Dark Road

Image by Christian Kiefer

A Member Story by Christian Kiefer

Originally Published in Guidebook XIX.

My father enters the hospital after his third round of chemotherapy. Over the preceding months, he has suffered a sore throat and often been out of breath. The diagnosis is, at first, a crushed tonsil, the result of a previous round of chemo seven years before. Then came the revision: a return of lymphoma, a different variety than the one he had beaten, although this one is, they tell him, easier to treat. A good prognosis, considering; he feels calm and resolved. He beat it once; he knows what to expect; this will be much the same.

The first new round of chemo knocks him off his feet for a few weeks, but he recovers. The second results in a cough and shortness of breath serious enough to be of concern. Now, after the third round, the cough becomes persistent enough that he has trouble catching his breath and can't sleep. I am climbing in Red Rocks when my mom calls to tell me that I need to come home. It takes most of a day to get back to my parents' Northern California home, and when arrive, it is to find my father pale and drawn, exhausted, clearly out of breath, his sentences comprised of three or four words.

***

Over the next 25 days in the hospital, my father's condition improves and then worsens and then improves again and then finally cascades into an increasingly untenable situation. Air is black on a CT scan, and the image of his lungs from the previous year showed healthy black emptiness striated by white threads. The newest images show lungs the color of concrete: tissue without air.

“I just want three good days so I can talk to people,” he says. It does not yet occur to either of us that all the good days he might have had are already behind him.

I stay overnight every night, my sister and my mom take the day shifts. Some days, he wants visitors-anything to assuage the boredom-but the visits also exhaust him. On a day when neither my mom nor sister is available to sit with him, he bursts into tears when I arrive in the early evening. "That was too long," he says. "That was too long."

He goes from the ICU to the telemetry floor and then back to the ICU and back to telemetry and back to ICU again, where he stays. At no point do I really believe that he will not make it home. I assume that he will probably be on oxygen, at least until the chemo is over, and we talk about how I might rearrange his house so that he can get around better in a somewhat debilitated state.

"I think this is it," he says sometimes.

"But you're getting better," I tell him. "You don't see it because it's so slow, but you're better than you were when you first got here."

"I guess," he'd say in return.

"Shut the f*&k up," I'd tell him.

He would laugh. I would laugh. There would be laughter.

Illustration by Foster Denney

***

I give my dad the best of me, but when I’m not in the hospital, I feel the black wave of depression come washing once more over my heart. I was officially diagnosed with major depressive disorder at the age of 18 or 19, although it probably started well before that. There have been better days, of course, but over the past three or four years, the darkness has felt increasingly overwhelming.

Climbing has been the only thing I’ve found that helps at all, and in the days between hospital visits, I’ve found a mungy, moss-covered, dirty, fractured, undeveloped crag not far from my home. My current climbing obsession is dry-tooling, although I’m not particularly good at it. Using ice tools to climb bare, unfrozen rock is a strange obsession for someone who lives in Northern California, the topography of which offers few venues. Climbing takes all of me, body and mind, so that there is nothing left. I can hardly remember a climb when I’m done with it—it’s like I enter a fugue state, less flow and more annihilation—and dry-tooling puts me in that headspace from the moment my cramponed feet leave the dirt. Perhaps this is a strange reason to climb, but I’ve found nothing else that brings me to absolute zero, without which I often don’t think I’d survive at all.

There’s an arête at the center of the crag, perhaps 20 feet of vertical or near-vertical climbing after which it devolves into typical Sierra granite rambling. It’s probably something like 5.8 in climbing shoes, the holds solid if dirty, but with ice tools and crampons it feels skittery and tenuous. I bolt it between trips to the hospital and do solo top-rope laps for hours.

***

I think about taking my dad out to the new crag when he’s better. I think about him sitting in the shade, belaying or just watching as I scratch my way up and down the route. Sometimes it feels like that day might be possible. Things get better. But then things get worse. During the days, I venture to the crag and put three sets of top anchors in, and then drop a rope and run up and down possible routes with my tools. At night, I show Dad pictures on my phone. At some point—10 or 11p.m.—I pull the chair into a bed and fall asleep listening to the various machines beep and whir. The nurses come and go. He does not sleep well—how could he?—so his nights are mostly tedious, watching the clock and waiting for the day to begin. When the sun comes up, it’s always a relief.

“Why?” I ask him. “Day and night are pretty much the same here.”

“I know,” he says. “It’s weird, but I’m always waiting for the day.”

He is mostly terrified—terrified and bored, a combination that anyone who has spent much time in a hospital will recognize with abject horror. He felt betrayed by his upbringing as a Catholic, and when he split from that faith, it was total. For him, what lies beyond is only a bleak and all-encompassing emptiness.

And yet this: “I keep thinking how much I’ll miss everyone,” he tells me from his hospital bed, the high-flow cannula a constant hiss. “I know that’s stupid. I’m the one who’ll be gone.”

***

By day 25, my father has deteriorated to the point where he can only function if dosed regularly with Schedule II painkillers—morphine and Dilaudid—and a cocktail of benzodiazepines for his ever-increasing anxiety and air-hunger. When I arrive home early that morning, I tell my mom that I hope we can wean him off the benzos, as they make him so exhausted and distracted, and it is impossible to communicate with him.

It is that same day that my sister calls to tell me that Dad wants to be taken off everything. “He’s done,” she says. There isn’t even a sense of loss. Not yet. There is nothing but the physical motion of getting back in the car.

His family, my family, gather across the afternoon. At his request, he is dosed with morphine, and we drop the oxygen slowly. I hold his hand and talk to him for five hours until he is gone. Or I try to. At four hours and 30 minutes, I fall apart, screaming and crying, my snot dripping onto the hospital floor. I can’t help him. I can’t do anything. And there is my dad, his final, agonal breaths rasping, and then, finally, lifeless, pale. And all I can think is: That’s my dad. That’s my dad. A few weeks before, he had been helping me build a storage shed in the forest. Now he is gone. And what I thought then, what I still think, is this: How can there be a world that my dad is not in?

* * *

Illustration by Foster Denney

The day after my father’s death, I return to the crag, clip into the anchors, drop onto the rambling, fractured face, and begin bolting again. A few hours of granite dust, tears, sweat. Occasionally, I think of telling my dad about the new route only to be reminded that I’ll never get to tell him anything again.

I call the new route Mr. Subaru, in reference to my dad’s late-in-life used car business. The route runs up the side of a broken arête so that the climber must shuffle up and to the right over and over again, rising and turning across the face on thin edges, one’s body constantly tipping sideways into the fall line, ice tools scratching at bare granite. It is balancey, tenuous, and just difficult enough to demand attention. I cannot say that I feel any joy upon the first ascent, but it at least requires enough of me that I can’t think of anything else.

I have no partner at the crag. Everything I do here is alone. I bolt routes and climb them. I sit in the shade of the cedars. I weep.

* * *

My father returns home as a box of ashes in early July. The box is simple cardboard wrapped in plastic, although there’s a separate small baggie for me to scatter in Yosemite, the place he loved the best in all the world. I have plans to go up El Cap and scatter those ashes from the top after climbing it, but realistically, that will probably never happen.

My mom places the box on a small shelf in the closet of the bedroom, which is now only her own.

What is the point if, in the end, you are just a box of ashes in someone’s closet? Why struggle? Why do any of it at all?

* * *

I bolt three more routes. There is a wasp’s nest in one of the cracks under a prominent roof, although I cannot determine which crack actually holds their paper hexagons. The wasps are uniformly black and move lazily around me as I pull myself up the route, testing holds, looking for good crampon placements from which to clip, thumping possible bolt locations with my fist or the hammer. Then the impact drill. Then the bolt and the hammer. Then I wrench it down.

The rope I have been using was fairly new when I started; once 80m, it has been cut into 50m and 30m, rockfall having created a core shot. Even what remains is fuzzy in places, probably unsafe. I’m not sure that I care, although I have noticed that, when putting up my rope for the day, I’m not excited about falling from the top anchors. So do I want to live? Maybe my body does, the animal in me. Sometimes I holster the drill and just hang there in the harness midway up that fuzzy rope. Sometimes I cry there, up above the ground. Sometimes I just remain where I am for no reason I can determine. Maybe it’s just the act of being in a location difficult enough to get to that I feel a measure of safety. Sometimes I close my eyes. Sometimes I open them.

* * *

The most difficult route gives the entire crag its name: Grief Project. It’s the route with the wasps, beginning with a short slab with scratchy but positive placements, just enough to keep you moving and in balance. The trouble starts at a roof that is, coincidentally, about where the slab smooths out, and the placements disappear. One can lever in the back of the roof—difficult but possible—and then a pick can be slotted leftward into a crack formed by an exfoliating hunk of granite akin to a loaf of French bread. It’s a solid placement, but just at the edge of the lip of the roof, so that one is forced into a left-handed lock-off on that tool. It’s difficult—impossible for me—to get into a Figure 4 or 9 as my body ends up crammed up under the roof and I actually lose more height than I gain.

I think about the route at night when I’m lying in bed, in my parents’—in my mom’s—spare bedroom. Sometimes I feel like I can almost do the move. If I lock off and then reach far right and then shift my feet over to the bottom of the roof …

But instead, I’m stuck at the lip of the roof again. I scratch around, sweat running into my eyes, but find no purchase. The black wasps circle. One eventually stings me on the forehead as I struggle to release my two progress capture devices from the rope. This is the price of the ticket, it seems.

* * *

When one is in the depths, when the black dogs are roaming, you do not remember ever feeling different. You cannot. The overwhelming feeling of doom is your only reality, and it is infinite. Upon waking, it is with the grim understanding that I am now faced with the task of filling another seemingly endless collection of bleak hours before I can return to bed. I’ve told people it is akin to waking up each day with an invisible gun in your mouth.

The psychiatrist writes a Wellbutrin prescription to augment my current Prozac. My mom tells me I seem better. I don’t feel any difference except that now I’m waking up at 7a.m. and can’t get back to sleep, a problem in that it adds to the daylight hours I need to fill. So I do what I do: I pack up my car with my increasingly decrepit rope and the box of bolts and hangers, screws and washers, set everything on the junk-show that is the back of my car, and head back to the project.

A few times a day, teenagers, mostly boys, pass on the trail below me on the way to or from the swimming hole and cliff diving downriver.

“Whoa, bro, are you a climber? That’s so sick.”

“Did you see that movie about that guy who climbed that stuff?”

“Have you climbed El Cap?”

I’m kind, and I even answer their questions, but you can imagine what I’m thinking.

* * *

At some point, I put the Grief Project on the internet. I’m not done with the development yet, but it helps me keep track of things. Each route is named with significance, most related to my dad’s passing, but others in tribute to a friend’s deceased brothers. There are ten climbs now, each slowly being filled in with lead bolts; all ready for top-rope, at least.

I tend to head out to the crag in the late afternoon, avoiding the direct summer heat, bolting for an hour or two, and then heading home. Sometimes I think that the bolting is not really the point; the point is that I have to force myself to get out of the house and do something, and this is what I’ve chosen. It is lonely, but then again, so am I.

Illustration by Foster Denney

Then comes a day when, much to my surprise, I arrive at the crag to find a rope—not my rope—affixed to one of the anchors. I rap in to discover someone I don’t know top-rope soloing Mr. Subaru. When he reaches the ground, he introduces himself. He’s found the crag from my internet post and has driven from Sacramento. Now he’s effusive in his thanks for my commitment to dry-tooling and the work I’ve done in putting in the routes. When he talks about the climb, calling it by the name I have given it, the name that was in honor of my dad, I almost start crying. He rattles off the other climbs he’s already done here: Pop Goes, The Creezle, Take What You Need. They’re all names that hold deep meaning to me, and now they are in the world. “I did a variation of Discrete Mathematics,” he tells me. I ask him if it’s good, and he tells me it’s his favorite of the crag. So I bolted it as a route and put his name up on Mountain Project as the FA. Mathematics Direct (Variation), I call it.

I call my eldest son that night and tell him I met a guy climbing the routes I put up. “That’s f*&king awesome,” he says. “Those routes will be there forever.”

I guess that’s true.

* * *

I don’t know where this all leaves me. In depression, there is no great reckoning. With addiction, one can—at least theoretically—stop using and begin the path to recovery. But there is no recovery from depression, or at least I don’t know of one. I take my meds each morning, although there comes a day when it’s clear that the Wellbutrin is making things worse. I cry during a visit to my regular doctor, then I cry at the dentist’s. There isn’t any clear thought behind it; it’s just a terrible ache in my gut and a mangled moan interrupted by sobbing. I pull over on the freeway; I stop in parking lots. There’s no end to it. My head aches. I have a therapist and a psychiatrist, so I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing, but I don’t know if any of it will amount to anything.

And yet I return again and again to the Grief Project. It’s been a private place for me, but now it’s public, a community resource. I know of five people who have visited the crag. Perhaps more will come. There’s an active dry-tooling community in Bozeman, the place where I first fully caught the dry-tooling bug, and sometimes I wonder if I could start something similar in Northern California. This has been a place of terrible grief but also a variety of solace, and sometimes I fantasize that we could hold a small dry-tooling festival here under the cedars, on the banks of the river. What a strange thought to have. Does this mean something is working?

I feel empty when the final bolt is tightened down, and I pull up the rope, coil it, and begin the short walk back to the car. It feels like something has ended out here in the shadows of the cedars. Not my grief, but this stage of working through it, of allowing my heart to change shape enough to begin to contain it. Or whatever the heart does. That night, I log into Mountain Project and add one final route, the sixteenth: up the mungy, broken corner that runs up the right side of the crag. I’d been looking at it for a long while, thinking it might need bolts, but I think I’ve put enough bolts in already, and it’s not really a climb that someone would much want to lead: a scramble up broken granite steps with plenty of easy rests, perhaps something a newcomer to dry-tooling might enjoy. I decide to keep it unbolted. Top-rope only. A blocky road disappearing into the ever-darkening sky.

As I type this, my dad’s 1970 El Camino SS gathers dust in the carport under the deck. He restored it from junk, lavishing it with care and attention. Even through the dust it shines, a blue that is almost black.

I call the route El Camino Obscuro. The dark road.

I wish you were here to see it all, Dad. God, how I wish you were here.

---

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Linger

Photo by Katie Kelble.

A Story From the Mountaineering Fellowship Fund Grant by Katie Kelble

Originally Published in Guidebook XIX.

The dust clung to our ankles, its layer thickening with each step. Horses, porters, climbers, and the farmers of the Karayshin Valley had worn this trail before us, winding a path that led us deeper into the heart of the valley. In the distance, we could see the mountains grow, their landscapes becoming steeper and more sinister. My heart began to race, despite our meandering pace. I had only left the States once before, but had dreamed of a trip like this for as long as I could remember. I wanted, even needed, to come here; to try and prove that I was worthy of having such lofty climbing goals. To stand in front of something that didn't care how badly I wanted it, and find out if I had anything to offer in return.

We had started our morning with tea and breakfast at a guesthouse in Aktatyr Village, Kyrgyzstan. Our passports survived scrutiny as we crossed through the military zone, and then we were driving up a steep mountain pass with an eroding road carved into its side. Around noon, we strapped our bags to horses and began to trek into the valley. For hours we walked, following the vague trail. By the afternoon, the mountains in the background had grown from their small outlines to imposing peaks. We were first greeted by Odessa, 1,000 Years of Russian Christianity, and Kotina, three granite towers that shot out of the ground, dividing the Karayshin into its two hearts: the Ak-su and the Kara-su.

Golden hour came and went as we unloaded haulbags and duffels, set up tents, and organized our gear at basecamp. Illuminated by the moonlight, Slesova Peak loomed over us. Straight up its prow was our objective for the trip: The American Way, a 950-meter free route that had become the king line of the val-ley. The weight of expectations soaked deeper with every second I stared at the wall.

Katie Kelble and Colin Baker walking in the Karavshin Valley. Photo by AAC member John Ebers and AAC member Katie Kelble.

I was joined by my longtime climbing partner, John Ebers, and his childhood friend, Colin Baker. The plan had come together on a cold winter day earlier in the year. In a Google Doc filled with names of faraway places begging to be explored and climbs we yearned to try, Kyrgyzstan stood out. A friend of mine, Nik Berry, had raved about the fierce granite monoliths tucked away in the Kyrgyz mountains of the Pamir Alai. The first time I texted him about it, he told me it was "one of the best places" he's ever been. Given Nik's impressive climbing resume, I knew his praise had to be well placed. He particularly emphasized a route he established, The American Way, which he completed in 2019 in a team free ascent with Eric Bissell, David Allfrey, and Brent Barghahn. Since then, the route has seen a few ascents, the most famous being Emily Harrington's first individual free ascent, featured in an HBO series called Edge of the Earth.

Guarding the Karavshin Valley was a complex history of political violence and boundary wars. Borders drawn without regard for the people living within them had left lasting fault lines between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Since gaining independence in 1991, both countries have borne the scars of clashes over land, roads, and water access. Probably the most well-known expedition to the valley was in 2000, when a group of professional climbers was shot at while on a wall and held captive for days. While the political climate in the area had since quieted, unrest lingered. A few months after booking our trip, we were comforted by the official demarcation of a distinct border between the two countries and a steady decrease in violence in the southwestern parts of Kyrgyzstan, where our basecamp was located.

We made fast friends with the other climbers at basecamp, sharing inReach numbers in case of emergencies, sipping tea, finding the best spots for clean water, and attempting various camping cuisines. I was oddly comfortable with this group of people, whom I otherwise would never have met. I hadn't expected to find that kind of ease here, at the foot of something so large.

Photo by AAC member John Ebers.

Photo by AAC member Katie Kelble.

Our first day on the route was filled with self-doubt and shivers. A biting wind blew up the wall as I stared at the blank granite face. Most of the hard climbing was in the first four pitches, though above that were 16 more. Besides the crux pitch, seven of the pitches were rated 7at or harder, creating a fairly sustained route. The first working day left me with little hope. As I walked back to my tent after dinner that night, l peered up at Slesova, her moonlit face cold and unmoved. She had swallowed my confidence whole and given nothing back. Show me your secrets, I thought. Let me know you. But she only loomed there, ancient and indifferent, as if I were just another small thing that had come to the base of her and broken.

The second working day was a bit warmer. It was just John and me that day, as Colin had come down with a stomach bug that left him horizontal. The first pitch's grade didn't initially intimidate me, but the style was punish-ing. I grunted and slipped all over it, trying to trust credit card edges for feet while hunting for near-invisible handholds. As I reached the anchor, it was all I could do to steady my breath, to keep the tears from coming. If I couldn't do this "easy" pitch, how was I supposed to do the rest of the route? After a quick rest, I calmed my nerves and geared up for the crux pitch, a 45-meter 7ct that weaved its way through a sea of blank granite. From the base, the pitch looked impossible, its surface too sheer. But as I climbed, Slesova slowly revealed herself. I lingered at each rest, truly sinking into her presence, and she'd reward me by revealing a foot chip or a small hold to balance on. As I breathed and settled into each body position, the chaos I was feeling in my chest began to resolve. Sections that had looked completely blank simplified into precise foot moves that flowed into boulder problems.

Over tea that night, we agreed it was time for the send push. The first four pitches seemed within reach. However, our team was not whole; Colin was still sick, and although his condition had improved, he was in no shape for a multi-day big wall. We were torn between waiting for Colin to improve and making the most of our time there and going for the push without him. I had never been one to want a team to split up. For me, climbing is a conduit for friendship. We waited out a few days of bad weather while we prepared our bags. As the sun set the night before we set off, Colin insisted we go without him, that he would be okay and just needed more time to regain strength.

Early the next morning, John and I hiked in silence, both plugged in to our own music, but in reality, not listening at all. We were lost in an endless swirl of thoughts: Doubt and excitement traded places in my mind. The rock was still cool and shaded when we got there; Slesova's face only saw sun in the after-noon, often when clouds came with a threat of thunderstorms. Numb hands carefully brought us to the top of the first pitch, where we peered up at the crux. To maintain a balance between style and efficiency, John and I would both lead the crux pitch and alternate leads from there, ensuring each person freed all the pitches.

I finished tying my knot and took a steadying breath, pressing my forehead to the wall. All I can do is try. I launched into the crux, enveloping myself in its every move. I imagined the pitch as a marathon. While it was long, there were plenty of spots to rest, coupled with plenty of technical moves on small feet. I danced through the sequences, fighting to keep my heart rate down and my breathing slow. Eventually, I came face to face with the last sequence. The anchors were a mere five meters above me, taunting me. The moves guarding the chains shouldn't have been too difficult, but the only way I had found to do it was to swing and kick my leg to the opposing wall, leaving the security of the static climbing that had gotten me up here. I took a deep breath to soothe my nerves and launched, sheer grit keeping me on the wall. At the anchors, I was met with a twinge of satisfaction, but anxiety nearly suffocated me as I looked up. There was so much more ahead of us.

Katie focusing on her footwork while following a pitch on The American Way. AAC member John Ebers.

After John's success on the crux pitch as well, a quick sip of water and an exchange of gear had us moving again. We swung leads, going seamlessly from one pitch to the next. Moves that had felt impossible to execute the first time on the route went with ease now, and I found that suddenly the climb had dissolved into a methodical dance of pulling, pushing, jam-ming, and resting. As the sun neared the hori-zon, we finally reached the small ledge where we would spend the night. We cooked dinner as the sky turned pink and orange. The silence of the valley was interrupted by our laughs as we recounted silly mistakes and moments from our day. With some of the hardest pitches out of the way, my anxious soul felt more at ease, but I knew it was far too early to count it as a win. We still had one 7c downclimbing pitch, and a subconscious race had begun between our success and our fatigue.

The next morning was even colder than the first day. While the difficulty was far less than the day before, I had more than one bleeding fingertip and an aching body. A few pitches later, we found ourselves at a beautiful ledge carved into the wall like a small sanctuary. Before we could crawl into our sleeping bags, though, we had one more challenge. With rain threatening the next day, we needed to move as fast as pos-sible, so we reluctantly made our way to the downclimb pitch. John went first, pulling off an impressive onsight. He jugged back up to the belay, offering encouragement and tips on where to look for the feet. On my first and second attempts, I was stumped at the same move, a long reach down to a foot that stretched me from my toes to the tips of my fingers. I tied in for my third go, determined that I would not let a single long move stand between me and completing this route. By some miracle, I pulled it off, and we rapped back to our ledge with the last of the light. We cooked dinner as the sunset bled out behind the peaks, Odessa and Kotina standing guard on the horizon, enclosing us in a globe of granite. For a moment, the mountain felt like ours.

Day three, we began early, racing to escape the impending rain that would surely drench Slesova. Did she delight in attempting to foil us, in throwing challenge after challenge our way? I needed to prove to her that we could do it; we could beat her timer. We moved fast, and at every anchor a wave of relief came over me that we were one pitch closer to our goal. Around 2 p.m., we finally crested the summit. A sheath of clouds was collecting around the summits across from us, a reminder that we had not made it yet; it was still far too early for a celebration.

One benefit of having climbed with someone since age 14 is that you begin to move as one, with little need for words. In about two hours, we made it from the summit to the base, rapping Slesova's 950-meter face with ease. Rain fell as we finished our raps; a quiet benediction from the mountain. We shoved ropes and gear in bags and got ready to navigate the scree down to camp. Before we left, I paused and looked up, pressing my palm against the granite. Thank you for this experience, for allowing us safe passage. She had watched climbers come and go for decades, and she had watched me, too, with the same cold patience.

