That's me trimming the fat, mid expedition. Even the zipper pulls had to go. I mean, really, this isn't Boy Scout camp, after all.

Fastandlight! Let’s face it – it’s sexy. When you open up that Backpacker magazine at the Dentist’s waiting room and see some youthful, vibrant Caucasian couple leaping across a flower-crested, gurgling alpine brook, and their packs are all tight, tidy and petite against their backs, and their clothes are colorful and clean, and – get this – they’re smilling! They’re smiling even though they’re backpacking, and so they must be traveling SO light. So light and so fast! Don’t they just reek of freedom? Doesn’t it just make you want to buy a hybrid Subaru, get all hopped up on Mochaccino and go places? Quickly? With very little weight? Mmmm….

That’s a nice little day dream, as I stare down the business end of a summer filled with 70+ nights out in the field, instructing and directing courses for Outward Bound. So take that above image and flip it a little: yes there’s gurgling brooks and flowers a plenty, but clean? Ha! Secluded? Sure, for me and 12 of my closest friends for the moment. Light? Oh god, not between the satellite phone; Armageddon-style medical kit; and a small bible of policies, procedures, and lesson plans. And fast? Forget it. One to two plodding miles per day. I love every minute of it, but I love it more if I’m not breaking my back under a behemoth backpack.

So, while Fastandlight is not in my immediate future, Slow and Light is (you know, “Light” relatively speaking). Despite some non-negotiable professional weight, and some luxury ounces for a bit of backcountry pampering, I do a lot to par down my pack – if you carry an overnight pack for three months a year, you’ve got to be weight weary (save the knees and such). Here are some packing and gear tips I use for my Slowandlight system:

The Pack

Pack accessories are just free-loading hitch hikers with crappy stories. Here are my hitchhikers post the mid-expedition pack surgery. Take that, ounces! I basically floated the rest of the trip.

A true ultra-lighter would snag one of those sill-nylon type tube packs without a frame, stuff their sleeping pad in and call it good. Because I want a pack that has many season’s worth of bushwhacking in it, has the integrity to be a camp chair and climbing step, and has plenty of space to load up clients’ and students’ gear if they’re bonking, I use a sturdy old Gregory Shasta that I scored from the CSU OAP’s rental clearance years ago. But I cut all the damn danglies off of it, and never use the lid. That saves me close to a pound. I never was too interested in cutting superfluous crap off my pack until the middle of a 33-day traverse in Alaska with the most god-awful heavy pack I’d ever toted around. Half way through at our fist airplane resupply I suddenly became VERY interested in trimming superfluous crap, so I got out the medical scissors and my Leatherman and downsized!

Note the sleek, lid-less pack (somewhat off-set by that heavy nalgene...that and the pounds of smoked oysters and technical glacier gear). If this were an REI catalog I'd be leaping that creek.

Water

I go for the Platypus: 37 grams for a 2.5 liter capacity. A 1-liter Nalgene weighs in at 175 grams, and a 2.5 liter CamelBak is  around 212 grams. No filter, no water treatment tablets or drops. Just a good ol’ hearty immune system. When I do carry treatment I use a tiny bleach dropper (a couple drops will do). Then I let the bleach evaporate out of the bottle a couple hours later (theoretically speaking, anyway). Sometimes I hose myself, though, by carrying a 1/2 liter thermos (311 g.) – I just love an afternoon yerba mate session!

Sleeping Bag

No need for a stuff sack. Just stuff the sucker down  in the bottom of the bag. Stuff sack = 2 oz. I use a big, light trash bag to line my whole pack instead of individualized stuff sacks to keep everything dry.

Sleeping Pad

When I’m feeling rugged I go for a half-length ensolite pad or ThermaRest. Then I combine it with my pack, or climbing ropes, or flattened clothing to insulate the rest of me.

Ice Axe

Yeah, I hate to admit it, but sometimes lightening the load means buying new gear – I swapped my sturdy, tried and true Black Diamond Raven with Grip (505 grams) for a BD Raven Ultra (348 g.) for a net loss of 157 grams. Aw, snap!

Shelter

Mega Light mid, midnight light. Comes with a sexy, light trekking pole adapter. View optional across the northern Wrangell-St. Elias National Park optional.

