Living Passionately
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Gone With The Winds
Featured Photo: The Fortress from Alpine Lakes, Wind River Range, Wyoming Photo: War Bonnet and Warrior, Cirque of the Towers. Driving south from Green River Lakes, our exit trailhead, to Sweetwater Gap trailhead at the southern end on the range, you crest a hill just outside Pinedale, Wyoming. From the top of the hill, stretches…
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Grand Anniversary: One Mountain, Two Climbers, Three Generations
Photo: Grand Teton summit, Charlie and Steve Markusen, July 2019 Forty feet below the summit of the Grand Teton we paused as a gaggle of Exum guides and clients passed by us on their descent. It was 9:30 in the morning on July 27, 2019. My son Charlie and I had left Petzoldt’s Caves…
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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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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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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…
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Remembering Bob McCord
It has been two years since my best friend and adventure buddy of 43 years died in a sky diving accident on Oahu, Hawaii. Not a week goes by that I don’t think of him. Bob pointed his skis, a long skinny pair of Truckers with three pin bindings, downhill. He pushed off. As the…