Perspective of a visiting professor to the JIRP

by Dr. Karen Grove, Professor of Geology (specialization in sedimentology), San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA

As a geology professor with 25 years of experience, one of the highlights of the JIRP is the 33 student participants who have chosen to stretch themselves beyond their comfort zones. They are learning to do research in a harsh environment, which includes numerous days of safety training and learning a variety of techniques to investigate the glacial environment, often in inclement weather that includes cold and very wet conditions. But always the attitude has remained positive and the curiosity to learn high. For me, it’s like taking my top students from over the years and putting them together in one class---a total joy!! The students are pursuing degrees (mostly undergraduate, but a few graduate) in a variety of Earth Science fields, but all are enthused about the ice field and the opportunities to expand their horizons. No doubt, we’ll be hearing more from them as they continue in their education and subsequent careers. It’s a bright and highly motivated group of young people that gives one hope for our planet’s future.

What does a visiting professor do? For me, it’s the first time to the Juneau Icefield, and so I’m doing the safety training along with the students. For my husband Jay, who was a JIRP student in 1973 and 1975, it’s a refresher course and a chance to reprise a life-altering experience. We also assist with the educational mission as much as we can. We provide perspectives from our areas of expertise.  For me, this has included informal discussions about geology, leading a field group to describe the rocks Camp 17 is built upon, and giving lectures on the geologic record of global climate change during the past 60 million years. Jay has provided perspectives on how to manage projects (including the students’ research projects) and used his photography skills to document JIRP activities. Some professors/researchers come here with their own specific research goals; they include students on their team and teach them how to do the investigations. We feel like one big expedition that is collaborating to accomplish common goals. Most visiting professors stay for several weeks of the 8-week-long program. Although I at first resisted spending two summer weeks on a cold and windy ice field, the students have made the experience well worth the effort. The scenery of rugged, glacially-sculptured mountains is quite a draw too!

Faculty geologist Karen Grove during safety training week.  Photo by Jay Ach

Life at C-17

by Lizzie Kenny

After more than a week at Camp 17, everyone has settled into camp life.  Wake-up call is at 7:30, which is when the most important question of the day is asked: “Is it raining?” The answer is usually “yes”, but we have been lucky enough to have a few clear sunny days.

The day begins at 8 with breakfast – unless you are one of the chefs, in which case you have to be in the kitchen bright and early at 6, as cooking for more than 50 people is no easy task. After breakfast comes work detail, and everyone chips in to do chores around camp. Daily chores typically include cleaning the outhouses, fixing the water supply (shoveling snow onto tarps which will later melt for water), refrigerator maintenance (making sure the food is guarded from ravens – also known as “glacier dragons”), sweeping the buildings, picking up little bits of trash around camp, and setting out trail lunches.

After all the chores are done, it is time to head out to the glacier! We have mostly been doing safety training and improving our skiing in order to prepare for crossing the Icefield. While doing so, we have been exploring the Lemon Creek and Ptarmigan Glaciers. Depending on the day’s activities, we usually head back to camp for lectures at about 15:30. With 9 fabulous faculty members, we always have interesting things to learn about. Lecture topics have included paleoclimate, glacier dynamics, wilderness medicine, and many others. There is occasionally some free time in the afternoon, but we are usually kept pretty busy.

At 19:00, it is time for dinner! On clear days, the majority of people sit outside, enjoying an amazing view of Juneau and the surrounding mountains. The food is always delicious, thanks to the hard work of the chefs.  Brownies have already been made numerous times, much to everyone’s delight. After dinner, there is usually another lecture or knot tying practice, mixed with fun events such as 4th July celebrations or the knot tying competition. And of course, if we are lucky enough to be able to see the sunset, nearly everyone gathers to watch. It’s lights out at 23:00, so we can get enough rest for the next full day. The whole group has become extremely close during our time at 17, and as we prepare to go to the next camp, Camp 10, we are all excited to see what the rest of the summer has in store.

Camp 17 in all of it's glory!

Students gather in the cook shack at C-17.

Everyone recaps a great day in the cook shack at C-17.

JIRPers prepare for a great day of safety training!

JIRP participants enjoy a fabulous sunset.

C-17 from above.

