Why everybody should be angry at the militia in Oregon.

North and South Six Shooters, Indian Creek,, Utah 2014 

Armed gunmen invaded a wildlife refuge in Oregon to try and steal millions of acres, including the land in this photo, from the rest of us and it's really starting to piss me off. The militants themselves speak using religious phrases and they may actually believe they are doing God's will but if so, they think God wants them to take the West for themselves.  Yeah, this is a blog about climbing and this post is about climbing. It’s also about a whole, whole lot more.

Part of our freedom as I see it is being threatened by a fairly dangerous and underestimated movement. We need to protect public land from the politicians and militias that want to sell it off to the highest bidder and I think our freedom and quality of life depends upon it.  What is freedom if we don’t have the ability to come and go as we please?  You cannot be free if you are surrounded by No Trespassing signs unless you are rich enough to be the bastard that put them there. 

The threat to our freedom is often couched as a struggle for public land. It is that but those struggling to grab public land are banking that most of us won’t realize how much of our freedom is tied to land until it’s too late. A few weeks ago an armed militia took over a federal office for a wildlife refuge in Oregon and they occupy it still. They demand land reform, most notably they demand that land be taken out of public hands and auctioned off to ranchers.  Some of them want the government to retain ownership of the land but allow grazing permit holders to control how the land is used. It’s a sweet deal for the rancher because the government pays the bills for upkeep of the land. Their demands aren’t new but their tactics are. They are armed this time and they say they will kill law enforcement that try to arrest them. Thus far they are guilty of trespassing, breaking and entering, obstruction of justice, and resisting arrest.  But they aren’t the real threat to our freedom. 

You are free to climb here, hunt here, camp here, ski here in winter, or roll around in the grass in the summer. There are no fences or signs reading “No trespassing.” Mount McGinnis, Tongass National Forest, Alaska. 

It might not be a comfortable thought for many people but if you don’t live in the West, Alaska, or few other places in this country with public land, you are not as free as those of us with public land. I spent a year in the Midwest and the land is truly possessed, in this case it’s possessed by thousands of landowners. Everywhere you turn you encounter somebody’s fence and somebody’s sign. Land is fairly cheap so a working class person can buy a quarter acre lot and walk around on it like a rat in a cage. You are free to mow the lawn.  Lawn mowers are a big deal in the Midwest and it’s not surprising.  Neighborhoods have lawnmower races on their riding mowers. Fun stuff if you are into that sort of thing.  However, you can’t go hiking or climbing unless you trek to a few state parks where you get to share your day with all the other people that don’t have anywhere else to go. You can make a major trek to northern Minnesota, northern Wisconsin, or Michigan's upper peninsula and find open space. Indeed, you can be free living in up north in the Midwest and it's access to public land that makes that possible. It isn't the rural nature of the place that makes possible. People living in Seattle, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, Salt Lake City and many other places have almost immediate access to fairly sizable tracts of public land even though many of them do not climb mountains or hike a trail they are free to choose to do so.

Physically and geographically climbs and hikes I have written about so far in this blog have had little in common other than that I have been to these places and they are all owned by the government.  It is not a coincidence because without even thinking about it I went to these places because it was public land or more specifically because these places are not private land. Scroll back to previous posts in this blog and you will see photos of Mount Shasta, the Mendenhall Towers, Split Thumb, the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and the Superstition Mountains. While going there I didn’t see one No Trespassing sign and it wasn’t because I knocked them down.

Mike Miller’s Video footage, Lynn Canal. Tongass National Forest, Alaska Tongass.

Chilkat Range, Tongass National Forest. Alaska’s politicians want to get their hands on this land and open it to strip mining.

The threat is many loud mouthed conservatives cheering this militia on and that prominent politicians are among the cheerleaders.  Many scream for the neck of the police officer who shot LaVoy Finicum, the militia spokesmen that committed suicide by cop. It is tragic that anybody had to die but immoral to blame the cop. Perhaps, some blame could be placed on the cult of Cliven Bundy. Indeed they believe they are on God's errand and Finicum was willing to die for it. However, Finicum reached for his gun because he preferred to die rather than go to prison. I suppose I can understand his not wanting to prison but forcing a cop to shoot you because you would rather die is a really shitty thing to do. I think it was immoral of Finicum that his last act was to place his blood on someone else’s hands. It’s too bad this whole fiasco led to his death but the people who defend his actions concern me because the national craziness level is rising off the charts. Another concern is that the media uses words like activist or protester to describe men who broke into an office building and threatened to kill cops. I understand they vowed to never shoot at an officer unless he or she drew first but they had to know that no sane officer approaches an armed militant without his or her gun at ready. They expected a war because they weren't entirely delusional.

