Rules Of Finding Sweet Ski Town Housing

front porch view of paradise

So…you are planning to move or just showed up to Jackson Hole/Vail/Telluride/Mammoth/Big Sky etc.  Here are some rules to make finding a place to sleep besides the back of your vehicle a little easier (unless that’s what you are going for):

1. Arrive a month or more in advance of the ski season.  There is a magic time between when summer seasonal workers take off and winter gets in gear.  The papers will be (relatively) full of rooms available, and landlords will be more willing to work with you when the supply of rooms is higher than the demand for them.  If you are looking for a place as the snow is falling, you are too late.

2. Use a variety of resources to find housing. There are housing available ads in the paper.  Find out which day of the week new ads are posted, and get the paper early in the morning of that day.  Start calling people right away and reserve that day for going to see potential housing.  Remember, a dozen or more other people are also going to be calling the same new posting.  You have to be aggressive.  Local radio shows often list housing available that isn’t in the paper.  Listen every day.  Also, don’t wait for the housing to find you - take a proactive approach.  Put up a sign at local coffee shops or libraries with your phone number on little strips people can tear off.  Make a drawing or something creative or funny on this sign to catch peoples’ eye.  Put an ad in the paper.  Go on the local radio show and advertise that you are looking for a room. 

3. Please, PLEASE don’t assume (or worse yet financially plan) that you are going to walk into a caretaker position for some rich person’s house.  This is a long shot.  You are probably wasting your money if you put an ad in the paper stating you are available for this kind of position.  People do this, yes, but usually only after building a reliable reputation and references within that ski town.

4. Have first, last, and deposit for a room in your price range saved up and put aside.  This is a lot of money for most people, but it will broaden your options.  If you end up not having to pay F/L/D, sweet!  New skis!

5. Try to have a job lined up before you arrive in town.  People will be more inclined to rent to you if you are already gainfully employed.  This one is not always possible.  In that case, if you are planning on renting a place with 4 walls, running water and heat and not living in your car, have F/L/D and one month’s rent saved up on top of that.  It is a lot of money, but will be worth it in the amount of stress you save.  If you can’t get that much money together, try to hustle as soon as you get to town.  Do anything - work with the temp service (or as a flagger, a leaf-raker, construction site cleanup person, etc) – to get a little money together in case you run out before you get your first paycheck at the winter job you find once you arrive in town.

6. Prepare a small card to leave with potential landlords.  It could be a handwritten card.  Include your name, job if you have one, and two or three housing references.  This will make you stand out from other potential renters.  Little do they know you will soon be doing kegstands in the living room, muhuhaha!

7. If you can secure housing through work, do it, but beware of mixing work and pleasure.  If employee dorms have a no drinking or no drugs policy, you might end up screwing yourself out of a job AND a place to live if you choose to violate these rules (seriously, you think you won’t?).

8. This is one time when networking – however distant – really pays off.  Your mom’s co-worker’s sister’s daughter moved to Big Sky?  That girl one grade below you who was in outdoors club with you for 2 trips in high school now lives in Jackson?  Get those phone numbers, or better yet, those Facebook contacts, and introduce yourself.  Meet and offer to buy this person a beer or coffee when you get to town.  They might not have a room available, but will probably know someone who heard that someone’s buddy does.

9. Be deliberate – and choosy – about the kind of environment you want to live in, even if it seems like the only option at the time.  Are you in a ski town to party your ass off (YAGER BOMBS!!! WOOHOO!!!!) or to be an outdoor professional (like you’re not going to drink yager bombs)?  Be as up front about it as you can be to your potential roomies as possible.  Want to do a job where you are going to be waking up at 4 to throw bombs or work the breakfast rush?  Don’t live with people who are just going to bed at that hour.  Want to be the other guy?  Don’t live with people who are going to be constantly pissed at your party habits.

10. IF YOU DON'T KNOW YOUR ROOMMATES, DON’T PUT YOUR NAME ON THE LEASE.  Oh, did you miss that?  DON’T PUT YOUR FUCKING NAME ON THE LEASE, especially if your roomies are a bunch of (bong-ripping PBR shotgunning pallet burning) partiers.  At the very least, co-sign the lease with your other roomies.  If it is only you on this legally binding rental agreement then when holes get punched in walls and the bonfire in the backyard gets out of control and the cops show up, you will be the one responsible.  When someone loses their job or runs out of money in the middle of the winter, you are still responsible for the entire rent, subletters or no.  Having people point in your direction or your roommates ditch because you don’t have anything in writing is pretty much the biggest buzzkill possible in the housing game.

