2025 In Review
Notables
General
Solid year for running, maybe my best ever: All of the lingering injuries (aside from some weird brain damage from heat?) have healed up. I was able to do just over 500k feet of gain and something like 1200 miles on foot. There was a lot of skiing and paddling too.
Rollerboating made it into the International Packrafting Film Festival. That was fun.
I made a backpack at Alpine Luddites- it’s very high quality and I’ve already used it a few times for Ski Touring.
The DJI Air 2S that we pulled out of the river was fully repaired- so i have a drone now to do nothing with.
We bought a house and are happily ensconced in Missoula proper, finally out of the dark, busy house on 14th. I have a bookshelf, a garage, and my own room to leave as chaotic as I want.
The start of the year was packed with Rando Radness (a local skimo race), lots of backcountry ski weekends and hut trips.
The crowning achievment was probably my Tin Cup Creek FD with Cruser- I was pretty satisifed with that for a long while. I had a great lead-in to that trip living in the car and bouncing around Oregon and Northern California beforehand, too.
AG gave me a raise at the end of the year, and we grew by a lot. I’m very happy there and am super proud of the engineering team. I love everyone there.
M and I’s relationship is in a really good place: I had some weird overtraining stuff show up in November and stopped exercising more or less entirely for something like 6 weeks. My mood and general affability drastically improved and I have a lot more space for her, too. She’s just getting over hip surgery (and crushing it, very quickly) and is excited for a year of racing in far-off places. We have plans to go to both Corsica and Switzerland towards the end of next year to race together.
Bikes
We got Zwift, it’s been pretty fun. It’s very easy to keep my heartrate down to make easy rides easy. Otherwise nothin’.
Running
RUFA Mt. Sentinel was fantastic: Megan and I both competed in the twelve hour. It was to be one of two only races I did, the other being The RUT. I was happy with my performance at RUFA coming off the stress fracture (31 miles, 16,000 ft. of gain in twelve hours) and I really nailed The Rut: Just under eight hours. That race is HARD.
Otherwise I had a great time exploring the bitterroot and figuring out how to actually train easy. I even got my resting heart rate down to something like 48, wich has been a goal for many years.
Adventure
- Cowboy Ridge was incredible and I wish I had done more scrambling like this. It was an amazing day scrambling along a knife-edge ridgeline.
- A cool loop through the Pintlers with Megan (I fastpacked and she backpacked with a friend, they did more days than I.) The Rumple is not a good blanket to use for backpacking.
- A route with Andrew and Bryce near the Idaho/MT stateline trail we just called “Bloodroot Ridge”
- A cool long run through the Crazies coupled with a fun hut stay.
- I did a solo overnighter up to Sky Pilot just before it really got wintry- that was very fun.
Skiing
I got a lot of laps in at Snowbowl and Marshall, and even managed to ski Sentinel. Andrew, probably my best friend in Montana, moved up to Kalispell and cut our adventure time way down, but we did a lot together before he headed out. Otherwise I was part of a crusher crew of Laurel, Kyle, Nick, Alex, Mike and Megan, and we got out together quite often.
Climbing
I don’t think I did any- there was some scrambling present, though. We did a little bit of ice climbing at the Bozeman ice fest.
Packrafting/Kayaking
Quite a few new rivers this year with Andrew, and with others. A list:
- Prospect Creek
- Nyak Creek
- Siyeh-Reynolds into St Marys: A real banger.
- Kootenai Creek (Wild!)
- Tin Cup Creek
- Illinois River
- Cal-Salmon South (Butler)
- Cal-Salmon North (Idyllwild)
- Clear Creek (trib of the klamath)
- Applegate Creek
- Sullivan Creek (Wild time, very manky, lots of wood, a friend slipped and bashed himself + his boat up pretty good during a portage)
- A new section of the Lochsa for a Dirty 30 day- huge.
And then some other oldies:
- Bull Run
- The Box on the Sacramento
- The lower Chetco
- North Fork Blackfoot (early in Spring and again on the Winter Solstice in the snow)
- Clark Fork (Alberton Gorge)
- Tons and tons of days at Brennan’s Wave on the Clark Fork.
- The Method River
- The Lochsa
- The Rattlesnake
- All the payette classics: Swirly canyon, Lower V, South Canyon, Staircase, Deadwood. It was fun to paddle with Landon at the round-up, and everybody else.
Andrew and I hiked boats into Bear Creek but didn’t paddle anything, so I don’t know where that fits in.
New Boats: A Dragorossi DRX, which is amazing, and a XXX, which has upped my paddling skill immensely. Bow stalls are SO MUCH FUN. Hand paddling is WILD. I sold my Ripper 2 to Andrew and still have the Firecracker.
Strength/Fitness
Off and on lifting, but I got my heartrate as low as it’s ever been. I wrote a whole other thing on this..
I did my first skimo races at Rando Radness, which is a little weekly skimo race series here in town. I’ve entered the lightweight category this year and will no doubt get my ass kicked.
Books
More audiobooks, managed to clutch out 2666 which has left quite a lasting impression. I’ve been doing a lot of reading, recently a biography of Hannibal and I’m fighting my way through Underworld by Delillo.
I put a ton of time into the Malazan Book of the Fallen series and got to book eight before I ran out of Steam. It is really quite a good series but man it just stacks up.
Code
Not much- just upkeep. Some embedded ESP32 hacking, some attempts at porting Norns to the Raspberry Pi 5. Not too much else besides work.
Goals from Last Year
- Self
- Stay healthy
- New tattoo
- Stop renting
- General
- Leave M more notes
- Books
- Finish 2666
- ? Read three other difficult books (No rereads!)
- Videography
- Make more short films- Rollerboating was fun to shoot and put together.
- Paddling
- Tin Cup
- Illinois
- South Fork Flathead
- Futaleufu/Zambezi
- Get back into Central Asia
- Do some skirafting
- Running/Skiing
- 500k vertical feet of gain
- The RUT
- Go for an FKT with M
- Do more ridge runs
- Do more scrambling
- Writing
- More Trip Reports, Blog Posts, Journal entries
Goals for 2025
- Read more- 10-30 minutes a day. It doesn’t matter what but favor challenging things.
- Easy days easy.
- Get fit.
- Chrome Creek.
- Play guitar every day, or almost every day.
- Do cool stuff with M
- Do cool stuff with friends
- Get into the mountains more often
- The Bitterroot Traverse!
Injuries
I was pretty severely overtrained at the end of October- it took almost 6 weeks fully off to come back out of. I’m a little paranoid about it now, but I need to go even easier than I thought.
Aside from some random patellar tendinopothy (or what I hope it is, anyway) I’ve been doing pretty well. No real injuries. The lower legs kept up well last year, now that I’m eating enough.
I was sick a handful of times, which kept me from doing cool stuff.
