1963 American Summit: Jim Whittaker – Back on Earth

Roped men on the 1963 American team climb Lhotse’s face carrying supplies for Everest’s South Col camp.

Photograph by Barry Bishop, National Geographic

By Michael Shnayerson

Forty years ago, Jim Whittaker, age 34, was selected from a group of elite mountaineers to be the first American atop Everest. That twist of fate would open up a world of soaring successes, bitter failures, public fame, and personal tragedy. He wouldn’t trade a day of it for anything.

Originally published in the May 2003 issue of National Geographic Adventure

He’s a big man still, nearly six and a half feet tall and broad-shouldered at 74, though his hair is now wispier and mostly white. At the fog-shrouded marina in Port Townsend, Washington, James “Big Jim” Whittaker looks like an old sea salt, and that he is: His steel-hulled, 54-foot sailing yacht, Impossible, where he likes to entertain visitors, is tied up at a nearby pier. But the license plate on his Chevy TrailBlazer tells the more important story. It reads “29028.” On May 1, 1963, Whittaker became the first American to climb that many feet toward the heavens to plant a flag.

Whittaker came home to national headlines, a parade in his hometown of Seattle, and a Rose Garden tribute from President Kennedy. The American conquest of Mount Everest made the covers of Life and National Geographic(the Society was one of the trip’s sponsors), and Whittaker was voted Man of the Year in Sports by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The reverberations of the Cuban missile crisis were still being felt, Cold War tensions remained high, and the race between America and the Soviet Union to put a man on the moon was under way. In that heated climate, America was ready for a new hero. With his lean good looks and modest manner, 34-year-old Whittaker stepped into the role effortlessly, an alpine Jimmy Stewart.

Whittaker’s long, still-powerful legs barely fit under the polished wood table inImpossibe’s cozy mahogany-paneled den. This is his third boat namedImpossible; during flush times the first was traded in for a larger version, which was sold off years later when Whittaker’s finances crashed. For three years at the end of the 1990s—around the time that the mountain that made him famous was resurveyed at 29,035 feet—the current Impossible was home to him, his wife, Dianne, and their two young sons, Joss and Leif, as they sailed halfway around the world. A map on one wall traces the family’s route from Port Townsend across the Pacific to Australia: one more challenge in a life built on taking chances. Whittaker writes in his autobiography, A Life on the Edge: “If you stick your neck out, whether it’s by climbing mountains or speaking up for something you believe in, your odds of winning are at least fifty-fifty. If you take risks with preparation and care, you can increase those odds significantly in your favor. On the other hand, if you never stick your neck out, your odds of losing are pretty close to 100 percent.”

At the life-defining moment he stood in the frozen netherworld of Everest’s summit, gasping for air from his empty oxygen bottle, Big Jim Whittaker could not have guessed that this ascent was about to fling him into a world far beyond climbing. As Louis Reichardt, a neurobiologist who later climbed K2 with him, puts it, “Along with Willi Unsoeld, Jim is far and away the most interesting of the American mountaineers, because he’s done so much else.”

Whittaker had been flattered, but unsurprised, to have received an invitation from Swiss-born climber Norman Dyhrenfurth in 1960 to join the team he was assembling for a first U.S. assault of Everest. Both Jim and his twin brother, Lou, had established reputations by their early 30s as two of the best climbers in the Pacific Northwest. Jim Whittaker had also made a name for himself as the general manager of a small but fast-growing Seattle co-op that sold climbing gear to members at a discount—Recreational Equipment, Inc., or REI.

“I’d never been to the Himalaya before,” says Whittaker. “But I’d been to 20,320-foot-high McKinley. I’d trained hard, put 60 pounds of bricks in my backpack. I swam in Lake Sammamish in [winter] to build up to the cold we would encounter. I didn’t know anyone who was in better shape.” When the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research, which was helping to fund the expedition, asked the climbers in the summer of 1962 if they’d be able to summit, most replied, “I hope so” or “I’m going to do my best.” Whittaker’s response: “Yeah, I will.”

Deserted Land

Upon hearing the word “desert” most people conjure up images of lots of sand and heat. It’s a common misconception. Some deserts are blazing hot and others happen to be the coldest, least sandy places on Earth, like Antarctica, for instance, or the frigid Gobi Desert of China.

