DURING THE 1980S, WHEN I was the editor-in-chief of the French magazine Alpinisme et Randonnee, I spent several days in Grenoble each year for an international trade show. My meetings were exhausting work, happily interrupted by visits with good friends, which allowed me to forget, for an hour or two, everything that the show signified: that the mountains had become a business and that we–the journalists, the guides and the technical consultants–were all part of it.
On April 16, several days after his partner Thomas Bubendorfer experienced foot problems and the pair aborted an attempt on Cerro Torre, Austrian alpinist Markus Pucher made the first ascent, solo, of the remote West Face of Cerro Marconi Sur. The 8,150-foot (2484-meter) peak is the high point of a jagged ridge in the Cordon Marconi range northwest of Fitz Roy and Cerro Torre on the eastern edge of the Patagonia Icecap.
SEPTEMBER 22, 1871, WAS ONE of those magical autumn days, when your gaze pierces farther than usual across the crystalline air. Mists had already consumed the valleys, obscuring most signs of human presence–apart from the occasional plume of distant smoke that rose straight up.
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.
It was 1999, and this was our first climbing trip to Patagonia. His dark, unkempt hair hid his eyes, and his jaw betrayed no emotion. But as the plane’s wheels screeched along the tarmac, he looked over at me with concern and asked, “How do you say ‘bathroom’ in Spanish?”
The versatility of the Maverick played a key role while hiking (a.k.a. sweating) uphill and making my way along a knife edge in Summit County, where winds picked up to near 35 mph, leaving little option other than getting low and waiting it out.
When the unlikely pair of Mike Libecki and Angie Payne teamed up to climb the south face of 3,264-foot Poumaka on the jungle island of Ua Pou in French Polynesia, they knew it would push them beyond their emotional limits.
TWELVE YEARS AGO, I was knee-deep in a dumpster digging for groceries. Inspired by legends like Yvon Chouinard, who famously lived on cat food for a summer, my friends and I considered bruised apples and stale bread to be a blessing that allowed us to extend our climbing trips from weeks into months.
