The Liminal Line

I Can’t Go to Ethiopia This Year, Can You Instead?

2012-05-15T15:25:43Z

This October, a powerful, engaged, and curious team is heading to Ethiopia to both change the world, and change how they interact in that world. Usually, I’d be joining them. But this year I need you to take my place.

Imagine Ethiopia 2012 is the third iteration of a dream I helped create in 2009 with imagine1day. Our goal was simple: enable others to have their lives profoundly affected by Ethiopia by enabling them to profoundly experience Ethiopia. For the past two years I have co-led trip with Sapna Dayal and a select team of other leaders. Together we have created an experience blending culture, adventure, and connection along with an initiative to raise $100,000 to build schools in Ethiopia. This year’s school is in the Alose Community in Oromiya.

I can’t go on Imagine Ethiopia 2012--I will be in Mozambique for my Lost Mountain Project. But you can. Here is how:

Go Yourself

In support of imagine1day's big goal for all Ethiopians to have access to quality education funded free of foreign aid by 2030, a Dream Team of 14 participants will be heading to Ethiopia this October. Together, the Dream Team will unite around a goal of raising $100,000 to build a new school & provide access to quality education for one of imagine1day’s partner communities. Faced with a big goal, participants will discover how their passions and talents combine as catalysts for a new form of contribution. Once the funds are raised, the fruits of the Dream Team’s labor will culminate in an epic, awe inspiring, world changing, shake it up, transformative adventure.

This is Your Year. Apply to Join the Dream Team for the Imagine Ethiopia trip thip fall. Check it out and see if you're game for the adventure of a lifetime-- both locally and gloablly.

Go Virtually

Support the Dream Team in reaching their $100,000 to build a school in the Alose Community, Oromiya, Ethiopia. DONATE

Want More Reasons?

This year’s trip includes astonishing new territory in The Bale Mountains where participants will experience a new landscape and adventure (horseback riding, warthogs, nyalas and more)
This year’s team will join imagine1day as they break ground on a new partnership in with the Sinana District Education Office in Oromiya
Participants will have the opportunity to meet imagine1day’s Class 2016 High School Scholarship students and their families – a unique program that sets parents up with small business funding and training to support their children’s high school educations
There is already and incredible mix of participants – from a 400m Olympic hopeful from LA to a lawyer from Vancouver, to a teacher from Cincinnati

It's time. This is your year.

Alaskan Lessons of Honest Skiing

2012-05-03T11:41:21Z

Peter Doucette heads up to get a down. Photo by Majka BurhardtFourteen years is thirteen too many to go between visits to Alaska. I sensed that every year that passed during my recent Alaska pause, but I knew it when I saw the landscape of mountains, pure mountains, and more mountains on the clear, still day I made it back this April.

How did you know you wanted to be a climber? When did you know the mountains had to be part of your life? People ask me these questions all the time. Bottle Alaska and you will have the answer.

This April I was there backcountry skiing on the Kenai Peninsula between tides on the Turnagain Arm. The last time I’d skied in Alaska it was on nicked-over Mountain Noodles with my plastic Scarpa Invernos heading down the NE fork of the Kahiltna from an aborted climbing attempt on Mt. Hunter’s Moonflower Buttress. This time I had two pairs of powder skis and no objective other than turns. Or rather that, and holding my own with my in-laws-to-be.

Pastoral Peak lines, photo by Peter DoucetteTotal immersion in the mountains can happen in New England, the Appalachia, the Rockies, or in this case the Chugach. Anywhere it happens, total immersion keeps me honest. This year that honesty taught me two things: 1) sometimes the up is better than the down, and 2) it’s best to have the brightest skis you can find.

Up Versus Down

As a child, I grew up skiing on a sodded-over-trash-heap-made-ski-area—pure Minnesota style. Skies were for going fast, cutting gates, and holding edges. Back then I never imagined that skis could also provide ascension. But as a backcountry skiing adult I’ve spent 90% of my time on skis going up on my skis. And, as a backcountry skiing adult on this Alaska trip I have realized that I like the up better than the down. Ok. That might be a lie. I like them equally. But I like them equally in the way my mother used to tell me she loved both my sister and me equally but differently, but I really knew that meant she liked me better.

