On June 6 a climber was struck in the lower right leg by a large falling block while climbing Missionary’s Crack (5.10) . This was roughly in the area where a major rockfall occurred in August 2009. Two Kananaskis Public Safety personnel were heli...
Robert Adams, Tom Adams, Steve Kennedy, and leader Andy Nisbet (all U.K.), and Bill McConachie and I (both U.S.) visited an east-west side valley of one branch of the Darcha-Mayar Valley, immediately north of Ramjak (6,318m). Our objectives were t...
Every year more blank spots on the map are filled and more peaks are crisscrossed with new routes and variations. Inevitably, many climbers decry the disappearance of exploration and adventure in our world. But exploration is only evolving, not ...
Letters from Chamonix: Stories and a Novella. By David Stevenson. Imaginary Mountain Surveyors (Canada), 2014. 230 pages. Paperback, $24.95.Editor's note: Longtime AAJ books editor David Stevenson’s collection of short fiction won the Banff Mounta...
The Call of the Ice: Climbing 8,000 Meter Peaks in Winter. By Simone Moro, Foreword by Ed Viesturs, translated by Monica Meneghetti. Mountaineers Books, 2014. 224 pages. Paperback, $19.95. Simone Moro (Italy) is a remarkable high-altitude speciali...
Denali's Howl: The Deadliest Climbing Disaster on America's Wildest Peak. By Andy Hall. E.P Dutton & Co. (Penguin Group), 2014. 272 pages. Hardcover, $27.95.Blind dates don’t often work out well, but they only last a night. Climbing with peopl...
Cold Feet: Stories of a Middling Climber on Classic Peaks and Among Legendary Mountaineer. By David Pagel. Self-published, 2014. 384 pages. Paperback, $19.95.There are only a few climbing writers whose work I genuinely look forward to diving into ...
One Day as a Tiger: Alex MacIntyre and the Birth of Light and Fast Alpinism. By John Porter. Vertebrate Publishing (U.K.), 2014. 230 pages. Hardcover, £20. Late at night on an expedition to Afghanistan in 1977, John Porter gazed through a hole in ...
The Calling: A Life Rocked by Mountains. By Barry Blanchard. Patagonia Books, 2014. 440 pages. Hardcover, $27.95. The Calling: A Life Rocked by Mountains is Barry Blanchard’s story of rising out of what would have been a soon-to-be- forgott...
High Summits: 370 Famous Peak First Ascents and Other Significant Events in Mountaineering History. By Frederick L. Wolfe. Hugo House Publishers, 2013. 703 pages. Hardcover, $49.95. This massive history is organized by continent and chronology. Th...
The Tower: A Chronicle of Climbing and Controversy on Cerro Torre. By Kelly Cordes. Patagonia Books, 2014. 400 pages. Hardcover, $27.95.The Tower is not only the definitive book about Cerro Torre—it’s also one of the finest examples of a subgenre ...
In 1953, when Bob Craig joined the famed Anglo-American expedition to K2, most mountaineers in the United States were amateurs. Climbing mountains was a seasoning that complemented another life, in which they pursued their big dreams and goals. Bo...
Click here to open a spreadsheet of all accidents on the Nose of El Capitan reported in Accidents from 1973 through 2013, with links to the relevant articles.
On September 26 I fell about 55 feet while lowering from a session on the Madness (5.13c), which I was hoping might be my 1,500th route in the Red River Gorge. Once I realized I was falling, I cursed, straightened up, got my feet underneath me, an...
Scott Sederstrom (44) fell to his death on March 13 when a bolt failed on Life in Electric Larvae Land (5.10b) at Silent Pillar Wall in Owens River Gorge. When Sederstrom did not return that evening, his fiancée drove to the Lower Gorge parking lo...
“We were born too late. Roper’s already been here. We’re just picking up his scraps,” Tim Halder mused as we gazed up at the unclimbed south face of the Himmelhorn (7,880’). Maybe so, but neither he nor anyone else had ventured onto the big face i...
In the AAJ 1947, Fred Beckey wrote, “Although they do not rise so high as the great mountains farther to the N.W., these peaks of the Alaska-Canada Boundary are magnificent in their alpine grandeur and challenging in their technical difficulties...
Over the weekend of April 25–26, Craig Pope and I teamed up to attempt a new route on Dragontail Peak in the Enchantments—Craig’s idea. He had started up a variation of what we would end up climbing the weekend prior and was eager to see it throug...
On June 7 a woman (29) suffered a serious head injury while leading a 5.9 sport route. After clipping the first quickdraw (previously placed by her belayer, age 26), the climber slipped before clipping the second draw, causing her to fall. The bel...
On June 25, a Boy Scout group was climbing and rappelling at Sycamore Falls (a.k.a. Paradise Forks). At approximately 11:30 in the morning, the first rappeller (age 56) was struck in the left knee and foot by a falling rock when he was approximate...