Edwin Drummond, a mountaineer and poet who made international headlines by scaling landmarks like the Statue of Liberty as a form of protest, died on April 23 at a care facility in Oakland, Calif. He was 73.

His son, Haworth Ward-Drummond, said that the cause was pneumonia, and that Mr. Drummond had had Parkinson’s disease since 1994.

Mr. Drummond was already well known in climbing circles as a sort of alpine poet laureate before he decided, in the late 1970s, to use the talents he honed on European peaks and El Capitan in Yosemite National Park to draw attention to causes he considered important. He faced legal repercussions for climbing various buildings and monuments, which he saw as a small price to pay for battling injustice.

In 1978 he climbed Nelson’s Column in London with Colin Rowe, another mountaineer, to protest apartheid in South Africa; the next year he climbed Grace Cathedral in San Francisco to protest the incarceration of Elmer G. Pratt, a Black Panther who had been sentenced to life in prison in 1972 after he was convicted of killing a teacher. (Mr. Pratt spent years trying to prove that he had been framed before his conviction was vacated in 1997.)