Sneak Peak RSS

What Moab is to mountain biking, Bolivia is to ski mountaineering and climbing. After several years of honing our cold weather ski mountaineering skills in the Alaska and Wrangel/St. Elias ranges, fighting monstrous storms and getting pinned in tents for days on end, a friend told us we were crazy and suggested we go to Bolivia where the weather is consistently good and the climbing is superb. So in 1996, instead of heading north to Alaska we went south to La Paz, Bolivia where we were treated with some spectacular technical steep snow and ice climbs that were the perfect training ground...

A different kind of adventure. 1986, John Callahan, Steve Marolt, Roger Marolt and I would start at Little Nell and walk some place every fall before heading back to college. This trip we started, walked over Aspen Mountain to Telluride. No trails. Just maps and a compass. This is crossing the blue mesa over the mountains from Crested Butte. There was no water out there in the fall for miles so the discussion was do we chance it and go ahead or walk back to the reservoir 15 miles. We were on the trail for a week doing 25 miles...

After recent storms in the Front Range, I set out on Saturday hoping to get some decent turns on James Peak, but what I got was a lesson in perseverance and some nice footsteps in the snow.   When I arrived at the parking lot, the ground was damp but there wasn't any snow at 10,300 feet, so I pretty much knew that skiing was going to be a long shot. However, I slid into my Intuition liners, buckled up my Fischer Transalp AT boots, and strapped my rock skis to my pack and headed out with my dog Norbu doing...

Altitude is defined as: "The height of anything above a given planetary reference plane, especially above sea level on earth". So what is sea level and how is it calculated? Check out this great minute physics video and see various altitude related info here. Highlights from the video: The summit of Chimborazo, in Ecuador, is the furthest point from the center of the earth. Not Everest. Geodesists created the World Gravitational Model to predict the average seal level within a meter anywhere on earth which is used in GPS devices and is the basis for the actual height of mountains on the earth....