Foraker 2011: Thursday, April 28 – Kahiltna base camp to Crosson (Day 2)

Watch for links to video below, and click pics for larger versions!

We poked our heads out the tent door this morning around 7:30 AM and got a faceful of perfect blue skies--and Mt. Frances.

Nate Opp, our lead guide, and Joey McBrayer prepared a light "breakfast" of bagels and cream cheese for me and my climbing companions for the next two weeks: Craig, Bob, and Kirk.

Craig is a big tall guy with an easy laugh and a gravelly voice, and reminds me quite a lot of Jerry from last year.

Bob is a quieter, less gregarious character who seems oddly reflective, perhaps a bit distant, and who has known Craig for about 45 years. They've climbed lots of big mountains together.

Mt. Frances' false summit. I stood on the true summit last year. CLICK THIS AND MAKE SURE YOU VIEW IT AT 100%!

Both men are in their 60s, and while Bob *seems* solid, Craig is more of a sure bet. He's definitely the guns-blazing-get-after-if mountain climber type. You can hear his booming gritty baritone from far away and he's quick with a joke, while Bob seems more content to let Craig take most of center stage. Both have climbed many times with AMS.

Craig

Kirk seems like a nice guy. Funny, and begins most of his sentences with "like" haha

He's climbed with Nate before on Mount Russell last year (which they summited… a peak that's on my list, too), and has also been with AMS many times before. As the least experienced climber and the only one on the expedition who's wholly new to AMS, that sorta leaves me feeling like a bit of an outsider.

In fact, I've found myself strangely quiet the last couple days… not my usual outgoing, loud, slightly obnoxious self. I think that's partly because of the sobering nature of this kind of climbing for me, and partly because of the group dynamic, but that's ok... I'm here to climb.

Bob

At any rate, all of us are tall, lanky types, so nobody is really dwarfed when we're all standing around. Kind of an interesting dynamic.

After we finished eating, we broke camp, loaded up our packs, packed our sled duffels, strapped those into our sleds, rigged the sled hauls to our packs, roped up, popped on our accursed snowshoes, and started the crunchy, lurching (but easy) march across the glacier.

Kirk and Craig loading up for the glacier walk

As I suspected, we were split into two rope teams of three men each, with a guide at the front of each team. I was on Nate's rope, with Craig in the middle, and me last.

Joey broke trail with Kirk and Bob in tow, and we followed (thanks for breaking trail, guys). We started down Heartbreak Hill—so named because Denali climbers returning from grueling West Buttress climbs are confronted with this very long hill before they can at last collapse in Kahiltna base camp at the top.

We headed down the West Buttress track for a mile or two before cutting off hard left, finally slogging into unbroken powder for nearly the entire Kahiltna crossing, aiming for the foot of Crosson – and Foraker. God, they're huge.

My team, being second as I mentioned, had the benefit of Joey's team's trail (thanks, guys!). It was mostly pretty easy glacier walking for a while, with some ups and downs as we undulated up, over, around, and between crevasses.

There were a few icy cracks here and there, but it seems like this early in the year, the crevasses are mostly still covered by snow bridges.

We'd done some crevasse rescue scenarios last night to make sure we are all on the same page for today's crossing, and the new-to-me pre-rig prusik and ascender setups Nate demonstrated for getting yourself out of a crack were now spinning through my head as I stepped and walked over crevasses both small and large.

Break before veering off the West Buttress path into untracked snow

And while I definitely hate the klunkiness of snowshoe design (have I mentioned that?), I was nevertheless glad to have the flotation they provided in deep snow.

My pack/sled combination was heavier—probably MUCH heavier—than it should have been, due to packing too much food (as usual), too much gear, and an unfortunately large, heavy (but awesome) camera at my side, so without my snow shoes, I'd have been sinking a lot deeper than I already was.


The 1.5 hour glacier walk to the lower of the two icefalls we were aiming for near the toe of Crosson was pretty easy, with a good pace... but it's hard to keep your eyes off the giants in the background.

We skirted it up a hill to the left and wove our way up to the flat area that separated the upper and lower icefalls and serac fields. The plan was to hang a right on that flat and head straight over to the rocky base of Crosson—and that's exactly what we did.

Being last on a rope team can suck if the leader isn't paying attention to pace. On undulating up/down terrain like this, the leader might be heading down the other side of a hill you're just starting up, and gravity is on his side.

