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The Path
It’s 3 a.m., July 2015. We walk through the darkness, headlamps illuminating our path. A cool breeze awakens the trees, and the creek bubbles to life as we switchback up the trail. Our movement becomes rhythmic. Three hours pass rapidly. Faint light paints the horizon, and the mountains are stirred awake…
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Glen Denny Remembers Valley Walls in the 1960s
Valley Walls: A Memoir of Climbing and Living in Yosemite by Glen Denny. Published by Yosemite Conservancy, May 2016. 210 pages. Paperback. $18.95. During the 1960s, Glen Denny, a young college dropout and budding photographer, was part of the famous crew of riff-raff climbers who spent their days in Yosemite Valley, honing skills…
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Poetry Feature: “Kalymnos”
This poem was inspired by climbing in Kalymnos for the first time a few years ago and thinking about that point in the day when you feel as if you’ve climbed out of your own skin.
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The Climbing Life: She Climbed Alone
As a young climber in the 1990s, I developed a strange habit. Each year I found myself obsessively searching the American Alpine Club’s Accidents in North American Mountaineering for entries about women.
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The Merino Air Hoody: A Most-in-One Base Layer
Recently I added Patagonia’s Merino Air Hoody base layer to my collection. Unlike my other merino wool items, The Air Hoody, with its fluffy appearance, resembles a thin, non-itchy sweater more than a typical next-to-skin layer.
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The Climbing Life: The March of Folly
“I’M SO GLAD TO SEE YOU BOYS,” Lee Sorenson shouted as he ran across the campsite toward us, his bearded face beaming with love and relief. His oldest son, Tobin, and I were a full day and a night overdue. It was March 1975, and we’d just made the second ascent of the Valley’s first…
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Darwin’s Disappointment
In September 1833, Charles Darwin set out for the four peaks of the Sierra de la Ventana alone, lured by local murmurs of caves and forests and veins of silver and gold. The small range was barely visible from the port of Bahia Blanca, a notch in the north-central Argentine coast. There, the H.M.S. Beagle…
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Mammut 8.7mm Serenity Dry: Light, Stiff and Specialized
Although rope technology has greatly improved in the twenty-some years since I started climbing, I was still skeptical when a lime-green Mammut 8.7mm Serenity rope showed up on my doorstep. The manufacturer states this rope is designed for single, double and twin configurations. Mammut also says the rope is designed to stretch 31 percent when…
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Solo Faces: The Camaraderie of Divine or Reckless Brotherhood
Before I left for Chamonix to go hiking in the French Alps, I borrowed Solo Faces by James Salter from the lending library at work. My list of must-reads was long and only growing longer, but the ghostly mountain landscape of its cover caught my eye–a silhouetted man ascending a jagged peak.
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Down to the Wire
This story is about Jack Tackle recovering from a debilitating sickness and then traveling to Mt. Augusta (14,072), Saint Elias Mountains, Yukon Territories. High on the peak’s north face, he was clocked by a rock, and rescued from the wall a few days later by Pararescue Specialists (known as parajumpers, or PJs), highly trained members…
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Poetry Feature: “Belay”
As an ecologist and a writer, I spend a lot of time contemplating how those two vocations speak to each other. Fundamentally, my research explores what it is to translate a landscape and how language shapes our perception of the ecosystems on which we depend.
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A History of Imaginary Mountains–Thoreau’s Dream: Beyond the Maps
Behind the histories of exploration lie less-visible tales of rumored summits that prove to be nonexistent, and of physical mountains whose shapes and heights transform according to different legends.
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Friends and Family Honor Dave Bridges (1970-1999)
On October 5, 1999, while Dave Bridges and Alex Lowe were investigating a potential ski descent on the southwest face of Shishapangma, an avalanche buried them. This spring, their remains were found on the mountain.
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A Quartet for Silent Lands: A Photo Essay
We asked Lise Billon and Jerome Sullivan, two of the four authors of “A Quartet for Silent Lands” in Alpinist 53 (the other two authors are Diego Simari and Antoine Moineville) to share additional photos from their story for us to post online.
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Local Hero: Fay Pullen
At seventy-three, Cascades climber Fay Pullen bushwhacks through dense thickets and climbs isolated peaks–generally alone. Cindy Beavon pays a visit to one of Washington’s most prolific soloists.
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Off Belay: Darwin’s Disappointment
Before his theory of evolution made him famous, Charles Darwin was an enthusiastic, if somewhat picky, mountaineer. Paula Wright considers the significance of his most disappointing ascents.
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Andrew McLean Remembers Alex Lowe, David Bridges and the 1999 Shishapangma Avalanche
Andrew McLean shares his reflections on the 1999 expedition, the avalanche that killed Alex Lowe and David Bridges and the void left by their passing.
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