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The five explorers of the future

by Jon Bowermaster on

I’ve spent a lot of time in recent years pondering the future of exploration. As we creep into the 21st century, what exactly is the definition of exploring? New lands have essentially all been discovered, we’re no longer out looking to plant flags on new territory. These days we are spending more time attempting to discover new energy sources over new finds of gold, silver or silk. Ending disease is today a far more prominent search than trying to discover what’s just over the horizon.

Some direction to my big question was provided recently at the headquarters of the National Geographic Society. I had the privilege of sitting in on its annual, two-day Explorer’s Symposium and hearing from some of its newly-appointed class of “Emerging Explorers.” The emphasis among the bulk of the 14 young explorers was definitely science, focused more on agroecologists and molecular biologists than hard-bodied climbers eyeing new peaks simply because they are there.

The program goes back eight years – its first “class” was anointed in 2004 — and focuses on recognizing and supporting “uniquely gifted and inspiring young adventurers, scientists, photographers and storytellers, explorers who are already making a difference early in their careers.” Each gets a stipend of $10,000, an introduction to the extensive depths of the Society’s in-house media connections and access to the more veteran Explorers-in-Residence and Fellows it supports.

Several of the new class are already atop their fields and have gotten some good press. Sasha Kramer’s non-profit SOIL (Sustainable Organic Livelihoods) has been building toilets and trying to transform Haiti’s waste into valuable resources since 2006. Norwegian paleontologist Jorn Hurum has been digging for fossils for several decades and has unearthed the bones of 50-foot long, sea-loving cousins he’s dubbed “Predator X.” Nairobi-based Paula Kahumbu is capitalizing on the Internet to help preserve wildlife in Africa, Asia and South America, as executive director of both WildlifeDirect and the Kenya Land Conservation Trust, which allows interested parties (donors, scientists, the general public) to observe real wildlife problems in real time using blogs, online videos and fundraising tools.

Certainly each of the emerging explorers is already having an impact in their chosen fields, whether as educators or in-the-field scientists. Five to keep your eyes on:
1. Hayat Sindi is introduced as a “Science Entrepreneur.” Her main work focuses on new ways to monitor health in remote and impoverished parts of the world, specifically using low-tech diagnostic tools to test for liver function. Across the developing world, powerful drugs are used to combat HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and hepatitis. Unfortunately the same drugs often cause liver damage. The result is that millions are dying from the very medications meant to save them, because doctors don’t have the ability to monitor long-term health implications. Born in Saudi Arabia, when she moved to London hoping to attend university there, she spoke no English; she learned by watching the BBC and became the first Saudi woman accepted at Cambridge University in the field of biotechnology. She is now a visiting scholar at Harvard, working on her Ph.D., and she and her team have been awarded prizes by both MIT’s $100K Entrepreneurship Competition and the Harvard Enterprise Competition, the first group ever to win both prizes in the same year.

2. Ashley Murray’s modest goal is get the world to rethink how it views waste and wastewater. Given that 2.5 billion people on the planet wake up with no access to basic sanitation, her audience is sizable. Her specific goal is to turn getting rid of or recycling wastewater into for-profit businesses. Currently based in Ghana, she founded a company there called Waste Enterprises, which relies on human waste as its primary product and looks for ways to reuse, recycle and profit from it in order to help provide better sanitation for the poor. The options seem endless: Fertilizer for fish farms, as industrial fuel to help make cement, to replace coal or oil as an energy provider. “The real goal is improving basic sanitation, health, and environmental conditions for some of the world’s poorest populations,” she says. “If I can prove this is a viable business model, I hope copycats spring up everywhere. I want to catalyze the use of our ideas in cities all across Africa.”

