Latest Alpinist Podcast Episodes
Graham Zimmerman's Balancing Act
Alpinist - February 28, 2024 20:43 - 44 minutes ★★★★★ - 162 ratingsFor all of his expeditions and cutting-edge climbs around the world, Graham Zimmerman’s story is one of balancing adventure and exploration with social responsibility and an examined life. His book, A Fine Line: Searching for Balance Among Mountains demonstrates that, and also serves as an ode t...
The Many Facets of Len Necefer
Alpinist - February 20, 2024 22:45 - 52 minutes ★★★★★ - 162 ratingsDr. Len Necefer didn’t grow up skiing steep slopes or topping out on summits like he does today. Instead, his connection to the outdoors began with golf—a fact he shares rather sheepishly. Necefer was an avid golfer from age five until he was eighteen, when he moved to the desert southwest and r...
Climbing and Journalism with Lauren DeLaunay Miller
Alpinist - February 12, 2024 22:00 - 43 minutes ★★★★★ - 162 ratingsLauren Delaunay Miller is an award-winning author, journalist and audio producer based in Bishop, California. Her first book, Valley of Giants: Stories from Women at the Heart of Yosemite Climbing, was published in the spring of 2022 by Mountaineers Books, and won the Banff Mountain Book Competi...
Training for the New Anything with Steve House
Alpinist - December 15, 2023 19:30 - 54 minutes ★★★★★ - 162 ratingsSteve House began venturing into the high mountains as a teenager, and has since built a career on climbing, guiding and coaching. By the time he published his book Beyond the Mountain in 2009, Reinhold Messner said House was “at the top of mountaineering.” House’s life in climbing has taken ...
Unpacking Packing with Sarah Pickman
Alpinist - December 06, 2023 20:32 - 41 minutes ★★★★★ - 162 ratingsSarah Pickman is an encyclopedia of expedition history, in particular the gear early explorers relied on. She recently earned a PhD in history from Yale University. She’s an independent scholar, editor, writer and content producer based just outside New York City. Sarah is also a contributor ...
Writing and Routes with David Smart
Alpinist - November 29, 2023 20:00 - 34 minutes ★★★★★ - 162 ratingsDavid Smart’s life and work seem to intersect with climbing at every turn. He’s a lifelong climber, revered route developer and the editorial director at Gripped Publishing. He’s a founding editor at Gripped Magazine and has been crucial to its success and longevity for more than 25 years. Sm...
Racing Fear with Justin Bowen
Alpinist - September 06, 2023 16:00 - 32 minutes ★★★★★ - 162 ratingsJustin Bowen’s first time scaling walls and new routes was in a climbing gym during a friend’s birthday party. It wasn’t until high school, driven by persistent memories of that experience, that Bowen started climbing on a more consistent basis. Eventually, while attending college in Arizona, ...
Aiming for the Bushes with Alan Rousseau
Alpinist - August 30, 2023 21:00 - 31 minutes ★★★★★ - 162 ratingsFor Alan Rousseau, the allure of mountaineering is in the unknown. When he looks up at a mountain and contemplates whether it can be climbed, he sees a mystery to be solved. Rousseau is an IFMGA guide who divides his time between pursuing his own goals in the mountains, and helping others do ...
Climbing for Change: Caroline Gleich
Alpinist - August 23, 2023 15:00 - 40 minutes ★★★★★ - 162 ratingsCaroline Gleich lives on the ridgeline between adventure and activism. Her trips around the globe often transcend summit goals as she merges mountain missions with driving awareness around diversity, equality and inclusion, and environmental justice. In 2019, Caroline summited the tallest moun...
Talking Schist with Andrea Charest
Alpinist - April 26, 2023 16:00 - 42 minutes ★★★★★ - 162 ratingsFor Andrea Charest, climbing is entwined with community. She and her husband Steve own Petra Cliffs, a climbing gym and mountaineering school in Burlington, Vermont, where they also work as guides. She’s volunteered much of her time over the years to Crag Vermont, a nonprofit organization dedica...
