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Cover: Shawnté Salabert examines what it might really mean to leave a trace or not.Manoah Ainuu on Neat (5.10), Optimator Wall, Indian Creek, Bears Ears National Monument, Utah. [Photo] Caitlin McNulty

Features

Art of the Topo

Before his death in 2017, Hayden Kennedy pitched Alpinist a story on what he saw as the endangered art of the topo. Alongside the draft Kennedy left behind, Jeremy Collins, Clay Wadman, Tessa Lyons, Vic Zeilman and Paula Wright share a few images of climbing's illustrated worlds.

Pandora's Box

In 2009 Japanese alpinist Kei Taniguchi became the first woman to receive a Piolet d'Or for her first ascent of the Southeast Face of Kamet (7756m), with Kazuya Hiraide. During the final years of her life, Taniguchi continued to explore challenging new routes, while hinting at a mysterious personal quest. Piecing together diary entries and interviewing family and friends, her biographer Akihiro Oishi tries to see inside what Taniguchi called "the Pandora's box."

Less Rich Without You

In 2018, at age fifty-two, famed British mountaineer Nick Bullock left for his twenty-fourth expedition: a journey to attempt a new route on Minya Konka, a 7556-meter peak in Sichuan Province, China. Amid heavy mist and falling snow, he and his climbing partner Paul Ramsden searched for a way through the hazardous maze of an icefall—and through the allures and pitfalls of a modern professional climbing life.

Blood That Dreams of Stone

During the early twentieth century, the talented young poet Antonia Pozzi sought freedom from her family and her society amid the rock spires of the Dolomites and other Italian peaks. David Smart provides an introduction to her career, along with translations of three of her climbing poems, with the help of Brian McKenzie.

Departments

Sharp End

Retracing the steps of a famous guidebook author, our editor-in-chief goes on a pilgrimage to an alpine basin left off most maps.

Letters

Our readers write.

On Belay

For 141 years since its first ascent, mountaineers from around the world traveled to climb la Meije in the Massif des Écrins of France. Meanwhile, the permafrost that held its stones together was melting. On August 7, 2018, rockfall destroyed much of the normal route. Two locally based guides—Benjamin Ribeyre and Erin Smart—recount a search for a new way up the peak amid the uncertainties of the planet's future.

Tool User

John Hessler explores the history of an energy bar invented in 1869: the famously (or infamously) sweet Kendal Mint Cake.

Climbing Life

Erin Connery has a perfect climbing day. Derek Franz learns to keep quiet. David Wilson observes the end of winter. Rebecca Young climbs above the flames. David Guterson turns around. Tami Knight strikes (yet again). Spencer Gray retraces second lines.

Wired

In mountains across Turtle Island (North America), Anishinaabe climber Kayla DeVault de Wendt seeks a means to find harmony between current practices of outdoor recreation and ongoing traditions of Indigenous peoples.

Local Hero

Whether they've collected summits, books or memories, many climbers long to preserve records of the past. Paula Wright presents the person responsible for cataloguing and managing one of the most extensive of these collections: Katie Sauter, director of the Henry S. Hall Jr. American Alpine Club Library.

Off Belay

Shawnté Salabert examines what it might really mean to leave a trace or not.