#trip reports

[theghostpinesmusic]

Shasta West Face (2/2)

When the alarm woke me up at 3am, I was immediately hit with the nausea and disorientation that I almost always experience when fully waking up suddenly in the middle of the night, but it was quickly overridden by excitement: we'd made it to Hidden Valley in one piece, we had enough water, and I'd actually slept pretty well. It had been seven years since I'd been on top of Shasta, and I was ready to get back up there.

But first, breakfast.

For anyone who hasn't ever gone through the process of dragging yourself out of your sleeping bag in the dark and in below-freezing temperatures, setting up your camp stove on a slick of crusty, frozen snow and lighting it with numb fingers, waiting impatiently for the water to boil, and then eating the lukewarm, mealy instant oatmeal that results...well, it's exactly as miserable as I'm making it sound.

Also, while instant oatmeal is the perfect backpacking breakfast as far as I'm concerned, it is terrible for early, high-elevation alpine starts: the nausea came back about fivefold right after I'd finished eating, as all that cold oatmeal formed what felt like a literal brick in my stomach. I'd expected this, though, from previous experience, and decided to assume that if I wasn't actively throwing up onto the snow the discomfort would eventually go away. And it did. Three or so hours later.

To be fair, it's not as if I'd expected that first hour or so of our morning to be fun. When you're headed up the side of a massive volcano, grinding through these physically and mentally unpleasant bits is just part of the deal you negotiate with the mountain, part of the sacrifice it demands that you make to get to go where, frankly, no person should really ever be.

Fortunately, before long, we were headed north, up and away from camp, and as usual I started feeling at least a bit better as soon as I was moving.

All the sturm and drang of alpine starts aside, snow climbing in the pre-sunrise dark is one of my favorite things in the world. We had a deceptively easy but beautiful start to it, as the West Face ascent proper is preceded by a half-mile of relatively flat approach from the main Hidden Valley camp area. I'd toyed with the idea of waiting to put on my crampons until we'd reached the first chute, but the snow outside the tent was so solid and icy in the predawn cold that I'd put them on right away.

We ambled forward atop lightly sun-cupped, hard snow, our headlamps lit but almost unnecessary due to the bright moonlight that stretched our shadows out behind us in the dark. Ahead of and above us, the bulk of the mountain loomed.

As we exited the valley to the north, we bore east and started up the second-from-the-right chute. This is typical West Face route, as I understand it. You can also take the furthest-to-the-right chute instead, potentially avoiding the pitch that Ken affectionately (?) referred to as "The Gates Of Hell," but then you have to traverse left over a wide rock band at around 12,000 feet to access another, higher chute: the only one that actually leads to the top of the West Face. We'd decided to bypass that particular complication by taking on the route more directly.

But that meant we had to pass through the Gates Of Hell.

In my opinion, that should probably be adopted by the USGS as the official name for this pitch. You encounter it very early in your ascent, about three hundred feet above the level of Hidden Valley, and it is almost certainly the steepest part of the entire West Face. If you start your day from Hidden Valley, as we did, it is basically the first legitimate climb you do, and it is about five hundred feet worth of climbing that feels almost vertical.

In a way, I think this was good for me, because I was out of practice with my crampons and ice ax, and it helped me get reacclimated quickly: I had no choice but to do so. Being on such hard snow was a big help: the crampon points and my ax both bit in and gripped so securely that early on I might have started to get overconfident...had I not felt like I was one slip away from falling off of the entire mountain every time I leaned back even slightly.

Ultimately, it wasn't scary if I didn't dwell on the exposure, so instead I stayed focused on following Ken as he sketched out a zigzagging traverse up the chute. I'm not great at estimating slope angles, but I wouldn't be surprised if there had been parts of the Gates that were pushing fifty-five degrees of incline. That's in the ballpark of the steepest snow climbing I've ever done, save for one brief, half-hour "jaunt" up and then back down Hood's Mazama Chute, which was steep enough the day I was there to require front-pointing and probably deserved ropes and harnesses that we hadn't brought.

Suffice to say that by the time Ken and I reached the top of the Gates, I felt like I'd already used up my energy for the day. I was sweating despite the below-freezing temperatures, and was sure I would fall asleep immediately if I just laid down on my crash pad. But Ken kept going. Maybe that's why he kept going. I kept following him.

Here, I think, I benefited from all the trail running I've done since the last time I'd taken a serious pass at Shasta's summit in 2020. Trail running really cemented for me that, yes, there is a limit to my physical endurance, but it also taught me that I can approach and very nearly hit that limit, and then slowly back off my pace and elevation gain while continuing to move and, eventually, my equilibrium will reestablish itself. In short, I don't have to stop when I start to feel completely wiped out, I just have to slow down. So, despite wanting to collapse into the snow at the top of the Gates, I kept climbing, the pitch mellowed out quite a bit, and before too long I was cruising.

There are few sensations in the world that I enjoy more than the feeling of snow climbing up the side of a mountain while in a groove like the one I hit above the Gates. Without getting super nerdy about it, I'll just say that this is the feeling that best exemplifies Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's "flow state" for me, beyond the feeling of mastering some twitch-based video game, or laying down a perfect take in the studio, or even bombing down Hogsback at a sprint without tripping and breaking my face (I've only broken my face on Hogsback once, to be clear).

Suffice to say, the next however-long passed in a rush as we traversed up the West Face. There was almost no wind, the snow conditions were perfect, and, somehow, we had the entire side of the mountain to ourselves: no other headlamps shone below or above us. It felt, somehow, as if we had passed into some space outside of time, that there was just us and the mountain. When a train whistle howled up from the valley below, it took me a long time to remember what a train was.

Somewhere in the midst of that glorious hour-or-two, I noticed that our tent had grown smaller below us and the sky had turned from black to purple-blue as the sun rose to the east, on the other side of Shasta's bulk. Having never climbed this high up the west face of the mountain before, I was transfixed as the mountain's shadow grew, solidified, and then grew some more behind us. I've seen a lot of mountain shadows in my time, but this one was almost hilariously detailed, to where I could pick out the top of Misery Hill across from the true summit in silhouette as they were projected across and below Hidden Valley.

