Explorersweb

A climber in serious trouble, balancing unroped and alone on a thin ledge at night, was rescued from the Stawamus Chief Mountain in Squamish, British Columbia, Canada, by an innovative method. Two cargo drones flew to him. One carried a rope that the climber used to descend, while a second lit the route for him.

The Polish team has finished its expedition on the still-unclimbed Gasherbrum VI. They didn’t reach the summit, but expedition leader Pawel Czech has claimed a new route, despite the fact that they didn’t complete the first ascent, and it is unclear if the part they did climb is really new. “They tried so hard to reach the summit but couldn’t,” outfitter Anwar Syed told ExplorersWeb after the team safely returned to Base Camp after a final push on September 12.

Tetsuhide Yamazaki. Photo: X On November 29, 2023, Japanese scientist and explorer Tetsuhide Yamazaki walked out of Siorapaluk and disappeared. It was the polar night. The sun had left this northernmost settlement in Greenland weeks earlier and would not return for months. Yamazaki went down toward the sea ice in the morning. By afternoon, when he had not returned, people began searching. They found his tracks. They found his tooq – the ice-testing pole. They found a hole in the newly formed ice.

When we’re not outdoors, we get our adventure fix by exploring social media and the web. Here are some of the best adventure links we’ve discovered this week. Polynesian Wayfinding: Ten Hawaiian sailors recently completed a 2,574km journey from the Cook Islands to New Zealand aboard a replica of a traditional double-hulled Polynesian canoe. They navigated without a compass, GPS, engine, or charts.

Everest. Photo: Screenshot This full-length 2010 documentary intertwines the life history of early-20th-century mountaineer George Mallory and the investigative efforts of modern climber Conrad Anker. A bafflingly star-studded voice cast, over dramatic recreations and sweeping Everest footage, takes us back to 1924, when George Mallory and Sandy Irvine seemed to disappear on the way to the summit. On the same mountain, 75 years later, Anker finds the prone, frozen body of George Mallory.

In a world shaped by the control of trade routes, the discovery of navigable shortcuts through the Arctic had the potential to reshape the global power balance. This goes some way toward explaining why Catherine the Great’s Arctic expedition proceeded with all the secrecy of the Manhattan Project. Englishman Martin Sauer was recruited as a translator for the 1785 Russian-backed Billings Arctic expedition.

Joshua Moodie, 22, is about to set off on a 25,000km bikepacking trip from the UK to Russia’s Pacific coast. His 26-country route will weave south through Europe and Central Asia and then north through Russia and Mongolia. He plans to complete the journey within a year. Moodie will begin at Land’s End in Cornwall — the southern tip of the UK that juts out into the Atlantic Ocean — on September 14.

The number of climbing permits on Manaslu this season has set a new record. There are 422 foreigners, plus an even larger number of local staff on the mountain or on the way to Base Camp. Meanwhile, rope-fixers are hurrying to pave the way to the summit.

Makalu from the lower Base Camp. Photo: Aleksenko/Tsentsevitsky Denis Aleksenko and Artem Tsentsevitsky of Russia are going to Makalu for their second attempt on the mountain. This time, they will climb alpine style. Last year, the pair used traditional style and fixed a few ropes on the most exposed passages. Otherwise, they were completely alone on the mountain, which is common in the fall. They had to break trail through deep, unstable snow, climbing and retreating several times.

The Polish team has launched its third and final attempt on Gasherbrum VI. After reaching a dead end on their first attempt, Jacek Pawel Czech, Szymon Kita, and Aleksandra Kita moved to the left side of the Southeast Face and tried a different line. That second attempt took the climbers 14 hours: 9 hours to gain 600 vertical meters and five more to return to Base Camp.