Here are a few videos to get you through the holiday! Geshido, Mac
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Geshido, Mac Peter Croft is personally a favorite author of mine, along with Doug Robinson. His true personality is always found in his writing, which really brings it to life. Here's part 4 of the short essay series. Geshido, Mac More than a Mountain Peter Croft Peter Croft on an attempt to make the Palisades Traverse (VI 5.9, ca. 160 pitches; FCA: Adams-Fischer, 1979) in the 1990s. In Alpinist 20, Croft explained how he became drawn to long enchainments in the Palisades and other parts of the Sierra, "Big traverses on its ridges would form the perfect lodestar, defined by their most mind-expanding element: the first summit is just the beginning.... [Y]ears of nervous alpine starts, high traverses and shining mountain walls have revealed less than half of what the range has to offer." He continues to climb vast linkups there today. [Photo] Andy Selters I was 500 feet from the top of Dark Star when the rain settled in for good. A dizzying vortex of mists sucked through a small notch below, cutting me off from the dark walls and the gloomy gulf. The overhanging crack I was climbing was mostly dry so far, but I knew water rivulets were already guttering down from the arete toward my hand and finger jams. Thunder shook the bedrock itself, and my rucksack—overloaded with a gallon of water and a loafs' worth of peanut-butter sandwiches—tugged me over backwards every time I looked up. I was miserable, my chalk bag a sad sack of white paste. Just shy of completing the longest technical climb in the High Sierra, I should have been pleased, or jacked up—or something. After all, barring earthquakes or lightning bolts, I'd likely beat the worst of the storm to the summit. But instead I was just dully depressed. I'd wanted to go a whole lot farther. The Sierra Nevada contain the most ideal traversing terrain in the Lower 48, and there's good reasons for this: one part California weather, one part accessibility and about five parts simply the way these mountains have grown up. More than anywhere else, this range seems to want to form into long, sharp ridges. Clearly there are technical theories to explain how this genesis occurred, but to the light-footed and itchy-fingered alpinist, these unromantic explanations smack of mere mumbo jumbo, distractions from the alpenglow-ed sawblades of granite that ride high above the pocket glaciers. For the up-and-at-'em climber, such nerdy lingo deserves to stay well hidden in the world of books. The Palisades, especially, could be considered the local epicenter of sideways mountaineering. It's been going on here for a good eighty years (since Jules Eichorn and Glen Dawson traversed the razor-fanged ridge from Norman Clyde Peak to Middle Pal). More than merely a way to bag additional summits, it is the notion that one route/one mountain was not enough, that the high places are something to hunger for, to grab onto and to stay in as long as possible like a child refusing to come down from a tree. It was this line-in-the-sky romantic ideal that I was trying to follow when the rain set in. My plan had been to leave my house in Bishop predawn, hoof it up to Temple Crag, climb the longest route there—and then make it longer. Heading southwest, I'd follow the ragged ridge over Mt. Gayley to the buff white granite on the Swiss Arete of Sill, where I'd hit the main crest and swing northwest over a high handful of peaks, including the Palisades' highest, North Pal, before finishing with the northernmost: Mt. Agassiz. In the course of the day, I'd traverse tottery gendarmes as well as fine-textured bedrock; frost-fractured, lightning-blasted mountaintops along with flint-hard summits bald as a bottle. Along the way, sure, I hoped I'd taste the ecstasy of an eagle in flight. I also knew that I'd experience the despair of a galley slave. But I'd failed almost as soon as I started, and I slunk home soaked to the skin with most of my water and all of my sandwiches. This dressing down left a mark, deep enough to make me wait a year before trying something like that again. This time I reasoned I needed to start earlier and climb faster in case of storms, so I decided to begin with the shorter and easier Moon Goddess Arete. It seemed like a smarter choice and a sound plan, but I once saw a quote that read, "Courage, not compromise, brings the smile of God's approval." So what was I? Cowardly or clever? Hard to say, but when I ventured into the realm of thunderheads and lightning bolts, I sure didn't want Him mad at me. Hours before daylight, I strapped on my headlamp and lit out with fresh batteries and sandwiches. Sunup found me halfway up Moon Goddess, and the orange glow took the gloom out of the dark grey granite. The first peak, Temple, with its church-y name, seemed the perfect place for breakfast. I paused there and read my rain-smeared summit entry from the year before. Temple Crag (12,999'), with the northeast sides of Mt. Sill (14,162'), Polemonium Peak (14,000'+), North Palisade (14,242'), Starlight Peak (14,200') and Thunderbolt Peak (ca. 14,000') to its right. The knife-edges and summits rolled by—Gayley, Sill, Polemonium, the high witches' hat of North Pal, and by early afternoon, the bare-knuckled thumb of Thunderbolt. So far, no thunderheads in the vicinity, but (as I'd feared) the first storm clouds of altitude sickness were squeezing my head. Anything more than a brief sip brought me to verge of vomiting. My pace and condition spiraled downward until I was circling the drain. Winchell seemed never-ending and Agassiz, the last, actually was—a death march of numbness and throbbing all at the same time. I was reduced to walking on all fours like a bear, stopping now and then to see if I had the strength to puke. I tried to dredge up memories of why I was there, but the clouds in my head were far too heavy and choked, and I just had to trust that there was a reason.
