Bernard Amy Defends Alpinism

/ Andrew Szalay / Leave a comment

Bernard Amy was recently awarded an honorary membership to the Italian Academic Alpine Club. I must fit the stereotype of an ignorant American because I had no idea there was such a club until I heard the news.

Amy, a French mountaineer and a writer is best known among American climbers for his short story “The Greatest Climber in the World.” I became aware of that piece and Amy himself last year when a reader from the place of Amy’s birth — Lebanon — brought them to my attention.

Amy’s acceptance speech, which he gave at a ceremony in Turin, Italy, was well worded and extremely timely. He addresses the criticisms of climbing, particularly of mountaineering and alpinism, most of which revolve around the notion that climbing is a dangerous, frivolous activity.

The speech is brief and worth reading but if there is one key take away in his remarks that defends climbing, it’s that we must not try to explain why we climb but rather what we get from climbing. As Kelly Cordes put it in Alpinist 41, we should stop asking the unenlightened question of why, and instead ask what do you seek?

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Your Time to Climb Niagara Falls

/ Andrew Szalay / Leave a comment

UPDATED: January 29, 2015.

Niagara Falls almost froze once in your lifetime. It may never freeze again for you. If it does, will you be ready?

Of course, Niagara Falls isn’t a typical ice climbing destination.

By comparison, water ice in Hyalite Canyon, Montana and the Adirondack Mountains, New York are usually pretty reliable each winter. Albeit some routes form better than others year to year. However, even consistency has off years: This season in Chamonix, France is unseasonably warm, which has precluded any of the water flows from slowing down and stopping firmly in place. With the normal consistency of these locations, you can take for granted the reliability of the quality of the climbing.

Generally, those routes, like Dave’s Snotsicle (love that name) in Smuggler’s Notch, Vermont, are attractions for their length, challenge and setting reasonably far from any town. Sometimes the word ephemeral is used to describe them. Except there is no route more ephemeral than Niagara Falls; the last time it actually froze was in 1938.

Niagara Falls is amazing. It pours 5.5 billion gallons of water down its wall every hour. My dad told me about the people that rode a barrel over the falls; then I day dreamed about being one of those nuts climbing into a capsule and waiting for the river to carry me away. Yet it never crossed my mind to go in the other direction.

I grew up in the Buffalo, New York area just a 25-minute drive from the falls. I took girls on dates there when I was in high school, gambled there, been grossed out at Ripley’s Believe it or Not, drank a respectable quantity of Labatt’s Blue and Molson and other northern beers just above the gorge, and I have seen the falls from both borders in all seasons.

The typical ice buildup on the gorge walls is substantial most winters. It grows somewhat thick alongside on the gorge walls adjacent to the flow, mostly from spray and mist, but I have never seen the falls itself freeze solid like it nearly did during the 2013 North American Polar Vortex. Will Gadd and Sarah Hueniken ice climbed the adjacent wall by the Horseshoe Falls on January 29, 2015, but that’s not the falls proper.

The attraction for ice climbing this fleeting icicle is not about its height or serene outdoor qualities, like the ice crags I mentioned. You have to ignore the tourist traps, factories, casinos and tackiness and just focus on the ice. This likely won’t be worthy of an entry in the American Alpine Journal. I originally thought that this event will be more likely to be covered by Geraldo Rivera, but after seeing the coverage of Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson on the Dawn Wall in January 2015, perhaps the New York Times would want a piece of it. But public attention isn’t why you should pursue this climb.

Niagara Falls is the unicorn of ice climbing. If you’re an ice climber and it freezes again, you better have a plan. A drop-everything, call-in-sick, postpone-your-wedding and drive, fly or hitch to the Canadian border -plan.

Someone, one day, so long as ice climbing maintains a grip on restless souls seeking something they often can’t put into words, will be the opportunist. They may be the only person to ever attempt to climb Niagara Falls.

Maybe it’s you. Make a plan now. You have to take these photos and print large versions to study and become familiar with what may be in your future. You need to have gear and a way to get to Upstate New York/southern Ontario. You’ll need help getting to the base of the ice. Or maybe you rapel down.

When you’re done, if it happens in my lifetime, I’ll meet you on the Canadian side at Falls and Firkin (cheeky tagline: “Want a little Firkin more?”) and I’ll toast to you. There may not be another to follow your path. Ever.

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Polar Vortex and Winter First Ascents

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I just read where someone described a route in Patagonia by claiming it required some “Alaska style groveling.” I now think that I haven’t been outside enough and haven’t climbed often enough because I wanted to know if he needed a partner.

Well, here in most of the United States, most of us will be on our own to deal with this bout of arctic air (from the “polar vortex” phenomena) that has swept over North America. We’re all forced to be a little more self reliant by bundling up, keeping pipes from freezing and dealing with dead car batteries on our own. The utility company cannot help you. It sounds miserable to some, maybe most people, but for this moment we’ll feel alive in the moment and not just on auto pilot cruising through our daily routine.