The Dream Team: Peter Doucette, Cate Doucette, Saben Rossi, Kelsey Rossi, Majka Burhardt, Jim Doucette, Silas Rossi. Photo by Silas RossiAlaska solidified this with seven days spent in the constant suspension that only snow can provide. That 90% was glorious (and, occasionally lung-searingly gnarly). That 90% gave me the time in the mountains I needed to be in the mountains. It gave me that feeling you get from the rhythm of the up and the feeling of lightness when you have the perfect line of planer ascent before you. It is that moment when you feel you can travel on top of anything and the mountains unfold in front of you with an offer of endless opportunity. We should all have more of it.

Majka with the whiteout en route, Photo by Peter DoucetteBright Beacons of Truth, aka Your Skis

Last year in the Canadian Adamants I converted to the Phat revolution (read the story here). This year, I had my very own pair of powder boards: chowder-seeking, rockered, 105 under-foot, sluicing green-apple rides of joy. The Movement/La Sportiva Hi5’s were given to me for what I assumed was the blower powder I was going to ski. I thought that for four days of such powder--right up until I saw their true raison d’etre: the whiteout. The sluicing green-apple rides of joy were also the best beacon around in the white, white snow. I was skiing 175’s, a length I worried that was too long for me until I realized that the rockered tips would disappear over the drop off with just enough advance notice to tell me I would soon follow. After a bit of trail and error, and sharpening of my reflexes, I realized I could use them to dictate my terrain. I would not call this what the skis were made for, but on the mile-long sidehill out of that day’s basin I would not have argued otherwise. A brightly colored future sister-in-law can also work—but it’s hard to keep up with mine.

Skiing is fun. It’s why I did it on a trash heap growing up and why I do it in the Alaskan mountains today. The trick is in noting the moments it gets more fun—and then making sure you are adding to your store of them as you go along. That could be the trick to playing in the mountains in general. I needed Alaska to help me remember this. I think (and hope) I will continue needing this for the rest of my life.

See more of the photos at Snap MyLife

Post Post

2012-04-16T00:26:42Z

Kate Rutherford and Majka Burhardt, Red Rocks 2012It’s always hard to write about rock climbing when you are ripping powder in a new bowl, or to write about skiing when you are latticing hand jams up granite. This year, I put myself on spring break to do both activities, type about neither, and then come home to the poodle and the computer.

I’ve spent countless season shifts in Red Rocks. For the past fifteen years it’s been the place to either jump-start or wrap up the year’s era of rock climbing. Spring has always been my favorite time. It’s when the green grass pokes through the sandy soil and softens the desert for the moment before you The Osprey Packs Intro Rock Climbing Course at the Red Rock Rendezvousstep on a barrel cactus. Spring is when the edges hurt your fingers because you’ve let them grow soft in your ice climbing gloves, when last year’s warm up is the biggest send of the current day, and when the sun feels exactly like thing you’ve been pining for all winter long.

My Red Rocks dose this year was miniscule and magnificent. Day 1: climb with one of the best climbing partners I have—Kate Rutherford. Day 2: teach an introduction to rock climbing clinic at the Red Rocks Rendezvous. Over exactly 30 hours I had the honor of teaching someone how to trust themselves enough to move off the ground to

swapping leads six pitches up a blanched white and sanguine red Red Rocks classic. It was hard to beat. It was worth the trek from New Hamsphire to Nevada. Even for those two days.

I’m in the middle of learning about how to live east and climb west, east, north and south. This time, I did it with two pairs of skis in tow. My brief Red Rock window made me want more. It always has.

The ski stories are coming. I promise. But first I have to go make up with the poodle for being gone.

My climbing partners for day twoPtarmigan, waiting for me to come home

The Bird and The Bear

2012-03-06T14:26:22Z

PtarmiganThere are dog people, and there are poodle people. I am a poodle person. But for the past year, I’ve been a poodle person without a poodle. That was a problem. Said problem manifested in scenes similar to this one:

At 3:00 one afternoon in Boulder I spotted a woman with two standard poodles—one black, one gray-- starting off on the hike I was just finishing. I walked up to her. She was on the phone. It seemed she was all right with me petting her poodles, and I thought I checked to make sure before I dropped to my knees and starting loving them both, tucking one into each arm. This went on for several minutes until I heard a distant voice that I soon realized was the woman, talking to me, instead of her phone. “You must like dogs,” she said.

