Having grown up sailing in Seattle with my dad, I was familiar with wire gate carabiners as they’re very common in the maritime industry, so when it came to the “lightweight” part of the product description, this seemed obvious. The first prototype I made of the wiregate carabiner involved hand bending a piece of “piano wire” from a hobby store and milling the body out from a solid billet of some exotic military grade mystery metal that a supplier had sent us.  I printed out drawings of the design and spray mounted them to the metal as a template for cutting and remember going through about 50 endmills as the material was so gummy and unmachinable.

HotWire Prototype #001 circa 1994

Between the crude prototyping and horrible gate action, this first prototype was greeted with almost universal disdain by everyone except Johnny Woodward.  Johnny was also a Designer at BD, as well as having a background in math and being an incredible climber. At the time, the hallmark of BD carabiners was that the gate action was “as smooth as a BMW’s transmission” and Johnny was the guy who actually dissected the pivot points and geometry of the wire gate to understand why it worked and how to optimize it. He also realized that with less mass, a wiregate biner wouldn’t be as susceptible to gate whiplash, which can lead to carabiners being loaded in the “open gate” mode, which can reduce their strength from 25kN to 7kN. To prove this, Johnny mounted carabiners on a pivot and used high-speed photography to show beyond a doubt that a wiregate closed in a fraction of the time that it took a standard gate to retract.

A classic photo of Johnny Woodward on “Beau Geste.”

The wiregate idea was dropped from the immediate carabiner design, which eventually turned into Black Diamond’s first hot forged carabiner, The Fin. The Fin was intended as a sport climbing specific biner, but after it was introduced it became obvious that it had been designed and tested by people with large hands and was ridiculously oversized.  It died a fairly quick death, but the namesake “fin” on the back spine eventually resurfaced on the LiveWire biner years later.

The short-lived “Fin” carabiner – so large you could fly a Space Shuttle through it.

Meanwhile, Johnny was still interested in the wiregate concept and it was decided that if we were going to make a wiregate biner, it needed to have its own body as the tail sections of existing biners was too small to house two holes.  This was the official start of the HotWire biner and it took roughly a full year and 15 prototypes to dial in these two simple parts – the body and the gate.

Even after all the weights, strengths, functions, manufacturing and price issues had been resolved, there was still a large degree of skepticism about the biner and it was commonly referred to as “the paperclip gate” as it looked so weird. I distinctly remember the disappointment of hearing the pre-sales projection numbers before the  HotWire was introduced as they were a tiny fraction of the numbers for the best selling Ovals, Light D’s and Quicksilvers.  It was almost seen as a novelty biner with a host of unforeseen issues, like ropes being cut when it was cross-loaded (unfounded), gates losing their action or worst of all, general rejection by climbers.

Instead, what happened was that experienced climbers started using a few of them and realized that wiregate made an Aid rack lighter, they didn’t jam in the snow for alpine climbing, they were easier to clip for sport climbing, and best of all, there were no cut ropes or widespread failures.  After that, the wiregate concept basically sold itself.

The modern day HotWire carabiner, which has been through a few redesigns since the mid 90′s.

For the first few years the HotWire had a “Pat. Pending” stamp on it, which was a crafty move on BD’s part. While wiregates may have been new to climbing, as other carabiner manufacturers pointed out, they were hardly a new invention, so how could they be patented? Good question, but is it worth sinking a bunch of time, effort and money into a project knowing that you might be infringing on a patent? Considering that the patent process can take years, especially if the applicants want it to, and gearing up to design and make a wiregate from scratch could take years, there were no other wiregates on the market for many seasons. The patent itself turned out to be on the riveting process for the two ends of the gate, and although I don’t know if it was ever granted, it served its purpose of holding off the competition, at least for a little while.

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One of the most common skinning mistakes it to bend at the waist. This has the unintended consequence of shifting your weight forward of the pivoting toe-piece, which makes it almost impossible to apply pressure to the skin pocket. To properly pressure the skin pocket on steeper climbs, keep an upright posture and press through the heels as much as possible.

Bending at the waist = blowing chunks.

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Pyramid style tents (Megamids, Kiva’s, etc.) are an art-form, which once learned, has many advantages.  They are incredibly light, spacious, simple and allow you to cook in the tent (not that I don’t anyways).  They work well for protection from the sun or rain, and can be used anywhere from the sizzling desert to a freezing glacier.  For summer camping, I usually just erect them and leave it at that, but for winter camping, especially if the tent is being used for a cook tent, I’ll excavate bench seats and a table.  This process takes anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour depending on the snow quality and urgency, so it works well for extended stays at a basecamp, but is a bit impractical for moving camp every day.

The finished product.  This can hold up to about 6 seated people.  For added comfort, place a RidgeRest foam pad on the seats.