However, the cold that has come south of the arctic circle is only a taste of the prolonged cold several climbers in three expedition teams are facing on Nanga Parbat, the ninth highest mountain in the world. Of the 14 eight-thousand meter peaks in the Himalayas and Karakorum, only two have not yet been summited in winter:

2. K2 (28,250 ft./8,611 m.)
9. Nanga Parbat (26,660 ft./8,125 m)

The last to “fall” in winter were the eleventh highest mountain, Gasherbrum I (26,470 ft./8,068 m.), as well as the twelfth highest, Broad Peak (26,401 ft./8,047 m.) The story of the Broad Peak ascent was shared in the short movie Cold.

In alpine climbing, what is a matter of official record are the firsts: The first ascent, first ascents by new original routes, and the first winter ascent. There are a lot of these winter objectives to set out on a quest.

Still, others try for firsts that are a little more of a particular challenge; Arctic explorer-turned-mountaineer Lonnie Dupres had tried to get up Denali solo these past three seasons during the height of winter (January, really.) However, based on the latest news available no one has announced plan to try for the top “Big Mac” in the darkest days of the year.

I’ll report on these climbs as I read read the news. For now, stay warm and enjoy feeling alive.

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Unsung Hero: A Review of Everest, The First Ascent

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No one gave Griffith Pugh much thought. That was true among the climbers too, it seemed. And at first glance he was absent minded, eccentric, and stubborn.

Yet, his daughter, Harriet Pugh Tuckey, introduces her late father in a new light and while he might not have been beautiful, he can be appreciated to a greater degree. She has also made me rethink, to some extent, the reasons that the 1953 Everest expedition was successful. She does this through her award winning book, Everest, The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain. Tuckey won the grand prize at the Banff Mountain Book Competition and the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature, both in 2013.

The Boardman tasker committee gave it this description: “Immensely readable biography of the 1953 expedition doctor and physiologist, the author’s ‘difficult, bad-tempered father’ who she lived with in an ‘uncommunicative co-existence’.” Yep. That’s the brunt of the story, however from a pure climbing history lens, it adds something new or at least brings some formerly obscure factors into focus.

The Golden Age of Himalayan climbing began in 1950 when the first of the 14 mountains over eight kilometers above sea level were climbed. After various failed attempts on the Himalayan giants, including eleven on Mount Everest, Annapurna in Nepal was climbed thanks to improvements in equipment and mostly bullheadness. Most climbs to the Himalayas at that time followed the tradition of ascents from the graceful Alps mixed with a military-style seige; grit and determination and advancing camps along the route to the top.

Before the Golden Age, it was a mystery why the oxygen tanks, brought to make climbing in the thin high altitude air easier, only earned complaints from the climbers about how useless they were. It was also a mystery whether man could adapt to the altitude, and if not what that meant.

Still, in the early 1950s, these mysteries were being settled by expedition leaders and their gut feelings on the matter. That approach seemed the only practical way; there was no one else with the skills or know-how to test the theories.

At the same time, sharing new ideas that ran against convention, like those from Pugh, had to go up against a virtual behemoth. The Everest Expedition was not a simple band of friends. It was institutional and political. The role of Everest Committee of the Alpine Club and the Royal Geographic Society was more akin to Washington, DC calling the shots in a ground war in Vietnam; the climbers with a real stake in the strategy rarely got to weigh in under the hierarchical structure. However, the Expedition Doctor (an official position on the Expedition), Michael Ward, understood this and believed that there were things the whole Expedition didn’t know that it didn’t know. He suspected an expert in physiology in cold might help break new ground.

Dr. Griffith Pugh was a lifelong tinkerer and a man of science in the exploratory sense. He knew more about humans operating in cold climates than almost anyone else because of his work for the Royal Army Medical Corps in Lebanon during World War II. He was also once an Olympic skier and did a bit of climbing himself. If someone can solve the mystery of how to put a man atop Everest (which had become as great a challenge as landing a man on the moon), perhaps Pugh could.

Tuckey summarizes one of the crux problems the expedition faced that Pugh solved:

“Pugh suggested that this common complaint [about the oxygen apparatus required so much energy to carry as to negate the supposed benefits] might be well founded. The oxygen sets used on Everest between the wars had been adapted from equipment developed for high-altitude flying. The supplementary oxygen was given to climbers at the same rate as to airmen — 2 to 2.5 liters a minute. However, unlike pilots sitting in their cockpits, climbers had to carry the oxygen sets on their backs while also expending energy climbing. If pilots needed 2 liters a minute, everything suggested that climbers would need much more.”