“I love poodles,” I said.

The black one, by then, was permanently attached to the space between my elbow and ribs. I may or may not have been making plans to take him home.

“Have you ever had one of your own?” The woman asked.

Osito showing pure loveThe world swirled in front of me. Both poodles leaned in closer. I coughed. I made that horrible noise when you pull the snot back in your throat. I thanked the universe for making poodle hair absorbent of human tears. “I lost mine,” I tried to say to the woman, “in February.” I looked up when I said February. The woman made eye contact for a moment, gave her two dogs a tug, and walked away.

Now, I don’t blame the woman. She had a crying snotty poodle-missing stranger fall apart in front of her on the public sidewalk. While I watched her walk away I finally acknowledged to myself that I had a problem.

2 Poodles, 4 skis. Mountain Companionship via a poodleIf you google “Poodles in Africa” the results are slim. Most hits are for poodles in South Africa, but few to none are of poodles in Ethiopia, Mozambique or Namibia. This is a problem. This is likely why, when people know of my work and learn of my need to have a poodle they make that awkward concerned face the way the would when a six-year-old tells them they want to have a unicorn.

You can’t organize your whole life. I had Osito for almost 11 years. I would have had him for 111. My life is less complicated without a poodle. But that’s not a life I want to live.

Osito and I talked about this all. We had a deal. He’d be the best poodle in the universe and when he had to leave, he’d help me find another one. Back then, the next poodle was going to be Hank or Buck, but as it turns out, he’s Ptarmigan. Like the bird. So now I have a bear in my soul and a bird in my life and both in my heart.

Ptarmigan and I are a month into our lives together. He is 12 weeks old tomorrow. He likes to sleep on top of the airport carrier that carted him from Wisconsin, through Michigan, to Maine, and finally to me in New Hampshire. It’s clear he is still trying to understand the massive journey in his life. I know the feeling.

I tell Ptarmigan Uncle Osito stories every day. They are different poodles—they need to be. I spent 12 months and 5 days without either in my life and I learned the following: life is short, get a poodle. I promise it will make you a better human.

West To East

2012-02-21T14:32:23Z

The View of Mt. Washington 87 steps from my front door

I’m practicing owning up to my origins. Colorado used to just roll off my tongue. New Hampshire? It’s clunky, it’s two words, and it takes explaining.

Contrary to what many presume from my quick speech and intense personality, I am not an easterner and never have been. Until now. In January Peter and I packed up the van and headed east. I’ve flirted with living in New Hampshire for the past three years (read more in my Go East Article in Alpinist Magazine). Now we’re going steady.

Based on my recent sociological studies—mainly consisting of telling the people I meet while traveling out west that I live out east—a move to New Hampshire suggests a potentially unstable personality disorder. This was made clear to me while speaking recently at the Commonwealth Club of California. The woman introducing me asked where I lived. “It says Boulder in your bio, but you flew in from New England?” She asked.

Majka Burhardt Speaking at the Commonwealth Club of California, aka explaining why I live in New Hampshire“Portland—Maine,” I said, “but I’m living in New Hampshire. I just moved out there, from Boulder.”

She looked more confused.

“They’re close,” I explained. “Maine and New Hampshire—not Boulder and either of them.”

This woman then exhibited what I now can identify as the number one western response to eastern migration. She squinted her eyes, tilted her head, and asked, Why?

I gave her my best answer. “Climbing.”

Remission on Cathedral Ledge, Photo By Anne SkidmoreIt’s winter right now and the climbing I am currently referring to is of the ice variety. It’s amazing to be in New Hampshire during ice season. It is almost amazing enough to make a person move here. But I’m telling you the whole story. Because when I say climbing in response to why I moved east, I mean climbing.

Climbing, to me, means everything that comes with the physical act of attempted upward movement on rock, snow, ice, or vertical grass clumps in Mozambique. It means finding a new thirty-foot long ice route after two hours of post-holing in the woods, eating too much desert with three friends under a full moon lighting up Mt. Washington, and meeting a new friend every time I step into the outdoors with my boots, skis, or just plain old shoes on. Climbing is the thickness of life.

