Cold Splinters

Mark Kryskow, one of my best friends from the University of Colorado, is someone I’ve written about before here on CS, describing him as an “animal, more fit and strong and crazy than anyone I have ever met, or probably ever will meet.” It was impossible to keep up with Mark in college. Waking up at 3am to ride your bike to Estes Park and back (37 miles each way in the mountains) was not part of my agenda. Mark lives up in New Hampshire now, so I get to see him pretty regularly, either in North Conway for an ice climbing adventure, in Portsmouth (while visiting my folks) for a beer and a burrito, or in Alton at his house on Lake Winnepsaukee, alongside his equally crazy immediate and extended family.

Mark is one of the humblest guys I’ve ever met, so of course he didn’t tell me that he was featured in an article in Outside this month, in a profile of the Army program he works for, studying the effects of altitude and extreme conditions on the human body. When I called him last night to talk about it, he quickly changed the subject, probably because they refer to him as one of the “hardest of the hard” and pull a quote that details a test that involved a tube up his ass. The article isn’t specifically about Mark, but I couldn’t be happier to see him gracing the pages of Outside. Makes it even better that he and his wife don’t give a shit.

From the article:

One of the hardest of the hard men is Sergeant Kryskow, a recreation rock and ice climber who has participated in “eight or nine studies,” including one designed to test a helmet prototype that cooled the wearer’s head with streams of air coming from the lining. Researchers wanted to know if cooling the head cooled the body as well. To test this, Kryskow and others walked for hours on a treadmill in 120-degree heat, fitted with anal and esophageal temperature probes.

“It was kind of miserable,” Kryskow tells me, suddenly transported back to that test. “You’re tired, you’re dehydrated, you’ve got a probe in your ass and another down your throat. But I like the challenge.”

And in honor of Mark giving up his “horn” for a climbing helmet…

MP3: John Coltrane – Giant Steps

We’ve posted some Summit Magazine covers before, and when a few more popped up on Garden and Gun’s Southern In The City a couple of weeks ago, well, they’re just too good. Go over and see ‘em yourself…

I was recently gifted a subscription to this fine magazine for my birthday. A couple months back, I happened upon a nice collection of Foxfire books on the cheap on ebay, which I’m sure you’re all familiar with, but Foxfire started as a magazine. In 1966, a high-school English teacher in Southern Appalachia named Eliot Wigginton resolved with his students to document and preserve the wisdom of their grandparents and local elders (initially, as a way to get them excited about English) by creating a magazine. Stuffed full of folk traditions, recipes, and some of the nicest looking covers around (especially the old ones), this magazine is released twice a year in two, double issues. I also loved that my address on the envelope with my first issue was hand-written in a high schooler’s hand, with a hand-written ‘thank you’ for the subscription. Some of the old issues of the magazine pop up on ebay every now and then, and go for less than $10. Feel good.

Caught this one over at the climber’s forum on SuperTopo. This ’68 catalog was still early Chouinard, noted on the site that at the time of it’s release “the Chouinard crampon was just out and the Piolet still in the oven…” (the first Chouinard carabiners were nailed out in 1957-58). Four years later, catch up on the 1972 Chouinard Catalog, all archived here. And if you like what you see, you can buy it for $350. Yes, the catalog.

Click on over to google books and read the June 1978 article in Backpacker Magazine titled Elder of the Tribe: Aldo Leopold. A great primer to Leopold and his “land ethic”.

“What I am trying to make clear”, he wrote, “is that if in a city we had six vacant lots available to the youngsters of a certain neighborhood for playing ball, it might be ‘development’ to build houses on the first, and the second, and the third, and the fourth, and even on the fifth, but when we build houses on the last one, we forget what houses are for. The sixth house would not be development at all, but rather … stupidity.”

After reading the article go to your local library, check out A Sand County Almanac and read it twice.

Good Ol’ Cold Splinters has a story in the new issue of Mountain Gazette called “The Lost Art of Hiking With Strangers.” Go pick it up at your local magazine shop or get a subscription. Published in the same magazine that Ed Abbey contributed to? Not a bad Christmas present.

MP3: Fred Neil – Little Bit Of Rain

Some of you may already be hip to this, but the New Jersey camping supplier Campmor (still) puts out a fully illustrated, black and white catalog printed on newsprint.  This thing makes everything look like the stuff we wish we could still buy from the ads in the margins of a 30 year old Backpacker magazine.

Request one.

ALPINIST, one of the best looking magazines around, has just released their 32nd issue for your reading and eye popping amazement. (The picture above is from the archives, not from 32.) Articles in the new issue include “Earth Stone and Sky” and “On The Trails Of Glaciers”:

In 1909 the Duke of the Abruzzi attempted K2. Although he didn’t get the summit, his expedition photographer, Vittorio Sella, captured some of the most beautiful mountain images in history. A century afterward, Fabiano Ventura traveled to the Karakoram to re-create these and other legendary shots. Along the way, he uncovered visual proof that the world’s glaciers are shrinking.

If you’ve been on this blog more than once and you’ve never seen an ALPINIST, do yourself a favor and chalk up the 12.99 to buy one.

Thanks to Southland Topology for scanning the covers of his old Summit Magazines. They’re beautiful. Have a look here.

MP3: Vetiver -Through The Front Door

Once in a while, it’s too hard to refuse buying yet another t-shirt on Ebay. This handsome little number should be arriving any day. Thank you, Justin.

The first issue of BACKPACKER appeared in the spring of 1973, and in it, founding editor William Kemsley explains, “It took us three years to put together the first issue of Backpacker. In that time we debated some serious questions among ourselves.”

A couple of years back, in 2007, Kemsley wrote an article for the AMC’s magazine, Appalachia, titled “How The 1970s Backpacking Boom Burst Upon Us” about the beginning of BACKPACKER. The article has a recognizable feel…

One morning on the AT in 1963, I woke up in camp, yawned, stretched, and heard the patter of rain on my tent. I changed my hike plans, snuggled a little deeper into my sleeping bag, and decided to cook breakfast beneath the tent fly. The only others at this campsite that morning were some teenage boys standing around a campfire. I barely could see them through the trees.

While eating my oatmeal, it began raining more earnestly, causing the other campers to scurry out of sight. At first I paid little attention. But while savoring my coffee and beginning to peel an orange, it dawned on me that those campers had taken down their tent and left camp with no intention of returning to put out their fire.

If anyone has the rest of the article (only a portion of it is online) let me know.