In 1997, Russia adventurer/madman Alexander Abramov decided it was a
good idea to try and drive a Land Rover to the top of Mt Elbrus. They
started off driving up to the barrel huts at just under 4,000m where by
the vehicle decided it wasn’t having any part in the shenanigans and
started to literally fall apart. Undeterred, Abramov and his 10 man team
spent the next 43 days winching and hauling the vehicle up, making
multiple trips make down to collect parts. Amazingly, on September 13th,
they actually managed to drive the vehicle onto the summit, a new a
world record as the ‘highest mountain climbed by a vehicle’. One of the
team then decided he’d try and drive it back down, promptly losing
control and bailing out. The Land Rover still sits on the mountain
today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Elbrus
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Artical from 7Summits-club
The history
http://www.7summits-club.com/newssections/all_1/newssection_3_11/item_1409/
11 years ago, on
the 13th of September a car “Land Rover Defender - 90” stood on East
summit of Mt.Elbrus. The idea to bring a Land Rover car to its summit
had become a full-size project in 1996. The project had been initiated
by Avtodom, the 1st Channel, Risk company and had been supported by
Alpindustria and other organizations.
Alexander Abramov, a climber and the author of the idea and Oleg Bogdanov, a professional driver, became the leaders.
This
epic work lasted a year and a half. It started with two tentative
attempts and finished with the final and successful 43 days long
climbing operation, which included 9 serious breakages, falls into
crevasses and many days on end of snow storms.
The results of the expedition were impressive: a
lot of unique pictures and video tape footage, four press conferences,
dozens of articles and hundreds of notices, the film “Man, car,
mountain”, which became the winner of the extreme and adventure films
festival “Vertical”
The governing body of Land Rover
congratulated the winners and the record was entered in the Guinness
Book. Unfortunately, the expedition’s second record was “The highest
mountain breakage”, which was duly entered too. The car had crashed on
the descent at 5500m (150m under the summit). It is still there on the
slope of the highest mountain of Europe and has been a silent reproach
for us ever since.
The core of the project
On
the 60th anniversary of Land Rover and the 20th of Alpindustria the
participants of that expedition are uniting again. Yet, now the aim is
to take down the mortal remains of the heroic car and restore the slopes
of the great mountain to their pristine state.
The reconnaissance operations on Elbrus will start
on the 15th of June and will be led by the well known climber and
paraplaner Alexander Koval’, who has about 200 Elbrus climbs in his
climbing record.
The technical plan how to bring the car down will be fixed after the close inspection of the remains.
The
prospect of using a helicopter seems to be rather remote in view of the
altitude, so preliminarily the main variant is to take the car to
pieces and transport the parts by cableway, which will go to the easy
snow slopes. From the Pastukhov Rocks they can be carried by the Snow
Cats. All the works are planned to be conducted from 14th to 31st of
July, 2008.
