Travel Guard Trip Insurance Available Online!

We are happy to announce that we can offer all of our US and Canadian climbers the comprehensive Travel Guard Adventure Protection Plan.

It is easy to set up, and can all be done from home via a link on our website that you can reach HERE.

The unfortunate reality for active outdoors people is that we often expose ourselves to the potential for injury while we train for our upcoming trips. A somewhat parallel reality is that most trips in the mountains are subject to a level of subjective hazard that is even higher. Injuries and illness are occasionally unavoidable in the big mountains. The Adventure Protection Plan is one of the better ways we've found to help our climbers protect their investments in their expeditions.

There are some valuable additional benefits that are included in the plan if you sign up within 15 days of making a deposit, so please consider that into your decision making. When purchasing a policy, also consider the cost of your flights and any additional travel expenses you might need when deciding on the appropriate level of coverage.

We have had several of our climbers use this plan over the past couple of years and they have expressed a high level of satisfaction with their experiences. Unfortunately, we have also had a couple of climbers injure themselves right before a climb who did not have any trip insurance as well. They all wish they had protected their trip expenses...

TRAVEL GUARD ADVENTURE PROTECTION PLAN

Our 2010 Denali season is filling up!

It has been a very interesting experience to see how our pre-season bookings have changed over the past five years. "Back in the day," it was fairly typical to have a fair amount of space left on trips as late as a month before the season started. We began filling trips by February a few years ago, and our 2009 season was completely full by December 1st, 2008.

It looks like we are on a similar track for our 2010 season. We have space available on most dates, but are rapidly filling up. I'd encourage anyone even considering joining us on Denali to at least give us a call to talk about whether it would be a good choice for you or not. Any perspective small groups of even two or more friends should contact us very soon as trips with even two spots left open are becoming few and far between.

We will probably open our May 23rd Denali Traverse expedition up to climbers who want to climb up and down the West Buttress. This trip has some confirmed traverse climbers, but still has many spaces open, so we will most likely run a combined trip on that date. We have done this before and it works well.

Thanks for checking in, and we hope you are all enjoying the warm, "Indian Summer" that we are having here in SW Colorado.

Keep climbing,
Todd

Another Successful Carstensz Climb!

Bill called earlier today from the summit of Carstensz Pyramid!

Carstensz expeditions are never easy, and can often be plagued by unecpected challenges that we have little control over. This particular climb was all that and more. We want to really commend our climbers for keeping faith in Bill and in the trip and for being flexible and committed enough to get their opportunities to reach the top. Patience, grit and determination are crucial for any expedition, and these climbers displayed those qualities in exemplary fashion.

Great work, team!!!

You can read about their climb HERE.

Denali Cuisine Cooking Class

Mountain Trip Lead Denali guide Kevin Koprek is teaching a class on Denali Cuisine in Ouray, CO this Saturday. Kevin will instruct participants on the fine art of menu planning, meal preparation and how to handle the nuances of all the logistics of packing for a long expedition like Denali.

For more information or to register, please contact Weehawken Creative Arts HERE.

Bill and the team are at Base Camp!

After some days of delay waiting for a helicopter repair, Bill Allen and our team are finally at Base Camp below Carstensz Pyramid. This trip is never easy, and this particular expedition is living up to that tradition.

Read all the dispatches HERE.

Getting Ready for Carstensz Pyramid Expedition

We are settled back in to our beautiful home of Ophir, Colorado for a couple of weeks, but preparations are on for the upcoming Carstensz Pyramid trip. I am looking forward to going back over for my yearly trip to Indonesia for this adventure. I missed going over last year due to a knee injury that has healed up just fine now. I say it all the time, but it is always an adventure traveling to the remote island of Papua and navigating the logistics and politics that it takes just to get to base camp. This will be my 6th trip to Indonesia, and it makes it something like 10 for Mt Trip. It has been different every time.

This time we are going to be flying in by helicopter from the village of Nabire. It's over an hour flight to base camp from this village over some of the most remote jungle left on the planet. The island of Papua is split in half by the border between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. The Surinam range runs East to West across the island, and Carstensz Pyramid is the highest peak in the range at just over 16,000 ft. The climb is a one day push from our base camp at a beautiful lake at the base of the mountain.
The climb is a fun outing climbing about 4,000 ft up a limestone peak. Most of the climbing is really pretty straight forward low 5th class climbing with a fixed rope for protection. The real excitement starts when we gain the ridge and need to pass over several gaps along the way to the top. The first of these gaps is by far the biggest, and we will be using a "Tyrolean Traverse" to get across it, instead of rappelling down 20 meters, and climbing back out the other side. The tyrolean is really pretty fun, but it definitely get's your heart beating fast as you look down several thousand feet while suspended by a rope (or two).

This spot is the technical crux of the entire 7 summit journey.

Most of the climbers coming to Carstensz are working towards climbing the highest peak on each continent, these peaks have been dubbed the "7 Summits" It's a great excuse to travel all around this planet to extremely different places for some fun climbing, and incredible cultural experiences.

The culture and people of the island of Papua are some of the most fascinating on the planet. I don't really claim to grasp the complexity of their varied cultures, but the island is home to the most different languages, and tribal groups left in the world. It is truly a sense of stepping back into the stone age when you get into some of the more remote villages, where there first contact with the western world occurred in the last 50 years or so.

This picture was from a small village outside of Wamena in the central mountains of Papua. They put on a bit of a show for us with their ritualized war ceremony. It's the real deal over there, as there are still local tribal wars that break out with some regularity. This is a Dani tribe, one of the largest groups in the highlands.


The Mountain Trip team for this adventure:
1) Ben Swart. South Africa
2) Elsi Bezudinhout. South Africa
3) Ephi Gildor. Aspen, Colorado
4) William Hanlon. Alberta, Canada
5) Chris Davenport (guide). Aspen, Colorado
6) Bill Allen (guide). Ophir, Colorado/Anchorage, Alaksa

We are meeting in Bali in early October for a day or two of surfing fun, and then it's off to Papua!

I'll be posting and updating a trip blog when the trip starts. We're planning to head back over for a couple of trips in March of next year if you are interested in heading over for an adventure of your own.

Cheers,
Bill

Dave Ahrens passes his AMGA Alpine Exam!

Congratulations to guide Dave Ahrens for passing his AMGA Alpine Exam in the Cascades last week. Dave put a lot of time and effort into getting his Alpine certification which involves 3 separate courses and an intensive week long exam.

Good Work Dave!