mountaineering

i suppose my conception of mountaineering is totally ignoring crevasses

you can avoid crevasses and still have a lot of fun with crampons and ice axes though...do a winter summit of Mt. Washington is where I did that. Mountaineering gear is so Batman.

i've always thought ice axes and crampons were pretty cool, despite not being a gearhead of any kind. maybe i just thought they went well with the outfit.

I'm kind of fascinated with the Southwest and canyons, mazes of buttes, boulder fields, all kinds of geology that's super visible out there b/c of the lack of topsoil & vegetation. But that's largely due to the greatness of a writer named Craig Childs. Also because people have historically LIVED there and learned to live with the landscape instead of against it (because otherwise you might died) and you can apparently sometimes find their routes if you know what you're looking for -- cf stories of reaching down off an edge and having to commit yr weight to the existence of a handhold and then realizing there's a measured sequence of hand- and footholds all the way down, carved hundreds of years ago.

never heard of this Craig Childs. this book might interest you.

Ed, did you ever climb the chalk cliffs of Eastbourne, or Beachy Head? I read this history of Beachy Head and it mentions some wild stuff about how dangerous chalk surfaces are, how these "fingers" of chalk break off and form highly unstable towers. Was that going on the faces you climbed?

http://www.bandmerch.com/java2/BandMerch2/Display/ProductImages/1869F.png

rock n' roll, dudes.

I was climbing the much more stable and slabby cliffs at Saltdean. The chalk is moist enough and soft enough to get some great holds with ice axes and crampons. I used to maintain the southern chalk guide, I shall dig it out and tell you exactly what beachy head had/has to offer.

maybenot so good

yeah, probably not so good at all. it is unfortunate that Everest's greatest challenge is its altitude, and not the climbing itself, which means that anyone with the $$$ and the time to get in shape can get up it eventually. K2, only about 800 feet shorter, is substantially more difficult, which reduces traffic considerably (also: kills way more people than Everest does).

This kinda lost in the morass of May season Everest summits, but three guys summited Lhotse's South Face - which as about as difficult as you can get in the Himalyas.

OK, this is freaky...

Free soloist Michael Reardon, has been lost at sea in Irland. Con Moriarty, whose house Mr Reardon was staying in, told an Irish TV news station that Reardon had just finished a climb and was standing on a rock shelf at the base of a cliff when a wave hit him from behind, knocked him on his back, and carried him out to sea.

The accident occured west of Valentia Coast Guard Station yesterday evening. The alarm was raised shortly after 5pm yesterday when Reardon was unable to get himself out of the sea.

Mr Reardon, who was 36, had been in Ireland for the past month along with a photographer who was taking pictures of him climbing for an American magazine. He was due to return to the United States today.

Mr Reardon's wife Marci and 13-year-old daughter are expected to arrive in Ireland tomorrow morning.

Valerie O’Sullivan, a photographer from Killarney who had accompanied him on a number of climbs, told The Times that his death had shocked the climbing community in Ireland.

“He was standing below a climb he had just completed and the photographer, Damon Corso, was about 30ft away taking pictures of him. Michael was on a real high after the climb. He was about 10ft above the sea and he let go and had his hands out, celebrating, to say he had completed the climb of his life. But then a wave just came in. The wave hit him on the knees and he lost his balance and slipped on the algae. He was shouting for help but there was nothing Damon could do.”

My greatest claim to mountaineering fame is that I attended college in Minnesota with the climber who eventually found the body of George Mallory on Mt. Everest. He was a long time guide on Mt. Rainier and well known in international climbing circles most of his life.

Back then, he and I would talk about mountains in the PNW a lot, because we were both homesick for them. His favorite saying was 'go for it', always spoken with gleeful zest. We dropped acid together in college. It was his idea. Really. He even bought my tab. Pretty lousy blotter, but how were we to know?

this thread reminds me of patagonia catalogue in a good way

i'm sad that i've never really mountaineered. river wolf should lead a pansy mountaineering trip for feeble nerds with no upper body strength.

whoah, I just came here to post about the Michael Reardon thing!

bell labs: okay! I am happy to!

...I am going to City of Rocks in ID for 8 days and am :D :D :D :D :D

...and my homey just got back from climbing the Snowpatch spire in the Bugaboos; hopefully I can go back with him later this summer.

http://www.bugaboorock.8m.com/images/snowpatch,spire,from,bugaboo.jpg

also, I just bought a new rope!

OK, I'm awed...

First successful climb of K2's west face ever

More info here

05:15 am EDT Aug 21, 2007
(K2Climb.net/Madrid. Story updated 10:35 am, EDT) At 12: 50 pm, local time today, Andrew Mariev and Vadim Popovich checked in over the radio - from K2's top! The west face has been finally climbed.

