From Peter Haan, on Supertopo:
Another similar story, perhaps even worse, is the tale of the running logbook of first ascents we kept in Camp Four for many years. It was a loose ring binder and jammed with everyone's handwritten tops and route descriptions. Mine too. It became quite huge. It was priceless, obviously, completely authentic, and terribly valuable to all of us, especially the guidebook writers. Well it was in a variety of hands through the years and everyone knew where it was. Participation in it was active and ongoing. It was terrifically important by the mid-seventies. Eventually it ended up mounted in a box on a tree east of Columbia Boulder and lived there for I don't know how long. At one point, some non-climber low-life white trash took a site nearby and needed to make fires for their dumb activities and pulled the damn thing off the tree and used it for fuel. That was the end of this amazing document from our history, all original entries, hundreds of them, highly colorful and interesting. Gone. This tale has appeared on Supertopo before, but not in recent years.
I say here that that ring binder should not have been left on the tree in original state. It should have been copied out, archived and a facsimile grunted up and put back on the tree for continuing participation. It had become so terrifically valuable, historic and one-of-a-kind that we needed to make a copy of it. In a way, it was our fault, but nobody had a clue about such things back then, and it was pretty hard still to take our climbing lives seriously enough that we would consider our artifacts of any importance in the runaway years to come.
