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"Because it's there."

thør said:
From the ADN.com:

"A 25-year-old climber from Pennsylvania who reportedly planned to paraglide off the summit of Alaska's Mount McKinley has been flown off the mountain and taken to a Fairbanks hospital.

Denali National Park spokeswoman Maureen McLaughlin says the unidentified man was strapped to a backboard Wednesday and plucked from the 14,200-foot level of the 20,320-foot peak by an Army Chinook helicopter.

The park's medical director prepared a 72-hour protective custody order after Park Service volunteer medical professionals evaluated the man's behavior, described as "increasingly unusual and erratic."

The spokeswoman says rangers confronted the man when they learned of his plan to paraglide, a prohibited activity in the park. He reportedly agreed not to bring that equipment. But when he reached the 14,200-foot camp, "cold, wet and in distress," rangers found paragliding equipment in his sled. Other climbers reported the man lacked proper gear and was not climbing safely.

His hometown was not immediately available. "
Click to expand...



To: Darwin Awards Committee
From: Literotica thread
Date: 9 July, 2010
Subject: Scouting Report
________________________________________



See above. The man is a potential future nominee.




 
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/...id-extreme-weather-cause-their-disappearance/



Mallory and Irvine on Everest: Did extreme weather cause their disappearance?


Research considers role of weather in historic Everest tragedy
http://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/pub/web/24399_web.jpg


Their legend has inspired generations of mountaineers since their ill-fated attempt to climb Everest over 80 years ago, and now a team of scientists believe they have discovered another important part of the puzzle as to why George Mallory and Andrew Irvine never returned from their pioneering expedition. The research, published in Weather, explores the unsolved mystery and uses newly uncovered historical data collected during their expedition to suggest that extreme weather may have contributed to their disappearance.


George Mallory and Andrew ‘Sandy’ Irvine disappeared during their historic 1924 attempt to reach the summit of Everest. The pair were last seen on June 8th on Everest’s Northeast Ridge, before vanishing into the clouds and into the history books. For decades a vigorous debate has raged regarding their climb, their disappearance and if they were successful in reaching the summit.


“The disappearance of Mallory and Irvine is one of the most enduring mysteries of the 20th century, yet throughout the debates surrounding their disappearance the issue of the weather has never really been addressed,” said lead author Professor G.W.K Moore of the Physics Department at the University of Toronto. “Until we completed our study the only information available was an observation by mountaineer Noel Odell, who was climbing behind Mallory and Irvine, who claimed that a blizzard occurred on the afternoon that they disappeared.”


Many writers have since ignored the storm as Odell believed it had only lasted a short time. However the size and extreme height of Everest mean that Odell’s observations have always been difficult to place into context, making the blizzard potentially more significant than first realised.


This latest research focuses on meteorological measurements from the 1924 expedition which the authors uncovered at the Royal Geographical Society library in London. Although the data was published as a table in a 1926 report on the expedition, it was never analysed for information on the disappearance of Mallory and Irvine until this study.


“We analysed the barometric pressure measurements and found out that during the Mallory and Irvine summit attempt, there was a drop in barometric pressure at base camp of approximately 18mbar. This is quite a large drop, in comparison the deadly 1996 ‘Into Thin Air’ storm had a pressure drop at the summit of approximately 8 mbar,” said Moore. “We concluded that Mallory and Irvine most likely encountered a very intense storm as they made their way towards the summit.”


“Mount Everest is so high that there is barely enough oxygen near its summit to sustain life and a drop of pressure of 4 mbar at the summit is sufficient to drive individuals into a hypoxic state,” said Dr. John Semple an experienced mountaineer and the Chief of Surgery at Women’s College Hospital in Toronto.


The authors conclude that with the additional stresses they were under with extreme cold, high winds and the uncertainly of their route, the pressure drop and the ensuring hypoxia contributed to the Mallory and Irving’s death.


This research not only contributes a new, and perhaps final, chapter to the Mallory legend, but is also of importance to modern mountain climbers as the same types of storms and hypoxic stresses continue to confront those who take on the world’s great mountains.


The Mallory and Irvine storm serves as both an example and a warning of the magnitude of the pressure drops that can occur and the severe physiological impact they can have.


