Colin Haley in the Niponino Bivy, Torre Valley, January 2007. I originally did the following interview of my old friend  for the La Sportiva website… As often happens, the following conversation was condensed into an eight-hundred word piece for their print catalogue, but here is the raw-cut.

In North America, most of today’s climbing youth approach the mountains with a degree of respect that borders on trepidation – first spending the obligatory seasons in Yosemite and Indian Creek, learning to ice climb in Colorado or New Hampshire before venturing into serious alpine terrain.   Not so Colin Haley.

Colin’s meteoric alpine career began by spending as much time as possible in the mountains — by the time he was eighteen he’d already pulled of successful climbs in Peru, Patagonia, and logged serious time in his home mountains, the North Cascades.  And these early trips were only the harbinger of what was to come.  In 2007 alone, Colin pulled of major new routes in Alaska (The Entropy Wall on Mount Moffit), Patagonia (The first complete ascent of the Marsigne-Parkin/West Face route on Cerro Torre), speed-climbed established test-pieces (The Denali Diamond on Mount McKinley), and turned more than a few heads with his exuberant, outspoken personality and willingness to discuss alpine climbing’s addictive nature.

I first met Colin in 2000, when he was a fifteen year-old high-schooler with an awkward, seventies-glam-rock haircut. But it was obvious even then that he was completely captivated by the mountains, and committed to learning the diverse skill-set necessary to climb them as quickly and efficiently as possible.  It’s been thrilling to watch his early years of apprenticeship pay-off big time, and I know there will be much more to come from America’s most promising alpine talent.

1. Talk to me about the North Cascades. I have a ton of respect for them, mostly from all the time I’ve spent with Bart and Miles. Is it the terrain, accessibility, or having a vibrant alpine scene with climbers from the older generation who are willing to mentor, or all three?

Actually, I consider the lack of easy access the only thing that makes the North Cascades not a world-class climbing destination. At the same time though, I feel that I owe most of my alpine experience and route-finding skills to long, rugged approaches that the North Cascades require. The North Cascades are the only real alpine-climbing in the Lower 48 – period. The approaches are long, the weather is foul, but if you want to prepare for Alaska or the Himalaya the North Cascades are the only area that will give you a relevant experience. This is of course why so many of the US’s best alpinists have come from the Cascades: Fred Beckey, Tom Hornbein, Willi Unsoeld, Ed Cooper, The McNerthny Brothers, Doug Klewin, Todd Bibler, Rob Newsom, Steve Swenson, Jim Nelson, Kit Lewis, Mark Twight, and Steve House – to name just a few of the many.

2. Name the three most influential partnerships in your early years as a climber.

1. Bart Paull was willing to attempt big routes with me when I was only sixteen. He showed me the determination and pragmatic approach to alpinism that allowed us to attempt almost anything in the Cascades as a day trip.
2. Mark Bunker became my regular climbing partner when I was seventeen. On countless trips into the Cascades in winter he taught me all the techniques of full-blown, cold-weather, multi-day routes. These are the skills that I feel prepared me for climbing in Alaska, Patagonia, and the Himalaya.
3. Rolando Garibotti is the most talented climber I have ever tied in with, and the person whose advice I trust most in discussing what might be possible to try.

3. Your epic with Bunker on the NE Buttress of Mount Johannesburg seems like it was the full expression of how committed you can get in the Cascades… How did that prepare you future trips farther a field?

Yes, our winter climb on the NE Butt of J-berg still remains one of the most intense climbing experiences I’ve ever had. After that climb, things like the south side of Denali no longer seemed like impossibly big objectives.

4. Having meet both your parents, my impression is they are each pretty unique and free-thinking personalities to let their son have so much freedom in high school. Your first international trip was to Peru, right? Do you remember if you had to work very hard to convince them to let you go?

I went to Peru by myself when I was seventeen. I didn’t have to convince them at all – I just told them I was going to Peru! My parents have both lived incredibly adventurous lives – in many ways I am actually quite cautious and conservative relative to both of them.

5. Describe your first trip to Patagonia.

I went to Patagonia for the first time with Bart Paull during my winter break from my freshman year at the University of Washington. I only had 2.5 weeks actually in El Chalten, and we had no amazing weather windows, but we still managed to summit Poincenot, Guillamet, and Aguja de la S. It was an incredibly successful trip for me at the time, and really opened my eyes to what I consider to be the most beautiful mountains on Earth. I’ve been a Patagonia addict ever since.

6. The time you came over and stayed with us in Chamonix was around the same era. You are definitely an extrovert, and enjoy hanging out in other cultures, meeting people, trying to learn the language… how much of this appealed to you when you began to do lots of expeditions? Does the travel ever get old?

The travel itself gets old – the planes, buses, and baggage fees. But once I’m there, I love it. Chamonix and El Chalten especially are such fun places to hang out between the climbs – with whole communities of people that are alpine junkies, just like me. In many ways, I feel more at home surrounded by other alpinists and skiers in Chamonix and El Chalten than I do surrounded by generic Americans in the US.

7. Empanadas or dumplings?

Whatever it is, if it’s free I’ll probably eat it.

8. It seemed like something happened a few years ago, when suddenly, you just went on a tear. I know that it’d been quietly building for sometime before, but was there a tipping point, sometime you realized that you really wanted to raise the bar?