We got back just as light gave way to night-fall. We devoured some bread bought from Kamal, the shepherd in the valley, drenching it in Nutella and honey. The momentum from the day carried us, masking the exhaustion exuding from our bones. A short walk across the basecamp brought us to a warm kitchen tent, a cup of Kyrgyz vodka in my hands. Our basecamp friends had certainly become more of a family. We played cards, sang, and told our tale before crawling into sleeping bags, finally safe on the ground. Maybe it wasn't so lofty to have dreams of climbs like The American Way.

The last half of the trip was a fever dream, as l chased sun and climbed easier terrain, buzzing with the glow from our accomplishment. The hike out was like being held in the arms of nostalgia. Maybe a lifetime ago I had walked these trails, but maybe it was yesterday.

After a few days wandering around Osh and one night in Bishkek, we were boarding the flight home. I watched the city shrink as our plane ascended into the clouds, my heart filled with gratitude for this land and its people. I wondered if I would go back, if I would ever again be in sheer wonder staring up at the granite giants of the Ak-su Valley. I wondered whether I would ever have another moonlight conversation with Slesova. It was like closing a book, content in the knowledge that you might get a sequel or that the rest might remain simply a dream in your mind's eye.

---

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More Than Mescalito

Mark Hudon belaying Ben VanderStouw on The Seagull, pitch six of Mescalito, El Capitan. Photo by Tom Evans.

A Story From The Live Your Dream Grant by Ben VanderStouw

Originally Published in Guidebook XVIII.

I was shivering in the darkness as I led up pitch two that day in Zion. My friend Will and I were climbing our first big aid route, Touchstone Wall. I moved upward in flared pockets and old piton scars—slowly. We had both underestimated the chill cast by the December shade. By pitch four, we were in the sunlight—not because we climbed into it but because dawn caught up to us.

Mark and Ben on the first bivy of Mescalito. Photo by AAC member Mark Hudon.

The day before, I was on a phone call with Mark Hudon, who coached me through the systems we would be using that day. Mark had become my long-distance mentor during the pandemic, calling and emailing when I had big-wall questions. Will and I made it up and down in a day thanks to his advice, but I had a lot more to learn.

In the fall of 2021, I attempted Lurking Fear on El Capitan, where I bailed after popping off a series of hook moves. I blamed my busted knuckles when it was really my nerves. The following year, in the fall of 2022, I drove all the way from Maine to Yosemite to try the Nose. We bailed because of a forecasted storm that never came. I was crushed, and the drive back underscored the immense distance between me and my goal.

Up until that point, I wanted the feather in my cap of having climbed El Capitan. I wasn’t ready for what it demanded, nor was I seeking the experience itself. I continued to learn from Mark, but thought I might never get up the mountain.

Two years later, I called Mark and told him I felt ready. I no longer wanted to check a box; I wanted the experience of climbing a multi-day route with all its frustrations, discomfort, and pain. Though I still lived a long way from Yosemite Valley, and many places traditionally used to prepare for its polished walls, I knew if I had the right partner and opportunity, I could do it.

Mark suggested we climb Mescalito, a 26-pitch aid route that was longer and more challenging than any I had attempted before. It would require multiple nights sleeping in a portaledge and push my aid climbing abilities. It would force me to confront the discomfort that had sent me down twice before.

“You’re going to be a gumby at the bottom and an expert by the time we get to the top,” Mark told me.

At 69, Mark has been climbing El Cap for 51 years. He consistently climbs at least one challenging El Capitan route a year. With Max Jones, Mark had previously climbed the fifth ascent of Mescalito in the fall of 1977, using pitons and chocks.

“I have three El Cap routes left in me,” he told me. “I would love to do one of them with you.”

I kept training, practicing systems, and checking off the gear list, but Mark and I both felt like we were getting an ulcer over the climb. Even with the AAC funding secured, we didn’t know if the October 2025 government shut-down would close the park. I had no choice but to prepare the best I could, hoping our trip wouldn’t be canceled. Less than a week before my flight, we got the good news we needed. After a full day of cross-country travel, I made it to El Cap Meadow.

Two whole days were dedicated to moving our equipment to the base of the wall. We managed to climb up three pitches and hauled our gear to this high point. This allowed us to start higher on our summit push, with the luxury of sleeping on the ground as we prepared. Twenty-three pitches lay ahead of us still. I was already exhausted from hiking seven days of water and equipment up to the base.

To combat the fatigue, Mark suggested that we treat the first day on the wall as a “rest day,” climbing only two pitches instead of four. Leaving the ground for the final time, we jugged our fixed lines, started climbing, and set up camp at the top of pitch five.

I did not expect the unease I felt that first night. I have been up on big features in the dark before, but this was my first night on a proper portaledge. Relaxing and resting had always been something I would do after getting off the wall. A sea of white granite was illuminated by the bright, silvery full moon. I covered my head with my sleeping bag, out of the moon-light, and tried to sleep.

After a leisurely breakfast and coffee, we prepared for the next day’s pitches. The forecast showed great weather. I nursed my cramping legs with electrolyte mix and as many calories as I could choke down. It wasn’t much, but I started racking up.

Mark pushed me hard, insisting that I get the haulbags up to the anchor before he cleaned the gear from the pitch. I never beat him, but it forced me to move quickly and get the systems set up in time. The haulbags had to come off the anchor cleanly so they could move upward without tangling the system. Worse yet, we had brought so much water that I could barely move the bags. I needed to use a 2:1 pulley system to squat over and over again to slowly drag our provisions upward.

“I’m climbing this route with you, I’m not taking you up it,” Mark had told me before we had even started planning the route.

This was important to me, too. I wanted to haul and lead my fair share. Being able to climb and learn with Mark was an incredible opportunity, but it couldn’t be an excuse to slack off.

The first nine pitches of the route angled up and to the right, meaning a retreat after this point would be difficult. We could not rappel straight down, and with such heavy bags, we were committed to the top. As we sat on our portaledge on the top of pitch nine on the second night, we saw cold temperatures and precipitation materialize in the forecast.

The storm was expected to last several days. We now needed a strict quota of four pitches per day to make it up before it hit. We could last a few nights of bad weather, but the extended forecast showed dangerous temperatures and could force us to stay on the wall for too long.

We woke up at 5:30 each morning, forced down breakfast, skipped coffee, and started upward yet again. I knew I was not as efficient as my partner, and there was no time to waste. We ended at twilight, set up the portaledge, and tried to rest.

The biggest variable in getting down safely was the speed with which I could integrate Mark’s lessons into my climbing. Each day, I had to lead at least one difficult pitch, with insecure fixed gear, long sections of standing on hooks, mixed aid and free climbing, and tenuous pitches like the famous Seagull and Molar traverses.

On day four, darkness came before we were able to stop climbing. The sun had set, and I still had a section of 5.7 climbing ahead of me before we could sleep on the Bismarck Ledge. I climbed by headlamp, without climbing shoes or chalk, up the thin seams and blocky ledges. Fear and cold gripped me as I went upward, unable to see where the pitch ended. As I pulled over the edge, I was confronted with a sight that filled me with both frustration and amusement. Plastic containers holding at least ten gallons of water lined the ledge. We had struggled hard against the weight of the water in our own bags for days. Now we had enough to fill a kiddie pool.

The Bismarck looked like a sanctuary on the topo. It was the one real ledge on the route, a place where a storm could be endured rather than survived. It was narrower and more slanted than I’d imagined. Before we started, many said it was their favorite ledge on El Cap. In the cold and dark, I saw it differently. I wrestled the bags up the rocky buttress until they rested beside the treasure trove of water bottles.

I iced my aching hands on the cool rock. The summit stopped being the goal. It was only a step toward getting down in one piece.

Day five on the wall was taxing. Mark fell trying to free climb the offwidth section of pitch 19, The Bismarck. It was a beautiful crack in an orange corner that gradually widened until it could fit a ten-inch piece, which we did not have. There were no features to use aside from the crack itself, so he called down instructions for me to fashion a contraption made of tape, the portaledge fly spreader bar, and our big blue offset nut.

The “ten-foot-long blue offset” Mark used to get to the top of The Bismarck. Photo by AAC member Ben VanderStouw.

After fashioning the device, I sent it up, and Mark used it to place a nut in a seam 20 feet above his head. Mark jugged hand over hand to the nut placement and used it to reach the top. I was relieved when he built his anchor, but when I arrived at the belay, my stomach churned. It had looked decent from below, but any outward pull could have ripped it instantly.

My next pitch was hardly an improvement. It took me hours to find a way through the aptly named Circuitous Pitch. Looking at the topo made it more confusing—there were three different roundabout ways to get to the next anchor, either with big swings and lower-outs, or a 30-foot unprotected ledge traverse. I took the pendulum into another crack system and aided off a horribly tipped-out cam, wishing badly that I hadn’t used so much gear earlier in the pitch.

“Get as high as you can on each piece!” Mark shouted.

On Mark’s next pitch, he had to aid off a huge chunk of rock that shifted under his weight. It threatened to cut the rope and would certainly kill someone who went up this route and pulled on it without looking. After using it to move upward, Mark sent the microwave-sized block down the face. The sound of the impact was delayed a few seconds after we saw it hit the talus below.

According to the itinerary we fretted over, we needed to climb four pitches that day. We had only climbed three. My next pitch looked hollow and delicate, and we were both fried. The sun slid along the wall until it was no longer visible. We both knew this meant we had 20 minutes until darkness.

It was the most reasonable choice to set up the portaledge there and climb an additional pitch the next day. Our last night on the wall felt strangely jovial. We knew we would finish tomorrow, but we needed to climb our biggest day on the wall to do so.

Three separate nights, I saw a shooting star streak across the sky, and each time I wished for the same thing—getting back to the valley floor safely.

Starting off on day six, I moved past hollow flakes that sounded like bongos when tapped. Get on the piece, bounce-test it, highstep, place your next piece. Get on the piece, highstep... I got into the groove and let out a sigh of relief once I was through the notoriously rotten rock of the Gray Bands.

I called down to Mark: “If I can figure out how to wall climb, what can’t I do?”

He seemed pleased, as if I had finally figured out something he had been trying to show me for years.

The rest of the day involved long pitches. We were done being up there. It took a horrendously long time to lead the pitches I needed to link, but we climbed through some of the most beautiful, golden granite on the mountain. We knew even if it took till dark, we were going to beat the storm.

After a very long last day, we managed to creep over the edge of the mountain. On the very last haul, the bags were stuck, and we had little leverage moving them on the slab. Mark and I both had to put an ascender on the rope and pull with all our might to get the bags to move a few inches. We rappelled down to fix them twice. Finally, after hours of hauling, we had the bags at the top of the cliff.

“We haven’t climbed El Cap yet,” Mark told me sternly. “We’re tired, and are still in a dangerous position. We can’t get complacent.”

He was right—we were on top of the cliff, but we and our bags were on a ledge with a slab between us and the very top. I hip-belayed Mark up and across the slab to set a handline on a tree above. We clipped into this handline and dragged our heavy loads upward by headlamp.

“NOW we have climbed El Cap,” Mark told me, exasperated.

I looked at his face in the light of my headlamp and noticed a change in him. We had each lost ten pounds on the route, and our faces looked hollow. We hugged on the summit, and I found myself feeling so grateful for all of Mark’s lessons. We found some flat ground in the darkness, set up our bivvies, and drifted off to sleep looking at the Milky Way.

The morning brought rain and snow, soaking our sleeping bags before the East Ledges descent, a series of slick slabs and fixed lines. Three porters hiked up before sunrise to help us bring our bags down before the big storm hit. It felt surreal to move so fast after inching along the wall all week.

For days afterward, I awoke thinking I was still in a portaledge. The relief of solid ground came slowly each time. Our hands were too battered to make fists. The days blurred as we tried to recall the last week.

Later, Mark told me, “I could have skipped climbing Mescalito. I don’t need another El Cap tick. The true reward is the positive impact it will have on your life.”

Before leaving the Valley, we stopped in the meadow. Another party bound for Mescalito was arranging their gear and food on a large tarp. They asked about our rack, and I shared what worked for us. We wished them well.

I traced our line up the wall one last time, watching the upper pitches disappear into the clouds.

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Imprints Left on Summits

All images and scans were created with help from the AAC Library. Image by AAC member Foster Denney.

Library Spotlight written by Sierra McGivney

Originally published in Guidebook XVIII.

The need to leave our mark on the world is very human. It’s no surprise that when climbing mountains became popular, people started leaving fingerprints here and there in the form of summit registers. After 100 years of the practice, with untold pages of names, addresses, jokes, environmental activism, and weather and wildlife updates, summit registers have become a vibrant record of how humans interact with the mountains.

One historical register from Johnny Bull Mountain (12,026’) in the San Juans of Colorado is a small notebook. Flipping through, you’ll find two self-described “disgruntled employees” warning of the United States Forest Service plan to build a road and drill in the area. You’ll also see a kid named Will grow up, first signing his name at age three in 1988, and then again at ages six and seven. When the paper summit registers were full or nonexistent, hikers would take to writing on anything they had around. According to a Trail and Timberline article from 1989, people have used student IDs, driver’s licenses, a birth certificate, and a Monopoly “Get Out of Jail Free” card. In the James Peak (13,272’) summit register, you can find a Massachusetts car registration and a tuition receipt from Colorado State University, both from 1959.

It is believed that Mt. Powell (13,586’) had the first summit register in Colorado. This 13er is the highest peak in the Gore Range, known for steep terrain with class 2 climbing. On September 26, 1868, John Wesley Powell and Ned E. Farrell summited the mountain and placed a note inside a tin can at the summit. In 1913, during the third ascent of Mt. Powell, Percy Hagerman found the can with two previous ascents recorded, one from the Powell party. His party recorded their ascent on a chocolate bar wrapper and placed it in the tin can. In August 1935, a Colorado Mountain Club (CMC) outing group climbed Mt. Powell, recovered the tin summit register, and gave it to History Colorado, where it currently resides.

The CMC began placing summit registers on Colorado peaks during the 1910s and 1920s. These registers were later used to track usage and determine which mountains needed designated trails, especially after the formation of the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative in 1994. They would archive the registers and then allow people to conduct research or locate their signatures.

Today, the American Alpine Club Library collects, archives, and houses the CMC summit registers, the majority from Colorado—13ers and 14ers, of course, but also from mountains below 13,000’ that are rarely climbed. In addition, the AAC collects a handful of registers from mountains in Wyoming, and has the old Shiprock or “Tsé Bit’a’í” (Rock with Wings) register, from before climbing was banned there—the rock formation is sacred to the Navajo Nation. Once the AAC receives the registers from the CMC or others, they flatten them and sort them into the correct folder for the mountain. If you climbed a peak in Colorado and signed a summit register before 2015, there is a good chance the AAC Library has it.

Photo by AAC member Foster Denney.

Originally the summit register canisters were made of brass. Today, most register canisters are PVC pipes, but a few are glass jars, food cans or tins, or plastic bags. Spencer Swanger, the first person to climb all 100 of the highest peaks in Colorado, used a pneumatic bank tube. If the canister is closed correctly and undamaged, the register holds up well. Unfortunately, water damage and mold are common, making some registers hard to read.

Most summit registers have not been replaced since the 2010s. With stricter Leave No Trace protocols, it fell out of favor to keep registers on the tops of mountains, but legend has it that on lesser-climbed peaks in Colorado, there are still summit registers. You’ll have to climb them to find out.

Sometimes the summit registers go missing or turn up in unexpected places. The elements sometimes take the registers, and occasionally, curious hikers trying to make a little money do, too. A brass summit register was put up for sale in Grand Junction for $400 in 2020. Katie Sauter, the American Alpine Club Library Director, was notified by a volunteer that it was on eBay. She reached out to the seller, asking if he would donate it to the Library since it was technically CMC property and was needed for archival purposes. The brass summit registers were worth $20 to $25 in the 1920s, and, with inflation, they are worth about $400 in today’s money. Whether the seller knew that or not, he was aiming to get his money’s worth from the register. The seller donated the brass tube containing the register to the Library, and it turned out to be from Culebra Peak, which now has restricted access, making the summit register even more sought-after.

Photo by AAC staff Foster Denney.

That isn’t the strangest retrieval of a summit register Sauter has seen. Jim Detterline, also known as “Mr. Longs Peak,” logged 428 ascents of Longs Peak (14,259’) and was often the person who retrieved the summit registers. Detterline was a Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP) climbing ranger who started out his National Park Service career at Dinosaur National Monument in 1982. In 1984, he transferred to RMNP and was very determined to climb Longs Peak. By 1985, at 29, he had five failed attempts under his belt. Weather, specifically lightning, had been a problem for Detterline.

In the foreword for Longs Peak: The Story of Colorado’s Favorite Fourteener by Dougald MacDonald (also the editor of the AAJ), Detterline describes his first attempt of the Diamond in July 1979: “As the clouds darkened and increased in mass, I started to feel like one very small microorganism clinging to one very large piece of the universe. Eventually the clouds split open, and 30 million-volt bolts of lightning poured down on us with the cold rain. We retreated.... Standing soaking wet, tired, and cold at the base of Longs Peak, however, I realized I had fallen in love with the rocky mistress.”

Longs Peak circa 2003. Photo from the Detterline Collection courtesy of the AAC Library.

POV of Jim Detterline atop Longs Peak with a summit register. Photo from the Detterline Collection courtesy of the AAC Library.

Each name logged in a summit register is a hint at a personal adventure. Ultimately, Detterline was right to be cautious of the lightning around Longs Peak. In 1985, he and Duane Kitzis set out to climb the Casual Route (5.10a) on the Diamond. Detterline was leading pitch six, 40 feet up, and was still unable to find his first piece of protection. Suddenly, thunder rang out, and a sheet of rain showered down. A basketball-sized ball of St. Elmo’s fire at the top of the crack system began sizzling toward him. According to his unpublished memoir, “The ball came quickly to my position, hovered in front of my face, and exploded with a loud ‘boom’ and a flash of bright light.”

Detterline held strong; however, he had been totally blinded by the lightning strike. Kitzis helped guide Detterline down to the ledge, talking him through each foot and hand move as he downclimbed. They waited about an hour until Detterline’s sight returned; by then it was late, and the rock was wet. With no choice but to bivy, they began climbing at first light the next morning. This was just the beginning of Detterline’s time on Longs Peak, and just one story folded into the pages of the summit registers archived in the AAC Library.

Sauter remembers one Saturday morning at the American Alpine Club Library in the dead of winter. When the door flung open and snow swirled in, Detterline appeared, clad in a snowsuit. He handed her the Longs Peak summit register and walked back out, taking the snow with him. At least, that’s what Sauter says it felt like. The AAC Library is located in the building’s basement, with the door usually propped open, but when Sauter looks back on that day, it feels like Detterline had stepped off Longs Peak’s blustery summit and into the Library.

Longs Peak isn’t the only mountain with intense weather. Mt. Bierstadt (14,066’) is one of the more forgiving 14ers and one of the most popular, given its location near Denver. The weather, especially the snow, is still just as intense. In a summit register entry from February 15, 1976, a hiker describes the weather as “snowing, windy, vis[iblility] 500 feet.” The next entry with an illegible date has the opposite problem: “Too F@%*ing bad there wasn’t snow to ski to the summit.”

The weather turns fast in the mountains, and the summer months don’t always bring warm weather. An August 10, 1976, entry for Bierstadt reads, “...despite the snow. F@%* Colorado weather!” Another entry from August 18, 1976: “Holy sh*t it’s cold.”

Mt. Blue Sky (14,268’), formerly Mt. Evans, is another 14er near Denver that is popular. The summit registers of Mt. Blue Sky don’t have many entries about the weather; instead, they focus on mountain goats. This doesn’t come as a surprise; the mountain is known for these troublesome, salt-licking creatures. Notes from the register from 2011 show considerable goat activity, with entries like: “Hi goats,” “Baby goats,” “Gorgeous Goats!” and “Goats = Awesome Views = wow.” Unfortunately, the abundant presence of mountain goats reflected in these historical summit registers is now precarious—in a 2025 population estimate by Colorado Parks and Wildlife, the goat population on Mt. Blue Sky was around 70, a far cry from the 2024 estimate of 125. An unknown disease has struck the goats, causing large fluctuations in population. It is suspected that human waste is the source. Hopefully the health of the mountain goat population can be addressed, or else these summit register logs will be strictly history, rather than a vibrant reference to a shared experience across time.

Digging through summit registers and archives in the American Alpine Club Library can transport you into the past, onto windblown summits, or next to shaggy-furred mountain goats. In the AAC Archives, history steps out of the books and into the room with you. The names scribbled onto worn paper on mountaintops miles away hold untold stories waiting to be discovered.

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An Interview with American Climbing Journal Editor

American Climbing Journal editor Matt Samet showing love to his cockatiel, Gandalf. Photo by AAC staff Foster Denney

By Hannah Provost

Originally published in Guidebook XVIII.

The American Climbing Journal (ACJ) is a new publication of the AAC. Building on the 97-year history of The American Alpine Journal, the ACJ will be the journal of record for the most significant rock climbs each year, covering sport climbing, single-pitch trad, bouldering, and shorter multipitch climbs in sport style, as well as performance-oriented achievements such as outdoor speed climbing and link-ups. AAC members can expect to receive the very first edition of the ACJ in the fall of 2026.

Editor’s Note: The following discussion includes a lot of sidebars, as Matt Samet managed his cockatiel, Gandalf, who was flying around Samet’s home office and making a ruckus as we chatted. Sidebars to Gandalf are noted in parentheses.

Matt Samet: [Referencing the cockatiel on his hand] He’s been flinging fruit pellets at me all day. He’s such a f#@ker. Gandalf?

Hannah Provost: Is that just a plea for attention?

MS: Well, he likes to sort through and get the seeds he wants, but some of it’s just, yeah, being a bird—being a brat. Look at that: Are you a brat? Yes, you are.

HP: Haha. Well, let’s get started. Why is there a need for something like The American Climbing Journal [ACJ]—why should it exist if we have the internet? I.e., what’s the argument for your relevance, Matt?

MS: I think it’s important to have a journal of record for rock climbing, just as it’s been important to have a journal of record for alpinism, like we’ve had with The American Alpine Journal [AAJ] for 97 years now. Rock climbing in the last 40 years has become just as relevant as alpinism, I think. For years, the magazines functioned in that capacity with news departments, features, articles about areas, and profiles on climbs. The magazines were the keepers of that record. Before the internet, they were the only way you could find out what had been done.

(Hi, Gandalf. You are a pretty birdie. You’re a very pretty birdie. He’s ridiculous, isn’t he?)

So, with Drifter’s Escape, the 5.15a traditional climb that Connor Herson freed in Squamish, Connor did something that’s very trendy these days, where he waited to post about it online—some kind of punk-rock marketing, I suppose. But how deep can any Instagram post ever go?

My goal with the ACJ would be to get Connor to write a first-person story and to help fill in the details, which he and a Squamish local and climbing historian, Nat Bailey, did an incredible job of. That way, it’s preserved forever in journal form. And then we have a searchable archive like we have with [the] AAJ, and you can be like, Hey, when was Drifter’s Escape done? and get detailed answers about the facts, but also a first-person description of the experience. It’s also important to have these facts, not because names, grades, and dates matter so much, but because there is a continuum and a living history that’s still evolving, and in very unique and unpredictable ways.

