A.A.C., Sierra Nevada Section. The continued high level of member involvement made 1992 an important year for the Sierra Nevada Section. Section members have made ascents of mountains from South American traditional summits, i.e. Aconcagua, to new routes on the Central Tower of Paine in Patagonia. In Central Asia, Al Steck completed a three-week Silk Route odyssey from Beijing to Rawalpindi, and R.D. Caughron on a Polish expedition just missed the summit of Nanga Parbat. On a local level, many classic routes have been revisited and impressive new routes of 5.11 through 5.13 have been put up throughout the Sierra Nevada.

Section access issues have included Paul Minault of the Section and the Access Fund representatives working together with the Forest Service to solve the problem of overuse of the Lover’s Leap campground. The Section has long been involved in issues of the Leap, and in 1983 built the first out-house for Leap climbers.

Russ Faure-Brac has been involved in minimizing the impact of the Mount Shasta wilderness management plan that would open a large area of the mountain for ski development, while restricting the number of climbers that could be on the mountain at any one time. David Chick has been representing the AAC and the Section on the Yosemite Climbing Management Plan Committee. This committee has been meeting for a year and is charged with developing a resource management plan for all climbing activities. Our stated goal is to try to minimize resource impacts by climbing, while minimizing the National Park Service impact upon climbers.

During this year the Section activities included the annual Sierra ski weekend at Grover Hot Springs, climbing weekends at Lover’s Leap, Tuolumne Meadows, and Yosemite Valley. Section Socials were held in the Bay Area both in the spring and the fall. The annual Section fund-raising dinner to provide funds to publish the quarterly section newsletter was held in May. The dinner, attended by 95 members and guests, was a gala affair featuring George Lowe. George dazzled the audience with his trilogy slide show of extreme exposure on the Nose of El Capitan, accomplishment tempered with survival on K2, and his solo of Dhaulagiri.

David N. Chick, Section Chairman