https://ift.tt/3EUjM8e Every U.S. state has its own romanticized identity. New York is the high-energy center of high culture. Wisconsin is the land of beer and cheese. Texas is full of things that are bigger than the things in other places. But no state in the country has been more romanticized, in more ways, than California. Endless beaches strewn with surfer babes . A perfect climate that nurtures the nation’s television and movie stardust factories. As many breathtaking national parks as New Jersey has clogged turnpikes. California was glorified even before it became our 31st state, when the gold rush of the mid-1800s saw San Francisco grow from a sleepy outpost to one of the biggest cities in the country. Eighty years later, in America’s largest-ever migration, 200,000 dust bowl farmers abandoned their heartland homes and headed to California’s verdant farmland. In fact, the state experienced such a steady flow of optimistic newcomers for so many years that today, one in eight A...
https://ift.tt/jbTkJ9z As it has been for decades, Yosemite National Park is the climbing mecca of the universe, attracting visitors from all over the world to challenge themselves against its massive granite walls. The crowning achievement? El Capitan —the great monolith in the sky. It’s the Everest of rock climbing, the tallest, most famous, and most challenging. Though there’s no official tally of how many climbers visit Yosemite annually, the National Park Service estimates 25,000 to 50,000. The once comparatively small group of counter-culture athletes, as seen in the movie Valley Uprising , has blossomed into a mainstream sport, with close to 8 million climbers in the U.S. alone. But with increased usage comes greater impact, including both personal and human waste. Up until two years ago, climbers didn’t have any regulations regarding big wall climbing. But in May 2021, the Park Service implemented a pilot program, the Yosemite Big Wall Permit Program, requiring anyone planni...
https://ift.tt/iSGysnC Legendary free-solo climber Zach Milligan was found dead at the bottom of a 2,300-foot ice climb in the Canadian Rockies. Rangers with Parks Canada found Milligan’s body close to the bottom of Polar Circus in Jasper National Park on February 11 after noticing his parked car hadn’t moved. Milligan was part of the team that first skied down Yosemite’s Half Dome in 2021. The Georgia native, 42, moved out to Colorado in the early 2000s to adventure full-time, chasing crags around the great American West. He spent his early years teaching himself how to climb on faces in Alabama, Tennessee, and North Carolina. Milligan first became interested in climbing ice in 1999 while living in Atlanta, according to Gripped . He asked a friend, Doug Peterson, who owned a climbing shop, about getting into ice climbing and he hooked him up with his own personal set of gear. After climbing in North Carolina, he went out and bought his own ice climbing kit and promptly took off for...
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