ExWeb’s Links of the Week

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

Ice Warrior: The late Polish mountaineer Jerzy Kukuczka might have lost the race to become the first person to bag all the 8000’ers, but he was arguably the strongest high altitude climber of the 1980s.

Paddle and Portage: British kayaker Will Copestake recounts the 800km expedition he and a partner took through coastal Patagonia. Fiords, glaciers, difficult portages and exquisite photos of this wild backcountry.

Detained: America’s half-witted approach to immigration hit a climber on the way back from his successful climb of Denali. The Guatemalan immigrant to the U.S. was dragged from a train and made to sweat it out in jail while border officials leisurely checked his right to remain in the country.

The English Patient: German magazine Der Spiegel tells the true story of Saharan explorer Laszlo Almasy, who was the inspiration for Michael Ondaatje‘s book (and the subsequent Hollywood film), The English Patient.

The Loneliest Man: Often forgotten, the third man of the famed Apollo 11 moon landing crew, Michael Collins, never set foot on the lunar surface but was left to orbit in the command module. This New York Times interview sheds light on what Collins did in those fateful moments as possibly the loneliest man in the universe.

Dodo’s Delight: An international team of climbers encounter arctic ice, polar bears and storms as they go in search of unclimbed big walls on Baffin Island. The result? a wacky folk song. If you recognize the climbers, you’ll know it’s par for the course…