Alpinist Magazine Issue 68 – Winter 2019-2020

Features

Art of the Topo
Before his death in 2017, Hayden Kennedy pitched Alpinist a story on what he
saw as the endangered art of the topo. Alongside the draft Kennedy left
behind, Jeremy Collins, Clay Wadman, Tessa Lyons, Vic Zeilman and Paula Wright
share a few images of climbing’s illustrated worlds.

Pandora’s Box
In 2009 Japanese alpinist Kei Taniguchi became the first woman to receive a
Piolet d’Or for her first ascent of the Southeast Face of Kamet (7756m), with
Kazuya Hiraide. During the final years of her life, Taniguchi continued to
explore challenging new routes, while hinting at a mysterious personal quest.
Piecing together diary entries and interviewing family and friends, her
biographer Akihiro Oishi tries to see inside what Taniguchi called «the
Pandora’s box.»

Less Rich Without You
In 2018, at age fifty-two, famed British mountaineer Nick Bullock left for his
twenty-fourth expedition: a journey to attempt a new route on Minya Konka, a
7556-meter peak in Sichuan Province, China. Amid heavy mist and falling snow,
he and his climbing partner Paul Ramsden searched for a way through the
hazardous maze of an icefall—and through the allures and pitfalls of a modern
professional climbing life.

Blood That Dreams of Stone
During the early twentieth century, the talented young poet Antonia Pozzi
sought freedom from her family and her society amid the rock spires of the
Dolomites and other Italian peaks. David Smart provides an introduction to her
career, along with translations of three of her climbing poems, with the help
of Brian McKenzie.

Departments

Sharp End
Retracing the steps of a famous guidebook author, our editor-in-chief goes on
a pilgrimage to an alpine basin left off most maps.

Letters
Our readers write.

On Belay
For 141 years since its first ascent, mountaineers from around the world
traveled to climb la Meije in the Massif des Écrins of France. Meanwhile, the
permafrost that held its stones together was melting. On August 7, 2018,
rockfall destroyed much of the normal route. Two locally based guides—Benjamin
Ribeyre and Erin Smart—recount a search for a new way up the peak amid the
uncertainties of the planet’s future.

Tool User
John Hessler explores the history of an energy bar invented in 1869: the
famously (or infamously) sweet Kendal Mint Cake.

Climbing Life
Erin Connery has a perfect climbing day. Derek Franz learns to keep quiet.
David Wilson observes the end of winter. Rebecca Young climbs above the
flames. David Guterson turns around. Tami Knight strikes (yet again). Spencer
Gray retraces second lines.

Wired
In mountains across Turtle Island (North America), Anishinaabe climber Kayla
DeVault de Wendt seeks a means to find harmony between current practices of
outdoor recreation and ongoing traditions of Indigenous peoples.

Local Hero
Whether they’ve collected summits, books or memories, many climbers long to
preserve records of the past. Paula Wright presents the person responsible for
cataloguing and managing one of the most extensive of these collections: Katie
Sauter, director of the Henry S. Hall Jr. American Alpine Club Library.

Off Belay
Shawnté Salabert examines what it might really mean to leave a trace or not.