When I was 10, Comet Peak put up a fight. But it wasn’t a fair fight.
The first time I climbed Comet Peak – at the north end of the Pioneer Mountains (the second highest range in Montana behind the Beartooths) – was after a long morning of hunting deer in the Grasshopper Creek drainage in the Big Hole. Hunting with my dad wasn’t a sedentary experience. It was an up-before-dawn with a heavy daypack and 20 pound rifle trudging over fences and rivers to get to the most inaccessible places because logically “that’s where the game hides.” I don’t remember the details of this particular hunt, except that we didn’t see anything (we did hear a large crash through the deadfall), and by the early afternoon, we decided to call it quits.
So to fill the rest of the day, we drove over to Comet Peak. I was already hungry when we set out – up the old road that starts at some abandoned mines.
Montana can get cold during hunting season, and with a summit over 10,000 feet, Comet Peak was downright wintery. Once the road ended, you’re confronted with a large boulder field, which requires scrambles. Ordinarily, I enjoyed these sorts of hikes, but on this day, it was cold and the scrambles not only required me to take my hands out of my pockets, but to hold onto freezing granite.
About three quarters of the way up, it started to sleet. The wind picked up. It hailed. It was miserable.
Once you crest the boulder field, you’re confronted with the final gradual rock-strewn slope to the summit. That slope proved to be my breaking point. The exhaustion from the day’s hunt, the freezing weather and the psychological blow of facing more vertical after achieving the false summit proved too much, and for the only time in my hiking memory, I cried…
So a return to Comet Peak has been on my to-do list, and the recent trip to Big Hole provided the perfect opportunity for a rematch.
Once again, the weather threatened precipitation (although, August favors rain to November’s sleet and snow). Rain clouds began rolling in from the south. We took refuge from the short afternoon rainstorm in the relative safety of an abandoned mine shaft.
After it stopped raining, it was onward and upward through the boulder field. Among the boulders, Tiffany came across this patch of wild flowers. She went nuts. It was pretty stunning, and we named it Tiffany’s Meadow.
Tiffany and Rachel gain the summit. Tiffany celebrates while Rachel signs the book at the top. For some reason, the USGS Marker doesn’t indicate an elevation at the summit. It should read: 10,217 feet.
Comet peak might be named because of its shape. The westerns slope is gradual and easy to climb, but at the summit it plummets into a steep mountain canyon. The granite boulder that is its apex is situated with thousands of feed of exposure – sheer cliffs – along two thirds of its circumference. Standing on it provides a commanding view of Hopkin Lake far below. It also provides a feeling of standing on a naked precipice thousands of feet over the rocks below.
But eventually, with some coaxing from Rachel, I stood up. And as I did, the sun broke through the clouds! It had been cloudy all day, but within ten minutes of reaching the summit, as we were eating, the clouds began to break and for the next half hour we had sunshine, beautiful clouds and (for the photographer in me) excellent light.
There was another cliff face a few hundred yards away that you could get to by hiking down and then back up. After lunch, I decided to scout it out so I could get some shots back at the group. From the summit, it was hard to see just how sheer the cliffs we were perched on actually were. It was very steep, such that you couldn’t see the bottom, and the ledge was too unsure to approach close enough to look straight down. The new view afforded by my venture revealed just how exposed we actually were. These cliffs continue downward for hundreds of more feet than what was visible in the shots below. From my subsequent research of topo-maps, it appears that these cliffs are matched on the other side as well.
The first three are Rachel; the fourth is Tiffany:
More pictures here, including shooting the .22 when we were done:
In the southwest corner of Montana is the high-altitude Valley of 10,000 Haystackers known only as The Big Hole. At 6,000 feet, it was the highest point visited by Lewis and Clark, and the annual Memorial Day visit by the Link family when I was growing up. Winter holds on in Montana, especially at the higher elevations, and it’s taken a long time for those memories of cold, wet spring camping, fishing and hiking to grow fond.
We always stayed at the Jackson Hot Springs Lodge in Jackson, Montana (Population: Tiny) which has gone through more ownership changes that I care to remember.
Camera: Nikon D50
Lens: Nikon 18-200 mm VR 2 @ 35 mm
Mode: Aperture Priority
Aperture: F/4.2
Exposure: 1/13 second
Exposure Compensation: -2/3 step
ISO: 400
Flash: None
Workflow: RAW Image Contrast and saturation increased in Photoshop
Camera: Nikon D50
Lens: Nikon 18-200 mm VR 2 @ 60 mm
Mode: Aperture Priority
Aperture: F/13
Exposure: 1/500 second
Exposure Compensation: -2/3 step
ISO: 400
Flash: None
Workflow: RAW Image Contrast and saturation increased significantly in Photoshop
I knew I wanted to be a doctor since high school and always thought I would go into pediatrics. Working at Disneyland, summer camps, children had always been a passion of mine. As I went through medical school, I became interested in other areas: Neurology, Pathology, Dermatology. As I finished up Ob-Gyn and started thinking about my next rotation, pediatrics, I became excited again.
