Bigg Kidd
The relentless beep-beep-beep of the alarm wormed its way into my dreams. Surely it was still too early to rise and get ready for my morning class, wasn’t it? Slowly, reluctantly, I emerged from the depths of sleep and remembered the backpack full of gear sitting by the front door, the water bottles lined up on the kitchen counter. It was indeed far too early to get up for work, but not too early to rise if we wanted to hit the snow-covered trail below Mt. Kidd by headlamp. It’d been a busy yet lazy fall. Classes and committees at the university seemed to claim more than their usual share of my time, while evenings and weekends were spent writing about last summer’s expedition to Pakistan. I had an uneasy feeling that I was contemplating life instead of living it. The odd thing was, it was largely by choice. When Greg and Nick, visiting from the UK, suggested I join them at the Stanley Headwall, I replied I’d rather sleep in and write, maybe go drytooling for a few hours in the af...