I think it appears that way to someone else, but I feel like I have been steadily applying the same determination and energy to alpine climbing that I have since I was fifteen. It’s just that a few years ago the climbs I was doing starting getting media attention, but I was operating the same as I always have. Now that I have finally finished school, however, I hope to devote more time to climbing than I’ve ever been able to before.

9. What’s the most committed you’ve ever felt on an alpine route?

The first ascent of The Entropy Wall with Jed Brown (on Mt. Moffit, in Alaska’s Hayes Range) was definitely the most committed I have ever been. Two climbers, two ropes, in an extremely remote area, with no radio, attempting a super-technical, unclimbed face that is almost 8,000 ft. tall, with precipitation every day, and the hike out involved two days of tundra and a serious river crossing.

10. Doing the Torre Traverse with Rolo, and Emperor Face on Mount Robson with Steve, climbing two of the most iconic mountain features around with two of the sport’s current legends – that must have been pretty cool for you. What lessons did you take away from partnering with each of them?

The Emperor Face was a really great climb, but I don’t think it was a particularly significant climb for either Steve or I. The Torres Traverse, however, was far and away the best climb I have ever accomplished, and I felt that I learned a huge amount from climbing with Rolo that season. I’ve never seen someone so “dialed,” with extremely proficient climbing skill and also extremely calculated attention to detail.

11. What’s the appeal of alpine soloing?

Alpine soloing is an extremely satisfying game. To put it simply, it is the most difficult style in which you can attempt a route. I think that climbing a difficult route with a partner is always more impressive than an easy route by yourself. But still, I think soloing is the ultimate demonstration of mastery in your climbing discipline.

12. Let’s talk about the Himalayas. You’ve done four trips to Pakistan, and in your own words, failed each time… But, by the scale and commitment of the objectives you are attempting – Nanga Parbat, Ultar, the Ogre, Latok 1 – It’s obvious you thrive on throwing yourself into the deep end, going after some of the most impressive unclimbed lines in the Karakorum, especially on the 7,000 meter peaks. Why would you rather fail on the truly gnarly beasts, versus picking objectives where you know you would have much better chances of success?

There is no adventure, and therefore no appeal, in attempting a route that is easy for you and ensures almost certain success. Climbing in the Himalaya is an extremely large commitment of time and money, so why would I waste it on climbing something easy? Climbing the standard route to the summit Cho Oyu would feel like a failure just as must as climbing half-way up the North Ridge of Latok I.

13. Are you content calling the Seattle area and Washington State in general “home”?

My financial situation at this point in my life dictates that I live with one of my parents when not on climbing trips, who fortunately are kind enough to let me do so. I would love to live in Chamonix if I could, but I am pretty grateful that my parents live in Seattle and Bellingham, as the only place I’d rather live in North America is Squamish.

14. What other personal challenges or goals have you set for yourself in 2010?

I’m about to head to Patagonia for three months, to hopefully climb with Rolo most of the time. I’m also planning a big Alaska trip for this spring. I am taking a year off from the Himalaya though, and during the summer I hope to keep improving my rock climbing skills.

In Memory of Wade Johnson, Micah Dash, and Jonny Copp

Friends, family, and climbers around the world are mourning the loss of Micah Dash, Wade Johnson, and Jonny Copp. The trio were last seen alive when they left their basecamp in the Gongga (Minya Konka) Range of the Eastern Himalaya in Seuchuan Province, China, on May 20th. Jonny and Wade’s bodies have been positively identified by search parties. It is likely all three perished in an avalanche.

In their home city of Boulder, Colorado, friends mobilized as soon as it was discovered they had missed their flight home. Some immediately flew to China, while others stayed awake for days on end to coordinate information, procure travel visas, collect donations, write press-releases, and provide comfort within the close-nit adventuring community. The outpouring of love and support on their blog has been staggering.

I never had the opportunity to meet Wade. But I can imagine the excitement he must have felt to be going into the mountains with Micah and Jonny, who I knew through years of haphazard encounters while traveling and climbing. I would bump into Jonny in Alaska or Micah in Yosemite Valley, share an evening of revelry, and then not see them for another nine months or a year. I am grateful for the few chances I had to tie into a rope with them at the crags, and saddened I never shared a true mountain adventure with either of them.

2003: Some friends and I were slumming it at Kahiltna International Airport when Kelly Cordes and Jonny arrived.  Most of the West Buttress expeditions had been keeping a dignified distance from our slushy hovel, but Jonny and Kelly came right over to say hello and socialize. We watched them blaze up to the third-ice band on Depravation on Mount Hunter, then they headed to the East Fork of the Kahiltna for something a little more remote. That was so Jonny: he seemed like he’d rather go see what was around the next corner, instead of wasting all his time on the obvious, popular objectives like Hunter. I remember watching as they skied back into BC several days later in swirling grey clouds. They’d found adventure, all right. After FA-ing a 4,000 mixed route, Kelly had gone into a crevasse while skiing down in a white out. After hauling his partner out, Jonny found their tiny bivy tent. They crawled inside to brew up, and, though they were out of food, Jonny reached into a stuff sack to present Kelly with… a can of beer. That was also Jonny. You knew he was capable not only of leading the crux pitch or haulling your arse out a crevasse but he also had the class to produce a malted beverage in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness.

