Barely two weeks ago, the speed record from the top of Mont Blanc to Chamonix was broken by French skiers Antoine Montegani and Nicolas Anthonioz, who dropped the 12,000 or so vertical in 32 minutes (see video below). Now the Chamonix-Mont Blanc-Chamonix speed record has fallen to French ski mountaineer Mattheo Jacquemond, who went from the church in the center of town back to the church in 5 hours, 5 minutes, beating the old mark by 10 minutes.
Jacquemond ran from the church to the Mont Blanc tunnel with skis on his back, then ascended the Grands Mulets, Petit and Grand Plateaux, the Vallot Hut, and finally the 15,781-foot summit. He had planned on making the attempt with noted speed runner Kilian Jornet, but Jornet was in the Canary Islands running a trail race.
According to the Wall Street Journal, there’s an anti-Lycra backlash sweeping through the cycling world, and it’s because nobody wants to be associated with cheaters, dopers, and those who cry on Oprah and/or wear matching kit. More likely is that this story wouldn’t have gotten attention if it didn’t have a Lance Armstrong hook to it. The fact is that there’s a ton of growth in non-traditional, non-Lycra riding apparel, and it’s coming because 1) Rapha showed people would pay top dollar for nice threads and 2) cyclists are tired of looking like a cross between NASCAR vehicles and sausage casings. Enough with Armstrong already.
Giro, for example, just launched its New Road line, which is sweet. Of course there’s Rapha, as well as Aether and Outlier, and even mountain bikers are getting style, with awesome clothes from Kitsbow.
Which means roadies might finally learn to embrace the individuality and more modest dress that mountain bikers have known for ages. Might.
I’ve been thinking this would come for years, but I don’t actually think Lycra is going to go anywhere. I think more likely, the designs will become less ridiculous, and more understated. Nothing like seeing a 200 pounder in the suburbs granny-gearing it up the local hill with sponsor names plastered all over them. The sponsors would probably pay to have their logos removed!
So the thought that EVERYONE who doesn’t road bike and thinks Lycra is the most hideous thing you could wear doesn’t play a role? I guess if you shave your legs to ride a bike you are way past the point of no return. Although I love waking up Saturdays and seeing a group of identically dressed roadies pounding the pavement together. Makes me think they missed the time in their life when it was semi cool to join something…a frat
Over the course of six years photographer Tim Nunn and surfer Ian Battrick patrolled the coasts of Norway, Canada, and Scotland catching waves and shooting photos. They created this new book, Numb. While 6mm wetsuits are a bit of a bear, and there were sometimes actual bears waiting on shore, at least they never had to fight their way through crowded lineups. I just wonder why they didn’t also pack a video camera during those six years.
Biologist Brad Josephs set up a GoPro to capture some footage of a grizzly bear in Alaska. It went better than planned. Watching it, you get a good idea of what it’d look like if a bear ever decided to casually eat you. Notice the blood on its snout. Brad says that amazingly his GoPro survived with no damage. Just how’d he get this footage? Maybe he rubbed it with a steak before planting it.
Patrick Ward of Lyons, Colorado was known to stand up during town meetings and rant at length that hat cyclists “don’t belong in Lyons” and “they certainly don’t belong in the foothills around Lyons.” This week he was charged with vehicular manslaughter after running over and killing 47-year-old cyclist Michel Van Duym, an avid rider who put on 150-200 miles each week.
San Francisco area photographer Eric Dugan managed to get an amazing image: a blackbird catching a ride on a red-tailed hawk’s back in mid-air. You can see the strange series on Eric’s website. The story’s gotten a bit of traction, and appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle this week. The blackbird wasn’t a hop on, it seems it was involved in some kind of nesting dispute and trying to chase off the hawk. Watch out for hop ons, you’re gonna get hop ons.
