Go to MountainLessons.com

No more content will be posted here.  I’ll see you in the mountains.

I’m going to make the redesignated purpose of this blog public, short, and well defined, so that you may understand what I am trying to do.  I will still be writing the blog– I can’t remove that kind of  ‘I’-ness from the process, but if I have written anything here that has been of value to others (self-reported), it has been the writing that contained little of me.  What you have responded to was my writing on travel in the mountains, and the lessons that I have learned about life and living.  This leads me to the purpose of the latest resurrection:

Mountain Lessons will not be about me.  I will be a character in this story, but I am just the eyes that see and the ears that hear.  Mountain Lessons will contain writing and photographs about what the mountains lead us to learn, and about a life moving through them.  They are the guide, the mirror, and the judge, and there is much to be learned from them because they can be nothing but perfectly, cruelly, and beautifully honest.

I hope you’ll come and follow along soon.  Sitting Stone will no longer be updated, though select posts will move with me to the new domain.  The link will be posted here as soon as the site is up and running.  Winter is nearly here, and the snow’s starting to fall–  I must be off, but I’ll see you soon.

Why is it hard to find the time?  Why is it so scarce, and where is it going?

Recently I put the knife to all the information that I consume.  The blogs, the radio, the tweets, the videos.  What was it doing anyway?  By asking what of this media I actually used, what media actually benefited me in some way, it quickly became clear that the answer was ‘very little of it’.  The reason that I found myself reaching for the mouse or for the dial was rooted in habit.  Cut off the habit and what happens?

Interestingly, very little.

When I took the distractions away, only then was I able to realize how little I do in an average day.  Sure, these days I take care of the most important and pressing things before I even turn the computer on, but what happens during the rest of the day?  Just filling time really.

This, I expect, is why entertainment is even a spending class on most budgets.  If you don’t do much with yourself, then you have to fill the empty spaces in your day just to support the illusion that you’re not worthless.  If you spend your day consuming, and you produce nothing (your job doesn’t count unless you’d do it without the pay), you’re just a cog, part of the herd of sheeple.

Turn it off.  Sit there.  Face the truth.  Only then can you start to do the real work of making your life into what it can be.  If you can’t go without, isn’t that addiction?  I’m going to give it a shot because I don’t want to be mediocre.  Do you?

The was a great samurai who went to visit a meditation master in a cave high on a mountain.  He approached the man on his cushion and said, “Tell me the nature of heaven and hell”.

The teacher looked up at him and said, “Why should I ever tell you, you dirty, miserable slob?”

The samurai grew red in the face and angrily insisted that the master deliver his teaching.  The master said, “Why would anyone ever teach anything to such an ugly brute as yourself?”

The samurai, caught up in great anger, drew his sword, and was about to strike the teacher’s head from his body when the teacher looked up at him and said,

“This is hell”.

The samurai, being actually quite sensitive and perceptive, immediately understood.  He fell to his knees and began to weep, pressing his palms together in thankfulness.

The master said, “This is Heaven”.

Hell is the state in which we are so absorbed with ourselves and our problems that we close up in our emotions and can do terrible things, because we see ourselves in opposition to our world and have to defend ourselves and our sense of self from its insults.

Heaven is the moment when something jars us, breaks our shell, and makes it possible for us to take a more expansive view.  This is because our perspective governs how we treat ourselves and others in every situation.  Gentleness, space, and wonder can coexist with our negative emotions if we don’t let ourselves fall blindly into our own stories.

I hope that this will be helpful to some of you.  Enjoy the weekend, and if you can, get outside for all of us who are in the PNW, where it will be raining all weekend.

p.s. this is a bit goofy, but illustrative nonetheless:

“I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all the times I have enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
That loved me and alone; on shore and when
Through scuddling drifts the rainy Hyades
Vexed the dim sea: I am become a name.”
(Tennyson – Ulysees)

“The passage of time can work for me or against me: I must not drop the ball, and I must keep my name, so painstakingly discovered.
Listen! I know that something similar will happen to you someday, for in our wide world there are many goings home. We must hold on to our dreamings, all of us, now that we have earned the right to dream.”
(Morgan Hite – After the Adventure)

Security is an illusion. Always.  There is nothing that can’t change and nothing that won’t eventually do so.  To be in a state of transition makes this truth startlingly clear, as the ideas that we normally use to shield ourselves from this fact have been taken away.  This is such an uncomfortable state of being that most people, by my read at least, spend a significant, if not dominant, portion of their time and effort and energy avoiding it like the plague.

Recently I’ve found myself approaching a transition: in a month, the grant that funds my research will have paid me all that it can, and beyond that date I’m unsure of where or how I’ll be employed.  My search for work, especially in this job market, has highlighted for me that mobility is one of my greatest assets in finding a job.  Thus, I’m looking at jobs in Oregon, Washington, Wyoming, and elsewhere.  The thing is, I don’t know where I’ll end up, or if I’ll even want to leave Portland.  There’s more for me here than my heart cares to admit.

As this transition approaches and I try to find a direction, I’ve asked myself what I believe to by my purpose in life.  Yawn, you say, give me a good YouTube link and I’m out of here.  But I’m not about to offer any conclusions, just an idea about how to get to them, which will perhaps be useful to you.

I often find myself trying to reverse-engineer this problem by asking what it is that I want, and then figuring out how to get it.  Without committing my thoughts to paper, I was vaguely answering that question with ‘free time’, ‘mobility’, and ‘money’.  But I recently attempted an exercise that suggested spending 30-60 minutes writing down every idea that popped into my head about what my life’s purpose might be, no matter how absurd or immoral it might sound.  45 minutes later and with 134 answers, I’d made a bit of headway.

But more than making headway, I made a small but important realization.  It’s not rationally founded, but I think that self-examination on your part might confirm that what I’ve found is true.  What I found is that ultimately my sense of fulfillment comes from releasing the energy that I have inside of me towards a focused end.  No, not the hyper energy, or the sort that comes from coffee, but the driving energy that is the basis of yearning, determination, and willpower.  The object of this energy, i.e. that towards which is flows, changes pretty much seasonally, but my sense of fulfillment and my happiness are greatest when it is flowing.

So, to maximize these states (fulfillment, happiness), there are two paths to follow.  The first is to amplify the energy itself, so that it carries more weight and is less-easily stymied.  The second, and likely more useful in the short-term, is to identify the hindrances to its flowing-forth, and to remove each blockage by whatever means are proper.  The greatest block is fear, but there are others: distraction, poor health, inertia– no doubt you can produce your own list.

What my babbling boils down to is a different idea about how to find direction: rather than picking external aims and working towards them, more returns in happiness and fulfillment will come from eliminating the blocks that hinder expression of your internal energy.  During this process, it may be necessary to support yourself by non-inspiring means, but ultimately, you will have freed yourself to be a creative and effective force at whatever it is that you choose to do.  We can think of the energy that leads to fulfillment like money: to produce wealth in the long-term, it’s much more effective to reinvest in the capital that produces wealth than it is to work at managing the bit of money that you already make.

The first point is that I am by no means perfect, or even close to it.  Often, when I am inspired to write and to represent myself and my ideas through writing, I write from the voice of who I wish to be or what I want to become.  I’m not there yet.  I may never arrive.  I don’t live up to my manifesto.  But unlike many of you from whom I’ve received criticism, I’m trying to.

The second point is that if anything I want to inspire you to do things by writing here, not thump my chest and say how great I am.  What I include here is a cross-section of my most amazing experiences, not my average day.  It’s an evolving publication that started in a more wayward fashion and becomes more specific with time.  I hope that my photos and writing make you want to get up off the sofa and get after whatever it is that you know lights your fire.

The third and last point is that I have little choice but to be extreme, both for myself and in opposition to the status quo.  To quote Station 515:

“We work hard because we know we don’t have to. We are angry because we know we could roll over with a whimper and people would tell us that its ok. We work hard as an act of revenge upon the pieces of ourselves that want to be average. We work to become more than what we are.”

We’re all in the same boat:  If we allow ourselves, we’ll look for comfort because part of us is weak and scared and afraid to fail.  I don’t resent the world for being scared and weak, I just resent these qualities in myself.  What I do resent is those who would impose their fears and weakness on me; they hate to see action because it takes away the comfortable excuses that they have for not leaving their shell.  This is why I won’t respond to their scorn again, because cowardliness doesn’t deserve that kind of validation.

In summary, I’m imperfect. But unlike my critics, that’s the burning fire that makes me want to be better.  Forgive me for my grandiosity, my ego, and my insecurity, and then join me.

