Elbrus Land Rover must be back
On the 60th anniversary of Land Rover we would like to recollect this record of 1997 and to remind society about it.
The history
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.
