The Harvard, Mountaineering Club has initiated a careful selection plan for rope leaders in two categories: first-class leaders and second-class leaders. First-class leaders are qualified, in the eyes of the Club officers, to lead and to take full...
Abraham, Three Patriarchs, Southwest Buttress, Zion National Park. Walt Shipley and I met in Springdale, Utah in May for a major big-wall climb in Zion. We chose unclimbed Abraham by a natural overhanging crack system up the center of its southeas...
Various climbs, Cordón de la Jaula. A group has been active in this area of Argentina, west of the Cordón del Plata, near Aconcagua but much more isolated. Access has been by the El Plata-Vallecitos col and Quebrada del Peine, after the Quebrada d...
FALL ON ROCK, INADEQUATE PROTECTION,INEXPERIENCE WITH ASCENDING DEVICE California, Yosemite ValleyOn September 21, 1987, Wolfgang Schrattner (21) fell 50 meters while seconding on mechanical ascenders. Schrattner was on the traverse of the Great R...
Pumasillo Group, multiple ascents. Sean Easton and I spent 20 days in the Pumasillo group of the Cordillera Vilcabamba, in south-central Peru. It is quite hard to describe the mountains we climbed because the new government 1:100,000 topos have ma...
Peak 11,998, The Cooked Walnut. The LeConte Divide in general holds little of interest for the technical climber. Rising above Arctic Lake, however, is a beautiful north face that has escaped even the notice of Fred Beckey. On August 31, Rick Boyc...
New Fork Lakes Buttress, 1990. About six miles up from the New Fork Lakes Trailhead lies a large south-facing granite wall to the left above the trail, visible from the road driving into New Fork Lakes. I have heard it referred to as the China Wal...
Rimo I Attempt, Eastern Karakoram. The Indo-Intemational Rimo-Shyok Expedition had three goals. Our plan was to approach Rimo I via the Depsang Plain, an 18,000-foot plateau which rolls off into Tibet and which no foreigner had traversed since Eri...
Uli Biaho Tower, South Face, and Solo on the Great Trango Tower. Our group consisted of Rosanna Manfrini, Maurizio Venzo, Kurt Walde and me as leader. On June 4, we placed Base Camp at 4300 meters on the side of the Trango Glacier. For two weeks i...
Manaslu Tragedy. Our climbing members were Nancy Jackson, John Petroske, Dr. Charles Schertz, Steve Stockmyer, Howard Weaver, Canadian Dr. John Haigh and I as leader. Dave Gordon was Base Camp manager. We left Gorkha on March 3 with 120 porters an...
Vertigo Games is a collection of chatty, informal tales of Colorado climbing from the mid 1970s to the early 1980s. All major areas are represented, as are many minor ones, with rock climbing justifiably being the major focus. The text is liberall...
Ali Ratni Tibba, West Face, Kulu. Our seven-man expedition went to Kulu to climb alpine-style. On June 4 to 6 Alan Burgess, Bob Toogood, Bob Dearman and I climbed the 4500-foot-high granite west face of Ali Ratni Tibba. Spending 2½ days on the fac...
Everest. Our members were Patxi Fernández, Mikel Reparaz, Juan Tomás, José Ramón Zubizarreta, Félix Iñurrategui, Juan María Eguillor, Iñaki Ochoa de Olza, Josu Bereciartua, Alberto Iñurrategui and I as leader. We climbed the standard South Col rou...
Spokane Mountaineers. A seasoned organization founded in Spokane in 1915 makes its AAJ debut in this report. It was easily predictable that a climbing club should have an early start in such surroundings as those accessible from Spokane. Here with...
Mercedario, First Winter Ascent. Many parties had attempted the winter ascent of Mercedario (6770 meters, 22,212 feet), fourth highest in the Americas, but all had had to retreat under extreme conditions. In June, Mauricio Fernández, Carlos Domíng...
Peak 5,772m, attempt. Our three-man team (Wojciech Chaladaj, Jakub Galka, and Marcin Kruczyk) hoped to attempt unclimbed Purian Sar North (6,247m) in July. However, the bag containing the majority of our climbing gear was lost at Heathrow Airport ...
Mount Bona and PI1,920. On May 30, Paul Claus of Ultima Thule Outfitters landed Ruedi Homberger and Stefan Wyss of Switzerland and myself at approximately 10,300 feet on the upper Hawkins Glacier under the immense south face of Mount Bona (16,421'...
Trisul, 23,360 ft., which for twenty years was the highest summit ever reached has just been climbed a second time, when on June 21st, 1933, P. O. Oliver and Kesar Sing effected its ascent. The first ascent was made on June 12th, 1907, by T. G. Lo...
AVALANCHE AND CLIMBING ALONE—Colorado, Mt. Ypsilon. At 8:43 a.m. on July 6, 1976, Christopher Sommer telephoned ROMO Dispatch to report an overdue friend, Jim Boicourt (29). Sommer believed Boicourt to be in the Ypsilon Lake area. A trailhead chec...
Tan Shan and Putala Shan, first ascents via difficult rock routes. My wife Tanja Grmovsek and I planned to visit the Qionglai Mountains in the spring of 2003 but due to the outbreak of the SARS virus just a few days before leaving for China we had...