TR: Early Season Skiing!!

The season here went from non-existent to ON almost overnight. Usually we get a slower start with a few runs up on the WROD (white ribbon of death) and then some easy backcountry as things fill in. This year it went straight to the backcountry with some big storms dropping close to 48" at Loveland over a few days. I got a new tiny camera for better easy of portability recently and have been screwing around with the video function. Here's a little mock up of what I've been up to on the odd day off from grad school these last few weeks. Day 4 was yesterday!
Hope you enjoy!

TR: Kelso Ridge, Torreys, 09/28/2010

The banni-maniac hittin' up the knife edge

To steal the words of my friend Tim, this has been some SPLITTER fall weather. Absolutly ideal for running around up high. Recently, between my job and adjusting to a school schedule, getting out and about to go run around up high has been very hard to find time for, so pretty much since Longs I've been mainly running around crags on the front range(especially Eldo) and haven't really had a chance to get out much other than that. So when I saw the forecast of 60 degrees and sunny at the top of Torreys, I gave Ann a call (we've been talking about Kelso Ridge all summer) and said that it was time to go take a look at some aspen trees. From way high up.
So due to my totally screwed up sleep schedule these days, I got woken up by Ann calling me saying that she was at our assigned meeting location already. Learning from experience, (I do sometimes do that), I had packed everything the night before and was out of the house within 10 minutes of her waking me up. (Sorry Ann, I'd say it would never happen again, but that's probably not true :))
A short drive later(which the volvo totally made it up a classified easy 4WD road!!! NO PROBLEM!) we found ourselves below grays and Torreys with a short hike to the start of our climb bathed in beautiful alpenglow.

Our first view of the ridge, looks harder than it is
Kelso is a class 3 ridge, without too much difficult route finding, however, we'd made it a point that if we didn't like the way the wind was or if it had too much snow on it, we'd back off. However, when we got to it, we quickly decided that you couldn't begin to find better conditions and with helmets off the pack up we went.
Kelso is an awesome climb, great easy scrambling, a solid degree of exposure, and a 14er at the end with views of the continental divide. What more could you ask for! I can pretty solidly say that this is the most fun I've had on a 14er without being on skis, highly, highly reccomended!

The ridge from higher up

Author about to head into the chimney, photo by Ann B.

The first major obstacle involved a chimney section (easy moves, but definetly some exposure) followed by a winding ridgeline that moved to the right and left of the ridge, (basically, look for the easiest way up and it stays class 3 with no major difficulties). Climbing this with Ann was a total blast, we chatted while enjoying easy and fun movement, spectacular views, and scary exposure as we wound our way up. The major crux here I would say is route finding, it's nothing super difficult but you definetly have to pay attention, case in point. The most famous part of Kelso is the infamous Knife Edge, 30 feet of drop off on either side exposure over a jagged point of rock that requires the most stellar of all moves to overcome: the butt scoot! Now Ann and I had been climbing for about an hour and a half when we reached a point that we were positive was the knife edge. Both of us looked at it, compared it with our mental photos we'd seen, hemmed and hawwed, decided it was it (since no easy route appeared) and me being relatively chivalrous, started up.

Yours truly, feeling perplexed and pumped. Photo by Ann B.


The second I got on this thing I realized that it was harder than class 3, there was no feet, bad friction, and even though I was straddling it I was still yarding myself up with my arms. My first thought was crap, I can't do this, quickly followed by, oh yes i can! and the adrenaline hauled me up! Definetly 5.0-5.2 I'd say, but hey I thought, the hardest part is over! I turned around to shoot some photos of Ann hauling herself up and onward we continued.

Yeehaw! Airy! Photo by Ann B.

Ann crankin' it



50 feet later and here we are confronted with a second knife edge, which clearly indicated that we were off route earlier. This one was significantly easier than the one that we first encountered, actually requiring only some substantial butt scooting and some substantial exposure. A short pitch of Class 3 later and we're at the summit!

Myself on the ACTUAL knife edge, photo by Ann. B.

