No Cake Walk on Denali

/ Andrew Szalay / Leave a comment

The weather can rapidly shift and deteriorate at any altitude. It’s less interesting here in Peaklessburg, except, it actually snowed here yesterday! And then, moments later, the grey sky parted to make way for blue skies and sunshine. The flurries were so brief I thought I imagined them. However, the fact that the schools south of here actually closed for a snow day gives me reason to believe I wasn’t imagining things.

It’s easy to take common weather shifts for granted near sea level and in well-populated areas. We have the luxuries of automobiles and firm walls — and Starbucks coffee houses — to shelter us. That’s not the case alpine climbing and certainly not on Denali.

Every mountain has dangers, and Denali has some special characteristics. Jonathan Waterman, a former Denali guide, Mountaineering Park Ranger and author, makes the case that Denali has to be thought of as a bigger mountain than it’s elevation actually indicates. At 20,320 ft./6,196 m., it’s the highest mountain in North America but it’s dwarfed by Himalayan peaks in terms of girth and towering size by an extra kilometer or two. That being said, it’s proximity to one of the poles makes it much colder than mountains at similar altitude.

In Surviving Denali: A Study of Accidents on Mount McKinley 1903-1990 (AAC Press 1991), Waterman gives the example that the weather at the 17,200-foot camps can shift by dropping temperatures, increasing winds, and sudden snowfall causing decreased visibility. By contrast, at the same elevation in the Himalaya, climbers can often find refuge to rest and recover.

However, the dangers of climbing Denali are not limited to the weather conditions and climbing conditions (including crevasse fall, avalanche danger, rock fall and so forth), but are also like any other higher altitude peak. Climbers are susceptible to Altitude Mountain Sickness (AMS), High Altitude Pulmonary Edema (HAPE), and High Altitude Cerebral Edema (HACE). While immediate descent to lower elevation is the only real remedy, getting down can be a challenge as significant as the medical condition.

Helicopter evacuations are often requested for rescue, both in climbing accidents and medical incidents — and thank goodness it’s available. However, I believe that it takes away from the true purpose of going to the mountains: To experience deprivation from the infrastructure of society and be self-reliant, which is to say, to take-in wilderness.

The temptation of an alpinist to get to and from the mountain itself in haste has also presented numerous dangers and loss of life. For example, the climbers from the Harvard Mountaineering Club that made the second ascent of the north face by a new route survived frequent avalanches and rock fall, but nearly lost of their teammates by attempting to cross the McKinley River on there return. The river was at the height of its flow at that time of day. Waterman mentions about a dozen similar incidents — some deadly — in his other book, High Alaska.

Well, in other areas it sounds like the American Alpine Club Benefit Dinner was a success. I’m hearing good things about Freddie Wilkinson’s film of the ascent of Saser Kangri II last year. Hopefully I’ll get to watch it soon.

Laslty, news of expeditions’ plans for 2012 in the northern hemisphere are coming to surface — at least for climbs that will be promoting a brand or a cause. Regarding Denali, I’ve heard from Stewart Green’s blog that an all African-American team will be going for the top. I think that would be great to introduce the sport to a demographic that isn’t normally inclined toward climbing. What better way than through the romance of climbing a big peak? I wish them luck!

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A Little Adirondack Ice

/ Andrew Szalay / Leave a comment

The only picture of me climbing ice is before I learned how to climb. I’m spread way too long vertically with my arms straight up, picks stuck in the ice and my legs straight. I learned quickly that you don’t climb like that… anywhere.

While my college classmates went to Mexico, Florida or to their homes for Spring Break I got in my blue Mazda MX-6 and drove to Keene, New York. The plan was to do some short one-day climbs for two-to-three days with Bill Simes, who was guiding for Ed Palen’s Rock and River Guides. Rock and River is also a B&B so I had a room in the “Guide House.” In fact, I was the only guest at that time.

The weather would hold for the day I got there, my 22nd birthday, but the climb at Chapel Pond the second day was in doubt. The layer of grey clouds were growing thicker through the day and sealing off the spouts of sunshine. The forecast called for freezing rain, and lots of it.

Bill and I chose an only-slightly gentle slope to warm up. He set up the top rope, rapped down and reminded me to only use the pics for balance and to stand on my feet. Just like on rock, sort of. There aren’t front points on rock, usually.