Since getting out east in January I’ve been busy with all of this climbing. It’s what makes this community in the Mt. Washington Valley thrive. It is what makes it possible for me to live here. I’ve lived in many outdoor towns in my life. This one ranks up as one of the best—for all of the ways the outdoors intersects my life when I am here. Maybe it has something to do with just how long folks have been integrating the mountains into their lives here. They know that when climbing is climbing, climbing is more.

Next weekend there is a grand celebration of climbing in Boston at the American Alpine Club’s Annual Dinner. If you climb, want to climb, or have a grandmother that climbs, you should come. This is when our community is at its thickest best—when we celebrate the vertical and all that comes with it. I’ll be there. Join me?

Tickets are available until February 24^th. Get yours today HERE

See you March 3^rd in Boston.

Adventure When and Where it Matters- The Lost Mountain Series

2012-01-01T16:05:43Z

Mt. Namuli, MozambiqueBy Majka Burhardt and Sarah Garlick

A month ago we left Mozambique and Malawi. Less than a year from now we will be back. How much time does it take to gain perspective? Our goal for this initial trip was simple: to learn if an expedition pairing science, climbing, adventure, and conservation would be possible on Mozambique’s Mt. Namuli. Here is what we found:

MAJKA

Mt. Namuli is an extraordinary mountain of rock in northern Mozambique I’d been looking at for over a year from afar, and this November finally got to see up close. My expectations were realistically low. My hope was unrealistically high. What transpired had nothing to do with either emotion. What transpired had everything to do with the unique combination of granite, climbable grass, a strong partner, a scientist, a gecko, and a queen. Are these the necessary ingredients for adventure? Maybe in this case, yes.

Two months ago, before I’d been to Mozambique, if you’d asked me if I were going on a climbing expedition in Mozambique I would have told you I was going on an expedition that involved climbing… and science, and culture, and conservation. What I would not have told you was that the climbing part was the glue. I would not have wanted to admit this. Fast forward to standing beneath Namuli’s 2,000-foot southeast face. Sarah and I had promised each other that the climbing was not important in the grand scheme of it all. We were there on a recon mission: our goal was exploration, pure and simple. But then, in the visual space it took to see the towering, sloping rock, the singular passion driving us forward was undeniable. We were there to climb.

Exploring the cliff-side habitat of Mt. Namuli, Mozambique. Photo courtesy of the Lost Mountain Film team.

I went first. I won the rock-paper-scissors to do so. I shoved myself into the only crack we could find on the whole face, the one with a tree ten feet up, and proceeded to spend sixty-three minutes fighting branches that turned to powder from the dryness, wrestling soot-covered limbs left over from out-of-control crop fires, avoiding torso-sized loose granite spears, and wallowing in dirt, dirt, and more dirt.

Climbing—whether you are watching it or doing it—often seems to happen in slow motion. It was even slower for me that day. I had enough time to think about every one of my decisions that led to this point. I thought of the people living in the surrounding villages and what we’d tried to tell them about our plan. To climb or hike on Mt. Namuli you need permission from the local queen. We’d visited the queen two days before and she’d blessed our journey. Was this the blessing?, I wondered, as I fought to keep myself on the face. Then again, we hadn’t told the queen we needed a blessing for vertical grass, and she likely didn’t know that was what we’d be relying upon for our ascent. Namuli makes her own weather. On 360 degrees of her flanks people live and farm and watch the mountain hourly for a signal of what was to come. What we were doing was no different, really. I tried to tell myself the queen and I were in it together. That worked… until it didn’t anymore.

I went up until I could no longer fight the growing feeling that this was not possible, not worth it, not going to happen. And then I went down.

Majka climbing through the first crux: a tree. Photo by P. YooNon-climbers ask me all the time if I climb by myself, without ropes, without a safety system, without anything connecting me to the rock or ice. I usually explain to them that I’m afraid of bees and want a rope to catch me if I get stung. But in November, when I returned to the ground after doing vertical battle on Namuli and handed the gear to Sarah under our newly earned arc of shade from a 95-degree day, I realized that the real reason I don’t solo is that I need another attachment to the rock: my partner.

