All-Black climbing team makes history summiting Mount Everest’s peak
Seven members of the all-Black mountain climbing team called Full Circle Everest made history after summiting Mount Everest on May 12. Only 10 Black people have climbed the peak including only one Black woman and one Black American.
The team included people from all over the U.S. and one man from Kenya. The climbers, who included a sociology professor, a Microsoft data scientist, a chemistry teacher, a freelance photographer and an Iraq War combat vet, hoped to inspire the next generation of outdoor enthusiasts, educators, leaders and mountaineers of color to continue “chasing their personal summits.”
“When children around the world see themselves reflected in this all-Black expedition, they too will experience and become part of the value set that is climbing,” team leader Conrad Anker told National Geographic.
12 tons of trash recovered from Lake Tahoe
A scuba dive team completed a cleanup of Lake Tahoe pulling up more than 12 tons of submerged trash after a year’s worth of work. The project was organized by the nonprofit Clean Up the Lake. The team collected 24,797 pieces of litter weighing a total of 25,281 pounds throughout the entire lake.
The team collaborated with environmental scientists and completed 81 days of diving and 6,715 volunteers hours to address pollution issues in Lake Tahoe.
“Over the past year, despite winter weather, COVID and wildfire related challenges, our dive team has been in the water at every opportunity to complete this unforgettable effort,” said Clean Up the Lake executive director Colin West.
8,000-year-old skull found in river
A skull, discovered last summer in Minnesota by two kayakers in the Minnesota River about 110 miles west of Minneapolis, has been confirmed to be 8,000 years old.
Renville County Sheriff Scott Hable gave the skull to a medical examiner assuming it might be related to a missing person case or murder, but a forensic anthropologist used carbon dating to determine it was likely the skull of a young man who lived between 5500 and 6000 B.C.
The anthropologist determined the man had a depression in his skull that was “perhaps suggestive of the cause of death.” Kathleen Blue, a professor of anthropology at Minnesota State University, said the young man would have likely eaten a diet of plants, deer, fish, turtles and freshwater mussels in a small region, rather than following mammals and bison on their migrations.
“There’s probably not that many people at that time wandering around Minnesota 8,000 years ago, because, like I said, the glaciers have only retreated a few thousands years before that,” Blue said. “That period, we don’t know much about it.”
