Chris Jones (November 24, 1939 – September 17, 2024) was a British–American rock climber, photographer, climbing historian, author, and alpinist.
[5] The photos included in the book were thought to have been lost in a 1996 wildfire that destroyed Jones's California home but copies were later found by Dorworth.
[11][12][13] Their climb was one of four ascents defined as "career highlights" by the Piolets d'Or when awarding Lowe a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023; where they described the route as "a sheer black wall of north-facing limestone, steeper than the Eiger, one-and-a-half times the height of El Capitan, and the hardest in the Rockies" and the climb considered much harder than anything that had been done in the European Alps at the time.
During this exchange, they did a new ice route up the North Face of Mirali by Lowe, Jones, Onishenko (Soviet), and Obchenekov (Soviet) in the Fanksy Gory range of Tajikistan, and explored mountains in the Tien-Shan having been told that they were the first Westerners to gain permission to climb in that range along the Soviet-Chinese border.
In the Tien-Shan, Jones, Mokauskas (Lithuanian), Pablechenko (Soviet), and Bertulis climbed the central route up the North Face of Free Korea Peak.