On Monday afternoon, as I was packing to travel to a conference, Natalie was going through the mail and handed me a modest postcard and said, “You’re invited to a dinner.”

How quaint. Usually, someone just calls or emails me for dinner. But this wasn’t from a friend or a donor from work. This was very different. New York City would be the site of this year’s Annual Benefit Dinner of the American Alpine Club.

I put it on my desk next to a list of questions for a future post about the future of the American Alpine Journal. I had three interviews to do, questions for Dougald MacDougald, the Executive Editor of the AAJ. Dougald and I have been exchanging messages about when to talk, but work (the day job,) has been dominating my time.

I should have reached out to Dougald sooner. He came up in my social media feed associated with that sharp gala logo as soon as I returned from my conference: Dougald was being honored as the H. Adams Carter Literary Award for Excellence in Climbing Literature.

If you’re wondering why Dougald, well, he hasn’t written a smashing best seller or wrote about a dashing first ascent in pure style for Alpinist, rather he has been conveying news and curating the record of the world’s most significant climbs in the annual American Alpine Journal, periodic updates online, and a podcast. Just a few weeks ago, I pointed out that Dougald’s list of climbing-book recommendations was the best, of literally thousands, on the Web.

His influence and character have ripples everywhere he goes. For example, he’s helped me with content and given me encouragement. And I am clearly not alone in that regard; Dougald’s Facebook friends responded warmly to his understated news of his recognition by pointing out his contributions to various publications and their own work as well as the enjoyment they share in the publications he leads.

Here is what the ACC included in its Meet the Awardees page about MacDonald:

“After learning to climb as a teenager in New England, Dougald MacDonald published his first climbing story (about ice routes on Maine’s Mt. Katahdin) in Summit magazine in 1983. Professionally, he spent the first quarter of his career as a business journalist, eventually serving as editor of the weekly Denver Business Journal for five years.

“In the early 1990s, he switched to climbing journalism, writing hundreds of articles and a book, Longs Peak: The Story of Colorado’s Favorite Fourteener. He has been editor-in-chief of two climbing magazines—Rock & Ice and Climbing—and co-founded Trail Runner Magazine. Since mid-2012, he has edited the American Alpine Journal currently hosts The Cutting Edge podcast and supervises other AAC publications.

“He considers his greatest career accomplishment to be mentoring dozens of writers and editors over the years. After decades of climbing, he still gets out at least once a week at home in Colorado and travels frequently—often with his wife, Chris Blackmon—for climbing, trekking, or skiing.”

Dougald wondered whether what he did was actually literature. Well, if journalism is indeed literature in a hurry, Dougald has nothing to be concerned about, but I do consider the AAJ an invaluable part of climbing literature.

So, to all of you heading to Manhattan for the gala, and even if you’re not, be sure to raise a glass to Dougald on March 11th.

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The arrival of climbing as a medal sport in the Olympics was celebrated by the competitive climbing community, and some others looked on with curiosity if not interest. Although the competitive climbers viewed it as an indication of its validity as an athletic pursuit, climbing, by-and-large, did not reach an evolutionary peak. Born to Climb: From Rock Climbing Pioneers to Olympic Athletes by Zofia Reych had a opportunities to address or refute this evolutionary development, but instead it tells a story that gives too much weight in connecting Olympic climbing to climbing’s very beginnings.

Zofia Reych was born and introduced to climbing in Poland and was introduced to pulling plastic later in the UK. She also studied anthropology and applied it to Born to Climb, published by Adventure Books / Vertebrate Publishing in 2022. Born to Climb was released in 2022, the year after competitive climbing debuted in the 2020 Olympics (which, of course, was delayed a year due to the coronavirus pandemic and actually held in 2021.) The timeliness poised this book to tell a story based around the milestone, which was both why I wanted read it and its flaw.