Kick, kick, swing, swing. I stepped up and repeated. At the top, the first rappel was a little dicey. I quickly swung to my left, my hip and arm hitting the ice; clearly I didn’t start with a wide stance. Or I was just plain unbalanced. I don’t remember.

We walked over to a steeper wall of ice and I climbed and practiced placing ice screws. Bill told me that a recent study concluded that the screw will hold better — surer — if it’s angled downward, as if it would slide out. It seemed completely counter intuitive at the time. He explained why, but I’m not sure he completely understood. Bill was clearly convinced and I trusted him — he was one of Ed Palen’s guides — so I bought it too, without completely understanding. I read the engineering explanation later.

After we ate some granola bars and fruit for lunch, Bill set up the rope on an ice wall that was plain verticle and finished slightly overhanging. Gravity pulled at me from behind the whole time and I felt my heels dipping low, stretching my calves. I gripped my axes tighter — probably unnecessarily. This was when we had axe leashes (does anyone still use them?) and Bill told me to relax my grip and let my skeleton hang in the wrist loops. I tried. But even that hurt too, just differently.

I fell and hung suspended. Bill lowered me down. As it were a video game, I had to start over. I did top out — a couple of times. But I was spent. By four, we called it a day.

This would have been the perfect moment for him to slap me on the shoulder and say, “Let’s grab a beer.” Instead, I enjoyed a Saranac Pale Ale with dinner in town by myself. I watched the TV in the bar, got the news and then I got the weather forecast.

The next day wasn’t an epic. It was awash. But it was a nice birthday.

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Freedom of the Hills’ Non-Uniformity

/ Andrew Szalay / 1 Comment

These past few weeks climbers that follow the news (whom are distinct from climbers that only climb, don’t follow the news and live out of a van, right?) have been exposed to more headlines about Jason Kruk and Hayden Kennedy’s bolt chopping on Cerro Torre’s Compressor Route than on any other single subject. In fact, there has been so much chatter, figuring out where people stood on the issue became the most interesting point and to that end Patagonia mountain guide Rolando Garibotti collected leaders’ positions and quotes for Alpinist.com.

Except in the guiding space, like the American Mountain Guide Association, or competition-climbing world, there are few official standards in climbing. Equipment is built to exacting requirements for the good of the climber’s safety as they push the envelope — even if the limits are merely their own.

The standards we have are really a subjective set of ethics and style and in that vastness there is a lot of room for variances and dissent. I think that’s part of the appeal of climbing. We’re free to repeat routes and others accomplishments, explore lines previously untouched, and climb to the summit or just the ridge and call it a victory either way. They may not land in the pages of Climbing or the American Alpine Journal, but that’s okay for some of us.

But in that freedom come room for sincere controversy. We can argue about a lot of things. What is a first ascent? Was that really a new route or just a variation? Did they really climb unsupported? Or, in Kruk’s and Kennedy’s case, was it ethical and acceptable to remove the bolts on the Compressor Route?

The climbing culture is mainly a group tolerant of many things so long as it doesn’t interfere with the way they climb. There are anecdotes from expedition basecamps (one springs to mind of the 1996 Everest season I read about) where discussions of politics risked coming to blows and yet they climbed the next day tied to the same rope.

Until the AMGA or the International Federation of Mountain Guide Associations establishes some regulating body for terms and behavior, we won’t have clear answers. And that is wonderful! I would encourage them not to anytime soon. There is a great appeal to leaving the world of climbing style and ethics to human subjectivity. It’s a wilderness of our own making. Establishing rules should only happen out of a desperate situation stemming from anarchic danger. For now, climbing is exiting, controversial and dangerous enough.

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Lodging, Glamor and the Wilderness Experience

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My wife and I are searching for my family’s vacation destination for this summer. Camping as I want it isn’t on the table; while Edewiess’ idea of camping doesn’t require the Four Seasons Whistler, it was nice! We went, we zip-lined, we enjoyed a bottle of wine and a really nice pool with food service. That, as we both know, is not camping.

The field of outdoors recreation spans a spectrum that covers, surprisingly, diverse audiences. Both camping and fashion styles ranges from traditional “roughing it” to the highly sophisticated. The hardcore roughing it parts I embrace. Then there is the outdoor inspired fashions that are really only meant to be worn apres ski, for the most part.

