The American Alpine Journal is seeking volunteer translators to help produce the 2010 edition of the world’s “journal of record” for documenting long, significant climbs. This year, we particularly need help translating stories from Russian and Slovenian. Native English speakers and experienced climbers are preferred, but any person fluent in both English and these foreign languages may be able to help. Translators are needed for both short and long articles.

If you’d like to help out and be an essential part of this 80-year-old tradition, please contact the AAJ editors.

Bob Craig, one of four inaugural inductees of the Hall of Mountaineering Excellence.

The American Mountaineering Museum will induct four members of its new Hall of Mountaineering Excellence in April at a celebration of the lives and achievements of American climbers Yvon Chouinard, Robert Craig, Bob Bates, and Dr. Charlie Houston. At the awards gala on April 10 in Golden, Colorado, Chouinard and Craig are expected to accept their awards in person; the family and friends of Bates and Houston, who both have passed on, will accept their awards.

The evening will be filled with stories of each mountaineer’s greatest ascents and expeditions, memories of the inductees no longer with us, as well as an appreciative look at each man’s work beyond the climbing world. In addition to being a pioneering ice and big-wall climber, Chouinard has been one of the most important outdoor equipment and clothing innovators of modern times and a leading voice of environmental activism. Bates, Craig, and Houston are perhaps best known as climbers for their roles in the dramatic K2 expedition of 1953, but each has had profound impacts outside mountaineering: Bates as a beloved educator; Craig as founder and longtime president of the Keystone Center public-policy conference center; and Houston as a doctor and medical researcher.

Tickets for the April 10 event will go on sale February 15 through the American Mountaineering Museum website and at the museum’s Base Camp Adventure Gift Shop in Golden.

The American Mountaineering Museum opened in February 2008. The new Hall of Mountaineering Excellence will be located in a rededicated space in one of the museum’s theater rooms.

Micah Dash (left) and Jonny Copp below the Shafat Fortress in India.

The deaths of alpinists Jonny Copp and Micah Dash, along with young filmmaker Wade Johnson, last spring in Sichuan, China, left a huge void in American climbing. But it’s not just their climbs we miss—it’s also their unique and fresh perspectives as storytellers, whether in print, photos, slide shows, or video. Both Copp and Dash were great characters, and their passion for telling the tales of their adventures was as vital and enriching as the great new routes they completed.

The brand-new Copp-Dash Inspire Award celebrates this spirit. These awards will fund bold climbing adventures in the remotest ranges on Earth, and, equally important, they will help talented storytellers bring back multimedia stories. The new grant, administered by the AAC and sponsored by Black Diamond Equipment, La Sportiva, Mountain Hardwear and Patagonia, will provide a pool of $20,000 in grants to North American climbers for expeditions between May 1, 2010, and February 28, 2011.

Good candidates for the grant will propose first ascents in distant ranges and regions, requiring a high level of skill and commitment, and climbed in a fast, light, and clean style. Proposed documentation styles can include any mix of photos, video, or writing that will vividly capture the essence of the adventure, and these stories may be shared through many outlets: slide shows, the Internet, magazine articles, and more. Creativity is key.

Uniquely, the Copp-Dash Inspire Award also will provide recipients with mentoring before and after their expeditions. Instruction and storytelling advice will be provided by the Adventure Film Festival, Alpinist magazine, Sender Films, and professional photographers John Dickey and Mikey Schaefer, in order to help award winners achieve their goals.

Applications for the 2010 awards are due March 31. Click here to learn more and download an application for this exciting new grant program.

A preview of the AAJ Online

First there was the AAJ Search, which brought you every article in the AAJ all the way back to 1929, when the first issue came out. Now the AAJ has taken its next great leap into the digital age with the AAJ Online. Here we’re hosting new reports destined for the 2010 AAJ, posted as we receive and edit them. If you’re planning your next mountain excursion or just want to know what’s new, please check us out. Right now there’s not much meat on our virtual bones, but this will change fast as the new reports keep rolling in. As the months and years go by, we’re sure to become the world’s primary resource for new route reports, just as the printed AAJ has been for the last 80 years–only now the information reaches you even faster.

Remember that the AAJ is only about new stuff: we don’t cover the umpteenth (or even the second) ascent of a route. And it’s not one of those sexy commercial sites, with paid writers fawning over or ripping into famous names. Instead we bring you the raw edge of mountain exploration, where the climbers themselves tell their own stories of how it was to go where the hand of man has never set foot. AAJ contributors are new routers from around the world, many of them not even AAC members. Our goal is to capture EVERY big new route in the world’s mountains, regardless of who climbed it.

So come check us out. And while you’re at it, have you sent us YOUR new route reports from 2009? We need them now!

Cheers,

John Harlin III

Editor, American Alpine Journal

A Murie Research Fellow maps beaver dams near Denali. USGS Photo, Courtesy of Chris Arp

Two fellowship programs based in Alaska’s national parks are now accepting applications from scientific researchers. The Discover Denali Research Fellowship supports field research in and around Denali National Park and Preserve area. The Murie Science and Learning Center Research Fellowship Program is a similar grant that supports field research in eight different national parks and preserves, including Denali, Gates of the Arctic, Kobuk Valley, and Wrangell–St. Elias.

Grants in both programs average around $3,000 to $3,500, but may go as high as $5,000. Applications are due February 1 for the 2010 program, and information on both fellowships is available here.

