On Top of Shastina, Sort-of Covered With Snow

Amidst a bunch of smaller ones, my big climbing goal for this summer has been to climb Mount Shasta, the 14,000+ foot monster that looms on the horizon south of Klamath Falls. There are routes on the mountain that are embarrassingly non-technical, but I've been out of practice when it comes to camping (I haven't camped out since last May) and high-altitude climbing (my highest-ever summit was Mt. Adams at 12,280 feet, a climb I did almost three years ago and with a friend). So, I was a bit hesitant to kick off my summer by soloing a peak 2,000+ feet higher than I'd ever handled before on a route that would require at least one night of alpine camping using a lot of new equipment that I hadn't properly tested yet. Fortunately, there's Shastina.

She's just what she sounds like, a diminutive of "Shasta," and a separate summit resulting from one of the primary four volcanic cones that created the mountain(s) in the first place. Though she looks pretty tiny next to the bulk of the main mountain, her summit is actually higher than Adams' at 12,335 feet.

She's the "bump" on the right.

 So, last Thursday I headed down to the city of Mount Shasta, California (about a 90 minute drive from K-Falls) to try to summit Shastina, trying out all my new gear and learning the ropes of getting a permit (fun!), wilderness pass (funner!) and ziploc human feces bag (funnest!) in the process. It all worked. Even the feces bag, but I won't talk about that anymore.

The drive down to the Forest Service office was straightforward enough, and the trailhead I was planning to start from (Bunny Flat, at 7,000 feet) was actually down the exact same road Lindsey and I had taken a few months before to climb Black Butte. So, getting started was pretty easy. The plan was to hike up an established trail to Horse Camp, a Sierra Club cabin and camping area at 8,000 feet on the slopes of the mountain that many people use as a base for attempts on Shasta via Avalanche Gulch. From there, I would take a "use trail" from Horse Camp to Hidden Valley, an open area nearly 1,500 feet higher on the mountain that would allow me to sleep higher, get better acclimated to the altitude, and have an easier go of it (in theory, at least) the next morning during my summit attempt.

I got a late start on my drive because I didn't want to get to Hidden Valley early in the day and either be tempted to try to tackle the whole mountain in one day or have to sit on a rock and wait 12 hours for the sun to go down before I could go to sleep. I avoided these perils, but at the same time, I ended up hiking up to Horse Camp in nearly 80 degree temperatures, in direct sunlight, with somewhere between 25 and 30 pounds of gear on my back. The trail was well-developed, and actually mostly peopled by casual dayhikers, but it was hot. Luckily, I knew there was a natural spring at Horse Camp, so I proceeded with sweating my ass off and downing nearly two liters of water on the first 1,000 feet of the climb. 

Nice trail. Nice hot, sweaty trail.

Horse Camp was a really neat area, and a great potential base for launching future conquests of Shasta from. I hung out in the shade of the building's roof, refilled my water bottles, and chatted with a group of guys who were planning on attempting Shasta at midnight that night (more on them later). After I'd had a much longer and languid rest than I usually take, I headed off down a clearly-marked but secondary trail to Hidden Valley.

Horse Camp, with Shasta in the background.

Now, I was a bit nervous about this part. "Use trail" can mean anything between "obvious trail with recent bootprints all over it and no sign of vegetation or anything else to obscure the route" to "only a deer could follow this without getting lost four thousand times, so good luck!". In this case, fortunately, it was more the former than the latter. The way was mostly clear, and where it wasn't it was marked by wands wrapped in neon-colored tape (much more effective and permanent-ish than cairns, by the way). That was the good news. The bad news was that the trail as a whole ran across an incredibly loose scree field and was still bathed in late-afternoon, nearly-80-degree sunlight. So this was tough going. Nothing worse than what I'd face actually climbing the mountain the next day, but still more work than I'd expected. It'd been awhile since I'd tried to gain 2,500 feet of altitude with thirty pounds on my back in summer sun.

Looking down the scree field to Black Butte summit.

Looking back along the "trail" to Hidden Valley.

Finally, though, the trail wrapped around the terrifying edge of one last precipice and then I was treated to two welcome sights: the mountain summit at the other end of a gorgeously flat valley and a swelling creek running down from the mountain's slopes and roaring off into a cataract to my left. No melting snow for drinking water for me, it seemed.

The Cascade Gulch stream flowing off the cliff behind me.

First view of the two summits from the valley.

I still had about three hours before sunset once I reached the valley, so I took the next hour or so to scour the area, dead-set on finding the best campsite. I eventually came upon a small plateau near the south end of the valley that let me set up my bivy with the hood roped to a tree branch (my favorite way of sleeping, since you aren't waking up all night long with the bug netting brushing over your nose and mouth). For the rest of the night, life was tough. 