i am worth the trouble

11. Consider leaving your best four-legged buddy at the home of your parents/aunt/brother/friend.  Leave this person an abundance of food for your furry friend and make sure they have a good way to reach you if your buddy needs to go to the vet.  Always pay vet bills incurred in your absence.  If you find housing that takes pets and you want to be in town for more than a season, take a trip back when it’s convenient and get your dog/kitty/rabbit/chinchilla etc.   If you cannot leave your furry buddy with someone, have a pet deposit (I have seen people ask up to $200 for cats and $500+ for dogs) ready to pay along with F/L/D.  This tip can seem too sad for some, and I myself have broken this rule for 10 years.  It has made things harder for me in the way of housing, but has been worth having my kitty friend Juniper along for the ride!

12. Think about spending a bit more for a totally sweet place.  Hot tub.  Walking distance to the lift or bar.  Huge living room.  The difference in cost between having an awesome place to bring the party back to (or start it off) might equal out to money spent out on the town.  Also, consider all the free beer people will bring to/leave at your place.  Plus, when you are done for the night you are already at home.

13. Try to pick a place with an entryway/tile floor/heated garage where snowboards, skis, skins, helmets, ropes from ice climbing, and all your clothing can drip all over the place and dry.  It might be sunny and 65 degrees when you show up, but that house with nice carpeting or hardwood floors is going to get messy in a hurry when the season revs up to full speed.  Things hanging outside on the porch will not dry.  They will freeze.

14. If you are going to cram as many ski bums as possible into one house/apartment, MAKE SURE THERE IS ENOUGH PARKING.  There is nothing worse than having to shuttle half the cars to the public lot every night or waking up to pissed off neighbors or a tow truck or boot on your car when it’s a powder day and/or you have to be at work.

15.  Make sure there is a washer and dryer.  If there is not, pool your money with your roommates and buy them used.  Split between 2-8-however many people a used washer and dryer are not that much money. They will save you time.  They will save you money.  And if you and your roomies do not have to go to the laundromat when it’s a powder day every day to wash your clothes and sheets your house will smell a LOT nicer.

1. Trust your gut.  You read it right.  It should be #16, but it is in fact the #1 rule of finding shared housing in any town.  If something feels shady or uncomfortable, trust your instincts.  Don't let desperation or discouragement lock you into a situation that you know deep down is going to be wrong, sketchy, or dangerous later.  This is especially true if you are female and get weird vibes from male potential roommates or are very uncomfortable with anything illegal that you know will be going on (cough cough).  Don't put yourself in a bad situation when the door is wide open to walk out of it and into a great one.

I am sure there are many other tips I could give for finding ski town housing.  In closing I will say living in a ski town for at least one winter is totally worth the trouble.  Some of the rules on this list are ones I have not always followed, especially the ones about having a bunch of money saved up for moving expenses.  It has been harder, but I have gotten by.

bottoms up bitches

Don’t wait.  If the mountains are calling, go for it, even if you don’t have a pile of cash saved.  Show up with a willingness to work hard and play hard, don’t expect any freebies, keep your eyes and mind open and don’t be a douche.  Things will work out for you.  May your days be full of sunny bottomless pow and your nights full of good people, good food, woodstoves, bonfires, hot tubs, and an endless supply of high quality beer.  Happy hunting. 

Pay Attention

headed for new ground

            Sometimes a phrase gets caught in my head and plays over and over again.  Out here in the Frack Lands of NoDak I do a lot of repetitive exercise in places where the scenery is, shall we say, less exciting than my home in Jackson or my second home in Seattle.  The phrase pay attention has been the one on repeat of late.  Part of this is due to the excellent book I am reading on the advice of my friend Matt, The Rock Warrior’s Way, and a fair amount of cross-referencing in other works I have read recently.  I don’t have to tell all of you who practice yoga or do other sports which require a high degree of presence that this mindfulness brings unexpected rewards, a new awareness of the beauty and problems all around us that we miss when we walk around on auto-pilot.

exciting scenery in Watford City, ND

I have found as I venture further into guiding and into the oil industry that this phrase also applies in the working world.  The more I focus on whatever task is at hand – rock rescue, the downhole workings of an oil rig, how to fix my car, how to train for ice climbing – the more I get in return.  I earn more interesting guiding assignments, higher-paying oil jobs, no labor bills from a mechanic , off the couch performance – all from clicking away from Facebook and towards the YouTube how-to videos, by picking up and deciphering each step in written manuals, by asking co-workers or climbing partners to explain something else.   Pay close enough attention and you will get to the meat of how things work.  This will give you the confidence to act on that knowledge (for those females who have mastered your fear of working on your own car, you know what I am talking about!).  