3. Kevin Hand is no ordinary rocket scientist. His job at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, under contract to NASA, is to figure out a way to send a probe to explore Europa, Jupiter’s fourth largest moon. Why Europa? Its average temperature is 280 degrees below zero, is devoid of atmosphere and at times is 600 million miles from Earth. But it is believed, below its ice surface, to be home to a 60-mile deep ocean (Earth’s is just seven miles at its deepest), which means it could be home to three times the volume of liquid water as Earth. His is a long-term commitment: The orbiting probe is not expected to be ready until 2020 and will take six years to reach Jupiter, then spend two years touring the planet’s four largest moons before spiraling back to Earth. “By the time we get there,” says Hand, “I’ll be a much older man. This business is not for the faint of heart.” To research the best way to study such a forbidding place, his travels have taken him from the glaciers of Mount Kilimanjaro to the valleys of Antarctica, testing new tools he hopes will one day be strapped to the end of a robotic arm 600 million miles from Earth.

4. Juan Martinez grew up in a tool shed in South Central Los Angeles, far from anything remotely considered wilderness. Ironically, it was failing a high school science test that led to three months of after-school detail tending a garden begun by its Eco Club. A two-week scholarship to Wyoming’s Teton Science School followed. “Ten years later, I still can’t find words to describe the first moment I saw those mountains rising up from the valley,” Martinez recalls. “Watching bison, seeing a sky full of stars, and hiking through that scenery was overwhelming.” Today he is national spokesman for getting youth, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, into the outdoors. Everyone from the Sierra Club to the White House have recognized his efforts; his Natural Leaders Network of the Children & Nature Network creates links between environmental organizations, corporations, government, education and individuals to reconnect children with nature, with an optimistic spin. “Some kids on my trips have been in foster care their whole lives, feeling very disconnected from other people. Suddenly they’re out in the backcountry relying on each other. Nature can be a real facilitator for skills that are so crucial in life-communicating, working together, and realizing you can do things you never thought you could (like hiking six rough miles in one day). I take kids who have been abused, heavily medicated for behavior problems, violent, distrustful, but after a few days outdoors they’re sharing feelings and fears, laughing, and thinking like a team. You may be able to see the stars through a computer screen or book, but it’s nothing like lying on the grass looking up at the Milky Way.”

5. Cambodian Tuy Sereivathana also grew up in an urban setting, but his introduction to wildlife was thanks to the Khmer Rouge, who chased his family into hiding in a remote part of the Cambodian rain forest. So many people were similarly forced into a rural life they quickly began to impede on those that were there first, particularly elephants. “Overnight a traditional elephant migration route would become a rice farm,” says Tuy. With rain forests shrinking, hungry elephants foraged farmlands, destroying crops. The poor farmers fought back, killing elephants to protect “their” lands. As a result, Cambodia’s elephant population dwindled to fewer than 500. Tuy has made a career of trying to introduce a conservation ethic into the country “People were not well educated about conservation,” he says. “They thought the elephants belonged to my project, so they threw all their anger at me. It was difficult to build trust and convince them to join my efforts. But day-by-day we proved that we were concerned not only with elephants, but also with human beings. His efforts have led to construction of schools and encouraged teachers to make conservation part of their curriculum. Since 2005 not a single wild elephant has been killed in Cambodia due to human conflict.

[Flickr image via Paulo Brandão]

Missing plane found 71 years after it disappeared

by Kraig Becker on

A Royal Canadian Air Force plane, missing since 1940, has been found at the bottom of a lake, ending a 71-year old mystery regarding the final resting place of the aircraft and its crew. The plane was lost on Dec. 13, 1940, but was recently discovered by a group dedicated to finding missing airplanes, who used sophisticated radar to guide divers to the site.

On December 12th, 1940, another RAF plane went down near Lake Muskoka in Ontario, Canada, due to a raging blizzard. The next day, two Northrop A-17A Nomads, carrying two man crews, were scrambled to search for the missing plane. With the weather and visibility still poor, the two Nomads had a mid-air collision, sending them both crashing into the lake. One of those aircraft was recovered a few weeks later, but the other, along with her crew, were never seen again.

