Armenia Bound

In conjunction with Patagonia's The Cleanest Line and Kate Rutherford

Any climbing trip starts with a conversation. Kate and mine went something like this.

Kate: “What’s your fall look like?”
Majka: “October’s wide open.”
Both of us: “Want to go somewhere good?”

The basalt columns of Armenia. Photo: Gabe RogelWe considered Norway but were scared off by the rain; Germany was a strong contender but neither of us wanted to drink that much beer; and as crack climbers (aka sport climbing on tufas feels demoralizing) we were seeking a new ascetic in both the climbing lines and the surrounding culture.

Click to read more ...

The Best Worst Idea

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....

Click to read more ...

Robbery Friendships, An Additive Adventure Entry

Haile, Photo By Peter DoucetteIn Conjunction With OutsideTV.com and Osprey Packs

...I’d like to say I went straight for the direct question: Hello, you look familiar; did I put you in jail a few years ago? But really, I stalled. We were hiking up to the base of the rock wall over hand-built terraces cradling the lush remnants of the recent rain. This year was the rainiest in three decades in Northern Ethiopia. That’s a big deal anywhere—it’s a huge deal when you are in the exact land where one million people were killed in a famine in 1984. This year, new trees were sprouting in muddy soil, yellow flowers covered desert thorns on tree branches, and wheat, barley and teff fields undulated in the wind....

Click to read more ...

The End of the Beginning, An Additive Adventure Entry

Mango Tree Planting at Laelay Wukro School GroundsIn Conjunction With OutsideTV.com and Osprey Packs

The bowels of the Addis Ababa airport are laced with sweet, thick exhaust. Five minutes ago--forty-five minutes before my departure back to the United States--a man in a sharp-creased navy uniform summoned me away from the fluorescent passenger holding tank with a gun holstered at each hip. He didn’t give me his name, just confirmed mine. Now I’m trying to keep up as he strides quickly over the oil stained concrete floor in the dim light of the airport underbelly.

I know what this is about, but I’m not about to tell the man. The gun. It keeps coming up in my travels in Ethiopia. The gun; and the forty pounds of metal with it.

Click to read more ...

Me, As a Dot. An Additive Adventure Entry*

Photo By Gabe RogelFrom OutsideTV.com.

I have no idea who the people are who will change my life in the next two years. I had no idea, two years ago, that a woman making a spontaneous stop in a Patagonia store in California would change mine now. Susanne Conrad caught a glimpse of a tall hardbound book called Vertical Ethiopia. I’d written it, but that didn’t matter to her, then. Ethiopia mattered.

A few months later, a random email appeared in my inbox. Sapna Dayal introduced herself and suggested that we might have much in common. She was the executive director of imagine1day, a non-profit dedicated to changing the world’s future via building schools in Ethiopia. We spent following winter months talking. I’d come home from ice climbing in New Hampshire and watch it get dark and cold in New England as Sapna would pause her afternoon in a rainy Vancouver for us to brainstorm about how to work together in the high desert in the Horn of Africa.

Click to read more ...