Alpinism and Ski Mountaineering with Cordes and Fabrikant

In episode 3 of The High Route Podcast, we bring together two high level practitioners of their respective crafts. Kelly Cordes and Adam Fabrikant.

If you are unfamiliar with Cordes and his work, you are about to familiarize yourself with a gem. He's a notable alpinist, mixologist, and even a better writer—which is saying something. If you haven't read his classic book The Tower, please do. It's such a good and in-depth read. Although a fine, very competent skier, Cordes comes to mountain travel as an alpinist first and skier second.

Fabrikant is the opposite—he comes to the conversation more as a sharp end ski mountaineer seeking first descents than an alpinist.

For this reason, we wanted to bring the two together and learn about their similarities and differences when approaching more cutting objectives in the mountains. Although separated by roughly twenty years, Cordes and Fabrikant share similarities in how they have prioritized their lives around their mountain pursuits and made a go of it.

The original intent of the conversation was to explore the idea of risk and risk management in the mountains and how that may evolve. Part of our prompt for the risk side of the discussion was a Will Gadd social media post where he writes about the classic equation Hazard X Probability = Risk.

Gadd notes, "Hazard X Probability = Risk is a simple baseline tool for risk management. But get the probability or hazard level wrong and the equation is worse than meaningless because it leads to bad decision making and statements like, 'Driving to the mountains is more dangerous than climbing them.' Bullshit. Climbing the Grand Teton is about 250 times more dangerous per hour of activity than driving to the Grand Teton." There's more in Gadd's post; we encourage you to read and posit it.

In the discussion, Cordes and Fabrikant eventually land on risk. But before we get there, we clarify the differences between "sketchy" and "spicy" and the quest and practice of becoming comfortable in high consequence terrain as an alpinist or ski mountaineer.

You can find us at the-high-route.com. Yeah, there are two hyphens for redundancy, which is a good policy in the mountains. For weight weenies, hyphens weigh next to nothing.

The theme music for The High Route Podcast comes from Storms in the Hill Country and the album The Self Transforming (Thank you, Jens Langsjoen). You can find a link to the album here—there are so many good songs on this album. And if you think you've spotted a UFO in the past or visited the 7th dimension, "Beautiful Alien" is a good tune to start with.