For 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 to the friends and mentors he’s lost to the mountains. Zimmerman became a professional climber at 24 years old. Now 37, Zimmerman is accomplished well beyond his years. He has made first ascents from Alaska to Pakistan, and in 2020 he received a Piolet d’Or for his climb on Pakistan’s Link Sar with Steve ..read more

Dr. 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 realized how water-intensive that sport is.  Necefer is a member of the Navajo Nation, and is working to bring more Native voices and talents into the outdoor industry through his organization Natives Outdoors.  He believes in the importance of engaging with the environment in a thoughtful, mea ..read more

Lauren 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 Competition for Climbing Literature.  Growing up on the East Coast, Miller says she wasn’t initially an outdoorsy person. But she was inspired to start climbing while at college in North Carolina—after seeing a photo of Alex Honnold climbing Yosemite’s Half Dome on the cover of National Geographic. She re ..read more

Steve 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 him all over the world. His most famous ascent may be the Central Pillar of Nanga Parbat’s Rupal Face, a climb he completed with Vince Anderson. But he has compiled an impressive list of first ascents and new routes in Alaska, the Canadian Rockies, the Alps and the Karakoram. Steve has been a profess ..read more

Sarah Pickman is an encyclopedia of expedition history, in particular the gear early explorers relied on. She recently earned a Ph.D. 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 to Alpinist. She’s written articles on expedition first aid kits and sun protection for the Tool Users section of the magazine. As it turns out, burnt cork is no substitute for sunscreen.   Through her research and writing, Sarah looks at the gear explorers carried with them on their trav ..read more

Justin 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, Bowen planned his first trip to Yosemite, where he jumped right onto the East Buttress of Middle Cathedral. He quickly realized just how much he still had to learn about building anchors and placing gear. A few years ago, Bowen met friend and mentor Mark Jenkins, who he says shared a wealth of knowledge b ..read more

For 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 the same. His achievements in the Alaska Range, to which he has ventured more than twenty times, include first ascents of Ruth Gorge Grinder and Aim for the Bushes. In 2020, his first ascent of the west face of Tengi Ragi Tau with Tino Villanueva was recognized as one of the year’s greatest climbing ..read more

Caroline 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 mountain in the world—with a fully torn ACL in her knee. Two years earlier, she was the first woman to ski the entirety of Utah’s Chuting Gallery. But before she became a professional skier, Gleich thought she wanted to be a pro climber, after getting her start on old school sandbagged trad routes. While she ..read more

For 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 dedicated to conserving, protecting and advocating for climbing access in the Green Mountain State (her’s is the first face you see on the organization’s website–a face that is surprisingly calm as as she reaches for a sloper high overhead). She empowers her fellow climbers to take the lead, and has a knack fo ..read more

Poet 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. Kilimanjaro to Turkey’s Mt. Ararat to the White Mountains of New Hampshire, before making her way back to Vermont, the state where she grew up. Audsley’s work has been widely published, including her debut collection titled Landlock X. Her poetry and writing has also graced the pages of Alpinist, with p ..read more