If you’re lucky, you own a copy of the 1964 A Climber’s Guide to Yosemite Valley–Steve Roper’s seminal “Red Guide.” Shey Kiester unearths Valley lore to reveal the genesis of Roper’s creation, and how it changed climbing in Yosemite and throughout America.
As a mother, wife, climber, cartographer and self-described “accidental adventurer,” Barbara Washburn was the antitheses of a ’40s housewife. “Sometimes [my] home would be in an igloo, at 12,000 feet, sharing Tang-flavored fig pudding with my husband; or as the lightest climber going first to test the cornices on a narrow exposed ridge; or staring out at summit views that no one else had seen.”
Jed Williamson is retiring after four decades as the editor of Accidents in North American Mountaineering. Having dedicated some 5,000 hours to the journal, he may know more about North America’s climbing accidents than anyone else on the continent.
