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1 month ago | 
explorersweb.com | Jerry Kobalenko |Kris Annapurna |Angela Benavides |Rebecca McPhee
Officials at the Chugach National Forest Avalanche Center have confirmed that three skiers on a heli-skiing tour died in an avalanche near Girdwood, Alaska, southeast of Anchorage, this week. The avalanche occurred on March 4 at about 3:30 pm. The skiers were traveling with Chugach Powder Guides, and the guides with them immediately attempted to save the victims.
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1 month ago | 
explorersweb.com | Jerry Kobalenko |Kris Annapurna |Angela Benavides |Rebecca McPhee
Today, a naval warship rescued 44-year-old ocean rower Aurimas Mockus off the coast of Australia. The Lithuanian rower was within a week of completing his 12,000km row across the Pacific from San Diego to Brisbane when Tropical Cyclone Alfred hit him. It generated winds up to 100kph and waves up to seven meters high. He set off a distress signal on Friday when he was about 740km from his endpoint. Australian search-and-rescue authorities sent out planes, which eventually located the exhausted rower.
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2 months ago | 
explorersweb.com | Jerry Kobalenko |Angela Benavides |Kris Annapurna |Rebecca McPhee
In 1905, during Roald Amundsen’s first transit of the Northwest Passage, two of his men set out from Gjoa Haven to explore the unmapped east coast of Victoria Island. They reached halfway up before turning back due to the lateness of the season. Now 38-year-old Anders Brenna of Oslo will set out early this spring to manhaul 1,100km alone from Gjoa Haven all the way up past the explorers’ farthest north and around to Glenelg Bay on northern Victoria Island.
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2 months ago | 
explorersweb.com | Jerry Kobalenko |Lou Bodenhemier |Kris Annapurna |Angela Benavides
Professional road cycling has made huge leaps in curbing cheating since Lance Armstrong’s seven-year dominance of the Tour de France. But rabid cycling fans and insider pundits still harbor fears that cheating is still producing winning performances at the highest levels. The complete trust of the top riders and teams has been hard to come by. Any hint of foul play generates extreme scrutiny.
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2 months ago | 
explorersweb.com | Jerry Kobalenko |Lou Bodenhemier |Kris Annapurna |Angela Benavides
So far, the three High Arctic deaths we’ve covered in this series have all been the certain result of foul play. Charles Francis Hall’s death is more mysterious. It may have been a murder whose motive combined expedition friction and a love triangle. Or maybe not. Hall’s background as an arctic explorer was unusual. He grew up in New Hampshire with little education, became an apprentice blacksmith in his teens before moving to Cincinnati. Here, he somehow became a businessman and newspaper publisher.
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Jan 23, 2025 | 
explorersweb.com | Jerry Kobalenko |Kris Annapurna |Angela Benavides
In 1914, explorer Fitzhugh Green shot and killed his Inuit guide Peeawahto. Green was a member of the Crocker Land Expedition, which set out to find a mysterious island that Robert Peary allegedly spotted off northwestern Ellesmere in 1906. The expedition leader, Donald MacMillan, had been north once before, as one of Peary’s assistants. An ambitious man, MacMillan hoped that the discovery of Crocker Land would make his reputation.
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Jan 21, 2025 | 
explorersweb.com | Jerry Kobalenko |Angela Benavides |Kris Annapurna
In 1970, the world’s northernmost murder took place on the drifting ice island T-3, 350km northwest of Ellesmere Island, on the Arctic Ocean. Ice islands were big, flat pans of ice that broke off from the 3,000-year-old ice shelves that until recently, clung to parts of northern Ellesmere. They’ve almost all disappeared now — broken away, melted — but they used to be important platforms for research. Unlike sea ice, these giant platforms lasted for a couple of decades.
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Jan 17, 2025 | 
explorersweb.com | Jerry Kobalenko |Angela Benavides |Kris Annapurna |Andrew Marshall
In 1909, a young American, Ross Marvin, was helping Robert Peary on his last North Pole expedition. Marvin did not survive. He supposedly fell through a crack in the sea ice and drowned. Years later, it came to light that his death was no accident. While part of the joy of expeditions is the deep bond that can form between partners, the chemistry doesn’t always go well. Arctic exploration, in particular, can be so stressful that several murders and near-murders have occurred.
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Dec 25, 2024 | 
explorersweb.com | Jerry Kobalenko
A lot of contemporary adventure is long on athletics and short on imagination. Is it really exceptional any more to jumar the South Col route on Everest? Or to be the 1,401st person to climb Mount Vinson in Antarctica? Some might argue that the great adventures have already been done, but even that is not true. The last successful North Pole expedition was 10 years ago; only one party has gone to the North Pole and back to land; no one has done a solo round trip.
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Dec 21, 2024 | 
explorersweb.com | Jerry Kobalenko
The Italian mountain site montagna.tv has listed ExplorersWeb’s Angela Benavides as one of the 50 most influential mountain people of 2024. Regular ExplorersWeb readers will be familiar with her almost daily coverage of mountain happenings around the world, especially in the Himalaya and Karakoram. Angela doesn’t only report the news; she gives context and depth to the alpine stories of the day.
