Articles tagged “adventure travel”

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Heavy snow strands 250 skiers in New Zealand lodge

by Kraig Becker on

Heavy snow, and the threat of avalanches, left more than 250 skiers and snowboarders stranded in a ski lodge in New Zealand earlier this week, as that country struggles with one of the harshest winters in recent memory.

Nearly 16 inches of snow fell on the Mt Lyford ski resort last Monday, making travel extremely dangerous. As the fear of avalanches grew, authorities were forced to close access roads, which left many of the resort’s guests to spend the night in the lodge.

It turned out to be an extremely long night for those stranded at the resort, as the lodge is not equipped for overnight guests and there was little food for them to share. Worse yet, high winds and blowing snow caused power outages, which meant there was no heat inside the building either. The stranded skiers made the best of the situation however, getting comfortable for the night in any way they could.

The next morning, a specially equipped snow vehicle delivered extra food, and emergency crews used controlled explosions to clear the road. Eventually the stranded travelers were cleared to leave the resort, although only ten cars were allowed to drive down the mountain at a time.

Late in the week, the resort was still closed and access remained limited.

Early in the Austral winter it looked like it was going to be a poor ski season for the New Zealand resorts, as the only snow on the slopes was the man made variety. That has all changed now however, as a cold front out of Antarctica has reduced temperatures dramatically and brought plenty of snow along with it. There are even reports of snow at sea level, with some Kiwi beaches even getting a dusting of the white stuff. Now, it appears the resorts could be in for a banner year, and skiers are flocking to the mountains.

[Photo courtesy Mt. Lyford]

Watch Shark Week on Discovery Channel, have a shark encounter of your own

by Kraig Becker on

This Sunday marks the return of Shark Week on the Discovery Channel, one of the most popular annual events on any cable network. Now in its 24th year, Shark Week manages to pull in millions of viewers who are both fascinated by, and terrified of, the notorious predators from the deep. And after watching sharks on television all week, if you should happen to find yourself inspired to see them in person, Discovery can help you with that too.

This year, Discovery has enlisted the aid of Saturday Night Live‘s Andy Samberg to help host their fin-filled prime-time specials. Samberg has been named CSO (Chief Shark Officer) for Shark Week, which will see the return of some of the most popular shows from the past, as well as seven new shark-centric programs. One of those new shows actually sends Samberg himself to the Bahamas where he gets up close and personal with some of the local sharks.

Discovery knows that Shark Week is extremely popular with their audience, which is why they also give us the opportunity to have a shark experience of our own. The network’s adventure travel company Discovery Adventures offers four unique itineraries to the Galapagos Islands, where travelers will have the opportunity to see a variety of shark species –including Reef Sharks, Whale Sharks, and Hammerheads– in their natural environments.

For a complete listing of the shows that will air during Shark Week click here, and don’t forget to tune in on Sunday to get your shark fix. And when Shark Week ends for another year, book your own shark adventure to help ease the wait for Shark Week 2012.

[Photo courtesy Terry Goss via WikiMedia]

A profile of Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation

by Jon Bowermaster on

In the course of humankind’s global wanderings – whether in search of new lands or gold – there have been a couple historical cycles during which science has prevailed over more material seeking.

The early 21st century is one of those times. Already deep into the information age, what we want to know today about the future are things like where will new energy come from, what can we continue to learn from deep space and deep ocean and how the hell are we going to clean up the variety of messes we’ve created in the preceding 2000 years.

A fine example of this transition is in my recent post about the new class of Emerging Explorers named recently by the National Geographic Society. Among the 11 men and women in their 20s and 30s there wasn’t a mountain climber or North Pole trekker; instead they included molecular engineers, agroecologists and biotech entrepreneurs.

Along the same lines a six-month-old non-profit group, Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation, is attempting to make sure that any adventurer headed into the field goes armed with some kind of scientific mission, big or small. The Bozeman-based group also wants to make sure that whenever a scientific team goes into the field, if they need to take along an accomplished adventurer to help further its work – to climb higher, dive deeper, walk further – it can help in the matchmaking.
In a ClimateWire/New York Times post the group’s founder Gregg Treinish, who with partner Deia Schlosberg walked the length of the Andes Mountains over the course of a couple years from 2006-2008, admits to feeling “selfish” at the end of that expedition for not doing more “for the planet and people.”

