SPRING 2022 $16.95 U.S./CAN ROBBI MECUS HEADS TO THE RESCUE LESLIE HSU OH GOES UNDERGROUND CHOI SUK-MUN HOLDS THE LINE TAMI KNIGHT PAINTS THE VOID 77 DENALI SEASON MICHAEL GARDNER COMMITTED. There’s only one way to reach the top. You try and try again. There’s always failure. You learn from your past mistakes. Train some more. Gain experience. Then you try harder. Fail and fall again. You take a beating. Get hurt. And keep coming back. But in the end, when you pull past the point of no return, steady your breath, and stare down what’s between you and success, you know what you have to do. Commit. We know what it takes. At Black Diamond, we’re committed to catching the falls along the way. Christian Adam Black Diamond Athlete Colin Duffy FREE SHIPPING to the US & Canada americanalpineclub.org Climbing can be a risky pursuit, but one worth the price of admission. With the newly enhanced rescue and medical expense coverage of Membership 2.0, you can tie in a little easier knowing the American Alpine Club has got your back. If disaster strikes, we’ll rescue you from the crag, get you to the hospital, and even help pay your insurance deductible or other direct medical expenses once you’re there. With enhanced rescue and medical coverage, national policy initiatives, annual publications, gear discounts, and more, the AAC has supported climbers for 120 years. Join the Club. You belong here. [Cover] Sébastien Berthe on the Changing Corners pitch (5.14a) on the seventh free ascent of the Nose of El Capitan (Tu-Tok-A-Nu-La) in 2019. He was the first to free climb the route ground up without rappelling from the top to practice any of the cruxes beforehand. The climb took him eight days, during which he ran low on rations. Lynn Hill was the first to free climb the Nose in 1993. In 1994 she became the first to free climb it in a day. This year, to minimize his carbon footprint, Berthe sailed across the At- lantic to join Siebe Vanhee in a bid to free climb the Dawn Wall (VI 5.14d). Alex Eggermont l [This Page] Pumori (7161m) and Lingtren (6749m) above Gorak Shep, Nepal. Sujoy Das FEATURE C ONTENTS 54 Worth the Weight? Over the course of the spring season of 2021, in addition to their guid- ing jobs, Michael Gardner and Sam Hennessey established a new route on the daunting Isis Face of Denali (carrying skis for the descent), climbed the Bibler-Klewin on Begguya (Mt. Hunter) and summited Denali again by the Cassin Ridge, with Adam Fabrikant, before making the first ski descent of the Northwest Buttress and trekking out of the Alaska Range to Deenaalee Bene' (Wonder Lake). Weighing on Gardner’s mind, however, were the potential costs of such experiences. Since his father’s death in a climbing accident in 2008, he has known intimately how “every loss creates an irreplaceable void” and how “the fabric of a community is altered forever.” 68 After Dusk As he read Tom Hornbein’s Everest: The West Ridge , Indian photojournal- ist Sujoy Das was struck by intense descriptions of darkness and stars near the summit of Chomolungma (Everest). He set out on his own expeditions to document the haunting beauty of Himalayan nights. 76 Empty In March 2020, when her hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia, went into lockdown because of the pandemic, climbing artist Tami Knight was taking care of her ninety-six-year-old mother. Faced with the uncertainties of her mother’s remaining days, Knight found inspiration in memories of past alpine adventures. A L P I N I S T I S P R I N G 2 0 2 2 I B E T W E E N C O N T R O L A N D C ATA S T R O P H E 9 [Photo] Gerry Egbalic on an offwidth (5.10c) in Red Rock Canyon, Nevada, traditional Southern Paiute and Newe land. Irene Yee DEPARTMENT CONTENTS 15 Sharp End An Alpinist editor ponders her obsession with early season ice. 19 On Belay For more than two decades, Choi Suk-mun has climbed around the world, including first ascents on giant Himalayan peaks; yet he remains haunted by a five-pitch rock route back home in South Korea. 22 Namesake Paula LaRochelle recounts tales of a Lost City. 32 Tool Users John Middendorf finds the original hooking pitons in an unexpected place. 35 The Climbing Life Erin Connery learns to write from the mountains, Jerry Auld dreams of falling in an unexpected way, Talley V. Kayser pens an ode to a stunted tree that shelters her, Rosie Bates untangles her life, and Claire Waichler paints glaciers. 84 Full Value As she begins another rescue on a cold, windy night, ranger Robbi Mecus considers the weight of the past missions of her life. 89 Wired Micheli Oliver contemplates some of many metaphors of ascent for herself and other Indigenous women. 