The descent took more ages. Finally, as I neared Third Lake at around 10,000 feet, the vise grips on my temples eased up, and I was able to take a few swigs of water. As I hiked down into the thicker air, the world I knew should have slowly morphed back to normal. Instead, it swiftly turned weird. Late-afternoon sun slanted across a flowered meadow as I turned a corner on the trail and stood face to face with a woman. She was fairy-tale beautiful with flowing strawberry-blond hair, wearing an ankle-length gauzy silk dress. She looked up, surprised, but then smiled shyly. I knew I likely appeared half leprous—all sunburned and scraggly haired—and instinctively I dropped my head in shame. Wretchedness such as mine shouldn't look pure beauty in the eyes. But I had to try.... She'd vanished! I was standing in a large clearing, and I'd only looked away for a second. There was nowhere for her to hide. Everything else looked quite normal—the pine trees, the rocks, the sky. In the midst of my everyday world, a red-haired angel had come and gone in a flash. The vision staggered me, but I continued on my way down. The image of her face stayed with me even as my hunger finally returned and visions of French fries accompanied her in my mind's eye. Soon the smell of fresh sliced potatoes in hot oil drowned out all other thoughts. I stopped and scoured the countryside for the deep fryers that just had to be there—only I knew I was still five miles from the nearest road. Since our oldest ancestors stood up on their hind legs and gained the first semblance of having a clue, we've lifted our eyes to the mountains and seen them as an ultimate, as a place to commune or worship. For some people, the highest summits are singularly important because they are just that much closer to heaven. To me, those are heady thoughts, but I'd like to think that the striving, the beauty and the rapture we experience bring heaven that much closer to home—and that Heaven can be whatever you dream of—like a beautiful girl and a bag of chips. Louder Than Eleven has released some good footage, check it out! Geshido, Mac My Craft from Louder Than Eleven on Vimeo. The third article in the series for you to enjoy! Geshido, Mac The Nature of Memory Joan Jensen There are things I remember and things I have forgotten; some memories come together as I look through the boxes of photographs and notes unearthed from the storage loft. The cobwebs and dimness there echo my frame of mind. Do I really want to remember those times forty-five years ago when Don Jensen and I were together in the Palisades? Don and Joan Jensen on the Palisade Crest, June 1968. On the back of the photo, Joan says, "is the notation in the Gothic script that Don sometimes used...'to EmBeth & Howard [friends of the couple], as a token of your honoring us at our wedding.'" Don and Joan were married in the Palisades, a region they loved. [Photo] Bob Swift/courtesy Joan Jensen After Don died while biking to work in Aberdeen, Scotland, I tried to dissociate myself from moments that would have been painful to recall. Apparently, I was successful, as I now find those ancient memories almost nonexistent. But searching through the old boxes to enable someone other than myself to write about those times has helped release me from sorrow. If he had survived beyond his thirtieth year, what would have been his life's path? Mathematician/logician, equipment designer, photographer/artist, teacher and inspirer of others? Whatever it was, it would have been accomplished with enthusiasm, a sense of humor and eagerness for exploration and discovery. Don didn't dwell on the past: I rarely heard him mention the Alaska climbs he undertook prior to our meeting. But he did try to envision the future. In November 1970, after we'd been together for four years, he wrote: "Now we should begin...to encourage our real excitement about life. It is over five years since my last (Huntington) really expensive expedition to Alaska, and our own Alaska exploration/escape [from LA] is one of my first promises to Joan—the time is overdue." Instead of his planning another expedition with his climbing buddies, Don and I wanted to try living in a remote area of Alaska. He wrote: "I felt I could have become the greatest of mountaineers—but chose to integrate the joy of the mountains into my life—instead of making it control my life." In life, as in climbing, I went wherever his joy for the mountains took us. He was the kind of man you could trust with your health and safety, and I did. In the years after his death, I never found anyone else about whom I felt this way, and so I never climbed again. Still, a few memories stand out from the haze of forty-five years. There is my first summit in the Palisades, a peak whose name I can't recall, with Don: 360 degrees of rock, snow and glacier below us on a glorious, sunny summer morning. And there is the moment of waking up on a narrow ledge thousands of feet above the Palisade Glacier, watching the sun rise over the Owens Valley, with us—or at least our sleeping bags—anchored to the rock behind. That might also have been on the trip I wasn't supposed to be on: The guides at PSOM wanted to go to Palisade Basin and were strongly against having me along, not because I couldn't climb, but because they thought