[This story originally appeared in Alpinist 87 (Autumn 2024), which is now available on newsstands and in our online store. Only a small fraction of our many long-form stories from the print edition are ever uploaded to Alpinist.com. Be sure to pick up the hard copies of Alpinist for all the goodness!–Ed.]
Death is only ever a breath away. Anyone who reads or writes for publications like this one is well aware of how fragile life is, that tomorrow is never guaranteed.
Among the several people our international community has lost in recent months are three luminaries who contributed a great deal to this magazine: Stewart M. Green, John Middendorf and Keita Kurakami, who passed on June 6, 21 and 26, respectively. All of them died of natural causes, though Kurakami was only thirty-eight. Each of their lives is worthy of a full biography. Doing justice to their legacies in these few pages is an impossible task. I cannot portray well enough what these people meant to so many. What I can speak to is how they influenced me for the better, directly and indirectly, as one example of a life they touched.
A thick, tattered guidebook with a faded black and yellow spine sits on my bookcase. Green’s Rock Climbing Colorado, published in 1995, was still a current edition when my dad gave it to me as a gift. That was shortly after I started spending all my lawn-mowing money on ropes and carabiners as a young teenager. In the days before the internet, the few guidebooks and magazines I owned were incredibly influential. My parents didn’t climb, it was just something I gravitated to. When I had no immediate mentors to turn to, these printed materials did more than educate my approach to the mountains—they introduced me to lifestyles and philosophies, mostly for the better.
I encountered Green’s words and photos in various places over the years as I grew up, and the old guidebook became a sentimental item. Thanks to his work, and others like him, the collective knowledge and ideals of generations came to rest in my soft, untested hands. I aspired to join those ranks, and thus had found higher aspirations to focus on during an otherwise troubled time in my life. An example of the words I took to heart are found in the conclusion of Green’s introduction to the aforementioned book: “Climbers live on the edge with an awareness of the fragility and tenderness of both life and the world itself. The rock teaches that life itself is a cup that must be fully drunk from to understand, appreciate, and love its essential joys and sorrows. Climb Colorado’s rocks then—learn their hard lessons, love their simple grace, and above all, take care of them.”
From left, Bryan Becker, Ed Webster and Stewart Green in 2008 after climbing the first pitch of Supercrack in Indian Creek, Utah. [Photo] Stewart M. Green collection
Stewart Maynard Green was born on February 4, 1953, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, a place that would remain his home throughout his life. He had five siblings—two older brothers, an older sister and a younger brother and sister, and he was the first of the family to be born in the United States after his parents moved from Canada, according to his son Ian Green.
His first rock climbing experience was in 1965 on a three-pitch route near his home in North Cheyenne Cañon when he was thirteen years old. “I wore tennis shoes and tied directly into the rope,” Green recounted in a 2022 story for ElevationOutdoors.com. “During the summer of 1969, while other young people were smoking pot and proclaiming free love, I was climbing mountains every weekend in the three-month break between my junior and senior high school years, although I think I might have liked the alternative.”
He was a teenager when he met Jimmie Dunn, who was four years older, while bouldering. Their friendship marked the beginning of a magical time that would impact the history of American climbing. After high school, Green went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and archaeology at Colorado College. There, he met Ed Webster, Bryan Becker, Earl Wiggins, Dennis Jackson, Brian Teale, Harvey Miller and Steve Hong—an influential collective of climbers if ever there was one.
A transformative moment that illustrates the trajectory of Green and his friends happened in November 1976. In the days before spring-loaded cams enabled easy protection in parallel-sided cracks, Wiggins, Webster and Becker completed the first ascent of Supercrack of the Desert in Indian Creek, Utah, while Green filmed them from the ground. A vast new realm of possibility emerged before their eyes, captured on Green’s camera. The three-pitch 5.10 crack became world-famous, often credited as the spark that jump-started a new age in desert crack climbing.
As his friends went on to explore bold new routes, Green took a different path, starting a family and turning his focus to a career in photography and writing. According to Cam Burns, one of Green’s longtime friends and contemporaries, Green wrote somewhere in the range of seventy-one books (Green’s LinkedIn profile takes credit for “over 65 books,” noting that many of those are in their fifth editions). “He was likely the most prolific climbing guidebook writer North America has ever seen. Maybe the world,” posits Burns, who has penned quite a few guides himself over the decades.
Green brought his kids along to help him research many of those guides, and photos of them grace many pages. Ian Green shared many memories of traveling with his dad, who took them climbing most days after school and coached their youth hockey teams. “If I could be a quarter of the father he was, then I’d think I was doing pretty good,” he said. Whatever they were doing, Stewart was always on the move.
