West Temple, How the West Was Won. In April I teamed up with the Greer brothers, Jared and Brody, to attempt the previously unclimbed 2,000'+ west face of West Temple. We started with the path of least resistance in the center of the face, followi...
THIS story really begins in the winter of 1942, back in the “good old days” when the 10th Mountain Division was a single battalion of enthusiastic volunteers. These were the days of Mt. Rainier, the experimental, glee club days. Back then, and alw...
Charles Fredrick Kroger 1946–2007 “I’ve been thinking, Clay. Maybe I don’t have much time left, so what should I do? Try to find a cure for pancreatic cancer? I don’t think I could do as well as lots of other people trying to solve that problem. B...
Laurel Knob was purchased by the Carolina Climbers Coalition in 2006, which opened the cliff to legal first ascent activity. It is a beautiful granite dome hosting primarily slab climbing with some vertical sections. At the top it rounds off, as m...
Mt. Talchako, Northeast Ridge. In the last week of July, Fred Beckey (2003 Subaru), Drew Brayshaw (Chilliwack, B.C.), James Nakagami (Woodinville, WA), and I (Redmond, WA) flew from Hagensborg, B.C., with Richard Lapointe of West Coast Helicopters...
HEART ATTACKWashington, Mount RainierIn early August, Lawrence “Laury” Minard (51), a Seattle native who had moved to London to edit and write for Forbes Global Magazine, collapsed and died around 12,000 feet up Mount Rainier during a guided climb...
Kumbhakarna (Jannu). Our team was made up of Elizabeth Julliard, Marion Gaillard, Gérard Auger, Jean-Robert Grasso, Mario Paffumi, Frédéric Vallet, Michel Vincent and me. We trekked for eleven days from Shidua to Ghunsa. After the storm, which lef...
Eiger: Wall of Death. Arthur Roth. W.W. Norton, New York, 1982. 350 pages, black-and-white photographs. $15.95.According to the jacket cover, this book of the complete story of the assaults on the Eiger will easily become the most popular climbing...
Numbers Refer to Number of Persons Involved1951-661959-661967TerrainU.S.A.CAN.U.S.A.CAN.Rock58228521Snow32426533River3000Unknown0210Ascent or DescentAscent 44330481Descent 41222523Unknown 54460Immediate CauseFall or slip on rock33414271Failure of ...
HAPSThe Arctic Institute High Altitude Physiology Study on Mount LoganCharles S. Houston, M.D.THE small group of scientists who met in New York that fall day in 1966 were intrigued by the invitation “To talk about the feasibility of establishing a...
Annapurna IV, North Ridge Attempt. Our expedition was composed of Curt Hewitt, Bob Wilson, Craig John, Ken Bures, Jean Ellis, Al Chambard, Richard Wright, Charles Peck, Dan Holle, LaVerne Woods, Jeff Shropshire, Paul Slota, Jan Cover, Bill Thompso...
What went on before the German Himalayan Expedition 1964 was the same as with other expeditions: high hopes, intense expectations, obstacles, disappointments. It finally seemed in the summer of 1963 that our objective, route of approach and person...
The Ultimate Mountains, by Thomas Weir. 98 pages, 76 photographs, and 4 sketch maps. London: Cassell & Co., Ltd., 1953.Thomas Weir was a member of the Scottish Mountaineering Expedition to Garhwal in 1950 and this brief book is his record of i...
On Saturday, November 10, Peter Noble (44) and I, Scott Berry (37), set out to climb the Southeast Buttress (five or six pitches, 5.6) to the summit of Cathedral Peak (10,911 feet). I had been bagging peaks and leading trad routes up to 5.9 fo...
The Torres del Brujo area is situated in the Chilean Andes, south of Santiago, in the massif of Cerro Portillo (4,850m). The starting point is the small town San Fernando, located in the province Region VI, 150km from the capital. From San Fernand...
Peak 11,793, Twenty Lakes Wall. Above a magnificent unnamed lake east of Mount Roberts, this face lies to the north, an interesting wall but quite overshadowed by Roberts. Eric Bjørnstad made the first ascent on July 6, using a series of short wal...
The Great Couloir on EverestJames WickwireWITH THE DECISION of the People’s Republic of China in 1979 to open its autonomous regions, including Tibet, to non-Chinese mountaineers, new opportunities to climb Mount Everest were presented. A few mont...
Ten to RememberA thousand climbs couldn’t capture the richness of our last century.So here are 10 to get us started.While editing the stories that follow I had to start deleting the word “inspire”—it just came up too often. In fact, the I-word app...
Changwatang and Nalakankar, First Ascents, and Exploration of the Chandi, Nalakankar and Takphu Himal. We were granted climbing permission for Nalakankar, but ours was the first expedition to the peak since 1963. Why? In the revised Climbing Regul...
Climbing in the Cordillera Blanca. Netherlanders M.A. Bonhomme, M.A. Briet, K.E.J. Dijk, P. Dekker, R. Staaftjes, J.K. Richert, H. Tollenaar and A.C.A. van Helbergen climbed the south (higher) summit of Alpamayo by the north ridge and over the nor...