Sublime

Late in the month Mugs Stump crossed paths with Waterman on the upper Ruth Glacier. Stump, an alpinist of world renown who died on Denali in 1992, had just completed a difficult new route on a nearby peak, the Mooses Tooth.

One more day on these mountains……………………………...that changed when I offered to assist a Japanese woman who was feeling the strains of the Himalayas. She slipped and hurt her back, so rested for three days. I carried her bag as she limped alongside. Mimi was quiet and shy, taking great care to protect herself from the sun. My friends had left earlier t

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.

I then took on one of the hardest treks in Nepal on foot with my Sherpa team, at speed, running all the way to Kathmandu, only stopping to drink beer and whisky, until we’d completed a six-day journey in eighteen hours.

A gibbous moon rose above the shoulder of 27,824-foot Makalu, washing the slope beneath my boots in ghostly light, obviating the need for a headlamp.

George Melville would serve as the Jeannette’s engineer. Said to be distantly related to the great author, Melville was an improvisational genius with machines—a greasy-fingered savant who seemed most at home among thumping boilers and sharp blasts of steam. The engineer, thirty-eight years old, had a booming voice, a stout physique, and an enormou