Partway up a frozen waterfall, Katie Ives is alone in the night. Her world has narrowed to whatever is visible in the opaque beam of her headlamp: the bluish-white fractured ice, the slow-moving water beneath it, the ice crystals glinting off the steel of her tools. She cannot see the void, but she feels it yawning below. “There’s just this sense of being enfolded in mystery and darkness,” Katie told me over coffee.

It’s a scene that has played out countless times over the years — first in Vermont, where she cultivated her peculiar practice of free-soloing ice at night in order to squeeze climbing in after work days that often stretched beyond 10 or 12 hours as editor-in-chief of Alpinist Magazine, a job she held for more than 10 years (with another eight-odd years before that as an Alpinist editor).

“When I was alone, it was almost easier to feel that sense of larger interconnection,” she said, referring to one of the primary reasons she climbs — to feel part of something greater than herself.

Since late 2022, when Katie moved to the Front Range for a writing project, she has continued night climbing — often alone, yet sometimes with others — on various local cascades.

“I got addicted to the beauty of it,” she said. One evening as she walked back to her car after several laps of easy ice, moonlight illuminated fresh mountain lion tracks in the snow. She picked up her pace (and an ice tool), frightened, yet enchanted. It’s precisely this wonderment that continually draws Katie back into the mountains, and also to her writing and editing.

Since 2004, when she started as a copy editor at Alpinist (and in January 2005, as an intern), Katie has become one of the most well-respected voices in mountain literature.

She attended the Sorbonne and graduated from The Winsor School, Harvard, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Banff Mountain and Wilderness Writing program, yet what Katie brings to her writing — and her writers — is an extraordinary compassion and curiosity, meticulous and unhurried.

“The whole ethos of editing for me … there is this sort of sacredness to it,” she said. “You’re connecting with another human being, you’re helping them find these infinite realms of wonder and dreams and memories and possibility within their own minds. When it’s successful it’s almost like you’ve preserved some reflection of another human being’s soul on paper.”

Tall and slender, with auburn hair that reaches her waist, Katie thinks fast, talks fast, and reads fast (100 pages per hour at last count). She started climbing in New England in the 1990s, but it was in grad school in Iowa, from 2002 to 2004, when she really embraced it.

Yet for a climber of her competence and experience (she turned 49 last weekend), she is all but uninterested in what many climbers seek: to climb harder. Athleticism and performance are immaterial to her pursuit of the heightened perception that accompanies the beauty and awe she finds in the mountains. “I’m trying to progress in different ways,” she explained. “I’m trying to see the mountains more deeply; I’m trying to become more attentive to the details on the cliffs; I’m trying to let go of myself more and really immerse myself in the landscape.”

In addition to her more than full-time writing and editing project in Boulder, she now writes a bi-monthly column for Canada-based Gripped magazine. She chooses to look at mountain literature from alternative perspectives and — as she did so brilliantly at Alpinist — to amplify diverse voices that have largely been ignored. Rather than follow traditional mountain narratives of conquest, triumph and antagonism, she views mountains, “Not necessarily as summits to be reached, but as elements of nature to connect with, as webs of ecosystems and responsibilities.”

And while climbing seems as necessary for her well-being as breathing, her writing and her editing work with others is where she tends to glean the most meaning. “Finding your voice as a writer is not only important for writing, but it’s a metaphor for finding yourself and your place in the world,” said Katie. “And if you can help another human being do it, that’s magic. I mean, there’s nothing better than that.”

Contact Chris Weidner at cweidner8@gmail.com. Follow him on Instagram @christopherweidner and X @cweidner8.