Category: Climbing
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Go anyway
Logging Lake, just after the snow turned back into rain. The weekend’s forecast was bleak, but the best answer was and always is to go anyway. Even under less than ideal circumstances and if the trip gets cut short, you’re bound to see something cool. The crew amongst the mud and brush. Me, Sally/Megan, Nate.…
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Bob Marshall Wilderness Open: 2012 official unofficial report
Compiled and written by Dave Chenault For a comprehensive set of links to trip narratives, please see below. This report is available on Google, as well. The Bob Marshall Wilderness Open (BMWO) was devised as a test of wilderness savvy, to be held over Memorial Day weekend each year. Choosing to traverse the Bob Marshall…
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The Belly of the Chief
I have a new goal for the summer; becoming a better trip partner. This won’t entirely supercede training for the Wilderness Classic in the way I did last year, but given my mediocre physical condition one month out, and more importantly my different sorts of present motivations, my approach in Alaska will be different than…
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The ultimate partner
How to do adventures outside with your SO; a subject I’ve thought of writing about for years, and under implicit prompting from Geargal Jill I’m taking a crack at it today. It’s a desire many have, for good reason. Building a lifetime partnership and outdoor adventures both rank high on the life list of anyone…
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A prince of denmark
Over half my life ago I was a teenager learning to trad climb, and my friend Adam and I were down in the Red River Gorge looking for easy leads to build our skills. We both had several years of gym fitness under our belts, just enough to be pretty dangerous. At some point on…
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Back up there
Climber-neck. Mphoto. A few days ago M and I did something we haven’t done for too many years; went cragging outside. That it’s been seven years since that happened with any sort of regularity is something I never thought I’d write. I started climbing, in the gym on my Ohio hometown, when I was 12. …
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Gender, grading, and the mental game
My idea was to promote this new sport by challenging climbers to improve their technical skills to the point they were capable of “bouldering level” difficulty, but discourage the degeneration of bouldering itself into a numbers-chase. –John Gill, on his invention of the first rating system for bouldering The logical follow up to Gill’s statement…
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Why i might be full of shit
or: Credibility and experience in blogging The Black Hole of White Canyon, January 1, 2007. Blogging has irrevocably changed the face of writing about outdoor adventure, in almost all respects for the better. The chief problem today, perhaps different from days previous in scale only, is how to allot proper credence amongst the sea of…
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Preliminary data
Fleece, synthetic fill, and down: the big three insulators for outdoor garments since before I can remember. Synthetic’s have come on strong from the back of the pack in the last 15 years, down fill powers have crept higher, and fleece has undergone myriad transformations in an attempt to address the three reasons why so…
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There are no first de(a)scents
M and Isaac playing in the mud, Robbers Roost, November 2005. In 2005 we found ourselves, during the course of an extended road trip out west, spending a long Thanksgiving holiday camped out in the Robbers Roost in southern Utah. We did a lot of great, cold hiking with ropes (aka canyoneering), cooked a spectacular…
Bedrock & Paradox 
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