Deadspin.com published a photo you don’t want to see that legendary adventure faker/hunk Bear Grylls originally tweeted with the note: “our man vs wild producer suffering from a brutal snake bite – fighting the injury with courage.” Yes, it would take extraordinary courage to recover from this horrific snakebite, which could have only come from a snake able to shear off massive amounts of flesh. It looks like some kind of CGI thing…at least I’m pretending it was some kind of CGI thing.

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Starting Saturday, all Whistler, Blackcomb, and Mount Seymour employees working on skis or boards will have to wear helmets, and if they could get through the plastic shells they’d be scratching their heads why. The mandate comes from British Columbia’s workplace safety agency, called WorkSafeBC, but apparently only applies to three of the nearly 50 or so hills in the province. And the rule, from Section 8.11 of the Workers Compensations Act, has been on the books for ages but is only now being applied to ski areas.

“We really don’t know what sparked this sudden change of opinion from them,” said Joel Chevalier, Whistler Blackcomb’s director of Employee Experience. “We’re definitely keen to find out.”

They’re also taking it seriously. After a surprise visit from WorkSafeBC a week or so ago, Whistler Blackcomb snapped to attention pretty darn fast. The 38 percent of WB who currently don’t wear lids at work will be donning them May 4 — at their own expense. Can’t afford it? Don’t worry, there’s a helmet lending program…but how gross is that?

Via Pique News Magazine

Read more stoke, sports, outdoors, and news at Adventure Journal.

Tags: Skiing, Snowboarding

Have you been following the Everest weirdness? I’ve been reading a bit about it here and there. NPR even covered it. Interesting to follow from the outside, but so odd. Egos, stress, and sleep deprivation clashing on the world’s highest mountain. It’s more painful to watch than Vertical Limit. And now this strange peace treaty drafted at 17,500ft has come out.

Tags: everest

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The U.S. cycling industry sells approximately $6 billion worth of gear each year, and among all those companies, brands, and corporations, there’s just one person fighting the wave of counterfeit frames and apparel — Specialized’s Andrew Love. Bike knockoffs are a big deal — $5.2 million known in 2012 — and worse than that, dangerous.

“It’s a matter of time before someone gets killed on one of these things,” said Love, whose title is the impressive Brand Security, Global Investigations, and Legal Enforcement. “You could count on the fingers of one hand the failures we had on carbon Tarmacs and [we] recalled 12,000 bikes and gave people huge credits. The counterfeiters have no allegiance beyond getting past the sale moment, and that’s where it stops.”

Specialized has acquire counterfeits of its frames and put them through its testing chamber, with results like those shown here in the picture. It’s not uncommon for aluminium head tube cups to detach from the frame, which could, you know, cause a few issues with control and steering.

With the tough economy of the last few years, consumers have been more watchful of their bucks, and with smartphones and bar code apps, it’s easy to search for lower prices right from the shop floor — though the deals they find are anything but. Yes, the bikes and apparel are often made in the same Chinese factories as the originals – “I think we face about four factories that have gone to the dark side,” Love said — but their materials, tolerances, and quality are far from the authentic frames.

Via Bike Radar

Read more stoke, sports, outdoors, and news at Adventure Journal.

Tags: Cycling

The land of strange, fast-changing weather managed another oddity: chandeliering ice. It seems that the super cool water and high winds created the perfect conditions for shards of ice to grow and quickly pile up on the shore of Medicine Lake in Plymouth, Minnesota. A woman with a smartphone camera managed to shoot a video of the phenomenon, which is seldom observed in nature.

Tags: video

A Georgia man is trying to convince his neighbors to blow the face off the state’s iconic Stone Mountain carving. It depicts Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Generals Robert E. Lee and “Stonewall” Jackson in the noblest of poses. He suggests that the carving is a black eye on the state’s fine culture. Did I mention that the Klu Klux Klan was founded on the same mountain? I hope they take the carving down with dynamite, but first I’d like to see them host a rock climbing tournament on it. So far the petition has 149 signers. They only need 24,851 more.

Tags: mountain

At the base of the tallest mountain in Europe, Russia’s 18,510-foot Mt. Elbrus, there are scores of empty lifts, half-built hotels, security cameras, and panic buttons. You’ll also encounter police checkpoints, pot-holed roads, and a billboard that shows the earth in flames and warns “Terrorism is a threat to humanity.” What, this doesn’t sound like Vail to you?

