climber

  • Vet-Ex-Featured-660

    Invisible Wounds

    Hours before sunup, we click on our headlamps and follow the blue-hued cones of light on the first steps of what will surely be a very long day. We’re embarking on a 20-mile traverse of the Mummy Range in Rocky Mountain National Park, over the course of which we’ll summit seven peaks over 13,000 feet. For the first half hour or so, our crew of eight military veterans doesn’t say a word—the only sounds are gravelly footfalls and varied degrees of labored breathing in the thin alpine air.

  • Prominent Norwegian Alpinists Die in Accident

    Prominent Norwegian climbers Bjorn-Eivind Artun, 45, and Stein-Ivar Gravdal, 37, died while attempting a new ice route on the big wall of Kjerag, Lyesbotn, in southwest Norway.

  • Alaskan Alpine Club Founder Dies

    Doug Buchanan was filled with hospitality, humor, wit, intelligence, incredible drive, insight, and honor. His last adventure was a fight with cancer.

  • The view from Gasherbrum II. Photo by Cory Richards

    2012 Golden Piton Awards

    On frozen Karakoram peaks, fierce alpine faces, and crags around the world, climbers killed it last year. Here, Climbing presents the 10th annual Golden Piton Awards for top performances in six disciplines: mountaineering, big wall, traditional climbing, crack climbing, sport climbing, and breakaway success.

  • Survivors - Enduring Desperate Situations

    Survivors – Enduring Desperate Situations

    We surveyed readers and more than a dozen climbing historians and writers in North America and Europe to collect 25 stories of stamina, ingenuity, and human will, some well-known, others not. Our hope is to remind readers to take care and prevent accidents--to"do nothing in haste, look well to each step," as Whymper famously said after the Matterhorn tragedy.

  • Staying Alive

    Staying Alive

    Survival tips from climbing rangers - Nobody expects to be loaded onto a litter and evacuated off his first big wall. Or stuck in a snow cave, out of food and fuel, hypothermic, and praying that a storm will quit and someone will find him. Yet it happens, every year, and not just to newbies. Climbers make mistakes, or get unlucky, and rescue rangers drop from the sky and save our asses.

  • 10 Things You Didn't Know about Avalanches

    10 Things You Didn’t Know about Avalanches

    Avalanche danger will always be a hazard for those seeking to climb some of the world's most sought-after peaks. Here's a look at some facts about the deadly snow slides.

  • Everest Pioneer Nawang Gombu Dies at 79

    Everest Pioneer Nawang Gombu Dies at 79

    4/25/11 - Nawang Gombu Sherpa, who accompanied Jim Whittaker to the summit during the first American ascent of Mt. Everest, in 1963, died at home in India on April 24.

  • 2010 Golden Piton Awards

    2010 Golden Piton Awards

    Hardest, highest, fastest, best--it's human nature to submit our "ests" to the test. Is it an ego thing? A crude exercise in nationalism? A magazine scam for commercial interests? You could play it that way. But how boring. And futile. In the end, we appraise others' achievements and compare them to our own weekend-warrior world for one reason: to be inspired.

  • Wing and a Prayer

    Wing and a Prayer

    The Curious Case of Maurice Wilson and his Doomed Quest for Mt. Everest .

  • Angels of Mont Blanc

    Angels of Mont Blanc

    Inside the world's busiest alpine-rescue service - Francis Claudon, of the Peloton de Gendarmerie de Haute Montagne (PGHM) in Chamonix, France, was on second call that July evening. With one team already out on a rescue, he was kitted up and ready for the next mission, boots on and rucksack packed.

  • Chloe Graftiaux Dies in the Alps

    Chloe Graftiaux Dies in the Alps

    8/23/10 - On Saturday, August 21, Belgian climber Chloe Graftiaux died after falling from the South Face of Aiguille Noire de Peuterey in the Mont Blanc.