In the final installment of our series of essays about climbing in the High Sierra’s Palisades group, Steve Porcella quests for the “remote, barren, trailless, treeless, oxygenless and peopleless,” where he finds out what it is to really know a mountain range.
“Sixty-five Sierra routes that first summer; about a dozen the next, a fifth of them first ascents. Brutal-as-hell approaches with seventy-pound packs, decrepit knees and bad footwear. I blame Steve, but really, he and I were just the syringe plungers, and the Sierra Nevada was the heroin.”
Peter Croft ambles along “the local epicenter of sideways mountaineering”–the High Sierra’s Palisades–in his own Peter Croft kind of way.
Joan Jensen searches through old boxes to uncover memories of her daring yet methodical soulmate, the late Don Jensen.
I thought I knew the Palisades, my home range. That is until I was deep in the process of writing a Mountain Profile about them for Alpinist 48.
“…As Marc neared the station, he asked if all climbing in the Rockies was this good. I had to apologize for spoiling him on his first route.”
There are only a handful of days in a climber’s life where weather, conditions and partner line up like the planets aligning to create a rare event: a magical first ascent.
An interview with Valley speed climbers Quinn Brett, Libby Sauter and Mayan Smith-Gobat.
In 2006, Barry Blanchard wrote “The Calling” for Issue 15. In writing his new memoir, The Calling: A Life Rocked by Mountains, Blanchard used the Alpinist feature story as a springboard to continue exploring the climbs and partnerships that developed from his childhood musings growing up in Calgary.