Mt. Foraker's massive Southwest ridge and face. CLICK THIS!

If he's paying attention to where the rest of the rope team is behind him, it's not so bad, because he'll slow his pace until the guy in back crests the hill. If not, you have to really motor on uphill terrain to keep up—which means you can be working very VERY hard hard on uphills from the back of the rope.

Nate is a great leader, but we were all still finding our groove with each other, so he probably wasn't paying attention to pace in this way today, and I found it extremely challenging to keep up. 

Consequently, near the top of the big hill between the icefalls, I was overheating and sweating profusely--a condition to be avoided in mountaineering.

I was a little mystified by this... I'm in amazing shape, and very strong, so this shouldn't have posed any kind of problem physically.

Note: I've since realized, having experienced this kind of challenge during two other days this trip that the main problem was not being fueled up for breakfast with enough calories to perform at the sustained high levels mountain climbing requires.

Approaching the lower icefall below our access point to Crosson

My other hard days from this trip came on 1. another bagel day, and 2. a two-pack of instant oatmeal day… about 400 calories of input vs. the huge, 5000-7000 calorie average output days of hard expedition climbing.


No matter how many 270-calorie energy bars you wolf down on short breaks, it's never enough without a huge breakfast to start with).


Today, I was just simply just out of gas, and hit the wall early. I've learned that I'm a very strong climber, but to take full advantage of that strength, I MUST be fueled up properly to perform at a high level… otherwise, I just have to wallow through it, and that can make for a very, very hard day.

Crosson Base Camp, looking back toward Kahiltna Base. Probing the site.

At about this point, I made another mistake: the day was heating up, and I should have shed a layer when Craig stopped the rope team unexpectedly to do just that. I thought I'd be ok, but it got hotter, and I got sweatier (and therefore wetter), so that just made the problem worse.

It was also about this time that my left snowshoe (which I hate—have I mentioned...? haha) came sloppy loose and started getting hung up on my boot every other step or so, causing me to sink a lot of unnecessary additional effort into correcting it, while still keeping moving at pace. Eventually, I had to stop the team to fix that, too. (Note: I sound like such a whiny little bitch as I'm transcribing this journal entry. HAHA)

We reached the base of Crosson about where we expected, but Nate and Joey didn't readily spot a good place to camp, so we continued and dropped down the slope a bit to a flat area a little lower than the gully we planned to ascend to gain the ridge tomorrow.

Nate and Joey probed the prospective camp for crevasses.

With such a light breakfast and only a couple of snacks on the trip, I was more gassed than I should have been, so stomping out a tent platform seemed pure, unadulterated masochism, but it was fine, and we eventually got a comfortable camp established.

Nate and Joey climbing the gully (yes, there are people in this shot)

We ate an early dinner, too, so that Nate and Joey could gear up once more and go do an exploratory climb to cache some gear higher up and anchor a fixed rope up the gully for the teams to use tomorrow.

Dinner was welcome, and very tasty: macaroni and cheese with ham, peas, and carrots. After this morning's meager volume, I made a point to mention to Nate the same thing Jason and Tyler learned last year from experience: I need more fuel, so if there's anything left, I'll take it.

Me: the human disposal, as usual. HAHA

After dinner, Nate and Joey donned their harnesses and packs again and took off up the mountain, heading for a bergschrund below a steep, narrow, rock and ice gully that led up the side of Crosson and onto rock scree on the ridge above.

This aspect of Crosson melts out quickly every year, which is why this expedition goes so early, I learned.

They were gone about three hours, and cached some of the gear they were carrying (wands, group food, and a few gallons of fuel) near the ridge above us, and set a rope for us to stabilize our climb up the gully tomorrow.

Shortly after they got back to camp, it started to fog in, cloud over, and Foraker disappeared from view as it started to snow lightly.

If that keeps up through tonight, we won't be climbing tomorrow. Weather report is for snow in the night, so it's not looking good.

Panorama of the Foraker/Crosson massif - CLICK THIS!

Foraker 2011: Wednesday, April 27-Talkeetna (Day 1)

Watch for links to video below, and click pics for larger versions.

I arrived at 8 AM at AMS—once again deprived of another Talkeetna delicacy, the epic cinnamon rolls from The Roadhouse. They're not open til 9! WTF. I want!!