I enthusiastically sought out Born to Climb to read because I was curious about the author’s lens on just that story. Reych explains, in what could be irony, why climbing was welcomed by the Olympics into the fold as it welcomed snowboarding in after the success at the X-Games. Reych also goes farther back in her research and lets the reader consider the factors that resurrected the ancient games and why it was actually reestablished. There were fascinating discussions on the establishment of sports for the affluent and the workforce in the 1800s, and the economics of the Olympics over the 1900s. It made me a little more cynical about the populism of sports in general.

Climbing, as we know it today, evolved from the 1800s. And ever since then, climbing has varied by different ethics and arguments about pro, various styles ranging from traveling in pairs to big heavy expeditions, and broader categories from alpine mountaineering, ice climbing, trad climbing, sport climbing, bouldering. Climbing was complex in the 1800s, and with the multitude of new branches of climbing categories sprouting in the 20th Century, with their own ethics and styles, have made it even more complicated. Drawing a line from the past to the Olympics made me pick up the book, but there is no straight line, and it made Born to Climb informative but not significantly insightful.

Born to Climb is misleading, in its timing of publishing, and the drive the story takes in telling the adjacent, but not parallel, stories of how climbing and Olympic developed and changed through the 1800s and 1900s. Although Born to Climb states no thesis about the ascension and crowing of climbing as a medal sport, the book is merely a good history lesson mixed with some current day climbing anecdotes, told through autobiographical details.

Reych does an exceptional job of educating the reader about how climbing changed from the Greek and Roman times to the alpine ascents in a pure sporting fashion in the 1800s, and the first rock climb (ropeless, by the way) at Napes Needle in 1886 in Wasdale, Lakes District by Haskett Smith, and all the way to contemporary competitive climbing. If not a thesis, at least a key point she makes in different ways, is that all forms of climbing “stem in a straight line from the ideals and ethics that were born in the Alps in the nineteenth century.” While competitive climbing is the hot topic, what about ice, mixed, and dry tooling climbing?

Reych shed new light for me in her review of the cultural conditions that women climbed in the 1800s. More women climbed than maybe recorded, but those that did were viewed as potentially harming their bodies and could border on vulgarity. Women climbers were part of the “new women,” which was a pejorative term.

While reading I was questioning whether the personal stories Reych sprinkles throughout the book advanced a theme or illustrated other points in the book. It was a little more biographical, which was sincerely charming, but didn’t initially move the story along. But later, it shined insight into contemporary culture around climbing as it entered the Olympic era, for instance when she speaks of a notable climber dying climbing outdoors. She makes herself an example of the current climbing culture, which is descended from the past.

In the end, Born to Climb is well researched, but having read many of the works she cites, I am not sure this was added more to the climbing shelves other than added one celebrating the 2020 Olympics. I appreciate that it embraces and looks to climbing history, searching for a thread from the top of Mont Blanc that isn’t there, other than climbing itself, but I am not buying a copy to give to my friends.

Rating: 3/5

Was this a classic? It was an excellent history. I wished it was available ten years ago, though it couldn’t have been. It might be valuable to some readers, and might be a good reference for a long time, but it won’t compete with sagas of remarkable attempts or biographies of great climbers.

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Four stories up, by Mr. Wooley’s physics classroom, a young Paul Pritchard looked down well-like spiral stairwell, and dropped down. He saw a classmate that passed too quickly to shout to, and recognized the school’s heat radiators as he flew, and the red tiles at the bottom by the pool before he blacked out. Pritchard woke up in the hospital. No one dared him. He wanted to see if he could do it.

Pritchard was the climber many people, possibly even my parents, had in mind when they thought of a rock climber: A risk taker that wakes up after “accidents” in the hospital, if he wakes up at all. He fell, went unconscious, and woke up in the hospital at least three times, including the flight from Mr. Wooley’s classroom, in his 1997 book Deep Play: A Climber’s Odyssey from Llanberis to the Big Walls. This was before his horrible and life changing fall on Totem Pole in Tasmnia. He suffered from a severe head injury that has impaired his use of his body’s right side.

