The following pages recount my personal impressions on mountaineering expedition in which I played a part in the period 1965-1981. On each of these expeditions I made a concerted effort to describe the activities on a daily basis. And although there are occasional gaps in my daily records, for the most part I managed to do this with remarkable consistency—remarkable in that I often was doing this with a ball-point pen in a 5”x8” lined record book, while sitting up in a tent at the end of a very demanding day. I generally wrote on the right-hand page until the book was full near the end of the trip, at which time I turned it upside down to start back on the facing page. After the fact I often scotch-taped a number of small photos where they matched the diary entry du jour.
And despite circumstances that often were stressful, these journals generally were written fairly legibly and even with attention to the niceties of grammar and punctuation. Therefore, the pages that follow were –at least for the most part– transcribed essentially verbatim from what I wrote in pen, with the only editing necessary being some spell-checking and the insertion of explanatory notes and addition of photos.
Each journal includes a preface to put it into context; for a few I also felt an afterward to be appropriate.
At this point the collection includes my journals from the following expeditions:
- The Hummingbird Ridge (South Ridge) of Mt. Logan, 1965
- The American Antarctic Mountaineering Expedition (AAME), 1966-67
- The International Himalayan Expedition (IHE) to Everest, 1971
- The USA-USSR Pamirs Expedition, 1974
- The Indian-American Nanda Devi Expedition, 1976
- The American Medical Research Expedition to Everest (AMREE), 1981
Needless to say, these journals are nothing more than my own impressions and by no means should be viewed as the whole story or even a balanced story of particular expedition.
