Shasta and the Midlife Crisis.

Climbing changed my life and specifically climbing Mt Shasta on July 14, 2002. To be sure, other things have changed my life to a greater extent but not in the same way.  I climbed Mount Shasta on my fortieth birthday with the precise intent to shake things up. I had seen Mount Shasta hundreds of times. On the rare day that it isn’t smoggy, you can see Shasta from the Sacramento River valley, and you see it from Klamath Falls, Oregon, and I lived in both. Mount Shasta was omnipresent for many years of my life and I had also read John Muir’s Snow Storm On Mount Shasta.  Gripping stuff.

Mount Shasta as seen near base near Brewer Creek. Google image.

The recommendations and stats for the route are:

1. Mt Shasta - 14,162 feet, it has four glaciers, the only glaciers in California.
2. There are several routes up Mt Shasta but no trails ascend above 10,000 feet
3. Our route, the Brewer Creek Route starts ~7,000 feet, most on snow.
4. The route crosses a small section at the top of the Hotlum Glacier.
5. The climbing season is early to mid summer as the scree beneath the snow is unstable.
6. It is recommended climb start before 2 AM so you ascend before the snow slushes up in the afternoon.
7. All Shasta climbs require ice axe and crampons
8. All Shasta climbs require an understanding of self rescue.
9. A thousand or so people climb it every year. Hundreds of thousands climb fourteeners.

 Some stats and info about myself and climbing team.

1. All but one of the climbers were part of my family and included Doug (brother), Katie (niece), David (nephew), William (brother), Rebecca (William’s girlfriend), Sam (brother), Michael (nephew), Aubrey (daughter), Randy (brother in law), and me. The group spanned a range of ages, the youngest was Aubrey (14) and oldest was Doug (46).
2. I was nearing forty and feeling out of shape because I was out of shape.
3. Prior to the trip nine of the ten climbers had never seen an ice axe except as a door handle to an REI. I organized the trip and I was one of the nine.
4. Self rescue requires the use of ice axe and crampons. See 8 above.
5. I was living at sea level in California, I spent most of my teens in Arizona, and I was born in Utah. All but one of us lived at low elevation and we didn’t have time to acclimate.  

We practiced self rescue here. 

If you live in Arizona, California, or Utah, and you are at all outdoorsy you carry a pocket knife for all manner of uses. Uses could include carving a spoon, cutting a bagel, spreading cream cheese, removing a splinter or in rare instances one may need to amputate their own arm if it gets stuck under a rock. It happened before in Utah and Utah is where I was born. Aaron Ralston’s amputation story doesn’t relate to my Shasta experience directly except to inform the reader that climbers in Juneau perceive wearing crampons and carrying an axe as a common place experience much like carrying a pocket knife anywhere else.  I had never been to Alaska prior to our climb and in my mind that gear was the stuff of serious National Geographic. This was 13 years ago. Little did I know that ice and axe and crampons are pretty easy to use. 

In my 39^th year I simply felt out of sorts like though my life was good, it seemed much of it was not my choosing. I spent the first 25 years of my life in a fairly religious setting and obedience to leadership the “First law of Heaven.” That works great as long as the direction you want your life to go lines up with the direction your leaders want your life to go.. Religious leaders held the rudder to my life in my early years.  In my mid twenties I abandoned religion but didn’t completely figure out how to grab the rudder for myself.  In my thirties I kept thinking about Henry David Thoreau’s famous quote, “I went into the woods because I wished to live deliberately.” That’s a pretty hefty statement by Ole Hank when you think about it.  Live deliberately. Does anyone really do that? I sure as hell wasn't and I am still working on it now.. So there is the back story. 

 Mount Shasta with Brewer Creek route.

As my fortieth birthday approached I wished to live deliberately. If you are thinking that this might be a tale of a guy in a midlife crisis, you could very well be correct. That’s what mid life crises are about.  Somebody, usually a man, makes an attempt to live deliberately that often ends with the consequences of rash decisions.  The crisis victim looks around and clearly understands that he never chose the life he's living and time is running out to change course. Crazy and dumb things can happen but great things as well. There is truth to a midlife crisis because quite honestly most people aren't half a free as they think they are. Women ought to have them as well.  I wasn’t looking to get a young girlfriend and I was too poor to buy a sports car but I figured I could learn to be one of those people that look cool standing on icy summits. Understand that in my naïve mind, the basic act of using ice axe and crampons placed me on the pages of National Geographic. People from Alaska and Canada can laugh but that is how it's perceived. I was that uninformed! I had no idea that the tricky part in this case was organizing a  trip that ended having a lot of moving parts and very little of the work actually happened on the mountain.

The story actually started six months before the climb when I emailed about 50 people in my contact list with this message. “I am going to climb Mount Shasta for my fortieth and if you want to join, let me know. My b-day is July 14” That email was a snowflake that started an avalanche.  About 75 people responded. People really do want to climb and my email offered something new and interesting. Note 75 is more people than I sent the message to but that didn't bother me. I figured the more the merrier, though I should not have thought otherwise. Mountaineering parties are best small even simple mountains like Mount Shasta.   It started out for me as an exercise in learning basic mountaineering skills and dealing with a group that size wasn’t what I bargained for.

 Google earth generated path of the Brewer Creek Route. 3.7 miles one way, 7,000 feet elevation gain.

Yet, this expedition expanded. We all rented gear. My brother in law walked into gear rental shop in Mt Shasta City and said, “I want to rent some clampons and I’m going up the Beaver Creek Route on Mount Shasta.” My sister about died of laughter. There is no such thing as clampons and there is no Beaver Creek Route on Mt. Shasta. They rented him gear but I wager they kept his credit card number so they could recoup the cost of the gear if he killed himself on the Brewer Creek Route.  With similar level of ignorance I faced the problem of leading a large group of people.  Fortunately I learned of my predicament months in advance and the RSVPs rolled in. I ended up placing much of the planning on each individual. I let people know the meeting place, the time, what equipment was needed, where to get it, and what to expect, to the extent that I knew. 