About the only thing all deserts have in common is their lack of abundant and reliable water. They are dry. That, as the word implies, makes them some of the most open, treeless, deserted lands in the world. And because they are already living on the edge, the habitats of desert animals and plants also tend to be among the most easily disrupted, according to desert researchers.

Desert Recipe
In the simplest terms, a desert can be defined as anyplace where the rain- or snowfall is less than the rate that things dry up. As to why they exist at all, one need look no further than a satellite image of Earth, or a world map with all the major deserts highlighted, to see that there’s a method to the planet’s deserts: The majority of desert lands fall inside two bands north and south of the tropics, at midlatitudes.

The reason for this is atmospheric. It starts in the tropics where there the sun beats down ferociously and evaporates a lot of water, causing the thunderheads to pile up. As that warmed air reaches higher altitudes, it cools and rains out its moisture, then is pushed toward the poles by global air currents. This dried-out air tends to cycle back down over the midlatitudes where it creates high-pressure systems. High-pressure systems result in fair, dry weather, as any meteorologist can attest, whereas low-pressure systems spawn storms.

Another thing that grows deserts is the rain shadow effect, which is created by mountains blocking wet weather from inland areas. When a storm has to climb a mountain, its air cools with the higher altitude and produces more rain and snow — dumping the moisture on the mountains. By the time the air makes it to the desert, it’s squeezed dry.

Some desert areas have multiple mountain ranges blocking moisture, like Death Valley, in California, which is cut off from Pacific Ocean storms by no less than three mountain ranges. Other deserts are behind only one range, but they are real doozies: the Atacama of Peru, which is behind the Andes, and the Tibetan Plateau and Gobi, which are behind the gigantic Himalayas.

A third ingredient for a desert is cool water offshore — if an ocean is nearby, that is. Cold currents, like those off the western United States, western and southern Australia, or southwestern Africa, don’t tend to spawn summer rainstorms, and they keep coastal and interior areas dry. It’s the opposite case along the Atlantic Coast of the U.S., which has very warm waters from the Gulf Stream. The warm, moist air makes for muggy summers and wetter winters as well.

 

By Larry O’Hanlon

New Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport Vitesse

Posted by: Matthew Jones, 22 February 2012

Please be upstanding for the most powerful factory-built roadster in the history of TIME – the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport Vitesse.

So, what sort of numbers does a convertible need to be the fastest in the world? 1184bhp and 1105lb ft. That’s 197bhp and 183lb ft up from the cooking variety Veyron’s 987bhp and 922lb ft. Or roughly one Golf GTI more…

Extra power’s been teased out of the 16-cylinder engine by enlarging the four – FOUR – turbochargers and intercoolers. The chassis’s also been beefed up to support the extra muscle.

Bugatti President Wolfgang Dürheimer says: “The rapid success of the Super Sport convinced us to increase the performance of the Bugatti roadster… Our engineers worked hard to demonstrate that Bugatti is able to constantly redefine the boundaries of what is technically feasible.”

No performance stats have been released yet, but if it’s anything like the Veyron Super Sport, it’ll hover around 2.5 seconds to 62mph. That’s 0.2 seconds faster than the current Grand Sport. Pricing’s equally mysterious, but we reckon it’ll be in the region of £2.1m.

BEAR GRYLLS

MAN VS. WILD host, author and seasoned adventurer BEAR GRYLLS began a lifetime of exploration at an early age.  Bear grew up on the Isle of Wight, and as a young boy would go mountain climbing with his father.

He served three years with the Special Air Service, a special forces unit of the British army. During his service, he broke his back in three places in a parachuting accident over Southern Africa.

Despite the accident and severity of his injury, Bear went on in 1998 to become, at age 23, one of the youngest ever climbers to summit Mount Everest. He wrote about his experience in the book, The Kid Who Climbed Everest.

Not content to slow down, Bear achieved another first when he and his Everest climbing group circumnavigated the United Kingdom on jet skis. He also led the first unassisted crossing of the frozen North Atlantic Ocean in an open rigid inflatable boat. His book about this adventure, Facing the Frozen Ocean, was shortlisted as the U.K.’s “Sports Book of the Year.” Bear was awarded a commission in the Royal Navy in honor of leading this record-breaking expedition.

