As climbing has grown in popularity, the print magazines for climbing dwindled to a set that can pretty much be counted on one hand.

It’s kinda funny, isn’t it?

Look at this list of climbing magazines from 2013 from Weigh My Rack. Even when you take the non-English-language magazines away, that’s a dozen periodicals.

From that list, for me, I miss Urban Climber (I don’t think it was a redundant magazine), Climbing (preferred it in print and before Pocket Outdoor Media took over and put it under Outside Magazine and made it Climbing Online, so it was no longer Climbing Magazine, really), Rock & Ice (no thanks to Pocket Outdoor Media for simplifying the market, yet again), and Ascent. Ascent was a special annual periodical published by a few different magazines, most recently Outside in 2022, but I haven’t heard about it since. Have you?

I also lament these hard copies of magazines because I spend a lot of time on a device for work. And my work communications, calendar, to-do list, phone, notes, banking… everything is facilitated through my damn mobile device. (And I don’t think I am unusual in that regard, am I?) Hard copy has an advantage: Paper doesn’t pop up with a message from one of my kids or a teammate from work. It fosters focus on the article without distractions from other sources. By comparison, I feel like time can be eaten and wasted scrolling looking for news and content that interests me.

Here is all I could find from English language climbing periodicals that aren’t journals. Now, there are a few online magazines that I are worth mentioning, like UK Climbing and Common Climber, but these four are in print:

Alpinist — The award-winning long-form literature quarterly that focuses on alpinism, but excludes sport and competition climbing.

Climbing Zine — This is designed to be the refined messenger magazine, as the name suggests. It might be the most culturally authentic of the publications printing on paper today.

Gripped — The Canadian climbing magazine printing six-times annually and edited by climber and author David Smart. It has great reporting and connects you to the climbers, even if you live in the Toronto area, like David.

Climber — The UK’s in-print climbing magazine prints six times annually, and, like Gripped, covers the world of climbing news and technique.

These four publications are those that haven’t or wouldn’t be sold, amalgamated, gutted, and shutdown. This all happened in 2022, principally to Climbing and Rock & Ice. The new owners didn’t want several publications and didn’t want them competing with each other once they owned them, and often decided that they didn’t care to invest in your market.

I get lean business decision making. I make cuts in my line of work. But I also am keenly aware of unserved and underserved markets. Well, maybe those are better suited for the smaller publishers of Alpinist, Gripped, The Climbing Zine, and Gripped.

If you value these publications, bound with a spine and delivered to your mailbox — the one at the curb or in your lobby — then you should subscribe.

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Updated April 28, 2024

On K2 in 1939, a mere few hundred meters from the summit, Pasang Dawa Lama was climbing in support of Fritz Wiessner, the leader of the second American expedition. Wiessner had summit fever. But it was late in the day and the conditions were turning poor. Wiessner took the next step upward, but met resistance from the rope connecting them. Pasang looked to Wiessner and said, “No, sahib.” Wiessner passed it off Pasang’s desire to stop as superstitious, being so close to the top, the home of the mountain’s spirit.

Reluctantly, Wiessner relented and lost his best opportunity to summit. It’s also widely believed that Pasang may have saved their lives. I reflected on this story several times in this book, because it encapsulates so many of the things I thought we knew about climbing in the Himalayas in the early 20th Century.

Starting with George Mallory, Western stories about climbing mountains in the Himalaya and Karakorum focused on an individual Western hero, like Fritz Wiessner, and placing local climbers, like Pasang and porters in an ethereal background. In learning about Muhammad Ali Sadpara, Bernadette McDonald, turned her attention to a subject without a lot of previous written records, and researching what did exist and interviewing people in remote regions of Nepal and Pakistan.

The result was Alpine Rising: Sherpas, Baltis, and the Triumph of Local Climbers in the Greater Ranges by Bernadette McDonald and was released by The Mountaineers Books on February 20, 2024. (I appreciate the Oxford comma in the subtitle.) In the acknowledgements section at the end, you can see that she had a cast of many helping interview and gather the information that created the context of their world and the stories of how mountaineering shaped them and, now, how local climbers are shaping mountaineering.

McDonald applies the term local climbers to distinguish those born in and living around the high mountains of the Himalayas and Karakorum, from the foreign or international climbers form elsewhere. Sherpa is one group of people has been the most widely used, both generously with merit and fraudulently, but there are also Ladakhi, Balti, Hunza, Astori, Magar, Bhotia, Rai, and Gurung. McDonald also defines some terms from used in past historical works, from “coolies” (now a demeaning term for hired help or porter,) porter, high-altitude porter (or HAP,) Gurkha (British soldiers now hired from Nepal,) and sahib (a term of respect, once all foreign climbers including Fritz Wiessner, but no longer used today.)

