Seventy Years Of Adventure With The Mountaineers

John Sarracino, Mark Felthauser, and other club members on a Blanca-Little Bear traverse trip led by Don Liska, July 1978. Photo by Bob Cowan

By NORBERT ENSSLIN
Edited by BILL PRIEDHORSKY
Los Alamos Mountaineers

This weekend, the Mountaineers are celebrating their 70th anniversary.

Throughout the decades, Los Alamos Mountaineers have been important to many in Los Alamos and beyond. The club is a place to meet other people with a love of the outdoors and to adventure together. The Mountaineers have come to know and love many beautiful local areas, as well as mountains, canyons, and climbing areas in the wider region.

Don Liska captured importance of mountains to our lives: “I believe that the mountains symbolize the conjunction of humanity and nature in some very special ways. Always a barrier to expansion, always a challenge to conquest, always a sanctuary for beauty and grandeur, always a test of endurance and acceptance of hardship on nature’s terms, always a reminder of beauty and wonder, the mountains play a crucial role in our collective humanity. Without the mountainous regions of this beleaguered planet, our senses for pulchritude and awe would be diminished, our love of the delicate and eternally enduring would be less developed. Above all, our mountainous environment raises us as individuals to more exalted heights.”

Tom Newton on the highest point of the Organ Mountains near Las Cruces on a climbing trip with John Ramsay and Stan Landeen, April 1955….