The Gear Junkie is up to his old tricks, launching another “Choose Your Adventure” contest that will send a lucky winner off on an adventure of their choosing, and load them up with all the gear they’ll need to have fun along the way.

The contest, which runs from now until September 15th, allows entrants to select from one of five different multisport getaways to the Alleghenies Mountains. If your name is picked, you get to go on the adventure you select, and bring a friend along for the ride, all expenses paid, including airfare and plenty of great gear as well.

Each of the five packaged adventures includes a variety of activities, such as fishing in the mountain streams, kayaking on local lakes, hiking scenic trails, and road biking through the Alleghenies. When you sign up for the contest, you can look over the combination of activities and select the one that best fits your interests. When you win, find a friend who wants to join you, and later this Fall you’ll be zipped off to the southeastern United States for some outdoor fun.

To join in the fun, simply click here and begin filling out the form. Good luck!

Primal Quest Badlands is just over a week away, and I’m working hard at getting everything in order so I can leave town for the event. PQ is one of the biggest adventure races in the world, and while not everyone can devote all the time necessary to prepare for a ten-day race, that doesn’t mean they don’t want to give adventure racing a go.

If you’ve been considering getting into the sport, then PlanetFear has a nice article you’ll want to look over. It’s dedicated to helping beginners navigate through all the essential gear items that they’ll need for their first race, including good trail running shoes, headlamps, backpacks, and a whole lot more, including some that you might not have thought of on your own, suck as the proper socks.

The article offers up some good insights across the board, without bogging you down with too much info. For example, they recommend that when buying your pack you go with something in the 20-30 liter range, and make sure that it has waist and chest straps to hold it firmly in place while running. They even recommend a few specific companies and a pack or two, but don’t weigh you down with thoughts on all the pack features you may or may not need.

All in all, it’s a good, comprehensive report on the basic gear you’ll need for your first few races, which will tend to be shorter, but not necessarily less gear intensive. Sure, the expedition length races like Primal Quest have you out on the course longer, and you may need a bigger pack, but a lot of your gear will translate over to the longer races just fine. But as a beginner, you should just be thinking about getting through the first races in one piece, and not worrying too much about the epic events. At least not yet.

I missed this video when it was making the rounds last week, but it’s definitely worth sharing now. Back in January I posted about Ueli Steck setting yet another speed record for climbing in the Alps, zipping up the North Face of the Grandes Jorasses, part of the Mount Blanc Massif, in just 2 hours, 21 minutes. If you’ve ever wondered how Ueli does it, then take a look at the video below, and prepare to be amazed. Really impressive climbing.

More updates from the Karakorum today, where the season is rapidly coming to an end, and teams are either topping out or packing up to come home it seems.

We’ll start on K2, where Kazakhs Maxut Zhumayev and Vassiliy Pivtsov were hoping to make another summit bid today, but high winds near the top have forced them down, along with a Japanese team they were hoping to work with. The weather forecast calls for “hurricane force” winds on the summit over the next few days, which prompted the hasty retreat back to Base Camp. The question now is, will they hang around for another go?

It seems that most of the teams are preparing to give up on K2 this seaons, and Everest News has already declared “No Summits this Year”. The latest update from the Field Touring Alpine Team says that they’ve elected to go home. Their porters have arrived in BC and packing has already begun. They hope to exit Base Camp on Friday to begin the trek back to civilization. The team is healthy but tired, and although there were no summits from FTA this year, they still consider it a successful outing.

We’ll probably have to wait a few days to find out if any teams plan to stay behind and make one final attempt on the summit, but it seems that BC is going to be very empty by the weekend. If I were to venture a guess, I’d say Max and Vasso are the most likely pair to try again, but with high winds and very deep snow up near the summit, it seems that the chances of topping out are very slim. If the Karakorum season does end with no summits on K2, it just underscores how difficult it truly is to climb this mountain.

Meanwhile, the Altitude Junkies have updated their blog with the confirmation that Spanish and Korean climbers made successful summits on the 3rd. This includes Oh Eun-sun, the Korean woman who now has 13 8000m peaks to her name. The AJ team is completely off the mountain now, and their porters have also arrived on the scene, so they are packing up and preparing to head back to Skardu as well. It seems that the season is over on the Gasherbrums as well.

Finally, ExWeb is reporting that a team still remains on Broad Peak, and they are attempting a new route on that mountain. They’re into C1 right now and will be proceeding upwards to C2 and 3 tomorrow. By the end of the weekend, they may be the final team in the Karakorum.

