2017: A year in review

2017 was a weird year, and I'm not referring to the crazy politics and general state of the world. Weird isn't the right word for that. 

For starters, new job, new city, new climbing gym, running routes, and whatnot. 

Luckily, it turns out that I really like my job, the climbing gym is pretty good, and we're living a mile and a half away from some really nice running trails. So although 2017 kinda felt like a year in flux, it was, all in all, a pretty good year.

Granted, there were some bad spots. My grandmother passed away, Ev had a kidney stone epic, and I messed up my thumb/wrist climbing. 

But the year ended on a high note: while in Dillingham over Christmas, Ev asked me to marry him. Apparently if you adopt a panther for a guy, he has to marry you. (Backstory: Ev loves big cats and talks nonstop about wanting one, so I 'adopted' one in his name at a big cat rescue. Then I gave him a framed picture of his new black panther, Amos, for Christmas.)

So that's a thing. Details will probably not follow. 

Anyways, I briefly considered doing an actual blog post, then decided to just get this up so Lorraine stops bugging me. So this is for you, sweetie. 

Kalymnos (still) Smells Like Thyme

There's nothing quite as amazing as taking a 3 week holiday directly after sitting for an exam that takes a minimum of 6 weeks for results to be posted. It's hard to obsess about your score when you're in Greece, playing on some of the best sports climbs on earth.

The first time we went to Kalymnos (back in 2015), we went in the middle of July. It was stupidly hot (90F/30C), and we could really only climb early in the mornings to avoid being burned off the walls. This round, we went at the tail end of the peak season. Temperatures were closer to 70F/20C, the weather was fantastic and sunny, and we still managed to avoid the worst of the crowds at the crags.

We also had some friends with us, which means that there are actually pictures from this trip.

Meet Dakota and Sarah, the crazy people who decided to come to Europe and climb with us. The weirdos.

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Unsurprisingly, Kalymnos still smells like thyme, even in November when the bees are way more chill.

So we climbed every day and it was magical.

Dakota got a little artsy and took some pics through the belay glasses. Which I think turned out really cool.

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Kalymnos has majestic, huge faces, spectacular exposure, and well over 2,500 climbs. We went all over, sticking to our usual M.O. of getting up early so we had the crags to ourselves for a couple hours. There really isn't anything comparable to being 30m up a wall with the Mediterranean Sea at your back and no one else around. It's humbling and peaceful and slightly terror-inducing if you happen to be really far above your last bolt.

 

That little spec on the wall in the right pic is Dakota.

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I took this trip as an opportunity to climb really hard and practice taking lead falls. Well, the falling wasn't the goal, just a result of attempting to lead things that are right at my limit. Or slightly (*ahem* very) above. The outcome being lots of pictures of me mid-fall. In my defence, this particular route was a 6c (5.11a). A really lovely 6c. Which I did finish. Eventually. It was a struggle fest, but also one of my favourite climbs of the trip.

Ev making Panakia (6c/5.11a) look way easier than I did. The jerk.   

 Dakota on Monohiki Elia (6a+/5.10b) and Ev on Azche zu Azche (6a+/5.10b)

  

Ev on Fouska (7a/5.11d) Terrifyingly steep, really epic looking, and proud owner of a quickdraw that he bailed off.

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Climbing trips, like most things, are made better with good friends. Even when said friends try to lick your eyeball. Or someone gets bored while on picture duty and takes amusing selfies with the sole intent of making someone laugh when reviewing said pictures.

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There was a lot of sass, marathon belays (sorry boys), and card games. And a surprising number of photos of the belayer hanging in the air after catching a Dakota fall. Might I say, the Ohm is amazing when there's a big weight differential between the lead climber and the belayer. Also, there is a new rule that in order to climb with us, you must own a pair of yellow pants.

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On the way back from Kalymnos, Ev and I spent a couple days in the Netherlands to catch up with our Euro-friends. We hung out, wandered around Delft, went bouldering (cuz obviously we hadn't gotten enough climbing done in Greece), and I attempted to teach Lorraine to make pie.



And now we're back in Alaska. Well, we've been back for almost a month, but I'm lazy and haven't bothered to finish this post (which I swear I started about a week after we got home).