I cannot stress enough how fun this was.

It would get worse, but man, it was all worth it.

We took a few short breaks along the way, but didn't stop in earnest until I suggested we take a break on a cozy-looking rock band just above 12,000 feet. This was over a half-mile above where we'd started earlier that morning, and as someone who has only successfully summitted Shasta in the past by taking a break every five-hundred feet or so, mentally I'd worried that maybe we were pushing ourselves too hard too early in the day. Physically, though, I felt great and was almost inclined to try to continue pushing another thousand feet to the top of the face before stopping and sitting.

I was surprised by how much energy I had, and discussed this with Ken a few times on our way up the face. I was seven years older than I'd been during my previous climb, for one thing, and didn't have much reason to believe I was somehow in better shape now than I'd been seven years ago. At the same time, our pace was much faster than I'd climbed before, and I felt like I was keeping up just fine nonetheless. I settled on the possibility that despite being a less technical route, Clear Creek might actually be harder than West Face in a sense because it is a) mostly scree-climbing, and b) directly exposed to the sun starting at 5am or so. Climbing on solid snow and ice feels much less energy-intensive than climbing on loose scree to me, and of course you're going to save energy by not climbing for hours while being hammered by direct, high-elevation sunlight.

Whatever the reason(s) were, I was feeling great...but I also very much enjoyed our break. I traversed slightly over to the rock band to enjoy the feeling of sitting on dry (if steeply angled) ground, while Ken laid out his crash pad directly on the snow and (maybe?) took a brief nap. It felt great to briefly be in such a beautiful, inhuman environment without the struggle of the climb. It was almost unbelievably calm and quiet, and I felt like if we had suddenly decided, for some reason, to abandon our quest for the summit, I would have been happy to just sit on that rock band for the rest of the morning before descending back to our tent.

That said, obviously we actually kept going up.

Above our break spot was the last eight hundred feet or so of the climb to the top of the face. This started straightforwardly enough, but got legitimately physically hard for the first time since the Gates pretty quickly. This was for a few reasons, I think. For one, the pitch of the top five hundred feet or so of the face rivals the pitch of the Gates, so we were climbing on steep ice again. Second, the sun finally lifted itself above the top of the face, and we went from climbing in below-freezing temperatures to climbing in what felt like fifty-to-sixty-degree temperatures in the space of a minute or two. Finally, both the exertion and the heat made my body aware for the first time that morning that we were, in fact, closing in on 13,000 feet of elevation and there just isn't that much air up there.

We slowed down quite a bit in response, our traverses got shallower to compensate for the steepness of the face, and the snow started to loosen up a bit beneath our crampon points in the sunlight. Though the climbing here felt more exposed than it had down at 9,500 feet in the Gates, it honestly never felt quite as steep to me: likely more like 45 or 50 degrees of incline than 55 degrees.

It was a grind, though definitely a beautiful one. There were times, looking up at Ken as he led the way in front of me, that it seemed like we shouldn't actually be able to do what we were doing. I tried to take a few pictures to capture this feeling visually, but every time I took a hand off of my ice ax the sensation that I was about to just float off the mountain into the void became overwhelming.

Near the top of the face, we passed a few bands of rock that brought to mind the Red Banks, a named feature along the Avalanche Gulch route that I've never reached but have seen frequently from afar. These unnamed rocks were just as colorfully striking, and we had them all to ourselves.

The last fifty feet of the face were a bit sketchier than the rest, as a few large, red rocks and a field of wind-sculpted ice forced the aware climber onto one narrow, rock-less and ice-less line to reach the top. Ken followed this line, but I, being less aware apparently, somehow managed to get off of it and found myself stuck amidst the ice field. I panicked for a moment, and started trying to figure out how best to descend down out of the ice and then ascend the "right" way, but then I realized that (of course), I could just smash through the ice with my metal-encased feet, so I did. So it was that I loudly and unceremoniously crunched my way to the top of Shasta's West Face for the first time.

As if on purpose, the mountain provides a wide, flat bench at the top of the face for weary travelers. We dropped down there to drink and eat a snack, and I think it was at that moment that my body finally decided to get really, really tired for the first (but not the last) time since the top of the Gates. The sun felt really hot in spite of (or because of?) the elevation, and I quickly shedded some layers while I ate. Afterward, laying down awkwardly on the snow and amidst the rocks, I nearly dropped off into sleep despite the pounding in my oxygen-starved head.

From the bench, we had a great view downhill and to the north to the top of the Whitney Glacier. I'd seen the Whitney from afar many times, and even climbed on a bit of it briefly years before, when I'd traversed across the top of Cascade Gulch on the way to Shastina's summit, but I'd never been this close to it this high up on the mountain before. It was a wonderful vista to take in, the glacier below and the remainder of the mountain's cone dominating the sky above, but also an unnerving one, as I knew that we'd have to skirt that glacier and then actually climb the remainder of that mountain. In the distance we could see and even occasionally hear the climbers using the "highway" of the Avalanche Gulch route to access and then ascend Misery Hill, and I imagined myself being there an hour from now, and, an hour after that, maybe, atop the mountain.

We got up and kept going.

The traverse around the top of the Whitney wasn't technically steeper than the gnarliest parts of the West Face had been, but having that constant view down into its crevassed maw was nerve-wracking as we passed above it. I tried to keep my eyes ahead as much as possible, and definitely kept my ice ax planted in the snow uphill from my feet.

It took longer than it had looked like it would from the top of the face, but eventually we reached the base of Misery Hill. This is, perhaps, the most aptly named geographic feature on Earth. I'd never actually climbed it before, as the Clear Creek route bypasses it to the east, ascending the high mountain instead via a bit of the Wintun Glacier to reach the summit plateau proper.

In a way, it felt like an initiation rite that I'd somehow cheated my way out of previously, and at least initially I was excited by the idea of finally being able to say I'd climbed Misery Hill. That excitement lasted for the first one hundred or so feet of climbing before the elevation and the sun melted it away.