I mean, come on... besides climbing, there just aren't THAT many things that make a trip to Talkeetna worthwhile foodwise, and I've so far missed out on two of the three I was looking forward to!! GAH!

Anyway, we did introductions, ran through a swift gear check (where I shaved at least 10 pounds from my pack… overpacked!! Did I mention? Ha ha). Awesome.

Before we took off, we harnessed up and did some crevasse self rescue training out back, hanging from the rafters on ropes. It was a new twist (for me) on the familiar prusik method... just basically getting everybody on the same page using a partial "Texas pre-rig" system for glacier travel. I found it educational, since I've never done glaciers pre-rigged with prusiks in case of falls.

Kevin Wright. With a brother Brian. Weird.

When that was done, we finished packing our gear into backpacks and sled duffels, loaded it all up in the van, and headed over to the Ranger station to sign in and pay our climbing fees... $210 for Foraker. Ouch!

Oh yeah, one weird thing: we were required to do a briefing on the dangers of Foraker at the NPS station, and it was basically just a presentation from one of the rangers... who was named Kevin Wright (same as my bro).

I noticed it right on his nametag and interrupted him mid-sentence.Turns out he has a brother named Brian, too. Bizarro.

Just like always, it's a whirlwind of "hurry up and wait" activity and deadlines getting out of Talkeetna and onto the glacier.

We rushed over to the airstrip... where we promptly sat down and waited for our TAT pilot to figure out whether there was an air leak in his left tire or not.

They got it sorted, though, and we loaded the gear up, boarded the plane and flew directly onto the glacier.

How awesome is that? There have been people stuck in town burning time for three days waiting for weather to get good enough to fly onto the glacier, but the instant I show up, the weather clears, and on we fly, with not a single minute lost. Haha Sweet!

All the other climbers in town should thank me for showing up haha. Anyway I got tons of epic shots of the Alaska Range on the way in,we dumped gear on the snow, and set up camp.

It's a very eerie feeling at Kahiltna Base Camp this year. There's almost nobody here, and much more than last year, it's now scarily evident just how remote a location this truly is.

Last year, climb season was in full swing with tons of Denali traffic, bustle, tents, noise, and everything else.

Today, though, the NPS tents aren't even set up yet, there's barely even a runway, and we're making first tracks in the snow almost everywhere we go.

A high glacier that pours its ice off an immense cliff 

It's a deathly silent and beautiful experience , standing amid these giant spires, towers and buttresses... one that requires, if you're even the slightest bit of a thinking person, serious consideration of what one is about to undertake. I was awed once again by their very presence, and knowing that I was to climb what lay before me in short order gave me a reason to consider my quest even more seriously than I had up to this point.


And there, across the glacier once more, looms Foraker, silent and vast. I'd forgotten just how massive it is, the way it forces you to look, the way it draws your gaze and fills the field of view of even the unwilling.

Crosson is utterly vision-filling, too, lying under nearly perfect blue azure skies.

Today, it's touched occasionally by drifting fingers of cloud that caress its slopes, as though the mountain were the immense pet of an even larger, colder, and less corporeal being whose stroking hand is manifested only in wisps as they cross the dimensional boundaries that divide us from the deep, ancient souls of the mountains.


The whole area is exhilarating—and terrifying. I can see nearly our entire route from here. Crosson, the dirty and imposing dirtpile; Foraker, icy and forbidding, guarded by gargoyles, corniced ridges, insane hanging glaciers, titanic ice falls, and other immobile-yet-raging menaces.

Foraker looms

It's always been a mountain to me that fairly bristles with benevolent (and yes, even malevolent) attitude, a mountain that dares one to climb it.

Sitting this close to such a towering monster—one that was once only an idea, a concept, an intention to climb—I can now feel in the reality of the actions I set in motion the icy breath of the mountain.

And I can hear the distant deep booming of its heart, as the mighty seracs on its flanks collapse in cataclysmic explosions of neon blue ice.

Crosson in the mist

There's a power beyond description in these great peaks.

A shot of the Crosson start

That I underestimated even the size of Crosson (not to mention Foraker) as I sat home in my little world, studying picture after picture of it on a tiny screen was painfully obvious the instant I stepped off the plane and into the pillowy snows of the Kahiltna.

I realized that I had been lulled by the sense of tranquility that photos of these mountains can sometimes portray. My sensitivity to being dwarfed by these great beings was dulled by the time spent in proximity to them as I stood in this same spot last year.

