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New Zealand

NEW ZEALAND

Te Pukatea Bay

Abel Tasman Coast Track (Marahau to Te Pukatea)

Abel Tasman National Park, New Zealand

Distance: 17 miles (27.4 km)
Elevation Gain: 1,586 feet (483 m)
Time: 7 – 8 hrs (Marahau to Anchorage return); ~1 hr (Anchorage to Te Pukatea return)

Ben Lomond

Queenstown, New Zealand

Distance: 10.1 miles (16.3 km)
Elevation Gain: 4,919 feet (1,500 m)
Time: 6 – 8 hrs

Hooker Valley Track

Aoraki Mount Cook National Park, New Zealand

Distance: 7.1 miles (11.4 km)
Elevation Gain: 606 feet (185 m)
Time: 3 – 4 hrs

Lake Te Anau

Mount Luxmore

Te Anau, New Zealand

Distance: 20.5 miles (33 km)
Elevation Gain: 4,181 feet (1,274 m)
Time: 8 – 10 hrs (return to Luxmore Hut)

Roy’s Peak

Wanaka, New Zealand

Distance: 9.6 miles (15.4 km)
Elevation Gain: 4,279 feet (1,304 m)
Time: 5 – 7 hrs

Red Crater, Mount Ngauruhoe & Mount Ruapehu

Tongariro Alpine Crossing

Tongariro National Park, New Zealand

Distance: 14.6 miles (23.5 km)
Elevation Gain: 3,241 feet (988 m)
Time: 6 – 8 hrs (alpine crossing); 1.5 – 2 hrs (Tongariro summit return)

We made our first trip to Jasper in 2014 for our t

We made our first trip to Jasper in 2014 for our tenth anniversary. It holds so many wonderful memories for us, and we are absolutely heartbroken over the incredible devastation to the town and surrounding area. It’s shocking how quickly it all happened, and there’s no worse feeling than being powerless to do anything to help stop it.
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Our thoughts are with all the residents, business owners, fire personnel, park staff, and all the precious wildlife that calls Jasper home. So much beauty and so much loss.

#jasper #jaspernationalpark

Sunday scramble: Observation Peak The searing tem

Sunday scramble: Observation Peak

The searing temperatures and relentless wildfire smoke over the last week have created the most inhospitable environment I think I’ve ever felt. With no end in sight, we thought we’d take a gamble on a peak along the Icefields Parkway. We knew it would at least be slightly cooler, and the smoke would be a coinflip. Wanting to minimize midday heat and haze, we picked the shortest outing on our list.

When we arrived at the trailhead, the air was fairly moderate and there was no strong smell of smoke. We decided to start out. About halfway up the peak, high-level smoke started rolling in fast, quickly hampering the views. By the time we reached the summit, we could hardly see neighboring peaks that were just a kilometer or two away.

While the scramble was slightly relentless, gaining nearly 3,000 feet in one mile, the smoke was absolutely punishing. It was the slowest pace we’ve ever maintained by a longshot, and on a very short trip. Check out the difference in air quality between pics 1 and 4. While Peyto Lake’s blinding waters still manage to cut through the haze, Caldron Peak is nearly indistinguishable.

Edit: Our thoughts now are with everyone in Jasper. Conditions in that area have worsened since the weekend, with the historic town being evacuated on Tuesday. Please send all your good vibes into the universe for a break in the weather and to all the first responders.
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(1) Peyto Glacier, Peyto Peak, Caldron Peak & Peyto Lake
(2) Stephan & Sanchez hit the ridge
(3) Mountain avens
(4) Seriously smoky as we approach the summit
(5) Cool cornice and glacier hanging off the north side

Sometimes you get a perfect anniversary celebratio

Sometimes you get a perfect anniversary celebration. Other times you get a moldy cake, a cancelled dinner reservation, heat and air quality warnings, and COVID.

While the circumstances may suck this time, the love is no less there.

Thanks for two decades of being the equilibrium to my entropy. The patient to my antsy. The easy-going to my tightly-wound. The rational to my reactive. And the confident to my self-doubting. Thanks for being the guy who devotedly goes along with all my harebrained ideas, never makes me step foot in a grocery store, and always offers me the biggest helping of dessert.

Most recently, thanks for being the guy who spent the last ten days in solitary confinement while being waterboarded with green tea and assaulted with a barrage of chemical warfare… all to ensure I remain a ‘Novid.’ You may accuse me of violating the Geneva Conventions, but you’re still my masked hero.

Cheers to twenty years of togetherness! One of these days, maybe we can have a proper celebration.
😷❤

Not a scrambling weekend, but we did get out and a

Not a scrambling weekend, but we did get out and about around Canmore a bit. While it looks like the saturation was cranked on these pics, it is not the case. The water really is that intensely blue and the riverside vegetation that brilliantly gold.

First weekend in Alberta, first scramble of the se

First weekend in Alberta, first scramble of the season.
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While the Main Ranges are still largely snowbound, we were able to get out into the Front Ranges for our first summer summit. I optimistically thought we’d be in primo scrambling shape after hiking over three hundred miles in the Whites this spring; however I was very wrong. It’s such a different ballgame up here, and one that’s clearly going to take a bit to get back into. At least we got a killer view while [two of us] suffered through round one of reconditioning.
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Trip stats: 13 miles | 4000’ gain | 2800 m (9100’) max elevation

Now that we’re finally settled, unpacked, and wi

Now that we’re finally settled, unpacked, and with laundered skivvies, we can finally share a few of our finds from our rockhounding adventure in the Great Lakes.

