Month: October 2011

The Climbing Community and Its Many Parts

/ Andrew Szalay / Leave a comment

This past weekend I watched the television show The Good Wife with my family. In case you don’t know, it’s a court television show that centers around the wife of a politician. What interests me here is this week’s courtroom drama: It involved an Everest climber that died on the mountain but that might have lived hadn’t other climbers taken and removed his oxygen tank.

It seemed to be a takeoff on some of the current events from 2010 where stories of a climber, Peter Kinloch, stopped from suffering from temporary blindness and in need of help was left to die by other climbers. The media and blogs then claimed that climbers gunning for the summit ignored him completely, which does not appear to the case.

The take on the television show was rather entertaining and they took mountaineering seriously in this show. The terminology used was credible without being forced and thereby laughable by climbers. My singular moment of oh-gosh-they’re-trying-too-hard was when they brought in witnesses to talk about the incident. They got into the effects of altitude above 26,000 feet, which was fine, but then a seemingly affluent working professional and guided climber called Everest “my mountain” wistfully and made some comment speaking on behalf of the “climbing community.” It seemed forced and unnecessary for the show’s plot.

It also illustrated to me how complex and diverse the real climbing community really is, but that most of the public only really sees (and still don’t typically understand) the Everest guided-climbers illustrated in Into Thin Air, Jon Kraukauer’s book about the 1996 Everest disaster. The climbers in The Good Wife episode and in Into Thin Air were all primarily professional guides and clients on high altitude Himalayan peaks. If I chose to climb an objective like Gasherbrum II I would definitely be in this group on a client-guided trip. But this is only one portion of the climbing community and they don’t all tend to get along in regards to respect for their style of climbing.

As you know, there are many types of climbing that climbers engage in and various styles they prefer. Aside from strictly rock climbing, alpine climbing alone has its own factions and varying styles. For instance, contrast Alison Levine to James Pearson. Levine climbs established routes as a client like many of us in the mountaineering consumer market. She also speaks to non-climbing audiences regularly. Pearson seeks out unclimbed and rarely climbed routes and while he is known in climbing circles he is far from a household name anywhere.

In the Pearson example, he is pushing the limits of the sport. Levine uses the sport as a message platform. Both undoubtedly enjoy the self-challenge. But I hardly think that I will be able to sit down for a beer with both of them at the same time, let alone the same pub.

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Climbing Washington, DC’s High Point

/ Andrew Szalay / Leave a comment

I’ve lived and worked in America’s capital city region for almost a decade. As a repressed mountaineer – alpinist in particular – that would prefer to live in a mountain setting, I deride it as Peaklessburg, though there are many peakless towns we live and work. But not in my whole time here did I consider climbing the city’s highest point.

I am not referring to Reno Hill (409ft./125m.,) Washington, DC’s natural high point. If I was I would be significantly lowering my standards of what classifies as a climb and I might start to hate myself. I’ve casually driven passed Reno Hill before but hardly gave the thought of “hiking” to the “summit” consideration.

No, I’m talking about the mountaineers smearing on the city’s highest point of all, the Washington Monument (555ft./169m.). You have probably heard that the August 23, 2011 east coast earthquake damaged several Washington landmarks, including the monument. Last week the National Park Service, which manages the facility, hired climbers from Colorado, Massachusetts and other locations to scale the exterior of the obelisk in order to inspect and document all of the damage.

This has made me wonder whether it’s possible that I’ve been missing out of the climbing potential of my hometown. Perhaps we should send the Capitol Building rotunda (from the exterior rather than the interior staircase via the “architect’s tour.”) Maybe the Jefferson Monument by the Tidal Basin offers decent “bouldering” problems that I haven’t considered. Maybe the Access Fund ought to get involved here. Of course, none of these features ice over with waterfall ice except every few centuries… and I’m hoping this winter is the time!

Artificial mountains and routes though are just substitutes for the purpose of practice in lieu of the natural ones, in my opinion. But I cannot discount their value too much. So if we started climbing more buildings (be it the Washington Monument or the CN Tower), would they be in the same class as climbing walls at gyms or would they be in a separate category? What about the proposed artificial mountain being talked about in the Kingdom of the Netherlands for skiers and climbers? Will we start crafting mountaineering routes the way golfers design fairways?

I do want to point out before I sign off today that the climbing going on at the Washington Monument is primarily involving rappelling and not ascending. So it’s not quite being climbed. Of course, if one of these monument inspectors were to climb to the summit, I wonder what he or she would name the first ascent route? If you’ve got a suggestion, leave me comment below.

Thanks again for dropping by. If you enjoyed this post, please consider following the Suburban Mountaineer on Facebook or Twitter. Happy reading and carpe climb ’em.