Fuel for the Fire:

Gym Jones

Project Deliverance

Simple Iron Truth

Station 515

K2, Image via Wikipedia

“Why climb mountains? The answer cannot be simple. It is compounded of such elements as the great beauty of clear, cold air, of colors beyond the ordinary, of the lure of unknown regions beyond the rim of experience. The pleasure of physical fitness, the pride of conquering a steep and difficult rock, the thrill of danger controlled by skill…How can I phrase what seems to me the most important reason of all? It is the chance to be briefly free of the small concerns of our common lives, to strip off non-essentials, to come down to the core of life itself. On great mountains, all purpose is concentrated on the single job at hand. Yet the summit is but a token of success. And the attempt is worthy in itself. It is for these reasons that we climb. And in climbing, we find something greater than accomplishment.”

-Jake Norton, on the falsification of this year’s only “ascent” of K2.

“It’s hard to describe to somebody why you do it, but the important thing, and the lesson almost is THAT you do it.

Simply that you do IT.

SOMETHING.

You try it. You go for it.”

-Timmy O’neill

Descending Sacagawea, originally uploaded by raventrickster.

On day one of climbing during NOLS‘s Mountain Training Trip 2010, three of us made an attempt on Sacagawea, a sub-peak of the Fremont Peak group in Titcomb basin. The day prior, it had rained, but during the night the weather turned *splitter* and brutally cold. We woke in our camp in Indian Basin at 2 am (too early) to begin our approach into Titcomb Basin.

The approach took two and a half hours by moonlight, and we arrived at the base around 4 am. It was too dark to see the route, and our four-sentence topo gave us little information, so we decided to sit and shiver at the base until there was more light. The three of us spooned in a little hole behind a small rock and shivered under a cold wind until around 6 am. Miserable, we decided that even though the weather looked iffy, we might as well approach the base and take the gear for a walk. “In alpine climbing, you can always take the gear for a walk and see what happens” -Evan Horn, NOLS Training Manager.

Sun Rising Over Sacagawea

The base seemed not too far away, but it was two and a half hours later that we had managed to negotiate the “endless gravel escalator” through three 3rd-4th class rock bands glazed here and there by startlingly dangerous verglass.

When we finally reached the base of the climb, the weather had improved, but much to our dismay, we found that the previous day’s rain had glazed Sacagawea’s crack systems with smooth, impossible ice. Our single 7oz CAMP Corsa ice axe with its aluminum pick wasn’t going to cut it. Back down we go.

The descent took almost as long as the ascent, as the ice made some probable routes unexpectedly hazardous. By the time we reached our little shiver-bivy at the base, the knees were crying and the body tired of moving, though it was only 8:30 am. A nap followed.

It was a good warm-up to the alpine start, to the persistent optimism needed to get on some climbs, and to the need to stay comfortable on exposed and icy terrain.  Though it was not a successful climb in the traditional sense, taking the gear for a walk always seems to beat sitting in camp, even if it really throws off one’s body clock and sleep schedule.  It’s a funny feeling to have been up and moving about for eight hours when some in camp are just waking.  For you, a whole day has passed, and a second is ahead of you.  For them, the day’s consciousness is just beginning, and without the early-morning anxieties afforded by the alpine start.

(More entries come, with successes no less.)

I’m back from the NOLS Mountain Training Trip 2010, and I’m spending some time in Park City, UT before heading back to Portland. I may have some more stories and photos soon. Until then, enjoy this photo of the eleventh pitch of the North Arete of Ellingwood (the angle is nauseatingly offset– this pitch was much lower angle than it seems to be). The climber is Kyle Duba (www.kyleduba.com).

From Caribou Lake, North Talkeetna Mountains, Alaska – July 2010

It’s time to give things the attention that they deserve.

The marsh grasses root beneath the water, their tops rising from the small dimple that they leave on the pond’s polished surface.  The shadow of each cuts the reflected sky like a sharp, black brush stroke.  To look at the clouds resting on the pond’s surface is to see each blade connected to its shadow, a green sliver of life waving its dark partner at the sky.

Though the air is mostly still, subtle wafts move through the grass, stirring the blades and sending small bursts of ripples laughing across the silvery surface.  Farther out on the pond, the shadow of mountain blocks the sky from reflection, and the dark water is punctuated only by the glimmers  of where grass meets water.  The mountain, immovable on the horizon, is on the water tossed about and distorted, its edges chased like an elevator’s steps by the passing ripples.

The mountain’s solidity is the water’s jest, and the grass’s luminance in the sun is likewise mocked on the water’s surface.  Even the fullness of the sky is teased apart by the tiny water-strider, whose crooked path leads to nowhere, but centers somewhere.

From where I sit, I cannot see my own reflection, and beneath me is not water but mineral and soil.  Nevertheless, I know that like the grass and its shadow, so too is my form broadcast into the earth in a natural opposition.  Someday, perhaps as soon as tomorrow, life may lay me down to soil like grass to the water, light meeting dark in a final consolidation as my sleep eternity and by body takes another form.  Inspiration, I suppose.

Inevitability is both a curse and a certain sort of freedom.  Paths may lead away into the sky or the earth, to wherever they please, but always they return to the surface, meeting their reflection.  Ours is a path yet to be chosen.

It’s time to give things the attention that they deserve.

When I arrived in this quiet town, the daylight was growing by about an hour a week until the sun seemed only to feint towards the horizon, to duck briefly behind the Talkeetna mountains.  Now, each day’s darkness grows at near the same rate, though it is only early August.  Even as I walked through the Talkeetnas, the tundra began to change into its fall suit; maroon, ochre, and rich reds ringed patches of green and hid amongst the still-fresh leaves.  It is a rich transformation, though it is tinged with nostalgia.  A biological remembrance yields a different insight though: The colors of fall are not the colors of death as green is crippled by cold, but are a revelation of the underlying pigment, a hidden spirit beneath the usual greenery.

It’s a transition that I’ll see again, as tomorrow I’ll be back in Portland, many degrees of latitude to my South.  It’s summer there, with temperatures reaching into the eighties that will only just have started to cool come the end of August.  Twice, it seems, I’ll greet fall this year. Twice I’ll see the curtain dropped on the gold behind red behind the green.

It has been a summer of transitions.  From college student to NOLS student, from NOLS student to NOLS instructor, and the ball rolls on.  When we debriefed our students at the end of our course and tried to prepare them for re-entry into “a harsher environment” (ie. the rest of their lives), we asked them to say one thing about the course for which they were thankful, one fear about returning home, and one hope.  The question moved around the circle.  Students were grateful for the community that we’d forged, for the beauty and harshness of the landscape, for the time to reflect on their lives, “for being shaken alive”– I saw a disguised version of myself each time someone talked, as it all sounded so familiar that my lips might have once formed those words.  Their fears and hopes were likewise ground that I’d once tread, but for each of them it was a new insight into their honest selves; earth freshly plowed by the undeniable environment.  I shared my fear, and my hope: I feared, and still do, that I might lose the momentum that I have so built this summer and fall back into complacency.  I hope that in a year’s time I will be, if nothing else, as content yet excited as I am now, and that I will have shared this contentment with those who most need it.

To have shared my season of learning with fourteen new faces has been intensely rewarding.  So has the assumption of a new face and of a new trajectory.  The bags are packed.  In two weeks I’ll be amongst the alpine rock of Wyoming, wind all around me.  After that, nothing is certain.  It feels as if the deck has been stacked in my favor, and the table’s been cleared for another hand.  More than ever, I’m ready to be dealt in.

I’m back in Alaska now, and tomorrow I’ll begin briefing for a 30-day backpacking course, likely in the Talkeetnas. I have few reasons to be confident, with so much across the line of the unknown, but I am nonetheless. If I return with the same number of students with which I began, then the course will be a success. Everything else is sauce, detail, and garnish.

Here on the farm, I’m surrounded by fun and interesting people who have similar life goals. I’m with my people, I guess, and I’m slowly getting to know them. I’ve met one of my co-instructors for the course and will meet the other tomorrow, and this is no doubt going to be a solid experience. I think that I can’t avoid learning more than I even now anticipate, even if I try.

Here’s to the unknown, to tolerating uncertainty and adversity, to the enthusiasm of novices, and to the collaboration of the experienced. See you in August!

There, that was easy.

Climbing through the clouds around 10,500', above Leuthold's Couloir.

