English Unlimited HTL 4/5, Schulbuch mit Audio-CD und CD-ROM

189 activities Unit 1, exercise 20a Student A David Lama was born on Aug. 4, 1990. His mother is a native of Innsbruck and his father a mountain guide from Nepal. He was five years old when Himalaya veteran Peter Habeler first watched him climb. Afterwards, Habeler immediately called his parents to tell them that their son had an extraordinary talent.  Little David had no interest in hiking courses or Alpine Club activities; he wanted to go vertical from the get- go. At the indoor climbing gym, he met his coach-to-be, Reini Scherer. David and the East-Tyrolean climbing enthusiast Scherer are still a successful team today, 13 years later.  David quickly and safely mastered the slick walls and the colourful climbing holds of the climbing gym. The ever-tighter training and competition schedule at the climbing gym correlated more and more with outdoor mountain climbing. David balanced the athletic successes with Alpine pioneer achievements, like, for example, free-climbing the ‘Desperation of the Northface’ or first ascents in Yosemite National Park and in Chile.  What makes David exceptional is his Buddhist calm and his flexible and confident climbing style. David resists the temptation of making a show of his skills. “It’s not about collecting achievements, it’s all about the experience,” he says. David Lama represents a new breed of super-alpinists. He also has more detractors than Lebron James. When he took his talents to South America’s iconic Cerro Torre last January, his bold free ascent highlighted an eventful season that will go down in history.  After two failed attempts to free-climb Patagonia’s iconic Cerro Torre via its controversial Compressor Route, things weren’t looking good for David Lama, a 21-year-old World-Cup-winning climber and alpinist from Innsbruck, Austria. His sponsor, Red Bull, had been pouring money into a film about the project that was going nowhere, and climbers around the world were upset that he seemed to view the famed 10,262-foot mountain as his personal film set. And yet, on January 12, 2012, there he was again, along with his climbing partner and fellow Austrian Peter Ortner, ready to make a third attempt.  The Compressor Route ascends more than 4,000 feet of vertical rock and ice on the southeast ridge of Cerro Torre, which sits in a disputed border area between Chile and Argentina. When people talk about the route, what they’re actually referring to is a series of more than 400 closely spaced bolts that were controversially placed in 1970 and now allow climbers using nylon ladders, called ‘étriers’, to effectively skip the hardest parts of the mountain. Lama wanted to use the bolts like he would at a rock-climbing gym, clipping into them for safety purposes only while becoming the first person to free-climb the nearly blank granite that no one else had managed to conquer.  Lama finally succeeded spectacularly. He now has Red Bull’s ‘Cerro Torre’ film to show for his efforts, which is among the most expensive climbing films ever made. Nur zu Prüfzweck n – Eigentum des Verlags öbv