Adirondack Peeks Summer 2024

Friendship took up climbing seriously, joining the Mazamas moun taineering club and summitting numerous Cascade peaks in Oregon and Washington. Around the time of the birth of our first child, Alice, in 2005, our trips together started to move to lower elevations. A climbing acquain tance also died in a glissading accident on Mt. Whitney, which dampened my ambitions. But I still pursued near by summits. Before leaving Portland for grad school at Cornell in 2009, I made six summit trips to 14,000-foot Mount Hood, including one in the winter in 2017. A re porter for the New York Times joined us part of the way and wrote about it in the now-defunct Sports section of the Times (see www.nytimes.com/2007/01/20/sports/ othersports/20outdoors.html). Climbers had gotten stranded in a storm near the summit one month before and one died. The author was trying to figure out what made people want to climb in the winter considering the recent tragedy. I later regretted agreeing to him coming along. My letter responding to the article was published the following week. I wrote: As one of the climbers mentioned in this article, I was disappointed to discover that you missed an opportunity to explore the higher aspirations and values of mountaineering. While perhaps there is no universal reason climbers continue in light of a death, a deeper exploration of motives would reveal that many climb for camaraderie, spiritual growth, beauty, and genuine experience. Alpine decisions are mostly about mitigating risk, and experienced climbers consistently back off when factors don’t align for safety. We climb to live well, not to die. When we moved to Ithaca in 2009, I figured two years at Cornell pursuing my master’s degree in city and regional planning would be a nice chance to reconnect with family in New York while advancing my career, and then we would return to our community and the moun tains in Portland. Instead, Mary and I fell in love with the Finger Lakes, found community and meaningful work in our chosen fields, and decided to stay. There was only one problem. No “real” mountains. A kitchen conversation with Tim Logue made me rethink that notion and eventually led us both to the summit of Whiteface in March 2022 where we celebrated the completion of our forty-sixth Adirondack peak above 4,000 feet in the winter, a journey taken over 11 winters and many memorable trips. Tim and I became close friends while I was doing my exit project for grad school, which was a conceptual plan for better bike infrastructure for the City of Ithaca. Tim was the city’s transportation engineer, and his wife, Becca, was a teacher like Mary. Their kids, Hannah and Connor, were around the same age as our kids. During our first family dinner we discovered that we had a mutual close friend, Justine Willey. Tim and Becca knew Justine

out on an island in the clouds, then glissaded, squealing down the snowy slope on black plastic bags. The sublime views made a lasting impression, melding with a youth ful pride of withstanding resulting hardships: painfully numb fingers from using gloveless hands to brake and leg cramps from too many miles on small legs. I’ve been hooked on exploring high, wild places ever since. My first visit to the Adirondack High Peaks was a memorable overnight hike to Avalanche Lake and Lake Colden in October 1997. Mary Grover and I were juniors at Binghamton University. In hindsight, the trip was a sort of compatibility test. We met in April of freshman year and were already thinking of our future together. I knew I wanted the outdoors to be a big part of my life, but Mary didn’t yet have much experience. An ill-planned rough campsite, spilled dinner pot, and early-season overnight snowfall didn’t dampen our spirits. We planned to com plete a loop over Mount Colden, but when an athletic solo female hiker in her 50s from Brooklyn saw our heavy packs and fashionable Timberland boots and asked if we were carrying crampons and ice axes, we suppressed our summit urges and trekked out the way we had come in, with vague plans to return. It took me 15 years. In the intervening period, af ter graduating from Binghamton, Mary and I explored the rough 6,000-foot peaks of Shikoku in Southwest Japan where we taught high school English for three years. Mary overcame a powerful fear of heights and bravely scaled the near vertical chains on Ishizuchi-san, and we co-led winter trips with Japanese, British, Australian, Canadian, and American friends to the summit huts on Tsurugi-san, replete with gleeful Suntori-fueled midnight howling at the moon. On 9/11 and the days following, we ignored fam ily pleas read at an internet cafe in Kathmandu to come home and instead spent a blissful month hiking around the Annapurna range, reading and dreaming of Herzog’s early summit attempts and misadventures, and climbing high to Tilicho Tal lake at 14,000 feet and the Thorung La pass at over 17,000 feet. On moving to Portland, Oregon, in early 2002, we The crew on Noonmark ridge for Tim's first post-surgery winter ADK peak, January, 2024: Kent Johnson, Tom Knipe, Tim Logue, John Guttridge, and John Licitra

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