State Route 1 runs along the Pacific Coast for most of California’s length, winding steeply and sharply along some of the world’s most spectacular shores. But about forty miles north of Mendocino, the highway takes an abrupt turn east and joins Highway 101 further inland. The highway leaves the coast because that part of California is so rugged that the highway’s planners simply couldn’t build a road there. Known as the Lost Coast, the area boasts some of the most incredible coastline in the world, with steep cliffs and hills dropping straight into the ocean.
About thirty miles south of Lake Tahoe and thirty miles north of Yosemite, the Carson Iceberg Wilderness is a little known gem in California’s high country. Just beyond Bear Valley on Highway 4, the wilderness is past the point at which the road is maintained in winter, making access impossible after the first heavy snows of winter. I led an introductory backpacking trip to Carson Iceberg just before the beginning of the winter season.
Fourteen thousand, one hundred and sixty-two foot Mount Shasta is a dormant volcano that rises in solitary drama in the far north of California. A few years ago, I attempted the climb with my father. We were turned back by low snow, poor conditions, and severe dehydration. Over Memorial Day weekend I tried again with a group of friends from school.
At 9,983′, Pyramid Peak is the highest point in California’s Desolation Wilderness. Since it is only about a three hour drive from the San Francisco Bay Area, Desolation Wilderness is the most heavily-used wilderness area in the United States. Thus exploring Desolation during the winter months has a number of advantages—not only do the snow-covered peaks make for spectacular vistas, but most of the visitors that swarm the area during the summer are kept away by colder temperatures and feet of snow.
One of the most popular winter activities in Yosemite National Park is skiing or snowshoeing Glacier Point Road. The road is closed to cars in winter beyond the Badger Pass Ski Resort, but most of the road is groomed, making the 10.3 mile road a relatively easy ski route. The reward is a spectacular view of Yosemite Valley.
The winter retreat for the Stanford Outdoor Education Program instructors was a back country skiing trip off of Highway 88 near Kirkwood Mountain Resort. We left campus early on a beautiful Saturday morning. Despite a flat tire in Jackson, we managed to make it to Tragedy Springs Road, of which only the first hundred feet or so had been plowed. We parked in the plowed area and distributed group gear and food. Then we strapped on our skis and went on our way.
In late October of 2008, I led an attempt to climb Sequoia National Park’s 11,188-foot Mount Silliman as part of the Outdoor Education Program. We left Stanford on Friday evening and arrived at Lodgepole campsite a little after midnight. Mount Silliman is in the same area as a peak I climbed last spring, Alta Peak; it lies a few miles to the northwest. We went to sleep almost as soon as we arrived.
Early in September of 2008, I attempted a climb of 14,153-foot Mount Sill in the Palisade Range of the eastern Sierras. About one year prior, I had tried the climb but was turned back on the second morning by inclement weather and ill health. On that trip I climbed Mt. Agassiz instead. This time I was determined to make the summit with my three friends, Kate, Whitney, and Ian.
At the end of June during the summer of 2008, I left for Yosemite with a group of Stanford Outdoors leaders. Our goal was ambitious: to watch the sun rise from the top Half Dome.
As an instructor for Stanford’s Outdoor Education Program, I led an introductory mountaineering trip to 11,204 foot Alta Peak in Sequoia National Park during May of 2008. We left the Bay Area at around 7:30 PM on Friday evening, and drove all the way to the park that night. We camped at Lodgepole, a front country campsite with a visitor center, market, flush toilets, and showers.
Every quarter, the instructors of the Stanford Outdoor Education Program (OEP) go on a retreat to refine skills and plan trips and lessons. For our Spring 2008 retreat, we took advantage of a spell of hot weather to brave the cold, swift waters of Arroyo Seco, a gorgeous canyon east of Big Sur. Not only is Arroyo Seco beautiful, but it’s much closer to campus than the Sierras, so it made for a short and easy drive.
I managed to sneak five days of skiing in before New Years during the 2007 – 2008 season. After an usually low snow year for 2006-2007, it was encouraging that Tahoe got several feet of snow before Christmas. Despite this early snowfall, all of the Tahoe ski areas suffered from the usual early season low coverage with lots of exposed rocks.
During our week off from school for Thanksgiving, my friend Paul and I decided to do a short backpacking trip along California’s Point Reyes National Seashore. We left early on Monday morning, piling ourselves and our gear into Paul’s 1978 Volkswagen bus. The morning was cloudy and gray, with dreary rain tumbling from the overcast sky. We drove for a little over two hours, picked up a permit, and parked at the trailhead.
Shortly after I returned from Alaska in the summer of 2007, my family left for a short backpacking trip in the Eastern Sierra. My mother, my father, and I met my father’s high school friend, Chris, near the town of Bishop, California. Our goal was the 14,153 foot summit of Mt. Sill, a remote peak in the Palisade Range.
After the first two weeks of my trip to Alaska in the summer of 2007 (see Wrangell Mountains Part One for stories from those two weeks), I began designing my field study for the second segment of the program. Along with a group of three other students, I decided to study the issues involved in safe bear-human coexistence, including identifying bear habitat to help backcountry travelers avoid or at least be conscious of it, and researching methods for storing bear attractants in the backcountry. We spent about a week researching these topics and designing our field study. Then we embarked on an eighteen-day journey through the Wrangell Mountains.
I spent two months in Alaska during the summer of 2007 as part of a college field study program. On our day off, a group of people in the program decided to go ice climbing on the Root Glacier, one of the two major glaciers in the area.