But I know in my heart that I'm absolutely up to the task. I've prepared hard, and with great discipline and forethought... no more thinking. It's time for doing. Tomorrow, we climb.

Foraker 2011: Tuesday, April 26, Talkeetna, Alaska - travel day

Watch for links to video below, and click pics for larger versions.

Bambi hangin' with her daddy
for a while before he leaves



I woke to an easy preflight ritual this morning. My flight wasn't til 1pm, so it was rather unlike many trips I've taken lately where I've had to be up at the butt-crack of dawn.

I've spent the last several days frantically running around comparing gear lists, because for whatever reason, AMS has multiple versions : one mostly geared toward climbing Denali's West Buttress, and another that's based on that one, but a little more Foraker-specific—but they don't agree completely.

BOOM!

And neither of them agree completely with my own list items; packing got unruly quickly. Looked like a climbing gear bomb went off in my studio.

Last year's experience in the Alaska Range has proven invaluable, though, as I now have at least some sense of what worked for me and what didn't.

So comparing all three lists I'm finally packed, and my First Ascent bags are once again sitting in the family room waiting to be (tortuously) lugged out to the 4Runner for transport to the airport. I believe I'm one bag smaller this year, though, and for a trip that's more than twice as long, I call that progress!

 Still, it's just a ton of crap… I'm probably still overpacked, too, like always. This whole thing with packing light is always a challenge for an anal retentive idiot like me, but I am getting better. It just takes practice.

My modest room at the Tee Pee

My flight today was at 12:40 PM—which means it got in to Anchorage around 6pm: a great time if you like getting to an airport at an hour where no trains run and nothing but expensive custom trips go to Talkeetna, and then charge you $150 each direction for the privilege. Gas prices are crazy now, true, but still… Ouch. Last year was $60 each way.

The flight: so uneventful as to be nearly unworthy of mention here, and my ride to TKA was equally aggressively mundane.

The rugged Chugach range just outside Anchorage

I dropped my gear off at AMS around 9:30 PM and had high hopes of a caribou burger at the West Rib, but it was not to be: the were closed for the night.

So instead, I headed over to my "hotel," the Tee Pee where I stayed last year, and whose proprietor is still that same nice, but wayyyy too chatty older woman. She promptly checked me in.


I asked if there was anywhere still serving food in town and was told nobody was open at this hour. GARRR!

Miraculously, though, she volunteered that she'd hosted a banquet at the hotel that day, and had tons of leftover food—and that she would feed me for free!! Done, and done.

The Chugach range

I took my stuff to my room. I sat on the bed. Bored. Hmmm... Continue sitting in room and ponder my impending starvation. Wait, what am I doing? Okay, time to eat.


Two huge plates of barbecue baby back ribs, macaroni salad, garlic bread, and two beverages later, I crashed.

Foraker: 4 days and counting

Watch for links below, and click pics for larger versions!



Mt. Crosson (foreground), Peak 12,472 (bump on
the right), Foraker towering behind

It's odd... in the last few days leading up to my departure for the heavily glaciated and shattered flanks of Mt. Foraker, Crosson, and Peak 12,472, I've caught myself absentmindedly reflecting upon the complex web of training, planning, circumstance, drive, and need that has led me to this point. It's as though I'm drawn back to memories of the process subconsciously, automatically--almost inexorably.

Perhaps it's just the final manifestations--the death throes of the near-obsession mentality I've had as my mantra over the course of the past 12 months.

That laser-focus has been a necessary part of the journey, too, to keep me focused on doing what's required day in and day out to be physically and mentally prepared for a climb of this magnitude. But it's as though that deep rumbling in my spirit is finally ready to stop making quakes and at last relinquish my mind to the actual experience, instead of just far-off imaginings of what the reality *might* be.

Day by day, week after week, month after month, I've struggled against gravity in the gym, hurled myself into the street for long runs down neverending dark roads, leapt, pushed, squatted, pulled, grunted, screamed, and sworn my way to the condition in which I now find myself... prepared.

Punctuated by the weekly rituals of long miles in steep upward slogs under outrageous pack weights to the tops of local peaks, I now stand fully ready to perform in the manner of my training, and to now do it in one of the world's most unforgiving and inhospitable environments: the Central Alaska Range.