Connected to Place: Sarah Audsley
Alpinist - April 19, 2023 14:00 - 41 minutes ★★★★★ - 162 ratingsPoet Sarah Audsley has an elevated point of view, even when her feet are on the ground. While the Vermont-based writer and climber believes she was indeed born to write poetry, she didn’t start pursuing it professionally until age 29. Before that, she traveled the world, from Africa’s Mt. Kil...
Beyond Success and Failure: Young Hoon Oh
Alpinist - April 12, 2023 14:48 - 42 minutes ★★★★★ - 162 ratingsKorean rock and ice climber Young Hoon Oh is a student of the mountains and the culture borne from them. While pursuing a PhD in anthropology, he spent two years living among Sherpa communities in Nepal and studying the outsized impact Sherpas have on Himalayan mountaineering. Today, Young Ho...
The Art of Playing: Babsi Vigl
Alpinist - April 05, 2023 12:00 - 33 minutes ★★★★★ - 162 ratingsBabsi Vigl’s pursuits in the mountains transcend summit aspirations and self-indulgence. The Austrian alpinist, guide and writer embarked on her first expedition at age 20. Since that time she has experienced many highs and lows, from climbing Cerro Chalten as part of an all-women ascent of ...
Heart of the Sierra: Doug Robinson
Alpinist - March 29, 2023 14:30 - 43 minutes ★★★★★ - 162 ratingsWhen Doug Robinson speaks of a life spent climbing in the Sierra Range, his stories emanate joy rather than ego. He points to experiences and relationships, instead of his many contributions to climbing’s legacy and lore. Robinson worked alongside Yvon Chouinard before Patagonia existed, forgi...
Creativity and Climbing: Nikki Smith
Alpinist - March 08, 2023 14:00 - 50 minutes ★★★★★ - 162 ratingsWith a geologist father, Nikki Smith’s love for rock and the outdoors came naturally. Born in Portland, Oregon, Smith moved with her family to Utah at a young age. She spent her youth wandering the state’s vast outdoor spaces, hunting for minerals and fossils. Smith was 16 when she had her fir...
Of Peaks and Parenting: Majka Burhardt
Alpinist - February 23, 2023 12:00 - 47 minutes ★★★★★ - 162 ratingsMajka Burhardt went climbing for the first time while attending a sleepaway camp for kids in Minnesota. Since then, she’s built a career ascending ice and rock all over the world. As climbing brought her to frozen pitches and high peaks, it also led Burhardt to Legado, an international nonprofit...
Braving New Worlds: Steph Davis
Alpinist - February 02, 2023 17:00 - 41 minutes ★★★★★ - 162 ratingsSteph Davis has been a professional climber since 1991. But simply calling the Moab, Utah local a climber seems inadequate. From three years old, Davis was trained in the Suzuki Method on the piano. She practiced everyday, sometimes for hours a day, until she discovered a passion for climbing....
Honoring Mountains and Mentors: Clint Helander
Alpinist - January 23, 2023 14:00 - 35 minutes ★★★★★ - 162 ratingsClint Helander’s narrative is driven by stories of persistence. Persistence in the face of nearly insurmountable odds, in far-flung places like Alaska’s Revelation Mountains. Persistence in honor of friends lost, and partners with whom he’s made the push to the top. Helander is a regular Alpin...
Dreaming of Imaginary Peaks: Katie Ives
Alpinist - December 29, 2022 18:00 - 53 minutes ★★★★★ - 162 ratingsFor those who’ve contributed to or read Alpinist over the last 18 years, Katie Ives needs little introduction. Ives started at the magazine in 2004. After reading the Chicago Manual of Style cover to cover, she took on the roles of overqualified intern and copyeditor. She became editor in chief ...
A Life of Adventure and Positive Impact: Timmy O’Neill
Alpinist - December 22, 2022 12:00 - 49 minutes ★★★★★ - 162 ratingsTimmy O’Neill’s climbing career spans more than 30 years. He’s traveled the world, gaining climbing accolades and wisdom about life, and once spent 60 days living in a cave in Joshua Tree National Park, sharing his food cache with mice who also called it home. His resume of first ascents include...
