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Mount Everest
To compile the list of the most expensive mountains to climb, Outforia looked at everything from the cost of joining a guided climbing group, acquiring the necessary permits, the required equipment, to guides and sherpas to hire.
Scaling the highest peaks in the world requires a combination of hiking, rock climbing, ice climbing, and cold endurance, which naturally makes it quite a niche activity. You need to be mentally and physically ready, have expert skills and equipment, be experienced and aware of the dangers, as well as being able to fund your trip.
As there is so much preparation and equipment involved in tackling these daunting climbs, they can cost eye-watering sums in total. You’ll likely be going as part of a guided group, led by someone who is familiar with the mountain and has completed the climb multiple times before.
Gareth Andrews (left) and Richard Stephenson (Right)
Devon Bolger, New Zealand Herald »
A New Zealand doctor and his brother-in-law are attempting something that’s never been achieved in Antarctica before — the first unsupported crossing of the icy continent.
Richard Stephenson, 40, from Dunedin, and his brother-in-law Gareth Andrews will begin the 2600km journey with little more than a sled and some skis.
They are expecting it to take about 110 days and will start in November next year.
The pair will begin at the edge of the ice shelf and make their way across the continent, to the other ice shelf, by skiing while dragging their supplies in a sled.
The Belgica caught in the Antarctic pack ice, 1898.
If the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—by the likes of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Jules Verne—imagined a link between the polar regions and insanity, the Belgica expedition confirmed it. The decades of frenzied Antarctic exploration that followed the voyage cemented the continent’s reputation as an inherently maddening place. Still today in Antarctic research stations, as modern amenities dull the ferocity of the environment and digital communications keep year-round personnel in touch with the outside world, madness lurks in the corridors.
How do you choose your next adventure when there are so many options available?
Wizarding up ideas for adventures is one of my favourite things to do. I find it enjoyable, exciting, but also easy. If I was a specialist I would need to search for something higher, harder and faster within my niche every time I wanted a new challenge. But because I am a generalist, I make the next adventure more challenging by making it differently challenging to previous projects. It is an important part of keeping adventure fresh for me.
I am surprised how often people tell me that they really want to do an adventure but don’t know what to do. Hopefully this walk-through of the way I come up with ideas might get your own adventure cogs whirring…
Dr. James Bowyer, a medical doctor for the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), tells of life in Antarctica.
Since 2019, Dr. Bowyer has been based at the Rothera Research Station, a centre for biological research and a hub for supporting deep-field and air operations.
Standing on the Devon coast, my phone rings.
“Hi James, we’d like you to look after Rothera for us. Are you happy to take the job?”
“Yes, of course!”
After an hour-long interview only that morning, I have just signed up to work in Antarctica for eighteen months, providing medical cover for a research station of 27 people in the winter, 160 in summer. I would be the only doctor for at least half of that time, with only narrow windows for medical evacuation in case something goes wrong. My patch in the summer consists of an area the size of Europe, with deep-field teams scattered in some of the harshest environments on Earth.
Following Colin O’Brady’s claim to have completed the first unsupported and unassisted crossing of Antarctica, the polar adventure world came together to point out the inaccuracies of the 33-year old American’s highly publicised and inaccurate claims. They then set about to develop a standard of definitions relating to polar travel.
So in the wake of the O’Brady saga, veteran polar guide Eric Philips, along with other senior members of the polar community, decided that standardization was overdue in the polar world. Over the past two years, they developed The Polar Expeditions Classification Scheme (PECS), which was launched earlier this week.
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