Matt Maynard Archives - ��ϳԹ�� Online

The Quest to Complete the Greater Patagonian Trail

jversteegh — Sun, 19 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The 1,900-mile-long route winds through the southern Andes from Santiago to the climbing mecca of Mount Fitzroy. To complete it, hikers need a lot more than physical stamina.

The post The Quest to Complete the Greater Patagonian Trail appeared first on ��ϳԹ�� Online.

Setting a Speed Record from Patagonia to Alaska

jwphippen — Mon, 25 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Only two people have made the hike from Ushuaia, Argentina, a town at the country’s southernmost tip called the “End of the World,” all the way north to Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay. The first was 35 years ago, when British explorer George Meegan finished in six years and 236 days. The second? Holly “Cargo” Harrison. On May 30, the 58-year-old completed the 14,481-mile trek in 530 days, 1,895 days faster than Meegan’s record and quite possibly one of the most substantial (time-wise) FKT takedowns ever.

Cargo’s relentless 27.3-mile daily average took its toll on his body. Raising his crutches in triumph at the Arctic Ocean last week, he proved there are still big FKT records out there for the taking—you just might have to survive a heart attack and tussle with a bear to beat them.

Before his hike, Cargo, who is from North Carolina, reached out to Meegan with his biggest concern: “I’m getting really old and don’t know if I can do this.” Meegan set him at ease, emailing back: “You’re probably the perfect age. Practiced determination is what will carry you through.” And it did—all the way up South America, through the Darien Gap into Panama and through Central America north through Mexico.

When ��ϳԹ�� reported on Cargo’s arrival into the United States last November, it seemed like the last leg of his trip would be the easiest. It wasn’t. “Coming up through Arizona and Nevada,” Cargo says, “there were long stretches where I was alone, without any shops, and eating terribly.” On a freezing night near Reno, still without a sleeping bag, the lifestyle of the ultralight hiker caught up with him. “I woke with this terrible pain in my arm.” After popping some aspirin, he hiked in a daze through the night. The next day, in the relative safety of a motel room, Cargo had a major heart attack.

Emergency rescuers helicoptered Cargo to a hospital, and doctors inserted a stent into his coronary artery. Against his doctor’s advice, Cargo was out hiking within five days. “I want to say I built up slowly, but within another five days I was back up to my 30-mile daily target.”

A few habits may have caused the heart attack. Cargo was eating mostly junk food, like cheese, hot dogs, bread, and chocolate, all of which were easy to find along the trail. He’d also picked up an unhealthy habit on the hike. “I’m not a smoker or anything,” he says, “but down in Mexico, I was in such a hurry that I developed the strategy of having a cigarette just to force myself to rest.”

Then, in British Columbia this March, an injured hamstring delayed him for ten days. Tired of waiting for his body to heal and winter to end, Cargo . The four-limbed thru-hiker had already honed this injury-cheating technique on both his successful thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail in 2011 and during a previous, aborted attempt at the Patagonia-to-Alaska record in 2015. As Cargo walked 2,000 miles through the Yukon, his trick worked again. Later, he converted the crutches into litter pickers, which, because his brother-in-law was now tailing him in a camper van, Cargo used to collect discarded beer cans, earning up to $47 a day to help cover gas.

By May 28, with just 15 miles separating him from Prudhoe Bay, Cargo was alone again. “People had been stopping me on the road for days, telling me the bears were waking up.” A couple had even jumped out of their car, warning Cargo that grizzlies would use his crutches as toothpicks. Spurning advice to pack bear spray, the thru-hiker took shelter from the wind by bedding down in the lee of a remote outpost.

“I just had a bear encounter,” Cargo begins a . He goes on to say how a grizzly “sat up on his haunches right in front of me…started snorting, shaking his head and moving his paw…at me.” The bear was after his food, and Cargo says he picked up a crutch and gave the animal a quick swat across the nose. Then he lowers the camera to show a trail of feces left by the fleeing bear. “I think I knocked the crap out of him, although I haven’t checked my own pants yet.”

When asked about Cargo’s FKT, Meegan told ��ϳԹ�� that “his achievement and speed are extraordinary and aren’t likely to be bettered.” But the new record holder is not so sure. “Consistency is key,” Cargo says. “You’ve got to get up and walk 12 to 15 hours every day for 17 months. But without injury, it could be done a month quicker, maybe even more.”

Now that he’s finished, Cargo says he’ll write up the adventure in a book. While he’s glad to be done, he says there was something very soothing about walking all day that he’ll miss. Life, Cargo says, “is going to be more complicated now.”

The post Setting a Speed Record from Patagonia to Alaska appeared first on ��ϳԹ�� Online.

This Man Is Hiking from Patagonia to Alaska

jversteegh — Fri, 03 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Holly Harrison had a goal: tackle the longest possible land journey across the Americas. The 57-year-old North Carolinian (trail name: Cargo) started on December 17, 2016, in Ushuaia, Argentina, and has already stomped through 12 countries, crossing both South and Central America.

