It wasn’t hard to figure out why the 250 or so Broughton High School International Baccalaureate students were so taken with elite climber Mark Synnott’s message earlier this afternoon.
One, he was talking about the remote and curious nooks of the world his “job” as a professional climber has taken him. And there was his stint as founder and president of the Crazy Kids Club of America.
Synnott was giving the Broughton students a preview of the talk he’ll give this evening at 6:30 p.m. at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences in downtown Raleigh.
Synnott has been part of The North Face’s elite climbing team for 17 of his 43 years. At first, he was primarily motivated by the climbing. But he quickly discovered something interesting about every place he went, no matter how remote it was.
“There were people there,” says Synnott, whose home base is in Jackson, N.H. “Everywhere I went, there were people.”
He quickly became just as intrigued by the people as the climbing.
In the Musandam Peninsula at the Straight of Hormuz, for instance. Accessible only by boat — and then a challenge considering the peninsula is notable for its 2,000-foot rock faces that jut out of the straight — the inhabitants speak a unique language based on Persian and Hindi but that borrows from Spanish, French, English and other languages. No one, not even the residents themselves, know how they got there.
“In one village, everyone had the same last name,” Synnott said.
Then there were the two gentlemen they encountered on camels in the Sahara desert of northern Chad. The pair were returning from a salt run to Libya. When the pair saw the strangers in the four-wheel drive vehicles, one quickly dismounted and began milking his camel.
“It’s a custom in many of these areas to give your guest something,” Synnott explained. As the man presented the climbers with a tin of fresh camel milk, Synnott quickly thumbed through his Lonely Planet Guide to see what it had to say about drinking unpasteurized camel milk.
The recommendation? “Not advisable.”
“It was a bad scene,” Synnott said of the aftermath. “Nobody died, but we wished we had.”
Then there was the Crazy Kids Club of America. The club, of which boyhood friend and Tour de France cyclist Tyler Hamilton was also a member, involved crazy stunts that Synnott would dream up. Complete the stunt and and you’d get a cardboard Burger King crown bearing the image of a kid jumping off a cliff.
“We were really into pole vaulting,” Synnott said by way of example. “Only not for height, for distance. We’d pole vault over these icy rivers in the winter. The bigger kids, we’d just barely make it,” he said, a smile beginning to creep across his face. “The little kids wouldn’t make it.”
Synnott will share more stories from the remote corners of the globe tonight at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences, 111 W. Jones St., Raleigh . General admission is free, reserved seats at $10, all tickets must be reserved online by going here.

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Read more about Mark Synnott’s adventures here.

The post ‘Crazy Kid’ Mark Synnott previews tonight’s talk appeared first on GetGoing NC!.

Climber/photographer Cory Richards is in town tomorrow night to speak about his experience as a top climber and photographer. His talk at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences, “Both Sides of the Lens,” is part of The North Face Never Stop Exploring Speaker Series. I managed to get an interview with Richards late last month; I say “managed” because Richards was on location in the Crimea and he managed to fit my questions in between his climbing and shooting.

I’m looking forward to meeting Richards in person tomorrow. Maybe buy him a beer, go climbing with him.

Oh, please, you’re probably thinking. This is Cory Richards — first American to climb an 8,000-meter peak in winter, creative eye behind some of the best mountain (and non-mountain) images made, the guy who was part of Conrad Anker’s team on Everest this past May. You think Cory Richards is going to have a beer and go climbing with some blogger?

Sure. Here’s why.

A couple years ago, Conrad Anker was in town as part of the same TNF Never Stop Exploring Speaker Series. Chuck Millsaps, Great Outdoor Provision Co.’s Minister of Culture (actual title; bet he’s the only one of those on LinkedIn) mentioned that Anker would be at their Cameron Village store the morning of the talk. “Drop by if you have a chance,” Chuck offered. So I did.

A minute with Anker and we were like old climbing buddies. Just as interested in where I’d been and what I’d been up to (“Tell me more about this Umstead place … .”) as I was in his latest exploits. When it was time for him to leave, he said he was going stand-up paddle boarding. “Wanna go?”

That evening after Anker spoke, Andrew Kratz and Joel Graybeal saw America’s most famous climber “just sort of hanging around,” so they bought him a beer. “We’ve got a climbing gym in town,” the two told him. “Wanna come climb with us?” The next morning, Kratz and Graybeal were living the dream, climbing with Conrad Anker in their Triangle Rock Club. “He invited Andrew and I to go ice climbing with him in Montana,” Graybeal recalls.

Five months later, Graybeal is in the Atlanta airport and he spots Anker. “You probably don’t remember me,” Graybeal begins, but he’s cut-off. “Of course,” says Anker, “we climbed at your club in Raleigh.” Both had time to kill before their flights, so the two old buddies grabbed a bear in an airport lounge.

