Alpine Style!

“Buy the fucking plane tickets!” I believe I heard this from Jack Tackle once. He says it to his climbing partners. In a simple sense, buying the plane tickets firmly cements one’s commitment to an objective. If you are serious about it, you will get the tickets right away as it is going to be much harder to back out after you have purchased expensive plane tickets.

I am sure that many reading this have experienced: “Dude, I going to have to bail on our plans for Alaska (or wherever)” before. It is classic and seems to happen more often than people actually following through with their barstool inspired dreams (delusions?) of grandeur.

It is not uncommon for people to lose their enthusiasm for your big plans as the time draws nearer. Thoughts of sport climbing, skiing locally and likely fear will often extinguish the flames of anticipation and lead to a change of heart. Once you have shelled out a bunch of cash, however, things are much different. It is often the hardest thing to do. So, my advice is if you really want to make a dream trip happen: find a willing partner, agree on dates, then BUY THE FUCKING TICKETS! You’ll be satisfied as it takes all the second guessing and worrying away. You are safe in your knowledge that, in a sense, your fate is sealed. You are going. All the other details, like equipment, route specifics and other logistics will work themselves out. The ticket (pretty much) ensures that both you and your partner are going and you ain’t going to bail. It is a good show of commitment.

Of course there are some other small things to consider, as well. If you are going to Asia, for example, you may need a VISA. So, get on this right away as it can take a while to process these applications. Also, if you are going to need a permit for your objective get someone working on this as soon as you have made your decision to go. These are important, but I find that once the ticket is purchased, the gig is on!

Obviously, Alpine Climbing is much more than just a physically demanding endeavor. There is a VERY serious psychological, even emotional component to it. Training for the physical hardships is easy, if time consuming. Training for the other, more intangible components can be much more difficult to do, especially in a nice comfortable gym or whatever. You really need to learn how to suffer. I think this is why many climbers from form Eastern Block countries have done so well at Alpinism; they are master sufferers. Some might say their everyday life (at least until the late 80’s) was, to some extent dealing with a low level of suffering. How do we in the comfort crazed Western World, then, come to find solace in pain and hardship like our Eastern comrades do?

While I never seem to bring myself to consciously seek out pain and suffering, I inevitably find some in my training, often in the most unexpected places. When it happens, I learn to relish it.

Here I am in Texas for a few days in June. That alone is painful! I have decided to do some single speed biking on the local trails while I am here to better pass the time in this hellhole. This place is hot. REAL HOT. I am a masochist, but I just can’t do it when it is in the high 90’s with high humidity. So, I plan on hitting the trail early in the morning when the temps are at a much more reasonable mid 80’s. I was warned, “The mornings can be bayad ‘cuz of the cowob weyebs.” (In Texas speak) Cob webs? Big deal. I’d rather deal with those than die of heat exhaustion.

7:30 am this morning. I start riding. First one on the trail. They weren’t fucking kidding about the cob webs. They were all over the place and home to numerous spiders. Big ones! Tons of spiders! As in hundreds. Within minutes I was covered in untold amounts of web material and at least a dozen creepy, crawly spiders. Did I mention it was hot out? Yeah, only 85º with high humidity. That way, you sweat and the webs are easier to wipe off of your face when it is nice and slick. Most of the webs seemed to be about head height. Needless to say, I rode with my mouth closed.

I was a bit apprehensive at first: constantly swatting at the webs and little beasts within them as I would ride through. This became very distracting and caused me to take the worst digger of the year. I was trying to pick a spider off me that was hanging off my eyebrows when BAM. I hit a small stump and went straight down over the handle bars to meet the dirt head on. I slammed my chest into my right hand and both are hurting, especially my chest. This was only five minutes into the ride. I contemplated giving up and going back, but looked upon this as an excellent opportunity for some quality suffering.

I finished the loop in an hour and half and reckoned that I might as well do another lap now that the webs were clear. Besides, it was not yet 90º so I might as well.

Tomorrow, I’ll try and listen to country music instead. 

The British magazine “Climb” asked me to write something about what I put in my sack: a Kitlist, as they call it. Here is what I had to say.

Perhaps one way to start is to tell you what is NOT in my pack. I don’t bring material to make V-threads. On most alpine routes, I tend to bring along real skinny ropes, sometimes one lead rope and a 5 mm tag line, that (with the end tape removed) will feed right through the V-thread holes themselves. Steve House likes to call this the “Naked V-thread.” Unless I am working, I will not bring a radio. Besides weighing a lot, it decreases the level of commitment, which is half the reason I go alpine climbing in the first place. I will not bring along any bolts for I feel that to be too cowardly in the mountains. With that in mind, I can also leave behind the drill. Ascenders have no place in my pack either. I just don’t have the patience for much aid climbing and rope fixing while in the mountains so I just leave behind all the specialized tools for aid and big wall style climbing. If I really have to get up a fixed rope of any sort, I have become quite handy with improvised rope ascension. My favorite way is to use a simple waist prusik and an Alpine Clutch (Garda) for the feet. It works quite smooth and I’ve practiced it enough that I’d be willing to take the Pepsi challenge with a fully mechanized opponent. I never have daisy chains with me. While climbing, I almost always secure myself to the anchor with the rope and while descending, I just scavenge one or two of the sewn runners to clip in with at rappel stations. Of course, I never bring along bottled oxygen unless I am climbing with Ian Parnell on a Scottish Winter route.

