Highest mountain climbed by a vehicle

 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.