Fall Himalayan Climbing Season Begins

by Kraig Becker on

Most mountaineers, both actual and armchair, know that for two months each spring, Everest and the other big Himalayan peaks become the epicenter of the climbing world. From April to June, hundreds of mountaineers from around the globe descend on Nepal and Tibet with the expressed goal of scaling one of the tallest mountains on the planet. As a result, Base Camps across the region can become noisy, dirty and overly crowded, which dramatically detracts from the experience, to say the least. But not everyone knows that there is a second climbing season that arrives in the fall, after the monsoon has departed for another year. The fall season is much quieter and more tranquil than the spring, affording climbers more solitude in the mountains.

The 2012 fall Himalayan climbing season officially got underway at the end of August when teams began arriving in Kathmandu. Most spent a few days in Nepal’s capital city organizing their gear and putting the final touches on their preparation before they begin the trek to their respective Base Camps throughout the Himalaya. That hike generally helps to start the acclimatization process that will prepare them for living at high altitude over the coming weeks.

Often times the fall season is used to hone technical skills in preparation for bigger challenges to come. For instance, climbers who are planning a spring ascent of Everest will often visit the Himalaya in the fall to gain valuable experience and assess their body’s ability to adapt to the thin air. For some it will give them the valuable tools they’ll need for taking on the world’s tallest mountain, while others will learn that the Big Hill is ultimately out of reach.The two mountains that will receive the most traffic this fall are Makalu and Manaslu, the fifth and eighth tallest peaks on the planet respectively. Of those, the 8481 meter (27,825 ft) Makalu is considered a more challenging climb. The lone peak, located along the border of Nepal and Tibet, features a distinct pyramid-shaped summit that provides plenty of technical challenges including a final approach that mixes both rock and ice. Manaslu, on the other hand, features a double summit, the tallest of which extends 8156 meters (26,759 ft) into the sky. While not quite as difficult as Makalu, it does indeed make an excellent testing ground for climbers looking to move on tougher peaks.

Cho Oyu, another popular destination for fall Himalayan climbers, is off limits this year due to the continued closure of the Tibetan border by the Chinese. That 8201 meter (26,906 ft) mountain is also a good tune-up in preparation for a spring attempt on Everest. But because of on going protests inside Tibet, no entry visas are currently being approved. That has caused several expeditions to change their plans and move their climb back into Nepal instead.

While the fall season is much less crowded in the Himalaya the weather also tends to be more unpredictable as well. At the moment it is calm and warm there, but winter tends to arrive early in that part of the world, which means climbers could easily be dealing with high winds and heavy snows before they’re through.

Most of the fall expeditions will be between a month and six weeks in length. In the early weeks the climbers will mostly be concentrating on acclimatizing to the altitude while they slowly build a series of camps that they’ll use in their final push to the summit. Once that process is complete, they’ll simply wait for the weather to be right to facilitate their summit bids. If they’re lucky they won’t have to wait long, but more often then not they can end up waiting for a number of days before conditions are right to go for the top.

And when they’re done, they’ll head home rest, recuperate and begin planning their return to the mountain in the spring.

[Photo credit: Ben Tubby via WikiMedia]

North Cascades National Park Looks To Expand

by Kraig Becker on

Hidden away in a remote corner of the Pacific Northwest, the North Cascades National Park is amongst the least visited parks in the entire U.S. system. On an annual basis, only about 20,000 people pass through its gates, despite the fact that it contains some of the most breathtaking backcountry in all of North America. There is a movement afoot to expand the park’s borders, however, and if successful, advocates of the plan believe that it could attract many more travelers to the region.

A group of conservationists, led by former U.S. Senator Dan Evans and mountaineer Jim Wickwire, have proposed an expansion to the North Cascades National Park that would add an additional 237,000 acres to its already impressive 500,000+. They also propose spending $23 million over five years to add or upgrade park amenities – something that is a bit of a tough sell with Congress these days.

Proponents of the plan feel that the addition of the extra land would move park boundaries closer to main access roads, giving it a higher profile with travelers passing through the region. It is hoped that the easier access and enhanced amenities would at the very least lure a few more visitors from Seattle, a major metropolitan area, which sits less than three hours away.

