly steady rain? At the time, the main landmass was Pangea. Essentially, it was a gargantuan, barren desert stretching from the North to the South Poles. Plant life was unimpressive, characterized by small desert plants dotted across the sands.

Rainy seasons were short and infrequent. Mountain ranges around the interior prevented rain from penetrating regularly. Only the coastlines had their share of water. Earth was 10°C warmer than today and seas were 47°C -- much hotter than bath water. 

Animal life consisted of very ancient forms of insects, reptiles, mammals, and the earliest dinosaurs. Reptiles ruled while small dinosaurs were the awkward new kids on the block. Conditions weren't optimal for them. The Earth also had one main ocean called Panthalassa, in which there lived ammonoids, gastropods, sponges, corals, and other species.

This all changed when what started as a few dark clouds and drops of rain soon turned into a two-million-year monsoon.

Strangely enough, this event has rarely been talked about until now, although evidence about it has circulated since the 1970s. When it comes to mass extinction events, scientists have always focused on the "big five": Ordovician-Silurian, Devonian, Permian-Triassic, Triassic-Jurassic and End-Cretaceous. However, this one seems to have escaped their notice for quite some time.

Some researchers blame the event's odd chronological position for its neglect. It did not happen at the beginning or end of a major geological era, like they often do. It seemed to have occurred at a very random time. Was it random, though?

Volcanism at work?

The main theory for this long period of rainfall is that a series of powerful volcanic eruptions around Alaska and British Columbia sent massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This caused a long period of global warming and acidification of the oceans. It created great humidity, which inevitably led to extreme rainfall.

These volcanoes would have been powerful enough to change the water and carbon cycles, altering the climate forever. Many species died out as a result, including one-third of all marine animals. It's important to note that the rains were in intervals, not in one continuous, neverending deluge.

“It’s like charging a massive battery," explained geoscientist Jacopo Dal Corso, who has led research into the topic. "A ton of cooling high in the atmosphere and a ton of evaporation and heating near the surface…[is] going to cause an enormous storm.”

Some palaeontologists suggest that a new mountain range caused all this trouble due to pressure changes between land and the ocean. However, most scholars believe that the volcanism theory is more plausible.

Evidence

The Carnian Pluvial Event was only discovered in the 1970s. Geologists Schlager & Schollnberger were studying rocks in Austria's Northern Limestone Alps when they noticed a peculiar and sudden layer of dark grey siliciclastic rock within the previously consistent carbonate rock record.

They dated it to 234 million years ago. This rock was not consistent with Pangea's hot, dry climate. Rather, this type of rock typically showed up in very wet areas or those with an abundance of water.

Other deposits from this time started popping up all over the globe. In southwest England, geologists found it embedded in layers of red sandstone. It also turned up in Israel, Italy, and Utah, in the U.S.

Other indicators of a deluge included the presence of amber, coal, ancient rivers and lakes with fossilized plant debris, and a white powdery clay called kaolinite. Additionally, fossilized pollen and spores found in rocks from the Carnian period also indicated a humid climate and hot temperatures.

Because of its recent discovery and the difficulty in finding data over the years, some geologists refer to the CPE as the "hidden extinction." 

After the rains...

Though climate change from human activity is considered undesirable nowadays, this ancient period of climate change did the world a lot of good. The planet saw a drastic acceleration of the major cycles, including the carbon and hydrological cycles.

Dinosaurs thrived, and the weather regulated itself more. Reptiles began to decrease as towering conifers and other large plants replaced their food supply (ground vegetation). Dinosaurs fared well with the larger plants. The ancestors of modern animals such as turtles and crocodiles emerged alongside them. The newly acidic seas led to the growth of plankton and coral reefs.

Did the rains stop? Yes, this period of rain and its subsequent flooding dissipated and global temperatures settled down into a less intense, cooler climate. Pangea became a desert again, but it was a different-looking landscape. The accelerated hydrological cycle caused rampant erosion and weathering. The soil from which plants grew changed radically from a carbonate base to much darker and more fertile sediment. The air shifted from its hot, dry state to a more humid one.

When the Late Triassic closed and the Jurassic period began, Pangea started breaking up and new oceans began to form. This created even more humidity, turning the climate subtropical. Deserts became tropical forests.

After the CPE, rain also regulated itself. It instead fell regularly at an average of 1-3 metres annually in more steady, seasonal intervals that did not last that long, especially not as long as two million years.

Essentially, this event was the beginning of our modern world, in the geological sense. The environment we have today, the climate, and our flora and fauna took hold after the CPE.

Conclusion

The climate continued to change after the CPE. More extinctions and reshaping of the environment occurred. The timing of the emergence of the dinosaurs and the CPE is no coincidence. This event was crucial for their domination in the Late Triassic. Scientists are happy to include yet another mass extinction in their line-up of Earth's history. While this event is not as substantial and violent as the "big five," it still played a pivotal role in birthing our modern world.

Herders in Mongolia are undergoing an unusually harsh winter — or at least, one that used to be unusually harsh. 

“Dzud” winters feature a punishing combination of extreme cold, heavy snow, and high winds. While Mongolian winters are cold in general, these frigid seasons are exceptional. They’re also uniquely threatening to the country’s herders and livestock.

If sheep and goats can’t reach grass beneath heaps of snow and sheets of ice, even the woolliest animals are less likely to survive the extreme temperatures. 

To make matters worse, summer droughts often precede dzuds. These conditions happened last year and are worsening due to climate change, the Yale School of the Environment reported. 

The upshot is grim. About 190,000 herder households and 64 million livestock animals are “struggling with inadequate feed, skyrocketing prices and heightened vulnerabilities” this winter, according to United Nations officials in Mongolia.

Reports indicated the most snowfall in 49 years and 668,000 livestock dead.

This February, 90% of the country faced the threat.

Snow the height of a ger

That’s after January snowfall amounted to nearly double the long-term national average — an average which has climbed 40% since 1961. Despite government efforts to clear roads, 13,500 households were snowed in and cut off from basic services, as of early 2024. 

“I’ve never seen snow that is equal to the height of a ger in my life,” Tserenbadam G., a nomad in her 70s, told Yale’s e360.

“Extreme cold and windy weather weaken animals and lead to starvation; pregnant livestock miscarry or die. Young animals are at greater risk of death,” the UN reported. “The aftermath destroys the livelihood of many herding households.” 

According to Yale, a dzud used to occur about once every 10 years. But these days, they have featured in six of the last 10 Mongolian winters. 

The winter of 2023-4 especially bad

This year’s is especially severe. In a “white” dzud, very deep snow cuts off animals from grasses. In an “iron” dzud, a rapid, hard freeze follows a brief thaw, which locks pastures in ice. Both sets of conditions exist this winter. 

Combined, the UN and Mongolian Democratic Party have proposed over $6 million in aid funding. Relief measures include road clearing and free feed for livestock. However, herders are concerned the resources will fall short of the need.

UN seeks $6.3 million to combat #dzud in #Mongolia. Approximately 90 per cent of the country is facing a high or extreme dzud risk, imperiling millions of livestock and livelihoods. https://t.co/0BiHKhIqiK

FAO/Z. Zolzaya pic.twitter.com/ZcAsdJL9BB

— ReliefWeb (@reliefweb) February 20, 2024

Split between hundreds of thousands of people and millions of animals, the funding would only cover a sack or two of feed per household, herders explained. One sack sustains a sheep for about a week.

And while herders braced for this year’s dzud by slaughtering their weakest animals early, the strategy may further weaken Mongolian rangelands in the long run. Grazing pressure has increased with growing nomad populations, and land fertility is suffering overall. 

Mongolia’s Ministry of the Environment and Tourism linked 49 percent of desertification in the country to overgrazing. The rest, officials estimated, is linked to climate change.

Official high-alert conditions will persist until May 15, the World Health Organization advised. Early weather forecasts for March called for more snow accumulation.

The longest-lasting snow patch in the UK has completely melted for just the 10th time in 300 years. It has been around longer than three centuries, which is when records of the Sphinx patch began.

The Sphinx is located in a sheltered part of the third-highest mountain in Britain, Braeriach Munro in the Cairngorms, Scotland. The patch of snow has now disappeared five times within the last six years.

A famous perennial patch

Until 100 years ago, everyone thought the snow patch was a permanent feature on the mountain. It exists in a coire, a glacial hollow that formed during the last ice age. Even in the warm summer months, it used to stay cool enough to maintain snow.

The first confirmed record of it fully melting was in 1933, then again in 1959. Before this, it is thought to have melted in the 1700s for the first time. It was known as a perennial patch because it lasted for more than two years at a time. 

Since 1996, its disappearance has become much more common. Over the last three years, it has fully melted each summer, meaning that it is now classed as a seasonal snow patch.

It is with a heavy heart I report that as of today the Sphinx has gone *again*. What 100 years ago was considered to be a permanent feature of our hills has vanished for the 10th time. Five of these have been since 2017.

A sad day.

Joe Glennie pic.twitter.com/IdM97aog8J

— Iain Cameron (@theiaincameron) September 6, 2023

Iain Cameron, a snow expert who monitors the patch, confirmed its 10th disappearance. He said that it is "beyond reasonable doubt" that global warming is the cause of its more frequent melting.

After it disappeared in 2021, he told The Guardian, “What we are seeing from research are smaller and fewer patches of snow. Less snow is falling now in winter than in the 1980s and even the 1990s.”

For those in the UK, it might not be surprising that the snow patch has melted this week. In the last seven days, we have had the hottest day on record this year and set the record for the hottest September ever.

Cameron believes that it will now become a rarity for the Sphinx patch to survive through the year. In 2020, a report by the Cairngorms National Park stated that snow cover has been decreasing on the mountain since 1983. By 2080, there will likely be no snow on the mountain at all.

If a tornado touches down in Saskatchewan and no one is around to hear it, does it still sound like a freight train?

This modified saying is surprisingly relevant in Canada, a country with the second-most tornadoes of anywhere on the planet. And yet, despite their relative frequency, scientists believe many Canadian tornadoes go untracked and unnoticed.

“If we’re ever going to pin down how climate change is affecting this stuff for real, we need accurate quantification — not only of how many tornadoes happen, but where,” Ian Giammanco, a meteorologist at the Insurance Institute for Business & Home
Safety, told The New York Times.

A group of scientists at the Northern Tornadoes Project (NTP) at Western University in London, Ontario, is hoping to help. For the last few years, the group's used crowdsourcing, drone footage, social media, and satellite imagery to get a better handle on Canada's twisters. The result is two years in a row of the most confirmed Canadian tornadoes.

Canada’s tornado detectives find forests felled by twisters that no one was around to see https://t.co/rJHO6fZfx1

— NYT Science (@NYTScience) March 12, 2023

Scientists at NTP noted it's likely the count is higher because of their increased observation. And though they also think climate change is altering tornado activity in Canada, they can't yet verify whether their observations indicate more tornadoes.

“We’re just putting so much more effort into finding these things,” said David Sills, director of the NTP, told the newspaper. “We’re trying to have an impact."

How can you miss a tornado?

The problem is Canada's size relative to its population density. Canada is second only to Russia in terms of landmass, but most of its citizens live near the U.S. border. That leaves a lot of space to the north, where tornadoes can and do touch down unnoticed by anyone who isn't a moose.

Tornadoes are especially prevalent in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta — the prairie provinces that roughly correspond with Tornado Alley in the U.S.

The use of drones and crowdsourcing information has been especially effective for the NTP, according to the Times. While improving constantly, satellite imagery still isn't sophisticated enough to tell the difference between a tornado and other wind events like downbursts and straight-line winds.

Getting an accurate count on the true number of Canadian tornadoes is about more than tracking climate change. Even though most Canadian tornadoes seem to touch down in the middle of nowhere, they sometimes strike in the densely populated areas along the border.

In 2019, Sills told the CBC that the Canadian government "hasn't been doing very well," at notifying its citizens of tornadoes.

"About 70 percent of tornadoes had no tornado warning on them — and that included most of the EF-2 tornadoes that we have in our database," he said.

Building an accurate map of yearly tornadoes in Canada can help meteorologists better predict where and when a tornado might strike, and could be life-saving.

According to residents, the air temperature in the eastern Siberian village of Essey dropped below -72˚C overnight on Jan. 10-11. If accurate, the temperature represents a new record low outside of Antarctica.

Unfortunately for record hopefuls and weather nerds, there's no Central Siberian Department for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring (UGMS) weather station in Essey.

UGMS weather stations nearest to Essey during the cold snap read a mere -53˚C. So as it stands, the nearby Yakut village of Oymyakon — known as the Pole of Cold — still holds the official record low of -71˚C.

"If local thermometers show such a temperature there, I doubt their reliability...we cannot confirm or deny,” Dmitry Ulyanov, the lead forecaster at UGMS, told the Russian newspaper Kommersant.

Felt boots and firewood

"Well, today it’s -64°C, but yesterday a photograph from Naberezhnaya Street [showed] -72°C and even three divisions lower. It is -75°C practically," said Essey resident Andrey Miroshko. For Fahrenheit aficionados, that's a nostril-hair-curling -103˚F.

According to a tweet by mountaineering outlet Russian Climb, residents in Essey heat their homes with firewood or electricity. And while the temperature was extreme even by eastern Siberian standards, it appears that life in the village went on pretty much as usual. A post on RIA Novosti's Telegram channel indicated that everyone in Essey had access to firewood and water and that shops continued operating.

Today the temperature -73C was registered in small town in Krasnoyarsk region. This is the strongest cold snap in the memory of local residents. Houses are heated with firewood or electricity

— Russianclimb (@russianclimb) January 12, 2023

Russian Climb editor Anna Piunova reported on Facebook that no one in the village died as a result of the cold snap.

"The locals wrote something like, 'yeah it was cold and we had to wear felt boots to keep our feet warm,'" Piunova recounted.

As of data collected in 2014, 614 people live in Essey. The village is nestled on the shores of Lake Essey, above the Arctic Circle. The settlement is a long-time crossroads of northern trade routes, first mentioned in historical documents in 1632. It is primarily inhabited by the Essene Yakut ethnic group.

New research suggests that the reindeers' flexible diet might save the entire species. That's because a warming planet has not only melted ice and tundra — it's also supporting more plant growth in Norway's Svalbard archipelago.

The region's reindeer population seem to have adapted to this change, shifting their diet to "popsicle-like" grasses, according to a study published in Global Change Biology this past fall.

By feeding on these grasses poking through the ice and snow, the Svalbard reindeer have more time to build up fat reserves, the study said. They're a bit smaller than more southerly reindeer/caribou species, yet have lived for thousands of years in Svalbard, just 800 kilometers from the North Pole.

The species' ability to adapt to their changing environment provides a stark contrast with other reindeer species in Canada, Alaska, and Russia. In those regions, populations have declined, as a rapidly changing environment makes finding food more difficult.

Biologists believed that the same thing would happen in Svalbard, yet the Norwegian sub-species surprised them.

Deadly freezing rain

As climate change warms the planet, polar inhabitants are often seen as canaries in the proverbial coal mine.

And like many other natives of the polar regions, reindeer (known as caribou in North America) have experienced difficulties adapting to a warming planet.

Arctic regions around the world have experienced thicker snowfall and increasing rain. Sometimes, freezing rain coats the ground with an impenetrable glaze, and winter sets in before it has time to melt. Then reindeer can't dig for lichen, their preferred food, and starve.

This happened in Russia last year when up to 80,000 reindeer perished. The freezing rains also affected many reindeer in Norway, where one official called it "a serious crisis." It has also happened in the Canadian High Arctic several times since the 1970s, at times killing 90 percent of local caribou and muskoxen.

 

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Such events led researchers in 2020 to suggest that muskoxen face "an uncertain future".

So the news of Svalbard reindeer finding new ways to survive is "definitely encouraging," Jaakko Putkonen, a professor at the University of North Dakota, told The Guardian.

Putkonen's own research had accurately predicted that increased arctic rain could have disastrous consequences. The scientist also pointed to the complexity of the reindeer's situation.

“Some of the upcoming changes may be good to the reindeer and some may be detrimental," Putkonen said. “For example, from Scandinavia, there are reports of rain on snow promoting the growth of fungi [which can be toxic] under the snowpack due to warmer conditions, which has led the reindeer to avoid those areas. They may be trading one challenge for another one."

The crowded stone corridors of the popular tourist destination Petra turned dangerous recently when floods forced evacuations and injured several people.

Footage posted to social media on Dec. 26 showed floodwaters raging through the site. The chaotic scenes depicted sandy water cascading down cliffs, rivers running through what would usually be walkways, and people trying to escape in vehicles.

Video of flash floods in iconic #Petra in Jordan today, a world heritage site. Tourists have been evacuated, and a number of casualties reported in area: pic.twitter.com/kJIzQ6Paqn

— Joyce Karam (@Joyce_Karam) December 26, 2022

The calamity at the UNESCO World Heritage site triggered the evacuation of 1,700 people, according to Middle East Eye.

Heavy rain has inundated the region recently, and southern Jordan has become especially saturated. Raed Khattab, head of the Jordan meteorological department, told the Petra news agency that the country's southern region has received the worst of the rain.

#Jordan : Gorge known as the Siq in #Petra becomes river of mud as storms hit the ancient city & force evacuation of tourists #السيق #البتراء #البتراء pic.twitter.com/tYZ9PDHP74

— sebastian usher (@sebusher) December 26, 2022

And the situation has produced more than just the reported evacuations. Jordan's public security directorate issued a severe weather warning on Dec. 23 and reported that landslides and rockfall could occur. Jordanian news outlet Amman Net said three people sustained injuries when a deluge tipped over a minivan in the Ma'an Governorate, also in the south of the country.

Flooding in the area surrounding Petra has proved lethal in years past. In 2018, floods killed 11 people at the site and forced thousands of evacuations. That occurred just weeks after 21 others (including children on a school trip) died during floods in the Dead Sea region.

Also this weekend, flash floods hit Mecca, Saudi Arabia, causing damage to vehicles and property. Driving rain in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities forced municipal workers to pump water from choked streets.

Reports of floods also filtered in from the United Arab Emirates, Gaza, and Alexandria, Egypt, Middle East Eye reported.

What’s a rainbow scarf? The answer could be a straightforward descriptor for a way to display your gender politics and keep your neck warm simultaneously. Or it could refer to a rare, brightly colored structure seen in the sky in China last week.

A viral video showed a circular, iridescent rainbow pileus cloud floating above Haikou City in late August. From various camera positions, the colorful ring appears stationary above a dark cumulus cloud.

What is it? A pileus cloud, according to the World Meteorological Organization, is a small horizontal cloud that takes the position of a cap or hood near the top of a cumulus or cumulonimbus cloud (commonly, thunderhead) below.

Also called a “scarf” cloud, it’s rare enough to see one — let alone in technicolor.

In the atmospheric event that creates a pileus cloud, air rises rapidly around the lower cloud structure and condenses above once it hits its dew point. In the case of Haikou City’s rainbow scarf, light appears to have refracted just right off the millions of tiny droplets inside.

Some internet sources say it’s a hoax. The trolls then back off to claim the images are probably Photoshopped. Others have invoked China's recent cloud seeding efforts aimed at fabricating rain on the drought-stricken Yangtze River.

When was the last time you stood below an avalanche and steeled your nerve to keep the camera rolling — even as it enveloped you?

One hiker in the Tian Shan Mountains of Kyrgyzstan did exactly that. According to Harry Shimmin, he heard “the sound of deep ice cracking” nearby while hiking with a group of nine others on a guided tour in the range.

Soon, a cloud of ice, rock, and snow started cascading toward them from a ridgeline above. Then it started to become obvious that Shimmin wouldn’t get away.

Taking stock of his surroundings, he realized the safest thing he could do was stay put. So he did, and trained his camera on the onrushing deluge.

Shimmin’s report is thorough, and his hand proved steady. Watch it all play out here. Spoiler alert: everyone involved survived, but only by a matter of a few minutes of hiking.

