With record-breaking summer heat becoming the norm each year, running endurance events beneath the beating sun becomes a tough — and dangerous — proposition. Just this spring, one runner died and others were hospitalized during a California half-marathon in May. Another died last year during a Disneyland half-marathon amid rising numbers of heat-related deaths in the U.S.
Even Paris had to make big changes to ensure athletes didn’t overheat during he 2024 Olympic games.
Amid all this hand-wringing over how to adapt to rising heat, a group co-founded by Bear Grylls has proposed a bold alternative: run underground.
On October 25, 60 runners will compete in a marathon using the underground tunnels of Swedish mining company Boliden. The race will occur 1,000 meters below the surface, with a goal of raising $1 million for charity.
In contrast to traditional marathons, participants will have to endure subterranean conditions, total silence, and “running in complete darkness with only their head torches for light,” organizers said.
“We’re incredibly proud to host this historic event at our Garpenberg mine,” Mikael Staffas, Boliden’s president and CEO, said in a news release. “As one of the safest and most technologically advanced mines in the world, it’s the perfect setting to show that mining can be both cutting-edge and purpose-driven. We look forward to welcoming the intrepid runners and shining a light on an industry that’s critical to a sustainable future.”
Unfortunately, the race is not open to the public due to “space reasons,” organizers said. The selected participants mostly come from the mining and metals industry, and will represent 17 different countries. They all have “good running experience,” with many of them employees of Boliden who were offered the chance to participate.
The race will be a traditional marathon distance of 26.2 miles. Though Boliden also said that some of the race will be “partially illuminated,” we’re guessing that extra bright headlamps will be indispensable for this one.
Moreover, event organizers hope to earn two Guinness World Records with the race: one for the world’s deepest marathon and a second record for organizing the event.
This innovative event is organized by BecomingX, a digital platform co-founded by adventurers Bear Grylls and Paul Gurney. They partnered with the International Council for Mining and Metals and settled on the Boliden-owned Garpenberg Mine for the location. According to a news release, Boliden is “one of the world’s safest mining companies.”
Canada’s most popular national park turned deadly Thursday, when a sudden rockfall rained boulders and rubble down on visiting hikers.
The incident occurred at about 1 pm Thursday, when Parks Canada received a report of a rockfall near Bow Glacier Falls in Banff National Park. Canadian officials confirmed that one person was immediately found dead at the scene. By Friday morning, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police confirmed another body was recovered by rescue crews, Global News Canada reported.
Two more victims of the rockfall were evacuated by STARS Air Ambulance, and another by ground ambulance, according to Parks Canada. The injured visitors were all in stable condition, Jasper Local reported.
“We are all heartbroken by the recent tragedy at Bow Glacier Falls in Banff National Park,” said Ron Hallman, the president of Parks Canada.
At least 20 people were believed to be in the area at the time of the rockfall, according to multiple videos and personal accounts posted to social media on Friday. Video of the event shows a massive wall of rock crashing down from Bow Glacier Falls. Many onlookers ran for their lives as an enormous dust cloud engulfed nearby hikers.
Videos and photos of the incident quickly took over social media feeds on Friday, as tourists visiting the park for peace and quiet suddenly found themselves bearing witness to the fatal rockslide.
Kamala Dixon, whose Facebook profile lists her as a digital creator, has many posts of wildlife and landscapes from across Canada. She happened to be at Bow Glacier Falls on Thursday when the rockfall occurred. She posted several jaw-dropping videos and images from the event that quickly went viral online. Her videos also ended up in news feeds like the one above.
“Not sure if I’m the luckiest or unluckiest,” Dixon wrote. “As I turned right…I heard a sound like I’ve never heard before. I swing my phone around to capture not realizing what exactly I was seeing, then I threw my phone and deployed my Garmin. This is an EASY hike, that people take kids and elderly to, no one could have ever expected such devastation.”
While Banff National Park remains open, Bow Lake is now closed to all visitors.
Bow Glacier Falls is a popular tourist hike a half-hour north of Lake Louise, Alberta. The 120-meter waterfall drains an emerald lake high above that collects water from the melting Bow Glacier. Though the lake is called Iceberg Lake, it no longer has icebergs, as the glacier has retreated dramatically.
The deadliest landslide in Canadian history, called the Frank Slide, also happened in Alberta. In 1903, 110 million tonnes of Turtle Mountain broke away and fell on the nearby mining town of Frank, killing at least 70 people.
The original version of this article first appeared in GearJunkie.
It’s no coincidence that the first video ad for the Volonaut Airbike was published just before May 4, a.k.a. Star Wars Day. The video’s aesthetic will be immediately familiar to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the science-fiction franchise. Since the first film debuted in 1977, hover bikes speeding across the Tatooine desert have captivated the imaginations of fans the world over.
Now, a Polish inventor claims to have a working prototype — albeit with quite a few caveats.
Polish entrepreneur Tomasz Patan founded Volonaut to realize his dream of a real-life “flying air bike.” Patan explains that it’s the first “hoverbike vehicle” that doesn’t use propellers to fly. Instead, it’s powered by jet propulsion that supposedly offers speeds up to an incredible (terrifying?) 200 kph.
His prototype is the result of “many months of hard work, solved challenges and multiple failures,” according to Patan. It’s the realization of a concept often portrayed in science fiction. It “became the obsession to its creator,” Volonaut says on its website.
The Airbike is seven times lighter than a typical motorcycle, thanks to a construction that combines carbon fiber and 3D printing. A proprietary stabilization system, aided by a flight computer, will provide automatic hover controls for the rider.
However, other details about the vehicle remain scarce, as it has just emerged from “stealth mode development.” Even in the video, we’re not shown any moments of liftoff or landings, which raises questions about the Airbike's viability at this early stage of development.
But the attraction of soaring across desert landscapes on a hover bike is impossible to ignore. We can only hope that the viral success of the brand’s first video teaser will lead to further proof of concept.
This article first appeared on GearJunkie.
What’s in a name? How much does changing the name of a body of water really matter?
These are the questions that irked U.S.-based cartographer Michael Hermann when President Donald Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” Hermann and his wife had been traveling throughout Mexico for years, and he became increasingly fascinated by the immense scope of the Gulf’s history.
While visiting Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula several years ago, Hermann — the founder of Purple Lizard Maps — had an ambitious idea. What if he tried to make a “story map” that visualized 10,000 years of the Gulf’s history, from ancient civilizations to modern oil extraction?
The idea crystallized when Trump changed the Gulf’s name on the first day he returned to the presidency. Hermann didn’t like how Trump depicted Mexico only as a place “filled with gangs and murderers and rapists.” He didn’t like Trump changing North America’s highest mountain from its Indigenous name (Denali) to Mt. McKinley.
Those actions fuel a “nationalistic narrative” with “all the overtones of white colonial power,” Hermann said this week. So Hermann launched a Kickstarter to fund his vision for a new map of the Gulf of Mexico.
“Maps tend to shape things like memory and meaning,” Hermann said. “They can tell stories, and this lets us tell a deeper story about the Gulf.”
Trump wasn’t content with just issuing an executive order changing the Gulf’s name. He has instructed federal agencies to ban or limit the phrase “Gulf of Mexico.” When the Associated Press (the country’s oldest news organization) continued using “Gulf of Mexico” in its stories, Trump banned AP reporters from the White House.
Amid all the rhetoric, however, it became clear to Hermann that few people really understood the uniqueness of the Gulf itself.
After all, it’s the place where a meteor struck the Earth 66 million years ago, killing all the dinosaurs. It’s where ancient civilizations like the Olmec, Maya, and Aztec developed for thousands of years in the lands that eventually became Mexico. The Gulf was critical to the arrival and expansion of colonial powers from Europe.
Then it became crucial to U.S. political power, and finally an international hub for extracting the oil — created from all those dead dinosaurs.
This article first appeared on GearJunkie.
As I pulled into a Buc-ee’s gas station here in Georgia last week, it was impossible to ignore the huge sign planted at the corner: “Tariffs are a tax paid at the pump by you, the consumer.”
Like most of us here in the Land of the Free, I’ve been hearing lots of anxiety lately over President Trump’s tariffs. That’s not a word many Americans hear in their day-to-day life, but they are essentially taxes (also called duties) placed on imported goods. Trump has significantly increased tariffs on many overseas products, especially those from China, Japan, and Europe.
Like many Americans, that’s not something that I was expecting to actually impact my life. But then I got a $58.50 bill in the mail from FedEx to pay “additional tariffs” on some high-tech, Chinese-made glasses I was planning to review for GearJunkie.
With Trump now implementing even more tariffs — 10% on all countries and higher rates for China, Japan, and Europe — many Americans may end up with a surprise bill for online purchases.
Let me explain.
GearJunkie editors constantly receive new gear for testing, so I barely thought about the pair of AI-powered cycling glasses that a Chinese company decided to send me. But then I received a phone call and email from FedEx asking me to clarify details about the shipment to get it past U.S. Customs officials.
A few days after that, I received the package with the glasses, followed by a bill in the mail from FedEx. They want me to pay $58.50 for the total duties associated with the shipment. It shocked me, as I’ve never received a bill like this.
Apparently, I’m not the only one. Other Americans across the country are receiving similar bills from delivery services like FedEx, DHL, and UPS, Reuters reported.
Surprised and a little agitated, I called the number for FedEx customer support. The line initially offers phone assistance and then informs you that it’s no longer available and you’ll need to use email.
When I heard back from FedEx via email, they explained that the Chinese company had indicated that the package’s recipient (me) would pay the additional taxes. That means FedEx must pay those taxes to get the package through Customs.
So to recap: the company passed on the burden of the tariff to FedEx, which then passed it on to me. Notably, FedEx did not answer my other question: What are the consequences if I don’t pay the tax?
But this episode also raises an even more important question: If foreign companies can simply choose to pass these taxes onto consumers, how will Trump’s tariffs actually hold them accountable instead of Americans?
I’m fairly certain the answer to those questions is the same. Nobody really knows.
This article first appeared on GearJunkie.
Like many countries post-COVID, America's national parks have never been more popular. Though visitation to the U.S. National Park System has been steadily increasing for years, 2024 set a new record. A whopping 331.9 million people visited in 2024 — the most since record-keeping began in 1904, the National Park Service reported.
That marks a 2% increase over 2023, which saw 6.36 million fewer visits, and beats the previous record set in 2016. The National Park Service (NPS) celebrated its centennial that year, racking up 330 million visits.
In past years, the news would likely be greeted with celebration. This year, however, the visitation statistics arrive at a critical moment for the nation’s public lands. President Donald Trump and Elon Musk have fired thousands of parks workers at both the NPS and the U.S. Forest Service. They’ve also delayed seasonal hires and instituted a spending freeze for both the NPS and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
Those actions have led to widespread protests, and former parks officials have warned of serious consequences for an understaffed park system about to enter the busy summer.
“The National Park Service just reported the highest visitation in its history, as the administration conducts massive firings and threatens to close visitor centers and public safety facilities,” said Kristen Brengel, senior vice president of government affairs for the National Parks Conservation Association. “It’s a slap in the face to the hundreds of millions of people who explored our parks last year and want to keep going back.”
Usage of the parks in 2024 trended upward by several different metrics. Overnight stays, both in NPS facilities and private lodgings, increased compared to 2023. Also, 28 individual parks set new records for visitation, and another 38 experienced visitation above the 10-year average in every month of the year.
And while national parks may receive the lion’s share of attention, they only represent 28% of park visits in 2024. The rest are spread among national recreation areas (16%), national memorials (12%), and other categories like national monuments and national seashores.
The NPS manages all of those, and Trump's laying off 9% of the total workforce has impacted every category, according to the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA). Several parks have already announced closed facilities and reduced hours and services.
As the summer approaches — when visitation to the country’s parks is at its highest — former parks officials like Don Neubacher worry how parks will fare when a skeleton crew of workers must manage millions of visitors.
“Overall, between the funding and staff cuts and this freeze it makes it almost catastrophic for parks,” Neubacher, a former superintendent at Yosemite National Park, said last week. “A lot of these people want to do good for the American public, and it’s almost impossible for that to be accomplished in this context.”
The original version of this story first appeared on GearJunkie.
The canoe has always been part of Canada’s national mythology — but it’s a complicated history. For thousands of years, these watercraft provided essential transportation through the vast wilds of North America for the continent’s Indigenous peoples.
Then those same vessels became tools of colonial expansion during the Voyageurs’ fur trade era, displacing native communities and fueling the extraction of natural resources. Finally, it arrives in the modern era, where it’s mostly known for recreational activities “dominated by middle-class white people,” as sports and leisure historian Jessica Dunkin wrote in the 2019 book Symbols of Canada.
That’s quite the circuitous journey — even for a vessel designed specifically for navigating them.
But there’s likely no place on Earth better equipped to tell the canoe’s story than the upgraded Canadian Canoe Museum. Though the museum’s been around for 27 years, it finally raised enough money for a massive expansion last year. It now offers a generous space for paddle lovers, who can explore its collection of 600+ watercraft on a beautiful lakefront property in Ontario.
From the enormous exhibit hall to the hands-on workshops to paddle tours on the water, the museum aims to bring together the canoe’s rich and varied history.
“You can go in one door and paddle out the back. It’s like a family reunion for your boat to be able to go there and see what its parents and grandparents look like,” said James Raffan, a Canadian educator, author, and adventurer. “But it’s not just about celebrating canoes. It’s also about figuring out how to relate better to each other.”
While the U.S. has the soon-to-expand Minnesota Canoe Museum, and the Canoe Heritage Museum in Spooner, Wisc., both are relatively small operations. So the Canadian Canoe Museum provides a represents a unique draw for American tourists with its depth of history and canoe variety.
It also took years to raise $45 million for the museum’s new 65,000-square-foot building, said Megan McShane, communications coordinator for the museum. Donations came in from around the country, with about half the money coming from private foundations and individuals and the other half from various government funding.
This article first appeared on GearJunkie.
Few climbs have captured our collective imagination quite like The Dawn Wall. This notoriously difficult route on El Capitan in Yosemite became a crucible for legendary climber Tommy Caldwell, who spent years developing it.
When Caldwell and partner Kevin Jorgeson finally ascended the entire route in 2015, their triumph became a seminal moment in the history of rock climbing. It has only been repeated by Czech phenom Adam Ondra (in 2016), and it is now widely considered the most difficult big wall climb in the world.
Almost a decade later, Belgian climber Sebastien Berthe has become the fourth person to score an ascent. Climbing mostly with France’s Soline Kentzel in a continuous 14-day push, the duo topped out on January 31.
The 31-year-old overcame a back injury, bad weather, and a bit of despair to etch his name into climbing history. But he still sounded stoked about the accomplishment during a recent interview. Berthe had first attempted The Dawn Wall in 2022, but the 5.14d traverses (the crux of the route) proved as difficult for him as for Jorgeson, whose famous night climb of the traverse became the stuff of legend.
We caught up with Berthe about how he pulled off one of rock climbing’s greatest challenges.
Why were you inspired to climb The Dawn Wall?
Berthe: It’s hard to say when I first thought about it. In 2019, I climbed the Nose in eight days. And that was probably my best achievement so far. I had a good feeling about climbing this route. Somehow, I got confident that I was quite good in the Yosemite style and also that I really liked it a lot.
So, after this trip, I was hoping to get back to Yosemite and try a really big goal. I wanted something hard, even if it was too ambitious. I was there in the Valley when Adam climbed it in 2016. It was a dream I had, even though I didn’t know if I could even try it. After the Nose, I knew I had at least a chance.