Another expedition that I haven’t updated on in awhile is Walking the Amazon, which has British adventurer Ed Stafford attempting to wall from the source of the Amazon River to its mouth along the eastern coast of Brazil. If successful, this will be the first trek of the Amazon from start to finish ever, and quite an impressive feat. So far, Ed has been out walking for 420 days, and he isn’t expected to finish up until sometime next May. In between, there is a whole lot of suffering in the “Green Hell” to endure.

I’ve mentioned before that I enjoy Ed’s Twitter feed, and I still fully recommend it. The former British Army officer, and his companion Cho Sanchez, send daily messages out to the world that keep us informed what is like for them to be traveling through one of the harshest environments on the planet. But Ed also updates his blog with weekly reports that offer a lot more detail on what it is like to be trekking across the Amazon.

For example, the latest entry gives us a bit of insight into Ed and Cho’s morning routine, which begins at 7 AM with the boys rolling out of their hammocks and getting the day off to a start with a malaria pill washed down with some water. From there, it’s out of the cleaner and considerably dryer clothes and into the wet ones. They only carry two sets of clothes on them, and one of those sets is perpetually wet thanks to the humidity and lack of ventilation in the jungle. After that, it’s time to cook breakfast and things underway for the day, which will mostly include hiking through miles of dense rainforest.

From my limited time in the Amazon, I can completely relate to the stories of wet clothes. Literally everything I wore ended up wet, and it would not dry at all while I was in the jungle. When I returned to the air conditioned cabin aboard the boat that served as my home for the two weeks I was on the Amazon, the clothes still didn’t dry all that much, and my backpack was often soaked for no real apparent reason as well. The moisture gets into everything, and my camera lenses struggled to autofocus with the humidity causing the glass to fog up. I have a tremendous amount of respect for Ed and Cho being able to continue to hike all those miles every day, with the end still a long way off. But through the use of modern technology, we can continue to follow their adventure, which is fascinating to watch.

It’s been a few weeks since we checked in on Mark Beaumont, who is in the process of cycling the Trans-American Highway from Alaska to the tip of South America. He’s been blogging about his journey and updating us on his adventure over at the Cycling the Americas website.

When last we checked in on Mark, he had summitted Denali and was preparing to begin his ride. He has since ridden out of Alaska and south through Canada, and is presently back in the continental U.S. and riding through the Washington/Idaho border region.

Mark is making good time so far on his journey, but on this type of ride, the northern end is always the easiest. Riding through the U.S. and Canada gives the cyclist a great infrastructure with excellent roads, campsites, and supply stations along the way. The further south he goes however, the worse those conditions are likely to be, especially once he enters Mexico and continues into Central America and then down into South America as well.

Today on his blog update, Mark is answering a series of questions, that are quite interesting. He talks about his route thus far, and how scenic it has been. He mentions his climbs, having already knocked off Denali, and setting his sights on Aconcagua in January, and what it’s like to spend hours on the road alone with just his bike.

For the next few weeks, Mark will continue his ride through the U.S. and updates will continue throughout the entire journey When he reaches Mexico, I expect a different tone to his updates and very interesting stories from the road.

I wrote about this little adventure this morning on Gadling as well, but thought that it was such an interesting story, I wanted to share it here too. It’s called the Listen to Africa Expedition, and it’s an interesting mix of adventure travel, culture, and more.

A few months back, Huw WIlliams and Rebecca Sumner set out from the U.K. to ride their bikes through Africa. Over the course of the next two years, they’ll be covering more than 15,000 miles as they explore amazing landscapes, rustic African villages, and other remote corners of the continent. All the while they’ll be blogging about their journey and taking us along for the ride, so to speak.

Of course, we’ve seen other long distance cycling adventures before, including a number of them through Africa. But what sets this one apart, is their unique approach to capturing the very essence of the continent. The two British adventurers are taking some recording equipment along with them, and as they go, they are recording, quite literally, the sounds of Africa. This includes natural sounds, such as wildlife, the wind through the trees, and so on, as well as the voices of the people they meet along the way. They hope to preserve some of the culture as well, by recording local music, oral histories, and more. Some of the recordings are already in place on the expedition’s website, and it is fascinating to listen to them, especially in context with the blog posts as well. Click here to see a list of the audio files available.

