Episode 094: Beyond Everest, The Annapurna IV Series Introduction

Posted by on Jan 14, 2009 in All Podcast Episodes, HD Episodes, Season 3, Beyond Everest-Annapurna IV | Comments Off on Episode 094: Beyond Everest, The Annapurna IV Series Introduction

Everest Isn’t Necessarily The Pinnacle. We’re kicking off season 3 of The Rest of Everest with a special series I’m calling Beyond Everest.

All of you know my dear friend Ben Clark and you’ve watched him summit Everest. It was an extremely large accomplishment and it may have seemed like the pinnacle of any climber’s career. Well, over the past few years Ben has set his sights on other Himalayan peaks. In the Spring of 2008 Ben and his climbing partners Josh Butson and Tim Clarke attempted to summit a peak in the western half of Nepal called Annapurna IV. This time I gave the team an HD camcorder, lots of batteries and lots of blank tape to film their entire expedition.

The footage they returned home with tells the full story of their Annapurna IV climb. Much like previous episodes of the podcast, the footage shows that there’s so much more to the experience than attaining the summit. In fact, the team were unable to summit Annapurna IV due to extreme avalanche danger.

While they cannot show all of us what it was like on top of the peak, they will be able to show us a climbing style that that is very different from the Everest climb and known as alpine style. No fixed ropes, no sherpa teammates to carry supplies up the mountain and most importantly no rescue if there is an accident.

What you’ll see is a group of close friends who are also talented mountaineers experience all of the trials and tribulations, successes and failures, tough decisions and even tougher climbing conditions on a Himalayan expedition to a remote and largely unknown peak. Oh yeah, and they even brought their skis along and carried them up the mountain for some truly out-of-bounds skiing!

I’m very excited to bring all of you this Beyond Everest series. I think you’ll find it completely engrossing. We’ll bring the show back to it’s mountaineering roots and get reacquainted with Ben while introducing Josh and Tim.

There’s so much more to climbing in the Himalayas than simply climbing
Everest. So rope up, the Annapurna IV expedition begins next week!

Jon Miller

Total Running Time: 5:30

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