Losing the known?

Yvon Chouinard said, “Fear of the unknown is the greatest fear of all.” That may be true. Perhaps Chouinard’s statement needs a nuance. Jiddu Krishamurti said, “One is not afraid of the unknown, one is afraid of the known coming to an end.” I don’t know if the two ever met.

Lately I ask myself if it is beneficial to practice leaping into darkness. FYI, I am not off my rocker, at least not any more than I usually am. Like many things, there is a backstory to any persistent thought.

A few years back I was at a family reunion sitting at a campfire. Somebody was probably playing the guitar. Earlier in the day we went to a swimming hole on a river. The right bank had a rope swing that launched you into the stratosphere, or so it seemed. The opposite side of the river is a cliff about 10 meters high. Just in case you aren’t familiar with  river trash lingo, the right bank is the bank on the right facing downstream, "river trash" describes people that spend their lives rafting and/or kayaking, and 10 meters is about 35 feet. The rope swing  scared me enough that only did it once. I jumped off the cliff a few times after we determined the water was so deep that you couldn’t swim to the bottom. Just downriver there was a gravel bar on the left bank where you could swim out.

Juneau is down there somewhere in the unknown.

Later we were sitting at the fire and somebody suggested we jump off that cliff again. Many dares were made and I seemed to have the most bravado at the fire. Alcohol  was not involved in our decision. My bravado waned as the situation became more real. I was the last to jump.

We got to the top of the cliff and there was nothing down there but dark. I don’t know what metrics they use to measure darkness but there was not a single photon reflecting off the water. Light is measured in photons and perhaps dark is measured in fear, at least when jumping into it. The moon illuminated the gravel bar enough that we knew where to swim out.  

We weren't leaping into the unknown but it seemed like it. Jumping off that cliff wasn’t fundamentally different than it was earlier in the day. The water was still deep and the cliff was still about 10 meters high. Yet, my bravado was gone.

Deep water solo, near Skagway, Alaska. 
I don't have a photo of the cliff we jumped off in the dark.

My brothers jumped first and swam to the gravel bar. I stood on top the cliff for a while. There was no logical reason to walk down so peer pressure gave way. I jumped and it seemed like it took a long time to splash down. Certainly, it took the same amount of time as it did in the day but it didn’t seem that way. Under water I closed my eyes and followed gravity and buoyancy to the surface.. Yet, the forces of physics feel different in the dark. Maybe it isn’t only the dark that changes our perspective. Maybe it’s a good idea to practice leaping into the unknown because without practice you fail badly when faced with a novel experience.

Yvon Chouinard could be mostly right. The unknown might be the greatest fear of all precisely for evolutionary reasons. Evolution tells us not to eat an unknown mushroom. Evolution tells us not to jump off a cliff unless we know the water is deep enough. I am not sure if there is any evolutionary benefit to jumping off a cliff into water on a dare. Yet, dares have been around a long time and people who take dares haven’t been eliminated from the gene pool.  

Half my family jumped off that cliff. The other half would have joined but they had gone to sleep by the time we thought to do it. I have a big family. We were raised by parents with a sense of adventure. I have several friends that took major leaps into the unknown, in very different ways. The common denominator in their stories is that unlike most people they recognize that the familiar world and is just as dangerous as he unfamiliar world.

Interstate 405 in Los Angeles. There is at least one breathing human in each of those metal boxes and most of them base at part of their self worth upon the make and model they drive.

I know two people that saved some cash, bought a sailboat, and floated out to sea in search of foreign lands. People told them all manner of risks and none of the naysayers knew squat about sailing. Few of them knew squat about foreign lands. Astoundingly the naysayers didn’t know that the US has a crime problem yet they warned that you might find crime in foreign lands. Six months after sailing away, my friends made it to Tahiti. They were gone almost two years and had a great time.

