By Jennifer Pharr Davis, on November 17th, 2009 Okay, if you’ve been following my blog then we need to back up before the PCT. Consider this a flashback amid the other flashbacks. While I was on the Appalachian Trail in 2005 I realized how important family was. And in the January 2006 I had the opportunity to spend some quality time with family – on Mount Kilimanjaro.
There she is…
I wasn’t necessarily a prime candidate for climbing Kilimanjaro. I had never been mountaineering, I didn’t like being cold, and I was poor. But two very important family factors made it possible for me to go to Africa. First of all my cousin Wende married someone famous, at least I think he is famous. He is a mountain climber and photographer and an overall phenomenal person. His name is Jake Norton and he and my wonderful cousin live in Colorado (that is a state shout-out for all you local mountain shoppers). Jake has been up on Everest a couple times and he was even part of the expedition that found Mallory’s body.
So yes, Jake was 50% of the equation. I tried to make a mental note not to go mountaineering when I saw several of [Read More]
By Francisco Tharp, on November 16th, 2009 The pragmatically pointless pursuit of holding onto tiny things and getting a good scare from gravity illuminates a certain freedom to me – the freedom growing out of the notion that maybe life is one big Cosmic Joke and somewhere Buddha and Jesus are laughing a big-bellied laugh, and play and fun are the key to the lock. And in the light of that freedom, humor just spills out of and all over everything. [Read More]
By Justin Harkins, on November 12th, 2009 Took us twice the time we thought it would, but the view was nice…
There’s been a lot of action in Montana this week.
Last time I checked in, I was about to embark on a three-day trip with Jason, a local climber who answered my online personal ad. Jason has been climbing ice around the country for more than a decade and moved to Montana five years ago for the same reasons that I have come now.
On his suggestion, we loaded up my truck and drove three hours southeast to the Beartooths – a range Jason reveres as “very white, very tall, and very infinite.” The range occupies the area just northeast of Yellowstone and, as part of the greater Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, boasts some 900,000 acres in northern Wyoming and southern Montana.
The plan was as follows: get up early on Monday morning and drive into the mountains; knock out one route that afternoon; drive to another part of the wilderness that night; catch a few hours of sleep in the truck; get up around 3:00 am on Tuesday for the 5-mile approach to that day’s route; finish the climb and get back to the car [Read More]
By Jennifer Pharr Davis, on November 10th, 2009 After completing the AT in 2005, I was hired to my first office job and I made it 10 months before needing to break free from the cubical. I also needed to lose the 20 pounds I had put on sitting in said cubical.
In some respects I was lucky, because at least my desk was positioned near a window where I could look out at nature, but instead of providing inspiration it made me feel trapped. Fortunately my job had a four-month slow season that coincided with the optimal PCT thru hiking months, and when I asked my boss for time off, she gave it to me.
Since finishing the Appalachian Trail in 2005, not a day passed that I didn’t miss the trail. I missed the friends I made, the animals I saw, the time to think, the way my body felt at the end of a long day. But to go straight from my experience on the AT to hiking out west was still a bit of a stretch. The thought of walking through the mojave desert with 30-miles between water stops terrified me; and I had to Google the definitions of an ‘ice axe’ and ‘crampons.’ [Read More]
By Francisco Tharp, on November 9th, 2009 As we watched other fire circles from afar, and listened to tribal cries echoing between granite monoliths, I though of Ed Abbey’s line from his Havasu chapter in Desert Solitaire: “Like the Taoist Chuang-tse, I worried about butterflies and who was dreaming what.” [Read More]
By Justin Harkins, on November 5th, 2009 Fifteen minutes down the road, all was well. Robert Earl Keen and lemon-lime Gatorade had me in a fine frame of mind, and I was cruising down the road toward certain triumph. Yet again, however, the snow was to get the better of me. [Read More]
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