After climbing Everest in 1975, Pete Boardman found he had become a mountaineering celebrity. Uneasy with this status, he still felt he had to prove something to his peers. Accordingly, the next year he teamed up with Joe Tasker to launch himself at what was then probably the hardest Himalayan climb yet made – the [...]
mountaineering
AMGA and IFMGA certified guide and founder of Alpenglow Expeditions Adrian Ballinger recently returned from Mt. Everest and Lhotse and filed this essay, in which he argues that requiring or demanding certified guides is a key to reducing risk on the world’s highest peak. — Ed. Over the past two years, I have read numerous [...]
Originally from Philadelphia, Norman Clyde migrated to California to become a schoolteacher in his mid-20s. After the sudden death of his wife in 1919, he went to live alone in the Eastern Sierras and became wedded instead to the mountains, devoting most of the rest of his long life to pioneering climbs there. Renowned for [...]
In 1959 the diminutive French swimwear designer and accomplished alpinist Claude Kogan set out for the 8,200-meter summit of Cho Oyu, the world’s sixth-highest peak. She was joined by her friend, a Belgian, Claudine van der Stratten. They were never to return. Their top camp was struck by a devastating avalanche, killing the two women [...]
With nicknames such as the Lung with Legs and the Mutant, it comes as no surprise that Alex Lowe had a reputation as one of the fittest and strongest mountaineers who ever lived. Lowe’s exceptional upper body strength was developed through a fanatical exercise regime that regularly included 400 pull-ups and hundreds of dips. But [...]
There’s nothing wrong with parachuting into an area, skiing a renowned peak, and then heading home, but that’s not why Kim Havell came to Wyoming. No, she moved to Jackson a year ago specifically to immerse herself in the steep wild playground that is the Tetons, and the list of her descents after just one [...]
George Mallory and Everest became inseparable in the public imagination during the first attempts to climb the mountain in the early 1920s. Both became icons; the latter as a symbol of the terrible might of nature, and the former as the idealized, romantic Englishman rising to its challenge in giving his all before meeting a [...]
This morning, Alexey Bolotov and Denis Urubko were to set out for a 10-day attempt on an unclimbed line on Mt. Everest’s Southwest Face. Sadly, when a Sherpa accompanying Bolotov (at right in blue, with Urubko) went to look for him this morning, he discovered that Bolotov had fallen from their Camp 1 site into [...]
Lithuanian-born Wanda Rutkiewicz was arguably the finest female high-altitude mountaineer of the twentieth century. During her action-packed life she led or participated in some 22 expeditions to the Himalaya and Pamirs and climbed extensively in the Andes. She reached the summit of eight 8,000m peaks. Raised in Warsaw and educated as a computer engineer, Rutkiewicz [...]
Happiness is only relative to our expectations. That’s why I like to enter every ski adventure with low expectations and an open mind. Last weekend JP Auclair sent me a message saying he got the week free for skiing and that we should catch up. Chamonix weather did not look like it would be on [...]
Generations of Sherpas have tirelessly schlepped foreigners’ gear (and hides) up Everest. And for much of that time they’ve been treated as little more than servants, not mountaineers in their own right. Even before setting out for Everest in 1953 with Sir Edmund Hillary, Tenzing Norgay (right) – as sirdar, or leader, of the Sherpas [...]
If you’ve climbed in the Gunks in New York State you know the route on the Vandals wall that Hugh Herr put up in 1983, the first 5.13 on the East Coast. And on the West coast he made the second ascent of City Park, 5.13c, on Washington’s Index Town Walls, in 1986. But if [...]
There’s always the “because it’s there” excuse for climbing a mountain, but naming peaks has typically come down to “because we’re the people with the power and we have to suck up to the guys who funded the trip.” And that’s always been the issue with the long-simmering scrap over what to call the highest [...]
How could you be on the edge of your seat reading about a 50-year-old expedition to the top of Everest? Easily. Pick up a copy of the May issue of Outside (the Everest feature isn’t on the web yet, unfortunately) and read Grayson Schaffer’s exhaustive, riveting, even arm-hair raising account of the first successful American [...]
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