As for camping, almost everyone has a different idea of what it is. A few years ago, a friend of mine, originally from Texas and drives a big diesel pickup, suggested he and I go camping in Shenandoah. He wanted to make a fire and cook our dinner while enjoying some beers outdoors. Sounded good to me. Our differences surfaced when we humped packs and carried a cooler three miles down a trail to land where campfires were permitted. He was cursing me the next day and we never went camping together again. He would have been fine pulling off the side of the road at some formal campgrounds. To me, that is not camping.

Then there is glamping. I don’t like this artificial conjunction, but the idea isn’t detestable. Glam or glamorous camping, is somewhere between the Four Seasons and my Shenandoah trip. Edelweiss would go for this! It’s actually an old aristocratic form of camping. If you think about an old African safari movie where the explorers have a big tent, a real bed, often rocking chairs and a full-sized porcelain bathtub within a tent, then that’s pretty close.

While glam camping is trendy now, some great explorers embraced it with panache. The great mountain explorer Luigi Amedeo, the Italian Duke of Abruzzi, brought a brass bed with him to Alaska when he lead an expedition to Mount St. Elias. However, he did have his practical limitations: Realizing the bed would be a hassle for porters to move at high altitude during his explorations in the Karakorum, he left it behind.

I like to think that we all seek the outdoors for the same reasons, and generally speaking, it’s essentially this: We want to see the world differently. But camping, in most forms is partly there to engage us more with the environment, whether its through Whistler’s porch facing Blackcomb mountain as opposed to our urban balcony back home, or tent walls to the Maine forest compared to the shared walls of our apartments. Taking it to another level, it’s about deprivation; only by separating ourselves from the luxuries from the world we are comfortable do we properly experience wilderness. It can be experienced at varying levels, depending on the level of separation from the world we know. As Andrew Skurka said during his 7,000-plus mile, bare-bones hike around Alaska and the Yukon, he felt the world he left behind was inconsequential to him and that he had more in common with the caribou during his trek.

Glamping is not everyone’s preference, but it is somebody’s comfort zone and I suppose that it’s a good bridge to bring the natural world a bit closer to them. Designers of all kinds have taken the adventurous and often romantic angle of the outdoors experience and tried to bring it into our world of urban and suburban luxuries. Eddie Bauer and the The North Face are my favorite examples — at least in the fashion area, but home stores like Crate and Barrel use the outdoors as inspiration too.

And then there’s this… The high heeled Teva.

Those that favor “roughing it” to get the wilderness experience balk at how Teva has made a stiletto version of the popular — and ultra reliable — sport sandal a couple of years ago. The original Teva was made for white water rafting, and people — like my father — have hiked significant trails in them. Now, you can wear them clubbing too, evidently.

I love art and I recognize the inspiration for these women’s shoes. They are, in some ways a tribute, to the Teva quality and a salute to the rugged ways. Hardcore hikers and climbers can’t usually surmount this idea, partly because the highly fashionable wearers usually balk at them for their chosen, grungy ways. Despite their different ways, my Texan, roughing-it buddy would definitely appreciate the wearer’s fine taste in the high heel salute to the wilderness and would honor her in return by asking for her number, thus transcending the cultural differences.

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Mountain Paradox: Peace and Restlessness

/ Andrew Szalay / Leave a comment

At long last, I obtained my copy of Mountain, a hefty collection of images from the mountain world by Sandy Hill. I ordered it with the Barnes and Noble gift card from my parents after Christmas; it just arrived on Wednesday.

It’s an amazing coffee table book, both in size and scope. It includes work from Ansel Adams, Victorio Sella, Bradford Washburn and many others, some of which has never been published previously.

Paging through it is quite different than going through my latest issue of Climbing (which I am really getting a lot out of) or reading whatever climbing story, history or guidebook I have listed on my Recommended Reading page. It’s not like going on the Internet and searching page after page for images or Gasherbrum IV or Pangbuk Ri.

