mountaineering

“too close to the sun” is def the correct title for a high-risk outdoor life bio/autobio- *checks*

fuck that, yeah def done by some imperial brit.

https://www.outsideonline.com/sites/default/files/styles/width_1200/public/2019/03/04/mera-sending-it_h.jpg

The First Dog Ascent of a 7,000-Meter Himalayan Peak

On November 9, 2018, a dog named Mera became the first of her kind to reach the summit of Baruntse, a 23,389-foot peak in Nepal’s Himalayas, located just south of Mount Everest. The peak, often overlooked as it lies in the shadow of some of the tallest mountains in the world, is a steep, challenging climb in its own right. Other than a brief human-aided zip line down a short section of fixed line, Mera made the ascent completely unsupported.

“I am not aware of a dog actually summiting an expedition peak in Nepal,” says Billi Bierling of the Himalayan Database, an organization that documents climbing expeditions in Nepal. “I just hope that she won’t get into trouble for having climbed Baruntse without a permit.” According to Bierling, there have been a few cases of dogs at Everest Base Camp (17,600 feet) and some who’ve followed teams through the Khumbu Icefall up to Camp II (21,300 feet), but this is perhaps the highest-recorded elevation ever reached by a dog anywhere in the world.

Mera, age unknown, is a 45-pound Nepalese mutt who appears to be a cross between a Tibetan mastiff and a Himalayan sheepdog. She possesses an extraordinary level of confidence relative to her small frame. Though slight, she’s lean, with muscles likely honed by years of travel over rough mountainous terrain in the Khumbu Valley. She has soft, close-cropped black fur, with legs and a snout dipped in golden yellow, small ears that flop forward, and kind eyes.

:)

started a yellow snow joek then realized i had to read about that pup and snark it went away cuz dog, aw.

[back in ilx after long spell away, hullo peeps!]

just saw "free solo" last night. for me, watching it was an emotional experience. i was intensely into climbing at one point in my life, decades ago, when 'sport climbing' was not a thing yet, rock gyms were a rumored curiosity, and shoe selection involved a choice between just two or three brands.

my climbing was mostly done with two good friends. we lived in montreal, so spent most of our time in the adirondacks. all granite. climbing was the first sport in which my gangly body felt gifted and graceful. i had a lot of difficult things going on my head in those days, self-hatred, terror, stuff that has taken me decades to get on top of, but the slow vertical dance on those vast granite faces, the rhythm of crack climbing, the controlled exhilaration i felt when leading a pitch, the feeling of setting up secure anchors for my partners, ...purified me deeply, and after topping out, the sense of feeling, not just okay, but exalted, was incomparable.

some years into this, i had a bad accident. not climbing: a car accident. i emerged with nerve damage in my left hand. could no longer oppose the thumb (i'm only half human now!), grip strength rendered negligible. i've continued climbing, but nowhere near at the same level. mostly bouldering, some indoor stuff.

for me the star of "free solo" was el capitan. i couldn't take my eyes off it. like many climbers who haven't even climbed the big wall i suspect, the profile of el cap, the great crack systems, flakes and roofs -- much of it is imprinted in our mind, from simply looking at so many photographs, topos, and whatnot. hell i went twice to the ansel adams exhibit that recently closed at the museum of fine arts, just to stand in front of those exposures and feel the storm clearing out of the Valley. i don't know, i just love granite. and el cap in "free solo" presented so many facets. massive and terrifying, yes. but on a small scale: textured, multi-colored, intimate even. above all predictable, when it counted.

i was just struck by the beauty of the wall and of the climbing. in some ways honnold's ascent is the supreme way to pay homage to all of what that is.

nice post! will have to watch free solo asap...

cg that post is fantastic, thanks for sharing.

