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Posted July 21, 2016
"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.
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Posted June 22, 2016
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.
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Posted June 13, 2016
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...
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Posted June 10, 2016
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...
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Posted June 7, 2016
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.
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Posted June 6, 2016
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.
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Posted June 2, 2016
"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.
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Posted May 26, 2016
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.
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Posted May 24, 2016
Before I left for Chamonix to go hiking in the French Alps, I borrowed Solo Faces by James Salter from the lending library at work. My list of must-reads was long and only growing longer, but the ghostly mountain landscape of its cover caught my eye—a silhouetted man ascending a jagged peak.
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Posted May 20, 2016
This story is about Jack Tackle recovering from a debilitating sickness and then traveling to Mt. Augusta (14,072), Saint Elias Mountains, Yukon Territories. High on the peak's north face, he was clocked by a rock, and rescued from the wall a few days later by Pararescue Specialists (known as parajumpers, or PJs), highly trained members of the Airforce Special Forces.
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