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Given the world's easy access to all human knowledge, it's often tempting to feel like everything has been discovered. Yet an objective way of measuring waves has remained elusive. A new drone company claims to have found a solution.

Given the ever-increasing number of claims from surfers about record-breaking waves, the need for a proper measuring tool becomes apparent. For example, it took over a year for Guinness World Records to confirm that Sebastian Steudtner surfed a 26m wave in Nazaré in October 2020.

Called Henet Wave, the startup has announced a drone-based method for obtaining "objective" measurements of waves in real-time.

A recently released YouTube video shows the company's first demonstration of their drone technology in collaboration with surfing pro Andrew Cotton.

This new technology, if successful, could modernize surfing competitions.

"Henet was conceived late one night in 2020 in an office overlooking the Soup Bowl in Barbados," according to the company's website. The Soup Bowl is a popular surfing spot on the island's rugged east coast.

"An article debated the XXL female wave of the year entry...[whether] the surfer needed to complete the ride in order to win the award. To us, the bigger debate should have been the ability to differentiate between a 73-foot wave and a 69-foot wave using subjective methods. Henet was born."

Over the weekend, soaring temperatures near the planet’s poles alarmed the scientific community worldwide. Both the earth’s polar regions recorded record highs that didn't just surpass but obliterated previous records.

Officials at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado were tracking unusually warm Arctic temperatures on March 18, when even more erratic readings from Antarctica blindsided them.

That day, readings from the Arctic came in 10°C warmer than average, and areas around the North Pole approached or exceeded the melting point. At the same time, weather stations in Antarctica shattered records. The 3,234m high Concordia station registered -12.2°C, a massive 21˚C warmer than average.

High polar heat: what it means

The high readings weren’t the only facet of the events that made an impression on Ice Data Center scientists like Walt Meier — their simultaneity also came as a surprise. Anyone familiar with polar seasons will understand why.

“They are opposite seasons. You don’t see the North and the South (Poles) both melting at the same time,” he told The Associated Press. “It’s definitely an unusual occurrence.”

University of Wisconsin meteorologist Matthew Lazzara monitors East Antarctica’s Dome C-ii station. On Friday, it logged -10°C. The average for the date is -43°C.

“Not a good sign when you see that sort of thing happen,” Lazzara said succinctly. “That’s a temperature that you should see in January, not March. January is summer there. That’s dramatic.”

Both Lazzara and Meier said that the anomalous Antarctic temperatures are probably random — not signs of climate change. They did appear to flag it for future monitoring, though. If the phenomenon recurs, it might merit attention as part of a more comprehensive pattern.

Meier said that “a big atmospheric river” most likely poured warm, moist air over the continent from the Pacific Ocean. Similarly, warm Atlantic air swept into the Arctic off the northern coast of Greenland.

Though Friday’s events may have been random, they signify noteworthy data points in broadly measurable shifts. The Arctic as a whole checked in at 3.3°C warmer last week than the recorded average from 1979 to 2000. By comparison, the planet was only 0.6°C warmer than average.

Antarctica also experienced one of the least icy summers since record-keeping began in 1979. Ice coverage shrank to an all-time low of 1.9 million square kilometers in late February.

Janusz Golab, Maciej Kimel, and Michal Krol have arrived in Pakistan to repeat the British route on the Nameless Tower (6,286m). This would mark the first  (astronomical) winter ascent on that line in the Trango Towers.

The route, opened in 1976 by Martin Boysen, Joe Brown, Malcolm Howells, and Mo Anthoine, follows a 1,100m line up the South Face. It was graded as VI 5.10 A2 in summer, but the upcoming expedition will have to tackle an ice-covered face. They may have to climb the entire route with ice axes and crampons.

Tail end of winter

Polish teams have chosen targets in the Trango area at both the beginning and the end of the winter season. Marcin Tomaszeski and Damian Bielecki pioneered a new route on Uli Biaho Gallery in November-December. While they missed doing the entire clib during astronomical winter, the 800m-high face was definitely in a wintry state.

Tomaszewski and Bielecki had first aimed for Shipton Spire. They changed their minds after Pawel Haldas, the third member in the team, couldn't board the plane because he lacked some COVID documentation.

The current expedition, led by Golab, will surely be the last winter project in the Karakoram this season. While not within the limits of "meteorological" winter, they hope to complete the climb before calendar winter ends on March 21.

Denis Urubko has returned to high-altitude mountaineering in grand style. Yesterday, he and Russian teammates Anton Kravchenko, Andrew Shlyapnikov, and Max Berngard sent a new variation route on Koshar Gang.

The peak is "only" 6,046m and sees regular summer action, thanks to its short approach from Skardu and straightforward normal route. However, it had never been climbed in winter, and nothing in the winter Karakoram comes for free.

Standard route too dangerous in winter

The new variation leaves the standard ascent line soon after the high camp (4,800m) and traverses the flank of the mountain. As Urubko explained on social media, they chose the new line because the standard route was "too icy and avalanche-prone in winter". They called their new route Russkiy Moroz (Russian Frost).

Urubko and his partners were looking for a short expedition and so chose Koshar Gang, which is just one day from Skardu. From Skardu, the team spent two days acclimatizing near Base Camp. They then launched a summit push as soon as Urubko recovered from a bout of illness last weekend. The weather was far from stable. "[It was] the worst day of the expedition," he told RussianClimb after the four had safely returned to Base Camp.

Interestingly, the other climbers currently in the Karakoram -- Grace Tseng's team on K2 -- remained in Base Camp because of similar bad weather. Only today did conditions improve enough for them to move again toward Camp 1.

Coincidentally, Urubko stood atop this peak 11 years to the day after his previous first winter ascent of an 8,000'er. On February 2, 2011, he summited Gasherbrum II with Simone Moro and Cory Richards. Their climb featured stormy weather and a nerve-wracking descent in which they almost died in a massive avalanche. The documentary below reminds us of that epic.

Baintha Brakk I (7,285m), better known as Ogre I, has been attempted over 20 times. Only three expeditions have summited. ExplorersWeb dives into the history of this imposing granite tower.

The Karakoram presents some of the toughest mountaineering challenges on earth. Angular mountains, gigantic towers, dizzying ridges, unknown faces in remote places. It has always attracted the best climbers. Today, more than the 8,000'ers, it is the Karakoram's 7,000m and 6,000m peaks that are the future of mountaineering. Here, exploration continues to play the most important role.

Panmah Muztagh is a sub-mountain range in the heart of the Karakoram. In the Baltistan district of Pakistan, it is made of four groups of mountains -- the Ogre group, the Latok group, the Choktoi group, and the Chiring group.

The Ogre

Baintha Brakk I (7,285m) is better known as Ogre I. Besides its main summit, it has two secondary peaks. Its west and east summits are both 7,150m. Like a violin standing upright, this steep granite tower, with a prominence of more than 1,800m, requires serious commitment.

Over 20 expeditions have tried to climb it, but only three have managed to reach the summit.

The commitment begins at its often storm-battered Base Camp. From there, whichever route climbers choose hides danger. The weather is harsh and unpredictable, and the peak itself grants no respite. Once embarked on the ascent, the climber has to endure lack of oxygen, the endless lengths of its pillars, the challenging faces, the hanging seracs, and always, the ferocious winds.

The normal routes on 8,000m peaks have higher mortality rates, but then, far fewer people attempt the Ogre. There are no high-altitude tourists, you don't pose for photos, you can't get a helicopter directly to Camp 2, and there's no one waiting for you with hot tea at the camps.

The first ascent

After three previous attempts, the main summit of the Ogre was climbed for the first time on July 13, 1977. British climbers Doug Scott and Chris Bonington ascended via the southwest spur to the west ridge, and over the west summit to the main summit. They made a quick push, 15 straight hours of climbing from their final camp. The last section of the climb was a tower with a 100m vertical face.

After reaching the summit, disaster struck. At 7,200m, at the start of the first rappel, Scott fell. The rope held, but Scott hit the rockface hard. He lost his goggles and ice ax and broke both legs. Bonington climbed down to him, and they spent the night in a bivouac on a ledge.

”It was a long night waiting for the first light of dawn, which was ages coming,” Scott recalled in his book, The Ogre. "There was no wind, no sound at all, just a penetrating cold kept at bay by involuntary shivering and creating friction heat by rubbing arms and legs."

It was a slow and technical descent, hanging from ropes and crawling in sections. Scott dragged his broken legs inch by inch down the Orge. Their companions, who were in Camp 2, gave them up for dead and began to descend.

A storm forced Scott and Bonington to shelter for two days in a snow cave. Bonington contracted pneumonia, so he too was very weak. Things got worse when Bonington fell on his side and broke two ribs. Despite everything, they continued to descend, helping each other with all their might.

Finally, they met their two companions, Mo Anthoine and Clive Rowland. Together, they were able to reach Base Camp after a week. There, they had to wait a long time for rescue. Somehow, everyone got out alive.

The second ascent

On July 21, 2001, Urs Stocker, Iwan Wolf, and Thomas Huber reached the summit via the south pillar. Bad weather forced them to take refuge in a crevasse at 5,000m. At first, they had a dispute with an American team that was on the same route and had to wait for them to withdraw.

They built Camp 1 at 5,000m and then slept in two porta-ledges fixed in the middle of the pillar, at 5,900m and 6,200m. The team made a final camp at 6,500m at the foot of the traverse to the main summit, which was 800m of mixed terrain. From there, they began their summit push on July 21.

The wind was very strong, but they were able to top out. The group also made the first ascent of the Ogre III.

The third ascent

Hayden Kennedy, Kyle Dempster, and Josh Wharton started up the southeast ridge, then moved up the southeast face, and finally a section of the south face.

The team had to struggle through a rubble traverse and climb on mixed terrain. They bivouacked at 6,900m. Wharton got sick, but Kennedy and Dempster continued to the main summit. On August 21, 2012, they topped out. The descent was very difficult because Wharton was still unwell.

In the same season, Kennedy and Dempster made the first ascent of the east face of K7 (6,934m).

"I think alpine climbing comes down to 40 percent luck, 40 percent motivation, and 20 percent skill," Kennedy said after the expedition. "You have to be really motivated to do that. You just keep building and dealing with the bad rock and dealing with whatever."

For this climb, the young climbers received the Piolet D' Or.

Unfortunately, Dempster and Kennedy both died a few years later, Dempster on Ogre II in 2016, and Kennedy in 2017 in Montana. One day after his girlfriend died in an avalanche, Kennedy committed suicide. They were two unique talents.

Notable attempts

On June 15, 1983, French climbers Michel Fauquet and Vincent Fine completed 900m of the vertical south pillar without a fixed rope. They still had over 600m remaining to the summit, 400m of snow slopes, and more than 200m of rock. However, the weather turned and they had to wait in their bivouac tent.

On June 17, they tried to continue. They reached 7,100m before they decided to descend. They were very close, but the Ogre was not accommodating.

The south buttress

On August 5, 1993, a Swiss-German team led by Tom Dauer arrived at Base Camp. After two weeks of miserable weather, they fixed rope on the buttress up to 6,100m. They wanted to continue up the alpine-style route in two teams of three each. They made two attempts, but bad weather forced them to abort.

When the weather cleared on August 28, they tried again. The next day, Phillip Groebke fell while jumaring and died immediately. Nobody witnessed his fall to explain what went wrong. The group then retreated from the mountain.

The southwest face

In 2002, a Japanese team attempted the southwest face. Japanese climbers are famous for attempting new routes, and the Ogre has many potential new lines. But the southwest face is very dangerous because of a large number of seracs. The Japanese team almost made it but had to turn around 10 to 15 metres before the summit.

Some climbers might claim a summit, but the Japanese climbers were clear: They did not summit the Ogre, even if they only missed by a few metres. Their honesty is commendable.

The southeast buttress

On July 12, 1993, Americans Tom McMillan, Peter Cercelius, and Carlos Buhler made Base Camp at 4,450m. They intended to start their route from the head of the Choktoi Glacier. A group of Japanese climbers was already working on the route through the icefall, but the seracs changed day by day. The Americans did not want to enter the icefall and decided to flank it on ice slopes and rock walls.

The ascent to the col was steep, with 12 pitches of mixed ice and rock climbing. The Japanese, who had already roped off this dangerous stretch, offered to share the route and the ropes. They were about to withdraw after 20 days of trying. Only seven of those days had provided good weather. The Japanese fixed six pitches on ice. They also left one pitch equipped on the 600m granite buttress.

The U.S. group advanced, but the weather deteriorated and they had to return to Base Camp. McMillan got sick. On August 30, after several attempts, Buhler and Cercelius began their push up the buttress. But with only three or four pitches left, they saw that they could not continue alpine style and so withdrew.

The north face reconnaissance

Herve Barmasse and Daniele Bernasconi reached the foot of the north face of the Ogre at the beginning of July 2012. The north face is also dangerous, but Barmasse felt they had a chance. "There are weak points if you accept the constant exposure to avalanches and icefall," he said.

They started to acclimatize. After nine days at or above Base Camp, they wanted to start the climb. However, July 12 to July 28 yielded only two days of fine weather. Instead, they went to other peaks and returned to the Ogre on July 28. When they returned, they saw that even the vertical rock walls were covered in snow.

The north face of the Ogre remains one of the greatest unsolved challenges in the Karakoram.

The action -- or inaction -- on winter Manaslu enters a new stage, as a new storm approaches and forces the remaining climbers to wait longer. But winter still has 40 days to go, plenty of time to get things done, if the weather cooperates.

Some stay, some go

Stef Maginelle, Sophie Lenaerts, and Paula Strengell have called their attempt off and flew to Kathmandu eariler today. Oswald Rodrigo Pereira is staying and so are Pasang Rinzee, Chhepal Sherpa, Pasang Nurbu, Tenjin "Lama", and Mingtemba Sherpa, who previously supported Strengell. Dawa Sherpa, who was helping the Belgian couple, is pondering his options.

According to Seven Summit Treks, Strengell and the Belgian couple originally intended to climb until the end of January, but the excess of snow and the upcoming bad weather made them decide to call it a day.

Simone Moro and Alex Txikon have committed until the end of meteorological winter (February 28). Txikon reached the mountain on the first day of calendar winter on December 21. Moro showed up some days later but had already acclimatized on Ama Dablam. Strengell arrived at the same time as the Txikon team, but Maginelle and Lenaerts were unable to fly to Nepal until January 1.

The Belgians seem not to have given themselves much time for a winter expedition, although Seven Summit Treks' Thaneswar Guragai points out, "This year, there is a strong Sherpa team. If the weather had permitted, reaching the summit in January would have been perfectly possible."

Rinzee, Moro, and Chhepal had reached Base Camp after a tough going in deep snow. However, everyone returned to Samagaon today to shelter from the expected snowfall.

With their internet connection, the climbers have begun to share photos and some explanations.

Pereira's take on goals -- and crampons

Oswald Pereira contacted ExplorersWeb to provide details of his latest foray up the mountain. In contrast to Lenaerts and Maginelle, the Polish climber never intended to go to any higher camps. He was simply helping break trail and getting some drone footage of the mountain.

"I went ahead, together with Mingtemba, to break trail from Base Camp upward and brought photography equipment, so I didn't take the crampons I had in Base Camp because I preferred to go light," he explained. "I have a second pair [of crampons] in Camp 1."

Instead, he used snowshoes in the deep snow up gentle slopes. "Needless to say, had I had any intention of reaching the col and Camp 1, I would have brought crampons!"

Pereira admitted on social media that the mountain is putting his patience to the test. On a positive note, he has at least obtained some good imagery, as seen on the feature image.

The route to Camp 1 on Saturday

Stef Maginelle posted a video showing the highest point that the team reached: a snow-loaded serac section. He points out the 30m-long crevasses hidden under the fresh snow that were too dangerous to cross.

"There should be a ladder somewhere there, but where -- that's the question," Maginelle said.

Dawa Sherpa climbed with them and also mentioned the deep snow. The going was particularly hard between the "lower" Camp 1 and the standard Camp 1, which is 100m higher and 350m further. That short distance took them three hours to reach. Shoveling their equipment out from beneath a metre and a half of snow was an equally tough task.

The next time you hear the high-pitched whine of a drone cut the alpine silence, it may not be because an influencer is hunting down video content.

In Scotland, mountain rescue teams have implemented drones to make their jobs, and the mountains at large, safer. The machines can already help search for missing or injured people in remote, hard-to-access locations. Drone experts see their mountain utility expanding, thanks to the wide range of tools and technology they can carry.

ExplorersWeb has called drones "game changers" for mountain rescue. In those applications, they work fairly intuitively. Most elementarily, a drone pilot on the ground can help rescuers suss out the situation from below with the unit's onboard camera. Operators can also fit drones with various gadgets like lights, speakers, and even radio handsets.

Experts say the technology has helped rescue teams access terrain previously thought too dangerous for ingress. So far, Scotland's 28 volunteer search-and-rescue teams have all adopted the technology. Rescuers implemented drones on Ben Nevis, the southern uplands, Fife, and the Trossachs over the last year.

Drones in mountain rescue: how it works

John Stevenson leads a rescue team for Lochaber mountain rescue in Fort William, which covers Ben Nevis. The group currently employs four drones. Their most critical advantage is in scouting.

"The drones are definitely an asset; there's no doubt about it," Stevenson told The Guardian. "We're putting drones into places where years ago, we might have thought twice about putting people in."

The Lochaber unit has also found that drones can sweep terrain faster than humans can during searches for missing persons. Tom Nash, a former RAF Tornado navigator, founded the Search and Rescue Aerial Association of Scotland and has trained rescuers to pilot drones across the country. He explained further:

Risk reduction is a key use of a drone. Previously, where someone has needed to do a rope rescue or a stretcher lift, you would have some poor person dangling over the edge of a cliff, roped back, peering over saying 'I think we should put the rope down here.' Now, just put the drone 20 yards out the other side of the cliff and look back, [and] you can see where the casualty is. You can floodlight that at night. We can put a speaker on, and if we know it's going to be a while, we can speak to the casualty and say help is on the way, 'give us a thumbs up if you're OK but can't move.' That's a really critical use.

Nash looks for drones' roles on rescue crews to keep expanding as pilots' skills and available technology advance. In the future, he said they could potentially "drape" 4G mobile phone coverage over areas where phone masts are knocked out or don't exist. Eventually, drones could even deliver supplies and equipment to rescue sites.

"It's so exciting because it can and will revolutionize things," he said.

The last we heard, Marcin Tomaszewski and Damian Bielecki were in Skardu, Pakistan, bound for Shipton Spire. They had lost team member Pawel Haldas, when he couldn't board the plane because his COVID paperwork was not in order.

For three weeks, there were no updates. Reports spoke of bitter cold in the mountains. Yesterday, the two Polish climbers emerged with an amazing new route under their belts.

The climbers had had to recalibrate their original Shipton Spire goal because there were only two of them. They made their decision when they saw the spectacular Uli Biaho Gallery (ca. 4,500m), which rises from the Trango Glacier.

In the shade

The climbers spent 11 full days climbing the 800m route. While not officially a winter climb, since winter only begins today, conditions were extremely hard on such a big wall. The climbers reportedly endured -32˚C, which they said they were expecting.

The real problem was that the sun never once touched that northeast-oriented wall. "[Climbing] on sunny walls in the same period would have been completely different," Tomaszewski wrote, "as far as conditions on the wall, climbing techniques, and factors such as drying sleeping bags."

The fight

The climb itself "was a fight," Tomaszewski said. "Climbing in narrow and exposed areas with heavy gear for technical belaying, hauling gear up the wall, applying survival logistics, the bivouacs, the so-short days...These made us feel like being in the ring or a fighting cage with ourselves, without an opponent. Hence the name of the route: Frozen Fight Club."

"Catching our breath while climbing on the verge of frostbiting all our fingers required a lot of attention and constant warming up," Tomaszewski recalls. "In the evening and in the morning, our gear was all white, as if someone had sprayed it with nitrogen."

