Alpine Margarita Recipe

Observation Peak as seen from Cairn Peak.
The shadow is Split Thumb

A while back I had a conversation with my daughter’s friend Rachel who was hiking the Chilkoot Trail and on the trip one of the merry backpackers are having a birthday. By and by the subject of what to bring rose to the surface. You can’t or shouldn’t pack a bottle of champagne up a pass and over. It's heavy and glass. Yes, I know the miners who made that trail famous carried things way heavier. They are dead now.

The Chilkoot Trail is a historic trail heading from near Skagway and into Yukon and it gained fame as route thousands of miners took during the Gold Rush of 98. This was 1898 and not  a gold rush based on some corporate raid on pensions like we see now. Jack London wrote of the Yukon Gold Rush that people didn’t go to Yukon for the gold, they went because they wanted excitement in their lives. That hasn’t changed. Have fun Rachel.

Lemon Glacier

Anyway, you don’t want to carry heavy stuff on a backpacking trip and the Alpine Margarita is light and tasty. I concocted this drink just prior to our trip up Split Thumb to celebrate the day. You can use glacial ice on the rocks if you are near a glacier like the Lemon Glacier pictured to the right 

Here's the recipe:

Before you ever leave home add 150 ml of tequila (2.5 shots), juice of 2 medium sized limes, and 100 ml simple syrup to a water bottle. A Nalgene actually has milliliters marked on the side of the jar. The ingredients weigh about 10 oz.  

Once you are on the mountain and your day is done. Don’t hike drunk. Public Service announcement. I digress. Fill the bottle half full of snow and/or ice and shake it up a lot. The snow will melt  and get smaller in volume. Add a little more snow and shake again. Then add water. The proportion of water and snow depends on how slushy the snow is. On a hot summer day you may not need water at all. The goal is to have about 500 ml or two cups of slushy margarita and if you get the snow right it will be so much like a frozen margarita that you will wish you had fajitas. 

Gaps Between The Trees

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

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

Northeast bowl, Mount Jumbo, Juneau, AK

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pico de Orizaba, from summitpost.org

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

55 Hours in Sitka.

Mt Edgecumbe. Sitka, Alaska. 

Know Thyself (Sailing Failures)

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

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

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

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

We roasted hot dogs.

Front page of the blueprints.

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

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

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

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

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

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

γνῶθι σεαυτόν. Know thyself.

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.