As it turns out about 30 people showed up to Mount Shasta, most of them with no intent of climbing. My parents showed up, three of my brothers showed up and each of them brought people, two of my sisters showed up with their husbands and kids, and I showed up with my Evonne and my kids. Everybody made a hefty effort to get there as none of them lived nearby. Doug and family came from Alberta and most of the rest came from Arizona. We played guitars around big fires and ate food and sang songs. We spent July 13 at the base and we spent about two hours practicing self rescue. In the afternoon we met three guys carrying skis that turned back at 12,000 feet due to lightning that raised  hair on their arms.  We only heard of it in the distance and temperatures at the base neared ninety degrees. Those intent on climbing woke up at 1AM July 14 and started up the trail at 1:30. We soon found that charging uphill can make you sick if you live at sea level. At about 9,000 feet Aubrey felt like vomiting. This was about where the trail fizzles out. Aubrey turned back down the trail. Yes, it was dark still and somebody should have gone with her but she acted like it was no big deal. Aubrey has a tendency to act like stuff is no big deal even when it is. It’s a positive trait most of the time. She arrived in camp at 6 AM.

I apologize to Aubrey but I can't change it now.

The rest of us headed onto the large perennial snowfield just north of the Hotlum Glacier. A snowfield differs from a glacier in that it may disappear once every century or so. This means it doesn’t move downhill and doesn’t have crevasses or seracs.  At about 10,000 feet the sun started to rise and with the sunrise I witnessed and felt the entire atmosphere turn pink and orange. Alpine glow (pronounced alpun) is caused by low angle light like a sunrise hitting snow or ice which reflects in all directions, including back to the snow.  Because the angle of the snow is low, the light isn’t intense like midday; the net effect is that you feel like you are inside the light, like you can breathe light. This was my first experience of alpine glow and I was hooked. I have sought alpine glow ever since like a junky’s jones for cocaine.

The view from about 11,000 feet.

Near 11,000 feet we encountered a section of ice on the snowfield. This was about 8 AM. Rebecca felt a little unsure on her crampons as did most of the rest of us. Doug had used crampons a lot and I think he chuckled at us a little under his breath. We probably deserved it but we really didn’t know that the icy patch was no biggie. Rebecca and Sam turned back. I am pretty sure Sam turned back because we were far enough uphill that Rebecca shouldn’t return alone. The rest of us continued up mountain. The ice diminished soon and we continued to plod upward.

Plod is the correct word. My sea level  and out of shape lungs couldn’t get enough oxygen. You can’t get pulmonary edema at 14,000 feet even if you live at sea level but you can get a nasty headache and you will get tired faster than you normally would if you are not acclimated to elevation. I took some ibuprofen and plodded on, taking many rests and eating a lot of sugary food. We reached the summit around 2:30 PM. Bear in mind that we reached 10,000 feet at sunrise at 5 AM. It took us 8.5 hours to go from 10k to 14k and it was only 2 miles on the ground. Serious plodding.

Katie Reese (now Oviatt) ,Michael Peterson, David Reese, Carl Reese, Doug Reese, William Reese.

Photo by Randy Mckinnon.

Yet, 7 of us climbed the mountain. We looked around. Randy successfully climbed his first fourteener in clampons. We started our descent about 3:30 by the same route we ascended. Since much of the route is snow we glissaded from 13,500 feet to 8,000 feet in about twenty minutes. During the glissade I encountered a steep section that raced off to some penitentes, ice points that form on snowfields at high altitudes. The two hours of self rescue practice paid off and I stopped before I got there.  It was the best glissade I have ever experienced. I became addicted to glissading that trip as well. These addictions may kill me. Cocaine.

Michael Peterson, David Reese, Carl Reese,

Katie Reese (now Oviatt), Randy Mckinnon, William Reese,

Photo by Doug Reese. Dig my aviator glasses. I think I still own the hat.

The non climbing folks at base woke up around 7 and watched us with binoculars until 11 and then went to a swimming hole on the McNeil River for the afternoon.

The climbers got back to base around 7 PM and though I had been eating all day, I was absolutely starving but more than that I was exhausted.  All thirty of us went to a Mexican restaurant in the little town of Mount Shasta City and the food was awesome. I briefly nodded off and woke up just in time to stop my face from landing in my enchiladas. Exhaustion overwhelmed me.I have little doubt that most of the climbers on this trip could make it faster and with less exhaustion even we are all 13 years older. I needed better sunglasses. My eyes hurt from the sun on snow even though I wore sunglasses. I fell asleep at 8:30 and slept like the dead until 10AM the next day. They had to roust me for checkout time at the motel in Shasta City. 

Yet, it was a perfect day, everybody was awesome, and nobody got so much as a blister.  So the story ends we are told.

The following summer I was asked to help on a salmon survey on the Scott River, California. As I drove up the Scott Valley I rounded the top of a hill and Mount Shasta came into full view. I was struck with intense emotion and broke out laughing to the point that I had to pull over.  Mount Shasta still creates strong emotions. Somehow the experience changed me. I think it provided me with some confidence that it is possible to grab the rudder on the ship of life and steer yourself. Live deliberately. That experience had a huge part of my moving to Alaska and a huge part of climbing another mountain and another. I joined a community of hundreds of thousands of climbers and most of them live deliberately.

Mount Shasta as seen from near Scott Valley.There is more snow here than when we climbed. The Brewer Creek Route on the viewer's left ridge  Base camp was about where the snow starts in this photo. 