Last fall, Matt Fairbrass, President of Lost Airmen in Muskoka Project, made it a priority to find the missing aircraft. He and a friend discovered that a family living on the lake at the time had witnessed the two Nomads collide and were able to give them a general idea of where the plane went down. Fairbrass says he spent “hundreds of hours” searching for the airplane, and using side-scan sonar, he was able to narrow its final resting spot down to three possible locations. Divers from the local underwater search and rescue team were able to take it from there.

When the plane went down it was carrying two pilots – Canadian Ted Bates and Brit Peter Campbell. The families of the two men were left to wonder what became of them and after more than seven decades, this discovery has brought those families a measure of closure. Bates’ younger brother Tom, now age 84, says he’s “glad they found the plane,” adding “My parents thought about it often.”

The Nomad was a big, yet versatile plane, that was commonly used early in World War II. The plane had a wingspan of nearly 48 feet and was primarily used as an attack bomber until retired from service in 1944. Finding one is seen as a rare event amongst aircraft enthusiasts. For Matt Fairbrass however, he’s just happy to recover the airmen who sacrificed themselves for the good of their country.

Venice’s Island of the Dead, Isola San Michele

by Gadling Staff on

Half an hour away by vaporetto, Venice‘s waterbus, from the chaos of Saint Mark’s square, is the Isola San Michele, a stopping point between the city of Venice and the island of Murano. Circling the city of Venice by boat towards the north, the lagoon is paved with small islands, but Isola San Michele turns heads. It is a small island surrounded by terracotta brick wall punctuated by arched tips at regular intervals. Cypress trees peer over the wall giving the appearance of a floating garden in the lagoon, until you pass round the front of the island and notice a grand entrance with three arched gates with white steps disappearing into the water. Above the gates is a simple white cross, marking the entrance to Venice’s Island of the dead.

There is a sense of serenity when you step off the vaporetto onto the unstable platform at Isola San Michele. It is one of Venice’s best-kept secrets, as most tourists will continue on the boat to Murano. The cemetery is both tranquil and surreal. Venice as a city is silent after the cruise ships go home, there are no cars and the only sound you’ll hear are the occasional footsteps echoing through the alleys and sometimes a church bell. In the cemetery the silence is broken only by birdsong. Walking between the tall cypress trees, you are aware of crunching gravel beneath your feet and you feel something is out of place.Unlike Pére Lachaise in Paris, Venice’s cemetery is surprisingly “modern,” there are no tombs or mausoleums dating back for centuries, no hoards of tourists scouring the graves name-hunting. Here, the graves are tightly packed line by line, with the path lined with cypresses running down the middle towards the grand arched gates where the coffins are carried up from funerary gondolas. If you’ve seen the cult classic, “Don’t Look Now,” the front view of the gates, as approached by boat, look familiar. From the waters, the gates are an ominous “momento mori,” a reminder of our mortality; looking out from the inside through the wrought iron, you glimpse the city of Venice lingering in the distance across the waters, a peaceful reflection of life.

Walking away from the central division of the cemetery, you’ll find the neo-classical mausoleums and tombs dating back to the 19th century that belong to prestigious Venetian families. Memorial walls for the dead, circle the island’s perimeter, while rows of tall white columbarium walls, containing plaque-covered niches for cremated remains, close in on small pathways as you head back to the vaporetto jetty.

While Isola San Michele is not one of the great monumental cemeteries – like those found in Paris, Milan or London – Isola San Michele is a curiosity, it is after all the resting place of Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Diaghilev and Ezra Pound. A key player in Venice’s history, surrounded by the calm waters of the Venetian lagoon, almost forgotten behind its terracotta walls and under its cypress trees – welcome to Venice’s Island of the Dead.