I have to comment that the weather on top of Torreys was absolutly unreal spectacular, clear skies, no wind and views all the way to the Elks.
Torreys sits right next to Grays, both which are 14ers and require no more than a class 1 ridge between the two of them. Neither of us having been up Grays we decided to make the quick jaunt up after downing some grub. 30 minutes later, and we were on top of the second 14er in an hour.

Grays summit shot!

After this it was a short retreat to the car and then straight to the bar (Tommyknockers as the Plume saloon was closed-sorry Chris, I tried).
Kelso Ridge=Highly reccomended!!!!, 4 stars from this blogger!

TR: First Flatiron

Photo Courtesy of Google Images

The Flatirons are a pretty decent sized massif right outside of Boulder. Their known for easy technical long climbing, great views both east and west and are generally considered to be a classic ascent. Couple that with the fact that you generally see them every day whether you live in Denver or Golden and I've wanted to climb one of them for a while. So Tuesday morning when Andrew, Brian and I were sitting at Big Daddy's Bagels in Golden and Brian suggested we nix going to Eldo and we go climb the First, I was stoked.
We headed up to the trailhead and hiked up to the base of the climb. The classic route is rated 5.6 R and it's entirely because of the first two pitches, which Brian also mentioned that it's required to take the sharp end on one of those two pitches your first time doing it. Andrew rared up for the first pitch and led it off. The first pitch is actually pretty scary, it's almost all friction climbing and smears with very little pro and one eyebolt that you can clip in between the starting point and the first belay station. Andrew pretty much killed it on this pitch, leading off with a killer sense of humor, joking about a mono-undercling and humping the belay tree when he arrived at it. Climbing the pitch myself I was even more impressed with his calm of mind as I woulda been SCARED! (note to the reader: we used a pretty interesting system of climbing for this climb being that the two followers simul climbed on different ropes while being belayed from above by the leader using an ATC guide set up., it worked well for speed, sucked ASS for rope drag)

Andrew about at the belay on the First pitch
So being that it was my first time as well, it was time for me to take the second pitch. Up I went, placing in a little tiny red nut about 8 feet off the belay, and then running it out for about another 15 or 20 feet until I found a MAMACITA cam placement in a bomber crack! I was so happy to get that placement in, I'd started singing to myself lightly to keep myself from getting freaked about how high above the pro I was. 15 feet up, slung a piton and grooved on up to a ledge through some easy smears and big jams and setup a belay station. This was pretty fun! It took me a little bit to hunt out some appropriatly sized cracks that I could build an anchor on. Belaying the simul climbers up was brutal. Way more pumping out than any of the climbing had been.



A few pictures from around 2 pitches up
The next two pitches went pretty uneventfully with Brian, Andrew and I swapping leads on pretty easy climbing and terrain, I'd say one highlight was Andrew getting a booty call text message while we were two pitches up and then Brian and I simul climbing an easy pitch and talking about girls the entire way up. Fun day!
Now we got to my lead which was on the 5th pitch up, the weather had been getting darker and gloomier looking for most of the day and by this point we were starting to hear sounds of thunder getting closer. I almost bailed on leading this pitch in favor of a faster trad climber heading up so we could bail if necessary but I decide to take it after some encouragement from Brian. I'm so stoked I did, this pitch was super fun climbing varying from some long easy runouts, to some good crack jams and stemming problems, purely a joy to lead and anywhere there was a scary move, I was able to get a good piece of pro in. Couple this with the distant rumblings of thunder and being close to 1,000 feet off the deck and this was a truly interesting lead to have. The only down side was the thunder was SCARY and CLOSE and the pitch certainly meandered so that the rope drag was un real. I had to do a final traverse to the belay station after laying back a big flake and I shoved a piece in simply because I was worried that the rope drag would make me peel off 15 feet above my last piece of pro.
So we got to the belay and once the other two guys got up we had to make a decision to rap off the back side or finish the route. By this point the thunder was right over head and it was starting to rain, so after a small debate we decide to check out the rap station and bailed off the route. Brian scoped it out and after looking at it said it wasn't half as sketchy as he remembers and went off the back. I was pretty in favor of bailing as I'll admit the thunder was freakin' me out so I was pretty happy with this decision. Although, it does mean, I'm going to have to head back and climb the thing again and make the true summit sometime soon. Oh well, the climbing was fun enough that I'll gladly do it again even though we were probably 40 vertical feet from the top.
The rappel was a true freaker though, total free hanging at one point. Definetly a song creater! (I sing sometimes when I get scared enough)

Rap city on the backside of the first with lots of air underneath!

