Commercial/music video director Wiland Pinsdorf’s SAMPARKOUR is “a short that reveals the city of São Paulo (Brazil) under the look of Parkour. Where people see obstacles, Zico Corrêa visualizes new possibilities.”
Shot in HD with a 35mm lens adapter, the short is simultaneously dizzying and becalming, presenting Corrêa’s death-defying feats in a breathtaking rush of carefully framed shots and well-paced edits. Today –perhaps more than most days– it is deeply satisfying to witness a collaboration (between filmmaker and athlete, city and gravity) so vital, immediate, and perfectly alive.
“Parahawking is a unique activity combining paragliding with elements of falconry. Birds of prey are trained to fly with paragliders, guiding them to thermals for in-flight rewards and performing aerobatic manoeuvres.
Parahawking was developed by British falconer Scott Mason in 2001. Mason began a round-the-world trip in Pokhara, Nepal, where many birds of prey – such as the griffon vulture, steppe eagle and black kite – can be found. While taking a tandem paragliding flight with British paraglider Adam Hill, he had the opportunity to see raptors in flight, and realized that combining the sport of paragliding with his skills as a falconer could offer others the same experience. He has been based in Pokhara ever since, training and flying birds during the dry season between September and March.
The team started by training two black kites, but have since added an Egyptian vulture and a Mountain hawk-eagle to the team. Only rescued birds are used – none of the birds has been taken from the wild.”
“A voyage to fabled Timbuktu in a flying car may sound like a magical childhood fantasy. But this week a British adventurer will set off from London on an incredible journey through Europe and Africa in a souped-up sand buggy, travelling by road - and air.
With the help of a parachute and a giant fan-motor, Neil Laughton plans to soar over the Pyrenees near Andorra, before taking to the skies again to hop across the 14-km (nine-mile) Straits of Gibraltar. The ex-SAS officer then aims to fly over the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, above stretches of the Sahara desert and, well, wherever else the road runs out. But forget Chitty Chitty Bang Bang - this flying machine is based on proven technology.”
“It’s a summer night in Oz Park and Michael Zernow, whom everyone here knows as “Frosti,” is undressed for action. Wearing nothing but black shorts, yellow sneakers, and a black skullcap, he stands on a two-inch-wide plank and prepares to run a precarious route on, over, and around the play lot equipment he’s using as an obstacle course.
Frosti takes a flying leap from the top crossbar of a wooden play set to a ledge on another playset several yards away that looks like a castle rampart. His feet land with perfect precision. He then winds in and out of the structure’s various openings like a centipede. After crawling along the exterior of the play set, he takes another flying leap, about four feet down to the ground. His landing makes barely a sound. His bare torso—inscribed with a tattoo that says change yourself, inspire the people, save the world—is glistening with sweat.
The discipline he has just demonstrated is called parkour, which in France, where it originated, means “obstacle course” and is also known as “the art of displacement.” Parkour is based on finding ways to get from point A to point B in the quickest manner possible. Typically, that means jumping over, climbing on, or flipping off of any obstacle in your path. Frosti’s version of parkour also incorporates elements of “freerunning,” a variation that emphasizes stunts more than speed. If you saw the 2006 Bond movie Casino Royale, you saw Daniel Craig chase the creator of freerunning, Sebastian Foucan, up, down, and around a construction site, including the cranes.”
“Three Canadian adventurers have broken the world record for the fastest unassisted journey to the South Pole. Ray Zahab of Chelsea, Richard Weber of Cantley and Kevin Vallely of Vancouver reached their destination yesterday morning. They travelled across Antarctica from Hercules Inlet on the Ronne Ice Shelf to the South Pole in 33 days, breaking the previous record of 39 days set earlier this winter. Mr. Zahab travelled on foot and on snowshoes, while Mr. Weber and Mr. Vallely skied the more than 1,130-kilometre distance.
The trio filed regular updates via satellite phone to their website, www. southpolequest.com, which was tracked by about 3,000 schoolchildren in Canada and the U.S. “So the great news is we have arrived in world-record time at the geographic South Pole, in 33 days, 23 hours and 30 minutes,” Mr. Zahab wrote in a blog. “We are here, guys, and in the coming next 24-48 hours you’ll get a lot of photos.” They survived altitude sickness, enormous blisters, countless frozen snowdrifts, known as sastrugi, and blinding whiteouts.”