Sarah took a different approach to the face. She delicately moved across clumps of grass attached only to micro-pores in the unseen granite. She avoided the tree and the crack at the bottom, and earned a new crack, new tree, and more soot up top. She moved through the place I stopped, and she kept moving. And just like that, we, as a team, were climbing. Of course, it wasn’t just like that, really. Sarah’s lead took over an hour, and my next one would as well. It was not pretty. It was battle. But there were moments of finesse, and moreover, the moment of satisfaction—shared—that what we were doing was possible. It was happening.

SARAH

On every expedition, at least for me, there comes a point when I ask myself, What in the world am I doing here? In a way, I’ve come to love that moment. It’s the signal that things are happening, that wheels are in motion, for better or worse. In Mozambique, the moment arrived within the first 48 hours of the trip.

Sarah hiking... before it got dark.It was dark, I was jet-lagged, and I was struggling to keep our team of porters, guides, translators, climbers, and scientists—14 of us in all—at least reasonably together along a discontinuous trail. We’d reached a river crossing and the porters had stopped, waiting for someone to make the first move. To literally test the waters and find out how deep, and how swift. It took about a split second to realize it was going to be up to me to scout the river. Majka was ten minutes behind with Paul, our filmmaker, and the two scientists. So I grabbed Cotxane, our translator, as my spotter and I stepped into the river’s current: shoes, pants, backpack, and all. Cotxane and I were halfway across, the water swirling around the tops of our thighs, our headlamps providing zero visibility for what might be obstructing the bottom or lurking along the banks, and—wham!—the moment: What the #*!% am I doing in the middle of a river, at night, in Mozambique?

If you’re lucky, there comes a counterpoint to that moment: the stage at which the various pieces and players align, when the expedition hits a perfect sweet spot and you find yourself thinking, Yes…this is why we do what we do. Sometimes it’s an obvious climax, like the summit of a peak or the first cold beer after many days in the field. In Mozambique, we were blessed with many of these moments: the night we hunted chameleons in the rainforest, stalking the little alien-like reptiles for our scientists to observe and record; and the evening of the moonrise, when the moon glowed a shocking red through the smoke of crop fires from the mountain’s surrounding villages. But one of the best was the moment we spotted the gecko.

We’d put this whole journey together on a biologist’s hypothesis that the granite cliff face of Mt. Namuli was the perfect habitat for a certain gecko, and given Namuli’s isolation, if we found this gecko, it’d likely be a new species. Majka and I had spent hours scouting the face, establishing a fixed rope along the most probable habitat: a four-hundred-foot arcing corner system choked with grass, bushes, and dirt. The problem was, we didn’t see signs of any critters. No bugs, no creepy-crawlies, no gecko.

Werner on the gecko hunt. Photo by P. Yoo

I was at the base of the wall with Werner, the South African biologist on the expedition, and I was teaching him how to ascend a fixed line. I felt like I was just going through the motions. We’d hauled all this equipment halfway around the world and battled sketchy vertical vegetation to establish the safety systems, we might as well get Werner up there like we set out to do. Just as I clipped Werner’s top jumar onto the line, his eyes caught a flash of motion near the base of the corner system—his powers of observation clearly more attuned than ours. He said he knew it was the gecko in an instant, the flick of its movement gave it away. In a frenzy we unclipped and detangled him from the rope so he could try to catch the specimen as it scurried toward the tree Majka’d grappled with during our ascent. And then, like the story had been scripted from the beginning, the dark-bodied reptile sprinted up the smooth granite face out of sight. Werner turned back to me, his eyes wild, yelling Get me on that rope!

Expedition Stats:

Successful exploration of southeast face of Mt. Namuli, Mozambique’s second-highest mountain (7,936 ft) and surrounding rainforest
Climbed ~650 ft of granite slab and corner systems, accessing previously unexplored cliff-face habitat
Expedition resulted in the discovery of at least three candidate new species, awaiting confirmation: a frog, a skink, and a gecko
Identified numerous important species of reptiles, amphibians, insects, and plants
Anticipated results, beyond the description of new life, include new biogeographical links among the northern Mozambican and southern Malawian inselbergs, and extended ranges for East African species

See the slideshow of images on www.thelostmountainfilm.com

Home on the African Road

2011-12-05T15:34:04Z

Mt. Namuli

In Conjunction with Engelhorn Sports

I feel bad for my seatmate on the plane the other day. I’d like to issue an apology but I never got their name. The woman had harmlessly asked me where I was coming from and where I was going. I tried to keep it simple at the start. I told her Malawi and Cape Town. But then she asked me why I’d been in Malawi.