There are a million variations on this theme, but here’s how I do mine.  In the name of furthering the art-form, I’d be happy to post other people’s kitchen arrangements as well.  Please send them to amclean@xmission.com.

BEFORE STARTING, ORIENT THE TENT DOOR TO THE LEE OF THE WIND!

Step One: Level a flat spot (size not too important right now) and then mark out The Holy Ground which will become the table top.  Don’t step on this area or dig in it, as it is hard to replace!  Mark it off with shovel tic-marks at 1.5 shovel widths wide by 6 widths long.

Step Two: Cut out two identical trenches on either side of The Holy Ground.  These should be 1 shovel width wide and about waist deep.  When finished, these should be big enough to bury a body in, so keep an eye on suspicious partners.

Step Three: Moving laterally one shovel width, dig a half depth trench.  This forms the seats.  Don’t worry about making these too narrow, as it is easy to widen them later, but not so easy to narrow them.

Step Four: Connect the two bays with a trench one shovel width wide.

Ta da! Jim Harris basking in the glory of it all.

Shitters are just smaller variations on the theme.

After a few days the table will start to melt out and will probably need to be rebuilt.  Once the pit has been excavated and the tent erected, cut out a few steps leading down into it.  I like to put them off center such that they line up with one of the foot trenches, that way you can keep one side of the tent door closed.  Another nicety is to dig out foot/toe wells, although you do so at the risk of structurally weakening your table.
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The Rocky Mountain Region saw a 7.2% drop, as a result of the worst snow season in 20 years. Last year Utah had 4,223,064, so -7.2% would put us at 3,910,557.

I’m going with 3,951,732.  This would put us slightly ahead of the Rocky Mountain Regional average (HA!)  and allow for a legitimate round-up to 4 million, while still acknowledging that it was a bad year.

I’ll put up a copy of The Chuting Gallery, PLUS a new Voile strap (must be a lower 48 address – sorry) to the person who posts the closest number in a comment on this StraightChuter.com posting.  The contest is over when Ski Utah posts their official number, which could be any day now, and, of course, Ski Utah employees are not eligible as they already have enough trashy books and strap-ons.

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Cardiff Fork – it doesn’t look like a war zone, but you never know what’s hiding in those trees.

Having followed this for a few years, the key word to me is “re-issued.” Because of the patchwork of land ownership in the Central Wasatch Mountains, it is common to cross Forest Service land, in which case a special permit is needed for motorized transportation.  These permits involve paying a fee and agreeing to a long list of conditions, (such as staying on the road) and can be revoked or denied if the conditions are not met. In the case of Cardiff Fork where there are 15-20 separate landowners, if one landowner jeopardizes the permit, then the entire group loses out on motorized access, which I suspect is what happened.

What is different this time around is that there are now two contacts for the CCOA – Wayne Crawford who is the President of the organization and Dave Robinson.  The Forest Service has also prepared a map showing the private in-holdings as well as the winter/summer, public/private access routes.

The Forest Service access map.

It is in everybody’s best interest to be respectful of this new agreement and it will be interesting to see how it develops. From a backcountry skier’s perspective, hopefully it will eliminate all of the rogue high-marking snowmobiles and enraged encounters.  That said, it is almost impossible to tell exactly where the property lines are back there, and I don’t think anyone likes the idea of placing signs every ten feet to delineate it. I also wonder what qualifies as “motorized transportation?”  Bulldozers?  50 person Jeep Safaris? And once you get to your property, is it open season for hill climbs or high-marking?  Time will tell.
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I was involved with the Kids Camp in 2008 and thought it was fantastic, as well as excellent tribute to the spirit of Hans Saari. Just by nature of taking place in the Tetons, the camp is a very legitimate and intense outing with many lifetimes of experience packed into five days. No backcountry skills are needed, but applicants should be strong skiers to get the most out of it as they will be skiing all sorts of terrain in a variety of conditions, as well as packing all of their gear in and out of the mountains.

The application process involves filling out a questionnaire, converting it to a pdf and emailing it in on or before May 15th. More information on the camp can be found by clicking here for a pdf cover letter, or by visiting the Hans Fund website.  A photo gallery from the 2008 camp can be found here.

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The pot parkas themselves are basically just an asbestos (?) cover that you put over your pot while it is melting snow, cooking or boiling water.  It helps a little bit with fuel efficiency, but it also serves to cut down on the roar of an XGK stove, and most importantly, you can redirect the stove’s exhaust gases to dry out gloves, boot liners or help thaw frozen food. It is a lightweight, multipurpose accessory that seems well worth the additional few grams.  They are available in two sizes (the 10″  fits a 3L pot well) and as an added bonus, folding them back up correctly is an excellent little time wasting brainteaser.