Often that thing we think is a huge bugaboo…  isn’t. Unless it actually is a huge Bugaboo. Learning to use basic mountaineering gear is no more difficult than learning to wear sandals or tie your shoes and I am pretty sure that applies to lots aspects of life as well. Many things seem difficult because they are outside our range of experience. I still need to learn Spanish. 

 Like most people, I didn’t know that most new things are not as hard as they seem. That is the core of the life changing experience for me in mountains.The human race is rife with people that get stuck in a rut waiting for something to happen and making excuses to stay in the rut for a whole bunch of bullshit reasons.  Often people die waiting for somebody else to give their lives direction. People are obsessed with obedience and conformity. I got a tattoo to be a non conformist but I waited until everyone else got one. How's that?  I know way too many people that admit their lives are punctuated with boredom and loneliness yet there is no way to convince them the rudder is right there and it isn’t that tough to steer. 

The Freedom of Solo

Lately I have been thinking about the art of climbing free solos and why the hell anybody would do it. To be clear a free solo is a climb without assistance from anyone else or protection from a falling to your death. The climb could be done with another person but they aren't belaying you and thus, from a climbing perspective, you are on your own.

Why would anyone want to free solo? Don’t expect an answer somewhere in the text because I have free soloed and I still don’t know. I will likely free solo again and I still don’t know why a person would. My thinking process turns to free solos more recently when I watched an interview and a video of Alex Honnold. For any non climbers, Honnold is the most famous free soloist in the world right now and perhaps the second most famous climber of all time. Nobody has surpassed Edmund Hillary.  Honnold and I have never met and everything I know about him comes from video footage and the fact that I once met a guy that knows him personally who said he is absolutely the most humble guy you could ever meet. That is so rare in climbers.   Like Edmund Hillary, Alex Honnold does mind boggling feats in the mountains and acts like it’s no big deal at all when he is back on flat ground. The humility of both climbers impresses me not just for their achievement but for the contrast with their peers who are often first class egomaniacs. Many are also delusional to the point of believing that death is for somebody else. I kid you not. I watched video footage of a climber that thought he had the soul of a raven with a cosmic understanding of flight and I believe that delusion led him to smash into a cliff in Yosemite Valley where he fell a thousand feet and exploded like a bag of water. He was base jumping, not climbing when he died.  The metaphor “explode like a bag of water” came from Alex Honnold who said, “If you fall from fifty feet, you die a slow painful death but if you fall from a thousand, you explode like a bag of water.”  To be fair Honnold said that before Potter fell to his death and not about Potter specifically. I think the two were friends.

Honnold spoke of a body breaking like a bag of water to downplay the fact that he climbs without a rope thousands of feet off the ground. Lots of people climb fifty feet off the ground and in Honnold’s view it’s better to fall from a thousand than from hundred.  I feel bad speaking ill of the dead but the facts are that I always thought Dean Potter was an egomaniac that tried to make up for low IQ with bravado. In contrast Honnold seems intelligent and completely lacking in bravado; I admire both traits. I first took note of Honnold last fall when Pete Boyd and I were preparing to go to El Potrero Chico in Nuevo Leon, Mexico and I did an internet search for the area. Video of Honnold’s 2012 free solo of El Sendero Luminoso topped my search for El Potrero Chico. The video is here LINK . I was even more impressed when I saw the wall from the ground up. Pete and I walked right past El Sendero Luminoso and toward the easy stuff but looked up long enough to marvel that anybody could climb that wall with nothing more than rock shoes and chalk bag.

Alex Honnold in Yosemite. Photo from National Geographic. 

Like Alex Honnold I have been climbing since what seems like birth but few people have Honnold’s talent and I am no exception. According to my mom I started singing before I could speak and started climbing before I could walk.  My first attempted ascent was when I climbed to the top bunk in my sisters’ room, climbed out the window, and into Box Elder tree. I didn’t make it far after that. I don’t remember this attempt to summit the Box Elder tree and not because I lost consciousness but because I was two years old. The details are obscure but what is known is that my mom found two year old me screaming outside the house below an open window. The fact that I dislocated my shoulder is recorded at the Utah Valley Hospital. My parents presume climbing the Box Elder tree was why I climbed out the window because I had tried before. I first learned to use a rope and a harness at age 35 so I spent a good bit of my life free solo, though the term wasn’t in my vocabulary. I got a concussion while climbing in a tree in the White Mountains of Arizona when I was fifteen.  I recall a lesson about climbing that occurred in the Peralta Canyon, Arizona when I was 21.

My brother Garth, his brother in law Dan, and I went hiking up Peralta Canyon in the Superstition Mountains. Peralta Canyon is about an hour east of Phoenix and I had been there many times before as it’s a family favorite hiking spot. The west side of the canyon has a vast array of hoodoos, spires created by wind and rain. Hoodoos are sometimes called Goblins and they are often fantastically shaped formations that remind people of metaphysical creatures. The Peralta Trail doesn’t go up through the hoodoos but you can see them upslope. As a kid my mom called them petrified Apache Soldiers. Peralta Canyon is part of the Apache homeland. These hoodoos are some 75 feet tall and only look like soldiers from a distance. On this hike with my brother and Dan, we wanted a closer look so we hoofed it up there. I don’t recall whose idea it was for us to head up there but our desire to climb those hoodoos wasn’t different than my two year old desire to climb out the window and into the Box Elder tree.  Incidentally, Garth and I share the gene that leads each of us to top of hoodoos so this crazy plan may not have even been his idea.  I don’t recall. 

Some of the hoodoos in Peralta Canyon. There are hundreds.