I should have said I was in Malawi for work and opened my book. Instead I told her I’d been stranded in Malawi but was on a trip to Mozambique, that I’d been in Ethiopia and was en route to Cape Town, and that ultimately I was heading home to Boulder, Colorado. When her why came again, I told her about the vertical grass.

Anchor in Vertical Grass, MozambiqueIt is not easy to explain to anyone why a person would be in Mozambique trying to climb vertical grass. My reasons are solid (it’s for science, for the conservation to come, and yes, in part because it seemed like a good idea at the time) but perhaps not best suited for planeside chit chat. I’m reasonably sure my protracted story of origin and destination were the reason behind my seatmates move to the seat two rows back. That, or the fact that I had not done laundry in two weeks. Either way, we parted.

In the past five weeks I have climbed Ethiopia’s soft sandstone and Mozambique’s hidden granite. Today it’s quartzite in South Africa. The actual number of days climbing are as inconsequential as that number. The vertical thread is always there. I’ve taken eleven plane rides, lived in a tent, a lodge, a hotel, and a place I’d never tell my mother about. I’ve eaten re-hydrated dried fish, stewed cow stomach, and enough goat to be one myself. My consistency has been gained only from the familiarity of the contents of my luggage. My same climbing gear, rope, harness, helmet, clothes, yoga matt and one pair of high heels are the familiar. I didn’t realize just how much I’d been counting on them until half of them did not join me on that plane ride to Cape Town.

Anchoring to the Abune Yemata Church, Tigray EthiopiaAs last night’s summer sun set over the Atlantic Ocean my missing bag made its way to my friend Tristin’s house in Cape Town. It – and remarkably all of its contents – is back creating my sense of home on the Africa road. It’s just in time. I have Table Mountain on my agenda today. Here is to another foray into the vertical and an ongoing extension of home.

Read more and see a video from my trip to Mozambique here.

Notes from The Mozambican Bush

2011-11-22T09:13:08Z

By Majka Burhardt and Sarah Garlick

DAY 1

MB: I say goodbye to Ethiopia (intentionally), and to my new ultralight Thermarest (unintentionally). My first-ever spotting of the Congo appears initially out of a plane window, and soon through a propped-open plane door during a re-supply. Malawi and Mozambique bound.

SG: It’s 5:30 a.m. at Boston’s Logan Airport. I have a bad reaction to my anti-malaria meds and vomit into a trashcan at the airline check-in desk. I can feel the stares of the hundred or so early morning passengers in line behind me. Please let this not be a sign for what’s to come.

Werner and Frog. Photo by Majka BurhardtDAY 4

MB: We hike the wide side of a long arcing bend in the trail to see Mt. Namuli on its other side. I requisition a flask of whiskey from an already drunk porter. Herpetologist Werner Conradie confirms the presence of crocodiles in the Malema River while we are hip deep, midstream.

SG: It’s dark. We’ve been hiking for 6 hours already and there’s nowhere to stop until we get to the Queen’s hut at the base of the mountain. Our guide Cotxane (pronounced co-chan-ee) says it’s only 30 more minutes, but I don’t believe him. We are a group of thirteen—climbers, scientists, guides, and porters—hiking single-file through the bush, illuminated by the narrow light of four headlamps. I can’t help but think about lions and spitting cobras, the former apparently hunted out from this area, the latter we’ve already seen, but with any luck not active at night?

Porters on the flanks of Mt Namuli. Photo by Majka BurhardtDAY 5

SG: My skin, thinned by the malarial meds (the bane of my existence), feels like fire under the equatorial sun. I hike behind a young woman named Katarine who we’ve hired, with a few other locals, to help carry our equipment from the Queen’s village up to a grassy plain near the base of the mountain’s southeast wall. She is slender and strong, balancing the 40-pound duffel seemingly without effort on her head as she hikes barefoot along the dusty red path.

Majka mid-pitch 1. Photo by Sarah GarlickDAY 7 (See Video Above)

MB: Today I finally meet Namuli’s granite face, face-to-face. It turns out that a 50-degree granite slab is the threshold for reasonable “hiking.” 53-degrees means we start climbing. I watch Sarah levitate up vertical grass. We swing leads leads. The high point of my lead? Feeling like I was one with the vertical grass. Low point? Slinging clump of said grass for protection. Gave up any semblance of cleanliness under my fingernails.

