If you scroll to the bottom of the Coldpole homepage, you’ll notice that the flask ski pole company is based in Texas. I was hoping somewhere in Wisconsin. The top of each grip screws off so you can fill the poles up with booze before ripping down the hillside. You drop one of these off the lift and the local high school kids will ensure you never find it. Only $80 a pair.
Sunshine Village ski area in Banff fired four longtime staffers days after a ski patroller reprimanded the resort owner’s son skiing out of bounds. The junior patroller busted the kid with four friends and told them to get back inbounds. Twelve days later four of the resort staff were fired by the kid’s dad after they were questioned about the event and the junior patroller refused to write a letter of apology. A few days later all but six ski patrollers staged a sick-day walkout, and the resort opened with only a couple lifts in operation.
The guys who got cut loose weren’t college kids taking a year off - most had been working at the resort for nearly 30 years. They’ve filed a wrongful termination lawsuit for about $500k.
I wonder who this kid’s dad will fire when his kid gets buried in an avalanche while skiing out of bounds.
A Scottish climber who was part of a 24-person team fell off the near-vertical face of a 3,589-foot mountain landing 1,000 feet below. A Royal Navy helicopter spotted him at the bottom of the slope about 35 minutes later. He was standing up reading a map.
“It seemed impossible. So we retraced our path back up the mountain and, sure enough, there were bits of his kit in a vertical line all the way up where he had obviously lost them during the fall.
“It was quite incredible. He must have literally glanced off the outcrops as he fell, almost flying.”
The helicopter landed a paramedic who reported the man was okay except for some superficial cuts and bruises, but that he was shaking uncontrollably from the experience. They flew him to the hospital for observation just to be safe. Hopefully he doesn’t get stuck with the ambulance bill on that one.
It seems there are some rough roads through Death Valley that have been popping up in GPS units for the past several years, and at least a few people have followed these directions to their deaths. In one sad case in August of 2009, a woman got her Jeep stuck for 6 days after blindly following her GPS directions and her kid died before anyone happened upon her.
One case happened last summer, when visitors arriving from the west on Highway 190 told their GPS to take them to Scotty’s Castle, a popular tourist destination at the north end of the park, which is easily accessible by paved road.
Instead, the unit directed them over an unpaved, winding, washboard road toward Saline Valley, where they turned right onto an even rougher four-wheel-drive road and became stuck near a remote abandoned mine site called Lippincott.
It’s happened several times when drivers ignore commonsense and push on, with some blind confidence that they’re heading the right way. The ranger who discovered all the closed and non-existent roads appearing on GPS units contacted the companies to try to get them to update their maps and remove impassable routes. Google, surprisingly was the worst to work with. It took him a year to get them to update their maps, while TomTom did it over the phone for him.
I did not see this one coming. I thought these FiveFingers would stick around for a year, be adopted by a handful of barefoot runners who would buy every pair they could find in closeout bins across the country, and then the shoes would quietly disappear. But no, it seems they’ve developed a following. To see more casual GloveShoes, visit GearJunkie.
I always considered ice fishing the redheaded stepchild to fly fishing. No excitement, no skill. The only draw was that you could use both hands to hold cans of beer instead of using them to cast. Turns out ice anglers (as they prefer to be called) occasionally get to experience some excitement. Two men on Lake Superior tried to keep their balance on chunks of ice that broke free in a 12-foot swell in near whiteout conditions and floated out to sea. They were rescued by something called an Ice Angel. The local police department keeps a 12-foot airboat on hand just for this - rescuing ice anglers who are on chunks of ice that have floated out to sea.
They’re so eco-conscious in France. Instead of towing friends behind gas-guzzling trucks out on a lake like we do in the Midwest, they hook up to a train and let it drag them over the railroad ties.
A study in Canada that looked at avalanche fatality data over the last three years has found that snowmobilers are more likely to die than skiers. If you consider that snowmobilers can cover a lot more ground and therefore traverse more avalanche-prone terrain, it makes sense that they’d be more likely to get caught in something catastrophic.
Matze Brustmann nails a first descent of the Bruresløret waterfall at the Store Ula - an extremely impressive endeavor. Plus, the background music is great - it’s exactly what I’d expect to hear in Norway no matter what I was doing there.
via Adventure Blog
