She's slipping right through my hands.

Round here we talk just like lions
But we sacrifice like lambs
Round here she's slipping through my hands.
Counting Crows

I love the song Round Here by Counting Crows. I always think that “she” is not a woman but America.  

Regardless of world view, I think most people agree that the United States is heart wrenchingly divided and angry, mostly at each other. The potential for ugly confrontation is becoming increasingly less abstract every day. There are those that say people of all political views have more in common than we think and that we could be more civil if we just focused on commonalities. That all humans have a lot in common is a fact but a mostly useless fact. The capitol of Madagascar is Antananarivo but it’s a completely useless fact unless you need to find a government official in Madagascar.  Some facts are not very useful. Humans evolved to focus on the danger zone for good reason. The sabre toothed tiger was mostly covered in fur but a smart cave man focused on the claws and the teeth. River runners think about rapids, not because they take up most of the river miles but because people rarely drown in the flat water. It’s all fine to talk to a conservative about climbing or any number of subjects we all might have in common. Ignoring the danger zones does not make them disappear.  People are way more dangerous than rapids or sabre toothed tigers

At some point we all have to start speaking the same language. I don’t mean English or Spanish or French or Russian. We need to clarify our words. We need to understand that when I use the word liberty and another person uses the word liberty, we aren’t necessarily talking about the same thing. Very often people hum and haw when asked what they mean by liberty. A conservative might say, “Ya know… Freedom. America is free. Europe is less free and socialist Venezuela doesn’t have any freedom at all.” Liberals are equally or perhaps even more unintelligible.  Full disclosure. I am a liberal. We generally think that freedom means that you can do what you want but that answer is so vague it’s useless. Regardless of citizenship, you can do what you want… Until you can’t. The capitol of Madagascar is Antananarivo.

To be clear, it insults conservatives and liberals to reduce our current divide to differences in vocabulary. We don’t define some words differently because we use a different dictionary. We define words differently because we don’t have the same core values. Think about that. We don’t have the same core values. Concepts like faith, 

justice,

liberty, 

fairness, 

prosperity, 

honesty, 

and many others words carry a different meaning depending upon the speaker’s core values.

Colorado River, upstream of Lava Falls. It's relevant that you can't see Lava Falls.

A colleague told me recently that guns make us free. We were in a office cubicle that we call a lunch room and I asked him for advice because I am thinking about buying a .30-06. That’s a gun for you non-Alaskans. He figured I was part of his political tribe because I asked about a gun. He feels that guns not only make us free but are requisite for freedom. I started to ask if he thought the British are free but quit. I figured it was best to shut up because I don’t have the tools to deal with his sort of mental illness. Upon further reflection I realized I was right to shut up but not right about mental illness. He is perfectly sane.  I was right to shut up because I don’t know how to talk about freedom with a person that doesn’t share a common meaning of what freedom is. I still don’t know and I need to learn.  Next time we were in the lunchroom, I asked if he bought a ski pass this year. Common ground. Antananarivo. We agree that it’s not really a lunchroom because it doesn’t have a sink to wash dishes.

I still don’t know how talk about most of the danger zones we face nationally. I can say with some confidence that almost nobody knows and those that think they know, don’t actually know. I recently listened to a podcast where a sociologist explained the mentality of conservatives and the tools we need to reach out. He said liberals need to use words that conservative use. His was like the theory that we need to talk about common ground but he said it with academic jargon so he sounded smart. It wasn’t. That fucking sociologist would get his ass kicked the minute he stepped into a bar in Alaska. His ass kicking might even be for good reason.  

Americans are not united in our core values. Each of us wants something different. Sometimes fundamentally different.  My colleague is not mentally ill but he does seem to want an America unlike the one I aspire to. I will also say that it is becoming ever more apparent that all Americans understand that doublespeak has invaded all walks of life and that each of us might speak a little. By definition, you don’t know when you are speaking double speak unless you stop and check yourself.

The entire dis-United States are all in a raft just upstream of a large rapid. We can hear the roar of the waves as the river disappears from our downstream view at the point when the flat water drops into first of the waves. We don’t know how many waves, how large, or if there is a waterfall. The rule of whitewater is that if the river drops off to where you no longer see it, you better quit thinking about flat and peaceful water.

I am probably wrong about Round Here. The song also says, “She came from Nashville with a suitcase in her hand. She said she wants to meet a boy who looks like Elvis.” That’s probably not metaphor for America.

