Book Review — Tap Dancing on Mt. Everest: A Young Doctor’s Unlikely Adventure

By: Katie Ives | Originally published in Alpinist 89. May 1988: For days, Mimi Zieman stared into a void of whirling snow. Somewhere behind the mists, her teammates Robert Anderson, Stephen Venables, and Ed Webster were staggering down Chomolungma (Everest), after the first ascent of the remote Neverest Buttress, far from

Strange Places: Finding a Voice through Climbing and Writing

By: Katie Ives | This essay previously appeared in the February/March 2025 edition of Gripped. It feels strange to defend the human art of writing, yet with the rise of generative AI, I find myself having to do so — even at times among fellow climbers, though by nature, we love

2026 Recommended Readings

Book Review — Mountains Before Mountaineering and Other Everests

By: Katie Ives | A version of this review previously appeared in the 2025 American Alpine Journal. Ghosts haunt the pages of mountaineering history: names of the innumerable dead recounted in litanies of loss; blank spaces between the lines, recalling those forgotten, silenced, or erased. And there are also what historian

Book Review — A Line Above the Sky

By: Katie Ives | Originally published in the 2023 American Alpine Journal. Beyond the crisp lines of streets and rivers, beyond the typed names and elevation points of cities and mountains, beyond the ripples of hillside contours and the dots of marked trails, there are other tracks of passage, invisible on