Three women - Luisa Giles, Sarah Hart and Jacqueline Hudson - attempted a new 900m rock climbing route on an unclimbed 5200m peak in the Karakorum mountains of Pakistan over the course of three attempts. They climbed 19 rope lengths reaching 5150m before stopping due to time constraints. Despite challenges including stuck ropes and poor weather, the team communicated well and strengthened their friendship through their alpine climbing experience together. The author reflects on the experience and wonders if aspects of being female facilitated their ability to work as a team, though acknowledges their accomplishments are modest in the wider world of alpine climbing.
Presentation on March 25, 2014 to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Women's Mentor Program on how to leverage social media for personal branding and job placement.
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Official session description:
Your boss or client may think top rankings are gold, but veteran SEOs know those stats are so 20th-century they’re virtually irrelevant. So how do you measure – and more importantly, prove – the value of your SEO activities, especially in the age of personalized, unique search results? Speakers in this session have promised to "open up their kimonos" and reveal the really useful, measurable techniques they use to demonstrate the value of their work.
Presented with: Rob Bucci, Owner of STAT Search Analytics, Jon Henshaw, Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer of Raven Internet Marketing Tools, and Will Scott, President of Search Influence
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Why is ORM growing in popularity for search marketers? This keynote will look at how technical changes from the search engines and the proliferation of social media have led to a booming ORM industry. We’ll also review the tools and services available to both agencies and in-house professionals that can help combat threats to a brand’s most valuable asset.
Surviving Personalization with Bing and Google - SMX Advanced 2012Rhea Drysdale
My presentation from SMX Advanced 2012 on personalized search with Bing and Google. Get all of the session coverage at Outspoken Media: http://outspokenmedia.com/internet-marketing-conferences/smx-advanced-2012-liveblogging-schedule/
Presentation on March 25, 2014 to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Women's Mentor Program on how to leverage social media for personal branding and job placement.
How To Groove To The Google Dance (Yes, It’s Back)Rhea Drysdale
Official session description:
Your boss or client may think top rankings are gold, but veteran SEOs know those stats are so 20th-century they’re virtually irrelevant. So how do you measure – and more importantly, prove – the value of your SEO activities, especially in the age of personalized, unique search results? Speakers in this session have promised to "open up their kimonos" and reveal the really useful, measurable techniques they use to demonstrate the value of their work.
Presented with: Rob Bucci, Owner of STAT Search Analytics, Jon Henshaw, Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer of Raven Internet Marketing Tools, and Will Scott, President of Search Influence
The Online Reputation Management LandscapeRhea Drysdale
Why is ORM growing in popularity for search marketers? This keynote will look at how technical changes from the search engines and the proliferation of social media have led to a booming ORM industry. We’ll also review the tools and services available to both agencies and in-house professionals that can help combat threats to a brand’s most valuable asset.
Surviving Personalization with Bing and Google - SMX Advanced 2012Rhea Drysdale
My presentation from SMX Advanced 2012 on personalized search with Bing and Google. Get all of the session coverage at Outspoken Media: http://outspokenmedia.com/internet-marketing-conferences/smx-advanced-2012-liveblogging-schedule/
A trip report of our Kilimanjaro expedition in February 2010 by Marangu Route. We want to thank everyone who sponsored our fundraiser and helped us raise money for he Ovarian Cancer Research Foundation.
A trip report of our Kilimanjaro expedition in February 2010 by Marangu Route. We want to thank everyone who sponsored our fundraiser and helped us raise money for he Ovarian Cancer Research Foundation.
1. --
Three Women, a Mountain and a Mosque
Posted on: October 31, 2007
Jacqui Hudson
Looking south towards the entire Latok Group from the team�s basecamp on the north side of
the Choktoi Glacier, with Luisa Giles (right) and the assistant cook, Furman (left), on the
moraine above basecamp. [Photo] Jacqui Hudson
During the summer of 2007, three women--Luisa Giles (British, 25), Sarah Hart (Canadian, 27)
and Jacqueline Hudson (Canadian, 28)--attempted a new ca. 950-meter free rock line in the
Karakorum Range of Pakistan. The route is on a possibly unclimbed 5200-meter rock peak, on
the Choktoi Glacier, in the Latok group. The peak, on the south side of the Choktoi glacier, is
situated east (down valley) of Latok I's famous North Ridge.
