Sublime

Climbing of such difficulty had never been done at such extreme altitude.

At the base of a mountain wall, where you spread out your gear to organize for a climb, it was easy to spot the tools made by Chouinard Equipment. Ours stood out because they had the cleanest lines. They were also the lightest, strongest, and most versatile tools in use. Where other designers would work to improve a tool’s performance by adding on,

rock scramblers on the West Ridge, ice climbers on the Col route.

the much more difficult summit of Carstensz Pyramid (16,535 feet) in the Indonesian province of Irian Barat,

Immediately above rose the Lhotse Face, a vast, tilted sea of ice that gleamed like dirty chrome in the dawn’s slanting light. Snaking down the frozen expanse as if suspended from heaven, a single strand of nine-millimeter rope beckoned like Jack’s beanstalk.

Hornbein was thirty-two years old when he climbed Everest half a century ago,

Fortunately, there was an alternative to pitons: aluminum chocks that could be wedged by hand rather than hammered in and out of cracks. British climbers had been using them on their crags, but because they were crude, they were little known and less trusted in the rest of Europe and the States.