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The Klamath Adventure Club

Stay Wild

Stay Wild Magazine Sent Five Creative Explorers on an Adventure to Klamath, Oregon with a Loose Map, Some Goods, and Total Creative Freedom. 

Here’s What They Came Back With.

Story by Liz Ibarra // @lizibarra

Alin Dragulin // @alindragulindotcom

Lexi Smith & Cody Cheng // @stateofmindstudio

Monica Mo // @i_am_monicamo

“Adventure is jumping into water you’ve never jumped into before, upside-down and with your eyes closed. It’s when everything you planned goes absolutely wrong and you find yourself on the side of a mountain overlooking a river, in hot springs during pouring rain, drinking beer with people you just met.” -Liz

“Adventure is probably different to everyone.” -Monica

“At first it was a little scary, and gave us anxiety because we didn’t know what exactly we were doing, and didn’t know these people. It was a wonderful surprise how closely and quickly friendship can form when you’re put in an uncomfortable situation.” -Lexi

“The hot spring we went to was unlike any I’ve been to. Water hot enough to cook ramen in starts at the top of a hillside and collects in six pools downhill, where it gradually gets cooler and collects more dead skin and used bandaids. Naturally everyone wants to make it to the top where the water is warmest and pure. But that pool is always taken, so you have to start at the bottom and work your way up like you’re climbing a hippie corporate ladder.” -Alin

“I’m kind of a loner so I don’t go out of my way to meet people. Lexi started to chat up a couple guys we met at the hot springs, and it turns out they were on a bro trip, rock climbing and sightseeing around Washington and Oregon. She invited them to camp with us and we had a lovely visit with them around the campfire. They were nice guys and they didn’t kill us!” -Alin

“It felt like we were all 10 years old again, without a care or worry in the world and just having some pure fun.” -Lexi

“Klamath has tons of great roadside flowers.” -Liz

THE GOODS USED ON THIS ADVENTURE

Element for clothing and skateboards // elementbrand.com

Sanuk for footwear // sanuk.com

Burton for backpacks and camp gear // burton.com

Proof for sunglasses // iwantproof.com

Oru for Kayaks // orukayak.com

Biolite for electricity // bioliteenergy.com

Celestron for binoculars // celestron.com

Scout Books for Doodling // scoutbooks.com 

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Skate the Rez

Stay Wild

Wood, Wheels, and Potential

Story and Photos by Dylan Christopher // @dielan

I wish that I could travel back in time to tell my 14-year-old self that someday I’d be driving across the country in a van full of professional skaters, camping in national parks, and giving skateboards to kids in need along the way. I’m pretty sure my teenage self would shit his pants, which would be funny. 

The mission of Elemental Awareness is to connect kids to nature and spread positivity through skateboarding. For the past decade we’ve been traveling across the nation visiting Indian reservations, stoking out their skate scenes with events and giving away massive amounts of product to the kids. We’ve spent time with the Apache, Navajo, Hopi, Kootenai, S’klallam, and Pima tribes. The reservations of America are some of the most barren underserved communities you’ll see outside of a Third World country. Poverty, alcoholism, and drug use run wild—yet happiness persists. We’ve been welcomed with open arms into homes, ceremonies, and lifelong friendships. 

To give skateboarding to someone who seemingly has so little is indescribable, especially knowing what skateboarding has done for me. I can only imagine the potential this piece of wood with wheels has for these children. It’s more than a hobby or passion; it’s an escape, it’s life. Last year on the Pima reservation outside of Phoenix, I handed a kid a skateboard and he looked up at me and said, “This is the best day of my life.” And not in the way people say it ironically. Like, literally that was the best day he had lived in his life up until that moment. I was at a loss. All I know is I hope to do this over and over for as long as I can.

Get on a skateboard; you never know where it will take you. 

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The Rules of Adventure

Stay Wild

The Hinku Valley, Western Nepal

Story by Charlotte Austin

Photos by Bryan Aulick

 

Each breath burned. As we trudged up the glacier, I traced our route of ascent with my eyes: milky blue ice, undulating in every direction. I swung my arms hard to force feeling into fingers stiff with cold. It was somewhere between midnight and pre-dawn.

Three hours before, I had tied into the middle of 50-meter rope. Behind me was Bryan, my partner; ahead was Mingma, the climbing Sherpa we’d hired because it is required by law in Nepal. We were on Mera Peak, a rarely traveled 21,247’ massif deep in the Hinku Valley of the western Himalaya. We were alone on the mountain, and I—a professional mountain guide and the most experienced member of our team—was scared.

