Alpinist Magazine Issue 43 | Summer 2013 Back Issue

Most climbing areas get only one Golden Age, when the pioneers venture forth onto the grand, natural routes for the first time, haunting future generations with a sense of some unattainable and heavily mythologized past. Squamish, British Columbia, is now on its third or fourth or fifth Golden Age. The irrepressible (or as the artist Jeremy Collins would say, "the uncontrollable, indescribable, gratuitously indefatigable") Tami Knight highlights the climbs, characters and (occasionally substance-fueled) mayhem that have gilded each decade. Hamish Mutch, Peter Croft, Hamish Fraser, Anders Ourom and Sonnie Trotter contribute their own memories of what makes the Stawamus Chief and its outlying crags seem forever young.