If we’re out camping in the wilderness and going without washing for weeks at a time then we’re rugged enough to wake up and get started a little bit early for our hike to the top of Kala Patthar. Our guide Pema knows well enough that a whole trek could be ruined by delaying the start just a few hours on the day of the final ascent. Although you could say that the journey is the destination, most of Pema’s clients hired him to actually get to the top of a mountain and get pictures of themselves as proof of the efforts. Add to that the costs of travel and taking time off from their jobs, and the price puts pressure on reaching the objective. The M.O. of the weather patterns up in the Himalayas is to offer clear skies in the early morning through noon, then in the after noon the tufts of condensed water vapor begin to rise up out of the valleys and they bunch up against the slopes.

If you noticed the photo from my last blog post it looks an unbelievably steep trail from the summit down to a bottomless chasm miles below. I was writing about snowboarding down Mt. Everest and this photo came up in an internet image search with not much of a description, so I thought it might be the route Marco Siffredi took. Thinking more about it I can’t imagine anyone making any form of a controlled descent since it is practically 90 degrees vertical, not to mention the major outcroppings of rock. This is more like urban legend than anything and I must be way off. But then looking at that photo there don’t seem to be any other reasonable choices for where to tip your nose down and fly. I mean really, what can you do besides loosely controlling free fall to the bottom? You couldn’t even get traction on your board to slow down. The only thing keeping your speed in check would be when you reach terminal velocity, where the force of the rushing wind holds you back from accelerating any faster than a few hundred miles an hour.

Although I’ve spent a number of years of my life in Utah I’ve never actually gone to any of the fine ski resorts to go skiing. That is until this past weekend, when our chief web designer invited me to go snowboarding at Snowbird. I remember in high school noticing that a lot of the other kids disappeared several days out of the week each winter to go skiing, and then some of them would turn up hobbling back to school in a cast. Not only was it an expensive sport to get into, it seemed to me like you’d probably break something along the way. I got enough encouragement to try it out this time, and I’m glad I did. The equipment rental turned out to be a lot more expensive than if I had just gone to a movie for the afternoon, or about five all day actually. I had a great time showing off my crashing skills, but after the first couple of runs I got the hang of it. I probably won’t get out of the Chikadee run for a while, but then I’m not in a hurry to leap off of any black diamond trails.