High-Altitude Picks

The High Peaks were already in winter’s grip in October 1875 when Adirondack surveyor Verplanck Colvin noted, “The morning of the 30th, showed the mountains wrapped in dense fog streaming down into the deep gorge, ghostlike over the black yet icy ledges or slides on the inclosing peaks. The black cliffs of Haystack are grim with monstrous yellowish icicles.” Colvin was focused on the logistics of measuring Mount Marcy before severe weather moved in, not on scaling ice flows. The age of technical ice climbing in Panther Gorge began more than a century later, with Chris Fracchia and Charlie Dickens’s 1999 accent of Agharta (WI4-), an 800-foot route on the highest cliffs of Marcy.

The next recorded milestone was in 2009, when Willard