It’s important to have as much documentation as you can for old, geeky history nerds like me, but also for people new to the sport.

(Gandalf, are you a pretty birdie or are you just a pain in the ass? You are a pretty birdie.)

HP: Definitely pretty birdie. Haha. Okay, well, how is the ACJ structured, and in what ways is it similar to or different from the AAJ?

MS: We have our primary features, which aren’t necessarily just the most important things that happened in 2025—they’re also the ones that lend themselves to the best storytelling.

So, for example, there’ll be [Adam] Ondra’s flash of Lexicon, the world’s first flash of an E11—basically a 5.14 death route. Seb Berthe doing the fourth ascent of the Dawn Wall— he took a boat over here twice to get it done, because he’s committed to green travel. Sasha DiGiulian and her first female ascent of the Platinum Wall, a 39-pitch 5.13d on El Cap.

Hamish McArthur, with his astonishing V17 repeats. Connor Herson, as I mentioned, doing Drifter’s Escape, perhaps the first-ever 5.15a trad pitch. Katie Lamb talking about being the first woman to do a V16 “twice,” and what that meant.

Then we get into the gallery section, with photos of [climbs] that are stunning and/or difficult across the world and country, with longer captions that offer deeper storytelling from the people who did the climbs. We’ll also have images of new areas (and newly protected old areas) that have opened (or reopened) up because of successful pushes by local climbing organizations and the Access Fund—places like The Venue at the Red, Farley Ledges in Massachusetts, and Howard Knob in North Carolina.

And then we have a section that’s new in the sense that you wouldn’t necessarily see it in the AAJ: Crag Profiles, which are basically what they sound like. This edition, we have the Ships Prow in Rocky Mountain National Park, and then Cheat Canyon, West Virginia, which is this crazy bouldering, soloing, highballing, off-the-radar gritstone area.

Then we have our American Rock section, which features regional reports on climbs significant to their area. And then World Rock, which is the international version. One idea with some of these American Rock and World Rock reports is that we also want to clue people into areas they might not have heard about—kind of like the Climbs & Expeditions section in the AAJ.

(Stop eating a $10 bill, you f#@ker.)

HP: One of my favorite things about working with Dougald [MacDonald, editor of the AAJ] and Pete [Takeda, editor of Accidents in North American Climbing] is that they’re both big personalities. You are also a big personality, and of course, so is your bird Gandalf...

MS: He’s a bigger personality than me—look at this. Now he wants scritches, or he’s going to bite me.

Matt Samet examining a boulder at his local gym. Photo by AAC staff Foster Denney.

HP: So what’s your background in editing, and what parts of your professional and climbing background are you bringing to the ACJ?

MS: I’ve been climbing since age 15. I’m 54 now, so we’re coming up on four decades of climbing. Primarily rock climbing, a little bit of alpine rock here and there. I’ve always been into performance rock climbing; at one point, like, in my teenage years and into my 20s, I was a sponsored climber.

In 2002, I started working at Climbing Magazine after getting my BA in journalism and then a master’s in English/creative writing. I’ve been involved nonstop in editing or writing about climbing since then. So, 24 years of editorial experience, working as a desk editor at Climbing, at Rock & Ice, at Alpinist. I have twice been the editor-in-chief at Climbing, though it wasn’t quite as, umm, glorious as it sounds, because at times I had no staff other than myself. Like 100-hour weeks—I wouldn’t care to do that again.

And I’ve been involved with the AAJ as a freelancer since 2022. I’ve edited a lot of outdoor books and memoirs, too—through Mountaineers Books, Di Angelo Publications, Patagonia, things like that.

HP: Do you ever get bored with climbing stories?

MS: I don’t. I did get bored of climbing stories when I was at the magazines, and the frequency was 10 to 12 issues a year, and my workload was insane. Now, with the longer timeline to put a journal together, I get to spend more time with the stories.

For me, the coolest part is helping climbers/ writers find their voice and their story. When someone’s done a cool climb, but they haven’t quite figured out how to translate that to the page so that other people can experience it with them, it’s a really cool thing to be that conduit or bridge.

When you get into the details of climbing, it becomes this really fascinating thing, because it’s an experiential sport. Being at your limit is a universal experience, right? No matter what the grade or the climb is, we all have to dig deep in the same way in order to succeed at our physical or mental limit. When you’re able to take a climb that’s also at the very cutting edge and translate that climber’s experience into something rooted in details, and that feels universal, it makes for really cool storytelling.

Have you seen the video of Adam Ondra doing Lexicon? It’s insane. He talks [in his article for the ACJ] about the two minutes before he got on the wall, being scared. Here’s the world’s best climber admitting he was scared. That’s such a beautiful thing, because we all get scared. It’s this profound and very real and very human moment we can translate into our own experience. As a dedicated and passionate climber myself, I can see myself and my love of the sport in all these stories.

HP: In the course of sharing your answers to the previous questions, you gave us some sneak peeks of some stories. But can you tell us in detail about a story that really surprised you?

MS: There’s this Korean boulderer, Sungsu Lee, who’s extremely strong. In May 2025, he repeated Burden of Dreams, the world’s first V17, in Finland. But on the successful ascent from the ground, he pulled on, cocked, and maybe bounced off the pads, but maybe not. It’s hard to tell, because he had a baggy T-shirt on. Then he got to the top, and everyone’s like, “Yay!” And he has his celebratory beer.

But you could see something in his eyes where he’s like, Eh, I don’t know if I did it or not. So he went back and repeated it. We have an interview with him that a friend of his, Brian Kim, helped translate, getting into the mindset of why Sungsu went back to do it again. The second time, he did it with his shirt off, which I thought was funny.

To me, this all showed the sense of absurdity but also the seriousness with which we interpret climbing. I mean, someone who’s not a climber, if you tried to explain to them why this guy’s T-shirt and maybe butt bouncing off these foam landing mats below this tiny rock mattered, they’d be like, “Wait, what?”

But to a climber, to the diehards who are our Club members and readers, it’s everything.

Style is everything.

HP: You’ve been an obsessed climber for decades. Is there a climb that still haunts you?

MS: Okay, there’s one I haven’t done that I bolted that I’ve been trying now for three years. It’s up in Skunk Canyon in the Flatirons here above Boulder, Colorado, where I live. It’s 21 bolts long, and my friend Brandon and I bolted it in the fall of 2022. I did the first half of it that season. And I didn’t expect the second half to be that much harder, so I thought, I’ll come back next season and finish it off.

I’ve probably been up there 100 days since then, just trying to do the second half by itself.

Last fall, I almost did it—the second pitch. It’s essentially like V10 into a difficult clip, straight into a V9, on a 35° overhanging panel on small, awkward holds. I had my hand on the jug at the end of the hardest part. And all I needed to do was bring my feet up and bring my other hand in. And I just couldn’t—my elbows were in the sky.

I was very excited to train for it this winter, but then my right pinky finger got infected, as did the tendon. I haven’t been able to train, but I hope to be able to train in the summer and go back in the fall. I mean, at age 54, I don’t know if I can, but I know that it’s now or never. I’d like to do this route because I think it would mark the culmination of everything I’ve worked toward in four decades of climbing. And also to show that as you age, you can still push yourself.

The first half is called The Alpha. The second half is called The Omega. Together, they are The Alpha and The Omega.

HP: What’s an example of a unique challenge that you had to deal with when compiling the ACJ?

MS: The biggest challenge was coming in, and there was no ACJ, no template. We’ve had to develop it from scratch, which initially was very intimidating. We didn’t even quite know what this was—and we needed to get it done by spring 2026. But obviously, you, me, Dougald, and Shane [Johnson, the Vice President of Media at the AAC] put our heads together on it. I’m very grateful for all the help that you guys have given me. And I think the ACJ is going to keep evolving, too. I’m excited to see how people respond once the Journal is out in the world.

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The Steck-Salathé on Yosemite’s Sentinel Rock

Sentinel Rock circa 1916. Photo provided by Mountain Views Collection.

By Sierra McGivney, with research and imagery support by the AAC Library.

Originally Published in Guidebook XVII.

A lone blacksmith gazed out his window one morning in 1945. He felt awful. After 13 years of working away in his San Mateo, California, forge, located on Highway 101, his health had begun to decline. He watched as a cow and its calf grazed peacefully in a field.

“John, look at those healthy animals. They eat grass, not meat. You eat meat, and you are always feeling sick,” said the voice of an angel.

The angel and the blacksmith conversed a while more. Suddenly, it all clicked for the blacksmith: Vegetarianism was the answer to his problems. Little did John Salathé, the blacksmith, know that his sickness and this moment would propel him toward the tall granite walls of Yosemite, solidifying his spot in climbing history.

Salathé was an immigrant from Switzerland who headed westward, landing first in Montreal, where he met and married Ida Schenk. He then immigrated to the U.S., settling near the Bay Area. There, he opened up Peninsula Wrought Iron Works, his blacksmith shop. He was described as lean and ruddy, and spoke with a thick Swiss accent.

Once Salathé began to fall ill, doctors recommended that he spend time in the Sierra Nevada, where he learned about the Sierra Club. In the fall of 1945, Salathé joined the Sierra Club on a climbing outing at Hunters’ Hill near Vallejo, California. Robin Hansen led a complex and exposed pitch of climbing. He called down to Salathé to “climb freely.” Hansen tugged on the rope but felt no movement or weight. After two or three minutes, Salathé appeared from around the corner unroped because he thought that to climb freely was to free solo. This was the beginning of many instances in which Salathé scared his climbing partner by being extremely bold.

“Height had no meaning to John, and to him fear was a stranger,” wrote Hansen in his tribute to Salathé in the 1994 AAJ.

Salathé started to feel physically better, between his newfound vegetarianism and passion for climbing. Naturally, Salathé was drawn to Yosemite. At 46, he quickly picked up the basics of climbing but was not the most agile; therefore, he leaned into the technical aspects of climbing that were then evolving in the Valley.

Piton technology, when Salathé started climbing, was subpar, so he decided to forge his own. Most pitons at the time were malleable steel pitons, bought at the army surplus store or imported from Europe. They worked great in parallel-sided cracks, but most cracks are irregular along the edges and in the back—the pitons pounded into these fissures tended to get stuck, and if they were removed, they were often too damaged to be reused. Salathé’s high-strength carbon steel pins were far tougher than the European pitons of the day. On each, he added a P inside a diamond, the logo of his blacksmith shop. He could make them big, small, wide, narrow, or long, for the type of cracks he encountered on various climbs.

In 1946, Salathé convinced his friend John Thune to climb the Lost Arrow Tip with him.“I have found a rock in Yosemite that has never been climbed. It is an easy one,” he told Thune. The Lost Arrow Tip is a 250-foot formation, now classified as Grade III, 5.7 C2— not an easy climb, then or now.

Thune, less experienced than Salathé, was the belayer. As Thune stood in the Arrow Notch, belaying, he watched as Salathé’s first piton, of his own making, popped out, and Salathé went for a ride into the void.

“Slowly, John worked his way back to the notch and said with a smile, ‘Well, we start over again.’ He had little fear of high places. I did the shaking for him,” Thune later said.

They got about 30 to 50 feet from the summit, but darkness was approaching, so they retreated. Competition was stiff in the Valley. Unfortunately, another group—the foursome of Robin Hansen, Anton (Ax) Nelson, Fritz Lippmann, and Jack Arnold—just days later got to the summit first by lassoing the Arrow Tip from across the rim. Salathé later told Steve Roper in all seriousness that this competing team had enjoyed “the help of the devil.”

Later that year, Salathé and Ax Nelson climbed the Southwest Face of Half Dome (800’, 7 pitches, Grade IV) in Yosemite. They bivouacked and placed 150 pitons as they ascended, both a first for Yosemite. According to Roper’s Camp 4: Recollections of a Yosemite Rockclimber, for the next year, this stood as the hardest rock climb in the United States, until Salathé and Nelson climbed the Lost Arrow Chimney (1,100’, 10 pitches, IV 5.10a) in 1947. It was the most challenging climb at the time and the first successful big-wall ascent in the United States, done in a single push that took the two men five days and five nights. The sun was rising on the golden age of climbing in Yosemite.

On January 20, 1950, Salathé filed for American Alpine Club membership, backed by Oscar A. Cook and seconded by Richard C. Houston. Allen Steck, a newcomer rising in the Valley after returning home from World War II, had his AAC membership proposal published in the January 10, 1950, list, which Houston also seconded. Both of their climbing résumés were long, but there was something just beyond the horizon waiting for them. It would become one of the greatest climbs in North America: the Steck-Salathé (15 pitches, V 5.10-) on Sentinel Rock.

Sentinel Rock circa the 1950s, photo by Nicholas B. Clinch Collection.

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Sentinel Rock circa the 1950s, photo by Nicholas B. Clinch Collection.

In 1950, Allen Steck had become obsessed with climbing Sentinel Rock, and he wasn’t alone in his ambitions. The Valley was a competitive environment. Steck, Phil Bettler, Bill Long, and Jim Wilson made a serious attempt in October 1949, but only managed to reach 400 feet past the previous attempt. More attempts were made in 1950, and with the Fourth of July weekend approaching, Steck was getting antsy; someone would unlock the climb soon. He lay awake at night thinking about the north wall above the buttress.

At the time, Steck was a 24-year-old living in Berkeley, California. He was young and ambitious, just beginning to make a name for himself in Yosemite, and a “carnivore,” as Salathé would say. In contrast, Salathé was 51, had dentures, and was known for his doggedness and patience in climbing. All of Steck’s friends were out of town that weekend, so he asked Salathé to join him.

The angels had earlier told Salathé to look around the Valley, and he would see three superior climbs: Half Dome, the Arrow, and the north face of the Sentinel. The first two were completed, but there was one last climb to go.

Perhaps Salathé and Steck were always moving toward this climb, fated to complete it together—the innovator and the young gun.

When Nelson heard of their plans, he remarked to Salathé, “If you expect to make the top, Al will have to be every bit as stubborn as you!”

On the morning of June 30, the two quested off—Salathé with a handful of dates and Steck with dried fruit, canned tuna, and some nuts. Between the two of them, they had two gallons of water in tin cans, believing it would be enough for their time on the wall.

By midafternoon on the second day, they had reached Steck’s previous high point.

“Even though we were swinging leads, it was clear that Salathé, an aid specialist that he was, should be the one to tackle the steep, almost blank section known as the ‘Headwall,’” wrote Steck in his memoir, A Mountaineer’s Life.

The terrain was complex and unknown, Salathé’s progress slow. They retreated to their bivy at the top of the Flying Buttress. At first light on July 2, Salathé went to work, struggling on the steep headwall for seven hours. They began to feel hot and thirsty. Temperatures reached 105°F on the valley floor—the climbers were like two eggs in a frying pan. Even worse, their water—which should have been enough for a few days under cooler conditions—wasn’t going to last much longer given the dehydrating effects of the heat.

At last, they reached the Great Chimney. They looked up at a steep, flared slot ending in a narrow section. Steck began to wonder how they might escape the wall. Disappointment and thirst were setting in.

The next day, July 3, Steck noticed a cave at the far end of the chimney. He roped up and wriggled up it, popping out a hundred feet above. Salathé ditched an empty water can and his dates, his parched mouth making them unappealing, and prusiked up to Steck. For years to come, climbers would see a rusted tin can as they entered the chimney.

Now, they were at another impasse: A slot about the width of a human head rose above them.

Sentinel Rock circa the 1950s, photo by the Nicholas B. Clinch collection.

Salathé searched for a crack, discovering a rare and thin line leading around the outside of the slot. Salathé placed pitons, climbing the outer face of the chimney until he reached an ample ledge. Salathé had solved the crux of the Narrows, which would become the most notorious feature on the route. Salathé’s route up the Narrows has no known repeats: On the second ascent, in 1954, Royal Robbins discovered an oval-shaped hole in the ceiling above the belay spot, shinnying through this and the chimney above until he found himself in the sunlight again. This has become the standard route.

Steck, before following Salathé, saw water dripping down in a crack. He desperately reached for it, but it was only enough to moisten his lips.

They continued upward in the unrelenting heat, letting their tempers boil over. Whatever their motivations were—anger, water, or the love of climbing—they ended the night two pitches from the summit, albeit sleeping in a painful, seated position hanging from their anchors.

On the morning of July 4, Salathé used their last half cup of water to moisten his false teeth so he could put them back on. By noon, the two stood at the summit.

They “yelled and jumped and almost kissed each other to think we’d made it,” said Salathé in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle in 1950.

Steck, meanwhile, had become crazed with thirst. He threw his food off the summit and rushed down a gully leading to Sentinel Creek, which they could see from the summit, leaving Salathé. Water was all he could think about. Steck got cliffed out 30 feet above the creek and had to climb back up the gully. He “tripped over bushes, fell over unseen ledges, and finally collapsed fully clothed into a pool at the foot of a small waterfall,” as Steck later wrote in his Sierra Club Bulletin article about the ascent, “Ordeal by Piton.”Salathé, ever patient, had taken his time and traversed over to the water. The men immediately got to slaking their thirst.

Sentinel Rock circa the 1950s, photo by Nicholas B. Clinch Collection.

Finally, after facing a complex descent over steep, water-worn granite slabs down toward the Valley, they piled into Salathé’s Model T Ford for the drive back to Berkeley, stopping at a produce stand on the way. Salathé bought various fruits, and they ate them eagerly.

“And I can say, in retrospect, that it was well worth the effort. The reason, the incentive, the motive for all this? It is an intangible, provocative concept that I shall leave to the reader to explain. Some think they know why; others despair of ever knowing. I’m not too sure myself,” concluded Steck in “Ordeal by Pitons.”

It was clear Steck was a bit fed up with the climb, but like all climbers, as time goes on, the sufferfest memories fade, and going back up doesn’t sound so bad. Steck went on to climb the Steck-Salathé five more times, the fifth time on the 50th anniversary, when Steck was 75 years old.

Unfortunately, Salathé’s mental health deteriorated soon after this ascent. His wife, Ida, took unknown legal action against him in 1952, and shortly after, he believed she was trying to poison him with cobra venom. He soon returned to Switzerland and joined a religious cult led by a medium who claimed to have the “spirit Joseph” speak through her.

In 1963, Salathé returned to the United States, were he wandered the deserts and mountains of California, living off the land and a pension from the Swiss government.

The Steck-Salathé route on Sentinel Rock was a monumental climb in Yosemite history, a five-day big wall that opened up the idea that other walls could be and would be climbed, if only climbers were willing to bivy for multiple nights in a row. Soon after, several other big features were climbed in the valley, including the Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome in 1957 and The Nose of El Capitan (47 days on the wall) in 1958. Salathé and Steck’s route opened up a new playing field for climbers, leading to some of the greatest routes in North American climbing history.

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An Interview with ANAC Editor Pete Takeda

ANAC Editor Pete Takeda on set for a Prescription shoot in Boulder Canyon, Colorado. Photo by AAC member Foster Denney.

Originally published in Guidebook XVII.

Photo by AAC member Foster Denney.

AAC: Describe the scope of the work that goes into making Accidents in North American Climbing [ANAC].

Pete Takeda: The scope and the type of coverage we do have expanded over the years. It’s not just a print publication anymore, where we analyze accidents from across the continent. It’s also the monthly email, called The Prescription, that delves into one of the accidents from that year’s book, repackages it, and adds related resources. Now we’ve also brought in the video component, with me as the on-camera personality, plus IFMGA/ AMGA guide Jason Antin and how he recommends folks avoid the accident we’re analyzing.

So as an editor, I have to change hats a bit. I kind of hate being the on-camera personality. But I see it has an impact, and so whatever I feel about it is irrelevant because it serves the community.

Another new exciting thing is working with Dr. Valerie Karr, a professor who studies human behavior across many complex environments, who came out of the blue and scanned and made searchable every physical copy of ANAC dating back to 1948. We can now respond to legitimate, official queries for data.

Dr. Karr has also brought forward a framework for examining human factors in accidents. In other words, how you feel, what you’re thinking, your background, what you’re doing and experiencing in the moment, and how those all can lead to accidents and also influence the outcome. For example: I was distracted, or I was thinking about my dog, or someone asked me a question. It’s just basic things like that every climber can relate to. You can read about some of her initial findings in this year’s book.

So, we’re no longer just addressing the mechanics of the accident: My carabiner came undone, or the rope was running over the edge, or I placed a cam and it blew. It goes beyond just these technical aspects.

AAC: What’s the history of ANAC?

Pete: First, it was simply a report from the AAC Safety Committee, starting in 1948. In 1952 they settled on calling the annual book Accidents in North American Mountaineering. The person who really evolved it into what it is today is Jed Williamson, a past president of the AAC and the editor emeritus on the masthead of ANAC. He steered the direction of ANAC, as a volunteer, for 30 or 40 years. He’s the one who established this current format and managed to source information from all these different reporting sources, like federal rangers, SAR teams, and individuals.

In 2016 the name changed to Accidents in North American Climbing, [to reflect the fact that] we as climbers really would not self-apply the term “mountaineer” to what we do 99 percent of the time.

Pete Takeda highball bouldering in the Peruvian Andes. Photo provided by Pete Takeda Collection.

AAC: What’s a unique challenge you’ve faced while compiling and editing ANAC?

Pete: Figuring out how to accurately portray such technical concepts is always a challenge. You really have to partition your mindset, just like you do in the disciplines in climbing. Some things work in the print realm. Some things work in the digital realm. Some things work in video.

With a print publication, you’re combining imagery with graphics and words. Between those three things, you should be able to allow people to view the material, read the material, and come away with as comprehensive and as fact-checked a report as they can. And that’s something that really sets us apart: We actually check facts.

Of course, it is challenging to create a graphic that matches the nuances of how a knot came undone or how a carabiner unclipped, but we have excellent designers on our team. [Another] major hurdle I have is acquiring photos for every accident, either of the accident scene or showing the mechanics of the accident, the routes, the area, etc. People on Mountain Project have been very generous in donating their photos.

The purpose of all this material is to evoke questions. You can usually tell how successful you’ve been by the questions that people write on social platforms or via email. That’s [certainly] the case with the Prescription videos—and, if someone wants to dig more, they can always look in the book or get on the AAC website and look up the accident.

The ultimate thing is for people, regardless of experience level, to think about what they do in the light of understanding the mechanics and mindset that create any accident situation. I hope the analyses always get people thinking: What can I do that might encourage an accident? What do I do that might encourage me to be safer and more accountable to all those people around me? That’s definitely the culture in backcountry skiing, but I don’t see that same culture universally in climbing.

Once you bring humility to reading these reports, and self-analyze, you can start being accountable to safety for yourself and, more importantly, safety for others.

I guess that’s the challenge of the human race: Have some humility, get out of your f@#$ing head, and start f*&%ing thinking about the impact and effect you’re having on yourself and others. If everyone did that, you know, now that would be a utopian society—but that’s another story.

AAC: Is there an example accident report that was especially standout for you from the 2025 ANAC?

Pete: There was the anchor knot coming undone in Yosemite: The individual attempted to tie a BFK but instead tied a slipknot. And I can totally see that happening to anyone.

Another involved someone I knew—Robbi Mecus, who was a correspondent with ANAC from back East. She died in a fall [during a descent] in the Ruth Gorge, Alaska, and her partner survived despite critical injuries. That one got to me because there’s a person who really does everything right and is super aware of the hazards, yet still perishes.

