Avid climber Dougald MacDonald has gathered histories, hair-raising tales, and personal journeys to tell of this prominent peak in the Rocky Mountain National Park. Reflections on mountaineering, geology and wildlife are presented with historic images and gorgeous, full-color contemporary photography. The ten best hiking and climbing routes, plus See It Yourself activities, offer great ways for both novices and seasoned climbers to explore the great mountain.
At 14,259 feet, Longs Peak towers over Colorado’s northern Front Range. A prized location for mountaineering since the 1870s, Longs has been a place of astonishing climbing feats—and, unsurprisingly, of significant risk and harm. Careless and unlucky climbers have experienced serious injury and death on the peak, while their activities, equipment, and trash have damaged fragile alpine resources. As a site of outdoor adventure attracting mostly white people, Longs has mirrored the United States’ tenacious racial divides, even into the twenty-first century. In telling the history of Longs Peak and its climbers, Ruth M. Alexander shows how Rocky Mountain National Park, like the National Park Service (NPS), has struggled to contend with three fundamental obligations—to facilitate visitor enjoyment, protect natural resources, and manage the park as a site of democracy. Too often, it has treated these obligations as competing rather than complementary commitments, reflecting national discord over their meaning and value. Yet the history of Longs also shows us how, over time, climbers, the park, and the NPS have attempted to align these obligations in policy and practice. By putting mountain climbers and their relationship to Longs Peak and its rangers at the center of the story of Rocky Mountain National Park, Alexander exposes the significant role outdoor recreationists have had—as both citizens and privileged adventurers—in shaping the peak’s meaning, use, and management. Since 2000, the park has promoted climber enjoyment and safety, helped preserve the environment, facilitated tribal connections to the park, and attracted a more diverse group of visitors and climbers. Yet, Alexander argues, more work needs to be done. Alexander’s nuanced account of Longs Peak reveals the dangers of undermining national parks’ fundamental obligations and presents a powerful appeal to meet them fairly and fully.
This is a book about the making of a hero - a rescuer. There are few of us that can claim to be bigger-than-life heroes, but surely the story of Dr. Otto Trotts life is the story of one of these. Because of his existence many lives have been saved or improved, human suffering has been reduced, and the world is a better place. What greater statement can be made about a person? A hiker sees the beautiful blue of a mountain gentian just off the trail and stops to capture the image through a snapshot, but in seeking a slightly wider angle steps back -- in a flash the hiker lies injured amid the rocks. A snowboarder searches for untouched powder snow, but finds a cliff instead. A small plane has engine trouble and glides steeply toward a mountain meadow. An early snowstorm catches two climbers exposed in the high alpine. An avalanche buries a foolish snowmobiler trying to make the highest mark on the side of snow-covered slope. An older gentleman has a heart attack far from his city hospital. Its quite possible and even probable that what all of the above have in common is Dr. Otto Trott. He co-founded the search and rescue organization that seeks out the injured and carries them down from the mountains, he pioneered the medical treatments that will be used for hypothermia and frostbite, he introduced advanced European methods of climbing as well as the identification of avalanche danger areas and the systematic search for and rescue of accident victims. Most importantly, Otto taught generations of others to follow in his footsteps. As Lou Whittaker, the renowned mountain guide states, This book is a must for anyone who seeks the mountains and their reward. Dee Molenaar the acclaimed mountaineer, artist and writer, says that this treatise is long overdue, while the legendary high altitude premier climber Jim Wickwire writes that Nicholas Corff has brought to life the fascinating story of Otto Trott There is no question that Dr. Otto Trott was one of those few men who was a legend in his own time, but he always remained a man of great empathy as well as skill who sought to relieve suffering, improve the safety of the outdoors and protect the mountain environment he so loved. In his long and adventuresome life he overcame great loss with courage and perseverance, and ultimately was the recipient of many awards including the Jefferson Award. Along with the text there are over 250 full page photos and illustrations.
Since the Pikes Peak gold rush in the mid-nineteenth century, women have gone into the mountains of Colorado to hike, climb, ski, homestead, botanize, act as guides, practice medicine, and meet a variety of other challenges, whether for sport or for livelihood. Janet Robertson recounts their exploits in a lively, well-illustrated book that measures up to its title, The Magnificent Mountain Women. Arlene Blum provides a new introduction to this edition.
This book is a collection of rock climbing experiences which captures the essence, the challenge, and the spirit of the sport at its best. It describes the historical interplay between events and personalities in Colorado rock climbing, and shows how the concept of the impossible was redefined.
Long established as a standard reference work worldwide, this is a thorough bibliography of all mountaineering books that are of practical use to climbers or for reading pleasure or historical interest. Documenting more than 2000 books of mountaineering literature, it also includes nearly 900 climber's guidebooks, a sampling of more than 400 works of mountaineering fiction, plus journals and bibliographies.
Fat, forty-four, father of three sons, and facing a vasectomy, Mark Obmascik would never have guessed that his next move would be up a 14,000-foot mountain. But when his twelve-year-old son gets bitten by the climbing bug at summer camp, Obmascik can't resist the opportunity for some high-altitude father-son bonding by hiking a peak together. After their first joint climb, addled by the thin air, Obmascik decides to keep his head in the clouds and try scaling all 54 of Colorado's 14,000-foot mountains, known as the Fourteeners -- and to do them in less than one year. The result is Halfway to Heaven, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Obmascik's rollicking, witty, sometimes harrowing, often poignant chronicle of an outrageous midlife adventure that is no walk in the park, although sometimes it's A Walk in the Woods -- but with more sweat and less oxygen. Half a million people try climbing a Colorado Fourteener every year, but only twelve hundred have reported summiting them all. Can an overweight, stay-at-home dad become No. 1,201? With his ebullient personality and sparkling prose, Obmascik brings us inside the quirky, colorful subculture of mountaineering obsessives who summit these mountains year after year. Honoring his concerned wife's orders not to climb alone, Obmascik drags old friends up the slopes, some of them lifelong flatlanders tasting thin air for the first time, and lures seasoned Rockies junkies into taking on a huffing, puffing newbie by bribing them with free beer, lunches, and car washes. Among the new friends he makes are an ex-drag racer trying to perform a headstand on every summit, the lead oboe player in a Hebrew salsa band, and a climber with the counterproductive pre-climb ritual of gulping down four beers and a burrito. Along the way, Obmascik experiences the raw, rowdy, and rarely seen intimacy of male friendship, braced by the double intoxicants of adrenaline and altitude. Though danger is always present -- the Colorado Fourteeners have killed more climbers than Mount Everest -- Mark knows his aging scalp can't afford the hair-raising adventures of Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, and his quest becomes a story of family, friendship, and fraternity. In Obmascik's summer of climbing, he loses fifteen pounds, finds a few dozen man-dates, and gains respect for the history of these storied mountains (home to cannibalism, gold rushes, shoot-outs, and one of the nation's most famed religious shrines). As much about midlife and male bonding as it is about mountains, Halfway to Heaven tells how weekend warriors can survive them all as they reach for those most distant things -- the summits of mountains and a teenage son. And as one man exceeds the physical achievements of his youth, he discovers that age -- like summit height -- is just a number.