Beautiful post!

thanks so much guys :-)

really great post

granite is so wonderful, but i think my heart belongs to desert sandstone?? for sentimental reasons, many great memories from red rocks nv

i just started climbing again (ie going to the gym) after a several year long hiatus and i have become obsessed with going to indian creek (finally, after a couple decades of fascination), but am a) out of shape b) not an owner of 500000 cams and c) without partners :(

wonderful post cg - welcome back!

free solo is airing on demand on NatGeo channel at the moment

watching it now & lol i didnt even realize that Jimmy Chin was one of the filmmakers! I saw Meru for the first time just last year so it all just clicked for me just now

maybe not everyone is familiar with mark twight, but the most recent enormocast with him is really good, definitely broke down some notions i had about him. he was the prince of darkness when i was reading climbing mag every month, interesting to see him come out the other end of the tunnel

finished the movie. so good!

i am not a climber
i have never climbed
but my god that climb was so incredible it made me cry

just amazing


i do feel bad for his girlfriend. i mean in general to paraphrase kenny rogers “dont fall in love with a climber” but also she seems lovely & i see so much hearbreak ahead for her.

but also i think his perceived dickishness is a function of his flat affect & a by-product whatever the untreated issue is that he clearly has going on. not to give him an easy out but he just doesn’t seem to generate emotional responses in a “normal” way. his family backstory was pretty o_O

i want a minute by minute no soundtrack film of his climb

yes!

i was kinda annoyed by the high-speed section, i would have liked less lead up if it meant being able to see the whole climb

*sections

thanks vg!

i too would love to see a 3 hr 56 min version, from the deck to the top-out, if such footage even exists (i suspect not, given the small film crew, the terrain to be covered, and the sheer speed of honnold’s climbing).

i could not believe how fast he went
especially after the false start etc etc

lookit now

she didnt come across as any innocent to me neither.

scenes jumping him with big questions were pretty staged and manipulative, her being all made up for her closeups in one or two were straight up lols

not that he doesnt need that tbf

like a younger version of lauren hollys character from any given sunday

idg what her makeup has to do with anything but ok

sound

The Dawn Wall (Tommy Caldwell vs El Cap) is on Netflix atm if anyone is keen
Good companion to Free Solo

Weird timing to see this on SNA. Went out to Western Maryland for a little father/son hiking with my kid. We always used to go hiking in state parks as a family, but once his little sister came along, having to wait up for her little legs slowed us down a lot and made it less fun for him. So I wanted to just take him out, two dudes with nothing in our way.

Anyway, we hiked this small mountain until we came to this great rock formation at the top maybe 30 feet high. He was eager to just climb straight up them (because he's a little intense), but I convinced him to take it slower because he doesn't know what he's doing. We climbed up top from one of the lower parts of the wall and we ended up scrambling around exploring some of these giant cracks and fissures for a good long while. It was a great morning.

Then we got home and he started watching Valley Uprising on Netflix. It had a lot of stylistic quirks that I've seen a thousand times before in sports documentaries like Dogtown and Z-Boys or whatever. I'll have to check out the docs you guys recommended to compare. But it was still cool to see him following up on his new interest. I guess the next thing is to look into climbing instruction so he doesn't go off half-cocked.

watching him makes me feel sad & worried for his girlfriend who seems to be a beautiful young good person who is way in love with him :( :( :(

Finally getting around to this, and she seems to be ascribing a lot of emotions and inner monologue to him that, by all indications, do no exist. Those people should not be in a relationship imo, that stuff is much harder to watch than the climbing.

We saw it this past weekend -- our read was that she did approach him initially via the book signing, and that she says she appreciates his blunt honesty. I'd just say it seems like they're reaching their own kind of random balance bit by bit, but who knows.

