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Ghost
climber
A long way from where I started
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Jan 25, 2009 - 07:16pm PT
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"It's a 5.10 Mantle Into Heaven" get a vote from me, too.
On a longer, and more serious, side, I think my all-time favorite mountain writing was by William H Murray. "Mountaineering in Scotland" and "Undiscovered Scotland" are wonderful books describing an amazing and relatively unknown period of climbing history. There's a certain amount of writing by continental Europeans on the years on either side of WW II, but this is a pretty much unknown gem.
And as a side note, anyone who thinks he's hard is in for a major deflating. Bill Murray, and a couple of his friends, more or less invented serious winter mountaineering. Their climbs were perhaps the biggest single leap over previous generations ever made.
D
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Steve Grossman
Trad climber
Seattle, WA
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 26, 2009 - 11:12am PT
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The Scottish winter is not for the faint in any regard. I haven't had the opportunity to dig into the Murray books but I have both that you mentioned. A whole world waiting patiently for you on the shelf!
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Ghost
climber
A long way from where I started
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Jan 27, 2009 - 01:35am PT
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Steve
An interesting bit of history regarding Bill Murray's books is that while he'd done a fair bit of climbing before WWII, he hadn't written much. When the war started, he enlisted and was eventually posted to North Africa. Where he was captured and interned in a German prison camp.
To pass the time, and stay sane, he began writing about his climbing experience. As I understand it, he'd written pretty much all of what would eventually become "Mountaineering in Scotland" when his manuscript was taken from him and thrown away. Not long after that the war ended and he returned home, where he started the writing all over again.
D
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Mighty Hiker
Social climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Jan 27, 2009 - 01:55am PT
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W.H. Murray was a fine mountaineer, writer and man. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._H._Murray
His post-mortem autobiography is called "The Evidence of Things Not Seen", and is a treat to read. The title is taken from the Jewish/Christian/Arab scriptures, Hebrews 11:1.
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Steve Grossman
Trad climber
Seattle, WA
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 27, 2009 - 10:50am PT
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Thanks for the background!
I sometimes tell myself that I'm saving learning the guitar for an extended stay in jail, though I desire the one and not the other!
Order in the midst of chaos. Hardly the last to be saved by the written word!
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Thorgon
Big Wall climber
Sedro Woolley, WA
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Jan 27, 2009 - 11:54am PT
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Yet another classic from the "Vault"!
Thanks Steve, by the way when is that
SuperTopos SlumberParty at your house,
so we can pour through your collection?
Ha det bra,
Thor
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Steve Grossman
Trad climber
Seattle, WA
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 28, 2009 - 11:42am PT
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From the aforementioned Mountaineering in Scotland by Murray, this gem of a chapter closing on a winter ascent of Tower Ridge on the Ben.
"To our surprise we found ourselves in calm. For the wind, baffled, struck upright from the cliffs. Before us stretched vast snow-fields, shining frostily under the stars; beyond, rank upon rank of sparkling peaks. A great stillness had come upon the world. We seemed to tread air rather than crusted snow; we were light of foot; we walked like demigods in joyous serenity. The intensity of our exaltation seems peculiar to the following of a great rock-climb to a climax of supreme beauty. After the hard fight on Tower ridge we were elated, by the miracle of sunset, steadied; for in profound beauty there is more solemnity than gayness; so that our faculties were in balance yet highly keyed, therefore abnormally alive to the deep peace of the summit. Its grace flowed in upon the mind with a touch soothing and most delicate. We need feel but once the spell of that enchantment to understand Schumann's declaration that the true music is a silence. In the quiet I feel something of the limitation of personality fall away as desires were stilled; and as I died to self and became more absorbed in the hills and sky, the more their beauty entered into me, until they seemed one with me and I with them.
Later, while we walked slowly across the plateau, it became very clear to me that only the true self, which transcends the personal, lays claim to immortality. On mountains it is that spiritual part that we unconcsiously develop. When we fail in that all other success is empty; for we take our pleasures without joy, and the ache of boredom warns of a rusting faculty.
At last we turned toward Achintee and went down like fallen angels, with an ever-mounting reluctance, from a spiritual paradise to the black pit of Glen Nevis."
Absloutely stunning bit of prose!!!!
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Ghost
climber
A long way from where I started
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Jan 28, 2009 - 04:30pm PT
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Another interesting facet of Murray's climbing (as opposed to his writing) was that he was a very early practicioner of the non-stop ascent. When we read about the current wall rats doing non-stop pushes up El Cap, or Steve House and crew doing non-stop pushes up Denali or Himalayan peaks, we tend to think of it as a big breakthrough, a new thing. But Murray was doing it seventy years ago.
Read his piece about the Cuillen (sp?) traverse. Kinda Croft-like, isn't it?
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Mighty Hiker
Social climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Jan 28, 2009 - 04:31pm PT
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Should that be "Croft is sort of Murray-like"?
