Northwest:
--A popular warming shelter burned to the ground early Saturday at the Marble Mountain Sno-Park near Mount St. Helens. The cause is unknown and under investigation. The structure, built about 20 years ago, is popular with snow-shoers, snowmobilers and other winter recreationists. To read more, click here.
--K2 Skiing, Atlas, and Transworld Snowboarding joined the American Alpine Institute for a day in the backcountry. Unfortunately, snow conditions were not optimal. Transworld Snowboarding posted an article on the day, here.
Sierra:
--Ticket scalping is a crass reality for the Giants, the Lakers and Lady Gaga, but here's a wave of price-gouging you may have missed: Yosemite National Park. Campsite reservations and permits to scale Half Dome have become such hot commodities that the National Park Service is scrambling to halt the auctioning of park access to the highest bidder. To read more, click here.
--Who says bears can't go rock climbing...? Not me. Check them out, here.
--A climber sustained a fatal rock-climbing in the Joshua Tree National Park on Monday. It appears that the climber took a 100-foot fall in the Hall of Horrors. However, other reports dispute this and say he was on Saddle Rock. To read more, click here and here and here and here.
--Two hikers who disappeared over the weekend in Zion National Park have been found safe. Evegnia Buzulukova, 25, and Jonathon Wilson, 28, were found late on Tuesday night along with several other hikers, officials said. To read more, click here.
Alaska:
--The departure of our van from Bellingham to Talkeetna last week made it into the Alaska Daily Dispatch. We ran a blog on Friday about the van's departure and the start of the Alaska season. To read more, click here.
--Jeff Wyshynski was carving turns on a beautiful slope in Alaska when an avalanche struck. Like a handful of others recently, Jeff was wearing a helmet cam during his descent. The difference here was that he deployed a Backcountry Access Float 30. This is a pack that deploys an airbag in order to keep the person on top of the snow. Jeff deployed the bag and walked away seemingly uninjured. To see the video, click below. To read more, click here.
Himalaya:
--Sixty Minutes produced a piece that paints Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools author Greg Mortenson in a very unflattering light. They claim that there are holes in his story and that there are other problems with the schools that he was purported to build. There are additional financial questions. To see the clip, click here. To see the angry response made by the editors of Explorer's Web, click here. To read Mortensen's full response, see the Bozeman Daily Chronicle. To read a report about this in the Los Angeles Times, click here. To read the Central Asia Institute's response to this the Sixty Minutes report, click here. Outside Magazine did an extensive interview with Mortenson that can be found here. Duane Raleigh at Rock and Ice says that if "Mortenson is the the face of corruption, the rest of us are definitely going straight to hell." To read his defense, click here.
--"The Swiss Machine," Uli Steck has soloed the 6,500-foot south face of Shishapangma (26,335') in 10.5 hours. To read more, click here.
Notes from All Over:
--Wolf Creek Ski Area in Colorado's Summit County could be facing $12,000 in fines related to the death of Scott Kay, the area’s ski patrol director. Kay died November 22 while doing avalanche control work alone at the ski area in southwestern Colorado. John Healy, OSHA‘s regional area director, said the agency found three serious alleged violations during its inspection at Wolf Creek. To read more, click here.
--A 22-year-old Atlanta man walked away with minor injuries after falling thirty-feet at Looking Glass Rock, according to rescue workers. The man, who said he was an experienced rock climber, fell to a ledge that was about 80 feet from the ground at about noon Tuesday, according to Brevard Rescue Squad Assistant Chief Brian Kreigsman. To read more, click here.
--The recipients of the 2010 Piolet d'Or were announced last week in Chamonix, France. The winners were Nicolas Favresse, Oliver Favresse. Sean Villanueva, Ben Ditto, and Bob Shepton for their ascents and exploration on the coast of Greenland. And Katasutaka Yokoyama and Yasushi Okada for their ascent of Mount Logan's Southeast Face. To read more, click here and here and here.
--Legendary Adirondack Pioneer Jim Goodwin died on April 7th at the age of 101. Goodwin was well-known to the East Coast climbing community as both a prolific first ascentionist and guide. To read more, click here and here and here.
--The 11th anniversary of Adopt a Crag was another great year with over 4,300 volunteers and 32,000 hours of work to improve and steward crags around the country. Since its inception in 1999, Adopt a Crag has been the largest climbing community volunteer initiative throughout the nation. Adopt a Crag events show land managers and the public that climbers take care of the places they climb. These stewardship efforts not only conserve our climbing areas, but also strengthen the reputation of the entire climbing community. To read more, click here.
--There was a very important emergency that everyone should know about in Colorado's Aspen Ski resort. The Onion reports on it, here.
