Publications

AMC Outdoors, July/August 2002

By Katharine Wroth

The date was set, the justice of the peace lined up, the location chosen. The only question left was how to get to the knot-tying site: drive, or climb? When Ildi Morris planned to hold her wedding at the top of New Hampshire's Cathedral Ledge, she thought of it as a symbolic — and car-accessible — nod to the fact that she had often climbed there with fiance and fellow AMC member Ian Springsteel. But the groom and his friends took things a bit more literally, making a tuxedoed ascent to the ceremony. Climbing crept into Morris' imagination on a family trip when she was a teenager, and she hasn't been able to shake it since. At 16, she accompanied her parents, who had once lived in Africa, on a trip from Chicago to Kilimanjaro. "We trained by walking around golf courses," she remembers, laughing. 

Morris, now 34, kept the memory of that "incredible" trek in mind during college in Boston. But she didn't return to the mountains until her early 20s when, in an attempt to quit smoking, she joined AMC. The cure was successful, and being part of AMC "changed my life," she says. "I signed up for the [Boston Chapter] spring hiking course, winter hiking, rock climbing, and ice climbing — just about everything there was." She soon joined the chapter's Mountaineering Committee, and volunteers as the committee's webmaster. And she headed for the peaks: Katahdin in winter, Rainier in winter and summer, and Nepal's 22,494-foot Ama Dablam last year. Though a chest infection kept her from reaching that summit, the experience was not a loss; her father joined her for the trek in, and she was so taken with the land that she plans to return. 

For now, Morris, who works at an educational research company, is satisfied with smaller peaks. This spring, she and Springsteel took their seven-month-old daughter, Aniko, up New Hampshire's Mount Waumbek. Though no match for the Himalaya, it merited mention in a different record book: it was Aniko's first 4,000-footer.

—Katharine Wroth is Senior Editor of AMC Outdoors.