Rolling Back

We’ve firmed up our plan for climbing Devil’s Tower – we’re going with Wyoming Mountain Guides on July 11th. We’re doing a trad refresher on the 10th, and then climbing the tower on the 11th. (“trad” in this context means “setting your own protection as you’re climbing, rather than using pre-set bolts in the rock). Here’s a picture from their web site:

I’m giving up on what I’ve been doing for the last two months or so. I moved to a strength training scheme, and rearranged my week to support that. But – it hasn’t worked. I tore a hamstring, and my bench press hasn’t improved at all. So, I give up. One of the things about being sober and aware is that I can say “well, this isn’t working”. So, it isn’t working.

So I’m going back to swim M/W, ride, jog and lift T/TH, Friday off, long ride Saturday, and attempt a short jog on Sunday. Now we’ll try this for a while and see what happens.

Now, a person smarter than I am might say “Gee, Jim, maybe it’s time to give up on working out altogether. I don’t see your contemporaries at the gym.” Well, actually, you do – maybe not a lot of them, it’s true. But I see what happens to Pucketts that don’t work out, and it’s not pretty. (No, it’s not pretty what’s happening to me, either, and I’ve never stopped working out. But, trust me, it can be worse).

We’ve sent off our taxes for 2025. We’ve been using the same tax accountant since 1998 – one of the managers at Fidelity Investments recommended her, and we just kept using her. She’s done our taxes from Utah, Arizona, Utah, Montana, Panama, Alabama, and now from Colorado. (yes, we’ve lived in Colorado before, but that was just half-time, and we kept our legal residence in Arizona at the time). Our taxes are probably getting a lot simpler now, but – well, I just prefer using our old, trusted retainer. Maybe next year, when we have only Social Security, our disbursements from our retirement accounts, and only have lived one place for the whole year, we’ll try doing it ourselves.

So now I’m definite for heli-skiing in Canada, Iron Horse in May, and Devil’s Tower in July. Ethel is still waffling on Everest Base Camp. She keeps saying that she wants to go to Germany, and see where I was stationed. Whenever she says this, I say “Buy a ticket”. But she won’t do that. She just keeps talking about it. I’d go tomorrow, if she’d buy a ticket today. It’s really that simple. Well, okay – I have a lot of medical appointments set up already. But…but….forget the buts. I’d go anyway. Seeing all of these doctors doesn’t seem to have helped me all that much.

So now, I’ll walk into the other room and say “Buy tickets for Europe.” Let’s see what happens.

(Update – she didn’t.)

The Year

Well, it looks like we have our plan for the year – well, mostly.

We finish out the ski season here, and in late March, I go to the outback of British Columbia to do heli skiing with CMH – Canadian Mountain Helicopters – at the Galena lodge.

At the end of May, I have the Iron Horse bicycle event, riding from Durango to Silverton. We’ve been planning on doing the trek through Nepal to Everest Base Camp in the fall – that hasn’t been nailed down yet, though.

And now, we’re going to meet a friend in Wyoming in July, to climb Devil’s Tower.

(this is a stock photo, off the Internet. Since we haven’t done it yet, we don’t have any photographs).

We visited Devil’s Tower back in 2020, when we were doing our COVID walkabout. Looking at it then, I knew that I wanted to climb it, but Ethel hadn’t show any interest. But our friend Grant in Kalispell was interested, and for some reason he finally has stated that he’s ready, so – let’s do it!

We won’t be doing this on our own – we’ll be using a guide. There’s no way that I would attempt to climb an 867 foot tower without having somebody along who knows which way to go 🙂 It’s surprisingly reasonable getting a guide – they’ll even give us a refresher on big-wall climbing in the package. (I haven’t done a multipitch climb since 2004 or so, when my friend Todd and I climbed the West Slabs of the North Face of Mount Olympus in Salt Lake).

So – go heli skiing, ride over two mountain passes between Durango and Silverton, climb Devil’s Tower, and hike 80 miles round trip to Everest Base Camp. That sounds like a pretty good year.

Had physical therapy today. The hamstring is a Grade 1 – or low Grade 2 – longitudinal tear; it’s not as bad as I was afraid it was. So I should be able to recover in plenty of time. I am riding, and I’m lifting with my upper body and swimming, so I won’t get completely out of shape. Which is a good thing, given the year that we’ve got planned.

Still no snow here, and nothing in the forecast. But I’m going skiing tomorrow anyway.