I think the takeaway is that climbing is dangerous. It can be fun; it can be joyous; it can be an athletic thing where you share these moments with your friends—and it should be. But there are times when we have to remind ourselves that this is dangerous. There are things at stake.

Pete Takeda on Nanda Devi, India. Photo provided by Pete Takeda Collection.

AAC: Any others?

Pete: One I found really, really interesting was a ground fall in Mission Gorge, San Diego. It’s really slick crack climbing on granite. These cracks often collect fine dust. Someone was leading a pitch and using hard aluminum Camalots—like, first-generation or second-generation ones that were 30 years old. And they were using super-unstable second-generation Metolius TCUs. This person had multiple pieces pull just by taking.

This climber is just doing their thing; nothing should go wrong. And suddenly all these pieces are blowing out. Apparently, the day after, someone suffered the same thing [on an adjacent climb].

It’s a combination of the dust and the crack, the slick rock, the hard, thin cams. You know, you might’ve done your hardest send in 1990 on this gear. [But now,] there’s no reason not to replace your gear. Because every so often something bad happens, like someone has a really worn Grigri and they partner up with someone who has one of those super-slick, ultra-skinny ropes. You know, there’s nothing wrong with this, but there’s also nothing right with it, especially when you lose control of the rope and your partner falls and hits the ground.

Finally, some people really pooh-poohed the reality of the knee-stuck-in-an-offwidth video we made. Sure enough, I got two accidents reported where that happened in 2025. And, for the 2026 book, and I kind of predicted this, but man, someone got stuck in an inversion offwidth. With that scenario, the clock is ticking, and you will die from hanging upside down from one knee, unable to move. The blood goes to your head; you suffocate. Stay tuned for that story in the 2026 book. [Editor’s Note: The climber survived!]

AAC: What parts of your specific climbing background inform your editorial vision?

Pete: The length and breadth of my climbing career is the single strength I have. I started as a boulderer, then we developed into top-ropers, and then we got into leading. Then we got into bolting. And then I moved to Yosemite and got into big-wall climbing—a lot of aid, speed ascents, so on. Then got into ice and mixed climbing; competed; got into pure ice; low-altitude alpinism. Then alpine rock, all that stuff, and then Himalayan alpinism and Alaskan alpinism.

So, along that path, I’ve either had the mishap, witnessed the mishap, had a close call, or nearly died in the same ways that people report. I understand the mindset. And I also understand, from having friends die or almost getting killed or being party to an accident, what it’s like being the partner involved.

I bring all that skill and experience into my tone and the way I treat people with whom I have a dialogue. I think that really informs things, because I’m really nonjudgmental. And you learn, like, Wow, I could do everything right; I could be minding my own business, and still get killed.

For longevity, we have to be taking what we know and giving it to other people without any thought of recompense. That’s the final stage in a climber’s evolution. At the same time, still burn your friends off and tick that next box. That’s all part of the game.

AAC: What have you learned about the emotional side of accidents from talking to so many accident witnesses and survivors?

Pete: Whenever there is an accident, especially a really serious one, we walk away as observers or participants with some degree of survival guilt. This is as old as time itself.

People often go straight to: How could I have prevented this? And right there is a mistake.

It was an accident. It was something that was unintentional. You don’t wake up in the morning and go: God, I really hope my climbing partner takes a big whipper today and breaks both legs. That would just make my day. I usually bring people back to that. Just think about what you were thinking the morning of the accident. That’s the truth of the intentions there. There’s always a presumption within humans that we can control things that we [can’t].

On a final note, I think the people who really walk away with a positive experience from accidents are the SAR folks who go in and do the job they’ve trained to do, or the volunteer rescue people—they get to practice their skill set and actually have a happy ending to the story when they save someone.

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The Huayhuash Is Still Open

Eric Kanopkin quests to find a dry spot for his tent. Photo by AAC member Luca Raso.

A Rare Ascent of Jirishanca Chico—A Story from the Mountaineering Fellowship Fund Grant

By Luca Raso

Originally published in Guidebook XVII

The mountain’s scale, as seen through my own eyes, terrified me. Film and photographs, a 60-year-old trip report, and even the topo sketches I had stared at for hours before arriving—none of them captured the size, or the exposure, or the weight of it. Lying in its eastern valley, listening to the static hiss of rain against nylon, I couldn’t sleep. I had been catfished by my own dreams. Any confidence I had built up in the Cordillera Blanca now felt suspect. Bootpacks and snow anchors set in place by mountain guides, lively refugios and high camps, and broader terrain that was mostly walkable; these were all crutches that fed into my delusion, now taken away by just one close glimpse at Jirishanca.

On June 2, 2025, after a few hours of tossing and turning in my sleeping bag, I set off with my partner Eric Kanopkin to climb Jirishanca Chico, a 5,400-meter peak in the Cordillera Huayhuash range of Peru. The grassy hills that rolled up to Niñacocha, the meltwater of the Rondoy Glacier, were flooded with rainwater and cow manure. Our double boots squished loudly as we went up the valley, waking and startling cattle as we passed. We were indiscreet spies under the cover of midnight’s darkness, clambering across no-man’s-land toward what we assumed was our acclimatization objective.

The first time I had seen the Huayhuash was back in 2024, from the popular hilltop sport climbing crag of Hatun Machay. I was there with Maxwell Hodges, a friend who helped introduce me to the climbing life—as well as to the Cordillera Blanca. That day, we were sunning ourselves on rock, a happy respite from slogging up the Blanca’s sloping glaciers. “Why don’t we head there?” I had asked him, pointing toward the jagged, snowcapped massif of the Huayhuash.

Trekking into the Mitococha Valley with views of (left to right) Jirishanca Chico, Jirishanca’s twin peaks, Rondoy, and Ninashanca. Photo by AAC member Luca Raso.

All we knew then of that place was the famous climbing accident recounted in Joe Simpson’s Touching the Void. While descending a 6,000-meter peak called Siula Grande in 1985, Simpson broke his leg and fell into a crevasse, which ultimately resulted in one of the most epic survival stories in mountaineering. Max just laughed. We weren’t ready. He was right; we could barely lead the bolted 5.10s at Hatun without our legs shaking.

Throughout a season of climbing the high peaks of the Cordillera Blanca and another year of climbing in Colorado, I could not stop thinking about the Huayhuash. Max and I climbed tourist peaks like Chopicalqui, Tocllaraju, and Pisco, and since we were always surrounded by other climbers and guides from all over the world, it was easy enough to mimic the common patterns of ascension even on our dirtbag budget. We followed the well-worn paths made by pack mules and beater taxis. Throughout our adventures, I kept my head up to admire the condors, untethered by the ground’s limits, as we were.

Luca and Eric find a mule at the Quartelhain trailhead of the Cordillera Blanca after driving through herds of cattle. Photo by AAC member Luca Raso.

The Huayhuash represented something different to me. Unlike the Blanca, it hosts no regular climbing activity; it’s harder to reach and has a higher concentration of more technical peaks. The number of climbers coming into the range each year can be counted on one hand. A significant reason for that lies in its history. The Huayhuash was closed off to climbing in the late 1980s into the ‘90s, as a result of the violent hegemony of a Maoist terrorist group called El Sendero Luminoso. Foreign climbers were turned away from the remote area for years, and the Huayhuash faded off of ticklists. Even after its reopening, the Huayhuash brought in limited climbing activity, while the Blanca, just hours to its north, expanded in popularity.

Eric Kanopkin traverses around one of the snow mushrooms on the west ridge of Jirishanca Chico before leading a pitch up an ice runnel. Photo by AAC member Luca Raso.

After leaving Peru in 2024, I was still drawn to the Huayhuash, but not just for the austere beauty of its mushroom-capped ridges and dramatic summit pinnacles. The mystique that shrouded the range, the lingering stigma among climbers, was what really captivated me. It was simply bizarre to me that two ranges, the Huayhuash and the Blanca, so close and similar in geography, could be perceived so differently by climbers. Stoked, ambitious, and just out of college, I was determined to go find out for myself.

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Once the sun rose, warm colors illuminated a world of winter above us. Eric and I were finally on the Rondoy Glacier, heading toward Chico’s northeast face. To climber’s right, Jirishanca’s north ridge was a sweeping ramp of snow and ice into the golden and pink heavens. That was the ultimate route that we were preparing for on Chico, a goal that ironically seemed farther out of reach the closer we got to it. I was worried that I was already in over my head, but my fear was dissipating from the restless night before. Dwarfed by the apu, the Quechua’s mountain gods, I was momentarily comforted by the extreme beauty around me. In that light, I was inside a Gothic cathedral on a Sunday morning, soothed by the voices of the choir. It took me a while to notice the serac that loomed over our path on the face above. Anxiety returned. “Are you worried about that?” I asked Eric.

He paused to catch his breath and looked at it. “Let’s just keep moving.”

To gain the west ridge, we simul-soloed a couple of easy mixed steps and then steep snow, around 100 meters or so. Once we crested it, we could see that much of the ridge proper was a corniced knife-edge, narrow and even steeper on its southern side. Between us and the summit stood a kilometer of snow mushrooms.

At first, the ridge looked impassable. The only other two reported attempts of this exact ridgeline (besides its first ascent) declared it to be too dangerous. Still early in the morning, we decided to give it a shot. We moved back down from the ridgeline to go around the serac, eventually climbing through it via a narrow chute of ice. This was nothing in comparison to our next obstacle. Across a football field of flat ridge, a 30-meter step of snow-covered rock stood in our way. Shattered limestone choss frosted with dollops of sugar snow obscured any obvious line.

Eric Kanopkin leads the chossy mixed crux pitch on Jirishanca Chico’s west ridge. Photo by AAC member Luca Raso.

Protection was doubtful, the climbing was steep, and the snow on top was too shallow for any pickets. Demoralized, I looked to Eric.

Eric, ten years older than me, was one of my first ice climbing partners back in Colorado. The two of us have gotten in over our heads together several times—trauma-bonding over epics like the 29 hours it took us to climb Kiener’s Route on Longs Peak in the dead of winter. Married, with a steady job and a house, Eric had his sh*t together, and he was easy to trust. When I asked him to come to Peru for his first trip, his eyes lit up. Our first week and a half climbing together in Peru had its highs and lows. We went to the Ishinca Valley and easily climbed Urus Este as our first acclimatization climb, though a bad empanada resulted in some gastrointestinal difficulty. On the North Face of Ranrapalca, I had my turn. Halfway up the route, I vomited all over the ropes and soiled my new M10 pants, which I blamed mostly on altitude sickness.

Base camp in the Huayhuash had been anticlimactic. Days of rain isolated us in our separate tents, and despite the surprising numbers of trekkers and their entourages around us, a claustrophobic loneliness set in. Eric had mentioned that his wife was not happy with his decision to go on this trip without her, and he was preoccupied with the aftermath via his inReach. I spent a lot of time alone in my tent, listening to the soft patter of rain and the thundering conversation and laughter emanating from the trekkers’ tents across the valley. It was a different feeling of remoteness than I’d expected from the Huayhuash.

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Luca Raso is very tired and stressed out on Jirishanca Chico’s summit mushroom. Photo by AAC member Eric Kanopkin.

“I think I can do it,” Eric said.

I looked down at our anchor, two pickets and an ice tool tied together. “Well, if that blows, I will try to jump off the other side of the ridge.”

Literally on the edge of my snow seat, I watched Eric lead the rope up and over the mixed step. At every placement of piton and Camalot, I shouted forced stoke at him. He showed stubborn confidence in every hook of his tool, standing on his frontpoints without any tremor in his legs. Occasionally, he cleaned chunks of rock into the abyss, but it never startled him. He was all in.

Once he swam up the next mushroom of sugar snow and built another picket anchor, he groaned with relief. “Hell yeah!” I yelled back. Eventually, the rope went tight, and I followed in his wake. I didn’t say anything when his gear came out with eerie ease, even as each pry of my ice tool to clean the pitons fractured more heaps of rock off the ridge.

From there, we swung leads across knife-edges and snow mushrooms for another half a kilometer to the summit. Often, it was hard to tell whether there was any mountain beneath our feet. It became clear why most climbers had thought the ridge to be too dangerous. The snow mushrooms’ physical structures seemed impossible: How could deep powder pile up so steeply without collapse? A few weeks after our ascent, Alexander Huber, Dani Arnold, and Simon Gietl bailed from Jirishanca’s east ridge, just across the saddle from our route, opting to end their route at the east summit, instead. It’s hard to say if conditions were the same, but there is a chance that we were braver (or more stupid) than the professional alpinists.

Eric let me have the final pitch. Exhausted from breaststroking my tools and kicking my feet into nothing, I had to catch my breath before belting out a loud “Whoo!” on Jirishanca Chico’s summit. From there, I finally appreciated the panorama of Siula Grande, Yerupajá, and Jirishanca around me, a momentary distraction from the stress of the past seven or so hours. Eric joined moments later, and we rejoiced in the reunion.

As we downclimbed the ridge back to the glacier, I thought about sirens. In The Odyssey, Ulysses sails his crew through treacherous waters past these alluring creatures and their infamous, transfixing siren song. While his sailors plug their ears to avoid the danger of drowning themselves for this beauty, Ulysses commands them to tie him to the mast of the ship. While most rational people would decide to cover their ears, Ulysses risked his sanity in order to experience something truly beautiful.

Perhaps Eric and I, tethered to each other, heard the Huayhuash’s siren song. On that delicate, corniced ridgeline, we experienced a new level of earthly beauty, unparalleled by any other experiences I have had in the mountains. But its fatal temptations also frightened me to my core. We were already talking about bailing on Jirishanca proper as we descended its smaller sibling. We had escaped the treacherous ridge alive, and it was hard to fathom another one on an even larger mountain at 6000 meters. We were satisfied enough with our time on Chico, a probable second known ascent of the Northeast Face. But as we left the Huayhuash and went home (where Eric patched things up with his wife), the feeling of failure crept into my mind. It felt as if we had gotten away with something, just barely escaping the lethal lure of the mountain.

With time and distance, this ascent has become a scrying glass. I had been driven by curiosity, a quiet itch to see if these seldom-climbed peaks could be a place of exploration and self-discovery for someone like me. I found the Huayhuash to be a place of alluring, dangerous beauty, but not without significant challenge. Yet my experiences there have ultimately reinforced my original curiosity with the range. As a young climber who quite frequently gets in over his head in climbing, the Huayhuash was a lesson in restraint. I came to the range with arrogant ambitions to climb Jirishanca, and its smaller sibling humbled me. While I false-started on the main objective for that trip, I am only more excited to return as a more experienced climber and rediscover these peaks with trusted partners like Eric—to hold me to the mast.

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Safer Than Socks in Your Hat

George Hurley and Layton Kor on the Titan, 1962. Photo by Huntley Ingalls.

A History of Climbing Helmets and an Updated UIAA Standard

By AAC UIAA Representative Stephen Gladieux, with research support from Denis Pivot, Lionel Kiener, and Alain Maurice

Translations of Chevalier and Bonatti by Stephen Gladieux

Originally Published in Guidebook XVII

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Less than a thousand feet from the summit, on the north face of the Eiger, Gaston Rébuffat hooked a finger into a piton, left behind from a previous ascent. The night before, as they bivvied, Rébuffat was surprised to find himself sleepless, with a sense of bad omens. “The stars seemed so near that you could touch them, and the Milky Way shone with sinister brightness,” he wrote in his book Starlight and Storm.

On that July day in 1952, their surroundings did prove sinister. Stuck behind several slower parties and faced with warming temperatures, Rébuffat’s team had to inch their way across the tedious traverses that guarded the summit, often taking alternate routes in order to avoid bottlenecks.

As luck would have it, Rébuffat hooked that piton at the exact moment a thunderous crack boomed from above. A massive rock came tumbling down, bursting and splitting into pieces that struck Rébuffat on the head. “But the finger hooked through the piton still held. It was very painful, and felt as if it had been sawn through.... A little blood fell from my cap and reddened the snow-flecked rock.”

Yet, with his head aching and the motivation drained out of him, Rébuffat carried on. Rumor has it that Rébuffat had stuffed his hat with socks, as was the custom at the time when climbing in areas with rockfall danger, and some credit this habit for saving his life. Well, that and the piton.

Without the padding of his rudimentary “helmet,” Rébuffat might not have become the first man to climb all six of the great north faces of the Alps.

Since then, it’s fair to say climbing helmets have undergone an evolution.

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Helmets: A History

The history of head protection in climbing starts earlier than Gaston Rébuffat’s injury on the Eiger. There was a parallel evolution, but staggered, between those climbing in the mountains and those exploring underground in caves.

In 1936, the trailblazing French caver Pierre Chevalier reported, “Helmets are beginning to be considered essential in sport caving.” However, during this period, and until around 1950, climbers aboveground were still wearing wool berets as the standard headwear. In 1948, Chevalier’s Escalades Souterraines (Subterranean Climbers) was published. It was one of the seminal works in early caving.

In the early 1950s felt hats became the norm. When there was risk of rockfall, they would occasionally be stuffed with socks or newspaper. This is where Rébuffat’s story takes the stage.

Four years later, in 1956, the ninth edition of Accidents in North American Mountaineering (now Accidents in North American Climbing) already showed an increasing preference for protective headgear. In comments preceding the accident reports, the editors wrote: “Another point that should be re-emphasized is the desirability of wearing a plastic helmet to protect the head from falling rock in areas where this danger is present. This has become a standard practice for some rock climbers in the Yosemite area.”

As helmets for other sports evolved, so too did climbing helmets. In 1954, Amisano Gino Valenza (AGV) produced the first fiberglass motorcycle helmet. It was used by many climbers until climbing-specific models became available.

Walter Bonatti knew helmets were critical. Describing his last ascent of the north face of the Matterhorn, done solo in winter, he wrote:

Again once more, I look to lighten my pack to move more rapidly. I toss food, two étriers, some pitons. I am tempted to get rid of my helmet as well, the glorious plastic helmet that, for four years, accompanied me on the most difficult enterprises. But after an instant of hesitation, I stay my hand and hold the helmet to my chest.

I caress its bumps as if they were wounds: each one of them corresponding to a rock, fallen off Mont Blanc, the Andes, so many other mountains. I placed it back in my pack.

It’s clear Bonatti recognized how many times the helmet had prevented injury. Despite the weight of early helmets, anyone who had their life saved by one would appreciate their value.

The new, lighter fiberglass motorcycle helmet and its growing use by serious climbers spurred the creation of helmets designed for climbers. Sporthaus Schuster was one of the earliest to come out with a model, released in 1960.

Helmets still weren’t used in a widespread way, however. They only had traction in select locations and circles of climbers. In 1966, Joe Brown developed a fiberglass helmet specifically for climbing. He only produced 50 or so of these before contracting with Mo Anthoine to make them. The Joe Brown helmet became popular with English-speaking climbers (and cavers) and was used extensively for decades.

In 1980, the first climbing helmet standard was created: UIAA 106. This was later used to create the European standard EN12492 in 2000, which made it a legal requirement for helmets sold in Europe.

With two milestones, 1993 was a big year for helmets. C.A.M.P. launched its LW 260 helmet. It was the first shell-and-foam-style helmet and weighed only 260 grams. That same year, Petzl started selling the once-ubiquitous Ecrin Roc. This powerhouse of a helmet, which most climbers have seen or worn, was the first with easy on-head adjustability. This allowed it to be loaned, rented, or borrowed easily. Many more climbers were able to try them or even swap them on climbs.

Helmets have continued to evolve alongside climbing. With helmets like the LW 260 and Petzl’s Meteor, which came out in 1997, the excuse that a helmet was too heavy for moving fast and light was seriously challenged. Helmets were becoming more and more comfortable.

In the earliest days of climbing, rockfall was considered the primary reason to wear a helmet. Both Gaston Rébuffat and Walter Bonatti prepared for rockfall hazards—and they both likely survived because of it. So, why did the standard for helmets need to change in 2025?

Ultimately, our climbing has changed, and so has the technology available to design helmets.

In an accident from 2022, ANAC editors reported on a leader fall at Smith Rock, where the climber got their leg snagged around the rope, flipped upside down, and smacked their head. The climber was not wearing a helmet. The analysis included the takeaway that “wearing a helmet would have prevented the skull fractures and brain bleed.”

Accidents like this certainly could have happened in the 1950s, but as we began to climb steeper routes, free, at ever higher grades, significant lead falls became more frequent. A fall on steep rock at Smith Rock is not going to result in a broken ankle from hitting a ledge as much as it might result in an inverted climber hitting the side of their head on the wall.

In 2023, when a climber was lowered off the end of his rope, having tied no stopper knot and misjudged the length of the climb, the climber suffered a serious head injury. Witnesses wrote to ANAC: “While we didn’t see the fall, we understand that he fell feet-first onto a flake near the bottom. He landed, tilted backward, and impacted the back left side of his head, crushing his helmet and sustaining a horrible head injury. The total fall was about 35 feet.” Though the climber was wearing a helmet at the time of the accident, it was not certified with any sort of rim impact. The crushed helmet shows that the climber was better off than had they not been wearing one, but it raises questions about helmet designs that were never forced to consider rim or side impacts.

The injury described above is one that doesn’t require a steep, hard climb. Rappel accidents are unfortunately common. Both of these accidents highlight that when we design helmets, we should care not just about protecting from rockfall, which is typically from directly above or a slight off-angle—rim impact is important too.

Climbing has changed over the decades. Routes are steeper in both rock and ice. Climbing and skiing have blended more and more. Ski mountaineering is becoming nearly mainstream. We must be more concerned with protecting ourselves from rim impact injuries, be it from flipping on a steep climb or falling while skiing—or something else unexpected.

A helmet can prevent injury in many cases or reduce the severity of injury. Modern helmets are not built with a nearly indestructible shell like early fiberglass helmets. Rather, they are designed to crush during impact—that is how they absorb some of the impact forces and spread the remaining force out, therefore making the peak force lower.

Berets stuffed with newspaper/socks.

First fiberglass motorcycle helmet.

1936: Pierre Chevalier reports that helmets begin to be used in sport caving.

1940s: Bérets used by French Alpinists.

1950s:

• Amisano Gino Valenza (AGV) makes the first fiberglass motorcycle helmet.

• French climbers favor berets stuffed with socks or newspaper

Pre-1960: Helmets are rarely used in climbing (outside of caves).

Joe Brown’s climbing helmet.

1966: Joe Brown produces a fiberglass climbing helmet that weighs 650 grams.

1980: The first UIAA 106 Helmet standard is published.

1993: Petzl releases its Ecrin Roc helmet. C.A.M.P. comes out with the shell-and-foam LW 260, at 260 grams.

1997: Petzl goes even lighter with the Meteor.

First UIAA 106 Helmet standard.

2000: The EN 12492 standard is published using UIAA 106.

2018: Petzl shares its PCSR-001 ski touring helmet testing standard with other manufacturers.

2025: UIAA 106 is updated with 10° rim impact.

2026: The UIAA will establish a ski mountaineering helmet standard.

Petzl Ecrin Roc helmet.

C.A.M.P. shell-and-foam.

Petzl meteor.