I know a guy who quit his job and moved to Latin America to travel around for the rest of his life. He figures he can live indefinitely on $15K/year and that is the interest on his savings. He doesn’t have a work visa in any Latin American country so if he runs out of money, he must return to the States. People warned him that $15K isn’t a lot of money. They still warn him even after he’s been living well on $15K for years. They also warned he might get robbed or killed by cartels and narcos. All manner of rotten predictions were made and so far he’s doing just fine. He currently lives in Belize near the beach and volunteers with an organization trying to preserve coral reefs. I don’t know how his safety compares to life in Alaska. Neither does anyone else unless they spent time in Belize. If by any chance he runs out of money and must return to the States, he still won’t fear the unknown. Once you learn the unknown isn’t any more dangerous than the known, you can’t easily unlearn it. Once you see what drives human behavior, people living in industrial society start to look like a flock of scared chickens with destructive social habits.

White Faced Monkey, Cahuita National Park, Costa Rica

There’s a cliff and it’s dark down below. I am not interested in living full time out of a backpack like my expat friend. I don’t want to live on boat either like my sailboat friends. I like knowing where my home is.  However, I think we could all learn from them. 

Is it possible that Jiddu Krishamurti was right? That we don’t fear the unknown but fear letting go of the known. It takes more courage to question what we think we know than it does to jump off a cliff into the dark. Jumping off a cliff into the dark is an adrenaline jump but embracing the unknown feels bonkers. It’s scary to embrace the unknown when what we know might come to an end. My friend living in Belize made two important choices. He first chose to say "no" to a consumerist  lifestyles and second he chose to move to Belize.  I think his first choice required more courage than the second.  Sometimes it requires as much or more courage to say no to something we do not want than it does to say yes to a leap into the dark.

I once thought I “knew” that if I followed set of instructions and worked hard, I could become a captain of industry. I could rule my own little kingdom but what I thought I knew was wrong for at least two reasons. If you work hard sometimes you still don’t become a captain of industry; you become a meaningless peon. But the most important lie is that it’s a false win even if you succeed at becoming a captain of industry. I mistakenly “knew” that I wanted to be a captain of industry even though ruling anybody runs counter to my personality. I don’t even like being in charge over anybody at work. It took me a long time to question why would want a rule over a bunch of people because the metrics of “success” are so heavily ingrained. We are taught measure ourselves by a contest to see who can obtain the biggest house, the fanciest car, etc. Our success (as we perceive it) is measured by how many commodities we obtain. Foreign lands and/or foreign ideals seem tamer and less dangerous once we recognize the dangers of the world we inhabit. By most definitions Bill Gates is a “success” but my friend living in Belize presumably isn’t a success because he’s living on $15K/year. 

Sometimes we  mistakenly think we know that even experience is a commodity. Bungee jumping or riding the zipline can be distractions from facing real fears. Those things aren’t any more dangerous than my leap into the river at night. Too often we define adventure as a commodity purchased from a vendor. Tourists in Juneau are commodities to the cruise ship industry. Cruise reps use fear to con people out of their cash. They tell tourists not to go on a hike without a cruise ship certified guide because you could be killed by bears. There are three trailheads near the cruise ship docks but cruise reps are instructed not to tell anybody how to find a trailhead in Juneau.  Hint from a guy that hikes all the time in bear country, you won’t get killed by bears.  You get the same con when you try to plan hikes elsewhere. I have been looking at activities in Costa Rica because I am going there with my wife in May. We get told it’s too dangerous to do the most basic things unless we pay somebody to hold our hand. We get told hiking is dangerous without any explanation for why except that you need a guide.  People hike in Costa Rica without guides all the time.  Deep down most of us understand that consumerism is a con but we fear the unknown. Letting go of what we think we know is harder sometimes than embracing the unknown.

Eyelash Viper, Costa Rica

Bears are real. Paying a guide to take you into bear habitat won’t change that.  Don’t eat strange mushrooms. Don't get addicted to television.  Poisonous snakes live in the jungle.  Don't die of boredom or meaninglessness. Don’t jump off cliffs unless you know the water is deep.  Don't jump off cliffs unless you want to. 

