Ruth in da gorge

Cascade Locks, Ore.

 

Corinne's bike ride

Portland, Ore.

 

Parkinen

Brush Prairie, Wash.

 

Ruth in the backyard

Portland, Ore.

 

Dane

Olympia, Wash.

 

Nestucca IV

Nestucca, Ore.

 

Nestucca III

Nestucca, Ore.

 

Nestucca II

Nestucca River, Ore.

 

Nestucca I

Nestucca River, Ore.

 

Alpental IV

 

Alpental, Wash.

Alpental III

Alpental, Wash.

 

Alpental II

Alpental, Wash.

 

Alpental I

 

Alpental, Wash.

RX 100 Kyrgyzstan XVIII

 

The next day, we woke up early in Bishkek and got a taxi that brought us to the airport just in time. On the flight from Istanbul to San Francisco, I somehow lost my glasses, and when we landed and the plane cleared, someone found them on the floor a dozen rows in front of me. It felt like a bad dream.

Kevin and I parted ways in San Francisco, and I felt unsure of how to say goodbye. We hadn't climbed much at all really since we were students at the University of Montana, but he still brought me to the other side of the planet to explore big rocks. Thank you forever, Kevin.

RX 100 Kyrgyzstan XVII

 

When we returned to Bishkek, Kevin and I chartered a van to drive us to the northern shore Issy-Kul, a gigantic salt water lake in the eastern part of the country. By chance, we were in the country at the same time as the World Nomad Games, a biennial festival of competition and culture featuring nomadic groups from all over the world, as well as representatives from more developed nations. I took many photographs on my Mamiya, less on the point and shoot. It was an unexpected and amazing experience that we barely were able to make happen.                                                     

RX 100 Kyrgyzstan XVI

 After just a day and a half of walking, we arrived at a small community called Sarydzhaz. From there, we rode in the back of a sheep truck with wheel issues to a house in Samarkandyk. It was the family house of the woman who sold us bread in the Kara-Su, pictured a few posts ago, and of the guides who led us out (they're related!). It was a wonderful evening, in a very special place.

The next morning we drove back to Batken, where Kevin and I would board a plane back to Bishkek. We already had our tickets, but they were sold out when Alix tried to buy one. She would get a ride in a van back to the city, and thus ended our travels as a trio.

RX 100 Kyrgyzstan XV

I had gotten used to the small routines of camping in a remote valley in Kyrgyzstan for weeks, and became endeared to the tiny island in the Kara-Su we pitched our tents on. I wouldn't miss cooking with gasoline, but it warmed up the canned cow and ramen just fine and was all I really had to complain about.

Alix decided to leave with Kevin and I, and we hiked out via a different route than the one we used inbound. The trail was specked with the ghosts of ancient villages, shepherd huts long out of use, and skeletons of Soviet infrastructure- military, mining, or otherwise. It was slightly eerie at times, and at all times beautiful. Rather than going up and down many passes, we mostly stuck near the bottom of the steep gorge of the Karavshin River. At one point, the trail disappeared into a loose slope that had slid straight down into the river, before appearing on the other side. Our guides grabbed a pick-ax and a shovel from their horses and got to work cutting a new grade above where the slope had slid. We could see then the many previous grades, softened with age, cut into the slope below the one that had very recently fell. I was fascinated at the age of this route, and with the readiness at which our leaders repaired it. How many iterations of this riverbank have been known? After crossing the slope ourselves, we watched the horses, laden with haulbags, unhappily stumbling across a line that is certainly no longer there.

RX 100 Kyrgyzstan XIV

With time running out on our trip, Kevin and I recruited Alix to try free climbing the crux of Everything is Normal, the route we climbed earlier on the Yellow Wall. It was really nice to stretch out a bit in the sun, but when morning became afternoon, we put on all our layers and still had to shiver off the frigid air blowing from the glacier below. 

RX 100 Kyrgyzstan XIII

 

When I think of wild places in the United States, I think of rugged land, largely untracked by trails, and inaccessible to industry. I understand this solitude from humanity is contrived directly from the forced removal of indigenous people, and their original practice of maintaining healthy, productive relationships with the landscape is well known.

