I've been struggling all week to write something useful about the death of extreme skier and Exum guide Doug Coombs above La Grave, France. For once, I'm speechless. Instead, two links:
1. A beautiful video shot last June during Coombs and Doug Workman's ski (and rappel) descent of the Otterbody Couloir on the Grand Teton.
2. A way to contribute: The Doug Coombs Memorial Fund.
Thursday, April 06, 2006
Coombs
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
Scottish Lunacy
Raise a glass to Stephen Perry, who just completed a 121-day effort to bag all 284 of the Scottish Munros in winter conditions, without any motorized assistance other than ferry rides. What's a Munro? It's any peak in the Scottish Highlands higher than 3,000 feet. What's so hard about climbing a 3,000-foot peak? This is Scotland. The weather is just plain awful in winter (it's pretty bad in summer too). Perry's online log of the journey gives a sense of the difficulties, from beginning to end:
"Day 1, Thursday 1 December. Starting on Mull, climbed Ben More from the south side in winds gusting up to 86mph, then walked some 17 miles to Craignure at speed in order to catch the ferry to Oban and stayed overnight at the youth hostel."
"Day 121, Friday March 31. Walked to the foot of Ben Hope, then climbed the final Munro of a long and arduous trip. The weather was suitably Scottish—absolute blizzard conditions."
Perry stayed at a few inns and bothies (simple stone huts), but most nights he camped out. He walked around 1,500 miles. What a nut. I love this guy!
Sunday, April 02, 2006
April Fools
Some pretty good April Fools posts emerged all over the Web on Saturday. In my quick survey of outdoor and travel sites, nothing else came close to the flurry of fake stories on Gadling.com. Two of my favorites:
Palin to Explore Inside of Cruise's Head
Monty Python alum Michael Palin and a BBC documentary crew will embark later this Spring on a 21 day expedition through the folds and recesses of actor Tom Cruise’s brain. Hot off the success of travelogues which have taken Palin Pole to Pole and Around the World in 80 Days, the British actor has made a career of journeying to locations so remote that many people don’t believe they even exist. The trek through Cruise’s brain will continue this exciting trend....
Nepalese Plan Everescalator
The Nepalese government wants to make it easier, much easier, for people to climb towering Mount Everest. Turns out they are planning to build a working, electric escalator that will carry people from base camp to the summit in less than an hour. The engineering effort is being put in the hands of the Japanese, in a serious political snub to the Chinese who had also bid on the project. The proposed escalator will be approximately fifteen miles long and will rise and fall with the jagged gradations of the mountain. It will move approximately five miles an hour and will offer superb views of the surrounding Himalayas....
Friday, March 31, 2006
Ranger Mike's Rainier Blog
When I cited Mike Gauthier's Rainier climbing numbers yesterday, I also should have mentioned his new Mount Rainier Climbing blog. Gauthier, the supervisory climbing ranger and guidebook author on the mountain, is packing his pages with route conditions, accident reports, NPS updates, permit info and some good photos like this one borrowed from his blog. Very useful reading if you're planning a trip to the mountain. Want to see more photos? Check out Gauthier's old site Crevasse.com for some spectacular images from Rainier.
Thursday, March 30, 2006
Keep Climbing Weird
There's a bumper sticker I see around here that says, "Keep Boulder Weird." It's a lament for the good old days when Boulder was something of a hippie town (or at least trustafarian), and not the overcrowded, upscale "Best Place to Live in America" it has become. Old-time climbers have the same lament, pining for the tribal days when everyone in Camp 4 seemed to know each other, gear was cheap (and you didn't use that much of it anyway), and the rare mainstream advertisement that featured climbing was regarded as a source of wonder and amusement.
Well, guess what? Climbing may soon be a fringe sport again. At least in mountaineering, participation numbers are plunging. There's a recently revived thread on the subject at cascadeclimbers.com, from which I stole these numbers provided by Ranger Mike Gauthier. These are registration totals for Mt. Rainier, the premier glaciated mountain in the Lower 48:
Year: 2000= 13,114
Year: 2001= 11,874
Year: 2002= 11,313
Year: 2003= 9,897
Year: 2004= 9,251
Year: 2005= 8,972 
That's more than a 30 percent decline in six years. With the notable exception of Denali, numbers at other U.S. mountaineering destinations also are falling, as are backcountry reservations of all kinds at national parks across the country. What gives? It sure seems like the gyms and sport crags are more crowded than ever, to say nothing of bouldering areas. Backcountry skiing is booming. Is mountaineering just too hard and slow-paced for the average outdoorsy American? Did the recession knock the wind out of the mountaineering market? (If so, then why are Rainier's numbers still falling?) Are kids playing the Everest video game to train for the Big One instead of climbing real mountains? I dunno. But at this rate, climbing (or at least mountaineering) soon will be weird again.
