Archive for the ‘Extreme weather’ Category

It has been predicted that the 165 RacingThePlanet competitors from 30 countries will experience soaring temperatures and extreme weather during this event, adding to the already challenging nature of the 250 kilometre rough-country footrace.

Five years ago, temperatures reached as high as 50 degrees Celsius and with this year’s race taking place in June instead of April, competitors could be racing in similar if not hotter temperatures.

“The competitors are going to find the heat in the Gobi Desert oppressive. It’s not humid, but below sea-level it can be stifling when there’s no breeze. They will also have to prepare for the worst as the weather is so unpredictable in the Gobi, storms can blow up from nowhere and temperatures can vary wildly between night and day and in different areas along the 250 kilometre course. Couple this with the changing terrains the competitors will face and the race will be a stern test of good preparation and adaptability,” said Founder of RacingThePlanet, Mary Gadams.

On his blog David Casselli from New Zealand (Survived. Hell it’s getting hot here) summed up day 3:  “The last stage (3) was running up and down moonscapes. I have never run across so many sharp rocks in my life. And …. to cap it off, they made us climb a peak and run down the ridge line. Terrifying …. but ‘fast and loose’ was the solution.

It’s 40C and I am roasting.

Day 4 tomorrow – 37km before we take on the 99km longest day. The river was great, but the next 2 days sound terrible.”

Denvy Lo from Hong Kong was, at the end of day 3, thoroughly enjoying herself: “I am enjoying every minute of it here – life should be like this, I reckon, as all I do is run, eat and sleep. Brilliant.”

Results for Day 4 have just come in. 125 runners have completed all 4 stages. David Parr (33) from Great Britain is leading the field with an impressive overall time of 11hrs 34mins 40 secs. Denvy Lo (29) is the leading woman with an overall time of 17hrs 52 mins 59 secs. 25 people have not completed all 4 sections, 3 have withdrawn and 5 did not start at all.

Parr is raising money for Sparks, the children’s medical research charity. Denvy Lo is supporting the Shark Rescue Charity.

Wanda Summers from the UK is one of the amazing people taking place in this race. She ran the Marathon des Sables in 2008, but broke her back when parachuting in 2009. Yet here she is in this most extreme of extreme races with a very admirable overall time of 22 hrs and 47 mins under her belt at the moment. This is her first attempt at a 4 Deserts race. She is supporting the charity Shelter Box Trust – a registered UK charity which provides emergency aid for victims of natural and other disasters anywhere in the world.

An inspiration to us all…

You might have heard about the seriously extreme weather we had here in the South of France last week. Here at our home we had 230 mls in a few hours, but luckily we live in a very old house and those old Paysans knew where to situate their homes some 300-odd years ago. Slightly further north from us they had more than 300 mls and the devastation was and is appalling.

The Med comes up beautifully in bad weather, but pretty well the best we can hope for is 3m high waves and that’s pretty extreme for us. Nothing like this gorgeous video. Feast your eyes on surfing on Jaws (mauicoconuts)….

Mount Logan, at 19850 feet, reigns as Canada’s highest peak and the second highest peak in North America, second to Mount McKinley, and has had, to date, one of the great unclimbed walls on the North American continent.

Mount Logan from the southwest

That was until early-May, 2010, when two men, Yasushi Okada and Katsutake ‘Jumbo’ Yokoyama, both from Japan, climbed the 2,500-meter (8,200′) wall alpine-style over three long days, and then continued to the east summit of Logan at 5,900 meters (19,357′), before descending via the extremely long east ridge.

Okada traversing on Day 3, high on the route.
UKC News, 19 May 2010
© Katsutaka Yokoyama

Logan is a double challenge because of its extreme weather. On the high 5,000 m plateau, air temperature hovers around −45 °C (−49 °F) in the winter and reaches near freezing in summer with the median temperature for the year around −27 °C (−17 °F). A temperature of −77.5 °C (−108 °F) was recorded in 1991. Minimal snow melt leads to a significant ice cap, reaching almost 300 m (984 ft) in certain spots.

On May 4, in good weather, Okada and Yokoyama started up the south wall, climbing the right-hand rib on the face, the only line not threatened by hanging glaciers. Above the steep ice and snow of the lower wall, they found a cache left in 2007 by Tackle, Smith, and Fabrizio Zangrilli. They then continued up and left into the steepest section of the face. Yokoyama said the crux was a 200-metre stretch of climbing with thin ice, loose rock, and M6 dry tooling.

Above this, the technical difficulty eased but the psychological pressure grew, despite mostly good weather. “The higher we climbed, the more confidence [we had] that rappelling on the same route is out of the question,” Yokoyama said, “because there were a lot of traverses, loose rock, and it’s simply big.”

They reached the east ridge at nearly 11 p.m. on their third day of climbing, and the following day completed the ascent up to the east summit, where they “decided to descend via the east ridge without hesitation,” Yokoyama said. Two other climbers had left fresh tracks along the ridge, which made the descent much easier than expected, but it was still a 30-kilometer walk back to base camp.

They follow in the footsteps of other intrepid adventurers. In 1922, a geologist approached the Alpine Club of Canada with the suggestion that the club send a team to the mountain to reach the summit for the first time. An international team of Canadian, British and American climbers was assembled and after a delayed start due to various hiccups, they finally got going in 1925.They began their journey in early May, crossing the mainland from the Pacific coast by train. They then walked the remaining 200 kilometres (120 miles) to within 10 kilometres (6 miles) of the Logan Glacier where they established base camp. In the early evening of June 23, 1925, Albert H. MacCarthy (leader), H.F. Lambart, Allen Carpé, W.W. Foster, N. Read and Andy Taylor stood on top for the first time. It had taken them 65 days to approach the mountain from the nearest town, McCarthy, summit and return, with all climbers intact.