This day was awesome, I can't wait to get out with those guys again and go climb something big and tall like that. Even though we didn't finish it we were all pretty stoked with our progress and pleased with our decision to take the safer course of action of bailing. Although, when we were sitting at the sun and eyeballing the lack of rain up there it would have been sweet to high five on the true summit....next time.


Andrew lookin' pleased with our attempt

Belated TR: Long's Peak

Cause of the events of the last week, I haven't had time or the energy to post up a write up of a little outing that I had up Long's Peak Keyhole route about two weeks ago, so now that I've gained some time and energy, enjoy!
So Long's Peak is the furthest north 14er and one that you can see from pretty much anywhere in Denver, Golden etc. And oddly enough, in my last 3 years of being here, I've never been up it. I'm assuming because most of my 14ers have been skiing oriented and the ski lines on Long's are burly and typically one of those things that you might not ski unless you had a particular goal in mind. So when Mike emailed me a few weeks ago asking if I'd be interested on a moonlit ascent of Long's, my first reaction was "Crap it's a friday, I'll miss out on work." My second reaction was "I'll make it happen somehow".
So that being said my dumb ass decided to go to work for 3 hours before heading up to Boulder to meet up with the gang to go up Long's. This was very very dumb. So essentially I warmed up for a 14 mile hike with 5,000 ft of vertical gain by riding a 150 lb tri-cycle around for three hours. I'll reference why I'm making a big deal about this later....
So we met up, got up to RMNP and started the booking it approach up the long trail to Long's Peak at around 1:30 pm. The first half passed pretty uneventfully other than our moonlit ascent was screwed by the huge cloud sitting over the peak. Mike had reccomended using a red headlamp to light the way as it would help with night vision. He was totally right about this but wrong about the fact that it totally screwed my balance point. The first half of the Long's trail is pretty smooth and easy but the second we hit the boulder field I was crashing left and right until I switched to a white lamp and suddenly I could see again.
Now reaching the boulderfield is usually a pretty long hike in. For some reason we did it in about 2 hours or so. About this point, between the light color issue and the fact that I'd worked that night I was getting pretty freakin' wrecked and starting to move really slowly and frankly started to feel pretty damn bad. We'd had an arrangement to regroup by the keyhole but by the time I got there everyone had taken off. (In the after discussion, I think this was the best for the group FYI)
Most people know that it takes me a lot to lose my temper or my cool in this matter, but between how wrecked I was feeling and then finding no one there I kinda lost it. In retrospect, I'd simply pushed myself a little too hard and my emotions were all sorts of jacked up at this point. I polished off the last of my coffee and because I was beginning to be able to see the trough with the sun coming up I decided to push on aways.



Some of the views as the sun began to lap up RMNP
So it should be mentioned Long's Peak standard route is really not a hike. It's a scramble through some pretty high consequence terrain. The ledges are huge, and the climbing never harder than Class 3 but if you fall, your going quite a ways. Add this in to the amount of people that this peak sees and I'm astounded that there aren't more accidents up there. The trough is really what I'd call the real beginning of the route too. Big exposure, easy scrambling, actually extremely fun too. Mentally, I calmed down and actually began to enjoy the route finding and climbing as I worked my way slowly higher. I managed to actually catch up to half of the group just below the narrows. Coupling this with teh beautiful light hitting the Ships Prow and Mt. Meeker (I think, must check a map on that one) it became a pretty special experience.
So this was not the end of teh unpleasantness on this trip, and I'm going to publicly apologize for being an asshole at high altitude to Mike at this point. Seriously dude, my bad. I was feeling super crappy and I'm sorry I bitched at you when I passed you in the narrows. Feel free to bitch at me at some high altitude vantage point at some time.