It was inspiring, then, to see the shepherds who daily led their herds up and down their respective sides of the valley, surrounded by granite giants. We interacted with them almost every day in some way, either as their sheep grazed in our camp, or to buy loaves of flat bread or hunks of sheep meat. Once, a shepherd summoned us to help rescue four of his sheep that got themselves stuck high on a cliff. Alix, Kevin, myself, and a Czech friend named Zdenek heeded the call and set up a rope system that gave us access to the errant sheep, fashioning harnesses for them with slings to be lowered, but ultimately just herding them down the faintest series of ledges to the ground. As thanks, the shepherds invited us over for a delicious dinner of sheep stew in their stone home.

RX 100 Kyrgyzstan XII

 

In the morning we scrambled up the worst scree field (it's always the worst, isn't it?) I've ever walked a haul bag on, to the base of Perestroika Crack. The wall towered over us, cavern like, for several thousand feet, and we were soon exposed to winds that made standing on the approach slab difficult. We could see the shade line inching down the walls on the west side of the valley, but it would be hours before the sun would make it to us. The thought of climbing out of a bivy, high on the wall, in these conditions, was not pleasant. We decided to wait for the wind to die down, and when it refused after a couple of hours, we retreated back to the Ak-Su River, and hiked back to the Kara-Su that day. 

RX 100 Kyrgyzstan XI

For the next route, we joined forces with Alix, the American from the other camp, and backpacked over to the Ak-Su Valley, which parallels the Kara-Su to the east. We wanted to climb what is probably the most famous climb in the Karavshin, Perestroika Crack, on Peak Slesova. We had heard that the weather in the Ak-Su was better, and the water running from the glaciers were clearer. The weather did seem to be better, but the water was thick with sediment so we still had to search for spring water to drink. We camped near a party of two French climbers who were wrapping up their trip. One was sick in his tent and I don't remember even seeing him, the other shared beta and snacks. From what he told us, it seemed that Ak-Su was the place to be, especially this late in the season. 

RX 100 Kyrgyzstan X

 The morning was a cold one. Concerned about the weather already forming up glacier, we made a decision to rappel back to the ground. It's always a hard decision to bail, and I've made a career of bailing in big places, but it's especially difficult when the next pitch begins with a true 5.10 hand crack. I knew the climbing got much more difficult soon after, but as a devotee of the one-foot-in-front-of-the-other school of thought, I needed to at least try the next step. I stuffed my hands inside the icy crack and climbed. I soon couldn't feel anything below my wrists, but I could see the rough grain inside the crack cutting into my skin. Once the climbing started getting harder, I leaned back, took in the view, and down climbed.

We got snow at our camp on the valley floor that evening, and when Asan finally revealed itself after the storm, its faces were white. In the picture above, Asan is the shrouded thumb on the left side of the frame.

RX 100 Kyrgyzstan IX

After taking a couple loads of gear, food, and water up to the base of the wall, Kevin and I began climbing up the lower angle bottom third of the route. The rock was generally good, but cracks often bottomed out, and splitters were rare. We had also been been hearing loud rockfalls booming throughout the valley during the entire trip, which never seems to soothe the soul. The weather held throughout the day though, and we arrived to a bivy below the steepest section of the route. 

RX 100 Kyrgyzstan VIII

When we arrived in the Karavshin, a guided trekking company was taking down its camp for the season, but Kevin and I weren't the only climbers still hanging out in the Kara-Su. We camped next to an international group of four, hailing from Canada, the Czech Republic, and the United States, and we often shared time together. It was cool seeing how they approached a big-wall expedition, and how they appeared to be more comfortable committing to the big lines in less ideal conditions. Still, they had arrived before us, and had planned to spend several more weeks in the valley after we left. While we climbed the Yellow Wall, we could see their portaledge across the valley on the Free Aussie Route, on a peak called Asan. It seemed to be relatively accessible and its summit less wintry than the slightly higher peaks, so Kevin and I decided to make moves to attempt it.