Soooooooo happy whatever holiday you celebrate this time of year. Maybe I'll manage one more post before 2018. Although if my current track record is any indication, that's severely unlikely. Oh well.

Busy busy busy and now we play

Life has been both routine and incredubly hectic. It has primarily consisted of studying for, and finally sitting, the PE exam on Friday. And now I wait 6 - 8 weeks for the results. I’m honestly not sure how it went, which is definitely not how I wanted to feel after all the studying. But c’est la vie. Or something. 

A couple weeks ago a few of us went up to Fairbanks and got a tour of the CRREL Permafrost Tunnel. I’d never been, and it was pretty amazing. Massive ice wedges, lenses (why hello, topic of my thesis), fossils, hoar ice, and some very ice-rich silt made me a very happy geotechnical engineer. 

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The permafrost tunnel trip was made all the more awesome because I’ve been doing a lot of thermal modelling at work. SVHeat is a powerful program, but will use literally all the processing power you have on your computer. All. Of. It. Its made for some epic model runs, but nifty results. And very pretty pictures. 

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We are now sitting in the Seattle airport as we slowly make our way across the world. We’ll spend two weeks in Kalymnos climbing with Sarah and Dakota, then hang out in the Netherlands for a few days to catch up with all our Euro-peeps. Call it a well-planned reward for the studying and working that’s led up to now. 

I’m so excited to have my life back. 

And you know what this means? A blog update about playing! It feels like its been forever. 

It’s gonna be a good couple weeks. 

Tundra Travels

I've spent the last 8 days on the Slope. More precisely, I've been on the tundra. Hauling around several hundred pounds of geophysical equipment. We had sun, rain, wind, and mosquitoes. Weather holds, wildlife (no bears, luckily, although we did have a bear guard), a very friendly caribou, dry tundra, wet tundra, big tussocks, small tussocks, deep holes, bogs, water over topping our xtra tuff's, and, miraculously, no equipment problems.

We did some ERT (electrical resistivity tomography) mapping all over a predetermined area. ERT can be used to generate continuous land surveys and is often used to identify the location of mass ice. We're interested in the soil exploration applications, so went to a site with lots and lots of boreholes. Lots of boreholes means lots of ground truth (we know what soils are present), and the hope is we'll be able to correlate the different resistivities to soil properties. We set up the project as a blind study in conjunction with Logic Geophysics, an awesome geophysics outfit out of Anchorage, and I picked the lines we measured based on the geotechnical data available, which, for once, was copious. Over the next couple weeks, I'll compare the processed ERT results to the actual soil profiles and see what, if any, relationships can be identified. 

ERT works by injecting electrical current into the ground via electrodes and measuring the resistivity at the surface. We laid down 240 meters of cable at a time and placed electrodes every 5 meters. This was a lot of electrodes. I started off using a hammer to put them in, but it turned out to be faster to just push them in by hand, since the permafrost is basically right under the tundra mat. 

I would like to note that walking across the tundra hauling a sled with 150 lbs of gear in it is a pretty good workout. Also, tussocks are evil and a threat to ankles everywhere. Amazingly, I didn't roll one or fall down traipsing around for a week.

Yeah, I'm surprised, too. 

We had enough gear (mostly electronics plus aforementioned 240 m of cable) that it was transported to the site in a sling. Did I mention we had to be dropped off at our site in a helicopter? This was the first I've flown in one. It was pretty cool, except for the whole dislike of heights and confined spaces thing I have going on. 

If you live in Alaska (or a northern region), you hear all about patterned ground, pingos, and ice wedges when people start talking about the Arctic. You see pictures, even understand the processes that cause them and implications for engineering applications. You walk over miles of tundra, through the boggy bottoms of polygons, over the pingos, spotting the occasional exposed top of an ice wedge. But there's something special about flying across the tundra and seeing those polygons, pingos, and thousands of lakes from above. It gives you a sense of scale, the monumental scope and forces at work to create the landscape. It's powerful and humbling and beautiful.  

Beautiful, at least, until you have to navigate 240 m of tussocks while pulling 150 lbs of gear. 

Alaskan bear warning

I had a super Alaskan experience today.

