Cold weather adventures Lonnie Dupre and Pascale Dupre-Marceau will attempt to become the first to summit Mount Lucania in January.
Lonnie Dupre doesn’t like to do things the easy way. He could climb Mount Lucania, Canada’s third highest mountain in the summer.
Shoot – he could just fly over the top of the mountain, wave at it and call it good but nope, Lonnie isn’t taking the easy way out. He never takes the easy way out.
This January Grand Marais favorite arctic adventurer Lonnie Dupre and fellow climber Pascale Dupre- Marceau will attempt to become the first people to make it to the top of the 17,257-foot behemoth, which is located in a remote part of Yukon.
What awaits them are temperatures that will dive down to minus 50 degrees F and gale force winds that will try to blow them off of the mountain.
Then too there are hidden crevasses and possible avalanches to avoid. All the while they will fight gravity, ice, and snow as they make their ascent, stopping to rest and to prepare shelters that sometimes take almost a day to build. And if need be, they will hunker down in a snow cave to wait out a storm.
Dupre has been trapped for up to seven days in a snow cave waiting for the weather to calm.
There won’t be much light. The mountain is located so far north there is limited daylight at this time of year.
Oh, and storms often come multiple times of the day.
The storms, cold, wind and lack of light might be some of the reasons why no one has been able to climb the calamitous frozen mountain in the winter.
At least Lonnie won’t be alone.
When she isn’t climbing mountains with Lonnie, Pascale Dupre-Marceau is a consulting engineer who likes to spend time in the Canadian Rockies where she focuses on climbing and alpinism. Pascale is doing her fourth climb with Dupre, and she boasts an impressive resume of outdoor accomplishments as well.
Should this climb be successful, it will only be a prelude for two more climbs Dupre has planned for 2018.
Once again Lonnie will attempt to be the first person to solo climb Mount Hunter. This time his attempt will come in March.
At 14,573 feet, Mount Hunter is considered the steepest and most technical climb of the three magnificent peaks located in Denali Park, Alaska.
In May Lonnie and a team of five climbers will attempt to climb Mount Fairweather, British Columbia’s tallest peak and one of the world’s tallest coastal mountains.
At 15,325 feet, Mount Fairweather is known for harsh weather conditions because of its dramatic rise from the Pacific Ocean.
Dupre and his crew will try to establish a new route on the mountain’s Northeast face.
Born in 1961, Lonnie has 25 years of polar expeditions to his credit. He was the first to complete a west to east, 3,000-mile winter crossing of Canada’s famed Northwest Passage by dog team.
He was also the first to circumnavigate Greenland, a 6,500 mile, all non-motorized journey by kayak and dog team. Dupre even pulled sleds on skis from Canada to the North Pole twice, and in 2006 his expedition reached over 68 million people worldwide on issues surrounding climate change.
After several attempts, Lonnie also was the first to climb Alaska’s 20,340-foot Mount Denali alone in January.
All of these adventures and work on climate change have led to some pretty noteworthy awards. Dupre was named to Outside magazine’s Most Badass Adventures 2015. He received the National Geographic Adventure – Best of Adventure 2005 and the Rolex Award for Enterprise in 2004. In 2000 and 2001 he was awarded the Polartec Challenge Award, and he was honored at the Winter Olympics, Oslo, Norway 1994. Lonnie was also elected Fellow National of the Explorers Club in 1996 and in 1989 he was a recipient of a Soviet Sportsman’s medal.
Leave a Reply