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International Team Completes Mt. Waddington Project
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International team completes line on the highest mountain wholly within British Columbia, Mt. Waddington. From August 18 to 19, Paul McSorley, Ines Papert and Mayan Smith-Gobat completed a two-day ascent of Mt. Waddington’s Southwest Buttress to reach its Northwest Summit (4000m). Two parties had previously attempted their 20-pitch 800-meter route, rated 5.11+ WI3 M5 ED1.
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Searching for Light in the Dark Arts
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Jeff Shapiro reflects on wingsuit flight after the death of his friends Sean “Stanley” Leary, Dean Potter and Graham Hunt. See the tribute to the three men in Alpinist 51 (on newsstands now and available online) or read the feature here–Ed.
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Clint Helander’s Social Media Guest Postings September 21-27
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Between September 21 and 27, 2015, Alpinist contributor Clint Helander posted his photos and stories on our Instagram, Facebook and Twitter pages as part of our Alpinist Community project. Helander has been featured on our website and his words appear in Alpinist 32, The Relentless Raven, Alpinist 46, Local Hero: Mark Westman, and Alpinist 49, The Question: The Direct East Face of Golgotha.
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Craig Muderlak’s Social Media Guest Postings September 14-20
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Between September 14 and 20, 2015, Alpinist contributor Craig Muderlak posted his art, photos and stories on our Instagram, Facebook and Twitter pages as part of our Alpinist Community project. Muderlak’s artwork has been featured on both our website and in Alpinist 50 and 51. This web feature is a compilation of his work from that week.
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Into the Shadow Chapter 1
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STARS FLICKER IN A SLOW-SPINNING SKY. Old snow crackles. The moraine–a rubble-strewn lunar surface–creaks under our feet. A yellow moon lights our path. Ice gleams. Houseman and I are creeping like thieves. We’re scared the mountain might hear our approach.
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Into the Shadow Chapter 2
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THE BEDROOM WAS DARK. Ten minutes, just ten more minutes. I curled the covers over my head. How do you prepare yourself? Soon I’d get up and make the daily prison commute. Ten heavy steel doors would open and close with a clunk as sharp as a cork pulled: ten inmates escorted to the gymnasium.
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Photographer Jason Gebauer: The Silent Observer
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We caught up with photographer Jason Gebauer when he was passing through Winter Park, Colo., while scouting landscape to shoot this coming winter. A resident of Golden, Colo., Gebauer is on the road two months a year but gets out climbing and photographing about three days a week. “I mostly shoot climbing and climbing lifestyle, but I’ve been getting into skiing and ski mountaineering,” he tells us.
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Dru Part II–1983: La Voie Lesueur, First Winter Ascent
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THE CLANGOR OF OUR SKI BOOTS on steel stairs broke the winter silence atop the Grands Montets. I turned, my gaze riveted on the North Face of the Drus: “It’s there,” I told my climbing partner Thierry Renault. “Yes, yes, yes,” he murmured in the Frank Zappa style of talking he favored at the time. The wall rose from depths of shadow, silver-streaked and foreboding. The Voie Lesueur formed an almost continuous line of iceand snow-lined chimneys and gullies spiraling from right to left, terminating atop the Grand Dru.
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Mountain Profile: The Aiguille du Dru Part II (1955-2015)
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“It seemed built to perpetuate our dreams”–thus Guido Magnone described the Aiguille du Dru in The West Face. Ian Parnell relives the history of a peak poised between mountaineering fantasies and environmental realities. Royal Robbins, Claude Remy, Andy Parkin and Jerome Sullivan share dispatches from the past to the future.
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Between the Lines
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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.
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Smith and Kadatz: Free Climbing on Baffin Island
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“I believe that in Hell, they make you posthole,” Anna Smith told Alpinist, recalling the conditions she and her climbing partner, Michelle Kadatz, endured while shuttling a loads to one of Baffin Island’s big wall routes during July.
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What the Heart, Only, Sees
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February 20, 2015: I lay awake in a small cave, high above the Torre Valley in Patagonia. Storms echoed across the giant arena of granite spires, hidden in the night. I listened for avalanches and rockfall, but the deep rumble of rain eclipsed all sound. A cold fog hovered over my face.
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Patience and the Dragon: Fitz Roy
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Going Home
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One after the other, their toes compress then release from the cliff’s edge. Shoulders hunch forward, chins are tucked in. Toes are pointed. Legs are spread apart, holding their wingsuits open. Streaked granite surrounds them: El Capitan, the 3,000-foot wall they’ve climbed for years, its golden polish framed by ponderosa pines. Rushing air fills their ears. They thread a channel that opens toward the Cathedral Spires across the valley floor. The orange sky feels thick, heavy.
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The City and the Blade Chapter 4
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IN MARCH OF 2011, while skiing in the Tetons, Renan fell off a small cliff. His doctors said he was lucky: although he’d fractured his skull and two vertebrae, and severed a major vertebral artery, his mental acuity would not be compromised. Maybe, as Mugs might say, Ganesh, the mover of obstacles in the Hindu religion, had helped us out. But Renan would have to wear a neck brace for twelve weeks.
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The City and the Blade Chapter 3
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SOME WESTERNERS ARE DRIVEN to explore the “unknown,” believing that we will discover bliss in uncharted regions, whether we define it as riches, science or self-discovery. To the Hindus of the Gangotri, the known features of the landscape already form part of a sacred, present reality–one that can be seen, touched, heard, tasted and felt.
