“Sean has bad case of diarrhea, Nico has bit of a sunstroke and is vomiting, Stephane has bad headache and Evrard has sore back. So nothing unusual to report really,” the four-man team wrote from Kyzyl Asker (5842m) on the Chinese-Kyrgyzstani border. And they hadn’t even started climbing.
When I was a new teenage climber, I had to talk my parents gently through the mechanics of leading, following and rappelling, but it was their worries that taught me to think beyond the accepted norms of those around me. I came home gushing: my friends were putting up a first ascent from the ground up. Yet my mother didn’t adopt the same enthusiasm….
Early this season, climbers Shawn Gregory, Chris Guyer and the intrepid Aaron Mulkey sniffed around cowboy country for climbable ice smears. Along the way, an ice pillar gives these desperadoes more than they bargained for.
Canadian Jon Walsh and American Josh Wharton completed the second ascent of the North Pillar (5.10d A2, 1500m) of Twins Tower on North Twin, a climb known for its horrible rock and technical nature on a face once described as “…dark, sheer and gloomy…like a bad dream.”
In the aftermath of the Nanga Parbat attack, Swedish alpinist and conflict dynamics analyst David Falt looks at some of the potential risks and possibilities for the future of Karakoram mountaineering and peace in northern Pakistan.
The late 1950s and early 1960s marked the arrival of Highway 99 in that small logging town, and a shift in climbers’ interest from peaks with pointy summits to rock faces with technical challenges. In this Web feature, Ed Cooper and Dick Culbert reflect on those early days leading up to the first ascent of the Grand Wall in 1961.
“We have a rule, climbing in the mountains-you just don’t fall,” says veteran alpinist Mark Richey, “…but you do, sometimes.” Before leaving for the Eastern Karakoram to attempt Saser Kangri II, then the world’s second-highest unreached summit, Freddie Wilkinson and Mark Richey get a first-hand reminder of how abruptly the climb could go wrong.
Earlier this month, twenty-year-old Squamish local Marc-Andre Leclerc solo-climbed Squamish’s Chief three times in 17 hours: the historic Grand Wall route, topping out on the wall via Upper Black Dyke; the 1970 Burton-Sutton aid line, Uncle Ben’s; and the classic University Wall. What Leclerc found difficult was not the technical grade, the speed or the endurance required, but making the switch among three techniques: free soloing, roped soloing and ropeless aid.
For decades, the future legality of fixed anchor use in Wilderness areas remained uncertain. Because land management agencies had no national guidance to assist local planners and managers, each local park and national forest was left to interpret the Wilderness Act–as it pertains to fixed anchors–on its own, and with wildly varying results. Last month the NPS issued Director’s Order #41 to finally clarify the agency’s management policy in Wilderness areas. Jason Keith of the Access Fund tells us what is means for climbers.
Over seven days, Jens Holsten and Chad Kellogg made their way across the toothy ridgeline of the Northern and Southern Pickets in the Cascade Mountains. The ten-mile linkup would be one of the longest routes in the Lower 48–had they completed it.