When did you first learn about The Dawn Wall?
Berthe: I remembered when Tom and Kevin topped out. I was following their push at the time when I was in Belgium. I remember I was watching when they topped out, and the media circus around it was incredible. It was the first time I had seen that in climbing.
Next year, I came to Yosemite, where Adam was working on it. Seeing him struggling, then doing it, was a big inspiration. At the time, it wasn’t a proper goal or a dream. I hadn’t considered it. I spent too long in the Valley that year. The first month was just going up Astroman and other classics there, and it felt so hard. After my first month, I got somehow used to the climbing and could climb some 5.12s. After two months, I could free El Cap on some routes.
This article first appeared on GearJunkie.
Traditionally, staying safe on outdoor adventures has meant purchasing expensive GPS devices, and then paying even more for insurance covering costly rescues.
But the status quo is changing fast.
An expanded subscription service may offer the cheapest way to ensure financial coverage of backcountry rescues. With its global launch today, Overwatch x Rescue (OxR) is the first SOS plan to take advantage of the satellite capabilities added to newer-model iPhones two years ago. For $80 a year, iPhone owners in North America can get access to 24/7 emergency assistance that also covers the cost of rescues, including air ambulances.
Moreover, OxR is compatible with GPS devices like SPOT X, Garmin inReach, ZOLEO Satellite Communicator, or the new HMD OffGrid. And because the annual plan supports up to three devices at a time, a backcountry hiker could potentially bring along both an iPhone and GPS device for redundancy.
Backed by FocusPoint International, which coordinates 15,000 rescues a year around the world, OxR could “democratize access” to emergency support, said Greg Pearson, the company’s founder and CEO.
“I’ve taken away the messiness of insurance,” said Pearson last week. “I’m in the business of rescuing people and covering the cost along the way.”
OxR first debuted during the pandemic in 2021 when FocusPoint International was asked to take over SOS coordination for SPOT devices. Garmin had bought up SPOT’s previous provider, GEOS SOS, forcing SPOT’s parent company to find a new partner.
For the last few years, OxR has been available only to users of SPOT devices, who could purchase the SOS plan as an add-on.
This article first appeared on GearJunkie.
If there’s one attitude that’s nearly universal among adventure athletes, it’s a pathological commitment to optimism. Johnny Coyne and Liam Cotter of Ireland possess this quality in spades. In the last five months, they’ve camped in freezing cold temperatures beneath the cliffs of Dover, hauled loaded kayaks uphill for 160km through Germany’s Black Forest, and when they knocked a hole through one of their boats in a French canal, they went door to door asking for help to repair it.
To these many obstacles, Coyne merely says, “It’s all part of the experience.”
The two 24-year-olds set out from Ireland in early September 2024 to pull off an improbable quest: kayaking across Europe from Dublin to Istanbul. That could make them the first people in the world to travel the continent by kayak. It hasn’t been easy, and several setbacks have added months to the planned itinerary.
Recently, Coyne and Cotter were happily setting up camp along the Danube River, near Germany’s border with Austria. Of the 5,000 total kilometers likely required to reach Istanbul, the pair have traveled more than 1,900. They’ll now follow the Danube through Eastern Europe until it empties into the Black Sea, where they’ll follow the coastline all the way to Istanbul.
“I know this is going to be one of the longest and most unique journeys I’ll ever do,” Coyne said. “Trying to stay in the present moment is key.”
While Coyne’s kayaking quest has been more difficult than he expected, it’s far from his first grand adventure. The young Irishman has committed himself to daring outdoor journeys in the last few years, from cycling to Portugal and trekking across Nepal to a bike trip from Canada to Costa Rica.
Though neither consider themselves serious kayakers, Coyne and Cotter compensate for the lack of experience with an indefatigable attitude.
“I didn’t have too many expectations of the journey. I just knew it was gonna be hard,” Coyne said.
It’s possible that the most difficult parts of the trip are already behind them. For starters, it took them nine long hours of paddling to make an unsupported crossing of the Irish Sea to England. They arrived at 10 pm, slept for a few hours beneath the famous White Cliffs of Dover, and then woke up at 4 am to start their crossing of the English Channel.
Though they’d planned on having a support boat for some extra protection while crossing one of the business shipping lanes in the world, the operator canceled at the last minute. So Coyne and Cotter once again paddled unsupported, pulling off a 12-hour crossing while fighting the channel’s fierce winds and waves.
This article first appeared on GearJunkie.
The 47th president of the United States wasted no time putting his agenda into action. President Donald Trump issued a flurry of executive orders following his Monday inauguration, many of them aimed at reversing environmental policies from former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. But it’s Alaska — a longtime battleground between environmentalists and oil and gas developers — that received immediate attention on Trump’s first day in office.
First, Trump changed the name of North America’s highest mountain back to Mt. McKinley, undoing a 2015 Obama decision to call it Denali. (That executive order also purports to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.) And while Alaska senators expressed disappointment with Trump’s decision to remove a native name, they celebrated another of his executive orders.
With a swipe of his pen, Trump also removed environmental protections that limited oil and gas extraction, logging, and other development projects throughout the state. That includes the comeback of the controversial Ambler Road project. Trump’s decision aligns with the Republican-controlled state, where lawmakers praised his plans to restart energy development in places like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).
“Alaska is unleashed!” Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy said on social media. “On his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order recognizing Alaska as a true energy warehouse, paving the way for unprecedented opportunities in resource development and energy independence.”
Trump’s efforts include a range of resource extraction projects that had been blocked by previous administrations, especially Biden's.
His Monday order made the following changes:
This story first appeared on GearJunkie.
For decades, rock climbers in Yosemite National Park have set new standards by asking themselves a simple question: How much can you accomplish in 24 hours?
This “game,” as some climbers call it, is what inspired legendary crushers like Dean Potter and Alex Honnold to climb the park’s three biggest walls, known as the Yosemite Triple Crown, as fast as possible.
Now, two relatively unknown climbers — Tanner Wanish, 34, and Michael Vaill, 32 — have taken the bar set by their predecessors and pushed it a little higher. Earlier this month, they shaved a half hour off the Yosemite Triple Crown record, practically swimming up El Capitan, Mount Watkins, and Half Dome in just under 18 hours.
That would be impressive enough. But the duo were still chasing elite climbing feats in Yosemite Valley.
This week, they announced themselves the “Valley Quadfathers” for pulling off four big walls in a single day. Wanish and Vaill added a 366m Yosemite face called the Washington Column to the Triple Crown and still managed to summit all four walls in 21 hours and 50 minutes.
Put the four walls together, and that’s 2,500m of vertical climbing.
Many climbers would consider ascending just one of Yosemite National Park’s big walls a lifetime achievement. It requires mastery of many different technical skills, incredible endurance, and meticulous planning.
So, it’s no small thing that Wanish and Vaill met just three years ago during their first attempt to climb El Capitan. They met through climbing wiki Mountain Project and quickly established a bond that would take them higher than ever before. In a tribute to their partnership posted on Instagram last week, Wanish noted that “climbing is inherently a team sport” that often requires the right partner for the biggest objectives.
This story first appeared on GearJunkie.
“We’re trying to awaken minds with a bold gesture,” 31-year-old French climber Seb Bouin said of his ropeless climb this week. Personally, I can’t say watching this terrifying 183m ascent up a French skyscraper makes me feel “awakened.” But my palms certainly feel sweaty.
Bouin — known for pulling off some of the hardest sport routes in the world — evidently decided he needed to venture “outside his comfort zone,” he said on Instagram this week. So he joined in the riskier endeavors of fellow countryman Alain Robert, a legendary free soloist called the “French Spider-Man” for his bold, ropeless ascents of mega-tall buildings.
The French duo posted videos and photos this week of their Saturday ascent up Paris’s Total Tower. It was supposedly Bouin’s first free solo climb, and he acknowledged that starting off with a skyscraper sounded like a “crazy idea.” It also doesn’t help that climbing buildings is generally frowned upon by those in charge of public safety. Indeed, the 62-year-old Robert claims he’s been arrested more than 150 times for climbing buildings.
Bouin didn’t immediately respond to a request about how he and Robert arranged the climb. But in the post of this slow-moving video taken by photographer Jan Virt, Bouin seems to sense the outsized reaction the stunt may provoke. He frames the ascent as a way to remind others that “life is precious.”
This story first appeared on GearJunkie.
Charles Barrett, a 40-year-old rock climber convicted of sexual abuse, was sentenced to life in prison Tuesday.
The longtime Yosemite climber had been convicted of two counts of aggravated sexual abuse and one count of abusive sexual contact, according to a news release. All three incidents occurred at Yosemite National Park in 2016, said U.S. Attorney Phillip A. Talbert.
“Barrett’s long history of sexual violence supports the imposition of a life sentence,” Talbert said in the news release. “He used his status as a prominent climber to assault women in the rock-climbing community, and when his victims began to tell, Barrett responded by lashing out publicly with threats and intimidation. This case is a testament to the courage of the victims who reported these crimes.”
Barrett committed the crimes in August 2016, when the victim was visiting Yosemite for a weekend of hiking, according to court documents. Barrett, who was living and working for a private business in the park, sexually assaulted her three times over the course of the weekend.
During the trial, three other women testified that Barrett also sexually assaulted them, Talbert said Tuesday. Those assaults were not included in the charges against Barrett because they occurred outside federal jurisdiction. However, they were allowed as additional evidence in the trial.
“It is time to put a definitive end to Barrett’s reign of terror,” one of his victims said, according to The Sacramento Bee.
It wasn’t until several years after that 2016 weekend that charges were filed against Barrett.
In 2017, he “purposely” climbed at the same gym as a victim he had assaulted in 2000, prosecutors said. That woman disclosed Barrett’s assault on her to the gym owner, which resulted in Barrett harassing and threatening her for several years. In August 2022, he was convicted for the criminal threats he made in January 2022.
That same month, federal prosecutors charged him with sexual abuse, leading to a two-year trial that ended today with life in prison for Barrett.
While in custody for this case, Barrett made hundreds of phone calls, prosecutors said. During these calls, he showed “no remorse or regret,” Talbert said in the news release. Instead, Barrett threatened to use violence and lawsuits against the victims, claiming they created a conspiracy to ruin his life.
This case was the result of an investigation by the National Park Service.
“We are grateful for the tireless work of the National Park Service investigative team and the U.S. Attorney’s Office to bring this case to justice,” Yosemite National Park Superintendent Cicely Muldoon said. “Today’s sentencing sends a clear message about the consequences of this criminal behavior. It makes Yosemite a safer place for the climbing community, park visitors, and our employees.”
Barrett’s sentencing comes days after The New York Times reported on accusations of sexual assault by mountaineer Nirmal Purja. The story included other notable examples of sexual misconduct in climbing — including Barrett.
This story first appeared in GearJunkie.
For thousands of people worldwide, summiting Everest is at best a once-in-a-lifetime achievement. Kami Rita Sherpa, however, likely has a different perspective.
This morning, the 54-year-old sherpa guide reached the highest point in the world for the 30th time, beating his own record. It’s also his second Everest summit this month, as Kami Rita continues to ferry clients up and down the mountain during its busiest season.
According to Khim Lal Gautam, a government official at Everest Base Camp, Kami Rita reached the 8,849m summit at 7:49 am Wednesday for the 30th time.
On May 12, he summited for the 29th time. In a brief interview at the time, the Sherpa seemed to shrug off the accomplishment. According to CBS News, Kami Rita’s closest competitor for the title of “most Everest summits” goes to fellow sherpa Pasang Dawa, who has made 27 successful ascents.
“I glad for the record, but records are eventually broken,” he said. “I am more happy that my climbs help Nepal be recognized in the world.”
Kami Rita first reached Everest’s summit in 1994 and has done so almost every year since, according to Seven Summits Treks, where he works as a Senior Guide. The company said in an Instagram post earlier this month that he has “become synonymous with the world’s highest peak.”
“Kami Rita’s achievements extend beyond Everest, as he has also conquered other formidable peaks, including K2, Cho Oyu, Lhotse, and Manaslu,” Seven Summits Treks wrote.
It has already been a busy season on Everest, and Nepali officials said more than 450 climbers have already completed their expeditions this year.
The original version of this story appeared on GearJunkie.
A climber was found dead Monday after falling from the upper reaches of North America’s highest mountain.
Denali National Park and Preserve rangers located the deceased climber on Monday after family members reported them missing, Alaska officials said. The climber was attempting a solo ascent of Denali’s 6,190m summit, and kept in touch with family through an inReach communication device.
But on Sunday, a concerned family member said that they hadn’t heard from the climber in several days. After locating the climber’s empty tent at the top of the 4,940m ridge, rangers conducted interviews to determine the last known sighting.
A climbing team had witnessed the soloist traversing from a 5,240m-plateau to Denali Pass at 5,550m on Wednesday, May 15, according to a news release.
That’s a dangerous area of the mountain even for experienced climbers, said Denali mountain guide and ExplorersWeb gear editor Chelsey Cook. Since 1980, at least 14 climbers have died in falls on this “treacherous section” of Denali’s West Buttress route, park officials said.
“It’s exposed and generally very icy,” Cook said. “If you slip, you’re likely going for a very long ride.”
Rangers at the Walter Harper Talkeetna Ranger Station also collected satellite location data from the climber’s inReach account, according to a news release. That led them to a probable location of about 5,200m on Denali’s West Buttress. Since the device location hadn’t changed since May 16, it’s likely the climber fell on that day, officials said.
A patrol from the National Park Service discovered the climber’s body on Monday using a spotting scope. The rangers secured the climber’s body in place, and plan to return for body recovery when weather conditions improve.
The climber’s name will be released once the family has been notified.
Meanwhile, another 352 climbers are currently on the same route, according to park officials. However, most of them are much lower on the mountain this early in the climbing season, which typically begins in early May and ends in early July.
The original version of this story appeared on GearJunkie.
Major Taylor broke more than 30 world records and became a successful entrepreneur — while dealing with racism during the Jim Crow era.
Jesse Owens. Jackie Robinson. Muhammad Ali. They all followed behind the first path-breaker for African Americans in sports: Major Taylor.
On Monday, PBS in the United States will premiere a new documentary about the extraordinary life of Marshall Walter “Major” Taylor, hailed as the world’s first Black sports superstar. “Major Taylor: Champion of the Race” delves into the legacy of an athlete who succeeded despite the incredible challenges of Jim Crow America.
Taylor, who earned nicknames like “The Cyclone” and “The Whirlwind,” gained widespread acclaim for his speed and athleticism in cycling. Despite the intense racial discrimination of the time, he shattered records, including more than 30 world cycling records.
The film is narrated by acclaimed opera mezzo-soprano Marietta Simpson, with jazz legend Branford Marsalis interpreting Taylor’s written words. Five-time Emmy Award-winning composer Tyron Cooper crafted the soundtrack.
Featuring interviews with top historians, archivists, athletes, and activists, the film aims to provide new insight into Taylor’s journey and the challenges he confronted and overcame on his way to greatness.
“He was the one leading that slipstream in a race for racial justice and equality,” one historian says in the trailer above.
The film premieres on PBS this Monday, Feb. 26, at 8 pm ET. It will also air at 10:30 pm on March 5 and 6:30 pm on March 10, also in Eastern Time.
This story first appeared on GearJunkie.
How did ancient nomads reach North America?
Scientists have long believed that the continent's first human visitors arrived about 13,000 years ago, during a brief period of icy connection between Asia and North America.
But new research from PNAS suggests a different story. They walked across a sturdy "sea ice highway" — perhaps reaching North America many thousands of years earlier than once thought.