“He was completely awesome and down to Earth,” recalls Graybeal. “He gave me his cell and personal email — he also said that if I ever aspired to go to Everett Base Camp that he would hook me up with his personal sherpas!”

OK, so Anker’s the exception. These high-profile athletes, they —

No, not the exception. Last October, ultrarunner Diane Van Deren, another elite The North Face athlete, comes to town, also as part of the Never Stop Exploring Speaker Series. Diane is a regular at the Western States 100, arguably the hardest ultra marathon in the country, and once raced 300 miles across the Yukon, had such a swell time that the following year she signed up to do the 430-mile version of the race. The Mayo Clinic has studied her to see what makes her tick.

“Hey, a few of us are going to run at Umstead with Diane,” Chuck mentioned when she arrived in town. “Join us if you want.” So I did. After 4 miles, Diane had asked me more questions about myself than I had been able to ask her.

Later that evening, after her talk, Diane decided she would like to run across North Carolina (which she did in May). As plans for the run progressed, I heard that she would need trail guides, someone to run with her 40 or 50 miles each day. “Can I get in on that action?” I asked Chuck. A bold request from someone who’d never run more than 20 miles in a day. I ended up spending a few days on the trail with Diane and became her official trip chronicler. And I did one better than Joel Graybeal with Conrad Anker: Every once in a while I get a call from Diane on her morning training run in Colorado, just checking in to see how things are going. I’m not the only one from her record-breaking Mountains-to-Sea Trail run who hears from her, either.

Based on the interview with Cory Richards, I can tell he’s cut of the same cloth. I asked him some hard questions, he gave me surprisingly honest answers. I heard him in an interview with Colorado Public Radio and he was the same. In fact, he was the same in every article I read to prepare for the interview. I can’t vouch for every elite adventure athlete, but in the decent person department I’m batting a thousand so far.

So come hear what Richards has to say tomorrow night. And bring your climbing shoes: There’s some sweet flagstone to be climbed downtown and I’m guessing Cory would be more than happy to give you some pointers.

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Cory Richards: “Both Sides of the Lens”
The North Face Never Stop Exploring Speaker Series
When: Oct. 10, 7 p.m.
Where: Main Auditorium, N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences, 11 W. Jones Street, Raleigh
Cost: $20, including exclusive VIP reception at 6 p.m., $8 for reserved seat, free for general attendance (based on availability). Proceeds benefit the Mountains-to-Sea Trail.
For tickets, go here

The post Cory Richards: Just another regular extraordinary guy appeared first on GetGoing NC!.

Monday — never an easy time for the outdoors enthusiast. After a weekend of adventure, returning to the humdrum work-a-day world can make one melancholy. To help ease the transition, every Monday we feature a 90 Second Escape — essentially, a 90-second video of a place you’d probably rather be: a trail, a park, a greenway, a lake … anywhere as long as it’s not under a fluorescent bulb.

Today’s 90-Second Escape: Waiting for Diane.

Since May 10, Diane Van Deren has been experiencing North Carolina in a way few others have: On foot, on the Mountains-to-Sea Trail. The Colorado ultrarunner set off from Clingman’s Dome with two goals: to get to know North Carolina and to cross the Mountains-to-Sea Trail in record time.

Here’s how she fared on the latter.

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Sunday, Day 4 of the MST Endurance Run, began on schedule for Diane Van Deren with a 3:45 a.m. wake up call. After getting off the trail the previous evening at 9:36 with Annette Bednosky, her trail guide for the weekend, she’d gotten her first good night’s sleep — 4 hours. She arrived where the Mountains-to-Sea Trail passes the Folk Arts Center in Asheville ready to rock a 43.8-mile day.

The mischievous Southern Appalachian Mountain gods had other plans.

On Thursday, Van Deren began her quest for a speed-record crossing of the 1,000(ish)-mile Mountains-to-Sea Trail, descending from the murky 4:30 a.m. dark of Clingman’s Dome en route to Jockey’s Ridge on the Atlantic, hopefully on May 30. By Sunday morning, she had covered 134.3 miles.

I tagged along with Van Deren and Bedonsky for the first five miles Sunday, a steady climb into the Craggy Mountains that began dry but evolved into a steady drizzle. No big deal to Van Deren, who once trekked 430 miles across Canada’s frozen tundra in the Yukon Arctic Ultra.

“The rain is meditative to me,” Van Deren said as she applied a fresh dose of moleskin at mile 5 Sunday morning. “It’s like music.”

That music was about to turn from Neil Diamond to Iron Maiden.

