The other Round the World

Laura and I went around the world in 2008-2009. It's a bad habit we learned back in 2002-2003, when we did the same thing. We were both living in Utah. I quit my jobs, sold a lot of stuff, and put the rest on a trailer that I hauled down to Texas.

We left June 2 and flew to London. We hopped and skipped across Europe, Turkey and Morocco for three months before flying to India. Stuck, we went to Bangladesh, where we got stuck again and wound up in Nepal, where we spent two months. I went to Tibet and then we flew to Bangkok. We moved around southeast Asia for several months before flying to New Zealand, where we bought used bikes and camping gear and spent three months circumnavigating the South Island. We sold the bikes and went to Tahiti, where we island hopped on freighters for a month. We flew to Los Angeles and took Amtrak to Houston, and that was a year.

We each had a camera on that trip, but we used film cameras. In all, we took about 800 photos -- a lot, but a piddling compared to the 18,000 or so we took on our 08-09 trip, when we both had digital cameras. Anyway, we printed our photos and put them in albums, occasionally assaulting visitors with "Would you like to see our trip photos?"

I've got access to a scanner now, so I thought I'd post some.

November, 2002: A hike around Annapurna, Nepal



August, 2002: Hamil loads our camels after a lunch break outside Zagora, Morocco



September, 2002: Laura in an old Bedford taxi in Calcutta



September, 2002: Quite an amazing photo, considering the circumstances, and difficult to this day to look at. We took a Trooper from Calcutta to Dhaka. We left at 6 a.m. and had three flat tires. We were left alone to walk through the border into Bangladesh. They kept us in a room where Laura got a marriage proposal, and the bus left without us. A boy came with a bike and pedaled us to a new bus, which poked across the Bangladeshi countryside before loading onto a boat which crossed the Ganges in the dark, surrounded by thousands of other boats, in what I can only describe as a scene out of Dantean novel. We arrived, with Laura now quite sick, in Dhaka at about 9 p.m.



November, 2002: The morning of our flight to Bangkok, at Amar Hotel, where we stayed for several weeks in Kathmandu, often the only people there. Amar is on the left.



February, 2003: A minibus ride from Medan to Bukit Lawang, Sumatra.



February, 2003: Me looking quite sweaty in the jungle in Malaysia.



January, 2002: One of my favorite photos. Laura on a perfect beach in Ao Nang, Thailand.



August, 2002: Dolomites, Italy.



November, 2002: Another amazing photo -- downtown Lhasa, Tibet, with Potala Palace, the boyhood home of the Dalai Lama, in the background. Lhasa sits at more than 11,000 feet above sea level.



June 2003: Round the world, completed. Laura in Atlanta with Jimmy and Bill.

Urban Wilderness

One of the great things about Missoula is that I can wake up on a Saturday, have breakfast and coffee, and make plans for a day in the mountains.

(This is the view my boots have all day long)



One of the main factors that finally won me over to the Smokies and life in Waynesville was that I could drive 30 miles from my house and been in deep wilderness. Some of my best days there were on the Smokies' long trails -- 17 or more miles with 3,000 vertical feet of gain and a bike shuttle or hitchhike to round the day out, plus an evening's worth of limping around in pain from the exertion.

(Bass Lake)



There's that same kind of challenge in western Montana, only you don't have to go looking for it, like you do in North Carolina, and purposefully set yourself on to a punishing mountain. Here, you have to make a conscious decision not to overexert yourself.

(The remote headwall of South Fork Lolo Creek)



With three major ranges converging on the Missoula Valley, it's almost hard to narrow down your options.

(Tom pushing off from Little St. Joe, the Bitterroot Valley more than 5,000 vertical feet below)



Two Saturdays ago I drove to the Bass Creek Trailhead and set out on skis up Bass Creek. Eight miles and five hours later I was at the mouth of Bass Creek Lake. I skinned across the lake and climbed the east face of Bass Creek Peak, turning around short of the summit when I experienced signs of snow instability. I made it back to the truck at 6 p.m. exhausted and limping.

(View into the Great Beyond)



On that trip I saw exactly one other skier -- Tom, a recent transplant from Maine, who told me he got to the trailhead at 6 a.m. This, I figured, was someone I needed to get to know.

Last week I picked Tom up and we went back to Bass Creek Trailhead, but this time bushwhacked up a steep ridge until we found a trail and put our skis on. Six hours later we traversed across the summit of Little St. Joe, 9,033 feet, and took in the nearly monochromatic expanse of rock, snow and tree that make up the background of the surrounding few thousand square miles. From here, we could see into the heart of the Bitterroot and off into Idaho. The Bitterroot Valley, brown under the effect of a warm winter, slumbered more than 5,000 vertical feet below.

