Alpinist Magazine Issue 29 | Winter 2009-10 Back Issue

Ice gargoyles, serac mazes and legendary epics.... Few mountains haunt their climbers as much as the highest mountain in the Canadian Rockies: Robson. Barry Blanchard looks behind the mists at the "King." And are you tired of enhanced colors, beautiful bodies, blank expressions and posed moves? Photographer Andrew Querner stops preplanning shots to capture self-doubt, questioning and leaps of faith—the uncensored, emotional realities of the alpine world. Majka Burhardt travels against the East-to-West migration to explore classic New England icefalls and learns from hard-core locals that sometimes you have to go small to "go big." And when his mother dies after a long illness, a young Cascades alpinist realizes he has sacrificed too much for his dreams. In search of healing, Jens Holsten ventures onto the wild Stikine Icefield.