Photo: September 2020, unknown route (5.10a/b) up the left side of 5-Point Buttress on Hallett Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado. Rebolting rappel and Search & Rescue anchors with Greg German and Jerry Nothstine.

Trad & Alpine Climbing: A List of Insights/Thoughts

• Fear of Hights vs. Fear of Falling - People who don’t climb often say they don’t want to because they’re afraid of heights. In fact, most people who think they are afraid of heights are actually afraid of falling—there’s a big difference. People who are truly afraid of heights have a panic attack when they look out the window of a plane…everyone else just has a fear of falling. But this isn’t just a semantic/pedantic distinction. The fear of falling is actually a result of not understanding (and therefore not trusting) the safety systems meant to keep you alive…thus the fear. Which means that if you’re afraid of falling, you can overcome it by working to build your understanding and trust of the safety systems (whether it’s learning to trust that your plane isn’t going to crash or that your anchor and rope system are going to catch you). In climbing, this can be accomplished though a very straightforward process designed to teach your body to trust the rope/anchor (rather than trying to intellectually convince yourself).

• What “The Mountains Teach Life Lessons” Actually Looks Like - Summary of this lesson: you must do everything you can to keep yourself out of extreme weather…but when you inevitably encounter it, embrace it as one of the most powerful teachers of life lessons. In 2020, Natasha Steinmann and I found ourselves summiting Tower One (Redgarden) in a heinous storm, lightning cracking horizontally multiple times per second no more than 100 feet over our heads. Chance of lightning was minimal in the forecast (which doesn’t mean much in Colorado), and in Eldo, you can’t see it coming most of the time.
  
  In climbing, you try to stick to low-risk, high-consequence situations but this quickly became a high-risk, high-consequence situation. We were at a very high risk of being stuck by lightning, given that we were literally standing on the tallest prominence in the vicinity, just below horizontal lightning, covered in metal climbing equipment, dripping wet, and roped together (in these conditions, a rope basically just becomes a suicide pact). To make matters worse, we had to decide between the lesser of two sketchy descents: (1) walk off the back, which meant staying on the exposed ridge without a rope and risk a potentially high-consequence slip or (2) rappelling down a sketchy chimney, which is nearly as unsafe as being on the summit because lightning ricochets through caves and chimneys, making them a horrible place to take shelter from lightning. We chose the latter, but to even further compound the problem, the extreme pressure that the weather was exerting on us astronomically increased a second risk: the risk of making a mistake on a technical 4-pitch descent down a sketchy/lose Eldo chimney in heavy rain and lightning, and without the ability to communicate (thunder and rain are loud). There are probably a dozen small mistakes that either of us could have made that would have ended in both of our deaths.
  
  I describe this because it illustrates why extreme weather can be such a powerful teacher. In a situation like this, you can either (1) lose your cool and probably die by making technical/psychological mistake or (2) force yourself to keep your cool and have a chance of surviving if the lightning decides not to kill you. There’s no third option. You don’t get the luxury of “brushing off” the situation you’re in.
  
  So we began actively using everything we’ve learned about mountain safety (which is no small feat in these conditions), including the following:

  • Narrating every single thing we were doing as we were doing it so the other person could double check (“I’m going to walk up to the anchor, now I’m going to clip in, OK I’m clipped in, now I’m going to double check my anchor, etc.)

  • Discussed all logical possibilities of descents, even if they initially seemed crazy, and quickly eliminated options sequentially until we reached the least bad option—this by default becomes the best decision.

  • Triple checking all actions that involved safety systems and transitions (e.g., each of the dozen or so steps involved in directly clipping a bolted rap anchor and going off rappel).

  • Overriding default social norms that work against climbing partners to get them killed—for example, tamping down all feelings of stupidity of repeating things 3 times, narrating the tiniest thing like when you’re taking a step to the left, etc.

  • Lots more.

  But the most important lesson (and unwelcome yet incredibly valuable opportunity to practice) was this: once we made the decision to rappel the chimney, it was imperative that we both mentally shut off the intensely strong evolutionary/emotional fear of an immanent lightning strike, and straight up pretend that the lightning wasn’t there. This step was absolutely crucial to ensuring we would be able to think clearly enough to not make a rappel mistake and stupidly kill ourselves trying to escape lightning. People often use flowery language like, “just let go of the things you can’t control” and though I recognize that it’s good advice, I’ve always felt that it’s sort of an empty and dismissive thing to say to someone. But the mountains have a way of teaching this lesson and it isn’t empty and it isn’t dismissive. The mountain basically says, “you have a choice: either be consumed by the thing you can’t control and probably die, or let go of things you can’t control and have a chance of thinking clearly enough to get yourself out of this situation.”
  