Practically speaking, compared to even the shallower parts of the West Face, Misery Hill is not steep. Even covered in snow, it sports an easy-to-follow bootpack trail to the top, the first trail we'd been on since we'd reached Hidden Valley the previous afternoon. But it is a relentless climb that begins at 13,200 feet and ends at almost 14,000 feet. At its base, you've already climbed around 6,000 feet since the parking lot, and you have 1,000 more to go. Oxygen is scarce, and at least for us, the snow was becoming noticeably softer and looser in the sun, requiring more effort for each step uphill. I started doing the mountain step to conserve my waning energy, but instead of counting seconds between steps, I counted the hammering pulses of pain in my head: every five altitude-and-dehydration-induced thuds, I took another step.

We made it to the top intact, eventually, but by the time we did I was sure I was done climbing for the day. This was the first time throughout the whole climb that Ken seemed mildly tired, too, which (oddly) made me feel a bit better. We sat on a rock atop Misery Hill, other climbers similarly sprawled out around us, and contemplated Shasta's true summit, visible for the first time that day.

I had gone from utterly confident at 13,000 feet to feeling like I'd been run over by a semi at 14,000 feet. This isn't uncommon for me during long climbs at this elevation (and is probably not uncommon for most climbers), but that doesn't mean it didn't suck. On the other hand, the summit was right there.

After everything we'd already done, it seemed impossible to me that we wouldn't make it the rest of the way. At the same time, though, in that moment it was also impossible for me to imagine dragging myself up that final hill.

We drank some water and ate some food, and I started to feel a little better. Ultimately, when Ken eventually stood up to continue on, I made the only decision that made sense to me: I jumped out ahead of him with a burst of speed and started almost-running across the summit plateau.

Somehow, this worked: a third of the way across, I had to slow down, but I felt suddenly euphoric. I realized that this was probably an effect of my body and brain giving in to the madness that I was putting them through, but I just kept moving along anyway, passing a line of descending climbers who all congratulated me on my (assumed) accomplishment. I congratulated all of them in turn and wished them luck descending the mountain, smiling widely with lips that had cracked in the sun and wind.

The trail rises to two high points above the summit plateau: the first one overlooks a series of sulfur vents that lay just below the summit and the second one is the summit itself. I stopped above the sulfur vents to look back at Ken as he crossed the plateau behind me, and to catch my breath, inasmuch as I could in the thin air.

It was a beautiful vista, and as silly as it seemed to take another long break one hundred feet below the summit of our 7,000 foot climb, I definitely needed it. Even after Ken caught up, we rested for a bit longer, the wind occasionally wafting the smell of pure sulfur our way.

The last one hundred feet of the climb zigzags back and forth through a maze of rocks and ice. The footing is unpredictable, and it's always much more work than it looks like it's going to be on the map. It felt to me like it took us an hour to climb from the sulfur vents up to the summit, but at the same time reaching the top now felt like a foregone conclusion: either my energy or my stubbornness (or both) had kicked back in, and that was enough to carry me the rest of the way.

The last fifty or so feet were surprisingly emotional for me, climbing up through terrain I'd seen twice before, terrain laden with so many intense memories from my previous successful summit attempts. It felt great to be back: not as a conquering hero, but as one of the privileged few who are granted such an experience and such a view by the mountain.

That's not to imply that it's easy to reach the top of Shasta, of course, but it's hard to feel like you've "conquered" anything standing atop such a vast living, breathing landscape. So I'm okay with a greater sense of humility being my reward for my exertions.

The view to the west highlighted the terrain we'd crossed to get to the summit and then, further out, the Eddy mountains, and, further still, the Trinity Alps.

The view to the east (my personal favorite summit view from Shasta) accentuated the vast expanse of the mountain as snowfields sweep downhill to and then below treeline. A few skiers skinning up an improvised route below us really brought home the scale of the view this time around.

We spent what felt like a long time on the summit, taking in the view and savoring our accomplishment. And also just resting, of course. To our surprise, we encountered a colleague from Oregon Tech up there, and we chatted with her for a bit as well, though we mostly kept our distance and gave her and her climbing group the space to celebrate their accomplishment in their own way.

Eventually, of course, it was time to go back down.

Honestly, much of the descent passed in a bit of a blur for me, and as I've already written a lot about the ascent, I'll necessarily shorten the back half of the narrative a bit here.

Descending from the summit plateau and then downclimbing Misery Hill was punctuated by the euphoric feeling of finally getting to walk downhill instead of uphill. The sun-softened snow actually made the going a bit easier on those relatively gentle pitches since we could often slide a bit here and there without ending up in a dangerous tumble.

At the bottom of Misery Hill, we made a slight detour to pick up a cache of gear I'd left beneath a large lava rock (I maintain that dropping this weight below the Hill was the only thing that enabled me to make it all the way up the mountain). Then we repeated the traverse above the Whitney to the top of the West Face. I'd enjoyed the views and the novelty of the traverse earlier that morning, but Ken, who had done this route multiple times in the past, had warned me that it would be much less fun to repeat on the way down the mountain.

He was right.

The traverse seemed to take forever on the way back and the slipping hazard felt higher as well with the snow having softened even further in the sun over the past few hours. Slowly but surely, we made our way across, then celebrated with another break at the bench above the face.

When it came time to continue, we descended very carefully and very slowly down the steep top of the face. It felt a bit vertiginous to me, but I also felt like I had much more energy now that we were no longer climbing uphill, which helped me feel steady and under control in spite of the challenging terrain.

Five hundred feet or so below the top of the face, things leveled out a bit and we decided to try glissading down the remainder of the route to the tent. It felt a bit too steep and icy to me for glissading, but I tend to be overly careful because of a bad slide I took glissading down Mount McLoughlin years ago. And Ken seemed pretty confident about the conditions, so I followed along.