The first time I met Micah was in Indian Creek, back in the early 2000-s… Somebody had fallen near the top of a hard, tricky to protect finger crack, and they asked Micah if he wanted to go up to finish the lead. “Sure”, Micah responded, “– but pull the rope because I want to place my own gear on this… “. He sent. A couple of years later he was pacing around the Camp IV parking lot, waiting for temperatures to cool so he could go try the Phoenix. “Is it too warm? It’s still a little too warm, but it will take an hour or two to drive over there and warm-up, and by then it might not be too warm…” He was mostly talking to himself, twitching with excitement, and by the end of the conversation he had convinced himself that temperatures were really not too warm to go climbing. That was Micah: hyper-frenetic, with the infectuous joy of a golden retriever, impossible to stop from doing whatever he wanted.

This February I drove with Micah from Ouray to Boulder.  At that moment Micah didn’t have formal living arrangements in town.  Which is to say he wasn’t paying rent anywhere. Of course we would normally stay at his girlfriend Nellie’s apartment, but her mom was in town. No problem, Micah said, we can stay with friends.  I normally feel a little awkward about crashing a friend’s house or invading their personal space, but Micah waded into his friends lives in South Boulder with such gusto and genuine love. He heckled Zack about when he was going to marry Sasha, heckled Nick about going to college, heckled me to become a better sport climber.  He had the same frenetic energy for the people around him as he had for climbing.

I think one of the most revealing things about both Jonny and Micah is that they were always in the company of accomplished, independent, and extremely intelligent women.  If you only see someone’s climber-personality, it is easy to think of them as just another passionate, talented dirtbag. But it was obvious from their girlfriends that they had their shit together and their priorities in line. My second-to-last day in Boulder, Micah got more nervous then I’d ever seen him. He was going to dinner with Nellie and her mom, and wanted things to go perfectly. “Here’s what you do,” I offered. “Two-thirds of the way through dinner, get up to go to the bathroom and slip the waiter your credit card, so the bill is already taken care before you’re even brought the check.”

“That’s a good – fucking – idea, ” Micah said, totally captivated, like I had just given him the key beta for free-climbing the Salathe headwall.

Micah passed me off to Jonny for the evening. We did a crushing Mountain Athlete workout, then went to dinner with his girlfriend Sara. The evening passed in a blur of talk about the various non-profit organizations they each were involved with. I don’t think we mentioned climbing once. After eating, we went to rendezvous with Micah. He was beaming. “Dude — I killed it with your check trick! She loved me!” he said. I cracked a smile myself, realizing that Micah Dash thought more highly of me for this little piece of advice then anything else I had done in our short friendship.

Before we headed back to South Boulder to crash, Jonny grabbed me. “Let’s go do the Daily Camera Chimney,” He said, leading me through an alley and down the street. I protested that I was drunk, and we’d get fined if the Boulder Police caught us. “Come on, you’ll love it,” he said. An inset brick arch around the entrance to the building made for a nice climb, something I could indeed pull off even after a few beers. We started on opposite sides and met on top, right where the apex of the arch formed a little perch to stop and look down on the street. We lay there on stomachs, catching our breathe, taking it all in.

“See, isn’t it cool up here?” Jonny asked.

If being an alpine paparazzi is your thing, it’s hard to beat hanging out at basecamp on the Southeast fork of the  Kahilitna glacier in Alaska.  The SE fork is the starting point for virtually all ascents of the Alaska Range’s big three: Denali, Mount Foraker, and Mount Hunter.  On a busy evening in mid-May, one finds plane loads of guided West Buttress expeditions with their matching tents, private groups of gumbies trying to figure out how to light their stoves, and brooding alpinists sulking around “waiting for the forecast to improve”.  Basecamp is to Alaskan climbing what Ellis Island was to American immigrants: a snowbound customs house where the journey ends and the climbing begins.  It all makes for excellent people watching.

And nobody gets more scrutiny then those attempting the North Buttress of Mount Hunter, a gleaming turret of ice and rock only two miles from basecamp.  Through the National Park Service’s high-powered spotting scope, you can sit back and watch a team’s every move.  When Ben Gilmore, Max Turgeon and I arrived there two weeks ago, I immediately noticed a group of folks lurking around the scope and knew: somebody was up on the Moonflower.  It wasn’t long before one basecamp gossip filled me in on all the details: They were Japanese, a man and women, they had been up there for six days already and had already sat out a storm low on the route, it looked like they were flipping leads, and they were moving really slowly.

The Bibler "come-again" exit pitch, about 3,500 feet up the Moonflower Buttress.

I took a gander through the scope for myself.  There in the middle of the circle of pale white were the climbers, two unmistakable patches of animated color on the vast wall.  One was leading, hacking and kicking at a slow, deliberate pace.  The other was standing at a belay, swing their arms to stay warm.  From my vantage point, it all seemed so abstract and disconnected, like a view into another world.  The highly magnified view only seemed to underscore how small they really were. What did they think they were doing up there?  At that rate they were still days from the summit….

The next morning we found ourselves skiing towards the same very route.  “Don’t forget to wave to basecamp”, Max joked as we neared the first iceband.  As we climbed, we found traces of the Japanese’s passage: a cached backpack low on the route, a couple of wands here and there (exactly why they were wanding the Moonflower Buttress, I don’t know), the dull yellow and brown stains of piss and shit.  Other than that, all other trace of their presence had been washed away by the near-constant spindrift the face was producing.