It is possible to jump off the cliff and into the dark. People do it every day and they are just fine.

Amalga Shore, Juneau

I have a dream. It's a climbing thing, mostly

Mount Lemmon, Arizona. MLK Day, 2020

I have a dream. Yeah, this story is partly about Martin Luther King but it isn’t only about him. I went on a climbing trip on MLK Day. Many years I go skiing but this year I was in Arizona.

The Battle of Picacho Peak was a Civil War battle that occurred in what is now the state of Arizona and it was more of a skirmish. Thirteen US soldiers met up with 10 Confederate soldiers and three people got killed. Afterward an American army went to Tucson to find that the Confederates had already left for Texas. As it turns out, territorial Arizonans didn’t much care what side of the Civil War they were on. Slavery didn't matter to them.  They cared which side sent troops to fight the Apaches.  Some 150 years ago Cochise felt like a real threat to white supremacy so they slaughtered Chiricahua Apaches. Now there’s a plaque at a rest stop on I-10 commemorating the battle and there is a mountain in southern Arizona named after Cochise. The plaque doesn’t mention slavery or Native American genocide. I happened to be at Picacho Peak about sunrise on Martin Luther King Day. A few yards away from the Civil War plaque there was a sign warning people that dangerous snakes and lizards inhabit the area. Some things don’t change. I got back in my rental car and continued toward Tucson and finally Mount Lemmon, the tallest peak in the Santa Catalina Mountains.

Alex on a trad route.

I was in Arizona because I have family there and I was able snag some cheap plane tickets. I also met up with a friend who is living in Tucson and we went climbing up Mount Lemmon. I have spent years in Arizona and mostly ignored Mount Lemmon. It’s a great climbing destination. There is a ton of exposed granite with very little loose rock. The highway leaves Tucson at about 2,500 feet above sea level and climbs to the 9,159-foot summit. Summer and winter there is always a place with the right temperature for climbing somewhere along the road. There was snow on the summit this January. We drove up to about 6,000 feet and found some sport routes. Climbing on Mount Lemmon is also great because of Eric Fazio Rhicard and Sara Plummer Lemmon.

Mount Lemmon, as the spelling might indicate, is not named after citrus but after a feminist pioneer Sara Plummer Lemmon. In 1871 Ms. Lemmon traveled solo through Panama and continued up the Pacific Coast. This was just nine years after the Battle of Picacho Peak and nine years after  Cochise and the Chiricahua Apaches fought off the Confederate army at what is now called Cochise Stronghold. Cochise's victory was short lived. 

Sara Plummer Lemmon was a botanist in a time when women weren’t usually allowed in the halls of science.  Sara cataloged the plants of Santa Catalina Mountains. She eventually married John Lemmon but the mountain is named after her.

Several decades back, Eric Fazio Rhicard got a good deal on a thousand climbing bolts. For those of you unfamiliar with climbing, bolts are sometimes put in rock so you don’t fall to your death. Eric thought his bolt purchase would last his whole life but once he started looking at all the options on Mount Lemmon he quickly ran out of bolts. He obtained more bolts. Eric and the rest of the Tucson climbing community have been careful to not place bolts on routes that could climbed as trad. Trad routes are climbs where you protect yourself from falling with cams and nuts placed in cracks. Most of the bolted routes are close to the road on routes that don’t have cracks.  There are great trad routes on Mount Lemmon.  Other people helped Eric develop the mountain of course but it’s fair to credit Eric Fazio Rhicard with elevating climbing in Tucson. He also had a goal to climb 60, 5.12 routes during his sixtieth year and surpassed his goal and climbed 63 routes.  If I ever meet him, I am going to buy him a beverage for sure.

I got to Alex’s house in Tucson a little after 9AM and we headed up the mountain. We started the day at Windy Gap. There’s a parking area there and a magnificent view of the desert headed to the west. Parking is free and so is entrance to the National Forest. The weather was about perfect but clearly it had been colder. There were remnants of snow in shady areas. The place was a little busy with folks but not too crowded, especially since it was a holiday. I was impressed with the type of routes because climbing felt more three dimensional than I am accustomed. I spend a lot time in the gym.