There was no room for any error or omission. The heat released during the climb evaporated instantly when we stood still, giving way to the cold, as if we had suddenly crossed over to the shadowed side of the moon or Mars. Because of the lack of [flexibility], we could not climb in down suits, so quickly adding new layers of warm clothing became crucial. While climbing, it was snowing a little and a bit windy.

Tomaszewski praised his climbing partner: "Damian is a pure winter climber and he quickly found himself adapting to the new conditions, although it was a big-wall premiere for him. He fought beautifully at the M7 pitch on the upper part of the route, which was difficult until the very end."

After the summit, the team needed a last bivouac in the portaledge, including all the "standard procedure of getting into the sleeping bag, melting water, cooking a meal, and warming the feet."

Blazing a winter big-wall trail

"Perhaps we are just blazing the winter trail for big-wall climbing...in the Karakoram and the high mountains," Tomaszewski said. "Winter conditions on the Karakoram's rocky faces benefit technical, big-wall climbers a lot, although it is not an easy piece of bread."

In winter big-wall climbing, each existing line can be seen with a different eye, Tomaszewski points out, adding, "[Our climb was] another opportunity to learn more about yourself...come to a few conclusions, and finally eat a delicious meal after descending to the base."

The Polish climbers are on their way back to Islamabad to catch a flight home. They expect to spend Christmas in Pakistan but be back in Poland by the New Year.

Tomaszewski has posted many more pictures of their climb on his Facebook page.

Winter officially begins in one week, and some teams have already reached their Base Camps. Others are acclimatizing not far away.

Winter Everest: Jost Kobusch is in Lobuche, his home for the next two months. "I am beside the Pyramid," he texted ExplorersWeb. He's referring to the high-altitude research centre at 5,050m. The German solo climber left Kathmandu on December 8 and trekked all the way from Salleri  -- the last point accessible by Jeep -- instead of flying to Luckla.

The point was not to acclimatize more slowly. "You don't get acclimatized in the lowlands," he points out. He just wanted to reduce his carbon footprint without going full Goran Kropp and cycling from Europe to Everest. Kobusch will spend the next days "organizing gear, reading some books, going for walks, and preparing for a quick start once winter begins."

Moro's change of plan

Winter Manaslu: As we reported yesterday, Alex Txikon's team and Oswald Rodrigo Pereira are already in Kathmandu. They plan to reach Base Camp on the first day of winter. Meanwhile, Simone Moro is acclimatizing in the Khumbu. Originally, he planned to do Ama Dablam as a training climb, but a forecast of very high winds on the upper mountain for the next five days has forced him to change plans. Instead, he is heading for Lobuche Peak (6,119m). Moro confirms that he will climb with Pasang Rinzee Sherpa during acclimatization and on winter Manaslu.

Winter K2: Visa problems are delaying Grace Tseng's arrival in Pakistan, her outfitter, Dolma Expeditions, told ExplorersWeb. The Taiwanese client's Sherpa team has already received their visas and is ready to leave at any time.

Hiraide and Mitoro: Kazuya Hiraide and Takuya Mitoro are in Base Camp after reconnoitering the unclimbed and unnamed 6,020m peak they have set their sights on. The pair also plan the first ascent of 7,000m+ Karun Koh's North Face. Bad weather should keep the climbers in BC for at least two days.

Nepalis for the Seven Summits

Tashi, Mingma, and Chhang Dawa Sherpa, the three brothers who jointly own Seven Summit Treks, are temporarily abandoning their Himalayan realm and extending their tours to Antarctica. This winter, the trio will guide both Mount Vinson and a last-degree ski trip to the South Pole. For Dawa, Vinson would mark the fifth of Seven Summits. The siblings hope to become the first Nepali team on Vinson, but they will have to hurry: Nirmal Purja is also there, guiding another Nepali, as well as Qatar client Asma Al Thani, who was with Nims on Manaslu and Dhaulagiri.

Finally, the brothers are planning not only to complete the Seven Summits but also to do some kind of trek to the North Pole next spring (in all likelihood, a last degree). They will be back in Nepal in time to oversee their company's expeditions, which has hundreds of clients signed up for Everest and other 8,000'ers.

Gelje Sherpa is trying to become the youngest 14x8000er summiter ever, but the odds seem against him. He has no sponsors, two peaks left in two different foreign countries, and only 11 months left. Mingma David Sherpa, the current youngest, finished his list at age 30 years and five months. Gelje is ready to go to extremes to surpass that.

Currently, Gelje has only Broad Peak and Cho Oyu to go. He plans to climb Cho Oyu this winter, but not by the straightforward Tibetan route. With China closed to foreigners, Gelje will attempt the 8,188m peak via a new route from his own country.

The challenge is huge. Only 14 people, according to Mingma G, have ever summited Cho Oyu from Nepal. Denis Urubko and Boris Deshesko did it last, in 2009.

Unlike the normal route from China, the peak's southern side is highly difficult and exposed. If we add winter to the equation, we get an extraordinary venture, fit only for the very best. But Gelje, though only 29, fits that category.

"This would be the 13th peak in my 14x8,000'er challenge [and] my sixth expedition to winter 8,000'ers," Gelje told Explorersweb. "If I succeed, it will be my second winter 8,000m summit after last year's K2.

Gelje has a route up Cho Oyu in mind.

"I checked a potential route during a helicopter flight last year," Gelje said. "Also, three members in the team have been at Cho Oyu's South Side Base Camp and are familiar with the route. Finally, I fully trust in my climbing partners' wide experience."

There is much at stake, both for Gelje and Nepal. If he succeeds on Cho Oyu, this may be the alternative that Nepali outfitters have long sought, one that does not depend on China's complicated regulations.

A Sherpa leader

But there is something even more important at stake with Cho Oyu. For the first time in his career -- and in the history of most Sherpa climbers -- Gelje will succeed without piggybacking as a guide for others. This time, he wants to be the leader of his own all-Nepali team. And he is not short of volunteers.

So far, the list of confirmed climbers includes Nima Dorji Sherpa, Tenging Gyaljen, Pemba Sherpa, Mingma Sherpa, Karma Sherpa, IFMGA guide Vinayak Malla, plus some Base Camp staff.

"The list is not final, though," Gelje told ExplorersWeb. "If I obtain enough funding, I'd like to add at least three more climbers in order to have as strong a team as possible." He has obviously learned a lesson from Winter K2, where the combined effort of 10 strong Nepalis was the key to success.

Funding is currently the main issue. With no sponsors, he is trying to raise about $66,000 through a Gofundme page. Other Nepali climbers are trying to help by spreading the word. We heard about it from Mingma G, who was also one of the Winter K2 summiters. Mingma, however, is not joining Gelje on Cho Oyu. "My family does not agree with it," he explains.

Gelje ticked off two peaks of his list this year: Lhotse in spring and Kangchenjunga in fall. After Cho Oyu, he will need to go to Pakistan for Broad Peak. He'll have all summer to do so.

The next generation

"They say we are nice guys, but I want to be the world's BADASS!" Gelje wrote on Instagram this week. This is a good sign for the younger generation of ambitious Sherpa climbers, eager to grab their opportunities and leave behind the old patronizing image of the patient Buddhist, smiling with a huge load on his back. Gelje is used to being recognized in Nepal as a climbing celebrity. And yes, he is surely a nice guy too.

Only a few years ago, he was risking his life as Ice Doctor at Everest's Khumbu Icefall. Alex Txikon hired him to help on his first winter attempt on Everest and counted on him for subsequent expeditions. So when Gelje joined the Winter K2 expedition as its youngest member, he was also the most experienced at dealing with 8,000m peaks at that time of year.

Like Mingma David, Gelje climbed most of his 8,000'ers as part of Nirmal Purja's 14x8,000'er project. However, while Mingma David is Purja's business partner at Elite Exped, Gelje freelances for several outfitters. Most recently, Dolma Outdoor hired him to guide Grace Tseng on Kangchenjunga and Seven Summit Treks contracted him on Ama Dablam shortly after.

His dream, however, as he told us in a previous interview, is to start his own company and give his two kids an easier life than his. Nevertheless, mountains are more than a job for Gelje. They are, he suggests,  "my dream, my passion, my life."

Kazuya Hiraide is busy with last-minute preparations in Hunza, which he considers his "second home". He is adapting his stomach to the local Pakistani food and shopping for supplies and kitchen implements.

"This is a winter expedition and it is so cold that there will be no Base Camp staff," Hiraide explained. "We will cook ourselves." He and climbing partner Takuya Mitoro leave tomorrow for Karun Koh, to pioneer a line up its North Face.

When they arrived in Hunza, clouds covered Rakaposhi, where Hiraide opened a new route on the South Face two years ago. Still, Hiraide felt that he could see the mountain "in my heart". The clouds tore open at sunset on the following day, and the Japanese climber took the photo below.

Also in Pakistan, sad news broke yesterday that military helicopter pilots Major Irfan Bercha and Major Raja Zeeshan Jahanzeb lost their lives in a crash. Details are scarce, since the pilots were on a mission in the disputed Siachen Glacier area, long claimed by both India and Pakistan. Apparently, the weather conditions were bad at the time. The helicopter crashed onto the glacier.

Both pilots were members of the so-called "Fearless Five", the search-and-rescue squadron on K2 last winter. Climber and filmmaker Elia Saikaly came to know the pilots during the search missions on K2, as the helicopters looked for traces of missing climbers Ali Sadpara, John Snorri, and Juan Pablo Mohr. Irfan Bercha was also a passionate photographer and had become a friend of Saikaly's.

"During the search and rescue operation on K2 last winter, the Pakistani pilots...flew higher than 7,000m, an incredibly dangerous endeavor," Saikaly wrote. "These men risked their lives on that mission, as they do on all their missions."

Meanwhile in Nepal...

After missing his connecting flight and getting stuck in Istanbul for two days, Simone Moro finally arrived in Kathmandu. He is preparing for winter Manaslu but first he will climb Ama Dablam.

"The idea is to climb as much as possible, starting with Ama Dablam to acclimatize, and then go to Manaslu," Moro wrote. The Italian climber has not been very explicit about his specific climbing plans for Manaslu. How will his expedition interact with others on the mountain, for example? Besides Alex Txikon's team, a commercial expedition may be coming.

Teams going to Nepal in 2022 should note that as of the New Year, Nepal's Civil Aviation Administration will require that all climbers have an insurance policy covering at least $5,000 in case they contract COVID. The insurance must cover a 14-day quarantine in a hotel room and medical expenses in case of getting sick. Climbers must submit the policy to Nepali authorities one week before arrival.

Photo: 4Sport.ua

Marcin Tomaszewski has arrived in Pakistan, ready to tackle Shipton Spire in winter conditions. But he has already lost part of his team.

At the Berlin airport, Pawel Haldas didn't have all his COVID paperwork and couldn't board the plane.

"When we found out about it, we only had two hours before departure," Tomaszewski wrote on social media. He and Damian Bielecki, the third member of the team, hurried to redistribute some of the vital gear in Haldas's luggage. Then the two of them boarded "with a lump in the throat and a feeling of collapse".

Haldas has no time to get his paperwork in order and board another plane, so the team will have to do without him. "Postponing the expedition to next year is not an option," said a still shocked Tomaszewski. "So here we are in Skardu, getting ready for tomorrow's journey into the mountains."

No further contact

Given the unexpected reduction in manpower, Tomaszewski and Bielecki are not entirely positive about the outcome of the expedition. For now, they want to trek to the Trango Towers, set up Base Camp, then decide what to do next. "We have a lot of thinking ahead of us: Our original plan has broken, so we'll need to create a new one."

The Polish climbers also warned that they will not post updates while in the Karakorum. "We're cutting ourselves off from the world, disappearing into the frozen mountains," they said. They will be alone in every way since no other team is coming to the Trango Towers at this forbidding time of year.

The nearest people might be the porters trudging to K2 Base Camp. They are carrying supplies for Nepal's Dolma Expedition team and lone client Grace Tseng. Neither the Nepali outfitter nor Pakistani agencies listed other expedition members, besides Tseng herself.

Tseng last posted on Instagram two days ago, still at home and using a hypobaric chamber to speed up acclimatization.

Women make up less than 2% of all mountain guides certified by the International Federation of Mountain Guides Association (IFMGA). Here, we examine the gender disparity, talk about what it takes to attain this highest guide certification, and briefly profile some prominent female mountain guides.

What is the IFMGA?

The IFMGA was founded in 1965 by several mountain guides organizations from various Alps nations. As of 2021, the IFMGA oversees guiding standards for its 26 member associations, encompassing more than 20 countries.

IFMGA mountain guides have attained the highest professional credentials, and the prestigious IFMGA pin is given to those certified as Rock, Alpine, and Ski Mountaineering Guides. For that reason, mountain guides can "work in any type of terrain, anywhere" in any of the IFMGA's member countries.

The IFMGA gender gap

Although female mountain guides are common in some parts of the world — the Alps and Canada, for example — overall, the ratio of female-to-male IFMGA-certified guides stands out from almost any other vocation. Estimates from 2018 indicate that just 1.5% of all IFMGA Mountain Guides are women. That percentage gets substantially slimmer in areas like Nepal and Latin America. The United States is also stunningly short on female guides, with a headcount of around 12-15.

Social and cultural barriers are the primary cause of such a low female IFMGA turnout. After all, some of the world's best and most encroached high-altitude peaks rest near extremely "traditional" settlements. Here, women rarely stray from their traditional domestic roles.

Becoming an IFMGA mountain guide

IFMGA programs are conducted around the world by member associations. Often referred to as the Ph.D. of mountaineering, IFMGA training takes at least five years and $30,000 to complete. To even qualify for enrollment in the proper IFMGA course, applicants must have four nontechnical, sub-7,000m treks and at least one successful ascent of a peak above 7,000m.

Once enrolled in the program, candidates must pass three-month guiding exams in the field and a 21-day test in which they must guide a client on an alpine trek.

Prominent female IFMGA mountain guides

Angela Hawse: AMGA President & 6th-ever female IFMGA guide

Angela Hawse became the sixth female IFMGA mountain guide globally and only the third in the U.S. For many years, Hawse has led the American Mountain Guides Association (AMGA) in a significant capacity — first as director, then V.P., and today, as president.

She also co-founded Chicks Climbing and Skiing, a women-led, female-focused outfitter.

In her long career, Hawse has led expeditions to Denali, Carstensz Pyramid, Ama Dablam (6,120m), Everest, Aconcagua, and Pakistan. She also executed a self-supported, 26-day ski traverse from Sweden to Norway. Hawse has deep experience in sport, trad, alpine, ice, big wall, and mountaineering disciplines.

Notably, her Ama Dablam expedition was all-female and raised $23,000 for the dZi Foundation, a women's organization in the region.

Juliana Garcia – 1st female Latin American IFMGA guide

In 2017, Ecuadorean Juliana Garcia became the first IFMGA-certified female mountain guide in Latin America.

Even earlier, in 2015, Garcia was president of the Ecuadorean Mountain Guide Association. She now sits on the IFMGA's Board of Directors, the first woman to serve as a board member. Garcia and Angela Hawse (AMGA) are the only two women in the world at the helm of a mountain guide association.

Garcia is known for establishing high-altitude routes alpine-style, including H.K. on the eastern Huandoy in the Peruvian Andes in 2021, for which she and Joshua Jarrin received a Piolet d'Or nomination. In 2016, Garcia and climber Anna Pfaff established The Solstice Route on Bolivia's Tiquimani (5,551m) and attempted Gasherbrum II (8,034m) in Pakistan, one of the tallest peaks in the world.

Dawa Yangzum Sherpa – 1st Asian female IFMGA guide

Nepalese mountain guide Dawa Yangzum Sherpa received her IFMGA certification in 2018 at the age of 27, making her one of the youngest female mountain guides in the world.

By that time, Yangzum had already summited Everest at just 21 years old. She has also summited Yala Peak, Island Peak, Ama Dablam (6,120m), Annapurna 1, and K2. She owns the first ascent of Chekigo Peak, also in the Himalaya. Finally, Yangzum remains the youngest woman ever to have climbed K2. In 2019, she clinched the speed record on Makalu, taking just 20 hours from Base Camp and back without supplemental O2.

In April 2021, Yangzum's all-female team summited Annapurna (8,091m) without supplemental oxygen.

Fifty years ago this week, the UK experienced the worst mountaineering debacle in modern history. Five adolescent students and their guide perished during a weekend school trip to the Cairngorms.

A weekend expedition to Ben Macdui

On November 20, 1971, 14 students from Ainslie Park secondary school set out for a weekend school outing to the Cairngorms mountain range in Scotland's eastern Highlands.

Ben Beattie, Ainslie Park's 23-year-old outdoor education teacher, spearheaded the short expedition. Joining him were Beattie's 20-year-old girlfriend and fellow mountaineer, Catherine Davidson, and 18-year-old Sheelagh Sunderland, a mountain guide-in-training at the Lagganlia outdoor center near the Cairngorms.

Beattie's plan involved dividing the students into two groups, according to experience. The groups would take different routes over the Cairngorm's plateau to Ben Macdui (1,309m), the second-highest peak in the UK. Beattie helmed the eight strongest hikers. Davidson and Sunderland oversaw the less experienced group.

The expedition would, in theory, take two days and one night. Both teams would meet at Corrour Bothy, where they would set up camp before hiking back the following day.
That was the plan.

A blizzard strikes the Cairngorms

Although Beattie, Davidson, and Sunderland were prepared for cold conditions, they weren't ready for a severe turn in the weather. A blizzard walloped the groups, disorienting them on the featureless plateau. Temperature drops would soon prove fatal.

Beattie's team was able to secure higher ground and a shelter where they spent the night. Facing similarly dire conditions the next day, Beattie steered his students off the plateau to a hut where he could radio the Lagganlia Centre.

Davidson and Sunderland's team were not so fortunate. For two days, they huddled on the mountainside in their bivouac, unable to move because of the storm. Lagganlia dispatched a team of 50 rescue workers from surrounding areas to locate the missing group.

On Monday, November 22, a helicopter crew spotted Davidson crawling and searching for help. When they reached Sunderland and the six students, they found all but one deceased and buried in snow. Carol Bertram, Diane Dudgeon, Lorraine Dick, Susan Byrne, and William Kerr, aged 15 and 16, along with Sunderland, had perished. Only 15-year-old Raymond Leslie and Davidson survived.

Impact

Three months later, authorities conducted a fatal accident inquiry into the Cairngorms tragedy. It revealed that the permission forms issued to parents of the Ainsley Park students did not state that the expedition would include winter mountaineering. Still, the quorum held that Beattie and John Paisley, Lagganlia Centere's principal, were not responsible for the fatalities.

The inquiry did require schools to provide more exacting information to parents and guardians about excursions involving certain risks. It also called for improved training and certification standards of instructors and for institutions like Lagganlia to consult with experts when planning emergency accommodations.

Now, 50 years on, it's difficult to quantify how impactful Britain's greatest mountain disaster in the Cairngorms has been on mountaineering and outdoor guiding protocols. The Lagganlia Centre remains open and continues to instruct youth in the safe pursuit of adventure.

Metaphorically and literally, Ken Smith is a man who lives on the fringes. For the past four decades, the 74-year-old has hewn an unconventional, off-grid life in Scotland's rural Loch Treig. And the "Hermit of Treig" is the subject of an intimate documentary by filmmaker Lizzie McKenzie, who spent two years documenting Smith's unconventional lifestyle.

Although many of us associate the wilderness hermit life with a log cabin in the Alaskan or Yukon wilderness, several eccentric wayfarers also call the Scottish Highlands home, according to The Guardian.

A brief history of a hermit

In Smith's case, he had a lifelong love of wilderness and exploration and spent much of his early adulthood traveling the world on foot.

His decision to live reclusively transpired after Smith learned that his mother and father had passed away while he was on a 35,000km trek across Canada's Yukon Territory. When he returned home to the news, his grief was so immense that the young Smith took to wandering across the UK.

In 1984, he came upon Loch Treig, the 'lonely loch' as he endearingly calls it. There, a two-hour walk from the nearest market, nestled in the Highlands, Smith built the humble log cabin that he has called home ever since. No electricity, no running water, no gas.