There will be major obstacles to the proposal getting the green light. As already mentioned, a looming budget crisis is likely to make the expansion of any national parks very difficult in the near future. In fact, most could be facing significant fiscal shortfalls in 2013 as Congress looks to cut spending across the board. Opposition is also expected to come from outdoor enthusiasts who don’t want to see more lands fall under the National Park Service‘s domain. While the NPS provides excellent protection for those lands they also greatly restrict how they can be used.

No matter the outcome, we’re likely a few years away from having this proposal get any serious attention. Still, if you enjoy hiking, camping or backpacking in remote areas, then you should make an effort to visit the North Cascades. Its snow capped peaks, pristine forests, idyllic waterfalls and more than 300 glaciers make it a fantastic destination for anyone who enjoys the outdoors. Considering how low the visitation numbers are, you’re also likely to have the park mostly to yourself.

Inside The Urban Underground: Exploration Gets Personal

by Jeremy Kressmann on

New Yorker Steve Duncan was so desperate to pass his college math class, he crawled through a tunnel to finish it. A computer assignment was due the next day and the software to finish was inside a building closed for the night. In a moment of desperation, Steve came up with a crazy plan: he could sneak inside. Having heard from a classmate about a collection of well-known tunnels connecting the university’s buildings, he resolved to convince the friend to guide him. After escorting Steve to the tunnel entrance, the friend offered vague directions, wished him luck and promptly left. As Steve recalls:

“He took off in the other direction and … here I was absolutely alone – it was terrifying and eye-opening, because every building on campus was connected by these tunnels. I passed the math class, but what always stuck with me was that first moment of being alone in the dark and being absolutely terrified but realizing that if I could face that, I had access to every part of the campus.”

Duncan had educational goals in mind when he entered the underground tunnels that night, but his experience kick-started an interest in an activity he continues to practice to this day: urban exploration.

Urban explorers seek to investigate the centuries of infrastructure created (and sometimes abandoned) by modern civilization: disused factories, historic bridges and unknown tunnels entered using legal, and sometimes illegal, means. The reason they do it is not as easily defined. Urban explorers come from a range of backgrounds, ranging from urban planners to historians to preservationists to architecture lovers, photographers and just plain old thrill-seekers all of whom are often lumped together under the banner of this general term. Just in New York alone, there’s the founders of the website Atlas Obscura, Nick Carr from Scouting New York and Kevin Walsh from Forgotten New York, along with countless others living around the world. These individuals, taken together, are less a community than a loose network of individuals united by a common love: re-discovering and investigating the forgotten and sometimes misunderstood detritus of modern day urban civilization

Yet the popularity of urban exploration confronts an interesting dilemma facing many 21st Century travelers: now that so much of what we seek to “discover” has been Google mapped, investigated and written about ad nauseum, how is our relationship with the concept of exploration evolving? And what does it tell us about the future of travel?

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Steve Duncan – Urban Historian, Explorer and Geographer
It’s been over a decade since that math class first brought Steve Duncan underground, but he’s continued to evolve his approach to urban exploration from his home base of New York City. Styling himself as an “urban geographer” and historian, Duncan continues to direct his energies towards understanding the unseen layers of infrastructure that constitute our urban environment – namely the sewers, bridges and subway tunnels of the Big Apple.

In more recent years, Duncan has gained increasing attention for his adventures, including a week-long expedition through the sewers under NYC with Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge and a short documentary made by filmmaker Andrew Wonder that follows him as he visits New York’s off-limits subway stations and climbs to the top of the Queensboro Bridge.

But Duncan’s urban adventures aren’t undertaken merely for thrills – they’re a means to an intriguing end. In fact, Duncan cares less about being the first to rediscover forgotten places than taking a fresh look at the urban environments we inhabit. Despite the fact more than 50% of our world’s population now lives in cities, Duncan notes, much of today’s travel media continues to focus on outward-looking explorations of far-flung places perceived to be “exotic” – for instance, the wild jungles of Borneo or the ancient temples of Jordan. Steve believes his own adventures constitute an equally exotic form of adventure – a new inward-focused method of exploration.