Using this setup with an MSR XGK stove for heavy winter burning, I figure on .18 liters per person, per day of white gas fuel consumption.

The pot parkas use to be part of the Backpacker’s Pantry baking kit and you could buy the parka as a spare item, but I haven’t seen that option for a while.  The parkas take a lot of abuse, but I did have one suddenly melt down on me, in which case it sent out a harsh acidic smoke that probably caused all sorts of lung damage.

The photo that launched a thousand “Where do you get those?” questions.

By putting items on top of the pot lid and below the parka, it is possible to steam them, or at least get a surface defrost going.  Gloves can be laid directly on top of the parka (mfg probably doesn’t advise this…), and boot liners can be inverted and balanced for a fairly good drying session.  You have to keep an eye out once the water starts boiling, as steam can quickly undo any drying progress you’ve made.

Thanks for the link Forrest!  The race looked, uhmmmm, fun and you probably didn’t need those three fingers anyway.  ;)
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Most of the trip was in the Wrangell-St.Elias National Park & Preserve, but we had a few spare days at the end, so we went over to Thompson Pass for some car based skiing. The trip started out with three days of warm up skiing out of the Ultima Thule Lodge with the Claus family, Eli Potter and Hombi which set the stage for the fantastic conditions to come.

Eli Potter cruising the Wrangells.

This was followed up by the first annual Wild Alpine Wilderness Ski Week, which involved eight of us (a full Otter load) doing day trips out of the Ultima Thule Lodge, then coming back for one of Donna’s excellent dinners and warm, dry beds. We skied a variety of terrain and a typical day involved getting a high drop-off, taking a few laps in the local area, then finishing off with a full-length run all the way to the valley floor. Oftentimes the snow will get mushy and isothermal as you descend down into the low elevations, but we seemed to be ahead of the warming curve this year and the runs were good to the last drop – all 4-5,000′ of them. By the end of the week we had averaged about 5,500′ of climbing per day and 8,000′ of descent.

A typical Wild Alpine Ski Week run – huge slopes, great snow and nice weather.

Aria Thomases, the organizer behind Ski Week, has already started setting the dates for next year and I can’t wait to get back there. It was a blast!

After Ski Week, Jim Harris and I stayed on for an attempt on Mt. Bona, which I had tried in 2007. This year the ridgeline we were intending to climb and ski was a glistening sheet of blue ice, but we decided to give it a try anyway, as I’m a slow learner. It took two days to decide that our time would be better spent elsewhere, and luckily Paul Claus was able to pick us up and fly us back to the Ultima Thule Lodge.

Jim Harris shooting a few photo of the flanks of Mt. Bona.

A day later, we ended up flying out to a lake in a nearby valley, which may be the holy grail of backcountry skiing. I’d done a few laps in that area before, but by camping and spending multiple days there, the potential of the region suddenly became obvious. There’s just about any and every type of skiing you could imagine, and it is all very high quality.

“Taken for Granite” couloir – one of many 3,000′+ runs in the Slotterhouse Valley.

As we had no car in Chitna, and thus no way of getting back to Anchorage, we gratefully hitched a ride with Paul in the Otter when he flew back to start another project. This turned out to be one of the most spectacular flights I’ve ever been on as we flew along the crest of the Chugach Mountains in perfect weather for what seemed like hours (it was probably more like 1.5 hours).

After a night in Anchorage at the Puffin Inn (ironically, no smoking allowed), we rented a car and drove out to Thompson Pass, where we ended up seeing three friends within five minutes of arriving. I hadn’t been to TP for a while, but between Tailgate Alaska, high powered snowmobiles, snow cat operations and roughly 7-10 helicopters spread out over a handful of heliskiing operations, it was like a ski resort without lifts. Fortunately, it is a large corridor with tons of options, so the additional activity in the area just means that it has a fun social scene. We skied a variety of couloirs, including a few of them in the legendary Chugach powder, where you are able to lay into a turn full-bore on a 40+ degree slope with total confidence.

The aptly named Iguana Backs off of Thompson Pass.

A big thanks to everyone who helped make it happen, especially Jim Harris who is a five-star travel partner. We have some unfinished business to return to next year. ;)

Here’s a link to a photo essay of the trip:
http://www.straightchuter.com/am-content/AK2012/index.html
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In an effort to bolster support for their intended SkiLink land-grab, Mike Goar from the Canyons/Talisker put together a group called the Lift Utah Coalition, which held a press conference yesterday in Salt Lake City. The closed-door conference was accompanied by an equally large, or larger number of protesters, of which I was one. It is a sign of the times when skiers, hikers, snowshoers, hunters  and outdoor enthusiasts are boycotting new recreation infrastructure, while locked inside a closed room, bankers, real estate developers, ski resort managers, resort attorneys and home builders are promoting it.  While it is becoming clear that SkiLink is all about ski resort expansion, at least they have dropped the flimsy pretense that it has anything to do with transportation, which was about as transparent as a Fredrick’s of Hollywood nightgown on Gayle Ruzicka.  I think the only vestige of the transportation concept is to try to get state funding to help pay for it, or at least garner some massive transportation tax break.