Counting Crows, Round Here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAe3sCIakXo

Florida Wall

It may baffle some and it may sound outlandish but here me out folks, we need to build a wall around Florida, a great wall, and we need to get Cuba to pay for it, and it should be called the Florida-Trump Wall. There’s logic here really. Florida as y’all know is a beautiful place with coconut trees, beaches, and Everglades but it’s also flatter than a tortilla but tortillas are Mexican, not Cuban. We want to send to bill to Cuba for this wall, not Mexico, so let’s say that Florida is as flat as a panqueque, which is Spanish for pancake. Setting aside the question of which metaphor best describes Florida, a pancake or a tortilla, there are no lines on the topographic of Florida and that creates a problem. Water from the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean threatens Florida and the water doesn’t have documenting papers. It’s an invasion. There is an incredible disparity in geography between Cuba and Florida and this makes Florida vulnerable to rising seas. Cuba has its own coconut trees and beaches but it is mountainous and that means the sea ain’t gunna swallow it whole. Unlike the map of Florida, the Cuba topographic map is a labyrinth of concentric lines so confusing it must have been drawn by an intellectual.  The sea is rising because of climate change which is a Chinese hoax and the Chinese are commies just like the Cubans.

Cuban topography also means the rock climbing in Cuba vastly supersedes anything in Florida. Cuba should pay for the wall around Florida out of jealous spite.

Viñales Valley, Cuba

Some intellectuals might ask why climate change is a hoax when the earth really is getting warmer and the seas really are rising but these are questions that are no longer relevant. Climate change is fake news because fake news is defined as anything complicated enough that a lazy mind finds confusing.  That the climate is changing even though climate change a hoax is a paradox that is solved by distracting the public with mindless reality shows that aren’t even remotely close to being real.  We don’t like intellectuals because they are the sort of sissies that make fun of the football players for their head injuries. However, we LOVE billionaires and have firmly reestablished the American tradition of allowing the richest people to make the poorest people to pay for things they don’t want or need. Middle class Americans pay for US wars to increase profits for oil companies and their taxes also pay the oil companies outright subsidies.   The oil companies don’t pay taxes and the middle class get trickled down upon.  It’s only fair to extend this this golden shower to Cuba.

Rich people forcing poor people to pay makes America great again. Cuba needs to step up and pay for the fact that they have mountains but Florida did not. Che Guevara waged a guerilla war in the Cuban mountains knowing that one day those mountains could be used to combat rising seas. We don’t like Che even though he had a cool hat and a motorcycle. 

Developing nations should pay for expensive projects that they don’t want. I have heard the people of Beverly Hills are going to hold a lobster bake and they are going to get Ethiopia to pay for it. Don’t blame Beverly Hills for the fact that Ethiopia invented coffee but failed to get a patent on it.  I have also heard that I don’t need to verify anything I might have heard as long it supports my preconceived notions, including the alternative fact that wanton greed is good for all. I have heard that Jesus taught this.

       

                                                               

The Florida-Trump Wall will start just southeast of Tallahassee and go all the way around the Florida Gulf Coast and up the Atlantic to just south of Savanna, Georgia. Among other things, the Florida-Trump Wall protects Trump’s Mar a Lago and I have heard that Trump does not have the cash to pay for his own wall.  He doesn’t have enough money to pay taxes.  Tallahassee and Savanna don’t deserve to be protected from rising seas because they are bunch of liberals. None of them work and they suck off the gubmint tit. We need to engineer a way to get to ocean to swallow Austin, Texas for the same reason but that’s another engineering project and I don’t want to be silly. Let liberals drown or learn to swim and make Ethiopia pay for the swimming lessons.

We can do this people! Those commie Cubans sit smugly in their elevated topography while Florida worries the next hurricane could wash right over Key West. If Cuba won’t pay, we can aim nuclear missiles at Havana. We have done that before and the Cubans didn’t mind at all. I have heard.

Cimarron, Cuba

Eyes of the World (What is known)

Eyes of the World as seen from a distance.

I am going to tell you about the Eyes of the World but first I am going to place it in philosophical context. The Eyes of the World was very recently the unknown unknown.  There is a lot of rock that we don’t even know that we don’t know about, the unknown unknown. 

Years ago Donald Rumsfeld was asked what we knew about Iraq’s nuclear and biochemical weapons programs and he said. 

“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.”

Dylan Miller Cleaning the Eyes. 

