Climbing and Outdoor News from Here and Abroad - 5/26/16

Important Recall Notices:

--WARNING: Petzl has reported that a third party has been selling "modified" Petzl ASPIR harnesses on ebay. These harnesses have been modified in a way that makes them EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. If you own a Petzl ASPIR harness, click here to learn more.

--Black Diamond Equipment has issued another recall. They are recalling the Easy Rider and Iron Cruiser Via Ferrata lanyard sets, Index Ascenders, Camalots and Camalot Ultralights. This is in addition to previously announced recalls of select carabiners and nylon runners. To learn more and to see if your equipment has been affected by this recall, click here.

Northwest:

--The cliff-face near Larabee State Park's Clayton Beach was recently vandalized with graffiti. Clayton Beach has long been a popular place for bouldering. To read more, click here.

--This letter about people camping around Squamish is offered without comment. But be sure to read the comments of others at the bottom of the letter. To read the letter, click here. Please note that some of the comments are NSFW.

Sierra:

--It looks like someone "inadvertently" walked away with a climber's rack near the Washington Column in Yosemite. To read more, click here.

--Yosemite free-soloist Alex Honnold wrote a nice piece on protecting the national parks for the next generation. To read more, click here.

--And while Alex is working hard to save public lands, a University of Oregon frat house appears hell bent on destroying them. A massive party at Lake Shasta run by a U of O frat left tons of trash at Lake Shasta. To read more, click here.

Desert Southwest:

--Officials at Zion National Park have scheduled a series of public meetings to discuss challenges facing the park as it continues to draw record numbers of visitors. National Park Service figures show that nearly 1 million people had visited the park in southern Utah through the end of April. That's about an 8 percent increase over the same time period last year and puts the park on track to set an attendance record for the third year in a row, reported The Spectrum newspaper in St. George. The increased traffic, combined with a stagnant budget, has taken a toll on Zion's infrastructure. To read more, click here.

--Advocates of a contentious national monument designation for Utah’s Bears Ears area are concerned that local residents will be misled about the designation dispute after forged federal documents and deceptive flyers addressing it were distributed in public spaces nearby. To read more, click here.

Alaska:

--Check out where all the AAI Denali teams are and read up on summit successes!

--On May 15, Graham Zimmerman and Chris Wright topped out Celeno Peak (13,395 feet) in Alaska’s St. Elias range via the West Face Direct (M6 5.10 X A2+ 95 degrees, 6,000 feet). This was the first ascent of the route and the second ascent of the peak. To read more, click here.
Notes from All Over:

--A man stranded while rock climbing on Monday was airlifted to safety near Idyllwild, California, authorities said. To read more, click here.

--Two mummified bodies were found on Mexico's Orizaba of climbers that had been missing for 55-years. To read more, click here.

--LG pulled off a strange, but very cool marketing stunt recently that had a famous rock climber called Sierra Blair-Coyle. Blair-Coyle was the winner of the 2015 US Extreme Rock Climbing contest and rather than climbing rocks this time, she scaled the outside of a glass skyscraper using suction created from a pair of LG Code Zero K94SGN vacuums. I have to say that we are a little worried about Sierra's back-up system. The rope coming from the back of her harness looks suspiciously like a static rope... To read more, click here. Or check out the video below:

--A black bear killed at Great Smoky Mountains National Park after an attack on a hiker was not actually the bear involved in the attack, according to a DNA analysis. “It was a large, dominant male bear that fit the profile of the bear we expected to be responsible,” park spokeswoman Dana Soehn told Reuters. To read more, click here.

--And finally, is your instagram destroying the environment?