A few climbing shots

So when the trough ends, you come into this system of ledges called the narrows, once again super easy climbing, big exposure. Other than the above mentioned bitching at (sorry again dude) this was really fun! The exposure added a nice little sphincter clenching scariness to the otherwise easy ledgewalking that led up to the homestretch. I'm going to add, I looked up and saw tons and tons of 5th class lines all around it that I'm going to have to do some research into because the crack systems and granite looked killer. So at this point we were almost at the top when we presented with the final problem, a slabby cracky wall known as the homestretch.


Shots of the Trough and Allan climbing the Homestretch

Once again a little route finding presented nothing harder than 3rd class, although a fall would have been an absolutly massive catastrophe. At this point I'd realized that the best thing for me was to just continue up at my own slow pace and relax and enjoy the easy jams and scrambling. The beautiful thing about this peak is that it gives you a wonderful alpine climbing experience. With the harder rock and exposure, long hike in, the second you crest the summit you feel as though you've gained a peak of massive importance. When I crested the summit and looked over the diamond all I could see was clouds thousands of feet below me covering the front range and to my west the vast expanses of the Indian Peaks and Rocky Mountain National Park. It was a beautiful moment especially with it all bathed in golden morning light. We summited at 10 of 7 so it was about a 6 hour trip up.

Goofy lookin' summit shot, can you tell I'm sleep deprived?



So this brings me to the other problem with Long's. Crowds. We got an early start so on the way up and at the summit there weren't that many folks but I would NEVER EVER start any later than we did because on the way down there were HORDES coming up the trough. The other problem with this is a lot of the terrain in the trough is loose scree. If I ever do this again I will be wearing a rock climbing helmet because I was living in terror that someone was gonna knock a rock down and kill me the entire way down.
There should really be a better education about the terrain and weather on long's. I saw people going up in Chacos, cotton t-shirts, jeans, carrying a single 8 oz water bottle. Seriously if there was a storm or something they'd be in some severe trouble. Last soapbox moment, PEOPLE PICK UP YOUR FREAKIN' GARBAGE! There was so much trash all over the standard route. It was absolutly foul.
Other than that I had a great time, the descent was pretty uneventful (as all good descents should be) other than a quick stop at the Chasm Lake viewing point to snap shots of the Diamond (god I want to climb that) and a beautiful view of the peak, I pretty much popped in my Ipod and let passion pit ease my weary legs down the peak.
Lessons learned, seriously pay attention to how my body is feeling on stuff like this....and don't pedicab before hand :) I would really like to go do this route again at somepoint, in a more rested state though as I feel like I'll enjoy it way more

RIP Lacy Meadows: July 24, 2010

It's been a hard few days.
I've been putting off writing anything here for the last few days as the thought of it has been way too much of an emotional leap. On Sunday, July 24, my friend and ski partner Lacy Meadows was found dead in the Indian Peaks Wilderness near Ogallala Peak after a fall. I found the news out as I was gathering gear up to head out the next day to go look for him. This is that phone call you never want to hear. It's the one you then never want to make as you need to spread the word to other friends who may not have heard yet.
Trying to come to terms with this over the last few days has been tricky. For one I've found myself being extremely sensitive and thin skinned. I've been easy to anger and one moment I'll be enjoying myself and laughing and the next moment I want to cry again. It's just so hard to believe that when the lifts start turning at Loveland this year he's not going to be there bombing down Spillway and Richard's Run over and over again with us.
Lacy was one hell of a skier. He loved to ski. I love to ski, but the way that Lacy loved to ski blew everyone I know out of the water. He loved a long hike, with a steep technical descent. He was known as the powder prophet, because he could always find the good snow on a bad snow day. Or as he would say, on a less better ski day because there are no bad ski days. He had this grin that I think I'll remember for the rest of my life. It was infectious, when you saw it in full bloom you got stoked. His passion and enthusiasm came radiating out everytime that grin showed up. And you better believe that no matter what he was skiing, he was grinning.
I skied one of my first spring couliours ever with Lacy. It was the first day I met him actually. It ended up being one of my favorite ski days of all time. Starlight coulior, James Peak, James Peak Wilderness. I remember being so scared looking into the coulior and it seriously taking me a moment before I could sack up to link some turns and when I paused to breathe, I looked up and there is hungover, barely having slept Lacy, ripping beautifully linked tele turns down the slope and smiling to beat the band. I'll always remember that day.

