Photo courtesy: Petra Cliffs
Last month, three unlucky skiers were caught in a large avalanche in the Alaskan backcountry. Guide Steve Charest of Petra Cliffs and one of the skiers were taken for a ride and partially buried. The other skier was fully buried and nowhere to be seen. Read More …
Photo by: Steve Charest
A few weeks ago I was on the last leg of a red-eye from Los Angeles to my home in Vermont. I was haggard. As I was zoning out at my window seat, a young woman sat down next to me, looking equally as tired. “Are you as ready as I am to get back to Burlington?” I asked.
“You have no idea.”
With a knowing smirk, I waited patiently for the typical sob story of missed connections, bitchy airline employees, and lost baggage.
“I’m coming back from Alaska … I was caught in an avalanche.” Read More …
Mt Rainier (14,411ft) as seen from sea level
Proper acclimatization allows your body to adjust to both the lack of available oxygen in the air and the lack of barometric pressure experienced at high altitudes. There are a few different ways to acclimatize, but your decision on which strategy to use depends greatly on your chosen route, climbing style, and personal genetics. Read More …
Andy Chapman above 6,000-meters in the Cordillera Blanca, Peru.
As a result of the lower barometric pressure at high altitude, the air (and the oxygen in it) becomes less dense (fewer molecules per unit of volume), so you cannot get as much of it into your lungs. Have you ever put a bag of chips in your car and then driven over a pass? The bag that was about half full of air will be bursting at the seams by the time you’re a few thousand feet higher. Though the amount of air in the bag hasn’t changed, it’s under less pressure than it was at a lower elevation. That expansion is similar to what’s happening to the air around you when you climb a peak. However, while the atmosphere around you is expanding, your lungs are the same size, so each breath you take has a lower percentage of oxygen than it did at a lower elevation.
As you near the poles, the atmosphere becomes less deep (there’s less distance from sea level to the edge of the toposphere at the poles than there is near the equator). So, comparable air density decreases happen at lower altitudes at the poles than they do at the equator. As a result, altitude changes have larger physiological impacts near the poles. For example, 20,000 feet in Alaska feels higher than 20,000 feet in Peru.
No matter where you are, you have to take more breaths at a higher elevation to make up for the lack of oxygen in your body, so even just walking around feels like you’re running. This lower barometric pressure and decreased oxygen may cause a number of life-threatening illnesses, so proper acclimatization is key on any trip to a big peak. Read More …
In today’s installment of Improvised Splints, we’ll go over how to make an impromptu brace for wrist, hand, and forearm injuries.
This is the second article of a three-part series. Check out Improvised Splints – Part I: Basic Principles. Read More …
You’re halfway into a backpacking trip in Wyoming’s Wind River Range when a hiking partner slips on a wet scree slope, injuring her knee. She can bear weight but needs some support to hike out. She also injured her wrist as she tried to catch herself. Now what?
We’ve put together a three-part series of guidelines and techniques for constructing improvised splints. Today, we cover the principles, which apply to any improvised splint. Later, we’ll provide specific details on creating upper- and lower-limb splints. Read More …
Go with gusto
All work and no play makes Jack or Jill a dull—not to mention irritable—boy or girl. To avoid the training doldrums, mix up your usual regimen, and try Ultimate Frisbee. Seriously. Usually referred to as “Ultimate” for fear of attracting unwanted attention from Wham-o attorneys, the game involves a lot of extremely aerobic running around chasing a plastic disc, which makes it a perfect cross-training complement to any stale training routine. Read More …
Haute Route Shack - Photo: Dustin Robertson
March and April are the ideal times to head across the pond for the hut-to-hut-tour to end all hut-to-hut tours: the Haute Route. The Haute Route, or High Route, traverses from Chamonix, France to Zermatt, Switzerland. It usually takes seven to ten days to travel through 60 miles of the most stunning scenery in the world: glaciers, mountain passes, and 14,000-foot peaks in every direction. Read More …
Skiing lost one of the all-time greats when CR Johnson passed away while riding at his home resort on February 24, 2010. Although he was somewhat out of the spotlight in recent years, we’d like to remind everyone of just how talented, influential and important CR was to our sport. Here’s our top-5, and we’d like to hear about your favorite CR Johnson moments. He will be missed. Read More …
Saturday, February 27 marked the second annual Big LePowSki, and you missed it. You idiot.
$75 got you a Brighton lift ticket, lunch, free demos and free instruction from pros like Andy Jacobsen, Kim Havell, Jamey Parks, Andrew McLean, and Jenn Berg.
Showing up late as usual, we dropped into Jamey and Andy’s advanced freeride clinic to pick up some cliff-dropping and steep skiing pointers. Read More …
Move out
We had hoped that a super-dump of lake-effect Utah powder would bless this experience, but that’s not how it goes tonight—no fresh, just overcast skies. Ty pokes a few buttons on the smart phone that’s connected to the entertainment system, and the cats roll out one-by-one to a soundtrack courtesy of the brothers Allman. Read More …
Shoes to packs, hit the trails.
Backcountry house-hunting, simplified.
Stay dry out there.