SG: Paul has dubbed this our “Chia Mountain” and it’s an apt description. Who knew grass could grow on vertical rock? But it’s surprisingly solid to climb. Meter by meter, move by move, I make my way up the first pitch. It feels good to open this face, despite the absurdity of the vegetated terrain. A difficult move around a non-solid bush gets me into a squeeze chimney. I realize the black coating on the rock is not dirt here, but soot, which instantly coats my face, my arms, everything. I keep going until I run low on gear, then build an anchor. The thought of wildfire reaching this high up Namuli’s rock face occupies the back of my mind.

DAY 8

MB: Watched from 100-feet up the face as Werner, Sarah, and Paul celebrate spotting a gecko running up the granite face. I convince Werner to trust a rope and let go. We eat dinner as a blood moon—dark orange from the smoke from dozens of burning fields—rises over Namuli’s eastern hills.

SG: I am so dirty. I’ve tried to wash the soot and dirt away down at the river in the rainforest, but I can’t seem to get clean. My fingernails are rimmed with black grime and I’ve seen Majka’s sidelong glances. How does she stay so clean? Will she ever want to travel with me again?

Majka and Sarah. Photo by Werner ConradieDAY 10

MB: I don my gaiters at dawn. Eight hours later I learn that one of the most deadly snakes in the world is as skinny as my thumb. Today we leave Namuli; memories full of what we need to know to come back in 2012.

Setting Off For The Lost Mountain

2011-11-06T08:24:14Z

Tomorrow I head to Mozambique. Actually, that is a lie. Tomorrow I fly from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia via the Congo to Lilongwe Malawi and then to Blantyre Malawi. It’s Tuesday I head overland in Mozambique itself. I’m ready.

Mozambique. We're going to Zambezia in the middleOver two years ago I came across photos of granite faces in Mozambique. I had no idea that those photos would lead me to today, November 6^th 2011, packing for one of them in room 108 in the Jupiter Hotel in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. It is fitting that Ethiopia—the place that has given me so much unexpected adventure and even more of life from adventure—is my staging ground for this next journey.

I’m lucky on this trip to be joined by Sarah Garlick and Paul Yoo. Sarah and I have been climbing partners and friends for years but this will be our first big trip together. Paul is a filmmaker base in LA and this is the first project for the three of us as a team. We really have no idea what we’re in for. None of us would want it differently. We have the basics—an unclimbed granite face, a landscape in Mozambique that is a hotbed of biodiversity, a group of local stakeholders who care about that landscape and need it to live off of to survive and flourish. And we have the intent to find all that we can in ourselves and in the journey.

Photo of Mt Namuli Courtesy of Renata JagustovicWhen I was a kid what I wanted most was to be an adventurer. I have just spent the past two weeks in Ethiopia leading a trip with imagine1day where we have been in and out of communities with new schools and schools about to be built. These kids here are no different. Adventure crosses cultural boarders. The anticipation of the unknown is part of it, but I think that adventure also gives us a chance to be our full selves with all of our great traits and flaws jumbled together on one path. That collage of self is intoxicating. It’s further more so when it’s an “additive adventure” -- when that adventure goes beyond exploration to cultural and environmental connections that create a larger conversation of singular and collective human meaning. At eight I just wanted to go be outside and explore. Now, at 35, I want to be outside and explore and have it matter. And it is not just want anymore because I know it does matter.

I have to finish packing (see the video). I have to get all of my gear into two 50-lb bags and practice my wink to get the rest of it through the airline weight check. I have a team to meet in Malawi and a ride to catch to Mozambique. I have the unknown to find.

Check out http://thelostmountainfilm.com/ and follow the journey over the next weeks as we report back.

