Jack Durrance

John Randall "Jack" Durrance (1912 to 2003) was a pioneering American rock climber and mountaineer. He learned to climb while attending high school in Germany and founded the Dartmouth Mountaineering Club in 1936 while a student at Dartmouth College. His first ascents include the North Face of the Grand Teton and the route on Devils Tower that still carries his name, and he also contributed to the early development of bouldering in the United States. In 1939 he joined the American Karakoram expedition to K2, where four members died and the leader, Fritz Wiessner, blamed Durrance. A 1993 book drawing on a Durrance diary that surfaced fifty years later put the responsibility on Wiessner, while later accounts such as that of Ed Viesturs point to the decision to strip the lower camps. During the climb he saved the life of Chap Cranmer, who had pulmonary edema, and he went on to become a pulmonary physician in Denver and a hybridizer of irises.