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Well, here’s one you don’t see every day: a 35-year-old hiker climbed Wales’s highest peak completely naked.
As the U.K. newspaper Expressreports, snow, ice, and freezing temperatures didn’t deter Dan Arkle, a photographer, from ascending Crib Goch (still clothed) in the hours before sunrise. Once atop the secondary peak, however, Arkle reportedly stripped out of all his clothes and continued along a knife-edge ridge to bag the summit of nearby 3,560-ft Snowdon. The route is notoriously dangerous and has claimed several lives.
Naturally, not everyone is amused by Arkle’s feat. Andy Simpson, a spokesman for Mountain Rescue England & Wales, told the Express that it was “the stupidest thing he has ever seen” and continued from there:
“Apart from the fact that he’s naked and exposed, he has nothing on his feet which means he has no grip with the mountain. It’s tough to comment without calling it a really stupid stunt.
“It’s completely irresponsible and if he did fall it wouldn’t be him who would be picking up the pieces. I would hope most people would look at that and realise its not a good thing to do a all. The RAF would undoubtedly be called, with the cost of a Sea King helicopter running into thousands of pounds an hour, but the main thing is the personal risk he would be putting the rescuers under.
“From a rescuer’s point of view it is extremely annoying. He is courting disaster.”
Arkle, for his part, tells the Express that he wanted “to highlight how weak and vulnerable humans are in such a place without modern technology and protective equipment.”
BACKPACKER is a family publication, but if you’d like to see the photographic evidence of Arkle’s au naturale climb for yourself, check out the full story here.