On my way Home!

On the 5th of January we packed our bags into my Subaru and headed to the airport. I was sad to say goodbye to all the wonderful people of Canmore, but not to the cold. I left dreaming of alpine lines, and warmer temps, so I know I will be back.

When we landed in Montrose, Colorado, the sun was shining, the mountains were plastered in fresh snow, and we had to dig in the bottom of our packs for our sunnies. Peeling off layer after layer of clothing after a month of -30 to -40 temps in the Canadian rockies, the sun made us smile.

I have lived in Ouray/Ridgway Colorado a few times over the years, and every time I come back I miss living there! It is one of the few towns in North America I could imagine living in.

The weekend was full of friends, festivities, parties, clinics, hot springs, and competitions.

Despite the cold temps in Canmore I had enough time to train at the Vision gym, where there is an awesome cave with holds for dry tooling, and Haffner Creek, the Playground, and other local mixed crags. For the first time I showed up at the competition with a bit of strength and lots of psyche.

I was lucky to draw my climbing number towards the beginning of the day, but not too early. The morning was crisp and cold with a blanket of fresh snow covering everything, and clear skies. Majka Burhart, another competitior, and myself warmed up on some easier mixed and ice routes. We forced ourselves into the screaming barfies, it was our tactic. If we got them first thing in the morning, maybe we wouldn't get them in the competition. As I climbed my first pitch of ice, on top rope, with my hands gripped as tight as I could on my leashless tools, with the lightest gloves I could find, and tons of fresh snow, the goal was accomplished. It was not fun, but it worked.

The warm up was a fun atmosphere, a handful of competitors from across the USA and Canada traded ropes, smiles, laughs, nerves, words of encouragement. I love the atmosphere. We are all super competitive, and want to do well, but mostly I think we are competitive against ourselves, and love the drive of others that pushes us.

After a few pitches my time was almost up. The temps had warmed up to a sunny day and I knew it would be a perfect day for the comp route.

We get to preview the route from a distance and get an idea of what the climbing is like before the comp, but we are not allowed to scope it with binoculars, or photos, or watch anyone climb on it.

Local Hard Man Vince Anderson put the route up this year. I was for sure intimidated!! The route climbed 20 or so meters of grade 4 ice on top rope, a good warm up, to a belay, and then you are on lead. You get two or three moves up a rocky slab, and then the route is in your face. It is a full on roof, angling at 45 degrees, traversing up and left. I could see some of the holds that were marked with green spray paint to at least give us a chance, but I couldn't figure out what you did with your feet. And I knew for sure I couldn't do twelve figure 4's!!

I get super nervous before comps or before performing for a crowd. It's kind of funny because I am by no means shy, or introverted, but the pressure of performing weighs on me. Though just like Division 1 sports at University, or guides exams, I always seem to find the groove once I start.

Full of nerves, with a twisting stomach, I dropped over the lip into the canyon, feeling like I couldn't even remember how to rappel!

I got to the bottom to find a familiar face, Bill Whitt, with a huge smile, the organizer of the comp, super hard worker, and wonderful guy. He always gives a big smile, a pat on the back and words of encouragement.

I worked my way up the wierd, ice park, ice, or snice...Without too much trouble. It felt like it took me forever, but it only took 5 minutes. While at the change over point, from top rope to lead, I took a deep breath and warmed up my hands while looking at the route. I'm not much of a sport climber, or competitor for that matter, I don't do well at working routes, or reading them. But, after a few weeks of training and some good advice from Max, my boyfriend, I decided to read the route, or at least try to see where my moves would take me. The route was steep from the start, so I wouldn't have a lot of energy to waste.

I saw the first four or five moves, my hands were warm, and I took off. I moved up the slab thinking, this would be a crap place to fall off, but easy to fall as well, the slab was not hard but insecure and an intimidating start.

