Posted July 1, 2008 11:36 PM
Shane Trudell
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In verdure and bloom, spring brings a shrugging off of long worn ermine coats and an unfettering from the frozen shackles of ice and snow.
Posted July 1, 2008 8:45 PM
Alice Osborn
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Mike falls to the ground...
Posted July 1, 2008 6:35 PM
Tara Kramer
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In a gray brown autumn the clouds hung low in the damp air...
Posted July 1, 2008 6:06 PM
Melissa Alcorn
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During the morning we lounged between climbs like lizards in the hazy sun...
Posted July 1, 2008 4:25 PM
Meghan Ward
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When I am in the mountains, I need not dream about them, but they somehow still manage to invade my dreams. The line between dream and reality may fade into oblivion, but the line to the summit is clear as day.
Posted July 1, 2008 12:32 PM
Melissa Alcorn
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That’s how I found myself in a sport climbing paradise leading 5.6 on jugs and bizarre chickenhead formations when I really wanted to be ruining my fingertips on 5.11 crimps.
Posted July 1, 2008 11:06 AM
Wil Treasure
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The line between this world and, and what? Without knowing the line becomes both exhilarating and terrifying. Like the red button you mustn’t press - yet you can’t resist. We know no good can come of it, but still we persist.
Posted July 1, 2008 2:22 AM
Chris Simmons
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He has earned it all, a guide’s badge and a company... He has everything every guide hopes for.
Posted July 1, 2008 1:09 AM
Gregg Vigliotti
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At four pitches up I’m miserable, the Fruit-Cup wall is a water fall and I’m a sitting duck.
Posted June 30, 2008 10:07 PM
Geoffrey Johnson
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Don’t ever trust a rope. I know you have, hell, I have too. But never trust it again. It will lie with its coils. It is bold and audacious, but so are the best liars...
Posted June 30, 2008 5:31 PM
Kamalika Gyorgyjakab Bedo
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Around three thousand meters it wears a thick white cloud skirt, but above that layer a thousand meters of seemingly virgin brilliant white slope ends in a partly stony suave summit.
Posted June 30, 2008 1:40 PM
Matthew Traver
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I wonder how many more will be lost to this. All that have failed have been given the final kiss. Lives are scattered beneath the face, broken hopes of those who lost the race.
Posted June 30, 2008 1:39 PM
William Dwyer
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My Sportivas were a bit leaky and I felt a bit under-dressed...
Posted June 30, 2008 1:14 PM
John Heap
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I hope you don’t mind me mailing, but I found your address on the net and was wondering if you could help.
Posted June 30, 2008 2:08 AM
Bernadette Regan
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Me, my standards are even lower. I’m looking for someone to hold the other end of a rope.
Posted June 29, 2008 11:37 AM
Blair Hollingsworth
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When we were students, the mountains were an obsession, no, a religion for us...
Posted June 26, 2008 10:55 AM
Timothy Elson
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The 'Electro-Goths' head into the tempest, tempted by unclimbed ice...
Posted June 24, 2008 7:43 PM
Lise Beaulieu
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I didn’t set out to break the First Commandment of Ice Climbing: Thou shall not fall.
Posted June 24, 2008 5:14 PM
Roberto Colombo
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Right ski, left ski, right ski, left ski, again and again, I move, exhausted.
Posted June 20, 2008 9:26 AM
Ry McHenry
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Every time I miss the thin ledge, every time. And now dense blue sky pushed around, hiding the ledge, and everything else, but it was wired, it was going.
Posted June 18, 2008 3:03 PM
David Thoenen
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We should have just turned around, Freddie. But we'd invested a lot of energy to get that far. Neither one of us wanted to admit that the best decision was to go home...
Posted June 17, 2008 4:25 PM
Nathaniel Shedd
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Here at our wind scorned, wintered mother's perch...
Posted June 17, 2008 9:44 AM
Don Roth
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While I lowered to the ground, a local man took an extraordinarily keen interest in our equipment...
Posted June 15, 2008 2:05 PM
Kamalika Gyorgyjakab Bedo
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Fragments of a diary written in darkness, wearing gloves.
Posted June 15, 2008 2:02 PM
Kamalika Gyorgyjakab Bedo
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This may be the most breath-taking moment...
Posted June 13, 2008 3:09 PM
Felipe Pontes
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We were segregated resistors of a practice fed by the virtuality of Internet videos and foreign magazines...
Posted June 12, 2008 3:57 AM
Luc Fortin
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We have perfected the art of the "Alpine Blitz."
