Community On Ice, An Additive Adventure Entry

Peter Doucette on Mummy IVIn Conjunction With OutsideTV.com and Osprey Packs

...We chatted for a while. I tried to convince him ice climbing was a good idea—fun even—and he told me he liked to scuba dive. I told him I was afraid of dark water. He said he was afraid of frozen water. We accepted each other’s differences right up until he asked me where I ice climbed.

“This year?” I said, “Bozeman, MT, Ouray, CO, Cody, WY, Munising, MI, North Conway, NH…” I rattled off my winter schedule. “I go for ice, and for the ice festivals,” I said.

He nodded and thought for a while, as if mentally mapping out the locations in his head. “Is that really necessary?” he asked....

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The Big Switch, An Additive Adventure Entry

Filing picks down for dry-tooling in the Boulder Rock Club: Ice Climbing Prep 2010.

In Conjunction With OutsideTV.com and Osprey Packs

It’s November 26^th. It’s 5 degrees in the mountains. It’s time to go ice climbing. To be fair, it’s been like this for a few weeks now. But it’s finally time for me to notice. I’m t-minus twenty-four hours from swinging into blue ice. It sounds glorious and exciting… and a bit terrifying. The question is: terrifying good, or terrifying bad?

It would probably be better not to talk about this—online, in a public forum, or even inside my head. It might be more effective to simply forge ahead and forget/ignore this anxiety. But that’s not how I operate. And besides, it takes so much blasted time to switch sports that you—if you are me—are going to have to get close to the deep dark thoughts just by virtue of the minutes spent preparing.

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Post Op

Osito with Golden Retriver's (his favorite non-poodle breed) pictured above as inspiration for healingLast year, during my first winter in New Hampshire, I made the mistake of asking what one does for culture in North Conway. Not that wanting culture in North Conway is a mistake--you can want it--you’re just not supposed to admit you want it. Especially not to someone like Freddie.

When I slipped last winter and inquired about culture, Freddie and I were in a car driving back from climbing. I don’t remember what spurred me to ask him, but I do remember his answer: “That’s what we come here to get away from,” he said.

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Common Denominator

The trouble with having a blog is a sudden desire to take basic elements like your decision to go to Africa with shoes that suddenly feel too small, how to fix the squeak of your van with a wooden spatula, the death of your grandmother, the unexpected appearance of antivenin five months after you needed it, and an utter sense of self-imposed displacement equal only to the sleep-deprived elation of a new project, and put it together in a pithy way as some sort of logical explanation of life.

Instead, I think I might just talk about the rodents. They were the least expected. On Monday I gave my first talk about Namibia at Colorado College. Somewhere between addressing the conservation work and the climbing, I talked about snuggling rodents. It was not planned.

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Vertical Homesteading

Home In Namibia, Photo by Peter Doucette

--In collaboration with Petzl, check out the good things, and the good people who make that company one of the best--

Quick test: What’s the first word that comes to mind when I say the following four places: New Hampshire, Namibia. Spain. Wyoming.

Did anyone else answer home? I’ve been in Wyoming for five weeks now, before that it was Europe for three, Namibia for five, and New Hampshire for 3.5 months before that. I pay a mortgage in Colorado, but I’m homesteading everywhere else.

Visitation implies a temporary sampling of an area. Homesteading implies making an effort at living in an area. I think I’m doing the latter—through climbing.

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