“This is why,” a mentor once said to me. I was sitting on my pack, soaked and beaten after a stormy day in the mountains. As he walked by he saw me staring open-mouth as the storm clouds pounding us all day rolled off of a distant peak like curtains at a big show — gut-grabbing glory and scale. “This is why,” he said with a nod, and it felt like enough.

I’ve had quite a few of these moments in the last few months. In January I worked a climbing course at Cochise Stronghold in Arizona. It’s dusty and scary and magical to climb there:

In February, Bryan and I hosted our second annual Colorado ice climbing trip — except this time we went ice climbing in Colorado. Stories and photos here.

In March-April I worked a Canyons section of a NOLS semester in Cedar Mesa, Utah. I got really thirsty, snowed on, swam in the coldest water ever, and saw a bunch of incredible human history. This deserves a story of it’s own, but here are some photos instead:

After washing the sand out of my orifices, I snuck in a final few days of ice climbing at Lake Louise outside of Dubois — because you can ice climb in late April in Wyoming.

Marcus and I made our annual pilgrimage to the North Cascades in May, with the usual pattern: get the beat down on Cascade River road, succeed on a few other things. Stories and photos here.

After a few days of needed recovery, I hopped a plane to Alaska to work a NOLS mountaineering course in the Chugach Range in Alaska. This was my first time climbing in Alaska, and was a pretty rad experience. Most of the Alaska climbing scene is centered on the Alaska Range, but in the Chugach I found myself inspired by awesome hanging glaciers and unclimbed faces.

Right now I’m gearing up for a long in-and-out stint in the field for NOLS. I’ll be pretty busy until October. Until then…