Harrison arrived back on U.S. soil on November 3, and he won’t stop until he’s reached Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, in fall 2018—more than 15,000 miles from his starting point. He wants to reach Alaska by June 1, 2018, for a summer weather window. If successful, Harrison would be only the third person to complete the whole route—and the first to hike it nonstop.

“At night, I never veer more than 50 yards off the road,” says the former U.S. Army Ranger and kids’ camp program director. “I’m as efficient as possible.”

British hiker George Meegan was the first to embark on the trek, in 1983. Explorer Karl Bushby hiked it from 1998 to 2006 as part of his round-the-world walk. Others have tried it, says Meegan, but “they usually don’t finish because they fall in love.”

Harrison’s journey perhaps has less romance. In the same accelerated spirit of recent thru-hiking record attempts in the United States, his journey is about setting the FKT () from Patagonia to Alaska. It took Meegan 6.5 years and Bushby seven. Harrison is trying to do it in 20 months. “People are always telling me, ‘You should see this along the way,’ but I’m in a race,” he says. That’s not to say Cargo has lacked for adventures along the way.

“He is very competitive and tough on himself,” says his mother. “Nobody could talk him out of it.”

Harrison caught the thru-hiking bug in 2011, when he planned to complete the Appalachian Trail. He suffered a serious horse accident that put him on crutches before he left, but there was “something about my brain that still made me go,” he says.

So Harrison set off anyway, hobbling along on crutches for the first 200 miles of the AT. “I was averaging ten to 15 miles a day. I would get into camp after nightfall but was keeping up with most hikers along the way.” Devising a neat way to carry his gear inside his crutches, he inscribed the word “cargo” on the poles. The name stuck. And while the crutches are now gone, today the ultralight hiker uses an adapted concept: carrying his five-pound kit inside his supersized hiking poles, which are hollow and made from baseball bats and leaf blower parts.

In 2015, four years after his AT attempt, Harrison began his first assault on the Patagonia to Alaska thru-hike. After 2.5 months on the trail, he’d hiked 1,700 miles. One rainy night, however, as he was trying to reach the shelter of a storm drain, Harrison fell in a hole and tore a tendon. “I tried for two days to continue on crutches, but it kicked my butt so hard.” He returned to the United States for surgery.

Once healed, Harrison opted against picking up where he left off and instead headed all the way south to begin afresh in Patagonia’s hurricane winds. “He is very competitive and tough on himself,” says his mother, Jackie Holmes. “Nobody could talk him out of it.”

Now Harrison is more than two-thirds of the way through, and he hopes the roughest miles are behind him. He says that crossing the Darién Gap—a 60-mile stretch of roadless jungle between Colombia and Panama—was the most harrowing part of the journey thus far. By the time he started that portion of his hike in June, FARC troops in the Darién Gap had signed a peace treaty to end their 50-year guerilla war. “Half the time, you are in the river,” Harrison explains of his illegal crossing between continents. “The rest of the time, you’re going up and down mud slopes or along rocky banks beside muddy torrents.” Whenever he tripped and fell, his hired guides rescued him from the current.

Traveling with ten other illegal immigrants, Harrison’s passport was confiscated—but quickly returned—by Panamanian officials when he reached the relative safety of the road in Yaviza, Panama. “The Darién Gap plays mental games on you,” he says, shaking his head. “It really wore me down.”

From here to Alaska, Harrison hopes the experience will be easier—and more familiar. “I’m looking forward to finding places to eat that I know,” he says. “I don’t want to be surprised anymore.”

The post This Man Is Hiking from Patagonia to Alaska appeared first on ��ϳԹ�� Online.

How to Survive a Swim in the Antarctic

gthomas — Wed, 28 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Lewis Pugh swims in the coldest waters on the planet in only a Speedo, swim cap, and goggles. The 47-year-old Brit has front-crawled across the North Pole and breast-stroked through a glacial lake at the foot of Mount Everest—all to raise awareness for climate change. As a result, he’s no stranger to frozen fingers and hypothermia.

“People think that because I have done it so many times that I have some kind of genetic advantage,” Pugh says. “But your body will never get used to it.”

On his latest trip to the Antarctic Peninsula earlier this month, Pugh swam for 18 minutes, covering his target 0.6 miles off the icy 32-degree islet of Half Moon Island. Shortly after the swim, on a stopover in Santiago, Chile, en route to Cape Town, Pugh and his medical team talked to ��ϳԹ�� about what happens to the human body in freezing water, and how Pugh is able to pull it off.

The Dangers

To swim nearly two-thirds of a mile in open, freezing water is to put your body on the edge of life and death, Pugh says. Parts of your body begin shutting down, and it can happen so quickly that you don’t even realize it. In fact, a few English Channel swimmers have , despite not presenting any alarming symptoms—and that’s in water that’s 60 degrees.

Pugh likens the sensation to that of burning skin. Your skin cells slowly freeze and burst, causing your fingers to swell. And the longer you are in the water, the more the pain you feel. Hypothermia creeps in slowly.