  Once I made this switch in my head, I felt a very bizarre sense of calm amid the literal storm and I was able to focus on getting down safely. Natasha had her own internal way of doing effectively the same thing. I’ve only been lucky enough to have to practice this one other time in my life, and it was the evening I had to fill out a “Do-not-resuscitate” (DNR) and basically get my affairs in order before my first major lung surgery (my lung had collapsed and was caught on my heart, requiring emergency surgery in 2007). But anyway…
  
  As I was sitting getting pelted with rain in that lightning-forsaken chimney, waiting for Natasha to take off rappel so I could rap down to her, I was able to appreciate how lucky I’ve been in life to be exposed to circumstances that so deeply engrain these important lessons. Accident science has observed that survivors somehow are able to find a sense of wonder and awe within the real-time chaos and immanently life-threatening situations. The study of accidents shows that there’s something important about this ability that separates separates survivors from those who don’t. I wasn’t trying to get myself into that psychological place (I was just trying to survive), but at that moment I realized that sense of calm I felt is what I’ve read about in books. That’s when I realized I’d probably make it.
  

• Fear in General - When rock climbing comes up in conversation, sometimes the response is a somewhat judgmental, “I’d never do that—you’d have to be crazy to do something like that.” In my opinion, this kind of response is dismissive and lazy: it represents an unwillingness to take seriously the value of certain types of experiences that you’re scared of, and it’s an effort to save face by dismissing people who do that thing as crazy. I’m also not delusional enough to believe that doing something that scares me makes me morally superior or something: I will never BASE jump, for example. But I do think it’s important to take these activities seriously enough to recognize the incredible benefits enjoyed by those who engage in them. In the case of BASE jumping, I had to recognize the benefits, then take stock of who I am as a person and how I want to spend my time. I ultimately came to the conclusion that due to my lack of self control when it comes to speed-related activities, combined with my slower cognition (meaning: I’m kind of a slow thinker), this activity is not well suited to my particular temperament and personality. So the point I’m trying to make here—the lesson that I’ve learned from climbing mountains—is that when I recognize myself dismissing some new discipline offhand, it’s pretty much always because I’m scared of what it might mean about me if I tested myself in that discipline and came up short.
  

• The Technical Learning Curve - Trad/alpine climbing have a very interesting learning curve with very specific and unique plateaus. I’d characterize these plateaus roughly in this order, and each one can last from weeks to months to years:

  • Develop an understanding the safety systems that seem very complex at first.

  • Developing basic skill proficiency with placement of protection, anchor building, and other systems (on the ground).

  • Develop enough confidence in your ability to place protection that you are emotionally comfortable falling on a single piece (this can/should be a long plateau).

  • Develop the planning skill required to read trad pitches, terrain, and belay locations (IRL and via guidebooks) to judge what you can safely climb (sticking to routes with bolted rap anchors or easy walk-offs).

  • Develop the planning skill required to read/predict the technicality and seriousness of descents to judge what you can safely climb (focusing on climbs without bolted rap anchors or easy walk-offs).

  • Building a very broad base of tons of easy (i.e., non-strenuous) climbs to incrementally build all the skills above.

  • Begin building a base of experience with complicated long alpine routes with much more experienced climbers (1000-2000 foot climbs at altitude with varied terrain, complex route finding, and serious consequences).

  • This is about where I’m at, so I don’t know what the future plateaus are yet.

• Relevance to Leadership & the Professional World - More serious forms of climbing like trad/alpine are one of the most powerful tools the leader of an organization/company can use to become a great leader (gym climbing and sport climbing won’t really do it). I tend to think jazz improve, philosophy, and martial arts are also very powerful tools to develop these skills, but even they don’t hold a candle to serious climbing.

Photo: Though I know it’s an extremely common practice, it still feels disrespectful to me to post the photo I took with the first deer I killed (harvested, as they say). So this is the shell of the shotgun slug I shot it with. This picture was taken in the 30 minutes after I took the shot while I was waiting before tracking the deer.

