trip reports Archives - Perpetual Weekend by Jim Harris

Orizaba Ramblers

Jim Harris — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 10:00:05 +0000

Windmilling his kayak paddle into the breeze, Luc Mehl, 34, pulls onto the sandbar at the mouth of Mexico’s Rio Antigua and squints at the novelty of a seascape horizon in the hazy afternoon glare. Two days of sleepless dysentery have drained Mehl’s prodigious vigor and his hands are blanched and clammy as we high-five. Still, he’s grinning with accomplishment in the salt air. Eleven days earlier we’d set out pedaling bikes strapped with mountaineering and whitewater paddling gear in Cholula de...

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Revelations, AK

Jim Harris — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 05:29:04 +0000

The first photos or words I had published in print was this article that ran in a Powder Magazine last year. I was psyched! A few months before, Photo Editor Dave Reddick had written to ask for a “wider edit of photos.” I’d already sent what I thought were the seventy best pictures and I was mortified, certain that I had no better photos to submit. I sent him another seventy photos anyway. Many of the photos that ran in the...

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Box Death Canyon Wilderness Backpacking

Jim Harris — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 21:31:36 +0000

For a week each of the last 14 or so years, my dad, Jeff Harris, and I take a backpacking trip together. Usually we wait until the last minute to decide on an exact destination, following favorable weather. This year the forecast in Utah called for snow in the mountains and rain in the desert. It was a big enough storm that we’d have to spend a full day driving north or south to avoid it. Rather than do that,...

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Lone Peak all-nighter with the Provos

Jim Harris — Thu, 26 May 2011 17:41:12 +0000

Ian wasn’t scheduled to fly in to SLC until 10pm and Neil wanted to run the idea by him first before committing. I’d proposed an early, early start so that we could ski down the East Face of Lone peak at sunrise, guessing that a 1:30am start would get us there around 7am. I also figured that Ian, just returning from a surf trip to the California coast, wouldn’t be interested in a stupid early start and I’d be off...

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North Face of Timp

Jim Harris — Tue, 17 May 2011 16:48:39 +0000

The North Face of Mt Timpanogos is a steep, seldom-traveled place. Andrew McLean and Brad Barlage skied a direct line decade ago before descending a poorly protected series of rappels down the 600 foot cliffs that stripe the lower face. Since then, the line has seen little action. Derek and I had eyed an elegant sneak down a tucked-away couloir in the cliffs on prior ski tours, but the face above was just too intimidating to try it on a...

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NW Cascade Super Chute

Jim Harris — Sat, 14 May 2011 18:36:32 +0000

Mark often imagined lines down the west face of Cascade Mountain. Wide alpine bowls tighten to rock lined chutes before ending abruptly in a massive limestone cliff band that wraps for miles around the peak. The chutes are in plain sight of Orem and Provo, Utah but the wide band of chossy rock is unappealing to rock climbers and skiers alike. After scrutinizing the cliffs with binoculars, Mark hypothesized that rappelling the cliffs might not be as bad as they...

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Doubleheader

Jim Harris — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 18:00:13 +0000

After getting rained out in Fruita, we headed back to Utah where the NWS was forecasting a foot or two of snow. Early Monday morning we put on boots and skins by headlamp and discovered that between the three of us we knew quite a few of the other folks doing the same thing in the parking lot around us. It had snowed two feet overnight but cleared and now the stars were fading into the dawn. Grant, Dustin and...

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Crow’s Toes

Jim Harris — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 18:32:40 +0000

Mark and I skied Crow’s Foot Chutes after I almost blew it by forgetting my boots at home. Luckily, I had a pair ordered and ready to be picked up at Black Diamond and I’d have to break em in sometime, right? Our mid-morning start had become a noon start so we decided to shorten the route by traveling straight up the South Fork of Dry Creek. 4400′ of trail-breaking later and we were on top of the avalanche paths,...

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Cold Smoke

Jim Harris — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 22:40:37 +0000

The National Weather Service couldn’t decide what the storm was going to do. Two days out they were calling for 5-9″. By T-minus-24 they’d upped that to 7-14″ but then just as quickly backed those numbers way down when the front split around the Wasatch. So I was surprised to wake up and see Alta reporting 15″. Sure the temps were well below zero with ridgeline windchill some scary number around -30F, but it hadn’t snowed much for a week...

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Orion

Jim Harris — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 20:06:39 +0000

We went south looking for cold, fluffy powder. Instead we found a thick melt-freeze crust under a dusting of new snow. The climbing was that challenging type of skinning where skis have to be edged just perfectly to get traction. Lean one way and you’re sliding sideways downhill. Lean the other way and, well, same result. It’s the skiing equivalent of climbing offwidth: usually unpleasant and insecure but punctuated by moments of enjoying the challenge. The ski down wasn’t really...

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