The Mountaineers

Publication Year: 2000.

The Mountaineers. The Mountaineers’ Seattle climbing program, under the leadership of Ron Eng, continues to maintain a long-standing focus on alpine climbing in the Pacific Northwest. However, the program has continued to expand significantly. In addition to the Basic and Intermediate Climbing courses, which are its foundation and continue to draw high demand, the climbing program now offers the Waterfall Ice Climbing Course. This course, which includes winter trips to the waterfall ice climbing areas of Colorado, British Columbia and Alberta, is designed for the experienced alpinist and represents a significant expansion of the traditional curricular and geographic scopes.

The program also continues to offer a variety of climbing seminars designed to foster further development of the climbing course graduates’ technical skills. Seminar offerings range from basic climbing skills (e.g., friction climbing and risk assessment) to “Advanced Climbing Experience” seminars (e.g., aid climbing and planning an expedition to Denali). In addition to numerous climbs of mountains in the Pacific Northwest, the program also sponsored trips to Yosemite Valley and Tuolumne Meadows, British Columbia and Alberta.

Program administration includes the increasing use of electronic technology. A growing number of climb leaders are taking advantage of the climb leader web page trip registration system to schedule trips. More and more information is being incorporated on the climbing program general web page. The climbing program web page URL is http://www.eskimo.com/-pc22/CC/cc.html.

Mountaineers Books published a number of books in 1999, among them The Totem Pole, by Paul Pritchard, Mark Twight’s Extreme Alpinism and A Life on the Edge: Memoirs of Everest and Beyond, by Big Jim Whittaker. We also pulled off a minor publishing miracle in late September with the publication of Ghosts of Everest: The Search for Mallory and Irvine. On May 1, when we learned of the discovery of Mallory’s body, we had no manuscript. On September 25, we printed 55,000 copies of a 200-page, full-color book. Typically it takes an author several years to complete a manuscript and at least nine months for us to edit, design and produce a book. In addition, Mountaineers Books has now completed two reprints for a current total of 85,000 copies in print (see reviews of the above titles beginning on page 397).

Donna Price, Trustee