Adventure
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Forever Young: Climbing the Guides Wall
“May you build a ladder to the stars And climb on every rung May you stay forever young…” Bob Dylan My gaze drifted up, taking in the steep rock wall that was the last, and most difficult, of a six pitch rock climb called the Guides Wall in Cascade Canyon, Grand Teton National Park. It…
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Passing the Torch
Photo: Charlie Markusen on the summit of Pingora, Wind River Range, Wyoming, July 2019 Sitting on a comfortable ledge, 400 feet below the summit of Pingora, I watched with fatherly concern as Charlie climbed the thin 5.8+ crack splitting the vertical wall of granite rock. This crux pitch of the Southeast Buttress is called the…
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Solo
Photo: Chillin’ on the summit of the South Teton 12, 519 feet with a view of the Grand Teton, Wyoming, July 2019. I stepped onto the steep snowfield, beginning a traverse to the Northwest Couloir and my goal: the summit of the South Teton. The bright, early morning sun of July 16, 2019 had touched…
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A Gift
Photo: cloud-base at 8000 feet msl, June 2, 2019 The soaring forecast was marginal, the day…exceptional. My favorite gifts are unexpected. Though receiving such a gift can be uncomfortable. Yesterday’s paragliding flight was unexpected, at times uncomfortable, but most certainly, a gift. The sky was hazy, tainted by smoke from Canadian wildfires in Manitoba. The…
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Escalante
The names on the map tell stories: Scorpion Gulch, Deadman Ridge, Carcass Canyon, Fifty Mile Cliffs, Rattlesnake Bench and Little Death Hollow. This is the Escalante, three million acres of National Monument and National Recreation Area in Southern Utah. Among the most remote in the country, it was the last to be mapped in the…
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Grand Design
GRAND DESIGN – Non-Fiction by Steve Markusen – Author’s Note: An abbreviated version of this article was published in Rock & Ice in November of 2017. This article has been published on Dreamers website https://www.dreamerswriting.com/stories-poems/exum-ridge/ An insistent voice brought me out of the void and darkness. “What is your name? Where are you?” My eyes…
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Remembering Al Grahn
“I don’t know what happens when people die Can’t seem to grasp it as hard as I try” (Jackson Browne, For a Dancer) I was struggling, too much effort and too little output. It was my eighth day on skate skis. Since early February 2019, we had epic Nordic ski conditions. Every week I skied…
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Remembering Fred Beckey: A Close Encounter
Wilson Peak: Photo credit Whit Richardson, The Trust for Public Land Author’s Note: Fred Beckey, a fabled mountaineer and author, made as many as a thousand first ascents of North American summits and routes, considered at the time, too difficult to climb. Fred passed away at age 94 in October of 2017. There are two…
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Remembering Robert Goforth 1953-2016
Photo: Bob Goforth, 18,000 feet on the Harper Glacier, Denali AK, 1976 Remembering Robert Goforth 1953-2016 Bob and I were the first to descend to the West Buttress high camp at 17,200 feet. Two days earlier we had stood on the highest point in North America, the summit of Denali 20,310. The 17,200 camp was…
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First Snowfall: Feeling the Itch
Snow on my car, it’s the first of the season in central Minnesota. It triggers an emotional response in the amygdala located deep within the temporal lobes of my brain. In the Teton Range, where I will be skiing in two months, they have received over four feet of snow. I started skiing when I…