Hunting: A List of Insights/Thoughts

• Purpose - People hunt for different reasons. I wanted to learn to hunt for ethical, environmental, and nutritional reasons. This is something I could literally write a book on, but I find this to be the way of eating with the fewest ethical & intellectual contradictions or cognitive dissonance. It also tastes the best and is the most nutritious if you define “nutritious” in terms of nutrient density of food. but I’ll spare you the proselytization. My goal was for the vast majority of meat/fish we eat on a regular basis at home to be self-caught or self-hunted or sourced from local regenerative farms. Between the 80+ lbs of salmon, halibut, and rockfish we catch in Alaska with my sister, the deer I hunted, and the regeneratively raised beef and pork we get from Parker Pastures in Colorado, we achieved this in goal in 2021, and I intend to keep it that way.

• Skill Development - I had no idea how incredibly technical hunting actually is, especially if you actually want to shoot an animal. For most hunters, particularly in the Colorado Rockies, “hunting” is actually just a term people use to describe hiking miles and miles at high altitude with a rifle on your back (punctuated with a single instance of extreme excitement if you’re skilled and lucky enough). The skills I either didn’t know existed, or underestimated the level of commitment to learn include: safely handling firearms (esp. relearning how to handle physical objects), long range rifle marksmanship, medium range shotgun marksmanship with iron sights, learning animal behavior across landscape and season, reading the wind and thermal patterns relative to time of day and weather, reading animal signs, tracking animals based on the previous 3 skills, optimizing gear for the type of hunt (e.g., midwest stand hunting vs. high altitude elk hunting in Colorado), field dressing an ungulate, planning a hunt, learning how to assess Game Management Units to apply for tags (an incredible feat of complex analysis), and so on.

• Experiencing wilderness differently - I’m lucky to have developed a relatively broad base of wilderness expertise: skiing, trad rock climbing/alpine climbing, minimalist backpacking, fishing, etc. Each of these comes with a required set of auxiliary skills that keep you from dying and which allow you to more deeply enjoy the wilderness, including: wilderness navigation, reading and predicting weather patterns, assessing and controlling for objective risks (avalanche, rock fall, water crossings, wildfire, etc.), basic first aid (though more advanced wilderness first aid is on the list), self rescue, flora and fauna identification, and so on. But to my surprise, hunting led me to experience the outdoors in yet another way, which almost felt as if I had never spent time in the wilderness—not in the sense of lacking skills, but in the sense of having an entirely new world if wilderness awareness open up to me. There are two things that particularly stuck out:

  • Animal behavior: When you learn to read animal signs, the wilderness looks completely different. There’s something about being able to track an animal that is deeply engrained in the human brain. There’s a bizarre sensation of being able to feel the size and movement of the animal you’re tracking. The area in which you’re tracking comes alive and you can literally feel the weight, size, and shape of the animal as if a weighty holographic (but invisible) representation of the animal is there with you while you’re reading its signs. This means that with tracking skills, wild place that used to “only” look like a beautiful forest (an incredibly important experience for the human spirit) comes alive with a physical sense (the best I can describe it) of the animals that also inhabit the area you’re in.

  • Reading the wind: Another thing was was completely not expecting. I’m used to reading the weather and predicting what it’s going to do in 15, 30, 60 minutes (or over a couple of days) because when climbing or doing more intense backcountry backpacking, your life can sometimes depend on it. But reading the wind and weather for hunting is a completely new dimension. Animals can catch your scent if you’re positioned up wind of them, and while weather and wind patterns are extremely complex and difficult to predict, they are possible to predict with relative (but not perfect) accuracy. For example, overnight and in the morning in the mountains, you typically get downhill thermals. As the sun begins to warm the land mid morning and into the afternoon, the hot air rises and you tend to get uphill thermals…and as the sun sets, the opposite happens and you tend to get downhill thermals again. But you also get to macro/climate effects of the sun warming the earth as it rotates, which in part causes macro wind patterns…then there’s the shape of the landscape, that influences wind as well (e.g., saddles between mountains and mountain passes tend to act as wind tunnels and changes the thermal patterns on either side of the pass/saddle.) If there’s snow on the ground, that’s also going to change how quickly/not the sun heats the air, and it can be helpful to know that the north aspect of most mountains/hills tends to hold snow/ice much longer than the south aspects of mountains due to sun exposure. But depending the angle of the sun (which gradually changes with the seasons), the speed at which snow/ice is melted changes with the angle of the sun…and of of this also effects the winds. Not to mention, every square mile of landscape is completely different, and is bordered by completely different topography as well…so it’s quite a skill to develop! Being able to read invisible winds, like the invisible animals I mentioned in the “animal behavior” section above, makes the landscape feel alive in a way that just adds to the depth of beauty and appreciation you’re able to experience in the wilderness…even when you’re not actively hunting.