“Over the 8 decades since Mallory and Irvine died we have learned a lot about Mount Everest and the risks that climbers attempting to climb it face”, concluded Moore. “The weather is perhaps the greatest unknown and we hope that this line of research will help educate modern climbers as to the risks that they face.”
Click to expand...


http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-08/w-mai080210.php
 
Last edited:
After he swam the North Pole, Lewis Pugh vowed never to take another cold-water dip. Then he heard of Lake Imja in the Himalayas, created by recent glacial melting, and Lake Pumori, a body of water at an altitude of 5300 m on Everest -- and so began a journey that would teach him a radical new way to approach swimming and think about climate change.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lewis_pugh_s_mind_shifting_mt_everest_swim.html
 
For some reason I have this urge to install a AT&T cellular tower on the South pole.
 
http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=129235100


LINDA WERTHEIMER, host:

Last week, an Austrian mountain climber reached the top of the world's second highest mountain. Christian Stangl was the first to reach the summit of K2 in the past two years. K2 is the second highest peak in the world. It's a little shorter than Mount Everest, but it is a far more treacherous climb. High-altitude climbers have referred to K2 as the Holy Grail of mountaineering.

STEVE INSKEEP, host:

This morning we're going to review three new books about the people who attempt to climb that mountain on the border between Pakistan and China. Nick Heil has written extensively about climbing, and he's with us. Welcome to the program.

Mr. NICK HEIL (Writer): Nice to be here.

INSKEEP: The first of these three books that we're going to look at here is called "No Way Down: Life and Death on K2" by Graham Bowley. What's it about?

Mr. HEIL: It was a complicated story. K2 is a little different than Everest. Everest has this calm weather window, and K2 is a little bit different. It doesn't quite get that sort of extended calm, but what it gets is little breaks in what's typically very turbulent weather. And so they had this little break in the weather in - I believe it was the very end of July, in 2008, and about 30 people from several different expeditions were positioned way high on the mountain and they decided they were going to make their summit attempt during that weather window.

INSKEEP: This book begins with a description of one of the climbers who realized that this was a catastrophe and backed away. But you see from this man's perspective what it looks like as more than a couple dozen people are scrambling around in the most dangerous part of that mountain and passing climbing ropes back and forth and you see the little mistakes that are going to cause disaster later.

Mr. HEIL: Yeah, the crux of the climb on K2, at least on the Abruzzi Spur, which is the standard route on the mountain, it's called the bottleneck, and it basically funnels all the climbers into a very, very exposed, steep, and dangerous part of the mountain. And everybody has got to move through there and you're going to go just as fast as the guy in front of you. So...

INSKEEP: We're with a glacier with a glacier overhanging over your head.

Mr. HEIL: Yeah, the scariest part really of that part of that part of the climb is this massive 300-foot ice cliff that just towers over you for hours while you're on the route. And it's prone to just halving(ph) off building-size chunks of ice and flushing down to the couloir, and if you're there at the wrong time, you're in big trouble.

INSKEEP: What did you learn from the descriptions of some of the survivors of that event?

Mr. HEIL: You know, here I think you had a combination of a lot of people in a dangerous place, things moving not quite as efficiently as they could, and people getting trapped when conditions started going bad. And this wasn't necessarily a storm, but when the ice cliff did actually shatter and flush down over the mountain, people were in a bad place.

INSKEEP: The second book on our list, "One Mountain, Thousand Summits," goes after that same 2008 season, but from the perspective of some people who are not the foreigners, or at least not the outsiders to South Asia.

Mr. HEIL: "One Mountain, Thousand Summits" is really this incredibly meticulous, almost forensic analysis of what transpired during the season, you know, from a very experienced climber. And I really appreciated Freddie Wilkinson's effort to tell the story from the point of view of the sherpas and the high-altitude porters who are, you know, a very, very big part of Himalayan mountaineering and very often get short shrift in, you know, the media accounts of what transpired, particularly when it comes to disasters up high.

INSKEEP: So what did the sherpa guides who spoke for this particular book do to get themselves and other people down off that mountain when everything went wrong?

Mr. HEIL: What's happened is, is that the serac has broken off and it's flushed down through the bottleneck, and it's torn out the fixed lines. Fixed lines are ropes that are anchored into the slopes so that the climbers have some safety protection.

INSKEEP: And the serac, that's this overhanging glacier?

Mr. HEIL: That's the overhanging ice cliff.

