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Outside Magazine September 2001
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Expeditions
Because It's Still There
A new wave of adventurers makes the case that the world has much left to offer
By Brad Wetzler


Boldly going: approching Guna La, a peak in West Tibet's remote Gurla Mandhata Range, 1997
"I know wonderfully little about where we're going," says celebrated British mountaineer Sir Christian Bonington of the expedition he will lead this September to an obscure mountain range in the Ladakh region of northeast India. "But that's the beauty of it. Our only information comes from a few distant photographs and a satellite map. It's the real unknown."

Real unknown? Does such a thing still exist? Sticklers might argue that any place that's been mapped and photographed
Expedition Coverage
Sir Bonington and his team have established camp and begun climbing. Updates on their progress are posted here
can in no sense be called terra incognita. Nevertheless, Bonington's expedition, whose ranks also include British climber Jim Lowther and Boston-based Mark Richey, does seem to be attempting something with more, well, soul than the usual spring cattle drive up Mount Everest's South Col or the umpteenth attempt to complete the Seven Summits. Sixty-seven-year-old Bonington and his team will seek out adventure in a nearly pristine location and bring back new information about the area's people, places, and wildlife—renowned historian Daniel Boorstin's notion of "feedback," that quality separating true exploration from ordinary adventure. "You have to be clever to find the unknown," says Bonington, author of ten mountaineering books and the leader in 1975 of the first successful assault on Everest's southwest face. "But it's there."



Of course, untrampled ground wasn't always so difficult to come by. Barely 150 years ago, one could discover new lands in this country simply by strapping on a pair of sturdy boots and walking toward the sunset. But technology has since shrunk the world to the point where even the Himalayas are just a couple dozen hours and minibottles of scotch from any major city in America. It seemed exploration had reached its zenith in May 1953, when Hillary and Norgay topped out on Everest. And more than a few goal-obsessed climbers considered hanging up their spikes in 1986, when Reinhold Messner climbed Lhotse, the last of the world's fourteen 8,000-meter peaks, without supplemental oxygen.

So what remains? Well, as it turns out, a heck of a lot.

While untold numbers of rivers remain to be run and countless caves await the tools of scientists, the high mountains offer perhaps the best example of the earth's enormous untapped potential. Of the 448 peaks above 7,000 meters, a full 146 have never been summited. Countless routes in the Himalayas still remain to be climbed, a fact predicted by Sir Edmund Hillary as he stood on top of the world. "I remember looking out over the Himalayas and not thinking that I'd closed the door on exploration but rather just the opposite," says Hillary, now 82. "I remember thinking, 'God, the possibilities are endless—this range will never be fully explored.' It looks like I was right."

Indeed he was. A growing number of climbers are pursuing geographic objectives that are less apt to make headlines but more likely to be inwardly satisfying. Canadian adventurer Will Gadd, who prefers to employ several modes of travel—say, hang gliding and kayaking—to explore virgin territory, represents the new breed of climbers who rely on their imaginations as much as their technical skills. "Every generation says that there is nothing left to explore, that all future explorers might as well just sit on their ass and read about the great climbs of yore," says Gadd. "But the adventure to-do list on my computer has literally a thousand places I'd like to go—places that nobody I've known has ever seen."

British mountaineer Simon Yates, who earlier this year climbed an unnamed peak in Chile's Cordillera Darwin, has his own secret roster of must-do trips, crafted through intensive research, word of mouth, and frequent recon. "Even in the Alps you can find gaps between established routes where exploratory mountaineering is possible," says Yates. He then rattles off a dozen regions bristling with unclimbed peaks: Antarctica, Greenland, the Tien Shan range in central Asia, and crags all across Africa. "I've never understood why so many climbers gravitate toward ugly-piles-of-shit mountains," says Utah-based climber Greg Child. "I could walk into Pakistan's Karakoram range tomorrow and find hundreds of beautiful spires and walls chock-full of beautiful virgin routes."

Yet not all of the new breed of alpinists are greeted with approbation by purists. Take peak bagging—the act of compiling lists of somehow related mountains, and then ticking them off one by one, as with the Seven Summits, the highest peak on each continent. Proponents, like American Everest deity Ed Viesturs and Canadian photographer, writer, and climber Pat Morrow, argue that such lists actually promote adventurousness. "The very existence of lists is enough to generate or amplify people's interest in going to places they ordinarily wouldn't go," writes Morrow in the recent book Voices from the Summit. But detractors argue that lists are nothing more than contrived concatenations that overshadow the individual mountains. "Is there any reason to be the eighth person to climb all the 8,000ers?" asks Yates, 38. "Or to be the 117th person to climb the Seven Summits? It's ridiculous."

In a strange way, all these competing opinions about the meaning of exploration are probably a good sign that humans have nowhere near exhausted the earth's capacity to surprise us with new experiences. The growing ranks of climbers in search of virgin territory—spurred by grants such as W. L. Gore's Shipton/Tilman program and the Polartec Performance Challenge—should reassure anybody who doubts that explorers are as plucky as they used to be. As for Bonington and his team, any day now they should be beaming field reports back to civilization via the Web. And while the descriptions of towering rock faces, high-altitude critters, and new Indian friends probably won't turn the world upside down, only a fool would dismiss their feedback. "Let the peak baggers jostle among themselves on the already-climbed mountains," says Bonington. "I've learned that true exploratory climbing is all about letting go of your ego, something that's hard for most climbers to do. But if you can forget about money and fame and follow your heart, you just might find the unknown."


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