Now, this is the first year that I’ve really dug into backcountry skiing as an alternative to lift-served resort skiing, and I set what for some would be an extremely modest goal for the year: I wanted to get my ass out into the backcountry enough that I logged at least 50,000 vertical feet of human powered skiing.  If I lived in Utah for a winter, well, this could be a two-week goal and I’d still get rest days.  But I don’t.  I live an hour and a half from a mountain with limited bakcountry access, in a town without a lot of gung-ho partners.  It is a pretty big day out there when we log anywhere around 6,000′ for the day.  On some days I only logged 2-3k, but that’s how it goes.

Anyways, after the trip up Leuthold’s Couloir I decided to total up my vert, which I hadn’t done in a while.  Season total: 56,235 vertical feet.  Good job me, and next year, maybe I’ll take a leaf from Greg Hill’s book and just double it.  Or add a zero. Three goals down– don’t forget your own resurrection.

You were very good to me, but I want to thank you for not giving anything away for free.  When I touched down in Anchorage, looking at otherworldly hills rising out of the mist, I wondered if I’d come to the right place.  Anchorage felt empty; of people, of life, of what I’d come to find.  Or so I thought– turns out, I just couldn’t grasp the Alaskan way quite yet (not that I understand all that much more now).

The bus too me to Palmer.  The landscape changed.  Everything grew around me, reaching a scale I’d never seen before.  Palmerites live as calmly as Oregonians in a landscape as startling in its scale as in its beauty.  Fred Meyer still sells the same beer in Alaska, just for more money and under the shadow of the Talkeetnas, the Chugach, the Alaska Range.

Before I knew my place in our group, before I knew what to expect, we were in the field.  Or, should I say, walking down a road into the field.  Strange cabins in the middle of nowhere- a town called Strelna that likes to be left well enough alone.  Into the woods, climbing slowly into valleys of greater and greater size, draped in soft tundra hummocks and split by clear streams of snowmelt.

A group of friends, a mile back on the tundra.

Then, from a distance, the ice field.  At the head of the valley was a dark wall of snowless rock, shattered and sharp.  Rising even above these peaks was a white horizon cast by Mt. Wrangell, a peak of such scale that once again the possibilities of scale had to shift to accommodate a new largest being.

It drew closer, slowly.  Then, as a fog rolled up the valley, we gained the ice.  For three days we walked inside a ping-pong ball.  The whiteness was nauseating.  On the front of the rope team I hallucinated horizons, imagined cracks in front of me, struggled to walk a straight line.  Occasionally, the fog would break for a hundred yards a reveal crevasses of an unanticipated scale.  Jetliners could easily pass through these yawning holes in the ice.

Day four on the ice:  I’m at the head of the rope team, towing a bag of human waste and relying on the GPS to get us to an airfield (or rather, where we will build an airfield) where with any luck ten days of rations will land.  The sun begins to burn through.  As the GPS reads “arriving at destination”, the horizon begins to reach back and back until Mt. Jarvis is revealed in all it’s terrible size what seems only a few miles away.  Seracs line its south face.  It’s rock is striped horizontally– black stone and white snow layer in bands that remind me of the Canadian rockies.

A low cloud ceiling, and empty stomachs.

The plane can’t come in.  Were standing under robin’s egg skies, but a cloud ceiling in the valley prevents our resupply.  Fuck; move to plan B.  The next morning, the clouds sit just over our heads as the sun glares diffuse, baking us with its UV.  Three days of hunger are punctuated by glimpses into the unbelievable beauty of the ice field.  Mt. Blackburn lies to the South, a 16,000 ft behemoth of cracked ice cascading over cliffs.  It is impossibility itself.

The Blackburn group from our camp on "Ramen Ridge", a.k.a. "Hunger Hill".

Turbo Dave, in his blue and silver Piper Cub (“Hang in there boys, I’ll keep trying”) have switched to tundra tires and we’ve run down the other size of the ice field.  On one of our four sets of maps two parallel lines of pencil suggest that there just might be an airstrip on a barren piece of plateau to the North.  Alaska, your weather changes faster than I’ve ever seen.  Clouds form out of nothing, obscuring the valley as we pray that Dave will make it in.  It begins to snow to the Northwest, to rain in the Northeast.  There’s the sound of a prop and up comes the Piper Cub from due North, splitting the two storms.  Redemption, for now.

You taught me about hunger.  I can’t think of a time before you when I was hungry with no chance of rain.  Much more, I would never have guessed that I could cover such ground on a stomach full of water and corn meal.  I am stronger than I though, I guess.  And more alive.  More animal; more vulnerable.

My body has transformed into a creature that walks by default, not one which rests.  Days off seem long.  They feel as I imagine life in the nursing home might feel.  There’s nothing like that thought to get me up, off the rocks, and down the valley.  As we descend, you grow still larger.  Valleys are many miles wide, draped in a green lawn of tundra with no brush to obscure the horizon that disappears beyond yet another range of peaks.  Your lakes are full of Greyling, your high passes of moose and carribou antlers from last season.

Time flies and crawls out there.  In my personal log, I’m counting up and counting down the days in the field.  Before I know it, I’m out– memory is never as complete as we think it will be.  Reentry is chafing, too much, too soon.  Strangers are now friends.  Some are colleagues.  Rye whiskey, rhubarb pie, email.  There’s a lot to get used to.  Much has happened since we left.  Where are our loved ones and our friends, and what have they been doing while we grew lean in mind and body?  Thankfully, they remain and welcome us back to the world of complications.

Three days before the solstice at Grizzly Lake, as dark as it ever gets in Alaskan summer.

I am now in Portland, and the whorlwind feeling of reentry is subsiding.  But what’s the point?  I’m now employed by NOLS, so I’ll be seeing you soon.  In a week I guess.  I can only imagine the smiling but nervous faces of the students getting off the bus.  I doubt that they’ll suspect that I am as uncertain of the future as they are.  I’m looking forward to growing with them, Alaska, and to see you again so soon.

Sincerely,

Patrick

In the mean time, here’s a video of Kelly Cordes that I’ve enjoyed several times, and which bears sharing.

I’m looking forward to getting out of town.  Some parts of my life have been really amazing lately: finishing my thesis, spending time with a great girl, preparing for Alaska.  But all of these things and more have a cumulative stress-effect– there’s just too much going on to process.  Graduation is in three days.  I’m in Alaska in five.  The road construction outside my house has been shaking the foundation and making the windows buzz.  And I’ve been sick.  It’s time to gain some altitude.

I’ll have some pictures for y’all when I come down.  For the time being, check out this new sport: Liquid Mountaineering.  It’s all about the freedom really.

The Cliff’s Notes of the story is as follows:  Apparently, a student informant has made it abundantly clear to the DA’s office that Renn Fayre (our year-end party) will be a site of significant illegal drug use.  They didn’t need an informant to know that.  As a result, the DA plans to crack down.  This is best quoted:  “We have been told that, during next weekend’s Renn Fayre celebration, undercover Portland police officers will be circulating on campus, uniformed Portland police officers will be on alert to respond immediately to calls, and prosecutors stand ready to process criminal charges (Colin Diver).” Nice.  Naturally there’s a lot of jabber about our community supporting itself through Renn Fayre, about having fun and staying out of trouble, and a strong leaning towards “watch the hell out”.

Well, I wasn’t really planning to pour anything onto my brain next weekend besides malty beverages, so I’m not terribly disappointed.  Nor am I surprised; this is simply the logical conclusion of the tactless game that we’ve been playing as a community.  The student body has made it nigh impossible for the administration to turn a blind eye, and on this issue the administration has proved itself almost completely ineffectual at curbing or sheltering drug use.

As I’ve said before, it’s not about the drugs.  It’s about the culture that we’ve fostered here: one that lacks any intrinsic honesty and integrity.  Drugs can be used discretely– I went through a period of my life where I poked around in psychedelia a bit, and not only am I not in jail, but I’m happy, healthy, and drug-free.  The reason that we don’t have just drugs but a “drug problem” is that our students take the run of campus like kids partying at their parents’ house while they’re away, and the administration has just behaved like the parent who says “don’t touch the liquor cabinet while we’re gone *wink*”.  The problem is not limited to drugs– we have problems with theft, smoking, graffiti, etc.  The drugs are in the foreground because of our national anti-drug culture, and because students are dying.  (As a side note: the complexities of drug addiction are beyond my experience and beyond the judgement of this posting.  I in no way want to castigate those who’ve fallen victim to addiction.  Their personal burdens are ones that I wish our community had been able to help shoulder.)