Lacy, wherever you are, I want you to know that your passion and love was inspiring to me. The way that you skied was an absolute beauty to watch and every time I saw you link a turn I wanted to be able to ski like that. I hope one day I'm even close to being as good as you. I'll miss you friendship and hanging out with you at the Plume or anywhere else and I'll miss your incredible lust for life. All of your friends down here are feeling as though something was ripped away from us, and I think it's knowing that your larger than life presence is no longer going to come busting in the door. I also hope that you've found peace, beauty and deep bottomless powder on the steep endless lines of heaven. I feel like you were taken from us too soon and that I should have had years more to ski with you (I know! I should have skied more big descents this spring!), but that when I think of the way you went and that the last thing you probably saw was a vista of the cragged Indian Peaks that I know you loved, I know that it filled you with peace and that gives me some comfort. I also know that every time I have an amazing ski day, I'll think of you and I know you'll have been with me carving up every turn.
Vaya con dios, my friend and wait for us at the top.

Alaska: Pika Glacier

Mike and I arrived in Anchorage after a late night flight around 2 am. Our shuttle wasn't getting us until 7 am so we had 5 hours to kill. I started the cycle early and busted out my sleeping pad and jacket and curled up in corner on the floor. Mike stayed awake. He's nuts.
After a couple of hours of surprisingly good sleep (amazing how exhausting pedi-cabbing can be) we caught our shuttle and arrived in Talkeetna. After dropping off our stuff, I took Mike on a short tour around downtown Talkeetna. Talkeetna is an awesome, awesome super cool hippie climber town. During the spring and summer it's packed with climbers and tourists. It's the best juxtaposition ever, you get fat princess cruise type tourists walking around next to super fit Denali climbers. Talkeetna's also got probably the best bar seen of any town I've been to in a while. The Fairview inn happens to be my personal favorite, it proudly takes the credit for President Hardings demise a few weeks after having beers there.
During the tour we swung by the ranger station and AMS, where we met our Guide/Instructor Greg Runyan and pow wowed briefly about the plans for the next day. After that it was beers and grub for the rest of the evening. Mike passed out around 730 pm as he hadn't slept the night before at all. He's nuts. I got beers, which I was super glad for cause they'd be my last libations for a few weeks.
The next day Greg picked us up at the hostel and we ran back to AMS for a morning full of skills trainings and gear checks. We met Allain, the 4th member of our team as well. Allain is a rockstar climber and french canadian and I hope to get many more adventures of this sort in with him. After a quick stop by the gear store and re packing we were set to head to Talkeetna Air Taxi, . If your ever going on this kind of a trip into the Alaska Range or simply doing a flight see, ONLY go with Talkeetna Air Taxi! They are by far the best pilots and for climbers they're the most reliable to pick you up.



Mike and Allain loading up the otter

Our destination was to be the Pika Glacier, a "small" glacier off the Kahiltna and a world class rock climbing destination. While this place is known for it's spectacular rock climbing I'm totally going to head back there in May at some point to ski. There were so many amazing looking couliors that look like they'd be a blast to get on in good snow.



A view of the Ruth Gorge on the flight in



An aerial view of the Pika Glacier, or home sweet home for the next two weeks!



Mike rockin' co pilot on the flight in.

So the plane landed and we hurriedly unloaded all the gear. (lot's of gear) and the plane piled it's other load of tourists back in and took off. This had to be one of the single most intimidating moments of my life. I won't lie and say that my first reaction wasn't "WHAT HAVE I GOTTEN MYSELF INTO!"
However, shortly afterwards we probed out our camp for crevasses and set it up and suddenly the glacier started to feel a little more like home. It's truly amazing how important a good camp set up is for this type of trip as it truly is your only shelter from the elements and in glacier terrain possibly the only place that isn't crevassed. Our tent, ice home consisted of two Mountain Hardwear Trango 3 tents, a Black Diamond Megamid and a crap hole where the CMC lived (Clean Mountain Can).