In June 2005, Bear broke a world record by hosting a dinner party at a table suspended below a hot air balloon at 24,500 feet. He rappelled from the balloon’s basket to the table, where in full naval uniform he ate a three-course meal before saluting the queen and skydiving to earth. His goal was to support the work of two charities: the Prince’s Trust and the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award.

Bear hosted a 2005 television series for the U.K.’s Channel Four, called Escape to the Legion, in which he took a group of young men to the Western Sahara Desert to undergo the French Foreign Legion’s infamous basic training. A second Channel Four series, titled Born Survivor: Bear Grylls, completed its U.K. run in April 2007.

On May 15, 2007, Bear set another world record when he became the first person to fly over Mount Everest by powered paraglider. Supported by the GKN Mission Everest Team, Grylls and fellow pilot Giles (Gilo) Gardozo flew specially developed paramotors. Though a fault in Gilo’s machine forced him to abort only 1,000 feet below the summit, Bear continued to ascend until he reached 29,500 feet and was able to look down on Everest as he circled above some of the most famous peaks in the Himalayas. Then his own engine developed problems and he, too, had to glide back to safety — but he had achieved his goal. The mission raised $1 million for the Global Angels Foundation, a charity that supports children in Africa. Filmed by thePlanet Earth team, Bear and Gilo’s undertaking will be made into a two-hour documentary for Discovery Channel and Channel Four in the U.K.

Bear’s most recent book, Born Survivor: Survival Techniques From the Most Dangerous Places on Earth, was released in spring 2007. It is already listed on the Sunday Times Top 10 Best-Seller List.

He has hosted the Discovery Channel’s MAN VS. WILD, in which he strands himself in remote locations to demonstrate localized survival techniques, since November 2006.

Bear lives on a converted barge on the River Thames with his wife Shara and their young sons Jesse, Marmaduke and Huckleberry.

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Bear Grylls and the crew receive support when they are in potentially life threatening situations, as required by health and safety regulations.On some occasions, situations are presented to Bear so he can demonstrate survival techniques.

Professional advice should always be sought before entering any dangerous environment.

2012 Pictures: 6 Maya Apocalypse Myths Debunked

Myth: Space Strikes to Scramble Planet

Illustration courtesy Nicolle Rager-Fuller, NSF

The end of the world is near—December 21, 2012, to be exact—according to theories based on an purported ancient Maya calendar. Scientists, though, are tripping over themselves to deflate the ballooning hype as the new year dawns. (NASA itself recently felt compelled to issue a comprehensive 2012 fact check.)

(Related: “End of World in 2012? Maya ‘Doomsday’ Calendar Explained.”)

In some 2012 doomsday prophecies, the Earth becomes a deathtrap as it undergoes a “pole shift,” courtesy of an asteroid impact (illustrated above), a rare alignment with the center of the Milky Way, and/or massive solar radiation destabilizing the inner Earth by heating it.

The planet’s crust and mantle will suddenly shift, spinning around Earth’s liquid-iron outer core and sending cities crashing into the sea, the story goes. (Interactive: pole shift theories illustrated.)

Princeton University geologist Adam Maloof has extensively studied pole shifts, and tackled this myth in a 2009 National Geographic Channel documentary called 2012: Countdown to Armageddon (video).

Maloof says magnetic evidence in rocks confirms that continents have undergone such drastic rearrangement, but the process took millions of years—slow enough that humanity wouldn’t have felt the motion (quick guide to plate tectonics).

—With reporting by Brian Handwerk

The Maldives
From the air they look like a thousand shimmering jewels in a sea of velvet; an artist’s fantasy or a photographer’s dream. The Maldives, meaning ‘garland of islands’ has occupied a special place in the hearts of its visitors, reflected even in the very first writings about it. Marco Polo called it ‘flowers of the Indies’ others believed it was ‘one of the wonders of the world’. The Maldives consists of 1190 island grouped into 26 natural atolls. The atolls and islands of the Maldives are scattered over an area of 90,000 sq km in the Indian Ocean, straddling the equator between latitudes 7 6″ North and 041″ South and longitudes 72 32″ and 73 45″ East. Today the country is better known as an exotic tourist destination. Over few decades Maldives has gained tremendous growth in Tourism industry with over 500,000 (five hundred thousand) tourists to Maldives every year

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The National Geographic Society has been inspiring people to care about the planet since 1888. It is one of the largest non-profit scientific and educational institutions in the world. Its interests include geography, archaeology and natural science, the promotion of environmental and historical conservation.