Attention is a commodity, arguably the most important one you can cultivate in an age of that offers you the choice of constant electronic connection.  Attention is something scattered, blown to bits by omnipresent screens and their shiny promises of fleeting distractions.   The distractions offer brief, reliable bursts of emotional response that we no longer get from each other.  We don’t need to.  We have brain candy, a mental diet of little sugar highs.  We never have to be bored again. 

We must re-teach ourselves how to pay attention, those of us still interested in learning after leaving the educational institutions set up for this purpose.  I have stopped saying I cannot afford something, because if I really want to I can borrow and afford most things.  I will not afford more education through debt.  Another degree will not solve my problem of how to get out of debt and learn how to live so I never have to be beholden unto these lending institutions ever again, only postpone this.  Most things taught in a school you can learn yourself.  You can earn that knowledge just the same outside the institution.  The price is focused attention.

We are living in a very different age than that of our parents.  Perhaps a few from a generation that still had pensions and job security and living wages realize that the math doesn’t add up for their 20 or 30-something offspring, but most don’t.  It’s easier to blame us, because that’s easier to understand than what is actually going on.  It also has an easier solution: quitcher bellyachin’ and pull yourselves up by the bootstraps, kids.  They think it is our refusal to start at the bottom, not realizing that the bottom is all most workers can look forward to for the length of their careers.  There are a lot of articles going around about how we are the entitled generation, a bunch of self-important children who grew up with trophies for participation who want high paying jobs without doing the work.  Let me tell you: the world has changed.

 People didn’t always have to take out 20 to 50 to however many tens of thousands of dollars to get a degree.  A degree does not necessarily equal a job, and once taken out student loans are there and you cannot declare bankruptcy on them.   “So what happens if I just stop paying them?” I asked one day to the customer service representative for the company that manages my own student loan.  After several minutes of ‘we try to make your lifetime of debt slavery as painless and affordable as possible so you don’t default and we can keep milking you for interest’ she responded that if I defaulted on my loans my degree could be taken away, any professional licenses that depended on that degree could be revoked, and my wages could be garnished by the IRS. 

I remember my incredulity when I, after two years of temp work and a hesitant willingness to try the ‘working in offices’ path (my mother once told me that if I had ‘worked in offices’ my whole life, I would have everything I needed by now.  I thought where are these mysterious offices?  And what would I do there?), I was offered a job for the whopping sum of 13 dollars an hour with an outdoor clothing company in Seattle.  Really?  How will that pay off my student loans?  How will that allow me to get a mortgage, let alone pay one, for any kind of property in the city of Seattle?  Where is the American Dream?  You can borrow it.  You can buy it with credit cards.  A lifetime of debt is normal, said my family.  Your student loans will always be there, now Buy A House, because that will make you an adult.  Five figure credit card debt is normal, said some friends.  As you get older you get more. 

lonely

The belief that you must accept debt is bullshit.  You should get out of debt as quickly as possible.  Banks make money on interest from your student loans and your credit card and your car loan.  They make money off the fact that you get to have those nice things that you have been told you need and that everyone else has right now.   The interest you will end up paying is hours of your future life sold.  It is money you earn but don’t get to use to run your own life, to stay healthy by buying better food and getting outside (of those mystery offices?) and moving, to work less and do more.  I don’t need to tell you this, but I am, because this is my blog for things that matter to me and I am fucking mad as hell that I listened to the voices of family and a few peers telling me what they thought I needed and fell into the trap.  My oilfield work is undoing my mistake: I bought in.  And I want out.

Anger is a motivating force if harnessed at a problem and not, as so often happens instead, at another person or group of people.  Refusal to accept diminished circumstances is the basis for the biggest changes and most inspirational stories we know.  Good enough is not good enough for me.  It’s about time I stop being vague about my motivations and intentions for this oil patch business and share the hard truth of my current work project alongside all the effusive posts about ice climbing and danger and beauty.  Today I just got confirmation that I will soon be starting a much more time-consuming but lucrative job on rigs in Pinedale, Wyoming that will effectively end my guiding career for the unforeseeable future but will allow me to climb out of the debt hole I am in.  Hell, it will allow me to live where I can see a mountain at all, where I can climb or ski without first driving six hours.