It’s my experience too, after a couple decades exploring the planet’s ocean and coastlines that adventure for adventure’s sake just doesn’t cut it today. Climbing, or crossing, something “just because it’s there” is very, very old school. Today if you you’re going “out there,” I think you are obligated to come home with more than frostbite or some unique collectibles. Whether by contributing to science, or somehow trying to link the planet’s growing oneness by sharing stories of environmental ills or solutions, it is imperative to make explorations about something bigger than self. (Full disclosure, I am an ASC board member.)

The goal of the ASC, says Treinish, is to identify and recruit hikers, bikers, climbers and other athletes headed into the field to help scientists by collecting valuable – and hard to access — data from some of the planet’s most remote ecosystems.

The novel notion is off to a good start, having already married a handful of expeditions with scientific goals:

  1. In June, climbing brothers Willie and Damian Benegas delivered samples of the highest living plant life collected from the flanks of Mt. Everest (at 22,300 feet) to researchers at Montana State University and the U.S. Geological Survey. One goal of the researchers is to ponder how food can be grown as the planet’s climate changes. The brothers also brought back rock samples so that scientists can study microbes growing on them and the impact of high levels of UV radiation.
  2. Another group of trekkers has begun research in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in partnership with the Center for Conservation Biology focused on ivory forensics as a way to help stop the illegal ivory trade. The work is not always glamorous: This particular assignment includes collecting elephant dung from five focus areas across the country.
  3. The ASC has organized 22 groups of hikers planning to hike the Pacific Crest Trail stretching from California into Oregon, asking them to collect data on the Pika, a small, hard-to-spot mammal regarded an “indicator species” for a changing climate.
  4. The group is actively looking for adventurers to help gather sightings of ice worms on glaciers in the Pacific Northwest, track the movements of grizzly bears in and around Yellowstone National Park and catalog the spread of an invasive plant – garlic mustard – throughout Europe, Australia, Asia and North America.

Anyone collecting data on behalf of the ASC goes out armed with strict marching orders, the projects organized from the start with an eye on providing good science not just collecting stuff. Before the Benegas brothers’ climbed Everest, for example, they were trained to collect plant samples by Montana State University microbial ecologist Tim McDermott and USGS microbiologist Rusty Rodriguez. The Pika work is part of a larger effort overseen by the nonprofit, Bozeman-based Craighead Institute.

Beth Holland, a biogeochemist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research is a science advisor and board member. She sees the linkage between scientists and adventurers as “a great way to build bridges” between the two. “There is so much about science that can seem to happen in an ivory tower,” she says.

Anyone with an idea for linking more adventurers and scientists should get in touch with Treinish, who says interest in the concept has been “overwhelming.” Now he hopes money – from the outdoor, environmental and scientific communities – will trickle in to help finance new technologies and collecting.

[flickr image via Shayne Kaye]

Andrew McCarthy discusses his new role: travel writer

by Don George on

For many people, the name Andrew McCarthy probably conjures images of iconic movies from the 1980s and 1990s, films such as St. Elmo’s Fire, Pretty in Pink, Less Than Zero, Weekend at Bernie’s, and The Joy Luck Club. But these days the actor is playing a new role: travel writer. Since he first wrote a piece on Ireland for National Geographic Traveler in 2006, McCarthy has published some two dozen travel stories in publications including the Wall Street Journal, Travel + Leisure, Afar, and Islands. He is now a Contributing Editor for National Geographic Traveler, and last year in the Society of American Travel Writers’ annual Lowell Thomas awards competition, he was named Travel Journalist of the Year. McCarthy will be guest of honor at the Book Passage Travel & Food Writers & Photographers Conference next month and has just signed a contract to write his first travel memoir.

I had the pleasure of interviewing McCarthy onstage at the National Geographic Auditorium in May. The evening was full of great anecdotes and insights; here are some that especially struck me.

