The MountainWorld™ Blog

Jake Norton's Adventures on Snow.com

Just recently, I started writing some content for Vail Resorts and their mountain social media website buzz.snow.com. Last week's trip report was a fun little outing from Colorado's Loveland Pass over Grizzly Peak, Lenawee Mountain, and down through Arapahoe Basin Ski Area, finishing with a ride up Loveland Pass and back to the car. Read about this fun trip here. 

In the coming months, I'll be writing a handful of posts each month, covering fun trips in the hills, some gear reviews, photography tips, and perhaps even some competitions you all can get involved with. 

So, stop on by buzz.snow.com to follow along! (The next post - coming tomorrow - will be on some great alpine cragging on Mount Thorodin in Colorado. A fun place!)

Jake Norton is an Everest climber, guide, photographer, writer, and motivational speaker from Colorado.

The Remotest Place on Earth

On South Georgia in 2004...Felt pretty remote to me!

I've been to some pretty remote places...or so I thought. Western Tibet. South Georgia. Borneo.

But, according to an article in this month's issue of New Scientist, these aren't really that remote. Or, at least not that remote according to the criteria used in a new study by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy, and the World Bank.

The study identified "remoteness" based on, as Michael Robinson points out in Time to Eat the Dogs, "information on terrain and access to road, rail and river networks. It also consider[ed] how factors like altitude, steepness of terrain and hold-ups like border crossings slow travel." It didn't necessarily take into account access to cell phone networks (now available on the summit of Everest) or other technological advances that may limit aspects of remoteness."

Nonetheless, it is a pretty interesting piece. Some findings tell us how small indeed our world has become:

• less than 10% of the world's land is more than 48 hours of ground-based travel from the nearest city
• in the Amazon, extensive river networks and an increasing number of roads mean that only 20% of the land is more than two days from a city - around the same proportion as Canada's Quebec province

And, according to the study, what is the remotest place on earth? It's a tough spot high on the Tibetan Plateau at 34.7°N 85.7°E, sitting at about 17,500 feet, and from here it takes 3 weeks on foot to reach Lhasa. Pretty remote!

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Jake Norton is an Everest climber, guide, photographer, writer, and motivational speaker from Colorado.