Climbing up the Abol Slide, my mind reverted to the story from the Bangor Daily News: “Holden man died Saturday after falling more than 1,000 feet down the icy surface of the Abol Slide.” I was thinking, maybe we should just take a break. There was great purchase on the ice with our microspikes and […]
Highpointing
Posted inLife and Culture
Ashland climber beats some of the strongest winds on Earth
A month had passed since my first summit and state highpoint and I was busy researching and reading and thinking way outside my skill level. My buddy Tony in Oregon suggested I fly out to join him on a late winter bid of Mt. Hood. It only took a paragraph of Wikipedia to realize, even […]
Posted inAshland Source
Delaware peak leads to interesting drive through Appalachia
A thousand miles of contemptuous travel through the Keystone State to Ebright Azimuth, the highpoint of Delaware, started on March 19, 2017. It was midnight, but I was far from falling asleep. The cellphone alarm on my square end table was set for 3 a.m. Needed rest for the drive, but was too excited. Not […]
Posted inLife and Culture
Eagle Mountain, Minnesota: Taking a 10 year old to the frozen tundra
Where’s that line, of child endangerment versus providing your offspring with an unbelievable adventure that many will never get to experience? If you take your child mountain climbing, and something goes wrong, if the child gets hurt or something even worse, should you be charged with child endangerment? With every peak, there are records attached […]
Posted inAshland Source
Ashland man conquers one of USA’s 5 toughest peaks
The Timberline Lodge rose to fame in the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s, “The Shining.” No other mountain lodge could capture the ominous and murderous feeling of elevator doors full of blood, slowly opening and spilling down the hallway. Behind Timberline was Mt. Hood, the highest point in Oregon, a volcano of death glaring at […]
Posted inAshland Source
Failure on a high peak: The Kansas Saga
Inside “the trough,” looking up at the rock scramble, looking down at death, looking up, looking down — for 15 minutes. The route was nothing I hadn’t completed before — and that was the problem — it was the same mountain. Where was my escape? Longs Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP) in Colorado […]
Posted inAshland Source
Ashland’s Fox scales Wyoming’s highest peak amid controversy
We start the series with my hardest climb to date that left me hated by half of the highpointing community: Gannett Peak, Wyoming. It took days of hiking with a 50-pound pack, over mountain passes of 11,000 feet, to even get to Base Camp II. You start the expedition in shorts and a T-shirt, and […]
Posted inAshland Source
Ashland man’s path to mountaineering got off to a rocky start
ASHLAND — I became a mountaineer kind of by accident. My cellmate and I were at a cowboy wedding at an abandoned ghost town used for Wild West movies outside of Santa Fe in 2012. We were trying to figure out what to do between nuptial events in the alcoholic desert of northern New Mexico […]