the adventure life | Hollywood Stands on Top of Kilimanjaro, Jimmy ...
by steve casimiro

Jessica Biel, Emile Hirsch, Lupe Fiasco, a club-load of other celebs, activist Alexandra Cousteau , Everest vet/guide Melissa Arnot, and others made it to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro today on a mission to raise awareness about the lack of clean drinking water faced by millions. Well, good for them. Kili might be a walkup, but 19,341 feet is 19,341 feet and they did it under the own power. No celeb-u-taunting here. The element that strikes me most about this summit photo, though, is that almost everyone in the group is swaddled in down and many are even rocking goggles, but photographer Jimmy Chin is dressed pretty much the way I last saw him in the snow, out the north side J-Hole backcountry: Little more than a North Face shell and little beanie. Oh, and here he’s barehanded (one) and sporting shades. That cat is chill.
The climb is, of course, a publicity stunt, but at least it’s for a good cause. Dan Neil, a Los Angeles Times columnist who covers advertising, recently wrote about the “Summit on the Summit” climb and contrasted it with an Alfa-Romeo marketing campaign. It’s extremely unlikely, but Alfa-Romeo claims to have lowered a billboard to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, 36,000 feet beneath the surface of the ocean to tout its low prices.
Geoffrey Hantson, creative director for Alfa’s ad agency, said, “We needed a campaign that really pushed the limits; so if this is the lowest price possible for an Alfa Romeo, then maybe we should place the poster at the lowest place possible.”
Neil, who didn’t win any fans among Adventure Life readers when he slammed National Geographic Channel’s TV commercial , comes down on the side of good judgment this time. “It’s not particularly important to determine whether the video is a hoax or not,” he wrote. “Whether Alfa Romeo Belgium did or didn’t throw this monstrous piece of trash into the ocean, it has trivialized the problem of ocean pollution.”
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