Cartography
The IFMGA Guide as Cartographer: A Bench at Chamonix
Many alpine guides keep their own private maps. A morning with one of them, in a small flat above the Rue Whymper.
Editor in chief
Anders Hoffmann
Anders Hoffmann is an IFMGA-certified mountain guide who left the trade in 2022 to edit a magazine about it. He still works summer routes in the Stubai.
Beats
Published in Mountain Ledger
Routes
The North Ridge of the Piz Badile: A Granite Classic in Late Spring
An account of the north ridge of the Piz Badile in the Bregaglia, climbed over twelve hours in early June, with notes on the line's hundred-year history.
Guides
What Guides Are Paid: A Survey of Six Mountain Ranges
The day rate of an alpine guide in 2026, compared across six ranges and four certification systems.
Routes
The South Ridge of the Aiguille du Tour: A First Alpine Climb
A patient account of the south ridge of the Aiguille du Tour, the route most often chosen as a first alpine summit in the Mont Blanc range.
Rescues
An Overdue Hunter in the High Uintas
Summit County Search and Rescue spent nine days in May looking for a sixty-six-year-old elk hunter who had not come home from a four-day solo trip into the Bald Mountain drainage. He was found three miles from his truck.
Snow
The Snow Ranger of Tuckerman Ravine
For thirty-one springs, a US Forest Service snow ranger named Doreen Aikins has stood at the lip of the Headwall and decided who should ski and who should turn back.
History
The Eigerwand Recoveries of 1936 and 1957
Two failed attempts on the north face of the Eiger left bodies on the wall. The recoveries — twenty-one years apart — became part of what the route now means.
Guides
Two Generations of Davenports in the Tetons
A father and a daughter, forty years apart, working the same routes out of Jenny Lake.
Snow
One Season at the Wendelstein Weather Station
At 1,838 metres above the Bavarian foothills, a two-person crew kept the longest continuously operated alpine weather station in Germany running through a difficult winter.
Cartography
Leigh Ortenburger and the First Guidebook to the Tetons
How a Stanford mathematician compiled the route descriptions that have shaped six decades of climbing in Grand Teton National Park.
Huts & Refuges
The Highest Hut in the Eastern Alps
The Schiestlhaus sits at 2,156 metres on the Hochschwab plateau in Styria. Its solar passive design, completed in 2005, has quietly become a model.
Mountain Towns
Ouray, Colorado, in Mud Season
Between the last ice climbs of March and the first dry rock of June, the small box-canyon town of 980 people empties out. A report from the Ouray Brewery and the canyon above it.
Snow
Spring Corn Snow as a Touring Objective
In the Bridger Range above Bozeman, a small group of skiers waits each April for the brief window when the snow becomes something you can carve.
History
The 1953 British Everest Expedition, Revisited from Base Camp
Seventy-three years after Hillary and Tenzing stepped onto the summit, a quiet reading of the expedition's logistics, oxygen sets, and the men whose names sit on the second page.
Huts & Refuges
A Season Warden at Bondhusbu
Ingrid Vestre kept the hut above the Folgefonna glacier from June to September. A field record of one summer at 1,040 metres.
Routes
The Walker Spur in Summer: A Line Read Pitch by Pitch
A patient account of the Walker Spur on the Grandes Jorasses in late July, written for climbers who have studied the topo and never put hands on the rock.
Rescues
A Sierra Rescue from a Couloir on Mount Whitney
Inyo County Search and Rescue spent thirty-one hours bringing a fallen climber out of the East Face of Mount Whitney in April. The route in was a corniced ridge at 13,800 feet and the route out was the same ridge, in worse light.
Guides
The IFMGA Aspirant Examination, Observed
Three days at the Aiguille du Midi with a cohort of aspirants and the examiners who will pass or fail them.