The Best Worst Idea

2011-10-25T23:33:56Z

Packing for Africa 2011.I’m in Africa, again. And on this trip, Africa x 3. My bags are loaded with what I need to find the course for a trail race in Ethiopia’s high sandstone escarpments, to lead a trip where I and fourteen others will rock climb, mountain bike, and do yoga from Lake Langano’s western shore to Tigray’s northern fields, and to journey to a new mountain in Mozambique for something still very unknown. In five weeks, I will live out a year’s preparation in three phases. I have enough things—six ropes, two sets of full raingear, nine different types of antibiotics, high heels and sticky rubber approach shoes, yoga tops and bug shirts, gaiters and flip flops, down shirts and shorts, a GPS, camera, back-up camera, audio recorder, two external hard drives, tent, cook sets, titanium pots—to stay here for longer. And I might. After all, I’ve already done the hardest part: I’ve gotten ready. The moment I manipulated that last zipper closed on my last bag I breathed a sigh of relief and submitted to the journey.

Almost six years ago I saw a photo of a cluster of sandstone towers in the north of Ethiopia. Those towers started a trip, a book, and a life where now I have come back for this, my fifth time, to this land to which I never thought I’d return. But here is a confession. Those towers that started the trip? I have not seen them in five years. I’ve been close—last year the closest, two bends in the road away, merely four kilometers from the first moment when you glimpse their proud profiles—but I have not ventured closer. I didn’t realize I was saving them until last week when I finally stood before them.

The Kentaro Towers, Tigray, Ethiopia. Photo By Majka Burhardt
I’d spent the two days previous hiking cross-country in the mountains surrounding the towers. I maneuvered up micro slot-canyons, through cactus tunnels, over a fifteen-foot vertical step of an ancient path worn with scalloped holds for your feet and hands exactly—an only—when you need them, into sandy washes, over giant boulders, and around the largest massif of the Gheralta range. I’d seen the land from all sides during those days. There is more rock in this landscape than any other place I have ever seen or been. It tricks you with its sheer volume and makes you think it is good. Because, after all, it might be. Somewhere.  But I know better by now. I have pulled off chunks and blocks and whole corner systems. I did not know better in 2006 when I came here for the first time with a quadruple set of cams, three other climbers, and the power of hope in the unknown. (Read the full story in the book Vertical Ethiopia.)

It seems fitting that it was a day of completion that led me back to the towers. My 13.5-mile negotiation had resulted in a return to the valley with success as represented by a body coated with scratches and clothes still covered in grasses and thorns. I’d just set a course for what will be the international trail run in Ethiopia. It was time to pay homage to what brought me here first.

My partner Helen Dudley on the First Ascent of Learning the Hard Way, Kentaro Towers, Ethiopia 2006. Photo by Gabe RogelMemory knows no rule of accuracy. The moment the largest tower—over 600 feet of sheer mass pushing into the Ethiopian sky—came into view, I knew that I’ve spent the last years in apprehension of the truth of this reality.  But here they were. Five fingers of monolithic beauty that reveal themselves in new ways from each direction. I saw them, and they took my breath away. Again. I knew in that moment I’d been afraid they might be small and uninspiring and that the truth of them would sadden me.  But instead I felt a kernel of excitement and trepidation build in my throat. My breath grew shallow and fiery with the excitement of exploration. Again. I got out of the car, walked to a high hill where I could see the towers without obstruction and I looked straight at them and said thank you.

Really, out loud. By myself in the Ethiopian highlands. I said thank you to that land. I shouted it. I cried it out. And I am not prone to solo outbursts, religion, or homage. But I looked at those beautiful abutting chunks of stone that I know are magnificently horrible to climb, and thanked them again.

It is rare to be alone in Ethiopia. This land of over 80 million guarantees you companionship, eventually. I stayed on that hill as the wind blew and coated the dust onto my tear-soaked cheeks, as the afternoon sun blazed thick and hot on my shoulders, and as children from a nearby home spotted me and began to run to greet me. No one asked me why I was standing in the middle of a hill staring at a cluster of towers, and if they had the only answer I could have given was that somehow, without my knowing it, these masses of stone changed my life.

I doubt I will ever try to climb another of the Kentaro Towers. I know better. All in all trying to climb them was one of the best worst ideas I have ever had.  In the days since I've realized that the best worst ideas might just be what create the true allure of adventure.

Salem from Ethiopia. I am here for another two weeks and I'm now starting phase two, leading a trip for imagine1day. There will be more stories. There might even be more best worst ideas that start here. Why not? I'm packed and ready for them.  And moreover, I now know what it feels like to go back to their origins and offer the deepest gratitude I've ever felt in my life.