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Modern Helmet Standards

The UIAA 106 helmet standard has now been updated since its first version in 1980. It consists of multiple requirements based on the variety of ways in which a helmet needs to protect a climber. Helmets are conditioned at different temperatures and humidities before testing—for example, they’re artificially aged with UV radiation to simulate degradation over time—all to ensure they work in the environments where we climb. The real soul of the standard can be boiled down to a few key ideas: A helmet has to prevent a sharp rock from penetrating, it has to absorb impact forces, and it has to stay on if it gets pulled or pushed up or off your head.

As more accidents like the ones described above occur, due to the increased prevalence of that kind of impact, it is the middle requirement that we need to look at in depth. What does impact absorption mean? How do we control it?

One of the most common serious closed head injuries happens as a result of a sudden impact to the head. In a coup-contrecoup injury, the head is typically moving very quickly and then is stopped by an immobile object. The brain sloshes forward and hits the inside of the skull, then rebounds and hits the other side, getting damaged in both cases. With this and other types of traumatic brain injury (TBI), the goal is to slow the acceleration (or deceleration) of the head. We do that by limiting the forces that get transmitted to the head when it is impacted.

The UIAA helmet standard allows a maximum of 8 kN of force to be transmitted to your head. Essentially, when a bigger impact (sudden) force hits the helmet, it needs to slow down that transmission to your head.

The UIAA standard limits this to 8 kN, whereas the EN standard only limits it to 10 kN—so a UIAA-certified helmet is much safer than one only certified to EN 12492.

The UIAA Safety Commission took the lead on a revised helmet standard because of the large amount of research and testing involved. We could be more nimble and get an update published much more quickly. And of course, the sooner a standard is published, the sooner the wheels can get turning on implementing it, as there is a lag time between a new or updated standard and when manufacturers are able to change designs or update testing, and finally get a new product on the market.

From 2022 to 2025, the UIAA conducted a large helmet study with nine labs and numerous manufacturers. One of the most difficult issues was standardizing the impact testing in a way that consistently worked, given the different testing apparatus at different labs and manufacturers. Also, helmets have ventilation holes in different places. Any ventilation hole means you might get unlucky with a sharp rock, but the test shouldn’t favor one ventilation hole pattern over another arbitrarily; though, if a ventilation pattern is truly better, the tests should show that. These are the shared challenges for manufacturers and the UIAA Safety Commission.

Several years of work resulted in an updated helmet standard that includes testing for impact absorption 10° above the helmet’s rim on the front, back, and sides. Helmets will be coming onto the market in 2026 that will be tested to this new standard.

Wearing a helmet is a deeply personal safety decision. Bonatti’s indecision was ultimately swayed by memories of the times his helmet saved his life. But a helmet doesn’t last forever; they break down with time, UV exposure, and small impacts, even if there is no major event. Check the manufacturer’s recommended lifespan and inspect your helmet for damage. It can be worthwhile to upgrade to a new one even if your current helmet isn’t quite to the end of its recommended life.

Now, almost 74 years after socks in his hat likely saved Rébuffat’s life, we can have confidence that a new helmet can do the same for an accident that impacts the rim.

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Elsewhere: The Problem of Human Waste Management in the Wilderness

A Profile of AAC Member Geoff Hill

By Hannah Provost

Originally published in Guidebook XVII.

It wasn’t the first time, nor would it be the last, that Geoff Hill had chopped up frozen human waste—overflowing from a 200-liter barrel. He was a graduate student at the University of British Columbia (UBC), studying the effects of climate change in the Canadian Arctic. The university had arranged a deal with the Inuit whose land he was standing on. The students could conduct research there, but they could not leave any trace, including human waste—hence the chopping.

All around him, the Arctic gleamed in shades of dense ice, the ocean a penetrating blue. Below the tundra, in a hole, out of sight, was where the research team kept the thing no one ever talks about: a frozen bucket of human waste, a.k.a. a “sh*t barrel,” as Hill often calls it. Tucked away. Put elsewhere.

And that’s the trouble. In a wilderness like the Arctic, there is no elsewhere.

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As a climber who fell in love with alpine rock, Hill has spent much time on the road driving toward his next climbing destination. He learned quickly that what he loved most was swimming through a 5.10 hand crack high on a steep, sunny wall. That lifelong thirst for high-country granite would bring him to many wild places, including Mt. Barrill in the Ruth Gorge, El Cap, the Bugaboos, and Mont Blanc’s aiguilles. An epic during an alpine climb in the Canadian Rockies in 2004 spurred him to start reading Accidents in North American Climbing, and he would continue engaging with the AAC throughout his climbing career—for the rescue benefit, community, and research grants that would, in turn, help catalyze his calling.

His passion for these alpine landscapes was boundless, but Hill’s educational path in environmental science was bringing him up against the reality of outdoor recreation’s environmental impact. He wanted to do something about it.

Hill began with driving, launching the Biodiesel Project at UBC, which added sodium hydroxide and methanol to a vat of recycled cooking oil to create an alternative to diesel. “It was fun and dangerous in the beginning,” he recalls. “The pH is crazy. Like, if it splashed in your eye, for sure it would have dissolved a hole in your eyeball.” But it worked. He would fuel up his 1993 Volkswagen Jetta with this biofuel and hit the road to Canmore, Squamish, and even Yosemite. He would later teach some Yosemite rangers how to run their own trucks on biofuel from their waste kitchen grease.

Called by the mountains, Hill toyed with becoming an ACMG Guide (the AMGA equivalent in Canada), but when he failed his exam, he realized his heart wasn’t in it and that he’d rather serve the mountain environment itself—not clients.

Funded by Canada’s Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (and an AAC Research Grant), Hill started ringing up the rangers and national park personnel he’d worked with during his previous studies and guide training. He wanted to study the alpine environment in a way that would produce practical results: What did they need help with?

Geoff Hill installs a urine-diverting conveyor-belt toilet system at Rocky Mountain National Park.

Again and again, the National Park Service spoke to the problem of human waste management. Tara Vessella, who runs the backcountry program in Rocky Mountain National Park, spoke of the ongoing struggle to find new land for pit toilets. As Hill recalls her saying, “I cannot find a spot in the forest to put a new pit toilet because every time I dig a hole in the ground, I find old sh*t.” The pit-toilet model, so ubiquitous in the United States, wasn’t sustainable for backcountry landscapes with such intense visitation numbers. So Hill, recalling his frozen-waste-chopping days, embarked on a PhD that would make everyone else’s “business” into his business.

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Humans expel feces and urine daily—what we term “waste” when it’s not well integrated into the ecosystem, especially our poop. Yet when we look at the terms more commonly used for animal poop—dung, scat, droppings, guano—the “waste” subtext is absent, revealing a bias toward thinking that human excrement is dysfunctionally related to the natural environment. But Geoff Hill believes it doesn’t have to be that way.

The science is pretty straightforward: Human urine (and all mammal urine, for that matter) is excellent plant fertilizer. Meanwhile, human poop is food for invertebrates and microorganisms—in fact, in the process of eating mammal poop, microorganisms produce rich organic matter that makes for fertile soil.

We’ve evolved to be part of our ecosystem. As Hill puts it, “[We’re] no different than a buffalo running around, dropping a dump on the prairie.” But the problem comes at scale, and when these streams mix.

As Hill relates, “[Waste] became a problem when we moved into castles from nomad culture. It’s concentrated there; it’ll breed bacteria. People got really sick. Black plague. So, got to get it out of the castle. We [then] try putting it in buckets and sloshing it out onto the street.... More black plague. So, get it in the river. But there’s no sense in having a bucket of poo and a bucket of pee if you’re just going to put it in the river, so put it in one bucket intentionally—that’s the toilet.”

Continues Hill, “And from a human health perspective, it is one of the great inventions of all human time. Add to it flushing water and a waste water-treatment plant, so you’re not polluting the river, and you have this whole paradigm of human waste going together in a single-hole toilet and getting flushed downstream to be managed elsewhere.” This paradigm, so dominant in the Western world, doesn’t transfer well to the alpine, however, where there really is no “elsewhere” and where the single-hole toilet is in fact part of the problem.

With no plumbing and waste-removal being exceedingly expensive in such remote locations, the pit toilet—burying it and forgetting about it—has become the common solution. But when human urine and excrement are stored together, like in a pit toilet, urea—the main chemical constituent in urine—will rapidly oxidize into ammonia. And ammonia is toxic: It smells bad, and the invertebrates and worms that would normally happily eat mammal waste, catalyzing its decomposition, say no thanks.

In 2000, the EPA banned the creation of new large-capacity cesspools (which include many pit-toilet designs), “because untreated sanitary waste from cesspools can enter ground water and contaminate drinking water sources.” Between the ammonia toxicity, Vessella’s testimony about running out of land for new pit toilets, and the EPA ban, it was clear that what Hill was hearing from the rangers was rooted in very tangible problems.

At first, Hill was tempted to believe that composting toilets could be the solution. But as he researched and tested the output of various models installed in national parks, he repeatedly found grim results. Because these toilets required the introduction of dry goods like wood shavings for their “composting” process, they added volume. Moreover, they weren’t actually creating compost—with the amount of excrement added daily, the process for turning the results into safe fertilizer was too slow, plus most parks had to remove the waste anyway, instead of reintroducing it back into the ecosystem, because the composted waste didn’t meet federal safety standards for fertilizer.

Hill eventually found himself in France, looking at a conveyor-belt toilet. This model took the science seriously and did one major thing differently: The conveyor belt diverted the urine so that the combination of waste products wouldn’t create ammonia, leaving the worms and nematodes to gobble up the solids. And the design was feasible without running water—after a user does their business, urine is directed to the ground via grooves in the conveyer belt, while the inclined conveyer belt carries away the solid waste thanks to a few steps on a mechanical foot pedal. Once it’s in the storage container for solids, worms happily munch away. The example toilets Hill saw in Europe barely needed attention from their technicians, even after years of use, simply because the system was functioning properly, resulting in a significantly lower volume of end product.

He quickly licensed the use of these robust, reliable, stainless steel, urine-diverting conveyor-belt toilet seats from Emmanuel Morin, the industrial designer who designed and sold them through his company Ecodomeo, and started using them in toilets across the Americas. Hill’s business, Toilet Tech, was born.

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Through Toilet Tech, Hill has outfitted over 400 remote sites, from Alaska’s Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve and Glacier Bay to Los Glaciares and Torres del Paine in Argentina and Chile, respectively. You can also find Hill’s creations at Smith Rock and Angels Landing in Zion, where desert environments also make human waste management extra tricky. In fact, Hill’s toilet technology might be the most efficient and cost-effective solution for any public-use toilet that isn’t incorporated into existing municipal sewage structures.

However, the US Forest Service, BLM, and National Park Service move slowly, and often don’t have the funds for a new system, regardless of how badly they need it or how well it works. But despite these constraints, many enterprising NPS staff have partnered with Hill to implement this new vision of waste management in the backcountry—at Mt. Rainier, Rocky Mountain, Zion, and other national parks.

Ultimately, Hill isn’t making a crapload of money on this endeavor—it’s a side quest at best. Yet Hill’s passion for eco-forward innovation and deep knowledge of composting continue to motivate his work at Toilet Tech and his salaried position as head of science at Earth Funeral, a company that specializes in an environmentally friendly alternative to burial and cremation that uses a 30-day process to transform a body into nutrient-rich soil. Hill’s love for alpine granite remains undimmed as well, and has inspired a new dream that involves figuring out how to clean up water bodies in the alpine—he envisions a world in which climbers can hike up to alpine ascents with a teacup, no filter needed.

Though most of us climbers can’t do much more than incorporate good WAG bag etiquette into our climbing ethics, it’s inspiring to know that some climbers are using their expertise to move the needle on the infrastructure that supports our outdoor recreation. Perhaps someday soon those outdated pit and composting toilets at your local area will be replaced by one with conveyor belts, all thanks to Geoff Hill.

Beyond all this, Hill’s story also helps us shift a common paradigm: What would it mean to interrogate the things that we, as a community, let disappear into the elsewhere—that we bury and don’t address? Whether it’s our excrement, the way we interact with and support (or don’t support) each other, or our relationship with fear and risk tolerance, sometimes it’s worth taking a page out of Hill’s book and uncovering the stuff put elsewhere.

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A Message from AAC Leadership + AAC Updates

Originally Published in Guidebook XVII

As we step into 2026, I want to begin with gratitude. The support you provide the American Alpine Club through your membership and donations enables us to deliver meaningful work to climbers across the country. Your commitment strengthens the AAC and ensures that we can continue to serve our members.

Climbing is built on connection: the bond between partners, the shared experience at the crag or on an expedition, and the knowledge passed from one generation to the next. This year, we are deepening our focus on uniting climbers and celebrating the culture that gives meaning to our time on rock, ice, and alpine terrain. We are building programming that strengthens members’ connections and creates more opportunities to gather, learn, and celebrate climbing. We look forward to sharing more in the coming months as we build toward 2027 and our 125th anniversary.

Across the country, our lodging facilities remain places where friendships are formed, knowledge is shared, and adventures begin. We continue to deliver critical publications and media, including The American Alpine Journal, Accidents in North American Climbing, monthly Prescription videos, the American Alpine Club Podcast and The Cutting Edge. Our core member benefits, including rescue and medical benefits, discounts, and access to our world-class library, reflect our commitment to supporting climbers wherever their journeys take them.

The AAC plays a unique role in sustaining and strengthening climbing. We maintain the record of climbing so it continues to inform and inspire climbers today. We create moments of connection where people see themselves reflected. And we remain committed to being a sustainable and adaptable organization prepared to meet the evolving needs of our members.

Inside these pages, you will see the AAC’s charge reflected: a commitment to learning, the power of member contributions, and the meaningful journeys climbers undertake around the world. In this edition of The Guidebook, you will find:

• “Safer Than Socks in Your Hat: A History of Climbing Helmets and an Updated UIAA Standard”—a practical look at how helmet design and standards have developed, and what climbers should understand about today’s protection.

• “The Huayhuash Is Still Open: A Rare Ascent of Jirishanca Chico”—reflections from a challenging expedition funded by the AAC’s Mountaineering Fellowship Fund Grant, offering lessons in risk, humility, and renewed inspiration.

• “Elsewhere: The Problem of Human Waste Management in the Wilderness”—a celebration of the work of one AAC member in advancing human waste management systems in alpine environments and what it means for sustainable access.

• “An Interview with ANAC Editor Pete Takeda”—sharing key insights from the incidents featured in this year’s Accidents in North American Climbing, to help climbers make better decisions in complex terrain.

• “Rewind the Climb: The Steck-Salathé on Yosemite’s Sentinel Rock”—a return to an era-defining ascent in Yosemite and the unique vision of John Salathé.

Each of these contributions reflects a core part of our mission: supporting climbers, learning from experience, honoring our history, and strengthening the connections that define this community.

Thank you for being part of this effort. I am grateful for your continued support and look forward to the work ahead.

Ben Gabriel

AAC Executive Director

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AAC Updates

Operations and Governance

• The Board, with continued leadership from our President, Nina Williams, welcomed new directors Maryanna Saenko and Sean Chiasson. In addition, the Board elected a new Executive Committee:

  • Vice President: Keith Thomajan

  • Secretary: Mo Beck

  • Treasurer: Howard Lukens

• We want to extend our sincere appreciation to outgoing board members Rob DeConto and Pavan Surapaneni for their years of dedication, guidance, and support.

• At the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival, we were honored to be a part of the Best Film: Climbing award, which was given to Old Man Lightning, a film sponsored by the AAC.

• We are pleased to welcome new staff to the American Alpine Club, including VP of Philanthropy Melanie Hood and Administrative Assistant Alyssa Grizenk

Member Services

• Congratulations to the following climbing teams for receiving Piolets d’Or in 2025. We are honored to have been a small part of these ascents, through conferring the Cutting Edge Grant to the first team listed below, and reporting each of these ascents in the AAJ.

  • August Franzen, Dane Steadman, and Cody Winckler, for the first ascent of Yashkuk Sar.

  • Aleš Česen and Tom Livingstone, for the first ascent of the west ridge of Gasherbrum III.

  • Spencer Gray, Ryan Griffiths, and Matt Zia, for the first ascent of the southwest arête of Kaqur Kangri.

• The AAC 2026 Spring Grants Cycle will be increasing funding for the Research Grant to $9,000.

Programs

• The AAC met with other national federation members in Kosovo for the UIAA’s annual General Assembly (GA). At the GA, AAC representative Ron Funderburke was named President of the Training Commission.

• Due to a lapse in appropriations, the federal government shut down and halted nonessential operations. The shutdown abated efforts to engage government agencies on implementation issues associated with the EXPLORE Act, and it also impacted federal agencies, such as the National Park Service, in the execution of their duties.

• The Climbing Grief Fund received expanded funding and will be able to fund additional awards this year.

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Foremothers: The Story Behind the Four Women Who Helped Found the American Alpine Club

Annie Peck (top left)] Library of Congress; [Fanny Bullock (top middle)] AAC Library Collections; [Fay Fuller (top right)] Wiki Commons; [Josephine Peary (bottom)] Library of Congress; c AAC member Foster Denney

By Sierra McGivney, research supported by the AAC Library

Originally Published in Guidebook XVI

Fuller, Miss Fay
Peary, Mrs. Robert E.
Peck, Miss Annie S.A.M.
Workman, Mrs. Fanny Bullock, F.R.S.G.S.

Their names were written in ink, part of the list of founding members of the American Alpine Club in the AAC bylaws and register book. These four women answered Angelo Heliprins' call to establish an “Alpine Society.” The American Alpine Club was established in 1902, but would not get its name until 1905.

The founding members determined that dues were to be five dollars a year, about $186.90 in today's money. This early version of the Club was interested in projecting a reputation of mountain expertise: members had to apply for membership with a resume of mountain climbing or an explorational expedition they had participated in. Those without a sufficiently impressive resume would not be accepted as members. All the founders had lists of their ascents and exploratory expeditions underneath their names to drive the point home that this was a club of high mountain achievers.

It was no small feat that these women were invited to participate in founding an alpine club at the turn of the 20th century. After all, women weren’t allowed in the British Alpine Club until 1974, forcing women to create their own alpine or climbing clubs.

But Fay Fuller, Josephine Peary, Annie Peck, and Fanny Bullock Workman were forces to be reckoned with, each in their own way. They helped steer the American Alpine Club from its beginnings and pushed boundaries in mountain climbing and Arctic exploration, all well before the 19th Amendment, ratified in 1920, gave women the right to vote. Each year, their new accomplishments were published in the bylaws and register book under their name, and some were even invited to speak during the AAC Annual Gathering about their expeditions.

Ultimately, these four women are foremothers to American climbing and exploration. Their stories are shaped by their historical context, but the meaning of their mountain achievements is timeless.

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Miss Edwina Fay Fuller was the first woman to summit Mt. Rainier in 1890. Fuller also climbed other glaciated peaks in the Cascades: Mt. Hood, Mt. Adams, Mt. Pitt (now Mt. McLoughlin, which still had a glacier until the early 20th century), and Sahale Mountain. She was described as self-reliant and dogged.

Fay Fuller’s ascent of Rainier nearly ostracized her from Tacoma society—not because she was mountaineering but because of what she wore and who she traveled with.

Her party of five, all men except for her—scandalous for the time—woke up on August 10, 1890, at half past four and began their arduous journey toward the summit. In a 1950 feature article about Fuller in Tacoma’s newspaper, The News Tribune, she said, “I was very nearly ostracized in Tacoma because of that trip—a lone woman and four men climbing a mountain, and in that immodest costume.”

Her “immodest costume,” an ankle-length bloomer suit covered with a long coatdress, was made of thick blue flannel. She also covered her face in charcoal and cream to prevent a sunburn (unfortunately, it didn’t work). Fuller was determined to reach the summit on this attempt, her second up Mt. Tahoma or Tacoma, now Mt. Rainier.

Fuller and her group climbed the Gibraltar Ledges, a Grade II Alpine Ice 1/2 with moderate snow climbing and significant rockfall hazard. Today, the most popular route on Rainier is Disappointment Cleaver, a mix of snowfields, steep switchbacks, and crevassed glaciers, but no technical climbing. Fuller and her team navigated the difficult and exposed terrain of there route with little prior experience and with gear we wouldn’t dare use today, successfully summiting Rainier.

Fay Fuller. Photo by Wiki Commons.

Len Longmire, their guide—though he had never been to the summit—recalled that one of the group members offered Fuller a hand at an especially dangerous place. “No thanks,” she replied, “I want to get up there under my own power or not at all.”

That night, under the stars, the team slept in one of many craters on the stratovolcano, listening to avalanches raging down the mountain. The team continued down safely the next morning, leaving a sardine can containing their names, a tin cup, and a flask filled with brandy as proof of their adventure.

Fuller went on to summit the mountain once more with the Mazamas in 1894.

Her ascent led to her becoming a fierce journalist. She went on to cover the Chicago and St. Louis world’s fairs, and helped found the Mazamas in 1894, the American Alpine Club in 1902, and The Mountaineers in 1906. She became the world’s first harbor mistress in Tacoma and was an actress. Expectations be damned.

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Mrs. Josephine Peary attended Spencerian Business College and graduated as the class valedictorian in 1880. Fueled by her own sense of adventure, she accompanied her husband on four of his Arctic expeditions, learning how to hunt, fighting off walruses, and exploring the breathtaking beauty of Greenland. She was considered the “First Lady of the Arctic” and gave birth to her first child, Marie, about 13 degrees, or just under 900 miles, from the North Pole in 1893.

Josephine Peary. Photo by Wikimedia Commons.

“I cannot but admire her courage. She has been where no white woman has ever been, and where many a man hesitates to go,” wrote her husband, Robert Peary—who was embroiled in his own controversy in the early 1900s about whether he “discovered” the North Pole and his treatment of the Greenlandic Inuit—in the preface of Josephine’s book My Arctic Journal.

When the American Alpine Club was formed, sport and trad climbing didn’t exist, and ice climbing was extremely primitive. Exploration was nearly as important as mountaineering in defining the sport.

The American Alpine Club’s foundation was based on exploration and mountain climbing. Indeed, included in the 1902 bylaws was the following mission: “The objects of the Club shall be the scientific exploration and study of the higher mountain elevations and of the regions lying within or about the Arctic and Antarctic Circles; the cultivation of the mountain craft...”

Josephine Peary was not a climber. Her expertise was Arctic exploration, which was wholly unknown to the Western world at the time. In 1891, Peary ventured to northern Greenland with her husband and their crew on the Kite. She spent days under the midnight sun gathering yellow arctic poppies and shooting auks, gulls, and eider ducks.

On September 23, Mrs. Peary joined a small group on a smaller boat, the Mary Peary, to head up Inglefield Gulf. They searched for walruses to obtain the ivory in their tusks and meat for the coming winter. At this time, ivory was in high demand, with the United States taking in 200 tons per year by 1913. The devastating effects of the ivory trade on animal populations have made it illegal since 1989.

Robert Peary had brought a Kodak camera and asked the crew members to row until he said stop. He was so engrossed in getting his picture just right—much like a national park tourist—that he forgot to tell them to stop and ran right on top of an ice cake, nearly tipping the boat over. In the chaos, a walrus was harpooned and it dove underneath the water, dragging the boat off the ice cake and righting it.

But the damage was already done. According to Peary, 250 walruses surrounded the boat and bullets started flying. The walruses were not going down without a fight. Bullets whistled by Josephine’s ears in all directions while she reloaded guns.

“I thought it about an even chance whether I would be shot or drowned,” wrote Peary in My Arctic Journal.