I turns out we have pretty wildly different skill levels when it comes to glissading. Ken disappeared ahead of me down the mountain, sliding away and, ironically, making it look easy. Emboldened by his confidence, I tried to follow, and immediately got sketched out by the speed at which I started sliding and how hard it was to brake. I made a few more attempts, sliding fifty to a hundred feet down the mountain each time before self-arresting in borderline terror. On the last attempt, I actually turned over onto my stomach while sliding, and briefly lost control of the slide before sinking my ax deep enough into the snow to stop myself.

With 3,000 feet of mountain between me and the tent, I knew I Iikely wouldn't survive a longer uncontrolled slide. It was time to walk instead.

I dug my heels into the snow as deeply as I could, overwhelmingly aware of the slippery, steep face stretching out beneath my tenuous perch and of the fact that I wasn't wearing crampons. I kept my ice ax tethered to my wrist and hoped that I wouldn't have to use it to self-arrest as my bag full of gear rolled down the mountain by itself. Getting my bag off of my back, getting my crampons out of it, and then getting it back on my back without sliding down the face was absolutely the scariest part of the entire climb for me.

Fortunately, my perch held until I got my crampons back on my feet and my bag back on my back. Then I began the long slog down the West Face.

Initially, Ken waited for me just above the top of the Gates, clearly aware that I hadn't followed his glissade track and likely thinking something had gone wrong. I'm not sure exactly how much sooner he got there than I did, or how long he had to wait there for me to catch up, but I appreciated the show of support. In spite of the increasingly loose, slippery snow I felt like I had made good time on a safe descent line until I caught up to him. After making sure I'd made it that far in one piece, he continued glissading down to the bottom of the face, and I was off on my own again.

The view from the top of the Gates, which hadn't been as clear in the predawn light earlier that morning, completely psyched me out. I wasn't sure that I could descend the chute without slipping and sliding, and while a slide would probably deposit me gently at the bottom, along the flat that we'd hiked in the moonlight earlier that day, it might instead deposit me facefirst into one of the huge volcanic rocks that poked out of the snow here and there along the way.

So I made the executive decision to traverse west, onto a nearby rock band. My admittedly half-assed plan was to hike across that rock band until I reached an alternate chute to the west of the main West Face route, that was supposed to be (from what I'd read before we'd left Klamath Falls) shallower than the chute below the Gates.

It was not shallower. In fact, it might have been steeper.

In the end, I somehow, maybe idiotically, ended up traversing below that same rock band back toward the east, on perhaps the steepest-angled snow I'd been on all day, sweating bullets and leaning hard on my ax until I'd entered into the chute below the Gates about halfway down, from the west side. I then made my slow, shaky way down the rest of the chute from there.

By the time I reached the flat, I was absolutely wiped. I vaguely remember crossing it (and it taking way longer than it seemed like it should have), and then helping Ken pack up our campsite while melting some more snow to provide us with water to drink during the descent back to the car, but I think I was running on mental autopilot a bit because of the stress of the descent.

That stress was exacerbated further by the fact that I knew that we'd have to re-cross all of those snow ramps below Hidden Valley, this time with tired legs and (likely) softer snow.

I needn't have worried (even though I did): the crossings went fine, and from there it was "easy" to follow the trail down from Hidden Valley back to Horse Camp (honestly, I think the improvised route we'd taken up to the Valley the previous day was easier than the actual descent trail, but whatever). About halfway down from the Valley, my body stopped functioning solely as a container for adrenaline and I started to feel a bit more normal. It occurred to me for the first time in awhile that we'd successfully summitted Shasta and that it seemed we would survive the trip back down.

We took one final, well-deserved break at Horse Camp. From there, it was a "only" a mile-and-a-half descent to the parking lot along a well-defined trail that I'd used many times over the years for a variety of dayhikes and other adventures, but it felt almost unbearably long now that our adventure (and my ordeal during the descent) was past and my brain had started fixating on the dual prospects of food and sleep.

In a final twist, as it turned out, those things would have to wait even a bit longer than I'd expected.

We got back to Bunny Flat, loaded up my car with our gear, and had just started to roll out of the parking lot when a couple of hikers flagged us down, shouting that one of our tires was flat. Sure enough, the tire had somehow gotten a huge metal bolt embedded in it and over the course of our climb had emptied almost completely of air as the car sat waiting for our return.

Despite being awake since 3am and having climbed one of California's most dominant fourteeners in the meantime, we were now going to have to mount a spare tire in the trailhead parking lot and then drive under the speed limit for almost two hours on the highway on it to get home.

Fortunately, Ken took this in stride, which I appreciated, since it made me feel like I could also take it in stride, rather than pouting around like a baby about it, which was my inclination in that first moment of realization. Instead, this new ordeal took on the feeling of a dark joke that the universe had conjured at our expense and then, eventually, just a normal old joke as we spent an hour driving on the spare around downtown Mount Shasta city in search of a gas station with an air pump that actually worked.

Eventually we found one, and eventually we got home. But still. That final curveball is a necessary part of this mountain story because seriously. What the hell.

I like to think that that last-second spell of bad luck was, ultimately, a balancing of all the good luck we'd had while on Shasta. My travails during the descent aside, it had been an absolutely gorgeous long day on an absolutely gorgeous mountain. The climbing conditions had been essentially perfect, and we'd had the entire route to ourselves until we'd reached the base of Misery Hill. I'd not only made it to the top of Shasta again, I'd had the easiest (believe it or not!) time of it that I've had yet. And even though the descent had put me off the idea of ever climbing the mountain again in the moment, by the next morning I was already reading about the Avalanche Gulch route and daydreaming about the next summit attempt.

I love every backpacking trip, every mountain summit, and even every dayhike in part because of the natural world's ability to immediately break through my "normal," human routine with a universe of reminders that life is about more than emails, and Zoom meetings, and office drama. But there's something special about Shasta in particular, something outsized and overwhelming and humbling but also, at the same time, challenging and deeply inspiring. I feel a little bit of it every day when I look out my front window to see her hovering atop the horizon to the south, and I suspect that that feeling will keep drawing me back again and again as long as I'm able to go.

