mountaineering

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

i really want to see this

it's very good!

even if you don't care about or even hate rock climbing/mountaineering as a selfish dangerous pursuit

I'll try to see that. Honnold is pretty amazing.

definitely looking forward to this

i don't have an issue with rock climbing being selfish or dangerous, i just find the personalities of climbers to be annoyingly alpha

over the past 5 years or so i’ve discovered that mountain climbing docs are one of my favorite things. i love watching ppl do stuff i would never in my life even attempt.

i love imagining myself running them over with my car.

*shrugs*

:(

lol sorry, i have feelings about climbers as i'm living in one of their meccas right now and i guess this thread at this moment gets to receive them. i feel like i get what makes climbers tick and i just don't care about witnessing their increasing degrees of fearlessness; nonetheless, the spotlight is always turned on them and the same old story of physical triumph over nature.

Funny, nature never understands that it has been subdued or conquered. It just keeps on being nature in the same old way.

also it'll make your palms sweat
first theater I've seen with chalk marks all over the seat arms. Xp

Re what makes ppl tick - I get your point, and it relates to a phenomenon I call "venue toxicity". I get it when trapped in any super intensive sports environment esp. med/long course tri dorks hang gravity riders. but it can be non sporting, like jam bands. after like 8 consecutive hours I'm was way done. bluegrass? pretty instantaneous for me.

living in Moab tho? so many offsets.

not hang, "and"

map! i agree that climbers can be aggressively self-aggrandizing w/r/t their accomplishments ("accomplishments") and certainly with how they turn the camera on themselves (cf conquistadors of the useless)

also: climbing is so fucking fun i actually don't care

anyway if/when i get to moab i'll buy you a beer if you let me

I like the close-ups in climbing movies to the extent that they show spots that are so impossible to see irl: high in the Himalayas, etc. The Meru film, for instance. I can take or leave the actual climbing and alphaness.

Freeskiing movies are even worse. The accomplishments are generally not as impressive and the skiers are just blasting through the terrain. Best part of big-mountain ski movies tend to be the slow ascent shots imo. When I watch one I often wonder why/how they get made. Who is financing this stuff and why?

I love skiing and find climbing insanely hard and not so much fun, fwiw.

I liked Free Solo a lot! It was a nice look at "excellence" and how that relates to normal human relationships. Like I can admire Honnold's ability and focus, but those ex-girlfriends who thought he was impossible to deal with weren't wrong. It was interesting compare Honnold to Tommy Caldwell, who has off-the-charts danger tolerance by any normal metric, but at this point isn't trying to die for his art, while Honnold is basically okay with that idea.

NB: I have basically zero exposure to climbing culture and have found in the handful of times I've tried anything more than scrambling up rocks that I get freaked out very easily.