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.
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.
There are, of course, some very nice things about living in Pagosa Springs. For instance, last week, when I left the gym, I forgot to lock my locker.
Of course, everything was fine. Nothing was taken, and nobody even bothered to lock it for me 🙂 We don’t worry about such stuff very much here in Archuleta County.
Yes, it’s a small town. And it’s a small town in Southwest Colorado, which – except for the current drought, I really like. (Today it snowed all morning, but it’s been so warm that it just kept melting as it hit). While we’re close to Durango, it doesn’t “lean left”, as folks say. Nobody here has asked me for my pronouns.
But this morning, I had a bit of song lyric stuck in my head as I was getting ready to go to the gym. And it occurred to me that it is entirely possible that nobody in Pagosa Springs had ever heard the song. It’s the old Ray Stevens chestnut, “Jeremiah Peabody‘s Polyunsaturated Quick-Dissolving Fast-Acting Pleasant Tasting Green and Purple Pills.” (Woah yeah).
I was careful not to sing this song while doing my lifting and core routine – however, the gym speakers did play Alanis Morrisette’s “All I Really Want”. I actually have a copy of “Jagged Little Pill”. I hope that she got some therapy, eventually.
But that’s a heck of a juxtaposition, ain’t it? Ray Stevens and the Queen of Angst.
The workout went okay – I was weaker on my pushups and pull-ups than I was last week, but I was a little bit faster on the swim. I wonder if skiing yesterday had any effect. I’m going to have to find a way to ski and also work out. When I look back at my last 100 day year – that’s the winter of 2019-2020 – I see that my working out was hit or miss until the last week of February, when I managed to stick to the plan, while skiing every day, although that all went to heck on the middle of March, when they closed the ski hill and the gym on successive days.
Of course, I was six years younger then.
I haven’t yet booked my heli ski trip. I’m concerned about several things – but, mainly, I doubt my own ability to ski the way that I would need to ski, and keep skiing, to take advantage of that opportunity, Yesterday’s 11,000 feet wore me out. For the aforementioned 100 consecutive days of skiing, back in 19-20, I averaged over 12,000 feet per day – and those 12,000 feet were steeps, bumps and trees, in powder.
That was the year that I was SUPPOSED to go heliskiing in Alaska. I was supposed to go at the end of March. But the day before I left, Alaska closed the doors – something about a global pandemic or something.
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.
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.
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 🙂
Here’s the base Webcam at Wolf Creek a few days ago –
…but now that snow has melted already, and there’s nothing new. They were blowing just after this, but then they stopped. It’s just too warm to keep snow on the ground.
Now, Keystone and Arapahoe Basin are competing – A Basin said that they were opening this Sunday with one run, so then Keystone announced that they would open at 3 PM on Saturday, just to get bragging rights 🙂 Last year, Wolf Creek opened first – but that was last year. This year, it’s not looking good early. There’s nothing in the forecast.
Last Thursday, I got my flu and RSV shots. I’ve never had any real reaction to those shots, but this year I did. It felt like I had the flu for about 36 hours. I came out of it enough to function, but wasn’t up to normal. This morning, however, I felt great, so I went and did my Tuesday morning workout – VO2Max bike, half hour ellip and core work. Yes, it’s Monday, but tomorrow morning early we leave for Colorado Springs so that the doctors can diddle in my cardiac spaces. They’re opening up the veins on both sides of my groin to send up two catheters – I understand that one of them is video, and the other one is the one that will actually do the burning in the pulse area of my heart to shut down the wayward nerves causing my AFib.
Tomorrow I just get there in time for a cardiac CT, and then go in early on Wednesday morning to get the actual procedure. I met a lady yesterday at church who had this procedure done three times, and it never worked, and now she has a pacemaker. That wasn’t encouraging. But….well,, the truth is that I’m going to go ahead and take the chance, so no sense pretending that there’s still any decision to be made.
Now, the list of possible side effects is as long as any ad for any medication on TV – where the announcer’s voice is listing all of the possible catastrophes while the video of the commercial shows the patients cavorting and singing and grinning – and that list ends with just plain ol’ “death”. Well, I’m well insured.
If everything goes okay, though, I stay in the Springs on Wednesday night as well, and then we drive home on Thursday. And it’s a beautiful week for a road trip. Colorado, in late October. Wow.
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.
