When you’ve waited 35 years to go to Italy, the wine, pasta, meat and cheese will be just as good as you imagined. When you’ve waited 35 yeas to go to Italy, you will likely have overestimated the amount of wine, pasta, meat and cheese that is reasonable to consume. My Garmin Nuvi has a search setting for “Winery.” It’s … Read More
Post Post
It’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 … Read More
West to East
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 … Read More
Going Big
In Conjunction with Pemba Serves Five days ago I drove out of Eldorado Canyon after seven pitches of climbing with two professional women who live in Boulder. We’d spent the day climbing sandstone cracks freshly crisped by the proceeding evening storms. The river roared beneath us for the full day making communication difficult and creating isolation of judgment and choices for … Read More
Rolling With The Cool Kids
An Additive Adventure Entry In Conjunction WithOutsideTV.com and Osprey Packs It’s taken three months, but it’s happened. I was spotted. Rollerblading. It was just as awkward as it sounds. I was skating on 30th, or trying to skate amidst the gravel byproduct from recent construction. I rolled past a woman walking on the sidewalk and was just about to turn up my … Read More
Trifecta, An Additive Adventure Entry
In Conjunction With OutsideTV.com and Osprey Packs It’s spring. It’s time to emerge from winter. It’s time, for me, to stop wearing long underwear. This is hard, because I have been wearing the same pair all winter long. One pair. It’s been easier this way. This wooly bottom/top combination has swathed me while I swung at ice in Montana, Wyoming, Ouray, Michigan, New … Read More
Robbery Friendships, An Additive Adventure Entry
In Conjunction With OutsideTV.com and Osprey Packs This is Haile. In 2006, I put Haile, and thirteen of his closest friends, in jail. In Ethiopian jail, to be precise. I’d like to say it wasn’t my fault, but then again, I was the one climbing in Ethiopia. The story went something like this: Caroline George and I were three hundred feet up a … Read More
The End of the Beginning, An Additive Adventure Entry
In 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. … Read More
The Ballad You Forgot, An Additive Adventure Entry
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LfSxYaZojs&w=450] A blog in conjunction with Osprey Packs and Outside Television. Let’s get this out of the way. I was 8. I made bad choices like singing Don’t Fence Me In at my father’s second wedding and lying down on the carpet in the school loft; I had bad choices foisted upon me, like a two-inch buzz cut—billed as a smart fashion move with … Read More
Me, As a Dot. An Additive Adventure Entry*
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: Climbing Toward Possibility in the Horn … Read More