Friday 13 July It takes an entire day for Hal and Virgil to traverse 8m in an attempt to find a line of weakness the overhanging section on the big wall. Virgil Places a bolt by hand in order to retreat from this position and leave a solid anchor to ascend to the next day. Bernard, Ben and Markus climb a short icefall to the East of base camp.
I’m recently a Wyoming Girl, but having spent a few years in the unshorn-leg-hair land of Oregon, this still feels like it hits close to home. The following is excerpted from a larger piece that appeared in the Northwest Mountaineering Journal about last December’s well publicized–or completely over-hyped–series of fatalities on Mt. Hood.
There may be other inflatable sleeping pads out there, but you know you’ve got a corner on the market when your brand name becomes the vernacular for your niche. For years, however, I avoided Therm-a-Rests, preferring the closed-cell pads that, while they might not offer quite the same insulation and comfort as an inflatable pad, had the distinct advantage of low-tech: you could be pretty sure they’d never fail in the field, regardless of how many times you flopped your crampon-laden pack down on them at inopportune moments.
On July 22nd we reckoned the approach to the base of the South face and assessed the real magnitude of the challenge. The wall only grew taller and more vertical as we came closer. We roped up in the middle of the glacier to cross some crevasses, checked out the start of the climb and came back to camp to sleep for a few hours before the start of what would prove to be the most demanding adventure of our lives.
Three women tackle a new 950-meter free rock line in the Karakorum, where they discover that friendship and solidarity are the keys to success and survival.
