Just saw the notice about the fire. My stomach turns at the thought of all those back issues burning. I had just saved enough to buy that set of the first 10 issues, but my inconvenience pales in comparison to your very real material loss and the shock of seeing so much work go up in smoke. It also reminds me that the most important thing is to keep working at what you love and make your own adventures; no back issue or water bottle makes up for inhaling ice-crystals and grit at 3 am, wanting to puke while placing gear, or simply topping out with a good friend and splitting the last gulp of water.

"Squamish climber Matt Maddaloni rigged a 30-foot-diameter trapeze net, fashioned from fishing net and industrial-strength bungy cord, to protect his attempts to free-solo a 5.13a route."

This is my first post on alpinist.com, not that that matters. Anyways, I wanted to post two pictures from a recent trip to the San Juan Mountains in southwest Colorado, where a group I was with climbed Wetterhorn Peak, one of the 54 14ers in the state. Hopefully these are considered alpinism/mountaineering pics... if not, I hope you enjoy them anyways! Thanks for taking a look.

I attempted a winter attempt on the East Rib with a 9 member US/Canadian team in December 1987. Most of the climbing was done by me, Ken Reville and our Sherpa Pemba. We reached about 23,000' on the East Rib and were turned back by a big storm. At the same time a large Japanese party was climbing the Bonnington Route. The two who made the main summit perished on their descent.

As a leader of our community and well informed about the effect of global warming, i feel it is my duty to spread awareness of this issue to all concerned authorities, environmentalists, local community and all our mountaineering friends. The natural treasures are for all of us...

I, in keeping with my anonymous internet persona of constant, indignant rage, took this as a glaring example of nanny-state meddling and risk averse "progressive" loony-tunes protecting me from myself.

Public attention in these sports generally focuses on tragedies and as such are highly emotive and sensationalized. Dramatic accounts of accidents and hardships often lead to fierce debates on the merits and ethics of these sports.

Yes, that's right. Ladders. Now, this may blur the line for a climbing website, but I did find it by googling "climbing", so I feel moderately vindicated. Following, is my slightly longer rant that will theoretically tie us back to the actual act of climbing mountains or rocks or small rocks or whatever else it is that we do..

"Mike Robertson (45) of Wareham, Dorset, the deep-water soloist, photographer and recent Banff award-winning author of Deep Water was arrested on Monday whilst climbing the Eiffel Tower in Paris. "Mike was protesting against Total's - the French oil company, based in Paris - continued involvement in Burma..."

"The sky was stunningly blue and clear and there was no wind; you only get a few days like this each summer on Antarctica's highest mountains. Where we expected to encounter snow between the bands of rock we found hard, clear "water ice" similar to that on the frozen waterfalls we had climbed in Europe and North America. As its name would suggest, such ice is formed directly from water, usually running water. It is not the compacted snow or hard blue glacial ice that is almost everywhere else in Antarctica."

Oh yeah? Really? As if I didn't have enough to be concerned about, now I learn that a chemical secreted by ants can cause rappel slings to fail. Great.

In 2005, a two-man Spanish team took seven days to climb the route in alpine style. Our aim was to repeat the route in alpine style and confirm that Pakistan is a great destination for these kinds of ascents.

On summit day we thought we could simply climb to the ridge and follow it to the glacier, which would lead to some easy rock towards the summit. How wrong we were.

We'd both wanted to do it. We lay there on the ground, shivering in the night air as much from fear as from the cold.

Mark Twight apparently was also experiencing hallucinations (or just a bad memory) as he appears to have confused two passages from Snow in the Kingdom.