Travel literature and the importance of scenes:

I asked McCarthy how he made the transition from actor to travel writer, and he said he began reading Paul Theroux and that Theroux’s travel books changed his life. (Reading Paul Theroux is, I think, excellent advice for any would-be travel writer.) Theroux and others taught him that in regard to travel literature, “when people do it well, they can really capture the essence of a moment in time, in a place — in themselves and in the place.”So,” McCarthy continued, “I just started buying tickets to places, a ticket into Capetown and out of Dar es Salaam 2 months later, and the rest I’d just fill in. Every year I’d take a couple of months and do that. I started writing scenes of encounters I had with people – just for myself — because that’s what I knew how to do, be in scenes. So I’d write the scene between me and the kid who picked me up on the moped in Hanoi and took me around for the day. I did nothing with them, I put them in a drawer.”

I love how McCarthy’s perspective as an actor illuminates the importance of scenes in travel writing. Deconstruct most great narrative travel articles, and you’ll discover a series of scenes – like a movie script, but supplemented and strung together with facts. One of the great arts of travel writing, of course, is choosing which scenes to put into your story to convey your point – the experience and the experiential lesson/s that you want to convey. In most stories, probably 90-95 percent of the available material, the totality of scenes from the trip, end up on the editing room floor. But the final story proceeds as a succession of carefully chosen and crafted scenes. In this sense, creating scenes is the essence of great storytelling, and McCarthy’s words made me appreciate that grounding truth all over again.

Scaffolding and chance in storytelling:
When I asked McCarthy how he goes about shaping a story on the ground, he quoted what John Gielgud said about acting: “Build a strong scaffolding and leave the big moments to chance.”

“That’s a bit what I do with travel stories,” McCarthy said. “Initially I’m very much in service of what I think I’m going to write about – and that always alters….”

There are two great points here, I think. You can’t support a story without the scaffolding, so your fundamental job as a travel writer in a place is to find the scaffolding for your piece. “I make sure I nail down a few lampposts when I get there,” McCarthy said, “hooks that I know I can swing from one [scene] to the other – I’ve got to get from here to here and suddenly I meet the guy selling ice cream who grew up wherever and that will swing me to where I can lynchpin to the next one….”

But equally important is Gielgud’s point about leaving the big moments to chance. That chance is the serendipitous spark and stuff of the story: the moment that you didn’t expect to happen – on the ground, in the writing – and that happened only because the scaffolding was sure and strong enough. These “big moments” are the unexpected gifts of traveling and writing – the epiphanies that suddenly give everything a clarity and meaning you hadn’t realized before. Surprising those big moments on the ground and then re-capturing them in the telling is the great quest and joy of travel/writing for me.

Fear, vulnerability and transformation:
I believe that every travel writer has a trip that changed his/her life. I asked McCarthy if he had a trip that changed his life and he immediately answered, “Yeah. Around 18 years ago I walked the Camino de Santiago in Spain, and that changed my life. “

He elaborated, “I walked across Spain for a month and it was just a transformative experience for me. I found it terrifying, and I was lonely and miserable for most of it, and then something happened and I had one of those experiences that you have – I went there to see if I could take care of myself and I discovered that I was taken care of. It wasn’t a religious experience but it was some kind of experience where I felt unafraid in the world on a deep level for the first time. I carried so much fear with me in the world that I didn’t even know I carried it until it was suddenly absent for a short time — and that changed my life and started me traveling.”

A bit later, I asked McCarthy what travel does for him now, and he said, “When you go out in the world, you realize that you have to lay yourself vulnerable to the world and ask for help and you become much less fearful in the world…. I’m a great believer in the transformation that happens when you travel – I’m a better version of myself when I travel, I’m happier, I come home a better person.”

I was very moved by the conjunction of these experiences and truths – the way walking the Camino de Santiago had helped him confront the fears he’d been living with all his life, and the recognition of the vulnerability that is at the heart of the traveler’s situation in the world.

This has been one of travel’s great truths for me as well: that we are fundamentally vulnerable, reliant on others, when we move out into the world, and that cultivating the art of vulnerability is one of the traveler’s greatest challenges and rewards. Every time I travel I re-learn this lesson: the more I open myself to the world, the more the world opens itself to me; the deeper my trust, the deeper my reward.

I agree completely with McCarthy that in this way, travel makes us better, bigger, people, more attuned to the nuances of life, more embracing of its diversity, and ultimately, more embracing of ourselves.