But here I am, 4 days from embarcation and, like last year, I again find myself put upon by the same strange paradoxical emotions. It's a dizzying cocktail of exhilaration, trepidation, confidence, disbelief, conflict, fear, and certainty that always seems to be fueled by a latent, ill-mannered guest in my head: a quiet but nevertheless nagging worry.

Worry that I didn't train hard enough, didn't practice the right skills, didn't weight my packs heavy enough, didn't train on the right kinds of terrain or with enough variety... but I know in my heart and in my conscious mind during daylight hours that I did all those things--and more.

I'm absolutely ready... but at times like these, I can never quite seem to shake that quiet doubt, as if a slippery worm were turning over and over inside my head, boring tiny pinholes in my otherwise iron resolve. It's fascinating to uncover such strange and conflicting feelings.

A few days ago, I was tooling around on the web looking for climbing statistics for 2010 on both Denali and Foraker, and I was struck by some of the facts I found.

For example, I ran across this image of a 2010 expedition on the Sultana Ridge of Foraker, the same route I will attempt this year. It came from their expedition blog. The weather looks great in the photo, and they definitely found a nice window of opportunity here. As alpine climbers, we all hope for such opportunities, for they often lead to summits.

Interestingly, though, a glance at the stats revealed that just 9 climbers in all of 2010 attempted it, and that a team of 3 climbers were the only ones to summit Foraker via the Sultana Ridge... which tells me this photo may not be that team (because there's a fourth man taking the picture). Glancing through previous years' numbers showed similarly low attempt numbers. By contrast, in 2010, Denali (across the Kahiltna glacier from mighty Foraker) had 1,222 climbers registered to attempt it.

The 2011 Foraker numbers, though, showed just 6 registered! ... and then it hit me: one of those 6 was ME, and the other 5 were the rest of my climbing party. We will have the entire mountain to ourselves. 

The ferocious subarctic weather of the region will determine our every move on the mountain. But while there are other factors that can cause an expedition to fail, if everyone remains healthy and in good spirits, I, too, hope to be approaching the base of the Sultana Ridge in the next few weeks.

But even if waiting out storms and running out of time high on the mountain means "defeat" and turning around without a summit, I have always believed in drinking from any experience as much knowledge and learning as I possibly can. This mountain is beautiful to behold... but she is a rare and fickle creature, and does not allow many to conquer her. With uncooperative weather, there's indeed a good chance I won't summit. She's that kind of mountain; but there is no defeat if you walk away with lessons learned.

• Thanks to a new sponsorship from Spot, you can now track my path up the mountain by satellite between 4/27/11 and 5/15/11 here:
• I'll also be using my Spot Connect to post updates to my Facebook wall, too.

See you when I return.

On the summit of the Radio Control Tower - May, 2010. The tail of Mt. Hunter's west ridge
is on the left, Foraker in the distance.

Final training for Mt. Foraker -- on Mt. Shasta April 15-17, 2011

Watch for links to video below, and click pics for bigger versions!

What better way to finish up a 6-month training cycle for the biggest climb of one's life than on beautiful Mt. Shasta? That's exactly what I did this past weekend in preparation for my departure next week for three weeks expedition on 17,400-foot Mt. Foraker, 200 miles south of the Arctic Circle, deep in the Alaska Range.

I was excited to spend three days in the backcountry of my official "home mountain", camping, climbing, ski mountaineering and touring, refreshing my crevasse rescue system and ice/snow anchor building skills, and generally doing a dress rehearsal for living for in frigid winter weather.

This time of year falls into an amazing transition Shasta makes between ferocious, unpredictable winter and periodic spring powder dumps of spring, and it seems there's been no shortage of that this year, but

Forecast says rain for the weekend… hmm… bleh. Well, one does what one must… and off I went. I was excited to see the mountain again as I made the 5 hour drive from San Jose. The goal for this trip was to leave early so I'd arrive with plenty of light to get up to Bunny Flat, ski in, and find a good campsite before dark.

I arrived with plenty of light, grabbed a few items at The Fifth Season down in town, and headed up. The higher I went, the foggier it got, however, and as I pulled into the parking lot to prep my gear for the climb in, I was in near-zero visibility fog conditions—and it was drizzling. Yuck.

I changed into mountaineering gear, shouldered my pack (which I'd packed to about 60 lbs, as though this were the real deal on Foraker), slapped skins on my skis, clicked into my bindings, and headed off up the mountain. I climbed about 200-300 vertical feet before I realized just how foggy it was getting… and the dark was coming.

