AAJ Newsletter December 2009

Two big items for you: First, we hope you climbed some new mountain or big-wall routes in 2009. If so, we look forward to hearing from you soon! Second, to mark the 80th anniversary of the American Alpine Journal, we’ve launched a website to deliver reports and articles on a much more timely basis.

Once your new-route reports from 2009 start rolling in, the AAJ Online should become the world’s site to discover what’s new in the mountains, with more depth and much more timeliness than the printed book. Don’t worry, you can still Search all the AAJ’s back to 1929, and AAC members and AAJ contributors will still receive their annual books in the summer. But now you’ll also get this information faster.

The essential ingredient to making this possible is you: please send us your new route reports now. Our submission guidelines are available here. Please forward this email to all your new-routing friends.

We’re calling the AAJ Online a beta site because we’ve only begun to upload content. What you’ll find now is the site’s structure, reflecting the AAJ’s standard table of contents, as well as the first reports from 2009. We’ve also uploaded some reports and articles from recent AAJs in order to put a little meat on our virtual bones while we’re waiting for your new reports.

Besides more timely reporting, the website also allows additional features, including maps, topos, occasional longer articles, and other Extras.

To keep track of what’s being uploaded, please subscribe to our RSS feed by clicking on the RSS button (the orange sound-wave symbol) on the right side of the website’s banner photo,check out New, or wait for our monthly AAJ Newsletters.

A sampling of what’s already uploaded includes new routes in Alaska (Denali National Park, Mendenhall Towers, Burkett area), Pakistan (Nanga Parbat, Charakusa Valley, Baltoro, Hindu Kush), Tamotsu Nakamura’s latest great exploration in Eastern Tibet, and new routes in the Sierra and the Wind River Range.

If you love reading about new routes in the world’s mountains, just click here. If not, there’s always this.

From the AAJ’s editors,

Kelly Cordes
Lindsay Griffin
John Harlin III
Dougald MacDonald