 With MWD  (Measurement While Drilling), there is room to advance on the rig, and therefore that valuable attention I was going on about could actually earn me more money for a change (which is what any other MWD will tell you, because everybody knows EVERY SINGLE MWD EVER is going to become a Directional Driller.  Probably next year. I am serious – ask one sometime).  This is something mudlogging will never offer me.  I have the wrong type of degree (not geology), and therefore am not allowed by the company that contracts the one I work for to be the wellsite geologist who steers the well.  I am working in the oil industry mainly to pay off debt, but stagnation in any form still bothers me.  

This next step is a mix of sacrifice and gain.  I am sacrificing time, valuable life hours and days and months, all in one chunk instead of letting my debt fester like an untreated wound for decades, siphoning away my life energy in monthly increments, narrowing my field of possibility.  I am paying attention, and finally have put my life in a pattern in which I have a shot at earning my way out of the trap.

 

             

How Stanibaby Zee and I got our PhD's in Being A Badass...from Harvard

NOTE: This blog post is a twofer, as it will also appear at some point on MSR's blog. But as I see no reason to re-write the story of this adventure, here it is:

flying down I-94

The voice over the phone was nervous.  I was barreling down I-94 somewhere outside Miles City, Montana, going about 90 on my way to the Bakken oil patch and already tired.  I was telling my climbing partner Stanislav (known in some select circles as Stanibaby Zee), who had just completed a bone dry ascent of New York Gully on Snoqualmie Peak in Washington, about the hip-deep powder my friend Tess and I had found on Teton Pass.

i think you have a powder problem

“I’m worried you are skiing too much and not climbing enough ice.  I don’t know if you will be adequately prepared for Huntington.”

This worry voiced in his familiar Russian accent made me the kind of mad that promotes a flurry of training.  Up at work in the oilfields I ramped up my workouts.  I camped for days at a time in the back of my truck in Hyalite, Montana throwing myself at leads on mixed routes.  I worked through the fear and climbed into the long days of spring until all the ice fell down and I was ready to leave for Alaska.  

training in Hyalite

Stanislav greeted me at his apartment in Seattle, and we proceeded to buy beers to drink while doing our final packing for Huntington.   We were as strong as we were going to get.  We didn’t know if our training and preparation would be enough.  He had climbed Denali three times, including Cassin Ridge,  and I the Southwest Ridge of Francis and guided several Denali trips, but this was the biggest undertaking either of us had tried.  Gear spilled out over the floor.  Five screws with screamers, a set of nuts, a single rack of cams to 3 with doubles from .5-2, a 9.8 60 meter lead rope, for the aid pitch, an 8.1 tag line/spare rope, a BD Firstlight, an MSR Reactor, spare pick each, light puffies, extra gloves, and sleeping bags.  We had lists of lists.    

back in the day (at 14 camp in 2010)

He dropped me at the airport as he had so many times in the various states where we had climbed and traveled together.  Ours was a friendship begun on Denali in 2010.  I was on an expedition with two friends from Jackson.  We were the first team on the glacier that year, along with a Russian who had climbed the mountain solo before and was now going for the ‘triple crown’ – Hunter, Foraker, and Denali.  No one had soloed all three peaks in one season. We kept skiing by his camp as I wondered just who this mysterious badass Russian soloist was.  On the third day of our trip a serac fall avalanche off Mt. Hunter knocked our team of three over and buried our legs while skiing up to the Mini Moonflower.  At the same time, an avalanche carried Stanislav 200 feet down a lower slope of Foraker which resulted in a broken finger.  We all decided to team up as two teams of two, and thus began our partnership.  That year he earned a reputation as the ‘worst soloist ever’ – and completed an ascent of Kahiltna Queen with Bojan, one of our Jackson team, a visit to the North Summit of Denali with me, and an ascent of the Cassin with a guide named Kelly from Colorado who he met at 7800 camp.  We had climbed together since that expedition all over the United States, but had not returned to Alaska together.  Until now.

That's What She Said

Stanislav arrived in Anchorage.  Our friend Lewis, who used to climb with Stanislav in Bellingham and whom we had both hung out with in the endless weather days at 14 Camp in May 2010, helped shuttle our dirtbag asses from store to store in his bright red minivan.  The forecast looked amazing.  We arrived in Talkeetna in the morning of our departure and promptly registered with the Parks Service.  They were not surprised to see either one of us, as we were familiar faces on Denali.  The ranger did not find as much amusement as Talkeetna Air Taxi did in the expedition name we registered under.  The people in TAT’s office chuckled as they registered us as expedition “That’s What She Said.”

