Adventurer Completes Second Leg of Attempt to go from Lowest to Highest points of all 7 Continents

A climber and endurance athlete who is attempting to travel from the lowest point on each of the continents to the highest points under his own steam has successfully completed his second continent: North America.

Oli France has become the first man in 20 years to both cycle solo across America and summit one of the world’s most dangerous mountains. Over two months he has cycled 3,500 miles from Death Valley in Southern California to Alaska, before summiting the highest mountain in North America, Denali at 6,194m.

Starting in Death Valley, one of the hottest places on earth, Oli cycled North through Nevada, Oregon and Washington, traversing the Sierra Nevada mountains and on into Western Canada cycling the full length of British Columbia, and through South West Yukon until he reached Denali.

Many consider Denali to be the world's coldest mountain because of its high elevation and subarctic location at 63 degrees north latitude with the summit regularly reaching minus 40 degrees.

Oli’s summited Mount Denali from the very bottom, traversing a mountain range, fording freezing rivers, and several dangerous glacial and crevasse fields (where crevasses have a depth of 1000 meters) on the dangerous West Buttress route to reach the summit - where all other climbers are flown into basecamp at 1300 feet below the summit.

Each year only 1000 people are given permission to attempt to summit Denali, and less than a third make it, and all are flown into Base Camp making Oli and his team the only four men to summit Denali from the bottom this year. 

The day before Oli reached the summit of Mount Denali (20,000 ft), a solo climber died while trying to reach the top, another climber was taken off the mountain with a broken leg and another group had their camp ripped to shreds by the gale force winds that forced Oli to wait for five days for a break in the weather.

Before even getting to base camp, Oli who was travelling unsupported as a group of four, faced vast crevasse fields where crevasses 1,000 meters deep are covered by a thin blanket of snow. During the expedition, one of Oli’s team fell through the snow into a crevasse and it was only because the four men were roped together that they were able to pull him out. At other times, as the team skied across the snowy tundra, their heavy 60kg sleds that contained all their kit, would often pull them down the mountain dangerously fast. They were also tracked by wild bears and found a moose carcass that had been savaged by bears close to their camp one morning. During a gale the team had to wait for five days in their tent for a storm to blow over before they could continue.

The trip from is part of what Oli has called The Ultimate Seven, in which he is aiming to  become the first person to travel from the lowest geographical point to the highest on all seven continents - entirely by human power.

The quest has already seen Oli, traversing deserts, jungles, icecaps, mountain ranges and oceans on foot, bike, ski and kayak and will ultimately see him cover 15,000 miles across 20 countries and achieve 4 World Records in an epic feat of endurance. 

One of the world’s most experienced extreme adventurers and professional expedition leaders, for over a decade Oli France has guided teams through some of the planet’s most inhospitable places, traversing every terrain imaginable in 75 countries, across a third of the world’s landmass. Recent expeditions have included trips to Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, and Congo where Oli has been held at gun point, faced militia, interrogation, minefields and arrest, alongside avalanches, earthquakes, tropical storms, meningitis and severe dehydration.

Last year Oli completed the first leg of his challenge, cycling 1,600 miles from Djibouti to Tanzania before summiting the highest mountain in Africa, Mount Kilimanjaro at 5,895m. On that trip he faced furnace-like temperatures in Djibouti; hostilities and traffic chaos in Ethiopia; the kindness of the Masai in Kenya, as well as the knowledge he was a perfect ‘meal on wheels’ for lions in Tanzania.