When we’re not outdoors, we get our adventure fix by exploring social media and the web. Sometimes we’re a little too plugged in and browsing adventure reads can turn from minutes to hours. To nourish your adventure fix, here are some of the best adventure links we’ve discovered this week.
Scatter My Ashes in the Rocky Mountain: Peter Moore was hiking the Colorado River trail with his family when he started thinking about where he wanted his final resting place to be.
He and his wife decided on the west side of the Rocky Mountain National Park. It is where they hike with their sons and where relatives will eventually scatter their ashes.
Climbing has Succumbed to Numbers: For many, mountaineering has become about competition and commercialization. In this excellent opinion piece, John Porter argues that “in this ‘fast-food’ fixation on commodification, consumerism, and competition, something of the philosophy of climbing and mountaineering has also been lost.”
British Tourist Falls 90m to Death on ‘Stairway to Heaven’: A 42-year-old British tourist has fallen to his death on the ‘stairway to heaven’ in the Dachstein Mountains, Austria.
The 40m ladder that runs from the lower section of Dobberkogel Mountain to the Grosser Donnerkogal is popular with tourists. Investigators have ruled out third-party negligence.
Live streaming a climb
First Ascent of Project Big: Jakob Schubert has made the first ascent of Project Big in the Hanshallaren Cave, Norway. He first attempted the route with a friend in 2022, then returned in early September to attempt the climb alone.
Schubert reworked the route and added a fresh element, he was going to livestream his climb. On September 20, he completed the climb on his sixth attempt.
“[This is] the biggest mental battle I’ve ever had in my career,” Schubert said.
Taking Flight: Liv Sansos, Zen Roche, and photographer Aurelie Gonin headed to Jordan with a unique goal in mind. In the Wadi Rum, they planned to both climb and fly.
Santos carried a paraglider, Roche a tandem wing, and Gonin lugged her filming equipment with her. After climbing a rock face they flew from the top over the Jordanian desert.
20 Classics in 20 Days: From August 8 to August 23, Aidan Multhauf and David Katzenmayer repeated Hans Florine’s 1993 effort, “20 Classics in 20 Days.”
Multhauf and Katzenmayer reversed the order of the climbs, starting with Bear Lodge in Wyoming and ending with Charlotte Dome in California. In total, they ascended over 19,000m, climbed 224 pitches, hiked 225km, paddled 10km, and drove 5,400km.
20 classics in 20 days. Image: Climbing.com
Renaming a mountain
Why did this Colorado 14er just get a new name? The Colorado 14,000’er Mount Evans now has a new name: Mount Blue Sky. The mountain was originally named after John Evans, the governor of Colorado from 1862 to 1865.
Tribal leaders have requested a name change for years because of Evans’s involvement in the Sand Creek massacre of more than 230 Cheyenne and Arapaho people. A vote last week passed the new name, but it was not unanimous. Evans’s descendants opposed the change.
The Dolphin Sex Scandal that Outraged a Nation: One of the strangest news stories from the ’90s involved the arrest of Alan Cooper for allegedly masturbating a wild dolphin.
Now, the story has been turned into a podcast by Becky Milligan. Though police found no evidence of wrongdoing, the news story wrecked Cooper’s career in the animal rights movement.
On the podcast, Cooper tells Milligan that though the dolphin hooked his penis around his arm or leg, nothing improper had taken place. Tourists on a nearby boat, operated by the owner of a local dolphinarium (whom Cooper frequently protested against) reported Cooper to the police.