Driving back to my sister’s house in Gilbert, I decided to listen to MLK’s speech on my phone. It was only then that I remembered the people on Mount Lemmon were almost exclusively white, myself included. I might not have noticed everybody we met on the mountain was white if it weren’t Martin Luther King Day and I had not read the plaque about the Civil War. The Civil War was about slavery and the plaque didn’t say squat about that. I have a dream that we remember what the Civil War was about. I have a dream the we don’t forget that Robert E. Lee wasn’t a hero.  I have a dream that we recall that Cochise was a hero, even though the Chiricahua Apaches eventually lost. After the Civil War the US Army returned in larger numbers.

Photo Credit, Alex Hughes

 Tucson is an ethnically diverse city. It has an incredible culinary tradition as a result. Tucson also has the benefit that the Santa Catalina Mountains sit just east of town. The mountain range is part of the Coronado National Forest. Mount Lemmon is also great because somebody had to foresight to designate the land as National Forest. The Catalinas are a “Sky Island,” which is an ecosystem separated from other montane environments by a ‘sea of desert.” The Catalinas are the north end of a chain of sky islands that stretches into Mexico. Rare ocelots, jaguars, and coatis live in the sky islands of southern Arizona and these species survive only through transport corridors to Mexico. Endemic species of plants and animals live up there and they are distinct because they have not had contact with species from other sky islands for thousands of years. It’s an evolutionary experiment in action where species survival depends upon subpopulation connectedness. At the same time some new species were formed by years of spatial separation. Darwin would love the American West. 

So I have a dream. Everybody should have a dream, not only Martin Luther King. I have a dream that we don’t sell it off. I have a dream that we don’t let public lands get polluted or turned into a commodity only available to the wealthy. I have a dream that we don’t kill off endangered ocelots, jaguars, and coatis with a racially motivated wall on the Mexican border.  I have a dream that we don’t treat any ethnic group like they are subhuman. I have a dream that we actualize the phrase in the Declaration of Independence that states that all men and women are created equal and entitled to certain inalienable rights. I have a dream that everyone regardless of ethnic background or economic status will feel equally welcome on public land. I don’t think I am in a position to know if everyone feels welcome.

I am glad that I can climb and hike and ski etc. on public land.  Everybody should have that opportunity, now and in future generations. Public land really is a part of our freedom. If we lose access to public land we lose part of our ability to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Freedom becomes the choice of consumer products or a choice of television shows.  We can’t take public land for granted and we can’t let corporations gain more access to it.

Cochise (photo from AccessGeneology)

She's slipping right through my hands.

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

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

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

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

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

justice,

liberty, 

fairness, 

prosperity, 

honesty, 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lava, Grand Canyon 

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

Counting Crows, Round Here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAe3sCIakXo atch?v=SAe3sCIakXo

Florida Wall

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

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

Viñales Valley, Cuba

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

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

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

       

                                                               

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

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

Cimarron, Cuba

Eyes of the World (What is known)

Eyes of the World as seen from a distance.

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

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

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

Dylan Miller Cleaning the Eyes. 

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

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

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

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

Top of the Eyes. photo Adam Moser

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

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

Bolted routes on The Eyes of the World, 2019

Sheep Mountain Heli Drop.

Not on Sheep Mountain and not my photo.

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

Taken right before I hopped out.

Anyhow, the Sheep Drop was fun at ridiculous levels.

Gerry Landry photo, Unknown skier near Shark Lake. 

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

North Side of Sheep Mountain, Gerry Landry photo.

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

Helicopter taking off at Sheep Creek Beach.

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

Sheep Mountain near day's end.

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

Near Shark Lake                                                               Skin Track  

 

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

Summit of Sheep Mountain looking south. 

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

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

Selfie 

A google search taught me that sheep drops are real.