Steven Threndyle

In January 2021, ten Nepali climbers solved what mountaineers liked to call “the last great problem”: a winter ascent of the notorious K2. On this expedition, in contrast to many others, no Western “clients” accompanied the Sherpas, some of whom celebrated by dropping their oxygen masks and singing their national anthem on the summit, the world’s second…

Not far from our North Vancouver home there’s a stand of old-growth Douglas firs that I first read about in Randy Stoltmann’s Hiking Guide to the Big Trees of Southwestern British Columbia, from 1987. Stoltmann, whom I met on a few occasions before he died in a backcountry skiing accident in 1994, tracked down and measured humongous coastal…