It has been a loooong time in the wilderness for the status of placing climbing bolts in federal wilderness. In June 1998 the U.S. Forest Service banned all fixed climbing anchors within the designated wilderness areas under its jurisdiction. This didn’t just mean permanent bolts: It meant that pitons, nuts, and pretty much any form of “anchor” was quasi-legal. Or quasi-illegal. This meant that from California to Wyoming, North Carolina to Arizona to Colorado, anywhere the Forest Service managed wilderness, permanent anchors were banned. In 2007, though, the tide began to turn. Then the BLM issued a ruling that said that nothing in official wilderness legislation prescribed prohibiting fixed anchors, but the decision was still weak, because it meant that each area where anchors might be allowed had to be reviewed on its own.
Now, at long last, the National Park Service has issued its final ruling on fixed anchors and wilderness and it says specifically that climbing is a legitimate activity in wilderness and that fixed anchors necessary for climbing are also allowed. The new policy allows the authorization of new bolts by zone, rather than the red tape-heavy process of requiring permits for individual routes/bolts. The ruling affects parks like Yosemite, Grand Teton, Zion, Joshua Tree, and Canyonlands, and most fed watchers say it will likely be taken up as law by the Forest Service as well, which would then become something close to a national policy on climbing on all federal land.
Joe Azougar sat on his cabin porch on a remote plot of land not too far from Cochrane, Canada enjoying his breakfast when a bear crashed through the woods charging towards him. His German Sheppard sprang up and ran at the bear, attacking it while Joe ran inside his cabin, slamming the door. Moments later, the bear having killed the dog, smashed through the window, and Joe took flight.
“He knocked me down and I covered my head. He took my shoulder apart, then he peeled the skin off my head and started biting my skull,” Azougar remembered.
“I could feel his teeth rubbing against my skull. That was the worst feeling ever. I jammed my thumb into his eye and so he went back to my shoulder,” said Azougar.
Two women campers, having heard his screams, swerved their car from the road and drove up his driveway blaring their horn. The sound sent the bear running, and the two picked up Joe and drove him to the hospital where he’s recovering with over 300 stitches.
Don’t want to feel bear teeth in your skull? Remember your bear bells, and bear spray. And a car.
Ouch. Road-building crews in northern Belize recently knocked down a 2,300-year-old temple to pave the way for their route — and to add insult to injury, they used the remains of the temple for the roadbed. Sadly this isn’t the first time a road-building operation has bulldozed a Mayan pyramid in Belize. Archaeologist Patricia McAnany at the University of North Carolina says that northern Belize is mostly flat, so pyramids and other archeological sites are obvious and stand out — meaning there’s no way the crews didn’t know what they were up to, even though it’s against the law.
The Mayan temple, made of limestone, dates back to pre-Columbian times. Only a small core of the pyramid was left standing. Archaeologists said they were alerted to the destruction late last week. The Maya complex lies on private land but under Belizean law any pre-Hispanic ruins come under government protection and many local Belizeans would even today have a genetic and of course cultural link to the ancient Mayans who once heavily populated the region.
The man in the red backpack thought he had a great spot lined up to watch the riders pass during stage 10 until they got a little too close and he had to take one step back. Hopefully people standing near him weren’t too concentrated on the race action to notice that he disappeared.
More than 70 million people living in the western United States rely on the Rocky Mountain snowpack for their water, and a new study by the U.S. Geological Survey does not bode well for long showers: Since the 1980s, the snowpack has dropped 20 percent.
“Until the 1980s, the northern Rocky Mountains experienced large snowpacks when the central and southern Rockies experienced meager ones, and vice versa,” the USGS reported. “Yet, since the 1980s, there have been simultaneous snowpack declines along the entire length of the Rocky Mountains, and unusually severe declines in the north.”
The reason: warmer spring temperatures. That might seem obvious to anyone who’s skied around mud patches in March, but weather is a complicated thing, especially so in the rugged terrain of the Rockies. Sorting through the data to determine the root cause wasn’t easy — temperature and the amount of precipitation are factors, as well as “complex mountain topography, the different influence of Pacific Ocean climate, like La Niña and El Niño, on winter precipitation in the northern versus southern and central Rockies, and the brevity and patchiness of detailed snow records.” But USGS scientist Greg Pederson and his colleagues developed a computer model that fills in the gaps of missing data and accounts for the various factors. They compared recent results to 800 years of climate information to determine that hottest springs have the biggest impact.
