mountaineering

this is interesting, and sort of tragic in that its like one trys to get some breath of fresh air from contemporary programed materialistic culture and whats available, a leisure activity w/gyms gear media etc, you cant escape

oh this makes things seem so sad and pointless! oh let us simply toil away in our shallow urban lives!
- climbing gyms are a business, sure, but they're also pretty niche and the people who run them are usually (i can't adhere completely to a generalization) super committed to what they're about. the basics of climbing aren't devastatingly $$ nor is there overt pressure to get "the best" gear - yet you do need money to buy basic stuff ($200 or so). but like i'm in the gym and i see a group of high school kids from the neighbourhood and they've mostly prob never come to the gym other than on a school trip, but they're so into it i wish there was a way to have them be there every week (this was me in high school - a couple of climbs but didn't know what i could do to go further, esp re $), and it's fucked up to me that they can't. at the same time i know this gym will cut them a good deal somehow if they're really into it. and i don't know, it's also like with playing music - you get what you can afford or what people give you and you can do good things with that, e.g., you don't need boutique gear to be awesome. but anyway, also one of the points of the gym is to get/stay fit so that you can climb outside! outside!
- media, i mean, i know gyms usually have websites but they're pretty low on the advertising spectrum...
- what this also makes me think about is the differentiation between what is leisure and what is "work"/non-leisure these days. a lot of people dislike their "work" and want something more, want more meaning or responsibility, which they find in their "leisure" activities. a lot of work is bullshit, fuck work! climb! be alive! overcome! new world order!

i think getting exercise and being outdoors is great, but theres certainly nothing more emblematic of our current era than trying to find meaning in entertainment/leisure activities,i mean theres a reason no one ever thought of climbing a mountain until fairly recently

on a wider scale imho the more you try to define yourself in contrast to something be it our current societal mores or w/e the more beholden you are to it - so i think rock climbing is a fine and wholesome if somewhat dangerous activity, but i have a hard time believing it the solution to the human condition

What if you define yourself and it just happens to not be in alignment with mainstream social mores, not a fight, just a way of being? Wait is this suddenly an argument about hipsterism? ugh! Can anyone do anything anymore.

Hell I live in a country where people are constantly on about "let's not define ourselves as what we're not! eg the US!" - to which my response has always been I'm just doing some things i feel like doing and possibly they are influenced by media big and small! Culture! It's all around us! and the US has many awesome things I love the US too.

People have been climbing mountains for hundreds of years! Pilgrimages for one!

i sincerely hope people can just be themselves and be happy and get along and not have to worry so much abt how they fit in or w/e, im just somewhat suspicious of oppositional stances thatre all the world is so fd up im gonna go do this other thing when that other thing is still taking place on the world, its just kind of interesting how peoples solutions to the problems of the times also tend to be v of the times themselves

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountaineering#History

everything is of the times; no escape

Moses was the original mountaineer

ha yeah i mean people did set foot on mountains in the past but the origins of mountaineering as a thing thing can be dated to around the time of the industrial revolution

I don't believe I linked it here earlier, but this article from 2007 is worth reading. What it's like to be in Everest Base Camp for a month: http://www.outsideonline.com/adventure-travel/asia/nepal/mount-everest/High-Times.html

HIGH TIMES
You were told that Everest base camp is an insult to the true spirit of mountaineering. (Harrumph.) But why weren't you told about the excellent bars, the butter people, and that friendly Playboy bunny from Poland? The author spends a month at the world's most exclusive party town.

http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/dvd/fox/soundofmusic/SOM1_L.jpg

command-f butter people

What are the chances of dying while climbing Everest? I've read everything from 1/60 to 1/10, and you could argue that it's not the best place to look for experienced risk-aware level-headed climbers; either way they don't sound like great odds compared to any kind of driving.

butter people can only exist at a certain altitude cos they start melting once they descend below the tree line

http://durbutter.com/durbutter.gif

Amazing panoramic gigapixel photo of Everest, Lhotse, base camp, and the Khumbu Icefall: http://www.glacierworks.org/the-glaciers/pumori-spring-2012/

HFS, I just zoomed in on that photo and saw just how small base camp and the climbers are in comparison to the mtn

what is this? a base camp for ants?

http://theadventureblog.blogspot.com/2012/12/first-8000-meter-summiteer-maurice.html

Sad news from France today, where we've received word that Maurice Herzog has passed away at the ripe old age of 93. If his name is familiar, it is because he was the first man, along with climbing partner Louis Lachenal, to successfully summit an 8000 meter peak.

Herzog and Lachenal climbed their way into the history books back on June 3, 1950 when they made the first successful attempt up Annapurna, the tenth highest peak in the world at 8091 meters (26,545 ft). Even more remarkable, considering the time, they actually made the ascent without the use of supplemental oxygen. The climb was not an easy one by any stretch of the imagination however, as the summit team, along with two companions, spend a night camped out in a crevasse on the descent. They had one sleeping bag between the four men and as a result, they suffered severe frostbite. Herzog himself had lost his gloves on the way to the summit and ended up having all of his toes and several fingers amputated in the field.