The honor principle is defined in the negative: don’t do wrong.  It’s another flavor of prohibitive law, which arises only when a community cannot govern its own behavior through culture.  We can change our collective attitude, but I think that it might take something severe to get us pissed enough.  Like undercover cops on campus.  We deserve the treatment that we’re receiving.  The only out that I see is reform from the ground up.  The administration won’t do it, at least not effectively.  Realize that your freedoms are contingent on your ability to self-govern, and hold others to a higher standard.  Their misbehavior is your problem.  Cut them down for not living up to your values.  It’s not the sixties any more; we need to grow a spine.

Dawn on the Southwestern aspect of Mt. Hood, around 10,000′, as three climbers ascend the Leuthold’s Couloir route.

Nearing the Summit Ridge, originally uploaded by raventrickster.

Our two companions following us towards the summit ridge. Just below, a chute of rime led to either blue water ice or amusingly fragile rime. In the distance, the mountain is casting its shadow in the morning sun.

Sunset on our camp.

2:40 am: Alarm goes off late.  I’m covered in spindrift, and not too excited about my 4.5 hours of spotty sleep.  The steel cut oats with raisins do little to improve my mood.

Mmm. Less fiber next time.

4:00 am: We’re roped up in as best a system as I can conjure for two-man glacier travel.  A group arriving at the camp site says that they have the same objective.  They graciously give us the lead and a fair bit of space.

4:30 am: Traversing through the dark.  Are there crevasses?  If there are I can’t see them.  I imagine myself walking over gaping depths, unawares.  Likely the case.  It’s somewhat unclear where the objective is, though I’ve seen plenty of pictures.  It’s hard to find things when you can only see for twenty yards.

4:40 am: Think I’ve got it.  Lose the rope, we’re going up.  Kick, step, kick, step, to the tinkling sounds of a constant rain of falling rime ice.

4:45 am: I can see the lights of the party behind us growing closer, as they ride the escalator that I’ve set up the snow.  The objective remains unclear.

5:00 am: Time is now a guestimate, as both my watch and, how sporting, my headlamp have gone dead.  Apparently all of my spare batteries have nothing to spare either.  We’ve chosen to take a right at a forking ridge.  A few minutes later, with some discussion, our followers head the other direction.

5:40 am: Some rights, some lefts, hundreds of feet of climbing, and it’s now clear that we’re off route.  Welcome to the Reid Headwall, the route that you wouldn’t have knowingly chosen.

5:45 am: It’s freeing to be without a plan.  The adventure streak runs deep and we’re going for it.

6:30 am: The sky is beginning to grow brighter, and we’re weaving our way on the most likely path through towering hulks of ice.  There’s a party of two behind us, strangely choosing to kick their own steps.  “For exercise”, they explain later. Kick, step, kick, step.

6:50 am: I’m sinking tools into blue water ice at ten thousand feet.  This is more than I could have hoped for.  My calves are screaming to be back on snow, but the ice scares me, and that’s what it’s all about.

7:10 am:  We’re a party of four now, trying to find our way out of the maze.  One, two, three, possibilities are eliminated.  There’s only one left, and I don’t know that I can climb it.

Kick, step, kick, step.

7:12 am:  Alex is stemming on rime ice, raining dinner plates and forging a way forward.  He sends, so impossibility is no longer a viable concept.  I sack up as the two below me watch and push through.  From the ridge, looking left we can see the other parties coming up the route that we’d intended to climb.  Looking right, we can see down into the crater as little streams of ants move up the South route.  What a difference a year makes.

7:15 am: I’ve got a headache, and I’m suddenly nauseous.  Oh yeah.  Haven’t eaten or had any water since camp, three hours and 1800 feet ago.

7:25 am: The traverse to the summit follows a ridge that’s only three feet wide at times.  The exposure is a bit breathtaking, and focus is reined in once more.

7:30 am: Summits are a bore.  The uncertainty’s gone, and all that remains to make the day exciting is the possibility of injury on the descent.  A Portland Mountain Rescue member asks us if we saw any evidence of the bodies of two climbers lost on the route that we’d just climbed.  Food for thought.

9:30 am: Camp has been broken, and I’m making turns down the Zigzag glacier.  My headache is gone, and the warm sun keep me elated.  Time away from my thesis has been more rewarding than I could have asked for.

6:42 pm: I’m dead tired, and haven’t slept.  Nothing taxes a body quite like mountaineering.  It’s time for some coffee though, as my friend is back from Columbia and its margarita night.  Morale has improved.  Thank you Portland, for making my life what it has become.  The people, places, and spirit of the city have done so much for me in four years.  I’m going to sleep well tonight.

Shadows, as a rope team travels a ridge.

The avalanche forecast changed since yesterday.  Yesterday it was low in the mornings, and moderate in the afternoons.  Good.  Now it’s moderate in the mornings, and considerable in the afternoon.  Really questionable.  Considerable is the rating that kill most skiers, because hey, it’s not high right?

The plan is to head up to Mt. Hood in a few hours.  Alex and I will skin to Illumination rock and make camp there at around 9000′.  An open bivy will bring us through the night in the low twenties to a cold morning around 2am.  From there, it’s a dash across the Reid glacier, up the couloir, and across the ridge to the summit.  I think that five hours is a generous amount of time to allow ourselves, which puts us down out of the danger around 9am.  That’s about the time that the freezing level rises to 9k’.  In and out, quick and alpine.

The question is, how do you know when you have to turn around, or even if you can?  The danger’s above, not under your feet.  Retreat may be more dangerous than topping out.  Failing upwards, Mark Twight calls it.

I’m looking forward to sleeping out in the open on the Saddle.  You can see the lights of Portland stretching out to the West, and the Cascades out to the South.  I’m sure though that I won’t have a peaceful night.  If the dreams were bad at home, they should be all the more real when I can sit up and stare down onto the glacier that I’ll have to cross, and up along the chute that we’ll climb.

The last time that we went after this route, we were almost clocked by rockfall even before we got to the saddle.  I don’t want to say that I have a bone to pick with the route, but I will be glad to get it done.  That said, returning unharmed, having headed into the dragon’s lair, is success enough.  I’m not sure that what I’m doing is the right thing, on the mountain or off, but I figure that if I just keep trying to do what I think is best then I’ll at least have given it my best shot.  No living in the shadows– I’d rather meet my end early in the sunshine.

“Ignore the “is [crossfit] a sport?” dialogue

Ignore the amount of weight on the bar

In fact even ignore their form

Instead notice the look in their eyes.

The Mind is Primary.

It’s not though is it? Because if that crux few minutes of the task is so important, it’s because you’ve invested a hundred failures, crap days, rehabs, and grind that gave you the fitness, the tactic you didn’t think of before or the grit to deal with the effort. A lot of folk go to great lengths to minimise (sic) or avoid failing. And that’s the reason for the ultimate failure. It’s not even endurance of repeated failure that’s the limitation – it’s not that hard to get over, really. It’s not unusual either. I think it’s just the orientation away from failure that’s the problem.

Trying to bypass failure is the shortcut back to the start. The shortcut to the end is directly through the failures.”

I’ve begun writing the results and discussion section for my thesis.  The capstone.  It’s a strange feeling to see time roll out before me punctuated by very real deadlines that will define a transition period in my life.  In 26 days it will be Renn Fayre; my thesis will be finished.  In 29, it will be Orals week, and I will defend that thesis in front of my professors.  In 44 days, God willing, I’ll graduate, and in 47 days I’ll be in Alaska.  On paper it looks like a lot of time.  In reality, frustrated by the sheer number of things that have to be accomplished in the interim, it feels like I’ve got about 2 weeks before Alaska.

It’s odd to now distill the work of an entire year into about 10 pages of text.  Unlike time, the efforts of a year look so truncated on paper.  Is this really how I’ve spent in excess of 400 hours this year? Is this all that I have to show for it?

Not really.  What I’ve gleaned from the project was a sense of the process (Reader vomits).  I began in September incompetent in the laboratory and irritatingly uninformed on the subject of my research.  Now I know exactly how incompetent and uninformed I am– little has changed but the self-awareness that comes from long nights repetitively moving around billionths of a liter.  Oh, and I’ve discovered that my personality is not well suited to the type of science that I’ve chosen.  This has perhaps saved me a misguided trip to grad school, to my parents’ chagrin.

It’s a sad thing though, that so much effort won’t produce any real results.  Sure, I can write for ten pages about how I tried, but who wants to read that?  Especially since, as I’m sure you can tell, I’m not writing very well at the moment.