Summer in the Sierras: 6 Tahoe Adventures for Outdoors Lovers

by Kyle Ellison on

Anyone with a pair of skis or snowboard pants has probably heard the names: Heavenly. Northstar. Squaw — world-renowned winter resorts that sit on some of the finest powder in North America. Luckily for anyone in need of a 12-month adrenaline fix, it’s the summer months in Lake Tahoe where the outdoor adventures really start to heat up, hence, a list of six Tahoe adventures that will keep the blood pumping until next season’s first snowfall.

1. Mountain Bike the Flume Trail

For anyone who is familiar with the Lake Tahoe basin, the concept of mountain biking during the summer months should come as no surprise. For many, taking two wheels to the steep downhill of the Sierras is a way to fill the adrenaline void that’s created by the closure of the fabled ski runs.

While there are myriad trails that form a complex network of singletrack running throughout the Sierra, none of them are quite as famous or awe-inspiring as the five mile ridgeline that forms the Tahoe Flume Trail. Formed by 19th century lumber workers needing access to the region’s bountiful timber, water flumes were utilized as a way to transport heavy logs down to lumber mills in the Carson Valley. Though loggers no longer dominate the peaks and ridges of Tahoe’s eastern shore, the trails they cut and left behind lay waiting to be explored.

The Flume Trail is a 13-mile, one way ride that can be combined in conjunction with sections of the Tahoe Rim Trail. The trail starts at the 7,000′ elevation at Nevada’s Spooner Lake, and bikes, maps, and equipment are available from Flume Trail Mountain Bikes. The trail begins with a substantial 1,300′ climb to pristine Marlette Lake, its placid waters rung by towering pines. The trail traces the perimeter of Marlette Lake before turning to singletrack on the knife-thin ridgeline that offers sweeping views of 193 sq. mile Lake Tahoe. High above the turquoise waters of Sand Harbor and the oft-photographed boulders that run the length of the lake’s undeveloped eastern shore, it’s nearly impossible to avoid periodic rest stops simply to marvel at the view.

2. Tackle a stand-up “downwinder”

Rapidly gaining momentum as Lake Tahoe’s most popular summertime watersport, the clear, placid waters of this alpine lake provide the perfect theater for a peaceful morning paddle. While much of the stand up action on the lake involves novices who’d prefer to stay close to shore and in calm waters, one of the Tahoe’s true water thrills is navigating a long section of the lake on a stand up paddleboard with the gusty alpine wind blowing at your back.

Though the morning hours in Tahoe can be eerily calm, most afternoons provide ample wind out of the southwest to create 2-4 ft. lake swells that paddleboarders can ride from one point on the lake to another. Popular runs include Dollar Point to Tahoe Vista, or Homewood to Cal-Neva point on the California/Nevada border. While the Lake Tahoe area has an increasingly popular summer race series, the granddaddy distance race on the lake is the Tahoe Fall Classic, a 22-mile paddle marathon that runs the length of the lake every September.

3. Jump off of a mountain

The summertime thrills in Tahoe aren’t exclusively found either on land or in the lake–for some, they even take to the skies. Though there are a fair number of daredevils who engage in dramatic displays of cliff jumping in the deep waters off Rubicon Point, a different set of aerial enthusiasts routinely launch themselves off of lofty mountain peaks that overlook the lake in the ultra-adventurous sport of paragliding.

For anyone across the country who has ever strapped a wing to their back (as the paragliding chutes are known), paragliding Lake Tahoe is one of the most rewarding, challenging experiences that a paraglider can find in the lower 48. While considered to be one of the nation’s most scenic spots to fly, the large amount of air moving over the Sierra crest, mixed with the hot air rising off of the Nevada desert, creates dangerous thermals and pockets of air that can really ruin a paraglider’s day.

4. Hike the Tahoe Rim Trail

While the mountains around Lake Tahoe contain segments of the 2,650 mile Pacific Crest Trail, hikers that don’t have six months to devote to walking the West can opt for a shorter–albeit still lengthy–loop of the lake on the well-maintained and remarkably scenic Tahoe Rim Trail. While many hikers each year take advantage of the campgrounds scattered around the trail and tackle the entire 165-mile loop in a single shot, most mortals opt to spend a long day hiking one of the Rim Trail segments that run in the more manageable 14-25 mile range. Maintained by the Tahoe Rim Trail Association, each year the group organizes 14-day “thru-hikes” for those who want to leave it all behind and spend two solid weeks soaking up the beauty of the Sierra.

