Wanda and K2--The Suburban Mountaineer
Greetings from Peaklessburg.
August has been quite the month of mountain news. Tourists had new access to the Dolomites and they learned how dangerous it is up high without proper skills, clothing, and equipment. Some 60 people had to be rescued from Bugaboo Provincial Park due to flooding. And — the one that really worried me — this young climber was grabbing attention on Instagram by free soloing with a GoPro and telling people to Venmo him.
Lincoln Knowles was the young climber and was profiled on Climbing dot com. The article was insightful and helped me breakdown and understand his use of social media and the intentional attention-grabbing tactics I disdained. These tactics weren’t just carney calling, “Come see the greatest free soloist,” stuff, it was bating and anger inducing by breaking with traditional ethics. Well done, Lincoln for breaking with the from the prescribed trail.
It’s behavior like this that makes me grab hold of tradition, norms, and the old ways, or at least want to hold on to them for myself. For a little while, Lincoln’s behavior genuinely worried me about where climbing would go from here. Did he represent others that would challenge and celebrate a new level of risk taking? I no longer think so, as Lincoln has stopped his free soloing quest. But he’s on our radar now, and he’s learned how to influence an audience, make us watch, and know his name. I’m not following him on Instagram and probably won’t, but even I will be paying attention, mostly through second-hand sources, cautiously watching, just to see what stunt he’s going to pull now. And for that, I am sorry.
For this August 2025 edition of the T.S.M. Newsletter, with that apology out of the way, I have a couple of past posts to share including one about the best mountain fiction books that I ever read, Joanna Croston has a piece in Summit Journal dot com, and I have an amusing video that is far removed from Lincoln. Here we go…
RECENT POSTS, in case you missed them...
Well, these posts were not recently written, but in case you did miss them…
The Problem with Climbing Book Lists on the Internet
I’m guilty of writing a bad list. Several years ago, a blogging friend invited me to write a guest post. He wanted the top 10 climbing books ever written. He thought I could write it. I knew it was more than my reading experience, but I felt I had enough knowledge to fake it. I disclosed that to him and he actually agreed and said that’s why he asked me. Well, the post still comes up either number one or in the top 10, depending on our search query and I cringe at it. Click here to read more.
Peak, a Witty Horror Novel, by Eric Sparling
It was intelligent, exciting, gross, at times nauseating and frightening, and I nearly quit reading it. But I am glad I toughed it out because the conclusion was climbing-history informed and damn witty. Click here for more.
EXCERPT FROM MOUNTAINEERING WOMAN: WANDA RUTKIEWICZ
Summit Journal published online an excerpt from the bookMountaineering Women by Joanna Croston, Nandini Purandare, Jasmin Paris, Ashima Shiraishi, and Tessa Lyons (2025). That’s the same Joanna from the Banff Centre and the Banff Moutain Film & Book Festival, by the way. Anyway, Jo’s chapter titled “Wanda Rutkiewicz and Her Obsession with K2” is available to read.
Jo explains, or retells the explanations, of how Rutkiewicz came to mountaineering and grew her ambitions and became focused on not just climbing 8,000ers, but K2. You probably know the story, but these Digest books, as in Readers Digest books, compiling vignettes of mountaineering tales rarely get published these days, and maybe that was the case in decades prior, but they were some of my favorite books about mountaineering. You can get a great deal from the Internet now but paging through a curated work is much more personal, connecting the reader and the author to the subject. Thank you to Thames & Hudson for permitting Summit Journal to share Jo’s piece.
GREAT WALL OF CHINA, NEW YORK
Lastly, let me share with you one of my favorite climbing flicks. And this is a flick, not a film. This is the story of the longest, certainly not the highest, climb. I caught myself chuckling several times and forwarded it to friends immediately.
Go big, people. Make a mark.
Well, that’s it for my August newsletter. Be sure to subscribe to a climbing magazine to support the climbing community and climbing writing in print. As the Mountain Gazette has been saying in their sponsored ads lately, “Print ain’t dead.” Go subscribe.
Andrew, The Suburban Mountaineer