...on the shoulder of giants...
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Steve Grossman
Trad climber
Seattle, WA
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 28, 2009 - 07:30pm PT
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And the indomitable Harold Reaburn before him and.....
If I could edit the title on this thread, it should have been Excerpt Your Favorite Climbing Story. Fun to get at the pith of the tale.
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SammyLee2
Trad climber
Memphis, TN
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Jan 28, 2009 - 08:35pm PT
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I've admitted to being stupid in the past, so no surprise here and now.
Why can't I read the GD thing? Comes out pale in tiny print. I saved it as .jpg and tried to change it, so I could read it, no luck.
What am I not doing that I need to, to read the dang thing?
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deeski
Trad climber
North Carolina
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Jan 29, 2009 - 12:05am PT
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Definitely "Channel Surfing" by John Long! I read it late one night in the Ski Patrol Hut at the top of Beech Mountain in a total white out at 9:30pm waiting for the ski area to close so I could sweep the slopes and just go home. After reading the story I stopped channel surfing and enjoyed the beauty of a full moon that peaked through the snow storm as I slowed down and totally enjoyed the ski back down to the base. I took the time to listen to my friend's stories over a few brews of the special moments they remembered in the snowy places they had skied and climbed....and somehow it didn't matter that it was 3:00am and we all had to be back at the base to patrol again in just a few hours. Thanks Largo!
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Steve Grossman
Trad climber
Seattle, WA
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 31, 2009 - 12:25am PT
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Can't leave Shipton and Tilman out of the discussion. Blank on the Map and Nanda Devi are pretty hard to beat for adventure.
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Doug Robinson
Trad climber
Santa Cruz
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Jan 31, 2009 - 10:22am PT
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“I was climbing the long ridge west of Mt. Clark….I saw more clearly than I have ever seen before or since the minute detail of the grasses, the clusters of sand shifting in the wind, the small flotsam of the forest, the motion of the high clouds streaming above the peaks. There are no words to convey the moods of those moments.”
Ansel Adams
Undated fragment quoted by Nancy Newhall in The Eloquent Light (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1963)
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Fritz
Trad climber
Hagerman, ID
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Jan 31, 2009 - 09:05pm PT
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Steve: I’ll stay on topic for a second and actually agree with you (after hurriedly leafing through my collection of Ascents) that Drumond’s Mirror Mirror was a great story. I’ve always enjoyed reading British climbing writers.
After some more leafing I came up with “The Conquest of Tillie’s Lookout” by Ira Wallach in the 1969 Ascent as the most fun Ascent story (still on topic with Ascent). I was able to quote terms like “Enfoot”, “Nastiff”, and “Rumpage” for the next few years to the confusion of my friends; as we did exploratory climbing “off the map” in Idaho.
The short story that most influenced me was in Mountain 24, in 1972 and was later reprinted in “The Games Climber’s Play.”
“The Greatest Climber in the World” by Bernard Amy borrows much of it’s ideas from another author’s previous story on Zen Buddism in the “Nobel Art of Archery”.
It mattered not to me. The concepts and images invoked by the story caught my imagination with quotes like: “to be at the summit of the rock, you must be the summit of the rock, and thus of stone.”
The narrator of the story meets the Japanese Zen super-climber in Chamonix. He shares the story of the Asian climbing disciple Chi-Ch’ang who studies climbing as a Zen discipline. Chi Ch’ang so masters the art; that he eventually transcends climbing and indeed forgets what stone or climbing gear looks like.-----------how could a early 70’s hippie not be taken with the theme.
Fritz:)
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BEA
climber
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Jan 31, 2009 - 09:30pm PT
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Pratt's desert climbing essay and Dave Seidman's account of the Direct South Face on McKinley, both from early Ascents.
Also from Ascent: "Fashion, Climbing, and Dahluagiri"
Chuck Kroger's account of the Heart Route in, I think, Climbing had a welcome whimsical tone to it.
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Steve Grossman
Trad climber
Seattle, WA
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 14, 2009 - 09:57pm PT
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A little Reinhold from The Seventh Grade, another of my favorites.
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Mighty Hiker
Social climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Mar 14, 2009 - 11:39pm PT
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I'll see if I can scan and post some photos of the Troll Wall. Photos, that is, from a distance - I haven't climbed it, though I've done other things in the area.
To translate Norwegian into English:
Trollveggen = the Troll Wall.
Trolltinden = the Troll Peak.
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Largo
Sport climber
Venice, Ca
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Mar 15, 2009 - 01:37am PT
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Anyone have a copy of Mind Games by David Pagel??
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lucasignorelli
climber
Torino, Italy
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Mar 15, 2009 - 05:01am PT
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Lito Tejada Flores "Rojo's Peon", a story that when was published in 1975 on Italian climbing magazine "Rivista della Montagna" (translated by no one else than "Nuovo Mattino" guru Gian Piero Motti) affected me as no other climbing fiction has ever done.
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