A Legend Worth His Salt
A Legend Worth His Salt
A Legend Worth His Salt
“Yossi Brain”
I first visited Bolivia 25 years ago. The country was vivid—deeply indigenous, deeply impoverished, and utterly mesmerizing. It was home to once-in-a-lifetime adventures that few ever attempted.
During two incredible summers, Will Fox and I teamed up with British expat and mountaineer Yossi Brain to climb rare summits and photograph peaks for his book on Bolivian mountaineering. I’ll never forget one climb on the technical route up Cabeza de Cóndor: when asked how we should approach it, Yossi—his British accent rich and dry—simply said, “Just relax and enjoy the fear.”
That ascent ended with the epitome of celebration: Yossi had asked our driver to bring a duffel bag with him—a cassette of the Repo Man soundtrack and a bottle of Jack Daniels. We swigged almost the entire bottle while speeding across the Altiplano, before Yossi climbed out the truck window, standing up to howl his triumph into the sky. That night, La Paz’s bars still talk about it.
A year later, Yossi and a climbing partner were tragically killed in a slab avalanche on Cerro Presidente in the remote Apolobamba range in northern Bolivia alpinejournal.org.ukpublications.americanalpineclub.org+1. It ended my high-altitude mountaineering days—but not my thirst for adventure.
Yossi Brain
His passing inspired a moving tribute in the American Alpine Journal:
“Yossi was a complex character, and it would be wrong to suggest he was perfect. He was thoroughly uncompromising… If you climbed, drank or wrote, he was your friend… He left a legacy of work that will leave generations of visitors to Bolivia and Ecuador indebted to him… You loved him or hated him, but even his enemies will miss him.” publications.americanalpineclub.org+1
Returning to Bolivia a quarter-century later, Yossi’s book—published posthumously—remained the only guide on Bolivian mountaineering. His ashes rest on Illimani, watching over La Paz. As we traversed his stomping grounds, his spirit—the loud laughter, the fearless climbs, the unapologetic zest—felt as alive as ever.
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