94 Local Hero Shawnté Salabert shares the climbing philosophy of Erynne Gilpin, founder of Indigenous Womxn Climb. 96 Off Belay In a cave in Brazil, Leslie Hsu Oh catches a glimpse of all that lies beyond the frames of photos and the edges of maps. Alpinist.com Encyclopedic climbing news from around the world: alpinist.com/newswire Videos, interviews, reviews, podcasts and exclusive online stories: alpinist.com/feature Climbers test gear hard in the field: alpinist.com/mountain High Camp, Alpinist ’s premium newsletter: alpinist.com/signup 12 Editorial Director: Tyler Cohen (tyler@holpublications.com) Editor-in-Chief: Katie Ives (katie@alpinist.com) Art Director: Mike Lorenz (mlorenz@alpinist.com) Designer: Robin Earle (robin@alpinist.com) Deputy Editor: Paula LaRochelle (paula@alpinist.com) Digital Editor: Derek Franz (derek@alpinist.com) Assistant Editor: Leslie Hsu Oh (leslie@alpinist.com) Assistant Research Editor: Anders Ax Contributing Writer: Mailee Hung Editors Emeriti: Christian Beckwith, Michael Kennedy Special Correspondents: Gwen Cameron, Bob A. Schelfhout Aubertijn, Steve Grossman, Janice Sacherer Fact-checking: Austyn Gaffney, Sam Yadron, Julie Schwietert Collazo Copy Editor: Laura Case Larson Additional Photo Captions: Austyn Gaffney Leslie Hsu Oh, Oh Young-hoon Regional Correspondents: Chris McNamara, Yosemite; Renny Jackson, Tetons; Don Serl, Coast Range; Raphael Slawinski, Canadian Rockies; Rolando Garibotti, Argentine Patagonia; Damien Gildea, Antarctica; Ian Parnell, United Kingdom; Rémi Thivel, Pyrenees; Claude Gardien, France; Menno Boermans, Switzerland; Vlado Linek, Slovakia; Eberhard Jurgalski, Himalaya; Anna Piunova, CIS; Tamotsu Nakamura, Japan. With additional thanks to: Katie Sauter and the Henry S. 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We support the following organizations: S P R I N G 2 0 2 2 / I S S U E 7 7 Photographers, from top to bottom: Courtesy Sujoy Das, Eric Bissell, Robbi Mecus, Josiah Holwick, Luke Kaneb, Joo Min-wook C O N T R I B U T O R S Indian photojournalist SUJOY DAS feels most at home in the high Himalaya, where he has been photographing for more than forty years. He is the co-author and photographer of a number of books including Nepal Himalaya: A Journey Through Time , Everest: Reflections on the Solukhumbu and Sikkim: A Traveller’s Guide Growing up in the San Juans of Colorado and the Tetons of Wyoming, MICHAEL GARDNER spent time in the mountains as far back as he can remember. Now based in Teton Valley, Idaho, he climbs extensively in the Alaska Range and abroad, relying on ski alpinism for fast and light creative adventures. A climber for twenty-seven years, ROBBI MECUS is a Forest Ranger in the Adirondacks. Both climbing and search and rescue work, she finds, require seeking communion with fear and doubt. At home, she relaxes by playing ‘80s metal songs on her blue guitar, affectionately named Rage, or building LEGO castles with her daughter. LESLIE HSU OH (@lesliehsuoh) would love to know she’s not the only one who loses things—such as cell phones—when she’s happy. You can find her work in Condé Nast Traveler, National Geographic , Outside , Smithsonian , Sierra , Travel + Leisure and Vogue , and in the Notables list for Best American Essays 2010. From creating extravagant fiction as a child to pursuing photo and journalism projects as an adult, MICHELI OLIVER has always valued the power of story. She has been published in Freeskier and Powder and worked with Patagonia, On The Land Media and NativesOutdoors. Oliver is fueled by passion for protecting the land and everyone on it. Born and raised in a mountain village in South Korea, CHOI SUK-MUN loves seeking the most natural, graceful lines on granite spires, alpine faces and Himalayan walls. In 2017 his new route on the south face of Gangapurna with Kim Chang-ho and Park Joung-yong received an honorable mention from the Piolets d’Or. 15 Adirondack Gothic By December 5, 2021, signs of early winter appear and fade like fata morganas—mirages of some higher mountainous coast rippling above low Northeast ranges. Hoarfrost blooms and vanishes along the summits. Storms blend rain, sleet and snow, strewing farmers’ fields with quickly melting crystals. When I drive from the Green Mountains to the Adirondacks, black ice glistens along paved roads like pools of water. Cars spin into ditches. I stop for the night at a motel in a dark wood, its small lamplit windows enfolded by tree shadows and snow-dust. The next morning, local climber Kevin MacKenzie and I trudge past deciduous trees, still autumn-brown with dead, unfallen leaves, and then through quiet corridors of