It’s time to shoot this horse and end the thing.  Both this post and my thesis have gone lame.  I leave you with some interesting search terms that directed traffic to my blog today:

Two of these I understand. But Tall Porch?

Maybird Canyon Wall, originally uploaded by raventrickster.

It’s a term paper day. I have plenty of thoughts that bear processing into writing, but I am unfortunately otherwise engaged. Soon enough, friends.  (Give the picture a click to blow it up to a proper size.)

I’ve been thinking a fair bit about Reed College recently.  There are two reasons: first, I’m about to graduate, or at least, that’s what my parents think, and second, there’s been a fair bit of trouble around here recently with students dying and all.  Heroin overdoses, mysterious, unexplainable deaths, the whole nine yards.  Normally, I wouldn’t concern myself with it too much, but it’s come time for me to process my feelings about Reed College, to summarize my experience, so that I can move on in a way that many don’t seem to be able to.

Don’t worry reader, I’m not about to do that right now.  I’ve simply had a thought that I think is worth sharing, that’s all.  The other day I was reading some unofficial materials coming out of the Harvard business school.  One was about a basketball game, and the other was about the Toyota meltdown.  The thesis of each, and what they held in common, was their distillation of what makes an organization great.  What separates the men from the boys is culture. Culture makes a good company a great one, and an athletic team a great team.  Culture is about a commonly held set of ideals and a general zeitgeist within a group, and it’s what produces the most pervasive and long-lasting results.

Naturally, I started thinking about culture, and the culture at Reed specifically.  We have this whole Napoleon complex towards the Ivies, wherein we like to pretend that we’re actually better than they are.  I even subscribed to this notion for a couple of years.  But we don’t have the culture.  Sure, we have the sweatshop mentality that drives our athletic performance through the roof, and we certainly work harder in that regard.  But as they say, work smarter, not harder.

It’s my understanding that the liberal arts education was essentially a renaissance idea– to produce well-rounded people armed to deal with high society.  This education included not only the core academic disciplines that we stubbornly maintain and keep separate in this house of learning, but a whole host of other skills as well.  It turns out that a human is not just a brain, and it well entertained with music, art, manners, and society.  At Reed, this is a forgotten notion.  We accept academics as the full manifestation of the original ideal.  Just as Toyota used to focus on improving their supply and manufacturing rather than their bottom line, and dove head-first into trouble when they began to focus on the latter, so too have we trained our blindered eyes on what we take to be the bottom line.

It’s false growth.  It’s 200% per quarter false.  The shareholders were happy when we broke into the “new Ivy” list, but some may be starting to feel a little uneasy about their investment.  It turns out that one can’t ignore all of the factors that make up a person and just demand extreme performance from one aspect.  The machine will fail, one way or another.

You can see it in the faces of students on campus.  The winning culture isn’t there.  Instead, we’ve got a culture of whining.  We do a lot of work, sure, but how we approach our challenges is the real crux, and the one that will stay with us long after our thesis has been burned.  I have limited insight into Ivy culture, but from what I gather about the Harvard business school, it fosters a culture of calm intelligence that is trained to overcome a problem, rather than submit to it with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.  That’s what we really need.

We can’t claim the success of a few when so many fail.  In the words of the fine ‘blog’ shit my dad says: “A parent’s only as good as their dumbest kid. If one wins a Nobel Prize but the other gets robbed by a hooker, you failed.”  Reedies are renowned for not getting jobs.  That would, I think, be an excellent gauge of success if we want to change.  So much goes into finding a job that we might measure the success of the education by how many students get jobs out of college, and what jobs.  Moreover, are the students happy? I don’t see any smiles.  Are the students healthy? We’ve got a lot of smokers. Are we producing people empowered to be successful?  I can’t tell, because no one will look me in the eye.

The ball’s in your erudite court, Colin Diver.

Crossing a log bridge near Mt. Hood, OR.

I wrote the invocation below almost six months ago and I can’t remember whether it ever found its way into this outlet, but it feels right for the time, so I’ll offer it up again:

Venture

May the sky be cloudless when needed, the nights cold with a billion stars,
May the winds be warm, but the rock cool and shaded,
May the beer be cold, and the women beautiful, but not too willing,
May discomfort be your freedom, and your tools strong medicine towards liberation.
May your campfire illuminate the faces of many friends,
and may your humor outlast your struggle.

May the world offer all that you need, but not all that you want,
May the morning dew be your breakfast, and the distant horizon your tea,
May your ascent be light, and the deep powder lighter,
May the mountains fly above you, and you over them,
And may you always return to your true home, wherever that may be
Amongst family and friends, a good dog, and the birth of future ambitions.

I’d had big plans for the day of returning to my schoolwork with renewed energy and focus, but somewhere between Sunday’s hangover and the rain that had arrived that had all faded and I was just watching the traffic go by.  To be fair, I’d written a to-do list, but it was full of inactionable items like “get life in order” and “find inspiration”.  As I sat watching the morning commute get under way, a truck caught my eye.  At first, it drew my attention because it had giant cookies plastered on its side, but my eye was held by the slogan:

“Never have an ordinary day”.

Thanks Pepperidge Farm! For some reason, when I saw that slogan, I agreed with it.  My day turned around and flew by, leaving me feeling calm and energized.  Not bad for a Monday. What did I do that made the day so different?  Practically nothing.

According to the interwebs, the slogan is part of an advertising campaign directed towards women.  Internet 1, me 0.  But if you decontextualize the slogan, it’s really good advice.  Why was my Monday heading downhill?  Because I’d seen 100 just like it, I knew what to expect, and I didn’t like what was coming.  But my day turned around when I realized that it was actually a new day.

The cynic in you may be smiling, thinking it itself, “what a hippie, obviously his expectations were intelligently constructed based on his past experience, and are a good prediction of what’s to come”.  If you think about the cynic’s comment for a moment, you’ll realize that it’s circular– that how I approach my day affects my day, and the effects are the basis for tomorrow’s model, which directs my thinking.  What am I getting at?  Karma I suppose, but that’s such a culturally misunderstood word that I loathe to dive into it.  Instead, I’ll say that we can behave in this same way, allowing our expectations to make our days boring, stuck like a goddamn TI-83 in a logical loop.  Or, we can be freshly conscious and break the loop.

That's not true, fish.

It’s what the Zennies call “Beginner’s Mind”.  For the strictly rational (not that the Zennies aren’t) who would object to my recruitment of Zen, I invite you to closely examine reality:  it is a fact that no day is “ordinary”, as we can’t define than term, and in fact, it’s true that no two moments have every been the same, so you’re a fool to think that you can predict the future.

The only way to start seeing the days roll by over and over again with the same flavor is to ignore the details and blur the edges.  We do it naturally– in avalanche science we call this heuristics, ie. rules of thumb.  You don’t approach familiar situations without preconceptions.  In avalanche territory, heuristics can get you killed, and I’m starting to think that heuristics can kill you in everyday life, or worse, make you bored and boring.

So what am I suggesting?  Well, I already ran my experiment, but I’m suggesting that you give it a try.  Tomorrow, try to recognize and discard the feelings and patterns that dominate your day and obscure what’s in front of you.  If you’re bored, take action on the chores you’re avoiding.  If you’re depressed, recognize that it’s anger without direction, and give it a direction to turn it into action.  If you’re jaded or cynical, find the small quirks and little pleasures that you’ve been ignoring in everything you do.  It takes energy, but I promise you that you wont go to bed feeling like you haven’t accomplished anything.

Rime Towers, originally uploaded by raventrickster.  Click for a larger image.
]]> http://sittingstone.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/rime-towers/feed/ 0 stonebhikku http://sittingstone.wordpress.com/2010/02/28/coming-into-the-country/ http://sittingstone.wordpress.com/2010/02/28/coming-into-the-country/#comments Sun, 28 Feb 2010 23:32:48 +0000 Patrick Fink http://sittingstone.wordpress.com/?p=542 ]]>

Yours Truly, on Mt. Hood. Photo courtesy of Elliott Reed, used without his permission.

Two goals in two weeks.  The list is getting shorter quickly.  This last Thursday, I was amazingly pleased to find a voicemail from a nice feller at the National Outdoor Leadership School.  Not only was he a nice guy, but he offered me a spot in the NOLS Alaska Instructor Course this coming summer.  So, barring disaster, come May 20th I’ll be on my way to either the Alaska Range or the Chugach Range for 30 days of learning and assessment.  There’s not much that’s more pleasing than crossing out the goal with “1.” written next to it.

