A Climber We Lost: Allen Steck
Allen Steck, 96, February 23
You can read the full tribute to Climbers We Lost in 2023 here.
Adept on rock, snow, and ice, Allen Steck was a leading climber in the USA during the post-war years including the Golden Age of Climbing in Yosemite. Not surprisingly, he considered himself more of a mountaineer, and made significant ascents in Europe and participated in the first attempt on Makalu (8,481m) in 1954.
Born in Oakland, CA, in 1926, Steck served aboard a destroyer escort with the Navy in the South Pacific during WWII then graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Business Administration in 1948. But it was a climbing trip to Europe the following year which set the course for the rest of his life; he traveled by bicycle from Austria’s Kaisergebirge mountains to Italy’s Dolomites and then to the Mont Blanc region with a partner, making early repeats of many of Europe’s hardest climbs. He never looked back.
Back in Yosemite in 1950, he teamed up with John Salathé and over five extremely hot days made the first ascent of the 1,600-foot North Face of Sentinel Rock. More than 70 years later the Steck-Salathé is still a much revered and sought-after climb.
“I met Fox in the 1950s and soon we started climbing together frequently,” recalls Dick Long, a dear friend. “Al, the Fox, was realistic about climbing. We knew our objective. We concentrated on one pitch at a time. Both of us would bail if things went bad and dangerous!”
Al and Dick would team up to make several significant ascents, most notably the 1965 climb of the Hummingbird Ridge on Mount Logan. Their team of six took 35 days to climb the six-mile-long ridge and ascend 12,000 feet to the 19,850-foot summit. The climb remains unrepeated 58 years later.
Long and Steck, along with Yosemite guidebook author Steve Roper, made the third ascent of Yosemite’s Salathé Wall in 1966 purchasing a movie camera the day before and ultimately producing a documentary of their ascent in true cinéma vérité style.
“A.S. was basically a weekend climber, with of course many exceptions,” remembers Roper. “He did his thing quietly with no real attempt to influence the ongoing evolution of climbing.”
In 1964 the Sierra Club stopped publishing its “Sierra Club Bulletin” which was one of the primary conduits for chronicling climbers’ significant ascents. Steck and Roper decided to fill the void and the first issue of Ascent premiered in 1967. It was a groundbreaking publication which concentrated more on why we climb than what was climbed.
“Fox was a romantic,” explains Long. “His ability to incorporate that along with realism created beautiful prose.”
“Our proudest moment came when other mags hopped to and began to emulate us (Mountain mag comes to mind, as does the early Climbing mag),” adds Roper.
Other publications followed most notably the “50 Classic Climbs of North America” where Steck and Roper, often fueled by a bit of California grape, tried to determine not just the most difficult climbs, but also those with interesting history and good climbing.
In 1969 Steck leveraged his worldwide experiences to found Mountain Travel arguably the first adventure travel company in the USA with Leo Le Bon. Their first trip was to the base camp of Mount Everest which undoubtedly looked a little different than it does today. He led trips all over the globe and the company is still going strong 50-plus years later.
Steck’s lust for life and all it had to offer left a legacy in three worlds: climbing, publishing, and travel. He embraced each day with vim and vigor. “Often, in Camp 4 or on a dawn bivouac Allen would burst into lively yodels,” remembers Roper.
Allen Steck died on February 23, 2023. He was 96 years old.
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