Media

The Rachel Carson Society
PROFILES IN CONSERVATION: Ruth Anne Kocour
Ruth Anne Kocour is a world-class mountaineer and a charter member of the Rachel Carson Society. As an expression of her deep concern for wild places, she made Sierra Club a beneficiary of her will many years ago... More here.

Don't Sell Your Saddle
Special to the Reno Gazette-Journal
I’d never been on a cattle drive, so when I was invited to move 300 head of cattle from central Nevada to the mountains in May, I needed to outfit myself with the proper attire. More here.

Trekking Pakistan
SPECIAL TO THE RENO GAZETTE-JOURNAL
Why Pakistan? people ask. The question is probably a good one. Traveling in Pakistan is challenging both physically and culturally. It’s also relatively hazardous, especially in the context of the United States’ recent bombing of Pakistan’s neighbor, Afghanistan, of India and Pakistan’s recent nuclear tests and their on-going war over the disputed Kashmir region (Editor’s note: As this story was going to press on Friday, the U.S. Embassy, the U.N building and a U.S. cultural center in Islamabad, Pakistan, were fired upon with rockets, allegedly by supporters of Osama bin Laden). More here.

From the Reno Gazette Journal, April 5, 2003
From Reno to Bhutan
Reno writer and outdoor adventurer Ruth Anne Kocour chronicles a country’s struggle with modernization.

From the Toronto Sun, May 17, 1998
Graphic tribute to a deadly mountain
By YVONNE CRITTENDEN

Following the success of Jon Krakauer's book about his part in the disastrous recent climbing of Mt. Everest, and others in the genre, American Ruth Anne Kocour, with Michael Hodgson, has written a page-

turner about her own brush with death mountain-climbing.

Her goal was not Everest, but the highest peak in North America, Mt. McKinley in Alaska, or as the natives call it, Denali. Denali is just over 20,000 feet, but it is subject to some of the worst weather in the world, and Kocour's expedition in 1992, the only woman among eight amateur climbers and two professionals, was a nightmare.

The worst storm on record slammed into the mountain as they were camped two-thirds of the way up, pinning them on a precarious ice shelf at 14,000 feet for two terrible weeks during which 11 climbers -- American, European and Asian -- died.

Kocour and her companions were assaulted by 110 mph winds, -47F temperatures and -150F wind-chills. Trapped in their fragile tents, they suffered severe frostbite, hallucinations, near-starvation as their food ran out and growing terror that they would suffer the fates of other climbers on the mountain.

Kocour's story of their ordeal examines the reasons why climbers put themselves through these hells, her own motivations (an experienced climber, the trip was her 45th birthday present to herself) and the physical, emotional and spiritual aspects of this most gruelling of sports.

A good read and a graphic tribute to a deadly mountain which has claimed 87 lives since the National Park Service began keeping records in 1932. They died after being swept away by avalanches or by tumbling off rocky or icy walls. Some simply disappeared, swallowed by one of the many active glaciers. Thirty-four lie buried on the mountain.

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