Talisker has been throwing an impressive amount of money at this project, including roughly $500,000 on lobbyists, including Ted Wilson who is pretending to be an environmental consultant. I recently even got a request from a local marketing firm by a guy posing as a concerned citizen who said he wanted to write a guest post on straightchuter.com, which turned out to be a glorified press release promoting SkiStink.  You need to follow this blog a little closer there Porter Olson – nice try though you little scammer.  :)  Try skiutah.com – they’ll publish it and you can get your commission.

The silver lining on this dark little cloud of a press conference was that I actually got to see a real, live person from Talisker, namely Steve Postorino, Talisker’s Director of Public Relations and Press Conference Door Bouncer.  Considering they operates in a small ski town, most of my impressions of Talisker involved large logo’d SUV’s with tinted glass windows, private clubs and gated communities. They are a secretive organization and prefer to do most of their business behind the scenes in congressional offices, lobbyists suites or through attorneys.  Steve, pictured above, has no opinion on giving away public land – just ask him.

One of the more disturbing aspects of the local media coverage of SkiLink is the continual parroting of Talisker press releases as if they were facts, instead of pure sci-fi. Five hundred new jobs, $52 million a year in revenue and construction ethics endorsed by Northern Goshawks all over Utah?  None of them seem to notice that the crux of this entire project involves a foreign private equity group skirting local government and public input (and objections) by submitting a congressional bill to try to usurp public land for their private use. The painful irony of the situation is that Utah politicians claim to hate the Feds and love local control, yet the first thing they do is bypass the local agencies when “they don’t give us the answer we are looking for.”  It is also painful to see the newspapers describing the bill as “allowing the Forest Service to sell the land” when in fact it would force the Forest Service to sell the land, much like forcing grain down a goose’s throat to make foie gras before killing it to eat its liver.

The entire legal process is a bit of a mystery to me, but according to Carl Fisher of Save Our Canyons, the bill, H.R. 3452, is adrift while it awaits a Senate hearing, which may be a while as they have other more pressing issues.  I hope for the sake of the Wasatch Mountains that this bill is shot down as hard and as fast as possible, mainly because it would create such a horrendous precedent.  I’m not sure why a car dealership like Ken Garff Automotive would support ski resort expansion, aside from the fact that it Talisker gets their 30 acres, why not give Ken Garff 20 acres for a new car lot at Alta, or Ivory Homes a 40 acre chunk for some condos in Big Cottonwood , etc.?

For the record, I’m not opposed the idea of linking all the resorts together, but I think it has to be done in the least  obtrusive way possible to begin with to see if tourists even care, which I suspect they won’t. I’ve done the SkiUtah Interconnect once, which is was enough to understand why it is affectionately known as “The SkiUtah Disconnect.”  After finding out it takes all day to ride lifts to and from Alta and the Canyons, the thrill will be gone but the chairlift bedsores will remain.

A few parting words of hypocrisy from the Talisker website:

…belong to a club that’s more like a family, one that gives you access to Talisker’s 10,000 acres of private wilderness and experiences few people ever even dream of.  A place where design excellence is revered and nature is honored.

As a member, gain unrivaled access to world-class skiing, golf and every imaginable outdoor activity in the pristine wilderness of Park City, Utah.

Apparently wilderness is valued as long as it is privately held, nature is honored by constructing exclusive gated communities, and the area around Park City is pristine wilderness, except when it comes to public land, in which case it is just a wasted slag heap waiting to be saved from itself.

Paul Lambie and Allison Schwam booting up the “Shrinking Dragons” couloir.

In typical Wrangell-St.Elias fashion, some of the most memorable lines we skied defy words or photos and have to be experienced to believe. On two separate days we skied out drainages with 4,500’ or more of elevation drop where the slope angle never got above 20-25 degrees as you skimmed by Yosemite scale granite walls on a perfect cushion of powder all the way to the valley floor. It’s hardly the stuff of modern ski movies or radical first descents, but it makes for unforgettable runs that redefine what true wilderness skiing is all about.

Pete and Titus Leung about to top out after 1,250′ of booting.

Assuming the mountains don’t wash away by 2013, the Wild Alpine Wilderness Ski Week will be back next year, and more likely than not, be the highlight of the season.

Pete, Reto, Eli, Aria and Hombi enjoying a campfire light appetizer before being served up a double helping of Northern Lights.