May 2011
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Conditioning for the long climb
I always get a bit of a nervous feeling as trip planning comes to an end and all that is left is the trip itself. At that point you just have to hope you did your homework and roll with it because you know that an adventure is almost sure to ensue.
Well now that I am just a few weeks out from a 4-week trip to Washington where my climbing partners and I have planned a rather hefty schedule of...
December 2010
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November 2010
1 post
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October 2010
1 post
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Staying in touch with Glaciated Terrain
As I started to look ahead towards planning upcoming climbs, Rainer & Hood this spring, I thought that it would be important to brush up and read more into glacier travel and crevasse rescue. Route finding and rescue skills are something that everyone who travels in the backcountry especially in roped climbing situations whether it is rock, ice, or snow should be familiar with, I know...
September 2010
1 post
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August 2010
1 post
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July 2010
4 posts
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Stephen Gorman:The Winter Camping Handbook
The Winter Camping Handbook is a great book to dive into winter camping, and backcountry use. In this book the author Stephen Gorman who is also a outdoor photographer goes through the process of winter backcountry travel how to prepare and how to stay safe.
He has written this book in a manner that takes you step by step through the process of winter...
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June 2010
4 posts
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May 2010
3 posts
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April 2010
7 posts
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Glenn Exum: Never a Bad Word or a Twisted Rope
This is a book of short climbing stories direct from Glenn Exum. The book starts out by giving you an insight into Exum’s life and how a potato farmer from Idaho ended up in Jackson Wyoming. The stories really highlight Exum’s fun loving personality and take you on many of his comical adventures. It also talks about how the famous Exum guides service started in Wyoming with Paul...
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Wild Country Cam book
I was searching around for information on different cams when I came across Wild Country’s Cam Book. This is an online “book” you can download and contains some of the history of the development of the Caming unit by Ray Jardine and the start of its production by Mark Vallance. Also it goes into a pretty in depth look at how cams work and more specifically how Wild Country...
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Mountaineering Safety
Earlier this week I was out with some climbing friends talking about climbs when mountaineering came up and we started to discuss safety. I was really shocked to find out from a few climbers that I had just recently met that they did not carry avalanche equipment, beacons, shovel, & probes. The points that they made had me considering the facts on this issue and if the methods of travel for...
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March 2010
7 posts
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AIARE CERT 1 RA Guides
With the hope of building up my skills to be able and become a professional backcountry ski and snowboard guide I decided that it was time to get my American Institute for Avalanche Research and Education level one certification, or AIARE I this weekend. This is one of the three required certifications needed before you can try and become certified through the American Mountain Guides...
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Banff Film Festival
I went and checked out the Banff film festival tour last week in Denver at the Paramount Theater. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this festival it is a film festival hosted by the Banff Centre, which is an art and mountain culture centre located in Banff Canada in the center of Banff National Park. This centre helps to promote the mountain culture and lifestyle through art, and...
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Climbing Life
ClimbingLife.com is a great resource for Rocky Mountain National Park and some of the surrounding areas. It is run by Eli Helmuth who is an AMGA certified Rock, Alpine, and Ski Mountaineering guide as well as an IFMGA Licensed Mountain Guide with over 20 years of professional guiding experience. To me this makes the credibility of the sites information very reliable.
ClimbingLife.com is...
February 2010
6 posts
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This book by Laurence Gonzales is not your typical mountaineering survival book. Instead of not being written entirely of the authors first hand experience on survival it is a compilation of stories involving mountaineering, sailing, fighter pilots and other activities where people find themselves in skill defying situations.
Gonzales then studies these cases from a more psychological point of...
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Powder Forecasting
Thought I would put this out there for anyone in Colorado that is not familiar with the Colorado Powder Forecast Website. It is a site run by meteorologist and backcountry enthusiast Joel Gratz. Through his website he uses his great meteorologist skills to update, usually twice a week, followers on the storms moving through the state and where you can expect the big dumps so you get there to...
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