Elbrus, as the crow flies, is roughly 150 miles from Sochi…where the 2014 Winter Olympics will be held, in the Caucasus Mountains that stretch west-to-east between the Caspian and Black seas. And the war-torn region of Chechnya is right there, too, in the mountains that form a high spine between the two resort lakes. And right here is where Russian authorities envision an alternate Alps. By 2025 multiple resorts will attempt to woo Europeans to the Northern Caucasus, rather than, say, to Zermatt. Several billion dollars have already been invested — and rampant corruption has resulted in arrests and stalled projects. Even the lifts see bribery at work; just recently at one lift on a resort adjacent to Elbrus there were two queues that fed the cable car, a slow lane for those with tickets and a fast lane for those bribing their way up.

None of this bodes well for Sochi, not to mention for the larger notion of resorts as solution to terrorism. As the locals view it, it’s just imperialism with a shiny wrapper. Via Yahoo.

Read more stories like this at Adventure Journal.

Tags: 2014 Winter Olympics, ski, Skiing, sochi

I never made it in business, but at least I’ve always been able to tell myself that it’s because I’m terrible at golf. You know, spending Saturday networking on the golf course, talking about work and complaining about your home life? Well, according to the Economist, corporate sports hangouts are getting cooler.

TRADITIONALLY, business associates would get to know each other over a round of golf. But road cycling is fast catching up as the preferred way of networking for the modern professional.

This is great news for bike shops that will be selling plenty of high end bikes to guys who walk in the day before a big ride. “I’ll take the bike, the outfit…the helmet too, yeah, everything that guy is wearing.” The Economist article focuses on Rapha, which as purveyors of overpriced cycling gear would of course put them at the front of this trend, but we can only hope it grows. The more people on bikes the better.

Tags: Cycling

This maybe hits close to home if you’re a Washingtonian, like me. I grew up teaching ski lessons on Friday nights at The Pass and then crashing in the loft of a barely serviceable, non-heated ski hut. Next day I’d teach more lessons and the fact that skiing at Snoqualmie Pass was always great for being about as fancy as faded Gore-Tex and whatever you could brown bag made it perfect, and perfectly affordable for families.

But change happens. And to be honest, with zero lodging and almost no amenities, Snoqualmie could use it. So Bryce Phillips, owner of the evo Ski & Snowboard Shop in Seattle, is behind a plan to build between 50-100 condos/lofts, with a restaurant, brewery, coffee shop, and some shopping all in a tight village dubbed the Pass Life. This won’t be Park City. It’s all going to sit on five acres. And it’ll be relatively affordable, with two-bedroom units starting at a not-insane $327,000. And regardless of how anti-gucci you are, the Pass Life deserves props for finding a permanent home for the Washington State Ski and Snowboard Museum (WSSSM); Washington has proud and rich skiing history, with legends like Otto Lang one of the Northwest’s first ski instructors, and of course K2 was a local brand, and Winter Olympians Phil and Steve Mahre and Debbie Armstrong all grew up skiing locally. Via Powder and the Seattle Times.

Read more stories like this at Adventure Journal.

 

I loved Death Valley Dreamlapse, but at the end I found it left so many questions unanswered. Well, there’s a sequel out, and I think you’ll find it wraps up the whole story quite nicely. Will they get the tent up at night? Will the guy with the headlamp walk around? Does the Earth rotate? All of these questions and more are answered in Death Valley Dreamlapse 2. The video comes to us from the Sunchaser Pictures team, who remind us that no special effects or photo enhancing was done. Best viewed fullframe/HD with headphones/mushrooms on.

Tags: video

In Oregon the Department of Fish and Wildlife has decided to kill some cormorants to see if they’re feeding on young salmon. The young salmon are protected; and so are the cormorants under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Around 4,000 nest along the Oregon Coast, which is where sport fishermen have been pressuring the department to do something about the birds. In the meantime they’ve been chasing them off with firecrackers and boats, trying to help the recovery of the threatened coho salmon. Insane? Perhaps. It’s also not the first time. Sea lions, protected under the Marine Mammal Act, where killed when they threatened endangered salmon on the Columbia River.

via Moldy Chum

Tags: wildlife

 

Matt Segal and Backcountry.com Athlete Cedar Wright headed to China for the very first Trad Climbing Festival. The North Face sponsored the event, which makes a lot of sense seeing as how they have a huge manufacturing footprint in the country and it represents an enormous market. People from different cultures finding common ground over their passions, always a good time.

Tags: china, Climbing