Traditionalclimbing, is a style of rock climbing in which a climber or group of climbers place all gear required to protect against falls, and remove it when a pitch is complete. Traditional bolted face climbing means the bolts were placed on lead and/or with hand drills. The bolts tend to be much farther apart than sport climbs. For example, a trad bolted route may have bolts from 15–75 feet apart. A sport route may have bolts from 3–10 feet apart, similar to a rock climbing gym. The term seems to be coined by Tom Higgins in the piece "Tricksters and Traditionalists" in 1984. A trad climber is called a traditionalist.
Devils Tower is a butte, possibly laccolithic, composed of igneous rock in the Bear Lodge Ranger District of the Black Hills, near Hulett and Sundance in Crook County, northeastern Wyoming, above the Belle Fourche River. It rises 1,267 feet above the Belle Fourche River, standing 867 feet from summit to base. The summit is 5,112 feet above sea level.
Jon Krakauer is an American writer and mountaineer. He is the author of best-selling non-fiction books—Into the Wild; Into Thin Air; Under the Banner of Heaven; and Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman—as well as numerous magazine articles. He was a member of an ill-fated expedition to summit Mount Everest in 1996, one of the deadliest disasters in the history of climbing Everest.
Tree climbing is a recreational or functional activity consisting of ascending and moving around in the crown of trees.
Tree sitting is a form of environmentalist civil disobedience in which a protester sits in a tree, usually on a small platform built for the purpose, to protect it from being cut down. Supporters usually provide the tree sitters with food and other supplies.
The International Mountaineering and Climbing Federation or UIAA recognise eight-thousanders as the 14 mountains that are more than 8,000 metres (26,247 ft) in height above sea level, and are considered to be sufficiently independent from neighbouring peaks. However, there is no precise definition of the criteria used to assess independence, and since 2012 the UIAA has been involved in a process to consider whether the list should be expanded to 20 mountains. All eight-thousanders are located in the Himalayan and Karakoram mountain ranges in Asia, and their summits are in the death zone.
Abseiling, also known as rappelling from French rappeler, 'to recall' or 'to pull through'), is a controlled descent off a vertical drop, such as a rock face, using a rope.
Richard Preston is a writer for The New Yorker and bestselling author who has written books about infectious disease, bioterrorism, redwoods and other subjects, as well as fiction. Whether journalistic or fictional, his writings are based on extensive background research and interviews.
Julia Lorraine Hill is an American environmental activist and tax redirection advocate. She is best known for having lived in a 180-foot (55 m)-tall, roughly 1500-year-old California redwood tree for 738 days between December 10, 1997 and December 18, 1999. Hill lived in the tree, affectionately known as Luna, to prevent Pacific Lumber Company loggers from cutting it down. She is the author of the 2000 book The Legacy of Luna and co-author of One Makes the Difference.
Hyperion is a coast redwood in California that was measured at 115.85 m (380.1 ft), which ranks it as the world's tallest known living tree.
Wild Country is a major manufacturer of rock climbing equipment, and is most noted for introducing the Friend, a spring-loaded camming device. The company is based in Tideswell in the English Peak District, close to some of the UK's most popular climbing areas.
Stephen C. Sillett is an American botanist specializing in old growth forest canopies. As the first scientist to enter the redwood forest canopy, he pioneered new methods for climbing, exploring, and studying tall trees. Sillett has climbed many of the world's tallest trees to study the plant and animal life residing in their crowns and is generally recognized as an authority on tall trees, especially redwoods. He is the first Kenneth L. Fisher Chair in Redwood Forest Ecology for the Department of Biological Sciences at Humboldt State University. He is featured in Richard Preston's New York Times best seller The Wild Trees, as well as in academic journals, general interest magazines, and nature television programs. He lives in Arcata, California, with wife Marie Antoine, a botanist and fellow forest canopy research scientist.
Lost Monarch is a coast redwood tree in Northern California that is 26 feet (7.9 m) in diameter at breast height, and 320 feet (98 m) in height. It is the world's fifth largest coast redwood in terms of wood volume.
The Grove of Titans is a redwood grove in Del Norte County, Northern California, with several massive coast redwood trees, some of the largest known redwoods in terms of wood volume. The largest coastal redwood tree in the grove by volume is the single-stem Del Norte Titan. The Lost Monarch is comparably large, but a large sprout from the ground at its base is not part of the main trunk structure.
Iluvatar is a redwood tree in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park in Northern California that has been confirmed to be at least 20.5 feet (6.2 m) in diameter at breast height, and 320 feet (98 m) in height. Measured by Stephen C. Sillett, it is the world's third-largest coast redwood, the largest being Lost Monarch.
Del Norte Titan is a coast redwood tree in Del Norte County, Northern California, that was confirmed by measuring to be at least 23.7 feet (7.2 m) in diameter at breast height, and 307 feet (94 m) tall. Measured by Stephen Sillett, it ranks as the world's fifth largest coast redwood. One source recognizes it as the largest based on a single-stem measurement. But the source's recognition pre-dates a 2014 discovery in the redwood parks that is larger. Lost Monarch in the same park, is actually larger with more wood volume than Del Norte Titan, if basal stems are included. The fourth largest coastal redwood is in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park called Iluvatar.
Atlas Grove is a grove of Coast redwood trees within Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, in Humboldt County, northern California. It contains the third largest known Coast redwood, Iluvatar.
The 2008 K2 disaster occurred on 1 August 2008, when 11 mountaineers from international expeditions died on K2, the second-highest mountain on Earth. Three others were seriously injured. The series of deaths, over the course of the Friday ascent and Saturday descent, was the worst single accident in the history of K2 mountaineering. Some of the specific details remain uncertain, with different plausible scenarios having been given about different climbers' timing and actions, when reported later via survivors' eyewitness accounts or via radio communications of climbers who died later in the course of events on K2 that day.
Michael W. Taylor is a leading discoverer of champion and tallest trees - most notably coast redwoods. In 2006, Taylor co-discovered the tallest known tree in the world, a coast redwood now named "Hyperion". He also discovered "Helios" and "Icarus", the 2nd and 3rd tallest.
Sequoia sempervirens is the sole living species of the genus Sequoia in the cypress family Cupressaceae. Common names include coast redwood, coastal redwood and California redwood. It is an evergreen, long-lived, monoecious tree living 1,200–1,800 years or more. This species includes the tallest living trees on Earth, reaching up to 379 feet (115.5 m) in height and up to 29.2 feet (8.9 m) in diameter at breast height (dbh). These trees are also among the oldest living things on Earth. Before commercial logging and clearing began by the 1850s, this massive tree occurred naturally in an estimated 2,100,000 acres (850,000 ha) along much of coastal California and the southwestern corner of coastal Oregon within the United States.