“He was a bit of a lone ranger at times,” Ian said. “Making a living as a writer was tough, especially in the beginning. There were always a million ideas going through his head, but he could relate to everyone and his kindness was unparalleled. If you said, ‘Hey, I have a day off, let’s do something,’ he’d be there.”
In a follow-up email, Ian wrote: “As I become older, I am respectful of Dad’s stoic, unwavering ability to set decisive plans into motion and follow through, no matter the hardship or complexity at hand. He lived a life of calculated purpose, geared toward teaching, educating and sharing his passion for the natural world around us. He loved his family, children, grandchildren, friends and all living creatures.”
For as much writing as Stewart did, it’s hard to find much about his own life. Ian told me that his dad was working on an autobiography at the time of his death. As for photos, it’s no surprise that Stewart was always the one holding the camera. “He never let anyone take pictures of him,” Ian said.
Last year I had the privilege of working with Stewart on a tribute to his lifelong friend Ed Webster, who died in 2022. In the essay that he wrote for Issue 82, his last words are: “I like to think that Ed is out there in dreamtime, taking his place in the pantheon of climbing gods and chatting with the great ones that he knew—Layton Kor, Harvey Carter, Fritz Wiessner and Eric Bjørnstad—and waiting for the rest of us to catch up and join the party.”
Green joined Webster in the dreamtime at age seventy-one, a result of heart complications. His survivors include children Ian and Aubrey, and grandchildren.
“There are so many trips left unfinished,” Ian said. “Mr. Green is now onto the real journey.”
As I continued reading all things climbing-related as a teen, there was another name that came up often—John “Deucey” Middendorf. He was famous for his difficult big-wall aid routes all over the world during the 1980s and ’90s, from El Capitan to Zion to Great Trango Tower in Pakistan. His 1992 route to the east summit (6231m) of Great Trango with Xaver Bongard, the Grand Voyage (VII 5.10 A4+ WI3, 1341m), remains unrepeated. More than being a great climber, he was an inventor who revolutionized portaledge design several times over, along with other engineering contributions. The character I pictured from the stories I read was a fearless giant with a thundering voice. I couldn’t imagine that one day I would collaborate with him on articles, nor could I anticipate just how kind and approachable he would be. If I had to summarize his incredible life with one statement, it would be this: In everything he did, Middendorf embodied the definition of “growth mindset.”
John Middendorf at Barry Ward’s workshop in Durango, Colorado, in 2017. The location became a US fabricator for Middendorf’s open-source D4 portaledge designs he had created at home in Tasmania. [Photo] Bill Hatcher
Born in New York City on November 18, 1959, John William Middendorf IV grew up with three older sisters and a younger brother. Their father was a Navy man and the family moved around, even living in the Netherlands at one point.
Middendorf was introduced to climbing at age fourteen when he attended the Telluride Mountaineering School in Colorado. One of his instructors was the legendary climber Henry Barber. The obstacles that Middendorf had to overcome to even get that far make his career that much more remarkable.
On his website Bigwallgear.com, he shared a lesser-known story about his youth titled “On overcoming challenges (slowly)”:
When I was a boy in the 1960s and 1970s, I was fascinated by those who were “great” at something…. I admit I sometimes imagined the feeling of being great, looking up into the sky, arms outreached, with a victorious expression, just like [the boxer Muhammad] Ali.
The trouble was … I was pretty bad at just about everything, even schoolwork in my early years. I was born with a legbone disease that had me in a metal brace and cane for years, and the cure was awkward socially and physically (one of my legs was several inches shorter than the other, and the cure was to wear a high-lift shoe on the longer leg, so the shorter one grows by necessity). The experience set me back physique-wise, too, but probably provided a good base for the fine balance climbing skills I was later to develop.
Also, I had pretty severe asthma, so wretched sometimes I had to be hospitalized…. Luckily, I mostly outgrew the asthma, or perhaps compensated by sometimes pushing harder, and by the end of high school could hold my own in track and rowing events. I recall it took a lot for me to get there, expectations were low, but generally, I kept ahead of the lagging lasts, and occasionally was able to push beyond my own expectations…. In my later years, I came to appreciate that the lack of natural-born athletic talent was frustrating, but probably helped my rock climbing career in a way, as vertical skills could be continuously honed with fun practice, until almost by surprise, one day I found myself partnering with the top climbers in Yosemite on the latest testpieces, and taking risks I could never have previously imagined.
By the time Middendorf completed a degree in mechanical engineering at Stanford, he’d become a full-blown Yosemite climber. According to a 1994 article for Mountain Review by Cam Burns that is preserved on Bigwalls.net, Middendorf set off on his motorcycle to attend a series of job interviews around the country, assuming he would be moving on to the next phase of adulthood and would settle down in some place like Ohio. Then Werner Braun suggested he join the Yosemite Search and Rescue team. Middendorf ended up working for YOSAR for two and a half years, from early 1984 to 1986.