[biglisbonnews]

Flight Review: TAP Air Portugal Airbus A320 From Milan To Lisbon Delayed flights and little legroom. https://simpleflying.com/flight-review-tap-air-portugal-a320-milan-lisbon/

[laurapetrie]

The wedding, when it came, had a fairy-tale quality, in this very remote church, with no electricity, and it happened after dark. It felt quite otherworldly, very dreamlike. - John Perry Barlow

Carolyn was stunning and very stark — as if the few lights were just for her, with the rest of us in darkness and her betrothed's face leaning into her halo. When John fumbled with the ring, Carolyn gently put her hand on his shoulder and laughed. The moment that she put her hand on his shoulder to reassure him that everything was okay, that was quite a loving subtlety. But that was her. - Billy Noonan

It was an incredibly magical moment. I saw it as it was unfolding, almost in silhouette. It was virtually dark outside. John reached for the hand of Carolyn; she was caught off guard. I'm walking backwards in the light rain at dusk, and John does this amazing gesture, taking her hand and bringing it to his lips. It was lovely, the spontaneity of that gesture. - Denis Reggie

[chickenoptyrx]

....I just wanted to draw gators :T at this point these 2 are more 'a representation of my last 2 brain cells' then they are actual characters 😅

[lulu-draws-stuff]

This was gonna be a comic, but I wasn't having fun drawing it, so I scrapped it

You get the cover and outfits section

[baeddel]

my 1st year of hrt

i don't post here much now, but as i have shared so much of my journey with you, for so much of which i wasn't able to transition at all, i wanted to make a post about my first year on hormones.

this post will be nsfw because of frank discussion about genitals, sexual functions and sexuality. it's also long, sorry.

ORAL, INJECTIONS

i have the entire time merely done what the diy wiki told me. between the time that i first looked into it, with the sort of long and helpful advices i received from friends, up to now, the whole thing has become much more well-understood and by that measure much easier to transmit and there are more plentiful resources. so it is really easy to diy. it's also much easier to get hormones and blockers and many more kinds are available.

i started off on 50mg bica and 6mg oral estradiol. i knew i wanted to use bica becuase it's supposed to keep your horny. a major hesitation for me was losing my libido, since being an extremely high libido person has been such a core part of my identity for pretty much my entire life. it turns out i had no reason to be afriad for reasons i'll explain later, but in the end i'm not sure how much of a role the bica played in that.

the chepaest place was actually from Lillian at the time we bought it. this regimen worked out to an amount per year that i don't really have and my first year was paid for entirely by my incredible and wonderful and amazing girlfriend @shimakaze-revivalism which i am so thankful for. it worked out the best to go for oral at that time but i had no preference for it over injections; gel seemed annoying to me.

to be honest i don't really recommend all that because it's basically ten times as expensive as monotherapy with injections. good golly! i didn't realize injections were so cheap until another girlfriend pointed it out to me around the time that i was due to refill. plus, not only am i used to injecting because of diabetes, but i like needles. since starting i have fallen in love with this method; i look forward to injection day and delight and savour in the entire process. i inject intramuscularly in my thighs with a 1" needle. the needle presses my skin into a deep valley before finally piercing through at which point my thigh snaps level and swallows the needle. i salivate a little bit when i do it. it hurts for a few days wherever the needle went, sweetly. if i'm too rough it bruises. my girlfriend is frightened of neeldes and i make her watch. i take 0.1ml at 10ml/400mg which according to Transfem Science (click) is equivalent to 8mg per day of estradiol orally, a little more than i took before. i stopped taking bica so i am on estradiol monotherapy.

because Lillian had issues right around the time of my order it was delayed by a bit and i went without hormones for a little while. this was utterly miserable and felt physically awful. i'll talk about it a bit more later. then my wonderful girlfriend lent me hers after we worked some things out so that she wouldn't also be left short. so for about a week or two i was taking 4mg estradiol and some amount of finasteride; this regimen felt bad and i struggled to stay hard or cum until i changed to something else. the phenomenally sweet and kind @hypnosister was bringing some estradiol gel for me to tide me over the rest of the way (—the second time she has given me hormones to cover for my errors), but my estradiol miraculously arrived the exact same day she did, so i never used any gel.

as you can tell, the principle ingredient in my hrt regimen has been the milk of human kindness. i owe an unpayable debt of gratitude. hopefully i can be more competent and independent in the future.

BLOOD TESTS

my plan was to get tested every 4~ months and monitor my blood.

there is a private blood test service you can get here in NI. they send out a little kit and you make a sample and send it back. supposedly. so far i have not known anyone to succeed. strangely, they don't allow refunds until you've tried it three times. for me i quickly realized my problem was that i have to use a lancet to draw blood several times a day to monitor my blood sugars, which means my fingers are scarred and calloused around there already and i'd never be able to draw enough blood as the test wanted. the last test i simply sent back undisturbed; they gave me my refund.

you can instead book an appointment with private clinics they work with and they will draw blood intravenously. however, at the time, agoraphobia would have made this a profoundly difficult journey, and i started off transitioning in secret and couldn't ask anyone for help getting there. so in the end i haven't been getting blood tested at all and don't really know what my hormones are and don't know how my liver is doing. this isn't ideal, but things are starting to change for me; i am now out at home, and what's more, i have started to beat my agoraphobia (!) and can get about now on public transport on my own. so i will go in a few months to monitor how my injections are doing.

SIDE EFFECTS

when i first started i was extremely nauseous. this went away after a month or so. after that there were simply no negative side-effects.

going off of hormones felt bad, but it was as bad as i felt before going on hormones. being on hormones simply feels much better; i'll talk more about that later.