We endured a rather precarious bivy before pressing towards the summit on the second day.  Just as we simul-climbed towards the Bibler come again exit, I noticed a recently dugout ledge with another backpack sitting on it.  Then I heard something: few inaudible sounds, but undoubtedly human voices.  The Japanese were two pitches above, in the middle of the come again exit.  We reached a belay at the start of the ice runnel, then Max linked two pitches together to reach the same belay the Japanese were at, just under the final technical pitch of the route.
Their English was limited, and since none of us speak their language, our conversation was pretty basic.  I smiled and greeted the guy who grinned and seemed quite happy with how his climb was going.  Evidently this was their eighth day on route, and they had endured seven bivies in frequent spindrift without a tent. As we chatted, his partner, the woman, struggled up the pitch above.  Max, meanwhile headed out left to find an alternative line through the rock band.

I watched the woman working her way up the pitch.  She seemed a little shaky, climbing with a wobbly swing that reminded me of days guiding beginner and intermediate climbers back home in new Hampshire.  She hung off a tool, placed a dubious-looking screw, and then lowered back to the belay.

Fair enough, I thought.  This was no place to push your comfortable limits and risk a leader fall.  The couple had a brief conversation, and though I couldn’t understand a single word of it, it seemed like the guy was actually encouraging her to go up and try the pitch again.  After a five minute rest, she started back up, placing another screw before sketching her way to easier ground above.  It was all very casual and routine, like a new leader being coached through a tricky pitch at the crag – except for the fact that we were 4,000 feet up Mount Hunter.

“You going to summit?”  the fella asked.

“Well, we’re sure going to try”, I responded. His eyes lit up with surprise, and I could tell that they were only thinking of reaching the top of the buttress.

Max finished his pitch, and then we simul-climbed towards the large cornice that marks the top of the buttress, leaving the Japanese behind.  We eventually summited at around nine PM.  The winds were picking up, and I could see a bank of clouds moving in from the southeast.  A familiar, uncomfortable hole settled in the pit of my stomach: here we were, spent some seven thousand feet above basecamp, with the weather possibly turning and a four thousand foot face to rappel.  It was time to put our heads down and get the hell out of there.

As we hurriedly down-climbed to the top of the buttress, I rounded a serac and there was the Japanese fellow, smiling, struggling upwards in his belay coat. I gave him a slap on the back and a “Good luck” before continuing down.  When I passed the woman on the other end of the rope, she was feebly clubbing her way up a bit of serac ice, but she seemed happy, knowing that the summit was now close by.

The Japanese returned to basecamp the day after us: it had taken them eleven – or was it twelve? – days to climb the Moonflower to the summit of Mount Hunter and descend.  This is probably one of the slowest successful ascents of the climb, and in my opinion, one of the proudest.

The next day, Ben and I shared a plane back to Talkeetna with them.  Over the deafening roar of the deHavaillard Beaver, they fell asleep in their seats for the entire flight.

One might describe expedition climbing as a long, multi-week adventure travel experience with the goal of safely conveying yourself, your partners, and several very heavy duffle bags of climbing gear in good health to a remote mountain basecamp, then turning around and reversing the entire trip, with a short climb sandwiched in the between. Lost baggage, third world parasites, washed out highways – frequently the real crux of a climbing expedition has nothing to do with climbing.

The warning came from an amiable local citizen of Tingrit who called in at our Kiva cook tent for a spot of tea. Tingrit is literally the end of the road: a small stone hamlet pressed into the deep folds of the Lahul Valley in the mountain state of Himachal Pradesh, India. We were on our way to the Miyar Valley, a small constellation of brilliant peaks and glaciers lost in the immeasurable universe of the Himalayas.

But this spring, a secret dossier worked its way into my hands, and I knew I had to go to India. It was put together by a team of British climbers, detailing the Jangpar Glacier, a side valley of the Miyar. It was glossy and professional, containing many color pictures of spectacular alpine architecture. And the best part – it was all unclimbed. The British had visited the area in the spring of 2004, put hampered by an unusually deep snow pack, they were thwarted in their efforts to climb all but one small mountaineering peak. Here were the proverbial keys to the castle – Pat Goodman, Dave Sharratt and I were soon packing our bags.

The world doesn’t pay enough attention to India – even though it is a remarkable place, and a country that will certainly play a pivotal role in the coming chapters of our world’s history. India’s “Tryst with destiny”, as Jawahar Nehru, the country’s first prime minister put it, begins with it’s people – and there are currently 1.1 billion of them. India is home to the largest Hindu population in the world, and third largest Muslim population (after Pakistan and Indonesia), plus millions more Sikhs and Buddhists, and myriad localized tribal groups that are impossible to count. Though it second in population to China, estimated growth rates project that India will overtake people China as the world’s largest country by 2040. And here’s the amazing part: it’s a democracy. This is not to say that the Indian government doesn’t have its share of problems, but it is a functioning republic, more so than . Certainly the answers to some of the thorniest questions of our times are hidden in this diverse, sentimental, flamboyant culture.

