Gaps Between The Trees

Years ago when I was learning to ski, a friend gave me this tip. Don’t look at the trees; look at the gaps between the trees. That dear folks is the answer to a lot of things. If you look at the trees too long, you think too long about what it would be like to hit them.

Soon you actually hit them. Your feet follow your eyes. Even if you manage to hit the gap, you don’t notice an obstacle in the snow in the gap because you were looking at the tree you were trying to miss. Your feet follow your eyes on lots of stuff. People who drive down the highway staring at the concrete abutments sometimes find themselves wrapped around them. Nations that dread war often start them. A good climber spends most of his/her  time climbing looking and thinking about where he or she is headed as a way of avoiding heading where nobody wants to go. Canoe through the gap between the rocks and on and on.

Northeast bowl, Mount Jumbo, Juneau, AK

Backcountry skiing is my new love. My wife is jealous. My guitar yearns for affection but I can’t stay away. What’s not to love? You climb mountains in skis.  Often you can climb mountains that are extremely tough to access in summer and you can ski down most any slope with snow on it. Bushes, stumps, and Devil’s Club lie peacefully beneath the snow so it’s not so much work to go off trail.  A set of backcountry gear increases the amount of skiable terrain from the number of mountains that have ski lifts to a number that approximates the number of mountains in existence.

Near the top of the Ptarmigan Lift, Eaglecrest Ski Resort, Juneau

I am thinking today about a short film I recently saw called 55 Hours in Mexico. It’s a nine minute film about three guys from Denver that flew to Vera Cruz, drove fourteen thousand feet up a mountain, got stuck in the mud on the way, pushed their rental car for miles, climbed the third tallest mountain in North America, skied down, and made it home in one weekend. I made a comment to a friend that what I liked about the film is that it was about regular people doing some quite irregular things. She commented that they were doing insane things and I countered that this isn't any different than what they might see in Colorado. 

Now that I have had time to think about it my friend was right about it not being like Colorado. At first I said that indeed it was black diamond skiing and every ski resort has black diamonds runs. I should say here that she doesn’t ski so it’s quite remarkable that she nailed the most important part of why Pico de Orizaba is not like the Rockies. Those guys didn’t leave Colorado and go to Mexico because the skiing is better down there. I was right that what they did wasn’t insane.

I think my friend said it was insane because she was looking at the trees and not the gaps between the trees. Watch the nine minute video HERE.

Pico de Orizaba is not like the Rockies because it’s 18,500 tall, four thousand feet taller than any peak in the Rockies. Indeed the slope is about 35 degrees and you find that at most any ski resort but it isn’t a ski resort.  If you have watched the video that I linked above, you will see they are not in a range of mountains. If you have not watched the video, quit reading and go watch it.  The base for their climb was an alpine hut at 14,000 feet.  Monkeys frolic in the jungle below Pico de Orizaba. There are no ski lifts and no maps differentiating black diamond from blue square. Because there are no peaks of comparable height in the area, the summit view had nothing in sight but clouds. 

Pico de Orizaba, from summitpost.org

These guys weren’t professionals. They put this trip together by adding up several steps and focusing on the gap between the trees and not the trees themselves in each step.

Step one: drive a car to a mountain hut and hope not to get stuck.

Step two: climb a peak with 4,500 foot gain. Try not vomit.

Step three: ski down. That’s almost always the easy part.

Most of the things you would expect to go wrong actually went wrong. They lost their luggage. They got stuck in the mud. They got altitude sickness and vomited all over the snow. The film didn’t say if they had to pay the rental car company any cash for the mess they made of the car. Regardless, the only real tragedy is they brought Sierra Nevada when they could have had Mexican beer. What’s wrong with Mexican beer?  Yet, they made it.  Had they added up all the steps and focused too much what could have gone wrong, they would have never left home.  None of this story would have happened if they had gone skiing in Colorado for the weekend. That’s something to think about.  Skiers ski in the trees because it's fun to ski through trees so you don't want to ignore them entirely.

