No sooner was I back from AK than it was time for the next adventure. The journey lines crew had plans to finish this historic snow season in style with a next level fatpack snowboard mountaineering trip. The bike tour and intended climb/ski routes were obscure and remote. We'd travel to a seldom visited part of the San Juan Mountains and use fatbikes to access camps below our objectives. A SAG vehicle would shadow the team but couldn't drive the route. The truck would have t

Day Eight The alarm goes off at 1:30 and I lay there wondering if I really slept at all. It’s summit day and the suck of the now will all be forgotten if I can just rally and get this shit done. Although it’s the middle of the night, the Alaskan summer provides me with enough light to prep in the tent without a headlamp. Our goal is to be moving by 2am and our team spent a good deal of time prepping the prior evening so that dressing ourselves and brewing up would be the only

Day 5 (con't.) We rope up and head out to tackle the icefall proper. I take the lead, snowplowing back down icefall camp’s entry spine before taking a sharp left turn out to the ramp. Leaving the spine, I immediately have to navigate across three monster troughs that sport slumping snow bridges to gain the center of the low angled slope leading upwards. The moves are heady. I trust nothing. I'm ready to fall at any moment. There are cracks everywhere underneath me and there’s

Sometimes a mission takes longer to pull off than you originally think. Such was the case with Mt. Sanford, a 16k+ peak in Alaska’s Wrangell St Elias National Park. I had first learned about this mountain, while running backcountry snowboarding trips for Outward Bound in the late 2000s. A colleague of mine who calls AK home regaled me with visions of splitboarding off this massive peak. Ever since I first learned of Sanford, the dream of heading to the Wrangell Mountains and