Last summer I worked with a guy who talked my ear off about how rad the Patagonian Icefields were. After working down there on a NOLS mountain course in the San Lorenzo area it didn’t take much for him to convince me to buy a plane ticket to join him and another guy I didn’t know on a traverse of the Northern Patagonian Icefield — one of the most remote places on earth. His vision was for small range of mostly-unclimbed peaks on the Western edge of the icefield: through various human- and internal-combustion powered means, travel across a huge lake or three, up and down some big rivers, across 42 miles of ice, and climb some unclimbed peaks. I’ll let the video tell most of the story:

Unbelievably bad weather. Good people. Great times. More photos and info on my Hielo Norte trip report page.

After some down time and work time in the Tetons this winter I’m headed back to Patagonia to work a course for NOLS and then on to a spring time of romping around the PNW. Peace!

It’s near the end of winter, I’m currently packing for a flight into Austral fall, and I’m writing about last summer — weird. Anyway, updates.

After a wonderful winter in Bozeman — lots of community, a rekindled love for snowboarding, and a lot of ice & mixed climbing — my decrepit Toyota hauled me and a lot of climbing gear all the way through Canada to Talkeetna, Alaska for the Ruth Gorge climbing trip I’ve been plotting for a few years and got Bryan on board with finally. It went well. We climbed some stuff and rapped off of other stuff. I haven’t been writing much lately because apparently my creative bandwidth is limited to one thing at a time and I’ve been consumed with the video world — but here’s some fruit of that obsession:

That ended in May, so I had time for mini climbing trips around Fairbanks with friends before launching into a full summer of NOLS field work in the Talkeetna Mountains. Palmer, AK is summer paradise. Lots of veggies and chilling hard between courses. I drug the camera along for one of them, so here’s more video fruit (that’s a weird sentence):

I was in Alaska for almost five months by the time I limped home on the Alcan with a noisy transmission in the Endurance. No explosions, and I had a spare waiting at home. So, after some fall semester sections with NOLS at the Rocky Mountain branch, I flew to Patagonia for a personal expedition on the Northern Patagonian Icefield. In the next few days I’ll have a video, photos, and an account of that trip so stick around!