Separately, I did like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7qSiEKntQA

Anyway, separately -- yes: ridiculously beautiful film at its best, El Capitan as iconic place may never be captured so well, though I think we'll catch The Dawn Wall this weekend as a companion piece.

love that gq bit

and yeah, need to see the dawn wall too -- they kinda messed up releasing it so close to free solo

weeks later i still want to know wtf the eiger sanction is, and also to hear honnold pronounce the latest domestic political atrocity as "this...this is not a real thing" (and have it be therefore true).

last year i did sorta ~see~ the eiger tho, which even as a non-climber feels rad to say.

i remember sitting in a hotel restaurant in grindelwald wondering why wetterhorn et al weren't climbed officially until like 1850. because people were digging salt mines at 9k+ in the BCs. a book i found in the lobby actually told me one version of the answer- until bored english rich people got around to inventing mountaineering and visited the alps, no one did it or recorded it.

(also, the englishes discovered frankensteins and draculas very shortly before that (but they were also the bored rich).

Dawn Wall is really good. I had no idea of Caldwell’s backstory! They do a really good job at conveying all the emotional context to the climb and overall it is a great, well told story imo. INTENSE also.

my favorite thing about all these extreme climber dudes is how when really traumatic & emotional things happen & they’re on camera
“so i figured i should really just yknow CLIMB MOAR”
and you’re like “uhhhh i don’t think that’s...”
cut to year of psychotic obsessive climbing montage
“....”

it’s really O_o

Caught Dawn Wall (loved it) and Valley Uprising (good, though slightly put off by the PuNk RaWk trappings) on Netflix this week, even though I thought I had little interest in rock climbing. Just saw that Free Solo is on Hulu and put it on. Probably the right one to watch last. Man, ok, even though I will never be a climber this stuff is really compelling.

Also his achievement was retroactively negated by that terrible Tim McGraw song at the end, sorry that's the rule.

lol agree

watch full-screen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bos_FCt4sxg

yuck

I just watched Free Solo on the plane. It was soooo good but then I couldn't sleep after. I did not like the gf arc and could've done without it but she seems like a nice person and they obviously made it work. Both seem to have vast amounts of patience.

Let's climb the Matterhorn...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ2BSHNgTlo

Finally saw Free Solo today. I wasn't prepared for the emotional wallop of it. Christ.

never know if it's a good or a bad sign when i start rereading jon krakauer's INTO THIN AIR

ppl whose day is almost certainly going worse than yrs: the climbers on everest 10-11 may 1996 :(

That's one of the few books I genuinely read 'in one sitting'. Fantastic (and grim as all hell).

anyone interested in the mystery of mallory and irvine shd probably be checking out michael tracy’s blog and youtube accounts: tracy sets up a detailed and dryly meticulous counter to the standard readings, of the route M&I took and whether they reached to summit (he thinks yes) and finally how some of the mystery actually (needlessly) arose

(tldr on the last point: it arose via edward norton’s unexplained news-release obfuscation of noel odell’s famous final sighting of the pair as they climbed “with alacrity” etc etc — tho why norton did this and why odell went along with it are not so far explored as far as i've spotted)

ps pleased to say it’s NOT *that* michael tracy (who spells his name w/an extra e)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SGRCaGjZf0

just to expand on this (as I spent a long evening yesterday reading all tracy’s replies to all his youtube, some patient and some not so much)

it looks like tracy’s evolving a kind of triple theory why the myth of the modern or ridge route is now so embedded on the internet (by contrast he believes mallory and irvine traversed below the ridge towards the grand aka the norton couloir and then probably took what’s called the “zig zag route” up to the third step, that odell saw them at the third step, and that from there they very likely summited — and basically came adrift much later, on the way back, boned tired and dehydrated, when one of them slipped from the ice axe location and pulled them both off to their deaths. much of his work is suggesting where perhaps irvine’s body might be — he has some photos which I personally find it hard to decode)

anyway “zig zag route” is not currently the dominant narrative, for three reasons as he tells it