It is difficult to make accurate predictions about how and when humans crossed Beringia, a landmass that once connected Asia to North America. That's because the human evidence is likely down in Davy Jones' locker, said Jesse Farmer, a paleoceanographer at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
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"If finding a suitable archaeological site on land is like finding a needle in a haystack, in Beringia it's like finding a needle in a haystack that is buried under 150ft [45m] of ocean water," Farmer told LiveScience.
Now, a growing body of evidence suggests that humans arrived between 14,000 to 24,000 years ago, according to a study presented Dec. 15 at the American Geophysical Union Annual Meeting.
Given that glacial currents were much stronger back then, travel by paddleboat was likely not a viable option. Instead, the nomads simply arrived much earlier, when sea ice was plentiful, according to a statement from the American Geophysical Union.
For the latest study, led by Summer Praetorius of the U.S. Geological Survey, the team focused on reconstructing ancient ocean currents of the Pacific Northwest.
Praetorius and her team analyzed climate proxies from ocean sediment along the coast, primarily using fossilized plankton. By examining the abundance and chemistry of these fossils, they reconstructed past ocean temperatures, salinity levels, and sea ice cover.
Their research found that during the last glacial maximum about 20,000 years ago, ocean currents were more than twice as strong as they are today. The causes? Stronger glacial winds and lower sea levels.
Navigating these strong currents by boat would have been challenging. Moreover, the study concluded that a significant portion of the coastal region remained covered by winter sea ice until 15,000 years ago.
This finding has led to the hypothesis that early Americans might have used this "ice highway" as a means of travel. Much like the modern Arctic peoples, who use sea ice for transportation, ancient humans could have moved across the ice, hunting marine mammals along the way.
Praetorius said that the "sea ice highway" theory does not preclude other migration routes or methods. The Alaskan current had calmed down by 14,000 years ago, making it easier for people to travel by boat along the coast.
"Nothing is off the table," she said. "We will always be surprised by ancient human ingenuity."
Few genres of photography stir the urge to go out and explore quite like the aurora borealis.
Technically, these lights are the result of charged electrons and protons colliding with gases in Earth's atmosphere. But if you're as chemistry-ignorant as I am, and that sentence means basically nothing to you, let's just call them "magic lights."
And anyway, the science behind this natural phenomenon can't explain why it captivates us — especially photographers.
In the spirit of celebrating this polar spectacle, the 6th edition of the Northern Lights Photographer of the Year showcases the 25 most stunning images of the aurora borealis from around the globe.
From the remote subarctic forests to the landscapes of Australia and New Zealand, this photographic journey will leave you desperate to strap on a backpack and head out of civilization. The featured image above was one of the finalists (and probably my favorite of the bunch).
Check out several of the competition's other winners below.
Sukakpak Mountain is located in Alaska's Brooks Range, an area known even in The Last Frontier as one of the state's most unspoiled wildernesses.
So it's no surprise that Warner managed to snap a particularly wild shot.
"That night, there was an expectation of an X-Class flare hitting, so I knew we needed to head somewhere great. We took our chances and decided to drive an hour north from our accommodation to capture Sukakpak Mountain in all its glory," Warner wrote.
I'd say he pulled it off.
With the reflection of New Zealand's Moke Lake below, McInally captured something special with this one.
This Chinese climbing doc has nostalgia, mystery, and an epic quest for a mythical waterfall frozen into the shape of a Christmas tree. What more do you need?
Tired of the same old Christmas classics?
I know I am. Yet we can’t seem to shake these cinematic standbys any more than we can avoid Mariah Carey’s voice every time we hit up the grocery store for egg nog. Are we really interested in The New York Times’ deep dive into how the McCallister family was part of the 1%? Count me out.
Instead, I’ll be enjoying the holidays with a rewatch of 2017’s Searching for Christmas Tree. In all honesty, this film is even less about Christmas than Die Hard. But as much as I love me some John McClane, I’m ready for something different. In this case, it’s two Chinese ice climbers searching for a mythical frozen waterfall in the shape of — you guessed it — a Christmas tree.
But this short documentary is also about China’s fast-changing culture, epic landscapes, and two men climbing not for the grade or recognition, but simply for their appreciation of nature’s wonders. For me, He Chuan and Liu Yang’s voiceovers inspire a nostalgia every bit as warm as a yule log on Christmas morning.
“Every piece of the wall is a masterpiece of nature,” Chuan says.
If you’d like a brief diversion from the expected this holiday, make some time for this award-winning film.
This story first appeared on GearJunkie.
If I woke up to find dozens of skiers in my driveway, I’d be more than a little confused.
That’s how I imagine this black bear was feeling when it sprinted across the busy slopes of Lake Tahoe’s Heavenly Ski Resort in California. While bears might scare the pants off most of us bipeds, it’s clear that this fellow was just minding his own business upon encountering a strange pack of humans speeding down the powder.
“I was just waking up, looking for a spot to poop, and — bam! — the people came out of nowhere!” Or at least that’s what I imagine this befuddled bear was thinking as he raced to escape the skiers around him. Kudos to TikTok user @Tao7570 for capturing this moment of ursine antics.
This story originally appeared on GearJunkie.
Is anything quite as universally loved as funny animals?
The winners of the 2023 Comedy Wildlife Awards certainly make a case that we just can't get enough of critters cutting it up in the wild. Is that turtle actually smiling? Does that monkey know how hilariously seductive he looks?
Maybe not, but it's impossible not to see some of our own behavior in these wilderness antics. So sit back and enjoy some classic anthropomorphizing. Embrace the suspension of disbelief. Who knows? Perhaps that kangaroo truly dreams of one day shredding a mean guitar solo on stage with Guns N' Roses.
Either way, wildlife photography is always a good time.
We can only hope to one day enjoy the success that this fox has earned through hard work, smart investing, and — because Wall Street isn't for the scrupulous — frequent raids of the chicken coop.
Greed isn't just good, folks! It's foxy.
Look out, Russian ballet! You've got a new candidate for lead dancer for next year's performance of Black Swan.
Maybe this turtle looks so stoked because he just found lunch? Hard to say. But we all want some of whatever this turtle is having.
Kate Winslet ain't got nothing on this sexy ball of fur, am I right?
Check out the rest of this year's finalists in the 2023 Comedy Wildlife Awards by visiting the organization's website.
Some of the ocean's largest predators are up to something, and marine scientists want to shed light on it — literally.
New research into great white sharks and swordfish has revealed that these massive fish regularly dive several kilometers below the surface. They reach pitch-black depths known as the twilight zone (200 to 1,000 meters) and the midnight zone (1,000 to 3,000 meters).
Why is that news, exactly? Because marine biologists had no idea that those species explore these hidden ocean habitats as part of their normal behavior. The discovery was explained in a November 6 study in the journal PNAS.
Researchers gathered data from 12 species of formidable ocean hunters, including sharks, billfish, and tunas. They first tagged 344 predatory fish, among them great white sharks, tiger sharks, whale sharks, yellowfin tuna, and swordfish.
Sonar technology recorded the animals descending regularly to the twilight and midnight zones. Now scientists want to find out why they went so deep.
"How, when, where they access the deep ocean certainly varies, but the clear anecdotal answer is that the deep ocean seems like an important habitat — regardless of the predator species," study lead Camrin Braun of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution told Live Science. "It's clear there are good reasons for these animals to dive deep. Otherwise, why would they all do it?
The findings unveil a compelling correlation between the fishes' deep dives and the presence of the deep scattering layer (DSL). This is a mysterious oceanic stratum that teems with small fish and various marine organisms.
This layer is so densely populated that it's sometimes mistaken for the seafloor. The creatures residing in the DSL ascend to the surface during the night to feed before retreating back to the twilight zone during the day.
This new study suggests that marine predators target these denizens of the DSL as a primary food source. But that's only a partial explanation for their behavior. Many of these predators venture even deeper than the DSL, reaching previously uncharted depths.
Great white sharks, for instance, were observed diving as deep as 1,128 meters. Meanwhile, whale sharks plummeted to 1,912 meters, and swordfish explored depths as far as 2,000 meters.
Many of the species that inhabit this zone are commercially fished, making it imperative to comprehend and safeguard this ecosystem, researchers said.
"We also find several cases where we can pretty definitively say the use of the deep ocean is not for feeding — or if it is, it represents a totally different kind of predator-prey interaction or mysterious prey resource," said Braun.
It's just another example that the deep ocean remains a mysterious and unexplored realm.
Climbers have about two months to voice their opinion on a federal proposal that could reshape American rock climbing.
This article originally appeared on GearJunkie.
Last week, the U.S. National Park Service and the U.S. Forest Service unveiled a policy that would designate climbing bolts and anchors as “permanent installations,” which are banned under the 1964 Wilderness Act. That caused immediate concern among climbing groups, who said the change could threaten climbing routes across the country, from El Capitan in Yosemite National Park to Longs Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park.
Under the proposal, any route with fixed anchors (usually bolts drilled into the rock) would have to undergo the same federal approval process as garbage dumps or fence lines, said Erik Murdock, interim executive director of the Access Fund. That equipment has been allowed for 60 years.
“It would be a paradigm shift,” Murdock said on Tuesday. “People would still be able to climb, but climbers would have to fight to protect the areas forever. It would mean that any future superintendent could remove all the climbing routes with the stroke of a pen.”
Many outdoor recreation groups issued statements opposing the federal proposal, including the American Alpine Club, the American Mountain Guides Association, the Outdoor Industry Association, USA Climbing, Outdoor Alliance, and others.
Federal officials could not be reached for comment Tuesday.
It’s not all bad news.
The federal proposal does acknowledge that climbing is permitted as “an appropriate use” of national lands. However, the policy also says that park officials can subject all fixed anchors to a federal review. That will determine if the gear is “the minimum necessary to facilitate primitive or unconfined recreation or otherwise preserve wilderness character.”
“They’re going to do a federal review for every fixed anchor in the wilderness now? That’s a big deal,” said Bryon Harvison, the director of policy and government affairs for the American Alpine Club. “It’s a massive undertaking, and these agencies are already saying that they’re underfunded and undermanned.”
This article originally appeared in GearJunkie.
Have you watched Free Solo and Dawn Wall? Did you enjoy them but wish there were more jokes about drinking beer and falling to an untimely death?
If so, then The Long Wall — a brisk 20-minute documentary about arguably the longest technical rock climb in the world — has plenty of humor to complement the epic task undertaken by two dirtbag BFFs. Ben Wilbur and Drew Herder bring old-school charm to this buddy comedy about the first continuous ascent of Great Wall of China, a 2,740m traverse at New York’s iconic Shawangunks (or just Gunks, to the locals).
The route had only been climbed twice before — but in both cases, the previous climbers returned to the ground each night. Wilbur and Herder, however, manage to pull off a continuous send, climbing 67 pitches in just under 37 hours. For perspective, the route’s nearly 2,800m feet of sideways climbing is equal to about three ascents of Yosemite’s El Capitan.
So how do these beer-chugging climbers manage it? Mostly, they opt for risky runouts of rope and constant danger of becoming a “New York pancake.”
“Usually, it’s nice to be the follower for some of the spicy pitches,” Herder says in the film. “But on a traverse like this, both ends are sharp.”
After several hikers got lost while following a trail on Google Maps, a search-and-rescue group in British Columbia has released some sage advice: Don't use Google Maps for hiking.
In the last two months, two separate hikers got lost and needed rescue while following a Google Maps trail north of Mount Fromme, an area with steep cliffs located near Vancouver. A third hiker died in the area two years ago in the same area, the CBC reported.
The search-and-rescue group, North Shore Rescue, has now successfully petitioned Google to have the non-existent trail removed from its map app, it announced Nov. 6 on Facebook.
There are several "lessons learned" the group shared in its post. First, if you're going to hike with a phone as guidance, try to use an app made specifically for hiking, like CalTopo or Gaia. Second, they recommend "a good old fashioned paper map and compass."
This is also another good reminder to always practice the Three T’s:
On Nov. 4, the group rescued a hiker stranded on a cliff on the backside of Mount Fromme. The hiker had "attempted to climb Fromme from the Kennedy Falls area," the group said.
That echoed another rescue from a month earlier in the same area. A hiker called 911 while stuck on a cliff on the backside of Mt Fromme.
"The hiker phoned 911 and said he was hanging on and wasn’t sure how long he could [keep] holding on," North Shore Rescue reported. It described a complicated helicopter operation to rescue the stranded hiker.
"This subject was located exactly on the cliff where a hiker fell to his death two years ago," North Shore Rescue wrote. "The back of Mt Fromme is extremely steep and dangerous."
It's not the first time that Google Maps has led hikers astray. A handful of hikers on Scotland's Ben Nevis were injured in 2021 after the map app led to technical terrain.
That led Mountaineering Scotland and the John Muir Trust to issue warnings about the dangers of relying on digital technology to navigate wild places.
So if you're looking to go exploring, it might be time to lay the phone aside and brush up on your compass skills.
It began as a review of a film.
Our intrepid writer, Andrew McLemore, sat down to complete his latest assignment for world-famous publication ExplorersWeb when he found himself in a puzzling situation: This short documentary about bikepacking in the Balkans was presented in the style of cinematic auteur Wes Anderson.
The film, The Balkans Mirage: A Journey on Wheels, was quite different from the countless outdoor documentaries that McLemore had covered in his career. None of the adventurous cyclists ever speak. Instead, they are presented as mere characters in a story trying to be as charming as the Balkan villages they explore.
Indeed, McLemore found himself surprised by the film's contrast with most documentaries about cycling or other outdoor pursuits. The film avoided long-winded philosophical ramblings about nature's impact on human consciousness. There wasn't a single self-congratulatory description of humankind's ability to "push the limits."
No, rather than accept those expected trappings, The Balkans Mirage embraced an entirely different set of conceits. Namely, formal narration, symmetrical framing, head-on camera angles, and text slides reminiscent of vintage magazines.
This would be recognizable to any self-respecting cinephile as the style of dollhouse-obsessed director Wes Anderson. In fact, even philistines would recognize it. Anderson's aesthetic approach had become a source of constant appropriation thanks to the curious behavior of frequenters of the World Wide Web, who use Artificial Intelligence to recreate popular films in his iconic style.
McLemore found himself asking the hard questions: Where does this end? How long can one man's artistic vision continue to thrive merely by changing the cinematic context? Why do people like this?
He didn't have the answers. So he returned to his work, and suddenly found himself writing as though he, too, had become an Andersonian disciple of detached storytelling and overly formal language.
Both journalism and bikepacking had fallen victim to the director's inescapable style, and neither would ever be the same.
This story first appeared in GearJunkie.
How do you feel about freezing your butt off while dogsledding across the Scandinavian Arctic? If that sounds like your cup of crazy, then Fjällräven would like a word.
The Swedish outdoor retailer has announced its 19th edition of the annual Fjällräven Polar, set to kick off in April 2024. This dogsledding race invites 20 people from around the world to navigate a grueling 300km journey across the Scandinavian tundra. And if you’re wondering whether you need Ernest Shackleton-level experience with winter survival — the answer is no.
The event is about showing that “anyone” can tackle this challenge, as long as they receive top-notch cold-weather gear and some guidance from experts. “Guts and gusto” are prerequisites as well, Fjällräven wrote in a press release.
“Over the years, participants have faced everything from blizzards and -30°C temperatures, to the beautiful, sun-drenched landscapes,” Fjällräven said in the release. “For a few lucky people, Fjällräven Polar is the opportunity to test their limits on the adventure of a lifetime.”
