2007
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Early Season ’07-’08
I managed to sneak five days of skiing in before New Years during the 2007 – 2008 season. After an usually low snow year for 2006-2007, it was encouraging that Tahoe got several feet of snow before Christmas. Despite this early snowfall, all of the Tahoe ski areas suffered from the usual early season low coverage with lots of exposed rocks.
Point Reyes
During our week off from school for Thanksgiving, my friend Paul and I decided to do a short backpacking trip along California’s Point Reyes National Seashore. We left early on Monday morning, piling ourselves and our gear into Paul’s 1978 Volkswagen bus. The morning was cloudy and gray, with dreary rain tumbling from the overcast sky. We drove for a little over two hours, picked up a permit, and parked at the trailhead.
Mt. Agassiz
Shortly after I returned from Alaska in the summer of 2007, my family left for a short backpacking trip in the Eastern Sierra. My mother, my father, and I met my father’s high school friend, Chris, near the town of Bishop, California. Our goal was the 14,153 foot summit of Mt. Sill, a remote peak in the Palisade Range.
Wrangell Mountains, Part Two
After the first two weeks of my trip to Alaska in the summer of 2007, I began designing my field study for the second segment of the program. Along with a group of three other students, I decided to study the issues involved in safe bear-human coexistence, including identifying bear habitat to help back country travelers avoid or at least be conscious of it, and researching methods for storing bear attractants in the back country. We spent about a week researching these topics and designing our field study. Then we embarked on an eighteen-day journey through the Wrangell Mountains.
Root Glacier
I spent two months in Alaska during the summer of 2007 as part of a college field study program. On our day off, a group of people in the program decided to go ice climbing on the Root Glacier, one of the two major glaciers in the area.
Wrangell Mountains, Part One
If you follow the archipelago of southeastern Alaska north to the Gulf, the first mountain range after the coast is the Chugach. Stay on the far eastern edge of Alaska and continue north forty miles. There lie the Wrangell Mountains, a stretch of peaks forged by ice and fire, carved by glaciers, forced upward by the crashing of tectonic plates, and scorched by volcanoes. In 1980, Wrangell – St. Elias National Park and Preserve was created. At 13 million acres, it is the largest national park in the United States. The old copper mining towns of McCarthy and Kennecott lie at the center of the park. I spent two months during the summer of 2007 in a field study program for undergraduates based out of McCarthy.