The application deadline for the AAC’s own research grant programs is March 1. Each year, the AAC awards nearly $10,000 in Research Grants for scientific projects within the scope of the club’s charter. Meanwhile, the AAC-cosponsored Nikwax Bellwether Grant provides a total of $3,000 to two or three researchers documenting the effects of climate change on alpine environments.

New field reports from AAC Research Grant recipient Kevin Ford and Nikwax Bellwether Grant recipient Tracie Seimon have just been posted at the AAC website.

Rinjani, 12,224 feet, is Indonesia's second-highest volcano.

Two English expats have launched a website called Gunung Bagging, featuring a list of all the mountains and volcanoes in Indonesia with 1,000 meters or more of prominence. (Gunung means “mountain” in Indonesia.) The website eventually will include hiking tips, photographs, and route descriptions for all of the peaks, and visitors will be invited to post comments about their own ascents.

Merapi (9,738 feet), a highly active volcano in Central Java.

Many Westerners, of course, are familiar with 16,024-foot Carstensz Pyramid on Papua, the highest peak in Indonesia and one of the Seven Summits, or 13,455-foot Kinabulu on Borneo. But there are hundreds of other dramatic peaks in the Indonesian archipelago, from well-known day hikes near large cities to remote and rarely climbed summits that might require a week or more of hiking to reach; some peaks on the list are active and dangerous volcanoes.

The website calls these peaks Ribus, after the Indonesian word for “1,000.” The site’s creators decided that 1,000 meters of prominence would encompass the greatest variety of the country’s high peaks, across dozens of islands. Which province has the most “ribus”? East Nusa Tenggara, home of the Komodo dragon.

Climbing on Kilimanjaro. Photo by Jeremy Windsor

Of the 40,000 people who travel to 19,334-foot Kilimanjaro each year, half to three-quarters never reach the summit. Medical issues, including acute mountain sickness and gastro-intestinal problems, are at the root of many failed attempts.

Hoping to address these issues and thus allow more climbers to succeed on Africa’s highest peak, Dr. Jeremy Windsor and Dr. George Rodway (an AAC member from Salt Lake City) crafted an extensive guide to “Safety and Success on Kilimanjaro.” This document, posted at the UIAA website, describes the Lemosho Glades route, whose gradual ascent profile allows for better acclimatization—and thus a better chance of climbing the peak safely. The article also covers many other dangers of climbing in Tanzania, from bites to traffic accidents. Essential reading for those planning a Kili trip.

The UIAA’s medical pages are stacked with helpful articles on mountaineering topics, from portable hyperbaric chambers to water disinfection, the effects of extreme temperatures on drugs, and special concerns for women and children at altitude.

Researcher Jon Kedrowski at Kahiltna base camp in 2009.

Jon Kedrowski from Texas State University spent more than a month on Denali this past season—including a trip to the summit via the West Buttress—in order to conduct a study entitled “Climbers’ Perceptions on McKinley: Crowding Concerns, Hazards, and Climber Demographics.” The researcher handed out written surveys to climbers at Kahiltna base camp, and the results are analyzed in a report that you can download at the AAC website.

One interesting finding was that climbers’ fears about climbing Denali changed while they were on the mountain. Fears of acute mountain sickness, HAPE, and dehydration were most prevalent before the climb, while high winds, not making it to the top, sunburn, and snow blindness were the biggest concerns of climbers after their expeditions. The survey also found that a substantial majority believed crowding on Denali remains within acceptable limits.

Kedrowski’s research was partially funded by an AAC Research Grant. (He received an AAC grant for a similar study on Mt. Rainier in 2008.) Each year, the AAC awards nearly $10,000 for scientific research projects within the scope of the club’s charter. Click here to learn more about these grants or to download an application.

The north face of Kang Ri Karpo (ca. 5,800 meters) near the headwaters of the Dongchu Valley. Photo by Tamotsu Nakamura.

Japanese explorer and AAC Honorary Member Tamotsu Nakamura and companions have just returned from an extraordinary photographic expedition to the Nyainqentanglha East and Kangri Garpo regions of eastern Tibet. Starting from the town of Qamdo, the team covered 4,800 kilometers in a vast counterclockwise loop over five weeks in October and November. As we’ve come to expect from Nakamura’s many expeditions to eastern Tibet and southwestern China in the past two decades, he has returned with gorgeous photos of unclimbed peaks.

You can see a gallery of 28 new Nakamura photos from this fall’s expedition, plus a map of the team’s route, at the American Alpine Journal website.

The AAC and a select group of nonprofits and government agencies are teaming up to host an international conference on managing human waste in wilderness settings. The three-day “Exit Strategies” meeting will be held at the American Mountaineering Center and Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado next summer: July 30 to August 1.

The Exit Strategies conference will bring together up to 100 land managers, scientists, entrepreneurs, and students to discuss strategies for dealing effectively with human waste, including existing solutions and innovative proposals alike. Presenters will include land managers and scientists from the U.S., Canada, Japan, and Nepal.

Event chairman Roger Robinson is continuing to solicit sponsors, speakers, and interesting solutions to present at the conference.

In addition to the AAC, the event’s sponsors include the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Public Health Service, Access Fund, Alpine Club of Canada, and Leave No Trace. The AAC has had a long history of cooperation with land managers in developing human-waste solutions. In 2001, an AAC grant helped launch the Clean Mountain Cans program in Denali National Park. The club also has been instrumental in developing carry-it-out waste programs for Indian Creek and Castle Valley in Utah, and in building and maintaining a composting toilet in the popular Ishinca Valley of Peru.

Registration for the Exit Strategies conference is open now. Click here for more details.