I reached to the first hold sinking my tool, and testing it, up and right I found a great crack for my other tool. Looking down at my feet i found a few nubs to move on and then made my first clip. After two moves I was leaning back hips pressed in and fully IN the roof. As I tried to clip the second clip, my not a good sport climber, showed itself as I fumbled the clip and had to drop the rope. After shaking out I gave it as second go, sucessfully. Moving up a few more moves, my arms were fully pumped. I did my best to shake out, but could feel the blood pooling in my arms.

I pulled with all my strength to have a look for the next hold, but knew there was no way I could actually move, and that was me off!

In the end I climbed well, placed second, there was a three way tie for high points in the women's division, so it went to time, I was second fastest, and likely placed around 10th overall of 20 including the men. I am content with my performance, but super motivated to take the training to the mountains and climb some trad mixed lines surrounded by big peaks back home in Chamonix, where I am headed right now. And, i hope to have more time and motivation to train next year, when the hard women come back (Audrey Gipery, Ines Papert, and Jen Olsen were in nepal this year trying an alpine line) and see how it goes!


P.s...I"m not canadian, but that's not a bad nationality to be mistaken for, he he he!

Bike, Hike, Climb, Get Pumped, Suffer, Spindrift, do it all over again!!

Ahh the glory of early season....Canadians have the luxury of climbing ice from October to April or May in a good year. Us non-Incredible Hulk, American types, get a few wily months in and we call it good. I would have to say that I'm not a natural born waterfall ice climber. My years of climbing have taken me through more of the Alpine Style ice, smooth couloirs choked with ice, if you're lucky, or snice (snow ice), or neive. Or mixed rock lines or crampon points teetering precariously on minute, granite edges, tools torked in small fissures, cams stuffed in ice choked cracks.

So...I agreed with Max that we would spend a few months in the Candian Rockies getting fit and strong, and me getting reaquainted with ice (if you look into the archives you will see early season ice from last year explaining my fall on ice two years ago). After a long summer of house renovations




feeling severely unfit, we made the trek to my car in Salt Lake City, Utah and drove North. We settled into our less than romantic, house, to be shared with a few local mice, a handful of dog food in the utensil drawr, an overflowing bathroom sink, a leaky bathtub, and then washed all the dishes in clorox bleach before daring to eat off them, unloaded our tools, ice screws, and bundles of kit and packed up to go play in the snow and ice.

After one day of mellow warm-up at the back of Lake Louise



, we headed up to the Trophy Wall, a huge North Facing wall just outside of Banff on Mount Rundle. The wall is full of gems, lusted over by locals, and visitors. I have always wanted to make my way up there.



We borrowed bikes from a friend and cycled as far down the road as possible



The 3 hour, 1000 m acent, approach was a long haul for me feeling desperately unfit! And, for the record biking in the snow on thin road tires is less than enjoyable.

The ice on The Replicant, was steep and featured, hooked out and fun climbing, but the snow kept falling and the wind picked up. So, we decided to bail, or maybe I convinced Max to bail. There was so much snow on the trail we ended up having to push our bikes most of the 5km back out that we had been able to ride in, NOT FUN!

A few days of drytooling at haffner creek and ice climbing on Carlsberg in Field, and we headed back up to the Trophy Wall.

This time feeling a bit more fit we woke up before light and headed in by headlamps. The snow had mostly been blown clear so the hiking was much more fun! Ok FUN is an overstatement, but not as painful.

This time we were going to try Terminator 2, the mixed start to the Terminator. Climb ice blobs to an anchor just below the daggar. From here Max traversed out onto mixed terrain, then hooked onto the scary looking dagger, and over onto the top of the hanging icicle. I luckily maanged to avoid barfing while watching. From there the climbing doesn't get any easier, steep steep, climbing, unprotectable, three fractures clean across the pilliar, freezing hands, cold temps, and windy weather coming in. It was a pump fest!!

I managed to make my way up behind him with out too much grace. We made it back to the forest before dark, and to the bikes with head lamps...Back home and could barely walk the next day!!