i: the expedition’s own history of itself: tracy believes that, shortly after noel odell’s original version of his sighting (at the third step at 12.50) was published in various places, expedition leader edward norton first promulgated a wildly different version of this sighting (first step some hours earlier) and then persuaded odell to fudge a comprise version and claim forever after to have possibly been confused, possibly between the first first and second steps. both of these, even given odell’s original timing, make summiting highly unlikely. there is evidence that odell did not in private accept that he had been confused or mistaken — which suggests he was (in public) taking one for the team, for reasons that (to me) seem opaque. there is documentation of the changing story, except for a key message which has conveniently gone missing. tracy says that norton’s deception is more interesting to him than his motives: though he also gestures gently towards reasons of high imperial state, given that colonialist hyper-weirdo frances younghusband was both president of the royal geographical society and chairman of the everest committee at the relevant time, and some of the reason there was an expedition at all (tibet was very reluctant) was of course the brits spying on russia lol

ii: china’s gatekeeping: china (bcz tibet) is how you access the northern route, which is the route at issue. assuming M&I did not summit, then hillary and tensing were the first up, via the southern route out of nepal, in 1953, and a chinese expedition in 1960 were the first up via the northern route, and specifically via the ridge or modern route. the chinese summit is controversial! reinhold messner for example thinks they did not summit and just faked their achievement beyond the second step (messner is tbc also a bit of weirdo). acc.tracy the the chinese are very discouraging of the notion that the mallory zig zag route is possible and permit no one to attempt it or explore it (tbf there are also safer concerns, like climbers on the ridge kick lethal rocks down on yr head): messner’s legendary solo sprint-summit w/o oxygen went up the grand or norton couloir but not up the zig zag, which remains unclimbed unless mallory and irvine used it in 1924.

iii: the mess after the discovery of mallory’s body in 1999: tracy claims that this important discovery was absolutely botched in forensic terms, and that ever since the big corporations and publications backing expeditions linked to it have been covering up their incompetence, rubbishing anything but the ridge route theory, amplifying both the “mystery” (bcz mystery sells copies of national geographic, the main disney-owned publication in question) and the fact that mallory could never have claimed the second step (an obstacle he explicitly said more than once he had no intention of attempting), plus just uncritically sucking up to the chinese version. tracy has absolutely uncovered a lot of inconsistencies in stories and is good at minor mallory myth-busting and sternly pointing out that ppl do fib a lot when various things are at stake, including pride and of course money (in real life he’s an attorney, tho he’s also an accomplished climber who’s been up everest north route and unsuccessfully searched for irvine’s body (too much snow that year).

all three of these element are obviously conspiracy theories in the classic sense — tho this fact doesn’t by itself invalidate them (sometimes ppl do conspire!) — and beyond the material sometimes gets deep into the detailed weeds. tracy talks a bit too sweepingly about the “post-truth society” as if this is a term we all use in a similar way, but it’s evidently a shorthand for his own exasperation at how hard it is to get the foax who claim to care abt the facts in this story to actually take the actions they would if they did care

claimed s/b climbed, my posh roots showing thar

one plausible if entirely petty reason for norton's deception is that he himself (norton) had failed to summit just days before via the grand couloir, at that time climbing higher than anyone else in recorded history. if mallory and irvine didn't summit, then this record stood from 1924-1953. so was he defending his altitude record against something that was at best uncertain?

tracy seems unpersuaded by this motivation however, since, unlike mallory and irvine, norton was climbing without oxygen: his altitude record without oxygen stood (i think) until messner's various ascents, solo and otherwise, in the 1970s? norton had also suggested the zig zag route to mallory as potentially climbable.

(actually a swiss team got higher than norton but not to the top in 1952: they had oxygen but the equipment was fucked so it's debateable which column they shd go in)

The 1960 Chinese expedition ran out of oxygen on the way up, so they're another in the question mark column. I believe they summited - given their descriptions of the third step and onward. I think Messner is sore simply because they did it without oxygen. Synott's book The Third Pole reviews much of the unearthed documentation of the 1960 expedition (and indirectly interviews the last surviving summiter) and the political back-and-forth.

