At 1:30 in the morning in early October I woke up to nearly freezing temperatures in the back of my car parked at Castro Park, in Douglas Arizona. I crawled out of my sleeping bag, desperately pulled on thicker socks and shoes, and stumbled out under the street light to meet a tiny crowd of…
Author: Summit Hut
First Snow of the Season
Snow days are few and far between in Southern Arizona – and when they do come, you usually need to drive up a mountain to enjoy them. Mt. Lemmon is the highest mountain in the Santa Catalina range just north of Tucson and resides at a modest 9,157 feet. While it isn’t the tallest point…
Mount Rainier: Part Two
Finally the day came. After three months of intense training and intense worrying, I was on a plane flying over the peak that I hoped to stand on top of. And then I was on a van driving through thick pine forests scarred by avalanche. In the parking lot we divvied up group gear and…
Climbing Mount Rainier – Part One
From March through June, climbing Mount Rainier was all I could think about. Njow, a few weeks after my guided trip up the Emmons route, that amazing experience is still all I can think about. But this is the part where I’m relieved. For three months, I obsessed constantly. All my worries could be summed…
Repairing a Zipper
It happens to everyone: you’ve had your favorite backpack for years. It’s held textbooks, a week’s worth of clothes, and camera equipment. You’ve dragged it on and off of trains, planes and automobiles; you took it caving and scraped it against rock walls. Its limits were tested and it always stood up to the test,…
Climbing Moby Dick
The day began with a long drive down a deeply rutted dirt road into the far reaches of the Cochise West Stronghold. I swear I have car-narcolepsy; sometimes no matter what the circumstances, I completely bonk out in the passenger seat, and this was happening to me as the truck bucked down the road: despite…
50 Year Trail
The 50 Year Trail on the west side of the Santa Catalina Mountains is a magical place. It’s hard to explain why really; this network of trails does not go up one of the many scenic and rugged canyons, but rather loops around on the shallow ridges and washes below the range. It was cloudy…
Open Climbing Season at Cochise Stronghold
Chris tries to tell me what to expect on the fourth pitch: when my quads will start to burn in the layback, the point where I won’t be able to see my gear placements, and when I’ll be far enough above my last piece that I’ll just have to gun it to better ground. I…
Pushing My Limit on Steel Crazy
We racked up to Steel Crazy, a four pitch 5.9 route on the spine of the Fortress, at just about two in the afternoon; not an entirely appropriate start for a party of four on long route none of us had done before. Clare and I would start the route, and the boys would come…
Trail Running With Vibram FiveFingers
How I Learned to Not Hate Running I started my first trail run ever with the goal that I would just run as much as I wanted to. A quarter of a mile in on the Marshall Gulch trail, I started thinking I should have set some loftier goals, seeing how I only seemed to…