Peralta Canyon is comprised of Breciated Granite and other igneous and metamorphic rock (Stocknicki and Ferguson, Arizona Geological Society 1995). Breccia is “rock composed of broken fragments of minerals or rock cemented together by a fine-grained matrix that can be similar to or different from the composition of the fragments.” What this means is that most of the hoodoos in Peralta Canyon feel and look like granite but the rock is a matrix of granite rather than solid granite and that means it can break apart and crumble. It doesn’t actually take much push or pull on the rock to know that it’s crumbly but we did not trouble ourselves with such tests.  This type of rock is also called Superstition Tuff and it is not the sort of rock one ought to climb, a fact that I learned later in life. Nothing bad happened in the hoodoos that day. Elsewhere in the world billions of people sat on couches and added a day’s layer of saturated fat to their arteries.

Carotid Endarterectomy removing the fat from the carotid artery.

Dan, Garth, and I started early because we thought Peralta Canyon was a big hike. It isn’t. We thought it would be a long day because all our previous encounters there were with our family and we generally carted a couple babies and toddlers up the hill with us. .  It’s 4.5 miles round trip to Peralta Pass so we found ourselves with lots of time in a beautiful winter day in Arizona.

Peralta Pass, the Hoodoos are on the right.

So we went up there and we climbed a whole bunch of those hoodoos without rope, harness, rock shoes, or chalk bag and no knowledge that chalk even existed for climbers. We climbed those things like falling off them wasn’t possible and we even jumped from hoodoo summit to hoodoo summit when the gap between them was close enough to do so. We tossed rocks off the top of hoodoos and had a grand ole time. 

Chuck Taylors

I recall I was wearing black high topped Chuck Taylor’s and I remember this because that detail is seared in my head. I was standing on a ledge and the ledge broke under my right shoe. I quickly shifted all my weight to my left foot. I was out of balance for about half a second at most. With my right foot back on another foothold, I looked down at my Chuck Taylors with my toes on the ledge and noted that I was about 45 feet off the ground and had an understanding of Honnold’s comment about falling fifty feet even though this happened before he said it. My right leg started to shake uncontrollably. I seriously could not stop my right leg from shaking.  Climbing slang calls this phenomena “Elvis leg” and it’s just like Elvis shaking his leg. I didn’t know any climbing slang at the time and that wasn’t the only thing I didn’t know.  I sure as heck didn’t know Chuck Taylors are a poor choice for rock climbing shoes. When the foothold popped I was out of balance long enough for me to poop bricks. I didn’t curse much back then due to my religious choices, though I curse a shitstorm now.

Hoodoos in Peralta Canyon.

After a few moments of Elvis leg, I gathered my crap together and climbed to the top of the hoodoo and there was enough space up there for Garth and I to comfortably sit and breathe. On the way home Garth said, “I don’t plan to do anything like that again. It was fun but I have children and can’t justify the danger.” I don’t think he ever has.  I was single at the time but I figured my life was valuable with or without kids. Being young and full of bravado, I didn’t say anything about quitting climbing. If you get nothing from this story, understand that I don’t like bravado and I really don’t like to see it in myself.  However, I made up my mind that if I ever climbed anything vertical that could kill me I would do so with training and know how to not get killed. I have since climbed considerably but for many years I did not.  

This Peralta Canyon climbing trip happened the year Alex Honnold was born.

Years later I bought my first rope and used it to climb at cliffs at the beaches in Humboldt County, California. Lots of folks climbed there and top ropes were easy to set up. My daughters were a little into climbing, especially Sydney but Aubrey as well. By and by we moved to Alaska where I started climbing mountains, mountaineering style. I got an ice axe and crampons and pickets and learned how to use them. I started climbing regularly in a climbing gym. Why not? It rains a lot here, I needed a workout, and I didn’t have any friends. All my friends are climbers and mountaineers.

Moonstone Beach, Humboldt Country, California

We all free solo whether we acknowledge it or not. With time and experience I gained a much greater understanding of what I can do and what I can’t do. I have also gained an understanding of my surroundings and the consequences of being wrong. Dean Potter was a great climber but he actually thought he could fly. I free solo on those places on a mountain trip where the ridge is thin and you just know you would die if you fell off but you know you won’t fall off. It’s a little like standing on a curb knowing that if you fell three feet into the street, you might get hit by a bus. Any time you are one step away from death you are philosophically on a free solo whether you are on a curb, driving a car on hill, or standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon taking photos. If your brakes fail, you make a mistake driving, you step into the street at the wrong moment, or pay too much attention to your camera when you should pay attention to your feet, it’s a “death fall” but you have so much experience walking on the sidewalk side of the curb, driving a car, or standing on cliff's edge with a camera that you don’t even think about the potential.

One of my big problems in Peralta Canyon was that none of us understood rock. This applies to all climbing in the sense that once a climber has done a maneuver safely a thousand times or more, he or she figures out it’s safe to do without a rope. These skills have to be practiced and placed in context of environment.  Most climbers don’t know what breciated granite is and it isn’t necessary to know. I looked it up online yesterday. But you do need to know that some rock fractures easily and other rock does not and that making that distinction wrongly can  mean your life.  A climber needs to spend enough time climbing to differentiate a difficult climb that might lead to a fall from basic easy going. Before climbing anything that is not protected, like a free solo, you should know for damn certain you aren’t going to fall.  

Years ago in Peralta Canyon, I didn’t know any of that stuff. None of those climbs were tough and I could probably climb them now but the rock was and is choss and we didn’t have any clue what the fetch we were doing. Even though I never met him, I am sure that Dean Potter for all his bravado didn’t want to fall. He wanted to fly and he thought he could and few things are more dangerous than a person that thinks they know something that can't actually be known.  Once a person decides they can't be wrong, they are in dangerous space. 

I haven’t met Alex Honnold either but he seems like he most definitely doesn’t want to die. I am 53 years old and I hope that Honnold lives to be my age and longer. Considering the risks he takes, that may not happen. Then again it might. I am always surprised by the fact that climbers seem to live to old age.