Posted June 9, 2008 2:22 AM
Jon Page
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The only thing you are looking for is some kind of perspective away from people who are concerned.
Posted June 7, 2008 1:12 PM
Naomi Judd
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We both shouted expletives that began with "holy" and I quickly glanced back toward the rock to better position myself.
Posted June 5, 2008 3:49 AM
Landon Wiedenman
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After mantling onto the ledge and clipping in, my partner hands me two nuts. “These both fell out,” he says.
Posted June 4, 2008 6:25 PM
Douglas Brockmeyer
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The Scene: Approximately 2 PM at about 18,500 ft. above Denali's Orient Express.
Posted May 30, 2008 5:19 PM
Fridjon Thorleifsson
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Posted May 23, 2008 11:59 AM
Anonymous Author
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Hands and face gnarled by a sun that has shone down and then back up for most of his life, pre-cancers pop up like bi-monthly crops to be frozen off at the mercy of his dermatologist.
Posted May 22, 2008 12:00 AM
Ann Raber
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Ames is having no luck waving down cars at midnight on Mexico-85 on a Friday in late August, and it’s because he’s using the one handed wave. I teach him the two handed wave with a headlamp in each hand, and in a few minutes a white minivan pulls over.
Posted May 20, 2008 3:39 AM
Charlie Daniel
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Ten feet above my last peice, I wedged my weary carcass in a left leaning airy chimney and looked for a place to die.
Posted May 19, 2008 4:41 PM
Brian Phillips
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Admit it or not, the majority of us live vicariously through the stories of great climbs and epics and as armchair mountaineers we climb higher, faster, and two grades harder than in reality.
Posted May 17, 2008 1:41 PM
Anonymous Author
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A tiny white void — a kind of cosmic tumbleweed bouncing north on the Ruth glacier, an isolated sphere of humanity in close orbit to the earth. I see only white, I hear my own deep breaths interrupted by great, rumbling crashes from either side of the invisible gorge like massive, curling waves against a rocky shore somewhere out there.
Posted May 15, 2008 8:14 PM
Landon Wiedenman
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Chapped hands shook, sunscreen burned my eyes, the curve of the earth rolled out before us.
Posted May 9, 2008 1:15 PM
Sharon Yencharis
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You reach the crux,
scrub away the myth of "what if" and find
fragile footprints, a small voice
pulling you up.
Posted May 6, 2008 1:48 PM
J. Arthur Blyth
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But I cannot forget how you made it down too by your own navigation of the night sky, or how we embraced in the dark there at the base.
Posted May 5, 2008 1:03 PM
Tom Slater
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Tomorrow, early, he would push with all his strength for the summit, but tonight he would sway under the stars by a thread and ignore the world below.
Posted May 5, 2008 1:02 PM
Tom Slater
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If I end up with another climbing partner who turns out to be a “people person” I’m going to rip their head off.
Posted April 30, 2008 12:00 PM
Joe Antol
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We'd both wanted to do it. We lay there on the ground, shivering in the night air as much from fear as the cold.
Posted April 28, 2008 5:01 PM
Mike Sampson
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Instinct darkens my mind, must keep going...
Posted April 28, 2008 4:53 PM
Mike Sampson
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Another morning. Another hangover. Another solo journey to second peak.
Posted April 26, 2008 1:46 PM
Guido Freddi
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From the top you can watch the whole universe below...
Posted April 25, 2008 8:26 PM
Mike Scharnell
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After last night I didn’t think we would see the sun for days...
Posted April 24, 2008 2:25 PM
Grover Shipman
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Maybe it was a passage in Siddhartha that made me start listening to rivers speak...
Posted April 23, 2008 4:21 PM
Paul Mahler
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The jeep descended and ground to a halt on a dusty flat near the riverbed. It was not going well...
Posted April 22, 2008 6:16 PM
Marten Blumen
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Approach
The air - grey and misty. The mountain - glued together by dirt. This drives us closer to the edge. We are breathless, speechless and serious. This is Paradise?
Posted April 21, 2008 3:04 PM
Kelly Sheridan
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The sun's glow is beginning to rise on the Eastern Cascades, and it's time to go climbing.
Posted April 21, 2008 3:02 PM
Rob Mecus
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Is this something everyone does? Or is it reserved for the truly pathetic?
Posted April 21, 2008 2:57 PM
Brian Irwin
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If I had known how intimidating I’d one day find my wife I’d never have asked her out that day at Carderock Cliff...
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