I put Pritchard’s book on my Short Long List because it interested me and I wondered whether it could be a climbing classic. Part of this was that Prichard had climbed on many amazing climbs I read about when I just started reading about climbing. These routes were the big wall climbs of my daydreams: Mount Asgard, Paine’s Central Tower, Trango Tower, and Meru’s Shark’s Fin, and Pritchard tells his story of these routes in his book.

Deep Play is a memoir told through a series of essays told chronologically. He starts at the beginning of his life and I adore the first sentence: “I was born on top of the quarry.” There he and his friends played with explosives, found a dynamic climbing rope, and learned to climb with some real climbers. From there, he and friends developed routes along the sea wall cliffs of England, which appears to earn him invitations to bigger climbs. Later, he says, the Garwhal Himalaya was the “coolest” place he had ever been.

Pritchard was always poor. He lived off unemployment and relied on friends to help him out. His caring character and mischievous spirit earned him his adventurous friends, who were quite loyal. Scrounging and dealing for food, gear, and transportation was a perpetual theme.

What I don’t like is not knowing what actually happened at times. His writing is mesmerizing and kept me interested throughout the book. My favorite chapter was On The Big Stone; he retells one of his early climbing road trips in snippets and clues. It resonated with me and felt like the carefree and sometimes frantic qualities of an adventure with friends. But, there were a lot of details that I wanted to know that went unaddressed. For example, upon leaving, he says he forgot his pack with his gear, but it appears that they kept going, but they might have turned around and got the bag. Yet, they were low on gas. Does that mean they kept going and Pritchard used someone else’s shoes? Did he need shoes or was he climbing in his everyday sneakers? I don’t know and Pritchard doesn’t say.

David Stevenson addresses this in his review of Deep Play in the 1998 American Alpine Journal:

When I say “one gathers,” I mean it literally—it’s hard sometimes to tell exactly what happens. Pritchard quite consistently abandons the literal for the figurative, imaginative, impressionistic. The reader can’t always tell exactly what happens, but nonetheless has arrived (if he’s patient) at a sense of what has happened that’s somehow larger than the literal.

David Stevenson, 1998 American Alpine Journal

Stevenson was harsher than I want to be. He wondered whether we would be complicitous with Pritchard’s next great accident if we consider to praise him. I don’t think that would be the case. As read in Deep Play, Pritchard has been both daring and reckless since arriving at the quarry. Still, it was an ominous question as Pritchard had his life-changing fall on Totem Pole the year Stevenson’s review was published.

Deep Play was short-listed for the Boardman Tasker Mountain Literature Award with Against The Wall by Simon Yates, Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, Icefields by Thomas Wharton, Spirits Of Place by Jim Perrin, and Dark Shadows Falling by Joe Simpson. These are well-respected writers, even if people (like me,) disapprove of some of the stories they told (which is a tale for another time.) Pritchard’s writing was not comparable and it is a little surprising it surpassed these works.

However, Pritchard’s climbing resume, told in Deep Play, has a gravitas, and his disjointed writing is still understandable to the reader even if details (which aren’t always critical for the wonderfully mesmerizing tale anyway) are discarded with abandon. It’s a passionate, authentic, and whirlwind of an adventure that you feel much more than you see. You enter Pritchard’s dream-like memories of the climbs, and road trips, and late nights at the disco between adventures.

I recommend it to meet Paul Pritchard and feel the mountain through his writing alone.

Rating: 4/5

So that was the review. Now let me consider whether Deep Play should be advanced from my Short-Long List to be a candidate for a climbing classic? It is about significant climbs, told authentically by the author, but I am not sure if the writing and how Pritchard conveys his experiences is worth naming a classic for the good of the readers of the final list.

I am undecided. Or perhaps my reservations could put it on a to-be-determined list. Maybe it would be most suitable to be an honorable mention since the language and communication techniques are unique.

Pritchard has written other books, including about his accident on Totem Pole and a new book out this year, The Mountain Path. Perhaps after reading those, or hearing your take, I might have my opinion on the book’s place more firmly positioned.

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