Hiking & Climbing
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Don’t Let The Old Man In: Seven Strategies For Adding life To Your Years
Photo: Steve and Charlie Markusen on the summit of the Grand Teton, Wyoming. From August 2019, fifty years after Steve first climbed the Grand with his dad Dave Markusen in 1969. “I just get up every day and don’t let the old man in.” Clint Eastwood Aging is like rust—it never sleeps. As we…
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Gaining Fitness, Losing Weight and Slowing Aging with Interval Training
Photo: Doing what I love to do at age 65. Deep in the Escalante Grand Staircase wilderness, Utah; on a eight day, eighty mile off-trail through hike. May 2019. Photo Credit Paul Gardner In my previous What I Learned newsletter, https://crooked-thumb.com/2021/04/07/interval-training-live-longer-live-healthier/ I defined interval training, how it works and the benefits of incorporating interval training…
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Body Set Weight: Why It’s So Hard To Lose Weight
Photo: Steve ice climbing at Sandstone, MN, January 2021 My client was twenty five pounds overweight. A common problem in our country where over forty percent of the population is obese. When I started full-time personal training at Lifetime Fitness, the company’s weight loss philosophy could be summed up in the phrase, “eat less, move…
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Into the Cold: Training for Backcountry Skiing
Photo: Steve Markusen on Triple Direct, Teton Pass, WY, 2019. Photo Credit: Max Markusen I peel the climbing skins off my skis, reset the bindings to downhill mode, don hat, gloves and goggles. I am alone at the top of Edelweiss Bowl, just south of Teton Pass, Wyoming. My son Charlie left two days earlier…
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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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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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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…