Some camp shots

So I thought originally that my body might have issues falling asleep due to the fact that it NEVER got fully dark while we were there. No issues whatsoever. I think the mental physical strain had me out like a light every night except until the end but I'm getting ahead of myself here.
The first day we did some skill work on crevasse rescue, anchor building and other useful glacier mountain skills and then roped up for a quick ski to go get a view of our potential objective, Granite creek and some unnamed spires.




View of Granite creek, a very little explored area off the Pika (future destination?)
Alain and Mike enjoying some little seen sunshine.
Skiing in mountaineering boots is freaking HARD. I consider myself to be a stellar skier and the first turn I did I feel flat on my ass. I finally made it down the equivalent of a green run looking like a total newb and to chorus of Greg cackling like a hyena. I have no idea why no one took a video of this it was hilarious.
(mike did the exact same thing)
We moved camp the next day in order to get closer to our objective (Exit Pass) and to as Greg put it, "to get away from the riff-raff". It was really nice to move camp down away from the landing zone and to what you might consider to be our own private little glacial valley. After a long trip in coupled with tons of learning moments on how to load a sled, more practice skiing roped up and with a heavy sled through heavily crevassed icefalls, we found ourselves down on what we've dubbed the Exit Glacier.

Greg on a rest break with the Dragon's spine and the Kahilitna Glacier in front of him. Notice all the sunshine. This was probably our only well timed weather window.


Mike with the Marsupial behind him.


Camp 2 with the Hobbit's path up the Dragon Spine in front of us.

This glacial valley was awesome! All around us we could see good rock, fun looking couliors and all sorts of other things that looked like a party to explore.
The next day dawned with some pretty nice weather so we decided to head over to the dragon's spine and get some "top roping" in.
After a nice short ski on in, which I got to take the lead end on through crevasse terrain (scary!). We got to the rock where we figured out a good system to get all 4 of us up it and started going!
Top roping turned into multi pitch trad climbing as the second we got above our first pitch that's where we found the really fun rock. Rule of thumb of climbing in the Alaska range is the higher up you get the better the rock gets, because it's been destroyed way less recently by the glacier and all the loose crap has gotten off it. The first pitch we climbed as fraught with perilious rock fall threat from a bove, while suddenly a good 70 meters up perfect granite cracks appeared. Delicious. It's worth mentioning that we were probably only the second people ever up this line as Greg and some of his buddies had put it up two years earlier and there were no definite quotes from anyone else putting anything else up up there.
Funny thing was, the higher we climbed the more the weather seemed to sock in, it wasn't raining so we kept on going although we were losing visibility and fast. We got to the top of our 5th pitch when Greg said we were going to do one more pitch and then head back down. This last pitch was probably the best crack climb I;ve ever done. Huge perfect jams alternating between gaping off widths and a nice traversing line. SO MUCH FUN!!! The pitch then topped out on one last bouldery move where you crawled out of a chimney onto a face that had about 300 feet of exposure dropping to the valley floor on one side and 400 feet on the other side (SCARY!)
Some Hobbits Path photos, all are by Greg Runyan, as I don't seem to have any :(




So as probably doesn't need to be said, it proceeded to start raining the second that we started our rappels. As I just described the end of pitch 6 up there, now add in lowering yourself backwards down it in the rain. Totally terrifying. The other raps after that were fairly innocous although there certainly were a lot of them and we were all getting pretty soaked and tired. As we got down to the bottom, Greg mentioned "Man, if it hadn't started raining we'd totally still be climbing."
I believe I replied something like, "Just in time for a late dinner"
Greg "What time is it anyway? 7 pm?"
Me: 10 pm?
Greg: YOUR KIDDING ME! NO WAY!

He's a madman, as he says though, "the higher you get, the higher you get!"