"The land loves you back."

As a capable fisher and gardener, Smith has thrived off the land and nearby streams. The Hermit even brews beer and vints wine. He's reportedly stored 80 gallons of homemade wine in anticipation of his funeral.

His way of existing is exceptionally sustainable, give or take his monthly supply run to town and a recent run-in with medical mishaps. "I think if you love the land, it sort of loves you back. It loves you back in all the things it produces for you," Smith said.

For the most part, modern luxuries (which, in his view, include electricity, plumbing, and gas) aren't particularly useful because they aren't essential. The Hermit of Treig isn't concerned with being "the most off-grid" person or garnering any such notoriety.

He owns a radio for weather forecasts, a wristwatch, a few cameras to help him remember things, and a GPS beacon, which he turns to "check-in" mode every Sunday for family and friends afar.

In a bout of good luck, a friend gifted Smith the beacon in 2019, just days before he suffered a stroke. The Hermit sent out an SOS, which first pinged a station in Houston, Texas, before relaying to local Scottish responders. Emergency personnel helicoptered to the lonely loch and flew Smith to a hospital where he stayed until deemed recovered enough to return to Treig.

Owing to residual memory and vision impairments, Smith now pays for biweekly deliveries of supplies. Still, the elderly Scotsman remains considerably self-sufficient. And, contrary to the moniker, he maintains close relationships with family and friends made throughout his travels — through letter-writing, of course.

'The Hermit of Treig' Documentary

Smith's longtime friend and film director, Lizzie McKenzie, offers a close look into his spirited, unconventional world in The Hermit of Treig ,which premiered on November 9 and is available to UK viewers through BBC Scotland.

On February 13, 1983, 27-year-old ski mountaineer Rudi Moder disappeared during a two-to-three day solo trek in Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP). Six days later, Moder's roommate in Fort Collins, Colorado, reported him missing.

From February 20-23, ground and aerial crews as well as an avalanche search dog scoured RMNP's northwestern perimeter. Except for a small food container and a handbuilt snow shelter housing Moder's sleeping bag and nonessential gear, the recovery effort was a bust.

Follow-up ground and air operations continued the search in the spring and summer, but the German skier was never seen nor heard from again.

That is, until the dog days of 2020 when a hiker discovered desiccated human remains while passing through the park's Skeleton Gulch, an area that was part of the original search swath 37 years before.

But conditions precluded an actual recovery of the skeletal leftovers when wildfires forced the area to close. By the time that the fires abated, snow was already falling, covering the high elevation area.

It wasn't until the summer of 2021 that park rangers and FBI officials could extract the remains. At Skeleton Gulch, they also uncovered ski mo equipment, apparel, and a few personal effects.

But it's unclear if the story ends there. Comparisons of the subject's teeth to Moder's old dental records failed to yield conclusive results. Officials, however, seem satisfied that the remains are those of Moder.

“The discovery and recovery of Rudi Moder’s remains close out a nearly four-decade-long cold case," the Park stated in a news release.

An avalanche on Ecuador's highest peak, Chimborazo (6,263m), collided with 16 alpinists on Sunday, October 24. At the time of writing, three climbers were confirmed deceased, three were undergoing intense medical care, and three remained unaccounted for, according to Quito emergency responders.

The mountaineering group was at 6,100m, just 160m below the summit at the time. Authorities have not released the climbers' identities, but all are believed to be Ecuadorean nationals.

Chimborazo, in the Cordillera range of the Andes, is an inactive stratovolcano. The caldera last erupted around 550 A.D. and typically lies dormant for 1,000 years between eruptions. Volcanic activity was not at play here.

Instead, bad weather and snow melt reportedly caused Sunday's avalanche. Experts with the Geophysical Institute of Quito explained that Chimborazo's corniced summit and severely steep grade make this peak especially dangerous.

Chimborazo's past avalanches, eruptions

This is not the first time that an avalanche on Chimborazo has proven deadly. In the 1970s, a passenger plane carrying 59 people slammed into the mountainside, which an avalanche had obscured from the pilots' view. Authorities didn't uncover the wreckage until 2003.

In 1994, an avalanche killed a group of 10 international ascensionists.

In 2015, climbers discovered at around 5,500m the remains of three people who perished 20 to 30 years earlier.

While the Polish National Team still considers whether or not to attempt Winter K2, at least one top expedition from Poland will in the Karakorum this winter. Marcin Tomaszewski, Damian Bielecki, and Pawel Haldas have set their sights on the stunning 5,852m Shipton Spire. Starting in December, they will try to open a new route on its frozen granite slabs.

Marcin Tomaszewski is a big wall-climber with an impressive international resumé. His two partners are also well-seasoned winter climbers, with wide experience in the Tatras Mountains and the Alps. For Bielecki and Haldas, Shipton Spire will be a logical next step after climbing the North Face of the Eiger last winter. Tomaszewski himself climbed that classic wall in winter 2016 with the late Tom Ballard, opening a new route that they called 'Titanic'.

Tomaszewski has never been to the Karakorum in winter before. But he and Marek Raganowicz opened a new route, the remarkable 'Bushido', on the Great Trango Tower in 2013. The 46-pitch route (VII- A4+, UIAA grade: VII+) is considered one of the best big-wall ascents in history. They did this, however, in summer. This time, he and his team are determined to bag what seems to be a winter first on Shipton Spire.

"Someone has yet to climb big-wall style in the Karakorum in winter," he told ExplorersWeb.

Before heading for Pakistan, the team will train on big walls in the Alps and the Dolomites.

As for the challenge ahead, they know what will it be like. "It's gonna be cold," Tomaszewski said. "We'll fight".

Four women and one man have died on Russia's Mount Elbrus when a major blizzard caught a large commercial group on its way down from the summit.

According to preliminary reports, four of the deceased climbers froze to death. Another climber fell sick during the ascent and turned around. She eventually "died in the guide's arms," the AFP agency reported. Others were rescued in highly difficult conditions.

A later and more expansive account from Mountain.ru said that at 10 am, the 16 clients and four guides had reached Elbrus's summit plateau. The lead guides were Ilya Chuikov and Anton Nikiforov, assisted by Taulan Kipkeev and Igor Dankov. On the plateau, a woman fell sick and started down with Dankov. The rest of the group continued toward the summit.

Sudden blizzard

Fifteen minutes later, "the pressure dropped sharply, the wind began to blow up from below and an unprecedented storm broke out. Visibility from dense snow was no more than half a metre," reported Mountain.ru.

The woman died before reaching the Sedlovina hut. Dankov called for help, then descended on his own. Meanwhile, authorities launched a rescue operation.

On the upper part of the mountain, the guides divided the group into "fast" and "slow" ones and tried to save everyone's lives. But one of the participants broke a leg while descending, slowing down the rest. Two died on the trail and two others collapsed. They were carried to the Garabashi station at 3,900m, where they died without regaining consciousness.

The victims were Anna Makarova, Vyacheslav Borisov, Elena Nesterova, Anastasia Zhigulina, and Irina Galchuka, all in their 30s.

Rescuers evacuated 11 with frostbite and other injuries to a nearby hospital. Three escaped unharmed and are resting at a hotel in the area.

Elbrus's gentle slopes draw the ill-prepared

Mount Elbrus (5,642m), an inactive volcano located in the northern Caucasus near the Georgian border, is the highest peak in Europe and thus one of the Seven Summits. Its normal southern route includes no technical sections.

It also features easy access: A ski resort on lower Elbrus includes lifts up to Base Camp at the Barrel Huts. Snowcats typically convey climbers up to the Pashtuchov Rocks at 4,700m on summit day. This makes Elbrus a popular and often crowded peak.

Its mild slopes and dome-like summit even allow climbing all the way on skis or snowshoes. Peak season runs through spring and summer, but it can also be climbed in fall -- depending on weather, as the recent events have sadly shown.

Emergency evacuations and tragedy are not uncommon at Elbrus. Its apparent ease encourages some inexperienced people to treat it as just a really big hill. Many are not properly acclimatized, have inadequate equipment, or are in poor shape.

I have a strange habit of losing whatever I happen to put on my feet. Once I tried to throw my boots across a river in a remote place in the Yukon so I could then wade across. While I succeeded in throwing one of the boots across the river, the other boot landed squarely in the river, floated downstream, and disappeared. 

Another time I climbed an icy mountain in Iceland, and upon reaching the summit, I decided to shake the snow off my crampons. I shook one of the crampons a bit too vigorously, and it flew off my boot and bounced down the mountain. My Icelandic climbing partner carried me much of the way down the mountain on his back.

More recently, I was leading a nature walk outside Anchorage, Alaska, when — perhaps to exhibit my expertise as an outdoorsman — I tried to leap across a brook. Instead of landing on the other side, I landed in the middle of it, whereupon some of the folks on the walk cheered. One man shouted, “Terrific performance! Do it again!”

Needless to say, my boots were soaked from sole to shaft. That night I put them on the mat outside my motel room so they could get at least partially dry. The next morning, they were gone. Stolen, I assumed.

“I’ll drive you to a store where you can buy some boots,” said my friend Ted Mala, an Inupiat elder and director of traditional healing at the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage. He also happened to be the son of Ray Mala, star of a 1933 film entitled Eskimo.

I warned Ted that my feet were so wide that I often had considerable difficulty finding boots or shoes that fit them. He merely nodded.

Our first stop was Sam’s Club, of which Ted was a member. Not surprisingly, none of the boots fit my feet. Then we visited a sporting goods store called Big Ray’s. No luck. Next was an Army-Navy type store located on Anchorage’s so-called Eskimo strip. Still no luck. Then we went to an outdoor store whose products were designed for mountaineers, but it would seem that mountaineers don’t have very wide feet.

In front of one store sat a drunk singing a ballad about a woman named Nellie, who “has hair all over her belly.” I stopped to listen to the song, but Ted took my arm, and we went into the store. No luck there, either.

“We’re not going to find the right boot size for me,” I said.

“I’m a Native person,” Ted replied, “and we haven’t survived this long by giving up.”

At last, we visited a small shoe store on the outskirts of town. The owner appeared to understand my dilemma, and he retreated to the store’s storage room, then came out with boots that were a perfect fit. “I have very wide feet myself,” the owner, an Algerian man, explained to me.

For his services, I treated Ted to dinner, and when I got back to my motel, I saw my other boots outside the door to my room. I learned later that the motel’s cleaning woman thought I wanted them dried, so she took them and put them in the motel’s dryer.   

Now I possessed two pairs of boots. The first pair was 10 years old and looked at least twice that old. The second pair, although spanking new, reminded me — and, to this day, still reminds me — how northern indigenous people have survived in habitats much riskier than urban Anchorage, Alaska.

In 2009, two men drifted helplessly inside an icebox for 25 days. Miraculously, they survived a disaster that killed their 18 crewmates.

The two Burmese men had been working on a commercial fishing boat. The day had started innocuously enough but turned into a nightmare when the weather changed. Rough seas splintered their 9m wooden vessel. The boat sank, and the crew was forced into the ocean.

The two men found a 1.5m square icebox that usually stored fish. Seeking refuge, they clambered inside. The rest of the crew (mostly Thai nationals) had no flotation devices.

“We saw a Thai man floating past us but we couldn't reach him to help,” one survivor told the rescue team.

There had been no emergency beacons or life rafts on the fishing boat. The men were now at the mercy of the ocean, praying for rescue.

“We drifted for hundreds of miles, and although we think some ships saw us, they didn't come to help,” said one of the survivors. “Even when the fishing boat we were on sent out distress signals, no one responded. When the boat sank we had to grab what we could or we would drown.”

Drank rainwater

For 25 days, they survived on rainwater that pooled at the bottom of their icebox and ate chunks of fish that had been left inside. Wind and waves threatened to capsize them as they drifted.

In a stroke of luck, an Australian Coast Guard aircraft spotted the icebox during a routine flight. The shipwrecked men removed their shirts and waved furiously to the crew above. The Coast Guard then radioed a rescue helicopter to retrieve them.

“They were ecstatic to see us,” reported the helicopter pilot.

The men (aged 22 and 25) thought they had been approximately 300km off the coast of Australia when their ordeal started. They may have drifted hundreds of kilometers before being winched to safety 110km northwest of Horn Island.

Onboard the helicopter, the parched fishermen downed almost two liters of water each. They were lucky to be alive. All 18 of their crewmates were presumed dead and no further searches were conducted.

"The information [the men] provided to us was that they witnessed other crew members in the water, none of whom had a flotation device, so we've done an assessment and we don't believe anybody would be able to survive 25 days actually in the water," said one of the rescuers.

The survivors were hungry and dehydrated but otherwise in good health. They were released from the hospital the following day.

The Torres Strait between Australia and Papua New Guinea is fished both legally and illegally. It is unknown if the crew was permitted to fish when their boat sank.

Deborah Kiley's gruesome, five-day ordeal in 1982 began as a routine sailing trip in the Atlantic. Soon, she would be forced to feed her friend to sharks and watch helplessly as two others leaped to their deaths.

Kiley was a confident sailor. By the age of 23, she already had years of experience crewing yachts. She earned her big break sailing in the 70,000km Whitbread Round the World Race (now The Ocean Race). In 1981, Kiley became the first American woman to complete the event. Her sailing future appeared prosperous.

The following year, she was hired to crew an 18m yacht called Trashman, during its transfer from Maine to new owners in Florida.

When the crew -- Kiley, Captain John Lippoth, his girlfriend Meg Mooney, and sailors Brad Cavanagh and Mark Adams -- set off from Maine for their six-day, 2,000km trip, conditions were perfect.

“The weather was beautiful, the boat was fun to steer,” recalled Kiley years later.

On their second day, they began to run into trouble.

A storm, and a drunken captain

A violent storm hit Trashman with 110kph winds and 10m waves. A heavily intoxicated Lippoth lay asleep at the wheel when the voices of her terrified crewmates woke Kelly up. Cold water gushed into the cabin. In a matter of moments, their situation turned desperate.

The yacht, now off the coast of North Carolina, was sinking quickly. The crew's only option was to throw themselves into the ocean.

Adams managed to inflate a small rubber dinghy. As the crew clambered into their life raft, Adam felt a nudge on his leg. They were completely surrounded by great white sharks.

“The minute we got in, there were fins everywhere in the water. I don’t mean like two or three, I mean 10, 20. They were everywhere,” said Kiley.

They realized that Mooney had gashed her leg severely during the capsize. The smell of blood drew sharks to the helpless crew. One shark clutched the dinghy’s bowline in its mouth, pulling the terrified crew along. When that didn’t tip them into the ocean, the sharks started nudging the boat.

Kiley resolved to stay focused. She covered her body in seaweed for warmth. To stay in control, she recited prayers.

Mooney was in agonizing pain. Her leg quickly became infected, and blood poisoning set in. By day three, everyone was severely dehydrated.

Out of desperation, a delirious Lippoth and Adams began drinking from the ocean. Toxic saltwater accelerates dehydration and shuts down the kidneys. In different circumstances, both men would have understood this.

Lippoth was the first to go. Convinced that he saw land, he suddenly threw himself overboard.

A blood-curdling scream and the captain was gone

“All of a sudden, we just heard this shrill scream. Blood-curdling,” said Kiley. “Then it was over, silence. There was no crying, nothing. There was no doubt what got him. The sharks got him.”

Shortly after, Adams suffered a similar fate. He babbled incoherently of heading to the shop to buy beer and cigarettes before hurling himself over the side of the dinghy.

“It was by far the most horrifying moment of my entire life,” Kiley said as she watched sharks eat him too. In their frenzied attack on Adam, the sharks butted the raft, tipping it precariously. Somehow, it managed to stay upright.

Hallucinations weren’t yet over for the surviving crew members.

Mooney succumbed next from the blood poisoning. She was dying before Kiley and Cavanagh’s eyes, but there was nothing they could do to help. When the pair woke in the morning, she was dead.

Starving and dehydrated, Cavanagh considered eating Mooney’s remains. Focused, Kiley talked him out of it.

A third perishes

Mooney’s infection had wept all over the dinghy's floor, which was now sodden with a mess of seaweed, blood, and pus. Feeling that they were risking infection themselves, the two survivors threw their friend overboard.

First, they undressed her, saving clothes and jewelry to give to her family, if they survived. Then they recited a prayer and pushed her over the edge of the boat.

'We tried to sleep so we wouldn't see Meg being eaten by sharks," said Kiley.

The pair had now been at sea for five days. Three of their friends had died. They tried to clean the boat from Mooney's infection. While doing so, Cavanagh slipped and fell into the shark-infested waters.

A desperate Kiley used all her strength to try to pull Cavanagh back into the boat, but she was just too weak. Then the pair spotted a cargo ship on the horizon, and a surge of adrenalin came over Cavanagh. Summoning the last of his strength, he managed to haul himself back on board.

Deliverance

When the pair were picked up 140km south of Cape Lookout, they'd drifted almost 150km off course.

Kiley and Cavanagh's five days in the Atlantic Ocean shifted the course of their lives irreversibly. It took years for Kiley to stop hearing her friends' screams as the sharks ate them. Returning to her previous life no longer made sense.

Kiley became a motivational speaker and penned two books about her ordeal. Albatross: The True Story of a Woman's Survival at Sea (1994) and No Victims Only Survivors: Ten Lessons for Survival (2006).

She married twice and had two children. In a cruel irony, her son drowned at the age of 23. When Kiley was 54, she herself died at home in Mexico. The cause of death was not made public.

Before she died, Kiley and Cavanagh featured in a 2005 Discovery Channel episode of I Shouldn't Be Alive. In the documentary, Cavanagh admitted, "It's not something you just turn off when it's over. You keep living in that survival mode. I don't know if you're shellshocked or what...but it's impossible to just go back to being the way you were before."

Although his outlook on life changed, Cavanagh returned to the water as a professional yachtsman.

For more than 10 years, Miriam Lancewood and Peter Raine lived free from society as hunters and gatherers in New Zealand’s remote mountains. They survived happily without timepieces or timetables, but now the couple have to adapt to the changes wrought by time.

Their story is almost unbelievable. They grew up more than 18,000km apart, Raine in rural New Zealand, the son of a sheep farmer. Lancewood (her pen name) was born three decades later in the Netherlands, the middle of three siblings born within three years.

Lancewood's home was lovingly filled with music and theatre. In adolescence, her athletic career took off. For six years, she represented her country in pole vaulting and competed in the youth Olympics. She established a fitness acumen that helped her for years, and not just in sport. At the same time, she learned early the perils of a full schedule.

Revolt against scheduling

“My life in the Netherlands was based on time, running around the clock, jamming my studies and training and seeing friends, all in one day. It was stressful,” Lancewood told ExplorersWeb. “But because it is so normal in modern society, I never questioned it.”

Her parents introduced her to the joys of nature. Sometimes they camped wild near a river, sleeping under the stars. “That, I loved,” Lancewood recalls. "I always dreaded going back to my flat and crowded home country."

By contrast, Raine spent much of the 1970s living in the forest, protesting against commercial logging operations, which were a national concern in New Zealand back then. He bought land on the West Coast, preparing for a nuclear apocalypse which never came. He married and studied for a Ph.D. in environmental studies.

Shaped by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Raine believed that people didn’t need government or authority for survival. When Raine encountered Raimon Panikkar’s Cosmotheandric Intuition (a theory that dissolves the idea of separate realities between man, God, and world), his view on reality transformed. He quit his job as a university professor in New Zealand and moved to India to live like a "modern nomad". That’s when Raine and Lancewood's worlds collided.

Lancewood had just completed her university degree and was in India after a year in Zimbabwe. With a chessboard under her arm, she was looking for company when she met Raine in a local chai shop.

Thirty-year age difference

The connection was instantaneous. The 30-year age difference was no barrier. His stories of adventure captivated Lancewood. What Raine had in intellectual curiosity, she complimented with physical prowess.

Despite inner words of caution, Lancewood moved in with Raine the following day. The pair then spent years traveling together through India, climbing mountains, and exploring South East Asia and Papua New Guinea. Eventually, they settled in Marlborough, at the top of New Zealand’s South Island.

