The Alpinist | Outside Online

Outside Magazine, March 2005

Page:

The Purists (cont.)


	BIG DREAMER: Alpinist editor Christian Beckwith at home in Jackson, Wyoming (Michael Lewis)

On a sunny morning in Jackson, Beckwith, Koch, and I pile into Beckwith's Subaru wagon and head 160 miles east for a day of sport climbing near Lander, Wyoming. (Sport climbing, which Alpinist has never featured, involves using ample, evenly spaced bolts from top to bottom on a route.) A few days ago, Beckwith shipped the final pages of Alpinist 9 to a printing plant in China. Now, from behind the wheel, he recaps the issue's highlights, including a story on what he calls one of the "climbs of the year": Kelly Cordes and Josh Wharton's first ascent, in July, of the southwest ridge of Pakistan's 20,623-foot Great Trango Tower.

Though Beckwith has never set foot in Pakistan, he deftly conjures the jagged, 7,400-vertical-foot route and the terrible choice it posed for the two Colorado climbers. "They ran out of water on day three, but there was no way they were going back," he says, glancing over, eyes shining. "The route was way too complicated—too many runouts and tension traverses and pendulums—to turn around. The only way off was to go up and over."

As we approach the limestone cliffs of Sinks Canyon, a few miles outside Lander, Beckwith's expansive mood gives way to seriousness. At five foot seven, with rimless glasses and a stern demeanor, he stands in marked contrast to his strapping, gregarious climbing partner—a brooding Jeff to Koch's Mutt. He climbs deliberately and with dark intensity, and when he falls he glowers. "It's frustrating," he says after peeling off a route rated 5.11a. "You just can't do 70 hours in the office and then come out here and expect to climb halfway decently."

Beckwith, who grew up on a farm in Warren, Maine, and went to college at the University of Vermont, got his first taste of rock climbing during a 1990 junior year abroad in Canterbury, England. There, classmates introduced him to the legendary crags of North Wales—as well as the area's lively pub scene. When Beckwith arrived in Jackson three years later, after stints at climber hangouts like Joshua Tree, California, and Hueco Tanks, Texas, he was struck by the lack of similar social opportunities for Teton climbers. So he helped create an outing club called the Wayward Mountaineers.

"Christian was always the instigator," says Angus Thuermer, co-editor of the Jackson Hole News & Guide. "He organized slide shows, speaker programs, avalanche-training sessions —stuff that went pretty deep. And it was always followed by a party."

Beckwith was a night owl who could quote poetry and argue climbing history into the wee hours—and still find time, as Koch jokes, "to kiss every woman in Jackson." Not everyone was charmed, however, especially once his moralizing editorials began appearing in the Yodel.

"I remember thinking, Man, this guy is fun and bright, but he's only been climbing a very short while," says Sam Lightner Jr., a former Jackson resident and accomplished sport climber. "Seems like a pretty short time in the sport to make all these beliefs the absolute gospel."

One summer, Lightner and some friends put up a difficult route in the Tetons' Garnet Canyon, placing a few bolts in the process. Lightner knew that the route, a tough 5.12, was too hard for Beckwith to climb, so as a rebuttal to his anti-bolting rants he named it Yodel This.

Another rebuff came from Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia and a part-time Jackson resident. When Beckwith approached him in 1994 asking for advice about the Yodel, Chouinard told him it would never succeed. Still, Beckwith clearly made an impression. A few months later, when the longtime editor of The American Alpine Journal, H. Adams Carter, suddenly died, Chouinard recommended Beckwith for the position.

Thus did Beckwith obtain what's undoubtedly the most influential post in mountain climbing: the editorship of the Journal, an annual 500-page compendium of "the world's most significant climbs" that is distributed to the club's roughly 7,000 members. By all accounts, he worked tirelessly, in particular reaching out to climbers in the former Soviet Union, whose many accomplishments had never been fully appreciated in the West.

"Christian really modernized the Journal and kept it relevant, and by going out and getting the stories of those guys, he made sure it stayed the journal of record, not just for America but the world," says Michael Kennedy, the former publisher and editor of Climbing and a seasoned Alpinist in his own right. "I thought he was pretty well psyched to settle in and run the thing for the next 25 or 30 years."

But six and a half years into the job, in February 2002, Beckwith's tenure came to an abrupt end. There was no single cause, and in part Beckwith simply got caught up in power struggles that were swirling around inside the club. But his high-handedness and brusque business manner were factors, too. He'd alienated a large portion of the club staff, and he sometimes leaped before he looked. In one 1998 e-mail, for instance, sent to a climber friend who had participated in an expedition on Baffin Island whose apparent first ascents Beckwith had questioned, Beckwith added a profane reference to one of the expedition's sponsors, National Geographic. This gratuitous slap got forwarded around, and it did considerable damage to Beckwith's standing in the climbing world.

"It burned me pretty hard," Beckwith says of the episode. "I never realized the power of e-mail before that."

Beckwith committed his final blunder on the eve of the club's 2002 annual meeting in Snowbird, Utah, when he threatened to resign in a phone conversation with the club's executive director, Charlie Shimanski. When club president Jim Frush heard about it, he convened a closed-door board meeting at Snowbird and informed the attendees that he had another editor, John Harlin III, ready to take over the Journal. Two hours later, Beckwith was out of a job.

"In the end, I think it was a 'doesn't play well with others' kind of thing," says Kelly Cordes, a Beckwith hire who is still an assistant editor at the Journal. "When you're part of a big organization, you have to be diplomatic and accountable. When the president of the club is calling you, you gotta call him back. You don't resign and then say you're just kidding."

The day after his dismissal, Beckwith went ice-climbing in Utah's Maple Canyon—one of his best ice-climbing days ever, he says. When he woke up the next morning, he says, he "felt like I'd been run over by a truck. Then, still processing what had happened, he made the six-hour drive back to Jackson.

Not long after he got back, the phone rang. It was a secretary from Chicago, asking if Beckwith had time to speak with her boss, some guy named Marc Ewing.

"I'm starting a climbing magazine," Ewing explained a few minutes later, "and I wanted to see if you were interested."

"Well," said Beckwith, "your timing is impeccable."

Page:

•	Subscribe to Outside and get a FREE Gift!

•	Give the gift of Outside Magazine!

•	Subscribe to Outside Online's free weekly e-mail newsletter featuring gear reviews, fitness advice, galleries, podcasts, and more.