bowed evergreens. Beyond a snow-filled river, we peer at the 1,200-foot North Face of Gothics: only a few faintly golden hues hint at ice. Perhaps enough to climb. Gradually, we follow minia - ture things skyward: clumps of frozen moss and tufted grass, glimmers of grey verglas, patches of amber ice, crusts of pearly névé. There is always enough, when we look for it. I run an axe point through loose powder until it catches on something invisible: a feldspar crystal, maybe, or an anorthosite edge. Often, I don’t see what I’m placing my trust in. I only know how it holds me, how little it takes to hold the weight of a human body on a vast rock slab. The summit ridge billows in cumulus forms of rime and snow, drifts so deep I sink to my eyes before we switch from crampons to snow- shoes. Rain is forecast for the evening, though it’s impossible even to imagine. The air is so cold, so clear and still. While we were climbing, clouds began to rise above the lake and pour between the hills in long, white plumes—only to hover motionless, now, paused in the very instant of crossing from one side to the other. Since dawn, there’s been no murmur of wind. By the time we descend, we enter another kind of silence: the quiet of falling snow, the glitter of crystals as they float, soundless, through the blue dusk. A day later, when I’m home, the wind returns, and the rainstorm finally sweeps the ranges. Soon, the summits are bare again, and the ice-world we traversed is gone. The Crystal Forest To roam the Northeast hills between late autumn and early winter is to be entranced by metamorphosis: a bead of newly formed ice, a clatter of wet stones, a trickle of water behind icicles. Here, seasons unspool from any predictable trajectory. You might climb up shimmers of ice that spread like frost on a morning garden, only to descend, mere hours later, into a murk of misting rain, muddy earth and orange leaves. At sunset, alpenglow turns summit rime to iridescent violet, rose and gold. Even the valleys light up, and the drab hues of barren oaks, maples and birches give way to glowing burgundy and orange, as if the peak foliage, vanished weeks prior, has come back as colored light. I’m drawn to twilight spaces between day and night, waking and dreaming, one season and another. Growing up in eastern Massa- chusetts, I learned the peculiarities of nights too cold for rain, too warm for snow, when Photo: Katie Ives, on the North Face (the common name for the northwest face) of Gothics, Adirondacks. Kevin B. MacKenzie T H E S H A R P E N D OF THIN ICE | KATIE IVES 16 ice storms coated everything with crystal strata as brittle and transparent as glass. Tree limbs, transformed into fragile sculptures, fell across power lines. Ice-sheathed wires snapped, extin- guishing electric lights for miles. In the morn- ings, unwilling to heed my mother’s warnings, I wandered deep into the forests, knowing that, when the wind blew, large branches might break off and fly through the air. Shards of silver twigs fell in chimes of strange music. It was like an enchanted wood in a fairy-tale, improbably beautiful, possibly deadly. The nineteenth-century philosopher Henry David Thoreau, whose Walden Pond cabin was near our house, devoted many pages of his journals to the aftermath of heavy frosts and ice storms, immersing himself in what he called “crystalline botany.” He admired how the diamond-bright blades of frozen grass acted as prisms, reflecting “all the hues of the rainbow,” when the sun’s rays passed through them. He noted how a “dense ice-foliage” burgeoned across windows and fences, woods and mead- ows. And then, with increasing excitement, he observed similar leaf-like forms elsewhere, in the plumage of birds, the braiding of rivers, the meandering of thoughts—shapes that a modern reader might compare to fractals. He began to believe that the “ghost leaves” of winter hinted at some underlying pattern of existence, mani- festing and disappearing again and again. Even quartz crystals on granite resembled “the “frost-work of a longer night...but to some eye unprejudiced by the short term of human life, melting as fast as the former.” More than a century later, in the 1966 apocalyptic novel, The Crystal World , J.G. Ballard imagined a crystallization of the entire earth after collisions between what he called “time and anti-time,” similar in concept to matter and anti-matter. Chronology gives way to infinite replicas of static images, refracting light like prisms. Skyscrapers proliferate into countless, self-reflecting stained-glass spires. Forests remain forever like the aftermaths of ice storms: leaves and branches encased