Pagosaversary

Yesterday we celebrated one year in Pagosa Springs. It was our Pagosaversary!

And, as it happens, I joined the local gym the day that we arrived, so I just had to pay my annual dues. It comes out to less than $40/month for the two of us, for a full gym and lap pool a half a mile away. I think that’s a good value.

So we’ve lived here for a year. And we still really like it – well, okay, not having any snow in my yard is weird. But we went skiing yesterday, and most of the Texans have left, and Wolf Creek is a really nice place to call your home mountain.

After skiing with Ethel for a while yesterday, she took off to take Juneau snowshoeing, and I did big bumps laps on the Alberta chair. After that, I told her to go ahead and book my trip. So I’m going to Kelowna, British Columbia, the last week of March, to spend five days climbing into helicopters and skiing down big mountains.

We live in remote southwest Colorado, And Kelowna is a sizable city in the middle of BC. And there is no convenient way to get from here to there. So I’m losing a day on either side of the trip to travel. But, again, I suppose it’s worth it. I’m only doing this once. Might as well go big or go home.

This doesn’t affect our travel plans – such as they are – for the Everest Base Camp trek this fall, but Ethel has been shanghied^H^H^H^H^H^H asked to take on the treasurer position at our church, and the budget cycle is in September and October. So that may put the kibosh on trekking in Nepal. Yes, there’s the spring trekking season, but that’s when the farmers in the valleys are burning their fields, and they say that the smoke can get really bad. So we’ll figure it out.

We also want to go to Europe for a while. She wants to see where I spent two years sitting on an M1 Abrams tank keeping the Russians out of Paris, and the beaches at Normandy, and I want to actually jump on trains and just travel around Europe for a while. But I don’t know when we’ll do that. There is only so much time – and there’s only so much money. I have to let our financial advisors refill the tanks after we spend all this money 🙂

Pagosaversary. Funny, we never noted our first year anywhere else. The longest we’ve spent in one home was seven years – that was the first Park City – and the longest that we’ve spent in a single area was eight years – that was Anthem and New River, in Arizona. I’d like to make it here longer than that.

As long as it snows 🙂

Winterless

Here’s the tram at Jay Peak, in Vermont.

We’re not there. I’ve tried to get Ethel to go there, but she won’t. She’s so mean and selfish.

Here’s a post from this time last year. I’m not showing you what my back yard looks like now, because it looks exactly like this. Winter just ain’t happening. It’s happening in Vermont, but not in Colorado. Now, I admit, I’m as surprised about this as anyone is. Southwest Colorado has always been a pretty good bet for great skiing and great weather. But not last year, and not this year.

We came to Pagosa for five or six weeks in the winter of 23/24, and the skiing was great – or, at least, that’s the way that I remember it, and that seems to be what this diary says. Right now, here in Pagosa Springs, we’re not wild about the skiing – I went today, and it was better than (say) North Carolina, but there was a lot of, shall we say, firmly packed powder.

But one thing that Southwest Colorado has that Jay Peak will never have – Texans. Lots and lots of Texans. I thought that they would have gone home by now. I was wrong. Now, there are nothing like the throngs of Texans that we had the last two weeks, but there are still plenty, and they fill up the parking lot and the lift lines….and the restaurants, and the stores, and they are all driving all day long everywhere.

Okay, let’s tell the truth and shame the Devil. We won’t be going to Jay Peak, Vermont. We’re going to stay right here. And right here is a whole lot better than (say) Alabama. And who knows? Eventually the Texans will leave, and maybe it’ll start snowing.

But it’s a nice fantasy. Besides, in Newport, VT, I could buy the house I have here for about 200K less. Whups – I forgot. I was going to stop thinking about that.

Aging Is For The Birds

I’ve spent a good bit of time like this, after ski days – taking off my boots and sitting there, looking down at them, meditating or ruminating – usually feeling rather pleased with the ski day.

Today was a pretty good ski day, except for the fact that I can’t ski nearly as much as I could just a few years ago. In the winter of 2019-2020, I skied 100 days in a row, and averaged about 15,000 feet of vertical a day – with almost every foot of that vertical being steeps, bumps and trees. Today, I managed just over 10,000 feet, and I hadn’t skied in several days, and it was almost all groomers.

And yet it left me exhausted. So, while I had that mild bit of post-ski glow, I was aware that things are still going downhill, pretty fast.

