Maybe that title’s too harsh for an obit for America’s most artful, scholarly, and absorbing climbing magazine.

Alpinist takes a whipper? (Too casual.) Alpinist rappels off the ends of its ropes? (This implies a preexisting, downward trajectory.) Alpinist peels? (Meh.)

The title stands. It suits founder and editor Christian Beckwith’s vision for Alpinist, which favored directness of documentation and faithfulness to the sport. If you deck, i.e., hit the ground from any appreciable distance in climbing, you die (unless you’re Lynn Hill). Hitting the ground is climbing’s most immediate horror, but also provides its metaphysical counterweight, as we all deck in the end. Alpinist just hit ground sooner than we all thought it would.

So what happened?

As I understand it, Alpinist’s lifeline was the stock portfolio of investor Marc Ewing, the Bill Gates of Linux. In the last few weeks, that lifeline took a core shot. Marc coiled it up and stuffed it back in his pack, so to speak, and Alpinist was left without a belay.

Which illustrates the problem of not selling out, i.e. making profit a priority. When your magazine covers a niche sport for dweebs with death wishes, it’s probably advisable, at some point, to sell out. But selling out means compromise.

In its six-and-a-half year history, Alpinist never sold out.

I remember well its inception. In 2001, Christian engaged in a power struggle with the leadership of the American Alpine Club, for whom he edited the august American Alpine Journal. The struggle did not end well for Christian. Almost simultaneously, as if summoned by The Publishing Fairy, climbing enthusiast Marc Ewing wrote an email out of the blue to Beckwith expressing his wish to start a magazine devoted to alpinism, which at that point was receiving cursory coverage from the two leading climbing magazines. One door slammed shut in Christian’s face and another burst open with a cartoony mound of cash flooding into his ski-fenced bungalow. Immediately he sprang to work, mocking up covers for Alpinist, taking for his graphic inspiration Slovenian badass Tomaz Humar’s rare coffeetable book, No Impossible Ways, its pages strikingly designed in fat blocks of red, black, and white.

In Fall 2002, the first taste of Alpinist appeared, Issue 0, with an unforgettable cover shot of Brit trad ace Leo Houlding, moments after being injured while climbing in Patagonia, his anguished face flecked with blood, his hands upraised in seeming supplication to the gods of gravity that had just delivered a painful, scary spanking. What a way to start a climbing magazine – with a flashlit, nauseating closeup of its costs.

It was Christian’s way of telling the AAC, “I’ll Show You.” Which, in the six years hence, he has. So has he shown to everyone in the outdoor industry that if you want cult status, make your product better than anybody else’s, damn the cost. From the start, subscribers saved each issue of Alpinist, lining them up numerically on their bookshelves. Such veneration made other magazines jealous, and it took little reading-between-the-lines to recognize that Outside’s 2005 feature story on Christian, “The Purist,” was basically their way of sniping to their readers, “We wish WE had a benefactor like Christian does. Must be nice.”

Which it is and isn’t. Repeatedly Ewing threatened to pull the plug on the expensive magazine. Christian and Marc were often derided for Alpinist LLC’s questionable business model – to produce an artistic, lustrous magazine with minimal distraction from those annoying intrusions called advertisements. It’s the Surfers Journal blueprint, except, unhelpfully, without all the surfers. Nonetheless, Alpinist held firm. It included no appeal to the sport’s lowest common denominator (sport climbers), no “service journalism” (“where to stay and eat” sidebars), few gear reviews, and nothing of any practical help except the route lines that striped those beautiful pictures in each issue’s “Mountain Profile,” and those are of scant use to anybody except Rolando Garibotti, Marko Prezelj, and about 20 other climbers around the world, mostly in Canada, Poland, and Slovenia.

But that’s why climbers loved Alpinist: it made their pastime (or the pastime of their daydreams) seem heroic, even holy, with its glorification of asceticism, solitude, and suffering, its Job-worthy testaments to endless tribulations (the master of such, in my opinion, British taxman and über-alpinist Mick Fowler, whom you could practically hear giggling as he recounted his Himalayan discomforts, which contrasted nicely with prose from Italian and French climber-correspondents, whose laptop keyboards must surely be poulticed by all the cigarette ashes and salty tears shed while pouring out their tender little hearts), everywhere accompanied by pictures of biblical grandeur – mountaintops above cloudbanks, tents engulfed in stormclouds, granite ramparts filigreed with ice and specked with teeny tiny climbers. It would take divine deliverance for most readers, even the climbing ones, to see with their own eyes such sights, and Alpinist soon became a quarterly bulletin from the far beyond.

At the same time, it romanticized those who dwelt in the dirt of Yosemite’s Camp 4, Indian Creek’s Beef Basin Road, and Chamonix’s Snell Field. It was a charming conceit of Alpinist — this high-minded, impeccably designed, 13-buck magazine — to be so solicitous of and infatuated by dirtbags who couldn’t afford it, but this devotion probably assuaged the self esteem of some of the ’60s and ’70s characters it lionized, reassuring them that their decades of scenic poverty were not whiled away in vain. Moreover, a stolen issue of Alpinist was a great way to glamour up the interior of a VW camper van, especially if there was a story inside that you wrote, photographed, or appeared in.

Certainly Alpinist must rank as the most poetic sports magazine penned by its own readers, and credit must be given here to tireless under-editor Katie Ives for so lovingly and assiduously massaging climbers’ muddled words. But I also give great credit to Beckwith for such a clear and uncompromising vision. From the start, Christian knew exactly the magazine he was shooting for, and that was the magazine he made. Kudos for him for forging so singular a vision for so many issues (culminating with Alpinist 25, devoted largely to Yosemite, climbing’s undisputed center of the world), forcing the other US climbing magazines to resume highlighting the most serious exploits in the sport, and getting somebody else to pay for it.

Marc and Christian, thanks for the magazine. You sent it. Alpinist will be missed.