Not that any of this was really on my mind when our plane landed at Gandhi International Airport in India’s capital city of Delhi on a simmering August evening. At the start of an expedition, I am always hyper-focused on one goal: getting to basecamp. Often, this can be the crux of the entire trip – buddy was recently stymied in Pakistan this summer because the Though we had planned to sleep for the night and catch a bus to the city of Manali, the jumping off point to the mountains of the Himachal Pradesh, we quickly found that our taxi driver was open to negotiation. So it was that we immediately left Delhi on what eventually became a twenty hour, go for broke, Indian road trip. Our driver, a charismatic Sikh who went by the anglicized nickname of “Happy” needed to pull over several times to nap, but he kept us supplied with tasty local food and beer, and was would pull over when we had to piss – what more could you ask for?

The party getting started.

I’m always amazed at how backpacker towns all seem the same — and Manali is what you could describe as a “destination backpacker town”. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in Yangshuo, China, Chalten, Argentina, or Tamarindo, Costa Rica, these places are all about making hippies feel good about themselves for traveling while subtly providing all the comforts of back home (cheap drugs, food that won’t make you sick, and the ability to check your email every ten feet). Anyways, it took only a day in Manali to buy food, arrange a cook, (Maybe the only fortunate legacy from India’s two centuries of colonial rule is that most Indians speak at least a little English) and then we were off again. This time it was a 10 hour drive over the Rhotang Pass and down into the Lahul Valley: basically a ten hour, 4×4 mission in a jeep to reach Tingrit.

The Miyar Valley is definitely off the beaten track. Over the past ten years, Italian, Spanish, and Slovenian climbers have visited the area, but only at the rate of one or two expeditions a year. Nobody in Tingrit has even thought to open up a tea house yet, so we camped on the lawn of the local grade school. Farming is the main source of income in the Miyar – particularly a wonderfully fat strain of green peas that are cultivated in terraced gardens, then harvested and sold all over India. Higher up, the valley is used as grazing lands for thousands of goat, sheep, and cattle.

Other than acclimatizing by smoking beedie cigarettes with our porters, my main occupation during the approach hike to basecamp was restraining Mr. Sharratt from breaking his ankles on the many appealing bouldering problems we passed along the way. (Recall that the goal of expeditioning is to get to basecamp in good health.) Dave’s nickname is “the Monster”, and for good reason: the guy craves hard rock climbing the way the rest of us need beer and oxygen to survive. On the map the British had made of the approach, one spot about a day below basecamp was clearly labeled “massive blocks”. Dave was first out of camp that morning, racing up valley towards the mysterious boulders. By mid-afternoon we had reached the blocks – an impressive boulder field that tumbled across a well grazed flat field from a hillside to the east. Dave ran around like a kid in a candy store, while I issued strong warnings to not screw the whole trip with a twisted ankle and provided spots.

So it was that we had our first encounter with the infamous shepards, while Pat and I were laying on the grass drying our socks and watching the Monster boulder. Three scrappy looking fellows approached us, carry several water jugs and towing a goat on a leash. What to do – should we hide our gear, run for cover, pretend to be asleep? Pat and I tried to play it cool as they sat down next to us and offered us a sketchy looking drink as a gesture of friendship. “Be careful Freddie”, Pat whispered between his teeth. “These guys… they are cunning.”

I’m still not sure what happened next, but within fifteen minutes one of them had appropriated Dave’s MP3 player., I had given another my two lighters and a pen, we were officially made blood brothers to the shepards – and we were all smashed.

Luckily we made it to basecamp the next day, a bit tired and hung-over, but having nevertheless succeeded in the first goal of expedition climbing.

River polished bouldering, sketchy road travel, the pastoral Miyar Valley, and beautiful sunsets.

It’s Rick or Maury, two of my bosses at IMCS, the local climbing school in North Conway.  “Fred, what are you doing?,” they’ll ask.  And this is an entirely redundant question because they know goddamn well what I’m doing at 11.45 on winter evening.  “Can you go on a rescue?”

I sigh and close my eyes and watch as whatever I had planned for the next day flashes before me, and then I say “Sure…. What time do you want me?”

Everybody likes to think of them self as a hero.  It doesn’t take much effort for any of us to close our eyes and picture the scenario – a nasty fall, helpless rope team, and you-know-who in just the right place at just the right time to come selflessly swinging to the aid of their brother climbers.  Unfortunately, organized rescues rarely follow this perfectly scripted plot.  For starters, rescues are rarely dramatic – once the call goes out, chances are the drama’s already happened.  And they are slow – have you ever carried a litter down a talus slope? Than there’s the fact that organized rescues have to be, well, organized.  And that mean you have to take orders for someone.  If it’s a search, there’s a good chance you’ll spend six or twelve or eighteen hours walking around in the woods calling some stranger’s name at the top of your lungs and never come close to finding him or her.

The truth is, I find rescues to be tedious and stressful, vaguely ego-deflating and overwhelmingly boring, all at the same time.  What they really remind me of is going to a high shool dance.  So this January, when my phone rang in the middle of the night, I had to take a moment before responding.  And in that split second pause before I committed myself to another day of alpine tedium, Maury, with the verbal acumen of a used car salesman, made his pitch.

“You’ll get to ride in a helicopter”, he said.

Looking for love in all the wrong places: Bayard and Brad scope the east face of Lafayette.