INSKEEP: Coming apart.

Mr. HEIL: Exactly right. So the serac has collapsed and it's ripped out the fixed ropes and the climbers come back down and they discover that the ropes on the most dangerous part of the route are not there. And so one of the climbing sherpas down-climbs without any kind of protection through this very steep, fully exposed section of ice, and according to Wilkinson's account, actually has another sherpa attached to his harness. So not only is he picking his way down using his crampons and his ice axes through this very difficult section, but he actually has another climber, another sherpa with him, and he was the one that gets back down to the high camp and sort of informs people exactly what's going on up there and starts getting a rescue operation going.

INSKEEP: This same book brings up some criticism of people who test mountains like K2. Here's a quote from one of the critics. What these men and women do is impressive, but are they heroes? They go out of their way to experience something very dangerous that has zero utility except to themselves.

Mr. HEIL: You know, I think there's a point to be made there. Im not sure that that's the end of the discussion, but certainly, you know, it's difficult to justify going to a big summit when you're talking about folks who have families, folks who have lives at home, and anybody who may be putting someone else on the mountain at risk.

INSKEEP: Let me ask about one more book. This is called "The Last Man on the Mountain." Once again, we're on the slopes of K2, it's really cold, but the year is 1939, and it's the story of a man named Dudley Francis Wolfe. Who was he?

Mr. HEIL: Dudley Wolfe was this wealthy American who was invited onto an expedition of K2. It was actually the second U.S. attempt. The person who invited him, Fritz Wiessner, needed somebody to kind of help bankroll the expedition. And Wolfe, though, an experienced climber, had a lot of financial resources at his disposal. So he got the nod for the expedition and ended up being, along with Fritz Wiessner, the only two people to make it up above 25,000 feet on K2. It was a very, very impressive accomplishment at the time.

INSKEEP: But it was a one-way trip. What happened?

Mr. HEIL: Well, Wolfe got up high. He found himself exhausted in a tricky technical section and decided he couldn't go any further. And so Dudley parked himself at a high camp. You know, in what turned out to be the very controversial part of the book, Fritz Wiessner came down just short of the summit. They had a very nasty fall trying to get the three of them back down off of the mountain. Wolfe was injured and still very fatigued, and they decided they were going to leave him at a high camp.

And Fritz Wiessner and the sherpa descended to base camp. They made repeated attempts to get up to Wolfe. They actually reached him at one point, but were unable to get him back down the mountain, and that was the last time anyone saw him alive.

INSKEEP: He, according to some accounts, actually refused to go down the mountain. Is that true?

Mr. HEIL: Thats the account that will survive him. It's hard to know what the reasons were. I mean he'd been at this extraordinary altitude for more than a month. You know, he must have just been in such a debilitated state, so who knows if he was even aware of what he was telling the sherpas.

INSKEEP: I wonder if there's something symbolic about that moment though, that some guy would climb up so high and be in such peril and finally have an opportunity to get down and he would say no.

MR. HEIL: There's an interesting sort of dignity to it. You know, I mean he was really the description, the physical descriptions of him when they finally get back up to him are really horrible. I mean he's messed himself. He was just he had lost like 30 pounds, and I think there was this sense of him being like, you know, I just I made it this far and I don't want this to be the last image of me. I don't want to go back to the world like this.

INSKEEP: Nick Heil, thanks very much.

Mr. HEIL: Thank you, Steve.

INSKEEP: He's a writer for Outside magazine and author of the book "Dark Summit: The True Story of Everest's Most Controversial Season." He reviews here for us three books about K2 - "No Way Down," "One Mountain, Thousand Summits," and "The Last Man on the Mountain."

Copyright © 2010 National Public Radio®. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.
 
trysail said:
http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=129235100


LINDA WERTHEIMER, host:

Last week, an Austrian mountain climber reached the top of the world's second highest mountain. Christian Stangl was the first to reach the summit of K2 in the past two years. K2 is the second highest peak in the world. It's a little shorter than Mount Everest, but it is a far more treacherous climb. High-altitude climbers have referred to K2 as the Holy Grail of mountaineering.

STEVE INSKEEP, host:

This morning we're going to review three new books about the people who attempt to climb that mountain on the border between Pakistan and China. Nick Heil has written extensively about climbing, and he's with us. Welcome to the program.

Mr. NICK HEIL (Writer): Nice to be here.