Now, we said many years ago that, when we were too old to ski, we’d go live in Latin America on the beach. But now we’ve already lived in Latin America on the beach. Ethel won’t go back to Panama. So I’m pitching Cartagena, Colombia. It’s big enough to have all of the service we need, it’s got three – count ’em, three – Episcopal churches, it has local SCUBA diving, and it’s got to have plenty of meetings. But Ethel won’t even consider it. So, here I am, going downhill fast, and watching my skiability decline, quickly, and can’t do anything about it.

Speaking of which – my cancer doc wants me to get an MRI to see if the illness is progressing, but Aetna says no. I just found out tonight that the pre-authorization had been denied. I don’t know what that means – it may mean that we’ll have to do a biopsy, instead. Or it may mean that I’m just supposed to go up to Camp Bird on the Imogene Pass road and wait for death. I’m not sure.

Kim says “Talk to the doctor on Monday. In the meantime, there’s no reason to be upset.” But I am quietly cursing. Yeah, I’m spoiled – for 30+ years, I was a software engineer, which meant that I had a good income and great benefits. If I needed some kind of medical care, it was simply provided.

Now, I’m supposed to just sit here and die.

But I’m not bitter!

Left Behind

We’re in Alabama, and my granddaughters made pancakes for me. So I ate them Harry Bosch style.

Harry and Maddie generally get pancakes at DuPar’s, and they eat them by pouring the syrup onto the plate, and then putting the pancakes on the syrup, rather than the other way around. No, I can’t really tell any difference. But I do like Bosch 🙂

If my granddaughters are cooking for me, then we must be in Alabama. But I almost wasn’t. Yesterday I got abandoned – left behind. Remember Willem Dafoe in Platoon? When the helicopter was taking off, leaving him behind while the Viet Cong was coming out of the woods? Yeah, like that.

We got to the airport at about 4:45 for a 5:15 flight. We went through security, and Ethel got pulled aside so they could go through her bag. I went on to the gate.

Well, I mean, I thought I went to the gate. Durango has few gates, and only two big “rooms” – one for American, and one for United. So I walked in and went to the right, just like the last time we were at this airport.

In that room, they had rows of seating, and a guitar, on stand – just sitting there, with a note saying it was available for playing. So I picked it up and played it. I was just sitting there, waiting for Ethel, playing guitar.

Finally I checked my phone, and I had texts from her – one said that I could go to the gate and they would check my carry-on bag all the way through for me. So I went to the gate, and showed her my boarding pass….

….which was for the other airline. At the other gate. At the other end of the airport.

So I ran over there, and saw the “Boarding Closed” sign, and looked out the window, and jumped up nd down and waved my arms – to no avail. They closed to door of the airplane and rolled the ladder away.

And there I stood.

Ethel was on the plane, going to Denver, and I was standing in Durango, all by myself.

Okay, the nice lady at the ticket counter took care of it – she put me on the flight two hours later, and she arranged to have Ethel’s flight from Denver to Huntsville moved to the next flight as well, so I caught up with her in Denver and we got to Nashville a couple of hours late. All my fault. Just wasn’t thinking.*

I slept pretty well last night, and went to the little Hartselle gym this morning and did my VO2Max ride – an ersatz version of it, on a LifeFitness exerbike – and my heart rate got up to 155, so I’m glad that coming off that calcium channel blocker seems to have worked. I don’t know if I’m going to try to go to the pool while I’m here; I’m thinking that I won’t. But the fact is that I don’t have that much to do while I’m here, so even though it’s inconvenient, I might go ahead and swim tomorrow.

We don’t have our mats, and this little AirBnB – although very nice – doesn’t have carpet, so I don’t know how we can do Yoga with Adrienne. It always seems like I let something get in the way of what I should be doing.

*N.B. – I had woken up at 1:30, and couldn’t get back to sleep. So I’ll say – of COURSE I wasn’t thinking! But it’s still my fault.

Opening Day

They said that they were opening on Saturday, but only the beginner lift.

But they’ve changed their minds 🙂 There will be at least two of the regular lifts open.

So, tomorrow morning, we’re going to drive up the hill to get in a few runs. It won’t be great, and there won’t be a lot of it, but it’ll be sliding on snow 🙂 We had to go into the attic to get our boot bags, and drop down the Thule to get the ski poles out. For some reason, although we left the skis down in the garage, we put the poles up. No, it doesn’t make sense. But we were in a hurry, I reckon.