Facing the Dark Side

Photos: Top: Jeff Banks giving a Kiss to Mark Ryle, a fun day out on the South Face of the Aguille du Midi, rock climbing sunny granite. Middle: Mark Ryle on the crux pitch, as Jeff Banks and I heckle from below. Bottom: Three Amigos Mark Ryle, Me, and Jeff Banks, at the top of the route after a day full of laughs, hand jams, and back in town for dinner!

I went down to visit my friend Mark Monday, it's weekly ritual. An hour and a half drive to Rumilly. Usually I have a small bag of his laundry, some home made treats, soup, cakes, salad, and a handful of letters. It's usually either heaving with rain as I descend the auto route, or its one million degrees. I park at the old church, and walk into the sterile building, pushing the elevator button to arrive at the first floor. Passing each room marked with a name I find my way to Mark's. He's sitting in a chair eating his lunch or dinner, or on his bed reading a book. His face lights up as he sees me. He's likely been waiting, wondering who will visit today. He smothers me with a huge kiss and I feel needed and loved. He sighs "Ahhh great, now I can take my helmet off." I"m ready for him to take his helmet off now, the first time it was a little traumatic. As he lifts the white plastic helmet off his head he unveils his injury. The right side of his head sags into a depression the size of a large grapefruit due to the fact that he is missing nearly a third of his scull bone.

"Do you have any news about when you will have the plate put in?"

"Yeah, the 1st of October, I can't wait!! I hate this helmet, it's like having to wear a wooly cap in the middle of summer, while walking on the treadmill doing physio."

"What is the surgery like?"

"It's not supposed to be too bad. They will take me back to Geneva which is good, because that's where I was right after the accident so the doctors know my story there."

"Yeah, I remember Geneva."

I remember the whole thing, rockfall on a relatively normal day out in the mountains. Climbing a day route off on the Blatiere, just to the left of the Aguille du Midi. A dozen or so climbers on the face and Mark got hit....I sit there and face Mark, we chat, he's hopeful, he's positive, he's just taking it as it comes. I can't help but wonder if he's in denial, if he's putting on a brave face for me. I can't help but change places with him, or put Maxime, my boyfriend there, it could have just as easily been someone else.

But I am amazed, as we dance through topics ranging from literature, to physio therapy, to Chamonix gossip how "Mark" he is. I can't believe how well he is doing.

We talk about the parts he doesn't remember, the coma, the two brain surgeries, coming out of the coma, not knowing he had a head injury, being restrained to the bed, initially not being able to move his left side, and all the progress until here.

Once we have exhausted all the topics of conversation, he's eaten the tomato soup I brought him, and the fennel (wierd, but he loves fennel), we pretend like we're having a dinner party together, Mark is getting tired, visiting hours are coming to an end , and I have an hour and a half to drive back to Chamonix.

We say our goodbyes, give traditional French cheek kisses, patented Mark hugs and I go back for just a few more, before I leave, not really wanting to leave. Knowing how close it all was to not having any of this.

The drive home is hard, it leaves me to my head for an hour and a half. I process his progress. I process his deficiencies, due to the head injury. I process his bad luck. I process my chance, my luck. And I wonder.....why we take the risk? I have to answer to family, friends, loved ones, and I want to have good answers.

I go through his past two months, a week in a coma, two brain surgeries and all the progress since. And I am amazed. Mark is lucky, he is strong, he is brave, and I can't help but wonder if I would be so composed.

It's the dark side of what we do, I think about how fragile life is. I think about loving the people in my life harder, being more forgiving of others and myself. I think about the great days, the glacial sunrises, the shiver bivies with Max or a good friend, I think about the laughs, the little epics, and I think about the risk. I think about car accidents and randomness of life and balance that into the risk I take in the mountains. I think about my Dad who died of a heart attack at 42 on a run, and my Uncle who died in the World Trade Center.

I know the dark side of climbing is always there. I know we only face it on occasion otherwise, if we processed it every day, we would be too scared to go climbing. But I know the dark side of life is there too. If we processed it every day we would never get out of bed.