INSKEEP: The first of these three books that we're going to look at here is called "No Way Down: Life and Death on K2" by Graham Bowley. What's it about?

Mr. HEIL: It was a complicated story. K2 is a little different than Everest. Everest has this calm weather window, and K2 is a little bit different. It doesn't quite get that sort of extended calm, but what it gets is little breaks in what's typically very turbulent weather. And so they had this little break in the weather in - I believe it was the very end of July, in 2008, and about 30 people from several different expeditions were positioned way high on the mountain and they decided they were going to make their summit attempt during that weather window.

INSKEEP: This book begins with a description of one of the climbers who realized that this was a catastrophe and backed away. But you see from this man's perspective what it looks like as more than a couple dozen people are scrambling around in the most dangerous part of that mountain and passing climbing ropes back and forth and you see the little mistakes that are going to cause disaster later.

Mr. HEIL: Yeah, the crux of the climb on K2, at least on the Abruzzi Spur, which is the standard route on the mountain, it's called the bottleneck, and it basically funnels all the climbers into a very, very exposed, steep, and dangerous part of the mountain. And everybody has got to move through there and you're going to go just as fast as the guy in front of you. So...

INSKEEP: We're with a glacier with a glacier overhanging over your head.

Mr. HEIL: Yeah, the scariest part really of that part of that part of the climb is this massive 300-foot ice cliff that just towers over you for hours while you're on the route. And it's prone to just halving(ph) off building-size chunks of ice and flushing down to the couloir, and if you're there at the wrong time, you're in big trouble.

INSKEEP: What did you learn from the descriptions of some of the survivors of that event?

Mr. HEIL: You know, here I think you had a combination of a lot of people in a dangerous place, things moving not quite as efficiently as they could, and people getting trapped when conditions started going bad. And this wasn't necessarily a storm, but when the ice cliff did actually shatter and flush down over the mountain, people were in a bad place.

INSKEEP: The second book on our list, "One Mountain, Thousand Summits," goes after that same 2008 season, but from the perspective of some people who are not the foreigners, or at least not the outsiders to South Asia.

Mr. HEIL: "One Mountain, Thousand Summits" is really this incredibly meticulous, almost forensic analysis of what transpired during the season, you know, from a very experienced climber. And I really appreciated Freddie Wilkinson's effort to tell the story from the point of view of the sherpas and the high-altitude porters who are, you know, a very, very big part of Himalayan mountaineering and very often get short shrift in, you know, the media accounts of what transpired, particularly when it comes to disasters up high.

INSKEEP: So what did the sherpa guides who spoke for this particular book do to get themselves and other people down off that mountain when everything went wrong?

Mr. HEIL: What's happened is, is that the serac has broken off and it's flushed down through the bottleneck, and it's torn out the fixed lines. Fixed lines are ropes that are anchored into the slopes so that the climbers have some safety protection.

INSKEEP: And the serac, that's this overhanging glacier?

Mr. HEIL: That's the overhanging ice cliff.

INSKEEP: Coming apart.

Mr. HEIL: Exactly right. So the serac has collapsed and it's ripped out the fixed ropes and the climbers come back down and they discover that the ropes on the most dangerous part of the route are not there. And so one of the climbing sherpas down-climbs without any kind of protection through this very steep, fully exposed section of ice, and according to Wilkinson's account, actually has another sherpa attached to his harness. So not only is he picking his way down using his crampons and his ice axes through this very difficult section, but he actually has another climber, another sherpa with him, and he was the one that gets back down to the high camp and sort of informs people exactly what's going on up there and starts getting a rescue operation going.

INSKEEP: This same book brings up some criticism of people who test mountains like K2. Here's a quote from one of the critics. What these men and women do is impressive, but are they heroes? They go out of their way to experience something very dangerous that has zero utility except to themselves.

Mr. HEIL: You know, I think there's a point to be made there. Im not sure that that's the end of the discussion, but certainly, you know, it's difficult to justify going to a big summit when you're talking about folks who have families, folks who have lives at home, and anybody who may be putting someone else on the mountain at risk.

INSKEEP: Let me ask about one more book. This is called "The Last Man on the Mountain." Once again, we're on the slopes of K2, it's really cold, but the year is 1939, and it's the story of a man named Dudley Francis Wolfe. Who was he?