Pictured: Life, being tough.

I slept for an hour or so after getting everything set up, then ate dinner and settled in to read by headlamp until I fell asleep. I don't sleep well in general, let alone on rocks at 9,500 feet in below-freezing temperatures, so the reading lasted about three hours, and then the sleeping lasted about three hours. I had a bit of a magical moment when I woke up a little after 3am to see the near-full moon blasting the valley and the pockets of snow on the mountain face with bluish light. I sat up in my bag and ate a snack while watching a few small headlamp specks move slowly up the face of the mountain, including, most likely, the headlamps of the group I'd spoken to at Horse Camp. They would have been 3 hours underway on their attempt at this point. I was not so dedicated. Knowing I'd be out of the sun, in a rock-walled chute for most of the morning, and that slushy snow on the descent would actually make my life easier, I went back to sleep until a huge hawk flying overhead finally woke me up just short of 6am.

After filtering water from the nearby stream-cum-waterfall and eating breakfast, I was off up the rockfield toward the obvious snow-filled chute on the east side of Shastina.

Look! An obvious snow-filled chute!

The going was pretty easy at first. I didn't seem to be having any immediate problems due to the altitude, the terrain, though rocky, was pretty tame, and I was able to stay mostly out of the morning sun by hugging the east side of the chute. Before long, I was able to bust out the crampons and start up the snowfield proper. Climbing on snow with crampons is one of my favorite things, both because it makes you feel like Spiderman and because if you're doing it, you're probably in a wonderfully beautiful place.

Looking back toward camp from partway up the chute.

I distinctly remember even whooping out loud a few times as a scrambled up the first 1,000-1,500 feet of the climb. After that, though, things got dicey fast. I think it was part the fact that I was suddenly out in the sun with little to no cover, and part the fact that I was climbing at something like 11,000 feet instead of 9,500, but the whole headache/dizziness thing started kicking in and life became notably less fun. Add to this the fact that I'd reassembled one of my crampons incorrectly when I'd sized it before leaving, which meant that I had to stop every few hundred feet and basically take it off and put it back on, and I was having a rough go of it.

It was around this time when I decided that instead of marching directly up the south face of the mountain, I'd angle up the chute and come at the thing from the northeast, from just below Whitney Glacier, as was suggested by the trip reports I'd read. Frequently in the past, I've tried to shave time and/or distance off the recommended route, to disastrous results, so here I thought I was doing the mature thing. In reality, heading up the south face would have been so much easier, despite the scree-scrambling that would have been necessary.

The true Shasta summit and part of Whitney Glacier on my right.

The last five or six hundred feet of climbing (or so I thought) turned out to be all scree, so it was off with the crampons again. Now, scree climbing is annoying at the best of times. At nearly 12,000 feet, it is both annoying and damn hard. So when I climbed up this:

Just to see this on the other side, between me and the summit:

It was a little disheartening to say the least. I thought about turning around at this point because I was getting low on water and it was getting hotter. But the drop into the valley was only about 100 feet, which meant maybe 200 feet from there to the summit. So, agonizingly, painfully slowly, I drug my weary shit-ass up the mountain until there wasn't anything else to climb. Well, except for Shasta, mockingly eyeing me 2,000 feet above. There were two summit blocks at the top of Shastina, and, not knowing which one was the "true" summit, I made the sensible choice of climbing the only one that seemed safe to my dizzy, hypoxic brain. From there I got a great view of Sisson Lake, one of the highest alpine lakes in the Cascades:

And the crater of Shastina, featuring Dillon Canyon (running off to the left) and Clarence King Lake, the highest lake in the Cascades unless you count a subglacial lake on Mount Rainier, which I don't because that seems like cheating:

All in all, there were some pretty fantastic views. And Shasta.

"BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA PUNY MORTAL"

But, as has always been the case the all-three-times I've climbed peaks over 11,000 feet in elevation, I really didn't care all that much about the views, as my emotion center seems to shut down at high altitude. So I struggled back down the scree field, linked back up with the gear cache I'd left at the edge of the snow chute, and began the seemingly endless slog through slush-snow back to camp. After that, it was a quick pack-up effort while the sun was blessedly hiding behind some clouds and I was back out onto the Hidden Valley Trail, having eaten the last of my food and drank the last of my water. I cut the food thing a lot closer than I normally do, not on purpose, unfortunately. So, with access to that natural spring in mind, I was very happy, after a few hours of hiking downhill at knee-jarring speeds, to see the flags that signaled the entrance to Horse Camp in the distance.

