My old friend/ partner-in-crime Jarod Sibbitt recently returned home from Alaska where he was fighting fires/hiding out from Johnny Law. We all went out to Rock Bottom for "Pint Night" where he regaled us with his wild tales of defying Mother Nature in a frozen wasteland. (Who has been going around saying you shouldn't get between a mother black bear and her cubs? Get that guy on the phone!)

This guy though, Sibbitt, is one of the old-school bad-asses. You want misadventures, Trevor? I spent over two weeks with this guy (back when I was "running" from the Army) climbing mountains in the Sierra Nevada.

I should have just hid in the attic, Anne Frank-stye.

During our relatively brief excursion, I personally nearly died 4 times. Jarod had one close encounter, I think. Maybe he just never told me about any more. But I'm not yet counting the times we nearly died together. We crossed this field of solid ice on the side of a mountain by hacking footholds into it. We didn't secure any ropes to catch ourselves, which meant that in the case of the tiniest slip, we would have slid right down and right off the side of a cliff, landing in a frozen lake hundreds of feet below. We later learned that that very thing had happened to another mountaineer a couple weeks before we climbed it.

Also on Mount Whitney, I developed a very high fever. I had just thought I was really tired. Sibbitt had gone off to climb another nearby mountain (see, he does stuff like that all the time) and I took a nap in the tent. When he returned, he found that I had thrown out everything, food, gear, backpacks, his sleeping bag, and it was all strewn around the opening to the tent. In my fevered state, I had decided that everything in the tent "offended me" and therefore had to go. But I got better.

We were climbing this incredibly easy mountain (only a half-day hike to the top) in Nevada when a little cloud rolled overhead. We thought nothing of it. A few bigger, darker clouds rolled overhead. We thought nothing of it. A light snow began to dust the landscape. We scoffed and went on.

Five hours later, we were still desperately searching for the car while under the onslaught of an all-out blizzard. In the white-out that had struck us as we were near the peak, we had somehow gotten completely lost. No problem, we'll just check the compass. Do you have the compass? I don't have the compass, I thought you had the compass.

We tried to swear then, but our words were torn from our lips and flung gleefully about by the wind.

Sibbitt found a compass in a first-aid kit he had brought along. All I had was a canteen and some graham crackers. I ate them while Sibbitt figured out the way back to the car.

We lived that time.

The moral of the story is: Running won't solve your problems. Well, it worked pretty damn well for me, but I still don't think it will work for you.

Now, I'm going to haul ass to Lollapalooza!
(I'm going pretty much for A Perfect Circle)