(A phalanx of rock, snow and tree: the view from Little St. Joe south into the central Bitterroot)



We got back to the car at 7 p.m., making for an even 10-hour outing, and I was so sore that Sunday was for the most part a loss.

Disco, the Mav, and the Big Hole

Feeling the need to get out of Missoula last week, I begged Monday off work (President's Day, after all) and got off early on Friday. We loaded the truck, threw the plott hound in, and set off down the Bitterroot.

We stopped for coffee in Lolo and picked up some rain in Hamilton, which turned to slush then snow past Darby and heavy snow on up Lost Trail. At Lost Trail Pass, in the dark, we turned east and crested Chief Joseph Pass before descending into The Big Hole in snow and blowing snow. The Big Hole is one of those great Montana landscapes: a few hundred thousand square miles of valley and wolves and the towns of Wisdom and Jackson.

With no traffic on the road and snow crossing it in great drifts we pulled off the highway at Big Hole Pass and camped in the truck.



On Saturday we woke to pink skies, a few flurries and heaped snow around the truck. We pulled out and motored down the pass and up to Polaris, home of Maverick Ski Area.



In the base lodge, we found more dogs than people.



We also found lots and lots of orange carpeting.



Maverick is 1,520 vertical feet served by a 1962 Riblet.



Coverage was thin and grooming was spotty, but what can you really complain about for $30 lift tickets?



We knocked off early and went to Dillon, where I had romantically made reservations at the finest Motel 6 in town. First things first, however: the Patagonia outlet's President's Day sale.

On Sunday we were up to high overcast. We went back up to Polaris and I took off to climb Comet Peak (10,200 feet). I thought I had scouted a good route up the west ridge but got lost in a thicket more suited to machetes than skis and lost about two hours. Made it only to 8700 feet before having to turn around.



On the way back to Dillon we stopped at Bannock National Historic Landmark.



And took in the immensity of the Big Hole.



We drove up I-15 and drove up to Dewey, where we camped in the truck in a BLM campground.

On Monday we woke to snow and made first tracks over the Continental Divide, popping out in Anaconda, before heading up to Discovery.

Discovery is an exceedingly pleasant place, and with lift tickets costing $35, my type of mountain.



There was a few inches of new snow here, but even that could not mask the fact that this mountain, like every other place in Montana, in is real need of snow.

Lots of variety here -- from 50-yard wide beginner slopes to tons of chutes and cliffs.



Disco has a new lift opening what looks like interesting terrain on the slope toward Phillipsburg -- and will add to the vertical -- but there was not enough snow down low to open it and anyway it did not look like the installation was complete.

We skied till four, took in Georgetown Lake on the way out and stopped for a Montana original: Huckeberry slurpees (free, with that day's lift ticket!)

Lost Photos

Just before I went to Austria in the winter of 2008 Laura and I went out and both got new cameras. Laura had been using the old Canon film camera I got as my high school graduation present and wanted something more, ah, modern. I had been using the latest in a string of profoundly cheap and crappy pocket digitals which never seemed to be as good as their advertising claimed.

Laura wound up with an "SLR-like" Sony, and I got a small point-and-shoot Sony. Her's is a larger, better camera while mine is smaller and simpler. Her's is what you use for important shots. Mine is what you use when you don't want to lug a big camera around.

Mine has performed admirably. It is now on image 12,367 -- that's right, the shutter has snapped more than 12,000 times in a little more than two years.

About three weeks ago I started having problems with mine. While the camera is definitely well used -- with scratches, dings and cracked plastic -- it's worked fine until now. Then lately I started getting low-battery warnings when the batteries were fresh. Later, the camera refused to turn on when it was cold. Living in Montana, that was a problem.

Last week, having had enough, I went out and got a new Sony point-and-shoot. This one was actually very cheap and nearly as good as the old one, though it does not feel as solid or perform quite as well.

Most of those 12,367 images were taken on our year-long around-the-world trip. The small Sony was handy in places where you did not want the risk of carrying an expensive camera, or when social situations called for something the locals wouldn't take much notice of.

One day early in the trip, in Peru, we took a day-long guided trip into the Cordillera Blanca outside of Huaraz. This was a longish hike and we went light, taking my smaller Sony.

A few hours into the hike Laura called out to me -- she was taking pictures but got a warning message that the memory card was full. Since we had gone out of our way before the trip to outfit our cameras with large memory cards, that should not have been the case. If the camera was malfunctioning in Peru -- a country not known for its electronics superstores -- then we'd have a problem.

