Home Studio Pics

A few crappy pics of my modest but rockin' home studio setup:

Beaver Creek Cabin - Jan 2012

Join me and Ghetto-C as we ski into the Beaver Creek Forest Service cabin and attempt (and fail) to build our first igloo with the Icebox Igloo Building Tool.

Florida Fishing at Christmas

Enjoy this video, wherein I travel home for the Holidays and go on an excellent day of fishing with my brother in the Mosquito Lagoon area of Florida.

Granite Peak - Part 2

And finally, at long last, I edited together Part 2: wherein giant cuttthroat trout are caught out of Upper Aero Lake and mountain goats invade our camp.

Enjoy!

Granite Peak - Part 1

In the second week of September, Ghetto-C and I decided to make a go of it and attempt to summit Montana's highest mountin, Granite Peak, on a four-day adventure into the Beartooth high country.

Enjoy the action-filled video:

Union Falls - Yellowstone Nat'l Park

Over Labor Day weekend we took a backpack trip with friends to Union Falls in Yellowstone National Park!

Go straight to the video:

Electric Peak Summit Attempt!

Ok, let's do this right. Herein we will have the quintessentially late blog post with pics, but I will also embed the YouTube video of our adventure.

First off, straight to the vid:

And now, the long-winded format.

In early August, me and Ghetto-C decided to try a fast and light summit attempt of Electric Peak in the northwest corner of Yellowstone, near Gardiner.  We decided to come in via the National Forest side (Beattie Gulch) to obviate the Nat'l Park camping permits. The plan was to head up as far as we could Friday after work, camp/bivy (I used my awesome new Marmot Alpinist Bivy from 3point5.com), then hit the peak in the morning and head back down Saturday afternoon. This made for the most efficient use of time, as Ghetto-C had to work on Sunday and so no vacation time needed to be used. Also with the lightweight bivy (and one pound Marmot Pounder sleeping bag!) I would only have to stuff a daypack and spare myself the weight of a full pack on the grueling uphill.

The first part of the approach involves a heinous mountain bike ride (read: walk) up an old forest service road. Total: about 5.5 miles with almost 3000' of elevation gain. Needless to say, this SUCKED and took us the better part of 4 hours. It was hot and dry at the Beattie Gulch trailhead, and only slowly cooled off as we gained elevation and the sun set. We're headed up to the top of the ridge to the left of the telephone pole:

The old road passes by a dilapitated cabin, and eventually some other cabins at the top of the ridge on private land.

It was almost dark by the time we passed the private land and we set up our bivy camp in a field and pretty much crashed (after a little scotch, of course). It had been a tiring uphill climb with the bikes.

In the morning we packed up our stuff to go and stashed the bikes, as from here on there would only be a faint trail and no more road.

The trail was not too difficult to find, following the obvious east ridgeline through varying degrees of forest and meadow. Still, it continued its unrelenting uphill ascent.

Eventually the "trail" peters out above the treeline at the base of an obvious, large rampart leading up to the north/east false summit (the true summit is across a saddle to the left of the snow):

A little further on, at just over 9,000', we spooked a large herd of elk.

Heading up the grassy rampart looked easy, but once again the constant uphill grade made progress slow. Here you see the view up the rampart to the false summit, with the real summit on the left of the snow.

The plan was to head up to the false summit, go across the saddle, and scramble to the peak. What we didn't know, however, was that the false summit was an 800' pile of talus and loose rock. Getting up it was slow and treacherous. It continued getting steeper and steeper, until at one point some rocks gave way and I took a little spill, cutting my finger on some rock. It could have been worse (broken ankle, etc), but as it was I left some blood on the mountain and considered myself lucky.

At this point we were looking at the clock, and were already almost 2 hours behind our self-imposed schedule with at least another hour to the peak and no sure bet we could make the scramble on the other side of the saddle. In fact, it looked a little sketchy. With more time, perhaps. But, we decided to head back down after almost reaching the top of the false summit (made it to just above the snow fields in the pic above) and call it a day. There was still a 5 mile hike back to the bikes before the glory of an easy ride down the last 5 miles. That's 10.5 miles (each way, meaning over 20 total!) with an elevation gain of 5,200' from the trailhead. Good times!

Here's Ghetto-C near our turnaround point atop the Talus Pile from Hell, with the summit in the distance on the left:

I think I will get up there again sometime, only next time perhaps from the Nat'l Park side via the standard route. We'll see.

All in all, an awesome weekend adventure for a Friday evening and most of a Saturday!