I might raise a fuss. Finally, after some pressure from Don, I was allowed to join, but I was expressly told to keep my mouth shut and not complain. On the ascent to the pass, Bob Swift's long stride leading through the ice and snow was too wide for me, but I never said a word. Don noticed the problem and cut additional, shorter steps that I could use. A portrait of Jensen. David Roberts, who climbed with Jensen in Alaska, wrote in the 1974 American Alpine Journal obituary: "The style of Don's climbs, the special stamp he left on them, came from a blend of daring scheme and methodical preparation. He would choose the route or the mountain; then began a kind of brooding, full of diagrams and logistical data, during which all his other worldly concerns atrophied. Once on the mountain, he made the place livable, familiar, his own: to be his best there, he had to endure the mountain with the quirks and echoes and scenic furniture of home." [Photo] courtesy Joan Jensen. On another occasion, Don and I went to Palisade Basin to leave a cache of equipment for the guiding season. The most reasonable container was a 40-gallon metal garbage can, which Don strapped on to his pack. Off we went, up and over the crest into the basin. Presumably the cache is still there, hidden in the depressed area next to a huge boulder.
The pack he used, or at least the sack, was of his own design. Don made most of his own equipment: either he didn't like the available designs or he didn't have the money. His motto was "go light"—I would count pieces of toilet paper so as not to have to pack the whole roll. Don also calculated the number of calories needed. For winter excursions, breakfast was instant oatmeal and dried buttermilk powder mixed with hot water. Lunch under the crisp blue winter sky was cheese, crackers and hard salami, shared with the Steller's jays perched in the scrubby trees. Dinner we called "glop": instant rice, dried soup mix, canned meat or tuna. A splurge was an onion, which livened up the one-pot brew. A dram of apricot brandy was our reward before calling it a night. Although we spent most of our time in the Palisades during summer climbing-school season, my sharpest memories are from the winter. We would drive from LA in Don's VW Bug to camp near the trailhead. The owners of Glacier Lodge lived there year-round, and thus the road along Big Pine Creek was plowed (most of the time), eliminating a long trudge. I had first met Don when he was giving a talk on Mt. Huntington to the Fresno Sierra Club during the autumn of, probably, 1966. He wanted to show me his beloved Palisades, and he planned a ski-mountaineering trip during term break. It was to be my first overnight experience in winter. We strapped on our skins over wide, heavy mountaineering skis and headed up the trail. I loved the serenity and purity of our snow-blanketed surroundings. Late that afternoon, after we'd settled into our camp, he began preparing our glop. Then the stove malfunctioned, and the tent caught fire. We managed to get out (not difficult, because the thin ripstop nylon melted easily), but the tent was ruined and one of Don's boots was damaged. Because of the severe cold, we had no choice except to make our way down to the lodge, following our ski tracks back through the moonlit forest. We stayed the remainder of the night in one of the empty cabins, thankful for a roof over our heads. A few years afterward, we were married, so obviously the scare didn't diminish my opinion of him. In fact, it might have improved his chances with me, as I saw how calmly he executed our emergency descent (though I can't imagine the names he was calling himself while doing this). Of a later experience, Don wrote: "On Thanksgiving afternoon we walked from Sage Flats in new snow. There were perhaps a dozen 'winter hikers'—some years ago we would have been alone. The next day we had passed all and waded to the overlook beyond the Black Lake Trail—we had abandoned our minimal hardware selection and skis near the roadhead, seeing their inutility (and ill repair respectively). Due to the big work push this fall [on Don's PhD], we have not been able to escape the traffictional field of LA prior to this, and we needed desperately what we got—to see plumes of snow blow off Temple Crag, and to be alone—but as dusk was deepening, our grateful solitude was interrupted by two persistent followers. I guess we were not as cordial as they had expected—but we were both honestly angry. As Joan said later, they were new and enthusiastic to the winter mountain scene and could in no way understand the extent to which we needed to be alone there...." It was these opportunities to be alone together and away from the crowds of LA, and even of Bishop, that interwove and cemented our relationship. They are what I remember most vividly of the years I was fortunate to share with my soulmate, Don Jensen. Sometimes it takes failure to notice the unrealized value of your successes. Geshido, Mac The Hardest Line from Rab on Vimeo. |
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AuthorThis is for the ones that try their hardest for no apparent reason, except for the reason they only know. The ones that provide the inspiration. You. Archives
March 2016
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