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.