Mt. Chephren, Dogleg Couloir. Our second night on Chephren sticks in my mind. A night spent surfing the line between control and chaos. The final rock band on the face festooned with obscene snow mushrooms, like a scene from a demented dream. But ...
FALL ON ROCK, INADEQUATE EQUIPMENT, OVER CONFIDENTOregon, Mount HoodAround 0545 in June 1985, David Thomas (32) and Doug Sahlberg (27) were ascending Mt. Hood when Sahlberg lost his footing. The following is part of the account he wrote concerning...
The Mountaineers: Famous Climbers in Canada by Phil Dowling, Hurtig Publishers, Edmonton, 1979, 258 pages including index, 16 photographs, $13.95.This is a charmingly written partial biography of ten selected persons who have contributed heavily t...
OTHER INCIDENTS AND EVENTSClues to fate of two mountaineers lost in the Northern Cascades in 1947. By referring to page 11 in the “Report of the Safety Committee of the American Alpine Club May, 1948,” one can read about a tragic accident which fo...
Paddy Englishman, Paddy Scotsman, and Paddy Irishman (Jim Osborne, Rob MacCallum, and I) arrived in La Paz in one piece but subsequently fell apart when we reached base camp in the Condoriri Valley. A heady cocktail of AMS, gastroenteritis, mild...
Pumori Tragedy. Jon Giersson, Thorsteinn Gudjonsson, Kristinn Runarsson from Iceland and I from Scotland established Base Camp on October 2 at 5300 meters west of Kala Pattar. Our permit was for the south ridge of Pumori, but as an Australian team...
Yerupaja, Limitless Madness to summit ridge. My latest adventure began at the end of June. We were three Slovenians—Matevz Kramer, Tadej Zorman, and me—whose goal was to climb a new route in the Cordillera Huayhuash. I had climbed the Southwest Fa...
The rainy season ended at the end of May, and I’ve returned to the Hampaturi. I pitch the tent near my vehicle and fall asleep. At 3 a.m. I set out for the southwest face, which I’ve been dreaming of for years: I’m well acclimatized and during t...
FAILURE OF RAPPEL—FAILURE TO CHECK SYSTEMBritish Columbia, Squamish, Smoke BluffsOn May 28, 1989, Deborah Richards and I were finishing up three days of climbing in the Squamish area. I had just finished a lead on Cat’s Crack (5.7 or 5.8, not sure...
AAC, New England Section. The year began with our second Annual Dinner. Almost 90 New Englanders gathered once again to dress up, dine, socialize and travel back in time to vast and faraway mountains. Craigen Bowen assembled a graceful display of ...
Allevano Tower, Avellano pal Verano, and Costumes Rehearsal. While working for a month by massive San Lorenzo Peak as a mountain instructor, I thought about a third attempt to climb a direttis- sima up the northeast pillar of Avellano Tower in the...
East Kanthari, First Ascent. East Kanthari (6167m) lies on the Tibet-Qinghai (Changtang) Plateau in an area known as the Kokosiri that covers the borders between Tibet, Qinghai and Shinjyan. The Kokosiri is one of the most remote places in central...
FALL ON SNOW, UNABLE TO SELF-ARREST, CLIMBING UNROPED, POOR POSITIONAlaska, Mount McKinley, Kahiltna GlacierOn May 16, French mountaineer Pascal Frison (51) fell to his death while climbing Mount McKinley. He and his partner were approaching a fea...
Baintha Brakk, attempts and second ascent. Four expeditions attempted 7285m Baintha Brakk (The Ogre) last summer and although talented groups from America, Austria, and Slovenia all failed, a three-man Swiss-German team achieved the highly coveted...
Ascent: The Mountaineering Experience in Word and Image. Steve Roper and Allen Steck, editors. Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 1984. 174 pages, black and white and color photographs, drawings. $25.00.These days a wider diversity of people than e...
Sierra National Forest, Sunset Point. This fall, Ron Negrette and I explored this area near Huntington Lake and climbed a two-pitch route, Get To The Point (I, 5.8) right of the main face of the crag. It starts with thin liebacking up a right-faci...
Shri Kailas. A team from Bombay set up Base Camp at 4575 meters in the Thelu Nala on September 18. They established five more camps. On October 6, leader Dr. Hu Silin, Prakash Samant, Cyrus Shroff, Chris De Souza, Pradeep Iyer and Vijay Parekh cli...
Hypothermia, Frostbite and Other Cold Injuries: Prevention, Recognition and Prehospital Treatment. James A. Wilkerson, Cameron C. Bangs, John S. Hayward. The Mountaineers, Seattle, 1986. 105 pages, illustrations, color photographs, charts, diagram...
Chicago Mountaineering Club. The Chicago Mountaineering Club continued to expand its program of local outings in 1956 by holding several winter weekend trips to the regular climbing areas of Devils Lake, Wisconsin, and Mississippi Palisades States...
SLIP ON SNOW, INADEQUATE EQUIPMENTWyoming, Middle TetonOn September 4, 1991, at 1600, Fred Perl, Curt Pohr and Bonnie Schwartz (25) were descending the Southwest Couloir route of the Middle Teton. Schwartz had been descending across the top of the...