Thursday, July 29, 2010

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.

Friday, July 9, 2010

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!






















re