They briefly settled into a house. Lancewood taught phys ed for at-risk youth while applying for New Zealand residency. But they soon knew that this wasn't a lifestyle they aspired to.

They decided to see how they would cope with living in the wild, away from society. They sold their belongings and headed into the mountains, armed with little more than a tent and bow and arrow.

“We spent a lot of time tramping in the wilderness, but then we decided we wanted to be a part of it, not just observers. We decided to spend four seasons [there] and see how we'd survive,” says Lancewood.

Seven years in the bush

The experiment lasted seven years.

“We saw no reason to come back to town or to settle. We felt completely at ease in the wild mountains of New Zealand. Sometimes we didn't see anyone for months,” Lancewood recalls. “I never missed anything.”

I can’t help but be enthralled by Lancewood and Raine. New Zealand has plenty of self-sufficient, off-grid stories, but Lancewood and Raine’s style is vastly wild and authentic.

Outwardly, they embody health. There’s no strain or sadness shown on their faces. No filth in their clothes, although Lancewood promises that all their belongings smell of campfires.

They lived in small, compact tents. Their few possessions fit into one backpack each and they spent their days hunting and gathering. In a bit of a gender turnaround, Lancewood took responsibility for hunting while Raine cooked and gathered wild food.

Hunting hare and possum with a bow

For the first two years, Lancewood hunted exclusively with a bow and arrow. She mostly stalked hare or possum (an unprotected animal in New Zealand), which were easy to carry back to camp. Later, she acquired a rifle.

When they first entered the bush, they left their pasts behind and had no plans for the future. They said goodbye to schedules and calendars. Not knowing what time, day, or month it was, they found it easier to focus on the present.

“Peter and I made a radical shift in our thinking and therefore in our life,” Lancewood said. "We went off the beaten track, to live an adventure. Not just going on a challenging holiday and returning home.

Every year, they approach their lifestyle differently to break up the monotony. One year, they walked the 3,000km Te Araroa Trail, which spans the length of New Zealand. Sometimes they spent one night in each place, sometimes four months. Occasionally helicopters dropped them food buckets in the rugged Southern Alps. It was a change from possum and a thrill to see visitors.

Lancewood isn’t like anyone I’ve encountered before. She’s a breath of fresh air. Her 38-year-old skin is flawless, without a wrinkle. Her effortless smile could appear in a toothpaste ad. Her shiny hair bounces enviably. She’s personable, grounded, and somehow relatable. When she speaks, her words make sense even to mortals like me, even though she barely spoke English when she and Raine first met.

Not for everyone

Raine worries about what will become of Lancewood when he is gone, although she certainly has a survivor mentality. In general, Raine is not as public or open as she is. Although she enjoys life without distractions, she also wants to share their lifestyle for others to learn from. Scores of people write her, saying that they want to do the same. But Lancewood knows that the challenges aren't for everyone.

“Last summer was pretty cold,” she admits. “Sometimes it's hard to keep warm in the snow in the mountains. Worst thing is endless rain. Our year on the West Coast was hard. Rain is no good when you live in a tent.”

To put her words into context, the West Coast is one of the wettest regions in the country. Annual rainfall regularly exceeds 10,000mm, and their lifestyle is at the mercy of the weather.

When it’s sunny, they walk, exploring lakes and waterfalls. When it's raining, they read in their tent. During their first winter, spent up at 1,200m, even the waterfalls sometimes froze.

Lancewood says that one of the major benefits of their lifestyle has been improved senses. But learning to do nothing has been one of her biggest challenges.

“It takes about two weeks for the mind to slow down in order to meet with the rhythm of nature. And in that time, you go through a period of boredom and restlessness,” she says.

Bestselling author

In 2017, after seven years, the couple left the New Zealand backcountry. Before they left, Lancewood penned her first book, Woman in the Wilderness. It became an international bestseller, translated into five languages.

The title made her a reluctant celebrity, especially in her native country. Since then, she’s been invited to book festivals around the world, including Dubai and Hong Kong. Although the festivals are exciting, she says that she can't ever see herself returning to life in a city.

They next flew to Europe and began a new adventure, walking 2,000 km across the continent, then on to Turkey.

Lancewood has always known that her days with Raine are a blessing. But in Turkey, the physicality of their life began to show on Raine’s then 64-year-old body.

They were having a bite to eat. Then Lancewood stood up and put her pack on, ready to continue walking. Raine didn’t do the same. The strain of shouldering his pack further was showing on his older body. When they went on to the Australian desert, things took a drastic turn.

“Peter got kidney failure in the desert in Australia," Lancewood said. "The doctors told him to live near a hospital in town and go on dialysis. He said, 'I rather die.' "

Dialysis? "I'd rather die," he said

Medics told Raine that he had a three percent chance of survival without a new kidney. When Lancewood offered hers, he declined. They told Lancewood to say her goodbyes.

“I have much respect for Peter's courage, he is not afraid to die,” Lancewood said.

Raine wanted his remaining time to be in the wild. A three-hour walk from cellphone coverage isn’t the smartest idea for someone with serious health concerns. So instead, they elected to recover in a hut back in New Zealand.

For the couple, the hut was restricting. Suffocating even. Diminishing their heightened senses and preventing the breeze from brushing over their cheeks.

Last November, Lancewood released her second book, Wild at Heart. It adds to her life story of living in remote areas of New Zealand and walking long routes, such as the 2,000km across Europe.

Eventually, when Raine’s health improved earlier this year, they returned to the backcountry. But they recognized that they had to adapt their lifestyle for the sake of Raine's health.

“It’s too cold at night, even with a possum duvet and yak blanket,” says Lancewood. Even in the height of summer, they were snowed in for five days.

Raine can't walk with a pack anymore, but they have found a new way of living.

Against medical advice, they flew to Bulgaria last year. For the summer, they lived in a shepherd’s cottage that they purchased in the Rhodope Mountains three years ago. They lived off-grid at 1,200m, a 2.5km walk from the nearest village. Their closest neighbor was a bear. A wild cat shared their hut, wolves scouted the mountains, and the couple ate from their vegetable garden.

From hunter-gatherers to nomads

Their new plan is to become nomads. Where? They don’t know yet. But Raine’s kidneys prefer warmth, especially in winter.

“One day we will end up in Tajikistan, or living in a hut in the Himalaya,” Lancewood said. “The main thing for us is to live free. To live without obligations, without many possessions. The more stuff I have, the more stuck I feel.”

Despite an innate fascination for survival in extreme conditions (Lancewood is currently reading One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn; Raine is rereading Nietzsche), their future will likely involve buying small cottages in different countries, and moving between each. Lancewood says that although it takes more planning to live that way, they are happy, and it’s another adventure.

“Living without security is healthy for the mind," she insists. "That is what keeps me sharp, alive, and happy. It is, by the way, also the secret for a long-lasting relationship.”

In 2016, a 72-year-old woman and her dog were rescued after spending nine days lost in the Arizona desert. Her smart thinking led to the pair's unlikely survival.

Technically their chances of getting out alive were “statistically abnormal”, said one professional survival instructor. Gila County's wilderness covers an extensive 1,214,000,000 hectares and is the largest of the six national forests in Arizona. One thing the area doesn’t have is outstanding mobile phone coverage.

Rodgers was on her way to visit her grandchildren in Phoenix with her pet dog when her hybrid car ran out of power and gas reserves. She’d noticed a gas station sign earlier but when she turned off the main road to locate it, quickly became lost. Now out of mobile phone coverage, she and her small house dog left the vehicle and climbed several ridgelines, hunting for a cell signal to call for help.

Abandons her car and begins walking

"I waited until sun up the next morning hoping a truck or car, anybody, anything would go by, even a steer! I didn't care, anything alive," Rodgers recalled. But nothing and no one came. After two days, she abandoned her vehicle and headed for a stream she had seen from one of the ridges.

For the next nine days, Rodgers and her dog survived by eating desert plants and drinking pond water while waiting for rescue. Rodgers had read a book on the edible plants of the Southwest, which informed her choices of food.

Under normal circumstances, leaving a vehicle behind when lost is a certain way to evade rescue attempts. But this resourceful Gran came up with ways to be detected by authorities.

After they had spent three days without food, Rodger’s made a sign across the canyon floor from rocks and bones from a bleached elk skeleton, spelling out the word, “HELP”. Under one of the rocks, she put a small note outlining her predicament. At night, when the temperatures dipped below freezing, Rodgers built a fire. Her lifelong smoking habit helped her on this occasion. Then she made shelter for the pair.

"I was eating desert plants. My dog was too, diving into clover and finding all the places that were the easiest path for me to take. She was my pathfinder on that journey," Rodgers said.

When Rodgers had been missing for three days, a multi-agency search began after someone finally noticed her car on a remote stretch of road. Even with two separate helicopter searches and multiple ground searches, they found no trace of her during those first few days. A breakthrough only occurred after nine days, when a Game and Fish officer found her dog wandering in the canyon. Rescuers then spiked their aerial search efforts.

Help sign spotted

Next, they spotted the “Help” sign and handwritten note.

“The note said she had been without food for three days and that she was going to continue looking for a ranch and going downstream,” one of the rescuers said.

Shortly afterward, from the helicopter, they noticed an abandoned shelter Rodgers had made. After rounding a bend in the canyon, they saw Rodgers herself waving next to a signal fire.

"When that helicopter, that air rescue police copter landed, I just sat down and bawled," Rodgers said. "Remarkable, remarkable, remarkable."

She had escaped unscathed and was able to board the helicopter. Rescuers agree that after leaving the vehicle behind, she was smart to create a trackable trail for rescuers to follow.

“If it was a different season, she would not have lived,” said a survival expert. “Arizona can be a brutal state to stay alive in because we have mountains and deserts and everything in between.”

Flown to hospital for treatment, Rodgers was released later that same day.

Some of the most popular UK trails for walkers, hikers, and mountaineers are known as “black spots”, the places where the most accidents occur. Below, the most treacherous of them. They are the most dangerous places in the UK.

Snowdonia: 200 rescues a year

Wales’s Snowdonia National Park is perilous in spots and also incredibly busy. The Llanberis Mountain Rescue Team works around the clock answering over 200 calls annually, from mild injuries to fatal falls. The park averages eight deaths per year, mainly due to two specific black spots: Crib Goch and the Pyg and Miner’s Track scrambles.

For those who don't know the term, a scramble is a little more than a hike and a little less than a climb. You don't need ropes, but you have to use your hands at times. Scrambles offer varying degrees of exposure. Sometimes, a slip at the wrong place is fatal.

Crib Goch is Welsh for red ridge. It is an arete on pyramid-like Garnedd Goch, part of the Snowdon Massif. This scramble has a famously narrow section that is not technical but where the consequences of a slip are dire. This ridge becomes even more treacherous in bad weather or high winds.

The Pyg and Miner’s Track on Snowdon Mountain becomes icy in winter and it is very easy to misstep, especially on the jagged rocks. Ice axes are recommended on this stretch in winter. The route is also avalanche-prone.

The Cairngorms

In Scotland, the Aonach Eagach and the Cairngorm Plateau are two notorious black spots that receive more than 130 rescue calls annually. The Anoach Eagach also includes a treacherous scramble with a narrow, exposed ridge which becomes very slippery when wet.

A narrower section of rocky spikes called the Pinnacles is a black spot within this black spot. People who try to ease their way around the sides are usually the ones who call for help. People who opt to descend down Clachaig Gully may suffer a world of hurt in the loose scree. Descending via the Pap of Glencoe is safer.

The Cairngorm Plateau is probably the blackest of black spots in all the UK. Frequent avalanches are the least of its perils. Crosswinds up to 278kmph can blow people over the hard-to-spot edges. It is easy to get lost.

From the 1950s to 1960s, the plateau served as a training ground for rescue teams and even the Royal Air Force, but this stopped because of danger to the trainees! Snow blankets this exposed plateau throughout the winter, disorienting hikers and making the edges of the cliffs difficult to determine.

Mountain rescue teams get over 50 calls annually. It's safest in summer, but even then, the weather can change so quickly and intensely that winter set in temporarily at any time.

The Lake District

Because of the sheer number of visitors, England’s Lake District tops the list as the most dangerous place in the UK. Rescue teams respond to over 600 calls a year. The well-named Sharp Edge is a ridge on Blencathra, one of the Lake District’s most northern hills. It is another scramble with an exposed crux raked by crosswinds. It becomes as slippery as glass when wet.  While the ridge is short, it remains challenging for inexperienced visitors even on a clear summer day. Its reputation lures daredevils from all over the country. 

Lastly, Scafell Pike, England’s highest mountain, endures the worst visibility of any place in Britain. Cloud cover frequently disorients hikers, some of whom venture into Piers Gill, thinking that it is a viable descent route. It is actually an area -- difficult for rescuers to access -- that includes a plunging drop into a small canyon with a small stream. When wet, the rocks become polished and slippery, causing a lot of broken bones over the years.

Louis Zamperini first gained fame as one of the greatest middle distance runners of all time. He represented the United States in the 5,000m at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

Then World War II broke out, and his life took a drastic turn. He spent 47 days drifting on a life raft in the Pacific. He battled years of starvation, disease, and torture from sadistic Japanese prison guards. Eventually, after the President had officially declared him dead, he returned home.

Zamperini was born to immigrant Italian parents shortly after World War I. A delinquent child, he fought, committed petty crimes, was smoking by the age of five, and drinking by age eight. Once after a teacher disciplined him, he deflated her car tires. On another occasion, he threw tomatoes at a cop.

Then one day, a couple of charming ladies encouraged him to try athletics. He quickly discovered that he had a natural ability as a runner. He soon channeled his energy into sport and turned from local terror to local hero.

Delinquent to runner

While running for the University of Southern California, he set a national record over the mile -- four minutes 21 seconds. After graduation, he switched to the 5,000m distance. He was the youngest athlete ever to make the team at the Berlin Olympics.

Although he didn’t have a podium finish in Germany, he returned to a promising running career. He planned on chasing the elusive sub-four minute-mile at the 1940 Olympics, 14 years before Roger Bannister actually achieved it.

But Zamperini never had the chance to try. World War II broke out in 1939, and the Olympics were canceled. Instead, he joined the U.S. Army as a lieutenant in 1941. He never ran competitively again.

Zamperini approached his military training with the same energy and discipline as he had in athletics. He was one of just 15 attendees out of thousands invited to a survival lecture. Although he didn’t know it at the time, the techniques he learned that day later saved his life.

He served as a bombardier on a B-24 airplane and flew several missions. On one, Japanese fighters attacked his plane and riddled it with more than 600 bullets.

The B-24s were ahead of their time but they weren’t without issues. In another sortie off Hawaii in 1943, Zamperini and his crew ran into serious trouble.

The plane crash

They were searching for lost crew members and aircraft when their plane suffered mechanical issues. Both engines lost power, and they plummeted into the ocean south of Oahu.

The impact killed 11 of the crew, leaving just Zamperini, pilot Russell Allen Phillips, and tail gunner Francis McNamara as the sole survivors. But their ordeal was just beginning. For Zamperini, it lasted almost two more years.

Amid the burning fuselage, the three men managed to clamber aboard two life rafts. With no means of communicating, they floated aimlessly in the Pacific Ocean, hoping for rescue and to evade capture.

They drank rainwater and ate fish and birds. Once they managed to capture two albatrosses that landed on their raft. They ate one and used the other as bait to catch fish.

They endured constant famine, blistering heat, and were in dread of capture by the enemy.

Enemy bombers attacked them from above and punctured one of their rafts. Everyone managed to transfer onto the second. When sharks brushed up against it, they fended them off with a paddle.

The outcome appeared bleak, but Zamperini had an inner strength. “When I was on that life raft, I was the only one who was prepared," he said later, referring to the attention he'd paid to survival training.

After 33 days, McNamara died. The two survivors had little choice but to throw him overboard.

Prisoner of war

Eventually, after 47 days at sea, Zamperini and Phillips managed to steer their raft into the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. They finally set foot on land but were far from safe.

The Japanese captured them almost immediately and separated the pair. Zamperini spent his first six weeks on Kwajalein. Then his captors transferred him to mainland Japan. He was confined in three different POW camps and interrogation centres.

Zamperini’s athletic abilities made him an easy target for a sadistic Japanese corporal named Mutsuhiro Watanabe, who took particular joy in torturing him.

Initially, starvation, disease, exposure, and near-daily beatings from guards were the primary issue. But Watanabe quickly upped the ante, which caused nightmares to Zamperini for years to come.

Watanabe beat him with clubs, bats, and fists, threatening to kill him. He forced Zamperini to punch other prisoners until they were nearly unconscious. He once even forced Zamperini to hold a heavy wooden beam above his head, threatening to shoot him if he dropped it.

Guards forced the starvation-weakened Zamperini to run foot races against Japanese soldiers. If he dared to win, they beat him.

By this point, he’d been given up for dead back home. The United States War Department assigned Zamperini an “official death date,” and President Roosevelt signed a condolence letter to his family.

Then Japanese officials tried to have him read propaganda messages over Radio Tokyo, denigrating the U.S. government.

In September 1945, more than two years after Zamperini's plane crashed, Japan surrendered and he was liberated.

"None of us believed [he was alive]. None of us. Never once. Not underneath, even,” Zamperini’s sister Sylvia said.

The long aftermath

Zamperini arrived home famous. He had been an Olympic hero thought to have perished at sea. “After being declared dead and finding that we’d crashed and survived the 47-day drift and nearly 2,000 miles, you get quite a bit of publicity,” he later said.

But the damage he received during his time as a prisoner was irreversible, and the years of malnutrition and torture rendered him unable ever to run competitively again. He was plagued by nightmares. Like many returned servicemen, he used alcohol to stave off the memories. He eventually found solace in Christianity and was able to forgive the men who tortured him.

Zamperini returned to Japan five years after his release, facing his former guards. He shook hands with most, some he embraced. Watanabe was absent, so Zamperini penned a letter to him, forgiving him instead.

Watanabe was later listed as number 23 on a list of Japan’s most wanted war criminals, but he was never executed.

Zamperini’s story has been chronicled in Laura Hillenbrand’s book, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption. It has been a bestseller since its publication in 2010. In 2014, Angelina Jolie directed a film version, called Unbroken.

Although he died shortly before Jolie’s film hit theaters, Zamperini viewed it from his hospital bed before passing away in 2013 at the age of 97.

Here at ExWeb, when we’re not outdoors, we get our adventure fix by exploring social media and the wider interweb. Sometimes we’re a little too plugged in, and browsing interesting stories turn from minutes into hours. To nourish your own adventure fix, here are some of the best links we’ve discovered this week

The Woman Who Trekked Through Pandemic-Hit Europe: Ursula Martin defines herself as an extreme rambler. Between 2014 and 2015, she walked 6000km in and around her homeland of Wales, while undergoing treatment for ovarian cancer. More recently, in the last two years, she walked alone from Ukraine to the most westerly point of Spain.

An Agonizingly Thirsty Crawl Through the Desert: Just how long can someone last in the desert without a drink of water? In 1905, a gold prospector named Pablo Valencia reportedly wandered through 43˚C heat in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert for six days before stumbling into a geology camp. He was about as close to dead as you can get while still breathing.

These Polish Dudes Slipped the Iron Curtain and Changed River-Running Forever: One of the most inspiring chapters in whitewater history was written by an unlikely group of young Polish men who slipped under the Iron Curtain in 1979. Without money, proper gear, or much of a clue, they pioneered many of the classic river runs from Mexico to Argentina.

"How many more sunsets will you see?"

Years of Sunsets: Alpinist Editor Katie Ives ponders her obsession with mountaintop sunsets, and the question that a college professor posed to her years ago: "How many more sunsets will you see?" Many more, we hope, as we're big fans of Alpinist!

Mountain Photography Awards: The International Photography Contest of Mountain Activity, organized by the Club Vasco de Camping Elkartea, a mountaineering club in the Basque country, has announced the winners of this year’s competition. It brought together the work of 372 photographers from 58 countries.

