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Travel in remote areas can often present hydration challenges that are often compounded by weather, elevation and exertion. Often times the only water available is from the nearest lake/stream or snow/ice. In certain instances these sources can be used successfully without any treatment. In other cases successful use requires some form of treatment.

Success in terms of drinking water can be defined as follows:

The quantity of water available is sufficient to prevent dehydration and the quality of the water is such that the health risk from consumption of the water is acceptable.

Comici-Dimai on Cima Grande di Lavaredo North face at the age of seventy-one and the overhanging Scoiattoli Direct on Torre Grande d’Averau at the age of eighty: these are Raffaele Carlesso’s incredible last enterprises. Truthfully awesome! A French mountaineer, having found his signature on Hasse-Brandler’s route-book at Cima Grande di Lavaredo in 1960s, asked if this signature was affixed by a son or by a namesake: he couldn’t believe that the matter in hand was the same famous Raffaele Carlesso climbing in 1930s! Sixty years of climbs and about two thousands ascents represent his unique “curriculum”; self-trust, moral and physical strength, agility, deep self-esteem, steady training and high reliability, either in mountaineering or in life, were “his bow’s arrows”.

Ticks are small parasitic arachnids that make a living by hematophagy, a fancy word for blood-sucking. About the size of a grain of rice, these dark colored pests feed on the blood of mammals, birds and sometimes reptiles and amphibians. They are widely distributed throughout the world, though most common in areas with warm, humid climates since ticks require some air moisture to undergo metamorphosis and cold temperatures inhibit egg development. They can be a bane to hikers, pets, livestock, as well as wild animals. Ticks are most common in environments with many large mammals that help to feed and distribute the pests. In addition to the nastiness of having a parasite burrow into the skin, they can be carriers of a number of diseases including Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.

Despite the repugnant features and habits of ticks, there are measures you can take to minimize their impact when you are hiking in areas known to harbor them. Of course the easiest way to avoid them is to stay out of their habitats, but this leaves many beautiful and interesting places off-limits. Knowing their habits and behavior can help you defend against them and allow you to enjoy an outing without undue anxiety and apprehension.

It is nothing like a Dolomites's wall, or even the West face of the Drus, the steepness is not excessive. However, we are already very high on the spur and the Leschaux glacier which gets darker and darker with the sun setting down beyond the Flammes de Pierre, is 800 meters below us: Denise Escande, Cabri (Jean Thérond), Habib (Marcel Zerf) and I the last.

When I settle, it is dark, and all the others are already in their sleeping bags. The manoeuvre is quite prickly, particularly when I take out of my rucksack the brand new ‘elephant foot’ duvet which Denise borrowed from Lionel Terray, covered with the content of a huge condensed milk tube which broke open in my rucksack. I sticked to everyone near me! I learned there that on the Walker spur, making such a joke is not the best thing to make yourself popular, particularly if you do not want your companions to have the sudden desire to throw you overboard. And as there, as far as “boards” are concerned, there were none. I then understood that I should not laugh, and I put on my face the most sorry expression which I could manage.

Gary Hemming Enlarge Gary Hemming the Beatnik of the Alps On the 13th of August 1966, two German alpinists, Heinz Ramisch et Hermann Schridell started the ascent of the West face of the Drus and stopped on the ledge below the pendulum, 700 meters above the ground.

They will spend ten days on the wall. Plunged into an adventure largely above their capabilities, they will be the cause of one of the largest mountain rescue operation ever done in the Alps.

Neither hurt or exhausted nor sick… but simply unable to make a further step on this wall too huge, too steep, too difficult for them.

In the second post-war period the French mountaineering, which had previously played quite a secondary part, without participating in the run to the great North walls’conquest and in the roaring Sixth Grade’s epos, really lived one of its best historic moments. In that age a group of young transalpine alpinists, greatly motivated and free from the rhetoric and nationalism which had characterized the pre-war times’ European mountaineering, “rode the wave”, realizing important undertakings in the Alps, in Himalaya and Peruvian Cordillera Blanca. Among them Lionel Terray, between 1945 and 1965, year of his premature death, quickly became an outstanding protagonist, bringing great prestige to the French mountaineering. He was one of the greatest alpinists in that age, but not only: as a matter of fact history tells us, through his behavior during some definite events, as Annapurna Expedition, that he also was a true mountain’s hero.

Rock climbers are people who scale near vertical, vertical and overhang rock faces. Humans have been climbing for thousands of years, and one of the most curious examples is the Anasazi. The Anasazi lived in the Southwest thousands of years ago and built cliff dwellings in the Grand Canyon that could only be accessed by rock climbing. They built trails and bridges to cross sections without handholds, but may be the first rock climbing people. In the millennia since, safety equipment has been created to connect climbers to walls in case of a fall. The gear that links climbers to the rock face is called protection, or pro. The idea with protection is that one climber, called the leader, ascends a route and attaches himself to the wall with protection, while his partner, belays, or feeds rope, from below. Protection is used to guard in case of a fall. If the leader falls, the protection is supposed to stop the fall because the rope is connected to it. The debate in the climbing community is where and how this protection should be placed, and is a question of safety and ethics. I believe permanent protection, called bolts, should be placed in areas with unreliable protection and at belay stations, in order to make climbing safer, and minimize impact on rock formations. There are two categories of protection: removable and permanent.

The extremely diverse terrain of our planet presents to men a scary number of characteristics: Quality, advantage, fertility, productivity, moisture, dryness...But also challenges men with adversity. These difficulties can occur in any type of terrain or altitude. Let’s think of it in another way, if we had the ability to configure a soil with the click of a mouse, we could select the difficulty of an infertile soil as a sandy desert soil, only instead of applying it where it naturally occurs in Africa, in low altitude as the Sahara, let's apply a different altitude, miles above sea level. The result is obviously a very adverse environment for human beings not only by soil infertility, but the altitude itself and all the limitations it imposes on us, homo sapiens.

Several months ago I published in my blog a short text that exemplified the popularity of mountain climbing and mountains as a whole around the world and especially in Brazil, now let’s take a look at some more specific examples.

In the past five years or so climbing in general (whatever: ice, rock, Andean altitude trekking, eight thounsand peaks, etc.) has been gaining attention in the media more and more. I see posts on blogs noticing this. Every week or so often appears in the media some scenic rock around the world, a story about a popular rock climbing.

I believe that to be a columnist for altamontanha.com and eventually wrtite somthing here at summitpost means more than having vast experience in mountains or high altitude mountains itself. Means to be critical in nature, to be unconditional lover of nature and everything that relates to it, means not only to be a lover of the mountains but all its features and cultural events that involves the imaginary places and its impacts. It means more than to be always on the mountains, above all, to understand the will and our endless passion for freedom that they provide. Of course, this is a personal opinion.