Climbing

As a full-time student, most of my climbing these days is done in gyms. So I was excited for an opportunity to spend a weekend climbing on real rock at Phantom Spires, an area south of Lake Tahoe off of Highway 50 with excellent climbing on granite spires. Phantom spires is a neat place to climb because it has routes of varying difficulties, opportunities for trad leading, sport climbing, and top-roping, and it’s a beautiful area but only a ten minute walk from the parking lot.

Just a few miles east of Kirkwood Ski Resort, across Highway 88 from Carson Pass, lies a mountain called Round Top. At 10,381 feet, the peak looks daunting, but it requires no technical climbing to reach the summit. I attempted to climb the peak with a group of nine other Stanford students through Stanford’s Outdoor Education Program.

We stepped out of two monstrous pickup trucks into a Sno-Park at Carson Pass around 11:30 PM on a Friday night. The beds of both pickups were full to the brim with backpacks, snowshoes, harnesses, shovels, and other gear necessary for our summit assault. The spring night was clear but warm, so we decided to sleep out under the stars in the parking lot between our trucks.

During World War I, the northeastern Italian city of Cortina occupied a strategic region in the Dolomite Alps. A string of forts was built high in the mountains among extremely rugged terrain. To assist soldiers in reaching their posts, the army installed miles of iron cables and ladders through the rocky mountains above Cortina. Since then, the via ferrata (iron road) has been extended and opened to the public. I visited Cortina with my parents in September of 2006, when we spent three days exploring the via ferrata.

One year after I climbed the Grand Teton for the first time, I returned to climb it again, this time with my parents. On my first climb, I’d taken the Exum Ridge route (5.4-5.5). This time, we would follow the path of the first ascent along the Owen-Spalding route.

There’s a lot more hiking on the Owen-Spalding route than on Upper Exum Ridge. We walked without belay until we were around 12,000 feet. The first technical pitch is known as the Belly Roll. It’s a small v-shaped ledge around the side of the mountain. The ledge is only a foot or two deep, so you can wedge one leg into it, but the other hangs out over the 2,000 foot drop on the other side.

I’ve flown into Jackson Hole, Wyoming twice now. But, no matter how many times I do it, I will never cease to be blown away by the final approach to Jackson. The small airport only takes prop planes and very small jets, and both times I was on a prop plane. If you look out the plane’s right side as you approach Jackson from the north, abruptly to the west rises the Teton mountain range, its grey and brown rocks speckled with snow patches and glaciers. Since the plane was so close to landing, even the more modest peaks of Middle Teton, Teewinot, and Mt. Owen stand about four thousand feet above your window. But between Middle Teton and Teewinot the unmistakable form of the tallest mountain in the Tetons—the aptly-named Grand Teton—carves out its place on the horizon.