January 27, 2020

Aconcagua: Interesting Facts

To celebrate the New Year (and my second year on sabbatical, but who’s counting), I climbed Mount Aconcagua in Argentina last week. Aconcagua, at 22,841 feet/6,962 m, has several rather impressive statistics about it’s height: Facts about Aconcagua: Height It’s the tallest mountain in South America. This makes it an uncontested member of the seven summits club. (Not all mountains are so lucky as there is some controversy regarding the European and Oceaniac peaks ) It is the tallest mountain in the world outside of the Himalayan range. The current height was caused by the subduction of the Nazca Plate under the South American plate. This process started 8-10 million…

Read more

written by carolineschley@gmail.com - Posted in live fabulous

February 9, 2019

Ice, Ice Baby: When the Mountains Are Calling

Since getting back from my recent trip to Ecuador, I’ve been thinking a lot about ice. Why?! You are dying to know. When I said here that I was eager to travel outside of Quito, that was only the half of it. The reason I was in Quito at all was because I had booked a nine-day mountaineering course with American Alpine Institute. “Mountaineering” (loosely defined as “the sport of activity of climbing mountains”) generally becomes rather intertwined with ice-carved features. On this particular trip we had: –An ice “chunk” the size of a VW Bug come pounding into our glacier training site, literally chasing one of the participants down…

Read more

written by carolineschley@gmail.com - Posted in live fabulous

June 10, 2015

Get Ready to Climb Mont Blanc

 A reminder to do things that scare you

I have a new objective: to get ready to climb Mont Blanc this summer. It sounded like a great idea when “summer” was a vaguely defined pipe dream on the horizon of my thoughts.  Now that “summer” has arrived and I am trotting off to climb the highest mountain in Western Europe in 10 days I’m a little bit terrified. I’ve had to remind myself (generally while I’m looking through expensive piles of waterproof outwear, envisioning the cushion an orange North Face Summit Series windbreaker will provide when I fall into a 1,000 foot crevasse) that being a little bit terrified is not a bad thing.  It means I am…

Read more

written by carolineschley@gmail.com - Posted in deep fabulous