A very prominent threat is that many politicians sympathize with them and that includes Alaska’s congressional delegation. I can’t count the number of times I have heard my senators and representative use the words “Federal Overreach.” It’s a buzz phrase for politicians that want to allow corporations to run roughshod on the land. In Alaska, the words Federal Overreach are often used when the feds operate the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as a place for wildlife and not as an Exxon land holding, but the ANWR isn’t the only public property they want to steal and then give away.

There is a delegation in Congress pushing to give huge chunks of the West and Alaska to the states. Most of those states, including Alaska, are pushing for this so they can auction off the land or auction off the resources. Setting aside some very legitimate environmental concerns that come from rampant resource development, this raises the specter of access for all of us.

Students in the Juneau Icefield Research Project raise the flag on the Fourth of July at Camp 17, Tongass National Forest.




Right now anybody can go anywhere they want on public land. In Juneau, you can climb peaks in the icefield or boulder in the forest up the hill from my neighborhood. Many people living in the West and in Alaska take this sort of freedom for granted.  Until recently I did. I grew up in Utah, British Columbia, Arizona, and Missouri and even in Missouri I had some access to public land in the Mark Twain National Forest. I was so accustomed to being free to go wherever I wanted to go that I didn’t mentally process that many Americans don’t even know what they are missing. 

I don’t love the federal government. I think federal agencies trend toward red tape and suffer from swings in funding that cause them to bloat one year and starve the next.  Examples of government mismanagement are easy to see. However, even with the drilling and overgrazing we see on federal land, the public still has the ability to weigh in even though all too often we don't. Furthermore, quite often they do a great job and we ignore that too.

BLM land, Arctic North Slope. 

We ignore our public lands at our peril. If we allow  public land to pass to private hands, we lose not only our freedom to access the land but our freedom to participate in the dialog about how the land is managed. There could be a silver lining if this militant standoff spurs everybody from climbers to couch potatoes to pay attention to issues on public land. 

But even with the problems we see on federal land, their goal is to make it possible for us all to climb, hike, camp, hunt, fish, and many other activities on public land. I generally like federal employees and most do know the red tape can feel a bit clownish at times but they do care about the land. Trails are usually reasonably well maintained and most important we are allowed to use them.  Every acre of land deeded out of public hands runs the risk of a No Trespassing sign and often it runs the risk of a chain saw or a bulldozer to a greater degree than it does in public hands. 

Terminus of the Herbert Glacier, Tongass National Forest, Alaska

I agree with the Bundys about one thing; it's not about cattle. The militia standoff is not about grazing or drilling or mining; it's about whether public lands stay public. I don't even think the militia thinks it's about grazing. To them this is a holy war even though the end point is still thievery, as is the case with any holy war.  It's about ownership and control of the land and they are zealously out of control because they think God is on their side. The fact that they might graze it to dust once they own it, is secondary. 

Next time somebody talks about selling off public land, ask them where they plan to climb or hunt or fish or whatever it is they like to do. Next time you hear somebody use the phrase ‘federal overreach,” throw some rotten fruit at them. It’s a mild protest. Next time somebody tells you that God is on his side, throw rotten fruit at them with extra fervor. Our ability to access many things we love, including climbing, depends upon it. So does our freedom. 

Climbing Development

 

Sydney and Jane at Sea Cliffs, February 2014

Juneau isn’t Moab or Yosemite. We need to get out and develop some easy to access climbing areas, places you can access with a short drive or hike and not spend most of your energy getting there. Last summer I became friends with a geologist  and climber named Kevin who came to Juneau to work for one of the mines and he asked “Why haven’t you folks developed more of your local crags?” 

Good question.  

One answer is that it’s a lot trickier to do here than it is down south where you can drive right up to the cliff and there are thousands of climbers willing to jump in and help. Some of the rock around here is choss and brittle and that is especially the case near town.  There seems to be an inverse correlation between rock quality and how difficult it is the access the rock. We don’t have much road access compared to other states or much of Alaska so to find spectacular climbing you first must bushwhack in or climb to the icefield.  Untold numbers of rocks grow moss in forests here completely unseen. There are not thousands of climbers to help develop crags either.