Why are Sherpas Always Happy? A pretty poor choice of headline that doesn't do justice to the interesting question posed in this interesting Nepali Times article. Did Western ideas about Sherpas actually shape their interactions with outsiders?

Virtual Mount Everest Tour: Climber, filmmaker, and photographer Jake Norton presents a project 21 years in the making. The result is 47 panoramic images and 811 information popups that cover Everest and the surrounding peaks. Chockful of history of the landscape and its people.

Hobbs Kessler: Teenage American prodigy Hobbs Kessler wants to be the first person to run a sub-four-minute mile and climb 5.15 and V15. And he just might do it, as Kessler already climbs 5.14+ and has run a mile at that pace.

TikTok in the Arctic

The TikTok Star Living in the Arctic Circle: TikTok: We've no idea what it's all about, to be honest, but apparently Cecilia Blomdahl’s viral videos offer a window into an unfamiliar (for most folks) world full of polar bears, reindeer, and adventures on snowmobiles. They also offer surprisingly resonant insights for those of us who’ve just spent a year in quarantine.

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Just Got A Reprieve — But It’s Not Safe Yet: The United States recently announced it would suspend oil and gas leases in a pristine Alaskan ecosystem. But many environmental battles await the 400,000-hectare refuge.

He sheltered the hypothermic competitors in a cave and gave them food and clothing.

As the events of the ultra-marathon tragedy of May 23 continue to unravel, a humble hero has emerged from the chaos. Zhu Keming, a shepherd, braved the freezing winds and rains to save the lives of several competitors. 

Zhu Keming was having a pleasant Saturday morning tending his sheep when suddenly high winds and hail forced him into a nearby cave that he used in emergencies.

He kept food and dry clothes in there, but he didn’t think he'd need them that day. Not long after, his eyes spotted a distant competitor struggling with a cramp in his leg. He ran through the rain and helped the man to safety. Soon, more runners found refuge in the cave.

But the most remarkable rescue was that of competitor Zhangye Xiaotao. He had fallen unconscious after sending an SOS via his GPS tracker. Xiaotao was reportedly on the mountain for two-and-a-half hours before Zhu found him. The shepherd had ventured out to help other runners and came upon Xiaotao. He quickly brought him to the cave to warm him up. Zhu lit a fire and gave the three men and three women he saved whatever warm clothes, food, and blankets he had. 

Public rage about the loss of life continues in China. The event organizers in nearby Baiyin city had ignored the adverse weather warnings for the 100km cross-country race. Some believe that this was due to their desire to improve tourism in the depressed mining towns by turning them into prime spots for extreme sports.

The race stopped at two pm after competitors sent out pleas for help via social media. However, many competitors did not receive the notice. Had Zhu not been there, there would have been more than 21 casualties. 

As a result of the tragedy, five other races have been canceled. 

Twenty-one runners died yesterday during an ultra-marathon in northwest China. Freezing rain, hail, and plunging temperatures at an elevation of 2,000m abruptly turned a balmy day into a hypothermic ordeal for the 172 lightly-clad runners. The previous day had been remarkably hot.

The 100km-long cross-country race began at 9 am on Saturday in Gansu Province, near the Yellow River's popular Stone Forest.

About 1 pm, between the 20km and 31km mark, the weather changed dramatically, with hail, freezing rain, and strong winds.

Many runners were missing for hours

The wind became so strong that "it was hard to stand up straight and move forward," one survivor told Xinhua News. "When the wind was the strongest, I had to grab the ground with both hands to avoid being blown over.

"I felt nothing but cold...I fainted halfway down the mountain."

Officials eventually halted the race when it became clear that a number of participants had gone missing. While details are not completely clear, some runners lost their way during the storm. Around midnight, 11 hours later, some started posting videos on WeChat begging for help. By then, long after sunset, the temperature had dropped still further.

Local authorities launched a massive rescue operation, including helicopters and heavy vehicles. A further 1,200 rescuers searched the barrens hills and deep canyons on foot. Landslides that followed the heavy rain impeded their work, Reuters reported.

By 3 am on Sunday, 16 people had been found dead and five remained missing. Later that morning, the rescue headquarters raised the death toll to 21. The search continued until afternoon. By then, they had accounted for the remaining 151 runners. Eight are currently recovering in hospital.

The tragic events triggered an angry reaction since the forecast had predicted a strong temperature drop. Among the deceased was 31-year-old Liang Jing, one of the world's best ultramarathoners.

Tragic losses in the French Alps have shaken the European mountain community. On Saturday May 8, two avalanches killed a total of seven people in the Savoie region, near Col du Galibier and Mont Pourri. A few days earlier, on May 3, two avalanches killed five people in Isère and Hautes-Alpes. 

The first May 8 avalanche took place in the morning near the village of Valloire, gateway to the Col du Galibier, the highest pass on the Tour de France. Four hikers between 42 to 76 years old perished in the slide. Remarkably, one survived without any injuries. The second avalanche killed three more people later in the day near Mont Pourri. 

According to mountain guide Michel Pele, a southerly wind known as the foehn may have triggered the slides. The foehn is a dry, warm wind that sometimes carries sand from the Sahara to the Alps. It is possible, he says, that the grit prevented proper cohesion and made the snow generally unstable. Since last week, officials have warned against crossing slopes because of their instability and the 50 to 70cm of heavy new snow. 

Thirty-five people have died since the beginning of the 2020-2021 ski season.

The disturbed hiker killed one man and stabbed a woman nine times on the Appalachian Trail in 2019.

In 2019, James Jordan killed one person and injured another on the Appalachian Trail with a hunting knife. This week, the court accepted his plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. Jordan will now be indefinitely committed to a prison psychiatric facility.

Such outcomes are rare. Only one percent of defendants plead insanity in such cases, and only a quarter of those are successful. Jordan has a history of mental health problems and has been diagnosed with a schizoaffective disorder.

In court, Jordan gave a short apology. His attorney said that he was “deeply remorseful...and regrets that his lifelong battle with mental illness ultimately resulted in this trauma and loss for innocent hikers and their families.”

Jordan was initially arrested in May 2019 after killing Ronald Sanchez Jr, 43, and attacking Kirby Morrill. Morrill suffered nine stab wounds and 40 individual lacerations in the attack.

“I look like Scarface now,” she told Canada's National Post. Prior to the attacks, a mobile app used by backpackers had warned several times about a male hiker who was threatening people, but Morrill was already on the trail.

Two managed to escape. Two did not.

“He wandered around the campsite talking to himself," Morrill recalled. "Then he came around the tents threatening to kill us in a variety of ways and telling us why we deserved to die.”

Jordan wandered off, and Morrill and the three others at the campsite, including Sanchez, decided to leave. As they packed, Jordan returned. Two managed to escape.

After Jordan had stabbed her, Morrill played dead. When he eventually left, she had to walk 10km in the dark to the next campsite. With every step, blood spurted from her leg. She ended up using duct tape to patch her wounds.

After the court decision, Morrill wrote, “It is anguishing to have him labeled not guilty in any fashion, though I accept the legal ramifications of those words are very different from the effect they have on me. If he is truly unable to recognize that his actions have deeply harmed people, if he is truly unable to recognize that he ended a good man’s life, if he truly must not be held responsible for his actions, then I beg you to please use what power you have to still keep that man under lock and key. Keep him from harming anyone else.”

A wonderful, old-fashioned film about a man who builds a cabin in Alaska in 1965 and lives there for 30 years.

It’s never too late to change your life; or so say motivational posters, “life coaches”, and Instagram influencers. For those that have spent the last year cooped up at home, drastic change is an increasingly attractive proposition. One Man’s Alaska might serve as a call to action.

In 1965, Dick Proenneke swapped his life as a mechanic for the Alaskan wilderness. A welding accident that had nearly cost Proenneke his sight was the final kick he needed to move to Twin Lakes, 200km by air southwest of Anchorage. “I decided I was going to enjoy my eyesight, if I had any left,” he explained during this 1976 interview.

His new life started with the kind of work schedule you’d think he would want to leave behind. Using only hand tools, he put in 12-hour shifts, six days per week, to build a wooden cabin on the lakeshore. He even filmed the process, using a timer-controlled camera and a tripod. His hard work paid off: The cabin still stands today, immaculately maintained by park services and a team of volunteers.

A keen naturalist, Proenneke documented the comings and goings of bear, moose, caribou, and arctic hares. He filmed the changing seasons and hiked for an average of 5,000km every year.

His relationship with the land changed over his 30 years in the cabin. He stopped hunting large game. Instead, to impact the environment as little as possible, he survived mostly on lake trout and vegetables. He detested waste and decide that large game was too much for one man. He developed a flair for recycling too, taking discarded gas cans and converting them into cooking pots.

Proenneke’s wilderness films appealed to the public. The slow, meditative snapshots of his new life inspired others to make their own Alaskan pilgrimages. But it was apparent that wilderness life wasn’t for everyone: “People come up here and remark how nice it is, but it’s not 30 days before they’re trying to make it like where they came from…this is pretty nice here, let’s not spoil it.”

We can't embed this particular film, but you can watch it on YouTube below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWBOBQm3bFI

The pro hockey player and snowboarder had it all, including arrogance and a drug habit. Then he made a series of mistakes that cost him his legs but may have saved his life.

By 1994, Eric LeMarque seemed to have it all. Born in Paris, he grew up in a wealthy Los Angeles suburb, had inherited the athleticism of his Golden Gloves grandfather, quickly scaled the ranks of his chosen sport, hockey, and represented France at the 1994 Winter Olympics. Then he had to survive for eight days alone on a snowy mountain, which led to a double amputation.

As a kid, LeMarque was never drawn to the Californian beach scene like many Los Angelinos his age.  A talented hockey player, he was drafted by the Boston Bruins of the NHL at age 17. He wasn’t the biggest guy on the ice, but he was a strong skater and adroit stick handler with a powerful shot. He never quite made the NHL and spent most of his career in Europe.

“I’m not a really physical player because of my size,” LeMarque once said.

His stepdad taught him gritty determination and the ethics of hard work. LeMarque would fire 500 shots a day and skate six days a week, working hard to make it as a professional athlete.

No matter how good he was, his difficult reputation and bad habits superseded his skill level. When he became a liability to his team, he found it hard to keep contracts. Le Marque’s hockey career expired soon after the Winter Olympics.

He was left empty, searching for the next big thrill, when he stumbled upon snowboarding.

For LeMarque, snowboarding was a new source of adrenaline, with the freedom of seeing how far he could push boundaries, and his athleticism transferred seamlessly to the snow.

"Snowboarding became my passion...something that I lived for and something that I became very selfish with," he said.

By now, it was 10 years since he'd played hockey for a living, and LeMarque was constantly looking for new ways to obtain a bigger high and take bigger risks. He was managing a dangerous drug addiction to crystal meth alongside his professional snowboarding career.

Then in 2004, he and a few friends decided to take a snowboarding trip to Mammoth Mountain in California's Sierra Nevada. The trip would permanently change his life.

At 3,300m high, Mammoth Mountain has the state’s highest lift-served summit. It’s a year-round outdoor recreation resort with long winter seasons, known for some of the best skiing and snowboarding in the United States.

LeMarque's natural snowboard talent, combined with arrogance and impaired judgment from drug use, created a risky concoction.

During one of their days at Mammoth, a storm was approaching and the snow patrol was clearing everyone off the mountain. While LeMarque’s friends went to the lodge for a hot tub and beer, he ignored the warnings and headed back up the chairlift for one last run.

“I made several mistakes, and the first one was the attitude that I brought up on the mountain. Even though I had ridden Mammoth hundreds of times, I kind of took it for granted...thinking, It’s just Mammoth. I know it like the back of my hand. I don’t have to listen to the ski patrol. I’m a professional snowboarder and I’m not going to be inconvenienced,” he later said.

Here was a cocky professional snowboarder who felt he knew best. In the same style he’d carried throughout his hockey career, he didn’t take orders from anybody. And he was high on meth.

LeMarque decided against the safety of a groomed trail. Instead, he ducked beneath the ropes and went off-piste down an unmarked section of the mountain, ignoring the crossed ski poles that signaled the last of the ski patrol had left.

Initially, he enjoyed gliding through the untouched powder, as the sun set and the temperature began dropping. But before long, he entered the storm, and fog limited his visibility to just three metres.

He was wearing just his shell over a T-shirt, and the wind now blasted through those thin layers, and he became noticeably cold.

Still unaware of the seriousness of his situation, he thought he was through the steepest part of the ride, and knew how to get to the bottom of the mountain. But within minutes he realized that he wasn’t where he thought he was. He was lost.

“It was like I had stepped into a different dimension,” he said. “The fun had come to a complete halt.”

He hatched a plan to hike over a ridge, find the road, and hike back to a lodge. Instead, he was stuck in a flat section, unable to ride off the remote easternmost flank of the mountain. He found himself walking in circles –- up tracks he’d already made and down slopes he’d already ridden -- using critical energy in the process.

He had barely any provisions on him -- two Power Bars, three sticks of bubble gum, a book of soggy matches, and an MP3 player –- and had no choice but to spend a cold night on the mountain.

When day broke on that first morning, he began trudging through four metres of snow, searching for safety.

He spotted two coyotes and -- marred by poor judgment -- thought they would smell his bubble gum. So he swallowed the piece in his mouth and buried the other two pieces in the snow. He was becoming delirious.

Hour after hour, LeMarque trudged the cold wilderness alone, trying to orient himself. Eventually, he heard the sound of a running stream and reasoned that if he located it, it would surely run downhill, back to civilization. But when he came to the stream he made another costly, impaired, decision.

Rather than follow along the stream from the safety of the riverbank, he hopped downstream along the rocks within the river, trying to avoid trudging through deep snow.

When he fell into the icy water, he was just moments from plunging down a 20m waterfall. Scrambling to the safety of dry land, he was now soaking wet, freezing, and at risk of hypothermia. He then removed his boots in an attempt to dry them in the sun, all the while trying not to notice the purple and black shades of his feet, clearly in the early stages of frostbite.

“I couldn’t get a boot on. I was walking in the snow with one foot in the boot, with no socks on either foot. One foot was by itself in the snow,” he recounted. “I found myself trying to walk, and falling over.”

One sensible decision he did make that second day: He still had a bag of meth with him. He wondered if he should take it or dump it. He dumped it, and that was the beginning of his recovery from that burden.

LeMarque melted snow in a small plastic bag to drink, but now he had spent four nights sleeping on the mountain, and he knew death was rapidly approaching.

Desperate for food and shelter, he ate the dead skin off his frostbitten feet. He collected pine nuts and used his snowboard to hack bark off nearby trees.

He was rapidly losing energy but managed to build a quinzee for shelter. Then he stuffed branches and leaves into his clothes for insulation.

LeMarque had now survived six nights on the mountain, with no end in sight. His chances of survival were rapidly diminishing. He tried to alert rescuers to his whereabouts by lighting a fire with his matches and clothing, but they were too damp.

Now he was running out of ideas and turned to his MP3 player for help. When it powered on, LeMarque noticed that the signal became stronger when pointed in certain directions. In a brief moment of clarity, he realized that if he followed the signal's strength, it would probably lead him back to Mammoth.

He was now very near the end of his life. He’d spent seven nights on the mountain without food, shelter, or water, and he was riddled with frostbite.

On his eighth day, as he contemplated death, he heard the sound of a helicopter above. LeMarque had just one thing working in his favor. The snowfall had been light during his ordeal, allowing rescuers to follow some of his tracks. When they found him, he was 20kg lighter and just hours away from death.

“It amazed everybody,” said one of the Search and Rescue team who found him. “I don’t think anybody was not surprised to find him alive.”

In disbelief, rescuers radioed to double-check his name, so certain were they that LeMarque simply couldn’t have survived.

Although he was lucky to be alive, he’d suffered irreversible damage. His legs were amputated just below the knee shortly after his rescue. He developed a near-fatal fever in the hospital from the gangrene but managed to survive that too.

His story has been written up in a book and dramatized in a film. Professional medics said he’d never snowboard again, but even with his new, mature perspective on life, he still isn’t one to let others call the shots for him. Now a father of three, he is often found on the mountain, this time sticking to marked trails.

Belgian ultrarunner Peter Van Geit's first winter experience covered 110 mountain passes and 170,000m of climbing.

When India's national lockdown ended late last year, Peter Van Geit headed for Dehradun, the capital of the state of Uttarakhand, to begin his first winter expedition in the Himalaya. He spent 85 days exploring Uttarakhand. He crossed 110 passes and hiked 2,050km and 170,000m of elevation gain.

“Every step in one to two feet of snow was draining," he said. Still, he averaged 25km a day with a 2,000m elevation gain.

Van Geit, a Belgian ultrarunner based in India, has spent several summers running across the Western Himalaya. In 2019, he crossed 150 passes in a 5,000km solo journey. He had planned a new 2,000km journey for March 2020, but that date was unlucky timing for every would-be traveler. When COVID-19 hit, a national lockdown ensued across India.

Instead, for the next four months, using online resources, Van Geit began mapping the Western Indian Himalaya with his friend Aman, who is completing a Ph.D. on Himalayan glaciers. In total, they mapped 2,000 high passes, 700 glacial lakes, 20,000 villages, and 50,000km of hiking routes across Uttarakhand, Himachal, Ladakh, Jammu, and Kashmir.

Eventually, the lockdown lifted, and though Van Geit hadn't hiked in winter before, he set out, using the maps he had spent the previous months creating.

Because the highest passes are only hikeable in summer, he focused on the mid-range passes between 2,500m and 4,000m. “It’s a totally different ball game when snow covers the landscape,” he said.

Most of the time, all the trails he had painstakingly chronicled were under snow. “You have to use all your instincts to stay on track," said Van Geit. "Sometimes, you end up exploring off-track, using contour lines and the topography to guide you.”

Van Geit prefers a minimalist style and he made every effort to maintain that, despite the cold. His pack weighed just six kilos. He carried a slightly warmer sleeping bag (rated to -12˚C instead of his -4˚C summer model). It weighed less than a kilo. His four-season solo tent weighed just 400g. He brought no food, having breakfast and dinner in the villages, and not eating during the day.

A local start-up (BlueBoltGear) designed the ultralight equipment. Apart from those few specialty items, his kit was identical to the summer version. He did not wear boots, just light shoes and waterproof socks.

Unlike his other trips, he did not chart a specific route, but his rough plan was to cross Uttarakhand from west to east. At the Nepal border, he did a U-turn and traversed back. “I could not fix a route in advance because every winter is different, and the snowline goes up and down with every fresh snowfall," he said. "I selected my passes based on the latest snow conditions…It was very dynamic.”

He learned the hard way that keeping up-to-date with the weather was essential. One night, he slept in an isolated dwelling at 3,700m that is usually only used in summer. At first, the weather was good, but then, "at six am, I heard a loud thundering," he recalled. "When I opened the door, there was already a foot of snow.”

The snow was piling higher by the minute. "I knew that I would be in a life-threatening situation if I didn’t move," he said. "It was still dark and there was no visibility…It was trial and error finding my way back below the snowline.” After that, he followed the forecasts more closely.

When he stayed in these remote shelters, he would “barricade the doors” to keep out curious wildlife, such as wild boars and foxes. Sometimes, he could hear steps in the snow outside, and occasionally an animal jumped on the roof.

At this altitude, the temperature dropped to -20˚C, making for some uncomfortable nights in a bag designed only for -12˚C. He also had to sleep wearing his contact lenses because the saline solution had frozen. But the views from these harsh outposts were the best of the trip.

He only camped in these remote places for 10 of the 85 nights, usually at the higher passes around 4,000m. More often, Van Geit managed to cover the distance from one hamlet to another in a single day.

The plus side of hamlet-hopping was that Van Geit didn’t need to carry food. The odd time that he did not stay in a village overnight, he simply did not eat or drink. “I got used to hiking for 24 hours without water,” he said.

