Adventures in Onionism

Again, didn't sleep well, but had a great day. Maybe I'm inflating the Thermarest too much? It feels better slightly under inflated, but it's definitely not wide enough. We started the day with an out and back to Mott Lake. It was only a couple miles each way, and definitely worth it.  When we got back to camp it still wasn't very warm, so we packed up and headed out. We started ascending Mono Creek and finally hit running water in the sun around 11 so we stopped there and cooked hot food on a lovely beach by the creek.  Starbucks Via, and most other instant coffee tastes like metal and is awful--that was the only downside. Laird Hamilton has some coffee+coconut creamer+mushroom powder ("adaptogens" which are all the rage but quite obviously snake oil). I had one of those yesterday and that tasted halfway decent, but I only brought one because they're annoyingly expensive. I think the thing to do would be to grind my own beans at home, put a scoop in a pap...

Not the best night sleep last night, NeoAir XLite just isn't wide enough for this tossing and turning side sleeper. However, had a nice morning. Got up and walked without breakfast until the sun was actually shining on us and we were near water. That happened to be in a gorgeous basin, so it worked out. One of the peaks looking over us looked like a wave in a rip curl, and Margo behaved herself while I cooked food, so worked out well.  We went over McGee Pass, and when we were out of the wind, I counted up the mileage and looked for another way over the Silver Divide so that I wouldn't have to use the JMT for so long, but all the passes (Shout of Relief, Bighorn, Warrior Ridge) mention talus, which I'm not sure Margo could handle. So the PCT it is. Also decided against a few extra miles of a simple loo down Cascade Valley on Fish Creek Trail and Minnow Creek Trail. Actual fatigue wasn't setting in yet, but decision fatigue was. Took the PCT/JMT south over Silver Pass, a...

Normally about now I'd be pulling up at the Tahoe National Forest campground and falling asleep in the back of my car before Euchre Bar Massacre, but I just wasn't ready for it. Since UTMB and non-UTMR I've had too little  motivation, and too many work trips and house projects. Once I got back to Reno from DC, I was too tired to go to SoCal with Amy and George last weekend, so I waited a week and planned a backpacking trip with Margo. I didn't leave Reno until noon and still tried to pick up a few things on my way south, and traffic was bad, so I didn't start until around 6pm.  It's 8pm now, completely dark, and I have no intention of cooking tonight. My gear isn't dialed and that bothers me--pack seems too small, sleeping quilt too big, bummed a lighter off someone at the trailhead, I don't really like the tarp I brought, Margo won't stop licking my face, and her new dog bivy arrived literally minutes before I left this morning but she's being w...

Here's my delayed report on UTMB. I finished UTMB this morning in 39 and a half hours. I feel OK but not ecstatic about that. [ My splits are here ] The race is a zoo at the start. There were literally no starting corrals, which seems like a massive oversight for a race of 2,500 or 3,000 people. There were a couple signs for people hoping to finish under 35 and under 30 hours, but I think there was no enforcement nor even encouragement to pay attention to these, and not nearly enough room for these people. Family and friends were not kept out of the starting area in any manner. The only chute was after the start, which means runners pass through quite a scream tunnel the entire way through town, and up into the first mountains.   The zoo start Zoo aid station Maybe all the way through the first neighboring town of Les Houches up and over Prarion, and down into St. Gervais, the cheering crowd was nuts. Certain stretches felt like the Tour de France. How long could this go on? (The ...

With the race basically cancelled, I took advantage of the gorgeous weather Friday and ran the ~30 miles from Grächen to Zermatt. I ran into several other runners from the race out doing their own thing. I stayed high along the Tour Monte Rosa/Europaweg, and it was gorgeous. A bunch of the trail is blasted into cliffs or requires stairs, bridges, or ropes. The valley itself was incredible, and that's without even considering the Matterhorn, which is so amazing it's hard to believe it's real.  Took the train and bus from Zermatt back up to Grächen and collapsed in bed after an excellent, exhausting day. The race director had organized a 50K for Saturday starting at 4AM. I saw most of the high parts of it on my own on Friday, and the other parts were running along gravel paths along the valley floor, so I had no interest in the race. Instead I enjoyed a leisurely morning coffee and pastries, and then headed around the corner into the Saas Valley. The only road to the valley i...

UTMR was supposed to be 170km and start at 4AM Thursday. Then the weather at the pass and glacier crossing to Italy (Theodul Pass) was forecast to be too bad, so the race was delayed to Friday at 6:30AM (then 4AM) and rerouted to just be in the Zermatt and Saas valleys, and 132km. Just now, we've been told the Saas valley is cut off completely. The race is not starting Friday. It *might* start Saturday.  My flight home is Monday morning from Geneva. The weather is supposed to be good Friday and Saturday, bad again Sunday. A few of us in the race group accommodations might do the Zermatt out and back tomorrow (Friday).  What to do? This sucks. I'm glad I'm not a high elevation mountain climber--waiting out storms is a bitch.