Mr. HEIL: Dudley Wolfe was this wealthy American who was invited onto an expedition of K2. It was actually the second U.S. attempt. The person who invited him, Fritz Wiessner, needed somebody to kind of help bankroll the expedition. And Wolfe, though, an experienced climber, had a lot of financial resources at his disposal. So he got the nod for the expedition and ended up being, along with Fritz Wiessner, the only two people to make it up above 25,000 feet on K2. It was a very, very impressive accomplishment at the time.

INSKEEP: But it was a one-way trip. What happened?

Mr. HEIL: Well, Wolfe got up high. He found himself exhausted in a tricky technical section and decided he couldn't go any further. And so Dudley parked himself at a high camp. You know, in what turned out to be the very controversial part of the book, Fritz Wiessner came down just short of the summit. They had a very nasty fall trying to get the three of them back down off of the mountain. Wolfe was injured and still very fatigued, and they decided they were going to leave him at a high camp.

And Fritz Wiessner and the sherpa descended to base camp. They made repeated attempts to get up to Wolfe. They actually reached him at one point, but were unable to get him back down the mountain, and that was the last time anyone saw him alive.

INSKEEP: He, according to some accounts, actually refused to go down the mountain. Is that true?

Mr. HEIL: Thats the account that will survive him. It's hard to know what the reasons were. I mean he'd been at this extraordinary altitude for more than a month. You know, he must have just been in such a debilitated state, so who knows if he was even aware of what he was telling the sherpas.

INSKEEP: I wonder if there's something symbolic about that moment though, that some guy would climb up so high and be in such peril and finally have an opportunity to get down and he would say no.

MR. HEIL: There's an interesting sort of dignity to it. You know, I mean he was really the description, the physical descriptions of him when they finally get back up to him are really horrible. I mean he's messed himself. He was just he had lost like 30 pounds, and I think there was this sense of him being like, you know, I just I made it this far and I don't want this to be the last image of me. I don't want to go back to the world like this.

INSKEEP: Nick Heil, thanks very much.

Mr. HEIL: Thank you, Steve.

INSKEEP: He's a writer for Outside magazine and author of the book "Dark Summit: The True Story of Everest's Most Controversial Season." He reviews here for us three books about K2 - "No Way Down," "One Mountain, Thousand Summits," and "The Last Man on the Mountain."

Copyright © 2010 National Public Radio®. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.
Click to expand...

Yowza. There's a special kind of craziness involved in climbing K2.
 
Speaking of K2.......

From the ADN.com:

http://media.adn.com/smedia/2010/08/22/22/5443027.78019.original.highlight.prod_affiliate.7.jpg

"Two years after he was swept from the world's second-highest mountain after rescuing three others during a two-day span when 11 climbers died on K2, Ger McDonnell -- an Irishman whose love of the mountains brought him to Alaska -- will receive a prestigious posthumous award for his history of heroism.

McDonnell, who worked in Alaska as an engineer and was well known in both the climbing and Irish music worlds, will be honored by the mountaineer town of Pinzolo, Italy, which since 1972 has presented the International Alpine Solidarity Award in recognition of those who put themselves at risk to help imperiled climbers.

In 1996, retired Denali National Park ranger Daryl Miller became the first American to receive the top award, the Targa d'Argento, also called the silver shield. Gold medals are presented in memoriam to the families of those who die while aiding others.

This is the second time McDonnell has been honored for his actions on K2. Last year, explorersweb.com gave him its Best of Explorers award.

"It is very good news and incredible that Ger has been recognized internationally once again," McDonnell's brother, J.J., told Mountaineering Ireland. "It is in some way comforting, yet hard also on the eve of his second anniversary."

McDonnell was 37 when he died Aug. 2, 2008, a day after becoming the first Irishman to stand atop the 28,253-foot K2, a mountain known for its ruthlessness.

After an overnight bivouac on his descent, McDonnell and Italian climber Marco Confortola discovered two Korean climbers and their Sherpa trapped upside down in a tangle of ropes above the Bottleneck, a steep ice couloir in the mountain's death zone.

In interviews later, Confortola said he and McDonnell delayed their descent by three or four hours while they tried to free the men.

Confortola finally decided the effort was futile. As he began his descent, he was puzzled to see McDonnell climbing up the mountain -- though he later realized McDonnell had gone up to release tension on the ropes. McDonnell reportedly spent several more hours working alone before finally freeing the three men.

