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Bull Lake Single Push Onsight | July 2023

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“Heyyyyy bear!” Ben slapped his paddle against the boat sitting on his shoulder. It was two in the morning and were making as much noise as possible as we walked down the trail in the dark, hoping to make any bears in the nearby vicinity aware of our presence and hopefully too intimidated by our boisterous voices to contemplate having a middle of the night snack of two very haggard kayakers. Still, our pace picked up in this theoretically bear infested section before Ben stopped suddenly and checked the downloaded map on his phone. “Shit, we’re somehow on the Continental Divide Trail, we’re gonna have to backtrack”. There wasn’t much to say at that point. We turned around and walked back through the bear den before reconnecting with the correct route that would take us over the pass and into Bull Lake Creek.  It is often hard for me to pinpoint when precisely a dream becomes a goal. The Bull Lake single push onsight was no exception, and inspiration for this mission was drawn from...
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The Mangoro - Madagascar 2022

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It is easy to connect modern Madagascar to its history. The country is an ephemeral concoction of many things, all of which appear, as an outsider, to be constantly shifting and evolving. Similarly, the island has seen Arab traders, French colonizers, Asian settlers and African immigration, despite the fact that Madagascar was one of the last places on earth to be settled by humans. The capital has an air of desperate poverty; many people live on less than a dollar a day. They move in and out of vision, selling whatever they can. The informal economy serves many more people than the established stores and restaurants, who's high prices can only be met by the Malagasy elite and us-- the visiting fahaza. Outside the cities, much of the land seems to be rejecting the best efforts of the people to create stability. The wet season obliterates many of the roads. Getting around is not easy. Madagascar is constantly near the top of the UN’s famine watch list. To say that the people are liv...
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Middle Kings Vacation

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My good friend Sam Swanson once described the high sierra season as “drinking cheesecake out of a fire house”. It’s a lot of something good. It can also be a lot to take in, but you better make sure you get as much of the cheesecake as you possibly can before the hose turns off. I returned to this metaphor from time to time as my friends and I used every second of our time off from work to chase the melt that cascades down the Sierra mountains at sporadic intervals during the spring.   Coming into this season, I was less goal oriented than I have been in previous years. My main objectives were centered around getting outside with my friends as much as possible, sleeping on my Z rest, and perfecting fire-in-pot cinnamon roles (which still eludes me). So much of the high sierra is intangible; water levels fall well outside of the domain that we can control and the added work siphon made my schedule much more rigid than is necessary for the “drop everything and go” mentality that beco...
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