Been awhile...

Its been an amazing few months since I last wrote.
The past month involved:
A week in Moab and Salt Lake City
New trad climbing in PA
Weekend of hard climbing in the Gunks
Getting my wisdom teeth out
Camping
Planning for Alaska

Some pics from the last few months:

The Transplant Song

Ive been a transplant too
Anyway as Im not mad at you
But I get compared to all of you
makin a thousand bucks a day
My heads all wrong to live here any longer anyway

I should have been born in North California
Northern California fifty wintertimes ago

I am moving away from the place I am from
Cause I don't like to squeeze where I dont fit in.
Its my birthright to stay but Im leaving anyway
North country take me in.

My mother is always telling me that I don't work enough.
"You don't work enough" she says, but it isnt true.
It just burns me up to think she thinks
that I don't work enough.
No one can see the kind of work I do.

Im a native in a stranger land,
there is a stranger in my box of sand.
I would gladly accept him extending my hand,
he looks at me,
he doesnt understand.

I am moving away from the place I am from
Cause I don't like to squeeze where I dont fit in.
Its my birthright to stay but Im leaving anyway
North country take me in.
North country take me in.

North country take me in.

--Transplant Song
Tim Bluhm

Backcountry in PA

For some reason, the Mid-Atlantic has had a phenomenal winter. Central PA has seen several first descents. Gary and I skinned up to our county's highpoint and skied down (approx. 600 vert).

Here is a pic of the approach

Work in progress

"Excelsior"

I spent my morning ice climbing. I felt like a medieval warrior,
weilding two razor-sharp ice axes, like twin excaliburs, and donning
stainless steel spikes on my broken-in mountaineering boots.
Feeling much like a sea urchin, I tied into my frozen climbing rope.
My breath was as visible as my misgivings in the cold January morning.
It happens every time: this feeling of "what the #$%^& am i doing
here!"

What am I doing here?
Why do I subject myself to this barbaric, dangerous, cold, wet pastime?

I climbed up about 50 feet, my ice axes skritching and scratching on
the bare rock, like nails on a chalkboard. I longed for the reassuring
"thonk" of a well placed ice tool in deep ice: safety. I continued
this delicate dance toward the sky. Perhaps I was more a dancer than
warrior, my delicate movements finely tuned so as not to shatter the
chandelier ice I was on.

In this twilight zone between control and choas, success and failure,
life and death, I find myself.

Perhaps that is why I climb rock, ice, and snow. When I climb, my mind
is emptied of everything else but the climb. There is simply no room
for distraction. I become lost in my environment of icy blues.

Climbing is a microcosm of life. There are successes and failures, and
every decision has a direct consequence, often amplified by the
immediacy of the decision.

I finally reached the top of the climb, and built an anchor: safety.
success. My urchin-esque, warrior-dancer projection of myself had made
all the right decisions in this microcosm of life. It reassured me
that I can make good, successful decisions in the macrocosm of life.

Now onto higher mountains.

Excelsior: ever upward.

Right-click and select view image for full view.

Christmas and Photoshop

I got ice tools for christmas. I played around down the road at a waterfall, took some pictures and worked some photoshop magic.

In Pennsylvania

Here is a picture taken from the live webcam at Ski Roundtop. ...Pennsylvania skiers ski in Jeans.