I biked the Coastal Trail today. Nothing new there; Kincaid Park (where the trail starts and home to a single track trail and miles of running trails) is one of our default running spots, and the Coastal Trail is a lovely 22 mile bike ride round trip. We've done a 30-something mile loop that follows the trail down and along Ship Creek, and there are several iterations of the Coastal Trail that don't involve doing it as an out and back.

But I digress.

I was biking along at a reasonable pace, enjoying the glorious weather, dodging walkers, other cyclists, and tourists. There's been a bit of bear activity in Kincaid Park, complete with signs warning trail users to be alert. I've never been on the Coastal Trail without seeing a moose. This is Alaska, after all. When I went running earlier this week, I found myself doing variations of a little loop that I managed to run three times before I gave up and doubled back. This wouldn't have been a big deal, except I ran past the same, still slightly warm pile of bear scat three times.

So as I'm biking today, I pass a cyclist going the other direction. "Black bear," he says, as we sped past each other.

I kept an eye peeled, and lo and behold a mile or so later I get a glimpse of a bear off the side of the trail near the bluff.

A few more miles and an oncoming cyclist slows down as we approached so I could hear his clearly stated warning of "Bear."

Any other place, the casual warning of upcoming wildlife, especially bears, since they've been especially feisty this year, might cause a change of plan. But here, a casual warning is considered sufficient notice. I made a point of singing to myself at top volume for the rest of my ride when there weren't other people near me. I figure that way, if I got mauled it's just because the bear really didn't like my choice in music.

Gotta love Alaska.

Playing outside

The last couple weekends have been amazing. 

I had a massive push at the office to get some reports out that resulted in a couple 60+ hour weeks. Which is a bit soul crushing when it's in the office. It's a totally different story if you're in the field, playing with dirt, being outside, and moving. Something about being at a desk when I could be outside kills me.

Anyways, I started compensating for my insane, 14-17 hour work days by playing hard on the weekends. Adam came down and we did an overnight hike to Rabbit Lake, which was windy as hell. Windy as in it collapsed Adam's tent a couple times until he relocated, blew me off a rock and into a stream, and generally was pretty wild. But it was absolutely stunning and we had the lake to ourselves, since everyone else who started out with the intent to camp decided to make good life choices and wait for a better weekend. It says a lot about the quality of our friends when strong winds, chilly temperatures, and no good camping spots don't put them off a night in a tent.

This was followed by another 60-something hour work week, and then another excellent Alaskan weekend. Weekend number 2 involved a magical hike in Hatcher Pass, climbing an easy multi-pitch (theoretically 3 pitches, but we linked the first 2), and meeting up with a good friend in Palmer for dinner. Then on Sunday we went for a wonderful 30 mile bike ride down the Coastal Trail and to the end of the Ship Creek trail. It was magical. 

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This weekend I flew Rach down from Fairbanks for some climbing/hiking adventures with her and her fiancé, Chase. We snagged my morning climbing buddy Nelson, stuffed Rach and Chase into the truck, and drove up to Hatcher Pass (seeing a trend yet?). 

We proceeded to hike up Reed Valley towards the lovely, yet solidly damp and misty climbing crags. After we missed the turn for our original destination (the cliff was in the clouds and we couldn't see it - probably a good clue that the rock was going to be too wet to climb), we headed up to a slab that looked like it had potential to dry out a bit. 

The mist started burning off and the rock dried out surprisingly fast.

We scouted around it a bit and decided, while parts of the rock were dripping water, there was a route that I was comfortable leading. 

As the day progressed, it got sunnier and hotter. 

We set up a top rope on a route and took turns on a lovely little 5.9+. It also happened to be one of those routes that's incredibly photogenic.

Unless you're Nelson. I have at leat 15 photos of Nelson and he has some variation of this face in every. Single. One. 

Eventually we moved down to a different section and did a nice little trad lead. We even got Chase to do his first outdoor climb. He crushed it. Some people are really good at crack climbing. I kinda hate them. 

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On Sunday we hiked Rainbow Ridge. It was one of those hikes that was pretty awesome going up and seemed waaaaaaay steeper going down. But, like most things you have to work for, it was totally worth it. 

I must confess, the my quads have been quite sore today. I blame the prolonged, steep downhill. 

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And that is the story of my life. And by 'life', I mean adventures. 