5. Surf Lake Tahoe

Yes, you read that right. You can actually surf on Lake Tahoe. Not wakesurf, or standup paddle surf, or even windsurf, but good ol’ fashioned lay down on your chest and stroke into some waves style of surfing. While the strongest storms blow through Tahoe in the frigid winter months, strong summer winds that gust over the ridges of the Sierra on certain days provide waist-chest high waves that any longboarder would be stoked on.

As the prevailing summer winds blow from the south-southwest direction, Tahoe “surf breaks”–ironically just like in Hawaii–are located along the North Shore of the lake, with sandbars from Tahoe Vista to Sand Harbor lighting up with windswell on a strong enough storm. Though early summer snow melt can make lake temperatures warrant wearing a wetsuit through at least the end of July, the combination of warmer late-summer lake temperatures (up to 68 degrees) and an early fall storm is enough to send landlocked surfers up and down the Sierra scrambling to find their favorite board.

6. Ski the backcountry

Once again, yes, you read that right. One of this summer’s most unique outdoor thrills is strapping on the skis and taking to the Tahoe backcountry. With the Tahoe area receiving record amounts of snowfall this past winter (over 800 inches at some resorts), many of the area’s off-piste runs are packing enough of the white stuff that skiers and snowboarders will be able to click into their boots deep into the summer.

For the first time in 18 years, Tahoe ski resorts such as Squaw Valley and Alpine Meadows were open for business on the 4th of July, and even through the end of July backcountry areas such as Mt. Rose, Desolation Wilderness, and Mt. Tallac still have enough snow cover to warrant the long hike up. There’s really no telling how far into the summer Tahoe skiers who are frothing for winter will be able to make this record powder last. Fortunately for them, once it’s finally all gone, they’ve got plenty of other summer adventures right outside their doorstep.

Jackson Hole Mountain Resort offers discounted ski passes

by Kraig Becker on

While most of the U.S. continues to recover from a nasty heat wave, certain parts of the country are already looking ahead to winter. For instance, Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, located in Wyoming, has already announced new pricing on season passes for the upcoming ski season in advance of those passes going on sale on August 1st.

Last year, the resort introduced the Grand Pass, as an all new alternative to the All Mountain Pass that skiers had previously been use to. The Grand Pass was offered at a 25% discount at that time, and this year it will be even more affordable. When the passes go on sale next week, the price will be $1195 for a full season of skiing, which will extend for 135 days this winter – the longest season in the resort’s history.

JHMR also offers discounted pricing for skiers of all ages as well. For instance, the Grand Pass for Seniors (65 years and older) is just $815 for the full season, while the Junior and Student passes make skiing affordable for the younger crowd as well. Junior passes, aimed at kids age 6-14, is priced at just $159, while the student pass, for 15-18 year olds, is just $289. Children under 6 get to ski for free any time.

Each version of the Grand Pass comes with similar benefits. Those include unlimited skiing or snowboarding between November 26, 2011 and April 8, 2012, a complimentary bus pass for the winter season, discounted food and drinks, as well as lower rates on equipment rental and purchases. The pass also comes with a free adult group lesson, as well as complementary tram access during the summer and a discounted pass to the resort’s mountain bike park in the summer as well.

I know that it is difficult to think about hitting the slopes in July, particularly when the mercury climbs into the triple digits, but for frequent skiers, these passes offer significant savings at one of the premiere destinations in the western United States. And for those who don’t have time to ski the mountain as often as they’d like, there are several other discounted package options as well. For more information on the Grand Pass and the other options click here.

[Photo courtesy Jackson Hole Mountain Resort]