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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 major ice climb, Upper Sentinel Falls.

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 remained docked with Captain Fitzroy, who had invited Darwin aboard the ship to circumnavigate the globe as a scientist.

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 arresting a fall. When used as a single, the Serenity is the thinnest-diameter cord in Mammut’s line.

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 of the Airforce Special Forces.

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.

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.