“So what happened to this guy, anyways?”  The speedometer on Bayard’s Elantra pushed passed sixty as we crested Crawford Notch and blasted towards Interstate 93.  We were running a few minutes late, and who wants to be late for a helicopter ride?  The guy in question was actually named Brian.  He was a college student in nearby Plymouth who’d gone for a winter hike with a few friends up Mount Lafayette in Franconia Notch that Saturday.  A stong weather system was moving to the west of New Hampshire, and producing some very sporty conditions.  As they moved up the mountain the winds only increased.  Brian’s friends turned back, but Brian, with the wind at his back, decided to keep going and try to tag the summit.  By this time, the Mount Washington Observatory was recording gusts of over 100 miles an hour.   Brian’s friends waited, but he never showed at the parking lot.

When Bayard and I rolled into the trailhead at 7.15 AM, the place looked like the parking lot at Gillette Stadium an hour before kick off.  There were news trucks, reporters and photographers.  There were forest service rangers, fish and game cops, and state police.  A hundred other folks from three different volunteer teams milled around in bulky winter clothes, awkwardly talking and shuffling to stay warm: guides, ski patrollers, and experienced winter travelers.  This, I suddenly realized, was a Big Deal.  This was a black tie event, a full blown senior prom for every climber and mountain professional in New Hampshire.

By now, Brian had been out for two nights, and the New Hampshire Fish and Game was throwing all of their available resources at finding him.  Everyone knew that after today, the odds didn’t look good for our hapless college man.  And those resources included a Blackhawk helicopter, curtiousy of the New Hampshire Air National Guard.  As I walked around the parking lot, chatting with the many framiliar faces, I heard very little discussion of Brian.  Certainly everyone there were good, caring people who had gladly volunteered their time to come to the aid of a fellow climber.  But all everyone was talking about was the Blackhawk.

The plan called for nine different five man teams to be flown to the top of Mount Lafayette, and than conduct searches of predetermined sections of the mountain from the top-down.  Yet the chaotic state of the universe there in the Old Bridal Path parking lot at 7.30 in the morning meant nobody was assigning teams. It was every man for himself.  Which team would go first?  What section of the mountain is your team searching?  What team are you on?  Nobody wants to go to senior prom with a slow team or a lame search assignment.  Luckily, Bayard and I bumped into our friend Jim Shimberg.

“Hey guys,” he called.  “There’s two more spots on our team, come here!”. As we mingled with Jim and the rest of newly formed team, Bayard noticed something in the snow.

“Hey, check it out,” Bayard said.  He held up a decent pair of sunglasses he had just found lying in the snow bank.  Nobody claimed the shades, and Bay happily added them to the collection on the dashboard of his car.  I took it to be a good omen.

Everybody wants to ride in the helicopter.

The lost party was located in the East drainage of Mount Lafayette, approximately in the middle of the burn mark.

An hour later we trudged passed a crooked cairn and onto the summit of Lafayette.  The Blackhawk had dropped us off in a slight saddle to the south of the summit.  The flight from Route 93 to the ridge, my first ever helicopter ride, was (along with losing my virginity and standing on the summit of Cerro Torre) one of the greatest 4 minutes of my life.  Words won’t do it justice, so I’ll move on to the man of the hour, our friend Brian.

We were assigned a search zone to the northeast of the summit, a steep, trailess ravine that dropped into Pemigawasset Wilderness.  If you were looking at a map of the White Mountains and asked to point to the most remote part of the range, you could very well pick the East side of Mount Lafayette.  Not that it’s that remote (this is the northeast, afterall), but anyway you slice it is about twelve miles to 15 miles to a serviceable road.

I motored past the summit, heading towards on assigned search area.  But Jim, the old White Mountain bloodhound, took his time, poking around some rocks a few feet off the trail.  “I think I got something!” he called.  A suspicious depression in the snow could have been a boot track.  The group halted and began following Jim.   A hundred yards below the summit we found a trekking pole, than a water bottle.  A quick radio call confirmed the gear as similar to what Brian had been carrying.  Jim was on the scent.

The farther we dropped off the summit, the easier it was follow Brain’s trail.  Bushwacking through the White Mountains in winter is hard work, but once someone’s beaten through waist deep snow and thick krumholtz, following their path is a no brainer. We came to a glade with what appeared to be an improntu bivy spot.  We found discarded food rappers, a pair of hiking crampons, and – most disturbingly – a crumpled map.  It was shredded and scorched.  Had the poor lad tried to use his map to start a fire?  A round hole was burned through the center of the paper, erasing the exact area where we now stood.  Farther down, the trail dropped down a steep streambed, breaking through the ice into running water in several places.

This was getting weird.  By now, I think everyone in the team was silently preparing themselves for the worst.  Adding to the tension, the Blackhawk circled overhead and the radio crackled with communications from the command post and various teams.  It felt like getting dumped on prom night, with your parents, friends, teachers, then entire fucking universe, watching.

And then we heard screaming.  Bayard and I started to run.

As we had followed his trail that morning, I had absently thought about what I’d say to Brian if we found him and he was alive.   It had to be something catchy, something historic like H.M. Stanley’s quip in the heart of Africa, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume”, or Conrad Kain’s crack to his clients on the summit of Mount Robson, “Gentleman, I can take you no further.”

Bay and I trashed through a final stand of spruce, rounded a turn in the stream – And there was Brian.  He was siting in a sleeping bag in the middle of the frozen stream, looking expectantly at us.

Knowing he was a good New England college guy, I cut right the chase.   “I got bad news, Brian,” I said gravely.  “The Patriots lost yesterday.”

