Black Spruce

In the winter Black Spruce take on a certain beauty that defies their very appearance.  Like a portrait of a weather-beaten and wrinkled old Nepali man in the pages of National Geographic, they hold a certain elegance of a life hard-fought, hard-lived, and, for now, hard-won.

The Indescribable Lightness of Skiing

Fairbanks can really start to feel like a worn-out hick town.

My car pushes through the ice fog as I drive home from work, past the box stores that seem to have sprung up overnight.  They want to put a road through a migratory waterfowl refuge and popular recreation area to relieve the congestion going in the opposite direction.

When I finally make it home I remember that I turned the heat all the way down when I left that morning, which seemed like a good idea at the time.  I dick around for a bit before I finally push my way out the door, stomping clumsily over to the start of the trail.  Its after 9pm, and has been dark for over 5 hours.

The snow is so cold and dry that it squeaks.  The only skin showing is a slit around my eyes, and my clothes get coated in ice, most notably around my face, which becomes such a glacier that the clothing will be difficult to remove when I get in.  The snowmachine track I'm skiing on seems like it is half grass, and is so lumpy and abrasive, due to a snow-drought that is notable even for Fairbanks, that it removes all my kick wax after only a couple of miles.

But I can't help it.  As I push through the dark, past the lonely scrub black spruce, my headlamp catching occasional bright reflections off the ice crystals, I think

fuck yeah.

I'm lucky.

The High Sierra - Temple Crag

The Final Hurrah - Sun Ribbon Arete on Temple Crag

(last in a series of posts about my 2012 trip to the High Sierra)

By this time the altitude wasn't affecting me much, and we could really tear up some trail on the approaches.  Yet another predawn start.

Neale busts a move up the first 5.7 corner.  We started this route the day after the Temple-Sill Traverse but bailed due to a late start and some threatening looking weather.  We also must have been tired, because I led this pitch the first time and thought it was really hard (5.7 is usually quite easy for me).  Neale thought it was a bit stout for 5.7, but as usual indicated quietly that he thought I was a pussy.  I still think it was hard.

The route has a Tyrolean Traverse.  Its a bit of a party trick, but neither of us had ever done one before, so it was a bit fun.

It was worth smiling about.

Sun Ribbon Arete was really fun.  For whatever reason we didn't have that high of hopes, but there was some really quality climbing and lots of cool traverses like this one.

That's a cloud.

There was another party on the neighboring route, called Moon Goddess Arete or maybe that is the next one over.

Big exposure, big terrain.

At the top of the Arete, scrambling to the summit.

LOOK AT THOSE GUYS! I MEAN JUST LOOK AT 'EM!!

Walking back.  When California makes a lake it really doesn't fuck around.

The next day we drove back to Las Vegas.  We braved another hour or two in the desert heat to spend a few minutes enjoying this off-road truck race we happened across (driving the wrong way onto the course, accidentally, which a race official got his panties all bundled up about).

The Subee, she didn't really fit in among the lifted-up and all fancied-out pit trucks, but I'd like to think she held her own.

That night we partied until the wee hours with the cast of one of the Vegas Cirque du Soleil shows, then I took Neale to the airport in the dawn hours after about 3 hours of sleep.  I downed an iced coffee and busted a move 8 hours across the desert back to Tucson.

Thanks as always to Neale for another great spree of sending that shit and for leading the hard pitches!

The High Sierras - Mt. Whitney

East Face

(6th in a series of posts about my 2012 trip to the High Sierra)

We started early.  The peaks come into view.

The morning sun was pretty.

Scrambling to the start of the route. 

Neale follows the first pitch.

Junk climbing.  Get used to it.

Neale starts the Airy Traverse.

Then more junk climbing.

Mt. Russell's Fishhook Arete.

Suddenly, as I led towards the summit, I heard voices, lots of voices.  Though the route we did is very popular, there was no one on it or any of the adjacent routes.  But suddenly we popped onto the summit into a throng of people.  (Mt. Whitney is the highest mountain in the lower 48 (14,505 feet, I think), and the hiking trail is limited to 100 people per day.

I thought that the people watching was top notch, but Neale was full of hate and couldn't wait to get out of there.  Nevertheless, we had to steal a heroic summit photo amid the masses of people, which I thought was hilarious.

Walking down the Mountaineers Route, which I wouldn't recommend even to someone I didn't like.  Its a chossy ditch.

We had big plans to climb the Fishhook Arete on Russell the same day, and we had plenty of daylight, but as usual, the weather shit the bed.

Of course we walked up to the col so we could sit underneath a boulder to wait out the storm, since it had been a couple of days since we did that last.

It really hailed and turned the whole place to winter.

The Thunderbolt - Sill Traverse

(5th in series about my 2012 trip to the High Sierra)

This photo was taken from the summit of Temple Crag, but the Thunderbolt to Sill traverse starts at the second notch from the right and ends on the summit of Sill, the prominent mountain in the middle of the photo.  It covers 5 peaks over 14,000 feet, but which of the little bumps they decided was a peak (and which ones they didn't) seemed a little bit arbitrary.

This little bit of Americana was visible from one of the Subee cool-down breaks on the drive up to the trailhead (the Subee didn't fare so well with the long climbs in the intense heat, and needed rests.  She's getting old, after all.)

We met back up with Chris for the one (Chris, Stolz, and Stolzie are all the same person, fyi)  We hiked in the night before, and this is Stolz trying to make sense of the approach beta in the dark.

Sunrise on the morning of.

The hike up involved getting going up this mini-waterfall to get around the snowpatch. Its like coffee, except it wasn't delicious and didn't make me shit.

GO, GO, GO!

At some point during the morning, Stolz and I got slow (Neale took this photo, see me and Stolzie in the distance?)  After food, I felt better.

We started scrambling.

We were mostly unroped.

The first summit is a 5.9 boulder problem that Stolzie hiked up.

Neale poses. 

My turn.

Lowering off.

Another of the summits.

Neale heads up to another of the summits.

Part of the traverse.

Setting up the rappel into one of the deeper notches.

Another summit, but the weather was going sideways.

Chris likes to free solo since he read somewhere that its cool, but me and Neale have decided that we're not into it.  However, on this route it was clear that climbing unroped was necessary in order to move fast enough.  In the end, it was fun and no big deal.  In fact, in retrospect it seemed obvious that we probably should have been unroped or mostly unroped on routes like Conness and Mathes' Crest, since ropes on those routes were really a pain in the ass (especially Mathes).  Of course, a month of climbing really helps to build confidence.     

We weren't fast enough, though.  We got caught in a storm.

We were a short distance from the summit of Sill, but the descent doesn't require going over the summit.  We were cold, and it was a short bit of unpleasant 3rd class on wet rocks, so we skipped it and went down.  There was actually one other summit where the true summit was a few feet away and a couple of feet higher, but it was a 5.8 boulder problem to get to the top of, so we skipped it.  So we only actually climbed 3 of the 5 summits - so, did we do the traverse?  You decide.  

Walking down the Palisade Glacier.

GO, GO, GO!

This photo isn't that pretty, but that's not really what was there.

The Subee was a the hero of the trip, handling the hot summer weather and the mountain ranges with aplomb.  I hate this, I hate hate hate this, but Neale took this photo.  I didn't take any heroic pictures of the Subee! What's wrong with me??