In 1955 Jean Crenshaw and Helen Kilness founded Summit, the first monthly climbing magazine in the United States. They produced it out of the basement of their cabin in Big Bear, California, at first going by their initials “J.M. Crenshaw” and “H.V.J. Kilness,” because they worried readers might not buy a magazine published by two women about what was then a male-dominated sport. Yet the list of the magazine’s editors and contributors over the years included some of the most well-known American climbers, including Royal Robbins, Yvon Chouinard, Fred Beckey, Arlene Blum, and many others.

Though it quickly became a popular source for information on everyday hikes to major expeditions, the pair limited production to just 10,000 copies so they would have time for their own excursions into the mountains, which was their true passion. Jean and Helen eventually sold the magazine in 1989, and it relaunched as a quarterly until publication ceased in 1996. Resurrected as the biannual Summit Journal in 2023, the print-only magazine focuses on mountain storytelling and large-format photography.

In addition to its well-respected editorial content, Summit has long been known for its cover art. The imagery ranged from thrilling action shots and breathtaking landscapes to playful abstraction and heavily processed photography. Some of the most iconic covers are the quirky cartoons of illustrator and outdoorsman Sheridan Anderson, who is perhaps best known as the author of Curtis Creek Manifesto, an illustrated primer on fly fishing. He connected with the Summit community through his many summers at Yosemite’s Camp 4, the epicenter of American climbing in the 1960s and 1970s.

Among the covers he illustrated was a bright yellow one celebrating “clean climbing,” a philosophy that promotes chocks or hexes for climbing protection over more damaging pitons, which were steel spikes hammered into rock. In Sheridan’s depiction, a chock stands triumphantly over the vanquished piton as the mountains rejoice. Another cover demonstrates Sheridan’s tendency to prank Summit’s strait-laced founders, Jean and Helen, with indecent elements hidden in his illustrations. In a yellow and brown-hued illustration, for example, a rocky anchor point for a climber’s rope resembles a crude hand gesture.

But there was no love lost between the illustrator and the editors. The sign Sheridan painted for Jean and Helen’s cabin, featuring a piton with the words “Summit House,” hung on their front door for decades.