McDonald structures here story chronologically, after introducing the subject, by telling the story of the local climbers involved in the early attempts on Himalayan and Karakorum peaks. Then she shifts to tell the some stories by theme, from a particular climber, like Mingma G., to the widows who started to climb, like Furi Diki, Jangma Sherpa, and Sherki Lamu. In all, she shares the lives of 20-30 local climbers to varying degrees.

She chose the term “mass market climbing” to describe the large commercial climbs that employee many local climbers, especially on Everest and now even on K2 in Pakistan. Multiple generations of local climbers participate, mostly fathers and sons and uncles and nephews, earning their money for their grit and later their skills and tenacity at the heights. While I dislike that style of climbing, it has given birth to Ali Sadpara and Mingma G., who are not just local climbers, HAPs, or Sherpas, but respected climbers.

Overall, I found the book more subtle in its conveying new information. For instance, this wasn’t shedding light on ascents unseen or climbers completely unknown to knowledgeable readers, but this was the first survey course, so to speak, on the local climber’s work, perspective, and how they also had their own ambitious. Many of those ambitions were easy to relate to: The well being of their family, financial success through a growing resume of expertise, and the sheer joy of being in nature and attempting to reach summits.

Alpine Rising is not a comprehensive history of local climbers, and McDonald acknowledges that. It is still full of helpful historical and contemporary contexts. For instance, understanding why Sherpas were eagerly looking for work when the early British explorations started, and how HAPs (High-Altitude Porters) came to be. In the end, they are increasingly climbers, whether they are working to pay for their mother’s medical care, or aspiring to reach the summit for their country. (HAPs, I was interested to learn was first coined by Willi Unsoeld.)

My sole complaint about Alpine Rising was in McDonald’s handling of Nims. McDonald recounts Nirmal “Nims” Purja’s six month-attack on the 8,000ers well. He hadn’t spent time working his way through the mass market climbing business, and he stepped in, seemingly out of nowhere, to climb all fourteen of the world’s highest peaks in a unique style of a modern military assault with helicopters. Nims flew and climbed, and the world watched, as the fourteen mountains were ticked off. Except, today, in this environment of competitive-record climbing, Nims did not reach the actual or true summits of Manaslu and Dhaulagiri.

This may be nitpicking, but when I read this McDonald’s take on it, she finishes the first account on this effectively stating the record was six months and six days. I knew that it had actually been two years, five months, and fifteen days. Yet most popular opinions orbit around a six-month record, when it wasn’t true. I read through the book and never found a satisfying explanation, which I expected would be more blunt than it was. His six-month record is listed under “Purja, Nirmal” in the index, but the story of his return was not (it’s actually on pages 202-203.) It was retold with the story of Mingma G., which makes logical sense since it was Mingma G.’s attention to detail about true summits, particularly Manaslu, but clarifying Nims’ record under emphasized, in my opinion.

(This was relevant to Nims’ story. It is also a relevant topic in Himalayan and Karakorum climbing today. The actual summits are now better understood, and the number of people taking shortcuts to say they reached the top have grown from either error, omission, or outright lying. This would need to be explained in greater detail in Alpine Rising to get the general reader up to speed, but it is an issue that speaks to the true challenge of Nims accomplishment. It is remarkable, but it wasn’t six months and six days, and McDonald does not perpetuate the myth.)

Alpine Rising does not exhaustively break new ground, but as a book deemed as “significant” is fundamentally about what needed to be said. I expect to be referring to it from time to time as the perspectives on these events need to be remembered. McDonald’s Alpine Rising tells a story of climbers that needed to be said.

And while I still like to think about Wiessner and Pasang Dawa Lama on K2 in 1939. If they were in the same position, Pasang would not have called Fritz “sahib.” They would have had a different conversation, probably one of peers. Or perhaps, Pasang would have his own local team.

Rating: 4/5

Was it a climbing classic? I think it needs more time to age, like a wine. I think it’s certainly groundbreaking for a full book. I am doubtful that a journalistic retrospective like this will stand on a list of top 10 or 20 nonfiction climbing books. But I could be wrong. And I could change my mind (everyone should be free to change their opinion.) It could be a lasting title, if it is referred to regularly too, I suppose.

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Next month, Mimi Zieman, M.D.’s memoir of her journey from New York City to Mount Everest, Tap Dancing on Everest: A Young Doctor’s Unlikely Adventure, will be released. There is no reason you should know her, if you are focused on mountain literature. This is her first and probably only book on the subject. She worked and cared for Ed Webster, Robert Anderson, and Stephen Venables. It’s not your traditional mountaineering story. Tap Dancing on Everest is actually a feminist story of self-discovery, with a mixture of adventure and medicine, from Falcon Guides. And, yes, I wanted to read it despite the central objective being Mount Everest.

So, about that: Let’s get my Everest disclaimer out of the way. If you know my take, you can skip ahead to the next paragraph. Here goes: Contemporary Everest is over publicized, which is a way of saying it’s overrated. Today, Everest is crowded, over commercialized, suitable for an adventure but not a wilderness experience, which means that it is no longer one of the most compelling mountain climbs. The real climbs that are significant today are happening on other mountains.