I’d like to tell y’all all about the climb, but that, of course, would be impossible. It was nine days of discomfort ranging to pain, inconvenience, sleeping cold and walking in magnified sunlight, and camaraderie. It can’t be described. I say this as somebody who pretty much thinks that he can talk about anything.
Summit day, all by itself, would involve a post that would go on and on and on – just like summit day itself.
Breathing is very difficult at 19,000 feet. Breathing at 19,000 feet while hiking up a 25% grade is absolutely stupid. I can’t even make any sense out of it. I can’t remember why I thought it would be a good idea. I was trying to remember that on summit day, but I couldn’t think clearly about it, or anything.
Then we came back down to 15,000 feet to camp that night, and came down to 10,000 the next day, and down to 5,000 yesterday, to get on the bus back to the hotel.
We hadn’t had a shower in nine days. We hurt all over. Ethel is still limping badly on one knee.
But, we did climb Mount Kilimanjaro 🙂
It’s now dusk, the next day. We checked out of that hotel this morning and spent the day on safari. This was not my idea. I’d rather be sitting somewhere comfortable. I’d rather be on a plane heading home. I’m tired of Africa – of the endless poverty, of nothing working right, of nobody hurrying to do anything, except for the mountain porters, who run with 50 lbs on their heads for $6 a day.
Now, my mood may be colored by my extreme fatigue. But, then, I should be fatigued, after climbing Kilimanjaro. I can’t figure out why Ethel, who is in terrible pain, doesn’t want to go home. (I think that she would say that we can’t go home until our flight leaves. But money can change that). My son wants to stay here and see lions and giraffes, so I’d let him stay without me. But I’m not running the show.
On Tuesday, we climbed Mount Elbert, the highest peak in Colorado.
That was really dumb.
It was 4500 feet, up and down, and about 10 miles distance. It was a lot of work. Of course, there was some satisfaction with being at the summit, the highest point in Colorado. But then we had to go downhill. And that hurt.
I somehow tweaked my knee on the way up, so, going down, I sort of changed my gait a little. Now it’s two days later, and it feels like I did a squats workout for five hours going downhill. I’m having trouble walking, and my quads hurt.
Leadville is a very funky town. It’s the highest incorporated city in the US, and the architecture all seems to be late 1800s. It’s a cool place. I could live there, except they have very few meetings and no real gym or lap pool.
But the mountains! Driving up 285 N, as soon as you pass Salida, you are being watched by giants. GIANTS. The mountains here around Pagosa are very pretty and pointy, with a lot of features and faces.
The mountains up there are GIANTS. They are huge looming presences They are huge, they are in your face, and they don’t really care about you or anything.
And they have so much, so much, area above treeline. I can’t even talk about it and make it make sense. Look at the above photo – notice how you see nothing but bare rock, all around? That’s the way it is. The mountains are huge, looming….never mind. Go there yourself.
So on Tuesday, we took a total of eleven hours, elapsed, going up and down. It should have taken less time, but we were being careful, because Ethel’s knee had really acted up. It took all day long, and still left me so tired that I couldn’t see straight.
The next day, we drove to Mount Sheridan, over in the Mosquito range, which is a much easier 14er – but Ethel’s knee was again bothering her, so we turned around a thousand feet below the summit and came back down.
Now, if you’re like me, you’re wondering, “Gee, Ethel’s knee is in that kind of shape, and yet you’re going to start climbing Kilimanjaro a week from Sunday? Is that smart? Does that make sense?”
Don’t bother asking the question. Her answers won’t satisfy you. But they seem to satisfy her.
She’s going to the doctor in about an hour to do….something or other. I have no idea. She seems to think that she can find the right combination of prescriptions that will allow her to hike for nine days, while climbing and descending 14,000 feet (we start and end the climb at about 5,300 feet). And maybe she can. Or maybe she’s just willing to endure the pain; she might not have been willing to endure it yesterday, because that might have affected her chanced of getting to the top of Kilimanjaro.
I will say this – I don’t want to go to Africa and climb Kilimanjaro. I’m tired, and it hurts to walk. I’m so tired that I am questioning all my life choices. But that’s the way that I react to fatigue. I didn’t react that while while I was climbing on Tuesday. But I did, starting yesterday.
And I’m glad to be back down in the San Juan Mountains, where the mountains aren’t sneering at me.
Fat Charlie's Diary 