I SAG DEEP INTO MY HARNESS and absently stare upward into a mesmerizing plane of granite. From my precarious hanging position, I am doing my best to keep the moist arctic wind from blasting my skin. Despite wearing every layer that I packed for th...
On April 12, at approximately 1:15 p.m., the Coconino County Sheriff's Office received a call regarding an accident at the Pit. The county search and rescue unit responded, along with the Flagstaff Fire Department and Guardian Medical Transport. I...
Looking west from the summit of Gangapurna. Various mountaineers have ascended the peak labeled "D" from the north (right) and "E" from the south, both using a "Tarke Kang" permit. In fact, it is obvious from this vantage th...
In June, Damien Gildea attempted the south face of CCKN (6,303m, a.k.a. Chau Chau Kang Nilda, the “Blue Moon in the Sky.) Gildea climbed 650m of snow, ice, and rock (50°) to around 6,150m, where he was stopped by a large crevasse. He retreated dow...
On February 16, Tim Nielsen and I hiked up to the north face of West Lion (49°27'28"N, 123°11'11"W), just north of Vancouver in the North Shore Mountains, via the Lions Bay Trail. Our plan was to repeat the North Couloir (300m, WI3+), which Matteo...
FAR FROM the ever-connected hustle of modern life, deep in the heart of northern Chilean Patagonia, the pristine granite faces and snowy caps of the Avellano Towers rise up from a hidden valley at the head of the Avellano River. They say the best ...
IF ONLY I HAD KNOWN how much time, sacrifice, sorrow, and disappointment it would cost me to finish a new route on Gasherbrum I, never would I have started down this road. But I am not a Sibyl, an oracle, and actually it is better this way, becaus...
From February 9 to March 3, 2018, we spent 22 days in Chile’s O’Higgins National Park, hoping to climb Cerro Riso Patrón. This mysterious mountain on the western border of the Southern Patagonian Icefield has seen very few climbers. The central su...
TRYING, FAILING, AND STARTING OVER: It’s the basis of any experience, the thing that pushes us forward. What would we do if everything were easy?Nuptse was a beautiful challenge—an extremely difficult climb in every imaginable way. The technical l...
During the pre-monsoon season, a French team comprising Laurent Bibollet, Lise Billon, Emmanuel Chance, Aymeric Clouet, and Sébastien Corret attempted the unclimbed north spur of Chamlang (7,321m). After acclimatization trips on the west ridge—the...
The elegant south spur of the west ridge of Pico Norte (6,403m), attempted in 2014 and reported to be unclimbed in AAJ 2015, was actually climbed in 1989 by Franco Maestrini’s Italian expedition. Like the climbers in the 2014 attempt, the 1989 tea...
Norman Dyhrenfurth died September 24 in Salzburg, Austria, just short of a century old. He is best known as the creator and leader of the 1963 American Mount Everest Expedition (AMEE), which has been regarded by him and others as the magnum opus o...
The morning of March 14, 2017, Royal Robbins passed away, a man who stamped us with his elegance and class. The American Alpine Journal published an article of Royal’s in 1963, when I was a high school kid. I was moved especially by one line:What ...
ON JUNE 3, I free soloed Freerider on El Capitan, the culmination of an eight-year dream. The year and a half I took to actually realize the climb has, at this point, been well documented. The story of that journey is told in an upcoming documenta...
While researching a trip to India we discovered a Flickr Image folder from Martin Moran, which documented his trek over the Poat La and down the ZK Glacier, past unclimbed mountains he called Zanskar Matterhorn and Badile. Our goal was now clear,...
From May 25 to June 25, my husband, Antoine Trichot, and I climbed seven routes in the Cordillera Real, most of them new, and a few to summits that may have been unclimbed. For me, first ascents had long been a dream.Only 48 hours after arriving i...
Big-wall free solos and mountaineering first ascents don’t happen in a vacuum—they are part of (and are influenced by) the broader evolution of climbing performance. To provide context for the long climbs we have documented in this edition, we rec...
In late September, Daniela Teixeira and I headed to the Indian Himalaya. In order to acclimatize, we first went to the Parkachik Glacier, south of the Suru Valley, and walked up to its head, enjoying awesome views of the north and west faces of Nu...
I first met Liz Hawley in 1991, as the leader of the American Annapurna IV expedition, when she came to interview me at the Malla Hotel in Kathmandu. She was armed with the results of all of the previous expeditions to Annapurna IV, while I had pr...
The legendary Himalayan historian Elizabeth Hawley passed away on January 26, 2018, at the age of 94 in Kathmandu, Nepal. Although her remarkable life encompassed several distinctive chapters, climbers knew her as the chronicler of Himalayan climb...