Van Geit was nervous about intruding on remote communities during the pandemic. “I had heard other people who went into the mountains after lockdown faced some pushback, but that was in the more commercial regions," he said.

In these remote villages, no one wore masks, and Van Geit was the first outsider to pass through in years. "They were very hospitable," he said. "They saw you as a guest and not a customer."

He was often offered a place to sleep and home-cooked meals. On a few occasions, he was invited to weddings. Once, he attended a ceremony where the village women were trying to communicate with departed souls. “They were screaming, throwing food as offerings, and there was very intense music and dancing as they tried to connect with the spirits of people who had died that year.”

He recorded all the routes he used and sent the data back to his home team to upload onto Open Street Maps. As the maps they had created earlier came from a number of sources, sometimes decades old, Van Geit's traverse of Uttarakhand involved some trial and error. “Ninety percent of the time, the trails worked out pretty well. The other 10 percent no longer existed or I couldn’t find them.”

In the end, his winter travel experiment was a success. Until then, he had only traveled from May until September. "Now I have a 12-month window," he says. "I can go to high places in the summer and mid-ranges in the winter. I can explore for nine months and map around 6,000km of new trails each year.”

The 72-year-old woman has lived her whole life in the Siberian wilderness, after her parents fled Stalin's oppression in 1936.

Known as the world’s loneliest woman, Agafia Lykova was 35 years old when she first saw a human being outside of her own family. Since 1988, she has lived alone, continuing to survive off the land. This week marked a monumental change in her lifestyle, as Lykova moved into a new home.

Lykova’s story began in 1936 when her father Karp, his wife, and their two children fled the Stalin era. They carried only essential items with them and built a tiny, bitterly cold, windowless shack more than 2,000m up a mountainside and 250km from the nearest town. Here, the devoted Old Believers lived a 16th-century life. Karp's wife even bore two more children in the wild. Lykova was one of them.

In 1978, a team of geologists accidentally discovered the family. Despite their instant fame, they didn’t want to change their way of living. Eventually, all but Lykova perished from the brutality of their isolation.

In recent years, as Lykova has aged, she’s received welfare checks a few times a year. The regional government periodically checks that she is in good health and delivers essential items donated by people around Russia, including buckwheat and rice and fabric for mending clothes. Lykova also been given a satellite phone with which she can call the ranger at the nearby Khakassky Nature Reserve if she needs help.

"We all take extreme care when visiting Lykova, virus or no virus," said one of the visiting workers. "She is like a Mowgli who has never come across modern diseases. We know how disciplined and cautious we must be to ensure that she stays safe."

During one of these checks, it became evident that Lykova's home was deteriorating. There was a public appeal for help, and oligarch Oleg Deripaska stepped in. Deripaska (worth an estimated $2.9 billion dollars) is the founder of Basic Element, a Russian industrial group with interests in aluminum, energy, construction, and agriculture. He funded the new cabin, which allows Lykova to live out her remaining years in the only lifestyle she knows.

Construction began in December, and the cabin was finished earlier this week. It has a lovely wood interior, a veranda, and lots of natural light coming through four windows. A small, wood stove provides a cooking surface and warmth from the Siberian winters. The cabin also has a sheltered space for storing firewood. Lykova requested the simple, one-story design.

Since Lykova lives in such a remote area with limited accessibility, the house was built elsewhere. Then the planks were numbered, the home dismantled, and re-assembled in her corner of the wilderness.

Lykova says she likes the new house, and baked bread and served homemade drinks to thank those who helped construct it.

Despite dozens of volunteers wishing to live close to her, Lykova prefers to have only her cousin living relatively close by.

"She is not an easy person to live with, and many people who wish to help her don’t understand her character," said one of the welfare workers. "She is a child of nature. She needs somebody who would listen to her and obey her orders."

One of the greatest escapes of all time

Picture a man swimming several hundred metres through ice water, bullets whizzing about him. One bullet shears off a big toe. He then runs barefoot through snow until the gunfire dies out. And that is just the beginning.

Jan Baalsrud’s 1943 escape from Nazi-occupied northern Norway is the stuff of astonishing individual courage -- an almost bottomless will to survive -- but also a larger kindness and humanity. During two months in which he attempted to escape into neutral Sweden, he was buried in an avalanche, amputated his own frostbitten toes with a penknife, battled starvation, went snowblind and groped around until he accidentally bumped into an empty cabin where he took refuge, and was under constant threat of capture and execution.

Eventually, through the support of local villagers who put their own lives in danger to help him, he found freedom and went on to live a relatively normal life until his death in 1988 at the age of 71.

Baalsrud was born in Norway’s capital city (now Oslo) in 1917. Like many other boys of his time, he came from modest means –- the son of an instrument maker. He completed military service at 19, and when World War II broke out, he went to serve his country.

After Germany took hold of Norway, the country's politicians, royalty, and many civilians fled to safer countries. Baalsrud relocated to Sweden where he re-trained in spy tactics. Eventually, he arrived in Britain, where he was recruited by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and trained in sabotage operations.

Baalsrud, 25, had three years of military experience behind him when he set off with 11 other men on a covert mission to Norway. His assignments: swim underwater, fastening explosive devices (limpets, or magnetic bombs) to German seaplanes, and to recruit Norwegian resistance fighters.

When the crew sought contact with the Resistance, they made a life-altering mistake. In a case of mistaken identity, they spoke to a civilian who had the same name as their contact. Fearing for his life, the man reported them to German authorities.

A German patrol boat attacked their ship. Baalsrud and his men hastily detonated all eight tons of explosives they had with them, then jumped aboard their dinghy, and sought to flee.

The Germans opened fire, sinking the dinghy, forcing all the men overboard into the freezing Norwegian water. Baalsrud swam to shore and saw that all his comrades were either in German custody, facing certain death, or were killed on the spot. Only he had managed to escape and he would certainly be killed if caught.

Baalsrud faced a grim reality. He was now stranded in enemy territory, aware that anyone who might help him would be killed if Germans found out. He had only one boot, his soaked clothes were beginning to freeze, and he didn’t have any provisions. Worse, he didn’t have a plan.

Somehow, he had managed to retain his handgun, a small Colt still firmly in its holster. When he noticed a soldier gaining on him, he pulled it out and fired a handful of failed shots before a final successful one killed his enemy.

On foot, wearing only one boot in the snow, he stumbled upon a house and took the risk of banging on the door. He was in luck: The house belonged to a family who bravely took it upon themselves to help the stranger. Baalsrud had no choice but to trust them.

From then on, he was passed among families, reliant on kindness and goodwill. To minimize the risk his presence posed, he promised to never mention where he had come from, or who he had seen.

A kind fisherman gave him new boots and a pair of skis. A father grieving the loss of his own innocent child rowed him in a dinghy through the night. Another warded off a German soldier while keeping him hidden, and a midwife offered to disguise him as a woman in labor. He was shielded from German soldiers and shunted between villages, desperately trying to cross into Sweden.

He eventually found himself at the foot of Jaeggevarre, a 900m mountain near the Lyngen River. Passing over the mountain was critical to his escape, but he was ill-equipped for such a venture.

A blizzard set in. To help know which direction in which to walk without falling off a cliff, he made snowballs, listening to the sound they made as they hit the ground. Next, an avalanche swept him down into a valley, buried up to his neck and stripped of his skis and boots. His feet frozen, he spent three days wandering aimlessly in the blizzard. A further snowstorm entombed him for another four days. Ill-equipped as always, he braved the elements under open skies.

When the weather finally cleared, he was snowblind, hallucinating, and crippled with frostbite in his toes. Finally, his luck began to improve, when stumbled on Furuflaten, a small village between Mt. Jaeggevarre and the Lyngen River.

A desperate Baalsrud banged on the door of a house, uncertain whether friend or foe lay behind it. Narrowly escaping the clutches of Nazi soldiers who were just one door away, he was taken in by a family who helped him to freedom. By now, Baalrud's fortitude had made him a symbol of Norwegian resistance, and the occupying Nazi army redoubled its efforts to capture him. Helping him was extremely perilous.

For days, the generous people hid him in a remote barn. While he awaited their delayed return with provisions, his toes severely deteriorated. The threat of gangrene increased every day, forcing Baalsrud to do the unfathomable: He used a pocket knife to slice off the tips of his toes and amputated his big toe to save the rest of his feet from infection.

Eventually, the family returned and moved him to another town, where he waited for over two weeks in a cold, dark, cave in the Skaidijonni Valley.

By now, Baalsrud was on the verge of suicide. His remaining toes were succumbing to frostbite, risking severe infection. One lonely day inside the cave, he took out his pocket knife again and amputated the rest of them.

He was weakening by the day, in the grip of starvation and reliant on the goodwill of others. Now unable to walk unaided, he wondered if he would be best to end his suffering and ease the risk to those helping him. At one point, German soldiers even searched the barn where he was hiding, but he managed to evade detection staying quiet in the loft.

But something inside him kept fighting to survive. An unimaginable strength and resilience had taken hold of Baalsrud. Barely alive, he continued to resist. A normal man in many ways, he had a genius for survival.

Over the next weeks, local villagers coordinated to assist him safely from place to place. He lay tied to a stretcher as they stealthily took him through fiords and dragged him up and down snowy mountains. When the mountains became too steep, they enlisted a local carpentry teacher to build a sled to carry him.

Eventually, traveling by reindeer sleigh, with his pursuers now hot on his tail, he made it through Nazi-occupied Finland to Sweden. He was deposited into the care of the British Red Cross, weighing barely 35kg.

It took six months for Baalsrud to regain strength and learn to walk without toes. When he did, he moved to Scotland and trained resistance fighters. Once his country was liberated in 1945, he was reunited with his family in Oslo for the first time in five years.

Brave visitors can attempt the grueling route that Baalsrud took, now marked on certain maps with a small red “B”. The trail begins in Toftefjord, then zigzags south up and down mountains, across rivers, before finally ending at the border shared by Norway, Sweden, and Finland. During winter, the route has proved impossible to travel: When two commandos once tried, they needed to be airlifted out partway through their journey.

A small, discreet museum in Furuflaten commemorates Baalsrud’s story. It houses a few of his recovered possessions, including his skis which were found in 1943 at the bottom of a gully, and hidden until the end of the war.

The museum tells the story not of a man lucky enough to escape death, but instead that of kindness and humanity. Inside sits a stuffed fox with a sign in Norwegian that says, “I saw him, but I didn't say anything.”

David Howarth’s book We Die Alone (1955) retells Baalsrud’s story and was made into a film soon after its release. Years later, in 2017, a film called The 12th Man explored a new version of the events.

Ballsrud’s ashes are buried in a grave in Manndalen that he shares with one of the local men who helped him escape.

In 2013, Harrison Okene became an accidental aquanaut when he survived more than 60 hours at the bottom of the ocean by breathing through an air pocket.

In 2013, the 29-year-old Nigerian cook was working onboard a tugboat when it capsized in heavy seas. The 12-man crew was there to stabilize an oil tanker at a platform in the Atlantic Ocean. They were about 32km off the Nigerian coast at the time of the incident.

The ship eventually settled 30m down on the sea bed, upside down. Everyone drowned, except Okene.

"It was around 5 am and I was on the toilet when the vessel just started going down –- the speed was so, so fast," Okene said later.

In pitch dark, he managed to grope his way from the toilet into another room, which had enough air to keep him alive. There, he rigged a simple platform to keep his body partially above water and delay hypothermia.

There in the dark, as the horror of his predicament began to sink in, Okene could do little but pray. "All around me was just black and noisy. I was crying and calling on Jesus to rescue me. I prayed so hard. I was so hungry and thirsty and cold and I was just praying to see some kind of light."

He was wearing just his underpants, stuck in an air bubble a little more than a metre thick, alone, and partly immersed in cool water.

After almost two-and-a-half days, seemingly beyond help at the bottom of the ocean, Okene’s prayers were answered when he spotted a light.

A team of South African divers had come to inspect the vessel and retrieve the bodies. Okene gently reached his hand out to touch a diver's arm. So as not to spook him, Okene then withdrew his arm and waved. A recovery camera caught the diver’s shocked reaction at seeing a man alive. It was as if he'd seen a ghost. The moment comes at :50 in the video below.

"How it wasn't full of water is anyone's guess," said one of the rescue team. "I would say someone was looking after him."

The next challenge was getting Okene safely to the surface. After such a long time at depth, Okene had absorbed potentially fatal amounts of nitrogen. Bringing him suddenly to the surface would induce a deadly attack of the bends. The team needed to skillfully readjust the gas levels in Okene’s body.

They suited Okene with a diving helmet and guided him to a diving bell, designed to maintain internal pressure. Okene lost consciousness during the transfer but managed to survive. The bell then brought him safely to the surface, where he spent two days in a decompression chamber. He suffered from peeling skin, recurring nightmares, and insatiable hunger, but was otherwise in good health.

Okene had assumed that all the other 11 crew made it safely to the surface when the boat went down, while he alone sank to the bottom. It wasn’t until later that he learned that he was the sole survivor. All the bodies of his companions were recovered except one, who was never found.

Although Okene swore never again to go near the ocean, he became a certified commercial diver in 2015. The rescue diver who discovered him at the bottom of the ocean presented him with his diploma.

A polar bear injured a man in a surprise attack early today on the east coast of Svalbard, in a frozen bay called Mohnbukta, 75km east of Longyearbyen. The man survived, thanks to a quick reaction from his partner, who shot the male bear.

An autopsy revealed that the six-year-old bear weighed only 231kg. A bear of that age should have weighed 50 to 100 percent more.

The two men were in a remote bay measuring sea ice thickness when the attack occurred. Their idling snowmobiles may have masked any sound the bear made as it approached.

Polar bears, and the danger they can create, are a fact of life in Svalbard. Residents of Longyearbyen sometimes carry rifles around town for protection, though they have to leave them outside before going into a bank to make withdrawals, one story recently reported.

Last August, a man was killed when a polar bear tore into his tent near the Longyearbyen airport, where he was camped. And in 2018, a bear was filmed squeezing its way out of a tiny window after breaking into a local hotel, below.

Most polar bears will ignore or even flee from people, but a small percentage of them, mainly adolescent males, will investigate campsites or even people. If not deterred, their investigations can quickly turn lethal.

Svalbard has a history of such attacks because the 3,000 polar bears in that region clash with the tourists who come to this northern Norwegian enclave to experience the Arctic. Adventure kayakers, skiers, even children on school outings have occasionally become victims.

In most other parts of the circumpolar north, polar bears rarely run into people.

In 1936, fleeing Stalin's Terror and religious persecution, in particular, Karp Lykov, his wife Akulina, and their two children, Savin (aged nine) and Natalia (aged two) walked more than 250km into the remote Siberian wilderness. For the next 50 years, they lived a remote, self-sufficient life. Two more children were born into their family. These two had never seen a human outside of their own group until the family was discovered by accident in 1978.

The Lykovs were Old Believers, an Eastern Orthodox faith that practiced pre-16th century rituals. This sect was persecuted even more than ordinary Christians during the 1930s Soviet Union. Karp’s own brother was shot by a Communist patrol while Karp worked beside him.

In response, he and his family fled to the taiga, or boreal forest, near a tributary of the Abakan River, about 160km from the Mongolian border. They carried only a few essential items on their arduous journey: a couple of kettles, seeds, a crude spinning wheel, and the components of a loom.

They wore their clothes and shoes until they fell to pieces. Many of the original items proved impossible to duplicate in the wild. They replaced worn-out shoes with bark-soled versions and used hemp that they grew from seeds to replace threadbare clothing. Metal, however, was irreplaceable. Once the kettles wore away, food became a daily struggle.

The family lived continuously on the verge of starvation, They mainly survived off potato patties mixed with hemp seeds and ground rye. Life was so precarious that they held an annual family meeting to discuss whether they should plant the seeds for the following year or eat them for sustenance now. In 1961, choosing to feed her children instead of herself, Kulina died of starvation.

Each family member had his or her own strengths and resourcefulness. They’d each rule over part of their living environment. When Dimitri –- the youngest son, born in the wild –- was old enough, he’d hunt for meat. Sometimes he was gone for days at a time, sleeping without shelter in freezing temperatures. Without modern traps or weapons, he relied on hidden, self-dug ground traps or followed his prey until they eventually relented from exhaustion.

Then one day in 1978, a group of geologists was flying over of the area, which had never been explored, when they noticed a clearing. Since there was no known record of human habitation near the area, they circled a few times. The evidence was compelling; a garden large enough to notice from the air could only have been made by humans.

They found somewhere to land and set out on foot to investigate. What they found defied belief.

They stumbled upon a dwelling which they later described as “not much more than a burrow, soot-blackened and cold as a cellar”. It was cramped, filthy, consisted of a single room, and the floor was covered with potato peels and pine nut cones. Cowering frightened in the corner were two girls.

Sensitively, the geologists retreated from the home to give the girls time to adjust to the unfamiliar visitors. To improve the chances of a positive first contact, they waited for the family to come to them. There they learned the Lykovs' astonishing story.

The daughters spoke their own unique language, talking to one another in a “slow, blurred cooing.” They’d heard the concept of cities and countries through the stories their parents had shared with them, but their only reading material had been religious books and the Bible. When one of the geologists offered bread, one of the daughters replied, “We are not allowed that.” In fact, she’d never heard of such a food. The family's chief entertainment was for everyone to recount their dreams.

Although they were now known to the world, and the world was known to them, they refused to accept new items into their lifestyle. Shortly after their discovery, Savin and Natalia died of causes most likely related to their harsh diet. That same year, Dimitri died from pneumonia after refusing to be airlifted to a hospital. Karp, the old man, succumbed to heart failure in 1988. The sole survivor, Agafia, one of the daughters, continues to live alone in the wilderness, 2,000m up a mountainside.

Kiwi mountaineer Marni Sheppeard is missing in the mountains once again, 17 years after she disappeared in the same place.

Sheppeard was the subject of a major search in December 2003 when she and fellow tramper Sonja Rendell went missing for eight days in the Southern Alps.

Back then, the two women spent seven nights huddled together on a rocky mountainside, in a cavity no bigger than a coffin, before their rescue.

Rescuers were astounded at the pair’s good health, which they credited to Sheppeard’s mountaineering experience. The two survived rain, sleet, and snow in one of the country’s most rugged national parks.

Shepperd is said to be a "level-headed" person, despite her atypical lifestyle in recent years.

The 53-year-old has a Ph.D. in theoretical physics and is trained in Alpine Operations. Once, while living in the resort town of Wanaka, she worked as part of a search-and-rescue team.

Recently, Sheppeard has been homeless and impoverished. After living on the streets of Auckland in 2019, she moved into one of the City Mission shelters to “continue her research”.

She was last seen in November 2020 and was thought to be heading into the Arthur's Pass region, tramping again. She was reported missing in January. Police are concentrating their search around the same area where she was located in 2003.

The self-professed “Queen of the South” tweeted in November that she was “heading for the mountains”. Her tweet was short and to the point, surrounding philosophical quotes of a bizarre political nature.

Arthur's Pass National Park is located on New Zealand's rugged South Island. The area covers 1,185 km² and is a popular year-round hiking destination. Its warmest temperatures usually occur in January and February. Since 1998, there have been 272 rescues in the area.

A family's nautical dream turns into a 38-day nightmare of survival

In 1971, the Robertson family –- Dougal and his wife Lyn, their children Ann, Douglas, Neill, and Sandy -- set off on a 13m wooden boat called the Lucette, that they had purchased with their life savings. The idea was to voyage around the Atlantic, through the Caribbean, and across the Panama Canal to the Pacific side. They did so for a year and a half, then continued toward the Galapagos, learning from the "university of life".

One of the daughters, Ann, 18, left the expedition in the Caribbean. In Panama, they took on a young hitchhiker named Robin Williams.

Shortly after, they ran into trouble. Some 300km west of the Galapagos Islands, en route to the South Pacific, a pod of killer whales struck the boat.

"The whole boat shook and the keel must've cracked," said one son, Douglas, later. "There was a splintering noise of wood cracking. I heard this splashing noise behind me, and there were three killer whales following the boat."

