Climbing’s Latest Losses: An Aborted Rescue, A Fatal Fall, and the Passing of a Legend
ByMary Anne Potts
August 17, 2009
2 min readIt was a somber weekend for climbers the world over.
First, the search for Oscar Perez on Latok II was called off due to the amount of time elapsed since last contact with the injured Spaniard. American and Spanish mountain climbers have been working in conjunction with the Pakistani air force for ten days, in an effort to locate Perez and evacuate him from where he was last seen at roughly 6,200 meters above sea level. However, the bad weather that has thwarted so many climbs in the Karakorum this season extinguished their chances of a successful rescue (read more from mounteverest.net).
Closer to home, climbing writer and respected Colorado all-around mountaineer Craig Luebben was killed in an ice fall on Mt. Torment, in Washington's Cascade range. Luebben is credited with establishing hundreds of new routes in the United States and writing important product reports that still influence the way that people ice climb (read more from climbing.com).
Finally, Last week saw the passing of one of the greatest climbers of the 20th century, Italian Robberto Cassin. In his one hundred years of life, Cassin established over one hundred first ascents including the highly technical Cassin Ridge route on Mt. McKinley, the highest mountain in North America. Cassin also fought with Italian insurgents against the armies of both Mussolini and Hitler in World War II. Never one to slow down, he climbed until he was in his mid-80s (read his obituary). Text by Tesuhiko Endo
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