It’s a rather peaceful experience, just you and the mountain, one image at a time. In that calm, memories of thoughts, ideas and daydreams from when I was just entering high school return. They’re from when I sat in my aunt’s and uncle’s home during Thanksgiving break paging through an old coffee table book of Asia, including the Himalaya and Karakorum. I was thinking about setting out to be a mountaineer and explorer before I knew what that meant.

With Mountain, like the old Asia book before, it pulls at my restless qualities. As the ideas and thoughts of the climb surface I can’t help but just look. So here I encourage you to go buy it. It supports the American Alpine Club — and association dedicated to fostering climbing and supporting inspiring climbs. And then go climb where you dream about.

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Being First and the 8,000ers Winter Ascents

/ Andrew Szalay / Leave a comment

A long time ago I claimed once or twice that climbing wasn’t competitive. That idea was one of the appealing parts of the sport. I mean sport in terms of it being an athletic activity but not necessary organized like baseball or hockey. (It’s also worth pointing out that it being a sport doesn’t preclude it from offering a wilderness or spiritual experience). I now know better.

Climbing, other than organized competitions like those at SportRock in the Washington, DC area or the ice climbing games at Ouray, Colorado, more about self challenge and measuring those personal bests against other climbers through tales in guidebooks, and word or mouth, but only if that matters to us. There are many that climb for themselves and don’t care how they rate against others’ performances.

Still, climbing is in fact a subjective contest of firsts — most notably in alpine mountaineering. If you do care about the ratings, the ones that really matter for the history books and to be included in the American Alpine Journal are the first ascents of peaks, new routes, the first alpine style ascent, and the first winter ascents, all of which that are lengthy challenges by being typically taking a full day’s effort or more. All other ascents may stand out for other merits, such as the climber, the style or the controversy.

But that’s not to say that the competition in climbing is exclusive of cut-throat pursuits or camaraderie. I think there is more camaraderie overall, but earning respect or “street cred” is important to participate; definitely don’t over sell yourself. Not everyone is worthy of partnering with Joe Josephson or Steve House.

The instances where people are desperate for success have ranged from embarrassing to down right ugly. One that comes to my mind was from 2010: Oh Eun-Sun, a South Korean alpinist, was in position to be the first woman to climb all 14 8,000 meter peaks without supplemental oxygen by summiting Kangchenjunga (28,169 ft./8,586 m.) Unfortunately, her claim to have reached the top was put into significant doubt and the honor of this first has gone to Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner of Austria.

In another race, Reinhold Messner — now a legend — was in an unofficial race with Polish alpinist Jerzy Kukuczka to be the first person ever to climb all of the 8,000 meter peaks without supplemental oxygen. In all honesty, it wasn’t ugly. For that, usually jealousy and suspicion had to come into play, like in another Messner ascent — the first ascent of the Rupal Face in 1970, or the distaster of the Frizt Weissner 1938 K2 expedition. Messner got his first, Weissner did not. Both returned to a lot of criticism.

I say all of this to put the news unfolding in the Karakorum into perspective. Four teams set out to be the first to top out during winter on three peaks: K2, Nanga Parbat and Gasherbrum I. While they aren’t involved in any organized races, the teams are seizing the moment to claim the historic first on their mountain-objective.

The Russian team that was attempting K2 has retreated. Their 15-person siege style expedition lost a life in basecamp earlier this week. The impressive Vitaly Gorelik had made it to 7,200 meters but died, ultimately of heart failure. As Alpinist Newswire says, Gorelik had summited K2 in 2007 and was nominated for the Piolet d’Or for a route up Peak Pobeda in 2009.

Two teams are working on Nanga Parbat. One, with just Simon Moro and Denis Urubko, are working summiting via an incomplete route on the Diamir Face. They are, with the other team of Poles, Moro’s and Urubko’s neighbors in basecamp, are being rather patient with the weather; there has been a decent amount of snow and some avalanches.

I haven’t heard as much as the Polish/International team working on Gasherbrum I, but I have heard the weather has caused delays. More to come, I’m sure.

I am trying not to give the impression that these are a competition between each other, though I am probably not doing a good job of that. These are really about exploration — probably more so about human endurance and persistence than the mountain itself.  Also, most successful winter ascents appear to put in the work in January and reap the rewards of the summit in mid-to-late February before winter closes out in March (that’s purely anecdotal). If you hear some more details, shoot them to me in an email or leave me a comment.

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