RX100 Kyrgyzstan VII

 

The main climbing in the Karavshin is split between two massive valleys, the Kara-Su and Ak-Su. Kara-Su translates into dark or black water, Ak-Su means clear or white water. The water in the Kara-Su was thick with glacial sediment, so we had to find our drinking water from spring-fed tributaries, which dried up as the weeks wore on. Our objectives were undecided until we got into the valley, but we were attracted to an east facing (read: morning sun) chunk of rock called the Yellow Wall, famous for an incident in 2000 where some well-known American climbers were taken hostage by militant rebels. Although we had a folder filled with cryptic Russian topos, we climbed one of few routes in the area that had been posted to Mountain Project and was waiting a free ascent. We were stuffed on an overhanging 5.12 corner, although I was able to do the moves on lead with a few heavy hangs.

RX 100 Kyrgyzstan VI

It was a strange feeling to have been in motion for so long, from Portland to Seattle to San Francisco to Istanbul to Bishkek to Batken to Özgörüsh, and to finally arrive at the remote valley where we would be staying for weeks, but hopefully not staying still. Quickly, though, a daily weather pattern emerged that concerned any big climbing plans. The sun peeked over the high walls to our east at just before noon, arriving later each day, and rain clouds formed nearly every afternoon over the valley.

RX 100 Kyrgyzstan V

Karavshin, Kyrgyzstan

We walked past the biggest mountains I had ever seen, crossing over 4 huge passes. Near the end of the second day, we made it to the Kara-Su River, a tributary of the Karavshin, and home to what might be considered the Yosemite Valley of Asia, replacing the 24-hour traffic snaking along the Merced River in California for a herd of sheep on either side of the valley.
 

RX100 Kyrgyzstan IV

Özgörüsh, Kyrgyzstan

The trek into the mountains took two days. If we could count on anything, it was the steep grades of the trail and the signs of a robust but disparate sheep herding community, visible in the huts and corrals that were connected by zig zagging grazing paths worn over a very, very long time.
 

RX100 Kyrgyzstan III

Katran, Kyrgyzstan

 

Although I'm not sure I really learned too much about it, I was interested in seeing if there were any comparisons to be made between the colonization of Turtle Island by Europeans and the colonization of Kyrgyzstan by the Russian Empire. The biggest difference I could tell is that in North America, the Europeans stuck around permanently, while the Russians basically left. Although Russian is still one of two official languages, there are very few actual Russians living in Kyrgyzstan. We both studied Russian a bit before the trip, which became less helpful as we began traveling into less cosmopolitan areas that spoke more Kyrgyz.

RX100 Krygyzstan II

Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

Uzbekistan?

I'm no fan of the original hierarchical take on world that designated the political west the "first world" and the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence the "second world", but I felt like I was in a different world, one that developed with a different set of guiding principles. I quickly realized, though, that those different principles were merely different methods of achieving the same wants and needs as the society that I was raised in. 

RX100 Kyrgyzstan I

Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

I went to Kyrgyzstan in the summer of 2018, which remains a singular experience in my life. My travels have otherwise taken me exclusively through North America, and I'm forever grateful to Kevin for bringing me to the other side of the world to climb big walls with him.

Seekseekqua with Timmy

Mt. Jefferson Wilderness, Ore.

This past summer, Timmy asked if I wanted to climb Jefferson in running shoes. This time we hiked up to timberline through an avalanche path I had spotted the year before. Ascending through the mass of fallen trees felt much quicker than navigating around trees that still had full lives ahead of them, and provided a huge shortcut from that route taken by most parties who attempt the southwest ridge. Once on snow, we moved efficiently up to a high shoulder, from which we belayed a few pitches across a steep traverse and up to the summit. 

When I compare my experiences on Seekseekqua, it's like I was on a different route. Climbing in running shoes is such a pleasure, allowing me to move through a variety of terrain with as little friction created by gear as possible. Yet, despite the relatively frictonless ascent, the mountain didn't let us off without a little thrashing.