Fjällräven will only accept applications until Nov. 19, 2023, so if you’re interested, apply sooner rather than later.
Fjällräven Polar is an arctic expedition that traces its roots back to the early 1990s. That’s when Åke Nordin, the founder of Fjällräven, was inspired by the grit of an experienced Swedish dogsled driver who had conquered the treacherous Iditarod race in Alaska.
Initially, Fjällräven Polar was a race in the spirit of the Iditarod, but in 2012, the event underwent a significant transformation. It shifted its focus from competition to inclusivity, inviting everyday individuals with little to no wilderness experience to participate.
Over the years, participants have braved extreme conditions while experiencing awe-inspiring arctic landscapes. Notably, the expedition has also achieved success online, the company said, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors to its website annually and garnering thousands of applications from around the globe.
However, in 2020 and 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic forced a hiatus, but the event made its return in 2022, drawing nearly 15,000 applications.
Have you heard the one about the Viking, the turd, and the museum?
It's actually no joke: A 1,200-year-old bowel movement has become one of the most giggle-worthy exhibits at the Jorvik Viking Centre in York, England.
The world's largest fossilized human excrement, known as the Lloyds Bank Coprolite, has offered historians new understanding of the dietary habits and health of a Viking from the 9th century AD.
Its scientific value also translates into actual value, with the large piece of fecal matter carrying an estimated price tag of $39,000. Not that it's up for sale. The historic discovery is a testament to the insights that can be gleaned from the most unexpected sources in the field of paleoscatology (yes, that's a real thing).
The Lloyds Bank Coprolite, affectionately referred to as the "precious poop," is believed to be the largest known fossilized human turd in recorded history.
Measuring a remarkable eight inches long and two inches wide, this ancient specimen was initially unearthed in 1972 by construction workers during the construction of a Lloyds branch in York, in northwest England.
The discovery site's historical significance is amplified by its association with the Norse warriors who once ruled the region.
Andrew Jones, a scatologist, made the poop immediately famous with one of the greatest quotes of all time:
“This is the most exciting piece of excrement I’ve ever seen,” he told The Wall Street Journal when first appraising it in 1991. “In its own way, it’s as irreplaceable as the Crown Jewels.”
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This fecal relic has been meticulously studied by paleoscatologists, who have discovered intriguing details about the life of its creator.
The Viking responsible for this prodigious deposit was likely a carnivore with a penchant for bread. He also had the unfortunate burden of intestinal parasites: Examination of the coprolite revealed the presence of Whipworm and Maw-worm eggs, suggesting a history of gastrointestinal discomfort.
In 2003, it endured a brief mishap when visitors at the Jorvik Viking Centre accidentally broke it into three pieces. It has since been repaired. The museum considers itself the artifact's "final resting place" and even hosted a virtual workshop named "Poo Day!" in February, allowing enthusiasts to delve into the coprolite's historical significance.
This story first appeared in GearJunkie.
Ed Viesturs wants you to know one thing: He was not the first person to climb all 14 of the world’s tallest mountains.
In 2005, Viesturs became the first American (and second person ever) to summit every mountain over 8,000m. It took him 18 years to do them all, as he literally followed in the footsteps of legendary alpinist Reinhold Messner, the first climber to pull it off.
But last week, Guinness World Records revoked Messner’s biggest achievement after a German historian claimed he stopped five meters below the summit of Annapurna. The institution argued that Viesturs, in fact, is the actual record-holder. Except Viesturs refused to accept the record and declined to add his voice to the announcement.
“I was like, this makes no sense to me,” Viesturs said on Wednesday. “Messner is still the record-holder.”
Now, the two climbing legends will meet for the first time on Oct. 14 as part of a sports festival in Trento, Italy. They’ll discuss the fallout of Guinness’ decision — and probably how little the mainstream media understands it.
“People down here don’t really know what it’s like up there,” Viesturs said. “For them to nitpick like this is kind of ridiculous.”
Messner lost two Guinness records last week: the first person to climb all 14 peaks over 8,000m and the first to do so without oxygen.
Guinness took away the titles because of Eberhard Jurgalski, who runs 8000ers.com. Jurgalski and a team of researchers spent 10 years investigating claimed ascents of the 14 highest peaks, all located in the Himalaya and Karakoram. He interviewed Viesturs by phone and asked for photos of his summits.
“I sent him some photos to accommodate his research, not knowing that he was trying to nitpick about Messner,” Viesturs said.
Ultimately, Jurgalski made several shocking claims, including that Messner never reached the “true summit” of Annapurna. He even convinced Guinness to rewrite history (at least its version of it) by giving the Guinness record to Viesturs instead.
But even if Messner did fall short of the Annapurna summit (which Messner denies), that doesn’t really matter, Viesturs said. That argument only makes sense to people who haven’t climbed those mountains, he added. That evidently includes Jurgalski, who has apparently never climbed an 8,000m peak.
“It’s pretty irrelevant, actually,” Viesturs said of the argument over Messner’s record. “When you’re talking about Annapurna and Dhaulagiri, then you’re splitting hairs. All you can really do when you’re up there is move along the ridge. When I was up there, I was like, ‘Let’s just keep moving around until we hopefully touch the highest point.’ Sometimes the weather is bad and you have a whiteout…You do your best.”
In the last few years, the media has latched onto the alpine stories of Kristin Harila, a Norwegian, and Nirmal Purja, a Nepali. Both focused on speed records on the 14 tallest peaks, receiving international attention for climbing them in months rather than years.
As a result, Viesturs often receives questions from non-climbers about why they’re so much faster.
“People are like, ‘Hey, they did it in six months. It took you 18 years. What’s the deal?'” he said. “You have to explain it.”
That explanation involves the vastly different tactics used by Purja and Harila, which include supplemental oxygen, fixed ropes, helicopters, and support teams — none of which were used by Messner or Viesturs during their ascents of the same mountains. Climbing big mountains as fast as possible is more about logistics and manpower than mountaineering, Viesturs said.
“Most people are gonna think, ‘Look at these speedsters out there, they’re amazing.’ But it isn’t, really. It’s more a regression than a progression,” he said. “You can beat these mountains into submission, but it doesn’t make mountaineering better.”
That’s just part of why Messner was “years ahead of his time,” according to Viesturs. Before Messner, most expeditions relied on a siege-like approach that’s still preferred by the private companies now dominating the biggest mountains. Then Messner climbed them without oxygen, alone or with a partner, and sometimes setting new routes along the way. On Oct. 16, 1986, he’d finished all 14 peaks in a bold style that few climbers have replicated even now.
“Early in my career, I read all about him. I thought what he was doing was really innovative. He was the guy that I tried to emulate, the guy that I looked up to, as did many others,” he said. “I don’t think you can take that away from him.”
While some of us are still recovering from the giant bugs of Peter Jackson's King Kong, it turns out the "biggest insect" title actually goes to a dragonfly.
(Cue the giant sigh of relief.)
Dwarfing modern insects, a massive dragonfly from the late Permian era named Meganeuropsis permiana holds the record as the largest insect ever to have roamed the earth.
Approximately 275 million years old, this ancient creature was first unearthed in the Wellington Formation in Kansas, according to the U.S. National Park Service.
This formation, a trove of fossils from the Early Permian period, has provided insight into an ancient world bursting with insects, amphibians, and fish dating back nearly 290 million years.
In addition to North America, fossils of Meganeuropsis permiana have also turned up in China, Russia, and France.
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With an incredible wingspan reaching up to 75cm (2.5 feet), this huge flying bug would dwarf most birds, not to mention other insects. Its body was equally impressive, measuring between 17 and 43cm, according to Earth Archives.
This huge size gave the Meganeuropsis permiana a predatory edge, allowing it to feast on small vertebrates — including amphibians and mammals, according to GeologyIn. Some scientists believe the dragonfly's size might be attributed to higher atmospheric oxygen levels prevalent during its existence.
In fact, those greater oxygen levels in the distant past are a major reason why scientists believe today's insects don't grow as big as their ancestors.
Like any species, the reign of the Meganeuropsis permiana and other gargantuan insects couldn't last forever. By the end of the Permian period (about 252 million years ago), these magnificent creatures had vanished from the face of the earth.
Several theories have tried to explain the decline and extinction of these insects. Popular theories include climate change, a significant drop in oxygen levels, and the advent of birds.
As we look at modern bugs, they are, on average, much smaller than their ancient counterparts. While we have some large insects today, like stick insects and the atlas moth (which sports a "not too shabby" 27cm wingspan), they still don't come near the size of Meganeuropsis permiana.
In the shadow of these ancient giants, today's insects seem diminutive. Yet they remind us of a time when the world was very different, and enormous dragonflies ruled the skies.
In an astronomical breakthrough, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope may have detected the first signs of extraterrestrial life.
The large telescope has already made several thrilling discoveries. Recently, it took a closer look at the atmosphere of a potentially habitable exoplanet about 120 light-years from Earth.
Researchers discovered an intriguing blend of chemicals in the atmosphere of an exoplanet known as K2-18b. Since one of those chemicals has a foul smell — and is only produced by phytoplankton here on Earth. Researchers jokingly referred to the chemical blend as "alien farts."
The findings were recently published on the pre-print server arXiv. It will appear in a forthcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters, according to LiveScience.
K2-18b orbits a red dwarf star in the habitable zone. Initially discovered by NASA's Kepler telescope in 2015, it's about 2.6 times the size of Earth.
The exoplanet caught more attention in 2018 when NASA's Hubble telescope discovered water vapor in its atmosphere. This unique profile, combined with its location in a habitable zone, make the planet an ideal candidate for extraterrestrial life.
The latest study uses the James Webb Space Telescope to analyze light that had passed through K2-18b's atmosphere. That provided the most detailed atmospheric spectrum ever captured for a habitable planet, the researchers said.
The analysis revealed significant amounts of hydrogen, methane, and carbon dioxide, along with trace amounts of ammonia. These chemicals hint at K2-18b being a "Hycean" world: a type of exoplanet with a hydrogen-rich atmosphere and an icy mantle covered by an ocean.
However, while Hycean worlds are candidates for life, there's no guarantee that the planet's potential ocean has the right temperature and nutrients to support living organisms.
One of the most exciting findings was the trace detection of dimethyl sulfide (DMS), a foul-smelling chemical usually emitted by microscopic marine life in Earth's oceans.
While more research is needed, the presence of DMS represents a tantalizing possibility, according to an official statement on the NASA website.
"This result was only possible because of [the James Webb telescope's] unprecedented sensitivity," said lead author and astrophysicist Nikku Madhusudhan.
Hycean worlds like K2-18b are the most common type of planet in the galaxy, according to study co-author Subhajit Sarkar. With this new discovery, researchers hope to extend the search for extraterrestrial life beyond smaller rocky planets.
Plans are already underway for further observations of K2-18 b using the James Webb Space Telescope.
Finding more evidence of extraterrestrial life on the exoplanet "would transform our understanding of our place in the universe," Madhusudhan said.
Given the inherent subjectivity of peakbagging, it's not surprising that Eric Gilbertson's latest achievement is a bit difficult to describe.
The 34-year-old American has summited nearly 2,000 mountains worldwide, according to his own count on PeakBagger.com. But on Sept. 1, Gilbertson and his partner Andreas Frydensberg claimed a possible new first in mountaineering: climbing in all seven of "the 'Stans."
Put simply, the pair have climbed the highest mountain in seven countries in Central Asia: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan.
While that means Gilbertson and Frydensberg climbed the infamously dangerous K2 — Pakistan's highest point — most of the other mountains aren't well-known, even among mountaineers. Completing these seven high points is likely more difficult than summiting all 14 of the world's peaks over 8,000m, said Gilbertson, who has summited three of them, in addition to an Everest attempt.
"This subset just kinda collects most of the hardest peaks in the world," he told ExplorerWeb on Monday. "It’s a unique list because it’s so difficult. I’m not aware of other people who are collecting all these peaks."
As for claiming the first ascent of all seven — Gilbertson has the evidence to back it up. Since 2018, he has been measuring mountains around the world to find the true high points. His research has resulted in new "highest mountains" for seven countries, including Uzbekistan, which he and Frydensberg summited in August.
According to his measurements, it's Alpomish — not Khazret Sultan — that's actually Uzbekistan's high point.
"A lot of the time, just getting to base camp is one of the most difficult parts," Gilbertson said of his far-flung ascents. "Sometimes, that feels like the crux."
Earlier this summer, Hungarian journalist Laszlo Pinter wrote a comprehensive essay summarizing what many of the world's best alpinists have noticed: Just Collecting 8,000m Peaks No Longer Has Any Real Climbing Value.
"Guided summit collectors who seek fame do nothing more than exploit the myth that real climbing greats have created," Pinter wrote.
If "real mountaineering" must include the uncertainty and danger that fixed lines mostly prevent, then Gilbertson's focus on lesser-known peaks certainly counts as something outside the ordinary.
In 2019, for example, he climbed Afghanistan's highest mountain, a 7,000m peak called Noshaq. Hiring local guides is necessary here. For one, the approach requires avoiding land mines, tragically common throughout Afghanistan due to its troubled history. The area was also controlled by the Taliban, meaning that climbers risk a million-dollar ransom if captured.
So it's easy to understand why the mountain's crux (several pitches of 5.7 M4 climbing, according to Gilbertson) might not happen on the rock.
"We saw a cow that had stepped on a land mine on the way out," Gilbertson said. "It wasn’t very pretty. They just kind of left it there...Luckily, the locals know a safe way."
Given that Afghanistan is even more unstable now than in 2019, aspiring climbers might reconsider following in Gilbertson's footsteps any time soon.
But what makes Gilbertson's exploits even more interesting is the research he conducts along the way.
When he arrived in Uzbekistan this summer, officials considered Khazret Sultan the highest peak in the country, based on a 1981 survey by the Soviet Union that measured the mountain at 4,643m.
When Gilbertson and Frydensberg climbed a neighboring peak, Alpomish, Gilbertson took six measurements with his sight level from different points. He found that Alpomish has an elevation of 4,668m, with a margin of error of 8 meters.
That means it's actually the highest point in Uzbekistan. To date, Gilbertson's research has also revealed new country high points for Saudi Arabia, Togo, Guinea Bissau, Guinea, Ivory Coast, and Gambia.
"It’s kind of surprising that there’s all this uncertainty still in country high points," Gilbertson said.
While mountain measurements can easily be found on Google Earth, those have a margin of error of up to 10 meters. It's possible to pay private companies for more specific measurements of a given mountain, but that's expensive and still comes with a margin of error of up to 3 meters.
A ground survey at the actual mountain remains the "gold standard," Gilbertson said, and many of the world's mountains are sufficiently out of reach to make that difficult.
For Gilbertson, it's just one more example of a truth that's hard for many modern humans to accept: There are still lots of places to explore.
"I couldn't find much documentation about the mountains in Uzbekistan. I didn’t know until I went in there," he said. "There are still plenty of places like that left — you just don’t hear about them."
Keep up with Gilbertson's busy climbing schedule on his website CountryHighPoints.com. Also, here are the full details of all seven high points of the Stans, as completed by Gilbertson and Frydensberg:
This article was originally published on GearJunkie.
What do you think about cruising nearly 110kph down a steep mountainside with only a single wheel wedged between your ankles?
If that sounds even cooler to you than Marty McFly on a hoverboard, you're probably the target demographic for the Adventure, an all-electric, off-road unicycle from Chinese company InMotion.
