How a Legendary Mountain Magazine Came Back to Life
Summit, one of the coolest-looking climbing journals ever, returns to the peaks.
Like many great American pastimes, mountain climbing has inspired a catalog of classic magazines covering the sport’s lore, gossip and nitty-gritty. Climbing had a glossy heyday; Alpinist is a brainy, literary take on a sport with a proud heritage of writing and philosophy.
Among climbing’s print stack, Summit always stood out. Founded in 1955 and vanished in the ‘90s, Summit remained a cult-favorite among both alpinists and magazine geeks for its sensational covers and eccentric history.
That tale got a new plot twist recently: Summit came climbing back.
Michael Levy, a long-time mountaineering journalist based in the canyons of New York City, unveiled the first issue of the reborn Summit Journal last February. The relaunch fits into a minor renaissance of outdoorsy print magazines—definitely a trend we here at WILDSAM endorse. We recently sat down with Michael to hear the story behind the story.
Q: How and when did Summit come into your life?
I love climbing, and I’m a journalist—I love journalism. I’m a jack of all trades, master of none. I worked for about five years for climbing magazines: Rock and Ice, which for my money was the best climbing magazine around, and then Climbing for a little bit. I took my leave because it was just time for something new, but I always wanted to work for a print climbing magazine. And then print climbing magazines largely went away.
Katie Ives, the former editor of Alpinist, wrote a number of essays about the history and legacy of Summit. By this point, in the 2000s, most climbers had never even heard of Summit. Katie kind of dusted it off. That’s what put it on my radar. And since then, it was in the back of my mind as this amazing title, this amazing brand, that was just laying there.
How do you go about bringing a magazine back from the dead?
The hardest thing was figuring out who owned it. From 1955 to 1989, Jene Crenshaw and Helen Kilness self-published it. At first, it was the only climbing magazine. By the end, it was the kind of old-timey climbing magazine. In 1989, they sold it, and it got rebranded as Summit: The Mountain Journal and became a glossy quarterly, more about mountain outdoor culture, not purely climbing. And that closed up shop in 1996.
I got ahold of Jene Crenshaw’s niece, Paula. She told me about David Swanson, the guy who bought out Jene and Helen. She said: “I have a number for him. He may or may not be alive. He's in his late 80s." And I called David up and gave him my elevator pitch. And he said, "Okay, meet me at the Harvard Club."
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This guy—he’d been president of the Explorers Club. And I felt really out of place in the wood-paneled Harvard Club. But to his credit, David just wanted to see the legacy of Helen and Jene carried on.
Yes, let’s talk about Jene and Helen for a second. Can you fill us in on who they were?
Jene and Helen were just mountain lovers. In 1955, they started Summit—basically as a little pamphlet. One of the coolest nuggets about them: On the magazine’s masthead, Jene spelled her J-E-N-E instead of J-E-A-N, and Helen went by her initials, HBC Kilness. They didn’t think macho climbing guys would want to read a magazine published by two women.
But they went for it. And they had the best climbers of the day writing for them—people like Royal Robbins and Yvon Chouinard. They self-published the magazine out of their house in Big Bear, CA, which was called Summit House. It’s nestled in the San Bernardino Mountains.They were also out adventuring in the hills. One endearing thing is that they would go climbing for however long, come back and forget what issue they were on. There are at least a couple of instances when you’ll see, like, “May 1965” … and the next issue is also “May 1965.”
What was your plan for this revived magazine? And why did you think it would work?
Honestly, most ways I gamed it out, it was dead on arrival. But I figured, got to shoot my shot.
I love long-form writing and really rich, reported storytelling. And climbing has a very rich, long tradition of that. Dramatic writing is woven into climbing's DNA. But with the disappearance of climbing magazines, that has become like an endangered species. So my goal was always to just create a magazine that was focused on long-form storytelling, and to make a really beautiful print product that matched the quality of the writing inside.
I didn’t know if it would work, but that was the goal. I had a couple solid inspirations in Adventure Journal and Mountain Gazette. The latter is another old magazine that was resurrected. I thought, having watched those over the past few years, I could do the same with climbing. It’s a sport that is exploding, yet the media landscape around it is, in a weird way, shrinking.
Why does climbing have such an incredible literary tradition? I can’t think of another sport where—at least historically—the top performers are also noted writers about the pursuit itself.
I think climbing does attract a particular analytical type. Not that other sports aren't cerebral, but climbing is this very slow, methodical thing, with a lot of systems and ropes and stuff. It's not a purely physical exercise.
Climbers tend to be very intrepid travelers. Where are some of the places the new magazine has gone so far?
In the first issue, there was this piece about Ireland, about Inishmore, this climbing area that's honestly flown under the radar. We’ve been to Yosemite, of course. Peru. New River Gorge. Though we have a US-centric focus, it’s definitely global in terms of coverage. The current issue has a story about Iceland.
We got a cold pitch from this guy who's not even really a climber, but wanted to go climb a mountain in Alaska that was named for his great-grandfather. It had only been climbed once. So he roped his dad and his drinking buddy into this plan, and they went and climbed it. And the story is this irreverent, rollicking affair of these city slickers who don't know what the heck to do yet managed to get up the mountain.
Your magazine has very cool covers so far—which is very true to the old Summit. That archive of old covers is definitely a gem of American magazine history.
The old covers are incredibly stylish. Particularly in the first 25 years, Summit had a ton of illustrated covers. And the aesthetic was minimalist, with these paradoxical colors. You’d have a mountain scene that was neon green. Stark shapes. Not quite art deco, but just really hip, really cool. We’re not trying to recreate that exactly, but we’re leaning into that heritage.
Final note: It’s an obligatory question—why print, why now?
With digital media just ever-expanding, a lot of the time it feels like drinking from a fire hose. There's too much, but it is all just scratching the surface. So I think there is an appetite for careful and considered curation. That's part of what the magazine does. It's putting A next to B, and putting a lot of work into both A and B, and then they're in conversation with each other. And it's nice to have something on your shelf or on your coffee table.