Access Couloir

We left the green world of Talkeetna springtime and donned our headsets in the DeHavilland Otter.  After a spectacular view of our objective and a smooth landing on the Tokositna we moved into someone’s camp platform, set up our tent, and slept all night.  
We got a start at the crack of noon the second day on the glacier.  The bergschrund was our first obstacle, but a guided party climbing the West Face Couloir had wanded a clear path over the broken moat of ice.  We had to sidestep a significant distance to reach the base of the Access Couloir.  Firm neve perfect for crampons and hero sticks with our ice tools greeted us, and we simul-climbed quickly up this section.  In the lead - 10 pitches according to the book - I placed a grand total of 5 ice screws.

exposure

From the Access Couloir we gained the ridge.  Stanislav led up a mixed bit and onto some snowfields.  We stopped

to brew up at a little platform kicked out at the base of a sheltering rock before the crux pitches began.  The weather was still quite good and warm in the sun as we kicked our way up to the Spiral.  I racked the rock gear with great glee.  “Stanislav.  My dream came true.  I was afraid to say it in case I jinxed myself, but I’m gonna do this with bare hands.”

“That’s what she said."

the Spiral

The Spiral was everything I expected: legit 5.9 in crampons.  The movements were protectable, pumpy, and fun, and the rock was indeed kitty litter at the top of the pitch.  I hauled the packs and then belayed Stanislav up.  I re-racked and set out on the mixed pitch that the book had said was C2.  I climbed through the ice and rock moves and reached a slightly overhanging crack with three big orange pins hammered into it.  I studied it for a moment, clipped a pin, and yarded up on it until I could get a good hook over the edge.  Hauling the packs proved strenuous.  We moved over some easier mixed ground.  Stanislav took the next steep mixed pitch, an M5 chimney with a continuous runnel of ice in the back.   I watched him disappear into the chimney from my protected belay spot.  I heard him as he worked through the difficulties, but did not see him until he emerged on a ledge far above me.  He brought me up.  I led on in the snow that had begun falling as the Alaskan twilight wrapped our world in a blue-gray veil.  Spindrift poured down from above over golden rock that disappeared upward into cloud and storm light.  We climbed step after step of rock, finally reaching a highway of ice that led us up to the Nose pitch at last.

the only night the tent got used on the whole trip

We pitched our Firstlight on a small ledge other parties had chopped.  We melted water and fell immeditaly to sleep after setting up our camp. We slept tied into our harnesses and sliding slightly towards, or at least aware of, the abyss all night.   Daylight greeted us as we awoke, brewed up, ate, and started moving once more.  Stanislav styled his way up the aid lead on the Nose pitch.  As I belayed his lead up the tiny overhanging crack threading up the wall I recalled our days practicing our

aid climbing in Leavenworth in a slight drizzle.  We were ready for this.  So far our training had paid off, though I still despised jugging up the line after his lead.

am i pondering the mysteries of the universe, or dreaming of beer and sleep?

The belay station for this pitch was crowded, difficult, and had stunning exposure.  Below us the Tokositna glacier flowed past Hunter, which towered above us across an open expanse of air.  The next section was a spicy run-out mixed traverse that I dispatched with the knowledge that our mixed difficulties would soon be over.  Indeed, we were happy to return to neve and ice.  We joined the West Face Couloir route at this point and climbed to the top of it and over onto a traverse into a cave.  A sea of solid golden granite soared above, riddled with splitter cracks.  Were this mountain not in the heart of the Alaska Range it would have hundreds of routes on it.  We climbed up into the cave.  The snow floor was the flattest place we had seen since the ledge below the Nose.  We brewed up, took off our packs, and dozed for an hour before continuing.

Stani, with the first mountain we climbed as a team in the background

The thing that makes an Alaska Grade 6 route a Grade 6, we decided later, was that it just keeps going.  We found out why the Harvard Route had earned this grade as Stanislav led out over the mixed entrance to the upper icefields.  When I got to his belay stance I sensed his fatigue, grabbed the handful of screws from him, and continued the lead out over incessant 50 degree slopes.  Swing after kick after swing after kick after swing led us higher and into new realms of exhaustion.  We had been moving for over 20 hours.  Tired muscles were a laughable inconvenience.  Our raunchy sense of humor had gone out the window hours ago.  It was replaced by a care for each other and tolerance of each others’ eccentricities when very tired that I have only experienced between seasoned alpine partners.  We had seen each other stripped bare before (that’s what she said).  We knew when to step up, step in for the other.  Stanislav told me when to eat when my blood sugar tanked.  I grabbed the rack when his energy waned.  So it was we arrived at the gateway to the summit: an overhanging snow cornice.  