The Alaska-Yukon ace climber Jack Tackle had attempted the south route twice over a 10-year span, getting about 3,000 feet up the wall both times. Although he still considers this line on Logan to be his “last great project” he helped the Japanese climbers with photos and advice.

In an email to Jack Tackle, on their return, Yokoyama wrote, “It’s too much honour for me to get such a great line and share this route with you. We named the route I-TO, which means thread, line, relationship, etc.”

We have all experienced a winter of varying degrees of severity. Here in the south of France we have had so much rain over the past few months that the ground is just oozing water. Two days ago a socking great cyprus tree fell over and squashed our car – the ground so saturated with water that there was no support any more for the root system. The whole thing came up … roots and all.

But that’s nothing compared to some of the disasters happening around the world, and Mongolia is one of them. I will copy The Adventurists entire plea for help here. Please click on the links and they’ll take you through. Thank you.

The Adventurists visit every year, and now

Mongolia needs our help.

Thousands of animals have died in Mongolia since the cold set in. The Adventurists have launched an emergency appeal to raise funds for the purchasing and distribution of food to the herders for their horses and other livestock.

Please donate to AVSF through this AFD JustGiving page: our initial target is £5,000, we hope with your help we’ll smash this.

The Current Situation

Mongolia is experiencing extreme weather conditions, which is killing thousands of animals across the country. The herders need food for their animals, but there is very little stock available in Mongolia. Emergency measures are being taken by Agronomes et Veterinaires Sans Frontieres (AVSF) to import feed from China and Russia. Funds are desperately needed to pay for the food and its distribution to save the herders’ animals.

Goats, sheep and horses have been dying every single day of hunger and cold, and even the hardy yaks are suffering and numbers are dwindling, leaving their herders with no livelyhood and no means to feed or support their families.

What is being done

AVSF – an Official Charity for the Mongol Derby 2010 – are already working on the ground t o procure and distribute food to the herders. So far they have implemented the procurement and distribution of two food deliveries, each mission taking two weeks.

During that time they also checked the animals for disease and foot rot, and helped the herders with their own efforts to save the livestock. Locals are rallying round, donating a day’s salary as regularly as possible towards food purchases, and sewing coats and pelts together to shelter the animals from the cold.

AVSF have mobilised exceptional funds from current projects in an effort to help during this emergency and are already responding to the consequences they see occurring by restructuring their 2010/2011 programmes to meet the new needs the local people now face. The charity are realistic about this weather – this is not short term – it’s here until the summer months and the knock on effects will be seen for many more months to come.

How you can help

AVSF have the use of the trucks, access to sources of food and the means to distribute the food. They’re desperately in need of immediate funds to buy the food and the fuel to reach the herders in the Steppe. 100% of the funds you donate will go to help the herders and their livestock right now, and save the lives of hundreds of animals and contribute to the rebuilding of the herds.

Adventures for Development (AFD) is the UK registered charity collecting funds in the UK for AVSF. They will transfer your donation in full to AVSF. If you’re a French tax payer, please donate directly through AVSF’s website www.avsf.org.

Thank you, your donations will make a difference fast and be greatly appreciated.

The Adventurists
http://www.theadventurists.com

We are showing a cerebral video this weekend for a change (FFreeThinker). Something that slips into our extreme weather catagory. Make of it what you will, but if people would only stop bickering and commit themselves to the future, I am sure there will be something better there for our children than the way we are going now…

Charity for Change (CharityForChange) have come out with some  facts about America. Snow, for example – which state has the most?

Which is the hottest?

From previous articles of ours talking about the Badwater Ultra-marathon and the 508 Cycle Race in Death Valley, we know that Death Valley is the hottest place in the States with searing temperatures. The highest ever recorded there was  134 °F (56.7 °C) in 1913. It also dominates the records for being the hottest place in continental America on any single day.  And this is a place where extreme competitions take place!

Places in the US that have reached temperatures of at least 49 C or 120 °F:

In contrast, the lowest temperature ever recorded in the United States was -80 °F (-62 °C) on January 23, 1971 at Prospect Creek Camp, located near the Arctic Circle along the Alaska pipeline. This is not much warmer than the -81.4 °F record low for North America that Snag in the Yukon dropped to on February 3, 1947. On that record cold February day, Tanacross Alaska reached -75 °F.

Montana, too, has a record to be proud of – or should I say scared of? It takes the record for being the coldest place in the continental US with a temperature of -70 °F on January 20, 1954 at Rogers Pass, Montana. The pass sits at 5,470 feet elevation in the Rocky Mountains, northwest of Helena.

On any single day, the mountain town of Stanley, Idaho, is most often the coldest place in the 48 continental states.

Other states in the US which have dropped to-45 C or  -50 F or below are:

Is it significant that none of these dates are recent?

This Sumo wrestler (thesnowfiles) would be perfectly content in these conditions I feel…

And if climate change is so dramatic and the snow starts melting, we could always try to get a taste for this alternative skiing (Sony6Honda)…

Let’s hope the powers that be decide to do something about global warming before we are reduced to that!