Young Explorers Update!
Here’s a follow-up e-mail from my adventurous young pal, Erica:
Brooooooooose,
Please tell everyone THANK YOUUUU for creating the most amount of hits on my group's video by far!!! YAY! And thank you so much for blogging about it so much! I really appreciate it!
So the camp is done! It was an amazing 10 days; full of learning, adventure and fun! All of the 15 young explorers that I was with in Chateau d'Oex were so SO great! They all had wonderful new ideas about projects around the world and were all so friendly and just fabulous! It is amazing that I can now go anywhere in the world and have a place to stay; the YEP (Young Explorers Program) community is slowly growing and everyone in it just wants to meet everyone else!
So after those ten days, 8 of the 16 were chosen to continue to Pakistan for a month and attempt to summit a +6000m virgin peak and name it!! (and do some other cool stuff too). AND I WAS CHOSEN TO GO TO PAKISTAN AS ONE OF THE 8!!!!
I am so excited and thrilled to go with 7 other awesome people! There are two girls and 6 guys and I think we all work really well together! I am sad that I won't get to see the other 8 anytime soon, but I have a good feeling that I will see them in the future doing some projects around the world! For example, I plan on going to South Africa next fall to do some projects around Capetown and Johannesburg! Gosh it is so exciting how excited everyone is about doing projects and working together in the future!
So you may wonder, why are we climbing this mountain....just to name it and say we were the first? How does this have to do with environmental projects around the world? Well.....Mike Horn's idea is to get millions of people following us up this mountain. National Geographic (I think) will be with us, the Mayo Clinic (who were with us in Switzerland) will also be involved as well as some other press from Europe. They will be using new technology that has the ability to send signals to a satellite and back to the internet (I'm actually not too sure of how it works)..but basically as we are climbing the mountain, you can see us live 9 seconds after (on the internet)!
After Pakistan when any of us go do a project, for example, raising awareness for shark finning and shark fin soup, people will know about the Young Explorers program and the young explorers and the awareness level will increase dramatically! I think we will also be doing some clean up projects around the base camp of K2 or just in the area on the Baltoro Glacier! So yeah, the idea is to get more people aware of this program!
I will be writing a blog everyday, I am pretty sure, so if you are interested you can follow our progress!
I actually don't know a ton about it yet, so as I find out, I will surely let you know!
Ciao!
- Erica