“Do you want to lead this, Stanislav?” Oh please say you do.

“Nope.”

Grumble. You wouldn’t say it if you didn’t mean it.  Time to rally.

oh shit am i leading this pitch?

International summit success!

I set a screw in the last of the ice before the overhanging snow, stared at it for a while, whined like a baby kitten, then with a feral war cry sunk my mixed picks as far as they could go into the bottomless sugar and swam, groveled, and swore my way up to the relative safety of low-angle snow.  I flopped over like a fish and kept on going.  The sun was bright in the sky.  I belayed him up on a hip belay seated one rollover below the summit.

We summited this peak - the hardest summit to reach in the Alaska Range - together while each in our own unguarded moment of emotional release.  A dream realized.  All our work, all our planning and training, our rambling phone conversations

while commuting to work, all the road trips, the ice climbs, the desert towers – we needed to live all of it to stand atop Huntington as a solid team of two individually strong climbers.  We were surrounded by a sea of peaks.  The golden granite slopes of Denali soared in the distance, marking how far we had come since our first climb together.

gotta get up to get down

In Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, the character Japhy Ryder (a thinly disguised Gary Snyder) tells the protagonist that when you ‘reach the top of a mountain, keep climbing’.  This applied on Huntington.  We had been awake and climbing non-stop for 23 hours.  We still had to get down the sketchy overhanging cornice and many, many snowfields, a process that would ultimately take us seventeen more hours.  One scary unconsolidated downclimb, several v-threads, armloads of tat, one found ice screw, one exhausting sunny traverse and many, many v-threads later found us at the base of the West Face Couloir, getting drenched.  

A rapid warmup had turned the route into a running stream.  We rapped fast but in control, wanting to get out of the way of the ice pellet avalanches the heat was releasing from the upper mountain and away from the path of potential rockfall.  We had climbed the route just in time.  As I slid down our icy ropes to the slings of the last rap station I found the multicolored webbing was now in a running stream.  With incredulous resignation to our situation I clipped in.  Water ran down the sling to my harness, down my leg, and into my boot.  I gave a thwarted laugh that came out like a little cry.  I was so tired.  I croaked out a hoarse ‘off rappel’ and stared ahead into another Alaskan twilight.  We hadn’t used watches for the climb – as I told Stanislav at the airport in Talkeetna, we were on the mountain’s time – so I did not know the hour.  I had been seeing faces in rock – something that only happens when I am deeply exhausted – since the cave.  

the dream team does it again!

As I had on the summit snowfields, Stanislav had a burst of energy.  He took the lead making a path down the vast snowfield, mechanically kicking and swinging as I followed his bootpack.  Less than 2 hours later we were staggering on the flat trail back to camp.  We were vibrating with exhaustion and adrenaline after forty hours of climbing.  We drank the four Sockeye Red beers that we had brought and power-ate a party size bag of Lay’s potato chips.  We crashed out and awoke to some whiskey generously offered by the small party that had formed in the Posh House next to our camp among a guided party and some personal climbers from Jackson.  

Ask this guy how he really feels about the isothermic snow...

...then ask her.

For the next eight days we climbed…nothing.  The Great Alaskan Warmup  - my name for the warming trend each year during which all the snow gets isothermic and useless for walking – had begun during the last raps of our climb.  We started walking down glacier for some objectives on the other side of the Tokositna, but the crevasse bridges were too spooky with the punchy snow.  We got a flight bump over to Base Camp and tried both the West Ridge of Hunter and Southwest Ridge of Francis, only to find bottomless sugar on both routes.  We ended up eating all our bacon and junk food and drinking all our single malt far too soon.  We camped above but in sight of the runway, sitting on folding chairs with footrests lording over the masses of people waiting to fly out from Denali’s West Buttress.  People Magazine and other reading material generously lent by Basecamp Lisa, our highly refined and extremely mature sense of humor, and the company of some good-natured ice core scientists from Dartmouth got us through this too-warm week in good spirits.  We had sent our objective.  And there was always next year.

lording over the peasants of base camp

do you think we ran out of bacon?

