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The Cobra: Memories of its First Ascent
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High-desert climbing pioneer Jimmie Dunn recounts the quirky Cobra’s first ascent on a sizzling April day in 1991 when “even the ants [were] lying low” in Utah’s Fisher Towers. He bids farewell to the now-collapsed formation that was enjoyed by so many fellow desert rats over the years.
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Experts Ask: Are We Loving Our Mountains to Death?
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A quorum of mountain experts gathered in Golden, Colorado, to sift through the mounting social, economic and environmental challenges that have grown with the increasing populations of outdoor recreators across the world. Brad Rassler reports back.
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Fun with Routelines: Results from a Ridiculous Facebook Contest
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We drew routelines on the Paramount Pictures logo and asked our Facebook fans to tell stories of the routes’ fictional first ascents. Here are some of our favorite responses.
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The Ultimate Linkup in Washington’s Stuart Range
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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
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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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In Memory of Charlie Porter (1951-2014)
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“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
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“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, completely out of context….”
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Uncharted Space
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“[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, not ever!'” Russel McLean spends 10 days on the Kichatnas’ Middle Triple Peak in Part 4 of the Charlie Porter series.
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The Man with the Van
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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, and attempt on Grand Central Couloir, Mt. Kitchener.
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Charlie!
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Sibylle Hechtel remembers Charlie Porter as the “burly, and utterly huggable” boyfriend of Bev Johnson, with whom Hechtel made the first all-female ascent of El Capitan. Her story continues our series on Porter’s life, as told by his friends and climbing partners.
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76 Visions of Charlie Porter
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Waiting for Dawn
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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
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“…[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 know anything of Porter’s feats.”
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An Interview with Alpinist Contributor Forest McBrian
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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
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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
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Songwriter and videographer Evan Phillips tells the story of a Revelation Mountains first ascent–without any hype.
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Scenes from the Alpinist Office on Deadline
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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
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“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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Slideshow: A Busy Season in the Revelations
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Following years of quiet climbing, Alaska’s Revelation Mountains see their most active season on record.
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Video: ‘A Tribute to Discomfort’
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Cory Richards, a regular Alpinist contributor, considers the realm of the uncomfortable along with the realities of modern alpinism.
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Hermann Buhl: A Hero Undiminished
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Jerzy Porebski and artist Ewa Labaj explore the great alpinist’s life in a comic strip. For many, including Reinhold Messner, Buhl was, and always will be, a legend. “When Buhl was declared missing I cried, too,” Messner wrote.
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1992 | White as a Sheet
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2007 | Kaipo Wall
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2008 | Newcomers
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2008 | Incantation
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2012 | Cirque Creek
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The Illusion of Control
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Harvey Carter’s words become a catalyst for writer Chris Van Leuven’s quest to understand how climbing prepares us for the challenges of ordinary existence, the approach of old age and the unavoidability of loss.
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The Life, Times and Scary Climbs of John Turner (1931-2014)
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Fifty-five years ago, the famous Recompense at Cathedral Ledge was first climbed with wooden wedges. It was by the imagination and British boldness of this gentleman, John Turner, who injected new life into a stagnating New England climbing scene in the 1950s. Another New England great, Ed Webster, recounts Turners’ more venturesome climbing tales in this web feature.
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The End of the Everest Myth
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To look behind the layers of mythology that still gather around Mt. Everest is not merely a matter of pointing out differences in mountaineering styles. To the degree that Sherpas and other local guides remained invisible in international Everest stories, their concerns, their risks and the value of their lives appeared invisible, too.
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Three Springs
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“[I]n ‘post’-colonial democracies where ethnic minorities carry the burden of insidious and vicious prejudices at every turn, Sherpas are fortunate. Everyone loves us, everyone trusts us, and everyone wants their own collectable one of us….”