Now! Climbing

That’s right. Blog winds up. At long last (only to me, really). Here we are.

Right. Well, it’s August and that means that another season is in transition. Summer is coming into its last third, autumn is on the horizon and my rhythms are starting to shift away from Mount Hood and sleep deprivation and into guide training, rock climbing, alpine endeavours and life on the road. The yellow beer will be a constant for a few more months, although limes will be present more often and the variety will need to rotate in order to keep things interesting, but from a wooden table in a wooden cabin in the wooded forest in Washington, things are starting to seem fairly reasonable. With any luck, these next few months could line up to be winners. Norman Maclean wrote in his classic “A River Runs Through It” that sometimes when everything lines out just right, one can feel a purgation. I, for one, like to carry that sentiment along whenever I find myself able to do something closer to profundity than dragging my ass along the gravel of daily minutia. Also when I’ve slept enough to have any sense of what’s going on, which is to say that at the moment, until next spring at least, Mount Hood and the grind of another alpine season are a memory.

Anyway, the whole point of this is that I’ve been meaning to get this thing going for a while now, but I just haven’t gotten around to it. Between spring in Alaska and summer in Oregon I’ve been pretty busy running up, sliding down, climbing around, up and over various chunks of rock, ice, snow, mountain and volcano that I’ve barely had time to pack the bag and unpack it again before it’s time to go out on the next trip. So here we are, in the quiet before the storm really and it seems like a good day to get the blog rolling. My last alpine climbs in Oregon have given way to the next pile in Washington and points elsewhere. Writing from a buddy’s cabin in Mazama, knowing I won’t see my bed in Bend for a few weeks, I’m about to get started on a season that hopefully will be worth writing about. Roughly, it will involve hopefully attaining Alpine Aspirant status through the AMGA (American Mountain Guides Association) Advanced Alpine Guides Course and Aspirant Exam, a 12 day course that starts tomorrow and which I have the pleasure of taking in an unusually small and strong group with my friends Mark Allen and Tyler Jons, then a little non-climbing trip for architectural and maritime indulgence in the San Juans, then getting out there and after a few first ascents I’ve been eyeing up since last season, then maybe a little more work in Oregon, a wedding or two, a whole lot of rock climbing, a good bit of training, and then a month in Red Rocks for my AMGA Rock Guide Certification Exam, the highest level of training attainable for the international guiding standard in rock. After that, it’s Rocktober, and who knows – the Valley? The desert? Oh the the possibilities. Anyway, so for anyone who cares, that’ll all be up here soon enough.

As for life up til this point, I’ll get around soon to a trip report on this spring’s expedition to Mount Huntington in Alaska, and all of my photos from this summer’s guiding and climbing are up at christopherwright/zenfolio.com, my current photo-hosting site. I also have a pile of pictures on my Flickr site, which has all of my photos of trips taken prior to this April. Every now and again I’ll check in with Facebook, but that’s on the to-do list too, I guess. I’m pretty reachable though, so if anything interests you, shoot me an email at chris@timberlinemtguides.com and let me know!

Okay. That’s all for now _C