49-year-old Apa Sherpa, a Nepalese Sherpa who is attempting climb Everest for the 20th time, is finding ways to provide an education for his three children: climbing, connecting with Americans, and even transplanting his entire family to Utah.
“…Apa and his family have worked hard to get by in America. When Karma Outdoors went out of business in the economic downturn of 2008, Apa took a series of odd jobs to keep up with his son’s tuition. Eventually, he returned to what he knew best and led yet another climb up Everest’s slopes.” David Knowles of AOL News reports.
Royal Robbins, the 75-year-old rock-climbing pioneer from Modesto, California and founder of the outdoor apparel company of the same name, recently released the first in a series of autobiographies entitled To Be Brave, My Life: Volume One(Pink Moment Press; $19.95).
Sam Whiting of The San Francisco Chronicle interviews Royal about supporting his climbing habit, a biographical movie? and the craft of writing: “Writing is as hard as climbing. I like things that are hard.”
Actor Emile Hirsch–star of Lords of Dogtown, Into the Wild, Milk, and many other films–writes in The Huffington Post about his recent trek to Mount Kilimanjaro, as part of the Summit On The Summit–an organized expedition by musician and philanthropist Kenna to help raise awareness and summon relief to the world’s clean water crisis.
“Out in the middle of nature like this with none of the mixed blessing technology like cell phones and blackberries so many of us find ourselves chained to, the jokes, conversation, exchange of ideas flows so freely and is so intellectually engaging that I wonder if this is what college would have been like if I had gone. I’m happy on the trail, beaming as I climb up every sloping hill, and looking at the landscape, which at present reminds me visually of the Southwest, like Santa Fe New Mexico, where I was partially raised.”
Writer and climber Mark Synnott of Men’s Journal heads to northern Borneo’s Mount Kinabalu (13,500 feet) to scale the infamous walls of Low’s Gully with veteran climber Conrad Anker and rising 23-year-old free-soloist Alex Honnold.
“As we scanned the ground, we hadn’t realized that the upper reaches of the cliff we came to climb had been revealed across the misty 1,000-foot gap. We stood face-to-face with our wall, its spire rising like something out of a Tolkien story from deep inside the seemingly bottomless chasm. It was a clean, unbroken, 2,500-foot sweep of golden-orange granite, streaked with tiger stripes of white, green, and black.”
“In 1968, Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tompkins set out to surf, ski and climb their way to Patagonia. The wild places they found later motivated them to protect the environment. Inspired by this journey, Jeff Johnson and Woodshed Films set sail on a voyage to South America to climb a mythical peak called Corcovado with Chouindard and Tompkins,” as told by Fletcher Chouinard.
The film is entitled 180° South: Conquerors of the Useless and also is a behind the scenes book of the same name, written by Yvon Chouinard and Chris Malloy and photographed Jeff Johnson.
Parts of the book were recently excerpted by the Wall Street Journal and are worth the read:
“It had taken us three days to get high enough to see a possible approach to Cerro Corcovado: a 10-mile Zodiac ride up a river that ruined three outboard props, an all-day rock-hop up a labyrinth of winding rivers, and miles of horrible bushwhacking. Half the time we thought we were lost. Yvon commented more than once, ‘I’m getting too old for this s—.’ Eventually, we made high camp at the last of four pristine lakes where we thought no one had been before – unless they’d dropped in by helicopter or airplane.”
Royal Robbins, rock-climbing pioneer from Modesto, California and founder of the outdoor apparel company of the same name, recently released the first in a series of autobiographies entitled To Be Brave.
Focusing less on the climbing and more on Royal’s “tumultuous” upbringing, the author says the first volume will relay messages of hope and determination:
“‘I think we are what we dream about,’ Robbins said, choosing his words carefully. ‘If you dream about things going well and things turning out well, they tend to. There’s no guarantee, but it tends to work that way. If you take a negative view of life, negative things will come your way. If you take a positive view of life, positive things will come your way,’” writes Lisa Millegan of The Modesto Bee.
British alpinist and photographer Alfred Gregory has died at the age of 96. In 1953 he was part of the successful team–along with Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay–to make a first ascent of Mount Everest.
“Greg reached 27,900ft (8,500m) in support of the successful assault on the world’s highest peak, and took many of the best-known pictures of the Everest expedition, including images of Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay as they began their ascent to the summit, and as they celebrated their success afterwards,” writes Jim Perrin of the Guardian.co.uk.
“Maybe God did give Greg many presents in the course of his long life – the mountaineering opportunities, the photographic talent, the palpable happiness of his second marriage – but he also had a toughness that enabled them, a fortitude and a philosophy that always carried him through.”
“Based on a true story, North Face is a gripping adventure drama about a competition to climb the most dangerous rock face in the Alps [the Eiger]. In July of 1936–less than a year after the most recent and fatal attempt, two top German mountaineers, Toni Kurz and Andi Hinterstoisser, take up the challenge to become the first to scale the infamous rock face, the so-called Murder Wall,” from NorthFaceTheMovie.com
“The Nazis loved mountain climbing. The whole idea of climbing fits into the way the Nazis saw death—dying for an ideal was a metaphor, that you could become a willing hero in the war against the rock. When you look at the early mountain movies, they are very symbolistic, with a visual type of language. They were connected to a German Romantic vision of nature, with the mountain as a character.”
Italian mountaineer Lino Lacedelli is remembered for his long history of “scaling cliffs” and his initial ascent on K2, the world’s second-highest peak.
“Mr. Lacedelli, who died Nov. 20 at age 83, with his mountaineering companion Achille Compagnoni overcame walls of rock and cliffs of ice in brutal cold and thin air while ascending K2. The 28,251-foot peak on the border of China and Pakistan is nicknamed ‘Savage Mountain’ for the heavy toll it has exacted on climbers—Mr. Lacedelli lost a thumb to frostbite on the descent, and another climber in the party died of pulmonary edema. It was 23 years before anyone else summited at K2,” writes Stephen Miller of the Wall Street Journal.