For it’s size and weight, I like BD’s circus-esque Mega Light. There are certainly lighter shelters out there, but for two people the Mega Light is downright luxurious. Plenty of space to organize your odds and ends before bed (which, if you’re like me, is very important). The Mega Light comes with a sleek, trekking pole adapter for the middle. What my community affectionately calls the “Chastity Pole” also serves to keep everyone’s ducks in a row, so to speak. You know, no smelly wads of clothing skewing the center line or unexpected midnight spooning. Or, if you’re into that kind of stuff, one side of the pole can be the gearage, and the other can be snuggle town. But still, there are categories and order. This is America, after all.

Well, friends, this is my last Tale From the Midcountry for the foreseeable future. Not too much internet access out in the bush (at least not for a guy with a circa 1999 cell phone). So, until next time, I bid you bon voyage, happy trails, smooth sailing. May your pack be light and your pace slow.

Mmmm...ultra light, ULTRA tasty. Even Joe agrees, food weight can make or break your back.

Max, getting all froggy on the lower crux.

I learned how to crack climb in the land of the off-width: Vedauwoo. I can still remember taping up for the first time, and sinking those first painful but thrilling jams into Edward’s Crack. I still have my tape gloves that my climbing partner gave to me that day (thanks, David!). On some autumn weekends during a particularly car-less fall semester at CSU I’d stand on the side of 287 by Ted’s Place with a sign: “Going Climbing.,” and I’d hitch my way up to Laramie to grunt in the Woo with a Wyoming friend.

Since moving out of FoCo I haven’t climbed much off-width stuff, but I was inspired by off-width fiend friends the other day in Moab and we made the 15-minute, .8-second approach to some 5.10 splitter offwidth on Wall Street above the Potash Road. Vedauwoo gets a bad rap (you know, bring tape, advil, and plenty of thrift store clothes to shred). But after chicken-winging and road-runneering on slick sandstone, I realized that I’d been a little bit spoiled by the Woo. At least there the crystals are so big that if you can’t hang onto them, they’ll at least hang on to you, and just about everything is a foot hold. Sandstone off width is nothing by squirming and squealing. Less painful, for sure, but a little trickier.

Adam enjoys the security of a chimney after working hard in splitter offwidth.

My King Fisher Tower partner, Adam, hopped on the sharp end after we warmed up on “30 Seconds Over Potash” and “Lucy In The Sky With Potash.” The route is kind of like the Generic Crack of off widths: spliter, pod; spliter, pod; repeat. As he reached the size-6 Camalot parallel crux, he writhed up, set a cam, and down climbed to rest before the final push. “A la muerte!” I yelled from the road, trying to evoke the macho magic of our favorite cri d’guerre. Seemingly inspired, Adam arm-barred, side pulled and thigh-mastered up toward the cam, sending slow and ferocious, and just at the apex of the effort….he down climbed again. “That wasn’t very ‘a la muerte,’” yelled Max, Adam’s belayer. “More like “Al descanso!” I yelled. “Al descanso!” When Adam finished his descanso, however, he saddled up and rode that wide horse all the way to the chains. “A la muerte, después del descanso!” That seems like a fitting new war cry, not to mention a worthy modus operandi, especially in the desert. Especially in the desert in the spring. So, once the TR was hanging, I put on the patched-up Carhartts, with long underwear, and ½ size too big Sportiva high tops with thick socks, and got back to off-widthing.

Then, Max’s climbing partner got on the thing and proved once again that 5.11 face climbers can hike right up – or rather, around – 5.10 offwidths. I guess even crack climbers benefit from a little crimp strength, eh?

Got any favorite off-width climbs or off-width stories? Share your grunt and glory in the comment box below!

Max, placing deep and clipping off-width style: with his teeth!

Yellowstone traffic jam. In addition to the ever-present bison, we saw herds of elk and pronghorn, a coyote, and, according to a ranger, the season's first black bear.