So I found a suitable spot up higher, stomped out a platform for the tent, but then changed my mind and decided to follow my track back down a bit so that my mountain guide could find me more easily tomorrow.

I skied back down a ways, but I struggled to find the track in the fog, and I really couldn't tell much about my heading. So in the gathering rainy gloom, I continued downward, and then decided I must have missed the cutoff to the right, which put me farther below my origin than anticipated.

All that aside, it was time to get camp set, or I'd be doing it in the dark. I found a spot that was protected from the only small avalanche danger I could see near me, stomped out another platform in the deep snow, and as silent darkness enveloped me, I set up camp, got comfy, and cooked dinner. Tasty. I love this.

All bundled up, I was tired from the drive, and soon felt the urge to crash.

It was a rough first night. Rain drummed on my tent on and off through the night, and the transition from comfy bed at home to winter sleeping pads in my tent wasn't a smooth one. I woke up every few hours, checked my watch, tossed a bit, and then finally fell into a deep sleep near 4am.

2 hours later, I woke to crystal clear skies and a beautiful alpenglow dawn breaking over the hills across the flat, and a glance uphill staggered me. The mountain was just coming out of a restless fog, and it was clearing. I grabbed the camera, threw on my down camp booties, and lurched out into the snow to start snapping pictures.

After that, I looked down the hill… and my realized my campsite was the perfect distance from the car, and in an exactly perfect spot, too. AWESOME.

A hearty breakfast of eggs, hash browns, peppers, onions, and sausage, complete with coffee, spiced hot cider, some cocoa rounded out my morning, and I then set about the daily task of melting snow to fill up my water bottles again.

I had originally planned to get out early for a quick skin and ski up the mountain, but I was enjoying the scenery so much, I decided to just wait it out until Dane from Shasta Mountain Guides arrived.

We'd spend the day drilling on crevasse rescue systems, rope skills, glacier travel, anchor building, and other things I'll need to be sharp on when I arrive in AK next week.

He arrived at 9pm sharp, and most of the morning was spent discussing anchors. I then built a good strong one, attached the climbing rope to me and a backpack to the other end, and tossed it over a 15-foot snow cliff to act as the "fallen climber in the crevasse" I'd be rescuing.

That was fun. We built the primary direct haul systems for 3:1 and 5:1 with a couple of variants thrown in for special situations, and then moved on to rope skills discussion and practice.

Then it was on to fixed line ascension and review of technique and options for climbing on running belays, and fixed lines, which we'll probably be using on Foraker to get people up trickier sections. I especially like that we got to spend some time on personal tricks that make life safer or better on any glacier.

Then Dane and I headed uphill to my campsite, where I cooked me some lunch and provided hot water for his afternoon beverages, and then we set out on a ski tour up to about 8k… Horse Camp.

It was an easy climb up the gully leading to the Gulch, Green Butte Ridge running upward on our right, but got a great workout in, and we did it in about an hour, arriving at a COMPLETELY buried lodge (up to it's rootop!) owned by the Sierra Club that's only used for emergencies. Super cool place… stone walls, a huge fireplace, and a classic European feel, and it sits near the base of the spectacular Avalanche Gulch. This is a route I've never done on Shasta so far. I did the North side twice last year, soloing it once, but the South side is much more accessible, and that's the main reason the majority of climbers go up this way.

Anyway, while we were transitioning for the ski back down, the rain picked up a bit… yuck. We waited it out a bit, got the gear dialed, and then took an easy ski back down our skin tracks on manky wet snow. Back at camp, I had a brilliant idea that I could never do on the North side of the mountain, because it's so remote: drop the gear and head into town with Dane for burgers! That was a good idea.

After a BBQ chipotle bacon burger (whoa!) at the Wayside, I thanked him for his time and expertise—it was super valuable to me—and then I headed back up to my little campsite.

I vowed that if it were raining when I woke the next morning (I'd checked the forecast in town… more rain predicted in the morning and afternoon), that I'd pack up camp first thing and head back home. Why? Climbing in the rain totally sucks, and when you don't even HAVE to, it's especially miserable.