It was during this time that the nickname “Deucey” was born. A recent story by James Lucas for Climbing.com attributes the origin to Grant Hiskes mispronouncing Middendorf as “Düsseldorf,” which became “Deucey.” Middendorf recounted on Bigwallgear.com that sometimes people called him “Deuce-mama” or “Deucey-daddy,” the latter “if I just pulled off a hard lead.”
A key episode in Middendorf’s life was when he was rescued from a freezing storm on the south face of Half Dome in 1986 with Steve Bosque and Mike Corbett. The poor designs of their disintegrating portaledges inspired Middendorf to make something better, but that didn’t happen right away. He told Burns that after the rescue, the near-death experience had rattled him so much that he didn’t climb another wall for more than three years. He moved to Flagstaff, Arizona, and used a small inheritance to start a mail-order company making big-wall hammers. The name of his company was A5 Adventures. After selling all 550 hammers that he made, he started tinkering with sewn equipment, which led to his first renovations in portaledge design.
“In the first couple of years it was hell,” Middendorf told Burns. “Nobody had faith that there was a need for anyone to make high-quality portaledges and haul bags and big-wall climbing equipment.”
About nine years later, in 1997, A5 had become so successful that it was bought by the North Face. Middendorf stayed on for a short while but soon left, disenchanted with the corporate ways of handling things.
“It was a very tough time for him, and he still had problems with it,” Middendorf’s close friend Paul Pritchard recounted to me and Burns in an email shortly after we learned of his death. “That’s the reason he made all his [new D4] designs open source. He saw how greed can make you less of a human. Anyone can go ahead and just make the D4 portaledge and lots have.”
D4 Design was Middendorf’s reboot in the portaledge business, which he started in 2016. He’d been living with his wife and family in Tasmania since 2008 by then. Part of his motivation for open-sourcing his designs was to support the efforts of tree sitters to save the Tasmanian rainforest from logging.
One of the first emails I ever received from Middendorf was in 2017, inquiring about a gear review for D4:
Mostly, I am interested in the exposure so that alpinists know there is a better tool out there for their endeavors. It is half the weight and half the packed size as the current top expedition portaledge (while still being full size when deployed). I don’t really consider it a “commercial product” per se … this one [is] more to help others with their dreams—in other words, a lot of work for low financial, but high contribution, payoff.
He and I bonded during a recent collaboration for a Tool Users article he wrote for Issue 85 about the significance of early silk climbing ropes. The degree to which he could nerd out on what most people would think to be an insignificant detail was impressive even to me, which is saying something. He was the most enthusiastic participant in the fact-checking process as anyone I’ve met. My inbox was overloaded with photos of pages from ancient textbooks written in foreign languages with schematics that seemed to date back to the Pythagorean theorem. His wife, Jeni Middendorf, says his library was full of these books, some hundreds of years old.
Whatever he was doing, Middendorf approached it scientifically, as any good engineer would.
“One thing that stands out for me about John was his interest in pushing discomfort,” Burns recalled in our emails with Pritchard. “We’d go up to some unknown … painful crack and try hanging off fingers or fists or whatever we could get in…. The goal was to see how long you could go without getting out of it…. I remember this never-ending fascination with what kind of pain you could put up with.”
“He sure deep dived into all he did, exploring every last corner and aspect of it, whether it be tent poles, drones, archaic climbing technology, hydrology on the Rio Grande,” replied Pritchard. “I’m sure pain would be no different.”
In all my exchanges with Middendorf, it was never about him. He wasn’t seeking recognition or profit. His focus was on accuracy to the facts and serving the common good. Earlier this year I sent him a private critique of his Mechanical Advantage books, encouraging him to enlist some help with page design to improve the readability; photo captions in bold overshadowed the main text, and “footnotes” were often half a page long.
“Your frank assessment is very welcome!” he replied. But he was only interested in disseminating knowledge. True to his word, digital copies of the books are available for free.
“John played an important role in encouraging people to look at climbing history in new ways, to see beyond entrenched assumptions and biases, and to consider the need for a larger paradigm shift in how we understand the story of mountaineering from the early days to the present,” former Alpinist editor-in-chief Katie Ives reflected to me in an email.
Middendorf died in his sleep at age sixty-four while visiting family in Rhode Island. His survivors include Jeni and two children, Rowen and Remi, with whom he shared all his many passions and interests.
The Japanese climber Keita Kurakami entered my awareness when I read his story “A Thousand Days of Lapis Lazuli” in Issue 56 (2017). Translated from the Japanese by Elise Choi, the story is about his commitment to follow an ideal of “no bolts and no falls” as he goes on to establish Japan’s hardest trad route at the time, a sustained 250-meter 5.14a R/X. “No matter how I thought about it, I became obsessed by the idea that this ancient stone had remained unmarred for so long,” he wrote. He named the route Senjitsu no Ruri (A Thousand Days of Lapis Lazuli), after a complex 1,000-page novel, Sennichi no Ruri, in which the writer “allots one day for each page,” Kurakami explained. He would go on to author harder lines in the same style.