It’s a recent and welcome development that I’m able to derive a legitimate enjoyment from things like animals, waterfalls, sunsets, and wildflowers.  This progression comes on the heels of a prolonged period where I mostly faked caring about all of it; I could intellectualize the reasons people provided when they talked appreciatively of nature’s simple gifts, and I parroted them appropriately.  I just didn’t much find much inspiration in it myself.  Nature was basically a peripheral concern – if the approach trail happened to wander through a pristine rhododendron grove on the way to the crag, awesome; if not, you know, whatever.  The joy was always in the doing, not the being.

Because of this, I’ve long had a dismissive attitude toward most of our national parks.  I considered them to be, on the whole, places where people went when they didn’t really want to do anything; rather, they just wanted to be.  They wanted to be near animals, they wanted to be near waterfalls, they wanted to be near sunsets and wildflowers.  Because the officials knew this to be the case, they made it pretty easy to visit most of the parks’ major attractions without having to do anything other than drive.  If I had a free week to spend somewhere, that’s precisely the opposite of the experience I was after.

The preternatural blue of Glacier's McDonald Creek.

Certainly, there are exceptions – Yosemite, Joshua Tree, Grand Teton, Denali, Grand Canyon, Zion – all of these are places where it’s very easy to do; but, for every one of those, there’s a place like Acadia or the Everglades or the Great Smoky Mountains where being is, as far as I can tell, the dominant activity.  Again, I have no trouble understanding these parks’ places among America’s jewels (the Everglades is clearly a unique and remarkable environment, and GSMNP boasts more than ten thousand species of plants and animals), and there’s no doubt that a measure of action-sport elitism is an ingredient here.  I recognize that the point of the national park system is not to collect the country’s best climbing and rafting spots, even if it often succeeds in doing so.  Still, those are the experiences I was looking for when I went into the wild, and I wanted to do them in places that felt more like parks and less like museums.

Michelle and me in snowy Yellowstone. Only one of the major roads was open, but we had plenty to explore for one day.

Lately, though, I’ve found myself more satisfied with the being, and I attribute that, in large part, to the amount of doing I’ve been, well, doing for the past few years.  The majority of days I spend outside are either at the end of a rope or at the back of a raft.  The same things that make these activities so fun and attractive for me also guarantee a high-stress experience.  Practice and diligence can lessen the stress to an acceptable level, but there’s nothing I can do to get rid of it completely (and I wouldn’t want to even if I could).  Over time, though, all that stress takes a toll, and it’s refreshing to grab a light pack and a camera and not have to worry whether or not this will be the day I come home with a broken ankle.  I’m not even close to ready to bury my climbing rack for good, but, for the first time, I can imagine a situation where I might be.

Given all that, I was eager to test out this new-found fondness for being when Ben and Rachel, two of my best hometown friends, flew out to help Michelle and me celebrate our last week in Montana.  The high points on our agenda (other than the NCAA championship/Braves opening day/Masters trifecta) were trips to Glacier and Yellowstone National Parks – places that I had heretofore placed squarely in the museum category.

Ben and Rachel at Mammoth Hot Springs.

I’m sorry to report that the results of the experiment are, as yet, inconclusive.  I had a blast at both parks, but it’s hard to say how much my expanding interests really contributed.  There’s a certain population of people that can make most any situation fun for me, and my companions on this particular trip more than qualify.  For instance, we walked five miles of closed-off park road in Glacier, only to be diverted by a prohibiting sign a quarter-mile shy of our destination.  We walked the same five miles back in the rain and laughed the whole way to the car; no amount of maturity and quiet meditation will bring me to a place where I can enjoy that scene on my own.  On the other hand, the young black bear who chose Yellowstone’s Mammoth Hot Springs as the ideal spot to spend a lazy Friday afternoon was thoroughly entertaining and exciting, and I can think of no qualification that might detract from how much I enjoyed watching him play around in such a setting.  By contrast, the dominant emotion during my last encounter with a black bear was annoyance at the mother and two cubs whose trail occupancy cut short one of my fall training runs.  That seems like progress.

Adam, enjoying the view from the top. Snowy LaSalle's in the back ground, and the Titan presiding.

Last week I got my first taste of  desert tower climbing and aid climbing. Let me tell you, they taste sandy and sour. Sandy because the rock – that material in which we put so much trust when we climb – was crumbling before my eyes. And sour, well, because standing in the top rung of my aiders on a rattly cam with 300 feet of exposure below me just put that funny adrenaline taste in my mouth. But you know what they say – sour grapes lemonade does not make (they say that, don’t they?). And sure enough, when the fear subsided, I took in the beauty of our bird’s eye view, I marveled at the smooth technical geekery aiding requires, and I felt pretty damn euphoric.