With McDonnell still above them, the three began their descent and ultimately met up with two other members of their expedition. An ice serac above gave way, sweeping McDonnell to his death. A subsequent avalanche killed the party of five below that included the three climbers McDonnell had saved.

"McDonnell was the finest of mountaineers," the Pinzolo awards committee wrote. "He was ... someone who took part in many rescue efforts, and someone who was capable of abandoning his own plans, such as conquering the world's most difficult peaks, to assist climbers in difficulty."

In 1999, McDonnell and climbing partner Mike Mays were awarded the Denali Pro Pin for their efforts in leading five imperiled climbers -- one suffering from snow blindness, one from exhaustion -- to safety during a whiteout. McDonnell broke trail to get the group to McKinley's 17,000-foot camp.

"Ger just couldn't walk away without helping people," John Dowd, an Irishman who climbed with McDonnell in Alaska and Pakistan, told Mountaineering Ireland.

McDonnell is one of five people who will be honored with gold medals at a ceremony next month in Pinzolo. The other four will go to the families of four rescuers who died a helicopter crash after a landslide last year on the slopes of Monte Cristallo in the Italian Alps."
 
Dear Members,

Climbers have a pretty good track record when it comes to caring for the lands we enjoy. From the AAC’s second president, John Muir, to Wilderness Act activist David Brower, to modern role models like Yvon Chouinard, climbers lead when it comes to the environment we so adore. More of that tradition took place here at the American Mountaineering Center last month when we brought stewards and researchers from over forty land management regions in seventeen countries together to expand our knowledge of how to manage human waste in the backcountry. The conference, Exit Strategies, was successful because of the extraordinary volunteer leadership of Roger Robinson and our conservation chair, Ellen Lapham. As science and practice move forward, our reputation as a group that takes responsibility for itself continues to uphold our good standing with the land management agencies here in the United States.

We honored another of those environmental leaders, Nick Clinch, at the 40th Anniversary Celebration of the Grand Teton Climbers’ Ranch. We know Nick as the leader of expeditions that made the first ascents of Hidden Peak, Masherbrum and the Vinson Massif. Nick was also hugely instrumental in the establishment of the Grand Teton Climbers’ Ranch back in 1970. His environmental bent was demonstrated professionally during his years of service as the executive director of the Sierra Club. The celebration was just right for the Ranch: informal, inclusive, and flavored with great food. The speakers—Ranch chair Bill Fetterhoff, Nick Clinch and Yvon Chouinard—were all in fine form.

Finally, I wrote earlier about our work to substantially rebuild the AAC for the first time in decades: better benefits and more knowledge resources in an organization that is delivered at a far more local level. Despite the fact that July was our best membership month to date (bringing our ranks to record highs), the case for change is clear. I will be presenting a comprehensive plan to the board at our October meeting which will be held, appropriately, in America’s most iconic climbing destination: Yosemite.

Respectfully,





Phil Powers
AAC Executive Director


(AAC=American Alpine Club)
 
Teacher looks to climb 5 treacherous 'teeth'

From todays ADN.com:

Jay Rowe tries Broken Tooth in June for the seventh time.

http://media.adn.com/smedia/2010/09/13/22/5493888.80814.original.embedded.prod_affiliate.7.jpg

"Anchorage climber Jay Rowe has an obsession with teeth -- giant, precarious teeth.

The Huffman Elementary School physical education teacher has made it his mission to climb the five forbidding peaks in the Mooses Tooth massif not far from Mount McKinley in the Alaska Range.

The 9,050-foot Broken Tooth, which has only been climbed four times, has proven particularly pernicious. Seven times Rowe has made a bid for the summit. Seven times he's been repelled, most recently with Peter Haeussler in June.

Sometimes it's bad weather. Other times it's bad rock. Occasionally, just bad luck.

"Last time we got 2,000 feet up and hit rock so rotten, you couldn't put a piton in," he said. "It was just a dead end."

Rowe has climbed the other spectacular yet treacherous teeth -- 10,335-foot Mooses Tooth, 10,070-foot Bear's Tooth and 9,000-foot Eye Tooth in 2004 and 8,000-foot Sugar Tooth in 2006.

None is easy.