Although killer whales are not known to attack people, the teenaged Douglas feared for his life. But the foundering boat was the real danger. They scrambled on board an inflatable life raft, to which they hitched a small, three-metre dinghy, as the Lucette sank beneath them.

The life raft was a tight fit for the six of them and they needed to use a bellows to keep it afloat. But the bellows eventually became useless, and they had to keep inflating it by mouth. But after 16 days, even that was ineffective, and the six of them had to crowd into the little dingy.

Father Dougal, a retired mariner, tried to sail the dingy toward the centre of the Pacific, to catch a current back to land.

They had managed to grab water before abandoning their original vessel. They also collected rainwater and drank the blood of turtles when that ran out. They ate meagre rations of bread, biscuits, fruit, and also turtle flesh.

"Turtle was the mainstay of our diet," said Douglas.

Somehow, they all survived for 38 days before a passing Japanese fishing trawler spotted their distress flares.

"I never regretted the trip, even in the darkest hours," said Douglas.

Their father wrote a book about their ordeal called Survive the Savage Sea, which was later made into a truly terrible movie starring Ali MacGraw. Douglas, feeling that his father had not given the rest of the family enough credit, later wrote his own account, called The Last Voyage of the Lucette.

The true story of the man Leonardo DiCaprio played in The Revenant.

After Hugh Glass was mauled by a bear in the early 1800s, he then escaped from the shallow grave his companions had buried him in. Alone in the wilderness, he had to crawl for six weeks back to civilization. He survived catastrophic injuries, later coming face to face with the men who left him for dead and chose to forgive them. His tale of grace and survival was largely forgotten until 2015 when Leonardo DiCaprio played him in The Revenant.

Glass’s story typified parts of early 19th-century America. Large expanses of western America remained blanks on a map, and the fur trade was a major industry. Glass was a fur trapper, hunter, and explorer, born of Scots-Irish parents in Pennsylvania.

Fur-trade expeditions sometimes took years, as they ventured into unknown regions.  General William Ashley was in the process of revolutionizing the fur industry by introducing the rendezvous system as a substitute for traditional trading posts.

Ashley was a U.S congressman who, after serving as Missouri’s first lieutenant governor, co-founded the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, which helped pioneer Western exploration. In 1822, the company hired 100 men to join their first expedition up the Missouri River to the mouth of the Yellowstone River, where they established a trading post.

Fur trade expeditions

The following year, Glass was recruited into Ashley’s existing team, joining the second expedition up the Missouri. Glass spent his most of his life dutifully working for Ashley’s company, but his time there was fraught with tragedy. The first happened just three months after he departed St Louis on a keelboat with Ashley and John Fitzgerald.

Ashley, Glass, and Fitzgerald had rejoined the initial corps when they were confronted by Indians in an Arikara village. A battle ensued, and 15 of Ashley’s men were killed. Glass suffered a gunshot wound to the leg. The battle forced Ashley’s troops to split up, with Glass and other survivors retreating downstream to send help.

Communication in those days consisted of handwritten messages carried long distances by men on foot and hand-delivered to their recipients. This time-consuming process was the only way for one group to know where another was positioned, and where or when to regroup.

Back at Fort Kiowa -– a base camp of sorts -- Glass nursed his leg back to health while the group restocked and prepared to set off again down the Yellowstone River. It may seem crazy by today's standards that a man who had been shot in the leg would resume a dangerous expedition as soon as possible. But this was before notions of modern labor. Glass and the rest of Ashley’s men were assigned a duty and had to perform, regardless of the consequences.

Two months passed. They were near the forks of the Grand River (in present-day South Dakota) hunting for food when Glass’s bear attack occurred.

The bear attack

It was the classic scenario: Glass found himself between a mother grizzly and her two cubs. By the time he realized it, it was too late. The grizzly bear picked him up from the ground, biting into him. Incredibly, Glass managed to kill the bear during the mauling but he was severely wounded in the process. His scalp was ripped open, his leg broken, he had puncture wounds to his throat, and numerous gashes over his back and torso.

More than 300km of wilderness lay between his party and the nearest settlement when the attack occurred. Certain that his injuries were not survivable, Ashley ordered two of his men (John Fitzgerald & Jim Bridger) to stay with Glass until he died. They were to bury him before rejoining the rest of the party and continuing their expedition.

Fitzgerald and Bridger stayed with Glass for several days, who continued to cling to life. The two men began to grow impatient, seeing little reason to hang around, waiting for him to die. They started digging a shallow grave. They stripped Glass of his weapons, wrapped him in a bearskin shroud, and buried him prematurely. They assumed, as Ashley had, that Glass simply wouldn’t be able to survive his injuries. Fitzgerald and Bridger then left Glass for dead and rejoined the expedition.

But Glass wasn’t dead at all. He’d somehow withstood the savage mauling and regained consciousness to find himself beneath dirt, miles from provisions. His weapons were gone, he had a broken leg, wounds exposing his ribs, and deep lacerations all over his body. His situation looked bleak.

Managing to regain a little strength, Glass set his leg straight, of course without any analgesic. He recognized that he’d need to make an arduous journey back to civilization in order to have a chance of recovering. He wasn't able to walk, so instead, he crawled much of the 300km.

Glass spent almost two months living on berries and roots as he crept toward Fort Kiawa. To prevent gangrene, he allowed maggots to eat his rotting flesh while crawling painfully in a direction he thought would lead him home. When he reached the Cheyenne River, he built a crude raft to float across it.

By the time he arrived at Fort Kiowa, he’d spent six weeks plotting in his mind how he could seek revenge on the men who had left him for dead. He was angry and desperate to find them. After nursing himself back to health, Glass set out on the Yellowstone River to Fort Henry, looking for Fitzgerald and Bridges. His intentions were clear: he wanted to kill them.

At Fort Henry, he learned that Bridger was at a new camp on the banks of the Bighorn River. Dodging conflicts with Native Americans, he reached the camp and finally met Bridger face to face.

A change of heart

At this moment, his spirit changed. Perhaps envisioning a burly man who had been so callous in his decision to leave him alone and dying, he instead saw a young man, barely 19 years old at the time of the incident. Glass forgave Bridger, sparing his life and re-enlisted in Ashley’s expedition.

Revenge on Fitzgerald was still in Glass' mind, though. The following year, Glass tracked him down, only to discover that Fitzgerald was now a high-ranking army officer.

Glass had little choice. If he harmed an army general, then he would be killed in retaliation. So he chose to forgive Fitzgerald as well and simply retrieved the gun that was taken from him that fateful day.

Glass continued to join expeditions led by Ashley’s company. Eventually, 10 years after his horrific bear mauling, he was in Montana when he was involved in another confrontation with the Arikara people -- the same tribe who had shot him on his first expedition. This time, he was killed.

At Manaslu Base Camp, the climbers are getting some rest and hoping to have a new summit chance before it snows too much. "We would have needed just one more day," said Alex Txikon. The Spaniard did not add any details but he did mention that the five-men team "suffered from cold, hunger, and fear" to get that far.

"Before planning any further, we must see how much snow falls," said a cautious Simone Moro. On the recent summit push, Moro lent his crampons to Iñaki Alvarez and returned to Base Camp for a spare pair, intending to head back up. However, the Italian climber changed his mind after receiving a new forecast from Karl Gabl, who predicted worsening weather throughout the weekend. "Gabl was not wrong," said Moro, who filmed the heavy snow blanketing Base Camp yesterday.

Laila Peak

Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the Polish team on Laila Peak are in Camp 1. Tomorrow, they will scout the area above 5,000m, then return to Base Camp. The four-man team includes the first winter summiter of Gasherbrum I, Janusz Golab.

Alex Txikon and Jose M. Fernandez first climbed Laila Peak in winter in 2013. While their climb is widely accepted (including by Polish climbers), some quarters have discussed whether it was a true summit, since Txikon and Fernandez admitted that they stopped about 10m shy of the highest point after climbing the upper section in very deep snow. At the point where their GPS indicated 6,100m (Laila is officially 6,096m), the climbers feared that they might be about to step on the summit cornice, which could collapse under their weight. After shooting some photographs, they swiftly retreated.

It’s already been a tough year for the mountaineering community. Five lives have been lost on K2 and two more perished in an avalanche in the Italian Alps. The mountaineers left behind friends and families. Some had young children.

We spoke to author Maria Coffey about how families and climbers balance home lives with the risks inherent in high-altitude mountaineering. Coffey has authored or co-authored 10 books, including Where the Mountain Casts its Shadow, Explorers of the Infinite and Fragile Edge, which details her relationship with famed UK mountaineer Joe Tasker, who perished on Everest in 1982. Where the Mountain Casts its Shadow deals specifically with the effect of mountain deaths on families back home.

Our Comments section is divided over whether some of the missing K2 climbers have been “selfish” because they have children at home. Is climbing an inherently selfish act?

When I wrote my book, I decided to avoid making the judgment of selfish or addicted. But it was very interesting that most of the climbers I spoke to said, “Of course it’s selfish, how could it not be?”

They have this inherent need to climb and they make their own rationale for how and why they go. But as we drilled down, they often acknowledged that they weren’t doing this for their families; they had this deep need to climb. Particularly with something as dangerous as K2 in winter, there has to be some understanding that to go off and do this, you are putting your own needs above those of your partner, children, or parents.

After a mountaineering tragedy, the why of climbing is inevitably brought up. Is “because it’s there” enough?

It is a deep need for many climbers. Every human being needs transcendence, moments of stillness, moments of perfection. We all yearn for this and we all find it in different ways. Some of us get this from a beautiful sunset, from yoga, from running. But some people are wired in such a way that they can only find those moments doing something more extreme.

In my book Explorers of the Infinite, I interviewed a lot of climbers and was amazed that most of them didn’t balk at the idea of a spiritual need to climb. Many climbers have told me that they long to reach these moments of stillness when objectives are clear and life feels simple. I do wonder how much harder it is to find these moments now, with cellphones, sponsors, blog posts, and social media obligations.

What are the positives of pursuing a risky passion like climbing?

The world needs risk-takers. We are inspired by them. Inspired by their leaps into the unknown, pushing the boundaries of imagination and physical possibility, all those things that have always pushed explorers, from time immemorial, to explore. Discovering spiritual, physical, and mental territory is a deep need.

Would public judgments about Snorri, Mohr, and Sadpara be different if they were women?

Oh, absolutely. There was a furore regarding Alison Hargreaves when she died [climbing K2 in 1995] because she had young children. Her memory was ripped apart. Even before she left on her expedition, she was ripped apart in the press.

However, I think there is more discussion now, whether the climber is male or female. There is more equality in relationships too. There was a lot of blowback from mountaineers when I first published Where the Mountain Casts its Shadow. I felt like I was opening up the conversation and it’s been gratifying to see that these discussions are becoming more prevalent. Twenty years ago, you’d never have gotten the reactions you are getting on your website.

In your experience, what might the impact be on the families left behind?

It’s devastating. I think particularly when the person has died so far away and if the person has disappeared without a trace, it compounds the loss. If the bodies have been left on the mountain, there is no possibility of seeing the body to say goodbye. It can be hard to believe they have gone.

Of course, it is different for everybody. When I interviewed partners who had lost someone, many had found it very difficult to let themselves be angry. For me, that came a lot, lot later. You felt angry because the person had gone away but you don’t want to let that feeling in. But I think for me, there was the sense that there was another great love in my partner’s life. Partners at least have a choice, they have chosen to be with someone who is going to take these risks.

Likewise, for the children, there is no one pattern. There have been instances when a child has told me that the role of a parent was to protect them and that they couldn’t understand why their father or mother had put themselves before their child. Age can factor into the impact, but even very young children can feel the absence of the parent throughout their life. I had a very emotional interview with the daughter of Mick Burke who was lost on Everest in 1975. She spoke about problems in her relationships with men, a fear of being left. She described it as a shadow in her life.

We shouldn’t forget the parents either, the suffering for the parents is terrible too.

How do families deal with a major expedition?

These days, you can be in close contact during an expedition. I’ve spoken to people who have experienced expeditions before and after this technological change. Interestingly, they have said it is harder now, as you can’t switch off. Every time the phone rings or your phone beeps, it could be news. It can increase the stress level.

Some people build up a wall, I know I did this. It’s almost like a defense each time the person goes away, just to be able to deal with it emotionally. One woman told me that each time she built up this wall, she built it slightly higher and that eventually, she thought the wall would be so high her partner might not be able to come back in over it.

There is an element of denial. You have to block out the risks and believe that they are going to come back. Maybe some people are pragmatic enough to prepare for the loss of a loved one, but you can’t know how devastating it is until it happens.

How do climbers mentally separate their home life from the risks required in their professional life?

I was surprised how many mountaineers didn’t have wills, even those with children. Some would actually say, “Well, I’m not going to die.” They didn’t want to face that possibility. There were all these rationalizations. But the question that always stopped them in their tracks was, “What do you say to your children just before you leave on an expedition?” Without fail, they found the question very hard. Some broke down. It was a question they almost couldn’t bring themselves to answer.

I think that anybody who embarks on something so dangerous has to compartmentalize. In my book, I called them masters of denial. Climbers told me about how they change their focus away from home and toward the mountain. Joe and I didn’t discuss the risk of death often, because he didn’t want to talk about it, but I remember him saying once, “if I really think about what would happen to you if I die, I wouldn’t be able to go and climb, so I don’t think about it.” I think that sums it up really.

I’ve often been asked if mountaineers have a death wish. They definitely don’t, they have a life wish! They are among the most life-affirming people I have ever met.

Is family life ever really compatible with life as an 8,000m climber?

I’ve never had any regrets about my relationship with a mountaineer. But I was young and had a life ahead of me, and we didn’t have children.

Passing judgment is very difficult. I never wanted to take a hard line on that. If a climber survives, it is OK, right? Some climbers get away with it. Many famous mountaineers have families, have children. If they survive, there is no judgment. Unfortunately, there are those who don’t get away with it. Climbers risk breaking the hearts and shattering the lives of those who love them the most.

Because of the tragic events on K2, we naturally think that the winter season is over. But three weeks remain until the end of meteorological winter, and six weeks until spring officially begins. That's plenty of time for the new generation of Polish winter warriors to launch a lightweight attempt on one of the most beautiful mountains in the Karakorum: Leila Peak.

Organized by the Jerzy Kukuzcka Foundation for the support of Polish mountaineering, the expedition follows the proven tactics of combining experienced older climbers with strong, young spurs. The current team is led by Jerzy Natkanski, a veteran of winter expeditions to Nanga Parbat (1997-98), Makalu (2000-2001), and K2 (2002-2003). He has summited Gasherbrum II and Broad Peak and led expeditions to Manaslu (2012), Dhaulagiri (2013), Broad Peak Middle (2014), K2 (2016 and 2017), Gasherbrum VI (2019), and Mitre Peak in the winter of 2020, just before the worldwide lockdown.

By his side is Janusz Golab, who bagged the first winter climb of Gasherbrum I with Adam Bielecki in 2012 and summited K2 in 2014. Golab also has completed an impressive number of routes in Europe's Alps, Greenland, Patagonia, and Alaska.

Younger members include Marco Schwidergall and Bartek Ziemski (spelled Bartosz Kacper on the climbing permit). Despite their ages, both have several major climbs in the Alps and the Caucasus under their belts.

The team landed in Pakistan last week, operator Akbar Syed told ExplorersWeb. After some days of trekking, they reached Base Camp today, at the foot of Leila Peak (6,069m) in the Masherbrum range. If they succeed, it would be the second winter ascent of Laila Peak after Alex Txikon's in 2013, and the first by Polish climbers.

In 1959, nine students went on a skiing trip in Russia's Ural Mountains and never returned. Searchers found their bodies scattered a variety of distances from the tent, which had been cut open from the inside. The deceased skiers were in varying states of undress, without shoes, with traces of radiation on their clothes, and all with different injuries: a crushed skull, broken ribs, missing eyes, and a missing tongue. It was the stuff that conspiracy theories are made of.

For more than half a century, people have analyzed, speculated, theorized, and opined about what happened that mysterious night. Notions have ranged from avalanches, animal attacks, and murders by locals to wild hunches about a nuclear weapons test, KGB spies, yetis, and UFOs. All these theories offer what-ifs, but no one has definitively solved the mystery of Dyatlov Pass.

Till now, perhaps. Sixty-two years later, scientific modeling has yielded a plausible explanation.

The Swiss research team of Johan Gaume of the Snow Avalanche Simulation Laboratory and Alexander Puzrin of ETH Zurich, a research university, have published a paper in the prestigious journal Nature concluding that a very small avalanche could have been at fault. At the very least, any explanation that involves equations like the ones below has to be taken seriously.

The avalanche explanation has been advanced many times before, including by Russian government investigators in 2019 and 2020, but they offered no scientific explanation about how this might have happened. The mountain, called Kholat Saykhl, on which their tent sat was relatively gentle, just 28˚, and avalanche terrain generally begins on 30˚ slopes and steeper.

The rescue team also found few avalanche signs, and the injuries seemed inconsistent with those of avalanche victims. And if there was an avalanche, it happened about nine hours after the skiers set up camp.

Puzrin found the nine-hour delay particularly intriguing. He had previously published a paper explaining how an earthquake can lead to an avalanche hours later. He and Gaume created computer simulations and models to try to replicate that night. They concluded that even though an avalanche was unlikely under normal conditions, a combination of unusual factors might have created a small snow slab avalanche that could explain the various bizarre injuries.

The initial investigation described an underlying weak snow layer at the site that overlying snow might move over. In their journals, the group also mentioned strong winds. Yet the possibility of an avalanche had often been dismissed because the snow buildup wasn't enough, and no snow fell the night of the accident.

But the simulations suggested that strong katabatic winds could easily have brought large masses of snow down toward the campsite. The skiers also destabilized the slope when they cut into it to create a platform for their tent. Together, those conditions could have triggered a small but fatal slide.

The Swiss researchers' conclusions about this bizarre mystery came from an equally bizarre place –- the CGI coding used for snow animation in the 2013 Disney movie, Frozen. The movement of the snow in the movie so impressed Gaume that he met the specialist who had worked on the film's special effects. He then modified the coding to simulate the ways that avalanches could impact the human body.

To get realistic values for inputting the coding and animation equations, they used research on car crashes. In the 1970s, General Motors broke the ribs of a hundred cadavers, using different weights and velocities, to see what happened in car crashes and thus to improve seatbelt safety. Some of these bodies had rigid supports, others did not. The skiers on Kholat Saykhl slept on top of their skis in the tent -- these would have acted as a rigid platform when the avalanche hit.

The computer modeling showed that a five-metre block of snow, in this very specific situation, could in fact break ribs and skulls. These injuries would eventually be fatal, but the victims would not die immediately. They would have time to cut open the tent and flee. The differing severity of injuries would determine how far a particular individual made it from the site of the accident before succumbing to hypothermia.

Others have quickly weighed in on the research. Geohazards expert Jim McElwaine of Durham University in England is not convinced that a small avalanche could lead to such injuries. He believes that the snow would need to move faster than it could achieve on that slope to do so.

Pat Morrow, a Canadian photographer and the first person to complete the climber's version of the Seven Summits, remains dubious. "I’ve never heard of anyone running away from their tent after it was hit by an avalanche," says the lifelong mountaineer. "The natural reaction is to unbury and try to get warm."

Other professional climbers think it reasonable that snow slabs could lead to blunt trauma injuries. One also wonders why the radiation traces on the victims' clothing has been disregarded completely. Dyatlov Pass is not far away from the secret city, known then as Chelyabinsk-40, where the Soviets built their first atomic bombs. Two years before the skiers' fatal outing, the world's largest nuclear accident (until Chernobyl), called the Kyshtym disaster, occurred at that plant. Dyatlov Pass is a little further north, but radiation was endemic in the 1950s in that part of the Urals.

Gaume and Puzrin admit that they have not tried to explain everything that happened that night. But this is by far the fullest, most scientific explanation to date of what might have happened at Dyatlov Pass.