in diaphanous, frost-like layers of shifting colors. Animals and humans transform into sparkling, gem-like forms. Despite the dangers, characters become captivated by this reenchantment of the familiar world. “I accepted all these wonders as part of the natural order of things,” marvels the protagonist Dr. Edward Sanders, as if echo- ing Thoreau, “part of the inward pattern of the universe.” Sanders begins to think that the crystallized forests might even evoke memory traces of “some ancestral paradise.” The annihi- lation of time, to him, seems to stop the relent- less progression toward death. “But there is no human life in the city of jewels,” counters litera- ture professor Elana Gomel, in her analysis of the novel. “Like Snow White in her glass coffin, the crystallized humans are neither dead nor alive. Suspended in timeless animation, they have become not angels but objects, beautiful and lifeless things.” On late October days, above the alpine tundra zone of Northeast peaks, I’ve seen deep- green moss and delicate alpine plants glow emerald, burgundy and gold beneath a spume of translucent ice—safely beyond the reach of my sharp axe and crampon points—like minia- ture worlds of living things preserved in giant drops of amber or globes of glass. Illusions of eternity that will vanish and reform with each melt and freeze. When the air chills, I, too, watch myself turn, temporarily, to crystal. Rime slowly forms along the loose strands of my hair, in thicker and thicker flowers of white and silver, encrusting my lashes until I have to rub my eyes or blink hard to keep my vision clear. At times, I imagine a strange beauty like a silver land ahead; I find an indescribable solace in something unimaginable that feels, almost, like wonder and like love. On Thin Ice On an early winter evening, when the ice is still thin, I notice, more, how much each small presence and absence matters. A tiny oval gap between half-congealed icicles just large enough to hook an axe point, a crystal lattice just strong enough to bear the force of my pull—such details appear both marvelous and necessary. None of them exists for my sake, and yet, pieced together, their fragments create an upward path. In the classic book Flow , psychol - ogist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described how a climber becomes so attuned to the slightest nuances of a cliff that she experiences a “sense of kinship” between her body and everything she touches, feels and sees. All sense of self- consciousness dissolves; all that seems to exist is a luminous orb of space and time around her, like the beam of a headlamp in the dark. Kevin Tatsugawa, a mountaineer and a professor of adventure education, recalls the invented word ambedo , from John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows : “a kind of melan- cholic trance in which you become completely absorbed in vivid sensory details—raindrops skittering down a window, tall trees leaning in the wind...” While finding a route up thin ice, Tatsugawa says, he feels something like that— though he adds, “I can never predict when nor engineer an experience that will guarantee it. Kind of like flow or awe. I become very focused on the ice and the climbing—not on myself, the cold, the consequences of a fall.” There’s another part to Koenig’s definition of ambedo , the idea that the sensation “leads to a dawning awareness of the fragility of life.” Although such moments appear beyond time, the escape is only an illusion, the intensity itself becomes a reminder of the sharp precariousness of existence. Csikszentmihalyi died of cardiac arrest in late autumn of this year, October 20, 2021, at age eighty-seven. We are all existing on thin ice , not only in the mountains. Each loss evokes the often-invisible voids beneath our feet. Each threshold moment can seem to open a multitude of branching, alternative timelines, like the patterns of frost on a window, curling into infinite fractal forms, tracing phantom narratives of falls untaken, ice unbroken, ill- nesses uncaught, decisions unmade. In his journals, Thoreau tracked the chang- ing seasons with meticulous notes, seeking to understand nature’s own chronologies. On March 11, 1856, the same frigid day that he measured the snow and ice of Walden as “a curtain twenty-eight inches thick,” he mused, “I may dream of no heaven but that which lies about me.” The next day, he fantasized, “If the present cold should continue uninterrupted a thousand years would not the pond become solid?” More than a century and a half later, biologist Richard B. Primack compared Tho- reau’s records with his own, noting the “exqui- site