Manmade climate change is a factor, but the USGS couldn’t identify how much. “Both natural variability in temperature and anthropogenic warming have contributed to the recent snowpack decline, though disentangling their influences exactly remains elusive,” said one of the study’s authors.
Good thing no one took a shot at this quail right as he was catching it. This would have been a very different video. The fact that the video is being used to market a book called The Real Win, a story of backup quarterback for the 49ers Colt McCoy’s “personal experiences and a close study of Scripture” make me wonder if this is some kind of fake vid meant to go viral, but then I have to hope that people trying to sell a religious book wouldn’t turn to fakery to sell their wares. I don’t think it would go over all that well if they were found out.
Barely two weeks ago, the speed record from the top of Mont Blanc to Chamonix was broken by French skiers Antoine Montegani and Nicolas Anthonioz, who dropped the 12,000 or so vertical in 32 minutes (see video below). Now the Chamonix-Mont Blanc-Chamonix speed record has fallen to French ski mountaineer Mattheo Jacquemond, who went from the church in the center of town back to the church in 5 hours, 5 minutes, beating the old mark by 10 minutes.
According to the Wall Street Journal, there’s an anti-Lycra backlash sweeping through the cycling world, and it’s because nobody wants to be associated with cheaters, dopers, and those who cry on Oprah and/or wear matching kit. More likely is that this story wouldn’t have gotten attention if it didn’t have a Lance Armstrong hook to it. The fact is that there’s a ton of growth in non-traditional, non-Lycra riding apparel, and it’s coming because 1) Rapha showed people would pay top dollar for nice threads and 2) cyclists are tired of looking like a cross between NASCAR vehicles and sausage casings. Enough with Armstrong already.
Mitchole
Brian
It has been a loooong time in the wilderness for the status of placing climbing bolts in federal wilderness. In June 1998 the U.S. Forest Service banned all fixed climbing anchors within the designated wilderness areas under its jurisdiction. This didn’t just mean permanent bolts: It meant that pitons, nuts, and pretty much any form of “anchor” was quasi-legal. Or quasi-illegal. This meant that from California to Wyoming, North Carolina to Arizona to Colorado, anywhere the Forest Service managed wilderness, permanent anchors were banned. In 2007, though, the tide began to turn. Then the BLM issued a ruling that said that nothing in official wilderness legislation prescribed prohibiting fixed anchors, but the decision was still weak, because it meant that each area where anchors might be allowed had to be reviewed on its own.
saltwater
Ouch. Road-building crews in northern Belize recently knocked down a 2,300-year-old temple to pave the way for their route — and to add insult to injury, they used the remains of the temple for the roadbed. Sadly this isn’t the first time a road-building operation has bulldozed a Mayan pyramid in Belize. Archaeologist Patricia McAnany at the University of North Carolina says that northern Belize is mostly flat, so pyramids and other archeological sites are obvious and stand out — meaning there’s no way the crews didn’t know what they were up to, even though it’s against the law. 
More than 70 million people living in the western United States rely on the Rocky Mountain snowpack for their water, and a new study by the U.S. Geological Survey does not bode well for long showers: Since the 1980s, the snowpack has dropped 20 percent.
I’ve been thinking this would come for years, but I don’t actually think Lycra is going to go anywhere. I think more likely, the designs will become less ridiculous, and more understated. Nothing like seeing a 200 pounder in the suburbs granny-gearing it up the local hill with sponsor names plastered all over them. The sponsors would probably pay to have their logos removed!
So the thought that EVERYONE who doesn’t road bike and thinks Lycra is the most hideous thing you could wear doesn’t play a role? I guess if you shave your legs to ride a bike you are way past the point of no return. Although I love waking up Saturdays and seeing a group of identically dressed roadies pounding the pavement together. Makes me think they missed the time in their life when it was semi cool to join something…a frat