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The City and the Blade Chapter 2
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IN THE YEARS AFTER MUGS’ DEATH, I climbed in the style he’d imprinted on me, venturing into places where nature was still in power, where everything became simple because no falling was allowed. A new partner, Alex Lowe, joined me on expeditions to Central Asia and Antarctica. In my memory, now, it’s hard to fix a single image of him, for he was always moving, drinking coffee, bouncing on his toes. Like all his friends, I found myself caught up in that endless stream of energy, bewildered by what I could achieve while he cheered me on.
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The City and the Blade Chapter 1
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Mugs had tried the Shark’s Fin in 1986 and 1988 with various partners. He was turned back by an avalanche, a shoulder injury and heavy snow. When speaking of the peak, his voice dropped to a reverential whisper. On the back wall of his van, he tacked a tattered cover of Mountain with a photo of the Shark’s Fin framed perfectly against a blue sky. He covered the image with a weatherworn prayer flag, only sharing it with his closest friends.
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Fun Times at the 22nd Annual Lander International Climbers’ Festival
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The Lander International Climbers’ Festival, which celebrated its twenty-second anniversary from July 8 to July 12, is the modern-day equivalent of the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous–but for climbers. Here, at City Park, by a river still lined with cottonwoods, the itinerant climbers pitched a city of colorful tents, while their iron horses lined the narrow street beside the river.
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There and Back Again: Chapter Two
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After being kidnapped in Kyrgyzstan I suffered from nightmares and loads of mistrust in the world. I went to see a therapist a few times to try and rid my sleep of nightmares, but my therapy and focus on mental healing stopped there. I felt that therapy was a sign of weakness, and that I should be tougher than that.
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Meru: Documentary Reveals Honor and Obsession among Himalaya Big Wall Climbers
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It’s over and they know it. Conrad Anker, Jimmy Chin and Renan Ozturk are 7,000 miles from home, 20,000 feet above sea level and a mere 300 feet below the summit of Meru Central (6310m), the middle summit of Meru Peak, in India.
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There and Back Again: Chapter One
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The past two years I’ve either been pregnant or a new mom to our 14-month-old boy, Theo. Reflecting on There and Back Again reminds me of a time where climbing and everything surrounding it was my sole focus in life.
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Cliffs Ahoy: Vertical Sailing and Sea Ditties in the Arctic Circle
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Last summer a group of climbers navigated the chill waters of the North Atlantic to access remote big wall routes in the Uumannaq area of Greenland, Gibbs Fjord, Nanavut and Sam Ford Fjord, Baffin Island. During this trip they authored ten new long routes in alpine style. This wasn’t their maiden voyage, but a reprise of a 2010 adventure–a style of climbing the team dubbed “vertical sailing.”
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Timed Just Right
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A gentle breeze drifts over my bright-yellow bivi bag, tickling evergreen bows just overhead. We doze beneath magnificent trees, poised at the foot of North Maroon Peak thousands of feet above Aspen, Colorado. A pyramid of choss just beginning to shed its winter blanket of white looms over us and just now seems in condition for an alpine ascent.
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Photo Essay: Bad to the Bone
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This past April, Jonathan Griffith and Will Sim endured avalanches, rotten rock and tent-flattening winds to author a new route on the unclimbed northwest face on Mt. Deborah (12,339′) in the Alaska Range. Sim calls their route, Bad to the Bone, “The most spooky and unnerving thing I have ever been on.” The pair declined to grade its difficulty, and does not recommend a second ascent.
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Alpinist Sponsors Upcoming Squamish Climbing Festival: Arc’teryx Climbing Academy
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Squamish, B.C. A salty breeze washes inland from Howe Sound, tangling the air at the busy Port of Squamish. Snowcapped mountains rise beyond the docks, hemming in the broad valley with dark misty forests.
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Arctic Rage
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This week we are re-posting Kevin Mahoney’s account of Arctic Rage, (WI6+ R A2, 4500′), from Alpinist 8. Mahoney and partner Ben Gilmore climbed this new route on The Mooses Tooth in March 2004.
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Interview with Angie Payne
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Angie Payne, a multi-time national bouldering champion and the first woman to climb V13, recently took a break from bouldering to go on an adventure with expedition climber Mike Libecki. Together they climbed her first big wall, the 3,264-foot rock spire called Poumaka on an island in French Polynesia.
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The Face of the Future
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LIKE A LIGHTHOUSE DOMINATING the sea…. The Sea of Ice. The Drus seem to have conquered the Mer de Glace and stilled its waves, until the glacier no longer dares defy their steep mountain walls. Large pale stains, signs of recent rockfall, gleam like salt crystals deposited during some earlier epoch when the Sea of Ice flowed powerful and high, before it began to die down and to draw back, slowly and gently, leaving behind only vile shores of scree. Tourists arrive in uninterrupted floods to view Mont Blanc–merely to find its pallid summit drowned in a mass of satellite…
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Mike Libecki Interview
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Last week we posted a piece about Mike Libecki and Angie Payne’s ascent of 3,264-foot Poumaka on the island of Ua Pou in the South Pacific. Here, we interview Libecki to find out more about the expedition and his personal background.