Like the slew of electric mountain bikes that have emerged in recent years, the V12 High Torque Adventure unicycle is designed for off-road adventures, the company announced last week. With a top speed of over 109kph, 25cm pneumatic tires, and a battery meant to last for 160km on a single charge, the Adventure seems primed for action.
"InMotion is always looking for creative ways to excite our riders and provide an exhilarating adventure," company CEO Bob Yan said in a press release.
Not familiar with extreme unicycling? That's not too surprising, but there's actually a clear precedent for long-distance cycling with one wheel — even if "normal" bikes tend to grab the headline news.
Yet the Adventure still enters a lonely marketplace for electrified unicycles, making it immediately attractive to anyone in this niche sport. That's because it offers several rare features, like "powerful hill-climbing capabilities" from a "frighteningly powerful motor" that puts out 2,800 W and 188 Nm of torque.
It carries a 1,750Wh battery, enabling the Adventure to "easily tackle" inclines of up to 45%, the company claimed. It's also hermetically sealed and waterproof, making it durable even in rain and snow, InMotion said.
A "smart" Battery Management System keeps the electric battery secure, and an app provides owners with extra options for customization. Those options include a Comfort Mode for extended battery life, as well as a high-powered Sport Mode.
As for the top speed, 109kph isn't even the fastest unicycle available from InMotion. Its Challenger model can supposedly reach speeds up to 140kph. So, if you love unicycles and hate the idea of playing it safe — the Chinese company clearly has you in mind.
Ready to start turning one-wheeled tricks with your own electric unicycle?
According to InMotion, the V12 High Torque version of its Adventure will soon be available on Amazon for $2,500. Details on that availability remain scarce, so check out the company site for more information.
This article was originally published on GearJunkie.
Unsteady, vibrating skateboard wheels catapult forward foot-by-foot as a team of three 19-year-old Californian skate bums push along the road shoulder, wheels aimed for the Atlantic coast. They are doggedly pushing along the Santiam Scenic Byway in Oregon, surrounded by dark, tall Douglas firs and a constant stream of cars and semis that pass inches from their legs.
Packed to the gills with camping gear, a 1969 Firebird (their support vehicle) helps shuttle the skaters to and from impromptu rendezvous points. Jack Smith — one of these young skate bums — pushes on a tiny, proline skateboard with a translucent deck. Its first-generation urethane wheels are top-class for 1976, but tiny and insufficient for a cross-country journey. Smith’s feet can barely fit on his skate deck because it is so small.
Their route would take them from Lebanon, Ore., up through the Northern U.S. to Williamsburg, Va. The whole plan was haphazard, with a rough route scouted out to hopefully avoid the heat of the American Southwest.
Each skater, three in total, would earn $500 from a skate company (Roller Sports, Inc.) if they successfully made it across the country. Adjusted for inflation, that'd be over two grand today. The group would skate from Oregon to Virginia and cross through 11 states, taking 32 days to complete the journey.
“We had no idea what we were doing. We really didn't have a clue as to how many miles we could cover a day because we didn't train for the thing at all. You know, we were 19 and full of ourselves and thought, ‘Let's just go do this,’” said Smith.
Jack Smith, now 66 years old, has a soft, welcoming voice. He uses phrases like “knuckleheads” and speaks slowly and thoughtfully, just like you’d expect from a man who has lived his whole life on the California coast.
Smith has skateboarded coast to coast across the United States five times, yet there’s no bravado in his storytelling. For such a feat, someone would definitely have the space to brag, but Smith refrains. Sure, he likes to reminisce, but he is reserved in his storytelling. You have to push him for details.
In the 1970s in California, the skate scene was evolving and hot. Technology was advancing from clay wheels to urethane and Smith was kicking concrete day in and day out in Morro Bay, competing in skate slalom competitions (where skaters race and weave through cones) and dreaming up new ways to spend his time on a skate deck.
Then came the 1976 trip, which would herald in a lifetime of skate crossings for Smith, pushing from the Pacific to cities on the East Coast. The routes over time would vary slightly, one time ending in New York; another time the team dipped down through Iowa. Always, the trip was dictated by unforeseen road conditions, closures, or construction. “You become a connoisseur of shoulders and road surface,” said Smith.
Most folks would call it quits after one cross-country trip on a skateboard. But for Smith, the journey continues to strike a nerve. “The thing I tell everybody is if you do this trip, it will change your life,” said Smith. Nothing about these attempts is easy, and in 1976 the team was woefully unprepared. “It was much harder than any of us expected,” says Smith.
Leaving Lebanon, Ore., on the first day of the ‘76 trip, the team would take on Santiam Pass, a 4,816-foot mountain pass in the Cascade Range. As the team pushed upward for miles, they had to teach themselves to push with both legs to avoid cramps and severe fatigue. Their feet would rattle and go numb, or hours would be spent descending a steep grade weaving back and forth across a lane.
From Oregon, the team would push through the boonies of Idaho and through small towns and cattle fields in the mountain states. The Midwest would bring more expanses of unfamiliar farmland that then opened up to the tough, relentless rolling hills of West Virginia. The team would finish to small flurry of press and meager stacks of cash, driving the Firebird on a winding trip back across the country to California once again.
Back in Morro Bay, years rolled by as Smith worked in the skate and sports world. But the journey of skating across the U.S. would soon return, this time as a tool to raise money for charity. In 1984, Smith headed out with a new team, completing the crossing in 26 days to raise money for the Multiple Sclerosis Society.
Nineteen years later, Smith completed another cross-country trip, this time raising money for Lowe Syndrome (which Smith’s son passed away from in 2003).
With each new attempt, new technology, skate-related or otherwise, improved conditions and route finding. In 2003 especially, longboards with drop decks built specifically for long-distance pushing had hit the scene. The team didn’t train, but still cut their time down to 21 days.
Another 10 years went by until Smith gathered a team together to raise money for Alzheimer’s research. The team of five, including two women, completed the attempt in 23 days. Smith was 56 and the oldest person to complete a cross-country trip on a skateboard at the time.
In a journal entry from the trip, Smith reflects on their progress: "The team is getting stronger every day. What we are doing is so foreign to 99% of the skateboarding world. It's hard to explain the stoke in pushing up miles of 6% grade, on rough road in 100+ degree heat. But the stoke is definitely there."
On that 2013 trip, Smith would injure himself, hitting a crack in the road and fracturing his elbow. “I was still able to finish skating, but the last few days were pretty painful,” said Smith.
Flash forward only three years, and Smith was skating again for his last trip, this time on an electric skateboard. Which unbelievably, is an artifact you can find at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. While Smith wasn’t pushing, the attempt was still physically and mentally draining. It was just him, the board, and cars whizzing by too close for comfort.
“Just standing on a board your legs cramp,” said Smith. “I would actually get off the board every two to three miles and walk around because I knew if I had to bail, my feet weren't gonna work and I would have a bad crash.”
Smith stopped in Mountain Home, Idaho, after several close calls with the grills of semi trucks. Two years later, in 2018, he would return to Idaho to complete the journey. The trip from Idaho took 45 days and covered 2,394 miles.
In 1976, the heat was horrendous and money was tight. The team wasn’t trying to set a speed record, all they wanted to do was make it to the Atlantic Coast. So, days often included detours. “When you're pushing a skateboard across America, you're in that same environment for three or four days,” said Smith. “It's up close and personal.”
Questions were abundant and generosity was frequent. One night, the skaters stayed at a “hippie man’s” property, slinking into his pond to clean their grimy bodies.
Sometimes their fame would precede them. Arriving in Hopkins, Minn., on the outskirts of Minneapolis, a marquee with big letters spelled out their arrival: Welcome Skateboarders.
Still, years later the allure of cross-country skating has really only captured a very niche audience. But, Smith has become an integral figurehead in the long-distance skate movement.
For one, Smith’s skateboard attempts have begun to formalize a routine for crossing the U.S. by skate deck. In all of the group attempts, Smith and the rest of the team would use a leapfrog relay method. One skater starts, a support vehicle drives several miles ahead and another skater starts from the van, skating onward until the van picks up the skater behind and meets them to switch out.
Most recently, a team of four, some of the world’s top long-distance skateboarders, set the record for the fastest crossing of the U.S. by skateboard using the leapfrog method while following the trend Smith started — raising money for the Invisible Disabilities Association.
The team completed the journey in 17 days and 6 hours and is in the process of formalizing FKT guidelines for the route. Smith drove the support vehicle. “I could have never imagined in 1976 that almost 50 years later I would be driving a support vehicle for a team attempting to break [my] record,” said Smith.
“In the early days, there was no specialized equipment. I mean, that first trip, I can't even remember what kind of shoes we wore. In ‘84, we actually sent a letter to Nike and they sent us three pairs of shoes,” said Smith. “We used to joke that we never used the Nikes when we went downhill. Cause we didn't wanna burn 'em up.”
Now, skaters have boards and even paddleboard-style poles designed for pushing. Technical running and cycling gear has helped immensely too, with skaters often wearing running tights and running shoes for their attempts.
“The actual skating equipment is light-years beyond what was used in the early days. We adapted regular skateboarding equipment back in those days to fit our needs. Whereas now you can buy off-the-shelf long-distance skating gear,” said Smith.
The community has grown as well. “In ‘76, there was no cross-country skate community,” said Smith. “If there was, there were three guys that were in it.”
Now, there is a small but mighty group of long-distance skateboarders who compete in competitions around the world, including a 24-hour ultra-skate at the Miami Speedway. Others, like Paul Kent, specialize in “wild,” off-the-beaten-path attempts, with gnarly downhill descents and pushes through gravel.
“It was kind of bittersweet,” Smith tells us while driving the support vehicle. “I'm realizing that I probably won't be doing any more long-distance pushes myself. I'm 66 now. I still skate, but I think my really long-distance days are in the rearview mirror.”
Even with his long-distance days behind him, when Smith talks, this lifetime skateboarder pulls you back to 1976. Feet to pavement — push, push, glide — a lulling pattern of road-shoulder survival. With maps stuffed in the glove box and the radio blasting in the boxy Pontiac, there is only a simple task at hand: stay alive, and get to the other coast.
The 1960 discovery of Shanidar 4, a Neanderthal skeleton surrounded by flower pollen, reshaped modern perceptions of Neanderthals.
Early research of the discovery suggested our evolutionary ancestors held funerals with floral tributes, meaning they held a spiritual view of death similar to our own.
“Although the evidence was subsequently questioned, the story was spectacular enough that it is still found in most archaeology textbooks,” Professor Chris Hunt at Liverpool John Moores University told The Guardian.
Now, new research published in the Journal of Archaeological Science is overturning the specifics of the "flower burial" hypothesis. However, it might also reinforce the underlying point that Neanderthals could have been just as empathic as modern humans.
That's because recent excavations near the Shanidar 4 site have challenged old interpretations. Hunt's team identified two additional Neanderthal bodies and additional remains. All were placed near a large rock, in a gully, suggesting a tradition of positioning the dead similarly over several centuries.
“What is becoming very clear is that at least three times Neanderthals came and camped on the sediments beside this gully, and placed a body into it,” Hunt observed.
Further analysis revealed multiple types of pollen in the clumps, not all from the same blooming season, casting doubt on the flower burial idea.
The team now believes that nesting bees, found close by, might be the more plausible pollen source. In addition, Hunt notes one of the flowers (the yellow star thistle) has sharp spines, raising questions about its likelihood as a funeral tribute.
Yet, tree pollen and woody fragments near the bodies hint they might have been covered with branches.
“It is very sad that we’ve demolished the flower burial story because it is a lovely story, but there’s something else going on here, which I think is in many ways just as remarkable,” Hunt said.
Rebecca Wragg Sykes from the University of Liverpool considers the pollen and woody material discovery with Shanidar Z as "convincing" evidence of bees' role, according to The Guardian. However, Sykes also pointed to the possible intentional inclusion of plants with the deceased.
Paul Pettitt, a Neanderthal behavior expert, emphasized the original pollen sampling wasn't exhaustive. In reality, the original "flower burial" idea was never based on strong evidence but was merely a reflection of the 1960s' desire to humanize Neanderthals.
Nonetheless, Pettitt acknowledged Neanderthals buried their dead, at least occasionally.
"They were our human equals in other ways, and clearly buried some of their dead, some of the time," Pettitt told The Guardian.
Traversing the Northwest Passage is proving itself an increasingly popular pastime for the world's adventurers.
This month, a small team will attempt the crossing by rowboat, becoming at least the fourth expedition to try and tackle the difficult journey by human power alone this summer.
"You really do need the gods to be on your side," expedition leader Leven Brown said in a promo video.
Brown is no stranger to dangerous rowing expeditions. He's one of the world's best maritime adventurers, with multiple crossings of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. But the Northwest Passage still poses his biggest challenge yet.
The NWP Expedition will follow a 3,700km arctic route from Baffin Island, Canada, to Point Barrow, Alaska.
But Brown and his cohort aren't the only adventurers attempting to make their way through the Northwest Passage by human power alone.
In fact, at least three other expeditions are currently in motion.
A group of four kayakers known as the Arctic Cowboys are paddling the route and making good time so far, though they still had 2,300km to go as of Monday.
And finally, the rowing duo of Matty Clarke and Adam Riley has turned into a solo endeavor for Clarke after Riley suffered an injury.
In that context, Leven Brown's rowing team is the figurative caboose in a train of adventurers hoping to find a bit of glory through the Northwest Passage.
The rowers will face what Valles refers to as an "unethical psychology experiment." Rowing in two-hour shifts, the biggest battle will likely be sleep deprivation.
The key to success in the Northwest Passage is being totally flexible about the route that they take, Brown said.
You can follow the expedition's progress via their online tracker.
This article was originally published on GearJunkie.
Yvon Chouinard may have given away his company to fight climate change, but he's hardly taking a vacation.
The Patagonia founder figures large in the company's latest documentary about improving our collective stewardship of the environment. "Home, Grown" follows architect and climber Dylan Johnson and a small crew as they build two houses in California. The catch? They're using straw bales that would otherwise have gone to waste.
When building materials contribute an estimated 5-15% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to a Patagonia press release, finding sustainable ways to build will be a necessary part of addressing climate change.
"Which begs the question: What if we used materials that not only take less carbon to produce, but also can capture and store carbon?" the company said in a statement.
Folksy wisdom meets modern problem-solving in this short doc about yet another way we could do better by Mother Earth.
Whether you use social media or not, these platforms have changed climbing.
Look no further than Reel Rock's documentary Big Things To Come, which follows Alex Johnson's 10-year quest to send an uber-hard boulder problem. Social media plays a crucial role in the film, starting as a megaphone for Johnson's failures and ending as emotional support in her journey of self-discovery.
That give-and-take reflects the experience of many climbers on platforms like Instagram, which has become a crucial pillar for athletes of all kinds. To understand how climbers deal with life online, ExplorersWeb reached out to several stars of the sport. We asked them about their positive experiences with social media — and what they wish would change.
For many athletes, social media has become a necessity for furthering their careers. As veteran ice climber Will Gadd puts it: "The other older athletes that didn’t adapt to social media are gone like the dinosaurs."
But for alpinist Calum Muskett, his sponsors don't care much if he makes posts or not. The responses we received reveal a broad diversity in both attitude and practice.
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Will Gadd has long been one of ice climbing's most recognizable athletes, though he's also a top paraglider and well-rounded outdoorsman -- kayaker, caver, skier, rock climber. He has plenty to say about social media's impact on the outdoors.
ExWeb: What impact do you think social media has had on outdoor sports?