Sleep came easy Saturday night. I'd had a good workout and a huge gut-bomb of a meal, complete with sweet potato fries, so I pretty much passed out and slept warm. Again, though, every few hours I'd toss a bit, check my watch, and go back to sleep, again finding my sleep rhythm near the morning hours.

I overslept Sunday morning, so I missed the early dawn light, but caught some fantastic pictures in completely clear weather! I was stunned and excited to have a window of opportunity to climb again, so after a hasty breakfast of gross oatmeal, good coffee, and more hot beverages, I threw on my climbing gear again, packed up my camp entirely, and back up the hill I went under near-full weight..

Instead of bearing left to the lodge at Horse Camp this time, I hung right a bit, skinning along a line of trees on the upper slop of the approach gully, grunted up the last few hundred vertical feet to a flat area at about treeline with a spectacular view of just about EVERYTHING, and shot a bunch of pics.

I was satisfied, and with my mission accomplished, I stood about halfway up Shasta's mighty flanks, and knew it was time to go home. The difference, however, is that today's uphill pack was fully loaded, so the ski down was quite a bit harder than the day before. My quads were burning by the halfway down mark.

But it was a quicker ski down, nevertheless… and all the way to the car this time, too. I sorted gear in the parking lot for a bit and waffled about whether I should cook a meal here before I headed back home, thought better of it, and loaded up for a bailout.

 On the way home, I noticed I'd taken 344 pictures. Whoa. HAHA

My first backcountry ski tour - North Fork Wilderness, Big Cottonwood Canyon, Utah

Watch for links to video below, and click the pics for larger versions!!

Well... it was time once more for ANGST (the Annual Naked Guy's Ski Trip haha) in Utah. This year was to be Park City... 4 days of bliss in feathery Utah pow, but after having done a backcountry ski training course this past weekend at Alpine Meadows in Tahoe with the ever-cool Rich Meyer (my guide the first time I went up Shasta last year), I decided to fly in a few days early to put my newfound skills to the test.

With a huge dump of fresh powder in the night, my original plan was actually to just head up Big Cottonwood Canyon to Solitude and resort-ski my ass off while maybe diving off into a bit of the sidecountry. But on the way there, I spotted the most beautiful lines in high, uncut snowfields, accessed by up a steep drainage in the North Fork trail direction.

I simply couldn't resist the call of it. In a split-second, I'd made the decision to stop, pulled off to the side of the road, parked the car at the trailhead, and unloaded my crap.

It didn't take me too long to get the skins on my skis and out onto the track, and along the way, I made a few carefully planned switchbacks that gave me the opportunity to practice my kick turns, and kept a good, steady, efficient grade up the mountain.

About 500 vertical feet up the first hill I paused for a minute, because I heard a helicopter coming in. Sure 'nuff... below was a heli rescue happening, apparently for somebody at the nordic center. Can you get injured cross country skiing? Maybe somebody had a heart attack or something. I dunno... Bizarro... Anyway,

I continued upward, and every minute I climbed higher gave me ever more spectacular views. It was such a perfect day... sunny but cold, and the snow conditions were perfect. the scenery got more spectacular by the minute.

It was a perfect sunny day, snow conditions were good, . And Higher and higher I went, marveling at my good fortune. THIS is why I do what I do... those perfect solitary moments of quiet calm, of absolute alone-ness... I had the entire mountainside to myself, and I couldn't believe people were passing this by.

I had set a time limit for myself of a few hours just sorta cruising around up in the area to see what I could see and get some good practice in before heading back down, and I definitely found what I needed. Pure perfection, in a single photograph:

I think I'd have just about killed for an ultrawide or a 180-degree fisheye to capture even more of that scene. The clouds were perfect, the day was bright, and the conditions were pristine, but the deep powder below me beckoned as the sun waxed high.

Amply satisfied, I decided to find myself a place to transition from climbing to skiing and head back down to the car. Due to some poor planning of my upward line, I got a little bit hung up in some trees near the top of my route for the day, so I had to kinda work my way out of that mess and traverse back over into the clean downhill line I'd spotted far below and hours earlier.

I finally made my way out, found a good spot to transition, and made the switch. As I took one last glimpse of the perfect beauty that surrounded me, I shook my head in disbelief. "Imagine what I could see if I actually PLANNED to be here," I thought to myself.

And then I hurled myself down the hill in fresh, chest deep Utah fluff. WOW. Hard to beat a perfect line in perfect snow on a such a heartbreakingly perfect day.