I am supposed to ride for 2:15 tomorrow. I don’t know how I’m going to fit it in. I might have to wake up really early and get started while Ethel is still in bed. I’m not doing nearly as much as I used to do, so I really think that I need to be careful to at least do all of the schedule workouts, or I will slide down into the abysmal oblivion of sloth and inactivity.

And, besides, I have that Iron Horse thing schedule for May.

Ethel was talking about cycling the Icefields Parkway from Banff to Jasper, but I think that she’s started to refocus on Everest Base Camp, instead. She’s watching the videos and talking to people. Who, me? Oh, no!…don’t make me trek through Nepal to Everest Base Camp, B’rer Ethel! ….the high point of the trek isn’t at base camp; it’s at the Kala Patthar pass, around 18.500 feet. That’s not Kilimanjaro – in fact, it’s 800 feet lower – but the trek round trip is 130 km or 80 miles, and that’s twice as far as we trekked on Kili. So it’s definitely something to do.*

We leave Monday for Alabama; it seems that the forecast is calling for a lot of snow for the week that we are gone, so things should greatly improve by the time we get back.

Today was a lazy day. We did nothing besides yoga. Ethel is lost in Neal Stephenson’s “SEVENEVES”, and only comes up for air when I make a fuss about it. I’m reading Bosch and Ballard books and taking the odd nap.

Tonight we’re eating Chinese with friends. I’m not hungry, but that’s OK – I’ll figure out some way through the menu without feeling stuffed. And, if I do get stuffed, I’ll be empty in an hour.

*yes, we finished watching Cool Hand Luke today 🙂

Anchors

Well, the other day, I was talking about how I didn’t have anyone here to do anything with. But then, on Friday, I went climbing with a couple of guys.

We went to the Big Meadows crag, in the San Juans, and play with gear on rocks.

It had been five years since I had laid hand to stone, and I was definitely stiff and rusty. But I wasn’t as stiff as the climbing rope that I brought with me – it had been in the bag for at least those five years, and it was too stiff to bend enough to go through the belay device. So we wound up using a different rope. (My friend John, who has done more mountaineering than I have done living, told me to take it home, run it through a cycle in the washing machine, and to throw in a half bottle of Downy. Now I need some Downy 🙂

But I had a great time. I’ve never been sure if I love the mountains because I can ski and climb in them, or if I love skiing and climbing because they get me in the mountains – but it’s all a win, either way.

However, it showed me – even more – what terrible shape I’m in. Yesterday I did a full 2:15 aerobic ride, but today I didn’t even try to do my one hour run/ellip. I see the cardio PA on Wednesday; I’ll as her if this is normal, or should I apply for medical euthanasia.

Tomorrow, I am going to to pool, again to start over; I haven’t been for four weeks. They were closed starting 20 October for cleaning, and the next week was the surgical trip, and then I wasn’t allowed to submerse my body….I am going to the pool even though I probably won’t want to do so. I have to do something. Don’t I?

They have me taking a calcium channel blocker to keep my AFib from doing any damage, but one problem is that it keeps my heart rate down – so I can’t work hard, and if I try, I get exhausted, because my heart can’t pump hard enough to feed my body. I started to skip that pill this morning, but I remembered that I’m not supposed to stop taking it on my own device; if I stopped taking it, and then had a stroke, I would be getting an earful from Ethel. So I’m still taking it.

Now I’m going to go get in my recliner. That’s what you do, when you feel like me.

But we’ve already made arrangements to climb again next Friday 🙂

Our Own Private Hillarys

Here we are at the start – the Lemosho Gate, way down at 7500 feet elevation at the west end of the base of Mount Kilimanjaro.

We got to know each other pretty well over the next nine days. There’s not too much that you can hide when you are together sixteen hours a day, and everyone is at their rawest and most vulnerable. Remarkably, I don’t recall any cross words or conflicts on the team (which may just mean that I am, once again, out of touch) – everybody stayed mutually supportive the whole time.

We were a fairly diverse group – three Pucketts, a tall blondish Virginian, three people from the San Francisco Bay – but no natives; one from Japan, one from Peru, and one from Mexico. One Kiwi and one Aussie – but the Aussie was actually from the Bay Area, although he’s lived in Brisbane for thirty years. And one lady from Houston by way of Atlanta.

The guides had us do chants – they’d say “One Team!” and we would respond “One Dream!”, then they’d say “One Dream!” and we would respond “One Team!” – but I’ve been thinking about it, and I simply don’t believe that that was the case. I don’t think that we had “one dream”. I really have no idea why the others were there, but then, I didn’t know why I was there, either.

