Dr. Charles Houston Show at Kane Hall Nov. 14

[jon]

TALK BY CHARLES HOUSTON, M.D., "Exploring the Heights".

TIME: 7 PM, Thursday, NOV. 14, 2002

PLACE: KANE HALL, UW CAMPUS

ADMISSION: FREE (thanks to several benefactors). Tickets needed, available at all University Bookstore locations.

 

We in Seattle are in for a unique treat. Dr. Charles Houston, one of our country's great gurus of the golden age of exploratory mountaineering, will narrate mountaineering's world premier of a video he has just created recounting his near lifelong love affair with high places. And it's not a short affair, for Charlie turned this summer. His affair is with two closely-related mistresses: the climbing of mountains and the study of how human's adapt to their high altitude.

 

Dr. Houston's introduction to mountaineering took place as a barely teenager in the Alps in 1925 but his first creative explorations took place while a Harvard student in the '30s, notably in the remote, unexplored wilderness of Alaska and the Yukon. This film, created from both still and movie footage, depicts his four grand Himalayan journeys and also captures some of his pioneering research endeavors exploring man's affair with thin air:

 

<sum> Nanda Devi, 1936, at the time the highest mountain yet climbed.

<sum> K2, 1938, the first American "reconnaissance" and attempt to ascend the Abruzzi Ridge.

<sum> Everest, 1950: His and Bill Tilman's journey as the first westerners to reach the scene of Mount Everest's notorious Icefall, enabling them to express their doubts about its sane passage.

<sum> K2, 1953, one of the great American epics of heroic effort, recounted in the book by Houston and Robert Bates, K2, the Savage Mounntain.

<sum> High Mountain Research, from the chamber studies, "Operation Everest I in the 1940s, through the years of studies on Mount Logan in the Yukon, to Operation Everest II in 1985. It was Dr. Houston who catalyzed these major explorations of how well and badly humans can fare at extremely high altitudes

 

The video will be followed by a conversation with Charlie Houston, who will close the evening by signing copies of his books for those who desire: K2, The Savage Mountain, Five Miles High (?), and Going Higher, the story of human adaptation to high altitude.

 

[ 11-12-2002, 10:53 AM: Message edited by: jon ]