Ironically, Annapurna was the first of the 8000 meter peaks to be summited, but is now considered to be amongst the most challenging of those 14 mountains to climb. It wouldn't be successfully conquered again until 1970.

After his harrowing climb, Herzog published a book about the adventure entitled Annapurna: The First Conquest of an 8000-Meter Peak, which has gone on to be one of the best selling mountaineering books of all time. The book has been translated into 40 languages and has sold over 12 million copes across the globe, inspiring generations of mountaineers that followed. He also served as the Commissioner of Youth and Sport in France and was the mayor of Chamonix from 1968-1977.

(his book is one of my all-time faves)

putting that on my to read list

Man Makes History by Climbing 1,500-Foot El Sendero Luminoso with No Net

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX_rh8Qugt0

honnold is nuts

no thank you and good day sir

Off my comprehensibility scale. Gbx, in what sense does the yds rating only go to 5.13? Whats the disti ction being drawn there vs 5.14s or more?

Wow, no, 15 seconds into that, I'm going to be sick.

o_O

hoping that's like old Batman films and he's just crawling around the floor with the camera at a funny angle

Cool video from an airplane flying around Everest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HziXPKFpLu4

I just finished reading the book about the 1999 expedition that found the body of George Mallory, Ghosts of Everest. I knew the expedition leader way back in my college days. Incredibly, when the climbers first reached the area where they intended to search, they located Mallory's body in less than 1.5 hours. At ~8000m you can't walk very far in that time.

Searching on -name of mountain- + gopro turns up some great videos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW_6eO6VMpk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKq-3H04SkQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUMHPnV8qz0

ueli steck is the greatest living human

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjRGHGV_MVI

not like as a kind giving loving human, but as a specimen, aliens would harvest him

Let's climb the most insane route on the most notorious climb ever - the Eiger North Face.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MELPIlqCU74

RIP royal robbins

what a handsome man

https://www.royalrobbins.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/05-Royal-Portrait1.jpg

^^ People who are (barely) not River Wolf

i saw rw recently and id say that's more than a bit generous

but im sure he appreciates it

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/features/athletes/alex-honnold/most-dangerous-free-solo-climb-yosemite-national-park-el-capitan/

Renowned rock climber Alex Honnold on Saturday became the first person to scale the iconic nearly 3,000-foot granite wall known as El Capitan without using ropes or other safety gear, completing what may be the greatest feat of pure rock climbing in the history of the sport.

instant legend status

i'll be amazed if he makes it past 40yo

i don't think i can ever watch footage of what he did. reading that article made me sweat

can't wait to watch it tbh

Climbers have been speculating for years about a possible free solo of El Capitan, but there have only been two other people who have publicly said they seriously considered it. One was Michael Reardon, a free soloist who drowned in 2007 after being swept from a ledge below a sea cliff in Ireland. The other was Dean Potter, who died in a base jumping accident in Yosemite in 2015.

John Bachar, the greatest free soloist of the 1970s, who died while climbing un-roped in 2009 at age 52, never considered it. When Bachar was in his prime, El Capitan had still never been free climbed. Peter Croft, 58, who completed the landmark free solo of the 1980s—Yosemite’s 1,000-foot Astroman—never seriously contemplated El Capitan, but he knew somebody would eventually do it.

“It was always the obvious next step,” says Croft. “But after this, I really don’t see what’s next. This is the big classic jump.”

reardon's death was kind of a bizarre accident iirc, but worth noting that croft (a hero of mine as a teen) is one of the only prolific soloists who got out alive, and i think that's because he stopped trying to push technical standards while free soloing. i think he continued to do it (and may still, even in his dotage), but i'm not sure he did anything harder/more bold than Astroman.

as he says, there's not really much left available to honnold that doesn't involve more technical difficulty (which greatly increases the already astounding risk of human error) or more objective hazard (like some kind of remote alpine wall, like the trango tower or mt thor on baffin island).

xp i too am pretty excited to watch, though i will probably have sweaty palms the whole time

he doesn't seem to have much reason to stop. not much close family, lives in a van, lives for climbing

and i don't expect he will, tbh -- i suppose he could try to free solo the dawn wall but, from a technical pov, that's like an order of magnitude harder

if it's been free climbed, it can be free soloed, would be his outlook i'd imagine

his life insurance is presumably a bag of chips and a sausage roll for whoever scrapes him off the valley floor

nice

went to a mountaineering event at caltech a while ago and was impressed by some of the video footage of some dudes

dear ilx: please see Free Solo (documentary about Alex Honnold, who free soloed El Capitan last year)

it isn't just a bro'd out depiction of what (imho) is one of if not the singular athletic accomplishment of the last oh hundred years, it's a pretty intriguing portrait of the person that did it

also it'll make your palms sweat