The Self Motivator: Chantel Astorga
Alpinist - November 18, 2021 20:03 - 43 minutes ★★★★★ - 162 ratingsIn June 2020, Chantel Astorga soloed Denali’s Cassin Ridge in less than 15 hours, setting a women’s record and making the first known ski descent of the Seattle Ramp during the approach. She recalls one particular moment after skiing through a dangerous icefall and spotting an eagle: “I’ve never...
Balancing Risk and Reward: Mike Gardner
Alpinist - November 16, 2021 22:52 - 54 minutes ★★★★★ - 162 ratingsMike Gardner was 16 years old when his father, a respected climbing guide, died while free soloing on the Grand Teton in 2008. Mike has suffered the loss of other loved ones since then, yet he continues to climb and guide in the Greater Ranges as well as the Tetons where he grew up. In that time...
From Pebbles to the Himalaya: Pete Takeda
Alpinist - November 15, 2021 21:29 - 34 minutes ★★★★★ - 162 ratingsPete Takeda is a world-renowned alpinist who started climbing on boulders as a kid in Idaho. He has pursued every climbing discipline over the last several decades, from hard free climbing to big wall aid, as well as ice and mixed climbing. His first ascents range from ephemeral mud towers to so...
Birth Pains of New Nations - Pete Oxley
Factor Two - August 12, 2021 12:54 - 52 minutes ★★★★★ - 5 ratingsThe whims and motivations of climbers really are another world to the person in the street. Understanding them is crossing a threshold, it requires a certain suspension of disbelief to start to see the world of risk, adventure, suffering and more in a different light. Those thresholds exist w...
The Novelty Seeker: Madaleine Sorkin
Alpinist - July 07, 2021 17:07 - 29 minutes ★★★★★ - 162 ratingsBesides free climbing big walls, Madaleine Sorkin devotes herself to social activism, and has been a leader in starting the Climbing Grief Fund through the American Alpine Club. In this interview from April 2021, Derek Franz asks about her first climbing experiences as a teenager; her perspectiv...
Hateja - Louise Thomas and Glenda Huxter
Factor Two - June 24, 2021 15:37 - 44 minutes ★★★★★ - 5 ratingsIf you had to select your late 90s dream team for a British, all-female Himalayan big wall trip, you couldn’t go far wrong with this one. Glenda Huxter was onsighting E7, Kath Pyke had extensive experience on rock and alpine routes, and Louise Thomas brought even more big wall and expedition exp...
Not in Ohio Anymore: Anna Pfaff
Alpinist - June 23, 2021 14:44 - 39 minutes ★★★★★ - 162 ratingsAnna Pfaff grew up in rural Ohio, running through cornfields, playing softball and showing animals at the county fair, “but I always felt like there was something more out there,” she says of her decision to apply for a nursing job in Denver, Colorado, at age 20. “I had no idea what a climber wa...
Finding the Balance - Katherine Schirrmacher
Factor Two - March 23, 2021 12:19 - 41 minutes ★★★★★ - 5 ratingsWe all get enjoyment from climbing for different reasons. For many of us those reasons change over time, according to our geography, time, money and other pressures in our lives. I’ve read Katherine Schirrmacher’s blog for years, and she’s unusually good at expressing all of those little thing...
Alpinist Aloud: “To Look the Bear in the Eye”
Alpinist - December 21, 2020 18:50 - 56 minutes ★★★★★ - 162 ratingsIn this episode, Derek Franz narrates “To Look the Bear in the Eye: The Life of Yasushi Yamanoi,” a story by Sartaj Ghuman that was first published in Alpinist 62 (Summer 2018). Yamanoi is among the few who have established new climbs, alone and in alpine style, on 8000-meter peaks. His many sig...
El Capitan - a film by Fred Padula
Factor Two - December 10, 2020 12:00 - 54 minutes ★★★★★ - 5 ratingsIn the spring of 1968 San Francisco film maker, Fred Padula, drove into the Yosemite Valley and gazed up at El Capitan. He had been approached by one of his film students, Glen Denny, a talented climber and photographer, to advise on making a film about climbing The Nose. Denny had been part o...
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