At 85, More Peaks to Conquer and Adventures to Seek

By MICHAEL BRICK
NYT

SEATTLE — He had been called a vagabond, a recluse and a schemer, a cantankerous mountain man hiding his little black book of secret climbing techniques from the world. In seven decades, he had claimed more virgin ascents than any mountaineer alive. Some ascribed his feats to vengeance of a long-ago slight, others to the murder of his own fears. He was said to howl at tourists. His past was the stuff of lore, his plans the stuff of mystery.

Then, this fall, word of his next expedition spread among the worldwide network of contacts whose telephone numbers he kept scribbled on notecards wrapped with rubber bands in the gearbox pocket of his station wagon. The plan was announced in disarmingly casual fashion.

“Hi everyone, Fred Beckey called yesterday and he is going to northern Spain in early to mid-December,” began one posting this autumn at an online rock climbing forum. “Might be a long shot, but he’s looking for a partner to hook up with in Barcelona.”

Wolfgang Paul Heinrich Beckey: The name, shortened and altered when his family had emigrated from pre-war Düsseldorf to the Pacific Northwest, resounded across the archives of mountaineering journals, the pages of literary guidebooks and the maps of newly discovered peaks. His own reluctant namesake, Mount Beckey, rises some 8,500 feet in a largely uncharted subrange near the Cathedral Spires of southeastern Alaska.

(More here, plus video.)