I owe my sincere thanks to Rodney Sofich, Will Symms, and Jane Chipman for taking the time to write letters of recommendation for me.  In addition, all three have done much more than just write letters, and I owe them my inspiration and a good part of my skills as well.  Thanks to all of you.  The beers are on me.

I can’t know yet whether I’ll end up working for NOLS this summer following my course, but I’m happy, if nothing else, to go where I’ll be going and to acquire the training that is not only valued at NOLS but across the industry.  It’s also nice to have some answer to the question “What are you planning to do after school”.

Thanks again to everyone who’s helped me to make this happen.  It’s on me to do the dirty work now.  Until next time: it’s either sunny or it’s snowing, so get after it.

It's fine, he has his Avy 1.

Avy 2 was a bit more serious, and started to actually get into enough detail about the snowpack and human factors to make some go/no-go decisions.  Even here though it’s clear that there’s no amount of learning that can completely protect you, especially from yourself.  The only safe decision is to head to the bar, or stay in and train for climbing.

Sure is a lot less scary than climbing ice. And the G&Ts are right down stairs.

I’m now in a position where I have knowledge greatly disproportionate to my experience, which is pretty much a recipe for disaster.  My only hope is not to gain experience too rapidly, but to take my time and travel with experienced people.  The best education is watching the behavior of people who’ve survived the learning curve.

The reason that it’s taken a while for me to write anything about the AAI classes is that instead of doing so, I went climbing, which meant that I had to do a lot more homework in a lot less time.  Yes, I am, for now, still a full time student.  But when the sky shines blue on Portland in February, it’s time to go climbing.  Plus, it had been one of my written goals for this spring to get out there and climb Mt. Hood in the winter.  As I mentioned before, you don’t get to know about my goals, except when they’re completed.

Crazy-ass rime ice and fumaroles ~10,700'.

I’ve never climbed in such great conditions (2/19/10).  It was 20-32 degrees from 3:30-10:00 am, with moderate, dry winds coming out of the East, off of the Oregon desert.  The snow was plenty crusty down low, but it was at least a 150lb crust, so I wasn’t punching through.  Once the sun came up, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.  I brought my skis up to the Hog’s Back at around 10,500′, after which we followed the boot pack up hero kicker snow to a sunny and still summit.  Emerging from the top of the rime chute that gained the summit ridge, I encountered a man in an orange jacket with a fine mustache who was handing out mint Milanos.  A welcome surprise.

Have you seen the winter ski journal cover?

Avalanche danger was, on the whole, low.  The S/SW-facing slope climbers left of the Hog’s Back (the one which is traversed by the standard Old Chute) had been loaded a bit by those Easterly wind.  This made about a 2 inch layer of very hard wind slab, and a quickpit showed that it was sitting on some facets as well.  It didn’t seem very willing to propagate, more willing to break apart than anything, so we went ahead, thinking Moderate thoughts.  On the way back down, when it had started to warm a bit, it started to get a wee bit spicier.  Not enough to really worry about, but enough to think about.  It would be a small slide there, but the way that the terrain is shaped, it’s like a toilet bowl into a fumarole, and that’s game over.  That thing is the definition of a terrain trap.

“A very wise man told me recently this:

“Others discuss and even argue about which training method is the ‘best.’ I’ve participated in that conversation. I won’t now though because – the way most people do it – it is only physical training and therefore, for my purposes, one-dimensional and shallow. To me the point is growth, and to be specific: psychological growth. Building strength and endurance is dandy. Hell, it’s an admirable objective and pastime in a society of the mostly indolent and obese. But it’s EASY. The hard part is what comes next. The hard part is using one’s acquired physical capabilities, testing to learn whether those skills are as meaningful or valuable as all the ‘atta boy’ gym patter pretends. And the really tough part is translating physical capability into equivalent mental horsepower and psychological growth. Nice muscles decorating a 4-bit CPU are (like) lipstick on a pig. And in my opinion, if, using whatever means, one develops his own multi-core processor, then the rest, i.e. the decoration or the physical capability will follow as a consequence. Every meaningful physical achievement that has occurred has originated in the mind. And it’s the only muscle worth training.”

Starting to burn through, on Shuksan Arm, NCNP.

Reviewing the weather and avalanche forecast the previous day (Friday), our class had noted that everything was fairly safe, though there were reports of shallow slab on NE aspects, especially at higher altitudes.  After running some scenarios on a safe slope and digging out victims, we moved to digging snowpits.  In our pits, we were quickly able to find a roughly 25-35cm slab sitting on top of a crust that had formed during warming in January.  It failed at Compression Test 12, a red flag for sure.

As we regrouped and moved to another area to have lunch, I spotted some skiers high on a ridge known as Table Mountain.  One had already skied, and another was preparing to drop in.  As I watched, the skier mainlined it through a convexity with NE aspect and poof, the slab popped in a decently sized triangular crown.

The scene of the avalanche, with the crown on the left-hand ridge. (Click the image to make it huge.)

Thankfully, as we watched, the skier managed to stay on top, though the slide carried him over some rocks and deposited him on a bit of a terrain-trap.  They spent probably another 2 hours up there before coming down (probably looking for lost skis).  Another interesting thing to note is that the skier who remains on the ridge in the photograph skied down slightly more to looker’s left safely, which speaks to the importance of micro-terrain selection.

A larger view of the scene.

As no one was hurt, I’m chalking this up as a good experience because I’ve never seen someone get caught in a slide before, and it really put the class and everything that we were learning into perspective.  No more abstraction, it’s real out there.

I can see it when I go to the climbing gym.  It’s a real scene in there, with lots of coeds wandering around looking a bit lost.  For the most part, people there aren’t interested so much in improving as they’re just content to hang out and be part of the scene.  This accounts for 80-90% of the crowd.  The other 10-20% are trying to climb hard; harder than yesterday, twice as hard as the day before.  The problem is that most of them will never climb as hard as they like to.  Athleticism, as a god-given trait or adolescent bonus, can only take a person so far.  Trying hard can only take a person to, say, V8-, or 5.12b, and that’s only reached by devoting a huge amount of free-time to the gym and to the rock.  Trying hard in the way that comes naturally to you is just one method of training, and training in only one way inevitably leads to a plateau, or to injury, both of which are frustrating.

So what’s the deal?  You’ve got to get smart.  Sure, there are some 18-year-olds out there with unholy talent who’re taking all the bouldering comps by storm.  But they are young, freakishly talented, they train hard (though many don’t admit that), and most importantly, they’re not you.  What are the rest of us pedestrians to do? We have to become students of our sport, or of whatever it is that we want to do well.  Being a student of the sport means that we have to dissect what it is that we do, find our weaknesses, develop a strategy, cut away the unnecessary, commit, and execute.  The great masters of our sport, John Gill especially comes to mind, were creative students of climbing as a discipline, and they excelled beyond their peers.

I recently began this process in a very different way: I began taking banjo lessons.  I’ve been playing banjo for a little bit more than a year now, and up until now, I’ve been entirely self-taught.  In the beginning I struggled, and then I practiced.  I became competent, and then I hit a wall.  My progress stalled, and it was time to seek help.  Most real students have a teacher of some kind (or several for that matter), so I found one.  Until I began taking lessons, I was what I would now call a “tune player”: I lacked a deep understanding of what I was doing, but I learned to execute certain patterns with a degree of precision.  Now, I’m back to square one, and I’m blessed to have found a teacher who is deeply seated in both musical theory, and technical craftsmanship.  I’m learning the instrument all over again, and it isn’t easy because real learning requires real study.  Rather than a hit-or-miss try-and-try-again method of learning, the reconstruction and repair of my technique requires very acute attention that can follow the movements of my feet, voice, and both hands as all try to do something different from the bad habits that I previously ingrained in them.  I feel like a complete beginner again, which brings to light the point that effort without directed study just brings about a false sense of understanding and accomplishment (in a fairly short amount of time), while as a true student one feels like a complete fuckup most of the time, but the gains are real and deep and rewarding.

Right now, I feel like I am almost less competent than I was three weeks ago.  But I am confident that this feeling simply comes from slowly destroying my illusions and revealing my weaknesses.  What components need to be trained?  Left hand fingering technique.  Right hand rhythmic patterns.  My feet.  My voice.  My ability to read music.  Everything.  In the same way, if you want to excel at something else, like climbing, you have to dissect it.  Power, power endurance, contact strength, technique, resting, nutrition, flexibility, training cycles, aerobic capacity, weight training, attitude, focus.  Good lord, it’s a long way to go.