LIBIDO, BONERS AND CUM

as i mentioned this was my biggest hesitation before starting. my libido had always been so high as to be debilitatingly intense. i would masturbate several times a day. if i hadn't masturbated recently i would be unable to concentrate; i would be so horny i'd get dizzy, feel faint... something in me had to be ceaselessly arrested, cooled, soothed and put away, shortly to lift its hatch and claw at me again. in a lot of ways it was really a big problem in my life and looking back it wasn't a good thing. but it was who i was and i was scared of losing it. it also seemed like an important component of maintaining a lot of sexual relationships. or was it the special solvent that held all my work together? a manic energy. without which i would become slovely and pointless.

erections are also of course an important part of performing in the way i was used to; and i could cum a lot. like, a lot. thick, goopy, white cum. which girls like. because i am not attractive in any other measure, giving up this source of puissance felt like giving up everything. so it was really frightening to me to be honest. these are all ways that the idea of a loss of libido or sexual function felt like the end of myself as a person.

this is i understand probably a distorted source of self-worth, but, in any case, hormones did not in fact oblige me to give it up, and i worried for nothing. hormones drastically improved my sexuality in every single respect. first of all, it did hurt my libido, but only so much as to take the edge off. it let me master it; and having mastered it, i was able to do things i could never do before in my life, like chastity games, and everyday life wasn't so painful, and i had more freedom about how i spent my time, since i didn't have to masturbate before anything that took concentration. but i'm still a very high libido person; what's more it made me much more engaged with sex with partners rather than masturbating.

there was a brief period of time close to the beginning where it did affect my erections, i believe, but this passed and i now have erections like normal. neither my penis or scrotum changed size or appearance. and thankfully my loads did not diminish at all; though on bica it was a little more translucent and less goopy white, it seems to be back to normal on monotherapy. it takes several minutes to clean up after.

but here's the thing; on hrt, my sexuality improved in ways i didn't even anticipate. these are: 1. every sensation feels so much better, to such an extent that sensations seem to take on a profound meaning. it is especially lovely to use the soft parts of a girl's thighs. 2. orgasms are completely different. not just a quantitative but a qualitative difference. they make me shiver, they last forever, my toes curl as i gasp and perspire. afterwards i am submerged in bliss; wheezing asthmatically, sticky or soaking wet. 3. when not having sex, i mostly cum handsfree, neither using my hands nor any implement, or any special technique but to look at something or think of something or talk to someone. either naked or under my clothes. i could do this before but it took more effort. 4. when having sex, i cum much, much faster, which is a really good change for me, because performing was always a source of anxiety, and now i have no problem with that, unless i'm having blood sugar problems which can't be helped.

i understand that most people don't have my experiences when they start hrt. although for most people sex feels better and orgasms feel better, most people cum less and have more problems performing after hrt rather than the opposite.

in the few weeks that i went off hrt i went pretty much back to normal, and it felt awful. i went back to masturbating several times a day, became less interested in having sex, and derived much less enjoyment from masturbation which was little more than habitual. i could still cum handsfree but mostly i didn't. by comparison it all simply felt bad. at this point i would take estrogen merely as an aphrodisiac.

BOOBS

i have little boobs. if it really is accurate to talk about transfem bodies this way, then i think i am in Tanner Stage 3. i don't really care about having boobs so i don't really think about it. mainly i felt A LOT BETTER about my body after i started removing my chest hair, no matter what my chest looks like.

early on in transition i asked you all if my boobs would stop being sore. some of you said no. well listen up fuckers, you were dead wrong! after three or four months they stopped hurting entirely. but then afer i started injections they began to hurt again, and now they still hurt. maybe they'll just hurt every August, no matter what i do.

WEIGHT GAIN, FAT DISTRIBUTION

i literally weigh 50 pounds more than at the start of 2023. however, 30 of those pounds i put on before even starting hrt. so i think it's a coincidence; regression to the mean. in the past i constnatly lost weight mysteriously, now i am quickly gaining it. i'm a little worried about it really, but i feel a little better about myself with chubbier cheeks as well.

i have definitely gained more of an hourglass shape now that i didn't have before. but i still think my body is very ugly and i'm ashamed of it. looking more feminine doesn't mean looking or feeling any more attractive necessarily and you have more body image issues than gender dysphoria. it's necessary to consider them a little separately. to be honest, i have no idea what i wanted hrt to do to my body. no matter what outward physical change i consider i will say 'that's some accidental change and is not the reason i'm on hormones, so i don't really care about it.' then why transition?

HRT AS WILL

this is to me the most fascinating change and the one i could anticipate the least; hrt completely changes my fundmanetal first-person experience of reality. i have no idea how to describe it; surely any words are inaccurate metaphors which cannot possibly denote anything to you if you haven't felt it. i simply feel that, before hrt, i was out of alignment, and that when i am on hrt, my alignment has been restored, and i have achieved some kind of invisible perfection. every waking moment feels so much better, and stopping hrt made me feel awful for that reason only. i knew what it was like to be on it. Tiresias.

this is the biggest thing for me; even if hrt did absolutely nothing else i would take it for this reason alone. not only that, but i would still regard it as deeply important, fulfilling some deep need. i would pay a high price for it.

do you know what i mean? what is this?

oh god... have you felt this? it's rather... rapturous... ah haha...

it means that i'm chosen...

maybe i have eyes on the inside. if you kill me you'll get a Caryll Rune: Clockwise Metamorphosis.

when i think about other things to add to my transition progress, such as progesterone, this is the primary lens that i look at it through. how would this change my inner experience? what effect would it have on me at the level of pure feeling? i don't really care what it would do to my body. what new chamber of the soul is unlocked thereby?

PERIODS

i was promised that i would get periods when i started hrt. this seems to have been a myth. if i want periods i suppose i would have to actually vary my own hormones throughout the month. in the past i actually had a pretty intense dysphoria about not getting periods, and the idea that i'd get them one day was very relieving to me. thankfully i don't really care about that anymore; all of my desires orient themselves with reference to transfems, so not having periods doesn't create any kind of distance between myself and my peers.

CONCLUSION

anyway, transition is going extremely well in my estimation. there are other aspects of transition than just hrt; gender-affirming clothes, laser (cheap here), optionally voice training and such. i think for some people a year is kind of a long time, but i tend to have a long-term view. it's something healthy but it also makes me slow to act. in any case i still see myself as just starting, and i will get to other things soon enough. i like changing. i like doing things that change me. you have to resist the temptation to see every possible avenue of transition as a form of assimilation to cisnormativity. we have a culture; we do certain things that change us, sometimes forever and sometimes for now.

thanks for reading.