“Kids are not small adults” was the first thing they told us on day one of peds and man was it true. The awesome thing about peds is that every patient is entirely different and must be approached differently as well. The newborn exam is completely different from the 10 mo old exam, the 7 yo well child check up, or the adolescent check up. Each one has different medical and emotional needs and each one has different abilities to be involved in their own medical care. Each patient was a new experience for learning and kids are just plain awesome. How can you not adore a patient who tries to eat your stethoscope?
Kids are a naturally healthier population of patients in general which is nice. You don’t usually have to balance a long list of diseases and medications. The things that they do come down with are also generally different from those of adults: mostly infectious diseases vs. chronic diseases, asthma, allergies, ect.
I spent the first half at the Harriet Lane Clinic where I did Outpatient care (kids coming in for immediate problems like a cold, rash, ect. or well child care). The days were crazy busy and I worked about 12hrs a day, but no nights or weekends which was nice. I saw all sorts of cool things: scabies, bed bugs, hand foot mouth disease, various genetic illnesses, among other things. Coming off of Ob-Gyn, I was much more comfortable with adolescent kids than even most of the other residents, so if a kid came in ages 14-21 it was called a “Tiffany special”. I spent many hours giving teens literally bags of condoms and discussing all the different birth control options. I really feel like I had the opportunity to make a difference in these kids lives. It was a very humbling experience. The newborn exam was also a lot of fun. They are so small and dependent it’s quite extraordinary and it was awesome to be able to help out new parents and be able to tell them that its okay and even necessary to take some time for themselves.
Pediatricians are great people to work with. They tend to be very nice, kind people. Doctors tend to be very busy, overworked, and extremely stressed and that tends to make a formula for not the most pleasant people to work with. I never got this vibe from any of the Pediatricians I worked with. They were all so supportive and passionate about their work, it was a great environment.
The second half of my rotation, I went to Howard County to do pediatric inpatient service. My typical day was to get in by 6-7am and pre-round on my patients. This means I check up on anything that happened overnight, vital signs, how they are progressing, perform a physical, and speak to the patient on how they are feeling and make sure they understand the plan. We then presented the patients to the attending physician and discussed the plan for the patient and saw them again together. It was a great learning experience. I saw kids with croup, abcesses in their throat, babies with jaundice, difficulty feeding, ect. It was an amazing learning experience. When we were done with the inpatient side, I would go across the hall and work in the pediatric emergency room. Unlike the adult emergency room, I didn’t see a lot of stab or gun shot wounds, drug overdoses, or heart attacks. Mostly it was kids with broken bones, cold symptoms, asthma attacks, high fevers, and things of that nature. The case which sticks out most in my mind are a little girl who came in with balance issues. She couldnt walk straight or stand up well on her own. Other than that, she had very little symptoms. MRI of her head showed no evidence of trauma or internal bleeding, but did show a very subtle darkened area near her cerebellum (part of the brain responsible for balance) that looked abnormal. In fact, the radiologist read her scan as completely normal. The only reason we picked up on it is the ER doctor I was working with was stressing to me the importance of reading all of your own films first before you jump to the radiologist’s report when he noticed it. We went back to the radiologist and they admitted that they had entirely missed that abnormal area. If the ER doc hadn’t read the film themselves, that little girls brain tumor would still be undiagnosed and could have been inoperable by the time it was finally discovered. Fortunately, it ended up being benign and the fantastic neurosurgeons at Hopkins were able to completely remove the tumor.
I got to do all sorts of awesome things like stapling head wounds, sewing up lacerations and reducing dislocations. The coolest thing I got to do was this 17 year old kid was at a concert at nearby Merriweather Post and came in after another kid elbowed him in the face. The kid had braces so fortunately (or unfortunately) the four dislodged teeth were hanging in his mouth by his braces, rather than being swallowed by him or lost at the concert. When we called his orthodontist, he told us to put the misplaced teeth, back up into his sockets and he would repair them the next day. The stiffness of the wires meant that I needed to use pliers to grasp the teeth and shove them, one by one, back into their respective sockets. I was nervous, but tried not to show it. I numbed his mouth, grabbed the pliers, and went to work. It was hard because of all the blood, but I was ultimately successful! It was pretty nasty!
My time at Howard County was some of the best of my life in regard to medicine and can see myself working in a place like that. Pediatrics is definitely still in the running as far as potential future specialties go.
Camera: Nikon D50
Lens: Nikon 18-200 mm VR 2 @ 18 mm
Mode: Shutter Priority
Aperture: F/13
Exposure: 1/500 second
Exposure Compensation: None
ISO: 400
Flash: None
Workflow: None
Camera: Nikon D50
Lens: Nikon 18-200 mm VR 2 @ 62 mm
Mode: Aperture Priority
Aperture: F/5
Exposure: 1/800 second
Exposure Compensation: -2/3 step
ISO: 400
Flash: None
Workflow: RAW Image straightened and contrast increased in Photoshop
Camera: Nikon D50
Lens: Nikon 18-200 mm VR 2 @ 70 mm
Mode: Aperture Priority
Aperture: F/7.1
Exposure: 1/40 second
Exposure Compensation: None
ISO: 200
Flash: None
Workflow: RAW Image contrast slightly increased in Photoshop
