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.

How to climb the border fence.

Suppose you were in Mexico visiting friends or climbing El Potrero Chico and needed to get home but Trump sealed the border during one of his rants. Suppose you wanted to move north for whatever reason and found a fence in your way. I have seen the border fence muchos times and only now thought of it as a climbing project.

This is my thoughts. There’s a good chance you will come to either a chain link or iron fence and it might be tall enough to make it suck if you fall from the top. If you have a harness, a lanyard, a carabiner, a scrap of carpet, and two prusiks, you can climb that cabrón easier and safer. If you know how to tie a hand harness, your trip got cheaper.

It’s a public service announcement.

You will need five meters of good rope to make a harness. Three, two meter lengths of 8 mm cord to make one lanyard and two prusiks. You will also need a chunk of carpet because they keep putting really sharp stuff on top the fence.

The harness can be a hand tied harness. I learned to tie these from Freedom of the Hills, the bible of climbing. 

To make a hand harness, first tie a loop about 1.5 meters from the end of the 5 meter rope. The loop should be fit over your thigh, snug but not uncomfortable. About 15 cm up rope, tie another loop. Put both legs in the loops like pants and wrap the ends around your waist and tie them together with a square knot. 

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Next, take a two meter strand of 8 mm cord and make a small loop on the end. Run the cord through both rope between your legs AND the strand around your waist and run the cord through the loop. Make another loop on the end of the rope and attach a carabiner. This is used to clip into chain link or clip to spikes on the iron fence. This will allow you to hang on the harness while you put the carpet on the top and while you climb over. 

Climb a chain link by sticking your toes and fingers in the chain link. Climbing the wrought iron is trickier but easier once you know. Make a prusik with two meters of an 8mm cord following this video. LINK You should have two.  Do this before you get near the fence.

Once you are at the fence wearing a harness, with prusiks in hand, this video shows how. LINK. Substitute a wrought iron bar for the vertical (green) rope. It works. You can climb any pole or bar with two strands of rope. Learn this before you are climbing a border fence. 

Put a chunk of carpet to cover any sharp junk on the top of the fence and climb on over. This is good to know if traveling north into the US or the event that we Americans need to run south.  Crossing the border is a misdemeanor but treason is a felony. Once you are in the US beware that our president is a treasonous Russian puppet. Tenga cuidado. Peace to all on both sides of that damn fence.

Lastly, you can write on your resumé that you climbed the fence using these tools to help get a job at a climbing gym. 

My blog is notorious

Capitol Reef National Park

Apparently, the National Park Service is singling me out.  I have entered infamy.

There is no other explanation. 

A Clutter of Electric Flying Spiders

In May I had shoulder surgery and it’s improving but I am still nowhere near ready to climb rocks so I cheer others that can climb. In this case I am talking about spiders that I have seen flying over the mountains. 

They don't have wings.  

Some spiders fly using static electricity and this is one of the coolest and perhaps useless bits of scientific trivia I have heard in quite some time. The fact that I just learned this last month indicates the bulk of societal priorities are caught in a web of mundanity. Darwin wrote about spiders flying a thousand at sea while on his now famous trip on the Beagle. He was curious enough to wonder even though he knew an answer was forthcoming. Science these days spends too much time trying to develop the next whizbang smartphone widget and not enough research to investigate just how cool this world is. I have seen electric flying spiders, most people have. My most poignant recollection of spiders was last summer up on Mount Juneau Ridge, I stopped to let my dog swim in a pond. Juneau Ridge has kettle ponds tucked into rocks and moss that make it possible for an animal wrapped in fur to run the ridge on a hot summer day and cool down by swimming. As Jane swam I laid down in the grass and noticed a clutter of spiders flying overhead, each suspended by a thread of silk.  I have seen this elsewhere and if you are looking, it's not that uncommon. I figured at the time they were carried by the wind but didn’t know the whole story at the time. I also didn’t know a group of spiders is called a clutter. The stuff I don’t know exceeds I do know by a fair margin. I don’t even know the size of the margin. I am not different than the bulk of humanity in not understanding the depth of what I don't know. My interest in electric flying spiders started when I read a journal article and watched the accompanying video. See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982218306936

Juneau Ridge, same pond but different day.

Human ignorance is like Shroedinger's cat. The box contains ignorance, not a cat, but we cannot open the box because by definition, we cannot know what we do not know.  There are no metrics to measure ignorance. What we know is that spiders are known to climb to a high point on a mountain, point their abdomens skyward, shoot a few strands of silk upward, and fly away. Wind can help but spiders fly when the air is completely still. Spiders placed in a field of static electricity can move upward and will shoot downward when the direction of field is reversed or removed. They literally grab electricity from the atmosphere and fly thousands of feet up like Mary Poppins with her umbrella. Soon after scientists discovered this, they determined it highly unlikely that humans could use static electricity to fly. Flying spiders weigh less than an ounce. Knowing we can't use this info to further technology causes some to lose interest in HOW they incorporate static electricity to fly.  

That’s what I mean that we are often a mundane species. Not only are we earthbound (planes aren't human) but our research priorities suggest we care more about next year’s smartphone interface than we do about pure natural fascination.   

Spider taking off, (uploaded Cosmos Magazine)

Sir Isaac Newton conducted experiments where he timed the speed of rolling balls on an incline plane. He also timed the speed of rocks he dropped of the walls of Cambridge University. Newton determined that in the absence of air, a feather falls the same speed as a brick. How cool is that? It’s a myth that the Laws of Gravity occurred to Newton from apple hitting his head. Newton could teach us something and not just about physics and calculus. It’s not a myth that Newton reinvented how we see the world without any thought that his discoveries might one day help develop the next whizbang smartphone widgets. I worry that too many people are emotionally stunted because we are taught from youth that education and learning are useless if you can’t use it to make a buck. Too many people make fun of poets and philosophers and too many scientist forget that we are poets and philosophers first and foremost. Intellectual curiosity makes the human race spectacular and sets us apart from spiders. They have their thing and we have ours.