the dirtbag herself

At Home In The World

this is a picture of a drilling rig

        Back to mudlogging in Frack Land and its concomitant boredom.  I arrived with that nervous trembling of still being in motion after driving a thousand miles or more by yourself in a matter of days.  I had to take a walk on the road this afternoon (as the other rig hands think: what a weirdo! or more likely: OMG A CHICK SHE’S HOT and stare at my ass) to center myself in the heat, crickets, waving wheat and slow rhythms of the Dakotas once more.  I had to jump in the back of a rig hand's pickup to make it back for my shift on time.  I am in the dream-world mindset of both 4 months of crappy sleep and switching from a day to a night schedule.  It is my Great Seasonal Slowdown, mentally and metabolically, travel-wise and everything else.  I am trying to approach this return to my Other Job with a certain degree of mindfulness and intention.  This is to combat the inevitable let-down and mini-depression that occurs at the end of the guiding season, ie the sadness after I go from living my most authentic life as my best self to living in a more money-conscious, goal-driven, tough-it-out reality.  I love one and hate one but the one I hate makes me strong and financially stable for the other.  It doesn’t feel good but it makes me better.

with the right kind of eyes

         I try to live where I am and not in the happier future of my next climbing trip.  It’s hard out here.  It is a groundhog day kind of job.  Every well is like every other well, save a few things that could go wrong.  I establish a strict routine.  I greet the sunrise and let my feet touch the burnt rock scoria of the straight-grid roads that connect farm to industry out here.  I use a broader vision and see that despite the gas flares that dot the night landscape it is still a harsh beauty that underlies the farmland of the Dakotas.  It is as if the ice age just ended and the glacier just receded.  With the right kind of eyes you can see huge herds and bands of people following them.  That is what this kind of landscape can sustain.  For now it is tanker trucks kicking up plumes of dust and rows of four oil tanks on a pad next to a horsehead pump and a gas flare.  Quiet.  Pump, solar powered, squeaking up and down, pulling the light sweet crude out of the ground.  Post-production.  Harvesting oil with horizontal drilling technology.  With fracking. 

         So I plan, and drive, and visit.  When I am talking to my family back East about a typical plan for a big loop they marvel at my itinerary. From the rig I am going down to visit my friend in North Dakota who keeps bees, then to Taimi and Phil's in Longmont on the Front Range.  Then I have to visit my friends in Boulder and Vail before I head to Red Rocks to meet my friends from Bozeman and Washington that I also climb with in Alaska, before a stop in Fresno to climb with my buddy from Seattle...(notice how this resembles an ideal fall route to the Rock Instructor Class in Joshua Tree? I mention all these people to illustrate the forthcoming point but will probably not get to visit everyone on this next trip.)  My nuclear family marvels at how I seem to have friends everywhere I go.  This is not true.  I go where my friends are.

eating grass fed beef and veggies like a bunch of hippies

         My friends know that aspartame is a poison.  They don’t clean their houses with toxic products and try to eat real food.  Their homes are full of meaningful items from their travels and self-created art and climbing gear.  The driveway or couch or guest room of any of these folks is as much home to me as my little apartment in Jackson or the back of my truck.  I have forged these relationships out of necessity, and so have they.  I travel according to my plans and ambitions, and this takes me to many new places.  I must create community everywhere I go, or I will live the majority of my life lonely.  More than a decade of this has led to my having friends in many places, both ones that I have lived and ones that they have moved to while following their own ambitions.  They are islands of sanity in a world that is largely asleep, a world whose beliefs and values I have consciously chosen not to accept. 

back into asphalt hell

         Life on the road can be lonely.  I am not a counter, but if I was I might tally as many afternoons in distraught, heat-shimmering asphalt Wal-Mart or K-Mart or similar Death-Mart parking lots as I do in the pristine wilds, running into the store for hair bands or paper towels or cat food from my rarely-seen kitty, ear buds dangling from my iPhone, exhausted.  These times the vast dessication of strip-mall America stretches before me.  People with little kids staring look askance at my windblown hair and raccoon-eyed sunglasses tan.  They do not know how to receive a wild woman on the dream-trails of climbing culture, roaming the land in purposeful circles of ambition and home.   I wear my difference like a cape.  I was supposed to become like them.  Grad degree and a nice man (a woman would be acceptable as well, as long as she meets the right criteria) who is of my same socioeconomic class and level of education.  Move in together.  There is a dog and a ring somewhere in there, a garden and a promotion, a gradual move away from these wild dreams into What Is.  I’m not saying it’s bad for anyone who freely and joyfully chooses this.  I am saying it doesn’t work for all.  For me.  I am surprised and unsurprised at who I have become, and not sure what to do with it next.