Earlier in the day one of us had replaced the batteries and must have accidentally hit the button which releases the memory card. When Laura handed me the camera I saw that was what happened and popped the card back in. It worked fine.

When the memory card is not inserted into the camera, all images are stored on the camera's very small hard drive -- there's room for about eight images. That's why Laura got the warning message -- while there was plenty of room on the external card, the internal memory had filled up.

Last night, when we were setting up the new camera I popped the memory card out of the old Sony and put it in the new Sony. Then, just to see if the old Sony was feeling like working, I turned it on and snapped a picture. Immediately I got a warning -- memory full. Weird, I thought. So I reviewed the images in memory and found, to my surprise, eight pictures which Laura had inadvertently taken when the external memory card was popped out. I had never thought to look for images on the camera's body and had forgotten about the incident altogether.

While only 14 months old, these are not exactly a time capsule from the distant past, though seeing them last night did for a moment take me back to a time that already seems very long ago.

(Huaraz from 14,000 feet)



(Looking deep into the Cordillera Blanca -- a range of massive proportions.)





(Me midway up the hike, a scene forgotten until now.)

The January Thaw

Laura got me a book for my birthday called "Downhill in Montana." It's a history of skiing in Montana and focuses on ski areas.

(Lower Lolo Canyon)



Like many states in the U.S., Montana is peppered with ski areas that opened in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, operated for a few or 10 years, and then closed up. Many of these ski areas opened during periods of unusual snow and cold only to find that when conditions returned to normal their once-great ski season had shrunk from five months to two, or less. The author interviewed one former ski area owner who noted that no matter how warm and snowless a winter can be in Montana, there was always one thing he could count on: the January thaw.

(Crystal Theater)



While we've had our moments of snow and cold here, it's been overall a dry and warm winter. Such winters are particularly frustrating when we are new here, excited to get out and ski peaks only to be confronted by brownery.

(Lolo)



My first winter in Salt Lake City was the same way, as was my first winter in Tooele, so maybe we can write this off to a sort of first-year phenomenon.

(Crystal Theater)



So, the thaw is on. Missoula is about to totally melt out, which means lots of puddles, mud and piles of melty black snow. Apparently it also means lots of fog, which we've had almost every day for two weeks.

(Looking to Idaho from Lolo)



The Clark Fork and Bitterroot rivers are now wide ribbons of flowing water edged by ice and stranded bergs. South faces above the valley are snow-free. Jumbo has two wild ribbons of snowing arcing up the west face where south winds deposited drifts; elsewhere on Jumbo, the winter elk herd has all the grass it can eat.

(Fresh lines in the Crystal Theater)



(I'm not the only one making tracks here)



Of course, though we are in thaw there is still snow -- just much less of it.

(Laura at Lost Trail)



(Lost Trail is great, but it sure has a lot of flat spots. Every snowboarder needs a telemarker, if for nothing else than to loan poles.)





Let's hope winter resumes before spring begins.





(Stevensville)

"The Whole Reason For Winter"

Last weekend, as temperatures rose, snow settled and skies broke, Laura and I headed up to Snowbowl.

Properly, the ski area is called Montana Snow Bowl, but over the years it's also been called TV Mountain, SnowPark and Missoula Snow Bowl. Either way, the ski area is about 11 miles from our front door and visible from all over town. On radio and TV commercials we're told Snowbowl is "the whole reason for winter.

Snowbowl is best known for its steeps, accessibility and low lift ticket prices. It's rather infamous for its rickety facilities and southern exposure. (One sticker plastered on a chairlift tower on the Grizzly lift says "Snowbowl: The Whole Reason for P-Tex.")

Montana is filled with funky locals-only hills like Snowbowl. Each have their bonuses, and each have their drawbacks, but all are uniform in that they are cheap. I tried to figure a formula for comparing Montana ski areas against those elsewhere in the country and never decided what were the appropriate factors to use. Nevertheless, you can't argue with the prices. Lookout Pass is $33. Lost Trail is $34. Discovery is $39. And Montana Snowbowl is $39 as well.

In many respects, you get much more than you pay for. In others, you get exactly what you pay for. Swanky on-mountain lodges and high-speeds lifts do not have a home in our part of Montana (and really only are those found in a few places in the Treasure State). Snowbowl's access road is dirt, its chairlifts squeaky and ancient, its parking attendants look slightly crazy, and the lodge could use a good scrubbing. And all those reasons are precisely why it's also so loveable.

Oh, and then there's the skiing.

All this stoke comes from Laura. Enjoy.