1953, Zanskar Himalaya: A small shadow of a woman moves slowly over a drape of white. The summit cone of Nun glows, no longer distant, its 7135-meter apex still untouched. Panes of ice lie scattered like thin glass, across drifts so soft and deep that French alpinist Claude Kogan can find nothing secure for her crampons to hold.
IN A BRICK HOUSE in the tree-lined village of Hildenborough, England, a Tibetan woman listened to her British husband translate books and newspapers, so she could hear how foreign writers depicted her homeland. It was the early twentieth century, in the midst of the first British attempts on Everest.
IN A BRICK HOUSE in the tree-lined village of Hildenborough, England, a Tibetan woman listened to her British husband translate books and newspapers, so she could hear how foreign writers depicted her homeland. It was the early twentieth century, in the midst of the first British attempts on Everest.
FOR A LONG time, I used to work on Alpinist from twilight until dawn. In the small hours of the night, time appeared to stretch into an illusion of eternity. The boundaries seemed to grow thinner between the stories and my mind, until the snows of distant summits seeped through my cold apartment walls.
In which our editor travels to California to meet the women who founded America’s first monthly climbing magazine, Summit, in 1955.
Editor-in-Chief Katie Ives searches for “A Wild of One’s Own” in the annals of women’s mountaineering history in Western Canada and the writings of Mary Schaeffer Warren, who urges, “…leave your world, your recognized world, and plunge into the vast unknown.”
To look behind the layers of mythology that still gather around Mt. Everest is not merely a matter of pointing out differences in mountaineering styles. To the degree that Sherpas and other local guides remained invisible in international Everest stories, their concerns, their risks and the value of their lives appeared invisible, too.
