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Lessons of the Free Solo
Steph Davis free soloing The Diamond, Longs Peak, Colorado As a student of exploration, it would be fun to tell you that my eureka moments come at the end of long days of dog-sledding, bear-wrestling,...
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Fallen Giants Wins the Banff Book Award
Congratulations to Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weaver, winners of the 2008 Banff Mountain Book Award for Mountaineering History. Their excellent book, Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan...
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Contingent World, Part 3 of 3
John Muir I didn’t plan on writing another post on contingency, but I was reading Donald Worster’s new biography of John Muir, A Passion For Nature: The Life of John Muir, and found this: A human life,...
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Maybe I Was Wrong
Why do people climb 8000-meter mountains? Free-solo the Eiger? BASE jump the Eiffel Tower? Motives are tricky things. My work on Arctic explorers gave me a way to think about it. Nineteenth-century...
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Call Me Starbuck
Guy Waterman On February 6 2000, Guy Waterman drove his Subaru Impreza to Franconia Notch in New Hampshire, hiked up Mt Lafayette, and in the windy -16 degree night, let himself die of exposure....
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Interview with Steph Davis
Davis on El Capitan Steph Davis climbs such outrageously steep things that one wonders whether sorcery is involved, that perhaps her gifts extend beyond climbing to include the manipulation of physics....
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Mountains of the Moon
Mountains of the Moon, detail of 1655 Kircher Map of Africa In 1788, twenty years after sailing into the Pacific with Captain Cook, Joseph Banks turned his attention to the next riddle of geographical...
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First, Fastest, Youngest
Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay on Mt Everest, 1953 Firsts have always been important in exploration. This seems rather straightforward, even tautological, to say since being first is woven into the...
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The Myth of Pure Experience
The Hero’s Journey The hero’s journey is a story common to all human cultures. While this story varies from from place to place and era to era, there are deep structural similarities among its forms....
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Exploration Round-Up
So much exploration news rolls through the wires that it’s impossible to write posts about all of it, even a small fraction of it. So I tweet when I can, but 140 characters is not a lot of space to...
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