Now, let me give my explanation why I reviewed this book, despite my caveats: When permits to climb Everest were few and far between, before the 1990s, the attempts and ascents were genuinely interesting. The mountain was still wilderness, without base camp villages, commercial teams, helicopter re-supplies, and wifi. Take legendary alpinist Ed Webster’s three climbs on the peak, which he recounted in his book Snow in the Kingdom: My Storm Years on Everest (2000), and culminated in his masterpiece in 1988. Back then, he wanted to climb in a purer fashion. He shunned packing radios. Tap Dancing on Everest dealt with this 1988 expedition, but that’s not the only reason I accepted the opportunity to read and review it.

I wanted to read it because of this line in the email from the publicist: “This was the expedition that Mimi Zieman, then 25 and still in her third year of medical school in New York City, joined as the lone woman of the team to serve in the capacity of medical officer.” I hadn’t read a book about a support team member. And this was a new perspective on a significant climb. Significant, as in on a National Geographic map of historical climbs, it’s one of only nine highlighted routes. And Zieman wasn’t another dude from the era, but a strong and independent woman. Well, the description didn’t claim that, but from that description and that climb, I concluded she must be worth reading about.

Zieman’s book is autobiographical through her 25th year of life. She was born to an immigrant family living in New York City. There was danger of theft and abuse around many corners in her neighborhood. But she found respite through the challenges of life, urban life in New York City in the 1970s, in jazz and tap dancing. The way climbing guarded Jon Krakauer, as he said it in Into the Wild, from a “post adolescent fog,” tap dancing lifted Zieman’s eyes with purpose and joy. She also said that she learned from her parents, that a second life was possible through “hard work, intelligence, and wits.”

A series of intentional and accidental events all paved her way to Mount Everest. From New York to Colorado, from Colorado to the Annapurna Circuit, from the Annapurna Circuit to meeting mountaineer Robert Anderson and being invited on as medical officer of an ambitious climbing team. The linkages must be read, and even when things didn’t go as hoped, still brought some remarkable results.

My favorite segment was during her solo trek through the Annapurna Sanctuary in Nepal. According to Zieman, women didn’t do this alone in those days. (Yet, she meets another solo trekker at Everest Base Camp, rare, but not absolutely unheard about.) She carried an inappropriate backpack for the duration, and made some wonderful discoveries about human endurance and attitude. She also applied her knowledge gained in Colorado: Move swiftly over a field of deep pebbles, otherwise you’ll sink for a brief moment only before slipping terribly.

As a medical student, with some experience at Himalayan altitude, Anderson recruited Zieman for the team he and Ed Webster were forming to ascend Everest’s East Face by a new route, its second. They invited Stephen Venables later. It didn’t hurt that Anderson was romantically attracted to Zieman. Zieman wasn’t sure what was going on between them, until they arrived at Base Camp and they shared a tent.

As Zieman tells her story, she shares a steady perspective on the human body throughout. The body is a stronger theme than is tap dancing as a source and symbol of strength and joy. The story weaves details about her body, her mother’s shape, people disrespecting their body in various ways, the crude solutions to care for a human body from urination to catheters, poor health, medicine, and its frailty. I found it somewhat uncomfortable yet liberating. As a parent cleaning up a lot of bodily messes, I have found the body is a messy thing we try to dress it in dignity. Zieman’s work globalized what I learned.

As a climbing story, this was every bit Zieman’s story and perspective. Looking at Webster, Anderson, Venables, and the other expedition members, they were her friends and patients first. She danced and drank with them. She treated them for digestive troubles, altitude sickness, frostbite, and helped them relieve themselves when they were too weak. Some of the medical care was wonderfully vivid. Undignified moments with climbing legends. Legend or not, it was graphic, real, and it even made me chuckle. This was why the book is a climbing related story, not a climbing story.

I didn’t like the first chapter. Zieman opens at Advanced Base Camp, peering into the white nothingness, waiting for the overdue climbers to return. It made me ask questions I was curious about the answers — what an author does to keep us reading — but it seemed overreaching and borderline sappy. I didn’t start to forgive Zieman until the story arrived in Colorado and fully on the Annapurna Circuit. I was suspicious why I chose to read this, as a mountain book reader, for quite a bit.

This book won’t make it on my list to consider for climbing classics, and I wouldn’t recommend if you’re looking for a great mountaineering story. But I did glean some new appreciation for our medical care providers, and I enjoyed the chance to see things through someone’s eyes who are very different from my own. Plus getting a perspective on someone’s complicated love life with Robert Anderson, was momentarily entertaining too.

Well, thanks for dropping by. If you enjoyed this post, please consider joining my email list, which is the best way to get updates. (I am on Facebook too, but make sure your preferences will allow you to see my posts.) Thanks again and be well!