Of course we all think about trees, rocks, concrete abutments, deadlines, debt, sickness, death, and a host of obstacles. Those are obstacles and like it or not the obstacles make life interesting. You don't climb a mountain because it's easy.

Would it be possible to go to Sitka, sea kayak to Mount Edgecumbe, climb it, and ski down in one weekend? 

55 Hours in Sitka.

Mt Edgecumbe. Sitka, Alaska. 

Know Thyself (Sailing Failures)

Know thyself (Greek: γνῶθι σεαυτόν) is an ancient Greek motto.

Socrates used the phrase but did not invent it.  Socrates claimed Know thyself was written on the wall in the Oracle at Delphi. The Oracle was considered the source of wisdom at the time but the phrase spread from Greece and danced around different cultures for ages. It seems people have been creating havoc for themselves for millennia by trying to place round personalities into square social norms or square personalities into round social norms. In my case, I will think of this phrase if I ever think to build another sailboat. My sailboat construction project ended in a bonfire.

Sydney and frame of the boat before we put on the outside (2006).

I started out with modest plans for a  dingy with one mast and a single sail. Starting small would let me learn boat building skills and once built, I could learn the simplest of sailing skills and move on from there to build bigger sailboats and ultimately circumnavigate the globe like Magellan.  The blueprints suggested it was a good project for a Boy Scout troop so how hard could it be? I have worked construction and have some woodworking skills. It wasn’t lack of ability that sunk the project. To be fair my half built dingy made a nice fire. 

We roasted hot dogs.

Front page of the blueprints.

γνῶθι σεαυτόν. I am more apt to succeed at building a fire than I am at building a boat. I am probably more apt to excel at writing a song on the guitar than I am at building a guitar. It’s actually a tad silly that I have a climbing blog and not one about writing music because I am way better at playing music than I will ever be at climbing. I am not a top notch climber. Maybe my music speaks for itself and perhaps there isn’t much to write about the writing of music.

The frame. The project ended after I secured the marine grade plywood on the left to the frame but I gave up before I  sealed the hull. I have no photos of the fire.

I love the idea of building my own sailboat. I dreamed of doing it for years. I still dream of building a sailboat and sailing to sea, without a pony. What was Lyle Lovett thinking? If I Had A Boat is a great song but don’t to take a pony out to sea. Horses evolved on the savannahs and steppes but horses may not have been Lyle Lovett’s main point of the song. Kiss my ass I’ve got a boat and I’m heading out to sea.  Ole Lyle was talking about dreams and horses and boats are metaphors. When dreams die, dreamers die with them. Listen to the song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4evzpIVnMVs . 

To be fair to Magellan, nobody will ever circumnavigate the globe like he did. Magellan sailed around the world without a map for most of it and he did so in spite of an ecclesiastic chorus singing that the earth was flat. God said the earth was flat. Modern climate change deniers didn’t invent crazy. We will always have people that are intentionally ignorant of basic facts.

I think it’s important to be fair to reality even if it hurts. To be fair to reality, I will never sail around the world and will count it success if I ever sail around Mendenhall Lake.  The world is round even though the pope disagreed for centuries. Climate change is real even if it means we have some hard work ahead of us. The earth wasn’t built in 6 days.  All those dinosaur bones weren’t placed in the ground by Satan to tempt us to disbelieve Genesis. Magellan had more guts than I will ever have. 

Ultimately, I burned my sailboat project to ashes because I was long on dreams and short on follow-through. I didn’t think about the fact that I would rather spend the day hiking than sanding the hull of a boat. If I ever sail out to sea it’s going to be in a boat that I purchased, built by somebody else. Taking that position ups my odds of actually learning to sail. I am not going to build my own cams or weave my own climbing rope either. I once tied my own harness from webbing. There are instructions in Freedom of the Hills.  The harness worked to catch a fall but it wasn’t comfortable when hanging for a while. I don’t recommend it.

γνῶθι σεαυτόν. Know thyself.