Rumsfeld’s dictum sounds a little clumsy until you take it apart. Rumsfeld divides knowledge into groups as an aid to decision making and it’s a good dictum even though Rumsfeld is now known to have made one of the biggest blunders in modern history.  He isn’t wrong when he says, “There are known knowns.”  It's a known known that if you fall off a cliff and you aren’t roped in, you are going to die. The statement, “There are known unknowns,” describes a fair amount of the climbing around Juneau. You know that there’s a cliff on a map on a rock jutting out of the icefield and you know that you don’t know anything else about it. Should you decide to climb it, the decision process is different than some route in guidebook where they tell you the grade, what pro you need, where to place the pro, and how to overcome the crux. This was where Rumsfeld’s dictum went astray. Rumsfeld didn’t mention that there are things we are positive that we know but we are wrong. In both climbing and war, it's the known unknowns that kill you.  The known unknown is that thing you swear on a stack of bibles (or Quorans) is true but isn't true. You aren't going to get 72 virgins in the afterlife for blowing yourself to smithereens along with a busload of infidel commuters.  If Trump tells you the press is fake news, it's wise to check his credibility before you sign up for the marines and invade Iran. Climbers are smarter than military leaders.The only real facts are Darwin's. If you don't double check your knots, you win a Darwin award.

In climbing we stay safer through redundancy because we know that we might be wrong about what we are positive know.  If you know your anchor is bomber but you are wrong, you know you're going to be fine but you are not going to be fine unless a backup anchor.  Unfortunately, they don't use redundancy in war often enough. Rumsfeld was positive there were chemical weapons in Iraq but his mistake killed thousands of  US soldiers when the soldiers were ordered to invade the wrong country, kill the wrong dictator, and murder a million people. 

Climbing is less dangerous than war. In climbing the unknown unknowns can be dangerous but they can also be a ton of fun.

Three years ago I wrote a post called Climbing Development and it did not include anything about the Garden of Rocks or the Eyes of the World and this wasn’t in intentional omission. These places weren’t on the map, they had not been visited, or even considered as climbing destinations. There are rocks in the woods and beaches around Juneau that climbers have never considered climbing and don’t even know that there is something there to consider. 

Top of the Eyes. photo Adam Moser

The Eyes of the World is so named because the view from the top is phenomenal. The top of the cliff is about 1,050 feet above sea level and at this writing there isn’t a trail to the bottom of the cliff but there is a brushy trail to the top.  What is known is that so far local climbers have developed three bolted routes and there is more to develop. The rock is solid but I still don’t know what the rock type is. It’s the same rock type as the Tee Harbor boulders. Indeed this cliff is a thousand feet above the Tee Harbor boulders and it appears the boulders fell off the cliff some time in the past.  you can hike to the top of the cliff in about 45 minutes. The climb the bolted routes you have to rappel off the cliff and climb back up. There are three anchor points about 25 meters down the wall at the base of each climb. I think a 50 meter rope is too short to reach them if doubled up. There are yet many climbs to be developed. It is known that there are unknowns. That and it’s tough to follow the trail if you haven’t been there before. The beginning of the trail, in particular, seems like a needle in a haystack or more accurately, a strand of boot worn ground in a vast temperate rain forest. Right now the trail starts 100 yards from the parking lot and you have to bushwhack to the start. It seems that if you are going to get lost, it’s better to get lost before you lose sight of the parking lot.

Perhaps, it would be good to make some of the unknowns a little more known.

Bolted routes on The Eyes of the World, 2019

Sheep Mountain Heli Drop.

Not on Sheep Mountain and not my photo.

Saturday was Juneau’s annual Sheep Mountain Helicopter drop. For a while I was calling it the Sheep Heli drop until someone asked what sort of sicko drops a sheep out of helicopter. There have never been any bighorn sheep in Juneau area and the name Sheep Mountain is a perpetuated mistake. The old miners confused mountain goats and sheep. There are mountain goats on Sheep Mountain and rumors of sharks.  Nobody has the desire to change the names to Goat Creek and Goat Mountain and they probably never will. There is a Goat Creek and Goat Mountain elsewhere in the borough of Juneau. Just to be clear, a group of skiers were dropped that got dropped on the summit of Sheep Mountain. I know you were worried about the sheep.

Taken right before I hopped out.

Anyhow, the Sheep Drop was fun at ridiculous levels.

Gerry Landry photo, Unknown skier near Shark Lake. 

There’s absolutely nothing noble about climbing into a helicopter and hopping out on top of mountain. The helicopter landed and I grabbed my pack and skis out of basket hanging under the helicopter, sat down on top my gear, and waited for the helicopter to fly away. I paid $79 for a five minute ride.

North Side of Sheep Mountain, Gerry Landry photo.