I ran UTMB. It was fine. I'll write a report later. Afterwards, I cleaned up, cheered the final finishers, shouting "dae-han-min-guk" (대한민국) at the South Koreans, and got a veggie burger with Jan. I took a train to Vallorcine and then Martigny, Switzerland and stayed in a crappy hotel near the art museum. The next day I didn't go to the art museum because I don't really care for the impressionists or antique automobiles. I also didn't go to the St. Bernard dog breed museum because even though I love dogs, I don't particularly care for purebreds (even if St. Bernards seem pretty cool as far as breeds go). I sat at a cafe, but unfortunately outside is where everyone smokes rather than enjoying fresh air, so that's weird. I got a McVeggie at McDonald's because McDonald's piloted their US veggie burger in *Texas* and, surprise, it didn't do so well. It was decent as a crispy chicken sandwich substitute, but like all McDonald's sandwiches, i...

I slept for another 17 hours with a little break for breakfast and a shower, and now Lucas' mom Jan and I are on the train to Cham from Les Houches. I need to turn in my drop bag and then line up, and that's it. Hopefully this 6pm start will go better than my first two (Grindstone and Standhope). I think sleeping until 1 pm is my best hope. Yesterday I checked in, was given my empty drop bag, bought some ultralight waterproof over mitts and extra water capacity to try and lighten my pack and meet the extra "heat kit" requirements.  (There are numerous specific gear requirements. I didn't game/optimize as much as I should have. Panty hose and surgical gloves as tights and waterproof gloves, etc. More on that in a future post, perhaps.) Anyway nothing much to report yet, just trying to stay out of the sun until the 6pm start.

I'm in Les Houches, France, getting ready to run the UTMB 100-Miler (actually 106). I took a red-eye Sunday night from Reno to Denver to DC. Then Tuesday I took a red-eye from DC to Geneva. Scott Jurek was in business class on my flight, and the lady I say next to was a runner's mom headed to crew him. I took trains from Geneva airport to Geneva downtown to St Gervais Les Bains La Fayet to Les Houches, all with under five minutes to spare for transfers (man, Europe is so civilized). I couldn't check in yet, so I headed up to Chamonix, which is quite a zoo this week, and watched TDS runners finish, and scoped out where I would need to go for check-in, but also was so exhausted that I collapsed and napped in the grass for a bit.  Finally I checked into my room and went to bed around 5pm. I woke up multiple times, but thankfully I slept mostly well FOR 16-17 HOURS!  Snuck in under the wire for breakfast, and now I'm headed to check in. It's hot this weekend, so the ext...

 Did I go to Alaska? Man, that feels like forever ago. As soon as I got back, I got to work on the house in Reno that Amy and I bought. We closed before Alaska but the sellers needed a short rentback. As soon as we saw the house empty I realized there was a bunch of work to do. We painted the whole interior, we had an electrician put GFIs on every circuit and improve wiring, had HVAC people do their thing, and then of course after we painted and moved into the new place and spent too much time cleaning the rental we were moving out of, the electrician did more work requiring drywall repair and repainting. At least we know the paint color--Swiss Coffee!  The most stressful thing was installing a new exterior front door. God, so stressful. I would trade a lot of stats knowledge for just a little carpentry skills. The new door closes well and is plumb and level and square and true, but I put pressure treated lumber under it instead of a PVC sill, and the latch side reveal is a li...

Coastal Mountains from the flight to Seattle Huh. Well, I'm on a plane to Seattle looking down on some spectacular Yukon and SE Alaskan glaciers. Now *those* are mountains! (I kid, I kid, all mountains are glorious in the sight of (non-existent) God.) But seriously, how on Earth do you do any sort of human-powered travel down there? Anyway, my first trip to the Brooks is over. I carried as much food as I could fit in two bear cans (well, one Ursack and one can) and I pretty much ate it all, so I'm going home.  I woke up, walked the 4 miles of ATV track and gravel road to the village. Walking by the village dump was a bit of a downer, but I checked in with Amy about hopping on a Wright Air flight home, and then had a nice chat with Ranger Al about the park, the village, federal employment, etc. He's a wealth of knowledge, having been a seasonal NPS employee (the only one in Anaktuvuk Pass) for 18 years. He answered all the questions I posed in my previous post--basically yes...

