Failing Season

It’s been a while since our last post, and for that I apologize. Winter was a long season of failure. Being our first year swinging the tools, and overall relatively new to the game we are still developing our voices. What we know is we move fast on approaches and don’t mind a small rack. When in doubt, run it out. Most of what we’ve had to experience this season has been failure. With each mission, our acceptance of it grows deeper and our frustration greater. As partners we fill in the blanks and both have something to bring to the table. At 6’1” Jonny packs a hungry stride and a will to suffer. As for me, my lead head feels stronger than ever and I look forward to applying that to the mountains. Being new to the winter alpine, we are both eager to gain experience, but are also aware that one cannot make up for lost time in this game.

Despite being limited to one day a week to get a taste of altitude together, we managed to get out a decent amount, however never managed to reach any summits on our larger objectives. It seems that the wind remained “too damn high” the season’s duration. At least the days we were climbing. When until early spring came we managed to have a glimmer of success. It was then that we had our first chance to touch some ice on Big Mac (M4-WI4). We soloed to the first anchor where it was apparent that the looming, forty foot, cornices above us was more of a risk than we wanted to take. Especially since the sun had only been up for an hour and we were already stripped down to our thin base layers and looking at 70 degrees at noon. Although at first, the season appeared to be a complete wash, it proved to have made us much quicker at approaches on both dry ground and glacial traversing alike.

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