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V1N2

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ays to s '�a le it, and then the young snowboarder ripped down what little snow clung to the peak in a mere three and a half hours. Koch calls the Andean climb deceptively easy: "There are easy routes up it that you can j walk, but it's known for very severe winds and storm s," he cautions. "In Decem ber of 1991 , I was tent-bound in a storm there at 19 ,000 feet fo four days." Mount Elbrus, located in the Caucasus range between the Caspian and the Black seas in Georgia, and Carste nsz Pyramid in N Guinea both qual ify more as "exotic hol id ays " than technical climbing challen ges. Faced with the two-headed lump of Elbrus, Koch found th biggest challenge in its 18,480 feet to be ... er. .. cultural. "OK, it was th vodka," Koch says, groa ning at the memory of that Russian hangover. "On jet lag before the climb I went �ut and got twisted. I tried t recover for like two or three days." Koch 's anthropological interest i arstensz is a little more legit: "The people are, li ke, from the Ston Age!" In fact, the j 6,503-foot limestone pile is almost an afterthought. It's got nothing for snowboarders. Ca rstensz boasts so li ttle of the frozen stuff that Koch will have to take his board elsewhere. Next fa ll he plans to scale the mountain and then schlep up a neighboring ice peak to claim the descent. The gnarly Vinson Massif, 600 miles from the South Pole in estern Antarctica is no vacation . here's only one way to fly there, an Adventure Netwo International C-130 that takes y Punta Arenas, Argentina, camp at Patriot Hills tarctica . The spectacular vie of ice fa lls and the endle expanse of white below the summit are great, but don't gawk too long. ith temperatu res that drop as low as -1 28.6°F, your fi ll ings might fa ll out. Vinson is clearly the expensive e?

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