If you follow the archipelago of southeastern Alaska north to the Gulf, the first mountain range after the coast is the Chugach. Stay on the far eastern edge of Alaska and continue north forty miles. There lie the Wrangell Mountains, a stretch of peaks forged by ice and fire, carved by glaciers, forced upward by the crashing of tectonic plates, and scorched by volcanoes. In 1980, Wrangell – St. Elias National Park and Preserve was created. At 13 million acres, it is the largest national park in the United States. The old copper mining towns of McCarthy and Kennecott lie at the center of the park. I spent two months during the summer of 2007 in a field study program for undergraduates based out of McCarthy.
The final trip of my Advanced Wilderness Skills class this quarter was a student-led backpacking trip to the Emigrant Wilderness. I’d never visited the Emigrant Wilderness, but it was described to me as a larger, less-crowded Desolation Wilderness. I knew the Desolation Wilderness to be a gorgeous area, so I was excited to explore Emigrant.
As a full-time student, most of my climbing these days is done in gyms. So I was excited for an opportunity to spend a weekend climbing on real rock at Phantom Spires, an area south of Lake Tahoe off of Highway 50 with excellent climbing on granite spires. Phantom spires is a neat place to climb because it has routes of varying difficulties, opportunities for trad leading, sport climbing, and top-roping, and it’s a beautiful area but only a ten minute walk from the parking lot.
Just a few miles east of Kirkwood Ski Resort, across Highway 88 from Carson Pass, lies a mountain called Round Top. At 10,381 feet, the peak looks daunting, but it requires no technical climbing to reach the summit. I attempted to climb the peak with a group of nine other Stanford students through Stanford’s Outdoor Education Program.
A longtime alpine skiier, I was roughly introduced to the back country version of that sport one weekend during April of 2007. I was a student in Stanford’s Outdoor Education Program, and I was excited to venture into Tahoe National Forest with eight other students and two instructors. We met to organize our gear on Friday the thirteenth late in the afternoon. After testing stoves, pitching tents, and checking out gear, we threw our packs and skis into a large SUV and a monstrous pickup truck and hit the road.
We began the drive to Northstar around three P.M. on January 4. As soon as we hit 4500′, it suddenly started snowing heavily. Millions of giant snowflakes extinguished visibility and blanketed the road. I took the wheel from Kayleigh, and slowly drove the Ford Escape over the white highway. When we finally reached Kayleigh’s cabin at Northstar, we knew the heavy snow meant we were in for an awesome first day.
Kirkwood is my favorite resort in Tahoe. It’s small, out of the way, and less crowded than almost any other resort in the area. It also gets the most snow of anywhere in the lower 48. With 7800′ base, it snows top to bottom at Kirkwood when it’s raining on the bottom half of many other resorts. Kirkwood also has an awesome variety of terrain, from solid intermediate slopes to extremely steep bowls and chutes for experts.
My first ski trip of the year was a one day bomb up to Northstar on December 16. Northstar is not one of my favorite resorts; it gets too crowded, is too low, and lacks really tough expert terrain. Despite opening up two entirely new ski areas, it still suffers from the problems suggested by its nickname “Flatstar.” Any ski resort that advertises, of all things, its snowmaking system should immediately cause skiers to doubt its snow quality. Northstar prides itself on the most extensive snowmaking system in Tahoe, and the snowmakers were out in full force the day we were there, spraying us with cold pellets of manmade precipitation. Because the base was so small, only a few lifts were open, and all runs rated more difficult than blue were closed.
I gunned the Highlander down Miner Road and smiled to myself as I noticed that the stoplight at the intersection with Camino Pablo was already green. A few minutes later I turned into the Orinda Safeway. As the three rucksacks in the back of the car testified, I was on my way to go backpacking with two of my best friends.
One year after I climbed the Grand Teton for the first time, I returned to climb it again, this time with my parents. On my first climb, I’d taken the Exum Ridge route (5.4-5.5). This time, we would follow the path of the first ascent along the Owen-Spalding route.
I’ve flown into Jackson Hole, Wyoming twice now. But, no matter how many times I do it, I will never cease to be blown away by the final approach to Jackson. The small airport only takes prop planes and very small jets, and both times I was on a prop plane. If you look out the plane’s right side as you approach Jackson from the north, abruptly to the west rises the Teton mountain range, its grey and brown rocks speckled with snow patches and glaciers. Since the plane was so close to landing, even the more modest peaks of Middle Teton, Teewinot, and Mt. Owen stand about four thousand feet above your window. But between Middle Teton and Teewinot the unmistakable form of the tallest mountain in the Tetons—the aptly-named Grand Teton—carves out its place on the horizon.
Straddling the Montana-Idaho border, the Bitterroots are a remote but spectacularly beautiful mountain range in the Northern Rockies. It was among these rugged peaks that Lewis and Clark crossed the Continental Divide in the early nineteenth century. The summer after my sophomore year in high school, I spent a month in Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana on a wilderness leadership training program. The trip included an unforgettable nine day, sixty-five mile backpacking trip across the Bitterroots, much of which would turn out to be off the trail.
The town of Skagway is nestled on the shore of the Pacific Ocean in southwestern Alaska. It is situated at the northern end of Alaska’s Inside Passage, a busy shipping lane dotted with tiny, often uninhabited isles and rimmed by countless blue-white glaciers. In 1897, gold was discovered in the Klondike region, and soon thousands of prospectors flocked to Skagway. It became a bustling mining town, complete with its own railway, port, and brand of Old West lawlessness. But within two years the gold rush subsided, and Skagway’s economy collapsed.
I grew up backpacking in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, but for most of my childhood, I hadn’t done much backpacking anywhere else. So the summer after my eighth grade year, I spent three weeks on trip through the American southwest on a trip with nine other students my age. We met at Oakland International Airport and flew to Las Vegas, where we met our trip leaders, Courtney and Porter.