Yeah, there’s that danger of being caught in a slide, too, but we often forget that ski patrollers are wielding dynamite. As if to underline that danger, in the Alps last week a 54 year old ski patroller was killed setting a charge during avalanche control work. The patroller and his colleague had loaded a rocket into a launcher and were removing the safeties when the charge blew without warning. Just a week earlier, at another Swiss Alps resort, two patrollers were injured when a charge exploded inside a launcher.

In the late 1960s/early 1970s, the ice fields slipping down Mont Blanc and the surrounding mountains of the European range covered some 375 square kilometers; by the end of 2010 they’d shrunk to 275 square kilometers, a 30 percent loss. This new research mirrors what’s happening in the rest of the Alps, in Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, Germany, France, and Italy. As you might expect, the greatest loss has been in the south, where some glaciers are nearly gone. Scientists believe the cause is more than merely due to southern latitude, saying that the south also has lower glaciers and that the cloud cover over the northern Alps is consistently thicker, preventing more melt.

In The Netherlands 30% of people commute daily on a bicycle. Compare that to .7% in New York. With so many people wheeling around on bikes in that country, by comparison it makes Portland/Minneapolis look like a monster-truck-friendly town. Of all the fantastic things I’ve seen come out of The Netherlands, this trash can for bikers has to be my favorite. Sure, some city worker probably has to walk behind it to collect all the empty beer bottles tossed by imbibers with bad aim who are enjoying a sip on the ride home, but you take the good with the bad.

via Brain Pickings

Romero spent Christmas Eve climbing Antarctica’s Mt. Vinson, completing his quest to be the youngest person ever to climb the seven summits. Romero first had the idea to climb the world’s highest peak on every continent when he was just 10 and later that year he bagged Kilimanjaro and then went on to tick off Kosciuszko (Australia), Elbrus (Europe), Aconcagua (South America), Denali (North America), and Carstensz Pyramid (Oceania). At just 13 he tackled Everest, but the logistics and fierce weather of climbing Vinson made summiting on Antarctica especially challenging. This past Friday he had the weather window he needed. He climbed to High Camp with his parents, and then, in sub-zero temperatures with high winds, went on to summit solo and made it back down to High Camp. The family then skied down to base camp together, where they had Christmas dinner.

The backwater town of Hull in Wisconsin is seeking to make it illegal for pedestrians and cyclists to use public streets without first obtaining special governmental permission. The hicks on the town board cited accidents involving joggers and cyclists as the reason for the law, though an audit conducted by a local newspaper found that since 2008 there hasn’t been a single accident. I love how these idiots on town boards think they wield the power to create laws that strip away basic human and constitutional rights. While they’re on a hot streak they should also create a law that grants town board members the superpower to fly.

When Monterey, California surfer Eric Tarantino was attacked by a great white this past fall the 27-year-old had just paddled out into the surf in the pre-dawn light. When the shark struck, it knocked Tarantino cold, and he awoke upside down and in the jaws of the shark. What happened next is somewhat of a blur. Understandably, considering doctors later said that the deadliest of Tarantino’s wounds came just two millimeters from slicing open the carotid artery in his neck. Tarantino vaguely remembers kicking back at the shark, then mounting his board and managing to paddle back in to the point where he could catch a wave. It was only then that he realized his arm was bleeding and at that moment the fear came: “Seeing all the blood in the water and realizing that if the shark decided to come back and get me, there would be nothing I could do about it. That’s when it became really scary.”

There are plenty of those end-of-the-year videos coming out, and Canoe and Kayak is getting into the mix. Though I don’t normally associate the words “canoe” and “carnage,” the magazine has pulled together the biggest kayak crashes of 2011. There’s plenty of swimming rapids, broken paddles, going over falls backwards and other things that make water look very painful. For the non-kayakers, there are some other painful crashes thrown into the mix.

via Adventure Blog

It’s no wonder that fleece was invented by the outdoor clothing industry, which sought something lighter and more easily modifiable than down or wool. But do you know how it’s made, why it works, its pitfalls as well as advantages? Do you know what happens to it near a campfire, and why? On this public radio segment Sean Cormier, assistant professor in the Textile Design and Marketing Department at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and Jill Dumain, Director of Environmental Strategy at Patagonia, go through the glory that is polyester fleece. It’s a good 101 for any outdoor geek who wants to better understand not only how this stuff came to be, but when to wear what — why wool stretches out, but doesn’t stink, and so on.

Russia’s big felines are seriously endangered. There are only 35 Amur leopards left on earth and they occupy a huge range of roughly 8,000 square miles in both remote and wild land in Russia’s far east. BBC Nature rode along on an expedition to track and tag the huge cats, and to study how they get along with Russia’s other rare felines, Amur tigers, which are also incredibly endangered, with fewer than 500 expected to still be in existence. The biggest threats are both intense timber harvesting and poaching: the market for a whole tiger in China is said to exceed $15,000.