Will Gadd: When I was a kid, the latest skateboarding trick would arrive months after the fact as a series of stills in a magazine from California, and we’d try to puzzle out the missing frames over the course of months. Now it’s on YouTube, sometimes literally in seconds, in full HD and often 60 or more frames a second. And the same is true for every trick and tactic in every mountain sport. If I can rebuild my car with YouTube, then I can definitely learn to build anchors, mostly. This has driven the most insanely rapid progression in every sport I’m involved with, but especially the session sports like play boating, ski tricks, etc.
What has changed for the worse with the advent of social media in climbing?
Social media has made it a lot easier for more people to make a living off outdoor-related content. You don’t have to win comps or do the sickest version of your sport anymore, it’s all about connecting to people with engaging “content.”
This means that really talented athletes may not receive the dollars they would have historically, while mediocre athletes who produce great content can be the top earners in a sport...As someone who has genuinely pushed my sports, I thought it was bad at first that an attractive young person with skimpy clothes would rack up huge followers, despite climbing at a local junior team level. But the market has grown so much that there’s room for the “influencer athletes," and for the high-end athletes who can use social media effectively.
Can you give an example of a social media post or experience that resonated strongly with you?
Most of my most successful posts have been emotional, and about things I really care about. The engagement has been almost universally respectful among people and often led to some surprisingly positive outcomes. The terrible accident on Howse Peak springs to mind. Some real good came out of that in terms of product design (integrated Recco to reduce the load on rescuers, families, etc.), and just conversation about risk-taking in a non-judgmental way.
I try to make roughly 25 percent of my posts genuinely useful to people, and that’s an ethic that has helped me do better personally rather than just putting up posts that give our dopamine-starved brains a quick hit.
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Mary Catherine Eden, known as Tradprincess to her many followers, has become a heroine of the brutal climbing style known as off-width crack climbing. Last fall, she set a new benchmark by climbing Necronomicon, a 5.14a roof route in Utah.
ExWeb: You’ve developed a huge following on Instagram. What impact has social media had on your climbing?
Mary Catherine Eden: I thought about deleting my social media a million times. Especially when I realized how much negativity I was getting. But I met Mercedi Carlson through social media, and she’s the best climbing partner I’ve ever had, and that friendship pushed me so much. I wanted to be Robin to somebody’s Batman.
Not Batman?
No, Robin has more fun. Batman has too much responsibility.
Do you think social media has made climbing more inclusive?
Yeah, I think so. I travel a lot for climbing. It’s so much easier to find women to climb with now. I’m now more of a “normal” instead of the “other.” For the first five years of my rock climbing, I was always the “other.” The only girl. ‘Cause I was a trad climber in the desert. There wasn’t somebody that I could get in the car with that was like me.
Now I’m so grateful to social media. I feel so much more connected to women than ever before in rock climbing. I can’t believe I’m here. It’s weird. I didn't feel like I belong here. And then one day I realized I do belong here.
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Anna Taylor has developed a large following on social media through photos and videos of her daring free solos, mostly in the U.K. In addition to becoming the first woman to do the 83 routes of the Classic Rock circuit, she's also pulled off big adventures in Tasmania.
ExWeb: What impact has social media had on your life outdoors and your personal life?
Anna Taylor: It’s impacted my life in some very positive ways. It’s very easy to connect with people through Instagram, and I’ve been given some really great opportunities over the years because someone somewhere saw a post I’ve put out. For instance, working on a big TV project with the children’s show Blue Peter, and shooting an advert for a technology company that involved pretending to work an office job from a portaledge.
I also began talking to my now-fiancé online, and I honestly doubt we would ever have bumped into each other in person. So I guess I can thank Instagram for my relationship, too.
Can you give an example of a social media post that was important for you?
I once had to put a story out there, calling out a scene from a film I was in that had been edited in pretty poor taste. I really didn’t want to have to do it, but the response from people when I did was lovely. It turned out that an awful lot of people had been thinking exactly the same thing. That cleared any doubts I had that I was worried about nothing.
I’m not usually one that needs a lot of support from people I don’t know, but having it in that moment really helped, and I was extremely grateful to each and every person who reached out to me.
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When it comes to BASE jumping, few people have the resumé of Tim Howell. The climber and BASE jumper has drawn understandable attention for the stunning photos and videos of BASE jumps from Aconcagua and the Six Great North Faces of the Alps.
ExWeb: What impact do you think social media has had on outdoor sports? What has changed for the better and for the worse?
Tim Howell: The amount of knowledge that can be passed on is a great thing. There are pages dedicated to gear, safety aspects, techniques, news bulletins, etc. Knowledge is key when it comes to safety in the outdoors.
There are, of course, negative aspects. When I post on social media, I try to be as genuine and natural as possible. I often climb or jump without a camera, it's not always about the content. So when people do things just "for the gram," it seems so contrived. Apart from the newsworthy "selfie fatalities" on unforgiving clifftops, there are also lots of cases of the environment being damaged due to tourists crowding areas of beauty because it's such a popular Instagram shot.
Can you give an example of a social media post that was particularly useful for you?
Some of my favorite expeditions have started with one photo. Four years ago, I saw a picture on Instagram of a single limestone cliff in northern Vietnam. That started a huge quest to research the area and find out if it was possible to wingsuit from this cliff. I asked around on travel forums and Facebook groups to see if people had been to the area and had any pictures.
After getting in touch with local motorbike guides and measuring the distances on Google Earth, I finally took a trip out to Vietnam. After three days of overnight trains, local mini-buses, and scooters, we arrived at the cliff and I was able to be the first person to wingsuit BASE jump in Vietnam. For a lot of the expeditions I do, the research comes from the communities on social media.
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Calum Muskett is an alpine climber and skier who has pulled off many impressive solos, such as the Chamonix-Zermatt Haute route in just over 24 hours. He has sponsorships, but his relationship with social media remains ambivalent, despite his obvious skill and the beautiful Instagram photos of his adventures.
ExWeb: What impact do you think social media has had on outdoor sports?
Calum Muskett: Sponsorship tends to go toward content creators (who might be terrible at the sport) or to the very best athletes in the world (who often have a content creation team). This can be pretty frustrating for a lot of elite athletes who are incredibly good but can never sustain a living as professional outdoor athletes from sponsorship. With that said, this has always been part of the adventure sports game, where there's little state funding for elite sports compared to more mainstream Olympic sports.
Can you give an example of a social media post that particularly affected you?
I remember in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic seeing a friend discuss on Facebook whether it was ok to go bouldering a short walk from his home in a secluded spot. The responses to this genuine question, from people I know are very reasonable in person, were extreme and filled with absolute certainty one way or the other, with very little level of proportionality or reasoning. I just found the environment very toxic and it was the final straw for me. I realized that Facebook was really not adding much positive to my life.
Adam Ondra decided to break with tradition in his latest video. Instead of simply climbing yet another elite-level route, he takes a trip down memory lane.
His new video below shows never-before-seen footage of his first ascent of Vasil Vasil. At the time, it was only the third route in the world done despite the mega-hard difficulty of 5.15c.
Ondra first climbed it in 2013 after bolting it himself five years earlier. It's located at Sloup in the climber's native Czech Republic, where he's now established many of the country's hardest climbs, including this one.
The route's crux involves a V13 move within a larger V14 problem, followed by a 5.13d section. If that doesn't make any sense to you, let's just say it would be a tough nut to crack for any climber in the world.
As for Ondra, he spent 20 days spread over two years working on the route. Now, we get to see the prodigy's process.
Spoiler alert for Ondra newbies: That means plenty of screaming.
This article was originally published on GearJunkie.
If you know any two rock climbers by name, they're probably Alex Honnold and Tommy Caldwell. The elite climbing duo have repeatedly captured the world's attention with bonkers accomplishments, from their traverse of the Fitzroy range in Patagonia to an epic enchainment in Rocky Mountain National Park. It doesn't hurt that their jocular dynamic makes insanely dangerous adventures feel like Hollywood buddy comedies.
Now climbing's odd couple might face their biggest challenge yet: riding bicycles really, really far.
According to their social media posts, Caldwell and Honnold plan on cycling from Colorado to Alaska. The 3,000km trip will also include some climbing (no details yet) and learning about climate change's impact on the environment.
"A couple days ago Alex and I set off on what I think is likely to become our biggest adventure (at least in terms of calorie expenditure) to date," Caldwell wrote on Instagram over the weekend. "We have some ambitious climbing objectives, and we'll be passing through a bunch of environmentally sensitive areas. I figure if you want to learn to love the planet enough to find ways to protect it, sometimes you need to immerse yourself in it as deeply as possible."
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Honnold and Caldwell have delivered both laughs and awe with two major documentaries: A Line Across the Sky (the Patagonian traverse) and Cuddle (the Rocky Mountain enchainment). The two even host their own MasterClass on climbing.
So it should come as no surprise that their latest adventure will also result in a film — this time with Honnold's name on the masthead. Speaking at the Sheffield DocFest in the U.K. last week, Honnold said the two-wheeled tour will culminate with "a difficult climb in Alaska."
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The Alaska trip with Caldwell will be filmed for a series tentatively titled The Last Frontier with Alex Honnold, according to Deadline, which reported on the event.
There's no word yet on a release date — and that's likely the farthest thing from the minds of Honnold and Caldwell at the moment. They've spent their first week "route finding through the Wyoming plains," Honnold wrote on Twitter.
If you click through the photos in Caldwell's post above, you'll find a video of the pair chatting about a coiled rattlesnake on the trail in front of them.
"It jumped at Tommy!" Honnold says. "Thankfully it didn't get either of us."
This article was originally published on GearJunkie.
Can a bike work without wheels? Well, that depends on your definition of “work.”
For YouTube channel The Q, engineering isn’t about solving problems so much as inventing bizarre contraptions no one had asked for. For its latest oddity, the channel’s talented creator made a bicycle without wheels.
What does that mean, exactly? You’ll have to watch this wordless video to find out. It ends with a test run that proves a bike with linear “wheels” can, in fact, function.
Although the degree of that functionality is best summarized by the vid’s most-liked comment: “Finally, someone’s made a mode of transportation that’s as fast as walking with 10 times the effort.”
Seeing as how the vid has racked up 6.5 million views in four days, the internet clearly doesn’t care about practicality.
This article was originally published on GearJunkie.
At a normal entry level, ice climbing is pretty hard.
So when in 2020, a pair of the world's best ice climbers claim to have sent a new level of difficulty at the world's steepest ice wall, you can expect something epic.
"It's absolutely huge," Tim Emmett says in this short doc from YouTube channel Louder Than Eleven. "It's right at our limit."
Emmett joined with partner Klemen Premrl to create the massive, 131-foot line at British Columbia's Helmcken Falls, developed by ice climbing godfather Will Gadd. The overhanging pitch only gets steeper as the climbers go higher, so the the crux "is literally the last move," they explain.
They named the route Mission to Mars and rated it WI-13 — a new grade of difficulty in ice climbing.
It's one of the oldest and most frustrating questions when studying animal behavior: Is the thing we're seeing what we think we're seeing?
But for nearly anyone who watches the below video, the source of the octopus's behavior seems obvious — he's having a nightmare.
Researchers at a laboratory aquarium at the Rockefeller University in New York spied one of their specimens, a Brazilian reef octopus named Costello, having a rare and unexplained episode.
While sleeping, the octopus changes colors, then swirls around in a series of tense contortions, shoots out some ink, and finally settles on the bottom, intensely clutching a pipe.
University scientists called the behavior very unusual, and described the movements as similar to a fight response when attacked by a predator.
See for yourself:
To be clear: Researchers can't say definitively that the octopus is having a nightmare, though they've already published an initial paper on the incident. There's that problem again of having a scientific system based on empirical evidence.
Regardless, there are some behaviors that seem too obvious to the human eye to be easily dismissed, and this is clearly one of them. These eight-armed animals have become the focus of increasing amounts of research in recent years because of their fierce intelligence and emotional behavior.
It's also fair to point out that science doesn't have a great track record in granting animals individuality, sexuality or creativity. A slow acceptance of those traits as belonging to more Earthly creatures than just Homo sapiens is changing how we understand evolution, The New York Times reported.
Looking at the bigger picture: Do we truly think we're the only species on this planet that has dreams and nightmares?
Whatever caused Costello's abnormal fit of behavior, we can all understand the difficulty of getting a good night's rest.
If we're not currently living in the Golden Age of outdoor sports, it's hard to imagine what the real one would look like.
In the simply titled Rockies Traverse, athletes Will Gadd and Gavin McClurg break through to a new frontier of paragliding. Over two weeks, they manage to pull off what they call the longest paragliding trip ever, soaring above the Canadian Rocky Mountains for 700km.
How does that work exactly? It means Gadd and McClurg find a hill to launch from, fly as far as they can, then land and find a place to camp. Then they get up the next day and do it all over again.
It's an insanely high-stakes mission, requiring the pair of flying athletes to break every rule of paragliding along the way, as they explain in the documentary's intro. Those rules?
First, don't fly in heavy wind. Don't fly in the lee. Don't fly close to terrain. And never fly over terrain where there's no place to land.
"The tiniest mistake can be lethal," McClurg explains.
That almost proves the case about halfway through the expedition, when high winds force McClurg off-course, separating him from Gadd. The pair even lose radio contact, creating a sense of real worry until McClurg manages to battle his way back to his partner.
"I think I had some luck today," he says upon reuniting with Gadd. "That has been some intense flying."
Ultimately, the pair reach the U.S. border, as planned, after 700km of pure Canadian wilderness.
It's a mind-bending accomplishment and one that might just become merely the opening salvo in a new form of outdoor exploration.
Or at least that's what Gadd thinks. How many people have the skill, gumption, and resources to manage such a feat is an open question. At the same time, where there's a deep-pocketed sponsor like Red Bull, there's a way, and there seems little doubt we'll see more adventures like these in the near future.
"I don't think any one trip has ever changed my view of the world so much," the renowned ice climber says. "There's a lot to do now. You can go places that you can't walk, and you fly a paraglider through them and come out the other side. Alright, where in the world can you do that? And the answer is: There's a lot of places in the world where we could do this."
Say what you will about Alex Honnold — the free soloist rarely disappoints.
In his latest climbing marathon, Honnold joined with Scott Bennett to link together six granite spires in Washington's Cascade Mountains. The pair successfully connected a half-dozen classic Cascade ascents — and it took them just 15 hours to pull it off.
In short order, Honnold and Bennett ticked off a bucket list of Cascade climbs. They include Tooth and Claw (5.12-) on Lexington, the East Face (5.10) of the Minuteman, Freedom or Death segueing into the Liberty Cracks (5.12) on Liberty Bell, the North Face on Concord, the West Face (5.10) on North Early Winter Spire, and finally The Passenger (5.11+) on South Early Winter Spire.
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It's just the latest endurance climbing feat accomplished by Honnold, who continues to complete daring climbs, often without a rope. His incredible solo traverse across Nevada's Red Rocks resulted in an exceptional documentary for Reel Rock earlier this year.
And he's already got his next goal lined up.
Honnold plans to undertake a 3,200km cycling trip with equally renowned climber and long-time accomplice Tommy Caldwell.
In a recent Sheffield DocFest session in the UK, Honnold announced their plan to cycle from Caldwell's Colorado residence to Alaska. The journey includes tackling challenging climbs along the way, culminating with a difficult ascent in Alaska.
It will, of course, result in another big-budget documentary, produced by National Geographic and streamed on Disney+.
Will Steger "survived it again," he said this week.
