Climbing

Apocalypse Peak FA and the Piolet d’Or

/ Andrew Szalay / Leave a comment

West Face of Apocalypse Peak (Photo by Clint Helander 2013; made available by permission.)

In between responsibilities (fleeting nanoseconds, really), including coordinating an advocacy campaign at work and still unpacking from the move (yes, we’re still unpacking) I’ve been brooding about this year’s Piolet d’Or. I look forward to learning about the nominees and who they choose to honor every year. But this time, not only did I disagree with their choice, the recipients probably don’t feel as honored. I wouldn’t.

I’ll fill you in more in a moment, but there was some positive news that I’d like to tell you about first, especially if you’re as into the possibilities of climbing mountains in Alaska as I am.

Alaskan First Ascent
Clint Helander — the current expert and first ascentionist in Alaska’s Revelation Mountains — and climbing partner Jason Stuckey climbed the range’s largest unclimbed peak, Apocalypse Peak (9,345 ft./ 2,848 m.). They named their route on its 4,400 ft./ 1,341 m. West Face “A Cold Day in Hell.”

After several false starts from Talkeetna, Talkeetna Air Taxi pilot Paul Roderick found the weather window that would allow them to land in the midst of the Revelation Mountains, a sub-range of the greater Alaska Range, approximately 80 miles west of Talkeetna.

After spending two nights on the mountain, they rated the route up to WI5. The final leg included a signature Alaskan traverse with plenty of knife-edge exposure leading to the summit.

The Revelations have only recently started to be explored. In the 1960s, author and alpinist David Roberts lead the first expedition there. Roberts named most of the mountains himself, including Apocalypse Peak, which he described as “fearsome” in On the Ridge Between Life and Death.

Congratulations to Clint and Jason, and a special thanks to Clint for being generous in allowing me access to his photos.

Jason Stuckey coming up the crux pitch of A Cold Day in Hell (Clint Helander 2013; made available by permission.)

Indecisive 2013 Piolet d’Or Jury
All six nominees, save one, was a major traverse and included an ascent or descent of a previously unclimbed face. The jury, lead by British alpinist Stephan Venables, emphasized this and it’s mentioned in each press release and English-language news story. That indicates to me that the judges identified the commonalities but couldn’t, wouldn’t or refused to find what differentiated any of them. (I found several aspects.)

The jury named all six nominees recipients of the 2013 Piolet d’Or. Not just two plus an honorable mention, but all of them. They included some very impressive routes:

  1. A French ascent of Kamet (7,756 m.) in India.
  2. A British climb of the so-called Prow of Shiva (6,142 m.) in India.
  3. A Russian team that climbed light, except an enormous food-stuffed haul bag to traverse iconic Muztagh Tower (7,284 m.) in the Karakoram.
  4. An American team that tackled the southern features of Baintha Brakk (7,285 m. and a.k.a. The Ogre).
  5. A noble British traverse of the Himalayas’s longest ridge on an 8,000-meter peak — the Mazeno Ridge on Nanga Parbat (8,125 m.)
  6. A committing six-day Japanese ascent of the south pillar of Kyashar (6,770 m.) in Nepal.

It’s hard to disagree with the jury in that each climb is worthy of note. In fact, just reading up on the alpinists from these ascents is thoroughly fascinating. But sharing the honor of the title of 2013 Piolet d’Or winner devalues the competition.

I celebrate alpinism and climbing in general on this blog and I do so through my personal perspective; it’s subjective (though I insist it’s more often correct than incorrect). What I choose to feature — like Helander’s new climb — is about as much matter of taste as it is about respect. I select certain climbs and climbers to honor here. Why I choose one over another is up to me, and if people knew my rubric for making these pages I might get criticized. Still, I make decisions and I usually stick by them.

If I were working with Stephen Venables and rest of the 2013  jury, I would have advocated for the Mazeno Ridge traverse to be given the award outright. Of the ascents, it was the largest in scope, in length and elevation. So congratulations Sandy Allan and Rick Allen: You win my Piolet d’Cuivre.

Michael Ybarra

On a side note, I’ve been in touch with the Michael’s sister, Suzanne, about some of his work outside of climbing. People in our circles usually only remember Michael for being a charming, yet badass climber. He was also a gifted researcher and writer. He walked a line of the Suburban Mountaineering life like few contemporaries.