Michigan’s state stone, Petoskey stones are actually fossilized coral that lived during the Devonian period, around 420 to 360 million year ago. During that time, modern Michigan was nothing like it is today. Rather, it was near the equator and covered with a shallow, tropical sea.

Petoskey stones are a type of rugose coral belonging to the genus Hexagonaria, named for its six-sided ‘corallites.’ Each corallite is the remains of an individual animal, called a polyp, and consists of a hexagonal-shaped exoskeleton surrounding a central pillar where the mouth and tentacles were located. Hexagonaria lived in tight colonies made up of genetically identical individuals. As such, each Petoskey stone contains many individual corallites.

Similar in appearance to Petoskey stones, Charlevoix stones can also be found in this part of Michigan. While these stones are also made up of fossilized coral, they are taxonomically distinct. Charlevoix stones are a type of tabulate coral from the genus Favosites that lived 450 to 250 million years ago (from the Late Ordovician to the Late Permian). This type of coral thrived for a much longer period on the planet – about 200 million years compared to just 57 million years for Hexagonaria.

The top and middle rows are Petoskey stones. The bottom row shows Charlevoix stones (note the smaller honeycomb pattern). You can see how wildly different they look when wet versus dry. When dry, the fossils are virtually indistinguishable from any other old rock. Consequently, searching along the shoreline and in the shallows is much easier – unless it’s raining or you have a bucket to wet the rocks further up on the beach.

Our first afternoon, the water was so choppy that it was impossible to rock hunt along the shore. The next morning, we got up early to try again. With the water like glass, rockhounding was much more achievable and we had quick success. While we didn’t find any large stones, we’ve got a passel of smaller specimens to play around with.

Here we are... Canmore, AB. Our home for the next

Here we are... Canmore, AB. Our home for the next five months. ❤

For the final part of our road trip, we decided to

For the final part of our road trip, we decided to visit Alberta’s badlands. Having previously visited the badlands in the Dakotas, we were curious to see how Canada’s compared.

Covering some 35,000 square miles of southern Alberta, much of the Canadian badlands skirt the Red Deer River. The area started to take shape around 13,000 years ago, when meltwaters from glacial retreat began chiseling away at the landscape at the end of the last ice age. Today, the barren expanse is peppered with sandstone sculptures, vast canyons and towering buttes.

The centerpiece of Alberta’s badlands is, arguably, Dinosaur Provincial Park. This extremely remote spot is one of the most significant paleontological sites in the world. Designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979, the preserve is unmatched in terms of the quantity and quality of dinosaur fossils that have been unearthed. To date, more than 150 complete skeletons have been discovered here, as well as specimens from every known group of Cretaceous-period dinosaur. In addition to a small museum, the Fossil Hunters Trail leads you past two fossil sites, one containing an in situ hadrosaur skeleton that was discovered in 1959 by the park’s first ranger.

Beyond the 75 million-year-old bones, the trails here offer endless beauty. Because of its riparian habitat, much of the area along the river is unexpectedly lush and green – a wild contrast to the stark sandstone. If you’re ever itching to drive hundreds of miles into the middle of nowhere, Canada’s badlands are a pretty special little place.

Images 1 through 5: Dinosaur Provincial Park
Images 6 through 8: Horsethief Canyon, Drumheller

As we drove across North Dakota, in the middle of

As we drove across North Dakota, in the middle of nowhere along desolate and seemingly interminable US-2, we came upon the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it town of Rugby and its major claim to fame: a 15-foot stone monument marking the Geographical Center of North America.

Naturally, running into such a prominent point by happenstance on one of only two major east-west highways to cross the state instantly begged the question: Is this really the geographical center of the continent?

A little research revealed the answer we kind of expected: most likely, no.

Back in 1931, a USGS employee used a curious and, in today’s world, highly unsophisticated method of determining the continent’s center – balancing a cardboard cutout of North America on a pin. One brief moment of unrefined equilibrium later and Rugby, ND was (literally) on the map.

In 2016, some eighty-five years later, a geography professor from the University of Buffalo decided to revisit the claim using a more scientific approach to calculating geographic centers. The published, peer-reviewed results of his map projections and computer models determined, ironically, that the true midpoint was in a town called Center, just 102 miles south of Rugby as the crow flies. The town was originally named for being the center point of Oliver County, so it’s kind of poetic that it can now claim an even bigger title as ‘Center.’

While Rugby may not be the continent’s true scientific center, it sure holds an interesting place in our country’s geographical history. And frankly, for someone to balance a crude map on a pin and get within what is quite likely just a hundred miles of a continental midpoint… well, color me impressed.

Road Trip Day 4: ... How many of you have driven 3

Road Trip Day 4:
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How many of you have driven 300 miles at 70 mph with a four-pack of craft beer on the roof of the car?

We drove clear across Minnesota and halfway across North Dakota before Stephan abruptly pulled the Subie over while stammering, ‘uh-oh, I need to check on something.’

Shout out to @thule and @innoracks for collectively creating the perfect support system for our @blacklistbeer IPAs to survive sustained high speeds and unrelenting crosswinds for over five hours on the highway. 🤦‍♀️

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