After a lifetime of adventure in the frigid wilds, the 78-year-old explorer has pulled off another massive accomplishment: 1,300km through the Canadian Arctic, solo.
"It's been an incredible experience these last 55 days," he said in his final audio report. "Some of the best experiences of my life: a lot of beauty, a lot of danger, a lot of in the moment all the time."
The renowned polar traveler arrived in Canada’s Northwest Territories in mid-April, ready to tackle another months-long solo journey. This time, however, Steger intended to follow rivers "that will be either frozen, breaking up, or flowing."
It's a departure from the focus of his 2022 expedition, when Steger struggled to deal with shin-deep water on the ice, leading him to abort the trip.
This year, he traveled through the Arctic during one of its seasonal transitions, between the water drainage and a full breakup. He took three six-foot sleds and hauled a total load of 240lbs of supplies, Steger wrote earlier this year.
When he completed the first 500km a few weeks ago, Steger witnessed massive blocks of ice floating down the river near his campsite.
"It was just beyond anything I ever expected physically and spiritually, and you only get that by putting out 100% all the time," he said on SoundCloud. "It's really rare to stay in that moment for weeks at a time. It's amazing what a human being is capable of."
For Steger, the journey is part of his larger goal. Steger plans to open the Steger Center, his dream project in Ely, Minnesota.
The beautiful five-story building looks out over a beautiful Minnesota forest. When completed, Steger hopes the center will provide mentorship to other adventurers and environmentalists.
"It would lead to a center that nurtures community, cares for the earth, and inspires leaders to solve real-world problems," the Steger Center website says. "With community spaces, master classes, and international leadership conferences, the Steger Center exists to build a sustainable community in the North Woods and inspire future generations of leaders."
Despite just finishing an expedition that would represent a singular achievement for almost anyone else, Steger's final audio dispatch showed a man ready to move on to the next challenge.
"I'm ready to return to work at Steger Center," he said. "The effort of my lifetime has been the Steger Center. Everything I've done was a means to an end to launch that legacy."
Funnel-web spiders aren't just the most venomous arachnids in the world, they can also choose how deadly they want their venom to be.
The lethality of the spiders' venom depends on the context in which they use it, according to a new study published in the journal PLOS ONE. With a complex cocktail of toxins in the venom, continued research could unlock new health benefits for humans.
"Funnel-webs have the most complex venoms in the natural world, and they are valued for the therapeutics and natural bioinsecticides that are potentially hidden in their venom molecules. Knowing more about how the spiders produce these is a step towards unlocking this potential," study author Dr. Linda Hernández Duran, from James Cook University's Australian Institute of Tropical Health, said in a press release.
Duran and her team collected four different species of funnel-web spiders, including the Border Ranges (Hadronyche valida), Darling Downs (Hadronyche infensa), Southern tree-dwelling (Hadronyche cerberea), and Sydney funnel-web (Atrax robustus).
They used several tests on the spiders, including prodding them with tweezers and puffing air at them. The results? Researchers saw variations in the spiders' venom based on factors like defensiveness and heart rate.
"We mapped their behavior and measured their heart rate with a laser monitor to establish a proxy value for their metabolic rate. We then collected their venom and analyzed it with a mass spectrometer," Duran said.
A few of Australia's spiders are famous for being the deadliest in the world (at least to humans).
While spiders bite 30 to 40 people in Australia annually, only the male Sydney funnel-web has killed people, Science Alert reported. And in fact, the deadly arachnid hasn't killed anyone since researchers found an anti-venom in 1981.
Many studies have looked at the molecular composition of the venom, but none had considered the spiders's behavior, physical state, and environment. That led Hernández Duran and her colleagues to weigh the impact of those variables on the venom produced.
"With the Border Ranges funnel-web, the expression of some venom components was associated with heart rate and defensiveness," Duran said. "The other species didn’t demonstrate this, suggesting that particular associations may be species-specific."
"We showed for the first time how specific venom components are associated with particular behavioral and physiological variables and demonstrated that these relationships are context-dependent. We gained some valuable insights for further exploration and understanding of the ecological role of venom."
What does climbing mean when you've lost your country, your culture, and maybe even your family?
In Patagonia's latest documentary, Afghan women find a renewed sense of strength and hope on the coarse granite of Yosemite National Park.
The film follows a small group of refugees who participated in Ascend, a nonprofit that brought climbing and outdoor sports to women in Afghanistan. Like many nonprofits working there, Ascend's mission pivoted to evacuation during the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from the country in 2021.
Now, women like Mina Bakshi and Haniya Tavasoli are trying to rebuild their lives in the United States.
Here, the women spend a week in Yosemite National Park. As they climb, laugh, and sing together, Bakshi and Tavasoli find reasons to move forward.
"We can do climbing. We can do sports. We can support each other. We can be leaders," Tavasoli says in the doc. "With all my hardships, I am here. So it means a lot."
For 20 years, thousands of Afghan women grew up in a country occupied by the United States.
Though they still faced an uphill battle, many young women gained access to education and opportunities long denied by Afghanistan's patriarchal, fundamentalist society.
Arguments about the merits of America's 2001 invasion will continue, of course, but one of its undeniable results was to give hope to women across Afghanistan.
At least until August 15, 2021.
That's when chaos erupted in the country as President Joe Biden ordered the long-anticipated withdrawal of U.S. military forces. Afghanistan's political leaders, including its president, fled the country as the Taliban took control. Civilian casualties hit record highs, CNN reported, and a bomb in Kabul airport killed 13 U.S. troops.
The Taliban reinstated the draconian laws that prevented women from doing much except staying home. Almost overnight, Afghanistan's women saw 20 years of progress crumble.
"All over the country, women report feeling invisible, isolated, suffocated, living in prison-like conditions," a U.N. report detailed. "It’s a sobering reminder of how swiftly and aggressively women’s and girls’ rights can be taken away."
Though Ascend started in 2014, everything changed for the nonprofit during the withdrawal.
"On August 15, we went from being an organization empowering girls in Afghanistan to an organization evacuating and resettling refugees," said Marina LeGree, the group's founder.
Many U.S. aid groups suddenly found themselves pivoting to evacuation, including Free To Run, which brought running to Afghan women (and was highlighted in a North Face documentary about its own efforts to evacuate women).
Ultimately, Ascend evacuated 134 people from Afghanistan, helping them resettle in eight different countries.
"I'm trying to feel the safety here," Bakshi says about her new life in the U.S. "I wanted that safety for everyone in my country."
When one of the Afghan women reaches the top of a tough route in Yosemite, she begins to sing. As her fellow refugees raise their voices to join her, the group's hosts try to wipe away their tears while maintaining a safe belay.
Sometimes, all you can do is keep holding on.
When career alpinist Christophe Profit removed safety equipment from Mont Blanc last summer, he called it a "political" act.
But according to a Monday verdict from a French court, it was also a criminal one.
The Bonneville Criminal Court found Profit guilty of removing and "stealing" steel rods installed on the mountain, 4sport.ua reported. Profit must pay 600 euros for removing the stakes, which were added to help climbers safely pass the mountain's new crevasses along the standard summit route.
Profit, one of France's most famous mountaineers, claimed to have ethics on his side, arguing that the stakes only encourage novice climbers to attempt routes beyond their ability.
For that reason, Profit maintained transparency, even emailing the mayor of Saint-Gervais, Jean-Marc Peillex, to claim responsibility. (Profit seems comfortable airing his opinions, like the Instagram post below, in which he shares his feelings about GPS.)
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But Profit's honesty didn't stop the mayor of Mont Blanc's nearest town from lambasting the climber for his presumptuousness.
“Security is essential, especially when there are more and more people in nature," Mayor Jean-Marc Peillex said in a statement. "Me, I did my job, I did what the guides asked of me [by ordering the stakes placed] and it is not because we secure a place with a crevasse 16 meters high that we increase attendance. We are improving security."
It's just the latest conflict in one of climbing's oldest debates: How do we manage mountains, especially as they become more popular? As climate change and other forces reshape our environment, balancing the desires of pros and novices will only become more complicated.
But as far as the French courts are concerned, the answer isn't a single climber making a unilateral decision for everyone else, no matter how impressive his resumé.
On May 31, NASA held its first public meeting as part of a nine-month investigation into UFOs.
Judging by the hundreds of questions — many of them pointedly accusing the agency of hiding extraterrestrial secrets — it's easy to wonder if NASA scientists are already regretting their decision to tackle this loaded subject.
Some of the event participants called them UFOs (unidentified flying objects). Others called them UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena). Either way, the questions show that many people believe "the truth is out there" — if only the government would reveal it.
Examples include:
NASA officials responded to many of these questions during a live-streamed event on Wednesday. It's a stark departure from a longtime U.S. government policy of avoiding UFO discussions at all costs.
In October, NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense launched a joint investigation of 800 reports of unexplained sightings in the sky, also referred to as "anomalous phenomena."
Their conclusion so far? Only a small portion of the database of sightings (about 2-5%) remain unexplained. To make more headway, the investigation will need better quality data, NASA officials said.
Since starting their investigation in October, NASA and the DoD have dug through hundreds of UFO sighting info collected over several decades.
In news that shouldn't surprise anyone. Most of the data is unreliable and difficult to analyze.
The 16-person "study group" includes planetary scientist David Grinspoon, former NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, and science journalist Nadia Drake, the space agency announced in October. It’s chaired by David Spergel, an astrophysicist and president of the nonprofit science organization the Simons Foundation.
The study team’s mission isn't about making concrete conclusions on the nature of UAPs, but rather to create a foundation for additional research, according to Spergel. That means developing a framework for what a scientific investigation of UFOs will look like, Popular Science reported.
As a result, Wednesday’s meeting included discussions of standards of evidence for evaluating UFOs and the continued difficulty of obtaining reliable reports from witnesses.
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But the most obvious solution — NASA making its own field observations — might also be the most difficult. Options for that include FAA radar installations, sensors on commercial aircraft, and even government spy installations. The problem, as Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the Department of Defense’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), put it on Wednesday: Americans don't like government surveillance.
“Most people, including the government, don’t like it when I point our entire collection apparatus to your backyard," Kirkpatrick said. “We’ve got to figure out how to do this only in the areas that I can get high confidence there’s going to be something there, and high confidence I’m not going to break any laws.”
Lovers of all things UFO-related can expect NASA to deliver a final report in July.
Even for those accustomed to extreme sports — the Tenzing Hillary Everest Marathon is something to behold.
This year's iteration, held on May 29 -- the 70th anniversary of the first ascent of Everest by Tenzing and Hillary -- was no exception. Dozens of international runners joined Nepalis in a race around the world's highest mountain.
Maybe unsurprisingly, the locals dominated. All three podium spots in the main race fell to Nepali runners, with Tirtha Bahadur Tamang taking top overall honors with an 8:38:09.
Since 2003, the event has attracted extreme athletes willing to run a marathon that begins at Everest Base Camp. That means runners start at an elevation of 5,364 meters, and then race through the crisscrossing trails of the Khumbu valley.
Given that the original marathon came from Greece (with its average elevation of 498m), it's fair to say that the Everest Marathon is a bit more difficult than your average race.
But the race's history also mirrors the story of that first epic run from Marathon to Athens back in 490 BC.
When Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay famously made the first ascent of Everest, news of their success was carried by a runner from base camp to Namche, where it was telegraphed to the world, according to the Everest Marathon website.
The Everest course follows that same route, and "as luck would have it, the route is almost exactly 42km, or an Olympic marathon," organizers wrote online.
There are three categories, including the 70km Extreme Ultra, 42km Full Marathon, and the 21km Half Marathon.
With such extreme altitude, it should come as no surprise that locals dominate the competition. That's become even more true in recent years through the influence of Nepali ultrarunner Mira Rai, whose success has encouraged her fellow Nepalis to compete, alpinist Pat Morrow said.
"It’s interesting to note that, given the opportunity, indigenous people excel at any kind of physical feat in terrain they have grown up in," said Morrow.
See all the photos and race results on the Tenzing Hillary Everest Marathon page on Facebook.
Few parts of our galaxy have captured the human imagination quite like the elegant, colorful rings of Saturn.
But like all things in nature, they're going to disappear, new research says. And soon. Well, soon as in 100 million years, at the earliest.
Assuming the human species survives another 1,000 years, that means the rings will still be around long enough for any potential space tourism.
In the context of the universal timeline, however, Saturn's rings have a much shorter lifespan than once believed. They likely formed within the last few hundred million years, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
That's according to the new analysis of data from NASA's Cassini mission, which orbited the gas giant between 2004 and 2017. The research, published May 15 in the journal Icarus, posits that the rings appeared long after the formation of Saturn itself.
More importantly, the Cassini data suggests the rings are losing tons of mass every second.
With other studies reaching the same conclusion this month — one in Science Advances and a second in Icarus — it's likely that astronomers can rely on this new perspective on Saturn's iconic rings.
“Our inescapable conclusion is that Saturn’s rings must be relatively young by astronomical standards, just a few hundred million years old,” Indiana University Professor Emeritus of Astronomy Richard Durisen said in a news release. “If you look at Saturn’s satellite system, there are other hints that something dramatic happened there in the last few hundred million years.”
The possible origins of Saturn's icy rings have long fascinated scientists — even more than its many moons.
For the new study, Durisen worked with Paul Estrada, a research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center. The pair have argued for years that Saturn's rings are young by cosmic standards, as older rings would likely be darker from the effect of interplanetary meteoroids, according to the Indiana University release.
That theory holds up in their latest analysis of data collected by NASA's Cassini spacecraft over 13 years. In its 2017 Grand Finale, the spacecraft made 22 orbits, frequently passing between Saturn and its rings. The data enabled Durisen and Estrada to estimate the rings' age and longevity.
The results? Meteoroids will definitely pollute Saturn's rings. They just haven't had lots of time to do so because the rings are relatively young. As the rings suffer repeated impacts from these flying space rocks, their dusty essence slowly erodes, with tons of ring mass drifting down to Saturn every second.
It's a glimpse into a cosmic cycle that has likely taken place many times throughout the Milky Way galaxy — in a distant past before Earth-orbiting telescopes and NASA spaceships.
“We have shown that massive rings like Saturn’s do not last long,” Estrada said. “One can speculate that the relatively puny rings around the other ice and gas giants in our solar system are leftover remnants of rings that were once massive like Saturn’s. Maybe sometime in the not-so-distant future, astronomically speaking, after Saturn’s rings are ground down, they will look more like the sparse rings of Uranus.”
Want to know more? Check out this Indiana University video of Durisen explaining his research.
Zachary Porter, a 20-year-old from Illinois, was just visiting Alaska with three friends last weekend for "a little adventure" in late spring.
But the trip turned horrific when the group visited the tidal mud flats of Turnagain Arm, a popular destination on the Kenai Peninsula south of Anchorage.
The small group of friends were walking on the mud flats around 6 pm last Sunday. Suddenly, Porter found himself trapped waist-deep, according to multiple news reports. His friends tried to free him, but the tide moved in quickly, drowning Porter, Alaska State Troopers told MSN.
Porter's body was recovered Monday when the tide water had receded enough for rescuers to reach him.
Other people have died when sucked into the quicksand-like mud flats. However, it's likely been decades since the last incident, Alaska officials said.
"It’s big, it’s amazing, it’s beautiful, and it’s overwhelming,” Kristy Peterson, lead EMT with the Hope-Sunrise Volunteer Fire Department, told The Associated Press. “But you have to remember that it’s Mother Nature, and she has no mercy for humanity.”
An Alaska tourism website calls Turnagain Arm a "spectacular setting for wildlife watching, nature photography, and hiking."