So now let me tell you a little story:

There’s an event at Reed College called Paideia during the week before the spring term begins. During this week there is funding available for any willing students to teach classes on any subject– it’s an alternative educational week for all of the practical and impractical subjects that aren’t covered by our conservative curriculum.  Classes in the past have included everything from underwater basket weaving, semantics, speed walking, and animal skinning/processing.

Well, this year my friend and housemate Gabe, continuing traditions of old, secured funding to teach a class on chicken slaughter and processing.  $80 or so was granted by the college to purchase a number of spent laying hens from the local organic egg co-op.  These were going to be slaughtered at our house (“the Fridge”) for the education of anyone who wanted to attend.  And just to clarify, both Gabe and I have experience slaughtering fowl at home in a humane (read: as painless as we think we can be) and sanitary way, so we were perfectly prepared to teach such a class.

Where did the trouble begin?  Perhaps when I suggested that we list the class under the title “Choking the Chicken”.  The listed description of the class was as follows:

Hey meat eaters, come take responsibility for your diet: learn how to properly slaughter, clean, and dress a chicken. And then grill and eat them! We also have a coop with 4 feathery residents if you’re interested in seeing how to keep them alive as well.

The name may have inspired the following events, though it certainly doesn’t justify the boneheaded tomfoolery that resulted.  A few days ago Gabe received an email from Reed student who will henceforth be called Sciureuse or S for short.  S expressed their concern as to whether we were qualified and prepared to present such a class, and I think that they did so is a relatively meek and respectful manner.  However, S also foolishly took it upon themselves to tip off the Portland Animal Defense League.

The Portland Animal Defense League promotes their own brand of “terrorism” (their word choice) towards ending the use of animals for food, clothing, and entertainment, with the caveat that they are “opposed To ANY action that physically endangers or harms ANY human or animal.”  They’re a cheery bunch whose supporters have been listed on the domestic terrorist watchlist. They say: “almost always, laws must be broken in order to expose hidden abuses.”

Anyways, so Gabe starts receiving emails and starts getting nasty facebook messages from members of the PADL.  “Do you know if it is legal to sacrifice four animals this sabbath day?”…Paraphrase: “You should try killing youself and eating your flesh and see how you like it”.  S, in their tipoff certainly gave them enough information to find Gabe, and may have given away his contact information.  This led to harassment and threatening messages and more.

Yesterday, Gabe and I discussed whether we should go ahead with the class.  There was talk about protesters showing up, we weren’t sure if permits were lined up properly, and he needed to work on his thesis before school resumed.  We decided that it wasn’t worth the trouble, and we got permission to spend the $80 on some whole chickens and other food from New Seasons, so that we could celebrate the wonder that is dead chicken without all of the hassle.  So beer and some roasted chicken would suffice.  Laughing at the absurdity of our situation, we went to bed for the night without giving it another though.

Fast forward 8 hours: I walk down the stairs to the kitchen in my bath robe, the morning hazy from a night’s worth of drinking and celebration.  Gabe and his girlfriend stood over some food on the table with some of my housemates.  He looked up at me as I entered the room, “They took the chickens.” “What?” “They came and took our laying hens”.  Some fools from the PADL (presumably) had come onto our property in the middle of the night, broken into the chicken coop, and taken hens that weren’t even destined for slaughter.  No doubt, they thought it an act of “liberation”.  We’re thinking about it more like trespassing and theft.  And to add insult to injury, it was later discovered that they’d also stolen the lid to our grill, so as to preclude any grilling.  Indignant and bit defeated, Gabe left to go buy some chicken.

We’re in the kitchen. We’re making pancakes, bacon, recovering from the night over fresh coffee.  I stepped out to take a shower, and when I returned downstairs, my housemate looked up at me, “The vegans are here.”  I walked into the living room and looked out the window.  Standing on our porch were twelve or so tight-jeaned, tall-booted, crusty hipster looking types with an average age of 17.5 at best.

Time writer Dan Fletcher states that "Hipsters manage to attract a loathing unique in its intensity". (Wikipedia image)

Two of my housemates walked outside and told them to “get the fuck off of our porch” and they retreated and regrouped on the sidewalk.  They approached again, one of them holding a digital camera aimed towards the door.  “Is Gabe there?” they asked.  “No”. “Why can’t we talk to Gabe? Is she afraid to come talk with us?”. In a moment of glory, clean-cut, going-to-grad school Ezra stepped forward, “Gabe’s not here because he canceled the class two weeks ago, you cocksucker”.  “Whoa” their head-woman responded, “there’s no reason for it to go there.  Look, we didn’t take your chickens.”  More words followed, the door was closed, and the skinny-legged hipsters retreated to the bus-stop across the street, smiling and high-fiving.

What comes of all this?  Well, there may be some action against S for giving out information that led to Gabe’s harassment, location of our residence, theft, and general nuisance.  We’ve lost some chickens to morons who stole the wrong ones, and I’m comforted to know that no matter how stupid things get, there are young people out there who can be trusted to lower the bar and make us all feel better about ourselves.  I often think that I spend my time pointlessly, but they’ve got me beat in spades.

“It was fun enough, but I’m sweating bullets.”

“Come stand over here and you’ll cool right off.  What do you think about that?” He pointed down and out of sight.

Approaching the East ridge of The Pfeifferhorn.

I stepped up and looked over the ridge, “It looks thin”.

“Are you up to ski it?”

“I’m scared”, I said, “but I think I’ll do it”.

“We can get out there and dig a pit if it’ll make you feel better about it.”

“No”, I said.  I wasn’t worried about the avalanche danger, which was low to moderate.  It was just steep, and it looked thin, and we were a long way from help.  I could tell though that what I felt wasn’t the same kind of nagging fear that I’d felt booting to the summit earlier on softening snow, wondering if I was going to go for a ride over the cliffs in a wet slide.  That was a real, self-preservation fear, or at least, closer to it.  This was self-limiting fear, a fear of success almost.  So I committed.

“You can stay here in the safety of these rocks.  I’ll make a slope cut across, and then we’ll see how it goes.  Just spot me until I’m safe.”

I watched Scott ski slowly ski out onto the slope, bouncing to weight the snow, and stopping to probe with his poles.

The Northeast Face of the Pfeifferhorn.

“Whoo boy,” he hollered, “it is thin.”

Obviously not too thin, I thought, as he carefully committed to his first jump turn.  He stuck it, and then another.  I watched as he got smaller and smaller, and skied further down the slope.  I wondered where he would stop, and it felt like a long time as I waited.  Just a small dot, he stopped on a rise below the large apron that wrapped around the cirque.  After a moment, our agreed-upon monkey call echoed up to me; he had eyes-on.

I slowly arced out onto the slope, following his track and feeling into the snow.  As I looked downhill, the steepness of the slope was almost a visceral feeling, a feeling of how far I could fall.  With no real choice left, I threw my weight to the fall line and pushed off into the first turn.  Weightless for a moment, my skis touched down on the icy breakable crust, scraped a bit, and held.  My apprehensions dropped away abruptly.  Instead of feeling far from help, I felt nowhere but there.  I cut into another turn, paused, then another.  Feeling playful, I began to make figure-eights out of Scott’s turns.  Checking my speed and feeling the changing snow I made my way down twenty or thirty turns to the low-angle apron below, nearly falling there as the breakable crust tried to steal my leg from me.  Soon enough, I was standing next to Scott looking back up at the slope.

Looking back to the South.

“The snow sucks, but it’s a good line.  And it’s good to ski all kinds of conditions.  Good job.”

“Thanks”, I said, as I looked around at the beautiful walls of Maybird canyon.  Even though the snow was bad, I felt great.  The summit behind me had capped off the last few weeks of good tours and the occasional good snow, and I was starting to feel comfortable moving through the Wasatch mountains.

The walls of Maybird.

Soon enough I’ll be driving back to Portland and back to school.  Graduation isn’t far away, but there’s a lot to tackle between now and May.  I’m not looking forward to dealing with all the mundane things that stand between me and graduation, but I am ready to tackle some goals that I’ve laid out for the New Year.  I’m not going to share them yet, as I’m told that statistically speaking those who talk about what they’re going to do are less likely to do it.  I will share the results, be they success or failure.  Until then, you may notice a change in the look of the blog to reflect some of my ideas, which I’ll explain when it happens.  Pray for snow.