For those of you that work day-to-day and live an alter-ego life on expedition vacations or weekends at a crag, this might be insightful. More to come…

Thanks for dropping by again. If you enjoyed this post, please consider following the Suburban Mountaineer on Facebook or Twitter. Climbing matters, even though we work nine to five.

Western Eyes on K2 Part III

/ Andrew Szalay / 2 Comments

I remember a great line from the Indiana Jones movies. In The Last Crusade the Jones character is lecturing to his students and he says most archeology work is done in the library and that X never marks the spot. He then proceeds to have a Hollywood-style adventure in archeology across Europe and the Holy Land which includes him finding a large roman numeral 10 to which he remarks, “X marks the spot,” and proceeds to dig.

Bob Schelfhout Aubertijn’s work was more like what Jones said to his students. (Unless he lied to me in our interviews and he really used a bull whip and a pistol in his work as a historian to obtain the stereo slides of K2.) As I explained in my previous two posts, these slides were of the very first image of K2 ever taken, replacing vague, inaccurate contours on a map with an avatar. Let me continue from where I left off…

French Ministry of Culture
It was a typo in the database of the French Ministry of Culture that held back Bob Schelfhout Aubertijn from connecting the image of K2 directly to Jacot-Guillarmod through more than his book, Six Mois dans l’Himalaya. He traced another image — a group shot of the members of the 1902 K2 expedition — to the French Ministry of Culture. They misspelled Guillarmod’s name: “GuillarmoT.” No search engine would have solved that puzzle.

There, he came across images just like those from the set of eight slides he purchased all credited to Jules Jacot-Guillarmod. He even found the actual photo image of K2 that was the template for an engraving in Six Mois. Finally, there it was: The slide in question. Of the eight slides in the purchase, Schelfhout Aubertijn was able to prove four of them were by conclusively made by Jacot-Guillarmod in 1902.

Stereoplates
The image in question was a medium we don’t use or think about today. It was on high resolution glass plates meant for a stereo viewer. Think of those toys when you were a kid: a plastic viewer you might buy at a museum or aquarium gift shop. You aim the viewer to light and look in with both eyes to see a Saturn with its rings bright and real or a shark in what looks like you could put your hand in its jaw. It did this by having two separate images bent by a lens to tease our eyes.

The original stereo viewers were far more elegant (see the image at the top). They were sometimes wooden boxes with brass or other furnishings. You slide in the dual slides and look in with a or without a light behind it so the world inside, whether it was the Taj Mahal or some other nearly mythical place. This was even more true before National Geographic magazine had a wide circulation and television and the Internet desensitized us to the exotic nature of the world a continent away.

David Roberts, the author and Harvard Mountaineering Club member, recounts when he and classmate Don Jensen spent time in Bradford Washburn’s attic office at the Boston Museum of Science looking through a stereo viewer what even then was old (though perhaps not yet given the status of being called an antique.) Roberts describes how it was an ideal way to see a mountain and consider it’s virgin possibilities for new lines. He said the images “leap into three dimensions” (Roberts, On the Ridge Between Life and Death, 78).

New Again
Schelfhout-Aubertijn’s stereo plates were not the original close-up image used to make the engraving of K2 in Six Mois dans l’Himalaya, which may have helped the Duke of the Abruzzi, but as it would turn out, had a another significance. Another research colleague of Schelfhout-Aubertijn’s arranged all the photos credited to Jacot-Guillarmod and arranged them chronologically. The photos were laid out according to the schedule of their trip. When you move past the images into the towns and into the wilderness, it became clear that Crowley, Eckenstein and Guillarmod arrived at Concordia and must have paused nearby.

K2 probably dominated their attention more than Broad Peak and the other nearby mountains. A near-perfect pyramid. Jacot-Guillarmod was eager. As a photographer on a major adventure, every great moment needed to be memorialized. In haste, he set up his Verascope Richard and exposed the plates. He didn’t move the porter stick and other items in the foreground (see below). Not to mention, as Schelfhourt-Aubertijn points out, with their gear and low sensitivity materials, “[I]t’d be foolish not to shoot several images before you got there.”

The first image of K2 as taken by Jules Jacot-Guillermod in 1902 and recently purchased in auction by Bob Schelfhout-Aubertijn in 2011.

The first image of K2 as taken by Jules Jacot-Guillarmod in 1902 and recently purchased in auction by Bob Schelfhout-Aubertijn in 2011.