It’s not just the cold water than can kill you, says Roger Melvill, a South African neurosurgeon and mountaineer who acted as Pugh’s trip doctor. During Pugh’s swim, Melvill rode in a support boat nearby and watched for leopard seals. These predators will grab a person by the leg and pull them under. Sighting one would mean the end of the swim. Sharp floating ice is another concern—for obvious reason—Melvill says.

Air temperature needs to be monitored, too. On previous swims, Pugh has resorted to using a breast stroke action because it’s actually warmer if he keeps his arms submerged, Melvill says. During a in October the air temperature reached -35 degrees.

Preparing the Body and Mind

Pugh spent the journey to Half Moon Island alone in his cabin, calmly focusing his mind. It’s a meditation-style practice he’s developed to reduce anxiety before a dangerous swim. British psychologist Lee Harrison, who studies how humans experience pain, believes Pugh is on to something. “By practicing mindfulness (concentrating on the task at hand) or alternatively by using distraction techniques, it’s possible to diminish the threat that causes stress,” he wrote in an email to ��ϳԹ��.

Once Pugh has his feet in the snow at the water’s edge, it is very important that his team avoids expressing any kind of negative emotion. “Fear is contagious,” Pugh says. In the final moments before a swim, Pugh will typically put in ear buds and listen to music—anything from Puff Daddy to opera arias. But on this trip, he just concentrated on “justice,” he says. “Justice for future world children” who will grapple with a warming planet, he says. “Justice for marine animals and justice for the future of the Antarctic.” Then he dove in.

Surviving the Swim

The act is a mental battle as much as a physical one. “Once in the water, there is a good wolf and bad wolf in your head,” Pugh says. “The wolf you feed is the wolf that wins.”

Harrison agrees. “A fearful brain will typically increase the perception of pain, whereas a distracted or mindful brain will inhibit this information.”

Once in the water, Pugh focuses on controlling his breathing. At the start of , in 2010, Pugh began breathing heavily, gulping water and then vomiting, prompting him to pull out and reschedule. “Hyperventilation linked to fear and panic is thought to be one of the main causes of drowning,” says Michael Ramage, a surgeon who researches muscle function and has spent 15 months working in the Antarctic. “This happens very rapidly, even if the individual can swim and is rescued early.”

During his recent Half Moon Island swim, Pugh’s fingers started changing color, from pink to white. When exposed to cold temperatures, blood vessels on the skin’s surface narrow in a process called vasoconstriction. The body is trying to reduce the amount of blood that becomes chilled, instead pooling it in the organs, the abdomen, and fat found deep underneath the skin. The process stops cold blood from returning to the heart. But “there’s a point where you are going to have to stop,” Melvill says, “otherwise there’s no coming back.”

Partway through the swim, Pugh began dropping his head further below the water’s surface, indicating increased physical strain. A member of his support team, Dawid Mocke, paddled close to check on him. It was a delicate moment. “Should Dawid tell me the time?” Pugh said after the swim. “Or should he tell me the distance?” He explained this conundrum: “If I am exhausted and he tells me I’m only half-way, that would break me. Alternatively, if he tells me, ‘Fantastic, you have done ten minutes,’ that might boost me. It’s a constantly developing situation and we only sometimes get it right.”

How to Recover

After the swim, Pugh struggled to haul himself into the rescue Zodiac. He was slurring his speech and his movements were uncoordinated. Clambering over the boat’s rib was excruciating, and caused massive bruising on the partially frozen soft tissue around his shins and ribs. “I was both physically and mentally finished,” Pugh said later. His trip doctor had no doubt that the swimmer was hypothermic.

Support team members covered Pugh with blankets and wrapped his face, then ferried Pugh to a nearby ship for a lukewarm shower. The short ride over was slow, as any sudden movements could have thrown Pugh into a lethal heart rhythm called ventricular tachycardia. “From this there is no way back,” Melvill says.

Melvill continued to attend to Pugh during an hour-long shower. As Pugh’s constricted blood vessels began to open, warm blood returned to his blue fingers. Ramage warns that this moment can be the most dangerous for a cold water swimmer. A cold-water survivor’s body temperature can drop by more than a degree as chilled blood returns in greater volume from the extremities to the heart, a phenomenon known as “afterdrop.” The consequences can be fatal.

After showering, Pugh’s body temperature warmed and Melvill relaxed. The bruising on the swimmer’s legs and ribs was serious, but Pugh is never out of the action for long. Just three days later, Pugh swam a short distance around a giant Antarctic iceberg on the same day that two of his team members staged an impromptu wedding on a nearby island. Aerial photos later revealed the ice block to be in .

Asked what plans Pugh has for future swims, he says “the swims are just to carry the environmental message about melting ice and the fragility of the polar regions. I have a three-year fight to get six more Marine Protected Areas agreed in the Antarctic before 2020. There is no time to lose.”

The post How to Survive a Swim in the Antarctic appeared first on ��ϳԹ�� Online.

Matt Maynard Archives - ���ϳԹ��� Online