Thursday 3rd June (last release)

Back home

As is the custom in circumstances such as this, and because it is always highly constructive to take a step back and look at things in perspective, we are waiting for a few days before making an assessment of this latest Himalayan adventure and will return to the thorny issue of Everest being visited by tourists with little or no experience (see on this subject the message from a visitor that we have just received from the United States).
Alain Hubert's return home will no doubt help us to see things a little more clearly in terms of what has happened on the mountain this spring and also to take a closer look at the causes for the failure of this fifth attempt. In any event, it is certain that the Belgian adventurer - and we have already written about this - is more than a little disappointed at not being able to achieve his goal. Whether launching oneself along the pathway trodden by the great professional adventurers, or simply being a traveller searching for extreme altitude, it is clear that it hurts to fail. And it hurts even more when that failure occurs on the world's highest mountain where more than a hundred people have walked this spring.
So please be patient for a few more days, all of you who have been kind enough to follow "antarctica.org" as this adventure has unfolded. Just a little aside to inform our readers that last week, more than 400 of you visited our web pages every day. This might well be considered to be a good result for a site operating with such modest resources and that has only just been reactivated after a year of inactivity. But we are not fooled by these numbers: if the drama surrounding Pascal had not happened, it would have been very different and the hundreds of visitors would very certainly have dwindled to just a few dozen a day.
Whatever, the adventure goes on, as the homepage has been saying for two months. Just a few more days of Everest, during which opinions will be made public and the major questions debated.

One piece of news: the "photo gallery" section will be opened shortly, featuring the photos from the Himalayan expedition, of course, but also some magnificent shots from Antarctica that we came across with a young American engineer. After this, we will continue to develop the site, focusing on the Antarctic and its environment as the next steps in this work.

 

FOR PASCAL This Saturday 5th June at 2.00 pm, at the church in Aye (near Marche), homage will be paid to Pascal Debrouwer. A book of condolences will be made available so that his friends, acquaintances and anyone else can leave a memory, an anecdote or a thought. That way, Robin will be able to understand that he had an extraordinary father