“Todd Carmichael has officially set a new solo and unsupported world speed record to the South Pole. His time of 39 days, 7 hours, and 33 minutes bested former world record holder Hannah McKeand’s time of 39 days, 9 hours, and 33 minutes set back in 2006. This is an official time coming from Todd’s tracking equipment and being reported by ExplorersWeb. How close was it? The difference between Todd and Hannah is 1 hour and 44 minutes - or less than 0.2% of the time on the ice. If the same difference was applied to a 100 meter dash, it would equal less than 0.02 seconds - just barely measurable with modern time keeping.
Along with gaining the new official solo and unsupported world speed record, Todd Carmichael has also become the first American to go solo and unsupported to the South Pole. It is still undecided if Todd will gain the record for going the longest distance on foot. When I first interviewed Todd before this journey, becoming the first American to go solo and unsupported was his biggest priority. A week before he set foot on the ice, I got an email that nonchalently stated “I might as well go for the world speed record while I’m at it. What do you think?” Todd felt that his conditioning and preparation for this journey were miles ahead of where he was with his unsuccessful South Pole expedition last year. Obviously, we can now see how far ahead Todd was.”
“Recently it was discovered that the tallest building in the world - the Burj Dubai - had been the scene for a world record (and highly illegal) BASE jump. 1 British man attempted the jump and was successful, while a second man, a Frenchman, was caught before he could jump. They were both arrested and held in Dubai.
What is not known to either the authorities or the world in general, is that 2 men had already succeeded in climbing the tower and base jumping from it without being caught: another Brit and the same Frenchman who was later caught attempting a second jump. They were the first and have gone down as legends in their sport, for claiming the latest jewel in the crown of the sport. This is the story of that jump.”
“A daredevil teenager has become the first person ever to perform a backflip in a wheelchair. Aaron Fotheringham, 16, who is known to friends as ‘Wheels’, finally landed the official world record after learning the amazing acrobatic stunt two years ago. Aaron, who was born with spina bifida and has been in a chair since he was three, said: ‘It feels awesome to have the record.’
The American teenager is also credited with creating the sport of ‘hardcore sitting’ where daring stunts adapted from skateboarding and BMX are performed in a wheelchair. ‘It’s wonderful,’ said his mother, Kaylene Fotheringham after he was accepted by the World Records Accademy last month. ‘We always thought he was the first one to do it but today we know he has the world record.’ He began doing stunts at the age of nine when his elder brother Brian took him to their local skate-park in Las Vegas.Brian encouraged him to go down a ramp and the obsession was born.
Now Aaron gets flown all over the world to perform stunts and spends at least three hours a day practicing.‘I love being in a wheelchair,’ said Aaron. ‘Everyone thinks “Oh you’re disabled that’s such a terrible thing” but I think it’s positive.‘It’s like being able to carry your skateboard everywhere with you. People don’t realise how much can be done in a chair.’”
(via The Daily Mail. There’s a better video of his backflip and his struggles to get it right, here.)
What is Rage Froobling? It seems to be an aggressive and competitive version of Parkour. Since it’s a fairly new thing, there’s not much available on the net about it. Parkour is a mind/body discipline with the objective of moving from point A to point B as efficiently and quickly as possible. It is frequently used in military training and is used as a means to overcome obstacles in an emergency.
“Parkour is a physical activity that is difficult to categorize. It is often mis-categorized as a sport or an extreme sport; however, parkour has no set of rules, team work, formal hierarchy, or competitiveness. It is an art or discipline that resembles self-defense in the ancient martial arts. According to David Belle, “the physical aspect of parkour is getting over all the obstacles in your path as you would in an emergency. You want to move in such a way, with any movement, as to help you gain the most ground on someone or something, whether escaping from it or chasing toward it.” Thus, when faced with a hostile confrontation with a person, one will be able to speak, fight, or flee. As martial arts are a form of training for the fight, parkour is a form of training for the flight. Because of its unique nature, it is often said that parkour is in its own category.