Mendenhall Glacier. It's a lovely place but you wouldn't want to climb here. 

As I write, avalanche risk prohibits any sane person from going high into the mountains to ski and it is raining concrete blocks at sea level. It’s the middle of January and it shouldn’t be this warm even though it shouldn’t feel this cold. The wind whistles outside like a freight train and it’s 44 degrees but it feels colder because the wet sinks into the bones. Many cliffs along the sea are brittle and dirty as well. There is a granite zone five zone about miles inland but in most cases you either have to climb thousands of feet on foot or take a helicopter to get to it, it’s covered in snow eight months out of the year, and it’s raining half the time during the summer. A good bit of the icefield is in the granite zone. 

Lemon Glacier and Juneau Icefield from the top of Cairn Peak, Photo Pete Boyd.

The icefield can be spectacular but it is not easy to access by any stretch.  I posted already about Split Thumb and Solva Buttress. Herbert Glacier’s terminus ends in the granite zone and it only takes thirty minutes to get there from the highway on a bike but Herbert’s cliffs are largely undeveloped. There is a basalt zone about thirty miles north of town at the Sea Cliffs. These are wonderful cliffs but they are forty feet at most and the developed area is not very expansive. There are some great boulders at Tee Harbor north of town but they are in the woods in the shade so it takes a day or so for them to dry out after rain. It rains here they say.  

Sydney reading by the fire at Herbert Glacier.

There are undoubtedly other places to climb rocks that haven’t been developed. Boulders and cliffs dot the forests and hills all over the place if you look closely and their rock quality varies immensely.  When you first find a cliff, it’s usually coated in moss.

Summit of Mount Ernest Gruening, another place worth a revisit.

An alternative answer to Kevin’s question is that we should develop more.

I call this Miller’s Pillar because Dylan Miller wants to be the first to climb it. It sits in the middle of the glacier on the west slope of Mount Ernest Gruening. 

Somebody developed the Sea Cliffs and I am glad they did. The Sea Cliffs are short walls that look out onto Lynn Canal and beyond the Chilkat Mountains. After work in summer evenings you can go out there and climb while watching humpback whales, sea lions, and seals frolic. Make sure your belayer doesn’t get distracted; it’s a lot to take in. It stays light late in summer but at some point the sun will set over the Chilkats and the whole of the sea and sky will turn bright orange and red. 

Check out Paul on this Tee Harbor climb. 

People cleaned the boulders and Tee Harbor and now it’s a great place to go. Juneau is a small city sitting in a very vertical landscape. Mountains jut from sea level to near 7,000 feet right out of town. You can strap on a pair of boots and within hours find yourself wandering ridge lines and peaks with views that many spend a lifetime seeking and never find. When the snow is right, the skiing here is close to orgasmic. The snow isn’t always right but it’s right more days than I can count.

Slopes at Eaglecrest

Juneau climbing is underdeveloped but that is both a curse and a boon. It would be great if somebody had already scouted the cliffs out the road for more climbable sea cliffs. It would. However, I am quite excited that one of these times I go looking new cliffs; I am actually going to find a “brand new cliff.” It’s quite possible in Juneau to actually discover a new wall and climb something that has never seen shoe or cam. Imagine that!

In the near future I plan to focus some attention on finding new rock out Herbert Glacier way. Sometime next summer I am planning a boulder cleaning party in the woods near my house in North Douglas as well.  I figure climbers will come and clean a cliff if I announce on facebook that I built a fire and put some beer in the creek to chill. If you build it, they will come and they might bring brats. I would love to cruise the shore north of Echo Cove and see about the rock quality of some cliffs there.  It’s the same geologic zone as the Sea Cliffs.  There is a long cliff band on the back side of Dean Peak that I would love to check out. Getting there will be a bushwhack but it looks so cool from a distance and it’s in the granite zone. I would really love to get up to some of the summits in the icefield again like Solva Buttress. There are actually more spires in the Juneau icefield than I can count and some of them have never been climbed by anyone.

Dean Peak as seen from a boat in Lynn Canal, May 2015. I am interested in the cliff band on left. It's up Sawmill Creek.

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.