This was just the beginning of their time in the Arctic, and danger was all around them, but she was excited by the uncertainty.

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AAC founding member Fanny Bullock Workman standing on Silver Throne plateau, Karakoram. Public Domain Wikimedia Commons c Image recolored by AAC member Foster Denney.

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Today, Annie Peck might be best known for wearing knickerbockers on her 1895 ascent of the Matterhorn. According to Peck’s article “A Woman’s Ascent of the Matterhorn” for McClure's Magazine, wearing knickerbockers with or without a short skirt was the norm when “high climbing.”

Annie Peck. Photo by Wikimedia Commons.

But not everyone felt this way. Both in and outside the context of mountain climbing, women could face retribution, such as arrest or fines, for wearing pants, but most of the time, they just walked away with damaged reputations or faced social exclusion for their fashion choices. However, some women were arrested for wearing pants and even jailed. Emma Snodgrass, in 1852, was arrested several times for wearing pants in Boston, and Helen Hulick spent five days in jail in 1938 for wearing slacks to a court hearing in Los Angeles.

Peck was a suffragette—whether her pants-wearing was an act of political defiance or a matter of safety, other women had been badly injured or perished while wearing skirts climbing, and she would not be one of them.

“For a woman in difficult mountaineering to waste her strength and endanger her life with a skirt is foolish in the extreme,” wrote Peck in a 1901 article for Outing Magazine titled “Practical Mountain Climbing.”

Peck was a former Latin professor at Smith College who left it all behind to climb mountains and lecture about her adventures. From 1890 to 1910, she climbed a dozen mountains in Europe and Latin America. She would lecture, save up her money, climb mountains, and then repeat the process.

Peck was on the hunt to stand on the apex of America and thought she had found it in Mt. Huascarán in Peru. In 1908, at the age of 58, she successfully summited the mountain on her sixth attempt. She was the first known person to ever stand on top of Mt. Huascarán.

With the help of fellow American Alpine Club member Herschel Parker, a physicist and mountaineer, she determined that the top of the mountain was around 23,520 feet, but she took no measurements from the summit, only the saddle. Peck’s ascent and the associated height she had achieved meant she now held an altitude record, eclipsing Fanny Bullock Workman’s previous record. The claim would start one of the biggest disputes of mountaineering history.

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Fanny Bullock. Photo by Wikimedia Commons.

Fanny Bullock Workman was a fierce woman you wouldn’t want to cross. She had an impressive climbing resume, with ascents in the Alps, the Karakoram, and the Punjab Himalaya— she had one of the longer lists of ascents in the AAC’s founders section.

Deeply ambitious, Workman snatched the women’s altitude record from Annie Peck in 1906 when she climbed Pinnacle Peak in the Nun Kun massif in the Himalaya. This spurred Peck to try to take the record back with her climb of Mt. Huascarán, which she claimed to be higher than Pinnacle Peak.

People were engrossed in their feud. The media couldn’t get enough of two powerful women in the same field fighting for the top spot—or rather, the highest spot. Both women gave interviews for articles in newspapers like the Trenton Evening Times, Harrisburg Daily Independent, Detroit Free Press, and Suburbanite Economist, to name a few—defaming one another and trying to frame the story's narrative for their benefit. Whether their feud was malicious or mutually beneficial, people knew their names and accomplishments as mountaineers first, then as women.

In 1909, the American Alpine Club invited Annie Peck to speak about her ascent of Mt. Huascarán. However, the Club grew concerned when newspaper coverage and fans began to question how she ascertained the height of the mountain. Earlier on the same day of her lecture at the AAC’s annual meeting, Charles E. Fay, Vice President of the AAC, proposed an investigation into the height of Huascarán since “exaggerated reports have recently been circulated by the press...regarding the altitude of Mt. Huascarán.”

News outlets exaggerated the peak’s height to up to 26,000 feet. Peck had not brought an aneroid barometer—a sealed metal chamber that expands and contracts depending on the atmospheric pressure around it—with her on the climb to measure the altitude, nor did she take a measurement from the summit, so she couldn’t be sure about the height.

Workman wanted to end speculation and get her title back. In 1909, she spent the equivalent of half a million dollars to send surveyors to Peru to find the true height of Mt. Huascarán. The surveyors returned with triangulated heights for both the north and south peaks. They determined that the north peak was 21,812 feet (modern technology has determined it is actually 21,831 feet) and the South Peak was 22,187 feet (actually 22,205 feet). Either way, Pinnacle Peak was higher than both.

According to a 1911 New York Times article, the Academy of Sciences ruled in Workman’s favor. The year prior, in a letter sent from Henry G. Bryant, then AAC President, to Annie Peck, Bryant said the AAC sided with Workman’s assessment of the peak’s height. Workman had won back the altitude record, retaining her reign over women’s alpinism.

Caught off guard, Peck didn’t hesitate to make a quippy remark in a letter back to Bryant: “I had not been aware that her interest in my ascent of Huascarán extended so far, though I am not surprised. What fine thing it is to have plenty of money!”

But not all was lost for Peck. In 1910, the Hassan Cigarette Company featured a series of trading cards titled “World’s Greatest Explorers.” Out of 25 cards, Peck was the only woman featured. That same year, the Singer Sewing Machine Company gave away a packet of postcards featuring Peck’s travels and climbing accomplishments with every machine they sold. She still published her book about her expedition on Mt. Huascarán, but switched the title from The Apex of America to A Search for the Apex of America. She was a household name, something money can’t buy.

Still, you wouldn’t have wanted to be seated between Peck and Workman at the American Alpine Club Annual Gathering that year.

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These four women helped shape the Club as we know it today. Fuller, Workman, Peck, and Peary were strong-willed, educated women in a world governed by rules and regulations of what a woman should be. Each woman stood defiant in her own way. Fuller was independent. Peary welcomed exploration. Peck believed in safety regardless of norms. Workman was dogged in all of her pursuits. They were courageous and ambitious, petty and imperfect. They were history makers. They were part of something bigger than themselves.

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The Lizard Life: A Glimpse at Hueco Climbing Culture in Its Modern Age

Photo by AAC member Michael Lim.

By Hannah Provost

Originally published in Guidebook XVI

Luis Contreras is breathing steadily, forcefully, with intention.

He is 15 feet off the deck, and has 20 more feet of textured edges, sidepulls, and huecos to top out Wyoming Cowgirls, a 35-foot V5 on Hueco Tanks’ North Mountain that has recently been reopened.

A few pads sit lonely in the rocks below. Each of his precise foot placements and composed breaths are indicators of the stakes, and they reflect the time this climber put into top-rope rehearsing such a consequential highball. His movements are linked in chains of powerful bursts punctuated by rests. A certain barely observable shaking reverberates from his core into his limbs, but his breaths and the wind are the song he is dancing to—the shaking and the fear squashed down.

For Contreras, “the best climbs are the ones that even if you’re not a climber you walk by and you say, 'Wow that’s a sick climb...' I [am] drawn to these striking tall faces.” Wyoming Cowgirls had always been one of those climbs.

Contreras tops out quietly, his focus unwavering until he is fully over the rounded slab of this immense boulder, where he sits. No whoops, no cheers. Just a private adrenaline high coursing through his veins.

Instead of celebration, he gazes out to the brush-filled desert beyond.

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How do you understand the essence of a place? There are of course the facts and figures, the ecology and topography of the terrain, but there are also the traditions and rituals and history of the people who move across it. Such entanglements are why some might say that “the climbing community” (singular) is a misnomer. Our landscapes too-specifically shape us.

For example, Rifle is the land of lifers. That tight canyon, with its near-instant access to climbing seconds from the car, allows for kids splashing in the stream, craggers at Project Wall rubbernecking as you drive by, and the daily parking shuffle as you move from crag to crag. Ten Sleep is Adult Summer Camp: Given the long journey required to get there and its minimal infrastructure, the place welcomes tech bros and remote workers to set up shop for a month or the whole summer, with scheduled camp activities limited to river time, brewery time, or climbing time. As a final example, the Red River Gorge is never never land, where a dirtbag might never grow up.

Climbing cultures, like any culture, are a mixture of language, beliefs, rituals, norms, legends, and ethics that are largely shared by a community and emerge from the interaction of that community with their landscape. Hueco’s iconic roofs, abundant kneebars, airy highballs, deep bouldering history, importance to Indigenous cultures like the Tigua Indians of Ysleta del Sur, and fragile and rare ecosystem shape its climbers too, on an individual level and at scale.

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Bouldering in Hueco is an intimate affair. With guides required to access most of the climbing, and groups capped at ten people, “most people know most people, and if you don’t know them it’s only a matter of time,” says Luis Contreras, who is a Hueco guide of a decade and El Paso born and raised.

Most climbers at Hueco fall into one of four groups: the El Paso “city” climbers, the lifers who own property right outside Hueco Tanks State Park, the seasonal dirtbags who migrate every winter, and the out-of-town visitors who pilgrimage there (often yearly) when they can scrabble together some PTO. Even the visitors become known entities—once you have a guide you trust, why not come back to climb with them again and again? You’ll likely find who you’re looking for at one of three community hubs: the Iron Gnome, the AAC’s Hueco Rock Ranch, or the Mountain Hut.

Photo by AAC member Dawn Kish.

Within such a small community, a run-in with an old head or unique character is considered commonplace. You might chat with Lynn Hill over beers at the Iron Gnome, or spot Jason Kehl out in the distance developing a new line. You’ll likely wave at Sid Roberts as he leaves the park from his early-morning session, or even share a laugh with the colorful John Sherman—the originator of the V-Scale.

But no matter what kind of Hueco climber you are, climbing at Hueco feels deeply entangled—it requires a self-consciousness of landscape, access, and ethics that doesn’t just fall away when you throw down your pads and pull onto rock. But that’s not a downside for locals like Luis Contreras and Joey McDaniel. That’s the richness of it.

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Among the javelinas and ringtails, among the scooped huecos and textured patina crimps, it’s common to hear the idea that “climbing in Hueco is a privilege.”

Again and again, locals point to a shared ethic when asked about the culture of Hueco. There is a protectiveness over the ecological uniqueness of the place. The Chihuahuan Desert holds 25 percent of the world’s cacti diversity after all—including prickly friends like the Texas rainbow cactus, scarlet hedgehog cactus, and horse crippler cactus. Hueco guide Joey McDaniel always likes to say, when it comes to Hueco, “the more you look, the more you see.” And indeed, for the ancient water systems in the huecos for which the park gets its name—where the famous fairy shrimp eggs lie in wait, for years at a time, anticipating the water that will enable them to hatch— this is most certainly the case.

Some Hueco climbers express pride in the sandbagged nature of the grading. Others hold tight to the humbling challenge posed by the proliferation of highballs in the area.

Others note the awe of walking past ancient rock art on your way to the proj, or learning from a tribal elder during the park’s Community Fair (also known as the Interpreter Fair) about the way local tribes continue to celebrate Hueco as a sacred space.

For some, there is something special about how knowledge and local ethics are passed down orally—from guide to climber as they laze about in the shade between burns. Whether it’s the story behind the FA of Scarface and The Flame, or how Verm started it all.

Plus, climbing at Hueco doesn’t come easy. It’s serious business that you follow established trails, and climbing is an absolute no-go until at least 24 hours after it rains. Water scarcity in this desert area can be a pain for van-lifers, and group dynamics among tours can be a challenge when climbers don’t agree on an itinerary, or are restricted by the number of groups that can be in one area at a time. Evidently, going with the flow is essential.

Photo by AAC member Michael Lim.

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Photo by AAC staff Foster Denney.

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The AAC’s lodging facilities are a launch pad for adventure and a hub for community and the Hueco bouldering season is upon us! Experience this place for yourself by booking your stay at the Huceo Rock Ranch today.

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But these are the rules of the Hueco game.

Some of Hueco’s traditions flirt with a classic climbing motivator: competition.

Photo by AAC member Foster Denney.

Challenges are what you get when locals get bored—or when climbers want to break from the bleariness of project-send-repeat. They range from famous and lauded, like the Big Five in Fontainebleau—a circuit of five classic problems from 7c to 8a (V9 to V11) in the Cuvier Rempart sector, which pro climbers now complete in a day—to locally legendary, like the Dungeon Master challenge at Staunton Rocks, which involves sending all the 5.13s at the crag in a day (still unclaimed).

At Hueco, there’s the Wanker 101.

The Wanker 101 is a list of one-hundred-and-one boulders on North Mountain, ranging up to V2 but most in the V0 range, that essentially functions as a tour-de-North Mountain and an iconic test piece of volume, skin strength, and planning. These days, a number of the original lines are closed due to proximity to rock art or fragile environmental surroundings, so alternative problems have been chosen to ensure the challenge lives on.

Carrie Cooper, reflecting on her experience completing the challenge in an article for Climbing, highlights how unexpectedly challenging the Wanker is, even if by the numbers it looks trivial. But with that volume of climbing, and romping on beautifully sculpted holds, can come a climber’s high: “It felt like falling in love. Problems 96 to 99 were fantastic, every move a joy. We would rest at interesting holds, 15-plus feet up, no pad, almost singing to one another the beauty of the climb.”

During the 2024-2025 winter season, AAC Hueco Rock Ranch camper Jackson Jewett on-sighted the challenge in a very impressive time of 5 hours 38 minutes.

In recent years, a new challenge has emerged that’s a little more bite-sized, though one climber reflects that “so far, all who've completed it have tasted blood.” The car-to-car format of the No One Runs Out of Here Alive Challenge is familiar, but with a bouldering twist. Competitors bust up the infamous chain trail on North Mountain, top out Nobody Gets Out of Here Alive (one of the most iconic and classic V2s at Hueco) and return to the starting position. The fastest time is currently held by Jake Croft at 6 minutes, 24 seconds.

Of course, other traditions have popped up, shaped by Hueco’s unique environment. One that stands out is the newer tradition of Aoudad Feast.

Aoudads are barbary sheep that roam in and out of Hueco Tanks State Park and the surrounding area. These brown mountain-goat-looking creatures are actually invasive, and have posed a growing problem in the park, due to overgrazing, kicking up soil, displacing native animals, and competing for the same resources. For Aoudad Feast, local climber Billy Heart hunts a few aoudad (outside the park boundaries of course) and provides a meal for local climbers—an excuse to gather and bring attention to the ecological impact of the aoudad, which is often incorrectly attributed to climbers. Appropriately for the desert, the party can get a little weird.

While not necessarily making a dent in this environmental issue, the event is symbolic at the least—these local climbers are tuned in to what matters to Hueco climbing, and how access is complexly intertwined with the landscape’s environmental health.

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Hueco, importantly, has a critical role in bouldering history and the cutting edge of the sport. It has become known as a proving ground for climbers of all levels. And it certainly has been the site of many a sending rampage. Though no doubt it requires “paying your dues” to learn the movement and style, the rock also largely rewards strength and power—something plenty of pro boulderers have in spades. For example, Nathaniel Coleman showed up to the AAC’s 2024 Hueco Rock Rodeo and flashed Slashface (V13) and sent Li (V13) and Coeur de Leon (V14), among plenty of other double-digit boulders.

Similarly, Michaela Kiersch had her “best bouldering day ever” at the same Rodeo, reclimbing Crown of Aragorn (V13) and standing atop plenty of other double-digit boulders, like Thrilla in Manilla (V12), Rumble in the Jungle (V12), Phantom Limb (V12), Power of Landjager (V11), and Sunshine (V11).

Matt Fultz, a pro climber known for being down-to-earth with an unusually long wingspan, has been at the forefront of recent hard ascents in Hueco in the last year. Last winter he reopened a climb that previously had been done at V12, located on the left side of the famous Martini Cave. A key hold had broken around 2005, and the route was proclaimed impossible. Fultz was able to reopen the problem again as The Hangover, playing into the martini theme of the area. According to Fultz, it was “probably the most morpho problem [he’s] ever done.” He shares: “I thought the original sequence looked so fun, but was disappointed to hear it was broken and impossible. It wasn’t until last year that I realized I could potentially span the move, but only using every inch of my [six-foot-five] wingspan, along with extra strategy on how I would grip the holds and set up for the move. After a few days of dialing in the sequence, I was able to open up the line again.”

Photo by AAC member Keith Allen Peters.

That same season, Fultz also did the second ascent of Desesperación, and has proposed an upgrade to V15 for the climb, since he thought it was at least a grade harder than its twin, Esperanza (V14). Reflecting on his process, Fultz shares that Desesperación “involves some cryptic moves in and out of a kneebar to some very intense shoulder and tension positions, all through a 60-to-70 degree roof. It’s so cool! It was a pleasure to work out the moves from scratch, as all I had for clues on beta were a couple pictures from the first ascensionist, Martin Mobraten. Projecting Desesperación was different from trying The Hangover in that the biggest challenge was solving the puzzle rather than spanning the moves.”

Of course, Jason Kehl has proved ever-prolific in his ongoing development of boulders in the park, but first ascents on the cutting edge of the sport have slowed down. Fultz thinks that will change in the future: “To my knowledge there is currently nothing harder than V15 that has been climbed at Hueco, but I believe that there is so much potential for harder problems! And with how incredibly talented the upcoming generation of boulderers are, I have no doubt V16 and beyond will come to Hueco in the near future. I think generally people can find Hueco difficult for projecting or having extended trips due to the regulations, but what I’ve found is that they're really not as bad as their reputation.”

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Photo by AAC member Michael Lim.

But Hueco’s star status for the pros is just one piece of the puzzle. The close-knit “keep it small” culture at Hueco is why the mijos and mijas will rally around a friend to support a big highball attempt, lugging out pads on a rest day. It’s reinforced by how far Hueco and El Paso are from other major cities, requiring a force of will to get there. And it’s fueled by waiting in the hot desert sun in your car, living the “lizard life” as one climber called it, alongside friends and strangers, waiting in line to be one of the 70 climbers allowed into North Mountain to climb for the day—knowing that climbing access isn’t a guarantee.

Rather than begrudging the regulations and inconvenience, many climbers of Hueco seem to recognize that the lizard life represents something necessary about an incredible world-class climbing area that climbers share with the world. This holistic take on climbing access even pervades the art coming out of the Hueco climbing scene. The Hut Smut Review is a zine that many locals and travelers have contributed to in its first few years. The driving force behind Hut Smut is to get into the complexities of who we are as climbers and how that fits into our other identities. Joe Knapp, one of the creators of the zine, says the idea originated during the dead space and boredom of hot lizard days. What else will emerge from this landscape?

Like every crag, Hueco is a unique experience. Traditions and competitions have emerged around Hueco’s boulders, ecology, and culture. Climbers aren’t afraid to hold each other to the ethics of the area. And at the center of it all are the crimps that taste like glory, that pulled us in in the first place.

Forget stone monkeys—meet us in the dusty Hueco Tanks parking lot so we can be rock lizards.

Psyched to visit Hueco? It’s imperative that you be in the know on all Hueco Tanks State Park regulations and the ins and outs of getting a guide: tpwd.texas.gov/state-parks/ hueco-tanks/activities

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The Fluidity of Grief and Beauty: A Story from the McNeill-Nott Award

Photo by AAC member Kelly Fields.

By Heather Smallpage

Originally published in Guidebook XVI

I move, therefore I am. I reminded myself of this throughout the journey to and from Arviqtujuq Kangiqtua, formerly known as Eglinton Fjord. Throughout our five-week, multi-sport, primarily human-powered expedition to Baffin Island, in the Canadian Arctic, Kelly Fields, Shira Biner, Natalie Afonina, and I continued to move. We skied over 100 miles across the sea ice in order to get there, and we slogged for another 100 miles over moraine fields, loose talus, sinking meadows, a frozen lake, and a partially frozen river to get out. Movement was our rule, our rhythm. And as a team of three women and a non-binary person, we were motivated to define this movement on our own terms.

Kelly, Shira, Natalie, and I met for the first time in person at the Ottawa Airport en route to the Arctic. Only a few of us had tied in together before this trip. Prior to our real-life introduction, we spent months exchanging messages, photos, screenshots, videos, and group calls on WhatsApp. Now, past the logistical chaos of prep for this expedition, we still had a lot of learning to do about each other. I’m lucky in that I know an abundance of female, non-binary, and queer people who are incredible climbing partners. I prefer to rope up with them because of my ongoing struggles with self-confidence and self-trust that I learned in the shadow of my male climbing partners.

Here was an opportunity to move toward my goals and the style of climbing that most inspires me, alongside a group of people who uplift one another. When we received our first grant—the McNeill-Nott Award from the American Alpine Club—I started to feel that other people believed in us, which gave me more belief in myself. Representation is important, and the organizations that supported us believed that too. It was coming together all too perfectly.

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I stared at the vast ice and seascape before me: Circles of white interrupted the piercing blue water that settled up to a foot deep in some places. We were leaving the bay in the small Inuit community of Clyde River.

The gray sky let go of gentle snowflakes that melted on my sunglasses, making my surroundings appear as if I were looking out a window on a rainy day. “So...how thick is this ice?” I asked, my voice wavering. The last time I had put skis on was a number of years ago. On snow, on solid ground.

However, I was soon submerged within and captivated by the ice’s symphony as we glided, heaved, soared over, walked, and trudged—depending on the conditions of the sea ice—over a hundred miles on a seascape that was constantly changing. Moving through that environment was dictated by the wind, temperature, snow, and our bodies’ needs. One moment, we would be trapped in a cloud, the snow absorbing the sound around us and sticking to our ski skins so thick that we had to take them off. Moments later, after turning a corner, the winds had blown the clouds and snow off the surface, and we found ourselves flying over the best ice conditions we had yet experienced. That landscape spoke to me, telling me that it, too, exists in states of movement and change.

I often look to the natural world to find my own sense of belonging. Being a non-binary person often means that I don’t always find a type of belonging that is representative. I struggle in groups of men. In groups of women, I push back on the definitions and create an exclusionary space for myself. Asking for a non-binary category creates the exact thing I don’t want to exist within: a category. One day, I hope I can exist in a way that is outside the confines of man or woman—that I can exist as myself without needing to choose between explaining and educating, or quietly disrespecting myself.

Photo by AAC member Natalie Afonina.

The thing about gender, being non-binary specifically, is that it’s simultaneously the most painful and most beautiful experience one can have. There is a deep gratitude in being the truest form of yourself; there is a wholeness in accepting one’s authenticity. It can also often be painful to a core level. My relationship with gender is like the Arctic wind: always present, sometimes gentle and caressing, other times a chaos that threatens to knock me down.

I felt the spirits skiing into Arviqtujuq Kangiqtua. Finally, among those great walls, exhausted, hungry, sore, and cold, we debated where to set up our base camp and had a hard time getting anywhere productive with it. I remember feeling confused about how I could be in the greatest place I’ve ever stood, a place that made my soul feel so full, yet in conditions that made my humanity feel so absent. Feeling insignificant because of landscapes that humble us is familiar to me, welcomed even. I much prefer the way the land makes me feel small, compared to the way humans have that same ability.

We settled into a base camp at the toe of Eglinton Tower. For a few days, we unpacked our cache of climbing gear and food, and Kelly and I healed our blisters we got from skiing in. I had blisters, and Kelly essentially had holes in her feet. After a few days of rest and skin care, inspired by a period of good weather, we started up the talus to the mountain’s base.

