Times piece on Peter Potterfield paints pleasing portrait of popular prosaicist:
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Books
Seattle author, outdoorsman takes readers on his favorite hikes
By Craig Welch
Seattle Times staff reporter
KEN LAMBERT / THE SEATTLE TIMES
Peter Potterfield, hiker/climber and author of "In the Zone" and "Classic Hikes of the World," is seen here at Discovery Park.
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Beginning in the 1990s, the era of the Mountaineer as Pop Star, it seemed that every great climber was shadowed by a writer. Or four.
The toothy, raccoon-eyed faces of high-altitude alpinists graced mainstream men's magazines. Big-wall climbers like Lynn Hill — who once fed herself by sneaking food from tourists' plates in Yosemite — were featured in fashionable, picture-of-grace coffee-table tomes.
Behind the scenes, Seattle journalist and author Peter Potterfield took turns riding — and steering — that wave of celebrity.
He's been an author of guide books, an editor of mountaineering anthologies, a biographer of American climbing's reigning high priest and the co-founder of a Web site that made instant icons of alpinists who found an icy corpse.
Today, by some measures, climbing has backed down from the pinnacle of outdoor pop-culture hipness. Athletic cult heroes now include aerobic machines firmly rooted at or near sea level — cyclist Lance Armstrong or triathlete Lokelani McMichael. Mountaineering's top celebrity, Seattle's own Ed Viesturs, is famous for his caution.
Potterfield, whose athletic pursuits often mirrored those of his generation, is counting on this nuance in the outdoor world's Zeitgeist. At 55, he's going back to his baby-boomer roots, trading tales of the Death Zone for the wilds of New Zealand and Patagonia and even Washington state.
Author appearance
Peter Potterfield will present a slide show and talk on his book, "Classic Hikes of the World," at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the main REI store: 222 Yale Ave. N., Seattle.
He's hoping his new book "Classic Hikes of the World," a coffee-table-style guide to 23 of what he considers the greatest backpacking trips on the planet, proves to be an antidote for readers suffering an extreme-sports hangover — those wanting to blend wanderlust with simpler activities.
"There no longer seems to be the same focus on the super extreme things," Potterfield said recently over coffee as he favored a knee banged up while climbing. "It's not the same phenomenon it once was. People want to read about things they can get out and do."
A defining moment
It's not at all striking, really, that an athlete's ambition can crest in a moment — a moment after which all goals are recalibrated. What's striking is that in Potterfield's case that moment can be pinpointed: July 26, 1988.
Cooking instant oatmeal at 5,000 feet at 5 that morning, he was a half-day's journey to the 7,680-foot summit of Chimney Rock in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area. By midday he was stranded on a ledge surrounded by too much blood. Shards of bone protruded from his elbow. His left leg curled at an incomprehensible angle.
The story of Potterfield's fall off Chimney, and his now-legendary helicopter rescue, anchored 1996's "In the Zone," his collection of horrendous climbing-accident stories, and highlights the everyman persona that makes Potterfield's writing so accessible.
"I can report that it [his nearly 150-foot fall] happened with lucidity," he wrote. "Nothing blurred or was lost to velocity. I registered the impacts, felt my bones break, remained aware the whole way down."
Potterfield had been climbing and hiking since the mid-1970s, while he worked as a reporter for newspapers from Atlanta to Santa Fe. He'd found his way to Seattle in the late 1970s while feeding an obsession with Mount Rainier, and spent the 1980s as a writer and editor with (now-defunct) Pacific Northwest, the glossy regional magazine founded by Harriet Bullitt.
There, Potterfield intuitively grasped the pull of mountains to the culture, once telling friend Jim Nelson, the owner of the University District's Pro Mountain Sports, that he made a point to put Rainier on the magazine's cover twice a year. "When we have Rainier on the cover, we sell more magazines," Nelson recalled Potterfield saying.
There was no better time to be a journalist with a passion for mountains.
Things had changed
Potterfield continued to climb after his fall, but he was different — and not just because doctors put steel in his arm and leg. He married, grew less arrogant, took fewer chances.
"As a climber, I was never among the best of the best," Potterfield says today. "I was always a journalist first, and a climber second."
When he left the magazine (which folded in the early 1990s) Potterfield made it easier for Northwest climbers to find their way to fabled peaks, with his "Selected Climbs in the Cascades," co-authored with Nelson.
In the mid-1990s, he wrote "In the Zone," which featured golden-haired Seattle mountain guide Scott Fischer's ascent of treacherous K2 with Viesturs.
"Peter always recognized how to reach a mainstream market," Nelson said. "He knew that accidents were always compelling, and that people were interested in the highest mountain in the world. Put those two together and you had a grand slam."
Yet it was in 1999, as a founder of MountainZone.com, that Potterfield steered himself to ground zero in the collision between mountains and media. Potterfield and his Web site became New Media pioneers, airing the first dispatches from Everest via satellite phone as a team led by Washington-based mountaineer Eric Simonson discovered the frozen body of George Mallory, the British climber who disappeared near the summit in 1924.
"The biggest thing was the Webcasting, and the instant ability to put news out there," said Matt Stanley, a former MountainZone.com staffer, now an editor at Climbing magazine. "The only real sort of popular outlets were National Geographic Adventure and Outside, and often the news you'd get in there was several weeks or months old. Peter helped fuel people's appetite for on-the-spot news."
After selling MountainZone.com in 2000, mostly in stock, which collapsed in the dot.com bust months later, Potterfield got a call from publisher W.W. Norton: Could he spend three years researching the world's best hikes? "Sure, twist my arm," he told them.
For outdoor lovers, the resulting 224-page volume is a mouthwatering package of stunning photographs and descriptions of everything from Rainier's Wonderland Trail to a North Cascades' hike near Lake Diablo, and to a romp along the British Columbia coast. His favorite: A solo hike across the tundra of Arctic Sweden.
"What I found totally reset my threshold for what constitutes wilderness," Potterfield said in an e-mail interview. "The Arctic wilderness of northern Sweden is big and wild and pristine, you can drink the water out of any creek, camp wherever you wish, I felt like I could walk for days and not run out of room."
Even though kids today spend hours with video games, Potterfield believes that backpacking is coming back in vogue, at least among some.
"I've noticed that when I go hiking, I'm more likely to see people my age," he says, adding that he's convinced the mean age of backpackers was 20 when he was 20, and hit middle age when he did.
And history would suggest that Potterfield knows his audience.
Craig Welch: 206-464-2093 or cwelch@seattletimes.com