A cloudy stand of aspens.

The reason that I’m choosing to forgo writing about 2009 is that it’s too easy to get bogged down in what I’ve done, how I’ve succeeded, how I’ve failed, etc., and it’s too easy to see my past as my identity.  That’s stale at best.  Going into the new year, I’d like to propose that we forget the naughts.  Sure, there were lessons to be learned, and I spent most of my conscious life learning them in a ‘post-9/11′ world colored by some really worthless leaders and a lot of depressing news.  But the stock market is going up and the unemployment rate is going down, and its time for a new objective.

I’d like to propose that 2010 be named The Year of Resurrection.  Whatever it might mean to you, resurrection implies a new life, maybe even a new body.  Implicit is a detachment from the previous mindbody, and the birth of a new mind.  What is stopping us from achieving all of our goals in 2010?  Fear of failure?  Fear is a kind of memory, it can’t know anything about the future.  Let’s drop the past and surpass the fear.  Let be groundless and accept our groundlessness as our real condition.  One of Brad Lewis’ mentors said that it is, “better to work without a net, or a saw guard. The intensity [is] greater, more concentration, total commitment, better results.”

To borrow (again) from Mark Twight and Gym Jones (I raise my glass to you guys), “You have to be willing to bite off more than you can chew, to overdose, and to fail. If you won’t risk the answer you won’t ask the question. If you lack the will to ask then consciousness will not unite with muscle and bone. I criticize such a lack of will (especially in myself) and ask, “What’s the worst that can happen?” The fearful part of me replies, “I may fall short of my expectations. I may not be who I pretend to others. My perception of self may be proven wrong, very wrong.” The confident part of me says, “So what … only after breaking myself apart may rebuilding begin.” So go ahead, break stuff. Break yourself on the once-hard edges of yourself. And recycle the debris into the foundation of your future.”

The priest Sekiso asked, “How do you step from the top of a hundred foot pole?” Another eminent master replied “You who sit on the top of a hundred foot pole, although you’ve entered the way it is not yet genuine.  Take a step from the top of the pole and the worlds of the ten directions are your total body”.

He darkened the eye in his forehead
and clung to the mark on the scale.
Throw away body and discard life
and the blind one leads the blind.

Mumonkan, (The Gateless Barrier), Case Number 46

The first step after resurrection is direction.  Direction needs a heading, so pick a goal.  Then don’t hesitate to jump off the end of the pole and get after it.

The White Pine Backcountry

Yessir, I finally got the goods that I needed.  A  Salt Lake resident and friend, Scott, who is a friend of my dad’s, graciously led me on a tour of the White Pine canyon (gully? drainage? watershed?).  It begins as a small gully in south side of Little Cottonwood Canyon, but it quickly opens to a really large, high opening surrounded by rounded peaks.  The amount of terrain in this one high cirque, by my estimate, roughly equals the accessible terrain that we have available in the Mt. Hood backcountry.  But in Oregon, we don’t have this rediculous access, variety of terrain, or quality of snow.

Scott hauled ass up to 9250′ from 7500′ in just over an hour, a pace which seems common to Utah skiers and one that hurt my lazy Oregonian legs.  The snow was great, and relatively stable, with about a foot or recrystallized powder on top of variable quality snow.  The coverage was thin in generall (damn you El Nino), but it was deep enough where it needed to be.  An added bonus was the great view of Tanner’s slide path and Little Pine couloir across the valley.  Some day…

Merry Christmas to all of you near and far. It’s time to think about some goals for the New Year; I’m with Fitz Cahall, let’s make goals, not resolutions. Make ‘em serious, and we can make 2010 a big year. In th meantime, I’ll give thanks for the good friends, deep snow, cold beer, and bright sunshine.

12 hours to the minute has brought me to Utah through the baddest of the badlands. I hated Southwestern Idaho, but otherwise, it was all gorgeous country.

I’m about to head to Utah tomorrow morning, and, barring a mishap, will soon be back up in the mountains. I have to admit though that, on some level, I’m going to miss being at the fridge for this month and a half. There’s something about living in a place that used to be great, and now has more seasoned character than a president-gone-wino. The wood heat, the DIY fix for anything and everything, and more than anything else, the evenings sitting around the wood stove hamming it up over a rack of bad beer.

I’m psyched though, don’t get me wrong. Today was the first taste I’ve had in months of “pointlessness”, or maybe of “idleness”, and it just got me excited for having some free time to take on things that I’ve been putting off. Second semester is going to go well, with so few classes and so much time to climb harder, ski higher, and push my skills farther. I’ll have time to go to yoga again, which has been missing from my life, and time to do what I like to do without cutting into my sleep and well-being.

The wood stove is simmering low now, and I’ve got a stack of cds by my side with 12 hours of Dirtbag Diaries podcasts to keep me company tomorrow as I roll across Eastern Oregon and Idaho. There’s so much to do and so little time. Ski touring trips to organize, thesis to write, photo-editing to catch up on, and of course the NOLS instructor app to pour myself into.

I’m sure you’ll be hearing from me again soon, hopefully with some snowy photos, despite this whole El Nino thing. But regardless, be well for the holidays. Drink good beer around warm fires, and ham it up with the people who deserve your attention. Cheers!

This week’s marg recipe comes on Monday, and goes out to the Sitting Stone crew. As far as I can tell, they go to Reed College in Portland – hmmm, of the famed Portland Rock, where the Mayflower landed on Thanksgiving, from my last recipe? And Reed is my middle name…see, it really ties the room together, does it not?…As with so many things, the Beergarita can range from rank to pretty good. I’m not sure that it ever gets truly good, like good marg good, but it has its place. For now, and with all respect to the Sitting Stone guys, we’ll go lowbrow. Lowbrow has its benefits, like that you can only go up from here (once your hangover leaves).  -Kelly Cordes

As you might have noticed, Kelly has somehow ended up tangentially connected with us boys over here in Portland (Oregon, Kelly).  How does a hard climbing alpinist end up being sociable towards a housefull of college-dropout-aged folks, only one of whom climbs (that’d be yours truly)?  Well, simple, he started posting margarita recipes, and I started making them.  Every monday.  Voila, Margarita mondays.  Problem was, as of last weekend, I was out of new recipes, so naturally I asked for more, and I asked for cheap.  Not one to be out-cheaped, Kelly hit us with the beergarita, including a recipe (if a little fuzzy on the details).

After some research and development, we’ve developed a good ratio for the beergarita, so I’ll give you a revised recipe:

• 1 can Minute-Made Limeade Concentrate
• 4 cans Pabst Blue Ribbon

Mix those together and stir to get the bubblies out (assuming you’re not using last-night’s flat beers).  Shaking, though often reccomended, is precluded by carbonation in this case.  Now, salt your glass, and mix in your preferred proportion anywhere from 4:1 to 1:1 mix and tequila.  Squeeze a little bit of lime on top to fool your nose, and get rowdy.  This recipe is just about enough mix to use up the entire bottle of tequila, if you’re drinking about 1.5:1.  And yes, we used Sauza gold, because it was cheaper than the recommended Jose Cuervo.

As to the quality of beergaritas: not so bad eh?  They’re not much worse than the cheap marg recipe that Kelly posted last, and they’re loads cheaper.  Total cost for the margs: $15.

As with all margarita Mondays, or, as we came to call it on Kelly’s suggestion, Man Up it’s Monday, there was eventually a bout of complete chaos.  Total damage for the night: 42 PBRs, 2 bottles cheap wine, 2 limes, 2 burnt socks, 1 bottle tequila, 1 can limeade, 1 puncture wound.  Man up! It’s Monday!

Rodney, originally uploaded by raventrickster.
]]> http://sittingstone.wordpress.com/2009/12/13/salmon-run-2/feed/ 0 stonebhikku http://sittingstone.wordpress.com/2009/12/13/more-ice-please/ http://sittingstone.wordpress.com/2009/12/13/more-ice-please/#comments Mon, 14 Dec 2009 00:50:33 +0000 Patrick Fink http://sittingstone.wordpress.com/?p=379 ]]> Well, I studied for more than 10 hours straight today, and it’s not even 5pm yet.  I took a few minutes out to mess around in iMovie (I know, I’m an instant amateur for using that piece of *@^&$) and to toy with some little clips that Rodney shot while we were out ice climbing along with some of my photos.

How did I choose the music you might ask?  I queried my itunes as to what was coincidentally the same length as the little clip that I’d made.  It works out a little strangely, but I think I like it.