We had a badass ski back to camp, some rice noodles (Taste of Thai baby!) and crashed. The next day we decided to take it pretty easy and ski off to go check out Exit Glacier so we could plan out our next few days. A short snow climb and bergschrund navigation and we were up at the top of the pass. It was loose and rocky and we frankly did not like the looks of it. Our plan initiallly had been to rap down it, explore Granite glacier and the Granite spires and then ascend back up fixed ropes to regain our base camp after a few days of camping with light packs. We decided that the rockfall danger was way too great and that we should spend our next few days ice and snow climbing and working on general skill stuff instead.
Exit pass photos



The next few days were spent doing just that, ice climbing, and snow climbing. The highlight would be when we climbed a previously unnamed Coulior now dubbed the What? Coulior. This is in tribute to Alain and his language barrier that by this point had led Greg to issuing open threats of bodily harm to him for saying What? all the time. This was a super spicy fun mixed climb. It went at about 4 pitches up to the top, with the last two pitches being a mixture of snow, ice and rock. I won't write here the best thing about this coulior but if for some reason you find yourself heading there and you have the option of nice weather, bring your rock shoes with you to the top. Or hell, I'd go back and ski the damn thing given good snow conditions!

The What? Coulior and Exit Pass. I believe the what coulior is the one on the far Looker's left.



At this point in the trip I have to say our activity got severly limited due to weather conditions. I believe in the next week we managed to get two skis and two camp moves in due to rain on and off. One of our camp moves was accomplished on a rainy evening (we suck at weather windows) back up to the Hobbit's footstool and wound through a beautiful yet terrifying icefall lit up with twilight mist. I remember thinking that it was pretty damn cool looking! God bless my hardshell pants is all I have to say after this whole trip. Other than that our attempts to go rock climbing kept on getting shut down by weather or gigantic crevasse and bergschrund holes.
Here are some final highlight photos from the last of the "planned" trip.












So the last night we were supposed to be there we were given a beautiful gift and what I took as a good omen from the mountains. The skies cleared and we were given an incredible view of Mt. Foraker, in it's full summit at twilight. Little did we know that this was the last of any clear skies we would see for the next 60 hours.

My attempt at capturing the beauty that Mt. Foraker showed us, a piss poor attempt I might add...




We called TAT that evening and asked if they could come pick us up, considering we had accomplished all of our objectives. They said they were socked in in Talkeetna and couldn't. No big deal if the weather stays like this we'll for sure be out tomorrow.
I got up at 4 am to go take a pee and the glacier was so socked in you couldn't see 20 meters in front of you. CRAP. As the day went on our dreams of beer, burgers and debauchery in Talkeetna kept on getting further and further away, as this was also July 4th we were seriously hoping to get down to a rollicking good party. As 8 pm rolled around we resigned ourselves to couscous and food.
I'd say the hardest part of this kind of tent socked in was keeping our spirits up. Especially at the end of a trip when all we wanted to do was go home and yet we couldn't and other than the daily sat phone call we had no way of finding anything out about when we might get out of there. It was pretty easy to get really really down on the whole experience. Also as day 3 rolled around we were starting to run out of food and fuel pretty seriously, I know I had started limiting my consumption and trying to ween myself down to the minimum amount of food required to keep me running by this point. If we had been there one more night our dinner was going to be black beans in a tomato paste and I was already recycling green tea bags for my morning caffeine boost.
Some shots of our imprisonment:




On the third day we were stuck there we woke up to half a meter of the stickiest heaviest snow we'd seen, and my first reaction was FUCK we're never getting out of here. Around 11:30 the skies started to clear and we put a phone call in to TAT who said that t hey were trying and hopefully they'd see us soon. We started to slowly pack, heard a few planes buzzing around but not bust through the cloud cover and then went back to chill mode. Shortly before 2 pm, I got a feeling, that we needed to start doing something, so we packed up a few other things and Mike and I shuttled a load over to the LZ. Just as we were about to drop off our stuff and ask some other dudes who were there if they'd heard anything, we heard a BZZZZZZZZ and saw an Otter break through the clouds in between one of the mountain passes!
My reaction : "PLANE! PLANE!!!" and spring back to camp to break down the tents. I had our trango down in one minute 30 seconds I have to say. Short landing and loading and we were on our way back to Talkeetna and the land of the green and living!

This trip was awesome. A couple of things I would do next time I do a trip like this 1) Make sure my return plane ticket is changeable
2)Bring loads of emergency rations
3) Bring a Crazy Creek Chair

AMS is awesome. If this is the kind of experience your interested in getting I would reccomend them 100% for their knowledge and abilities in teaching. I'm definetly going to go on this kind of a trip again however, at this point I need a few weeks not in a tent!






















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