Thursday, 10 May 2012

They drove a Landrover to the summit of Mount Elbrus!

How amazing is this little bit of information!  I must take my hat off to these dedicated people - if you read what they had to go through, the breakdowns, the cold etc, they really deserve a medal...

I found this information online:

The history

11 years ago, on the 13th of September a car “Land Rover Defender - 90” stood on East summit of Mt.Elbrus. The idea to bring a Land Rover car to its summit had become a full-size project in 1996. The project had been initiated by Avtodom, the 1st Channel, Risk company and had been supported by Alpindustria and other organizations. 


Alexander Abramov, a climber and the author of the idea and Oleg Bogdanov, a professional driver, became the leaders.
This epic work lasted a year and a half. It started with two tentative attempts and finished with the final and successful 43 days long climbing operation, which included 9 serious breakages, falls into crevasses and many days on end of snow storms. 


The results of the expedition were impressive: a lot of unique pictures and video tape footage, four press conferences, dozens of articles and hundreds of notices, the film “Man, car, mountain”, which became the winner of the extreme and adventure films festival “Vertical”
The governing body of Land Rover congratulated the winners and the record was entered in the Guinness Book. Unfortunately, the expedition’s second record was “The highest mountain breakage”, which was duly entered too. The car had crashed on the descent at 5500m (150m under the summit). It is still there on the slope of the highest mountain of Europe and has been a silent reproach for us ever since. 




43 days to the top

After a year of hard work and a couple of test drives in the Caucasus the team of 10 people with Alex as a leader arrived in Elbrus area in August 1997. They drove the Land Rover easily up to the Barrels, 3750m, (the shelters) along the old rocky road. Above this the snow and ice began. All in all they were struggling for 43 days to get Land Rover to the very top: they were using chains on the tires and winches. The Rover kept breaking and sometimes the guys had to go down from 4800m or 5300m to get spare parts to make repairs. To speed up the descent they paraglided down a couple times. 





Now that's something to think about!

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