Oof. Got an enjoyable late start and descended Confusion Creek. I decided I wanted to try and make the loop a tiny bit longer and get a bit more of the "there's nothing left to the north but the Arctic" views, so I climbed up on a ridge. It was a nice moment, except marred by the fact that I was at least a mile away from where I thought I was (my guess before I turned on GPS). I was well further north, off the good base layer maps that I downloaded, and outside of Gates of the Arctic National Park. Not problem, really, even a bit neat. Except these unforced errors became a bit of a pattern. I descended back to Confusion Creek and climbed up a ridge to get to Skimo Creek. It was a dry creek bed full of dry rocks, which felt rare and interesting, since every single drainage on the trip, and plenty of non-drainages too, have been full of water. Eventually some running water surfaced in the creek, then went back under, and I stepped on a large flat boulder and thought "o...

Got a nice long restful sleep. But I was bummed to realize when packing up that I really truly have only three days of food left, and the store, which isn't too great to resupply from anyway, is closed today (Sunday). Guess I'm finishing midday Tuesday! I set out on my solo loop up Contact Creek and down Confusion Creek. I checked in with Amy one last time (the Starlink connection was still open) and asked her to move up my Wright Air Services flight back to Fairbanks so that I (a) won't be starving and bored and (b) so that I won't smell awful on my Thursday afternoon flight from Fairbanks to Reno. I saw some folks headed towards the ranger station and started up a conversation, turns out they were the researchers we saw yesterday, and they were doing bird counting. I tried to ID the most common bird I've heard so far by its call, his best guess was tree swallow (ironic because there are no trees here). I finally got moving and headed out of town up Contact Creek. ...

Perfect time to start a hike Very cold, though Hit by the sun at 2:46AM Done with the loop around 5AM Off goes Nano Woke up at 11:30 PM and starting hiking under the midnight sun. Unfortunately the sun was behind a mountain until 2:30 AM even if it was technically above the horizon and plenty light out. Also, it was very cold. The first few creek crossings were painful, and we avoided crossing the main river nearly at all cost. Eventually after an hour or two it became not-the-worst, but still pretty annoying, and after maybe three hours, immediately after an obnoxiously deep and unsurpassable duck pond that we had to go around, we found the ATV trail we were pretty sure would exist closer to the village. We walked 5 miles of that, sometimes awful and boggy, sometimes halfway decent, and the village was in view. We saw a few researchers outside the village (found out later they were doing a bird count for NPS) and strolled across the airstrip in town a few minutes after 5 AM. Anaktuvuk...

Big day. We woke up below the pass and as usual, walked by plenty of nice dry camping spots further along the way. We descended the drainage and joined the Tinayguk River, which we'd heard might be big and powerful. It wasn't really an issue since we were so close to eh headwaters, but we had to follow it 10+ miles and pass lots of feeders. It didn't really have much of a gravel bar to it, and the rocks were slippery as snot, so I didn't like crossing it. We stayed on the left side for a while, first on a bench, then on good moose trail. We eventually switched over to river right, climbed onto a ledge and just shwacked and shwacked and shwacked. Sometimes the game trails were good, sometimes they weren't.  So after maybe 12 miles of mostly shwacking, we crossed over into our next drainage and climbed up to the pass above Inukpasagruk Creek. I underestimated how long it would take, but it was far less crappy rock than many other climbs. A nice frozen lake greeted us ...

Two-Pass Day, starting with Peregrine Loving the views at the top These flowers indicate good, non-boggy, walking Kicking steps up Horseshit Pass Happy to be at the top Has it really only been a week out here? It feels like at least a month. Been great not being glued to my phone (except for photos, looking at the map, and doing these nightly updates). I thought of this big thing of national importance happening in November for the first time of the trip today.  Anywho, we left our surrounded-by-bogs spot and were pretty much immediately on more solid ground. We climbed up and up the North Fork of the Koyukuk and then straight up to Peregrine Pass, or rather, just south of it on the map, the place that actually makes sense to cross. The views were spectacular, and the descent was a ton of fun, just a nice slightly slippery field of small pieces of slate, I even ran a bit of it. We had been thinking about going separate ways back to Anaktuvuk Pass (one over Ernie's Pass and back the...

We skirted a lot of creek edges like this But it didn't always go, somtimes you just had to climb up up up to get out We popped out into this wonderland River ice is good walking, way nicer than unconsolidated slope snow Woke up late after a night spent coughing nonstop. We descended Alinement Creek, which wasn't so bad. The crossings weren't super deep, maybe a fast one or two, and we could often skirt the edge of the side we were already on to avoid crossing. Eventually we climbed up across a hill connecting it to our next drainage, the North Fork Koyukuk. We stopped for lunch, but Nano has to get water so he descended to the Koyukuk and I stayed on a bluff enjoying the views of big mountains, possibly Wien Mountain and Mount Doonerak. And then there were three wolf puppies playing with each other maybe thirty yards away from me. I go a good look at them through the monocular. So cute. Unfortunately in my attempt to get Nano's attention I scared them away, so I didn...