2. Luisa Giles leaving the belay on Pitch 13, during the team�s second attempt on the peak.
Shortly after it started to snow, and they turned around. The Choktoi Glacier is visible below.
[Photo] Jacqui Hudson
Seizing one of the few weather windows that summer, Giles, Hart and Hudson attempted the
peak three times, the third over the course of three days. They climbed 900 meters up a series of
granite corner and ledge systems on the peak's east face. Fifty meters short and a couple
hundred meters lateral of the true summit, they turned around, having free climbed nineteen full
60-meter rope lengths. The route offered many fantastic pitches of 5.9 and 5.10 climbing, and
roughly 300 meters of simul-climbing over moderate terrain to reach a northern sub-summit at
ca. 5150m. They called their progress The Partition (TD 5.10b). Due to time constraints and an
estimated absence of quality climbing remaining, the team stopped at this high point and
descended.
3. The new climb ascends the sunlit face on the right hand buttress to a point just short of the true
summit. [Photo] Luisa Giles
The unnamed peak is the second (westernmost) of two similar north-facing rock buttresses joined
by a high col and an ice couloir. The other buttress holds the Indian Face Arete (5.10 A3), which
Doug Scot and Sandy Allen established in 1990.
Jacqueline Hudson is currently on the scenic route though a five-year residency in
Anesthesiology with the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada. In the past she
also managed to convince the same school to grant her a BSc in Immunology and a Medical
Degree, despite principally spending her time on rock and snow. Jacqueline enjoys free, aid, ice
and alpine climbing, and escapes Canada when possible to broaden her practice of medicine
overseas. She tells the story.
PART I
quot;I need your knife.quot;
quot;What?quot;
I dusk-dream, clipped in at the belay, while Luisa fights with our stuck rope 20 meters above.
Sarah belays her out on our other line. I stare down, across the Choktoi Glacier almost a
kilometer below us, and watch the slow-moving clouds swirl north over 8000-meter peaks to the
east, where they are swallowed by the dry air of Western China.
4. After so many days of snow and rain during our early time in basecamp, the weather finally has
stabilized. When we first arrived on the Choktoi we had three days of fantastic weather. We
made our first attempt then, but we were anything but acclimatized, so when the weather turned
foul, we retreated. After more than a week of rain and snow (and a second attempt on the route,
denied again by poor weather), blue skies finally split the clouds. Our cook, Abbas, a man who
has lived his entire life in the Karakorum, told us that we now had four days of good weather
before the next storm. We did not have a working satellite phone or a reliable altimeter--
something we discovered only after arriving in basecamp. Abbas was the best weather report we
had, and his prediction would be right.
quot;I need your knife!quot;
Sarah Hart (left) setting up for the next rappel while Luisa Giles (right) finishes off the seventh
rappel long after dark. [Photo] Jacqui Hudson
quot;Ok, ok, lower me your free end of rope.quot;
It is the end of our third day of stable weather, and we're making our first rappel. I feel like I
watch it all happen, just an observer. I force this sensation of detachment because my stomach is
cramping and my body is shivering. Yet I am neither hungry nor cold. Perhaps I am both. We
have been trying to free our rope for the past ninety minutes, and the sun has nearly disappeared.
Our bivy gear is low on the wall. We left it there after spending our first night on a series of
ledges. We went lightweight even to the bivy: no stove, minimal water, and only a small amount
5. of extra clothing. With our only real warmth for the night still far below us, we're feeling more
than a little vulnerable.
PART II
The air is heavy with the heat of Islamabad. The night smells of cardamom, two stroke engines,
and cotton soaked with human sweat. We feel the artillery (there is no sound yet) shake the
windows of our hotel room.
After a month in the mountains and a seven-hour drive from the road-head at Askoli (access to
the Baltoro Glacier) to Skardu, we are greeted by the start of the pavement, and rainbows.
[Photo] Luisa Giles
We've been traveling for days, around half the world, away from cool, temperate, sedate
Vancouver (where, back in December, my program director reluctantly granted me two months
to climb here).
6. Luisa Giles heading up Pitch 16, one of the final headwall pitches before reaching the upper
ridge crest. The true summit is far beyond the sub-summit seen here. [Photo] Jacqui Hudson
With me now are my two partners--finally sleeping quietly, after so long in airports, airplanes,
and buses. Luisa is an energetic British ex-pat who now makes her home in Vancouver and
cycles over 200 kilometers every week to work and back. Sarah is quieter, more introspective, a
recent and already very competent convert to alpine climbing from a path previously focused on
bouldering and competition sport climbing. I asked them to join me on this trip to Pakistan
because they are wonderful women, and happen to be pretty damn good at quot;getting the rope up
there.quot; They also could drop everything to fly into the unknown for two consecutive months.
