Snow snobbery at its finest
After a summer in Alaska, I spent the fall of 2004 exploring the West in my beat-up VW Golf. I had the inkling that I would find a mountain town for the winter and become the proverbial ski bum—working as a lifty or something, and riding every day. I handed out my résumé at job fairs in Big Sky and Jackson Hole before making my way down to Salt Lake City. Read More …
Underhill before; photo courtesy NELSAP
You see them in the remote woods of New England—the ghostly remains of apple trees standing forlornly among the looming pine, birch, and maple trees that crowded them out when the farmers that tended them abandoned their stony farms for greener (or at least flatter and less stony) pastures in the 1800s. A casual hike up certain hills will also reveal the 20th-century equivalent: rusting chairlift towers and rope tows, abandoned after serving a generation or two of local snow enthusiasts. Victims of competition from larger areas, overly ambitious expansions, bad snow years, insurance costs, and plain bad luck, many of these are now simply melting back into the landscape. Read More …
Photo by: Tommy Chandler
More than a decade after receiving my Black Prophets, I continued the trend of gifting dangerous items for Christmas. My girlfriend received her first pair of ice tools—the finest the modern world has to offer: Black Diamond Cobras. The shiny new tools brimmed with optimism and when placed next to my battle-weary pair, looked more like a work of art and less like a piece of gear. Read More …
Quito Skyline. Oil on Canvas by Andy Chapman
I’ll never forget that Christmas. I had been in Ecuador six months and walked multiple times up every volcano in the country that wasn’t erupting. My glacier slogging game was perfected: self-arrest, rest step, French technique, setting up Z-pulleys and hip belays were all on speed dial. Unfortunately, I had become genuinely tired of being a mountaineer and just walking in crampons. I wanted to be an alpinist. I coveted the few “steep” lines those volcanoes offered. There was only one problem: I had but a lowly mountaineering axe. Read More …
Hiking Cinque Terra - Manarola sunset
Backpacking through Europe usually means trekking from hostel to hostel, exploring museums and ruins, navigating various forms of low-budget transport, and surviving the local nightlife. While this type of travel may include a fancy Arc’teryx or The North Face pack, and can certainly provide an adventurous experience, it remains a far cry from the traditional idea of wilderness backpacking. And so it was with extreme satisfaction that I was able to trade my bus pass and tourist map for my trail runners and a real topo map for a couple days during a recent trip though the northern half of Italy. Read More …
Greek gear
In addition to crowd control tactics, to climb in Kalymnos you need a few other pieces of gear beyond your standard North American sport climbing kit of one 60m rope and 10-12 draws. Massive tufa routes clocking in at 35 to 55m require a shit load of draws (especially if you want to be able to do more than one route that day ) 70m ropes are a minimum requirement and 100m ropes are necessary for lines that don’t have mid way lower offs. Above all, you need kneepads. Lifetime kneebar total was doubled my first day there. Draws are not fixed, even on massively overhanging routes. This surprised me as cleaning can be nearly impossible while lowering (often requiring a top-rope cleaning burn). Read More …
Kalymnos Sunrise
It all started innocently enough with a conversation with Diane: Should we get married? We talked objectively, weighing the pros and cons of marriage vs. “partnership”, examined social stigmas, and discussed various forms that unions can take. We largely centered on what we did not like: Materialistic, large-scale, impersonal weddings costing a small fortune, leaving the couple nothing but cheesy photos, an expensive shrink-wrapped dress and some frozen cake. We also bemoaned the lame “immediate comfort” honeymoons that people tend to take: cruises, beach side hotels, all-inclusive Sandals Jamaica. The conversation then turned to the hypothetical honeymoon we might take. Where to go? What to do? I get cagey and intolerable when subjected to cities or beaches without the pressure release valve that is climbing. We took a peek at our ever-growing list of places to visit and Greece jumped to the top. It started to feel like we had begun to plan a trip, not to mention a wedding. Read More …
Start praying now ...
Every autumn, snow worshippers around the nation—nay, around the world—unite and engage in a sacred ritual called the Pray for Snow party. Anthropologists note that this ritual often includes multiple kegs of frothy beverages and bonfires large enough to be seen from outer space. Here in Utah’s Wasatch, we supplicate the snow saints for a solid 500+-inch year (with 28 inches at Snowbird in the past 48 hours, we feel solid about our entreaties thus far). In New Jersey, they pray for enough money to buy a ticket to Utah. We traveled the nation to give you a little inspiration for your own Pray for Snow Party. Read More …
BC.com Does Halloween
October is an urgent month. Before the snow falls, you climb insatiably, trying to grope enough granite to quell your lust ‘til next season, and the first storms find you obsessively pursuing skiable stashes. Amidst these frantic forays, it’s easy to forget about coming up with a killer Halloween costume. Last year’s nudist-on-strike outfit was pretty clever, but that kind of slackage won’t fly twice.
So how do you come up with a cred-worthy costume without neglecting new snow or ditching out on the last desert camping trips? Easy—just use your gear. We came up with some costumes that’ll help get your idea-wheel reeling. WARNING: some of them appeal to the lowbrow crowd.
Days left: 3 -- Fights: 0 -- Stoke: High
Pack a few climbers into a gear-crammed car and leave town, and one of two things are going to happen. You’ll either have a kickass road trip, or you’re going to be at each other’s throats over things like who paid for the last tank of gas or what music to listen to. We’ve all seen a car roll up to a crag and release its three fighting occupants. Everyone’s yelling and dropping F-bombs left and right. Trust me, you do not want to be one of those people.
Last summer my road-tripping skills were put to the test. I piled into a small Subaru with several hundred pounds of gear and two people who I barely knew. Three days and 2,100 miles later, we arrived in the Yukon, ready to fly into the Northwest Territories. No one so much as said a single bad word to each other (that wasn’t a joke, anyway). On the way back, we pulled out all the stops and covered the same ground in 30-hours flat. Again, no fights at all. How did we pull this off when some groups can’t seem to make it through a weekend without attacking each other? We followed the rules.
The writers for the Backcountry Beacon are finally shedding their Luddite ways and have embraced the Twitter. (And there was much rejoicing.) Read More …