We are intellectually curious  for the same reasons we climb mountains. Neither learning about the strangest quirks of science nor climbing a mountain will bring you any more closer to winning at consumerism.  John F Kennedy said we should go to the moon for the same reason a mountaineer climbs a mountain “Because it’s there” but there is more to it. We climb mountains because we can’t imagine not climbing mountains. When I see a mountain or a rapid, no matter how difficult or 'out of my league' it might be, I ask wonder about potential lines. Intellectual curiosity is like that.  Darwin didn't know how and certainly didn't know why spiders were flying a thousand miles out to sea but he thought about how to answer those questions. You don't become curious for any other reason than it hurts to know we are ignorant and it feels so good to fill the gap. We should, I think, climb to the top of mountains, stretch our abdomens to the sky, and spread silk at least do so figuratively.  I can’t raise my arm above my head but my mind can fly away and it doesn’t need static electricity to do so. I am not sure a clutter of spiders knows where they will land once launch into the sky. Maybe I underestimate their capacity for curiosity. At least they don't watch TV.

I am intellectually curious as to why more people aren't intellectuals. It's a big question for me. I meet mental luggards and wonder if they were that kid in school that asked, "Is this going to be on the exam?" ... " How can I use this to get a job." I always wanted to throttle that kid. I sure as don't want to hire him.

Skiing is about as close to human flight as we get. 
 Douglas Island, Alaska

The Freaking Magnificent Great Unconformity

There is a geologic zone in the Grand Canyon scientists call the Great Unconformity but I have a friend that prefers to call it the Freaking Magnificent Great Unconformity.  I just got back from the Grand Canyon where I rafted from Lee’s Ferry to Phantom Ranch. A story is on its way about the Grand Canyon even though it's not exclusively from the Grand Canyon. I thought about this on the river often.

Redwall Cavern.

1.7 billion years ago, the earth had mostly cooled and the part of the earth we now call northern Arizona was likely under the sea but it isn't known. There strata in the inner gorge is composed of Zoroastrian Granite and Vishnu Shists, igneous rocks from the mantle of the earth. All those rocks with Hindu names haven’t done a damn thing in the last billion years or so except rise and fall with whims plate tectonics. Life wouldn't be around for a long time. When life rolled around at about 600 million years ago, Northern Arizona was under the sea. Sedimentary rocks formed on top of the shists and granites and they have microscopic fossils. As you walk up canyon the fossils get larger and more complex. There are “unconformities” in the layers that are basically places where millions of years are missing. The Great Unconformity is a place where 545 million year old Tapeats Sandstone rests on top of the Chuar group of Pre-Cambrian Rocks dating 825 million to a billion years old. Either no rock formed for about 400 million years or rock formed that was later eroded away. Either way, eons disappeared from the geologic story. There is a side canyon of the Grand called Nautiloid Canyon with fossilized nautiloids like those on my tattoo. Higher up in the canyon there are dinosaur fossils in places. After that evolution tottered. Life hasn't improved. Nothing tops the Velicoraptor, present company included. 

Nautiloid Fossil, Nautiloid Canyon.

Time moved along and the sea floor rose and the Colorado River was born as a meandering tropical river on a vast coastal plain much like the Amazon today. With time, the North American Tectonic Plate rose to 7,000 above sea level. The river stayed put at lower elevation but the land kept rising. The Grand Canyon was cut much like if you placed a knife on top of a cake and lifted the cake with the knife not moving. The river didn't cut down a mile deep but it did cut. The Kaibab Plateau rose and the river stayed put. 

Sometime after the mastodons went extinct and before the humans go extinct, I came along and rowed down the river in a rubber raft. I got back a few weeks ago. How is that act of running a river or my existence important in a grand scheme (pun intended) that includes Nautiloid fossils encased in rock for 300 million years? 

Once you find out you’re meaningless, 

you want to spend as much time under a waterfall as possible.Sydney at Stone Creek Falls

Every night I laid on the ground looking at stars so old and so far away that some of them could have died back when the velociraptors went extinct. The entire time span of the human race is VASTLY shorter than the Great Unconformity. Millions of species rose to existence and went extinct leaving no noticable trace of their existence. For a moment chew on the thought that eons can vanish from the face of the earth and that humanoids have been around for about 2 million years.

Life is short, do this whenever you can. Elevs Chasm.

All trace that humans ever existed could disappear from the planet with vastly more ease than not. What silliness it is for us to jockey for position in traffic to see who gets to work first to kiss the bosses ass? We want to build a wall to keep Mexicans out but lose sight of the fact that Mexicans and Americans share the North American Tectonic Plate for such a short period of time that it would suck to spend our short existence manufacturing differences or generating unnecessary divisions. I think once my shoulder I will learn how to play Mexican guitar. Considering how insignificant we are compared to geology, rowing rafts, climbing rocks, and camping out with friends makes a lot more sense to me than most anything else. 

My life matters a lot but only to me and to others that care about me. The universe is too big and the fossils too old to fret too much about the details.

In the vicinity of the Great Unconformity.

Tomorrow surgeons fix my shoulder but it involves considerable cutting. No climbing for me for a while. Maybe when I can climb again, I will head to one of the side canyons with Zoroastrian granite. Granite is dumb as a rock but in climbing granite that has been there for 1.7 billion years, we can gain wisdom.

I took this photo east of Phoenix near the Superstition Mountains. I drove by the sign, turned around, parked, and took photos of the sign from all angles.

Zoroastrian Granite, Grand Canyon