![An 1805 map of the Yellowstone River, which historian James P. Ronda writes, was based off drawings or information from the Mandan chief Sheheke and copied by William Clark, who noted that it led "as far as the high mountains." [Photo] Beinecke Library, Yale University](https://dev.alpinist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/typologies-of-silence-930x620.jpg)
In “Typologies of Silence,” the Sharp End article for Alpinist 55, Editor-in-chief Katie Ives discusses some of the muted stories in accounts of early American mountaineering–as well as the efforts to create a more inclusive history today.
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.
During the Victorian Age, an intrepid group of women helped pioneer winter mountaineering–only to have their contributions largely vanish from mainstream history.
1953, Zanskar Himalaya: A small shadow of a woman moves slowly over a drape of white. The summit cone of Nun glows, no longer distant, its 7135-meter apex still untouched. Panes of ice lie scattered like thin glass, across drifts so soft and deep that French alpinist Claude Kogan can find nothing secure for her crampons to hold.
IN A BRICK HOUSE in the tree-lined village of Hildenborough, England, a Tibetan woman listened to her British husband translate books and newspapers, so she could hear how foreign writers depicted her homeland. It was the early twentieth century, in the midst of the first British attempts on Everest.
IN A BRICK HOUSE in the tree-lined village of Hildenborough, England, a Tibetan woman listened to her British husband translate books and newspapers, so she could hear how foreign writers depicted her homeland. It was the early twentieth century, in the midst of the first British attempts on Everest.
FOR A LONG time, I used to work on Alpinist from twilight until dawn. In the small hours of the night, time appeared to stretch into an illusion of eternity. The boundaries seemed to grow thinner between the stories and my mind, until the snows of distant summits seeped through my cold apartment walls.
In which our editor travels to California to meet the women who founded America’s first monthly climbing magazine, Summit, in 1955.