The other images Jacot-Guillarmod would take would be closer to the mountain. This image was the first. It shows the emotional excitement of the photographer that hoped to not only see it but had hoped to climb higher on it than anyone else, like Crowley and Eckenstein had hoped. I wonder if he knew at that moment whether it would not be possible for them.

The Cover
There has rarely been a cover of Alpinist that has been universally agreed upon among the editors. The cover of Issue 37 wasn’t any different. But the image was not only among the first but the first and so it’s place was decided; the cover it was.

Personally, I’m not sure I would have appreciated this picture of K2 so much had it not been on the cover or if Greg and Katie hadn’t introduced me to Bob himself. It was an opportunity for Bob that turned into a climbing history geek’s dream and a great mystery to be solved.

Thanks to everyone for reading this short series and to everyone that helped me tell the story!

I’ll be back soon with more to share. If you want to stay connected with updates about new posts and other climbing news, please consider following the Suburban Mountaineer on Facebook or Twitter. Happy reading and happy climbing!

First Winter Ascent of Broad Peak

/ Andrew Szalay / 2 Comments

Just before arriving downtown at work I got an email from relentlessly cheery Bob Schelfhout Aubertijn. He’s good at making a climbing-obsessed person’s day. This time he was simply spreading the news: The Polish expedition that has been working on summitting

Broad Peak in the Karakorum did it today, March 5, 2013.

I posted the news on Facebook and Twitter right away. It’s significant because of the other 8,000-meter peaks, only K2 and Nanga Parbat now remain unclimbed in winter. It’s also significant because the Poles once more are the leaders in this space, with only one first winter ascent to these highest of cold mountains to their credit thus far.

Congratulations to Maciej Berbeka, Adam Bielecki, Tomasz Kowalsk and Artur Malek. You’re in the history books. As Bernadette McDonald has pointed out, in Poland the key questions about any mountain are, when was the first ascent and when was the first ascent in winter. Now Broad Peak has a complete answer. Best of luck on the descent to them!

On a personal note, we’ve got a big snow storm coming and I’m really excited, as I consider myself snow-deprived here in Peaklessburg. If we all get the snow day I’m expecting, I’ll pretend I’m in the mountains for minute, sip some wine, spend quality time with the family and pray the power doesn’t go out.

Have a good night.

Updated March 10, 2013: Since posting this, Maciej and Tomek went missing during their the decent. There is no news about either climber.

Western Eyes on K2 Part II

/ Andrew Szalay / 5 Comments

This is part II of my posts on the first image of K2. Now that you understand why the photo is significant, let me tell you about how it was lost and then resurfaced.There are probably countless climbing antiques and photographs that have remarkable stories to tell if only they were well researched and featured according to their merit. In fact, I don’t think that there is a dull climbing story, only tales that are poorly told.

K2 1993
In 1993 — the same year Greg Mortenson, the now infamous author of Three Cups of Tea attempted the mountain — a climber with roots in Australia and a passion for photography set forth to reach the top as well. Bob Schelfhout Aubertijn wasn’t yet interested in the history of the mountain. He hadn’t even seen the images taken by Vittorio Sella. Without topping out, Schelfhout Aubertijn returned home and his interest in K2 turned into passion. Some may say that it’s an obsession.

Since his attempt, Schelfhout Aubertijn built an extensive library around K2’s early exploration to its contemporary climbs. To illustrate how comprehensive his compilation is, he has 13 copies of Ardito Desio’s account of the 1954 first ascent of K2 — one in English, another in Italian, German, French, Spanish, Swedish… Of all the foreign language editions in print, he is only missing the Japanese edition. Schelfhout Aubertijn is also a bit of a linguist, which allows him to glean from the interesting details and nuances between translations. With those skills and his experience on the mountain itself, he’s an extraordinary authority.

His collection is greater than just books. He also owns Fritz Weissner’s ritual robe and cap, and carabiners that have been to K2’s summit that were given to him by Anatoli Boukreev. Then there is the art, ranging from paintings to photos by Sella himself.

If you read The Suburban Mountaineer regularly you can understand what Schelfhout Aubertijn sought by climbing K2. He calls it experiencing the “true essence” in mountaineering. But clearly for him it was a beginning rather than and end.

Six Months in the Himalaya
Unfortunately, one book about K2 Schelfhout Aubertijn doesn’t own is Jacot-Guillarmod’s record of the 1902 expedition, Six Mois dans l’Himalaya. It’s rare and listed by one collector at US$2,500. This book contained the Jacot-Guillarmod’s photo — the first photo — of K2 that the Duke of the Abruzzi no doubt referred to as beta for his expedition soon afterwards.