So I take moments and events like this to value life, experience and people more, and to be honest with myself about why I climb. And by the time I get home, with the panorama of mountains laid before me, the Aguilles, the ridges, the rock, the snow, the ice...I am excited to share another adventure with someone I love, to tie into a rope and trust my fragile life and theirs to the partnership of sharing a rope. Because that's why Mark is so special to me, because we shared dozens of days like that in the mountauns, and we know friendships that lies deep in the elements of sharing each other's fragile lives.

And that's why we climb, and that's what I'll tell those who ask me!

The Other Side of the Guide/Climber Life

The glory of the past few months, the accomplishments, the travels, the summits, alpine days, suffering, Guide Exam Completion, becoming a home owner (sorry I know, I'm dropping a half a dozen stories that I left untold due to slow internet, too many travel days, and too little computer time, but maybe I'll work both backwards and forwards), have metamorphosed into plain old blue collar hard work.

I'm a home owner! YAY, the American Dream, only it's in France, in Chamonix, and I managed to convince French authorities I was a good person to trust a loan to....he he he. Sometimes the arbitrary nature of the French culture works in my favor, and m I be bold enough to say the cultural massogeny?

Can I have thousands of Euros please? I begged with my sparkles and cutest Patagonia water girl skirt I could find.
Oh what do I do for a living I'm a Guide de La Haute Montagne.
Bah Non! Une Femme Guide!
Bah OUI!!
What do I make annually? How much money do I want?
Hmm they don't seem to balance out but heck why not....
Yehaw!

So that was it. Between the help of my fantastic mother, who opens my mail, deposits my checks....basically cleans up all i leave behind. After almost 10 years of trying to separate myself from my family, and become INDEPENDENT, I have digressed, I am on my mom's family plan for a cell phone, cheapest option when living out of the country most of the year. I have given her access, check books, bank cards to my meager bank account, and asked numerous favors of her in the process of procuring a home. Then there are my friends Miles and Lisa, the savy business peeps.

It started on a whim on a weekly run in the mountains, it proceeded with begging for my family to invest in the property, it continued with sweat, concrete, and tiling my step dad's chalet floor in hopes of helping him sell and convince him to support my blind ambition.

And it ended in January, with me running around Ouray inbetween ice climbing competitions, teaching clinics, unpacking from a month of climbing in Patagonia Argentina, and a day before leaving for Nepal and Oman for a month.

Papers were signed, notariezed, fed-exed to France (again by another integral friend Tony Brent), and a few days later, in the Khumbu Reigon of Nepal, in Namche Bazzar, I recieved an email saying I was a homeowner, with my new address!

A month later I stumbled back to Chamonix, my home base for the past 8 years, and found a set of skeleton keys with my name on it. The apartment 40 square meters, around 400 square feet, is small by American standards, but reasonable by European, especially Chamonix.

The work that I remembered as being aesthetic mostly as it turns out is now a complete gutting, removing a structural wall, trenching the house to dry the concrete walls that are home to dozens and dozens of earth worms.

I looked at my skeleton of a home, that is now a meager 4 concrete walls! The electric and plumbing removed too...and realized that I had devalued my home about 50,000 Euros. A brief panic attack, hyperventillation, and the commitment of my amazing boyfriend Maxime, a set of amazing and knowledgable hands, and I began wrapping my head around the idea of a mortgage, and a "working space".

To follow you will see the progress of our small home as it unfolds the challenges of working in another country, language, metric system, etc.

Ahh an adventure to begin.

Do You Really Want My Life??

Ahhh the less glorious side of travel, transience, and the climber/guide/dirtbag lifestyle....Packing, Packing, and Packing again...I'm pretty sure I spend more of my life doing this than climbing.

Thanks for the help Max!

