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.
Looking Toward the Oak Fire from My Front Yard, I Thought, This Is Going to Burn My House Down: On July 22, the Oak Fire started in Midpines, California, 60km from Yosemite Valley. To date, 7,500 hectares and 41 homes and buildings have been destroyed. This is the story of one local resident who lost his house in the fire.
What Is Killing Nepal’s Snow Leopards? A bloody conflict between the Himalayan ‘ghost cats’ and Nepali shepherds is only partially to blame — and raises questions about their future. Despite the threat of a 15-year jail sentence, retaliatory killings of snow leopards are a relatively common occurrence.
The Nutso 1910 Attempt to Plant a Flag on Denali’s Summit — In Winter: The claim was an affront to Alaska and the frontier spirit. The mere idea that a certain Frederick Cook — later, of polar infamy — had climbed the highest peak in Alaska was preposterous on its face and demanded a full-blooded response.
Game up for alpinism?
The upper glaciers of the Alps are under serious threat from boiling summer temperatures. Photo: Shutterstock
Climbers and Guides Adapt to Changing Climate and Landscape in the Alps: Rapidly deteriorating conditions across the European Alps from rising temperatures are forcing mountain guides, their clients, and independent teams to change their objectives. The risk of rockfall, avalanches, and serac collapses is just too great. Guiding companies are no longer selling some normal routes up major peaks. The impact of climate change and the current heatwave became clear after a tragedy on the Marmolada this month. A spate of incidents and near-misses during the high season also shows the sad state of the mountains.
Eleven Climbers Who Shouldn’t Have Survived: We all love near-miss stories: the ones that end happily, that you can laugh about because nothing really bad happened. But some stories are more miraculous than others. Here are lucky tales from climbers who had the odds stacked way, way against them.
A poop-the-pants epic
El Capitan in fine weather. Photo: Shutterstock
An Actual Poop-The-Pants El Cap Survival Epic: Jimmy Ray Forester and Marcus Garcia were on El Cap’s exposed headwall, on the Shield, stormbound on Chicken Head Ledge. Even today, people still talk about the 1997 El Nino storm that so savaged the Valley that the park had to close for two-and-a-half months, and dead fish littered the roadways adjacent to the Merced River.
Lost in Time: When exploring southeast Alaska in midsummer, you can pedal your fat tire bike on the broad, bear-tracked beaches at midnight and think you have no need for a watch. Oh, but you do.