There is a rough plan in place as to how Huw and Rebecca will go about their journey, but they are being very flexible in their travels, and leaving their options open. After leaving the U.K., they rode their bikes across France where they hopped a ferry to Morocco. From there they peddled down the western coast of Africa, and are now currently in Mauritania, with many months, and miles ahead of them yet.

The expedition website obviously contains a lot more information about the journey, including a gallery of photos and a map to track the riders’ progress. Gear heads will also appreciate the information on the equipment they are using, which is always fascinating to me.

Seems like a very cool project and I like their approach to capturing audio. It should be fun to follow along and listen to their progress.

A quick update this morning, courtesy of ExWeb, who is reporting that weather conditions on K2 have prevented the teams on their summit push from reaching the top of the mountain. Deep snow, reportedly up to the climbers chests, was the main impediment to their progress, and while most are heading back down for now, the Kazakhs are going to stay in C4 and make another go of it tomorrow.

According to the story, Gerlinde Kalenbrunner and her climbing mates have been turned back and are proceeding down. She’ll no doubt be weighing her options and the chances of getting to the summit yet this year, although time is beginning to run short. But Maxut Zhumayev and Vassiliy Pivtsov have remained at altitude, and hope to gather their strength to make another attempt on the summit. This shows how strong these two men are at altitude, having the ability to actually recover without descending, and they are actually use to spending days above 8000m.

The Field Touring Alpine Team has updated their status today as well, with the news that their climbers have also gone back down the mountain and are either in C2 or BC. Everyone is said to be healthy and feeling fine, if a bit tired.

The ExWeb report also indicated that a large chunk of ice broke off from a serac just above the Bottleneck and went sliding down the mountain, narrowly missing one of the climbers, in what had to be a very scary scene some what reminiscent of last year’s tragedy. Lets hope that these falling chunks of ice are not a precursor to another major serac collapse.

I’ll keep an eye on Max and Vassiliy and their next summit bid tomorrow. If anyone can get up to the top, it’ll be these two.

We’ve been following her progress for months, and today it’s official. Sarah Outen has completed her solo row across the Indian Ocean, and reached Mauritius today at 8:27 PM local time. She rowed up onto the shore to greetings from friends and family and in triumphant style. You can read more about the finish on the most recent posts on Sarah’s blog.

Sarah set out from the town of Freemantle on the western coast of Australia back on March 31st, and now, more than four months later, she has completed her quest to become the first woman, and youngest person, to ever solo the Indian Ocean. Along the way she faced a number of hardships, including killer storms, high winds, weeks alone at sea, and having her boat rolled in the middle of the ocean. But through it all, she remained upbeat and her dispatches always seemed pleasant, confident, and positive.

I want to send my congratulations along to Sarah on a job well done. That was one heck of an effort, and I’m glad to see she completed the crossing safe and sound, and none the worse for wear it seems. I’m sure we’ll have more updates soon, as she is no doubt looking forward to a hot shower and a fine meal, not to mention a long sleep on a comfortable bed that doesn’t move beneath her.

Welcome to Africa Sarah!

Here’s a story that I wrote about over the weekend on Gadling, but thought some would find interesting here as well. The New York Times posted a really interesting story about Colombia opening back up for travel after years of turmoil from drug lords, high crime rates, and crazy guerilla activity. The gist of the article is that there are a lot of opportunities for adventure travelers to enjoy remote regions of the country before the mainstream crowds start to show up on the tourist buses.

The spotlight is placed squarely on El Cocuy National Park in particular and Ritacuba Blanco, a 17,749 foot peak that resides there. The park is an off-the-beaten-path wilderness some 1000-square miles in size that falls near the Venezuelan border. It is home to a number of animal species, including pumas, tapirs, condors, and more. It also happens to have its fair share of tall mountain peaks as well.

The author of the story compares Ritacuba Blanco with Kilimanjaro and Aconcagua, and while it doesn’t quite have the altitude of those two peaks, it is a similar climbing experience, minus the crowds. That seems to be the main point of the story, that for now, Colombia remains an untapped resource for anyone looking for a little outdoor adventure. There is plenty to see and do, and few visitors to take advantage of it all. But the author warns that this is changing quickly, as El Cocuy saw nearly as many tourists in January of this year than it did for the entirety of 2008.

If you’re looking for a new travel experience, and the opportunity to visit a place that remains off the tourist radar for now, you could do far worse than Colombia. There are still some areas of the country that remain dangerous, but for the most part, it has become a great place for travelers once again, and at least for now, it is a bit of a hidden gem.