I have zero illusions that I will ever be talented at climbing. Yet I climb on. I don’t remember being two years old but I am sure I didn’t climb out the window and into the Box Elder tree for fame or peer approval. I climbed out there for reasons I can’t put into words.

Oar your own boat, Build your own fire

I like to oar my own boat and I fear we are losing the capacity to do that because powerful lobbies are pushing people like me off the water and off public land.  What bothers me even more than the fact that we gave away our greatest treasures to concessionaires is the fact that so many people don't even know what we have lost in doing so. We lost freedom and we lost beauty and lost independence. We are losing the freedom to oar our own boats.

(Yes, I tossed in photos from my 2012 Grand Canyon trip for eye candy.)

Sam Reese

I speak of oaring your own boat both literally and figuratively as guiding concessionaires are wheedling their way into boating, climbing, hiking, or doing most anything else outside. I am not alone in this concern and numbers often bear out that those of us that like to “oar own boats” get squeezed off public lands from time to time and it pisses me off.  I totally understand why a person would want to hire a guide and I REALLY understand why a person would want to be a guide. Guides are talented and know the area and help those that don’t.  I like guides and those who hire them. I hired a guide last summer for rock climbing in Indian Creek, Utah last year and he was good. However, guides and guiding companies are starting to make it difficult for people that want to access public land that don’t want a guide and 99.9% of the time, I don't hire a guide.

National Canyon

My problem with the National Park Service's system is that guiding lobbies have become so powerful that it is extremely tedious to access some public lands unless you hire a guide.

Take Grand Canyon National Park for example. NPS has a lottery to allocate permits for private rafting. A person can apply for up to five time slots in a year and you can only raft the river once a year. They charge $25 to apply even if you lose and most applications lose. All of this I agree with. I praise the Grand Canyon NP for limiting the number of people rafting the canyon. It is seriously possible to love that canyon to death.  I don't think it possible to preserve the natural integrity of the Grand Canyon and simultaneously allow unrestricted access to the river.

Hermit Rapid, Moonshadow at the oars.

Cottonwoods, Thunder River, Grand Canyon National Park.

My concern is that guiding companies own too large of a share of the allocation of rafting opportunity. Guiding companies have their own permits and sell them to the highest bidder, essentially pushing anybody off the river that isn’t rich and pushing anybody off the river that wants to oar their own boat. In practice you can’t get on the river unless you hire a guide and the guiding companies want it that way. The odds of winning a slot in the private lottery in the summer are less than 1%. Each person can apply for up to five slots so your odds of winning are less than 5% in any given year.  Let those numbers  soak in.

You could apply for twenty years and not win. However, if you want to run with a guide next summer all you need is to make a reservation and shell out a sizable pile of cash. That and you have to sit as a passenger. That is fine if you want to be a passenger.

Floating the Little Colorado River
 sans raft. Carl Reese

It is not in the National Park Service’s mission statement to have a river plan that caters almost exclusively to the wealthy and it should not be their plan to make everybody ride as a passenger. I understand why many people would want to be a passenger. The rapids are big and dangerous for the inexperienced. I think a person that wants to hire a guide and ride as a passenger should have an equal opportunity to raft the river as a person that wants to oar their own boat but the opportunity is skewed heavily in favor of those who want to hire a guide.

Above Lava Falls

The wait is one year on average if you want to hire a guide and twenty years on average if you want to oar your own boat. That is a travesty, especially considering the National Park aren’t supposed operate for profit and they have a goal of being open to all Americans

The National Park Service's mission statement is: "The National Park Service preserves unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the National Park System for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations."  Nowhere in their mission statement does it state they are supposed to increase revenue for the government or the private sector and there is an implied goal to ignore profit margin within park boundaries. We don't mine, log, or even farm national parks. National Park Service did a good job of preserving our best treasures. Operating in the red is acceptable and expected for the Park Service. I support that mission as do the vast majority of Americans.

William Dean Reese live at the Matkat Hotel

This problem is not exclusive to the Grand Canyon. If for any reason a land managing agency has to limit the number of people, soon guide companies take over most of the opportunity. I used the Grand Canyon as an example because they post all their statistics clearly and it’s clear as crystal rapid that NPS is heavily influenced by guiding companies that have become big business. This sort of thinking is all over the place and often related to climbing, hiking, kayaking, and just everything I enjoy doing except playing the guitar. Guide companies basically own Grand Teton. You can apply in January to climb the Grand but you probably won’t get a slot. Grand Teton Park will include a list of guides in the notice informing you that you lost.  NPS personnel have flat out told me that the Park leadership prefers people to climb or raft with guides because they know the guides, have their contact numbers, and it just goes smoother.  Where does smoothness fit into the mission statement for public lands? Edward Abbey mocked public agencies with the phrase, “Ski in a clockwise direction. Let’s all have fun together.”  Sometimes I don’t want to have fun together. I want to be in charge of my own fun and my own life.

  I think we were looking at a red tailed hawk.

So here is where I am going with this.  There is a place for guides. Sooner or later we all want to see something in nature that we don’t have the skills or equipment. Yet I think at each opportunity we want to make it clear that we value the opportunity to go it alone. To be ourselves. The takeover of our lands by guiding companies is part of why public land agencies aren’t adequately serving the poorer communities in our country. The costs of running rivers or most outdoor activities are expensive enough to exclude some poor people and it is a shame that the National Park Service adds to the problem.

Doug Reese, Grand Canyon NP.

We lose something as a society if we allocate our capacity to just live outside and be in charge our experience. I think many of us are so disconnected to nature that we forgot that we can “oar our own the boats.” I happen to be one of the lucky saps that actually won a private permit for the Grand Canyon next year and when I tell some people about it they really can’t fathom that anybody would or even could go without a guide. It’s like they think guides are a different species with the capacity to do things that we can’t do ourselves. We have become a helpless group as a society.