Some hours later, I found myself in a massive offwidth flake high up on the route at midnight, poking my head outside of it, feeling the never-setting sun on my skin. I saw a river of clouds drifting through the canyon below us, swallowing the ground and remaking it into a moving mass of shadows, curves, and drifts that was the most spectacular portrayal of beauty my eyes have had the pleasure of taking in. I started crying in disbelief. Then crying in belief. How often is it that we have the opportunity to pause and take in the moments of beauty that surround us? I had not experienced something that forced me to see my own grandeur and the beauty of it all, or to reckon with the work that I’ve put into arriving here. I found myself in the center of all of that, celebrating this arrival as I felt my humanity swimming through my body as I swam my way up the chimney.

Eglinton Tower has two tiered summits connected by a long stretch of 2nd-to-5th-class terrain. We ascended the main headwall on the lower summit, walked along a series of ledges, and scrambled to the top of a terrace as snow and wind started blowing. From there, we saw the true summit, another 300 meters of rock with portions of snow and ice. It looked unwelcoming and uninspiring with the worsening weather and our lack of food and energy. We celebrated our high point and began our 11-hour descent.

After 49 hours, Kelly, Shira, and I had made our way up and down Eglinton Tower, establishing Lemnos in the Clouds (5.11+ A0). I could say many things about that climb—about our shiver bivy, how Kelly climbed in approach shoes because her heels still had holes in them, how beautiful the rock was to climb, witness, and respect—but the lessons it taught me in taking that pause stay with me most. A pause to let yourself listen to and sing with the birds, to witness the magnificence of your surroundings, and yourself within them; a pause to allow yourself to be in awe.

Photo by AAC member Kelly Fields.

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Photo by AAC member Heather Smallpage.

After resting for a few days and monitoring the weather, we decided to start moving from base camp to our next obstacle: Ayr Pass, a six-kilometer pass that connected us to Ayr Lake. It looked cruel and intimidating, and unfortunately was our only option to get back to Clyde River. Now that we had more food, our climbing gear, packrafts, and other essentials resupplied from the cache, we found ourselves with hundreds of pounds of food and equipment. Thus, we became mules.

As we approached Ayr Pass, the fjord fingered off into an outlet and the walls grew around us—the blackest walls I’ve ever seen, where light is swallowed by the water that has dripped and stained the rocks throughout time. We did some repacking and started off on the first of our slogs. First, we crossed a moraine field flowing with a river of silt, where our steps were swallowed by saturated sand and mud. Then came heinous mounds of sand, a frozen lake covered by avalanche debris that we post-holed through, and a large field of loose talus scattered with unstable boulders of all sizes. Finally, we navigated 3rd and sometimes 4th-class terrain with our loads threatening our balance. At last we arrived at our new camp with stiff shoulders and bruised hips, surrounded by tussocks, wildflowers, mosses, streams, boulders, and probably fairies. We walked Ayr Pass five times, three times with heavy, awkward bags.

The conditions of Ayr Lake were a big question mark, and one that would dictate how fast we could move and how easy it would be to continue. Navigating an ice breakup is difficult and incredibly slow-moving work, which we hoped to avoid by getting to the lake before the weather warmed up. Fortunately, it was still solidly frozen apart from the edges, so we packed our pulks again with all our gear and headed north, across the lake toward the Kuugaaluk River.

All this slogging allowed me to take a moment to check in with myself. At this point three weeks in, I wasn’t eating or sleeping much. I felt angry and I couldn’t focus for long. Suddenly, it became abundantly clear: I wasn’t doing too well.

Despite so many moments of connection with myself, moments that could be nothing but experiencing a relationship with this landscape, I was emotionally exhausted from, of all things, disconnection.

I had hoped that going to Baffin Island with women would be a chance to be part of something that could heal some of the jealousy, insecurity, and isolation I feel when I compare myself to people I can understand but don’t identify with. Instead, I found myself drowning. The contradiction was startling: We were in a landscape that elicits a presence that connects to the soul, among certain dynamics that severed any hope of authenticity from each other. The weight of the grief grew heavier as I came to understand that I wasn’t part of a team where there was care for one another or compassionate communication, as I had dreamed.

We were a fractured group because of behaviors that placed experiences and achievements above character.

Photo by AAC member Kelly Fields.

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Support This Work—AAC Grants

Today, with up to $100,000 in annual grant awards, the Club continues to support these endeavors and is proud to stand behind the individuals and their projects which seek the betterment of the climbing community and climbing landscapes.

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Photo by AAC member Kelly Fields.

Approaching the end of our trip, we spent two days paddling on the Kuugaaluk River— the two most peaceful days of the expedition. On our first day, we were in light rain as we pushed off from our beachfront camp. Our second day on the river immersed us in blue skies and gentle flows.

I spent the few hours we had on the river floating and singing along with the rhythm of the water. It was a time for reflection about all the land we had moved across, by foot, ski, rock, and water; all the far-reaching sights we had seen; and the variety of noises the wind creates. It was a place that connected me to myself, and the changing currents of the water reminded me of the changes in myself—my movement going forward, my flow being the pace of the moment, needing to be nothing more than what I am. The river offered me peace and gentleness when I needed it most. When we got to shore, I thanked the Kuugaaluk as I looked up and felt the sunshine on my skin.

To me, the Arctic feels like a landscape that knows no depth, with wisdom frozen in the glaciers and a sea that is inaccessible to those just passing through. It is a place that impels one to be fully present with your surroundings.

I left Baffin Island with feelings of wonder, gratitude for the lessons from the land, and a deep exhaustion permeating my mind and body. Since coming back and having space to process the duality of the beauty and grief of it all, I’ve felt as if I’ve been laid out for the one who matters most: myself. My resiliency, grit, and authenticity stare back at me. I moved deeper into the person I am.

I move, therefore I am.

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Guidebook XV—Rewind the Climb

A World of Appalling Grandeur

The First Ascent of Mt. Logan

By Hannah Provost with support from the AAC Library

Photos from the Allen Carpé Collection in the AAC Library

The snowy fortress of Mt. Logan massif had opened its door after weeks of siege. It was June 23, 1925, when Allen Carpé and five others stood atop the highest peak in Canada for the first time, the sheer pinnacle of the summit plunging down sharply to the Seward Glacier below.

To Carpé, in the thin air, it felt like every moment was twice lived.

And in the media storm and flurry of drama that followed, he would be called upon to set the record straight—and relive those moments yet another time.

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At first glance, the 100-year-old story of the first ascent of Mt. Logan might have a familiar outline—a band of men push up and up to ascend to the great heights, facing great hardship along the way. In the classic telling, we follow the expedition leader Albert MacCarthy as he spends weeks caching supplies in the dead of winter, utilizing sleds pulled by snowshoe-clad horses, and higher up on the mountain, cunning dog teams that fight whenever left alone.

In the classic telling, we follow MacCarthy, American Alpine Club representative Allen Carpé, American Norman Read, Colonel Foster, and the others on the expedition as they ferry their own gear back and forth between each subsequent camp, the measure of days the number of heavy loads these men have carried to the next advanced base camp, or their proximity to frostbite. With teeth on edge, we’d read of 11 journeys through a precarious icefall as they consolidated their camp above 10,000 feet, transporting nearly a ton of equipment and food.

Once high on the massif, we’d delight in the cunning trick, attributed to MacCarthy, of planting 600 bare willow branches in the blowing snow every hundred feet, to prevent against getting lost in the whiteout. Such trail maintenance would ultimately save lives and precious time, but still couldn’t prevent one rope team from losing their way during a storm that chased them down from the summit. Those men spent 42 hours without shelter in the freezing, grainy snowbanks, only realizing their mistake when they found themselves walking in circles, back on the summit plateau, the slopes ominously appearing at unexpected angles.

The theme of that story is loneliness, drudgery, and the sheer force of will needed against the worst conditions that such an icy world could offer.

Reflecting on these themes, Carpé writes in his own telling of the ascent, published in 1933 in the American Alpine Journal: “I think it was during these days that the awful loneliness of these great ranges was first borne in upon me with something of the force of a personal experience. Until we turned the corner into the Ogilvie glacier, we could look back down the valley and sense the presence of the lower hills and of living things. Now as we worked in toward the savage cliffs of Logan we entered a new world of appalling grandeur, and our little band seemed insignificant and very much alone. We had no support behind us, no organization of supply, no linkage at all with the outer world. We were on our own.”

That telling is perhaps best left to those who experienced it. But a 100-year distance can sharpen the focus of our lens on something else—the mundane letters and newspaper stories that came afterward, that can so easily be forgotten as part of the story, and that might tell us a little something different about the legacy our climbing ancestors have left us.

There are, of course, the historical accounts—a hundred pages dedicated to the planning of the ascent, scientific studies accomplished during the expedition, and the story of the climb itself, all included in the Canadian Alpine Journal. Because the AAC was not yet publishing the American Alpine Journal (it would do so for the first time in 1929), the American account of the ascent was published in the Appalachian Mountain Club’s journal. The American public, too, was in awe, with repeated articles appearing in the New York Times, the Boston Transcript, and others.

But a flurry of letters from September 1925, dashed off in angry haste with cross-outs and misspellings, reveal a gap in the telling. The writer, expedition member Norman Read, repeatedly argues to his friend and reader, Allen Carpé, that the representations of the expedition in the media are “positively disgusting in its sensationalism and its falsity.” He asks Carpé to write the story the right way—to tell it in a manner ‘worthy of the fraternity of mountaineering.’ The letters are a source of 100-year-old gossip—they tell of personal disgruntlement and vendetta, but also raise a question that a century later still holds: If there is no cheating in climbing, only lying, then what do you do about a little storytelling flair—a little hyperbole? What are the ethics of telling a mountaineering story right?

Flip over one of The New York Times clippings that features the story of the Logan ascent, and you’ll see pictures of the season’s debutantes printed in sepia—flaunting flapper dresses and long strings of pearls. It was the 1920s: a period of extravagance, economic growth, and patriotism after the horrors of the First World War. Only a decade before, in 1913, did the first people stand atop Denali (Mt. McKinley). In 1924, a highly public attempt on Mt. Everest ended in the disappearance of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, generating considerable speculation about whether they had made the first ascent before going missing. The American Alpine Club was founded in 1902; the Alpine Club of Canada had started in 1906. Amid this milieu, as they watched the U.K.’s Alpine Club take their shot at Everest, the Canadians and Americans had started to look around for their own slice of history. There was a lot at stake— this ascent needed to make a splash.

From the get-go, the Logan expedition was known to be a massive undertaking in logistics, and MacCarthy took on the labor of caching the supplies needed for a siege-style ascent, so deep in the Canadian interior that it was a slog of over 100 miles from the nearest town to Logan’s surrounding glaciers. As Carpé would write, MacCarthy “was not a man to hold back when there was work to do.” MacCarthy, as leader, dominated the expedition, and this really rubbed Read the wrong way.

Read alludes to “unpleasantness of the trip” and “personal grievances” in his letters. And it seems that such unpleasantness wasn’t all in Read’s head. MacCarthy, in his own account of the trip for the CAJ, closes with an acknowledgment of his behavior, and quite the excuse: “Thus, at midnight on June 28th, we again were down to the level where men think and breathe and work in a rational way and so may be held accountable for their actions. If sometimes while above that level, I was harsh and disagreeable, I ask that my companions please forgive me.”

Many accusations pile up in Read’s letters.

Read had heard whispers that the Canadians hadn’t even wanted the Americans to come along, and in Read’s opinion, Foster and MacCarthy were colluding to take all the attention from everyone else.

In the newspaper stories citing MacCarthy and Foster as sources, aspersions were cast that Read had deserted his companions in an hour of need, that another expedition member was weak and ineffectual, that Carpé was a coward and had wanted to turn back during the final summit push, and that “[MacCarthy] forced [Carpé] on since he felt that the official representative of the American Alpine Club should reach the top.”

And then there was the hyperbole—yes, they had rafted back down the river as the final leg back to town, but they were not “plunging through the swift waters of canyons” by any stretch. Similarly, there was plenty of heroism in the expedition, but the newspapers likewise stretched the danger they faced in the final snowy pitches. Read writes: ”Nobody was in a precarious position and there was no danger of loss of life that I could see. Such accounts as these hardly seem to fit in with the ethics of true mountaineering.”

In each of his letters, Read nudges Carpé to set the record straight. Always, it is some version of the note in his last letter: “Someone ought to really write the true story and blow up their attempt to distort the facts.” It was the 1920s version of double-texting: Read, experiencing intense emotion after reading each newspaper story, wrote Carpé multiple letters before ever receiving a response.

Allen Carpé did set the record straight—in fact it was one of his last acts. Carpé’s accounting of the Logan expedition, included in the 1933 AA J, was published posthumously, after he went missing on Denali in 1932. It is suspected that he fell into a crevasse while attempting to help a fellow expedition member. He had brought a draft of what would become the 1933 AAJ article, intending to work on edits for a magazine, before he vanished on the mountain. It is one of his last known writings.

Seven years after the original ascent, Carpé’s story is reflective of the man himself. In his AAJ obituary, W.S. Ladd describes Carpé as a “quiet, shy man” with a “clear, calculating mind...precise in his methods” and with “little patience with inefficiency.” Indeed, “all his efforts I shall always think of as being governed by one motive—precision.”

Allen Carpé (right) with Howard Palmer.

How did Carpé, given this characterization, receive Norman Read’s undifferentiated vitriol for the leaders of their expedition, and the (supposedly inaccurate) tales told in the media? Carpé’s own letters back to Read have yet to be found, if they even survive at all, and yet penciled-in commentary in the margins points to a potential understanding of his mind.

The marginalia could be Carpé’s reactions to Read’s letters—or maybe Howard Palmer’s, whose papers they were found with, or an unknown other—but regardless the marks are enough to question the full veracity of Read’s grumbling. “Not strictly true” is noted in the margins where Read shares his version of events to prove he didn’t desert his fellows. Yet Carpé does address some of Read’s concerns in his own account—he clearly wasn’t discounting Read outright. Whether we should consider Carpé’s account as universally true, it’s hard to say—but at least he seems a more measured and dispassionate observer of the tale than either Read or MacCarthy and Foster.

Carpé’s telling captures great trials with understated grace. Describing the summit, he writes:

What did we see, how did we feel, what were our thoughts in that precarious half-hour of victory? The first question is the easiest: we saw fog about us, and rare glimpses of a world far below of which we seemed not at all a part, and for a time we saw in the fog gigantic shadow mind...precise in his methods” and with “little patience with inefficiency.” Indeed, “all his efforts I shall always think of as being governed by one motive—precision.”

How did Carpé, given this characterization, receive Norman Read’s undifferentiated vitriol for the leaders of their expedition, and the (supposedly inaccurate) tales told in the media? Carpé’s own letters back to Read have yet to be found, if they even survive at all, and yet penciled-in commentary in the margins points to a potential understanding of his mind.

The marginalia could be Carpé’s reactions to Read’s letters—or maybe Howard Palmer’s, whose papers they were found with, or an unknown other—but regardless the marks are enough to question the full veracity of Read’s grumbling. “Not strictly true” is noted in the margins where Read shares his version of events to prove he didn’t desert his fellows. Yet Carpé does address some of Read’s concerns in his own account—he clearly wasn’t discounting Read outright. Whether we should consider Carpé’s account as universally true, it’s hard to say—but at least he seems a more measured and dispassionate observer of the tale than either Read or MacCarthy and Foster.

Carpé’s telling captures great trials with understated grace. Describing the summit, he writes:

What did we see, how did we feel, what were our thoughts in that precarious half-hour of victory? The first question is the easiest: we saw fog about us, and rare glimpses of a world far below of which we seemed not at all a part, and for a time we saw in the fog gigantic shadow

images of ourselves...As to the rest, I fear we were too spent to make the answer very exciting. Almost automatically we went through the appointed routine: hand-clasps and congratulations, a round of motion pictures, the empty gesture of a record of names and date thrust into the snow. Then we turned and began the descent in the gathering storm.

Whether truly Foster and MacCarthy’s fault, or the heavy hand of overexuberant newspaper editors, the sensationalism of the media recounting of the Logan ascent feels a little familiar to our modern gaze. In Carpé’s hands, the moments of low morale at the false summit, or the small moments of heroism, like when in their haste to descend they were all going the wrong way before Read saw the error and corrected course, feel truer.

In Carpé’s more stoic account, there is danger and bravery, heroism and moments of a greater spiritual connection. The drama is already there, in the act of climbing itself. Even if some of Read’s fighting words come from a place of hurt ego, perhaps his larger point isn’t so off the mark. We don’t need to add anything in for effect—climbing already has a built-in plot. Logan was already a world of appalling grandeur.

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Guidebook XV—Policy Spotlight

A Little Rust is All It Takes

By Stephen Gladieux, AAC delegate to the UIAA Safety Commision

Consider the following true story:

It’s the mid-2000s and two friends are on a long, multi-pitch sport climb. They’re excited—it is the climbing vacation to paradise they’ve dreamt about. They’ve been on clean, hard limestone all week. They’re prepared and plenty experienced for this climb.

The leader has reached a belay stance and is getting ready to bring up their partner. They are building an anchor on two shiny new bolts. As the leader flakes the rope, they see the first bolt on the next pitch is close, and they decide to clip the rope into it—giving their partner a little more of a top-rope in the last moves and setting them up for swinging into the next pitch. The follower gets to the anchor and clips in. What a climb! They both lean back to laugh.

Both anchor bolts break. They fall.

Only that extra bolt on the next pitch holds, keeping them from dying, but all three bolts were shiny and brand new.

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Corrosion isn’t always visible, and there are a few different kinds of severe corrosion that result in scary failures like the one described above. These have been known for a long time in industries like construction and nuclear power, but it has only been in the last 20 years or so that we’ve recognized them in climbing anchors. These failures don’t require a lot of corrosion, just a very small amount. The two main types are Stress Corrosion Cracking (SCC) and Sulfur Stress Cracking (SSC), but there are others as well. For a number of reasons, these are really terrifying problems in climbing safety: they can happen very quickly without any easy-to- spot outward signs; they are difficult to predict; and they happen on stainless steels that climbers and route developers commonly think of as bomber. Like in any other part of climbing, assumptions can kill.

Starting in the late 1990s, climbers started talking about this issue. The problem seemed particularly obvious in coastal climbing areas, but it began to crop up elsewhere as well. Companies were quietly adjusting the alloying content of their wedge bolts, scientific papers were being written, and developers were beginning to use glue-ins and titanium. And ultimately, the Union Internationale des Associations d’Alpinisme (UIAA) Safety Commission (SafeComm) started looking into the issue in a rigorous way.

The UIAA is where the buck stops with global climbing safety. It is a union of climbing federations from 73 countries that works on things like mountain medicine, protecting climbing areas globally, organizing Ice Climbing World Cups, and standardizing training curricula and safe practices. It is where gear failure from all countries gets analyzed. It is where climbers, manufacturers, and labs come together to make climbing safer. As the national organization for climbers in America, the American Alpine Club is the U.S. representative to the UIAA.

To address the SCC issue, the SafeComm worked for almost 15 years to develop a new Rock Anchor Standard that tests the complete anchor—UIAA123. In the summer of 2025, we updated it at our 50th anniversary meeting with guidance on welding.

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How Stress Corrosion Cracking (SCC) Works

SCC starts with a pit on the surface of the material. This could be a small defect in the steel, damage caused by placing the bolt, or something left over from manufacturing. Pitting corrosion can also start the process. Pitting corrosion causes deepening pits to form in the surface and is typically fueled by the presence of chlorine. In all these types of corrosion, chlorine isn’t consumed, it is just something that facilitates the corrosion’s progress. That means it doesn’t take very much to make this happen—a high concentration, but not a large amount.

Once there is a deep enough pit, the process changes—in some cases it will stop here, but in others, the corrosion will develop into SCC and a crack will begin to extend from the bottom of the pit. This crack drives forward through the shaft of the bolt via a complex mechanism that doesn’t cause the outside of the bolt to corrode. In a short time, the bolt could break with body weight but show little sign of this danger.

Sulfur Stress Cracking (SSC) is similar in effect, but not in process. For now, we’ll focus on SCC.

Stress Corrosion Cracking requires three things: a susceptible material, a suitable environment, and sufficient stress in the material. None of these things are quite as straight-forward as they seem and the rate of cracking can vary from a few months to several years. However, solutions exist to keep our community safe.

Rethinking Susceptible Materials

Photo by AAC member Caleb Timmerman.

There are hundreds of alloys of stainless steel. Climbers have historically only used a few. These historically-used alloys tend to be more susceptible to SCC than zinc plated low carbon steel. There is a spectrum of resistance to SCC. The resistance of a material comes from more than just its chemical composition: It is influenced by its microstructure, and this is controlled by how it was manufactured.

The thermal history of a bolt—how it was heated and cooled—can have a particularly large effect on its resistance. In fact, a relatively resistant material can be made extremely susceptible to SCC through its manufacturing process. This is one reason why any welding in bolts or anchor rings and chains can be dangerous if not well controlled. It is not just about the type of steel alone.

Acknowledging the Environments That Facilitate SCC

The environments that cause SCC aren’t all that exotic. We’ve seen it in some places more than others, but the ingredients can be found at many crags. Only a small amount of chlorine is required. The presence of sulfur helps. Calcium can make both worse. Concentration right at the bolt is what matters, not how much there is in general.

These elements are not rare. Calcium is in many of the rocks we climb, not only limestone and dolomite. Sulfur can come from many sources: In the Pacific we see underwater volcanoes vent into the water; in swathes of the U.S., coal power plants create plumes of sulfur that drift eastward. Sulfur-reducing bacteria in the soils above our climbs convert it to a form that is more dangerous. Chlorine can come from seawater and spray hundreds of kilometers inland. It can come from road salt. It is in our sweat and in rocks and lakes.

TCE Installation steps: 1) the nut or bolt is turned to a specified maximum torque based on the shear strength of the bolt; 2) the shaft is pulled out of the hole; 3) friction between the rock and the collar keeps it in place, which causes expansion as the wedge on the shaft moves through it. As the wedge meets more and more resistance to pulling out, tensile stress is generated in the shaft which will be there from now on. Tension in the bolt shaft can be a factor that contributes to Stress Corrosion Cracking (SCC), as described on page 20. The second illustration above illustrates how hard it is to detect SCC. The third illustration shows how a small amount of corrosion in the expansion components of a TCE can lead to the bolt slowly moving out of the bolt hole instead of expanding more, even without SCC developing. Illustration by AAC member Stephen Gladiuex.

Understanding Stress Created by Bolt Type

Most of the fixed anchors we use are torque controlled expansion anchors (TCEs). This includes wedge bolts and sleeve bolts like the five-piece as well. Think of them as small machines that are part of the safety system. When the nut or bolt in these machines is turned, it creates tension in the shaft—when the shaft is pulled out by this tension, and the collar/sleeve stays put, it results in expansion at the back of the hole. There is no way to avoid this stress—it is inherent to the design of the bolt. This stress is there day and night. In this kind of bolt, that inherent stress allows SCC to form cracks across the shaft.

And even without SCC, and instead with the littlest bit of rust, these bolts can become ticking time bombs.

When the bolt was brand new, there was less friction between the wedge and the collar than there was between the collar and the rock. When it was initially tightened, this friction caused the collar to stay put—and instead the wedge moved and the bolt expanded. But with only six months and a winter, and the environment found at any crag in the U.S., now there is a little corrosion between the wedge and the collar.