Summiteers back in C6 - 9 more climbers in camps above 8000m

At 6:15 pm, local time the sumiteers have reported safe and sound from C6. Back from the summit, Andrew and Vadim had rested for some time in C7, currently occupied by Shabalin and Tukhvatullin.

In addition there are seven team members currently in C6, while Penzov, Shamalo and Cherny provide with support from ABC.

As night falls on the Karakorum range, Victor Kozlov has reported on weather conditions finally improving: "Clouds are not wrapping K2 any longer, and the wind is decreasing," the expedition leader told Russian Climb.

Earlier this morning, the Russian climbers on the west face of K2 woke to red storm clouds, poor visibility and 30/50 mph winds. In a 10 am radio call, Shabalin and Tukhvatullin were reported holding in C7 (8400 m), while Mariev and Popovich were out scouting above the camp.

Four climbers were holding in C6 at 8150 m after a wrecked attempt to ascend further. The Jannu climbers were meanwhile approaching the high camp 6 as well. Serguey Penzov is still descending, and is now between C1 and ABC.

None of the climbers is using supplementary oxygen.

wow, this thread is giving me one of those "what the fuck have I done with my life" mindbenders. That is so awesome you made it to ABC on Everest, Drew.

-- Dandy Don Weiner, Tuesday, May 29, 2007 10:08 PM (4 months ago) Bookmark Link

:( :( :( :( :(

http://cascadecrusades.org/SkiMountaineering/eldorado/eastridge2007/DSC_3153.jpg

*sigh*

Moraine Lake went on my Places I Must Visit list the first time I ever saw a picture of it. It wasn't even labeled and I had to do some google fu to find out where it was a picture of.

Ha, wrong Moraine Lake. Mine's in Banff:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c5/Moraine_Lake_17092005.jpg/800px-Moraine_Lake_17092005.jpg

The avalanche tragedy on K2 is worldwide news now (11 dead now), but this guy's story is worth reading. It's one of those random event climbing things that lead to survival/death.

Yeah, I was just looking over that story myself...

The NYT has a pretty good article on the whole thing and a decent graphic map

Fred Beckey (video)

cool video!

i was searching for a good climbing thread but didn't think to search "mountaineering" is river wolf still posting?

i climbed a little bit in high school/college. not much at all, all indoor stuff too. the college where i work now has a wall and a bouldering cave, free access anytime, they rent shoes/equipment, too. so i've been messing around a bit since starting this job, and i kinda want to get into it a bit more.

any recommendations for good shoes for beginners/novices? i like the velcro ones, real easy to get in/out of. also, is it true you should buy a size lower than normal?

also, currently reading krakauer's "into thin air." wow....

oh hi guys

i'm just going to shamelessly plug my friend freddie's new book: One Mountain Thousand Summit

it's a piecing-together of the complicated and contentious 2008 tragedy on K2, and an investigation of both the mistakes and the aftermath. of particular interest imo is his exploration of the heroic and practically unreported actions of the climbing-Sherpas involved---esp since he takes the time to explain the historical, sociological, and personal circumstances that shape the lives and perception of these guys

anyway, i'm only 2/3 thru, and even though the writing is a little uneven at times (it's his first book!), it's compulsively readable and (imo) totally accessible to a non-bro audience---you don't really have to know a ton about climbing to follow the action, and fred seems to have consciously styled his writing to be digestible by the layperson.

i know none of you will read it, but man i would kinda love an otm nabisco (or max or someone smart) review, esp since fred raises a lot of chewy issues w/r/t the wider public's perception of mountaineering ("reckless!"), the curious socioeconomic disposition of professional climbing-Sherpas (some of them were "equal partners" in some teams' summit bids, not just "the help"), and the eerily futuristic way in which the tragedy was reported ~in real time~ via satellite phones and blogs (eg one climber was calling his wife from a sat phone while he was hunkered down for ~fifty hours~ and she was, in turn, relaying the info to a webmaster, who was giving a live feed on a blog).

anyway---read it! freddie needs the money!

Fraid I'm a sucker for anatomy-of-a-tragedy mountaineering books and will almost certainly order this one.

Live web coverage of the big mountains has become a real issue, hasn't it – in that blame is now being apportioned even before people are off the mountain, while we do not even know who has died, let alone how ... Quite grisly.

yeah, if I'd been a cannier English major I wouldve done a senior project on mountaineering/tragedy books---pretty ripe for cultural criticism imo. mountaineering itself is an old and mature subculture with weird codes and morays, and the retrospection and apportionment of blame/success in mountaineering lit raises interesting questions about authorship and reliable narration. plus egos, post colonialism, modernity, etc

also: generally cracking reads ime

The spate of books in the wake of Into Thin Air make a case study in themselves - Anatoli Boukreev's and then the extraordinary book of the South African expedition, especially. Together they comprise the Rashomon of Everest disasters.

