Tag: Alaska

Back in the Saddle: My Triumphant Return to Mediocrity

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Days later, all this peeled off and my toe looks pretty normal now. Isn't it so gross?!
Days later, all this peeled off and my toe looks pretty normal now. Isn’t it so gross?!

When given a choice between sleeping in and being repeatedly hit in the face with ice, normal people would choose the former every time. Due to some kind of malfunction in my brain, I am drawn to the latter option, and when someone asks if I’d like to get up at the crack of dawn and endure hours of falling ice and freezing temperatures, I reply that I’ll be there with bells on. I guess my synapses aren’t firing quite as they should be.

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Frostbite: Putting the “F” in NFA.

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Sheep Mountain Airport is NFA when it comes to cold temperatures. This screenshot of tonight's weather absolutely does not do justice to how damn cold it was out there.
The Interior is NFA when it comes to cold temperatures. This screenshot of tonight’s weather absolutely does not do justice to how damn cold it was out there.

For the better part of my childhood (and by childhood, I mean age five or so to the present day), anytime I was cold for more than about an hour, I absolutely insisted I was being frostbitten. Despite my tendency toward melodrama, I have always enjoyed cold weather activities, even the ones I suspected might result in frostbite.

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“The mountains are calling and I must go.” John Muir

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Once I recovered from my professional-grade hangover, my January was off to an excellent (second) start. APU offers month-long block classes in January and May, which means students have an entire month to get credit for doing awesome stuff. Case in point: this month, I’m taking Winter Wilderness Skills, in which I get my Level 1 avalanche certification and ski and camp for an elective credit. Needless to say, I am pumped.

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Bah, Humbug! (And other Yuletide musings)

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I have spent the better part of the last month or so in a bit of a funk. A number of factors could have contributed to this: the overwhelming nature of finishing my first semester of grad school, the inherent homesickness that comes with living 3,500 miles from my family and friends, the fact that my neck of the woods gets just under seven hours of daylight this time of year, the list goes on.

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Fact: It doesn’t have to be fun to be fun.

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Whenever I find myself in a sticky or otherwise unpleasant situation, I draw upon the wisdom of Mark Twight, a prolific alpinist and writer who initially rose to fame after his first ascent of “The Reality Bath,” a since-unrepeated ice climb in the Canadian Rockies described by one guidebook author as “so dangerous as to be of little value except to those suicidally inclined.” So, this guy is not fucking around. There are lots of little Twightisms, and when the going gets rough, I use them to remind myself that nothing worth doing comes without a little (or, as the case may be, a lot of) suffering.

Continue reading “Fact: It doesn’t have to be fun to be fun.” →