[vynnyal]

Turns out Sunlit Trail isn't quite done just yet, so after all that they just send you to a dead end 😂

[raydoobles]

Remember that one fakeman post i made a lil while ago? Yeah, i drew one of the tags of it for Fakeman Friday (i didn't forget abt it this time 😈)

Kinda lazy for my standards tbh, some of the shading's wonky, but do i care? Kinda... but not enough to change the things that bother me bc that's jus how i roll

[expelliarmus]

[theghostpinesmusic]

McKenzie River Trail (2/2)

I woke up on the second day of my hike down the MRT feeling a bit better about my prospects. The beautiful morning light filtering through the trees didn't hurt.

I'd planned to take on the trail over three days, mostly just because I wanted to spend a second night camping outside under the trees. But now that I'd covered twelve miles and found a place to sleep for the first night, I knew that if it was necessary I could knock out the remaining fourteen miles on the second day, get to the car, and take a long, night drive home instead of going through a second panicky search for a maybe-nonexistent campsite.

(As it turned out, I did find a place to camp for a second night and everything worked out just fine, but because my hike out on the third day was extremely short and uneventful, I'm combining days two and three into this one post because it feels silly to do otherwise.)

Apparently this newfound sense of comfort infiltrated my subconscious, because I slept through my alarm twice and somehow didn't manage to get on the trail on the second "morning" until 11:30.

I did get going eventually, though, and before long I passed Olallie Campground. During the previous day's search for a campsite, I'd had Olallie in my head as my last-ditch option: if I didn't find anything else first, it was thirteen miles down the trail and despite being a campground instead of a backcountry spot, it would have done in a pinch...or so I'd thought. Turns out that Olallie Campground is on the east side of the McKenzie River and the MRT, at this point, is on the west side. There is no way to actually get to the campground from the trail unless you want to hike multiple miles out of your way.

I was both embarrassed at myself for not noticing this on the map earlier, and happy that I'd found the site I'd found the previous night, because camping at Olallie would not have worked for me.

I waved to the car-campers as I walked by on the "wrong" side of the river.

I bit further south, I passed by Bigelow Hot Springs and an extremely fancy bridge spanning Deer Creek.

It was the first of a few cool bridges along the next section of the trail, though some were more bespoke than others.

At one point, the trail turned into a weird double-track, but only for a short stretch, and that short stretch also featured most of the few wildflowers I saw during the trip.

The next few miles of hiking were beautiful in their own way, but the second, southern half of the trail is definitely lacking big, "marquee" scenic spots like waterfalls or the Blue Pool. It's perfectly fine, but I can definitely understand why it's frequented more by bikers than backpackers.

A second, related problem started to make itself clear once I'd covered five or six miles from my first night's campsite: though there are actually many flat, established spots on the southern half of the trail, the MRT is so close to Highway 126 that, for the most part, you are constantly clearly hearing the roar and rattle of semi trucks hurtling down the road anywhere you stop. I'd certainly never expected the MRT to provide a pristine wilderness experience, and even if I originally had, my first day on the trail would have disavowed me of any such notion. But, I knew I'd also rather just finish out the trail on the second day and drive home than lay awake to noisy, clattering traffic all night long.

Complicating things a bit more was the fact that you aren't legally allowed to camp along the final four miles or so of the trail, which meant that I was going to have to either find a not-noisy spot before then, or give up and go home.

So, past the five-mile mark, my second day on the MRT was a...weird day. I spent a bunch of time walking slowly along and eyeing the GaiaGPS map on my phone, making sure I didn't hike too far south and west while keeping an eye open for camp spots. More than once, I found one that looked cozy, then spent ten or fifteen minutes sitting in it, trying to get a sense of whether or not the road noise overpowered the roar of the river in that one particular spot. In each case, the semis won out and I moved on.

Then, just about when I had given up and decided to hike out early and drive home, I came upon an amazing little spot just off the trail, situated on a little island above the river and screened from the main trail by just enough brush to make it feel private. I engaged in my neurotic surveillance ritual to judge the amount of road noise, and while I could occasionally hear some traffic in the distance over the rush of the river, I decided that it was quiet enough that it was worth putting up with to spend a second night on the McKenzie River.

At seven miles (give or take a mile or so), this was probably one of the shortest days I'd ever taken on a backpacking trip, so I had a lot of time to wash up in the river, wander up and down the trail a bit without my pack in search of Whatever, and read. And take a bunch of pictures of how cool my tent looked underneath the giant trees, of course.

I slept surprisingly well, considering my worries about road noise and all, and woke up early the next morning ready to finish out the last five or six miles of the MRT.

First, though, with better light to work with, I took more pictures of my tent.

I took a little bit longer eating breakfast than I usually would, knowing I had both a short hike and a short(ish) drive ahead of me and wanting to stretch out the experience a bit more now that I was nearing the end.

When I finally got on with things, the MRT almost immediately, disorientatingly, led me uphill and directly alongside the highway for a bit.

This certainly wasn't actually as weird as it felt, but it felt really weird.

Shortly after, I passed Belknap Springs and the Belknap Springs Resort. I think if I ever did this trail again, I'd probably stay at this Resort one of the two nights: it came highly recommended by a few dayhikers that I passed and if the southern part of the trail kind of lacks a real wilderness character, I might as well embrace it by staying at a fancy resort, right?

We'll see.

Shortly after the Resort, I crossed Lost Creek via another cool bridge.

The last four miles through the "no camping" zone were really straightforward and featured a bunch more of the silver-barked mallorn trees.

Once I passed through this area, though, I immediately understood why you can't camp there: it's right next to the highway, and there are tons of little side roads and trails intersecting the MRT here. The underbrush is a mess and dotted with human-built slash piles everywhere. None of that is a complaint, as lots of the forest throughout Oregon could be described this way, but you definitely wouldn't want to camp here, even if it was allowed.