Cool story of a couple of climbers who were first to summit some unexplored and unclimbed mountains in a very remote part of Afghanistan.

http://www.tetonat.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/50classicscover.jpg

moms got me a to-do list for xmas, thx

^_____^

Ueli Steck climbs the north face of the Eiger mountain in 2 hours, 47 minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-dPjDYVKUY

so. baller.

holy shit at the footage from ~2:15 onward: like a crab running up a mountain wtf

I'm kinda shocked there are still unsummited peaks out there...

most of them are! <3 mountains

TAKE A NUMBER - In the 16 years since Into Thin Air, Mount Everest has become safer in many ways, with better storm forecasting and amazing high-altitude rescue helicopters. So why did 10 people die in 2012?

(BTW, have to give props to Outside magazine - their investigative reporting is some of the best out there)

That was a really good read. But I have to say that the "DEATH ZONE" article linked to in there (the original blog post with the images, not the Gawker reprint) is one of the most terrifying and poignant things I have ever read.

The photos are kind of depressing - I had been reading about traffic jams on the way up Everest but until I actually saw the pictures, I had no idea of the scale.

That image of George Mallory face down and clutching the mountain is haunting. More like a sculpture instead of a corpse.

There was a passage in The Old Ways (yes, spoiler alert) about how Macfarlane took the daughter of one of his friends to the mountain that he had perished climbing - only to discover on their ascent that the glacier had moved, and brought the man's body to its surface, 18 years later, perfectly preserved. It was both haunting and chilling, reading the passage where he warned the daughter to go back, then had to explain what had happened, and her making the choice to view her dead father's body, perfectly preserved as she had last seen him, as a child. That image just really struck with me.

I have the Macfarlane book on preorder here. Can't wait to read it.

I've been increasingly obsessed with hiking the Hadrian's Wall Path and have sort of been in a fugue state of highway archeology and historical exploration. Probably a side-effect of not working and being at home all the time.

That story reminds me of the discovery of the Star Dust crash site and the WWII-era pilots that keep being found up in the Sierras.

I had been reading about traffic jams on the way up Everest but until I actually saw the pictures, I had no idea of the scale.

Yeah, those queues just look idiotic. Plenty of other mountains out there to climb guys.

After plowing through dozens of Everest documentaries and books, I felt like I knew the Sagarmatha Zone better than I knew the hills above my house - that is until I searched YouTube for Everest climbing videos and lost about two hours.

The best one is this footage from up on the Lhotse face with great zooms into other activity on the mountain, including a big traffic jam on the South Summit. Fuck, it looks steep as hell and positively alien.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0oVJR0W8yQ

p boss

btw can i pimp my friends' movie? ok thx

http://www.theoldbreedmovie.com/

Taking a nice hike in the mountains aside, aren't 'extreme' climbers of the type who scale K2/Kanchenjunga necessarily odious yuppies? The very act of needing to 'get to the top' strikes me as self-indulgent, reckless and requiring a degree of mania to even want to do. Especially when a lot of the climbers themselves have young families.

I half-watched this pseudo-documentary recently that was obviously made by North Face. It profiled these climbers seeking to climb the "Sharks' Fin" on Mount Meru. One of their previous failed summits brought the party within 'shouting distance' of the top, before they had to turn back due to weather. However, afterwards they began planning a second expedition... because. I just can't relate to that! If you've made it that close, why not call it good and revel in your ability to even get that far? Can't you enjoy the experience without putting some arbitrary condition on success? What makes one think this way? Peeking into the psyches of these climbers is interesting but mostly for all the wrong reasons.

Think of the sheer amount of privilege and social and financial capital that goes into having a hobby/compulsion such as this: acquiring visas/having the spare time/having the financial means to acquire the (extremely expensive) equipment/having the upbringing that entailed getting into the hobby in the first place. Maybe I'm being a bit strident and lack romanticism when it comes to human beings doing things because they can. But at least the original mountaineers a la Hilary could at least be seen to have some scientific/exploratory aim.

I have to say that folks like these are certainly gifted athletes. And of course I could apply this whole logic towards things *I* like, like musicians, who can be equally self-absorbed and destructive and consumptive. I dunno. Kind of a half-thought I've had since watching that doc. How much does a whole expedition like that cost in total? 100,000 dollars? At least. One of the climbers had to go to the hospital for some massive stroke/brain problems and also lost toes. How much did that medical care cost? Doesn't that kind of seem a bit flagrant when people in your own country lack basic preventative care? Or when millions of people in the country you're climbing in lack access to basic sanitation? How do you even get 'climbers insurance'? Or are they quite simply that rich?

I read somewhere that some sherpas were originally baffled as to why westerners would *want* to climb to the top of mountains. That seems a bit more wise than the attitude I currently see permeating the sport as a whole. Overall I haven't made up my mind necessarily, and obviously I am a bit fascinated by the topic or I wouldn't have thought this much about it. Any particular books that would convince me of the value of alpinism? Or at least let me relate a bit better to their point of view?