Photo: Tricia on the downhill on Green Mountain on the west side of Rocky Mountain National Park…in lots of powder!

Backountry Ski Touring: A List of Insights/Thoughts

• Fast vs Slow Decision-Making - Though I grew up skiing, I purposefully didn’t ski for the last 11 years that I’ve lived in Colorado. At first, it was because I was a teacher making $43k per year and I basically had to choose between climbing and skiing, so the choice was obvious. But the other more important reason I refrained was because something I’ve learned about myself as I’ve earned more experience: I tend to get injured (seriously) when doing speed sports. In general, I use principles ot make decisions—this is pretty clearly the most effective way to make consistently good decisions across pretty much all areas of life. This is especially true when you need to make a large volume of decisions over time that you want to be consistent in some way. But when I’m forced into situations where I have to make a high volume of decisions very quickly, I tend to make judgement errors. For example, if I’m speeding down a mountain at 40 mph, the principle I naturally fall back on is “what will be the most fun and still be safe?”…but the reality is that a principle that causes you to weight two different considerations against each other is not an effective principle for rapid decision making. If the ski run is, let’s say, a mile long, I’m probably needing to make probably upwards of 500 decisions in the roughly 3.5 minutes it takes to ski a mile (left to miss that tree, next turn needs to be a super narrow heel turn but the following two should be wider edge turns with my knees, go left/right/left to avoid that cliff, readjust the pole in my left hand because the wrist strap flapping in the wind is distracting, don’t slow down here but slow down there, etc.). And when trying to use a principle that balances two concepts (fun and safety), I have a very strong tendency to intuitively favor fun over safety in the majority of those snap decisions. This has led to serious injuries. I’ve tried favoring safety over fun in the context of high volume/rapid decision making, but I basically just get bored. Incidentally, this dynamic is probably why I’ve gravitated much more towards climbing over the past 15 years: there are TONS of decisions you have to make while climbing, but for the most part, you can stop and think through each decision if you need to…or at the very least you can control the speed at which you’re forced to make decisions. In climbing, every single move requires you to decide if you’re going to make the move. But in skiing (and all other speed sports, like longboarding, sky diving, etc.), once you start moving, you’re committed and gravity determines how quickly you need to make decisions.

• Gear - Thanks to my friends Natasha Steinmann, Emily Olsen, and David at Larry’s Bootfitters in Boulder for spending what was probably an annoying amount of time answering questions about gear and gear preferences over the course of my initial month-long-ish learning curve. I ended up mounting Atomic Backland bindings on Faction Agent 2 skis with the Dynafit Radical Pro boot, custom fit at Larry’s. The Atomic Backland are tech bindings with a super simple construction (less complexity = more reliability) and super burly build while still being pretty lightweight as far as tech bindings go. The Faction Agent 2s are 96 underfoot with a rocker/camber/rocker profile and extra thick edges, which makes them feel like they have a smaller turn radius than they do on paper (i.e., they’re super responsive despite having a turn radius of 18m on paper). The Dynafit Radical Pros have the AMAZING Hoji lock system, which automatically loosens the power strap and top buckle when you transition the boot to walk mode.

• Reading the World - There are many skills that must be developed with backcountry skiing that overlap with other backcountry activities like climbing or hunting…but there are a ton more that are new. Some of these are included below:

  • Predicting snow conditions: When heading up to the mountains, you want to give yourself the best chance possible at having great snow conditions. But by definition, backcountry areas generally don’t have people monitoring and reporting on conditions for skiers like resorts do. So in order to try to predict conditions a day or two before heading out, I’ve started doing a combination of: (1) looking at historical snow accumulation, temperatures, sunny vs overcast, etc. for the past few days to a week on Open Snow, (2) reading condition reports from the land management agency of the few places I might be trying to decide between, (3) looking at recent reviews of the area on AllTrails to see what snowshoers/spike hikers have said, (4) reading the avalanche report for both risk and snow loading analysis, (5) using a topo, my knowledge of weather patterns, and satellite imagery to check if a slope is wooded or exposed in an area to guess how snow conditions have likely been affected by the weather since last snow.

  • Predicting how extreme real-time conditions will be: This is largely just looking at Open Summit wind, temp, and precip predictions to try to gauge how hardcore vs bluebird conditions are likely to be on a given day.

  • Avelanche Safety: This is an area where I have some skill, but not nearly enough to venture into terrain where there’s even a possibility of avalanche on the day. This means my primary risk mitigation strategy is, “Don’t go where even a slight chance of risk.” I plan to take my AIARE 1 sometime next season.