My friend and climbing partner, Adam, convinced me to have a go at the King Fisher Tower’s Colorado Northeast Ridge route  (III, 5.8, C2) in Utah’s Fisher Towers (home of such classics as Ancient Art). After cragging outside Moab on Wall Street, we picked up some groceries, drove out to Castle Valley, drank some of Utah’s finest 3.2 beer, organized our racks, and got some shut eye for an alpine start. The grade four climb would surely take us most of the next day.

The next morning, in the quiet gray of desert dawn, we parked in the Fisher Towers lot, ate breakfast and put the final touches in our packs: 4 liters of water, plenty of wind layers (a wind advisory had recently subsided) sun screen, and a tent pole. That’s right a tent pole. See, as we were about to head out, a climber zombie-walking to the outhouse saw us stuffing aiders and Jumars into our packs and wandered over to see what we were up to. When we told him we were going to try the Colorado Ridge, he said he’d been up it a few days before, and that he and his partner had to fix their first two pitches because they got stopped where a group of pitons had fallen out and left a big hole in the rock. They back tracked, grabbed a tent pole from camp, and ascended the next day by stick clipping a bolt 10 feet above the insurmountable gap.

Adam and I sped along the approach (mostly to make good time, but partly, I feel, to work out the nerves – this climb was going to be a challenge for us). Between quick breaths I got the down and dirty version of how to aid climb. Sensing my nerves, Adam asked, “How you feeling about this?”

“Well, I’ve never aided a pitch in my life, and this is nasty sandstone we’re talking about, so, all in all, pretty good.”

“You can lead the first two pitches,” he said. “One’s a bolt ladder, and the next is a 5.8 mud chimney. I’ll take the C2 pitches.”  Fair enough.

On the first pitch's bolt ladder. In the desert, just because they're bolts, does not mean they're secure! My first aid pitch.

We found the beginning of the bolt ladder on the mud-coated tower, and began racking our gear and stacking ropes. Adam showed me how to connect my aiders to my daisy chains, and then use a fifi hook to high step. Confident in my ability to –  at the very least – not totally F up, I tied in, went on belay, clipped the first bolt, and headed up via a mix of expansion bolts and rusty mud nails. On bolt number two I laughed out loud at the novelty of stepping up in my webbing ladders. Such fast, tangible progress! On bolt three, my aiders got dismally tangled with all the other crap dangling off my harness and gear slings, and I looked down at Adam dutifully belaying: “Honeymoon’s over!” I shouted. From there the learning curve accelerated. Step, step, clip, hang, clean, clip, step, step, repeat.

Adam, leading up the third pitch and trying to find the least bad placement. Note the tent pole taped to his harness.

Pitch two was a fairly easy but unprotected mud chimney that got the heart racing, but it felt familiar and comfortable to be free climbing. Then I passed the lead to Adam for the next two C2 pitches. We punched the clock, ’cause it was business time. Adam soon found himself in the first crux of the route: a flaring, crumbly constriction requiring a small tricam. “Watch me dude, I’m kinda scared up here,” he said. “I’m going to bounce test this piece.” As he bounced he looked down at me to keep the rock from shattering in his face. Sure enough, the tricam blew out, and Adam fell into a surprisingly soft catch on the piton a few feet below him. Reality check. After reworking his placement, he continued up through tenuous terrain taking tipped out cams and rattly tricams. He finally gained a ledge, where he unleashed the secret weapon: the tent pole. He taped an open ‘biner onto the pole, put the rope through, and made his reach. The wind had picked up, and we were both shivering in the shade in the middle of the sunny desert (remember, it’s the Northeast Ridge). The wind made Adam and his tent pole look like a fly fisherman who suddenly finds himself in a terrible dream. He became audibly frustrated as the pole whipped in the gusts. Finally, in a calm spell, he clipped the bolt, and hauled up on the lead line. Four hours in, pitch three complete.

That's me dangling from my mental crux: the roof on pitch 5.