I could have given the money to the poor and climbed the mountain on foot. I could have gone to the Bernie Sanders rally Saturday afternoon and maybe helped make America free again. I don’t think we are free. I will say that. But rather than join the struggle for a better future or join the effort to help those less in need, I spent $79 for a five-minute helicopter ride and burned more than my share of fossil fuels.

Helicopter taking off at Sheep Creek Beach.

We met the helicopter at the Sheep Creek beach and rode up in five groups of five. Once we hopped out, we huddled over packs and didn’t stand up until the heli flew away. The helicopter made laps to the beach to pick us all up. Coastal Helicopters charges about $1,800/hour and it took an hour to carry all the groups to the summit (25/$1,800 + tip). The summit of Sheep Mountain is a plateau about an acre large and it makes for a great lunch area for a group of twenty-five people. Once we were all on top, we sat down and ate breakfast while scanning the landscape. By and by we decided to ski to Shark Lake. It’s called Shark Lake due to a subspecies of great white shark called the Snow Shark (Pistris skierus), endemic the east side of Sheep and Clark Peaks. That or maybe they call it Shark Lake because it sits between Sheep Mountain and Mount Clark. Shark is the marriage of Sheep and Clark. 

Sheep Mountain near day's end.

The snow conditions were great on the east side of Sheep Mountain all the way down to Shark Lake. At the bottom I realized the day was going to be work, even with the heli drop. It’s 2,200 back to the summit of Sheep Mountain and this was a drop, not heli skiing. They drop you off for a heli drop and from there you are on your own to get home. Heli skiing is different. They pick up you at the bottom for heli skiing and repeatedly carry back up, and they take you back to town. Heli skiing is for lazy, rich people. One day I will do that too if I am lucky enough to get rich.

Near Shark Lake                                                               Skin Track  

 

The average college student graduates with $37,000 in student loan debt. Furthermore, Americans are beholden to our employers for our very lives because health insurance is tied to our employment. We could literally die if we don’t get a job for a corporation of government agency and continue to work for them until nigh unto death.  The cost of health insurance in the US is high enough that we spend most of our lives paying health insurance and student loans. That’s what I do.  However, on Saturdays we can burn shitpiles of jet fuel while riding in helicopters. Nero fiddles. Sharks ride in helicopters.

Summit of Sheep Mountain looking south. 

Once we got to Shark Lake, we skinned back to the top of Sheep Mountain, having opted not to ski up Mount Clark. Then we dropped off the north side of Sheep Mountain and down a steep gully through some of the nicest skiing I have done in all year. The powder was earned though because it was tough getting out. My skins are getting older. So am I.  I don’t notice my skins are losing grip until I try skin something steeper than the ridges on North Douglas. Still I cursed appropriately when my skins slipped and it didn’t take that long to get back to the summit of Sheep Mountain. Some time in the morning my lunch had a minor disaster occurred. It wasn’t a disaster like the fact that millennial Americans are screwed. Wages have been flat and declining for forty years so if you are under 40, decline is all you know.  I brought cheesecake in a plastic container, the lid popped off, and it commingled with my peanut butter and honey sandwich. It tasted good though I won’t put it in recipe book. I don’t have a photo.

The last run of the day was off the west side of Sheep Mountain in the direction of Perseverance Trail. The snow by afternoon had loosened up and felt like dreams. It’s hard to describe just how cool it was. There is a drainage you can take from Sheep Mountain that leads to the end of Perseverance Trail. Then you walk out. Eventually we made it to the Perseverance trail but by way of the wrong drainage. Because we took the wrong drainage, we spent about an hour crawling from snow line, through brush and old mining equipment with skis on our backs and finally made it to the trail. We even climbed through a mine shaft to get through. I wonder if that is a new experience in humandom. Millions of people ski and many people have climbed through mine shafts but I wager the climbing through a mine shaft has never been part of a ski trip.  I could be wrong. Once to the trail and out of morass of brush, we walked out to the trailhead. I got a ride to a restaurant and made it just in time for my food to arrive. I was three hours late for the Bernie Sanders gathering so I didn’t go. 

Selfie 

A google search taught me that sheep drops are real. 

Perfect is the enemy of the perfect

Somewhere down in the fog there’s a city of people complaining about the dull gray sky.

Yesterday I blew off work to go skiing and it was perfect, or good depending on your point of view.  “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”  Voltaire that said that. Maybe Voltaire spent time the mountains. He is also credited with the phrase, “No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.”  Voltaire was centuries before people turned the word snowflake into an insult. I like snowflakes cuz, ya know, I am a skier. I am a snowflake seeking an avalanche but that’s a cultural avalanche. I digress. I am also a skier that doesn’t want a damn thing to do with real avalanches.

