Q&A with Conrad Anker

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Online magazine Wide World has a great Q&A with climber Conrad Anker in which he discusses a number of interesting topics, including finding George Mallory’s body on Everest, how technology is changing climbing, and what life is like along the vertical plane.

It’s a fairly short article, but covers a lot of ground, including what Anker’s been up to recently. He notes that he has just returned from Borneo, where he spent four or five days on a big wall, and he’s off next week to Yosemite, where he’ll spend four days on El Cap as well.

Anker also took the opportunity to plug a new television show he’s been working on that called On Thin Ice, which looks at the receding alpine glaciers, which is happening all over the world, and the effect that that is having on the atmosphere as a whole. He doesn’t mention when or where the show will be airing, but he does say that in his time in the Himalaya, which he has been visiting since 1986, he has seen ice routes move as much as 1000 meters higher on the mountain due to receding glaciers.

And speaking of the finding George Mallory, is anyone else surprised that it has been 10 years since that happened? Where did that decade go? It seems like it was just a short time ago that I was reading about the discovery of the body, and now it has been ten years. I’m starting to feel old here.

Kraig Becker

2 thoughts on “Q&A with Conrad Anker”

  1. Well the feeling is mutual. I am still a bit bitter about how the whole thing was handled though. DNA testing and messing with the remains was completely unnecessary. You have got to figure that the body in tweed had to have been Mallory. Simpson goes into a lot more detail about it in his book.

  2. i feel irvine died first when mallory and irvine were climbing up. mallory took his axe and proceeded further, reached summit and while climbing back died on his way. high altitude and loss of sandy must have played on his concentration levels.i feel mallory alone reached the summit but after sandy's death.

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