Burying Dead-men and Plummeting Head First and Upside-down: It’s Much Safer than It Sounds

by Kelly Hughes

A large chunk of our days at Camp 17 are spent in safety training lectures and hands-on safety activities both on and off the glacier.  JIRP is dedicated to the health of all of the participants, and the first step to being healthy is being … yup, you guessed it … ALIVE.  Fieldwork on the ice and glacier travel between camps subjects the participants to inherent and sometimes unavoidable dangers … you know, like human swallowing crevasses.  The Field Safety Staff (FSS) and certified badass Jamie Price have led us through a very nice progression of safety training lessons over the past few days. 

We started gently (swaddled in our baby blankets) by learning how to tie knots and hitches.  Everyone immediately fell in love with figure 8’s, bowlines, and double fisherman’s knots.  After dinner hours exploded with knot-tying frenzies, and experienced students helped the more motor-skill challenged individuals (like myself) with those naughty knots.  Girth, clove and Munter hitches came next, and again the knot magicians shared their secrets to success until everyone (even me) had the orientation and folding of the loops correct for each.  Our friendly FSS members checked off everyone one by one to ensure that everybody is able to tie themselves into a rope or into anchors appropriately.  A team built with self-sufficient members can travel with less risk and less confusion.  Another crucial part of successful team operation that the FSS has been pressing upon us is communication.  Effective communication can lessen confusion and keep a team focused and efficient under stressful circumstances.  For long traverses across the Icefield, like our journey from the Lemon Creek Glacier to the Taku Glacier will be, the less risk and confusion the better (assuming that everyone would like to get there alive, in one piece, and sometime within this decade).

Ice axes outside the cook shack at camp 17. Photo by Jay Ach

Just as we were all getting cozy with our knots, Jamie and the FSS took us out to a steep hill on the Lemon, stripped us of our skis and packs and armed us with nothing but our ice axes.  Jamie took us through 3 different scenarios of how we might fall (or be yanked over by a falling rope mate):

1) feet sliding out from under us onto our butts,

2) sliding face first on our bellies, and

3) sliding head first on our backs. 

There was initial hesitation from some people, but I personally have practiced self-arresting previously, so I knew very well the fun we were in for and couldn’t wait to run to the top of the hill and chuck myself off!  Everyone was jumping left, front and sideways within just a few run-throughs.  Later on we had a maximum sliding contest, burning a trail in the snow behind us!  Oh, and no one lost an eye to a poor pick placement … so the day was a WIN!

Jon Doty teaches crevasse rescue. Photo by Jay Ach

The safety training progressed to lectures on and practice with building snow anchors and belaying, should we be fortunate enough to recognize that we’ve entered dangerous territory before a team member pops through into nothingness while traversing across the Icefield.  There are regions on glaciers where extensive crevasse fields are more probable than other places, like convexities in the glacier surface (rises, bumps, or the top of an icefall) where tensional stresses are dominant, and along the margins where shear stresses are dominant. 

Along our traverse from Camp 17 to Camp 10, we will rope up in such areas, and if open crevasses are visible or probing reveals possible snow bridging, we will stop and build snow anchors in a secure area to belay team members across more questionable ground.  To do so, we will implement one or two of a few methods to establish an anchor point:

1) burying dead-men (not dead men we find on the Icefield, though that would work, but an ice axe placed horizontally into a slot dug at least 1.5 feet into the snow),

2) driving an ice axe in vertically (actually, not exactly vertical, but angled about 10 degrees away from the direction of pull for added strength), or

3) doing either of the first two methods with a snow picket if one is available. 

After the anchor points have been established, we will connect them with a closed cordelette and tie an overhand on a bite into the convergence point (called the master point).  The belayer will then girth hitch or likewise connect to the master point and put the climber/skier on belay using one of three methods:

1) an ATC belay device,

2) a Munter hitch, or

3) a body belay (though if a crevasse fall, rather than just a fall on a steep slope, is likely, the body belay is not the proper method as the friction is not high enough for a shock load). 

When practicing snow anchor building and belaying, we worked in small groups of two or three students supervised by an FSSer. Each person took turns as the belayer and the belayee (that’s not a real word, FYI), and the belayee would pretend to fall suddenly, surprising the belayer.  From what I could tell, everyone passed as a safe belayer (awesome!).