The book fell into dated obscurity. (Aside: Other books come to this purgatory and I recently noticed that Don Mellor’s out-of-print guidebook to climbing in the Adirondacks is now fetching over US$100, though Mellor’s book seems to remain in demand.) For K2, other stories from the Duke’s expedition and Sella’s superb photographs superseded Jacot-Guillarmod’s work from his six-month visit to the Karakorum.

Inde
The images Jacot-Guillarmod took were preserved on glass stereo plates, similar to slides for a projector your teacher may have used in school before SmartBoards, except there were a pair meant to be seen through a stereo viewer. They were among several others. The collection was simply labeled “Inde”, French for India.

The private owner put them up for auction on Ebay and they caught the eye of a photographer hobbyist. That same hobbyist was Bob Schelfhout Aubertijn. The images on the eight plates were of pictures you might imagine in an old book of British India with one plate devoid of people with a foreboding landscape on the lower half and on the top half a bright shining pyramid feature. He asked the seller for a larger image than the one posted online. Unmistakably, it was K2.

Schelfhout Aubertijn bid and won the auction.

Verascope Richard
Without knowing when the images were taken or by whom, the glass plates were merely a historic curiosity. The only clue was a notation on the margin of the slide, which read, “Verascope Richard.” After some digging, Schelfhout Aubertijn found that it was a French camera company that produced cameras from 1880 to 1930. That gave the image a window of time.

In addition to keeping excellent records, Schelfhout Aubertijn also has an good memory. He immediately narrowed the field of possible photographers, considering the expeditions I mentioned in my previous post. Schelfhout Aubertijn’s memory and collections for reference were also sufficiently comprehensive enough to rule out Younghusband — he did not see K2 from the south — and the others.

Schelfhout Aubertijn’s senses went on “full alert,” when he discovered that Jacot-Guillarmod used a Verascope when he went to the next highest accessible mountain in the world, Kangchenjunga in 1905.

American Alpine Club Library
Connecting the dots turned into a game of six-degrees of separation. Schelfhout Aubertijn contacted his friend, award winning author Bernadette McDonald, because he knew she read Six Mois. Unfortunately, she didn’t have a copy and referred him to Katie Ives at Alpinist. But she had actually only seen copies of pages from the rare book, which were made available by the American Alpine Club Library. That meant a call to our mutual friend, Beth Heller, who was the librarian at that time.

Heller, with Adam McFarren, got scans of pages with photos printed in the book to Schelfhout Aubertijn. I know Heller to be extremely prompt with email and she was true to character. It wasn’t the K2 image, but they matched some of the other glass slides he had acquired — exactly.

Schelfhout Aubertijn was getting close, but there was still a giant leap to be made to arrive on the cover of Alpinist. I’ll cover that in my next post about the first K2 photograph and tell you about these stereo plates and why even Bradford Washburn loved them.

Thanks for dropping by again. If you enjoyed this post, please consider following the Suburban Mountaineer on Facebook or Twitter. Climbing matters, even though we work nine to five.

To read the next post in this series, click here.

Western Eyes on K2

/ Andrew Szalay / 4 Comments
The cover and mountain profile of K2 from Alpinist 37 (courtesty Alpinist magazine)

The cover and mountain profile of K2 from Alpinist 37 (courtesy Alpinist magazine)

On a subject tangetial to the topics on The Suburban Mountaineer, but quite impactful, Natalie and I are excited that our home is listed for rent and we signed a lease for a new home with more space for our family’s growing needs. We’ll miss a lot of wonderful things about our current home but the move means a dedicated space for my books and maps as well as room to finally use my hangboard. I’ll let you know how that goes after we move in a month.

Now back in December I teased a little project I was working on concerning the first photographic image of K2. I love this story that I am about to start telling because it makes me feel closer to the events that helped shape our world. It also makes the people from the past become more alive.

