A Climber We Lost: Burton “Burt” Angrist

You can read the full tribute to Climbers We Lost in 2024 here.

Shawanagunks climbing pioneer Burton “Burt” Angrist died on May 17 at the age of 87. Angrist climbed across North America, from the sandstone of the American Southwest to the granite of the Bugaboos, but is best known as the author of now classic hardman routes in the Gunks in the 1960s, and as a counterculture fixture in the New York climbing scene for the better part of a century. Angrist and his wife, Anka, owned a cabin in the Gunks from the 1970s, which was a popular hub for visiting climbers. Angrist was an avid activist, supporting the Mohonk Preserve and other regional wilderness areas throughout his life. (Anka, still living, is a member of the Friends of the Shawangunks Board of Directors.)

Angrist was a core member of “The Vulgarians,” a loose collective of young climbers who banded together in the early 1960s in response to the stuffy, insular elitism they perceived from the Appalachian Mountain Club and other prominent Ivy League climbing groups at the time. The Vulgarians, whose ramparts were manned by Gunks luminaries like Dick Williams, Dave Craft, Roman Sadowy, and Art Gran, were routinely fueled by drugs and alcohol, and—in addition to their prowess on the wall—were perhaps best known for climbing naked. Vulgarian chronicler Claude Suhl, who welcomed Angrist into the group in the early 1960s, had an endless slew of “legends, wild times, and near death experiences on and off the rock” with his late friend.

Suhl recalled the gang’s idea—dreamt up one “weed-plethoric inebriatorical night” in the Gunks—to create a “triple front lever.” This stunt involved one climber (Jim McCarthy) getting into a front lever position on the edge of an open trap door in the attic, above a staircase. Another (Richard Goldstone) performed his own front lever while hanging off of McCarthy’s shoulders, and then a third, Angrist, launched a lever from Goldstone’s shoulders.

“No one had calculated that the top leverist would be supporting approximately 450 pounds with his grip on the attic door edge,” Suhl recalled.  “For a brief moment all was static—what a sight—a triple front lever!” Then McCarthy’s grip failed. Angrist, on the bottom of the three-man stack, fell onto the edge of the staircase below, landing directly on his spine, and was instantly pancaked by the 300+ pounds of McCarthy and Goldstone. “Exuberance, coupled with inebriatory numbness and weed mellowness, was such that Burt did not seem to audibly register much pain,” remarked Suhl.

This genre of hairbrained behavior was common on the wall as well. Friend Todd Swain recalled Angrist and McCarthy’s 1965 first ascent of Anguish (5.8+ PG13), so named because Angrist was gripped while trying to place a piton, swung his hammer into his own hand, smashing it, and peeled off into a “spectacular leader fall.”

(“Strenuous pro indeed on that third pitch,” one Mountain Project commenter notes of Anguish. “Whoever pounded in the manky piton just below the crux was quite a stud…”)

Though Angrist and the Vulgarians were strong and successful on the wall, the group chiefly enjoyed sheer adventure, no matter whether born of success or abject failure. “While being proud of any accomplishments, we basically reveled in fiascos,” Suhl recalled.

“During the last 15 to 20 years, as Burt slipped deeper into incapacity, at gatherings we would tease out the ‘old Burt’ and sit around quietly as he repeated, as if passages from the Bible, legendary jokes and expedition reports,” said Suhl. “All adventures, when recounted by Burt, elicited similar laughter and glee. He was a wonderful joke and storyteller.”

Although Angrist continued to climb (and party) with his Vulgarian comrades throughout his life, he balanced his prolific and colorful climbing career with serious academic and professional ambitions. Off the wall, Angrist was a graduate of Albert Einstein College of Medicine, a member of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, and served in the NYU Medical Center’s Department of Psychiatry for nearly 50 years, working at Bellevue Hospital and the neighboring New York Harbor Veterans Affairs (VA) hospital.

Angrist’s research, primarily conducted on the origin and treatment of psychoses, was particularly instrumental in the development of the “dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia,” which suggests that schizophrenia principally stems from an imbalance of dopamine in the brain. Much of Angrist’s work revolved around the effects that stimulants had on the development of temporary psychoses. (Suhl mentioned that he partook in numerous “freelance” psycho-pharmacology studies with Angrist.)

A memorial for Angrist in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology mentioned how, in the early years of his career, Angrist took “meticulous descriptions of transient stimulant-induced psychoses, often in late-night jazz musicians, brought shackled by police to the old Bellevue emergency room and misdiagnosed with acute schizophrenia.” This memorial, penned by several of Angrist’s medical colleagues, remarked that Angrist’s research “led to translational work on schizophrenia … [and] helped consolidate and buttress our understanding of dopamine’s role in mediating psychiatric symptoms and treatment-related movement disorders.”

Angrist’s efforts, his colleagues said, had a monumental impact on his field. They “served as a foundation for dozens of new hypotheses, hundreds of grants, the development of dozens of antipsychotic ‘me-too’ agents, and to our present understanding of mechanisms of action antipsychotics.” His colleagues recalled Angrist’s sublime bedside manner, remarking on how “even the most disorganized of our VA schizophrenia patients responded positively to his empathic, patient, and meticulous interviewing style.”

Angrist is survived by his wife, Anka, daughter, Laurel, and “a global retinue of mentees, colleagues, and admirers who deeply loved this energetic, gifted, generous, humble, and most unusual character”

You can read the full tribute to Climbers We Lost in 2024 here.

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