There was one more hitch we had yet to learn, but the night Jamie and the FSS had us learn it something was different.  The tables and benches in the cook shack were stacked and shoved off to the side and three ropes hung from the ceiling.  I knew what was coming because I had hung a very similar rope set up with my dad from a branch on a tree in our backyard in Colorado.  We made prusik hitches for our waists and feet, attached them to the rope (in the proper order: waist prusik on top of the foot prusik … crucial), and then we began to climb the rope to the top of the cook shack, three people at a time!  Everyone quickly realized that the hardest part is coming down … you know, when your muscles are already near maximum SWOL (as Lu-Tang would say).  We’ve set up the prusik lines on a few evenings now, and every time someone is ascending the rope (whether they’re “killin’ it” or having a bit of a struggle fest), everyone else in the room is cheering them on.  The dynamic of this group is indescribable.  For only knowing each other for a little over two weeks, we sure act like we’ve known and adored each other for years.

Kate Baustian demonstrates a self-arrest position.  Photo by Jay Ach

The last main thing on our safety training list was the crevasse rescue system called the Z-pulley.  I won’t bore you with the details (because by now you’ve realized I can turn anything into a dull novel), but it’s a 3 to 1 pulley system (meaning that we can pull 3 times the weight we could pull if we were directly dragging or pulling something up on a straight rope).  It works pretty dang well, and we’re getting lots of practice setting it up and using it with volunteer victims and/or Mr. and Mrs. Backpack.  It seems fairly complicated at first, but in practice it’s really not that bad – there are just a few places where it might be quite easy to royally mess things up (so the FSS are making sure we don’t).

That concludes the update on safety training from Camp 17.  Tune back in a few days from now to see how many of these things we had to put to use on the traverse from 17 to 10. Happy prusiking!

Virtual Field Environments Created During JIRP 2014

By: Frank Granshaw, Portland State University - Department of Geology & Portland Community College

Elias Brown and I are a team from Portland State University (that's Portland, Oregon, not the other Portland) working with JIRP students and staffers to create a virtual field environment (VFE) based on the 2014 JIRP experience.  A VFE is form of virtual reality portraying an actual place, that gives the user the ability to explore that place like they might do if they were actually there. VFEs are used in both education and research to prepare for and record fieldwork, as well as analyze data collected from a site. They are sometimes used in lieu of actual site visits, especially when getting to a place is logistically difficult. The JIRP VFE is intended for presenting JIRP and the Icefield to the wider world, as well as for the orientation for future JIRPers. 

While lots of people construct virtual tours, as indicated by Google Street View and the virtual home tours on realty company web sites, what is unique about the JIRP VFE is that it is being constructed by JIRPers rather than virtual reality geeks. This means that the environment will evolve as the journey across the ice field evolves. This is an exciting project for me because it is an opportunity to combine my background in glacial geology, with a love of teaching, experience with educational research and development, and fascination with digital technology and geoscience visualization. As I leave on my way to Portland I am eager to see what the Wizards of VFE (JIRP students doing the photography for the VFE) and others will produce.  

Watch for the public unveiling of the VFE in early fall!

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The wizards of VFE are prepared to document the sights on the Juneau Icefield.

Introducing the Summer 2014 Faculty and Staff

Jeffrey “El Jeffe” Kavanaugh

Hi, I’m Jeff Kavanaugh. As Director, I have the privilege of overseeing this incredible group of students, staff members, and faculty members as they make their way across the icefield.  I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Alberta, where I investigate the dynamics and hydrology of glaciers and their response to climatic change.  This research has taken me to glaciers in Alaska, British Columbia, Yukon, the Canadian Rockies, Arctic Canada, and Antarctica.

Jeffrey Kavanaugh, photo by Jay Ach

Ben “Partanimal” Partan

This is my eleventh summer on the icefield, where my primary role is to maintain the buildings and snowmobiles. My background is in carpentry, chemistry, electric wiring, furnace-cleaning, public relations, teaching, maple syrup production, and scientific logistics. This fall, I’m starting a Master’s in Earth Sciences at the University of Maine in Orono.

