Public attention in these sports generally focuses on tragedies and as such are highly emotive and sensationalized. Dramatic accounts of accidents and hardships often lead to fierce debates on the merits and ethics of these sports.
Yes, that’s right. Ladders. Now, this may blur the line for a climbing website, but I did find it by googling “climbing”, so I feel moderately vindicated. Following, is my slightly longer rant that will theoretically tie us back to the actual act of climbing mountains or rocks or small rocks or whatever else it is that we do..
“Mike Robertson (45) of Wareham, Dorset, the deep-water soloist, photographer and recent Banff award-winning author of Deep Water was arrested on Monday whilst climbing the Eiffel Tower in Paris. “Mike was protesting against Total’s – the French oil company, based in Paris – continued involvement in Burma…”
“The sky was stunningly blue and clear and there was no wind; you only get a few days like this each summer on Antarctica’s highest mountains. Where we expected to encounter snow between the bands of rock we found hard, clear “water ice” similar to that on the frozen waterfalls we had climbed in Europe and North America. As its name would suggest, such ice is formed directly from water, usually running water. It is not the compacted snow or hard blue glacial ice that is almost everywhere else in Antarctica.”
Oh yeah? Really? As if I didn’t have enough to be concerned about, now I learn that a chemical secreted by ants can cause rappel slings to fail. Great.
In 2005, a two-man Spanish team took seven days to climb the route in alpine style. Our aim was to repeat the route in alpine style and confirm that Pakistan is a great destination for these kinds of ascents.
On summit day we thought we could simply climb to the ridge and follow it to the glacier, which would lead to some easy rock towards the summit. How wrong we were.
We’d both wanted to do it. We lay there on the ground, shivering in the night air as much from fear as from the cold.
Mark Twight apparently was also experiencing hallucinations (or just a bad memory) as he appears to have confused two passages from Snow in the Kingdom.
A recent perusal of Mark Twight’s self aggrandizing (not to mention downright brilliant) “Kiss or Kill” brought me to the following passage, in which Twight references partner Barry Blanchard’s out of body experience on the mountain: “I assumed it was a benign hypoxic hallucination, remembering a story in which Ed Webster saw a taco truck pull up next to him on the South Summit.”
“They should have signs and stuff and trash cans outside,” said Pham, who climbs regularly in the safety of a San Francisco gym. “I don’t think they even clean your rocks off for you out there.”
This is the first time I’ve see Alpinist late to post news. An outstanding climb was done by Tomaz over a week ago.
