Robert Bates

Personal

Vocation

Notable

American mountaineer, author and teacher, best remembered for his parts in the first ascent of Mount Lucania and the American 1938 expedition and 1953 expedition to K2. He attended Harvard University from 1929 to 1935. At Harvard he was a member of the Harvard Mountaineering Club and with Charles Houston, Adams Carter, Bradford Washburn and Terris Moore was part of the group of climbers later known as the "Harvard Five" who would push forward the standards of American mountaineering in the 1930s. In 1937 Bates, with Bradford Washburn, made the first ascent of Mount Lucania in Yukon, which was then the highest unclimbed mountain in North America. It was also one of the most remote and inaccessible and had been declared "virtually impregnable". Bates and Washburn survived on mushrooms and squirrels during the trek out. Bates was the author of several books. With Charles Houston he wrote accounts of their two K2 expeditions as Five Miles High and K2 - The Savage Mountain; the latter being regarded as a mountaineering classic. He also wrote Mystery, Beauty, and Danger, a study of mountaineering literature, and Mountain Man: The Story of Belmore Brown, the biography of an artist and explorer. His autobiography, The Love of Mountains Is Best, was published in 1994. Robert Hicks Bates died on 13 September 2007, aged 96. Link to Wikipedia biography