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.
The day is done. In the darkness, bruised and battered hands react unconsciously and follow the familiar Braille trail of the desert pinstripes scratched in the fender, door and quarter panel of my car. It’s been a long while since I’ve felt boxes of slide film jostling around my cooler. At first, the empty space was a shock.
SO BEGAN THE LETTER. Marc Ewing wanted to start a magazine–the magazine, actually, that I had always worried somebody else would start. The timing was good: my seven years with the American Alpine Journal had just come to an end. Shortly after receiving the letter, I called Marc on the phone.
In which our editor travels to California to meet the women who founded America’s first monthly climbing magazine, Summit, in 1955.
Stewart Green pens an elegy for Eric Bjornstad (1934–2014), author of Desert Rock, climber of sandstone spires and lover of open spaces.
Described by the famous mountaineering writer David Roberts as a man “for whom no expedition was long enough,” Don Jensen spent years creating the perfect homemade gear for his epic excursions. Brad Rassler tells the story of the rare “Jensen Pack,” a relic of its creator’s intense climbing and quiet ingenuity.
A graduate student unpacks more of the myths of mountain tourism. A librarian and a sailor share stories of meeting and missing the late, elusive Charlie Porter. And a reader adds a footnote to a Mountain Profile.
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.”
