Sella also did the first traverse of the Matterhorn. The Duke of Abruzzi was quite wealthy and wanted expeditions in relative comfort, so had brass beds hauled on sleds across the glaciers to the foot of Mt St Elias, greatly multiplying the effort needed! Like you, I really appreciate the photographs of Bradford Washburn too. I personally grew up in the Sierra, so have been to a lot of the same high country as AA, plus probably quite a bit more, but have taken only a handful of shots in Yosemite Valley itself, even though I had property fairly near. I can appreciate his sensitivity to the natural light of the Sierra, and how he poetically rendered it. But I'm more impressed by the earlier work of Watkins and Muybridge there, for reasons I won't elaborate on at the moment. I also have Shirakawa's book on the Himalayas, where in instances he went to great lengths to find specific viewpoints of Sella and reinterpret them in his own style; likewise, Shirahata somewhat later in the Karakorum. Then my nephew had the opportunity go with with Kurt Diemburger - a living legend who is the only person in history to have two first ascents of 8,000 meter peaks (Dhauligiri and Broad Peak), and was the oldest person to ever climb K2 - to a totally unexplored section the Karakorum on the Chinese side of K2. At the same time, one of my nephew's regular climbing partners, John Climaco, was climbing Chogolisa on the Pakistan side, the peak Sella had lugged his big camera partially up; but coming back he got kidnapped and held for ransom, not by the Taliban, but by his own assigned government agent. He published a book about the harrowing episode, titled, Dangerous Liaisons. And thirty years ago another high altitude mountaineering legend, Martin Zabeleta, offered to give me the new high altitude LF camera record getting me as far up as Camp II on Dhauligiri; but if that had happened, someone would probably just have a sherpa lug something to the summit of Everest for a token shot, just like they've hauled a golf club and ball up there. Any such feat would be wimpy compared to what Sella did anyway. Sella and his party were being chased by Gurkha soldiers up the Baltoro Glacier while he took the time to make a quantity of famous shots in spite of the risk. Zabeleta himself, who is a comparatively little guy, became famous because his own sherpa passed out on the summit of Everest, and he hauled him all the way back the mtn on his back; he also did the first alpine-style ascent of Kanchenjunga, the world's third highest peak, and adjacent to two of Sella's very most famous mtn shots, of Jannu and of Siniolchun. Sella also photographed Kanchenjunga itself from the remote Nepalese side. Nobody can render the gleam of ice and glacier quite like Sella.
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