What’s the role of a guidebook? Mountain legend and author Joe Kelsey says it’s to help you to lose your way
STORY BY LEATH TONINO
Joe Kelsey scrambles up the south shoulder of Pingora Peak during a recent trip into the Cirque of the Towers. Kelsey, who authored Climbing and Hiking in the Wind River Mountains, first visited the Cirque 40 years ago. Photo by Bradly J. Boner
Cirque of the Towers, Titcomb Basin, Squaretop—the Wind River Range in Wyoming boasts not only the state’s highest piece of ground (Gannett Peak, 13,804 feet), but enough clean, soaring granite to make Yosemite Valley jealous. At twenty-eight hundred square miles (or thirty-five hundred, depending how you count), it’s a truly astonishing wilderness of glaciers, cataracts, tundra terraces, tangled forests, and more than twenty-three hundred lakes.The Continental Divide runs through the heart of this beautiful beast, and Benjamin Bonneville in 1833 summited what he estimated to be a twenty-five thousand-foot mountain: factually inaccurate, yet a nice evocation of the grandiose mood.
Joe Kelsey, a former Exum Mountain guide who got his start in the Shawangunks of New York as an infamous “Vulgarian”
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