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McKinley

Twenty-thousand foot Mt. McKinley is the highest peak in North America, and the Kahiltna Glacier is one of the five major ice rivers that flow down and around its base.  At about 8,000 feet, these glaciers begin to level out and circle the mountain, creating a 90-mile river of ice.  Galen Rowell first saw this glacial beltway during a fly-over in 1972.

Six years later, he joined three other adventurers to circumnavigate McKinley on skis, using this route, which no expedition had ever completed.  The pinoeering three-week trek went relative smoothly, despite a number of falls, one dislocated shoulder, brittle ice, abrupt storms and more than one unexpected avalanche.  On the 19th day of the expedition, the small group discovered faint ski tracks in front of them.  It took them a moment to realize that the tracks were their own.  They had closed the great circle.

After the expedition, Galen and Ned Gillette, the original planner and leader of the McKinley orbit, decided to try the first one-day ascent of McKinley.  The plan was to get up and down the mountain quickly, so they wouldn’t need a lot of gear.  Speed would also help them avoid high-altitude plumonary edema, an acute altitude sickness.  This kind of climbing, on a mountain like McKinley where expeditions are normally three weeks long, is almost superhuman.

On their first attempt, the snow abruptly turned to blue ice at 13,400 feet.  Ned slipped as he was about to switch from skis to crampons.  The two men were roped together, and as Ned fell, he popped Galen off the mountain with him.  Galen tried to break the fall by jamming his ski pole into the ice.  The tip didn’t hold, but the brief lull gave Ned the chance to grab an old polypropylene rope fixed on the mountain by a previous expedition.  Ned’s one-handed grip on the rope stopped their fall less than a yard from a 3,000-foot drop to the glacier below.  Galen landed on top of Ned, and seriously slashed his face on the meta edges of Ned’s skis.  Later the same day, after a 12-mile journey down the mountain and a 180-mile ride to Anchorage, a plastic surgeon stitched Galen’s face back together.  A month after that, Galen and Ned were back on the mountain. This time, they made the summit, becoming the first men to climb McKinley in a single day.

Karakoram

In the late winter of 1980, Galen Rowell, Dan Asay, Ned Gillette and Kim Schmitz set off on a 285-mile ski-traverse across the remote Karakoram Himalaya in northern Pakistan.  Their route followed four of the longest glaciers outside the subpolar regions (Siachen, Baltoro, Biafo and Hispar) through the planet’s highest and most exotic peaks:  K2, Mustagh Tower, Broad Peak Masherbrum, Gasherbrums I-IV, the Ogre, Great Trango Tower and Chogolisa.

As much as the mountains beckoned, the team had no plans to climb them this time out.  Instead, Galen had dreamt up a ski tour that followed a glacial highway through a high, remote and mystical part of the world.  This six-week Karakoram traverse turned out to be his most taxing, most difficult adventure.  During those six weeks, the temperature sometimes dropped to minus 25 degrees F.  Often, the fabulous peaks – and the skiers – were shrouded in clouds.  Still, the expedition crept along on skis, each man bowed under 120 pounds of food, fuel and equipment – everything he could need for the journey.  Supplies that wouldn’t fit on their backs were dragged behind on children’s plastic sleds.  On good snow, they traveled at four miles per hour downhill; on bad snow, clambering amidst meltwater streams, they slowed to four miles a day.  On these days, time and distance became glacial.  Forty-four days after stepping onto the Siachen Glacier, the expeditioners ended their trek at Hunza, having traversed most of Pakistan, east to west from the Indian border almost to Afghanistan.

The adventurers’ re-entry to civilization was muted.  The trauma of moving through the Karakoram, day after day under their own power, had numbed them and drained the color from the experience.  Their capacity for emotional response had shrunk to near zero.  It was not until months later that Galen felt full satisfaction from the most unprecedented adventure of his life.

Fitz Roy

They tried to make it in only a day, but darkness beat the climbers to the top of Fitz Roy by a few hundred feet.  With no tents or sleeping bags, and scarcely room to stand on an ice ledge, Galen Rowell, Michael Graber and David Wilson were forced to stay up all night.  They jogged in place to keep warm on their perilous perch as they waited for dawn’s first light.  The merest breeze chilled them to the bone but their spirits were high:  They were close to the top.  They sang songs to keep from shivering.

“Tonight we will have no sleep, no warmth, no food, and no liquid,” Galen wrote.  “We are lacking those basic aspects of human existence, yet we have come to this by our own choosing; for us it is a privilege to stand the night away near Fitz Roy’s summit in clarity and stillness.”

With first light, the three tired and cold climbers began to move to the top.  Within minutes they were there, warmed by their effort and the sun’s first rays.  From there, they overlooked the sheer spire of Cerro Torre where legendary Italian mountaineer Toni Egger disappeared in an icy storm in 1959.  To the west, they could see the arctic expanse of the Patagonial Icecap stretch for 200 miles.

‘The power of the view from Fitz Roy,” Galen wrote, “comes from within us.  It would not be the same from an airplane, or if we had ridden to the summit in a gondola.  Thought and vision are intertwined … we feel a strong connection between what is before our eyes and the knowledge of our inner selves that we have gained by pushing the outer limits of our endurance.”