Cliff Diving Tips from Guys Who Know

By Stephanie Pearson
Thu Dec 1, 2011 11:11 AM ET

Photo: Jakob Helbig/cultura/Corbis

Cliff divers have no margin for error. That’s why they put on such a good show. What does it take to hurl oneself off a 28-meter platform into the watery concrete below? We asked two of the best cliff divers in the world—2008 British Olympian Blake Aldridge and Purdue All-American David Colturi—their secrets for executing the perfect dive. We also asked them how they avoid splatting like a tomato when they hit the water.

For Blake, it’s all about mentality, letting your body take over and enjoying the ride down. David offers practical tips for a successful dive. Below, their best advice, in their own words.

Photo: David Pu

Cliff Diving Tips from Blake Aldridge

Standing on the end of the 28-meter platform is a feeling of complete concentration, immense fear, nerves, adrenalin, and excitement. It is the hardest thing to keep all these emotions under control, but this is how you don’t freak out.

Photo Credit: Roy Hessing

Most divers start normal diving first: 1- and 3-meter spring boards that bend and bounce. Divers will learn to dive spin and twist from all these heights. There are very few however, who decide to enter into a whole new world called cliff diving.

Most lead-ups are done from a 10-meter platform, but only a piece of the dive can be perfected at that height. There’s an 18-meter jump to the cliff diving platform, with no lead-up boards in the middle. You must be sure in your body and mind that the rest of the dive you haven’t been able to perfect is clear and you can visualize it before attempting it from 28 meters.
This is one of the reasons it can be so dangerous.

With Olympic diving, the only and best way to enter the water is head first, completely vertical with as little splash as possible. Cliff Diving is very similar, but you always go feet first, again completely vertical with as little splash as possible. The reason for the feet-first entry is that the impact in to the water is far too great for a head-first entry. The arms, neck, and shoulders just can’t take it.

When you leave the platform there seems to be a complete calm as you’re flying through the air, as if your body has taken over and your mind is on auto pilot. It’s an amazing feeling that only lasts for a split second. After this comes the entry, where you must spot the water and brace yourself for what can only be described as the biggest impact your body will ever feel; it’s like a shock wave from head to toe. Then the feeling of excitement, relief, and the joy that you’re still ok and able to do it again hits you as you start to come up from the bottom of the ocean.

Never think it’s easy, never attempt to dive if your mind is not feeling completely clear, and never think you are invincible.

Photo: Emily Breslin

Cliff Diving Tips from David Colturi

Relaxation techniques are key to staying calm before trying a high dive.  Mentally visualizing yourself performing the dive correctly and concentrating on your breathing are good ways to stay focused.

Platform diving anywhere from 10 to 28 meters requires solid fundamentals and confident lead-ups from lower heights. Having consistent feet-first entries and smooth, straight lines throughout your dives are helpful prerequisites before taking a leap from the top. Once it’s time to go, don’t overthink the dive; have one or two simple cues then let muscle memory take control and enjoy your flight.

The best way to break the surface is straight up and down on your feet, squeezing every one of your muscles tight to produce what’s called a “rip” entering the water with no splash and a piercing noise. The worst way would be completely laying yourself out horizontally over the water, either on your face or back. When jumping from 20 meters or higher, it’s best to have scuba divers in the water and medical personnel close by.

After leaving the platform, I focus on feeling the flips and twists throughout the dive, knowing where I am in the air. Once the dive is complete, spotting the water is a high diver’s final reference point before putting your feet on the water and standing straight up.

Never bail in the middle of a dive.  Even with a bad take off, try to finish as much of the dive as you can to find the water and put your feet down.

When it comes to seeing top notch cliff diving, there’s no better competition than the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series, which draws huge crowds with events around the world (including Boston Harbor).

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ALL-NEW EPISODES THIS SPRING!

Hosted by Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage — and co-hosted by Tory Belleci, Kari Byron and Grant Imahara — the MYTHBUSTERS mix scientific method with gleeful curiosity and plain old-fashioned ingenuity to create their own signature style of explosive experimentation.

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Read more: World Atlas: Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, Middle East, Oceania, … — Infoplease.com http://www.infoplease.com/atlas/#ixzz1eoCuxmZC

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