As he notes, “I’m not interested in going to places nobody’s been before, [but rather] I’m interested in how we shape places.” This life-long history lover views exploration not as a means for public recognition but rather as a way to better understand his personal passion for the ever-changing nature of cities. Whether or not he can “claim the place” as his is irrelevant – he’s more interested in understanding. As he tells it, “All exploration to some extent is personal. It doesn’t matter if someone’s been there before. If it’s new to you, it’s still exploration.”

Taken together, Duncan’s adventures constitutes a kind of inward-driven “time travel” – a concept in which the worlds of history, the growth and decay of cities and adventure travel merge together to define a new opportunity all of us as travelers can take to re-examine the everyday world around us as a source of curiosity.

Dylan Thuras – Cartographer of Curiosities

Not all stories of urban exploration involve spending weeks in tunnels under New York City. For Dylan Thuras, co-founder of website Atlas Obscura, a mind-altering childhood trip to House on the Rock in Wisconsin defined his early travel memories. The strange house is part museum and part hall of curiosities, filled with bizarre collections of artwork, carousel rides and giant biological specimens. As Dylan recalls, “the fact that this could be tucked away in the woods in sleepy Wisconsin made me feel like there were these magical worlds all over the place … if I just knew how to look, I would start to find these fantastical places everywhere”

Ever since that moment, Thuras and his co-founder Joshua Foer of Atlas Obscura have dedicated their website to altering travelers’ perspectives of the places worth visiting on their itineraries. To date they’ve built a worldwide, user-driven database highlighting more sites on all seven continents. As an example of the sites Atlas uncovers, Thuras mentions two sites in Florence, Italy – whereas the Uffizi Gallery is probably on most travelers’ radar, Dylan and Joshua also want to help you discover La Specola, the museum of wax anatomical models that contains a specimen of astronomer Galileo’s middle finger.

As Dylan points out, if an attraction isn’t listed on the top ten list in a guidebook “… it is easy to slip into anonymity, obscurity and disappear. I want to give people a sense that there is so much more than those ten things and that they might find that they have a better time if they venture into new territory.”

The style of exploration advocated by Thuras seeks to shift the context of the worlds we already know. That’s a far cry from the conception many travelers have in their heads of an idealized explorer discovering uncharted lands. Says Thuras: “This isn’t [exploration] in the Victorian sense of climbing the tallest mountain, or finding the source of a river … but in the sense that every one of us can find new and astonishing things if we look for them … it doesn’t always have to be about far-flung adventures.”

Urban Exploration – What’s Next?

Duncan and Thuras may appear to occupy different ends of the urban exploration spectrum, but their motivation stems from a distinct similarity. After years of endless exploring, categorizing and searching, both have arrived at the realization that our mundane daily worlds can be unknown places of curiosity and wonder. The challenge of getting there then, isn’t in the physical act of getting there. Explorers like Duncan do face large risks of injury in their wanderings, but it’s not on the scale of Ernest Shackleton, Captain James Cook or Edmund Hilary.

The difference in these explorers’ adventures thus seems to be a mental reframing of what we conceive of as exploration. Their perception of what is worthy of our consideration and interest as travelers is gradually shifting from the physical towards the mental. In the relentless search for finding the most far-flung undiscovered locations on earth, all of us as travelers have neglected to look right in front of our faces at the places we inhabit everyday as worthy of discovery. Unlike Steve Duncan the journey might not require a crawl through a sewer to appreciate, but ultimately it can be just as rewarding.

Hiking, Scrambling And Swimming Oregon’s Oneonta Gorge

by Laurel Miller on

Despite the various nicknames bestowed upon me throughout my 20s (all along the lines of “Hippie,” “Nature Girl” and “Treehugger”), I had a love-hate relationship with hiking the great outdoors. Blame my poor, misguided parents, who made my brother and I undertake many forced marches on summer vacations. We hiked all over California, the Pacific Northwest, the Rockies and even Europe. I know, I know – call Child Protective Services.

It is perhaps unsurprising that I rebelled as I grew older. I was quite a sloth in college, despite my love of travel and camping, and not until 2000 did I rekindle my early love affair with walking the woods, deserts and mountains.

I was attending a conference in Portland, Oregon, and decided to spend a few days camping in Columbia River Gorge, an hour east of the city center. The Columbia is the second largest river in North America, covering 1,200 miles, from British Columbia to the central Oregon coast.

