The Art of Flight

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You know it's funny what's happening to us.

Our lives have become digital.

Our friends, now, virtual.

And everything that you could ever want to know is just a click away.

Experiencing the world through endless second-hand information isn't enough.

If we want authenticity,

we have initiate it.

We'll never know our full potential unless we push ourselves to find it.

It's this self-discovery

that inevitably takes us to the wildest places on earth.

The Art of Flight

It seems like every place we go

has its own unique set of variables.

This place in particular

is no exception.

Alaska.

So far gone.

It's so hard to grasp the sense of scale here.

When your whole life is dedicated to travel,

you have to learn how to adapt to your surroundings.

It's just kind of hard to adapt when

you feel like you are on the moon.

All right, John, Drop in 3... 2... 1.

Come on.

Drop.

Hey, Travis, are you ready?

Yes, I'm ready.

Let's go in quick, though.

Let's do this.

Yeah, Travis!

The majority of time spent out here is

cloudy down days.

In order to create the great, you know, snow and glacier that we have

means we get a lot of weather.

Alaska's weather is hard to read.

Everybody is trying to nitpick everything all the time,

checking the weather constantly.

I just kind of like to wake up in the morning and look out of the window

'cause that's the ultimate test.

On May 2,

Nice cold morning.

The weather forecast

is for mostly cloudy with scattered rain and snow showers.

Here in Alaska, you don't always go with the weather forecast.

You kind of go with what's going on out of the window.

We try to create a lot of, you know, activities for down days.

We have a crew like this, we need to up the level a little bit.

Son of a motherless goat.

How are you doing?

I need a ride.

Fire.

That almost took my face off.

Pull!

What is that?

He used to dissect these in middle school.

Are you ready?

- There we go.

- Yep.

This is like "MythBusters," kind of.

At the bonfire, it's gonna burn.

It's gonna be like, "Fire burn!"

"And we are going to burn down Babylon!

"In Alaska Mountain!"

We're going deep. We have a plane coming out with fuel. So...

Firstly, use the plane to get

everybody out there,

allowing us to kind of go

deeper than we ever have before.

It should be.

I think it's "all systems go."

Looks I'm gonna fall out the sky for a while.

I'm ready.

One of the things about coming to Alaska

is there are a lot of terrain that is unridden.

And there's a lot of first ascents that go down.

You know, I came here four years ago with Jeremy Jones.

We had a lot of lines we had pick out.

He hasn't ridden them yet,

but we had identified them with names.

Jeremy Jones named this area "the Wizard of Oz",

but never rode it.

The wizard is something I saw

early on in the Tordrillo, then we put it

you know, on the top of our hitlist.

But the problem is that there's a lot of exposure below.

A ton of open crevasses which,

to people that don't understand,

like, those crevasses are black holes.

If You get taken into a hole with a bunch of moving snow,

It's not a good thing.

The chances are pretty good that you're getting buried.

Ready, Travis?

Yes, ready as I'll ever be I guess.

Nice job, Rice.

- Are you kidding me!

- Johny!

That's what I wanted. Yeah!

South.

It's always a bit surreal, chasing winter down to South America.

Geographically, Chile is one of the most amazing places on the planet

with thousands of miles of coastline

that reaches directly up to some of the tallest mountains in the world.

And right in the middle, thrives a cultural-rich nation,

yet one of the most effected by natural disaster.

In the last a few years, they have experienced one of the largest earthquakes,

tsunamis and volcanic eruptions in recent history.

It's just so cool to be here to see firsthand

a group of people that is so positive after such a dramatic series of events.

We're in the Andes

which is the longest mountains range in the world,

second tallest ranges in the world to the Himalayas.

It's crazy how much uncharted terrain is down here.

But it seemed like

that everywhere we looked

had been effected by a low-snow year

and usually high winds.

But after spending so much time and effort just getting down here,

we decided to see it through.

You know, it's not the destination, it's the adventure along the way.

It seems cliche to say that, but that's really how it is.

All-time kicker.

It's pretty epic.

I'm right now on the border of Argentina and Chile.

We got Argentina out that way.

Chile on yonder.

Some fingery little rocky shoots.

Super fun.

Snow's kind of got to sh*t, so...

make the best of it.

We were actually warned prior to coming down here,

that there was possibility of volcanic eruption in the region we were heading.

But the group decision was

that we just disregarded it.

That could've been a bad choice.

It was like something I'd never seen before.

We see ash started to cover the whole road.

It's all grey and super apocalyptic.

It's situations like this that you just can't plan for.

We were told that we had to leave the area immediately.

We've tried our hardest and it's just not working.

I'm gonna go home

and Trav is gonna hitch up with Mark Landvik.

And they are gonna go down south to Patagonia.

When we first started talking about going to Patagonia,

it's like epic.

Sounds like a great time.

And then, the more we started looking into it,

especially when we got down here,

that's when everything flipped up-side-down.

It's a place difficult to handle.

Mainly, here, everything is weather permitting.

This is like... like a beast,

like a live beast that doesn't like visitors.

You know, it became pretty apparent

immediately when we got down here

just how exposed to the elements we were gonna be, and

how we truly were at the mercy of our own decisions.

You cannot get in and you cannot escape from this place.

We are here in Puerto Williams,

in Navarino Island on the Beagle Channel,

one of the main gates to Antarctica.

And here it's a very, very remote place.

It's nothing, just the island.

It's very cold, mean, bad weather.

Sometimes you need to wait one or two months

to have two or three good-weather days.

When we first got down here,

we kept hearing about this place called the Darwin Range.

So we asked our pilot if he takes us there.

He said, "absolutely not.

"It's where the devil is."

Darwin?

Devil in the Darwin?

- You should consider a second the other time.

- No, no.

Does the Devil live?

Is that where he lives?

Tell me what you think, tell us.

He knows this area well and I respect his opinion of that.

- You are the pilot. Bottom line.

- Okay.

You are here in charge of our safety

- and I respect that.

- Yes.

We all respect that.

We cannot push that.

We could walk, we could walk this.

I mean, I don't know, maybe there's a big river here that we cannot cross.

- Across the glacier.

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