The weekend gale had forced Brian to continue with the wind, dropping off the summit to the east.  After breaking through the stream several times as he thrashed down, his boots were soaked.  He took them off for the night, and they froze solid.  With no way to dry them, he was immobile, and sat there for two days until we arrived.  Nevertheless, he was in remarkably good shape, with only superficial frostbite and an empty stomach.

An hour after we found him, Brian was dangling underneath the Blackhawk as he was winched to safety.  I lobbied on the radio for his rescuers to be airlifted out as well, but alas, no such luck.  Instead, we made the long and ignoble slog out to the Kancamagus Highway on foot, arriving a little after dark.  At least we succeeded in getting a few rounds of free beer at the brewpub in North Woodstock that evening – a tasty reward for a reluctant rescuer.

Outside the cafe, plumb raindrops bounced on the Rue De Pacard.  We were, of course, in Chamonix: crown jewel of the French Alps, birth place of alpine climbing, the world headquarters for all things extreme.  One might confuse the scene — the arrogant locals, the wet cobblestone streets crowded  with paitisseries, cafes and longerie shops — with any ordinary European city in March.  But the fact that a traffic cop was dissing our climbing style tells you that Chamonix is anything but ordinary.

People have lived in these mountains since the last ice age, some 10,000 years ago.  The wooded, pacific valley we were in with its elevation a modest 4,000 feet, once provided an ideal environment for pastoral and agrarian pursuits.  I say once because today the Chamonix valley is a bustling urban landscape that, according to one source, houses over a 100,000 people during peak vacation season. Imagine taking a town the size of Manchester, New Hampshire, or Charleston, South Carolina and dropping it smack dab in the middle of the Central Alaska Range or the Khumbu Himal.  Chamonix boasts a network of chairlifts, telefriques, and trains that whisk the alpine commuter thousands of feet into serious mountain terrain, and deliver him or her safely down to the town’s lively bar scene in time for dinner.  This unrivaled accessibility, combined with limitless shopping and partying available in town makes Chamonix the number one mountain town in the world.

Unfortunately, Max and I were stymied by this same modern engineering.  The lift was closed.  We had hoped to ride up the Aiguille Du Midi, a 9,000 miracle of engineering to access the steep ice and mixed climbs of the Mount Blanc massif.  In virtually any other place in the world, this type of terrain would require a multi-day, expeditionary approach.  In Cham, however, it’s a half hour cable car ride away.

But the weather was crap, the lift was closed, and we had nothing better to do but loaf around town and wait for circumstances to improve.  As we were building up a good caffeine buzz, Max noticed an acquaintance named Eric, who worked at the Gendarmerie.  This is not to say that Eric spends his days writing tickets or tracking down robbers.  He is part of a professional police mountain unit specializing in mountaineering.  Such groups were originally created during World War Two, when the high alpine borders needed to be defended from the Axis powers.  These days war is a distant possibility, but the French take it as a matter of national pride.  So Eric’s job is to climb, train with various other guide and rescue organizations, and generally project the perceived French superiority in all matters alpine.  The bastard.

I was climbing with Max Turgeon, a young French Canadian alpinist (even younger then me!) who’s recently been downing hard alpine routes like a serving of Mamma’s meatloaf.  Once the guy bites into something, he doesn’t stop until his plate is empty.  This makes Max and the ideal partner for yours truly, since I’m a bit lazy and prefer to climb with people better then me.  It means I have to do less work – I recommend trying it sometime.  Anyways, Max and I had already experienced a few snafus with the local public transportation: after an evening of revelry in town, we found ourselves stranded 5 miles from the chalet we were staying in (courtesy of Max’s girlfriend, Zoe) in the adjacent village of Argentiere.  The trains had stopped.  The buses had stopped. And of course, no one would stop to pick us up. Finally we called a taxi, only to discover that it would be a 30 euro fare for the five minute drive, a rate far greater then even New York.  We kindly suggested the French cabbie could drive to hell instead.

With a nonchalant shrug, Max started to walk home.  It was one thirty in the morning, I was tired, a little drunk, and not psyched to finish the evening with an hour and half journey up the moonlit Cham Valley a pied.  Normally in these sorts of situations I resort to a tried and true solution I’ve relied on for most of my life: throw a temper tantrum.  But I knew that Max, my Quebecois rope gun, would think I was a total pud-knocker and probably refuse to go climbing with me.  So I grumbled and bitched, but started walking.  An hour later, a kind soul took pity on us and drove us the final two kilometers through winding avalanche tunnels to our chalet in the shadow of the Dru.

Chocolate, tennis, sex: there are some things the French do very well (on this last subject, I presume).  But one thing the French don’t do very well, or even attempt to do at all, is to form orderly lines.  Max and I were stuck in a mob of a hundred plus skiers, pushing towards the entrance to the Aiguille du Midi telephrique.  The weather still wasn’t cooperating, and with only a couple of days left, we had lowered our sights to doing a short mixed line on the Mount Blanc du Tacul.  Stevie Haston, the infamous British climber who is one of the fathers of the modern mixed climbing revolution, had put up a couple of hard dry tooling lines on the Tacul back in the early nineties.  We targeted Scotch on the Rocks, a seven pitch line, as an objective we could sneak out in a day.