sensitivity” of local bodies of water to the rising temperatures since the philosopher’s life- time. “Just like the melting of ice sheets and gla- ciers in polar regions, we are now experiencing the disappearance of ice on a smaller scale at Walden,” Primack concluded in his 2014 book, Walden Warming At times on my vertical wanderings, I feel like the fairy-tale character in the Snow Queen’s frozen palace, still trying to piece together the words Eternity out of glass-like shards, still try- ing to find some underlying pattern of meaning. As the seasons of cold shrink, only old stories, hints and clues remain. Only the magic of imag- ination, memory and desire, fleeting and silver, like thin tendrils of ice binding together stone and earth, crystals and moss, movement and thought. The ephemeral veins of ghost leaves. z For 50 years, Hilleberg has been making the highest quality tents and shelters available. Developed in Sweden, manufactured in Europe, and used worldwide, Hilleberg tents and shelters offer the ideal balance of high strength, low weight, ease of use, and comfort. hilleberg.com 1-866-848-8368 order a Free catalog: Facebook.com/HillebergTheTentmaker 1971 2021 Yoshiko Miyazaki Hilleberg: Tents for any mountain, any weather, anywhere. www.trango.com | Lafayette, CO AGILITY 9.1 P H O T O B Y N AT E K E N N Y Red Flag High Contrast Rope Ends For Safer Lowering & Rappelling Haunted by Venus Park Hee-yong stared at the branching streams of cracks that flowed down the granite wall before us. Any of these would lead to the main line of Venus, a 180-meter classic climb on Ulsanbawi, one of the dozens of rock peaks in Seoraksan National Park, South Korea. A whirring force seemed to emanate from the route, drawing the gaze of many climbers who visited the valley, filling their imaginations with all the vertical dances they could ever perform. It was a sunny day in July 2020. I was here with Hee-yong and my wife, Lee Myoung- hee. We’d agreed that Hee-yong would lead the first pitch, and so it was up to him, now, where and how to begin. In between creation and imitation, he chose a lower-angled fissure that eventually joined the steep central crack. Through the robust swell of hulking granite, Hee-yong climbed like a young salmon swim- ming upstream. So graceful was the sequence created through his movements that I shiv- ered, and I craved my chance to join the same current. From the second pitch on, I led, and once I reached each belay, I lowered the rope so that either Myoung-hee or Hee-yong could re-lead the pitch and have more of an adven- ture. After wriggling up an offwidth, emerging from a small cave and surmounting an over- hang, I found myself at the start of a vertical expanse of rock under an azure sky. Ahead, a straight fissure stretched diagonally to the top far above. Such a thick, long extension of crack was typical at the roughly two-kilometer-wide southwest face of Ulsanbawi. The first serious challenge of Venus began at the fourth pitch: another elongated, yet harder, offwidth of more than ten meters. This came as a rehearsal, still, since I knew the highlight lay ahead: the fifth pitch. There, a left-facing hand-size rift strung out for a flawless thirty meters. Slanting a little to the right, and nearly vertical, the line embod- ied a steady, rhythmic balance, its shape nudg- ing climbers back and forth as they alternated between placing their hands into the fissure to pulling on the stone wave to the right side. At 5.11-, for many climbers, it was still moderate enough to be fun. This was my second climb of Venus. I’d first experienced the route during the summer of 1997, and anything I could recollect from that initial trip came with the feelings of sweat and blood and the pulsing of wild heartbeats at the crux. After more than twenty years of those memories, when I finally attached myself to the two-bolt anchor at the top of the fourth pitch, rested my feet on a horizontal crack, and caught my breath, I brimmed with enthusiasm and anticipation. Then I looked back up at the fifth pitch—a motion I’d visualized myself making a thousand 19 O N B E L A Y [Photo] Choi Suk-mun on Soseung Falls (WI6, 100m), Seoraksan National Park, South Korea, 2020. This climb—along with Towangseong Falls (WI5, 320m), Daeseung Falls (WI6, 100m) and Guksadae Falls (WI5, 120m)—are part of Seoraksan’s “icefall tetralogy.” One of the attractions of ice climbing, Choi observes, is the way that routes constantly change: “Every winter, and every wintry day indeed, you need to climb differently. Once spring arrives, no trace of the climb will remain.” Joo Min-wook, Choi Suk-mun collection 20