A characteristic of parkour is efficiency. Practitioners move not only as fast as they can, but also in the most direct and efficient way possible; a characteristic that distinguishes it from the similar practice of freerunning, which places more emphasis on freedom of movement, such as acrobatics. Efficiency also involves avoiding injuries, short and long-term, part of why parkour’s unofficial motto is être et durer (to be and to last). Those who are skilled at this activity normally have an extremely keen spatial awareness (a.k.a. air sense). Traceurs say that parkour also influences one’s thought process by enhancing self-confidence and critical-thinking skills that allow one to overcome everyday physical and mental obstacles. A study by Neuropsychiatrie de l’Enfance et de l’Adolescence in France reflects that traceurs seek for more sensation and leadership than gymnastic practitioners.”
Well, why not? How about some glow-in-the-dark signs to find it at night?
On a serious note, there are a lot of stories about mountaineers getting sick from drinking melted snow contaminated by human waste. Having some portable toilets in some designated areas might alieviate the sickness suffered by those who depend on melted snow for a water source. As a nature lover and avid hiker I’m disgusted by the amount of trash and graffiti I find in our national parks. Please take your trash with you. Let’s leave our wild areas clean for all to enjoy.
“A young Nepali climber is seeking to popularize a toilet fashioned from a plastic bucket with a lid to promote eco-friendly climbing on Mount Everest.Hundreds of climbers flock to the world’s tallest peak at 8,850 meters (29,035 feet) every year, with many simply squatting in the open or hunching behind rocks as the Everest base camp has no proper toilet facilities. Dawa Steven Sherpa, who led an eco-Everest expedition in May to collect trash dumped by previous climbers, said his team used a plastic bucket as well as a gas-impervious bag designed to safely contain and neutralize human waste and keep in odor.
“It is portable and very secure,” Sherpa, 25, told Reuters. “I want to promote anything that manages human waste on the mountain.” Sherpa’s team, during its month-long expedition, picked up 965 kg (2,100 pounds) of cans, gas canisters, kitchen waste, tents, parts of an Italian helicopter that crashed 35 years ago and remains of the body of a British climber who died in 1972. In addition, his team also brought down 65 kg of human waste produced by its 18 members, which it handed over to a local environment group at the base camp for management. “To date, no other container designed for human waste exists in this size, weight or strength,” Sherpa said of the U.S.-designed bucket, which is 11 inches tall and weighs 2.4 pounds, and has an opening that is eight inches in diameter.”
“Pete Takeda’s book An Eye At The Top of The World has reportedly be optioned for a movie, and will be coming to the big screen soon, according to this story over at RockandIce.com. Producers Steve Schwartz, Paula Mae Schwartz and Nick Wechsler have purchased the rights to the true story and intend to make it into a fictional film.
The book, which I reviewed back in May of 2007, deals with a CIA plot back in the 60’s to install a nuclear powered listening device on Nanda Devi in a remote region of India. The device was suppose to watch the burgeoning Chinese nuclear program and watch for test of their atom bombs. After months of extensive training, a climbing team went up the mountain carrying the device, but near the top, bad weather set in, so rather than carrying the heavy device back down the mountain, they elected to lash it to a rock, and return in the spring to complete the mission.
When the team returned several months later, they discovered that an avalanche had swept the device off the mountain, and it was never seen again. Presumably it was deposited thousands of feet below in a glacier. Over time, the area was closed off, and rumors arose that the mountain was radioactive. The nuclear power plant had more than four pounds of plutonium in it, enough to poison everyone on the planet, and the theory is that it was broken open on the glacier, and may be moving towards Ganges River, home to millions of people.”
“He was known as the king of the Yosemite lifers, that proud band of rock climbers, tightrope walkers and seekers who made camp on the margins of the law, sleeping under the black oaks and sequoias and California stars. On his shoulders he carried an 80-pound constellation of canvas stowage, books and sweatpants, bottled water and mushy food, a sleeping bag and a reserve sleeping bag meant for some encountered companion of the road. To the government, he was Charles Victor Tucker III, scourge of Yosemite National Park, fixture of the lodge cafeteria. To acquaintances, he was Chuck, harmless and stoned jester of the mountains. And to climbers the world over he remains Chongo, the Monkey Man, named for the sticky soles he had once fashioned from Mexican rubber. ‘I learned a lot from Chongo,’ said Ivo Ninov, 32, an accomplished guide from Bulgaria, ‘because he was the father of big wall climbing.’
