For our Climbing Life department in Alpinist 55, high school student Kai Lightner writes about his first multipitch traditional climb on Stone Mountain, with Yosemite pioneer Doug Robinson. For more, wide-ranging stories from our print magazine contributors, pick up a copy of Alpinist 55.
![Bluemlisalp traverse above Kandersteg, Bernese Alps. [Photo] Abacus Mountain Guides](https://i0.wp.com/alpinist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/bluemlisalp-traverse.jpg?resize=930%2C620&ssl=1)
“Tell me again about being single-minded, / about couloirs bulging with fat blue ice / and dawn arriving high in the Alps; / how a slope exists at a perfect angle / where it all might kick in again.” Read three poems from David Wilson.
“There is glacial power in language, in naming things. I am here because my mother gave me a vocabulary for motion,” poet Devi Lockwood writes about her experiences growing up as the daughter of a mountaineer–in this essay for Alpinist 55. Subscribe today or preorder at the Alpinist.com store.
Why Mark Westman should be famous (A postscript to Alpinist 19). May’s everlasting sun hovered in a low, lateral arc over the Alaska Range, bathing the massive peaks in fiery light. Waves of clouds washed up the Kahiltna Glacier and flooded the lower mountains in an ever-darkening fog.
It’s 3 a.m., July 2015. We walk through the darkness, headlamps illuminating our path. A cool breeze awakens the trees, and the creek bubbles to life as we switchback up the trail. Our movement becomes rhythmic. Three hours pass rapidly. Faint light paints the horizon, and the mountains are stirred awake…
Valley Walls: A Memoir of Climbing and Living in Yosemite by Glen Denny. Published by Yosemite Conservancy, May 2016. 210 pages. Paperback. $18.95. During the 1960s, Glen Denny, a young college dropout and budding photographer, was part of the famous crew of riff-raff climbers who spent their days in Yosemite Valley, honing skills…
This poem was inspired by climbing in Kalymnos for the first time a few years ago and thinking about that point in the day when you feel as if you’ve climbed out of your own skin.
As a young climber in the 1990s, I developed a strange habit. Each year I found myself obsessively searching the American Alpine Club’s Accidents in North American Mountaineering for entries about women.
“I’M SO GLAD TO SEE YOU BOYS,” Lee Sorenson shouted as he ran across the campsite toward us, his bearded face beaming with love and relief. His oldest son, Tobin, and I were a full day and a night overdue. It was March 1975, and we’d just made the second ascent of the Valley’s first major ice climb, Upper Sentinel Falls.
In September 1833, Charles Darwin set out for the four peaks of the Sierra de la Ventana alone, lured by local murmurs of caves and forests and veins of silver and gold. The small range was barely visible from the port of Bahia Blanca, a notch in the north-central Argentine coast. There, the H.M.S. Beagle remained docked with Captain Fitzroy, who had invited Darwin aboard the ship to circumnavigate the globe as a scientist.