“What looks like solid ground can turn into quicksand with little to no notice,” McDaniel said.
As for Porter, he loved traveling and exploring the outdoors, which he shared with his group of college friends, his father told NBC Chicago.
“They were just going to have a little adventure before their summer activities started,” Todd Porter said.
It's likely one of the first deaths at Turnagain Arm since 1988 when newlyweds Adeana and Jay Dickison were gold dredging on the eastern end of the arm, Alaska Dispatch News reported. When Adeana's ATV got stuck in the mud, she tried to push it out — only to find herself trapped as well.
Like Porter, she drowned with the tide.
Would you lay in a bed for two months straight — for science?
For people inclined toward reclining, this might sound like a dream job, but it could have a serious impact on long-term space travel.
It turns out that languishing in bed for extended periods mimics the effects of space on the human body, which include weakened bones, loss of muscle mass, and changes to blood flow. That's why the European Space Agency (ESA) has tasked 12 volunteers with spending 60 days lying on their backs, it announced this week.
Reading the fine print reveals that this experiment will hardly be a vacation for its dozen participants. They will stay in beds tilted 6° below the horizontal with their feet up — meals, showers and toilet breaks included.
"Add cycling, spinning and constant medical tests to the equation and it becomes a challenging experience for the sake of human space exploration," the ESA wrote.
Evidently, just playing the new Zelda game for two months isn't an option.
The ESA want to see if certain exercises can help counteract the effects of the sedentary lifestyle — the terrestrial substitute for the effects of zero gravity.
That means participants will cycle while lying down to keep their blood flowing. It's the first bed-rest test in Europe where researchers will determine if cycling can help counteract the negative effects of weightlessness.
“We encourage volunteers to reach their maximum effort on the bike, and then compare the impact with those who are not biking at all,” Rebecca Billette, the head of clinical research at the French Institute for Space Medicine and Physiology (MEDES), said in the ESA article.
Some participants will try cycling while spinning around in a centrifuge to create artificial gravity. If it helps preserve the participants' health, astronauts might try something similar in future space missions.
“We hope to understand the added value of artificial gravity to the fitness routine that astronauts follow on the International Space Station," Angelique Van Ombergen, ESA lead for life sciences at Human and Robotic Exploration, said in the ESA story. “It could become an effective solution for a healthier body during long-duration space missions."
No need to doubt this angler's "big fish" story — he caught the terrifying moment on camera.
A enormous tiger shark decided to try a bite of his kayak while the fisherman was cruising on the coast of Oahu, Hawaii.
According to the BBC, Scott Haraguchi escaped unharmed after his very close encounter with one of the ocean's largest predators.
“It was incredibly bad luck, but incredibly good luck to capture it,” he told local TV station KITV.
I hated selfies for a long time.
It wasn't because I had a problem with photography, either. My 80-year-old father has been snapping photos his entire life, especially of our family, so I've never felt uncomfortable in front of a camera.
I vividly remember the strange smells of the darkroom where he developed his film in a small shack behind our house, and I loved the mechanical snaps and whirring clicks of his Canon F-1, which felt so heavy and satisfying in my young hands.
When smart phones became ubiquitous during my college years, with their tiny lenses and large screens, I was slow to adopt them as "real" cameras. And I loathed selfies. My dad's reluctance to step in front of the camera himself — to my mom's constant frustration — imprinted me with a moral code against turning the camera around.
Eventually, I changed my tune for one simple reason: girlfriends.
Many times, I'd be on a trip with my significant other, usually in a beautiful outdoor place with no one around to help snap a photo. What do you do? You turn the phone around, stretch your arm out as far as possible, and use one hand to capture the moment together — and maybe squeeze some killer views into the background.
My reason for surrendering to this phenomenon was simple: I didn't like selfies, but I wanted to preserve more than just the physical setting. I wanted to show that I, and this person so special to me, had been there together.
According to new research in Social Psychological and Personality Science, that's exactly why many people take selfies: to capture the deeper meaning of events.
To better understand why we take selfies, researchers from the U.S., Germany, and Canada conducted six studies involving more than 2,100 participants.
Each of those six studies targeted a specific aspect of photo-taking, focused on the choice between taking a selfie or a normal photo (a.k.a. first-person).
The first study tested whether people take selfies to capture the meaning of a moment, rather than the physical experience of it. The second and third asked participants to read hypothetical scenarios and report what type of photo (selfie or first-person) they'd take, depending on their goal.
With the fourth and fifth studies, researchers then brought the experiment to real images posted on Instagram, and quizzed users about their reasons for posting specific photos. The final study tested whether people liked their photos more when the perspective matched their intention.
“Not only do we find that most people take both types of photos in different situations, but that people also differ across situations in whether their goal for taking the photo is to capture the physical experience of the moment or the bigger meaning of the moment in their life,” lead author Zachary Niese, of the University of Tübingen, told Neuroscience News.
While ubiquitous around the world, selfies continue to hold a certain stigma among many people, Niese said in the article.
Perhaps part of the problem of the negative perception of selfies lies in the name. It describes something inherently self-centered — rather than simply a change of perspective.
For example, until reading this study, I'd never considered the idea of normal photos as a first-person perspective and selfies as the third-person. Merely by changing the name, I understand the absurdity of criticizing how and why we take photos. It's literally just a change of viewpoint.
“Taking and posting pictures is a part of everyday life for many people," Niese said. "While there is sometimes derision about photo-taking practices in popular culture, personal photos have the potential to help people reconnect to their past experiences and build their self-narratives."
I still don't like selfies much. I prefer to stand behind the camera instead of in front of it.
But there's probably ample room for both in the broad field of artistic expression.
You'd be forgiven for thinking — as I did — that the Titanic's story is sufficiently well-known 111 years after its infamous demise.
Yet it only takes a glance at the digital images released this week to see the shipwreck as no one has seen it before.
For the first time, the ship's entire hull is visible in its resting place 3,800m below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. Thanks to 200 hours of work from the mapping company Magellan, the wreck appears as a decaying skeleton in the pitch-black desert of the deep sea.
Even for long-time students of the Titanic's history, the images felt extraordinary. Parks Stephenson, who has studied the Titanic for many years, told the BBC he was "blown away" when he first laid eyes on the scans.
"It allows you to see the wreck as you can never see it from a submersible, and you can see the wreck in its entirety, you can see it in context and perspective," Stephenson said. "And what it's showing you now is the true state of the wreck."
Many Titanic enthusiasts will be familiar with the close-up, slow-moving videos taken from submersibles, especially from James Cameron's documentaries.
Now, thanks to 700,000 images pieced together into a 3D reconstruction, the whole world can see the Titanic from a wider perspective.
Even for those not obsessed with the ship's history, the story retains a profound sense of tragedy.
More than 1,500 people died when the Titanic struck an iceberg during its maiden voyage in 1912. More than 100 years later, evidence of their lives still exists in the personal objects scattered throughout the massive debris field around the wreck. Those include dozens of shoes resting on the sediment, unopened champagne bottles, and ornate metalwork broken off the ship.
Researchers hope the images can help with unanswered questions about exactly what happened to the liner on that terrible night in 1912.
"There are still questions, basic questions, that need to be answered about the ship," Stephenson, a Titanic analyst, told BBC News.
"We really don't understand the character of the collision with the iceberg. We don't even know if she hit it along the starboard side, as is shown in all the movies - she might have grounded on the iceberg," he said.
Stay tuned: Atlantic Productions, which partnered with Magellan, will make a documentary about the project.
Tragedy struck Malawi on Monday, when a hippopotamus collided with a boat traveling down the African country's Shire River, according to multiple news sources.
The boat capsized, and a one-year-old baby drowned, Malawi authorities told The Guardian. Twenty-three people remain missing.
The large canoe was ferrying 37 people across the river when the incident occurred Monday morning. Some outlets have characterized the hippo's behavior as an attack, but ExplorersWeb could not confirm that information as of this writing.
Nearby observers sprang into action after the capsize and pulled 13 people from the water, according to Nsanje police spokesperson Agnes Zalakoma. They also retrieved the baby's body from the river, Zalakoma said.
The search mission for the missing individuals continues.
Accidents have become common on the Shire River, and local MP Gladys Ganda has repeatedly called for the construction of a bridge so people don't have to risk their lives in small boats, the BBC reported. So far, nothing has been done.
The Shire is Malawi's largest river, and shelters many hippos and crocodiles. At the same time, many of the boats and canoes used on the river "are often overcrowded or poorly maintained," the BBC wrote.
Five people died and 12 more went missing after a similar boat sank in Malawi’s central district of Mchinji in April, the Anadolu Agency reported.
“Other passengers drowned but I tried hard to stay afloat," survivor Chrissy Govati told the publication. "Dead tired, when I gave up hope from nowhere a well-wisher held my hand and pulled me out of the water."
Weighing anywhere from 650 kg to 2,350 kg, hippos are the world's third-largest land animal after elephants and white rhinos, according to National Geographic.
But their fierce territoriality in the water has made them the world's deadliest large animal. They kill about 500 people in Africa every year, National Geographic wrote.
Just watch the above video for all the evidence you need.
For as long as there has been life — there has been death.
Earth's diversity of animals spread over the planet a half billion years ago during the Cambrian explosion, when life as we know it took hold.
Five major extinctions have happened since then, caused by Ice Ages, climate change from volcanoes, and the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.
Now, a group of scientists say they've discovered another extinction event that predates all of those, according to research published in the science journal PNAS. It happened about 560 million years ago and killed an astounding 80 percent of all species. Known as the Ediacaran, this strange period in Earth's evolution saw mostly soft-bodied animals. Many of them looked like plant fronds stuck in the sea floor, or creatures with some kind of shells, Science Alert wrote.
But something big happened between the Ediacaran period's middle stage, known as White Sea (560 to 550 million years ago), and the last stage, known as the Nama (550 to 540 million years ago).
All types of life were affected by this sudden shift, the new research argues. Of about 70 known groups of species from the fossil record of the period, only 14 survived the transition from White Sea to Nama.
"The decline in diversity between these assemblages is indicative of an extinction event, with the percentage of genera lost comparable to that experienced by marine invertebrates during the 'Big 5' mass extinctions," the paper said.
Scientists had seen some weirdness in the fossil record before this new paper. Sudden shifts in biodiversity often point to extinction events, but evidence of an earlier extinction has often been dismissed as mere sampling bias.
After all, we're talking about soft-bodied animals that don't fossilize too well. Earlier researchers simply assumed that the observed changes came from a lack of well-preserved evidence.
But for their research, Virginia Tech paleobiologist Scott Evans and his colleagues compiled lots of data on the Ediacaran period's squishy animals. They found that the period's surviving animals were typically large, frond-like organisms able to cope with a reduction in oceanic oxygen.
That dovetails with 2018 research suggesting extensive anoxia of Earth's oceans that covered more than 20 percent of the seafloor at the end of the Ediacaran.
This newly discovered extinction event will likely see plenty of debate before/if scientists agree enough to give it an official name.
In the meantime, much of modern Planet Earth seems more concerned with the Sixth Extinction happening right now — the one caused not by environmental changes, but by human destruction of our own environment.
Say what you will about digitalization, but at least vintage documentaries can now live forever on YouTube.
We've shared plenty of these old-school climbing docs here on ExplorersWeb, and Storm Over Denali offers a perfect example of why it's worth revisiting these fuzzy classics in an age of high-definition video.
This 1994 film is much like the classic Sony Hi-8 camera used to make it: both outdated and timeless. These easy-to-use consumer cameras turned a generation of early '90s parents into amateur filmmakers, Kodak wrote. The slow process of digitizing them continues with both family videos and documentaries like this one — which are unlikely to get a re-run on The History Channel.
The deeply personal videos common to the Hi-8 reflect the tone of Storm Over Denali, where Thom Pollard becomes a one-man film team not unlike today's gear-obsessed contemporaries. He just does it with a single film camera.
Pollard joins a 1994, six-man expedition to climb Denali, previously known as Mount McKinley, during a season of perilous storms and few summits. The documentary moves at the pace of a memoir, filled with the verbose reflections so common in the literature of mountaineering.
"The first sight of Denali is itself something few would ever forget," Pollard wrote. "Its glaring bulk sitting majestically, looming like a silent lord amidst a jagged army of soldiers."
Like many alpine stories, this one is about failure, and the bittersweet mix of relief at survival — and frustration at never reaching the top. The expedition's team comes across as a group of strangers who become supportive, capable friends — another classic mountaineering trope.
When they reach Camp 1, the start of the adventure, Pollard declares:
"At 11 p.m., a weary team slurps hot soup in the late evening light of the Alaska Range. Snow falls gently but persistently, clouding all views of the peaks that loom near us. Denali is our ghost, hidden in the clouds. We can only revel in the happiness that at least we are here, inching toward a goal."
The weather at first improves, affording clear views of the massive mountain, and the even larger Alaska Range surrounding it. But things change fast in the mountains, and things soon take a turn for the worse.
"Clouds roll silently over the tops of peaks that shadowed us only days before," Pollard says. "As the day wears on, the clouds engulf us, sapping our strength but not our will to heft the 60-lb. loads up to 15,700 feet."
As the weather worsens, reaching wind speeds of 80mph and subzero temperatures, two three-man teams find themselves trapped at different camps on the mountain.
Though the storm shreds their tents, all six men manage to escape harm and return to base camp, where they agree the expedition is functionally over.
Pollard's intimate film of the experience premiered at Mountainfilm, according to the YouTube video description, but has never been broadcast.
"The failure to reach the summit of Denali will cause me no pain," Pollard says in the finale. "Only the attachment to the dream of it can."
One of anthropology's most enduring controversies is how exactly Homo sapiens replaced the Neanderthals that dominated the continent that became Europe.
A study in Plos One suggests that Homo sapiens needed three attempts across 12,000 years to finally wrest control from their predecessors. This slow-moving colonization took place between 54,000 and 42,000 years ago, according to the paper's authors, who studied ancient artifacts from caves in France's Rhone Valley.
“The first two of these waves failed but the third succeeded around 42,000 years ago,” Ludovic Slimak of the University of Toulouse, who is leading the excavations in France, told The Guardian. “After that, modern humans took over in Europe. The Neanderthals, who had evolved on the continent, died out.”
Slimak and his colleagues say they've found evidence that Homo sapiens arrived in Europe from western Asia. The colonizations took much longer than historians have previously thought, requiring travel along the Mediterranean before turning north toward the Rhone Valley.
Even more controversial than the timeline is the paper's assertion about the Châtelperronian tools.
These prehistoric stone tools uncovered in central France in the 19th century have long been associated with Neanderthals. The well-made blades have a sophisticated construction for the period, and some scientists believe they offer proof that Neanderthals could craft advanced tools.
But Slimak and his colleagues don't think so. The tools are more likely the work of Homo sapiens, they argue.
“The Châtelperronian tools are the handiwork of modern humans, and given their similarity to stone tools that were being made in the Middle East, we conclude they were brought there by Homo sapiens as they moved into Europe," Slimak told The Guardian.
Slimak also believes that our ancestors arrived in Europe with bows and arrows that would have trumped the weapons used by Neanderthals.
So why did it take us so long to take over? Slimak says early Homo sapiens likely lacked sufficient numbers until the third colonization attempt.
“The third time they came in, modern humans did so with a really huge wave of people and began to build social networks, not with Neanderthals but with individual small separate groups of Homo sapiens in order to build a huge network throughout Europe," Slimak said. "And in the end, that is what started the decline of the Neanderthals in Europe.”