I threw a quick elbow to some guy in a neon one piece ski suit, calmly dropped my skis across his companion’s knees, and Max and I darted onto the first tram of the day.  Twenty minutes later and 9,000 feet higher, we were lost in a razor sky line as far from city life as you could imagine.  The serrated blade of the Auguilles stood to our left, while to the right loomed the blunt backdrop of Mount Blanc.  Straight ahead on the Italian frontier, the hulking maul of the Grand Jorasses lurked in a drifting cloud.

After a quick, half hour approach, Max and I were racking up below Scotch.  Just as I had hoped, Max did a marvelous job leading through the crux slot, and after five rope stretcher pitches we reached the small ridge where the route ends and began rapping back to our packs.  A sea of clouds had slowly risen over Italy, and by the time we were back at our skis, the glacier was socked in.  The original plan had called for us to have a fun late afternoon ski down the Valley Blanche, catch the last train ride down from Montenvers to Chamonix, and be drinking beer and eating french fries (In France, they actually try to call them pomme frites but they’re still French fries in my book) by seven.  But the plan was about to change.

We blindly charged into the whiteout, and for a brief while I was convinced we were making excellent progress, until I noticed that my skis were actually pointed slightly uphill and I was barely moving at all.  That’s the problem with whiteouts, you become so disoriented its hard to tell whether you are going up or down, or even moving at all.  I hadn’t been down the Valley Blanche for five years, and Max had never done the descent.  I stopped and called a conference.  With that same nonchalant shrug, Max agreed to ski back up to the Aiguille du Midi top station.  We both knew the lift had long since closed, and there wouldn’t be any French fries waiting for us.

A couple hours later, we burst back into the blasted tunnel system carved out of the summit block of the Midi, knackered from the return hike at 13,000 feet (on thing Chamonix does not do is provide easy acclimatization).  Though the lift was closed, we stumbled on two caretakers enjoying a bottle of wine in a cozy looking apartment suite. “Follow me,” one of them said.  My spirits rose –surely there was some extra bunk space for the two of us.  We were led through more darkened tunnels, until at last we reached a door.  “And here you are….”

I had to laugh: we were going to spend the next ten hours, until the sun rose and the lift started up again, sleeping in the shitter.  Not that we could complain. Only a couple hundred meters away was the Cosmique Hut, offering warm bunks and hot meals, at the prohibitively exorbitant price of sixty euros a night.  At least the bathroom was heated.  Max and I curled up for an uncomfortable alpine bivy.  Only in Chamonix….

Of course, good as they are, I didn’t fly all the way from New Hampshire to my present location of Edinburgh for the fries. I came here for the mixed climbing. Every other year, the British Mountaineering Council holds a winter climbing festival at the Glenmore Lodge in Aviemore, nestled up against the Caingorm Mountains. One or two representatives from different countries attend, and each visitor is paired with a local host for six days of climbing and six nights of merriment. This year, John Varco, Dougal MacDonald and myself comprised the American delegation.

As we soon discovered, there are a few peculiarities to climbing in Scotland. For starters, you are only allowed to climb in bad conditions. In order to dry tool a route, it needs to be plastered with snow. This means that you are constantly cleaning off the snow to find drytool placements and gear. It means a lot of hard work, sweat, fear, and burnt calories — maybe that explains all the chips. These folks over here also like to walk. A “roadside” crag means about an hour of hoofing it, and a “normal approach” is about three hours. Good help you should you be taken to a remote crag. Most of us were a bit mystified after the first day of the meet, when we hiked an hour and a half in the rain to a crag full of appealing crack lines that looked ripe for drytooling fun, only to be told that no, we couldn’t climb them because they weren’t in condition. But, as Ian Parnell says: “In Scotland there are only relatively small cliffs, but if you wait until they are in full winter condition, you end up getting a big experience.”

Rok leading pitch 2 of the Sioux Wall.

The conditions improved as the week went on — far and away the best day was the last. I got out with Rok Zalokar, a young Slovenian climber. I was quite keen to climb with him. First, there was his name — Rok Zalokar. Sounds pretty bad ass, huh? Indeed, last year Rok, when he was only 23 years old, put up an amazing route on the 7,000 meter Himalayan giant Janak with Andre Stremfel. Then, there was the fact that the guy is pure muscle and must weigh in at one-ninety, maybe a duece. A couple of nights previously, just as we were enjoying a quiet beer before bed, Rok produced a slighty sketchy looking 1.5 liter water bottle with something scribbled in Slovenian on it. “This is Slovenian schnapps”, he said. “My grandmother make it for me. I tell her I am going to Scotland, she says, “oh, the wetter is very bad there, you must take this”. a half our latter, the entire meet was gobsmacked. Needless to say, the next day was a rest day.

Anyways, the Rok and I did a route Ian had put up the year before, the Sioux Wall. It was great fun — lots of digging, sketchy hooks, pounding on pins, nuts and hexs, and all the rest of it. The best part of the day was watching new friends on the surrounding routes, everyone out there giving ‘er in proper Scottish conditions. Rok and I made it back to the car just at dark, where we waited for another hour for our mates Ian and Sean Issac, who were having some good old fashioned alpine fun doing a new winter route just to the left us. “That was awerome, but I am fuckin’ starving. I need chips now.” Sean raved. We hopped in the cramped car, full of smelly gear and smiling climbers, and headed towards the lights of Fort William below, in search of the finest in British cuisine.