The Back Side of Douglas.

Wednesday we got a dump of snow so yesterday I took Thursday off work and went skiing. I chose to ski inbounds because I was going solo and there was avalanche potential. It turns out it wasn’t too bad and the snow was quite stable. It also turns out the day was perfect. What would Voltaire say about that?

Powder is sometimes called “Hero Snow.” Voltaire didn’t invent that phrase. I don’t know who did but it means that you can ski like a hero and the crashes don’t hurt. Usually. I showed up before the lift opened and rode to the top of the mountain one of the first chairs. At the bottom of the lift ramp I turned immediately and shot straight down a steep run on the east side. There was 10-12 of new powder and I got first tracks. I was looking and feeling like a hero in hero snow. Toward the bottom of the run I tried to hop over a snow pit but instead plunged into the pit. My first thought was that my crash ruined a perfect run. How often do I get to be the first skier down East Wolverine on a powder day and I messed up perfection AFTER I successfully run most of the mountain.  Though I had thoughts that I messed up a perfect run (I had) I also took a moment to look up. I lay in a pile of snow staring into a bluebird sky, snowflakes swirling down as they eased from the spruce trees overhead. I thought of Voltaire. The perfect is the enemy of the good.

Overexposed Selfie. It's good enough

Why concern myself about making a perfect run if I diminish the experience berating myself for screwing it up by falling into a pit? For the last few ski trips I have got into the habit of berating myself for other reasons. I am not the skier I used to think I am. I never was. I used to think I was a shit from the coffee bean cat on a ski slope. A better skier wouldn’t be in that pit. As a point of fact, a minute later a better skier blew past me and he did not biff it into a pit. Biff it or no, I got the first track that morning down East Wolverine.

I got off my ass and back on my skis and skied the rest of the way down the mountain to the Ptarmigan lift and found myself on the chairlift with the same skier that blasted by me.  He grinned an uncontainable grin and exclaimed, “It’s sucks to be us today don’t it?” Straight up! Conditions up there weren’t perfect if you thought for a while. Deeper powder provides more bragging rights. I have a friend from Utah that claimed 14 inches of snow in her driveway. Eaglecrest only had 10 inches. Skiing would have been better, I suppose, with more base. Shallow base caused the pit in the first place. I c

ould pick apart the experience like an inexperienced editor and come up with even more reasons the day wasn’t perfect but I am going to add to Voltaire’s phrase. Sometimes the perfect is the enemy of the perfect. Think of that. 

Pete.

Perhaps Voltaire wasn’t just talking about that perfectionists never get a damn done. He was talking about that partly but it’s not the only interpretation. Perhaps, in looking too closely at Van Gogh’s brush technique, we miss out on the genius sitting staring at us. We see how Van Gogh saw a starry night and the vision haunts us. That’s perfection. Do I lose a perfect moment when I ask myself if a day spent rock climbing would be improved if I was a better climber? Would it be improved it I hadn’t fallen off a wall while climbing last year and needed shoulder surgery? Would it be improved if I had started climbing when I was ten years old and not waited until I was 43?  Would Americans be more free if we weren’t shackled by broken notions of what makes people free?

It might be better IF I had learned to climb early in life. I might or it might not. This essay might be better if I used fewer commas, or more.  I, am, not, sure. What I am sure about is that it’s possible to tarnish a moment with “What ifs.” Sometimes it’s better to soak in the good and call it perfect. 

"What ifs" can shackle us if we allow them to become catastrophic what-ifs. Say, what if that pit had contained a razor sharp rock. What if nobody ever wants to listen to the songs I write and sing? What if instead of landing on my shoulder and severing half the tendons in rotator cuff, I had landed on my head and broken my neck?  What if walking my dog criminals  rob me at gunpoint? I might find myself scared shitless, not skiing, not climbing rocks, never singing and never writing songs. I might become one of those pathetic souls packing a loaded gun, forever dreaming that I get a chance to use it. Catastrophic what-ifs can be as paralyzing as a broken neck.

This photo would be better if I had a better camera

Around noon I ran into my friend Pete and I greeted him by quoting the guy on the lift, “It sucks to be us today don’t it?” Pete agreed. Pete came up at noon because he was on call to help with a search and rescue drill. The drill was canceled because the airport was covered in fog and they were supposed to use a helicopter. Pete and I hiked out the ridge and I made one run with him before going home to walk the dog. All the landscape below our mountaintop view was soaking in thick fog and we were bathed in eye-splitting beauty. Halfway down the West Bowl, I attempted a jump and I crashed again in hero snow. It was more than good.

It was a perfect crash.