Bonatti's Unclassic--The Suburban Mountaineer
Greetings from Peaklessburg.
Are you making the most of your summer? I wish I could say I have. I have had a lot of staff changes at the nonprofit I run that has made it difficult to be present in the late daylight hours, work in the yard or go play with the kids. Normally, I like getting outside to ride my increasingly-antique Hard Rock bicycle from Specialized or going to events in parks or the ballpark to take in as many innings of minor league baseball as I can.
Usually, my mountain-article reading rises around this time of year, because the Banff festival team is supposed to send me their article submissions for the article competition so I can read and score them to help the actual judges narrow their list. They had staff changes too and I seem to have fallen off the distribution list and haven’t received my packet. Perhaps it’s for the best this once, but if they get me the packet before the deadline, I know I won’t say no.
In this month’s T.S.M. Newsletter, I share my thoughts on Walter Bonatti’s The Mountains of My [yawn, excuse me] Life, remembering Chris McCandless’s odd contributions, there’s a new memoir that interests me that doesn’t involve seeking summits, and I wonder if maybe you too would like to know about it, and I comment on the crazy people that go to volcanoes, let alone fall into them.
RECENT POST, in case you missed it...
It’s Not a Classic: ‘The Mountains of My Life’ by Walter Bonatti
However, after reading his memoir, The Mountains of My Life (2001), I have been questioning why I have held him with reverence. I once listed him as a top five climber in history. I am not ready to reevaluate that list, but this book and my thoughts about Bonatti have been making me reconsider my conclusion. His climbing talent may keep him there, but his book will not be on my list of climbing classics. Read it all here.
And here's an old post that I think you will enjoy…
The Finest Relic of Chris McCandless
I am presuming you’ve read Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer (1996) or saw the 2007 movie by Sean Penn that it inspired. The first time I picked up the book, my parents saw the description that started “In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness…” It was definitely my kind of story, but the cover takes on a cult-like mystery; my parents were immediately weary of what it might do to me. Check out the full post.
A NEW MEMOIR AND RECALLING ANOTHER
Over the weekend I agreed to review a memoir by Sarah Boon: Meltdown: The Making and Breaking of a Field Scientist. It was just released in June by University of Alberta Press. She’s not an alpinist or a a climber, but she’s been to all the cold places of the Canadian mountains and far north as a research scientist. It’s not the normal subject for my reviews, but this might be partly in hopes for enjoyment. I used to think I had to climb to the top to be satisfied with mountains, and that’s not the case now. In fact, one book that I love is in this vein: Jill Fredston’s Snowstruck. I don’t plan to compare them, at least not right away, but maybe I’ll draw on some of their energy of the places and lifestyle they embraced.
ARE WE ALL CRAZY?
For some reason, two separate people came to me with the story "the woman that died after days in a volcano." I wasn't surprised that a mountain tragedy brought my friends and acquaintances out to share some mountain news that they saw. That wasn't surprising, but rather how they remembered it; both said she died inside a volcano, indicating into the lava-filled crater, and the other described how she slipped through fine black sand into a cave for days before being found.
That wasn't what happened. Reuters, a credible source, reported Juliana Marins, 27, was hiking on Mount Rinjani in Indonesia when she fell off a cliff on or nearby the trail. She was located deceased three days later.
I had no idea how the facts got lost, but they did. And one person had a preconception of Marins that was broader than just about her: She said, rhetorically, "Why do people do such dangerous things?"
She was really asking how people went crazy enough to to visit a dangerous volcano or climb a mountain. I don't know anything about Marins, or her experience hiking anywhere, but I know climbers, mountaineers, and I know from my own experiences that what we consider dangerous isn't straightforward.
Managing risk is partly building up skills, like a surfer, fisherman, pilot, or someone at a job. We all build and refine our skills for the task. A big job is often managing many small jobs, and gathering experience with the small tasks, and developing expertise and mastery are incremental steps toward more responsibility and bigger roles or challenges.
Hiking a volcano or climbing an alpine route require varying level of knowledge and experience. Whether Marin did I don’t know, but I don’t think she was doing something outlandish and you probably don’t either.
ALEX HONNOLD INTERVIEWS SONNIE TROTTER
Sonnie Trotter has done several podcast interviews to promote his book Uplifted, and this one is my favorite. In case you haven’t heard this episode of Climbing Gold, Honnold has a conversation with Trotter and it did a better job than my own review of what made his book so good. Check it out.
Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to subscribe to a climbing magazine, such as Alpinist, Summit Journal, Gripped, well, you know. By subscribing you are supporting the climbing community and climbing writing in print. It’s like an incubator for the stories we like.
Andrew, The Suburban Mountaineer