When that first big fall happens, the wedge could expand just a little more, the machine would work, and the bolt could be stronger. The climber would see a spinning hanger, but after tightening it, the bolt wouldn’t move again until a bigger fall happened, which might never happen. It was able to have follow-up expansion because the machine in the back of the hole still worked.

In a different scenario, both the wedge and the collar could move out together, because they are stuck together due to just a little rust. The climber still sees a spinning hanger and still tightens it—but the bolt doesn’t expand more, it just moves out of the hole. It will keep pulling out, little by little, and keep getting weaker. Depending on the type of bolt, you may never know.

Different bolt types are also made differently. Any time metal is bent or reduced in size by a process called rolling, there are residual stresses in the material. Hangers and glue-ins exhibit these kinds of residual stresses, but they tend to be lower in magnitude, and that’s good. It is one of the reasons glue-in anchors are a better choice for corrosion. It would be possible to almost eliminate these residual stresses with an annealing heat treatment, but this would add cost.

If a good resin is used for a glue-in anchor, the bolts also get the added benefit of having the metal shaft insulated from contact with compounds in the rock or its surface.

All of this combines to make SCC difficult to predict, and especially difficult to estimate how long it will take to render a bolt unsafe. Often, the only sign that’s visible is a slight black ring around the shaft just at or inside the rock. It is tough to predict, it is tough to inspect, and it can kill.

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UIAA123—Not as Simple as 1, 2, 3

In order to have confidence in our fixed anchors, we need to evaluate the entire bolt/ hanger/chain assembly, and its installation process as well. We need to pair these anchors with a crag environment that they can handle. The UIAA 2020 Rock Anchor Standard Update included testing the complete anchors and classifying them.

A lot of work went into figuring out the line between different environments, and how to test them in a repeatable way. You can now find bolts, hangers, and complete top anchors on the market that are certified to the UIAA Standard from a number of major brands such as Lappas, Fixe, AustriAlpin, Team Tough, and Climbing Bolt Supplies. Lappas and Fixe have anchors that have been certified at the SCC level as well.

In the spring of 2025 we met with bolt and anchor manufacturers and introduced a requirement to improve welding quality. This most commonly affects welded top anchor rings and chains, but also glue-ins where the ring is welded. Manufacturers are now required to follow welding industry standard quality controls. These standards ensure that welds are executed with the precision and quality needed to maintain the safety, reliability, and durability of the anchors. Most importantly, this will prevent any welds from being a sort of Achilles heel that cracks quickly in an otherwise safe anchor.

So now, with a classification of anchors and with tests, we’ll be safe, right? Not yet—there is more to do. We need to understand our crag environment in order to select the right bolt. It can vary pretty dramatically from route to route, and even bolt to bolt on a route. The classification must be sufficient for the whole route, and preferably the whole crag. One of the next projects we are working on at the UIAA is to improve the maps of corrosion risk and pin them with specific knowledge of crags and crag chemistry so that there can be better guidance for land managers and those placing bolts.

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Next Steps

Recently at the UIAA SafeComm, we received a request from the town of Kalymnos, an iconic climbing area in Greece. They have many routes that are suffering from corroded anchors. Climbers have become an important part of the local economy, and Kalymnos has gotten a large grant to rebolt routes—but they don’t know whom to trust with this important task, or how it should be done. Not every climbing area is fortunate enough to have a great local climbing organization that is skilled in route maintenance.

At the UIAA we’re pivoting again to help solve this challenge. We’re beginning work on the idea of a rebolting certification course that will include feedback from all over the world to gather the best techniques. Pooling knowledge and techniques globally will pay off in making climbers and routes safer everywhere. It will also mean that land managers will have something to look toward when they are not sure whom to trust with the lives of people climbing, or with the conservation of crags.

The UIAA has been around since the early 1930s. We just hit the 75th anniversary of our first rope safety standard, and the 50th anniversary of the Safety Commission. In those years we’ve moved from climbers not knowing which ropes they could trust with their lives, which carabiners and helmets to use, to having gear so clearly marked and reliable that most climbers don’t think about it. With the new welding update to our Rock Anchor Standard, we are working toward the day that each fall on a bolt—no matter where you are in the world—can be infused with just as much trust.

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About the Author

Stephen Gladieux has been the AAC delegate to the UIAA Safety Commission since 2020, and was a corresponding member and consulting expert since 2012. He’s been climbing for 31 years, and he holds a degree in materials science and engineering, as well as one in French literature from the University of Michigan. He does about half of his climbing underground and sees bolt failure all over (and under) the world. Stephen lives outside Portland, Oregon.

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Guidebook XV—AAC Updates

A Message from AAC Leadership

Dear AAC Community,

It’s easy to think that, as climbers, all of our success stories are individual. After all, when it comes down to executing that final crux on your project, it’s you alone that reaches the top. But one of the things I love about the AAC, and the stories in this edition of The Guidebook, is how individual success is supported by community. The summit is not a vacuum; when we reach the top, our accomplishments are because of ourselves and also those whom we’ve leaned on and learned from.

In these pages, you’ll see that support unfold. In our Member Spotlight, “The Quiet Stories the Land Can Tell,” Rob Mahedy, normally a solo adventurer, learns through a battle with cancer what it means to accept support from his community in order to pursue the summit of Mt. Hayes in Alaska. In our Rewind the Climb story, “A World of Appalling Grandeur,” we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the first ascent of Mt. Logan—a joint expedition between the Alpine Club of Canada and the American Alpine Club that made a huge splash in the newspaper headlines of 1925, in a world that was just imagining that humanity could stand atop Everest. In a splendid deep-dive into corrosion in bolts, called “A Little Rust is All it Takes,” Stephen Gladieux illuminates the importance and impact of the UIAA Safety Commission, for which he is a representative for the AAC. Through SafeComm, the AAC is able to join forces with representatives from nations across the world and work together to formalize standards for climbing equipment and safety practices.

Our final story, “Balance,” is a feature about Brooke Raboutou, who will receive the Robert Hicks Bates Award this year for exceptional accomplishments by a young climber. It’s in her story that I see this interweaving of community so clearly. Brooke’s accomplishments do stand by themselves—silver medalist in the 2024 Olympics for bouldering & lead, an ascent of Box Therapy (V15) in addition to multiple V14’s, and now the first woman to climb 5.15c with her recent send of Excalibur. I have seen Brooke grow from a bright, curious team kid into the warm, determined athlete she is now. The seed of Brooke’s success grew and flourished under the sunshine of overwhelming support from her family, coaches, fellow athletes, and friends, who push and encourage her. She has developed her incredible strength and talent in part because of her environment. As a result, Brooke’s spirit is so vivid that she inspires her community— myself included—to cultivate that same spirit in themselves.

An interesting note: Brooke was nominated for the Bates Award before she sent Excalibur (5.15c) and became the first woman to climb the grade. Excalibur, then, is simply another example of her momentum. There are still frontiers for women to face and break in climbing, but as a community, we are no longer asking whether a woman can climb a given grade. We are just asking—when?

I bouldered with Brooke recently in Bishop, and we made a day of touring the classics. No need to prove anything; we weren’t chasing the most difficult climbs. Instead, we focused on climbing for sheer beauty and joy. What I see in these stories of perseverance and adversity, of pouring one’s life into climbing safety and education, and in Brooke’s story, is that beautiful impulse of climbing for the soul. I see that same impulse bring so many AAC members together.

I hope you enjoy these stories of your fellow members and that they inspire you to shine brightly, connect with others, and pursue your climbing aspirations this summer.

Nina Williams

AAC Board President

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AAC Updates

Advocacy

• The U.S. House of Representatives removed the public lands sell-off bill from the reconciliation package. The Senate subsequently proposed legislation that considered public lands sales in11western states, which was ultimately removed from the package following strong public opposition. The AAC continues to work with our partners, such as Outdoor Alliance, to coordinate responses to these efforts to introduce legislation that impacts our public lands.

• The AAC Advocacy department will travel to Washington, D.C., in October to engage with lawmakers on a variety of issues and support Outdoor Alliance’s Grasstops Collective.

• The AAC’s Advocacy Director was recently appointed to the UIAA’s Mountain Protection Commission. The commission, founded in 1969, is one of the foremost authorities regarding the question of sustainability in mountain regions.

Member Services

• As of June, expenses up to $15,000 in mortal remains transport are now included in the rescue benefit at the Partner, Leader, Advocate, and Great Ranges Fellowship membership levels. Learn more at americanalpineclub.org/rescue.

• The 2025 American Alpine Journal and Accidents in North American Climbing books were sent to the printer in June. If you’ve opted in to print copies, you can expect to receive your books in late summer.

Operations and Governance

• The AAC Board of Directors met in Boulder, Colorado from June 6 to 8 for a Board retreat and meeting. The Board discussed strategic priorities for the upcoming fiscal year and future plans for the AAC, and enjoyed some Front Range climbing and dining!

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Guidebook XV—Member Spotlight: Rob Mahedy

The Quiet Stories That Land Can Tell

By Joe Tedino

Photo by Eric Larson.

Rob Mahedy, a 59-year-old cancer survivor from Crested Butte, Colorado, arrived in Alaska this spring with a purpose: to summit Mt. Hayes via the Washburn route. No stranger to high-altitude climbs—he’s soloed Mt. Earnslaw in New Zealand, Island Peak in Nepal, and Denali (Mt. McKinley)—Mahedy encountered a different kind of challenge this time. In Fairbanks, he heard reports of a milder winter and below-average snowpack, signs of a shifting climate he could not ignore. He adjusted course, choosing not to summit this year but to climb as far as the famed knife ridge, saving the final push for another expedition. As with his own survival, the lesson was clear: adaptation is not a sign of weakness—it’s wisdom.

“I didn’t get to the top,” Mahedy said in an interview shortly after his eight days on Mt. Hayes, “but I do consider it a successful reconnaissance climb.”

First climbed in 1941 with low-tech gear and legendary grit, the Washburn route to the Mt. Hayes summit is still considered one of Alaska’s great mountaineering achievements. Known formally as the North Ridge, the route’s reputation rests not only on its technical difficulty, but on the boldness of those who first dared to climb it. Towering 13,832 feet and rising more than 8,000 feet from the valley floor in just over two miles, Hayes is the tallest peak in the eastern Alaska Range—and one of the steepest in the country. So formidable is its Northeast Face that it wasn’t summited again until 1975, when climbers Charles R. Wilson and Steve Hackett led a four-person team across the ridge. In the American Alpine Journal that year, Wilson recalled sections so narrow and soft that “you could not put your feet side by side”—a place where progress toggled between precision and peril.

Mahedy remembers a previous climb that took him to the top of Denali—the classic West Buttress, a route that was also pioneered by Bradford Washburn. Climbing with a small group at first, he broke off and made his way up during a 21-day adventure. “I stood atop the summit alone,” he recalled. “I had a clear summit day and could see down the Susitna River to Cook Inlet and west to the Bering Sea.” He descended for six days on skis. With Hayes, he was searching for a similar moment of stillness.

To begin his Mt. Hayes climb along the Washburn route, Mahedy flew to Anchorage and then boarded the Alaska Railroad for the 12-hour trip to Fairbanks, where his local fact-finding began. A number of questions ran through Mahedy’s mind as he met up with experienced climbers in Fairbanks. “What am I up for, what am I getting myself into?” he wondered. “These people have local knowledge, so what went through my mind was, ‘What can I learn?’ ”

Mahedy was confident about withstanding the bitter cold temperatures, which can drop below −4°F with windchill factors below −22°F. Even with his experience in Alaska and Nepal, he knew to be wary of the glacier travel and potential crevasse navigation ahead of him. Weighing heavier on Mahedy was how cancer would affect his strength and stamina.

Mahedy, a muscular six-foot-four alpinist, left New Jersey for Crested Butte as a young man and quickly took to the mountains like a local. He hiked, skied, cycled, and climbed with the quiet intensity of someone who doesn’t just visit wild places but needs them and absorbs the solitude. A carpenter by trade, he’s helped restore many of the historical commercial buildings in Crested Butte’s bucolic downtown, shaping the town with the same hands that have gripped ice tools on Himalayan ridges.

But his passion lies beyond the summits—deep in the hidden recesses of the backcountry. “I seek out remote mountain ranges that are not heavily visited,” he said. “I follow bighorn, mountain goats, elk, caribou—sometimes bear and wolverine—looking for freshwater springs, and often I’ll stumble on evidence of the people who were here before us.” For Mahedy, wilderness exploration isn’t just about elevation—it’s about connection, and the quiet stories the land can tell. Whether it’s a summit or a century ride, Mahedy tends to meet the landscape on its own terms—and rarely turns back.

But his battle with aggressive bladder cancer and lung cancer since the middle of 2024 has taken its toll on his health and fitness. Last November, a tumor was removed from his abdomen along with his bladder. Doctors fashioned a replacement neobladder using material from his small intestine. Then his cancer—urothelial cell carcinoma—was found to have metastasized in his lungs, requiring weeks of chemotherapy.

Mahedy had an abnormal winter as he underwent treatment—only a few outdoor adventures close to home, including a weekend camping trip in March that enabled him to experiment with how to empty his neobladder in cold temperatures. Climbing Mt. Hayes along the Washburn route was a goal he set for himself last year, as long as his body would survive.

On May 8, after receiving good news from his doctor that immunotherapy treatments had shrunk the tumors on his lungs, Mahedy set out for Fairbanks. There, he met local Mike Hopper, who told Mahedy that he had attempted Hayes five times himself. During a 90-minute meeting over coffee with Hopper, Mahedy spread out his maps on the table and described his plan. Hopper pointed out the best routes to take and the ones to stay away from. Later, at an equipment store, Mahedy met Grant Wilson, a local climber who has explored around Mt. Hayes many times as well. He and Mahedy discussed climbing together next April when the temperatures are likely to be colder and the snow conditions more favorable for a summit attempt. Wilson explained that the lack of snow, warmer May temperatures, and the fact that Mahedy was going it alone made reaching the summit this time unpredictable.

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Rob Mahedy documents his solo spring expedition to Alaska’s Mt. Hayes—a journey of resilience, reconnection, and reconnaissance. From trains and bush planes to whiteouts and ridgelines, each snapshot marks a step in his ongoing quest to meet the wilderness, and his own limits, on their own terms.

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Mahedy assembled supplies for a 14-day mountain exploration, then met pilot Jesse Cummings at Golden Eagle Outfitters. They planned a 45-minute flight into the wilderness, but trouble arose immediately. Due to a winter with low snowfall, their aircraft’s skis couldn’t land at the intended drop-off point. They had to return to Delta Junction, transfer Mahedy’s gear to another plane equipped with low-pressure tundra tires, and then fly back to the Stonehouse drop-off.

With little snow, Mahedy had to haul his 60-pound supply sled over bare ground, which required offloading some equipment and making multiple trips to a camping spot. “Every mile turned out to be three miles—up and back and up again,” he said. Eventually, he made his way up to “this beautiful lateral moraine on this massive Hayes glacier. I finally got to the snow.”

Carrying 50 pounds on his back and pulling the sled, Mahedy spent three days getting to an elevation of 6,000 feet, which revealed a stark truth: His strength had deteriorated significantly. His decline was a direct result of inactivity over the previous six months following surgeries and chemotherapy. Despite his attempts at prior conditioning—limited backcountry skiing and mountain climbing in March and April before his Alaskan venture—he had lost ten pounds and considerable muscle mass.

“My fitness was not as good as it could have been,” he said. “But I could feel myself getting stronger as I went up—my legs, my thighs, my back. So that was encouraging. I was certainly physically weaker than I’ve been in over a decade, but I felt I was mentally stronger than ever to climb and climb safely.”

But cancer had not only taken a toll on his muscles and fitness. There were now new logistical challenges to contend with as he learned to navigate utilizing his replacement neobladder. On Mt. Hayes, Mahedy carried a lightweight cot that enabled him to recline above the ground and, when necessary, to use gravity to help the flow of urine into a urostomy bag. “I had to catheterize myself, and I figured all that out; nothing froze,” he said with a laugh. In this way, Mahedy locked down some survival beta that most alpinists never think twice about.

Over the course of his days on the mountain, two whiteout snowstorms dumped a foot of snow on the glacier, adding more uncertainty to his quest. During those hours, he read and enjoyed the sounds and sights of the wilderness. It also gave him a chance to reflect on why he does these climbs. “It’s a quest for me to find happiness,” he said. “I find joy in deep wilderness, where there is solitude, and it’s just me, the elements, and the animals in nature. I really do enjoy being high up in the mountains by myself.”

Once the snow let up, he was able to continue to an elevation of about 9,000 feet where he got a full view of the route that goes up the knife ridge to the summit. “It was very valuable to have two days of clear weather to get up on the ridge high above the glacier and see the original Washburn route,” Mahedy said. “I give them a lot of credit for doing what they did back in the 1940s.”

Mahedy feels good about his Mt. Hayes trial run and has made plans to climb with Wilson, the Fairbanks climber, next April to finish the job. “He and I will get together, perhaps with another guide or two—we’ll try to keep it a small group—and go for the full summit push,” Mahedy said.

The plan fits Mahedy’s new mindset since his cancer diagnosis. “I know I need to rely more on others and to not go it alone,” he said. As a cancer patient, Mahedy experienced an outpouring of support from family and friends, as well as from two local cancer support organizations—Gunnison Tough and Living Journeys. Both have been at his side since his diagnosis in May 2024.

“When I tell my doctors about the help that I’m getting, they are pretty amazed,” he said. “Our small community is really helping me financially, mentally, and nutritionally. I think the love is as important as the medicine.”

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Guidebook XIV—Policy Spotlight

Photo by AAC member Kennedy Carey.

EXPLORE—An Act and The Act

By AAC Advocacy Director Byron Harvison
Photos by AAC member Kennedy Carey

Act

1. A thing done; a deed.
2. A written ordinance of Congress, or another legislative body; a statute.
3. A main division of a play, ballet, or opera.

Drama

1. A play for theater, radio, or television.
2. An enticing, emotional, or unexpected series of events or set of circumstances.

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EXPLORE, in the waning days of the 118th Congress, met every definition of the words “drama” and “act” as it made its way into becoming law. As I sat at my computer watching Senator Joe Manchin ask for unanimous consent of the bill on the Senate floor, it was not lost on me that years of work, by hundreds of organizations, teetered on the edge of achievement. And it passed in a most glorious fashion. But let me back up just a bit...

Act 1, Scene 1

Not too long ago, in early December of 2024, the AAC policy team traveled to Washington, DC, and met up with the Access Fund and American Mountain Guides Association (AMGA). The mission was clear—examine and pursue all avenues to get the EXPLORE Act passed. At that time, attachment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) was still on the table, as was the possibility of being bundled in with the Continuing Resolution (CR) to keep the government funded. Additionally, there was the less probable route of the bill going “stand-alone” for a unanimous consent vote on the Senate floor, but we sensed that there wasn’t enough floor time, especially given the need to end the lame-duck session of Congress, and the condition that a unanimous consent vote had to actually be unanimous without a single dissenting vote.

Photo by AAC member Kennedy Carey.

It was an all-hands-on-deck moment for recreation-based organizations—Outdoor Alliance, Outdoor Recreation Roundtable, Surfrider, The Mountaineers, IMBA, Outdoor Industry Association, organizations representing hunting and fishing interests and RV interests, and many, many more orgs, all working simultaneously in an effort to see this historic recreation bill package passed.

Our small team focused a lot of effort on speaking with the bipartisan group of 16 senators that submitted a joint letter to the Secretaries of Agriculture and the Interior expressing the appropriateness of fixed anchors in Wilderness and wanting a report on the status of the agencies’ respective proposed fixed anchor regulations. The Protecting America’s Rock Climbing (PARC) Act, a component of the EXPLORE Act that serves to recognize recreational climbing (including the use, placement, and maintenance of fixed anchors) as an appropriate use within the National Wilderness Preservation System, further emphasized the intent of those senators, and of Congress more broadly, to preserve the historical and well-precedented practice of fixed anchor utilization in Wilderness.

Scene 2

It is no secret that the waning days of the 118th Congress were fairly chaotic. Characterized by the forthcoming change of administrations, few clear “unified” priorities, and the pending departure of several longtime members of Congress, the landscape was hard to navigate. We left DC understanding the potential pathways to passage of EXPLORE, but still not certain which vehicle would get it across the finish line. The following week we saw it miss the cut for the NDAA Manager’s Amendment and concentrated on advocating for its inclusion in the CR. As the days drew closer to a potential government shutdown, we came to understand that the CR was likely going to be relatively tight compared to previous iterations, and would probably not allow for bills such as EXPLORE to ride on it. The CR was out for us. That is when we heard that Senator Joe Manchin (I-WV) was considering introducing EXPLORE as a stand-alone bill.

Photo by AAC member Kennedy Carey.

This was INCREDIBLE news. However, we had some concerns as we knew that the Senate was working off of the House-passed version, which had been passed via unanimous consent (UC) in April of 2024, stewarded by Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-AR). We understood that the Senate wanted the House to address some issues in the bill, but that would require the bill to be sent back to the House for consideration and a vote...which would require time. And there wasn’t any.

On the morning of December 19, we heard that Senator Manchin was planning to introduce the House version of EXPLORE on the Senate floor for a UC vote. For those tuning into the live broadcast, we had no idea what time the possible introduction would occur. It was observable that Senator Manchin was talking to a group of senators and then left the floor. A few hours later Senator Manchin appeared and presented the EXPLORE Act for consideration via a UC vote. During his introduction, he emphasized that the EXPLORE Act was “...something that we all agree on” and that “the House and Senate are in agreement,” and that there were some changes that needed to be made but could be accomplished during the next Congress. Now keep in mind, in order to pass via UC there cannot be a single vote of dissent.

Scene 3

After Senator Manchin teed the bill up for a vote, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) stepped up to the podium. He began by reserving his right to object until the end of his speech. This is to say that no one knew whether he would be objecting and opposing the UC of EXPLORE or allowing it to pass. He spoke to his TAKE IT DOWN Act, which is a bill seeking to protect victims of deepfake pornography. The years of work on all the bills associated with EXPLORE hung in the balance—all the work on SOAR, BOLT, VIP, and Recreation Not Red Tape, on the precipice of passage. You can imagine all the breaths that were being held while Senator Cruz spoke.

“I do not object.”

Those words, spoken as a favor to retiring Senator Manchin and Rep. Westerman, provided true theater drama that we are generally accustomed to watching in a much different environment. The historic EXPLORE Act was passed, via unanimous consent through the Senate, and was on its way to the president. On January 4, 2025, President Biden signed the EXPLORE Act into law, and it became Public Law Number 118-234.

Act 1, Scene 3, complete.

Act 2

As EXPLORE was being teed up for a vote in the Senate, the National Park Service quietly announced that it was withdrawing its proposed fixed anchor guidance. This gesture suggests a new window of opportunity for climbing organizations, as well as other interested recreation and search and rescue organizations, to work in collaboration with land agencies to develop sound fixed anchor policies that reflect the direction of Congress and their passing of the PARC Act.

The AAC Policy Team and the Executive Director have visited DC over the last two months, working carefully with our partner organizations in these quickly evolving times to support the implementation of EXPLORE, discuss impacts on our public lands as a result of the federal reductions in force, and address other issues.

Stay tuned on the AAC’s digital platforms to learn more about the status of public lands policies, and how they impact, or may impact, climbers.

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