‘Tis Ski Swap Season. Buying used touring gear can make financial sense. If you’re looking for a first set-up or building out the quiver, our Gear Editor Gavin Hess and Matt Zia (Executive Director of the Montana Mountaineering Association, pack builder, and guide) help us comb through the used gear to find the gems and avoid the junk.
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Preparing for mountain adventures is now more science and less just throw-yourself-at-an-objective. And if you describe yourself as a mountain athlete, your training IQ has likely increased. Some mountain athletes have Sam Naney to thank for that—he joins us on the podcast.
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We’ve embedded the Windy app on the site in a few places—the sidebar and the conditions and forecasts page. As a habit forming species, weather forecasting workflows differ from user to user. Still, some of us may subscribe to predictive services like Open Snow, while others may not. Windy offers a suite of free functions that, depending on your needs, make it high-functioning for the beginner to intermediate meteorologist. In this series, we’ll run through a few of Windy’s functions so readers are more familiar with the app and can, at their own pace, add different datasets, predictive models, and visuals to their trip planning routine.
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In episode 3 of The High Route Podcast, we bring together two high level practitioners of their respective crafts. Kelly Cordes and Adam Fabrikant.
If you are unfamiliar with Cordes and his work, you are about to familiarize yourself with a gem. He’s a notable alpinist, mixologist, and even a better writer—which is saying something. If you haven’t read his classic book The Tower, please do. It’s such a good and in-depth read. Although a fine, very competent skier, Cordes comes to mountain travel as an alpinist first and skier second.
Fabrikant is the opposite—he comes to the conversation more as a sharp end ski mountaineer seeking first descents than an alpinist.
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The Southern Hemi’s Spring Equinox fell late last month. And by the time this podcast drops, the packing will be near complete for what Fabrikant and Haas expect to be a several-week expedition to ski a new line in the Andes. The two will haul heavy loads, likely over 60 pounds, for 4-5 days on the approach. And as they do, they’ll ascend some technical ground to access the line, and, if all things align, like the weather, health, and snowpack, plan to do what they do, which is to ski a first descent.
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