On October 6, at approximately 3 p.m., the Coconino County Sheriff's Office received a 911 call from a climber (Person 1) who stated she had broken her leg and was hanging in her harness on the last pitch of Oak Creek Spire. It was determined that...
The glacier was calving every half hour all day and all night. A thundering boom would reverberate off the narrow cirque walls, then a wave of water would roll across Glacier Lake. During the day we could get used to it, but at night the detonati...
Late August in the western Utah desert is hot. Bird-size bugs terrorize the unsuspecting, scorpions dwell under tents, and tarantulas lurk in the shadows. High above the basin, however, cooler temps can be found on north-facing aspects. Seeking re...
The Moai Face is a smooth wave of granite that rises out of the pines at Mt. Mizugaki, one of Japan’s premier traditional rock climbing crags. The nearly blank, 110m headwall appeared to be stunning to climb but very hard to protect, and the tradi...
At 8:30 a.m. on August 23, a group of three scramblers left the parking lot near the Great Divide Lodge in Yoho National Park to scramble up the southwest slopes of Mt. Daly. After hiking up the trail to Sherbrooke Lake, they followed the route to...
Banff Dispatch received a personal locater beacon (PLB) activation signal near Balfour High Col on the Wapta Icefields at 1 p.m. on March 29. The Balfour High Col is the crux of the popular Wapta Icefields ski traverse and is a notorious place in ...
I met Birch Malotky in Colorado and we unexpectedly made plans to travel the next day to the Wind River Range to climb at the Cirque of the Towers. We arrived at Big Sandy Trailhead around 3 p.m. on August 23 and did the hike in that afternoon, bu...
On Saturday, December 5, Chris Carr (owner, Shasta Mountain Guides) and Eric Rideout (friend) reported to rangers at Bunny Flat that they had encountered a man in his 20s who looked unprepared, at approximately 8,300 feet, near Spring Hill. The en...
In September 2013, Jamie Bunchuk and Matt Traver traveled to the Alichursky Mountains to make a documentary about a Kyrgyzstani-Tajik hunter and herder called Orozbek, and while there ventured into both the north and south Alichursky ranges (A...
On May 30, a 47-year-old man from Colorado was killed when his anchor failed while descending Monster Tower, above the White Rim in Canyonlands National Park. The victim, Climber A, was climbing with two companions, Climber B (27) and Climber C (1...
Allen Frame Hill, a prominent Colorado climber, filmmaker, and climbing historian, passed away March 24 at age 53. A longtime Denver resident, Hill was beloved by many people from several communities, including Colorado College (and the Colorado S...
An intensely private man, Don Gordon passed away in April 2016 in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, where he lived for over 50 years. Born Don Gordon Claunch in Ely, Nevada, on November 13, 1931, he changed his name for personal family rea...
Drawn: The Art of Ascent. Jeremy Collins. Mountaineers Books, 2015. 176 pages. Hardcover, $24.95.On a climb in Colorado, Jeremy Collins told his friend and mentor Jonny Copp about his dream “...to go in the four cardinal directionsfrom home—West, ...
Snowblind: Stories of Alpine Obsession. Daniel Arnold. Counterpoint, 2015. 296 pages. Paperback, $15.95.First-century Romans reminisced about the empire’s expansion by watching gladiators in the Coliseum. Early 20th-century Americans relived their...
Alone on the Wall. Alex Honnold with David Roberts. W.W. Norton, 2015. 248 pages. Hardcover, $26.95.Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last eight years, you’ve seen video evidence of Alex Honnold’s perhaps otherwise unbelievable free s...
Too Close to God: Selected Mountain Tales. Jeff Long. Imaginary Mountain Surveyors (Canada), 2015. 290 pages. Paperback, $19.95.For four decades Jeff Long has been on lead, moving climbing fiction from stock genres to serious and deep explorations...
Extreme Eiger: The Race to Climb the Direct Route Up the North Face of the Eiger. Peter and Leni Gillman. Simon & Schuster (U.K.), 2015. 394 pages. Paperback, $21.95.Arguably, the U.K.’s most significant climbing never occurred on British soil...
Supported by the German Alpine Club, Matthias Bohe, Harry Kirschenhofer, Philipp Moser, Chris Romeike, and I began our journey on July 14, aiming to explore side valleys of the Panmah Glacier. The approach from Askole took four days, following the...
My partner, Ralf Dujmovits, and I spent the months of June and July attempting two unclimbed 7,000m peaks, Gasherbrum VI and Praqpa Ri.After hiking more than 100km with our cook, liaison officer, several Balti porters, a few donkeys, eight chicken...
Yosemite in the Fifties: The Iron Age. Edited by Dean Fidelman and John Long. Patagonia Books, 2015. 176 pages. Hardcover, $60.Lavishly arranged and edited by Valley legends Dean Fidelman and John Long, Yosemite in the Fifties is a heady blend of ...