Overall, Tuckey doesn’t fundamentally change my concept of what Hillary and Norgay accomplished, but she does give detailed insight into the critical strides Pugh advanced among the Expedition. Sometimes his influence was subtle and sometimes not so subtle, like the climbers’ clothing and oxygen apparatus. As you’ll see in the book, he was often misunderstood, only now we know he shouldn’t be unnoticed.

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American Alpine Journal: In Memoriam

/ Andrew Szalay / Leave a comment

In addition to the records of first ascents, new routes and other significant climbs, the American Alpine Journal also contains a section in the back that may be more valuable in certain ways. The In Memoriam section is extremely brief, compared to the rest of the entries, but it captures climbing in a more global way.

The In Memoriam section is a tribute to the notable climbers that we lost the previous year. They are also mini biographies of climbing’s leaders. Role models and bad examples. Heroes and villains. Flawed like us and yet still impressive.

The main output of the obituaries isn’t to call out the climber’s greatest route or contribution to the mountaineering community — often summed up as singular events — rather to share the life that lead them to their accomplishments and what kind of life they lead as a result. Whether it was a bona fide gateway to another level of life seems to be rare, but the climbing lifestyle always seems to be perpetuated in some fashion.

Last fall, the American Alpine Club solicited applicants to be the next editor of the In Memoriam section of the American Alpine Journal. There were many applicants for the volunteer position, and David Wilkes of New York got the job. I actually met David over two years ago at an unrelated business meeting in Washington, DC (our roles in two separate organizations crossed briefly.) We didn’t know the other was a climber and we hardly thought the encounter was memorable beyond the business of the meeting. Another friend recently reconnected us because of our mutual interest in climbing.

Later I had the opportunity to ask David about overseeing production of the section as editor and managing the process with the writers. In the end, the AAJ included 14 obituaries, though he said there could have been more.

Not surprisingly, David described several complexities and complications that arose while putting the section together: “Each person that was profiled was a bit of a different story in terms of how the obit came about,” he explained. “For some, long-time friends or a relative were thrilled to write, in many cases providing far more stories and recollections than I could include and I needed to do some very difficult but substantial cutting.”

Some of the entries were obligatory. Had even one profile of the significant climbers been absent, the omission would have detracted from the section’s and the AAJ’s overall quality.

The tribute to Maurice Herzog that appeared in this year’s edition, was one of the mandatory profiles. However, finding the right person to write a true tribute, fitting the man’s life proved to be the most significant hurdle. I took that to mean that the seedier side of Herzog often overshadowed or unnecessarily threatened to cloud the man’s legacy.

On the potential for omissions, David said, “For some climbers’ obituaries it was more difficult to find an author – or when I did, to get them to complete the task.” Then he added, for some “we ended up with nothing.” For Herzog, being left with nothing would not be satisfactory.

“Maurice Isserman was the only person I found who could do the job right,” said David. “In the end, it made sense to include a line or two that pointed to the darker aspects of Herzog’s climbing legacy.”

Like Herzog’s obituary, much of the section was about balancing the content, particularly what needed to be said and what should be said to honor those notable climbers that we lost the previous year. American Alpine Club members can read the digital edition of the In Memoriam section in the 2013 AAJ section by clicking here. Nonmembers may also purchase it through the same link.

2013 Obituaries

  • Bjorn-Eivind Artun, 1966-2012
  • Bean Bowers, 1973-2011
  • Harvey Carter, 1932-2012
  • Herbert William Conn, 1920-2012
  • Bill Forrest, 1939-2012
  • Maurice Herzog, 1919-2012
  • Ben Horne, 1980-2012
  • Dale Johnson, 1931-2012
  • Ann Dodge Middleton, 1928-2012
  • Roger Payne, 1956-2012
  • Jack Roberts, 1952-2012
  • Gil Weiss, 1983-2012
  • Yan Dongdong, 1984-2012
  • Michael Ybarra, 1966-2012

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What I am Reading Now

/ Andrew Szalay / Leave a comment

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Quick note on what reading material is going with me during my commute to work this holiday season…

Harriet Tuckey’s Everest: The First Ascent. It won the 2013 Banff Mountain Book Competition Grand Prize and the 2013 Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature. I don’t like to dwell on Everest these days, but the history or the first atttempts are pure; they’re what most of us are really looking for in a climb, whatever that may be for you. In her book, Tuckey writes about her father and his unique contribution to making the first ascent of Everest possible. I’ll share my thoughts on it in the next couple of weeks.

I am also reading the December/January issue of Climbing (No. 321.) though not very quickly; Tuckey’s book has to be back to the American Alpine Club Library soon.

It also seems that I am “reading” REI, Patagonia, and LLBean catalogs at the rate of one each per week as we lead up to Christmas. They are mostly just a distraction to getting Everest done, except for the Patagonia catalog’s photography. These don’t go with me on my commute.

Happy Holidays.

Climbing matters even though we work nine to five.