Months before, I had carefully pitched our objective to my sponsors. Despite the exotic-sounding location, nothing about Mera Peak is cutting edge. The ascent requires basic glacier travel but is not technically difficult. When compared to surrounding peaks, the elevation of the summit is not impressive. If you tilt your head 90 degrees to the side, Mera Peak has the silhouette of an unexcited A-cup breast.

“This will be an incredible adventure,” I’d written in our proposal. “Bryan has never been on a big mountain. This will be his first big alpine climb. We’ll get off the beaten path, see the real Himalaya. The Khumbu Valley (which leads to Everest) is overpopulated, and we want to experience and share the stories of authentic Nepal.” We spent hundreds of hours studying maps, collecting gear, and battling our personal demons on Stairmasters at 24 Hour Fitness late at night. My Instagram followers posted meaningful emoticons. Bryan drove for hours and wallowed in thigh-deep snow to find a slope appropriate for practicing with his crampons and ice axe. Then, suddenly, the expedition began. Despite the valley’s proximity to Everest, the Hinku is rugged, remote terrain: deep jungle, herds of chocolate-colored mountain goats munching rhododendrons, untamed alpine topography. Twice a day Bryan and I ate rice and boiled lentils. Rivers pulsed with glacial silt. There are no roads, no internet, no electricity; just dirt trails snaking across hillsides for unimaginable miles. Every day we walked. We fought, we kissed, we sang. We walked for hours, then days, always moving toward our mountain. The skin peeled off my toes. We walked, always moving toward the unknown.

As I scanned the glacier with my headlamp in that middle-of-the-night morning, I thought about the hours we’d spent in preparation, Bryan’s hope and commitment, our shared dream of climbing something—anything—together, as a team. But I knew, had known for a thousand painful steps, that we weren’t going to reach the summit. We were both feeling strong, but the glacier was more heavily crevassed than I’d expected from the reports I’d gotten from previous years. With each step, I berated myself: What if I’d brought more rope, different gear, other ways to protect the route? But no. The glacier was cracked and brittle as sunbaked Styrofoam, and I simply didn’t have what we needed to summit and descend safely. I stopped walking and switched off my light. Once our eyes adjusted to the starlight, I showed Bryan the ribbons of sagging snow snaking around us, indicating the crevasse danger. I explained my assessment of the risk, my decision. Bryan closed his eyes for one long moment. I watched him, my breath steaming in clouds around us. Bryan opened his eyes, and together we looked out at the pre-dawn for one silent heartbeat. Then we walked downhill, away from our mountain.

Back in Kathmandu, I dreaded telling the world that we hadn’t completed our goal. What would I tell the sponsors who had sent gear, the guide service I work for, the members of our families who were watching our dog for six weeks? We limped around the city, feeling numb and distant from each other and ourselves. Bryan got sick. A tiny brown monkey—one of the thousands who run wild on the streets of the city—sat on my dusty duffel bag full of climbing gear and masturbated, his tiny fist moving fiendishly. I watched, exhausted and confused.

On the flight back to Seattle, I pulled my journal out of my bag, lowered my tray table, and made a list. “Ways we failed,” I wrote, underlining it twice. “No summit. Argued a lot. No summit. Puked.” In another column, I wrote: “Ways we succeeded: Saw new places. Made art. Did not get the shits. We are now black belts in communication. Quads of steel. Came home safely.”

A stewardess walked through the dark cabin, saw me awake, quietly asked if she could get me another drink. I nodded. Sipping bad whiskey, I looked at my list as we flew quietly toward home.

Seven months later, I am still thinking about that climb. Did I let people down? Should I have known, brought extra gear, planned for more contingencies? We were broke for months as we paid off our travel bills while I tried to avoid telling the story to my friends. Should I have pushed us further into the unknown? I wanted that summit. What price should I have paid? I find myself thinking about Mera Peak when I’m guiding, whenever there is the one question I’m asked more than any other. When we’re climbing, my clients don’t want to know about the route or the altitude or the weather. They want to know whether it will be hard. “Yes,” I say. “Undoubtedly. Climbing mountains is always hard.” They look at me warily, zinc oxide smeared across their noses, as though this is groundbreaking news. “You came here to do something hard,” I point out. “That’s the whole point. It wouldn’t be an adventure if it didn’t challenge you.”

I said that phrase to my clients a dozen times before I heard myself. Adventure is an overused word: it’s a conceit, a privilege, a contradiction. We’re collectively obsessed with it, because it puts us into situations where there are consequences instead of rules, where we can’t use Google to solve our problems, where we do hard things. Real adventure is painful. It’s terrible. It’s perfect. 

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