When they asked Edmund Hilary why he climbed Everest, he responded “Because it’s there!”. Everybody knows this. However,, the logical will note that this is not, actually, an answer. The fact that Everest was there was not a reason for climbing it – that statement is a tautology. Everest was always there, but nobody climbed it. A true answer would involve an analysis of why the presence of the mountain caused Edmund to climb it, and he skillfully avoided that issue with one of the most glib, and quoted, responses in history.

I’m grateful to say that everybody made the summit. But our reactions to it were very varied. And I wonder if that has anything to do with our varied reasons for climbing it.

We wound up split, on Summit Day, into three groups – a lead group of eight, and then two groups of one each, who were, for there own reasons, going slower as we approached the top. But then, when we got there – well, it was strange. Eight of us were there, all excited and getting our picture taken in front of the sign.

But, then, things changed – four of us were suddenly alone. After taking seven hard days to get to the top, four of the eight suddenly disappeared; they headed back down. I didn’t even know that they had gone. Four of us – three Pucketts and the Aussie expat – were hanging around the summit.

The Aussie was ecstatic; happy and hopping around. Ethel and Floyd were crying, which really confused me. Me? I was quiet – just sort of walking around and looking.

I suspect that all of our responses had something to do with whatever our various reasons were for climbing that thing. I do know that my response fit my patterns; I’m almost always more into the training than I am the event; for me, the event is the excuse, and the motivation, for the training.*

Neither Kim nor David have offered any explanation for the waterworks. They cried, and I have no idea why.

I suspect that each of us – all ten – have our own private Edmund Hillarys, our own internal reasons for doing this stupid thing that we can’t even articulate for ourselves, much less make plain to anyone else. So we say words that seem to make sense, but fall very short or actual explanation.

I’ve long held that many of our “decisions” happen either in the spirit – through God – or the gut – through instinct. But the brain doesn’t like the idea of not being consulted, so, once the soul or the belly has decided on something. the brain comes along and says “Yeah, I meant to do this all along, and here are the conscious reasons – do these make sense? Good.”

That’s not an explanation. It’s saying that explanations can’t really happen, because explanations take place in conscious thought, and that’s just not sufficient to cover what’s happening above, or below, the level of consciousness.

…who, me? Today is supposed to be a ride, and a run, and lifting – however, I feel the symptoms of a cold, and so I’ve taken cold meds and I’m waiting for the symptoms to go away. I’ve also got two meetings today – a mid-afternoon Zoom, and an early evening meeting of my home group. We’ll see how much of this actually happens.

*my first Ironman was a great exception to that, but then, Ironman is always an exception to everything.

We’re Back Home

We got home last night at about 7:15 or so, after some flight delays. It was 41 hours from getting on the first plane, to getting off the last one. We’re tired. But we did manage to watch most of the Bama-Georgia game last night, mainly because Ethel would not be denied.

Bama, to most peoples’ surprise, won.

This morning, we didn’t go to church – instead, we went to a meeting. The first non-Puckett, non-Zoom meeting that we’d been to since September 9th. Now, those meetings count as meetings, but….well, we made sure to make a meeting. We would have made one last night, except – flight delays.

We mostly got unpacked today, and Ethel got some cleaning done, and groceries in the house. It’s going to take a while before we really feel at home, since our bodies are kind of spread out across four continents and three hemispheres. But we have at least started some semblance of our lives.

We did have to shift the thermostat over from “cool” to “heat” last night, though. Now highs here are in the 60s, and lows in the 40s. So we’ve even enjoyed having the fireplace on.

My current plan for tomorrow is – assuming that He concurs – to go to the gym and get into the pool, and see what I can do for a Monday. Since Kilimanjaro is officially over, it’s time to go back to “normal life”. Ski passes are now on sale, and we should be doing that in a month, and the current plan is to do the Ironhorse ride from Durango to Silverton next May, so I reckon I’ll go back to normal training.

….or as normal as it can be, given how badly my right thigh hurts. And I mean “hurts”, as to needing pain medication, even if it’s sitting still. We’ll see what happens.

So – “There and Back Again – The Pucketts’ Holiday”. We had our adventure, but now we’re home in our Hobbit-hole, with the teapot just beginning to sing. The adventure was an adventure, but now we want our lives back.