I also recommend that public agencies adjust their allocation of permits to make it possible for us to enjoy the outdoors without hiring somebody to carry us along as a passenger. If you don’t know how to oar a boat, start with a river that doesn’t have rapids but I recommend oaring yourself some of the time. If boating isn't your thing, make your own fire, climb a rock on your own, catch your own fish, shoot a gun, whatever. Ski in a counterclockwise direction.

Solva Buttress

August 26, 2015. The spoiler is that we didn’t complete the climb partly because I took a whipper and bruised my ankle. Read on if you are interested in why it was a great day anyway. Admittedly, bashing my ankle was not the best moment of the day. The Solva Buttress is a great introduction to a big wall. It’s tall and almost all of it is fifth class climbing. The rock is clean and the scenery is stunning to the point tht the beauty adds a level of risk because you can’t take your eyes off it. The Buttress has a lot of places to place protection and none of the climbing is extremely difficult. Thus, you get a lot of practice setting pro, working with ropes, and dealing with exposure on pitches that don’t exceed 5.8. It’s also kind of cool that it is the Fourth Tower on the Mendenhall Towers so you climb in the neighborhood of some of some world class wall climbing. there are climbs up there that would turn a Yosemite climber green with desire.

Our buttress was one of the easiest walls on the Towers and it's probably good it wasn't as tough as Half Dome (though tougher than Snake Dike), because I am pretty sure none of us had ever climbed anything near that tall or involved before. Mountain Project has a great description of the Solva Buttress. LINK . Dylan Miller made a great video of his 2014 climb. LINK.

The Mendenhall Towers taken from the helicopter. Pic by Alli Hourigan

This trip has been in the making for at least two years for me, Pete Boyd, and friend JP Zamarron. The Buttress has been climbed by dozens of climbers by now. Pete had to work so he was out. JP and I met on Sunday at the Rock Dump to talk when the weather looked clear for Tuesday through Thursday. While there we met another friend Alex Botehlo who wanted to play. In order for Alex to go, we needed a fourth so we called some people and didn’t actually get a fourth until 5 hours before our helicopter reservation at 3:30 PM Tuesday, August 26, 2015. Our fourth was Alli Hourigan, who was also on the Split Thumb trip.  Everything turned out well though I only made it half way up the mountain. I quit taking pics at the pitch 4.

Our route, more or less, pic by Alli Hourigan.

We met at Coastal Helicopters at 2:30 PM and laid our gear on the parking lot and figured what we should leave behind and what we needed to bring. We each packed two bags, one for gear left at the base like tents etc. and one for climbing a wall. Our pilot was a dude named Jameel and he was quite helpful and a part of the story later. We put our gear in an A Star that holds seven people including the pilot and buzzed up the base of the Solva Buttress. It was a fifteen minute smooth ride to the Mendenhall Glacier at the base. We set up base camp and packed climbing gear and gear to bivvy up high. We divided into two person rope teams; I climbed with JP and Alli climbed with Alex. Above me was a wall that from the base feels the size of the Half Dome. It’s actually 1,900 feet of prominence, about the height. Like the Half Dome, it is solid granite and marvelous to look at. The climbing is noticeably easier than the Half Dome.. Unlike Half Dome you can’t walk off the back side; you must rap back down. Unlike Half Dome, one must take a helicopter to the base which means you can be stranded at the base by a storm and wait until conditions are clear enough to fly. Important to this story is the fact that unlike Half Dome, the Solva Buttress still has a glacier at its base and we had to walk across 200 feet of glacier from camp to the wall, passing a bergschrund on the way. A bergschrund is a deep fissure like a crevasse that forms where a rock wall meets ice or snow.

Base Camp


We got climbing about 5 PM Tuesday with intent to get to a palatial ledge at the top of pitch 5. It’s a ten pitch climb total. Climbing was a lot slower with sleeping bags and other stuff in our packs. We didn’t get to the top of pitch 1 until 7:30 but we weren’t concerned about getting stuck on a cliff in the dark because we knew there was alternative bivvy at the top of pitch 3. Pitches 2 and 3 on the Solva Buttress are relatively easy unless you take a wrong turn. I took a wrong turn and climbed a 5.9 trad climb with a 30 pound pack. It wasn’t bad but it was slow going. The route I took was arguably the toughest climbing we did in the whole trip and we moved slowly. It was basically dark as JP arrived at the belay station at the top of 2. We got back on track for pitch 3 and climbed it by moonlight. The moon Tuesday night was huge and it wasn’t all that dark because surrounding us were 1,500 square miles of icefield and a granite wall, all reflecting moonlight. We arrived at the bivvy at the top of pitch 3 at 10 PM. Because they didn’t take a wrong turn, Alex and Alli arrived at 8:30 in time to watch the sunset Tuesday night.


The start of pitch 1. Me and JP Zamarron. Pic by Alli Hourigan


Our bivvy was a small cave that barely fit two people and an outside ledge that easily fit two. Alex and I slept outside. At this point we were 600 feet off the glacier in a cozy little haven, our little piece of flat ground we called the Ho'tel de Tres because it was our hotel at the top of 3. We had some alpine margaritas and chatted and tried to sleep about midnight. We planned to retire early and start right at dawn but it was too beautiful to close our eyes. I finally drifted off to sleep but woke up to witness trillions of charged particles in simultaneous orgasm in the ionosphere. It was one of the most dazzling displays of the northern lights I have ever seen. I couldn’t look away. The down side is that I didn’t sleep for 2 AM to 4 AM.