what i've built since then

         Last year I thought I had it wrapped up.  I was a square peg, sure, but I found a man who was willing to shave those sharp corners off and make me nice and round like everybody else.  Settling down into a lifetime of abuse and misery, disguised as domestic bliss.  Mooching disguised as his support of female liberation (you are free to work so I can be a stay at home dad and do my ‘inventions’ in the garage and one day we will be RICH AND FAMOUS baby!)  I escaped several thousand dollars in legal fees poorer and spent a dark winter licking my wounds with strong women on the sides of mountains blanketed in quiet dying forests and soft powder snow.  Skinning up and clicking in.  Reading the avy forecast on my phone and opening my senses to whumphs and cracks, to the telltale recent slides.  The fight and float down, jump turns and hip-wiggling waist-deep pow.  The hitch back to the top of the Pass in vans or the open backs of pickups.  These were rituals I understood.  At the core was my home, a warm pocket of friendship and solitude, a woodstove and healthy-living roommate and kitty, a door I could shut and a space that was only mine.

         I found myself again.  She was huddled under a rock in the Bakken just past an oil rig, terrified and trembling, friendless and hung-over.  She had given up.  Canyons, mountains,

but how could i lose this?

glaciers that move like rivers a hundred miles or more and flow like highways to the sea, deck-loaded fishing boats, remote basins bursting with wildflowers in the North Cascades, little belay ledges and raunchy jokes with my climbing partners, hip-hop night at the Fairview, the friendship of everyone who opposed his presence – she had lost it all.  She had A MAN.  She BAGGED A MAN.  She was going to BUY A HOUSE.  And HAVE A BABY.  Maybe a few.  Her future was crumbling, set.  Build Rome to watch it burn.

         The price was her wild, wild soul. 

         So it crawled under a rock and tried to die.

         There is a passage from Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God in which Janie, the main character, realizes her lover Tea Cake does not want to kill that autonomous, free, wild part of herself.  ‘…and her soul crawled out of its hiding place.’  So mine did.  And there was so much shame that I had not been strong, but my friends did not care.  There was so much shame for the drama, for the lengths I had to go to to escape, for my self-destruction before I could begin to heal.  My family was right there, despite all our differences in the past.  My friends began to invite me again.  I started to go.  Then I started to climb again.

one of these years i will finally send this peak

         Skiing is one thing.  Backcountry skiing is not safe, but for me it is familiar.  Ice climbing and mixed climbing are not.  After living in the terror of an abusive relationship the constant fear of the vertical winter realm was calming.  I had lived in that fear and uncertainty.  Just as the monotony and low-level threat of constant harm for hours and sometimes days that exists while working as a deckhand on fishing boats prepared my mind for the rigors of expedition life my drama-filled life with my ex-fiance prepared my mind for a very surprising shift in my winter climbing. 

         Not to say I wouldn’t get scared on route.  I always get scared on route, and usually vocalize it.  I am working on this, and have had some patient belayers.  (You know who you are.  Thank you.  Also: I can’t fucking hear you.)  The point here is I took a horribly negative experience and turned it into an asset.  I used it for climbing.  And this is what climbing has done for me, more than anything else: it is the center.  Some find the center in another person, or in a job.  For me, it is simply returning to the challenge and scaring the shit out of myself on something new.

decompressing from ak LIKE A BOSS

          I don’t mean sending.  Sending occurs when you are well-trained and mentally prepared for the challenges of the climb.  Sometimes you surprise yourself and send something above your grade, but a smooth send is often in control.  Stani and I sent the Harvard Route.  We were not out of our realm.  This was a really big surprise for me, but a pleasant one.  It confirmed I had been doing it right since my breakup.  That despite those moments when I feel out of step with the rest of America for being 32, unmarried, childless, and living out of a tent or on a couch or in the back of a big red Toyota Tacoma most of the nights of my year I am dwelling on the right dream trail for once in my life.  I have tried so many.  I am not chasing ice or big mountains or anything anymore.  I am going there.  I am returning to these places with an open heart.  There is so little yearning for what I cannot do, what I cannot have.  I don’t feel deprived, only busy, tired, terribly amused, occasionally euphoric.  I try to express gratitude and send the poor-me self pity feelings on the first train to nowhere when they show their whiny little faces.  I do not listen to a popular culture full of materialism and its never-ending quest for more and the despair and soul-poverty which underlies it all.  I do not dwell within the ‘shoulds’.  I have cast them into the dented plastic garbage can on the way into Target to buy a toothbrush and a picture frame that will hang on my wall as I dwell within the pictures I create, occupying my space, at home in the world.

lake coeur d'alene on my 4 state swimming odyssey