"Horse Camp: Not Just For Horses Anymore"

From there, it was pretty academic. The hike down the Bunny Flat trail was a pleasant change terrain-wise, though having to pass lots of dayhikers who saw my gear and cheerfully asked "Did you summit?" to which I had to reply "Just Shastina" to their suddenly downturned faces was a bit of a morale hit. That said, Shasta gave me a lovely parting view to entice me to come back and take a stab at it as soon as my legs recover fully.

I'll get you, Gadget. Next time...

I don't really climb mountains to achieve any sort of athletic or fitness or strength milestone; I'm more of the Thoreau school of walking. That said, though, it's nice to know when I'm getting more proficient because that makes me confident that I can tackle harder challenges the next time around. That said, this was:

• My first-ever 10,000+ foot peak that I soloed at 12,300.
• The highest mountain I've ever summited.
• Only my fourth-ever 10,000+ foot peak.
• My highest bivy ever at 9,400 feet.
• The second-largest altitude exchange I've had on a climb (+/- 10,800 feet in 27 hours)

So that's neat.

Internet Memory, SnapChat's CEBro, and Bad Things I've Said In the Past

As Ben Folds so eloquently put it in "Rockin' the Suburbs": you better watch out, because I'm gonna say 'fuck'."

Less than a year ago, I made a huge deal out of locking this blog and starting a new one. That post remains one of my favorite things I've written anywhere, blog or no, and I still firmly believe the things I said regarding social networking and the changes it's working in how I communicate, how it's negatively effecting my ability to have meaningful conversations and interactions online and elsewhere, and how it's making talking at length and in depth online, publicly, a very scary proposition.

Yet, here I am, making Defiantly, Maybe public again. So, what's changed?

Well, two things, really. First, I realized that nobody really cares what I write about and where I write about it because I'm not an important person.

Brad knows how I feel.

I don't mean that self-deprecatingly. I just mean that I don't post enough and don't have enough interested followers to make a private blog a hub for conversation and debate (and, by extension, for unintentional controversy). Being able to post to a broader audience again might mean that I'll occasionally get a response that isn't a) nothing or b) "tl;dr." But I'll also be slightly more likely to get a response that's something like "OMG HOW CAN YOU THINK SUCH THINGS I HATE YOUR WHOLE LIFE NOW." Which brings me to my next reason...

I've recently become sort of incensed* by the culture of judgment I've seen growing exponentially on the internet, and somewhere in my mind the best way to combat this sort of thing seems to be to go online in front of everyone and say whatever the fuck** I want.

So, it seemed appropriate to "celebrate" making this blog widely accessible again by writing about internet memory and potentially saying things that people could later take out of context and use to decide that I'm a Bad Person. Because that's apparently all we do on the internet, now.

I didn't have to dig far to find some examples of what I want to talk about. One is a bit close to my heart and the other requires me to try to empathize with a guy who is almost definitely a hardcore misogynist. So this should be interesting.

I present case number one. If you don't like clicking on things or looking at webpages other than this one (good on you), case number one is the story all about how Jack White and the Black Keys got flip-turned upside down. The story, as it's been propagated across the internets, is that some private letters*** of Mr. White's were leaked as part of his custody battle with his ex-wife, and in these letters it turns out he said some things about not liking the Black Keys.

So, to recap thus far: a man gets divorced and in addition to having to deal with probably a pretty shitty situation involving falling out of love with his wife and all, there's also a custody battle, adding an extra-shitty legal dimension to the already-existing shitty emotional dimension of divorce to create a pulsing quadrilateral of personal shittiness.

This was the first result for "shit quadrilateral."

And what do we take from this? Oh, right. That he wrote in some letter to someone that was never intended to be seen by everyone that he sort of doesn't like another band that some other people who are reading this letter that they shouldn't be reading like. And oh my god is that so much more important than the marriage-ending thing and the sadness thing and the custody-battle thing, not to mention the give-the-poor-guy-room-to-suffer thing!

To be fair, though, Jack White is probably pretty good at suffering. Just look at that vulture.

Right. But Jack White is a celebrity, which means that it totally makes sense that his private words were made public and scrutinized ad nauseum by lots of people who don't know him or his private circumstances at all, who don't know the context those comments were made in. Right?

No. It's not right. I'm not even going to explain to you at length why it's not right. If you don't know, then go away and think about it until you figure it out on your own and then come back and finish reading.

