Wow, Laura!! Impressive pics, and more important, very impressive achievement!

Quote:
I finally started to get it. I started looking for features, weighting my feet, less hacking and scratching and more purposeful placement. I still occasionally got the satisfying "chunk" of the pick sinking into a solid hold, but I looked to glide instead of grunt. I realized I was climbing, not hauling.

That's an important paradigm shift in your thinking that will serve you very well in any climbing. My climbing mentor kept drilling this into my head, and it finally stuck, and made all the difference in my climbing technique.

Awesome, girl!! You're amazing!! Some of your pictures just take my breath away -- not only for their beauty and inspiration, but also for the raw-gut-check 'wow' factor!! I love the major gritty "I'm-gonna-whoop!-this-ice" look on your face in some of the pics.

But that last picture you posted above -- ya know, the one with the big satisfying fulfilled grin/smile -- says it all! Can't tell ya how happy I am to see that!!

CaT

If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them more than the miracle of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it.
- Lyndon Johnson, on signing the Wilderness Act into law (1964)