Ho’tel de Tres. Left to right. JP Zamarron, Alex Botelho, Alli Hourigan

The Ho’tel de Tres has outdoor plumbing. There is an easily accessible side ledge out of view where you can shit. I buried my morning treasure under some rocks where I hope it disintegrates before anyone passes by. JP’s plan was to poop on a plate sized rock and toss it off the cliff when done and literally scatter his shit to the wind. It’s a good plan too with one problem. The rock careened down the cliff and landed on Alli’s tent 600 feet below. Considering the distance the odds of that happening must be astronomical. It’s sort of like shooting a gun at the moon and hitting an astronaut. After breakfast Wednesday and after the rock and poo episode, we headed up the cliff and left our sleeping and camping gear the Ho’tel de Tres. Absentmindedly I also left my pack as well which meant I didn’t have water or lunch. Aside from that, pitch 4 went smoothly. JP said he could share water and food.

View from the Ho'tel de Tres at Sunrise


JP on the ledge with toilet paper.


Pitch 4, Alex on the sharp end
 Alex Botelho.


Near the top of pitch 5 I took a whipper, the first time in my life I have ever fallen any distance while trad climbing and I pancaked on a ledge. I fell probably 15 feet and hit the ledge feet first. In Boy Scouts I fell a similar distance while climbing a tree on a backpacking trip and ended up in the Springerville, Arizona hospital. I probably had a concussion. I lost all memory of six hours of my life. I know I fell fifteen feet in scouts because my scout master recounted the tale in detail and I would bet he still can. JP did a spectacular job on belay. I was above my highest cam by 8 feet so there was nothing he could do to save me from tanking on the ledge. I checked myself astounded that I didn’t have any noticeable injuries… yet. I finished pitch 5 and sat on the Pitch 5 Palacio, a thousand square foot ledge at the top of pitch 5.

View from the Pitch 5 Palacio, pic by Alli Hourigan

At 10 AM, JP and I sat down on Pitch 5 Palacio to collect ourselves. I stood up and noticed my ankle was feeling sore when I tried to point my toe. I figured it was no big deal because I wasn’t in much pain and I had full mobility but I figured it was a bad idea to continue.

Pitch 5 Palacio with my shoes in the foreground. My feet were elevated and resting on a pack. Pic by Alli Hourigan

For the next six hours I napped with my ankle elevated. We decided I could wait at the Pitch 5 Palacio while JP and Alex tried to summit. There was no reason to head down immediately but good reason for me to stop, sit, and assess. Alli said she would stay with me because somebody had to. Rope teams are pairs. Also, she said it was sunny, warm, and a great place to take a nap. Indeed it was. I found some snow under a boulder and iced my ankle. I elevated my ankle and napped. About noon another helicopter stopped by our camp below and dropped off two climbers. About 1 PM the wind started to pick up a little but my main concern was sunburn even with sunscreen. The sunshine was intense. At 2 PM Alex radioed us and said they were turning back near the top of pitch 8. The wind was blowing hard up there and the forecast was for rain starting late Wednesday night and we wanted to get back to the glacier in time to get picked up that day. We had planned to fly out Thursday morning but we worried the storm could stop helicopter flights, stranding us at base camp for potentially five days. Alli called Coastal Helicopters and set up a pick up for 7:30. We figured we could get back to camp in time to drink a beer before the pick up. Alex and JP started rappelling toward Alli and me on the Pitch 5 Palacio. Their rope got stuck several times but they got to the Pitch 5 Palacio at 4 PM and the group was back together. We all rapped our way down but each rappel the ropes got stuck. We threw the rope off the cliff and the wind blew it hither and thither and invariably it grabbed a rock. The rock up there has excellent friction which is good for climbing and hell to sticking ropes. Ultimately, we solved the rope in the wind problem by lowering a person on the rope from one rap station to the next. The rest of the team rapped down after that. We got to the Ho’tel de Tres at 6 PM and we started to worry we would miss our pickup.

At 6:30 PM our chopper arrived. We were shitting bricks because we were 300 feet above the glacier and it was taking us 45 minutes to for each 150 foot rap. I found it odd that we were close enough to the pilot to yell back and forth but seemingly a long way away because it was almost straight down. We knew that by law the pilot had to leave before sunset even if he had to leave us behind. We had food for a day. Water would not be a problem. Even as we faced intense sunshine we knew the rain could be equally intense, especially in duration. It might even snow up that high. We had gear to deal with the weather but the thought was not fun. I know in the abstract that you can live for weeks without food but I never want to test that hypothesis. The pilot yelled up to us and said he came up early to beat bad weather and indeed a storm was imminent. He sat and waited for 90 minutes, hopefully enjoying the view. He went the extra mile for us and I would totally recommend Coastal to any climbing team. Jameel in particular was great. Meanwhile, the two climbers that arrived at noon yelled uphill and asked if they wanted us to take our tents down and we gladly agreed.

At 7:40 PM I got to the base of the rock and made my way to the helicopter. I slipped on the glacier and shot downhill gaining speed toward the circular bergschrund I mentioned earlier in the story. My axe wouldn’t dig in and stop my descent so I made a quick decision to barrel roll to my right as fast as I could. I passed ten feet to the right of the bergschrund and continued on down the glacier and stopped near the helicopter. The pilot thought I did it on purpose. Sliding down snow on your ass is common practice; it's called glissading, but you don't glissade above a bergschrund.



This fall was probably the scariest thing I have ever experienced partly because I gained speed slowly but wasn't able to stop. I had time to envision what it would be like to fall in the hole. Since I was the first in our group to get to the chopper I had time to grab a beer out of my bag and down it. I tossed my bags in the chopper, climbed in and sat behind the pilot, and thanked the climbers for picking up our tents and removing the rock from Alli’s tent, but I did NOT tell them about the shit on the rock. Some truths are not very useful.