In My Own Backyard

We stood on the flats, Max and I, squinting in thrashing winds and sideways snow. If I squinted, lowering my frosted sunglasses, maybe I could see which way the slope was dropping, or whether there was a crevasse or serac band beneath my skis. Max looked left and right hoping that the skies would clear for a moment and the pillars of granite we knew surrounded us would appear behind us so we could orient ourselves. My neck gaitor was stiff and frozen, basically useless. I kept reaching my frosty, gloved, hands to my face to warm my cheeks in fear of frost nip. Mentally, I inventoried what we had in our backpacks, a stove, half a small bottle of fuel, a few bars, some tea, two sleeping bags, two pads. We could spend the night out if we had to. Max and I stood silently, in our own worlds, desperate for something to appear in the white fog. We had been standing there long enough to lose track of which way was up or down. Our tracks were covered by the swirling snow and winds already, we couldn't backtrack.

I stood awestruck. I was lost in my own backyard. Less than an hour ago we stood, with our backpacks packed, at the tram ready to go down to town, watching the winds swirl loose snow around the Aguille du Midi from the safety of the other side of a window. We chatted kindly with the station Gurdian Nicola, in hopes that he would let us sleep again another night in the bathroom to save the $70 for a night in the Cosmiques Refuge, even though it was INTERDIT!! And maybe even give us a few more hot chocolates and espressos when we returned from a long day in the mountains and missed the last tram down. Just as the cable car arrived, the sun poked through the clouds giving false hope and Nicola pushed our buttons, with casual arrogance, and a small modicum of demeaning "Ah, c'est pas trop mal, j'imagine tu peut ski le Vallee Blanche, et peut etre avec une peu de poudre, tout seul"

Which translates loosely to you wimps, the weather is not that bad suck it up, ski the Vallee Blanche, you'll have some good snow and be all alone. In the Alps, you're never alone unless you are on some scary obscure route, a really hard route, or in super bad weather.

So there we stood, totally lost, no compass or map, and we had only skied because our tender egos had been bruised a bit. Peer pressure, complacency. I was in my own backyard. I had skied the VB more than 50 times, but not this year. And here I was completely lost.

"Maybe we should rope up Max?" I shouted in the wind. "Yeah." He agreed.

My mind flashed to the snowboarder who had just died last week on the "Salle a Manger", the "Lunchroom", falling through a snow bridge into a crevasse after unclipping from his snowboard.

Even roped, the light was so bad that one of us could easily just step INTO a crevasse.

Looking left and right, still not moving up or down, I finally shouted "Maybe we should just skin back up, it's safer. Even though we're totally turned around now, we'll eventually hit a wall of granite that we know and be able to locate ourselves."

Max tossed down his pack in annoyance, agreeing that it was the best idea, remembering the same situation last year with Freddie.

As we skinned back up, or at least what we thought was up, I thought about all the people who take the Alps lightly. Of the group of guys who set off for the committing Biannossay Ridge on Mont Blanc last summer with the worst weather forecast I've ever seen in the valley and ended up dying of hypothermia while on the telephone with the Helicopter Mountain Rescue. I thought of all the people who skied down the Vallee Blanche or climbed Mont Blanc thinking they would just follow guided groups. Or set out for routes that were far too difficult for them with the idea that they'd just climb until they got scared and call a helicopter. I thought of the few extra ounces the map and compass would have weighed in my pack, and was glad that we had bivy stuff from the night before with us, and even more glad that I was familiar with the landscape, and strong enough to skin until I hit a wall the I recognized and could orient myself.

As we got to the base of the last hill, Max finally smiled and laughed. "That was so stupid it's almost funny."

"Yeah, we stilll have to climb back up the Arete, let me know when the story get's funny." I still wasn't convinced, my legs were jello, and my cheeks stinging from the cold and wind.

"We were five minutes from taking the bin down and eating pastries in Chamonix," Max grinned.

"Yeah, and then our egos got pushed and we went for the bait. And we were a few hours away from an epic." I scolded aloud, but more to myself for being complacent and succeptible to the peer pressure that exists in popular mountain ranges.