The Gorge itself is a stunning 80-mile drive, as well as a world-class wind-surfing destination, important salmon fishery and source of hydroelectric power. You can also kayak, fish and partake in various indigenous cultural events in the area.

During my 2000 visit, it was Indian Summer, and the dry heat combined with cool, mossy canyons, waterfalls (77 in the Gorge in all) and the Douglas fir forest made for enchanting hikes. On one memorable day, I embarked on three separate outings, stopping only when it became too dark to see.

Since then, I’ve returned to the area several times, but my favorite hike remains Oneonta Gorge, which is conveniently located on Oneonta Creek, just off I-84, 35 miles from Portland. Although frequently crowded with day-trippers, it’s such an unusual and beautiful hike (actually, it’s more of a scramble or slog, depending upon the season), it’s worth sharing.

Do note Oneonta requires some serious scrambling over massive boulders and a logjam or two, so you need to be agile and fit to do it. I’ve seen plenty of non-agile, unfit people in inappropriate footwear (tennis shoes, Chaco’s with Vibram soles or Keen shoes are ideal; water socks or high heels aren’t going to cut it) attempt the gorge. It isn’t pretty, and usually results in a homo sapiens jam, if not minor injury.Oneonta is a slot canyon, just 20 feet wide. A half-mile down the creek bed is a 100-foot waterfall that spills into a clear pool. The thing about the gorge is that there’s no trail; you need to either swim, scramble or slosh it.

The first time I visited, the water was so high in October that it hit me mid-chest. Because I don’t relish swimming in snowmelt and I love a challenge, I decided to see if I could climb the entire route without touching the water. To this day, I have no idea how I managed to grip those wet, slippery, craggy canyon walls without falling, but I succeeded. To be honest, I’m still impressed with myself (and rather despondent that I no longer possess that kind of upper body strength).

I’ve also done Oneonta when it’s just ankle-deep, but regardless of water levels, you can always count on its sheer basalt walls to be teeming with ferns, mosses, lichens and other primordial plants. It’s otherworldly in there, and I find it oddly soothing, even with summer crowds. You could go early in the morning to avoid them, but it’s better to wait until for heat of the day, when the cool, misty air of the gorge provides a respite, and the sun’s rays send shafts of light down into its green depths.

For the most diverse hiking experience, I suggest combining Oneonta in combination with the connecting 2.6-miles Horsetail Falls Loop. This extension will take you up into the forest, and provide views of the Columbia River from the Oneonta Bluffs. For the truly lazy, the 176-foot falls are visible from the roadside.

Getting there
Take I-84 East to the Ainsworth Park Exit 35, and make a right (west) on the Historic Columbia River Highway for 1.5 miles, until you reach the Horsetail Falls Trailhead parking lot. Cross the road, head west a few hundred yards through Oneonta Tunnel and you’ll see the “trailhead,” alongside a bridge with a set of decrepit concrete steps. Get ready to wade or scramble.

Tip: Ainsworth State Park is a lovely campground, and open March through October, first-come, first-served.

[Photo credits: gorge, Flickr user McD22; waterfall, Flickr user stokes rx;scramblers, Laurel Miller]

Video Of The Day: Woman ‘Walks The Line’ Between Two Speeding Trucks

by Libby Zay on

On a deserted highway in Vrgorac, Croatia, Faith Dickey walks a slackline between two speeding trucks as they barrel toward a tunnel. Slacklining is an increasingly popular extreme sport developed by climbers in Yosemite Valley, California, in the 1970s and 1980s. It is similar to tightrope walking, but instead of walking on a taut steel cable slackliners make their way across a piece of nylon webbing anchored between two points. Although this high production video was filmed by Volvo to show off the company’s new FH model truck, Dickey’s abilities (as well as those of the truck drivers) are not any less impressive.

“The stunt itself had to have been the most difficult line I have ever walked,” writes Dickey on her website. “It took numerous rehearsals and numerous attempts, the ratio of walks to falls was quite distanced. Unlike a slackline, where you cause the movement, the line between trucks was moving due to bumps in the road and of course any sway in the trailers where the line was attached.”