Adventures are supposed to be fun, right? Well, these ones ended horribly and you should be glad that you weren’t the least bit involved in them.
THE TITANIC
So its 1912 and you’re aboard the Titanic. The ship is a major feat of modern engineering and thought to be utterly unsinkable, except it wasn’t. It’s around midnight and you’re in one of the ship’s ballrooms getting down Jack and Rose style then all of a sudden you feel a massive lurch. You think “huh, that’s weird, must have hit a dolphin or something” then carry on with your night. The next thing you know you’re floating in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean watching the goliath ship snapped in half and slowly sinking into frigid water. This was definitely not your idea of a booze cruise and you’ll most certainly be requesting a refund pending your survival.
THE DONNER EXPEDITION
“Go west!” they said, “California’s a dream!” they said. Sure, you’ll have to travel via a rickey-ass wagon for months on end eating gross wagon food but it’ll be totally worth it once reach that beach front property just waiting to be claimed. You weigh the prospect and decide that it’s worth the gamble, so you pack up your wagon and set off for the west coast. A couple months in the trip becomes grueling and pretty over it. Luckily the guy leading the expedition thinks he has a short cut that can get you to the best coast faster. Your down for it at the time, but in retrospect calling it a bad call might be the biggest understatement of all time. Long story short, you end up trapped on a snowy mountain pass for approximately four months barbecuing your dead travel companions for dinner.
THE KHIVA CAMPAIGN
It’s 1839 and you’re a solider in the Russian army which is pretty much automatic grounds for your life sucking. To make matters worse, you’re forced to go on this really poorly planned out campaign to take over the city of Khiva. That might not sound so bad, you knew pillaging and plundering was part of the gig. Then you realize in order to get to Khiva you have have to cross the Siberian tundra in the dead of winter to get there. You mentally prepare for the hellish journey before taking off with 5,000 men and a bunch of camels. The shit hits the fan pretty quickly here. It turns out that no one thought to bring enough warm clothes. Or fuel. Or have an alternative plan of action for, say, being pummeled with near constant blizzards. Luckily your commander recognizes the severity of the situation and decides to end the campaign and retreat back to Russia, you only lost about 3,000 men in the process – no biggie!
THE ARCTIC BALLOON FIASCO
1897 was an exciting era of exploration and hot air balloons. Explorer Salomon Augustus Andree had the bright idea of combining both things in order to lay claim to the frozen wasteland known as the North Pole. He had somehow convinced two fellow explores to hop on his balloon and travel with him from his native land of Sweden. Andree and his crew quickly found out that manning a hot air ballon is pretty difficult task. After two days of flight the ballon went down and stranded it’s crew on a deserted arctic island. They futilely wandered around the island for three months before the last of them perished. Moral of the story: don’t take an arctic air balloon trip because its a stupid idea.
THE EVEREST DISASTER of 1996
Ever since Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary conquered Mount Everest, people have been showing up in droves to climb the mountain of death themselves. You’d think these are seasoned explores just itching to accomplish the the feat of summiting the tallest mountain on earth. But as it turns out, half the time its just a bunch of nut jobs looking for bragging rights. On May 10th of 1996, 34 people ignored the horrible weather, set aside common sense, and set out to climb Everest. That didn’t pan out so well for everyone involved. Having a large number of unqualified people trying to take the same path to the top of the mountain caused massive delays in securing ropes necessary to scale the beast of a mountain. It also took longer to set up nighttime camp, which really sucks when you’re smacked with a raging blizzard. The clusterfuck of climbers ultimately resulted in eight people becoming ice sculptures of the side of Mount Everest.
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