Ben Partan, Photo by Jon Doty

Stanley “Stan The Man” Pinchak

Hi, I am Stanley Pinchak.  It is my pleasure to again join JIRP as auxiliary staff, and as member of the JIRP Temperature Project this field year.  I enjoy sharing my knowledge and Icefield experiences with the students as well as learning from them.  It is the opportunity to learn from the staff, faculty, and students which brings me back.  Having the chance to get in some turns over the summer is an added bonus.

Stanley Pinchak

Matt “Rat King” Pickart

My name is Matt Pickart, and I’m one of the safety staff this year. This will be my third summer on the icefield; I was a JIRP student in 2011 and I joined the staff last year. I’m from Falmouth, Massachusetts, and I graduated from Dartmouth College last year, where I majored in Earth Sciences. [Editor’s addition: Matt was voted Most Eligible Bachelor on the icefield in 2013.]

Matt Pickart, photo by Jay Ach

Zach “Surefoot” Miller

Hi! I’m a native Juneauite, and a third year JIRPer. My greatest feats on the program have included being Santa Claus for the first annual JIRPmas celebration in 2012, acting as a leader in glacier haute couture, constantly sharpening the cutting edge of punnery, coming in second in the 2014 Staff Week Outhouse Yodeling Competition, and running logistics for the program in 2013. [Editor’s addition: If there is one adjective to define Zach Miller, it could only be “subtle”.]

Zach Miller, photo by Jay Ach

Jon “Port-a-Jon” Doty

Hi, my name is Jon Doty. I am currently working on a Master of Forestry degree at the University of Maine. I was a 2013 JIRPer, and was thrilled to join safety staff this year and complete another traverse. After such a low snow year this winter, the icefield may be very different; I am excited to observe these changes and facilitate a safe and enjoyable crossing for everyone.

Jon Doty by Molly Blakowski.

Annie “Boo-shay” Boucher

My name is Annie Boucher, I grew up in Brooklyn, NY, and went to college at Carleton College in Minnesota. I just finished my first year of teaching elementary and middle school science in New York City, and I’m excited to start my Master’s in Earth Science at UMaine in the fall. This is my third summer with JIRP, and I’m most excited about getting to know all of the fabulous students this summer while we dig snow pits!

Annie Boucher, photo by Adam Taylor

Mary “Gnotty” Gianotti

Hi my name is Mary Gianotti. I grew up in Juneau and will be a senior next year at Boston University with a major in Earth Science and a minor in Environmental Science. The first half of my summer was spent in the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park training to become a National Outdoor Leadership School backpacking and glacier mountaineering instructor. I am excited to work various research technician positions between NOLS contracts after graduation.  This will be my second summer up on the icefield and I am extremely happy to be back here with such wonderful students, faculty and staff!

Mary Gianotti, photo by Jay Ach

Kate “Can’t Lie” Baustian

Hey, I’m Kate Baustian! Like Matt, this will be my third summer on the icefield and second as a part of the FGER safety staff (with my five other super cute friends). In the JIRP off-season I live outside of Salt Lake City, Utah, where I enjoying skiing and exploring the desert Southwest. This summer, I’m looking forward to working with another brilliant, eclectic group of students while strengthening friendships with returning faculty and staff. 

Kate Baustain, photo by Mike

Christopher “Babycakes” McNeil

Hey, I’m Chris. Originally hailing from Essex, MA, I’m currently working towards a Master’s degree in Earth Science at Alaska Pacific University. My favorite things about JIRP are skiing in shorts, digging as many mass balance pits as humanly possible, and thinking about science. When it comes down to it, skiing and science are the two most important things going through my head.

Chris McNeil is probably listening to Sail on repeat.

Newton “Newt” Krumdieck

Hi, my name is Newt. I enjoy long walks along the power lines and evenings by the fire in a good pair of slippers. My hobbies include blacksmithing, turning bowls on a lathe, and lending out my ice screws to fellow JIRPers. Things that truly matter to me are my family, girlfriend, and dogs. While my eyes aren’t glued to the Taku Towers, or turned towards the Gilkey Trench, my time will be spent helping Ben Partan with camp repairs.

Newton Krumdieck

Introducing the Summer 2014 Graduate Students

Saskia Gindraux

Hi! I’m Saskia Gindraux. I graduated a few months ago in with a degree in Physical Geography and a minor in Glaciology from the University of Zurich, Switzerland. This will be my first summer participating in JIRP, and I’m really looking forward to applying what I have learned, and mentoring students with their scientific projects. I am very excited to live on the icefield for six weeks surrounded by this stunning landscape!