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Mountain, Ahem, Folk Art
Parental Advisory: Don't scroll to the next screen if you don't want to see a bizarre depiction of human behavior. Last weekend, my wife and I skied up to Charlotte Fox's beautiful cabin on the flanks of Chair Mountain, above McClure Pass in Colorado. It's over seven miles in, but the snow was fast. In the morning, Charlotte and I climbed about 1,300 feet for one run—good snow in the trees, but the open bowls had been wind- and sun-blasted over the past week. I fell down. A lot.
The land around Charlotte's cabin, at 9,900 feet, was used by Basque shepherds during the mid-20th century, and these lonely souls carved amazing signatures and illustrations into the big aspen trees in the area. Now, this web site does not condone tree carving, nor stereotypes of shepherds (Basque or otherwise), but we have to hand it to Gerardo Lopez, who apparently tended flocks of sheep on these hillsides during the 1930s. The guy's arbor-glyphs are quite impressive, and it's amazing to see how well-preserved his, ahem, "work" remains after more than 70 years.
Thursday, March 23, 2006
Skiing 52 Weeks Straight
You wouldn't know it this week, with snow every day in town and much more in the mountains, but spring (real spring—not the calendar version) is on the way. So now, with spring skiing in mind, a tip of the hat to Boulder's Andy Moore, who last year managed to ski 52 weeks in a row, ending in September—a streak that seems even more impressive (or nuts) than Mike Scherer's 246-month-in-a-row streak (as of this month). Andy posted a wonderful trip report, jammed with photos, on telemarktips.com, from which I borrowed his photo of skiing the north side of 14,267-foot Torreys Peak in late June. Reading through Andy's report is like flipping the pages of a perverse Colorado calendar, where the skiing gets worse and worse as the year goes on, yet is strangely inspirational at the same time. Definitely gets me jonesing for a litle spring action!
Speaking of inspiration, Chris Davenport's bid to ski the Colorado fourteeners in a single snow season has stalled at 10 peaks (out of 54), but big March dumps in the southern Colorado mountains may breathe new life into the project. I hope he keeps going, even if there's little hope of skiing every peak from its summit before the snow all disappears. His trip reports and photos make superb reading.
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Maestri Unrepentant
There's a fiery interview with Cesare Maestri in the April issue of National Geographic Adventure. Maestri, you recall, was the Italian who claimed the first ascent of Cerro Torre in Patagonia, not once but twice: in 1959 via the northern side and in 1970 by the southeast ridge. The 1959 ascent has long been disputed, and late last year a team of climbers completed the "Maestri route" on Cerro Torre's north side and found no evidence of his attempt above a gear cache only a quarter of the way up the route. Maestri is unrepentant. In the Adventure interview, French climber and journalist Charlie Buffet asks him, "How do you explain the controversy surrounding 1959?" Maestri says, "It is created by all those sons of bitches.... In my life, in my whole life, I never told a lie. Everyone knows I am sincere, I am loyal, I never tried to destroy someone in order to make headlines. I made headlines because I was the strongest solo climber in the world."
Many Italians still support Maestri, and I've talked to very accomplished American alpinists who say journalists and historians ought to leave the 76-year-old climber alone, to let him die in peace. In this interview, the Italian complains, "I am tired, I have had it up to here, and I am fed up. They ruined my life." But to ignore Maestri while he still lives, to give up any chance of a first-hand explanation for what happened on that granite needle in 1959, is an insult to history. The great controversies of mountaineering are surely less important to understand than the tides of war, the progress of science and destruction of the environment, but the truth still matters.
You have to buy the magazine to read the interview, but there's a good story about the controversy and fantastic photos from the November climb at Adventure's web site.
Monday, March 20, 2006
Well-Traveled Camera
Over the holidays, I drove away from Frankenstein Cliff in New Hampshire with my digital camera on the roof of my car. It didn't stay there long. By the time I got back to my motel, I realized what had happened. I dropped off my wife, drove back to Frankenstein, and carefully searched the parking lot by headlight and headlamp. The next morning, we returned to the cliff and looked all along the road for a couple of miles. No camera.
I posted notices on the lost and found sections of NEClimbs.com and NEIce.com that day. I also stopped in at the EMS and IME shops in North Conway to ask about the camera. No luck. Back in Colorado, I wrote off the lost camera and bought a new one. Then, a month or so later, I heard from a climber named Jesse Billmeier who had found my camera. He actually had dropped it off at IME the day I lost it, but an unhelpful counter person there hadn't directed me to the right place in the shop. Jesse waited a week or two, asked if anyone had claimed the camera, and then took it for himself. Booty! But, luckily for me, he happened to look at one of those web sites where I'd posted my notice, and, luckily for me, Jesse is an honest guy and he gave me a call. Well, to cut a long story short, Jesse took the camera back home to Alaska and then shipped it to me. After traveling more than 5,000 miles, it arrived in perfect working order. I sent him a reward and my heartfelt thanks. Moral of the story: Those lost and found notices actually work. And maybe ask twice at the store.
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