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The Ultimate Linkup in Washington’s Stuart Range
After climbing more than 4,000 vertical feet of technical terrain up to 5.12 and hiking 20 miles in less than 24 hours, Blake Herrington and Jens Holsten recount their Ultimate Linkup in Washington’s Stuart Range.
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70 Sendero Luminoso
In January 2014, Alex Honnold free soloed El Sendero Luminoso, a big wall in Mexico’s El Potrero Chico. Today, he looks beyond the momentary purity of ascent at the complex impacts of professional climbing.
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97 Off Belay
The Last American Dirtbag (TLAD Industries) seeks a qualified assistant dirtbag.
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In Memory of Charlie Porter (1951-2014)
“All his life, [Charlie Porter had] defied the odds on rock walls and oceans, from Yosemite to Antarctica. It seems improbable to imagine him knocking on the door of a hospital on the grid-square streets of Punta Arenas. Ashes in an urn, energy into dust….”
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The Gloaming: Charlie Porter in Tierra del Fuego
“If you started climbing in the early 1970s, you couldn’t help being aware of the Porter phenomenon, the meteor that flashed so briefly across the climbing firmament only to vanish. I knew about the famous El Cap big-wall climbs with their evocative hippy names, and the legendary Mt. Asgard solo…But I met Charlie much later,…
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Uncharted Space
“[A] frigid flow ran down our sleeves, exiting at elbows or coursing down over bollocks and quads into boots…. In the dim light, I stood in double boots on two sloping footholds, and I hollered down that I needed the bolt kit. ‘What?’ Charlie [Porter] answered. I’d woken him up. ‘No fuckin’ bolts! Not now,…
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The Man with the Van
With a number of hard El Capitan wall climbs under his belt, Charlie Porter drives to the Canadian Rockies in his dilapidated “California van” to climb with Bugs McKeith and the Burgess twins. In this installment of our Charlie Porter series, Alan Burgess tells of their first ascent of the now-classic Polar Circus, Cirrus Mountain,…
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Waiting for Dawn
In Part 1 of this series on Charlie Porter, told by some of climbing partners and friends through the decades, Gary Bocarde recalls their days together in Yosemite, where Porter pushed the upper limits of hard aid in the early 1970s and climbed not for ego but for joy.
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Visions of Charlie Porter: Introduction
“…[A]ll was done quietly, unremarked upon, in classic Porter fashion. With his reticence, [Charlie] Porter was “old-school,” a classical figure from the pre-social, un-hyperlinked past in which actions carried greater weight than words and images…. Thus it’s mainly through hist friends and partners, a few of whom have contributed the essays that follow, that we…
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An Interview with Alpinist Contributor Forest McBrian
Fresh off deadline, the author of our latest Mountain Profile–the North Cascades’ Picket Range–Forest McBrian sat down to debrief and explain why, among other nuggets of wisdom, “climbing is like mapping is like writing.”
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The Picket Range: Contagious Magic
Picket Range Mountain Profile writer Forest McBrian writes a short story about sharing his spiritual reconnection to the Pickets with his late stepmother.
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Video: Revelations Climbing, A Day in the Life
Songwriter and videographer Evan Phillips tells the story of a Revelation Mountains first ascent–without any hype.
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11 The Sharp End: A Wild of One’s Own
Editor-in-Chief Katie Ives searches for “A Wild of One’s Own” in the annals of women’s mountaineering history in Western Canada and the writings of Mary Schaeffer Warren, who urges, “…leave your world, your recognized world, and plunge into the vast unknown.”
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Scenes from the Alpinist Office on Deadline
After months of working with writers to edit, revise and fact-check the stories that make up Issue 47 of our magazine, all that’s left for editors Katie Ives, Gwen Cameron and Shey Kiester to do is proofread.
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Soloist Jes Meiris on Going Up the Nose and Falling Down
“I wanted to climb it solo in a push, without hauling or sleeping, and I knew that if I was successful I would break the record…. It was appealing because no woman had done it in that style before, and besides, let’s face it–hauling sucks.”
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