Author: Emma

The Upper C and surrounding area. (Photo courtesy of BLM-Kremmling Field Office.)

Throw bags, throw up, and other things I did this summer

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It’s an uncharacteristically rainy May afternoon in Colorado, and I’m gasping for breath in the deep end of the Evergreen Rec Center pool.

What the hell am I doing here? I wonder, but I don’t have much time to rethink my life choices.

“Again!” the head boatman cries, and I do my best to hoist my slippery carcass onto the upside-down raft for what feels like the hundredth time. I wedge the t-grip of my paddle into one of the boat’s self-bailing holes, shakily rise to my feet, and flip the beast onto its back.

It is my first day of raft guide training, and right now, I’m pretty sure it will be my last.

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A post where things get heavy: On life, death, and life-and-death matters

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Until recently, I’ve spent very little of my life thinking about death. It was pleasantly abstract; a concept with which I was lucky enough to have almost no personal experience. I have four living grandparents. I can count the funerals I’ve attended on one hand.

As my interests in climbing and skiing developed from infatuation to lifestyle, though, I’ve been forced to come to grips with the harsher realities of my chosen professional and recreational pursuits.

I first realized it when I was an intern at the American Alpine Club. As I pored over old editions of Accidents in North American Mountaineering, tallying the ways in which climbers had been hurt or killed in the preceding decades, it dawned on me: Statistically speaking, if you do this long enough, you or someone you know will die.

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North to the Future! (In which I experience a quarter-life crisis, Alaska-style)

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When I first started making noises about moving to Alaska, it seemed like everyone had a Last Frontier story to tell—a cousin who’d come up to work in Denali for a summer and never left, a cruise or RV trip taken by a grandparent, a piece of Palin trivia, that sort of thing.

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Solstice celebrations, the joy of commuting(?), and other mid-winter musings

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The winter solstice marks the official start to winter, which, until I moved to Alaska, always seemed sort of extraneous to me: there had been snow on the ground for weeks, usually, and I’d long since traded in shorts and sandals for mittens and boots.

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Read These Books: A Rainy Season Reprieve

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At long last, the dreaded shoulder season is upon us. It is too wet to climb outside, too muddy to risk tearing up the singletrack, and, worst of all, not yet snowy enough to ski. In a few short weeks, Anchorage will be cross-country skiing to work and spending its weekends earning turns, but in the meantime, I am consigned to my two least favorite forms of exercise.

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