Saskia's friend is jealous of her icefield adventures!

Kelly Hughes

Hi there! I’m Kelly Hughes and I’m currently finishing up a Master’s Degree at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon.  I grew up skiing and climbing the Rockies in Colorado, and am ecstatic to be spending the summer on the ice.  I’ve traveled to Antarctica twice for research, but studying glaciers in Alaska is proving to be equally as cool!

Photo of Kelly by Jay Ach

Kim Quesnel

 Hey I’m Kim! I just finished my first year as a Master’s student at Stanford University studying Environmental Engineering with a focus on Environmental Fluid Mechanics and Hydrology. Growing up in the mountains near Lake Tahoe, California, I’ve always loved playing outside, and I can’t wait to spend the next two months living on the icefield.  This summer, I’m really excited to see glacial hydrology in action, to work with the students on their projects, and to perfect my telemark turns!

Photo of Kim by Jay Ach

Introducing the Summer 2014 Surveyors

Scott McGee

Hi, I’m Scott McGee from Anchorage, Alaska. I’ve been here since before there were glaciers. Every summer, a crowd of students and faculty come to the Icefield for a few weeks. As I’ve almost memorized the regional geography, I’m happy to help these scientists safely traverse from Juneau to Atlin. In addition, I like the survey work, which gives me an excuse to explore those rare niches of the Icefield that I still don’t know.

Martin Lang

My name is Martin Lang, and I’m from Munich, Bavaria (Germany). I got sucked into the world of JIRP and the gorgeous Icefield in 1989. I have not succeeded in escaping since (well, I really never tried to). In the real world, I work as a surveyor for a small but cutting edge company doing high-precision kinematic 3D surveys. This minor obstacle does not allow me to be on JIRP every summer, so I come back on a regular irregular basis. I’m looking forward to supporting the surveying this summer, and working with the fantastic student crew we have up here.

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Martin Lang with faculty geologist Cathy Connor

Paul Winter

Hello, my name is Paul Winter. I just finished my first year as a Master’s student at Beuth Hochschule Berlin (Germany) studying geodata recording and visualization. I also love mountains, and on this program I found the perfect combination of connecting both worlds. The first two weeks in this incredible glacier world were just awesome. I’m excited to see more and broaden my mountaineering and glacier travelling skills.

Paul Winter with some GPS equipment.

Interview with Jay Ach and Karen Grove

By Luc

As new JIRP participants, we are learning the lay of the land at Camp 17. College students who purely specialize in ramenology are learning to cook for all 46 camp members. Those of us accustomed to flushing toilet paper are learning to use trash bags instead. The numerous names of previous JIRPers contained on the boards of the cook shack remind us of the hundreds that have gone through this initiation into JIRP before us. In addition to the students and staff, Camp 17 houses many guest faculty including Jay Ach, a JIRP student in 1973 who is currently a Environmental Manager for the Port of San Francisco.  Jay experienced the same hardship we experienced on the hike to Camp 17 and has been giving us insight into changes and similarities from the past to the present. Jay remembers the infamous devils club puncturing and tearing skin. Currently, Camp 17 has a double wide outhouse with a wall separating stalls. When Jay was a student, there was a two-story outhouse.  Unfortunately, this no longer exists. Apparently, the upper stall of the two-story outhouse was favored over the lower stall. Pilot bread serves as the staple of every JIRPer diet. In addition to Jay’s nostalgia over the JIRP staple food, he mentioned the packaging has not changed since the 1970’s. 

Jay had the pleasure of introducing his wife, Karen Grove, to the Camp 17 adventure. Karen is a geology professor and head of the Earth & Climate Sciences at San Francisco State University. After years of hearing Jay’s incredible adventure in JIRP, she decided to see what all the hype was about. Karen will be sharing her knowledge with the students on paleoclimate; looking at climate in the past in comparison with today. Even though there is currently zero visibility and sideways rain at Camp 17, Karen remains upbeat and enthusiastic.  This is a testament to the tradition of positive group dynamics of JIRP, and the connection that stretches generations of JIRP, from 1973 to 2014.      