"The rugged bulk of the Mooses Tooth sits directly across from the sheer east face of Mount Dickey, creating the grand Gateway to the Ruth Gorge," writes Joseph Puryear in "Alaska Climbing," his 2006 book. "But unlike Mount Dickey, this complex massif has no forgiving route to the summit.

"Its north face is strewn with hanging glaciers; its colossal east face contains some of the most severe alpine routes in Alaska; its southern flank is a massive rock rampart split by thin ice couloirs; and the lower angled western slopes culminate in the narrow spine that creates the literal crown of the 'tooth.' "

Most of Rowe's Broken Tooth attempts came in the early 1990s.

"My first three attempts, I wanted to climb it just because it's such a beautiful feature," Rowe said. "When we didn't make it I figured, 'Well, we can do better next time.' "

Then he knocked off Mooses Tooth, Bear's Tooth and Eye Tooth in one season. Two years later, he was on the summit of Sugar Tooth.

Slowly, the seed of an idea was planted.

"We're hoping to be the first to stand on the summit of all five tooths," Rowe said. "As you can see, it's taking a while. I'm 48, and I would really like to get 'er done by my 50th birthday.

"Broken Tooth is the crux. It's just hard to get to, and there's no line without some kind of peril."

May and early June are the best times for a bid -- lots of daylight but before the rain and drizzle of mid-June takes over. A surface of windblown snow that's rock-hard is ideal.

"That holds an ax beautifully," Rowe said in reference to the ice ax climbers use in that terrain. "It's like climbing ice but softer. You can move very quickly through that."

Under ideal conditions, the climb can take two or three days. On such vertical faces, climbers use a device called a port-a-ledge that hangs from suspension points, allowing them to rest at night.

But as most alpinists know, ideal conditions are rare.

Last year, Rowe and companions Haeussler and Cody Arnold made a bid to climb the west ridge of Broken Tooth, starting at 5,600 feet.

But a storm dumped about two feet of fresh snow, locking them in their bivouac for two days, ruining their intended route and sending the avalanche risk soaring.

Once again, retreat was the only wise option."

More photos
 
Climbers unhappy about proposed fee increases

From the AP.

"ASHFORD, Wash. -- Mountain climbers aren't happy about a National Park Service proposal to boost the cost of a permit to climb Mount Rainier by two-thirds and for Alaska's Mount McKinley by 150 percent.

The News Tribune reported that Rainier park Superintendent Dave Uberuaga plans to propose to the National Park Service that the fee for an annual Rainier climbing pass be increased from $30 to as much as $50.

The increase is needed to train climbing rangers and other expenses, Uberuaga said. Future fee increases might be linked to rises in the U.S. Consumer Price Index, he said.

Three climbing activist groups wrote to park service Director Jon Jarvis last week to protesting the increase and a proposal to raise the climbing fee for Mount McKinley in Alaska's Denali National Park by 150 percent, from $200 to $500.

The letter from the Access Fund, American Alpine Club and American Alpine Guides Association says the increases are "unnecessary and unfair."

"We fear that these added costs will make the unique mountaineering opportunities available at Denali and Rainier too expensive for many Americans," the letter said.

It also contends that officials at both parks are trying to increase the fees without a period of public comment.

Uberuaga said he has always planned to have public meetings after making his proposal to the service.

The News Tribune said it obtained a copy of an Aug. 13 e-mail sent to park concessionaires from Mary Wysong, the Rainier park's concessions management analyst. The e-mail states that "the park does intend to increase the climbing cost recovery fee to $50 starting in 2011," pending regional approval, and that the increase should be finalized "by the end of September at the earliest" but makes no mention of a public-comment period.

Uberuaga said the e-mail was sent as a courtesy to concessionaires who need to set their 2011 rates and print promotional material. He also said he asked the director of Mount Rainier's climbing program to discuss the proposed increase with guide services earlier this month.

The activists, he said, have "gotten way in front of us, and we have to dig ourselves out of a hole."

Uberuaga said that when the fee went up from $25 to $30 in 2003, he held three public meetings and a total of 19 people showed up.

"But I think it's important to always have public input," Uberuaga said.

About 10,000 people per year climb Mount Rainier, but permit fees cover only about 80 percent of the program's expenses, including ranger salaries, he said.

The park has a separate fund for search and rescues that does not receive money from climbing fees. "
 
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