On Saturday, November 7, a team of dive guides and guests aboard the 112-foot luxury dive vessel Solmar V went for their first dip of the day near Socorro Island, Mexico, when they spotted a whale shark tangled in a rope. On their second dive, they saw the giant fish again and resolved to cut it free. You can watch the rescue in the video above, and read a brief account of their plan of attack below.
The Drygalski Mountains. Photo: Berghaus.com
The realities of an expedition to Antarctica, where temperatures fall to -50 degrees and the wind can reach speeds of up to 100 miles per hour, are harsh. At night, for example, explorers must pack all those things they don't want to freeze into their sleeping bags. "Even your pee bottle," climber Leo Houlding said in a dispatch. "Or you won’t be able to empty it and might have to boil it up with your morning brew, as my tent-mate Jason did several times in Greenland. Not pleasant."
Houlding and five teammates are headed to Antarctica in mid-December to climb Ulvetanna. While tackling the peak will be a supreme technical challenge, the crew will also have to grapple with keeping their supplies in good shape. It will take four hours a day at an MSR stove just to melt enough ice for their water, and having access to that ice involves even more work. "Because huge stretches of Ulvetanna are dead vertical, much of the time there won’t be any snow to collect as we climb," said Houlding in a dispatch. "So we’ll have to melt enough snow at base camp to fill a 120-litre barrel, which we’ll haul up behind us, chipping ice out of it with ice axes every time we cook or make a cup of coffee in wall camp."
Here's a bit more* about the niceties of Houlding's expedition:
On his YouTube channel, BASE jumper Alexander Polli said he has completed the "first-ever successful wingsuit target strike." In the video above, Polli rockets down a slalom course, shatters a foam marker with his left arm, and continues flying forward on his projected path. Polli said in the text below the YouTube video that he reached a speed of 155mph on the course, which is in the same location where Jeb Corliss shot his famous Grinding the Crack video. BASE jumping fans with a knowledge of that Grinding the Crack flight might point out that Corliss famously hit a target during his flight—the string attached to a balloon.
In May of 2009, Jonny Copp, Micah Dash, and Wade Johnson were killed by an avalanche while on a climbing expedition in China's Sichuan province. We have written before about the number of different ways people are remembering them. Boulder's Adventure Film Festival is held every year in honor of Copp. The American Alpine Club offers the Copp-Dash Inspire Awards for climbers who are looking for help with funding and to share their expeditions via multimedia. Applications can be submitted for those awards now. In the latest Wild Love video, Sara Close shares how Copp's death affected her and how she's moving forward.
In 2003, climber Asa Firestone traveled to Rio de Janeiro to climb "Two Brothers," twin peaks surrounded by favelas—shanty towns harboring many of the city's poor. Many locals warned him against climbing in such a dangerous area. He went anyway, and decided to use climbing to help the area's children. In 2011, he teamed up with local climbing guide Andrew Lenz to begin the CEU Urban Climbing School in the Rocinha Favela. Now, they want to build a climbing wall in the government-run Rocinha sports complex. "Climbing can offer these youth a positive alternative to their daily struggles and the construction of a modern climbing wall will provide them with this opportunity," says Firestone on a new fundraising site. "Approximately 5,000 murders are reported per year in Rio de Janeiro's favelas. Climbing is not the end all solution but it can certainly help."
Possibly dead, still cute
0Fumes overwhelming neighbors
0Denies reports on Twitter
0"We have seen nothing."
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