My crux of the climb was the fifth pitch (C1), where the line split a free hanging roof. A flaring crack took two lobes of a size 4 camalot, and then two lobes of a size 2 camalot, but I threw in a slotted tricam and a size 1 camalot just for confidence’s sake. Hey, the rock sucked and so did the rusty piton below me. Not to mention the 300 feet of wind beneath my feet. After wiggling like I was in an offwidth and smashing my hands about a gazillion times between carabiners in the crack, I pulled up over the roof and clipped a bolt. Then I got the pleasure of run out 5.8 face climbing to a big ledge and our next belay.

Adam finished the route up a 5.8 chimney, and then we bouldered the cap rock together. 11 hours, bottom to top. The sun was dipping low, and we had to curb our urge to laze around on the summit for infinity. Below us hoodoo canyons rippled through the land. The Colorado river flowed lazy to our west. Red rock and shadows textured the earth for miles. I looked down at places I had camped as a kid, and an overwhelming sense of time, nostalgia and catharsis rushed over me. Time to descend.

The light oozed sunset red as we rappelled the route on solid, but scary looking desert anchors: bundles of old webbing around geriatric pitons. A route that took us 11 hours up required about one hour down. And if we’d gotten any ropes stuck, we would have had a long night ahead of us. We made it back to the car in the dark as the stars erupted from the atmosphere, thirteen hours after starting. Behind us the silhouette of the King Fisher was crowned by a single point of stellar light. Across the parking lot a family roasted marshmallows, children laughed, and dogs yipped. We sat on the tailgate and relived the day’s events: “Dude, and then you were like…oh my god, and your aiders were flying out to the side, and….Dude…” We sat quiet, too, and basked in the peace of struggle and accomplishment. All the while reconciling the vertical life with the horizontal; the bird’s eye experience with the human condition.

Mmmm....desert anchors. And this is a good one!

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My Vanderbilt crew came out during spring break. This is what the cool kids at divinity school look like.

Well, I didn’t get the job on Rainier.  It’s disappointing, but that’s the chance you take when you try.  There are plenty of compelling reasons to go back to the river, and I’m already looking forward to being closer to home for a few months.  I’m sure there will be a time or two when I’ll wonder what it looks like on the Rainier summit at that moment, but there are worse places to daydream than a sun-drenched riverbank.  If any of you have whitewater wishes, contact the NOC and come see me this summer – good times guaranteed.

Matt raps off Genesis I. He thought this picture was better than all the rest; I think it looks about the same.

Before I go anywhere, though, I have to pack up and say my goodbyes to Bozeman.  There’s a decent chance that I’ll find myself back in Montana come August, but that’d be three hours away in Missoula; weekend trips to Hyalite notwithstanding, my time here has likely come to an end.  I’ll miss it.  Life’s great out here.  When I left Atlanta last October, I was looking forward to endless ice pitches, relaxing book pages, daily mountain views, and a different kind of country; I found it all.

I climbed more than sixty days this winter – some of those, like the Sphinx epic and the Cody trips, rank among my most memorable days in the mountains; most were the standard crag sessions that make the others possible.  I finished several books that have been on my shelf for years and augmented my collection with several more that will keep me busy this summer and beyond.  I’m ashamed to say that it often required the exclamations of my visiting friends to remind me of the simple beauty of the ambient mountains that had, in the months that I spent here, faded into the background.

Jason shows off his (small) rainbow trout.

The most lasting effect of my time here may be a simple reinforcement of the fact that I’m at my happiest when I put myself into situations where access to great climbing, great running, and the great outdoors comes easy and often.  Big trips will always be motivators and rewards, but I don’t want to be in a place where the greater part of my climbing days requires any more planning than “right on, see you then.”  I’m proud to say I’ll be living that lesson for the foreseeable future as climbing access was the common denominator among my school applications.  When I leave the river at the end of this next summer, my destination expectations will be pretty much the same as they were when I pointed toward Bozeman eight months ago.  Granted, the books in front of me will be less relaxing, but the rest – the mountains, the new horizons, the climbing – will change only in style and location.