I wish that Tracy wasn't so dismissive of the 2019 expedition to look for Irvine and his camera but I think he's hung up a narrative of brave adventureous men carrying their banners with strange devices. Synott's tales of looting abandoned tents, resting up against frozen dead, and the constant spectre of having to climb up the second step ladder next to a dead climber that's hanging upside down. All of this is set against the current political economy of Everest itself. I'm still kinda shocked at the entertainment complex that's formed around Indian families sending their kids up to the summit in exchange for a big cash payout.

Also discussed in Synott's book - sometime between 1975 (when Wang Hongbao reports "old English dead") and 2008, the CTMA found and removed Irvine's body. Mallory's body seems to have been removed too, but that's more unclear.

tracy's recent youtubes are well worth catching up on; the story is very rich now and i like the way he painstakingly explores each separate element (the watch, the rocks, the ice axes, the oxygen bottles, mallory's planning): he talks a lot abt synott's book, which he likes (with reservations). he doesn't believe the chinese have removed irvine's body -- as he puts in one of the most recent (my paraphrase), "they don't care about mallory and irvine, they care about their own 1960 summit being respected and acknowledged"

is he driven by a romantic and idealised vision of M&I's climb? i mean, he's pretty unromantic about both of them -- i think tbh he's more driven (as a lawyer when he isn't an everest-hobbyist) by irritation and frustration when ppl lie or obscure the truth or mess with evidence, or invent unevidenced explanations of anomalies in a story, whether it's norton back in 1924 or the chinese or the 1999 expedition (which synott is very critical of)* or the 2019 expedition's evasiveness about its drone footage and so on

i find his "post-truth" riddles fairly exasperating but his point that ppl in this context very often fib abt themselves -- and that a lot of the journalism that cover this field is bad at pushing back against that -- seems p well taken

*i haven't read the synott book, which looks genuinely very interesting in a wider sense than this one micro-topic

We interrupt this thread's programming of "Historical Himalayas" with a special new bulletin... Eberhard Jurgalski at 8000ers.com finally issued his report after a decade of research on who has actually been to the true summit of all 8000m peaks and who only got near to it.

Rumors had swirled in the climbing community for months. Eberhard Jurgalski and his team at 8,000’ers.com were about to release research that would change the history of alpinism. Well, the bomb has arrived.

History may or may not change but, at least, it has provided material for both heated debate and quiet reflection. Basically, Jurgalski states that only three people have really summited all 14 of the world’s 8,000m peaks.

In the new list, the first person to summit all of them was not Reinhold Messner, but American Ed Viesturs. Both he and the second on the list, Veikka Gustafsson of Finland, completed the challenge without supplementary oxygen. In fact, Gustafsson and Viesturs climbed together on a number of expeditions.

The bronze medal goes to Nirmal Purja who, on the same list, loses his Project Possible speed record. According to Jurgalski, Purja did not summit Manaslu and Dhaulagiri during his Project Possible race in 2019. Instead, he only reached sub-summits. He only properly topped out during follow-up climbs last fall.

Moreover, Jurgalski claims that Purja knew from the outset exactly where the actual summits of those two mountains were, "because we spoke about it months earlier," Jurgalski said. "Nearly secretly, he 'corrected' it in autumn 2021, when he went to the true summits of both mountains."

The NYT has the background on everything as of a year back.

I dunno... I look at something like the summit of Manaslu and can't really go hard on this issue but if you wanna claim that you went to the top you gotta go. Otherwise, drones, gps, other climbers, and the internet massive can and will rat you out.

https://www.journeyera.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/CLIMB-MANASLU-MOUNTAIN-NEPAL-0082.jpg

I remember reading Edward Whymper's book when I was a kid. And now...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-W_nFlIAWFM

(terrible background music ahead - keep it muted & play yr own)