So, now we've got things like this assholish A.V. Club article (and I usually love the A.V. Club) that explains that White has for some reason issued a very public apology to the people who read his private writings against his (implicit) wishes, but makes sure to cast White as the bad guy before you even get to read the story by using the title "Jack White tries to pull his foot out of his mouth with lengthy apology." We, the culture, have clearly decided after rifling through this guy's personal mail that he is guilty. Jack White is a bad guy, and we should not like him now nor should we purchase his records. Why again? Oh, yeah, because he doesn't like some other band in private, and somehow that is an unpardonable offense. To us. Whose souls are as pure as the driven snow.

Okay, well, let's graduate to a case where the thing the bad guy did actually matters, and is probably worthy of widespread criticism and ridicule, as least when looked at a certain way.

So here we have Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snapchat, a guy who is also rich and famous and thus has implicitly agreed (according to us) to make his entire life available for public scrutiny. This case is a little tougher to me because Spiegel's past-comments are pretty terrible and misogynist. And in criticizing the way that we've gone after him for them I don't want to imply that I condone the comments themselves, because I don't. He said some pretty terrible things (in the past, under the assumption that he was saying it to a small, discrete audience).

But here's the thing. I've said some terrible things, too. You've said some terrible things. We've probably both thought even more terrible things and had the good sense not to utter them out loud so that they wouldn't come back to haunt us. Does this make the things that Spiegel said okay, because we're all jerks sometimes? No. But I'd like to try to put into perspective the idea of going after someone you've never met for a few comments he made years ago in a context that you aren't aware of because I believe that the judgmental ways we choose to respond to these stories about people we don't know (which seem to be happening more and more often lately) don't just have consequences for which records we buy and which apps we download, but also for how we treat the people we do know.

First off, context is important. Because this is a hill I'm absolutely willing to die on, I'll use examples from my own life. I have had, on occasion, good Asian-American friends. A part of my friendship with one such friend in particular consisted of us trading racial jibes and jokes: me tossing Asian stereotypes at him and he tossing white-guy stereotypes at me. It was part of our rapport, and we were both comfortable with it. Now, had we talked like this over, say, email, and one of those emails came to light years down the road and was made public, I would not want the same "consideration" that Spiegel has received from us over the last few weeks. If I were to issue an (unnecessary) apology for my once-private, now-public communication, I would not want to be met with the cynicism that Jack White's seemingly earnest apology has been met with throughout the rock music blogosphere. What I said was acceptable in context because in that context it had a certain meaning, granted it by that very context. Because I am a semi-intelligent and considerate human being, outside of that context, I would have said things differently, or not at all. That's how context works.

When it comes to this sort of thing, your example, I'm sure, is different, but I'm equally sure that there is an example, at least one, for each of us. Think about that before you roll your eyes at White, before you shake your fist at Spiegel. You don't have to not condemn them, but at least think about it.

Second, people grow old, if not up. They change, and maybe even learn. I try. I hope I succeed from time to time. A lot of people attacked Spiegel for his recitation of what seems to be the required response to these ever-more-popular situations: "[The messages] in no way reflect who I am today." The general internet response was "These messages were sent 3-4 years ago; how much does one person change in 3-4 years?! I call bullshit!"

Really?! How much does one person change in 3-4 years? Have you ever grown up before?

The variations on this response and the frequency with which they seemed to pop up blows my mind. To me, it communicates a very deep cynicism toward the idea that others can change, grow, and most importantly, learn. That we can make mistakes and still turn out okay, overall, in the end. I have bad news: mistakes are what learning is made of. What do we become when we stop allowing others to make them?

I've been an NFL football fan my entire life. I grew up watching every single game I could, collecting trading cards, memorizing player rosters, the whole ten yards. For the longest time, the Washington Redskins were just one of the teams in the league. It wasn't until I got to grad school and spent a few years studying critical race theory and assorted/related other cultural theories that I gained a real appreciation for why calling your team "the Redskins" might be insulting to Native Americans (or others). But I still didn't really see why anyone was bothering talking about the name of a football team when there were so many other, seemingly bigger problems in the world to worry about.

I don't even know what changed my mind, but it was a few weeks ago that, in the midst of grading student papers, it finally really, decisively hit me how shittily racist the team's name is and how stupid and backward we are in general as a culture for not demanding it be changed back in, oh, 1890 or so. I'm embarrassed to admit that it took me this long to understand. It's embarrassing to write about in a blog post that I'm going to post to Facebook. I want people to think I'm understanding, and nice, and considerate, and smart, and after reading this, some people might think the opposite.

But hell, we're learning all the time, a lot if we're paying attention, a little even if we're willfully trying to pretend that we can stay the same person for our entire lives. This is just one of my many, many examples. There's not, but what if there was an email from a few weeks ago in which I'd written something like "Oh, I don't see what the big deal is about the Washington Redskins, people should just get over it!" and someone read that email and was upset at me and I tried to explain myself by saying "Those messages sent 3 weeks ago don't reflect who I am today"?

