Fred Beckey, legendary mountain climber, at 94
SEATTLE — Legendary mountain climber Fred Beckey, who wrote dozens of books and is credited with notching more first ascents than any other American mountaineer, has died. He was 94.
Megan Bond, a close friend who managed his affairs, told The Associated Press that Mr. Beckey died of natural causes in her Seattle home Monday.
“He was an extraordinary mountaineer. He also had a personality and humor that almost dwarfed the mountains around him,” Bond said. “He was a brilliant writer. He was a scholar. He lived based on what was important to him, and he was not going to sell out.”
Mr. Beckey was known as much for his eccentric personality as for his singular obsession with climbing.
He was born in Germany and emigrated to the United States as a child. His family settled in Seattle, where he got his first taste of hiking and scrambling with the Boy Scouts and later The Mountaineers club.
In 1942, he and his younger brother Helmut wowed the climbing community with an impressive second ascent of Mount Waddington in British Columbia.
He accomplished hundreds of first ascents on peaks throughout the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, Canada and Wyoming. In 1954, he established new routes on three of Alaska’s mountains: McKinley, Deborah and Hunter. He also climbed in the Himalayas and China.
“Fred got the golden age of climbing first ascents,” Alex Bertulis, a former climbing partner told the AP last year. “That will be his legacy.”
He wrote more than a dozen books, including the three-volume “Cascade Alpine Guide” that details hundreds of peaks in the North Cascades in Washington state.