As Laura notes, this issue has been circulating for some time. I was surprised to see it on the front page of the Times! Musta been a slow news day, they gotta write about mountaineers.
The thief (and I don't think there is a bunch of them) is not a routine tourist.
Black Kaweah changes the story, as that is a non-trivial dangerous climb.
I always like the romance of "the registers belong to the mountains", although I also believed in preservation of the only record of some of these wonderful mountaineers. For some, there are few if any pictures, and no video. At some point, they won't exist anymore, and that makes me sad.
