Katie Ives, Editor in Chief at Alpinist, has just released her first book, Imaginary Peaks: The Riesenstein Hoax and Other Mountain Dreams. On December 9th, the AAC is hosting a conversation about this new book, and the imaginary alpine worlds that have haunted climbing history, between author Katie Ives and the new editor of Accidents in North American Climbing, Pete Takeda. Author Katie Ives will be exploring some of the richly varied tales behind the Riesenstein, from the long history of climbers’ obsessions with supposed blanks on maps to the complex motivations of the pranksters who plotted the hoax—and the collective fascination with wild places and mythic mountains that the Riesenstein reveals.
To get a taste of this upcoming book talk, the AAC sat down with Ives to learn a little more about her and her writing process. Alongside our interview, we have included holdings from the AAC Library, which are referenced in Ives' book.
AAC: You’re well known for your role as Editor in Chief at Alpinist. You’ve been doing work for the magazine since the autumn of 2004 and you’ve been Editor in Chief since 2012. How would you describe the more intangible aspects of your ties to the climbing community?
Ives: I live in a small town in Northern Vermont, and partially because of my extensive work schedule, I’m something of a hermit. So, apart from climbing with a few local climbing partners, I spent a lot of time in the winter scrambling up ice routes by myself and scrawling down poems about those excursions. That’s not a community experience in a literal sense but a metaphorical sense. Anytime you go climbing you’re tied into this much larger expanse of the history—and of the present day—of human experience with mountains and cliffs and ice and snow and rock. I always get a strong feeling of everyone who has been there before me—that for me is a sense of community.
Much of my direct interaction with the climbing community is through editing Alpinist. I really like that way of getting to know someone through working on an article or a story with them—in the sense that I get to watch their creative process as it unfolds, to see the world through their memories and imaginations. I get to watch a person try to distill sometimes seemingly random or chaotic events into a coherent narrative, and to try to find the underlying structure and meaning from a journey—that's really magical.
I feel very lucky because as an editor I've had that experience with so many climbing writers. And thus I’ve been able to glimpse something of the unconscious minds of all of these people and learn something about what they think about climbing mountains, but also about life in general.
AAC: Plenty of writers are also outdoor enthusiasts. Why are you specifically called to write about mountains and climbing?
Ives: I always knew I wanted to be a writer, and as a child I was obsessed with J.R.R. Tolkien. I wanted to write fantasy. I would read the Lord of the Rings series once a year from the time I was seven or eight.
In my 20s I went to the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and at that point I had a sense of my own writing style, but not my subject matter. I had always loved nature, and I had done a lot of hiking and backpacking, and around this time I got more into technical climbing. I started realizing that there was a connection between climbing and my ability to write. I think there are a few factors about climbing that lend themselves to creativity in this way, that attract writers or that help turn people into writers. First of all, the shape of a climb naturally matches a narrative arc…. Often, when you go on a climb you’re creating a story, with a beginning, an apex, and a resolution. You also become attuned to so much rich sensory detail on a cliff or a mountain, as the author Nan Shepherd describes. And then there is the “visionary” experience of climbing that Doug Robinson, David Craig and other writers have depicted—the intense focus in the moment. Climbing is a natural form of meditation in that sense. Maybe the element of risk plays a role as well, but this meditative element makes it much easier to get into a “flow state,” which is perfect for being creative. Ultimately, climbing was the only thing I wanted to write about. I really haven’t written about much else. It’s been the focus for the last 17 years of my career.
AAC: What was the process of writing this book like?
Ives: I first wrote a short article about the Riesenstein Hoax in 2011. Basically, in 1962 readers opened the pages of Summit magazine to see a photo and an article about an allegedly unknown range: the “Riesenstein” peaks of British Columbia. The main summit, the mysterious author claimed, remained tantalizingly unclimbed. When those readers eagerly tried to find the mountains on actual maps of Canada, they realized the account was a hoax—no such peaks existed there. But some readers kept searching for the real location of the peaks in the photo. And this story and the motivations behind it, the question of why it would dupe and entice people so much, got stuck in my head. In 2014, Mountaineers Books asked me for book ideas, and I mentioned this hoax and they found it really interesting.
Balancing my usually very intense work week at Alpinist with completing this book was extremely hard. I needed immersive time to delve into the research and writing, and my boss was generous enough to give me 3 months off in 2019 and then 6 months off in 2020. I stayed at a family friend’s house in Montana—near the top of a hill. And I just wrote and wandered around. It was a wonderfully creative experience. I was surrounded by mountains and by stacks of books about mountains, while writing my own book about mountains.
But I’m also keenly aware that the book would never have happened without the hard work of my coworkers who filled in for me at Alpinist during my absence, and I will never be able to make it up to them entirely. And during the final stages—when I was working long hours at the magazine and on the book simultaneously—I had little time to sleep, and there was a fair amount of chaos. So, before I start another book, I definitely need to figure out a better workflow.
I want to write more books: I loved being able to inhabit this world of history and imagination so deeply for so long, and the writing felt like a real adventure—going deeper and deeper with each sentence into interior ranges. But I wrote most of this book during the pandemic, while sheltering in place, and for the next book, I want to be able to climb more of the real peaks in my story, whatever that will be.
In Conclusion:
At the end of our conversation, Katie told an anecdote about her new obsession: watching sunsets from the top of mountains. This pastime of hers seems a perfect metaphor for both who Katie is, her work at Alpinist, and an insight into why the subject of her book is so compelling to her fellow climbers. Katie started timing her mountain excursions to catch the sunset at the top during the early parts of the pandemic, when health recommendations warned against visiting trailheads at busy times of day. Katie caught the bug for the breathtaking multiplicity of every sunset. In sunsets, Katie seems to be seeking the heart of the climbing life, the intangible art and beauty that comes alongside our endeavors in the mountains. This is one of Alpinist’s goals, and certainly Katie embodies that same drive in her own life. Her new book Imaginary Peaks: The Riesenstein Hoax and Other Mountain Dreams, in turn, uncovers the beauty and multiplicity of the climbing world’s collective fascination with wild places and mythic mountains.
Check out Katie’s book here, (and here if you live in Canada), and you can listen in to her conversation with Pete Takeda on December 9th, at 6 pm MST. Register for the virtual book talk here.
Check out the AAC Library Collection and Archives for more original artifacts and relics of mountaineering and climbing history. You can even read the original Resenstein Hoax article in full!