It was 1999, and this was our first climbing trip to Patagonia. His dark, unkempt hair hid his eyes, and his jaw betrayed no emotion. But as the plane’s wheels screeched along the tarmac, he looked over at me with concern and asked, “How do you say ‘bathroom’ in Spanish?”
When the unlikely pair of Mike Libecki and Angie Payne teamed up to climb the south face of 3,264-foot Poumaka on the jungle island of Ua Pou in French Polynesia, they knew it would push them beyond their emotional limits.
TWELVE YEARS AGO, I was knee-deep in a dumpster digging for groceries. Inspired by legends like Yvon Chouinard, who famously lived on cat food for a summer, my friends and I considered bruised apples and stale bread to be a blessing that allowed us to extend our climbing trips from weeks into months.
Fifty issues deep, and we’re still pushing for the infinite summit. The irrepressible Tami Knight directs a romp back through the years, with essays by Christian Beckwith, Leo Houlding, Andrew Burr, Emilie Lee, Majka Burhardt, Andreas Schmidt, Jack Tackle, Barry Blanchard and Kyle Dempster–and imagery from more than a decade in print.
To say that the mountains are a canvas on which we practice our art is one of the great cliches–and conceits–of climbing. Can comparing the act of climbing with that of creating art somehow elevate this pointless activity and give it social merit? We climb to be in the moment, savoring brief impressions as aesthetic in themselves: the varied textures of stone and ice; the way the light shifts across an ever changing landscape. We draw on our imagination to visualize a line, formulate a strategy or solve a sequence. But no matter how creative, significant and intense our experience of an ascent may be, at the end of the day, we are left with nothing tangible.
Sometimes seen as an aid-specific tool for the pin scars on big-wall routes in Zion and Yosemite, offset cams can be invaluable almost anywhere.
At noon on April 25, 2015, I was walking with my client on a rocky trail in the valley between the Nepali villages of Chukhung and Dingboche. The air smelled of wood smoke and juniper. A handful of shaggy yaks grazed in the distance. There was no wind.
The ground shook without warning. I lurched sideways. Rocks the size of pickup trucks crashed down the valley walls to our left and right, bouncing like rubber balls before shattering into splinters.