We’ll be leaving Bozeman a week from yesterday and driving the hours upon miles back toward homes and rivers and Braves games and Chick-fil-A.  But this is no time for lazy reminiscence; we’ve got more friends in town this week, and the roads are just starting to clear up at Glacier.  Adventure awaits; home will have to.

Rob ascends the Moose Knuckle variation on G1.

Bundled up and preparing to reap the rewards of ascent.

“A ship is safe in the harbor, but that’s not what ships are built for. And there is more in you than you know.” That’s what I told the group of nine aspiring backcountry snowboarders and skiers last week during their first dinner circle on the 8-day Outward Bound course that I instructed.

With those essentially Outward Bound concepts in mind, we headed out of our comfort zones for a week of backcountry riding and learning. Throughout the week I was reminded of how fast and deep humans connect to each other through shared adversity, struggle, and resilience. We spent the first part of the week preparing for a four-day overnight base-camp expedition: we prepped enough gear and calorie-rich food for 11 people, acclimated to the Rocky Mountain altitude, and got used to western-style snow and riding (most of the students were from somewhere pretty darn close to sea level east of the Mississippi). On the second day we rode in t-shirts and plenty of sunscreen at Ski Cooper to practice tree and powder riding, and on the third day we toured up Mayflower Gulch, between Leadville and Copper Mountain to get used to climbing on skins or snowshoes and learn some group travel and avalanche companion rescue techniques.

On the fourth day we headed towards Independence Pass and the wicked

Schralping some generously loaded wind powder.

storm that shut down the Elk Mountain Grand Traverse for four days of cold, wind, general suffering, heaps of hard work, variable snow, and amidst it all, tons of laughter, joy and excitement. We set up base camp in warm, springy conditions. Digging dead-men for our three North Face VE-25 tents and one Black Diamond Bibler was easy in the corny snow. So was carving a steezed-out kitchen complete with door-less cupboards, circular table and benches to match, refrigerator, and loads of butter. The next day the sun went away and the suffer-fest began. We tried to beat the storm and tour up to a high ridge, but were turned around by what one student dubbed “suicide snow”  - that is, a thick sun crust that couldn’t thaw in the overcast conditions in combination with up to 60 mile-per-hour wind gusts. So we skied back to camp for a hot ramen noodle lunch and a warm nap in sleeping bags. After that we stuck closer to home in terrain less exposed to the elements. In some north-facing glades we found wind loaded powder pillows which, most of the time, kept us above the breaker crust that plagues the Leadville area’s snowpack.  And for many of the folks used to riding East Coast ice, the 5 to 8 inches of powder was a thrilling, once-in-a-lifetime experience.

On our last night, huge wind gusts and blowing snow forced most of the crew into the Mega-Mid cook shelter mid-dinner. That left my co-instructor and I (and one hearty, helpful student) out to finish the cooking and cleaning. At this point we figured it was more important to keep everyone warm and happy than responsible for chores. From inside the Mid I heard the group’s usual sounds: belly laughter, hearty conversation, and a four-part acapella rendition of Jason Mraz’s “I’m Yours” (the quartet perfected the piece over the course of the trip during van rides, particularly heinous sections of hiking, and while waiting for hot chocolate to materialize out of the arctic cook scene). Despite the brutal conditions, perpetually cold appendages, and rapidly

Nothing quite says spring like sleeping in a Quinzee snow shelter.

cooling generic pasta, morale was high. I wondered what a different experience we all would have had without that positive group culture. Can you imagine packing nine people who can’t stand each other into a four-person tarp in a blizzard? Yikes. I was reminded of how quickly and profoundly we connect with those we adventure with. After seven days of knowing each other, many of these young adults said they were closer with one another than with friends at home. Those essentially real relationships with climbing, skiing and adventuring cohorts are a huge part of my mountain bliss. It seems that when we have to poop in bags or cat holes, warm our feet on one another’s tummies, cry out of exhaustion and frustration, laugh out loud at a huge toe-side powder turns, and come back together for a hard-earned dinner at the end of the day, we just can’t wear as many masks. We see our fellow adventurers at their worst, we see them at their best, and they see us in the same way.  I know that as I surrender to this rawness, it’s hard to imagine forming relationships on any other level. We learn a lot about ourselves as we sail out of that harbor, but I think we learn even more about our tribe.