It would be absolutely true, and I suspect that a great many people wouldn't care.

Honestly, my worry about our propensity to judgment, especially on the internet, has less to do with who we're judging and more to do with us. Evan Spiegel is going to be fine. Jack White will probably survive. But what's the cost to us of this kneejerk cynicism, this rush to judgment, this assumption that a few lines of text or a few moments of speech tell us all we need to know about a person?

I've had 30-odd years of issues with the vast majority of the Bible, but John 8:7 has always been near to my heart, the part where Jesus says "Let the one among you who is guiltless be the first to throw a stone." This certainly hasn't kept me from judging all my life, and it certainly hasn't kept me from doing things that have been, at times, likely deserving of a harsh judgment from others, but I often think of it when I read about people like Evan Spiegel and realize that I really do want to believe that he's learned something in the last 3-4 years, to think that there's more to him than a few nasty emails. And that's just as much, if not more, for my own sake as it is for his.

Would we rather live in a world where it's just understood that every single thing you put out on the internet (or elsewhere) is immediately available for public scrutiny and any statement that could be even mildly misconstrued should be kept to ourselves, or a world where we still live with the (potentially illusory) idea of different audiences and treat each other with that understanding in mind when one audience unexpectedly bleeds into another? Because based on how we're treating each other right now, we're definitely creating the former, but I'm pretty sure just about everyone, given a choice, would prefer the latter.

* Is it possible to be "sort of incensed" by something?
** Told you.
*** What's a "letter"? I think they meant "emails."

Why I Won't Feel Guilty Occasionally Sitting On My Ass This Summer

The end of the school year always brings conflicting emotions for me. On one hand, it's great to be wrapping things up, the weather is in that perfect not-too-hot, not-too-cold spot, and (mostly) all I have to look forward to now is three months of (mostly) not working.* I'm excited to have some time away from my teaching job, for which I'm not able to take any vacation days at all and can only take sick days if I'm able to make up the work I miss by working nights and weekends, for nine months of the year.

It's usually once I start thinking about all the awesome things I'm going to do over the summer that I start feeling guilty for not working. Especially now that Lindsey works at a "real" job, it's weird to have the entire summer "to myself" when everyone else is at their job, (supposedly) working away. I've lost track of the number of times over the last decade that others have explained at length to me exactly how I've got it better than them, able to just not work three months of the year. The implication is twofold: 1) they're jealous of my long "vacation," and 2) they simultaneously think that taking such a long vacation is lazy, slothful, and that somehow I don't work as hard as they do. It's number two that, in my weaker moments, makes me feel a bit like shit. So I decided that during my lunch break today (literally the first lunch break I've had, honestly, since October when my boss took me to lunch to talk about...work) I would figure out if I actually work less than Hypothetical Jealous/Contemptuous Joe Schmoe.

I'm working on the assumption that during a year of perfect attendance, Joe works 48 weeks out of the year, for forty hours a week. Joe takes his four weeks of vacation. This totals out to 1,920 hours of work a year. If Joe is an absolute maniac and takes no vacation, he works 2,080 hours a year.

After almost ten years of working as a university instructor/teacher/professor, I estimate that I average about 60 hours a week per work during the school year. This includes about 50-55 hours per week plus 5-10 hours per weekend. At my current job, this amounts to 60 hours a week for 30 weeks, or 1,800 hours. When you add to that the (unpaid) 15 hours average per week I do the rest of the year (during Christmas break, spring break, and summer break), you add another 330 hours to that to come up with 2,130 hours.

So. Mathematically at least, I have nothing to feel bad about.

Anyway, this was an interesting little experiment to me, and I wasn't at all assured of the result as it came out before I started.

Because this is going on the internet now, I suppose I'm obligated to add a little note to say I don't mean this as a complaint; clearly, there are more lucrative and, frankly, easier-to-get jobs than a tenure track professor in the humanities in 2014, and if I was dissatisfied or wanted to be doing something else instead, I sure as hell would be. Instead, this is my way of responding to all those "Oh, so you don't work all summer" sneers.

Yes, actually I do work (a bit) all summer, and even if I didn't, I still likely work about as much as you do. So pffffffftthhhhhht.

Back to grading.

* And, notably, not getting paid. So, you could say that in addition to working as much or more as "full-year" employees, I only get paid for 75% of my work. Yes, now that I'm tenure track I make a decent amount of money (an amount that is, by my standards, extraordinary), but no, we don't get paid "extra" over nine months to be compensated for the three months we get "off."