Hand Drawn (and Hiked) by McCall

We’re back! I couldn’t help but feel a sense of publisher’s remorse after hitting send on last week’s newsletter. The start was solid, but I didn’t quite land the plane with the rest of the sections. Gimme this edition to make it up to you.

Mini Musings

I’m a big believer that nearly everything in life is habitual. At the end of the day, we’re all the sum of our habits. The real trouble is forming those habits.

I joked with a friend last year that sometimes your mid-20’s feel like being old enough to know the habits that make me feel good, yet still young enough to neglect actually doing them. It’s such a fine process to figure out what those habits are — for me, it’s journaling, yoga, meditating, reading, morning walks, and drawing (to name a few). As hard as it was to figure those out, it’s been even harder to stick to them.

Last week was a weird one; I wasn’t quite sure if I was actually getting sick or just coming down from ~3 weeks of travel, so I spent the weekend investing all my time into the things that make me feel like me. Good sleep. Reading before bed. Yoga. Journaling in the morning with a cup of good coffee. At the end of the weekend, I don’t think Sunday night McCall would’ve been able to recognize Friday morning McCall — night and day difference. And all that took was one weekend!

Within all that, you know what’s the hardest? Giving yourself grace when you inevitably stray from those habits because you’re not a machine.

It always amazes me when I’m back to feeling my best that I let myself ever slip away from that. It’s like playing the game of life at 50% capacity — and it’s so easy to feel disappointed that I let myself walk around and live life at anything less than 100%.

Every ounce of self awareness comes with a pinch of self loathing; that’s especially true when it comes to iterating and refining ourselves and our habits.

Artiste In The Making

I had a bit of a reckoning a few years ago when I felt like my entire art business was built off the back of things that already existed. I started everything with a light pad and a set of colored pencils from Amazon with the sole intention of tracing stuff to kill time during quarantine. I didn’t think I had a creative bone in my body — and through talking to myself that way, I fell victim to my own confirmation bias for so long. I never actually created anything, or at least that’s what I told myself.

It took me a while to get comfortable with the concept that art is imitation, in all of it’s forms. Even Plato said so!

Same with this newsletter — I’m seldom creating something net-new, just aggregating interesting pieces and opinions and putting my twist on them. Enter: this quote. I bought the book Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon a little over a week ago, and this opening quote smacked me in the face.

I know I’ve said this before, but the mini twists I make on a piece - whether it’s a flaw, slight deviation from what the reference photo looks like, or just a fun detail I add - are where the true value of my work is.

At the end of the day, my art is (at best) imitating reality and recreating real places. Even if a drawing doesn’t look 100% like the reference, there’s still immense value in creating that piece in my own style. My style of drawing is like my own handwriting — distinguishable, unique, and me.

I’ve got two commissions to knock out and then it’s time for a new project that I can’t wait to unveil. More to come reeeeal soon.

The Wild, Wild West

I (sadly) didn’t make it up to the top of Pike’s Peak on Sunday because life did it’s thing and was unpredictable, but here’s my bad ass friend who absolutely crushed it. Look at this chick! She averaged a 35 minute mile! On a 14 mile hike! With 4K ft of elevation gain! I know her!!!

Since I don’t have much of a hiking rundown to throw here, it’s time for another edition of: Avalanche Fun Facts.

I had dinner with a friend on Sunday who’s (sadly) moving to California and we got talking about the snowpack in California vs. Colorado. I’m still learning about different types of snow and avalanches, and haven’t quite made it to the part of Staying Alive in Avalanche Terrain where they talk about differences in snow in the US, so color me shocked when I learned that CO, and what I thought was one of the more stable snowpacks, is actually the avalanche death capital of the US (merp).

So let’s get into the different North American Snow Climates. There’s three primary types of Avalanche Climates:

1. Maritime (also known as Coastal)

2. Transitional (or Intermountain)

3. Continental

And here’s the simplest map I could find of those climates relative to the primary North American Mountain Ranges. To boil it down, Colorado = Continental; Idaho, Montana, and Utah = Intermountain; and (naturally) California, Oregon, and Washington = Coastal.

We’ll use the rest of this section to dive into maritime/coastal avalanche climates.

As the name suggests, maritime/coastal avalanche climates are dominated by maritime influence. They lie in the middle of higher latitudes, and therefore, tend to lie on the western side of continents where prevailing westerly airflow off the ocean exposes them to cool, moist air masses.

Oceanic influence keeps maritime avalanche zones milder than other climate types and tends to deliver large amounts of very heavy and very wet snow — locals lovingly call it Cascade Cement. High precipitation and steep coastal mountains mean maritime avalanche climates receive some of the heaviest average snowfalls in the world (anyone ski Mammoth closing day?), often exceeding 600 inches.

Most importantly, the deep and dense maritime snowpacks exhibit low-temperature gradients, which makes the formation of faceted snow/depth hoar rarer.

Avalanches in maritime zones often result from overloaded snowpacks due to heavy snowfall and wind-loading, and they most typically occur during, or just after, storms. Persistent weak layers in the snowpack are relatively rare, and the relatively warm winter temperatures and direct triggering of slides mean maritime snowpacks stabilize fairly quickly, and generally speaking, danger is highest in relatively brief windows right around storms.

Tune in next time for intermountain/transitional snowpack 101.

What I’m Noodling On

🎤 I saw Maggie Rogers at Red Rocks last week and decided she deserved the top spot here (huge honor, I know). Holy sh*t is that girl talented. Give Surrender a rip. You’ll be glad you did

🎧 “Whatever is happening right now, you’ll look back on it as formative in some way to who you are now. But in this moment, all we’re doing is trying to make it something other than what it is”. Ryan Holiday, quite possibly the king of discipline, dropped endless nuggets of wisdom on Jay Shetty’s podcast

📘 I just finished The Electricity of Every Living Thing and can’t recommend it enough. It’s a journey of the author, Katherine May, hiking 600+ miles in Wales and simultaneously realizing that she has Asperger’s — at the age of 36

I’ll be in Michigan all week next week, so TBD on if you’ll see me next Wednesday. I’d love to crank out another edition, but I’m learning breaks are more valuable than half-assing this. See you when I see you!

- McCall 🌻

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