Keita Kurakami displays the minimal gear he used to climb the fourth pitch of Senjitsu no Ruri (5.14a R/X, 250m). The climb was the most difficult multipitch trad route in Japan when he completed it with Yusuke Sato in 2016. Kurakami went on to establish more bold 5.14 routes before his death, such as Pass It On (5.14+ R) in 2020. [Photo] Yusuke Sato
For the first ten years of his climbing career, he was focused on highball bouldering while earning a master’s degree in physics. He only started pursuing roped climbs about six months before he started working on Senjitsu no Ruri. “I’d begun to wonder whether I’d missed something of the essence of climbing,” he wrote. “I felt confined by the rigidity of separate genres: bouldering, trad, alpinism. Whatever the style, I wanted to experience the way that all forms of vertical movement were intertwined.”
It might be an understatement to say that Kurakami lived according to some strict ideals. He seemed to have a deliberate philosophical reasoning for every choice he made. In November 2017 he redpointed the individual pitches of El Capitan’s Nose (VI 5.14a), but he wasn’t pleased with his style. He’d used fixed ropes extensively, going up and down, rather than sending in a single push from the ground. About as soon as internet headlines congratulated him for the sixth free ascent of the iconic big-wall route, he asked that his name be stripped from the record.
“I will come back again to climb it in better style,” Kurakami posted on Facebook. “I’ve been told my ascent can be accepted as a free ascent, but even so, if I myself have doubts … I can’t accept it. Being honest with myself is the most important thing for me.”
He returned a year later and sent the route ground-up as a rope solo over five days. When I asked him what the most challenging moment was for him, he replied, “Deciding to do it and then telling this plan to my wife!” He added that besides his desire to improve upon his style from 2017, part of his motivation for the solo ascent was to honor a mentor who had died.
We corresponded semi-regularly since 2017. Every so often he would ask my thoughts about various ethics or ideas. He was another one of those curious people, always asking interesting questions. “How do you think restrictions on the use of power tools have affected the American climbing culture?” he once asked. Humble and enthusiastic in his approach, and so genuine to himself, he was impossible not to love.
Deepening our connection was that we both suffered from heart conditions. In 2021 he collapsed from cardiac arrest while bicycling; he was revived by three shocks from an automatic external defibrillator (AED). He was diagnosed with angina pectoris. Doctors recommended implanting a subcutaneous implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (S-ICD) to ensure it wouldn’t happen again. But he didn’t like that option. “It would greatly hinder my climbing,” he said. So he chose to live as he always had—boldly. Rather than receive the implant, he changed nearly everything else in his lifestyle except for his climbing.
“Even if I lived to be seventy or eighty without climbing, would that really be a happy life for me?” he told the Japanese magazine Number.
He was hiking the slopes of Mt. Fuji when he collapsed for the second and final time.
I can’t say I agree with all his decisions. But there’s no denying that he lived his own life. While we may not understand the risks he took, he at least seemed to have a thorough understanding about his personal motivations. He knew his mind and always kept an eye on the bigger picture. He was an artist and life was his medium.
A prayer that I often circle around while walking in the woods or meditating on a high rocky perch goes like this, in essence: Help me breathe in—and out—the good; help me put out into the world the best of what I take from it. Every whiff of rain-scented sweetness, every warm ray of sun on an autumn afternoon, every birdsong on the mountain breeze, every kindness a friend or stranger passes on—I do my best to absorb it, appreciate it and channel it back into my surroundings, similar to how trees clean the air, absorbing carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen. This is my eternal goal.
Stewart. John. Keita. They succeeded at this goal so marvelously. They were talented in the various ways in which they brought good into the world. They inspired the best qualities in the people around them. They surely had their human flaws, as we all do, but they have left us with tangible goodness in their wakes. Their lights still linger upon us.
At the end of “A Thousand Days of Lapis Lazuli,” Kurakami wrote:
I believe that our society is not something that we leave behind when we venture up a mountain or a wall; routes and culture must be tied together. The rock we climb is a mirror, and in it, we see the silent reflections of dialogues that have taken place between climbers across many decades—and also within ourselves. Out of all this action and conversation, something greater emerges that is transmitted from generation to generation, forming a kind of collective intelligence, an influence that might still flicker across great spans of time and space, mere fragments of dreams of the billions of lives that come into the world—and leave the world.
[In the print edition, the caption for the third photo gave the incorrect year of Kurakami’s first ascent of Pass It On. He completed the route in 2020, not 2021. Alpinist regrets the error.—Ed.]