The story began last winter when I received the 2011-12 winter issue of Alpinist in the mail. It was issue 37. I usually pause whatever climbing literature I am reading and go through the magazine from beginning to end. 37’s feature was part I of a Mountain Profile piece on K2 (28,251 ft./8,611m.) and the image on its cover was of the mountain in what looked like sepia; clearly an antique. Inside on the table of contents page the citation given for the image said: “The south face of K2 (8611m), with a survey rod and a porter stick in the foreground. Taken during a 1902 expedition, and recently found at an auction by Bob A. Schelfhout Aubertijn, this is one of the earliest photos of K2. Jules Jacot-Guillarmod/Courtesy Bob A. Schelfhout Aubertijn/Top of the World Books.”

I knew the proprietor of Top of the World Books, Greg Glade. He actually reached out to me about something unrelated sometime before issue 37 came out. His shop is a wealthy resource of books and artifacts on mountaineering and arctic exploration. I reached out to Greg this past fall. He gave me the gist of the story, which unwrapped the reference in issue 37 a little better and he told me something the reference didn’t say; it was the very first photographic image of K2.

HIMALAYAS 1902
The Himalayas and its Karakorum Range were still mostly a mystery to the majority of westerners in 1902. While the Great Trigonometric Survey estimated the heights of many of the Himalayan greats in the 1850s, the valleys and features were largely unmapped. In fact, the first western explorer in the region was Francis Younghusband in 1886-87, when he documented the way through the range via Muztagh Pass (west of K2). But the point of that route was to give the British options for military maneuvers rather than an interest in mountain exploration.

Two other small expeditions of westerners visited the area around K2 in 1890 and 1892 but they were of little significance to exploring the mountain. However, these two expeditions were drawn there because K2 was the highest accessible mountain in the world.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Mount Everest was shut off to foreigners. Both Nepal and Tibet denied access to all outsiders and so the mountaineers that were heading out from the Alps seeking greater challenges focused elsewhere in the greater Himalaya. Those that traveled there were relying on the Trigonometric Survey data from the 1850s and the little beta from Younghusband. The next two highest points became a fascination and both K2, the second highest mountain, and Kangchenjunga (28,169 ft./8,586 m.), the third highest mountain, were within British-controlled India.

1902 EXPEDITION
In 1902, Oscar Eckenstein and Aleister Crowley lead a small team to make the first attempt on K2. They pledged to climb higher than anyone had climbed previously in order to achieve the world altitude record. The team’s physician was also a photographer. Dr. Jules Jacot-Guillarmod took the first photographic image of K2 and it was published in his book Six Mois dans l’Himalaya (1904). After the mountain’s elevation recording by the Trigonometric Survey, this may have become the next piece of beta for future climbers. While I do not know for certain, I suspect the leader of the next expedition, the Duke of the Abruzzi, saw this book and this image. The Himalayas and K2 were beginning to be unmasked.

It’s a bit of revisionist history, but the 1902 attempt and this photo by Jacot-Guillarmod may have been a symbolic moment for the Himalayas. The blank on the map wasn’t just replaced by contour lines but an avatar or icon.

In my next post about K2’s first photograph I’ll tell you about how this image resurfaced and introduce you to an extraordinary linguist and K2 historian, Bob A. Schelfhout Aubertijn.

Thanks for dropping by again. If you enjoyed this post, please consider following the Suburban Mountaineer on Facebook or Twitter. Climbing matters, even though we work nine to five.

To read the next post in this series, click here.

Sources: 1) Greg Glade, Top of the World Books; 2) Katie Ives, Alpinist; 3) Bob A. Schelfhout Aubertijn; and 4) Viesturs, Ed and David Roberts, K2, 2011.

A Quick Note on Everest

/ Andrew Szalay / Leave a comment

In my last post I said that Everest won’t get interesting again until a team traverses Nuptse, Lhotse and Everest. Well, that was until we’ve heard the news of an all-star line up going for challenging new routes on the mountain.

According to Backcountry.com, three new routes will be attempted:

  1. Ueli Steck and Simon Moro will attempt a route on the south face, possibly direct;
  2. Denis Urubko and Alexey Bolotov will also attempt a route on the south face, possibly direct; and
  3. Gleb Sokolov and Alexander Kirikov will work on a new route on the east face.

It’s worth getting excited over, especially if it’s by fair means and in alpine style. If any of these teams can pull that off, it will be quite an accomplishment. I don’t know the Sokolov-Kirikov team as well as the others, but I always expect big results from Urubko.

Still, my Everest-cynicism has me cringing over the media circus that will follow .

Thanks for dropping by again. If you enjoyed this post, please consider following me on Facebook or Twitter. And feel free to share this post with your friends. Climbing matters, even though we work nine to five.