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44 Mountain Profile: The Palisades
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A Note from Our Palisades Profile Writer
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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.
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Picking the Plum Line on the Storm Creek Headwall
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“…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.”
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Chasing the Ethereal on South Howser Tower
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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.
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Yosemite Hardwomen: An El Cap Speed Ascent Debrief
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An interview with Valley speed climbers Quinn Brett, Libby Sauter and Mayan Smith-Gobat.
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The Calling: A Life Rocked by Mountains
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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.
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The Calling
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Growing up poor in Calgary didn’t just encourage dreaming; for one young boy, it necessitated it. Canada’s storied alpinist recounts the climbs and partnerships that sprung from his childhood fantasies.
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Barbara Washburn: Accidentally Adventurous, Deliberately Brave
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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.”
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The Patagonia Climbing Season is Coming
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As the austral summer approaches, videographer and climber Tad McCrea reminisces about climbing seasons past and offers a bit of advice to climbers everywhere: “[S]cour the interwebs for cheap airfare, unearth your passports, patch your gear and pack your bags.”
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Amazing Grace: A Tribute to Brian Delaney
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Patrick Horne remembers his friend Brian Delaney, a New England climber who transformed his ambling gait into graceful movement whenever he touched rock.
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The Sunlit Ledge
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A regular illustrator for our print magazine, Jamie Givens advises how to begin the monumental task of following your dreams. “Start with what you love,” he says. “Most people don’t realize that the knowledge they have about something that they are passionate about, the years spent memorizing information, physical skills developed, expertise, is all a marketable commodity.”
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Surviving the Best Pitch in the Pickets
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Blake Herrington adds his own saga to the story of Picket Range climbing.
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Early Season in the Mt. Blanc Massif: A Photo Gallery
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Fred Degoulet and Benjamin Guigonnet lead the charge into a promising winter season in the Mont Blanc massif, and come back with photos.
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Lessons from 40 Years of Accidents: An Interview with Jed Williamson
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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.
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More Important Than the Summit
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Mugs Stump Award recipient Kyle Dempster returns from Pakistan, not with a fresh routeline to draw up The Shining Wall of Gasherbrum IV (7925m), but with a story about choosing a friend over a summit.
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A Tribute to Fly’n Brian McCray
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Chris Van Leuven calls up a few friends of his mentor Brian McCray to share memories and create an outline of the late climber’s character and legacy.
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Alpine Exposures: A Photo Gallery
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Over the last decade behind his lens, Jon Griffith has focused on mountain sports photography: alpine, rock and ice climbing, backcountry skiing, BASE jumping, paragliding and speed riding. But beyond the dusky alpenglow and crisp ridgelines, the bulk of Griffith’s oeuvre is extraordinary in another important and more unusual way: it’s real.
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Ham and Eggs, Community-Style
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Unusual conditions in the Central Alaska Range one season leaves the classic Ham and Eggs (V 5.8 AI4) slathered in snice and yielding only to a collective, siege-style effort by the growing community of climbers at its base.
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The Cobra: Memories of its First Ascent
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High-desert climbing pioneer Jimmie Dunn recounts the quirky Cobra’s first ascent on a sizzling April day in 1991 when “even the ants [were] lying low” in Utah’s Fisher Towers. He bids farewell to the now-collapsed formation that was enjoyed by so many fellow desert rats over the years.
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Experts Ask: Are We Loving Our Mountains to Death?
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A quorum of mountain experts gathered in Golden, Colorado, to sift through the mounting social, economic and environmental challenges that have grown with the increasing populations of outdoor recreators across the world. Brad Rassler reports back.
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Fun with Routelines: Results from a Ridiculous Facebook Contest
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We drew routelines on the Paramount Pictures logo and asked our Facebook fans to tell stories of the routes’ fictional first ascents. Here are some of our favorite responses.
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The Ultimate Linkup in Washington’s Stuart Range
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After climbing more than 4,000 vertical feet of technical terrain up to 5.12 and hiking 20 miles in less than 24 hours, Blake Herrington and Jens Holsten recount their Ultimate Linkup in Washington’s Stuart Range.
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70 Sendero Luminoso
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In January 2014, Alex Honnold free soloed El Sendero Luminoso, a big wall in Mexico’s El Potrero Chico. Today, he looks beyond the momentary purity of ascent at the complex impacts of professional climbing.
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In Memory of Charlie Porter (1951-2014)
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“All his life, [Charlie Porter had] defied the odds on rock walls and oceans, from Yosemite to Antarctica. It seems improbable to imagine him knocking on the door of a hospital on the grid-square streets of Punta Arenas. Ashes in an urn, energy into dust….”
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The Gloaming: Charlie Porter in Tierra del Fuego
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“If you started climbing in the early 1970s, you couldn’t help being aware of the Porter phenomenon, the meteor that flashed so briefly across the climbing firmament only to vanish. I knew about the famous El Cap big-wall climbs with their evocative hippy names, and the legendary Mt. Asgard solo…But I met Charlie much later, completely out of context….”
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Uncharted Space
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“[A] frigid flow ran down our sleeves, exiting at elbows or coursing down over bollocks and quads into boots…. In the dim light, I stood in double boots on two sloping footholds, and I hollered down that I needed the bolt kit. ‘What?’ Charlie [Porter] answered. I’d woken him up. ‘No fuckin’ bolts! Not now, not ever!'” Russel McLean spends 10 days on the Kichatnas’ Middle Triple Peak in Part 4 of the Charlie Porter series.
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The Man with the Van
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With a number of hard El Capitan wall climbs under his belt, Charlie Porter drives to the Canadian Rockies in his dilapidated “California van” to climb with Bugs McKeith and the Burgess twins. In this installment of our Charlie Porter series, Alan Burgess tells of their first ascent of the now-classic Polar Circus, Cirrus Mountain, and attempt on Grand Central Couloir, Mt. Kitchener.
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Charlie!
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Sibylle Hechtel remembers Charlie Porter as the “burly, and utterly huggable” boyfriend of Bev Johnson, with whom Hechtel made the first all-female ascent of El Capitan. Her story continues our series on Porter’s life, as told by his friends and climbing partners.
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76 Visions of Charlie Porter
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Waiting for Dawn
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In Part 1 of this series on Charlie Porter, told by some of climbing partners and friends through the decades, Gary Bocarde recalls their days together in Yosemite, where Porter pushed the upper limits of hard aid in the early 1970s and climbed not for ego but for joy.