It's so nice being able to get outside and play. It's good for my sanity. And might result in a tan.

I'm lying. I don't tan.

Something about nothing

I love Alaska.

I love seeing the mountains when I wake up, drive to work, or go for a run.

I love the easy access to hikes where solitude abounds.

I love the rivers you can float down for weeks without seeing another soul, basking in the beauty of nature.

I love being able to go from rugged coastline to majestic mountains to winding rivers and rolling hills, to tundra as far as the eye can see.

I love the extra modifications added to climbing grades to account for moss/lichen, bees, and god-awful rock quality.

I love having friends to take on grand adventures.

I love having perspective from the last few years of my life that helps me appreciate what I have here. I missed it here.

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I've been travelling every weekend of May for various reasons. I'm ready for some one-on-one time with Ev, away from the rest of the world. We're thinking a multi-day hike, or climbing adventure if the weather holds. Having nice bikes helps, since we can go for a ride after work and cruise along the Coastal Trail. I must say, it's great having a nice bike again.

Anyways, I figured I should post something, even if it's basically nothing. These things happen.

I'm getting all up in some frozen dirt

I'm having fun.

This job lets me do basically exactly what I wanted to do with my masters degree. I get to do the preliminary design, then go out to the field, use the data to refine my assumptions and update models and recommendations, then be involved in construction administration. 

I got to do thermal hand calcs to determine freeze/thaw depths, then evaluate different failure modes (bearing capacity, slope stability, etc.) and developed recommendations based on the available data and our assumptions. Of course, a lot of the recommendations consisted of 'you should really let us go do a geotech investigation so we can try to save you money'.

And then I got to go out and drill lots and lots of holes. When I get back to Anchorage, I'll take the info from this geotechnical investigation and use it. Which is so freaking awesome! We'll do some additional field work this summer and should be able to validate the model outputs by comparing them to real-world results. 

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I've been in the field almost continually since 3 March. It's starting to wear on me, but all in all, I'm enjoying myself. 

After all, I'm playing with frozen dirt.

Granted, it's kind of awful when you're standing outside for 14 hours a day instead of working in a heated enclosure. I've taken and classified several hundred samples of various peats, gravels, sands, clays, and silts, and drilled boreholes anywhere from 15- to 70-feet deep. We've also confirmed that auguring through warm (e.g. 29-degree F) ice is basically impossible and a hammer or air rotary setup is a waaaaay better life choice. Turns out, it's hard to drill through what is basically a slushie. 

I've gotten to identify the bottom of the active layer/start of permafrost based on the ice formations, and mucked around with massive ice (if it's cold, it drills really well; if it's warm... slushie). 

I've stood around outside at 0 F in 20 mph wind while the drilling went really, really slow. 

I laughed my ass off when day shift drilled into a tundra pond and flooded the drill sled (I laughed cuz they had it cleaned up by the time night shift showed up). 

I got to man the drill controls and (kinda) learned how to drive a skid steer. I think the driller had me drive cuz he was looking for a laugh, since I definitely did not improve productivity.

I installed a couple thermistors to measure temperature profile in the ground in order to identify thaw bulbs and active layer depth (although I'm pretty sure I know exactly where the active layer ends. Yay ice formations!). 

And I have definitely regressed to the full classiness of my construction days. Apparently I fit in well with a drill crew. 

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Due to the nature of working on the North Slope, I can't go into much (aka any) detail on what I'm actually working on/looking for. Nor can I post any pictures that show any kind of oil wells, infrastructure, etc. So you'll have to content yourself with pictures of frozen dirt and sunrises (5 weeks on night shift means I didn't see much daylight for awhile). 

The drillers I've been working with, Onyx Drilling, are based out of Fairbanks and pretty much rock. They built a super sweet drill enclosure for our tundra drilling, and have been building their own drill bits to deal with the unique and changing soil conditions we've encountered. 

It's pretty sweet, even though occasionally we murder a bit. Or two.

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And now, I must confess, I'm ready to go home and sit behind a desk for a month or two. Being away from Ev for prolonged periods is a bit rough, especially since we had to do the long distance thing for a when I moved to Anchorage. There's lots more field work on the horizon (much to Ev's dismay), and now I get to take the info from all the samples we've collected and do some hardcore, fancy pants design.