But the fullness of Chongo’s legacy would appear only through his disappearance from rock climbing, a passage from sylvan to urban wilds that has made him a stranger to his sport and an outcast from his home, now reduced to sleeping under a tractor-trailer. Along the way, he would find a new kind of homelessness, and a new sense of mission. Even among outliers, Chongo, 57, had always diverged. In a time of corporate sponsorships, he lived on charity, scavenging and bartering handmade wares. In a time of brand-name gear, he rigged worthy contraptions from found parts. In a time of speed-climbing records, he gained renown for his comically deliberate ascents. Once, he stretched an assault on El Capitan across two weeks, including three days spent pausing to consider some half-forgotten existential puzzle.
Dumb jokes congealed around his legend, for he projected a familiar and comforting sort of weirdness. Around a campfire or a cafeteria table, tourists and weekend warriors could find in Chongo a certain box to cross off, the obligatory aging hippie recounting unintentionally hilarious misadventures, denouncing the prison-industrial complex and rhapsodizing on junk science.”
Amazing true story of survival and the strength of the human will. Two mountaineers, Simon Yates and Joe Simpson climb the Suila Grande in Peru. They reach the summit, and on the descent (where about 80% of all fatalities happen) Joe breaks his leg. Simon attempts to help him down the mountain when Joe is left hanging over an icy cliff by a rope with no ability to climb it. Simon realizes that if doesn’t cut the rope they both will die, and he cuts the rope. Joe falls into a crevice, and is given up for dead. The story then focuses on Joe’s journey, injured and alone, but determined to make it back to base camp alive. With the mountain as a metaphor for life and death, this movie is an inspirational testament for the indomitableness of the human body and spirit.
“In part one of an exclusive interview, Sir Ranulph Fiennes discusses his recent attempt on Mt Everest in aid of Marie Curie Cancer Care with Trail Magazine’s Simon Ingram. Here, Sir Ran reveals what it was like going back to Everest, what happened in the last 24 hours, and why he turned back.”
“Exactly a decade has passed since a man called Oxygen first hurled himself across Amerika. Known for his jumping ability, Oxygen, a lanky Czech, catapulted to legend status by leaping a nearly 10-foot-wide abyss separating two 100-foot sandstone spires. Today, Petr Kops, 21, is wearing Oxygen’s hand-me-down pants. ‘I did not know Oxygen personally, but my sister did,’ Kops said. ‘I wear his trousers for good luck.’
Minutes later, Kops was standing at the edge of a 70-foot chasm called Broken Bones. He announced that he was about to damage his ankle. Then he jumped. While it may seem suicidal, leaping across a gaping crevasse is actually an extreme sport that is gaining in popularity. Called rock jumping, or simply jumping by the locals, this adrenaline-charged activity is taking place in the Adrspach-Teplice Rocks, a remote nature preserve in the northeast part of the Czech Republic.”
“He had learned this extreme form of tightrope walking from a homeless man who wrote books on quantum physics. But that was years ago, while goofing around on a flexible piece of nylon webbing tied close to the ground between a tree and the bumper of a Chevy van.
This was something else entirely for Dean Potter, one of the world’s best climbers, barefoot in the dying sun last Friday, walking between ledges of a U-shaped rim above Hell Roaring Canyon, a 400-foot sheer sandstone wall on his right, a 900-foot drop to a dry riverbed on his left. No leash tethered him to the rope. Nothing attached him to earth but the grip of his size-14 feet and the confident belief that, if needed, his parachute would open quickly and cleanly and not slam him into the canyon wall.
At 6 feet 5 inches and 180 pounds, wirily strong, Potter dressed in jeans and blue T-shirt emblazoned with a hawk. He wore a wide headband over unruly hair, gaining the appearance of a less gaunt and reckless Keith Richards as Alpine daredevil. As Potter stepped onto the 180-foot rope - a strand of iridescent blue against desiccated canyon shades of brick and tan and coppery green - he was believed to be the first person to combine the adventure sports of highlining and BASE-jumping.”