Soon the rest of our team was at the helicopter having taken the slow way that didn’t involve a brush with death. We headed back to Coastal and I am pretty sure Jameel waited for us right up to, and perhaps beyond, the federal limit on flying at sunset. Some laws are not very useful. Because I left my lunch in my pack on the bivvy ledge and because we were in a hurry to catch the chopper, I hadn’t food or water since breakfast. By 9 PM Wednesday were at the airport and paid our bill. We got a discount because they split the costs with the climbers that picked up our tents. We sorted our gear each to its owner and we went to Squires. I ordered a bacon cheeseburger and it tasted great.

The climbing was incredible but that isn’t what really makes it worthwhile for me. The beauty is intense and made more so by struggle and concentration. This sort of climbing isn’t like single pitch because there is always exposure. The fact that you are up high is always in the back of your mind. Nobody in our group ever complained and I didn’t get the impression that any of them wanted to.

By 10:30 PM I was home and drinking water as fast as I could. As I tried to get to sleep I started having cramps in my legs and neck. By the next morning my ankle swelled up and I could barely walk, which I find odd considering I was mostly mobile coming down the cliff. I was on crutches for a few days and I will be limping for weeks. I have had taken time to consider the last few days and I figure I am surprised that I have never had a broken bone, never had a serious illness, never had a serious accident that I can’t blame on the Boy Scouts of America, and so far I seem to find myself on the right side of the bergschrund.


Chilkat Range and Fairweather Range as seen from Ho'tel de Tres

Split Thumb

July 2015. I have been looking at Split Thumb for years. You can see it from town but I have never got up there. For several years my plans fell through for one reason or another.

On July 4th, I climbed Split Thumb with four other climbers. I have made more attempts to climb split Thumb than I can count. The Thumb is visible from the boat ramp in North Douglas.The Thumb is the quintessential Juneau climb. You experience it all yet none of it is particularly troubling. The Thumb has a hike up an alpine ridge, a glacier crossing, and a rock climb but none of those pieces are particularly heinous, , unless you fuck up. I’ll get to the prepositional phrase ending the last sentence later.

The Thumb is center

The Thumb is a nunatak in the Juneau Icefield. A nunatak is a spire sticking out of a glacier or icefield sort of like a rock island in the midst of frozen. The ice erodes the bottom making the spire increasingly steep over geologic time. Split Thumb is 5,523 feet tall and made of granite. It’s surrounded by the Lemon Glacier on the west and to the east Death Valley, a branch of the Norris Glacier. We accessed over Lemon Glacier.

The Lemon Glacier in the evening with shadow of Split Thumb 

I spent Saturday morning working the deck with my wife. We also walked our dog. At 4:30 PM I met our climbing team at the trailhead and climbed to Camp 17. We got there about 9 PM. Ryland and Ryan didn’t get there until 10 because Ryan had a problem with a boot that fell apart. In addition to that, we had a bit of a snafu there because Camp 17 is a research station, though it’s usually vacant. There is a public cabin there. This time it was occupied by some fifty students and glaciologists. As we approached the students were raising the flag for the Fourth of July.
It was a nice view but I didn’t even bring a sleeping bag because we planned to sleep indoors on a pad. It was cold outdoors. It was also extremely beautiful. We drank Alpine Margaritas and watched the sunset.  I finally got some sleep and awoke at 5:30. However, Ryland and Ryan didn’t wake up until 7:30. I made and drank a lot of coffee and that’s good because it became a long, long day. After waiting for more than an hour Ryland and Ryan said they still weren’t quite ready because they were trying to fix the boot.

Kevin, Allison and I set out across the Lemon Glacier and Ryland said they would catch up. After we crossed the glacier we climbed onto Whistlepig Ridge that leads to Split Thumb. We slept up there in the sunshine for an hour until Ryan and Ryland showed up. They tried but never fixed the boot. Ryan had a pair of skate board shoes so he headed across in skater shoes.

They woke us from our nap and we headed toward Split Thumb. All went smoothly until we got the base of the mountain. Trip reports describe having to ascend a steep chossy rise to big flat snow field, above which is an obvious ramp to the summit. The chossy rise was fucked up climbing. I told you I would get that part. I chose the wrong path up and about 50 feet off the ground I realized I couldn’t climb back down and I had 150 feet more to go. The route wasn’t that steep but everything under foot was coming loose. I was creating a rain of boulders and my compadres moved quickly out of the way. They chose another more sane route. It was all the concentration I had to not freak out and make the top of that 200 foot pitch. I rejoined my compadres on the big flat landing. Then we climbed Split Thumb and it was an incredible summit. Unlike the chossy shit below everything was solid and easy climbing. We didn’t get there until 3:30PM with all the delays. Also, five people in a climbing team is three people too many. Yes, Ryan made to the summit of Split Thumb and wore Vans most of the way. He bummed a pair of climbing shoes for the technical pitch on the Thumb. He made it back too. On steeper snow slopes he followed the rest of us in our kicked in steps. Also, Whistlepig Ridge is a rocky ridge and Vans were better than our mountaineering boots.

Our route is the ridge on right. .

  

Me. 

 Kevin

Alli and Ryan

Ryland

I envision the pilot turning to his clients and saying, "On your right is Split Thumb with a team of climbers on the face." 

Summit

The remainder of the story is retracing our steps and heading back to the car. We got back at 12:45AM. The last bit involved hiking down a steep trail with heavy packs and tired legs.  Two of us had flashlights.. In all we walked about 30 miles and negotiated 15,000 feet of elevation. Sitting in the creek near the trailhead was a six pack of beer I left there the day before. Allison tasted her beer and said, “Half an hour ago I was wondering why I do this stuff. This is the best beer I have ever had.”  There is a Mexican saying I have known for years. Hambre hace la salsa mejor.” Hunger makes the best salsa. Indeed. 

Our Route.