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Alpinist editor Christian Beckwith looks over a dummy of Alpinist 26, which would have featured a picture of Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary on Everest, in his Jackson office Friday after he announced that the six-and-a-half-year-old magazine would fold. ANGUS M. THUERMER JR. / JACKSON HOLE DAILY

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Jackson-based Alpinist magazine will cease publication, editor Christian Beckwith said Friday.

Beckwith told friends, colleagues and contributors about the end of the publication starting late Thursday, attributing the close to the dismal economic scene. In a note published at Alpinist.com, Beckwith wrote “the October 2008 financial crisis has forced [us] to suspend operations.”

The glossy magazine, called the best in its field by uber-alpinist Reinhold Messner, among others, has been in business since 2002. In addition to the quarterly magazine, 25 of which Beckwith published, Alpinist produced a film festival, ran a Web site and had other publications underway.

In his office in West Jackson on Friday, the editor took the closing in stride, but was obviously disappointed.

On one wall were dry-erase boards covered with the names of authors and peaks and deadline dates, on another a series of stunning climbing photographs of Everest that he had hoped to publish in the next issue.

“We set out to create the magazine of our dreams,” Beckwith said. “We did have a vision as beautiful as climbing itself.”

Beckwith launched Alpinist with publisher Marc Ewing of Chicago, who climbs in the Tetons and owns a home here with his wife. Parts of the business were foreign to Beckwith, the editor admitted Friday.

“We didn’t know a lot about the publishing world when we went into it,” nor about marketing, advertising and circulation, Beckwith said. “I’ll always be proud of what we’ve done.”

Alpinist employed about a dozen people in Jackson and Chicago, Beckwith said, and had a worthy corps of interns.

The business will go into receivership and a trustee will decide on how to liquidate the assets, Beckwith said. As news of the magazine’s end flashed through the mountain community, he was taking calls from competing publications, telling other publishers how they might purchase some or all of the company he had built.

“There are a lot more questions than answers,” Beckwith said. Alpinist grew a following that should be worth something, he said.

“I feel like we’ve built a good brand,” he said. “We were trending in the right direction and just got caught flat-footed with this financial crisis.”

Jackson Hole was an essential ingredient in the birth and growth of the publication, he said. Beckwith, who first launched the Mountain Yodel in Jackson before moving to the helm of the American Alpine Journal and then Alpinist, has long touted the valley as an American Chamonix, a place where the tradition of the rope is woven into the fabric of the town itself.

“I couldn’t imagine a better place to have done this than in the Jackson Hole community – among people drawn in part by this town and its mountains,” he said. “It’s been a joy trying to build a business in this beautiful valley.”

In a statement from Chicago, Ewing agreed about what the two achieved.

“We’re extremely proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish in the six-and-a-half years since we started,” he said. “There hasn’t been a publication like Alpinist since Ascent [another defunct glossy that emerged from the 1960s to inspire a generation of climbers] and our readers have been our lifeblood. We owe them everything.”

Beckwith said he planned to take six months off. He will go climbing.

“You don’t often get a chance at this point in your life to pause,” he said.