Hike to Camp 17A

By: Gillian Rooker

All I can say about Camp 17A was that it was quite the treat. Just imagine sitting and looking out at a beautiful scenery of snow-capped mountains and a river streaming down from a nearby glacier. You want to sit and admire the view longer, but after a couple minutes, once you’re done you grab some toilet paper, wipe, stand, pull up your pants and step out of the door-less outhouse into the fresh crisp air… minding the gaping hole in the floor as you go.  That is what Camp 17A was, the perfect mixture of beauty beyond comparison and rundown quaintness.

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The beautiful view from Camp 17A. (Photo by: Stan Pinchak)

The camp was comprised of one building (a shack) and an outhouse (door-less). Even so, I loved it! My travel group took 12 ½ hours to get to 17A, hiking through forests of Devil’s Club (a plant similar looking to tons of other plants, except with thousands of tiny thorns), across ice-cold rivers, up the vertical swamp (with mud that went up to one’s knees), finally reaching an altitude of 4500 ft. After all of that, I would have been happy sleeping in a damp cardboard box. Even if I had not done that hike though, I still would have enjoyed staying at camp 17A. Honestly! It made me want to move out to the middle of nowhere and build a tiny shack of my own… probably a little nicer though, and with less rat poop.

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A welcome sight: Camp 17A! (Photo by: Stan Pinchak)

It wasn’t just the camp itself that I liked, though, but the bonding that took place with my hiking group and I. After all the suffering we shared on the hike, being able to sit down in a semi-warm room with everyone and have a good old time with them while eating a bowl of mac-n-cheese was priceless. Friendships and memories were forged on that hike and in Camp 17A that I will not forget anytime soon… maybe when I get old and start to lose my memories though… but that won’t be for a while, so I’m still good for now.

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The unforgettable trek to Camp 17A. (Photo by Stan Pinchak) 

Notes from a Flatlander: Ascent to Camp 17

By: Erik

My native Estonia boasts the highest peak in all of the Baltic States: towering above the landscape on her lonely quest to bring down the moon and the stars, she alone makes a dash for the heavens and stops just short of a thousand feet above sea level. There are no mountains in Estonia.

A wanderer from such a flat country thinks in two dimensions: he can head north or south, drift east or west. Of course he moves around in the world and sees other places, and in the back of his mind he will come to know another way: up, up and away.

It is not the old way, though. Over time, he will get used to the z-direction as one might get used to a helicopter taking into the air: it becomes a fact of life, but also remains a miracle. The way up still holds on to its mysteries almost as well as the way down, to the dark chasms of the deep.

Thus it is strange to start in the rainforest and end on top of a glacier barely ten hours later, passing through every biome in between – such is the hike to Camp 17. At least I have the tendency to think of a rainforest as equatorial, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, which further deepens the impression of ecological breadth that the hike makes. According to my two-dimensional northern hemisphere intuition, such breadth can only be achieved by thousands of miles of horizontal movement: all the way from the equator to the pole. We completed that traverse, one fourth of the Earth’s circumference, in less than half a day – forget around the world in 80 days, I bet we could do it in two!

Though one vertical mile is thus worth thousands of horizontal ones, a vertical mile does not always come cheaply – famously so. Seldom is this more obviously evident than on the last stretch of the hike to Camp 17, a steep dash up the snow-covered slope of the Ptarmigan Glacier. At the end of a long hike, a featureless and seemingly vertical white wall yields only to a stubborn and methodical clockwork of steps, one foot in front of another.

It can be a source of frustration, no doubt. But in this clockwork, there are also things other than fatigue and frustration to look out for – nuances that only resolve themselves against a perfectly white background in the vast tranquility of the glacier, small things to divert a hiker’s attention from tiredness. In the step-by-step trance of the last ascent, a sharp-eyed hiker will catch the small deviations in the step of the partner trudging alongside him; he will notice the minute corrections she makes to deal with the small yet sensible changes in the consistency of snow into which she plants her foot.

Once I reached that stage of mindfulness, I don’t think any fatigue could have become an issue in many hours of hiking to come, should they have been coming. A self who could get tired was no more: he had been lost in the collection of observations unreachable in other circumstances. The moment when that happened was the beginning of this post.