After flying into the Lower Ruth Gorge in early May–following a five-day wait while more than two feet of snow fell–I began to doubt my “dark horse decision” to bring along the Big Agnes Battle Mountain 2 tent. But I’ve always had a soft spot for the dark horse, the little guy, and Big Agnes is certainly a David among a field of tenting Goliaths like Mountain Hardwear, MSR, Sierra Designs, and an army of others.
After being kidnapped in Kyrgyzstan I suffered from nightmares and loads of mistrust in the world. I went to see a therapist a few times to try and rid my sleep of nightmares, but my therapy and focus on mental healing stopped there. I felt that therapy was a sign of weakness, and that I should be tougher than that.
It’s over and they know it. Conrad Anker, Jimmy Chin and Renan Ozturk are 7,000 miles from home, 20,000 feet above sea level and a mere 300 feet below the summit of Meru Central (6310m), the middle summit of Meru Peak, in India.
The past two years I’ve either been pregnant or a new mom to our 14-month-old boy, Theo. Reflecting on There and Back Again reminds me of a time where climbing and everything surrounding it was my sole focus in life.
Last summer a group of climbers navigated the chill waters of the North Atlantic to access remote big wall routes in the Uumannaq area of Greenland, Gibbs Fjord, Nanavut and Sam Ford Fjord, Baffin Island. During this trip they authored ten new long routes in alpine style. This wasn’t their maiden voyage, but a reprise of a 2010 adventure–a style of climbing the team dubbed “vertical sailing.”
A gentle breeze drifts over my bright-yellow bivi bag, tickling evergreen bows just overhead. We doze beneath magnificent trees, poised at the foot of North Maroon Peak thousands of feet above Aspen, Colorado. A pyramid of choss just beginning to shed its winter blanket of white looms over us and just now seems in condition for an alpine ascent.
This past April, Jonathan Griffith and Will Sim endured avalanches, rotten rock and tent-flattening winds to author a new route on the unclimbed northwest face on Mt. Deborah (12,339′) in the Alaska Range. Sim calls their route, Bad to the Bone, “The most spooky and unnerving thing I have ever been on.” The pair declined to grade its difficulty, and does not recommend a second ascent.