The MRT did dip down next to the river a few more times, though, and the last time it did I took an unnecessary but welcome break to watch the water flow by for a few final minutes before heading back uphill to the lower trailhead.

After cleaning up briefly at the car, I drove to the Three-Legged Crane in Oakridge and ate there for the first time ever. I had a tempeh reuben which was ridiculous and I will definitely be stopping there again on my next drive through town.

Overall, I'm glad I hiked the MRT: it was the only thing that really fit into my schedule at that exact point in the summer and I had been ambivalent enough about it for the previous few years that that was just the push I needed to get me to check it out instead of waiting until later to hike something I was more excited about.

I'm damning with faint praise here a little bit: I think I've made clear throughout this report all the things that make the trail less than ideal for backpacking in particular. That said, the northern half of the trail in particular was incredibly beautiful in spots in the way that only the wet side of Central Oregon can be. I'm glad I did the whole thing once, because I'd always wanted to eventually. Finding camping spots was stressful, but the two I found and used were great, and I spent two relaxing nights under the huge trees listening to the roar of the McKenzie, and that's definitely worth something.

I might go back and try this hike again as a March-ish spring break hike some year, because, as I understand it, it's much less busy during that time of year and you can backcountry camp in many of the built-up campgrounds without paying a fee or dealing with cars and RVs.

Except Olallie Campground, unless you can swim like a motherfucker.

[brothwizard]

Look what came out of the kiln earlier this week

[fishyvamp]

Related to this

Reader who rambles about history the moment Trapper asks about the moon landing. You sitting on his chest as you enthusiastically talking about the space race and while yes he finds it fascinating, but there are words you're using that he knows nothing of. So he just staring at you with the lovesick eyes watching the way your body bounces as you enthusiastically describing the entire world holding their breath sitting around their TVs, he knew about those thanks to The Onryo and Hillbilly though he still remembered freaking out about it then. You just going on standing up on the bed quoting the iconic moon landing quote, "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

"do humans live on the moon in your time?" Trapper asks with a big grin, it sounds so cool and to have humans finally able to travel to and from the heavens. Surely they did more then that. Your face dropping as you admit that in your time they had only done that once, but they are hard at work trying to get to Mars... Or at least corporations are. NASA's budget has been cut a lot, but hey you can explain the lesbian space crime incident and that some billionaire launched one of his cars into space just because he could. So that's something...

[voxxy-pumpkin]

Day 4: Blåhaj of @voxteks-sharkweek !!

Vox has a very important announcement to make

(text under cut)

"I've had Blåhaj for three days now"

"But if anything happened to him I would kill EVERYONE in this room and then myself ♡"

[cut off in the background of the second image]

FORFIET ALL MORTAL POSSESSIONS TO BLÅHAJ

[2hoothoots]

HELLO i spent a day in tumblr purgatory but now i'm back lol. anyway how was your day

[darkcreamz95]

Joker Out The Hague Concert Report (5.12.2023)

Oh boy... where do I begin with my first ever JO show and first ever pop/rock concert in my life...

[ UPDATE 15.1.2024: I finally put the Amsterdam report up, you can read it here. ]

Got to the venue at 2.30pm to get a queue number for me and my friend, got number 89 and 90.

Everyone was so lovely, even if we've never met before until that day! Thank you everyone for the friendship bracelets, sweets and charm! Also thank you to everyone who took my stickers, I loved seeing the reactions and it makes the last minute rush to go print and cut them before flying over so worth it!

My friend and I decided to go for the first floor balcony, and for a first show, that was a good idea so I don't end up feeling overwhelmed from standing at the floor (plus I got a good view of Nace and Jan even if I'm on the left side of the venue.)

Anna Rose Clayton is amazing on stage as the opening act, really hyped everyone up before the boys take the stage! Note to self, gotta listen to more of her stuff!

Ok JO part START!

I was warned about how epic the opening is, and YOU BET IT WAS! The lights, the opening music, even my video recording of the opening doesn't do it justice, you just have to witness it yourself live!

First thought when the boys first show up: I WAITED HALF A YEAR FOR THIS I CAN'T BELIEVE IT'S ACTUALLY THEM HELP HELP HELP ALSO BOI ARE THEY TALLLLLLLLL

Jan looked up and I did a tiny wave, he waved back ai crai

At some point during the show, Bojan also looked up and waved back at me ahahah...

Really Bojan made sure everyone in the room is having fun, not just the floor, even the balcony and the furthest end of the venue.

We got the 'Dopamin' dance and 'Tokio' wiggles from Jance, as a Jance girlie, I'm satisfied!

When I describe Jan's guitar solo, I tell people that "when he plays, it felt as if the world stopped spinning so that he could play", his guitar solo of 'Burning Daylight' and the added orange spotlight really felt like that...

The boys really poured their heart and soul into each of their songs, the energetic ones really pump you up, the melancholic ones make you want to break down and cry on the spot.

Heck don't forget that they've just battled Munich to get their asses over to the Netherlands and are probably exhausted from the journey, really massive respect to them and the crew...

SINTERKRIS!!! Kris looked so happy speaking Dutch and to be at his mother's home country! That Sinterklaas and NGVOT singing was so cute!

Before 'Barve Oceana', Bojan got a Magikarp hat and then he made a speech about protecting the oceans for the sake of the Magikarps, I laughed.

I set out to witness the guitar riffs in 'Katrina' live, and I was not disappointed.

Yes they've worn their Stozice/post-Eurovision outfits a lot in recent shows, BUT THE LACE AND BUCKLE DETAILS ON THEM... I'm happy to be able to see them with my very own eyes.

Overall, I'm happy that I've decided to go to the Hague one first, so this show can prepare me for the Amsterdam one (and what's about to go down on that day).

@zadig-of-fate thank you again for accommodating me that day! I had a fun time learning about the details during the show! :D

Bonus:

[raydoobles]

My problem with Fakeman's bowtie is... quite funny