Contributors

Herve Barmasse ("Mountain Profile") makes his home in Valtournenche, Italy, where he is a second-generation guide on his beloved Matterhorn. He and his coauthor—alpine guide and Webmaster (www.go-mountain.com) Luca "Rampikino" Maspes—are, at the time of this writing, in Patagonia as part of the second UP Project, which Maspes created in 2003.

Alpine guide and ski instructor Ermanno Salvaterra ("The Ark of the Winds") has spent most of his summers since age two above 2500 meters. Born in Pinzolo, Italy, where his family runs the XII Apostles refuge, he completed his first solo on the fixed ropes of Cima della Busazza's Castiglione Route when he was nine. His article "Mia Patagonia," chronicling his twenty-year relationship with that land, appeared in Issue 8.

Climber and photographer Heinz Zak ("Passion and Beauty") lives in the Tyrolean village of Scharnitz, Austria. Over the last twenty-five years, Zak's images have appeared in his books High Life, Rock Stars and Yosemite (with Alexander Huber) and in climbing magazines around the world. In 1986 he photographed Wolfgang Gullich making the first free solo of Separate Reality, in Yosemite; in 2005 he returned to make the second one himself.

Born in Britain, Steve "Crusher" Bartlett ("Killing Legends") started climbing on Northumberland's steep sandstone crags. His love of sandstone followed him to the US, where he immigrated in the 1980s and where he continues to explore desert towers, of which he has climbed more than 100. His Mountain Profile of The Titan (Issue 8) began the friendship with Harvey Carter featured in this issue.

Ian Parnell ("Victors of the Unwinnable") is a freelance photographer and writer based in Sheffield, England, whose climbing predilictions can be summarized as "the looser and colder the better." Although he has been nominated for the Piolet d'Or three times, his best prize was the "summit cake" that their liaison officer and cook gave him and John Varco after their first ascent of Saf Minal, in 2004.

When not on expedition, Steve House ("Sum Equals Zero") splits his time between Bend, Oregon and Osp, Slovenia—"two of the best towns in the world for year-round rock climbing." House and his climbing partner Vince Anderson won the 2006 Piolet d'Or for their ascent of Nanga Parbat, but he claims his proudest moment occurred when surfer Gerry Lopez pushed him into a perfect three-foot wave.