Still, the adventurer did descend into the fiery hole. “I can tell you when you are standing on the edge of this gigantic crater filled with fire-it is intimidating,” he says. It could transmit the ambient temperature where I was as well as it had a long end on it that I could jam into the ground and get a reading of how hot the ground was.”Įven after a few days of preparing, Kourounis says the idea of an actual descent into the Door to Hell was nerve-wracking. “It was able to transmit wirelessly back to the crater’s edge to a laptop. “It sort of looks like a sword,” Kourounis says. I did feel a bit like a baked potato in there.”Īnother very specialized piece of equipment that Kourounis brought to Turkmenistan was a heat probe designed by the engineers who build National Geographic’s Crittercams. They reflect a lot of the radiant heat, but you still get pretty hot inside. “These suits are used by some firefighters as well as steel-mill workers and volcanologists, any occupation where you need to be close to intense heat. “They look like aluminum foil and actually that makes sense because they are made from an aluminized fabric,” Kourounis says. This included a custom-made climbing harness made out of Kevlar, a self-contained breathing apparatus (similar to scuba gear), fire-resistant ropes, and an otherworldly heat-resistant suit. Then there are two large flames in the middle at the bottom, and that is probably where the drilling rig hole was for the natural gas extraction.”īefore rappelling into the burning pit, Kourounis says he got his equipment in order. There are thousands of little flames all around the edges and towards the center. The heat, if you are downwind of it, is unbearable. You can hear the roar of the fire if you stand at the edge. “It is burning with a tremendous amount of flame like there is a lot of fire down there,” he says. Kourounis says the crater, which is about 76 meters (250 feet) wide, looks like a volcano in the middle of the desert. The crew finally gained entry into Turkmenistan in 2013 after two years of trying to get into the country. “That was our biggest concern because Turkmenistan is one of the most closed countries in the world.” “The biggest goal was just getting permission to get into the country,” he says. One might think that rappelling into a burning pit would be the main challenge of this expedition, but Kourounis notes that his crew met another formidable obstacle earlier on. “It was there like a splinter in my brain that I couldn’t get rid of.” “Every now and then, I would look at pictures on the Internet of the place again, and it just never exited my mind,” Kourounis says. The Canadian adventurer and former host of TV’s Angry Planet had wanted to visit the Door to Hell for years. Kourounis and his team were unable to verify the story behind the pit, but they definitely confirmed that the singular site exists. The resulting gas-fed flames continue burning to this day. It is said that a Soviet oil rig fell into the crater in 1971, and a geologist decided to get rid of the rig by setting the pit on fire. Kourounis was the first individual to descend into a 30-meter (100-foot) deep pit of fire known as the “Door to Hell.” The Door to Hell is a crater in a large natural gas field that has been burning for decades. It was probably the only expedition where he admitted to feeling “a bit like a baked potato.” But a recent trek to remote Turkmenistan may be one of his most exciting expeditions. Explorer and ad venturer George Kourounis has had many memorable experiences in nature’s extreme environments-chasing tornadoes across the American Midwest, swimming with piranhas in Venezuela, even getting married on a crater of an erupting volcano in the South Pacific.