I peeled off at Craven Gap to perform my journalistic duty, with plans to reconnect early afternoon somewhere in the Mount Mitchell area. My journalistic duty took longer than expected, and by the time I was ready to reconnect, it was mid-afternoon. By then, the Craggy and Black mountains were enshrouded in thick (20-foot vis) clouds in a steady, drenching rain. As I drove up  the Blue Ridge Parkway from NC 80 at 15 miles an hour, hunched over the steering wheel, a thought occurred: This is ridiculous. There’s a much faster and safer way to get to the top of Mitchell.

So I turned around, drove to the Black Mountain Campground and began the 5.6-mile, 3,600-foot climb to the highest point east of South Dakota’s Black Hills, 6,684-foot Mount Mitchell.

Mount Mitchell Trail is in considerably better shape than the first time I hiked it in the mid-1990s. At the time, it took the National Forest Service trail philosophy that essentially denies the existence of switchbacks. It followed path-of-least-resistance drainages, for the most part, resulting in a rocky, steep climb that was typically wet, often flowing. The trail came to resemble more of a trail when it became part of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail.

Despite the MST upgrades, it remains a steep, rocky, rooty, wet trail. Saturday afternoon, in a steady rain, it was as bad as it gets in warm weather. (Warm? Make that non-freezing; it was a wet 44 degrees.) The closer I got to the summit, the more I realized this would be a dicey descent, especially in the dark.

When I reached the top of Mitchell at 6 p.m. the place was deserted. No cars in the lot, the concession stand bolted shut. The wind was blowing, the rain was picking up. The mountain-top thermometer read 42 degrees. I found a sheltered spot and called expedition leader Chuck Millsaps with the Great Outdoor Provision Co.

I learned that the weather was even worse on the Craggy Mountain end. Van Deren and Bednosky had been pulled off the trail an hour earlier at Walker Knob, about 10 miles from the summit. The plan was to get Van Deren rested, let her feet heal, then resume at 5 a.m. the next morning.

I looked at my watch: It was 6:16. Sunset was in a little over two hours; darkness would come sooner in a cloudy forest. I skedaddled down the mountain and made it to my tent as Sunday faded to black.

I mention my roll here mainly because of the accompanying photo. I only spent 31 miles on the trail this weekend, both with Van Deren and trying to track her down. Yet those 31 miles of wet, rocky, rooty Appalachian Mountain trail trashed my trail runners (look closely and you’ll see the seam at my big toe is busted open, on both shoes) and my feet. When I finished those 31 miles and went to take my shoes off, I thought my feet were just wet. They were bloody as well. And those dark toenails aren’t the result of Goth toenail polish; they’re a sign that we’ll be parting ways by week’s end. That’s the damage done by just a fifth of the miles Van Deren has logged.

Van Deren is an elite athlete with the mental and physical wherewithal to cruise into Jockey’s Ridge on May 30 — or earlier. Provided the cantankerous Southern Appalachian Mountain gods let her emerge from their 300-mile reign with her feet in tact.

I talked with expedition leader Millsaps early this morning. Van Deren and trail guide Doug Blackford made it to the Woodlawn Work Center off US 221 yesterday afternoon at 5:30. That was the good news. The bad news: the rain continues and today’s route through the Linville Gorge includes a rock-hop crossing of the Linville River just below the gorge. The rain-swollen river is running high according to the USGS, very high, at 600 cubic feet per second.

“A crossing is unadvisable,” Millsaps said.

Van Deren has made clear from the start that her MST Endurance Run isn’t a race, it’s an expedition.

The Southern App Mountain gods are seeing to that.

The post MST Endurance Run: The Southern Apps Attack appeared first on GetGoing NC!.

A large building loomed out of the dark woods to our right.
“Is that the Folk Arts Center?” Annette Bednosky asked slightly perplexed. It was — the very same Folk Arts Center we’d set off from 15 minutes earlier, at 5:01 this morning.
“Well,” said Diane Van Deren, “we just did a 14-minute warmup lap.”
To Van Deren, it was a “so-what” moment. When you’re spending up to 20 hours a day for 21 days hiking a thousand miles, what’s 15 minutes?
This morning was the start of Day 4 of Van Deren’s attempt to break the speed record for trekking the entire Mountains-to-Sea Trail, from Clingman’s Dome on the Tennessee border to Jockey’s Ridge on the coast. Her MST Endurance Run is sponsored by The North Face (Van Deren is one of the outdoor gear company’s elite athletes) and the Great Outdoor Provision Co. The goal: raise awareness — and $40,000 — for the Mountains-to-Sea Trail, a work-in-progress trail spanning North Carolina.
Since starting her quest before dawn on Thursday, Van Deren has covered about 145 miles. Read on …

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