We couldn't be farther from Vancouver. It is 4 a.m. on July 11th, and the stand off at the Lal
Masjid Red Mosque in Islamabad has come to a peak. The government has decided it has had
enough and is leveling the place. My half-asleep brain tells me there is little I can do except
believe what the hotel staff told us the previous evening: quot;Red Mosque is far away from the
Hotel.quot; This claim was clearly a lie, or at least a loose interpretation of the term quot;farquot; with
respect to artillery.
We survive. More than 100 people inside Red Mosque do not.
We also survive the Islamabad-Skardu flight on quot;Perhaps It Arrivesquot; Airlines, better known to
air traffic controllers as Pakistan International Airlines, escaping the very real possibility of
crashing into Nanga Parbat. And out of some western, idealized madness, we have left our nice
stable jobs, our comfortable existence with espresso coffee, socialized accessible medicine,
working traffic lights and people who obey them, to come climbing here. Why? Good question.
7. PART III
quot;The knife!quot;
Breaking out of my forced dreaming, I tie the knife I keep around my neck to the rope's end for
Luisa. We've tried coaxing, flicking, pulling (so hard we burned our hands), levering and
hammering to free our rope, to no avail. In the end, we lose only five centimeters of rope--but
also two hours of daylight. We tie the tattered ends together and finally continue moving down.
The sun sinks behind the 7000-meter frame of the Ogre to the west, and its long shadow
overtakes the Choktoi Valley.
Sarah Hart managing the rope on another after-dark rappel. The brown rope shows scars of its
courtship with the flake on the first rappel of the descent. [Photo] Jacqui Hudson
A full moon rises and walls of granite glow in the nighttime light. Although cold, we're steadily
moving down the wall, and my earlier feelings of apprehension wane as we progress back to our
bivy. By 11 p.m. we are at our ledge again.
PART IV
After two months of spending every minute with each other, night after night, close enough that
we could hear each other Cheyne Stoke breathe through endless hours of poor sleep at altitude,
we returned to Vancouver and our separate lives. Instantly we felt the separation, and missed
each other terribly.
There were many instances during our time in Pakistan where we felt particularly exposed: our
first morning in Islamabad; the reality of being without any reasonable method of contacting the
outside world from the Choktoi; our rope stuck at the top of a 5200-meter peak. But we
communicated well without egos, and we openly expressed our fears. I wonder if our approach
to troubleshooting through our more challenging times, and the subsequent strengthening of our
friendship, was facilitated by the camaraderie of women. Our challenges were not, of course,
unique to us being female, but were the methods we invoked to deal with them?
8. Sarah Hart facing up to the start of the upper headwall, during the team�s third and final
attempt on the peak. This was the start of Pitch 14, the crux pitch: 60 meters of sustained 5.10
climbing up thin corners on superb granite. Basecamp is tucked under the peaks visible on the far
side of the glacier. [Photo] Jacqui Hudson
After returning to work, I was discussing the topic of gender roles--specifically women entering
into traditionally male dominated arenas such as alpine climbing and medicine--with a female
anesthesiologist mentor. As she set about taking control of all the physiologic functions of the
anaesthetized patient on the table in front of her, she simply said, quot;Not until men can carry a
pregnancy to term will we ever really be equal.quot;
She has a point; there are some fundamental differences. How far these differences affect our
abilities and persuade our judgments is difficult, maybe impossible to say.
PART V
On the bigger screen of alpine climbing, our little route on our no-name peak might be a rest-day
outing for household-name alpinists, male or female. But to us it felt challenging, real. Before we
left for Pakistan the prospect of putting up a new rock route longer than a single pitch was a far-
fetched ideal. We are, by all accounts, quot;small friesquot; who keep too many quot;paid rest daysquot; per year
to ever register on the climbing radar.
But our ability to work as a team, listen to one another and communicate our differing
perspectives allowed us to surpass our own expectations of what we thought capable. Perhaps
our commonality as women allowed us to form a firm, solid, trusting relationship that gave us a
wild ride and a safe descent.