More to come.

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http://caballoblanco.com/

Luis Escobar

http://allwedoisrun.com/tarahumara.htm
http://www.reflectionsphotographystudio.com/

Barefoot Ted

http://barefootted.com/

Scott Jurek

http://www.scottjurek.com/blog/

Billy Bonehead Barnett

http://billybarnett.blogspot.com/

Jenn Shelton

http://bit.ly/vMZjo

2006 Copper Canyon results

http://www.caballoblanco.com/2006springresults.html

2007 Copper Canyon results (yeah, Scott won the next year

http://www.trailrunner.com/race_results/2007_copper_canyon_ultra.htm

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This is my disclosure with regards to product reviews.

I have never been offered any product for free for review.  I don’t think I am big enough that anyone would do it in the near future to do so .  All products I review are either purchased using my money or during the trial version of the product.  I will make it a point to be clear about trial version or purchase information in future reviews.

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Or so I thought.

This past couple of years, I have noticed that a lot of people never respond to email.  Unless it is an email that directly benefits them in some way, emails go unanswered.  I am not talking about the ‘Fwd:Fwd:Fwd’ type of emails.  I am talking about emails that used to generate conversations, that relate to a current topic.  Emails that are business oriented which need an answer.  Even RSVP emails.

I initially thought that people who I email simply do not want to correspond with me.  But no, they are open for occasional chat on Internet Messaging, messaging through FaceBook et al or on the online forums.  But, email – heck no.

At some point in time, looks like email has gone read-only.

I don’t know if people still get a lot of spam email that the Noise to Signal ratio is so skewed that it creates an aversion or if people are really busy.  What bums me is a lot of us now are connected permanently to the internet through our hand held devices.  We constantly check our email on the go – only that we don’t respond anymore.

What gives?

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I am also a first time entrepreneur and quite surprisingly, I find a lot of similarities in what I read about endurance sports and what I am going through with my startup.

Why do people get started?

Creating a startup when you are a twenty year old is a different story, but when you are 35 and you have two kids depending upon you, quitting your cushy job that pays you very very well for barely putting in minimal hours of work to start a startup – borders on lunacy.  In my case, even though I lean completely on the single income of my wife to support my family, pretty much each month, we come up short and end up digging into our retirement and other savings just to make ends meet.

When someone asks me why I am doing the startup, there isn’t a single clear answer.  The goal certainly isn’t ALL money, since I tend to be fiscally VERY conservative (I have no debt in my life right now), so from a financial perspective creating a startup from ground up is  financially bad in the near term with unknown benefits long term. The only reason I wanted to create a startup since I like working in small teams and I love the founding team.

This is my second startup, I was an early employee in my previous startup and I am stunned what a huge difference it is to be a founder as compared to an early employee.  The experiences are completely different from each other.  What really motivates people to go out and create startups often is an fuzzy area.  It just feels like the right thing to do.

Likewise, people who get started with endurance sport activities, often grapple with this question.  What motivates them?  Dean Karnazes put his shoes on his 30th birthday night and ran thirty plus miles busting his legs.  He had no real reason to do it – it just felt like a good thing to do.

Ignorance, may be a bliss in this case.  Had I known prior what is involved in founding a startup, I might have not ventured into this.  I now have great respect for serial entrepreneurs.

The endurance part

I was quite surprised to learn that even in the endurance sports, the endurance part is usually in the mind.  Once past the initial stages, it quickly boils down to your ability to control your mind, more than anything.  Yes, you take the physical abuse, but with enough conditioning, your body can take the hit and plod along, it is the mind that decides if you can reach the finish line or not.

Very quickly with my startup, I realized that it is perseverance that matters.  Once past the initial engineering and marketing tasks, it is mainly on your mind – can you persevere or not?  When you read the stories in Founders at work, the oft mentioned quality for startup success is perseverance, almost all of which is driven by the mind.  Yes, you will have to innovate continuously on the technical and marketing fronts, but the thing that takes you to the finish is your inner strength.

Highs and lows

When running his first Western States Endurance Run, Dean Karnazes writes about the highs and lows of running a 100 miler – a difficult one at that.  At one point in time, he feels he is on top of the world, ready to conquer it and complete the race.  Within a few minutes, he is blacking out with no end in sight and trying to struggle through with his next step.  Once the mind takes control, the highs are extremely high and the lows are extremely low.  This phenomenon is exactly the same with high altitude climbing.

The low points in a startup are just unbelievably low. Paul Graham

Needless to say, that is exactly how I feel with my startup.  There are days when I feel we are going to come out strong and successfully and there are days when I don’t know how I would survive the next week.  It is amazing how it zig zags – it is a roller coaster.

Not dying

The only way endurance athletes survive is by focusing on not dying.  The cut out everything else in their mind and focus on only one thing – their next step.  You take life one step at a time and you screen everything else out.  There isn’t much you can do otherwise.

The way to not die in a startup is to keep typing, focus on your next feature you roll out and take life one small feature at a time.  You don’t have much choice.

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