I do bring along a spoon, but no bowl or cup. I will usually take one freeze dried dinner to be eaten as the first meal. They weigh too much for their meager caloric value to take up more than that. From then on, that bag becomes my meal bag for the rest of my meals on the mountain. It is sealable and allows instant meals like mashed potatoes and stuffing to be cooked up simply by adding boiling water. Cooking like this leaves my pot nice and clean: it has only had water in it. So, I can drink my tea, soup or other hot drinks out it or the one hard plastic water bottle that my partner and I will share. Since our pot is going to stay clean (and the spoon is easily “lick cleaned”), I don’t bring along a scrubby or sponge. I don’t bring along a stove pad (often considered unthinkable in Alaska) since I can use the pad from my ruck sack for this. Now this may come as a surprise to some of you, but I don’t bring along a sleeping bag! Actually, I should say that between my partner and I, we just bring one bag. That’s right: two guys, one sleeping bag. Mind you, it is a custom tailored bag to accommodate two guys (American for blokes), but it still weighs less than most single bags. The way to make this “Brokeback” style work is to just use insulation on the top and to just use thin material on the bottom that can be fashioned into sleeves for the thermal pads. Compressed insulation underneath does no good so why have it in the first place? Plus, with two people in one bag there is a lot more mutual warmth generated so you can use a much lighter weight bag. Another thing we share is a pee bottle. Actually, we dont’ bring a “bottle” to pee in, but a light, collapsable water bag like a two liter Nalgene Canteen; remeber, it must have a wide mouth opening. I also don’t bring along a full length pad to sleep on. Between the ropes, slings, pack pad and my boots, there is going to be something to keep my feet off of the cold ground and mabye even make a small pillow. For a pad, I prefer to use an ultra-light 3/4 length Therma-rest. I blow it up super tight and find that it yields the best thermal resistance for the weight.

One last thing. I hate gaiters! If I had just one wish I would rid the world of every stinking last one of them(well, maybe that would not be my first wish, but perhaps number four). I just hate them, so I never bring them. Besides looking ridiculous it seems like just an extra layer where one already exists. So, I tie some elastic cord to the two loops in the bottom cuff of my pants (if none exist, then it is very easy to install a couple of grommets for this purpose). This can then be pulled underneath my boot sole and, voile, no stupid gaiters are needed.

 

Mount Rainier must rank among the top ten spots in the nation as a Dork Magnet. They’re up there in spades!

In spite of glorious weather and being on the technically easiest route on Mount Rainier, we failed to reach the top of the mountain. In fact, we just made it about half way to the top before turning back. The idea of doing a route where the main tools of use were long snow pickets and a single ice ax just did not have much appeal to me. I really did not want to do the slog up there so I talked Cindy into doing a something a bit more interesting sounding (to me) and much more ambitious. I suggested that we try to ski it. Cindy had been to the top several times and had never done so with skis. The idea of getting in a nice, long ski descent sounded WAY better to me than plodding down a long glacier. I then suggested that maybe we should just try and do it in a single push from the parking lot (I know, this was really fucking dumb, but what can I say?). So, she said “yeah, lets do it!” She had skied up to camp Muir and down many times, so going another 4K to the top and down could not be that bad. I recommended we try the Emmons route as it offered a little nicer line to ski plus, I would probably not run into other guides over there.
The idea morphed a bit from here. We would hike in the trail to a camp right below the route at 5,900 feet. Then, we would ski to the top and down with light packs and hike out. After packing, printing maps, and all that shit, we hit the road much later in the afternoon than expected. Wit heavy traffic and all of that we did not get to the trailhead until around 8:00. So, we figured why not just go for it from here with day packs now. We would hike through the night and then summit in the morning (yeah, this was the next dumb idea). We drank some Red Bull, stripped the packs of all the overnight stuff and hit the trail. As we quickly came to find out, the major floods of last autumn wreaked havoc on the trail into the mountain and it ended up being a bit of an adventure tripping over big trees, logs and loose rocks in the dark. Needless to say, we were unable to make good time on the trail. A major new stream crossing, an errant trail and tricky snow conditions on the lower glacier put us way behind (what I estimated to be) our schedule. We reached about 9,400′ and it was well into the morning. Cindy was wiped out. The summit was just 5K above us and it looked like it would be a great ski. She said she was game, but I knew better. After no sleep and ten hours of hard work on the approach, this one would not go down well if we were to keep going on. So, I pulled the plug and we went down (it was a sunny, Saturday morning) and passed all the amazing dorks full of questions on their way up.

Last night, I had a big burger and slept hard.