Trip Reports

Why Veganali? In addition to the selfish reasons to climb mountains (bond with teammates, bag badass peaks, experience the spiritual smallness of us versus the mountain) we wanted to use it as a vector to spread an environmental message. We decided to climb Denali with vegan food and gear to highlight the scientific consensus calling…

The best laid plans of moose and muskoxen are sometimes met with bad weather. My friend and I wanted to walk across Baranof Island in Southeastern Alaska- a trip that takes about three days and travels across a couple of ice fields. However, as we were scurrying around trying to borrow crampons and a GPS,…

“What is your favorite thing about backpacking?” My husband asked me this question when he joined me for 5 days of my thru hike of the Long Trail in Vermont. I couldn’t give him a short answer. I think I first said, “That’s a hard question.” And then was silent for a bit. There’s no…

On my first day at my new job, in a new city, in the new year, my new colleague Lisa invited me on an adventure. I was coming off a harried Fall of marketing myself to The Academy (:/) and finishing my dissertation. I forgot to take a break: I defended my dissertation at the…

Natural caves, along with deep oceans, are some of the least explored places on earth by humans. In fact, there are more undiscovered cave passages in the world today than mountains left to summit. This past fall (2018), thanks to the Sean Collier Adventure Grant, I had the opportunity to join an international caving expedition…

Read the related Rock and Ice article Fluid Machine: Life, Death, and Transformation on São Tomé’s Pico Cão Grande. From the plane over Accra the life of the lights below is strange and somehow comforting.  Their shape is organic and distinct from the geometry of other cities I know. Instead of the familiar grids that trace their arteries,…

I received a Collier Adventure Grant to climb the Kautz Route, a WI2/3 ice route on Mt. Rainier, the iconic 14,400′ glaciated peak in Washington state. Along with David Cain, I climbed the route in about 35 hours car-to-car on July 2-3 2018. My write up of the climb was picked up by Rock and…

Introduction May 2018, my sister and I recently resumed our weekly family dinners in Somerville. She had just come back from her first season living out in Revelstoke, British Columbia (BC), a gem of a ski town tucked away in no man’s land, 8 hours from Seattle and 2 hours from Banff. She said “I…

I had big plans for 2018. Having finished my PhD coursework and also completed my first ever self-organized short backpacking trip (in the Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho) the previous year, I felt finally ready to attempt longer and more challenging backcountry trips. Maybe a week in the Cascades? Or section hiking part of the Appalachian…

I heard about The Bugaboos after I got introduced to big wall climbing in Yosemite 14 years ago. After learning how to spend a few nights on el Capitan, it seemed like the next step would be to take the game to the alpine. The Bugaboos were also known as the “poor man’s Patagonia”, and…

Our background & rationale for the trip             We all met through MITOC and have been climbing in the Whites together but had been talking about trying to do a trip to explore some larger multi-pitch adventures. It so happened that we were all in the Pacific Northwest on other personal trips, and decided to…

The GR20 trail runs 112 miles (180 km) along the Corsican mountains, diagonally bisecting the island, gaining over 40,000 feet of elevation. The northern 70 miles (the GR20 North) from Calenzana to Vizzavona consist of steep ascents and descents, scree slopes, and a generous serving of rock scrambling. The southern portion offers more gentle, pastoral…