Near the end of our talk, McCarthy articulated the passion that propels his travels: “I love going anywhere,” he said. “When I’m out the door, and I’m on my way — yeah, I miss everybody, but who knows what’s going to happen in the next x amount of days? I love that feeling….”

And I knew that though we’d walked different paths to find it, wanderlust had touched – and transformed — both our lives.

*****

You can view my conversation with Andrew McCarthy here.

McCarthy and I will converse again at Book Passage in Corte Madera, California, on Aug. 13.

Gadling gear review: Solite 150 Headlamp from Light & Motion

by Kraig Becker on

A good headlamp is one of those pieces of gear that you really don’t know you need until you have one. Then you find all kinds of great uses for it. During my various travels, my headlamp has proven useful, in so many situations, that it is now difficult to think about leaving home without one. Whether I’m headed to a mountain campsite or a five star resort, I always bring a headlamp of some kind.

I do seem to have been cursed however, with an unnatural proclivity for leaving headlamps behind when I travel, so as a result, I’ve had the opportunity to test more than my fair share of the devices over the years. Every good headlamp that I’ve ever used has had a couple of things in common. First, they are all lightweight and comfortable to wear for extended periods of time. They have also offered a good combination of battery life and brightness, while also remaining rugged and sturdy enough to withstand a variety of harsh conditions. The Solite 150 headlamp from Light & Motion not only meets all of those standards, it offers a few extra surprises as well.

The first thing that strikes you when you take the Solite out of its box is just how small it is. The light itself is unbelievably tiny, which is partially achieved by the fact that the batteries are housed in a separate pack, detached from the lamp itself. The entire package weighs in at a mere 135 grams (about 4.7 ounces) and yet in a testament to its build quality, it still feels solid, tough, and ready for action in all but the most demanding environments. The included headband is also extra-stretchy to fit over a helmet if necessary, and is well designed to accommodate the light and battery pack.The second thing that impressed me about this headlamp was just how bright it is. The Solite has three levels of brightness, and even on the lowest setting, it provides plenty of illumination for working around camp or navigating a dark trail at typical walking speeds. The second level of brightness is useful for trail runners or cross country skiers who need to see further down the path while moving quickly on foot. The third, and highest setting, cranks out a stunning 150 lumens which is perfect for those traveling at an even higher speed – say on a bike for instance. Which of the three settings you choose however, has a direct impact on battery life.

Speaking of batteries, as mentioned, the Solite comes with a battery pack that incorporates state of the art rechargeable lithium-ion power cells. The decision to use this type of battery is both a strength and a weakness of the headlamp however. For example, on its lowest brightness setting, the Solite can burn for as much as 40 hours, which is enough to last most people for the length of a trip. Jump the brightness up to the second level however, and battery life drops to just six hours, and the highest setting cuts it down to three. In other headlamps you would simply bring spare batteries as a back-up, just in case your power cells ran dry. But that’s not possible with the Solite, which needs to be charged via USB. Yep, that’s right, USB. That means you either need to bring your computer with you to charge it or pick-up a third party battery pack or power strip that provides a USB input. Those options aren’t so bad if you’re traveling somewhere with your computer, but on a two week trek through the Himalaya, you’re probably going to want another option.

The Solite is nothing if not versatile. The light is designed to be used not only as a headlamp, but also a hand torch as well. Both the lamp and the battery back can be detached from the headband and connected to one another to make a very useful flashlight. The versatility doesn’t end there however, as Light & Motion also provided a mount for the handlebars of a bike as well as a cycling or climbing helmet. These small, but much appreciated extras help to make the Solite 150 more useful than your typical headlamp.

Despite the concerns with recharging the battery pack, the Solite is the best headlamp I’ve ever used. I’m continually impressed with its performance, both in terms of brightness and battery life. It doesn’t hurt that it packs so much functionality into such a small and lightweight package. Add in the ability to use it not only while traveling, but also while running or riding my bike, and you have a headlamp that extends its usefulness well beyond just sitting in the drawer until the next trip.

With an MSRP of $179, the Solite isn’t cheap when compared to other headlamps, but it still delivers a lot of bang for your buck. At that price however, I’d better not leave it behind when I take it with me on my next trip.